531: No Such Thing As A Teaspoon of Coal

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Your ring, your way.

Hi everyone, just before we start this show we've got an incredibly exciting announcement to make.

It is so exciting, especially for people who like to watch live comedy, podcast fact shows.

What a great description of our show, James.

It's like you've been rehearsing that for years.

Yes, we are going on tour to do our comedy live podcast fact show.

We are going all over the UK and Ireland and we are then going to Australia.

And then we are going to New Zealand.

Indeed we are.

When are we doing this?

I hear you ask.

Well, we are starting off going to Edinburgh to just perform the podcast in August.

Yes, and then we will go to Bristol, Dublin, Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, London, Manchester.

We'll play all those places in the UK and Ireland.

And then we are going down under in November.

Is that your attempt at almost doing an Australian accent?

I...

pulled out of it at the last second.

I think that was a wise choice.

Well, we're going to go to Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

But Anna, how do people get tickets?

They can go to no suchthing as a fish.com/slash fish tour, where you'll find links to any venue that you want to attend.

Or why not come to all of them?

Why not?

Indeed, I'll be in all of them.

So will I.

So, do come along to the show.

It's going to be so much fun.

We can't wait to get back on tour.

Come to those gigs, come and say hi.

We'll see you there.

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

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with fact number one that is Anna my fact this week is that in 1974 thousands of swallows migrated over the Alps by train and plane

wow but not automobile this is amazing yes it was 1974 and there was bad weather all over the Alps and this meant that insects were quite hard to find they were dying or not being born and the swallows were getting really hungry and cold cold, and this meant that they couldn't fly very well.

And bizarrely, it was the police in Zurich who, for some reason, drew attention to this.

This is a crime against nature.

Well, exactly, yeah.

Not too much crime in Zurich

at the time, I guess.

And so they said

quickly qualify that because it is a hot these days.

And so they said these swallows are having a bad time.

And

this thing was organised to fly them over the the Alps or take them by a train.

And Swissair flew 10,000 off them.

Oh, how interesting.

You see, when you said the fact, I thought it was like just a normal swallow was flying along and then jumped on a train.

You know, like sometimes animals jump on trains.

Like pigeons.

Yeah.

Oh, don't open this.

I know.

This was.

I can't believe you've gone there, James.

They are on planes or something.

But you're saying actual flights were put on.

Yes, sorry, because I can see, because swallows, I guess, fly in formation.

So if one goes on a train, I guess they'd all follow onto the train.

And that would just be a terrifying train journey for a lot of passengers.

Yeah.

But no flights were put on swissair put on lots of flights and then lots more thousands in fact were taken under the alps or through a tunnel

go-to swallows they were going to the mediterranean um to get a bit warmer so they were flown to nice marseille barcelona they got the train and yeah it's very nice it's a very heartwarming story it's a lovely tale and i learned it from a heartwarming place which is a book that my mum got me years ago called the little book of the dawn chorus it's made of cardboard and it's about 10 pages long and each page is a big picture of a bird and then you press a button next to that picture and it makes the noise of that bird's book um doesn't sound like a grown-ups book

i think children probably enjoy it for the most part are you getting all of your facts these days from bedtime reading for your kid you had good night moon oh yeah you had sweet packets good night moon oh yours was good night moon sorry god what was my sweet packet you said you found a a fact on the side of a of a sweetie that you were oh my god your research has gone downhill a lot it's a bit ropey isn't it actually yeah you do get um birds going by ship all around the world okay and that is more in what i thought the fact was in they're flying along they get a bit tired and they just sit on a ship for a while

and then they go in the ship for a bit and then they fly off again that's clever uh and we found out this because they put tracking signals on um on birds and they went well this one started going really slowly and exactly in the same direction as that tanker that we know goes in this direction so funny.

And so, yeah, apparently it is quite common.

If you get injured a little bit or if you're flying along and you get to a bit of turbulence that you can't really fly through very well, you might just drop down, go on a boat for a few days.

And fly off again.

I saw a video the other day of it was either a hawk or an eagle.

It was giant and there's a guy who's gliding and then it just perches on his frame and just kind of like chills out for a second to get a break and then goes off again.

It's the most insane footage.

I do think the hawk knows that it's like a glider or whatever?

I don't know.

Or do you think it thinks it's a really big bird?

Yeah.

In which case, do hawks also land on really big birds?

That was going to be my next question.

Do they have resting stations on like, yeah, a flock of birds?

And there's a blue tit on the hawk and then a butterfly on the blue titan.

I guess you do that kind of when you're flying in formation, right?

Because you're directly behind someone and you're kind of hitching a lift a little bit on the guy in front.

A bit, but if you did climb onto the back of the guy in front, I think he'd be annoyed.

There is a theory that would work, which is if you had flights, let's say from London to Zurich, there are 10 flights every day, whatever.

If you were to get them all to go at the same time, then you could have them flying behind each other like geese or like swallows or whatever.

And that would save us loads and loads of fuel.

That's so cool.

Oh, we're using the tailwind?

Yeah, you basically, well, you put it.

Well, there's no turbulence.

It's like a slip streak.

Yeah, sorry, slip street is what I mean.

We're using the slip.

There's really less air in in the way.

Yeah.

And the only reason we don't do that is because people like Dan are scared of flying.

Yeah, I'm not on for it.

If the one in front breaks hard, then I'm going in front of the brain.

If you have those air brakes on, exactly.

But what if you just, what if we arranged that all the sort of nervous people get to go in the front plane, so they're fine.

Oh, what if one of them get there first?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, no, all right.

All those losers go at the back.

See, this is why it's not happening.

Because people can't get along.

But apparently we have the technology as well.

It's a really good idea.

You don't want to leave at the same time.

Yeah.

It's inconvenient.

Sometimes you want to leave at a different time.

I think it's a great idea.

I think I might have mentioned this before.

I would like it if, you know, if you're sitting in traffic in a car,

right, technically, as soon as the light goes green, it should be fine for everyone to just jam on the accelerator to full, right?

Yes.

Because as everyone accelerates, the gaps also accelerate to the same level.

Oh, yeah.

But what about me reading my phone at the front?

That's what's called a New York second.

A New York second is the time between the lights going green and someone directly behind you beeping you the second it goes green to get you to move am I the only person who when I'm sat second in line and the other person hasn't noticed I don't beep and I'm just like you know what I'm not gonna beep I'm gonna be a good citizen and I'm not gonna honk I'm gonna let them notice by themselves how long does that last until it goes red again

I think you might be the only person Are you doing it if someone's behind you as well?

Yeah.

Usually the person behind me will beep.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So what you're doing is you're saving yourself the effort of a beep because you know that the person behind you will probably get out of it.

I'm just following the highway code.

You're not supposed to be.

No, you're not.

You're looking at your phone at the driveway.

That's not what you're supposed to use your home for.

Tell people that lights have changed.

No, that's true.

It's only if there's an imminent threat to life, isn't it?

That you meant to

let someone know where you are.

That's right.

Right.

You are letting them know where you are.

You're saying, I'm here, and I'm not happy about it.

Birds.

Yeah.

Like ab migration.

What's that?

Ab migration.

Ab migration.

It's basically when you're a bird and you're migrating from one place to another, but you accidentally join the wrong flock and you just follow them to wherever they're going when you end up in completely the wrong part of the world.

Wow.

So they don't realize there's not a halfway.

Not until they get there.

Yeah.

Oh, shit.

There's no one I can shark it.

Exactly.

Does that really happen?

It does happen, yeah.

This is a very old fact, but I discovered it's not on our show.

So I'm just plopping it in in our show because it's something we all know.

But in France, if your pet snail gets a train, it needs its own ticket.

It has to pay for a ticket, and it costs seven euro for it.

Seven euros.

Seven euro, which is

a dog is 20.

So do you think that's cheap?

Well, it depends where you're going to.

But if you're going all the way from, you know, Nice to Brest, seven euros is an absolute steal.

But not for a snail.

How long is it going to take to walk?

I guess.

You're just so used to hearing about European trains being so cheap and amazing.

And, you know,

well, that's striking.

I mean, especially because if you've got a few snails, that'll rack up quite quickly.

Well, what I'm confused about is one person is only allowed one animal, so one animal per person.

So, right, I think you're only allowed your favourite snail to come.

You must be able to claim it's a wild snail.

If you just put the snail down next to you and say it's nothing to do with me, yeah, but then he gets kicked off for fare evasion, but then you've lost your favourite snail.

He's like, Anna, Anna.

We've known each other for years.

Honestly, it's a different Anna.

james did story i have to ask when you just use the example of going from nice to breast was it because in your head you were saying the words nice breast

great question that's what i've assumed you've just got nice breast nice breast going through your head at all times and you thought i can use this genuinely i thought of what is the most southeasterly town and what is the most northwesterly town i could think of and that was it okay good yeah very strong i have a link i have a link yeah patricia highsmith the writer of the talent of mr Ripley, didn't she keep pet snails?

And I think she would turn up places with them in a handbag, and I think she would let them crawl around her.

I think she hid some under her breasts when she was going from one country to another, so she didn't have to

be, aren't they?

Her nice breasts.

So there we go.

We've come full circle.

There we are.

Fly train.

Birds and trains.

Yeah.

So Japanese trains.

What's the first thing you think?

Fast.

Shinkan Sen.

Fast.

Exactly.

You've all said the right thing.

Fast.

Shinkan-sen.

Bullet train.

Yeah, no, no, no.

Stop.

I know more.

I know.

Well, fair enough.

There was a problem with the bullet trains, right?

They were fast.

That was great.

But they were causing these sonic booms when they came out of tunnels because they pushed the air ahead and, like a cork out of a bottle, the air just pops out really loud, hundreds of meters away.

It was so loud.

It was like miserable to live anywhere near

these trains.

And they were on overhead wires as well.

And then the chief engineer, who was called Eiji Nakatsu, he was interested in owls and how owls move quietly because owls have these little structures on their feathers called fimbriae.

Yeah, they make like vortices and stuff.

Exactly.

They break down the air into sort of micro-turbulences.

And he said to his team, this is the future.

And every Japanese train has an owl strapped to the front.

That's right.

It's very cruel.

And instead of a horn, they go...

So there are these wing graphs put on the trains.

And then to deal with the train coming out of the tunnel and having the sort of cork-popping sonic boom effect, he looked to kingfishers because they dive into the water with no splash.

If you've ever seen really slow image video of kingfisher just diving in, no ripple.

So, he changed the body shape of the front of the train, and they are quieter, they have less air resistance, they use less energy, they cost less, they use less fuel.

You know what?

Birds also do fly.

So, he could have put wings on it.

Yeah.

And it all came from that?

Very good bullet trains are based on birds?

Basically, birds.

In China, they have a tunnel that they're building at the moment for trains.

It's 12 meters across this tunnel, but due to the movement of the Earth's crust, it's shrinking and it's currently now less than three meters across

because the Earth's plates are squishing it together.

Oh no.

Isn't that amazing?

That's incredible.

Hang on.

And this is a train tunnel that was built 12 meters across?

They're currently in the middle of building it.

It was supposed to be ready to go in like next year, but they keep going back and it's smaller again.

You'd think you were on punked or something.

You're like, what is going on?

This was massive.

Yes, they're going to have to make the train one of those very small novelty steam machines.

Everybody off the big train.

Isn't that weird?

So

they put loads of concrete supports in.

They just got smashed.

Yeah,

if these are tectonic plates, isn't it?

I didn't know bits of earth were moving that fast.

Well, let me introduce you to earthquakes.

Hi, well, nice to meet you.

But this is, yeah, I mean, there are some parts of the earth that are moving.

I mean, this is not like moving, you can't see it moving.

And they're still sticking with it?

They're not just going to get a new animal.

What they're going to do at the moment is they're just going to wait, and hopefully, it's going to stop moving soon.

And then they're going to be able to build it.

Oh, wow.

Just put it nearby.

Well, hang on.

Hang on.

All they need to do is wait long enough and then the movement will go so much that the tunnel will...

Start making itself.

It reverse, exactly.

And it'll start getting bigger again.

Because all the concrete will have gone through to the other side.

Do you see what I mean?

That makes no more sense with the accompanying hand gestures that we're passing than it does to the listener.

Okay, fine, fine.

Do you know the Snowdon Mountain Railway?

So, for broad listeners, there's Snowdonia, the highest mountain in Wales, and it has a train going up it, which is kind of famous because it's a way you can cheat to get to the top.

But did you guys know that it was built in the 1890s, and its very first trip, all the trains on it crashed and it had to close immediately for a year.

It's

yeah, 1896.

So, there were two trains that went on this inaugural journey.

They got off the top of Snowden.

One was released to go down, they completely lost control, the engine of it derailed, and the driver and the guy who was spooning coal into it or whatever both leapt off it.

Shuffling,

spooning coal.

We can't get the power, it's so weird.

Use the dessert spoon, stop with the teaspoon.

Oh, I thought differently.

I thought, whether the conductor is in bed with coal.

Stop hugging that coal and get out of here.

Yeah, look, I don't work in the rail industry.

Stoking.

Stoking.

The stoker and the driver both threw themselves off the engine just as it flew over a cliff and hurled down onto the ground below.

Wow.

Many, a few hundred meters.

And then

the carriage is careering down on its own, the rail.

So all these passengers are on the carriage.

But ahead,

there's a point,

and there are five people strapped to the track.

There was actually, there was one, there wasn't one death because there was one guy on the carriage who saw the driver and stoker leap off the engine.

So the guy in the carriage thought, well, I better do that as well.

So he just threw himself out of the carriage and sadly plummeted to his death.

Whereas the rest of the carriages eventually slowed down once they entered a tunnel, which gradually grew and grew closer, grinding them to a halt.

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

My fact is that in 1827, a shop opened in Cincinnati where the principal currency was time itself.

I'm just remembering, we only let you do this fact, didn't we?

Because we knew you would do that in one of the voice.

Yeah, and you did.

It's a good fact as well.

Thank you.

This is a place called the Cincinnati Time Store, and it was created by a guy called Josiah Warren, who was a utopian and a socialist.

And he would now be described as an anarchist, but I don't think the phrase really existed at the time.

Basically, his idea was: I'm going to sell things for what they cost me, and the only thing I'm going to add to the price is the value of the time I've spent on this stuff.

So he claimed basically labor was the only true currency, if you like.

So it's like the time of people coming into the shop and deciding what to get, the time of him wrapping it up, the time of him weighing stuff, the time of him bringing stuff from the back room into the front, like that, all that kind of stuff.

All of that.

And it involves quite a lot of calculation.

And also, I love this.

The longer he spent with the customer, the more it would cost the customer because his time was worth money.

Yeah.

So if I'm behind that customer that's taking so much time,

do I have to pay less?

Yeah, they haven't noticed.

You're in your car.

Do you honk your horn?

Even though it's costing...

I think he had a timer dial so that as you stayed in the shop for ages, saying,

I don't know if I want the big one or the small one.

Yeah.

He'd sort of notch up because this is his time.

But he seems more aggressive, even though it's a utopian, cheapening thing.

But he said that it went through so many customers in such a quick amount of time that he could shut the shop halfway through the day because he'd done basically the full day's worth of money that he needed to earn.

Yeah.

Which is pretty old.

Well, you can't do that with a shop.

What if I want to get to the shop at 3.30 and they've just closed at midday because they've gone, we've had enough customers for the day.

We'll go to like a square capitalist shop and not to the utopian anarchist.

He was also, and I don't think this is how he'd like to be characterized, but he was was just like a modern-day lawyer in the sense of time, wasn't he?

Yeah.

Because that's what you get with lawyers.

The more time you spend with them, the more they charge.

You're having nothing.

And sex workers.

And sex workers, so you've got to rush through both.

I assume.

Never used a lawyer, so I'm not sure he does the same.

For the first few days when he opened it, he didn't have a single customer.

Really?

Yeah.

And he asked his brother George to come and make some purchases for his family.

And then George came and told his friends, and then George's friends came.

And then in the first week, he'd made $5 worth of sales.

Was that a lot?

It was in the 18s, 20s.

Even in those days, it wasn't enough to live off.

But it took off relatively quickly after that.

There was a guy who had another shop around the corner who kind of came in and said, you're putting me out of business, mate.

Yeah.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

And he said, well, maybe you could show me how to do it.

And Josiah Warren sort of said, okay, well, this is what I'm doing.

And the guy copied his system.

I think the idea is that time also has a slightly variable value.

So nobody profits from anyone else's labor is the idea.

You don't get to just add a huge whack to the amount of time you spend on something because the time is the currency.

But also, if a job is harder or more disgusting, I think it would be worth more time.

So, for example, I love making this show.

So probably, you know, an hour and a half recording.

I will actually only get paid half an hour of time because it's so much fun to do.

But responding to the emails that people send in, how much would you...

Quintuple.

That's why I get paid five times as much as you, isn't it, Andy?

I hate making this show.

So two hours recording, you get paid.

Do you know why that was the case?

Because actually, this idea was not new.

But the reason that he had different amounts for different people is because he'd previously been in another utopia called New Harmony.

And at New Harmony, that had failed because anyone who was good at like building houses just decided, wait a minute, I'm getting paid the same as the people who are doing something which isn't skillful at at all.

And actually it all fell apart because of that.

And so he decided that his new utopias and new ideas were going to be slightly different and have a slightly different thing where different skills paid different amounts.

So he took over this small little town called Modern Times.

A place is called Modern Times.

It's called Modern Times as a name.

They had like 150 people who signed up to the idea of living in this utopia.

So that started off a bit dodgily because he had this big group of people who were all utopians.

And then one of them began to advocate for a plurality of wives.

Another one believed that clothing was a superfluity.

So you didn't have to wear any clothes.

And there was another one who thought that actually you shouldn't really eat properly.

You should just eat beans and nothing else.

Oh, no.

And yeah, it was basically attracted all these people who had all these different ideas outside of the mainstream.

And at the very start, it went really badly.

And the newspapers were saying, this is going to, this is going to be a disaster.

But it did prosper in the end.

Did it?

Even though it sounds like a load of farty, naked, sleazy sleazy men

they got rid of the farty ones and the sleazy ones okay and the other dwarfs

and then in the end it did falter but it was because there was a huge panic in the mid 19th century and then the civil war and then that was where it fell apart yeah but it did according to their like press you know it went for 13 years solidly they didn't have government they didn't have law no police um but they didn't have any reported crime or violence

Well, if you've got no law, you're not going to have any reported crime, are you?

Yeah, that's just from supposedly the people a naked man stole my third wife.

Josiah Warren also invented a lamp, time lamp,

just a non-time lamp.

It burned over time, but again, it had a utopian idea at its core, which was to save people money.

So it was made of lard instead of tallow, and it burned much more efficiently.

But the good thing about this lamp is that the patent for it was destroyed in a fire at the patent factory no in 1836.

That's very funny.

Isn't that true of like the fire extinguisher?

That's correct.

It's the same fire.

It was the same fire.

Well it was this huge, it was an incredibly famous fire and there are these things called the X patents which are the first 10,000 patents and I know I should be saying patents, sorry, but the first 10,000 patents ever issued and they were all destroyed in this fire, this massive fire at the US patent office.

It feels like there's a good plot for a movie or something in there where they've rediscovered actually that we made copies.

Yeah, someone made copies and all these new technologies turn up.

Yeah,

patent men.

Yeah, that's quite good.

That's excellent.

He made a newspaper as well, Warren, in 1833, so a few years after the shop, for which he built his own printing press and cast all the type himself.

He does seem to have been very practical, practically minded.

He also invented a new kind of music.

Did he?

What was that?

Rap.

Gangster rap.

No, it was called mathematical notation.

Okay.

And it was a way of using maths as opposed to using do, raimi, fasola t-do.

It was using numbers.

How interesting.

He's described as an anarchist, and my impression of an anarchist is very different to what it sounds like he was.

What do you think of an anarchist?

I guess an anarchist would be someone who's raising hell, like suffragettes were being anarchists when

they were bombing places.

That's a metaphorical anarchist.

Yeah, right.

An anarchist would be just someone who doesn't believe there should be any leaders in society.

Suffragette is very much not anarchist because they wanted to actively get into the role of electing leaders.

It's very weird.

So anarchism is, because, yeah, everyone calls Warren an anarchist.

It's this big school of thought, exactly as James says.

It's not, we don't want leaders, no sort of state structures, people doing things for themselves and their neighbours is the basic idea behind it.

But also, there is a kind of extreme end of it in the 1890s.

It was a big worry across Europe.

The anarchists, you know, who were mostly basically young men throwing these kind of like classic bombs, you know, sort of big, black cherry bombs.

Yeah, with bomb written on the side and with a few sticking out of it and, you know, throwing them at sort of elected leaders or royals across Europe.

Wily Coyote.

Yeah.

It's very, yeah, yeah, it is like that.

But it was a genuine fear because that was the sort of extreme end of anarchism.

And but President William McKinley, one of the four presidents assassinated, shot by an anarchist.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And his assassin was a guy called Leon Cholgosh, who was, this is very dark, this.

He was tried and executed.

And then

his body was destroyed by acid so that fellow anarchists wouldn't have a body to venerate or to turn into a martyr.

So they literally poured acid into the coffin.

Wow.

Put it in a coffin, clothes coffin up, pour acid in, and then burned all his clothes and possessions after that.

Wow.

I know.

Don't do that again.

Yeah.

And then we get the sex pistols, which kind of calms down the world of anarchy, doesn't it?

Yeah.

The evolution.

If you put an architecture of of it, it's not as anarchic as.

I was looking into the idea of swapping money for time and seeing if that's been used anywhere else.

And I found an example which is something that's being trialed in 2019 in Estonia.

They've had a huge problem with speeding drivers.

So people are speeding, they're getting tickets, and then they are just paying the fine because they can afford to do it.

And so in Estonia, they thought, instead of giving them a fine, what if anyone who's caught speeding has to do a 45 to 60 minute timeout?

And now they're really late to where they need to go.

They have no choice but to do this.

57% of people actually said they preferred the idea of having the timeout.

So the bigger problem they have is...

Meanwhile, James has pulled in behind the guy who's been stopped for speeding.

He doesn't mind.

How are you policing that?

Well, that's something you need to do.

This is what they're trying to work out because it takes a lot of people to have to sit there for an hour.

It's not practical, but it's a great idea because no matter how rich you are, time is time.

You can't get past that.

It's not practical, guys.

Well, what you could do is you could put some clamps on the car and so they can't go anywhere and then come back an hour later and take it off.

But most speed is got by cameras, aren't they?

Maybe out of every camera could drop a sort of big net that catches the car.

Yeah, that's much more practical than a

than hiring some unemployed people to do the same work.

Kind of like detention for grown-ups, basically.

I have a related fact because it's about Estonia.

I was in Estonia relatively recently, last last year, in Tallinn, and I went to the Museum of Banned Books.

Oh, cool.

So it's a museum, but it's also a shop.

You can buy books that have been banned from around the world.

And I asked for one particular book, and they had it hidden behind the desk as it wasn't on display.

Can you guess what the book is?

So they had every banned book from around the world.

And I said, oh, do you have this one?

And they went, we do, but it's behind the desk.

We're not allowed to put it on display.

Oh, we're not putting it on display.

Is it a famous book?

Well, we definitely have heard of it.

It's famous, but whether you've heard of it, I don't know.

I mean, it's very on topic from what we're talking about.

Oh, okay.

So, a time-related thing, maybe.

Or an anarchist's book.

The anarchist cookbook.

Correct.

Oh,

the anarchist cookbook is in the Museum of Banned Books, but isn't on display.

Why not?

Because it's so dangerous.

What's in it?

It's a way of making bombs.

Oh, basically.

Also, making illicit drugs, ways of freaking telecommunication devices.

So

this was written by a guy called Powell, whose first name I can't remember, but anyway, he reneged on it when he got older.

It was published in 1971, and by 1976, he'd converted to Anglicanism and tried to get his book taken from circulation.

And in 2011, he and his wife, Ochen Kasuma Powell, founded a thing called Next Frontier Inclusion, which was a non-profit organization for children with learning disabilities.

But he did that in a way to atone for this book that he'd written, which he can't control because he doesn't own the copyright to it anymore.

It's out there and that's it.

Did he do an anarchist thing with the copyright or something?

Or did it just go?

No, it was the amount of time it just sort of went to the publisher.

Silly boy.

Yeah.

Think before you publish.

I really thought you were going to say the book that you couldn't access, James, was Tintin and the Soviets.

Oh, that is true.

Like, I went to the Tintin shop in London and

they would sell it to me, but again, it was not on display.

You have a knack of finding things behind the counter.

It's interesting.

You can work out what will most freak out any shopkeeper.

But that they will own.

But they will own.

Yeah, yeah.

I was just looking at money, times when money's been abolished.

Do you know the only country to abolish money?

Oh, I'm going to say Bhutan.

Oh, I have some boots of these coins.

Okay, I'd like to change my stress

to

let's say a communist one.

Yeah.

Cuba.

No.

Angola.

You've got the right, Annie's got the right first letter.

It's definitely less utopian than Bhutan.

Colombia.

Well, it's, I'm just going to tell you.

Same number of syllables.

It begins with C.

Yep.

Begins with C.

Full syllables.

Oh, no.

It's.

Yep.

Same number of syllables.

Four syllables.

Four syllables.

Cambodia.

Very good.

Under the Khmers, was it?

Cambodia, under the Khmers, Pol Pot,

who

decided to ban money in 1975 when he came into power, and within three weeks there was a new currency But then he decided he didn't want the new currency so he blew up the central bank.

I mean, I don't obviously he did some absolutely appalling things alongside this

But yeah, blew up the central bank and money flooded through the streets and people were using it because Cambodia was in a terrible state by that point because of them we were burning money for fire

because it didn't exist when I was in Cambodia which admittedly was quite a while ago you would really just buy stuff in dollars yeah same

Yeah.

Do you know the commonest denomination of US dollars?

One dollar.

It must be one dollar.

Used to be.

In 2016, it was replaced.

It's now the second most common.

I'm going to go all the way all the way.

The $1,000.

I'm going to go in the middle.

The $7.

Andy, you've gone too far into the realms of unreality.

Okay, so $100.

It's got to be a $100.

It's $100.

It's the $100 banknote.

Isn't that insane?

$100 bills make up almost 80% of the value of dollars worldwide, and they are now the most commonly circulated bill.

And it's almost all held outside of the US.

It's a lot of crime, though, isn't it?

It's a lot of crime.

It's a lot of smart fraudsters and drug money because it's large amounts of value in a relatively small

country.

It's finicky to do that in $1 bills if you're paying for

800 kilos of cocaine and you're at the counter and the guy in front of you is paying in once.

It's annoying.

James just sitting there happily.

You take your time, buddy.

It's all right.

I'm going to be buying the stuff he has behind the counter.

okay it is time for fact number three and that is james okay my fact this week is that the 2023 nobel prize for chemistry was won for discovering something that has been used in stained glass window making for a thousand years

glass it was whoa just

a very late award we didn't know where it came from no we didn't know no one knew what glass was and then they were like oh it's in all those windows as well.

No, it wasn't that.

It was quantum dots.

It was won by Maungi G.

Bowendi, Lewis E.

Bruce, and Alexei I.

Ekimov.

And they discovered quantum dots, which are tiny, tiny particles.

You fire...

light into them and depending on their size they re-emit light of a different color.

It's all due to this thing we call science.

Tell me about that.

Quantum science at at that we don't need to really go into all that stuff today um but scientists have looked at glass back from the 10th century and found tiny bits of gold tiny bits of silver and they act in the same way that quantum dots act when the sunlight comes in they enhance the red light and enhance the yellow light and it's and it's the size of the it's the size of the dot yeah which are only they're a few nanometers across and the bigger ones emit a different color when light is fired at them than the smaller ones is basically i quite like it.

It took quite a long time for me to understand it.

But there was a really good explanation in the article you sent, James, by the American Chemical Society's president, Judith

Gordon.

G-I-O-R-N-G.

Ironically, pronouncing her name is more difficult than

Judith Jordan.

And she says to think of it like a little box.

So basically, the particle is the box, and you have the electrons bashing off the sides of the walls of the box on the inside.

But when you've got a big box, it's going to take longer for the electrons to bash into the size.

When the particle is shrunk down, the electrons are bashing quicker and quicker, and that's where it's emitting the different color, basically.

So it's to do with the size of the box and the electrons smashing into the sides.

It is hard.

It's hard to understand.

Yeah.

The thing is, they glow.

They're very exciting because they glow and they're very colorful.

And the reason they've won the Nobel Prize is because they've basically made television a bit better.

As far as I can tell.

We're going to have cool quantum tellies.

Q LEDs.

Q LEDs.

And it's the same principle as a normal LED TV, which is that light is shone from behind onto the dots, they glow in different colours, and you're watching your show, and you don't really need to think about it.

But like, if you think about an old computer screen or something, you could only really get like blue and yellow and magenta, like a printer.

You only get those colours, and to make any other colour, you have to mix them up in different amounts, and you will be able to get a certain number of colours.

But these Q LEDs can show you way more colours, more colours than you can possibly imagine.

Yes, yes, like teal.

Wow, I can't imagine

incredible.

Yeah, and mauve

juice.

Oh,

and we should just say, in defense of the Nobel Prize-winning scientists, that they are used for other things as well.

They're going to hopefully revolutionize the world of medicine because you're going to be able to spot the colors on the inside of the body.

So they're going to be used for diagnosing certain bits of the body.

Yeah.

What do you mean?

I don't know if you've explained that the right way.

Spot the colours on the inside of the body.

You said you mean send markers into the body that can identify gels by glass you've got a green liver you've got an orange pancreas

it's delivered

to leave to highlight spots where you need to monitor and make sure that things and that's the opening application of it just on nanotechnology and medicine and this is another cool use of nanotech this is nano shells so these are hollow gold or silver spheres wrapped around silica okay so i think they are hollow but they're kind of two layers okay like a ferrero rocher but small but so small that you could eat lots and it wouldn't matter.

So if you fire light at these nano shells, they heat up massively because they're made of gold and silver, right?

So the idea is if you have someone who's got cancer, you can inject the tumor with these nano shells, then you fire infrared light.

Now the light passes through the water in your cells because

the water in your cells doesn't absorb much infrared light.

These nano shells absorb huge amounts of infrared light.

They heat up massively and it kills the tumor off.

Right.

So if you can, yeah, and they're experimenting at the moment on raw chicken.

But the hope is that it'll make the leap from raw chicken to people.

It's a really clever idea.

Are they basically cooking chicken by putting these nano dots inside it?

Effectively, yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah.

That's clever.

Very cool.

That's really good.

That's a good idea.

Quicker cooking and better tellies.

When Ekimov first came up with the idea of quantum dots, he was working at the Vaviliov State Optical Institute in Soviet Russia, and he had got these special glass objects, semiconductor glass objects, known as shot glasses.

Sorry.

Isn't that cool?

They were known as shot glasses and they were lots of different colors and he developed the theories to explain their colour.

And the interesting thing about those shot glasses is they were made by a company founded by Otto Schott.

Okay, and that company still exists and they made 90% of the first 1 billion COVID vaccine bottles.

Wow.

So 90% of the first first billion COVID vaccines were delivered in shot glasses.

Lovely.

Beautiful.

That's great.

That's so funny.

Ekimov, who you mentioned, as you say, he was in the Soviet Union in 1981 when he became, in fact, the first person, I think, to generate these quantum dots and to identify them and learn how to generate them.

But it's just one of those amazing things.

It's so weird how often you read about this, I guess, when we do what we do.

Things happening simultaneously.

It just shows how predictable a path humans are on, I think.

Because

is it Bruce?

Do you pronounce it?

Do you know?

That's how I pronounced it.

Cool.

It could be Brue.

Brew, okay.

Fancier Brew?

Fancy a Bru in your shot glass.

Is that Scottish?

Scale?

Dunno.

At exactly the same time in America, Louis Bruce was working on the similar thing, and he came up with it pretty much a year later, I think.

And the interesting thing was, I hadn't realised that the Soviet Union, if you did science there at the time, it basically didn't get anywhere because you had to publish it in extremely obscure journals that no Western scientists were really reading because it was all thought was a bit bad.

And in Russian as well.

And in Russian, which, you know, a lot of us can't read.

And so Bruce, a year or two later, read this thing in a journal.

And good on him, he read it and was like, oh, that guy's done the thing I did a bit before me.

So got in touch with him, wrote him a letter to say, shall we hook up?

Oh, very.

What?

That's wow.

Then they had a beautiful romance blossom.

Amungi Bawedi, who was the third person who won this Nobel Prize, failed his first chemistry test at Harvard.

And he was specifically the chemist who came on board to sort of make what the other two had discovered become practically applicable.

And yeah, he did a speech recently saying he failed the chemistry test and actually got the worst grade in his whole class and said that could have destroyed me, but I decided that it wouldn't.

And

it was a chill.

It decided that it wouldn't.

I decided.

And that's the lesson.

Good luck, guys.

There was like,

there's a book about archery, about the best way to be an archer, like a really old one.

And the first line is, first, decide to succeed.

Wow.

That's so good.

That's awesome.

I really like that these three winners, by the way, they all advanced it in a slightly different way, each brought something new to it.

And I do like that the Nobel Prize system works like that, that it's not just the person who's found the application to the thing, it's the person who identified it.

It's like, it's like giving a goal score in football, not only to the person who's kicked or headed the ball in but to the assist yeah and then even to someone who passed it to the assist well the whole the whole team the whole team gets that goal that's it actually football does work like that because goals are not given to individual players

you're schooling me on football but it's increasingly you do find out who the assist was for every goal yeah and when you yeah and

when they talk about let's say you know mbappe's done whatever he's done this season they'll say he's got this many goals and this many assists and they will mention it each time yes and I think it kind of began from fancy football because you get points to how many goals your player scored, but they wanted to give points to the people who were creating the goals, and they get really good.

Really?

Wow, I've forgotten that it wasn't always like that.

Definitely not, yeah.

The Nobel Prize for Medicine this year, uh, or last year in 2023, was given to Catalin Caraco and Drew Weissman

for some mRNA vaccine stuff for COVID.

But they had their initial manuscript rejected by nature and by science.

No way.

And they were rejected in nature.

What do you mean by the journals?

Nature and science.

Also, God and man have rejected

your work.

Yeah.

So Nature, the journal, rejected it within 24 hours.

And so they didn't even send it to any reviewers or whatever.

They just got the letter through the post about this is shit and just threw it away.

What did you say it was for?

It was for mRNA.

It was for developing more effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

I just, I really worry about sort of Trump listening to this and going, see, I told you, nature and science agree with me.

But what it was is that they didn't think that it was a big enough advancement.

They thought they were just kind of repeating old, you know, things that people had already said, but actually, later on, they realized that it was actually a big, big advancement.

The 2023 Nobel Prize for Physics, which was won by Pierre Agostini, Ferench, Krauss, and Anne Jullier, is a way of measuring things with atosecond pulses of light.

An atosecond is even shorter than a nanosecond.

It's an extremely, extremely short amount of time.

In fact, it's one quintillionth of a second.

And if you wanted to have a quick meeting with every insect on Earth, but had to complete all the meetings in one second, then each insect would get an atosecond of your time.

Food for thought.

And they managed to make these pulses of light, each one an atosecond in length.

And that means that if you think about

a movie, it has however many frames per second.

If you can make one every atosecond, then suddenly you can see things that are happening almost instantaneously.

I just find that when I'm watching films, and I don't mean to denigrate these people, but I find the colours fine and the speed at which I see things happening is fine.

You're still confused about the plot 10 minutes in.

It doesn't matter.

I'm sorry, I should say that this atosecond stuff will not be used to fill the next born identity.

It means that you can see photosynthesis happening in real time.

Hang on, are you saying it also won't be used to give lots of insects performance reviews?

None of that.

What is the point then?

I don't need to see photosynthesis happening in real time.

I'm sure it's really useful.

Well, Anne Lee Lier said that basic research is very important because you never know what applications will be found in 50 years' time.

We don't know what they will be, but something, this kind of technology, will change our lives, but we don't know how yet.

We'll be kicking ourselves when the ninth born film is filmed using this method.

You can see him punch the guy as it happens rather than slightly after it happens.

But can we address the heated debate on nano?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, great.

Yeah.

So, this is nanotechnology.

This was all sort of the birth of nanotechnology.

How do you spell it?

N-A-N-O.

Na-no.

Sometimes yes, and sometimes no.

I got really into this etymology.

Sometimes no and sometimes nah.

So it first appeared in biology as nano with a double N, 1909.

This is niche.

I've never seen it spelled with double N.

N-A-N-N-O.

Yes.

Or N-N-A-N-O.

No, no.

I think you know the answer to that question.

All right.

So the reason you haven't seen it is because it was used in zoology and it was in biology, it is used with a double N.

It's much rarer in biology and it just meant very small and it's because nano in Greek meant dwarf.

So nanobacteria, nanoplankton, that it just became a tiny thing to mean tiny.

And physics took it on, but there's a rule in physics which I didn't know about, which is very niche, but very exciting, which is that if something is a multiple of something, so let's say you've got a meter.

If you're saying a thousand meters, what's that?

Kilometre.

Kilometers.

A kilometre.

And that you use the Greek.

So kilometre, kilos from Greek.

If it's a submultiple, a factor, like a thousandth of a meter, what do we say?

Milli.

Because if it's a sub-multiple, exactly, we use the Latin.

What?

So they shouldn't have used the double N in nano because that was the Greek.

Oh my gosh.

The Latin for dwarf uses a single N, nanus, and so the physicists who were adhering to convention changed it to a single N.

Aren't you delighted to know that?

No other podcast is blowing shit wide open like this.

Anna, I'm so sorry.

I actually heard that fact on Shagged Shagged Married Anoid last night.

But it was Shag Married Anoid with only one M

because

that'll be my spin-off.

Shag Married Anode, the batteries podcast.

Yeah.

Beautiful.

That's your spin-off.

There we go.

Shag married Adodoid, which is mine about my cytostrophilus.

Shag married Anodyne for Dan.

Ow, no, that's me.

You're lucky I don't know what that word means.

It's another word for wife wife guy.

Shank Mary's really happy.

Love my wife.

Make love, marriage.

Marry, then make love.

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

My fact this week is that right at the southernmost point of Sweden, you will find a statue of Umer Thurman's naked granny.

I'm going to say,

as a guess, that it will not be her when she was a granny.

It might have been her in an earlier life.

You would say that in the correct way, yes.

I'm like that.

Yeah, she was a model.

Her grandmother was a model called Bergit Honquist.

And the sculptor who wanted to make the statue hired her as a model.

And it's positioned right on this little seaside port in this town, which is called Smigerhoek,

outside of

Trelleborgs.

Basically, if you go past the nude Granny statue, you are leaving Sweden.

No, I don't, I'm not sure.

It's a nice statue.

It's a beautiful statue, you know.

Full naked.

She has no fig leaf or anything.

Look.

Good on her.

No.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Wow.

Do we know anything else about this woman?

Are there statues all over the world of her?

Or was she just that and then gone?

No,

you know, she was a model, but really the Furman family, like, they're all such fascinating statues.

I reckon it started with these guys.

Yeah.

So she was a great Swedish beauty, but not from like an extremely rich family or anything like that.

But she married a Westphalian baron called Carl von Schleibrugge.

Lovely.

And Carl von Schleibrugge had a monocle.

He was a baron.

Of course he did.

He was briefly jailed by the Nazis for refusing to denounce his business partners who were Jewish.

And Bridget used her Swedish nationality to kind of say, oh, look, he's Swedish as well.

He needs to come out.

he needs to come out.

And they managed to get him out of prison.

And then they moved off to, I think they went to Mexico or China or something like that, away from the war.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And yeah, that was basically the start of the dynasty.

Basically, they fled Nazi Germany at what is now clearly the most socially acceptable time to have done that, which is in the 1930s rather than in 1945, halfway through, and moved to Central South America at the, yeah, yeah.

You've got to specify, don't you?

Oh, I moved to South America from Nazi Germany.

When?

Yeah.

Because actually there was another German living in Mexico at the same time with a very very similar name who was a Nazi spy

and some people on the internet think it's the same person but I'm pretty sure it isn't the same person von Schleibruggers that's I'm also pretty sure that Mexico isn't South America by the way in case someone complains

Central America

what

then what's Canada

sorry great point great point great point great point sorry sorry to all uh do we have listeners in Mexico?

I don't know.

I don't think I've ever had an email from anyone in Mexico.

Okay, if you're in Mexico, yeah, right in.

Right in, please.

So, okay, that's the Schleibruggers.

Yeah, yeah.

And then Uma Thurman's mum, so their daughter was Nina von Schleierbrugge.

And she, she was also a model, because she was very good looking.

Monocle jeans.

Monocle jeans.

And

she was a model in Manhattan.

And she modeled for...

Dali, Salvador Dali, I think.

Yeah, but yeah, she was wild, wasn't she?

As in the life that she led and the names that come up, so before she married her husband that would lead to Uma and her brothers, she was married very briefly to Timothy Leary, who she was introduced to by Salvador Dali.

So Timothy Leary, for those who don't know him, he led the big push for psychedelics and LSD and counterculture in America in the 60s.

Briefly was correct.

Yeah.

They were married very briefly.

They separated during the honeymoon.

No.

Yeah.

Uh-oh.

Leary said, we had time traveled through a few mythic incarnations, played out magical dramas in panoramic realms.

Now we would have to rise to that most complex human art, gentle separation.

Right.

Yeah, I'd leave him too, actually.

That's how he's describing.

And she met, she met her then next husband, Uma's dad, while she was at a house trying to get Leary to sign the divorce papers.

So he was there for other reasons, trying to get Leary to do something.

Well, I read that Robert Thurman, who was Uma Thurman's dad, obviously, was only present at that house where Nina was trying to persuade him to sign the papers.

He was there trying to stop Leary taking so many drugs.

How did that go?

I don't know.

I'm not very well.

That's funny.

Leary's the guy who coined the phrase tune in, turn on, drop out.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah.

So he's

big counterculture guy.

But then Robert Thurman is even more interesting than Timothy Leary.

He's kind of an Indiana Jones-style scholar of Buddhism.

And he's very cool.

He seems to be one of the people who made Buddhism cool in the 20th century, really.

Kind of one of the leading popularizers of it in the US.

So he seemed to have a revelation in 1961 when he was changing a flat tire, and he said the tire iron flicked up into his eye.

And he went into a coma for three days.

So it must have flicked up quite hard.

He woke up and he'd lost an eye.

But as he says, he lost one eye, but gained a thousand more, as he put it.

And that's when he gave up.

Surgery as he.

yeah,

I think the uh the surgeon was on LSD at the time,

Dr.

Leary, not you.

He gave it, he was a bit of a playboy and he gave up his whole playboy lifestyle, hitchhiked to India, and thought, I really want to become a Buddhist monk.

That's kind of what the Buddha did, though.

The Buddha was a sort of Playboy prince, wasn't he?

But Thurman supposedly became the first American to become officially a Buddhist monk, like to be recognized as one.

Yeah, do you know how long he lasted?

How long?

I think less than a year.

Hello, go.

He met this Lama.

So he flew back from India to America, met this Lama, and was like, I've been in India and I'm desperate to become a Buddhist monk.

I'm going to be amazing at it.

The Lama kept saying, I'm looking at your karma and you don't have monk in you.

I promise.

You've got great things destined.

You haven't got llama karma.

You haven't got llama karma.

That's what he said.

But Robert kept on saying, no, I really want to do it.

So eventually the Lama took him to meet the Dalai Lama, the big Lama, as he's otherwise.

Boss Lama.

Boss Lama, yeah, boss level.

Um, who did ordain him as a monk?

And literally, within 18 months, um, he resigned.

Why?

Why?

The monk lifestyle he decided wasn't for him.

Yeah,

he's still leading, he's still massive.

He's still leading the movement.

The Dalai Lama was very like, Yeah, cool, good move, mate.

Best mate.

Yes, he and the Dalai Lama are very close.

And he's the president of Tibet House US, which is the main Tibetan organization in the USA.

So they have a bet with each other to see if they can both live until the year 2048.

Always getting closer.

Do you know how old that would make them both?

Because I think he's in.

Robert Thurman is in his 80s.

Is he?

One of them will be 107.

I think maybe Thurman.

Is it what happened?

They said, are you going to live until this date?

And he said, yeah.

And he said, want to bet?

He said, yes, I do.

And then Xi Jinping said, well, tough.

That is too good.

Uma Thurman sounds like the least interesting member of her own family.

I presume she was a relatively interesting person, but all these antecedents are so interesting.

Yeah, they're awesome.

So James, just on the topic of Uma Thurman, you have been watching her entire

entire output of movies, right?

Yeah.

But I only started two days ago, so I've watched Kill Bill 1 and Kill Bill 2.

Right.

Has any of you seen Even Cowgirls Get the Blues?

No.

Oh, I bet that's, I mean, it's based on an amazing book by...

Have you read it?

No, no, I have it at home.

It's the kind of book you would have read at the end Tom Robbins.

Yeah, very good, very good.

No, it's apparently in a very bad film.

Okay.

But I just love the concept.

It's just about a woman with unusually long thumbs.

Really?

That's it called?

It's called Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

So it's a Numa Thurman film, sorry.

So Numa Thurman film, she plays this girl with very long thumbs.

That's interesting.

She doesn't have long thumbs in real life, I don't think.

So I think she might have had to wear prosthetic thumbs.

No, she doesn't have feet.

She has big feet.

She's got massive feet.

That's why she's in all of, what's his name?

Who does those films?

Tarantino.

Tarantino.

Yeah, because he likes feet, doesn't he?

Does he?

Because there's lots of shots of her feet in these two movies, I can say that.

She has size 11 feet.

Yeah, and that's American.

What's that in Old Money?

12, I don't know.

10.

Yeah, it's one either side.

Yeah, it's one either side.

Well, that's big either one.

That's very big agree.

She can't have size 12 feet.

No, it's got to be 10.

But 10 would be very big.

It's still a good fact.

You don't need to write it and tell us, by the way, we will have been able to Google the conversions after you've got to go to the next one.

Oh, no, don't write.

Do not waste your time.

Oh, God, don't waste your time.

I don't want to wake up to 15 emails about all subject-line Uberman feet pics.

I don't want that.

If you're in Mexico, then tell us what size 10 is in your country.

And also, which America are you really in?

Oh, dear.

Do you want to hear about another very attractive Swedish woman who was turned into a statue?

Okay.

Okay.

Or not turned into, the model for her.

Can we guess?

Absolutely not.

Bridget Bardot.

No, she's not a famous one.

Rika Johnson.

She's still quite famous, I'd say.

Oh, yeah.

Just feel like you're not being listened to her name.

No, no, no, no, no.

This is Pitt Karen Eyre's daughter okay oh she was a swedish uh young woman she was incredibly beautiful she's just the whole story about her is just there was this she was a milkmaid and the whole story is basically she was just so fit um so she went to stockholm to work for a year and um basically no one could believe how attractive this milkmaid was and this is and the bar is high in sweden as well don't forget that's not like being the most attractive person in

wow

why would you name

that place out bleep that place name name out.

That was...

Bleep it out.

No one will ever know the place name.

Sorry, she was the most attractive person in the world.

She was just so she was just so fit, basically, that everyone.

We get it.

She's hot.

But the stories are like the crown prince visitor incognito to ask for some milk because he just wanted to look at this mugwitch.

And he forgot to bring a container.

So she gave him a sort of scolding.

With hot milk.

Not a scolding, sorry.

A scolding.

She created traffic jams because she was so beautiful.

People were doing a go-slow as they went past.

Or was that just James not moving with his horse and cart?

Yeah.

And there's a statue of her in Sweden now.

And I think part of the reason she was apparently so beautiful was that she hadn't had smallpox.

Oh, okay.

So her bar was slightly lower.

Yes, she had had cowpox.

And she was accused actually of having sold more than just milk.

Yes, you know what I mean.

But that's very tricky.

Yeah.

Milkshake.

Actually, she hadn't been selling any.

She hadn't been selling.

Any of her milkshake?

Right.

Yeah, she'd been selling milk and she was just kidding.

Her milkshake brought the king to the yard.

Yeah.

And he's like, do you have a spare bowl?

What's the most famous statue in Scandinavia?

Do you have the answer?

Yeah.

The pagan mermaid?

The mermaid?

The little mermaid, yeah.

Probably an advert for Carlsberg.

No.

Yeah.

It was commissioned by the founder of Carlsberg, Jakob Christian Carlsberg.

And he basically said, well, you know, I've got the best beer in the country, so I'm going to do this nice little statue for everyone to see.

And when they see it, they'll remember me and remember my beer.

Oh, dear.

That's fucked up, isn't it?

Because it's one of those adverts which is very memorable, but you've got no idea what it was for.

Yeah, yeah.

It's probably the best man-made statue in the world.

Yeah, very good.

He hired a sculpture called Edvard Erikson to create it, and he hired a ballerina called Ellen Price, who was very, very famous in Sweden at the time, to model for it.

But she was unwilling to get naked.

And so the face is hers, and the body is Mr.

Erikson's wife.

Really?

Wow.

What about the tail?

That's his wife.

Oh, that's his wife.

I've just got one more celebrity grandparent, in fact.

Oh, yeah.

Drew Barrymore's grandfather's corpse was stolen.

So this is John Barrymore, who was a very famous actor.

John's 1922 Hamlet, which you probably remember, was the greatest Hamlet maybe ever.

Yeah, that was a good one.

It really was.

He was a famous actor.

He was ruined by alcoholism and died in 1942, relatively young.

His mates were people like Errol Flynn, and Errol Flynn wrote in his memoir that after Barrymore died, their friend got his body, obtained his body, and hid it for Errol Flynn to find to freak him out.

So propped him up in a chair and then they spent the night playing poker with it.

Is that what Weekend at Bernie's is based on?

Do you know what?

I think largely it is because it was not only Errol Flynn, it was David Niven and I want to say Orson Welles, someone in that territory of

them.

There was a group of them.

I think it is because I haven't really heard of any of those people and I've never seen Weekend at Bernie's.

I'm not really sure what happens in it, but I still kind of knew that fact.

Wait, so it's Weekend at Bernie's about them playing

keeping a dead body.

Their buddy dies and they need to keep a holiday going.

And so they string him up and they use his dead body.

Yeah.

There we go.

That's sort of what they did, except just to have a fun game of poker with him.

Wow.

Confirmed by Drew Barrymore in 2020.

That's right.

Good lord.

Yeah, that's pretty cool.

If I die.

Yeah.

Please don't do that.

Don't do another podcast.

What do you want us to do with your dead body then?

Should we could prop it up and do something fun?

Collect prop it up and collect some moths with you.

Yeah, lovely.

Or the acid thing.

Let's just burn you.

Jesus Christ.

wow what a dark turn this podcast took at the end

it's time to go to our group therapy session now and just shoot that over

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 be found on our various social media accounts i'm on Instagram on at Schreiberland.

James.

My Twitter is at James Harkin.

Andy.

Mine is at Andrew Hunter Ebb.

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

You can get us on Twitter on at no such thing or on Instagram at no such thing as a fish or you can email podcast at qi.com.

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

All the previous episodes are up there, as well as a link into the portal that will get you to Club Fish, our private members club, where we post lots of bonus episodes and lots of fun things go up there.

So do check that out.

Otherwise, come back here next week.

We have another episode coming up.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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