442: No Such Thing As Borkenstein's Monster

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B21.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Toshinsky, and Andrew Hunt and Murray. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is, Andy. My fact is that Charles Darwin kept a pet bug so he could see how long it lasted on a meal of blood.

Who's blood?

So I went to Charles Darwin's house recently,

which is called Downhouse, and it's amazing. It's really great because they preserved it almost exactly as it was when he was living there.

Because it was his then it passed to his and his wife's children and then it became a museum so they've got the chair he wrote the origin of species in they've got all of his little experiments in the garden and there was a board up which said that it was it seemed to imply that it was his blood actually i think it was he got the bug to drink someone else's blood and then just monitored the bug did he just drag people off the street well he he was on the the voyage of the beagle at the time because the voyage took years i mean the voyage was really yeah yeah yeah yeah you need company on that kind of thing a pet's a good idea

do we know what this bug is, by the way? We do. It's called the Vinchuka now.
At the time, he called it the Benchuka.

And it's called the kissing bug or the assassin bug, and it crawls all over your body and then drinks your blood. And

so he put it on the table. And from the account, he got some sailors on the boat to offer their fingers to the bug.

And he said that it would immediately protrude its sucker, make a charge, and if allowed, draw blood. And then in 10 minutes, it went from being completely flat to being globular.

And that this one feast kept it fat during four whole months. Wow.
Wow. Yeah.
That's pretty good. Is that the one that he got Shagger's disease from? Yeah.
Yeah.

This is of all the bugs that you could keep as a pet, this is the one whereby,

yeah, it's the worst. Mosquito might be worse.

Mosquito's bad, but this is the one where it's got that longevity thing where if you get bitten by it and the sort of whatever saliva goes into your body 20 years later, you might have heart conditions.

So he had incredibly poor health for the last few decades of his life. Really terrible digestion and

just awful health. And we think it may be...
It's not completely sure what it was, but there's a really strong theory that it was his pet.

Shagger's disease from his pet bug. And when I say Shagger's disease, it's C-H-A-G-A-S.
Exactly, but I pronounce it Shaggers. It's much more funny to pronounce it Shagger's things.

Because you're going to a sex addict meeting, but you thought you were going to a Shaggers

disease meeting. It's just cool to say at the pub, isn't it? Got Shaggers disease.

Where did you catch it? Off an insect.

I'll be dead in a couple of years.

Did he ever name for the pet? No, I don't think he named the pet. And again, this brings into question.
Is it a pet? Did he take it for walks? It seems very unlikely that he has.

But a cat is a pet, and you don't take that for a walk normally. Did it sit on his lap while he watched Telly?

What was the age of the pet? Did it just aloofly walk away from him all the time, like my cat does? Pet, exactly. Did it show no emotional interest? Pet.

It was a cat. Effectively, it turns out he had a cat.

But if he got Shaga's disease from it, it does imply that he did experiment on it himself, right? It may have been one of his many rival colleague bugs which actually gave him the disease.

But he may also have, he probably did let it feed.

He did, but it was on that trip which he wrote in his voyage of the Beagle Diary that there was a night where there was an attack of these kind of bugs where he was bitten.

So I don't think it was necessarily his pet that went for him, as opposed to a whole swarm in the middle of the night.

It is a really cool house.

He had his desk chair,

like so many animals, evolved to meet his needs.

As in, it gave birth to other desk chairs, some of which died because they weren't adapted well enough for the environment. He intelligently designed it to change it.
Oh my god, he actually did.

He designed it.

He disproved himself. It was a big, comfy chair, and he had a board across it, so he could sit in basically a lovely big armchair but also right.
I think we said it had wheels.

He had wheels. They had to the office chair.

They love tampering with furniture because we've actually mentioned years ago that Erasmus Darwin, his grandfather, adjusted a table to accommodate his fat stomach, didn't he?

He was just kind of holding it. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, they were part of the Wedgwood family, so they liked interiors.

Yeah.

Was that? On that side of the family? No, it was his wife, wasn't it? But I've just remembered they were cousins, he and his wife. So actually,

both sides are a family. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So you said it lasted four months, right?

And a lot of blood suckers, they've got a bad rep, but they do last a very long time, most of them, on very small amounts of blood. Well, the little blood suckers.
So

I think you can get lice that last like a year on one blood meal. Wow.
And leeches, so we breed leeches. Actually, Wales has the world's biggest leech breeding farm for medical purposes.

Like the vast majority of the world's leeches that are used in medicine. And they don't put that in the tourist information.
No, no, no. And I I think they should.

Why did they choose the dragon as the animal? Leech? Dragons don't even exist. Good point.
And leech is much easier to draw. Yes.

Looks a bit like a poo, though, on the flag. Yeah, you don't want that.
If you draw the serrated teeth and the slobbering fangs, I think it'll make clearer that it's a leech on the flag. I think.

It's like if you put eyes on a poo, it still looks like a poo, as emojis of show does. That's true.

I think if you've got the leech latched into a human vase. That's a great idea.

That's a nice logo logo for the microphone. And maybe cut the back off it so that it just keeps sucking and the blood pours out of its rectum.

Why is it a severed leech? Well, that's what they do with leeches, isn't it? When you have blood-sucking leeches,

if you're a a guy from the 16th century or something, a doctor, you put a leech on them and you cut the end off and they just keep eating.

I think so. Because they don't know they're full.
I'm going off memory, so I might be completely wrong. They're not full.
They're empty. You're emptying them out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like, you know, when people pack suitcases to go on holiday but you don't want them to go in Austin Powers for instance

as they expose and you take them out. Oh I see you don't cut a hole in the suitcase.

No no

they get pissed off about it. Wait, so could you bleed to death if you had an anusless leech?

No, I think your body would create enough

your body has a lot of anus. Yeah, it would take a long time and a lot of leeches.
Okay, yeah. Still quite amazing.
My cat I have to feed it every day.

How long did that bug say? One year without a meal. Yeah, you can go one year without a meal.
These leeches, they get fed sheep's blood every six months on the farm.

Which is not I guess there's probably just one sheep, and every six months it gets a corn. It's like, no, it's your day to day.

But that's all right, if it's only twice a year. I think, do they put it in a put a load of sheep's blood in a condom or something, and then the leeches have to attach onto it? Yeah, maybe it's that.

Get that on the flag.

So I actually haven't realised how widespread they are in plastic surgery, for instance.

So there was a survey of 50 plastic surgery units in the UK, and 80% of them use leeches in the last five years. So it's very, it's common in the world.
What are are they in that scenario?

What are they using them? You shove them inside your boobs to make them bigger.

There's loads and loads of leeches.

You can see them wriggling.

They're posh pies.

They are used for because they thin blood. So when they latch

onto you to suck your blood, they thin it out so they can suck as much of it as possible. So in surgery, it's very useful because often you get blood clots after surgery.

And also if you're reattaching limbs, so if your nose has fallen off and you need to have it reattached, it's quite common to use leeches to sort of connect the two bits to keep the blood flow going.

Otherwise, your blood would just clot and then you wouldn't be able to get the blood flow.

It's a cooling in the area, they just remove it, and it means that the new capillaries form neatly.

They're amazing.

Let's do some other animals that eat blood. Okay, well, check this out, right? So, mosquitoes.
Oh, yeah. They eat blood.
They do. We all know that.
Famously.

What I didn't know is that there are midges that eat mosquitoes.

So they eat the blood from the mosquito.

So it's like they're having our blood via the mosquito. Then is there a smaller little louse that's latched onto the midge? Possibly, yeah.
That's the opposite of a Russian doll.

Because also it's on the outside. It's outflowing, yeah, flowing out.
Yeah. Yeah, that's incredible.
I was hearing, blood is actually incredibly.

I thought of blood as being an ultimate food. Well, you are a vampire.

Yeah, exactly. And I ask you,

as in, I thought. It's a superfood.
It's like kale. Yeah.

It's like red kale.

It's strong. You know, you drink the blood to gain the life.

Life force. Candy, this is really creepy.
It's incredible. I don't know.
Well, you can think of it that way. It's full of iron.
It's full of iron.

It turns out it's pretty much the worst food you can have.

It's so rubbish. So it's incredible.
It doesn't have enough B vitamins for you to survive on.

Almost everything needs B vitamins and it's got none. Quite a lot of cereals have B vitamins added, don't they? So you can put blood on your conflicts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, well, that's a good solution.
You're right, for the natural world.

But so red meat has a thousand times as much vitamin B12 as blood, just to put it out in context.

Also,

it does have loads of iron, which can be toxic. So that's a problem as well.

And leeches and ticks and lots of other blood-sucking creatures, they have to have special bacteria in their stomachs, which create B vitamins.

And leeches have to have particular tissue to sort of tie up the iron which they're ingesting.

They don't want to ingest this iron, but they've got these special chemicals in them to protect themselves from it. So it's a terrible food.
Yeah.

So there's 30,000 species I read that are blood suckers. Wow.

And that sounds a lot, except for Andy's point, it's really not a lot when you consider how readily available blood is for

how many species there are. How many species there are.
So that's actually quite a limited number, which goes to your point that it's not the most practical of foods.

Okay, so like everything, loads of carnivals eat meat. There are way more than 30,000 of those.
But yeah, blood suckers, you have to be really specially evolved to do it. Exactly.

So it's not the ultimate food. Well, that's you've exploded the myth there.

You'll kick that box on HelloFresh the next time you order it.

Blood box.

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

My fact this week is that the child who the book The Exorcist was based on went on to become a NASA engineer whose inventions contributed to the Apollo moon missions. So cool.

So you're saying that actually they levitated

all the way to the moon. Yes.
Saying, fuck you,

propelled by vomit coming out from the astronauts. Yeah.

So the author of The Exorcist, the novel, William Blatty, he based it on a true life story. And it was in 1949 in St.
Louis in Missouri. And it was the story of a kid who we've known as Roland Doe.

And no one's known who he is. Then it gets revealed: an engineer from NASA who's called Ronald Edwin Hunkler, he in fact was the boy.
Oh, and that the other name was a pseudonym.

And all along, people within NASA, you know, close friends knew this, but he never wanted to tell anyone because he found it an extraordinarily embarrassing thing.

So he was someone who worked at NASA, who was part of the Apollo missions, as I just said. He also had a few patents with them.
He made these ceramics that you put on the outside of

rockets. Cool.

stuff.

No, it's like special ceramic plates. And I think when there was a crash or a problem recently, they blamed it on the ceramic plates.

People might remember that.

We messed it up. No, no, no.
That was a different issue.

But he invented this thing which was like foamed ceramics. Right.
Where you would make a slurry of different materials

and then you would wait for it to bubble up and then you put it into the oven and it would bake and it would be really heat resistant.

He invented those things. So cool.
We should say that obviously the exorcist, the film, is Reagan the girl. So, Priscilla, I don't know at what point it changed.

Was it in the book that it was a girl as well? Or did it change from a boy to a girl?

I think in the book it was a girl. Yes, in the book, it was a girl.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he changed it.

What was his name? Blatty? Yeah. He changed it because it was a way of masking what had gone on.

The original case sounds extremely spooky,

which you wouldn't be in case. No,

does it, though? It does to me. So

it's actually terrifying. Yeah, he was born in 1935, this boy.

Don't open with that.

Well, the cases of things like hearing scratching noises from his bedroom walls, and the family minister wrote to a parapsychology lab at Duke University when the boy was 14 years old, so 1949, and said that his bed shook when he was in it.

No, come on.

No, stop.

He could have had Shagger's disease. He could.

He was 14. And that

a picture of Christ on the wall shook when he was nearby. As in the image itself was

spooky. He did live in an earthquake-prone place.
I can't believe they're the things you're picking out as spooky. So many mad things happened.
So the details

from the story that we know are based on basically this diary by Father Raymond Bishop. So there were a few priests who rocked up to try and help out with the exorcism.

And Father Raymond Bishop was one of them. Very confusing, not a bishop.
A priest called bishop. How clever.

But I mean, name yourself for the job you want.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, he's working his way out the markle priest in bolton's called a pastor that's great yeah yeah should have started an italian restaurant though

he replaced someone called father macvicar no yeah so that is that's someone who was voted on in an internet poll wasn't it

vicar mcvicar face

anyway bishop face wrote this diary about all the stuff that happened which is part of the reason why um we're somehow skeptical about the facts of the the exorcist, because he didn't come on a little bit later.

So he was using what he'd been told by the family and the other priests who'd been involved earlier on. But some of the things he said are kind of amusing.
So

there was, apparently, once there was a question of the time of departure from the house, and suddenly the word Saturday appeared written on the boy's hip.

So I guess the devil's like, you know, leave on Saturday.

There was, for instance, his desk at school used to move independently of him. It's very hard to fake that.
I just like it's not like all these

Wow, independently of anyone, that just moves. Okay, I'm with you.
Guys, can we just clarify, please, that obviously we know it's all lies. I'm not saying it's true.

I'm just saying that some of the claims that were made about what happens, you couldn't say a boy had done it. What I didn't believe was the pre-sing did it then? It's just lies.

Oh,

it made the uppy shit.

But he said he left school out of embarrassment that his desk was moving. Now, I think if I was a school child and my desk moved independently, you'd be the coolest kid in school.

That's not embarrassing, isn't it? Oh, children are very quick to find a point of difference, aren't they?

If you were quite nerdy and then your desk started moving, that's not going to help you become cool.

I can picture what would have happened if I had been possessed by a demon at school. It wouldn't have helped.
Right, if you can.

And this guy, Hunkler, the exorcism boy, then growing up, he always apparently went out on Halloween

because he was worried that someone would find him. On Halloween.
Oh,

I see. Not because he was worried the demons would come back, just because...
Right. Yeah.
he seemed to be very paranoid about being found out for being this boy.

Really terrified to have ruined his life a bit.

Yeah, it's because the book sold 13 million copies in America alone. But using a fictional plotline with the girl, he was nicely hidden.
But I guess someone would have known, right?

They would have known where he lived. People he worked with knew.
Yeah. Like, people did know.
Yeah, that's true. But I reckon it was an open secret in the area.
Yeah, definitely.

In the newspaper reports around the time, this is from the Baltimore Evening Sun from 1949, they said that it took 20 to 30 exorcisms to get rid of the demon and that at the end of each one the child would have a tantrum and voice scraps of Latin and that a boy once sat in a chair and it tipped over.

That was evidence that he had a demon.

But it did say that local families were sprinkling holy water around his house because they'd heard about this demon possession and everyone would go around and put holy water there.

You've got to get really good coverage though with holy because holy water doesn't come in big quantities. No.

It's not like putting in a hose pipe. Yeah.
It's not like putting down vinegar to deter a fox where you can just slosh it about. Couldn't you just get a big vat of water and get a priest to bless it?

Then all become holy. I guess.
Why don't we just bless all the water then? As in, if this works, which I'm not saying it does, why not just bless

send a priest to the Pacific Ocean? Exactly. Bless that, and then we'll priest.

Basically, you're going to have to do this. Go to Lud's, buy up all the holy water, drink it all, piss it out, get it back into the water cycle, and then some of it is holy.

It'll be like one or two bits of it will be in every glass of water you ever drink will have a little bit of holy water in it. Well, that's a good idea.
That's exciting.

Presumably that's true already. You know, the holy water has been part of the water cycle, hasn't it? Do people drink it and piss it out? But it's been somewhere sprinkled on people.

It evaporates, it goes up into the clouds, it's in the seas. All water is holy, I think, we've decided.
There we go. Nice.
We're fine. Well, that's how deep possessions have dropped off, haven't they?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well,

some local families, like I say, they sprinkled water around this house but there was one family that didn't believe any of it and they invited him to stay with them and said okay we'll see if you're really possessed and they reported that his bed shook and bumped in the night and they became believers according to the Baltimore Evening Sun.

One of the other symptoms according to the priests who were there and this one you could fake probably

if you're talented is that apparently during possession several times there was the passing of wind through his rectum.

Well one thing I noticed because I looked at all of his patents, one of his patents is for gaseous flow purging in thermal blanket cleaning.

So his patents were about gaseous flow, and while he was possessed, he also had gaseous flow.

And I read through every single patent he did, and that was the only link I could find to the gaseous flow.

Just seems to be a teenage boy farting and shaking the bed,

you know, through unknown mechanisms. I bet he needed some thermal blanket cleaning after the uh

in the film yeah was there was a lot of chat that maybe the filming itself was haunted oh yeah yeah because uh for example the climactic exorcism scene when they were filming it it had to be delayed because a pigeon flew into a light box

and the set burned down the set burnt down

yeah

burned down well a pigeon the pigeon i imagine the light box is very hot

we understand why, but I feel like that's a big story. Well, the thing is, the director, William Freakin, claimed that a winged creature with talons

had been responsible for this fucking freaking out. Oh, my God.

Was responsible for it. So I think he was sexing up

spooky.

There's officially three Exorcist movies. So the first one was based on the novel.
And then the second one, Blatty went off, and they just made, they wrote a sequel and they put that out.

Exorcist 3 So sorry is the famous one is the first one

and then there's a sequel Yeah, then there's the sequel and then there's Exorcist 3 which Blatty himself wrote and directed So he came back for the third one.

Oh but the novelist right the novelist Yeah, but he worked in he worked in film generally anyway but so he also wrote novels and he wanted to make his novel which was called Legion into a movie. Okay.

And I think when they were funding it, something went round where they sort of said, it's not going to happen. What if we call it Exorcist 3? So it was named Exorcist 3.

So he was directing it, directing the whole movie. They'd done the whole production.
And then during the production, someone noticed that, hang on, there's no exorcisms in this movie whatsoever.

What's going on? And so the money people came and said, what are you doing? Why is this called this? He said, well, it's actually based on my novel Legion, which doesn't have any exorcisms in it.

So they ended up making him re-film the entire last third of the movie at costs of $4 million just so they could introduce some random new father character who could perform an exorcism in the movie.

That seems reasonable if they're calling it exorcist three.

Yeah, it's either that or I'll change the name. It's like what was Legion about? Did it fit with the plot?

I actually don't know. Yeah, was it like a Roman army

halfway through? V D V D, what was that?

They're all speaking Latin all the way through. It's incredibly scary.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that plants remember droughts

and they like it. They like it.
They like it because it's useful to them. How's it useful for them? Because they can't go somewhere.
They can't go, oh, let's move next to that river.

They can't. They haven't went out to buy plane tickets to wet places yet.
What you can do is you can take action as a plant.

So

this is kind of an amazing discovery about plants because it kind of taps into something that we thought that they were not capable of doing at all, which is more of an animal feature.

How it works is: let's say you take a plant that has undergone a really bad drought,

and then you take a plant that didn't undergo a really bad drought, and then you subject them both to a bad drought the following year.

The plant that underwent the bad drought is going to have learned to deal with it, and it can do clever things, like it can not open its pores as much so it doesn't lose as much water.

You know, it can do clever things to conserve water to make it less

less shit.

These technical words are just

shit. That's what they said in the paper.
And

it's very clever. So basically, they make a molecule which is called the GABBA molecule, which acts like a memory.
So they make more of this molecule when it's droughty.

And that molecule is what tells it next time to do things like not open its paws so it doesn't lose water.

And the unbelievable thing about this, which I think is maybe even more amazing, is that it's sort of deposited on their genes this learning process. So it's epigenetics, you know, when

it's basically the opposite of Darwinism, it's like you're not just getting your genes from your parents, you're learning something, and then that goes into your genes, and then you can pass it on.

Wow, I feel a bit challenged, actually. It feels a bit pointed that Anna's brought up this anti-Darwinistic thing, yeah, yeah, just Lamarckism almost.
Yeah, yeah, so thanks a lot, Anna.

I'm rubbishing your favourite amazing thing about it. Sorry, I've just got one

specifically on that. You just said this thing was called Gabba, the molecule.

Gabba is also an acronym for a very dry place.

It's a cricket ground in Australia, the GABA. Well, it's in Australia.
So the GABA is a slang term, Aussie slang term, which stands for the great Australian bugger all.

And

it's the sort of ultra-outbacky, really, really dry bit of Australia. There we go.
We've completed the circle. It's one of the first facts I ever learned at QI.
Is it? Interesting.

GABBA actually stands in this case for gamma aminobutyric acid.

But the really interesting thing about it is that it's the same molecule that's used in mammals and in other animals to signal messages between your body.

So through your nervous system, you also use GABA and these plants are using the same thing.

That's amazing. That's cool.

So we all contain GABA. We're all contained.

Some of us more than others.

Yeah, there's quite a lot of stuff over the last kind of 10 years, if you start reading about plant, that looks into the idea of plant consciousness being a thing, not in the same way that humans have it, but investigating whether we've underestimated that.

And I think people didn't want to think about it for ages because of this thing that I'd never heard of, actually, but this guy called Trofim Lysenko, who's this Soviet guy.

So basically, he thought that plants had memories, and he turned out to be a real piece of shit. And

so people don't like to copy him. So there are some grains that are stimulated by cold weather to know to then grow in spring.
Oh, right.

But he realized that if he subjected those grains to just cold temperatures, he could trick them into thinking that it had been winter.

And then they'd remember that, and then they'd grow in what they thought was spring a few months later. So he said, Plants have got memories.
Great.

Does that mean double harvests? That means double harvests, exactly. So he was like, this is going to transform the Soviet Union.
Oh, my God. I am going to make it go so well.

And as many of us know, the Soviet Union did not go that well in a harvest sense. But he didn't sound like a piece of shit so far.
Right.

Sounds like a good guy so far, trying to get some extra harvests in. No, I agree.
Maybe his intentions were good at some point.

So he came up with some really dodgy scientific conclusions, which were completely incorrect and forced loads of farmers to plant specific grains at specific times. It didn't work.

And it's really responsible for a lot of the famines of the 40s and 50s in the Soviet Union. And, you know, he's possibly responsible for millions of deaths.

The whole plant consciousness is obviously a giant pseudoscience which has been around since the late 60s.

There was a book that that was called The Secret Life of Plants, which came out, which was a number one bestseller globally. And it had all of these big claims about what plants were able to do.

And so, a guy called Cleve Baxter was the main guy behind it. He was a CIA polygraph guy who kind of made

it was an extraordinary story. And it kind of the reason people talk to plants these days kind of is rooted back to him.

These days, there's an amazing woman in Australia who's called Monica Gagliano, and she's leading a lot in bioacoustics, which is looking at at plants and how sound might be something that they can pick up as well.

Many scientists, obviously hugely skeptical, but she works for a university in Sydney and she's publishing reports that, let's say, for example, you played the sound of water and it was a recording of water, the roots would grow towards it.

We should say Gagliano is not the kind of pseudoscience of the 70s book. Like she is a legitimate scientist.
She's a legitimate scientist, but she makes huge claims.

She wrote a book called Thus Spoke the Plant, which she says she co-wrote with plants, speaking to the plants. Not metaphorically, literally.
Did she share the royalties?

Possibly, I bet she does in some way give it to a character that looks after plants. Because yeah, she has done experiments which are very surprising.

Like she did that thing where if you drop certain plants, then they will close up to try and protect themselves.

And so she created actually this really cool thing, which you use to drop a plant, which, you know, when you're at a fairground and you sit on one of those benches, it carries you up a pole, a vertical pole, and it drops you down again she made that for plants and she realized that if you drop them enough times they stop closing up

because they learn because they learn that it's not going to do them any harm and she says that it can then remember that lesson for a month you can modify plants to make them drought-proof you can

you can GM tweak them basically so this is something that was done in 2018 scientists tweaked a single gene in tobacco plants which means they lose I think it was a quarter less water and it's because they have these pores right which they normally open up and close in response to daylight okay so that's what triggers it so when the pores open they suck in carbon dioxide and but they also lose water so the carbon dioxide is necessary for photosynthesis but losing water is obviously a bad thing if you're in a time of drought

so in the gm version of these plants they open for a briefer spell they just go

and then

close up

so

thank you so the good thing is they can still get enough carbon dioxide in to do all the photosynthesis they need, but they lose a quarter less water.

You will have a plant that is way more resistant to dry weather. Clever.
It's so clever. Why do we need all this tobacco?

That's a great point.

I suppose they hope it can be done eventually with other...

They're more useful plants.

Yeah, yeah. We're not just all going to have to just literally be smoking 20 a day.
But we will, if we smoke 20 a day, we will need less food, so we'll have to grow less weed. So actually,

it's a real problem. That's progress.

In 1933, yo-yos were banned in Syria because they thought they were causing droughts. Right.
Yeah, I read that. Was there a logic to that? Yeah, so you have ulama who were like religious heads,

and they petitioned the Prime Minister of Syria and said that the yo-yo was responsible for the drought that they were having at the time because the up-and-down movement was counteracting their prayers.

And so they banned it, and the next day it rained. There we go.

But anyway, there was an article in the New York Times at the time, and they spoke about whether this could be true or not.

And they said, well, London at the moment is full of yo-yos and it rains there all the time.

That is their evidence. That's counter-evidence.

James, do you have a view as a golf fan

on what I think you know is coming? The fact that in droughts, golf courses are very often exempt in the UK, in Australia. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's on health at the moment. This is is a huge deal.

In France, they're going and pouring concrete and stuff into golf holes on golf courses. Which is the most pointless thing because they change the golf hole every single day.

Like on a golf course, if you go onto a green, the hole is in a certain place. Every day, they fill it in and they put it in a different place.
I had no idea about that.

Because it's part of the game because people play every day, right? And so it would be boring if it was always on the same place. Oh, yeah, that's the thing that makes it boring.

But people are coming in, filling in these holes, which are literally about to be filled in anyway. They're doing the job for them.
Yeah, maybe they're doing it to help them out.

Well, that's very funny, and so is that.

Whatever, right? It tends to be like another part of the green, like with a different slope. Do golfers claim, oh, I would have got it if...
if I've been here yesterday.

I was playing actually to yesterday's hole. Yeah, actually, when you play golf, you can see where the old hole was because it never quite mends.

And so often you'll hit a ball and you're nowhere near the actual hole, but you're right next to where it was a few days ago. Can you get like a half point for that? No half points.

No, they don't give points. It's not a points game, is it? Well, the

shots. Yeah,

yeah. But

yeah,

I think we've all learned something very interesting to be honest. But yeah, they are exempt, and they're exempt on,

according to Southern Water, because this is happening at the moment in the UK. There have been a few hosepipe bans in certain areas.

Southern Water wrote on their website that on health and safety grounds, golf courses are exempt.

No,

rather think if I'm not allowed to use a hose pipe on my garden probably you shouldn't be allowed on golf courses. Probably would use more on a golf course.

But perhaps there are reasons like because it gets people doing healthy things. Maybe is there other exemptions on tennis courts for instance and more sporting?

I've got data on this. Yeah.
My local bowls club lawn is looking very green indeed.

I would imagine probably they'd for all sporting and health events they probably have an exception. But I don't know.
Yeah I guess golf courses are just the big one, the big grassy ones aren't they?

So that's probably the ones that get all the attention. Because bowls is smaller, you know.
Although it's probably less healthy as well. I mean, bowls doesn't do much good for you.

I remember once reading that it was the most dangerous spot that you can do, and that's because 90-year-olds do it.

And if you look at the number of deaths, huge fatality rate. Yeah.
Well, I was looking, sorry, just on golf courses.

If you did want to not alter your golf course, I was looking at advice on restoring courses after drought on some golf website.

And apparently, it said make sure that all dead grass plants are removed by scarifying or tickle-harrowing the turf. Tickle-harrowing.
Tickle-harrowing.

That's quite a good word for something, isn't it? If you've had a harrowing experience, but not very harrowing. That was a bit tickle-harrowing.
Tickle-harrowing.

Watching the exorcist.

I'm sorry, I cannot get over that they change the golf hole every day. It's absolutely blown my mind.

And I think listeners at home are in my position right now going, why are they talking about anything else? That is...

Certainly anyone who plays golf or has ever played golf or ever watched golf on television would know that.

Watching it on TV, you wouldn't notice the next next day. I mean, they talk about it all the time.
There's very little else to talk about.

Are there any rogue hole placers who put it right on the edge of the green?

Kind of the point.

Let's say, for instance, there's a green, right? It's got lots of slopes on it. One of the slopes goes right down into some water, right?

If you put the hole right next to that slope, then it really changes where you aim because you're not going to aim to the side of it where the water is, right?

Or you can put it 20 yards further, so you have to use a different golf club to reach it on the next time. Or you put it next to a bunker.
Why not do it so that there is no flag?

So all you do is when you arrive, and this is for professionals, when you arrive, you have the data of the previous month's hole positions. Yes.
I mean, that...

pretty much happens what you're talking about.

So the week before a major championship, all the caddies will walk around and look at all the possible places where the hole could be, where it's been in previous years, where it's been on a Thursday and a Friday on a Saturday and a Sunday.

And they kind of know more or less where it's going to be. And then on the morning, they all get a little booklet that tells you exactly where the hole is on each of the

18 holes. And it'll be like 17 yards on and eight yards from the left or whatever.
And that's every morning they get that. Okay.

So

I found a way of being less interested in golf than I was before, which was already a fascinating chat I think I've had in eight years of this podcast.

Oh, God. So then

just one more. Just one more question.
One more question. So let's say a masters is happening and

they go in the...

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, hang on, just one last question, and they suss out where the holes have been previously.

Is there a kind of thing where you go home and let's say Greg Norman and watch golf in a while. Greg Norman is...
You definitely haven't, if you're talking about Greg Norman and the Masters.

But anyway, carry on.

Is there a simulation thing where they can place the ball in a virtual reality kind of simulation so they can test with knowing what the wind speeds will be the next day and so on? Can they prepare?

You have simulated golf and you have, you can simulate wind for sure, and you can simulate pin positions. Whether anyone actually does that, I doubt, but it's not impossible.

Dan, I cannot believe you fought tooth and nail, even though we were saying shut up from that question. That was so boring, Dan.
Are you kidding me? That was so boring. Kill it.

You and I will do our own special podcast afterwards where you ask me all the questions that no one ever wanted to know about golf.

It's going to be a hit. Clubfish, new show coming.

Golfish.

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that when you play golf, it's cool.

Yes!

Yes!

Okay, my fact this week is that in 2017, there was a house party in Maryland that was so boozy, the ambient air in the building tested positive on a breathalyzer.

I'm just excited that everyone from the US is going to switch off because you just said Maryland. Maryland.
It's just Maryland. That's just how U.S.

But Maryland, I can see in a probably Bolton accent. In a Bolton accent, yeah.
Well, this feels like getting shit for the golf chat.

Sorry. Sorry.

This feels like the non-meat of the fact, given that the building tested positive on Bratalyzer. I mean, that was the funny thing.
It's incredible. So, yeah, this was a party,

like a frat party kind of thing,

advertised online as Tequila Tuesday.

Loads of neighbours complained that it was so loud, and so the police turned up.

It turned out that, as well as being beer cans and spilled alcohol, and lots of possibly underage people drinking, they also did a breathalyzer on lots of people, but they did it inside the house and it registered 0.01.

So it wouldn't be legally drunk, but it showed up on the breathalyzer. So it would be able to drive.

The building would be allowed to drive.

But the reason that this is kind of interesting, I think, is that some breathalisers work by taking the ambient air and then they compare your breath to what the air is.

And so, like, if you're outside, if you've been driving and then they stop you, they're testing against the air, you know, around the road. That's one thing.

But if they're testing against air, which is already also drunk, then there could be a problem with that. That's really funny.
So, if you could sort of hot box your car with alcohol and

make sure they test that. Yeah, yeah.
If you are drink driving right now, quickly pour vodka all over your car

and waft up the air conditioning, get it going, and you'll be fine. Yeah, yeah,

we're not condoning drink driving in any way. Absolutely not.
I think we are based on this research, by me.

I really like the fact that the breathalyzer was first called the drunkometer. It's a much funnier and better name.
It was an early version of it. It's for ages like 30 years, into the 60s, even.

They were still calling it the drunkometer. It was a standard phrase.
Or sometimes the alchometer. It was about 30 years, they called it that.
I don't know what it is.

Intoximeter, intoximeter as well. It's harder to say.
Saying it is a test, actually. If you can pronounce it, you'll find find it right.

But the drunkometer was a different thing than the breathalyzer we use today. I love that the breathalyzer itself was invented by a guy called Robert Frank Borkenstein.
It's amazing.

Frank Borkenstein is just such a great name. Yeah.

In Canada, it's sometimes called the Borkenstein, or it used to be. Like the breathalyzer was known as a Borkenstein.
Of course, Borkenstein was the name of the doctor.

You should call it Borkenstein's monster. That's right.

He really changed things a lot, Borkenstein, because it was 1954 he invented it.

And before him, the drunkometer could tell the presence of alcohol, but it couldn't tell the quantity of alcohol, couldn't measure it precisely.

And so before him, a defence lawyer, if someone was on a charge of drink driving, a defence lawyer might say, oh, my client was working very long hours and his eyes are red because he's got allergies.

And, you know, I've got friends of his racked up who will all swear blind that he only had two beers on the night. And so he's not, you know, he wasn't drink driving.

And it was incredibly, just so hard to prove. Yeah, yeah, uh, whereas Borkenstein absolutely changed that.
He did, he liked to drink himself, though.

If you look at any obituaries, they're not very euphemistic about it. Really?

Was he inventing it as a competitive thing? Like, he would score highest on my crystaliser.

In The Guardian, it says, He was a genial fellow who enjoyed serving drinks to his friends and exhibited a Catholic taste in wines and spirits.

But he was a really great guy.

When he was a child, he built a robot which worked like when he was at school

um in world war ii they had bombs which had latches in um which held them before they were released but they needed to be spot checked and he invented a new way of spot checking them which made it way way easier so it meant you know help the help the war effort in that way nice safety first again yeah

developing I read a thing, there was a judge in Kerry Island, so this is a case, two cases were thrown out where the drink driving claim was no longer useful because the judge said that the people who were accused of potentially being drunk had inhaled their own urine while they were in the actual custody of the police.

So

what? So this is a thing. There's a thing which is kind of known as a loophole law.
And what it is, it's called section 49.

It requires that if you are the police bringing people to the to the station, there needs to be 20 minutes before you breathalize them.

In that 20 minutes, you have to have your eyes on them, and they can't have drinks, and they can't have anything that might influence what their breath is going to be.

As in, you breathalize them straight away in the car, haven't you? Because when you stop someone in a car, you breathalize them.

But you need them, you need it at the station for it to be legit. So, what happens?

And I think that's because the idea is that you can show a false positive on a breathalyzer if you've drunk really recently or if you've got like alcohol in your mouth, right?

So, it's just waiting long enough that you're definitely to make sure that you're definitely positive, yeah.

So, where do we get to inhaling your own urine?

So, in these two specific cases, a judge called Judge O'Connor, he said that where he was told that during this 20-minute period where they went to be observed, they both went to the bathroom.

And when they went to the bathroom, they both were facing away from the police officers who were meant to be monitoring them.

And according to the judge, in that time, the urine could have released odors that would have been of an alcoholic nature. And that could influence the...
Is that why we say someone's pissed?

Possibly.

What year was this? That is incredible. It wasn't long ago, but I haven't written down.
That is bananas. Did it work, do we know? Yeah, the two cases were thrown out of court for that specific reason.

Yeah.

Why are we sharing tips? But, I mean, that is incredible.

So, what they should have done was after they came back from the toilet, they waited another 20 minutes, but then they used the breathalyzer test within that timeframe. Bananas, yeah.
Yeah.

Or you say it was just the police weren't monitoring them. So, or if the police were at the urinal, but the policeman is sort of facing them at the urinal and watching them for a second.

If you're at a urinal and someone's facing you, there are problems. Something's gone wrong.
They have to be sitting in the urinal, don't they? they?

Can we talk about Barbara Castle?

Yes, we can, yeah.

Very keen.

So, Transport Secretary, who introduced breathalyzers to British policing in 1967, you know, and part of the problem was that at the time, the number of cars on the road had increased sixfold in the previous 20 years.

So, there were, you know, in the late 40s, there were two million cars on the road, now there were 12 million. That's sixfold.
That's sixfold.

And my new podcast is going to be about simple sums. And we'll go up against your golf hole podcast.
We'll just see whose is worse. It was just that last week, Anna said something about doubling.

And she said from 6 million to 12 million. He went, that's doubling.

I've been hoisted on my own referential petard. I hate it.

Anyway, Barbara Castle was great.

But she was incredibly unpopular at the time for introducing this, partly because drinkers were saying, you know, I want to be able to have several drinks and then go home. I want to drive home.

So some pub customers stuck pins in a doll labeled Barbara Castle.

That's from the mirror in 67.

But her main foe, maybe, when this thing was introduced, was

have you guys heard of AJP Taylor? No. He was a very famous 20th century historian, basically.
Really, really famous at the time. And he wrote about her and about breathalyzers again and again.

There was a piece, Why Pick on the Private Motorist? And he said, no one has the slightest idea how much alcohol affects a driver.

The slightly tired driver, for instance, may actually be improved by a glass of sherry.

And he concluded at the end of this piece, it was a really, really rude piece about her and about the whole idea. He said, I've been driving a car for 45 years.

I have consistently ignored all the various speed limits. Never once have I encountered the slightest risk as a result.
This is what she was up against.

I found the way breathalyzers work really interesting.

In a way that's not

more interesting

than where they put the hole on the green. You do realize the mole we call back to the smaller one you're going to have to keep it in.
Oh no.

This is my spin-off podcast.

So

they work based on colour change, which I think is so cool.

So basically, when you breathe into a breathalyzer, you've usually got, or the police who's holding the breathalyzer, they've got the control solution on one side, then they've got the solution that you're breathing into.

And they're using a solution called potassium dichromite,

which is orange in colour but when you breathe into it the alcohol reacts with the dichromite and it produces chromium chromium ions on their own and that is green so if you're breathing alcohol into it the orange turns to green which is kind of cool and then the way it works is it produces an electrical current based on the colour change which I actually just didn't know could happen so because different colours produce different amounts of energy.

So if you've got a colour that's a high frequency like blue like at the bottom of the the rainbow, it produces more energy than, let's say, red.

So

we can connect it up to a system where that translates into an electrical current.

So you connect some electrodes to the green solution and the orange solution, and they can sense the difference between the two and exactly how green it is. Wow.

And that's exactly how much alcohol you've got. And

that's a standard

they use, yeah. And then it translates into a figure on a screen.
So you don't see any of this. No, of course.
Sadly. Yeah, Yeah, yeah.
And you probably might be too drunk to understand it anyway.

I haven't had anything to drink and I was clinging on.

In 2010, in Eastern Cape in South Africa, there was a person who was arrested and breathalised, and they were 32 times over the legal alcohol limit. Wow.
Which, as far as I can tell, is a record.

He was caught driving a Mercedes-Benz veto very erratically. And inside the car, there were also five children, a woman, and 15 sheep.
What?

That's a big number. Was he part of a joke?

Sorry,

in the car.

Hang on, you can't get 15 sheep in a car. Well, he did.
If you're drunk enough, you can do anything.

Probably not a mini.

It was a Mercedes-Benz Vito, which I actually don't know what that kind of car is. Well, it doesn't sound like it's a bus.
So that's

a bus.

Apparently, he'd allegedly stolen the sheep from nearby farms

while drunk.

Imagine waking up in the morning, kind of forgetting what you did last night, going out to the car. There's just 15 sheep.

2010 was a huge year for

drink driving incidents like this. So also in 2010, a guy in Nebraska was pulled over after swerving dangerously on the road.
And police saw he was driving very erratically.

And there was a bottle of vodka in the car, empty beer cans all over the place. He was 19 years old.
I mean, all the signs were there. He was a little bit.

You say you're going to the recycling centre, can't you? Well, yeah. He was tested.
He was definitely over the limit.

But the extra bit of evidence against him was that at the time he was dressed as a breathalyzer test.

He'd been to a party.

And it had a dial on the front which said, you know, are you blood alcohol level? And it was from loser having fun to brain damage. The arrow was set to brain damage for him.

And he had a tube which you blow into at his crotch level

with insert inside mouse written on it. And did the police use his breathalyzer?

He said, can you blow into this? And he's like, only after you blow into this.

Oh, what an absolute tool. Yep.
Police said that.

He was joined at the detox center by a French maid and a naughty border patrol agent.

There's one way that people think you can beat the test, and that's by sucking on a penny.

The idea is that the zinc or the copper in the penny reacts with your alcohol in your mouth, and it kind of puts a different chemical into the breathalyzer so it doesn't do all the chemical stuff it's supposed to do.

Basically, old breathalyzers, that would work, but these days, the way breathalyzers are made, it doesn't work. And it hasn't worked for about, you know, 10, 20 years almost that hasn't worked.

Gotta hope you get an incredibly old police officer.

Well, there was another thing in 1967. This was a warning published in the Somerset County Gazette.
A warning was given to motorists, and it was just as the breathaliser was being introduced.

A warning was given to motorists by Somerset Police this week that they should treat with caution the suggestion that they could beat the breathaliser by eating mashed potatoes.

The idea was just you load up on mashed potato and then you find out. Feels like, yeah.
You can't, they do get tricked by certain things, so you never know.

That's why breathalyzer can never be admissible evidence. It just gives you enough evidence to take them to the police station where you do a blood test.
Like, for instance,

if you have a lot of acetone

in your breath, that can be just because you haven't eaten for a long time. That's because you haven't eaten for a long time.

If you're diabetic, you can have acetone levels a thousand times higher than normal. That can set off a breathalyzer.

So you can make all of these excuses while you're on the way to the police station.

I'm sort of picturing someone right now listening to our show.

They've just been pulled over and they're desperately, while the policeman's walking towards their car, listening to all the advice we're giving right now, looking for pennies on the floor of their face.

We're mashed potatoes and the mottos.

Do you remember that fact that you guys didn't let me put in Book of the Year?

A guy pulled over who was probably on drugs more than alcohol and the police officers asked him for a urine sample on the spot. So he went into the bush and he took ages to come back out.

And then when he came out, he presented a semen sample and he had misheard what they said.

Okay, that's it. That's 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 have 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 Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com.
Yep, you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there, as well as links to this final bit of the tour that we're about to go on for nerd immunity. It's only around the corner, so check the dates.

It's early September. We'd love to see you there.

Otherwise, you can also join our brand new membership club, Club Fish. It's where we are putting up all of these episodes without any of the ads that you hear along the way.

Without any of the golf mentions. Without any of the golf mentions.
It's absolutely. Where do I sign?

But there's extra content as well. It's a really fun place, so do check it out.
Otherwise, just stay here. We'll be back again next week with another episode.
We'll see you then. Goodbye.

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