428: No Such Thing As Free Urine In The Uber

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Toshinsky.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with fact number one and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that pedestrians used to be expected to give way to sedan chairs.

So they're the e-scooters of their day.

They couldn't have been more so from everything I've read about.

Are pedestrians still expected to give way to sedan chairs but just there aren't any sedan chairs so it doesn't matter.

Oh like legally?

It's a really good question.

We'll have to well I guess we have to set it up with one of us Well, it would require three of us to have a sedan chair and then one of us to find a policeman to arrest.

Well, no, no, we only need one sedan chair and two people to lift it.

We need three people.

That's what I mean.

We said a sedan chair each.

No, no, no.

So we'll need three people, one sedan chair, and then one of us to be the pedestrian who doesn't give way.

Oh, well, I'll be the pedestrian, please.

I'll be the person in the sky.

In the chair, shop in the chair.

Front, front, I got the front.

What a joke.

Sorry, James.

Anyway, this was, yeah, the rules of the road, or in fact, the rules of the pavement in the great sedan chair era, which is quite a short era, really.

And just in case you're unfamiliar with the sedan concept, it's obviously a chair that one person's sitting on, and then it's attached to sort of pole railings, and those are held by one person at each end, and you're walked around the street in this chair.

And normally there's a box around the chair, we should say.

Yeah.

There are some rough and ready sedan chairs where it's literally just a chair and you're being carried.

There's quite a really

good fit for them.

There were military sedan chairs or for camp expeditions and it's literally just a chair with some handles that fold out.

Right.

You wouldn't have thought it's that useful in a sort of a military assault, would you?

There's no tank for the sedan chair.

It's before the battle.

Okay, right.

Galloping in on a sedan chair.

Over the lip of a hill, thousands of sedan chairs.

Anyway, yeah,

there were quite strict rules about how they could be used.

So it was in 1634, I think, that they really kicked off in the UK.

They came over from Europe and a guy called Sir Saunders Duncombe got a bunch of licenses to hire out some sedan chairs.

And the great thing about them was they were allowed to go on the pavements, much like scooters.

And much like scooters, this really irritated pedestrians.

But the rule was that pedestrians had to get out of the way.

And the men who would be carrying the sedan chairs, and it was usually men, obviously, would just shout, you know, by your leave, as they approached, or sometimes ruder things, according to some accounts.

I thought that it was very polite.

I thought a sedan chair would be making its way leisurely to you, and they would say it and you'd pause.

These guys were bolting down the street.

Yeah, really.

Yeah, that's the thing.

If you didn't move, you weren't sort of in a standoff.

You were just mowed over.

That's what I think.

Like, this was the rule, but it was kind of an unwritten rule, I reckon, right?

Because, and the reason it was unwritten was because if you didn't get out of the way, you would get smashed.

Yeah, yeah, they could be quite quite violent.

I always thought that sedan chairs were pretty much in the way that you might, if you were in London these days, you know, getting a rickshaw in the middle of the night.

Like it was just a thing of convenience, which was really nice.

But actually, they were really practical.

They were particularly practical for people whose legs, you know, had problems, who couldn't walk and so on.

And sedan chairs weren't just for the outside.

You had indoor sedan chairs, which I just didn't think of.

So

you could get from your room downstairs and have a wash, go out.

I think it was usually the same sedan chair, right?

What they would do is they would change the poles so they would have shorter poles when you were doing the the indoor bits and then they would give you longer ones for the outdoors.

So they were really popular in Bath, in the city of Bath.

They were, like Dan said, because you could use them indoors.

You could literally be picked up from your bed in your lodgings.

You could be carried to the bath waters, which were regenerative.

You could be put into the waters and then picked back up again and taken back to your bed and put into your bed.

And these guys, the chairman who would take you, they would also strip you and cover you in blankets.

So they would take off your nightclothes, put you in blankets, put you in the sedan chair, take you to to the baths, put you in, and then put you back as a baby.

It's a good service.

It's like being a baby.

Yeah, basically, I just think Uber should bring this in.

I think workers' rights might have got to a place where we're not going to have a sedan chair anymore.

It's a bit like a hover wheelchair, isn't it?

Like, you're, if you think about it, it's like, you know, not hovering, no wheels.

Just like, you know, an old, an old, like the concept.

It's a hovering.

If you imagine the men who are carrying you aren't there, then it is, isn't it?

Imagine they are the wheels, the men are the wheels.

So they were mostly for high society, obviously, because you had to pay fares to ride in them.

And so they had great fixtures, like they tended to have hinged roofs, especially as hairstyles got bigger, so that people's hair, big

hairstyles could fit out on the top, or headdresses, or top hats.

I saw a drawing as well, which, again, it's done in that style where you kind of wonder, is this being satirical or is this being real?

But you can see the hinge on the top of the roof and this giant wig coming out.

Now, obviously, one of the problems is if, what if it's raining or what what if there's a light drizzle, you're obviously going to get your wig wet.

So the person on behind, in James's position,

they have on their back a sort of huge pole that comes up with an umbrella on the top and that then sits over.

I think it's a satirical drawing.

Yeah,

but it kind of makes sense that you would do that, I would say.

Yeah, yeah.

I think from the attitudes of the chairman, I can gather their vibe would be, your hair can bloody well get wet, madam.

Have you, um, so there was, there was a thing as sedan chair sickness.

Oh, yeah.

Sedan chairs were huge in China, too,

and in Hong Kong as well.

And seasickness was known as sedan chair sickness because that was the best example they had.

I think more people might have experienced sedan chairs than the ocean.

No way.

So you went out to sea and you suffered from sedan chair sickness?

I don't know if they called it that when they were at sea.

Oh, I thought you were saying that was what they called sea sickness.

I think if you're a salty old sea dog, you're probably still called it seasickness.

Yeah, but

I think most people would have said, oh, oh, I've got a sedan chair sickness because I've, oh, it feels like I've been in a sedan chair.

If they had motion sickness, if they'd been on the waltzes or whatever.

I see.

They would think of it as a sedan chair sickness.

But cures, cures included drinking the urine of young boys.

Oh, God.

Which does seem to crop up quite a lot in ancient cures.

Was that in, would you get a little vial of that in the sedan chair?

For a nice felt it coming on you.

Yeah, like when the Uber driver has a bottle of water in the back and then you want to look classy like sedan lux.

Yeah.

Or bringing some earth from your kitchen floor for protection.

Well, that was how they used to treat seasickness, I think we've said before, right?

Ah, so it must have been the urine of young boys for the sedan chair only.

Okay.

Also, taxi drivers get annoyed if you get their cars dirty.

So if you bring earth into a car, and similarly with the sedan chair, they used to, they were able to charge passengers for any mess that was made.

So I think if you dumped a bunch of earth in the chair.

Or if you drank some young boys' urine and then vomited it back up.

But that's presumably fine because they're the ones who introduced the boy's urine into the...

Yeah, just don't spill it.

And I really like it how when it got to night time, the sedan chair, the price would then double on top of all these other fees that you had.

It would double.

It kind of makes sense because you needed one extra member of the vehicle, as it were, which was the link boy who would be standing in front of the sedan chair with a torch lighting the way like a big old headlight.

Just, you know.

So cool.

And it was, I read a thing about that.

It was very dark and jolting in the sedan because there are these just slight gaps of light where the curtains are or whatever where you see the torch.

And at the end of the journey, the link boy would thrust their flambeau into your trumpet-shaped extinguisher.

How cool is that?

Yeah, that was if you paid extra, though, wasn't it?

But and those extinguishers, you still see them in houses sometimes, don't you?

I walked past the building yesterday and I saw this weird iron trumpet on the outside and it was for them to stick the torch up.

And it extinguishes it.

That's great.

If you ever need to put out a candle in London and you happen to be in the right place, you can do it.

It's quite chishy buildings.

It's not.

Yes.

This was in, you know, Piccadilly or somewhere.

Yeah.

Look, if you live in one of those buildings, you can probably afford a torch, so you won't need to put the candle out in there.

The world record, longest journey in a sedan chair.

I'm not sure if it's still the world record, but this was in 1728.

It was Princess Amelia, who's the daughter of King George II.

And she was carried from London to Bath

in a sedan chair.

So far.

Wow.

It's a long way.

She must have gone through so much young boys' urine on the way.

They have like service stations where you can get some young boys' urine,

some drive-thrus and stuff.

It's 172 kilometers, and she did it with eight chairmen working in turn.

And they had a coach that was going alongside them that they would jump in and out of, and then they would carry her.

Who was it who did this?

Princess Amelia?

So, an actual princess.

Yeah, daughter of George II.

Wow.

It wouldn't be your average pleb, would it?

No, no, of course.

But what this reminds me of, every so often there's a news story today, which is like, this drunk person got an Uber 200 miles.

And it's basically that.

That was the first thing I thought of the Zark.

But she was really kind of quite unpopular, Princess Amelia.

She famously closed Richmond Park to anyone apart from her friends.

Bastard.

In London.

And so you had to get a ticket to go to Richmond Park and you had to get it from Princess Amelia.

You couldn't get it from anywhere else.

And so for instance, there was a guy called

Lord Brooke who asked her for a ticket and he said, can I have a ticket to Richmond Park?

And she said, I denied one to the Lord Chancellor.

I'm hardly going to give one to you.

Wow.

And there was like a huge sort of right to Rome thing.

And there was a guy called John Lewis who took her to court saying, I should be allowed into Richmond Park.

And in the end, this was in 1758.

He won.

John Lewis won.

And so they had to put ladders up over the walls so that people could get into Richmond Park.

But Princess Amelia made it so that the steps in the ladder were too far that people couldn't get on.

So they had to go back to court to get them put in.

How was she getting in?

She was, you know, she had her gates that she could go into that were guarded and stuff like that.

Because she didn't have a human trebuchet or something tossing her in.

But yeah, John Lewis, who did this, he became like a local celebrity.

And people who lived near Richmond Park would have his his painting in their houses because he was so famous for getting people into Richmond Park.

How cool is that?

Yeah, Princess Amelia.

Hang on, so could we say that without the sedan chair, we might not be able to access Richmond Park today?

Well, it's another one of my talking about someone quite a long way from the actual fight.

Yeah.

I'm only talking about her because she did have the record for the longest sedan chair race.

And just very quickly on the trip, you said that these guys were jumping out.

So

was it like passing a baton, as in, did she ever touch the ground, we know, or is it just one journey?

That's a really good point.

I would imagine she's a princess, right?

Do you reckon it's uncomfortable to be put down and picked up again?

Because if it is, they probably did a pass, baton, pass to try and make it as good as possible.

But it's also uncomfortable to

walk 170 miles without a piss.

So I imagine she would have stopped a bit along the way.

There must have been.

Hardly any of them had toilets inside the Savanjo, did they?

For that long ago, you would build that in, wouldn't you?

For that long a journey.

That's a rough gig for the guy at the back, aren't we?

Oh, no, what I'm thinking now is: this is just so obvious that this must have happened.

You get your free vial of young boys' urine,

neck it to make you feel better, and then you need a piss where you're going to go in that vial.

And then the next person who uses the taxi, they're not going to get young boys' urine.

Yeah, you're right, and if they get the motion sickness badly, they'll think, I bet that wasn't young boys' urine after all.

Only four stars.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that a woman called Mary Papa Nicolau once had a smear test every day for 21 years.

That is being a hypochondriac.

That is.

I mean, it's quite something, isn't it?

No, she was the wife of Dr.

Georgios Papa Papanikolau,

who was the guy who invented the PAP smear test.

And that's why it's called the PAP test, because it's named after him.

And he needed to do experiments, and it's kind of hard to get people to do experiments.

And so he got his wife to do it.

And she unbegrudgingly, or maybe a little bit begrudgingly, did this for 21 years.

Depends on the day, doesn't it?

If it's Christmas Day, your birthday.

Oh, yeah.

So, and the other thing is that he was a zoologist, really, and he came up with this idea of doing a smear of the vagina of a guinea pig.

And he could find out when they were menstruating.

And so, he was kind of doing that experiment on humans.

And everyone's like, yeah, but we kind of know when humans are menstruating.

It's a bit dumb.

There are some obvious signs.

There are.

There's the odd side here and there.

But what happened was Mary invited some of her friends to a party.

And I don't know how you bring this up in the party, but as part of the party, they all had a smear test.

And then one of her friends was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and Georgios Papa Nicolau had the smear, and he managed to see that there was something in that smear that presaged the fact that she was going to get cervical cancer.

And that was basically why we have smear tests today.

He's so brilliant.

What a hero.

Like, he should be a household name for me.

Or she should be as well.

Both of them should be.

Yeah, the Papa Nicolaus should be.

Sometimes she just lay there.

As the only person among the Vorbers who's had a smear test, it's genuinely not that difficult.

21 years?

It's not very pleasant, I understand.

It's not that pleasant.

So it's a sort of little...

What is it?

A little sort of

taking of a few cells.

Yeah, exactly.

So something, a little speculum.

I imagine, I really want to know who made the tiny speculum for this guy's guinea pig.

Well, I can tell you that.

So

he went to a shop and bought a nasal speculum for humans.

So a speculum is something that kind of opens up a gap a little bit.

Okay.

And so he would take the nasal speculum for humans and used it in the vaginas of the guinea pigs and so what that tells me is that guinea pigs vagina is almost exactly the same size as a human nostril ah oh well that's it's useful knowledge probably somehow it's going to be useful at some point one day

not a pub quiz

as i go to the pub quiz as i said

oh my gosh i just can't see the sound i want to i'm desperately trying to have a lot of listeners there's like how many people listening to this show one day just little i reckon maybe you're going buying some nose plugs, right?

Because you're a swimmer, and you go to the nose plug shop, and they say you're not allowed to put them in your nose before you buy them.

And you're like, luckily, I have a guinea pig,

so I can test the size of the guinea pig instead of testing it on my swimplay.

And that's the loophole in the chemist rule, but we don't have any rule that says you can't put them in a guinea pig vagina.

Oh, I'm seeing it more as like someone's being held captive by an eccentric billionaire, and they're like, I'm about to kill you, unless you can answer this impossible question.

That's quite good.

I've got another one.

So, you're being held captive by this guy, and he wants to put some poison in your nose.

And so, what you do is, oh no, I need to put my hockey mask on first.

And you put your hockey mask on.

He begrudgingly says, Well, that's, yeah, I understand.

But then, when you've got your mask on, you put a guinea pig where he thinks your nose is.

And so, he puts the poison in the guinea pig's vagina instead of your nose because he thinks it's your nose.

Yeah, that's quite good.

Anyway, look,

Papa Niccolo,

start so Giorgios, the husband, he started working on the guinea pigs during the First World War.

I think it was about 1916, maybe with a new or two either side, because that was the length of the war.

But it took him so long, he published his landmark work on it during the Second World War.

It was 1943 that the work was published, and that was with a brilliantly named fellow scientist called Herbert Trout.

Just on

very quickly on Trout, Herbert Trout, because I know you want to know this.

I read his obituary and he loved fishing.

Brilliant.

Lovely.

Good on you, man.

Very good to know.

What is truly amazing about this, though, is one article that I read is that in the early 1900s, cervical cancer was the number one cancer killer in women in the USA.

And now it's...

basically the most preventable cancer up there.

I mean, it's extraordinary what this guy's discovery, along with his wife's vagina,

did.

Another good name in the history of Smears is the sort of simultaneous inventor, in fact,

Aural Babes, which is also.

That's not real.

How do you actually pronounce it, Anna?

All right, fine.

I think you'd probably say it Aural Babes.

It's Aural Babesh.

Aural Babesh is the name of the person who was Romanian, I think, and he also was doing experiments around the same time and sort of came up with a slightly different twist on taking a cervical smear test at the same time.

Right.

And yeah, and in fact, in Romania, it's called the Methoda Babesh Papa Nicolau.

So they give him joint credit for it.

Cool.

He was, by the way, Babesh.

He worked with Robert Bunsen of Bunsen Berner fame.

Stop.

Wow.

He was his pupil.

I thought Bunsen were kind of hundreds of years old.

I thought they went back to the 1000s.

So 100 years old.

Okay, that is really cool.

So many great names being chucked around.

I know.

In 2009, Papa Nicolau, Georgios again, was named the second greatest Greek of all time in a national poll.

I mean, that's, of all the countries, that's a biggie Greece, isn't it?

It 100% is because they've got a lot of pedigree in there.

He was beaten by one man only.

Was it that guy who...

Anassus.

Not Anassus?

Oh.

Who's that guy who did all the politics and the economics and stuff when they had a show?

Yeah.

Was it him?

No.

I think it should be Yannis, but I think it's Socrates.

It's Alexander the Great.

Oh.

The only Greek voted greater than George.

What did the Macedonians think of that poem?

I don't know.

I really love the speculum

as

said no woman ever.

As a historical object, I don't like it too near me.

But it's got a very interesting history.

So it was invented by this chap called James Sims, who is actually a very unsavoury character in pretty much every way.

At the time, people, doctors were totally discouraged from looking at women's private parts.

Gynecologists would be told not to look at the affected area, and they'd be, you know, it was, they were instructed to sort of blindly fumble around under a lady's skirt and sort of have a little bit of a feel.

And I think there was even a textbook that suggested either the doctor stare determinedly out into the middle of space or look the person in the eye consistently as you're doing it.

Which is better.

To me.

Which is worse.

But yeah,

he didn't like doing it any more than any other of these male doctors at the time, and it was sort of as very unseemly.

But he did say one time this poor girl came to him with a fisture, a really bad fisture, and he said this girl was in such a condition that I was obliged to find out what was the matter with her.

And so we started investigating ways to see into the vagina, and he tried a bent handle of a gravy spoon

at first.

I don't know if it was clean before it was eaten off again.

Not clear on the details there.

But it was really controversial, even after he came up with the speculum.

Lots of people refused to use it in case it corrupted people, in case women got afraid of it.

We

did it.

In case it was just too damn sexy, it was exactly that.

And the thing about Sims that's really controversial is that he did a lot of experiments on African-American enslaved women, right?

And there was a question about how much consent he got.

And to such an extent that his statue was removed from Central Park in 2018.

Was it?

Yeah, it was.

So, I mean, I think he's been roundly cancelled now.

Yeah,

Yeah, yeah, he's not a good guy.

Another person famous in the history of smear tests is Anna Marion Hilliard.

She was a Canadian physician.

And the pad test was invented by this Greek guy, but actually, she invented the way that they do it in modern days because she made it much more simple and she made it in a way that any gynecologist or family doctor could do it without having to have loads of extra training.

So she's really, really important in this story.

As well as being a physician, she was a midwife.

she was one of the best women's hockey players in Canada in her day and there was a brilliant interview with her and they asked her about her life as a gynecologist and she said that sometimes women would come up to her six years after their wedding day and she would have to inform them that the reason that they still haven't had any babies is that they are still virgins.

Whoa.

Yeah.

What was this?

This was in the 50s.

This interview is in 1957.

Okay.

They were like, why have I not had a baby yet?

And they're like, well, Well, let me tell you something about life.

That's leaving it too late for the birds and the bees chat, isn't it?

Yeah.

It's also very fitting that she played hockey because, in terms of gynecological lessons, I was taught to apply condoms by putting them on hockey sticks by my English teacher.

Yeah.

Maybe that was a subtle nod of my English teachers to the.

Why is your English teacher telling you to do this?

It comes up in mid-March, January.

Dorothea has to pop.

Yeah, yeah, pop it on a hockey stick.

Yeah, cows are bonnet because it'll be quite difficult because she's ready for flooding, man.

I thought hockey.

Oh, no, I'm thinking of ice hockey sticks.

Which end of the hockey stick?

Where isn't the hockey stick like 180 degrees curved?

Yeah, and you're piping

the gravy spoon,

as we call it.

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

My fact this week is that ships can squat to get under bridges.

That's pretty cool.

Pop a squat and get under bridges.

They don't have any legs.

They don't have any legs.

Obvious response.

No, they can't.

What are you talking about?

So this is a pretty amazing thing.

Basically, what they do in order to achieve the squat is they make the ship go faster.

And when you move a ship faster, there's obviously a lot more water passing faster.

And when it passes faster, particularly underneath the boat, the pressure decreases.

And so the ship sinks further down into it.

It sort of gets sucked to the bottom.

And that's how they achieve it.

And they work out the measurements.

They work out how much they need to go down, and that's the speed to which they move in order to gain that extra distance from a bridge.

And we've seen it happen a few times.

I mean, it's pretty crazy.

There's one of the biggest cruise ships in the world.

It's called the Oasis of the Seas.

And it needed to do this.

It needed to get under a bridge that connects the Danish islands of Zeeland and Sprogo.

So it couldn't get under at the height that it was at.

And they did a few things, like they had to collapse the tall standing funnels.

Can you do that?

Yeah, yeah.

Some ships are built to do that specifically for bridges.

Yeah, I mean, but normally those ships are in bottles that can do that.

Well, in this case, this particular ship could, the Oasis of the Seas.

But it still wasn't enough.

So they needed to approach the bridge at 20 knots.

Oh, my God.

So they did that.

And if you get it wrong, then that's it.

You're going really fast into a bridge.

You're going really fast into a bridge, but it managed to do it and it made clearance by a foot.

They must have, I mean, imagine the maths for that, working out that this is exactly the right speed.

That's a lot of pressure, isn't it?

It'd be funny to be the ship's mathematician just hearing this enormous crunch above deck and looking at all your notes and going,

oh, I think Carry the one.

Oh, no.

Yeah, that bridge is called the Great Belt Bridge, right, in Denmark.

And I checked out whether it has been hit in the past.

It's been hit once since it was opened.

And that was by Karen Danielson.

Funny name for a ship.

That's the name of the ship.

You're joking.

No, the MV Karen Danielson.

Crashed into it in 2005.

And because you couldn't get any traffic across, this is one of the main bridges from one of the most populous parts of Denmark to the rest of it.

It basically cut the whole of Denmark into two, and no one could get from either side.

Wow.

Karen Danielson, as far as I can tell, must be named after Karen Danielson, who's a psychoanalyst, because I can't find any other Karen Danielsons.

She might be better known to you as Karen Horney.

Karen Horney.

Ringing bells.

No, she's a really, really famous psychoanalyst who is like a feminist Freudian.

And Freud has the theory of penis envy, right?

That women are neurotic because they want to have penises and stuff like that.

She invented something called womb envy in men, and she says that this is just as common, if not more common, in men.

And men are neurotic because they're envious of women's ability to bear children.

And whereas women fulfill their society simply by being here, men have to achieve their manhood by succeeding in life.

So that's Karen Horney.

That's, well, speaking of invention, something I've always wanted to invent a name for, the opposite of nominative determinism.

She's horny, and so she's gone in the opposite direction.

She denies all the horniness that old Freud put forward.

Yeah, according to Wikipedia, Horney was bewildered by psychiatrists' tendency to place so much emphasis on the male sexual organ.

Crumbs.

What a good reversal would be for normative determinism.

You could call it normative determinism.

Yes.

So it's putting things off.

I whatsapped that to you a while ago.

Just

I whatsapped that idea to you a while ago.

No, you did.

And as I said it, I thought

this bell went ding-a-ling of plagiarism, alert, plagiarism, alert.

But I thought, ignore the bell.

Ignore it.

Because it was quiet enough that I thought

it was.

If Lucy Porter was here, it would have been fine.

What are the odds that are plagiarizing someone in this room?

I'm really looking forward to your court case eventually, where when the accused stands up and explains what you've done, you just immediately go, oh yeah!

No, you're right, I did.

That bangs!

As I was stealing that loaf of bread, and the little bell went off.

I thought there must have been a boy wizard called Harry.

Okay, well, can we go back to shipping?

Let's have a ship fact.

Oh, okay, so you want to hear a cool sinking ship fact?

Yeah, we're just blurring us up.

This is something I probably said three years ago, but but

something someone else said three years ago.

There are ships called, I'm so paranoid now, semi-submersible ships.

They're called heavy lift ships as well.

Okay.

Right, any bells going off?

No.

Great, thank you.

What they do is they're designed to carry other ships, or they're designed to carry oil rigs, or they're designed to carry, you know, like enormously heavy things, things that weigh tens of thousands of tons.

And what they do is they're these weird, mad, huge platforms with towers at the corners.

They float along.

They then take on huge amounts of water as ballast, millions and millions and millions of liters, and they sink.

The ship sinks.

And then the oil rig or the other ship or whatever floats over the top.

Wow.

And then the submersible ship just jettisons all the ballast it took on and bobs back up, bringing the thing with it.

Wow.

It's

nice.

It's insane.

It's absolutely insane.

And they, yeah, some of them have feet to clamp onto the key as they're being loaded.

So some ships have legs.

They're just nuts.

Did you guys ever read about the Sean O'Casey bridge in Dublin?

Sean O'Casey.

It was a bridge.

Yeah, they said Karen Danielson, Sean O'Casey.

We just run out of names.

I actually didn't look up who Sean was.

I should have.

It's a bridge that, you know, would open in the middle.

Oh, yeah.

But not long after they opened it, they lost the remote control that opened the bridge.

And they couldn't find it.

And for four years, four years, it didn't open.

Well, their ship's stuck in a traffic jam.

The backup gets worse and worse.

Some pilots needing to get in in for dinner.

And they found it.

They know they had to just get a new remote.

Why would they do that after three years?

It's a slightly confusing story because, from what I read, the cost wasn't even that great.

It's only like compared with the cost of a bridge or the shipping life of a nation.

Exactly.

I sometimes do that.

You know, when you've lost, you know, you've lost your cheap headphones.

You're like, I will find them.

I know they're in my room somewhere.

It's all in one small lounge that they've lost this remote control for the bridge.

They just need to look in the sofa one more time and it will be there.

Yeah.

My God.

gosh.

In 2020, there was a Donald Trump boat parade on Lake Travis, which was in the Colorado River.

There were several hundred boats, all pro-Trump.

They had flags and they were just having a great day out.

We support Donald Trump, whatever.

Unfortunately...

they generated massive waves and five of them sank to the bottom of this lake and it's it was a completely calm day that's the thing oh no and this is due to a really bizarre shipping effect so basically there were boats with planing hulls which as far as I understand it, is above a certain speed, the top rises up a bit.

Oh, yeah.

And the boat is effectively riding its own bow wave.

The problem is that these boats, if they all go at the same speed, they kind of act on each other.

Oh, yeah.

And the waves that they're generating at 10 miles an hour, which was the speed they had all decided to go at, was the worst possible speed to go at.

And so they created this enormous set of waves, which they created their own storm, basically.

Oh, that's incredible.

I know, I know.

If they'd gone at five, it would have been fine.

They got at 20, it would have been fine.

Or if some had gone at five and some had gone at ten and some had gone at twelve.

Exactly, okay, because it was this parade.

That's quite impressive.

If it had been intentional, that could be a useful naval military tactic, couldn't it?

Better than the old sedown chip.

How are we going to sink our own navy?

What's the tactic here?

You need a mole.

You need a mole.

You need to infiltrate the enemy navy, don't you?

I was actually reading a bit more about the effect that you were talking about at the start.

And so there are a few effects that ships can can pull off.

Another one is the bank effect.

This isn't actually a good thing, but it's a very similar mechanism that Dan was talking about.

So as you said, the ship goes faster and faster and the water in front of it is displaced, as we know, so you get that wave, and that creates a decrease in pressure underneath the ship, and that's called Bernoulli's theorem.

But also

it can create a decrease in pressure in the water around a ship's sides.

So if a ship goes too fast and then it turns a tiny bit accidentally or something, then the pressure will be decreased and and so the ship will move to fill up that space of, you know, decreased pressure and get sucked in.

And that means as soon as you turn a corner, you can suddenly get sucked up onto a bank.

And actually, it's posited that, you know, the Evergiven that got stranded in the Suez Canal

last year, was it?

That that may have been what happened there.

Just very quickly, I was reading an article in

Hakai Magazine Magazine.

Your favourite matter's favourite mag.

Yeah, yeah.

Hannah's favourite mag.

But it was just an article about ships at sea and all the interesting methods that ships use for various different safety reasons.

And one of which is: if you look at a photo of a ship at sea, next time you see a photo, have a look out for some people standing on deck, sort of on lookout.

And that's two people, sometimes one, sometimes more.

They're looking out for pirates because that's a big problem when you're out at sea.

Sure.

But the thing is, is that they're not real people.

These ships have dummies that look like people who they just place on the side.

Scarecrows.

Basically, scarecrows.

Yeah, for pirates.

But for pirates, yeah.

That's pretty cool.

That was, I think it was in that article as well that it said about there was a passing comment about the metal discs that you see when big ships are moored.

And

next time you see a big ship moored, then you'll see that the rope's obviously tied round the mooring pole.

And then there's often a really big metal disc.

It looks like a giant CD that the rope's woven through.

In fact, I think that almost always is with big boats.

And if it's not down by the mooring, it's up against the side of the ship.

And do you know what that is for?

No.

No, so like the big CD that you get in taxis sometimes is apparently they think that it will stop speed cameras from being able to catch you.

It's not that

I did not know that.

Really?

I was told that by a taxi driver once.

I don't know if it's true.

Right, okay.

Oh, it doesn't work.

That must have made me quite anxious in that taxi as he was going at 85 miles an hour in a 20.

Drink some of that young boy's urine.

We'll be there in a minute.

Come on.

So it's not that.

Some safety thing.

It's a rat stopper.

Because of a rat.

Obviously, huge problem on ships.

Huge problem in harbours.

Rat can't run up that rope if you've got a big CD in the way.

Brilliant.

It's amazing.

That article just talks about all the things on the side of a ship.

And I've never stopped to think about, well, I haven't really looked at the side of ships too much in my time.

But it's basically covered in graffiti for various things that you need to know.

So there'll be signs that will show you how far the ship can dip as a result of the weight that it's carrying.

So here are the certain lines that you need to be aware of and the lines, there are different lines because if you're going to be in salt water versus freshwater versus sort of like tropical water as well.

The plimsole line or something.

That's exactly the plim, Samuel Plimsole.

And then there's lines to show you that sometimes boats have this little protrusion at the bottom of the ship at the front, which you would never see.

So when tugboats are coming out to get it, there's a little symbol, it looks like a five, but it's missing the top that says watch out because you might smack into something underwater.

And I think that's to stop the waves from is it to help it aerodynamically or something yes yeah yeah

exactly break the waves somehow and it's pretty amazing that these giant ships are basically guided when they come into shore if they don't have a pilot doing um the various like very very careful turning basically tugboats just tiny little boats yeah because they can't turn it but those little things are able to shift an entire ship and a maritime pilot which i always think is quite cool that you have the pilots who wait in the harbours or at difficult channels like the suz and these are the real pros who just know that very specific area of water and they leap on the boat and tell you how to do it.

I saw that in action in Sydney at the Sydney harbour so I was having a drink outside the opera house and there was a cruise ship that was going out and that's a very hard turn that it needs to make by the bridge.

So they just have a pilot come on, get it out and then he gets in a dinghy or a helicopter and just gets off the boat again.

That's it.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

Not dissimilar to airline pilots, right?

They take off and land but then when they're cruising...

And then then they jump off in the middle, didn't they?

Helicopter off the plane in a nightmare.

One more thing about boats and bridges from me, and that is about the Kinsey Street Bridge in Chicago.

Cool.

This is a bridge going over a river, and the bridge is kind of

mesh on the bottom, right?

So it's to kind of make it easier to clean.

If anything falls onto the road, it's just going to go straight down.

Do you know what I mean?

It's like a mesh.

Sort of, because when you said mesh, I was thinking of a sieve, and they're the hardest things to clean.

But I probably wouldn't do it differently in this instance.

Yeah, the holes are big enough that things can pass through like a sieve.

You're not going to get little bits of rice stuck in the colour.

That's what the main traffic on the road is, just loose rice.

Anyway, so there's a band called the Dave Matthews Band.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, right?

And they were gigging.

And the guy who was driving their bus decided that he was going to dump all of their human waste as he drove over the Kinsey Street Bridge because he felt, well, it's a mesh, so it'll just pass straight through, right?

yeah so he did that this is in 2004 unfortunately at the same time as he did this a tourist boat was going underneath

open top open top oh my god

and that incident led to more than three hundred thousand dollars in settlements donations and fines

oh my god and the Dave Matthews band always now has agreed to keep a log of whatever it empties its septic tanks keep a log, hey.

Logs feel like they were the problem in the first place.

I mean, that's amazing.

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

My fact is that the art of wooden lacrosse stick making is extinct in the UK.

God, is that a global warming?

I said it in a cheery way.

It was actually a very sad fact.

No, obviously, because you can't get a wooden lacrostic in the uk anymore well you know you can import one well you can you can import one you can you can buy an old one you can we've just done a whole section on massive ships you know what they use massive ships for is lacrosse

this is a fact about um basically i was on the website of the uh the heritage crafts organization which they're the advocates for traditional crafts and they keep this amazing watch list of traditional crafts which are either fine you know sustainable or uh slightly endangered or critically endangered or extinct and lacrosse stick making went extinct uh in 2014.

There's a firm called Hattersley's, which is the UK's main lacrosse stick manufacturer.

But their last wooden stick maker retired in 2014.

He was called Tom Beckett.

Thomas Beckett.

Probably.

Well no one rid me of this troublesome lacrosse stick maker.

Yes,

how does his life end actually?

He wasn't murdered on the steps of a he's still alive.

He's still alive.

Tom Beckett.

There we go.

Well thank God.

Still goes for a curry every year with the rest of the people at Hattersley's.

Does he?

Yeah.

James, you've been in touch with them.

I have.

What a blindingly good guess.

I have.

I was asking them why they have a stick called the Victoria Cross, but Victoria was with a K, and it's the best stick that they ever made.

And I asked them why they called it the Victoria Cross and why it has a K, and neither Tom nor David Hay, who's the head of sales, knew.

Because it's all plastic these days.

That's the sad thing.

Is it?

The lacrostics are

cast the fibre.

Yeah, they're lighter and more efficient and all that.

Well, one reason is because they yield on impact because it's quite a violent sport,

lacrosse.

And so, if you hit someone across the head with a lacrosse stick, which is wooden, they're going to do a lot of damage, but the carbon fibre ones bounce right off.

It's all gone soft these days, hasn't it?

You can't even beat people over the head with a stick anymore.

Well, did you hear?

Did you hear?

I mean, that is an important thing.

There was a guy in America at Wheaton College.

He's a he was a sorry, Wheaton College.

Where were you educated?

Wheaton, Eaton College.

Eaton College.

Really?

Yeah, Wheaton College.

It's the equivalent.

It's twinned.

It's twinned with Eaton.

He was 19 at the time called Alex Chu.

This is the French Eaton, isn't it?

He was, up until this point, playing lacrosse his entire school life for the school teams.

And then he became a freshman at Wheaton College and was told he couldn't play anymore because his head was too big for any of the helmets.

They just didn't make helmets big enough for this guy's head.

I think what he used to do was the reason he was allowed to play before was that he pieced together parts of two different helmets.

He created a bigger helmet.

He had a helmet.

Massive head.

It doesn't sound very safe.

It's not like you get two cars and weld them together.

That's really unsafe.

Yeah, exactly.

So he didn't get to play.

Wait, sorry.

He didn't sit on the sides.

Are the helmet makers of Massachusetts also extinct?

Is there no one available?

I can't understand what the...

No one built him a bigger helmet.

He couldn't play.

He played, I think, one game that season, and I think that might have been a mistake.

You know what?

He could have played women's lacrosse, because they don't wear helmets in women's lacrosse.

Why not?

Because it's almost a completely different game.

It's so odd.

They're different sports.

Well, so they say.

I actually think they're really similar.

But if you ask people who play lacrosse of either type, they say they're really different sports, don't they?

And they don't really do the body contact so much in women's sports.

So the men's lacrosse is incredibly violent.

Basically, you can essentially just attack someone with a large stick,

as long as it's not deemed to be sort of like unduly really intentionally aggressive I think whereas in women's you can stick you can stick people what do they call it stick people

slashing stick check in women's you can stick check so you can hit their stick with your stick but you can't really bash them around the face could you hit their fingers holding the stick with your stick I think you can do that and I should say in men's actually you can't bash them around the face but the torso Free for all golly, really interesting.

And then it's all down to a woman called Rosabelle Sinclair.

And what happened was, so lacrosse is an old Native American sport they played it in America but it was in the early 20th century girls weren't really allowed to play lacrosse and so it was an all-boys sport pretty much they came over to the UK and had a an exhibition in front of Queen Victoria so this a bit earlier and Queen Victoria said it would be a great game for girls to play in public schools and so they started playing it in public schools and so you had this one sport in the UK which was all girls playing in school and you have this one sport in America which was all boys playing and they've kind of evolved quite differently and then Rosabel Sinclair took the girls game over to America but she decided she was going to stick to the girls rules that they had in the UK and so that's why now in America they're almost it's almost like netball and basketball not quite but they're quite different sports

that makes sense and I'd love to see a team of traditional women's lacrosse players play the men's because just FYI if you're an American listener lacrosse in the UK is pretty much I think reserved for well this is an anecdote this is just based on my own life experience but in my own life experience lacrosse is basically reserved for very posh schoolgirls and in America it seems to be reserved for extremely hardcore large men so I was talking to someone the other day a friend of mine who played a little bit of lacrosse and she said it is quite violent still yeah the women's yeah yeah yeah

it's pretty primal that's pretty fun um so the kind of aggression of it i think kind of makes sense for the origins of it So it was played in the 1500s.

Native Americans did it as a way of kind of battling between local tribes, didn't they?

They sort of would have games that would last for days and the teams could be anything from five players to over a hundred players and it was

oh no they've they've gone for the opposite actually in many ways

but yeah that's kind of the origins of it isn't it and yeah there's there's one claim on the World Lacrosse Federation website which says that sometimes games could involve up to 100,000 players.

Stop it.

Unlikely that

it's so clearly bullish, isn't it?

But that's what it claims, and they're the authority.

That is amazing.

It was certainly common to have over a thousand people.

Was it war?

Or was it...

Were they fighting?

Well, we don't...

That's still a big war.

Yeah.

It is.

On one side, you've got lacrosse players coming sedan chairs on the other that's the time travel there was actually one team of five and then another team of ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety five and it was a draw it was a draw in the end amazing that's mental wow yeah but it was like it would be over vast distances so native americans would be you know running between states practically and people subbing in and out quite a lot i think over many days it is the only sport that recognizes Native Americans and First Nations people as their own individual nations.

So they will, you know, in international games, you would enter as an individual nation, like the Mohawk nation.

And in fact, that caused a real problem.

They travel on their own passports.

So I think the Iroquois Lacrosse team travels on Iroquois passports.

Iroquois and Haudenosaunee, by the way, are sort of synonymous, except they call themselves Haudenosaunee.

But yeah, the passports tend to be recognised.

There was a bit of an issue in 2010 when Britain denied entry to the Iroquois team because they didn't accept their passports.

They wanted them to have US passports and they said, well, we don't consider ourselves American.

They didn't play.

Lacrosse might come back, by the way, to the Olympics.

It is coming back.

Yeah, because it's such a growing sport, isn't it?

So, in 2018, they were given the status of receiving funds, which meant that they could sort of like start showing that it was possible.

They're now an official, whatever the official sport of that you need to be in order to get to the Olympics, they are now that.

Yeah, so they'll be there for the 2028.

Yeah, hopefully.

Really?

Yeah, speaking of, this is just something I read today about hockey, so it must be the same with lacrosse.

And that is that if you're a sports person in Canada, you're doing your sport, you're getting really sweaty, all your gear, your mitts and your, you know, your shirt and everything, your underwear gets really, really smelly, but you can't put it outside to air, right?

Because it's so cold.

And so traditionally, you find that these people have really, really smelly

like clothes and kit and stuff like that.

And so they invented this thing.

I can't remember what it's called, but it's like a big sort of trunk.

And you put your your kit in and it fires UV light into the trunk and then that makes ozone and the ozone kills all of the bacteria and when the bacteria has died it means it can't make all the smells and so you it kind of gets rid of all the smell of your kit and this is the amazing thing what they hope in the future is they might be able to scale this up to the size of a room and so you would come in after your game of hockey all across or whatever you'd hang up your stuff you go out of the room close the door and when the last person closes the door the whole place gets filled with UV light and ozone, and then when you come back in, it's all clean and not so.

I can't imagine.

Isn't that amazing?

So might we have these instead of bathrooms in the future?

Instead of a shower?

You know what I thought?

Because I read this article, and what I thought is it could be useful for putting your underwear in, right?

You know, like if you have a linen basket or something, get changed at night, take your underwear off, put it in the basket, next morning, take it out again.

Brilliant.

It's fine.

Yeah, perfect.

Brilliant.

You don't need clothes anymore, basically.

You don't need more than one of everything.

Just one set of clothes for the rest of your life.

Yeah, yeah.

And one set of night clothes if you're exactly worth them.

I mean, you can also put your clothes in a washing machine and a dryer.

Yeah, but that's two combined

systems.

Loads of water.

You can't do it at night because it upsets your neighbours.

I do it literally every night.

Oh, my God.

What?

Put your washing machine on?

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Psycho.

It's alright.

He lives in a cottage on the top of the mountain.

What you can also do is take your clothes to a tanning salon, presumably.

And drop them off and ask them to book a session.

Book a bed.

Book a bed, and you come and you take all your clothes off, and they go, Well, if you'd like to get in,

I sat in a chair naked next to it.

I'm going to climb into a washing machine now.

You've got to make sure all of the employees know that that's happening because I don't want to open a sunbed just seeing the missing body.

She's melted.

Can we talk about some extinct crafts?

Oh, yeah, of course.

Sure.

So I was on the, I've spent quite a while on the Heritage Crafts website, patron Prince Charles, obviously.

So I thought I'd do a little quiz for you.

Okay.

Right.

Is this craft endangered?

Critically endangered?

Currently viable or extinct?

Just before we start, you sent us the link of this list.

So

we all have a bit of an advantage.

We might still do badly.

Absolutely.

I've got it literally open in front of you for a shower.

Shit.

Okay.

I'll close it.

I'll close it.

I never bothered to read the sources you send around, so I'm into this naive.

All right.

making.

Orrey.

Orary.

Orrey making.

So an orrey is like the solar system, basically.

It's a model of the solar system.

Oh, that's fine.

That's fine.

Because, oh, yeah, it's in every kid's toy shop.

You've got to make them for kids.

I'm with Dan then.

He has insider knowledge here.

Okay, so you're saying viable?

I'm saying, yeah.

Okay.

Probably 200 of them

in North London alone.

There are 100,000, actually.

They all play lacrosse.

No, it's critically endangered.

There's one full-time professional orrey maker in the UK.

Well, he's doing a damn good job on the market.

The ones you're seeing in toy shops, Dan, I'm not sure, are made by the real handmade Heracles.

Mechanical, mechanical, Fisher Price Plastic ones.

Lizzie Fisher, he's the last one.

Timothy Staines and his father, Derek, who was the previous full-timer, they make six to ten of these toys.

Timothy Staines, by the way, is a sentence name.

Oh, so it is.

Welcome to the club, Timothy.

Rake making.

Is oral babes a sentence?

No, it isn't.

Sorry.

What were you saying?

Rake making.

Rake making.

I think, yeah, everyone needs a rake, don't they?

A garden implement, not a bit of a slimy, sleazy, blad about town.

Okay.

Then there's loads of them.

Yeah, alert to them.

It's endangered.

Yeah, there are only about 5,000 made per year.

There are specific kinds of rake, not just the normal garden rakes.

One more.

Rocking horse manufacturer.

Viable.

Extinct.

Yeah, viable.

It's viable.

There is a guild of rocking horse makers, which has 2,000 members.

The only qualification is you have to have made a rocking horse to be, which is fair enough, to be a member of the guild.

You don't have to have made it in the traditional age-old sculpting.

I imagine there are some barriers to entry about what qualifies as a rocking horse.

You can't just make any old shit and send it to a rocking horse and then claim your guild's membership.

No, you have to.

Yeah, but I don't know exactly what the criteria are: level of rock or whatever.

I read this incredible article.

Did any of you read it?

It's called Raiders of the Lost Crafts.

It was in the Independent in 2016.

No.

Raiders of the Lost Crafts, and it was written by a woman called Amalia Ildner.

And she talked about

pole-leaf wood turning, which is, you know, when crockery used to be wooden.

I didn't know you had wooden crockery.

And most people would, because it was just the most available substance.

So back in Tudor times, for instance.

Probably not.

I thought crockery was like the noise it made.

Got that.

It's probably like blockery or something.

Blockery, yeah, yeah.

Woodery.

I mean,

blockery is a joke.

Woodery is just.

It's not.

Can't wait to hear Andy make that joke again in three weeks time.

I'll tell you what, when I tell it, you'll laugh.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy?

At Schreiberland.

James?

Bit weird, but James.

At James Harkin.

And Anna?

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at andrewhunterm, or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

There's also a link to the upcoming tour dates that we're doing later this year.

Do check them out and see if we're coming to a place near you.

Otherwise, you can listen to us again next week on this channel, on this podcast.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.