589: No Such Thing As Dung Beetles In Madame Tussauds

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Hi everyone, afraid Dan Schreiber is away today, but we have an absolutely cracking guest for you.

It's someone that I've wanted to get on the show for ages and ages.

Definitely one of the wittiest, funniest people working in Britain today.

And in fact, for the last 20 years, it is the fantastic Miles Jupp.

We had such a great time with him.

So hope you like the show.

And he has just done the first stint of a tour with his live show on iBang, which was brilliantly reviewed.

And for those of you listening listening in America, get excited!

He's coming to you.

He will be going to New York in November.

Do look up the dates that he's playing there.

You can go to his website milesjup.co.uk, or just look it up.

It's at the Soho Playhouse in New York.

And I'm pretty sure more live dates are very soon to be announced, both in the UK and America.

So keep your eyes peeled.

You definitely won't regret it.

He is so, so funny.

And hope you enjoy this show as much as we did.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Holborn.

My name is Anna Tashinski, and I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Miles Jupp.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days in no particular order.

Here we go.

Miles, what's your favourite fact?

My favourite fact from the last seven days is people who get really lost usually don't travel more than a hundred meters from their starting point regardless of how long they walk for.

That is insane.

Is there

stupid?

It's well it's there's partly an element of humans have a tendency to walk in circles.

And there was a theory it was literally because one leg is always slightly shorter than the other.

That's what I thought it was.

So it would happen, like, you know, like an enormous perfect circle.

Is that really what you thought, Andy?

Because I think that sounds ridiculous.

I want, I could think that, and I was told this when I was at school, that if you ever get lost in the wilderness, to walk for five minutes in a straight line and then turn around and walk backwards for five minutes in a straight line so that your one dodgy leg is on a different side each way.

But

literally, sorry, walk backwards.

Yeah, go back where you started.

Yeah, where you started.

No, no, walk backwards.

Walk backwards.

That's good.

I went to quite a posh school, but we didn't have our own wilderness.

Sounds very, very, very extraordinary facility.

That's what they call the graffiti covered bit of tarmac up there.

Yeah, yeah.

But it's not that.

It's not that, but it doesn't seem like people we really know.

I mean, is there an idea that it might be evolutionary because it's safer to end up back where you started?

And, you know, it's a good homing instinct to have.

Yeah, that you would end up in that in the way that a drone now, if you, you know, if the battery fails, it gives itself just enough time, doesn't it, work back to where it was to launch from?

It should do, I think, but occasionally you find old ones in rivers where

that technology has sadly failed.

In the rivers near where I grew up, you get shopping trolleys, not drones.

Oh, yeah, shopping trolleys can't find their way back to where they're from.

They do go around in circles, though.

Yeah.

This is people who, I think they were blindfolded, weren't they?

In this particular study, I mean, people have been documented to walk around in circles so many times.

But yeah, this guy did this study in 2009, blindfolded them, and literally they don't travel any distance at all, not more than 100 meters, regardless.

In this experiment, were they on rough terrain?

As in, if I was blindfolded and in the woods, I probably wouldn't go more than 100 meters.

As in, I would feel my way quite carefully for the duration of the experiment.

What if it was a day long?

And no, it's not to do with terrain.

The worst place is to be on a massive open field with no landmarks whatsoever and no sun to look at and no moon.

Because landmarks are such an important part in how

we navigate.

And in the same way as how we tell time.

You know, you're able to remember when things happen because you've got little signposts that, oh, the milk comes on Tuesday.

And I remember it was the day after that that Mike got my new trousers or

whatever it might be.

We had a terribly yesterday, didn't he?

Yeah, you leave out the old trousers, don't you?

Yeah, yeah.

But that you'd need those sort of landmarks.

I read a very good book about wayfaring by a man called it's called Michael Bond, but he's not that Michael Bond.

But it was about that that thing where things look so similar that you can get lost incredibly easily because there's nothing to tell it apart.

And were incidents in that, I say people at the Appalachian Trail, they wander off the path to go and go and have a piss and then take your rucksack off.

You know, presumably, if you wear a heavy rucksack every day and you take it off, you've got an absolutely set way of doing it.

But if you're sort of quite new to it or whatever, you can't remember that I turned left as I took it off.

And then when you go to put it back on, you think, is it facing towards the path?

Is it not?

And people are found dead, you know, just tens of yards away from where they left the park because they cannot find the way.

But I think the distance thing is about panic as well.

If you're feeling lost and you don't find where you need to get to within 100 meters and already you were uncertain where you were for instance then I imagine you think I better go back to where I was so I think there's a there's a fear element to it you've got to be very foolhardy to go I'm just going to keep going in that way well but I think we really can't walk straight I mean that's it's it's just really impossible for humans to walk straight without landmarks but I think you're right the panic thing which sets in means that we also over adjust so you think you're walking straight but I think instinctively you think oh I must have I must have wobbled a bit there because your brain is constantly making little mistakes of perception it thinks you just wobbled a bit.

You better re-wobble.

And then you sit down to measure your legs before you do it.

There's an interesting thing about this with virtual reality.

So because we can't really walk in a straight line, if you're in a VR situation, so you've got your goggles on and you're walking towards something, the VR can slightly change the horizon and change the things around you that manipulates you into walking in a circle when you think you're walking in a straight line.

And what they can do is they can get someone in a VR who thinks they're walking in a straight line forever for miles and miles and miles and miles, but you can do that in a room that's just 44 meters wide because it manipulates you to go into a 44-meter circle, but you think you're going straight the whole time.

It must be frightening because you know, you've seen before they put the headset on that you're in a small room that's only 44 meters wide.

You both of them before they go in the room, you say, Right, we're about to go out onto the savannah, so good luck out there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it is really interesting,

and it's it just means that for now you could have video games where the whole area goes on forever, but you don't need a forever room.

That's useful.

We'll save costs.

So because of the realness,

I don't have one, but a friend of mine has a VR headset, and I insisted that he bought a cricket game for it.

And then I, which is money well spent, is money, but nevertheless well spent.

And although you've just gone into the sitting room, you know where everything is, within a while you're just in this different world.

And it's not even very realistic.

Because the visual cues and you've got the ones in your ears, you're so immersed in it that within seven minutes you have sort of collided with a radiator or whatever it might be.

It's hard to imagine that you're not, yeah, you're not where you are, and to hold in your head those things that you know, you might signpost them before you put the goggles on, but that's gone, that information.

We've played that, haven't we, Anna?

Oh, yeah, we did play a remote game.

Was that the Oval game?

Yes.

Well,

you think it was Oval.

Actually, it was a 44-meter circle

in the savannah.

Have you guys heard of Tristan Gooley?

No, he's sounds fun.

I have to remember that name, I think.

He's terrific.

So he's the only living person to have both solo flown and solo sailed across the Atlantic.

So he's a very good explorer and adventurer navigator.

But he writes a lot of books about how you can tell your surroundings from, you just look at your surroundings, you can tell where you are.

But he has these amazing tips, which I just, if you're out in the wilderness listening to this podcast and you're lost,

Snails need lots of calcium carbonate to build their shells.

So if you see any away from a pond, that's a sign that that you're on a chalky landscape.

Is that helpful?

I might have just saved someone's life.

Do they not also need moisture snails?

Yeah.

So, why have they gone so far away from this pond?

Well, maybe some water's gathered in a leaf, an upturned leaf or something.

I don't know all the updates.

You've got to have a geological map in your head, haven't you, for the chalky bits?

You do have to remember which bits of the country you are.

I don't know where I am, but gosh, it's chalky.

Is that the same as we found?

Is Dorset?

Did Dorset have a lot of stuff?

Hello, it's on the emergency services.

I couldn't tell you where it is, but it is undoubtedly chalky.

I know because there are snails.

Thank you.

Yes, I'll hold.

Okay, fair point.

Well, he can identify a bonfire if there was a bonfire somewhere years ago based only on the foliage that's grown around it since then.

Again, okay.

That's the whole country every Guy Falk's Day.

I think it's terrific.

Alum.

On Ongoing in Circles, Mark Twain had a nice story in his, he wrote a travel log called Roughing It.

And he had a nice story of how he went, they headed out in a snowstorm, they had to get somewhere.

And there was one man in their crew who was a real cocky guy called Ollendorf, who bragged about how he had natural navigation skills.

They didn't need a map.

He had an inbuilt sense of direction.

And they were all on horseback.

And they wandered for about almost an hour on horseback.

And then they found some fresh tracks and thought, brilliant, well, they'll be headed towards the

place we're headed.

We'll follow them.

And then they kept noticing more and more people joining the party of fresh chats every half an hour.

And they wanted for two or three hours before someone said, you arsehole Ollandor, these are on bloody footprints.

If you've been walking in the savannah for a long time and it's sunny, then you can tell which way you're going by which side you're sunburnt on.

Oh, that's...

Yeah, in the northern hemisphere, if you're more sunburnt on the left side of your face or your left arms, you're probably going westward because the sun's

That's useful.

You can also look at where the sun is, right?

You can't look at the sun, of course.

Don't look all blind.

Of course, don't look at the sun.

But I think that's how we instinctively.

So which side your blinder on?

You know,

you'd be sort of coming at it from an angle.

But it's daytime, so you can't use the north star.

That's true.

I didn't realise why the north star is the north star.

As in

why it's useful for navigation.

Should come out earliest?

It's just it's a fixed star, so all the other stars revolve around it.

And that's because it's sort of above the north pole, as it were.

were oh right so it moves a tiny fraction in the sky but really it doesn't i just didn't know that i mean i never did my d of e so it's aligned with the earth's axis so over the course of a night it stays still which is very helpful do you know who else uses the stars to navigate dung beetles oh yeah yeah

and they found this out by taking them to a planetarium

There were some scientists at Lund University.

They took some dung beetles to a planetarium and showed them the Milky Way and saw which way they went.

And then then they covered up the Milky Way and saw they went in different wild directions.

And when the planetarium turned into Madame Swords, presumably they were completely,

completely lost.

I thought I was going home.

Now I'm heading towards Dr.

Crippin or Chris William or

Meet Attenborough.

That's true.

Did you guys know you can all echolocate?

Almost certainly.

Most of our listeners can echolocate, like bats can.

That's how I get here from the tube every time we record.

Yeah.

Pop the blindfold on and start screaming.

So you're listening for the echo, and that tells you how to move.

It tells you how to navigate and where you are.

And there have been a few studies into this, but basically, I think the first one was in the 1940s, and it blindfolded a few people and it told them to walk towards a wall and stop just before the wall.

And they did it.

But then, when they carpeted the floor and then they walked and they weren't making footstep noises anymore, they all walked into the wall.

And so it turns out we just didn't naturally.

I've tried this myself and I think think I do need a few minutes more practice.

Come on, let's clear the furniture.

Let's see how this goes.

Yeah.

But isn't that amazing?

And we can all do it, and humans can actually be taught to be quite good quite fast.

What are you hearing?

Are you sorry?

Are you hearing things or are you sensing air pressure?

You're hearing things.

So you're hearing the slight difference in sound echoes.

You're hearing the sound bouncing back from your footsteps off the wall.

And we can tell amazing things.

Like in studies, they found that people can tell the shape of something they're going towards.

So they'll put a triangle in front of them and they'll say, you know, this is...

If you imagine yourself at one end, say, of a subway and you're spun around and you've got a blindfold on, so already it's quite terrifying.

But don't worry, it's an experiment you're part of.

But you imagine in a situation like that where you've got hard concrete walls or whatever, you would back yourself, wouldn't you, to work out, right, left to your own devices, which direction is the other end of the, if there's the subway and where are the walls and whatever, because you'd be able to hear the, you know, the echoes and where things were bouncing back from.

I'm sure you'd back yourself up.

I mean, we should be backing ourselves.

I'm not sure.

It depends on the stakes, really.

But if you've got a wall, say, two feet either side of you, and then the other wall isn't there for sort of another 40 metres.

Yeah.

But then it's also just the ears, like the eyes.

And the nostrils, isn't it?

We're using the input from each of those to sort of work out the information.

Like, our vision isn't real, is it?

That sounds mad.

But what I mean is what we see, the image that we see is that's constructed in our brain, isn't it?

From the information from the two different eyes.

And the same way with nostrils,

if you were following smell, you could think that's more.

that.

And you can triangulate it and things like that.

Can I tell you one more thing about getting lost?

Yeah, go for it.

This is in 2011, a computer scientist called Ben Kerman invented Get Lost Bot.

Okay.

And this was a technology which tracks your movements every day.

And if you are too predictable, it sends you somewhere new.

So if you have the same lunch at the same cafe every day, it will direct you to a different cafe.

That's clever.

I read that like if someone had your mobile phone and got all the data off it, they'd be able to tell where you are at any time of any day to within like a 90% accuracy because we're doing the same routes.

Yeah, yeah, so exactly and this thing was not popular by the way

where have all my staff gone

when you say if someone gets hold of your phone I mean they They have got hold of our phones, haven't they?

They know where we are and what we're doing

now or whatever.

Well it didn't work very well get lost pop because one user found the app had noticed him going to church every Sunday and told him to visit a nearby mosque instead.

That's very clever to be open on a Sunday.

And other issues.

So what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an organic valley farm.

Organic valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at OV.coop and taste the difference.

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

My fact is that one of the fiercest critics of poet Alexander Pope was a writer called Esdras Barnevelt.

This was a secret identity, and the real person criticising Alexander Pope was Alexander Pope.

Wow, what a twist.

The last person you'd expect.

Yeah.

He wrote a full thing slagging off his major work.

Was he doing it?

So why?

Was he like being self-hating or was he trying to get ahead of his critics, maybe?

I don't think he was.

I think a lot of this stuff was done for fun.

And loads of stuff was anonymous at the time.

So it wasn't mad

to have a lot of stuff coming out.

So it was literally on the day that his epic poem, which is called The Rape of the Lock, is about a society woman who has a lock of her hair grabbed.

So it's based on the Iliad and the Odyssey, but it's fun.

More fun.

More fun.

Yeah.

More fun.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But he wrote on the day it was published, he brought out a key to the lock under this fake name, Esdras Barnevelt, and he wrote to Pope, he addressed Pope directly himself, and said he's writing an antidote against the poison which has been so artfully distilled through your quill.

So what did he do?

Like say this bit's shit or did he say it would have been better if you'd done it this way?

I think he was advising a bit about the meaning of it and maybe throwing in some other games and things along the way.

I mean it was just a fun thing to do.

And he did this a second time actually.

So in 1735 there was a publisher who brought out an edition of Pope's letters.

Apparently his unauthorised letters were being published.

Imagine just someone publishing your WhatsApps, like full, just nightmare.

And this publisher was called Edmund Curl

with two L's.

How many R's?

It's so weird that you stress the R and not the L.

I know.

But it was right.

This was not true.

Pope had collected his own letters.

He'd edited them very carefully, then arranged for Curl to get hold of them.

But he had instigated it.

And then he had them seized.

They were actually fake letters.

And then two years later, he releases his actual letters.

all sorts of just horseplay going on confusing games what was he playing out there and wasn't his thing that he had a plan that some of those letters contained some correspondence with various members of parliament or the nobility where it was actually illegal to expose them because they're of a certain status so he thought oh good curl will be seized by the authorities

which he sort of was but then no one cared but then he fell out with curl because curl had now thought oh no this is cool i can just do all the letters i want so he got a load of other letters ones that he didn't want anyone to see and published those and so Pope met him at a pub the Swan Tavern and gave him an emetic to cause him to go into convulsions of vomiting and that's why the toilet's still blocked in that one isn't it yeah and then Pope wrote some pamphlets about that about his vomiting and so they really fell out those two but is it is it done for fun or is it is it sinister I think it's for fun but it depends

whether you're Edmund Curl or being given an emetic in the yeah yeah or yeah yeah having a spasm in a pub toilet sounds.

You think,

this has gone beyond banter.

Yes.

This is perfectly harmless.

Landing lads.

Didn't you do that?

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know.

I mean, he was a really, really funny guy.

He was.

He was strange.

He was called the Wasp of Twickenham was his nickname.

I think he was quite cruel.

He used to just turn up a pic next to me.

But yeah, even people who liked him, I think Virginia Woolf's dad, Leslie, wrote a biography of him.

And even he said, look, I like his writing.

It's very funny.

It's very clever.

And mostly, by the way, we should say he was famous for his translation, his serious translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey at the time.

He said, I like his writing, but still, morally, it's a bit indefensible to like this guy because he's so horrible about everyone.

He called him a monkey pouring boiling oil on his victims.

That's a good reason for him to criticise himself first, essentially, isn't it?

So he's one of the people who are in the

sights of this sort of mystery critic.

And then he goes, Well, it can't be me.

He's had a go at me.

And then he can really, you know, go at people.

So I suppose that's the mistake, is it, that

more contemporaneous sock puppets have made is to not turn the gun on themselves first.

Yeah, which is he didn't do all his other criticism, the mistake he actually made was not criticizing everyone under the pseudonym, sadly, which would have been safer.

All of his other criticism was under his own name,

it's very confusing because um, there was a big thing between Protestants and Catholics at the time.

So, this is uh end of the 18th century.

Um, William and Mary had come in, they'd swept the Catholics away, Pope was a Catholic, and so there was a lot of criticism of his work for being too popish, but that is quite confusing.

He wasn't allowed to go to university.

No, no.

No positions of trust or power.

So what do you do?

The term wasp then, that would be not, he wouldn't refer to himself as that.

Nowadays,

you might label yourself Waspish, wouldn't you?

Yeah.

I reckon he would have labelled himself.

I think he quite liked it.

But I think it was that other people called him that because he had an illness called Potts disease.

He was only four foot six and he found it very difficult to do anything, basically.

And I think that probably is what slightly made him an angry little person.

He was 4'6, which made it difficult for him to do anything, or he was 4'6.

No, he was also, yeah, like he had lung problems, heart problems.

He had problems walking and standing up for long periods and stuff like that.

There was a theory that his growth was restricted because of his nurse's milk.

I believe that is true.

Wow.

Because it contained a bacteria called myobacterium tuberculosis, which causes it.

It doesn't sound good.

No, it doesn't, does it?

Yeah, this causes this thing.

And he, you know, he was worried about it.

And he wrote to Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who was someone who he really fancied for most of his life, saying that he imagined a place where women best like the ugliest fellows and look upon deformities as the signatures of divine favour.

So he was like, really, he knew that he was not an attractive man.

Yeah.

Be hard not to know because you clearly aren't.

And then everyone's telling you you're hideous as well.

But you're also slagging them off in print.

Yeah.

And you're slagging yourself off in print.

And it's very...

And his options will be limited, wouldn't it?

Nowadays, you could join an an app that was presumably sort of a dating app for

people who are short and have had odd milk.

And he would be besieged with offers and opportunities.

You do wonder if he might actually, in this day and age, be, this is the kind of facile thing people say on radio, isn't it?

Be a Mennonist.

What are they, you know,

an in-cell, yes.

Well, he's small, he's got some confidence issues, and he hates everyone.

His podcast would have been terrific.

We do know that.

Very good, wouldn't they?

Oh, yeah.

Slagging everyone off.

The podcast.

It's really good.

He would never have called himself a WASP because that means white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Yes.

Oh, of course.

Yes.

He was white Anglo-Saxon Catholic.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

The nickname, Unpickable.

I've already forgotten it.

The nickname, the name he gave himself for writing criticism.

Esdras Barnevelt.

Oh, yes.

Esdras Barnevel.

Stupid it.

It doesn't mean any

clues or anything.

Well, Esdras looks like cod Latin, doesn't it?

Do you know what I mean?

It's like,

but it doesn't quite work.

Thanks, Miles.

I'm going to spend the rest of this fact just reiterating

over and over and over.

No, you're right.

I should have.

Could be an anagram or something.

I'm just going to write out the.

I'm just going to write a little spider map of the letters now.

Just while you two are doing that, I was going to mention just to Jane something about...

You think that I'm not getting involved with this anagram stuff?

You've known me for 12 years.

I'm not going to get involved in it.

You can talk to me.

Thank you.

I really appreciate that.

This lady, Mary Montague, he fancied her.

She didn't fancy him.

Quite an awkward moment where he made very, very passionate love to her in the old-fashioned sense.

He didn't, you know,

wooing.

Wooing, yes.

Propositioning.

And she said that it was like a very awkward moment.

He'd chosen a socially stupid moment to do it.

And she was busily convulsing in a pub toilet.

Yes.

She said that he did it so passionately that, in spite of her utmost endeavours to be angry and look grave, she had an immediate fit of laughter.

So she bursts out laughing in his face.

So then they became sworn enemies because she was quite upset.

But the amazing thing about her is she invented the smallpox vaccine.

And I think we, I'm surprised we haven't mentioned her before, actually.

She was part of that, wasn't she?

A few people

would claim.

Jenna was there as well at the time in the area.

She was the one who first, she went to Turkey because her husband was an ambassador.

And she noticed that the locals in Turkey visited this lady who injected them with little bits of smallpox.

And the children seemed not to get it.

And so she was the first person who said, right, I'm going to get my kid exposed to these weird smallpox rubbings.

The really fun thing about that is that he then started writing horrible poems about her and saying, like making jokes about smallpox and the other kind of pox like venereal disease and saying that she, you know, she had syphilis or whatever.

Oh, did he?

And she got really upset about it.

And so what did she do?

She went to Sir Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister, and asked him to have a word.

Terrific.

We can all do that with our enemies.

I know.

But yeah, he really fancied Lady Mary.

Yes.

Whenever he was with her, he would start talking in over-elaborate puns.

Oh, Alexander,

you're already fighting some considerable disadvantages in the romance game.

Don't do the elaborate puns.

I think it might work for some women.

James, you're.

James, you married you in spite of that.

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

My fact this week is that the first person to map the functions of the brain did so by literally sticking labels to different bits of it on a living person.

Sticky labels.

Yeah, they look like little post-its.

And I read the study and I couldn't find out exactly what they were made of.

It doesn't feel like because they must have glue on them.

Yeah, I think they feel very healthy for them.

And also to have had a large chunk of their skull.

Oh, yeah.

Yes, no, also.

Yeah, I mean, that's what struck me first.

It's temporary, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

Temporal.

It grows back.

It's like earthworms.

You just wear a cap for the rest of your life.

This was a Canadian neurosurgeon called Wilder Penfield, and he was the first person to do that thing that you might have seen in Hannibal, but also in brain surgery, which is safe if you do it right, where you can remove someone's scalp while they're awake and perform brain surgery on them.

And he was trying to remove bits of brains that caused epileptic seizures on people who couldn't be cured any other way, but without damaging any other bits of the brain.

And so he got a little electrode, stimulates lots of bits of the brain and then writes down exactly what those bits do.

So he'd, you know, poke a bit and then he'd write something like twitching of the left arm or numbness of right side of the tongue.

And you can ask them.

Evacuation of the bells.

Repeated cries of help.

And so he'd put numbered labels and lettered labels on each bit.

and he was basically the person who created the map, the thing that mapped the brain onto the body, the homunculus.

So he drew in his study, once he'd performed all these experiments, a picture that you've probably seen or seen variations of, where you have the brain, but then you draw, sort of following the line of the brain, you draw the size of bits of the body depending on how much brain is allotted to them.

So, you know, each section of this strip of brain he found that controlled all of our movement, there was a section devoted to each finger and the thumb, and lots of big sections devoted to the face the eyes the nose the ears but then you know you've got a tiny torso because what does the brain need to do so it's like a very monstrous figure with a big head big hands big genitals exactly the male homunculus has big genitals because men devote more of their brain to you know conscious uh but the female doesn't have any genitals at all and that might be because his sample size was very small of the women he was asking about this and experimenting on.

I think it was a very good thing.

Because it certainly isn't that women don't have a single bit of their brain devoted to their genitals.

They've got everything else.

But yes, we don't really know why he missed the women off.

I think it was actually a woman who drew the homunculus for him called Mrs.

Hortense Cantley.

And I think some people have suggested she was a bit too prudish.

She said, I'm not drawing that.

Certainly not at the size you suggest.

Makes me look as if I think of nothing else.

Exactly.

This thing, this method he invented that you're describing,

your brain is exposed and being operated on, but you are awake, is called, I just love this, the Montreal procedure.

And it sounds very spy filmy, doesn't it?

You know, like

the Ottawa protocols.

You know, that's just a sort of, it's quite cool.

But if you see people playing a musical instrument during their surgery,

that's the thing,

because they need to work out...

how to not damage your brain and the bit of you that's doing fine motor movements.

So if you play the violin, that's really useful to them.

If you can't play the violin, it's very bad.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's got to be an instrument that's sort of bearable as well within the slightly stressful environments of an operating station.

Yeah, you know what badges are.

Good idea.

Yeah, exactly that.

There was last year.

There's plenty of space for a harmonium in here.

There was someone last year in Wisconsin, he developed really shaking hands, and he couldn't.

It got to the point he couldn't pick up his granddaughter, and he really wanted to sort that out, obviously.

And he was operated on for deep brain stimulation.

And they said, well, do you play an instrument at all?

Have you played the trombone?

Well, he didn't, in the end, he didn't play it.

He did the fingering movements, but it turns out that when you play the trombone, you know, it causes high pressure.

You know, um, when you just said when you do the fingering movements and then you mimed fingering, yeah, do you know how to play a trombone?

No, you will play the clarinet there.

Yeah,

that's a yeah, alto sax.

Yes, that's why my big band failed,

it would have caused too much pressure inside his head, which might have killed him.

So, yeah, but

that's the last thing you want when you're doing brain surgery on someone.

It's very clear.

I've had brain surgery.

I had brain surgery in 2021.

And

I found myself sort of fascinated by that.

After you try not to think about it too much beforehand, but then afterwards, you think, gosh, I'd love to know how that worked.

I'm not saying I'd like to sort of witness it happening.

I remember having knee surgery once and said to a friend who's at Physio, it sounds fascinating operation.

It's a shame it's not a local anesthetic.

I quite like to watch it.

And she said, you would absolutely not wish that.

I've seen a lot of these.

No, you would really struggle.

Oh, really?

But the actual brain aspect of it, I mean, it's so, you know, in terms of the sort of heavy machinery that is required, and then there's sort of very sensitive work that's done once that bit's done.

You know,

it's actually

the contrast of skills.

Yeah, well, that sort of bit.

And then you get a thing like an old-fashioned sort of 1970s ashtray basically plonked on top of your head so they can sort of lean instruments on it or whatever.

So you sort of turn you into a kind of giant fondue,

I suppose.

Yeah, so I've got little dents in my head which are like, what's that bit from?

And they go, oh, that's just where the thing was attached.

You know, there's trays they'd attach to people's car doors for their burgers and things that drive through.

So sort of sort of clip on

the equipment shelf onto your brain.

Do you not kind of wish they left it there?

It could be useful.

For just for storage.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I feel like

we've got a house that's got quite a few sort of low door frames and things like that.

I can see it beginning to impact other members of the household as well.

On my own, of course, I'd absolutely love it.

So they sort of had to open and then.

Yeah, they sort of went around the side and the back for me.

I find it strange thinking of because what Wilder Penfield was doing was operating on the surface,

but not the I I don't know if he got into the very deep tissues of the brain and how that's.

I can't understand how they get through one bit of the brain to get to the rest of it.

I think that's extraordinary.

Well, now they can use a sort of laser knife, I think.

So, you're doing that's basically your target, you can target something specifically, not just in a sort of two-dimensional way, but in a three-dimensional way.

Goodness knows how the science of that works.

Is that what they did?

Do they use a laser on you?

For me, no, what I had was a fairly within this particular field, quite a straightforward spoon.

Just a spoon, just a spoon, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dessert spoon, please.

Do you wish you'd been awake during it?

No,

I really don't.

But I am sort of fascinated by the idea.

I didn't used to be sort of fascinated by it, who sort of slightly take it for granted, I suppose.

But the idea of them doing something so extreme and the sheer usefulness that that is now in terms of symptoms that can be related to an aspect of the brain.

And therefore, you could have no, you don't have to go in at all.

You could go, oh, no, this is a textbook.

If that's happening, it's because there's a specific issue and it can be got to without us even going inside you.

Yeah.

You know, a sort of piece of laser equipment equipment can handle that.

That's, I mean, it's completely remarkable.

It is matter.

And I feel like we always owe such a big thank you to epileptics over the last hundred years for it because it's basically them who are always being experimented on.

Like hundreds of times.

If you've got epilepsy, they're fascinated because you have an excuse to open the brain.

So they say, while we're here, do you mind if we do lots of twiddling around to find out how the brain works?

That's what Penfield was doing quite a lot, wasn't it?

That's what Penfield was doing, yes.

I find him so interesting.

He had a really amazing life.

He's a classic friend of the podcast, I'd say, in that

served in in the First World War.

His ship was torpedoed and sank.

His obituary was printed, despite him not being dead when that happened.

He was a road scholar at Oxford.

He was a football coach before that in

his homeland.

He was a medical ambassador after all these big discoveries.

His sister had a terrible

brain cancer, and he operated on her to try and save her life.

Really complicated surgery and very dangerous.

And he had to remove an eighth of her brain in the process.

He wasn't able to save her life in the end, but he did grant her years more of life that she wouldn't have had otherwise.

But he was really

pioneering.

He was really just discovering new things all the time and then having to do the most difficult thing imaginable, I imagine, operating on a member of your family and

try and save their life.

Just extraordinary.

And I think if you give, I think there's a thing, a time after which it does count as saving your life.

If you give, if someone's lived for an extra five years plus, I'd be like, save their life.

Yeah.

You can claim that.

It's a terrifying area in which to be a pioneer in, isn't it?

I remember some builders saying to us when we lived in peckham we talked to them about loft extension so we haven't done one before but of course you have to do a first one don't you and we thought

no yeah sorry guys uh the idea of being having that conversation in a sort of neurology ward

terrifying

um can i do something quickly about how the brain evolved because it's kind of mental right so you go back to the start of animals you have something called choanoflagellates and they're the relatives of all animals and they are the first ones where the cells can talk to each other so that's kind of where brain cells begin because you've got lots of cells talking to each other and they have been described as a sperm wearing a skirt because that's what they look like basically they're very very simple animals sounds like the sort of thing pope would call someone

and then you've got neurons okay so these are actual brain cells and they started in something called an herbilitarian which is a hypothetical animal but it's definitely a common ancestor of all the animals that are split in two.

So, like, basically, all mammals and lots of other animals as well.

They had the first tiny brain.

They also had the first eyes and the first anuses.

And people usually draw them like a little slug.

Okay.

Okay.

They're pioneers.

Seriously.

Absolutely.

And socially, they must have been very popular.

You know, they're cut above the neighbours.

Oh, yeah.

They've got eyes.

They've got, what was it?

An anus.

Yeah.

An anus and a brain.

People must have been terribly bunged up till then.

Very uncomfortable.

Often things would come out of the same way as the mouth.

Oh,

yeah.

Very much an Alexander Pop and Mr.

Curl

situation.

Pub toilets were ruined across the world.

And then it's really difficult for brains to evolve, right?

Because you kind of need them to work all the time.

So you can't just keep trying things.

Because if you try something, probably that animal will struggle to live, right?

Sort of mutation.

To mutate, right?

So sometime around 500 million years ago, two organisms had sex and their entire genome was duplicated okay and these are relatives of all the future mammals and all the future kind of this and when you had two lots of the genome that meant that one half the genome could start practicing and start trying things out and you get loads more mutations there and you might have an extra arm here or an extra bigger brain or whatever and that's really important for brains to develop and then we now think and this is really recent we think that that happened a second time about 100 million years ago where the entire genome got duplicated.

And that's when the brain's got much, much bigger.

And we're not sure about that, but it's called the ONO hypothesis

after Japanese geneticists, Sasumo Ono.

Oh, very good.

So there's no exclamation mark.

There's no exclamation mark.

No one.

That's terrific.

And then you get the brain.

There's a few other steps.

But now you've got to the punchline.

Yeah, you should know them.

I just found this funny name and I thought, how am I going to get to it?

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Okay,

it is time for fact number four and that's James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1885 a Samoan king plotted to kill a rival by disguising his army as a 200 man cricket team.

Was he caught out?

Oh,

very good.

Was he caught out?

When he slipped.

Yeah.

Yeah, let's get those out of the way.

Is it a bit of sledgehammer to crack him not?

Getting 200-man team to kill one rival.

Oh, well, the rival would have had an opposition.

Oh, he had his own men coming.

Yeah, yeah.

400 ping-pong players.

So, this is 19th-century Samoa.

Cricket

had been brought over by the British, and they kind of had their own version that had lots and lots and lots of players in a team.

We might get to Civic cricket in a minute and how that's different than normal cricket but he was in Appia the capital of Samoa and he'd heard that his rival was going to come over and try and take over and he decided he was going to get in there first so he sent like a Trojan horse of cricketers because you might have a really big cricket team in those days they had like their cricket bats and their cricket balls in these boats when they're going from one island to another but underneath were guns and

grenades and stuff like that so they weren't just going to use the ball down the back because this was the days before bodyline was banned.

So you could really just kill people.

That's true.

Such sort of

sharpened stumps and things like that.

Yeah,

but the coup was filed in the end thanks to the indiscretion of one of the players.

Oh.

That's a very poor team member, isn't it?

Yes.

That's like Kevin Peterson's texting the opposition.

I mean, what's going on here?

It's a very nice reference.

But what specific cricket then, if you're going to have large...

Because obviously, to us, like 200, that would be like that's half the playing staff of the county championship.

It would sort of

stick out like a sore thumb, wouldn't it?

But you could have the

specific cricket has complete different rules.

Yeah, definitely.

So, um, Samoa wasn't really into cricket for ages, and then it turned out that the British brought cricket to Tonga, and Tonga got really into it.

And they would, the Tongans would go over to Samoa and say, Oh, you guys can't play cricket, you idiots.

And so, the Samoans decided that they were going to get into it as well.

They're very childish, aren't they?

The Samoans.

Yeah, you're probably not supposed to say it.

It comes across that way, doesn't it?

But then it just kind of evolves that way, you know like village against village even in those times um soccer and rugby and stuff was quite often much bigger teams like village against village but in samoa yeah it kind of evolved that way and it's known as killikitti it's actually pronounced cricket but it's spelled killikitti so most people would say killikitti

it's really fun yeah and you would you might have instead of one batsman at each side you might have three batsmen at each side and you would have no sixes and fours you would just whack the ball and then just keep running and running

quite often you would have runners which you don't really get in cricket these days so much so if you were overweight you would just get a young person in to do all the running for you and stuff it's this this um cricket is killer kitty i'm gonna say that let's say

the samoan version it's it was so much fun that when in the year 1900 britain ceded control of samoa to germany the germans banned it Yeah.

Because it was taking up so much of people's time.

And in Tonga, in fact, they had to pass a law that you're only allowed to play it one day a week.

Because everyone was just bunking off the whole time to go and play cricket.

Yeah, because also, if you're that many people playing, presumably you could be perhaps not very active in the game, but be quite happily absorbed.

If you've got 200 people on each team, then there's quite a few passengers, aren't there?

Absolutely.

At the level at which I play, you can have sort of two or three people.

I could sort of, you know, I pulled a muscle the other week and I couldn't really move, and that was fine.

Whereas if you've got 200 people, you really could turn up going, where's the sort of quiet area?

The ball doesn't seem to be going anywhere much.

Yeah, so right.

They did ban it, but actually, no one paid any attention to it.

They carried on playing anyway.

But there was a civil servant there called philip snow uh this was just before it was ceded to germany and he said that work wesleyism and women were all suffering due to cricket basically he was saying because people were so into cricket they just were doing nothing else they weren't going to church they weren't looking after their family and they weren't doing any work oh i mean because cricket's more fun than all those things so yeah he was um cp snow's brother for anyone who was

reading cp snow who was sorry philip snow this chap who went out and um

cricket and and cp Snow was...

And C.P.

Snow's a writer.

I've actually never read C.P.

Snow.

I've read.

I've read The Two Cultures.

Is he good?

It's terrific.

It's about the world of arts and the world of science and how...

Anyway, back to cricket.

It's basically saying, I'll just say it.

If you say, I don't know what an atom is, no one looks down on you in a social setting, right?

Whereas if you say, I've never heard of Mozart.

I've never read C.P.

Snow.

Yeah.

Then people will think you're a complete irretrievable idiot.

And he was saying this is not really a reasonable thing because actually atoms are arguably even more important than Mozart.

And you shouldn't have this huge divide between the two cultures.

Mozart was made of atoms in many ways.

Exactly.

And so it's mad that the absolute granular, like the most basic floor-level entry thing of science, for example, knowing what an atom is.

We're not expected to know.

We should be expected to know that.

Anyway, it's a terrific essay.

It's an essay.

It's not even a book.

It's short.

Anyway, cricket.

We're talking about cricket.

Yeah, sorry.

So in this Killer Kitty, the bowling is all all throwing.

So you know in cricket, you're not allowed to throw the ball.

You're not allowed to chuck.

I've seen it.

I've seen it.

I'm telling you that that's it.

You had to keep a straight arm the whole time and sort of go over the top of your head and throw the ball like that.

But you're not allowed to...

If you were to throw a snowball, for instance, you would bend your elbow, wouldn't you?

Yes, I would.

We've already said in the past that you're not great at throwing things.

No, and this is taking me right back to a...

cricket ball throwing competition which I lost as a boy.

We don't need to get into a

mental snake pit.

But it was to a nine-year-old, wasn't it?

It was to a seven-year-old.

So sorry, seven-year-old.

And you were at what age?

14.

Okay.

Did they have particularly long arms?

She did not.

But she was German, and I think that gave her a certain athleticism, which meant that I, yeah.

Anyway, look, when she'd grown up in sort of Soviet-era German, she'd been one of these people that we said to throw in college from the age of three.

She heavily drugged.

She'd clearly never seen a cricket ball before in her life.

Freuded up to the max.

Yeah.

Anyway, look, we're not here to.

If I could have one bit of my brain removed, I think it might actually be that memory.

So,

this is according to a writer called C.H.B.

Priddam, who said about the bowling is all throwing.

He also said there is no idea of defensive play.

So, in cricket, if someone bowls to you, a lot of the time you're just trying to stop them from getting you out.

You're not trying to score runs.

But there was none of that.

And he also said, barracking is not in the Australian model, but consists of pious invocations of the deity.

So you wouldn't say,

you know, why are you so fat?

Because every time your wife shags me, she gives me a biscuit or whatever.

You would say, we would say,

as Shane Morgan famously said, but you would say instead, God's going to get you.

You've been abandoning and neglecting your Wesleyanism.

Would you say that?

Yeah, exactly.

But that really hurt in the 19th century.

And they really, in Calikati, they really sort of made it official, the barracking.

So they had, this was particularly Calicuti in Samoa, so slightly different between pacific islands but they had cheerleaders called lape and they would dance and they would sing to support their bats the lape dancers

no darling

no it's not what it sounds like

it does sound like actually it does sound like it

actually

it could be that this was all just one man's excuse for something that i've read but apparently the lape dancers would sing around and the batsmen would get all um g'd up and then once their size balled out then they switch over to the other group of lappes.

And they're the ones who barrack and hurl abuse at the opposition.

This all sounds better than the 100

as a format, I think.

So you play cricket, Mars, don't you?

Yes, not, I should say, to a very high standard.

When your county days are behind you.

Long behind, and in many ways, ahead.

Are you a batter or a bowler?

I'm bits and pieces, really.

I particularly like the bit afterwards where you sit down in a camping chair and talk about what's just happened.

To me, that's what the day is building up to.

That's what I'm going to have to say.

James.

James, you like going to really unusual places at unusual times.

Have you ever been to Bramble Bank?

Give me Ma?

I have.

In the Solent?

Yes, I have.

Oh, no, I haven't.

In fact, if it's in the Solent.

This is...

So we're talking for international listeners, just between Southampton and the Isle of Wight, basically.

Yes, sort of in the channel, in the French channel.

Yeah.

Le Mont La Manche, if you're listening from.

No, we have no French listeners.

We've shaken them all off every year.

What's happening?

Oh, yeah.

Deliberate policy.

About cricket, basically.

As a group of people who have played a gig in Paris, we could definitely say we have no French listeners.

Oh, really?

But basically, there is the sand bar in the middle of the Solent, which drains out twice a year for one hour or so.

Yeah.

And they try and play a game of cricket on it as soon as it opens up.

And you've been there.

Yeah, I did a thing with Stuart Broad, the England cricketer.

It was a sort of promotional thing, but we had to get there very early,

quite early in the morning.

We've got, I think, a boat called us Rib, which is like

some sort of speedboat thing that they can get quite a lot of people on, and arrive at this, and they just start playing.

It's not very big at all.

It was quite sort of, you know, just as much as you get on as you can.

And they do set up some stumps quickly and just play a sort of a game of knockabout cricket.

I was umpiring.

Stuart Broad was playing.

I'm going to say, if you

started up there with your mates on this sort of sandbank, and Stuart Broad turns up

one of the greatest bowlers of all time.

It was, yeah, I mean, the golf obviously is extraordinary, but he was just whacking everything.

But you have to, you know, you're fielding, you have to go and get the ball out of the sea.

Yes, but they're not landing in the water.

Well,

and it does get to a point where they go, okay, it's up to our ankles.

We've got to go.

The last sort of bit you're playing.

And there was spectators as well.

Of course, the longer the game goes on, the closer the spectators have to stand.

There are people playing the game who are further away from the wickets than the spectators.

And all the lap dancers as well.

That must be a nightmare.

Yeah, you're not.

The idea of being on the south coast after the game is over, like being a part of the immigration authorities and seeing one of these small inflatable boats coming back and looking at it and thinking, is that Miles Jupp and Stuart Broad?

What are they?

I hope we're not expecting a coup.

Amazing.

Have you heard of the Fellowship of Fairly Odd Places Cricket Club?

No.

So this is a Dutch team and they only play one game every year, but it always has to be somewhere strange.

So the first game they played was on the borders of belgium and netherlands you know that it's a really sort of funky border where you can walk from the belgium into the netherlands and cross the border like 10 times uh the second game was against the batican They thought that they were going to win that easily, but they got absolutely battered.

They thought it was going to be a load of cardinals and stuff, but it turned out to be a load of theology students

who were all great at cricket, it turned out.

Should have called themselves the Batican.

Carry on.

Amazing.

Sorry, I'm trying to pull Lady Mary Wortley Montague after the show's over.

Oh dear.

It doesn't even feel worth carrying on after that.

They played Iceland in the North.

It was hard to trump the invention of the anus.

They played Andorra

and they in 2017, the last one I could find, they played at a place called Hirschenge in Munich and they chose that as fairly odd because of the proximity of the nude sunbathers in the nearby garden.

Were they sort of a target?

Was it like that's a four?

Well, that's a six.

I guess they had a six and out.

Yeah.

Wide ball.

No, it's just the way the lights show falling across it.

Let me see your googly.

Oh, crikey.

Oh, crikey.

Oh, dear.

Your mastermind, you went on Mastermind years ago, didn't you?

I've done it twice.

Yeah.

Oh, have you?

Well, once your specialist subject was David Gower.

Yeah, that was unsuccessful.

That was it.

Yes, the first time, though, it was Michael Aston, cricketer Michael Aston was.

Okay.

And I had no passes on that one, but I didn't really get out of the block second time.

Both times you picked a cricketer.

So it's not a broad interest.

It's broad because they say, what's your...

No, not at all.

He has got a broad interest.

Well, David Gower, do you know?

I was like, I wonder if there's something that you don't know about him.

But did he ever tell you?

Did you meet we met him?

Yeah, many times.

Okay, you have.

Yeah.

I was reading about him.

So he's a a famous, he was an England cricketer.

Thank you.

In the 80s.

He sounds like quite a fun guy, actually.

In 1990, he went on holiday to St.

Moritz and he had, there was a frozen lake, and he was in a hire car at three in the morning.

You can only imagine that if he was breathalised, it might not have gone well, but I'm not saying that I know that for sure.

It was three in the morning, and he thought, I'll drive around on the lake.

And he spent an hour zooming around on the lake, you know, doing handbrake turns and spins and having a great time.

And then he saw a patch of what he knew was thin ice.

He thought, cool, I'll try and drive towards that and break just before I get to it.

Just sensible decisions at 3 a.m.

You know,

Cricket isn't excited to get up on his own.

And he misjudged it and he didn't break in time and the car sort of went through the ice and got quite stuck.

And he tried to reverse out.

So it didn't go all the way didn't sink all the way down.

It just got a bit wedged in the ice, broke through.

So eventually he had to climb out and walk back to the hotel went to bed and the next morning came down and said to the hotel manager would you mind sort of calling your people and checking if there's still a hire car on the lake because i need to come and pick it up and sadly the hotel manager said no there's not

so

there's no longer any ice on the lake

yes exactly and that hire car was never seen again but that made me think he sounds like fun he's jolly yeah he very well he injured himself i think he did the crest a run i think he once had to miss some matches because he'd broken his elbow doing the cresta run run.

Not ideal.

He was cobsted.

Yeah, no, he also did that in a higher car.

Hurts.

Yeah, it certainly does.

Okay, that's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us, you can find some of these people on some of their social medias.

James, you're on...

My Instagram is Nelsix SingsJames Harkin.

There you go, Andy.

My Instagram is Andrew HunterM.

Miles, do you?

Are you contactable?

I'm not actually.

I'll share Miles' phone number with you all in the credits of the show.

And to get in touch with us as a group, you can email podcastqi.com or you can tweet at no such thing or go to Instagram at no such thing as a fish or head to our website, listen to all of our previous episodes for free.

Or if you want to be part of the exclusive, awesome, really cool secret club Club Fish,

then pay a teeny bit of money in order to listen to extra bonus content and ad-free episodes and much else besides, but mostly that.

And if not, we'll see you all again next week.

Thanks for listening and bye-bye.

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