521: No Such Thing As A Human-Sized Peanut

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from multiple undisclosed locations across the globe.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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 Anna.

My fact this week is that in 1950, a ballet was performed at the Waldorf Hotel where the main characters were protons, protons, electrons, neutrons, and a Geiger counter.

Lovely.

I have a question.

Please.

I reckon it's hard to see an electron.

Even if you're on the front row, you're going to struggle to see an electron doing a plie.

Have you seen those ballet sort of little telescopes you sometimes get at the ballet where you like put a coin in the slot and get a thing out?

It's like that, but everyone gets a electron microscope

50 million times magnifying.

Yeah.

Got it.

Yeah, everyone had that.

It was a very expensive play to put on.

No, this sits, none of those things.

And they were human-sized, played by humans.

And this was reported in Time magazine.

And it was a story that the founder of the Atomic Energy Association of Great Britain, who was a woman called Muriel Howarth, was putting on Isotopia,

which was a ballet.

And the...

article goes on to describe or review it saying it was 13 bosomy women gyrating gracefully an ample electron in black lace wound her way around two matrons labeled proton and neutron.

I see because like an electron is like 2,000 times smaller than a neutron so they didn't get like a very small person or a child to be the electron and it wasn't to scale.

No.

I'm not sure the casting process was as scientific as you would like James for this.

I'm just getting a vibe that you would have some notes if you were sitting in as director.

I would have notes and they would say James you can be the electron because you've been so negative.

It sounds amazing.

I can't tell even from the review whether it was good or not because the person who wrote the review.

Well, the person says

250 wrapped ladies, that means it's good so far, and a dozen faintly bored gentlemen.

Faintly bored is a stupid thing to add in a review.

Sorry, can I also add what you said there didn't quite make sense unless you know that the word wrapped was spelt R-A-P-T.

So it wasn't 250 women who are wrapped in like, you know,

they burst out of their gift wrapping as the grand finale.

Yeah, and sorry, Dan, when Dan said faintly bored gentlemen, he meant bored B-O-R-E-D and not that they were made out of plywood.

Yeah.

You see what I mean?

It's a confusing review.

It's hard.

Yeah, it's very hard.

I don't think it's been restaged many times.

No.

And she wanted it after its debut to play at the Albert Hall, which I don't think it did.

No.

And she said, she's this brilliant woman, Muriel Howarth.

I'm sure we're going to talk more about her now.

She said she wanted it to be at the Albert Hall so they would have room for all the 92 transmutations of the atom.

It's like the director's cut version.

So ambitious.

And she set up loads of atomic bodies, Muriel Howarth.

And this might have been when she was at the Institute for Atomic Information, or it might have been its previous guys, the Ladies' Atomic Energy Club, which just sounds like such a.

It sounds like a Richard Osman buck.

It does.

It sounds like a cute novel.

Yeah, yeah.

It does.

Yeah.

Did you guys know she did a follow-up to this?

That there was a musical piece, a piano concerto that she did as a follow-up to Isotopia.

Yeah, it was called Atomica.

And the review of it says it chiefly consisted of loud, heavy chords, which indicated atomic bombs and springing, tinkling passages, which reflected the extreme surprise and alarm of the human race.

Sounds like what the response would be, but not a great advert because the whole point of it was that she was trying to tell the public how great Atomic Energy was.

So she was employed by Atomic Energy to be its PR man.

And the aim of this society was to lead women out of the kitchen and into the atomic age.

So she particularly wanted to target women, which is why there were all these rapt women and their mildly bored husbands, apparently.

But she was amazing.

Self-taught completely.

She was inspired by reading this Nobel Prize winner's book, a guy called Frederick Soddy.

And she was inspired by his statement that we could transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the world one smiling garden of Eden using atomic energy, which, weirdly, we have now done and it's not that good.

But yeah, and she taught herself all about the atom and then tried to spread the good word.

Yeah, yeah, and atomic gardening was the big thing, which is probably why Isotopia was so much about food.

It's like early GM, but it's incredibly unscientific ways of doing GM.

Basically, you plant a load of crops in a circle, you put a radioactive source in the middle.

When you say radioactive source, sorry, we're spelling that

because that's genuine possible confusion, isn't it?

I think.

Yeah, I suppose so.

Yeah, a source of radiation.

Does that clear it up?

Not much.

Anyway, there's some radioactive stuff in the middle of the pie chart, and then all the plants near it.

Was this a physical pie?

Or was this like a...

Gee-whiz.

Sorry, go on, Andy.

Yeah?

No one else got any amusing homophones they want to bust out?

When do you say homophon?

Oh my gosh.

So you put your gamma radiation right in the middle, right?

And the plants that are nearest it, the seedlings, get completely blasted and they just die, right?

And then

the ones further out get tumors.

And the ones further out than that, on the outer edge of the pie chart, get a load of mutations.

And those mutations might...

be useful in some ways.

So they might make the plant stronger or they might make it more resistant to particular kinds of blight.

And you just do thousands of experiments and they produce thousands of new varieties of plants, some of which I think are still in use today.

The mutations actually worked

for

like the peppermint oil, any peppermint oil which you have today, which you might think, well, I don't really have much peppermint oil, but actually, it's in loads of foods that you get as like a very minor ingredient.

That was invented by Atomic Gardening.

It's in toothpaste and stuff like that, for instance.

But she became famous for inventing the world's first atomic peanut, didn't she?

Yeah.

So

she made this radioactive peanut, which germinated in four days and grew two feet tall, which apparently is quite big for a peanut.

That's a peanut plant, not the peanut.

Yeah, but the peanut itself, disappointingly, as I read in the reviews, was the size of an almond.

Yes, yeah.

That's a huge peanut in the peanut world, doesn't it?

That's big.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's double or triple a normal peanut.

It is quite good, but you do get jumbo peanuts these days, which I don't think Kara radiated.

Not the size of a person, but sorry, you're under.

If you look at all the pictures in the newspapers at the time, she's there, a picture of her with her peanut, which looks a bit like an almond.

Because obviously the pictures aren't great either.

So you can't really see what she's doing.

But that was when she first really got in the newspapers and became big.

And then she started trying to do all of these publicity stunts of which the ballet was one.

And one of them was she cooked a roast dinner.

English roast dinner of beef, vegetables, Yorkshire pudding, potatoes and onions.

But the potatoes and onions were three years old.

So they'd been irradiated and they were absolutely fine after three years.

That was brilliant.

It's so good.

It's like that must have been revolutionary, like time travel cuisine.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know.

It must have been amazing, but apparently it didn't taste of anything.

Right.

Because once you'd irradiated them and kept them for three years, any kind of taste in this potato or onion had just disappeared completely.

If you're cooking with onions and they've often been in the back of your pantry for a bit of time, I mean, do you need to irradiate it to serve three-year-old onions?

I reckon I've probably tried to cook myself an onion verging on that.

You know, and you get the soft bits off.

And sometimes there's a bit salvageable.

I just, I'm not sure you needed to go to all of that trouble.

Do you know what I mean?

I know exactly what you mean, having known you for 15 years.

And never come to dinner at my house despite multiple invitations.

Another cool thing that she did is that she put a message out saying, I need people to help me with this.

And if you want to get involved, get in contact.

And if anyone did get in contact, she sent them seeds through the post.

And to encourage it she launched the Muriel Howorth Peanut Prize to the best mutant things each year but we don't actually know whether or not anyone was awarded it because again it was so hard to find these mutants really yeah wow well either that or someone created a mutant plant so vicious it ate all of them yeah

the evidence was destroyed She used to carry a potato around in her pocket that wasn't just any potato, it was an irradiated potato.

Did she

that was a publicity stunt.

And I.

It's not very good publicity if it's in your pocket, unless you have a transparent pocket.

Well, she had it very obvious, and she used to open with a chat-up line: you know, I am not just pleased to see you, it's actually an irradiated potato in my pocket.

So,

have I ever said that in the old days of Crown Green bowling in Lancashire, this was at the turn of the 20th century, the bowlers would often keep a jacket potato in their pockets?

Like a hot water bottle?

Why?

Exactly, yeah, yeah.

So, it would be to keep your hands warm, so you'd have a jacket potato in your pocket, and whenever your hands got cold, because it's always cold in Lancashire, you would put your hands in your pocket, warm them up, that would be good for the game.

And then, when there was a break in the game, you could eat the jacket potato.

Wow, there must have been a lot of either A, amusing mishaps where people accidentally threw the potato along with pitch, yeah, or B, a lot of um, arrests for suspected masturbation.

No, it's we we know the potato's in your other pocket.

Can we say on Howarth, there is a fantastic source.

If you do want to read more about atomic gardening, there's a website called atomicgardening.com.

I think it's run by someone called Paige Johnson.

Yes, who is kind of the,

I don't know if she's the official or unofficial, but she is the historian on this subject.

It's so interesting.

She's just kind of...

found everything about Howarth over the years.

And yeah, it's very cool.

And in fact, one thing she found that I couldn't find where she got it from, she wrote that Mural Howarth also patented an early picture and sound recording device called the talkie phone.

Did she?

Yeah, she did.

She was extraordinary.

She was a science fiction writer as well.

She was putting these concertos together.

She was an all-rounder.

And I thought the story was going to end.

And this is part of

the bad branding of nuclear power that, oh, she would have got really ill off the back of this and eventually died.

And that's why we don't do it anymore.

But that didn't happen.

This was safe.

This was safe.

I was wondering, Dan, do you think that she was so prolific because she'd had a bit of radiation in her body?

Maybe there was a big circle of Muriel Howarths with a radioactive source in the middle, and she was just at the right position where she got the right blast of radiation, and it made her a superhero.

That's so exciting.

I hadn't considered that.

And that's all I'm going to take away from this show now.

So, what's happened to all the other Muriel Howarths who are kind of weird, mutant, deformed, or gigantic, or minuscule?

She's eating green.

She's eaten them as something to provide flavor next to these awful potatoes and onions.

They are the bad guys in the Muriel Howarth comic book.

Oh, that's such a good idea.

Wait, and it's called, sorry, the comic book is called The Ladies' Atomic Energy Club.

And it's about all the ladies are Muriel Howarth, who've been replicated.

Yes.

They've got different skills.

One of them's got 19 legs.

One writes their own piano concertos.

The other writes science fiction novels.

Can I just say, like, it seems like quite often we come up with these brilliant ideas, but no one at Hollywood has gotten in touch with us yet.

So maybe they're getting our email wrong or something, but it's podcast at qi.com.

If anyone wants to give us a million quid to make that.

I think that's true.

I think maybe they assume that we've got them in development through our own obviously massive production company.

And they just think, oh, well, those guys have thought of whatever stupid thing we've come up with this week.

This was all kind of the pro-atomic energy movement, wasn't it?

Saying, actually, this thing was invented for war.

It's very, very powerful, but it can be used for peace.

It can provide electricity and power that's much cleaner, doesn't cause carbon emissions, all of that.

And I just found it interesting.

I had no idea how big the early movement was.

So I read a great interview with a, she's a poet actually called Deborah Greger, and she grew up in a place called Hanford, Washington, which is where the Manhattan Project was partly based.

It was where the first plutonium reactor in the world was sighted, right?

And it was such a culture of pro-atomic energy.

High school football team was called the the Richland Bombers.

The cheerleaders for the football team had a four-foot-high nuclear bomb painted in the school colours, which they would dance around at half-time.

And this is so cool.

Once a month, her dad came back from work with a case, right?

Special suitcase.

And it had two glass bottles in it.

And his job was to fill the bottles with urine and leave them out on the front doorstep.

Oh, really?

And it was so he could be tested for any, if he'd had too much radiation exposure at his job at the power plant.

So was there a postman specifically whose job was to come and collect two vials of urine?

I'm thinking maybe milkmen, though.

Yeah.

Because you've got the space on, if you've dropped two bottles of milk off, you've got a space for two urine bottles.

Yep.

That's it.

And it's like the milk fairy, the urine fairy comes around.

Yeah.

You don't want to mix up those orders.

Yeah, you don't want to mix.

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okay it is time for fact number two and that is andy my fact is that in 1340 At the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, Edward III challenged King Philip VI of France to settle who was the rightful heir to the French throne by exposing themselves to hungry lions.

Now, let's go through these words.

Exposing yourself.

Can you define that, please?

What a good point.

What a good point.

Sorry.

You would basically put yourself in a room with a hungry lion or a cage or whatever.

And the idea, obviously, a lion will never attack a true king.

So this was like

just a great acid test for who's the real king.

Has anyone told the lioness?

well exactly it's so weird that is amazing what i wonder at this stage it's a little bit like the cold war where you've got like two people who could mutually kill each other you know if philip calls his bluff then they're both dead because they both have to go and stand in front of lions and they're both dead yeah you're right and it is lions plural so that it feels like there's gonna be one lion for each of them maybe they believe i know i think maybe they both go in with one lion yeah and then the lion will have to attack one of them first And then the other one just runs for the, right, it's me.

I'm the king.

I'm the queen.

Like your servants will try and sneakily rub him with meat before you go in.

So that's the game as well.

Yeah.

Do you think they did that thing where boys used to hide their willy in their bum crack so that the lion couldn't see it?

I don't think the lion is going for the penis per se.

Anna, what do you think the costume choices are for this?

Why are you...

Because

they're exposing themselves themselves to the lions?

Wait, I'm sorry.

Sorry.

No, no, no.

I don't think that's traditionally how you put it, where you hide

in your bum crack.

I'm sorry.

When you're pretending, well, I don't know, because I'm not a man, but when you're pretending to have a vagina, don't you hide it in your bum crack?

Between your legs.

Between your legs, what's your normal traditional phrase

rather than

you don't actually tuck it in inside the anus?

Can we please get back to the 100?

I can just imagine Philip going, all right, Edward, fine, we're going to do it.

Fine, we're going to do it.

Where's the lion?

It's in that room.

Fine, okay.

And then Edward goes, okay, pants off.

Peterson, Bumcrack.

Imagine if we had BBC live news coverage back then.

Well, they're both in the room.

King Edward appears to be doing the most curious thing.

He's kind of

pushing his penis into his anus.

Anna.

Anna.

I don't know what I've done and I'm so sorry.

So that's not

horrifying.

Right.

Can we get back to the the horrific conflict which killed thousands and you know lasted a century?

I just got a quick question.

Did anyone find where this was an idea that came from?

The idea that.

Sorry.

Well, it's just a traditional belief of kingly, you know, you're chosen by God.

So that this, I should say, this fact came in.

It was based on a fact that was centered by Daniel Parrish because he heard us talking about scrofula and he has done a lot of research into that.

And there's an academic treatise called The Royal Touch in Early Modern England by Stephen Brogan.

And both of them did touching for scrofula.

Yeah.

Both Edward the Third and Philip VI touched people who had scrofula and hopefully they'd be cured.

You know, that was the idea of monarchs had the power to do that.

And that was another of the elements of the challenge was that Edward also challenged Philip VI.

He said, look, we can either have trial by combat, we can expose ourselves to lions, or we can have a touch-off, and we'll just touch as many people as we can for Scrofula, and whoever wins, whoever cures the most people, they're the true king of France.

So it's a way of avoiding this whole war.

You know, we've got a big dispute about who should be in charge of France.

Let's find out.

And these were the methods that were proposed.

And did Philip VI turn them all down and say I'd rather

get more than 100 years war?

He didn't go for it, which implies that he sort of knew maybe actually he shouldn't be king of France.

Yeah, or maybe they should have a king of France who doesn't think that lions are just going to randomly not attack you because you're king.

Yeah.

Yeah, 100 years' war, England beat France.

More than 100 years.

I think that's a classic QI thing, right?

116.

We're talking 16 years.

But basically, England owned loads of bits of France, and there was a big old fight about how much they should own and how much they shouldn't own.

Is that right?

A lot of people in France thought none and a lot of people in England thought some.

Who actually is England and who is France here?

Do you know?

Lots of the sort of French dukes sided with the English crown.

It's all very...

It's very confusing.

In a lot of ways, France wasn't really a, you know, a coalesced nation until it was over.

And my theory is that the whole of the Hundred Years' War was just about wine because it was triggered when Philip VI confiscated Aquitaine, which is this region that was owned by the English, confiscated it from Edward III.

So it was in Gascony, and Gascony was crucial to England because it contained Bordeaux and it made claret.

And England imported so much claret.

So by the 14th century, I think Bordeaux was sending Britain enough wine wine for every single person in Britain, including children, to have six bottles each a year.

And suddenly Philip VI said, you can't have that region anymore.

And the English said, well, what are we going to do about our wine?

And that's what caused it.

And I think that's the most justified cause for war.

Because the Gascons, they were like, oh, well, we're kind of happy being...

like friends with the English because they're quite a long way away and you have to get past the Bay of Biscay and over the Channel and they're not going to come and bother us and we don't really want to be friends with these French people who are right next door who might start taxing us more or might start invading us and whatever.

I didn't realize and I'm saying this more as someone who doesn't have a good grasp of English history and 100 years war and stuff like that, but I didn't realize that in this period, French was basically the language of the upper class in the UK and English was the working class language.

And so that's why there was, as you say, Anna, it was sort of a bit confusing.

And there was also the inheritance of the crown in France anyway, wasn't there?

With Philip becoming king, but he wasn't a direct descendant of the king.

And Charles thought he had a closer connection and should be the rightful heir.

So there was that as well as the wine.

Edward thought he had a rightful connection.

Sorry, that's what I meant.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that's true, actually.

As in, if you just go straight off that whoever's related the most closely, Edward was definitely the most closely related.

But the French barons, they wanted philip because he was one of them really that was a thing but um edward's lineage came through his mother who was isabella the she-wolf oh she's incredible why would you not why would you not want someone who's called isabella the she-wolf to be the mother of the king

you know well isabella was the one who um she was edward's mother but she had overthrown his father, her husband, Edward II, possibly thanks to shoving a red-hot poker up his ass.

But probably not, really.

Probably not, but definitely due to her picking up a lover, Roger Mortimer, and deciding to take over England.

Was the red-hot poker up the arse a

that was an aggressive thing and not an enjoyable thing?

It might have been enjoyable at the very beginning of the situation, but certainly by the end, he wasn't enjoying it.

Right.

Isn't that a bit, it's sort of a bit of later homophobic propaganda, isn't it?

That thing of because I think so.

Because Edward II took a male lover who was, I can't remember his name now, now, but he was.

I've just finished David Mitchell's book, which goes into great detail about the, you know, Dispenser.

Hugh Dispenser, is he called?

Hugh Dispenser.

I think so.

That's a funny name.

Oh, no, Piers Gaveston.

Piers Gaveston.

He had terrible reflux, didn't he?

They were both.

Oh, God.

I think they were both rumoured to be certainly rumoured to be.

Basically, the problem was that Edward II was a big at choosing favourites and was very bad at distributing favours in a kind of equitable manner.

So lots of people got very aggrieved about that.

And clearly, then Isabella enters the scene.

And the other thing about putting a red-hot poker up the bum is that it doesn't leave any obvious scars unless you take a good old look at the bum.

So you can kill someone theoretically, and they might think that they died of something, an illness.

No, until you look at the look on their face in death.

I'm surprised that you're a poker truther on this jailer.

What?

I think it's not.

I think it didn't happen.

I mean, clearly it was bumped.

Oh, sorry, I'm not saying it happened.

I'm just saying that that is part of the propaganda is that they

assess why.

There certainly seems to be a through line of arses in the Hundred Years' War because there was that, which fair enough is in the lead-up to it.

There was obviously the original fact.

And then there was the fact that in 1346, so very early on, on the way to the Battle of Crecy, which was one of the sort of biggest, most important battles of the Hundred Years' War,

the Norman soldiers exposed their backsides to Edward III's archers.

And according to reports, this pissed off the English so much that they basically launched the battle.

They decided to win the battle instead of.

No, they launched an ill-advised attack, which they lost because they were so offended by the bare arses.

That's interesting.

Sorry, Anna, can I just quickly check?

When you say there's a lot of arses and you say the original fact, are you including your new theory that they were shoving their penises up their ankles?

No, no, this is too much.

No, this is too.

She said the original fact.

I know it's nothing to do with the original fact.

This is out of the way.

It's not.

Sorry, sorry.

It's my reading of the original fact where they expose themselves in a flashing kind of way.

Yes.

One person in the Battle of Cressy was Blind King John of Bohemia.

He was there to support.

So he wouldn't have been affected by the mooning, to be fair.

He was the one person who was a family.

No,

he was actually on the side of the mooners.

He was on Philip's side.

But he'd had a bount of ophthalmia, which meant that at the time he couldn't really see anything.

So he asked two of his knights to be on either side of him while he was sort of strapped to his horse and the two knights went towards the battle while he was in between them so that he knew exactly that he was going in the right direction.

Good lord.

That is so brave.

King John, you are allowed to sit this one out.

It's fine.

No one will think any less of you if you don't fight.

No, no, I'm here now.

Well, obviously the English won it.

Did the English win the Battle of Cressy?

Yeah, they did.

James.

Of course the English won the battle.

I'm sorry.

Andy, your outrage there is embarrassing.

You're Scottish anyway, Andy.

You should be on the French side.

England only won about three battles in the Hundred Years' War and they were definitely tilted towards the start.

There was Agincourt, Cressy, Sluice,

Sluice,

where

the French fleet was sunk.

No, if Britain had just, Britain, England had just kind of sued for peace after the first 30 years, they'd had a completely cracking first 30 years to the war.

Right.

And then after that, it was kind of gradually all downhill for the next sort of 70, 80 years.

It didn't go well for them after that.

It is classic, you know.

Agincourt was a pretty good ending for

that was right towards the end.

It was like a late goal.

And I think the French would object to you calling Agincourt an ending, given that when it did end, it was very much

years after the Battle of Agincourt and the French won the whole war over.

The Battle of Sluice was interesting because this was a naval battle and the English fleet came up and they were kind of manoeuvring to get to the best angle because of the wind and stuff like that.

And when they were manoeuvring, the French got entangled with each other, all the different boats because they were ready but then because it didn't start straight away they kind of all sort of bumped into each other and all got really entangled the french actually chained their boats together sometimes this seemed to be a tactic that worked um but it certainly wasn't in this instance because as you say, it meant they got entangled.

So basically a ship couldn't go to the aid of another ship because they were literally attached together.

It was like doing a three-legged race, but with a hundred people all attached to each other in the race.

A bit like playing foosball it's like it's fine as long as the ball is right next to one of your players you can spin around and kick it but as soon as the ball goes anywhere not near your players you're fucked yeah that's why football teams tend to not chain themselves together isn't that right i don't watch a lot but that is yeah absolutely true i like this theory okay there's a theory that actually the hundred years war really lasted from 1066 until 1904 just a millennium of anglo-french conflict happened basically kicking off obviously with the battle of hastings and then the 1904 was when the entente cordiale agreements were signed between England and France, which really bonded them very closely together.

There was so much conflict, you know.

Do you think, Andy, like, obviously we are allies now,

but there were peace treaties signed all over those thousand years.

And there's no reason to think that in 500 years there won't be another battle between England and France.

So in that case, with the Hundred Years' War go on for a while.

Do you think this might be a long lull?

That's what I was thinking, yeah.

I hope, oh gosh, I do hope not because I love France.

Yeah, me too.

But look, it's possible.

I actually like it a little bit too much.

And I'm thinking that, you know, that area around Bordeaux is very nice.

Do you think maybe, James, you might actually have a claim to Gascony?

It's just, I do drink a lot of wine.

It might, you know.

Just give it a try.

A little foray, never hurt anyone.

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

My My fact this week is that Buzz Aldrin's dad once got so angry that his son wasn't featured on a U.S.

post stamp commemorating the moon landing that he went and stood outside the White House holding a placard that read, my son was first two.

So it's

the ultimate embarrassing dad move.

He's just demented.

This is such a weird thing to do.

Why?

I just think, take the win.

That your son has been the second man to walk on the moon.

He's not on the stamp.

Who cares?

It's odd, but I actually think so.

Buzz Aldrin's dad, Edwin Aldrin Sr., that Buzz's real name is Edwin.

He's a junior.

I have a bit of sympathy for him because I think basically he is one of the most extraordinary characters that we've had in relation to airplanes and rockets and so on.

This is a guy who was literally buddies with Orville Wright, knew the Wright brother.

He marries a woman.

The Wright brother.

You can't say the Wright brother.

It's either the Wright brothers or a right brother he is the right brother the other one's the wrong brother

so he's yeah he's but he's buddies with orville right of the right brothers he happens to be flying with a guy whose surname is moon he marries a woman who is called marion moon his son then goes on to stand on the moon but really he's also kind of the reason that we got to the moon it's because he was very good friends with a uh a rocket engineer called uh godard right godard is the one who basically got us to the moon.

He's the one who was so key to inventing the rocket power that we needed to get there.

And he didn't have funding and that was a huge problem.

So Edwin Aldrin Sr.

is, he knows him because he studied under Goddard and he's also an influential guy in that world.

He sets up a meeting with Lindbergh, First to Fly the Atlantic, in which he basically says, are you able to get Goddard the funding that he needs in order to go on?

He goes to the Guggenheim Foundation and manages to get the money.

So Edwin Aldrin Sr.

literally made the funding happen in order for us to get to the moon.

So, I can see why he's pissed off because he's literally the linchpin to all these elements.

I know what you mean, Dan, but you've introduced him in this section as the guy who stood with a placard as an embarrassing dad.

It's definitely an embarrassing dad move, no matter what, but I can see his reasoning.

No, come up with something better, like my son was there to, or my son also went to the moon.

He said, My son was first to.

It's the only thing that's not true.

Come up with this.

can i just say second can i just say

this is in 1969 right the stamp is issued yeah aldrin himself clearly was a bit um narced about it because he had to go to the unveiling of the stamp aldrin wrote in his memoir i smiled rather weakly when i first saw the stamp though it was a bittersweet honour i mean come on michael collins' thoughts about this are not registered michael collins is nowhere even near this stamp didn't kick up half the fuss also it's not neil armstrong on the stamp uh-huh what right you are not not allowed to commemorate the living on stamps.

So logically, it can't be Neil Armstrong on this stamp.

So

is it not like a famous image of him?

I think it's a drawing of the phone.

It's a drawing of the famous stamp.

It's a drawing.

At some point between the photo and the drawing, Neil Armstrong has been replaced by a generic man.

And this got controversial when they released an anniversary stamp some years later, because many thought that it portrayed Armstrong and Aldrin, who were alive at the time.

And that has two astronauts on it facing the camera.

but they've got the helmets up with the visor so you can't see and the US Postal Service never admitted to breaking the law forbidding the portrayal of living people they just said these are generic astronauts to commemorate these two people who were real who landed on the moon it's such a fudge it's definitely a fudge when you've literally drawn a picture of a specific person yeah yeah i would say that edwin's at least justified in that i read an article that was in the newspaper archives that came out the weekend after they landed on the moon where they spoke to all the families and stuff like that and we've said before that buzz had communion on the moon yeah uh but i didn't know this at the same time as he was taking communion on the moon the in his church back home they were taking the same communion with the same bit of bread no so the priest had gotten this big bit of bread and broken a bit off and given one piece of it to buzz and at the exact same time ish they did their own communion and the priest said this loaf is not complete.

Now we shall commune with him.

He is one of us.

And they're referring to Buzz.

And they had to get extra seats in the church because so many people wanted to come to this communion.

And they all had Bibles donated by Buzz that were inscribed with his mother's name because actually Buzz's mother died before he got to the moon.

It was the year before.

Yeah, it was May 1968.

And she took her own life.

And according to Buzz, the reason that she did that is because she couldn't handle the stress of the fame and and notoriety that he was gaining from being an astronaut that was going to the moon.

He says it was mixed with other stuff, but that was a big factor.

What a weird thing to take with you as you're about to go off to the moon that you lost your

reason or the mission.

Yeah, Marion Gladys Moon was her name, and it was because he'd done the Gemini mission.

So he was actually super famous before he went to the moon off the back of that.

And sweetly, Buzz Aldrin did, I realize, kind of looking into him, he's always mentioning the fact that his mother's maiden name was Moon.

I suppose he would, because it's an incredible fact.

But he does in any autobiography or interview or anything like that, he will say, or he'll tweet it and say, yep, mother's maiden name was Moon.

Who would have thought?

And he was in this newspaper article that I read, he was called the World Spacewalking Champion, they said.

And the other person on the moon is Buzz Aldrin, the World Spacewalking Champion.

Not the first, though, was he?

He wasn't the first.

He'd spent five hours outside Gemini 12, which meant that that he'd been out in space on his own for longer than any other person.

I think Leonov was the first, wasn't he?

Just back to the moon and families for a second.

There was a lot of stuff that was left on the moon, which was related to the family members of the astronauts.

Some initials were sort of put into the moon dust that will be sitting there for many, many, many, many years, unless they're disturbed by future missions or meteorite hits or whatever.

There was a photo that was left of one of the families.

So all these little, beautiful little mementos.

And there's actually, and I hadn't heard of this before, but there is a mystery about Neil Armstrong and the moon.

And that is a missing 10 minutes where Neil went off comms and stood by a crater just for 10 minutes on his own.

And

there's a lot of conjecture about what he did in that 10 minutes.

I reckon he put his penis into his bump,

stopped and walked around and said, I'm the first woman on the moon.

I think he just felt the hot jacket potato he brought with him in his space suit and warmed his hands up on that cold landscape.

I think he stared into outer space and surveyed the enormity of what he was achieving and representing.

Okay.

And stuck his penis in his bum crack.

My god.

Yeah, no.

So there's a,

it's to do with family is one of the biggest theories, which is the fact that he very tragically lost a daughter who was two years old at the time.

And there was a bracelet that he had with her name on it and the thought is is that he left that on the moon he chucked that into the crater and James Hansen who is the official biographer of Neil Armstrong desperately tried to prove this and he could never get it out of Neil whether or not it happened his family sort of said I hope it happened but they weren't quite sure themselves and so it's it's remained an unanswered question.

When the moon landing happened, there was a protest in

America at the same time not by Buzz Aldrin's father but by 25 families African-American families who walked to Kennedy Space Center because they said it was a distorted sense of national priorities that America was going to the moon

because at the time the poverty rate for African Americans was 31 percent and for black people living on farms it was 62 percent and so they said well why are you spending all this money on the space race when you have people living in poverty in your own country?

And the Victoria Maris, who was the head of the poverty program in Michigan, she said that the Apollo project was akin to a man who has a large family, they have no shoes, no clothing, no food, and the rent is overdue.

But when he gets paid, he runs out and buys himself another set of electric trains.

Oh,

slam on ouch.

People who just enjoy some nice train.

I gotta say, I sympathize with that guy getting his trains.

But you've got to stop keeping your wife in poverty, Andy.

There's no reason.

And the New York Amsterdam News, which was one of the leading black newspapers at the time, had the headline, yesterday the moon, tomorrow maybe us.

So it wasn't, and actually the space program.

They'll be spending money on us.

Yeah, precisely.

And actually, until 1969, pretty much the space program wasn't universally liked.

In fact, possibly not even 50% liked in America, because a lot of people were like, well, why are we wasting money on this when there's problems at home?

And it was really only when everyone, when they walked on the moon, that the kind of opinion changed in America.

Yeah, there's a really nice description.

One of the best books ever, I think, about the Apollo missions is a book called Moondust, if anyone is interested in this subject, listening, by Andrew Smith.

And he talks about all these protests and sort of the reaction literally as the rocket was going into space, the mood changed.

Everyone suddenly was on board in support of it.

Not everyone, but large groups that were protesting suddenly just couldn't help but see the majesty of what we were doing as humanity.

So yeah, it's pretty amazing.

You're falling on Dan, you think send money to the moon missions rather than people in poverty.

Okay.

I think send poor people to the moon.

That's how we just put them off Earth and we'll be fine.

Interestingly.

Oh, I see.

I was going to say, interestingly, that was kind of how the Soviets chose chose their cosmonauts, is that they tried to find people who were born into poor backgrounds.

Because obviously, it was very, yeah, it was very good with their narrative, which was, you know, we're all together.

And if you grew up on a communal farm, then you're just as good as anyone else in the country.

I thought you were going to say, obviously, it was very easy, which it would have been in the Soviet Union at that time to find people with poor backgrounds.

That certainly was true.

Gagarin was born, Yuri Gagarin, who was the first man in space, was born in a town called Gagarin.

Oh.

But it was named after him after his death.

But yeah, he was brought up on a collective farm and his mother had been a factory worker in World War II and this was like a perfect sort of background for a cosmonaut.

Tereshkova, Valentina Tereshkova, who was the first woman in space, she was born in a town which has a population of nine.

Wow.

Isn't that a town?

Yeah, it's officially a town.

She was working in a textile mill at

eventually did some correspondence courses and then

became a cosmonaut.

So they really wanted to get people from other backgrounds into space.

I'm really interested that you said that because it certainly is interesting researching cosmonauts and astronauts.

It's striking how all the astronauts from America at the time had quite similar upbringings, very successful parents, often in the aeronautical industry.

All Soviet cosmonauts were quite gritty upbringings.

I mean, Gugarin and his family lived in a three-metre square mud hut during the war because their property was taken over by Nazis.

On the one hand, Gagarin rebelled against the Nazis who were occupying his land, and he used to pour soil in the Nazi soldiers' tank batteries and kind of mix up their chemicals to foil their plans.

And then I was reading that later on, when he was famous, a famous cosmonaut, he got a scar on his forehead, which you can see in later pictures.

And it's from 1961 when he was on holiday with his wife and a bunch of other people.

And they were playing cards.

And he said, I'm going to bed.

His wife said, I'm just going to finish this hand.

You know, I'll be there in a sec.

He used this spare time to go into the hotel room of one of the other women who was a nurse who was staying in the hotel,

tried to shag her.

And then his wife walked down the corridor, having finished her hand, a couple of minutes later, saying, Where are you, Yuri?

And so he legged it off the balcony of this nurse's room room to escape, split his head open on the tarmac.

And that's the glorious story of

the first Russian in space's scar.

Amazing.

How did I get this?

Fighting Nazis, actually.

Would you like to talk to an alien, assuming that the alien can speak your language and your safety is guaranteed?

Yes.

Would you like to meet an alien?

I would.

Is this an offer?

Yes, Andy.

It's not an offer.

It's a survey from YouGov.

This was done last year.

21% of people said, no, I would not.

Thank you very much.

Even if we can speak the same language and I'm safe.

14% don't know.

I don't know.

I more can't understand than no's.

That is absolutely.

Are they too busy?

Did we get the reasons?

Maybe if you're religious, you don't want the answers that are going to ruin things for you.

Maybe.

Well,

there was that, I won't say who it was, Dan, but a very famous person who we offered to come on the Museum of Curiosity when

Buzz was on.

When Buzz Aldrin came on, and Dan emailed them and said, Would you like to come on?

You can meet the second person who walks on the moon.

And that person wrote back saying, No, I don't really like space.

Yeah, not really into space.

Can you bleep out and say who it was now?

Get out.

Yeah, write back going,

space not really my thing.

But thanks for the offer.

I'm staggered.

I'm staggered.

Yeah, it was incredible.

That's shocking.

So that person, I reckon, probably would be one of the 20%.

Yeah.

Agreed.

Don't we like aliens?

Not interested.

Yeah, no, thank you.

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Sucks!

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

Okay, my fact this week is if you go to the Arctic at the right time, you can view huge herds of moss balls migrating across the plains.

Magnificent.

Now, if you do go there to see the migrating mossballs, we should say migrating at a speed that you would expect is probably a bit of a misleading idea.

These are...

If your trip is for seven years, you might see it move a good foot or maybe...

If you're really eagle-eyed, they move about an inch a day.

Yeah.

It's not the quickest migration ever, but you know, it's not bad for a moss.

It is astonishing as well.

It is astonishing when you see photos of these things and the fact that they herd together and they turn left together and they move forward together it's insane so this is researched by a couple of researchers one of whom i was reading about called timbar tholomus

and he described them as bright green in a world of white in the 1950s when they were first described there was an icelandic guy who called them glacier mice so that gives you kind of an idea of what they look like but they're bright green and if you look at at them, they seem like they're not moving, but actually they're very, very slowly moving.

And they all move in the same direction.

And they don't all move with the wind.

They don't all move because sunlight is melting bits of ice and it's moving them.

They don't move.

There's various different theories.

They don't slopes here.

They don't go downhill.

We don't know why they do it.

And we don't know how they do it.

And every time we come up with a theory, someone disproves it.

Aliens?

Has anyone talked about the aliens?

No, actually, these are part of the 20% that don't really like aliens.

And the other brilliant thing is, this scientist, one of the ones, Tim Bartholomew, I think he's Tim Bartholome mouse.

And these are glacier mice.

Oh, yes.

That's true.

Yes.

It is actually quite confusing when you read about them because they're very commonly referred to in the few things that have been written about them as mice.

And so you keep having to remind yourself halfway through whatever the New York Times article when it says, and within the mice, it's extremely warm and lots of insects live.

They're not actually mice.

They're not actually mice.

Plural of moss.

Plural of moss is mice.

That's the other thing.

Of course.

The guy who discovered these in the 50s, Jun Eitherson, he pointed out that

rolling stones can gather moss because in the middle of all, at the heart of all of these mice, there might be a tiny bit of gravel or a bit of something that it's formed around and the moss has grown around.

And it's more like you get moss that gathers and rolls over stones.

Actually, really.

But either way, it's gorgeous.

They're kind of like little mossy tumbleweed in a way.

I love the idea, the imagery of the pedestals that they sit on.

If you catch them at the right time, let's say you come across a herd, they might all be perched up as if they're on plinths.

Because they're covering a very specific bit of the ice with the mossy ball itself, the ice won't remain because they're insulating it, or rather keeping it cold.

So you end up seeing what looks genuinely, I think, Anna, to your point, like you'd be like, is this aliens?

What is going on here?

Has some like weird artist come out here and just carved around these balls and left them for us to find?

And one of the thoughts is that then then it rolls down the hill for what it's created off this pedestal, and they all roll at the same time.

So that was one of the theories.

But again, this quite recent study where they put trackers inside the mice

kind of disproved this theory of the pedestals.

Not that they exist because they definitely do, but there's something else happening because it's not like they're staying in one place and then moving.

Yeah.

They're kind of every day on average moving about an inch.

And I love as well that this guy, Bartholomouse, he's the way they tracked it is they just put little bits of like small wire around the moss balls in different colours so they could see which one was which.

And he's been going back occasionally to see them, but now he doesn't know where they are.

He's lost his moss balls.

And that's extraordinary.

That whole herd has gone missing on him.

If that moss ball can outrun you, then you need to be taking more exercise, Bartholomew.

Can I redo a bit of romantic,

just a brief romantic passage about these things?

Did you write it?

No, thankfully, don't worry, I didn't.

Okay, then, yeah.

This is about the other scientists in this recent paper who studied these things.

Sophie Gilbert, she's a biologist.

And the University of Alaska website says they met in 2006 studying at the Wrangell Mountains Center, right?

And this is it.

In this expansive setting of a gorgeous ice plateau between high mountains, the pair noticed more than just tufts of moss.

She saw a handsome young leader who wanted to solve glacier problems.

He saw an attractive, worldly biologist who loved being outside.

Powered by flirty energy, they started thinking about how to study these moss balls and they're married now.

Do you think it was the balls that made them honey?

I don't know what prompted the sparked the romance, but I love the idea of proposing with a little moss ball that you open up and the ring is in there.

That would be nice.

And there's also another guy called Hotterlig about whom little is related, but he's the third scientist involved.

There's a woman called Robin Wool Kimmerer, who I suspect some of you have come across, who seems to have written this brilliant book about moss.

I've only read reviews of it, but she's sort of the moss pro.

And she looked a lot at moss traditions in the Arctic, in this area, and how people have used it.

And it's had so many purposes.

So

people would make pillows out of moss.

There's a specific type of moss that was very good for pillows called hypnum moss.

And the reason it's called that is because it was used as a pillow and it was thought if you slept on it, it gives you special dreams.

So it's hypnum, like

hypnotizing dreams.

Do you think that if you got one of these mouse moss bowls, then you know, when your pillow gets too warm, it can turn itself over.

That would be

lovely.

So slowly, though, you'd have to sit up for five minutes probably.

They were used as nappies and sanitary towels, which does make sense because we've talked about sphacnum moss before, which can absorb 40 times its body weight in water.

It's pretty good.

You could leave that nappy on for a week.

It's the dream.

That speaks someone who's a mother.

You're fine.

You're fine.

I can't smell it, you can.

You're fine.

I got a quiz question for you guys very quickly.

Okay, here's the question.

What colour is Oscar the Grouch?

Green.

Yeah, I'd say green.

Bird.

That's the QI Claxengo in there.

Oscar the Grouch is orange.

Is he?

So why is he green?

Because he has moss living in his fur.

It's because he's been living in a bin so long, he's entirely covered in moss

and mold.

That's very good.

Because that's why he's so grouchy.

Yeah.

So he's officially explained.

He said, the first year I show myself in my true colours, which is orange.

Actually, I'm still orange.

If I ever took a bath, you'd see that.

This is mold and moss.

It makes me happy.

Okay.

That's so funny.

When's a good time for me to ask who Oscar the Grouch is?

Wow.

After the show.

Yeah.

Okay, great.

Sesame Street.

Sesame Street.

He lives in the bin.

I thought so.

Okay.

Have you guys heard of Emmanuel de Grouchy?

Ooh, no.

He was one of Napoleon's marshals at the Battle of Waterloo.

I only remember this because we talked about Waterloo a few weeks ago.

Yes.

And one of the main guys there was Emmanuel de Grouchy.

And Napoleon made him like the marshal of all France or something like that.

Well, there were six other marshals, weren't there?

There was happy, sleepy, dopey.

Okay, giant moss.

Most moss is tiny, obviously, isn't it?

It's close to the ground.

It's low.

It's not, you don't get moss trees.

The gigantic moss, the biggest moss on the planet, is called Dorsonia superba, and it gets up to 60 centimeters tall.

And that is mega.

For a moss, that's insane.

That's big.

That is big.

And it's because mosses don't have internal fluid systems to carry water to their tissues.

So they can dry out really easily, so they have to stay close to the ground.

But Dorsonia has, it's so weird, it's done convergent evolution.

So you know how trees have a xylem and a phloem, they have the system of porting water all the way up to the leaves.

But Dorsonia has evolved a completely separate conduction system that functions in the same way.

And so as a result, they can reach for the sky and they grow much bigger as a result.

But that's very unusual.

How big are we talking?

I said 60 centimetres.

16 centimeters.

Not

6.0.

Imagine two school rulers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One on top of the other.

Yeah.

That's how tall we're talking here.

Yeah.

Massive.

Yeah.

It's a similar reveal for the peanut to the almond size, I would say.

Yeah, no.

This must be like, it must be a thousand times taller than your average moss.

No, it's a couple of times.

Yeah, yeah.

And mosses, I don't think we've ever mentioned that sort of the individual leaves are what are so tiny.

They're only one cell thick.

Isn't it so odd that we're looking at stuff that we can see and it looks, you know, thick and it covers rocks and tarmac and roofs and whatever.

Each leaf is one cell thick, which means one hundredth of a a millimeter, basically.

It's small.

It's small, yeah.

Some of them deliberately make themselves smell like poo

or corpses.

So this is why is that?

Because like plants do it so that insects come and they get pollinated, right?

But that can't be because they don't have pollen.

No, they no, same thing.

Same thing.

So they get, so dispersing their seeds, so most of them disperse via spores, they get taken by the wind and they can get taken amazing distances across continents.

But there are certain moss, and one of the species is called Splachnum sphiricum, which is also known as pink stick dung moss.

And it lives on droppings.

And in fact, all of dung moss lives on very specific types of dung.

So pinkstick dung moss lives only on the droppings of white-tailed deer about a month after they've been pooed out.

And it grows on these droppings.

And then it uses these droppings to make this amazing poo scent, which it emits, which attracts all of these flies, which come to lay their eggs.

And as they lay their eggs all over the moss, they pick up these clusters of spores on their legs.

And so they disseminate them.

That is amazing.

Yeah.

I think I've got a different impression of what moss is to maybe other people because it's so mad that there's the idea that moss has basically sperm and an egg and that the sperm needs to find its way to an egg.

I thought moss just happened.

I didn't think the egg.

Yeah, I did.

Absolutely.

I thought, I didn't realize that.

An ancient Greek naturalist.

He's a middle-ages spontaneous generationalist.

But I agree with Dan.

The idea of sperm and moss reproduction generally in moss sex is so hard to get your head around.

And they sort of have two phases of life.

But the way that the sperm find the eggs seems to be that certain male moss will produce sperm in like a cup on top of them often and then gets splashed by raindrops or sort of finds a way to swim to an egg of a female moss and sex it up, and that makes another moss that makes spores.

And understandably, I think they often don't do this very often at all because it's a lot of effort.

So, I read an

article featuring a biologist called Kirsten Fisher who studies the sex lives of a moss called Cintrichia canninervis.

And she said they have sex about every 30 years.

So, she's been in the field of the world.

Well, you know, you're tired, you've been at work,

it's so easy to just darling to 29 years and 11 months.

That's so funny.

Oh, my goodness.

What an amazing thing to study.

Yeah.

What a hero, in a way.

Get on to study the sex life of a very particular moss that only has sex every 30 years.

Here's one thing.

You've been in World War II.

It's been a pretty tough time.

You've been living in Europe.

Why would it be good to be a moss enthusiast?

So there's lots of moss suddenly growing in areas which

have been abandoned due to the war?

That's very good.

No, lots of dead people?

Lots of mothers.

Dead people as a kind of

corpses?

Oh, there might be.

No, this is more press calls.

There's a very famous moss scientist in America who named lots of mosses called Geneva Ser.

And at the end of the war, she organized the sending of food, clothes, and money to distressed bryologists in Europe.

So, like, if you were a moss scientist in Europe, you could expect a nice little package of money and clothes to come from

people stick together.

That's great.

Why are they particularly distressed?

Were they particularly traumatized?

And bryologists are moss studiers, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's not that they're particularly distressed.

It's just that the industry is, she's looking out for people who share her line of work, I guess.

That's exactly it.

Basically, the entirety of Europe was distressed after World War II.

And the bryologists were no exception.

And she thought, well, I'm going to send some money over, but I want to send it to fellows.

Moss.

Someone gets in touch.

I studied lichen, and I really am quite distracted.

No, no, absolutely not.

No, get out.

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 all be found on various bits of social media out there.

I'm on Instagram.

You can get me on at Schreiberland.

James?

I'm on TikTok.

I haven't ticked any talks and I mentioned it a few weeks ago and I now have 44 followers, 45 followers.

So, you know, if you want to boost my, you won't get anything in return.

But if you want to come and see me on TikTok, I'm at no such thing as James Harkin.

Right.

So that's when not to get in contact with James.

Andy?

I'm on Twitter at Andrew Hunter M.

A lot of people also say they don't get anything out of my stuff, but I do actually post quite frequently.

Or you can get through to all of us by going to our group account, which is at no such thing on Twitter, or you can email us on podcast at qi.com.

Why not even check out our website?

You'll find all of our previous episodes up there.

You'll find a link to Clubfish, our secret zone, where we have lots of extra bonus material and so on, and a Discord, all really fun.

Check it out.

If not, just come back here next week.

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

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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