420: No Such Thing As An Actor Called Macbeth

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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

Starting with fact number one, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that logs used to be carried around the Andaman Islands by swimming elephants.

There's a lot of information to unpick in that.

Okay, here's the first one.

Can, in fact, you've actually answered it with your fact, fact, but I was going to say, can elephants swim?

I'm not going to dignify that with an answer, James.

Uh, it's like you're questioning the veracity of my facts.

Yes, they can, they can swim.

I see, I do see what you're saying.

Is it just these elephants or all elephants?

Oh, I thought he meant are the logs like a flotation device and they were just using that to that's a great point, Dan.

That's exactly what I didn't really mean, but let's pretend I did.

I mean, you don't get swimming lessons for dogs, do you?

But if they jump into a pond, they're fine.

Well, interesting you say that.

My mum actually has a dog, which can't swim.

It's very embarrassing.

But yes, largely, I think four-legged mammals can instinctively swim and elephants can broadly.

And these ones particularly can, but they can swim incredibly long distances, these particular Andaman elephants.

And they, so what happened was the Andaman Islands, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in fact, are territories of India, about 572 islands altogether.

And in about the 70s, they started logging there.

And they brought a bunch of elephants over from mainland India.

And they sort of pulled down trees in the jungle, and then they'd load up the elephants with trees, and they'd take them to the beaches to be shipped off in barges.

But the elephants had to blog trees in various different islands, and there was no way of transporting them between the islands.

And so they just sent them on their way to swim it.

And they'd swim like 30 kilometers, 20, 30 kilometers between islands, do some logging and drag the logs out to sort of barges out to sea and load them up.

Good.

That's incredible.

That is an incredible distance

to travel as an elephant.

Are they getting guidance in terms of direction?

You know,

do currents take them out?

And we've had

lanes for them to swim in.

They're

heavily signposted, and I think humans would accompany them between the islands on small rafts and boats that couldn't accommodate the elephants.

I don't I actually I'm not sure maybe they had memorized various routes, but I think that might be a step beyond a lot of elephants.

An elephant could remember any route it was given, couldn't it?

But'cause an elephant never forgets.

Exactly.

Right.

Yeah.

I didn't know that we were doing a common erroneous phrase-based facts now.

The thing is about the elephants is I've read an article called Problems in the Land Vertebrate Zoogeography of Certain Islands and the Swimming Powers of Elephants by David Lee Johnson from 1980.

And he says, I'm sure you've all read it, but he says, I'm sure all the listeners have read it, but he says that elephants have such good eyesights and sense of smell that even kilometers and kilometers and kilometers away, they can see another island that most animals wouldn't be able to see.

What?

And also smell food on another island.

Incredible.

And because it can smell the food, it can find its way there.

Yeah.

So, what?

So you're saying the logging humans make a phone call to the next island saying, look, get a polo mint, leave it on the beach.

I'm sending the elephant over now.

Can I just say, I'm not saying that.

Donald Lee Johnson is saying that in his paper, Problems in the Land Vertebrate Geography of Certain Islands and the Swimming Powers of Elephants from 1980.

He was saying that.

I wasn't saying that.

That's so good.

But you just need to, I don't know, James, you're quoting him pretty extensively.

I think you are now saying that.

That's brilliant.

That's such a good idea.

But as long as all you have to do is coordinate, like no one, right, the elephants are moving today.

No one's allowed to open a banana if that's the key

within a 50-mile radius.

But that's how you poach, then, right?

That's the best poaching tactic.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's true.

All the elephants just fuck off this way.

Where are they going?

He's opening a banana.

The thing is that, according to this paper, until the 70s and 80s, a lot of geographers assumed that elephants couldn't swim.

And so when you found elephant bones on an island, even if they'd gone extinct or something, or even if you found living elephants, then there must have been a land bridge because otherwise there's no way they could have got across.

And that meant that a lot of geographers had these ideas of certain islands around the world that must have been connected by land at some stage because they assumed that elephants couldn't swim.

Really?

That's amazing.

I thought I didn't properly know that elephants could swim, actually.

I did know that they could walk underwater.

That was a thing I knew at certain depths because I've seen footage where they use their trunk as a snorkel.

And so, yeah, that's really fun when you see that bit of footage.

But that, yeah, that's amazing.

James, was it Donald Johnson you were saying?

Yeah, it was Donald Lee Johnson in his paper, Problems in the Lund vs.

Britsu James.

I don't know if we need to.

Don't know if we need.

I didn't read that paper.

I'm probably now the only person listening to it in Bulkinghouse podcast who hasn't.

But I think that I read a reference to it because there's a debate about how elephants got to Sri Lanka, isn't there?

Yeah.

And it was because it's about

how far is it from the Indian coast?

Quite a 30, 50 kilometres.

It is quite a long way, but it has elephants.

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

Yes.

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

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

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

The elephants on Sri Lanka,

I think they're still swimming there.

They're still making the journey over to Sri Lanka because every few months it seems like there's a story where a Sri Lankan elephant is caught at sea and is being swept around in the waves and has to be rescued.

Because there was one that, you know, when the media gets a theme and reports on every instance of it, it turns out it's happening all the time.

And it happened once in 2017.

A Sri Lankan elephant was found being washed around about 16 kilometers out to sea.

And, you know, they all had to get a raft and come and pull it in again.

And then, two weeks later, two Sri Lankan elephants were found stranded at sea and had to be dragged back in.

And it looks so funny, you should look it up.

There's all these people around with rafts and then bobbing under the water, just these two vast elephants who look so stupidly out of place in the middle of the ocean.

They look really kind of struggling, aren't they?

And the first one, anyway, the 2017 one, the elephant's really, really struggling to swim.

National Geographic emailed the co-founder of Elephant Voices, which I think is a charity called Joyce Poole.

They emailed her and asked her about elephant swimming.

And she said she wasn't surprised that the elephant was swimming out there because she said elephants are considered the best swimmers of any land mammal, perhaps excluding trained human swimmers.

And then they showed her the video of this elephant really, really struggling to swim.

And she said, maybe the elephant was tired.

Wow.

It's so tough.

It's 16 kilometers out.

If you've swum 16 kilometers, pal, you'd be tired, wouldn't you?

I certainly would.

There was the theory at one point that the lochness monster was a swimming elephant wasn't there

there was there yeah because there was a story that there was a circus in town and they thought let's bring the elephant out for a swim and the very famous uh photo that was seen i think it was the famous photo the surgeon's photo it's called um the thought is that that's the trunk just coming up through the water getting breath as it's going along it's there not like humps going up to the to the trunk in the cellar that's what i think is the end of the yeah so i think they think that that's the the head coming out from the back.

Maybe it was giving the circus's camel a piggyback in the water.

Yeah.

And then the snake was at the back.

I guess it's not the stupidest theory ever, given that it only requires us to believe in the existence of a badly managed circus rather than the existence of a dinosaur in a lake.

Well, it's not a badly managed circus, taking your elephant out for a swim.

I think if they've left the elephant in there and it's being photographed by the public, that's what I thought you were saying.

No, I'm not saying that there's

an abandoned elephant swimming Loch Loch Ness.

That's what you're saying.

If you're saying the Loch Ness monster is an elephant, then that's...

No, I'm saying the photo.

There was a thought that the photo was an elephant.

Yeah, okay.

But they put it in, then they took it out.

I see what you're saying.

I thought you meant, like Andy, there's been this elephant living underwater in Loch Ness for hundreds of years, which is almost more ridiculous than the Loch Ness.

If you look at that photo, actually, if you look at the surgeon's photo, you can just see in the corner of the shot

a clown getting out of a little car.

Yeah.

And you can just see that it actually looks like water, but it's actually confetti that he's swimming through.

And the clown's got giant shoes and has been mistaken for Bigfoot, actually.

Well, we've moved out of the realm of facts, haven't we?

Do you want a real fact about elephants?

I've got one.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well,

I'm going to put it in James's special Donald Lee Johnson tongs for quoting without saying this is definitely true.

I think it's an amazing theory though.

The theory is that Cornwall's first road network ever was created by elephants.

Okay.

And it's one of my favourite facts, and I can't believe we've never mentioned it before.

Go on.

This is according to researchers at the University of North Cornwall, who should know, frankly.

Can I quickly debunk their theory before it even got up to the city?

No, no, no, no, and I would like to get my I'd like to get my thing up in the air before you take a pop at it, if that's all right.

Okay,

up to 115,000 years ago, Cornwall had elephants, okay?

That was a bit warmer, it had them, right?

No, we're out.

There's a fossil record and all of that stuff.

Sorry, just to check, so we're going to listen to this knowing it's wrong.

We're just going to sit here and listen to this.

We're not, because I know it's right.

Again, Anna may know something different, but let me tell you what I know.

Right, so you know how ice ages kind of retreat and advance as the millennia go by.

So the most recent glacial maximum covered most of the UK, but it didn't cover Cornwall, right?

It didn't get that far south.

That's definitely true.

So most of the elephant tracks across the UK will have been covered by ice sheets and erased, but the ones in Cornwall were not.

And what the theory is by these researchers is that herds of migrating woolly mammoths and elephants

who came to the UK, they came to England basically on their summer holidays when it was a bit warmer up there to eat.

Those tracks that they had, their routes, which were used by them and by hunters, kind of map onto the road network in Cornwall today.

Ironically, it's the smaller roads that they created and not the trunk roads which were created in modern times for modern needs.

But the smaller road network in Cornwall is created by elephants.

Right.

There.

I've said my bit.

Now, please, Anna,

get out your...

Just going to say

it doesn't make any sense because the roads in Cornwall are so sodding narrow that two elephants could never pass each other on.

Actually, in the ice age, these elephants, they got stuck behind tractors so often that they ended up trampling loads of extra roads.

When I was looking into

elephants moving logs around everywhere, I discovered that they actually move trees

and poo them out eventually.

So, you know, they create trees.

They're not smuggling trees in their anus.

It's not a

it's

I'm getting it's a big session on the toilet, isn't it?

An oak.

What I mean to say,

you'd pay more, wouldn't you, for trees that hadn't been through the elephant anus?

So, what I mean to say is there's the African savannah elephant, and what it does is it basically, through eating, it transports seeds further than probably any other animal around.

And this is including a lot of birds.

It can go as far as 65 kilometers in delivering seeds, and that's because its intestines are so long for the seeds and the food to get through that it takes something like 33 hours, I believe, for it

before they actually start defecating the seeds that they might have swallowed.

And the last one will come out 96 hours after they've first swallowed a seed.

And so they've been spreading plants and trees all over, you know, different parts at greater distances than, as I say, a lot of birds in the area and certainly any other land mammal.

I wonder if they know they're doing it.

Like they pick up a seed and eat it and then they sprint for 96 hours straight.

Some kind of conservation project.

Exactly.

Just open a banana in that area.

They come running.

Yeah.

Clever.

Did we.

You know, we talked a while ago about sort of elephant trunk uses.

Oh, yeah.

And there was a bit which sort of came after that, which, because we'd already recorded the podcast, it didn't go in, but it was Anna found this website which had all the uses of an elephant's trunk

as observed by scientists.

Okay.

And one of the

there are about 200.

You know, there are so many different things, and they've all got a different name by the scientists.

So I don't think we mentioned this.

One of them is

mating pandemonium is one way they use their trunk.

One of them is dust with semen.

Okay, so let's go back to the first one: mating pandemonium.

No pandas involved, I assume.

I hope not.

What does that mean?

What is it?

Must be just like you.

I mean, how do you make mating chaotic introduce your trunk?

I can see how that would cause pandemonium.

What, a trunk up the bottom?

No.

That's not what it can mean, is it?

Sounds like pandemonium to me.

Dan, do you want to have a guess?

Do they form a heart

like you would with your hands?

You know, it's just to let people know there's some sex going on over here.

What a tame definition of pandemonium.

Romantic, frankly.

I would think on kids sound like maybe like

could it be like loads of males attacking each other to attract a female, maybe?

Like a baby.

It's much less fun, actually.

It's a mated.

When a female has had sex, her relatives and companions join her and they have a party basically.

So they shout and they rumble and they trumpet.

Like a baby shower.

It's like a baby sharing, except it's a sort of post-shag.

Right.

So I'm just quoting from the website here.

Females may turn towards the male, reaching their trunks to touch his penis or his semen on the ground or to touch one another and then turn rapidly outward in a kind of pirouette.

It's a bonding ceremony after one of your female friends has had sex.

Why don't we do that as humans?

I think that is a ceremony that should translate across species.

Every time someone loses their virginity, Andy, you could have yours quite soon.

If the semen's on the ground, we could all pirouette away from you.

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

My fact is that there is a French parliamentary maneuver which involves MPs hiding behind a curtain and then bursting out to vote at the last minute.

Why?

It's really fun.

It's not used often.

It's not a weekly feature of the National Assembly.

Well, you couldn't, because then people would just check for feet sticking out there.

How often people forget?

Eventually, people forget.

I found a reference to it being done in 2014, and I don't know if it's been done since then.

So

this was a fact that a writer for the New Yorker called Lauren Collins put it on Twitter, and she reads a lot of French websites as well as English ones.

And the National Assembly is their parliament, basically, and it's got these enormous red curtains.

And if you think, as the opposition, that you're close to defeating the government, sometimes you can try the coup de rideau, which is the curtain blow.

And you hide your MPs behind a curtain, you hold the vote.

The government gets all its votes in, and then they burst out from behind the curtain and vote against the government.

And the idea is that they defeat them.

It's a way of lulling the government into thinking that your side doesn't have the votes.

Does the government ever say, it's so weird there are only six of us in here?

Because I swear I saw about a dozen other people come in.

Well, the one main time when it happened in like living memory was with Sarkozy, wasn't it?

He had some kind of internet bill that he wanted to get through.

It was like just trying to, you know, ban people from the internet if they copied too many things or whatever.

And everyone was so certain it was going to get through that hardly any of his party turned up.

And so that's how the other, the opposition managed to do something.

The final result was 21 to 15 in the vote.

And if you think about how many hundreds of MPs there are in the National Assembly, it's like they literally didn't think that it was a problem at all.

And then suddenly, behind the curtain, there were 21 people.

When they were behind those curtains, you could have said to your mates behind it, we're all getting sarcozy behind here, aren't we?

That's great.

And it would have made sense.

You know, but then everyone laughing so loud at your amazing joke would have given the game away.

I was just reading some random stuff about French politics, and mostly I just really enjoy it when they conform to stereotypes.

So I enjoy that Felix Faure, who was president of France at the end of the 19th century, died just while having sex with a 30-year-old mistress.

Obviously, that's that puts a real downer on the party that you're having afterwards, doesn't it?

Well, you can

the dusting with semen is going to be a pretty somber affair this afternoon.

From dust to dust, from semen to semen.

He died doing what he loved.

I think everyone could always say that.

Just one or two more things on French parliamentary shenanigans.

One thing caught my eye, and it's just incidents that happen outside the French parliament.

In 2013, there was a group who launched a protest by releasing a flash mob of chickens outside the French parliament.

They had 450 chickens in the back of their van.

They were were a slightly regressive group, I'd say.

They were protesting against gay marriage, and so they bundled 450 chickens into a van.

Their plan was to release them all outside the French Parliament as part of an incredibly weak pun.

Anna, you would have loved it.

Basically, they wrote, ne plumes par le familie, or don't pluck families, which also means don't rip people off with family taxes.

So it's a very convoluted...

I mean, the

French for chicken is a clock.

Yeah, you're right.

You're absolutely right.

It feels like they missed a trick or two there.

I don't know.

Huge open open goal missed.

Yeah.

And surely a headline must have read at some point.

450 chickens, that is enough.

Brilliant.

Just to give a little coda, only about 40 of them got out of the van, the chickens, before the police noticed, why are these chickens out here and started chasing them?

So then they closed the van and bundled off.

Very sadly, two of the chickens were then killed crossing the road.

Oh, no.

Yes.

But presumably, they were the homophobic chickens who'd got out to protest.

So not too big a loss.

Can I tell you about a very exciting article page on Wikipedia that I read recently?

So just take us into the world of curtains for a second.

Curtain Rings really, really brought the thunder, I thought, when I was reading it.

So there's a very interesting fact, which is that Lewis and Clark, when they went out on their expeditions, they brought a lot of curtain rings with them as presents.

Were they traveling across America?

The North American interior, yeah.

They were.

I suppose they were interior guys.

So hence the curtain rings.

So if they'd been exploring the exterior, they would have taken the patio furniture with them and the fire pit.

So there's that little fact there.

And then there's this little paragraph of other uses, and it says.

Shall we just quickly say, because I think they will have carried them like to trade, right?

Or something like that.

Sorry.

Yeah, they were to trade and they were gifts as well.

You know, they were really popular new innovations back then.

They weren't for they They didn't have incredibly elaborate tents they were every night with 400 pairs of curtains.

But what?

They're just a good thing to trade.

I mean, if you're taking them to people who by and large don't have curtains.

They use them as rings and earrings, apparently.

Which seems odd as they were specifically meant to be large enough to go around a human finger.

Which I mean all curtain rings are.

Yeah, so that's the thing.

It says in this article other uses.

For example, they may be used as a wedding ring in a marriage ceremony.

So that's one use that they could have.

What kind of sausage-fingered people are getting married that you could use a curtain ring as a wedding ring?

That's what this Wikipedia page says.

But then the next thing it says is, or it can be used as a ligature to prevent nocturnal ureses.

So bed wetting, right?

And I thought, okay, this suddenly sounds like someone's just taking the piss here.

They're just, someone's hacked this Wikipedia page.

I clicked on the link and it took me to a book that's written by a guy called Robert Liston, Liston who was a big surgeon and he yeah

okay so so check this out this is the extract from the book about using it um

as a ligature A.R., when eight years old passed a brass curtain ring over his penis to prevent incontinence of urine during the night and thereby escaping chastisement to which he had been frequently subjected, great swelling soon took place round the ring and he was unable to remove the juggum.

He experienced much pain and difficulty in the juggum.

Sorry, can we go back to that word you casually used?

Is it not juggum?

I've just not heard that word.

No, I've noticed that word either.

Oh, okay.

How do you spell it?

How do you spell it?

J-U-G-U-M.

Wait, Dan, when you say it's an odd jump, what do you think is it?

Well, I assume it's an old word for a curtain ring.

It's

another word for it.

Imagine if the word on Wordle one day was juggum.

The internet would go fucking apeshit.

It's a very rare word, Dan.

Juggum.

You can't not acknowledge you've just

dropped the word juggernaut.

Let's say he's put something on his penis, and then this is the same thing he can't take off.

It's obviously just another slang word for the item.

It's irrelevant to the story.

So he experienced much pain and difficulty in voiding his urine.

The ring gradually ulcerated.

The ring appeared to sink into the substance of the penis, and the swelling subsided.

Oh.

Yes, except that this guy kept it on there.

It says that he then he, after a while, became the father of a fine family.

So he was eight years old when he put this on.

When between 50 and 60 years of age, he applied to me.

And then this doctor, Liston, then has to remove this curtain ring that's been around this man's penis since the age of eight, which has fused into the shaft of his penis.

So you're saying it sort of migrated into his penis?

Exactly.

It kind of, it just through the skin.

Exactly.

It migrated through the skin and it became infused.

He had a curtain ring.

His penis was the rod to this curtain ring.

And

he had kids.

He had every.

He never thought to take it off.

If it's fused into your penis, I would just live with it.

Can I just say...

We're filming this on Zoom today.

We don't usually at the moment.

And Dan is in a bedroom.

Can anyone else not take their eyes off the curtain that's behind his left shoulder?

Actually, you're right.

Is

one of the curtains at the end is sort of hanging off a bit.

Like there's a ring missing.

Yeah.

Well I thought Dan was getting slowly more and more purple as this went on.

Just because you said it

to know a juggum is not an old word for a curtain ring.

A jugum is specifically a forceps for compressing the penis in olden days using an anti-masturbatory device apparently.

Apparently you need it you needed a word that specific okay so great swelling took around took place around the ring and he was unable to remove the it seems like they're using it metaphorically because that's how he was using it right he was almost using it like one of these medical things anyway

his penis worked again like it worked normally again he was like wow my piss is flowing nicely this is in his 60s Yeah, but he always got an erection whenever he had a curtain being moved, which is very embarrassing.

Wow.

Can I tell you

an anecdote about politics, which is not French, but I kind of like it.

It's about a vote, so it is kind of related.

So, this is in 1872, and there was a vote against the New Zealand government, and it looked like it was going to come down to one vote.

So, this is like, what do you call that when it's like in confidence of the government?

So, if they lose this, the government could fall, and it was going to come down to one vote.

And one of the governing party called Edward Wakefield was a massive drunk.

Okay, so his colleagues locked him in a room and they took all of his alcohol away from him and they kept him in this room and they said, Right, we're going to leave you there and we're going to keep you sober.

And then as soon as the vote starts, we'll let you out and you can vote and then you can do whatever you want.

Okay.

So they put Edward Wakefield in this room and the opposition learned about it.

And so they lowered a bottle of whiskey down the chimney of the room that he was in.

He drank the whiskey and he was unable to vote and the government of New Zealand fell.

Oh, wow.

Jesus.

That's brilliant.

That's incredible.

Wow.

You really do have a problem then.

I think the next trip when you're out of that room is a trip to the AA.

He must have thought it was Christmas, right?

When the bottle of whiskey comes down.

Santa's changed, hasn't he?

Yeah.

Can't be asked to come down the chimney himself anymore.

Wow, that's great.

Well, do you want to look?

Do you just want to impress your curtain-loving friends?

Always.

Yes, please.

Yes, you do.

Do you know what you call a curtain's helmet?

I didn't even know a curtain had a helmet, Anna, embarrassingly.

Well, when I say helmet, what I mean is, you know, on quite old-fashioned curtains or ornate curtains, you get like a fabric or sometimes a wooden border at the top.

Or a skirt, like a top skirt for the curtains.

Like a hem kind of thing.

Yeah, but an upper and sort of a high hem.

I'd call it a skirton if we were starting from scratch with the language.

Yeah.

That's actually better.

And that wouldn't have forced me into saying, do you know what you call a gun's helmet when it's clear?

Not helmet, but it is called a pelmit.

A pelmet.

Okay, yeah.

It's called a pelmet.

Well, that's quite good, because isn't a pelmet slang for an extremely short skirt, like a racerly short skirt, is a pelmet.

Is it?

Oh,

is it?

It might be.

If a curtain was analogous to a pair of legs, that little bit at the top would be a pelmet, wouldn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

Dude, I did not know that, but that feels like one must be named after the other.

I know the pelmit.

Do you know what kind of pelmit, though, a lambrequin is?

No, I don't.

A lambrekin.

No.

Or a lambrequin is a pelmit with such deep sides they extend to the floor.

Just if you're ever at anyone's house, you can say, I love your lambrequins.

I think you're more likely to say, have you considered having some lambrekins here?

Because they're not likely to have them themselves.

Pelmit, which goes all the way to the floor.

On the sides of the...

Yeah, yeah, not all the way down because that would just be a blind.

That's a curtain.

Wow.

Is it to conceal so, like a square curtain, so it would come up on the sides and then it would be kind of flat in the front, and you'd have your pelmet at the top, but then on the sides, it would come all the way.

Yeah, I see, right?

So you're fine.

And yes, it is.

That's quite nice.

I might get that.

It is, in answer to your assumption, Andy, it is to conceal the embarrassing bits like the curtain rings and the polar.

Well, now we know they are functionally cock rings.

I think it's probably quite a good idea to hide them.

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

My fact this week is that one of the biggest theme parks in China has a ride that puts visitors in a coffin, rolls them into a chamber, and then simulates their cremation.

This is the uh, this is the Sadmahi game.

It's the experience of death.

It's the cremator.

It goes by many, many names.

It is a very bizarre 4D virtual experience that supposedly, according to reports from 2014 costs roughly £26

and the idea is that you go into a morgue you get into a coffin and they push you through on a conveyor belt all the way to the crematorium where then you are burnt to a cinder at least that's the sensation that you're gonna get lots of hot air lots of weird lights and it just prepares you for your inevitable death

is the idea.

I mean first of all it's not the sensation They claim it.

It's not the sensation of being burnt to a cinder, is it?

Because that would be a much less pleasant ride.

It's a sensation of being a bit warm with some weird lights.

Well,

the two people who came up with the idea who are Huang Weipeng and Ding Rui, they're two people from Shanghai.

When Huang went into it, he said, I couldn't breathe and I thought my life was over.

That was the first time he ever tried it.

So to him, he thought he was dying, get it.

Yeah.

Although, but that was when he...

So they, I think, to prepare for making this they asked to be sent through a crematorium right and they asked the controller of the crematorium to let them experience cremation with the crucial difference that he turned off the furnace it's it does say it heats you up to about 40 degrees um celsius not fahrenheit which is that's warm that is very warm i would i would feel pretty uncomfortable at that yeah i think it depends on also you know if you're claustrophobic if you're you know so many senses are going to come into play um but they do say it's an authentic experience of burning and i think that sounds

so the idea is it's not a ride like let's say the big one in or oblivion or something like that.

It's basically like an escape room and there's a load of challenges and let's say there's us four are doing all the challenges.

After each one whoever does the challenge worst will in inverted commas die and then when you die you get put into the coffin and they do this kind of cremation thing and then there's three people left and then whoever comes last out those three people then does the cremation so you're each kind of challenge, you're trying not to die, and the worst person does die.

And then, in the end, the last person, they actually make them die anyway, because all people die in the end.

That's the idea.

So,

everyone gets to do the little ride at the end, but yeah, it's like challenges that you have to do to get to it.

I would love, by the way, if anyone's listening to this who's been to the cremator, to please let us know what it was actually like, because I can't find anyone really who's properly done it.

Like, I went on TripAdvisor, and it says that this is part of the Windows of the World amusement park in Shenzhen.

So, this is a pretty amazing place where they've replicated some of the biggest landmarks in the world,

some to sort of quite a nice big scale, like the Eiffel Tower is the third of the size of the Eiffel Tower.

They've got a life-size Mount Rushmore.

They've got, you know, you can do anything that's a sort of landmark around the world.

They most likely have it.

And then, supposedly, they have this random cremator game that you can play.

No one on TripAdvisor has mentioned it.

I can't see anyone who's been to it so I would love to know.

Do you think is it possible that they keep forgetting to turn off the furnace?

Yeah.

Thank God they don't survive to leave the one-star review.

This is funny because I'm not really worried about there being cremator bit

because I don't expect to be If I am conscious for that, something's gone so badly wrong that even the brief preparation I've done at this escape room I think is not going to be enough good to see me through it with a calm mood.

That's a tricky one.

Yeah.

Do you guys have anything on cremation?

Just by the way, I could just say a little bit more on this particular thing that you're going to be doing.

Yeah, let's do it.

Yeah, sorry, yeah, yeah.

So, this

ride escape room thing, it comes from something called the Coffin Academy, which began in South Korea.

And this was a the idea was that it's trying to prepare people for death.

And if you prepare for death, then it makes you able to live your life more freely because you're not worried about something that might happen.

And it was founded by a guy called Jung Joon.

And

Samsung in South Korea, they required 900 of their employees to go to some of these sessions so that they could learn about what might happen when you die.

And you write your own epitaph, you compose last letters to your loved ones.

ones and you're placed in a coffin for 10 minutes at the end and that's supposed to be like this memento mori of reminding you to live your life because one day you might die.

That's really good.

I hope they don't post the letters.

Because that's a distressing experience for their families.

If they accidentally mix up in the post room.

Yeah.

It does work, though.

Thinking incessantly about death is actually good for you, apparently.

And I think it was about South Korea's soaring suicide rate, wasn't it, that they wanted to combat?

Because

highest suicide rate in the world, I think.

But there have been studies that show if you think about dying for five minutes a day, apparently five to ten minutes a day, you will be happier.

And they did a study where they got people to write emails or respond to emails about dying and death every day for about ten minutes.

And they found that the people who had done that, they had increased positive mood, better self-esteem, increased intrinsic motivation, whatever that means.

I suppose they felt like they had a reason to live.

And so it does work.

And you can get like apps.

There's an app called We Croak that that my husband has, which is very annoying because it reminds you five times a day that you're going to die.

What?

How do I work?

Yeah.

And it says, and it's quite annoying because he rarely uses his phone.

So it's always the latest message that came up because it comes up five times a day.

So whenever I'm walking past it and I move the phone, all I see is the phrase, don't forget you're going to die.

Why does he have this?

Because of this psychological thing we were just talking about.

Is this actually?

Does your husband actually have this, or do you text him this five times a day?

I've been leaving constant threats.

But But yeah, planning your own death, people do.

People plan their own funerals.

It's becoming more and more popular and actually attend their own funerals now, which is another way of reminding yourself you're going to die quite on the nose.

But this is a tradition that started in Japan, apparently, in the 1990s.

And they're called pre-funerals, so, or Saizenso in Japan.

And I think they started out in response to like funerals are being really commercialized, and people were being ripped off for these just

off-the-conveyor belt, out-of-the-catalogue funerals.

And they thought, Look, we want some more personalized funerals, and I don't want to fork out so much cash.

I don't want my poor family to be forking out so much cash after I die.

And so, pre-funerals have become a thing.

And it's when people plan and then attend their own funeral, say a few words, say goodbye.

It's usually older people, it's quite rare that you get like an 18-year-old

having a pre-funeral.

And then

that's nice.

Saves your family having to do it.

And I guess you get to go to your own party at the end of the day.

That is cool.

Yeah.

Do people, I guess people must know that they're attending your pre-funeral instead of your funeral.

Yeah, I don't think you do the surprise

behind the curtain.

Well, that'd be great.

That'd be a great use of your escape room coffin.

You'd finally get to use it instead of it just being a thing for post-death.

Good point.

I do think it's a good idea, but...

And I think it's a good idea from your perspective as the person who's having the pre-funeral, if you want to do all the mindfulness and remind yourself of your potential and experience life properly.

But I don't think it's a good experience for people who want to know what other people would say about them.

No, because everyone knows that you're not really in the front row, you're sitting there.

So they'll say nice things, but you'll think, yeah, but in fairness, Andy, no, people don't go to funerals in general and say, oh, he was a complete idiot.

Thank God I can let loose now that he's not conscious anymore.

If he was here, I wouldn't say this, but what an asshole

it's probably pretty similar before and after, and they're both lies, I think, is what we're saying.

I've definitely read, and this, I might have said this before, I've definitely read a funeral director say that it's really common when bodies are cremated that you end up with metal implements that have been left in their body during surgery.

And I've always been so sceptical about the fact that surgeons are so careless, they're just dropping things in our bodies left, right, and centre.

But apparently, that's quite a thing.

You pop and you get a scalpel and a knife, a pair of scissors.

Really?

Gossipy boma is called, isn't it?

Supposedly.

A what?

It's called gossipy boma.

Sorry,

if someone leaves stuff in your body during surgery, that's the technical word for it.

Right.

And it comes from gossipy mus, which means cloth or something.

Okay.

Which word do you think is rarer?

Gossipy boma or jugum.

I'd never heard of jugum before today, I must have now.

I think you might be right, yeah.

You know, when you're being cremated

and you go through the

curtains?

Yeah, there's a lot of French politicians.

Nightmare.

What's the next thing that happens?

Fire.

Right.

Well, I didn't.

Not necessarily.

Yeah, I didn't think there was fire.

I thought it was deep heat.

Not deep heat.

They rub you with that thumb.

Yeah,

there's just a muscular masseur on the other side of the curtain.

I told you it was just a sprain.

I don't know what your fuss is about.

What are you all about?

What, Dan, what is...

I thought it was an intensive heat, which

instead of a physical fire.

It turns out that you don't automatically immediately go into the furnace.

Just to be clear,

it is not deep heat, whatever Dan means.

It's flame.

It's

powered flame.

Yeah, yeah.

But legally, they have 72 hours before they have to cremate you.

What does that mean?

So do they do fun stuff with your body in that three days?

No,

they're they're not allowed to interfere, uh, but they they they aim to do it on the same day, but sometimes just they it's busy and they they don't uh get around to cremating.

I suppose they might want to do a few people at once.

No, because I don't think they're allowed to.

No, you're not, I don't think.

Well, I think because they're they're getting your

family and then

I didn't mean like just put everyone in the same box, but I thought like maybe just not turn the fire on and then turn it off again and then turn it on then turn it off.

Maybe it's incredibly energy intensive.

I mean it uses so much,

it uses so much energy.

And in fact there's a you guys have heard of Redditch?

The town?

The place?

Yeah the town.

It's Birmingham.

Yeah.

It's

a relatively large connivation.

Yeah.

Well there's a swimming pool in Redditch which is heated by the local crematorium's spare heat.

I love that.

They voted for it in 2013 and the council voted for it and they won an award for it from some green group.

There were lots of protests at the time.

Oh really?

And ironically whenever I use deep heat because I've seem to be allergic to capsaicin I get a red itch.

That proves something doesn't it?

It's hard to tell what.

It shows that the whole universe is connected in some way.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the actor Peter O'Toole once smuggled a pair of earrings out of Greece by hiding them in his foreskin.

Right!

And I must say, I came up with this fact before we talked about all the, you know, curtain rings and penises and stuff.

That's just a coincidence that those two things came up in the same show.

Yeah.

I completely forgot that I had that fact in relation to this fact.

What an extraordinary thing, an outer and inner ring in one show.

What an object to smuggle under your foreskin.

A pair of earrings.

Traditionally, quite sharp.

Well, unless they were they clip-on?

I think that would actually be more painful.

Oh, yeah.

I think not.

I think they because these were ancient, so I think before the invention of clip-on.

Not that I know when clip-ons were invented, but I assume they're more modern.

The Etruscans didn't have clip-on earrings.

We'd have to rethink a lot of our assumptions.

Seems unlikely.

So we are currently or just coming to the end of the T-Series of QI, and we were doing a section on tools.

And I thought when I was looking at the scripts I would flesh one of them out with an anecdote about Peter O'Toole so I thought if I'd find any anecdotes about him and I found this one in the Telegraph and then it was also in a biography of him by Nicholas Wapshot

and he said that while Peter O'Toole was filming Lawrence of Arabia he developed a love of exotic antiquities and so knowing that he wasn't allowed to take these things out of Greece legally he thought where can I hide them?

And that no one would think of looking.

And he said, Nicholas Wepshot says it was an act of daring which caused him pain for weeks afterwards.

Wow.

Okay, so this wasn't a classic, this wasn't like how we got the Elgin marbles here.

This is this is a very unique smuggling use.

They were absolutely,

oh, I smuggled the Elgin marbles out of mine.

They were smuggled in an elephant's foreskin all the way through the roads of Cornwall.

Do we know if he weaved them through or just tucked them under?

I don't know for certain, but it can only be tucked under.

It got to be tucked under.

He didn't pierce his warskins.

He didn't weave them through.

No, of course.

Did he pierce his wolf skin?

You would not do that.

The only other way I can think of doing it is you kind of sellotape them to your penis and wait for the foreskin to grow over them over many, many years.

That's the only other possible

game with those.

Well,

he was out out there filming it for two years.

Maybe the filming only took a month, but he had to wait the remaining year and three quarters for the

scant more information about this that I managed to find.

I don't know if you guys did, but it's just an anecdote in his anecdote-filled life.

Yes.

Yeah.

I do, actually, I do have a related anecdote.

Just before we get into Petro Toole, I do, on this subject, have a similar story.

A friend of mine,

I don't know if I should say this, but in the dressing room before each show, one of his colleagues would play a game with all of them called Guess What's Under the Foreskin, where he would hide something beneath his foreskin, show everyone the foreskin, and the rest of the cast would have to guess what it was.

Okay, and so the idea is you can see the outline.

So, if it was like a mountain bike, you'd be able to tell the shape of the wheels and stuff.

That's a fucked-up Christmas.

That's how your presents are wrapped.

So,

I asked for the kind of things that he said, he said, once it was an old-fashioned penny, once it was seven jelly beans.

How are you supposed to identify an old-fashioned penny?

You can't read the date inscribed on a penny through a foreskin.

That's too much to ask.

You can tell which monarch is depicted.

That is a hell of a brass-rubbing to work that out.

He was extremely eccentric.

I mean, he...

There are so many stories about him.

So, for example, his wife got him some ping-pong balls to throw at the TV screen when he didn't like it.

That doesn't sound very rock and roll, but apparently she only did this because he broke their previous TV set by throwing a smaller TV through it.

Right.

That's amazing.

Isn't that rock and roll?

That's impressive.

Yeah.

That's like one of those kids' games where you have to fit the appropriate shape into itself.

And he's done it right.

We should say really quickly, because a lot of people will be a lot younger, might not have even heard of Peter O'Toole, but this guy was a ginormous actor in the day of old Hollywood.

So, Lawrence of Arabia, probably his seminal role, the big epic, some three hours and a bit long.

He played the role of Lawrence, and he was part of that crew of Hollywood that were the sort of hell-raisers, these people that just didn't care about what they were doing.

But he was nominated eight times for best actor in the Oscars, so he was a huge player within the.

Never won an acting Oscar, did he?

And that's, I think, the record with Glenn Close.

Both him and Glenn Close, eight times nominated, no wins.

Wow.

Yeah.

And at least Glenn Close can say, oh, so close.

He doesn't even have that.

Yeah, he was quite pissed off about that, I think.

In fact, he was offered an honorary Oscar in 2003.

And that was when he'd had seven nominations for best actor.

And he didn't want to take it.

He said, I'd like to defer that for at least 10 years because I might yet win the lovely bugger outright, he said.

And the only reason he did go and accept the honorary oscar was because his daughter wanted a jaunt in la so he went and did it and then he got nominated an eighth time in 2007 didn't win that either didn't win it poor guy

there are worse fates but there are

um he was friends with samuel beckett

uh who we mentioned before yeah um there's a story it's not much of a story really that he um kind of had a big night out with um samuel beckett and soho um sitting in the doorway drinking whiskey until the early hours getting the policemen involved and having drinks with them.

His second Oscar nomination was for Beckett, the movie Beckett, in which he played Henry II.

So that was about Thomas Beckett.

So he was friends with Samuel Beckett.

He was nominated for the movie Beckett and he was born on Beckett Street in Leeds.

Wow.

Amazing.

Wow.

He had lots, as I suppose everyone has who's been a jobbing actor for ages, had lots of other jobs to actually pay the bills.

But he worked, I think, quite a good expression of his personality was the fact that he worked as a steeplejack and he worked as a demolition man.

And this was in his early 20s, I think, when he was in Leeds.

And he loved it.

He said, blowing things up and knocking things down with a bloody great hammer.

Nobody gave a flying shit for health and safety in those days.

It was glorious.

And he loved that.

And I think he also loved being in the...

Navy, didn't he?

Yes.

Sorry, what were you going to say?

A steeplejack.

That's someone who climbs up very tall buildings, isn't it?

A steeplejack.

Yeah.

What do they do when they're up there?

I thought they kind of fixed them.

Although this implies that he's knocking it down, so it sounds like he's doing it wrong.

Yeah,

it's one of those old, old jobs.

Yeah, oldie jobs, yeah.

Yeah.

The robots can do it now.

Just

on an irrelevant thing about climbing up tall buildings, I learned the word flaunching the other day.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Flaunching.

Is it launching yourself off a floor?

It's

very, it's actually extremely boring, but you know, the chimney pot at the top of a there's a chimney stack, and then there's a tiny bit right at the top with the round chimney pot.

The little layer of cement mortar between the stack and the pot is called the flaunching.

Okay, that is

quite a niche thing to have a word for, really.

I know, but if you have a roof around, you can you can knock them dead by saying,

have you considered the flaunching?

Is it maybe a problem with the flaunching?

That was like when I learned that brickwork had to be pointed.

I still don't know what it means, but I used to, whenever a builder came round, I was like, oh, I think these bricks need to be pointed.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

God, that is a useful word.

Anyway, what do we learn today?

We've learned jugum

flaunching.

And what was the curtains one?

It's a Lambrequin.

Lambrequin.

Wow.

Like a harlequin who's drunk on Lamborini.

That's how you remember it.

Launching.

First, there's a problem with my flaunching, then the Lambrequins fall over.

I'll tell you, if something happens to my jugem next, that's going to be the full set.

When they were delivering that bottle of whiskey to that New Zealand guy, was the flaunching an issue in getting the bottle down?

Great question.

I don't think the flaunching usually gets in the way, sounds like, unless it's very badly done.

Okay.

You don't want bad flaunching on a house.

That'll ruin the value.

No.

Yes, I know.

I'm sorry.

We weren't talking about Petro Tour.

I'm sorry for distracting you.

In 1980, he did Macbeth, the old Vic,

and it was absolutely hammered.

The critics hated it.

They said he was as subtle as a battering ram.

The observer said there are chances that he likes to play, but his performance suggests that he is taking some kind of personal revenge on it.

So he's like, really, really, really hated.

But

people loved it because it was Peter O'Toole.

He was very famous.

It was almost kind of fun to go and watch something that was so bad, it was good kind of thing.

But it could have been so much better because originally he was the director

and he was basically allowed to do what he wanted.

And so he decided it was going to be an inflatable Macbeth.

And he had a friend who was working for a company called Labuta Limited, which was making inflatables that you could keep in the boot of your car.

And he decided that he was going to commission this person to do all of the scenery in Macbeth.

And it was going to be a massive inflatable Macbeth.

And in the first time they tried to do the rehearsals,

someone said that the curtain rose to reveal a dimly lit collection of black plastic phalluses swaying in the wind.

Nice.

And on top of that, no one could hear what anyone was saying because these were inflatables that had to be constantly blown up.

So it's just like the air compression was just like

the whole time.

No one could hear anything that they were saying.

And so in in the end, he scrapped the inflatables, but it was still a terrible, terrible play.

Peter O'Toole sort of started acting by mistake.

He

was steeplejacking one day, wasn't he?

And there was accidentally an audience at the top of the flaunching he was climbing up towards.

It flaunched his career, didn't it?

No,

it wasn't that.

He was in Leeds.

He was doing a poetry course.

He actually always wanted to do something in poetry.

He loved literature and poetry.

He was doing a poetry course in Leeds, and there was a professional production of Fathers and Sons going on down the road.

And the lead actor in that production fell down some stairs and broke some bones.

And in fact, O'Toole remembered his name was Gordon Luck.

So, ouch, doubly painful for him.

Poor old Gordon Gordon.

Suffered some barred luck.

Gordon unlucky.

Fell down some stairs.

And they'd seen Peter O'Toole do some sort of little skit for fun on an amateur stage in the area the year before.

So they said, look, do you want to play the lead in Fathers and Sons?

And he said, yes.

And he played it for two weeks.

He said, I played it for two weeks.

And then I got the bug.

And there was no going back.

What's interesting is that it is bad luck to say God luck in the theatre, isn't it?

You're not supposed to say that.

You're supposed to say break a leg.

Oh my God, of course.

He should have changed.

What could you change your name to that sounds like break a leg?

If you change your name to Macbeth, no one will ever call you for anything in the theatre at all.

But why am I not booking any gigs?

He once took a double bed on the northern line, Peter O'Toole.

Yeah?

Where did he take it?

To another, to a different stop on the northern line.

Why?

Did he just not?

He thought the seats were uncomfortable.

No, he had to move the bed from one place to a.

It was in 1954, and it's an anecdote in his autobiography.

But I think the interesting part about the anecdote is he didn't pay, right?

And he sneaked it on and sneaked it off, And he managed to sneak it through the turnstiles, a double bed, without anyone noticing.

I think there were no turnstiles at the time.

He says at the start of the anecdote, this is before the bad days

of turnstiles.

But still, it's very impressive.

Yeah, I mean, how big was his foreskin?

It's extraordinary.

Oh, my God.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

James at James Harkin.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Do check them out.

But otherwise, come back next week because we will be back again with another episode.

And we'll see you then.

Goodbye.