407: No Such Thing As An Echidna With An After Eight Mint

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Hi everyone, it is New Year's Eve.

If you're hearing this on the day that this episode drops,

wow, 2021, what a year, eh?

Whoo, dear goodness.

Well, we got through it.

We got through it.

And 2022, I'm sure, will hold lots and lots of exciting things for all of you people and all of us as well.

So what do we have for you this week?

Well, we have a compilation of outtakes from our latest tour.

We like to think that we are the pros.

We've been doing this for 400 episodes.

We've been doing it for almost eight years.

Surely everything is so slick that nothing ever goes wrong.

Well, if you've actually been to one of our shows, you know that things quite often do go wrong.

Sometimes we say things that we can't possibly put out on the podcast unless I very heavily censor them.

Sometimes there's a really good fact and it just doesn't quite fit in the final edit.

Sometimes the set just just falls to pieces all around us.

And so what I've done is I've collected all those things together and put them into a compilation of all the craziest bits from the last few months of touring Fish.

Really hope you enjoy it.

We'll be back with a normal episode for the first show of 2022.

For the time being, hope you enjoy the show on with the podcast.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm 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 a particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Jane's.

What?

Wait, did you not bring your microphone?

Do you know, I'm so relieved about that because I forgot to bring my drinks on.

All right, you two go off cover.

Should we start again?

So it turns out...

Unbelievable.

Listeners at home, James forgot to bring his microphone, Anna forgot to bring her drink.

Welcome in.

I can't work out which is worse.

I'm here, Dan.

Thank you, Andy.

Dan, I don't think anyone's noticed.

I think if we go straight to me then, though.

Brilliantly, it's hilarious you didn't bring your microphone.

I think what's funny is it was only when I was speaking

I started speaking.

I'm like, my voice is a lot quieter than normal.

And you started looking at your empty hands and you're like,

what?

Amazing.

Absolute prose.

Teen years you've been doing this.

Okay, it's time for fact number one and that is James.

Okay, my fatness league.

It's going to make no sense in the edit when this show goes out.

His real name is not Caravaggio.

Yeah, he's actually called Michelangelo, but that name was taken.

So he had to resort to where he was born.

So Leonardo da Vinci, that's not his surname, it's of Vinci.

That's where he's born.

Same thing with Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merici da Caravaggio, of Caravaggio.

And so that just became his nickname.

And do you know why he was called Michelangelo?

No.

It's because he was born, we we think probably, on the 29th of December, which was the feast of the Archangel Michael, which is also my birthday.

Wait,

your birthday's not 29th of December?

September.

Oh, did you say September?

You said December.

Yeah.

Well, by the time the edit goes out, I won't have done.

Is there a reason why clownfish are so good to experiment on?

Do we know?

I'm actually not sure.

We've probably mentioned it at some point in our 300 300 podcast, so you should go back and check it out.

Just kind of funny.

Yeah.

Good looking, yeah.

Photogenic.

You can fit a load of clownfish in the same car, which is useful for research purposes.

That's something.

And do you know why he was called Michelangelo?

No.

It's because he was born, we think probably, on the 29th of September, which was the feast of the Archangel Michael,

which is also my birthday.

I was just looking into names of dentists.

There's always that thing that if you're called dennis you're gonna be a dentist you know more that there's there's the idea and there's been lots of studies to show that dennis or denise you'll be a dentist and uh so i found a few names where it does feel like you're being pulled into it so rachel b pullen was one um

and then in rubland there is a dentistry that are called

denneth and denneth dental practice

what you say that again dentith and dentith

Dentith.

Dentith and dentith.

D-E-N-T-I-T-H and Dentith.

But when they get their braces off, they're going to have to change the name, aren't they?

So good.

In the 1960s, some women were taught how to breastfeed using sock puppets.

Sock puppets.

Sock puppets.

So they would.

They would.

I mean, we're just doing the sock puppet symbol.

Yeah.

They were, well, they were knitted breasts as well.

So there were sock puppets and then knitted breasts to kind of demonstrate how the baby latches on.

Wait, so the sock puppet would suck on the knitted breast as opposed to the real breast.

Yes, that's right.

Like a weird Punch and Judy show.

It's a very weird Punch and Judy show.

In fact, I told one of our colleagues this in the office the other day and immediately he said punch and booby.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There was also an Advent Christmas clock, wasn't there, which had 24 hands on it and so you would move the hand.

Yeah.

24 spots for the hand to move on, and so you would move it each day.

And that was a primitive version of the airport.

Your clock would be so shit.

You'd just want 24 hands and a clock.

Just look at the relevant hand to know what the time is.

Do you remember the time when they asked if they could put our podcast on British Airways flights?

I think it was.

Oh, yeah.

And they said, well, can you go back through your first hundred episodes and remove, we don't want any ones where you mentioned plane crashes.

And it turned out we mentioned it in every single episode.

Yeah,

bizarre.

It was truly bizarre.

It was so weird.

Yeah, it was weird.

We've already done it in this one.

Yeah.

Do you know?

Can I just say a non-orgasm thing to do with llamas, which is that llamas,

there was a photo that was taken in the 20s, which led to an international incident where Tibetan monks were, or monks from, I think they were Tibet, were flown over, and there was a photo taken of them with llamas.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, and this caused, so a llama with a llama was the idea the British did when they brought them over.

And it led to big problems because, so this was part of publicity for a 1924 film, which was filmed by a guy called Captain John Noll, who provided for me the greatest fact that I think I've ever brought to this show, which is he said that it's easier to escape a female Yeti than it is a male Yeti because female Yetis have such long dangling boobs that before they can chase you, they need to chuck them over the shoulders and tie them like a scarf, otherwise they might trip on them as they're chasing you.

And in the time it takes them to do all that, you can escape.

So that's Captain John Knoll, who said that.

And he was responsible for bringing the Llama

to meet the Lama.

So he was the official filmmaker on the Mallory expedition.

He's the one who filmed the whole thing.

He made it into a big movie.

And it was a Hollywood-nominated movie.

And it's still to this day.

It's a classic.

But the publicity that he did is what actually banned any more attempts from happening on on Mount Everest because the authorities were so furious about the way that the religion was parodied by having llamas next to llama, we weren't allowed to go back to Mount Everest for ages.

That's interesting.

That happened when I tried to put some bananas in some pajamas.

It has also happened to me.

Who are you accused of parodying?

The bananas or the pajamas?

I don't know.

I haven't got that far.

I'm wiping out the joke.

Here's one really weird thing.

I don't know if we can do this in the UK.

I unfortunately found this way too late in the day to research this a bit more, but in other countries, this definitely happens.

So imagine you're at home, right, everyone, and the bins have just gone out, and suddenly you realize that you accidentally threw away or must have lost something really precious in the trash.

Yeah, right.

So what you can do, and the story that I was reading about, that's in a bunch of places, but in Montgomery County in Maryland, you can call up your local trash place.

And if the truck is still doing its rounds, they will will separate the truck into a different area when it gets to the dump dump the entire contents out and you can come in to go through all the trash to find your lost thing

so it's a 10 ton pile of trash basically they let you go in it what would it have to be do you think a wedding ring or um you can buy a new ready a passport if you were leaving the country like things a child can throw away a thing right yeah a child's teddy if i lost one of my teddies in the bin when i was four my parents would have both been in that rubbish dump for hours looking for it.

Yeah.

And on their FAQs, when you read their site for doing it, it says time available to work.

And it says, we must clear out all trash that comes into the transfer station before our day is over.

Therefore, we can give you a limited time of 30 minutes for your search.

I mean, we've had a few kind of TV formats that we've been pitching in the past.

This is a TV show waiting to be made, isn't it?

30 minutes, you're going to find your teddy in a whole bunch of shit.

Yeah.

And they sort of go, you might just notice your own personal black bag that you threw away amongst the 10 tons of black bags.

If you label them, yeah, of course.

I mean, don't you label yours?

You sew labels in, don't you?

Those kinds of things.

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Whether you're craving spiced pumpkin, warm amber, or nostalgic woody notes, there's a scent to match every mood in every space.

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We've got to move on in a sec to our next max.

I've just got one more thing.

This is more about...

I was looking into the telescopes and then I was looking into numbers behind them.

So this is a bit of a tangent.

There's a number called Graham's number, which is so big that if you could imagine it properly, it would cause a black hole hole to form inside your head.

What?

No.

Yes.

That's just not what I understand about black holes.

No, it's not bullshit.

It's real.

Black holes form, right, when there's an enormously heavy mass, huge mass in a very small space, right?

Yeah.

This number is so big, there are so many digits in it, that if you, if the smallest measurable space, a Planck volume, was a digit, and you had the entire observable universe to write with, you couldn't write it.

Therefore, if in your head you could conceptualize every single one of those digits, a black hole would form in your head and destroy you.

Which is wow, I've received an unexpectedly small amount of pushback on that fact.

I'm thrilled.

I'm not surprised you didn't get that job on countdown.

Do you guys know there's a plant that lives entirely off bat poo?

No.

And we only realized this recently.

It's a pitcher plant.

So you know those plants are like carnivorous and they're like champagne glasses, champagne fruits and then insects fall into them and they eat them.

But it was really confusing researchers because they weren't trapping any insects.

They didn't have enough of the liquid in them.

They were kind of too big.

But what researchers kept finding was that whole families of bats were nesting inside them.

And turns out they've adapted, they've evolved to just become the home for Hardwick's woolly bats.

This is in Borneo.

And they eat their guano.

So they attract them by basically they're shaped like this parabolic dish.

And so bats give out their sonar.

And then these pitcher plants are the only ones that are shaped perfectly to reflect that sonar straight back to the bats.

That's amazing.

So then they're like, okay, cool, that's the core of my home.

And they go to this plant, they go and live inside it, poo all over it, plant eats it up.

Bob's your uncle.

That's amazing.

Because there's another one that's in Barney, I think, because I remember seeing it.

It's like for, is it shrews as well?

They do kind of a similar thing.

They sit on the edge and then they kind of lick the pollen, but it's a laxative, so it makes them shit everywhere.

And then

the plant just goes, oh, yum.

That's so amazing.

so it feels like the plant is a bit sentient there right i know you're gonna say no but okay let's move on um but the what the so there is a tunnel under mont blanc now oh yeah yeah

yes

like a road tunnel or a rail tunnel uh it's a

it's a look it's a tunnel it doesn't matter whether it's a lockout no it's a road it's a road tunnel it's a road it's a road tunnel isn't it

thanks guys oh okay okay literally everyone in our audience knew that yeah yeah yeah but okay it's it's a road tunnel and it was started by one man who just decided to make a tunnel under Mont Blanc, freelance, off his own bat.

He was a count called Dino Lora Tottina.

He was Italian.

And when he was growing up,

getting between France and Italy around Mont Blanc is a massive pain.

And it took about 18 hours to make the journey.

And he called it an accursed mountain.

He grew up in the shadow of it.

And he became a wealthy businessman.

He owned a wool factory and he said I'm gonna do something about Mont Blanc and he just started digging with no permission from anyone he got 250 meters into the granite on the Italian side and the authorities eventually said what are you doing and they stopped him and then it's fine he was stopped but by that point the plans were in progress and France and Italy eventually agreed they were really nervous about it as well because it was only 15 years after the Second World War ended and they thought well this is feels like giving the other country a route just to pass military vehicles straight into our country.

But they did agree on it, and eventually it was completed in about 1962.

Wow.

And so now, you know, the 18-hour journey takes 10 minutes.

That's so cool.

Yeah, I have been through that tunnel actually because we got a speeding ticket on the French side on the way in, and then on the way out, on the Italian side.

Wow.

That's what an example of learning nothing from pressures.

I went to the dentist for the first time in two years the other day.

Okay.

And I went because I had a bit of a problem.

And when I got there,

the dentist misheard me when I said my name and put me down as Samuel Schreiber.

Okay.

And I didn't correct her.

And so for the whole thing, while she was setting it up, I was called Samuel Schreiber, which I thought was quite cool.

That was a nice, cool name.

Anyway, it turns out when she found out my name wasn't Samuel, she gave me a lot of crap saying, you can't do this.

This is in all the systems now.

This is all the records.

And she spent half an hour undoing it and then ran out of time and she wasn't able to look at my teeth.

So I have to go back in six weeks with a five-year-old.

I'm probably going to say, when she realized it wasn't you, the tooth that she pulled out, she shoved back.

But

it is important to identify people by their dental records sometimes.

That's true.

You know, so if they say, well, we found Anatozinski, James Harkin, Andrew Antamari, and someone called Samuel Schreiber.

It's going to be confusing.

It is confusing, yeah.

And I've got a painful tooth because of my dickheadness.

So, yeah.

Seagulls use humans as taste testers.

This is so weird.

This happens at the seaside.

There's a scientist called Madeline Gumas, and she approached 38 gulls with a bucket, right?

Each bucket had a flapjack in.

Sounds like a riddle, doesn't it?

A wonderful riddle.

She would unwrap both flapjacks, right?

And then she would pretend to eat one of the flapjacks for about 20 seconds.

She's

a sort of mind-nibbling away at it, right?

So then she would put down the flapjacks.

When seagulls approached and got involved with the food that she'd just left, 19 out of 24 times they approached the one that she had been pretending to eat.

Okay, seagulls are way more interesting.

It could just be that they're dicks.

And it's like, oh, she was really enjoying that one, so I'm going to steal that one from her.

Yeah, I mean, her thesis is that they know that a handled food is probably good for you and not going to kill you.

But your theory also cuts a lot of ice, frankly.

But also, maybe the other thing is that it's discarded food.

She ate it, she no longer wants it, so I'll take that, and we're going to have a cool symbiotic relationship.

It's like, cool, I'm not gonna touch your good stuff.

How many seagulls have you met, Dan?

Because

symbiosis is not on their to-do list.

When they steal a chip out of his mouth, it's like, oh, it's okay, I wasn't gonna eat that anyway.

That's nature.

Good on you.

More on the weirdness of echidna bodies, just a bit, because they, you know, we've mentioned a few things, but they have so little stuff that we take for granted.

So they have no stomachs, they have no teeth, they just have to crush their food up against the roof of their their mouth with their tongue.

They have no nipples, so when the baby hatches and is in a little pouch, there are these glands which just leak directly out of their skin.

They're very basic, basically.

They have to pop when just for the baby itself, they have to kind of like curl up and pop it out of their bum.

So that

they're an animal that is called like monohole.

I don't know the words.

Monotreme.

That's it.

It's sort of fact number one about echidnas on the Wikipedia page.

They are a monotreme.

Monohole.

I missed that episode of The Simpsons.

Monohole, Monohole, Monohole.

They are one hold.

It's their bum and they're everything.

Everything.

It's a trial, right?

Yeah.

It's a mono-hole.

Okay, so

they bring it up and then the baby sort of pops out and obviously there's an egg which is cracked and it pops out and then they have a pouch much like a kangaroo does, and the baby crawls along and it goes inside, and that's where the milk is secreted into.

Are you talking about goodness?

Yeah, that's not what happens.

Oh, shit.

How is the baby crawling along?

It's in an egg.

It's what?

The baby's in an egg, right?

So the way the mother...

No,

it's like a kangaroo, isn't it?

A Joey.

It's not.

I'm afraid that's the difference between your monotremes and your marsupials.

Your dolby dreams, yeah.

Right.

Okay, so.

But it is very fun the way they give birth.

The mother, it's much harder than as a kangaroo because you can just give birth and the thing sorts itself out, clutches at your hair and crawls up.

Right.

As an echidna, you lie on your back and you give birth, the egg comes out in egg form, no legs, and they have to sort of shimmy it up their stomach.

A bit like, oh, you know that game where you have to get an after eight down your forehead?

I was just kind of insisting that

pop it in your pouch, and then it sits in your pouch for a few more days.

It's a different game than the after eight comes out of your vagina, isn't it?

Right.

Well, kind of gets late.

Some parties, you know.

Oh my gosh.

I was thinking, yeah, that ping pong ball talent thing.

Oh, it's

they were the originators.

Talent.

It's a talent.

It is a talent.

I haven't seen it.

It is a talent.

Yeah, yeah.

I hadn't.

I thought they'd laid what was inside the ping pong ball and that's what shot out.

I didn't realise that it was.

Anyway, let's move on.

So

in fact, we actually do need to move on to our next.

That was a terrible insight into Dan's internal monologue there, wasn't it?

I felt really alone there.

I think you were alone.

I felt incredible.

I also felt like everyone, 900 people, were going, shh, just a bit.

Let's see where it goes.

Let's see where it goes.

Quite similarly, she was the oldest person ever in a rap song.

And again, someone just recorded her saying, Je ma pel jeim palmont.

What's happening, down have you broken the table my table's falling down

i'm literally holding it up i just

you were telling such a good story i don't want to do anything i actually think we might all be in one of dan's terrible dreams

can't fucking believe it

he's gonna be naked and have to do an exam in a minute

Okay, don't lean on this table, okay, Dan.

Holy shit.

Don't touch it.

I was literally, I was like,

like, who ho, Atlas?

You're like Atlas there, holding up the world.

I like this.

I was reading about this group of people that like to get to the top of a mountain or somewhere a bit hard to get to and set up a jacuzzi.

And then they all hop in the jacuzzi and they managed to do this on the top of Mont Blanc, which even though a lot of people assume it's quite an easy mountain to climb, it's responsible for a huge number of deaths.

It is a very hard mountain to get to.

So they packed up all their stuff and they managed to get this jacuzzi on top of there.

And you can see photos of about 30 people who've gone through all the night tretching up there, yeah, yeah, and setting it up and using it, it's heated by the snow with the system that they have.

Heated by the snow?

Yeah, so they have a system and, oh shit, okay.

So

they put the snow onto these kind of really cool things that then heat up the water that somehow they've brought up with them.

Have they brought water up?

No, you wouldn't bring water to the top of Mont Blanc.

Why would you do that?

That's an unnecessary.

Why would you do that?

So it was really hot because it was powered by snow.

And,

okay, so they get to the top.

Here's the fascinating thing.

They're on the top of Mount Mont Blanc.

And suddenly, this Italian group that climbs up and they see them.

And obviously, it's a shock for anyone that suddenly sees a jacuzzi full of people in their swimwear on the top.

But it just so happens this Italian group had already met these people in a jacuzzi on a previous mountain that they'd been on before,

completely by coincidence, got up there, and they're like, you again.

and they now just think there's someone in a jacuzzi at the top of every mountain don't they that's amazing

that's so funny it is funny and so it doesn't matter about how you can make a jacuzzi

snow

this is this has not been a good one for me guys i'll admit that right now

it's been a shitter um we need to move on to our next fact guys oh can i just talk about an origin of life thing yeah that i really like so there are lots of theories about where life started and most by sensible scientists but one was by an American homeopath at the start of the 20th century called Charles Wentworth Littlefield and it was he was reported as a scientist and it was in all the news that he's found out where life comes from and the way he found it was he took some salt out of one of his patients wounds and he looked at it under a microscope while thinking about chicken and he saw it turn into a chicken.

Sorry.

He took some stuff from a patient's wounds.

Some salts.

Some like bodily, bodily salts, basically sift them out, looked at it under a microscope, thought about a chicken.

It turned into the shape of a chicken, not a live chicken, that would be stupid.

But he realized that by concentrating on any grain of salt, he could make it transform into the thing he was thinking about.

And it was always inanimate until he thought about octopuses, tiny, tiny octopuses.

And then he created live octopuses from these grains of salt.

And he concluded that this must be how life initially formed.

Okay.

Well, who was doing the thinking?

And that's the question.

I suppose that's where God comes into it.

What was the octopus bit though?

He thought of octopuses and they didn't turn into a octopus.

No, no, they did turn into octopuses, but they were alive.

So it was life.

Sorry,

given that all this is complete bullshit,

what's the other thing?

Well, hang on, don't judge it.

Just

because there is a theory as well that octopuses are actually aliens that came to Earth.

And so

that would be the original life, right?

So

this guy was probably just going through every single animal and then suddenly hit on the one that actually, if you stare at it long enough, does turn into a living animal.

I should just say that theory is also bullshit.

I think it's demeaning it.

It's demeaning us, James, to say it's bullshit.

So what was he just crazy this person?

Yeah, he was just taken vaguely seriously in the news at the turn of the century.

And, you know, I like the idea.

And who's tried it?

Who's tried looking at salt and thinking of an octopus?

Not me.

Yeah.

So don't knock it.

Well, listen, okay.

This half of the table thinks there's something to it.

That half of the table doesn't it.

I'm not signing up to this.

Instead of the first car on the moon, we almost had the first pogo stick.

Okay.

There was debate.

So as I said earlier, Apollo 15 was the first mission where there was actually a vehicle that was driven around.

They drove it around and they were there for three days.

They drove it around for like...

At least six hours a day, which actually is just quite a long time to people.

And they had to wear seat belts.

The seat belts really didn't fit.

And they took ages to get the seat belts on, which seems so weird to me.

How many obstacles are there?

How many cars coming out you can?

There's a lot of rocks around.

Yeah, there are a lot of rocks.

Okay, I reckon I could hack it.

I don't know if I wear the seatbelt.

That's the main question at the NASA astronaut selection, actually.

Do you reckon you could hack it?

Yeah.

Come on, come on in.

Anyway, there were lots of ideas for what kind of vehicle to design for the moon.

NASA was very interested in a motorcycle at first.

I thought that might work.

And then there was the idea for a giant pogo stick, which would be be manned by two people.

I think sort of one on each

things that you do to get yourself along the railway tracks.

You know, those things.

No, but it's manned by two people, you know.

But so is a pedal.

It's not.

A seesaw.

Don't think the audience needed a simile for manned by two people.

I just trusted people to picture it.

They'd each be standing at one end of the pogo stick, and then one would go up and one would go down at the same time.

That is a seesaw.

That's a pogo stick.

Yeah.

Okay.

Look, we've drilled down, we've ascertained.

I don't know what a pogo stick is.

You are failing that NASA interview.

Very sad.

If they're testing laboratories, dog food is often used to put down them because it has a sort of...

And to simulate the stuff.

Yeah, it's got the same consistency

as my poo, for example.

Do you get it in jelly or in gravy?

Okay.

My poo?

Okay.

Sure.

You know,

there's quite a range of textures, isn't there?

But I suppose that's true of poo and dog food.

James, I want to split off and start a round podcast

just on this table.

There used to be a takeaway place near me that would cut off the top of a loaf of bread, and they'd hollow it out, and then they'd just pour in a stew, and they'd give you the bread.

That sounds great.

That was nice, it wasn't it.

South African thing, I think.

Okay.

Say again.

Bunny chow.

Sunny chow.

Bunny chow.

Bunny chow.

I don't think it was a bunny in it.

I think it was a vegetarian option, but it's very nice.

Wow.

William Christmas, very quickly,

the aviator, he claimed to be the third person to fly in America.

But we think he probably didn't because his planes were all terrible.

He kept inventing these really awful planes.

So there's one called the Christmas Bullet.

The wings were supposed to flap as you flew, but unfortunately they crashed on its maiden flight.

And then they made another one and that one crashed as well.

He made another design where it was a plane which had a huge hole in the top.

His idea was, right, if you get a parachute, a lot of parachutes have a hole in the top, and that's because you don't want all the air to properly, just get properly into the parachute, otherwise, it might get a bit wobbly.

So he thought, why don't I do that for a plane?

Interesting.

I hope they tell you when you do a parachute jump about the whole thing, because I can't imagine how fucking terrified I'd be if my parachute and I looked up, there was a huge hole in the top.

It could be worse.

James, when you said they have to have a hole at the top, I just thought, I thought you were going to say, because obviously if the air all goes up in there, it just gets gets stuck in there and you just stay where you are in the sky.

That's how that works.

Yeah.

Do you know that you may have seen it?

Actually, this is like extremely cutting-edge soup news right now.

Heinz have just released a Christmas soup, which is very exciting.

They've just announced it as a kind of PR thing.

They've only made 500 tins, but it's got, you know, everything.

It's got turkey, sprouts, stuffing, roast potatoes, pigs and baggage, gravy, cranberry sauce.

Well, I mean, that sounds all right because it's at least it's one course.

Have they just mushed it all up?

No, you get chunks of turkey and things like that.

Yeah, there are chunks.

James, don't worry.

There are chunks.

But it could be worse, because in 2013,

Game, the video game people, they launched a thing called a Christmas tinner, which was for people too addicted to video games to cook anything on Christmas Day.

And the top layer was scrambled egg and bacon.

Then there was a layer of mince meat.

Then there there was some turkey and trimmings, and then there was a Christmas pudding in the bottom of the tin.

Where are all the quality street?

Wow.

Are you allowed to eat a painting?

What do you mean, are you allowed to eat a painting?

Legally, if you own a painting, this is

if you own it, you can do what you want.

Well, you're absolutely right.

Okay, it's time for

fate number three and that's.

Eddie La?

Eddie La for that though?

Not really.

Is that

myth-busted?

Just, you know, would you be allowed to eat the Mona Lisa if you owned it, if you owned it?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you're right.

Has someone put this in the statute books?

Yes, they have.

Thank you, Anna.

Good question.

It's the 1990...

Oh no, hang on.

No, it is alright, actually.

There are laws about works that might still be in copyright, so if it's within 75 years of the artist's death,

or works that are protected under the 1992 Visual Artist Rights Act, you're not allowed to eat some of those protected ones.

But the good news is, anything from Caravaggio's time is on the menu.

Oh, wow.

That's interesting.

I mean, we really had to pull it out of you, but that's 75 days after years.

75 days.

I was just picturing somebody who's really drooling me.

okay cool 75 years.

That's Christmas lunch sources in the Hunter Murray household.

Oh boy.

I think the very first ever study of it, the long-beaked echidna, it's called, was published in 2009.

And even then the study author, who was a guy called Muse Opiang, spent 500 hours studying them before even seeing one.

Wow.

Was he studying them then?

Really, for that first 500 hours?

He was warming up.

He was doing stretches.

They are quite hard to find, though, aren't they?

There was a guy, the first scientist to study the testicles of echidnas.

He did that by employing Aboriginal people to find these echidnas for him.

And he always paid more for the females because it was more hard to find the females.

And actually, we now think that of all.

Junior, it is much harder to find the females' testicles.

Is that what you said?

He did lots of studying, but he happens to be the first person to have studied the testicles.

And this guy actually committed suicide.

He was a German scientist.

he committed suicide in 1918 while wrapped in a german flag because he was so upset with the way the war was going right uh but yeah he was most famous i think for studying the testicles of the echidnas and his name was dick seaman no what

what richard w seaman oh my god that's incredible a change your name b don't study testicles if your name is dick seman

i mean the guy was obviously a troubled man let's not kick him while he's down

okay fair enough Seriously, weird thing.

So random.

On soup, Ted Cruz, you remember Ted Cruz, came second to Trump in the primaries.

2016, during those primaries, his wife revealed that after they got back from their honeymoon, the first thing he did was he went out to the shop, said he was going shopping.

He came home and all he had was 100 cans of Campbell's soup.

And so

she said, we had to have a tough conversation.

I explained to him, you don't come back with 100 of anything, let alone Campbell's soup.

He said, you know, you're not going to cook, cook, love, so this is what I'll be eating for the rest of our marriage.

And she was, look, he didn't say, put it in those terms, don't worry.

But basically, that's what he said.

She snuck out and returned them all the next morning before he woke up.

And then she talked to her mum on the phone, and her mum said, Are you going to cook for him though?

And she went, No, I'm a terrible cook, can't cook at all.

Her mum was like, Go and get the soup back.

She went and got the soup back.

No, yeah,

and that's that's a beautiful marriage, right there.

There's one cashier at the soup shop who has no idea about this whole story, just knows a weird thing where some guy turned up, bought 100 tins, lady came and took them away.

Yeah, then returned, demanded the back.

What's going on?

Am I on a reality TV show?

Can I tell you one more trick?

Yeah, and we're going to have to wrap up in a sec.

Okay, this is a trick by one of the greatest magicians of all time, Robert Houdin, who Houdini got his name from.

This is the trick.

He would take a handkerchief from an audience member.

He would turn that into a file of liquid, he would pour that liquid on a dry twig, that would sprout and grow into a bush.

The bush would then grow oranges on it.

Robert Houdin would pick the oranges off the bush, he would throw them into the audience one by one, at the final one he would split open, out of that final orange, two butterflies would fly, living butterflies, holding the handkerchief between them

and return it to the audience member.

Return it!

The butterflies would return it.

And we're going to do that tonight, ladies and gentlemen.

But unfortunately, no one has a handkerchief anymore.

Sorry.

Can I just tell you one more thing about postcards?

Yeah, sure.

In 2017, Europol, so kind of like Interpol, but for Europe, they started trying to catch criminals through the mechanism of postcards.

They developed these postcards, each one featuring one of Europe's highest profile fugitives.

And they said things like,

you know, dear Arthur, Belgium fries are the best, and we know you missed them.

Come back to enjoy them.

We'll have a nice surprise in store for you.

That was for a famous drug dealer.

So, did they send them to him?

Did they send the postcards?

Published them and made people aware that these people were.

I was going to say, if he knew where he lived, to send him a postcard.

That's true.

So true.

Hi, David.

We've been trying to get hold of you because there is still so much to discuss.

Please get in touch soon, the police.

That was for someone accused of multiple, quite serious sexual offences.

And they won an award for it.

And three criminals were...

Sexual offenses.

They didn't win a sorry.

Okay.

It's hard, it's very hard to transplant testicles, obviously,

onto a different part of the body.

Oh, sorry.

So, actually.

Which part of the body was it?

It's actually a lot easier to transplant testicles onto a different part of the body than into a scrotum.

And this has been tested on

rats.

So a few years ago, a team put a load of testicles of rats, they did some transplants, they moved the testicles either into other rat scroti

or onto the necks of the other rats.

And it had a much higher success rate, the transplant, if the testicles were just put on the necks of the rats.

Yeah, but you'd be pissed off with your surgeon when you woke up if they said, Well, transplant was successful.

Of course, it was easier to do it onto your forehead, and so that's where we put it.

Yeah, it's strange that you have a tiger with canine teeth because they're felines, but they've got canines.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, that's weird though, isn't it?

It makes you think.

What does it make you think about?

It doesn't really make me think about anything.

It just makes me think in a kind of abstract way.

Bill Gates is intending to block out the sun.

What do you mean?

He wants to use some of his money to help scientists at Harvard University who are proposing an experiment that can hopefully stop global warming warming by sending a balloon up there, sending a load of particles into the atmosphere where the sun's rays will come down, bounce off into space and it will be less hot on Earth.

Okay.

I can't see that going wrong.

No.

Wouldn't it also look?

Why not?

Let's do it.

Let's do it.

I'm up for it.

Isn't it going to look like we're at a worldwide children's birthday party?

That's quite cool.

That would be cool.

That's cool.

That would be cool.

He's one of the few people in the world who has a McDonald's gold card.

And I don't know if it's connected to this.

What's that?

McDonald's gold card is where you can go to any McDonald's, you hand it in, and no matter what you've ordered, they give it to you for free.

Oh, thank God.

Because otherwise, how would he be able to afford a Big Mac?

So we don't have it in the UK.

What we have is the Nando's black card, which is quite a famous card, which I've experienced a couple of times.

It's like, what?

I have, yeah.

A couple of friends of mine have had it.

So Tom Davis, who is King Gary, he once had it.

The other guy had to stop using it because he was.

Good luck with the Nando's lawsuit Dan

I am not saying

good point let's edit that we're not saying that Nando's

we're not put it from your mind

there was an amazing thing that happened in the Netherlands at the start of this year actually it was the end of last year and that was that there was an Armenian family who'd been living in the Netherlands for nine years and the country had decided they wanted to deport them and they were like well we we can't go back to Armenia because if we go back, you know, we'll get we'll be in terrible trouble.

And they said to the church, what are we going to do?

And apparently, there's an old and obscure Dutch law that police aren't allowed to arrest someone in the middle of a church service.

And so, the local church started a mass that went on for 24 hours a day for 97 days

while this family were living in the church.

They started off doing it for a few days, a few days.

Eventually, more than 650 clergy members were signing up to be the next person to do it.

They kind of tag-teamed all the priests.

And eventually, the government just thought, fuck this.

And they went, fine, you can stay, you can stay, you can stay.

Oh, really?

I would have thought they'd go, fuck this, we're going to walk in and arrest you anyway.

It's the law.

You can't break the law if you're a government, can you?

Well.

Carl Faggio died maybe of sunstroke, we think.

Really?

Really?

Yeah, well, this is what people have claimed.

I couldn't find what their evidence was, except that.

So, researchers, there's this big mystery of how he died, all shrouded in mystery.

Like, was he murdered?

Was he poisoned?

Did he have syphilis?

And they thought in 2010 that they found some of his bones, fragments of his bones.

They studied his bones, these researchers, and they said it showed signs of lead poisoning and syphilis, but they think what eventually killed him was sunstroke.

And then the only evidence I could find that they had was that

1610 1610 was an extremely hot year.

Sense to reason, does it?

That makes sense, yeah.

It's been quite cold this winter.

In future, every single person who died this year, people will look at them and go, I reckon that was the cold that killed this one.

I'm not sure they were.

It was a very heavy cold.

A bit too much Nando, Sarah.

No, we can't keep that in.

We have to.

It has to stay.

Who's more litigious?

Gates or Nando's?

We'll find out when this episode goes out.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Very much hope you enjoyed that show.

If you would like to get in touch with me, you can find me on Twitter and I can be found at James Harkin.

Andrew Hunter Murray can be found on at AndrewHunterM.

Daniel Schreiber Schreiber can be found on at Schreiberland.

And if you would like to get in touch with Anna, you can email her on podcast at qi.com.

We also have our group Twitter account, which is at no such thing.

And if you are the lawyers of Bill Gates or Nando's, or indeed anyone that we have libeled on this week's podcast, then it's Christmas, guys.

Give us a break.

We were only joking.

Okay, listen, we'll be back next week at the start of 2022, can you believe it?

With a whole new episode.

so we will see you then.

Goodbye.