500: No Such Thing As A Cougar Called Jeff

What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo and Juliet, created by the Emu winning writer from Schittz Creek and Pop Music's number one hit maker, playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts?

What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo and Juliet, created by the Emu winning writer from Schittz Creek and Pop Music's number one hitmaker, playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts?

We just wanted to say we are so thrilled to have made it to 500.

We definitely didn't think we would when we started this in 2014.

And we wanted to say thank you to all of you for listening.

We know loads of you have been listening for many years, plenty of you have been listening right from the get-go.

And whether you've listened to 500 episodes or whether you've just started, we wanted to say a huge thank you.

It would not have happened without you and we're thrilled you're here.

This show is a very special one.

It was recorded live at the London Podcast Festival.

And as many of you know, we've been having lots of guests to cover Anna on maternity leave.

This time we pulled out all the stops and our special guest is a name that will be familiar to many of you because it's Anna!

Anna Todzinski is back, everybody.

She's back.

She's better than ever.

She insults us all in the first three minutes of the recording.

We really hope you enjoy this show.

And Anna will be back full time in another month or so.

The second announcement is about a very exciting new book that's been published.

It's called Everything to Play For, The QI Book of Sports.

And its authors are none other than James Arkin and Anna Tozhinski of this podcast.

That's right, James and Anna have written their first joint book, without me and Dan, weird.

It's a brilliant book.

It's a history of basically the entire world through the medium of sport.

So it's great for people who like sport, but it's also great for people who don't think of themselves as sport lovers.

I don't think of myself as a sport lover, but I'm reading it now and I'm absolutely engrossed.

I'm learning fantastic new things on every single page.

If you know someone who likes sport or if you like this podcast, you will love this book.

It is absolutely full of mad, bizarre, wonderful niche things about the biggest sports in the world and the smallest ones and everything else in between.

James and Anne have also read out the audiobook, so if you'd like to listen to them reading it, that's like a huge bumper bonus episode of Phish.

That can be done too.

Once again, it's called Everything to Playful, the QI Book of Sports.

Get it now.

Get one for yourself and one for someone else at Christmas.

That's it.

Hope you enjoy it.

On with the show.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a very special edition of No Such Things a Fish, our 500th show.

There just isn't one more thing by boss.

Oh my god, we're surrounded by idiots.

Idiot, idiot, idiot.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to King's Place.

Please welcome to the stage.

No such thing as a fair.

Yay!

Hey, everyone.

Thanks so much for coming, everyone, tonight.

How you doing?

Fuck yes.

All right.

Call the music, please.

So, we are so excited to be here tonight for our 500th episode.

We are, thank you so much.

We've been having a lot of guests over over the last nine months to come on in place of Anna because she's away on maternity and so we've had a lot of fun.

Arguably the show's been better, I would say.

It's felt stronger.

Yeah.

I'm joking, Colis.

Do you think I'd ever say that?

If she heard that, she'd kick my fucking ass.

So yeah, anyway, we've been having amazing guests coming on, but we thought for the 500th episode, we need a big gun.

We need someone who's going to really deliver the goods.

Unfortunately, we've found someone, a rookie.

So please make her feel welcome, kind of guide her in.

Please welcome the stage.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is the return of Anna Tashinsky.

What a funny ruse, Dan.

Dan.

What a hilarious little gag there.

We're back.

Shit.

Can I just say, no intro music for me.

Huge, ridiculously disproportionate build-up.

It's like welcoming Neil Armstrong back from the moon style build-up.

And then no intro music for the super special, most exciting guest you've ever had on, apparently.

Just a little director's note.

Well, let's see how you're doing this episode, and we might have you back tomorrow.

Thanks.

All right, so we got we all ready to go.

Should we do it?

500th episode?

All right, okay, let's roll theme tune.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the London Podcast Festival.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and ladies and gentlemen it is the return of Anna Tashansky.

And once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts for this very special 500th episode of No Such Thing as a Fish and in no particular order.

Here we go.

Starting with fact number one and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that in preparation for the 500th anniversary of the creation of Michelangelo's David, the people in charge of cleaning him had a huge falling out because they couldn't agree if he should be washed or dry cleaned.

This was a big deal.

There was 10 years of preparation for this big birthday that was coming up, but the one thing that they couldn't decide on near the end was how do you actually do the cleaning process itself.

From the image behind us, it looks like he's been hoovered.

Well so this is this is after a decision has been made and a vacuum was involved yes.

I see.

And also I haven't seen my clench saws David.

Is he really really big or is the person doing it a tiny little borrower?

He's 17 foot which I'm told by the internet is the average size of a giraffe.

If you want to picture that because we've all seen a giraffe.

Whoa.

No I have.

I've just realized I have.

Sorry.

That's why I say no.

Yeah they've got one at the zoo.

Yeah.

But But they don't have one of these at the zoo.

No.

That's how you can tell the difference in many ways.

How you can tell if you're in the zoo or in Florence.

Yeah.

One if you're in Florence at the same time.

Florence Zoo is.

Yeah,

that's the one test case which doesn't work because they've got both.

Has it always been this slick?

It's not director's commentary, May.

It's just

no, it is amazing.

In fact, so for the people listening at home, we've got a picture here of the lady who's cleaning him.

I think her name might be Eleonora Pucci.

She's the lady who currently cleans David and she was interviewed about it this year and she does it every two months and she photographs him very carefully to see where basically where the dust is and whether any extra grime has accumulated and then she dusts it and she has this special vacuum cleaner designed for statues, which I had no idea was even a thing.

And she gets on a scaffold and she has this backpack vacuum cleaner and just hoovers him.

I just thought it was a low-pressure vacuum.

Is it designed for statues?

It's not just a crap vacuum cleaner.

It's a Henry.

Okay, Henry is high pressure.

Is it?

Famously.

Yeah, I think my vacuum cleaner, I might have accidentally bought a statue vacuum cleaner.

I can't even get rid of a cobweb thread.

But yeah, I think there might be some jealousy amongst the other statues.

Because did you read?

I think it was the comment from her when she said, We dust the other statues four times a year, but His Majesty gets the treatment every two months.

Wow.

Yeah.

After they did the big restoration, I was reading an interview with a member of the team called Antonio Paolucci,

and he said, only someone with expert knowledge and a thorough and long familiarity with the statue will be able to tell that certain irregularities are no longer there.

Okay.

And I'm just thinking that that's what I would say if I hadn't done it.

Yes.

Oh, you could.

Oh, you can't say it.

Well, that's because you're not an expert.

If you're an expert, you'd be able to see what I'd done.

Yeah.

They got so angry about it, didn't they?

There was so much stronger.

Someone resigned over which cleaning method they were going to use.

Yeah, can we talk about what is the difference in statue terms?

Because I'm not even sure what the difference is in clothes terms between washing and dry cleaning.

What's the difference in statue terms?

Okay, well, okay,

so what I'm going to tell you has a lot of gaps because I don't understand it, but

roughly, what I'm about to say.

Yeah, yeah,

roughly it's this.

It's very hard to clean a statue.

Okay?

That's one of the big problems.

You're not even dealing with the grime that it's accumulated over the past.

It's about the previous cleaning methods that have messed up the statue.

So you're kind of dealing with the problems of of the past.

So David was cleaned in the 1800s at some time, and then nothing until 2004 or three, when they were getting ready for the big 500 anniversary.

So if you use anything that's wet on it, you're going to be making things worse, whereas the brush is just a light.

So is that dry cleaning?

Dry cleaning is the brush.

The vacuuming is the dry cleaning.

A wet clean would be

soapy water.

Soapy water.

A big car.

Oh, imagine a car wash with the David going through it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

But you had these two people.

You had the director of the museum who was going for one side.

You had the person who was brought in arguing for the other side.

And then there was an international body of artists who were protesting and writing letters saying, let him just stay dirty.

They didn't want him cleaned at all.

Yeah, so it's.

Why do we want him to stay dirty?

Is that because you'll damage them?

It's the case of damage.

Yeah.

I guess they did in the olden days, didn't they?

Like, they cleaned him with hydrochloric acid, I think, that time in the 19th century.

Yeah.

Which really screwed him up.

Yeah.

Wow.

Have you heard of natural enzyme cleaning?

No.

This is a thing that lots of curators do, and it's basically spitting on the artworks that you own.

Oh, yeah.

They don't actually spit.

Well, the good ones don't spit on the artworks.

Basically,

you lick a cotton bud and then you use that.

But during COVID, they stopped this practice.

But loads of really simple people

made.

But it's so safe.

That's the thing.

It's one of those things which was a bit overkill.

Yeah, people aren't going licking David, are they?

Exactly.

Unless visitors are are actually licking the thing, then it is totally safe.

So if you are in the National Gallery and you spit on a painting, is that a defence, do you think?

When they come around and say, we said not to go near it, I think you can probably say, I'm just cleaning Mona Lisa or whatever, who's not in the National Gallery if I know.

Yeah.

It's worth a try, I think, if you do anything like that.

So do you know a few things that were on David that needed cleaning?

There was beeswax on him.

Oh, really?

Why would there be beeswax?

Because well because bees have made a made a hive inside his butt crack

Good call.

No, yeah

same as James

Correct.

Yeah

Sometimes I just need to hear it a second time

So beeswax is used to

That's why yeah, you get beeswax to clean with yeah presumably so they're not entirely sure but what they think it is is that back in the day pre-electricity when people were coming to see and they were on, let's say, a higher ledge to look over it, the candles that they were holding to get a better view was melting on top of David.

And so they found 15 splashes of beeswax.

He was actually bald originally, wasn't he?

But that's all just wax accumulated.

It is weird, isn't it?

That because

David is famously a smaller person in the story, yet he's so big.

Have you not seen the Goliath

statue?

It's next door.

Oh, wow.

In the zoo.

There's one thing in particular that I have in common with David the statue.

Can you guess what that is?

Not the penis.

What do we know about?

You make your wife hoover you every day before you go to work.

We have a lot of suction on our Henry.

It's very much a three-person relationship, me, my wife, and Henry.

That's why he's smiling all the time.

What do you have the same as him?

Does he have the face blindness thing that you have?

Because he looks like he doesn't recognise anyone who's in front of him.

He's met her so many times.

Look at him.

He's like, who are you?

I know you.

I'll be honest, you're not going to get this.

We would both collapse if we were tilted forward 15 degrees.

Is that not the case with all of us?

No, so a normal human will fall over after about 20 degrees of tilt.

What about your big head?

Is that what it is?

He's got cracks on his ankles, and if you tilt him, his ankles will absolutely collapse.

And I tried this.

I videoed myself at home leaning forward until I fell over and then paused it and then measured exactly where I stopped.

Did you?

Really?

Your wife's next door.

Darling, Henry and and I are waiting.

And it turns out that I can't get much further than 15 either.

Wow.

Wow.

I just want to be clear, I meant you've got a physically big head, not a metaphorically big head.

Because that's better, I think.

Oh, here's the thing.

Michelangelo, what do we call him Michelangelo or Michelangelo?

What do you prefer?

Michelangelo.

Yeah, I think call him by the name that everyone knows him by.

Okay, yeah.

Okay.

So

he was shorter than real-life David.

And when I say real-life David,

he was just 16 feet.

Yeah.

No, I'm so sorry.

So David in the Bible,

the thing is, the Bible doesn't say the height and weight classes of David and Goliath before they went into the fight.

But there are lots of sort of biblical scholars who've had a rough

had a go at it.

Some think he might be 5'3.

And Michelangelo was 5'2 ⁇ .

But we only know that because shoes were found in his house.

And they basically, measured from the shoes, they assessed how tall, like, if his shoes are this big, then he's this big.

So how big was he?

5'2 ⁇ .

He's 5'2 ⁇ .

So that's about the same as Lady Gaga or Yori Gagarin.

Right.

And he would be too short to be an Emirates Airline flight attendant.

This is one of those studies, whoever came up with that, that is one of the many reasons I left this show originally.

Shoes back in the olden days were not measured with that kind of precision, A, that meant you could judge someone's height.

And then, B, you do get tall people with small feet.

Yeah,

it's an assessment.

Also, we don't know if they were his shoes, but yeah.

They were found in his home.

So, you know.

Could have been a servant, could have been his wife.

Could have been a servant, could have been his wife.

I'm not sure if there was a Mrs.

Michelangelo.

I don't know.

Right.

I think so.

A lot of people think that he likes men.

Michelangelo.

Yes, and one of the reasons, fancied men, I mean.

And one of the reasons is that his female sculptures often seem to be men with breasts.

And a lot of people have looked into it.

And you should look up Michelangelo female drawings and sculptures.

They are, they're just men.

It's like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and then with a sort of pair of lemons jammed onto the front.

It's so weird.

Do you know there's a theory as to why his penis is so small?

Have you read that?

David's.

James's.

Look, after all those nights with Henry, it's not as small as it used to be.

Oh, dear.

Okay, so he famously has a small penis.

Yeah.

What is it, cold?

No, it's so.

I thought you said, what is it called?

I don't know, Jeff, it's a private thing.

No, so there was a study done, and someone who read this study kind of pulled this out as a, as, I don't think the authors of the study were specifically saying it, but they read from the detail.

It's because he's about to fight a fucking giant and he's terrified.

Right, right.

So his penis has shrunk in terror, and that's Michelangelo showing that, yeah, that's.

Well, what happens?

And like, it was an adrenaline thing, isn't it?

The body, doesn't it remove blood from where it's not needed at the moment and puts it in, you know, like muscles for fight or flight and things like that.

Your body doesn't suck it up so that it doesn't get hurt in the battle.

That would be quite a bit.

No, no.

The actual penis on this statue is about six inches in length.

So, you know, it's not small by real terms.

But someone on Reddit called Bendy Bendy Spine

worked out that

in real life, if David was brought down to real size, he would be just under five centimeters.

And that means according to standard UK guidelines, he would be considered a candidate for penile lengthening surgery.

I noticed, though, he's converted it to centimeters to make it sound bigger.

Yeah,

there are a number of standard maneuvers you can pull, that's sure.

But also,

it's not up.

No.

It's flat, yeah.

But

is that the measurement under which you qualify?

I don't need to ask.

I'm not asking, in fact.

So let's just.

You know.

I'll send you a link to that.

Thank you very much, Chis.

It is time for fact number two, and that is Anna.

My fact is that having 10 fingers and no thumbs is very useful for playing the piano.

Okay.

Yeah, so if anyone's got that in the audience, then take up the piano.

Okay, so how do you end up with?

So this is a condition, a rare condition, sure, but it's where you can be born with no thumbs.

And instead of thumbs, you have fingers.

And I just find all this stuff so interesting.

So it's little tweaks in our genes.

So we have genes that specify like the position of things in our body, and they're called Hox genes.

So that says, like, your arm goes on your shoulder, your foot goes on your leg.

It's like funny bones, that book.

It's kind of like that, the Hox gene.

And if the Hox gene gets a mutation in it, then you might end up with something in the wrong place.

And so if there's a particular mutation, you might end up with a finger as your thumb.

And I happen to read two accounts.

One is of a woman who had this five-finger trait in 1957.

I actually initially read this in a book called Quirks of Human Anatomy, an Evo-Devo look at the human body, which is so interesting and I would recommend.

Anyway, yep, she said she didn't think of it as a disability, it didn't hold her back in any way, and actually it meant that she played the piano more easily.

And then there was a Reddit AMA quite recently with a man who has the same symptom.

And again, he's a professional musician and he said, it makes me better at the piano.

Really?

Now I know they don't know how good they would have been at the piano if they'd had eight fingers and two thumbs, but wait hang on.

Have you got two joints?

You've got

I think it varies a little bit, but one of them had one of them was opposable and the other wasn't.

Because some people get

this is a triphalangeal thumb, that's what it's called.

And it's where your thumb has three phalanges, those are the bones inside your fingers, instead of two.

So it might give you a longer thumb, but it might also give you a weaker thumb, and often those are not opposable, which is a pain.

That is a pain.

So, it's useful very much on piano, as in on a flat surface, but not on

another environment.

Like a guitar.

Which is weird because this guy also played the guitar and said it was useful for that.

It sounds like he's a really sunny guy.

Just really making it work.

It's amazing.

In the report about this woman in 1957, the woman with the five fingers on each hand, it said that she came into hospital because she was giving birth, and that's when they documented her.

And then it said her newborn was the same.

So, we think the trait is probably genetic.

That's a proper scientist.

It's not like those chances who found a shoe in Michelangelo's house and said, oh, well, we think he was five foot two, actually.

Do you guys think a thumb is a finger?

No.

No.

Yeah.

For the audience, is the thumb a finger?

Yes?

No.

Is it not?

Pretty evenly.

Pretty evenly matched.

A little bit more.

Well, it's a good job you guys aren't finger surgeons because this is a problem in finger surgery that some surgeons count a thumb as a finger and some don't.

And if you say to someone, you need to remove the fourth finger on someone's hand, there have been cases where people have counted from the thumb when they shouldn't have done and they've taken the wrong finger.

Stop it.

Really?

That's happened.

And we tested so much stuff as a species, we kind of had like the label to go, that's crazy.

Well, there are a few papers that have talked about this, and most of them say we should call them index finger, ring finger, all that kind of stuff, and that will remove any problems.

But as late as 2009 was the last paper that this came in in the Canadian medical journal, who said, we really need to stop saying fourth finger or third finger or whatever.

I mean, for instance, you could be counting from this way or from this way.

Yeah, yeah.

No, who starts with a little finger?

That's like people who say potato.

They just don't exist.

Or Michelle Angelou.

Yeah, exactly.

Yes.

They should have this little piggy system.

Yeah.

Like which little piggy?

The piggy who had roast beef.

There.

We all know which piggy we're talking about.

It's not usually toes.

God, you're a terrible surgeon.

Great news, we've got both little piggies.

Won't be needing those middle fingers again.

What?

Back in the 19th century, they used to use fingers as a way of determining quite a few medical things.

And one of the things was, are you dead?

How did they do that?

So one of the things was there was a guy who was a French doctor, Leon Colon Jules.

God, it's like being on the banks of the Seine, isn't it?

It's

lovely.

I can't say it collange.

It reads like colon juice.

I can't.

Colangeuse.

Do you want me to read out your facts?

Yeah, yeah, please.

Leon.

Leon Smith.

Yeah.

His way, he believed, of confirming if someone was dead.

I think they were quite nervous about actually if someone was dead in a coma, if their stats were just lower, we didn't have the technology, was to take a finger.

he would take their finger, and he would put it in his ear,

and he would listen for a buzz, because they sort of thought that the body just emitted a buzz when it was still alive.

So he would sit there, and he would take their finger, put it in his ear, and say, no, he's dead.

But wait a minute, fingers don't emit buzzes.

So does he just think that everyone's dead when he puts a finger in their ear?

I mean, you know, this is a time where he was developing a theory, and obviously he wasn't someone.

I do know that this is about when they didn't know whether, they didn't really know about the pulse and brain activity in the way they do now.

And there were competitions to see which doctors could come up with a guaranteed way of determining whether the brain is.

Yeah, well, actually, I think we still don't really know when the brain is dead compared to the rest of the body.

Yeah, but they did have, and this was one method, and they had, another was to put an insect in the patient's ear, I think, or nose.

It must have been like, who can resist going, ugh?

If you don't know that, you're dead.

And then another finger-based one from the 18th century was if someone was in a coma or potentially dead, you would cut their finger off.

No.

Yeah, and the idea was you'd cut it off and they'd be like, whoa!

And they'd either wake up from death or from a coma.

So that was another method.

Yeah.

Do you know, just speaking of bodies giving off buzzing sounds, I remember reading ages ago, you know, tinnitus?

Yeah.

Obviously, is when you can hear a buzzing in your ear.

Some people have a form of tinnitus where they emit a buzzing.

So if you get really close, as the ENT surgeon, you can be like, yep, you're right.

You've got tinnitus.

That must be really annoying.

And isn't that insane?

Crazy.

Wow.

But

I wouldn't hear your tinnitus and go, God, I got tinnitus because I was sitting too close to it.

No, you would.

You'd be able to hear it.

I would confuse it as my own.

No, because I would leave the room and then you go, God, it's so weird.

My tinnitus only appears when Anna comes in.

I do usually get a weird headache when you are around.

That's perfectly normal, sir.

Can I tell you about Joe Swarbrick?

Yeah, Joe Swarbrick.

Joe Swarbrick was a Belfast man who lost a finger in the luckiest way imaginable.

Oh.

Okay, so one that he wouldn't have otherwise needed.

I actually don't know that.

Oh, okay.

No, I like your thinking.

A lucky finger to have lost.

It's more about the circumstances under which he lost the finger.

And he's called Swarbrick.

That won't help you.

Are you sure?

I don't know.

I was thinking people used to be named after things that they'd done, and he may have sworn at someone with his middle finger, and then a brick took it out, it's gone.

Brilliant.

I've missed the theorising.

No, that's not it.

He was in a job where he only ever had to count to nine.

Yeah, that's it.

So he was trying to travel to Canada.

Okay, is that a clue?

Fairly.

Oh, barely.

Is this something to do with bears?

No.

Okay.

And he and his brother

wanted to go with his brother from Belfast to Canada.

Yeah.

Okay.

And he found a job on a ship.

Oh, Titanic.

Titanic.

He found a job on a ship.

But sadly, at Southampton, there was an accident in the engine room, lost his finger.

They had to kick him off the ship, and they said, and take your brother with you, you, too.

His brother escorted him off the ship.

And that ship was the Titanic.

Wow.

Why did the brother have to go?

From the version I read, unclear.

Hang on.

I guess.

Are you?

Wait, you've got a brother, Dan.

You're working with him on a job.

His finger in an awful accident gets chopped off.

Yeah.

He needs to be escorted away from where you're working on the job.

You'd be like, well, mate, I still want to do my holiday, so.

Hang on, is it.

You'd go with him, wouldn't you?

Is it on launch day?

It's out in Southampton at that point.

Yeah, yeah, so it's just before it was about.

about it.

Just before it's really.

You would have got on, wouldn't you?

Oh, it's the Titanic.

I'm going to.

Send a postcard.

How's the finger?

Yeah.

You won't send a postcard, you know.

And then actually.

Spoiler alert, Anatoshinsky.

Okay, yeah, that's a good story.

And then he was in the Navy in both World Wars, and he lived until the 50s.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, yeah, he was injured in the Second World War as well.

He was really, yeah, he was very...

So he went back to sea and still risked his life then.

Wow.

And after that, very impressive.

And the brother?

This guy's getting shafted and more shafted than this story.

Why?

He's kicked off his job because his idiot brother loses a finger.

Next fingerless guy goes on to World War Hero.

He's written out of history.

I'm sorry.

Jose Warbrick himself did get an OBE for his work, not even in the war, just being a great guy in shipping.

So yeah.

No word on the brother.

That's a fucking rough deal, man.

You've really taken sides of which brother you are.

Yeah.

That's it.

You're the brother here.

Stay on the boat that's going to sink.

That's what I say.

Wow.

Do you guys know what kind of finger a mascalitzane is?

Say it again, mascalitzane.

Mascalitzane.

No idea.

Mascalitz.

You're not going to get it.

Is it like an animal finger, or is it a.

No, it's not.

I'm just going to tell you.

It's a finger that's under your armpit.

Oh.

And it's sexalous.

Come here.

Can you beckon with it?

Yeah.

Because that is the greatest finger to have.

I have to.

This is awful, but I have to explain for people listening to the podcast what just happened.

Andeen is giving me the come to bed finger underneath his armpit.

I haven't been so aroused since I saw that smile on Henry's face.

Oh, dear.

Oh, gosh.

No, it's not a means of seduction, and I don't know why you think exposing your armpit would usually be a means of seduction.

Well, normally, if you're getting to exposing your armpit, things are getting pretty hot and heavy, aren't they?

What?

Do you go to the beach and go, wow, these people want it?

Normally in a three-piece tweed suit, you know, I'm heavily dressed down for this.

You cut the holes, don't you?

And then it's arms off if you like someone.

It's nothing to do with that.

Is that another genetic quirk?

No, this is actually something in ancient Greece.

And I came across this in a study that was called armpitting among the ancient Greeks.

And basically, it was where if you'd killed someone, then you would cut their finger off and shove it under their armpit.

And we're not quite sure why they did this.

We think maybe it's either offering it to the gods as like a sorry, I killed this person, please forgive me, have their finger thing, which seems a bit kind of on the nose.

Or it means that the dead person can't take vengeance in the next world because they don't have a finger.

Can you point out the guy who killed you?

No.

Anyway, this this was so common, also known, that there was a specific word, which was masculitzane, which literally means stuff under the armpit, which refers to fingers under an armpit, fingers tucked into an armpit.

Oh, sorry, mascalismata is the stuff under the armpit.

Maskalitzane is to put a finger under the armpit.

Wow.

Do you know what animal has the longest finger?

Is it the um is it the Madagascar, the aye eye?

The aye, you've got it.

So if you ever see an image of an eye-eye, they're like a really cute little primate thing, but they've got this really, really long finger that's almost as long as their probably their whole head, maybe a bit more even.

And the interesting thing about that is they love to pick their nose.

And when they pick their nose, they go all the way in.

Oh, right.

And no one could work out exactly what was going on because where does your finger go?

If your finger is, let's say a human finger, it's three times longer at least, and you're putting it all the way up your nose, where is the finger going to end up?

A bit bit in the brain.

In the brain.

Or in the eye side.

Well, exactly.

That's what you think, right?

So they did a CT scan on an eye eye who was picking her nose.

And they turned out that actually it kind of goes into the nose, through the sinuses, and then down into the back of the throat.

Wow.

And this is...

You can get rid of phlegm as well as snot.

Is that what it's for?

It's almost like that.

Almost as disgusting as that.

In fact, perhaps more disgusting than that.

Basically, they think that what they're doing is picking their nose and then they're eating it, but they don't have to go through the mouth.

Oh, brilliant.

So it doesn't get stuck in their teeth?

Secret bogey eating.

Time-saving.

I would argue not that secret.

It was secret until those bloody scientists came along with their CG scanner.

What a great scam!

Rumbled.

We need to evolve that.

We will eventually, socially, so that you'll never know who's eating their bogeys and who isn't.

And we will no longer be socially shamed.

They will no longer be socially shamed, those people.

It is time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in the late 1950s, a woman called Cougar Annie put an advert in a newspaper looking for a younger man to marry.

But that isn't why she got her nickname.

She was just really good at killing cougars.

There she is on our screen for people at home.

She was one of the most badass people that I've ever read about.

She lived on Vancouver Island.

Long story short, we'll get into it all, but basically, she was married to an opium addict and she lived in Vancouver.

And to escape the opium dens of Vancouver, you know, those famous opium dens of Vancouver, her family moved to this really remote area of Vancouver Island.

And she spent her whole time clearing the land, so getting rid of all the shrubbery, getting rid of all the any kind of wild animals that came to protect herself and protect her family.

She often had to kill them.

And according to reports,

obituaries and stuff like that, she definitely shot at least 60 cougars in her life, mostly in self-defense.

But then later, the government started giving money to people who did it because they wanted to have more humans living in that area.

So she was making money from it as well.

Some contemporary obituaries said that she shot more than a hundred cougars in her lifetime, and she also got 80 bears as well.

But yeah, she was basically going to this area where no humans lived and she was just trying to clear the area so she could live there.

And so her husband dies, she has three kids, and she decides, I want to look for another husband.

So in 1936, she advertises.

Oh, this is, sorry, there are two separate occasions on which she advertised for a younger husband.

Yeah, this is the first one.

But she used the same

advert both times.

Exactly.

Yeah, 1936, the Western producer, which is where she advertised it, she said, BC widow with nursery and orchard wishes partner, widower, preferred, object, matrimony.

And someone, she married someone, right?

And

she had a few marriages in the end.

She lost the husband that she had from the 1936 advertising in 1942 when he accidentally shot himself.

Allegedly.

Allegedly.

Yeah.

He was dressed as a cougar at the time, though, wasn't he?

He was, yeah.

There were suspicions.

Yeah.

And so then, and then she re-advertises, as Andy says, with the exact same wording: copy and paste for a new husband.

Yeah.

So good.

When you've worked on the wording, it's clearly done the job once.

Yeah.

Use it again.

Did it work?

Hard to say, because he was indeed a younger man, 12 years younger, was it?

The last husband.

The fourth husband, but he was also not very nice.

So I think he was a drunk and he stole from her.

And then eventually, and you probably read more about this, apparently he attempted to run Annie off a cliff in order to take over her farm, and she chased him away with her shotgun.

She did, that's what happened, and he never came back.

And then she lived on in the homestead into her 90s and carried on kind of working on there, living off the land, kind of selling bits and pieces.

She also set up a post office in the area.

There was no one else there.

And so basically, she would be able to get all these stamps in, and then she used the stamps to pay her bills.

It was like a bit of a scam.

But yeah, and by the way, a lot of this time when she was clearing the land and trying to get rid of these wild animals, she was pregnant.

So between 1915 and 1931, which was when she did most of the work, she gave birth to at least 11 children.

So I'm just saying, Anna, nine months off.

But maternity leave conditions weren't as beneficial in those days.

You know, if she'd got full salary for a few months, then she would never have killed a cougar.

She wasn't killed during the...

No, she does sound remarkable.

They paid a lot of bounties, didn't they, for killing cougars back in the day?

They did.

They were trying to sort of tame the frontiers, effectively.

And so there were like 200 professionals in the USA in 1930 and loads more.

Those were the federal ones, and there were loads of other state ones.

People like Cougar Smith or Ben Lilly, who hunted cougars with a knife, which I respect a bit more.

Okay.

I think, you know, that's giving the cougar a fighting chance.

Yeah.

It's not as efficient, is it?

It's like if I did this podcast every week, but I decided to find all my facts from the local library only using books between 1812 and 1829.

It's like, how interesting that you do that.

You're not nearly as good at the job.

I'm pretty sure you've just described how Andy finds his facts.

Dan, can you not spoil my fact about the Prince Regent today?

On one occasion, Annie heard her dogs barking outside.

It was the middle of the night.

Obviously, she's in the middle of nowhere, so there's no street lights or anything like that.

She went outside, she could hear a commotion, she got her gun, just shot into the darkness, and then went back to bed.

And then when she woke up, she saw that she had actually got a cougar with her gunshots.

What?

Just very impressive.

Wow.

That's amazing.

Canada was wall-to-wall cougars at the time.

So it's less impressive than it sounds.

You could miss.

It was, yeah.

So she's not the origin of the word cougar to mean a woman who

came in the well after she died.

Yeah, that was sort of 90s.

They think it might have been 1999, which seems quite early.

There was a website called cougardate.com, which was specifically for, yeah, for women of a certain age, looking for men of a younger age.

That was the idea of that.

I mean, it's definitely that.

There are some etymologies lost in the midst of time where we don't know the sort of, but I think we can say for sure.

I must say, I actually read some articles of the people who set up cougardate.com, and they said that they'd heard the name mentioned through their friends earlier, sometime in the 1990s in Vancouver.

so Vancouver, which is where Cougar Annie was from.

Absolutely.

Maybe.

Cougars themselves are not cougars.

Really?

So actual cougars, the cats I'm talking about,

females reach maturity at two and a half years of age and males at three.

Yeah.

So do you see what I mean?

Yeah, they don't go for...

They don't go for younger males.

Yes.

Do you know what?

I was so glad, just because it confirmed something that we've always kind of thought.

You know how cougars have all these different names and you're never sure what's what, like a puma, a panther, a mountain lion, a catamount.

What the hell is going on?

What are all these cats?

And they're all the same thing.

And it does have the Guinness World Record for the most names for a mammal.

Yeah.

So there you go.

And that's 40 according to them.

Surely

humans have more than 40 names.

I'm sorry.

Cool dude.

Awesome.

No, I mean actual names.

We're thinking like Dave,

David, Tara.

Like, humans have, there are more than 40 of those.

If I was given enough time, I could think of more than than 40 names.

I'm just saying it's the non-human mammal with the most names.

No, no, it's not, because they also have their own names.

You understand?

There's a different meaning to the word name, right?

Some cougars are called Jeff.

She's back there now!

Yeah, ridiculous.

Some cougars are called Jeff.

No, the names are incredible.

Like, I'd never heard the name catamount, which means cat of the mountain.

But they also get called the deer tiger, the purple feather.

I'm not sure how many people are using purple feathers.

Purple feather.

mountain screamer,

which I love.

You wouldn't call an ambulance, but you'd say, there's a purple feather coming out of me.

It's the purple feather.

It feels like you'd use one of the other ones.

Do you know how you defend yourself against a cougar?

We should say, because it's useful.

I would run.

I would try and run.

Don't run.

Oh.

You're dead.

Okay.

Okay, no, no, you're dead.

Dan and Anna have got a guess.

Can I have another guess?

Yeah, give James a quick guess.

Okay, let's say you've magically been resuscitated.

Play dead.

Play dead?

Yeah.

You're dead again.

What?

Sorry.

She played dead.

Well, so I can't run and I can't just stay there playing dead.

No, that's right.

Shotgun.

Shotgun, that's the

cougarana.

No, it's basically don't turn around and don't look away.

Make yourself big.

Oh, the ace of base defense.

Stand your ground.

You know, like stand on a rock, bear your teeth, shout anything to frighten it and scare it away.

Basically, and I've thought of a mnemonic for this, which I think might be helpful for listeners.

So just remember, if it's a mountain lion, don't be lying down.

And that's the the useful, like.

What if it's an actual lion?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I thought you were going to say opera singing, sing opera at it.

Ooh.

Yeah, because it was not on my list.

There was a case of a woman who was being stalked by a cougar, and she started hiding and she didn't know what to do.

And she just got up and started just singing opera.

And the cougar just went, whoa.

I'm with the cougar there.

Opera is awful.

Actually, cougars really hate podcasts.

Really?

Yeah,

this is quite a recent study done in California.

Which ones?

Name and shame.

Yeah.

Is it off-menu?

Come on.

And do you mean it makes them angry or they just don't want to be around it?

No, it puts them off their dinner.

Oh.

So let's say you're a cougar and off-menu comes on.

And who's that?

James A.

Caster.

He's talking about his food and stuff.

And they would just look at their kill, their deer that they've killed, and just go, oh, I don't really fancy that anymore.

In actual fact, the study is to check how they react to humans more generally.

Mostly men, yeah.

Mostly men.

You're saying it's not a study about whether there's an untapped podcast market out there.

You astonish me.

They wanted to see how they reacted to humans talking if humans are nearby, and what better way to do that than talk radio, podcasts, that kind of thing.

So they played some chatting humans, and they just left their food alone and just went off.

And the problem with this, this is really important.

So if you are a cougar and you kill something and you don't eat it, then that means you have to kill something else because you have to eat that, right?

And so this is the fact that fear really changes ecosystems.

If an animal is really scared because there's humans around, it actually affects the ecosystem in ways you don't expect.

As in loads of the prey will get killed.

It's not just that the cougar itself is scared.

Wait, sorry, the prey will get killed because the cougar has to go and find something else.

Yeah, because it gets put put off its food, so it needs to go and find something else.

And then another podcast comes along, maybe Chris and Rosie Ramsey, start chatting to it, and then it has to go and kill another animal.

Nightmare.

We're putting nature off its food.

Yeah.

It's awful.

If I'm ever attacked and just go, hello and welcome to another episode of Ah!

Can I tell you another record that cougars have got?

Oh, yes.

This is another Guinness World record that cougars have got.

I'm going to quite directly.

Mountain lions' large hind legs have greater muscle mass than their front legs.

This enables them to jump up to 18 feet into a tree.

So they could leap over the statue of David.

Yes.

Yes.

The highest jump on record for any mammal.

Any mammal.

They could just jump over and lick off that bees.

Was recorded for a puma or a mountain lion, which jumped seven meters, 23 feet, straight up from a standstill.

I worked out they could jump into the top of an open top bus if they were walking alongside it.

God.

Really?

This is so amazing.

Like I read another claim made by the US Wildlife Authorities.

They could jump over a school bus the long way round.

Like front to back.

Wow.

So what's the distance they can get?

Long.

It's long.

I've just named a load, like a load of, like.

The distance.

So now I've just named a load of statistics.

It's 40 feet.

40 feet is the statistics.

Okay, 17 feet by long is what we're saying.

Yeah.

45 feet long.

Can I just ask a quick question?

Yeah.

Because this bothers me about these kind of stats.

What is the difference in length between a school bus and a bus?

I wonder if it's slightly slightly an evil can evil thing, because a lot of stunts were about leaping over back-to-back transport.

No, but they never said school buses, they just said buses for evil can evil because they weren't afraid that evil can evil was going to eat their children inside the bus.

Whereas they always say school buses, if it's a slightly threatening animal, because it's like it will leap over it and then come in the front door, buy its ticket, and eat your kids.

You don't have to buy tickets for a school bus.

Yeah.

There's

just all the faster to get on with eating your children, my dear.

But they also save human lives, cougars.

More human lives than they end, probably because they don't really kill,

they don't kill many people at all.

Very, very rare to get attacked by a cougar.

But what they do prey on a lot is deer.

And deer caused 1.2 million car crashes in America a year and killed 200 people.

And they did a study which looked at if you were introduced cougars, how many people they'd save.

Because they've eaten all the deer, which are hitting the cups.

It's a tough sell, though, isn't it?

Yeah.

When you've got this animal that could jump over my school bus, come in, buy a ticket, and kill all my kids.

Are you like, yeah, but he's going to eat a few deer?

Yeah, it is.

All right, I need to move us on to our final fact of the show.

Time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy.

My fact is that nobody knows how large the world's largest crocodile is.

What they should do is get a cougar to jump over it and.

Alright.

Here's Cassius.

So on the screen is a very large crocodile.

Huge crocodile.

He's called Cassius.

He's the largest known crocodile because he's the largest crocodile in captivity.

He is.

Approximately?

Approximately 18 feet.

Which means if you stood him upright.

Yes!

That is amazing.

I want to see that show where you've got one cougar, one statue of David, and one enormous crocodile.

God, I didn't notice that until now, now.

One or five, if you're listening.

This is big bugs.

Yeah, and this is the thing, he's been estimated.

They're not sure exactly how old he is, his keepers, because they took him in about 40 years ago, or 35, and they believe he might be 80.

Some keepers think he might be up to 120 years old.

Yeah.

Old crocodile.

And he was last measured in 2011 at 18 feet.

But even then, when they took him in, he was missing bits of his snout and his tail because of fights or accidents or whatever.

And no one has tried to measure him since then.

And he's probably grown, but just, you know.

Because I think they grow their whole lives, don't they?

Crocodiles.

Exactly.

So he's probably grown, but they really don't want the admin of measuring.

Yeah, he's really terrifying.

He's so huge.

And he is terrifying.

I mean, I was thinking, what you don't want to hear about a crocodile is how his carer describes him, the guy who looks after him, who's a guy called Tootie Scott, which is a funny name.

And

Tootie says he still has a lot of spark in him, which is not what you want at all.

He says, because most crocodiles are quite disinterested, you know, they just sit there like a motionless lump.

But this one, when you walk in, Cassius, every time he sees you, he wants to come up and say good day, and his eyes,

his eyes light up.

Tragically, 2D Scott was actually called 3D Scott until an accident in the pen.

He's terrified.

He's met a load of celebrities.

Cassius.

Yeah.

Queen Elizabeth II?

Really?

Xi Jinping, King of Thailand?

They're not so much celebrities as heads of state.

Scott Morrison, who's not a head of state, he's the head of government.

Queen Elizabeth was the head of state at the time.

But nonetheless, I love that.

Oh, God, that seemed so important when I said it.

And as the words would leave my mouth, I thought, who gives a toss?

Has he met Kim Kardashian?

No data, don't know.

Might have done.

So he hasn't been the longest for that long, has he?

The longest crocodile.

Because there was another crocodile who I think died in 2013, who was called Le Long.

Oh, yeah.

For so long, they added an extra L and O to the beginning of his name.

They're just so astonished every time they see him.

They go, he's Le L Le Long.

Anyway, he was 6.13 meters, a little bit longer, than Cassius.

And he was caught in 2011.

I think these are taken into captivity when they're dangerous.

So he'd eaten some fishermen and a girl, I think.

And so...

Which

a black mark against your name, I think.

Yeah.

And so he was hunted.

And actually, Le Long, when he was hunted, it took over a hundred people to bring him onto land.

He was really aggressive.

He sort of broke his restraining ropes twice.

And he was named after the crocodile hunter in the area whose nickname was Le Long.

Oh, okay.

Fuck yeah.

Le Long died didn't he?

He did.

Lo Long died.

And I imagine for the obituary they would have gone with so long Lo Long.

If you have a baby crying, let's say on a speaker,

then a crocodile will run very quickly and aggressively towards it.

To change it or feed it?

I'm afraid not because then they start biting the speaker.

They're really attracted to the sound of primates crying and human babies crying the same way that bonobos might or chimpanzees might.

And probably because they hear

a baby crying, they think this is an easy meal.

And what do these crocodiles think of the rest is politics?

Would they engage with it?

I read about that study and the most amazing thing is that they can tell the difference between how upset a baby is more than you can and then they'll respond accordingly.

So and the way they tested this, which I quite like, is by recording human babies screaming at different levels of emergency.

And obviously you can't torture a baby for science these days.

So instead, what they did was...

And I said with a faint tang of regret in your voice.

They recorded babies at bath time when sometimes they cry.

And then when they get vaccinated, when they cry in a bit more of a

needle, yeah.

Yeah, it's a bit more of a someone stabbing me

kind of cry.

And the crocodiles swim more vigorously, more fast, towards the speakers that emit the vaccination cry.

And they can tell a sort of frequency difference that even we can't.

Crocodiles, anti-vaxxers.

That's what we're

taking from that.

Knew I never liked them.

Can I mention very quickly, we're talking about crocodiles.

Can't not mention the great Steve Irwin.

Thank you for the

silent respect.

Crocodile hunter.

Yeah, he was a crocodile hunter.

But he had a Australia zoo, and that was his big thing.

He used to jump on a lot of massive crocodiles.

And one of the things which is said about him, and there's a tiny bit of question about it, but a lot of people say this is true, is that he had a Galapagos tortoise inside Australia Zoo.

And the previous owner of the tortoise was Charles Darwin.

Isn't that insane?

Oh my god, that's so cool.

So she was called Harriet.

She survived from the time of the Beagle expeditions all the way through to Steve Irwin's zoo.

Just to give you the idea of the span of time.

And it's quite nice, because Steve Irwin was definitely a huge hero of mine.

There is a minor planet out in the universe now named for him.

So out there somewhere is a minor planet called Crikey.

Something clever that crocodiles do, which is really mean

and evil, is they, well, I'll tell you what they do and you'll tell me why.

They lie underwater, and allocators do this as well, and they just have a little bit of their head sticking out, and then they put sticks or branches on their head.

What are they doing?

The leering human children who like to play pick up sticks.

You're very close, and that could be a secondary purpose.

Oh, they're pretending to be a bird's nest, so a bird will land on them and delete them.

You're basically between you, you're correct.

A human baby flies down

and picks out one of the sticks and then says, Jenga.

You've gone the wrong way.

It's to trick birds into thinking that they're sort of a tree, because they look quite tree-like, don't they?

They look like branches.

And try and go and collect their sticks to make their nests with.

So then the bird will go and land on them to pick up a stick to make a nest.

Snap, you're done.

Dinner.

Do you know how to measure?

This is for alligators.

I hope I'm allowed a sort of slight curveball.

How to measure an alligator alligator if you see one in the wild.

So it's possible to measure an alligator in the wild, but it's not possible to measure this crocodile, which is in captivity.

Good point.

I suppose if you're in the wild and you see an alligator and you think, I wonder how big that alligator is.

Okay, so you want to see.

But you don't want to go up to it with a tape measure.

So you see something else around it, which you know, you throw your iPhone at it.

That's it.

The iPhone lands on it, and you work out how many iPhones it is.

That's exactly it.

Actually, you have to find an old pair of its shoes in its

nest.

Crocodile shoes!

That's what the song's about.

No,

it's so easy, and I just want to get another little tip.

You just approach it at night with a torch, and then you locate the midpoint on its skull, and you estimate the distance to the end of the nostrils.

Don't wake it up.

And then every inch of that distance is a foot of the alligator.

Okay.

So like if that distance is six inches, you've got a six-foot alligator, and so on.

Okay, that's clever.

Crocodiles do a crazy thing where they, you would think, in any scenario where they live, they're like the dominant species, right?

And they're not.

Often, hippos, if they're around, are much bigger.

So, talking earlier about crocodiles running to a baby monitor and hearing baby crying, one thing that hippos tend to use them as is basically like a baby chewing toy.

They'll go up, and while the croc is just laying there, they'll go and they'll start licking it, they'll start chewing it, and the the crocodile will just lay there as if nothing's going on.

Yeah, because if it makes any movement, it might antagonize the hippo into eating it.

So it just has to sit there and be like, this is a baby hippo, though, that's chewing on it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's just, you just has to lay there and just be sucked on, licked on, just take it.

Well, not everyone have a Henry Hoover, you know?

We've all got

on some.

I need to wrap us up very soon.

Oh, just some things on big animals.

Okay, yeah.

As soon as that's what this was about.

I was looking looking at big, small animals.

So the largest ant.

The largest ant in the world is the safari ant, which is five centimeters in length, which is the same length as David's penis if he was human-sized.

If he was human-sized, okay.

So if you can imagine a human with the world's largest ant, where your penis would be...

Yeah, yes.

That's David.

That's really helpful.

Thank you, Dave.

And the world's longest insect in total is a stick insect.

They found one in China, which was 24.6 inches in total length, which means that you couldn't legally use her as a rounder's bat.

So good.

Anything else before we...

Anna, you all go?

I've just, all I can think about now is giant house spiders because I've had a real problem with spiders lately.

So we've been talking about big animals, but they are the biggest.

And

genuinely, there was one in my room the other day and after an hour and a half of staring at it I was on my own um and eventually managing to kill it with the longest object I could find, me at one end, it at the other.

And they don't die obviously so that its legs are still wriggling.

They don't die, they die, don't they?

They can't, they it's not possible to kill them.

Um and so

they don't die.

And it was two in the morning, I was on my own, this newborn baby was next door, mine, my newborn baby was next door and asleep and you know how like the worst thing that can possibly happen if you have a baby is that it wakes up, and then

its legs, there were three legs still moving over the thing that I crushed it with, and I screamed at the top of my lungs, no, no, no, you can't be alive, you can't be alive, please die.

And um,

anyway, so I looked up how to deter spiders, and you can draw lines of chalk everywhere.

So, apparently, they don't like the taste of chalk, and they taste with their legs.

Like, it's all over the place.

I thought you meant like drawing an outline, like a murder.

merchant.

Whoa, this person kills spiders, so let's get out of here, man.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening to our 500th episode, everybody.

We can all be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland, James.

Matt, James Harkin, Andy, Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna.

I'm uncontactable.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah, podcast at QI.com and Andy will pick it up and he'll text me and I'll ignore it.

Yeah.

Or you can get us on a group account at No Such Thing.

You can also find our website, no such thingasofish.com, where all of our previous episodes are up.

You can find merchandise and so on.

Thank you, everyone, so much for being here in the room tonight.

Thank you, everyone, watching us from around the world.

We really appreciate it.

We're going to be back again next week with episode 501.

The story continues.

The facts keep going.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.