481: No Such Thing As Taming A Plane

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Hi, everybody.

Dan and Andy here.

Just to let you know that our special guest on this week's fish is none other than Anne Miller.

You'll remember Anne because she's been on loads of times before, though she hasn't been on for a little while.

We are so excited to see her again.

Anne is a brilliant children's author.

She's written Mickey and the Animal Spies, a series of children's books all about animals, spying, and codes.

Fabulous.

And as you're about to hear, she is obviously a magnificent researcher and elf.

So we hope you enjoy this episode.

That's right.

We also just want to quickly say happy birthday publication to Andrew Hunter Murray because The Sanctuary, yep, has just been released in paperback.

This is such a brilliant book.

It's a book that is so brilliant that Waterstones have actually decided to make it the thriller of the month.

So you're going to see it everywhere in bookshops.

And it's a book that's been called many things by many great people.

It's been called Imaginative and Intriguing.

The Sanctuary Sucks You In and Doesn't Let You Leave Until the Very Last Page by Anthony Horowitz.

It's a brilliantly clever thriller by a brilliantly clever author, says Richard Osman.

They are all telling the truth.

Oh, Dan, thank you.

Yeah, guys, it would mean the absolute world to me if you picked up a copy of The Sanctuary in paperback.

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It's about billionaires, it's about mysterious mysterious islands, it's about the near future.

If you're looking for a gripping summer read on the beach, I think this could be the one for you.

That's right, and it's also brilliant.

So, do make sure you go and get a copy from our own personal Sunday Times best-selling author here on the show, Andrew Hunter Murray.

As I say, available in all good bookshops, both online and in the real world.

Do pick it up, help our buddy out to get back in that Sunday Times chart.

All right, on with the show.

On with the podcast.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Ann Miller.

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

Here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is

Anne.

My fact is that Anne of Green Gables is from the same island as the world's largest potato sculpture.

Welcome back, Anne.

Are you suggesting a link, a causal link between the two?

Between great literature and great snacks.

Oh, that's

a large potato, a great snack.

I'm not coming around the house to Super Bowl Sunday.

So I don't know really who Anne of Green Gables is.

Shall I give you a potted Anne of Green Gables 101?

So Anne of Green Gables is one of my favourite books of all time.

It is set on Prince Edward Island in Canada.

I was given it when I was very young and the setting is just completely beautiful.

So the thing about Anne is she is an orphan.

This brother and sister called Matthew and Marilla live at a place called Green Gables and they are convinced to adopt an orphan boy to help them on the farm.

But when they go to collect the boy, it's Anne.

She's a chatterbox, she's imaginative she gets into endless scrapes but they love her and she sort of builds this new life on prince edward island and when i was a little bit older my godmother sent me a postcard from green gables and it was as if someone had sent me a card from narnie i didn't understand how she'd been somewhere that was in a book

and i remember being so confused and like it was like oh had a nice time at green gables and i was like how did you get there saw a really big potato did she say that as a

she did not i found out about that more recently um but yeah so the island because lucy mold montgomery who wrote the book, lived there, Anna set there.

There's lots of

places in the book is actually there.

And it's a sweeping series.

There are several books beyond Anna Green Gables.

And I

was planning the trip of a lifetime to go and see Prince Edward Island for summer 2020.

So I didn't make it there.

But while I was reading about Prince Edward Island, I found out that they also are the home of the Canadian Potato Museum.

And outside is a 4.3-metre-tall potato.

We had our picture taken.

And I just, I almost want to go there as much as I want to go to Green Gables.

It's got exhibitions, it's got potatoes in tiny coffins to show the different diseases they can have, it's got a potato-themed gift shop, it's got a potato-themed restaurant, so you can have baked potato with cider crisps, you can have potato skins, potato soup, and what do you reckon you can have for pudding?

Oh, I know that they make potato fudge there, yeah, with mashed potatoes,

potato fudge,

with mashed potato.

Wow,

I did have a quick look at TripAdvisor for the potato museum,

pretty overwhelmingly good.

Yeah, I think it's also a tribute to Canadian positivity

and politeness.

But what have you?

Which one have you picked out there?

Oh, you know, obviously, I was looking at for the negative reviews.

A lot of actually, there are very few, which is a tribute to the potato.

Yeah, but let's hear them at the second half.

Yeah, well, there's one, there's one three-star review which sniffs that the big potato could have been a little more realistic and something.

The TripAdvisor review does say suggested duration one to two hours for your visit, which I think by the end of the second hour

you'll be running short

of things to do.

Um, but they have they do, you're right, they have absolutely loads of um stuff.

They say it's a living testament to the humble tuber and those who have tilled the soil in its evolution.

Did they have any two or one star reviews?

They had so few, actually, that I think it would be unrepresentative of me to read any out.

And I didn't write any down because they weren't very amusingly written, but uh, it is, there's an answer.

It's clearly a very popular place.

The museum was started by a guy called Dr.

Lloyd George Dewar,

who was a politician.

And I tried to find anything interesting about him,

which was really tough.

I even went into like these, what they call it, the websites that tell you about your family.

Oh, like yeah, yeah, ancestry.

Yeah, like an ancestry one.

And I found out that his great-grandfather died at the age of 101 in the town of Dull in Perthshire.

The only interesting fact about that.

That's all I could find.

Yeah, that's great.

Amazing.

How heavy was this sculpture potato again, by the way?

Oh, they didn't say the weight.

They don't listen to the height.

They don't list the height.

500 thieves.

Because I found the world's heaviest potato and was just curious.

Well, it's going to be a lot less heavy, I assume.

We're saying heaviest, real potato.

No, it's a real potato, which was just under five kilograms.

Nice.

And that.

Well, that, no, that's.

I know.

Well, this is the thing, because potatoes aren't water-bearing

organisms like your squashes.

That's the way they think.

Squashes are kind of a ton.

And the biggest potato.

But it's grown by friend of the podcast, Peter Glazebrook, who we've we've mentioned several times before because he's done things like the longest bean or the biggest biggest marrow or whatever yeah yeah he's he's got a load of those records he's a UK guy yeah yeah he is

pushing him into the building sometime shake his hands

unfortunately he won't fit through the door

has been the other way you know oh that's a good point but what about the nine-foot apple

I wanted to find a bigger potato to kind of spoil this fact yeah because that's my job on this podcast right so I looked looked at all the other potato museums around the world to see if they had one.

There are surprisingly quite a few.

There are quite a few.

But I found in the Idaho Potato Museum, they have the world's largest Pringle.

And we have perhaps a Pringles controversy with this.

A further further.

A further, because Andy weren't here when Sarah Pascoe was on, but she had five Pringles controversies.

Yes.

But this is the world's largest Pringle, but it's flat.

Oh.

It's It's not the shape of a Pringle.

So do you call that a Pringle?

Was it made by Pringles?

It was made by Pringles, yeah.

Is it made from the material of Pringle?

It's made from

stehydrogenated potatoes.

It's just not got the shape.

That's an interesting thing.

Because it makes a Pringle.

Is it the shape or is it the Pringle?

Do you reckon it's a Pringle if it's not Pringle-shaped?

I think if it's made by Pringles, it's a Pringle.

Do you?

What about the box that's made by Pringles?

No.

The box is also a Pringle.

It's a cylindrical Pringle.

I'm going to double down on this.

Yeah.

Okay, fine.

Sadly, I do agree.

I think it is a Pringle.

If they say it's a, I think they have naming rights.

So I can't call it a Pringles controversy.

Oh, well, I think we've certainly argued about it just now.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

It's controversial that you're trying to introduce it as a controversy.

Certainly.

Okay, great.

Well, email, Sarah.

I did find out about the world's another non-largest potato in the world.

And this was, you may well have seen this in your research as well, which was nearly a knockout blow to Peter Glaze Brooks' five-kilo potato, potato, which is, I think, about an eight kilo potato.

Yeah, it was found by a pair of farmers in New Zealand who the Guinness World Records people wrote back to them when they wrote in saying, we've got this.

They said, in fact, it's a tuber of a kind of gourd.

And DNA testing actually revealed in true Jerry Springer style.

It wasn't a potato at all.

It was called Doug.

Doug.

Exactly.

Doug.

Samantha Baldwin, who's a researcher at the New Zealand Institute for Food and Plant Research, presumably having a morning off or something.

So we tried running multiple tests on samples of Doug, but he just wasn't behaving like a potato should.

Because he wasn't a potato.

I like the idea of like vegetable espionage though, like posing as a potato for many, many years.

I mean, it looks like a potato.

And the finders, they've made a little trolley to drag it around on.

It's quite sweet.

I have a couple more contenders for giant potatoes.

Oh, gosh.

Because I was a little bit concerned when I was double-checking that there was a giant potato in Cyprus, which is two foot taller, but sadly or luckily for me um was chopped down by vandals

it wasn't me who did it

was it just done this week really just after you said this

you are looking tanned

yeah and you look so gleeful at the moment i mean

no jury would acquit you at the moment i can't check out if you're sad or yeah if you're hysterical with

I'm very sad.

No, sorry, the one in Cyprus was two feet taller, but you're not doing a good impression of someone who hasn't chopped down a giant potato, put it that way.

Well, I definitely didn't chop down the one in Australia.

So they have the big things, I'm sure.

Yeah,

they have the big potato, but theirs is lying down, so it's long.

Did someone knock it up?

It did for a while have a face, which is sort of mildly terrifying.

And the face has been taken away.

I'm not sure if it was stolen.

Wow.

Any more for potatoes?

No, how about Prince Edward Island?

They make about a million tons of potatoes each year.

They're big breed.

Yeah, a quarter of Canada's potatoes, despite it being a very small Canadian province.

Yeah, one of the smallest, I would say.

A lot of the potatoes on Prince Edward Island are grown and processed by McCain,

who are the world's largest manufacturer of frozen potato products.

You all know them from their oven chips.

Yes, yes, big fans.

They were founded by two brothers called Harrison and Wallace McCain.

And like, it seems every single company that's founded by two brothers, they got into a massive legal dispute, and then one of the brothers had to leave and took over a thing called Maple Leaf Foods.

Oh, rival!

I thought you were going to say there's a potato equator around the world,

like the elder brothers.

Yeah, but no, isn't that surprising?

It does seem this thing that brothers start companies and they fall out.

Was it

Adidas?

Adidas and Puma, yeah.

And Puma, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And right wicks and left wicks.

Wow, an oasis.

An oasis, yeah.

Yeah.

So it's a very big island as well.

It's 175 miles long.

Oh, did I just say it was a small one?

It's a small province, but it's a big island.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Because Canada's massive.

Canada's

big.

I think everyone forgets how big Canada is.

Just shout out for Canada there.

But did you know we have a lot of listeners on Prince Edward Island?

Really?

So I had a little look in the inbox, the fish inbox, podcast at QI.com.

We have had so many messages from people over the years saying, I'm I'm on Prince Edward Island and I would like you to cover it.

And here are some facts.

Okay.

So I've got a couple for you.

Right.

Ryan Barrett, who works for the PEI Potato Board.

Wow.

Big shout out to me.

Yeah, I mean, here at Nemil a couple of years ago, this was when Anna was in charge of the inbox.

Ryan, I don't think you got a reply.

So I'm here to write that wrong.

Anna really hates Prince Edward Island, doesn't she?

Every week she goes on about how much she hates it.

I have to cut it out.

He just said some cool place names they've got.

They've got an Alaska, a Belfast, a New Zealand, a Toronto, a Norway, a Crapo,

which is French for toad, I didn't know.

And a Surice, which is French for mouse.

Cool.

And he also has a fact about Anne of Green Gables, which is that because of Anne of Green Gables, Prince Edward Island gets thousands and thousands of Japanese tourists every year.

And that's because the book was the first book taught in English in Japan after the Second World War.

It's a big cultural influence.

Yeah, still to this day.

It's ginormous.

And they have schools named after it there, the School of Green Gables.

They've got the University of Prince Edward Island School of Nursing.

And apparently adaptations are just always on TV, just non-stop on TV in Japan.

I've always heard that.

I never really understood why.

And I read a really cool article by Margaret Atwood to celebrate Anne's 100th birthday.

And she said she'd done an event in Japan and she'd asked the audience.

And her translator had written down the responses.

And one of the big reasons is the author who translated it in Japan was already very beloved, so sort of had an audience there.

And there are many things about the book that just really resonated.

So Anne was an orphan, and there were sadly a lot of orphans in Japan after the war.

She's got a huge passion for apple blossom and cherry blossom, which is very popular in Japan.

And sort of her work ethic.

Like, she's not scared of hard work and she's very thoughtful, but she's also quite forgetful, but it's because she's daydreaming, she's not lazy.

She tries to do her best, and she does wind up in scrapes, but it's never

she means well.

I did read one place that said that America kind of pushed Anne of Green Gables after the war because they thought it would help kind of as American liberal propaganda.

And they thought that this kind of book, which showed that women were more free thinking, might get them away from some of their old ideas.

So that was one of the, supposedly one of the reasons.

She sounds like a

pretty cool character, the author, Lucy Maude Montgomery.

When she was a kid, she had two imaginary friends, which is really cool.

So she was at her grandparents' house and

they had a bookcase and it had glass uh reflection doors on the bookcase and she could see herself in the reflection so the one on the left was a reflection of someone that she called katie maurice and the right was lucy gray and it was both her both her reflections but she created them as her imaginary friends yeah very cool idea um and i love that her titles of her books all sound like she's still workshopping the of her title this is emily of new moon pat of silver bush kilmany of the orchard one more to add to that so there's six in the anne of series and then there are two that focus on her children.

And the second one is Rilla of Ingleside, which is her youngest daughter.

So spoiler alert, she grows up to get married and has a bunch of children.

But what I didn't realise when I was younger is I followed the books through, and you see her grow up.

And I hadn't clocked that as she grew up, the year would get so much closer to the war.

So it becomes a book about the First World War.

So Rilla of Ingleside is about war coming to Canada,

which I wasn't expecting.

And so two of her children end up fighting in the war.

Her daughter Rilla ends up adopting a war baby and looking after him.

And it's just very odd to take a character who you know from a beloved children's book and put them in World War One.

I think this about, it's a slightly different example of it, but there is an episode of Fraser where Martin Crane, Fraser's dad, has just watched the Austin Powers film.

And it's very weird thinking of them in the same conceptual universe.

Because there's a bit where Martin keeps on saying, Shaggedelic, baby, yeah.

And it really takes you out of yourself.

All right.

Yeah.

It's quite amazing that she gave over the trademark, basically, to Anna Green Gables, to not only her daughters and the heirs, but to Prince Edward Island as well.

So they've got the trademark, which means that anyone who works on the island is allowed to make their own sort of products, their own merchandise, and sell them with no worry of the estate coming at them because they are the estate, which is really cool.

It sounds like it.

I mean, possibly, you might have to pitch and say, yeah, you couldn't have Anna Green Goebbels, for instance.

Oh, yes.

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

My fact this week is in 1952, a cowboy successfully lassoed a plane as it flew past his house.

His house?

Yeah, so he was working at this house.

He was working with his boss.

I have a question then.

Yeah.

Successfully lassoed.

Yeah.

Does that mean he got the lasso around the plane and then the plane flew off with his lasso attack?

He tamed it.

He tamed it?

Yeah, yeah.

He ended up riding the plane.

He broke it.

You know, he made it

submissive to him.

That's Andy's got it right.

And the plane lives happily in his garden to this day.

Yeah.

No, this is

the basic story is that he was at this house, he was working as a cowboy, and this plane just kept flying really low over the house and kept going by, and you had no idea what was going on.

It turns out what was going on was the pilot on the inside was trying to drop a love letter to a girl who lived inside the house and flying Kai, he was trying to get her to come out to see the love letter being dropped, right?

But this cowboy gets pissed off.

So he gets out his lasso.

It's a three and a half meter long lasso.

And as the guy is scooping down, he's going like, well, you know, he's got to drop the letter so it lands on a good spot.

Absolutely.

So he throws the lasso at the plane.

It manages to collide with the propeller, catches onto it, and snaps off and gets tangled up in the propeller.

So the pilot has no choice but to turn around and quickly land the plane.

Obviously, the cowboy was knocked onto his back.

It was not pleasant.

Did the guy in the plane survive?

Yeah, he did.

And actually, years later, when he was 78 years old, there was a photo of him with the propeller with the lasso rope still wrapped around it.

And did he get the girl?

I couldn't find that bit of the story.

Yeah, great question.

Can I just say, everyone in the story is an idiot.

Not the girl.

Yeah,

why isn't she coming out of a house?

How would she be going to come out?

There's a plane flying apparently two meters above your house.

Show some curiosity.

Like, she's idiot three on the list.

Idiot two, I think, is probably the pilot

who's doing this mad, like, just send the card.

It doesn't matter.

Idiot one's the cowboy.

Why?

He could have killed the pilot and himself.

But it's a good point, though.

I felt sorry for the pilot because I thought he's trying to do something in secret.

Instead, his plane's fallen out of the sky and made a big noise, presumably.

But the post is pretty secret.

Yeah, this is not secret.

This is less secret, I would say, than the post.

It's not secret.

He's not trying to be secret.

This is romance.

This is...

Look, you can see me.

Hi, I've got a letter.

I I want to show you my love.

Is it like the 80s thing of turning up outside the house with a boom box?

I was just thinking.

Or the love actually thing of turning up with the cards.

It's exactly that.

The propeller kind of thing.

It wouldn't be good enough actually in that scene if a lasso just came over the sound.

Or if he's going around to loop the loop with a plane, and every time he does the bottom of the loop, it's another card.

Oh, yeah.

Sorry, forgot to say.

Yeah, no,

fools.

But anyway, this is a great story.

It's a very random story.

It appeared in a Time magazine article in a language that is just, it says, like, then a few years ago, some smart fellas bought themselves a little airplane and opened a flying club, just a hoot and a holler, from where the ranch cowboy.

This is Time magazine.

This is how they're reporting this story.

So, yeah.

Okay.

50s journalism.

Yeah, his name was Euclides Guterres, is how I'm going to pronounce that.

That's the cowboy.

That's the cowboy.

Yeah.

It's South.

Again, so little detail about this story, but it's the South Brazilian cattle ranches.

So I don't even think this is an American cowboy.

We're talking...

Oh, I thought we were in the USA.

That's what I that's what I initially thought.

I thought we were in Brazil and ancient Greece from his name.

Just on lasso's and lassoing things

I did find someone who lassoed cats.

This was a cat lasso artist from the Sakawa War.

She was called Miss Iris Davis.

It's a really nice story actually.

So lots of buildings being bombed in the Sakai War, lots of rubble, lots of ruins and things.

Also lots of cats, lots of people keeping cats.

And she was a volunteer worker for what something called the dumb friends league which is friends of cats yeah yeah exactly dumb as in i think they don't speak rather than stupid cats um but she went from she went from bombed house to bombed house with a cat lasso which is a very long pole with the lasso at the end rescuing cats from the wreckage can i ask scandy you know um lots of planes flying very low there dropping monsters off do you think a curious person would get out of the house and unlock the wonder what's going on there

idiots no no no no.

Sorry.

She claimed in 1940, November 1940, so I guess the blitz has been going on for a while.

She claimed she had rescued 600 cats from bomb buildings.

No one cuts, it was probably the same one.

Someone who's an unexpected cowboy, Osama bin Laden.

Turns out he used to walk around with a stetson on.

His favorite shows were Bonanza and things like Fury.

He had his own horse and he absolutely loved the world of cowboys.

Yeah, there was lots of stories because a biography came out where they said you would see Osama bin Laden walking around with his stetson on, acting all cowboy.

It's amazing it took that long to find and catch him, given that he was.

There can't be that many people in the Tora Barra caves with a massive stetson on.

Wow.

I don't know what to make of that.

I know, it's odd, isn't it?

But there's a lot of, so like Stalin, for example, if we're talking like bad people generally, massive cowboy fan as well.

Used to love watching Westerns, loved John Wayne movies, but also hated John Wayne because of his anti-communism stance.

And so actually plotted to have him murdered.

He ordered KGB assassins to go and try and kill John Wayne.

And Chairman Mao did that as well.

Chairman Mao hated John Wayne.

There's stories of assassination plot from, yeah, from Chairman Mao as well.

Are these all put out by John Wayne's PR languages?

Communist dictators hate him.

Find this one weird trick.

There's a really good, there's a Hollywood writer called Michael Munn.

I've read a couple of his books.

One that he did on John wayne he found that the fbi had discovered that there were assassins that were sent to hollywood to try and kill john wayne amazing yeah gosh do you know how many people you can fit inside a lasso oh well surely oh it's you have enough rope well the guineas will record for someone who's done it so it has to be spinning oh yeah was it thrown yeah yeah so it's like it's spinning and he's like gonna i would say actually it's smaller than you think i'm gonna say 20 people gathered in a tight as in that'd be very hard i think to let's say 20 people standing together even standing together okay i'm gonna say just going with my imagination here,

I'm going to say 200, and I'm going to say that the person was standing on top of a first-floor building, like the top of a school, massive lasso, and just managed to get the throne.

A school, specifically a school.

No other buildings have more than one story, as we know.

What I'm thinking maybe is maybe around 240 to 300, and they're all on the same plane, and it gets lasso.

Oh, very nice.

Well, yes, you were right the first time.

It's 13 or 14, including the guy handling it.

Oh, so close.

So he counts.

It's sort of, does he count?

Oh,

he's in the lasso.

Yeah, then that absolutely counts.

He's in the centre and he's lassoing around, and other people are gathering round him as he lassoes.

Yeah, I love that.

Does that count as lassoing?

Because you don't usually stand, say, like next to the wild horse and lasso yourself into it as well.

They do tricks, don't they, Lasso artists?

And I think this is kind of part of that.

As in, they like a skipping rope, you'll kind of lasso around and then you'll do jump pinning.

You're going to get letters from the cowboys

and the skipping people.

How dare you associate up with those hats?

I'll tell you what, if someone flies very close to the top of my house, then I'll look outside and put it.

Yeah, Marlborough Man.

One of the most famous cowboys.

Cigarette, actually.

Cigarette smoking Marlborough Man.

Yeah, Bob Norris was the original Marlborough man who never smoked cigarettes in his life.

He actively was anti-it, but he he was found because he was in a photo with John Wayne, who used to smoke seven packs a day.

And they saw him in that shot and went, hey, that guy looks like he'd be good for our smoking.

Weirdly, he'd actually been hired by Stalin to kill Wayne.

And then the film people got to him in time, the cigarette people.

I was looking at other big animals that you can lasso.

You know how many lassoes it takes to get a crocodile safely.

I would have said one.

I would have said one.

I'm going to say three.

Three, yeah.

Point points to Dan Triver.

So apparently, the way they do it is they lasso the top bit of the mouth, and they do it again with a second lasso.

I guess that's the most scary part.

And then they do one around the whole mouth, and then they tape the mouth to be so, so, so sure.

And then the advice was: if it all goes pear-shaped, run.

I was going to say, that's a lot of detail to get right three times round.

Like, we get the clippers sometimes to go to our gigs up the creek, and whenever the boat comes in, they always have to lasso the boat to the end.

And I always have a bet with whoever I'm standing with, are they going to get it on the first go?

Sometimes it's the third go, but the thing is, the dock's not going to eat you.

Whereas

a crocodile, yeah, that's that's a fine, fine time.

That's one of the first QI facts I ever learned: was that a crocodile can, what is it, it can bite you with the force of a truck falling off a cliff, but once its mouth is closed, it presents no threat at all because you can hold its mouth shut with your hand.

And so a rubber band, even just a rubber band, wouldn't be.

I think the scariest job is the person who takes the tape off at the end of the procedure.

I think that's the real hero.

And by that point, it's quite annoyed, probably.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Have you ever held a crocodile?

No, No.

No.

No, me either.

But my wife has.

My wife has.

I thought we were on the brink of an amazing Jane story.

I never had a bad thing.

No, it's not.

Yeah, yeah.

We went to the Everglades, and there was a baby crocodile that you could hold called Snappy.

Of course.

And Paulina held it, and I didn't have the guts to hold it.

How big was Snappy?

I would say about a foot and a half.

Okay.

Something like that.

Wow.

That's amazing.

I also did once played mini golf in a place that had crocodiles sort of roaming around the lake

yes yeah there's that there's that one golf course where the lake literally has giant snapping crocodiles which is amazing you just have to stay away from them basically yeah um okay we're in london now we are right no crocodiles no no crocodiles but some cowboys quite near here there is a secret cowboy town in the middle of kent have you heard of it really yeah it's called laredo it's founded in 1971 what and it they've got a blacksmith they've got an undertaker a tobacconist.

Like a working these or are they models?

It's life-size and it's kind of functional.

So it was founded by a bloke called John Truder, who was a pig farmer, and he just loved the Wild West.

And he just wanted to recreate the Wild West in his corner of Kent.

It's members only.

And they go there at weekends and they recreate life in the Old West.

Cool.

Yeah, you can get a half an hour train from London and arrive in Laredo.

And they won't let you in.

They won't let you in.

No, no.

There's like a random Wild West in Morningsides in Edinburgh.

Like it's just, you go, like, you go through an archway and it's just a Wild West, like behind a bank of some flats.

It's just there.

Oh, I read about it.

It was created by a furniture shop for some reason.

It's called the Great American Indoors, the shop.

And they made their own.

Yeah, it's not advertised.

Someone would say, Have you seen the Wild West?

And you'd be like, No, we're in Scotland.

And they'd say, Oh, it's just over there.

And you'd go and look.

That's so weird.

And that one you can just walk into.

It's like behind some flats, yeah.

Does the piano player always stop whenever you see one?

No, but there's like always these planes coming down with ropes.

It's very strange.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that one of the best ways to trick puffins to a new nesting ground is with mirrors because they like to be in groups and can't tell the difference between a puffin and the reflection of a puffin.

So they fail the mirror test.

They don't know that they are.

Yeah, the mirror test is a thing with animals that

some animals, if you show them a reflection of themselves and put a little mark on their head, they'll realize that it's them and they'll try and wipe it off.

Whereas most animals won't do that.

They won't see, they'll see a mirror image of themselves and think it's another animal.

And in fact, humans, my daughter only did it a few weeks ago and she's what 14 months.

So it's until that age is the first time you get to do that.

So babies don't know it either.

But this is all about a guy called Stephen Kress

and he was working about trying to get puffins into a new area.

In fact, they'd been in that area before but he wanted to get them back into that area on the east coast of America and one of the ways that he did that was by making these decoys.

You can make actual decoys of little puffins but one good way of doing it is mirrors because you can get multiple

oh yeah hall of mirrors like kaleidoscope stuff.

Yeah yeah.

Unfortunately they saw some of that were really tall some of that were really

this mission he was on because Stephen Kress sounds like a great guy.

He's been working on this for about 30 years, 40 years?

Since 1969.

It's a long career in puffinology.

And he, so he and his colleagues, they went to a breeding colony which was healthy in

Newfoundland, just Canada.

And they basically had to kidnap loads of baby puffins.

Yeah, the start of the story is a bit dodgy, isn't it?

It's a real villain-to-hero arc, I think he and his colleagues went on, because they start off as puffin kidnappers.

At the start, people are just like, what are you doing?

Yeah.

Killing all those puffins.

They shove them in soup cans, which i like to to transport them all the way to their new home and then but then then then then there's the the twist the character twist where he and his colleagues became puffin nannies looking after them breeding them up on this new island in maine and they put them in these fake burrows which they had dug right and they fed them they left fish in there and he constructed all these decoy puffins and then the the thing is that the puffins go to sea eventually when they become kind of teenagers they gain their independence they go off and then he waited for years hoping they would come back to the island because the question is would they go back to Newfoundland where their kind of genes say that they should be living or will they remember where they lived as babies and then come back to that place and in the end?

In the end they came back.

But I think only in the third year, it was a few years before they did and he was getting really worried and then eventually he built loads of decoys and that kind of lured them back.

Right.

Okay, that's very cool.

I was reading about Puffin's Ministry of Silly Walks.

So when they want to show that they're not anybody, because they live quite close together, they live in boroughs.

And so if you want to cross across, you'll probably cross lots of other territories.

And if you don't want want to start a fight, they do this, like, hey, don't mind me, walk, where they it's like they lower their head and they sort of walk quite quickly and try not to get noticed.

But if they're on guard duty, they'll stand outside their burrow nice and tall, and they'll sort of stamp their feet like an exaggerated like guard doing a march.

Wow, nobody else really like the idea of like, I'm on patrol and don't mind me, just over here.

That's great, that's really funny.

And they take over rabbit burrows as well.

I love that they don't even need to just dig their own burrows, they're just yeah, they can make their own burrows if they want to.

And actually, sometimes rabbits take their burrows.

There's a whole little ecosystem going on there.

I went to the Isle of May a few years ago, which is off the east coast of Scotland, and they've got tons and tons of seabirds, loads of puffins.

And there's certain bits where you cannot stray off the path because the island is just covered in puffin burrows.

So you've got to walk on the bits of the thing where it's safe, which is really cool.

Back to Stephen Kress very quickly.

He had a big problem with gulls.

Seagulls would attack the puffins because seagulls had been living in this this area long before the puffins came back.

So he tried a few different things.

He attracted terns, which are like bigger than puffins, but smaller than gulls, and they'll kind of attack the gulls to stop them from coming in there.

And he also had a thing called a death sandwich,

which is where his arc of being the evil puffin thief and then the nice puffin nurse, then at the end he becomes the gull killer because he puts these death sandwiches, which is some bread with something called stalicide in.

And starlicide is a chemical which is really toxic to starlings and seagulls, but not toxic to any other animals.

He would put those out, which would kill the seagulls.

Oh my god, where's his ark sitting now?

I'm really confused.

We were doing a fact about gulls.

It's not good.

Exactly, but we're not.

We're doing a fact about puffins.

Oh, sorry, my fat this weekend would be evil gull killer, Stephen Kress.

No, he and there are still, I think there are still puffineers, as they call themselves, who have to go to the island to keep it healthy for the puffins and and you know prevent the gulls from taking taking root there um and they you know they have to smash up their nests and they also i love this they have a robot mannequin which is dressed in a yellow coat and an arnold schwarzenegger mask right and they inflate that i know it sounds terrifying and they inflate that to um to try and scare off the gulls it's a scarecrow basically yeah but the only problem is that the gulls will eventually realize this is a motionless it's not an effective scary thing because it just sits there doesn't do anything so sometimes what the puffineers will have to do do is they will have to dress up they'll have to put on the yellow coat and the mask and then go around shooting gulls on the island to prove that it's a dangerous thing

so the gulls realize what they're doing i just i just can't help thinking what if arnold twerzen the go books a nice relaxing break to just puffins

islands off the coast of maine lovely

i know that's fair but that's what it takes to you know get puffins up and running again i'm i'm all for it i think there's a lot of like grey areas i'm looking after puffins because i was reading about

numbers are declining very sadly and there's some concerns that perhaps it's the food they're eating, they're not getting the right fish, the fish are getting smaller.

And there's one study where to do this, they would put up a massive net to catch a puffin, then take all its fish off them to examine the fish.

It doesn't say whether they gave the fish back.

Right, yeah, yeah.

Their fishing is amazing because often they will have sort of depleted the area that's closest to an island where they're fishing.

And so they have to go on these huge journeys in order to get the fish to bring back back for their starving kids who eat like four or five times a day.

I watched this footage, it's amazing.

It was a David Ashenborough, Planet Earth.

They fly 50 kilometers out to sea.

50 kilometers.

There's a whole group of them that just go in one go.

They dive down into the ocean and they have an amazing swimming ability.

They can swim for up to a minute holding their breath and they use their wings like we would use our arms if we were doing front crawl.

They make their way.

They can go 40 meters deep.

They come back up when they've caught a fish.

It's just one fish

in most cases in this footage.

They fly them back 50 kilometers again.

And then when they get there, very similar to the gulf.

Oh, the kids don't want to eat it.

No, they were just saying, no, I had fish yesterday.

There are birds, which are called optic skewers, who are waiting for them as they come back, knackered, and they swoop down and they steal the fish off them.

It's an amazing shot in this Planet Earth documentary because suddenly one of them gets back because a guy wearing an Arnold Schwarzenegger mask is suddenly shooting.

No, that doesn't happen.

But a hundred kilometre round trip and then the skewers come for one fish.

Are the skewers, they're sort of famously pirate birds, aren't they?

Exactly.

I think I might be making this up.

Do they squeeze other birds to make them vomit up whatever they've just eaten?

Oh,

that might be skewers, yeah.

There is a bird that does that.

The thing with skewers, well, you pronounce them skewers.

Yeah.

Skewers, skewers.

Skewers.

The puffins can carry more than one fish because they have skewers on their tongue, don't they?

They have spiky bits on their tongue that they can attach one fish onto each spike and then go down for another one.

But if they get attacked, that's a skewers crisis, you know?

Brilliant.

Lovely.

Thank you.

But part of the reason they're so good at swimming is their bones are denser than other birds.

They find it easy to swim, but they can find it harder to fly.

So did you read about these puffin patrols they have in Iceland?

These are definitely good guys, not a grey area for these ones.

So basically when the little pufflings, the baby ones, they use the moon to navigate, but the street lights can throw them off so they sort of crash land in the town.

And so the whole town is basically united to like save these pufflings.

They go out on patrol, they try and find them, and if you find a puffling, like you have to look after it.

So they'll take them to the cliff, and then they either will pot it down so it can like trottle on and catch the breeze, or you just lob it into the air and hope it takes flight.

Lob it into the air.

Yeah,

because they need to get the momentum to get up.

But you're catching it if it doesn't, right?

And no, it's going off a cliff.

What if it sprained its wing?

Hopefully, you check that on the way in.

I don't know.

I don't think these guys sound like an uncomplicatedly benevolent fool.

Why don't they they turn their street lights off?

That's what a real good guy would do.

I feel like the terminal velocity of a puffin

wouldn't be fast enough that they would die.

I think they might be alright.

Because they're quite small, aren't they?

They're really tiny.

If it's the babies as well, then they'll have a really low terminal velocity.

Maybe.

You can survive.

Like, didn't Gordon Ramsey fall off a cliff when he was looking for puffers?

The thing about Gordon Ramsey is his terminal velocity is famously low, isn't it?

Yeah, 85 feet, I think it was.

He fell off.

I imagine when he falls he's got like lots of flapping skin on his body and that kind of yeah he turns into one of those gliding parachute of

yeah why sorry why did gordon ramsay fall over cliff he was looking for puffins i'm i do you know what this is a story just in the back of my head uh i'm gonna connect it to puffins he was doing a documentary and he was looking at various islands and he was on the side of a cliff and they were filming him and he just fell 85 disappeared yeah and he fell dead and he survived yeah i don't believe that it's true is it yeah i think gordon ramsey is an honourable guy I don't see why he would lie.

Presumably, it's on film.

I think they never released it.

Oh, they accidentally turned off the film before he fell 80 feet and survived.

85, 85.

85.

What's that?

Sort of 25 meters.

Yeah.

It must have been a big patch of heather he landed on.

Or whatever it was.

It's a big pile of other TV chefs who have previously fallen down there.

He bounced off a World Thompson.

Fortunately for him.

There's a thing which a lot of people say about puffins, which is that they're monogamous.

You know, they have the same partner every year, and that's it.

I've seen that red though.

That's very nice.

Well, it turns out I think it is actually true.

Because a load of birds, it's not true.

Yeah.

And they they study um EPCs, extra pair populations.

That's the

I think we've mentioned this on the twice before.

But they did a study of Atlantic puffins looking at extra pair parentage, because now we've got DNA tests.

We can actually look sample species.

And they are basically monogamous.

They are

I know.

So, you know, no grey areas there.

No Jerry Springer and the Jerry Springer.

Every DNA test comes back.

Yep, it's all fine.

You are father.

Great news.

My current favourite puffin fact is that there's scientists creating sunglasses for puffins.

Okay.

Oh.

Because I don't know how this happened, but they had a puffin and they realized that its beak lit up under UV light.

Okay.

Oh, yes.

But the puffin was no longer alive.

So they're not completely sure.

if it's some sort of the way it decomposes or whether all puffins do this.

So to test it, they need to get some alive puffins and shine UV on them.

But that could hurt their eyes.

They got to design little sunglasses to amuse themselves.

They've made them aviators.

Okay, cool.

That's brilliant.

What did they find?

I believe still pending.

They need to

find a puffin, give it the sunglasses, shine the light, and then report back.

Because their beaks do change a lot, right?

There's an outer beak that falls off, the colour changes at different seasons.

The beak falls off in winter.

And it leaves them with what I found described in one article as a drab grey pecker.

My old Tinder profile.

That's amazing.

I know.

Young puffins are just completely grey.

Yeah.

It sounds so boring.

Just grey all the way through.

Grey beak, grey, everything.

I always thought that was your favourite fact of all time.

It was one of my very, very first facts I ever found for a QI.

Which one?

That a baby puffin is called a puffling.

But now, puffins,

I don't know if you noticed, they are on everything.

Puffins are everywhere now.

So many kids' books about pufflings.

And someone I know who works in publishing used to keep a list of which animals were on trend.

So you will have noticed it without realising.

So for a while, it was sloths, they were on everything.

Oh, yeah.

It was flamingos for a while.

Llamas used to have a phase where they were on everything.

And I even think puffins.

It's like children's books.

Do you believe that?

Just like also in paper chase or like on clothing.

If you just notice it in a case.

Yes, certain animals seem to have their moment.

And I'm not quite sure why or how, but they do.

But it's never the disgusting toad worm, is it?

It's never the like.

He could be spring 2024 and they're like, the penis worm, is it?

Yes.

And do you feel slightly responsible for that?

Because I think you're partly responsible for disseminating the adorable adorable puffling fact.

Pufflings.

Because that fact has come out of various different QI iterations.

I did put it in a lot of things.

Exactly.

Yeah, no, after all, there's tons of pufflings up on there, and they're super cute.

You used to get enormous flocks of puffins, didn't you?

In the UK as well.

So the island of St Kilda, this was two people called Herter and Dunn in 1897.

And they said that the puffins are in such numbers that clouds of birds sweep past us and make a sound like a whirlwind.

And another one said that it was it made a great cloud that perceptively interfered with the light of day

and that parasites fell off the birds as they swarmed over us, much to our discomfort and annoyance.

So you can imagine there's like millions of these birds just blocking out the sun and flying over you and dropping their ticks on you and stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

It must have been incredible.

Very cool.

In St Kilda, there was one man who caught 620 puffins in a single day.

Last noose?

Yeah, using a noose.

I don't know a rod.

No way.

Sorry to jump in on you there.

I didn't expect it was going to be that.

Wow.

Yeah, pretty much a lasso.

That's what they used to use, like these sort of like fishing rods, but with a bit of rope on the end.

That's what this cat lady was using in the Second World War.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

That's very good.

That's amazing.

There are some places where the puffins are eaten, aren't there?

Iceland?

Yeah, Faroe Islands.

Yeah.

Am I allowed to say I've eaten them in Iceland?

Have you?

Have you?

What did it taste like?

It was a long time ago.

Oh, it was the 80s.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not that long ago.

What did it taste like?

To me, I thought it just tasted like fishy, oily,

not chicken, but like...

More like fish than like meat.

Quail-y kind of stuff.

Like gamey, fishy chicken.

It's a grey area.

Why is it a grey area?

No, I guess everything we're saying about the puffins is sort of like, you know, you've got to kill them to save them.

They're much more in danger than they used to be.

So, yeah, yeah.

Back in the day, certainly back in the day when I was eating puffin that one time,

they were all over them.

But you couldn't.

So you were on St Kilda, weren't you?

And the skies were thick with them.

You were actually doing the role a favour, yeah, yeah.

I was so hoping that when you were grasping for what they tasted like, you're going to be like, a bit like panda, slightly,

like kakapo taste to them.

Yeah.

But that's, I mean, lots of places eat.

People eat meat and people eat the meats that are close to them.

But if a particular meat is endangered, then you change.

Exactly.

There was whale on the menu, which I didn't eat.

Does that help my arc at all?

Exhilarating, yeah.

So, what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

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

My fact is that trash talk works better on dance players than shot putters.

Call that a fact.

It begins.

It begins.

I should have known when I picked this fact.

Idiot.

That's brilliant.

Yeah, that's just a study of trash talk.

Why would that be true?

Well, this comes from a piece in The Economist, and it's all about sledging,

which is cricket-based trash talk.

And, you know, sporting insults, basically.

You dish out to people you're in a competition against.

And it found that there have been studies conducted which have found that trash talk is especially effective at distracting players if you're in a sport that needs fine motor skills or creativity rather than brute strength exhibitions.

So sports where you need to concentrate are much more vulnerable, which is why maybe cricket is

vulnerable to lots of trash talk.

Chess, you don't see a lot of smack talk in chess, yeah.

But you do, you get loads in.

I mean, it's weird because lots of sports have different tolerances of it, you know.

So cricket has loads of it.

Boxing has loads of it, although

you shouldn't need to do any trash talk because you'll try to hit someone hard anyway.

No, it's psychological.

The whole thing is a psychological warfare, right?

And it's a very skillful sport, boxing, I would say.

Is it?

Yeah.

I just thought you battered the other bloke, don't you?

Well, that's one way of doing it.

If you're a really good boxer, it's all about.

Isn't this why my boxing career didn't

soar like a puppet

and thudded like a giant potato?

Oh, no.

Yeah, no, that's a really good point.

In chess, I guess, there is a lot of psychological stuff goes on, but it's not necessarily

in basketball, it's a big thing.

And I grew up watching basketball, so you would always see it happening.

It's amazing when you see it happening, trash talking between the sort of top players in the league.

So, are they better at it?

No, they're sort of, it's just interesting watching them because they're all on mic, right?

Basically, no, no, you can hear, like, you can hear through the mics of the studio, it comes through, you know.

So, you hear them saying, like, oh, yeah, exactly.

You hear things.

So, like,

yeah, well, Shaquille O'Neal was up against, so Shaquille O'Neill, one of the all-time greats of basketball, against Kobe Bryant, who was also one of the other.

And he was overheard saying, Kobe, tell me how my ass tastes, as he was about to dunk on him, right?

Like, they say,

what does that mean?

Dunk on him.

Dunk on him.

It's fantastic.

Dunking is when

you bring the ball into the ring and you hold the ring.

Why is he tasting his ass when he does that?

Because he's going so high that the face of Kirby would be right.

And then there's this thing in basketball where then you make someone taste your ass after you've

scored a point.

Every day's a school day.

In off the rim.

Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

One thing they did with

this research you're talking about is they sat people at computers and you had to move a slider to a particular spot and see how many you could do in two minutes.

And as you did it, a little message would come up on your screen, supposedly from one of the other people doing the experiment, and it would either say, I'm smarter and faster than you, or let's see what happens.

Hi, friends.

And they found actually that people who got the negative messages performed better overall in that one.

I think this because it could spur you on.

You think I'm going to lose?

Well, I'll just show you.

Yeah, absolutely.

And And that's what seemed to have happened in that one.

But then they tried it in a task which was slightly more skill-creative based, and they found that people did worse and they were more likely to cheat.

Oh, yeah.

It turns it dirty.

So you're like, well, exactly.

I think one of them might have been the

study by Karen McDermott, who was looking into this from the University of Connecticut.

And that involved people playing Mario Kart.

And before the game, some of the people were insulted with various things like grab a straw because you suck

and so on yeah and she I think she had to pick quite carefully because a lot of insults might be either you know homophobic or racist or sexist or whatever so she had to pick a carefully delineated selection of insults which were cruel enough to sting grab a straw because you suck being one of them and uh the insulted players perform worse right and they also rated themselves higher as having experienced anger and shame oh no yeah but were they playing rainbow road

If you're playing Rainbow Road, you always experience deep, deep shame and frustration and rage.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, but does it make you play better or worse?

There seem to be slightly conflicting studies on whether

you're not gaming or not, yeah.

And that's similar to what you were saying.

I also read, which thought was a lovely point, that in a university study, you've got a university ethics code, so what you can sledge someone with is kind of very different to what you can have, like, a whole stadium chanting at you in a basketball game.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I also like the weird social side of trash talking as well within professional sports, which is, let's say, a younger player trying to trash talk and create a relationship of conflict, which would then be on the cameras, and it's a way of social climbing.

So, like, Michael Jordan.

Yeah, so Michael Jordan, for example, would never trash talk whenever he was having it talked to him by like a rookie from a new team because he thinks, I'll let my game do the talking,

and I don't want

you famous by trash talking with you.

So, let's not get that.

It's not worth it.

Yeah, I think it's worth us saying off-menu a shit.

Yeah,

Chris and Rosie rosie ramsey

yeah yeah yeah

yeah there's no point saying you know john's podcast about nothing john's podcast about nothing is good james i stand by i've been listening i get all my facts from john's podcast about nothing

shout out to john hello john

um my

one of my favorite uh sledges that i read was not so much a sledge but um as an afl player called stevie baker and apparently during a game, he leaned over to someone and said, Have you got a sausage dog?

And they spent the next 20 minutes just being like, What?

What?

What?

And they couldn't play.

It was the worst insult they've heard.

When it turned out that Baker has a sausage dog, he was just like,

just making chat.

Yeah.

This guy was like, he couldn't focus on the game.

He's like, what's he saying?

Why did you think?

Yeah, I mean, I

well, it baffled me.

Like, I've heard the phrase sausage dog before.

I know what that is, but because it was at a sporting match, I was thinking of a hot dog.

And we're like, what's a sausage dog?

A hot dog is a sausage.

What do you think?

I should swoop in and out fact you, but

it's all about distraction, isn't it?

It just reminds me, this isn't a fact, but do you ever watch that episode of Cheers when there was like a basketball player and he couldn't miss and he was amazing and he was winning the whole season?

And then he went to the bar and started talking about trivia with two of the bar flies, Norman and whoever else it was.

And they asked him how many rivets there were in the basketball stadium.

And he just, all all he could think about for the rest of his career was counting these rivets, and all he would do was walk around counting them.

He just couldn't play anymore because he was so distressed.

I happened to be in an exam once.

Almost that.

I was in an exam, and people would always write on these like rickety old desks, you only saw them at exam time.

And they would say, like, I heart so-and-so, all that.

Maths is rubbish.

And I was thinking of that.

You went to school in an episode of The Beano, didn't you?

Yeah, yeah.

I grew up in Dundee, yeah.

So, but I was sitting in the in my seat doing my exam and on my desk someone had written there were 32 black lines on the ceiling.

And so I look up and there are black lines really close together.

Never seen them before.

So of course I had to count them and I lost count.

So I'd start again.

Wow.

Do you think that might have been written by a crafty teacher trying to smoke out easily destruction?

I think it was one person in your class wrote it on all the other desks apart from their own.

I mean they would be top of the card and all the time.

I was waiting.

I'd forgotten that until now, but I can, yeah, I remember trying to count them.

How did your exam, go?

You'll have still passed, I guess.

Play very badly, I don't remember.

That's so funny.

I was looking because you talked about darts and shot putting, some trash talking in those spots.

And of course, we can't not talk about Gary Anderson and Wesley Harms.

Of course, we can't.

The amazing match when Harms, who lost 10-2, did an interview and said there was a fragrant smell that came from his opponent.

And he said, it'll take me two nights to lose the smell from from my nose.

Wow.

And he claimed that Gary Anderson had been farting throughout the match to put him off.

And then, obviously, they interviewed the loser first, and then they interviewed the winner, and they interviewed Gary Anderson.

And he said, why were you farting the whole time?

And he said, there was definitely a smell, but it was 1,010% not me.

It was definitely the other guy.

And Anderson said, you can put your finger up my ass.

There'll be no smell there.

What?

What is it with this sportsman?

Yeah.

Okay.

I mean, I believe the first guy, because that's a very high percentage.

So,

do we have trash talk at QI?

No.

What do you mean, really?

Do we?

What do you mean?

I just, well, so there was a study of Fortune 500 companies, and like, can you remember people being slagged off in that kind of gamesmanship way in the office?

61% of employees found they could remember trash talk within the last few months.

Yeah.

And I don't think we do sledging here, really.

I've got nine years' worth of.

Unfortunately, for you guys, it's on record.

Cue the the click.

This podcast, the whole HR exercise.

One day you guys are going to be called into an office, yeah.

One place where you get smacked talk famously is wrestling.

Yeah.

And I was reading a book.

It's called Everything to Play for, The QI Book of Sport by James Harkin and Anna Toshinsky.

Oh my goodness.

Sounds rubbish.

Well, I don't know.

It doesn't come out until October, so I don't know if it's rubbish or not.

But I suspect, the big names, I suspect it'll be quite good.

Give a fair hearing, eh?

But they argue in that book

that the earliest depictions of wrestling that we have, which are in the Egyptian tombs, they're quite similar to today's pro-wrestling.

So there's an argument that it could be that all the games were fixed because they were often shown as being one person from Egypt, clearly, and one person from a place that isn't Egypt, clearly.

And the Egyptian one always won.

And perhaps it was that they were fixed fights so that the Pharaoh would know that his people were the greatest in the whole world.

So you're saying ancient Egyptian pro-wrestling is fake?

That's what I'm saying.

Sorry, no, that's what James Harkin and Vala Toshinski are saying in their book, Everything to Play For, the QI Book of Sports out in October.

But the other thing is that there's a really early one, and there is some writing next to it.

And it's an Egyptian who defeated a Nubian opponent, and he says, Woe to you, O Nubian enemy, I will make you take a hopeless fall in the presence of the Pharaoh.

And so that's basically Smack Talk

from 3,200 years ago.

Tell me the flavor that you find in mine ass.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at James Harkin, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Anne, at Miller underscore Ann.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing.

And you can also get in contact with us

via our email, podcast at qi.com.

And also go to our website.

Check out all of the previous episodes.

They are up there, no such thingasafish.com.

And otherwise, come back next week.

We're going to have another guest.

Thanks for coming back.

And so good to see you again.

And we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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