545: No Such Thing As Lightning At Sea

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

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that for at least 80 years, the same thundercloud has been raining off the north coast of Australia.

It's called Hector the Convector.

Brilliant.

Or he's called Hector the Convector.

Is it actually a...

He?

It's called Hector.

Yeah.

Oh.

Clouds don't have...

A lot of the press does give him...

Please, let's not get into pronouns for clouds.

She's called Hector.

Hector.

Like, it must be a he, right?

Fair enough.

Is the joke actually should be called humulonimbus, the cumulonimbus?

Is it really a convector?

Cloud?

I don't really know what convector means.

It does work by convection, yes.

As sort of, I mean, all clouds do.

Hulio-nimbus.

Humulonimbus.

Yeah.

No, you said humulonimus, the culinum.

No, he didn't.

You made that joke up into your own head.

That's good.

Yeah, better than what Andy said, which is just the name of the type of cloud.

I said him up, up, you tap him in.

Andy's correct.

He is a cumulonimbus, but he does also form through the power of convection, which, you know, is as hot air currents go up.

We know how clouds form, right?

Yeah.

Vaguely.

If you don't know, ask your 12-year-old niece-nephew Dar Terbit.

We'll probably go into it in more depth, so get excited about that.

But yeah, he builds up over the Tiwi Islands.

Tiwi,

which are

it is a cute word.

It's north of Darwin, right?

It's a little island off Australia.

Yes.

And it's at three in the afternoon every single day from September to April, which is before the rainy season.

And then during the rainy season, he appears.

You're going to set your watch by it.

So here's my question, right?

You know, the like the never-ending soup or whatever it's called, the immortal soup, where it's just always been the same soup and they just keep it.

So you eat the soup and then there's a little bit left and then they add more water and more vegetables and stuff.

So there's some of it as well.

There's some of it always in.

This cloud does disappear.

Hector does go away.

He's only there for the months that you just said, right?

September through to April.

So how can you say that it's the same Hector?

Well, Dan, not a single cell in your body, of course, is the same as the cells in your body you were born with.

So how can we say it's the same Dan?

That's true.

But it is the same.

And also, Dan disappears for six months every year.

It's going to be annoying for us, according to a junior.

I guess it's formed by the same forces every day.

Yeah.

I was looking for named clouds and there are so few.

Oh yeah, that is surprising, isn't it?

Considering they're things that just transiently appear and then disappear in a matter of minutes.

I just thought there must be a short list on Wikipedia of celebrity clouds.

The one I can think of is the tablecloth over Table Mountain.

Oh, that's good.

I didn't know about that.

I didn't find that one.

That's good.

What did you get then?

Nothing.

Well, I found.

on the only one I felt was the Lake Maracaibo one in western Venezuela, and that's an everlasting storm, which is there about 260 nights a year.

Okay.

So again, we mentioned it about eight years ago, a long, long, long, long time ago.

And it's at a point where a river empties into the lake, Lake Maracaibo, and sailors have used it for centuries to navigate because you can see it from 200 miles away.

And that's what Hector, Hector had a role in World War II, was part of the war effort because Hector was helping navigate Australian pilots or any pilots that were coming in via Australia in Papua New Guinea.

So any pilots, meaning he was kind of a Swiss cloud, basically

neutral.

Yeah, he didn't disappear randomly when the Nazis turned up.

You know how when you see a cloud from above, it looks a bit flat.

So a satellite image I'm talking really high up shots from down the side.

Yeah, actually, even when you're flying over in an aeroplane, it kind of looks bumpy-ish, but quite flat.

You're absolutely right.

It does, doesn't it?

And if you look from above, there's sort of these big disks of cloud, which you can kind of see they're lumpy beneath, and then they just top out.

And it's really weird.

So the reason for that, I've been on this fantastic blog called CloudsandClimate.com.

Can't recommend it enough.

It's by a cloud scientist from Imperial College.

They form in rising air, right?

Which is warmer.

And as the air rises, it stays a bit warmer than the surrounding air.

So you get this cloud forming.

And then,

at about 15 kilometers high, it hits the tropopause.

Okay.

And that is a bit of the...

atmosphere where the temperature starts to increase again.

So the cloud stops rising.

So that's why these clouds are shaped like anvils.

The tropopause is the bit where the height is limited, and it's why you get higher clouds over the equator because the tropopause is higher over the equator.

So that's why the very biggest thunderclouds happen near the equator because they've just got more room to grow before the temperature naturally limits them again.

That's really interesting.

That makes a lot of sense because it gets a bit warmer, doesn't it?

So it's like a knife slicing the top off when you hit the tropopause.

Exactly.

Exactly like that.

Nice.

I discovered, by the way, I'm very lucky to be alive because I do a thing that should have killed me long ago.

And when I started researching this, I thought lightning was connected to Hector.

But if I'm at home and if it's raining and it's a big storm outside, I often would like to have like a hot bath.

Like, you know, you're stuck inside.

I do that a lot.

It turns out that's really dangerous.

Open air.

I think it's not really dangerous.

It's not really dangerous.

You should have died is a stretch, isn't it?

All the things in your life should have killed you.

No, daredevil Dan Treiber.

Another bath to go with, despite it being rainy outside.

I just didn't know this was a possibility possibility that basically the ground near your home, if it's hit by a lightning bolt, it can be a conductor to bring it through the pipes into your house.

Yeah.

So yeah, I know, right?

So there's examples.

Okay, in November 2007, a bolt struck a teenager who was washing her hair at home in Blanford, England.

It hit her wrist and it knocked the shower head out of her hand.

2001.

Josephine Martine of Deal, England was blown out of her bathtub by a lightning bolt.

Yeah.

The mother of three who'd been soaking in in her bathtub during a thunderstorm was catapulted naked through the air by a force of a bolt landing on the other side of the bathroom.

Good lord.

Yeah.

Were they fine or did they?

Well, yeah, she survived because there's a quote on her.

So I think she's doing it.

She learned that the quote isn't.

Yeah.

Sorry, what?

How does it hit that?

Sorry.

So it hits your, it hits your, what, the pipes that take water into your house?

Mineral plastic.

Oh, well, you're okay then.

But if you live in an old house,

sort of copper.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Weirdly, even though being in the bath in a lightning storm is a marginally 0.01% more dangerous than not being in the bath.

Do you know where the most...

I just stand outside with a golf club holding it in the air and going, well, at least I'm not in the bath.

Dangerous done.

Do you know where the safest place to be is during a lightning storm?

Oh.

There are lots of answers to that.

Well, I'll say that.

I'm only looking for one.

One thing you're often told is in your car because it has

a charaday cage sort of element.

I'm going to say under the earth.

Deep enough.

You're thinking more along the right sort of scope that I was looking for rather than James's.

Right, practical.

Yeah, practical.

This isn't practical.

Fort Knox or something like this.

Like a plate.

Is it a particular place?

No, I'm going to tell you, it's the sea.

Lightning does not strike at sea.

Well, I've seen lightning striking complexity.

It strikes.

I think I've got a photo of it, even though.

It strikes a tenth as often.

I will backtrack slightly.

It strikes a tenth as often at sea as it does on land.

It is very rare, which I think is really.

What is a bath but a tiny sea?

Here's the thing: if you're a bit scared of lightning, like a lot of people are, but you think, well, if I can't see it, I'll be okay.

You're not okay because there's a thing called dark lightning.

And this is a shock of energy that can carry a million times more energy than visible lightning.

But if you get shocked, you might not even notice.

What?

It's so weird because it's radiation, it's not electricity.

Okay, it's radiation hitting you.

It can give you a maximum safe lifetime dose of ionizing radiation in a single instant.

So it might make you sick.

So it's going to give you the amount that you need to have accumulated over your life.

Yeah.

Once, really?

So you'll need to avoid all radiation forevermore.

Which is impossible, I'm afraid.

Don't go outside.

Don't eat bananas.

Don't go to Cornwall.

Don't go to Cornwall.

Cornwall's a bit more radioactive, isn't it?

It is.

It's got

red rock.

But I mean, there's radiation everywhere.

So you're more likely to get cancers and stuff like that.

And the thing is, there's one dark lightning occurrence for every thousand flashes we know because of science.

But we don't know whether people have been hit by it because there's no physical, you know, you can't feel it.

Can we counter it?

Like, if there's a lightning storm on the way, can I get my kids in some sort of anti-dark lightning suit that we all wear?

Like a.

You can wear one of those hats with a little windmill on it.

Dark kids already wear those.

You're shocked.

To protect against the

whole thing, you can all climb into a microwave

because that doesn't let any radiation out, does it?

Oh, there we go.

Into the microwave.

I really don't trust microwaves.

I don't understand that.

The whole thing where you can see the little holes, and they're like, oh, the radioactive bits are just a bit bigger than the hole and can't get out.

Yeah.

Fuck off.

What if they make this?

So, what are you talking about?

So, there's a mesh in a microwave, which is big enough that microwaves, because of the wavelength, can't get out of.

And that's why no radiation leaks.

Even though there was a massive conspiracy theory in, I think, the 70s, which Dad still believes.

Was that a conspiracy theory?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, wow.

But you came up with it independently.

This is like convergent evolution or whatever.

You know, we've never talked about Colonel William Rankin.

who do you guys know

we've never mentioned it

i don't know who that is sorry so basically no pilot has ever flown through cumulonimbus and succeeded, which I think is really interesting because they're a common cloud.

But if you see one in a plane, you cannot get through it because they're so huge and so dangerous.

And only one person, until 2007, actually, is known to have fallen all the way through one and survived.

And it is Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin.

But he didn't have a great time of it.

No, he wouldn't do it again.

One star.

Review.

The engine of his fighter jet failed in 1959.

And so he jumped out of the plane and went through the cloud.

And it's an insane situation to be in.

He He got frostbite immediately in a split second.

Decompression meant that his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth started bleeding profusely.

His abdomen swelled.

He vomited.

He's in the middle of a cloud getting buffeted around.

Yeah, didn't he physically swell up?

Like he's just like a balloon?

I think he did.

It's amazing for those things that just look so fluffy.

I know.

I mean, they look quite benign.

But also, you can't, you don't just fall through that cloud.

Oh, okay.

It keeps you in it.

It's like a washing machine.

Oh, because of your ejection.

Yeah, you're just

all over.

Especially because the buffeting of the cloud flicked a switch on his parachute somehow and opened it prematurely.

No.

So he's

stuck in his clouds.

Oh, wow.

He had to hold his breath to avoid drowning at repeated moments.

Anyway, he was in there for 40 minutes.

And

it swung up and down and up and down.

Awful.

And then he got out and he wrote a book about it.

And he survived.

Yeah.

James, do you remember?

I think there was one other story of someone who might have got it.

She was a paraglider and she got sucked up into it.

Yeah, cloud suck.

Eva Viznierska.

Right.

She did get sucked up and in fact she was up there for three and a half hours.

Oh my god.

Paragliding.

Did we ever talk?

I don't think we did about the Hunga Tonga explosion in the Pacific.

No.

No.

This was big news, but not as big as it should have been.

Basically.

Very recently.

Very recently.

2021.

End of 2021.

It's an underwater volcano, basically.

And it went off and it blasted through 150 meters of seawater, right?

That's how far below the surface it is.

It then sent a plume of ash 36 miles into the air.

Yeah, it's mental.

Wow.

5 billion kilos of matter every second.

5 billion kilos every second.

It's amazing, really.

I remember it happening and thinking, okay, that's, do you remember when that happened with

Krakatoa?

Krakatoa, yeah.

When Krakatoa went off, basically there was no summer for like three years, right?

And I thought that was going to happen with this one, but it just seems to have petered out a bit.

I know.

It's so bizarre.

And then it produced the most intense lightning storm ever on the the planet and higher than any lightning had ever been.

It was caused by the ash, that big ash cloud.

This was 19 miles in the air with lightning going off.

And over 11 hours of this particular storm, there were 192,000 flashes of lightning observed.

Crazy.

It's insane.

And you say this was over the sea, was it?

Yeah, I'm afraid.

I'm afraid it was.

Don't think so.

It must have been a trick of the lights.

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

My fact is that during the Second World War, a Polish pilot was shot down over southern England and he and his parachute landed in the grounds of a very respectable tennis club.

He was immediately then signed in as a guest, offered a racket, lent some white flannels and thrashed his opponents until the RAF came to collect him.

Rankin would have been so jealous of his experience.

This is possibly the best parachute landing anyone's ever made.

Supposedly, I think it was a long-standing match and someone hadn't turned up.

It was a doubles match.

Oh, I see.

I know.

Someone literally felt it was.

That's amazing.

Oh, no, there's only three of us.

We can't play.

Wait a minute.

This is so weird.

I should say what this is from.

This is from Anthony Beaver's book, The Second World War,

which is

so long.

So good.

It's amazing.

That's good, though.

Yeah, I'm only a couple of hundred pages in.

I'm in the foothills.

You're going to be hearing a lot more facts.

I'm going to say, when you're writing your review, start with so good, rather than so long.

So good.

I've been looking at it on my shelf for about nearly a year, thinking, I can never.

And then I've just started.

Anyway,

it's great.

It's really good.

This is what I would say of the lighter facts in the book.

It's pretty harrowing.

He goes heavy, beaver.

Well done.

I know.

But this is

a light bit of beef, and it's great.

Anyway, and this is all about the Polish pilots who fought with the RAF during the Second World War.

Poland was invaded by Germany and the Soviet Union simultaneously right at the start.

unless of course you think it started 1930s with the japanese invasion of anchuria i kind of think it started with the treaty of versailles

i'm so glad we're having this chat um but uh the the polish uh armed forces were defeated pretty rapidly a few weeks and tens of thousands of soldiers and pilots went to france big mistake uh because several months later france was also overrun and then so the polish pilots hadn't been deployed enough so they went to england they were quite annoyed at this point quite quite keen to get back in the fray and um like annoyed with the Nazis, not just generally annoyed, weren't they?

I think they were a bit annoyed with the Soviets as well.

Yeah.

And the Soviets, yep.

It was a term of justifiable annoyance was the hallmark of the...

Yeah, and just a large chunk of the RAF actually was Polish during the Battle of Britain.

When they finally arrived in the UK and they were put up with the RAF, the RAF people thought, these guys are going to be terrible.

Why are we bringing them in?

They've been defeated twice.

They're not going to be any good.

The language barrier didn't help because they obviously couldn't communicate if they're good by chatting to them.

So they set about training them, but they did it almost in a slightly mocking sense.

So in order to teach them their kind of patterns in the sky, they put them on tricycles and got them riding around.

Meanwhile, the Polish guys are thinking, what is this?

Natural tricycles.

They were heavily kitted out.

So the tricycles had things like speedometers, compasses, radios.

So they were very, very tooled up trikes.

I think this was a standard way of training pilots.

It wasn't just that they thought, oh, we'll just put the Polish people on here.

That was amazing.

That's the only way.

Wow.

Well, I think so, but the Polish pilots thought it was ridiculous because they were already trained up in this way.

Yeah, right.

And they fought in a slightly different way, which is that they would get up much closer to enemy planes in dogfights, which made you more accurate but was more dangerous.

So my granddad was in the Squadron 307, I think it was.

It was called the Eagle Owls because they were the only night fighter squadron of the Polish squadrons.

But he flew mosquitoes, which were the only wooden planes.

And people thought they were mad as well at first.

Haviland was the guy who made them and it was called the Wooden Wonder.

At first they thought we can't do this.

It'll just be so fragile.

And it turned out to be brilliant.

And the thing about them was they were completely unarmed.

It's just carrying a bomb, but it's incredibly light because it's got no arms on it.

And it just relies on the fact that because it's very light, it can get away quickly.

And so it got very, very zippy.

Like a mosquito, I suppose.

Like a mosquito.

And they were painted blue to match the sky because they were quite quiet as well.

So you could.

Were they the ones...

there was a plane and they needed a lot of furniture joiners basically to make them because they were made of wood.

I think it was the turn.

It was something like that.

I was at the Aerospace Museum in Bristol last weekend.

And if you look at these old planes made out of like canvas and wood and stuff, you think, how on earth does that stay?

Yeah, it's extraordinary.

It looks nicer as well, though, Moscow, because it is made of wood.

So I think everyone would have stopped to admire it.

Yeah.

I got really confused reading an article which showed, actually from his squadron, which showed a picture of one of the other people in it standing next to his plane and it had four swastikas on it.

And I couldn't, it took me ages to work out why there are four swastikas on it.

Do you know?

I do actually.

Yeah, go on.

Yeah, I didn't know this.

Basically, it was an intimidation tactic.

So you would put your kill list on the side of your plane.

So as people were flying up beside you, they'd go, oh my God, he's killed six Nazis.

Or you put a swastika on every time you killed a Nazi?

Yeah, you'd paint on the answer.

I'd like to see people who were doing riots at the UK last week.

Yeah.

With swastikas on their body.

Had they all been attacking Nazis as well?

Absolutely correct.

It wouldn't necessarily be just swastikas, it'd be skulls and so on.

And there were different ways.

So you would have a skull that was coloured in a certain way that said, that's a death.

The next one might be, I damaged the plane.

It was like a whole sort of like...

A bit of reading time for the enemy to catch up.

You're very rarely flying alongside each other for that long, to be honest.

But it is a bit of a Wikipedia entry that you can see like, oh.

And then they became famous as being really sort of brave and full of daring do and that kind of stuff, didn't they?

I think they were the most important in the Battle of Britain.

A Polish squadron was the most important squadron, shut down the best planes.

And that's why, if you drive out of London to the West these days on the A40, you always see the Polish War Memorial, which is one of the roundabouts, which I've always seen and never really knew why Polish War Memorial and not all the other countries have.

I haven't seen that.

I haven't seen that.

Haven't you?

You'd know if you grew up in my family, because every time we passed it on the way out of London, my dad would go, oh, I forgot again.

Brilliant.

Polish the War Memorial.

Oh, Polish.

Yeah, Polish War Memorial.

Oh, good.

Yeah.

And it's all in capitals and stuff.

Oh, shit.

That's a good joke if you're ever on the M.

That is.

That's a great unfortunate joke.

There's quite a few stories of these pilots who had to bail and landed in various places.

So the tennis match is a great one.

There was another pilot who he landed in a South London back garden, and there was a girl waiting out there as she landed.

They got married two months later.

So that was really good.

So she's like, oh, you know what?

It's a shame that I don't have someone to get my

good men don't just fall out of the sky, honey they'll be way in their ages uh there was a third guy who um he landed and the people around him in the town thought that he was enemy so they were going in to lynch him and as they were getting close to him he just went fuck off and they went he's one of us

um like no german would know how to say fuck off

tennis in war yeah okay oh tennis court sure yeah yeah well you know um

Roland Garros.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what's that?

This is where the French Open is held.

Yeah.

Right.

Did you know Roland Garros was a man?

He developed the first single-seat fighter plane, which was fitted with a machine gun.

That was his thing.

That's why they named the stadium after him because he was a war hero and they built the stadium in the 20s.

It's quite a weird leap, isn't it, to decide to name a tennis stadium after someone because of that.

It was a weird leap.

And

he was a sort of pioneering pilot.

He was the first person to fly across the Mediterranean in about 1913.

So very, very early stuff.

The problem was guns were always behind the propeller.

And that was a big problem in the end.

Yeah.

You shoot your propeller off oh no so annoying did he invent the rotation he did not invent the clever system which allows you to fire in between the propellers passing what a imagine the genius who thought of that well no he just he and his mechanic developed a similar system but it was like a wedge which deflected the occasional rounds which did hit the propeller so it was very much a bodge job and then I think it was a German engineer who actually thought no you developed this system to fire between and can we just say before Dan says what a genius who thought of that I think a lot of people have thought of that before

That was like the first thing you think is, well, we should just get it to five between them.

I think it's actually putting that into action that proved difficult.

I clearly met the person who

pulled it off.

Funny thing.

Light bulb moment.

Guys,

we should just fly to the moon.

Yeah, anyway, that was his innovation was sort of not quite working that out, basically.

Do you know he has a tennis connection?

Who?

Roland Garrows.

There's this amazing story which happened on April the 1st but was real.

So he was this incredibly famous flyer.

He went down over France 1915 and he was flying this plane he'd designed so he tried to burn it so the Germans didn't get hold of the technology but failed and they did.

And he was in a German prisoner of war camp and he sent these coded messages back to France to arrange for the delivery of two tennis rackets.

And within the tennis racket handles hollowed out were in one handle a map of Germany and in the other handle a felt hat to use as a disguise for escaping.

You're going to look like a Frenchman if you're wearing a felt hat.

Yeah, that's where they went wrong.

You've got two tennis rackets handles worth of stuff.

I guess a map is a good thing to pick.

A map is a good one.

Yeah.

I think a felt hat feels like a needless waste of a racket.

What would you put in it, Andy?

A sausage.

Everyone's going to believe you're a German if you're waving a sausage around.

That's it.

It's just the right shape.

Yeah, just a giant pepper army.

Yeah, thin sausage, but yeah.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Well, no, he didn't went for the felt hat.

And actually, I don't think he used it.

He ended up making his own costume to mimic the guards' costumes and then walked out dressed as a guard.

What a legend.

That's great.

Speaking of clothing and tennis, this is not about war, but it's a story that I really like.

Pat Stewart, who was a tennis player in the 60s, she was single and she was playing at Wimbledon and she wanted a boyfriend.

And so she embroidered her phone number on her knickers.

And

the hope was that the paparazzi would take photos of it and then someone would give her a call.

And, and?

It seems like no one did.

Oh.

Although she did a few months later meet and marry a cricketer called John Edrick, but they did divorce a few months later.

But it's quite a nice way to advertise yourself, isn't it?

It's quite forward.

Yeah, it's not everyone's type.

I would almost be a bit intimidated by someone that confident in themselves.

And I think a lot of the Wimbledon audience might feel the same way.

I think maybe she hasn't chosen her audience,

right?

Actually,

have you heard of Hans Riddle?

I'm looking at you especially, James Nana, sports people.

No, I don't think so.

Well, of course, he got to the fourth round of the men's singles in Wimbledon in 1947.

So I'm surprised you haven't heard of it.

Oh, Hans Riddle.

No, Reddle.

Sorry.

Different name.

But it's quite impressive for a particular reason, which is that he had one arm.

Okay.

And he had lost his other arm in the Battle of Stalingrad.

Really?

He'd been fighting, I presume, in the German army.

He was Austrian.

And he was given special dispensation to touch the ball twice every time.

Come on.

Oh, sorry.

Every time he served.

So he would toss his

legs into the air with his racket.

Oh, then.

Because otherwise, it does make it quite a lot easier.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that things named after May West include a soda bottle, a gas pump, a parachute malfunction, and a graph that explains the nuclear fission of uranium.

What a lady.

What's the

parachute?

She didn't invent all these things.

Okay, she came up with the idea, of course, but she didn't actually.

I know what you're going to say.

It's not an item that is designed to be a malfunction.

A parachute malfunction is illustrated.

This is all for my parachute.

The parachute one is basically it makes your canopy stick out in quite a suggestive way.

And most of these, if not all of them, are due to the fact that Mae West was famous for an hourglass figure.

Oh, really?

I thought the gas pump would be because she was like pump, pump, pump, pumping away.

Oh,

no, as in working hard in the industry.

Oh, right.

No, it was because it has like a slim waist kind of thing.

I see.

And the graph of the products of nuclear fission of uranium is basically two sort of normal distribution curves.

So it's like a pair of boobs, basically.

She was actually quite a sort of slim, straight up and down lady.

She wasn't actually sort of Jessica Rabbit style.

She wasn't Jessica Rabbit style because that is just an impossible

cartoon

image.

But yeah, I mean.

Yeah, I haven't studied her.

Actually, I can picture her face, but I haven't studied her body.

I just assumed she had that was that all of her well I read that I haven't been I'd like to clarify I haven't been studying pictures of May West

Yeah, I would say she was

She was curvaceous

She had the thin waist.

Okay in actual fact I believe the word curvaceous was coined specifically for her.

No pretty yeah if you look in the OED Basically all of the first few citations are about her and the earliest one says a new word has been coined to fit the personality of May West the word curvaceous is a combination of curves and vivacious, two of Miss West's chief characteristics.

That's incredible.

That's so good.

I had no idea that's where the word came from.

That's brilliant.

Just because we don't assume the vivacious bit.

You can't just have big boobs and big hips.

You've got to have the character to go with it.

Yeah, correct.

Is it a lesson for you, lady?

An anti-feminist lesson for you to do.

Yet, when I say that

to women on the tube,

there's no point just having big boobs.

Where's your personality?

I'm just asking you for your tickets, sir.

Okay.

I mean, so there was another thing named after her in the actually Second World War.

Some twin-turreted combat tanks.

Yes, obvious reasons.

Yes.

A life jacket, which makes you look like you've got big boobs.

Yeah.

The grip she had on the 20th century.

We should step back and say who she is quickly.

Yeah, because she was a great comedian of her time.

And her time would have been in the 1930s and so on.

She was in movies.

She wrote novels.

She wrote plays.

She has so many one-liners, and they were the kind of lines that you just thought, you wouldn't get away with that at the time.

I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.

All of that stuff.

Without the noise.

No, with the noise.

Sound of noise.

We're coming back to your comedy noise again, which we mentioned last week.

Can you do when I'm good, I'm good, but when I'm bad, I'm better.

When I'm good, I'm very, very good.

But when I'm bad, I'm better.

Very wacky, white.

Is that a guy in your pocket?

I think that was was her.

She did say that in a film in the end, but I don't think it was the first instance.

She said it in a film, weirdly in the 70s, like the last film she did, or one of the last films she did.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

She did a film at the age of about 80.

But she was described in her obituary as a sex personality.

It was a big part of her character and her persona.

Yeah, I think it's really weird that if you think of people who push the boundaries of comedy, Lenny Bruce will be someone, we've spoken about him on the show before, who was jailed because he was saying words that you weren't allowed to say on stage concepts.

That's what Mae West was doing.

And And she was, in fact, jailed for meant to be 10 days.

In the end, it was eight days because she got off for good behavior.

One wonders what that good behavior was.

Oh, yeah, I got off for good behavior.

I don't like that.

Someone else got off as well.

But yeah, she did a, she wrote a Broadway play in 1926 called Sex, and the production was taken up by the city officials as offensive.

They said, you're going to go to jail or pay a fine.

And she said, put me in jail because she thought the publicity would be great.

But she also meant it.

She was like, I should be saying this on stage.

This is fine.

She doesn't get the credit.

I read something really interesting about sex, the play.

I'd thought it was banned because it itself was so lurid and so sexy and too pornographic.

But it had been on for about a year in New York before they stormed in and banned it.

It'd been on for a while.

But the thing that had happened was she'd written another play called Drag, and that was showing somewhere else, I think in Connecticut.

And that was...

all about homosexuality.

You know, it's called drag.

It ends in this huge, big drag show.

It's about lots of gay relationships happening.

The lead character is a guy who's in the closet.

And I believe that the authorities in New York couldn't clamp down on that because it was outside their jurisdiction, but they really didn't want to get into New York.

So they then clamped down on sex.

And the New York Times called it a crude and inept play, cheaply produced and poorly acted.

Is that sex or drag?

That was sex.

Sex.

But of course, because it was being banned, everyone wanted to see it.

Yeah.

And it became really, really popular.

Another thing was that it had African-American music in it.

And that was seen as a hot jazz.

hot jazz.

Yeah.

That was the other thing, you know, it features lots of

sexy stuff.

There is prostitution, there are pimps, there are corrupt cops who are not in themselves sexy, I suppose.

Sounds pretty sexy.

I'm sorry.

I'm showing my showing my predilections there.

Anyway, but the point was that her character, because she played a Lady of the Night,

and she really doesn't have anything to apologise for.

And that she played a woman who thinks she has nothing to apologise for.

And you were allowed to show

grime and seaminess as long as everyone repents hard at the end.

And she didn't, you know.

So I think that was another part of the moral objection to it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Literally, people must have been just on the floor with shock that she was doing all this and sticking up for every minority there was because she considered herself kind of among them.

She'd come from the society's underbelly, really, hadn't she?

Her dad was a street fighter, I think.

Yeah, he was.

He was a boxer, yeah.

Who was, although he went on to be a masseuse,

weirdly.

That's interesting.

Did you keep the gloves on, do you reckon?

Showing your predilection to get Andy.

If people asked for it, I think he'd go for it.

That makes sense.

You can't box anymore, but you've been in the industry where they don't have lots of masseuses.

Let me pound you in the ring.

That kind of stuff.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

He also became a special policeman, which I'm not quite sure what that means, but it sounds like it might also be up your street, Andy.

The sex is a corrupt one, but yeah,

that's a dirty cough, no doubt.

Can I just say back to sex?

Yes.

Just on that.

So the group that was campaigning against the play sex was called the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

And they were founded by the world's greatest prude called Anthony Cornstock,

a self-given nickname, I think.

And he had been inspired by the death of a friend who'd become addicted to pornography and masturbated himself to death.

No.

Or so he thought.

Sat on the gravestone.

yeah so he thought that that's what had happened and he decided to start the society for prudery uh and it was these guys who stopped sex

i didn't know that that's amazing

i've heard the name cornstock you'll know the cornstalk law i think which was an american thing which stopped you from having any obscene material but it stopped you from sending anything through the post as well and what that meant was you couldn't send any contraception leaflets or anything like that so it's part of that whole sort of thing.

And Cornstock was a nickname, did you say?

No, that was his surname.

His nickname was the world's greatest prude.

Oh,

okay, when you said cornstock, I was like, oh, that's a weird nickname.

But also,

it just made me think when you said the masturbation thing, I thought, oh, cornstock, is that because cornflakes was an anti-masturbation thing?

Was it all about cornstocks?

It is incredible, Deb.

All the effort that you put into making these unbelievably great connections wouldn't be necessary if you just listened a bit more.

It's Columbo.

That's so embarrassing about his friend as well.

I know.

He keeps going around saying, this is in honor of my friend, who actually died masturbating.

Yeah, it feels like he didn't really like that guy, isn't it?

He was just having a bath and he got hit by lightning.

Now that constant goes around.

May West loved having an enema.

So when she was in her vaudeville days and she used to go to the bathrooms, she was saying, they're so filthy.

I'm never using these.

And so, she used to give herself a daily enema so that she didn't have to deal with them.

And that became part of her, if you were doing a movie with her.

So, Tony Curtis talks about this.

He says, On the last film that he did, Sextet, which he was in, he said that she would get her makeup done, and then always at 11 a.m.

approximately in the morning, she would then have the final bit of getting ready, which was to have her enema.

And then she was ready for the set.

And then she said, I keep my friends close, but my enemas closer.

Nice.

She did a strong, a really strong line in objectifying men, which I think we approved of because obviously women were used to being objectified for thousands of years.

After her sort of Hollywood career, she set up a Vegas review of sort of these bulging, beefy muscle men so that women could come and look at them.

Because she said, you know, men have always had something to look at.

Now it's time for the wives to have something.

I think it's basically Magic Mike that she sort of invented.

I know there were muscle shows before that.

Like Mr.

Universe and stuff.

Yeah, and so Charles Atlas was in.

Charles Charles Atlas and Eugene Sangda.

So there were muscle men before, but I think she kind of

got into a sexy.

She got into a sexy, more of a sexy thing.

Coca-Cola bottles used to be called May West bottles as well.

Yeah, so the first thing in my fact was soda bottles are named after her.

And that was what I'm talking about.

Yeah.

And I thought, because it said that it was inspired by her, and that's not true.

That just sort of got around.

But on Coca-Cola's website, they describe it.

These used to be called May West.

So they were designed to look a bit like coca beans.

And then they decided that they needed to be more curvy because they kept rolling off the conveyor belts.

So remember we talked about conveyor belts last week.

And so they kept rolling off the conveyor belts and so they changed the shape very slightly so that they rolled over an axis and went straight rather than kind of rolling off to the left or the right.

So that's why the modern Coca-Cola bottle looks like it is.

That's great.

Right.

Practical.

She came to the UK once

with a play.

It was actually in 1947, which is the year that that guy Reddle got to the fourth round of the men's men's singles at Wimbledon with one arm.

Wow, what the chance is.

That's not why she was here.

She arrived, and for her first press conference, she arrived.

She said, I want every man in England to come up and see me, especially this Big Ben character I hear about.

Brilliant.

Great job.

Anyway, when she was here, she did her play, obviously, but she also went to a boxing match.

She went to the Dunlop Factory, where she signed an inflatable life jacket.

Oh, yeah.

And I love this.

She went to the opening of the British Philatelyk exhibition in Glasgow.

There was a stamp exhibition on and she was there.

I think that she confused the word philately with philatio.

I believe that's what happened.

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

My fact this week is that in 2013, a survey revealed that 97% of students studying Finnish at Vienna University were mainly doing so because of their love for the country's death metal bands.

And most of them, by the way, sing in English.

So there's no real point in doing that.

But yeah, death metal from Finland is responsible as the main reason for all these students studying the language.

I can't watch that.

Yeah.

In a way.

Yeah.

Can you?

You can actually.

I find the lyrics in metal music quite difficult to make out.

And I don't know.

And I speak the language of English, which is the language I hear a lot of death metal in.

That's true.

Yeah, well, yeah, what's interesting as well is that I had to listen to a bunch of the bands that were cited.

Children of Bottom is a massive band.

And I listened to some of their songs.

It's very clear what they're saying.

For listeners, that wasn't very clear what you said.

It's bottom, not bottom, isn't it?

Oh, I said bottom.

I know you did.

Oh, right.

But it does sound a bit like Children of Bottom.

Maybe that's what they're going for.

Little bun joke.

Little bun bum joke.

The May Wests of modern film.

Yeah, Strativarius is another band.

And him.

And yeah, they all sing in English.

And I listen to them.

And yeah, it's quite clear.

It is quite clear.

Oh, is it?

Yeah, yeah.

That's what they're saying.

Yeah, right.

I would say so.

Finland does seem to have a unique affinity for heavy metal, though.

Yeah, it really does.

Yeah, the figures wobble around a bit.

But one recent dish figure was that there are 53 and a half metal bands per 100,000 people in Finland.

And that is...

That's a lot.

The UK has about five metal bands per 100,000 people.

So Finland.

It still feels like a a lot to me.

Yes.

Enough.

It feels like too many to me.

No, you're right.

Five, five per hundred thousand people.

If I think about the population of what,

I don't know, Bolton must be about 200,000.

So that means we've got 10 metal bands in Bolton.

It feels like a lot.

Yeah.

Does it?

I mean, they could be real amateur just doing an open mic night.

We're not talking charting bands necessarily.

I don't think so.

Maybe.

I think they're working Tesco on the weekdays.

There's a town called Lemmy in Finland which has 3,000 people.

What?

It's called Lemmy.

What?

What?

After the guy from the guy yeah no great point it's it's spelled a bit differently but it is called lemmy anyway they've got 3 000 people and they have 13 metal bands that really is the that's the metal center of the universe that is the core you know amazing it's called lemmy yeah um they have a church of heavy metal and there's a guy who does metal mass yeah so um this very cool pastor who looks like a heavy metal fan but then he's a lutheran pastor and he puts on the correct robes and he started in 2006 just adapting traditional hymns, so he keeps the lyrics the same, you know, the creed and the colour around it, but turns them into heavy metal songs.

All things, bright, and beautiful.

Exactly.

That's great.

That's really cool.

That sounds really cool.

It's really popular.

Heavisaurus are another cool one.

They're a Finnish heavy metal band where they're all dressed as dinosaurs and the songs are for children.

Oh,

their album Hermiluskoyen Jo, which means Night of the Dinosaurs, was the second most popular album in Finland in 2010.

Wow.

Nice.

And their members include Milly Pilly, Compy Mompy, Riffy Raffy, and Muffy Puffy.

Robbie's mad.

And according to their website, they were in eggs in the Cretaceous period, but they somehow fossilized and then came out of the eggs and survived and then started a...

a rock group.

That's cool.

That's very cool.

Although someone has pointed out that Muffy Puffy is a Stegosaurus and Compy Mompy is an Apatosaurus who lived in the Jurassic period, not the Cretaceous.

You've got to do your research and set up your dinosaur marathon.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Muffy Puffy.

Lordy's from there as well.

Yeah.

The Eurovision Song Contest winner.

He calls himself Mr.

Lordy, and he started the band when he met the other members while he was running a Finnish Kiss Cruise because he was the president of Kiss Army Finland.

He sounds incredible, Mr.

Lordy, as in, I think he's basically one of the great geeks of our world.

He's a comic book illustrator.

He's a graphic designer.

He's a special effects makeup artist.

Like, I think if you look at metal music, it's obviously not true of everyone, but I think there is a crossover of nerdiness.

Yeah.

Oh, God, yeah.

Well, Corey Taylor, when he came in for the 100th episode, arrived in a Doctor Who or a Sherlock t-shirt.

Yeah.

There's an element of misfit, I guess, being into metal.

It's not mainstream, except in Finland where it basically gets crossed over into it.

But I think it's if you know you don't fit into the mainstream, you go for it.

And they also are famous in QI circles for hosting the first ever heavy metal knitting world championships.

Oh, yes.

They do do that.

It is a bit stupid that, isn't it?

Hey.

Well, what is it?

It's just literally doing heavy metal and knitting.

There doesn't seem to be...

There's no extra bit.

No.

But is it like chess boxing where you do one minute of one and then one minute of the other?

No, you do them simultaneously.

But they are judged, and they're actually judged on...

quite interesting criteria.

Sorry, how can you do them simultaneously?

So at least one member of your band has to be knitting something at the same time as performing and you're judged on various things but partly on the piece of knitting that you produce by the end of your set.

Everyone I know who knits, they're like, oh, look at this scarf.

I've been working on it for four months.

What are we, are they coming in with the final like one day of knitting that's needed for the scarf or are they starting?

That's such it's quite small but they also do seem to go quite fast in the ones I saw.

Maybe there was some clever video editing.

That's the tempo of heavy metal, isn't it?

It probably does encourage speed.

You have to do it in time with the songs, of course.

You want to judge for that.

Can I ask,

do people ever do the knitting with their own bodies?

And what I mean by that is, sorry, what I mean is, do people ever get a maypole in the middle of the stage and then they've all got a ribbon and they move around the stage while they play?

That's not really knitting

so much as crocheting.

Yeah.

Because I watched The Wicker Man recently for the first time.

There's a great maypole scene in that.

And that's, it's sort of the Wicker Man bleeds into that world, doesn't it?

Yeah.

It's more platting, I think.

Because it does feel like for all the men in metal, usually have large, large gigantic beards yeah low hanging that's what should be being knitted while they're doing someone should

be working up they probably accidentally catch someone's beard sometimes and knit it into their daper sorry bass player you get part of it down you can never

off that i'm looking forward to andy's morris dancing platting competition

um in 2019 metallica played a gig in finland which was attended by one percent of everyone in the country.

I remember that happening in Iceland as well, I think.

Like, it was an enormous percentage of the Finns.

That's very cool.

Because there are five and a half million Finns and they had 55,000 in the audience for their gig.

So

the numbers do stack up.

Yeah.

Well done, Metallica.

Do you want to play a game of Finnish Metal Band or Game of Thrones?

Yes.

Okay.

No, I've seen every episode of Finland, so I'm confident about this.

Throne of Chaos.

Band.

Andy, you've seen every episode of Then?

I think band.

I think band.

Game of Thrones then.

It is a band.

They were unable to make commercial headway and broke up in August 2005.

Okay.

Winter Sun.

Game of Thrones.

I'll say band.

It's a band.

It's not really death metal, says the singer.

It's very difficult for me to label it, but if someone put a gun to my forehead, I would probably say something like extreme, melodic, majestic metal.

I think it'll just annoy whoever's put a gun to your head at this point.

That's irritating.

The pointy end.

Thrones.

I'll say thrones.

Metal.

It is thrones.

It refers to a sword fighting lesson that John gave to Aria before the farewell, where he says, stick them with the pointy end.

I do remember that now you say it.

Yeah,

but there's a lot of fun Finnish band names.

Piergunt.

That's crazy.

Does gunt mean the same thing in Finland as it does here?

I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and it doesn't mean anything in this country.

Don't know what you're talking about, James.

But it's obviously based on Greeks Piergunt, but also it's guns in Finnish.

I see Chlamydia with a K.

Los Bastados Finlandesses.

Brilliant names.

Those are great names.

Finnish language.

Oh, yeah.

Just quickly.

It's really hard.

Yeah.

Like it's really, really difficult.

For what reason?

It's very complicated.

Oh, wow.

It's got 15 different cases.

Okay.

And lots of people leave after arriving because it's just language complexities, also bureaucracy.

Lots of people move there and then go, oh, sodin.

Students who arrive, 36% of them leave within a year of finishing their studies.

So they don't stay on and make a life.

And there's another reason which is, I don't think anyone's tied it to this, but in Finland, apparently, there's almost no small talk.

You just pay for your coffee and you shut up.

I only learned one word of Finnish when I was there, and it's kitos, which means thank you.

And the way I remembered it is because it's like mosquitoes, but without the moss bit.

Oh, really?

Right.

And that's how they told it.

Because I actually got that through some small talk in a cafe.

They were hating it.

I was going to say, we are going to get letters off the back of that.

I don't think we are.

I think

I've read quite a lot about Finnish culture before.

I think it became a thing in China to call yourself spiritually Finnish.

And it's a very popular meme.

A lot of Chinese people tapped into this.

It's got millions of views.

The idea is that they like their own space.

They're very taciturn.

And I've never seen, and I've read so many accounts of Finns being asked about this.

I've never seen anyone say, this is bullshit.

We're all incredibly friendly.

So, do write in.

But it's not unfriendly, yeah.

It's just not unfriendly.

It's just quiet.

Which country did I get a few emails?

Because I said they don't talk about the weather because they have so much.

Oh, it's somewhere in Scandinavia.

Yeah, yeah, you definitely got emails.

Yeah, we did that.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, on the just on the language, it's a it is a really interesting language.

It's a Uralic language, which means it came from the Urals.

And there are kind of three main Uralic languages: Finnish, Estonian, which makes sort of sense because that's right next to each other.

You swim across, yeah.

So we've got a small bit of water.

And then Hungarian.

So weird.

Which is, there's like four countries in between them if you follow them down.

And it's a four countries, but they're four pretty big countries as well.

Yeah.

It's so mad.

And I think it's because it starts in the Urals to the east of both of them, and then some people went just directly west.

And

some people, but I don't know why it didn't sort of like drop bits of itself along the way in Ukraine or in bits of Russia, but it didn't.

But I think also, like, the Soviet Union, they basically banned any other language, didn't they?

Yeah, you're right.

So I think a lot of the smaller pockets just died out.

Got it.

That's probably it.

Yeah.

And didn't quite reach Hungary that rule, even though obviously Hungary being

part of the Eastern Bloc.

But yeah, Hungary just sitting there in the same language family as the Finns, but unable to reach them.

Wild.

Sob.

The oldest writing in the Finnish family of languages, which was found in the Urals, is very metal, actually.

If you translate it into English, it translates as God's arrow.

10 is your name.

The arrow is God's own.

The doom god leads.

That's brilliant.

And to go back to a former thing that we were talking about, we reckon that it was a magic spell to stop lightning from getting you.

You might say at the bath, for instance.

Yeah, it was found in Novgorod.

Dan has a rubber duck with those words closed on it.

That'll be good.

Yes, put that rubber duck under your ass.

Yeah.

To avoid lightning.

To avoid lightning.

Why have you got a rubber duck up your ass?

Let me tell you, I was in the bath.

It was raining outside.

You can't be too careful.

They invented the happy or not buttons.

The happy or not buttons.

Oh, so when you're in an airport and you go through security and you have to say, did I have a good time or did I have a great time?

There's like some little faces and you press one.

That's a finished person, which I think is interesting because they're known for being quite deadpan, although they're always also found to be the happiest country in the world, confusingly.

But yes, it was a Finnish guy who invented them after some bad customer service.

And they've just been hugely kind of revolutionary for customer service in a lot of places.

Have they?

Yeah, because it changes how the staff act.

So Heathrow was their big break in 2012, called this Finnish guy.

They said, can we have a couple of these?

We'll try them out.

They got nine.

Within, I think within two days, Heathrow called the Finnish guy back and and said, We need to shed loads of these right now.

Because the staff in security had gone from being kind of sullen, occasionally a bit rude, or just blanking customers.

Can I just say, for next time I go through Heathrow, I've always found them to be lovely.

Yeah, that's amazing.

See, they instill this kind of fear in me.

Did this guy invent it because him and all the rest of the Finnish people hate small talk so much that they're like, even a machine to ask that basic question is what I would prefer?

It could be.

I actually thought it might be related because it's so quick and you don't need to do any of interacting at all.

Yeah.

But it does make the staff, I think that's really interesting.

Subconsciously, as soon as you're aware that button's there for people's satisfaction to be logged, the staff give a little gag.

And I asked you a question about those.

I know you're not the expert in them and you've only read this thing, but I've spent about three and a half minutes reading about them actually.

So when I walk out of security and I've gone through really quickly, because I'm a good person who takes my belt off before I go through and trousers down your ankles,

showing your phone number to all security people.

Let me put the most rubber gloves on you.

And

I press the smiley button.

And I press it like 10 times because I had such a good time.

Does that count?

as 10 or do you think it doesn't?

Well, James, as the three and a half minutes, well, I do know the answer to that.

There is a little time restriction on it, which means that, for instance, staff or you can't cheat it.

So you can't log lots and lots in a row quickly.

But you could keep coming back.

You could go get your cost of comeback.

While you're saying that, all I could picture was what would it be like to get gloved at an airport.

I could see my session ending with them going, okay, there's nothing there.

You're free to go, Mr.

Schreiber.

Here's your rubber duck, by the way.

Okay, that is 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 at Schreiberland on Instagram, James.

My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

And Andy?

I'm at Andrew Hunter M on Twitter.

Yep.

And if you want to get to us as a group, where do they go, Anna?

We're at 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.

Check it out.

All previous episodes are up there.

You can get a link to our secret club, Club Fish.

There's a Discord.

There's bonus episodes.

It's really great.

And you'll also find the link to all the upcoming tour dates for our Thunder Nerd tour, which is beginning very soon.

So have a look at the list, see if we're coming to a city near you, and come and join the Dorkery.

Otherwise, just come back next week.

We'll be back with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.