427: No Such Thing As A Magnetic Skateboard

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

And once again, we have gathered around 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 scientists have invented a 30 centimeter tall robot that could jump over the Statue of Liberty

if it was on the moon.

If they were both on the moon.

If they were both...

Yes, sorry, not if the Statue of Liberty was on the moon and the robot was on Earth.

That would be incredible.

Wow.

So, sorry, we've moved the Statue of Liberty to the moon.

That's right, yes.

Which I don't know why.

So aliens, when they first come, the first thing they see is the moon, right, before they see the Earth, unless it's on the other side.

Depends what side?

They're coming from the moon.

I'm assuming they come from the moon side.

Yeah, the first thing they see is liberty enlightening the LL.

So we'll have to move it to the dark side of the moon, or rather the further side of the moon.

Oh, yeah.

We'll never see it again because the moon and the earth are locked, aren't they?

Or the moon is tidally locked or whatever.

That's true.

So we'll just never see it.

But you've seen it.

You know what it looks like now, don't you?

We've got pictures.

We've got pictures, Andy.

We've got pictures.

So this robot,

which is an amazing robot,

this jump, without leaping over the Statue of Liberty, it can leap 10 meters, right?

Yeah, yeah, it can still leap quite high.

It can actually leap 30 meters, so it could leap over a 10-storey building.

So it could also jump over the Statue of Christ the Redeemer in Brazil, I think.

I'm pretty sure.

And that's if it was on Earth.

And that's on Earth.

If they've got Christ the Redeemer back from the moon, where would you put it?

Right, because he always goes with the Statue of Liberty, doesn't he?

They're dating.

But how tall then is the Statue of Liberty?

So the Statue of Liberty is 93 meters, I believe, and this could jump on the moon 125 metres.

So it could actually jump the Statue of Liberty's height and then about a third as high again.

If she she was giving Christ the Redeemer a piggyback.

Uh yes, I think that should yeah, yeah, yeah, that would work, isn't it?

Yeah,

hard to do though, with the arm angles of both statues.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm just trying to work out how the piggyback would work.

He's fine, because he's up top, he's got his arms out.

Yeah, he's fine.

Do you know that the Angel of the North is actually giving Christ the Redeemer a hug?

But they're just so far away you never see it.

Wow, but tectonics one day will bring them together and eventually they'll meet.

Anyway, this is a jumping robot and the scientists are very excited because it's really the highest the robot's ever jumped proportionally for its size.

And

it's quite a basic looking thing.

It's made of rubber bands and some carbon fiber slats because they store energy really well.

And it does have a motor.

Yeah, so I just wanted to say it has a motor.

Is that counts as a jump?

If you have a motor?

Well, it's not using the motor to propel itself in the air.

It's using its motor like we would use a muscle, I guess, to jump.

To wind up the rubber band.

Exactly.

Okay.

But maybe it counts, maybe it doesn't.

Take it up with the researchers.

I think they've cheated on a number of fronts here.

First of all, they put it on the moon.

But it's a robot.

You're allowed to give a robot a motor, aren't you?

Yeah, you are.

They're showing off that it can jump way better than anything in nature.

And they're saying that the reason is they're saying, oh, I'd mind this better than everything in nature.

In your face, Grasshopper.

But the reason it does it is because it has these carbon fibre slats and stuff like that.

But actually, I would argue that one of the reasons is that they're using the motor.

I don't know.

I agree.

But I reckon they could do it with the force of just like a human pulling it, I think, really.

Or maybe they could do it with one with wind-up.

They'd have to have some sort of force applied.

But yeah, the motor is not flying it through the air like an aeroplane.

It's not just an aeroplane.

Also, it doesn't look like

whenever I hear robot, I think it's got two legs and two arms, human, humanoid kind of, or not even humanoid, but you you know, it's

C3PL.

Yeah, exactly.

Why do you not think R2D2 is a robot then?

Yeah, good question.

I...

God, you really set him a trap there.

That was a so-called lawyer, wasn't it?

Well, Your Honor, can I ask my client, actually the other person's client,

does he think that R2D2 is a robot?

If you were a lawyer, James, you absolutely would do that.

You start cross-examining your own witness.

Just so you can...

Because you saw a point to be made.

Yeah, and I would have set him up knowing that he's gonna give me the wrong answer as well

sorry that's fine damn it I've had so much thinking time I still haven't got an answer

I don't yeah it's obviously a robot but so it's just worth saying that this one looks kind of like a toy for a cat right like it's like a

little ball that you would call

yeah like got a couple it's got two wheels at cross angles or maybe three I'm not can't remember yeah it's like two bike wheels have crashed into each other at right angles yes or like the skeleton of a football

Anyway, it's a weird-looking robot, I'll give you that.

Your Honor, I have another question.

The way it works, I should say, is that it's basically by

releasing a really, really strong elastic force, isn't it?

So it's got these rubber bands that are stretched really, really super far, and this makes the carbon fiber bend like an archer's bow would bend.

And then when you release those elastic bands, then the archer's bow bends, straightens, and it shoots up into the air.

and it makes the comedy noise.

Yeah, they had to add that sound effect.

It actually has quite a lot of weight.

It's very cool.

Yeah, very cool.

Was it a surprise to them how high it went the first time?

I didn't even want it to jump.

It just leapt out of their hands.

This is the world's best standing still roller.

Oh, fucking hell.

We've invented the perfect coffee table.

One of the other good things about it is that it's able to right itself when it lands.

And so it sort of re-inflates on the ground and then gets upright and then jumps away again.

Great.

So you've got it.

It keeps you on your your toes.

And it will be useful, apparently, this kind of technology in space.

You know, in space we've got like

sort of robots and asteroids already that jump over the little lumps and it could jump over

big lumps.

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

Or like on Mars kind of thing.

Exactly.

Right.

For a there's a boulder in the way.

Yeah.

Exactly.

If the soul need to jump 100 meters into the air.

It could be a big boulder.

Could be a big boulder.

That's true.

I was looking up jumping records.

Yeah.

I got a bit distracted thinking, when do you think the queen last jumped?

Has she ever jumped?

I'm sure she did because she's been a child.

You know, she would have jumped and done skipping and things like that as a child.

I've never seen her jump to my knowledge.

No.

Is there any footage of the queen jumping?

Does anyone know?

If you have, send it in, and you could win £250.

When do you need to jump in life?

When you're skipping, that's exercise.

When you're...

Exercising in general exercising if you're she goes on long walks there might be a little stream that she needs to jump a stream yeah like if a corgi gets in the way when you're walking for your yes jump the corgi

i think her corgi's a better train than that do you think that's what they say when um a monarch has gone too far oh she's really jumped the corgi now

i don't know andy in fact none of us knows we're just speculating but it's a great question i think she has jumped but i don't think for a while do you know the highest jump by a horse

record so was this olympics uh no it wasn't it's just a the record although they did do the horse high jump didn't they in the really early olympics and long jump we covered as well

yeah it's not so anna i guess you mean the horse is allowed to run up to the thing so it's not jumping from a standing position no it's not jumping from a standing position horses can't even do that um well they can a bit jump from a standing position yeah they can jump from a standing position they've got muscles in their legs

can she do it on a horse though because she rides a lot doesn't she she can't jump the horse can she Can the queen jump over a horse and think?

And a horse can stand somewhat.

I think I've seen that happen at like badminton and stuff, where they have like multiple fences to go over and they'll stop from one to the other, I think.

They definitely do that.

I mean, I've seen horses do it as well.

I think they're quite better at it than we are.

I think you're right.

I'm thinking of a horse standing with all its legs straight.

But you're allowed to bend your legs before you jump.

Yeah, it can't fire itself up.

I am

a little bit more than that.

I don't think you can jump without a tiny bit of bending of any muscles.

You think you can, but now when you think about it, you're like, actually, I am moving my ankles a bit if I do that.

Sort of if I do that pencil jump,

yeah, yeah.

But it wasn't a pencil jump, just a normal horse jump.

I think it's, I remember a fact, I think it's shorter than the human high jump.

It's actually not that much higher than it, but it is a bit higher.

And it beat everyone else by quite a long way, all the other horses.

So it's eight foot one inch, and the record was set in 1949, and it's never been broken.

Oh, really?

And it was set by this really cool horse called Huaso.

And.

Huaso.

Huaso.

Horso.

Huasso.

Oh, my God, it's called Horso.

Well, it was a horse in Chile.

I guess Huaso was the Chilean for horse in the 40s.

Oh, my Juaz.

My kingdom for a horse.

Horse came from New York to Chile.

Anyway, it was really bad at everything else.

And it was almost retired.

In fact, I I think it was almost put down because it failed at racing, at dressage, at show jumping, because it was very hard to control.

And then an army officer was wandering by its field one day and saw it jump over a fence and thought, my God, that's high, and bought the horse on the spot.

And they trained it up specifically just to break the world horse high jump record.

And it did it, and it broke the record when it was 16.

And the moment it broke it, it retired.

And it was never ridden again.

Wow.

Isn't that nice?

No.

It was a moment of glory in its life.

Yeah.

Know when to quit.

It retired or it was retired.

It made the decision.

It signed the forms of little hoof prints.

They put it into a field with very high fences.

Some stuff on robots, maybe?

Yeah.

One thing that's really hard for robots to do is handle soft fruit.

But there is a...

What?

Because they don't need to eat fruit, I suppose, so I can't imagine it being a fruit.

They haven't needed to learn.

Yeah, but what if you want a robot to prepare you some fruit?

Yeah,

and I do.

The problem is that fruit is uneven in shape, right?

So even if you have two apples, they might not be exactly the same.

Two bananas might not be exactly the same.

But there's a guy called Hichio Kim at the University of Tokyo, and he and his colleagues have developed a machine learning robot that has learned how to peel a banana.

So it took 811 minutes of data that it had to watch to learn how to do this banana.

The task was divided into nine stages.

Like, first of all, grasping the banana, then picking it up off the table, blah, blah, blah.

And now they have this robot that can successfully peel a banana 57% of the time.

I'm not going to

staff my holiday beach bar with it, am I?

It doesn't take ages as well, does it take?

Three minutes.

Three minutes.

The queue is building up at Robo's beach bar from the banana smoothies.

Wow.

57% of the time, that's so funny.

I was reading about you can get these new robot smart suitcases,

which oh, it just looks so cool.

So, what do they do?

It just follows you.

So, like, let's imagine you're in the airport and you're just walking to your plane.

It's just coming up next to you, beside you.

Is it with a magnet or something?

Because I've often thought you could get a great, like, if you have the right magnet.

No,

no, no, no, it's not.

But you could, like, more likely radio waves coming from your phone and it just follows the wave.

Exactly.

That would be another way of doing it a problem.

Yeah.

Walking through security in the airport with a massive magnet.

Yeah, I can see that working.

And also, everyone else has the same luggage as you, right?

That's one problem.

Everyone's just attracted to your massive magnet, and you're just walking around Heathrow with a hundred bags attached to you.

It's not feasible, Andy.

Like a beekeeper for suitcase.

A beard of suitcases.

Yeah, there are some teething

teething troubles.

Murray's magnet suitcase, yeah.

But yeah, so no, it's what's also got facial recognition.

So it is a phone, and there's facial recognition.

And the facial recognition, that does mean if someone like Andy tries to run off with your suitcase, it's got an alarm system.

It says, no, no, or like you know, beep does it scream.

No, Mr.

Murray, no, please.

That's really clever.

Yeah, thank you.

It's great.

So, sorry, how does it?

I can't remember now how it works.

It follows you around.

I guess you'll have an app on your phone.

My facial recognition music.

Is this

what force?

Oh.

Sorry.

Well, what is it using...

They use a motor.

Cheating.

Cheating motor.

It's one of the cheating recognition.

So it's like remote controlled, only instead of you using a remote control, it's just following your phone.

But was there not a guy, when we were in New York and we were walking down the street, was there not a guy on a motorized,

what's it called, skateboard?

Yeah, who fell off his skateboard, and then his skateboard was like five meters away from him.

And he pressed a button on his phone and it kind of followed and came up to him.

Yeah, he summoned it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We were walking along the street and he came up.

He looked like a bit of a chump.

He fell off his skateboard, but then he summoned it like a dog, and it was cool.

Are you sure?

Because I remember the guy coming off, but I don't remember the skateboard which I was doing.

I do remember that did happen.

Wow.

Same technology.

Or a magnet.

Or a magnet.

He wouldn't have fall off at all with the magnet in place.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the last ever speaker of the Bo language of the Andaman Islands would only speak it to birds who she considered to be her ancestors.

So you might remember a few weeks ago we talked about the Andaman Islands, about elephants swimming among them.

I did a lot of research about the Andaman Islands themselves, but we never used it.

So

here we are again.

This is recycling.

Greta would be proud.

This is the Andaman Islands.

As we said before, they are between, just off the coast of India.

And it's an article that I read on BBC Online about Professor Anvita Abbey, who has written the first dictionary of this language.

And she talked about this last speaker who was called Boa Senior.

And she said that, you know, I spoke to this person, got all the words, blah, blah, blah.

But whenever this woman...

Did she have to dress as a bird?

Well, she said, Amvita Abbey, Professor Anvita Abbey, she said they caught this woman speaking it to the birds.

And when they asked her about it, why are you speaking it to a bird?

They said, well, they're our ancestors, and they're the only ones who understand my language besides yourself.

And yeah, this is.

Wow.

That's very sad.

Yeah.

If she'd dressed as a bird, she would have been a feathered boa.

Feathered boa!

Yeah, wouldn't she?

So she could have done that, but it probably wouldn't work in her language.

That's the tragedy.

That is the tragedy.

It is.

She spent 30 years as the only person speaking it.

Yeah.

Such a long time.

And obviously she knew other variations of Hindi that she

was talking about.

But

she could talk to other people

in some ways.

She was quite spry.

So she died in 2010.

Yeah.

And she was in her mid-80s, I think.

But when the Indian Ocean tsunami came in

2004, was it?

I think?

Yes.

Yes.

She was 79 years old and she had to climb up a tree to escape it.

Yeah.

Did she?

Yeah.

Maybe she asked the birds to lift her up into the branches of the tree.

It's very possible.

Maybe she had a little motorized little thing in her hand and lobbed up into the tree.

It was really interesting about that because she used her group used really old knowledge to see that there was a tsunami coming.

So it's the Onge tribe that she was part of.

And they used knowledge by the type of fish that are found at different levels of seawater.

So when the sea really went out, there were different fish that they could see and they could see that there was a problem.

So they went to high ground.

There was another group called the Jarawas who were in the Andaman Islands and they saw the patterns of the waves changing and they had this ancient knowledge that knew that there was something that was a problem coming and so they could get away.

And the Andamanese, they're much more sort of integrated into Indian society now and they were the slowest to react to this tsunami because they didn't have all of the ancient knowledge.

But that is, it's weird you mention that because that's one of the things about rare languages is the fear that that kind of knowledge will get lost.

In rural communities there's so much kind of knowledge that we don't know yet.

I was listening to a really interesting podcast, I think it was the Guardian Science podcast, and it was about how we're losing medicinal plant knowledge because of all these languages that are disappearing.

So it was someone saying that like every botanist, even however much they know, they'll go into the forest and immediately they'll go, shit, I only know about 1% of these plants.

And yet the local people who live in the Amazon or in Guinea or whatever will know all of them and will know what they can be used for.

And this guy did a study in the Amazon, North America, and New Guinea, and he made a list of 12,500 plant-purpose pairings.

My god, it must have taken a long time.

But it was, so that's like a plant and then the purpose that it's used for pairings.

And he said 75% of them were specific to one language, so they're not shared by any other language.

And most of those languages are endangered languages.

Yeah.

So all of that knowledge would go.

Do they work?

Sorry, do these 12,000 plants?

He didn't specify that.

He gave examples.

Doc leaves on a nettle stick.

That's the only one I know, and it doesn't work.

Well, you know, aspirin, that construction.

Yeah, I know how to go into a shop and ask for cowpole, you know.

Yeah,

most importantly, it feels like we need to teach people how to do that.

But

there's an explorer called Wade Davis who's been pushing this for many, many years.

We've mentioned him on the podcast before.

He's the one who claimed that a poo knife was made by

a frozen, a frosty poo poo knife.

A frosty poo knife.

Yeah, but he, so, Wade Davis.

Frosty the Pooh knife.

Less good Christmas greetings.

Slightly older children.

But so Wade Davis says that, and he says this in his talks, that he thinks that what our sort of period of time is going to be known for is it's going to be obviously the destruction of the environment, but he thinks the ethnosphere is the biggest thing that we've not noticed, that we've decimated.

All the languages of the world are becoming extinct because we keep spreading out.

We keep keep saying English is a great language.

Why don't you learn that?

Or French?

And we lose their languages and all the knowledge goes with it.

7,000 languages in the world and 2,000 are endangered, as in less than a thousand people speak them, I think.

It's sad, and they're going extinct every day, aren't they?

A couple of recent ones.

If you search on Google News for like extinct last speaker of, you know, there's loads in the last couple of years alone.

Really?

Yeah, this year we lost

the Yagan language, the Yaghan language, the Jagan language, the Yakan language, the Yamana language, Hausikuta, Yagankuta, Tequinitsa and Yapu languages, all on the same day because they're all different words for the same language.

This was in Chile.

This is a woman called Christina Calderon.

She was the last speaker of what we would mostly know as Yagan.

And Yagan language is most famous among people like us who do this kind of research for a word which is mammi lapinatapai,

which got the Guinness World Record in 1993 for being the world's most succinct word.

And it means the unspoken but meaningful glance shared between two people during a private moment where both individuals know the other understands what is being expressed.

And say it again what it is: mammi lapinata pai.

Okay.

It's quite succinct.

Yep.

I could create a shorter word.

Could you?

But.

Ah, we all know what you mean.

I read a really interesting piece about this Aussie island.

It's called South Goulburn Island.

Never heard of it before.

It's off the coast, because it's an island, obviously.

Which coast?

The Australian coast.

It's only one dump.

Yeah, it goes all the way around.

It goes all the way around.

Sorry, my bad.

My bad.

Bloody L.

Ask me me a stupid question, mate.

There are 500 people there.

This was a piece in the Atlantic, by the way, which confusingly is not a relevant notion, yes.

But there are 500 people there.

They live in a settlement called Warui Community.

And between these 500 people, they speak nine languages, right?

Now, the really weird thing is that they haven't developed a mutual pigeon, you know, a kind of mashup language where everyone knows that one.

And they don't speak each other's languages.

but there are only 500 of them that you know you can't only speak to people who know your language so the way they get along with each other is they all speak their own languages and everyone else just understands enough of the language the other guy is speaking

so effectively they are like british people on holiday who just use their own language and trust that it will be understood yes oh wow do they shout really loudly

and say it really slowly and in a slightly racist accent they want two beers that's what they want no and they have multilingual conversations so you walk past two people having a chat about something, one will say something in their own language, the other will reply in a completely different language.

Wow.

That's unbelievably confusing.

Yeah.

God.

Well, hey, here's a cool species from the Andaman Islands.

Yeah.

It's called Acidabularia galakanyakai.

Oh, yeah.

And it's 10 centimeters tall.

It's an algae, and it's made of one cell.

Wow.

We've done the larger single-celled creature, and I feel like it's not that much bigger than that.

That's amazing.

It's got one nucleus.

That's really what it looks quite complicated.

It's got roots and a stalk and a cap and all this stuff, and it's just one-celled creature.

I find those so weird.

And how high can it jump?

It's the same as the queen.

Yeah, exactly.

It doesn't.

Can I tell you about one more language which died this year?

Yeah.

So this was Gallic in the Braise of Lacaba.

It's a vernacular from this area of Scotland, and it was due to the death of Ronnie the Crofter, who died aged 90 this year.

He was well known in the crofting community, in the droving communities.

You remember, we talked about those.

He was a bit of a drover.

And his mother came from a family of farmers called the McDonald's.

Like

the McDonald's.

Not the McDonald's.

Well, the McDonald's.

It's in the Scottish McDonald's.

Scottish McDonald's.

Not the chain McDonald's.

No, and not from the old McDonald had a farm story.

Farming dynasty.

From the Scottish McDonald's.

And his father was a Campbell.

Okay, so the Campbells and the McDonald's, bit of a tough time, but since the massacre of Glencoe between those two families.

And so he had to find an explanation for his family.

And he found an ancestor who had been a piper for both the Campbells and the McDonald's,

who was one of his ancestors.

And so actually, he could say, well, you know, we were together back then and we're together again now.

That's fair.

And apparently, and this was in the article in the BBC, they said that the pipers in those days were so important in the clan system that a really good one would transfer between clans like a modern footballer would transfer between football teams.

Amazing, isn't that incredible?

So cool.

Having listened to enough bagpipes in my time, I think they were thrusting them on each other.

You take it, honestly.

Was he

called Ronnie the Crofter?

Ronnie the Crofter, yeah.

We're saying he was called Ronald MacDonald.

Did he raise cows?

It doesn't say what his actual surname was, but perhaps he was a cowboy.

Oh my god.

But he had two uncles who were Archbishops of Glasgow.

His grandmother was a close relation to Saint Mary MacKillop, who was the first Australian saint.

He was a shinty champion.

He was a champion shearer.

He never married, but he said those who were desirable were not available, and those who were available were not desirable.

E-I-E-I-O.

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

Andy.

My fact is that the Rolling Stones' latest tour was sponsored by a retirement planning organization.

They're so, so old now.

Surely the main audience of the Rolling Stones is, I'm sorry to say, too late to be planning their retirement.

You're right.

God, that's a good point.

You know when you watch daytime TV and all the adverts are like, don't forget your will, guys.

Or, you know, this donkey sanctuary would really be helped if you left it some money.

It's basically like a big version of that, but in Wembley Stadium or wherever it is.

So this is the most recent tour.

So there's a group called the Alliance for Lifetime Income.

It basically is a non-profit and it's formed to raise awareness about the need to, you know, protect your income in retirement by getting an annuity.

Rock and roll.

Yeah, and they actually,

I really like this detail.

So they, you know, they sponsored the whole thing because the Rolling Stones audience had lots of fans who were up to the age of 75, many who were over.

But they thought this is perfect to spread their message.

And they sent along a bus to the events where you could get your retirement income security evaluation showing how well you'd be covered in retirement at the gig.

That's great.

I mean,

I love it.

Yeah.

So this was the no-filter tour.

That's right.

That's called.

And it's pretty amazing to see how much money the stones are still generating.

There's a big list of most successful tours of all time, and this tour is in the top 10.

This late in their career is in the top 10.

So they don't need to worry too much, really, about their own retirement statements, given that they're all about 95 and still working.

Multi-hundred millionaires, yeah.

Yes, yeah.

And who haven't paid any tax on any of their earnings for the last 30 years.

Now, look, they moved to France for a very good reason in the 70s.

Rates are very high.

The Stones have always done this sort of corporate sponsorship, commercial stuff, like way ahead of other bands and things like this.

So in um 2003 they were sponsored by t-mobile in 1981 they were sponsored by joven musk which was a fragrance firm and like way like way way back well didn't they start out doing a jingle for rice krispies as well they didn't start out doing that but they did it very early on very early on in 1964 they and they so their first gig was in 1962 right quite so yeah so now mick jagger went to uh london's school of economics didn't he yeah so yeah he was quite and did finance and accounting i think certainly did a module in it and did pretty badly and didn't do any work, but

clearly picked up something.

Yeah, yeah.

His tutor said in the first year he got straight C's in all of his subjects because he wasn't really paying that much attention.

But the next year he did come back and do his resets and like went to the library and properly studied and stuff like that because it was only when they got the first contract to record a first single that he completely gave it up.

He still kind of thought he might go into finance so that's that's interesting.

So he kind of moved from class C to class A is what you're saying, which mirrors the other journey they went on as well.

There was quite a nice interview with the guy who was their accountant back then, a guy called Lawrence Myers, and he said he remembered talking to Mick Jagger when they were in their twenties and Mick Jagger being really worried then about getting a pension and saying, you know, I I need to start saving for my retirement because who knows where I'll be.

And he said he remembers a phrase Mick Jagger saying, I'm not exactly going to be playing rock and roll in my sixties, am I?

And then finding it the most hilarious idea that he would be.

And the man is now seventy-eight.

Yeah.

They're so old.

They're so I mean the the three surviving key ones, I think they're about 200 between them.

No, more than 300.

Really?

Are they?

Right.

Yeah, well, Mick and Keith are both nearly 80.

And

Ronnie Wood, who's the new boy, because he's only been in the band for 40 years.

He's never quite fit in.

Basically, yeah.

I mean, they have this combination of being, obviously, quite cool, greatest rock and roll band in the world, blah, blah, blah, and powerfully naff.

Yes.

There are so many incredibly boring things about them.

So, for example, Charlie Watts, the drummer who died a year ago, he was incredibly dull in multiple different ways.

It was like he made a study of it.

He wasn't really interested in rock and roll music, for one thing.

He liked jazz, and he had his own jazz band.

Not necessarily dull if you like jazz.

Very good point.

Very good point.

Sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, okay.

All right, that's just a warm-up.

That's a starting tank.

When they went on tour, what's the classic thing a rock band will do to their hotel room when they're on tour?

They'll throw TVs out of the window.

Absolutely.

Terror that.

Yeah, he would draw his room on tour.

He would produce an accurate drawing of every single room he stayed in on tour for about 50 years.

I think it was specifically the beds.

He was obsessed with the beds of every hotel room that he stayed in and he said that basically up until his death, he's had like 15 journals worth of, you know, they did like 2,000 gigs.

He did every single bed and he felt like if he didn't draw the bed, something was askew in his life and it just, it was out of whack.

Once you've seen one bed, I feel like you've seen them all.

Well, he would agree because he said, I have all these hotel rooms recorded.

He did all the hotel rooms, but he definitely did the bed every time.

But he would often do the whole lodgings.

But he he said, you've got Washington in 67, and then you've got Washington from a couple of years ago.

And they're kind of the same.

I was reading a piece about it, and it said the 15 notebooks full of drawings of beds by Charlie Watts.

And the person who was writing the article said, I mean, are there any publishers reading this?

We've got to get these printed.

Oh, my God.

No, you don't.

Come on, they'd sell like wildfire.

Here's what I want to know, though, and I couldn't find this out.

He passed away in hospital.

Yep.

In a bed.

I'll stop.

But I just want to know, did he draw the final bed?

Do we have the final Charlie Watts bed?

I hope somebody did if he didn't.

With him finally in it, Charlie Watts finally lying in his bed.

I like to think, I hope he did trash the rooms afterwards because I like to think he trashed the room completely.

And then as he's checking out, he went, I've trashed the room.

But here's exactly what it looked like.

So another thing of Charlie Watts is that he used to have all these amazing cars.

It was a hobby.

He'd collect all these cars, really expensive.

But he didn't have a driver's license.

So they just used to sit in his garage.

But what he used used to do is he would commission a suit that matched the car

in its color, and he would just go sit in his garage in his suit in the car, and just I guess go broom and just play with it for a bit.

Yeah, and that's what you do with all your tax-avoided money, isn't it?

Oh my god, you can't drive.

He didn't like the drums, even, or he didn't like practicing the drums, and in fact, just didn't do it.

There's quite a charming interview with him where he was asked if he ever practiced himself on the drums, and he was like, God, no i'd never practiced the drums playing the drums is so bloody boring and he said it's really dull playing the drums he's scared of the drums he thinks they're too loud he's scared of the drums

his life reads like a tragedy really you know you become incredibly famous and successful doing something you fear and hate yep yeah

imagine that every time he was like boom

He um started life as a banjo player.

She was harmed.

Yeah.

Well, he was given a banjo to play.

Has anyone tried to play a banjo?

By the way, it was really, really hard to play banjo.

And he found it also hard.

He couldn't work out the fingerings.

And so he kind of broke up his banjo.

And with his broken banjo and a Meccano set, he made his first drum kit, which is how he learned the drums.

Oh, wow.

That's quite cool, because on quite a few of the Big Stones tracks, he plays a kid's drum instead of using actual drums.

I can't remember which.

Yeah, the massive tracks.

I can't remember the names.

of them.

That's funny, because he said the only way he ever did practice was playing with heavy sticks just on his legs.

So maybe he loved playing drums that aren't real drums.

Sorry, he beat himself on the legs.

Yeah, he can't walk now, actually.

He was so scared of drums.

He definitely can't walk.

He can't be a good one.

He can't walk now.

God.

My landlord used to be Mick Jagger's old flatmate.

Oh, yeah.

And it's just, there is a bit of a celeb connection, which is that my landlord is Tim Henman's dad.

So Tim Henman's dad and Mick Jagger used to live with each other in Richmond, I think.

There are some stories they must have had to say to each other.

Yeah.

Tim Hemmon, I guess, wasn't born at the time.

No.

No.

But I'll bet they still found a lot to talk about.

Absolutely, yeah.

It's not the most.

That is very.

What?

Your old landlord.

Old landlord.

Was Tim Henman's dad as well?

I can't really know that.

Yeah, that's.

You've been holding that fact out.

I think you've told us.

I've seen that before.

I think I have.

I must have found it too exciting and deliberately forgotten it because I wouldn't have been able to look it down the same way again.

I'm actually shaking a bit just being in the same room as a guy who once paid rent to the father of former British number one, Tim Henman.

I'm shaking a bit, but the bit that's shaking is my head.

It's the true story.

There used to be a very huge thing in bands about eating on stage.

So, during the Rolling Stones' first ever gig, Ian Stewart is kind of the sixth member of the Rolling Stones, but he's never been one of the front lineup, but he played with them decades and decades.

At their first gig in 1962, which was in a club on Oxford Street, he was playing the piano with one hand and eating a pork pie with the other.

It's not a very complex piano part, is it?

If you can do the pork pie with the piano,

you know, when you play chopsticks and two of you can play at the same time.

Oh, you think he had someone else's hand?

Someone else was eating prawn sandwiches.

Interesting.

Actually, there is quite a lot of doo-do-do-do-do-do-do.

Single-handed piano going on.

Well, there's a lot of people.

It must be the pork pie in the other.

But the Beatles used to eat jam sandwiches on stage.

And then their manager, Brian Epstein, told them you have to stop eating jam sandwiches on stage.

Was that in Berlin?

Sorry, in Hamburg.

That's pre-that.

It was just like, this looked quite unprofessional, boys.

But that was the same way as Bob Marley had his sandwiches, wasn't it?

Oh my god.

We're German.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

Amazing.

Oh, my God.

Just for the dads.

For the dads for listening.

Actually, speaking of Bob Marley,

I was looking into people who were connected as staff of the Rolling Stones off the back of the fact that they had such a good financial package set up for them.

And just to see if any of them had gone onto anything interesting.

And I found this guy who used to work as private security for the Rolling Stones in the 60s.

Never permanently, he just had worked for them time to time.

Like an investigator?

No, as in like a bouncer

thing.

And his name was Judge Dredd.

And obviously not his real name.

Alexander Minto Hughes is his real name.

But he went under the name Judge Dredd, which was his later career, which was he was an English reggae and ska musician.

And he was the first ever white guy to have a hit for reggae in Jamaica.

First guy ever.

And he was massive there and he went over to tour and they had no idea that he was white when he got there.

So they were like, my My God, who's this incredible guy?

He had more band songs on the BBC than anyone else ever before.

So he was the bouncer for the stones.

Cool.

And he went on to that after.

That's good.

It's no, my former landlord was Tim Hedlet.

I lived in Tim Hedlet's childhood room.

That was my room.

Oh, God.

And have they preserved it exactly the way it had been?

Yes.

You weren't allowed to take the posters down, were you?

There was a drawing by Charlie Watts of what it used to look like.

It was trash by the time I got there.

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Okay, it's time for the final fact of the show and that leaves me.

My fact this week is that clowns can spot amateur clowns by the amount of makeup that they put around their mouths.

Too much or too little?

Too much is the problem.

An amateur clown will do up the top lip with white, with red, with black.

They'll do the whole mouth.

And the professional clowns,

they refer to this as a busted asshole.

That's an incredibly upsetting phrase.

And I wish it was the first time it had even been on this podcast, but it's not.

Is it?

What?

Because, you know, you've got to check the archive of what we've said before in this past.

Yeah, so that we don't repeat anything.

Well, exactly.

Well, fortunately, we're not repeating this fact, but it's just the second use of the phrase.

Because you can't.

Oh, God, should we guess?

When have we said busted assumptions?

I remember it now.

I'm trying to remember what it was.

It's not the ladies with the rectum that was.

No, it's not the ox rectum.

That was.

I think it was someone said.

It was like a quote from someone.

Oh, yes.

It's a phrase.

That's right.

It's a phrase.

It's, he's about as much use as a hat full of busted assholes.

Who was that by?

I can't remember.

Okay.

Were they referring to a fake found mat?

So I got this fact from a book called God Know by Pen Gillette, Penn of Penn and Teller.

So it's all about his life as a magician, how he got to be who he was.

And one of the things that he did when he was coming up.

His name is Penn.

He must have been able to think of a better name for his memoir.

No, no, no.

I like God No.

From the pen of Penn.

Yes,

he writes.

I mean,

Gillette, the best a man can get.

Yes, that's another one.

Yeah, so

he failed title-wise, but the content is quite good.

He went as a teenager or late teen, he went into the Ringling Brothers in Barnum and Bailey Greater Show on Earth Clown College, and that was in Florida.

And he started doing classes in trapeze and all that stuff.

And he really sucked at physical comedy.

He didn't like it at all.

He learned how to be a clown.

And in the process of being taught how to be a clown, you learn that there are certain things that you should and shouldn't do if you want to really get it right.

And one of the things that they do say is that if you put makeup on the top of your lip, you're effectively closing off emotion in a really interesting way.

That's interesting.

Yeah, so by leaving that empty, you can get more out of a clown's face.

Whereas an amateur clown just thinks, I've just got to cake the whole thing.

And is that because Ronald MacDonald, I think, does it wrong then in my memory?

He's just died.

The poor guy.

The poor croft is just died.

No, I think, doesn't he have a busted ass or Ronald McDonald?

He does.

Oh my god, absolutely.

Well, the legal letters will be flooding their way in.

Well, the area of clown IP is quite interesting because it's sort of mostly egg-based, it seems.

The way that clown makeup is registered is on eggs.

And this was a thing that was started in 1946 by a guy called Stan Bolt, who wasn't a clown.

He was a chemist, oddly.

And he started blowing, you know, when you blow eggs.

So I suppose that's sort of adjacent to chemistry.

So you mean blowing the insides out of the eggs?

Yep, hollowing out, blowing out the inside of an egg.

And then he started painting faces of prominent clowns on these eggs as kind of a hobby.

And then he developed this huge file of clown faces.

And all of their makeup is completely different.

I always thought standard clown, they all look the same.

I'm embarrassing now that I thought that, because if you look at the egg collection, they all look completely different.

And actually, there's a suitcase of hollowed-out egg faces that he painted that still exists.

It was quite impressive.

It still exists in London, doesn't it?

Exactly, the collection still exists in London.

It does exist in London, but used to be held in a

museum, wasn't it?

And I think it was only like once a month it would open

because of the costs of keeping it going.

But now it's not even there anymore.

There was a flood in the museum.

And the clown faces, the eggs, are kept in the basement of this guy in Clark and Well,

who was the archivist of the museum?

Are you serious?

There's been a terrible flood, so as a result, we've moved them to a basement.

Put them in the attic.

Yeah, really good point.

He probably lives in the ground floor flat.

I don't know.

But yeah, apparently, during lockdown, he kind of got through it by going checking all of his archives from the Clown Museum.

That's how he got through it.

Seeing a cupboard with a thousand creepy painted eggs while it's sitting there.

It gets worse.

He also has 47 clown costumes and 20 pairs of clown shoes which he would go and look at from time to time.

But he said in an interview, the only reason you get clown shoes in a museum is because the clown who wore them has died.

Ernest Hemingway was once asked to write the saddest poem he could with six words and it was for sale clown shoes

too big.

Have any of you guys been to clown school?

No, but

yeah, I have.

Just in case one of you guys had also been present and I hadn't noticed.

It was a horrible experience.

Was it?

Yeah.

Why?

It's not clowns as in, you know, like big shoes and tiny cars, was it?

It's a different type of clown school.

No, it's

the sort of upsetting Golier Lecoq, the master will break you down and then rebuild you thing.

Like learning to fall over and stuff.

No, no, none of that.

No, no, just

you get horribly insulted by the instructor.

They're trying to t work out who your comedy character is, is that right?

A little bit, yeah.

You all arrive in a tiny car.

That's the airport pickup.

Did everyone get horribly insulted by the instructor, or were you just not very good?

There was one guy who was a bit of a teacher's pet who didn't get horribly instructed, but the rest of us all got.

And it was only a four-day course as well, so they had time to kind of break us down very badly, but not really time to build us back up again.

So it was four of the worst days of my life.

They waterbarded you with confetti, didn't they?

I had to smell so many flowers.

Have you guys heard of Lady Aveta?

Who was in 1895 called the Only Lady Clown?

Oh, no.

Probably wasn't the only lady clown at the time, but she was a very famous clown.

And one of her favorite tricks was she would sit in the audience and next to some unsuspecting bloke.

And then she would claim that that was actually her fiancé and heckle the ringmaster saying, you're looking at my fiancé, that kind of thing.

But what I really like about her is that there's a quote from her in the New York Times, and she said, All my people laughed at me when I told them I was going into the ring as a clown, but they do not laugh now.

Oh my god, isn't it?

It's supposed to be a Bob Monkhouse junk, but actually, it's from 1895.

Bob Monkhouse was so old, it wasn't

a joke.

He was the husband.

That's amazing.

Yeah, isn't that cool?

Another female clown, Annie Fritolini, she founded the first circus school in Europe in 1975

and she did the full kind of

Auguste clown of the so you've got white face, you've got the red lips and all that kind of stuff and when she was asked whether she was portraying a male or a female she insisted that clowns have no gender.

She founded the first circus school so I think she is the authority on that.

So if you see a clown you think it's a man or a woman it's not it's just a clown

and her father her grandfather was Paul Fratellini.

Paul Francois and Albert, they were famous clowns, all three of them, really, really famous clowns.

And their father, so her great-grandfather was Gustavo Fratellini, and he was an Italian patriot who, along with Giuseppe Garibaldi, took part in the unification of Italy.

Wow.

But imagine

unifying Italy and then all of your kids are clowns.

Isn't that a weird song?

What was it all for?

That's amazing.

Or just on the clown sex thing, clowns don't have a sex.

That does kind of make sense.

Because otherwise you're implying the existence of clown genitalia.

And that would be what sacrilege to a clown.

Where does that

sound come from, if not from?

That's not them squeezing their balls.

Or vaginas.

They can do amazing balloon tricks, actually.

That's the really clever thing.

Henry IV of France had his life saved by a clown.

Really?

By his own clown in 1594.

An assassin got into his bedroom and was going to assassinate him and he was in there with his clown yeah oh yeah and

just testing is it true what they say the clowns have no genitals

maybe we should tested what they say about men with big feet

there was nothing untoward going on the clown how about a busted asshole

wow

No assholes were busted in the making of this

escapade.

This was actually a female clown as well.

She was called Maturine de Valois.

And she arrested the assassin and stopped the assassin leaving the room and thus saved his life.

I don't know how she did it.

I don't know if it was

confetti to the face, but yeah.

That's incredible.

And then his hand was burned with molten sulphur and lead.

Whose hand?

The assassin.

Yes, really.

As a punishment.

As a punishment, because it was the hand that...

As a pony trick I'm wrong.

Wow, that's

a good question.

Because it was the hand that had touched the king, and then he was executed.

Oh, I thought that was like a we'll let you off on this occasion, but we'll

mess up your hand.

No, no, it was we'll mess up your hand and then we'll kill you.

Oh, dear, and then we'll chop you into loads of pieces.

That was a different time, but

that was okay then.

You know, they don't say break a leg in clown land, do they not?

No, what do they say?

They say bump and nose.

Oh, no.

That's good.

Bump and nose.

A group of clowns together?

What are they called?

Clown town.

No, as in like the collective noun.

A collective noun of clowns.

Yes.

A

hock of clowns.

Hawk Hawk of clowns.

As a listener, Jane's hand did go under the table.

It's a giggle.

My gaggling.

A gaggle of geese.

A giggle of clowns.

Can I tell you one clown trick?

I was on the website of clown historian Bruce Charlie Johnson, which is an unbelievably good clowning site.

It's so, it's one of those old websites which made about 15 years ago, so it looks very old, but it's just full of great information.

And there was a clown who toured the world

called Adolph Proper decades and decades ago, but one of his tricks was this.

I think it's very important that we know exactly how many decades ago Adolph Proper was touring.

Was it seven decades ago, or was it nine decades ago?

Early 20th century, as far as I go.

Okay.

But basically, we had this musical comedy act, the clowning act, and

he could produce large numbers of items from his coat.

That was the thing.

It was kind of Mary Poppins bag.

Get what he produced.

300 bananas.

57% of which could be peeled.

Three watermelons, six pineapples, four oranges, 24 neckties, a broom, an oboe, 12 mandolins, a cigar box, a trash can, a hatchet, a music stand, and other items.

This is what he got out of one coat.

And the way he did it was they were all collapsible.

They were made from Papier Mâché.

So good.

And they were fitted with intricate springs so they all expanded whenever they were produced.

That's really clever.

That's fabulous.

Although, I really thought, because you started with a list of fruit, and then you said 24 neckties.

And I thought you thought that was the plural of nectarine.

What?

What have I been wearing this around my neck all this time then?

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 have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, James, at James Harkin, and Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

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

Check out all of our previous episodes.

They're up there.

Check out our upcoming tour dates in September.

We're going back on the road for a few shows.

Do come along.

and do come back as well next week because we'll be here with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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