507: No Such Thing As Fangtooth Boxing

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Hi, everyone.

Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Andrew Hunter Murray is off on his hollybobs, sailing the seven seas, looking for new

unbeknownst species of moss.

And while he is away, we have got a guest for you.

And that guest is none other than Anne Miller.

Of course, you know Anne.

She's one of the QAL.

She's a really good friend of ours.

And it's great to have her back.

One thing you really need to know about Anne, especially in these weeks upcoming to Christmas, is that she is also a published author.

She has written a series of children's books.

They are known as Mickey and the Animal Spies.

They're known as that because that is their name.

And they're absolutely brilliant.

My daughter absolutely loves looking at the pictures and I'm sure when she gets to the right age she will enjoy reading them as well.

While we're on the subject of books, of course, it would be remiss of me not to mention our book, mine and Anna's new book, Everything to Play For, the QI Book of Sport.

Definitely buy that for your loved ones for Christmas.

Anyone who likes sport, definitely buy it for them.

If you don't like sport, but you like what we do, I promise you'll love this book because it's full of loads of interesting human stories, drama.

It's the ultimate sports book for people who don't really like sports.

And also, people who do like sports will like it as well.

It's for everyone.

That's the great thing about our book.

But then that also has to be true of Andy and Dan's books.

You definitely should go and get those as well.

Dan's book is called The Theory of Everything Else.

It's a brilliant look into his brain, his

unique brain, let's say, but he's looked at the history of people who had done otherwise great things, but deep down they had a dark secret of believing some weird shit.

And speaking of weird shit, you should also have a look at Andy's books.

Andrew Hunter Murray, he has two books.

They're called The Sanctuary and The Last Day.

They're both brilliant, acerbic, dystopian books that tell you something about the modern day while thrilling you with an incredible story about the future.

They're absolutely amazing.

You've got to get those as as well.

Basically, what I'm saying is, who doesn't love a book for Christmas?

And there's a ton of them made by your favorite QI Elves.

They're all available online and mine, Anna's Dans and Andy's, you can find at nosystingsofish.com forward slash books.

One more very, very important thing I need to say before I leave you in peace to listen to the podcast is that we do have a couple of live shows coming up just before Christmas.

They will take place in London on Thursday the 7th and Friday the 8th of December at the Soho Theatre.

Now we've already mentioned this to the Club Fish members and I think it's been on social media so the truth is there are not many tickets left.

If you do want to come and see this show literally pause now and go to no suchthingsaffish.com forward slash live.

click on the link and check if there are any tickets left.

You never know, sometimes extra tickets do come up closer to the date, so do go and check there anyway and hopefully see some of you there for our Christmas shows.

Anyway, thank you so much for getting to the end of this without fast forwarding.

If you have fast forwarded and got to here without hearing the last bit, shame on you.

But anyway, it's time for our podcast with Anne Miller, so there is nothing more to say apart from on with the podcast.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, James Harkin and Anne Miller.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that a list of adorable things written over a thousand years ago includes chicks who look like their clothes are too big for them and faces drawn on melons.

Okay, can I ask for definitions of chicks and melons?

Because

I live in the 1990s.

Right.

Both chicks and melons mean what they've meant in every decade outside of the 1990s, I'm afraid.

Baby chickens

and fruit.

James is just frankly destroying all his notes.

Wow, people are writing about adorable things a thousand years ago.

That's yeah.

This was, I actually heard this reference on Radio 4 this week, so I'm sure there are people who also heard it mentioned.

It's The Pillow Book, which is this extraordinary book written by a woman in Japan in the 10th century under the Haiyan period.

And

hi.

That's why we chose this.

God, it took me a long time to find a high-an period back.

Anyway,

this woman basically wrote a diary of just random stuff that popped into her head: of lists and observations, and things she thought should happen and shouldn't happen, and things people should wear and shouldn't wear.

And one of them was, here's a list of really cute things.

And one of them was faces drawn on melons.

One of them was chicks who look like their clothes are too big, which I think is like if you see a chick but its feathers look like they're a bit swollen.

You know, they look like they went like you dressed dress them up in human clothes.

That's what I thought.

That's cute.

That would be even cuter.

From what I can tell from interpretations of it, I think they're just talking about chicks who look like they don't fit into their clothes yet.

Right.

They're too small.

But I would argue that's slightly less cute than like a hat and dungarees.

Well, take it up with Say Shawnegan, the author of this book.

Maybe she hadn't thought of that.

The good thing about this book is, and I'm sure you all found this reading it, it's just like someone is writing today, isn't it?

Yeah.

It's just like lists of cute things.

So one is a young palace page, obviously that's not a thing anymore, but a young palace page who is still quite small and walks by in ceremonial costume.

And that's just like, you know, if you go to a wedding and you see a little

toddler, a page boy in a suit.

Yeah, it's true.

But it's not all happy stuff, is it?

Like, there's so many great pissed-off lists, things like things that are unpleasant to hear.

Someone who has an ugly voice yet speaks and laughs without restraint.

So she has a list for that.

She has a list for things that give a pathetic impression.

The voice of someone who blows his nose while he is speaking.

The impression of a woman plucking her eyebrows.

It's all so odd.

My favourite random one in there is the list of extremely frightening things.

She goes.

Yeah, no, I didn't say that.

Thunder.

Yep, fair enough.

And then I just enjoy this one.

Extremely frightening thing.

When a thief has entered the house next door, one is extremely frightened.

If he breaks into that...

If he breaks into the house where one is actually living...

If he breaks into the house where one is actually living, one loses consciousness and knows nothing more.

Which is true.

That's true.

So I think some of these sound like stand-up routines.

Yeah.

It's like I've found one which is things that are infuriating, which sounds like it's like a Josh Whitticom routine.

It says, This is what's infuriating.

Someone suddenly falls ill and an exorcist is sent for.

They don't find him in the usual place, and a tedious amount of time is spent waiting while they go around in search of him.

Finally, they manage to locate him and with great relief you see him to perform the exorcism rites.

However, the recent exertions of exercising some other possessing spirit seem to have worn him out.

For no sooner does he sit down and start in on the chanting than his spirit seems to have worn him out, his voice goes drowsy and that is utterly infuriating.

I think.

So relatable, isn't it?

Yeah, my note for Josh, maybe broaden it as I need it.

I like the idea this is the hey, what about airplane food of like a thousand years ago?

It clearly is.

Like, there's a list, rare things.

A silver tweezer that is good at plucking out the hair.

This is today.

It is.

You can't get tweezers that pluck out hairs well.

How have they not designed this in the last thousand years?

It's basically Schott's miscellany, isn't it?

Because it is lists, but it's also essays sometimes or

random.

Yeah, diary entries, observations.

So, this is just to put it into the period.

I know everyone probably knows the years of the high-an period, but uh.

You refresh my memory.

we're talking the year 1000 um is what's going on here and uh at the time that she was writing this book Beowulf was being written also just to put in context the other great pieces of literature it's relatable Beowulf no no that's true I haven't actually read it so I the first word in it we still don't know what it means really think so

really yeah do it what what did you say the word do you know it or it's like quat or yeah there's arguments about what it means yeah um and she was so she was working in the court of the Empress at the time.

She was like a lady-in-waiting who was always there.

And she basically wrote this book because she just had a lot of spare time with nothing to do.

So she never intended it for publication.

It was just a personal book that she was writing.

We don't even properly know her name.

So she's called Say Shonagun.

But that's that's Shonagun is the title that you're given.

It's a minor counselor.

And Say is the name that was added later, which refers to her father's name.

So you can distinguish her from the other Shonaguns who were in part of the court.

So do we think it could be Josh Whittacom gone back in time to the Heiyan period?

It's possible.

Say Shonogan does sound like a Japanese version of Josh Whittaker.

Yes.

The word Haiyan means peace in Japanese.

Oh, yeah.

Because it was particularly, it was quite a long period and it was a time where there wasn't much war going on, so people had time to write these stand-up routines.

That's why she was so bored.

I reckon she craved a war.

Do we think she was a

bit of a bitch?

Was she?

What?

Well, I mean, just from what she wrote, like adorable adorable things.

Give us some examples.

I mean, no, pretty much the list you're reading.

Yeah, you're right.

I think she had mean qualities.

In fact, there was a story about her where one of her neighbours' houses burned down and they lost everything they own.

Look at the fire in the house next door is the book scary.

Thank god it wasn't in her house.

Well, I don't know how scary she was finding it because basically she wrote a kind of little note mocking this person.

Right.

He's lost everything.

He's standing outside his house, you know, naked, and gives it to her mum and says, hey, go give this note taking the piss out of this guy to him.

Okay.

She had what was effectively, a lot of people claim was a rival.

I don't think we fully know that, but it is someone who is friend of the podcast, Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote...

And we mentioned in episode 63 of Fish, the tale of Genji.

Yeah, the first ever novel, which finished mid-sentence, right?

Like it just cuts off.

What happened was, is that Sei Shonogun was working for this empress, and at at the time it was one emperor, one empress, that's how it worked.

But they bucked the trend with this one, and suddenly she was no longer the exclusive empress.

So he got married again, and the lady in waiting who became the lady in waiting for the next lady was this person, the tale of Genji.

No way!

Yeah, so that's why they were kind of like in rival land, according to certain historians.

So that book, The Tale of Genji by Murasaki, has a word kawayushi,

which is the word which turned into the modern day word kawaii,

which means cute in Japanese.

And this idea of, you know, lots of cute animals and, you know, hello kitty and all that kind of stuff.

This is kind of a 20th century thing that we're not sure exactly.

There's lots of reasons why it might have come about, but possibly a reaction to the war, to the bombs, stuff like that.

People wanted to go from the horrors of war to cuteness.

But definitely seems to have become popular when mechanical pencils came out.

So you know those pencils that kind of, you know, you twist them and the lead comes out.

Twist them.

Do not click them.

There's a lot of them.

Or the one where you take the little one out and put it in the top.

Do you remember them from Proud Boy Skull?

There's so many different things.

No.

Hang on, you have to.

There's a little pocket containing lead.

Inside where the lead would go.

They were like tiny little things, and you'd pop one at the bottom and pop it in the top to save you sharpening your pencil.

I hated them all because they write so horribly.

Well, they were very popular in 1970s Japan, where you would not have fit in.

No.

Because they they could write very, very thin lines.

And it inspired a kind of writing among teenage girls where they would put like lots of little hearts and little, you know, characters and stuff in their writing.

And it was so popular and it made their writing so difficult to read that it was banned in loads of schools.

Basically, you weren't allowed to write in this kawaii style.

But by then, the trend had already taken a hold.

I guess once you've started doing it, it sort of becomes your hand.

There were some people who would do like proper circles over their eye or like little hearts.

And I was like, why?

It takes a little bit longer.

If I was just going to ask Anne, were you a heart to blind?

My eye kind of

got my eyes.

Your eyes are just a line.

You don't have time for that dot.

But it's not, I was reading a sort of paper on it saying it's not as cutesy as maybe our version of cute.

Like it's got a bit of an edge.

It's like kawaii cute.

The kawaii cute, yeah, the Japanese cute, which you can kind of see.

There's sometimes a bit of a dark edginess to to it.

There's a character called Gloomy the Naughty Grizzly, who I haven't come across, but apparently he's a big cultural phenomenon.

And he's a two-meter-tall, like cuddly bear, but he's very violent.

He's covered in blood quite a lot of the time.

He attacks his owner quite a lot.

And that's kawaii in Japan, but not necessarily something we would say was cute.

I think that's like kimo kawaii, so it's like grotesque and cute at the same time.

I think that's what they call it.

And yeah, obviously they have loads of mascots, don't they, in Japan?

Yeah.

In 2015, the governor of Ossaka complained that he couldn't recognize most of his prefecture's mascots.

They had 92 of them

in Ossica alone.

And he ordered a cull, and 20 of his characters were

murdered by the grizzly bear.

Public executions, I hope.

So he met Jickie made a list like 20 mascots that really annoy me.

It's amazing how successful it was, though.

You know, how when governments try to be cool, um, you know, like David Cameron saying he supports Aston Miller or whatever, and it's just massive cringe.

But the Japanese government, basically, in the 90s, did like Cool Japan, which was a bit like we had Cool Britannia here.

Yeah, and Cool Japan was the idea of exporting all this Japanese cultural stuff.

And I don't know how they did it, but they nailed it because it's so popular now, isn't it?

You get people who are really into manga, really into those styles.

Hello, Kitty is a global phenomenon.

Hello, Kitty.

But, like, in the Cool Britannia, it was like Blur versus Oasis.

And do you think in Japan now kids are listening to what's a starring morning glory?

Yeah.

Oh yes.

It's still Blur and Oasis there.

It's not resolved.

Hang on, but are Blur and Oasis popular there?

I started by saying that.

Not anymore.

Damn, it'd be great if they were, because that would be my cultural homeland.

That's when I stopped learning about pop music, was in about 1998.

Yeah, wouldn't it be great if there was like a little museum somewhere where you could go and they're still listening to all your kind of

smooth events.

Oh, God.

Cuteness is a funny thing, isn't it?

And we are the cutest of the primates.

So that's nice.

Of course.

We're self-proclaimed.

I guess it is self-proclaimed.

We're the only ones that can write about it.

Where any of the bonobos are allowed to vote in this?

Screw you, gorillas.

You can't read.

You can't define what's cute.

So, what's kind of defined as cute

is the traits that are common in infants.

And that is, it was actually defined by this guy called Conrad Lorenz, who won a Nobel Prize.

It's called the Kinder Schema.

And it's a large brain capsule, as he puts it, big forehead, I think they'll call it.

Large and low-lying eyes, bulging cheeks, short and thick extremities, a springy, elastic consistency, and clumsy movements, which is like the ugliest way to describe what is actually a really cute

image.

Oh, wasn't there, there was a thing I read a while ago about animals who found us cute, like an elephant like caressing people.

They think like, oh, you're just so cute and small.

It was really lovely.

I don't know if I want to be caressed by an elephant, you know, of all the animals that could caress me.

It may not.

I think it was an elephant.

I feel like it was a trunk involved.

That sounds likely.

They're quite empathetic elephants, aren't they?

One of the scariest things is an elephant caressing next door's baby.

Absolutely terrifying.

There was a study done in 2009, and this was they gave people a load of cute images, and then they asked them to play the game Operation.

So, you know, where you have like a plastic

body and you have to pull out the funny bone and stuff so that it doesn't buzz.

Well, it turned out that anyone who'd been exposed to high-cuteness stimuli was better at operation.

Oh.

So, first of all, a tip for Christmas: if you go home and someone's got operation, have a quick look at some kawaii stuff before you play, and it'll help.

But secondly, it's due to extreme carefulness.

And the idea is you've seen lots of cute things, you want to look after them almost, and you want to be more careful.

Right, but don't look at the bloodied bloodied bear because that might give you the impression that blood all over your operation human is going to be adorable.

Adorable.

I like that you heard like 4D operation as a kid to have real blood.

You guys can use real blood?

Oh my god.

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

My fact is that the viperfish has teeth that are so long it can't close its mouth properly or it would impale impale its own brain.

Hmm.

I bet there are a few that have though.

Yeah, do you think?

Yeah, the idiot kids.

Yeah, the Darwin Award viperfish.

Exactly.

But so have they sort of evolved like the equivalent of a door stopper?

They have.

So basically they're very like very long and silver and they've got these lighty up spots along their

bottom of their stomach and then they have these huge teeth that kind of pierce upwards from their jaw and luckily it doesn't impede their hunting because to hunt it basically just swims around with its mouth open until it finds prey.

It can unhinge its jaw and rotate its skull so when it finds prey it just basically swims straight at it and then it clamps its teeth shut like a cage and holds them in its mouth and then eats them.

It can close its mouth.

But the teeth are coming out so it's not like making a seal.

So it kind of like having a very extreme overbite but yeah because I know there's another fish called the common fang tooth

which as its name might suggest has fangy teeth and what they have is they have special sockets on either side of their brain so that when they close their mouth their teeth go into those sockets isn't that amazing yeah it's so precise with the pockets I think like if you got punched in the jaw and that was slightly dislocated the first time you tried to shut your mouth it would then miss the holes and pierce you in the brain that would be that's why there's no boxing in the fang tooth

that's correct yeah but viperfish is really cool so as well as being able to get its prey in this cage um it can expand its stomach so it can swallow prey that's 50% bigger than itself Oh wow.

Witches.

That's amazing.

So I just think whenever you say, oh, I can eat my own body size of this,

he can.

Very unsubtle though, if you're invited to a dinner party and you know sometimes you have a meal before you go and you just fake it and just say, no, no, no, I'm, yeah, yeah, yeah, starving, starving.

You actually really feel can't hide that.

You've got 50% more body weight coming through the door.

Goldfish

have teeth.

Can't believe it.

How do you think they eat?

I just thought they swallowed things that didn't need chewing.

Well, they eat like little fishy flakes.

They're not going to dissolve on the water.

Kind of like fish basically.

If you open their mouth, you can't see it, but the teeth are at the back of the throat.

They just have a set of teeth that do all the old crunching.

Yeah, right at the back.

Yeah, that'll often happen.

And I always think, how does that do you sort of contract your throat as a fish?

Because lots of fish have it, don't they?

This teeth in the throat thing.

Yeah.

Seems like it would be very uncomfortable.

But what's really cool is if you have goldfish at home right now, go and have a look in your little

aquarium that you have.

Look at the bottom, because what they'll do is they often lose teeth and they grow new ones.

And so either you can catch your goldfish in the act of literally spitting its tooth out, or look at the bottom there'll be little teeth

we should say how often they do because I worry that someone's going to sit in front of their goldfish tank staring at it for days on end every seven minutes

if you have a pet Pacific link cod

then you might be able to do that because they gain and lose on average 20 teeth every day Such a house

yeah so every day 20 of their teeth fall out and 20 new ones grow in their place.

Amazing.

They are also probably too big for your fish tank, aren't they?

I think they're about five feet long.

Oh, they are.

Obviously, on the size of your fish tank.

They could fit in my pond.

Yeah.

If they kind of fed themselves in half.

Have you seen the really horrible sheep's head fish?

If you haven't seen it, Google it, but it's pretty gross.

It's basically got like just human teeth.

It's like a big gummy smile with it's very unpleasant.

And it's not nice human teeth, is it?

It's sort of like someone who hasn't cleaned their teeth for 20 years.

It's really disconcerting when you see a fish that doesn't have the face of a fish.

Yeah.

If anyone, I don't know if it's still there, I don't know the lifespan, but about seven years ago, I was in a restaurant in Bow Road, in a Chinese restaurant.

They had an aquarium, and there was a fish there with a face of a dog.

It just had a dog's head.

It was the weirdest thing.

Is it a dogfish?

Is this one of those restaurants where you go in and you choose the fish you want them to cook?

Because I reckon if it is, it probably is still there.

I'll have the dog face.

To be fair, it is possible that maybe a dog was looking through the other side of the

tank.

Was it a fellow diner's pet?

You can see fish that have human-looking teeth as well.

What's it called?

The paku?

Paku.

What you mean, as well as the one that Anne's mentioned?

Oh, is that the paku one?

He's a sheep.

Mine's a sheep's head, she said, but that might be the official name.

Right.

Apparently, there are more fish than you would think with like human-looking teeth.

Yeah.

But the one that scared me the most, I didn't know ducks could have teeth on their beaks.

You see?

Yeah, the Goosander duck.

Not only that, he lives in the UK, they're everywhere, and they're terrified of this duck.

That would be a great animated cartoon for Lou Sanders to do.

You've got the Goose Anders, which say Shawnee, Josh Whitticomb, and Goose Sanders.

I was thinking, oh, what did you see in the park?

Goose and the duck?

Oh, really?

Two things?

No, no.

Just the one with all the teeth.

The Paku we mentioned a few seconds ago, they supposedly can bite human testicles off.

Lovely.

They're invasive.

They were, I think you get them in like Papua New Guinea or somewhere, and they have come into the northern hemisphere more recently.

And whenever they catch one, it's always in the news.

It's like testicle biting fish in the thames or whatever really and i think it's not true they're vegetarian so they eat nuts um and the story goes

the story goes that someone with particularly nut-like testicles yeah was standing by the water in papua new guinea that's some swollen balls that person has got if they've got the consistency of a nut it depends what kind of nut are there any nuts that are as soft as testicles out there no this does sound like one incident and it's similar to a man going to a hospital saying, I don't know how my penis got inside this vacuum cleaner.

It's an invasive species of Henry Hoovers.

They supposedly eat penises.

I think it is, there's a little bit of that.

I think there was one story of some people in Papua New Guinea and one person possibly had their genitals bitten by this fish

and it has since kind of been.

But what was he doing with that fish?

He was urinating by the side of the

story, a scary story about fish that would swim up your urine stream yeah was that real no no i feel like they're not can we just establish that there's a big difference and i feel like tabloys often do this as well in headlines then you read the text and james you may have just done it between bitten and bitten off and i think it's much less scary to have something bite your arm than to have it bite off your arm for instance same with testicles i would argue as well yeah probably is the same i think what i'm saying is that there was a very small little nibble on this man's genitals and And it made the national news.

It snowballed into

whenever the paku comes to town, everyone's like, that's the ball eating.

The other option is that he was bit on the balls by a human and had to quickly come up with an excuse for his wife and went, no, it was the fish that has human teeth.

It's called the

sheep's head.

Because someone's human has bitten his balls.

He's gone, no, no, it's a fish.

And she's like, well, you can see the teeth marks.

They're human.

They're clearly human teeth.

No, no, yeah, the paku.

It's the paku.

No, I know you're having an affair.

You're having an affair with someone who gives very bad punches.

I was reading about a different type of mouths that fish can have.

Oh, yeah.

You can have a superior mouth or an inferior mouth.

Okay, what's your criteria?

What that is?

Can you guess what it is?

A superior and an inferior.

One's on top of your head, I suppose.

On the top of your head.

Well, because if it's superior, I feel like it's on the top.

How many fish have you seen where the mouth is above the eyes?

Oh, look, we've said that I bet there are some fish where the mouth is above the eyes.

That was an upside-down fish.

Turn it around.

Who's my dead goldfish?

You're more or less there, in fairness.

A superior mouth is basically: imagine a smiling fish.

And imagine a frowning fish for an inferior mouth.

Oh, so it's like whether it turns up or down.

Yeah, precisely.

And if you have a superior mouth and you're a smiling fish, then you usually would feed on the surface.

So you might get insects from the surface.

That's like turning your spoon around, like

if you're an inferior mouth, you're probably a bottom feeder.

As in, you're getting stuff off the floor.

Yeah.

And they have terminal mouths like goldfish, which is just at the front.

So it's neither a smile nor a frown, and they're usually omnivores.

They'll eat all sorts of stuff.

Oh, that's funny.

It's quite interesting that if you look at a fish and you see whether it's smiling or frowning, you can tell how it eats.

But it means you can't tell their mood.

No, you can't.

Because imagine if you're a really grumpy, pessimistic fish, but you've got the superior mouth, and you're like, oh, everyone thinks I'm so, Charlie.

They know they're having the worst day.

We've never had anybody talk about gnarwals before.

Oh, yeah.

And

they're a toothed whale.

Count as a toothed whale.

That's one big tooth.

That's on the tooth.

Yeah.

That's where they think unicorns, the idea for unicorns, came from.

They found these narwhal tusks and they were like, wow, this must be from a horse.

Okay, right.

But not only is it one big tooth, it's their only tooth.

Yeah.

And it's actually their left tooth.

Their left tooth.

It's their left canine.

So they all have a right canine that doesn't erupt in their mouth.

In fact, occasionally you'll see a narwhal where its right one has has erupted and it's got a double double horn thing going on.

That's cool.

That's cool.

Is it like mostly the males have really long ones?

Yeah, females tend not to have them actually.

Really?

At all.

And what's the do we know what sort of like the evolutionary reason for them retaining just the same?

The males have them.

It feels like it's sexual selection.

It does, but again, bizarrely, given they're quite prominent, we really don't know.

And they've looked at lots of things.

They thought maybe they use it as an ice pick

or as a tool for echolocation and

sort of like a cocktail stick stick for, you know, how you put sausages and pineapples on and cheese and so on.

But then only be for catering, because if it was on your tooth, you couldn't get it in your mouth.

That's true.

Oh, yeah, but you might bring it to the mate that you're trying to.

Oh, yeah, like what I've got for you.

Yeah, yeah.

Do you think that's sexy, Dan, if your partner has a really long tooth and you attach some pineapple and cheese on it and feed it directly into your mouth?

Is that what does it for you?

That is fine.

She's got that.

You've not signed up to my OnlyFans.

Is that the biggest tooth

in nature?

Ooh, it is big.

How long can they get to?

I feel like they can get to a couple of meters, can't they?

Yeah, I reckon it must be.

It's about half their body length.

Because tusks are not teeth.

Tusks are

ketarin?

No.

Keratin.

Ketamen.

I'll have a word with my drug dealer.

It's doing nothing for me.

My hair looks amazing.

I'm being accused of poaching.

What's going on, mate?

The only thing, other thing could be possibly like other large whales that have got teeth, but

I reckon that would be the biggest.

Yeah, it's got to be up there.

Yeah.

Just on the subject of fish teeth, I came across actually a while ago, and I've been looking for a chance to mention it, an old Russian folk tale of a beautiful young woman who's married to a really disgusting man that she hates.

And she's like my marriage.

Tell me how long that continues to be true in this story.

And so, to put him off having sex with her, she puts a fish head into her vagina so that every time

he's up for it, he's like, oh, what are all these teeth?

I guess it's one of these goldfish with the teeth.

That's the paku.

It's the paku.

It's a paku head, specifies.

And then she says, what, you idiot?

All women have this.

You don't want to do it.

You don't want to do it.

But that's what everyone's doing.

And so he never gets to have sex with her.

Oh, wow.

That's a shame.

It's a really sad story for him.

It is really sad.

And for her who's got a fish.

She's kind of a bit worse off, yeah.

If she'd have put a sucker mouth catfish up her fatty, that might have been better because they have bendy teeth.

Okay.

First fish that we found that have got bendy teeth

because they scrape stuff off rocks.

And if they had hard non-bendy teeth, then they might fall off or they might break or whatever.

And they reckon that probably more fish have them as well, but we've never found them before.

So that might be quite nice.

Some bendy teeth.

Yeah.

Oh, she'd be so annoyed if she got that one fish.

She's like, oh, I'm into this.

Vagina dentata is common in folklore, isn't it?

And is it

who's the

god in Moana?

It's Manoy.

Does he get eaten by some vagina?

Yeah, I think he does.

I think

he's not featuring the live-action Moana remake that Didn't you are currently working on?

okay it is time for fact number three and that is my fact my fact this week is that a book club in america has finally finished reading finnegan's wake after 28 years of monthly meetups 28 years 28 years so impressive it's incredible they started in 1995 there was between 10 and 30 people who would show up to these monthly book clubs and um finnegan's wake is a very complicated unreadable book they decided decided rather than getting through the whole thing and doing it in one book club, they would take it two pages at a time.

That proved to be, I think, a bit too much.

So they then brought it down to one page per book club.

And they've been doing this.

They did it through the pandemic.

They've been doing it over Zoom.

They keep meeting up.

And yeah, they finally just got to the end.

But it's been reported as the end.

But as the man who runs the book club, a guy called Jerry pointed out, it ends on a sentence that is a continuous loop sentence, which means means you come right back to the beginning of the book

so they're just starting from page one again now what a horrible realization that must have been in the last session the last day put your name it's like god i never have to see these awful people again that's amazing but it's amazing like the people who've been in and out of this group one guy dropped out of the group for 20 years and came back

he must have been quite lost but then i suppose everyone is i think they got through 15 chapters in that time yeah um yeah that's the whole point of it isn't it it's a completely impenetrable book.

Even people that you would consider to be those who love literature and would like be snooty and say, no, it's actually a masterpiece, or just say, it's just lots of words.

No one can agree like who the main characters are, what the plot is.

Have you dipped into it?

No, Finneger's Wait, no, of all choice's stuff.

I don't know if Anna has, but.

No.

Yeah, I think it's amazing that even after all this time, they've read it for 28 years, they won't be able to say what happened because no one knows what happened.

It's just, that's so amazing.

It's mad.

it's almost like an endurance sport rather than a hobby now isn't it like 28 years but this is the thing they're not like alone in being a book club that has done this they just happen to have possibly gone the longest there's a guy called sam slot who's a historian he's an expert at trinity college dublin on joyce he that's what he looks into and um yeah he he was reading the book for 15 years uh you know there was other groups that they all go into like just over 10 years but this is the longest one so far think of all the books that you've missed out on in that time that actually make sense yeah that's true You can't read all the books in your lifetime.

Yeah.

You might as well stick with one's The Hungry Caterpillar, absolute banger.

You just get through that many times in one meeting.

I think this is what Joyce wanted.

I think he wanted people to dedicate their lives to reading just him, to analysing him.

That's a big move, isn't it?

Like, no, you'll be my book, and only my book.

Yeah.

Yeah, it is.

It's a statement about what you think of yourself.

We've kind of done it with certain people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, your fact, sorry, I meant to say, Dan, is

wrong.

Yeah, I noticed that a spelling mistake.

A spelling bit of a spelling mistake.

Yeah.

Well, technically.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, yeah, a bit of a punctuation error, wasn't it?

Okay, I put an apostrophe S.

Yes.

An apostrophe.

I'd actually never noticed this until I went to the Wikipedia page.

There's no apostrophe in it.

So it's not the wake of Finnegan.

It's Finnegan's plural.

Wake.

It's like Finnegan's comma.

Wake exclamation mark.

And there's a character called Finnegan in it, and I believe he's being resurrected so it's like he's waking up.

So shouldn't he be the main character?

I haven't read it either but I would assume if it's called Finnegan's Wake and you've got a Finnegan.

Well there are quite a few Finnegans

as well.

Are there?

Oh really?

I thought the Finnegan's was just referring to was like pluralized to be confusing and referred to like Irish people generally but are there multiple Finnegan's?

Well there are multiple Finnegan's.

I think the collective Irish group being called Finnegans is the most common explanation for the lack of apostrophe.

Right.

Some people think it's so that the word wake can mean the awakening and also the wake as in after someone dies.

So it gives you a nice little bit of uncertainness there.

Some people think it was a fuck-up by Samuel Beckett who did write.

Wait, sorry?

Samuel Beckett.

So.

What's his proofreader?

No, well, Joyce kind of

spoke.

What do you call it when someone speaks it to you and you dictate it?

Yeah, Beckett dictated it.

Really?

Yeah.

Or certainly some of it.

Are you mixing transcribing and dictating?

Oh, perhaps.

What's the difference?

You would dictate.

You dictate to someone and then they transcribe what you're saying.

Oh, I see.

Oh, I see, yeah.

I think Joyce's.

Joyce was dictating, and Beckett was transcribing.

Excellent point.

Just maybe five minutes in the edit.

Maybe they weren't, though.

Maybe it was always the other way around and Beckett wrote it.

I was like, don't put my name on that.

I don't want to be cursed for that.

There's a famous story where Beckett is dictating and there's a knock on the door and James Joyce says, come in.

And Beckett just writes, come in in the middle of the story.

Oh, really?

So that was from a biography of Joyce, which where he interviewed Beckett and Beckett said this happened.

But if you look in the text and just control F, you don't have to read the whole thing, but if you look in the text and look for the phrase come in, there is no place where it's just like an interjection where it doesn't belong.

So either Beckett made it up or maybe it actually happened and then later on he thought, you know what, that was stupid.

I'm going to take that out.

Right.

Not sure what happened.

Or an editor was like.

I don't think there was much of an editor because there was loads of typos in all of Joyce's work, wasn't there?

And that's something that's really interesting.

I was reading an article where they're saying that basically the way you can read Joyce now, people have been trying to make sense of this book so much that they've employed different ways of cleaning it up in order to make sense of it.

So there's a version out there where people have taken all the typos out so it kind of reads a bit more smoother and you're not going, what the hell is this word?

There's a digital version now where basically everything is hyperlinked.

Therefore, you can get an understanding of everything.

everything and you find yourself using it as a repository of all knowledge.

It's basically a weird encyclopedia where you just go, oh, cool, I'm now learning about this random thing by clicking on it.

So they keep trying to turn it into something useful.

But it's not.

But it's not.

Ultimately, it's just not in its own thing.

And the words that he made up in it, there's a hundred-letter-long word on the first page, which is the sound of a thunderclap that was heard at the fall of the Garden of Eden.

Are you going to give us the words?

Yeah, I want to hear the words.

It's.

Brontoni Ron Tuan Fatantong Rova Hunau Sukon Tutuhu Renden Tantoruk Nukai

Manner's name is not quite pretty good.

I felt like there was a storm outside.

I would argue that Boom does the same job.

That would have been your first thing as an editor.

Right.

Boom, opening words.

Life would be more difficult for the Venga boys if no one had invented the word boom and they had to do this four times.

Much Much less catchy.

It was reused by Sylvia Plath in the Beljard, that word.

That word, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Can I see it written down?

Yeah, it's there.

Are you thinking about using that in your next children's book out?

I can't hear the title.

It depends if you're on a word count for being paid number of words or whether you're paid number of letters.

Useful words as well that he made up, which we've already mentioned before.

But quark.

Quark is from Finnegan's Wake,

the scientific word.

It's from, there's a line in it that goes, three quarks for Muster Mark.

And then quarks can cluster together in threes to form other.

Yeah, so that's that's where I think Murray Gelman wanted to call them quarks.

Yeah.

And he always had this idea of they're called quarks.

And then he saw the word quark in Finnegan's Wake, where it clearly rhymes with mark.

But even though he spelt it in the same way that Joyce did, he always pronounced it quark.

Do you think he really tediously corrected people whenever they referred to it?

It's really interesting because I always call them quarks, having studied physics, and I think 75% of physicists say quark rather than quark.

I can't believe as many as 25% are doing the pretentious this is what he wanted quark pronunciation.

Not physicists.

This is very like the laser loser.

So laser is an acronym.

Uh-huh.

Light.

I forgot what the amplified.

Yeah, and someone's like, actually, the light's oscillating, so they should be called losers.

But didn't catch on.

I never heard that.

Oh, that's great.

Joyce was particularly upset about World War II, wasn't he?

I know none of us liked it, but

it was a real bugbear for him because it interrupted the publication of his book, or he was worried it would get in the way.

So,

as discussed, he spent 17 years writing it, which is not that long when you consider how long it takes to read.

But he was realising he was sort of getting close to the end in about 1936, and he was getting really stressed out about global conditions.

At one point, he complained to a friend: Look, the fact that the world is in such a bad state at the moment is really stressful for me because I find it so hard to write being so anxious about it.

And then when he handed in the manuscript in 1939, he said, Please hurry publishing it because war's going to break out and then no one will read my book anymore.

That's not why.

The thing is, if you're going to spend how long, 17, 18 years writing it, the chance of you, it would have to be in the high-end period of peace, wouldn't it?

Like, there's no other time when you're not running to some war or other.

You're right.

So, I was looking at what the longest book to read, like by

pages rather than complexity.

Oh, yeah.

So the longest novel in the Penguin classics and modern classics is In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Perst.

It is six volumes, 3,616 pages.

So in the time it would take you to read it, you could fly from London to Auckland and back again and then to Barbados.

But only if you have it.

You have to not take any breaks.

You have to read one page a minute for that entire time.

One page a minute.

Yeah, I bought a copy of that thinking I would read it and it was absolutely massive.

And I started and then I realised that I only had the first volume.

If this is the first volume there is no way in the world I'm going to read this.

Years ago I thought I'd read Oliver Twist and I said to someone I've just finished Oliver Twist and they said oh did you like the bit about Dodger's trial and I said what trial and I'd had an abridged version and I didn't realize I really missed out loud.

You read the transcript of the musical theatre version.

Oliver Exclamation Mark.

I love the songs.

Yeah.

You read as part of fish research, or you started reading, curious if you finished, Lame Is.

God, I started reading so many things things as a part of this research.

In fact, I started reading The Woman in White a few weeks ago and still haven't got to the end of that.

But yeah, Les Miz, I got most of the way through it, but I didn't finish it.

Well, I read Les Mes' 365 chapters, so you can read one a day, which is quite neat.

But not in a leap year, or you can have a day off.

Interesting.

James, have you ever thought about reading fiction for pleasure rather than for the podcast?

I think you might get to the end of more books.

I really struggle.

I've got to say, I really struggle to read fiction for pleasure these days.

Really?

Yeah, because I read so much non-fiction non-fiction for my job.

I need like a year off.

What you need is a book club, because I started doing a book club, and it does force you to read.

Yeah, and it forces you to read, you know, things that you might not have, new books that have come out that people have been.

Is that the idea of fiction, that you're forced to read stuff, and that's why you do it?

It just carves out the time for you to do it, which is interesting.

Accountability.

Yeah.

Aren't you in the same book club as Andy, though?

I think I've heard about some of the books.

Is it just Andy's book every week?

It is.

Yeah, it does feel like a post-apocalyptic world I'm living in for every time we we chat about it.

What was your best book you discovered through Book Club?

Sylvie Plants of the Bell Jar, which I love her poetry and I've never read the book before.

I've actually never read it.

Did you remember this?

Because I haven't read that book, and so I was going off Wikipedia that this word was in it.

I think it is true, right?

Weirdly, I don't remember the word, but you know, you don't remember every detail.

Well, you might remember a hundred-letter word because I assumed it was a typos.

Whatever, but you know, also when you're on a deadline for book club, it's like, fantastic, what a great word.

Zoom me forward.

It's like the fast lane.

It's like a travelator.

They are good, aren't you?

In a book club, no, I'm not, but um, I think what I would like to be in one for is that discovering books that you might not know about.

So, I've got some friends who are just so, so good at book recommendations and really good at like personalizing it to what you like to read.

So, I read an article years ago saying that actually there's an argument that you shouldn't read books that win prizes.

And the argument being that if you say you're not into Russian high society and agriculture, why would you suddenly be so just because it won a prize?

So, actually, it can put you off books.

Whereas actually, if you go in.

You're describing War war and peace there.

Oh, sorry, I'm in the rest of the day.

But what if you aren't into agriculture, aren't into Russian high society, but are into people being hit by trains?

What are you?

Then I reckon there's I reckon there's somewhere a bookshop where that's the category.

I hear Andy's podcast at QI.com email pinging.

Furious.

How dare you spoil it again?

Um, well that that's good that we're bucking a trend a bit, you being in a book club, Dan, and I in fact am in a book club and Anne not because it's extraordinary.

I know we know that it's mostly women, but it's 88% of book clubs in America, at least, are all women.

And

women generally read quite a lot more fiction than men.

And book clubs are so popular these days as well.

I think since Oprah

Wimfrey's book club, they've shot up.

I think there was a survey of women who read at least one book a month that found over half of them were in book clubs, which makes sense because when you're reading that often,

here's a really interesting thing.

I went to

a publishing party not too long ago, and there was an author there who i'd met whose book came out the same time as mine she had an american release it was a fiction novel called waywards brilliant um

and she was the new york times bestseller and she's she's an australian who moved over here she's it's her first debut book i said how how you did you weren't even in america how did that happen book clubs she said publishers desperately try and put their books in positions to get them into book clubs because if you do you're a new york times

you sell like 30 a time rather than they're just massive

how do you what you go around like asking people, are you in a book club?

So you give away a lot of free books and stuff online as e-books, and then it gets a reputation, and then book clubs pick it up.

And Rhys Witherspoon is the other massive book club in America.

Oh, so do you mean big, famous book clubs?

Sorry, you don't mean just like my book club.

There are people knocking on the books.

But probably them as well, I guess.

Probably them as well, yeah.

Just books that are like heavily marketed or promoted.

Do you know where the biggest book club in the world is?

The biggest in the world.

Okay, in Europe.

Contender.

Contender.

I'm going to say Iceland because they're famously, they all write books and read novels and stuff.

So I feel like I've checked all the book club counts but I'm going with volume I'm going with the digital world book talk so this is a the book club version of tick tock oh okay so they believe that book talk has sold 20 million books in 2021 like it's huge there's this huge ton of books now where they'll yeah and they'll say like tick to tiktok made me buy it and it's like these books that just really drive through tick tock so much so that they've launched the tick tock book awards this year and what i love about this is Because TikTok, I guess, is so many people, they're not just books that came out this year that were popular in one shopper by one sort of person.

So they gave an award to Jane Austen.

She got revival really.

So it's like really new stuff, really old starters.

Can I ask you, sorry, for like older listeners, not myself, obviously, but for other people who might not really know what TikTok is, can you explain how that works?

It's not just one book club where everyone reads the same thing.

No, so TikTok is video sharing, and I'm guessing everybody who uses the hashtag BookTalk and can see what they're talking about.

So things sort of trend and build.

And I guess what's nice about it is if you read a book that you love it and no one else has, you can find someone who's made a video and see what they say about it.

Whereas if I've read one book and no one else I know has read it, and to be fair, sometimes I finish a book and I'll go onto Goodreads just to see what people have said and see if I agree with them.

Oh, yeah, me too, yeah, definitely.

But she wants a good like twisty end, and I'm like, did I understand that?

What actually happened?

I'll go and check.

I have a

mental reasoning question for you.

Brilliant.

Love these.

Going back to Oprah's Book Club.

Yeah.

So it was founded in 1996.

And

the idea was that it would be quite highbrow literary options that she chose.

So she had great books in in there, like William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Call Mike McCarthy.

So really good books over the years.

And every time she makes a choice, it pretty much becomes a bestseller.

It's like rockets at the top of the charts.

It doesn't exist anymore.

I think it stopped in about 2010 or something.

But

whenever she chose a book, book sales actually after that decreased.

Why?

Do you mean book sales more generally?

General book sales decreased.

Okay, this is why.

Everyone wanted to buy this one particular book.

It went out of print really quickly and no one bought anything else because they were waiting for that one to come back into print.

Interesting.

Interesting.

Not correct.

Good guess, though.

Paper shortage.

It used up so many trees that...

Half of the Amazon Oprah's responsible for destroying, actually.

No, it's specifically about the fact that she chose quite highbrow options but appealed to an audience that wouldn't necessarily be reading things like that all the time.

Okay, so you're...

spent more time reading?

She got it.

So, like, so rather than buying two books, you buy one and read it for two weeks.

Exactly.

These people who are buying, you know, three books a week and pacing through them, they're suddenly reading, you know, The Sound and the Fury.

And spending three weeks.

So, really, everyone should be buying much shorter books and getting through more of them.

How long's your book, Ben?

345 pages.

That's a very big font.

Mine's a children's book, so it's a bit shorter.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the liquid in a can of beans is more likely to make you fart than the beans themselves.

Okay, good to know.

Incredible.

Useful.

Useful knowledge.

Yeah.

Is it?

Are you going to start rinsing all the way off?

Now I'm going to start chugging bean juice because I just want to be more farty.

So this comes comes from an article on the website Sirius Eats, and they partnered with Harvard's Science of Cooking program and looked at the fartiness of various beans and stuff like that, and to see if there were any ways to decrease the effect.

And they looked at various old wives' tales of how you do this, like you soak your beans for ages.

This would not be a can of beans, for instance.

You might soak your beans for ages and then cook them in a certain way and see if that makes it better.

I like that doing someone soaking their hind spaked beans.

Everyone soaks beans, so yeah, I never left them overnight.

They might be cooking them with bay leaves or something like this.

Nothing really made any difference.

But they looked at tinned beans, and they did find actually that rinsed beans

from a tin are 20% less farty than unrinsed, and that the liquid you throw away is 30% fartier than the beans are themselves.

Wow.

And why?

So it seems like it kind of seeps into

the juice.

And also the beans, they kind of disintegrate the longer they're in there.

And the more farty ones are the ones that disintegrate.

The hard ones that you just kind of go straight through you, they don't disintegrate.

Right.

So, yeah, it's the fartiness seems to just get into the juice somehow.

That's so interesting.

I think some things probably work, right?

Like, there are some things that could counteract the

fartiness.

There's kombu, the Japanese seaweed that you get in like kombu dashi.

Um, it's an ingredient of that, and that has these enzymes that break down the sugars in beans when you eat them.

So the reason that beans make you fart is because you can't digest the stuff in them, but the bacteria in your stomach can, right?

And then the bacteria, as it digests it, releases these gases.

And I believe that kombu manages to break down those sugars.

So the bacteria doesn't have as much to eat and fart out.

Correct.

And so if you add this seaweed to everything, that might work.

Might do.

Give it a go.

I actually, you mentioned my book before.

I wrote about a guy who tried to stop farts from being produced produced off the back of beans.

Yeah, wonderfully, a man called Colin Leakey.

And Colin Leakey is the son of Mary and Lewis Leakey, who were the great anthropologists who discovered all these hominid skeletons throughout history.

So he had seen a report of NASA trying to make beans that could be sent into space and not produce flatulence, so lose the fart stuff from beans.

And he thought, yes, that would be amazing to do because if you could invent a bean that gave you less farts, you could have that in developing countries where they sometimes, you know, Crohn's disease, for example, beans are meant to be avoided.

So there's a lot of health implications if you have a lot of wind in you.

So he thought, if I could invent a bean, that could be like a meat replacement, and then we could have safe eating that's going on for all these poorer countries.

So he spent a lifetime doing that, and

he did invent two beans, which are on sale and have been sent over, which are meat replacements and less flatulence.

So he was a scientist who did great things.

But my favorite thing is he patented.

an invention called the flatometer, which was a device that slots into your rectum and there's a tube coming out that connects to a balloon on the other end.

And you tuck the balloon into your shirt pocket and then you just collect these.

These are real inventions.

It gets bigger, bigger, bigger.

Kind of like the viper fish.

At the end of the day, you're like, oh.

The worst children's party ever.

Yeah, the balloon dog you get given.

So I was reading that they have measured how much volume a fart has, and they did it by feeding everyone beans, then using a rectal catheter to catch the fart.

Would you like to guess the mils, how many mils your average fart?

It's hard, isn't it?

Because it's a gas, so it spreads out quite a lot.

So you would think it would be quite a high mils.

Yeah, interesting.

572.

Wow.

I was going to say more like 20.

You're kind of in the middle, 90.

So we'd fit in your airport hand luggage.

I suppose it doesn't count as a liquid, does it?

Unless you've done a little bit of follow-through.

Well, another useful thing scientists have invented, speaking of following through, useful thing scientists have invented is a machine that listens to your bottom and distinguishes a fart from a shart.

Ah,

and I would argue you would know without a machine whether that's happened.

You do usually know, don't you?

But often, um, but do they tell you before or after?

It actually tells you when it's happened.

Um,

wait, is it more for when someone's done it, but you're with them and you say, Was that a fart or a shart?

And they say, No, it's just a fart, and then you go, Let me get my machine out.

Get to the bathroom, you filth pig.

Um it's meant to also detect more than that as well.

So it's the idea is that you have this device, it's called the um and listen carefully, the synthetic human acoustic reproduction testing.

The shot.

Yeah,

and

basically it's to give early warning of like colorectal cancers, things like that, bowel cancers, because it's thought that you might have changes in your flatulent sounds or in your poo sounds.

And if it listens, it might then say, oh your poos sound a bit different these days or your farts sound a bit weird have you thought about getting checked out and so researchers listen to many hundreds of hours of audio of various pooing and farting noises and then tagged them correctly to train the machine wow and it can now identify whether something's urination flatulence solid defecation or diarrhea 98% of the time

so it's it's not at the super advanced level yet I suppose it's still at the stage of distinguishing a wee from a poo but it's not that advanced if you play them George Osborne's new podcast, it does say it's diarrhea.

I was just thinking who I could slam if the podcast community

wouldn't attack us or yeah.

Good luck when he's on next week.

How much do you think the cheapest can of beans you could buy in the UK was in 1996?

Oh, 1996.

Yeah.

Like 4p?

9p.

A couple of p.

A couple of p?

Yeah.

The answer is negative 2p.

Okay, you can take them.

Why?

I'll have 2 million.

Did you get money back for returning the 10 or something?

No, this was just a crazy moment in retail where

it was called the Bean Wars.

And basically, they were just competing and competing to make the price lower to win the competition that it got to a point where this one place was...

Supermarkets, man.

Yeah, supermarkets.

And this place called Sanders Supermarket basically had a deal whereby.

Surprisingly enough, it doesn't exist anymore.

sold too many beans and went bust but it went so low that they went into the negative so if the beans were part of a shopping pile that you had they took the 2p off so of your final bill if you were just buying the can of beans they gave you 2p but you could only do it for one tin that was their thing but there was a point where you were paid

to leave a supermarket with a can of beans this is like when you once buy when you want a sandwich and it's better to get the meal deal than so you end up having to like buy a drink as well and then your sandwich is cheap it is but it's very rare that you can just take the drink from the meal deal and they'll pay you for it the difference that you would have saved.

It's incredible.

That is unbelievable.

Tel Tesco was selling them at 7p.

Do you think people went around lots of different supermarkets collecting as many TPs as they needed?

But if it's two P and one tin, it's quite limited.

So they probably lose less money than they would from like halving the price of like ketchup or toilet roll.

Totally.

The price of petrol or bus fare to get to the shop is going to be more than two p.

So it's false economy to go around the country to all of these shops.

Making two p.

But it would feel nice to get your toothy off and get your free beans.

With God, I'm the kind of person who would just always do that for no particular reason.

Don't even need that many beans.

Just going in with different hats on to get more beans.

I'm back again.

Um Heinz, I was on the Heinz Factory website because they made beans.

Yep.

And do you know the average number of beans in a Heinz tin?

Oh, well what size?

The normal size.

There are three sizes.

You're classic.

Wow, three.

Oh, yeah, you've got those mini ones.

You've got the mini one, the full one, which is like two hundred, four hundred, and then you've got the snack pot.

Oh, you're you're so right yeah sorry I mean the normal ones showing you too much what I eat for lunch

and Anne mixes it up every day with a different one

yeah I'm gonna mix it up and have two small pots instead of one big pot

five hundred and seventy two that's a good guess which which titan did we establish

the 400 the one everyone does

the mainstream one

not your edgy left heels trendy one you're so hipster these days okay in a standard size of beans

um

i can't believe you now don't know the answer given your knowledge you've bought so much time

james how many did you say 572.

okay i'm gonna go you're so invested in this now i'm gonna go 424.

nice oh okay then 365.

And you have one, so I go.

I like Dan's idea of 365.

It's like every day I'll have one bean and read one chapter of Leimiser Army.

It's 465 on average.

But the reason I say that is because in 2019, Councillor Steve Smith,

in a break from cheating at cricket,

got back.

I do think it's a different guy probably.

He got back from a residence meeting late at night, thought, I'll crack into a can of Heinzpaked beans, and it was full of sauce and contained one bean.

I remember that.

How crazy that I remember that.

I still remember that story coming up.

Imagine how farty he went.

I'm hungry and farty.

It's the worst combo.

Very randomly, I was in an office the other day and in through the door came Greg Wallace, who's in Master Shaft.

Oh yeah.

That guy.

Yeah.

That's weird.

Yeah, he just, he was like, there was no connection between us two being there.

He came and walked up to me, just walked up to me and said, want to hear a bean bean fact?

And I went,

and I was like, okay, yeah, sure.

I went, oh, you must listen to fish.

And he went, so at the bean factories, they have a laser which tests out good beans.

And if they don't like it, they flick the bean off.

And he was like, so they have a bean flicker at

the thing.

And I was like, oh, great.

That's so cool.

We could use that on fish or QI.

And he went, are you connected to that?

I would have assumed this guy's really into food facts, you know, and he just tells anyone.

He literally opened a door, looked me in the face, walked up to me and said, do you you want to hear a bean fact of course i'm going to assume he knows

i genuinely would never have assumed that do people just come up to you randomly if it's greg wallace i would have thought he knows he's famous he's like i can get away with doing this to a randomer i just might come across as the weird one in the story you can't call this very self-involved oh it's all about my podcast

Greg Wallace is a bean guy.

Talks about that.

That's so weird.

It does sound like a dream.

That is bizarre.

It happened.

He does that, though.

It happened.

Would you like to hear a horrifying fart fact?

Now we're approaching the winter months.

So you know, on a cold day, if you breathe out, you can see your breath.

Yeah.

Well, if you fart loudly enough, you can see your fart on a cold day, but not if you're wearing trousers.

Yes, okay.

So it's only a problem for like Winnie the Pooh.

Yeah.

Winnie the Pooh.

And I think I've read that story.

Winnie the Pooh on a windy day.

That's what that was about.

That's another reason not to go out in public naked, eh?

I never realised that.

There must be footage on YouTube of people doing that, right?

I haven't searched it, but feel free.

I will.

I will.

I rather think it might be on more specialist channels than YouTube.

Back to Dan's OnlyFans.

Yeah, that's a new hot threat for me.

Yeah.

Wikipot.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

We have now reached the buy-an period of the podcast today.

Thanks for joining us, Anne.

We'll see you again soon.

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

I'm on Instagram at Schreiberland.

James.

Still on Twitter at James Harkin.

And my Instagram is at AnneMillerBooks.

And if you want to get us as a group, Anna, where do they go?

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Do check them out.

There's also bits of merch.

You can find club fish, all sorts of fun to be had there.

Or just come back here next week.

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

Goodbye.

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