437: No Such Thing As A Face Mite With A Laptop

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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'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter-Murray, Anna Tashinsky, and James Harkin.

Now, 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 that is Anna. My fact this week is that it's a common misconception that face mites don't have an anus.

How common. Oh well, I know that I've blown it wide open for all of you guys and everyone listening up.

If I, honestly, if I had a quid for every time I'd heard someone on the bus saying, you know that face mites don't have an anus.

It's exhausting. So we did think they were anusless for a long time.
We did think they were.

And also, sorry, face mites. What are they? Oh, right, sorry.
Yeah. Explain.
I suppose I better start from the beginning of this story.

So face mites are something that almost everyone with female scissors.

If you've got a face, you've got the mites, probably about 90% of people.

And they're very small, about between one-tenth and one-third of a millimetre. And so you can't really see them.

And they're living sort of like inside your pores in the daytime, so you couldn't see them anyway.

But there's been this thing, and honestly, if you look up face mites and you do a website search of news scientists, of National Geographic, very reputable sources, they all say, interesting thing is, they don't have an anus.

And so what they do is they store all their fecal waste in their bodies until they reach death, which does only happen after a few days.

And then they just explode it all out. And this is why they're bad because they explode feces on your face.
Now, this isn't true. And what's more, we've kind of known this isn't true since the 60s.

So there was an electron microscope in the 60s that did identify a face mite anus. But.

No one believed him or her. That's amazing.
I wonder, would you rather have face mites on your face that had an anus and were constantly pooing on your face?

Or one that only pooed as a one-off at the end of its life?

Well, I think there was an idea, sorry, that it's worse to have them storing up all the poo because this is where a lot of the bad rep of the face mite comes from.

People will put various skin diseases down to face mite infestations, and it's partly because they'd say, Oh, do you know, they build up with poo, so much poo, and then it explodes everywhere.

And it's not true. And actually, we don't really have evidence that they do any harm to us at all.

Yeah, although I found one thing that they might be doing to us, so they've got no protection from ultraviolet light, which is why they have to hide inside the pores.

And they can't produce melanin, which is related to you know, tanning and so on, but they do have the ability to eat our melanin.

so humans grin secretes melanin and then they gobble it up that's good so basically they get a suntan through eating as opposed to through sunbathing exactly that's exactly what it is but imagine if we could do that like a biscuit that tanned us

they're eating our suntans don't you find that oh they're eating away our suntans

that's so interesting and they're using our suntans to fuel all-night sex sessions on our faces i know this is the massive sounds like a toy party experience

can i ask about this massive poo Is it like fake tan coming onto your nose? Because it's what they've eaten, right?

There is no massive poo. It's all small poo.
It's all small poo.

So let's just quickly mention something you dropped in a second ago, which is the fact that every night when we go to bed, they crawl out of our little paws and they have a big old sex party on our face.

And this is happening every night on our children,

on our grandparents. It's happening everywhere.
It's quite a cool idea because nighttime is when humans often have sex.

So the idea that when you're having sex, it's likely that loads of face mites are also having sex oh so they're not even waiting for you to sleep they're it's just nighttime i think it's just darkness yeah because they don't away from the uv isn't it yeah right but also they find that couples pass each other's mites so while you're having sex you might pass a mite that's now having sex with another you might i think that's quite unlike unusual for you to pass your mites on to another person actually yeah i think babies normally get them from their mothers from breastfeeding yeah and i think any other way of me giving you one of my mites is quite unlikely, really.

But it is weird the idea that our face mites are basically our own because, as you say, mostly they come from through either vaginal childbirth or breastfeeding, because you get face mites hanging around sometimes in the genitals and the nipples.

And then they don't really change unless you are living like face to face with someone, like cheek to cheek with someone for years on end.

Like my colony is totally different to your guys' colonies at this stage, I guess, right?

That is amazing. So, you'll have got some mites from your mother, from breastfeeding, perhaps, or vaginally,

and then they obviously won't live for your whole life. You know, they'll have children, and their children will have children, and their children will have children.

So, it's a circle of life, or it's more like a straight line of life.

Because by the time you die, if you live to an average human age, it will be 1200 generations from the start.

Really? So, the ones that are living as you die will be the great, great, great, great, great, great 1,200 times from the ones that you got from your mother.

And that's the equivalent in humans of when rope was invented and ovens were invented and pottery were invented. So why aren't they achieving more by the end of my life?

Why haven't they got many laptops on my face that they're working on?

On the sex. Yeah.

Face mics. It's quite interesting because their penis is on their back.

So the male has to sort of get underneath the female to have sex. Right.
But his give her a piggyback. Like a piggyback.
Yeah, like a piggyback.

And it's really interesting because this is a gene which has changed in the genome called the Hock's gene.

And if you know the fact which all mammals have got nine neck bones. Yeah.
Even a giraffe has got the same number of bones as a shrew or whatever. That's because of the hox gene.

And the hox gene is the thing which tells you where all your body parts grow.

So that your arms are here and your legs are there and your necks here and all that kind of stuff and really very very few animals in fact this is the first one I've ever seen where they change the Hock's gene because it's really a hard thing to change because you need all your bits in the right place so evolutionarily at some point their gene just changed and now their penis is on their back

exactly and are you I are you suggesting that if we harness this power

we'll be able to have penises wherever we like

we could but then the problem would be that our other body parts would grow in weird places

Okay, so we've got a lot of things.

We've got to find a way of isolating it to give each other like a very sexy piggyback.

Yeah. What changed for them when their penis went on the microphone?

Well, actually, the mics have been in the news in the last few weeks because they've checked the genome and they found that the genome has changed quite a lot.

And the reason is because they are having sex, but they're having sex with their own cousins and brothers and sisters and stuff like that.

And what they're finding is that they're changing in the way that I said, but also in a way that they're losing lots of their useful powers, if you know what I mean.

So, things that could save them from ultraviolet, they might have had that in the past, but they're losing it because they don't need it because they have such a nice environment in your face.

They're basically becoming completely dependent on us.

They're very clingy. It's like having a partner who suddenly they ditch their whole friendship group, they can't even cook for themselves, and they're developing a completely symbolic.

They do have a penis on the back, though.

So, it is worth it.

I think the definition is they're currently classed as external parasites on us, but soon, if this process continues, they will be classed as internal symbionts.

And also, they might be classed as extinct because if they lose all of these skills to stay alive,

then it makes it much more difficult when they get passed on to the next generation.

They also have a seven-clawed organ around their mouth, which when they do eat your sebum, they kind of latch their claws, these claws around their mouth, into you. Right.

Which is quite cool to imagine. Just when I was warming to them a little bit.

I love that it's called sebum.

Yet we have not seen bum for brilliant these years. Very good.
Very good. How did I not realize that? Yeah.
Yeah. So just mites in general.
There are five million different species of mite, I believe.

As in everything's got one. Humans have their own.

At least one.

Every kind of beetle will have its own mite. Every plant, soil, ocean, any mammal.

I have a favourite mite,

which is the adactylydium. And this is so amazing, it's life cycle.
It's in like usually found in the Middle East, and they're basically born pregnant,

and they're born in order to die. And so

it's like human lifespan, but very, very fast. So basically, you've got the mother, and she only ever eats one meal in her whole life, and it is always an egg.

Hard-boiled? An egg. I think it's poached, and it's specifically a poached egg of the thunderfly, or I think in America you call them a thrip.
And so, yeah, it just eats one thunderfly egg, and then

this keeps her alive, and she inside her has six to ten fertilized eggs ready to go, and they hatch inside her.

So, all her offspring hatch inside her, and it's always one male, and then all the rest of females.

And then, inside the mother, all of her offspring, you know what's coming, we all know what's coming.

Obviously, the one brother shags all the sisters, fucky pup, impregnates them all, and then once he's got all the sisters pregnant, they eat their way out of the mother. Oh, for heaven's sake.

So the mother gets eaten from the inside, and then the kids are born, already pregnant, obviously. And then I guess they just start again.
Being eaten from the inside by the pregnant kids inside him.

There are some animals which are just too different to us for us to have anything in common.

Yeah. We wouldn't get along.
No. Yeah.
Nothing to talk about at all. Like if one of them gained human sentience, we just wouldn't like the other person.

At the dinner party, they start with their children bursting through their their chest.

At least at the dinner party, all they're eating is an egg.

Are you going to have that, Brett? Oh, great. I'll have that.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that a robot version of the Mayflower has just completed a human-free void from England to America.

It went really well, except that it took three goes, had to be towed in manually, and first hit land 400 miles from where the original landed. Yeah.

Still cool. Still cool.

Tom Marks for effort. Totally disastrous.
It was a disaster.

So this is a ship. It was a robot ship.
It was built by IBM and an organization called Pro-Mare. I think that's how it's pronounced, because it's Mare, like the sea.

And it was called the Mayflower Autonomous Ship.

And it was piloted by AI technology. And apparently, the technology worked perfectly.

But really funny thing, I just find it funny, the original Mayflower voyage in 1620 took 10 weeks to get from England to the Americas.

And this was expected to take three weeks because they said this is so fast, it's so efficient, it's so so AI, it's amazing.

And it's first set off in, I think, twenty twenty June twenty twenty one and it eventually landed in I think May or June twenty twenty two. It took about sixty weeks basically.

Many times longer than the original Mayflower. But it has come back and started again and that was like

most of those 60 weeks it was just waiting to try again

for a mechanic.

In fairness, it was a research thing, right? Yes. And in some ways, it's a way to prove that you can do this for research in the future.

So the idea is that a normal boat, like the Mayflower, most of the boat you're using to keep the people alive who are on the boat.

So you need to keep food, you need to give them shelter, you need all this kind of stuff. But if it's an AI boat, you don't need any of that stuff.
All you need to do is get from A to B.

And so you have loads of extra space to do loads of experiments and put loads of electronics in and loads of scanners and all that kind of stuff. Yeah.
And in that respect, I think it was...

something of a success. They managed to get quite a lot of data out of it.
Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly. And the whole thing is, what a cool idea as well.
Like,

yeah, it took a bit longer. It landed in the wrong spot.
Sure, if my factory died, it broke down a lot. Broke down a lot, caused nightmares.
But the

absolute mes. It's pro-mez.
Oh, there we go. Nightmare.

But it's got a great website as well, should say.

Well, it did crash three times, so

you ended up on bbc.com.uk.

The boat itself had microphones on the hull, the part of the research capacity, so it was listening for whales as it travelled. And it also had a smart tongue.

It had a tongue on the bottom.

That sounds like someone's Tinder profile.

I got a smart tongue. No, that's too rude, isn't it? No, it sounds more like a mite's penis.
It sort of migrated from the wrong side to sort of under the keel.

It was recording the chemical composition of the ocean. Yeah.
So I think in that sense it was in the right place. Right.
Yeah.

So before we invented this though, there used to be sailors who would have to lay at the bottom of a boat

with their tongue out through a hole.

Still salty.

We're not in the river yet.

I think it seemed like the conclusion of this voyage was AI works quite well, but it turns out humans still don't know how to make boats. Right?

Boats break down boats very hard. Boats really crap.
They're always breaking.

And this seems to be a problem with AI generally is that it can work very well, but if stuff goes wrong around it, it can't fix it.

And it made me think next time I go on a ferry, I'll have newfound respect for the people I think are doing nothing. Because stuff just

brings all the stuff. You'll stop telling them.

Name and shame these people who you think are doing nothing. You talk about the people manning the kiosk for snacks.
Because they're doing an important job. Keeping the people doing it.

Like health and safety officers. they're crucial the health and safety guys the mechanics don't necessarily

like the car parking bit who are saying no bring it in left left left left left no they're the far left they're doing a really important job reverse reverse oh it's in those are some of the most skilled people on the planet i would say to you know what fill a ferry

that bit of the ferry where you drive into yeah is one of my favourite smells oh

it's like oily and petroly and it smells like trucks it's just

i really like that smell anyway but it reminds me of holidays as a child

As a result of that smell, the guys who are doing the car parking, they're as high as kites the whole time.

Like they're in an altered consciousness where they can see Tetris.

The thing is, I thought I'd run over this guy, but it turned out he had his tongue through a hole in the wire.

Did you guys see the picture of the robot Mayflower when it was pulling in?

Yeah. When it finally landed at Plymouth, which it did eventually.
So it left from Plymouth, as the original Mayflower did. It ended up going Plymouth, England.
Yep.

And then it ended up accidentally somewhere in Canada where Halifax was. I love Halifax.
But then it did get to Plymouth in the end.

But it looks so pathetic because it pulls in next to the Mayflower 2, which is the exact replica of the Mayflower that was built in the 1950s, which I didn't know about. But that's obviously stunning.

It's got like, you know, got all the rigging. It's like triple masted.
And then it's got this crappy... It's like a cat maran, really, isn't it? It's a Trimoran

outrigger tiny thing. It looks like Thunderbird 3, I thought.
Yeah, they didn't make much of an effort, yeah.

I think there was a suggestion before they made it that, oh, should we make another replica of the Mayflower and send it across?

And then they decided, no, let's try and do something for the next few centuries. You know, that's looking to the past if we did that, had another replica.

So I think it is a really, it's a brilliant project. And, you know, well done, everyone involved.
It is really cool.

The Mayflower 2, when that originally went out in the 50s, they had problems as well on the way, and they had to divert.

And during the diversion, they went across Bermuda and they almost sank in the Bermuda Ocean.

So that could have been a Bermuda Triangle casualty, but they didn't, and so it's not a good story.

How almost are we talking? Oh, they just had, yeah, they had a bit of a water. But they had to bucket out a bit of water.
No, there was a big storm. And so it was, you know,

you could go. Oh, yes, there was, wasn't there? Yeah.
That journey,

it was in 1957 they went. And it was this entrepreneur called Warwick Charlton.
It was a great name. And he was full of crazy schemes like this all through his life.

And he wanted to thank the Americans for their help during the Second World War. So he said, let's build another version of the Mayflower and sail it across.
And they did it in quite an authentic way.

So they had one radio only. That was the only concession to modernity, I guess.
You know, they had no radar. They had no supplies dropped in.
They wore pilgrim outfits on Sundays.

Just on Sundays. Yeah, just on Sundays.
Yeah, they didn't want to do the whole thing as a cosplay.

And then... After it was arrived, it was officially welcomed by Richard Nixon.

It sounds so frustrating recreating it, like hand-forging the individual nails with which they make it, hand-sewing the canvas sails, because that's how they did it.

They must have thought at some points, is this, what the fuck is the point in this?

And apparently, according to the Wikipedia page, and this is taken from a pamphlet that's issued by the Plymouth Museum in Massachusetts, which is where it is now, when they built this replica in England, they employed the skills of elderly traditional workmen so that they could build a vessel that reflected the original.

How old were they?

You look like you were alive in 1620.

And do you know the one difference between the... It's not the one difference, there are others, but a difference between the Mayflower original and Mayflower 2.
Oh, toilet facilities.

Oh, that's a good one.

Yeah. Would you? I bet the toilets weren't that much more up-to-date.
Electricity.

No, although I think there was a little bit of electricity on the

to power the radio, which I'm going to say is the other. So there were lots of differences.

One of them was no women allowed on Mayflower 2. Oh, really? Holy

feels a bit regressive. Well, I'm not

allowed at all. No, it wasn't.
Not allowed because the captain, who's a guy called Alan Villiers. Bad luck.
Maybe. Because it used to be thought that women on boats was bad luck, wasn't it? Yeah.

Sort of. He basically said that we won't be having any women because there's no place for...

This is 1957, but there's no place for glamour pusses. And he said, look, the reason women came

was the original Mayflower absolutely stuffed with, you know, Raquel Welch and a Ferd bikini. Yeah, and that's why it ended up so badly when they arrived at the other end.
They're all shagged out.

No, he said the reason the Mayflower original worked, and they had women on board, and it was fine,

was because back in those days, women were chattels, you know, you just owned them.

And they're not now. They talk back and you can't handle them.
No, no women. Wow, Alan.

And so there were thousands of women who applied to help sail the boat over and they were not able to go on the trip. Wow.
But aside from that, it was a really great thing.

I found it amazing on the original Mayflower that you had three women

who were pregnant and knew that they would have a baby on the boat. Yeah.
Which I think that's hardcore, isn't it? Because you know how long it's going to take.

It's going to take you six months to get there. Yeah.
You're less than six months pregnant or you're less than six months to go. Yeah.
Would you do that?

I don't know. Medical facilities were so shit.
I think the further away you can get from them in those days, the better. The middle of the sea is better than anywhere else.
That's interesting.

Because you might... Were any of the babies born on the new continent or were they all born on board?

There was one that was born when the ship was anchored, I think, in Cape Cod. So they called him like the first baby in North America, ignoring him for thousands and thousands of years.

But yeah.

You would have thought that they might have said to the mother, if you just hold on a little bit longer, this will be the first pilgrim baby born actually on explanation. Exactly.

A bit like how we tried to have our Caesarean on the 22nd of the second, 2022.

And when you say that works, when you say we, you mean you and your wife, not you and me. You and I.
I was looking you dead in the eye when I said that, Andy. Yeah, me and my wife, yeah.

Doesn't always work out, does it? I'm afraid no.

But then, much like I think you named your child partly after the day they were born, one of the children who was born on the Mayflower was called Oceania, I think.

That is a cool name. After the Oceania.
Brilliant name. Yeah.
Better than 14th of February that we call ours.

There's been another Mayflower controversy recently. Okay.
In 2019. Yeah.

In Devon, there was this group which announced that they were planning to build a 400th anniversary Mayflower so 1620 2020 and then they were going to set it on fire oh yes and this prompted a row in America people saying it's very disrespectful

I can see why yeah yeah you know but it was it wasn't intended as a disrespectful move at all it was this group in Devon who I want to go and meet they're called the great Torrington Cavaliers and every five years they build a big old structure and then set fire to it.

They've done it with loads of different things and it's just their way of raising money for charity. Yeah, I saw a photo of it because they did do it in the end.
They did light it up.

And it had knitted rats. They had a oldie one-stop knob shop on board, which I'm pretty sure was an original feature of the mage lab.
One-stop knob? One-stop knob shop. What does that mean?

I don't know. What kind of knobs is it? Doorknobs? I imagine door knobs.
No, it'll be old knobs because it's only one stop. So for all your knob needs.

I'd like to buy a packet of hard knobs, a doorknob, and Piers Morgan there in the corner.

Anyway, they said it on fire. That was very cool.
Another controversial one was the town of Horwich, which is where the Mayflower was originally constructed. So this is in Essex.

They wanted to build a replica Mayflower and send it across again. So this was in 2009.
They had a town meeting. They said, how do we commemorate this big 400th anniversary?

Someone said, why don't we put up some bunting?

And then another person, a dentist called Tom Daly, said, why don't we rebuild the Mayflower and we send it across? And so they all agreed to it and they started raising money for it.

And it sounds like it was quite a doomed project from the get-go because, first off, they needed to build a shipyard, which they didn't have, in order to build the ship.

And so that took up a lot of funds. They raised millions and millions in order to get this done.
They hired lots of interns to come and build the ship, but they had no training.

So I think they went through hundreds and hundreds of these interns that just didn't know what they were doing.

Meanwhile, the guy who suggested putting up some buntings, just watching the whole thing, going, I told them, I told them.

So what happened? Well, they just kept trying to, they were investing the money that they kept bringing in.

They kept building up more money, and people were doing things like sponsoring ship bolts so that they could have their own shipbolt on the ship and so on. And eventually they just ran out of money.

So how much of the ship did they build? I think they did the keel and like the bow, and then that was it.

And then obviously all these people that had these plans anyway for the big anniversary couldn't do anything about it because covert hit and so all these plans got put into uh the back seat so even if they had their ship it might not even even gone at that point oh that's quite good i feel like covered conveniently disappeared a lot of doomed projects you could just say well then covid you know also they thought it was a completely stupid idea

Okay, it is time for fact number three. That is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that when the first four-minute miler, Roger Bannister, met his future wife Moira, she knew he was a runner, but thought he'd run four miles in one minute.

Many years later, their grandson bragged to his friends that his grandfather could run one mile in under four seconds.

This is like the down process of telling anecdotes. It's exaggerated beyond plausibility.
Well, I should let you know, I am his grandson.

Been holding that back for years.

Yeah, so this is Roger Bannister.

And his very stupid wife, apparently.

Come on, Moira. You've run before.

Four miles in one minute. That's pretty fast.
That's silly. Yeah.

So Bannister was a medic as well as a runner, wasn't he? And he became Sir Roger Bannister as well because of a load of work that he did for the Sports Council. So he wasn't just a fast runner.
He was

an all-round guy. He was.
I find it amazing that he wasn't even a fast runner after the age of, I think it was 25 when he quit. He just gave up.
He said he wouldn't be taken seriously as a doctor.

He wanted to be a neurologist, and that's exactly what he became. Yeah.
And the running, he just completely left to one side.

He said that it was only a small section of his life, and if he had to give one or the other up, he would definitely have given running up and would have carried on being a medic because that was his main part of his life.

That's amazing. Yeah, that makes sense.

It's quite striking if you read any interview with Roger Bannister. Pretty much the first thing he'll say is, I hate it how everyone bangs on about my running.
I don't even care about that.

All I want to be known for is being a doctor. Yeah,

he should have just run a bit slower, shouldn't he? Yeah, that's your eyes.

We wouldn't have been talking about it. Just had a few seconds on.
You'd be a complete footnote in his report.

Nobody would care. So, this happened in Oxford at a place called Ifley Road.
And he was... That's his four-minute mile.
That's his four-minute mile that he, yeah, that he ran.

And the track that he ran it on was actually built partially by him when he was at university. He helped lay that track down.
Yeah, he, when he did it, seems like a bit of a swizz.

It does, doesn't it? It feels like something's going on. What do you think he's done? Made it very slippery or something?

Made it downhill.

Yeah. A little spring.

Yes.

That lobs him forward. But yeah, so he did this, and it was an amazing thing that you can actually watch footage of online, which is pretty incredible.

And they talk a lot about his legs, which are very kind of weirdly spindly.

And the sort of big strides that he takes are really interesting. And you can see how knackered he is coming into the end as he does it.

In fact, there's a whole crowd waiting for him as he comes right into the end. And he basically collapses into someone's arms as if they knew that was going to happen.

They're waiting there to capture him. And then they all stood around to hear had he done it.
And there was an official announcement.

And he said that the announcer went, the time was three, and then there was a huge eruption because that's what they needed to do. Was it McWhirter? It was.

It was Norris McWhirter, the founder of the Guinness World Records, along along with Hugh Beaver. Apparently, we're in a pantomime, suddenly.

Norris McWhorter is a very pantomime, isn't it? He nearly didn't do it.

That morning he said he spent because he was training to be a doctor at the time, I think he was a junior doctor or medical student.

And he that morning was working and said it was really, really windy. And it was only at the last minute, I think, his friend about half an hour before said.
It's half an hour before.

You've got to do it, Rog. Come on.
And the wind went. That was the other thing.

Yeah, so the wind went and he went, let's do it. He did it in three minutes, 59.4 seconds.
So we we really taken it to the just under four minutes.

In actual fact, I said he was the first four-minute miler. I should have said under four-minute miles.

He didn't do it in exactly four minutes. Yeah.
But there was someone a few years later, Derek Ibertson, who in a mile race at White City ran in exactly four minutes and zero seconds. Wow.

So he became the first person to do an exact four-minute mile. That's fantastic.
Would that still have... Been as exciting to break the record or is the point that it has to be under four minutes?

Yeah, it just had to be under four minutes. It was this invisible barrier that people thought that humans would never be able to get under.
Yeah, right. But yeah, we got under it.

So, getting four minutes, actually, if Ibbotson had done that four-minute mile, arguably he wouldn't have become famous because he hadn't beaten the four-minute mile. Yes, yeah.

And it's pretty, again, when you watch the footage,

I do wonder it's the 50s here that we're talking about.

What sort of accuracy are we talking about with the stopwatch? Because it was so crowded.

What did they have? It was a stopwatch, presumably. Yeah, I guess I would imagine it was a a stopwatch.
Yeah, I think that as well. I was thinking, Quiz, we accept this so blindly.

It's just old Norris sitting there jamming his thumb out. He's doubting.

Norris McWhork.

The first woman to run a five-minute mile, Diane Leather. It was only 23 days after Bannister's record, but didn't get any of the

Diane Leather is a very good name. Ran Hell for Leather.

Yeah. That is good.
But in those days, basically, women weren't really supposed to run middle distance running. It was thought to be deleterous to their health.
Was long distance running allowed?

Yeah, they were only allowed to run over 100 pounds or under 100 meters.

Yeah, the IAF just banned them from running anything more than, I think, 800 meters. I think we might have said.

Did we say once in an earlier episode about there was like an 800-metre race in the 20s or something where all the women collapsed? They collapsed. Yeah, we talked about that.

And so that put them off. Well, just because everyone collapses, they collapse in the way that everyone at the end of a long distance race.

Like, if you've ever seen Mo Farrow or someone to get to the end of a race, they fall onto the nearest person, which they very often do. And so these women kind of did, some of them.

The IAAF, we should say, who they are, the International Amateur Athletics Federation.

Because they have, they seem to have, they did exercise quite a lot of power at the time.

This was all do, the IAAF. So Bannister was running as an amateur.
That was part of the point of it, I think.

And so after he'd run the four-minute mile, obviously incredibly famous, now one of the most famous people in the world, blah, blah, blah.

He went to the USA on a kind of diplomatic, you know, jolly, glad-handing celebrity trip. He was sent by the Foreign Office.

But when he got there, the IAAF said that if he was on sponsored TV, that might risk his amateur status. And therefore, you know, he'd be in big trouble.

And I don't know if he'd lose a record or whatever. And he was offered a trophy, which was worth £178

when he was in America because they wanted to reward him somehow. And the IAAF said, absolutely not.
You can accept no gifts worth more than £12 as a result result of this.

Wow.

Becoming the most famous

deal. You couldn't even have expenses to get to places.
Yeah, and maybe a bit earlier that, but yeah, the amateurism was really important.

That was why most of the people who were quite successful runners back in the 50s were quite wealthy white men in Western countries because you couldn't really afford to do anything like that.

That's true.

And actually, there is a thought that there were people who were running sub-four-minute miles before him, but they weren't Oxford graduates who had all the newspapers and and everything like that so for instance there's a guy called James Parrott who is a costermonger and he supposedly ran a mile in under four minutes in 1770 and there was in 1796 someone called Weller who did the same and the reason that we think it might be true is because they were bets so it was like this costumonger said to his mate I bet you £10 that I can run an under four minute mile and the other person paid up we know that they paid up so whether they did or not certainly the person they did the bet with you know was happy.

I don't know, though, if we're not trusting Norris McWhirter's stopwatch, I don't know if we're trusting whatever grandfather clock they timed it for.

I'm so glad we're on these guys because I think they're really interesting claims. I love the James Parrott one.

And there was also, soon after him in 1787, there was a runner called Powell who wagered a thousand guineas, which is a lot of money.

Today it's nearly £800,000. Wow.
That's a lot. That he could manage a four-minute mile run.
And he claimed to have done it in four minutes, 03 when he did this time trial.

It was near Hampton Court in London. And it was five days before Christmas.
And the really interesting detail is that he was naked at the time.

Most serious runners would have been naked when they...

In the 1700s. It was kind of harking back to ancient Greek athletic culture, but still.

And so what happened? Did he lose the money? I actually don't know if he lost or won the money.

I actually apparently didn't decide it was worth writing down whether or not he won it.

I did a similar thing. The current record for what the four-minute mile can be run in.
I've got all the other details. Got the guy's name.

Just have to written down what time he did it in. So does anyone know the current...

350? It's about 3.50. Al Garouge.
Yes, Al Garouge.

I don't know how much.

I think it would be less than that, wouldn't it? I think it's 340 something? 340. I know what he beat Bannister by in meters.

As in, if the two of them were racing against each other, how much of a lead he had on him. That's so weird that you just collected that piece of information.

Okay, well, tell us, we can work that out. Yeah, try and work it out.
How many meters was it?

He beat him by 100 meters. He would have crossed the line.
Okay, well, if you think 10 seconds for a really fast runner to run 100 meters, they would have done it in 15 seconds, something like that.

So if you take that off four minutes, then that's

45, 45 percent. You've made it a bit complicated by mixing up meters and miles, obviously.
But we can work that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But just at home, do the calculation yourself.

Or just Google Hitch ML Garouge and find out. 1999 it was.
It seems strange that we haven't beaten the world record since then. A century.

Since 1999, a century. This century.
Oh, this century, I think.

But yeah, the reason, according to Peter Weyand, who is a Southern Methodist University Professor of Applied Physiology and Biomechanics, he reckons that the reason it hasn't been beaten is because the next year we started testing for EPO,

which is a banned steroid,

which kind of gives you... What year was that, sorry? 99.

And so the Olympics knew that people were taking EPO, but they didn't have a way of testing for it until a year later.

And El Garouge, I should say, has denied that he's ever taken any drugs, and he is quite vocal in the anti-drugs kind of campaign in sports. So no problem.

Because all the other ones go, yep, that was definitely on him.

But the really interesting thing I think about El Garouge is that he was going to be a football goalkeeper.

And as a kid, he was really, really good.

But his mum stopped him from doing it because he would dive around in the mud and all of his clothes would get really dirty. And so she said, Oh, well, you know, I have to clean them all the time.

Can you not do something that's a bit less dirty? And he went, Okay, I'll be a runner instead. And he became the best miler ever.
Yeah. Wow.

Do you know who came up with the first steroid test for athletes?

Is it someone we'll have heard of? Norris. Is it Norris? Yeah, you're really close.
David Hollywood. Oh, Q Beaver.
No, it was Bannister. It was Bannister.

Yeah.

It was Bannister who developed the first steroid test. This is in 1973 because he was big into, you know, calling out people who took steroids in sports.

And other stuff he did, other medical stuff he did, since that's all he wants us to know about him,

is he was into self-experimenting. He was one of those doctors.
Okay. Yep.

Steroids.

Yeah, later at the age of 45, he ran out of two minutes.

He, not steroids, with pyrogens, actually, which are less fun. They are chemicals that induce fever.
So he wanted to study fever.

So he injected himself with pyrogens and then he sat naked in a hot chamber for six hours, which spiked his temperature to very dangerous levels and turned him dark green. Wow, what green? Really?

Do we believe that? Is that not the story of the incredible Hulk?

And he said, I wouldn't perhaps reference. Bruce Banner?

Oh my. Oh, we've blown this shit wide open.

It's so long since we blew something wide open. I'm so glad about that.

Wow. Yeah, you'll see in a lot of his papers, he'll refer to the study participant R.B.

And it's always him.

Obviously.

You mentioned earlier, Anna, that he was quite tricky to interview sometimes because obviously he had two very different aspects of his life.

So there was an interview by The Guardian, I think, in the early 2000s. So he was getting on them, but I just wanted to read you some of the

few questions. Then he said, right, is there anything else you want to know? And the interviewer said, well, I'll be honest, sir, yes.
What's your favourite biscuit?

Oh, I don't answer questions about biscuits.

Why not? Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not into biscuits

no what is he hiding that's the question the interviewer says everybody likes a nice biscuit he says well i'm not i'm not sure what the purpose of that aspect of the interview is it's quirky game showy odd

all right fair play to the guardian interviewer he perseveres

cheese or chocolate no no no all right i think you've got more than enough there What about pie fillings? Steak and kidney or chicken and mushroom? Banner just says, thank you so much. All the best.

That ends the interview. That's incredible.
What year is this? I think about 2004, it was. Okay.
Good.

I'm just wondering, is this like the era of like, you know, Dennis Pennis and LEG, and everyone's been primed not to answer stupid questions?

I think that's just, you think, pointless question from a journalist.

And that journalist, I can really imagine doing what that journalist has done, which is not be able to remember anything else that you might have asked it on your own. Just having to keep going on.

Or just quickly looking at your notes, going, Oh, fuck, what's your favourite sandwich? Can you do something rather? No, that's not going to work either. Have Have you ever? No.

Well, I was, I was saying to you guys, bizarrely, my brother helped him write his last autobiography a few years ago, which came out. I think it's called Twin Somethings.

And he said he was extremely nice, and actually, particularly his wife, my brother absolutely loved Moira, and she'd always bring them warm beer and sort of cold cuts for lunch, don't you?

The biscuits? Well, I read through that book, and there was no mention of Garibaldi, so so

every time she brought biscuits in, he flipped the table.

I saw him once at the

QIU SEBA building in Oxford, and he came to one of the parties.

He just ran in, had a drink, ran out of the dark. Exactly.
Yeah. Was he like a biscuit?

Yeah, but it was kind of like, I don't know, in a weird way, because he's someone who's a slightly obscure, famous person. It was sort of like spotting, you know, like a Bigfoot.

It was just like, wow, like, look, a sighting sighting of Bannister.

I mean, he didn't like it, but let's say he did like it. Would you walk around even in your 80s wearing your shorts?

Tank-top thing. Yeah, tank-top thing.

Carrying your record. What did he get? Medal?

He was the year before you get the Guinness World Records.

Yeah.

So he didn't even have the... He missed it by a year.
No proof. Because his record was then broken, wasn't it, 46 days later by John Landy, the Aussie.

And they ended up having an amazing run together, which was part of a race which was known as the Miracle Mile Race. So it had a few different names.

And

they went up against each other. I mean, how exciting.
Two guys who had the records trying to see who could beat them. I suppose that does happen in pretty much every race meeting in the world.

Yeah, that's true because you're always trying to break a record. I guess this was...
Ferrem Mofaro just raising a bunch of primary school children on Sports Day. Do you know what?

You should try racing other good runners.

I think Bannister said his race against Landy was the thing he was really proudest of because it was watched by 40 million people

when it was in Vancouver

and listened by 100 million on the radio alone. Listened to by 100 million.
Bizarrely boring. Just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

Is that what you hear when you listen to a race?

Commentary. Commentary would probably be.

A good commentator, if that's what they're saying the whole time. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

So in that race, they were both neck for neck the entire time, and Bannister's behind him. And that's not what neck for neck is.
Yeah, so he was kind of like putting his neck out and

back of it. It was neck and neck, I think.
Yeah. Not neck for neck.
No, I think. A neck for a neck, an eye for an eye.

That's the Bible, yeah. I think they were neck and neck.
I'm sorry, too. No, no, that's fine.
I would not make a good commentator either. Anyway, they were neck bang, bang, bang, bang.

They're neck for neck. They were neck and neck one in front of the other, yeah.

So Bannister's right behind him, and he's covered up, and on the final corner, Landy looks over left on his shoulder. And as he looks over left, Bannister takes over on the right.

And that was the famous moment where.

Tap him on the shoulder before you get it.

I want to report a ghost on the running track. I think we need to redo it.

So that was the big moment. And this moment has been a good thing.
And he stole his nose.

And then his thumb came off, and it was like, whoa!

Anyway, the prize money that Landy got was retrieved from behind his ear, actually.

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

My fact this week is that when the movie Ulysses was released in New Zealand in 1967, censors were so worried about it that men and women weren't allowed to watch it at the same time. So

they literally had to be placed in different cinemas if they wanted to go and see it.

and that continued on for years So there was a showing of it at a university in New Zealand in 1972 and even then they still had they allowed men and women in the same room, but they had to sit on either side of the cinema.

Okay, so is it because it's so sexy? It's sexy, it's sweary, it's uh it was just debauched city.

It was you see because I can see if it's sexy that you don't want men and women sat next to each other, right? Because they might have sex with each other, they might just straight like that.

Yeah, that's That's what happened when I watched stop on my mum on the shoes.

And you weren't on your own just too much, did you? So that poor person next to you.

I could see halfway through that sentence. That was going that way.

But then, like, if it was a sweary part of it, it doesn't make sense if they're in the same room, right? No, exactly. No, it was a mixture.
It was a mixture of the sexiness and of the swearing.

And in the room, there was a rope that went down the center of the audience.

And so you had the men and women still, there was one row, like one line down the center where men and women could have had sex.

With a rope. Well, just like the rope was sort of, there was no aisle between them.
They were literally in the seat next to someone. Yeah.

So if there's just a piece of rope in between you and a person, you can still have sex with them.

It's a pretty weak barrier to ardour, I would say. Yeah.
I got this fact, by the way, from a brilliant book called The Land Before Avocado.

And it's by a guy called Richard Glover, who I've met in Australia. When we were on tour there, he actually, I went on his radio show.
So he's a big journalist and broadcaster.

He's written a bunch of books. And he listens to...
What's the title referring to?

Well, Avocado is absolutely abundant in Australia as a breakfast item. And he's talking about the old Australia.
So Avocado is sort of the new world of Australia.

And the book is all about all the olden days and how things used to be. And Ulysses was actually banned in Australia, which is where it comes up, the book, as well as the movie.

So this is James Joyce's Ulysses, I should say. Yeah, James Joyce is just...
You haven't read the book? Now don't see the film.

But yeah, so he mentions that it was allowed in New Zealand, but then they had the segregation thing between the men and the women.

And then you said that it was the film as well, wasn't it? That was filmed in Australia and South Africa, I think.

Quite a lot of places.

It was a banana. Yeah.
Yeah. The ban in Ireland was only lifted in the year 2000.
Yeah. That is a long ban.

And I think Ireland's justice secretary sent his secretary to go and see the movie and reported back that if this film was allowed, it would discredit the Irish government. So

it can't be permitted. Yeah.
It was the first film shown in Britain to feature the F-word. Ooh,

spicy. It's really interesting.
It was made by a guy called Joseph Strick, and he was a massive fan of the book. So his initial pitch for making the movie was he wanted to do it verbatim.

So it was going to be 18 hours long. He wanted every bit of dialogue that was in the book used.
Moly, Marley. He got talked out of it, so it eventually ended up being two hours long.

But then when it came out, he was very angry about the response of all these bannings and the way that people were treating the film.

And there was one famous incident where they showed the movie in Cannes at the film festival and this was at the 1967 one.

It had French titles along the bottom and during the film where it got to a particularly spicy bit,

they had using their hands, scribbled out the translation in French subtitle of what was being said.

So Strick saw this, thought, you're messing with my movie, ran up, ran to the projection booth where he was met by the committee of the film festival who knew that he'd rush in there.

And then he was forcibly ejected according to him so he was pushed down the steps and suffered a broken foot and so he withdrew the film from cannes altogether the reason that he loved the book is that his father had smuggled a copy into America because it was illegal in lots of countries at the start of the 20th century and his father smuggled this copy into America and would just keep it in the house and leave it on the table so that whenever anyone came around they would say oh that's that dirty book isn't it like Ulysses and then like, even though no one had read it, they would still argue about it, about censorship and stuff like that.

Yeah, well, it was really, so it's, I think, 1920, uh, the very early 20s, it was published, 23, I think.

Um, and it was, you know, it was printed

because he wrote it in 18, didn't he? And it was serialized, but maybe it was published in Britain in 23. Do you mean?

Well, 500 copies were burnt at Folkestone in 1923, so I think you attempt to import it.

It was published in France in 1922.

That was in Paris by an American woman called Sylvia Beach.

She opened a shop and she had these copies of Ulysses that she managed to get and she sold them for 10 times more than any other book in the shop because she knew that everyone would want to get their hands on this book.

But still they managed to get them. Still they paid for them and she removed the copy from the store window because she thought that people would start throwing bricks in her store or something.
Wow.

Still none of the buyers ever read it. I think they guarantee all of these places, all of these people.
Beach was really brave.

So the book was sued in New York by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and it was convicted for being obscene. They were fun people.
Yeah.

But then after that, Beach published it in Paris. And part of the reason it was controversial was when it was printed in extract in the USA, even the printers themselves said, this is outrageous.

We're not working on this. And then when she was in Paris, French printers were obviously harder to offend with English filth because they don't understand the language that they're printing in.

But French, like

Madame Bovary. Wevid through, web it through.

They're used to this sort of thing. Madame Bovary's not that sexy.
Are you choking? Shit in a carriage. Come on.
It's much more subtle than what Ulysses sounds like.

Pretty raunty stuff, Madame Bovary. Okay.

Andy's barr is quite different to you.

I'm still lobbying to ban Madame Bovary.

But so Nausica was the chapter in America that was seen from Ulysses. So they were publishing these extracts.

And in the chapter that suddenly raised the concern, Leopold Bloom, one of the lead characters of the book, Ulysses. He's the lead, I think.

The main guy. He's not sharing it with many people.
Maybe Wally.

Yeah, I was thinking Wally.

So it's a scene in this chapter where he's masturbating on a beach while gazing at a 17-year-old girl called Gertie McDowell, and that's what they took exception to.

Do they have scenes like that in Madame Bovry? It's not quite that much, is it?

Or in fact, another scene, and this is just saving anyone the trouble of actually reading it because we're just telling you the couple of fun bits, so you don't have to bother.

But apparently, there's there's one scene in a I haven't read it there's one scene in a Dublin brothel where Leopold Bloom transforms into a woman and then gives birth to octopletz before the brothel madame who then turns into a man and starts auctioning off Bloom's like prostitution services and demonstrates so Bloom's now a woman with a vagina and so the brothel madame demonstrates how good a prostitute that he'd make by shoving her arm up his vagina.

Okay. Also doesn't happen.
Oh, shoves her arm up the vagina and then shoves it into the bidder's face to be like, look, how good is that?

There's another line.

I actually started reading Ulysses at the start of the year when my daughter was born and I had a lot of time in the middle of the night sat there with nothing else to do and I got through quite no not much of it but then I started listening to the audiobook the RTE version which actually I got through most of I didn't get through to the end and it gets really racy at the end so I'm a bit gutted that I haven't got there yet.

But anyway, there was this line and I did tweet this at the time which is Haynes helped himself and snapped the case too.

He put it back in his side pocket and took from his waistcoat pocket a nickel tinder box, sprang it open too, and having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk towards Stephen in the shell of his hands.

Hmm. What? And so that's...
Sorry, when did the spunk come in before that movement?

The reason is that the word spunk just doesn't mean what it means today. Oh, really?

It meant like a little bit of flame or a little bit of, you know, if you light a match a little bit of flame sort of flies away. That used to be called a spunk.

Flaming spunk.

I guess it is a sort of fly-away thing. It flies off and away.
Yeah, I'm sure there's some etymological reason. Golly.

Do you know that the day Ulysses was set, which is famously one day, June the 16th, 1904, is the day that James Joyce first got a hand job from his wife.

Is it? Yeah. Bloomsday.
It's to commemorate that day.

Really?

So that's why it's to commemorate. Yeah.
Yeah, he said it then. It was their first date.
Is it to commemorate the first date? Is it to commemorate the hand job? Is there a difference?

Is that, I don't know. But also, uh, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes married on that day.
Did they? In commemoration of Bloomsday, not the hand job. Um,

more about when the day was set.

I wonder if she gave him a hand job in proper commemoration. You may now kiss the bride, and you may now.
Oh, God.

The person who banned the book in the UK, this was in 1922,

it was the government that banned it, but the person whose idea it was was a guy called Sir Archibald Bodkin.

And he issued an official opinion saying that it was a filthy book, and it should not be allowed to be imported into the country, and the government agreed.

And I was reading about Sir Archibald Bodkin. Apparently, he was a man of unwavering Victorian sensibilities.
This is according to an author, Kevin Birmingham, who was writing about Ulysses.

And he said, on the rare occasions that he told a bawdy joke, he drained away the humour by delivering the punchline with a disapproving glare.

Why are you looking at me, James?

I don't know what you're trying to say here. I love that.
That's so funny.

I'd love to see his live at the Apollo 6.

Furious when the audience laughs.

Shut up. Just on films that are banned.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
The Wikipedia for which films are banned where is great. So, because it's quite nationally specific in lots of cases.
So,

Cuba, for example,

has banned the films Red Zone Cuba,

Cuba Crossing, Red Dawn, Cuban Love. Any movie with Cuba Gooding Jr.

Without Havana and finally Harold and Kumar Escape from the Guantanamo Bay.

That's bad. Okay, that's understandable.
There's one film called Titanic from 1943. It's a 1943 Titanic, not the original.
Yeah.

Which was banned by the Nazi government despite the fact that it had been made by the Nazi propaganda department. I remember that one, yeah.

Yeah, and why was it like a practice run to check how well they banned stuff? I can't remember.

I think Goebbels decided it would weaken morale because there was lots of bombing happening in Germany at the time, and Goebbels decided that because this film featured a lot of deaths on the Titanic, that it would weaken morale in Germany.

So, there were some test screenings outside Germany, but it was never shown in Germany.

It was also then obviously banned by the Allies because it was Nazi propaganda, so there was basically nowhere this film was allowed to be shown.

Yeah, um, do you guys know the film Too Cool for Christmas? No, no, not familiar with that. Do you know the film A Very Cool Christmas? No.

Right. Well,

they're both the same film. They're about a girl who wants to go skiing instead of spending Christmas with her parents.

But in one of them, in A Very Cool Christmas, the girl's parents are a female and male heterosexual couple. And in Too Cool for Christmas, her parents are two male gay fathers.
Right, okay.

And it's exactly the same. The films are exactly the same as each other.
They just re-filmed every single scene involving the parents, which I imagine is quite a lot of fun.

And they just show them in different parts of America or different parts of the world. That was pretty much exactly it.
It was for America. It was 2004.

And it's this director who is called Sam Irvin, who's a gay director who wanted to do the plotline about the gay dads, but couldn't get the budget for the LGBTQ station that he wanted to put it on.

So he also sold it to Lifetime TV, a rather traditionalist TV station.

So he also got a mom.

I want to go to like a traditional orthodox American family and show them the first film, the one with the heterosexual couple, and then show them the other one and say, you know what?

They've done this for all the films.

The secret archive of every film in the world.

Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

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

Andy at Andrew Hunter M James at James Harkin and Anna. You can email podcasts at qi.com.
Yep, or you can go to our group account at no such thing or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

Check it out. All the previous episodes are up there, as well as links to any upcoming live shows that we might be doing.
Our merch is up there as well.

But most excitingly of all, is the new thing that you'll find up there, which is a link to Club Fish. Club Fish is our new subscription service.

It's a membership club whereby you can get access to ad-free episodes. You can get all sorts of bonus content that we're going to be popping up there.
Or you can just, you know, support the podcast.

You might just want to do that. You've been thinking of doing that for a while.
This is your way to do it. So whatever your reason for joining Club Fish, we would love to see you there.

We hope you enjoy all the behind-the-scenes stuff that we're going to be chucking up there too.

But hey, listen, if you can't join Clubfish, don't worry. You don't need to because this podcast isn't going anywhere.
We are not going behind a paywall.

This will stay a free weekly podcast for the rest of its days.

So, the best way you could support us if you don't want to do Clubfish is simply just keep listening, just keep bringing your ears to the party and maybe tell your friends about it too.

We want to be spreading these facts to as many people as possible, and the only way we do that is by having listeners like you tell your friends about it.

We will be back again next week with a very special guest. We'll see you then.
Goodbye.

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Think about the last time you had a cancel subscription. There's probably some waiting on hold, some guessing at your password, some mind-numbing small talk.

And maybe after all that, you still weren't able to cancel it. Good news.
It doesn't have to be this way. Thanks to Rocket Money.

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Rocket Money organizes your subscriptions by due date and notifies you when something's coming up, so you'll never be caught off guard when you get charged.

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