435: No Such Thing As An Arm-Wrestling Chihuahua

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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 Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order.

Here we go.

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

My fact this week is that the author George Elliot had a massive head.

That's very similar to another fact that we've had a few years ago.

This is a sort of a sequel fact.

This is, so for fans of the show, you might have remembered in episode 265, we delivered the jaw-breaking news that George Elliott had a secret jaw slapping news jaw-dropping news yeah the

jaw-breaking news

my facts are really aggressive the female snapping news coming to you sorry what was it what was the news we delivered then so the jaw-dropping news um no breakage is that 50 years after she died for 50 years uh that was the fact that she had a massive hand but that was a secret and the family denied her having it.

Anyway, so this was written in a book, which was back in the 1840s.

So there was a biography that was put together of George Elliot by a writer called Mathilde Blind or Mathilde Blind.

I can't get the exact pronunciation.

It could be Blind as well.

Could be what?

Could be Blind.

It's probably Mathilde Blind.

Mathilde Blind.

And so Mathilde Blind wrote a biography of her and she went round.

She's South African.

Mathilde Blund.

She's a Kiwi.

Sorry, she wrote an autobiography.

No, she wrote a biography.

Yeah, yeah.

A biography.

And during the research period, she went to the farm where George Elliott used to live.

And there was a couple there called the Brays.

And it was Mrs.

Carabray who told everyone that she had this big hand.

However, when I was reading the book recently, I also discovered that her husband became obsessed with George Elliott because he noticed that she also had a ginormous head.

Was she just huge?

Was she massive?

Was she huge?

No, she wasn't that big, but I mean, I think that's why they were astounded by the size of her head.

She was taller than average, I think.

But you're not just dragging out for when you don't have a fact next time.

George Elliott had a massive elbow.

It's quite possible we will be back in 100 episodes time with another feature.

So Mrs.

Bray wrote of her, she said she had her head was massive, her features powerful and rugged, her mouth large but shapely, the jaw singularly square for a woman, unbreakable at the sound of a powerful fact, I imagine.

And so Mr.

Bray said, I need to get your head turned into a cast.

I need to take you to London.

And so we can go and we can do phrenology on it and see how exactly it's.

So phrenology is where you look at the shape of someone's head and you can tell their personality.

Exactly.

That's right.

It was very popular back in those days when people started trying to work out how the brain functioned and maybe certain basic things.

Well they couldn't do palm reading on her because it'd be like going through Ala and Sherska Tom Cardoon.

It sounds amazing, the report.

So her head was, it was measured by a doctor called James Deville and then it was analyzed by George Coombe, who was one of the leaders of the phrenological movement in the whole whole country.

She would have needed a very big Coombe.

Oh my gosh.

And when he first saw the cast of her head, Coombe, because he was doing the analysis, he was in the lab.

I don't think I had a lab.

But anyway, he took the cast for a man's head.

That's how huge it was.

You know, 22 and a quarter inches.

How much bigger are men's heads than women's heads?

Well, statistically speaking,

my head is five centimeters bigger than George Eliot's.

But that's good.

So

this is just a bit bigger than George Eliot's head.

Yeah, yeah.

So if anyone sees me in the pub and you're like, oh, that's James from the podcast, imagine my head, but five centimeters smaller, and that'll be George Eliot's head.

It's like she's there.

So this is actually, now your fact has become kind of an insult to James, because what you're saying is James Harkin has a really massive head.

Compared to...

But then

men don't have larger heads in general than women, I think.

That's true, except for Andy, apparently, which Anna was saying at the top of the show.

Yeah.

I'm not very comfortable with this line of inquiry.

Have you ever, if just listening at home, have you ever seen a matchstick?

Imagine the head was a bit smaller.

It actually goes in from the match shaft.

Australians, you might know them as dickheads, those matches.

Surprise.

Yeah, and funnily, at school,

a lot of the kids were Australian match fans.

No, but so she was analysed by this phrenologist.

And, you know, so it said that her temperament was nervous lymphatic, which means active without endurance.

And lo and behold, it turned out that she worked from 9 a.m.

until 1 p.m.

So she was active, but didn't have endurance.

And, you know, intellectual and all of this.

And she visited this guy over the years, Coomb.

She didn't just have her head sent to him via the casting.

She actually was in his presence a few times.

Well, that's what happened.

You would make the cast of the head and you would send it to phrenologists who were keen to sort of measure the bumps and so on.

You just need to be very careful that you do specify casts before someone saws off their own head and inserts it into a package.

What if, okay, here's the thing I don't get.

What about your hair?

So if you've got a huge hair, that will surely obscure the lumps and bumps in the body.

But you feel the bumps.

You're not looking for the bumps.

But this is one of the things that opponents of phrenology said, you know, this is why it's nonsense.

So Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Oh, yeah.

He...

Wait, who was he again?

I think he was a writer and a doctor, I think.

He was a celeb.

Victorian celeb.

I just double-checked because in my head I went, oh, Sherlock's brother.

And then I realised

that.

Definitely not.

No, no, no.

But he wrote this.

He said, could you tell how much money there is in a safe by kneading its knobs with your fingers?

When a man fumbles about my forehead and talks about the organs of individuality, size, etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt the outside of my strong box and told me there was a $5 or a $10 bill under this or that particular rivet.

Okay.

Which is fair.

Well, yeah.

So even at the time, people were...

It was a long way of saying, this is bullshit.

Yeah.

Isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Why is he keeping such small value bills in a safe box?

Jesus.

Maybe he's was on holiday.

Even like then.

This is just the 1900s.

Yeah, that's worth a whole lot.

See, is it 1800s, isn't it?

I think so, yeah, yeah.

That was his manner.

But the idea was that, you know, you could have your eyeballs almost pushed out even.

And this, in fact, was the first, you know, the first instance of it.

So phrenology was coined, the idea of it was coined, by Franz Joseph Gaul.

And he said that he came up with the idea, or he realised it was the truth, when he noticed that classmates in his class could memorise these massive long bits of text.

and the ones that could memorize it had quite bulging eyes.

He said they had big, salient eyes.

And he said, This must mean that the organ of verbal memory is sitting right behind your eyes.

And if you're really good at remembering stuff, it's pushing them out.

So I don't know if your eyes just drop out of your face entirely if you've got a really good memory.

But then, yeah, he's the father of it, really, wasn't he?

Yeah.

The thing I liked about it, though, is he wasn't this gaul character.

He wasn't onto the wrong idea, really, because all he could do was

definitely.

way I mean it was definitely all bullshit yeah yeah absolutely but you know modern-day brain understanding is that certain bits of the brain are compartmentalized to certain things music and so on and emotions and right thinking left thinking and all that he didn't come up with that idea so someone else had come up with that idea and he thought oh well what if I took that idea and then made the bump thing a thing right

I could just say that I would if I was around at that time I definitely would have believed it it just sounds so obviously yeah I think he would have as well

it's just quite.

I think I wouldn't.

It's quite hard to put yourself in.

My organ of credulousness is tiny, actually.

Phrenology is basically astrology, isn't it?

Or it was sort of a version of astrology in that it seemed to tell people things that were vague enough that they could go, yeah, that sounds exactly like me.

It mostly wasn't.

The reports you got from a phrenologist were very rarely, you're a wanker.

It was always.

Oh, you've got a nice organ of this and a organ of this.

And

I don't think they often said you've got the organ of the killer.

No, but they told everyone else after they left with Azure.

But it was used to suggest that other races were lower.

It was used in a very racist sense.

People believed it, yeah, eugenicists.

To be honest, it was mostly used to whatever your belief was, it was used to kind of strengthen that.

So, for instance, there was a woman called Mrs.

Hamilton, she was known as.

She was from Ayrshire, and she would go around talking about phrenology, but she said that because the bumps on a woman's head were generally the same as the bumps on a man's head, this proved that women had exactly the same intellectual capacity as men's.

And she went around saying, Yeah, well, you know, this proves feminism.

See, I knew it was bullshit, but that is the nail in the coffin of phrenology there, isn't it?

What the hell's she all about?

Alduban got phrenologized.

John James Alduban, the big bird man, did all the bird sketches and stuff.

And actually, he was.

He wasn't a bird man, he was a man who studied birds.

A man who studied birds, yeah.

Yeah.

The naturalist who was sort of the leading authority on birds at that time and like his books full of beautiful drawings.

And he wrote in his diary, I was astounded when I had my reading because they said that I must be a strong and constant lover, an affectionate father.

I would have made a great general, and that I was extraordinarily generous.

I know all these to be facts, so I'm amazed that they discovered them.

I'm amazed at the person who you're paying to do your phrenology.

Oh, apparently, it says you're very generous to your tips.

Yeah.

You guys remember Aaron Burr of Burr and Hamilton of musical fame.

Vice President of America.

Well, Aaron Burr was cast.

His head was cast, but after his death,

they found that he had lots of secretiveness and destructiveness.

Didn't he die in the duel?

No.

No, he lived.

He survived the duel and then ran away, I think.

Yeah, he died on his deathbed many, many years later.

That was such a mistake.

He should never have gone there.

He didn't die on his debt.

When you hit John Lewis, don't pick the deathbed.

I'm looking for a deathbed.

Yeah.

Are you sure?

And some celebrity fans just quickly oh yeah modern day ones no

kim kardashian or uh no arthur conan dole uh yeah of course i mean of course people believe

absolutely everything yeah i wish i'd been friends with him the pranking you could have got done on arthur curan has been epic

uh queen victoria as well and prince albert they had studies done by george killing say andy when you say some celebrities thank god you're not bucking celebrity love island.

Well, I've got us Queen Victoria and

you'd want to see it.

Dead.

Was there a deathbed in my dealer?

Shit.

Another deathbed.

Anyway, they appointed.

Barack Obama?

Find someone living.

End that sentence, James.

Sorry.

He's into.

No, no.

You don't let me finish my sentence.

Barack Obama is the subject of an incredibly weird book called The Phrenology of Barack Obama.

It's a self-published book by a guy called Benser Magos.

And apparently, he looked at a mysterious head scar on Obama's head that the mass media refuses to discuss.

And according to him, this is evidence that Obama once had a horn.

and leads ultimately to the satanic endgame revealed by the demon horn of Moloch.

Oh, okay,

I can't believe the Guardian isn't reporting on this.

It's outrageous.

It feels like he's missed the boat because he just served two terms and then left office in an orderly fashion.

What's Mollock's end game here?

Maybe it took a while to find a publisher.

Who knows?

Wow.

I'm definitely buying it, by the way.

Sounds awesome.

Yeah, this guy, Coombe, just going back to the casting of true celebrities,

he did very famous people.

He did Prince Albert's head.

So George Elliott was having her head done by the guy who did Prince Albert.

He did William Blake as well.

Or rather, he studied, it was someone else who Coomb didn't do it.

There was a different person, wasn't it?

Yeah, James Deville.

But where are these casts?

Where's George Elliott's head?

This room actually is inside of the cast.

They used it to the Statue of Liberty.

Actual signs.

It's such a good ending for the movie.

For the phrenology movie.

It's like they never knew where it was.

Whip pan out to New York.

Yes, yes.

Mount Rushmore or their hands.

Gives a little thumbs up with his massive hand.

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okay it is time for fact number two and that is anna My fact this week is that the chef who cooked for Lords cricketers on match days for 35 years was once asked to limit their meals to five courses and she refused.

So this was a woman called Nancy Doyle and she, yeah, she was the tea lady at Lourdes for 35 years until 1996, I think she retired, and she liked to make them large, large meals.

So obviously in cricket, you've got meals codified and you have to take your lunch break.

It's in the rules.

It's so amazing that they're actually in the rules of cricket, it says, unless the umpires and captains together agree to alter it, lunch shall be taken at the agreed time.

It's actually in the rules that you're not to have lunch.

And the captains of each team decide on what time lunch is happening, how long

like that.

What other sport has a conversation like that when you're about to flick the coin for who fats first or whatever?

By the way, what time?

What are we

having?

Well, we're having to roast today.

Okay, so that's how many of you guys.

So, Mrs.

Doyle.

Mrs.

Doyle, she, well, her typical menu seemed to be for lunch you'd have soup, then a starter, then

roast.

Well, you've got to, because you've got to moisten your salad, I suppose.

Then a starter, then roast meat and potatoes.

And she also served chips and vegetables.

It's quite hard to know.

This is just on an example list that I think Mike Brearley gave of what she'd serve up.

Chips and vegetables, then a dessert, then a cheese board.

Then you get back onto plate.

But of course, in cricket, every two hours, because although they decide when you have meals, it's pretty much every two hours is the general rules, roughly, for when you eat.

So two hours later, you get back in and she's made you a huge cake.

And there you go.

So there was this moment where Mike Bruley said in the 70s.

Mike Brilly, who was Mike Brilly was the England captain at the time.

He said to her, do you know what?

I don't know if it's good for the game

that the guides can't stand up after lunch.

And she replied, so you know, he was like, could we possibly make the meals a bit lighter?

And she said, but in an Irish accent, Tell you what, Michael, I won't tell you how to feckin' bat, and you don't tell me how to feckin' cook.

Okay?

And that was it, and she was apparently terrifying.

Someone called her small yet volcanic, so I think he didn't ask again.

She also couldn't cook.

I mean,

no snob on her whatsoever, but she said she'd never read a cookbook, she didn't use weighing scales, and she didn't follow recipes.

But that shows having a natural affinity to cook.

Her organ of cooking was absolutely massive.

She was taught by nuns, wasn't she?

Like, she did get taught, yeah.

She just didn't.

Yeah, yeah.

I think being able to cook without a recipe is.

No, that is the mark of quality.

I found a bit of a scandal researching this fact.

I thought tea in cricket was the most English thing.

Right.

It's not English.

It's Australian.

No.

It was introduced by Australia.

It was imported.

Australia started doing this in about the 1880s,

and then a captain called Joe Darling brought it over

to Tea Darling in 1899.

But even then, it was brought onto the field.

So, like, they would bring you a cup of tea where you stood.

And there are photos of England players just standing around with waitresses, you know, just bringing them a tea trolley, basically.

And it wasn't standard until about 1905 that players went off and had their tea.

So it was an Aussie thing.

Very cool.

You were saying about how Nancy can't cook, Andy.

She can't cook curries.

That is one thing.

She can't cook anything anymore because she is dead.

Sorry, she couldn't cook anything.

It was a

deathbed thing, yeah.

Cause of death, deathbed.

No, she couldn't cook curries, I should have said.

Because during tests, when England's playing, people like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, they want to have food which they had at home, and so they want to have curries.

And she couldn't cook them, and so she brought her daughter, Jeanette, in.

And Jeanette, who was a nurse, was apparently a brilliant curry maker, so she would come in and make the curries.

I love that.

Just get professional cooks, guys.

It's so weird.

Get a professional cook, though.

Get a nurse.

Get a nurse.

Get a nurse nurse who might have left some really ill people to die.

I'm just going to leave these deathbeds.

I'll be fine.

Curries have been a problem in the past for English cricketers.

So, back, you know, when they do big tours of India and Pakistan, and in the 70s and 80s, when curry was less common here and people weren't used to eating it, a lot of the players found it quite difficult.

And Alex Stewart, in fact, who was a player in the 80s, said that he basically, before they were doing a tour of India, him and Jack Russell, who I hadn't heard of Jack Russell, but they couldn't hack the Indian food.

And so before they'd fly out to Pakistan, they said they'd do a trip to Tesco and they'd just buy, Alec would buy 43 chicken breasts, 43 days worth of mashed potatoes, and 43 days worth of broccoli.

And every day, he'd just make himself chicken breasts, broccoli.

Oh my god.

Mashed potatoes.

Did he say going to India?

Yeah.

Quite a hot country.

Are these chicken breasts refrigerated or are they just

loose in his case?

Because

that is horrible.

Let's make did in the separating chicken case.

Look, I think they probably have some kind of refrigeration technology.

I don't know if we ever mentioned this on the podcast, that when the Beatles went to India to see the Maharaja, not the Maharaja, the guru wasn't it.

They went to see their guru who was going to teach them transcendental meditation and how to free their minds and all of this.

And Ringo Starr took a suitcase of baked beans.

Yeah.

Did we say that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, great, okay, great.

Well, that's because he had digestion problems from childhood when he was hospitalized and nearly died in hospitals.

Wow.

Just getting the facts in.

Whereas Alex Stewart was just being a bit of a bore.

In fact, Atherton wrote in his autobiography, and I feel like this might cause some tension with your teammate.

So Atherton was, um, in Captain Work played with Stewart, said, Alex Stewart has a narrow focus on sport and life.

I do wonder, and he said this of his meal choices in India, I do wonder whether he'll look back with regret at some of the missed opportunities that touring life offers.

But you can say the same about me when we go on tour.

And I'm sure you all three do.

I don't hear you, though, because it's after 9pm and I'm in bed.

You do have a lot of courses on your breakfast every morning, don't you?

That's true, but I have brought them all from home.

And I've stored them in a suitcase, so I've just brought 350 waffles.

I went to a cricket match once, and it was sponsored by Soreen Maltloaf.

Oh, lovely.

Yeah.

Delicious.

And so there was a guy there, and he was handing out free bits of maltloaf to everyone.

But no one really likes maltlaf, and everyone likes beer in watching Lancashire cricket.

And so everyone just started throwing maltloaf at him.

Oh, my God.

But he refused to give any more maltlaw to anyone and everyone got really upset because they wouldn't give him any maltlaf anyway.

They only wanted it to throw at the guy who's so hanging it up.

If he removes himself,

the loop closes.

Well he did exactly the right thing as far as I'm concerned.

But the 20,000 people in Old Trafford did not see it the same way.

I love maltloaf.

I'd have been grubbing around

with my big net standing near him.

What is it?

I don't think I've had it.

It's absolutely delicious.

Look, we're not sponsored this week by maltloaf.

I I do wish.

Sorry, if you're listening.

It's a kind of fruity bread, basically.

Yeah, it's very delicious.

Although I think any beer drinker worth his salt, if he loves beer that much, can turn a maltloaf into a beer.

It's got malt in it.

Surely.

You blend that.

And a cricket match over five days, eventually it's going to ferment.

Exactly.

Just on sort of eating and drinking in cricket and drinking specifically, there's a guy, a cricketer called Gary Sobers, and I want you to remember that.

Oh, okay.

I see all we're going here.

I was trying to work out which road you were going to go down.

Almost a sentence person.

You need to be here.

If he married and double-barreled with Helen up.

Yeah.

Anyway, Gary Sobers, he batted his last century while drunk.

And not even just a bit tipsy.

This sounds like a mad experience.

So he was playing at Lords.

He played for the West Indies, and he'd been out clubbing until 9 in the morning.

And he was batting that day.

And he was going straight into bat.

So he got in at nine he's completely hammered and solidly drinking for you know 12 hours straight he batted amazingly well he hit 132

extraordinary but then begged to be taken off because he said suddenly he sort of started to sober up the come down started to look up to his name and the come down and the sobering up and the hangover so he was taken off with a stomach complaint after batting 132 and then he was brought off but felt quite bad about it

and so ended up being apparently according to him revived with a couple of large port and brandies oh my my god, I didn't know.

Port and brandy.

I've not heard of that as a drink.

No, it's like a very old-fashioned Jagerbomb, basically.

I think that was what it was.

Yeah.

Can you come back on to cricket?

I thought once you got it.

Oh, okay.

I didn't know that.

So he returned.

He returned, hit 150, not out, and then

England retired.

Wise out.

I wonder if that's still, the drinking still goes on.

W.G.

Grace, for example, so he was around in the late 1800s.

His choice of drink during matches was if he was coming off he would drink champagne you know during the match all the way through and at lunch he would have whiskey as his choice of drink so he was you know bladdered the whole time that he was playing or you know comfortably merry as opposed to drunk yeah i wonder if that still happens of course it doesn't and this is i think this is one of the great tragedies of all sports because of course it doesn't because they've all changed in the last 30 years so dramatically like anything you watch tennis football cricket all of them are pissed

off Sober and they're eating these crazy diets.

I think there should be a rule that says no professional sports people are allowed to eat anything outside of what they would normally eat or drink.

And then you just have to play like that, which is basically how they did it until the 70s or 80s.

Agassizi won quite a seminal match in his career with a giant hangover from the night before, and he played so well with the hangover that he did think, Am I going to have to do this for every match?

Because this is so good.

And it's kind of like,

what's the chops?

Hussain Bolt, who at the Beijing Olympics, Olympics, I think, 2008, he pretty much only had chicken nuggets.

Yeah, because I think

he trusted the local cuisine to

think.

He brought them all.

He bought 43 days' worth, and they were pretty off by the end.

There are two cricketers for India called Risha Pant and Ishank Kishan.

And when they get together, they just eat any old crap.

And apparently, their favourite thing is they get a bun, they put some chocolate ice cream on the bread, and then they put Nando sauce on top of that, and then they put a piece of chicken on top of that, and they eat it.

And they reckon if you eat that, it guarantees you're going to score runs the next day.

Right.

Wow.

Has anyone put it to a scientific testing, rigorous testing process?

These are great cricketers, you know.

Okay, yeah.

There's two of the best in the world.

They're doing what you want, Anna.

They're just combining all the unhealthy foods into one meal.

I'm very hard to please.

Yeah.

Get on them.

But the Sri Lankan cricketers have been banned from eating biscuits.

This was a few years ago, actually.

But they were losing games, and the government decided to get involved.

And the Sri Lankan government gave them an ultimatum and said, start winning matches, or we're going to get rid of your biscuits.

And they didn't get

that word and they lost their biscuits.

No.

And Lassif Malinga, who's a really famous bowler,

he talked about the comments of the sports minister and said, What does a monkey know about a parrot's nesting hollow?

What an amazing burn.

As that segment of sledging, I just love the idea of one of them going into a shop trying to buy some biscuits and the shopkeeper looking under the counter where the entire squad's photos are up.

To be honest, if it's Lasic Malinger is very clear what he looks like, he's

distinctive looking.

Very distinctive.

There's no way he got a biscuit in the whole country.

Oh, man.

Him loitering outside a shop asking a couple of 10-year-olds on,

can get me some Garibaldi's, could you please?

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

My fact is that Northern Ireland contains the world's only upside-down lighthouse.

So, is that an architectural cock-up?

Or maybe to scare moles away from the

exactly.

Got a massive mole problem,

aquatic moles.

And no, it is so weird, because genuinely, it's not just a low it's got a tower, but the tower is above the light.

But it's just for anyone who's picturing in their head a lighthouse that's been flipped upside down.

It's basically that.

It is in no way that I'm sorry, it is exactly Andy.

Explain exactly what it is, and we'll see if it's exactly what Dan thinks it is.

It's on an island called Rathlin, which is off the coast of Northern Ireland.

Okay.

And

the lighthouse was built into the cliff face at the island's edge.

Right.

And they wanted a lighthouse because they wanted to warn shipping about, you know, the island and its presence.

But the problem is the island is often covered in fog.

Right.

It's covered in fog.

So if you were to have the lighthouse installed on the cliffs at the bottom of the cliffs and the light up at the top of the cliffs, the light will be lost in the fog.

So they built the tower, which is where all the supplies are kept and the stores and the spare lenses for the light bulb and all of this stuff.

But the actual light itself is at the bottom of the cliffs.

And that's the thing that means it can be seen from the size of the colour.

So it's like they've sliced the top off a lighthouse and then put it down in front of the rest of the lighthouse.

Exactly.

Or have they put it all in reverse order?

You have to climb down the stairs upside down to get there.

Yeah, so it's sort of a little, it's sitting in front of the tower.

It's not directly underneath the tower.

So it's a lighthouse, and the bulb is at the bottom, not at the top.

It's an upside-down lighthouse.

So it's not like in the daytime, it makes a dark area.

That's an inside-out lighthouse.

I always get a mixed up.

And

it's just a very cool thing.

And

it was built in about 1912, I think, so it's 110 years old now.

And also, I've read this about Rathlyn Island.

I can't, I don't know if it's true.

That it's the island where Robert the Bruce went after a battle.

And it's where he saw the useless spiders.

Well, the fact that whether that happened or not, it's definitely said to have happened on Rathlyn.

Said to have happened in a cave underneath the lighthouse, but not that lighthouse.

There's an east lighthouse and a west lighthouse.

And the Robert the Bruce one is the other one.

So the story is, isn't it, that Scottish guy?

He was in a Scottish guy.

He's gone away from where the battles are.

He's sat down.

He's worried.

There's a spider there.

The spider keeps trying to make a web, keeps trying to jump over, keeps failing.

And eventually he makes it and he thinks, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

And he goes back and gets dashed on the rocks because of this Bruce's lighthouse.

He lights at the bottom.

They also have fog bells sometimes lighthouses, because it is a problem a lot that you can't see a lighthouse if it's obscured by fog.

And it sounds like they haven't really cracked it.

So they have bells, which A is a lighthouse keeper, I suppose, you had to in the olden days before everything was automated, you had to just ring them kind of constantly.

So I think you'd ring them about two rings every 15 seconds in fog to let ships know that you were there.

And it only travelled about 100 meters.

So I think the light from lighthouses can travel many, many kilometres, can't it?

Seven, eight, nine more than that kilometers.

But it couldn't travel that far you and you could you could wind them up the bells so you'd wind them up really really really far and then it could as it unwound like a clock it could do 10,000 strikes

like that

yeah the Rathan Island fog signal can be heard 20 miles away oh so they've got an audio signal as well yeah yeah they have a fog signal too yeah yeah it's pretty cool they're very just they're very cool places lighthouses you know the beautiful lighthouse lens that you see which looks almost like a chandelier it's got loads of cut faces and sides and edges and it's incredibly complicated and it looks, you know, it's not just a big lamp.

That is the creation of a guy called Augustin Jean-Fresnel.

Who was by the way the one who realized that light is a transverse wave.

Big deal guy.

What is it though?

Oh.

So that's just a whole section.

But basically

the lenses would have been incredibly heavy if you just made a single lens.

So he created this clever lens which can be much thinner, but it has dozens of prisms and they all focus the light.

So you do get a beam using much less glass.

But the really cool thing about those heavy great lenses at the top is they were created to float.

And they float on mercury.

They float in this mercury bath.

And it's so cool because mercury is so dense.

It's 14 times denser than water.

And if you drop a lump of solid steel into mercury, it will float and float really high up in it.

And so the whole lighthouse top was just floating on this.

It's quite dangerous.

So dangerous.

Yeah.

Don't call it a bath.

If you're in that house with kids, they'll try and bath in it at some point.

What do you think the US Coast Guard's only lighthouse keeper has in common with the English female cricketer who has the highest ever score in a test match?

Long arms.

Yeah?

So she could change the lighthouse.

Change the bulb.

How many lighthouse keepers does it take

without going upstairs?

And obviously, as a cricketer, it's going to be a lot of fun.

You need longer arms, don't you?

Yeah, yeah.

Start that.

I think.

what do they have in college okay what do they have in coffee like the u.s only lighthouse keeper yeah on the

u.s coast guards only lighthouse keeper i would guess you're not going to guess that if it's the answer i think i reckon you're not going to guess it unless you know we're on both of them so this could be one of those long games like the other day what was it the other day we had a stained glass

bloody stained glass artist game again this is going to last us way longer than that

red doesn't live in a lighthouse uh she does

in a lighthouse but actually we don't know that do we do you know where she lives hang on Hang on.

I do know this.

Okay, cricketers wear white, don't they?

Oh, yeah.

And the ball is red.

Yeah.

Now, what are the typical colours of a lighthouse?

They're red and white.

Okay, so take that knowledge

and forget about it

and try and think of something else.

The Coast Guard surname is Lighthouse, and her surname is Coast Guard.

You're so close.

They have very similar surnames.

Okay.

Think of something that's white.

Something else that's white.

You know these white.

Cocaine, they're both called cocaine.

Jessica Cocaine.

The US Coast Guard's only lighthousekeeper is called Sally Snowman.

And the highest score ever by an English female cricketer in a Test match was by Betty Snowball.

Oh my god.

So it's not even something they've got in common.

It's just something quite similar.

You got the word snow.

Oh my god.

I'm in.

I'd count that.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

That's a million dollar question.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

That's like who would know that?

James.

What can my phoner friend be, be, James?

I'm there going, option B, please, red and white is the thing that links them.

She's actually had to retire, Sally Snowman.

Has she?

Yeah, last year, I think.

Which one's she?

The cost?

White housekeeper.

Yeah.

No more walking in the air for her.

Because when you're at the top of the lighthouse, it must feel like you're floating in the moonlit sky.

Yeah, that's good.

I wonder if she blasted that out in times of fog.

You could hear walking in the air.

You abducted boys at night, yes.

And now all that's left in that lighthouse is a solitary carrot.

Did you know that I am a member of the Association of Lighthouse Keepers?

Are you?

Yeah.

Did you join it just for this episode?

I joined it yesterday.

Yep.

Really?

ALK.

The ALK.

Are you an alcoholic?

I am.

And it's fun.

Have you got a posting yet?

Do we have to do a podcast from Lighthouses from here and in?

But you don't have to be a Lighthouse Keeper to join.

That's the one I'll take.

Evidently, if you've joined.

Unless you've also got a job as a lighthousekeeper, just to join.

That's the news, guys.

No, but it's really good.

Just to say, quick shout out to them.

It's a very reasonable price for a year's membership.

And I think you might get a sticker for your car.

Anything else you get for it?

You get their quarterly journal, LAMP.

Right.

And I've read a bit of it.

I've read a sample online.

It's really good.

Is it?

Yeah.

What are they, like, is it largely just the latest in Lighthouse news?

Shining a light on Lighthouse news.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

They don't do exposés or anything like that.

It's just lots of news from the Lighthouse community and, you know.

You've been quite cagey about how much it was, but what is a reasonable price to pay?

What is the sticker?

Is it like my other car is a lifeguard?

My other headlamp is a Fresnel lens.

How much was it?

Well, I don't want to say in Flash, but it was £18 for a year.

£18

for one joke and we might cut out.

It almost certainly will cut out, I know.

I'm worried that this is going to take over your life gradually, and when you quit the podcast in five years, this is the moment we should have known.

Wow, you think I'm going to last five more years of the show?

I'm incredibly flattered.

I'll just have one weird lighthouse.

One of my favourite lighthouses is I think basically an unnecessary lighthouse is the lighthouse in Machayas Seal Island.

So this is

China Seal.

Machias, M-A-C-H-I-A-S.

So it's a tiny little island just between the US and Canada, and its positioning is crucial because...

It's a land border, most of that, isn't it?

US and Canada?

Famously.

But

it's on, like, if you sort of continue the border, basically, it's in the Atlantic Ocean,

a sort of between Maine, between

Maine and New Brunswick.

And so it's disputed because both countries want ownership of this tiny, uninhabited island.

I think because you can claim fishing rights around a certain circumference of it if you do claim it.

So it's been argued over since 1832.

And Canada, to stake its own claim for the last 25 years, has just kept a lighthouse keeper in a lighthouse on there

to say,

to stamp its identity on the island.

And it's this guy called Ralph Eldredge.

Same guy.

It's been the same guy for 25 years.

It's actually two guys and they alternate, one month on, one month off.

But they're fun guys.

I read an interview with Ralph a couple of years ago where the interviewer said, because it's just him, the interviewer said, Are you a lonely person, Ralph?

And he said, lonely is the wrong word.

Independent is better.

Let's say I like me best of all.

And then the interviewer just goes, Divorced, Ralph?

Yes.

There was a bit of lighthouse news this year, so you might be seeing it in LAMP later on in your life.

You're right in your quarterly six months' time.

What Dan was right.

And that was, there was a film festival which took place in a lighthouse this year.

It was a Swedish film festival, the Gotteberg Film Festival.

And 60 movies were played in total at this festival, and they were played entirely to one human.

Didn't they use the light from the lighthouse?

The projector.

Did you have to keep walking around the top to see it?

There were 19 shipwrecks in it.

Sailors were so entranced watching Back to the Future 3.

That's so cool.

Was it a particular kind of film?

Was there a genre?

No, no, it was a film recently with Robert Pattinson, wasn't there?

It was the lighthouse.

And And they played two lighthouse keepers who are going mad.

Yeah, yeah.

No, no, it's a collection of independent film packing, yeah.

I just thought everything was genre.

It sounds like a horror film festival.

You know, we're going to trap you in the lighthouse and show you 60 films.

No, it was a COVID thing that happened, and so they couldn't put the festival on as they wanted to.

And actually, sorry, I slightly got it wrong, so it might have already been in an issue of LAMP.

This was 2021, so you might have missed out on the story just.

I'm sure you can get back issues.

Yeah.

So, yeah, well, the idea idea was they were going to have to go online and just stream it online for the entire

playing it to one person.

That was playing it to everyone with internet access.

Yeah, but for one thing they wanted to do was make it special.

And so they did a competition.

12,000 people applied for it.

And this one person, Lisa Enthroth, won it.

And so she got sent by boat to this island.

They took away all of her electronics.

She had just a little iPad.

It does sound like a horror film.

It does sound like a horror film.

There was one person on the island who was checking on her once a day just to make sure that she was okay.

The murderer, as he's otherwise known, yes.

And she was there for a week watching these 60 films.

So she had to watch about nine films a day, which is presumably about 18 hours.

She's undersleeping.

No, it's true.

Does she have to watch them?

Did she get kissed on the test on the offer?

The creepy caretaker of the island will do a little film quiz after every single one.

And who played the butler?

What does the cricketer and fatty snowball have in common?

Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 2007, a Japanese arm wrestling arcade machine was recalled when it broke three players' arms.

Amazing.

See, I am amazed it wasn't recalled after breaking one player's arm.

Yeah.

No, they thought,

let's let it break three more people's arms.

No, I think they happened.

All the breaks happened in a short enough time that they couldn't recall it before.

What an afternoon at the arcade that must have been.

You know,

ringing the third ambulance.

Yeah, amazingly.

Actually, we are going to contact the manufacturers now yesterday.

Possibly three kids who are holding it at the same time, trying to beat the big boss.

Oh, that's a good idea.

Three snaps.

They were all in the same trench coat standing on each other's shoulders.

I'm afraid you've lost the arm, but we have replaced it with one of these claw grabbers.

With which you won't be able to grab anything at all.

Just try and have your breakfast every morning.

you grab the spoon and then just drop it before it gets to your mouth.

No, so this is a company called Atlas and the game is called Armed Spirit.

And what they said, this was in an article from the BBC, is that probably the players got a bit overexcited and maybe they twisted their arms in a slightly weird way because the game was like a fake arm

and then you would grab hold of the fake arm and you would play an arm wrestling game against it.

And they were like ten levels and it went from the easiest level, which was a French maid.

Okay, okay.

Famously, famously weak.

There's a lot of lugging to do when you're a French maid.

Some of those dusters are extremely heavy with all the feathers.

Look at George Elliott.

That's where she got her hand from.

Milking all them cows.

Don't think that.

I don't.

French made is not the same as like a cow-made.

Milkmaid.

Is it not?

No.

French milkmaids don't wear the little lacy outfits.

They're quite different.

If you go to Aunt Summers and ask for a milkmaid outfit.

Do you mean French made?

No, no.

That makes sense.

On something I'll call Milfu Cowan.

Yeah, yeah.

After the French maid, you might fight against a drunken martial arts master, a Chihuahua dog, and the final is against a professional arm wrestler.

And it gets harder and harder each time.

So in the end.

That's not the order I would put that in.

You're saying a Chihuahua dog is better at arm wrestling than a drunken martial arts master.

Doesn't seem that way, does it?

How drunken, yeah, yeah.

If he's unconscious, then possibly.

I can see, though, how an arm breakage might happen based on a video video that I watched.

On YouTube, there's lots of videos where you can see people playing not this game, not Arm Spirit, but there's another game called Over the Top.

And very similar.

I think it's exactly the same game, basically.

I think that's...

Also, sorry, just for legal reasons, probably not exactly the same.

Yes, probably there's no Chihuahua, for example, in Over the Top.

And so you've got the big, bulky hand there.

And I watched a video of a super strong guy take on the final boss, and he was holding it.

And my God, he was like really going for it.

And someone leans over next to him and says, oh, when I tried to beat the big box, I totally cheated.

I leant in.

I got my arms underneath it.

I went.

So I can imagine by manipulation of your body in weird ways to try and beat it, a snap might occur when you buckle.

I can see that.

Isn't over the top as a move, isn't it?

In arm wrestling.

That's where you kind of twist your wrist a little bit.

Oh, I thought it's where you put your fingers over the top of their hand.

But they're probably meant to be anyway.

If they're holding your whole hand in their hand, you're not going to do very well.

Okay.

Yeah.

But

there are moves.

There are proper moves in arm wrestling.

Yeah, Yeah, there are sort of, I think, a couple of dozen different techniques.

As in, you know, if you're watching with an expert of the game, they'll say, ah, he's trying the French defence now or whatever.

But he's wearing a French makeup.

What were you going to say, Anna?

I was just going to establish that it was the kid's fault.

That seems to be where we're landing on this.

The company said they were playing it in a weird way.

Who do we think is likelier to sue, I think?

Any question we need to answer?

I think there was no,

as far as I could see, I couldn't see any later news stories that explained whether anyone had sued anyone.

I feel like some parents got some real large quantities of cash behind the scenes for that.

I don't know.

But I wouldn't like to comment.

But arm breakage does happen in arm wrestling.

Relatively regularly.

Apparently, this is according to John Brink,

who is the Guinness World Records greatest arm wrestler of all time.

He says that the people who break their arms tend to be beginners because you get incredibly strong when you're starting out arm wrestling, but you haven't actually built up kind of the bone and tendon resilience, so you don't know your own strength.

You break your own arm.

You literally, you push so, so, so hard that your bone just snaps.

And it's really horrible.

There was a match in Cumbria in 2018, it was like a farmer's event,

and there were various kind of fun things like a little fairground ride or a little, you know, shoot the tail off the donkey or whatever.

They do it those things.

Is that what they do?

Not really.

It's Joanna's fair.

Okay look, this was nothing like my fantasy fair.

This is just a normal fair.

There was an arm wrestling contest.

A 20-year-old girl broke her arm incredibly badly, it sounds like she was wrestling another girl, was in a huge amount of pain.

Her opponent fainted, which I can really imagine doing if you're arm wresting someone.

You know, when you see one of those snappages where it's suddenly a right angle to the arm.

So her opponent fainted.

And then they interviewed, I think this was on the BBC, they interviewed the paramedic, Andrew Dickinson, who said, This is what happened, the opponent fainted.

But he also added, the rest of the day was absolutely fantastic.

It ended in a dance where 600 people attended, and we were on site until 1:30 in the morning.

Is that good paramedicking?

I guess if you're the on-site paramedic, if you were summoned to take her to hospital, it's very bad paramedicking.

It's not clear.

They're starting the dance now.

Would you mind if we just kept the engine running a little bit longer?

So

I always wondered, because I'm not actually a professional arm wrestler myself.

No, no, no, no.

I'm a member of the Association.

Slam!

It's impossible to pick it up.

But

I thought that the rule was that you couldn't hold the table.

But actually, in the professional game, they install pegs in the table for you to hang on to.

So it's all about the rest of your body as well.

Cheating, I can believe it.

Yeah, I thought it was just about your arm.

Am I right?

I've got an old memory of you, James, of you and me hanging out, and you saying to me, I have an unbeatable technique.

and then we did it and you almost broke my arm basically in my attempt to so you know how to I do but I have to really

you know I have to trick you into the into position basically

there's a way basically you could if I was to arm wrestle you and we kept the table on my right hand side and your left hand side

and we arm wrestled on that table, then I would be pulling with my arm and you'd be pushing with your arm And the pulling muscle is way stronger than the pushing muscle, so you can beat anyone.

And it's like a pub trick where you can win a pint of something, that kind of thing.

But if you're

any brain cells on you, you insist surely you do it over a table, right?

Yeah, but if you're in a bar,

there might be a bar right on the road.

That's why it works in a pub.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah,

yeah.

Anyway, I have injuries now, that means I can't do arm wrestling.

I have something called tenosinovitis of the first compartment of the wrist, which is a very very common thing that arm wrestlers get.

And yeah, it's like arm wrestler's thumb.

It's called.

Did you get it from arm wrestling?

No, I got the version which is also known as mum's thumb.

I got it from carrying my baby too much.

But you can get the same injury from carrying a baby in the wrong way as you can get from arm wrestling in the wrong way.

It's better than getting the one they call Wanker's College.

So you mentioned John Brzenck

Anna, the great arm wrestling champion.

So he is the guy who the main bit of culture about arm wrestling ever to exist in the world is based on.

Oh, what's that?

It's the movie Over the Top, which is a Sylvester Stallone film, which we have briefly mentioned fleetingly in passing in the past.

Basically, he plays a character called Lincoln Hawke, whose character's name changes about twice as the film continues.

Like it's that level of attention to detail.

And, you know, he has to arm wrestle his way to winning a big prize and to a relationship with his son.

But it's based on John Brzezank.

And this is the really nice thing.

John Brzezank worked for decades as a mechanic at Delta Airlines so that he could arm wrestle because he wanted to travel.

His main expenditure was plane tickets to arm wrestling competitions.

Whereas if he worked as a mechanic at Delta Airlines, free transport travel.

Does that also mean that if you're in, let's say, the World Championships in Reykjavik or something and you want to go home, but there's a problem with the plane, and he's in the middle of an arm wrestling championship, you have to wait.

Everyone has to wait.

But if he sees a competitor heading towards the championship, he can mess up a piece on the plane.

Oh, that's

what?

He's not saying throw a crash, just so it doesn't take off.

Yeah, just throw something small into the engine, you know.

Anyway, but God, you wouldn't want to share an armrest with him, would you?

No.

Twitch sides are dependent at the tie, though.

But he...

I think both arms are probably strong.

I was hoping, I was looking at pictures of all arm wrestlers, desperately hoping to to find one puny, flattened little stringy arm and one knee.

There is a difference, though.

There is a difference in size, and it's roughly the difference between George Elliott's head and James Harkin's head.

That's the

five centimetres.

Yeah, it's a size.

Right.

That's interesting.

Because you get

some of them are experts with just the right hand, and some of them are experts with just the left-hand.

And I think the women's champion last year won both right-hand and left-hand.

I've forgotten her name.

So are there people who just never play each other?

Yeah, of course.

Because if you're right-handed and there's a champion who's a left-handed, how are you ever going to meet them?

Yeah.

You can't both sit on the same side of the table.

What if you're good, though, at backhand arm wrestling as such?

What do you mean?

So

if I went that way.

Well, like I told you, it's really hard to pull things in that direction compared to pushing with your other muscles.

Hang on,

you're saying we're sitting next to each other and I'm pushing this way and you're pushing this way.

I don't think we've invented a new spot.

No, hang on, I think we may have.

Arm pulling.

Isn't that?

You have exactly the same position as arm wrestling, but you have to pull.

You have to sit next to each other.

Or you just have to pull.

You have to pull.

So you slam your own arm down.

I mean, I think we've invented a sport that's even less exciting to watch than arm wrestling.

But you're saying they have the right-handed championships, and they say, and now we're going to have the left-handed championships.

It's different categories.

It's like different weights in boxing, but you've just got different arms.

Is there any other sport that does that?

Right.

In boxing, you can only punch with your right hand, and then some people are really good at only punching with the left hand.

I don't believe that.

No, that's because I've got that in the dream.

Can I just quickly quickly mention with Over the Top, this movie and with John Brzezenk,

basically when Over the Top was going into production, they did a thing for part of the promotion where they actually set up this massive arm wrestling championship that was called Over the Top

once the movie was green lit.

So they went, let's actually do this.

And so they did it as this.

both it was a sort of national thing in America, but then they had international qualifying rounds that would happen in places like Japan.

And they had a final in Las Vegas.

And the final when all of these competitors from all around the country came together that was the footage that makes it into the final of the film and so yeah and so you see real arm wrestlers who were part of this big tournament you would have to have real arm wrestlers otherwise you have normal actors with presumably like fake arms

the problem was is that they wanted to use real arm wrestlers to fight or to do the arm wrestle with stallone in the final of the movie but they were all too big it was unrealistic so they did get an no they thought they weren't big enough because it's it's more about technique they've got more normal arm lookings than the huge weightlifting.

Oh, I don't know.

Cleve Dean, who was the main arm wrestler at the time, was ginormous.

And they said this is so intactical that you would win this.

Like for instance, Garth all arms Carlson.

Well he does sound like he's got big arms.

Or tiny the rest of him.

Such a weird name, isn't it?

All arms.

It does imply he's got sort of nine arms.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Terry Bigman Barton is another one.

They're all big men.

I've seen videos.

They're very WD-40 nicknames, aren't they?

No one's called the smokescreen or the diplomat.

The best one I could find was Vern, the one-armed bandit, Martell.

And I don't know why you're laughing, because he lost his arm in a motorcycle accident.

Did he?

Yeah, one of them.

As if he was actually one-armed.

Oh, my God.

One arm bandit had actually did have one arm.

Oh, my God.

But yeah, he started going back into tournaments again after his accident.

Right.

Which did he lose his good arm?

No, he lost his less good arm.

That's incredible.

And then you don't.

Because you can't hold on to the pen, so he could use this.

So he became the best in the world in the non-able-body class, but he also came fourth in the regular able-body class once, which is pretty amazing.

Yeah.

Some arcade game stuff.

Yeah.

You know those penny pushers where you put like 2p in and there's like some shell.

I've spent more money than I'm comfortable with on those, but I love them.

Well, they're invented by a company called Comptons in 1964, and they were so sure that it was just going to be a one-year thing that they didn't even put a patent on it.

They thought this will just be fun for one year, everyone will forget about it, so we're not going to do that.

And then that's why you get them in all the arcades now because they weren't patented.

But why?

But do they steal my money so effectively?

Well, it's really interesting that.

So there's a hole where all the money goes down.

So it seems that when you put 2P in, it's bound to come out, right?

Eventually, it'll come out.

So every 2P that goes in.

Should equal one 2P out.

Now, the way to make money is for some of those 2Ps to fall into the machine.

But surely you'd notice.

Yeah.

You used to be able to notice there used to be a big hole in the middle, and you see the two P's go down, and that would be where, you know, obviously they made the money.

But now they hide the holes.

So there are holes on the side that the two P's go into, and so not all of the two P's that go in come out, and that's how they make the money.

I, as a Swiz, is an absolute Swiss.

That genuinely is something that's been blown wide open.

I can't believe that.

So do they have to muffle the noise of the two P's sliding down the holes?

Oh, they must do, I guess.

Because that's a noisy thing when you put your two P at the top.

I sometimes, you know, will resort to just banging in a Fiverr.

That'll do that a lot.

I'll put a Fiverr into the slots.

I have to pipe it down with a long pipe cleaner thing.

And then I think that'll get me a few two P's.

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'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 Harken and Anna you could emailpodcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or our website no such thingasaffish.com all of our previous episodes are up there so do check them out and also go and check out the links to the upcoming tour dates that we're going to be playing in September.

It's the final leg of nerd immunity.

It's an awesome night.

We're going to do a live podcast in the second half and a whole show that you've never seen before in the first half.

It's stand-up, it's facts, it's everything you want.

Come and see it.

Did I sell it?

I hope so.

All right, we'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.