514: No Such Thing As A Computer Tower

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

I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter-Murray, Anna Tashinsky, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is James.
Okay, my fact this week is that everyone in the French town of Evian is allowed unlimited free Evian.

Are they allowed it from

like, do they have to go up and put their mouth to the spring? I don't know how it comes out. It does come through the taps, right? No, no.
Andy's closest, but he is wrong. So

this is the town of Evian des Bain

on the banks of the Lake Geneva, and it's in France. And they have this special spring of water.

And this is where we get the Evian today. But the people of the town can go to the spring.
It has a special sort of spout, and you can go and get unlimited Evian from there.

You don't have to go with your mouth on the spout. When I went there...
Because that ruins the spout for everyone. It ruins the entire company's operations, actually.
Millions of people.

Yeah, absolutely. So I went there recently on my holidays because you guys have had some guests on the last few weeks.

I was going from a ski resort to Geneva, where our flight was going from, and saw that Evian was, I won't say on the way, we had to take quite a long diversion, but I said to my wife, why don't we go to this place, Evian, because it's kind of an interesting place that I've heard of.

Baby was sick, but it was fine.

Drank some bad water or something.

But we went there and I drank some of the Evian water with my cupped hands so I allowed it to go into my cupped hand and I drank it but just as we're leaving actually there was a guy who turned up in his car opened his boot and he must have had about 50 glass bottles where he went to the spring and he filled up all of his bottles so he had as much Evian as he could drink and that apparently is a common thing that the people of Evian do you're so lucky you're so lucky that you got there before him rather than just oh yeah

mate I'm just trying to fill up my two cupped hands here I want it no sorry I've only got 47 bottles to go

what I'm imagining is like a municipal water not a water cooler you know a thing like in a school gym where you put your mouth to it yeah it's like you press the button yeah right press the button and it squirts up a bit but not very much no it's not that it's something where it is always flowing out nice so it is kind of a mosaic of a nice sort of like flowers and stuff like that and then there's a little bowl underneath made of stone and the water just keeps going into the bowl and then drains away presumably to the every other factory where it then goes into your bottles.

No I don't know about you. If you're a rival company could you just go and bottle your own

bottles. Brilliant.
You could but I imagine it's probably not efficient. Probably the cost is not the water it's the bottling factory.

If you're Buxton Springs say and your entire factory is in Buxton in Derbyshire, probably it's not worth it to drive all the way down to Geneva. Free water.

I mean you could just get it out of the tap. If you were trying to get more like water.
Which some bottle companies did didn't they? Tasani, I think.

Tasani, which was Coke-owned, and it just turned out to be tap water that they

sort of run that water under the tap. I didn't know how they've done it, but they basically like...

I think that's

slightly misleading, but I...

If it was what it still is now, which is that it's tap water, as is more than two-thirds of bottled water in America, and lots of it here, basically, it's filtered tap water, so they've taken tap water and filtered it.

But the great thing about these big soft drinks companies is they're already filtering the water to put in their Fanta and their Coke or whatever.

So they've got this big water filtration system set up. All they need to do is turn the tap on a bit more.
So yes

that is, yeah. But what do they drink then in Evian through the tap? Is it the same source of water coming through or is it a trend? What a good question.

So no, because they will have, and I don't know this for sure, but they must have reservoirs where the water comes from, because this is just a small spring and certainly wouldn't be enough to fill what is a an averagely sized French town.

Yeah, right. Okay.
I heard though that they only take about 10% of the Evian water to turn into Evian from the spring. I don't like that.

And it filters down through the rock, and then it takes about 15 years, and it goes into an underground aquifer. And then once the aquifer is full, the water gets forced up, back up to the surface.

Okay. And then it emerges at that spring.
And that whole thing takes 15 years to do, I believe. That's what they say on their website.
15 years is

that's where I got it from. Yeah.
Why would they lie?

It's actually 19 years, which would do such a round number. There is an interesting thing on the website which talks about the history.
I don't know if you saw this.

They said that 1789 was a very important year in Evian Water history. And as soon as they were in France, it feels like 1789 probably was quite an important year.
I thought that.

Pretty much for everyone, because actually the water sauce was discovered by a French nobleman. Right.
Who you feel like probably had other things on his mind. That was the last thing he ever did.

I have looked for

the Marquis de Lessert, who I'm sure was not top of the list when the revolution came, but I searched for his name. I searched his name.
There's no other. He doesn't crop up anywhere else.

No, he doesn't. I think there is some suggestion that a bit of this origin story might not be 100% true, but it is certainly...

It was on this guy's land in Avian, and supposedly this nobleman had kidney stones or something, drank some of this water, and his kidney stones disappeared. And he was like, this is great stuff.

And then the guy who owned the land started to sell the water.

If it was a perfect origin story, like the ones they always make up, it would be he was out for a walk one day, he fell over, some of the water fell into his mouth, and then he felt his kidney stones clearing up.

So weird.

Yeah. Bottled water, the idea comes from the fact that it was good for your health, doesn't it? It was a medicine for ages.

And that's the reason we drink it today, really, is because of all these ban places or bath places, like Bath or Leamington or Buxton.

And in the 19th century, in Jane Austen,

Bath is named after Bath. It's like having a bath.
It would be so weird if we said, I'm just going to go and have a quick Lemington.

Yeah.

Have you given the baby his Lemmington tonight? Although, we should make clear for the email writers that we do know that baths are not named after the place, bath.

I didn't know that, and I don't mind getting an email about it. I'm at least don't send one now.

Are they not? That's a cool thing. It's the other way around.
It's going to be the other way around, isn't it? What?

You just work on that logic for a moment.

No, no, it could have been where someone had the first bath. It could have been.
Like

a Roman walking by tripped, fell

into the hot water, loved it.

A loofah landed on his head. And a duck floated by.
And he squeezed it and went, whack.

This is amazing.

Anyway, the way that bottling began actually was people used to go somewhere like bath and they'd take the waters for their health, like in Jane Austen.

You'd drink the waters, you'd bathe in the waters, you'd get rid of your whatever palsy you had or spots or whatever.

But some people were too busy or too poor to be able to afford this constant water treatment and travelling to these spa towns.

So they subscribed instead, much like you might subscribe to, I don't know, HelloFresh or

Rop the Clock Anna.

You don't have to do this, yeah.

They subscribed to water deliveries, which would be bottled up and sent to them for their health. And those are the original bottles.
That's the original bottle of water. That's very cool.

So it was a kind of spa destination at Vianne as well. And this was before they were bottling bottling it.
This is 1806. They had a thermal spa that opened.
The bottling happened in 1826.

But you would think then that as a result, this is just like you'd go there, it'd be this majestical, that kind of mindfulness place and really nice.

But we have an account of what it was like from someone traveling through there in the 1810s, roughly. And that was Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley.

He said, the appearance of the inhabitants is more wretched, diseased, and poor than I ever recollect to have seen. So not a great trip advisor review there.

Not a good advert for the health team also. It does appear in Frankenstein as well, by the way.
Ebian. He goes on his honeymoon there, I think.
That's right. Yeah.
Wait, Dr. Frankenstein? Yeah, yeah.

Really? He goes to Ebian, yeah. So

Mary Shelley literally puts the town into the book. Phil Collins has a house on the banks of Lake Geneva.
Get out. Does he? What? Is that that surprising?

I just, I'm happy I know it. Okay.
I just looked up people who live near Lake Geneva. It's quite posh, isn't it? That area has got nice stuff.
It's quite posh, yeah.

It became posh after they found the water, really. They built massive hotels there and and a casino.

The casino is interesting because after World War II and Hitler killed himself, there were rumors that Hitler was still alive and there was a rumor that he was working as a croupier in Evian in the big casino.

Yeah, yeah.

Loads of people went down there trying to find Hitler and they were like, oh no, that's just a guy who looks like Hitler.

Wow. How long were you there for, by the way? We just finished.
Oh, like just until the baby started crying, so about 45 minutes. Oh, okay.
So just to just to have it.

Yeah, we just we needed somewhere to go for lunch, so we just went there. We got long enough to find Hitler.
No. No, Hitler, no, we didn't see him.
And you guys a fan of Evian? Drink it at home?

Yeah, I drink Evian. Do you? Yeah, yeah.
Anyone else in your household drink Evian? Yeah, everyone in my house drinks Evian, yeah. Who are the members of your household again? Well,

myself and my wife. Oh, yeah.
And my daughter. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Anyone else? Well, no, humans.

Look, we've got to come out and say this. For the record, James has got a cat, and sometimes his cat drinks every hour and when we talk sometimes only when she's thirsty every single day

james gives his cat heavy i have to say before we started these guys already knew this and i do think of all the things in my life this is the only thing that really can spoil my man of the people

this is your meow to moment is it's brilliant

brilliant and i kind of want you to keep hold of it because isn't it because of it's your fault

it's anna's fault and just dear listener this is what happened anna told me that cats have special taste buds on their tongues that can taste water. And so for us, water doesn't taste of anything.

But for cats, it's really important. And they can taste the difference.
And London water is disgusting. True.

And we happen to have quite a lot of Evian in the house because I'd stop piled a load for COVID.

And I just started giving it to my cat. And she liked it.
And she still likes it.

Since you left Bolton, James.

We live by our facts. I think the listeners would appreciate that we live and we die and our cats live and die by our facts.
And that's fair enough. And it's true, cats can taste water.

Whereas we can't. But then there's this big question over, given that water tastes of nothing, how do we know we're drinking water and not some poisonous substance all the time?

Well you can't

just because it doesn't taste because it's but there are some tasteless things like arsenic doesn't taste of anything does it indeed but you can't like if I if I give you a pint of arsenic you wouldn't necessarily know it was not water.

No that's true but I would just think the odds are you struggled to get hold of a pint of arsenic. You'd have to really, I'd have to have really annoyed you.
And keep going.

He's a very resourceful man.

I just sort of think it's probably, it's probably going to be water. And I've been right every time so far.
I don't like to brag. You only have to be wrong once.
No, that's true.

I'll keep spinning that.

But there is a reason you haven't been wrong, which is that you can tell that it's water. And they've only just found this.

And it's that it doesn't taste sour, but it registers on our sour taste buds.

And this is related to a fact that a guest shared actually, one of those other guests we had in when we kicked James off the show.

I think basically, when you drink water, it washes away your saliva, and then our mouths, in the process of replacing saliva, produce protons.

And Steve Mould, when he came on, his fact was protons taste sour. Oh, yeah.

So it triggers our sour taste buds. It is mad how much bottled water we drink now.
I had no idea how much people are drinking bottled water, and I don't get it.

So, obviously, in developing countries, it's really important because you can't get in a lot of countries, you can't get clean tap water that's tasty water in London of course you can't get delicious water in London same same problem

but it's not developing countries I'm not helping him

you're fast tracking to cancellation it's not developing countries that are consuming it all so in Singapore how many litres do you reckon per person per annum per annum oh my god how many I mean half a litre a day a litre a day 300 litres 300 litres per person per annum of tap water 1129 litres

Three litres of water a day. Bottled.
And bottled water. Three litres of bottled water per person per day.
That's insane. Because there's going to be some outliers.
Aren't there?

There's going to be some people who don't have any of that. Yeah.
Australia is the second worst offender. Australians are drinking 504 litres of bottled water a person each day.
Yeah. Ow.

Isn't that insane? Bananas. That's really hot.
The water's good. Yeah, but the water's good.
The tap water's fine. I don't know.
There are

cuts in Australia, I just say.

By the beach, you can't drink the salt water. You need to have a good idea.
No one one is proposing you drink saltwater.

There is such a gap in your logic. No, there's not bottled water and the sea.
No,

the logic is you're down by the sea for a lot of the day where you cannot get access to tap water to fill up a bottle and take it down. Oh, yeah.

I do think that's probably that argument has persuaded me, not that it's right, but that's probably why it is. It's convenient, isn't it? People are out there.
They've forgotten their bottle. Exactly.

Remember your bottle, Australia. Is everyone at the beach always in Australia? I know that's the myth that we read, but like, I don't believe that.

They all do live next to the beach, though, don't they? I mean, no one lives in the middle.

Where you'd also need bottled water?

I found out a thing about water pipes. Oh, yeah.
This was, because I was looking up, you know, tap water and how it, you know, just how it works and what the pipes are like, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, this is from a website called Best Life Online. Oh, yeah.

And the headline is, eight surprising places, you're letting snakes into your home.

I'd be surprised living in central London if they're getting in anywhere. Yeah, and actually, the terrible thing about this article was I wasn't especially surprised by any of the places.

Well, toilet. They come up through your toilet.
Toilet? Water pipes. Window.
Plumbing gaps. Didn't have window.

Cut door. No.

I would be a bit surprised by that, because you're expecting the cat, aren't you?

Showers, cracks in the foundation, basement access points, and the only one I find mildly surprising, shoes you might have left outside. Yeah, that's right.

So enough to come home, take off your shoes outside.

What would be a surprising entry, though?

Out of your computer tower. Like just spiraling out of.

Computer tower? I just do my work on my computer in my office in my house. Do you come all the way to your computer's house? This is where I'm out of touch.

I have a tower, a medieval fortification that I do my computer work. It's annoying because you can't get Wi-Fi in there, but you still go over there.

You can get a bit if you stand near one of the arrow slits. You can get a tiny bit, but it's not much.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that there's a mangrove forest in Indonesia that's actually a woman grove.

Middle roundabout. Yeah, it's not

really a fact that you can tell your friends, is it? Without me explaining it a bit further. But it's really cool.
So this is in Papua, and it's a forest called Hutan Perempuan.

And it's a forest where only women are allowed to go. The oldest women who go there say it's been happening for as long as they can remember and their grandmothers did it.

And mangroves are basically forests that are underwater, partly.

No, no, sorry, it's a bad description. I backtrack.

Mangroves are trees. The mangrove, there are about a few dozen species of mangrove tree, and they're the only trees which can grow in saltwater.

They're amazing things for all sorts of reasons. You tend to get them in brackish areas where it's like right on the coast, so it's where the salt water hits the freshwater.

All along the shoreline, you get huge great water. And where it's basically, they exist between high and low tide, so they spend a lot of their life in water and a lot of their life out of water.

And it's very swampy and gross in a mangrove. But these

swampy, it's gross if you don't like swampy. But these women like it.

Because they get to gossip, essentially. So these are specifically people from the Ngros and Tobati tribes on the Indonesian side of Papua Island.

And they wade in, they collect these shellfish from the mud, they sell them at market.

You have to go in naked, which is kind of the reason why men aren't allowed, allowed, because then they see the ladies naked.

And they essentially use it as a way to swap stories, do some female bonding, bitch about the men,

pass down a lot of ancient wisdom. It's just a really great woman-only days.
Like gossiping, slang off the men, occasionally a bit of ancient wisdom if quite allowed.

I like those because I subscribe to one of those gossip magazines, but then on the last page, there's always a little bit of ancient wisdom.

But they also they're encouraged to just yell out whatever their inner voice is. So just random statements that no one will understand.

Yeah, you get it out. You do that.
That's fine. Yeah.
That's clever. The inner voice yell.
Yeah. I read that men are allowed in the forest, but only when there are no women there.
Is that right?

That is correct. So there are times that men are allowed in to collect wood, but they've got to make sure that there are no ladies in there.
Question.

It feels to me like it would be quite hard to work out when there are no ladies in a forest. As in, forests are big.
Is there like one of those in-out stickers or labels where you just slide it over?

No, you've just got to listen to the gossiping that's going on, which is basically what they say. That's it.
So they can just talk and talk.

So if you can't hear any ladies, they're probably not there because they use it as their time, literally, to just

or quoting Marcus Aurelius. And then, no.

And if you do enter as a man when you're not allowed to, you are taken to tribal court and you have to pay a fine in polished stones.

Hello.

Yeah. Okay.
Wow.

Yeah. So

they take their coal coal, it's called. It's like their boat.

They have a sort of group of them that go out with a singular boat, they make a pact not to leave each other, and then they go clam hunting, fish hunting as well.

And big problems in modern-day mangrove, woman grove situations is the fact that people like Evian bottles are getting into their areas.

It's full of plastic now, and so the clams have gone way down, sorry, to knock Evian just. I do, I recycle my Evian bottles that the cat drinks.

I don't go all the way to Papua New Guinea to throw them away.

But there's a big problem now.

It's really affecting them. Mangroves are so great.

It's quite sad researching them because you read about all the threats to them, predominantly from climate change and habitat loss, habitat destruction.

If people are using a strip of coastline for things like shrimp farming, which is a big industry in lots of these countries, then it just sort of tear out the mangroves, basically.

But they are incredible. They're among the only few plants which can tolerate saltwater.
Out of 400,000 species of plant in the world, 1,500 can tolerate water, and mangroves are among them.

They live for a really long time. It's so alien when I hear it.
Like just all the things that they can do that other trees can't do. So yeah, they filter out 90% of the salt that comes in.

But the ones that don't do that, they've got these special leaves. I mean, the leaves are like waxy substances where they leak out the salt.

They sweat out crystallized salt on their leaves. They're so good.

But then there's other ones where they will basically send the salt to the old leaves in the old bark so it's not touching the new bit of the that's so intelligent. I'm using the word intelligent.

I'm using the word quite wrongly.

It seems like if you look around the world that lots of groups of women are in mangrove forests working, it seems

in Mexico they have las chelamielas who are Mayan women who work in a certain area of mangroves protecting the ecosystem. In Kenya you have the mangrove mothers who work on Pate Island.

Pate Island?

You leave big footprints in Pate Island, don't you?

It might be Pate Island, but I prefer Pate Island, don't you?

And in India, in Maharashtra, you have a collective of women who kind of work in the mangroves. They do safaris, but they also help protect the forest.

So it just seems like everywhere you look around the world, wherever there's mangroves, it seems to be women working there. We need to rename them.
Sounds like they need a rebrand.

They mop up tsunamis.

That's incredible.

They absorb the energy of incoming waves when they're coastal. So the wave can lose two-thirds of its energy, I reckon.

Yeah, no, and that's really, really useful. There was a study in China which found they reduced floodwater level in a tropical storm by about three meters.
Wow. Which is very useful.

Annoying if you're a surfer. Don't surf in a mangrove.
You'll see a brilliant wave coming at you. It will have disappeared by the time you're going to be.

Very few of the Beach Boys' big hits are about mangroves. Mangroves.

Yeah. But the other nice thing they do is they store huge amounts of carbon because they build up these big peat deposits beneath them.
Some of them are up to six meters deep. Wow.

And they did a study in 2001, so quite a while ago, but they found that the loss of mangroves is 35%, which is worse than tropical forests or coral reefs. Oh, really? Don't like that.

Don't like that fact at all.

That fact. The world's biggest bacterium ever was found in a mangrove forest.
I think we make it this one.

I hope it was a her, otherwise that bacterium would have been arrested and forced to hand in polished rocks.

Can I say, if you eat mangrove,

it contains asparagusic acid, which is the stuff that makes your urine smell

after eating asparagus. Does it make your wee smell the same as asparagus does or different? No, the same.

So, asparagusic acid also kills parasitic nematodes, which is why it's evolved into these two places. So, it protects the asparagus plant and the mangroves against these nematode worms.

That's good. That's an interesting thing about that.
They need need wee, mangroves. Yeah, they rely on fish wee.

They're turned out because they, part of the way they survive is through consuming lots of nitrogen. They make great use of nitrogen, and that is produced by fish wee.

And they did a study of a mangrove forest in the Bahamas, and they found that there were just two species of fish, two types of snapper, that doubled the amount of nitrogen in the water and made it possible to survive.

Wow. Hey, here's a little mini quiz.
Yeah. Which of these is not a nickname for mangroves? Okay.
Walking trees, dead man's fingers, the kidneys of the coast.

Well, you would think kidneys of the coast because they effectively are doing what kidneys do, which is filtering stuff. So I'm going to say it's definitely not that.
That's not the nickname.

It's not the nickname. Oh, wait, no, that is the name of the name.

Because your question is, which is not the nickname. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, right. You're going the long way around.
Yeah. Double negative.
I'm going to say they look like they walk because their roots are so huge and they come out of the ground.

I've actually always found them really creepy because they look like giant spiders, don't they? Fields of spiders. So I think they're probably called walking trees.
Is that what you said?

Well, I think that bananas are walking trees.

Yeah. Like bananas walk, as in they move.
Excuse me? Bananas are

aside from in pajamas.

Bananas.

Yeah, yeah, banana trees.

Yeah, they move. Yeah,

as in they'll propagate another banana tree maybe a few meters away from them. And if you go back two years later, it looks like the trees moved.
Yeah.

I think this was like one of the famous moments on QI where Sean Locke said

the trees they walk and Stephen was like, No, they don't. And then it came through that.
Well, we were literally on the computers going, Yes, they do, Stephen. Yes, they do, Stephen.

Stephen, this is Andy coming to you from my computer tower. I can't confirm.

I'm going to say that I think you kind of danced around the idea of the dead man fingers when you said spiders. It looks like dead man fingers are coming out with these big poles.

I say yes to that, yes to that. And I think you're tricking us.
I think all three are. Dan's got it.
They're all nicknames for

Walking trees. You couldn't be asked to come up with a full fake nickname.
Dead man's fingers, the kidneys of the cat. I'll come up with another one now.
Go on, go on. Like, um,

uh, well, stop staring at me on screen. I'll need time.

You can do it later and edit it in. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Salty, creepy boys.

Oh, okay. No, that's a difficult one.

Can I quickly talk about a place where women are not allowed? Yeah. The Yorkie Factory.

Everybody's referencing this British listeners there.

This is Mount Athos in Greece, which was known as the place of 6,000 beards

because there were monasteries on there and monks were allowed, but women were not allowed in there. And they had a law called the Avaton, which prohibited women from entering.

And the idea is that the monastery started when the Virgin Mary was sailing across the coast or something, and they stopped at this place.

The voice of God said, Let no other woman come here because the Virgin Mary's been here and no other women are allowed. So we're going to put a stop to that.

We didn't like her.

So

even when the British royal family went, Prince Philip was allowed on the island and the Queen, Queen Elizabeth II, wasn't.

Wow. Helena of Bulgaria, she in the 14th century had the plague and she was brought there to try and help her, but she was carried so that her feet never touched the ground.

I know, and there was a brilliant writer, a French writer, called Marie Choisey,

and she had written a book called Unmoi Chez Les File,

which was a month with the girls where she was in a brothel. And then she wrote a second book called Unmoi Chez Les Homme,

which was a month with the men, which was about going to this place. And she had a double radial mastectomy.

Past commitment to her. I know.
What? And she wore a false mustache. Wow.
And she posed as a man and went to this place.

And she spoke to all the monks and stuff and asked them what was going on.

And she asked one monk, she said, What's this deal? Like, is it true that you're not even allowed female animals in this place?

And the monk said, We must draw the line somewhere. The day we possessed a hen, some brothers would argue that we should also accept a she-cat, a you, or even a she-ass.

And there is but a short step from a she-ass to a woman. What do you mean a you? Not a me? I'm not a woman.

I'm not.

But yeah, isn't that amazing? Wow. I've never heard of this Marie Schwazie.
Wow. Oh, she's schwazied pretty weirdly, I would say, having both her breasts locked off.

Yeah.

Just to go on this journalistic expedition. Yeah, she was like a feminist reporter and crazy sort of Louis Theroux of her time.

Yeah, but you won't see Louis chopping his dick off to get into this mangrove, will you? Like, that is. I don't know, Louis, if you're listening.

I'm in a ladies mangrove in Lapwa

hi I'm Louise Louise Louise

I'm from the BBC

okay

it is time for fact number three and that is Andy my fact is that until the early 20th century Swiss people were routinely being injured by the last ice age

the film That's right. Hated it.
Just a squirrel with a nut.

I don't know. I haven't seen it.

Is that what happens? That's what it's about, yeah. Series is not under the ice, can't find it very long.
Really?

All four movies. Yeah, yeah.
There's padding. Hasn't found it yet.
Look, let's press on.

This is

a fact. It came from a list of facts.
Every year, there's a guy called Tom Whitwell who does a list of 52 things he learns.

And I've mentioned one of his facts before years ago. I have to limit myself because it's such a great list of facts.

But he mentioned this fact, which came from a brilliant London Review of Books article by Jonah Goodman, and it's all about Swiss people who, until the early 20th century, loads of them had goiters, right?

And that is a bulge of flesh. that comes out of the front of your neck

and they can be really big.

They can really limit your life if you have one. They make you wheeze, they weigh on your windpipe.

They're really unpleasant to have, you know, and they're harmful. And everyone in Switzerland had them.
Not everyone, but a lot of people had them. 80% of the country.

And it was only on the sort of Swiss alpine plateau. We're quite near Lake Geneva, actually, for this fact as well.

And there were dozens of theories doing the rounds. Is it the landscape, the air, the high-altitude sunlight? Is it the incest, someone said?

Is it moral failure? Incest is probably a category of that. Anyway, all these theories were doing the rounds.
And basically, it turned out it was thanks to the last ice age.

Because during the last ice age, Switzerland, very high up, was covered by an ice sheet that was about a thousand meters thick, and it melted and then refroze loads and loads of times, right?

And it just absolutely ripped off the top 250 meters of rock and soil from the Swiss plateau. And wherever the ice sheet was, the soil was stripped of a chemical, which was iodine.

And the lack of iodine is what causes goiters. And everyone was like, thank God it wasn't the incest.

We can keep going, home.

Oh, Oh, dear.

And it was lack of it, and it just did a complete number on half the population of Switzerland for centuries. It was extraordinary.
I can't believe I've never heard of this.

Had you guys heard of this before?

It's astonishing because this isn't like the 1700s.

This is up until the 1920s that 30% of military personnel in Switzerland had giant, like when we talk about fashion, as we're going to do in the next fact,

you do stuff to, yeah, I know, we rarely throw throw forward.

Wow. But, like, you know, clothing was designed largely, you know, for them to hide these giant throbbing lumps on their necks, which is, yeah, and you can see photos.

Can I do something a bit more classic and throw back to the last fact? Yeah.

Good, yes, better. Safe ground.

They used to have these things in the mangroves, in the biggest mangrove in the world, which is on the border of India and Bangladesh, I think.

And they would also have these big sort of collars which covered your entire neck.

But it wasn't to stop you from being able to see your goiter can you guess what it was for vampires anti-vampire device close get away yeah very close um and

think of something more real

werewolf no so not that close spider oh spider

uh no it's because uh tigers live there and people working in the mangroves they would be caught by tigers and i don't know if a little rough rubber

would be that safe they were quite solid collars but they would stop the tigers from being able to bite you grab you by the scruff of the neck. Yeah, sorry, anyway.
We were talking about guitars.

Guiters. Yeah, and I find it incredible that the ice age was this specific, just affected this one place so specifically.
Everywhere else was kind of okay, but it stripped away the iodine.

I mean, I think maybe it was moral failing.

That's just a very targeted approach. No, no, it's good to re-litigate these things.

But it was quite hard for them to know exactly how many people had it because everyone was hiding it. People were embarrassed by it.

So the census, if they did any kind of surveying, wouldn't really truly show it. it.

So, when conscription was happening for the armies, you had to have your medical, and there was no way of hiding it. So, in 1921, nearly 30% of 19-year-old conscripts had a goiter on their neck.

If you buy one of those Swiss Army knives, there is a special goiter implement. People always say it's for taking stones out of horseshoes, but actually, it's for popping the goiter.

Yeah, oh, God.

There was Mark Twain when he visited in the 1880s. Oh, I bet he had something typically kind and understanding to say about it.

Wow. Made your views on Twain Cliff.
I don't like him. He said, I, this isn't going to indeed to him, actually.
He wrote,

I have seen the principal features of Swiss scenery, Mont Blanc and the Goiter. Lovely.
Thank you, Mark. Another

very human and wise observation. Sorry, I just don't like Mark Twain.
Anyway, let's move on.

It's because he was incredibly rude about Jane Austen once. He said,

he famously said, no, no, no, he famously wrote, oh, I'd like to dig her up and beat her over the head with her own shin bone. And I just think, give me a break.
Give me a break, Mark. Yeah.

Next time you write something as good as Emma, you can have a pop at Big Dog Jane. But you never did.
And you never will. Yeah.
Because you're dead. Anyway, sorry.

So it affected not just goiters. So there was this other medical condition called, it was known at the time as cretinism, right? Where people had very serious developmental problems.

They grew much shorter than normal. Their features didn't grow properly.
A lot of them were deaf and mute. And there was a Swiss goiter commission.

There were schools across the country for deaf, mute children. And it really was like a national health disaster.
That's what I mean. I can't believe we haven't heard of this.
Exactly.

The word cretin comes from the French Alps because of this. Right.
And do you know the origin of the word cretin? I thought it was really interesting.

Because obviously it became an extremely offensive word. But originally it came from an Alpine dialect word because it was so common in the Alps.
It came from an Alpine dialect word for Christian,

Cretin.

And it was to remind people that these people who looked often, you know, so inhuman in a way, a lot of deformities, to remind people that they were still human, Christian people who were equally loved by God, and we should be very kind to them.

That's amazing. It started out as a very humane term.
Because Bertrand Russell, he thought that iodine might have been evidence that humans don't have a soul.

Because what he saw was that when you gave this chemical to people, suddenly they became more human as he saw it.

Perhaps it's all about chemistry and it's not about the soul and Christianity and whatever.

Interesting. Yeah, that kind of you can see the kind of we're chemical-driven machines when you throw something new into us and it changes the course.
And it's kind of what happened, right?

So when all the theories that we're talking about earlier, moral compasses and all that sort of stuff, bad beer,

when the original list, and that was on there, that was on there. When you wake up in bed with cousin Nora.

Sorry, it was the bad beer that caused the incest.

There were four main players, I believe, when it comes down to how this eventually got solved. One was called Otto Bayard, and they were pushing this theory that, yeah, we need more iodine.

And he actually went to sort of little communities and he upped the iodine in all the things that they were consuming.

So he went to the cows and he made sure that it was in the salt that they were licking, it was in the, you know, in the milk that they were producing.

There was tiny amounts that were being put into the food of this family. And he did it over a term of a school course in the winter, and he came back and they had gotten better.

And suddenly he went, Jesus, this is this is what it is. They're missing their iodine.
And that's why we have it now that people put iodine in salt, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.

Because people around the world eat salt. Everyone eats a bit of salt.
Iodine actually works quite well with salt, so they put it in there, and that's kind of what did it.

This article that Andy said says 88% of salt is now iodine salt.

Not the UK, weirdly. Really? No, we get our iodine other ways.
But I mean, it's in a lot of milk

because cows are given iodine. And so it sort of happens that way.
I just had no idea our salt wasn't iodised. Really? I believe the vast majority is not.
Yeah, salt usually isn't, is it?

Yeah, like sea salt and rock salt are not because they're made differently. But even table salt in the UK is not standardly iodised.
The doctor who found it was called Heinrich Hunsiker. Great name.

And

it's because it all goes through your thyroid gland, which is at the front of your neck.

And if you don't get enough, it swells up because it's desperately trying to find more iodine from your bloodstream.

so it swells and swells and swells that's what causes it and it's um like all of it the brain fog and the muscle ache and the goiters all of it is due to your body just desperately hunting but the problem that took them a long time to work out why it was just a little bit of iodine was required is that if you give people too much iodine it leads to catastrophic health consequences in the other direction so you need one 15 thousandth of one gram of iodine a day it's massive it's very small and so and they were trying to give people a gram a day of iodine and then they were getting terribly ill and they were saying well the iodine's a disaster look at that yeah so it took a long time.

It is one of those frustrating things, it's a little bit like hand washing, where people were saying it for over 100 years. People kept saying, Do you know what? I think iodine is the answer to this.

And everyone went, No, no, no, don't. It's just going to kill you.

And one of the key people, another one of the key people who changed things was a guy called Hans Eggenberger, who sounds like a McDonald's offering.

Was actually a very important man.

Do you want? Well, someone said to him one day, Do you want salt on your Eggenberger? And he realised it was a moment.

Good old Eggenberger. He was a very charismatic guy.
He was the male. He was in charge of a specific Swiss canton.
And he realised that iodine, a little bit of iodine, was the answer.

And so he decided to add to his town cinema, this is in the 1920s, his town cinema's programme of light entertainment. So the cinema was showing loads of really fun films.

He added a lecture on iodized salt in amongst the light entertainment. But for some reason, because he was so charismatic and popular, everyone flooded in to watch it.
And he he put lots of jokes in.

He did this lecture, lots of tricks and jokes and fun words, like he called it whole salt. I know that's not fun, but you know, it was funny at the time.

Anyway, he straight after everyone went to see this great film of his, there was a petition. I got thousands of signatures and iodized salt was introduced.
Brilliant. Wow.

And then Gandhi hated it, didn't he? Gandhi. Did he? Yeah.
What? The iodization of salt. Yeah, he did lots of good stuff, of course, Gandhi.
But

we have to say, for balance.

probably I mean the problem was that it was the British who were taxing local salt and then kind of replacing it with these iodized salt and he kind of started anti-salt riots

did he walk to the sea protesting about the salt he did the long walk yeah to try and get proper just salt salt from the sea no i think it was he was rating awareness obviously i mean obviously like the tax thing was real but the iodized thing was kind of just a side hustle that he thought was colonial I see.

A rare misfire from Gandhi there. I'm not trying to cancel Gandhi like you're trying to cancel Mark Twain, just to say.
No, no, and I'll cheerfully keep going on the Twain thing.

Goiter used to be nicknamed Derbyshire Neck

in the UK. In the UK, right.
Yeah, supposedly because people in Buxton got it. Maybe.

Maybe.

Well, lots of bits of Derbyshire are quite far from the sea, and seafood could take lots, in fact.

Yeah, but some bits are closer than others.

The exact centre of Derbyshire is a long way from the sea. Yeah, like, and the seafood contains lots of iodine, so

maybe people living in the less sea-adjacent bits of Derbyshire, which obviously doesn't touch the sea, were getting a bit less. Just on iodine,

it's very useful in other ways. I actually remember, this is just personal, but I remember having to drink iodine water.
Have you guys ever drunk that? Because it purifies water. No.

I went to Malawi when I was a teenager for like two months. And yeah.
With iodine tablets.

Yeah, with you drop an iodine tab in and you taste it for the first time and you go, I can't drink this shit for two months. So what does it do? It purifies water.
It just purifies water.

Yeah, it's very useful. I feel like I've had that, yeah.
Because that's why Andy's the only one with a guitar around the table.

I really thought that my polo neck was concealing that, but

apparently. I did save you of that tiger in fact, too, though.

But something else it does, you can detect counterfeit money. And if you remember your school chemistry, you might be able to work out why.

So real money is on cotton or linen, usually, paper, so we shouldn't call it paper money. Counterfeit money, often just made of actual paper, wood-based paper.
And wood-based paper contains starch.

And do you remember when you're detecting starch in science? Iodine is the thing that reacts to starch and shows up if starch is in something.

So if you rub an iodine pen on paper, and it reacts to it, then

it means that it's made of wood. But this has been used to catch people.

And there was a story in 2016 where a 14 year old girl caused the police to descend on her at her school lunch and she was put in handcuffs because she paid with a two dollar bill bizarrely that an iodine pen that the school had showed up as fake the police came the police came she was put in handcuffs she wasn't allowed to eat lunch that day she went hungry um they tricked she said i promised that my grandma gave me the money um was her grandmother doing the forgery uh it turns out her grandmother's not a criminal either this method doesn't work on money that was made before about 1955, and her grandma had given her, obviously, a note that had been sitting in her wallet for a very long time.

So she went free in the end. She is not still

because she was still incarcerated.

But you've got to keep her in just in case. Pardoned by Biden 50 years later.

Her and the turkey. Gosh.
I've got an audience fact about ice sheets. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. It's from Percy Fulford.
And I just love the way this email begins, right?

Percy writes, admittedly, this one sounds a bit like a James Harkin quotes fact,

but bear with me. Now, I think Percy has confused James and Dan here.

Thank you, Percy, for your email. Percy put his address on.
I'm not giving you it.

I'm sure he just means a Dan Schreiber fact. Well, I'm glad no one's worried that I'm taking offense to that.

You know, because Dan likes his crypto stuff. Okay.
Anyway. Well, Percy.
Are you going to tell us about that? I've got to say, this fact is falling on very stony ground.

In the last ice age, much of Canada was covered in in massive, several-kilometre-thick glaciers, which have now melted.

Those glaciers were immensely heavy, but now the weight has been lifted, the crust is springing back up at about 12 million meters a year, like a memory foam mattress.

However, until the crust is... 12 million meters a year.

Millimetres. Millimetres.

It's amazing that picture of Earth from space, isn't it, where Canada is.

Hundreds of miles.

I'm not underwhelmed. However, until the crust fully rebounds from the weight of these glaciers, Canada's landscape is missing the immense mass that caused its shape.

So for the time being, moving to Canada, particularly to somewhere near Hudson Bay, remains an effective weight loss method.

That's true of the UK as well, I should say. Yeah, we had an ice sheet that went as far down as pretty much where Stonehenge is, and then it's not there anymore.
And that's why

the UK is slightly slanted, and that's why you get big cliffs where Dover is. But if you go to Morecambe, Morecambe for instance it's a really long sandy beach.
It's just been crushed down. Yeah.

Right. And now it's bouncing back, right?

Over millions of years it will do, yeah.

You can't bounce a castle on it but I should say I this is from memory but there's another thing about ice sheets you just reminded me of which is there's a restaurant in that was in Italy and I think due to climate change it was on a glacier and the glacier is very very slowly moving but moving more than you thought and they now think that the restaurant might be in Switzerland because it was quite near the border and it's kind of slowly moved in that direction.

That's amazing.

We should say as well, I stupidly didn't write this bit down, but one of the big moments in this whole story of this main fact about the last ice age being responsible is there was one person who stood up in front of the academic community and said, I think it's the melting ice sheets.

I think that's what's done. Like it was a proper idea, he put it forward as the idea and everyone just went, you are nuts.
That's worse than the incest idea. that's like who was it hans mcmuffin

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okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact my fact this week is that during the reign of charles ii women's dressing tables tended to include both face and nipple makeup.

Wow. Okay.
Yeah. So when you're making up your face, I'm no expert.
But you're putting on foundation and you're putting on stuff on top of that. Yeah.
Maybe some lipstick. Do they call it nipstick?

Nice. They should have had.
How are you making up the nipple? Yeah, is it more of a lipstick or a foundation? I think that's a great question. Yeah, it feels like it'd be a foundation.

Yeah, more like a foundation. I'd do it as eyeliner.
I'd do it as eyeliner, paint some little eyelashes around it. So you're kind of winking with your nip.
So it looks like a little sunshine.

Yeah, nice. I'd do lipstick, make it a big red blob.
Wow. Yeah.
But why did they need it? Well, they needed it because this came in a period where Charles II basically lowered the cleavage line.

Sorry, sorry.

Can King Charles do that now that he's the king? Oh, yeah. That's why he picked the name Charles.
He's going to start where he left off.

He's been easing us all in gently, but he will gently start lowering

those lines. The environment thing is just to lure us in, isn't it? And then he whips away our tops.
Wow. Yeah, no, he was a sort of like, you know, he came in.
He was very low.

He was the Merry Monarch, was he? Yeah. Merry Monarch.
Yeah, yeah, that was his name. That was his name.
He was very libidinous, saucy, pro-theatre, just after the Cromwellian times. Exactly.

Which anyone would have seen Merry after Cromwell.

Not a high bar, but he genuinely did seem like a bit of a goer. Yeah, and

there just grew this trend whereby if you were wearing corsets and your nipple happened to peek over, that was not a bad thing. And then suddenly everyone thought, well, let's lower the corset a bit.

Let's get the boobs out.

And it was, you know, seeing an ankle was far more scandalous and titillating to a pervert than seeing...

To learn a body.

You didn't have to be a pervert.

The word used to be ankylating, didn't it? Oh, very nice. Yeah.
There you go. I mean, it was still very raunchy.

We should say it wasn't like people were going around the shop flashing a boob to get a free loaf of bread.

It was still, you know, there are paintings we have of people exposing breasts, but they were generally prostitutes or actresses

who were meant to be

indeed.

I am very good, caveat.

Yeah, the famous Nell Gwynne picture. This is why I was never allowed to host the Oscars II time.

She was amazing, by the way. Just before we disappear on Nell Gwynne, I've never read about Nell Gwynne before.

And she, yeah, so Charles II basically stipulated that when you're at the theatre and men who were in all the plays playing women, that should no longer be the case.

It should be women now playing women. There was Margaret Hughes who was the first woman to step on stage and play a woman in a play.
And then Nell Gwynne who became very famous. They met.

She was working in a... Her and Charles met.
Her and Charles met, sorry. So basically she was working outside a theater, which was the King's Theatre.

And then she met this guy who was called Charles Hart, who became known as Charles I to her.

And then...

Not to be confused with the headless one.

Very clever. That was just what she nicknamed him

Retroactively after she got together with Charles II. Well, because then she had a Charles II, which was Charles Saxeville.
So actually Charles II was her Charles III.

This is a sort of bawdy farce developing. They're all behind a different door, all on stage.

She was, what I know about Mel Gwynne is her mother was a prostitute. She was an orange seller, I think.
Yep, that's right. And then became an actor/slash prostitute.

I always think it's very Pygmalion, isn't it? Don't you think? It's a much more extraordinary thing. She very much came from nowhere, didn't she? A sexy Pygmalion.
She was very witty.

There's all these anecdotes of made it through the years.

So, like, the one time she was going in a carriage through the streets of a city, and the people were furious because they thought that she was a different mistress.

They thought that she was the Duchess of Portsmouth. And so they were yelling at her, going, you Catholic whore, you Catholic whore.

And she leaned out of the carriage and she said, Pray, good people, be civil. I am the Protestant whore, not the Catholic.
That's clever. It's you know, really witty.

Rolling around laughing at the time. Yes.
But anyway, so she was one of the people who got their waps out. Waps, waps.
And we still have paintings of it from the time. We do.

And yeah, it was a time, it was kind of like the Roaring 20s, wasn't it? Because it was post, just for international listeners, it was just after we'd had this like unpleasant interregnum,

uptight.

Following an unpleasant Civil War. Yeah, yeah.
Everyone was a bit tired of the unpleasantness. They weren't allowed to have fun.
The Puritans were all over them.

And then this period came in and everyone loosened right up and people got really into fashion and makeup. So women hadn't worn that much makeup.

They'd worn very thick lead paint on their faces, often as famously Queen Elizabeth did and may have killed her. But other than that, didn't really wear that much until now.

And it was the century of the massive hooped skirt when you see women in these giant skirts. They couldn't fit through doors.

That was then. And I didn't realise with the hooped skirts, people took the piss out of them the moment they appeared.
And men kind of hated them. Men just laughed at women for wearing them.

You couldn't see the ankles, could you?

You're a pervert.

Yeah, they're very upset about that.

But yeah, women stuck to them. And actually, they were, when you look at like how they were made, you had much more motion in them.
Right.

Because basically they involved this big whalebone kind of giant umbrella sticking out from your waist. But underneath you were just fully naked and free.

So it used to be that you'd be covering heavy petticoats all over your legs and stuff. You could be doing river dance under there.
You could be doing anything.

You could be smuggling houses under there.

But they were quite sexy because if you bent over, you did expose a bit of ankle. Oh, right.
Really?

If you really bent over, you could expose everything.

I think even perverts would probably think that was a bit much.

The waistcoat was invented by Charles II on the 14th of October 1666. Yeah.
Which is... Isn't that amazing that we know when the idea of wearing a suit and a waistcoat meets on that exact date? Wow.

Did he think of it or did someone help him? Because Taylor invented his name. You know what?

I mean, he got the credit in fairness, but there will have been other people who did a lot of the hard yards. But

there were accusations that England was being dictated to by France in lots of different ways. And they were saying that basically, not only that, everyone in court is just copying French clothes.

And Charles II was not very happy about this and wanted to make a statement. And he said, okay, we're going to invent a new thing.

We're going to all wear trousers, all wear jackets, all wear waistcoats, waistcoats, and they're going to be made by English wool.

And you're not allowed to wear your French fashion anymore. You have to wear the English fashion.
And we know about it because Pepys writes about it. So it definitely did happen.
What year was that?

Sorry? 1666, just after the fire.

When, again, you'd think a king with his head...

Like a king with his head screwed on. Sorry, Charles II, that's probably a bit intensely.

Would have his mind on other matters like recovering from the plague of the fire. Then

you need distractions. You need the waistcoat.

Political distractions. Yeah.

Pepys wrote that the king banned pinking and the waistcoats because he said that it made his people in his court look like magpies. Pink and painted.
What's pinking?

Pinking is where you get some cloth and you make like tiny holes in it to make a pattern. Oh, yeah.
It was very fashionable at the time, but the king banned it.

It's probably bad for your insulation as well. Having small holes.
All over your clothes. It probably doesn't do your...

Well, weirdly, if you wear like a string vest, that's just holes, but actually, it's supposed to be very warm because it traps the air.

If it was just holes, it would be nothing, wouldn't it? That's that person you can see. No,

it's not. But it's mostly holes.
It's definitely mostly holes. No, I get that.
I've never worn a string vest. You were trying to use me.
I just can't believe it.

I can only imagine you on your Christmas holidays going down to Margate Beach with a handkerchief round your head. I go home, I climb up into the computer tower.

I take my clothes, I get my string vest vest on. Weirdly, even though women were uncovering their boobies, they were covering their faces at this time.

And this went in and out of fashion throughout the 1600s and 1700s, masks, but masks that cover your whole face. And they'd often have a little bead sewn into them where your mouth was.

So the way you held them on was by keeping the bead for your teeth. You bit them on, which added apparently an extra air of mystery because you couldn't speak.
So you were immediately.

that was a very sexy way of speaking in those days.

Isn't that weird they were called vizards? Was it to stop the sunshine from like

seen that in modern day sometimes people would wear like balaclavas? Stop the plague, the Great Plague, which was

knocking about a bit. How many people wearing balaclavas? Are you sure you haven't been robbed a number of times?

He's just trying to avoid getting burned. I think you see that in some countries they'll wear like colourful balaclavas.
Yeah. I I think more veils than balaclavas.

I'm thinking like, you know, like Pussy Riot War, those things. Oh, yeah.
I think I've seen them. I might be wrong.

Well, it was for sun protection a lot of the time and initially, but then it became a fashion which was unrelated to sun protection and it was to have this air of virtue

or high quality, high breeding. But would you have your boobs out at the same time? Oh yeah, yeah, naked from the neck down.
Oh but you're unrecognisable.

Well no but you might you might do, you know, because most people are recognisable by their faces and not by their boobs.

Yeah, and you're not going to admit to being the man who recognises the woman just by her boobs, are you? No. Not when you've gone to the theatre with your wife.

You're all like Sally over there.

What is that story? I'm going to really butcher it. Can you tell it, Andy? It's really good.

It's in Oxford. It's a men-only area in Oxford.
It's a bit of the river.

A swimming area called Parsons Pleasure, I think, where only male Dons or maybe undergraduates would swim, but they would swim naked.

And one day there were three Dons there and some ladies happened by.

They were surprised. And the Dons are all naked.
And two, they're all very embarrassed. And quickly, you know, two of the dons grab their, I know, flannel or whatever, and cover their genitals.

And the third Don very calmly doesn't cover his genitals, he covers his face.

And they say, What have you done that for, Charles? If his name was Charles. And he says, Well, I'm not recognizable by my genitals.

But unfortunately, they all heard of being called Charles.

Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

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

How did you get that? Yeah,

God.

I'm on HTTP.

I'm on Instagram on at Schreiberland. Andy.
I'm at Andrew Hunter M on various.

James. I'm on LinkedIn if you want to offer me a job.

And yeah, if you want to get to us as a group, Anna, where do they go? You can email podcast at qi.com or you can tweet at no such thing.

That's right. Or go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

Because if you do, you're going to find all the previous episodes up there, as well as the gateway link into Club Fish, which is a very fun place where a lot of the listeners of our show get together, get bonus material, and also get to chat to each other on a thing called Discord.

find out about it there otherwise just come back next week and we'll be back with another episode then we'll see you then goodbye

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