538: No Such Thing As A Sausage Cat

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Hi, everybody.

Just before we start this week's show, we have a very exciting announcement to make, which is that we are going on tour later this year.

That's right.

No such thing as a fish presents.

Thunder Nerds, we are back on the road.

And if you want to come see us live, you can do that.

The first date, kicking off the tour, is the 14th of August at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Tickets are available for that now.

And then the rest of the UK, if you want to come and see us, we will be in Bristol.

And then we're going over to Ireland to Dublin.

Then we're going to be in Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, London, Manchester.

That is all happening throughout September and October this year.

Yes, and if you want to get tickets to a brand new live recording of the show, which by the way, we should say includes lots of actually very funny bits we don't put into the final show.

Better in many ways, you just need to go to no such thingasoffish.com/slash live.

All the tickets are available there.

Some of them have sold out already, some of them there are some tickets left for.

So go, go, go.

Hurry now.

All right, that's it.

On with the show.

On with the podcast.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Toshinsky, and Andrew Hunter Murray.

And once again, we have gathered around round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one and that is Andy.

My fact is that British elections couldn't go ahead without a device called the Spanker.

Oh, because without it, we wouldn't have any Conservative MPs.

Actually, we're recording this two weeks before the election.

And at the moment, it looks like we might not have any Conservative MPs.

Yes.

So we don't know the result.

So really, it could go either way.

I personally think they've got it in the bag, but whatever.

So this is not an election special, also.

We should say that, shouldn't we?

Yes.

It's a quarter of an election special.

Don't worry, basically.

If you've just tuned in the morning after the election thinking, oh, it's nice.

And just facts about wasps or something.

This is only this bit.

But this is very exciting for you because you're listening to the only four people who don't know the result of the election.

I can't believe they didn't know at that point that Donald Trump was going to become the prime minister.

How did that even happen?

So I've been reading a lot about the election, and this was a feature about literally the stuff that needs needs to make it happen.

You know,

the polling booths and the ballot boxes and all of that.

And it's about this company called Shaw and Son, who have been making election equipment since 1750.

Wow.

I mean, that's before

even mass enfranchisement of the vote.

Wow, that's amazing.

And was it always like boxes and stuff?

I'm not sure what the very earliest stuff was, but these days they do about 160,000 little stuffy pencils per election.

That's brilliant.

I always thought they just got those from Argos.

Well, they're like baby carrots.

It's that you get a normal-sized pencil to shave it down.

It takes ages.

Oh, they're not specially brit.

They're not a different species.

No, no, no.

They're just cut in half.

It takes such long.

That's why this company is coining it in.

Can I ask what a spanker is?

Yes.

It's a very, very dull thing compared with its name.

It's a long ruler with a hole in the end, right?

And what you do is...

You stick that into the ballot box and you use it to mash down the votes.

So if your ballot box is full already, then you just give the old spanker a bit bit of a spanko and it just crams them down in the box and you get more votes.

Do we know the etymology?

Why such a sexy name?

I guess it's patting it down, like you might

spanking down those.

Spanking is a force, isn't it?

It's like a whack.

You know, the word spanker originally meant just something great.

Did it?

Yeah, just that's a spanker.

Oh, yeah.

A nice car went past.

That's a spanker.

I like that.

My brand spanking new

whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

It was, and it was a gold coin between 1663 and 1785 if you said you had a spanker it meant you had a gold coin in your pocket very cool is that a spanker in your pocket

one thing i didn't realize is now obviously this no one saw this election coming uh except

maybe a couple of people who put that sum

but we don't know if they've got premonition abilities we don't know what the mystical side of them is but no one knew this was coming and this is a nightmare for all of these companies that are running these elections because the uk is basically 650 individual elections so everyone has to run around and make sure they have the stubby little pencils that they have the ballot boxes that they have everything ready but it's even physical venues you know people are like having their weddings in certain places in halls that suddenly are needed on this on this day you know so the hecticness of the count is is quite a thing in britain and it's also a thing that is not true of all countries, right?

It's quite weird that we still have human beings counting through votes.

You know, in America, i think almost everyone does some form of electronic voting in lots of other countries um and we've mentioned before the most exciting result that you guys listening will know and we don't which is who won out of sunderland and newcastle in the race to see who declares the first constituency but did you know there is a third you know a reform equivalent coming up on the inside is there is it uh let's say it must be hartley pool or durham or it's got to be somewhere up there hasn't it it is somewhere up there well done james why do do you say that?

Well, because the other two are up there.

It's sort of because of that.

Yeah, because it seems that it's the brainchild of one single man who did this.

And it's a guy called Bill Crawford.

And he was head of elections at Sunderland Council in 1992.

He thought, let's make Sunderland famous for always declaring first the vote.

So for international listeners, they always take about an hour and a half to count all the votes.

And it's very exciting because they win.

But anyway, we mentioned that Newcastle then won in 2017 and 2019, but that was because Bill Crawford had changed councils.

So he went to Newcastle and he masterminded their victory.

That's amazing.

And is Bill gone somewhere else now?

He's gone somewhere else.

Has he?

He has gone to Ashington and Blythe, which I believe is one of the new constituencies

after all the redrawing.

And it's in Northumberland.

Yeah.

They've changed all of the constituencies now, haven't they?

Yeah, the boundaries have gone nuts.

It's really interesting.

But the reason they've done it is to try and make the number of people in each constituency more level.

I think that's the idea.

So they want every constituency to have between 69,000 and 77,000 voters in it.

But one interesting thing about that is in the United States, the Congress has 435 members.

But there was an amendment in the Constitution that was going to say that every district had to have a maximum of 50,000 citizens.

Okay, they never put this amendment in.

Okay.

But if they had, then the current U.S.

Congress would have to have at least 6,600 6,600 members.

Can I tell you about a candidate?

This is, I love this.

Okay.

So, you know, you get on your ballot paper, you like, there are some main parties, then a few others, depending on where in the country you are.

There might be some local ones, like the SP or whatever, and there might be a couple of independents as well.

Yeah.

And especially in the sort of senior, like the prime minister's seat, there'll be sort of 12 candidates.

And there are like monster raving, loony parties.

Exactly.

Well, I just love this.

Okay.

In the 1994, this wasn't a biggie actually, that was the European elections.

uh it was in devon richard huggett stood for a party that he called the literal democrats brilliant right as opposed to the liberal democrats thank you for making the comparison for us for international listeners who might not have heard of the liddems uh

maybe who hasn't but maybe they're huge in chattanooga i don't know but who's not heard of our new prime minister's party come on andy

but the literal democrats he got 10 000 votes because people just read oh yeah literal democrat yeah that must be that's they just misread it.

I think it's illegal to do that.

Well, he was responsible.

He's probably the only independent MP who's ever got a law changed because, thanks to him, the law was changed because the actual Lib Dems lost that seat by 700 votes.

Oh, wow.

They would have won it were it not for the 10,000 who voted for him.

Wow, zero.

And so he got the law changing.

So you now cannot do that.

That's crazy.

So someone was saying that if Queen Victoria sort of time traveled to today and went to a polling booth, it wouldn't look alien to her.

It would look exactly like how she would have remembered it.

Because 80% of all of the principles that were set out in the Ballot Act in 1872 are the same.

So you think those people outside doing selfies with their dogs, that was the same thing?

So

that will be a bit confusing.

But once she's inside with a little pencil, she's like, ah, I'm home.

She's going to say, what are all these women doing here?

So if you go to this website, by the way, Shaw and Sons, the company that did that with Malaki, you can just buy this stuff.

You can buy yourself a spanker if you like for $5.95.

Really?

Which I think is probably cheaper than a lot of other shops might charge you for a spanker.

Yeah.

But I mean, you can get all sorts of, you can get a basic kit.

You can buy a sign saying you may use your own pen.

What would you

have in?

It's only you and your wife in your house, isn't it?

Yeah.

Why might you want a ballot box in your house?

Oh, what's the titanium?

All sorts of things.

I would love that.

In fact, I might buy it.

There are two weeks to go till the election, so I might actually buy some stuff for the house.

Like, no abuse, that's another sign you can buy.

I'd love to buy one of those for my house.

Do you remember I accidentally walked into a primary school during the Brexit referendum?

Don't remember.

I was going to vote in the

voting age, haven't they?

And they were singing, in, out, in, out.

That's the problem.

I was looking for where I needed to go and vote, and I knew it was on this road, but I didn't see where.

And there was a sign that said, out, And then there was another sign that said in a bit further down.

And I was like, okay, here we go.

So I went inside and they went, what are you doing here?

And I was like, I'm just here to vote.

And they said, this is a school.

And I said, I'm sorry, the sign's outside.

They said, that's for cars.

That's the car park.

That's an insign and an outsign.

So you don't drive in the wrong spot.

Tragically, your vote to shake it all about

was declared invalid.

That's so funny.

So funny.

It was embarrassing.

Sean Kemp, who was the head of press for Lid Dems in 2010,

said that for party leaders, dignity has to be less important than coverage sometimes.

Oh, his lessons have been taken on by the current Lib Dems.

Because for people outside the UK, the main part of this campaign for me is that when you look at the news, it's like Labour talk about the latest tax or the Conservatives say how they're going to stop migration.

And then it's Ed Davey, the leader of the Lib Dems, goes bungee jumping with Mr.

Blobby

but this has been their technique for at least 15 years really

yeah yeah so Nick Clegg went to go ape and did a lip sync with Kylie Ray Jepson's I Really Like You.

Wow.

Don't remember that.

I don't.

But the main king of it was the head of the Scottish Lib Dems called Willie Rennie.

Once he was in a farm, I mean, he was talking about some.

I don't know, wind farms or something.

And he wasn't really sure why he was there.

And he said, I don't know how, but it certainly does help in some way.

Someone somewhere will work it out and work out why we're here.

He said this in an interview.

But while he was saying it, there were two pigs having sex behind him.

It's the most amazing video you've ever seen.

And it became so notorious that the Courier Evening Telegraph even reported when the pigs died a few years later because they became so famous.

And the idea is that they think that the...

the press who kind of go around with all these politics are always really grumpy and they always think they're in the wrong place because who cares what the lip dems say?

They want to be where the action's happening, and so they have to put on all these things to kind of keep the press happy.

Sounds super fun, yeah.

I mean, his tour bus is like champagne is given out and party poppers, and then you know, they all get to go down water slides naked with not naked, but you know, in trunks with him.

For me, Ed Davy has been an advert for how great Britain can be.

He's just done all the most fun stuff in Britain.

He's secretly working for the British Tourist Board.

I went on to, so like you went on to the website to buy all of that paraphernalia.

The spanker?

Yeah, the spanker and so on.

I went on to the major political party websites to look at their stores to see if there was any fun stuff that you could get as well.

Yeah, they're merch stores.

And they do have a few things that they're trying to have a sense of humor with.

So, for example, on the Conservative site, you can buy a pair of Kirstama flip-flops.

So you've got his face on them.

You walk them.

You can see flip-flops.

Can you also buy a massive bin fire from their

well, what's interesting is it suddenly made me realize that it's a very different culture here in Britain to it is in the States, where you have so much merch that comes out during an election and they print so much with the hope of the expectation the person's going to get in and continue to sell.

But what happens when they lose?

What happens when they have to drop out?

What do you do with all this merch?

And apparently for years after the 2012 election in Kenya, you could see kids just walking around with Mitt Romney t-shirts and hats because thousands were sent over there.

And so, yeah, so they have to just redistribute all of these things.

Yeah, it's pretty extraordinary.

I was on customcondoms.co.uk.

Oh, yeah.

Sure.

That was you.

What do you mean?

You were also on there.

Another user is currently looking at this condom.

We've been bidding against each other for that one condom, haven't we?

I won't go a penny above 59p.

They're selling condoms with political jokes on them.

Nice.

Not practical jokes.

That would be awful.

There's some snakes fly out of the packet.

So they have like

Rishi no Rashi.

Oh, yeah.

To protect you from STDs.

Very nice.

We're for Kia.

Or Ed Davy makes my legs go wavy.

Okay, that's a.

Sounds very

third one.

Yeah, okay.

Anyway, the really interesting thing about this is they also have a poll on their website about how many they've sold.

And at the time of research, Labour were on 34.2%.

The Tories were on 19.4%.

Reform were on 15.6%.

And the Lib Dems were on 10.3%,

which is almost exactly as the actual polls are.

It's insane.

The only difference is that the Green Party are on 14.1.

So if you give 7% of the vote to Labour, it is pretty much exactly the same as the polls.

Wow.

Isn't that amazing?

A great graphic at the end would be

if they actually put the condom onto three people's penises, but they are the right height

when gone erect.

Let's see who's won.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the never pink movement refers to hunters in the u.s who refuse to wear pink clothing even though it gives them more chance of shooting their prey and makes them less likely to be shot themselves

so by not wearing pink they're less likely to catch anything and they're more likely to be shot by a fellow hunter exactly but their mates might take the piss out of them because they're wearing pink and that's why they refuse to do it oh actually there's a few reasons that we might get to but is it a political thing is it like pinkos the communist thing or is it just a pink girly colour i'm afraid yeah more of like a homosexual

slash girly thing.

Although, actually, there are a group of women, never pinkers, and a reason for a lot of them is they just get annoyed that, you know, why should we wear pink just because we're women?

Because some of these pink things, they try and sell them to women, and they think, well, we should wear the same as everyone.

And you might be mistaken also for a flamingo, actually.

So yes.

It is amazing that as part of the research that they cite why pink is better is that pink is supposedly less visible to the animals that they're hunting.

Yeah, it's deer specifically, and it's compared to orange.

So most states in America say that you have to wear some kind of hivez, and they'll say it's either orange or pink, or it might be other things.

But basically, the choice for these hunters is between orange and pink, and they much more prefer to go for orange.

And this, I should say, came from an article in the Wall Street Journal by John Clark, which I read about this.

Here's a cool thing about pink.

You can tell where a salmon is from by the hue of its flesh.

Cool.

So we've mentioned before that salmon are pink because of the things they eat, right?

They eat the krill and flamingoes and

flunks.

But the different species of salmon, they all have different diets, which are heavier or lighter in the krill and the shrimp that give them that hue.

So if you're an Alaskan sockeye salmon, you'll be a very deep red because you live near the Bering Sea, which is full of krill.

That's interesting.

But if you're a king salmon, you eat relatively less of that stuff and you'll be much paler.

I think the problem is, though, that they just put colouring in salmon these days, don't they?

No, they don't put colour in, but they farm salmon and feed them deliberately pink stuff to make them more pink than they would naturally be.

It would be a lot more grey and less appetizing looking to us.

Yeah.

Pink's an amazing colour.

I've never really thought about pink too much, but as far as science knows at the moment, it's the oldest colour on Earth.

Okay, come on.

That's

the oldest colour.

Yes was in black and white at some point.

And then

Earth was black and white.

And then one very flumboyant caveman came.

Yeah, basically, a few years back, they crushed a 1.1 billion-year-old rock that they found beneath the Sahara Desert, and that produced pink.

And that's the oldest colour that we now know of.

Okay.

Yeah.

So cool.

Original Eric.

Weirdly, the oldest colour, but also, get ready to be upset.

Chemists, physicists, scientists, it's not a colour.

What I people get annoyed when you say this, but it's not a colour.

It's not on the spectrum, right?

You look at the spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, a rainbow.

Pink isn't in there.

And this does make it really special.

So the way our eyes merge other colours, right, is we see a specific wavelength.

So you'll see a specific wavelength for blue or a specific wavelength for red or for green.

And then if you're seeing two different colours, you'll see the average of those wavelengths.

So if you see red red and yellow, the average of those two wavelengths is orange.

So you see that.

But when we see pink, it's actually because we're seeing the shortest wavelength and the longest wavelength.

So we're seeing red at one end of the rainbow and then like a violety blue at the other end.

And if you've got the average of them, it would be like green in the middle of the rainbow, which doesn't really make any sense.

So our brain invents a new colour.

So pink isn't on the spectrum.

The way you can tell this, this is an exciting experiment you can do, which I find so cool.

Type in magenta circle or go onto Microsoft Word and draw yourself a magenta circle.

Stare at that circle for a minute.

And first of all, what you'll see is it goes green around the edge, which is super cool.

And then, if you stare at it for a minute, if you look at the white space on the page next to it, you'll see a green circle.

And that's because that's like the inverse of pink.

Like the negative.

Exactly.

And if you stare at it for a minute longer, it tells you who the Zodiac killer really is.

But you're wearing a pink watch and you're trying to say basically that colour doesn't, it's brain fabricated.

Yeah.

And other things, like brown is a little bit, but pink is the most obvious and most round the other side of the spectrum.

Yeah, brown's not on the spectrum either.

No, I know.

And that's another example of an extra spectral colour.

It's just not quite as spectral.

Maybe the spectrum is not as helpful.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, yeah, I'm with you.

Maybe the spectrum is not a good way of thinking about it.

That is just nature, though.

The spectrum is just the reality.

I guess I'm defining colour as something with a wavelength, and pink doesn't have a wavelength.

Okay.

I was reading about just the effect that pink can have on us.

There's this shade of pink called Baker Miller pink, and it's been given a big claim that it's a pink that if you stare at or if you're surrounded by, it calms you down.

So it was based on some old research, which has not been replicated.

However, people kind of don't care.

In jails around the world, like in Switzerland, they will paint this Baker Miller pink everywhere because they believe that if you're in its presence, it takes out all your aggression and it just absolutely winds you down.

And they also use it in sport.

So you have football teams like Norwich City Football Club who will paint the visiting team's locker room entirely pink so that when they get in, their aggression is taken out and they're not as feisty for the match.

And even though we don't even know if it's true, it does affect the mentality of people.

So in America, in American football, they do this as well.

And you'll have the coaches coming in getting furious about one pink room.

And he'll like put white paper all over the walls so that his players don't get influenced by this calming colour it could definitely have an effect because let's say well first of all the away team might think oh no it's pink i'm going to be less aggressive so they might just naturally think yeah but also the home team might think ah we've given them the pink dressing room that will make us better and it would just make you you know psychologically play better yeah psyops it's all sort of what's it called psychosomatic yeah if you're the home team it's good for you to know that and then you have to give the away team who are visiting you a pamphlet explaining.

Yeah, yeah, actually did you know that?

And as they leave the room, you just quickly whisper to each one of them, you know, that's not even a colour.

And it just psychologically faster.

That song, you know that song that Chelsea sing, Blue is the colour?

They used to sing blue is a colour.

Unlike pink, of course.

And a lot of other teams use different things in their dressing rooms instead of this pink colour.

So Burnley FC used to turn the temperature up in the away dressing room to make everyone sweat.

They also made the away dressing room door smaller than normal, making the players sort of hunch down as they left.

That would have the opposite effect on me because I think, gosh, I'm big and tall and mighty.

That's true.

I like giving them all a half pint.

They think, wow, I'm huge and powerful.

In Arsenal, according to legend, they have a table in the middle of the dressing room, which is such a height that wherever the manager stood, some of the people won't be able to see them.

Oh, wow.

That's clever.

How tall is this table?

So you're sat down, like you're sat down on benches.

Yeah.

And it'll be like halfway up the room is this big sort of like almost like a kitchen counter

table that's great in liverpool apparently they would polish the floor really an awful lot in the away dressing room so that um players would have to tiptoe around so they didn't slip over

and they put banana peel all over it today

one more of these chelsea fc apparently uh made the mirrors in the away dressing room you know like those halls of mirrors no

make you really tall or really small or whatever but they made them making it look like the away players were smaller than they are and the home players were bigger than they are so funny i should say this was all according to an article in the sun about all these okay right so that's a great collection well that's the sun pink ladies

from greece i'm actually thinking of the apples oh oh pink lady apple but it's not it's actually i believe several different kinds of apple is it but they're grouped it's like how when you order scampy you're getting any old stuff you know it's just got batter on it and it's from the sea, basically.

Wow.

I mean, there is a main one which is called Cripps Pink.

After...

Like how children say Crisps.

No,

it's after the gang, the Crip.

No, it's not.

It's

John Cripps, who was a sort of apolographer from Appleologist.

Yeah, an appleographer should be someone who draws apples or writes the biographies of apples.

Well, this guy was, in a way, doing that because he was breeding the apples.

It took him decades to get the pink lady perfect.

perfect because they originated in Australia because they need really high temperatures to grow and to become perfect.

And he died in 2022.

He was nearly 100 years old, I think, when he died.

Good on him.

All those apples.

Apple a day.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I like a pink lady, actually.

I don't know about you guys.

I think it's my favorite apple.

It's my favourite apple.

Yeah.

I love it.

It's objectively the best apple, guys.

And I think it's just, I mean, it's obviously rock hard.

It's nice and sour.

And I like to not like a pink lady.

I actually like a braben.

Oh.

The lesser appreciated.

Despite having just said the Pink Lady is the best.

Yeah.

You like the one that is less appreciated.

In my heart of hearts, I know Pink Lady is the best.

It's also the most expensive and I'm very stingy.

So I'll save that 25p and go for the braben.

I objectively know that Man City are the best football team, but that doesn't stop me from supporting Tramir Rose.

Exactly.

Braben is my Tramere.

Do you know we invented pink pigs?

Did we?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

What were they before?

So they won.

Yeah, wild pigs aren't pink.

Yeah, but they're they're not.

So it went from one non-colour to another non-colour.

Pigs don't exist.

That's why they have no predators in the natural world.

Nothing can happen.

No, we bred them to be pink, and we're not really sure why.

It's when humans started breeding animals for farming.

And we assume it's just because we like bright, fun colours.

And they wouldn't survive in the wild as pink because they are quite visible.

And obviously, pink is not a very good disguise colour.

And they get sunburnt as well, don't they?

And they do get sunburnt exactly because pink means they've got no melanin.

That's wild.

No,

the wild pigs.

I was looking up pink slang as well.

Oh, yeah.

From Jonathan Green's fantastic dictionary of slang, which we've referred to a few times before, I think, because it's amazing.

Pink cigar?

That's good.

It's the penis.

Oh, is it?

Pink oboe.

Is this all going to be the penis?

No.

Playing the pink oboe does feel like masturbating.

That's his penis.

Pink panatella.

Like a panatella cigar.

Oh, is it the Italian version of the pink panatella?

I'm afraid it's the penis.

Pink torpedo?

Yep.

Next.

Pink finger.

Next.

It's a skinhead, actually.

A pink finger.

Oh, yeah, okay, yeah, right.

Unfortunately, it means skinhead, but skinhead means penis.

Pink trumpet.

I must be.

I mean, they're all

pink steel.

Pink steel.

Penis.

Pink palace.

That's a vagina.

It certainly is.

Yes.

Pinken.

The pinken.

The pinken.

Pinken.

no that's the financial times needs faith oh the pink yeah the pink yeah yeah the pink one so there you go so it's most it's mostly penis yeah

unless it's the financial times there's not a financial times in your pocket

oh dear

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

My fact this week is that monks working at the 2,800-year-old Buddhist temple Daigoji in Japan maintain a five-story pagoda, a cherry blossom garden, and a space program.

Space program?

Yeah.

What advice is that up there with the US and China space programs?

This is,

it's a slow start.

They're going to be sending one small satellite up that measures 20 centimeters in length and 30 centimeters in width.

You won't even fit a very small monk on that.

No.

This is, yeah, is a this is a heritage place in Kyoto.

And the monks there have become very interested in the idea of if you know for example that a temple in space is flying over you can track it and you can pray to that temple.

So it's it's a sort of even for wandering monks and so on.

Yeah, so you know like whenever the ISS goes over yeah you always get a tiresome person like me going oh look that's a star that looks like it's moving that's the ISS actually.

Yeah.

But instead we'd be like, now we all meditate.

Yeah, exactly.

Now it's a meditation thing.

So they have teamed up with a satellite developer called Terra Space Inc., who are also based in Kyoto.

And it was meant to go up in 2023.

It hasn't been launched yet, but it's still, they're doing tons of talks about it and so on.

So it sounds like it's still on the cards.

But yeah, that's their

plan.

Yeah.

And it said that priests will give space services.

I mean, is that just like doing something over Zoom?

Does that mean the priest in the temple on the ground?

It's unromantic way of looking at it.

I mean, yes, it's technically like doing something over Zoom, but we already have satellites.

We can already communicate with far-flung temples with all the satellites Elon Musk has put up there.

I really like it.

I think it's awesome.

It is a bit confusing about how the operation is going to work at the moment, largely because the articles are just translated from a local source.

So we haven't got in-depth on it yet, as far as I know.

But inside the temple, that's going to be in space, a satellite.

They're going to include a Buddhist statue and a Mandela painting, or a few of those.

Not mandela.

No, no, Nelson Mandela.

Yeah, no, a mandala painting.

Yeah, that will be within this tiny little.

Really?

Yeah.

Which we should probably say what mandala painting is.

It's like one of those geometric

circles.

It's like lots of different colours.

Yeah, it's like a circle, but it's a circle.

But it means something in Buddhism.

It's a sort of holy symbol of eternity, is it?

Ongoing.

I have a few of them at home.

Dear, yeah, which I have absolutely no idea what they do.

Right.

I always sold them as a tourist.

And that's what they do.

They keep the temple going.

That's so good.

That's very good.

The world of Japanese temples and shrines is so interesting.

It's amazing.

It's so creative.

Because there are so many thousands.

A lot of them are amazingly old.

And this is, I love this.

The oldest continually operating company in the world is a temple building company called Kongo Gumi.

When it was founded, the Prophet Muhammad was eight years old.

It really is very old indeed.

And it was set up by a guy called Shigetsu Kongo.

And the firm kept going independently until 2006.

and then it's become a subsidiary of another firm.

But it is still going.

Don't sell yourself off after, what, 1500 years?

Big decision.

But they still do it.

They still specialize in construction and maintenance of Buddhist temples.

One good thing they have going is that some temples in Japan knock themselves down every 20 years.

Do they?

Is that a good thing?

Yeah.

Well,

if you're part of the building company.

Oh, yeah.

So the idea is, and this is most famously a shrine in

Tokyo that I've been to, whose name I can't remember and I haven't written down, but it's like one of the main shrines in Tokyo.

And every 20 years, they knock it down and they build a new one.

And the idea is, one, to sort of show renewal, which is obviously big in these religions, but also it keeps the artisan skills alive.

Because if you're building, let's say you're building churches in the UK, you might build a church, but then you might not need another one for 60 years.

Yeah,

or even 600 years.

Or even 600 years, yeah.

And so, who knows how to make an apps at that stage?

So, it's kind of planned obsolescence, which we're used to hearing about with iPhones.

But this is

these are the iPhones of Japanese temples.

That's the, I think, I know the name.

Is it the Chumbawamba temple?

It gets done

again, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just something for the 90s children.

No,

yeah, I loved it, Andy.

I loved it, but the entire process takes about 17 years.

So, you build it, it's there, you do three years of everything's fine, and then after three years, you have to start planning for the next one.

Oh, come on, this is unionised bullshit.

There's no way that's necessary.

There is this interesting division/slash marriage between shrines and temples in Japan, which I didn't really know.

So there are 80,000 Shinto shrines and about 77,000 Buddhist temples.

And you'll be going to see one or the other.

They often look really similar.

And often they used to be the same.

It's kind of sad because Japanese people believed in Shintoism and then Buddhism came along in about the 6th century and they sort of merged quite happily until the 19th century.

And you'd have shrine temples and temple shrines and you'd have like Buddhas inside Shinto shrines.

And then in the 19th century, the Meiji Restoration said, no, let's split them up and let's make sure that Buddhas know that they're secondary to Shintoism.

And now they're divided, but you do get some Buddhas hidden in shrines too.

some sneaky Buddhas.

I did believe that 40,000 temples in Japan were destroyed during the Meiji Restoration period.

Wow.

Because that's imperial rule was restored.

And basically, the Buddhist religion had been quite closely associated with the previous dynasty.

And there were all sorts of rules, like you had to affiliate yourself with the Buddhist temple under the previous rules.

And that was partly to prove you weren't Christian.

And you had to do that just to lead a normal life, basically.

It was kind of a condition of citizenship.

So I think a lot of frustration had built up around that, which is why when the Meiji Restoration happened, all of these tens, I mean, tens of thousands of temples.

Yeah, that's like half half the temples in the world.

Japan is obviously a very big country, but the number of temples that you have to fit in is just staggering.

I went to a moss one.

Did you?

Yeah, I think it was in Kyoto.

I can't really remember.

But I think you go over there and there's like a bucket of water and you have a spoon and you pour the water over the butter or whatever it is and then it helps the moss to grow.

That's really nice.

And then you like say a wish and it comes true.

My wish has already come true.

There's another one that helps you cure your warts.

The idea there is you put a coin in an offering box and you pick up a handful of salt and rub it in whichever area has warts in it.

And why didn't it work for you, James?

And there's another one I really like that I've never been to, but it's a single word shrine.

And what you do is you put your coin in the box, you clap your hands twice, and then your wish has to be a single word.

So you can't say, I wish to win 100 quid in the lottery.

You have to just say one word.

And if your wish doesn't edit down to one word, you can't have it.

That's quite good.

Stama.

And is that so that whatever god it is who's in control has a bit of leeway?

So you could say, cat, and if the god wanted, they could send a tiger to maul you to death.

Oh, yeah, that would depend.

That's good.

Like a monkey's paw.

Exactly.

Yeah.

One of the good things is if something traumatic happens in a Westerner's life, they often go to try and find themselves.

And there's an example which is slightly topical, which is Gareth Southgate.

So Gareth Southgate, right after...

England football manager.

England football manager.

So the Euros are currently on.

Sorry.

Yeah, sorry.

So back in the 90s, he famously botched a penalty kick, and it was huge news.

Even after that was.

Yeah.

When it got to the point where even his mother said to him, and I quote, why didn't you blast it, dear?

And he thought, I need to get out of here.

So

he went to Bali and he thought, I'm just going to get some rest.

And so they stayed in this beautiful place where they were completely isolated and they found a stunning Buddhist temple.

There were lakes and volcanoes nearby.

He said it was absolutely magical.

And then he said in the distance, he saw a monk associated with the temple walk over to him.

Yeah.

And he comes up to him.

And the monk says, You're Gareth Southgate.

Oh, mate, that penalty.

Now, I'm paraphrasing there, but those are the words he basically said.

Buddha did not like that.

Buddha would have blasted that.

That's amazing.

That's so funny.

Sounds like she was advising the space program temple as well.

She'd just blast it.

Have you heard of the shrine you go where you want to break up with someone?

This is great.

Oh, no, I haven't.

Sounds like quite a roundabout way of doing it.

You're in the car on the way along.

I know nothing about this.

I'll quickly Google it.

No, no, no.

Wait till we get there.

Basically,

there's a whole sort of subspecies of shrines.

I think they're called Engiri shrines.

And the local gods, they give you the strength to cut ties between you and another.

Of whatever kind.

So it might be a relationship, might be a work thing, might be anything.

And there's one, for example, Mantokuchi Temple in Gunma Prefecture, which is where women could escape their abusive husbands.

So it was quite an unusual kind of shrine because they're quite male environments, but this was a place where women could divorce their husbands.

And these days, if you go there, you can get a set of papers.

They're either red or black.

And you feel that, like, one is I want a new relationship to be formed and one is I want to break an old relationship.

You know how I was saying Andy about you buying a ballot box for you and your wife.

Oh no.

I opened it on the morning this episode is released.

Dozens of Japanese characters I can't read.

But all saying the same

sad message.

So you fill in these papers, right?

You go into this special prayer area, which contains two Japanese squat toilets and you put your paper so it floats on the water for a few seconds.

So it's not also used as a squat toilet.

You cannot use the toilet.

And then you flush your prayers, and that is the way that it gets carried away.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

That's a very unusual variety of trine, but it shows you the range they've got.

They've got a huge problem in Japan, haven't they?

Their rivers are just full of flushed prayers.

Very dangerous to swim in.

Do you know we've never talked about the oldest temple in the world?

This is Gobekli Tepe in Turkey,

which is quite recently recently confirmed to be the oldest in the world, and it has

a headless torso with an erect penis as part of its decor.

It's these 60 massive pillars, like limestone pillars, that have all these engravings on them.

And they were built 11,000 years ago and then deliberately all buried a couple of thousand years later.

And yeah, they've got these amazing carvings on them.

And a lot of them are penis-based, obviously, because the earliest temples, they were obviously worshiping penises.

And so they feature, they also feature eyeless ducks in their sculptures, which is quite scary.

And also euphemism of a penis.

That's the one-eyed duck.

But in the land of the eyeless ducks, the one-eyed duck is king.

Sure.

They also have

carvings of boars, foxes, and a headless man with erections, which the German and English text accompanying it mention, and the Turkish text does not.

Wow.

Yeah.

But interestingly, they think this temple is why we invented agriculture.

So it's unclear why this was built at a time when we were hunter-gatherers and moving around a lot.

It was built before we'd settled agriculturally.

And it would have taken an enormous workforce and they would have stuck around for ages and ages to build it.

And they think it might be that to build this temple, they had to be like, well, we need a permanent food source.

We need to get houses for all these people so that they can stick around and build it.

And that was what led to the first agriculture.

So it wasn't that we invented temples once we came up with farming and sat in one place.

We invented farming because of this temple.

Right.

That is really cool.

I was told one theory that the reason they buried it is because they knew that an army was coming to take over.

So they just all buried it.

And then when they arrived, they just went, yeah, no, nothing to see here.

Wasn't there on my map?

It says there's a big city.

That thing is.

Yeah, it's that way.

Just go over this big mound.

There's a little one-eyed duck sticking up here.

Is that not something?

Do you know we've never talked about someone who must be one of Dan's favourite characters?

Just speaking of weird space programmes, the Zambian space programme.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

No, we haven't.

No, we haven't.

And I love this guy.

So in 1964, obviously America had a space programme, Russian out of space programme, USSR.

And Zambia had one.

And it was headed up by Edward Makuka n Colosso, who was a science teacher and he was director of the National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy.

Unofficial.

And he decided that they would be the first country to reach the moon.

And yeah, they actually never made it to the moon in the end.

Yeah, I know.

Weird, but they got really close.

Yeah, no, they didn't.

He asked for a lot of billions of dollars of funding for various countries, but his methods were so fun.

So he recruited 12 Afronauts and he did this whole training.

He made up that name and he invented this training regimen, which included he'd shut them in an oil drum and then he'd spin them around trees and roll them down hills in it so they could get used to being weightless.

Yep, being bullied.

They get used to being bullied, which might happen if you're on a long space journey.

It will if I'm on one.

You arrive at the moon with no lunch money for days now.

No, no, don't flush my head down the toilet.

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

My fact this week is that cats only come in two colours:

pink and brown.

Well, close.

It's just not true, is it?

It's not even.

I've seen cats.

We've all seen cats.

This is explained best, I found, by the Cat Fanciers Association, who has a very excellent.

I would think so.

I'm not surprised that not dogs are us.

They had an excellent sort of paper on this and basically explained that all cats have two colours, black or red.

And all other colours you think you'll see on cats are just kind of degrees of black and red.

My cat is blue.

Thank you for raising blue at this early stage, James.

So black and red are expressed by the B gene, which stands for brown, in fact, because black is just very dark brown, and the O gene,

which is orange.

We're learning so much about colours in this episode, aren't we?

They're just not what you thought.

I haven't learned anything really.

It's

complicated.

Your blue cat, as you say, is just dark brown, which doesn't exist, by the way.

There's no such thing as brown, but if it gets really dark, it's black.

I'm not saying black itself as a colour is dark brown.

I'm saying the black you see on cats is actually dark brown.

Okay.

And actually, often, if you have a black cat, it goes browner.

James, your blue cat is just a dilute of black.

What does that mean?

It means it's got the black/slash brown gene, but then on top of that, it's got the dilution gene, and that turns black into blue.

But it's still black, it's just added some water.

My cat is perfect, and I don't like you saying her genes are diluted.

Diluted cat.

Sorry, mate.

What are we doing with white?

Is that just the blank canvas you get?

Oh my god, Dan, you've raised the most difficult question right at the top.

As the cat fanciers admit, white is the biggest problem.

The thing to know about white, and you're not going to like this, guys.

But this is according to cat fanciers, white is not a colour.

Okay.

Oh, I buy that.

It's a shade.

I would say black and white aren't really colours.

Dark is a colour, though, in this instance.

Yeah, but that's what's very dark brown.

It's dark brown.

But the thing with white is that your white cat is actually either brown or orange.

So your white cat has genes for either being a black cat or an orange cat, but then it also has a kit gene, quite nicely named, which covers up those.

And often you can see the true colour of the cat on its head.

So if you've got a white cat with a tiny bit of orange on its head, it's actually an orange cat.

And if it mates with another cat, then they'll likely be orange.

I think I follow that.

Because I was reading that orange cats are likely to be male.

Yeah, almost always.

And that's because the genetic information of the cat's colour is found on the X chromosome.

And females have two X's, like in humans, and males have an X and a Y, like in humans.

So if the male's single X chromosome is orange, that's just an orange cat.

Yep.

And a male can never have both black and orange

That's true, exactly.

So if you have a tortoise shell cat, which is like orange and black and white and stuff, it has to be female.

Because it's got two X's, it's got two X's.

And one X can be black and one can be orange.

Except there are very few males that have an extra X chromosome, which is really rare.

They're XXY.

That's really rare.

So they can be tortoise shell.

Huge if you've got one of those.

But that's a real.

It's really rare.

And the other tiger you can have male tortoise shells is if it's a chimera.

So you start off with an egg and a sperm, but then another egg and sperm come in, and then you've got two embryos and they fuse together to make one cat.

Wow,

you get chimeras, and then like you get some chimeras where you get a cat, and half of it is one color, and half of it is the other colour, and it's exactly halfway down.

Are you kidding?

Really?

That's a great thing for a murder mystery plot line.

Like, the cat that coming in was coming into the room, what color was it?

Two people give different answers, and that affects who the killer is somehow.

It's also really good for those Panto skits where you play the man and the woman.

Yeah,

that puss in boots is going to be electric

it's so weird this stuff it's fascinating it is it is quite fascinating one can go a bit too deep i actually found this fact reading an article about a new cat colour that has been discovered so there could be a claim that there's a third colour oh yeah and that is salty licorice and this has just been discovered it's a white chest and paws and then it's got black body with like white speckles on it and they're missing a chunk of dna so that's genetically totally different to anything we've seen before it sounds black in colour.

No, it's not.

What about the salt?

Salty licorice?

It's like someone with black hair that's going sort of patchy grey, right?

That's it, interesting.

And their hair starts out black and then it fades to white by the time it gets to the end of the hair.

So it's kind of that strange.

And I can't believe, having done this podcast for 10 years, you think, oh, everything's been discovered.

And then they found a new colour of cat in the last year.

Do you know the word licorice?

Yeah.

It means this food, this delicious food.

But it also had two old meanings.

It meant lecherous or someone who enjoys liquor.

So if you were licorice, it meant you really like drinking alcohol because you like drinking liquorish.

And then it also meant lecherous because you might lick things.

Is that actually true?

It's not related to the word lecherous.

This is like an old 18th-century meaning.

It was like someone that licked a lot of things was lecherous, and therefore they were licorice.

Cats,

when they are growing in the womb, this is cool about where they get their colour from.

So the colour cells all grow along their back.

They're called neural crest cells.

These are the colour cells, okay?

And they start building up and then they migrate around the body of the embryo and they can get all the way around, in which case you'll have a cat that's one colour.

Oh, is that why you have white bellies?

They can get only part of the way around.

Well, different patches of colour, basically.

Like white socks.

Yeah.

If they don't make it all the way round.

Or a Hitler mustache or something.

Or a Hitler moustache.

And yeah, that's it.

And whether your cat is one colour or different colours is completely dependent on how far those cells migrated around the body of the cat in embryo form.

That's interesting.

That's so cool.

Because that is it.

So often you see a white belly on a cat and it's just the belly is too far from the spine to have migrated all the way around.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

It's bizarre.

And those socks are weird as well.

Your cat doesn't have socks, does it?

No, she's the perfect all-one colour.

Okay.

She's your breed.

As As foe of the podcast, Adolf Hitler would approve.

So

the cats with socks, you know, the white little white socks that you get, they're lovely.

But they are because we domesticated cats.

Because pre-domestication, that would have been a terrible idea for a cat to have because they're hunting.

And if you see a big white sock clumping towards you, obviously you spot the cat.

So, but early humans probably would have bred for that.

That's a nice feature to have, a breed of cat with socks.

Like them.

Yeah.

That's very cool.

And cats are all the same, right?

As in not your cat, James, James, which is special and perfect of you.

But you know what I mean?

Like most cats look more like other cats than dogs look like other dogs.

I see.

So you don't get like little sausage cats or great babe cats or like bully XL cats.

It just doesn't happen.

And that's really interesting because there's no actual reason why we couldn't have done that, right?

So, and the reason is, how long have we been breeding dogs for different purposes?

Centuries.

Yeah, millennia.

Millennia.

Yeah, and and you breed a dog to hunt otters or like a daxon to hunt badgers in their sets or to whatever, pick up grouse that you've just shot, whatever.

All these different things.

Whereas cats have fulfilled basically the same function all that time, which is vermin in the home and companionship.

Right.

If we'd put our work in 500 years ago as humans, we could now have like you're lost in the Alps and then there's a cat with a barrel of brandy around its neck that comes and saves you.

A terrifying cat guard.

When you hear them yow walking past a farm, you tense up and freak out

all kinds we could have had every single cat under the sun every single dog could have had its mirror cat that would be i i think this is actually a kid's book ready to be read

isn't it it absolutely is sausage cat would be i'd read that

to a child that's amazing is it happening though are people breeding why why not sausage well no but like you know why not why why haven't we started doing it people do breed amazing like yeah like james' amazing british shorthair cat there are breeds yeah but they're not being bred to turn spits.

They're all basically being bred because we like the look of them, really, aren't they?

Right, I think.

Or some of them, like, the British shorthairs were bred for hunting prowess.

As in your cat.

Well, my cat is the most useless cat in history.

But, like, her breed was bred for chasing birds and stuff like that.

Nice.

It still does seem to me...

Not that I'm skeptical about this claim, because I'm not, this explanation, but that cats still seem to have less variety than you'd expect from lots of breeding.

In terms of size, for instance, if we have bred some for hunting,

it's very interesting that you can get dirty, dirty chihuahuas and giants and bernards.

And with cats, there's not much variety.

If we'd wanted to, could we have taken an ordinary domestic cat and bred it into the size of a lion?

Could we have reinvented that?

But I think the other thing is that domestic cats are hunters, all of them pretty much.

And so if you do breed a massive cat, it's not going to be a lap cat.

It's going to like it's going to go after you, isn't it?

well, the owner is behind it saying he's very friendly.

This is not the cat he is, actually.

The hairless cat, that was a kind of

useful thing they were trying to invent.

Well, it was for people who wanted cats who were allergic to cat hair.

That was a big idea.

But you can't...

Once you've taken off all the hair, I would argue it's no longer really the same kind of experience of cat ownership.

You've always wanted a cat and you were so sad you couldn't have one.

Gollum calls into the room.

Well, like those Sphinx cats.

They look like golem, really.

Yeah, they do.

They don't look good.

But it's a slightly pointless exercise as well, because it's not just the hair that people are allergic to.

They're stuck in their saliva, which is, yeah.

So at the time it was believed the hair was a simple thing, but now there's just this naked cat that's still.

And they didn't breed the dry-mouth, no-hair cat.

Do you know where Sphinx cats are from?

I'll jump on it.

Egypt.

There we go.

I did read it, actually, but yeah.

Toronto.

Toronto.

Oh, really?

It was three weird number of hairless kittens were found in Toronto in the 70s and they bred them and bred them and so now they're all hairless.

Nice.

I was on,

I think it was Scientific American.

Yeah.

I was on Scientific American.

I came across a headline which was, what is the difference between hair and fur?

We spoke with mammalogist Nancy Simmons of the American Museum of Natural History about this.

Here's the transcript.

Is this gettable?

Yes.

Okay.

Fur on animals, hair on humans?

No, hair on monkeys, I guess.

No, fur on monkeys, I'd say.

Oh, yeah.

If you comb it, it's hair.

If you brush it, it's fur.

Right.

No, you brush your hair.

Sorry.

No, no, no.

Is it structured different?

As in Malkeratin?

Hair grows only on your head.

Fur grows on your chest.

Yeah.

That's what I call it.

I'm going to put you out of your misery.

Scientific American asks, is there a difference between hair and fur?

Nancy Simmons replies, there isn't.

Hair and fur are the same thing.

I know, disappointing.

Okay, here's the craziest thing I found researching this.

Okay.

You can give dog blood to a cat.

To eat?

Not to drink, to infuse.

If a cat needs a blood transplant, it can take dog blood.

I find that very difficult to believe.

Hashtag more in common.

But only once.

This is as crazy as they die.

You can drink a pint of arsenic, but only once.

They don't die the first time you do it, but they will die the second.

This is insane.

So there are dog blood banks.

Oh, they do have nine lives.

There are dog blood banks, which is great for dogs, but there are very few for cats, because for a cat to give blood takes a lot of the cat's blood, and it's just very, it's harder to do, right?

But if your cat needs a blood transfusion, it can take some dog blood, but then it develops antibodies to the dog blood after the first time it gets some.

So the second time you give it a transfusion, it may react very badly and could die.

Oh, interesting though.

Basically, there will be cats walking around right now, which are half dog.

And dogs, if you're listening, please donate today.

Yeah.

You know, you could be saving a cat's life.

But that's not the way to advertise it to dogs, actually, is it?

I love that we have classical sort of dog people and cat people, right?

My favorite example of it is that the fact that that made it into the Webster's dictionary, the original in 1928.

So Webster, yeah, Webster,

he did an initial dictionary, which was in 1806, and in it, he used the exact same phrase to describe a dog and a cat, which is just a domestic animal.

However, when he published his dictionary in 1828, he defined a dog as a species of quadrupeds belonging to the genus Canis, and many varieties as the mastiff, the hound, the spaniel, the shepherd's dog, the terrier, the harrier.

Keeps going on.

With cats.

He describes the cat as it is a deceitful animal and when enraged, extremely spiteful.

That's it.

I really thought, did you guys think he meant in the dictionary he was going to have cat person and and dog person?

Webster was a dog person.

Yeah, he clearly was.

That's brilliant.

That was amazing.

James,

cat person, clearly.

Actually, really a neither person, I think, but I've had a cat forced upon me.

Okay.

Oh, okay.

You're a people person.

I wouldn't say that.

No, no.

I'm.

You're barely a person.

I'm a bacteriophage person.

Yes, finally.

Someone will stick up with those guys.

Quite right.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our various social media accounts.

I'm on Instagram on at Schreiberland.

James.

My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

Andy.

I'm on Twitter at Andrew HunterM.

And Anna.

We're on Instagram at no such thing as a fish or Twitter at no such thing.

Or you you can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or go to our website, no suchthingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

There's a link to our secret club, Club Fish, where you'll find lots of bonus material and ad-free episodes.

So check that out.

And also, you will find a link to the dates to all of our upcoming tour.

Thundernerds, we are going out back into the world.

We're going to be over in Australia and New Zealand.

We're going to be in the UK.

We're going to Ireland.

It's very exciting.

If you want to come along and see a live podcast recording, do get tickets now.

Otherwise, just come back here next week where we will be back with another episode and we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

That was really good, guys.

That was great.

I feel like the rest is politics.

Don't have to worry too much.

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