501: No Such Thing As Republican Barbie

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Hi everyone and welcome to episode 501 of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Well what do we have for you this week?

We have finished our summer live shows and we have loads of extra bits that I couldn't fit into the normal 15 minute to an hour episode of fish.

Usually what we would do with those is we'd make them into a compilation and they would go for our club fish members.

That's where all the compilations go go these days but seeing as they were the live shows that were coming to the end of summer and that we're all sleeping off our hangovers from episode 500 we thought we would put this up on our main feed now the thing is about these episodes is if you like the facts on fish then these are some of the best episodes for you because they are super concentrated of little nuggets of information but there's loads of fun silly stuff in there as well i really hope you enjoy it if you like your compilations then you can become a member of Clubfish.

You will also get ad-free episodes.

You'll get other bonus content such as drop us a line where we go through the mailbox and meet the elves, where we meet some of our newer members of staff at QI.

There's all sorts of stuff on there.

It's well worth joining, and you can join there by going to no suchthingsofish.com forward slash apple or no suchthingsaffish.com forward slash Patreon.

Anyway, I really hope you enjoy this week's show.

We'll be back next week with a normal episode.

But for now, it's on with the podcast.

Please welcome to the stage our buddy Lou Sanders, everybody.

Please welcome to the stage Rachel Paris, everybody,

Sophie Duker, everyone,

Hannah Frye.

We are joined by Nerd Royalty.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the stage.

Susie Dent.

He is, of course, Greg Jenner, everybody.

Harriet Lloyd, everybody.

It's Jamie Morton, everybody.

Sally Phillips.

Ella Al Shamahi, everyone.

It is Richard Osman!

Have you heard, there's a great anecdote which I've been trying to prove, but it's, I don't think it's true.

I was

actually, it's not true, and it's not relevant.

Let's move on.

Well, we got that a lot quicker than normal, didn't we?

That was great.

Usually I waste all our time, but I'm learning.

Nice one.

That's bullshit.

That's one of your best stories, Doug.

That's one of the best stories you've ever told on stage.

Quickly tell you guys about Alain Bombard.

Oh, yeah, God.

Alain Bombard was a French doctor, and he is very unusual because he's one of the only people in history ever to shipwreck himself.

Okay, so this is amazing.

There were lots of people at the time being, you know, lots of shipwrecked sailors who were dying each year, like when their boats were shipwrecked.

And he wanted to prove that even if you had no food or water, there were ways you could survive.

So he set off from the Canaries with a sextant, a tarpaulin, a fishing rod, and a sealed box box of food and water, which he was going to try really hard not to open.

The self-control he must have had.

He suffered terribly.

That's his fault.

Yeah, he had no rain for three weeks, and then storms snapped the mast of his dinghy.

Swordfish approached his rubber dinghy, nose first and terrified.

I know, I know.

Oh, my God.

I know.

That's cool.

53 days later, he bumped into a ship and they said, oh, yeah, you're still 600 miles off course for where you're going.

He had just become a father as well when he did this, which I find

like...

Well, at least he got some sleep.

The length some people will go to.

That's amazing.

But anyway, so he then got on board this ship, which picked him up after 53 days.

He had a small lunch of a fried egg, then got back on his dinghy and kept sailing towards Barbados.

And he made it there in the end.

He did it eventually.

But yeah, I just think, what a self-experimenter to do that to yourself.

It's extraordinary.

But why?

Well, to prove that.

Apart from not to see your child and wife or partner.

It would have taken 18 years to get there.

Yeah.

I think it was to prove what you could survive on if you could survive on fish or plankton, which you can do.

And you can do that without actually doing it.

You could just say, oh, I might eat fish today.

There's my self-control right there, in a tin of food that you can't open.

Just, out of curiosity,

have we been eating and drinking from the wrong end this whole time?

Would there be certain things?

Well, because President Garfield was felt through his rectum

famously.

Well, you've got a bit of your pipe left down.

What better time to put it into practice?

A tutorial, if you will.

I think if you have the option, the mouth is a better option.

If we have no other option, then the rectum is acceptable.

It's just fluids, though.

So, I mean, if you're trying to absorb lots of nutrients,

then your stomach and your upper digestive system will do all that work.

So it is a plan B, very much so.

I'll still try it.

I was looking at people

who died laughing.

This happened in 1920, and it was reported by an Australian newspaper called The Mudgy Guardian and Northwestern Representative.

Okay.

Do you know him?

Yeah, yeah, that's my local name.

It's about a man called Arthur Cobcroft.

And I'm reading directly.

So Mr.

Arthur Cobcroft died at his home in Loftus Street Saturday.

He was reading it, this 1920.

He was reading an old newspaper of a 1915 date and was comparing the prices of various commodities with those of today when he suddenly burst into laughter at the great difference.

He appeared to be unable to control himself and eventually collapsed and died.

Commodity prices.

They must have been so different.

I'm laughing thinking about it now.

It's amazing, because I reckon the cost of living crisis isn't that funny today.

No.

But for him.

But if I say to you, oh, like a Freddo used to be 10p.

Yeah, you see.

Yeah.

Careful.

Yeah.

I was reading about when something goes wrong on stage.

And so that got me into a whole territory of if someone is hurt as they're acting, what do you do?

And I found this thing that apparently it's a huge problem for paramedics when they're called to help someone who's really injured who's in a zombie movie because they arrive, they have no idea who the patient is because everyone is bleeding, everyone's got giant scars, and even if they find the person who's really injured themselves, they just can't tell where the wound is at all because of the amount of prisoners.

Well, I broke a rib being chased by a zombie once.

Did you?

Yeah, yeah.

I was in London.

Like one of these things where you pay to be chased by zombies.

Yeah, you know what?

We've all got our kinks.

It does sound a a bit like that.

I was like watching a lot of American football at the time and the zombie was coming towards me and I thought I'd do some amazing dodges past him and I got nowhere near past him and he kind of tagged me and pushed me into a wall and I broke a rib.

And we had to go to like the A ⁇ E and there were quite a lot of people who'd had similar problems.

And it was just like you say, it was like being in MASH.

It's just people with arms hanging off.

You didn't know what was real and what wasn't.

Yeah.

I found out that Bungay in East Anglia has the highest number of Satanists in the UK.

Oh, do they?

Now, I'd like to take issue with that.

Would you?

Because I think it's Bolsover in Derbyshire.

So, yeah.

How many has Bolsover got?

17.

17.

17.

17.

20 Bungay.

Okay, but it might be relative to population.

I don't know how big Bungay is.

Sounds tiny.

It does sound tiny.

This Bolsover thing is from the census in 2011.

This was from the census.

I bet it's...

Is it a later census, mine, maybe?

I don't know.

But in Bolsover, it was only 17 people who wrote Satanist as their religion.

But that was the highest per person,

highest concentration.

Even Bristol only had 34 people who wrote Satanist.

But Bristol's huge.

So the Google article I saw said Bungay in East Anglia.

And then the next one was Bronsbury.

Wow.

Yeah.

In London, which had 20.

So there's a big B contingent of the alphabet.

B L Z Bub.

Ah.

the beast.

There was a footnote that said they thought Bungay might have been doing it as a kind of tourist attracting thing because they've got a big black dog.

I can't remember what it's called.

Like a myth of a big black, a satanic dog.

Apparently, came in.

Yeah.

And they're trying to push that.

It's worked, haven't we?

We're all talking about Bungay all the time.

Did you know there was a pantomime horse arrest in Tesco's?

Oh, really?

When it was found that the Tesco's budget brand Everyday Value Burgers contained 29% horse meat.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, Pantomime Horse went to protest in Tesco's,

crying, going, Mommy, daddy.

And it was led away into the staff department and it was never seen again.

Here's a good quick little tip.

If you meet someone who's Dutch and they say to you, I fuck horses,

they don't.

Not necessarily.

Oh, I can't confirm for certain, yeah.

So is that Dutch?

Does it sound like?

FOK means breeding.

Yeah, they breed horses.

Yeah.

And there supposedly was a story where the Dutch foreign minister was introduced to JFK and he said, hi, how are you?

He said, I'm very good.

What are your hobbies?

I fuck horses.

And so why did he only say that one word in Dutch and the rest of it in English?

That's where I also questioned the anecdote.

Yeah.

But it does stand.

I looked up the translation and F-O-K is for breeding.

So, yeah.

Again, you'd never hear that in that kind of...

Unless horses.

I didn't look up horses.

I didn't look up if they say that in Dutch.

Should we move on?

So one person who did slightly pioneer the idea of living underwater was Jacques Cousteau.

Jacques Cousteau, you all probably know him.

He had the Calypso, and he was one of the greatest oceanographers.

Sorry, I don't know.

You know the dance?

No.

You know ice cream.

I was confusing it with a Calippo.

He's one of the greatest oceanographers of all time.

He kind of pioneered documentary making in the field of immersive and you follow a team.

And The Life Aquatic by Wes Anderson is very much based on the story of Jacques Cousteau.

But on a scientific level, he also invented or co-invented the Aqualung, which is why we're able to go diving.

So that was Jacques Cousteau.

And then one of the other things he did was this thing called the con shelves, which are the continental shelves, which were habitable zones down in the ocean.

And Continental Shelf 2 was this big looking starfish kind of housing unit.

And he lived in it with his crew for a number of days.

They had a parrot that came down and lived with them as well.

Because in a sort of slightly dark sense, it was like the canary in the martin, you know, something was wrong with the levels of oxygen.

Okay.

The parrot would know first, and so they could get out of there.

So he set a record for the longest that anyone's been down there.

And then his son, Fabian Custow,

he's the grandson.

So he lived down there and held the record for the longest anyone's been under the ocean for quite a while.

And then it got taken over by a professor and a student.

But he invented a shark submarine.

Have you seen this?

This is incredible.

It's the submarine in the shape of a shark.

So the idea is that he can observe sharks while being one of them.

It's a one-person submersible.

He has to be in a diving suit while he's in it because water flows all the way through.

He has to drive the submarine while laying down in the shark.

And his elbows are steering it as he goes.

Why his elbows?

What's he doing with the shirt?

Sorry, he's on his elbows steering with his hand.

Okay, thinking like

a needless layer of complication for an otherwise flawless idea.

He's on his phone, isn't he?

And he's just like.

I was looking at in British elections, you know, there's that thing of always on an election night, a general election night, there's a kind of who gets their ballot counted first, and it's which constituencies or citizenship.

Oh, should they like Sunderland versus Newcastle?

Sunderland and Newcastle.

Oh, you mean like a race to get the final result?

I was reading about Sunderland's methods for ensuring they stay at the top of their game.

Yeah.

And they're amazing.

Are they?

Well,

it's kind of a tradition now, and

they've really gone into details.

So they hire bank tellers because they're very good at flipping through lots and lots of paper very quickly, like individual bits of paper.

They use lighter paper for their ballot sheets because it's slightly easier to count fast.

So they switch from 100 GSM to 80 GSM.

Yeah.

They do, obviously they do practices, like they practice, they do dress rehearsals with the students who are running holding the ballot boxes and they like they say you're gonna be filmed you gotta be you need to be you know careful you don't want to drop those that'll be a disaster and

Labour always wins in that constituency right I think they do.

I think they always win.

I guess they would, yeah.

Because I remember like I always watch the election night and all the results come in and I only stay up for Sunderland and Newcastle.

100% Labour and then I go to bed.

I'm always slightly disappointed when I wake up.

I'm

You can get woollen coffins these days, I believe.

This is very

exciting.

A little price for anyone who can guess the headline that was used on the story announcing us in 2011.

Take your time.

That you're allowed woollen coffins now.

Oh, yeah, it's a cool woollen coffin that's been launched.

I'm gonna have to hurry you.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

No, no, no.

Really?

Let's all believe.

Silent bits of podcasts are very popular.

Anyone in the audience?

This is too tough a quiz, Andy.

Anyone?

Cozy burial?

What?

Cozy burial.

Cozy burial is good.

Famous phrase, cozy burial.

They went with

rest in fleece.

Not mine.

Very nice.

But lovely.

Yeah, and you can be buried in it, or it could be cremated.

It does the same either way.

You can get cardboard coffins, wool coffins, willow coffins, banana leaf coffins, or you can now be wrapped in a shroud as we used to be.

And there's a big movement, a natural burial movement, which is, because there are so many horrible chemicals in a lot of funeral processes, especially if you are embalmed, it's very bad for the environment for your body to go into the ground full of chemicals.

So, if you have a biodegradable coffin, then you can be buried in like what, in a natural burial, basically a field that someone's agreed to have people buried in.

Can you get wicker?

Yeah, wicker, yeah.

And you can also get one that's made of like a mushroom fungus that will start to decompose your body faster.

Oh, yeah, which I think is amazing.

That is cool.

And so, and this is really important.

I've talked before, I'm a big talker of planning your funeral and advanced care planning.

It's a big thing that you should write this down now, otherwise you're going going to get wrapped in that wool suit.

Right.

I just like to put it that because this is being recorded and will go out.

I do not want to be eaten by mushrooms when I get it.

Okay.

Do you want banana leaves or wicker or wool?

I'll be put in a big wicker cage and burned by some.

And probably some people will be dancing around in white in the situation.

That's going to be an amazing podcast when it comes out there.

One of the suffragettes, this was Anne Hunt.

She walked into the National Portrait Gallery and she stopped in front of a portrait of Thomas Carlyle, who's one of the founders, painted by Millais, and she slashed it.

It was a really famous thing that she did.

There was only one member of staff who was suspicious.

It was a guy called David Wilson.

And the first time she walked in, he wasn't that suspicious.

He thought she was American.

Apparently, he thought she was American because she was looking so closely at the pictures.

Apparently, that's what Americans do.

But then the second day she came back in again, and David Wilson said that she couldn't be american because no american would have paid the six pence entrance fee twice over

so it's like that must be someone up to no good was she coming back had she already slashed something no the first time she went in was to kind of case the joints yeah so there were lots of sort of famous incidents like particular flashpoints where for example uh mrs pancurst was going to speak at an event and then and you know the police didn't want it to happen and so that became a cool celebrity there was an event called the battle of glasgow

Mrs Pankhurst was going to Glasgow to speak and the police did not want her to appear they didn't want her to speak

there were 50 police constables in the basement of the building where she was billed to appear all the tickets have been sold you know huge presents like people checking everyone on the door suddenly mrs pankhurst appears on stage out of nowhere and it turns out she just came in as a punter with a ticket

sat by the platform and then gets up and starts speaking so all the police start coming up from the basement because they're you know they're activated um meanwhile 20 25 of the suffragette bodyguards get their clubs out and start trying to beat the police up yeah you know so you've got 25 suffragettes with clubs 50 policemen with their truncheons one of the suffragettes shot a policeman in the chest point blank with a blank bullet so it wasn't it was just a kind of surprise rather than a

I hope she said that.

I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, are you okay?

It was my fault.

And then plainclothes detectives try to get onto the platform where Mrs.

Pankhurst is still speaking at this point.

She's still delivering her speech.

The plainclothes detectives are trying to climb onto the platform.

It turns out the floral garlands all the way around the platform are barbed wire.

They've been disguised.

Wow.

I know.

It's amazing.

There are old ladies now beating the police with their umbrellas as they're trying to fight the truncheon.

It just sounds like an insane scene.

Who's listening to the speech at this point?

Weird moment today.

I was researching crisps and I found out in Japan at the moment there's a trend that's going on and then it turns out this is going global now to eat crisps using chopsticks so that you don't get the oil on your fingers as you are doing the other work that you're doing, right?

If you're eating so, so I was literally eating a bag of crisps as I was researching that fact, and my fingers absolutely were sticky on the

Mac sort of mouse bits, you know, like

oh, the keypad, yeah, yeah, the keypad, no, like the you know, the hand mouse thing that the keypad, yeah, yeah.

Well, the keypad's the mouse and the mouse,

the tracker, the trackpad,

the trackpad,

Gosh.

It's like living in the future, isn't it?

I found myself reading a piece about historical novels by a writer called

James Forrester.

And I just want to quote from this article he wrote about 10 years ago.

And listen to this.

Because he reads a lot and I think he wrote historical novels too.

One highly acclaimed and commercially successful recent historical novel had on page three the statement that there were no priests within a three-day ride.

Taking into consideration the time of year and the location of this statement, I calculated that there were between 5,000 and 8,000 priests

within a three-day ride in that year.

I could not carry on reading.

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Children are quite weirdly good at lying.

Or rather, they're good at...

So adults are very bad at telling when children are lying.

This is the thing.

And the reason for that, they can only work it out about the same as guessing on like 54% of the time.

So not much better than chance, really.

And the reason for that, there are lots of experiments, and it's because adults assume that children lie like adults do.

And they assume that children's faces move in the same ways that adults do.

But basically, there have been a load of experiments which assumed that children are not proficient liars.

And in fact, the problem is that children just look guilty quite a lot of the time.

Like because

you talk to a young child, they might avert their eyes, they might fidget, they might be incoherent,

they look like they're hiding something.

And that's so adults think they're lying when they may well not be.

So, yeah.

I think I look permanently guilty.

It makes me a bad liar, but it also makes me a really bad truth teller.

That's the problem because I look like I'm lying, whatever.

So, any lie I tell, I'm going to get caught because I look like I'm lying.

And anytime I tell the truth, no one believes me because I look like I'm lying.

It's very difficult.

That's why I have to have the computer in front of me on pointless.

One of the reasons that we have X as the X-Men and the X-ray and stuff like that is because Descartes

used X to mean an unknown in algebra yeah wasn't it he decided to use X Y and Z and the story goes that the reason he did it is because the printer who was doing his book said I got loads of X's Y's and Z's left over because no words have X's in them so I might as well use them But it turns out that because he's French, actually, X is quite a common, relatively common in French.

And it might have been because they just had lots of X's because X is quite common.

But yeah, but without those, without Descartes, we might not have the X men, we might have the A men or the B men or whatever.

Oh, wow.

And we wouldn't have the C men.

Tweets.

Probably not.

So I was looking into things that are named after people, and I was reasoning that there must be something which is the most famous thing that people don't know is named after a person.

Okay, that's true.

So we've said before, like, Shrapnel is named after a bloke who was called General Henry Shrapnel or something.

I think you said that nachos were named after a guy called Ignatio.

Yeah, exactly.

And I so we've done a few of these before, and I the cardigan.

Do people know it was named after the seventh Earl of Cardigan?

Okay, that is known because I read an article claiming that he was wearing one while he led the charge of the light brigade during

I thought that can't that can't be right, there would have been a uniform because it feels too

well like pushing his march during war Exactly.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it is named after him, but yeah, I think.

And it was during the Battle of Balaclava.

That's the thing that people don't know.

Yeah.

And the cravats go back to Croats because Croats were those.

And

slaves were Slavs.

I mean, that's not quite eponymous, that's the kind of toponyms.

And I'm really sorry to always lower the tone, but did you know that bugger is actually a riff on Bulgarian because there were these Bulgarian sects in the 11th sects in the 11th century that were supposed to get up to strange sects.

So that's where bugger comes in.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's kind of toponym, though, isn't it?

Really, not an eponym.

Thanks.

Strictly speaking.

In 1996, the Swedish Navy admitted that they had found a huge amount of evidence of Russian submarines operating in their waters, right?

Really serious, you know, post-Cold War, threatening security environment.

And there had been 6,000 incidents, a huge number reported from 1981 to 1994.

It turns out that what they had been hearing was largely otters splashing,

playful otters splashing in the water.

There were about one in a thousand claims was likely to be a submarine, and the rest was just random.

They also found out that it was farting fish as well, didn't they?

Yeah, herring, herring,

farting fish.

Farting, yeah, they communicate by farting.

In fact, we have this factor QI, which is herring communicate by farting.

Yes.

And we tweet it about once a year just so that everyone tweets Richard Herring to go, oh, I didn't know you communicated by farting.

He hates us.

I can imagine.

So the thing I want to mention about protests is to do with another quiz show, which is Mastermind.

And the first question ever was about protests.

And it was about a painting by Picasso, which was a protest about the bombing by Spanish planes on a village.

And the question was, what year when the event took place was the inspiration for the painting?

The answer was 1937.

The answer answer was 1937.

But the question was about German planes, not Spain.

So the first ever question on Mastermind was incorrect.

Yeah.

So how shit is Mastermind?

I just feel like it's QI and countdown on stage together.

Let's shit on someone.

What do you reckon, Susie?

There's shit, yeah.

Let's get some headlines.

That's it.

Yes.

Wait.

Oh, I don't want to diss any of the shit.

Oh, yeah, that was vicious.

Just on religion while we're there,

there's been a few naked religions in the past.

So the Adamites, they were a sect in North Africa in the second, third, and fourth centuries that used, always wore no clothes during their religious ceremonies.

The idea being that they were going back to the Garden of Eden before we had clothes, and this was the best way to get close to God.

Now, it became big again in the Czech Republic in Czechia in the 14th century, and people who were Adamites then would go naked through the towns and villages.

So they would everyone take their clothes off and they would go through the towns saying, come and join our gang.

You know,

we're the closest to Jesus.

Conga, basically.

You're describing a naked conga.

Sure, let's call it a naked cona.

Well, they did do a lot of naked dances.

They would have a fire and they would do naked dances around it.

And the idea was that they rejected a lot of the things in the Catholic Church.

And a lot of people think that they were like the precursors to the Protestant revolution.

So it was like, you know, these were the first people really to kind of go against the church.

And then it kind of built up and built up in Central Europe.

But it carried on.

Oliver Cromwell trimmed a lot of that stuff away, didn't he?

Before he came up with Puritanism.

Yeah, sorry.

And then it carried on.

And in the early US, they had some Adamites there.

And I was reading about one clergyman who was writing about them.

And he said,

about these people who were in church and were naked the whole time, if the planet of Venus reigned in their lower parts, making them swell for pride, or rather for lust, then then the clerk with his long stick shall strike down the presumptuous flesh so basically if you yeah you would yeah

and he said that on one occasion there was a woman who made a congregation member rise in such an unmeasurable manner that the old clerk was forced to use both hands to allay his courage at which the prophet

was in such pain that the whole house could not hold him and he said he would kill the clerk and basically this guy just started whacking his genitals with his stick he attacked that guy and basically they only just stopped him from killing the clerk uh but this guy said he wasn't bothered because it was in church god would look after him and it didn't matter if he killed the clerk because it was naked it would all be fine

It feels like we feels like pants is just easier, isn't it?

So burrowing owls, they have lots of piles of poo outside their nest, and it's cow dung and bison dung and all of of this.

And then they just stand by the poo and wait.

They just go into kind of sentry position and just stand there looking very still.

And what scientists reckon is that they're fishing for dung beetles?

Oh, they've got freshish dung.

Yeah.

And dung beetles are really interested.

And burrowing owls love eating the dung beetles.

Yeah.

And so they'll just stand and wait and let the dung beetles approach.

Isn't that crazy?

They're basically fishing.

Like they're land fishing.

Yeah.

No, I got it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I tried to find a uh, if there was another naughty Barbie, you know, kind of like the origins of Barbie being a core girl.

And I managed to find one, which was the pole dancing Barbie.

This was a one-off because it was part of a thing in Japan called Hebocon, which was, you know, like robot wars.

This was anti-robot wars.

This was a robot wars where everyone specifically...

Peace negotiations.

No, no.

Yeah.

You had to.

Robot Summit.

Robot Model UN.

You had to a very bad robot, basically.

It had to be terrible.

And so the worse it was, the better you got in the competition.

So there were 31 entrants, and Barbie doll that was entered was an attacking through pole dancing Barbie.

But the other ones that it went up.

How did she attack you with the pole dancing?

Did she spin round and kick you in the back?

I think so, because I couldn't find any photos because this was in 2013.

And I think before the invention of the camera.

So, no, so

it was a small thing that happened in Japan.

The winner was a robot that was so sturdy that no one could knock it over, so it just stood.

So the other things walked into it.

Okay, that's clever.

And the best one was the person who got a special acknowledgement was one person, a lady, who accidentally left her robot on the train and then just went for a beer instead.

And they were like, that level of shitness is so great.

We want to commend you with a special honor there.

That's awesome.

But yeah, Pole Dancing Barbie, the only one time in a anti-robot war Japanese competition.

Hebacon.

Very cool.

Yeah.

There is a thing called the Bubble Baba Challenge.

This is at the Wowotsky River in Russia, so it's near St.

Petersburg.

And it's a race,

kind of a rafting race, but instead of a raft, you have a sex doll.

It began in 2003.

Anyone's allowed to enter, but you have to have a compulsory alcohol test before you start.

Oh, yeah, we don't want to...

We don't want to make this seem tawdry or unprofessional.

And in 2006, there was a guy riding a sex doll down the river and had a shandy.

Get him!

The most exciting of the Bubble Baba challenge sex doll races was in 2006.

So all the racers jumped into the water and there was a really, really strong wind.

And that meant that almost all the sex dolls blew away.

And so you've just got all these rushing, mostly guys in the water, just sort of without their sex dolls.

And there was only one person, a guy called Ossipov, who reached the finish line.

But he was disqualified because the jury had noticed signs of recent sexual activity on the doll.

Which was very much banned.

I've got another

Barbie thing.

Okay.

Barbie is officially not part of any political party, right?

So there's various reasons for that.

She's been a presidential candidate at every election since 1992,

much like Hillary Clinton.

Not fair.

But

she got in a beef with Donald J.

Trump.

Barbie and Donald J.

Trump had a beef at the last election.

Because Donald J.

Trump tweeted, there's a thing called Voter Barbie.

Why do you keep saying Jay in his name?

Oh, sorry.

That's his junior I'm talking about.

Donald Trump Jr.

Okay, cool.

I believe.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Could be the senior.

I mean, they're both such.

They're both such different.

Yes.

Well,

I don't know which of them said this.

I think it was Junior, but basically, one of the Trumps tweeted, voter Barbie must be a Democrat because she's already wearing an I-voted sticker and yet she's got another ballot in her hand.

Clever.

And Mattel had to reply, Barbie is not and never has been affiliated with a political party.

Had to issue an official statement saying she's not a Democrat.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

I think she is, though, clearly.

Clearly.

Can I tell you one more dueling method that happened?

Yeah.

So basically, you know the thing about you turn back to back and then you walk and then you there are various different methods in different countries.

Walk 10 paces, turn round, shoot.

Sorry, yes.

So the back, that's French, basically.

And there is a much more fun variant, which has another French name.

It's called avalante.

You face each other.

Can we do the fun duel?

Well,

there was, people really relished it.

You know, a certain kind of person really seemed to enjoy it.

So there's a variant called avalante, where you face each other, right?

And you start walking towards each other.

Either of you can fire whenever you like, but if you miss, you have to stand still and wait for the other guy to shoot.

Right.

I know, and that feels tense.

I thought you were going to say that you're standing right in front of each other and then you walk backwards away from each other, and then you're just hoping someone's not kneeling down behind you.

That is amazing, really.

God,

it used to be in the Olympics, didn't it?

Pistol dueling.

Yep.

1906.

It was one of the categories.

It wasn't a medal one, but you would, you would.

So it was, it was a thing that was done there.

Because the winner would be dead.

Yeah.

Just pick him up.

I'm going to put a silver medal on him.

But that would be the, there was like an inter-caliber games, wasn't there, in 1906.

It wasn't the main games.

And they used wax bullets, and the idea was you would just see who got hit first.

And you had a sort of glass plate that was over your face.

But it was done as a proper thing with spectators around and everything.

Yeah.

It was very exciting.

Have we said before that I think NASA found the oldest known rock, the oldest known Earth rock was on the moon and then brought back to Earth.

Yes.

And then it was called Big Bertha was the name of the rock.

Was it?

Yeah, it was, yeah, they named it after I think a gun from the First World War.

So they brought that back and it was the first Earth meteorite ever found on another body, as in the first

meteor out, if you like.

You know, the first bit of Earth that had hit somewhere else.

Wasn't that the moon created when an asteroid hit the Earth and there was a little splash?

So they say.

So they say, yeah.

I'm not sure I buy it.

Yeah.

Pick sorry didn't happen.

There's actually a strong theory that it is hollow.

So

is this the moon cave theory?

Ooh, yeah, I haven't heard it called that before.

But yeah, I suppose, yeah, because supposedly when you hit it, it rings like a bell.

So is it artificial?

Is it real?

What do you mean when a meteorite hits it?

Not if you just go on the moon.

No, when they did drilling on the moon,

they specifically tried to find out.

Because

you can do seismic tests on the moon to see what the composure is on the inside.

And it was completely empty, apparently.

And so, yeah.

I'm joking, Hannah.

I'm joking.

I promise.

I'm joking.

Yeah, yeah.

Have you ever been in a diamond mine in your adventures, Hannah?

No, I haven't.

I wonder what that's like.

I see we've run out of facts and entered speculation territory.

God.

Andy, you've mentioned Oscar the Hypnodog before on the podcast.

Can you remember what that was?

Oscar the Hypno Dog was a Labrador who

was hypnotically trained and

went missing and there were signs put up all over the country saying, do not look at this dog.

Is that it?

That's it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Basically, he's dangerous.

We have mentioned that, but what I'd never heard before was about Puffy the Hypno Cat.

Amazing.

Puffy the Hypnocat was in the 1940s in America.

There was a guy who owned a bar, and he said that Puffy was sitting on the end of a nightclub bar, and a couple of girls came up to him, and I didn't really pay attention what had happened, but suddenly a girl was simply out on her feet.

She simply wasn't from drinking.

I'm something of a hypnotist myself, and I realized she was in a hypnotic trance.

And it turned out that this cat had been hypnotizing people in this guy's bar.

And he started then training the cat to stare at people really, really fixedly to try and hypnotize them.

And Puffy became really, really famous.

And in 1945, the American Feline Society called her the king of all cats because she was bringing in money for war bonds.

So you would go into the bar and you would pay some money to be hypnotized by the cat.

And then, you know, they'd get the money for the war.

And by the end of her life, she was credited with hypnotizing over 300 people, always for benign purposes.

Just, wait, I spent all my money on tinned tuna.

So weird.

Just left it open around the place.

Probably, probably nothing.

And you, Hannah, you're such a sceptic, you probably don't even believe that story is true.

Actually, that one I'm really behind.

One of us on this panel might be slightly harder to hypnotise than the other three.

Oh, okay.

Can we guess who?

Is it Dan because of his dubious questioning techniques?

It's not Dan because of his dubious questioning techniques.

I think it's a lot of fun.

Is it Hannah with her skepticism?

It's not Hannah with her dubious skepticism thing.

Is it Andy with his lack of ability to talk to people at parties?

It's not me.

My lack of ability to talk to people at parties.

Is it James for being so fucking judgmental about the other three people on the panel?

It's James, but not for that reason.

Not for that reason.

It's because so James, you have aphantasia, right?

Oh, right.

Okay.

James can't.

Well, you said what it is.

I just can't picture things in my head.

Can't picture things in your head.

Yeah.

And that might make it harder to hypnotise you.

There was a.

Well, this is from the UK Hypnosis Convention, which sounds amazing.

Last year's events included recreational erotic hypnosis

and aphantasia.

What is it?

And why should we even care?

Slightly.

Slightly barbed

subject for a talk, but.

I don't know how much time we got.

I got very deep in the weeds on people who want to be heroes and do bad stuff.

Ooh, okay, yeah, go for it.

Have you heard of the hero complex?

No, no.

So it's not quite a psychological disorder.

It's not in the diagnostic manuals, but it's like talked about by psychologists as a thing where it's sometimes known as a vanity crime, where people are desperate to be the hero, so they'll do something bad so they can then rescue people.

Like I'd mug you, but then beat myself up.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly that.

And honey yourself in, I guess, is the idea.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I'd rough myself up a bit first.

To waste my water bit of a lifetime.

But like, there's quite a lot of case studies.

The really famous one's in 1984, an LAPD police officer called Jimmy Wade Pearson heroically discovered and diffused a pipe bomb on an airport bus carrying the Turkish Olympic team in LA.

And people saw him running down like the airport holding a pipe bomb, dismantling in it and throwing it over his shoulder and shouting, get down, you know, like proper like Bruce Willis stuff.

And it turned out he had planted it there

because he wanted to be the hero, because he wanted to transfer into a different department and his boss hated him and he thought, the only way I'm getting out is if I get commendation.

And he failed the polygraph and he ended up with 1,500 hours of community service and it became a bit of a thing.

But everyone was like, all right, well, no one was hurt.

Fair enough.

But then there's some really bad ones.

So there's a thing called firefighter arson.

which is a serious problem.

Oh, yeah.

You heard of this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There are 100 firefighters every year arrested for arson in America alone.

There's a million firefighters, so it's a tiny statistic, but a hundred people, most of them are young men, aged 16 to 30.

I read a whole report issued in 2003 by the US government's National Fire Administration.

I got very deep.

There are six primary motives.

Excitement, vandalism, revenge, profit, political terrorism, hiding evidence of a crime.

And it's a really big problem for a small subset.

And there's a guy who's a Tennessee fire chief.

He set fire to his own fire station.

He caused three-quarters of a million dollars of damage.

And when released, he then set fire to a car dealership.

And he did it for the sexual thrill.

This is why we need Pornhub.

Yeah.

Sexual.

Sexual thrill.

He got off on the thing.

The worst one's John Orr, who's from Glendale Fire Service in California in 1991, was found to have planned eight arson attacks on shops and was suspected of many more.

He killed four people in these fires.

It was really, really horrible.

His main job at the Glendale service, chief arson investigator wow what a cover story and so they tailed him for months and every time there was a fire investigating conference there would be fires in the local area and he was possibly alleged to have set 2,000 fires making the most prolific American arsonist on record but one of the clues that they detected about him is that he had written a novel about a fireman who sets fires

It's like a serious thing.

And I'm so sorry to get stuck on this, but I then watched Fireman Sam with my four-year-old daughter.

Oh, yeah.

And and I went for.

Does he do that?

Hang on a second.

For sexual thrills?

No.

I work for CBebs, I don't want to get cancelled.

But like, I realised Fireman Sam, he's in charge of a tiny, tiny village called Ponty Pandy, but he's got a fire truck, a rescue tender, a four-wheel-drive SUV with inbuilt animal rescuing crane, a quad bike, an amphibious vehicle, a hovercraft, two helicopters, and a mobile command center.

Wow.

This guy is playing the game.

Like, he's clearly setting fires that get a huge budget.

Can I just say one thing about George Bernard Shaw very quickly?

Yeah, go ahead.

I'm saying it wrong, am I?

Hello.

But Bernard is there.

It's Georg.

Yeah, yeah.

Georg.

Georg.

Just I've never heard it said.

But like George Bernard.

Yeah, George Berger.

Oh, George Bernard Shaw.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, okay.

George.

I'm cool, whatever.

Hey, it's all cool here.

It's late night at the Soho.

Yeah.

Picking each other up and pronouncing.

Are they going to go home going, God, there was this mad fucking fight about how to pronounce Bernard?

Oh, man, you've got to to see fish live.

Sorry.

I'm sorry.

No, so he used to have a writing shed, which was amazing.

He lived in Herefordshire, and he had a writing shed, which was basically on a lazy Susan.

He liked to chase the sun.

So he would get in, the sun would be beaming right in, which was a big thing for him because he had specific glass, which was in the shed windows, that kind of beamed concentrated light in a way that was meant to be healthy.

It was thought to be a healthy.

He was always on fire, wasn't he?

Brilliant.

Burn hard, that's like.

Tell you a bit about milk floats?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

For one thing, milk doesn't float.

Oh, that's, yeah.

If it's food for thought, isn't it?

If it left on water, it will sink.

So,

no, but if you mix it, it's

like, yeah, that's not, that wasn't the terms I was.

Anyway, look,

milkfloats.org.uk has an FAQ page, and it's one of the, like, it's a very, it's a gorgeous website, milkfloats.org.uk.

I cannot recommend it enough.

And the FAQ page begins,

all right, maybe they are not exactly frequently asked, but

they might be the kind of questions people might ask given the opportunity.

It's so nice.

It's so good.

Yeah.

You want to do a quick game of is it bigger in Europe or America?

Yes I do.

Okay.

What year?

2023.

Oh wow, okay.

So where would you find the world's biggest dump truck?

Dump truck?

USA, America.

That's a mark of pride.

I'm afraid not.

It's in Belarus in Europe.

Really?

Yeah, the Belas 75710, which can move the equivalent of 1,000 whale testicles in one go.

That's my comparison.

That's not on the advertising.

That's how you measure trucks.

I think we all know that.

The world's largest log jam.

So that's when you have a load of logs in a river and they get stuck.

And so where is it?

Europe or America?

Oh, America.

Well, I was tricked last time, so I'll say Europe this time.

Well, you've been tricked again, Andy.

It's in none of us in Canada.

And the interesting thing about that is that it's about 20 square miles of log jam, and it goes deep as well.

And the logs store enough carbon to run 2.5 million cars for a year.

Wow.

That's interesting.

Sorry, is that

a genuine question?

Is that logs that have been cut by humans?

No, they usually are knocked down by wind and stuff like that.

And they fall into the river and they go down the river.

And then there's like a little sort of point where they can't get out.

And then they just jam and jam and jam and jam.

And it's a really good way of hiding carbon.

And then finally, the world's biggest barometer, Europe or America.

Europe.

I think I have that in my home.

You've got a massive barometer, Andy.

Yeah.

Don't boast.

It's a famous barometer.

Is it?

Oh, God.

It's one you see every day on TV.

On TV?

Every day.

Is there a barometer connected to Big Ben?

Somehow.

If there is, I don't know about that.

It's secretly also about it.

Oh, wow.

But it is in Europe.

It is in Europe.

It is on Shepherd's Bush Roundabout.

It's a.

Oh, yes, we all tune in.

Sorry, we all tune in every morning for five minutes.

Just watch the line speed of Shepherd's Bush Roundabout.

And then we get on with our day, don't we?

You know?

Just check what the pressure's like.

No, it's a huge barometer.

It was built as a barometer.

It no longer works as a barometer.

It's currently covering up a big pipe by London Water.

But that building was what inspired the score column in the TV show Pointless.

Oh.

Inspired by the world's biggest barometer.

Oh.

God, these are easy.

I'm surprised you haven't got any of these.

Yeah, yeah.

Do barometers, do they, do they go up or down?

I can't remember now.

Depends which way you hold them.

Yeah, okay, but they can go up, right?

And what the weather's doing, yeah, yeah.

It's just weird because when you said Big Ben, I suddenly had this image of the

Mercury going up in a barometer, right?

And it's suddenly, because I was at a fair the other week and my son did that strongman thing where you hit it and he has to hit the bell.

Do you think there's anyone strong enough in the world that if that thing had to hit the bell of Big Ben, that they could hit it hard enough?

No.

So let's move on.

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I've never felt like this before.

It's like you just get me.

I feel like my true self with you.

Does that sound crazy?

And it doesn't hurt that you're gorgeous.

Okay, that's it.

I'm taking you home with me.

I mean, you can't find shoes this good just anywhere.

Find a shoe for every you from brands brands you love like Birkenstock, Nike, Adidas, and more at your DSW store or dsw.com.

One thing I do know about E.T.

is that there's a lot of Reese's stuff in there, right?

Oh, Reese's Pieces.

Reese's Pieces, which is like an American candy.

But it was huge for them.

So their sales went up like 65% the next week, just after it had been in this movie.

And the interesting thing about that is that they weren't the first choice.

If you look at the original scripts, all of the bits where it says Reese's pieces, it was originally going to be M ⁇ Ms.

But apparently, Mars turned it down because they didn't want to be associated with aliens.

They're called for Mars, really.

I've got some stuff on dropping things from parachutes.

Okay.

This is about a place called Franz Star Ranch and Brothel in Nevada.

Time in.

They had an idea of an advertising campaign where they would put a mattress in the middle of an airfield.

And if anyone could parachute and land on the mattress, then they would have a chance to spend the evening with any of the women in the brothel.

It didn't go very well.

The problem was that all the women would stand

near to the place where people had to land.

And the guy flying the airplane, not that high, could see everything that was happening and got completely distracted.

There was also some sidewinds, and long story short, he crashed the plane.

Oh, no!

Everyone was fine.

Oh, no one died.

And the great, great moral of the story in the end is the crash plane was so good for business that they decided to leave it there, and it's still there in Nevada.

If you ever see that crashed plane next to the brothel, is the brothel?

Why are you looking at me?

I've never been to Nevada.

Well, now I think you have.

Wow.

Isn't that an amazing idea for advertising?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's an amazing idea.

Sorry, how low was the plane when he got distracted?

It was quite low, but high enough that parachutes would work.

Yeah, so that's quite high for a pilot to be like, oh.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's just like a little stick woman on the

check out the, I think, arms

on her.

Maybe arms?

No, it's a tree.

That's a tree.

Okay.

Yeah, that's okay.

Do you know that John Major and Tina Turner were born on the same day?

Were they?

Yeah.

Really?

That's cool.

Yeah.

If my memory is, I didn't actually write that off.

Wow, that's off memory?

That's off-memory, yeah.

Wow.

Once you hear that, you're going to forget that in a hurry.

You know, everyone who was born on the same day as John Major.

Classic Andy.

In February 2020,

there was a poll by the Center of Public Opinion.

This is in the United States.

It was ahead of the primary in New Hampshire, and they asked a load of voters what they would rather, and they found that 64% of Democrats would rather see a giant meteor strike the earth, extinguishing all human life, than see President Trump re-elected.

Do you know there's been a sequel to Phantom of the Opera, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera.

Okay.

Yeah, it was written by Ben Elton, and it was music by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

But it was delayed for months in the writing process because of cats.

The musical cats?

No,

his real-life cat.

He had a kitten who stood on his digital piano and wiped out all the music that he had done in the writing of it.

Oh my God.

It just feels...

God bless that kitten.

There was a group of secret operatives from Britain called the Choir Boys, and they came up with a plan during World War II to drive Hitler mad by airdropping huge amounts of pornography into his compound.

Oh, wow.

In the end, they kind of slightly, you know, they came up with the idea, they started going for it, and they thought, you know, this is just stupid.

And so they called off the whole idea, but not before, and I quote, the group had amassed an enormous collection of suitable material.

Oh, I made an invention once, talking of cars and weing.

Wow, that is a hell of a Venn diagram there, I don't think.

No, it's

the.

I've forgotten the name, it's a really good name.

But basically, you can piss and drive.

Oh, okay.

It was all in the name, which I can't remember.

My great invention.

Oh, yeah.

What's wrong with the piss and drive?

It's not as romantic.

I see.

I see.

So it's the idea that you just, you don't have to stop off.

Yeah, if you can't, like, I can't start my car a lot of the time, so it's annoying having to stop.

It's brand new as well.

It's an electrical fault, I think.

Anyway,

so I don't want to stop in case I can't start it again.

Many people would get the electrical fault mended, but

I prefer what you've done.

Engineer assistant, where you never have to.

Does the urine get utilized?

I'm thinking screen wash.

Yeah, yeah.

That would work.

Well, what?

It's just water.

It's mostly water.

I'm wondering if it's you pissing all over your electrics that is stopping the car from functioning to begin with.

I'm wondering that.

In Norway, if you are a fish

factory and you're kind of getting all the fillets out, what you do is you get the rest of the fish and you throw it away into a little area with all the heads and stuff like that.

In that area, children are allowed to go in and they cut out the little tongues of the cods and they sell them for extra pocket money.

And this is a really common thing in a place called Lofferton.

And from about six years until 17, you'll get get loads of kids who'll just go in, grab the fish, and they'll cut out this little tongue in the back.

And apparently it's the tastiest part.

And do you think they turn out to be psychopaths, like serial killers and psychopaths?

Yeah, unfortunately in that area there is a lot of death.

No, there isn't.

Do you want to know some other things that people are scared of?

Singers?

Yeah, sure, yeah.

I wrote some down, so I thought I'd do some work after you told me I was getting paid.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Forgot to tell you that until, yeah, quite late in the day.

But thank you for bringing your one sheet of.

It wasn't very much, I'm getting paid, so it is fitting.

Wait till you hear them.

Adele is scared of seagulls.

Who would have thought?

Oh no.

Yeah, yeah.

There's more.

Rihanna's scared of fish.

Okay.

And Kylie Minogue is scared of coat hangers.

She's scared of coat hangers.

Coat hangers, yeah.

Kylie Minogue.

And I'm scared of commitment.

So we're all different, aren't we?

How many different types of wrestling do you think there are in Iceland?

One type of wrestling.

Unlucky, there are two types of wrestling, but they do have the same name, so I can see why you got that.

That's what I was thinking about.

It's called glimmer, and basically there's two types, and they're quite similar, but one of them is a type of wrestling that you would do as a Viking if you came home after a long day doing whatever Vikings do and you wanted to warm yourself up.

They would just do some wrestling.

Nice.

Who with?

With another Viking.

Right.

Yeah, that sounds like a good one.

That's wholesome, right?

Yeah.

There was another one which was the dueling version.

And it was quite similar, but it would take...

place in a field with a large flat stone known as the slaying slab.

And that one you would try and slam your opponent onto the slab and break the back.

Wow.

And the amazing thing about this is they were going to have it in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.

I think probably the first version, not the second one.

And then the war happened and so the Olympics got postponed.

And in 1920 they were going to do it anyway.

You know, they've decided, okay, we'll keep all the same sports.

But Iceland decided that it only had a certain number of wrestlers and it needed them to impress the king of Denmark, who was visiting at the same time as the Olympic Games.

And so they decided we're not going to do this wrestling after all, we just want to impress the King of Denmark.

So it never became a worldwide sport that it might have done otherwise.

And then in the end, the King never came.

There was a shanty, not a shanty, but a sea song when you were getting your grog.

So you would get the amount of alcohol you were allowed each day.

They would give it you and they would sing while they were doing it.

And it was a song called Nancy Dawson.

And it's the tune that we now know as Here We Go Round the the Mulberry Bush.

But it was all about Nancy Dawson, who was a stage sort of performer, an actress, possibly a prostitute.

And I'm not going to say what the words are to the Navy song about her, but they are.

Are they rude?

They are very rude.

I think we say sex worker now, dear.

They were meant to be quite easy, weren't they?

Because you couldn't, like, not a lot.

Sex workers.

Sorry, no, no, no.

Depends how good you you are

no I meant the songs to sing um because like some people can't sing names of registered competitive roller derby players include skatebush venous thightrap

and weird al spanker bitch

I sort of thought what's like the rudest name that you can get to so I looked up the C-U-N-T word and I was heading down that way but on the way I discovered the C-L-I-T word and again.

Do you know how to say that?

Come on, come on, don't give us one.

Clite.

Okay, well, in the C L I T you've got Clitastrophe.

Oh, yeah.

Please welcome to the ring.

Clitosaurus Rex.

Oh, that's so good.

Clittler is about to enter the ring.

And who's this coming up the ring?

Clitty, clitty, bang, bang.

That's really good.