417: No Such Thing As A Guide Dog Called Neil

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you live from Belfast.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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

Here we go.

Starting with fact number one and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that during the festival of Britain in London in 1951 children would deliberately go go missing because the local police station where they waited for their parents had the capital's best collection of comic books.

That's incredible.

This was a huge, big deal.

1951, this is the Festival of Britain, probably the last massive festival we had in the UK before the Millennium Dome was built.

And this.

Don't laugh at the.

It was a huge success in some measures.

Number of domes.

But yeah, the Festival of Britain, it was an amazing thing.

They had all these incredible buildings and structures and exhibitions all over the UK, in London, in

Edinburgh, in Belfast.

In fact, they did have quite a lot here.

But then it was in 1951, and by 1952, the entire thing had been demolished.

There was no TV really in those days.

It was really the early days of TV.

And so these days, I think it's quite forgotten, the Festival of Britain.

But when you look into it, it was absolutely amazing.

And what's extraordinary about it as well, so it was the South Bank in London where the Royal Festival Hall is now, which is a very iconic venue.

And I've been there many, many times.

Didn't realize it was built for the Festival of Britain.

It was part of the big structure.

So the whole of this South Bank, right along the Thames, was just turned into this place of the future.

And when you see pictures of it, it is extraordinary what was there.

It is.

And it was built basically to cheer people up a bit after a little war-type episode, wasn't it?

A little run-in with the Germans.

Just a small run-in and it seems like it worked.

It seemed to be pretty successful.

So they had my favorite piece of the Festival of Britain was the

like one of the centerpieces was the Guinness Festival clock.

Oh yeah.

Which was it was in

Battersea Park.

It was 25 feet high.

It said it was the most complicated clock mechanism for 300 years.

Which what happened to clocks 300 years earlier?

Where they just forgot how to make them properly.

But it was amazing.

what I quite like about the Guinness Festival clock is nowhere is it explained why this one of these centerpieces of the great exhibition was something that is made by an Irish company which I don't know if you know this Belfast was not part of the United Kingdom at that time and

nor is it now and by two Polish designers and it's never mentioned but it sounds incredible so they had the whole Guinness menagerie so you know back in the olden days Guinness was advertised by all these animals like there was a toucan wasn't there toucan's the big one, the main event, yeah.

They had a crocodile, they had a pelican, a bear, a lion, a kinkajou, all these typically British

classic kinkajou.

Kinkajou, you know.

You know, you see them wandering up the south bank sometimes.

It's a real British, but some kind of South American.

Yes, they have Pikachu.

It's like a weird-looking mammal, a cute South American mammal.

Yeah, what kind?

What kind of mammal?

Like a bird or a.

Like a

sorry, backs.

Wait.

Hang on.

No, no, no, no.

You can't pull that back, Dan.

So I wanna know what kind of mammal, like a lizard or like a fish or a.

It was an insect, but.

It's not a mammal you're talking about.

Oh, fucking, because he made that joke, it's gonna stay at the show now.

That was always gonna stay at the show the moment that left your mouth, I'm afraid.

I suspect it's not the last you're gonna hear about.

Well, okay, so now we all know birds aren't mammals.

Great.

You're welcome, everyone else at home, who had to have me take the bullet to get that bit of information out there.

We've all learned something today.

And they all danced around.

So what was it, though?

Did we find out?

Was it like a spider?

It looks a bit like a sloth.

It's a little...

It looks a bit like a sloth.

Like a cute, slothy type,

like a possum or something.

Okay.

It looks a bit like that.

Great.

It's a furry thing.

Anyway, they jumped out of this clock and danced around constantly, and the ostrich would come out, which had beer, glass, ice,

and part of the bird family, I believe.

Is it?

Very strong.

Cool.

Yeah, it was very cool.

On the other, so I mean, there was so much stuff in London, but it was genuinely

all across the country.

So 18 million people across the UK went to one or other of the events that were local.

The Festival of Britain had its own ship, which is pretty cool.

Nice.

It was called the Campania, and the ship had an amazing life, okay?

It was truly a very versatile ship.

It was built, actually, built in Belfast, local ship.

It was built...

Yeah.

I certainly trust any ship that's been built in Belfast, by the way.

Oh, yeah.

Too soon, indeed.

It's just a strong industry.

Yeah.

Anyway, it was built in Belfast, but then, Second World War, it was requisitioned by the military, by the Navy, used as an export carrier.

Okay, so it's now fine.

It's a military ship.

Saw some action in the Second World War.

Then it was turned into the showboat for the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Then it was refitted as the command ship for Operation Hurricane, which was the test of the first ever British atomic bomb.

Okay.

And so it sailed to Australia and it was that it had some laboratories fitted and it did the test.

It was the main ship for that.

And then it was scrapped.

So,

you know, what an interesting life for a ship, guys.

Yeah, I feel like.

Great story.

The Northern Ireland part of the exhibition was run by a guy with a brilliant name.

He was called Willie DeMayo.

Isn't that cool?

Willie DeMayo.

And

the whole point of the bit around Northern Ireland was to show the importance of hard work.

Because Northern Ireland had made a really hard.

Someone in the UK had to work hard and it was down to you guys.

They worked out that Northern Ireland had made a much bigger,

much bigger part of the recovery after the war than anywhere else in the UK.

But they also had a lot of manufacturing on site because they wanted to show how many things were made here.

So they had, you could buy some festival cigarettes

that were made while you watched.

They made a cigarette and then you could smoke them.

Nice.

They had some stuff about stockings, nylon stockings.

And the way they showed those off is they had a load of sort of dismembered legs.

They weren't real legs.

They were like

kind of plastic legs and they were in the shape of a fan.

And they all had stockings on them and they would spin round and round and round.

And then there would be some nylon that you could kind of see through the spinning leg fan.

That's cool.

Wow.

That's so cool.

That is cool.

I like, there was back in London, there was was all these little other events that were going on.

So you would have the main features of the whole festival, which would be from theater through to these caves that were built that were absolutely stunning.

They were like grottos, which looked incredibly beautiful.

And then there was a French stunt tightrope walker called Eliano.

I think that's the right pronunciation.

And he walked across the Thames.

So they put a tightrope up the whole way through, across the Thames, and he walked it.

And near the end, he almost fell.

and he went down onto one knee and he stayed there for four minutes and then he eventually got up and then made it to the end and it was a success but it was particularly scary because Eliano didn't know how to swim.

And had he fallen that could have been a horrific moment.

But like, yeah, that's pretty bold going across a giant body of water.

Yeah.

When you don't know how to swim.

Well, people appreciated it.

You can watch the footage of that and 100,000 people were there and that's a lot of people.

It's like the entirety of London seemed to be rammed.

I guess it was when you only had two channels on TV, so nothing else to do.

And also no TV to watch them on.

And

when are we?

We're 51.

Most people haven't got a TV.

Well, there was a big theatre there where people went to see television for the first time.

It's the first time.

I've seen visuals, yeah.

Have you seen just with the Eleanor tightrope?

Have you seen what he does when he falls onto his knee?

No.

He mouths.

Well, according to one newspaper write-up, he's obviously doing something, and I don't know how the journalist could see this, but he mouthed to his wife, who was in the audience, who is also a tightrope broker,

I can't do this, the rope's too slack, I'm going to fall.

You know, somebody help me.

And she just shouted back, you've got to do it, you've got no choice.

Come on, get up, mate.

Wow.

And that kind of tough love is what does it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's so good.

Have you heard of the role that Laurie Lee?

Laurie Lee is author of Cider with Rosie.

And, go on.

What's the second famous book that I read?

The autobiography of Laurie Lee.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, it was a memoir, so that kind of was the autobiography.

Anyway, look at the point.

I was trying to help you out.

I'm really sorry.

I'm biting the hand.

Anyway, he was appointed the curator of eccentrics, because they wanted to have some fun stuff.

And

he sort of put an ad in the papers saying, send me stupid ideas and we'll build them and we'll put them in the exhibition of eccentric things.

And he got brilliant suggestions, okay?

And they built a lot of these things, which is really cool.

So, one that they didn't build is the deflatable rubber bus for going under low bridges.

Oh, brilliant!

Very good.

Brilliant.

A machine which was 20 feet by 20 feet, and its sole purpose was to blow out a single match held in front of it.

Okay.

That's a cool thing.

I love this one.

A staircase which had weighted steps, okay, so you could give someone the feeling of going upstairs while they were actually going downstairs.

How cool is that?

That's the not very cool at all, is it?

What?

You're getting all the worst bit, basically, of going upstairs, and you're getting it when you're going downstairs.

Yeah, but it would be useful

when

it's good exercise, isn't it?

Although if you could do the opposite and give the impression of sliding down a banister and then you end up on the second floor, that would be a mess.

That's the way to do it, yeah.

If you had to trick someone

to thinking that they were going upstairs when they were actually going downstairs, why would you want to do that?

You're a kidnapper.

Okay, I'm a kidnapper.

Only the most obvious, you know.

And I want them to think that they're in the top of a building, but they're actually in a basement.

So that later on, when they say,

where were you captured?

The kidnap situation has been resolved.

It's all fine.

And they try and escape, but they're just going deeper and deeper and deeper.

They'll be asked, you know, where were you being captured?

They say, well, I was upstairs.

And so the police will be looking in places upstairs.

Upstairs, you're right.

You're in the cellar the whole time.

And is this how they used this thing?

It wasn't.

Was this one of the main attractions of the Festival of Britain?

All the kidnappers were running riot because the police were taking care of the kids.

It was a millennium time

that you could feel like you were walking upstairs while you were walking downstairs.

It would have been a runaway hit.

You're right.

They also commissioned a lot of artists to do original art as part of this.

So they had famous artists building statues and so on.

And one of the artists they got was Henry Moore, and he did a reclining figure.

That was his piece.

And there's a story that a small boy caught his head under one of the legs of the reclining figure and got stuck in there.

And so the account was that they were pushing and pulling for ages, trying to get this.

Well, pushing and pulling isn't going to work.

Oh, from different ends, I suppose it would.

Yeah, they were just trying to.

Not just like for an hour.

That you are pushing, right?

No, I'm pulling.

Oh, shit.

They shouldn't have got the Chuckle Brothers to do the extrication job.

Yeah, so what they did was they were just trying desperately to get him out.

They couldn't get him out.

So then they brought huge quantities of soap over and they started soaping this boy up in order to get him up.

And they finally managed to, and they tried weird things.

Like

the soap was like on his neck, it was on his body.

They finally pulled him up vertically and managed to pull him out that way.

Sorry, sorry, they put him into a flat horizontal position and they managed to pull him out that way.

And they said it was like a missile from the breach of a gun, like he popped out.

And his mother reported that her son's neck had never been so clean.

These are the kind of japes that were happening at the festival.

There was another sculpture called Root Bodied Forth by someone called Mitzi Cunliffe.

And this was a sculpture of two bodies entwined together as if they're coming out of the earth.

So if you can imagine the bodies going round.

The person who was in charge of the Festival of Britain was called Sir Gerald Barry.

And he had to go and look at this sculpture when it was being made because he'd been tipped off that it might be a study in sodomy.

And he concluded that if it was a study in sodomy, then it was one that was anatomically impossible.

Fair enough.

I can't believe that it takes someone professional to judge it.

It seems like it'd be pretty obvious to most people if there's a study in sodomy or not.

No, no.

There's expertise in every field, Anna.

I think you're some kind of expert.

I just think we might all be experts in that, looking at it.

All doing it.

I'm not judging, but I'm just saying to look at most of us, we We should move on anyway.

No, no, no, no.

I feel like this is your mammal gate, Anna.

No, it wasn't amazing.

But the craziest thing of all is that they spent something like 12 million pounds on it at the time in the 50s, a huge amount of money.

It was funded by the Labour government, who were, it was Clement Attlee, who was in power at the time.

There was a guy, Herbert Morrison, who kind of was seen to be the person who was going to succeed Attlee, never actually did.

His grandson is Peter Mandelson, I discovered.

So it's like a history of staying in politics.

But

it went up in, when was it?

It was in 51.

Yeah, 51, but it was in May 51, I think it was.

Churchill then didn't like it at all.

So much money went in.

It looked beautiful.

And by September of that year...

He got back into office at the time.

Exactly.

So he got back in in that time.

And by September, they had it dismantled.

This incredible.

Yeah, they saw it as like an emblem of socialism and this great kind of all of these amazing sculptures and buildings.

They were kind kind of of the socialist government.

They're like, we're having none of that, let's get rid of it.

Yeah.

He was jealous.

This is basically Lego gate from my childhood when my brother managed to make the Lego pirate ship when I had failed.

And I got up in the middle of the night, went into his room, and smashed it to pieces.

And that is what this was.

Right.

And at least I'm adult enough to admit that.

I bet Churchill never admitted that was what he was doing.

Have you admitted it to your brother, or is he going to hear this podcast?

Fortunately, he doesn't listen to the show.

Very interesting, the dismantling of all this stuff.

It was really hard to dismantle because they had to do it quite quickly and they were losing staff all the time.

So they had things like the single largest sheet of glass in the world at that point because it was part of the telescope that they'd built.

And they didn't know how to, they'd had to dismantle everything around it before they could get this sheet out.

And they were losing people.

They had a train from India, which they couldn't put on the railway to get back to its ship in time because it was the wrong gauge.

Like there were all these issues.

And most things in there were really expensive.

So you had these security guards who were bouncers basically protecting millions of pounds worth of items and inventions that were there.

And one of the things that they had a lot of were dustbins, all the bins that were around for this place.

And one person went and bought them all up, or most of them, and that was a guy called Billy Butlin, who runs Butlands.

So if you ever went to Butlands in the late 50s and possibly through to now, the bins that you're putting your rubbish in are the bins that were at the Festival of Britain.

Wait, you think they're still the same bins?

I didn't find a photo of a recent bin.

Might be.

I mean, they can't, you know, they don't get much wear and tear a bin, do they?

Where are you going to throw them away, Anna?

Well, we need to move on to our next fact.

It is time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that in the 1990s, a British bank set up a computer system so they could write to all their wealthiest customers at once.

Unfortunately, due to a rogue bit of placeholder text, they started sending out letters which began, Dear Rich Bastard.

So

this is in a paper recently and the website Snopes who do a lot of debunking and bunking have

you checked it out and it did happen.

It was written up in Computer Weekly at the time.

It was a firm, a telecommunication firm, they were launching a new gold card and they wanted to email the richest people all at once and see if they wanted to buy a new product.

And so one of the programmers just wrote a bit of placeholder text.

Normally the name of the customer would be in there, but some of the records were a bit botched and it couldn't read it.

So he just said, as a little joke to himself, this will never go out, but it's going to be Dear Rich Bastard.

Anyway, he then left the project and

it was handed on to a different programmer who didn't know about this.

And it was restarted.

And so they started later sending out these letters to Dear Rich Bastard.

Allegedly, they got one complaint from a customer who hadn't been called Dear Rich Bastard and was very offended.

He'd been laughing at the bottom of the box.

Yeah, exactly.

It could have been sent to,

there was a British Royal Naval officer in 1798 called Richard Bastard.

No.

Could have gone to him, Rich Bastard.

There was also a rich bastard who was born in 1788 in Cornwall.

He changed his name actually to Richard Bastion, and it seems to be it changed it just when he got married.

He got married to a woman called Jennifer Sincock.

And they became the Bastions.

And the other rich bastard, the only other rich bastard I could find, a real rich bastard, is a friend of the podcast, Seagar Bastard do you remember him yeah what is he he was a football referee oh yeah um Segar bastard and his middle name was Richard so he was Segar Rich Bastard and on his Wikipedia there's a full paragraph on it says there is a popular belief that because of his name Bastard was the inspiration behind the chant who's the bastard in the black

And Wikipedia says it is unlikely that he was the inspiration because the colour of the clothing he wore while refereeing is not documented

and football chants did not include verbal aggression towards officials until at least the 1960s

long after he had died so thanks wikipedia

busting a myth there

i love these big mail outs where something goes wrong i remember reading a story about a guy in canada he went on this date and it was a really good date and at the end of the date he got given the number of this girl nicole who liked you know possibly wanted to meet up again So he gets home, and the next day he calls her, or you know, in the next few days, calls her, and it's the wrong number.

So he's like, shit, she's given me the wrong number by possibly one digit, I don't know.

But how do you find Nicole, you know, in the campus where he was, which was the University of Calgary?

So what he did was he tracked down all 200 Nicole's email addresses and he sent out a group email to all the Nicole's, sort of individually, saying, are you the Nicole who gave me a number?

I'm getting a a few red flags here.

I don't know if I'm anyone else.

But what's amazing is the story became a bit big.

A Facebook page was set up between all of the Nicole's, and they started becoming buddies.

So all these new Nicole's were like a big Nicole clan all of a sudden.

And they managed to find the one who he was looking for, and she did give the wrong number, and she did want to meet up with him again.

Oh, so yeah, yeah, so it wasn't like he was being.

She's now dead.

Wow.

Pretty amazing.

That is

maybe a nice

thing.

It's really on the edge between creepy and romantic.

It's so close, isn't it?

Romantic.

Just on these sort of mass mailing things, I really like the errors that companies make because it happens a lot.

So there was a time in 2016, maybe someone in the room got one of these messages, I don't know.

One person accidentally sent a test email to 840,000 people in the NHS.

They accidentally did a

right to everybody.

One working-age person in 40 in the country got an email.

That was a flub, and and it was obviously a big waste of, you know, it gummed up the computers.

Unfortunately, they were all CC'd in, not BCC'd.

So almost immediately someone wrote saying, reply all, please take me off this mailing list.

So another 840,000 messages went out, and then obviously the funny people started kicking in.

In a single hour and a quarter, 500 million emails were sent.

Wow.

The NHS.

had basically launched a crippling attack on its own computers.

Didn't they actually, didn't it shut down for a while?

I seem to remember that it really got so overloaded that it, yeah.

I understand that's the Tory party is saying the fewer NHS staff we have, the less likely this will happen again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The HBO sent a test, I sent an email round exactly like this to everyone that they shouldn't have done.

It was everyone on their mailing list got this kind of test email.

And someone wrote on Twitter that it happened, and then everyone on Twitter decided to share their stories of when they fucked up at work.

Some of them were really good.

There was someone called At Aaron Chevy Ford, and they said that they'd made a PDF assigning each employee to the Muppet they reminded them of the most.

They said, I meant to send it to my work friends, but I accidentally sent it to the entire company.

My supervisor, Beaker,

wanted to fire me, but the owners, Bert and Ernie, intervened.

So good.

It's amazing, isn't it?

And then, yeah, there was one person called Casey who also replied, and they said, I was using my desktop calendar to make a note of when I started my period, but after several months, I realized I was doing it on a calendar I shared with the entire company.

This useful information, some would argue.

It's just, yeah.

I like always imagining the behind the scenes when these stories come out, because companies will do this and then send out an apology saying websy daisies, and then I just imagine the person getting furiously fired in the background.

And there was one in 2018.

It was the US Embassy in Australia sent out an email invitation to just all the big shot diplomats, politicians, journalists, and the invitation simply had a cat wearing pajamas holding a box of cookies with the words cat pajama jam.

And it went out to people at the highest levels of government.

And so the embassy sent a tweet out saying, Oh ha ha, sorry if you were looking forward to the pajama party.

Don't worry.

I'm afraid it's not going to happen.

It was a training error made by one of our new staff.

And then they followed it up by saying that new controls will now be implemented so something similar doesn't happen again.

And you just know that that member of new staff, that one little intern has made this mistake.

And the new controls are that intern not being an intern anymore.

We're going to have to move on, guys.

Oh, can I tell you a thing about

auto-filled text, which is kind of what the original factor is about.

So there's a fake text generator.

Well, the fake Latin is called lorem ipsum.

You know, when you just get, it just looks like a Latin sentence.

It's not really, it's just an old chopped-up Latin text, basically, which looks like it's sentences, but it's not.

Anyway, that's been established for hundreds of years, but there are new lorem ipsums all the time, and it's really exciting.

There is Office Ipsum, you can get a Samuel L.

Jackson Ipsum,

and there's also, I really like, an online dating profile, Lorem Ipsum, basically, a text generator which just generates a dating profile.

So I just wondered if you fancied hearing a bit of it.

Yes, please.

Okay.

If you plug it in, it just gives you this.

Mountain biking, vampire weekend, exploring the city, Ethiopian.

Down to earth, snowboarding, new friends, running shoes.

If you think we have something in common, I'm pretty laid-back, sleeping late, kurasawa, I have a crush on.

If you're still reading this, my favorite word is sushi, passionate about making Lasanya from scratch going to the gym.

um guys we need to move on to our next fact okay it is time for fact number three and that is my fact my fact this week is that when leaving the norwegian military soldiers must now hand over their used underpants and socks for the next recruit to wear

yeah this is this is

this is breaking news um

it depends how you do it doesn't it it depends how you requisition those back it's not like i'm gonna need your gun your badge, and your pants right now.

Well, it used to be that you would give every other bit of clothing back.

Oh, but you've got to keep the pants.

Yeah, you kept your pants and socks.

Yeah, but then, you know, it's been a hard time in the pandemic.

So the Norwegian Defence Logistics Organisation spokespeople said that with proper checks and cleaning, the reuse of garments is considered an adequate and sound practice.

And so that's what it is now.

You've got to hand back your...

And I think it's fair, because you hear used pants, and what you've heard is unwashed pants.

And that's not what they're doing.

They do wash them first, right?

And do they also make them keep, you know, in a shop when you try on pants, you have to keep that plastic thing in the crotch bit.

They make them wear that the whole time as well, don't they?

What's that bit?

You know, when you go up and do a bit of stand-up and you're like, everyone will know what I'm talking about here.

Hang on.

I don't try on pants much in the shop.

Maybe you're not supposed to.

You know what?

It's when you're trying on, but actually, do you know what?

It's when you're trying on the bikini bottoms.

Right.

So, does anyone know what I mean, the sticky bit?

That sounded like a lot of female voices in the middle.

So distinctly female voices there.

Yeah.

Anyway, the plastic, sticky thing.

It's really useful if you don't want to get stuff dirty.

Just cover it in plastic, sticky stuff.

And then you don't even need to use deodorant.

Wait, so you wear...

Wait, do you wear...

Have you laminated your pants?

Yeah, that's what I mean.

I've laminated.

Everything I'm wearing is laminated right now.

I feel like we're all learning so much about each other tonight specifically.

It's really...

This happens a lot in

armed forces.

There are lots of stories about what happens with their pants policy.

So,

for example, the Swiss Army of Knife Fame,

they only allow their female recruits to wear women's pants in 2021.

Which is very recent for that shift of policy to have been made.

Until then, women were just issued with standard underwear, which was men's pants.

I think they wouldn't have been stopped.

They weren't checking whether they were wearing women's underwear.

It was just they weren't given women's underwear as part of their uniform.

Yeah, that's true.

But that's still, that's, you know, they're sort of being made to feel welcome with this kind of stuff.

So anyway, they've launched a trial this year where women actually now get women's pants, and they're convinced this is going to be a big draw for recruitment.

I'm not.

Hey, or a small draw.

It depends on your size, right?

Is there a lot of chat between the women going, What's this plastic thing that's on the inside?

But at the moment, it's only 1% of the Swiss army is women.

And they're hoping by 2030 it will be 10% just due to this pants thing.

Sure.

Really?

Yeah, maybe.

If they told more of the women about the corkscrew on the knives, I'm telling you, they get a lot more recruits.

What do you guys think that commandos wear underneath their trousers?

I'm going to press the button and say nothing at all.

No, that is the QI Clexen.

They wear nappies, basically.

Nappies known as blast pelvic protectors.

Okay.

Well, it's a scary job, isn't it?

Which direction is the blast coming from?

It's to stop external blasting coming in rather than the internal blasting going out.

But it's because basically, if there's like an explosion or a mine or something like that, you might get some shrapnel and you have a lot of very important arteries apart from everything else that's down there.

You know, if you get a bit of shrapnel in your upper thigh, then you're done for.

And so they all have these what they call nappy protectors and they put those those things up we're not sure why going commando comes from where it comes from according to the oed it probably is just because commandos are really brave and hardcore and it's like it was like american school slang college slang and they're like well if you don't wear pants you're as hardcore as a commando

and but then there is some interviews with commandos there was an interview with um Lee West, who is a commando, and he said that they would take off their pants because if they didn't, then there would be bacteria cultivated and their balls might drop off.

What?

That's what he said.

He also said sometimes they might go into an area and then they would leave a pair of soiled pants to taunt the enemy.

And so when they came away, they wouldn't be wearing any pants underneath.

Rat boys?

What's this?

Yeah.

It's the most serious.

Great news.

We've got Osama bin Laden.

Right.

You, Private Smith, get your pants off.

What's the...

Why did they think that why would being a commander make your balls any more likely to drop off in pants than anyone else?

Jungle territory is the thing.

Possibly it would have started around the Korean War or the Vietnam War, perhaps.

The British Army do have they have special antimicrobial pants.

Yeah, and you can wear them for months on end.

Because if you're deployed somewhere where you're going to be for months on end, I suppose it's useful.

So that's they could have just had that little bit of plastic and they wouldn't have had to do it.

It feels like I missed a trick.

Just laminate that shit.

The British Army has a combat COD piece.

Really?

Very similar to this Nappy.

Yeah.

They started issuing them in 2010 and it's actually a

three-tier system.

So they have, it's basically special detective, special detective underwear.

It solves crimes.

It's special protective underwear against explosives, missiles, stuff like that.

And the MMS.

It's incredibly powerful.

If the army's ever up against someone who fires missiles at individual soldiers' cops,

I'd say we surrender.

I thought when you said it was a combat nappy, that it was the other way around, as in it was like there was a gun down there that could fire.

That would be cool, a little bit like Liz Hurley's nipples in Austria.

Exactly, yeah.

And in the phrase, you could say, oh, is that a gun in your...

Oh, it is a gun in your pocket.

It wasn't nappy.

I didn't say nappy because it sounds more sexy than the ones James is talking about.

It's the combat cod piece.

And it's actually made up of ballistic silk,

which sounds like angry silk.

And then it's one layer of ballistic silk, and then it's one layer of detachable armoured modular trousers.

It sounds like something out of Rawlis and Grommet, but apparently it's crucial in Afghanistan.

Wow.

I've devised a little game for us to play.

Oh, great.

It's like, you know, the player cards, right, where you had to bid higher or lower.

It's that, basically, but with celebrity underpant auctions.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

So,

Eva Braun.

Yes.

Guess how much her pants went for?

Hitler's better half.

Are we talking just to

pounds?

We're going to go in pounds.

Yeah, please.

£6,000.

£3,700.

All right.

Now we get into the higher or lower bit because I was just setting you up with that one.

Oh, right.

So if you thought that wasn't exciting enough.

Yeah.

Okay, Queen Victoria, higher or lower?

Higher.

Higher, because they were huge, weren't they, Queen Victoria?

Absolutely right.

It's not done on acreage, but yes, you're absolutely right.

They were bigger.

£12,090.

Okay, they were dead.

Right.

Michael Jordan, next up.

Higher.

Higher.

Lower.

James is right.

Michael Jordan's pants went for 2,400 quinoa.

Queen Victoria or Michael Jordan.

Michael Jordan.

Greatest possible player of the world.

Queen Victoria, Queen of England.

Probably not that good at basketball, but good at lots of other things.

They thought it was going to be boring.

They're fighting over this now.

Elvis Presley, next.

Higher.

Lower.

He never wore underwear.

Trick question.

He did wear them and they did not sell.

Can you believe that?

They were up for auction and they didn't sell.

Are they the ones he pooed himself in?

Because he did poo himself in.

Didn't he poo himself?

Well, he died in the toilet.

Yeah.

Are they his death pants?

No, I don't think.

Because no one wants the death pants.

I don't think there is death pants, but they were a little marked.

Oh, come on.

I said marked.

What do you want?

They were macchiato.

Look, whichever way you want to phrase it,

they were not pristine.

Okay.

And that may have been the reason they didn't sell.

I doubt it.

Elvis fans.

Oh, skid marks from Elvis?

They didn't sell.

Yeah, probably because they didn't meet the reserved price, which would be higher.

Next question.

I've written Herman Goering, and I didn't write down the price that they went for.

You'd never have got that from Brucey.

Do you know who makes British Army bras?

No.

Victoria's secret.

Marks and Spencer.

No.

Two ends of the spectrum.

Shows your different tastes, and that's fine.

Well, they only started being issued bras in 2021.

It's a booby-doo.

Booby-doo.

Booby-doo.

The company Booby-Doo supplies the bras for the British Army now.

Wow, it would have taken us a while to get that, I reckon I did.

It would.

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

My fact is that it takes two to four months to train a dog to keep still in an MRI scanner.

Yeah, I found this out recently.

I was just reading about a study that did some brain scans on 18 dogs, a whole range of dogs, and I thought, well, I wonder how that works, because, you know, one knows people who've been in MRI scanners, lots of us probably have, and you have to keep pretty bloody still.

So I looked it up, and there's a study in 2018 titled Clinical Findings in Dogs Trained for Awake MRI.

And yeah, they've researched this properly.

And there's a specific trainer actually called Marta Gatchi who described the process.

And it takes between five and 20 sessions without the scanner.

So before you're even entering the room with the scanner, you've got to get the dog used to keep it.

It's easier to get them into a CAT scan.

No, you've become a little bit more.

Yeah, so

you introduce them to the scanner.

You can't food train them with treats because you can't give a treat to a dog in a scanner because that ruins the whole thing.

You have to start again.

They're not even allowed to lick their lips.

So they have to sit still for what, like 10, 15 minutes.

And if a dog so much as drools, so this is why you can't food train them.

Because if a dog is waiting for a treat, they start to salivate.

And if they're in the MRI scanner and starting to salivate, then they start to dribble a bit, then they lick their lips, then they fucked it up, and you don't get the crucial brain scan.

I'm not sure I could go 10 to 15 minutes without licking my lips.

genuinely yeah and I'm a very creepy guy so that's

everyone's got their thresholds I was gonna say do you know someone else who can't stay still in MRI scanners and that is men oh really yeah because when you look at when you put a man and a woman in an MRI scanner the man will almost always move around more than the woman right and that means that you're not getting correct readings from each person and it means that a lot of the studies that have been done between men and women in MRI scanners might not be 100% true because the men are wiggling around so much.

Okay.

And why are they wiggling?

Because they're men.

What are you guys doing?

Why are they exhausting themselves?

Yeah, possible.

I don't know.

I'm in there licking my lips all the time.

The dog thing, they found out quite a lot of interesting stuff about dogs as a result of the ones they managed to get in there.

And one thing that they found out was that dogs really genuinely love us as humans.

Like they properly, the bits of their brain that activate when bits of them are reminded of us while they're in there.

So there's like if aromas are brought in, if there's a human aroma that comes in, it activates this sort of reward center, it's called, where it sort of shows that they're like, oh my god, it's my owner, this is so exciting.

And that's a connection that we realize is a real thing now.

Because you always think if a dog notices, for example, if you're feeling a bit moody or you think, oh, the dog is picking up on my sympathy, it's not that it's just noticing and changing.

It's look, it's genuinely concerned for you.

It can follow your emotions.

And that's what they were looking at.

And even if there was a group of aromas, they found that the dog would try and prioritize finding the human smell within that just to be like, yeah, my owner's here or a human I know is here.

How pathetic is it that...

What a nice story you had, Dan.

We, sorry, that's lovely, blah, blah, blah.

But how pathetic is it that humans have gone to all the trouble of making this extraordinary machine just to absolutely make sure that dogs love us?

Like the tides were all there from them wagging their tails, they're exciting when we come home.

Let's just go Trey.

I don't think that was the primary reason.

Just quickly, do you know that there are almost no guide dogs called Neil?

Almost none.

I can't guarantee there are none because I haven't really checked, but you know.

Are there any called Fletch?

Exactly.

This is why, so probably not.

Yeah.

Because you can't, you shouldn't name a guide dog after very common commands or something that sounds like a very common command.

So Neil sounds like heel.

Fletch sounds like fetch.

Kit shouldn't be chosen because it sounds like sit.

So there are all sorts of names.

Neil also sounds like Neil.

I don't know why you didn't go for that.

That's what I thought, but then when you were saying that, I was thinking, did the dogs kneel down at all?

Yeah,

what's the common dog command saying, Neil?

Remember, I mean, I can't think of Neil.

Prove that you love me.

Prove that you love me.

Kneel down now.

I can't think of dogs specifically in this, but think of the opening scene of The Lion King when Simba's lift up and they all go down to sort of

Simba is a fucking cat.

No, a dog.

But to be fair, they're both murder.

They are murders.

I preface that by saying I'm not sure there were dogs in that scene.

I'm just saying we do know they do it.

Animals.

They do do it.

They do do it.

But it's not a common dog.

It's like, fetch, roll over.

Sit.

It has recently become quite popular for dogs to take the knee out of respect sometimes.

It has.

And there's not really able to speak speak with it.

At football matches.

Before crufts, before it starts, they all take the name, don't they?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, my God.

Have you guys heard of the 20-inch high club?

Certainly have.

Certainly have.

Go on.

The 20-inch high club is for people, a very elite group of people, small group, who have had sex

in a model plane.

No, one of those planes in a children's like shopping center.

Pop another pounding rod.

Elite.

This elite club.

It's a very small group of people who have had sex inside of an MRI scanner.

And the reason it's called the 20-inch high club is because that's the height and space of the hole that you go into

That the couple go into.

The initial people who first

helped that study, it was a scientist from the University of Groningen, actually.

We've played again in Groningen, and he was called.

There's a loting going on there.

Winebrud Weimar Schultz was the scientist, and he scanned a couple, but it was very hard to do.

It was very hard to get the couple to get the images they needed because

This was what you had to do.

You had to hold perfectly still for a complete minute.

And that's quite hard to do.

The only couple who were able to do it were amateur street acrobats, and so they had the experience and flexibility

to get that right.

To hold still during sex for a minute.

For a minute.

Please.

I've got to say, this podcast is going to be about 12 minutes long when it goes out.

Shall we?

There was.

Can I tell you about one other study in this broad area?

There was a writer,

Kate Sukel, she was called.

She was writing a book about science and sex, and she had to, the study that was being done on her, she had to have an orgasm inside an MRI machine.

Okay, but you know, by herself.

But as Anna and Dan have said, the thing is you have to be very still inside the MRI machine, and it's very hard.

And so, like training the dogs to be incredibly still, she had to train herself.

And this was the mechanism.

She wrote an article in The Guardian all about it.

Amazing

account.

She said she wasn't quite sure she could manage to get all the way there under those incredibly still circumstances.

Because she had to be in a helmet which was screwed to the bed, so incredibly still.

But she managed it.

She managed the training program by attaching a small bell, which belonged to her cat, to her forehead with some duct tape, and then practiced getting there with the minimum jingling possible.

What?

So she

strapped her cat's bell to her forehead.

foreigner.

She didn't get that bit.

Yeah, and then practiced having an orgasm without hearing the bell go once.

Oh.

To stay still.

That was the practice before she came in.

Before she went in.

She wasn't turned on by cat bells.

I mean, by the end of this process, she probably was.

Okay, wow, that's amazing.

Have you guys heard of Dr.

Digge?

No.

This is a guy called Graham Wiggins, and he helped to develop the technology for MRI scanners.

Okay, so without him, we wouldn't have have all of the really sharp images that we have today.

And most of his Wikipedia page is down to a type of didgeridoo that he invented which has got keys in it.

He invented it out of cardboard wrapping paper tube and he only made one of them.

He used it for one gig and it fell apart.

But then he later on played with the Grateful Dead playing the didgeridoo.

Cool.

He's like an amazing didgeridoo player, but he also was one of the main people behind inventing the MRI scanner.

You can definitely see the relationship between a Digiridoo and an MRI scanner.

You just hope that the MRI scanner doesn't fall apart after one go.

Because of the noise that it makes.

Because you go in a big tube and there's a big noise.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Big horrible sound.

You can get, you know,

F MRI scanners, so that's functional MRI scanner scanners.

They're for your brain.

But you can also get a non-functional MRI scanner.

There's one of these at the University of Michigan.

And what the point of this is, is you go in and it doesn't do anything it's supposed to do, but it makes all the noises that an MRI scanner makes.

So it kind of makes an MRI scanner, if you've ever been in one, it makes this really kind of the magnets are really, really strong and it's like this banging and

all this really, really loud noise.

That's a didgerido.

And people feel like they can sometimes, some people actually can make out a tune.

Like their brain turns this really weird noise into a kind of tune.

And if you want to study that, you can't just put loads of people in an MRI scanner because there's too much

electromagnetism and stuff.

And so they need to put them in this fake MRI scanner, which has all the noises, and you can see what's going on with people.

Wow.

Wait, but if it's fake, then you can't see what's going on in their brains because it's fake, right?

Yeah, so it's more experience.

They're not looking at their brains, it's the experience.

I see, okay.

That's the other thing, you know, the ASMR that people report about having.

So that's the idea that if you watch a video on YouTube of someone ironing, it gives you a sort of brain fuzz, like goosebumps around your head.

It's any noise that's...

Yeah, or some people, they say, I'm whispering now, and I'm rubbing the cloth between my fingers.

And that kind of thing.

Some people listening to this are like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

So that's an interesting thing.

It gives some people a really, yeah, exactly, yeah.

And

they're trying to work out what it is in the brain that does that.

So obviously an MRI scanner is the way to find that out.

Unfortunately, it's too noisy in there to even begin that that because it just breaks the spell of it.

So we can't work out what it is yet.

Shit, what a terrible loss to medicine that we'll never know why people get turned on by weirdos whispering to them on YouTube.

Fuck.

I guess we'll just have to keep curing cancer.

Guys, I'm going to have to wrap us up.

Hello, hello.

Yeah, we're out of time.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy,

James,

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 until next time, Belfast, thank you so much for having us.

We will be back.

That was awesome.

Everyone else listening at home, thank you for listening.

We'll be back again next week.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.