478: No Such Thing As An Award-Winning Gecko

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Hi, everyone.

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

Before we get going, I have some news, and that is that we are going to do some live shows.

Now, this news will not be news to those of you who are members of Club Fish because you have already had your priority booking time.

But to everyone else, the tickets will be available on Friday, the 12th of May at 2 p.m.

UK time.

That is today if you're listening to the show the day it goes out, or it's a Friday in the past if you're not.

So the tickets are very likely to be available right now, and the way you get those is to go to no sixfingersofish.com forward slash Soho.

The shows will be at the Soho Theatre in London.

They take place from the 17th of July to the 21st of August.

It's going to be a whole lot of fun, loads of facts, loads of dorkiness, loads of special, special guests.

And as I said, if you want tickets for that, you can go to nositesfingersofish.com forward slash Soho.

If you're thinking, it's in london i can't get to there i live all the way in belgium then fear not because we also will be doing one show in belgium at the nerd land festival that will be with our old friend leven skyra and that will take place zondag

the the 28th of may uh which luckily i mean my i assume that's flemish uh it's not that good but luckily my diary tells me it will be on sunday the 28th of may and tickets for that are available at nerdlandfestival.be.

So I hope to see lots of you at some of those gigs.

But as far as today's podcast is concerned, it is a live show and it was one that we did at the British Library with the incredible comedy actor and genius that is Sally Phillips.

We did the show for the Fantastic Beasts exhibition at the British Library.

They wanted us to do a show all about animals and I'll be honest we stretched that a fair bit from time to time but we had so much fun i really hope you enjoy the show i'm sure you will and i guess what else is there to say apart from on with the podcast

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the British Library.

My name is Dan Shriver.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Sally Phillips.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the British Library's fantastic beasts collection originally included accounts of a nine-foot dragon terrorizing Essex and an army of horses that teleported to rural Wales.

And it was donated by the founder of the British Museum, Sir Hans Sloane.

Wow.

So he was a nutcase.

So here's the thing, right?

Hans Sloane, if you don't know who he is, he was one of the founders of the British Museum, an incredible guy.

He was a doctor.

and at the top of being a doctor, he was obsessed with collecting.

He collected everything, and that's what became the basis of the British Museum's collection.

He was a hoarder.

He was a hoarder, yeah.

I mean, he was a serious hoarder.

He had like a separate apartment to hoard in because it got too much in his own.

Yeah, and he...

How did he die?

Did it all collapse on him?

Yes, exactly.

A museum pillar took him out.

No, he was quite old, I think, when he died.

I think he was in his 90s.

He was in 93.

93.

Is this the bringer of chocolate, the man I know is the bringer of the hot chocolate to the United Kingdom?

Controversial.

Controversial.

He was.

And I think it's been claimed that that was something he nicked.

It was already in place.

Yeah, I think he was in Jamaica, maybe.

He was in Jamaica.

Early.

Yeah.

Okay.

And then it was a practice there.

He sort of grated cocoa with milk and cinnamon and stuff.

But I think

sorry to shit on him in his own home.

Well, the teleporting horse is better anyway.

It's way better, isn't it?

Yeah, so this is what I was about to say was all the collections that got handed over after he passed away in his will to be the basis of the British Museum's collection eventually became the British Library's collection as well.

And there was lots of papers, there was lots of physical objects, and a part of it was a collection of things called strange news.

He was obsessed with strange news, stories that would come out from France and Scotland and Wales of...

odd things that you know like um uh well like dragons like dragons yeah appearing horses and the he was the artifact version of no such thing as a fish Exactly.

Well, he's the yeah, he's the old me, I guess.

You have fewer links to the slave trade, we should say, Dad.

Fewer.

Fewer.

Yeah, so this big dragon that arrived in Essex, it was in a place called Henham, which is just north of Stanstead.

It's about two miles north of Stanstead.

And so what I like to imagine is actually there was like a time travel portal that came in, and it was actually an EasyJet flight coming in.

Maybe, I don't know.

But there's loads of other things that he claimed.

And the thing is, he went out to collect things from around the world.

But the reason he did that is because he thought it would help people to better understand God's design of the world.

And so, when he was finding this strange news, a lot of things he didn't believe in, but there were some things that he did.

So, he found a story from France where fist-sized hailstones came down and kind of battered everything and hurt a lot of people and killed a lot of crops.

But the only thing that was saved was a Protestant church.

Yeah, he thought that this was proof that you know God was saving them.

Yeah, this one's amazing.

There was a story, this is from Scotland.

There was a guy who died and he was in his home.

They laid him in state.

Is it in state?

What is it?

When you lay someone, sure, yeah, sure.

So he's laid in the house, he's in a coffin for people to come and see.

Oh, like a coffin, like a weight.

Yeah.

Yeah, a state is pretty fancy.

It's pretty queenish, isn't it?

Yeah.

You just said this guy was this

king of Scotland.

How long was the cue?

Yeah, yeah.

It was just a guy.

And

it was a town of Dumb Freeze.

Okay, Dumb Freeze, yeah.

So apparently, people went to visit him, and then it came the time where, okay, let's bury him now.

And they tried to lift him, and no one could lift him.

He was really heavy.

They just, they tried everything.

So they brought cattle in and they tied ropes around him and tried to pull him, and he didn't move.

And then the house burnt down.

And he remained as the only thing that was still there.

Wow.

He's like Arthur's sword in the stone.

He's the guy in the house.

Yeah, the corpse in the house.

Sorry, so he collected this story, but he didn't collect the guy.

No, no.

You can't collect the guy, is the point of the story.

So he had strict.

Were these kept in diary form, or like what kind of stuff?

No, no.

So

these were like weird pamphlets that used to get produced, and so people would go and buy them on the street and it would just say, strange news from Scotland.

So he's 1660, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yes, really early.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We should say that.

I know we don't need to say it.

None of the stuff is true that we're...

As in,

we keep saying, apparently, and then describing things which all of us are.

Some people thought it was.

Yeah.

That's true.

I'm just saying, if in like 400 years, they're discussing a copy of the Daily Star and saying, apparently, there was a...

There is an infinitely heavy man.

I think I remember that headline.

Yeah.

I did.

Actually, weirdly, I found a star headline in the course of, because I was researching animals which are not proven to exist.

And there was a headline in the Daily Star in 2008 Loch Ness Monster dies aged three million

global warming very sad yeah yeah it's interesting the whole thing of fictional fictional creatures isn't it cryptids did I did Italian Dante there were a lot of fictional creatures the Phoenixes in in Dante ate only incense and cardamom pods in heaven cardamom pods what's that it's that bit of a curry that you see and and you're like, oh, they've left it in.

Oh, wow.

No, it's the thing

in the jazz version of a cinnamon bun.

Right.

Yeah, there are three types of phoenixes, three types of Yetis.

Yeah, you found a Yeti that I'd never heard of, which is, what was it called?

Yeah, there's three types.

The Nyaomo, which is black, has black fur, and is the largest, and the fietest, which is 15 feet tall.

The Chuti, which is eight feet tall and lives 8,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level.

And the Rang shimbombo,

which is only three to five feet tall, and I think must have been just the mistaken is an orangutan or some kind of baboon, is it?

Yeah, the first one sounds like a gorilla, rang shimbombo, yeah, it does, it does a bit, yeah, yeah.

The first one you're describing

is a little bit of a bad luck.

Yeah, it's interesting.

The abominable snowman, I mean, they had some fur, didn't they, that they kept

various times over history they would analyse the DNA of and occasionally find it to be a horse or

a bear or a.

But they now think it is a kind of bear hybrid thing, don't they?

Do they?

I think so.

That's interesting.

Also,

I've studied this a lot, actually, Sally.

And

I'm trying to find the thing you haven't studied a lot.

That's everything else.

I can't believe we've hit on the one thing I've studied.

This is the dream come true.

But Brian Blessard, who is a very Yeti.

That's what he would say.

He would go for the Yeti, looking for the Yeti, and then the locals that he would meet in the Himalayas would say, Oh, it's a Yeti, and he realized that all the stories are him.

I read about quite recently in Nepal, they had like these, I think they were models or badges or some kind of publicity of the Yeti, and they sent them out.

And then all the locals were like, Well, the Yeti looks nothing like that.

What are you doing?

Because it didn't have any fur on.

And the guy who did it said, Well, no one knows what it looks like anyway, So that's one thing.

And number two, fur is actually really difficult to draw.

So King Kong, for example, not encrypted, I know a fictional

character.

Character.

Yeah, a crowbar.

No, we're talking about large, hairy,

fellas.

And King Kong is all of these three things.

But King Kong was originally based on a lizard.

Was it?

Yeah.

Godzilla.

No.

I think Godzilla's a bit later.

King Kong was based on the Komodo dragon.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

So the filmmaker behind King Kong was

Marian C.

Cooper, and he was friends with an explorer called William Burden, who had got permission to collect some Komodo dragons from the Dutch East Indies, as they were then, now Indonesia.

And until 1910,

nobody from the West had seen a Komodo dragon.

So they were cryptids.

They weren't believed in.

They had not been...

sighted, spotted, hunted, brought back.

There were no specimens.

And one was brought back by William Burden to the USA.

And in the course of the expedition, his wife was nearly

eaten by a Komodo dragon.

What, really?

And yeah,

she'd finished sort of setting a

photography, you know, like a photo trap up or something for it and was going back and came face to face with one and had a lucky escape.

Wow.

And so that image of this kind of glamorous woman faced with a terrifying beast, when William Burden brought back the sample that he got of a Komodo dragon, Marion C.

Cooper saw it and thought, what if it was a monkey?

And that,

I mean, because gorillas were also new in the USA at the time.

How old was his wife?

Oh, I don't know.

Because there is a thing when you sort of hit menopause, your maternal instinct goes really

into overdrive, and you start wanting to mother beautiful primates.

And yeah, lots of women get into trouble that way.

Animals and show business is a marriage made in hell.

We had an animal agent who came on to Smack the Pony quite a lot, Jackie.

She had quite a lot of, represented a lot a lot of animals that would come occasionally with need.

And she had a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig on her business card.

I went, oh, he's so cute.

You know, perimenopause starting, so cute.

And do you still have him?

She went, no, he won't bring in any work, so we ate him.

Wow!

I hope she said that in earshot of all the other animals.

You better do your job.

Yeah, it was terrible.

Apparently, the hardest animals to train are owls.

They just don't get it, apparently.

It's really interesting, isn't it?

You'd think that an owl would be smart.

No, dumb.

Cannot repeat.

Ravens are the dogs of the sky.

Penguins are aggressive, a bit of a nightmare.

And they have explosive poo.

Do you know this?

Pooh ravens.

Penguins.

The poo explodes.

So very difficult to.

Well, no, no, no, no, no.

You mean the poo shoots out?

It doesn't.

They don't lay it and then it just

explodes.

Imagine if dogs did that.

Every time you'd be walking through the park, it would be like walking through World War I, wouldn't it?

It'd be like the end of Black House.

Don't take your foot off it.

Don't take your foot under it.

Yeah.

They have lots of animals obviously playing each part.

The kestrel in Cares was played, do you know this?

You Prudy?

Played by three different kestrels called Freeman, Hardy and Willis

after the shoe shop.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

I presented the Palm Dog Award for Best Pay Money.

The Palm Dog.

The Palm Dog.

There is, you know, in Cannes, the Cannes Film Festival,

some British journalists 22 years ago now set up the Palm Dog rather than the Palm Door for the best canine performance.

And I was lucky enough

to present the award with Ronnie Ancona to Quentin Tarantino on behalf of the dog in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Oh, which is played by three dogs, two male dogs and one

male dog.

yeah.

So the dogs don't get to come to the ceremony or well, they didn't, the dog didn't come to the no, they found a similar breed and they brought that dog in.

Dog didn't know what was happening.

Oh, god, they

did.

Quentin urinated on the carpet.

It was fine.

But yeah, yeah, so obviously you have several.

And they use different animals.

So he was saying

Quentin.

Quent, Quentin, Quent

Tar.

My brother tried to license his image to put on lunch boxes, and I don't know why.

Anyway,

well, hang on, we need to.

But he said they had three different dogs, one girl and two boys.

And on the day, he thought the two male dogs were better, but then turned out the female dog was actually, when he got into the edit, he realised she was a much better actress.

Sorry, can we

try to

license Quentin Tarantino's image, famously a man who makes 18 certificate films for lunch boxes.

Children's lunchboxes.

What was he thinking the market?

I didn't ask.

It was only like a long time after he told me that that I realised that that was mad.

Tarantino's up there.

He's accepting

it.

I've got to get that image of him, like the Shea Guevara Tarantino picture.

I think they were putting that on stuff.

Oh, okay.

Is that a famous picture?

The Shaguevara Tarantino.

Do you know the one I mean though?

Don't you?

Okay, so I feel like there's a very sort of known...

I don't know if you remember.

Dan knows everything about Yetis and nothing about anything else.

Do you know, just going back to mythological creatures a second, the um, speaking of penguins exploding poo out of their bums, there's a mythological creature called Smooth, by the way, smooth.

Thank you.

There's a thing called the Bonnikin.

Have you heard of the Bonnikin?

Bonnikin's like a, it's it's like this beast which is like a half horse, it's got curved horns, and the way that it would, if it was being hunted by humans, the way that it would deter the humans is to fire poisonous shit out of its bum, right?

But

it can make a distance.

And this is what's most impressive about this thing that doesn't exist

is it can shoot it three acres.

That's a unit of area.

Area, not distance, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So does he cover the entire like one and a half football page?

I think it does cover three.

I've also read about the Bonacon.

Interestingly, Brian Blessed told me that he could do that.

When he was on Everest, he said.

Four acres.

Yeah,

he said he had a bout of diarrhea on Everest and the poo

shot out and it he said that his thing he often says is don't camp under the French because the fuckers will shit on you it that's that's his like that's like a t-shirt quote from him but again who's buying these obscene t-shirts and lunchboxes yeah I need to meet your brother actually

So anyway, the Bonnikin.

The Bonnikin is

a terrifying creature with three acre poisonous poo shoes.

And everyone that's depicted trying to hunt it all faces the other way, basically facing as ready to run because they want to escape the fiery.

Poisonous poo.

Yeah.

It's like fighting Medusa.

Have you come across, I'm sure you have, the fictitious creatures of lumberjack culture?

No.

It sounds amazing.

No, guys, settle in.

There are a number of books called things like Fearsome Critters about fictional creatures in lumberjack lore.

And they're things like,

well, my favourite one, let me look at my favourite one.

There's a splinter cat.

It's a regular cat, but with no logic.

Who's an indiscriminate destroyer of hollow trees, which was their explanation for

lightning strikes?

But

there was one that was

the lumberjack hunter that hides behind trees so you can't see it, but can only be deterred by loads of alcohol.

So the lumberjacks must be drunk

to keep safe.

That's good.

That's kind of funny.

That's good logic.

We're going to have to move on.

We've run way over.

Oh, no.

I was reading some stuff by Alien, the Roman writer and orator.

What?

Alien.

Aeelian.

I'm going to call him Alien.

Aealian.

Alien.

And he's got loads of amazing creatures.

He has the Buprestis, which he believed existed, which is a creature which, if swallowed by a cow, causes the cow to swell and burst.

He had a smooth lobster where if you saw it on the beach and then you marked where it was and you drove it to anywhere in the world, when you got back to where it was, it would be back there.

Whoa!

You sure wasn't teleporting?

Yeah.

And he said also that if a snake is eating something that's a little bit too big for it to swallow and it kind of gets it into the mouth and can't go any further, it'll stand straight on its tail and jiggle itself so the food will go down into its stomach.

Have you seen those videos of people hunting anacondas?

No.

No.

They put a leather trouser on

and stick their entire leg into the snake's hole.

Yeah they get swallowed.

Why would you do that?

And then they have a load

to catch a snake to I guess they're all fish.

You're the worm for fishing.

You're the worm.

I don't like this.

And then they haul you out and then and then kill the snake.

And the leather thing is so that the snake doesn't digest, so all the juices don't digest the teeth.

And maybe the teeth can't go through it or something.

Yeah, I think that is well.

It's just there was a guy.

Did you see the guy?

I think this is right.

He was attempting to be swallowed by a snake as well.

And it was going to be like a world record.

I think I'm right in saying this.

Guinness don't even accept, you know, heaviest cat anymore.

I think, unfortunately.

Didn't they?

No.

They found an infinitely heavy one in Dumfries today.

But this guy who, this was big, it was big, it was set up, it it was like with a nacho kind of thing.

Um, the snake started swallowing on the wrong end, so he went head first

and he wasn't ready for it, and so they had to pull him out and cancel him.

Did he not have his big leather hat?

They do, I mean, they catch fish like that sometimes in America, don't they?

It's catfish, and they'll get the cat to grab hold of their fist, and then when it's bitten, they pull it out.

It's called cat fisting,

is it?

Yes, yeah.

I'd rather be catfished.

So, what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

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It is time for fact number two and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in real life the very hungry caterpillar would have gone around head-butting his mates.

So these days, you know, all of these children's books are getting rewritten, aren't they?

Like Charlie of the Chocolate Factory and whatever.

And I'm calling for the very hungry caterpillar to be rewritten to be more factually accurate.

Because, according to the people at Florida Atlantic University, whenever caterpillars get really, really hungry and they don't have enough food, they'll go around looking for other caterpillars and then they'll attack them, knock them off where they're eating, and then they'll go in and eat their leaf.

No way.

Yeah.

And so that's what Eric Carl really should have been writing about.

It's a tougher

thing.

They don't eat ice cream.

They don't eat lollipops.

They don't eat salami.

They tend to only eat one kind of leaf.

Any caterpillar.

Whatever caterpillar you get.

This is going to sell big, James.

On Monday, he got in one fight and he ate one of the same kind of leaf that he's going to eat for the rest of the week.

They do occasionally, they occasionally get a species which will eat fruit.

So you might get one that would eat an apple, but it would only eat apple, and it would only eat the same apple, and it would live inside the apple it was eating until it was ready to eat.

I actually would really enjoy that book.

My partner, Ian, pointed out on the way here that Eric Karl was conscripted into,

yeah, he fought on the Siegfried line.

I think it was.

So yeah, he was an American born.

Yeah, at age 15, he was conscripted and he had to dig the trenches.

In my head, that's a bit like a caterpillar to caterpillars.

Dig?

That's what gave him the idea.

He was born in Germany.

The family moved to America really soon.

His early years were in America, certainly.

Then the family moved back to Germany in 1935 when he was about six years old.

So at the end of the war, he was conscripted to dig trenches and he was fired at.

He was 15 as well.

He was 15 years old.

And then, after the war, obviously, he had a horrible time.

His father was in a prison camp and had an awful time.

Then the family moved, he certainly moved back to America.

And then he was conscripted a second time to go to join the US Army and to go back to Germany again, where he was involved in...

Filling in the holes that he dug.

I actually feel quite bad that I'm shitting on his buck now.

No, no, no, no.

Well, I mean, is it any wonder that the follow-up book was called The Very Grumpy Ladybird?

And there was another one called Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?

I think.

He wrote a lot.

What do you see?

What do you hear?

Yeah, because, yes.

He was a great artist, and he was a good idea.

Also, an amazing scheme off the back of this book, because there was an Eric Carl museum that you can go to in America.

And in the museum, everything

is edible in it.

oh sorry well no no everything's edible that would be amazing yeah no every so like if you go to the canteen you buy a cookie and the cookie has a massive hole in it like as brilliant so this guy is saving so much money in his like there was i remember reading that the new york times when they removed the dot at the end of new york times that little on the headline they were saving $600 a year.

That little bit of ink costs them so much.

Imagine how much that bit of cookie that's missing is.

What do they do with those little bits of cookie, though?

Do they smell?

they sell the cookies yeah but imagine how you could ruin that museum by having eric cole's experience of warfare like a room that's yeah that's not the good thing to go in yeah trench digging trench room yeah yeah so i went on to his website because there is another problem in this book uh and

that is that towards the end the caterpillar goes into a cocoon uh and becomes a butterfly but butterflies don't go into cocoons butterflies go into chrysalises or caterpillars caterpillars Butterflies don't go into anything.

No, they come from chrysalises, yeah.

And so some kids have written in to him and said, well, why have you got a cocoon in your book?

And he replied, saying, well, there is a rare genus that lives in Siberia, North Korea, and the northern islands of Japan called Parnassian, which does pupate in a cocoon.

So

he was hugely relieved when he found

out.

What's the difference?

Sorry.

What's the difference between a chrysalis and a cocoon?

So a cocoon is made out of silk, and a chrysalis isn't.

Chrysalis is made out of nylon.

Yes.

But you get quite a lot of moths that make cocoons

and other insects, but butterflies don't.

But he did then say, actually, you know, caterpillars don't eat lollipops either.

This was just a.

It's a special caterpillar.

It's allowed to do what it wants.

It's a children's book, grow up.

And then another kid wrote in saying, caterpillars don't have noses.

Oh, get stuffed.

I mean, just, you know.

And he said, I know it has a nose on its face, but this feature grew out of my imagination.

Don't have shoes either, caterpillars.

I read an anecdote about him, which I'm only bringing it up because I didn't understand it.

So I'm hoping that maybe you guys will.

So he said that

he wrote all these books, as you were saying, where it was sort of like the next kind of, so the very busy spider, the very quiet cricket.

And in an interview he says that he found himself in the changing rooms after swimming and a satirical young fan suggested a book entitled the very slow penis

to the author's great amusement and I can't work out what's funny about that

what's a slow penis ask your wife

does it also have a hole going through it this book

just can't work out what a slow penis is.

Yeah.

Anyway, there's a slow Loris.

Well, you've struck us all dead.

Thank you.

Cat, no such thing on Twitter, if you want to let us know.

He got their hairs right anyway.

Butterflies and moths, I discovered, have nearly 10 billion hairs on them.

No.

10 billion, because these scientists have spent over a decade studying the surface area of animals.

No, the surface area of animals.

I mean, that's such a funny thing, I think.

So, a cat's surface area is actually like a ping-pong table.

When you cover your ping-pong table in cat, the bowl doesn't bounce nearly as well.

A sea otter has the surface area of a professional hockey rink.

Because they've got, is it the same?

Yeah, so many hairs, so many different hairs.

And a honeybee has the same number of hairs as a squirrel.

Really?

Wow.

What?

I know.

Yeah, the Georgia Institute of Technology, just astonishing.

That's amazing.

Yeah, they were running calculations to find the true surface area of animals because they were trying to work out ways of keeping things clean.

So dogs obviously shake.

Every animal has a different way of keeping clean.

Sometimes the fur helps them to stay clean, sometimes it doesn't.

Well, you must never shave a dog.

I'm sure you haven't, but don't shave a dog, even a really furry one.

It's not good for it.

I used to have a child.

they don't get a number one

yeah you should shave a dog number one you shouldn't you shouldn't do that that's bad

that's what you're saying that's what were you told the child child needs to go and have a number one

did you go down to the hairdressers and say short as you can mate

and watch out for the number twos they will explode

on on uh the idea of james this whole thing that you have about the uh yeah incorrect facts about children's books here's one thing that i this feels like a very QI thing, so I'm sure a lot of people already know this.

I didn't though.

A lot of kids' books, when there's a whale, let's say a blue whale or any kind of whale that's surfacing, there's always this beautiful spout of water that's coming out, and there's you know, that's it,

they don't do that.

What

I feel like I've seen that in real life.

You have oh, what?

Go on, go on,

ah, the riddler,

But his horse was called Thursday.

And the doctor was his mum.

If you see any kind of thing where it's a whale with a huge, like, yeah, the water coming out.

Spout of water.

Spout of water.

That is basically, according to experts, that is what would happen if a whale is drowning.

Oh.

They don't spout water out of their blowhole.

That's their nostril.

That's their breathing.

They don't put water out through the nostalgia.

So they do breathe.

When you see that, the breathing is moist air that's just collected inside, and that's what's coming out.

So if you ever see a whale where there's spouts of water coming down, it is drowning.

So what I've seen, I've not seen the drowning whale, I've seen like a water vapor whale.

Yeah, exactly.

You're seeing water vapor

and it gives that misty kind of look.

But properly.

Like a kettle, exactly.

But if you see a fountain, that's yeah, you go save that whale.

Wow.

Yeah.

So basically, what it means is every drawing of a whale in a child's book is dying.

Very upsetting.

Dying whale.

That's

very upsetting.

It is time for fact number three and that is

Andy.

My fact is that the false gecko which has the Latin name pseudo-gecko is a gecko.

There are ten species of false gecko.

They're all geckos.

Not one of them is not a gecko.

And that is just a name.

It's just a really

bad name.

Yeah.

I couldn't find why they're called false geckos.

I think maybe they were found and assumed to be something different.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but geckos are wonderful.

There are geckos that don't have legs that look like snakes.

I would have thought that would have been the false gecko.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

Yeah, there are six families of geckos with no legs.

They're all endemic to Australia and New Guinea.

Right.

Brilliant.

And they've got their vestigial hind limbs.

Apparently, they look a tiny bit like flaps.

Yeah,

you can see these little bumps that come out, but that means it's a lizard.

No eyelids either?

No, almost every gecko has no eyelid.

There are 1500 species of gecko.

And all bar 43 have no eyelids.

And the eublepharidae, which literally means good eyelids in ancient Greek, they have eyelids.

But even they also lick their eyes like all the other geckos do to moisten them, despite having eyelids.

Right.

Amazing.

That's cool.

Have you heard of the fuck you lizard?

No.

This is a lizard which it's not its official name.

That's not the scientific name.

But it was a lizard that when Americans were over in Vietnam during the war, they kept noticing that

they just kept hearing a little voice going, fuck you.

And they're like, who, what is going on?

And they'd be walking up, fuck you.

And so they all discovered that it's just this lizard that just makes a noise.

They're all like, fuck you.

And so it became known as, yeah, the fuck you lizard.

Why do we not all have one of those?

Yeah, like the noises, I was surprised at gecko noises, though, that they bark.

Well, they're the only lizard that makes a noise, geckos.

Are they?

Yeah, that's because if you think what noise does a lizard make, you wouldn't have thought it was

but that sort of thing.

It sounds more like a sort of electric buzzer ring, doesn't it?

Sally, do you think a gecko could ever win the palm dog?

No.

No?

But

We covered a few years ago, I think we covered the Hero Dog of the Year, and a few years ago it was won by a cat.

That's true.

Really?

I presented Hero Dog of the Year.

I don't know if it was last year or the year before, not this year, but anyway, quite recently.

And this is going to sound a bit mean now.

But one of the finalist dogs...

Okay, this is just my problem, it was the finalist dog, and it wasn't a chihuahua, but it was similar, it was very, very small.

And

his owner/slash owner, mummy, whatever you prefer to call it, said that the dog had saved her partner's life by giving him

CPR.

She's got home and her husband is kissing the dog.

That's what happened now.

The dog was very,

very small, very small.

I don't know why the dog was trained in CPR.

But anyway, it was all a bit of a problem for me having to

silence the questions in my brain that kept coming.

Well, because there's so many stages.

You've got to lay the head back a bit.

You've got to.

You just want to go.

You're shitting me, right?

Was that the

funny thing?

The winner didn't win, didn't win, did it?

Well, who the fuck?

Are you that as a dog?

The winners were amazing.

There were these water dogs that...

Who did open heart surgery?

It's a dog with SpaceX in mission control.

Hey, animals have done some amazing things.

I do want to tell, before we move on from the gecko, though, did you know that in January last year, German Hans-Kurt Kubus was caught at Christchurch Airport, New Zealand, with 44 geckos concealed in his posts?

They were doing a small incision and

he's just walking through immigration.

Fuck you, fuck you.

There's a massive market in gecko smuggling.

Really?

And New Zealand geckos,

because they're diurnal, like most geckos are nocturnal.

Right.

New Zealand gecko is diurnal, very, very pretty, and they can go for about $22,000.

So there's a massive...

Diurnal.

Oh, is that the wrong word?

No, no, no.

Awake of the day.

Awake of the day.

You're diurnal.

I'm diurnal.

Yeah.

Is that the right word?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Don't question yourself, Sally.

Question gap.

I'm sorry.

You're going to get away from me.

Yet, tell me more about Yeti's my ignorance questions.

Dan, do you want to know a cool...

So, diurnal, awake of the day, nocturnal, awake at night, crepuscular.

Dusky.

Yeah.

I know that.

Dawn and dusk.

What happened to the turnal bit of the word?

Why did they lose that?

I don't know.

Latin, innit?

Speaking of Latin, I was reading about Alien, the Roman writer and artor.

He said that if a dead gecko lands in your wine, then it's fine.

But if it lands in your olive oil, it will taste terrible and when you eat it, it will immediately give you lice.

Wow,

great.

They've got lots of symbolic, there's lots of superstition around geckos and lizards, aren't there?

If you find a lizard tail in your left shoe, it is very lucky.

Do not take it out.

It's not real.

That's a real one.

That's the

day one.

Just the tail, yeah.

Because obviously, their tails come off and they can regrow them.

Do you know starfish, though, can regrow if you take its leg off, it can regrow a whole starfish from the leg.

That's nuts.

Like, that's crazy, though.

What do they have?

Do they have

they store all the nutrients in the leg until they can grow a mouse?

Does it have a brain or intelligence or any kind of thing?

I don't know.

Probably doesn't know it's a starfish is the truth.

But they eat neurons.

They distribute

it.

Yeah.

Can I tell you about a guy called Ben Barr?

He was looking for a particular gecko called the Cupola gecko,

which was spotted for the first time in 1968.

And then once again in 2007, and that was it.

No specimen had ever been observed or collected apart from those two occasions.

No one knew if it was still existing or alive.

Or if it was a teleporting horse.

Exactly, yeah.

And he led three trips to search for it and basically the process of searching for this Coppola gecko is just to turn over rocks.

He spent two years turning over rocks.

Leaving no stone unturned.

He left no stone unturned.

He didn't even know for sure what it looked like because not exactly, not exactly, and no scientist had ever held one in the hand.

And after two years and three expeditions, he found one.

Hey!

He said, he was so excited, he said it was very similar to having a baby, the euphoria.

And have you bought the movie rice?

It's just lovely, yeah.

And he found four, he found four on the same expedition.

I imagine under the same rock, but still.

It's just, yeah.

Imagine that determination to keep on.

It's like your surface area measuring

science.

Yeah, you do admire it.

I got addicted to watching conservation TV at one point, like the presentations of all the scientists, because it's all the conservation scientists, zoologists, I guess they're called.

Because

it was so funny, like the Argentinian Wolfman.

He had long, long hair.

And he really appeared to be having an affair with the British cheetah lady.

And

there was this really adorable couple, I think, from Chile, from Chile, who had been looking for the Andean wildcat and we spent to it and they said we have not ever seen the Andean wildcat it's been five years and they showed all these photos of uh land river in different places where they had looked for the Andean wildcat and not seen it and they were so charming and like ah well it's been an interesting journey but we think there is wildcat we think this is a wildcat uh poop or whatever they say stool and then they went off and then this really arrogant tall American thin American guy came in from the Rare Wildcat Conservation Society and he went, Wildcat,

wildcat.

And he just had 50 slides of wildcats.

Wait, were you presenting him with an award?

No, I just

was just depressed.

I was in bed watching them on YouTube.

I became very interested in the women who run sloth sanctuaries because they seem to have absolutely no zoological training whatsoever.

I know nothing about sloths.

There was this one woman who goes, oh, sloth orphanage in Costa Rica.

She'd gone gone on a cruise with her husband and her baby sloth had fallen out of a tree and she'd known right then she needed to abandon her life in the States and start a sloth orphanage, which she did.

And the problem she had, she has to stop them having sex with each other because she doesn't have room for anymore and people kept bringing them so they were kept strictly segregated.

That's a slow penis.

That is a slow penis.

There we go.

Yes.

Fair enough.

That is a slow penis.

But one of the got manged and she just shaved that, shaved it, and she didn't know whether this is the right thing.

She shaved them.

And these two.

She didn't shave a sloth, I'm sure.

And there was a PhD student, and I ended up watching the

documentary series about them and getting absolutely obsessed.

There was a PhD student there called Becky, who was.

Do you remember the woman?

I think we've mentioned Becky on the podcast.

Has she been on?

No, she hasn't been.

We can get her.

No, but I mean, like,

it was really, it was really.

I think I feel she was northern.

I feel she was northern.

She was quite

lethargic herself.

And she said, I couldn't decide what to do for my PhD.

And I went to see my tutor and I said, I can't decide between jaguars

and sloths.

And he said, what about sloths?

So here I am.

And then the cheetah lady went past me, that's really good.

Have you seen the video where a sloth mistakens its own arm for a tree branch

and then can't do anything about it because it's so slow, it just falls from the tree.

They can be quite fast, though, can't they?

The ones that can swim are they?

They swim really fast, really, really fast.

If you put them in a fast current, they're just drugs, aren't they?

Those leaves that they, that's just drugs, isn't it, for them?

They only eat one.

I did think about writing a film about this sloth sanctuary, which is why.

And

obviously, you can get the sloths out of Costa Rica.

Their agents will never get back to you.

That's the problem with a sloth.

You can't transport them.

I was reading about a woman who runs a hospital for Hawaiian monk seals.

I read about her.

This is amazing, isn't it?

Yeah, amazing.

Yeah, so

she runs this monk seal place.

And she was out and she was, you know, getting lunch or something like that.

And she gets a missed call.

Or like she gets a call on her phone.

She picks it up.

No one's there.

What's going on?

It happens nine times while she's out.

And she's called, she's called like the phone people.

She's like, is there like anything wrong with the line?

It looks all fine.

Gets back to the hospital and she looks and on the phone is a little gecko just pressing its finger on the call button and it's calling her and that was it she was getting

calling loads of other people as well yeah it called yeah it made a bazillion the newspaper said a bazillion phone calls

that was the official number yeah

yeah just a little gecko feed can i do a quick quiz before we move on yes we do need to move yes um so this was a weirdly named animal pseudo-gecko is it a gecko is it not um i've got some more like this so the coffin fish can the coffin fish cough ah

or are you tricking us with pronunciation?

Does it live in a float?

It lies in a coffin.

It does float.

It's coughing fish, like a coffin, but can it cough?

I'll say no, it can't.

I don't think fish can.

Well, you're wrong.

Oh.

Fish can expel air through their gills if things get stuck in there, and we call that coughing.

That's a cough.

Can the swallow-tail butterfly swallow its own tail?

Yes.

No, I'm going to say that.

No, obviously not.

But the only fact I know about it is it has an eye on its penis,

so it can see where it's going crumps really

that is not true.

It is true.

The swallowtail butterfly.

Oh butterfly.

I was thinking

you've read the very hungry caterpillar.

That's the final scene.

And finally, does the bloody-nosed beetle often have a bloody nose?

I'll say yes.

Andy, I've told you, insects don't have noses.

Oh!

Will you please listen?

Oh, I fell right into it.

No, it expels blood from its mouth.

And that's why it's called that.

It expels blood from its mouth.

We're going to need to move on to our final fact of the show.

Can't bear it.

The show?

Oh, no, no.

Right with you.

I feel like I'm going to go.

I want to talk about the penguin who got a knighthood and I want to talk about the Welsh corgi who's got a PhD.

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

The band, the super furry animals, do you see what I did there?

Wore Yeti costumes for a year and they said it really changed their personalities.

Becoming much hairier changed how they performed.

What was the surface area where they were

so I don't know much about it?

I don't know much about the super furry animals.

Well, you know, to be honest, until yesterday in order to find

But they're Welsh.

Welsh.

Rongers.

No, they're Welsh.

They're like the centrepiece of the cool Cymru, you know, Welsh resurgence with with Gorky's zygotic monkey.

I'm going to say that wrong.

That's correct, isn't it?

You're a super fan, though, aren't you?

I am a super fan.

You're a super fairy fan as a super fan.

And of Gorky's zygotic monkey as well.

You're wearing a t-shirt.

You're wearing a t-shirt right now.

Yeah.

They are very, very cool.

They did loads of like...

Yeah, they did loads of crazy stuff.

They had lots of costumes and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah,

they bought a tank and drove it into the nationalised steadfod.

Oh, wow.

They bought it for £10,000 from a one-eyed arms dealer with a limp.

And then they sold it on to Don Henley from the Eagles.

Really?

That wasn't that extraordinary.

Like a real

arms dealing band circuit.

It wasn't the only contact they had with arms dealers either.

They sampled lots of sounds, didn't they?

And they got some real guns.

But

what's with the Yeti thing?

So the Yeti thing,

well, they'd experimented on the album before.

They had some snow monsters on stage in Glastonbury during the Northern Lights song.

They were members of Mogwai.

Do you know all of this?

Mogwai, yeah,

a bit.

And unfortunately, Mogwai just dropped an E before putting the very hot suits on, and it became quite dangerous.

So they had to have people running around

giving them water, but they were really into different kinds of creatures.

And then they came across a sculptor called Peter Gray, who made loads of sculptures out of hair.

And he suggested just making these Yeti costumes for them for a video, the video for Golden Retriever.

And they thought this was brilliant.

And Peter Grace said, I'll tell you where it needs to be.

You need to shoot this on a glacier in Iceland next to a giant fire, which all the Yetis are worshipping.

But they'd recently signed with Sony, who said that was an uninsurable concept.

So they did it in a studio in North London.

And it sort of looks like the Yetis are playing inside a cardboard box, which is being sniffed at and then urinated on by a dog.

But it's really, really cool.

So how did it change their personality?

It changed their personalities.

They said they're none of them exhibitionists, really.

They're quite political and love music, very creative and non-conformist, and the rest of it.

They released a Welsh, entirely Welsh-language LP and then only tooled it in America and Australia.

It went to the top 20.

It went into the top 20, yeah.

But they said that it was like being transformed.

They said none of them were exhibitionists in reality.

It's an actual quote.

But we were able to put these costumes on and become 70s rock monsters, and it drove the audience nuts.

So they really

it's kind of interesting the impact of hairiness or hairlessness

has incredible power.

I think it's a costume thing.

So my son's fifth birthday was last year, late last year, and I dressed up as Mr.

Potato Head and I honestly felt

did you buy that or make it?

I bought it from

I bought it online.

I saw it.

It was.

Did it inflate itself?

Was it one of those?

It was like a brown piece of fabric and then you could stick on the eyes and the ears and stuff like that.

Do you know what?

It was a hit, Andy, despite you.

I'm saying it was good.

We've lent it out to multiple parents ever since for their family parties.

Yeah, we haven't even got it at the moment.

But here's the thing, the confidence it gave me, because it was...

With that audience of five-year-olds who would have worshipped you anyway.

No, I honestly, like,

yeah, it really, I felt like a superhero.

It was amazing.

That's interesting.

And I went up, because it was, school had just started.

My son was going to a new school.

We knew no one.

So I went up to all the parents.

I would never do that.

I went up to all of them.

Hey, what's up?

Not the school gates.

This is a...

No, no, this is the party.

I missed a potato head.

But what I'm just trying to say is I don't think it's the hair necessarily.

I think you must know this as an actor.

When you have a different persona that suddenly comes over you, there's a weird confidence that makes you a bit unstoppable in a way.

I was on the screen.

It can go both ways.

I'm thinking.

Oh, really?

Very vivid memories of it going the other way.

Okay.

I mean, I suppose one, yes, I do know what you mean.

It's weird when you play a bride in a film, people on set treat you as if you're getting married.

Even though they know you're acting.

We all know you're acting, but you get treated, people open doors and they smile at you and go, oh, it's interesting, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There is a thing with autistic kids where if you put them in a mask, you can find not all, I mean, you can't generalise, but lots of people have found that theatre can really help people who are very introverted to speak.

Well, that's really

well, interestingly, just on topic, so what they were doing there, they were dressing as Yetis.

It's not being a furry, but that's a lot of people dress up as furries, right?

I think we should say what a furry is for those.

I mean, yeah, so a furry is someone who feels more comfortable when they're wearing a costume that has been designed where it's an animal.

No, I think a furry is just someone who's a fan of the culture of, you know, anthropomorphic animals.

And some of them do like to work on.

Exactly.

Yeah, they're very keen.

They feel they get a bad press.

And over 60% of furries feel that they are bullied and get negative, people have negative concepts.

The weird thing is only around 25% of all furries own a suit.

Yeah, really?

Yeah.

So I don't know how you classify yourself as a furry if you...

Well, I guess you go to the cons and you like

in your home clothes?

Yeah, a suit.

I thought it was all about the suit.

So did I, but we're wrong.

Maybe you can't afford it.

But on the point of autism, there was one of these cons that had an autism panel with furries, and there was a lady there who said that it really helps if you're autistic.

So she said, for three days I am not autistic.

For three days I am a giant anthropomorphic version of the Titanic.

And she feels...

It helps break the ice.

Oh gosh.

Here we go.

The first furry convention.

The first furry convention was almost all people in normal clothes.

or in human clothes.

And you can still see videos of it online.

It was in Holiday Inn in California and there's basically only one person who dresses up in a costume it was a guy called Robert Hill who came dressed as a giant SM deer called Hilda the Bambioid

I know

and but it's amazing and they chose that place because it's so close to Disneyland and they thought that everyone who's kind of into anthropomorphic animals would also be into Disneyland and they went there and they you know there's if you go online you can see like the history of all these conferences that they've had called conference.

And the first time they had a problem with a hotel was in 1994.

And the problem was the hotel.

All the bathrooms got clogged drains.

That was the problem.

That was the only problem.

Yeah, it was so.

And the breakfast buffet was no.

Apparently, it was too big, the hotel, so they couldn't fill it up with just their people.

So there was a load of other people there as well.

And, you know, they weren't so understanding, and there was lots of complaints.

And then a maid found a costume in a room by a person who had a costume of veteran of the psychotic wars and it was a unicorn who carried a big sort of cartoon cherry bomb.

So they would have like this big sort of black bomb shape like you'd have an

option.

Yeah, exactly.

They found this.

The maid found this costume in the room.

Right.

And they called the bomb squad because there was a bomb in the room.

But a cartoon bomb.

A cartoon bomb.

Although what's the best place to hide a bomb?

I guess so.

But the bomb bomb squad didn't see it the right way, and they fined the hotel for making a prank call.

So, when the bomb squad came and they saw it was just cherry bomb and there was a Utica costume next to us, they're like, You're wasting our time.

And they fined them, and they never were allowed to go back to that hotel again.

Okay, I don't think anyone's behaved reasonably there.

What?

What about this guy?

He's just got a costume, it's not his fault.

Yeah, I guess.

It did amuse me that quote in the article we've probably both read where

they said, Most furries, it's not an erotic thing, it just gets too hot.

Right, the other astonishing fact was that there's 10,000 people in the UK who live as dogs.

That's what it said on Google.

Living as dogs.

Maybe not living as dogs, maybe like

dogs of a very broad spectrum.

They wanted to be referred to or dress up as dogs or have handlers.

And that seemed to be a different kind of output.

That seemed to be a kind of.

It's a lot.

It seemed to be a kind of white unitard with little spots.

Right.

It feels like you may have read Live on the Isle of Dogs.

I go for a walk every day.

Yeah, well, you know.

Am I one of your 10,000?

Just some people.

There's a broad spectrum of dogs, though.

Some dogs live in the house, some dogs might live in a kennel, some dogs are pampered house dogs.

There is a BDSM thing of pups being a pup.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you've got, you've got...

You say, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I did know that.

I did not know that.

I said, yeah, yeah, to kind of coss over it

rather than to fully endorse.

But you know, dogs divide into hound, pooch, and mutt, don't they?

Those are the three.

Do they?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Those are the three broad categories of dogs.

The broad category of dog that you can choose to dress up as.

Not at all.

Like, if you see a dog, normally you'll know within a second whether it's a hound, a pooch, or a mutt, unless it's a Labrador, in which case it's just a dog.

The Labrador is the kind of classic dog.

Does no one else play hound, pooch, or mutt?

No.

Extraordinary.

Extraordinary.

Andy an introduction to Hero Dog of the Year screen.

I think I could qualify.

I do, I do.

Just on dressing up as animals.

So

people who have to dress as animals a lot and not sort of for relaxation for their work are zookeepers.

There's a brilliant photo from 2004 of some.

There's a Japanese party of school children.

They're all about, I'd say, four or five years old.

And they are being approached by a life-size rhinoceros, which is a pantomime rhinoceros with two zookeepers in it, front and back, which are basically charging the school children.

The teachers have to get the children away from the rhino.

It looks genuinely terrifying.

But is it what?

How realistic is the costume?

It's pretty good.

Is it?

If I was five, I would be very nervous.

It'd be scared.

Well, I don't think so, because

I once did a kids' show.

I mean, a long time ago, I did a kids' show with Sue Perkins, in fact, and called Lucy and the Dinosaurs.

And a friend of ours was playing a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And

Ben Moore, do you know Ben Moore?

Yeah, yeah.

Ben Moore was Tyrannosaurus Rex.

He had a big costume.

And Sue Perkins very irresponsibly said to the kids, Hey, let's beat up Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And the stage was stormed with upwards of 55-year-olds just kicking the living daylight out of Ben Moore, who looks, you know, like an early Mr.

Muscle.

Mr.

Muscle's got muscly recently, have you noticed that?

But anyway, Mr.

Muscle used to be in the advert, but anyway, and Ben was just in the recovery position, sort of crying and shaking.

Get them off.

Well, I've been beaten up in a chicken costume by Alan Davis on QI.

You have?

Yeah, yeah.

Beaten up by who?

By Alan Davis.

Oh, yeah.

He properly, I think he was taking out a lot of frustration from the previous 10 years.

But yeah, I was in a costume, and he decided, as a joke, I think.

Was this during the show or you guys in the hotel room?

It was for a Christmas special of QI.

And the thing is, because the kind of slot that you look through is quite small, and it's a big sort of costume, the one that I had, and I assume it was the same, it very easily goes in the wrong place, and suddenly you can't see anything.

And it's boiling hot, you're sweating, and everything.

And all you can do is go fetal.

It's like literally the only thing.

And you did.

On set, like while filming, it was incredibly...

People had to talk you down.

I once got asked if I wanted to be an alien in a film.

The Roman orator.

I've got the look.

No, it was a, I was playing basically that I would have been playing the beast that sort of landed in a a meteorite and then crashed.

But the guy, my friend who was casting the film said, you will just have to lie in a field in a rubber suit for a week.

And I said, no, and I regret it now.

I bet.

I wish I'd done it now.

What was the movie?

I don't know.

So apparently, just going back to furries a second, the conventions are a nightmare for exactly the reason that you were saying about...

Everyone's too hot.

Yeah, everyone's too hot.

They can't see anything.

So anyone who's in a costume is just bumping into each other.

The article says inevitably going to smack a child in the head because your arms are just, you know, whapping about.

You can't see them at the level.

Got a big tail.

Sorry?

Got a big tail, maybe?

Oh, yeah.

Why not?

I was just trying to help.

I was trying to contribute to the.

Was it going that badly?

Hey, by the way, we are going to have to wrap up.

And we've gone really far over the whole thing.

Oh, no.

Only just started.

Can I give you some furry furry vocab and see if you can guess what they mean oh cool yeah yeah um so what do you think is a furry tan furry tan f-u-r-i-t-a-n furry tan oh a puritan someone who is like a puritan it's someone who only wears the costume it's a furry fan who is not interested in any sexual content

that's pretty good

um to scritch do you know what to scritch means oh oh you can't scratch yourself through the fur oh that's good what you do i don't don't know.

It's not that, but it is to do with scratching.

It's to scratch someone gently, often as a friendly gesture or greeting.

Just do a little...

Don't do that.

Can you guess what a fur pile is?

Is that like a fur pile?

A bundle.

Yeah, a bundle.

They all jush and carpet.

A carpet is like a carpet.

You would say it has a shag pile.

So is it broadly similar?

It's pretty much that.

It's a gathering of fully costumed participants who roll around on the floor scritching each other.

Scritching got quite sexy all of a sudden.

The other thing is that Andy mentioned tails earlier.

And there could be an idea in the future that maybe we give all

maybe give all old people tails.

For balance.

For balance.

Carl, you're good at this game.

Yeah, the idea is you get these sort of mechanical tails and you put them on old people and they can tell if an old person is with their consent and support.

Just stop them falling over, isn't it?

Yeah, so the tail can tell when they're about to fall over and it can move itself so it'll give them more balance.

It'll stop people from falling over.

Turn ultimately to Dr.

Octopus.

Yeah.

It's just completely terrifying.

I think we should give them gecko feet instead.

You know what a gecko feet is.

What are you doing up there?

That's one of the reasons there's such a trade in geckos, apparently, is they're being

studied for the space programme.

Did you read that?

Well, the only feet, because they're so feet can stick to anything except Teflon.

Is that how it is?

Gecko feet will stick to absolutely anything at all except dry Teflon.

It's all right if it's wet, but

it's Teflon what we largely use in space, though.

Yeah, so it's a problem.

Yeah, because the clingability is.

Great news.

We've made you exactly as good as a gecko.

Get up to that space station.

Yeah.

Yeah, they did this experiment where they got a load of geckos and they stuck them on stuff and then they euthanized them all

and then they put them back up and they stayed exactly the same, stuck, dead as alive.

So wow.

On that note, Danny.

Always good to go out on a big laugh.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Sally.

I've just given it up.

I know.

Yeah, but you're on Instagram, though?

I am on Instagram.

I think I'm Sally Smack on Instagram.

Sally Smack.

Okay.

Smack the pony.

And yeah, we are also on Twitter as a group as No Such Thing.

Or you can email us at podcast at QI.com or go to our website, no such thing asofish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Thank you so much for joining us tonight.

Sally, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's been awesome.

And we'll see everyone.

Okay, all right.

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