570: No Such Thing As Clay Valentines Cards

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Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish.

We've got a very exciting one for you today.

It is our Valentine's Day special.

So yeah, we've collected together some of the sexiest, most romantic facts that we could possibly find for your listening pleasure.

And we'll be getting to that over the course of this episode.

However, before we get into that, I've just got a quick announcement, which is that we have a live show coming up in July at the Crossed Wires Festival podcast in Sheffield.

So the Crossed Wires Podcast Festival is fantastic.

It debuted last year.

It was co-created by our good buddy Alice Levine from My Dad Road to Porno, and they are back this year for round two.

And really excitingly, she has invited us to be part of it.

So, we will be there to record a live episode at the City Hall on the 6th of July at 2 p.m.

And if you want to come along, you just need to head to no such thingasoffish.com/slash live to get your tickets right now.

It's going to be great fun.

As I say, a live podcast recording with a bunch of silly extra bits thrown in as well.

And if you get a chance, why not head over to the crossedwires.live website as well.

That's the address.

So many great shows are going to be there this year.

It's so awesome that these podcast festivals are erupting around the UK.

Do support them and do come see us.

We'd love to see you there.

All right.

Well, let's get into this week's episode.

It is our Valentine's Day special.

Enjoy our sexy, sexy facts.

On with the show.

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'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Toshinsky, and Andrew Hunter Murray.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite Valentine's Day facts.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is, before flirting with females, young male dolphins practice on their male friends.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

Yeah, this is an erotic special.

Roses are red.

This fact is very blue.

It is quite blue, actually.

What do they practice?

How blue is it?

Because dolphins are blue.

Yeah.

They're rude.

Are they?

Well, they're sort of bluish, aren't they?

I got cartoons.

They're grey.

Grey, blue.

They're grey.

Bluey gray.

This is a place that actually, as a friend of the podcast, it's Shark Bay in Australia, where where some research was done.

We said it was renamed Safety Beach.

Yeah.

We did.

Yeah.

I think that was fake.

I think that's a retraction we need to make.

Oh, great.

Okay.

Are we all making that as a group?

No, just me.

Leave it to me.

You guys, you guys stay unblemished.

So there's a group of dolphins who've been living there and they've been studied for about 40 years.

They're really, really well sti- the best studied group of dolphins in the world.

They have very complicated social relationships with each other.

Scientists find it very useful to kind of t keep tabs on them.

And these young males, they pal up in groups of two or three three, and they coordinate their behavior to consort particular females.

And that, this is where it gets a bit.

Flirting is a very nice way of describing it because male dolphins sort of coerce and harass individual females and try and separate them from whichever males they're hanging out with.

But then they do some displays of acrobatics and somersaults.

It sounds like a sort of sea world thing.

Uh-huh.

You know, they do tricks.

They do also bite her sometimes.

Anyway,

we're really getting some mixed signals here.

I don't want to get all rubbing Ficky on your ass.

Look at the somersaults.

Look at the somersaults.

Yeah, so, but they do practice with each other.

And the ones who practice with each other have better success later in life.

Romantically, you know, they father more offspring than the ones that don't.

Do they ever fall in love with each other accidentally?

Oh my god.

Good question.

Flipper three.

Reminds me a bit of a friend's episode where Joey helps Trigger the janitor to dance.

He's his dance partner and he sort of starts to wish that he was his real dance partner.

I wonder if there are dolphins out there who just are like, let's have one more practice.

I think so.

I mean, there's lots of,

you occasionally see, I find a lot of headlines in the mail, the Daily Mail, saying things like, more gay dolphins spotted off Canada.

Like a springbridge concern to them.

Yeah, they can be quite aggro, can't they?

Oh, yeah.

The dolphins.

And like, but it is sort of their male bonds are sort of nice.

It does seem like this study, I think, was the first to reveal that they have a buddy system and they'll pick a best friend.

Some of the males, not all of the males, they'll pick a best friend and that'll be someone that they hang out with for their whole life.

And sometimes you'll have the two male buddies who hang out together and if they're separated for up to decades, I think it is, when they come back together, they're best friends still.

Well there's quite a few ways that dolphins can mate.

There's a sort of T-section shape that they do.

So the male dolphin goes sort of horizontal against the vertical of the female dolphin in order to have sex.

There's a few other methods.

One method that gets described for one of the dolphins is having this buddy, the wingman, come and at surface level sort of hold for buoyancy reasons.

So they're sort of there just to prop them up to make sure the sex can happen, which a lot of NASA scientists are saying that might be the best way that humans will have sex.

We're not taking dolphins up to Mars.

We're not taking dolphins.

We're just screwing like them.

If sex is happening, there needs to be a third astronaut to come in and just hold everything together.

Stop, Dave, Dave.

Sex is happening.

Come on in.

Surely not.

But there was a recent report by someone who's trying to work on the problem of population space pervert.

I think dolphins are perverts really.

I think biodiversity.

Why?

Well, they have sex often with their mothers, male dolphins.

Oh, yeah.

Bottlenose dolphins like to gather around grey whales when they're mating.

No one really knows why, but they seem to just enjoy watching.

Right.

But you can't get porn underwater.

So their mum's nipples are up their butt.

So when they breastfeed.

It is.

It is.

So when they breastfeed,

they literally burrow their

dolphin noses into the anus of their mum.

No, that can't be true.

It's true.

Is it really?

I didn't just come up with that.

I mean, it's possible I did just come up with that, but.

Okay, can we bust one myth?

Yeah, sure.

This is exciting stuff not to blow wide open, but to close down.

And it's a thing we have propagated, actually, in the past.

So, you know, it's laughable the rest for us.

It's

the blowhole, the blowhole sex myth.

What's the myth that they have sex through their blowholes?

Yeah.

And we've claimed that.

I think so.

Have we?

I mean a long time ago.

Like nine years ago.

I think you know we're different people.

What's the truth then?

I think, well, there's one mention of it in a paper in 1994.

Oh, you shag one blowhole.

And the researcher, a researcher called Justin Gregg, spoke to the person who had authored that 1994 article who said, and I'm quoting here, with regard to the blowhole, they never inserted the penis entirely.

I don't know whether that stands up in cart and the I'm gonna say.

What percentage of the penis?

No, only 25, that's fine.

But they breathe through it.

It sounds like they can breathe through their mouth as well, which we didn't know until 2016.

It's assumed that they can't breathe because we've never seen them breathing through their mouth, but they found one dolphin with a damaged blowhole.

Wonder what

are you being serious?

You had a damaged blowhole.

no word on what did the damage.

But

they found that it was breathing through its mouth as a result.

So possibly even dolphins don't know they can breathe through their mouth.

Wow.

Yeah.

And we call them clever.

I feel like everything I've said is a lie so far.

Where did you get all this stuff from, Dan?

It's just stuff I know.

We've talked a lot in the past about dolphins having military connections.

They've worked with the military a lot.

I didn't know this, there's this, there's like the biggest horde of nuclear weapons is in a submarine base in America, and it's protected by military dolphins.

So anyone trying to get access to it has to face a dolphin.

Isn't that amazing?

And what happens?

Sometimes I think you have your own different Google and they're at some points.

Well, the interesting thing is if they, so they can't.

It's very hard to monitor an underwater base with nuclear weapons.

So they need need an animal that can just be there all the time to do it.

Where is this, sorry?

Where are the states?

It's near Boston.

Yeah, you can't.

give away the exact location, I'm sure, Dan.

Yeah, sorry, Seattle.

It's 20 miles from the station.

Oh, Seattle.

5,000 miles from Boston.

It's the world's largest single location of arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Wow.

It's up to them.

Certainly at the time of writing.

It's underwater, right?

And so they have these military dolphins, and they have this amazing thing where if someone's swimming to try and get access to this submarine base to steal a nuke of one man just swimming to get to it.

The dolphins have a metal plate in their mouth that when they go up and rub up against the swimmer, they can attach like a handcuff, like a subtle handcuff going to your leg.

Are you tired?

Honestly, this is what happens.

It goes around the leg or the arm of the person and then it deploys a boy and floats them, like just goes whoop and they just disappear up to the surface.

Where they get arrested by a police dolphin at the top.

The dolphins are purely underwater based, so that becomes a human problem when they arrive at the top.

That's either extraordinary or what are you talking about?

That's incredible.

Yeah, unbelievable.

This was in 2010, so it's possible the dolphins are.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Moved on to paw places now.

Well, they get seals as well, navy seals, but like actual seals.

Oh, yeah, I feel like we have actually mentioned that before.

We can't just laugh at everything, Dan, so far from now on.

Some of it's true.

You've got to start with something more believable, Dan, and then build up to this.

Well, we know that they do this kind of stuff.

It's only Cold War superpowers, isn't it?

It's only America and Russia that

we know of, that have trained dolphins.

I thought Israel did.

Oh yeah, they did.

They did.

I'm sure other military powers have experimented with all that stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, paw poisers that you mentioned.

You know, they're the reason that we call tortoises tortoises.

Which I don't think we've mentioned before, but because

pawpois, which is basically a diverse

show.

It does feel a bit like it, doesn't it?

No, this is absolutely correct.

Paul Pois, etymologically, pour is, it means pig fish.

So the paw always has the same root as pork, and pois is like poisson pois fish.

Tortoises were always tortus.

They ended just in US, probably coming from a word meaning twisted.

But once we started having pawpoises, people went, well, since we spell that like that, should we make it tortoises as well?

Because it sounds similar.

And we think that's the only theory we have for why suddenly, about 500 years ago, we started spelling tortoise like tortoise.

Someone was writing a poem in the dismal.

Exactly.

Nothing after pawpois.

That was the main economic activity 500 years ago, was the sonnet, unfortunately.

And so it was really important.

Can we talk about dolphin vaginas?

Of course, quickly.

They have clitorises, and the clitorises are so accessible when they're having sex that we think they're probably used for pleasure.

Okay.

But the vagina is really, it's like, unlike most mammals where it's really just like a straight tube, with them it goes in all sorts of different directions and stuff like that.

And you can tell what species a dolphin is by looking at its vagina.

It's like a labyrinth.

So they can decide whether or not they want to be impregnated.

Sorry, do you mean it's like a maze?

Because of course a labyrinth only has one root, doesn't it?

So that wouldn't fool anyone.

A labyrinth is like a spiral.

There's no dead ends in a labyrinth.

Yes, no, it's a maze.

It's not a lyric.

Because we'd get a lot of emails if we watched it like that.

Can I just very quickly mention the basketball player who had a great altercation with a dolphin, Clifford Ray?

He became super famous for this in 1978 for a short while.

There was a dolphin called Mr.

Spock.

They realised that there was a bolt and a really sharp screw stuck in its stomach and its second stomach down.

So quite far in.

The vet says, I can't operate to remove it.

My arm won't reach down its throat enough.

And then they were like, who's got really long arms?

This basketball player, Clifford Ray, famously...

has arms that are three foot nine inches long, which is long.

So they got in touch with Clifford and who was at a premiere in for some reason.

And he rocked up, he was staying at a premier in, waiting to go to a,

you know, to a game.

And he rocked up and he was guided by speakerphone by an expert in retrieving stuff from the insides of dolphins while he inserted his three foot nine inch long arm into the dolphin.

And he's like, it's like a labyrinth in here.

The other end, the other end.

Why am I holding a nipple?

Wait, sorry, why was he on speakerphone?

Because he wasn't there.

No, no, he.

Sorry, the basketball player was there.

The vet wasn't.

The vet.

Who needed to guide them?

The expert vet who needed to guide them.

You're the vet, you're not going to turn up to the most interesting dolphin-based event of your life.

He was staying in the holiday inn

in the next town.

It was too good to be.

They didn't have much time.

And they said as soon as once his arm was in, it was three minutes, and after that, the dolphin would suffocate.

And he had to get all the way down weave his arm.

What?

He's still cohort.

He would have been dumb.

Poor dolphin.

It turns out there's just one dolphin in the world.

There's this guy.

Can I ask a question?

If they're short on time, the dolphin is obviously in one place.

They immediately go, who's got long arms in the immediate vicinity?

Yeah.

And he happens to be in town.

Well, he's from California, so it was the same state.

Okay, right.

And they needed really long arms.

Right.

Like, not just like you're a bit tall.

Mr.

Tickle was in Boston.

Well, he did it.

He did it.

He did it with only, and when there were 15 seconds to spare, he says he just remembers the vet on the other on the other end of the line going, did they have a big basketball clock ticking down?

Come on.

Time around.

What if he didn't?

He would die.

Would it suffocate him?

And did Mr.

Spock live long and prosper?

Here we go.

Here we go.

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

My fact this week is that the adult who's come closest to freezing to death and being brought back to life got together with the person who resuscitated her.

Was it Anna from Frozen?

It should have been.

Maybe that's who Anna from Frozen was named after.

Right.

It isn't actually.

It's called Anna, isn't it?

Yes,

Anna Bergenholm.

Anna Bergenholm, who's Swedish, but she was in Norway at the time.

This is nine.

I don't know why I'm speaking like that.

This was 1999, and she was skiing with two colleagues.

And it's just the most amazing story.

So I'll do a short version and then we'll probably do a long version.

Basically, she's skiing.

She plunges headfirst through a massive layer of ice and she's stuck there for ages and ages.

And she gets very bad hypothermia.

Her heart stops beating.

Her breathing stops.

She's dead.

She's completely dead.

And then eventually she gets extracted from the ice.

And the crucial thing that happens as soon as she's extracted, and very important to remember this for any hypothermia sufferers, is that she receives CPR straight away from her two colleagues who've been skiing with her.

One of whom is a chap called Torvind Nysheim, who gave her CPR, and it seemed to have absolutely no effect at the time.

And the other one's going, let it go.

Oh, my God.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

James, just poised to use that.

It's possible.

Have you got that out of your system?

Yeah?

No more famous lyrics than that.

I don't know any of this lyrics.

I think that's a relief for everyone.

Anyway, it's thought that the CPR probably saved her life, along with a bunch of other incredible doctors.

When she got to hospital, there were over 100 doctors in the room or medical staff in the room with her.

And she did live.

And then a few years later, she got together with this chap.

And I believe as of 2022, they were still together.

Oh, lovely.

But really, this was a way of crowbarring this amazing story into a Valentine's special.

Yeah, it is an amazing story.

And at that time, they thought, no way she's coming back.

For all the doctors, she was literally, this was Medicine Into the Unknown, right?

It was, that's a Frozen 2 song, just for you all there.

Medicine 2, Medicine.

Oh, into the Unknown, sorry.

Medicine into the Unknown.

Frozen 2, she becomes a GP.

There's a polar bear who swallowed a plastic bag, and we need the world's best curling team to go and get it out.

This was a phenomenal thing.

They thought, no way is she going to survive, except they seem to have a phrase there, the doctors, which is something like, you're not dead until we warm you up first.

So no one who's cold can be declared dead.

You've got to bring them back to warm.

I think that's true around the world.

And it's a really crucial thing about being that cold because,

again, this is what a lot of hypothermia sites say.

They're like, don't assume they're dead.

No heart rate, no breathing, pallid skin, white as a sheep.

But it could be that once you warm them up again, they'll come back to that.

It's like a goldfish, isn't it?

If your goldfish is floating upside down, it might not be dead.

It might just have a swim bladder problem.

Is that so?

Yeah, so don't flush it down the toilet.

That's really going to work.

The same way with these people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Don't flush them down as they do.

Ignore it when they're done.

But this, so this accident she had, she was skiing, she had a fall, she went through a hole in the ice, eight inches of ice, thick ice, and she was trapped under the water.

Like her clothes are immediately soaked, therefore they're very heavy.

The shock paralyzes your muscles, so you can't move, right?

So her friends catch up with her.

They

can only see her feet and they can only see her feet.

They cannot pull her out because just the position she's in.

And also, just this is because she's in the water, she's submerged, it's a random air pocket that her face happens to be next to that allows for her to keep breathing.

It's stunning.

So she's breathing for seven minutes, but she's in the water for 40 minutes.

A team of rescuers arrive.

They can't get her out with a rope or a snow shovel.

It's not thick enough to get through the ice.

So she's there, I think, another 30 or 40 minutes.

Another 40 minutes, yeah.

And then a team arrives with a pointy shovel, which they use to dig through the ice and get her out.

So she's been in the water for 80 minutes, freezing.

She's white, she's cold,

nothing, nothing is happening.

It's just extraordinary.

It's amazing.

Well, she's dead.

She's dead.

She's dead.

She's well.

Except she's not.

Well, I mean, what's the definition of death?

Is she warm?

I don't think so, guys.

Good point.

Good point.

She had no heartbeat for four hours between when her head went through the ice and when her heart rate came back.

Extraordinary.

And it was like nine hours, and they say like hundreds of doctors and nurses who were just working on her the entire time, just trying to bring her back.

And they did it.

And when they did, she was paralyzed to begin with and pissed off.

She's like, why did you bring me back?

Why did you make me become alive again?

I now have to live a life where I'm not going to be the person that I wanted to be.

And she eventually calmed down.

Well, after she realized she wasn't paralyzed.

It took a long time, though, for her to get her body completely back to normal.

It was within not too long, actually.

And then she did apologize.

So yeah, not the romantic reunion initially with poor old Nysheem, who's like, oh, she's going to fall in love with me now in her eyes.

And then her heart melted.

It's Valentine's Day.

I love it.

Watch it.

The thing I find nuts is she skied again.

Absolute loon.

She's really into downhill skiing.

Six years later, she skied again.

Just extraordinary.

Did she stay unpeaced from now on?

I don't know.

I think she's into it.

She just went to the cafe a bit.

I believe she's really into extreme skiing still.

Because people are insane.

Can we say what she got down to?

So normally

your core temperature is 37 degrees, right?

If your core goes down below 35, you're officially in hypothermia.

Her temperature, her core temperature went down to 13.7 degrees Celsius.

And then a bit later, there was a kid who went to 13, who's the coldest anyone has ever been.

Yeah.

And apparently this is more common to work in children.

This idea of sort of freezing yourself and then coming back to life.

And it's because you have a greater surface area compared to your volume which means that you cool down a lot quicker oh of course and that's why and you want to do that quick freezing at the start that's kind of how it works so that's why you need to keep babies warm at night because they they cool down faster so the thing is when you get really really cold the oxygen demand of your brain lowers drastically um and if you're cold enough before your heart stops that's the key that's why doing the cpr is so important yeah then the cell death which normally happens when you don't have any circulation it doesn't happen so her brain needed no oxygen.

I think it was like it had 10% of the oxygen requirements of your brain normally.

Sorry, go ahead.

Well, just to say that because this happened, they're now using the idea of freezing people down.

You know, if people have had a stroke or, you know, if they've had liver failure or something like that, the idea now is to get people really, really, really cold and they might survive.

Yes.

And in fact, even though it's quite standard now or it's done a lot, but we actually don't know why it works.

And they think that actually it's not about the effect of your heart stopping which deprives your brain of oxygen it's actually about when your heart starts again and I didn't know this but if you have a heart attack or if your heart stops

one of the really common ways that you die is when your heart starts again and it's this thing called re-perfusion and it means that if your heart's been stopped for long enough then all the chemistry in your brain has changed so much in ways they don't quite understand if blood suddenly floods back in there it completely messes it up and you die

and so in this way, I think it allows that to happen much more gradually or it like slows the brain down, allows it to be, you know, a bit more controlled.

Is the word reaper a deliberate use there of the danger?

Reaper fusion?

Probably

reaper.

I see, it's not that.

It's just perfusion with the re on the front.

Yeah, the standard prefix re.

Interesting.

It should be.

They should put the A in, though.

Did you guys read about the two things that happen when you have hypothermia that are most bizarre?

Oh yeah.

Yes.

If someone has died of hypothermia, you shouldn't just look on the floor.

Look in all the crevices and look in all the like the shelving units because they might be curled up in there because it's a

terminal burrowing.

Terminal burrowing, yeah.

Yeah.

That was that was interesting.

The other one is taking your clothes off, isn't it?

Yes, and it seems to happen a lot.

There was one study that was done that looked at I think about 70 people who died of hypothermia and it found almost all of them did this thing called terminal burrowing, which as you say, it's where you sort of crawl under a bed or behind a cupboard or onto a shelf.

And it just feels like, you know, when you have a cat who's dying, it's, it crawls to the very corner under a bed.

It's like the last protective hibernation.

Like a really deep instinct, basically.

Yes, deep.

And the other thing that a quarter of the people did was this thing called paradoxical undressing, which again, people who've had hypothermia often found completely naked.

And that's because at first, you know, you have vasodilation where all your veins in your extremities constrict to try and flood blood to your internal organs to keep you warm when you've got hypothermia.

But then that takes loads and loads of effort for your muscles and your body just gives up.

All the blood floods back to your extremities.

And so suddenly you're like, God, bizarrely, I'm really hot.

And you take off all your clothes.

So odd.

So maybe the song it's getting hot in here is actually the last throes of someone who's suffering severe hypothermia.

That's what it's about, yes.

Yeah, the lyric is from Scott's diary, isn't it?

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

Okay, my fact this week is that if ancient Mesopotamia had Valentine's cards, they would probably contain pictures of knees.

So we've had the flirting.

We've now got together with Torvind, and now we're sending each other Valentine's cards.

Now we're on our knees.

We should have done it the other way around, shouldn't we?

You don't send a Valentine's card once you've got together with someone.

Anna, this is exactly what I said to these guys before we came on air.

And I disagree, Anna.

I think it's much more common.

I think most Valentine's cards are bought by people joylessly on the 13th of February in a train station.

I thought you always put like from anonymous on your Valentine's cards.

That's the whole point of them.

I put anonymous on all the ones I send, apart from the one to my wife.

Should I explain the fact?

Yeah.

So this is a new study about, they looked at a load of cuneiform texts.

This is some scientists at the University of Finland and they looked at loads of phrases that are about emotions and they looked at what parts of the body were used in those phrases.

And they found that happiness is mostly felt in the liver, for instance.

Schadenfreude, mostly in the lip.

Amazing that Schadenfreude was on the list.

Of course, really basic emotion.

It was like happy, sad, anger.

Schadenfreude.

When you're right.

On the lip.

On the lip.

Yeah.

You kind of curl your lip.

And they found that love was in, in order, in the knee, liver, heart, back, and male genitalia.

Sounds about right?

That's like that song, My Neck, My Back.

It's like

head, shoulders, knees, and toes.

Knee, liver, heart and back, genitalia.

I would struggle to pinpoint where my liver was.

As in, if I wouldn't know where to say if I was feeling something in my liver.

The reason that that is a thing is that when you open up a body after someone's died, the liver is so big compared to everything else.

You would naturally think that was a really important part of the body.

Yeah.

I'm impressed that they had that knowledge of, as in like that knowledge was widespread, that that was a phrase.

Well, they didn't know where it was, I suppose, necessarily, if you're an ordinary guy.

You'd just say, like in the same way, I'd say, my heart bleeds for you, and that would, I guess, show sympathy, and you'd say it's associated with the heart.

You might say, oh, my liver erupts with rage.

But it is true, the liver seems to have been the heart for...

hundreds and hundreds of years in loads of civilizations.

And they had, it was so important that they thought that gods imprinted their desires on livers.

So, and this is in ancient Mesopotamia, but when you sacrifice a sheep, let's say,

its liver would then be taken out and they used to make clay liver models of the exact shape of the liver that that sheep had had inside it and then they would analyse the models like you'd read a palm and that would tell them the future because they thought the god will have put their desire and the future onto the liver shape of this sheep but how do you know you've got the right sheep it just feels like a very inefficient system i think god knows i think maybe god changes the shape as it's being sacrificed so god sees that you're sacrificing that sheep and then quickly molds the liver into that shape i'm not sure exactly their logic no we shouldn't we shouldn't try that

where is mesopotamia again is it turkey iraq iraq

Yeah.

And we're talking 2500 BC-ish.

Yeah.

Long time ago.

Yeah, it's oh, it's a very long time ago.

It's the start of civilization.

It sort of is.

It's our oldest writing, these cuneiform tablets.

And so we keep finding out more and more about it because more are found.

They've survived the test of time, these amazing clay tablets that are found in their hundreds and thousands and hordes whenever they're...

Because they're made of clay, right?

Exactly, yeah.

It was.

Not like Balenzine's cards.

No, exactly.

For all we know, there were millions of those.

It was a huge trade back then.

Because it was thought up until recently that 1500 BC was when we started kissing.

You mean the oldest depiction we found?

We actually found a couple locked in.

No, the oldest depiction of it.

But actually, we now have records via cuneiform that show us that back then they were very romantic and they were kissing and not just within marriage.

They were also kissing as dates and socially and so on.

And there's only one other major contestant to say that it's older, which is a kiss that may have happened between a Neanderthal and a human over a hundred thousand years ago.

And they know this because they found a microbe inside

on the skull of a human, but you would only get it from a Neanderthal, so they know that a bit of tonsil hockey was going on.

Or they were playing that game where you pass an egg, passing.

Oh, pass an egg.

An egg, an egg?

Well, you pass something.

Is it not an egg from one mouth to the next?

What did you think it was?

It must have a big mouth.

This is quite big.

You could do it with a quail's egg.

But again, that's quite socially straight to it.

Weren't they scrambled or poached?

Was it the kind of egg that we just did?

I'm picking it in shell.

I'm sure we did it with eggs.

I mean, you can fit an egg in your mouth, but it is a choking hazard, I would say.

Oh, yeah.

It's not sexy, I think.

I locked behind my teeth.

I misunderstood the rules.

That's very funny.

That's, yeah.

I mean, we say I go weak at the knees.

Yes, exactly.

I was thinking that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think knees would be in our list of things.

The weird thing I found was under sexual attraction, which was one of the simple emotions they had,

the six body parts, was it five?

Five body parts associated with that.

Well, what would you guess was in there?

Eyes, you would think, right?

I would have thought firstly genitals.

I mean, genitals feature so much in so many other emotions, like kind of distress or contempt.

Sexual attraction, genitals, and penis aren't in there.

Okay.

It's head, knee, neck, hand, and ankle.

Head, knee, head, knee, neck, neck, yeah.

Neck and ankle.

Ankle's a bit of an odd one, isn't it?

Well, like.

Like Victorians.

Like, you know,

they've got restrictive sort of social practices.

What period are we talking about?

This is the same study.

This is ancient Mesopotamia.

Oh, right.

Because there's a whole subcategory now of celebrity spotting on celebrities' knees.

Not in that period.

We're not looking at that period.

Is it like wiki knees?

No, it's like how if you look at a sort of photo of Megan Markle, you'll see Casper the Friendly Ghost's face on her knee.

Oh, there was a thing where...

Oh, no, I'm getting it wrong.

I thought Sandy Toxwig might have been on someone's knee.

She was, exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of faces that are appearing on knees.

But it's normally.

I would presume it's normally.

I I mean, no disrespect to the glorious Sandy, it's normally people with quite wrinkly faces who are being spotted in other people's knees.

Surely it's very rarely, because knees are knobbly, you know, wrinkly.

Wrinkly?

My knees are perfectly smooth.

Yeah.

That's where the friendly ghost doesn't ever do.

I mean, you've been having routine knee Botox minutes and I've known you, right?

Knees, they have a lot of nerve endings, so they are known as an erogenous zone.

And that's because you have nerves that go through your knee that do everything in your feet and up at the top of your thighs as well.

Basically, all the nerves that are in your leg have to go through your knees, so they have lots of nerve.

That's good.

And the attraction to knees, the paraphilia of that, is called genuphilia.

Oh, like genuflecting.

Exactly, yeah.

Do you want some more of those, by the way?

Yes, please.

Alvinolagnia is the attraction to Alvin, a chipmunk.

I can do it.

It's the midriff.

Okay.

Like the belly button on the tummy and stuff.

Nice.

Bromidophilia.

Bro.

Yeah, it's like podcasters.

It's the attraction to body odour.

Oh, wow.

And matteophilia.

This is tough.

It's the attraction to non-normal looking eyes.

And it comes from the Greek term for the evil eye.

Like those dogs that have one eye of different colours.

Like David Bowie, I guess.

And like David Bowie.

There's quite a few of those, I would think, are not sort of unnatural attractions.

Like midriffs, you know, are traditionally a slightly sexy thing.

It's interesting because aparaphilia by definition should be attraction to something atypical.

But then when you look at the list, there was one which is normophilia, which is the attraction to normal things.

Right.

So it's not normal things to be attracted to, or normal things like a table.

I think that that is unusual.

Oh, that is unusual then, yeah.

I read one earlier today, weirdly, nothing to do with this about being sexually attracted to people falling downstairs.

And that's why you always sit down to watch an episode of You'd Be Afraid, isn't it?

His pants around his ankles.

Sending my family out of the room, right?

Everyone out.

If you've got any videos of yourself falling down the stairs, then send it to Dad and he'll give you £250.

All right, here's a little micro quiz.

Which of these phrases is the oldest?

I'm going to give you three.

To have someone over your knee.

I like to spank them kind of thing.

That's the implication.

A knee slapper.

That's a joke.

That's a joke.

And upon the knees of the gods.

Oh, I don't know what that one means.

So that's why I would say that would be the oldest because I've never heard of it.

Okay.

Do you mean thigh slapper?

I've never heard of a knee slapper.

A knee slapper is the phrase.

Is it?

Yeah.

I think thigh slapper too.

Depends on how funny the joke is.

Cool.

Or how long your legs are.

And what you're wearing.

But that basketball player was an ankle slapper.

Okay.

James is saying upon the knees of the gods is oldest.

Probably knee slapper, I reckon.

Yeah, I'm going to say knee slapper as well because.

Oh, no, I'll do the third one, just for the sake of having a full house.

To have someone over your knee.

Yep.

Upon the knees of the gods is ancient Greek.

What does it mean?

Well, that's what one would have guessed.

Yeah, that was the obvious one, Andy.

Yeah, well, James got there first, so maybe you two should buck up your ideas a bit next time.

You'd be great in a quiz, Dan.

What is the capital of France?

Paris.

Well, that was the obvious answer, guys.

We knew that as well, actually.

It did feel like Andy would be putting some sort of rug up under our feet rather than just going...

No, I'm a nice guy.

I leave the rug under your feet.

Right, okay.

It's the one you're thinking of is the title of my quiz format.

It's an ancient Greek phrase, theion en gunasi, which means it's beyond human control.

It's like it's in the lap of the gods, actually, but it's not the gods.

Okay, a knee slapper is from 1955.

And to have someone over your knee dates to 1866, which is quite something because someone used that phrase on me recently.

Say the phrase again?

To have someone over your knee.

And someone used that on you.

Yeah.

It was a removals guy the last time I was moving house.

Yeah.

I'd left a like a sort of I'd left something at the bottom of the staircase, right?

Because I was moving.

So they'd fall down the stairs.

You haven't sent me that video yet, by the way.

I'd pay good money for that.

I'd put like a glass picture frame at the bottom of the stairs, and I hadn't moved it out to the van or whatever.

Yeah.

And he said, I'd have you over my knee if you were one of my boys.

What an unusual thing.

It was really, it was much nicer than the way he made it sound.

I also think that this whole quiz is leading up to that anecdote.

Yeah.

How could you think

when the anecdote was so bad?

Unless there's one extra bit you're not telling us.

Nope.

Okay.

That's the subtitle of the quiz.

That's all there is to it.

That's all there is to it.

Here's a song from Chicago, which I won't sing, but I'll read you the lyrics.

The band Chicago.

Or the musical Chicago.

The musical.

No, the town.

The city.

That's in Boston, isn't it?

The pizza company.

Okay, so it's from the musical.

Why don't we paint the town and all that jazz?

I'm gonna rouge my knees and roll my stockings down.

Yep.

That's weird, isn't it?

Yes, why do they never question that before?

I'm gonna rouge my knees.

Hmm.

Carpet burn.

It's not carpet burn done.

Like, why would you

be deliberately faking a carpet burn on your knees, would you?

Well, that's pretty sexy, isn't it?

Yeah.

You want to know how I got these knees?

I'll never tell.

So, yeah, rouge as in makeup, red makeup.

And this was a popular thing in the

flapper period, which was to put makeup on your knees.

Like a little face.

In actual fact, sometimes they put...

There are some images of young women with quite short skirts and with little faces on their knees.

Is that how many people

soundly toxic on both knees?

So that's good flirting.

I think that's really good flirting.

If you're opposite someone on a train, for example, you just

hoik up your skirt a little bit.

There's your winking face on your knee.

And then you, you know, you see if they notice.

Yeah, okay, that's good.

Isn't that good?

I'm sorry, that's creative flirting.

If you're pulling up your kilt and saying it's winking at you, I don't like that.

That's no sporran.

But yeah, this was the thing.

It was women had started to be able to show their knees, and they decided, well, we're going to make the most of it.

And so they started putting makeup on.

So poor men were suddenly going around saying, Did you know women's knees have smiley faces on them?

That's amazing.

That's great.

Only animal with four knees?

Dogs, cats, elephants.

Quadrupeds.

Any quadruped.

No, no,

they don't have countless knees on the back.

No animals have four knees.

Zero.

One animal has four kneecaps.

Yeah.

And it only has two legs.

I know the answer.

Are we stopping Eddie's quiz?

Because I can get it if yes.

It's like this is a horrible riddle in a cave in ancient Greece.

It's ridiculous.

Sorry.

What you're saying is that all animals, all quadrupeds, they have arms and legs, rather.

They may walk around on all fours.

Exactly.

So they have

elbows and knees.

They don't have four knees.

Exactly.

Sorry, that's...

And there's one bipedal one that has four knees.

We should just let Dan answer.

Well, two knees are hidden under a coat of feathers.

Oh, they're all hidden.

Are we talking about the same animal here?

Yeah, we are.

I think you just haven't looked at the diagrams closely enough.

Okay, if it's two-legged and feathered, an ostrich.

Yes!

James, that's very good, actually.

Well, it was either that or an emu or a cassowarri.

Whose quiz is better?

Like mine, where it's to get me into a dull anecdote, or Anna's, where it's a mental shit show.

I haven't worked out the format, but I think the kernel of an idea is there.

This is really interesting.

We only found out recently that ostriches have four kneecaps.

Everything else has two.

And they is, and sort of four knees.

So if you look at birds like ostriches, the thing that you might think is a knee, if you're an idiot, is actually the ankle, right?

Because if you look at those birds...

the knees are up inside, the knees are up inside the feathers, yeah.

You've got really long feet bones, exactly.

It's like how horses, like the lower half of their leg, is actually their middle toe.

Precisely, all animals like that.

But up there, under their feathers, they seem to have two sets of knees.

We really don't know why.

Two sets of knees, two sets of kneecaps, and who knows why?

But Cassowaries and Emus don't have any.

The end.

Dan, back me up on this.

It's true.

Yeah.

It's a great quiz, but though, it says, back me up, Dan.

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Subject to change.

Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that once married, some Australian Aboriginals spend the rest of their lives actively avoiding their mother-in-law.

Hey, I didn't know I was an Australian Aboriginal.

Hey!

I actually think my mother-in-law's brilliant.

So, this is a thing that's called avoidance speech.

And a lot of Native Australians have this as part of their culture where once they're married the idea of talking to their in-laws is suddenly something that's seen as taboo and you never do and there's quite a few um examples of modern-day marriages where this is still adhered to so i was reading a blog by a guy who was saying that um with his parents-in-laws he can't hand food directly to them either as well as not talking to them um and it must make the egg game very difficult

you can't look at them directly if he has something that he needs to ask them he needs to ask them through the wife.

So she goes and gets their permission or finds out something for them.

And it's seen as something that's a mark of respect in these families.

And the same person who was writing this blog, who did that with his wife, now has that with his relationship with his daughter's husband.

And then your language gets changed as well.

So they won't say the name.

They'll say my mother-in-law and father-in-law.

They won't use their actual name.

And if they're in a room with them and they're watching TV, let's say the son-in-law's in the room, he'll face the wall away, you know, so he's not acknowledging them.

Why are they watching TV?

That's a very antisocial thing to do.

So annoying.

What's happening now?

What's happening now?

No, no, no, please.

I want my wife to tell me what's happening now.

I want you.

Why do these taboos exist?

That's what I'm really baffled by.

Well, they are sitting around the world, aren't they?

It's extraordinary.

Like Native America, across Africa, Australian Aboriginals.

Why?

And I haven't read an explanation.

I did read the book.

Which satisfies me.

It's potentially a respect thing.

It might be a way of preventing any hanky-panky.

I think it's that.

I think it's got to be sagging.

There was a big article I read called The Mother-in-Law Taboo by AEMJ Panz, which is one of the main papers on this subject.

And he reckons that basically it's to indicate publicly that the son-in-law and the mother-in-law are not having sex with each other.

But it makes me think they are.

That's the weird thing.

It's always in the office, it's always the two people who are completely pretending they don't know each other exist who turn out to have been having a torrid affair.

Is it?

That's exactly what I thought.

And also, it will make you fancy them.

The more you're told you're not allowed to speak with someone or stick your tongue down their throat the more you want to

fruit yes

also why was that bad well why is it bad

why is it bad so the reason is that it happens more in matrilineal cultures so and it's like

this taboo it does happen and that's true and it tends to be that the women have very particular roles that they have and the idea is that your mother-in-law is not taking over the job of what your wife is supposed to do.

I see.

So there might be lots of different things that a wife is supposed to do in this culture, one of which is sleeping with the husband, but they're trying to show that this definitely isn't happening and that the generation has moved on to the next generation.

That's the idea.

And I suppose that's the woman, other woman that you would see most often.

So if you were going to shag anyone else, it would probably be your wife's mum.

And I think sometimes mother-in-law's taboos also apply to like your mother-in-law's mate.

Sometimes mother-in-law can be a bit of a broader term.

So it can be a few women who are also really close to you.

Yeah.

We should say these taboos,

they vary a lot between different groups.

Oh, yeah.

So

in some cases, it's completely avoiding them physically.

In some, it's using a particular, like a different language to address them.

And in some, it's using a subset of language.

So there's a group called Diabel is a language.

And the main language is called Guwell.

And the language for your mother-in-law is Diyangi.

I'm sure I'm pronouncing it wrong.

But it's like, it's...

It's missing particular words that might be erotic flash points.

Like what?

Oh, loads.

Erotic flash points.

Like ankle.

I mean, there are loads there.

Pubic hair, sweaty smell.

You know, you don't want to mention that in case things just pop off suddenly.

Yeah.

So, yeah, yeah.

So, you're saying you don't say those words in front of your mother-in-law either.

I'd have to have a really good reason to talk about pubic hair in front of my mother-in-law.

Well, exactly.

I think anyone would.

But that's the thing.

It's not mad to have a taboo against sleeping with your mother-in-law.

I read one thing, this is by a US historian called Hampton Sides.

And the reason I'm saying it's by him is because I don't believe it.

But he wrote that in the Navajo people, husbands are not allowed to look at their mother-in-laws.

And it's so important that the mother-in-laws would wear little bells on their clothes

so that he could hear them coming.

I just can't believe it's true.

But he's a proper historian.

I think that's true.

I think it's a good thing.

Like he's a bird and their cat.

Yeah, exactly.

I think that was a first-hand account.

And it's similar to the Korowai people in West Papua who shout when they're going around corners for exactly the same reason.

The mother-in-law, son-in-law, taboo, they'll shout to make clear if the son-in-law's there, go away.

And also, if the son-in-law's friends see the mum coming, they'll run and find the son and say, She's coming, she's coming.

That's interesting.

That's like working in a restaurant.

Whenever you go around the corner, you go, Corner!

Oh,

people coming in the other direction don't hit you, and you drop all the food.

Is that when you're going in and out of the kitchen?

That's where you shout something like that.

At any time when you're going in a blind corner.

Well, and like, did your grandparents always used to honk the horn going around any corner driving?

No.

Didn't they?

It was so embarrassing.

Oh my god, that time we went to that labyrinth, it was a nightmare.

I used to hate it so much.

Every corner, Gamahonkto Horn, it was just awful.

Yeah, it was

so mortifying.

So funny.

Sometimes I think you have to concentrate really hard to keep these taboos going.

So there's one in a similar mother-in-law, son-in-law taboo in southwestern Ethiopia, and it's a practice called Balisha.

And it's basically that married women can't speak the name of their husband's mother or father, but they also can't speak any word beginning with the same syllable as their husband or father's name.

So, so if my mother-in-law was called Pat, I couldn't say

what's the word we couldn't have Pat.

Pat the dog, you couldn't right, you can ask me.

Can you stroke the dog?

What's the name of that World Bar II general from America?

Eisenhower,

what's the name of that postman?

That's interesting.

You don't have to concentrate so much.

Yeah, but apparently in those cultures where that's the case, you're taught another language so that if you're in that situation, not only will you be able to know what to do, but you will say words everyone else will know as well.

And some of them you do have another language, yeah.

And then in some they're just like, come up with another word.

Say stroke, which isn't the same as passing.

So, you know.

Postman stroke.

Incest taboos.

Oh, yeah.

From around the world, including Anglo-Saxon.

I wanted to see if it existed in this country.

And according to the penitential of Theodore, which is from the seventh century, if a brother commits fornication with his brother, he has to do penance for 15 years.

So that's 15 years without eating meat or drinking wine if you have sex with your brother.

Okay.

Slimey.

It's a lot.

That's a lot.

That's a lot.

It's not worth it, which you say.

Well, there was a thing in Old England, the Swaistrosunu, which is where that's your sister's son, right?

So it's a nephew.

Yeah, exactly.

But it's specifically with your sister, your sister's son, because your sister's son, your nephew, is definitely related to you by blood.

Because you and your sister have both come from the same mother, so you are definitely related by blood, and she has given birth to her son.

Yeah, so even if there was hanky-panky going on in any of these situations, you're still related.

Like, if my wife has cheated on me, my son might not be my own, but my sister's son is definitely related to me by blood.

So that is a sort of rock-solid relationship to form.

Yeah, that should be where inheritance goes.

I'm surprised that's not where inheritance works more.

Because sisters.

Yeah, because it's the ones you can trust, as you say.

Yeah, yeah.

We should change the rules.

Mothers-in-law?

Yeah.

I just found some famous mothers-in-law.

Okay.

Would you remember last time we talked about L.

Frank Baum's daughter-in-law?

Oh, yeah.

Tilda Gage.

So I thought I'd try and find any more notable mothers-in-law.

Yeah.

The mother-in-law of the Marquis de Sade

was really annoyed with him.

Oh, is she?

Yeah.

Well, a lot of people were.

Yeah, he ran off to Italy with his wife's younger sister.

Yeah.

So she was furious about that.

Also, she's still her mother.

She's the same mother-in-law even.

You don't need to explain that.

I think that's...

What you do?

You'd be flattered.

It's like, you don't fancy one of my daughters.

You fancy both of them.

Yeah.

Well, she got him arrested.

She helped the authorities hunt him down.

And he spent most of the rest of his life in prison or in asylum.

But he'd also been committing horrible crimes.

Yeah.

Jumping back to the L.

Frant Baum very quickly, the Tin Man in the movie, he had a son.

Do you know who his mother-in-law was?

The Tin Man Man's wife.

The actor who plays the Tin Man

has a son.

Who's his mother-in-law in real life?

Well, will it be his wife?

His wife's mum.

So he got married to someone who had a notable mother.

Dance quiz feels like the least good of all this.

It's not guessable.

It's got the best reveal.

It was Judy Garland.

Because Dorothy

had a daughter, Liza Minelli.

Liza Minelli married the Tin Man Sanders.

I did not know that.

That's cool.

Yeah.

That is cool.

There you go.

That is quite a good quiz where the questions are completely stupid all over the place, but the answers are absolutely amazing.

Isn't that what QI is?

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our sexy romantic facts.

If you'd like to get in contact with any one of us or send us a Valentine.

Hope you weren't listening with your mother-in-law.

We can all be found on our various social media accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram.

James.

My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

Andy.

I'm on Blue Sky at Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna, if they want to get to us as a group, you can email podcast.qi.com or tweet at no such thing or Instagram at no such thing as a fish.

That's right.

Yep.

Or you can go to our website, no suchthingasafish.com.

All of the previous episodes are up there.

There's bits of merchandise that you can check out as well.

And there is Club Fish, which is our secret club where we put up a lot of bonus episodes and so on.

It's really fun.

Join today if you haven't.

Otherwise, just come back next week.

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

Goodbye.

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