525: No Such Thing As A Clenched Shin

There's nothing like sinking into luxury.

At washable sofas.com, you'll find the Anibay sofa, which combines ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price.

And get this: it's the only sofa that's fully machine washable from top to bottom, starting at only $699.

The stain-resistant performance fabric slip covers and cloud-like frame duvet can go straight into your wash.

Perfect for anyone with kids, pets, or anyone who loves an easy-to-clean, spotless sofa.

With a modular design and changeable slip covers, you can customize your sofa to fit any space and style.

Whether you need a single chair, love seat, or a luxuriously large sectional, Anabay has you covered.

Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your home.

Right now, you can shop up to 60% off store-wide with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Shop now at washablesofas.com.

Add a little

to your life.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with Certapro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each CertaPro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, James Harkin, and Alex Bell.

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 the original voice of Porky Pig got fired for having a stutter.

That is so unfair.

It really is, isn't it?

Because they carried on with the stutter.

Did they then do auditions for people being like, you have to stutter?

Well, they didn't really need to do auditions because they had the great Mel Blank, who is the finest voice of all time, who eventually took over the role.

But the whole vocal styling of Porky Pig was created by a guy called Joe Doherty.

He's a guy who died 1978.

So he existed in like the early 1900s because Porky Pig was one of the original Looney Tunes, if not the the oldest, the oldest,

continuous one.

Yeah, exactly.

And so he did it for two years.

But the issue was it was really messing up recording times because he couldn't control his stutter.

He'd get away.

Wait, so have they decided to give Porky Pig a stutter and then deliberately chosen him, or was it like vice versa?

The first one.

The first one.

They decided to give him a stutter and then said, okay, we'll pick a guy with a stutter.

So the guy who invented him was Fritz Freelink.

Freelink.

And he said that he wanted someone with a stutter because it would distinguish him from other characters.

Now, have you heard the original one?

I have, yeah.

It's like the new Pocky Pig is like a fake stutter, but the first one is just like a person with a stutter, isn't it?

Exactly.

That's a very different voice.

They decided they didn't like the kind of stutter, so they were like, we're going in a different direction.

It was taking too long.

He just couldn't get through the words.

Yeah.

It just took way too long.

That's really sad.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a bit like firing someone having a disability and then hiring somebody to pretend to have that disability.

Yeah, in a way, it wouldn't happen today.

Yeah, you'd hope not.

You would hope not.

So Porky first appeared in a movie, a short animation called I Haven't Got a Hat.

So that was 1935.

So he was there for the two years.

It was easier to write cartoons back then, wasn't it?

For laugh, that sounds like.

I haven't got a hat.

It was kind of, he wasn't the main character.

He never was meant to be a main character.

It was like a production, a musical production where they had a stage at school and everyone was getting out of their seats and Porky was really nervous.

So he's stuttering his way through the song.

But before Mel Blank, who I said took over and is the voice that we all know and love, there was one in between guy who was called Count Gutelli.

And Count Gutelli.

He sounds like he is a Looney Teeth.

He does, doesn't he?

Did he go onto Sesame Street?

Count Teno Gutelli.

This guy was known as the big noise.

Like he had

2,000 sound effects to his name.

He was sought after by everyone.

Like that guy from Police Academy.

Exactly, Michael Winslow, yeah.

And when he died, the Berlin Anthropological Institute offered $2,000 to his family to purchase his head and throat so that they could study it after death.

How did they remove his head?

That's what they requested for $2,000.

Can you lob his head off with his neck, which is quite a rare request, I would say.

I feel like you probably get half the neck usually.

The whole neck is quite.

So would you have to cut it like a V-neck jumper or something to get the full thing?

Did they accede to this request?

They did not, no.

They did not want to hand over the head or neck.

Just fork out for the full body.

If you want it that much, just cover three grand.

That's weird.

But also, somebody ends up with sort of just like the shoulders.

It's really weird to have a headless body.

Yeah, who wants the lower arms?

I suppose they probably weren't giving away the rest of it.

They're probably burying that bit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, people did used to get different parts of their body buried in different places, didn't they?

Yeah.

They did.

It used to be a relatively common thing.

But still, I think the full head off, they seem to often take bits of the inside of the body body off or the outside.

Like the heart or something like that, right?

Yeah, Einstein's brain wasn't bigger than a normal brain, was why they wanted it, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, the guy who invented head, shoulders, knees, and toes, he's buried in far different places.

Where are his eyes is mouth and nose?

Actually, speaking of being buried, do you know what's on Mel Blank's grave?

Oh, it's lovely, isn't it?

Yeah, that's all, folks.

Do the voice.

Please do the voice.

That's all, folks.

No, I can't do it.

I can't do it.

That's all.

I can't do it either.

That is good.

But do you know why it's on his grave?

Because he did.

Because he played Porky Pig and he died.

That's a good guess.

And that's all refers to his lifespan.

Folks refers to the people who are reading the gravestone.

Yeah.

So you do want to understand the meaning of the phrase.

Great.

I feel like we're missing something massive, though, right?

Well, it was also his last words.

So it's actually the reason that his son decided to put it on the grave, because a lot of people say it was in his will, but I believe it's actually that he was filming a commercial for Buick Automobiles um and in that commercial they got him to say that's all folks as you would if you have Mel Blank doing a commercial and they were his last words that he did drop camera dead right then well he didn't drop dead he had he had he collapsed so they were his last words they do the music like da da da da da da da da da da they was quite insensitive actually

his family sued afterwards i don't think that counts as last words i was uh what do you mean well they're pre-written they're they're not but they were the last words he ever said i know but yeah it's which i want that is quite i think that counts no no but it would be great if that was his final words.

It wouldn't just be like, I'm at home, you know, I'm dying on my bed.

Yeah.

I'm going to go out with the porky pig.

My cash phrase.

Well, I think that he probably did decide that because he actually lived for another few weeks, but he didn't say anything else.

Are you kidding?

If I was him, I would go, excuse me, excuse me.

Can I have a glass of water?

That's all, folks.

Yeah, exactly.

Make sure you keep getting it in.

It's like this wasted the last few weeks of his life just not talking to anyone.

Imagine the quality time you could have had with his family.

All the things that were left unsaid because he didn't want to.

Alright, guys, quite often people don't speak for weeks before they die, do they?

Because

they're in hospital, unable to speak.

But I do like to think that he was lying there faking a coma, just so he could make sure.

Anyway, his son was like, well, they were his last words, I'll put them on his gravestone.

I saw an interview with his son,

and he said that the Pogy Pig voice that he did was not a stutter.

He said that basically Mel Blanc once went to visit a pig farm to get into character to see what Poggy Pig would be be like and he saw the pig grunting in kind of a stuttering way and his porky pig voice was copying the pig's grunt.

It wasn't like a human stutter.

It definitely doesn't sound like any samurai stutter I've ever heard.

It also doesn't sound like any pig I've ever heard.

No, it's closer to the stutter than it is the pig.

They've quite pretentious things where they're like, yeah, I spent like two weeks studying pigs in order for my role as a cartoon pig.

It's like, you don't need to do that, mate.

Like it's a stupid cartoon.

No one takes it that seriously.

Wow.

They did take it quite seriously, didn't they?

I mean, mean, they won Oscars, not necessarily for Porky Pig, but for these cartoons.

Did you read about the famous blooper reel of Porky Pig?

So this was 1938, and this was put together on purpose because you can't have bloopers in cartoons.

It's like at the end of Toy Story 2.

Exactly, where they do all that.

Yeah, so back in 1938, they already were doing this.

And so it's a video of Porky where he smacks his thumb with a hammer, he goes in pain, and he says, Oh, son of a ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba son of a ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-son of a gun, Which was the stuttering trick of Porky Pig.

He would always not finish the word and put a new word in.

But then he turns to the camera and says directly to the viewers, ha ha, you thought I was going to say this is a son of a bitch.

No, that's not.

And he does say it.

And yeah.

Because at the end of the show, his catchphrase, he says,

because he's trying to say the end.

And then he says, that's all, folks, instead of the end.

I did not know that.

I think that's what it is.

I think so.

Yeah, that sounds like it.

Yeah.

Interesting.

And then they made that in 1938, but it didn't get shown until the 90s, didn't they?

Yeah, exactly.

Because you couldn't show it.

But the word bitch?

Well, no, you couldn't say bitch in 1938 because, like, obviously, frankly, my dear I don't give a damn was 39, wasn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

But it was a corporate thing, so they were doing it as a behind-the-scenes, as a package of bloopers.

They just put that in as a joke.

And then when they had the 50th anniversary of Warner Brothers, that's when it came out with a load of other bloopers.

So how annoyed do you think they would have been the animators at the time when some dickhead said, look, we're going to make this blooper thing.

It's going to take you about two weeks of ridiculous drawing and it's not to be released ever.

Um, which is a funny little inn joke for nobody, but I feel like around that time, during that sort of golden age of animation and like during all the Disney Studios things, loads of incredible workmanship went into stuff like that that was just for like internal use.

Or they would put details in the designs of stuff that like no one would ever notice just because they had, frankly, the money and the time, but also the passion and the craftsmanship and like they were really into what they did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is quite nice.

Do you guys know how Porky Pig got his name?

No, it seems like it's because he was a pig and then pigs produce pork, doesn't it?

I don't like to do the old back at you.

Do they produce pork, like milk, or are they pork?

That is obviously part of the story.

Was it the result of sort of six months' brains drawing out a pig farm by the writers and then that is

again from Fritz Freeling who created him.

And when he grew up, there were two brothers who grew up in his neighbourhood.

One was called Porky, and the other one was called Piggy.

No, because they were overweight children.

So they were kind of bullied with these names, and then he took the names and used them for his character.

Really?

That's so weird that the most piggy name for a pig actually came from people.

Yeah?

Yeah.

Because I would just think if you're like porky and pig, it's like pork and pig, the two piggiest.

Like kind of says it is a very obvious thing to call a piggy character.

We think it's obvious now, but you know, at the time it was mind-blowingly imaginative.

Sorry, who is the name of the count that you said?

Count Cotelli.

Yeah, that guy.

C-U-T-E.

It's kind of appropriate that he's Italian because the origin of Porky Pig, he was based on or inspired by a staple character from like traditional Italian comedy, the Commedia dell'Arte.

Was it?

Yeah, so like during from between the 16th to 18th centuries, there was this traditional theatre comedy and it used all of these staple comedy characters.

Like the harlequin.

The harlequin was one, which is the servant.

And yeah, Porky Pig is based on the Tartaglia, which is Italian for stutterer.

And it's a far-sighted, dainty character with a with a with a stutter.

Really?

Do you know who hated Porky Pig stutter?

I believe he said that.

Daffy Duck.

You're Samity Sam.

Roadrunner.

Porky Pig himself.

Yeah.

There was an episode where he hears himself on a playback of an old tune of old McDonald's How to Farm, and he hates the stutter so much that he smashes both the record and the playback machine.

And I read this in an academic paper, which is called The Clinical Study of Porky Pig Cartoons.

And it's by Gerald F.

Johnson.

And basically, this was a paper that was trying to show, did it have a positive or negative influence to have a character that had a stutter like Porky Pig?

Because Porky Pig had jobs such as a farmer, a gas station attendant.

A farmer?

That's a bit dark.

It isn't.

Well, maybe it was...

Arable.

All right, okay.

He was a railroad engineer, a pilot, a private in the French Foreign Legion, a newscaster.

So he sort of makes the point that any kids that were watching it could see that they could do multiple jobs.

Well, this suggests to me that he can't hold down a job.

That's very true.

That's a worrying CV.

Do you know?

I was just looking up treatments for stutters throughout history.

And in the 19th century, there were obviously shed loads of quacks suggesting you kind of like cut your tongue in half or you slit that bit under the bottom of your tongue or you shrink your tongue by having it cut to pieces.

You know, lots of stuff, which never works.

So you're amazed how long it lasted.

But one of the leading quacks/slash doctors who promoted stuttering cures was this guy who went around Europe and actually was really important in developing like welfare systems in Europe because he went to the governments of places like the Netherlands and Prussia and Belgium and said, I want you to implement my stuttering cure, which he'd actually bought from a woman called Widow Lee.

But anyway, his name was Mr Malbouche, which means bad mouth.

Wow.

Done, dun, dun.

Yeah.

It's interesting that eighty percent of adults who stutter are male.

Way more men stutter than women.

And apparently they did they've done some like studies and brain scans.

And the way that your speech patterns work is just different between men and women when you stutter.

Really?

It's weird.

I don't think it's fully understood.

There was a theory in the early 20th century that eating too many vegetables caused stuttering, vegetarianism.

And there was a psychologist called Knight Dunlap who also founded the Journal of Psychology.

So he wasn't a proper quack, but he thought that if someone stuttered, maybe you should give them a diet of meat and that would cure them.

Meat, pork, pork, yeah.

So when was that, sorry?

That was early 20th century.

Okay, so like during the war, you had to really get the amount of carrots you ate right for like good eyesight, but not bad speech.

Oh, yeah.

That's true.

And also, speaking of Mel Blank, he never ate carrots, did he?

Did he not?

No.

No, there's a famous thing, like, there's a thing online that he was allergic to carrots, which we think is not true, right?

Okay.

Yeah, it's not true.

But do you know where it comes from?

The fact that people think he's allergic, it's because, and it does actually make perfect sense.

So, as Bugs Bunny, they experimented with lots of sound effects for how you can generate the sound of eating a carrot and they realized the only thing that generates the sound of eating a carrot is eating a carrot did they not have the big noise

the one thing he can't do is one weakness every time the big noise ate a carrot it was completely silent

it was so weird just sounds like a car going past

famously sucked his carrots like a lolly so

they couldn't use him and so Melblanc realized he just had to eat carrots in order to get the sound effect but once you're swallowing carrot then you can't say your line.

So, he'd have a spittoon and he just had to chew a carrot and then spit it out in order to then say his line, and from there, develop the idea that oh, he's allergic to carrots because he was always spitting carrots out.

I would have just got a runner-in to eat the carrots next to it.

I know, could they not hire

carrots?

Yeah, that would be the most awesome job, wouldn't it?

I'm a carrot eater for Mel Blank.

Let's be real.

Life happens, kids spill, pets Pets shed.

And accidents are inevitable.

Find a sofa that can keep up at washable sofas.com.

Starting at just $699, our sofas are fully machine washable inside and out.

So you can say goodbye to stains and hello to worry-free living.

Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics.

They're kid-proof, pet-friendly, and built for everyday life.

Plus, changeable fabric covers let you refresh your sofa whenever you want.

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 washablefas.com today and save.

That's washable sofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Want to save big at the pump?

Count on your WEX fleet card for major savings.

Save an average of $1,500 annually nationwide on fuel.

With the WEX fleet card, you can do more.

Apply now at wexcard.com.

Terms apply.

Okay, it is time for fact number two.

That is Alex.

My fact this week is that in the 1950s, you could catch a bus from London to Calcutta.

Okay.

You did have to book.

You couldn't just like tap, tap in.

Yeah.

I don't think it's outside the order.

Yeah, they didn't have a nice design in Calcutta.

Where was the longest stretch where if you missed your stop?

Fantastically pressing a bell.

So this ran, this is a bus service that ran from 1957 until 1976.

You could get single tickets or return tickets, which I thought was quite weird because you could take a bus to India and then just be stuck there.

Which lots of people did.

Yeah, that's true.

It was £85 for a single, which I think is about £2,500 today.

But it's more of a package holiday, including travel and food and accommodation.

And it was another £65 if you you wanted to come back again.

Oh, okay, because often a return ticket these days is like £2 more if you get a travel.

Yeah, no, no.

This is almost double, yeah.

Could you get like that thing where you split your tickets between all the different places?

Ah, yeah, split fare.

No,

no, none of the complicated things.

We've come a long way, haven't we?

We really have, yeah.

But we can't go to India anymore on a bus.

Right.

If your bus is 15 minutes late to the next destination, can you reclaim all of the money?

That would be great.

So this bus was equipped with beds and a kitchen and heaters and a music system for parties, apparently, and also something called reading facilities, which I don't know what that is.

Like a chair?

Like a library, I guess, like a bookshelf.

Sounds like a

spice well bus.

It does, it does.

It sounds like a lot of fun.

This specific first service was called The India Man, and it was run by a guy called Oswald Joseph Garrow Fisher, which is, I've never heard of someone who has a double-barreled first name and last name.

Do you know that he was known, everyone called him Paddy?

I was reading an article from the Buffalo Career express from the time and it said obviously again of its time it said garrow fisher who is better known as paddy because he is irish

i mean it is easier to say yeah than also joseph garrison his name with all those hyphens actually would look like confusingly like the destination it does

because on the outside it did say london calcutta london on the bus which i think was quite cool because it is a loop trip yeah yeah and the bus went from london it was a 10 000 mile journey on what what became known as the hippie route.

So it went via Belgium, what was then Yugoslavia, to northwestern India.

And up through like places today that you couldn't go through.

I guess it must have gone through.

If it's gone through Yugoslavia, it must have gone through Turkey and then like Iran.

Iran, Pakistan.

It started a big phenomenon of bus journeys all around the world.

And this route became quite popular, but it ended because of...

It was the Iranian Revolution.

Exactly, yeah, the wars.

And a lot of my parents, well, not a lot, a few of my parents' friends have done it.

It was the gap year of its day, wasn't it?

And they do talk about how different it was then that you could go through all of these countries.

And I know it's Cold War, so it was, you know, not a bed of roses, but now you would be told it was too dangerous to get a bus through any of those places.

And then you just went through and we met with friendly receptions in all those countries.

Didn't they think they'd got murdered at one point?

Yeah, so on the way there, he writes all about the cliffs around Mount Ararat and going through these crazy hairpin bends.

In Iran, they had to put wooden planks under the wheels because the bus was sinking into the sand.

It had to be dug out of a bog in Persia.

It was sandstorms and rains and incredible heat and collapsed bridges and like a crash.

Like, I mean, it sounds like a ridiculous journey.

And there are some amazing pictures you can see online as well.

And yeah, on the return trip, they were massively delayed by like, I think, a month because of an outbreak of Asian influenza.

So they had to take a massive detour.

And that prompted a rumor that they'd been kidnapped and murdered by bandits.

And I think the British Embassy in Tehran thought that and were so relieved that they had a cocktail party for them.

Yeah, that's amazing.

I read that definitely they had the cocktail party.

I read that at the time in the newspapers, but I couldn't find any evidence in the newspapers that people thought they had been.

I think it was a story because Gary Fisher said it, and I think it was a bit of a they thought we'd been killed, so they were so happy to see us.

Probably a throwaway, did they think you'd been killed, Lynn?

Or do they just have the cocktails going to be?

It's an embassy.

We do it for every bus that comes in.

Exactly.

We got invited to an embassy once just for being in town, didn't we?

No, I thought they thought we'd been murdered.

But yeah,

they were 50 days delayed back, which is...

Right.

I mean, I feel sorry for the people waiting at the bus stop on the next time.

And then three came along at once.

I can't do three minutes on a Jubilee line.

And they were called freaks.

Weren't they?

They called themselves freaks, the hippie trailers.

And there's still a street called Freak Street in Kathmandu, which was sort of like famously the kind of centre of where all the hippies sort of ended up, hung out, built lots of communities.

Yeah, so there's still Freak Street.

And it inspired Lonely Planet, the hippie trail.

So Maureen and Tony Wheeler, they did the hippie trail and then they thought, this is fun, we'll write about it.

They messed up the name.

They listened to a song and thought it referred to Lonely Planet.

It was a song called Space Captain by Joe Cocker.

And it actually referred to Lovely Planet, which makes more sense.

They should have called Lovely.

Lonely Planet is actually quite a sad title for a traveling book.

It doesn't really inspire.

It is for people who travel on their own, isn't it?

Lonely Planet, or it was originally, I think.

Maybe it was originally.

That's what I would have assumed.

But don't like like i'm single i buy a lot of products to single people don't put the word lonely in the branding

so you go to savesby's and you get a lonely meal for one we know wendy's meal for one right she's not thank you sad cheesecake

this is my die alone single bench

um some stuff on buses yeah yeah here's the thing who was the first person to ever be thrown under the bus oh you know this is like a if you watch the traitors and stuff these days everyone's saying oh i threw them under the bus, oh, they're going to throw me under the bus.

Is it going to be like a Roman like thrown over the chariot?

Wait, sorry.

So

are there two possible answers here?

One of someone was thrown under a bus physically, but then someone used the term for the first time later, or the two combined?

Okay, so my question to you is the term to be thrown under the bus,

who was the first person that that term was used about?

About.

Not who was literally thrown under the bus.

It's all metaphorical.

Was it connected to buses in any way, though?

Was it totally detached from what they were doing?

Totally detached.

Is this guessable?

In my experience with QI stuff, it's either going to be Stone Age or it's going to be 1800s, but never.

Okay, it's neither of those things.

It's guessable because it's one of the most famous people in British history.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Who was betrayed?

Keep going.

Who was betrayed?

Come on, let's think of someone famously betrayed.

Correct!

Matcho!

Alex is just listing famous people.

Named conservative MPs and all that.

I hate you people who play 20 questions like that.

Don't use all your guesses on names.

You got lucky this time.

So, this was basically: if you wanted to get get rid of a politician, you would say, what if they fell under a bus?

Right.

Do you know what I mean?

We can't get rid of them maybe with a little accident.

Yeah, we can't get rid of them any other way.

What if they fell under the bus?

Then maybe we'll get a new leader kind of thing.

So that was a saying.

But during the early 1980s, when the Falkland Island invasion happened, someone in the UK said President Galtieri of Argentina pushed her, meaning Margaret Thatcher, under the bus, which the gossips had said was the only means of her removal.

So it was falling under a bus was always a thing, but this was the first time someone was metaphorically pushed under a bus.

Oh, really?

Wow.

A lot of people threw her under the bus, didn't they?

I'd never thought of Galtieri as being the main

main guy.

Well, she did last quite a long time after that.

And actually, the boggler's law didn't really do her any damage at all.

They almost threw her into the driving seat of the bus.

I would say so, yeah.

Rather the opposite.

They threw her into that best seat on the top deck where it looks like you're driving.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

That is is a good seat.

Yeah, but you don't have enough legroom.

So swings and roundabouts.

Okay, excuse me, who complains about that?

Never mind.

Do you know there's a bus route in London between West Ealing and West Rice Lip, which is about a 20-25-minute journey?

And it goes once a week on Wednesdays at 11.17 in the morning.

And no one gets it.

Is it purely for throwing politicians in, then?

Those two places are very relatively close to each other.

Yes.

And I can't think of any reason why I would ever want to go between the two of them.

I think, you know, is it a ghost bus?

Is it real?

Is it a ghost bus?

Well, there you go.

It is a ghost bus.

And the people of West Dealing or West Rice Lip who have friends in the other, please write to James complaining about, you know, why you might want to go.

Oh, yeah, I'll wait for the flood of emails to come in.

I'm going to go ride it.

I love it.

I love riding a ghost bus.

Yeah, well, it's the kind of thing that people like you do ride.

I think they're going to.

I'm going to try it again with a little less contempt.

I can only get singles tickets because no one has it.

Fuck you.

It is a a ghost bus though, you're right.

And it's related to ghost trains, which I actually don't think we've ever mentioned on this podcast, but ghost trains are train routes that are kept open even though no one gets them because it's actually bureaucratically really expensive to shut down a specific route.

So there are various routes in the UK, 30 or so, where no one gets this train route, but the train still runs.

So that, you know, if you wanted to reopen it properly, then it's still open.

But there's more reasons to keep a ghost train because it like maintains the track and keeps everything running and keeps your train in good order.

Whereas a ghost bus, you just use the bus somewhere else.

And like, like, what's the reason for it?

Well, because this used to be a train route and no one was getting it.

Well, then it was driving on the train tracks.

No, it's not driving on the train tracks.

If you will hear me out.

Sorry.

It used to be a rail route.

The rail route no longer exists.

So it is a bus replacement service.

So this is called a bus replacement service.

A permanent bus replacement service.

For a rail that doesn't exist anymore.

And it's because it's bureaucratically too expensive to cancel the rail route.

Can I ask, why did they remove the rail routes when so many people want to go from

West Ryslip to Ealing or whatever it was.

Alright, there's only one person, but they make that trip all the time.

Do you reckon they'll continue downgrading it and then eventually there'll just be like a skateboard so you can change it if you want it's technically a DFL service.

You're talking about a rail replacement bus service.

Have you heard of a bus replacement rail service?

Bus replacement.

I haven't, but I get it and it feels plausible.

So in 2016 there were two villages in Scotland, One Lookhead and Lead Hills and they're in South Lanarkshire and the road connecting them was closed for resurfacing for a week but this was a bit of an issue for people who live there, a lot of elderly people, there's a doctor surgery in one and shops in the other and they need to get from one to the other and there was a 45 miles diversion if you want to drive around so it wasn't really workable for all these people.

So there was a small volunteer run railway line that goes between the two and it's just a tourist attraction.

So the authorities decided to turn it into an official service that you could actually travel between.

With the two old grannies who do the heritage tickets on their old typewriter having to print out just hundreds a day.

Thousands and thousands of commuters every morning and coming in absolutely um and it's i think the only one of its kind that very cool

it's very cool in 2015 there was a tweet that went viral for revealing that there was a bus service that went to woking and do you know what number it was what number bus you'd get to woking 69.

sorry no i don't know i don't know

oh 95 woking 95

yeah

925 because

i went through woking on a train once yeah and i saw the word woking and i was just thinking oh, working 925.

And then I looked at my watch and it was 8.55 in the morning because I was going somewhere in the morning.

So I was like, working 5 to 9, close enough, and tweeted it.

It's not close to 200.

It's not close to 9.

Working 5 to 9 is kind of funny.

Like, it's funny enough.

Oh, yeah, 52.

Yeah, okay.

It was a successful tweet?

No, it did not.

Shocking.

So, yeah, there was a bus service called 925.

This guy tweeted it back in 2015, except after getting however many retweets and likes, turned out that he had Photoshopped it, that it didn't exist, that it was in fact the 701.

So, this bus didn't exist.

However, the people who ran the bus service loved it so much that a few years later, they did change it to the 925.

So, the joke became a real thing.

But, here's what's interesting.

Well, my sorry, my story was less good, but at least it was true.

Well, no,

this guy made a joke which then got turned true.

He lied, incredibly lie.

He lied.

Okay, wow.

Can I quickly do one more thing about going to India?

Yeah.

So there's a book called Husband Hunting in the Raj by Anna Corsi.

And she's writing about how lots of women in the late 19th century would go to India to look for a husband.

And that's because the Indian civil service insisted that all its male staff remain bachelors until the age of 30.

And in those days, if you're a woman and you were not married by the time you were in your mid to late 20s, they were...

A lonely woman.

You were a lonely woman, yeah, exactly.

And so apparently, there was this sort of big influx of British women who every year would just all go to India to find the husband.

Wow.

Snap up those single civil servants.

And there were loads of like pamphlets and books that people would write to tell you what to do if you're a woman going to India.

There was one, a few words of advice on travelling to ladies by a guy called HMLS, we don't know who it was, who said, choose a simple dress of soft, warm tweed of dark grey colour.

It is also a good plan to use very old underclothing, such as can be thrown away when soiled.

Excuse me.

That is a good plan.

Is that about the curries?

It doesn't.

No more information.

I reckon that's about the curries.

No, you're on a long cost.

No laundry, so they're like, don't waste your good stuff because you're going to have to chuck it.

This isn't a bus to say this would be on a steamliner or something.

Oh, okay.

I mean, it's all very long journey.

These poor men, all these women turning up being like, I'm not wearing anything under this tweed.

I was when we set off.

It's in this plastic bag.

I was just going to tie it to this tree.

This poor town halfway to India.

They've just got piles of dirty women's laundry things

flytip to her.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that hockey masks were invented thanks to chronic sinusitis.

Well, they originally wanted to pewed tissue just around the nose.

Exactly.

No,

this is something that strikes home for me because I am a very keen hockey player.

No, I suffer from sinusitis quite a lot, so I'm really glad that some good has come out of it.

And this is the hockey mask.

And when I say hockey mask, one, I'm talking about ice hockey.

Two, I'm talking about the mask that a goaltender would wear.

So, you know, it's not the helmet.

It's the Halloween, the Halloween film.

Yeah, Jason Voorhees.

Jason Voorhees one, yeah, exactly.

Who's have a chronic suffering sinusitis

which is why he's so angry

so he never said anything

so this was a guy called Jacques Plant or Jacques Plant or Jacques Plante

on Chantayl Jacques Planté

and he had He had terrible sinusitis and he had an operation and after he had the operation he had to keep his nose intact, but he still wanted to play hockey, and so he wore a mask to stop the puck from hitting him in the face.

His coach, who's called Toe Blake, his first name was Toe,

as in the bit at the end of your foot.

He wasn't very happy about it, but he said, Okay, well, you know, I need you on the team, whatever.

As long as you take it off when your sinusitis gets better, then it's fine.

And when this was the 50s?

Oh, yes, I should say this was the late 50s.

And then later on, he was hit in the face with a puck, and he went off and came back with the mask again mid-game mid-game and then they went on a massive winning streak and so the manager said okay fine like this is obviously working and then all the other goaltenders saw this as a good idea and it just became everywhere and he really defied Toe Blake's wishes because Toe was like, yeah, he was a

mask out of here.

And he was like, no, either I'm going on with the mask or I'm not going on at all.

Yeah.

And it was.

It was entirely fair, like with a broken nose, like

in the face with the puck.

Yeah, and it's not the first time anyone's ever gone on with a mask.

It happened, you know, sporadically throughout the years because people had had their face busted up.

But Plant, Planty,

he's the one who said, no, I'm wearing it and I'm going to wear it again and again and again.

And then slowly changed the culture of ice hockey.

He gave the finger to Toe.

He sure did.

Nobody hadn't said anything for three minutes.

Do you know why Toe Blake was called Toe Blake?

Well, because both of his parents were also called Blake.

Yes.

And by tradition, you keep the surname.

He's bang on, guys.

Was it a family name?

Were there

four other toes?

Did he have one enormous toe?

No.

It was a toe.

Like in Spike's.

It was.

Yeah, they wanted to donate his toe to science afterwards.

It was so prominent.

A clue?

Buzz Aldrin.

Oh, he left his toe on the moon, but the gate of his toe was to buzz.

One small toe for man.

Okay, so Buzz Aldrin got his name because his sister sent his

called him Buzz.

Called him Buzz.

So his real name is Hector, but his little sister Hek-Toe.

Heck Toe Toe.

Toe is where it's stuck.

But what he was known as within the ice hockey world was...

Head, shoulders, knees up.

Who was the one you get two head-shoulders using toes to into one booker?

No, he was known as the old lamplighter.

Really?

And he's amazing.

So why?

He's been listed as one of the hundred greatest NHL players in history.

The old lamplighter, because he's so good at scoring goals that a light goes on when you score a goal to

go.

To let you know.

So he's the old lamplighter.

Yeah, that's good.

That's very nice.

Yeah, so the first actual example of anyone wearing a mask that we know of was a woman called Elizabeth Graham of Queen's University, who in 1927 wore a fencing mask.

And according to her son, she had done it because she'd recently had dental work and she wanted to protect her teeth.

There does seem to be a vanity element to the original masks.

There's her who didn't want to damage more of her teeth and get more dental masks.

So it just goes a little bit beyond vanity.

So I don't want my teeth smashed up.

Yeah, that's fair enough.

It's a hard time.

They trashed it.

It's 160 kilometres an hour.

I'm doing things like, oh, you absolute wuss.

You want a mask in your face.

I just think they're so mean back in the day.

No, but it was the, I think she specifically said that she was trying to save her dad the dental bills, but that was probably because she was too afraid to just say, I'm really scared of being wiped in your face with a buck.

But also, there was a guy called Jack Crawford who was one of the first people to wear a helmet in ice hockey, and that was in the 1930s.

And he wore it, apparently, because he was bald and he just wanted to conceal his bald patch.

That's so funny.

That's so crazy.

That's protecting your vanity.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's more a vanity thing.

You're absolutely right.

I wouldn't put the vanity on the only woman that we have in this question.

I'm allowed to do whatever I like, but the only woman in this question, Alex.

Do you you know that when actually speaking of women in hockey, when international women's hockey first became a big thing, and this was in the 1980s, a lot of the leagues required breast protectors.

So you had to wear like something solid over your breasts so that they don't get hit by the puck.

But one of the problems that they had in, I think it was in Sweden, is that one of the referees refused to check if the players were wearing them.

So they couldn't enforce the law because it was a male referee and he wouldn't go in and just prod and go.

Are they just very hard-breasted?

Are you wearing a protector?

That's a weird job, isn't it?

Like, what do you do

with rope women before games?

I started as the carrot eater from Alberta.

While we're on referees, has anyone heard of Frederick Charles Albert Waghorn, aka the old wag.

He had a tail?

No,

he's quite an innovative hockey referee.

He set a lot of rules.

One of the biggest things that he did was referees didn't used used to have a whistle.

Instead of a whistle, do you know what they had?

They had a cowbell.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Because it's like an alpine, I don't know, like mountainous cowbells.

Do you have cowbells in snow sometimes?

Yeah, I know.

I'm not really going anywhere with that.

Yeah, the problem was, is that people kept turning up with their own cowbells.

So you had people making it so that plays couldn't happen.

So what they did is they used something that no one else could possibly get a hold of, a whistle.

Exactly.

Now, this is what's so amazing.

I was like, I thought the audience was just cows

but this is what's amazing about the old wags decision is that there wasn't at the time a thing of you having a whistle whistles weren't no they weren't commercial

you're right because at the start of the 20th century everyone used to carry a cowbell around

exactly and the cowbells were more farming going on maybe that was more accessible yeah no one really had them so you were more likely to have a cowbell come to a hockey match than you were

a whistle.

This is true.

And so he introduced the whistle.

He introduced professional referees in amateur hockey games, the practice of dropping the puck from a few feet high when you're going for the start.

He did that.

And he also said, you can't count it as a goal if the puck breaks in half and half the puck goes inside the net.

You need the full puck going inside the net.

I guess maybe back in the day the materials were different and it did happen.

But here's the thing about the whistle.

He took it from being, not only introduced it, but took it from being a a steel whistle to a plastic whistle because referees kept getting their lips stuck around it in the eyeball.

They can't stop whistling.

What's wrong?

That's so funny.

Something else that hockey masks have given us.

The world record for the farthest eyeball pop.

i.e.,

like in the cartoon, exactly.

Some people can pop their eyeballs sort of out quite far out of their sockets.

Yeah, so deliberately as opposed to an accidental pop.

Well, yes, I guess so.

So this is the world record for the furthest eyeball pop by a woman, and it's 12 millimetres, which is quite a lot, obviously.

It's by a woman called Kim Goodman.

She discovered the talent when she was hit on the head by a hockey mask and her eyeballs popped out.

What was the context for a hockey mask hitting her on the head?

I actually don't have it.

But what happened was that her eyes went

like that out of her head.

And she was like, oh my god.

And then she discovered she could do this.

And then now she holds the world record for the furthest pop.

How bizarre!

So, this is just for women, though, because obviously, all men have that whenever Jessica Rabbit walks

and they're much pushback there always is to protective equipment in sports because it kind of degrades the sport.

I mean, people had the piss taken out of them a lot, didn't they?

The first people to wear hockey masks, the first people who were wearing helmets, and

people used to have extraordinary injuries that they still do, actually, really awful injuries sometimes, but like eyeballs being slashed and stuff like that.

Brian Berrard, I think, had a, he lost an eye and then continued to play with 20 over 400 vision.

The old winker.

He had 20 over

400 vision.

He had numerous operations on his eye to help try and restore his sight until it was eventually at the legal limit, which is 20 over 400.

We have 20, 20, but that means that what I can see at 400 feet, you as 20 over 400 can't see until you're 20 feet away.

What did that mean?

It meant he was still quite good at hockey, actually.

But not as good as he would have been.

Are you guys familiar with the most popular genre of sports romance in the world?

Okay.

Well, it must be hockey related.

Yeah, there is a clue in the fact that I've inserted it into this fact.

But hockey romance is extremely popular.

As literature, you mean?

Hockey romance novels.

So, Amazon has a list of the top sports novels, sports romance novels.

She gave me a Zambona.

Want a puck?

That one I get.

All right.

What was the first one?

A Zamboni is that little machine that drives around to make the ice smooth.

Oh, I didn't know that.

James's is actually much better because the puck one is used in almost every title in hockey novels.

Oh, so I'm the commercial one.

I'm the one keeping this industry afloat, man.

Apologies.

I'm the one who's doing some esoteric poetry.

Yeah.

James, your Kafka is going to be discovered after your time in the hockey romance.

It's amazing, though.

They sell so many, all the top 10 books in Amazon's list of sports romance are all hockey romance.

I wonder what their demographic is.

Do you?

Canadians?

I think I can tell you.

All right.

I'm sorry.

I'm just wondering.

What is it?

I think it's Canadian women.

Okay.

So they sell up to 2 million, estimated 2 million for the most popular, which I can tell you as people who sell books is more than we've sold on many of our books by up to

about 100.

And yeah, they all have titles like Puck Me and Pucking Around and Hot as Puck.

It doesn't sound like romance, it sounds more like erotic pornography literature.

I think they are traversing that line quite a lot, yes.

And do you think that I wonder if it's less about Canadian women just like it and more about you're going to write a sporting erotica book and it's the easiest pun to make it.

You could be right.

We were talking about ghost bus stops earlier, last fact.

I don't even just realise how much like ghost busters they are.

There's a company in London.

There's a company in London that does bus tours of like ghost tours of London and they're called ghost bus tours and I think that's

lovely.

That's really good.

See, there goes down again with a commercial pung.

So do you know what a ghost keeper is?

Ghostkeeper, so it's presumably about hockey.

Yeah.

Is Is it a goalkeeper that lets all the goals in?

He's actually straight through him.

He's actually a real person.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, he's called Jim Bob Ghostkeeper, and he's a ghostkeeper.

He's a Canadian hockey goalkeeper, and the reason he's notable is that in 2018 he won Name of the Year.

You know, there's those competitions together.

So that's his real name, is it?

It must be.

I think that's part of the.

Or certainly it must be his Deepold name.

Yeah.

Just because I do love a hockey nickname.

So goalies have great nicknames.

There's John William Bower, who was known as the China Wall.

Couldn't get past him.

The China Wall past him.

Do you mean the Great Wall of China?

Yeah, exactly.

A, you can get through that and B, a wall made of China would be very smashable by a puck travelling 160 kilometers an hour.

It's true.

Yeah.

Maybe he's visible from space.

Yeah, that's what he is.

Something I thought was really interesting that I didn't know about hockey, and I'm sure people who watch it a lot will, is that so 10% of ordinary people left-handed.

In hockey, the majority play left-handed.

60 to 70% of NHL players shoot left-handed.

And it seems to be that basically in hockey, it's really important to be quite ambidextrous because, you know, you're having to use both hands a lot and flip it around.

And so I think a lot of coaches think the way to get super high level, and the more high level you get, the more left-handed players you get.

The way to get super high-level is to breed ambidexterity.

So they're just taught from a young age, shoot with your off-hand.

So isn't that weird?

You want to come up with a whole new thing, like learn to play it, holding it with your mouth or something.

So you can have both hands, like come up up with something that's really good.

What are you going to do with your hands while you're...

Because the only thing you can do with your hands in a game of hockey is to hold the stick.

I'm just not going to be able to do that.

You can write hockey romance novels with your hands whilst you're playing.

People are wearing the breast protectors on that.

I can imagine what the romance is if you've got a hockey stick in your mouth.

When the puck, though.

That's really interesting because ice hockey came from another spot called Shinney.

Oh, that sounds painful.

Yeah, I think that is probably where it got its name: that people would be wrapped on the shins

because there's lots of different rules for this.

Basically, it's hitting a ball into a goal

quite often on ice in the winter.

But one rule that seems to be common no matter how the game was played is that you had to play it right-handed all the time.

But if you hit a shot with your left hand, the nearest opponent to you had to shout Shinny on your own side, and then was allowed to hit you in the shins with their stick.

That was, yeah.

I guess you're getting the warning, though.

Yeah, I mean, you can sort of like clench yourself.

You can't clench yourself.

You can't, there's nothing you can do.

I feel like you can.

Clench your shin muscles, everyone.

Like, psychologically prepare for it, but you can't physically.

I tell you what, you could run away.

I'm clenching my shin right now.

No, you're not.

You're clenching your calf, I reckon.

Yeah, but it's pulling back.

The muscle, it's pulling back.

There's nothing, that's the point.

There's nothing in between your shin bone.

There's a few layers of skin and the tiny bit of.

There's no muscle.

If anything, you want to be.

That's muscle.

You want to have a paunch to your shin so it doesn't hit your body.

He walked into the room.

He had incredibly muscly thighs, but a paunch on his shin.

He was clearly a hockey player.

Life's messy.

We're talking spills, stains, pets, and kids.

But with Anibay, you never have to stress about messes again.

At washable sofas.com, discover Anibay Sofas, the only fully machine-washable sofas inside and out, starting at just $699.

Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics, that means fewer stains and more peace of mind.

Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric covers, allowing you to refresh your style anytime.

Need flexibility?

Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly.

Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes.

Plus, they're earth-friendly and built to last.

That's why over 200,000 happy customers have made the switch.

Upgrade your space today.

Visit washable sofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life.

That's washable sofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

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

My fact this week is that the Lesu people of Papua New Guinea all avoid having sex during the pig farrowing season.

That's my excuse.

The lonely Lesu people.

Every season is pig farrowing season in the Alex Bell world.

What's pig farrowing?

Yes, it's when pigs are giving birth.

And I find it quite interesting that it's specifically for pigs.

Only pigs farrow, which is nice that they've got that special word when they're all getting piglets.

And I actually read about this when I was researching last week's fact.

And we were talking about pregnancy stuff and I was reading about coupard, which is the practice which happens in various cultures around the world where men sort of take on pregnancy symptoms or enact pregnancy symptoms or sometimes experience them.

They'll take to their beds, they'll perform certain rituals.

Anyway, I was reading about this in Britannica and it was talking about the Lesu men of Papua New Guinea.

And it said they avoid certain things before the birth of children in that mimicking pregnancy way.

But this also applies to non-human propagation, as they put it.

So the whole community avoids intercourse while pig farrowing is happening.

The important question is: how long is the pig farrowing season?

Yeah, good question.

Season's a big word, yeah.

It's not the pig farrowing afternoon, is it?

I don't know, but I mean, I think it's a few weeks, but I like to think that the pigs really drag it out watching these sex-starved Melanesian men.

Yeah, it was interesting.

And Lessu is just a little village in Papua New Guinea, so it's a small portion of people.

But yeah, what I mean by it being related to coupard is it's about like things giving birth to other things and the taboos that you have around that to make sure that it's good luck.

So they avoid sex in the hope that the pigs will farrow nicely.

I think they had some couvard practices in ancient Egypt where when a child was born, the man would sort of play out the ritual of labor.

So they'd go into their bed and like

basically, exactly.

It kind of sounds kind of mocking, to be honest like the dress and the mother's clothing um it sounds like it'd be a little bit more useful i was thinking yeah

like pretending it's funny when i um when my wife gave birth i was in the room when it happened and she had a cesarean and what they said to me was okay your job is here is a bluetooth speaker put on some nice music that your wife would like okay

and what i think is obviously attaching your bluetooth speaker to your phone is one of the most annoying sort of time-consuming things.

Exactly.

But it's just a thing that they're like, at least making the man useful, giving him something which is difficult enough where he feels like he's done something, but easy enough that it's not going to affect anyone.

Five hours in, you're sweating and screaming.

I can't do it.

I'm too difficult.

I fucking hate you.

Which hype of fish did you play?

It was one you weren't in.

So I was reading a very old book called The Golden Bough by Sir James George Fraser.

And this is like the Bible of anthropology, which was written well over 100 years ago.

Nowadays, if you look at it through today's lens, a lot of the things that he came up with are probably not true and a bit dodgy.

But, you know, he did look at lots of different cultures and see what they did.

And he found that there was quite a lot of cultures where when there was something happening in the farm, like, you know, the pigs are giving birth or we're laying the seeds for some plants or stuff there were quite a lot of people not having sex right basically because they were just so busy no well it could have been that that was the reason his theory and again we don't really adhere to his theories much is that basically you're taking up too much of the world's energy you know and you you don't want to use up all the energy because you want to let the crops grow and if you have too much sex then the the chi or whatever isn't going into the plants and they won't grow as well.

This is what I told myself when I shared a flat and my flatmates all off having loads of sex.

And I was sitting in front of the TV or cereal in my pajamas listening to them, thinking, This is fine, this is fine, I shouldn't be able to do it.

Listening to them

for the polyup TV, Alex.

What I mean is there's a lot of thin walls.

You can hear stuff on the left and the right, and you can't hear a YouTube video about buses.

But yeah, according to him, in other parts of Melanesia, men wouldn't sleep with their wives when they were training their vines.

These are all excruciatingly slow things.

Yeah, Nicaraguans wouldn't have sex between planting the maize and reaping the maize.

Wow.

And the Katish people of Australia wouldn't have sex after laying the grass seed until the first bits of grass popped up.

So it's almost like Lent, just a season of

abstinence.

But then he also said that, let's say this theory of the energy is true.

Some people thought, well, by having sex, we'll increase the energy in the area and it will be better for the plants.

Yeah, sow some seeds while you're sowing some seeds.

Exactly.

And so he said that um in Ukraine all the young married people would go into a field and roll around in it after you've planted some seeds.

What?

S having sex with each other?

It just said rolling around.

Right.

Like when you roll down a hill, okay.

Yeah, I think they might have been naked, so that's bringing some energy in there.

Okay.

He said in Russia it would be similar but it would be a priest who would be rolled around by all the women in the village.

That was really fun.

That's like when you got the bumps on your birthday.

So it's just one priest and all the women.

And then he said, the papillis of Central America have an older and ruder custom designed to impart fertility into the fields.

And because it was an old book, whenever it was something really rude, they wouldn't say what it was.

Oh, okay.

So we, you know, it's some people.

Could you put in a teaser, like a little taster?

For me, it's either having literal sex in the field or masturbating into the field.

Oh, yeah.

It's got to be that one.

Yeah, yeah.

In Tudor times in England, according to historian Lauren Johnson, you weren't supposed to have sex anytime in Lent, anytime in Advent, anytime in Pentecost, when a woman was menstruating, when a woman was pregnant for a month after giving birth, when a woman was breastfeeding during any of the holy days, during any of the days when you were taking communion, or the days leading up to taking communion.

You're not supposed to have sex in any way.

But on the 7th of March...

You've got a headache.

On the 7th of March, assuming that isn't a holy day, but not in the daytime.

Right, okay.

It doesn't have to be in the nighttime.

And also, especially in the Middle Ages, you could only really have sex to produce a child.

But presumably people did, right?

How deciduous is it taboo?

It's just taboo.

It's just not talking about that.

That's undoubtedly true.

But if you wanted to get away with it, you didn't have to go to a church to get married.

Basically, it was just an exchange of vows in front of a witness that meant you were married.

That witness was usually me.

The witness couldn't be downstairs watching a bus video.

They had to be.

So, for instance, there was one 15th-century couple who got married in Yorkshire while milking a cow.

Oh, okay, that's nice.

That's one of those hipster quirky weddings, isn't it?

Oh, we did ours on the top of the Empire State Building.

Oh, we did ours while milking a cow.

When did you get married?

Yeah, on the side of Arthur Sea, next to a tiny ruined chapel.

What's the point?

Pig sex?

Okay.

As in, should we talk about it?

Yeah, cool.

You weren't suggesting it.

Let's talk about it.

When pigs are pregnant, they're pregnant for three months, three weeks, and three days.

That's the gestation period, is that right?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Isn't that weird?

Three weeks.

Yeah.

I mean, not exactly, presumably, but their due date, you're saying, and they go to the doctor.

Yeah, exactly.

Obviously, it varies, but like, that's the official period, yeah.

Nice something.

Also, pig sex smells like truffles, and that's why we use pig for truffles, because female pigs, they think they're looking for sexy male pigs.

That's what they're smelling and looking for.

Really?

Yeah.

And they think sexy male pigs live underground?

No, they're obviously

just horny as fuck and looking for anything that smells like a sexy pig.

Fair.

Yeah.

There is a building in China that contains 300,000 pigs.

Real pigs or China pigs.

Real pigs.

The great pigs of China.

What floor?

They're on all the floors.

The entire building is a.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's like probably 20 stories high, about as long as it is high, and it's just full of pigs everywhere.

Wow.

And they have the.

I'm imagining like a pig office, sorry, now, like where they're wearing ties.

You know what?

It is like the building looks like a really sort of dystopian office building.

It's very nondescript.

It just looks like a big old building.

They have temperature control, ventilation control.

The animals are fed automatically.

Just one person in a central control clicks a button and then each pig gets a little bit of food.

And the idea is that if you farm pigs in this way, then you can get lots of meat, which they need in China.

But also, they don't mix with the domestic pigs, so there might be less transfer of diseases and stuff like that.

Where, of course, everyone else says, well, on the other hand, you've got 300,000 pigs next to each other, so if one of them gets sick, probably they all get sick.

Yeah, And it's also just sounds a bit sad.

I mean, I know we do it with people, and everyone goes into the office, but it's not quite the same, and it's slowly changing.

Imagine if you're late for a meeting and you've got the address wrong by one building.

I was just looking up some other sex-related

taboos, like things that you do for luck or things that you can't do, and came across the Banyang Koli people in they're in Uganda and southwest Uganda, and the aunt in those communities has a really really interesting position so it's her responsibility to make sure when her niece gets married that the groom is potent and able to you know perform and that their sexual stop looking so intelligent in my eyes when you talk about this

that plant over there

really likes it's still doing well isn't it it's really yeah it's really funny who jizzed into it

sorry

so they and this is actually another example of how a lot of people still have the anthropological approach that is very old-fashioned and offensive.

There's so much online about how the aunts have sex with their nieces' grooms.

Not helped by, I think, people from that community who say, Yeah, yeah, we do that, but I'm pretty sure they're joking.

But what the aunt does do is she watches the first time the couple has sex.

So she comes into the room to make sure that everything's functioning.

How interesting.

Yeah.

Is that still practice?

Are you saying?

Yeah, it is sometimes, I believe.

If that's what you do, it's not weird.

I mean, that's true about sexual practice.

That's just

humans.

We just try new things, don't we?

Yeah, and there's all this whole thing.

We're all the like taboo, all the taboos around the stuff that's the most basic thing we can do as creatures, like sex and going to the toilet and stuff like that.

We don't talk about it, and it's all private, but it is the only things that nearly all of us have in common.

So, like, why?

I mean, pretty much all we talk about is sex and going to the low, to be honest.

No, no, no, no, certainly on this podcast.

Obviously, we've really advanced as a society, obviously.

We've broken down those taboos.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on Instagram.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

Alex.

My Instagram is alexhbell.

And Anna, how can they get to us as a group?

You can email podcast at qi.com, or you can go to at no suchthing on Twitter or no such thing as a fish on Instagram.

That's right.

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

All of the previous episodes are up there.

There's also a link, the gateway to Club Fish, our secret members club, where we put a lot of bonus material up on.

There's also a Discord that you get access to so you can chat to all the other fish listeners.

Otherwise, just come back here next week.

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

Goodbye.

Tired of spills and stains on your sofa?

WashableSofas.com has your back, featuring the Anibay Collection, the only designer sofa that's machine washable inside and out, where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices.

That's right, sofas started just $699.

Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slip covers made with performance fabrics.

Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing.

The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity, and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime.

Check out washablesofas.com and get up to 60% off your Anibay sofa, backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.

If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund.

No return shipping or restocking fees.

Every penny back.

Upgrade now at washable sofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.