573: No Such Thing As Captain Birdseye's Caribou Sausage

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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 James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anna Tushinski.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is, after the first bridge from Europe to Asia was built, it took 33 years to build the second and 2,453 years to build the third.

Let's set the scene.

Okay.

Istanbul.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Famously, a city between two continents.

Europe and Asia.

Those are the two.

Amazing.

And it is amazing.

it is amazing it's a city in two continents it's the only one in the world i think right

yes is it there's like a a bit of trivia that says that that's what the isanbul tourist board want you to be yeah certainly that's why i've really got all the

istanbul sites yeah the and the in between is a body of water the bosphorus strait

uh which which links what is it the black sea and the well it's got the sea of marmara and then bang in the middle of a turkey and then the black sea above it and the aean sea and then eventually eventually the med eventually the med um Eventually the Atlantic, you know?

And then eventually the Pacific if you want to go all the way around.

Yeah.

That's Istanbul.

And the Bosphorus Strait across it

supposedly, says Herodotus, was first crossed in 513 BC because Darius, who we talked about a while ago on this podcast.

Darius the Great, yeah, we did.

Darius the Great.

He was apparently pursuing the Scythians and it was all a bit...

Anyway, the bridge that was built then was a pontoon bridge.

It was basically where you tie a load of boats together and you'd walk across the top of the boats.

and you say load of boats it's a load of load of boats right like that's a thousand boats or something attached because that's a very big distance yeah to cover yeah

seven hunch if we want to be specific

which

probably wasn't what seven hunch mean

seven hundred is that not a standard abbreviation

oh oh my god get with it kids yeah and then the second one was built 33 years later they presumably thought oh this is a really good idea and that was slightly lower that was the hellespond apparently which is oh that's the dardanelles so that's a different part of this temple right it is indeed it's the it's just southwest of the bosphorus yeah and then 1973 ad was when the third the first permanent bridge was built across the bosphorus yeah and what did they do in the meantime boats yeah lots of boats can i ask um jumping back to the first bridge they're all boats tied together yeah how long did that last until someone needed their boat back

yeah it's a temporary thing i think it's to make an individual journey so if you've got an army you want to get from one to the other yeah

it had one mission basically exactly and you might just rip it up after that because you don't want the enemy to follow you.

Yeah.

But then 1973, the Turkey got its first

cross-Istanbul Bridge and it made a massive difference.

Nice bridge.

Have you been across it?

Yeah, yeah.

Very cool.

Did you go on foot?

No, in a taxi.

You're only allowed one day a year on foot.

Oh, is it?

Yeah, yeah.

It's the marathon.

That's when they have their annual marathon.

You're allowed to run from Europe to Asia, which is very cool.

That is cool.

That is awesome.

Do you guys know what bosphorus means?

No.

Boss means like cow.

It's actually almost guessable, sort of.

Oh, okay, so like phosphorus was something.

Yeah, it's like light bringer.

So is it cow bringer?

Okay, no, it's not.

It's similar to origin to porous, a channel, or a ford, a cow ford, or in fact, an ox ford.

It's Oxford.

Whoa.

Phosphorus is Oxford.

Really?

Question, though.

A Ford is a very, very, very small river that you could just walk across.

Yes.

And having been across this part of Istanbul, there's no way that has ever been a Ford.

It was a Ford, it was a Ford in the myth which caused this because it was a myth of a woman called Io who was transformed into a bull and then she walked across the Bosphorus.

She forded it

because you know, in myths shit like that can happen.

Just cow, because otherwise, we'll get letters.

Cow, sorry, cow.

Yes, she wasn't turned into a bull.

Um, one cool thing about the Bosphorus is that the water flows in both directions.

So, um, on the top of the water, it flows in one way, and then if you go really low down, it flows the other way.

And so, that means that if you're someone on a boat, you can just float on top, and you'll nicely float across in the direction of the water.

But if you want to go in the other direction, what you have to do is you get a big rock, drop it down really, really deep, and then the current underneath the water will drag your rock in the other direction, and that'll drag your boat in that direction.

Wait, that's not a way anyone travels.

That's completely plausible to me.

It genuinely works.

I I mean, it wouldn't work with a cruise ship.

I was going to say, what size is it?

Because you're a fisherman.

Yeah,

is it done?

Well, in history, it has been done.

That's amazing.

These days, I don't think you get those kind of boats around there, but that's very cool.

But it is an actual river, isn't it?

And it was the world's first ever discovered underground, underwater, sorry, river.

And it's so cool.

So the bit underneath, it's to do with the salinity going from a salty bit to a less salty bit of water, the river underneath the sea.

The river's got like banks and meanders and all the features that you have on a normal river and oxbow lakes.

Oxbow lakes all over the shop.

Pedalos?

Loads of pedalos, yeah, yeah, yeah.

A lot of banana boats.

And they're shopping trolleys at the surface.

Nice.

So there's the bridge is one way to get across now, but they also have now the underground rail.

And that started being built in 2004.

They wanted to build it quite quickly because one bridge, having that one bridge, was just a crazy amount of traffic.

The problem was, is they tried to pick a spot that just wouldn't have any archaeology around it it's hard in turkey isn't it the sort of center of the ancient world particularly when you've had like you know bridges that were made of boats you know thousands of them 700 sorry anna um and so that's exactly what happened they started going down and they started finding all of these shipwrecks that had been buried into the ground and uh they had to pause and so between 2005 and 2013 they were just digging up something like 36 ships that they found they found all this pottery and so after they found everything they thought it was all done they then said okay We just want one more quick look just one more just a little tiny look and then discovered a 6000 BC unknown Neolithic dwelling that they had no idea existed Wow with everything down there and then it just took even more time

I feel a bit conflicted about that just that we don't owe the past this much.

I'm sorry to irritate all archaeologists listening.

I just

we wouldn't know about these things if it wasn't for the fact some brilliant person had the idea of building an underground railway, which is much cooler than an old boat.

I'm sorry.

Do you know whose side you're on here?

And I think this is going to make you happy because I know you're a big fan.

Is Erdogan felt exactly the same as you and he said this is a bunch of rubbish pots and pans and the more important thing is infrastructure.

And I know you guys see eye to eye a lot.

So I think of myself as the strongman of this podcast.

He even threw himself a pissed off birthday party in the unopened tunnel underneath saying this has to be open.

This is enough.

This is too much.

And it eventually was on the date that he suggested.

A lot of traffic goes through those straits, the Bosphorus Straits of the Dardanelles, doesn't it?

I think it's as if four percent of the world's oil goes through wow there

and um there's a sorry

there's a rule that says that um everyone has to pay but it's a very small amount they did some sort of deal 50 years ago and said that um well like one of those there's a toll bridge near me where you pay two p to go across it

like that yeah it's just one old boy who's collecting two pounds sorry anna what century are you living in what it's not they exist they exist in Lancashire a fair bit.

Do you have to pay 2p every time you cross?

It's like 5p the one in there.

It's 2p and that the property makes quite a lot of money out of it in a year.

It's enough to sustain the property.

Wow.

Do you have a roll of two peas in your car?

I actually think if you don't have the two peas, they now let you go anyway.

But you really should.

It's frowned upon not to.

Well, what are they going to do?

If you're sitting there blocking the two p toll,

eventually it'll cost them more not to let you through.

You won't be popular.

Wow.

Yeah.

I have been to one where it's 20p.

Actually, they hiked it to 50, and I was really annoyed.

Is that what you're about to say, James?

Have they hiked it?

No, I'm not.

But this is

about turn of what is this ridiculous thing you're talking about, Anna, too.

Yeah, I'm very familiar with those.

I'm sorry, for comic conceit, I wanted to, you know, tease Anna.

I wanted to have my cake and eat it.

But anyway, so Turkey are now building a canal, or they want to build a big old canal that goes right the way through Turkey so that you can either go on this route that goes through the Dardanelles and through the Bosphorus and pay your 2P,

or you can pay more and go through the canal, but you get through quicker and you don't have to queue up.

It's an amazing idea.

It's like double Bosphorus.

It's like, imagine if you had a road where you had to pay 2p to go across it, or then you had the M6 toll road that went the other way and you could choose which way to go.

I think the first person who suggested that canal was Suleiman the Magnificent in the 1500s.

And it's been suggested by almost every Turkish leader, Ottoman leader, since then.

But yeah, otherwise caught on.

Just a quick thing on the Ottoman Empire.

I don't think we've said before much about the Ottomans.

So if you became sultan, the traditional thing to do was immediately off all your brothers, plus any uncles, cousins, like anyone was just murdered immediately.

Anyone who could possibly take over from you apart from your son.

Exactly.

But you've got 19 sons.

And when your son becomes sultan, he'll kill the other.

And also, your main son is cool, but all the other sons are like put in cages.

They're all put in cages.

I thought it was cages.

Basically, it's a suite of rooms, but they're called the cages.

They're called cages.

Then they changed their policy in about 1600 and they said, right, we can't keep on murdering everyone.

So we'll just keep everyone in the cages.

And you would be kept there with some, apparently, some concubines, but concubines who won't have any children so that you don't present a threat because you're not.

producing more heirs.

How do you make sure?

So it's all sort of post-menopausal concubines.

I believe.

I think that's the drill.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're only allowed a few very specific hobbies, apparently mainly macrame.

Oh,

making knots.

It's basically elaborate knot work.

And then you can tie yourself a rope ladder and

that's terrible.

Another once escaped, Sultan.

But by a rope bridge?

Yeah, rope bridge.

And that's why the multiple attempts at bridges across the boss are all rope-based.

None of them survived.

But every so often the Sultan would die, and they'd have to get someone out of the cages.

And basically, you'd have this blithering idiot who only knew how to do macrame and was not experienced in ruling the largest empire on the planet.

That's so weird.

Did that happen?

Did you have the cage ruler yeah wow so imagine you're in the 17th century uh you're visiting the sultan you're like a big wig but from another part of turkey or the ottoman empire you turn up at the top kapi palace in the middle of istanbul that's where he lives and he gives you some sorbet okay normally you get some nice white sorbet but this time it's red It's strawberry flavor.

What does that mean?

Am I about to be executed?

I'm afraid so.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

That's what would happen.

That's how you find out.

You see yourself.

I just need to say, I need to say it was Sherbert's not so bad.

Sherbert.

Oh.

Which is a similar,

but I misread it on my file.

So, yeah, so you would give this Sherbert.

Normally it'd be white

with your little lolly that you would dip in it.

But now it was the red flavor.

And so you're going to get executed, right?

Yeah.

But there was a loophole.

You could escape execution if you could outrun the executioner in a 300-yard foot race.

Wow.

Okay, so the executioner, who's also a gardener, by the way.

Yeah.

So he might be a bit limber?

He is going to be limber.

Yeah.

He's going to be strong.

He's going to work outside a lot.

So how do you do it?

Well, you just have to race him.

And if you don't...

Oh, I thought that was...

If you beat him, you're fine.

And if you don't beat him, you're executed and your body's held into the sea.

See, I was thinking, pretend to eat the sherbet.

Keep it in your hand as you run, drop it down as a trap, let him slip.

Easy peasy.

No, he's a gardener, Dan.

What you want to do is you want to leave an unusual flower in his path.

So he can't help but stop and take a cutting for later.

Yes.

No, what you want to do is you want to take him on a path where you come to a 2P toll and you go through, but he, having left his chain

back at the castle.

Do you get to eat the sherbet beforehand, just in case you don't live to be able to eat it elsewhere?

Oh, you do, yeah.

Oh, that's a sort of last meal.

It's going to put you off a little bit, though, because you know it's your last meal.

I don't think you're going to enjoy that sherbet quite as much.

Are there stats on how many people won or lost against the gardener?

If there are, they didn't come up in the course of my research.

Yeah, right.

Fair enough.

This was 17th century, did you say?

That's correct.

Okay, so I was trying to look into anything else that has survived Istanbul from the 17th century onwards that we still have today and I found that if you look at a drums kit on most of the biggest bands out there in the world, you'll see on the symbols, a lot of them will say Zildjian.

There's like four major cymbal brands out there, right?

This one was created in 1623 by Evadis Zildjian and it was a family that were trying to bring metals together to create gold but instead created these amazing symbols and they would make little symbols that go on each finger so you could you could make it so as to create noise and war and so on that's not going to be a big noise the fingers imagine 10 000 ottomans yeah yeah so this became a product that they started making and it slowly over the years morphed into becoming symbols that were being used by drummers.

And then when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, which was seen,

probably the most viewed show, I think, at its time, Zildjian was on there, and every drummer started taking it up.

So, it has become the biggest thing.

And this is in the Ottoman, this is a Turkish Ottoman family in the 1600s.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, in the 1600s.

So, that survived into popcorn.

You'll see it at the Grammys, you'll see it everywhere in modern day.

I just like it when Dan starts a fact watching the excitement on your face and in your voice as you get closer and closer to the Beatles climax

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that because he talks so fast, when Martin Scorsese spoke at an international film festival, they had to provide an additional translator to first translate his fast words into slower words.

They're still the same words.

They're the same words.

You wouldn't know.

They sound completely different.

Does this mean that the event went on way after Scorsese finished talking?

Because what matters to the audience is hearing the words from the second second interpreter, right?

So you've got Scorsese, who's going to be translated into, let's say it's French, right?

The French translator is listening to Scorsese going, I have no idea what you're saying because you're so speedy.

So they brought another English speaker in to listen to Scorsese speak really fast and then go, so what he's saying is in English.

It will take twice as long, won't it?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, you could trim it down a bit along the way.

You could.

Unfortunately, Scorsese and his films are known for being very concise and brief.

So I'm sure his speech is the same.

Yeah, this is a very little-known nugget that I got from Michael Palin's diaries.

So I'm reading his second volume of diaries, Halfway to Hollywood.

This happened on the 24th of September, 1980.

He was out to dinner in Los Angeles with Scorsese, and he told them this over a dinner party.

So I haven't seen that referenced anywhere else, but I have since asked a bunch of filmmakers and watched a few interviews.

And yeah, he's powerhouse when he's speaking.

It's funny because I wouldn't imagine it because of all his films, they have these languorous long pauses and people who speak very very slowly before murdering people yeah it's weird to think of him as just

like a chipmunk i've never heard him speak i don't think no me neither he's slower these days i would say but he's 80.

but you've you've seen him speak i suppose james through cinema you know he's you've seen you've seen you've heard what he wants to say

yeah i suppose i have

for four hours at a time i thought i'd never seen one of his films i had to look through the whole i thought i managed to because it doesn't it's not my kind of thing you know the like like gangsters and mafia stuff.

It's not really my thing.

But no big worms.

It turns out I've seen two of his films.

You cannot get away from Scorsese.

I've seen Cape Fear, that's a bit of a stinker, and Shutter Island, which is amazing.

Yes, love Shutter Island.

Oh, what a film.

So good.

Oh, interesting.

Cape Fear isn't a stinker, is it?

It's a classic.

It's a classic, yeah.

It's a bit silly, isn't it?

I guess so.

Yeah.

Not allowed our own opinions.

Yeah, exactly.

Sorry, absolutely.

I don't think it's like, it's not like a classic Razzie kind of movie.

No, it's sorry.

What I mean is it's a highly garlanded, commercially successful, and critically acclaimed stinker, in my eyes

uh yeah but amazing filmmaker um he so the movies if you don't know taxi driver he made he made um what else did he make mean streets the king of goodfellas the king of new york uh yeah the irishman the irishman in recent times raging bull raging bull wolf of wall street oh yeah that's a big one yeah raging bull does seem to have saved his life because well he was a huge coke addict wasn't he in the 70s and is that why he was speaking so fast i think it will have contributed.

It had something to do with it, actually, yeah.

And he just made a film which actually was a bit of a flop with what she called Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz's daughter.

Liza Minelli.

Thank you.

He nearly died.

He ended up in hospital, and he was really bleeding internally everywhere.

They thought he was going to brain hemorrhage.

He said, I was bleeding internally everywhere, and I didn't know it.

My eyes were bleeding, my hands, everything, my mouth, my nose, coughing up blood.

Anyway, he sort of was surviving, but he was very depressed.

And he didn't really want to make Raging Bull, I don't think.

But Robert De Niro, who'd made a few films with him, was really keen on it.

And De Niro rocked up beside his hospital bed with a script for Raging Bull that I think had been sort of rewritten, redrafted, and said, Look, you've got to do this, mate.

What are you going to do?

Are you going to sit here and die?

Or are you going to do Raging Bull?

And he did it.

It's one of the best films ever made.

Another thing he made was a film called New York, New York.

Yes.

In fact, this is the one we're talking about with Liza Manelli in it, maybe.

I think it was.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

And so she sang the song Theme from New York, New York, which is the one that everyone knows.

New York, New York.

No.

New York.

New York.

Oh, that one.

Yeah, yeah.

There are two songs called New York, New York.

Is there?

That one's from an old sort of Bing Crosby film, isn't it?

New York, New York.

It's a hell of a town.

Yeah, that one.

Something's up.

Something is down.

Yeah.

Exactly.

But no, not that one.

So I was teasing.

You weren't real.

This is my 2P Tolbridge moment.

Right?

I feel like a fool.

Thank you.

Have your money back.

Well, so the interesting thing about that is that film came out in 1977.

And Liza Mnelli sang The Theme from New York, New York.

And then later in 1980, Frank Sinatra sang New York, New York, which everyone thinks associates Frank Sinatra with New York, New York.

But he never sang it until 1980 because it wasn't written until 1977.

That's insane.

I didn't know he was still singing in 1970.

I know.

So all of those times when he was in the rap pack and, you know, doing being absolutely mega famous, he never sang New York, New York, because it hadn't been written yet.

Wow, interesting.

Isn't that interesting?

That's really odd.

Yeah.

I feel like I've got a false memory of being alive in the 50s and the 60s and hearing himself.

Exactly.

I think that like a lot of people who are older would know that, but for me, it was really

incongruous.

Yeah, that was it.

It's time tunnel stuff.

Annie, you say that he was massive in Coke.

He loved his cocaine.

Massive in Coke.

In the Coke world.

Well, he did it a lot, right?

I mean, he did it to the point that there was a film festival he went to in Cannes in 78.

He was unable to score Coke there, so he dispatched a private jet to go on a coke run to pick it up for him and bring it back so it was a massive thing and also he made a movie called the last waltz so he's quite an amazing director he doesn't just do films he does documentaries and quite seminal documentaries as well um and so he's done a beatles documentary um let's see there we go there we go wow

and let's move on

now we've now we've loved that boil for this fact

let's plow on shall we there was uh there there was one which was called The Last Waltz and one of the musicians, Neil Young, had a bit of Coke under his nose and this made it to the film.

And so they were sitting in the editing room going, what do we do about this?

And he had VFX literally invent a whole new method that's still used in film today.

They called it the traveling bogey, where they were able to knock out the coke from his nose by having a thing follow and track the coke all along in the shot.

So when you see it, the coke's not in the shot, but it was in the print.

And

cinema was advanced as a result.

It's basically a Snapchat filter, isn't it?

Really?

Yeah.

Where they find one bit, like they know this is your nose or your ears or your eyes and they can scan and put a make you look like a potato or whatever.

Yeah.

That's a really good call.

They should have done that.

Just put a potato over his head.

I think it was Neil Young.

Yeah, Neil Young.

None of this stuff, I have to say, is in the IMDb on Martin Scorsese, which reads...

Let me just read you a couple of things from it, right?

Okay.

Because I think Scorsese might have written this.

Despite being known for directing extremely dark and often very violent movies, he is known in real life to be a very friendly, polite, and mild-mannered person who gets along very well with his cast and crew.

Because so many of his actors win or are nominated for awards, actors are dying to work with him.

Ask all Sazey rarely uses our rated language in real life.

And it's just pure hagiography.

Yeah.

There's a film he made recently called The Irishman.

Yep,

which I missed.

I watched it on the flight to Lanzarote, and it was almost the exact length of the flight.

Nice.

Which is about four hours.

Oof.

It seems long.

I mean, it is long, clearly.

But the one thing they did there, because James, am I right in thinking people age?

Oh, I don't fucking remember it.

It was just four hours of tedious bankster stuff.

Well, okay.

Basically, people get older and then younger.

It's the same characters, and you're going back in life and then forward in life and then back in life.

You know, they're 30 and then they're 80 and blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, they had to have a posture coach telling people, no, stop it.

You're getting up.

from the chair like an 80-year-old.

You're 30 in this scene.

And vice versa.

Just saying, no, like for this scene, you are a healthy, fit young man, so can you jump out of it?

So confusing.

That's very funny.

Another one he did was Hugo.

Oh, yeah.

Probably my favorite School Saisi film, Embarrassing.

The Victor Hugo biopic.

No, no, it's like a family film about the early days of cinema and stuff.

Lumiere?

Lumiere brothers.

Yeah.

It's a gorgeous, gorgeous.

It's a really good film.

And it was in 3D.

It was one of the early 3D films.

And one interesting thing about it is there was a guy called Bruce Bridgman.

Okay, he was a neuroscientist, but he had this weird thing where he couldn't perceive depth.

So whenever he went to,

like, let's say he went to a big church in Europe and he wanted to admire it, he couldn't really tell what was here and what was there.

It was all flat to him.

So he used to walk up and down the church so that the things closer to him would move quicker than things further away from him.

You know, like when you're on a train and like anything that's really close to the train flies past and then the mountains in the background background go really slowly he would use that parallax effect to understand depth anyway he went to watch hugo and he put on these 3d glasses and suddenly he could see the 3d and when he left the movie he could see 3d it had fixed his problem isn't that amazing That's incredible.

That is good.

So he didn't have to keep the glasses on.

No.

It just fixed his problem.

No, it just fixed his 3D.

It kind of triggered something in his brain that said, oh, this is how it works.

How weird.

Was that in the IMDB?

No.

What is going on?

Just on interpreters.

Oh, yeah.

As this fact was about.

It does sound insanely stressful.

They do have at the European Parliament, they have to switch every half an hour because otherwise they just can't, they get very, very stressed.

And they can't have mistakes as well, right?

Exactly.

And you're in a booth with one other interpreter, so you seamlessly switch over every half an hour.

And if you're not on shift, you should not eat an apple.

You can eat a banana.

Why?

Because it's too noisy.

It will distract your fellow interpreter who's trying desperately to listen to,

okay, James is doing some foley now, and the audience is just listening to this disgusting sound.

Yeah, that's cruel.

And if James, you'd had a nana there, it would have been fine.

I've actually been eating a banana this whole time.

Exactly, exactly.

Some of the gestures Dan's been doing have been actually more distracting.

No, but half an hour, half an hour's about apparently the safe limit.

And in 2009, Colonel Gaddafi

spoke at the UN, and his interpreter allegedly collapsed after 75 minutes of

mental stuff from Gaddafi.

He just the interpreter's brain just went into spasm and he did.

He cried out something like, I can't do this anymore.

Yeah.

I think that is a problem, isn't it?

So some interpreters talk about this with translating Donald Trump, which is you have certain phrases that he uses that just kind of doesn't make sense.

But in English, we all kind of let it slip.

But as a translator,

you've got to do it.

You don't translate the words, do you?

Translate the meaning of the words?

I think they just suffer from what he actually means is the issue.

What is he actually trying to say there?

The sentence lasts 20 minutes and it just goes yeah yeah and I think I can see how it's a pressurizing thing like a different kind of interpretation is to do sign language right and we have seen meltdowns publicly where they're often accused of not knowing sign language and I wonder if that's the case.

So do you remember there was the Obama speech after Mandela had died and the guy just clearly didn't know.

He still maintains that he does know it, but he was hallucinating.

And in America, Hurricane Irma, there was a moment where on TV they were saying, you've got to be safe.

There's flood zones you've got to get to, you've got to consider staying in shelters.

And the guy who apparently knew sign language was just making words like bear monster and pizza.

And he says, well, my brother's deaf and I do know sign language, but I just, it was too much.

This is the stress of it.

My cousin is actually a professional translator, a Russian translator.

And he was saying the stress of it, like you're fluent, you've been fluent for years.

And then suddenly you'll have a blank.

He said he was translating Russian, and at one point, someone was talking about baking and said the word keksv, and he knew that's a loan word from British, uh, so that's fine.

So, keks means cake in Russian, that's that's what the loan word they were using.

He was like, I know it's a loan word from British, what do I associate with kek?

Keks, I said, get your keks on as trousers, and just translated cake as trousers, and you panic.

Yeah, in the moment, one thing interpreters all do, apparently, is they interrupt people.

Okay, they're nearest to

shouldn't have mentioned this fact.

I knew.

I knew it would be you, James.

If listener, you'd notice I haven't spoken for a while.

It's because I've literally been eating the apple the whole time.

Unfortunately, swallowed it just in time to interrupt Andy Lee.

Go back to it.

No, basically,

the whole thing of being an interpreter is you learn what people around you are going to say and you slightly are anticipating the end of a sentence.

So when they go clock off after a long day of interpreting, they go home and their partner says to them, I'm making, and they say, chicken nuggets.

I know, I know.

And

their spouses and children are furious with them all the time because they just will not let them finish the sentence.

Sadly, relatedly, I saw a head of an interpreting service who hires people out for like UN and stuff, talking about how you do it.

And he was saying in this video, you have to be really careful about what distance you keep from the person who you're interpreting.

And at first, I thought, well, sure, you just keep the distance where you can hear them, right?

But he meant in terms of the time you leave between when they speak and when you start interpreting.

interpreting, so you can't get too close to them.

As in, if Andy starts speaking and I'm interpreting him, if I literally interpret after every single word he says, I'll mess up the grammar.

I won't be able to predict the end of the sentence.

I won't get it.

And he might be starting a sentence and then go on one of his whimsical endings of a sentence.

Exactly.

You don't do that.

Whereas if you're converting Dan, you just mention the Beatles at some point and you trust that train will come in.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that Indigenous Arctic peoples were absolutely banned from eating surf and turf.

Now, we said before we went on air, before the mates came on, that neither one's going to know what surf and turf is.

Yes, I thought this was universally accepted cuisine, but

Dan, maybe because of his unique upbringing and others don't.

So, surf and turf is basically where you get dumped like a massive lobster next to a massive steak or, you know, meat and fish.

Land and sea.

Land and sea.

Can it be, I was wondering, can it be like oysters and ham?

Is that

technically surf and turf?

Where I come from, it's usually scampy and very, very cheap steak.

Oh, okay.

Okay, okay.

Fish fingers and a Scottish egg would technically count as surf and turf, right?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, there you go.

There are lots of things that count.

You can all think of meat from land and meat from the sea and do it yourself at home.

Yes, Yes, hours of endless fun.

Poor.

It was fun.

I don't know understanding that's debatable.

Anyway,

I don't know if this is still true.

Obviously, there are a lot of Inuits left across Alaska and Canada, Greenland, and the Yupik people and the Aleut people, all from that kind of region of the world, all used to do it, but they've obviously integrated more into the outside world in the last hundred years, so I don't know if they still do.

But anyway, it was the idea that land and sea absolutely could not be mixed, mostly because you'd really upset the mistress of the sea.

And they went to such lengths.

So essentially, the only foods they had 90% of the time were seal and caribou.

And fish.

And fish, and fish, yes.

And

they could never be eaten together.

They could never be cooked or stored together.

In the dark months of the year, so like half of the year, they'd go and live out on the sea ice.

And because they're on sea there, the women who did all the sewing were absolutely forbidden from sewing clothes because they're made of caribou skins.

So, they'd have to do all their sewing in summer because you can't take the caribou skins out onto the sea because that's mixing land and sea.

So, that's surf and turf, yeah.

Surf and turf.

You're allowed to wear the caribou skins.

Weirdly, you're allowed to wear them.

Yeah, you don't have to go naked out to the sea.

You're allowed to wear them, weirdly, but just not make them.

This taboo was so strict, so as well as the thread thing, and you had to process all your caribou in the autumn before you then started hunting seal.

Um, but there was another taboo: so fish that were caught in rivers and lakes so trout and salmon

must not be cooked over a driftwood fire because driftwood comes from the sea oh wow so that is a land sea taboo where it's kind of fish from the land yeah if you like yeah and wood from the sea well if you caught your fish in some brackish water

i think it's a strong is it is it a freshwater fish well a salmon would go in between wouldn't it like oh yeah but as soon as they'd entered it was like even if the salmon were just 20 yards upstream having to come from the sea it's like no the sea's out now.

They're now river.

It's bizarre.

It wasn't easy, was it?

Living the life of an Arctic person 100 years ago.

You wouldn't have thought you'd introduce.

Imagine you're practically starving to death, and all you've got is a bit of driftwood to cook your caribou on.

Well, fuck, I guess we're going to die.

So interesting.

Is it one of those things where there's a great reason behind it?

And actually, the religious thing or the mistress of the sea thing is just a

little bit interesting.

I don't know.

You know, like there's a thing where people who don't eat pig products perhaps is because if you didn't cook them properly, you'd get terrible parasites and stuff.

And the meat spoils faster in the Middle East than some, so that's why there's a pork taboo or that kind of thing.

I don't know.

Could have been like if you take the caribou meat out to sea, it might spoil by the time you're out at sea or something.

But it's lost in the midst of time and now it's all about pissing off the sea goddess.

I was reading a bit about their diets and the stuff they ate.

And this is about the turn of the 20th century.

Quite a few explorers' memoirs who went and lived with Inuits for long periods of time.

And one guy who was living with the copper Inuits who were off the island off the north of Canada said that the only non-meat he ever saw them eat is the half-digested moss from the first stomach of a caribou or a rain.

Moss Andy?

Sounds good to me.

Yeah, you have a boss.

I think that's not necessarily picky, by the way.

Yeah, it's a thing called rock tripe is what they eat, which is this,

it's kind of, I think it's more lichen than moss andy, just to say, but they would, it would grow on the rocks and then you would scrape it off and you would eat it.

But you had to soak it for long periods and change the water a lot because if you didn't, it would basically give you the codestant shit.

Oh, no.

So you had to, yeah.

So has it been, if it's in an animal's stomach, has it kind of been pre-milked?

That would do it.

That would help it, I guess.

Maybe it ferments a little bit in there.

Yeah, maybe that's why they did it.

It's like having your oats pre-milked.

Yeah.

And you could, it came in like, I'm sort of imagining like a meat loaf because often it would be in the caribou's stomach and they'd take the stomach out wholesale and it would freeze, obviously, because it's freezing.

And then you just hack off bits.

So what you get is a nice mixture of you know like if you have a sort of sausage meat loaf with like herbs through it it's like you get a mixture of caribou stomach and moss

frozen off yum very nice another explorery type who witnessed the way that they ate their food and then transposed it to what we do now is captain birds eye I had no idea about this.

What's this?

Captain Birdseye basically was out in Labrador for quite a while and he noticed all the indigenous Inuit freezing their food and then being able to heat it later and it tastes really good.

Frozen food was happening already around the world, but the thawing process was really bad.

If you unfroze your food, it suddenly lost its taste.

It was really oddly and the texture of it and so on.

And he applied the method that he saw the Inuit do to his frozen food company.

And that's what sparked frozen food as a massive industry.

And of course, birds I today never sell sausages because sand and turf.

Surf and turf.

The early

caribou intestine and moss was not popular with kids at tea time.

Oh, you battered that.

Anyone's eating it.

Yeah, he noticed that when they caught some fish and froze it in the middle of winter, it tastes way better than when they caught it in like the spring and froze it because it was so much quicker that the freezing process happened.

And it just made things taste better.

And then that made him, you know, do his own.

version.

So basically his trick is free stuff really quickly.

Freeze stuff really quickly.

Flash freezing.

Yeah.

Kind of like flash frying.

frying huh but the opposite

wise words yeah yeah wise

another taboo even if you're allowed to make reindeer based clothing right yeah some groups of people you would match your clothes to the sex of the caribou that

the skin came from cool so men human men would wear male caribou based skin clothing okay do you think you'd be able to tell the difference?

I think if I was an Inuit, I would.

Yeah, you'd be.

Yeah.

Because apparently the skin is a bit tougher and therefore supposedly supposedly better for hunting in.

And the women would use the thinner skin from the female caribou for their own clothes.

Oh, really?

Because presumably they're, you know, doing them a crame.

Again, if you've only got the male caribou and you're freezing to death,

how rigidly did they adhere to these rules?

I don't know.

I don't know.

One thing is Franklin.

You know, Franklin went on an exhibition of the north and he got trapped and they had no food and stuff.

He had some Inuit people with him there.

And he said that when they got really desperate, they would eat their clothes.

Oh.

Okay, that's wonderful.

So that's quite useful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The sleds, right, as well?

Yeah, the sleds were sort of very frozen.

They weren't frozen fish.

I think I remember they were frozen fish.

Yeah.

Some of them.

Wow.

Really, really frozen, consistently frozen fish.

And some of the Aleu people, speaking of edible clothes, they had

gut parkers.

So any large sea mammal, their guts are very good for making a weatherproof, waterproof, windproof parker out of.

And some Aleyu people made robes from sea otter intestine.

Wow.

You know that?

Did your parents ever say to you if you did something bad, they say, I'll have your guts for garters.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They were probably Aleutes.

That's where it comes from.

But because they really sort of had like three ingredients, they used all of it.

So they ate caribou poo.

A real delicacy was caribou head

and fermented contents of caribou stomach and lots of caribou droppings made into a soup.

Could we eat it with our

if it was on a plate right now?

Would I get sick if I ate it?

No, you might not be used to it.

Might well do.

It's poo, like we're talking poo.

I think you'd struggle to keep it down in the first instance.

Yeah.

Okay.

But it's not poo because it's a herbival poo.

It's quite different to us eating our own poo, which is really, really bad for you.

It's like eating a cow pat.

Yeah.

I don't think we're recommending eating any poo.

Sorry, Emma.

It's a good job, Captain Bird's Eye saw the fish freezing thing, not the poo-eating thing.

Caribou head poo soup that has not taken off.

How different would the world be right now?

Waitjoy's freezer section would be an exciting place.

There are damn things about whether Inuit people were especially adapted and were, because you know, the stuff about the Mediterranean diet, you know, lots of vegetables, lots of olive oil, and so on.

People wondered for a long time why Inuit people were able to live on a diet that's basically just fat and protein.

There's no carbohydrates.

Where's the vitamins coming from?

Where's the vitamins?

It's confusing.

Almost no vegetation, apart from a little bit in summer.

And

they do have a few genetic adaptations, it's believed now, which make it easier for them to eat a lot more fat than everyone else and survive.

They have slightly bigger livers because they need to make more glucose from protein.

They wee a lot more to get rid of all the extra urea that they're taking in in their diet.

It's so annoying to be weeing so much when you're in such a cold place.

I know, I know.

It's bad.

Yeah.

They must have a system where you don't need to take things out.

There's an otter gut tuning system that's.

You've got to be like astronauts at that point, right?

Yeah.

But also, there are lots of,

they were genuinely less healthy in other ways, as in, you know, like they had lots of hardening of the arteries dating back hundreds of years just because you were eating mostly fat and protein.

So

it makes sense.

Sometimes they find a tiny bird, an arctic bird, and they'd swallow it whole.

Skin it and swallow it whole.

Which I'm impressed you're going to swallow a bird whole.

This is just what the.

How big is this bird?

Wait a minute.

Was there a spider that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside them?

Yeah, eventually they swallow the whole reindeer.

Kiviak is one thing that they do.

Oh, yeah.

So they get a seal skin and they fill it with loads of tiny little orcs.

Little birds.

A-U-K.

Yeah, not A-W-K.

Orcs, you mean?

Well, it's a bit of orcs.

So you have about 300 little orc birds and you put them in a seal skin and then you bury it under some rocks and ferment it and then eventually you eat it.

But you have to use orcs uh in 2013 there was a load of people from the town of sioropalok and they made kiviak out of eida ducks and eida ducks don't ferment as well as orcs and a few people died

because they need to ferment in the proper way that makes them edible silly billies that's why there are these taboos is because it's there's actually really sound food guidance that people have learned through trial and error over centuries yeah i mean that would make sense were there to be a taboo against eating eida ducks fermented inside a seal yeah yeah yeah

Um, do you know what the Scandinavian Sammy use reindeer spleen for?

Look at that.

It's like a question from the news quiz.

So, this week.

What have the Sammy people of the Arctic been doing with reindeer spleen?

Santa sax?

Oh, very nice.

Um, it's it is to eat, but it's for a particular group of people in your civilization.

Well, babies.

Got him one.

Oh, nice.

They're easy to suck on.

They're slightly sort of training food.

Okay.

Spleen.

That makes sense because a lot of the food that people were eating was just solid frozen, even though you were saying they sometimes thawed it.

Very often they just didn't have the equipment to make a fire big enough to thaw it.

And it's so hard for a newborn baby to chow down on a massive frozen chunk of raw meat.

Frozen jerky.

That's the reason why very little baby food is frozen jerky.

Yeah.

But yeah, reindeer spleen is apparently good for your tot.

Well, there you go.

If you run out of those little Ella pouches,

that's something to consider.

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that men can have three penises without knowing it.

So I checked.

And

yeah, no.

Surprise.

Yeah, surprise.

You only have the normal four.

I've only got

the normal five.

Yeah,

this is very interesting, isn't it?

Because they're not obvious.

No, they're not.

They're hidden inside your body.

This was a thing called trifalia, and it was only

seen in a human for the first time in 2020 in a newborn baby.

But then in 2024, I think, or 2023, there was a recent study from the University of Birmingham Medical School where they dissected a 78-year-old man who donated his body to science and found that he had an extra two penises hidden up there.

Yeah, it's crazy.

It's hidden inside.

They were inside his scrotum.

Yeah, so they were small.

They were really, really small.

Well, let's not judge, I mean.

Yeah, they were really small and they kind of attached to his normal penis, like the urethra kind of went through.

They said that there was no dead end.

So if you imagine, like, if the urine had not had a real, just a straight place to go, then he might have got a lot of urine infections and stuff like that.

But actually, it seemed like mostly everything was kind of fine there.

He might have experienced some pain during sex if he got some internal erections.

I'm wondering what that was.

That's ironic, isn't it?

Well, three penises might make sex less pleasant.

That's, you know.

That is ironic.

I think it would have the opposite effect.

It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, isn't it?

Right.

Three penises when all you need is a good jag.

Okay.

They were called two small supernumerary penises stacked in a sagittal orientation posterior inferiorly to the primary penis.

Lovely stuff.

Sexy.

Yeah.

And one was more of a main one, wasn't it?

He had one.

He had one main penis.

Oh, sorry.

Sorry.

He had the main main one, the big guy.

And then he had two...

The big guy.

The big guy.

As we all go on it.

The good enough guy.

I didn't actually really know the layout, the structure of the penis very well until this.

So you've got these two bodies of tissue, one on top and one underneath, the corpus cavernosa and the corpus spongiosum.

The urethra runs through the middle.

And so in his mini penises, he had those spongy bits as well.

And in the secondary penis, the second main one.

the standing, the urethra actually did still run through the middle of that.

But in the third one, the urethra didn't even bother

at all that it didn't really matter.

Yeah.

But the corpora cavernosa is the bit that fills up with the blood.

That's the,

I think we might have mentioned it before.

That's the bit that fills with blood, which allows you to have an action.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This poor guy, this guy, this is quite recent news.

You know, he's lived a long life, 78 years.

He's probably had chats with his family as he's going, what do you think I'll be remembered for?

What do you think they'll talk about?

He's like, one of his kids is sat there and his two tiny kids sat next to him.

Oh man.

I just think, what a great tragedy he never knew.

Yeah.

I know, yeah, exactly right.

You want to know.

And it's, yeah, I mean, who knows what

everyone listening to this podcast will have.

People might have extra fingers or extra all sorts of, you can get extra nipples, can't you?

But really subtle ones that you can barely tell that they're there.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, there's all sorts you can have.

Well, these things are quite rare.

And I was thinking about it would be good if we were more likely to have some of these interesting extra body parts.

So I was looking at the more likely ones.

And did you know that 20% of people, maybe up to 30%, estimates very, have an extra spleen?

Oh, that would be useful when we're feeding our kids.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the splenunculi,

an extra spleen.

Yeah, and it's a little accessory spleen.

They tend to be very small and quite near your main spleen.

And yeah, I think we don't really know why.

I think they think it's often you'll get a little injured or bumped when you're younger and it'll split off from the main spleen.

So this isn't done in the womb.

It's not the fetus that you can't do.

I don't think so.

No, it's not.

So there was a guy who was playing Ultimate Frisbee one day.

He was slightly injured.

He ruptured his spleen, so not good.

And the the doctors who operated on him later said, by the way, do you know about all your other spleens?

And he didn't.

And so the spleen, it sort of filters out damaged red blood cells and it's very, very useful.

Although it's not crucial.

A lot of people have a spleen off and it's fine.

Yes, that's true.

But it has a role in the immune system and things like that.

But as you say, it's not essential.

But if it's hurt, bits of it splinter off through the body and it depends where they land.

So if they land somewhere with a good blood supply, they will grow into another micro spleen.

And sometimes if you're having your spleen out, the doctors will just chop it up and hope a new one grows somewhere in you.

Like chopping up a worm, basically.

Oh, does that actually?

I thought they didn't know if that

works yet.

I said they hope.

I didn't say they guarantee it.

Because

something else that I also read weirdly conversely is if you're having a splenectomy, which is like if you've got blood disorder or something, you have to have your spleen out.

The doctors have to know if you've got an extra spleen because if your main spleen's malfunctioning, your tiny extra one will also be malfunctioning somewhere.

So you have the main one out, but you know, the malfunction will stay.

So you've got to search the whole body.

You've got to open up someone's entire body and search.

Yeah.

There's another thing which is called the LRP5 gene, which when it has a mutation, bones have a higher density about them.

So they've noticed that there are people who just can't break their bones.

Probably if you really, really went for it, ultimately it could break.

But in a situation where most people would break their bones, they would just not have a crack.

And it seems to happen a lot in America, in Connecticut, who people have been identified.

So something's going on.

The mutation is passing through genetically.

But one of the symptoms where you could know that you have this is difficulty staying afloat while swimming.

Anna.

Anna.

Dun, dun, dun.

The only person we notice sink in the Dead Sea.

Oh my God.

And my mum was so weirdly close to that guy from Connecticut who used to visit all the time when I was a kid.

That's amazing.

Have you ever broken a bone?

No.

Oh, no, I've broken loads of bones, but only small ones, though.

Like wrist bones and

my jaw.

Does it still count down?

Only the minor ones.

You were with me when I broke my jaw in facts, weren't you?

Don't get any more facts wrong on QI.

Wow.

Yeah, it's a top shipping rons, guys.

There was an interesting thing in 2020, which is the first medical case, I think, of someone who was shot in the chest.

but survived because his heart was on the opposite side of his body to most people.

Brilliant.

Isn't that cool?

It actually happened.

So this is a thing called citus inversus, where all of your organs are on the wrong side.

There's about one in 6,000 to 12,000 people have it, but most people would never know they had it.

But what's kind of interesting is Dr.

No had it in the novel, in the James Bond novel.

Did he?

And he was shot.

in the wrong side of his body just like this guy in the medical literature a few years ago he survived and he got a god complex because he thought this makes me special and that's why he became such a bad guy oh sorry, Dr.

No did not the other

study.

Did Dr.

No think his heart was in the right place then?

And

that's where the saying comes from.

No, he knew that like the doctors told him and he was like that makes me special so I see I should take over the world.

That has been used in a few plot points.

I remember my dad and I watching a movie and him explaining to me, because a lady shoots a man in the chest and leaves him to die, but she shot him.

She knows

it's quite near the middle, isn't it?

It's nearer the middle than we all think, which is just under the left nipple.

It's got to be a very good shot, hasn't it?

And you're still going to scrape probably a bit of it.

Because what does it really affect?

This Cetus Inversus thing where you're the other way around.

Because your lungs unaffected.

Oh, liver, because you've only got one liver, one spleen, gallbladder.

Also, your spleen, as we've heard, could be literally anywhere in your body.

But your liver is a big one, I think.

Yes, yeah, because that's massive, isn't it?

Yeah.

I mean, you probably will die if you've been shot in the chest anyway, right?

We should say.

Don't hope.

Don't eat poo and don't get shot in the chest.

Are you going to take any message from this podcast?

All these things about unusual body parts that we're talking about,

I think it might interest a guy called Etienne de Beaumont, who was someone living in Paris in the early 20th century.

And he was a big old posho and he liked to do lots of parties and stuff.

He was a friend of Coco Chanel.

And one of his parties in 1919, the theme of it was that every guest had to arrive with the most interesting body parts exposed.

Cool.

So whatever you think your most interesting body part is, if it's your head, lucky you.

If it's your spleen, tough.

Very hard.

What would you go for, Andy?

Sorry to put you on the spot.

That is fine.

Well, that weird growth down there is...

I would go with that.

That'll be it.

That'll be it.

I've got a weird-shaped finger.

There's a finger which got shut in the door when I was tiny and it's permanently disfigured as a result.

Yeah.

Do you think that would break the ice at this party?

I think I'm not getting invited to this party.

If that's if I filled in the form and put that on my RFVP, this is the thing I'm going to come with it exposed.

I think it's going to be a dull, dull night for us.

That's weird because I was going to pick my finger as well because I've got a little freckle on it, which makes it, I can make my finger look like an elephant.

I've got a trunk and an ear.

I think we'd be put on the same table.

I don't think, I think you'll be put on the table with other people who could do elephant impressions.

Oh, no.

Do we know what any, if anyone beat Dan and Andy suggested that?

No, I don't have.

Like, I really tried to find out, and really every source just tells you that this existed.

I got it from a biography of Coco Chanel initially.

Because you're either going for, oh, my genitals are the most interesting part, here they are, or what is it?

I mean, what can you expose?

Knees,

ankle, elbow, it's joints and genitals is going to be the spot.

But you don't want interesting genitals, do you?

I think you want standard genitals.

But they might be the most interesting thing about you.

Okay, yeah.

If you had three.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

If you had three.

On things you don't know are inside your body.

I mean, this is silly.

I was just reading a doctor talking on Reddit about experiences of patients with weird stuff inside the body and saying a young man came in complaining of a headache.

And sorry, this was someone who worked in radiology and said, and so they wanted to find out the cause of the headache.

And so I said, we asked for a history,

anything that could be relevant to this headache.

The man said nothing to report.

We scan his head.

CT shows a bullet rattling loose between his nasal cavity and his brain so i asked the guy have you ever been shot in the face and he said oh yeah i guess i forgot to mention that

you've got to run back through your full history sometimes yeah that's amazing i read something about a guy in 1911 called alexander grail who fought two duels uh near new orleans And the first one, someone sort of stabbed him with a sword and it went right through his lungs.

And then he went to hospital, managed to come out, but he's really sick.

He walked, they said in the newspapers, he was bowed like an octogenarian.

He had a bit of surgery, but the doctors are like, Ah, this is not going to work, mate.

You've got a huge abscess there, you're going to die.

And he thought, Well, I'm going to die now, so I might as well do more duels.

I might as well

say fuck you to the people who upset me in the past.

So he got into another duel, and the person shot him in the exact place where the sword had gone in, and it drained the abscess, and he got cured.

Yes, I was so hoping you'd say that.

Wow.

That is where we get the comic bonk on the head twice restores your memory.

The 3D glasses.

Wow.

I'm sorry, is this one of the things we are recommending?

Yes, absolutely.

If you've been in a duel and got an abscess on your lungs, get in another duel immediately.

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 on our various social media accounts.

I'm on Instagram on at Schreiberland.

Andy?

I'm at Andrew Honduran on Blue Sky.

Yep, James.

I'm on Threads.

No such thing as James Harkin.

Well, it changes every week.

And Anna, where can they find us as a group?

You can get in touch with us as a group by going to at no such thing on Twitter or at no such thing as a fish on Instagram, or you can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

Do check it out.

We've got a gig coming up in July.

If you want to get tickets to that at the Crossed Wires Festival, we've also got all of our previous episodes.

There's also a link, the gateway into our secret club, Club Fish, where if you join, you're going to get access to lots of bonus episodes.

So do check that out.

Otherwise, just come back next week.

We will be back with another episode, and we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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