453: No Such Thing As James Cameron's Worms

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Hi, everybody.

Dan and Andy here.

We've got a couple of quick, exciting announcements before the show begins.

That's right.

We just want to let you know that this December, we are going to be playing two live shows.

Our final shows of the year, the Christmas shows.

We're going to be at the Bloomsbury Theater on the 10th of December and we're going to be at our old stumping ground up the creek on the 14th of December.

Yes, they're going to be so much fun.

They're going to be Christmassy, as Dan says.

There's going to be a live podcast in each of them, plus an extra bonus half bursting with your facts, with special festive things.

Dan's going to do his tinsel-twizzle trick, and James is going to eat a sprout, and I will show you how to make eggnog.

It's going to be a fabulous time.

That's right.

Cannot guarantee any of that will happen.

However, what we can guarantee is an awesome rock and roll night of nerd comedy.

So do come along to that.

And if you can't make it, but you're thinking, hey, I want to still celebrate Christmas in some way with fish.

Well, we got some exciting presents for you.

Yes, we have launched our new range of lovely merchandise.

We've got beautiful new t-shirts.

We've got a fabulous pin badge set.

We've got the official fish book, which is a gorgeous guide to fish and it's full of facts and games and puzzles and articles and stupid stuff.

We put that together for our tour earlier this year and we think it's really great.

All of these things are available now at no suchuchthingasafish.com slash shop.

There's a special bundle where you can get all three.

If you are a fish fan or if you have a fish fan in your life and you think they'd like this as a Christmas present, we think this makes the perfect thing.

It's all available globally and if you order it now, it'll be there in time for Christmas.

That's right.

So head to no such thingasafish.com.

You'll find links to those two December live shows.

You'll also find links to everything that we've just spoken about in terms of t-shirts and badges and bundles.

Do get the show tickets.

Do buy some Christmas items and do enjoy the following episode.

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 Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Tashinsky, and James Harkin.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the ick people of Uganda are the standard textbook example of a selfish society where members only look after themselves.

It turns out they've just been misunderstood this whole time.

It's so funny.

And normally when you say something's a textbook example of something, it's just a figure of speech.

And actually, these people are used in textbooks.

Yeah.

They're about selfishness.

They are by anthropologists.

So this comes from a study in the 60s by a guy called Colin Turnbull.

He published a book that described these people called the Ick people, sometimes known as the Ik people, as extraordinarily unfriendly, uncharitable, and mean.

And he called them the loveless people.

It was really quite, it makes quite bad reading.

Yeah.

But then later on, a few more anthropologists came around

and they looked into what he'd written and found out that he was probably,

one, might have just made stuff up, but two,

it was during a famine that he went to study them.

And obviously, when you're under the stress of a famine, you might act differently than you might do under normal circumstances.

Hey, if I have a cup of tea not delivered on time, I turn into a monster.

That's true.

But this is when we say a few years later, am I right saying it was decades later that finally?

Because that's the problem.

No one went back to study the Ick people and to find out that it was just they were having a bad couple of years, basically.

He knew that.

And actually, as a turnbull defender, his whole thing, his whole thesis is this is an example of what happens to human beings when they're having a really bad time.

He says, for instance, the ick, like the rest of us, are kind, light-hearted, generous, and jolly when they can afford to be, but they were very hungry at this stage, therefore they had to abandon superficial luxuries and be mean.

So he's saying all humans are like the ick.

We're all capable of this.

But is he then also misrepresented when he made a suggestion to the leaders of Uganda that they should all be taken off to different bits of Uganda in groups of 10 so that they could effectively stop existing.

Yeah, no, he's not misrepresented there.

It's a bad idea.

Yeah, of course.

In answer to your question, the reason why people didn't carry on studying them is because the Ick people themselves were really upset about this book.

Yeah.

Because they were told about it and they didn't trust anything.

Yeah, exactly.

They're sensitive as well.

Like, they didn't trust any more white people to come and study them at any stage for the next 30 years because of this one book.

Yeah, I've got to say, the write-ups they got were so extreme.

They were described as a haunting flower of evil in the corner of civilization's garden.

Yeah.

Not good.

So lots of other writers then, you know, wrote more about them.

So there was a writer called Lewis Thomas, who was a pathologist, who wrote, they breed without love and they defecate on one another's doorsteps.

I mean, I am not surprised.

If someone had written that about me, I would not invite them around for decades.

What's the decades?

Was that in Turnbull's book, or did he just add the defecating on doorsteps as an extra?

I actually think it might have been because when another person came called Bernd Heiner who basically wrote the text saying everything that Turnbull wrote was wrong,

he said that the Ick told him that if Turnbull was ever to come back they would force him to eat his own feces.

Nice.

That's a very good fitting punishment for what you've claimed.

Eat your words.

Eat your turds more like.

It's so unfair because these are some of the poorest people on the planet.

If you've lined up a hundred people, they're right at the other end of it in terms of the resources they have.

And they couldn't do anything, right, to sort of rectify it.

Other than, you know, because they stopped people coming in.

Other than the feces thing.

Other than the feces.

You've just got to wait for that.

But I mean, it's just like, you know, like, whenever no such thing as a fish is mentioned on Google, some of us have a ping that goes off and we see a mention, right?

Anytime they're like, hey, Ick, you're in a new book.

Are we, really?

What do they say about us?

Oh, that stuff again.

Yeah, okay.

But then, as James says, it's sort of been disproved by other studies, hasn't it?

And I think the latest one is by a woman called Catherine Townsend.

she's cool.

Looked at them and said they behave when you do the dictator test with them, which is where you basically give someone in a group a bunch of resources.

I can't remember what they gave them, smarties or something.

Sort of money, basically.

And it's whether you share them with people.

And yeah, you asked how much you want to share it with people, and then they did it in accordance with all other beings.

And so Catherine Townsend's thesis is that humans aren't innately really bad because as soon as the famine goes away, this culture of niceness recovers.

So it's obviously always there.

It's just like in extreme circumstances, you just physically can't do it anymore.

Is it possible?

I don't want to slander the Ick people at all, but I'm just curious.

Is it at all possible that when Catherine Townsend went there, that it would be like going to North Korea and them showing you around going, look at what a wonderful place this is.

And everyone is...

Hang on a second.

Wait, rip off Dan's mask.

Oh my God.

It's Colin Turnbull.

Hello.

I think they have other things to worry about than trying to ingratiate themselves to Westerners.

Turnbull gave some words in his work,

like from the Ick language, which is called Ichaitwad.

But it turns out that a lot of the ones that he put in were wrong.

And it appears that he went through his whole time with the Ick people saying a reply rather than a greeting whenever he met anyone.

So it's like the equivalent of going down the street.

And whenever you see someone, you know, you're going, I'm fine, thanks.

Which is very passive-aggressive.

Yeah, don't worry about me.

Yeah, you you just get on with your life, mate.

Maybe that's why they were rude to him.

And this is also because he claimed that the person, Lomesia, who was a guy who he hung out with a lot and who taught him the Ik language, and he said Lomesia is an example of a true ick.

He's like a fundamental ick person.

And then Heine, when he came back, you know, 20, 30 years later, said Lomesia, they told him Lomesia was not an ick person at all.

He'd come from a completely different tribe.

And actually, about half the people in Turnbull's book come from different tribes.

Oh, wow.

And they said Lamasia couldn't really speak Ik very well.

He could speak sort of passable Ik.

So God knows what kind of nonsense he was saying.

Do you want to learn some Ichetoid?

Yeah.

Some words.

What's that?

This is the language of the Ik people.

Oh, nice.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

So the word Dan.

Oh.

Do you know what that means?

Cool dude.

Is that feces?

No.

We have our own bit of nominative determinism on this show.

Can you give it to us in an English sentence?

Replace Dan in and see if we can.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Dan told me a fact and I replied to him, Dan.

Bullshit.

It means exactly or precisely.

What about this one?

I looked over into the distance and I saw an Anna prancing by.

Oh,

drunk.

They haven't base their language on us.

I'll say gazelle.

It's a male kudu, so pretty close.

Yeah, and what about this one?

I pod some muzz over my plants.

Amazing.

Is it water?

It isn't.

It's a cactus-like tree which you burn and you use the ashes as fertilizer.

Oh, wow.

Who is your stand-in next week, actually?

That's great.

This Colin Turnbull, I just want to, while we're sort of saying that he's not the worst person, because this does make him feel like he sort of absolutely ruined a group of people, he also studied a group in Zaire, a group of pygmies, and he wrote a brilliant book about them.

And he did recordings of their music in Zaire, of the pygmies.

He collected some of their songs and he commercially released a few from other tribes as well.

But the one that he did with the Zaire Pygmies was girls singing an initiation song.

And that now, as a result of Colin Turnbull, is going to last for millions of years into the universe because it was included on the Voyager 2 Golden Disc.

And that's down to, yeah, Colin Turndall.

So he probably mistranslated it and it's actually saying, fuck you, aliens.

Earth invaded due to him accidentally including a reply instead of a greeting.

We're fine, thanks.

We're good.

The Eek people have some fun ceremonies, rites of passage.

So one is the Beer of the Axes, which actually is not that fun if it was me, but it would be fun for you guys.

And that's basically where to thank the men for doing all the farming and harvesting all the fields, they can demand beer from the women, and they all go and gather in the big village centre.

And then every woman has to bring this big vat of beer and all the men get to drink it.

That sounds cool.

Yeah.

And I don't think, it doesn't say that they stop the women from participating.

So I'm sure they can get pissed as well.

There's another ceremony they have called the Blessing of the Seeds, which is, again, good for me, but not so good.

good for the rest of you.

Everyone goes to a special tree.

They bring their seeds for the year and the seeds get blessed.

And then again, there's loads and loads of beer.

And everyone gets to drink the beer, but it goes in age order.

So the oldest person gets to drink first, and no one's allowed to drink until the oldest person's had their

age.

You're going to regret that, because pride will make you down it all.

And in an hour's time, you're going to feel like an idiot.

I'm as young as I've always been.

So

weddings.

At the very start of the wedding, they have a thing called the smearing.

Can you guess what the smearing is?

It's when you test for cervical cancer, isn't it?

Yeah.

Is it like an anointment?

You know, because in the coronation, don't we smear our monarchs with some ceremonial stuff?

That's pretty much right.

So the couple sit side by side and they're rubbed with oil by an old woman.

Lovely.

So it's pretty much that.

The bride then brings the groom to a tree and he has to throw a spear at it and has to hit the tree.

And then they go back to the house and the bride needs to make like a stew for everyone.

So it's kind of to show that his skills are in hunting and her skills are in the household stuff.

And the groom has to pay a payment for touching the bride's breasts.

Is that a pay-per-touch, or is it a.

It's a one-off.

It's like all the times I previously touched them, I'm paying off, and now...

Or is it I'm paying in advance, and I'm going to get to touch these breasts forever.

I think the understanding is that you won't have touched them at that stage, and you're paying for the opportunity to touch them for the first and hopefully future times.

I don't think the first and the last time.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, you can't rent, I don't think it's like a pay-per-month thing, is it?

It's all at once.

I think it's £2.99 a month, but if you pay for the full year, it's a lot.

If you stick in the offer code fish, you'll get those breasts because £1.50 a month.

Just on selfishness.

Oh, yeah.

And the opposite, but mostly selfishness.

Someone around this table probably going to be more selfish than the rest of us.

It's you.

Yes.

Okay.

Is it women?

It's something to do with what's happened to all of us in the last 24 hours.

Oh, Dan had a full English breakfast before he got here?

Weirdly, it is Dan, but it's not because he had a full English breakfast before he got here.

Oh, really?

Okay, listeners, you've just been let into some insight.

Apparently, the most controversial thing I've ever done is had a full English breakfast before today's recording.

It's not because of your breakfast, Dan.

That's the good news.

So.

What else is Dan?

How much do you know about Dan's last 24 hours?

Do we all know this?

And what could possibly top my full English breakfast?

We can all surmise it by what we know about Dan, which is

hair's very scruffy right now.

So are you saying, like, if you don't shower, maybe

Dan's done that?

I have to do it.

Have you?

We've all done this in the last 24 hours, but Dan's probably done a bit less than the rest of us of it.

Sleep.

Dan, you've got a new baby.

Yeah.

You've probably had a bit less sleep than us in the last 24 hours.

Okay.

I guess.

I mean, you've got to, you know, create time for that full English breakfast.

Sleeplessness, we think, makes you more selfish.

It makes you more hungry.

I know that much.

Yeah, but is it...

No, so basically,

they looked at this database of charitable donations, and they didn't do it with individual surveys.

They looked at 3 million charitable donations and the days on which they happened.

And one of the days was after the clocks changed.

Oh, yeah.

So, you know,

you change the clocks, and half the year, you get an hour less sleep.

And donations dropped quite substantially the day after people had just a little bit less sleep.

So that's the theory, you know.

Because I always think, you know, those chuggers who try and get money off you, I always feel if I have less energy to kind of walk straight past them, then I'm more likely to get them stuff.

So you're the opposite of that.

I feel like it.

I might not be, but.

Less energy to walk.

If your lungs are collapsing, you can't put one foot in the middle.

They don't stay on the net.

Oh, they do.

Like, maybe three of them are coming from different directions.

It's like, you know, those, is it huntback whales that they hunt by making bubbles around the fish so that the fish can't escape?

That's how I feel with those guys.

Actually, on animals and selfishness,

it's very hard to find out selfish animals because you try every way of googling most selfish animal, and obviously, everyone says, Oh, humans are the most selfish animal, aren't they?

And you know, I think maybe we need to look a bit deeper.

So, Adeli penguins, um, I think do a funny thing, which is disputed by a zoo that has them and insists they don't.

Okay, but Adeli penguins, when they all flock to the water's edge, you've probably seen them standing on the edge of an ice flow or something, and they all gather at the water's edge, but they're all too nervous to be the first one to jump in, as you would be, because there might be a big old leopard seal or something under the water.

So you see them shuffling closer and closer, and then they wait for either one of them to fall in to check that they don't get eaten.

Or they do sometimes push each other in.

And you can see videos of

like with a sneaky flipper on the bum kind of push through.

A little bit of, yeah, tripping.

Yeah, haven't we seen videos of a penguin putting its foot out and one tripping over as it's walking by?

I feel like.

Is that Charlie Chaplin?

That's what Charlie Chaplin.

I haven't, but I want to.

Are you guys?

Do you guys give money to charity ever?

Yeah.

No, I refuse.

Okay, well.

That's a joke.

Sorry if the chuggers outside Quinsbury Park Station are listening.

No, I don't.

Okay, so this is the really interesting thing.

In aggregate, people don't tend to like charitable people as much as they like other kinds of people.

Okay, so...

So does that mean I have to stop all my direct debits so that people like me?

I'm afraid that's what's been standing between you and universal popularity.

No, this is a study, again, Yale and Oxford this time around, and it was in 2018.

And people were asked, they were given some people and choices over whether they'd like to hang out with these people or not, right?

So they created a scenario, right?

A granny has won $500 in the lottery.

Should she give that to

her grandson who needs to fix his car,

or should she give it to a malaria charity?

Now,

obviously, overall, it probably does more good being given to the charity.

But people were way more likely to say that if they were looking for a friend or a spouse or whatever, they would like grandson car granny.

Yeah.

That's interesting because that 500 quid goes into a huge pot at the charity, but then to the guy who needs his car fixing, it solves all of his problems immediately.

It doesn't solve all of his problems.

I bet he's got other personal problems.

Well, we don't know anything about that.

All we know about this guy is one thing is that his car's broken.

Yeah, no, and he can finally drive to the Malaria Research Institute where he can continue his work.

Unfortunately, there's no money to fund the ideas.

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

My fact this week is that in 1797, an author was so criticized for the lack of punctuation in his book that in its next printing, he included a page at the end of nothing but full stops, commas, and exclamation marks for the readers to slot in wherever they liked.

Amazing.

Yeah.

And it's a really beautiful page at the back.

It's sort of all the full stops are grouped together in one of the things.

It's better than the audio book, that page is

like silence.

How would you do an exclamation mark?

You go, ooh!

Yeah.

How do you do a comma?

I can't work out how to pronounce that.

There's just a lot of silence, I think, for the full stops and the commas, isn't there?

Okay.

Suddenly there's a...

So this is a text, as the fact says, 1797, and it was by a guy called Timothy Dexter, who was an eccentric American businessman who led a life that is so bizarre that it's possibly in no way true.

It's just someone who has had myth built upon him and so on.

But one thing we do know for sure is that he published a book called A Pickle for the Knowing Ones.

And it is a book in which he basically downloaded his brain.

He just said, here's all my thoughts about things, my opinions and so on, but he failed to put any punctuation in, rendering it completely unreadable for anyone who wanted to make sense of it.

So criticism came in and in the second printing, and it's a self-published book, by the way.

Okay.

The second run of the self-publication, he just added this extra page.

Very funny.

Yeah, that's cool.

I didn't read, I think I read a couple of pages of A Pickle for the Knowing Ones.

I read a few sentences.

Yeah, me too.

But people seem to say it's a combination of total nonsense and some quite wise sort of observations about sort of about his thoughts on human beings and how they live and all that stuff, isn't it?

But one write-up of it soon after it was written said it was a jumble of letters promiscuously gathered together and that readers will find it difficult to determine whether most to laugh at the consummate folly or despise the vulgarity and profanity of the writer.

And that was in his actual obituary in 1806.

Normally they sugar the pill a bit.

I know.

I read the death notice in the Rutland Weekly Herald when he died, and it was really short.

It just said he was a man of great property and a perfect ignoramus.

He literally just died, this guy.

Wow.

I wonder, like, the books at the time, this is published in 1802, but in the late 1700s, there were a lot of books that were kind of bizarre.

And maybe was he following in a tradition of surrealism.

Like Lawrence Stern's Tristam Shandy was published in the late 1700s, right?

And his book would have things like there'd be a blank page, or it would have a a page that was entirely black or there was a chapter entirely missing because he said this chapter was so good, it just makes all the other chapters look bad.

So I've decided not to include it.

The message that he put at the front of the new edition where he said I've put punctuation in the back is so full of misspellings you think it must be intentional.

He says, I put in

enough, like A space, N UF,

and for some reason put that in quote marks, which seems like a knowing ha ha.

I'm deliberately misspelling that.

So I put in enough enough here that they may pepper and salt as they please.

P-E-P-E-R-S-O-L-T.

What a great position to be in as a human that just no one knows whether you meant it or not.

And it works in your favor either way, basically.

Yeah, well, that's what happens when you're really, really rich.

Yeah.

Which he was.

Which he was, wasn't he?

And how did he get rich?

It's so confusing because he seemed to make all these investments that worked.

Like, I think he invested in the first ever clay pipe making factory.

Okay.

One of his more sensible ones that made money.

He invested in some government government bonds at a good time.

But outside of that, he did bizarre stuff.

Like the famous thing that was always written about him at the time is that he,

and I think this did happen, or it seems like people who remembered him said it happened at least, is that he was persuaded by people pranking him to try and sell warming pans, like bed warming pans, to the West Indies.

And, you know, oh, it's so hot there.

And also, I think that he was persuaded to sell mittens there.

And it was brilliant because he went and sold the warming pans and they had a big molasses industry and apparently they sold really well as ladles in the molasses industry to people who could scoop treacle into vats.

Yeah.

It can't be true.

That bit.

It sooner.

The warming pans also, some red woolen pajamas went with him and the story is that there was a Norwegian in Havana who had a load of timber and he couldn't get rid of his timber.

But in Norway at that time there was a real fashion for red woolen pajamas.

And so he sold all of these pajamas for the Norwegians, swapped them for all this lumber, and then took the lumber a bit further south where he could sell all that and made an absolute fortune from that.

That's good.

I like that.

I read a book about Timothy Dexter for the research of this.

And it's quite rare that you get to read a whole book when you're doing these weekly shows.

So that was very exciting.

It's by William Cleves Todd.

It's about 13 pages long.

So that was quite useful.

But it was such a good read.

It reads like an incredible New York Times article, this book.

But one thing he mentions of the book is the house that he lived in after he started making his money, which was in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

And my God, outside the front of it, it's pretty spectacular.

There were these columns on which he had wooden carved figures of prominence standing up there.

So it would be George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, him put himself up there

and claiming himself to be someone of huge prominence.

It looks really cool.

It looks amazing.

Obviously, paintings of it, you know, people would stop and look at these giant wooden statues.

And he seemed to have animals statues as well, like some dogs and what looked like some pigs hard two lions i believe as well at the front yeah um but then he said did you see what he wrote under his own um big statue which is like the biggest one right in the middle was lord timothy dexter he always called himself lord um lord timothy dexter of newbryport massachusetts first in the east first in the west and the greatest philosopher in the western world so he was he was a humble guy he was a humble guy and think about him calling himself lord sorry on that i only saw this in one place it was in in the Boston Globe in 1921.

But according to them, they said that Lord was his wife's maiden name.

And so that's how he said, you know, he was like, oh, I'm going to take her maiden name.

I'm going to put it at the front of my name.

And I'm going to be called Lord Timothy Dexter.

What a fun list.

That's brilliant.

Such a fraud story.

And the story, which I'm sure you guys all saw as well,

about his funeral.

Oh, yeah.

Where

he staged his own funeral for the benefit of the town because he wanted to see how people would react.

So he put it about that he was dead, invited all the gentlefolk, got someone to play a clergyman, and then got his coffin and his coffin was deposited in the family vault or whatever.

And he thought his wife had not played her part properly because she hadn't cried enough.

She was in on it.

So she was in on it.

Yeah, I read accounts where it was like, oh, she didn't cry enough.

And he was furious.

And then he beat her for

not crying enough.

Actually, he beat her for not acting enough.

Yeah.

I mean, you know.

She didn't commit to the bit.

Come on.

You've all got to be in on it.

It sounds great.

You've gone to this funeral.

It's been very lavish.

He had his coffin drawn in on a white horse-pulled chariot and then descending into the grave.

And then they have a huge feast afterwards.

And then it was disturbed by, yeah, the sight of him in what I think was a bit of a pantomime, it seems like.

I think it might have been a set-up,

Punch and Judy style.

Oh, you think that was faked?

From what I was reading, from

with a load of sausages, didn't he?

It's very hard to say, but people who knew him say it might have been fake.

I mean, all of it seems to be made up.

Only that on stage,

he wasn't eccentric.

Sometimes he was a wealthy eccentric.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Most of it was true.

I mean, the house was definitely true.

I think the funeral definitely happened.

Like, for instance, there's a thing from his lifetime I read in the Vermont Journal from 1801 talking about how he had a boat and it needed staying.

Okay, so it needs ropes, basically.

It needs extra ropes.

He didn't really know what that meant, so he went to town and he bought a load of whale bone and then brought it back and gave gave it to the boat guy and the boat guy said well this is not I need the ropes I don't need whale bone and so he went back into Boston and he said well I've got all this whale bone can I sell it to you and the thing was he bought so much that the price had absolutely rocketed and so when he sold it back to the whalebone community he got double what he paid for it that's amazing very funny wow

what I'm doing with Ben Elton memorabilia on eBay hoovering it all up and one day it'll be worth

is that because the ship needed staying which I've never heard of so that's a rope thing.

But stays is a word for the whalebone struts in a dress?

All the supports in it?

I think stays are in a corset, maybe.

I actually couldn't work out how he'd made that mistake.

I think stays are the bits in the corset, which

is a beautiful chat.

There's a story as well that he heard that the King of England had a poet laureate, and so he thought, well, I'd like one of those as well.

And so he hired someone just to follow him around and just to capture his daily wisdom and to turn it into beautiful prose.

Yeah.

Again, that's, I mean, that's definitely true.

Jonathan Plummer, he sort of became a famous person in his own right.

He was a fishmonger, wasn't he?

Really?

Yeah, yeah, he was a fishmonger.

And I think he made him wear a black suit covered in stars, which sounds so cool.

It sounds very wizardy.

And he was crowned with parsley.

Yes, that's right.

He sounded like a really sad character.

He wrote an autobiography of his own about his poetry, and he described himself as persecuted, despised, and hated by everyone and suffering from such offensive breath that no one could go near him, occasioned by by Qatar of the nose.

Sorry, did he write that in his old altimetry?

That's the author's blurb at the back.

Yeah, he also swore off young women after he wrote so many poems for so many young women, he fancied, and they all rejected him.

So he turned up vigorous and antiquated virgins as he described them.

But they actually all rejected him as well.

Oh no!

They're too vigorous.

He should have gone less vigorous.

You're a slightly anemic, elderly virgin.

Passive.

Yeah.

You're sure about this dating profile, are you?

Just on punctuation, as this was about his Timothy Dexter's inserted punctuation.

So

I didn't know that Aristophanes invented punctuation, but not the famous Aristophanes.

The slightly different guy.

The playwright who wrote the clouds and all that stuff.

Yeah, right.

Yes.

Not him.

Someone completely different.

Yeah.

Wow.

200 years later.

I know.

What a fact.

Your minds are all been blown.

Did that Aristophanes have any punctuation in his poem, or did this guy come along and put them in?

He would have been before, right?

I think actually

punctuation Aristophanes is 200 years later.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But that's right.

Because if that poem now has punctuation in it, that's a collaboration between two Aristophanes.

Oh, yeah.

Just 200 years apart.

I love it.

Yeah, yeah.

But it was really very basic, his system.

It was just dots you could put at the top or the middle or a bottom of a line.

And then

they were pauses basically.

They were pauses of three different lengths.

But their names were the comma, the colon and the periodos.

And that's where all those names come from.

Contrast.

Isn't that cool?

That is cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So then Isidore of Seville came along after that.

The famous one, not a different one.

And he kind of took Aristophanes' idea and kind of standardized it.

And he had a a dot at the top of the line for a long stop, stop, a dot in the middle of the line for a slightly shorter one, and a dot at the bottom of the line for a very short stop.

And the one at the top sort of migrated down and eventually became a full stop.

The one in the middle became the colon, and the one at the bottom became a modern comma.

I think the one at the top leapfrogged the one in the middle to go to the bottom.

And do we have evidence over the hundreds of years of it gradually sneaking down one minute?

We do, we do, yeah.

Wow.

How do we know that rather than doing that, it didn't bump into the other one when it got there and knock that one far down?

Could have done, yeah, yeah.

They have some punctuation in the Quran,

even though in the early days of Islam, there was no punctuation in Arabic.

But the pausal signs are known as alamat al-waqf.

And they are different types of stopping that will kind of make the text seem more beautiful.

Because obviously, the Quran is supposed to be a very beautiful when you say it, right?

And so, if you see different ones, it might say, It is better to stop now.

You may stop if you want to, or you absolutely must stop at this stage.

They said they quite like that idea of punctuation where it kind of gives you advice rather than telling you what to do.

Absolutely.

Because I often think where the technical punctuation needs to go, when sometimes when you're trying to write something that's a joke,

the punctuation can really mess up the flow of the sentence.

You think, no, just let me put the comma here.

I know it doesn't belong there, but that's where you'd want the beat to be.

And you're a freestyler,

not a pedant.

Yeah, exactly.

You're a dexter.

A modern day Dexter.

A modern day Dexter.

Yeah.

Do any of that.

A serial killer.

Okay, it is time for fact number three.

That is Anna.

My fact this week is that Christians watch less porn on Sundays, but they do make up for it throughout the rest of the week.

Gosh.

You've got to even it out.

Is that what it meant in the Bible when it said that on the seventh day he rested?

Is that

average?

Yeah, because you're knackered, aren't you, after six days of that?

Yeah.

You obviously haven't studied Genesis that hard, but it's day one to six is all porn-watching.

No, it is.

I read this in the Joseph Henrik book, The Weirdest People in the World, which is a brilliant, quite famous book.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joseph Henrik, the guy who came up with the concept of weird, which is Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.

And that's what every single single one of us is, and almost every single person listening will be.

Sorry, that's not what it actually is, that's not where we get the word weird from.

He's just changed that combinator scale.

Sorry, yep.

And it's all a book about how we base so much of our assumptions on human behaviour on what we are, which is all of these things.

And when I say rich, I just mean literally anyone who lived in a Western country that has a welfare state.

So, anyway, it's in his book, which is full of interesting stuff, and he writes a bit about monotheistic religions.

And he says, yeah that there was a study that monitored porn news across the United States and in the more Christian states then there was a big dip in porn news on a Sunday and it sort of was still quite low on a Monday but it gradually crept up throughout the week and it was like reaching real highs the following Saturday and then it plummeted again on a Sunday and it averaged out as the exact same porn news as non-Christian states so just spread it out differently is there a real scramble on Saturday night as you head up to 12 a.m.

get it out of the way okay wow And this obviously is the Sunday effect.

So I guess you go to church on Sunday, you get reminded that you have to behave very morally.

You're not supposed to watch porn.

God doesn't like that kind of thing.

And then you forget about it, don't you, six days later?

Yeah.

Wow.

Interesting.

And similar thing happens with charity giving as well, I think.

Oh, really?

With Christians and Muslims.

What, you don't do it on a Sunday?

Surely it would be the inverse.

You do do it on a Sunday.

And it is the other way around, obviously.

Yes.

I'm feeling so lovely and relaxed now.

I think I can make some charity donations.

Great.

There was even actually a study in Morocco done which looked at when the call to prayer was audible, people would give to charity, but it would literally only last a few minutes.

So gi giving to charity would peak for a few minutes.

If you don't get suggestible, that would be a good thing.

That's amazing.

Because if you ran a, let's say, a cold calling thing for charity, you know, I'm ringing up from,

you know, like a I can't think of a single charity now.

Um but if you played the call to prayer in the background, then that would presumably be a way of getting more people to give.

Really?

So if your car had broken down and you're ringing your grandmother,

you're saying, can I borrow 500 quid?

You want to play them?

Do it outside the mosque.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Put that mosquito down, Granny.

Wow.

So just back to the headline fact.

I'm just picturing on Sunday all these guys at church sitting at the pews going, what'd you get up to last night?

I was just at home.

Yeah, me too.

Me too.

Always the same.

You may now shake hands with the person.

No, thank you.

The Sunday effect is very powerful.

You know, and it's largely, I think it's almost exclusively a religious thing.

You know, there's less of it secularly.

But still, I mean, loads in this country, loads around the world.

I found this.

In Tonga, you're not allowed to bake bread on a Sunday unless there's been a natural disaster.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Gosh.

And this was a law passed in 2016.

It's really strange.

It makes sense that stupid laws like that go out of the window when you've got a natural disaster, doesn't it?

Sundays have been messed up for me quite a bit due to religion since becoming a dad because I like to take my boys on the weekend to toy shops.

Oh, yeah.

And one of the biggest, if not the biggest, independent toy shop in the country is called The Entertainer, which is fantastic.

It's got so many of all my favourite toys, sorry, their favourite toys in there.

I didn't realize they sold limited edition Ringo Stardolls still.

No, it's a Ben Elton Barbie.

Oh my god, imagine a Ben Elton Barbie.

Please get onto it.

Imagine much.

Shiny suit, old school microphone.

Yeah, whatever.

What about the poor government in the 1980s?

Pull the string on its back.

Socialist opinions.

Perfect for any child.

So it's shut on Sundays because the creator of it, a man called Gary Grant, has made it so because he's religious and he doesn't allow for it to be.

And also, you can't get Harry Potter toys there because he thinks Harry Potter encourages witchcraft and that's very unchristian.

So if you want your Harry Potter toys, you don't go there.

Because Harry Potter has been very big over the last decade, more than that, in fact.

And the number of witches around

absolutely threw the roof.

It's gone crazy.

He's doing his bit.

Yeah.

You can't walk 10 metres down the street.

Before you get turned into a fraud these days.

So Gary Grant, the shop started in Amersham, he bought it from someone and took it over.

Amersham, we should say, outskirts of London.

Outskirts of London.

Yeah, it's in the middle of the UK.

It's in the middle.

It's in the UK.

I'd say it's not globally famous.

Oh, okay.

If there are like Eek tribespeople listening, for instance, it's unlikely that we can do it.

So he's, I looked into it just to see, is it a particularly religious place?

I looked at notable people from there.

So the people I found there are Tim Rice, who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph, and it's a very biblical sort of work.

Katie Brand, the comedian, who used to be very religious.

religious used to talk in tongues and all that sort of stuff.

Cindy Gallo, who started a company called Make Love Not Porn, which is less religious but on topic for the porn not being launched here.

What is that?

I think it's about sort of positive sex and personal sex rather rather than

saying that you know, sex is a wonderful, natural thing and it's and it's you know good for you, fun, it's loving and it can be all these wonderful things.

Yeah, okay.

Okay.

And she sells stuff in the entertainer, doesn't she?

She's, yeah,

she's got the dolls.

They're quite a lot bigger than Elton Barbie.

And then last of all, there is the Welsh international footballer, Simon Church, who is not religious.

Have you gone through the phone book on Amisham?

I don't know.

I know that doesn't exist.

But what is this weird conspiracy theory you're putting out?

It's just interesting when you notice that there's a lot of Christian connections.

Speaking of massively famous sports people like what was he called?

Simon Church?

Simon Church.

Good grief.

The one famous person who was religious was Jonathan Edwards, who still I think has the world triple jump record.

Okay.

If not he had it quite recently.

But he was such a devout Christian that he refused to jump on Sundays.

What a great way to beat him.

Wait, wait, wait.

Would he hop and skip?

But not jump.

He refused to compete on Sundays.

I don't know if during his normal life he was allowed to jump up and down on that.

And here comes Jonathan Edwards absolutely plowing into the hurdles as he does every Sunday.

He's now dragging 14 hurdles behind him.

But he's going to have it.

So what would happen well he just in the 1991 world championships he just didn't compete he would have probably won gold but he didn't want to do it because it was on a sunday and he went on to host songs of praise so he's quite famous yeah did he yeah did not know that and he became an atheist when this is quite ironic so he was reading about the road to damascus when saint paul became a catholic okay uh saint paul converted when he saw a light on the road to damascus and it made him turn around and stop being a tax collector and become an apostle of Jesus, right?

But he, Jonathan Edwards, read that St.

Paul might have had an epileptic fit and not seen a light after all.

And he became an atheist after reading that explanation.

So ironically, he'd read about the road to Damascus and had like a reverse road to Damascus moment.

Yeah, brilliant.

Was he too old to still compete at this point?

He was, yeah, that was after he took a lot of time.

What a shame.

Doubly piss you off, wouldn't it?

When Sundays are now available to you.

Yeah, I could have had that in 1991.

And who's this bursting onto the track?

My goodness, an elderly Jonathan Edwards.

He's behind everyone else.

He's losing badly.

He's last.

In 1686, there was a treatise written by a clergyman called John Baptiste Thiers and it was very famous.

Big deal.

And this is around the time when people thought laughing was really bad.

And he gave such strict rules on when you're allowed to laugh.

So he said you're only ever allowed to laugh discreetly and never on work days, Sundays.

So that does cover quite a lot today,

Lent days, Advent, or Holy Days.

So you're basically, you've got about 30 Saturdays

you're allowed to.

Like your sister.

And you're not masturbating on a Saturday.

Well, you've got time.

You are, aren't you?

That's your big day.

Oh no, you've got between laughing and masturbating.

That's a hell of a day.

Can you do them simultaneously?

You're going to have to.

What are you doing in there?

I'm laughing.

Don't come in.

I'm laughing.

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

My fact is that at least four seconds of the film Avatar was funded by Wayne Rooney.

But it's just that bit where there's an amazing strike on gold, isn't it, by one of the Na'Vi people, and then it's back to the plotline.

So amazing.

For any international listeners, Wayne Rooney's a big footballer.

He's probably globally.

He might be globally famous.

He plays in America, yeah.

I did.

Okay, okay, okay.

At least the Americans might know him.

Well, he's a footballer, formerly nicknamed the Spud-Faced Nipper.

I am a big football fan, and and I've never come across that nickname.

I think it's the one thing I heard about him in probably, you know, 2002 and it's just stuck.

Anyway, this is from a book by a colleague of mine actually from Private Eye called Richard Brooks.

And the book is called The Great Tax Robbery.

And this is about a tax scheme.

that was set up

which

included investing in movies and it meant you could you could claim a large amount of tax off.

So Mr.

Rooney put in at least £100,000 because I think that was

just Colin who's spud facing.

Try and make up to him after that sanderous comment.

Sorry.

He put £100,000 in the scheme.

And the film is 162 minutes long and it costs 237 million

pounds, I think.

Oh, maybe dollars.

Anyway, the math works out roughly at that.

Oh, hang on.

A pound is worth a dollar these days.

Fine.

A type of Ricardo.

Yeah.

And sadly, we'll probably never know which four seconds.

I did actually write to Wayne Rooney's people asking which four seconds.

They don't allocate money to

what?

There isn't a specific four seconds.

I just thought maybe for special investors they would say, you know, oh, this is what your, this is what it's helped fund.

Maybe if it was a Kickstarter, they might say, well, your hundred grand went to this four seconds.

Exactly.

Or, you know, it funded the development of this particular animal in the Avatar jungle.

And there's that bit in Avatar, isn't there, when Bob Geldoff actually took back his hundred thousand and it's just missing four seconds, isn't it, during the film?

Yeah, they haven't got back to me yet.

If you go on this scheme, they have on their website, which still exists, it shows all of the movies that they invested in.

Really?

And they include Sean of the Dead, Shark Nado 2,

and a movie called Brooklyn.

And the interesting thing about that is that David Beckham was also an investor, and he has a son called Brooklyn.

True.

So he gave some money for Brooklyn and also created another Brooklyn.

Brilliant.

Very nice.

Great movie, by the way.

But I didn't think the scheme was still going.

I thought it had been kind of shut down.

Well, they have a website with all the different movies.

Oh, fair enough.

Yeah, yeah.

And so there is a big list of people.

It's not just Wayne Rooney.

It's not just Wayne Rooney, yeah.

No, but so like David Beckham, Andrew Lloyd Webber, there's.

I saw him in the park the other day.

I wonder where this anecdote is going.

Probably nowhere.

Oh, absolutely nowhere.

Yeah.

Actually, Dad mentioned Tim Rice a while ago, and I thought about jumping in with it then, but

I'm so glad I held fire.

No,

there is a good anecdote with this, because you did mention it.

Yeah, yeah, he was.

His dog was terrorizing a gosling.

Ryan Gosling.

Sadly.

Yeah.

Ryan Gosling's a real Freddy cat.

No, no, no.

His dog was barking at a tiny, tiny baby gosling.

And I was so shocked that it was Andrew Lloyd Weber that I forgot to say, oh, I think actually it's meant to be on a leash in this bit.

And

I wouldn't have had the...

I mean, missing the main point, which is that I mentioned on the show that he hated the movie Cat so much that he went out and bought a dog.

It pissed him off so much.

And you've now seen the

dog, yeah, yeah.

It's a nice dog.

Well, it doesn't sound very nice.

Sounds like it was terrorising a baby goose.

Just doing what dogs do.

It's the owner's fault.

It's never a problem dog.

It's a problem owner.

You're right.

Blame the parents.

So Bob Geldof and

David Becker, Roy Keene.

Want to slug off Roy Keene now?

I'm thinking

Geldof reckons he owns a brief second.

So maybe his $100,000 was used on catering or something.

And then a tiny bit for the film.

Lots of men.

Do you think women aren't as prone to investing in shit films just as a way of avoiding paying tax legitimately?

Yeah, I don't know.

Could be.

Is the biggest grossing movie of all time technically a shit film?

I was maybe had Shark Nado in my head.

Oh, how dare you?

That's a brilliant film.

Shark Nado 2?

Oh, even better.

Is that the one we're talking about?

Yeah, yeah.

It's a very good example of the sequel being better than the the original.

Just like Terminator and Alien, yeah, yeah.

Although, Alien, uh, Aliens was James Cameron as well, wasn't it?

James Cameron.

This is, again, the thing about Avatar is it's the biggest film of all time, the biggest grossing film of all time.

And I think maybe Avengers might have beaten it.

It did for a while.

Oh, then it reovertook.

It's a really interesting story.

Sorry to derail you a second, Andy, here, but when it came out initially, it came out in China in 3D, and there was this big controversy.

Sorry, which one are you talking about?

Avatar the first movie.

There was a big controversy, which it's really hard to get to the bottom of what really really happened, but a lot of the 3D showings of it in China were pulled from the cinemas.

And the story goes that the reason that happened is China had a domestic film, which was Confucius with Chao Yong Fat, which they wanted to really dominate the box office.

And Avatar was doing that.

So they took the 3D movie out and left the 2D in, but it really hurt their box office amount in China.

It still became the biggest box office hit of all time until the Avengers Endgame came along and overtook it.

However, in the lead-up for Avatar the Second movie, which is coming out this year, they put a re-release of the original.

And in China specifically, where the box office has now boosted it back over Avengers.

Do you think James Cameron have a sly word with Xi Jinping on the side and say, look, mate, do me a favour.

Do me a skill.

The China thing, by the way, it's the place where it's based.

I haven't seen Avatar, but is it called Pandora?

Yeah, I think.

So it's based apparently on a place called Zhang Jiajie,

which is in China.

It's a national forest park.

In fact, it was the first first in China.

And it's got these amazing pillars.

Like,

there's a place in Greece called Monastero, which is more famous, which is like the kind of big bits of rock that just kind of stick up from the ground.

Anyway, supposedly, Pandora was based on this area.

And in this area, they also have the world's tallest lift.

World's tallest outdoor lift, I should say.

Okay, so I've got a question.

Yeah.

Is it the shaft that's tallest or is it the lift?

When you say the tallest lift, is it lift a giraffe could walk into and be fine?

I honestly haven't written down which it is, but I'm pretty sure it's taller than any buildings in London.

It's taller than the shard, for instance.

It's 326 meters high.

The shard is 309 meters high.

I'm assuming that is the shaft of the lift.

It's probably the shaft, not the lift.

Because imagine the shaft.

If that's the...

Well, it might just be one floor it's going up, but it is not

very tall.

But no, it is.

It's the shaft.

That's so good.

And it's so that you can get up to a viewing platform to

see the area.

But Shangjiaji, which is the mountain range, they've named one of the columns Avatar Hallelujah Mountain, and it's because of the film.

So China had a very problematic relationship with this film initially.

It's really come good.

Because they did say that one of the reasons they might have pulled it is because the Chinese people might have empathized with the blue people in Avatar and it might have shown them their own plight.

Because a lot of Chinese people were being kicked out of their houses so they could build new cities, all that kind of thing.

And Avatar is about a colonial invasion of new people, isn't it?

Yes,

it is.

There are these things in the world of Avatar.

They're called the Banshee.

Yeah.

And

they're basically dragons.

I'm just saying that quietly because James Cameron very strongly denies that they're dragons.

And he can't hear softly spoken things, can he?

He's lost so much hearing from filming Aliens and Terminator 2.

No, but they're, you know, they're...

What can they do?

Can they breathe fire and fly and they have tails and they're like lizards?

The last three things, not the first one.

I i don't think they breathe fire anyway they i mean they're pretty dragging the main one's called puff

um but they um they had to come up with an an entire workout for the cast so they could ride these fictional cgi animals because he wanted them to have a very realistic style you know they were filming all this motion capture stuff kind of um the gollomy style of filming yeah um so they created the banshee buns of steel workout so that they could be filmed riding these things and and when they filmed them they

you know you might get the actors.

So, Zoe Seldana is one of the two stars of it, and

she has to jump onto one of these things at various points in the film.

And, you know, you might think, oh, we'll just film her jumping onto a saddle or a vaulting horse or whatever.

And then we'll just use that motion capture.

They actually filmed her jumping onto a massive stunt man wearing a saddle because they want, James Cameron was so insistent.

He wanted the real, you know, I want her to be jumping onto a living being, you know, that get the flex of the movement.

Sorry, where was the stunt man wearing a saddle?

Because either he'd have to be on all fours, in which case...

He must have been on all fours.

But then he's very small.

She has to crouch down to climb onto him.

Or was he wearing it on his head?

And then she has to vault onto him.

I think he had stilts on each.

Yeah.

I know what you're saying.

He could have been on a platform.

Maybe he was on a platform.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, great point.

I haven't seen footage of it.

I've only read descriptions.

He sounds...

Like he was quite an atrocious director to work for in that sort of he really pushed people and was really rude and he got his way and if you didn't do things then you were in a lot of trouble.

One thing that he would do is he would wear a hat on the first day of filming which would have on it H-M-F-I-C and that would stand for head motherfucker in charge and the idea was don't get in my way.

Kate Winslet said she would never work with him again because of how much he pushed her on the Titanic movie.

He almost drowned for example, even though she's in the latest avatar.

She had the door.

Yeah, that's true.

We should probably talk a little bit about how why it was such a big deal I suppose suppose, because it was so groundbreaking in the technology it used.

It sounds really cool to act on, because actors were so used to having to wear these really hefty prosthetics if they wanted to play anything that didn't look exactly like a human.

So

they, I think it was inspired by Spider-Man 2, where Alfred Moliner plays the villain, and he was...

Doctor Octopus.

Yeah, Doctor Octopus.

And they first used motion capture on his face by putting lots of little beads all over it, like reflective beads.

And then a camera films all of those reflective beads

and automatically they can pick up the data of exactly how they move depending on what facial expressions you make.

And then a computer can regenerate those exact facial expressions.

So if you smile then it makes your octopus man smile.

Exactly.

But in a really realistic way because otherwise they're just stretching a smile on a computer screen.

It looks terrible, you know.

Yeah.

And it's really cool because it actually means that you don't have to have a camera in the right place ever because

the computers are capturing every single angle of your movement, you can decide later on when you're doing the computer, you know, computer-generated film editing which angle you want.

You'll be like, actually, I want the camera on this side of them.

And the computer's got all the data for how your face moves.

So clever.

I hadn't thought of that.

There's one big problem with Avatar.

Oh, yeah?

The breasts.

No one's paid to touch them.

I read a report of the science of avatar and whether, you know, whether this world could exist and all of these aspects.

And there was one very snotty line in it it said the females female na'vi aliens even have breasts even though cameron admits they aren't placental mammals that's a good point

what a what a what a blood hole that is that's that's well because he was very careful he had all these years to put it together so um the main like he had a botanist on set who did all of the naming of the plants um he had a linguistics expert professor come in and write the language which was up to a thousand words for the movie um in fact you know what's what's really odd?

He did so many from scratch things, language and botanist, but then the sounds that they used for the animals were taken from Jurassic Park.

So when you hear, not all of them, but when you hear a bunch of the nuts, yeah, so they use the T-Rex and they use the Raptor when it's in the kitchen.

Did they have famous people in it?

Like

Zoe Seldiner and Sam Worthington weren't.

Well, Worthington wasn't.

They weren't kind of megastars, but they were sort of reasonably well known.

Worthington was homeless at the time.

He was living in his car when he did the audition.

I read that as well, and I wondered if they decided, okay, we're going to spend all of our money on this stuff.

Let's get slightly shitter actors because it doesn't matter.

We're going to put dots on their faces anyway.

And the sound bit, let's just take the stuff from Jurassic Park.

That's fine.

Like, they save money here.

How do they get to 200 million dollars?

Just all making everyone blue.

That's it.

So many stickers.

One other thing they spent money on, the cigarettes.

So Zigourne Weaver is in it, and she's obviously brilliant.

And she's in it, and her character smokes.

But the cigarettes in the film are CGI cigarettes.

Yeah, odd.

And I tried to find out why.

and I read a few articles about this.

I found no explanation.

She held a toothpick.

Does she just not smoke?

Maybe.

I can't imagine Sigourney Weaver not smoking.

I can't picture it.

No, and then he got in loads of trouble for depicting smoking.

Did he?

In the film?

Yeah.

Various anti-smoking groups said this is very irresponsible to show anyone as cool as Sigourney Weaver smoking.

And he said, but people do smoke.

It shows a lot of trust from the actors, doesn't it?

That if he's like, yeah, that thing in your hand, I'm going to definitely make it a cigarette.

I'm not gonna make it anything else.

Wobble it around a bit and then put it up your bum.

It won't be a cigarette.

It's not gonna be a tiny dismembered penis.

I wasn't thinking that.

I was thinking like a kazoo or something.

But like

you know, you don't know.

Like, that's what I mean.

If you do a normal movie,

you've done your scene and you know that that scene is gonna be how it is.

Yeah.

But they could have put anything on your face, couldn't they?

Yeah.

They could in fact, I imagine it would be the press of a button to redo the entirety of Avatar, but they're all worms.

Anyway, that'll be great.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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Another day.

All right.

I'm getting out of here.

Bye.

See you next week.

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