429: No Such Thing As Newsbite

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Hi, everyone.

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

It is the super long bank holiday for the Queen's Jubilee, and so we have decided that we are going to take a weekend off.

And instead, this week, you're gonna get another one of my compilations from all the best bits from the last year or so of fish, which didn't make it into the final show because they were too silly, because they got the facts wrong, or just basically because there wasn't enough enough space.

Since it's the Queen's Jubilee, I can guarantee that for once this compilation doesn't contain anything libelous to the British royal family, but I can't guarantee it won't for the next one, so you better make the most of this, Your Royal Highness, if you're listening.

Anyway, just one more quick thing before we start this week's show, and that is that we have a couple of live dates coming up.

They will be in Inverness, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Cardiff.

They are postponed gigs from earlier in the year that will be happening towards the end of August and the start of September.

We would love to see you there.

If you live in any of those places, then get your tickets fast.

If you don't live in any of those places, but you can get to those places, then get the tickets as well because it's going to be a whole lot of fun, loads of facts, loads of silliness.

And the best way to get your tickets is to go to qi.com/slash fish events.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this week's show.

And what else is there to say?

But on with the podcast,

Mike Tess from Dennis.

Hello, hello.

Mike Tess from Harkin.

Hello, hello, hello.

Mike Tess from Andy.

Hello, hello, hello.

What an awesome chat we're having.

Hello, hello, hello.

Yeah, he's been trying to think of puns based on TV shows and dogs.

Heel or no heel?

The Barkfest.

Yeah, heal or no heel.

Yeah.

Oh, Barkfirst.

Barkfest is a good.

Yeah, yeah.

I am trying to do something with one of the biggest news nights or another.

Pretty much.

Newsbite.

Right, come on.

News bite.

Very nice.

There we go.

Off we walk.

He's been sat there for quite a while.

All right.

We good?

Are we recording?

We're recording.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, that is barking.

One thing I found on Alan Withy's page is a thing that he thinks might be the first ever beard and mustache show.

And this was in 1873.

Yeah, members of the public came to watch bearded men stand on a stage and have their beards judged.

Yeah, so this was set up by a guy called William Holland, and it happened in London.

It had quite a bit of momentum behind it.

Journalists who couldn't make it to the day because they were busy were writing in trying to influence the judges saying a beard has to be like this and it, you know, giving opinion pieces about who a winner should be.

So they thought it was going to be massive and it really, really wasn't.

It was barely attended.

They thought they were going to have 30 entrants to it, including Mr.

Charles Chaplin, who sent in fragments of his beard because he couldn't physically be there.

It's definitely not.

What?

Chris, did Charlie Chaplin have a beard?

I thought he had a mustache.

Exactly.

He says in brackets in his article, but unlikely to be that Charles Chaplin, and I agree because this happened 16 years before Chaplin was born.

Okay, so he couldn't even enter the beautiful baby competition.

Should we get onto some more steady ground and start talking about poos?

Because it feels like that's more kind of our direction usually.

Right for light.

He's onto solid ground.

Can I just say?

that

sometime today I got a text from Dan being like, just heads up,

these are all the facts on copperlites we've already covered.

Why is this bloody podcast?

What is literally, they've got a massive Excel list of all the coprolite facts.

It wasn't on any of the other facts, not on, you know, Amelia Earhart, not on just on compromise.

It's quite impressive.

You're so right.

That was pretty outrageous that we've never mentioned Amelia Earhart before, but we have mentioned coprolites 50 different times.

I think they come out of their tunnels to mate, don't they?

Moles.

I think that's one weird thing about them.

Because you can't really have sex inside a tiny little tunnel, so you have to come outside.

So you could say they're mounting out of the molehill.

Couldn't you?

Yes.

Yes.

Why have they not built a big sex dungeon in the mole boroughs?

They've got the birth room.

I think you missed my pun just there.

They're mounting out of the molehill.

Did you?

That's why they haven't built it.

Yes.

So that we can make puns rather than coming.

The mole are very big on comedy fans.

Torville and Dean were

figure skaters.

They're famous.

Ah.

Who are they again?

I know their name.

I know they skate, but in what context do they skate?

Were they professionals or are they an entertaining thing?

Yeah, won the gold medal at the Sarajevo Olympics, whatever that was.

Jane Torville and Christopher Deans

for Britain, or for Britain, right?

For Britain, yeah, that's basically why they're really, really a big deal here.

Probably international listeners are thinking, who the hell are Torville and Dean?

But, guys, they're a huge deal here.

Uh, because yeah, they were everyone loved them.

They won at the Winter Olympics in the 80s.

And I always thought they were a husband and wife.

And

no.

Oh,

cousins, father and daughter.

Brothers.

You've got it.

No, it's actually detective and villain.

The other one's there, and the other one's a basket.

It's none of the above.

It's nothing.

It's owner and pet.

No, it's nothing.

They were just friends, and they've snulled once at the back of a bus when they were 14 before they were even partners.

And then that was the end, and they were just really great friends.

But they had to spend so much of their lives together, so they both say their spouses took it took a lot to persuade them that this was okay.

right and they I think just it was only shortly before they won gold that they gave up their jobs I think he was a policeman and she was a worked in insurance so he was a detective

he said when they got it they I think when they won when they won I think it was one of the most watch TV programmes ever in Britain it was massive and Dean said afterwards or said in an interview since that the moment that he won it and and they won it and breaking all of these records so they got perfect scores throughout, which no one had ever got before.

And he said nothing had ever affected him so much in his life.

And then he specifically said, Sure, having children is a life-changing event, but this was the crowning moment.

And I wonder why his partner thinks that.

Do you know who the first Europeans, I should say, to climb Kilimanjaro were?

No.

So they were called Maya and Perchella, and they climbed it in 1889.

But to celebrate the 100-year celebration, they decided who this is, the organising committee, it just says in my notes.

I don't know who that is, but they decided to award posthumous certificates to the African porters who helped them to get to the top.

Because obviously, they didn't go by themselves.

So they went to this village called Marangu, which is near the bottom of the mountain.

And they asked the locals, you know, do you know who did this?

And they went, oh, this guy did it.

And there's a guy called Yohani Kinyala Lau,

who who apparently had taken these guys to the top 100 years earlier when he was 18 years old.

So he was given the certificate, despite the fact that if he was that person, he would be the oldest man who ever lived.

He continued to live for another seven years, which means that if this was the guy, he died at the age of 125, which would make him the oldest person, male or female, to have ever lived by three years.

Wow.

Can I believe it?

It's It's possible.

I mean, gosh, that clean mountain air really is good for you, isn't it?

The other option is he was nine years old when he went up and was just under the oldest person ever.

But no, it's probably a misremembrance.

It sounds like a lie.

There was a baby born at an Irish petrol station this year.

It was in Kildare.

And it was awarded free petrol for a year.

The baby was?

Well, his parents, I guess.

Wow.

That's great.

Yeah.

So it wasn't like, you know, sometimes people get christening presents of a case of champagne and, you know, they can't enjoy it for 18 years.

It's not one of those.

It's been kept in the cellar for when the baby turned 17.

Quite the reverse.

They have to do maximum driving.

These parents have to be driving as much as they possibly can in the area of the service station.

Right, I'm going to tell you a sort of similar fact, which none of you are going to care about or have any interest in whatsoever, but I I guarantee you, there's a slither of audience that might care.

There was a massive show that came out on Netflix last year called Selling Sunset.

Huge show on Netflix, and it has a big following.

And it's all about real estate agents in America.

And they're all sort of very beautiful Hollywood characters in it, right?

They all have really odd names, like one's called Amanza.

I just haven't heard Amanza before, not Amanda, Amanza.

And then there's a lady called Crochelle, right?

Again, very weird name.

Turns out the reason Crochet is called that is because her mum went into labor at a shell petrol station and she was delivered there by a member of staff called Chris.

That's beautiful.

So she became Chris Shell.

Now it means nothing to you three here, but I'm telling you, it's just blown the minds of about six people.

I had a really embarrassing thing when I was staying in Sussex last year where there was a post box, which I thought was a post box that it looked like a red post box.

So I thought it was somewhere where you post letters.

And it was like outside the house.

So I thought, my God, this is so cool.

The Royal Mail have installed a post box, but like in the property of this tiny little cottage.

And so I posted a few letters into it.

And then the owner of the property I was renting off came and delivered them back to me about three days later.

I was like, so you seem to have got these letters in my post box, which is where

it's the letterbox for the house.

It's the letterbox for the house, yeah.

Because what I thought you were going to say is every couple of years you see it in the tablines of some old man who've like for 25 years has been posting his letters in a dog poop in like literally

it's such a common story

they did smell pretty bad when she goes like that you come to think of it

so one of the people who was trapped in wuhan in china when it got shut down because of coronavirus was a mr bean impersonator who happened to be there he was he was at a lab wasn't he and he left a fridge open

He's a British comic called Nigel Dixon.

And his job for a living is that he impersonates Mr.

Bean.

So he's extraordinarily popular in China right now since the pandemic happened.

On Weibo, he's got hundreds of millions of views for each of the videos that he puts up.

He basically did all these videos about how to treat lockdown, you know, how to stay healthy in lockdown.

And so all done with the Mr.

Bean suit on, you know, the tie.

It was, it was him being Mr.

Bean on this thing.

But one of the things that he then did sort of as himself without Mr.

Bean is he released a video which reportedly was him delivering propaganda about the fact that

China was doing fantastic in the pandemic.

And this was in early 2020.

So he said things like, once people were waiting for hospital beds, now beds are waiting for people.

And it sickens me to hear of other countries blaming China.

But for what?

We're now hearing of cases where people around the world have contracted their virus with no obvious connections to China.

And this was a part of a state propaganda channel, an official channel with China.

So basically, because Mr.

Bean as a TV show, and I say this as someone who grew up in Hong Kong, Han Dol Xianshan, he is ginormous in China.

This guy, they suddenly had their own Mr.

Bean who could be used as propaganda.

Wait a minute,

Mr.

Bean doesn't talk, does he?

I thought that was the whole point of Mr.

Bean.

He doesn't talk about

it.

Wow, that is very depressing.

Yeah, well, he's massive there, and it was lucky for them because he was trapped literally at the heartbeat of coronavirus in Wuhan, and he defended them.

And we don't know if that was just him defending them on his own or whether or not it was because he was making it specifically for Xianhua, a news agency, which is an official Chinese state-run media agency.

Who knows?

We don't know.

Well, that's legally covered, Dan.

Thank you for buying yourself in that embarrassing hand grenade.

Here's the thing.

Here's a puzzle for you all.

Cool.

It's a word you have to guess.

Five letters.

It's G-R-A blank blank.

G-R-A.

Is this your James?

Are you trying to do an audio version of word?

Once a week, this is going to be the next big thing.

Okay.

This is going to be great.

Are the two.

Okay.

Okay.

I'll say gross straight anna anyone do you want us to say grave grape i wanted you to say whatever you wanted to say but now you've said grave anna

um that signifies a high mortality salience in you uh not in dan and andy uh and apparently this is a test that psychologists use to see how much you're thinking about your own mortality and what you can find is that people who think more about their own mortality tend to be more conservative

So the idea is that the more you think about death, the more you kind of try and conserve your own worldview and the more kind of entrenched you are in the current

system.

Not saying that this is Joanna, but this is the idea of the researchers.

Thanks, Tran.

And they said that people who did this test and went for grave as opposed to grass or grape,

if they were asked to set bail, like pretend to be a judge and set bail for a supposed prostitute, then they would give an average bail of $455

compared to $50,

the people who would have said grass or grape.

So you're a much more conservative person according to these researchers.

To be fair, James, when I said the word grass just there, what I actually was thinking of was a patch of grass on the plot of land where my mortal remains will be buried.

So

I don't know if that's a good idea.

And Dan was thinking that in the way that people crush grapes with their feet to make wine, so death is crushing above us and pushing us down and down deeper into the earth before we meet our maker.

Now I was thinking about like I love green grapes.

On actually silly mountaineering clothes, do you remember in 2016 on International Women's Day what a group of Chinese mountaineers did?

No.

A group of Chinese male mountaineers to celebrate climbed up

climbed up a mountain wearing dresses and heels in order to experience the struggles and strife of being a woman.

But yeah, they wore like hot pants and mini skirts.

Hot pants.

Yeah, so I don't think it was quite the same outfits as people in the 1700s.

Suspenders.

This is what all the women that I've seen on the internet were.

Exactly.

They were all wearing very high stilettos and stuff.

All going, God, it really is hard being a woman climbing a mountain, isn't it?

This branch of string fellas at the top.

It better be worth it.

What an, as James, you were saying, extraordinary character, Peter O'Toole.

His stories are very wild.

He was a very,

particularly in his younger years, a torte force of partying and

booze and Lotharioism.

He was just a big old character.

He accidentally, in a boating accident, cut the top of his finger off.

And so he put the tip of his finger into some brandy and then he pushed it back into place and wrapped it with a bandage.

And then weeks later, he removed it and found that he'd put it back on the wrong way around.

And that's where the story ends.

And I don't know.

I've looked at photos.

I don't see a backward finger on Peter O'Toole.

Was it sort of nail in or upside down?

See, the story just doesn't give us any more.

Yeah, it's hard to...

No, I think it must be backwards.

So let's imagine the nail would be, yeah.

Facing front.

It doesn't say how much of the finger it was either.

It could have been just the very, very, very tip.

Like I've cut the very tip off my finger, right?

Exactly.

It might not have been the whole nail.

Exactly.

But you would assume if it was the very, very tip, you wouldn't tell it was the right thing.

Exactly.

You kind of need a distinguishing feature, don't you?

Like a nail.

That's true.

If you heard him drumming his fingers on the table, would you get three taps and then a squelch as the soft head at the front?

Yeah.

Loved, loved.

I don't know if he loved a fight, but he certainly was in them enough to have some opinion that was probably,

you know, in favor of.

Otherwise, you might avoid it.

But it just seems like he was just constantly.

He's coming I'm done.

He's going to sue Dan.

I mean, he's been dead since 2000 and something.

He's...

We're fine.

That was a hell of a sentence.

I loved it.

I didn't give up as well.

I kept going.

I think his kids are going to get in touch going.

He did not love a fight.

He quite liked a fight.

But I read, so I found he was very good friends with Brian Blessed, another great actor.

Was he?

Very good friends.

And I read an article where Brian was talking about his relationship with Peter Atoll.

And basically, and it's it's a very long article, every single encounter ended up with Brian beating the shit out of him.

That was the thread of it.

And it even starts with him beating someone else up when he first meets Peter O'Toole.

So he says that they first met at a party in the mid-50s.

These are his words, where I'd memorably just punched Harold Pinter's lights out.

He got one right on the side of the jaw.

And Peter Atoll comes over and says, wow, that's really good.

And then Peter Atoll, because he's this drunken man, anytime he was on set with brian blessard on various movies brian would just beat him up and there's cases of him dragging him around the house as he was crying and throwing his arms around and and but peter o'tool supposedly loved him he said he was the only person who was you know properly honest and loved him and they were very it actually sounds like Are you sure that Peter O'Toole loved a fight?

What you've described there is the fact that Brian Blessard was a very violent man.

So

if you'd actually given my very interestingly long sentence a chance earlier, what I was trying to say was he was always in fights, which makes it suggest that he likes a fight, even though he was not necessarily the one instigating it.

Otherwise, or

at least he had an opinion on it.

At least he had an opinion on it.

One last thing on middle finger is if you do ASL, American Sign Language, then you can...

kind of make what you're saying profane by doing it with your middle finger.

So for instance, if you do the sign for mother, but instead of using, instead of pointing with the fingers you're supposed to point with, you point with your middle finger.

It means motherfucker, for instance.

And there's a few other things, like, for instance, the sign for a hearing person is kind of you do a little gesture around your mouth.

And if you do it with your middle finger, then it's like saying fucking hearing people.

Do you know what I mean?

It's a way of saying, like, that what you want to say is actually quite profane.

And they think this might be quite a new thing because there is a very old ASL symbol, which is having your

forearm facing upwards and then doing the middle finger.

And that is the sign for the Sears Tower or the CN Tower in North America, those two big buildings.

Basically, you have to do the middle finger, and that is the sign for those buildings.

For the CN,

so the CN Tower in Seattle or the Sears Tower, which is in, I think, Chicago, but I can't remember.

If you want to do a sign for that, you basically just do your finger.

Do you think that's because the CN Tower is CNT?

It really is not that.

It's because

it's got a spiky bit at the top.

Yeah, yeah.

Whatever.

I'm going to assume it's calling someone the C-word.

That's rude.

My favourite river that I've recently read about is the Congo River, only because it's so unfathomably deep.

I kind of mean unfathomably literally there.

So it's the deepest river in the world.

It's 220 meters deep, but at the bottom, there's no light can penetrate that low.

And I realised that if you put all of London into the deepest bit of the Congo River, only six buildings poke out of the top of it.

The last building you see the tip of is the cheese grater.

That's 225 meters.

And then the rest of us are all submerged.

Is the shard?

Is the shard submerged?

Yeah, yeah.

No, no, shard's up.

Shard's taller.

Shard's the

highest, I think.

Tallest.

Wow.

But yeah, so we don't, if that does happen, we all have to flee to the top of the shard, I guess.

I think that's going to be the least of our problems if all of the buildings in London get taken to the Congo River.

I don't know how we've woken up with this situation being as it is, but

you've just got to deal with it.

That's really cool.

That's good.

Yeah, I don't think of rivers being anywhere near that deep.

And I guess the point is that most of them are not, but this one is.

Yeah.

Okay.

I'm hard to touch the bottom, Andy, even on tiptoes.

And there was advice literature about beards that you could get back in the day

in the time of the beard mania.

And one of the best ones, according again to Dr.

Widy, was Don't, a manual of mistakes and improprieties more or less prevalent in conduct and speech.

And this was like a little pamphlet.

On every page, it told you stuff you weren't allowed to do.

At no stage did it tell you what you could do instead.

It only told you what you couldn't do and on one page it says that if men have beards or whiskers you should be careful to wash them after smoking and should not get in the habit of pulling your whiskers, adjusting your hair or otherwise fingering yourself.

Sensible advice then?

Sensible advice now.

Yeah.

Some things don't age.

But what am I supposed to do with these fingers?

The funny thing about omelets is that I've had maybe 20 30 maybe even 40 different kinds of omelette they all have tasted the same i've never had an omelette that i can differentiate this is a taste bud thing isn't it

i mean that sounds like you need to get your taste buds looked at but specifically a cheese omelette mushroom omelette spinach omelette it it's a small egg to me

you feel that way i do feel that way actually you can taste the mushroom within it right but at the same time it just i think what the egg does is it overpowers everything so it doesn't matter what you put in it it's just an omelette it is powerful You should try Eggler's omelette, that's what you need.

Oh, that's the cheese sandwich.

That's what that is, and it's better

on the Challenger expedition, which I had never read about.

They collected 4,800 new species, and they found the Mariana's Trench on that expedition.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

Did they just have seven miles of cable or whatever it was?

I actually don't know how many.

Sorry, I think maybe

in the 1880s?

Yeah, so it was weird.

Maybe.

I'm not sure.

That's incredible.

Yeah, yeah.

It was.

I can't remember anything about it, but it does sound like an amazing expedition.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Maybe it was, I once dropped a can of Coke into the ocean, very shallow, and it hit the bottom and came back up.

So maybe that's what they did.

Maybe they had sort of a...

Are you even talking about?

Or maybe they got over the Marianas Trench, dropped a can of soda or something.

Was it Diet Coke?

It was...

I can't remember, actually.

It was Diet Coke floats and normal Coke sinks.

Ah, so it must have been a nice name.

Was it normal?

Yeah, sealed.

Yeah.

Hang on.

It went to the bottom and it came back up again.

Yeah.

And you're suggesting that maybe they timed how long it took to come back.

I'm just trying to spitball how this happened, and I just know that I've had practical experience with...

Did that?

What practical experience have you had, Andy?

Well, yeah, people in dark houses.

I've never said compared to the rest of us, Dad is an expert

with his one experiment.

There's a ring on.

It went all the way to the bottom.

Who knows?

No, no, no.

You know, because this is your experiment.

It went all the way to the bottom and then came all the way back up to the top.

Well, what I did was I did it in a swimming pool and then in shallow water and then when we were out on a boat, we put a Coke can in.

It disappeared for something like five minutes, and then it bobbed back up.

That's really interesting.

It could be a change in pressure, I guess.

It could be an octopus holding it.

Read the back.

Hate Diet Coke.

Tossed it back up.

Why has Diet Coke never come down?

What's going on?

Wow.

That's proper science.

I'm

an experiment.

Yeah, you would have been on this expedition.

I'm not suggesting that that was a real thing.

Do you know where the largest man-made waterfall in the world is?

Do you know who owns it?

Man-made.

Who owns the largest man-made waterfall in the world?

So we're more likely to get who owns it rather than where it is, is what you're saying.

Is it a squillionaire who we've heard of?

Yes.

Okay.

Have they recently been to space?

They have not.

Musk.

Elon Musk.

No.

Bill Gates.

No, think of someone who has got no taste whatsoever.

Trump, Trump.

Trump.

How did you all get that straight away?

Amazing.

I feel like that clue was too easy to get.

This is is at the Trump National Westchester Golf Course.

And basically, every one of his courses has a fake water ball.

And each one is more tacky than the previous.

And they're so huge.

If you're playing anywhere near them, you can't hear anyone speak because there's so much water going over the top of them.

And

this one at Westchester is the world's biggest.

There is one at Chang'e Airport which looks really big to me and possibly could be bigger, but according to Guinness Book of Records, this is the biggest.

Wow.

Do you know how tall it is?

Did you say?

I don't.

I think it's 5,000 gallons go over every minute or second because I'm going off memory.

But there's a lot of it.

I'm working out from that.

Yes.

But another fake waterfall can be found in Australia and can be seen on our TV from time to time.

Can you guess where that might be?

Credits of neighbours.

No.

The harbour essence is adverse.

It's on TV

in Australia.

So when do we see Australia?

Oh, so maybe Arias Rock?

Is there there like a weird bit of water that comes down?

Water comes down there occasionally, but Airs Rock, I don't know if you know, or Uluru is not a fake rock.

So hang on.

It's a fake rock that we see on our TV.

A fake one.

A fake waterfall.

Fake waterfall.

That's in Australia that's on British TV sometimes.

Very famous waterfall.

Famous.

But it's fake.

It's fake.

Is it known that it's fake, or is this a secret you're busting open?

I'm not busting it wide open, but I think some people know.

It's a Sydney Opera House.

It's not a waterfall.

No, but a rock is I bet there's a feature somewhere.

I panic, I panicked.

We've been there.

Yeah, I didn't see a waterfall.

I just naming things in Australia now.

Crocodile Dundee.

There's often an attractive young TV personality underneath it.

Neighbours.

No.

No, but you can't just say neighbours.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I'm a celebrity.

I know you are, Andy, but do you know the name of this show?

Okay, so I'm a celebrity.

Get me out of here.

Yes, so they have that kind of place where where they all go for a shower underneath a waterfall.

And it turned out recently they found out that this is a completely fake waterfall, and they can turn the taps on and off whenever they want to.

Whenever anyone goes for a waterfall shower, they just turn the taps on and they get washed.

That is brilliant.

Do they that it was like My Lean Klaus literally turning a hot water tap

for the producers?

Yeah, producers.

What a shame.

What a shower that would be.

So which poor producer has to stand there watching the dry waterfall 24 hours a day in case someone stands under it?

I guess it's not that bad a job, is it?

It's one for an intern, I think.

It's really sad though, because President McKinley used to genuinely really love handshakes.

He used to, it's said that it was his favourite thing to do was shake people's hands.

And this guy basically used it as a tactic, as a

way to get it.

Yeah, because it was him that was killed this way, right?

McKinley.

Yeah.

And he was killed, it was at a fun fair, wasn't it?

He was at the Buffalo World Fair.

Well, it was like the Buffalo World Fair.

Um, so it was one of those places, sorry, Dan, there's a really big difference between fun fairs and the Buffalo World Fair.

They were fun, I think, because you know, it was fun space fair.

Dan was just using it as a descriptor.

It was a fun fair, not for William McKinley, but for everyone else there, like the fun fair down at Finsbury Park, as opposed to you know, this massive world fair where they were showing off, you know, American industry and like Bell or whoever else.

Yeah,

my poor kids, yeah, this is fun.

This is fun.

Dad.

Speaking of concrete, there was a woman called Sarah Guppy,

and in 1811, she invented a new way of making piling for bridges.

So when you make a bridge, you need to kind of fire some stuff into the ground so they'll hold it solid and put some concrete in there to make the foundations.

And so she came up with a new way of doing this.

And she was a friend of Isamba Kingdom, Brunel.

And so Brunel basically used all of her piling tactics for all of his bridges.

But she didn't patent it because she said it is unpleasant to speak of oneself, it may seem boastful, particularly in a woman.

So she decided not to patent it, and this kind of technique was used in a load of bridges.

Come on, guppy.

She did come up with a few things that she did patent.

So she came up with a method of keeping ships free of barnacles, which made her 40 grand from the government because it was so important.

I mean, that's so important that as well.

Exactly.

Not a lot of money for how important that is.

She must have identified there was a guppy in the market.

A gaff in the market.

Yeah, no, no.

Yeah,

it feels like it's not the right guppy pun when we're talking about ships and water.

Here's another quite

French politician, Gaston Daffer.

And he was a participant in the last duel that ever took place in France.

This was in 1967.

And Dafer had insulted a René Ribier in the French parliament.

He'd said, taissez vous abruti,

which means apparently shut up, stupid.

And so they decided they were going to have a duel.

And Defer vowed that he wouldn't kill Ribier because it was the night before his wedding that they'd organized this duel.

But he said, I will only wound you and spoil your wedding night very considerably.

Otherwise, it wouldn't be Defer.

Just stunning.

And James, what was the upshot of the duel?

So Deferre won, but it was a couple of,

there were a couple of nicks that he put on Riviere.

He wasn't like, he didn't chop his penis off or anything.

It was just like a few cuts.

And then the guy who was officiating the duel, who was France's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, decided this is enough.

Enough's enough.

We're going to call it a win for Defer.

I've actually been up a lookout tree.

Is that cool?

Yeah.

So in Australia, sort of south of Perth, there is three trees.

The Dave Evans bicentennial tree, there's the Gloucester tree and the Diamond Tree.

I don't know which one I was up because I went as a kid.

It's like 10 or so.

So basically the way you get up these trees is that they slammed in these metal bars and they would go circular around it and you would climb to the top and then you'd have that hut there.

And it was petrifying, but I had sort of kid confidence to get up to the top and you climb.

And so you climb on these metal bars.

You're sort of climbing on all fours.

Yeah, you're climbing on all fours and there's nothing underneath you.

Like there's no medication.

I'm employed by the Forestry Commission.

They open it up to the public so it's no longer a used tree for those purposes.

And so tourists can just rock up and go and they say don't go up if you're afraid of heights or if you might have a heart attack or if

you're a kid.

I don't know why I was allowed up.

And I do remember we went to the top, my sister and I, and there was a couple sitting shivering, petrified in the corner of the the hut at the top.

Oh, yeah.

And we went to...

Too scared to go back down.

Too scared to go back down.

It was petrifying.

Like it was, If you look down, I mean, it's...

But is it, when you go back down, presumably you have to climb backwards, descending a ladder?

Yeah.

Right, exactly.

With much more of an angle, I guess.

Yeah, and here's the thing.

There was no system whereby you would go up one way and come down the other.

Oh, sure.

You would bump into people coming up on the way.

Yeah, yeah.

So would you have to go all the way back up?

Like, if you're only 40% of the way down, they're 60% of the way up.

Is it like you have to climb all the way back up on the top?

I remember shimmying past someone who leaned into the tree.

Yeah, yeah.

It does sound horrific, this.

I mean, I would absolutely love to do it.

But also, why did you call it the Gloucester Tree?

Is that what they call it in Australia?

No, I'd probably just pronounce that weirdly, eh?

Well, I thought maybe all Australians do because they can't pronounce, you know, the English place names.

Gloucester, yeah.

It would have been the Gloucester tree.

I certainly have called it the Gloucester Tree.

I was once skiing with my in-laws, and I was at the top, and I didn't, I don't like other people seeing me skiing because I'm so bad at it.

And I get really embarrassed because I keep falling over and stuff.

And my father-in-law went down the first bit, and then he stopped.

I'm like, for fuck's sake, he's waiting for me because he's trying to be polite and he wants to wait.

So, anyway, I was like, I'm not going.

I'm not going.

So, I waited at the top and I waited at the top for about 40 minutes.

And then eventually, he went down.

And then I kind of followed him down.

And then I spoke to him afterwards.

And he said he was too scared to go back down.

And he was just trying to get up the courage to go down.

And I thought that he was, you know, just spying to see if I was going to follow.

So funny.

That's very silly.

That's such a weird situation.

Just all the women in the family at the bottom going,

what are those two doing?

That is a moment where you go to Polita, you've married your father.

Yeah, yeah.

There was a mountaineer who made kit out of balloon material.

So George Finch was an Aussie mountain climber, and he went on the Mallory expedition in 1922 and invented the Ida Down coat, the puffer jacket, essentially, from hot air balloon material when everyone else on the trip was wearing tweed.

So it's a really radical thing to invention.

And all the other mountaineers laughed at him.

It's really, you know, he was wearing a basket on his feet as well, personally.

But imagine being laughed at by a lot of people wearing tweeds.

I know.

Sounds like my school days.

And he was really looked down on by the other mountaineers.

So he was observed repairing his own boots.

Very, you know, very unclassy behavior.

And the deputy leader of the expedition, who was called Colonel Edward Strutt, said, I always knew the fellow was a shit.

Because he's invented a new jacket and cleaned, repairs and boots.

What a way with words this guy had.

That's true.

Yeah.

But he had the last laugh because obviously no wind got through his amazing jacket and he was feeling a lot warmer.

Yeah.

So today there's still something like 500 lookouts in America and they reckon it's a 50-50 split of men and women.

And they reckon it kind of was that in not the very earliest period, but

as soon as the sort of ceiling was broke and the first woman started doing it, which was this lady who was called Hallie Morse Daggett.

And she became the first female to serve in the Forest Service.

And it's an amazing recommendation that she got.

Did you read that letter?

It's incredible.

This guy who was the ranger, he wrote a letter to his boss saying that he thought that Daggett would be the best person for the job.

But obviously, there were three people applying and two of them were men.

It should have gone to one of them.

He certainly should.

Okay,

I'll agree on that now.

No, no, no.

I'm backtracking.

So, how on earth did this woman get the job?

I don't understand.

I'm still furious about this.

So,

what he wrote in the letter was: the novelty of the proposition which has been unloaded upon me and which I'm now endeavoring to pass up to you may perhaps take your breath away.

Like, just like even that thought alone.

I like the bit at the end, where he said, She is absolutely devoid of the timidity which is ordinarily associated with her sex.

Yeah.

Okay.

But she's not afraid of anything that walks, creeps, or flies.

She is a perfect lady in every respect.

Wow.

That's a perfect lady.

General Motors, they make artificial stalactites out of their car byproducts.

Pretty cool and pretty weird.

For where?

For bats.

Yeah.

Cool.

For bats to cling onto.

So they've installed a couple of hundred of these across the USA.

They put them in caves because it gives the bats more surface area to spread out and hang from.

And that means when the bats have more space, they don't all cluster together.

Because when they cluster together, they spread this disease amongst themselves called white-nose syndrome, which is kind of fungus.

It's very bad for the bats.

And as we know, if we've learned anything, it's that you should try and keep the bats healthy.

And so General Motors have started installing these.

Right.

What do they?

I thought you were going to say there was some sort of amazing benefit for General Motors as a company to do PR.

Just PR.

The intangible benefits of PR are huge, Dan.

I mean, look at them.

I'm talking about them now.

General Motors.

Ooh.

The bats tell their other bat friends and they tell their other bat friends.

And before you know it.

There we go.

Is the car market big in the bat world?

Do they particularly love?

Batmobile.

Yeah.

Come on.

Good point.

It's just the one model, isn't it?

That's true.

You'll get letters.

There are loads of models there on my car.

No, thank you for saving me, because I saw you think about letting me drop myself in there.

There's an old wives' tale that you tell if something is a fossil by licking it.

Oh, yeah.

It's supposed to, like, have air holes and it's, like, stickier to your tongue or something.

I've got to tell you, I've been on so many archaeological sites, and once in a while, like, some of the undergrads will be like,

like, nobody knows what on earth it means.

They've just got stone to their tongues.

It's, I don't think it's very good.

But what's the idea?

What, as in, what are you meant to get from it?

That people are.

It's supposed to be different.

I think it's supposed to stick more if it's actually a fossil.

It's supposed to be like...

It's not.

Oh, what is it now?

It's like supposed to have little tiny holes in it that when you put your tongue into it, it kind of sticks to your tongue.

And I worry very much that your undergrads might have heard this on QI.

I think we're right.

We might have a retraction to make if that's not true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Punks your undergrads accidentally.

And I'm sorry.

No, it just is not very.

The best method is actually just to see if it will break apart, which is kind of similar with crop because if it's if it's bone, it will just snap.

But obviously, you don't really want to be snapping fossils for obvious reasons.

But

I've definitely been on archaeology.

You've got two fossils then, if you do that.

Perfect.

You're not coming with me on a Tim James.

What?

We found 16 finds.

I'm like, I swear you started with eight.

But no, yeah, I was on an expedition and they were like, and we were having this massive argument about if something was a fossil or a stone.

And I might have accidentally dropped it and it made such a loud noise, we were like, that's a stone.

But then another time, a professor was massively arguing with me.

And I was like, I swear it's a fossil.

As you can tell, I think everything is a fossil, even when it's stone.

And he was like, no, it's not.

It's a stone.

It's a stone.

And then he went, look, you can't break it.

And then he broke it.

And he was like, oh, let's just pretend that no one.

Wow.

So much history destroyed.

Yeah.

By the professor.

That was the best way.

But yeah.

Other marine worms do that kind of dissolving thing, don't they?

There's a worm called the zombie worm, which feeds off skeletons of mostly whales, but other dead ocean animals at the bottom of the sea.

And that sends acid out onto the bone, which kind of melts it.

Well,

dissolves it.

And then they just live inside whale bones forever and ever.

And they're really cool.

The thing I like about them is that the males just live inside the females forever.

So there'll be one female, and then they'll have about 100 males living inside the females.

Oh, really?

And they just live there.

And they feed off her yolk, of her eggs.

Yeah.

And then eventually they inseminate her.

Because

they were looking for the males, right?

Because they found the sperm inside the females.

So they were like, well, where are the males?

And it turned out the sperm was the males.

It's like they're the little guys who live inside the female.

That's incredible.

Do the males ever leave the female and find their own new female?

Do they ever break up?

I don't think.

I think you haven't got a choice.

It's very much an arranged marriage sort of situation.

But what about when the new

when the female gives birth or when she lays eggs that then hatch?

Yeah, they must have to find them.

How do they have to swim around to find another female?

How reasonably.

Yeah.

Do they get the when they hatch, when a female hatches,

as in when a female, one of these fish hatches, how do they get new males?

I guess, yeah, you're right.

They just swim around and they finally find them.

I don't actually know.

They probably just look for some tasty bones where everyone else is hanging around.

That's where the term boning comes from.

What am I talking about?

The interesting thing is that they do, they live on

whale bones, but also they've been found living on the food, the bones of the food that people throw overboard.

And that is where the phrase throw me a bone comes from.

There was lots of reasons that people climbed Mont Blanc.

This was from a book called Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps by Fergus Fleming.

In 1818, there was a Russian count called Matsevsky who did it because he wanted to improve his poetry skills.

Hmm.

Yeah, do you think?

I don't know.

What's he practicing there?

Is it the writing of?

Is it the speech?

I think he's thinking, seeing all that beauty of helpful poetry.

He's kind of thinking there.

Being inspired by amazing sights.

Because there is a Shelley poem called Mont Blanc, which is

one of the worst Shelley poems in existence.

What does he rhyme with Blanc?

Blanc Monge.

There was someone I knew who had a tutor who, you know, an English literature tutor who said,

poetry is better than sex.

Apart from Shelley's Mont Blanc, sex is better than Mont Blanc.

Wow, yeah.

There was a guy called John Oljo, and he climbed because he wanted to see a better reflection of the mountain in the lake.

So he thought he couldn't see it properly from the ground, so he had to go to the top to see what they able to see it.

How do you know the lake was there if it was halfway up the mountain?

Maybe you can.

I don't know.

There was a guy called Comte Henri de Tilly who climbed because he wanted to cheer himself up after a failed affair.

And there was a guy called Edward Bootel Wilbraham who climbed Mont Blanc because he had been told not to.

Cool.

Wow.

That's literally all I know about it.

Was he an eight-year-old in a straw?

What have you done?

Isn't that amazing?

It's like proper reverse psychology, isn't it?

Don't climb that mountain.

Is bigger.

Do you think the tallest curtains ever made are taller than the widest curtains ever made are wide?

Okay.

Or do you think?

No, I would think width is easier to make than height.

I'm going to go height.

Okay, well,

the obvious answer is, I'm afraid the correct one here.

I wish I could have some kind of exclusive minority report for you, but no, the tallest curtains are only half as high as the widest curtains are wide.

That's actually still a surprisingly large proportion of the widest curtains.

That's quite tall.

Also,

they're 65 meters tall.

I mean, that's incredible.

Also, all you need to do is just flip it the other way up, and then you've got the tallest curtains.

Yeah, that's a really good point.

Just turn your landscape curtains into portrait curtains, and they're much taller.

There has been a new kind of paper invented made from biomaterials.

So you take like parts of people's body and you kind of squish it down and do a load of chemical stuff to it, and you can get this new kind of paper.

And the idea is that they can use it by kind of folding it into certain ways, and it'll help to heal wounds or it'll help the body to regenerate organ tissue, stuff like that.

So it's a way of using origami inside the human body.

And it's really interesting the way they discovered this.

There was a guy called Adam Jacos, and it's one of those discoveries where it was an accidental discovery

because

he'd actually created an ink made from an ovary that he was going to use for a 3D printer.

And he spilled the ink and it kind of hardened and turned into this paper.

And he realized that he could use that.

And I know there are more questions to be asked at the start of that sentence.

You saw questions appear on our faces one after the other.

What ovary?

Well, that's the way that they make these biomaterials is they take body parts from people.

Is it a human ovary?

Actually, I think it was a pig ovary this one, but the hope is in the future they'll be able to use human body parts as well or maybe stem cells to create them.

So it's the idea that you would sacrifice, let's say, a finger, but you would get a cool new power?

No, no, that's not.

No, it's almost like you haven't understood anything you've said.

It's more like you would get stem cells to create some kind of biomaterials and then that would turn into a paper kind of material and you'd be able to fold it and help to like cover wounds or.

Or swallow it, and it springs into a fake heart inside you or something.

That is closer to what might happen than what Andy said.

Yeah, but if you, if you, if you James said you can make it from a body part, so if in extremists you cut off your own finger, yeah, but you'd only be using the finger to make some paper bandage to put over that wound of the missing finger.

Oh, I see.

I see.

It's a problem that's solving its own creates.

It's a fake economy, really.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

Pretty cool, though.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Until the 70s and 80s, a lot of geographers assumed that elephants couldn't swim.

And so when you found elephant bones on an island, there must have been a land bridge because otherwise there's no way they could have got across.

There's a debate about how elephants got to Sri Lanka, isn't there?

Yeah.

And lots of other places used to have elephants like Malta and Crete and Cyprus.

Yes.

None of which I think, I think, have elephants now.

I've been to Malta and it's quite a small island.

you would struggle to hide a wild elephant population on it.

They also, they have British home stores there, don't they?

Which is

an extinct shop in the UK but it still goes on in Malta do you reckon there was a land bridge once from the UK to Malta where

British home stores

practically taking their reasonably priced outer rain garments with them

God you're right Malta is one of those funny places though because they've got it they've got a BHS they've still got a mother care yeah I don't think there's a mother care on the British mainland anymore and it's just like that thing where you know a species goes extinct on the mainland but it survives on the island yeah but the thing is, because it's an island, they get either very, very big or very, very small.

So the mother cur is really tiny, whereas a British hostage is massive.

That's so funny.

Do you know when I got there, when I got to Malta, I shared a cab from the airport to the main town because some guy just approached me and said, Do you want to share a cab?

And then he turned out he said he didn't have any money.

It was all a bit dodgy.

But he...

You've been duped, my friend.

Well,

he was a really peculiar guy because he said he was there for some kind of corporate espionage purposes.

Oh, yeah.

Right.

And he said that's what he does.

And he goes around to make sure that, for example, the Maltese mother care aren't selling.

He's probably from Chinese homestars.

It was so unclear what he was doing.

And then he found out I had some kind of job in the media.

And he didn't say a word for the rest of the journey, except to clarify perhaps that he didn't have any money to pay for the cab at the end of it.

Sounds like he really didn't want you to mention him publicly.

So

this will be going out to a few hundred thousand people.

um i have i have one last thing which is i think i have found the only copperlight street in the world

okay what do you mean like it's paved with poo no no it's called it's called copperlight street oh see as far as i can tell i've gone on google maps and i've put copperlight in and there's only one place in the world that has it on its sign is that in light register It's in Ipswich.

Oh.

Yeah, which is in Suffolk for anyone overseas listening.

And yeah, it's Copperlight Street.

It was named that because there was a guy called Edward Packer who started basically a fossil feces factory, burning it up and using the energy.

He was known as the golden mukman of Ipswich or the

Copperlight King.

Yeah, the Copperlight King.

What a great name.

Where are they finding enough fossils to

fossil fuels?

I guess back in the day in the 1800s, they're everywhere, everywhere, right?

Somewhere near Ipswich, I guess.

Norwich?

No.

I can't believe the way you research, Dan, is you just type in all the keywords that we're researching that week into Google Maps to see if that place is paid off.

I mean, do you think this is genius or are you just disappointed with your teammate?

I wish I'd thought of it first.

Seven years, it's finally paid off.

Coprolites, yeah, you would have thought.

The only one in the world.

Looking at that list, that massive list of coprolite facts.

I just imagine Dan being like, yeah, I'm running out of facts.

She's going to not Google it.

I'm going to literally Google Earth it.

You want to think outside of the box is?

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to speak to me, you can go to Twitter and you can look for at James Harkin and I will be there.

If you would like to speak to Andrew Hunter Murray, you can go to at Andrew HunterM on that very same website and Dan is there as well at Schreiberland.

If you would like to speak to Anna you can email her or indeed any of us on the address podcast at qi.com and if you'd like to learn more about the podcast you can go to no suchthingasafish.com and that is also the place where you can get tickets to the shows which I mentioned at the top of this show.

The easier place to go for those as well is qi.com slash fish events.

We will be back again next week with another episode of No Such Things a Fish, another normal episode.

But in the meantime, hope you enjoy your bank holiday weekend.

If you're in the UK and wherever you are in the world, hope you're having a great time.

We will see you again next week.

Goodbye.