508: No Such Thing As A Dragon Walk

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Hi, everybody.

Just before we start the show, we want to say a big hi to new listeners coming to us from BBC Sounds, where the podcast now exists.

Welcome to the fold.

We are no such thing as a fish.

I'm Anna.

I'm here with Dan.

Hi, Dan.

Hello.

What do we do?

Yeah, yeah, so there's four of us.

We are QI Elves.

We are the people who are involved in the TV series QI.

And if you enjoyed that, if you enjoy all the weird facts, this is a real kind of concentrated distill version of it where we just sit around and share the best, most wonderful, most odd things that we've discovered over the last seven days.

Yes, and also if you enjoy the occasional incredibly immature sense of humor on QI, then you'll get that by the bucket load here.

And with a little bit of a warning that there's the occasional bit of adult content.

So there is swearing, there's the odd adult theme, a little bit of animal sex sometimes makes it in, sometimes a little bit of human sex facts make it in, but it's all for the purpose of learning weird, interesting, amazing facts.

And you'll notice we've got 10 episodes up there right now on BBC Sounds.

And from now on, every episode will be published there.

That's right.

Now, we also just want to quickly address the members, the existing listeners of our show, and particularly the members of clubfish we know that many of you might have joined clubfish because you get an ad-free version of our show well if you head over to bbc sounds you are going to get the ad-free version of the show but i wouldn't leave clubfish you know what's there the amazing discord the behind the scenes bonus content like the compilations and drop us a line you want to miss out on andy saying bye at random moments no you don't absolutely not so if you do want to go in just for the ad-free stuff absolutely head over to bbc sounds otherwise stay with us in clubfish and uh enjoy all the background content.

So, huge, huge welcome to the BBC Sounds listeners.

Thanks for joining us.

This is a weekly show, and we're going to keep going for the next 400 years.

So, enjoy and on with the show.

On with the show.

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 Shriver.

I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Toshinsky, and Alex Bell.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one: that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is the artist Goya, who was famously a deaf man, lived in a house called the House of the Deaf Man.

It was actually named after a different deaf man who lived in that house.

So, first of all, what is Goya's full name?

Because I think you were practicing.

Oh, I thought you were calling back something that had happened before then.

I was.

His full name was Francisco Jose de Goya y Luciente.

Lovely.

Nice.

That is a lot less Spanish than I went in the pre-show chat.

And he is a very famous artist.

He was around in the early 19th century.

And he's kind of

the link between the old masters like Ren Brampton, whoever, and the modern artists, because he was doing lots of satires and lots of incredible stuff.

He is an absolutely incredible artist.

He's probably my favorite artist.

Really?

Yeah, I think so.

I can actually see why.

I can connect those two things.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

We'll get into it.

Some of his like dark, disturbed ladder paintings.

But can you please tell us about this?

Okay, I want to know: did this deaf man name the house after himself, the deaf man?

No, it was named by locals as that because this deaf man had lived there and then later Goya moved in there.

And did he move in there because he was only looking for houses called House for a Deaf Man?

Yeah, he actually googled House for a Deaf Man and this is what came up.

But there was nothing special about the house that made it like accessible for the deaf man.

No, it was a really nice house.

He was a former court artist so he had money and he had a pension from the monarchy and stuff like that.

It was also sort of away from the politics.

uh he sort of wanted a place to retreat and sort of get away because he was heavily involved his art would often you know either do satire or make political statements yeah exactly he thought if he hangs around where the spanish inquisition are then there's a decent chance he might get

you know um so he wanted to get away but the one interesting thing about this building is his most famous work for people at home perhaps is called saturn devouring his son you might know it it's like a real devilish face and he seems to be biting the head off what could be a chicken or could be his son or something like that.

It's a really sort of dark painting.

It's harrowing.

It's like really quite scary.

Yeah, if you Google it, you'll probably recognize it from memes and stuff.

But that was

what he would have wanted.

But it was on his wall in this house and actually he painted a load of these kind of satirical paintings on the wall of his house and actually they ended up being chipped off because he didn't intend to sell them or anything.

They were just murals in his house.

They're known as the black paintings now.

Precisely didn't he have a whole his whole first period of his life was much more involved in politics, like you say, painting on commission for royal courts.

And there was an awful lot more of a positive vibe to his painting.

And then he got really sick and he went deaf as a result of one of his illnesses.

And then he became very depressed and obsessed with illness and obsessed with death and kind of neurotic.

And these paintings we think reflect this dark state that he was in.

But they're all really weird and mysterious as well.

We don't actually know that the painting is called Saturn devouring hisself.

We don't know anything about it.

We know nothing really.

We don't know because, like, you say, they were all painted on the walls, and then the wallpaper had to kind of be chipped away from the wall and then put onto canvas.

But, like, a lot of art historians think that, like, they had to be very significantly altered when that happened.

A lot of people are like, definitely restoration, yeah.

You can spot little bits of it that really they think, again, it's almost theory.

Is that damaged or is that what he intended?

Uh, there's one called the dog.

It's basically a landscape where you see a dog's head sticking up at the bottom of the painting.

And, you know, is he coming over a sort of horizon?

Is he coming over a bump in a hill?

Is he drowning in quicksand?

A lot of people say he's drowning.

I looked at it and thought, oh, it's like it's like begging, like you get a dog at a table begging, but a lot of people have interpreted his drowning.

Yeah, but it's we have no idea.

Never intended anyone to see these.

These were private kind of things that he did on his wall at home.

You know, if a kid draws on the wall, they get in trouble, don't they?

Yeah, what kind of example is that setting?

You've got to own your own house in order to then make those decisions, right?

God, imagine if he was renting how pissed off.

You're not getting your deposit back.

Yeah, so he gave it, he gave the house to his grandson and then his grandson sold it to, I don't know, a baron.

And then that's the guy who went, let's take this off, put this on canvas, donate it to the museums.

The dog in particular, in the museum where it is, the curator of that museum says that there's not a single contemporary painter in the world who does not pray in front of the dog.

It's that important to I've got to say, the dog doesn't impress me as the grandma.

I think some of the others are better.

Really?

There's a bit of dog doesn't impress me.

Apart from anything else, it's a massive portrait-shaped vertical painting, and the dog's right in the bottom, and most of it's just brown.

Like, I love it.

95% of it is just brown.

Which you learn about Malievich, by the way, whose painting is just black.

It's like literally just a black square.

If you don't like something that's 90% brown, you're not going to like that.

I think the only reason people like the dog is because you've filed through these witches and decapitated, bloodied people tearing each other to shreds, and then you've got, oh, little black dog.

People love an animal.

Yeah, people love an animal.

He knew the TikTok generation was coming up.

He knew memes were on the way.

He's so pleasant.

It's actually doge, isn't it?

So, there's so much written about his art and the interpretations of it, but what do we know about Goya the Man?

Here's a few things.

Here's a few things we know.

Are you presenting a documentary?

I thought you were on the Southbank Show for a second.

It really felt like I was Melbourne Bragg all of a sudden.

The smell of orange.

Love the smell of orange.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

The smell of a girl's armpit.

Loved it.

As long as it had an orange in it.

You get this from like a dating profile, doesn't it?

The whiff of tobacco, the aftertaste of wine, and the twanging rhythms of a street dance.

This is all according to a biography that was written about him.

Is it according to him himself?

Because it feels like...

Okay, so he wrote this down somewhere.

It wasn't someone going, he seems like the kind of guy who loves sniffing girls' armpits.

Let's put that in.

Yeah.

I love the smell of an orange.

Like, who doesn't?

Like, orange is generally pleasant.

Why would you like note that down?

Well, maybe he chucked the orange thing in there to make up for the weirdness of the girls' armpits so that there was, you know, I'm not totally crazy.

I like normal things too.

He was the first major artist to paint a woman entirely nude in a profane style.

As in the, this was the one that he got summoned by the Inquisition for, right?

So profane means not religious.

And this was the naked macha.

Yes.

Who was deemed, I think, indecent and prejudicial to the common good.

So yeah, and a ma, I didn't know what a macha was, but machos and machas were, according to the New Yorker, this is how New Yorker described them, flamboyantly cheeky lower-class dandies.

And I don't know.

That's what I've got on my dating profile.

Lower-class plevy, anyway you talk, Alex.

But yeah, got summoned by the Inquisition, and I just find his tangles with the Inquisition quite bizarre.

Yeah, so weird.

Well, who knew the Inquisition was still bloody happening the start of the 19th century?

They lasted for ages, didn't they?

It lasted ridiculously long.

It was practically going since late medieval times, and still they're struggling on, clinging on.

I think they were quite toothless by then.

That Python sketch was topical.

But he did, he got away with it, with the naked painting, I believe, by saying, well, if you think this was gross, then you're condemning your former king, because he said he was emulating a Velasquez painting that Philip IV of Spain had loved.

So he was going, well, your king loved this, basically, your dead king.

So what are you going to do?

Well, the interesting thing I think about the naked maha is that he gave it, or sold it, I should say, to Godoy, who was the prime minister of Spain at the time.

And the story goes that we know that Goya made two versions: the naked maha and the not-naked maha, the clothed maha, you might call it.

And the prime minister supposedly kept the clothed one on display.

And whenever his friends would come round after a few whiskies, he would say, look at this.

And he would pull like a secret lever, and the wall would spin round.

And then the naked one would come up.

That's like one of those pens where you turn it upside down.

It's like, it's actually so tacky.

Well, that's the story, and that's supposedly what happened.

But for sure, the reason that he got brought in front of the Inquisition, Goya, is because Godoy was actually really controversial because he was the prime minister.

And this was one of the really controversial things that he did having this terrible painting.

Wow.

And it was Goya kind of got pulled into the Inquisition because they were going after Godoy.

Really?

That's amazing.

It's a painting that has caused controversy for not just his period, but well long after his death.

155 years, well, long after his life.

Well, long, man.

Bear long.

He used to say people used to go to Godai's house and go, that is a bear good painting.

Do you think this is bear good?

So many, many years later, it's issued in Spain as a stamp.

And this is suddenly the first stamp where there's a naked woman on a stamp.

And in America, this is 1959, they banned it.

So any letters that came into America, they said, we will not forward them on.

There are a few cases where at the post office, they would actually just, you know, they'd scrap,

scroll it over and stuff like that, and then send it on.

But it was a huge, huge problem.

You could have the letters returned because of, yeah.

It's a Time magazine wrote, an indecent picture is bad enough, but a postage stamp whose backside must be licked, millions, millions of innocent children collect stamps.

And so, yeah, and there were certain places that kind of allowed it, but eventually they did ban it.

You don't have a picture of her butt on the back that you could lick for.

So we don't know who the woman is in that painting, but there's a a pretty good chance that it's at least partly based on the Duchess of Alba, who was supposedly Gaia's mistress.

They were definitely very good friends.

We're not sure if they were,

but they were definitely good mates.

Is that at all

sleazy build-a-whistle?

They looked after a small bird together.

That sounded like an actual sensor on our show that you said a swear word and it's now been whistled over.

I thought now that we're possibly going on BBC Sounds that I should not be saying fucking.

Yeah, true.

Anyway, the Duchess of Alba's full name actually was Doña Maria del Pila Teresa, Cayetana de Silva, Alvarez de Toledo, y Silva Bazan, Decimo Tercera Du Cueza de Alba de Tomez, Decima Primiera Du Cueza de Huasca, Sexta de Jueza de Montero, Octavia Condesa du Cueza de Alvarez, Decimo Primera Marqueza del Capio, Decimo Tercera Marquesa de Coria, None of Novena Mara.

I won't do them all.

It's 754 letters in total, her full name was.

Oh, my God.

So, either we have to say this fact, or we have to say all the other facts.

It's not time for both.

So, yeah, and her descendant who died in 2014, who is actually quite famous Duchess of Alba, the one who was in the painting was the 13th, and the one who died in 2014 was in the Guinness World Records as the aristocrat with most titles.

She was a bit of an eccentric.

Yeah.

And the Duchess of Alba, who's in the painting, there's an interesting thing about her is she was one of the most powerful people because she was also supposedly the mistress of Godoy, the Prime Minister.

But she had a bit of a beef with Maria Louisa, who was the Queen consort, who was married to Charles IV.

These were the two most powerful women and they really, really hated each other.

And one day, the Queen Consort was going to go to a party and the Duchess of Alba found out what she was going to wear and got all of her maids to wear exactly the same clothes as the Countess and go to the party.

So suddenly there were like 20 women all wearing exactly the same clothes.

That could be seen as flattery.

It wasn't.

It was seen as...

Famously, women hate that.

It was seen as a massive, massive slam.

Do they?

Women, you say?

They don't like that.

Well, it was seen as a massive, massive slam, so much so that we think that the Queen Consort had the Duchess of Alba murdered.

Full

for wearing the

for getting her maids to wear the same clothes as well.

That is a practical joke gone wrong.

Yeah.

So I'm now terrified because sometimes me and Anne come into the office wearing the same jumper with a cuddly animal featured on the front.

Do you think she's plotting my demise?

I feel like she might be.

Actually, they exhumed her body in 1945 and they think she probably died.

Yeah, and she probably died of meningitis, we think, from being murdered.

But that was the story for hundreds of years that that's what happened.

That's amazing.

The number of paintings by Goya is going down and down by the day.

Right?

It's a real.

I'd be more surprised if it was going up.

That's such a good pipe.

I suppose sometimes you find paint.

No.

No, that is true.

You do discover he lost paintings, that was true.

He might have had another, like, a shed or something that he painted all over that we haven't discovered yet.

Absolutely.

He might have had a second home that he rented out as an Airbnb, but then it turns out that it had paintings on it.

Yeah.

But none of these things are true, which is what we're saying.

Well, I think what we're saying is we don't know.

We just don't know.

If you're staying in an Airbnb with disturbing paintings on the wall, get into it.

That's every Airbnb in my painting.

Have you ever stayed in

a tastefully decorated Airbnb?

You need to up your budget very slightly.

It's a lower-class daddy, huh?

So, this is because basically, lots of paintings that we thought were by him turn out not to be by him.

Oh, really?

And when modern analysis is done, it looks very closely at brushstrokes and the type of materials that were used, and they make certain deductions.

I'm always sceptical, you know.

So, there's actually one of his most famous paintings, Colossus, they now think was not painted by him.

And there's one expert called Manuela Mena, and she says that the brushstrokes are inferior to what he would have done.

You can tell that the confidence with which they were made is not an expert, and you think he could just be having a bad day.

Can I just say, if people in the like 200 years they listen to episode 183 of the podcast,

they weren't very funny in that one, so I don't think it was them.

That's that AI thing, turning over their voices.

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

My fact this week is that before governments experienced cyber attacks, they had to deal with fax attacks.

What a great name.

Alternative podcast.

Fax attack.

Fax attack.

Oh, yeah.

That's true, yeah.

So this is a thing that's called a black fax.

And people would do this as pranks, but they would do it to companies that they hated.

They would do it to governments where they would basically send over black paper from their side.

And often

they would loop it round so their fax machine was just sort of eternally sending a fully black page.

Like a conveyor belt.

Like a conveyor belt, exactly.

And so the people receiving it, if they were not near their fax machine, suddenly they would be using all the ink up or they might even heat the machine up so much because so much of it was processing the load ages, it would overload and it would sort of just I suppose also means you can't use the fax while that's happening.

Exactly.

We should say, because people will write in probably not ink so much as thermal paper.

Yes, sorry, yes.

But I love already the people who would have written in to complain about that.

I'm sorry we corrected ourselves because I want to know you better.

Send your faxes to podcastacui.y.

So, yeah, it's a method that was done.

And it was done, you know, before cybercrime, if we're being sort of talking about it loosely, because there are always examples of like the 1700s, a version of cyber.

Yeah, they say the first one was like 1834 was supposed to be the first cyber crime.

What was that then?

Well it was it was in France and it was obviously before the internet was invented and it was

a way of

sorry.

Because these days they might not know.

And

in those days

financial market data was like trading was happening but it it was sort of done via, like, letter.

So if you were in a different town, like, the information would travel quite slowly.

And people always tried to find a way to beat that information.

And people tried, like, carrier pigeons and all sorts of stuff like this.

But one way it wasn't communicated was the telegraph system, which was used for other things.

But these two brothers, the Blanc brothers, they set up a ruse with

some of the telegraph operators where they smuggled little information indicators in other messages.

But the way the hack worked was that the information would be like single character, like I suppose, U for up or D for down, or something like that, to indicate something to do with the stock market.

Um, but then if you followed that with a backspace character, it meant that it wouldn't get written down because it would be regarded as a mistake.

But the telegraph operator would see it all, so if they were in on it, they could write down and be and be like, Oh, yeah, this was sent over as a mistake.

We're not writing it down, but this is the information.

So, and the idea being that you know if the price of gold has gone down, so you can't do it.

Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's clever.

Do you think, obviously, if who was the modern artist we mentioned earlier?

Was it Rothko who did all the black paintings?

Oh, Malievich.

There's Malievich.

August when he tries to fax the photos of his new artworks through.

I keep trying to send it to you.

Stop pranking us.

That's why it's worth so much.

It's just the ink.

No, it's not black.

It's the Duchess of Alba's name in very small fonts.

Do you know who, as of 2017, so I don't know if it's changed, but the last report that I saw, 2017, was the biggest purchasers of fax machines in the UK?

The NHS?

It's the NHS, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So interesting.

They've really phased it out since then, I think, haven't they?

There was a big scandal.

Yeah, it was controversial.

They were like, we've got to stop.

Yes.

Yeah.

And pages as well, wasn't it?

Yeah.

I think they decided they wanted to get rid of the mulch.

Also, the NHS still have a big dictaphone tradition where a lot of the older doctors still, instead of...

Why don't they just use their fingers?

It's one of my favourite jokes.

It's a brilliant joke.

It's a great joke.

It's great.

Sorry, as you were saying.

No, just that loads of doctors still will be able to log into the usual NHS account, and when you go to the doctor, they'll make your medical notes and just put them into the system.

A lot of older doctors still prefer to use dictaphones, i.e., manual dictaphones with like actual take cassette tapes inside, dictate the notes, and then they're sent away to a third-party transcription service, and then the notes are sent back, and then the doctors then check them, like the written notes, and then they're input into the system by someone else.

And it's an insanely inefficient system.

You've got to feel bad about that.

Yeah, I know.

It's ridiculous.

Miley Cyrus uses fax machines.

Okay.

Is this

for communicating?

Everything, really?

No, only with one person.

She uses them to communicate with her godmother, Dolly Parton, because Dolly Parton actually does use them for everything.

Wow.

She refuses to use text messaging and instead uses a fax machine for everything.

Really?

You really buried the lead there, but you were trying to get the kids in by saying, Miley Cyrus uses he sometimes uses a fax machine for Dolly Parton.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

Dolly said, I don't want to talk to everyone that wants to talk to me.

I don't text because I don't want to have to answer.

So she thinks if people text her, she'd have to reply all the time.

But with a fax machine, she can just like get the messages and then...

Yeah, it's very indirect.

You can't do the three dots thing or you don't get seen on a fax.

But then it's still indirect this way because Miley Cyrus says that she doesn't really fax.

She has a phone.

What happens is Dolly Potten sends a fax, then somebody at the other end scans the fax to see what it says and then writes it in a text message that gets sent to Miley Cyrus.

Actually, the real lead of this fact is that somebody's job is sorting communications between Miley Saris and Dolly Parton exclusively.

And you tell me he's going to want that job.

Of course I want that job.

It must happen a lot.

I mentioned years ago on the podcast that that's how Brian Blessed would do his tweets.

So yeah, it's the exact same thing.

He would be sent the tweets to reply to to his agent, fax it to him, he would fax back.

There was a whole fax.

Didn't he write out the replies by hand, which were then faxed back?

And then there would be time to do that.

I can't remember.

He went through like eight different modes of communication.

There's a lot, but maybe that's a maybe that's more.

It can't just be Dolly and Bruce.

Didn't Brian Blessed once tweet Miley Cyrus saying, Can you tell Dolly Parton to answer her phone?

I think I want to go through the NHS in the morning, but it doesn't make it work.

Have you heard of the fax number of the beast?

Okay, 666 something.

It's 667.

Oh.

And it's quite just a little nice nugget for phone numbers of faxes.

Oh, because of course your fax number used to be your phone number, but with one digit at the end, gone one one up.

Yeah.

Remember that?

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

So 667 is the fax number of the beast.

Sorry, according to people

who...

I think it's a joke, right?

It's a little joke.

It's a joke.

It's a joke.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a joke.

Yeah, no, nice.

I like it.

Sorry.

I like jokes.

I'm a big joke guy.

Before we had cyber, let's say, urban legends being sent through email and Facebook and stuff like that, they were all done on fax machines.

And in 1993, there was a a big scare in Memphis, Tennessee, because there was a load of faxes going around about gangs would drive around with the lights off in their cars.

And if anyone flashed them to tell them their lights were off, then they would chase them, stop them, and kill them.

Oh my god, was this not true?

Because I had this rumor quite recently.

Just got to Anna's fax.

I mean, that still goes around that rumour, right?

But no, it is, it is fake.

But it was called fax law, the culture of sending faxes around.

And it was the old meme culture, I think.

Yeah, exactly.

And when emails came along it just went from fax to email directly from there to there yeah so fax law was the name for the rumors the lies that were starting yeah like folklore oh wow i thank you again i now get that that's a joke fax law to play on words she likes jokes she loves ladies and gentlemen i'm joker

the last time i came on this podcast

um do you know who else used to fax each other in the 80s well loads of people

i framed that question badly.

I've got a better way of framing it.

What was the and pretend that I didn't ask that previous question because otherwise it'll give it away.

What was the hotline between the White House and the Kremlin?

Was it a fax machine?

Dan, I know you cheated there by using previously.

I always thought it was a red telephone.

It wasn't a phone.

That's Batman you're thinking of.

I think that was part of where the rumour came from that the hotline was a phone, because I think it was in one of the Batman films that he speaks to the White House on a phone.

Anyway, the hotline between the White House and the Kremlin, famously started by Kennedy and Khrushchev in the 60s, was never a telephone between them, but it was in the 80s a fax machine.

So it started with type, so it was teletyped.

So it was basically like an old version of text where you'd type a message.

If you're in the White House, or in fact, in the Pentagon where it was, you'd type a message, it would be encrypted by people, sent to the Kremlin, and then translated by someone at the other end into Russian.

And it was quite sweet.

The start of the Cold War, they swapped machines for this teletyping.

So the Kremlin posted to the US four of their teletype machines that could print stuff out in Cyrillic, and the US posted back to the Kremlin four of their machines.

And they upgraded to fax machines in the 80s.

So in the 1980s, if there was an emergency between Reagan and Gorbachev, then they faxed each other.

There's many ways that people have to protect themselves against cyber attacks these days.

What do you reckon?

This is now turning just into a quiz.

The answer is not fax machine.

What do you reckon?

So like for the Navy, how they get by if they get cyber attacked for, let's say, their GPS system is hit with malware from an unknown enemy and that's on this ground.

So you need to know which way to go, but your GPS is broken because you've been hit by cyber.

Yeah.

Pop up and look at the stars in your periscope.

That's what it is.

It's celestial.

Oh shit, sorry.

Celestial navigation.

They're all taught.

Celestial navigation, yeah.

Which is amazing.

Such a great submarine captain.

That was my first thought and I was like, I mean I wouldn't have to do it, but like

someone needs to celestial and navigate.

Thanks, Alex.

That's why captain.

I'm in charge.

I'm not actually doing anything.

I'm just telling you what to do, right, am I?

But like, think about how quickly I made that decision that it was the right one.

Go on.

No, no, it wasn't funny.

And she knows funny.

So

we mentioned the number of the beast earlier on.

Yes.

I've got a little quiz for you.

Oh, great.

Are the following things the names of cyber attacks or the names of bands who have opened for Iron Maiden?

Let's go for Shady Rat.

Shady Rat's a band, surely.

Yeah,

I'm going to go cyber attack.

It's a cyber attack.

In fact, it was a series of cyber attacks in the late 2000s, originated from China.

Night Dragon.

Cyber attack.

Banned.

Cyber attack.

Oh, Dan, you suck at this so bad.

Around the same time as Shady Rat, these were attacks on energy energy companies.

Nitro Zeus.

Cyber attack.

I'm going to go banned this time.

Banned.

Cyber attack.

Anna knows how my brain works.

Everyone knows Iron Maiden have a policy of never having a supporting act.

These were attacks on Iran by the US that were planned if nuclear talks failed.

Let's go for...

Vinnie Vincent invasion.

Okay, that I'm going to say is a banned.

Surely it's a banned.

Yeah?

Dad?

Banned.

I am going to say cyber attack.

Oh, Anna, you've lost it.

I actually run out of cyber attacks now.

I did the bottom at the top.

I was looking at other, like, kind of non-digital ways of hacking things.

And did you have you heard of token suckers?

So, this was for many years the New York subway ran on tokens.

It was you would buy tokens which would go into the slots to let you through the barriers.

And it was because I think the denominations of coins never always matched up with the fares.

And there were people called token suckers who would steal tokens by jamming up the slot in the machine with a bit of paper so that when people put their token in, they'd lose it, but it wouldn't go all the way in.

And then they would come back and they would crouch down and suck the token out.

With their mouth.

With their mouth.

Really?

Yeah.

It's a hell of a vacuum you've got in your mouth if you can suck a coin out of a slot.

Yeah, I think if it's just inside, you can kind of

get it.

No, no, you could maybe use your tongue to just self-wiggle it.

Yeah,

you could take a Hoover, take a vacuum cleaner to the station.

It looks more sensitive to that.

I think that attracts attention.

But they used to, some of the subway station attendants would put chili powder in the slots as a deterrent, which is bad.

Yeah, that's nice.

You could get half a tennis ball and stick it on and then wham it, and that creates a vacuum.

And then when you pull it off, it would suck it.

Really?

Yeah.

That's good.

Or yeah, any plunger, I guess would be.

A plunger would do the same job.

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

My fact this week is that for 200 years, humans made wire by soaking steel in urine before realising that water works just as well.

We're so stupid.

I love it.

How recent was this?

Is this like last year we worked the same?

Yeah.

Someone squatting down to urinate on the steel again saying, we definitely not just put it under the tower.

What was the thought behind it?

Well, I read this in a great book actually called How to Invent Everything.

And the thought, I think, was that urine was used for various things historically wasn't it?

You know the tanning industry springs to mind but going through the podcast archive it was used for millions of other things and so this was in Old Tainer in Germany and it was in 1650 and at that point to make wire out of steel you had to pull a steel rod so like a thicker rod of steel through a funnel of decreasing diameter.

So you know like when you did filtration in science you had those funnels and so you'd put steel in the wide end and you drag it through until it gets thinner and thinner and then you get a thin wire coming out the other end and to stop there being too much friction because you're pulling it through really hard you use grease or oil and then in this place called Altene in Germany someone according to reports from the time accidentally sort of urinated all over it and then tried it and found that it works just as well as the grease and oil and so thought oh it must be something special about the weed.

I believe I found something from quite near the time that said that this guy who's called Johan Gerdes, or Gerdes,

he had been so annoyed that he couldn't draw it well enough that he'd thrown his material Vojedemann sien vasa abschlage,

which is where everyone casts their water.

So he didn't urinate on it, he got annoyed and threw it in the corner into the toilet, and that's where he was.

Yeah, exactly.

So he tossed it into the loot, and then he thought, oh no, I threw a strop there, that was silly, wasn't I?

But I'll go and get it back.

And so then he went and sort of got went elbowed

back

climbed down into the vat of wee got it back out and then found that it works better and when you say work better is it just that it's softer more malleable yeah so what it seemed to do what it did do is make a soft coating around the metal which reduces the friction when you pull it through now we now do know that water also does that but for 200 years people who worked in this factory would provide urine to it and actually their wives and children would also donate their urine to this factory.

I like the fact that they in between the we and the water they worked out that beer worked.

So they did it with the we for ages and then after about a hundred years someone tried beer they went oh this works just as well we don't need to

stop trying why they like try like a hundred different things maybe they did I kind of wonder what else would work that we haven't thought of yet.

It's like better than water.

I think once you've got to water it's like okay good.

This is the simplest trick.

I'd so love to have been there on the day that the person who came into town and said you know you can just use water to then said that can you or like dicks in hands

standing here dick in

you'd be so embarrassed how long have you been doing this 200 years

it's not important doesn't matter

yeah

wow i think it's also interesting that like you make wire like you make spaghetti you just

squeeze it in a i mean it may piss on my spaghetti i mean squeezing it through squeezing it through a

if you cook it in water it seems seems much higher than you.

You know that smell that iron and steel has, like doorknobs and stuff, you know that metal smell?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

The metal smell.

So you actually don't because it turns out that it doesn't smell.

And you know what it actually is, is the oils and chemicals excreted by you reacting with the surface of the metal.

Very similarly, and every kitchen should have this.

I don't have this.

But you can get stainless steel soap.

And I've never heard of that before.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, because stainless steel is like antibacterial, right?

Which is why a lot of doorknobs are made out of it, and especially when you go to public toilets and stuff, everything's metal.

Yeah.

Because bacteria can't last very long.

So you don't need to wash your hands when you're leaving the loot.

You just turn the metal doorknob and you say, as long as you do it in your hands.

You're not made of metal, Aaron.

No, this is specifically for if you're cutting up onions or you're cutting up garlic and the smell gets stuck to your fingers and you're like, oh God, I smell of this.

Rubbing your hands against stainless steel creates a reaction that knocks out the smell from it.

I don't think it's scientifically proven at all, but they do sell, as it were, bars of stainless steel stuff.

I actually think it is scientifically proven,

but it doesn't really work at all.

Exactly.

It's not actually practical.

But it's like,

no, I'm definitely rubbing my garlicky fingers up and down stainless steel stuff to no avail.

And does real soap not work at all for garlic?

No,

I don't think anything works for it except using garlic in a jar, which I've resorted to now in order to sustain my marriage.

I think just being happy with smells of garlic.

All that.

James, I wish life were that simple.

What a weird cryptic sentence about your marriage that just slipped in.

But Anna's husband is a vampire.

Can I give you a QI question?

But you've got to pretend you're in ancient Rome.

And then it works.

Sure, do we have to do it in Latin?

Yes, that's okay.

I'm sure the listeners at home are fluent.

So.

Shall we?

Oh, no, Alex actually can do this.

Shall I

You only need to know one word, and that's that the Latin word for steel, and astonishingly, they had a version of steel as far back as then, invented in India about 400 BC, but it wasn't able to be mass-produced until the 19th century.

But they did have it, made it to ancient Rome.

The Latin word for steel is chalibae, and it was named after the Chalibes people who lived on the Black Sea.

Okay, so you're in Latin QI.

What did the Chalibes people invent?

The Chalibi people, they made metal.

I mean, the Latin for steel is Chalibay.

I'm just going to say that.

Oh, okay.

I see.

Is it the word calibre?

Ex-calibre, swords.

Dan, can I get- I feel like you're the one who gives the more obvious, stupid answer.

Can you get a question?

Sorry, I'm still busy trying to picture myself what character I am.

Do I know?

What do I not know?

Chalibay, and there's supposed to be an obvious answer to this.

They invented steel.

Oh, they invented steel.

Did they invent steel?

And then you get a Claxon.

I don't understand what's going on.

Thank God Anna didn't pitch QY to the CDC initially.

Script editor, I don't understand how she's made such a mess of this.

I've rewritten all the scripts in Latin, it's just so awkward.

I'm saying to a Latin audience, what did the Chalibes people invent?

You know, speaking Latin, that Chalibbe is Latin for steel.

Steel.

Steel.

Woo, woo.

Claxon, my favorite.

Woo.

And they didn't.

They just invented another kind of hybrid iron.

They

invented steel.

Do Do you want to hear about the barbed wire was?

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay, so barbed wire invented in 1873 in America by Joseph Glidden and used by farmers to protect their farms.

Who was not happy about it?

The blunt wire manufacturers.

Yeah, fence makers.

Oh, yeah, that's true.

Ramblers.

Ramblers.

Lots of ramblers.

Golfers.

Golflers.

Yeah, these are all great answers.

But all wrong.

I actually feel like ramblers, because I think I may know the answer, but ramblers might be a vaguely correct-ish people who wanted to ramble, right?

I think it's true.

I mean, not many people like barbed wire, I'd say, but.

The answer is cowboys.

Because if you had a...

if you had a farm and you didn't have fences, your cows and sheep could run anywhere, but you kept them in the right place by employing cowboys.

But as soon as you had barbed wire, you didn't need to employ cowboys anymore.

This is the first time.

Who ramble freely, which is why I've given Alex half the points.

Ramble.

They're on horses.

Yeah, I think of rambling as just sort of roaming free, but do you think it has to be on foot?

I think what we're doing now is rambling.

But the other thing, the other people didn't like it were small ranchers.

Because if you had a big ranch and you could afford loads of barbed wire, you could put loads of barbed wire around your farm.

But actually, in those days, people weren't really sure where one farm stopped and another farm started.

So if you were a small rancher, you would often find that you would turn up to your ranch and there's a load of barbed wire and you couldn't get to your stuff anymore.

And so, there was a huge amount of violence and tension between these kind of small ranchers and the big ranchers.

And there were wire-cutting groups that would go out and cut all the wires.

And actually, Grover Cleveland, the president, had to send in the army to remove any unlawful barbed wire fences.

Didn't they have they formed sort of gangs, didn't they, with really fun names?

They were called like the Blue Devils, the Owls.

They supported Iron Maiden, didn't they?

Sorry, you're right.

Native Americans as well didn't like it because it stopped buffaloes rambling.

I'm going to make ramble happen.

And they depended so much on their livelihood for buffaloes.

It's one of the reasons the buffaloes basically went extinct by the end of the century is that they couldn't roam free anymore.

They were fenced in.

Right.

And it was all kind of Lincoln's fault, wasn't it?

Because he signed this act which said everyone can have a bunch of free land in the Wild West if you agree to farm it.

So all these farmers move there.

And then we're like, huh.

How do we stop these buffalo from trampling all over our crops?

Yeah.

Plenty of

electric wire, right?

After the barbed wire.

Yeah.

I'm just trying to think.

I wonder how many people died in that small town who were having a nostalgic piss on a bit of wire that I saw.

I think that's a myth, isn't it?

That if you piss on an electric fence, you get electrocutes.

So don't try it at home.

Don't try to know who's got electric fence on.

Get out of my room, mum.

I did warn you.

I think the myth that I remember, and again, I'm not sure that this is true, so people shouldn't try it at someone else's home.

But your urine stream isn't usually a complete stream, it's usually got gaps in it enough that the electricity can't travel up it.

Did anyone come across this guardian notes and queries section?

So, you know, the guardian does notes and queries, and someone asks a question, and lots of you often people who have inside knowledge answer Denise.

And there's one that's, when was wire invented?

Okay.

Did any of you see this?

No.

It's just very confusing.

So there's, when was wire invented?

And then various people underneath give their answers.

And one of the answers is...

Fierce controversy surrounded the invention of wire.

And it goes on to explain that Thomas Mallum said he invented wire in 1830 at his foundry in Sheffield.

But a Frenchman, Jean-François Martin, also said he'd invented wire at the same time.

There was this legal action contesting the right to the patent.

It was never resolved because Thomas Mallum died of an inflamed liver.

And then it said it's an extraordinary fact.

Thomas Mallum's memorial is in Abney Park Cemetery, very near where I used to live, which has lots of amazing gravestones on it.

And it's now rusted away, but it used to be constructed entirely of wire in the shape of an anvil, topped with a falcon.

And the source was a book called Wire: Its History and Application by Dr.

A.

Stone.

And

it's different material.

Well,

it is a different material.

But there's nothing obvious in this to give away that it's completely made up.

It's completely made up.

Oh, it's completely made up.

Oh, okay, fine.

This person gives this extraordinary story of the history of the founding of Wire.

And I was like, brilliant, something fascinating.

God, there's Abney Park.

I can't believe I never saw that.

Completely false.

So this is a story of you reading a comment section, finding the information not to be true.

A comment section?

It's Guardian notes and queries, okay?

You get highbrow experts replying to people about...

And then...

but the jokers can slip in that's the problem yeah it's not a very good joke though is it i don't know a state

i did laugh i did laugh really hard at that

that's not a joke i know jokes guys

just on other things you can use urine for virgin boy eggs oh yeah

virgin boy this is like so they are a traditional dish um from china uh from dongyang and basically it's exactly what it sounds like they boil eggs in the urine of young boys so like 10 or younger.

That's not what virgin boy eggs sounds like.

It's going to be.

It's what it

translates with boy egg.

Fine, like again, urine boy eggs.

You're absolutely right.

Urine boy eggs.

Got it.

You're trying.

No, sorry.

They are, it translates as virgin boy eggs, virgin boy being like small boy eggs.

And yeah, they all through the town, the kids are encouraged to, when they go to the Lewin schools, they either can go to the normal toilet or they can go and pee in like a collection bucket in the corridor.

And then

all of this urine gets taken and then eggs are boiled boiled in them and it's a whole process where they're double boiled in this urine and people eat them and it's like a delicacy.

Yeah, urine's been used like that for a lot, hasn't it?

Yeah, it's just interesting.

There is definitely like a legit ick factor there where I'm like, it's somebody else's urine that this has been cooked in.

Yeah, it's very interesting.

I had 100 years eggs.

100 years eggs.

Yeah.

They're like supposed to be 100 years old.

They're not really 100 years old, but they are quite old.

They're very old, yeah.

Yeah, and they just taste really sulfurous.

But they haven't been bathed in urine, have they?

No, they're just

different kind of weird eggs.

It's If the urine thing I don't like, yeah.

I can talk about weird eggs that I've eaten.

I have that balut, you know, that has the baby chickens, the embryo of the chickens.

All right, so save it for your spin-off Weird Eggs I've Eaten podcast, which will run forever and ever.

They've actually poached me, poached me.

The rest is weird eggs.

It's the new

Gold Hagger podcast.

It's me and Delia Smith just talking about weird eggs.

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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Alex.

My fact this week is that dragonfly wings are equipped with tiny knives that physically rip bacteria apart.

What

it's amazing.

Oh my god.

It's just a property they have that keeps their wings clean.

It keeps them safe.

Can I ask a question, Alex, straight off the bat?

I've currently got a chest infection and I'm on antibiotics.

Could I instead chuck some dragonfly wings?

That's such a great question.

I don't want to answer that in case you die.

I thought you were going to say should I strap a series of knives to my arms and flap them around?

Also an option.

I think probably not.

I think dragonflies were amazing if humans used them as inspiration for scientific innovation so much but one of the things that we are doing is trying to emulate this what's called they're called nanopillars these tiny tiny sort of blunt pillars that are so so small they're one 100,000th of the width of a human hair.

I mean, so, so tiny.

So bacteria literally lands on them, gets caught between two, and gets ripped apart.

I mean, it's absolutely astonishing how small this is.

There's more than 10 billion of them per wing, basically.

On each one.

Yeah.

And they're really, really good at destroying almost all bacteria that lands on them.

So there's a university in Melbourne, Australia, who have successfully made a sort of plastic version.

So that could be the new stainless steel.

You know, next time you go into your public bathroom, there'll be a plastic handle.

So scientists have managed to make stuff that small.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well done.

Well done.

I didn't make it when they sort of you can do novels on rice now.

Yeah.

You know that that's quite different to having something that's there's 10 billion of them.

I don't think they've been manually sharpening each one with a tiny, tiny set of carving knives or anything.

I once pushed an electron with a scanning tunnelling microscope.

Wow.

Right.

And it took me about an hour and a half.

Really?

It was quite a long time ago.

No, just like to slightly other place to where it already was.

Like, I just moved it.

Can you just blown it?

No, because it's an electron, it's so small.

So you have this little sort of like a needle, but it's some kind of quantum effect.

I don't know.

I did study it, but I don't really understand it.

But I had the machine, and then it was like a computer game thing, and you would kind of push this one electron.

And the idea is.

But they meant you to.

Yeah, they meant to me.

It wasn't like OCD.

You didn't just, it's like walking in and seeing a painting slightly askew.

You're like, oh, I'm really uncomfortable with that.

It is Princess and the PET.

This place is such a mess.

But yeah, dragonflies are actually astonishing.

They're incredible.

They are amazing.

Every fact I learn about them is that you are the most metal insane.

They are the most efficient killers in nature.

They are the most efficient predators.

They kill over 95% of the prey that they chase, which is like, that's unbelievable.

We're so lucky they're so small and they don't eat us.

Yeah.

I love you calling them the most metal.

They've opened for Iron Maiden.

When they're larva, so like little wormy things, they kind of live underwater.

And then they shed their larval skin and start to become a dragonfly.

And they create these wings, but the wings are like made of jelly.

They're not like the wings that they have when they're older.

So they need to dry them out.

And so they produce sodium bicarbonate in their rectum and they fart it out and it reacts with the water and it creates CO2 and it dries out their wings.

Wow.

Means that they become proper wings.

They are their own hair dryer.

They're asking for a separate hair dryer, yeah.

But also, when they're larva, they eat through their anus as well.

And they also spend most of their lives as larvae.

So they can, some species live up to five years, but they spend nearly all of it as a larva, and then they become a dragonfly for just a couple of months and flying around.

I always think it's weird with it's not weird at all, but it's unfair to these animals that we think of them as dragonflies when actually for almost all their life they're not dragonflies at all.

I think they want to be thought of as dragonflies rather than these weird underwater insects.

They're a bit creepy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

it must be.

I watched a great, um, I watched a couple of great documentaries actually about them.

One of them was talking about the extraordinary moment when they're climbing up a blade of sort of grass, which they would do when they're emerging from nymph phase into dragonfly phase.

Climb a blade of grass out of the water, and that first time that you feel the weight of gravity on you, they've been floating in water all of their lives, and suddenly they slow down massively because it's suddenly having to wrench their body weight up.

And then, if you watch videos of them emerging from the exoskeleton, it's very cool.

So, their abdomen, as a dragonfly, is concertina just like a telescope inside of their larval self.

So when they burst out, suddenly it's like pulling a telescope out to its full extension.

And when they climb up, they can retreat at any point.

So they're not dragonfly yet until their massive goggly eyes, you know, they've got this big eyes, until their eyes turn cloudy and white.

And then once the eyes have gone milky, there's no going back.

Oh my god, that's incredible.

That's awesome.

That's how you can tell.

Wow.

Did you know they can't walk?

They've got six legs and they can climb with them, but they can't walk on them, but they mostly use them to like grab their prey in mid-air and like stab it.

And like

they're not called dragon walks, Alex.

That's true.

I just thought it's weird having to, like, as in most flies and insects that land can also walk on their

stand and walk, whereas dragonflies specifically use it to grab and hunt.

They're more like pincers.

They're so awesome that the US decided to create a spying dragonfly drone,

which was based on all these amazing things that dragonflies could do.

So it had tiny beads that could reflect light and could check for oscillations, so you could work out what someone was saying from a massive distance away.

It could flap its wings 1800 times per minute using lithium nitrate crystals controlled by lasers.

It cost about $2 million for each ones, but they only ever tested it in lab conditions.

And then when they took it out, they realized it couldn't cope with wind.

I found a a documentary by David Attenborough, which was called Dragons and Damsels.

He made it in 2019.

It was a TV special.

And I really wanted to watch it.

And so I was googling Dragons and Damsels to see where you could get it.

Sadly, the closest I could get was a documentary of similar length, about 45 minutes,

called Dragons and Damsels, released on YouTube by Buxton Civic Association during the pandemic and hosted by a chap called Richard Knisley Marpole,

which was really good as well.

And so I'm

going to tell you some things I've learned from that.

Well, it was about dragons and damsels.

The production quality slightly lower.

There were interruptions like, Can you see my cursor as I'm moving it out there?

And sort of, can everyone see me on the screen, or can you see the thing I'm showing you?

But

never get Attenborough doing that, flying them out of the arc.

Why can't I see them?

But I would love to see Attenborough doing a new narration over this documentary.

Here we see the human attempt the cursor.

The thumbnails have confused the Jesus out of him.

Was it good, though?

It was really good.

So he said, sweetly, he said, the southern hawker dragonfly.

They're the only dragonflies that will fly up to you and look you straight in the eyes.

Sounds scary.

He said it's quite frightening.

Yeah.

Sounds like a US drug, doesn't it?

Really?

Maybe that's what they are.

They always have been.

He said, the way to tell the difference between damselflies and dragonflies, well, there are many ways, but one of them is, and you have to look quite closely, but during mating, they both grab the female from behind, But dragonflies grab the female on the back of the head, whereas damsels grab the female on the back of the neck.

So you do have to be quite careful.

And also I really enjoyed a metaphor he used, which actually referenced a fact that we mentioned before, which is that ancient dragonflies millions of years ago were up to a metre wide.

And as he said, you can imagine what sort of a mess that'd make if it hit your windscreen.

Actually, laughed laughed out loud at that.

And I've never laughed out loud at David Attenborough.

Or any of our jokes on this podcast yet.

She knows jokes.

She doesn't anyone knows jokes.

But don't the female dragonflies also, they fake their deaths to avoid having sex sometimes?

Yes, they do do that, don't they?

And the other thing I know about dragonfly sex is that the males have spoon-shaped penises so that they can scoop out sperm of the previous guy if he finds any inside.

Oh,

that is clever.

Bit gross.

Well, no, but necessary, right?

Well, yeah, I suppose so.

Arguably humans have that as well.

The idea is that the bell end shape at the top of a penis could possibly be used to scrape out other people's semen.

Yeah, or theory.

Or just get a half-cut tennis ball and you can

plunge that out.

I'm actually starting to question your fact now, Alex, having just looked at my notes, because Anna...

previously gave us a fake fact from a stone

and your fact about an insect comes from someone called a wolf really yeah

it's dr annalina Wolfe.

She does make this, there's this amazing point that's made inside this article, which you touched on earlier, which is basically all the things that we're looking for for modern invention, evolution has worked out somewhere on our planet.

We just need to look around for four billion years worth of evolution and you eventually find something that can be then taken into the lab to try and mimic, which is pretty awesome.

It's the mimicking that's hard, I think, sometimes.

We actually don't have four billion years to make it.

We've got about a week before the funding dries up.

But they've been around 300 million years.

Dinosaurs were walking the planet.

I mean that's always because in my head the romanticism of the dinosaurs being just because of how old they were and alive and we forget all these animals.

Dragonflies were there.

It's a different version.

In fairness to people who make cartoons.

and dinosaur movies, they do often have dragonflies flying around.

Yeah,

we should be dragonflies.

Yeah, that's so true.

That is true.

One other incredible thing about them you wouldn't expect is how far they can fly and that's another thing that scientists are looking into.

Can we replicate it?

Because the Globe Skimmer dragonfly has the record for the longest insect migration and it does a round trip of 18,000 kilometres.

That is insane.

It's always one of these things where I think...

Does it count if it's multi-generational?

Because it is.

It is one of these things where the dragonfly, this particular dragonfly, lays its eggs and lives and mates in shallow pools because the pools are warmer if they're shallow and so it can grow faster.

So it follows the rain so it can follow shallow pools.

So it flies from India to Africa and then the next generation flies back.

If I went on a gap year and then like I came back and it was my son like you wouldn't be like how was how is Africa?

Like

that was your dad.

Alex is so well traveled.

Alex and Alex Jr.

together.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on Instagram on at Schreiberland.

James.

My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

Alex.

I don't have any socials at the moment.

Yeah?

Look at me.

Copycat.

Living my life.

And Anna, how can they get in touch with all of us?

And you can get in touch with all of us by emailing podcast atqi.com or by tweeting at no such thing.

That's right.

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

All of the previous episodes are up there.

Do check them out.

Also, check out Club Fish, which is our behind-the-scenes special fun place where we have lots of bonus material, little fun extra shows like drop us a lines, lots of great stuff there.

But otherwise, just come back next week for another episode, and we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo?

And Juliet, the new hit Broadway musical and the most fun you'll have in a theater.

I got the I am the time.

Created by the Emmy-winning writer from Schitt's Creek and pop music's number one hit maker.

And Juliet is exactly what we need right now.

Playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts.

Tickets now on sale at BroadwaySanjose.com.