No Such Thing As Trigger's Stradivarius

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss valuable violins, validating vessels and Vincent Van Gogh. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com http://nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish http://apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon http://nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Edited by James Harkin Produced by Leying Lee Team includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:11Dan Schreiber?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Tashinsky and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is Anna.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  My fact this week is that in 2010, thieves stole a Stradivarius worth 1.4 million pounds, tried to sell it for a hundred pounds and couldn't find any buyers.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Oh, that is tragic.

• 0:49Speaker 03

  Is it because people saw the price tag and thought, if it was a really good violin, it would be more than that, so there must be some kind of scab? That's what I would think.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Very smart. Maybe this is what this person thought as well.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Interesting, they've priced themselves out of the market but at the wrong end.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  You know what I mean?

• 1:05Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Because even a terrible violin, you'd think would be more than a hundred pounds, wouldn't it? Like even your rope-iest kid's violin.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  If I walked into the shop and I saw a pack of sausages was 5p, I would instinctively think, no, not that.

• 1:18Dan Schreiber?

  Do we know, though, that they were trying to sell it to very knowledgeable violin makers? Or was it like a pawn shop, for example?

• 1:25Speaker 01

  They absolutely were not trying to do that. So this, this was a guy called John Morn, who did the theft, with a 14-year-old and 16-year-old accomplices.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Oh, so sort of Fagin's gang style?

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, really nice. This sort of gang of rapscallions went to Pret, near Euston, and this violin prodigy, Min Jin Kim, was having her lunch, and she left her violin by the side of her, and they whipped it, as The Telegraph reported, as she ate her £2.95 sandwich. And like, the next day, the thief and his two little rapscallions went to an internet cafe in Tottenham Court Road, and they were Googling the words Stradivarius and 1696, which is the year the violin was made. And we know that, because the person sitting next to them was a bus driver who saw what they were Googling. So they obviously knew kind of what they'd got. I think they probably freaked out, turned to this bus driver sitting next to them and said, "Do you want to buy this violin for a hundred quid?" And

• 2:21Speaker 01

  the bus driver, the bus driver said, "It's okay, my daughter already has a recorder."

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Incredible line. But also, these thieves, I'm sorry, they've done no market research on the audience. Like, it's just the bloke sitting next to you in the internet cafe, "Do you want to buy a violin?" That's terrible, that's terrible selling.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  Everyone knows that if anyone on a bus is going to do anything in the orchestra, they'd be the conductor.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Hey!

• 2:42Dan Schreiber?

  Pretty nice. Were they trying to sell it then because they realised they're in big trouble and at least they'll get a tiny bit of cash out of it? Or were they so bad at Googling Stradivarius's that they, after an hour, they're like, "I think this might be worth a hundred, if we're lucky"?

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Also, the idea of Googling 1696, along with Stradivarius, as though there's going to be a substantial difference between a 1699 and a 16... Like, it's a Stradivarius, it's obviously unbelievable.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  But I think they might not have even known what Stradivarius meant, right?

• 3:10Dan Schreiber?

  Yes, exactly.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  And so, because quite often Stradivarius's, they have Stradivarius written and the year written on them, right? So they will have just Googled whatever they've read.

• 3:19Dan Schreiber?

  Fair enough.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Right. I should quickly end this by saying, it was recovered three years later, and it then sold at auction for 1.4 million. Very sadly, she was unable to buy it back, the original owner, Min Kim, because she had had it underinsured, basically. So when she insured it, they hadn't given her enough money for it, compared to how much it was probably worth.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  But wait a minute, did they not just return it to her?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  No, because she had claimed on the insurance. And that means, when something is reclaimed, the insurers own it, if you've claimed. And so, so it is very sad. I think she wrote a whole book about the experience, because it had been her lifelong dream, she had been a child violin prodigy, she has this thing, she now can, she can't afford one again, of course.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  I guess, on the plus side, everyone in the world's insurance premiums probably went down by a fraction of a penny, because the company got a load of money.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Do you know what? That's a really nice way of thinking about quite a sad story. Let's spot the accountant down the floor.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Well, hopefully she's listening, and that's reassured her. It's amazing reading about her relationship with the violin, that, you know, it was proper grief, she got clinically depressed after that, couldn't get out of bed, it wasn't about how much it was worth at all, it was about her attachment. She was like, this was like a relationship, when someone said to her, "Couldn't you get another violin?", she said, "Would you say that if my child had died?" And, but she did then say, after a few years of self-reflection, that actually, probably a good thing, because it was an unbalanced relationship. Like, you know, she needs the violin more than the violin needs her, you know, the violin's in control of things, and now she's got a slightly less expensive one, which isn't as powerful and incredible, but which she thinks is probably better for her.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Wait, you've got another Strad?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Not a Strad, a Marty, I think, which made by one of Stradivarius's...

• 5:08Speaker 03

  So another big old posh one.

• 5:10Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. We should say, Antonio Stradivarius, he was a luthier, he was someone who mended broken instruments, stringed instruments. And so he lived from 1644 to 1734, so he was, he was very old, and in that time, he built something like a 1100, violins, violas and a few others. And we only have about 600 of them left, but they are, to a connoisseur, seen as the finest violins that were ever made, still to this day.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  But actually, people have done blind testing of violins, and it seems that generally people can't tell the difference between like a really modern one that you get and a Stradivarius. And you, you put blindfolds on them, you put it in a room where they can't see what they're doing, you give them to play, and you say which one's the Stradivarius, and usually they can't tell.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  So even violinists can't tell?

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Like, the proper violinists are the ones they've tested it on.

• 6:01Dan Schreiber?

  And then when it's not blind tested, and you hear reports of a violinist getting a chance to play one, they do report that it's the silkiest, most wonderful thing. So it's, that's such an interesting psychological thing. There was a journalist called Emma John, who also happens to be a violinist, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford had a Stradivarius there, and she played it, and she said every time someone would pick it up and play it, a crowd would gather around, and yeah, that's how she described it, just astonishing, different to any kind of thing she's ever played.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  That one is the Messiah, right, in the Ashmolean? Is that the one we're talking about? That's the big one that they have there now, anyway. It's supposed to be the one that's in the best condition out of any Stradivarius, but in fact, it has been modified, as they all have. So around the 18th century, people changed what they thought violins should be like, they got a bit bigger, they got a slightly different body, slightly different neck, and all the Stradivarius's got changed slightly.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 6:58Speaker 03

  And the Messiah, which is in the Ashmolean, which, like I say, is supposed to be the most close to the original, it's had its neck lengthened, its bass bar has been replaced, its bridge has been replaced, its tailpiece has been replaced, its pegs have been replaced, and its soundpost has probably been replaced, and its strings have probably been replaced.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Are you serious?

• 7:16Speaker 02

  This triggers Stradivarius.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 7:19Dan Schreiber?

  Do you know why it's called the Messiah?

• 7:21Speaker 03

  I think it was called Le Messie, which it means Messiah, and I think it's because Lionel Messi.

• 7:26Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, that's absolutely correct.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  He's the current owner. They're normally named after people who used to own them before. So there's one called the Ex-Huberman, which used to be owned by someone called Huberman.

• 7:35Dan Schreiber?

  There's a joke behind it, basically. It's a half-legendary joke, whether or not it's true. But it is called the Messiah, and it was a person who was called Luigi Tarizio, was the owner of it. He kept it in Italy, and he used to visit his friends and say, "I'm going to show you the Messiah", and he just kept it, never brought it along. And so people were like, "Do you actually own it?", so the idea...

• 7:52Speaker 01

  But he didn't say at the time, "I'm going to show you the Messiah", right? Because it wasn't called Messiah yet. He used to say, "I'm going to show you my violin".

• 7:58Dan Schreiber?

  "I'm going to show you my violin", exactly. They called it the Messiah because, like the Messiah, it was eagerly expected but would never appear. And so, that was the idea behind it.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  I see.

• 8:07Dan Schreiber?

  But you can see why she was very into the idea and connected to her violin. I think the name has something to do with it, because these have individual names, the Messiah, the Beachback, there's the Bennett, there's the Canadian. There was a golden period that he used to make them, and in that golden period, 1713 is one of the big years, and he produced two violins in that year, one called Daniel and one called Schreiber.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  What? No, he didn't.

• 8:30Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, and obviously named retroactively, that he didn't name them himself, but you can get a Daniel and Schreiber.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Any called Craig or Indiana?

• 8:37Dan Schreiber?

  No, I looked into that, I couldn't find that.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  For your middle names.

• 8:40Dan Schreiber?

  No, but the only other connection to the podcast I could find is that there is also a violin called Lord Boric. Now, he, I believe...

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Hang on, he wrote in?

• 8:49Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, a number of times on our Club Fish shows.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  About Big Ben?

• 8:54Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Lord Boric wrote in about the numbering on Big Ben, and whether it's an X.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  And he's an actual lord from the House of Lords.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Yes, he's a real lord, yeah, yeah.

• 9:01Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, and so there was a Strad called Lord Boric.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:04Dan Schreiber?

  And I looked into it, and I'm pretty sure that his great-grandfather was the owner and now the person named after the Stradivarius.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Really?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, you should have written back to him before the show, see if we could borrow it.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  I reckon I can get twinkle, twinkle out of a violin.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  There have been some other Strad thefts over the ages. My favourite one is the theft of one that belonged to a guy called Roman Totenberg, and this was taken in 1980. And I just kind of like the chutzpah of the person who took it. So Roman Totenberg was a good violinist, he was the teacher of a guy called Philip Johnson, and actually, Philip Johnson was a very talented but very troublesome, naughty, annoying student who got expelled in the end. Totenberg was the only person who defended him at the time. So a bit unfairly, Johnson turned up at one of Totenberg's shows in 1980, nicked his Strad, and people actually saw him. A, a lot of people said, "Look, there's a guy who looks a bit shifty around here, we think it's that guy who was really misbehaving, he was ranting about

• 10:02Speaker 01

  how he doesn't think Totenberg deserves his Strad". We saw him walk past Totenberg's office a number of times where the Strad is. And even given all of that circumstantial evidence, when Totenberg went back and found it was stolen, they weren't allowed to search his house because it's all circumstantial.

• 10:18Dan Schreiber?

  I think even the guy who stole it, his girlfriend slash wife said, "I think he's stolen it", and they still didn't say it was enough evidence.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  I remember when my laptop got stolen, and I could see with 5 My Phone exactly where it was, I could see the building where it was, but the police wouldn't go and get it.

• 10:33Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, really?

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Was your laptop worth 2.1 million dollars?

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Well, it had all of my facts on it.

• 10:39Dan Schreiber?

  So there we go.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  It's priceless, actually, yeah.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  It's actually a weird you-social relationship I have with my laptop. You know, sometimes I think I need the laptop more than the laptop needs me.

• 10:49Dan Schreiber?

  It's called Daniel Schreiber.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  It's called Daniel Schreiber, yeah, no, that's my password.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  But this, this guy was so brazen, once he nicked it, and everyone knew he'd nicked it, he didn't want to sell it. So he ended up being so poor, he had to shoplift to eat food, but he still didn't flog it. Also quite hard to flog a Strad, because everyone knows it's stolen. But he would turn up to his local orchestra and just play it. And then people would say, "Oh, that's a nice violin, can I have a look?", and he'd quickly shove it back in the box and make some excuse.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. And... If I was him, I'd hide it in a machine gun case.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  I think you could get even more trouble.

• 11:34Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. And then the end of that story is that Totenberg never gets to find out where it was. He dies. The year before, this guy, Johnson, died and the wife found it and all his belongings. So there was a one-year overlap between their deaths where if someone had just gone through his stuff, they could have got the end of the story for Totenberg, but he died.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Oh, that's tragic.

• 11:55Dan Schreiber?

  And they had a ceremony returning it to the family after it was discovered. Yeah.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  It takes ages when someone's died to go through all that stuff, you know? Blame the poor woman.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. There is a theory about why they're so good. It's partly that Stradivari was a genius.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  And it's partly that they're not that good.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Partly that they're rubbish. But in between that, there is this theory that it's due to the weather at the time. Because Europe went through this period called the Little Ice Age from about 1300 to about 1850. And the idea is Stradivari got all of his wood from a particular forest in Italy. And it came from particular spruce trees. And those spruce trees during this period of colder weather grew more slowly and the wood is more dense. And as a result, those are supposedly the golden period ones where he did turn out some actually quite good violins. And I just love the science that's gone into it. You know, the scientists did, they compared ring patterns in the violins

• 12:52Speaker 02

  to the International Tree Ring Data Bank, which is a huge vault of tree records from 6,000 different places around the world. 6,000. And they clustered patterns and they did a lot of clever analysis and they found these master chronologies of trees across Europe and they traced it down to this particular bit of this particular forest at this time. And so that's one of the, one of the reasons why they.

• 13:16Speaker 03

  There's quite a few different theories as to why they're so good. So one idea is that the wood was treated with borax to prevent worms from eating it. And that supposedly made it better. There's another idea that they made the varnish with volcanic ash.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  So that made it better. Really common one is the varnish itself was cochineal varnish. It's made out of insects, I think, cochineal. But this was supposed to really help the resonance of the instrument. And the thing is that he was the only one using cochineal because he was making instruments for extremely wealthy, powerful people and had everything at his disposal to make the best violins, which is why I think probably they were the best ones.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  You know, like he just had every chance to make the best ones because he was making them for the royal family.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Also, there weren't that many. It wasn't like violins had existed for thousands of years. You know, they'd just been invented. He was one of the early inventors of the violin, really. And that, yeah, basically the violin had that century. Yeah. And it was him and then a bunch of other people whose violins are also very famous, like Guarneri, who had the most expensive one, and then Amati. But I do love, I, do you always feel a bit Jekyll and Hyde when you read about these experiments where you think, how cool that scientists have found this? And given that we know it's a load of old bollocks anyway, and no one can tell the difference, why are people wasting their time? Don't we still have malaria?

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Do you find yourself doing that?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Not really. Yeah. I sort of like that it's been done.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. If you're, not every scientist can try and cure malaria. Otherwise, there's going to be lots of other parts of the science that.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Sorry, we can't fix your computer because we're trying to.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Him and his laptop again.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  I think it's more like people are so unwilling to believe the results of the study. I mean, this poor woman who did the study that showed people can't tell the difference in the sound. People laid into her, didn't they? And they said the methodology's all wrong. She went back and did it again, better, found exactly the same thing. People can't tell the difference. Still, they just sell for so much and people say, what's the key to how good they sound? And it's obviously that you're holding a strad.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  I don't think we've ever talked about the thing in 2019 where there was a city in Italy called Cremona, still is. And they had a Stradivarius that they wanted to record the sounds of because they were making a library of Stradivarius sounds.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  So that, I presume in the future, you can get it on a synthesizer and just play it like that, you know?

• 15:31Dan Schreiber?

  It's where he's from, by the way, as well.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Cremona.

• 15:33Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, he was from Cremona, Stradivarius.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Well, this all starts to make sense. They were making the Stradivarius Sound Bank and they had to record this one violin in particular and they had to make the whole city go quiet for ages while they record the sound. So they cordoned off five blocks right in the middle of town. And in the auditorium they were in, they turned off the ventilation, you know, because that might make a slight noise. They turned off the lifts, just in case in a different bit of the building, a tiny bit of sound came in. Ding. They unscrewed the light bulbs in case there was a slight electrical hum from the. They just did absolutely everything to make it as quiet as it could possibly be for literally 100 metres around. I love it.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  And then did the person completely fuck the piece up?

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Just really squeaky. They got a 10-year-old to play it.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  You can play it on the synthesizer now, but there's a cough in the middle of the main note. Yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  I imagine someone did cough at some point, you know, when there's Remembrance Day silence. And have you ever walked into a room not realising it's a two-minute silence? And went, Anna, how are you doing? Do you want a cup of tea? I'm pretty sure I've done that to you at the airport, actually. And everyone turns around to you and goes, shh.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, you did.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  When we were on tour, that happened.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it did. So I imagine someone did that to the strad and got a similarly ego destroying response.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  Does anyone know why the aircon's been turned off?

• 16:49Speaker 02

  I had to come up the stairs.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  It's really dark in here, by the way.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Stop the podcast.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Stop the podcast.

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  On with the show.

• 18:27Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  My fact is, there is a testing body in America which makes sure bins are bear-proof by testing them on live grizzly bears.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  Makes sense. Yeah.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Absolutely does.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  This is the work of the Inter-Agency Grizzly Bear Committee, the IGBC.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  And just a quick shout out to where I got this fact. I got it from a book called How to Keep a Plane in the Sky. It's by a guy called Alex Davies and it's all about test engineering, basically. It's the way in which engineers make products safe. Things are tested to destruction and beyond to try and make sure they work in the real world. And it's such an interesting book. So a big shout out to, to the author, Alex Davies. The Bear Agency Committee, this is an American thing. Basically, if a bear gets into your bin or your food canister when you're camping, that's a problem, you know?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Well, because it makes a mess.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Because it makes a mess.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  But it means they're more likely to go towards places where humans are, right?

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  If they know they can get a picnic basket from the humans, then they're going to go towards the humans a lot and they might attack them.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Exactly. So they test all these products which are sold as bear resistant. And there's only one way to prove if it's bear resistant, which is to get, get it in the ring with a bear. So they have a bear on staff called Kobuk the Destroyer, who is their MVP. He's really, really good at it. But they have a few bears they tested on and the thing has to survive. I think it's one hour of bear contact time.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then they get, then they get a sticker. From the IGBC. And that sticker means that it can go in like.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  God, I really thought you meant the bear. Right. Bear gets a little like you go to the dentist. Well done you. You tried really hard.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  I liked, I read an article about these guys and I like it that they're all problem bears that they use. They only use problem bears.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  What is it? Is every bear not a problem bear once it's quite near human being?

• 20:14Speaker 03

  No. These are bears who have previously gained access to unsecured foods, so they know that they're up for it.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:21Dan Schreiber?

  And Kobuk is like their code breaker. This is the one who's just got into things that no other bear has managed. And that, just very quickly, because you've given a shout out for the book, that is the name of the book in America, Kobuk the Destroyer. Just for any Americans who want to get it because it's coming out just now.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:37Dan Schreiber?

  And I do like, there's a point that Alex Davies makes, which is that it's, we're so obsessed with inventors and we remember the name of inventors, but what this book is trying to say is there's a whole other level of innovators who, once they get the product, have to refine and fix it. They're kind of a silent genius that we never get to see.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  And we have the same on our British bins, but with the less interesting foxes. They get tested on foxes, yes. Coral products who make food caddies. They have their own fox, fondly called Felix, they say. And they also have a bunch of rodents that they haven't named. And they try all of their bins on Felix and their rats.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  I did not know that.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Doesn't seem to work. Foxes seem to get into bins left, right and centre.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  Exactly. It doesn't seem to work at all. My wheelie bin, they absolutely worked out to get into that.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Have they?

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  They're very, very clever, aren't they? You can't outwit a fox in the end. We've all read Fantastic Mr. Fox.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do keep live chickens in my wheelie bins.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  I was looking at quite a lot of bin, I got really sidetracked by bins.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  Oh, great.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  And other testing on bins. There's a company called Simple Human, which I really like, actually. It's like environmentally friendly company that makes stuff. It tests its pedal bins with a massive robot called the Punisher. I mean, it's not that massive. It's like human size, but the Punisher, or can you guess what it does?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  It opens the pedal bin repeatedly and violently.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  I don't actually know if it has to be too violent.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  Well, it's the punishment part of it.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  I think it's just punishing for the bin once it has been open and closed at least 150,000 times, which is what it does.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  That's incredible.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Which is the equivalent of doing 20 open and shuts a day for 20 years. So that's what the Punisher does.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Well, you do open your bin quite a lot, don't you?

• 22:22Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and 20 years seems like a, actually, that's quite long to have.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  But that's really long.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  I've had my bin for 12 years.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Have you?

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, my main bin in my house.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. You're just so confident about how long you've had your bin for.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  I got it when we got the house, and I knew when we got the house.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  I know.

• 22:38Dan Schreiber?

  Easy equation.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  I got married in the same year, so.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  It was just as if.

• 22:41Dan Schreiber?

  The bin was the best man.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  A big thing in the book is like how you replicate real life conditions, but you're also trying to do standardized experiments. Do you know what I mean? And those things are slightly in tension with each other. So for example, planes are tested with having chickens fired at them, even though chickens do not typically go into plane engines because they're mostly on the ground.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Right?

• 23:03Speaker 03

  They're easy to get hold of, and also there's not going to be a bird that's much bigger than a chicken.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, geese are, geese are much bigger. That one that went down in, you know, the Sullenberger Miracle on the Hudson. That was a flock of geese, all of which are much bigger.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  That's true, actually, and it's not that hard to get frozen geese.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Or an ostrich at Christmas.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  Get an ostrich for God's sake.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Listen to Mr. Scrooge here. And get me the biggest turkey you can find, because I've got a Boeing engine here.

• 23:27Dan Schreiber?

  Would the Hudson not have happened if it was a flock of regular sized chickens?

• 23:32Speaker 02

  I don't know, because it's, again, they.

• 23:34Dan Schreiber?

  It was the number of them that went in.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  And it was the size. So it was, they're always trying to find out a thing where you can do the test repeatedly. So chicken is perfect, because you can get four pound chickens really readily. But even these days, they're using artificial chicken, bird simulant material, which is just a sack of gelatin. So again, it's like, that's not a real world thing, but it is completely standardized. So I think that's really interesting, you know?

• 23:59Speaker 01

  I think I've seen that in the vegetarian section at my local disco.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Lovely.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Battered bird simulant.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Fire some tofu into the engine.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  They call it torture sometimes, don't they? When you're testing one of these products again and again and again. And torture's been used in advertising quite a lot over the years. So RCA Victor radios, they would take two different radios and do torture tests on them and show that theirs was the one that would last for the longest. Timex did the same, where they would sort of whack their watches with hammers and stuff and say, look, ours is the one that survived. And there's a web, a YouTube series called Will It Blend? Have you ever seen that?

• 24:42Speaker 01

  I've heard of that.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Yes, I have seen that, yeah.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah. It's just, it's advert basically for a blender. I didn't realise it was an advert, actually, when I've seen it in the past. Yeah, yeah. And the idea is that the blender's so great that it can blend all these different things. And so they get like a rock and they put it in, they go, will it blend? And then an iPhone and then what?

• 25:00Speaker 02

  I thought it was going to be an advert for the iPhone that it couldn't blend.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  No, it's not. It's for the, yeah, for the.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  But they could do a partnership, I guess, with the iPhone and the blender.

• 25:08Dan Schreiber?

  Someone's always going to lose.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:10Dan Schreiber?

  I like that, because a lot of the stress tests are about quite large things, about plane wings and the turbines and all that. I like the really simple ones, and there's an example in the book, which is the Zildjian cymbal. And we've spoken about this cymbal before. It's the, the cymbal that every drummer uses on the drum kit.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  You love these so much.

• 25:28Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, and I better pronounce the name wrong, but they have someone who, up to 4,000 times a day, takes every single cymbal and just gives it three taps. And they know the quality of what should be out there, and that's when one is free to go. So it's just someone in a room going ting, ting, ting.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  On the same cymbal?

• 25:45Dan Schreiber?

  No, no, every individual cymbal, up to 4,000 a day of these cymbals come through, and he does three taps on each, and he says yes or no.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  He's the quality controller.

• 25:53Dan Schreiber?

  He's quality controller.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  So that's quality control.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  No, you'd think that would be incredibly boring to do, would send you mad with order, but fortunately, it's a drummer doing it, so they don't know it's boring. Just a drummer joke for you there.

• 26:02Dan Schreiber?

  There you go.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Very good.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  It's not, is he testing the quality of the sound then? Like, oh, this sound, this is a bit flat?

• 26:07Speaker 02

  What the sound does he expect?

• 26:09Speaker 01

  I know.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Someone put a chicken in this one.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  It's like the person at the Maltesers factory who looks at every single Malteser that goes past to make sure that there's none that are too big or too small.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  It was bad. It was bad.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  I can see faster than the cameras.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Do you guys know what a tenderometer measures?

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Oh, the tenderness of something?

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Yes, meat.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Of what, though?

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Meat.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  It should be meat, shouldn't it?

• 26:39Speaker 03

  James Blunt singles.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  What needs to be tender?

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Tender.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  You actually, I don't think you'll guess this based on that question.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  Turkey tenders, like, they're like, turkey strips are called turkey tenders, aren't they?

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Oh, I didn't know that. I thought they were turkey Twizzlers.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Turkey dinosaurs?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  You've all gone too meaty. That's the classic, isn't it?

• 26:57Dan Schreiber?

  How sensitive the product.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  What needs to squish?

• 27:02Speaker 03

  Something that tells you how bruised you are.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  It's actually something that you, you want it to be almost less tender. It's misnamed. It's peas. I'm going to put you out of your misery.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  It's peas. This big machine, the tenderometer, invented in 1937 and still use the exact same machine, or copies of it today. And it's to make sure you know exactly how much force they can withstand, because you don't want your peas to be too mealy. So actually, it should be called like the crunchometer or something.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so wait, it is smashing.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Yes, but what it does, I know what you're thinking, you can't use the peas, but.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  You smash.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  That's a problem with all of these things, isn't it? It's like, okay, we've smashed this mobile phone 200,000 times, now we'll sell it. That's not how it works.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  We need a better system. Yes, I think you're usually smashing one in the batch, aren't you? And then you say, all right, the rest of the batch must be good if that one works.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  Mobile phones are tested. What is the highest that anyone has ever dropped a mobile phone and for it to survive?

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm going to, I'm sorry, James, to do this with the guessing game, I'm going to say from space.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:03Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, wow.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  From the International Space Station.

• 28:06Dan Schreiber?

  I've, I've definitely seen a video of someone filming themselves on a parachute jump and it fell out, but it happened to land somewhere on like bales of hay or something.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, the person did not land on a bale of hay. Very sadly, but the phone survived.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's somewhere in between space and a parachute.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Okay, a very high plane?

• 28:28Speaker 03

  It was from the stratosphere. It was from 100,000 feet above Sweden.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  A Sweden particularly hard surface, is there a reason they chose?

• 28:37Speaker 03

  The reason they chose it is, I think, because mobile phones are made in Sweden. But it was definitely near the S-Range Space Centre, which is in northern Sweden. And the main problem was, once they dropped it, finding it.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Yes. I think surely it's got a thing in it.

• 28:52Dan Schreiber?

  Find my phone?

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Find my Rhino Shield phone?

• 28:54Speaker 03

  There's not much signal up there, I think.

• 28:56Dan Schreiber?

  Harkin would have found it if it was laptop.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  But they managed to use tracking to narrow it down to about two kilometres radius.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Still a lot to look.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  And it took them five hours searching in the wilderness to find it. Only, and then they turned it on and it did work.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  And it did? Oh, that's great. So that's what, 100,000 feet, that's sort of three times a plane, isn't it? Three times, a plane's a normally 30,000 feet.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  Now we're flying at 30,000 feet. So yeah, three times that. So it's in, it's basically in the stratosphere. And it had a special Rhino Shield case on it, which is what helped the impact.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  What is this Rhino, what is this Rhino Shield thing?

• 29:32Speaker 03

  It's the name of the company that makes the case.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  I see, okay.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, you wouldn't have it without a case at 100, from 100,000 feet.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  You're asking for trouble, aren't you?

• 29:42Speaker 01

  So if you're over the age of 55 and you drop your phone, it'll survive anything, because you always keep your phone in one of those leather cases that pop us up, don't you?

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, and also you've got a Nokia 3310 still out there, and they will actually go all the way from space.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is James.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  Okay, my fact this week is that Van Gogh sometimes ate his paint.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Was it on the canvas? Are there paintings where you say this is from his hungry period, where there's just a little nibble missing?

• 30:13Speaker 03

  No, it's not that. There is a myth that he ate yellow paint to cheer himself up. I, I have never heard this myth before, but the Van Gogh Museum debunks it on the FAQs.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  You've got to have something to fill up the FAQs, haven't you?

• 30:31Speaker 03

  And it does seem like he ate the paint, but it seems like he did it because he had a thing called pika, which means you sometimes, you just feel like you have to eat something, and it's something that's not normally eaten by humans. And he seems to have a craving for something called terpenes. And terpenes are also found in absinthe, which we know he drank a lot of absinthe. And we don't really know exactly why he had this cravings. His doctor thought that he was deliberately trying to poison himself because he was so depressed. We don't think it's that either. It just seems to have been a thing that his brain just told him that he needed this. And it is not common, but a not uncommon thing for people to have.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Pika's a thing. Isn't pika a thing when you're pregnant?

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you get coal and stuff.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Soil and coal.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  And it's good for you, isn't it?

• 31:17Speaker 03

  And broccoli.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Soil, coal and broccoli.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Steak or spinach.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  I think it's like, sometimes it can be good for you if it's broccoli.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Broccoli is edible, so that's where it starts being pika, I guess.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  I guess so, yeah.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  So did Van Gogh go to his doctor and say, I keep eating paint, what do I do about it?

• 31:34Speaker 03

  He did to a few doctors, actually, because he had quite a lot of problems. They thought he had epilepsy, but certainly he was having all sorts of health issues. And one of them thought it was due to turpentine poisoning, another one thought it was due to too much sun.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  The what? That he was eating his paint?

• 31:51Speaker 03

  No, that he was just having these mental disorders.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  But did he say to the doctors, I'm eating paint, or did the doctor say to him, I think you're eating paint?

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Well, they looked around his mouth and he had a little bit.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  I'm not sure exactly who said what, but certainly the doctors did know about it.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, because he was, I didn't really, well, I didn't know anything about Van Gogh really, but he was, he was quite unwell in the last couple of years of his life in particular. And sometimes he was in institutions. I mean, he's still painting at an incredibly rapid clip. But when it did happen that he was discovered drinking the paint, he was restricted to pencils for a little while.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Yes, and but he had himself committed to an institution, I think, partly because of this. The health issues that he had couldn't have been due to turpentine toxicity because before it gave him any convulsions or mental problems, he would have also had giddiness, redness and burning of the face and throat, itching and burning of the anus, and painful urinating and defecating. So he would have noticed before the, um, the convulsions and mental problems began.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  I don't know. You look at some Van Gogh paintings and they could have been done by someone with a very burning anus. You could that sort of frantic, hurling the brush around. That's what I get.

• 33:01Dan Schreiber?

  That's what that period's called, the burning anus period.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Burning anus period, exactly.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  I think he's a bit of an icon for late starters in life.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Because he only decided to become an artist at the age of 27. I think he died in his late 30s, didn't he? I don't think he saw 40.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, 37, I think.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  27, he did, he had done so much other stuff and it hadn't really taken. So he'd been an art dealer and his brother Theo was an art dealer. He was a big part of his story. He'd been a teacher in Ramsgate.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Not paid. So I don't know what, I don't know what the deal was with his employment. He was just not paid for it. But that didn't work. And then he became a preacher and that didn't work. And eventually, at the age of 27, he took his brother's advice. His brother kept saying, I think you should become an artist. And he did.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he was from a huge arty family, family of art dealers, wasn't he? His brothers, I think his dad was an art dealer maybe. But yeah. The thing that struck me about Van Gogh, reading up on him, is that he was such a nice guy.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Like genuinely seemed like the most unbelievably gentle. In fact, the whole family, very gentle, very sweet in a time when you'd think everyone has to be very masculine. You know, you said he became a preacher. What he did when he went to preach, he went to a mining district of Belgium, I think, as a preacher and was working with lots of very poverty stricken communities. And he did the Orwell thing of, he gave away his clothes, his bed, um, all of his money. And he went and he lived as them, preaching to them. He tended to the sick all the time. He was actually fired from his preacher job ostensibly because he wasn't very good at public speaking and organising people. But we think because the clergy thought, this is a bit weird. This bloke's kind of making friends with the poor.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  What, you mean he's living too like Christ?

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  That was certainly his version of events. I don't know.

• 34:41Dan Schreiber?

  I like, what's quite nice is, um, you don't often hear about who the man was. You often just have these bigger ideas that he cut off his ear, that, you know, he was in the institutes and so on. There's an amazing book that I'm reading at the moment by Bernadette Murphy called Van Gogh's Ear. And there's a description of what he was like from his friends. They said he had a strange gait. He had distinctive rapid footsteps. Um, due to the loss of 10 teeth in 1886, he had a slight speech impediment, spoke quickly, which combined with his Dutch accent apparently made it for it hard to follow. He spoke multiple languages. He spoke English, so hence Ramsgate. He spoke Dutch, French. I just, you never hear that kind of side of Van Gogh, just the day to day stuff.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  I want to know how you lose 10 teeth in one year.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  We've all picked up on the same detail, Dave.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  I don't know what those are, the languages, mate. What's up with your teeth?

• 35:28Speaker 02

  He spoke French, did he? Okay.

• 35:31Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  10 teeth.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  I know.

• 35:32Dan Schreiber?

  You know what's weird about his name? Vincent Van Gogh. I always thought, oh, that's just his name, right? But he's like Da Vinci. That's of Gogh.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  From Gogh.

• 35:41Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  But he signed the paintings Vincent. But he signed the paintings Vincent because, I think he wrote in the letter to his brother, no one can say Van Gogh.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  So he just said, I'll just sign the Vincent.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Well, it's true. No one can say it.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  No one can say it. You're absolutely right.

• 35:55Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  His main influence, I love this artistically, was his cousin. Did you guys find his cousin's name?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  No.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Anton Mauve.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  I did find them, yeah.

• 36:04Dan Schreiber?

  Who was a successful artist.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  And do you know that Anton Mauve was famous for painting in grey and blue tones? He never painted in mauve.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Wait, but if you put grey and blue together, isn't that sort of more?

• 36:17Speaker 03

  Kind of dirty blue.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you got it. You got it out of red in, haven't you?

• 36:22Speaker 03

  But yeah, isn't that funny?

• 36:24Speaker 02

  That's very weird.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  Mauve means, um, mallow, like marshmallow in French.

• 36:28Dan Schreiber?

  Is it?

• 36:29Speaker 03

  That's where that comes from, yeah.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Um, it's really interesting because we all have this impression that, totally underappreciated in its time.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  This post-impression more like.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  It's good stuff.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Because he was a post-impressionist.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, no, we understood it.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  I think I've never wondered.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Thank you, Dan. Um, we all have this impression that he was unappreciated in his time and that, I guess I thought, you know, he died and then ages later, he, lots of his paintings were sold. But actually, first of all, he went to art school and the students who met him, a lot of them said he's clearly a genius. You know, he worked insanely fast. He created these extraordinary canvases. His students hated him because he didn't do what they asked him to do. So they'd say, paint this statue in the middle of the room. And he'd like paint the walls and the floor and the chairs and the other people.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Legend.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  But, you know, people who remember him said, yeah, he was pretty damn good. And his whole family said he's a genius. Theo, his brother, devoted his life, and then Theo's wife devoted her life to making the world realise he was a genius. And also, it was literally straight after he died that he became famous, right? It was like within sort of five years, there were these big exhibitions on where everyone was going, oh yeah, he's good.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  He was kind of almost famous, wasn't he?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  He was so on the cast.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  He was part of a group and he did have some exhibitions of his work before he died. Uh, and even ones that were shown to the president of France at the time. So it was, you know, I think if he'd have not died, he would have been famous within two or three years.

• 37:53Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  I think.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  Dying helps an artist.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  But yeah, and he only, he sold just one, didn't he, in his lifetime to, um, Anna Bock? Uh, it was the Red Vineyard and it was sold for 400 francs. And she was, she was the only female member of a group called Levane, which was a group of Belgian artists. But they were Pissaro, Monet, Gauguin, all became quite famous because these Belgian artists really liked them and started putting on exhibitions for them. Um, she was one of the first people to own a car in Belgium.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 38:26Dan Schreiber?

  It's cool.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  In Belgium.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  In Belgium. Well, this was in the, what, in the 1890s?

• 38:31Speaker 02

  One of the first.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  Turn of the century. So, uh, but the, more importantly, she would drive alone or with her female friends. Like she wouldn't have a man with them all, all the time because they liked to drive around doing outdoor paintings.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  So wait, who was this? She was the one who bought?

• 38:46Speaker 03

  She was the woman who bought the only Van Gogh in Van Gogh's life.

• 38:50Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  I saw a few claims that actually he sold a few more than that, but it's never, he had big success. It's more like he sold six.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  I don't think we have like absolute evidence for any apart from this one, but yeah.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Some of them, apparently he would barter for more paint, which is kind of amazing, isn't it?

• 39:08Speaker 01

  What do you mean? He'd give away a painting for more paint?

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Well, he'd paint and then he'd sell the painting for paint. Yeah. And then he'd turn that paint into another painting.

• 39:14Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  Actually, that is perfect.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Oh, so he did sell that. We can't, if we're counting those as sales.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  That's sort of barter, isn't it?

• 39:19Speaker 03

  Well, you would have to pay tax on that, really.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  On the paint?

• 39:22Speaker 03

  I think so. If you're, if you're bartering, you still have to pay tax on the amount.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  You're joking.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  I'm afraid so.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm in big trouble with the authorities. My little barter.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  My little thanks for food.

• 39:35Dan Schreiber?

  Speaking of the authorities, uh, the FBI, they have an arts crime unit. And as part of their arts crime unit, on their website, they have produced a list of the 10 most wanted missing pieces of art that are out there, or things to do with art and culture. And there was a big moment where a bunch of paintings were stolen from the Van Gogh Museum, which is in Amsterdam. And, uh, they caught the guys, but they've never recovered the paintings. So those are still, it's still up there on the site. And there's 10, they've got their top 10 list. And one of the other 10 is a Stradivarius. So two, yeah, two of our topics today are sitting on the top 10 list of the FBI's most wanted missing bits of art and culture.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  So cool to be sitting in prison. I'm always jealous of those guys. Hmm, I take that back. I'm not jealous of them. But it's cool to be sitting in prison thinking, ha, ha, ha, I know where this is, but I'm not telling you. Is that what they're doing?

• 40:27Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, they must be, right? If they took it.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  And is it, are you thinking when I get out, I'll get it back and then?

• 40:32Speaker 01

  I'm all thinking you got one over on these dickheads who put you in prison.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  I think these are the police, these are the authorities. I'm sorry, I'm sorry to sound like a cop.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  This unjustified imprisonment just for sealing the old Price's painting.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Oh my God.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  Well, a lot of them were stolen by Nazis. I don't know what you think about those, Anna?

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Oh, look, once you're a Nazi and an art thief, maybe a couple of years, you know.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. So basically, Van Gogh was very popular in the Jewish community in the 30s and 40s, when he hadn't become really, really popular yet. Because they were a bit less conservative than the non-Jewish collectors and Van Gogh's were like still, they were expensive, but they were still kind of affordable at that stage. And so a lot of the Van Gogh's were in Jewish collections. And of course, the Nazis basically stole all of those. And by 2021, I haven't got the current figures, but the Nazi era provenance internet portal, which goes through all of the paintings and sees if they might have been stolen, they list 73 Van Gogh's in American museums, they say have questionable provenance.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  No way.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  So there's quite a lot of them on display, which might have been plundered in the war.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  Interesting. You would think that there would be records going back that far that would be able to nail it, but it is just a bit.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's difficult.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Especially because he painted so many, I imagine that's part of it, he painted sort of a thousand.

• 41:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you can't really tell what any of them are.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Because they're all just squiggles, aren't they?

• 41:59Speaker 02

  They're all just squiggles.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  He's not Kandinsky.

• 42:02Speaker 03

  Right? So it's a bit about the squiggles. So the squiggles that I was referring to is Starry Night.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  Which is the famous one. You will have seen parodied everywhere. But scientists have looked at it and found that the squiggles that he put between the stars are an exact model of turbulence. Like, let's say you're testing an aeroplane by throwing a chicken into it. You need to see where all the wind's going.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  And you can see the little eddies and the little walls that the, that the air makes. And the Starry Night is almost exactly what scientists would see if they fed that into a computer. But the really interesting thing is, he did loads of these similar paintings, but some of them were done in the institution, and some of them were done when he was not having his mental issues. And the ones that were done when he was having his bad periods, they're the ones that are more correct. Wait, are we saying he could see turbulence in the sky? It's kind of weird. I'm not saying that, but there is kind of like, if that was possible, that does seem to be what it's suggesting.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  I like it. I like it.

• 43:04Speaker 03

  He had extra vision.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:07Dan Schreiber?

  No wonder he was a genius.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  Do you want a few bonuses on Van Gogh?

• 43:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, go on.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Uh, I just want you to guess what these things are. Van Guff.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  Uh, it's an app where you put in the sound of your fart and it gives you, it turns it into a beautiful painting.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  That's really good.

• 43:24Dan Schreiber?

  Very good. Is it the type of sound that an exhaust on a van makes?

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Oh, you're all good. It's just a logistics company based in the UK. It's sadly been liquidated now.

• 43:33Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, okay.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Um, Van Cough.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  Okay, uh, Van Cough.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  Vincent Van Cough. That doesn't really help you.

• 43:41Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, no, but it's, okay, but it's not a van then. I'm just going for van every time.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe it's a comedian or something, or someone who goes on stage and does lots of coughing. You remember that fata, rolling the fata? Yes, Le Petemane. Le Petemane or whatever. Yeah. So this guy can cough the National Anthem.

• 43:59Dan Schreiber?

  Or puts paint in their mouth, swirls it around and spits it out into a canvas.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  The guy who can cough the National Anthem had a very bad COVID, didn't he? The work really dried up. Um, no, it's Doncaster's drop-in health van. It is a van, Dan. I'm sorry. It's called Vincent Van Cough.

• 44:16Dan Schreiber?

  Damn it.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  If you've got a minor ailment, you can drop in if you're in Doncaster.

• 44:19Dan Schreiber?

  That's very good.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  And Vincent Van Scoff.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  Well, it's obviously a Freet van somewhere.

• 44:24Dan Schreiber?

  Kebab van or something.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought it was just somebody who takes the piss out of post-impressionism.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Lovely. It is a food waste recycling truck in Merseyside.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  These are very loosely connected to the painter himself.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Anyway, the others in the Merseyside fleet are Bin Diesel, Oprah Binfree, and the Bin Credible Hulk. It's good.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  Not Osama Bin Laden?

• 44:45Speaker 02

  I know.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Much better.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:50Dan Schreiber?

  Woke.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  Oh, that.

• 44:58Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the author, Thomas Hardy, proposed to his second wife by taking her to the grave of his first wife, pointing at the vacant plot near it and saying, that's for you.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 45:13Dan Schreiber?

  Romance.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  What did she say?

• 45:15Dan Schreiber?

  Uh, she inferred that that was a proposal and she was sort of pro it. And then they sort of just got engaged off the back of it. They started talking as if they were engaged.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  I see.

• 45:26Dan Schreiber?

  And so, yeah, he was not the most forward of man when it came to that kind of thing.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  So his first wife had died.

• 45:33Dan Schreiber?

  His first wife had died. Yes. I mean, she was.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Because her grave was, yeah, yeah.

• 45:36Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, she was in the ground there.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  She does well inferred, Andy. Yes. I don't know if you would have got the implications of his statement.

• 45:43Speaker 03

  Inferred and interred, in fact.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  But no, you can have a grave without being dead yet.

• 45:49Dan Schreiber?

  Absolutely.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  What?

• 45:51Dan Schreiber?

  You can. You can buy the plot coming to you.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  That would have then become, shall we kill my first wife together? And then you'll get the next one.

• 46:00Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  And then I'll murder you?

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's creepy. It's a very creepy proposal, either way.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  It sounds like a murder threat.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  In fact, is it possible that it was? And then he felt too awkward to say, oh, no, you've misunderstood. And so he just said, okay, let's get married, when she assumed that was what he was asking.

• 46:15Dan Schreiber?

  So he married her in to just soften the awkwardness of life. Yeah. Well, I got, I got this fact from a book, which is, it's really good, actually. It's called Six Poets by Alan Bennett. And it's, it's best poems, it's curated by him, but then also little bits of biography in between each poem. It's a really easy read and he's very interesting with it. And so she was called Florence Dougdale. She became the second wife of Thomas Hardy. So yeah, it did work as a proposal. And I think he was a slightly socially quite held-back character because in, in the book, it also explains that he used to walk in the road so that he didn't need to bump into people on the sidewalk. He just hated having contact with people. The people who were the help in his house, if they needed to put his jacket

• 46:58Dan Schreiber?

  on, maybe back in the day, people would literally put your jacket on, they would just drop it on his shoulders. And then he would do the rest because he wouldn't want any contact.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Paul, put your own fucking jacket on from the start, Thomas.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  You should have learned that Montessori technique that kids can do where you put it on the ground backwards and you kind of shove your hands in.

• 47:14Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Pretty cool.

• 47:16Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  It's so cool.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  So do you think the reason people put it on their shoulders is because he didn't actually know how to do that bit?

• 47:20Speaker 03

  I reckon.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this is about proposals.

• 47:23Dan Schreiber?

  Proposals.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Marriage proposals. I found a place that is cool to propose, which I've seen a lot of proposals.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  The London Eye.

• 47:31Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  I think within the first decade of it opening, it had about 5,000 wedding proposals. So that is more than one per day.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Wow. How do they know?

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  You can just go up, right?

• 47:43Speaker 01

  But then you, you'll tell people as you get off, or you'll tell the staff, won't you?

• 47:48Speaker 03

  We just got engaged.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. And yeah, yeah. So basically, they, they now offer a proposal pod with three different packages. And I think these are so funny because they sound so mad, right?

• 47:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  Um, there is a musical proposal where, I'm just quoting from the website here, as the pod reaches the top of the ark, our musicians, hidden as tourists, begin to sing and play your special song.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  And the idea is they've smuggled their instruments onto the, the pod with you.

• 48:18Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  So I presume one guy's walking very, very straight.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  Darling, darling, that guy seems to be pulling an oboe out of his arse. Don't, don't look over there. Don't look over there. It's a surprise.

• 48:28Dan Schreiber?

  Look at the Houses of Parliament.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Is it? Because I would make sure if I were proposing to someone on the London Eye, you'd do it right before you're about to get off. Because you don't, obviously don't want to do it near the start.

• 48:40Dan Schreiber?

  No, you want to do it at the top.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  No, because then when they say no, you have to wait for half an hour for it to come down.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. I just think it's a funny place to propose. Because yeah, if you're stuck, you're stuck. Those 15 minutes, you know.

• 48:50Speaker 03

  If they say no, you've got to do the whole down, going back down bit, which is the worst bit because you've already seen all the going up bit.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  I think you'd say yes and then say no at the bottom. That would be what I'd do.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  And then run off as the thing opens.

• 49:03Dan Schreiber?

  No, but presumably that's part of the pitch is that's the opposite. Propose as early as possible. If a no's on the way, you've now stuck in the space. Like usually whoever says no gets up and leaves the dinner table or goes, oh, Brian, and runs off. You've got half an hour now with that.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  What's a persuade?

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Turn it around.

• 49:19Dan Schreiber?

  Turn it around.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Or maybe if you say, will you marry me? And they say no, then that guy pulls a trombone out of his arse and goes. David Bellamy. Remember David Bellamy?

• 49:35Dan Schreiber?

  Uh, the politician.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  No, not the politician. He was a naturalist.

• 49:40Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah.

• 49:41Speaker 03

  He had a big beard and he would go around going.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  He was on TV in the 80s.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  And he was, so, not naturist, sorry.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Naturalist.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  I'm thinking, where's he gonna hide the trombone?

• 49:54Dan Schreiber?

  Under the big beard.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Um, so naturalist, okay.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  He was a naturalist and he proposed to his partner Rosemary Frye in the middle of a waterlogged sphagnum bog.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  Very nice. Lucky lady.

• 50:07Speaker 03

  This according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and he used to call Rosemary his sphagnum widow because he loved moss so much.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Fantastic.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Why is she a widow when he's still alive presumably, when he's called?

• 50:19Speaker 03

  Sometimes you would say like a golfing widow because I play golf all the time. So it's as if I've died, but I'm playing golf. And for him, it's as if he's died, he's actually going looking at moss in bogs.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Have you ever heard that, Anna?

• 50:30Speaker 02

  A something widow, like a FIFA widow or whatever.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  I think maybe I have. I think in the context of sphagnum moss, even I couldn't stretch to understanding how that would take up all your time. And yet I know you. Um, all these romantic proposals, very old fashioned, obviously, very dated this day and age, but were even dated in the 1960s. I read an article in the Aberdeen Evening Express from 1961, which was all about the tradition of the romantic proposal and how it was over a century out of date.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Saying that the idea of proposing to someone by moonlight or by candlelight, over a century out of date. So they're saying even in 1862, this was too old fashioned. But I found, and I thought this was really interesting, propose means to offer to marry someone.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Ask someone to marry you. But when did, so that's an old word. When did pop the question come to mean that?

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Ah, so it's either gonna be like 700 AD and it's in the venerable bead, or it's gonna be 2012.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  What are you gonna plump for?

• 51:31Speaker 02

  Uh, 700 AD.

• 51:33Dan Schreiber?

  I think 2012, outside of things, but I think, um, if it did exist, it meant something very different. It wasn't, you were popping a question that was not to do in marriage.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  So, I mean, it did originally mean you would pop any question, but the phrase pop the question used specifically just to mean ask someone to marry them is older than propose. So it was 1722. It was first used in a magazine and in fact, it's really interesting because in this reference, it's about whether a woman should propose to a man. So 1722 in a magazine, there's an exchange and it says, I should be glad to know your sentiments about whether it would be improper for the lady to pop the question first.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  That's stunning.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Isn't that amazing?

• 52:13Speaker 02

  That's so good. There would have been people alive who remembered Oliver Cromwell being in charge, who were reading about popping the question.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  A woman popping the question, no less.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  And to propose without having to specify to propose marriage, as in using that to mean offer of marriage is 1771. So half a century later.

• 52:30Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  That's brilliant.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  And you used to shorten it, you'd say, has he popped? Has he popped yet?

• 52:35Speaker 02

  A bit of a personal. We're gonna wait until after the wedding, we're being traditional.

• 52:40Dan Schreiber?

  You know, Thomas Hardy's, uh, way of doing it with his second wife-to-be, um, it might not be as bad as it sounds if you were living in a different culture. And who knows, maybe he had read about this in Japan, but that is one of the ways that you would propose to someone in Japan. You would say to them, do you want to be buried with me? All words like that. I want to be buried with you, maybe as a softer way of saying it. Um, I read this on a Japanese website. Um, the idea is that when a married couples die, there's a lot of family plots in Japan and you would often be buried with the family plot. And that was a way of saying, I want to be with you till the end of our days and you will be buried with my family. So become part of my family, let's get buried together. Might be a bit out of date, but it definitely existed.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  I mean, we say till death do us part, there's just a way of saying till death, uh, do us continue not parting or something that makes more sense.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  That's really nice.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really beautiful.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've had a lot of refusals.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  I did read, just, we've all been doing cryptic crosswords together recently, um, about a proposal in the Times crossword, which is quite nice. This was about a decade ago and it was, uh, the crossword editor was a guy called Richard Rogan, who I actually met, he was a very nice guy. And he helped a guy propose to his girlfriend, Delith, right? So he put, uh, her name in the crossword as an answer.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  I mean, it's such an unusual name that I feel that even if I knew someone called Delith.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  And that looked like it must be the answer due to the clue, I'd be like, it must be Delilah or something.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  It can't be Delith, yeah, yeah. Pretty Welsh girl widely thought not to be all there. So it's in the middle of widely thought, the name Delith is in there.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  I love those ones.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  And the guy drew it to her attention because I think it had Delith and it had, will you marry me as two phrases in the crossword? But the guy had to solve the crossword and then pointed out to his girlfriend as his way of proposing. Her response when they wrote this up was, this was a typical gesture by her new fiance, who she said was a smart ass at the best of times.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  She didn't say yes.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  It's not very romantic to say, hey, look, I've managed to do the crossword.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  And stop the stopwatch. Right, 2734, pretty good.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  In China, you can propose to a dead person or people sometimes propose to dead people.

• 54:55Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Um, and dead people get engaged to each other.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  But they're both dead?

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Yes, where they're both dead. This is the tradition of ghost marriage, which has been going on since at least the third century. We've got evidence stating back to the third century. And it's when the family members of a dead person, um, find someone of the opposite sex also dead to marry them for various reasons. Or sometimes you'll marry a dead person to an alive person. And so the reasons are, um, for instance.

• 55:25Speaker 03

  That happens in France for sure.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  We have talked about it in France. We have mentioned the French thing.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  But you need like, um, permission off the president or something to do it in France.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  So.

• 55:33Speaker 03

  And that, again, that's a legal thing. If your husband dies and you weren't married, that means you get none of the money. But then the president says, oh, you should have gotten married. So you get some of the money or something.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  So it's slightly different in China. And this isn't all over the China, this is just in a lot of parts of China. Culturally, if a woman dies and she's single, then no one looks after her in the afterlife because it's your husband's descendants who look after you.

• 55:54Dan Schreiber?

  Got it.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  So you're like, oh my God, there's no one to care for you. We can't, we're your family, so we'll have to find you a dead man to marry. And then you'd go and propose to this dead man's family and say, can your dead son marry our dead daughter? Because otherwise there's no one to look after her.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Okay, Bridget Jones 5 should be afterlife based.

• 56:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do like that, yeah.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  Like, that's cool.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, yes.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Renee Zellweger, you know, it's still, but she's died.

• 56:17Dan Schreiber?

  It's a way of getting Colin Firth back into the series because he died, he's Darcy.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they meet in the afterlife, they don't know each other, but it's like, oh, our families have just set us up, we have to spend eternity together now.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  This is a film. I'm sorry, but it is.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  There you go. Or the other one is actually if a man has died, um.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  Bridget Jones's dowry.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Sorry, you're still brainstorming, I'll give you a minute.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Bridget Jones's dowry.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  It's good, it's good. It was worth it, actually.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  Sorry, sorry to cut across you.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  What about, um, Bridget Jones's die?

• 56:49Speaker 02

  She's just died.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Is it that someone's got to go back into, go into the underworld to get her out, to bring her back to life?

• 56:59Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no.

• 56:59Speaker 02

  It's better if she just stays.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  She's staying, she's staying. You can actually marry a dead person if you're alive. So this also could be another sequel, um, because if a man's died and he's got no descendants and his family need descendants, they can marry him to a live woman. Then that means his family can adopt children of this marriage, which is a positive.

• 57:18Speaker 03

  Guys, I'm gonna go out there. I think they should have stopped Bridget Jones at the first one.

• 57:22Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 57:22Speaker 03

  I don't think we're helping the world making new ones.

• 57:26Dan Schreiber?

  What?

• 57:27Speaker 02

  Disagree. No way, mate. Someone hasn't seen Bridget Jones's baby.

• 57:38Dan Schreiber?

  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've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online. I'm at Shriberland on Instagram. Andy?

• 57:50Speaker 02

  At Andrew Hunter M.

• 57:52Dan Schreiber?

  James?

• 57:53Speaker 03

  I'm No Sub Thing, it's James Harkin.

• 57:54Dan Schreiber?

  And if you want to get to us as a group, Anna, where should they head?

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Instagram at No Sub Thing or email podcast at qi.com.

• 58:01Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, podcast at qi.com. That's the most important address of all because if you have something to say to us, if you've got a extra fact, uh, that you want to add to what we've just said, well, we'll go through the inbox and Andy picks out the best bits of those and he brings it to drop us a line. That is a bonus show that we do and you can only access that if you're a part of Club Fish, which is our secret members' club. Go to patreon.com slash Club Fish. There's multiple tiers of stuff that you can get there. Do check it out. Or if you're emailing because you have a great fact that you want us to read out, send it to us and Andy will pick those out for us to read on Little Fish, which is our bonus Monday show. We put down our facts, we read yours, we love it. So please do send them in. Otherwise, check out our website for any upcoming live gigs or just come back here

• 58:44Dan Schreiber?

  next week because we're gonna be back with another episode and we'll see you then. Goodbye.