529: No Such Thing As A Badger Love Note

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Toshinsky, 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, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that in 1950s America, flight attendants consulted an alcohol chart of the sky so they knew when they were allowed to serve booze.

Wow.

Yeah.

So is that because it must be because some parts of America you can't drink, but does that Does that mean Colorado goes all the way up to the

top of the universe?

Where does does it end?

Does the ISS, are they not allowed to drink their snuck-up portions of booze that they hide?

Yeah.

This is the 1950s where there were a lot of dry states in America, and that dry ban expanded all the way up to 30,000 feet into the air.

I suppose it makes sense because let's say you lived in a dry county.

Yeah.

And you thought, well, I'm going to get out of this.

I'm going to hire a hot air balloon and I'm just going to float off the ground and drink a load of booze.

It makes sense that they stopped that from happening.

That would be my first thought.

Exactly.

But you you used to be able to go off shore, didn't you?

That's how people will get around it.

But so, this is the issue, is that obviously you're in a plane that's flying over multiple states.

Do all laws apply above all the states?

You know, there's like 12 weird laws, and it's like you're not allowed to kick a horse in Ohio on a Sunday and you're flying over in a plane, and you're like, stop kicking the horse.

Anyone intending to marry a second wife is now allowed for the next 30 minutes.

Was it the case that you'd have to say, quickly down it, we're about to hit Pennsylvania.

It's really odd.

What I couldn't find was if it's the sale of alcohol, because they used to sell the alcohol on board or whether or not.

So exactly, we're approaching Pennsylvania.

Quick, everyone.

Yes, go, skirt, scroll.

And the way that it was done is the flight attendants would look out the windows for monuments, so they'd be like, oh, okay, we're coming up to that now.

Yeah, yeah.

There were so many restrictions.

You're in Pennsylvania from the air.

Well, just to say this, surely the pilot had a better way of knowing where they were going than mushing down and saying, look, there's a church that I recognize.

Remember back in the 50s with mail delivery, they just had big arrows on the ground.

Concrete arrows, yeah, to point out.

Yeah, I know.

Having been in a helicopter with my wife flying, it's only a small helicopter.

So we don't have that much instruments and stuff, but you do.

Like, you have a map and it's like, there's a golf course here.

And you're like, my wife's like, can you check there's a golf course on the left-hand side?

Yes, there is.

Okay, we're going in the right direction.

Unfortunately, you always get lost because you're only looking for the next golf course, Jones.

But it wasn't just that.

The attendant would have to know, is this state allowing drinking on a Sunday or an election day?

What are the hour restrictions?

Because sometimes they're just restricted for certain hours.

So yeah, are certain holidays that are being celebrated there?

Are we allowed to drink then or not?

So question.

Yeah.

There are still dry states in America.

Why do they not do this anymore?

I guess maybe they've realized

it was weird being a Air Stewardess in the 1950s, wasn't it?

Sorry, the fact that I paused at Air Stewardess does remind me how weird it also is that I still think of air stewardess as the terminology, even though it stopped being the term in the 70s.

Yeah, before you were born, in fact.

Way before I was born.

Wait, I just want to emphasise way before I was born.

Does everyone else do that?

I've gone through, I cycle through them in my head, you know.

Like hostess, stewardess, trolley dolly.

I actually don't even, I don't even think trolley dolly anymore, I'd like to point out.

Yeah.

It's so woe, candy.

I think we can call them flight attendants, can we?

Well, it was weird being a flight attendant in the 1950s, and

it was explicitly just for women.

I hadn't quite realised how all flights in America, pretty much all airlines, stated men need not apply to the extent that there was a completely transformative lawsuit in 1971, which was brought by a man who wanted to be a flight attendant, a guy called Celio Diaz.

And they had a witness for the airline who was a guy called Eric Byrne, a psychiatrist, and he testified that a flight attendant who was male would make passengers really uncomfortable.

And he said, you know, because you'll be effeminate.

And he said, it'll make male passengers uneasy as it might arouse feelings in him he would rather not have aroused.

Oh, there are definitely some states in America that you wouldn't be able to do that.

Well, indeed.

How interesting.

And we've said before, I think, that the reason that they were women to start off with is because they were nurses.

Yeah, Ellen Church was

she wanted to become a pilot.

They said you can't.

She made a case of saying, what if then you need a nurse on board?

And while I'm there, I can serve some drinks,

I can refuel the plane.

Just like a bigger one.

But her biggest argument, I think, was that she said, if you have a woman on board, you're not going to have scared passengers because the men will be too afraid to admit that they're scared when there's a woman who's not scared on board.

That was her pitch.

And I think before that, it was children, basically, right?

It was teenagers.

And again, it's like, you know, if the teenager's not scared, then we probably won't be scared.

That's good logic.

I think that would work for me.

Teenagers famously have no sense of risk.

They have absolutely no clue whether something is harmful or dangerous behavior.

That's true.

Maybe it's more like the protective instinct.

You can't show you're afraid in front of a teenager because you're the grown-up in the room.

To be honest, one of the main reasons they were teenagers is because teenagers were a bit smaller than adults.

I'm talking now about the 1920s.

There was an airline called Daimler Airway, which went from Manchester to London in a biplane which could carry nine passengers.

But this was a route you could take, and they had these cabin boys whose job was to hand out hot water bottles and earplugs and reassure you during the flight, saying, Don't worry, it's supposed to be falling apart.

It's the early days of flying.

In 50 years, if it makes you feel better, this will be totally safe.

I should just finish what I was saying about the guy who brought the lawsuit to say that in 1971, four years after he brought it, it was ruled that airlines could not discriminate against men.

And it obviously also was a very homophobic thing.

So we think of the flight attendance rules as being sexist, but it was also really homophobic.

The idea was that these men would be effeminate and they'd be arousing homosexual feelings in other men that they didn't want to have.

And yeah, 1971, you weren't allowed to do that.

Sadly, this poor guy who brought the lawsuit was at that point too old to become an air steward.

Oh, so it was aegist as well.

It was aegist and he was hit 35, yes.

And women, we should also specify, were employed at first as nurses, but the reason that they employed only women after that was because they were fit and they wanted the male passengers to be attracted to them.

It was and it's really interesting.

Like until 1978 in America, if you took a plane from, let's say, Detroit to Chicago, you had to charge a certain amount no matter what.

Do you mean ticket price?

Sorry.

Ticket price, yeah.

Exactly.

So it was all dependent on the route and it was not dependent on anything else.

And so you had to attract customers.

So what would you do?

You You would make it really attractive.

So you would have like piano bars on your plane.

You would have fillet steaks on your menu.

You would have very attractive cabin crew, stuff like that.

And then in 1978, they increased competition.

Complete race to the bottom.

Cheaper the better.

They got rid of all the frills.

No more pianos on planes.

No more fillet steak.

Hideous stuff at every turn.

Unbelievably ugly stuff.

But what it meant was the race to the bottom meant that a lot of companies went out of business.

So you had much fewer companies who are running those routes, and it meant that the cabin crew had less sort of chance to move between different jobs.

Anyway, that's my rant against capitalism.

Please enjoy my next TED talk.

So you just want Porsche Phillip steaks on your first-class flights?

First-class for everyone.

Yeah.

I remember I was on a flight coming back from Dubai, and we were going through the craziest turbulence I've ever felt.

You guys know I'm a nervous flyer, so that was, I was petrified.

Do you?

Yeah, and someone started screaming in the back, Screaming.

And it screamed.

It kind of.

Is that the echo of your own scream?

We were traveling so fast, sound couldn't keep up with that.

Yeah.

No, this guy was yelling and he was yelling quite a few scary words.

And so we were like, oh my God, is this like a, is this a bombing?

Is it a hijacking?

Poltergeist!

Loneliness.

Yeah, and so everyone's terrified.

Everyone's really scared, but clearly the people know what's going on.

And suddenly, flight attendants were all running to to the back.

Now, it turns out it was a medical emergency.

But my last thought that I always think about this, my last thought that had the plane had blown up in that moment, was that I watched a chef run back, and all I could think was, they have chefs up front?

That's incredible.

That was my final thought.

How did you know he was a chef?

How do you know he was a chef?

He had a giant white.

He saw what was going on, but mum, mum, me!

A huge long mustache.

Yeah, yeah.

Flipping the pancake as he ran.

He was slicing some tribes with a big knife in midair as he ran.

Incredible.

They don't have chefs on planes.

Yes, they do.

Chef is the, but that's a perfect disguise.

He fools you absolutely.

He was an air marshal, but all air marshals these days dress as chefs.

First class, they have chefs.

They do.

Can I tell you about an incident that happened?

This is not a flight I was on, but it is in the great list of air rage incidents on Wikipedia, bro.

1995.

A group of 18 British and Irish tourists got rowdy on a flight from London to Minneapolis.

They started sending their children to steal food and drink from the flight attendants' carts, so they're causing trouble.

What they didn't know is that several wrestlers from the U.S.

Olympic freestyle wrestling team were also on board the flight.

And did they take part, or is it like a doctor?

Are they not allowed to intervene in situations, otherwise, they're liable?

I can't do a triple suplex on this child.

He is my son.

Yeah, they did.

No, they piled in and they helped restrain the rowdy.

They piled in.

They're a real thumbball,

one after the other.

Every 30

He's getting out the train table.

Wait, doctors aren't allowed to intervene?

No, they aren't.

They're not David Attenborough.

Is there a doctor on board?

Yes.

Greg, can you stay where you are?

Can literally anyone else perform surgery?

Attempt CPR.

I mean, I don't know the details, but there's a thing where if you intervene, you feel like you are liable or you could be liable for something.

So obviously they do because they can save someone's life.

But then if something goes wrong, then suddenly they're wearing their doctor's hat.

Yeah.

Good thing they're not wearing their chef's hat.

I was looking at some famous flight attendants.

Kate Middleson's mum, Carol.

Carol Middleton.

Yeah, was a flight attendant.

I'd say famous.

Oh, there was snobbery about her, wasn't there?

A strawberry about her.

Snobbery.

She always keeps a strawberry about her person.

There was snobbery because they called her Dawson to manual or something, which is what you say when the plane lands, don't you?

I didn't know about that, yeah.

Johanna Sigurthadottia, who was Prime Minister of Iceland from 2009 to 2013, and the country's first female PM and the first openly LGBTQ head of government.

She was a flight attendant.

Marina Machete, who was the first transgender winner of Miss Portugal.

Marina Machete?

It's such a great name, isn't it?

Wow, you'd be too scared to take her on.

Another one I was reading about was the first female steward in the Soviet Union called Elsa Garodyetskaya.

And she flew from Moscow to Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, and it took 13 hours and if you went by train it would take 129 hours and 30 minutes.

So the flights are really important in the Soviet Union because these places are so far apart and the best version of this I found was in Kazakhstan.

There was a flight from Almaty to Balkash okay and it was a two-hour flight but if you wanted to go by train it would take 157 hours

because there was no direct train between the two cities.

So you had to go from Kazakhstan from Almaty all the way up to Nobosibirsk in Siberia and all the way back down again.

And it would take about a week.

And we regret to announce there's a five-minute delay for today's journey.

Isn't that amazing?

Wow.

Some flight attendant codes,

codes of language.

So do you know what they say if they find you attractive?

No, and nor do you, I'm to be honest.

As in they say it to you directly.

No, I think.

So it's one of these silly little sort sort of things that gets put into clickbaity articles online.

I'm going back in it already.

No, so, right.

You can either say Bob about someone.

How would you say it?

Like, what's the context?

Best on board.

Yeah, exactly.

When do you sort of shout Bob about the plane?

Why is it so?

You must be saying to your fellow attendants, oh, there's a Bob in

RHEL 13 CB.

Yeah, yeah.

Or as people get off the plane, you say cheerio to them instead of of goodbye.

To you.

Or thank you for flying with us or whatever.

It'll be a word that you say, you know,

toodaloo or something.

Don't take this as gospel and humiliate yourself in front of just a perfectly polite vice attendant whose family marries.

Cheerio, and you just grab them like that guy at the end of World War II.

I have a favourite flight attendant story, a story of honey traps, very topical.

In the 1960s, the KGB was trying to blackmail the Indonesian president, a guy called Ahmed Sukarno.

And the way that the KGB blackmailed him was they had their agents on one of his flights, a private flight, disguise themselves as flight attendants and, you know, serve him drinks and stuff and look sexy.

And they flirted with him to the extent that eventually he invited them to his hotel room when he landed.

And they had a big old orgy, not knowing that the Soviets had hidden a camera behind the mirror in the room and filmed the entire orgy.

And then later on, the Soviets called him to a private cinema and gave him a private showing of himself having an orgy with these flight attendants who were, in fact, agents.

And so, do you know what he did?

Had a wank.

Bad news, there's another camera in the cinema.

Wouldn't be filming that.

And it just kept happening again and again.

He's still there.

That didn't happen, but he did ask for more copies that he could take home to his homeland because he said the people would love him for it.

That's very, I mean, that is funny.

He completely backfired.

Yeah.

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

My fact this week is that a team of ecologists have been studying the health of the oceans by dissecting leftover tins of fish from the 1980s.

All these fish are tads!

Yeah, it's quite

a roundabout way of doing it.

It seems like half of the ocean was made of brine, but the other half was made out of olive oil.

What about the spicy tomato sauce bits?

That was the Mediterranean.

So what, yeah, what's that?

Oh, this is really ingenious.

It's actually been published now.

It's a paper in the Ecology and Evolution Journal, and it's research done by Chelsea Wood and Natalie Mastic, who were looking into the health of marine mammals specifically.

So there's quite a few links in this chain.

They were looking at seals and whales and how their health had been over time.

But to do that, they wanted to know what parasites have been in the ocean, because parasites get into salmon and cause disease in salmon.

And then seals and whales eat salmon.

And then you know what kind of diseases seals and whales would have been getting because these parasites will give them certain diseases.

Okay.

So how do they find out what parasites were in the ocean 40 years ago?

Well they didn't know and then suddenly out of the blue they got a call from a seafood products association in Seattle saying they were cleaning out their basement, had loads of long expired tins of salmon.

Did she want them?

And she said that's actually a great idea.

Yeah, let's do it.

Does it work?

It worked.

They looked inside tins of salmon.

So can I just say, so this was 40 years ago, so just before you were born, Anna?

Just ages before I was born, yeah.

Ages before you were born.

But does that mean that anyone eating salmon 40 years ago might have had parasites in their salmon?

None of the parasites when they opened the cans were alive, nor would they have been alive once they'd been canned.

So they burrow into salmon's muscle.

They're right inside these muscle pockets.

And they said they could pick through the tinned muscle tissue with forceps and see the worms like spring out of their muscles.

What?

That's disgusting.

That's so disgusting.

So if I eat salmon,

that's not happening today, is it?

Yeah,

what?

You're going to get a magnifying glass on it.

Salmon do have a lot of problems with, especially the farmed ones, because they're in such a tight proximity to each other.

Sorry, I'm really putting you off here.

But they're so close that they get more, obviously they get more light.

But I've never seen worms in salmon.

Yeah, they're there.

You've got to maybe get a magnifying glass to them.

Oh, don't put a magnifying glass on anything.

It's the basic rule of food.

You have to be so off-put by whatever you see.

So the cans ranged from

expired cans from 1979 to 2021.

And they were literally able to plot the health can by can, year by year.

The parasite thing, I just found that really interesting.

I don't fully understand the science of it, but basically the parasite in order to reproduce, it needed to be eaten by something that then is eaten.

So it's eaten by krill.

The krill is then eaten by salmon.

The salmon is then eaten by a marine mammal.

And once it gets to the mammal, that's when it can reproduce and put its stuff back out.

And the cycle starts again.

So are you saying that these parasites don't survive unless they end up in a mammal?

Exactly.

They can't reproduce.

It's like the old woman who swallows a fly, but at the end a giant fly bursts out of the horse.

It's sort of that disgusting.

Wouldn't make such an appealing children's book, but yeah.

Tin food.

We have briefly mentioned Nicolas Apair,

who

discovered it.

There was a big competition in France to find a way of preserving food so that Napoleon could basically feed his armies overseas and at long distances.

And it took 15 years and he won it.

What we didn't say, I love this.

He originally used ceramic containers sealed with cork, but he's basically the father of canned food.

The process was called,

he was called Nicolas Apper, it was called appaertising.

Smelling is good.

It's appetizing.

It's good branding.

Yeah.

Is it a pun or is that there's no correlation?

It doesn't work in French.

Exactly.

His name is Apper and it's appetizing.

An accidental pun.

Isn't that mad?

Worst.

Best type.

He was so convinced about his work.

He published a book about it in 1810.

He was so confident about it, he attached a small note to every copy with his address on it.

So you could turn up at his house.

That's a great idea.

Andy, have you considered that for your novel?

For anyone who doesn't like it.

Yeah, absolutely.

I will do anything.

But his thing didn't really work that well, did it?

Oh, it didn't look.

No, all the chars exploded.

Oh.

Some of the chars.

Come on, it didn't all explode.

Yeah, no.

What happens is you heat up the food so that it kills all the bacteria and stuff.

But if you don't do it well enough, the bacteria will create gases and the gases will get more and more and more and eventually bang.

It's quite exciting opening the pantry, isn't it?

Every day

you have to wear face masks.

I quite like that the original tins were champagne bottles

because the first thing that he canned stuff in was empty champagne bottles.

Really?

Yeah.

And he, and they were champagne bottles corked with cheese.

What a disgusting image of the cork pops and just this foaming cheese comes back in.

Like it's cheese and wine together at last.

Yeah, yeah.

Only a French inventor would have come up with the empty chaméed bottles.

How the hell do you shove a whole duck into a champagne bottle?

Well, I'm delighted that you've asked.

He found this a bit of a problem at first.

He found, surprising enough, they weren't wide enough to fit a lot of foods in them, but he doctored them so that they cut off the top so that it widened the neck.

And then, yeah, stuffed it with cheese and lime wrapped in cloth to cork it.

I assume it's lime as in the quick lime, yeah.

Sorry, yeah.

Not just a squeeze of lime, just a squeeze.

But then it was a guy called Philip de Girard who came up with the tin can, which is closer to what we have today.

He was also French, but he actually sold it to the British.

He gave the patent to a guy called Peter Durand.

And Peter Durand.

Who also sounds French,

yes, he does.

Yeah, but he was Durand.

Yeah.

Durand.

There you go.

And basically became became part of the British Army, then started using the tins.

And actually, at the Battle of Waterloo, the British Army had loads of these French tins, which must have seemed a bit odd.

It's so weird that he was the frontman, Peter Durand, because he was completely the front man.

He did not come up with the idea.

It was also that Girard could get his thing through.

One reason because, like, the English didn't trust the French.

So, if a Frenchman came over with these tins of food and said, hey, everyone, buy these, no one would believe him because he was French.

Yeah, yeah.

So he needed someone with a French-sounding name.

But then Duran sold the patent after a couple of years to a man who we've, I think we've mentioned it once before, Brian Donkin.

Now that is a solid English name, isn't it?

Brian Donkin.

You don't get more English than that.

But I put a throwback to like 10 years of you constantly going donk, donk, donk, donk.

What was that?

Well, that was just an old music style donk.

Yeah, donk.

Do you not remember that?

Yeah, James would always mention that.

Honestly, like 10 years ago.

It was like a northern music style where it was like

dance music, but it would be like donk, donk, donk, donk, put a donk on it.

You take a normal tune and you put a donk on it.

It was good.

Yeah, it's like a remix.

But I once got Stephen Fry to say put a donk on it on QI as part of a bet.

That's it.

Yeah.

Did he also invent the music, Brian Donkin, or was he just the dunk man?

Donkin invented the donk.

Yeah, yeah, he made a big on that.

No, he, so he was an amazing engineer.

He's from Northumbria.

He was a metal worker.

He had a paper-making machine business.

He patented the first steel pen.

And then he starts making corned beef in his preservatory.

He's just a legend, this guy.

And then in 1813, he presented his beef to the Duke of Kent.

Not a euphemism.

He got a letter back from Four Royals saying the Queen herself had tasted and enjoyed his canned beef again.

And he got the patent.

And he's so popular.

He was so popular.

There is a cove in Chile, which is called Catela Donkin.

Because the crew had loved their Donkin tinned meats.

Where are our Donkin statues now?

Maybe there are some in Northumberland, but I've never, like, he should be a national hero.

Yeah, he's completely forgotten.

There was an amazing BBC article.

It was really, really a long one about his life and canned foods.

But Donkin is a huge part of it.

He's buried in Nunhead Cemetery, which is in South London, and his name is a footnote beneath three other guys, all called Brian Donkin.

You are related to Thames.

You are related to Tonkin.

All the random Donkins in one grave.

It was a mass Donkin grave, wasn't it?

It was called Duncan Donkins.

There's one angry guy trying to kill Brian Donkin, got it wrong three times.

Finally got it right, I know.

He did do lots of other stuff, didn't he?

He worked with Brunel, Brunel's son, on the Thames Tunnel.

He worked on Charles Babbage's computer.

He was multi-talented.

And as John Nutting of the Canned,

it's just a great name.

John Nutting, editor of the Cannes Medical.

Never going to the cinema alone like John Nutting.

Wait, why not?

It's a euphemism for masturbating.

Right.

I just thought it was head-butting someone.

So

that's led to all sorts of confusion in my life.

Anyway, he's editor of the Can Maker magazine.

Either way, we'll get you kicked out of a weather spoon on a Friday night.

The double nutting.

That's really, that's why you're getting arrested.

He's just a big fan of Duncan.

Duncan and Nutting.

He said that lamented that he's forgotten by the wider world, which I always think when people say, can we believe he's lost to history?

I can believe it.

I agree.

He's done an important thing.

He's come up with sort of tin canning or like commercialised the process.

Would you expect for that to be a household name 200 years later?

No, no, no.

I mean,

anyway, nice to dust off the donk.

There's a really old fact on QI that it took 50 years after the invention of the can to invent the can opener.

And I I'm sure we've said that before on this show as well.

I didn't realise that there are actually really good reasons for that.

Firstly, the first process, there were only six cans made an hour.

So, you know, there wasn't the massive amount.

If you invent a tin opener, they're going to open them quicker than you can make them.

Exactly.

It's not worth it.

And secondly, they were made of wrought iron and lined with tin.

They were thick.

No modern can opener would have possibly been able to crack into this.

What was the method back then to get into them?

It was chisel.

Hammer and chisel.

I mean, very few, in my experience, very few modern can openers can open modern cans.

That's a good point.

So modern ones are steel and they're incredibly thin.

But the original ones were just so thick.

I love this.

In 1860s America, shop grocery clerks would open your cans for you to take home.

Yeah.

They would open it in the shop.

You would have your cans open for you.

That's quite nice, actually.

I quite like that with jars.

Yeah.

Like a jar of pickles.

Just go to the person who's scanning the three.

Well, you wouldn't mind losing one.

Slowly walking back along the high street.

Imagine you're in the queue.

Like, there's always so many different reasons that it's going to take ages at at the counter when someone's in front of you and you just see the person who's scanning all the stuff heads off to get a chisel and a hammer and you're like, oh shit.

Cashier after cashier.

Jimmy with the big wrists trying to work with a can swap.

Jimmy big wrists.

Jimmy nutting.

I found out about an invention in can opening that I didn't know about and it was almost 100 years ago.

Wow, so just before you were born.

So

just before I was born.

It's the electric can opener.

did you guys know this was a thing

i own one why have i been struggling away with i would say

plastic thing this is no exaggeration my electric can opener is probably the best thing i've ever bought wow

i think it's it's a genius thing you just put it on you press a button and then it opens the can that's so good invented in 1931 why don't we all have why didn't they all have them by 1932 why don't i have one today i mean it sounds like they are readily available to buy they are you could just go to a shop and buy them well we don't all have James's secret sauces, but

you guys heard it here, but...

I've actually never heard one.

And it does sound like a...

I mean, James has given it the hard style.

Genuinely, I would say it is one of my favourite items in my entire house.

Wow.

Including his wife and child.

The only thing that obviously puts them out of business a little bit at the moment is those ring pull tins that you get.

Like, a lot of them are ring-pull.

So I will deliberately buy tins that don't have the ring pull on so I can use my tin opener.

Well, in the after times,

once the food's run out and everyone has used up all the ring pull cans, you're going to be the king.

Exactly, until the batteries run out.

Oh, yeah, then you're stuffed.

Yeah, yeah.

A glorious two and a half weeks.

I'm the king of the world.

Does it have a manual setting?

Like, can you do it

if the batteries run out?

Yeah, if the batteries run out, you're knackered.

Wow.

Yeah.

You should just pull all the rings off your cans when you buy them.

Yeah, I do ask the person in the shop to do that for me.

Yeah, electric can opener.

It just isn't big.

Does it have to sit on the counter?

Or is it not?

This big.

If it was solar powered.

If it was solar-powered, you could have permanent

car.

I'm afraid.

It's probably not very good for the environment, but

I've found it.

Yeah, yeah.

I find them so useful.

Yeah, that is a lot of fun.

I think that's not a big cost for the environment, frankly.

But I've got solar on my roof, so if you come round, we could form a power couple in the after times.

The original power couple, the opposite of the original, the post-apocalyptic power couple.

He can harness the sun.

He can open your tins.

Right, you're sort of giving yourself the main part in that, aren't you?

So non-tour.

And Dan and Anna, we'll find some jobs for you, you know.

I'm good, thanks.

Can sardines.

This is amazing.

i didn't know this um they have their own kind of connoisseurs and vintage years

so no oh wow if you buy an expensive can of sardines you might prefer to get a 2004 vintage compared to a 2008 vintage incredible right are there people at the restaurant who send them back so this is a 1993

specifically for the 97.

this is corked this is tonned it's absolutely amazing so there are like companies like who i'd never heard of like uh rodel and connotable in france and they sell these sardines and the thing is apparently sardines get better the longer they're in the can up to a certain number of years but what happens is the flesh becomes much smoother and more tender and the bones eventually kind of disappear the tiny bones that you get in your in your sardines eventually it just becomes a mush of sardine and that's the absolute best time to buy them and you get people who just buy them and then just keep them for 10 years until they're exactly the right moment moment and then they'll eat the sardines.

Again, that'll be funny for the prepping.

Don't have that!

That's exactly when the money won't happen.

Yeah, exactly.

We need to keep that another seven years.

And apparently you have to flip the tins.

Every six months or two.

Like a mattress.

Like a mattress.

Just, I don't know.

I think it's so that the oil or whatever gets nicely distributed and

doesn't settle.

This is really interesting, James, because my mum went to Portugal last year and she brought back tin, because Portugal, they're obsessed with canned fish, aren't they?

And they have these really beautiful tins.

And she brought back cans for each of her children, of which I'm one, with our year of birth written on them.

Really?

And mine just said 1986, and I just thought that's a nice design and cracked into it and had it on toast.

But I suspect that was actually a 1986 vintage.

Did it taste better than any other sardis you'd ever eaten?

It was sort of full of crawling maggots.

It was actually delicious, yeah.

Did you just, as we know, your mum would go, oh, what?

Crawling maggots?

We used to eat those every single week.

Exactly.

It's a delicacy.

Also, did you just slip in your birth year to prove that you're not 100 years old?

God damn it.

Cut that out.

Edit it out.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that German writer Christoph Friedrich Nikolai treated his visions of ghosts by applying leeches to his anus.

It really builds that fact, doesn't it?

Did it work?

Yeah.

Yes, it worked.

Of course, it worked.

Okay.

Come on.

Explain yourself.

So he had previously suffered from something that he called a violent giddiness and he was treated by leeches.

And he was kept having these treatments.

And then one time he missed his treatment and he started seeing what he thought was ghosts.

He said, I observed at a distance of 10 paces the figure of a deceased person.

I asked my wife whether she saw it.

She saw nothing, but being much alarmed, sent for the physician.

Okay.

And so then what he did was he decided, he was a bit of a skeptic, a bit of a scientist.

So he decided he would not take any more leeches for a while.

put up with the ghosts and then after a while he would try the leeches and see if it got rid of the ghosts and sure enough a bit later he presented his what he called his memoir on the appearance of specters or phantoms occasioned by disease to the Berlin Academy of Sciences and he said that he applied the leeches to the anus and they went away the ghosts and he concluded that the ghosts originated in my internal consciousness alone a consciousness that was disordered so he was kind of disproving that ghosts existed by saying there was a physical treatment for these ghosts and that means there's no such thing as a ghost it was all in my head yeah and was there a reason he had to apply it to his anus?

Why his anus?

I think it was an easy way to get up blood.

It's easy access, isn't it?

It is.

It's sort of easy access.

I think your hand is even easier access.

No, no, a leech is better than your hand

for getting blood out of Uranus.

I believe that there was like a relatively common place to put leeches in back in the day.

Well,

King George III used to put them on his temples when he was suffering from his bouts of depression and so on.

So

when was this guy?

When was this

Sorry, I should say who Christoph Friedrich Nikolai was.

So this problem that he had was in 1799.

He was German.

He was around at the same time as lots of other German writers that you would know, such as Goethe.

And in fact, he had...

You've listed all the German writers I would know.

I might come to some more.

But he had a big argument with Goethe, actually.

So Goethe wrote a book called The Sorrows of Young Werther, which we have mentioned before, which was about a depressed young man.

And actually, a lot of people copied this young man and dressed like him and committed suicide and stuff.

So it was like a real massive, massive deal in Germany.

And Nikolai wrote The Joys of Jung Werthe, which was kind of a slam on the sorrows of Jung Werthe.

And then Goethe, in response, composed a poem where Nikolai stood next to Werthe's grave and defecates on it.

And

he also put him in Faust.

Not one of his most famous works, works, was it?

Faust is one of his famous works.

It sure is, yeah.

There's very little defecating in Faust, is there?

There isn't, but there is a character called the Proctophantasmus, who was actually Nikolai in disguise

who put leeches on his bum.

And in Faust, Goethe says he is about to sit down in a puddle.

That's the way his soul acts.

And when leeches feast on his rump, he is cured of ghosts and ghouls.

Wow.

I mean, it must have been a big deal at the time.

He's made it it into that.

That's not the only work of fiction that he's made it into.

He also was in a story called Mrs.

Zant and the Ghost, which was written by friend of the podcast, Wilkie Collins.

Really?

And so, and in reference to the hallucinations and so on.

So it must have been the talk of the town.

B.

C.

A.

Hoffman wrote about him.

Schlegel wrote about him.

Not Schlegel.

Schlegel.

You know Schlegel.

I've heard the name.

You know him from the Philosopher's Song.

That's literally what I was about to say.

I was about to say Monty Python's song.

Yeah, he was just as drunk as Schlegel.

But yeah, Schlegel was a linguist, basically, who's a philosopher as well and stuff.

E.T.A.

Hoffman wrote The Nutcracker, I think.

Oh, wow.

That's big names.

So, you know, they are big names who were, as well as writing all these big things, also writing about this guy's rectum.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Tchaikovsky wrote the music to the Nutcracker.

Yeah, yeah, like he wrote the cut.

He wrote the.

Well, Schlegel actually wrote, in response to The Nutcracker, he wrote The Can Opener, which was a very beautiful.

So it was huge leeches for thousands of years, wasn't it?

You hear about

old treatments that come and go, but leeches just came about 2,500 years ago and then stuck around until the 19th century when finally they went out of fashion because it was thought to be unscientific and then came back into fashion.

But the way you treat people with leeches is you attach them to someone and they make you bleed.

Their saliva has an anticoagulant in it and they also put a chemical into you that widens up your blood vessels and they put an anesthetic into you.

They're great surgeons.

I think they can drink about a thumb full of or a thumb size of blood, you know, from an area.

Yeah, they can drink

five times more than their own body size, I think, which is a lot.

But

you don't normally leech to death unless the doctors have put dozens of leeches on you, which is pretty rare.

You're definitely not going to leach to death.

No, it'll just be like an annoying little pinprick in your finger for a day.

I've sometimes had to like blood sample from my fingers at home.

And you get these little sort of pinprick things, don't you?

Yeah.

And I just can't get them to work.

Really?

Yeah.

Last time I had to do it, they gave me two and I couldn't get it to work.

And so I had to go and buy some more.

But you could only buy them from the pharmacist in boxes of 500.

So

I now have about 495 of these at home, which I literally, if anyone wants to buy them off, well, in the after times, those will probably come in handy.

Those will be a way for you to test the faith of the elect.

You could probably gradually open a can with one of those actually.

Once you're in that battery, if you use 20 of them.

Have you heard of the Birmingham Leech Centre?

No.

This is run by Bridget Croft, who is a nurse, and she is the only nurse in the UK who is qualified to do private leeching.

Okay.

So everyone else is all the other leeching is on the NHS and it's to repair joints and after microsurgery and help blood vessels heal.

She does it privately.

And she says in some areas of Eastern Europe, it is looked on in the same way as going to a spa.

What is she using it for though?

Because it's not for sewing fingers back on.

No, exactly.

So that would be on the NHS or whatever.

This is pain relief, gout, baldness, all sorts of stuff.

And I think they're...

Oh, so is this stuff that doesn't work?

Because it doesn't work in the sense of it.

I don't think we are.

I don't know about baldness.

Well, is it just that people see you from a distance with all the leeches on your head and think, oh, he's got a full head of hair?

That's coupe is moving around the

head.

It works from across a dibbly lit bar, but up close, the results do fall off.

I mean, that does sound like old school leech work to me.

It does, yeah.

Whereas modern leech work is quite specifically for the getting body parts back on, isn't it?

Leeches, they share something in common with...

tinned salmon, which is then they're now being used to tell us about the environment.

So in China, they took 700 terrestrial leeches that they found, all of the same species, and they are going and taking the blood out of them and diagnosing what animal it was taken from.

Terrestrial leech.

Is that something that's not an alien?

You have to listen to Dan's other podcast to find out about terrestrial leeches

and the ones that you won't find in the water of bogs and stuff.

They're land-based.

That's me guessing, yeah.

But

you you get them.

So some of them feed on deer, for example.

The story of how they came back into use is a pretty amazing one.

I actually listened to a podcast on leeches, an episode of Sideways, which I love, by the way.

You should listen to it, Matthew Side.

And he was talking about this story.

So in 1985, there's a four-year-old called Guy Condeli whose ear is bitten off by his grandparents' dog.

And as the surgeon remembers it, the surgeon Joe Upton remembers it.

The ear arrived in the emergency room half an hour before the boy.

So I don't know what kind of thing happened there.

I said we're going to reattach you to the boy.

So they've got this ear.

They've got this boy.

And they can repair the arteries fine.

This is where leeches come in.

So useful.

It's for vein repair.

Because as Joe Upton described it, to try and sew veins back on, imagine sewing wet toilet paper together.

They're so floppy, they just keep flopping.

And they kept on reattaching the ear, and it kept on going purple and black as it filled with blood because the veins couldn't carry it away.

Old Upton, he'd he'd read about leeches as a treatment and he tracked down the Welsh biopharmer place where they bred them for use in pharmaceuticals.

So they hadn't been used actually the way they are now.

And he got some sent to him.

And this is a completely new idea.

He's just thought, you know what, let's attach a leech to this guy's ear and see if it works.

That's amazing.

So amazing.

And he just about gets the leeches out in time and says literally as soon as he puts them on this boy's ear, the ear goes from black to a lovely pink ear colour as the leech basically repairs the veins or it allows the blood to flow through the veins.

It widens the veins.

It means that the blood can flow freely, which gives them a chance to repair themselves.

The body's very good at repairing itselves.

It just needed a rest.

The ear just needed a rest.

So apparently, now these days, if you have finger or ear or penis surgery, what they'll do is for the 10 days afterwards, you keep getting a leech just put onto the place that needs repairing.

So over the 10 days, that's how they fix it.

Yeah.

It's just incredible.

Yeah, they're amazing.

Have you heard of the Bedale Leech House?

This is in North Yorkshire.

I know, Bedale.

Yeah.

So Yorkshire, and it's a little building, but it looks like a miniature fortress because it's got crenellations on the top.

Or castellations, you know.

So it looks like a castle.

Yeah, yeah.

I love that you just corrected crenellations to castellations, and I think people would appreciate that.

That's just absolutely just because people will have been listening to it and gone, I don't know what a crenellation is.

And then you started to repeat yourself, they'll have gone, oh, thank God, he's repeating himself and telling me what it is.

And then you said an even more obscure word.

Like these bits.

I've just drawn them.

I know.

Yeah, these guys are even worse.

I thought that was a crenellation, not a castellation.

That's what I thought as well.

I'm not sure it's the former.

It's definitely the latter.

I don't know.

So I think we've got distracted from the fact this is a house built for leeches.

So they would be kept in there because to collect leeches for the market, you collect them from the wild, you collect them from rivers and from bogs and swamps.

And you normally just walk through barefoot and you come out and you've got a load of leeches on you, and that's the leech collector's job.

Gosh, and then you'd take them to the leech house and drop them off there so they'd be kept alive.

And then it's a sort of staging post for them.

And this is the last leech house in the UK, and it's still there, and it's got a stream diverted to run through it.

It's on the banks of a little beck.

It doesn't still house leeches, does it?

It doesn't still house leeches, but it had a fire to keep them warm in winter, and it had there were special containers of moist turf and moss for the leeches to live in.

Here we go.

How'd I find this place?

It's amazing how Andy searches on Google for moss leeches and Dan searches for extraterrestrial leeches and it goes, did you mean terrestrial leeches?

I didn't, but okay, yes, what is it?

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

My fact is that in some American states and cities in the late 80s, children could be sent to prison for six months for the crime of owning a pager.

Ooh.

What's pager grandpa?

I don't know.

Anna, you're 100 years old.

So this is from a great

newsletter called Pessimist's Archive by Louis Anslow.

It's a brilliant article, And it was all about how there was this panic about pagers,

which are electronic devices.

Can you tell us a bit more about them?

Yeah, sort of primitive.

You could do very, very primitive texting on advanced models.

In the early ones, you just got a beep, and you knew that you had to do something in response to the message.

So like a doctor might have them.

It would beep and they're like, I have to go to the hospital.

Exactly.

But then later, they would be able to send you like a couple of words for those or something.

But usually you wouldn't be able to send a message back.

It's purely receiving.

To send the message, someone had to pick up a phone, call a number, and kind of direct your pager to be beat.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So there were all these headlines in the 80s about these powering the drug trade.

Maybe youths who own pages are getting paged and they're going to pick up the drugs or whatever.

And they probably were useful for drug dealers, to be honest.

But

it probably wasn't most pages in schools being used.

I think what it was

is that most drug dealers did use pages, but not most pages were used by drug dealers.

Exactly that.

It's exactly that.

That wasn't necessarily what the right-wing press thought.

No.

Yeah.

And so New Jersey banned them for under 18s on pain of six months in choke, which is such a long time for owning a pager.

Michigan did the same, and thousands of young people were arrested and suspended and handcuffed and things.

I couldn't find anyone who was sent to prison for that.

But in one year alone, there were a thousand arrests in Chicago schools solely for owning pages.

Arrests?

Because your fact, it kind of reads like one of those, like, there's a law in Mississippi that you can't let your horse open your cans.

Flying over New Jersey, everyone put your pages away.

But then, as you say, 700 school kids were arrested in 1994.

And weird kids, because if they're not dealing drugs, which as we say, some of them were, but if they're not, they're just losers.

Because I associate owning a pager with like nerdy businessmen.

What I associate it with, actually, is Ross in Friends, who famously has one in Series 1.

Does he?

And so, what kind of kid owns a pager?

In the 80s they were so cool.

They were so cool.

They were so cool in the 80s.

Because drug dealers used them, right?

And because your parents hated them and because politicians hated them to have one was the ultimate status symbol.

James is speaking as if I was alive.

You were desperate for a pager.

This was in America.

It wasn't in the UK as far as I could remember slash read.

But basically,

the reason they were good for drug dealers is before you had them, if you wanted to get in contact with someone to to buy your drugs, you had to give them your landline number.

And now you're giving them effectively a mobile number so the cops wouldn't know where you are.

But because they became associated with the bad guy, kids were wearing them round their necks as like a status symbol.

And they were so cool, there was a market for fake pages.

So you could buy a cheaper pager that didn't do anything, didn't send or anything like that, but you would just wear it around your neck and say, look, I've got a pager when it wasn't really.

Would you occasionally have to say beep to make people think you you were going to, oh, that's my dealer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I read an article that was written in 1977 about pagers, just talking about how awesome they were.

They would say that if you were in a queue for a restaurant and the Maitreye saw a pager on your belt, you would be able to go up the line.

There's stories of parties where the hostess of a party, and this was in Washington, became nervous that she hadn't invited the best people in her social group there because she couldn't hear the beep of pagers at her party.

These These pages are fake.

Well, what then became even cooler than the beeping pager was the wiggler.

And the wiggler was the one that doesn't beep out loud, but like a phone on silent, vibrates.

So she thought, okay, maybe if it's not beeping, it's because I've got the extra cool new kids.

I've got the wiggles.

I've got the wigglers.

Yeah.

It is interesting how transformative that is.

Just what you said, James, about it going from a landline to a mobile.

People communicating in new ways that cannot be tracked as easily.

It made a huge difference.

And then I read one article in 1993 that was talking about the drug business using pages.

They interviewed a cop and they said, now we're finding dealers with flip phones.

Maybe that will be the next rage.

Maybe.

Who's to say?

We probably should say pages are still in use.

Well, they were until a couple of years ago.

No, well, there's this old factoid about the NHS is the only place where you still get faxes and pages use.

They were slated to be phased out in 2021, but Matt Hancock said that was going to happen didn't they

and if you're outside the UK and you don't know who Matt Hancock is good for you and there were still I think about 80,000 being used in the NHS as of last summer yeah yeah yeah so they still kind of work yeah really and if you're in a hospital and there's no reception in a room uh it's useful and it is obviously it's used for the doctors who are in rooms where there's incredibly thick walls because of x-ray and all sorts of all that stuff is what they're basically fighting further than a mobile signal so it's and a lot of nhs staff deal a crack.

But we're also using pagers in ways that we don't realize.

All of us.

All of us have had probably our hands on a pager and not known it.

Is this thing at my bottom up?

Is our broader?

Anytime you go to a restaurant and you order up at the bar and they give you an item that says, when this buzzes, come back, that's when your meal is ready.

That's a pager.

Yeah, that's pager technology just using a different form i have one of those that i hang around my neck

and you get a beep on it and it lets you know that your cans have been opened

do you know what they stopped doing because they've been around for decades actually um i think they've stopped doing this although i've never tested it they obviously have a range that you can't go out of and they used to shout at you so pagers often used to speak instead of beeping and if you went more than 100 feet away they'd shout you are out of range So it was just so embarrassing if you go try and sneak into the shop next door.

Actually, just a normal one.

I can't say this is true of all of them, but they have a range of about half a mile.

Yeah.

So that's quite long.

That means in most restaurants, you could just go to the pub nearest pub in London anyway.

So in the middle of nowhere.

So sometimes pagers would have a thing in the 70s, 80s, 90s where if you wanted to contact someone on their pager, you would call a number and you'd get through to a

switchboard and you'd say, can you contact this pager?

And it's from this number.

And then the person would send a message to the pager and they'd have a series of messages that they could send.

So, if you were the wife calling, the message would be programmed to come up, call your wife, or if you were work calling, it would be go to the office, or if you were a doctor, it would be go to the hospital, which is also your work.

Yeah, yeah, so you don't need those two messages if you are a doctor,

but if you're not, you know, useful.

Anyway, I was reading a really good article in the New York Times from 1976, which is talking about the pros and cons of pagers.

And it does say: the problem is, almost every beeper wearer has a story to tell of the beeper going up at the wrong time and this is an issue with them so for instance a salesman we spoke to said that one evening he was having a very pleasant conversation with a young woman and just when he felt that he was making an impression and he was getting somewhere his pager blared out call your wife

honestly what a nightmare pager is definitely the bad guy in the area

and they did actually speak to an answering service in New Orleans, one of the interchange services, which said, we have 1,400 pages in our system, and not a single one, when the wife calls, asks them to say the message, call your wife.

They all said, I'd like the message, call your answering service, please.

Or just, you know, go to work.

Every man thinks there might be a situation where I don't want the message to come up, call your wife.

That is outrageous.

That is, men.

Answering service.

This is such an awful euphemism for wife, isn't it?

That's how I think of myself.

Have you you guys heard of Gaydar?

Heard of it?

Yes, I have.

The idea that gay people can tell whether other people are gay.

Yeah, but in 1999, someone invented a device which has been described as a kind of electronic pager, which was called Gaydar.

And what it would be was for guys who were walking through big parks.

And if they saw someone that looked good looking and they didn't want to embarrass themselves by hitting on them, they would have their Gaydar go off because they had a Gaydar as well.

What?

Yeah, yeah.

So it was an electronic device that you kept on.

What if I'm with my wife?

What's that coming from your ass, Andy?

Yeah, so they invented it.

This guy called Graham Lees

was one of the inventors.

And so he went to test it out in a park and he walked through the park.

And unfortunately, they discovered quite quickly...

No one else had one.

Buzzing around the park, crying.

Well, I assume there must have been someone else

in the parking lot.

And he didn't know they were testing it.

Unfortunately, they hadn't fully tested out the frequencies, and it was at the wrong frequency.

So instead of spotting someone else who was wearing one of the gay dars, he was suddenly chased by a horny badger.

There was squirrels.

There were squirrels that were coming after him.

He then, as he was running away from the corner.

Sorry, no badger has ever hornily chased a person with a vibrating puns.

We all have vibrating puns now.

We're all being chased by badgers now.

Frequencies, it's a specific frequency.

There's a love note for badges, is what you'll say.

Exactly.

He set off car alarms as he walked by because the frequency just met a certain tone that made them erupt.

It's the one special frequency that works for all cars and all badges.

Yeah, badges and squirrels and car alarms.

You often come back to your car and there's a badger humping it and the alarms going on.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Tribaland on Instagram.

James?

My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

Andy.

I'm on Twitter at Andrew Hunter M.

Yep, and you can get to all of us as a group by going to where Anna.

You can get us on No Such Thing as a Fish on Instagram or at No Such Thing on Twitter, or you can email podcast at QI.com.

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

You'll find a link there to Club Fish, our private members' club where we put up lots of bonus material.

You can also find all of our previous episodes, bits of merchandise as well.

Or you can just come back here next week for another episode.

That's where we'll be.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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Neat flexibility?

Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa anytime to fit your space, whether it's a growing family room or a cozy apartment.

Plus, they're earth-friendly and trusted by over 200,000 happy customers.

It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mess-proof sofa.

Visit washable sofas.com today and save.

That's washable sofas.com.

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