No Such Thing As Love Spaghetti

12:55Anna Ptaszynski:That was so important. The what website? Well, this list of hacked email addresses says different.

13:05James Harkin:Okay, let's move on. Time for fact number two.

13:08Anna Ptaszynski:No, no, no. This is amazing. So it was an affairs website. It marketed itself to mostly blokes who say, hey, you want to have an affair? Then join Ashley Madison. They were hacked into by some disgruntled staffers or former staff or something. And ha ha ha, it turned out 95 % of the members of Ashley Madison were men, right? So that was the headline that went around the world. It was quite a big story at the time. The really interesting thing is a journalist called Annalie Newitz looked into it, found something much more perturbing. It was that the parent company, who were called Avid Live Media, had made 70 ,000 fake women bots.

13:43Anna Ptaszynski:They would just say things like, hi, and what's up? And the men thought they were talking to real women. Like, there were 11 million interactions in the database between human men and bot women. And the men were paying for every message. Right. And the company was paying workers to generate these fake profiles. So it was basically real people interacting with bots, having no idea. Wow. That's quite, that's the really sinister thing, you know.

14:05Dan Schreiber:And let's talk about our level of sympathy for these men. Because I suddenly feel really bad for them. But I suppose they had gone on a website to cheat on their wives. In a way, they're doing something good, aren't they, this company? Because this hypothetical man has gone on the website to cheat on his wife. But they're just putting a fake thing up that he can chat to. So he's not going to be able to have the affair. What is sin?

14:26Anna Ptaszynski:I think is what we're asking. He thinks he is sinning, so is he? If I'm just talking to a chatbot, that's for God to say.

14:33James Harkin:I remember years ago when there was the rise of niche dating places when I was single, I went onto, I think it was like a ghost hunters dating site. Yeah. And I got on it and it was just men. It was just all men. The ghost dating. Yeah, but their profiles with their blurb came up and all of them sounded so interesting. So I actually messaged a couple. Yeah, just to say like, hey, can you tell me about ghost hunting? Because I'm not actually interested sexually. I'm just like, you sound really interesting. Who would like to meet? I've got one last example of someone who made it big in the world of creating online dating.

15:13James Harkin:A guy called Gary Kremen, who created Match.com. What's impressive about him is he seemed to have just cleaned up on domain names early on, right? Because that's where he's made a large fortune from. So he owned Sex.com. Can you imagine owning Sex.com? And there was a big case where someone forged fake documents so that the domain name went over to them. and he had to fight them for years and years. And there's now an outstanding bill of$65 million that is owed to Gary Kremen, which has not yet been paid by this person. What's on sex.com? Is it porn, I guess? He was going to use it in the way that he was using match.com, but match.com just flew into huge success immediately.

15:49James Harkin:So it was just kind of sitting there dormant. He also owned computer.com, which he sold for$500 ,000. But he set up match.com and even his girlfriend found a partner on there, which wasn't him. she joined up and met someone else and left him. Yeah, and he said, look how successful it is. What are you hoping for if you buy Computer.com? It's just old people going on Google and typing Computer.com because they think that's how they turn it on.

16:14Anna Ptaszynski:It's very much like Donald Trump saying everything is computer now. It's a bit... Okay.

16:23James Harkin:Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that one of the original 57 Boy Scout badges was the Invention Badge, which required kids to not only invent something new, but obtain a patent for it too. It's so hard. I mean, it's a lengthy process to get a patent in America. Is it hard?

16:44Dan Schreiber:Because there's so much random shit that's been patented that you see. That never went any out. I always seem it's a piece of piss, actually. Yeah, I always thought you could just draw a picture on a beer mat and just send it in and then give you a patent. I don't think it works like that.

16:55Anna Ptaszynski:This idea of yours for a beer mat is incredible, sir.

16:58James Harkin:Not as easy as it looks.

17:00Dan Schreiber:Is it quite a process?

17:02James Harkin:Well, I think it costs. You've got to pay in order to have it accepted to the submission and so on. Yeah, it's a lengthy process. And basically, they dropped the badge largely because no one was really achieving it. So the Invention badge, it's part of the American Boy Scouts specifically. There were 57 original merit badges that you could get, like archery and swimming and so on. And Invention was part of it. So that launched in 1911. and they took it out by 1914 and only 10 scouts in that time managed to get it, which I think is a very high number. Actually only nine got it in that time. One person got it in 1915 because he'd already started with his inventions, so they were like, oh well I guess you can have it.

17:40James Harkin:That's apparently one of the rules with a badge that's been stopped. If you've started the process trying to get it, you can finish it.

17:46Anna Ptaszynski:And the inventions have not survived. Most of them have not survived. We don't know what was patented but we do know one by graham thomas smallwood which was a scout's uniform with a removable sleeve to stop your boy scout badge arm getting dirty i think it's a great idea it's really good is it but it's yeah it's not just that you could take the sleeve off and use it to sew badges onto it you can carry on wearing the rest of your boy scout just take the whole jacket off

18:10Dan Schreiber:i must have another shirt but i think you still had from what i could see on the drawing you still

18:16James Harkin:had an underneath sleeve. It was sort of on top. So you didn't look like someone had just ripped your sleeve off. Well, there was a few different things you could do. You could do that and then you could also put a secondary sleeve on top of your other sleeve. So it's like a prophylactic sleeve. Was that so it matched the other side? It stops it getting dirty. It stops it.

18:32Anna Ptaszynski:Sleeve getting dirty. And we've all got these things these days. So you're walking down the street and you lean on some wet paint and everyone laughs at you because you've got paint on your arm. You go, ha-ha! And you pull off your fake sleeve.

18:43Dan Schreiber:Amazing. There you go. Incredible.

18:45Anna Ptaszynski:Richly deserved patent and badge. I can't believe he's not famous. Terrific badges back in the day. Other discontinued Boy Scout badges on the Wikipedia for them is top draw reading. There's beef production. That's good. Lost until 1975. You get a Boy Scout badge for beef production. Blacksmithing, nut culture, hog and pork production, taxidermy. Interestingly, hog and pork production was discontinued in 1958. So I wonder what the discrepancy between pork and beef is. We must keep the beef scouts going.

19:17Dan Schreiber:Were there a lot of nine-year-old farmers in those days? No. To get the pork production badge, you needed to confer with meat market men and from their instruction, draw a diagram of a hog and mark and name the parts for butcher classification. I think that is good. I think our children should be learning that kind of stuff.

19:34James Harkin:I love those details, all the things that they had to do, like farmhouse and planning was one of the merit badges you could get. and as part of that you had to present a drawing plan of sewerage disposal for a country home. That's amazing. I mean, these are the skills of the future.

19:47Dan Schreiber:I don't know. I don't like that element. It reminds me a lot of Duke of Edinburgh. I don't know if anyone did that, where basically you thought it was just going on a fun walk and there's all this background stuff you also have to do. So all the badges still, there's the family life badge, which is quite nice. It basically means being a good little boy or girl to your parents. But you have to write this full proposal, don't you, at the start and make lists and then submit various essays on it. It doesn't mean anything to be good to your parents if you're doing it just to get a badge, does it? I think whatever works.

20:17Dan Schreiber:I'm not saying that. Agreed.

20:20James Harkin:Stalking badge was another one, by the way. Stalking. That had to go. They just renamed that as tracking just to make it more acceptable. Do you know what the rarest badge that anyone got in 2024 was? Again, this is all American Boy Scouts, we should say. In fact, I think pretty much everything we've said as American Boy Scouts.

20:38Anna Ptaszynski:So, okay, I would say in 2024, because there are like some old school badges like Hog and Pork production, but there are new ones. Yeah, that's not there anymore. There are new ones like, you know. Ooh, being woke or whatever. Yeah. Is it one of the new or the old school ones that was the least common? Oh, it's old school, I reckon.

20:54Dan Schreiber:Is it motorboating? Because I think that... You've got your head between women's boobs. Well, that's the thing. I think that's got connotations now. It is a badge, but I bet a lot of people are doing the wrong thing when they try to get it. I see what you mean. Only one kid actually drove a motorboat. The others all just went... And I hope they get it. My God. It's not that. Okay. I'm trying to think if this actual thing could have any sexual connotation. Is it like schooner construction? I mean, it's a very difficult thing to guess, really. It's something that you might associate with the army as opposed to the scouting movement.

21:31Okay. Something that one person in an army regiment would do. Oh, only because I read through the big list. Is it bugling? It's bugling. Yes. I don't know if that is another sexual term. It feels like it probably should be. It certainly could be, couldn't it? But yeah, the least common are bugling, surveying, stamp collecting, drafting, composite materials, and then it goes on. We've lost so many of our traditions. And the top three, or top one, top one badge in 2024.

21:58Dan Schreiber:I think pioneering, because it's so classic. That's one with like ropes and building parts. Not where you put a pie in your ear. I've got to get off urban dictionary.com

22:10James Harkin:I just hope to god Anna you never meet a young boy scout who tells you they're doing a motor building and you go go on

22:18Dan Schreiber:show me your skills don't mind my mate with the pies in his ears he's just going for his so pioneering that's your guess right this is easy to get I reckon is it like helping a person geocaching it's helping a person but in a very specific way Helping old women across the road. There's no badge for that. First aid. Correct. And the biggest gain in popularity in 2024. This one went from the 121st most popular badge to the 81st most popular badge. And it's something that one of us around this table enjoys. But it's a skill. So it's wanging on about electric cars or something. Thank you.

22:59Anna Ptaszynski:Was it being a lush, James?

23:04Being weird on ghost dating websites. I wasn't being weird. I was being friendly. It was a friendly ghost. The wife guy badge. No, it wasn't. It wasn't. It was the golf badge. Oh.

23:17Anna Ptaszynski:That was the biggest game. Clever. Flot twist. It was him. Yeah, yeah. We were looking at this. That's very good. That's very good. There is this really big thing of, oh, all the badges, they've gone all woke, blah, blah, blah. And it's a very, very tiresome talking point because there are things, like there's a money skills one or, you know, Or the Scouts Digital Citizen. Actually, loads of them are just absolutely straight down the line. Like Athletics, Air Researcher, Angler, Caver, Climber. They're just absolute route one classic Scout stuff. Oh, yeah. They're all the classics. Great fun.

23:46Dan Schreiber:Except one of the really early classics, the Swastika Badge, which I don't think was on my list.

23:51Anna Ptaszynski:No.

23:52Dan Schreiber:Baden-Powell loved the Swastika Badge. What? He thought it should be like the defining badge of the Scouts.

23:57Anna Ptaszynski:So what are you talking about?

23:58Dan Schreiber:In 1921, he wrote, quite rightly, that the Swastika is a symbol used in every part of the world, in the ancient world, in the modern day. But now it stands for the Badger Fellowship Among Scouts. And how you used it was, if you're a Boy Scout, you always carried around a collection of swastika badges. And if someone did you a good turn, like gave you a leg up or a pie, then you gave them a badge. And you said, always wear this. And that means if a Boy Scout ever saw you, they had to offer to do you a good turn. So are we misunderstanding the Nazis? They just did a lot of good turns for the Scouts over the years.

24:31Dan Schreiber:I think that was it, yeah.

24:31Anna Ptaszynski:It was actually just a big sponsored march into Poland. Because Bayden Powell, because that was obviously when the swastika had not been adopted by the Nazis. But he was a bit fascistic. So in 1937, he wanted to form close ties with German youth movements. He wrote in his diary in 1939 that Mein Kampf was a wonderful book with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation, etc. I would agree on the propaganda front.

24:58Dan Schreiber:It did work, didn't it?

25:00Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, obviously he couldn't have known how it would turn out. Yeah, wow.

25:04Dan Schreiber:That shows the Swastika thing in a whole new light.

25:08Anna Ptaszynski:By the way, I'm not saying he was an out-and-out fascist. He was just a complicated character, very old-fashioned these days, but had amazing ideas about getting young people organised and working together, helping each other, all of that, like raising good citizens.

25:20James Harkin:And it impressed the world. So the reason the American Scouts started, there's an origin story, which is such like, it's like King Arthur. It's just like total bullshit. But it's a guy called W.D. Boyce. And W.D. Boyce is one of the five co-founders of the Scouts. Scouting for Boyce. Scouting for Boyce. So you've got Baden-Powell, who obviously is the British originator. But in America, you then had W.D. Boyce. You had Daniel Carter Beard, James E. West. And then you had Ernest Thompson Setton. The idea is that W.D. Boyce was in England. He's an American newspaper guy. And he was walking through a foggy street at night.

25:51James Harkin:Couldn't really see anything. Went out through the fog. Came a Boy Scout and said, let me help you across the road. and let me get you to where you need to go. And he thought, wow, this young man with impeccable behavior, what is this? Oh, you're a Boy Scout. I must do that. And he got taken to Baden-Powell and immediately said, I'll set it up. Now we know that it wasn't even foggy that day that he was there in the UK. Oh God, who's bothered to do that research? Well, people who try to work out.

26:13Dan Schreiber:Famous meteorologists.

26:15James Harkin:Because there's a lot of sort of questions about who actually is the original founder of the American Boy Scouts. So often it's raining outside and I look at my phone app and it says it's not raining. That's like literally happening right now. I don't trust this stuff. Yeah, I mean, who knows? But that's the kind of the story that was created, the mythology behind it. The other guy was Ernest Thompson Seton. There's a great fact I read in a Margaret Atwood book about him, which is when he turned 21, his father handed him a bill charging him for all the expenses associated with his childhood, including the fee for his delivery at birth.

26:49James Harkin:Just hand it to him. Yes, he's one of the founders of the American Boy Scouts. I will not do that for my daughter, just to say, because she was on the NHS.

27:00Faye and Powell, yeah, he married a woman called Olaf Soans. He was 55 and she was 23 when they got married. And the wedding present for those two, the Scouts were each encouraged to contribute one penny. And 100 ,000 of them did it. And they bought him a car, which is quite cool. and then in 1929 to celebrate the 21st birthday of the Scouts they all did the same again but at this stage there were 4 million Scouts and guides around the world and so they bought him a Rolls Royce oh that's great long con

27:35Dan Schreiber:they started admitting girls in 2019 the Boy Scouts of America and who did this piss off? oh the Daily Mail readers

27:46Anna Ptaszynski:was it someone in the Baden-Powell

27:48Dan Schreiber:sort of family or because he i mean he very much so his sister ran the girl guides though when they started well that's it was the girl scouts right right sorry girl scouts yeah yeah so yeah they they are furious about this because they now call themselves the bsa to try and take the boy out of their like name and the girls basically said the whole reason they've done this is to help with their massively plummeting membership they're trying to steal girl scouts from our movement from us. And they're suing them. And people who want their children to join the Girl Scouts, they might just Google Girl Scouts and get the girl members of the Boy Scouts.

28:28Dan Schreiber:Yeah, absolutely. So there's beef. There's beef. Not since 1968.

28:35Anna Ptaszynski:It's gone off now. Lovely.

28:37Dan Schreiber:So hopefully they'll fight. And then who do you back? But they're called the BSA now. I believe so, yeah.

28:42Anna Ptaszynski:What does the B stand for, if not for boy?

28:44Dan Schreiber:Well, you don't know, do you? You're hiding it, aren't you?

28:47James Harkin:That's the whole point. Why didn't the girls start letting boys in? Yes.

28:51Dan Schreiber:Yeah, I can see how that's the logical Daily Mail commenter's response.

28:57James Harkin:Sorry, I thought that was the woke response. You're trying to get your woke badge? Let me knock down the Girl Scouts, because it's about time someone let down a peg or two. They, according to a blog called Weighty Matters, are saddling America with a huge amount of obesity thanks to the Girl Scout cookies that they sell every year. So according to this person on the blog, they worked out that the Girl Scout cookies that are sold every year account to three quarters of a million pounds of trans fat. That's 3.5 billion teaspoons of sugar that they add to the American food supply.

29:32Anna Ptaszynski:Well, that does sound bad, but we need overall figures, I think, because it can't just be the Girl Scout cookies. Oh, no, there's other stuff going on. but it doesn't help it doesn't help

29:45Dan Schreiber:they're trying to fatten up the boys make them easier to defeat

29:53James Harkin:ok it is time for fact number 3 and that is Andy

29:56Anna Ptaszynski:my fact is that one of London's oldest windows is made of cow horn the window itself the glass as it were the glass substitute is cow can you see through it because if not I say that isn't a window Well, judge for yourself, James, because I've got a photo here of me this morning at the cow horn window. I can see you, but you are in front of it. Yeah, but you can see through it. It's very see-throughable. So horn, it turns out, is a fantastic window material, beaten maybe only by glass. This is in London. It's a place called Guildhall. So there's a separate thing called the City of London, which is different to London, right?

30:32Anna Ptaszynski:The City of London is the sort of ancient body. I mean, it's part of London, really. It's right in the middle of London, definitely. Yeah, you're still in London. But the actual Guildhall itself, the Town Hall of the City of London, dates back to the 14th century. It's the oldest non-religious building in London. There are a couple of abbeys and cathedrals and things that are older, but it's really old. And this window dates back to the 15th century. So it has survived any manner of stuff. All the other windows in the place have been replaced. Like there's been the Blitz, there's been the Great Fire of London.

31:05Anna Ptaszynski:This window is still there all these years later. It's kind of amazing.

31:07Dan Schreiber:Come on kids, go and play football outside. I dare you.

31:13Anna Ptaszynski:And it's made of cow horn. So you pop the horn off the cow, you slice it up, you heat that, and then you can mould it into this amazing, really pretty transparent window material. It's stunning.

31:24James Harkin:And is it incredibly strong? Is that how it's survived? Okay, so that makes it all the more amazing that we've still got it, right?

31:31Anna Ptaszynski:I mean, it's decent. Glass from the time is not incredibly strong either. And until the 18th century, cow horn was used largely for translucent sheets to go into like lanterns the word lantern comes from lanthorn you know because it would have horn that's the sides of it were horn i don't think it

31:48Dan Schreiber:does i think because i was like that's why they always spell it weird in old books you know you read um old like shakespeare will say lanthorn in old 19th century novels sometimes you see lanthorn so i was like that explains it but actually lantern just comes from latin like meaning light but people then did the old got confused lots of their lanterns were made out of horn so they went should we shove a horn on the end and i read a quite annoyed encyclopedia entry from about um 1803 saying lanthorn is a completely incorrect spelling of this based on the misconception so that's just idiots from the 18th century but it is based on the fact that

32:22James Harkin:lanterns were made of horn absolutely yeah right misconception was that's really interesting it's so cool i saw i mean basically in the 15th century they had the equivalent of laminated menus there were the horn books that students would use where they would have all the alphabet on it

32:35Anna Ptaszynski:You've got wooden frames where you've got horn that's written on with the alphabet to learn from and things like that. But you've also got ancient books which have a square of horn on the front to protect what's beneath, like a very valuable old bit of parchment or vellum or whatever. So the horn window covers that. But it's quite delicious for insects. So a lot of the very old ones are just nibbled away at all around the edges. The alphabet books that Dan was talking about are called horn books. And the horn book is also the title of a book from 1889, which is thought of as the principal work on sex technique in the English language.

33:08Oh, good Lord. It's basically... 1889. I didn't think they had that then. That's why it's interesting. Where do you think your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother came from? So it's like the Kama Sutra, basically, but for Victorian England. Wow. And they had sex techniques. Number one, the ordinary. End of book. What was that then? Was that actually in 1888?

33:34Dan Schreiber:That was upside down and back to front. Here's some more. Number five, the St. George. Whoa. Because you're sort of prodding a dragon, isn't it? Number nine, the view of the low countries. Oh, that is good. Number 48, waste not, want not. Oh, dear. Number 63, the sack of corn backwards. Wow. None of these say much about the people involved, do they? no on a much more wait what was the connection to horn sorry it's called the horn book oh that's it sorry it's like if you google I'm just warning people if they google horn books to get these alphabet books they might accidentally get this one do be careful

34:13Anna Ptaszynski:do be careful if you're on horn.com yeah

34:19Dan Schreiber:there's a cleaner horn book fact which I quite liked which was a poem was written in 1622 which said because they were the thing you went to for your learning your first letters and it read even so the horn book is the seed and grain of skill by which we learning first obtain. And it was written by William Hornby. Oh, that's really good. Can I give you another one like that? Please. The largest brothel in Europe is situated on Horn Street. Is it? Yeah. I was trying to raise the tone. Well, it's gone straight back down again. It's in Cologne and it has 120 sex workers working there. And it was Europe's first high-rise brothel.

34:57But how many of the customers

34:58Dan Schreiber:are going looking for alphabet books for their kids?

35:01Anna Ptaszynski:I think the architectural thing is not the interesting thing there. As in, I've stayed in the largest hotel in Thessaloniki and it's not a guarantee of quality. It turns out when you just say, Europe's largest brothel doesn't mean best. That's true. They basically had a red light district in the town centre and decided to do away with it and get this huge multi-storey building and stuff. And it advertises money-back guarantee in the case of unsatisfactory service.

35:30Dan Schreiber:No! it's so awkward to complain isn't it this second corn wasn't backwards at all

35:39Anna Ptaszynski:have you guys heard of the worshipful company of horners

35:42Dan Schreiber:yes I know someone who's connected

35:44Anna Ptaszynski:get out

35:45Dan Schreiber:well because London has all these guilds which are the worshipful company of and then you insert very old fashioned trade

35:50Anna Ptaszynski:so this is a thing that dates back to 1284 and it was a guild for people who worked with horn people and it was a huge business at the time obviously because all the people needed lanterns and windows and horn books and other uses of horn. There are thousands. Now, they declined, obviously, when pesky glass, stupid glass, took over the window industry and they were in the doldrums for centuries, but they came back. Any guesses what they reimagined themselves as? Oh, buglers. It's not buglers. They just can't get enough buglers through the door. I'm just thinking if they're still called the horners.

36:28Anna Ptaszynski:They're still called the Horners, but they took on another industry related to what they did in the first place.

36:33James Harkin:I read this earlier today, and I just couldn't believe I never made the connection, but shoehorns are made of horn. It wasn't. Yes, that's true.

36:40Anna Ptaszynski:That's not the gigantic industry.

36:43James Harkin:Globally, everyone's got a shoehorn. Absolutely.

36:46Anna Ptaszynski:Is it microchips? No, it's plastics. Oh, right. Horn was the original plastic. You heat it, you can mold it. So these days, all the members of the Worshipful Company of Horners are from the city, from the plastics industry. They sponsor the Polymer Apprentice of the Year Award. Big deal in plastics.

37:06Dan Schreiber:Huge. It's a scout badge. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, that's really cool. Do you know that actually being a Horner is pretty tricky today? Is it? If you're a true Horner, not one of these plastic people, but you're a person who wants to make things out of Horn, it is difficult because of breeding and modern farming and feeding has changed what horns are like so the material is not as good for molding as it used to be and it'll quite often retain what they call its memory so you kind of flatten it and then you put it into whatever shape you want it to be but it kind of remembers that it was horn shaped before and you can't get it flat properly

37:43Anna Ptaszynski:so you come down to your new car window it's just back in the shape of a cow horn

37:48Dan Schreiber:there's a cow there instead you ride it to work so did you read about the the abbey horn hornworks

37:53Anna Ptaszynski:go for it we've said the word horn so much i just love it anyway sorry it's on the edge of the lake district it's the only hornworks left in the uk right because it's an endangered craft these days because there are only about 10 to 20 horn workers left and i think most of them work at abbey horn it's been there for nearly 300 years and you can get some bloody good stuff there yeah i was going through the website and just they could you get a horn mustache brush some bloody good shoe horns Dan, you'd love it. Okay, send me their links. Absolutely. Foot-long monsters. And actually James, as you were saying, because horn has changed, they get some of those from, I think it's African cattle called the Ancol, because they have massive great horns, and you might want to buy a novelty drinking horn if your partner is into being a Viking or whatever.

38:33How is it, are you allowed to buy and sell this kind of horn compared to, obviously, ivory you're not allowed to, and lots of other rhino horns you can't.

38:41Anna Ptaszynski:It's fine, it is fine, because all of these cattle that they're buying the horns of were bred for farming and were they certainly weren't killed for their horns on drinking horns obviously

38:51Dan Schreiber:a huge use of horn and vikings really did massively popularize them it really it was kind of the vikings that brought them to the uk although they'd been used before but did you know that um they also brought such a drinking culture that got so bad by the 10th century that king edgar who you all know uh it was the late 10th century english king said that every village had to be limited to one ale house and every single drinking horn that any punter drank out of had to have pins inserted at certain levels, a bit like you have measures on cups a day. And whoever drank beyond those intervals in one swig had to be severely punished.

39:29Dan Schreiber:Which is tough to monitor as a bar person. Who's policing that?

39:33Anna Ptaszynski:But is it because did it lead to drinking culture? I think because you can't put it down. Yeah, that's the idea. It's like a cocktail party where there's no table. It's a nightmare. You know, you fill up your horn and you're just stuck around holding it. Yeah, I must say the Vikings coming to Northern England in the 10th century is just like you going to a cocktail party. There's nowhere to put it down. And often you lose track of your own horn. And what's good is to put a little hairband around your own horn.

39:57Dan Schreiber:Well, you're the only one who comes with a horn holder to make sure you can put it down between sits. Can you think of another use of the word horning? To be horned.

40:08Anna Ptaszynski:I'm thinking of horning in on a situation. Oh, like honing in. No, it's sort of where you interrupt. Oh, here Anna comes horning in on our conversation. No, not that. This is in a kind of sport. A very old-fashioned European sport. Marrying the Habsburg queen. Yes, that's the sport. Very good. No, in bullfighting, it's when you get gored by a bull. It's known as a horning. There's been a horning in the morning. Yes. Morning horning would be a good like royal rumble uh thing for bullfighting just in case the bullfighting people are listening wanting to rev it up a bit yeah the um the record for most hornings is by a guy called antonio barrera who has been horned 23 times is that a good record yeah do you want that guy on your team the guy from guinness is saying i'm so sorry i missed the 16th morning so you're not gonna get the record wait how many of those were the same occasion uh they were all different occasions Blimey.

41:05The most common place to be horned. Sorry, Spain, I imagine.

41:14On your body. In the ring. Now, in the upper leg. And second place is the perineal area. Second most popular. Do they have guards? Do they wear boxes? Bullfighters. No, no, they wear very tight trousers, don't they?

41:31Anna Ptaszynski:If only there was some system where there could be some kind of clown in the ring. who was able to distract the attention of the bull. What, some rodeo clown idiot? I guess you'd call them that, yeah. Have you heard of the German island of Borkum? No. This is a place that has a Christmas festival called Klassum, right? Or Klassum. And they had this tradition for many, many years there where men dress up in elaborate costumes and spank women with cow horns on the bottom. And this led to controversy recently because a lot of the women said, actually, we really don't like this. Stop using the pointy end.

42:05Anna Ptaszynski:Well, I mean, we don't like being spanked. You know, we're being spanked without permission on Christmas. But last year, there was a huge crackdown on cow horns spanking on Borkum. And it passed without any spanking, without any complaints. Certainly without any complaints. There may have been private, consensual cow horns spanking. I think that's fine. Absolutely. And in fact, when there was this big protest, like loads of the women saying, can you stop hitting us with cow horns on the bum every Christmas? This is not fun. A couple of hundred women did launch a counter protest saying, we love it.

42:31Anna Ptaszynski:It's our way of life. this is our tradition so there's definitely debate but for the moment it appears that the involuntary cowhorn spanking is over

42:42James Harkin:why don't women just spank the men back or I'm sorry is that the daily mail comments coming out again

42:49Dan Schreiber:I think that takes the fun out of it it's like giving someone a wedgie it's not giving someone a wedgie is it if you have to say beforehand is it okay if I give you a wedgie

42:56Anna Ptaszynski:are we saying Anna that consent takes the fun out of things because I do think we're on thin ice

43:08James Harkin:okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is anna my fact this week is that jack

43:13Dan Schreiber:kerouac wrote his most famous novel on one long scroll was it sold in scroll form ever

43:20Anna Ptaszynski:yeah the audiobook started oh yay oh yay

43:26Dan Schreiber:that's an interesting question it sort of is today but not at the time it has as in that scroll has been sold. Yeah, that scroll, you're right. You can go and visit it. I can't remember what. It's in a museum somewhere. It's owned by, or it was owned unfortunately died this year, Jim Irsay who owns the Indianapolis Colts American football team. Okay. There you go. Obviously, that's who it would be owned by.

43:49James Harkin:Maybe we'll talk about it later. Let's get into the fact that he was a huge collector, this guy. Oh, cool. Yeah, I've got a big old list of other cool things he has.

43:57Dan Schreiber:Well, excited to skip ahead to that but first of all, Jack Kerouac Jack. Yeah, he wrote on a long scroll and basically he got annoyed because he was a writer who typed very fast and it all came flowing through him and out of his fingertips. And he thought you should never have to pause or stop or have your flow interrupted.

44:15Anna Ptaszynski:Or think at all about the next sentence. Maybe I'll put a main verb in this one. That kind of stuff. Why would you think about the next sentence considering it's about five pages away? Which we should say, if you read any Jack Kerouac, it is very stream of consciousness.

44:29Dan Schreiber:it's interesting maybe we'll also get into a big debate over who likes his style and who doesn't I think I know around this table who's going to be the fan but he didn't like to reload his typewriter with bits of paper so he got this massive scroll it was made of like teletype paper kind of like tracing paper thick tracing paper and he taped it all together and then he made a 120 foot long scroll this is in 1951 and he was writing on the road

44:55Anna Ptaszynski:that was the name of the book sorry Sorry, yeah.

44:59Dan Schreiber:He was writing in his bedroom, but on the road. And when he was finished, he marched into his editor's office. He was a guy called Robert Giroux. And he was unspun the scroll across the floor like you would unroll a rug. And Giroux just said, Jack, don't you realise that's not how authors present manuscripts? I can't do anything with this. Take it away.

45:19James Harkin:I think he did know that that's not how you present manuscripts. Also, it is often presented as if he did the stream of consciousness. He handed it over and that's it. That's not the case. He spent years and years editing it. It's a very highly edited document.

45:31Dan Schreiber:Not that it seems like it, but yeah.

45:33Anna Ptaszynski:Should we say who Jack Kerouac is briefly? Like American part of the beat generation, post-war counter-cultural writers who were rebelling against the way America was. That was the basic movement. And Jack Kerouac was a huge part of it with On the Road, which is extremely famous. Yeah.

45:51James Harkin:And what's interesting is he influenced a lot of these people like Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew the Cuckoo's Nest, Alan Ginsberg, the poet. William Burroughs. Yeah, he gave the name to William Burroughs' probably most famous novel, Naked Lunch. That was something that he came up with. But when he wrote On the Road, he did spend all those years trying to get it published and editing it. And in the meantime, everyone who was influenced by reading copies of it got their own stuff published. So it ended up looking like Kerouac was copying off them when in fact he was the influence for this whole generation.

46:22Dan Schreiber:Yes, because it only ended up being published in 1957, we should say. So he proposed in 1951. The editor said, take it away and turn it into a proper book. And so he then did type it out on normal pages. But no one would take it. And all the publishers said, we think this is kind of a work of genius, but no one's going to care about the subject matter. And the subject matter is? It's basically a big old road trip. It's none of his books are novels. And I hate it when people refer to them as that, because they're all completely true to his own life. They're his autobiography, basically. And this was a bit of...

46:51They're exaggerated autobiographies, aren't they? Yeah.

46:53Dan Schreiber:So it's him travelling around with his mates. And they all put each other in each other's books, don't they? Ginsburg does and Burroughs does. He also incidentally named Ginsburg's most famous book, Howl. So he named the three most famous books of the B generation. His real skill was naming books. All these books that he did, which were semi-autobiographical and with all his mates in, the liars of his publishers made him change all the names for obvious reasons. you know there was lots of stuff happening in those books that they might object to but kerouac's intention was to towards the end of his life he was going to get all of his old books and he's going to republish them all as one enormous scroll from start to finish but then change all the names back so that we got all the people's names then he died quite young i think he died really yeah he died in the late 60s but can i sorry can i just say that has been done now just to make sense of what I said earlier, I think Viking Press in about 2011 released the original scroll, which is with all the original names, and it's with no paragraph breaks and written madly.

47:53Dan Schreiber:I've got it at home.

47:54James Harkin:It's a feast of a book. I haven't read it. I mean, just no way, but it's... And there you go.

47:58Dan Schreiber:There's the fan revealed.

48:00James Harkin:I'm a fan of the counterculture. I've not actually read Kerouac, because it's a difficult read. Yeah, a stream of consciousness

48:06Anna Ptaszynski:is harder. Can I give you one more version of that meeting with Robert Giroux, who was one of his previous editors, and then he'd written short stories and things like that. He turns up at the office with the manuscript, with the scroll, throws it on the floor. And this is according to Robert Giroux. He was very excited. This is Kerouac. I think he was high. Anyway, I bent down to look at the thing, and after a few moments, I looked up and said, well, Jack, this is going to have to be cut up into pages and edited and so on. Jack just looked at me and his face darkened, and he said, there'll be no editing.

48:37Anna Ptaszynski:This book was dictated by the Holy Ghost. And the book then went to a different publisher. You met him on a dating site, didn't you? I did. Yeah, I think he was off his face quite a lot. He was on Benzatrine when he did this, which is an amphetamine that a lot of people were on at the time. It was like a nasal spray, like a kind of Sudafred thing, but then it made everyone, gave lots of people lots of energy because it's basically amphetamines. It's not very cool, though, is it? It's not like the jazz guys trying to find a new vein for the horse. If it's a nasal spray, I do think that's an uncool administration for a mind-altering drug.

49:17Yeah, I guess so. But it was cool at the time. And then it did go out of fashion.

49:22James Harkin:And he went out of fashion within his own circle as well. That's one of the tragic things. So he did die young. I think he was 47 when he died. And even his friends, his closest friends like Allen Ginsberg, didn't want to know him at that point. He had turned from this amazingly magnetic character that basically defined this whole movement to someone who became very bitter, very angry. He used to write to newspapers about Boy Scout badges changing. He got quite right-winged in the end. He was always quite racist.

49:50Anna Ptaszynski:But those letters to the newspapers, they were so long, they couldn't get in. They were all on little scrolls. It's so sad. You know, the original On the Road, a dog ate part of his homework? Yeah, genuinely. It was auctioned some years ago, and the condition notes noted that the final 25 pages, or equivalent of, had been chewed and torn away by a dog belonging to Kerouac's friend in April or May 1951. But the thing is that no one who read it ever got up to the last 25 pages, so no one ever noticed.

50:18Dan Schreiber:On the Road was published in 1957. It was a huge hit. And immediately he couldn't handle it. He just like, he sort of had a breakdown. His publisher said he ended up like lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, not knowing what to do, became terrible alcoholic. I think we said that he went to a lookout tower, didn't he? Was that after that as well? Yes, that's right. He kind of just lived on his own for months and months in the middle of the forest looking for fires.

50:41Anna Ptaszynski:Did he find any? No, he didn't. But apparently he did leave behind him a column of faeces about the height and size of a baby. What an upsetting simile point for your column of faeces. There's so much else you could compare it to, like a melon. A melon? No ones are smaller than babies. How big are your melons? Excuse me, how small are your babies? Alan, we're not getting into motorboating again. Do you know the only reason he became so famous and it all ruined him anyway? It was because of one review he got in the New York Times. So if the review had not been printed, he would have probably stayed small time.

51:19Anna Ptaszynski:He was small time before it came out, right? But the main reviewer, a guy called Orville Prescott, hated him, hated his stuff. But he was away on holiday. And so there was a different reviewer who just got drafted in for holiday cover called Gilbert Milstein. And he gave it the biggest smash hit review the New York Times had ever given anything. He said, its publication is a historic occasion. The writing is of a beauty almost breathtaking. And this gave the book absolute rocket fuel. It made it a huge success. Prescott, who was the main guy in charge of reviewing, was so angry about this. He almost didn't allow it to go in.

51:53Anna Ptaszynski:And then he fired Gilbert Milstein. He was never hired again to write for the New York Times. Because he loved this stream of consciousness, hard to read, beat generation thing. Wow.

52:03Dan Schreiber:Love it or you hate it.

52:05James Harkin:Well, listen, guys, I can hear the audience at home. Well, I can hear at least my mum screaming, tell us about the collection that Jim Irsey had.

52:13Dan Schreiber:Ah, yes. In which the scroll was contained.

52:14James Harkin:Can we just remind ourselves who this guy is? Sorry. He was the owner of the Colts, the football team in America, and he bought up the scroll. And it's part of this big traveling collection that he has. So he has the big book, the original Alcoholics Anonymous book, the first manuscript that was ever written. Oh, I thought you meant with everyone's names.

52:35Anna Ptaszynski:It's Alcoholics Not Anonymous That's the Compromat book Just one guy is allowed to know who you are

52:43James Harkin:No, this was the original book that William or Bill W. Wilson had written Actually, wasn't that the Holy Ghost who gave him that as well? It was, you're right Huge episode for the Holy Ghost, this one He has two tickets from the performance of Our American Cousin for Ford's Theatre the night that Lincoln was assassinated he's got a rocking chair that was used by JFK inside the White House I should just say, he did die this year because we keep saying he has Sorry, he did, he died just over a month ago

53:13Anna Ptaszynski:Well, he'll be getting a chance to chat to the Holy Ghost won't he? That's exciting He has the greatest collection of guitars in the world or he has, I should say, again It was called that in Guitar Magazine in 2021 and every famous guitarist you can name, he has

53:30Dan Schreiber:Eric Clapton

53:31Anna Ptaszynski:George Harrison Jimmy Bedge Django Reinhardt Oh I just don't think

53:36Dan Schreiber:You've written them all down No I haven't I bet he does though I bet he does have a Django Yeah I'm sure he does Because I was really hoping That you would just name Any of these 20 names That I have on my list Give us one or two Oh okay No I mean Elvis, George Harrison John Lennon Paul McCartney Jerry Garcia Prince, Liz Paul Blah blah blah

53:52James Harkin:Kurt Cobain He has Kurt Cobain's Nevermind guitar It's like one of the most Iconic grunge guitars It's the guitar he brings out At a party And they say Oh for fuck's sake Nevermind Nevermind

54:08James 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 can all be found on our various social media accounts. I'm on Instagram under at Schreiberland. Andy? I'm on Instagram at Andrew Hunter M. And James? I'm on TikTok, No Such Thing as James Harkin. And if you want to get to us as a group, Anna?

54:29Dan Schreiber:We are on Instagram at No Such Thing as a Fish or on Twitter at No Such Thing or email podcast.qi.com

54:36James Harkin:That's right. Or you can go to our website, No Such Thing as a Fish.com. We have all our previous episodes up there. You can check out things like Club Fish, which is our secret members club. Do join that. Get bonus episodes, ad-free content, all that stuff. And we're going to be doing a couple of live gigs in September at the London Podcast Festival. Tickets are available for that now. Go check it out. Otherwise, just come back here next week. We'll have another episode waiting for you. We'll see you then. Goodbye.