391: No Such Thing As A Sausage Swingboat

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Hi everyone, James here.

Now, as you will have noticed the last few weeks, it is holiday season for us, mostly because we have a brand new, massive, stonking UK and Ireland tour just about to happen, and we need to get as much rest as we can before that happens.

By the way, you can get tickets for that by going to qi.com/slash fish events.

But anyway, what do we have for you this week?

Well, we have another compilation.

The last one went down so well.

You all sent loads of really nice messages about how much you enjoyed it.

So it's another hour of us being so silly.

These are the times when everything got derailed a little bit too much, so we couldn't fit it into the actual show.

But I always gather them together because they're always so much fun.

And I put them in a nice little package for you guys.

We will be back again next week with a normal episode.

It was recorded while I was away, actually.

It's another super special guest.

one that I particularly am quite upset that I wasn't there for because it's a really good friend of ours, someone who's incredibly interesting and funny.

I'm actually really, really looking forward to listening to that one myself because I haven't heard it yet.

But anyway, for the meantime, please do enjoy this compilation and we'll see you as a forestom on the road or on this podcast feed very, very soon.

Okay, on with the podcast.

Do you guys know Soldier Boy?

Soldier Boy, tell him.

You guys know.

Come on, guys.

He's a rapper.

He's a rapper.

Okay.

He's got a song called Kiss Me Through the Phone, which gives a phone number

halfway through it.

And a load of people decided to call it, and it turns out to be a house in Oldham.

Who, according to The Guardian, were getting a load of crank calls.

But I don't need to tell you, guys, that that's a terrible missed opportunity because one of his main songs is called Crankbat.

So they've

called it Crank Calls.

Crankbat Calls, yeah, probably.

Okay.

Wait, what's that?

I really misjudged my audience with this one.

Who are you aiming at that?

It feels like Dan might have had a prayer.

Anna hasn't heard anything since Cole Porter.

Britain's leading female table tennis player is this woman, this girl called Tintin Ho.

And do you guys...

Can you guess why she's called that?

She's got a quiff, Tintin.

That's why I was being a little bit more.

She's got a small dog called Snowy.

Confusingly, it's not related to the character of Tintin Ho.

Wait, she hangs out with an old fisherman called Captain Haddock.

Again, it's not like a skinny.

She has a pair of twins that she hangs out with called the Thompson twins.

You can't just stop us making Tintin jokes, Anna, immediately.

You've got to live with them.

Her father is called Herge.

Right.

As I have made quite clear, it's not related to Tintin.

And there must be other avenues you can pursue.

She's Belgian.

Tintin.

Right.

I'm just going to tell you, okay?

No, no, no, no, no, no.

I feel like we're close.

She's made of tin.

Yeah.

Hey, he's found something different.

But incorrect.

No, it's because her dad is obsessed with table tennis.

And it actually sounds kind of weird.

Sorry.

it's coming it's coming

I was so sure you were gonna say her dad is obsessed with Tintin

I wish I hadn't brought this up

he's obsessed with table tennis and the initials of table tennis are T T so we call that a Tintin and in fact her brother is called Ping and she said there was it was between her being called Tintin and her being called Pong when she was born and so she says that she is delighted that she didn't get belonged to her.

You can't have two kids and call them ping and pong.

The social services will get involved.

You would think.

Here's a stolen dog.

In 1860,

during the Second Opium War, the Anglo-French looted and burned the summer palace and found five Pekingese dogs guarding a corpse of a lady.

And so they stole the dogs.

And one of them was given to Queen Victoria, who renamed her Lootie after all the all the looting that the British were doing in China at the time.

Lol.

Isn't that amazing?

That is quite open.

I would have thought she would name it something like completely legal taking of stuff.

Wow, PG Woodhouse, he collected Pekingese dogs or he bred them or he, you know, he had dozens of them.

Did he steal them from

he stole all of them from China?

Yeah.

Oh really?

That's why his books have very low sales figures there.

It's really interesting that Pekingese,

like, they're quite small, aren't they?

But they almost look a bit like a lion.

Because they've got, like, a mane kind of around their face.

And there are a few myths about where they came from.

According to one myth, a lion fell in love with a marmoset.

And he begged the gods to shrink him in size so that he could have sex with a marmoset.

And they did.

And that's where the Pekingese came from.

You think you'd go the other way around?

You'd pray for a massive marmoset, yeah.

Expand the marmoset, oh God.

Actually, so that I may shag it.

No, I'd rather a tiny lion.

Take it back.

There's another theory, this isn't a myth, there's another theory that Buddhist monks,

like in Buddhism, a lion is a symbol of strength, is a symbol of wisdom, and they wanted to have dogs that looked like a lion, so they bred Pekingese to look like lions.

Which is true.

We might never know.

There was a guy who was a stunt flyer back in the very early days of flight called

Al Wilson.

And he hit golf balls off planes, which is not as impressive as scoring a putt on Concorde, except that he was standing on top of the plane at the time.

So he would climb up onto the top of a biplane and just do amazing drives off it.

There are photos of him doing that.

That's cool, true.

How is the air friction there not knocking the golf ball off the tee?

I don't.

I don't.

Maybe he nailed a tee into the top of the biplane before clambering up.

But you'd have to nail the ball also onto the T, which you nailed.

Yes, maybe he did that too.

And then...

Well, then how did he hit it?

Maybe.

Okay, you've got to do that.

You haven't looked into this, have you?

Maybe it was one of those Velcro balls, you know, that you throw at paddles.

Maybe he just Velcro did it.

Yeah, that's true.

You have thought about this, haven't you?

Except, hang on, he was in the 1920s and Velcro hadn't been invented at the time.

Damn.

So maybe he is the unrecognized inventor of Velcro, and we are giving him his moment of glory.

Excellent.

Well, Al Wilson, congratulations.

Gibraltar named after Jabel al-Tariq,

who was the general who brought the Islamic army from North Africa into Spain when Spain became an Islamic country in whenever that was, the 8th century or whenever it was.

But he was in charge of the whole army.

They came over, they landed in Gibraltar, they took over most of the Iberian Peninsula.

There was him, who was Jabel al-Tariq, and there was another guy called Musa who were in charge, these two generals.

And then, for some reason, in 714, they were both accused of misappropriation of funds, sent back to Damascus, and they both died in complete obscurity.

So they were the ones who brought the Islamic invasion into Spain.

And for the reason, now that, you know, there's a lot of Islamic culture still there, a lot of buildings and stuff.

But yeah, they just got kicked out for nicking a load of money.

Right.

Wow.

Yeah.

Fittingly, it's known as a little bit of a tax haven now.

So I suppose

doing him proud, the money nicker.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, that's the thing about money.

It's very moorish.

Nice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I like that one.

Probably one of the most famous fictional minerals in the world is kryptonite, I would argue.

Kryptonite was invented as an idea for being a thing of vulnerability for Superman that would make him really sick because when the first radio series happened in America, the actor who played Superman, who obviously had to be there all the time, was desperate to have holidays, and they couldn't have holidays because he's the main character.

So if in a previous episode kryptonite was introduced, like he was hidden behind a door where kryptonite was holding it closed, the actor, Bud Collier, could go on holiday and not have to be in the episode.

And the rest of the cast would be going, Poor Superman, where's he disappeared to?

But we all know he's behind the door.

He can't say anything.

Yeah.

How boring were the episodes where Superman wasn't in them?

What happens in those?

Just everyone going, I wonder where he is.

Is he better?

Have you seen him?

Did you give him Lem Sip?

Do you think Lem Sip works against kryptonite?

Oh, yeah, it's the only one.

Yeah,

um, it's so weird how long we went without dissecting human bodies.

So we just we,

I will claim responsibility.

I've done at least three weeks.

So the first known dissections in the West, at least, were Herophilus and Erasistratus, and this was the third century BC.

And so this is quite revolutionary.

They thought if we start cutting into human bodies, we can figure out how they work, what the anatomy is.

And they died.

And it immediately went out of fashion.

People said, we don't actually need that.

It's totally unnecessary.

It's kind of gross.

It's ungodly.

Then the Christians came along and they totally banned it.

And we don't really think anyone dissected a human body for science for another 1600 years until about 1231, the Holy Roman Emperor said, actually, we should start doing this and made a decree that medical students had to.

And so there was this rush on bodies.

And there was such a rush that there was a big old shortage.

So demand and supply didn't work out.

And so there became a situation where by the 15th century in Italy, medical students had to pay for the funerals of corpses.

And that would be their way of saying, Look, I'm going to pay you, but you have to give me that corpse afterwards.

So, basically, you can get your funeral expenses paid by a doctor,

as long as they then cut you open.

Yeah, but at the end of the funeral,

plop you over their shoulder and walk off with you, it doesn't shield.

I don't think they would do that.

I think they'd wait for the curtains to go across before they did that.

I don't think someone's walking in going, Are you done with that?

I paid good money for that.

Have you guys heard of Jacqueline Auriol?

No.

So she was the daughter-in-law of the President of France in the 1940s after the war.

And she helped to decorate some of the rooms of the Elysee Palace after the war.

And she was known as one of the most elegant women in all of Paris.

And then in 1948, she thought, fuck this, the Elysee Palace, it's fine, it doesn't need any more work.

So she decided to become an aerobatic pilot.

And she got into a massive crash and crashed into the Seine.

She had to have 22 operations to rebuild her face.

Wow.

That was how bad the crash was.

But then in 1953, she became one of the first ever test pilots to fly Concorde.

And she was the first woman to fly Concorde.

Really?

Yeah, imagine that for a C V to go from like interior design in the palace in Paris and then to that.

Yeah, that is incredible.

Yeah.

But no one would believe you were the same person because you've got the rebuilt face.

Oh my god, I'm just...

That's so right.

It's not the same person, is it?

No.

You've fallen for a really obvious breakdown.

Is it Conair where they changed the face of Nicholas Cage and stuff?

Yeah, I think so, yeah.

Is it Connor?

Face-off.

Oh, face-off.

Yes.

Face-off is the same plot as Conair, isn't it?

Apart from the face-off filming off.

I think Face Off and Conair, the merging of the two, is your story.

Your story lands right in the middle.

I just have one more recent dognapping that I liked.

This was a journalist in Boston called Juliana Matzer.

Did you see her?

She was reporting on a dog that had been stolen in the local area.

Clinton Slow News Day.

She's speaking on camera about a missing German shorthand pointer and she spots a man who matches the photos that have been put out, the CCTV photos of the dog been stolen, with the dog that looks like the dog.

So she goes up to him and she said, hey, can I just pet your dog?

Checks its collar.

It is, lo and behold, the stolen dog.

So on camera, you can watch it it's very awkward interview she says is this your dog and he's like um no it's not it's been missing for a day for 24 hours and she says why do you have it and he says I walked past a car and it was barking and I thought it was the dog that I was supposed to be walking because I'm a dog walker so often it's got into a car

so he was tired of walking

so I broke into the car and I took it and she said why didn't didn't you call the number of the person on the dog collar?

And he said, I was sort of trying, but my phone broke and then I lost my phone.

Simple mistake.

This guy's had a horrible day.

Well, that's an incredible story, Anna.

But also, what the hell kind of TV station is doing news video packages about a lost dog within 24 hours?

It's like I say, slow news day in Boston.

I should also say the verdict has not been returned on his guilt, I don't think, so jury is out.

Okay.

Jury's out.

Well, good luck to him.

Can we get done for subjudiciousness?

Definitely.

I don't think so.

Do you know where the American fear of sharks throughout the general poplace comes from, where it originated?

No.

So it wasn't jaws?

It was

before Jaws, for sure.

Ooh, okay.

Does it originate in the fact that sharks eat people in the water?

But they don't tend to eat you if you live in Montana.

No.

It basically comes, we think, probably from World War II.

There were lots of stories, especially in the newspapers.

This did happen, that planes would kind of crash in the water and then the sharks would

get the people.

But it didn't happen that often, but the newspapers used to report that it was happening all the time.

But nevertheless, the US military needed to come up with a way to stop sharks attacking not just people who've crashed, but also munitions.

So if you're in a submarine, you need to stop them from coming towards the munitions.

So the Office of Strategic Services, which was that kind of

office which kind of came up with lots of wacky, kind of dick dastardly plans,

they hired someone called Julia Child as part of their team to try and work out...

The chef.

The chef, yes.

What?

So before she became a chef, she was a person who worked in the war to try and come up with ways to stop sharks from attacking people and munitions.

And she tried things like clove oil, horse urine, nicotine, rotten shark, asparagus.

She tried all these things to try and stop sharks from coming near them.

And in the end, none of them really worked that well.

And so they came up with this thing called shark chaser, which was a little pill.

And you would put it in the water.

and it would release like a die into the water so the shark wouldn't be able to see you.

So it wouldn't repel it, but it would stop it from being able to find you.

That is crazy.

God, it's awful if you confuse a Julia Charles recipe with one of her shark repellents, isn't it?

Well, she's for anyone who doesn't know her, she was the one who basically brought French cuisine to Americans.

So

she was huge.

She was massively famous.

She had her own cooking show, didn't she?

One of the first people to do that.

She was huge.

Another good CV.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Amazing TV.

And you're sure it wasn't someone with the face transplant, James.

Was it Nicholas Cage?

There was a thing in 2012 where Boeing, the plane company, fixed their Wi-Fi on their planes using 9,000 kilos of potatoes.

Okay.

So did they just happen to have so much potatoes on board the flight at the time or?

I think they specially got them in.

And they got them in to pretend to be humans because they needed to test the Wi-Fi on their planes and where you get you know hot spots and then cold areas and you wanted to fix it all the way through

and it turns out that potatoes block internet signals in much the same way that human bodies do and so they got 9,000 kilos of potatoes and just sat them in the seats of the plane and pretended that they were people and

tested it that way and they didn't need paying and they didn't need feeding what

that's great this is so weird they have the same water content as humans like that kind of thing, right?

Yeah, I guess so.

And they're maybe about as dense as humans.

It reminds me of the time when I was on a plane and the Wi-Fi stopped working and I asked them to turn it off and turn it back on again.

And they said, we think this is the button, but we've never pressed this button on the plane before.

And I said, let me come and have a look at it.

And I looked.

I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the router button.

Wow.

Sorry, they took your advice.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Random dude on the plane.

Cool.

Right.

That's amazing.

Well, I I had my, it was the NFL draft for my fantasy football team, and I really needed to get on the antenna.

Wow.

Right.

What would, James?

That's real confidence in your abilities at identifying a router.

What else is it going to be?

What a weird place to put the ejector seat

or the spontaneous combustion button.

You never know.

All planes have one.

They always put it right next to the router.

And no more.

Table tennis was a a big thing in Britain in the sort of early 20th century.

I think it was kind of invented in the 1880s, went under, came back in the 1920s, and was popularised by this guy, Ivan Montague.

Did you read about him?

No.

No.

He's.

That's disappointing because this is going to be a long section.

Have you not noticed?

We've been doing this for eight years now, and we always say no.

Whenever someone says, have you heard of this person?

We always say no.

Because otherwise, it'd be a pretty.

Yeah, yeah, we've all done the research.

I genuinely haven't, though.

I've no idea about this seminal figure in table tennis.

I thought I covered the bases.

I haven't, clearly.

Well, Ivor, surprise for you, Andy, because Ivor Montague is the, thank you, grandfather of table tennis in Britain.

But he was also a spy.

So he's such an amazing character.

He founded the English Table Tennis Federation, and then he founded the International Table Tennis Federation in 1926.

Clever.

More spying opportunities internationally.

Nice.

Well, you joke.

But British intelligence was incredibly suspicious of him all the way through the war, World War II, because of his ping-pong habit.

Yeah, because he kept standing in airports with two ping-pong bats in his hands, didn't he?

Yeah, just redirecting planes into the English Channel.

Because they thought it was so weird.

So there's a letter from an MI6 agent who writes to the agent in Bulgaria, basically about all these letters that are being exchanged between Ivor Montague and these two guys in Bulgaria.

And they're sort of discussing like intricate details of the game, they discuss bat weight, they discuss the spin on different balls.

And MI6 was convinced this was code.

And so he wrote to this agent in Bulgaria and said, Look, you've got to investigate these two Bulgarians.

He said, the reason for our interest will appear to you rather quaint.

But the thing is, they write interminably to Ivan Montague about table tennis and trying out of table tennis balls.

So

the agent in Bulgaria investigated these guys and replied saying, it seems as though these guys are just perfectly solid individuals who spend their time testing table tennis balls.

And that was that.

Wow.

Seemed that way.

It did.

But the big reveal in the 60s was that he was in fact a Soviet spy.

Really?

Yeah.

So he was.

Wait, wait, wait.

But were they writing about table tennis balls as well?

Do we know that element of the story?

It's not clear.

We know he loved table tennis.

It doesn't seem to have been declassified whether or not this was code.

So

I don't know.

He was really into the game and a spy.

What do you think?

What do you think is the world record for slicing the most watermelons in half on your stomach with a sword in 60 seconds?

Oh, no, no, no.

I know the queen has this record.

I just want to read this.

It was a record beaten by friend of the show, Ashrita Furman, who his life's work is just to get as many random Guinness Book of Record things as possible.

60 seconds on your belly with a sword, slicing them on the side.

He's slicing them himself.

He's slicing them himself.

You're not allowed to wear any protection, so you're slicing down on a sword onto your stomach, basically.

Yep.

14.

Oh, I see.

You're lying on your back.

Oh, wow.

Is someone placing the watermelons or do you have to?

Someone would place them onto him each time.

Okay.

14 sounds like a very sensible bet from Anne.

That's quite ambitious.

Because you'd get to 13 and you'd think, oh my god, I don't want to do the unlucky one.

I'm holding a bloody sword.

I'd better slice really, really fast and hard this 40th one.

I'm going to say 23.

Oh, come on.

Yeah.

That's what I said.

This guy's a record holder.

Yeah.

Well, that is really close.

It's 26.

It's 26.

And there was an interview with Mr.

Thurman who said, my first reaction is, I'm relieved I didn't kill myself.

Do you know what you used to do in the 14th century in the Sahara if you got bitten by a snake?

Come on, guys, we've all done the research.

We all must know this.

We know this, yeah.

It's so hard faking not knowing any of this stuff.

What you would do is you would cut the throat of your camel and you would put your hand into the camel's stomach and leave it there for the whole night.

And in theory, that would suck out the poison and you would be fine.

I learned this from there was an account of a traveler, a Moroccan traveller called Ibn Battuta.

He traveled more than Marco Polo, who went 15,000 miles.

He went 72,000 miles all the way around the world.

He was an amazing traveller.

And when they went through the Sahara, this was the trick that they used.

Unfortunately, it didn't really work, and the guy had to have his fingers cut off anyway.

But it was worse for the camel, let's face it.

It was worse for the camel, definitely.

No one comes out of this well, I must say,

apart from possibly Dan, because when I was reading this account, I read that when they ran out of water, they would kill an antelope and they would drink water from the entrails of the antelope, which many, many, many years ago, Dan, I think, said on this podcast, and we all poo-pooed it.

But this, in the 14th century, this is what this traveller used to do.

Vindicated.

This is genuinely like five years later.

We were just doing that thing where we pretended not to know the fact, you know?

We all knew it was true.

One landlord was sacked for selling hay out of the back of the pub.

So there were strict rules.

This was Dora, right?

This was Dora who did this.

The old

cow, miserable old cow, Dora.

The Defence of the Realm Act, which had loads of other fun rules as well, as well as all this pub stuff.

So you weren't allowed to light bonfires or fireworks or fly a kite, I think, in case it was mistaken for a bomb.

A Zeppelin.

A Zeppelin, yeah.

You weren't allowed to whistle for a taxi in case that was mistaken for an air raid siren.

What?

Which taxi?

How loud is your whistle?

People whistled louder back then, famously.

If you can mistake whistles for air raid sirens, then when the actual air raid siren went off, were a load of taxi drivers driving around looking for these

rides the whole time.

It was absolutely tragic.

Yeah, orange lights going on across London.

Yeah.

All killed.

The Doctor Who theme tune was written by an Australian composer called Ron Grainer, the melody, but actually the importance of it is the crazy effects, right?

It's this amazing piece of electronic music and really when it was invented there wasn't really a such thing as electronic music or there kind of was but it definitely wasn't popular it wasn't done much and the mix was made by a musician called Delia Derbyshire and she basically took each note of the melody and individually made it by taking a version of it played on some strings and then kind of speeding it up, slowing it down, splicing it with something else.

Every single note was put together to come up with this amazing, iconic theme tune.

And Delia Derbyshire was brought up in Coventry in 1940, and she said she was inspired to get into music by the sound of the air raid sirens as the Germans were bombing Coventry.

And it was those kind of noises that got her interested in sounds, and that eventually got her interested in music.

So,

what a glass half-full kind of people she obviously was.

That's true.

That's so funny.

I have actually been to a place which has an annual tooth festival.

Oh,

I think I do.

Really?

I do as well, actually.

Is it like one of Buddha's tooth?

It's the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy in Sri Lanka.

And the town is called Kandy.

And

it's a tooth of the Buddha dating to about 300 AD.

You can't really see it when you go there, when you're in the temple, because it's in a casket which contains five progressively smaller caskets.

And in the smallest casket is the Buddha's tooth.

And it's an incredible bruhaha every year.

I wasn't there at the time of the festival, annoyingly, but there's drumming, music, there's dancing, there's cannon fire, massive great elephants, many with their own biographies on Wikipedia now.

The elephants parade through the elephants.

Yeah, four of the main elephants, they're called Tuskers, you know, they have these great big tusks.

They parade through the streets with the tooth container.

I mean, it's an amazing temple site.

It's really cool.

I've been to another one.

I've been to one in Singapore, which is the same.

Were you at the incisor or the canine or the molar?

It was the wisdom.

It was the wisdom of the butter.

Very nice.

My feeling is that that one, and this is so far going off memory that it might be completely wrong, but I think the tooth really doesn't come, comes out very, very, very rarely, as in...

Do you mean the candy one?

No, the one in Singapore.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, this one's the candy one's all over, isn't it?

But it must be so confusing for the elephants who are employed to carry this tooth all about town, this tiny tooth, are looking at each other going, have they seen our teeth?

Look at

a meter long.

But they're celebrated for their massive tusks.

They are,

that's why they're recruited for the job in Elephant Academy.

And the crazy thing is that this is all in a place called Candy, which is normally very bad for your teeth.

Exactly.

I thought that's why they were having the festival.

So many teeth were falling out.

They thought, we've got to do something with these.

Also, they always invite Rob Beckett over to do an opening set, don't they?

Because he's got such big teeth.

He actually carries it through the streets if the elephant's not available.

Yeah, and Esther Ransom for any older listeners.

Just,

are we now doing a sort of choose your own podcast?

Yeah, what about the TikTok generation?

Who's got big teeth on TikTok?

Write in.

Nobody.

They've all got perfect teeth.

The idea that formaldehyde can preserve people was discovered by a guy called Ferdinand Blum.

B-L-U-M.

And he was using formaldehyde as hoping to use it as an antiseptic.

And he was kind of putting it on things.

and then he noticed that he put it on his fingers, and his fingers got really, really hard when he put the formaldehyde on his fingers.

So, he found it kind of by accident.

As I know that you love that kind of story, Andy.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

Did he stop at his fingers once you noticed that they went really, really hard?

Did he proceed anywhere else?

I mean, you would, wouldn't you?

If you noticed that putting formaldehyde on your fingers made it go really, really hard, the cock is the obvious next

step.

It's a short step.

Wow, what a world we could have had.

Yeah.

Where that was standard.

You just pop and get some formaldehyde.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No?

Okay.

I don't know if it would have got flown off the shelves.

Yeah.

It wouldn't look great if medical students were getting boners as they were dissecting a body.

In Peru, if you go and eat potatoes and you go into the top of the Andes and you go to a potato shop or a little stall, they might give you a little bag of clay to eat with with the potato.

And you might put some water in the clay and make it into a little bit of a dip and then dip your potato in it and then eat it because that's like one traditional way to eat potatoes in the Andes.

And the reason is that potatoes used to be poisonous.

They come from the same

family as like deadly nightshade and stuff, don't they?

And in the early days when they were first domesticated, they were still a bit poisonous.

But if you eat a little bit of clay while you're eating your potato, then the clay will attach to these molecules called glycoalkaloids and it will stop your body from processing them which means that they won't become poisonous anymore and so there's still today it's a traditional way even though they're not poisonous anymore you might still put your potatoes in a bit of clay That's so cool.

It is really clever.

And what's clever about it is how do you learn that, right?

How do you decide, I'm going to put my potatoes in clay?

And what they think is that humans saw parrots doing it or saw llamas doing it and copied the parrots or the llamas.

But hang on.

That just raises a second question.

That is so annoying.

Exactly.

Oh, yeah, we just learned it from the llamas.

Well, how did the llamas learn how to do it?

And how did the parrots learn?

Yeah.

Animals learn different things to us.

That's, you know.

But where did the learning start?

If we're saying that our learning must have come from watching another animal do it, their learning must have come from watching another animal.

And I don't believe the parrot originated it.

If anyone's a copier rather than originator, the parrot must start.

you're right.

I did look up if there was a

George V potato, and I don't think there is, because the King Edward is named after Edward VII specifically.

But there are other things named after King Edward.

So

there is Poulard, Edward VII, because he was a big eater, basically, and he was a famous gourmand, so he had lots of dishes named after him by Crawley chefs.

Is that chefs from Crawley?

It is, yeah, yeah.

He always flew from Gatwick, and he made sure to go via Crawley on the way.

Poula Debor VII is chicken stuffed with foie gras, which feels like the most decadent thing I can possibly imagine eating.

Have you guys heard of Christina Zanato?

Christina?

Or Christina?

No.

Christina.

Why would you assume Christina?

How many people are you?

Because we're

because we're talking about the ocean and we were talking about, I thought it might be a crustacean.

Normal person's name, Christina.

Christina Zenato.

She is sometimes called the shark whisperer.

She works in the Bahamas.

And whenever any shark in the Bahamas gets a hook in its mouth, they go and see Christina.

Wow.

Isn't that amazing?

How's the word got out with sharks?

I don't know.

She put flyers up.

I don't know how they know.

But...

Ages and ages ago, there was a shark came up to her and she realized it had a hook in its mouth and so she took it out and now it does seem that whenever any shark one that she's never met before gets a hook in its mouth they somehow know to go to her and get it fixed they trust her not not when she's not when she's in land no not when she's in a restaurant

excuse me sorry sorry um

are you crustacean zonata

she scuttles away sideways to finish her meal um

you never know there are nine species of shark that can walk so you never know they could enter that restaurant could Could be.

That is so good.

But isn't it weird?

So she spends loads of time in the water, I guess, and they just...

Yeah, she's a diver and a researcher and stuff.

She spends a lot of time looking at sharks and looking with sharks, but she just seems to have, according to the article I read, she seems to have this reputation among sharks as being a person they can trust if they get a hook in the mouth.

That's incredible.

Just insane.

I once went to a restaurant in, I can't remember where it was now.

Mauritius, maybe, I think.

And it was a floating restaurant, and the sharks would swim around where your tables were.

And the waiters would throw bits of meat into the water to kind of get them to come up and bite and stuff.

And yeah.

I would not order the fish there.

What do sharks dislike?

Tofu.

I don't order tofu.

Actually, speaking of this, there is a story that Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley of Halley's Comet fame.

Am I saying that right?

Halley, I think.

But yeah, we say

It is Holly, I think.

I thought it was Haley, like Bill Haley and the Comets.

There we go.

Well, we know it's a little bit of a pause.

There's a story that Newton and

Halle, Hawley, once dissected, God, this is a nightmare to read out, a dolphin in a coffee shop.

It's actually a dolpin.

There's a story that they dissected.

Dissected a dolphin in a coffee shop called the Grecian Coffee House.

And I've traced it back, and maddeningly, I think it's not true.

So I'm just here to bust this myth wide open.

Was it a paupus?

There's a diary of a member of the Royal Society called Thorsby from June 1712.

And it says,

and he says in his diary, attending the Royal Society where I found Dr.

Douglas dissecting a dolphin lately caught in the Thames, where were present the President, Sir Isaac Newton, both the secretaries, the two professors from Oxford, Dr.

Halley and Keel, with others, whose company we afterwards enjoyed at the Grecian coffee house.

Okay, so that to me implies yeah they dissected the dolphin then they went for a coffee rather than dissecting the dolphin at the coffee house which makes so much more sense yeah that's the way to yeah

they're not gonna let you into starbucks with a dead dolphin are they they're not gonna give you a stamp on your card

i think it still is a remarkable story that those two characters were dissecting a dolphin in london i mean that's that's pretty cool that's the sort of yeah three things I didn't expect to be near each other.

So that's quite good.

Actually, Virginia Woolf is another one who has a famous plaque situation going on, right?

Because she lived in the same house as George Bernard Shaw.

So they, I think it's one of the only places with two blue plaques on it.

And I realized that Woolf and Shaw, their lives collided much later.

So there's a letter from Virginia Wolfe to George Bernard Shaw in 1940.

They'd only sort of met a couple of times.

They'd stayed in the same country house in 1915.

And it's so flirty.

He was in his 80s at the time.

She was about to commit suicide.

And

i hear i hear romantic music striking out

painted the romantic picture he was in his 80s she was on the brink of suicide well she sounded um she sounded in a good mood in the letter she said to him you have acted a lover's part in my life for the past 30 years wow yeah but presumably his work more than him but and he'd already confessed his love to her from another letter saying i fell in love with you the moment i saw your lover

and she said if you ever drop your handkerchief near my house you'd be welcome to come come and I'll pick it up and we can hang out.

Sexy.

Yeah.

But it was very jokey, by the way.

They didn't actually fancy each other.

Okay.

Sort of disliked him.

Oh, wow.

What?

Okay.

This is a roller coaster that you sent us on and so many little signals.

It was pride and prejudice.

They started off not liking each other.

She thought he was probably a fussy, sexist old man.

She said he had the mind of a disgustingly precocious child of two.

And then they gradually warmed to each other over the course of their 40-year romance.

And what was the thing about if he drops his handkerchief?

Is that so she could look at his bum?

Oh, what?

Is that.

Is so she can look at his bum.

Well, if you drop your handkerchief, he has to bend over to pick it up.

Mate, I didn't get that, but now you've said that.

I think it is.

Yes.

It's normally the lady dropping the handkerchief.

Was she saying, if you, you old man, drop your handkerchief?

I think from what I remember, that was the wording.

She did like to invert gender norms sometimes, Virginia Wolves.

He's in his 80s as well.

That's a hell of a bend in your 80s.

Maybe that's why she's offering to pick it up for me.

Oh, dear.

Do Do you know what the standard dissection kit in America in the 19th century consisted of?

Knife.

Yep.

Knife.

Fork.

You've got the knife.

Oh, forceps.

I'll give you that.

Fork, forceps.

Sounds similar.

I'll tell you.

A saw.

Starboard.

I bet it did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There were scissors.

Scissors because they're very useful for cutting through bits of stuff.

There were some hooks.

There were some scalpels.

And there was a blow pipe.

Oh, damn.

Yeah.

A blowpipe is just a pipe, isn't it, really?

Like a pipe blow-in.

Was it no, it's not just a pipe.

It's pipes specifically designed to be blown into a piece of pen.

I got it, you wouldn't just blow into any old pipe.

Can I guess a theory?

Yeah, goddamn it.

Was it a pipe that was

used for people's bum bums to make sure they weren't dead?

You know the thing where you blow into it in order to...

So it was just to make sure that your patient was actually dead.

Can I make a guess?

Yeah, that might be right, what Dan said, but I was just thinking maybe

we already know that a large proportion of bodies that were dissected were dolphins.

So, did they put it in the blow hole, the blowpipe?

Very clever, yes.

I retract my suggestion and I put all my money on James's.

I'll take Dan's suggestion.

I'm claiming it.

Anna, it's just as well you did.

It was for the colon, it wasn't to test whether or not people were dead.

By the time they were on the slab, they generally were dead, but it was to make the colon easier to see.

Well, like anything a dissection to inflate it, yeah, exactly.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So it was for.suck.

I'm sure it had a very strict instruction on the pipe written.

I'd probably also this side

for placing into the anus.

Ultrasound with animals can be quite difficult.

I saw there was in London Zoo, they tried to do ultrasound on an Akapi, and they had a real problem with that.

Can you guess what the problem was with the Okapi ultrasound?

Can you describe an Okapi again?

I can't quite.

It's like a deer.

So that means it might have antlers.

Okapis, I don't really think have antlers.

It's a bit bigger than...

It's like a mixture between a deer and a zebra, I would say, an Ocarpi.

Has it got a lot of confusing orifices on its body and they didn't know where to shove the...

You tend not to shove.

Well, I might get to shoving things in a minute, but with ultrasound, the whole point of it is it's on the outside.

That's absolutely right.

I was thinking of an endoscopy and I don't know why because it's backed and it's about an option.

So forget that.

I'll tell tell you,

it's so well camouflaged that you can't see where it is to do the ultrasound because they're prey animals.

No, it's not that.

When you have an ultrasound, you have to put this gel on, which kind of helps the sound waves to come through.

And L Carpies really love licking it off.

So they really like the taste of it if you put it on there.

If you're a rhino and you want to look at the reproductive tracts of a rhino, they're so full of fat that ultrasound doesn't really work, but you can do do it by going up the bum.

So that is kind of where you were coming from, Andy.

I think that's what you were thinking of.

That certainly is where I was coming from.

Also, that's a massive machine.

Are you going into one of those machines?

Because you can't build one of those for a rhino.

Well, an ultrasound, an ultrasound is just like you're firing some sound waves into the body.

You're right.

It's not like an MRI, but you're not an MRI.

Yeah, you don't want to put a rhino in an MRI.

You're right.

What we've ascertained is very few of us know the difference between an ultrasound, an MRI, and endoscopy.

Thank God we're not doctors.

Thank God we're doing a relatively harmless job.

They are amazing trunks because there's no bone in them.

There's a hell of a lot of muscles.

They've got way more muscles in their trunk than we have as humans in our entire body.

And

it's just so weird because it doesn't show up on fossil records as a result.

And I just wonder how many animals in history that we have the fossil records of actually

a big floppy trunk somewhere every single dinosaur could have a trunk yeah t-rex might have had a massive snozzer right at the end actually and other like muscly appendages all over their bodies right yeah might have done

everything looked like a huge octopus in the olden days but we've just got no record of the tentacles they did one experiment where um participants were asked to take part in an ice cream tasting test which I mean what a great

site to take part in

and they were asked to take part with someone else.

And that someone else would either be someone without a visible social stigma or someone with one.

And the social stigma that they would have is they were either obese or they had a scar on their face, a disfiguring scar on their face.

And the person who was asked to do the study with them, the ice cream tasting test, if the person without the social stigma ate shed loads of ice cream or hardly any, then they'd copy them.

But if it was the obese person or the person with the scar doing it, then they wouldn't copy them.

So they overcame that because I guess the idea is that you don't want to mimic someone who has negative associations.

I can see that with the ice cream.

Like, if you see, and if the person saw an obese person eating an ice cream and had this kind of idea that obesity was wrong, then wouldn't want to be like that.

But the scar is really interesting.

I would have thought that you wouldn't copy them if they were running with scissors, for instance.

If it's a scar often denotes perhaps being a pirate or

maybe a gangster.

And if a gangster was eating lots of ice cream and looking threatening at me, I would eat lots of ice cream too.

Would you?

I wouldn't risk it in case he wanted mine as well.

He obviously likes ice cream.

But also interesting that Watt mimics people a lot, parrots, where the parrots live, on the shoulders of pirates, what the pirates have, scars.

This is falling apart this theory, Anna.

I don't know what you're talking about.

This has gone pretty loose.

You guys may remember the EU's wine lake and butter mountain, but I don't know if all our listeners will.

Do you guys remember this?

Really?

So this is the idea that the EU creates too much of a certain product and they kind of store it so that the price doesn't go too low.

Exactly, yeah.

So there was a period where the EU countries in total were collectively producing 1.7 billion extra bottles of wine each year, which feels like an enormous overshoot to me.

And they paid farmers to turn it into ethanol.

So you would go through the whole process of turning grapes into wine, and then they would just convert it back into undrinkable pure alcohol.

But they were incentivized to do so.

And the butter mountain was similar.

What did they use the alcohol for, like industrial stuff, I guess?

Yeah,

it can be used as a fuel, can't it?

Ethanol and

the butter thing, they just made a massive sort of slip slide

all the way down the Eiger.

Yeah.

There was a beef mountain, too, which is the unknown third element of the EU food surplus pyramid.

Sounds disgusting.

Welcome to Beef Mountain.

Andy's theme park.

I'm not queuing up for that.

There's a big sausage swing boat.

That's one of the rides.

I was listening to a really great podcast about this whole history of the Shang Dynasty.

It was called Chinese History Podcast.

And it was really interesting.

There was a bit where the host of it put into context when this period was in time, the supposed mythological

dynasty.

And it's 1600 BC to 1046 BC was the rough period.

So in that time, Tutankhamun and Nefertiti were over in Egypt.

They were living.

The Trojan War was happening.

Moses.

Andy stops.

It's not funny.

Is it because I said it instead of Nefertiti?

It's funny.

I'm not smiling.

I'm not laughing.

I accidentally said Titti, didn't I?

You did, yeah, Dan.

And we didn't hear anything else after that.

I was reading about Mary Beard, the academic,

who died in 1956, I think, or 58.

Not our Mary Beard.

No, no, no, this is Mary Ritter Beard.

I know.

My heart stopped.

And then I thought, what?

She'd been a ghost all this time.

She's got so many great documentaries made because she was there.

That's why she knows so much about history.

Well, Mary Ritter married Charles Austin Beard in 1900, and they were a really amazing couple of intellectuals and Mary Ritter Beard wrote a load of articles, one of which was a study of the Encyclopædia Britannica to see how many women were in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

And basically the answer was not many.

She said she questioned in the article why there was no article on queen, even though there was an article on kings in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

She said that there were no women included in the article on health and medicine.

She said, according to the article on songs, no women sang in Europe,

basically in history, and the contributions of nuns, choir compositions, and singing from women is not recognised at all.

And so she had a right go at the Encyclopædia Britannica.

And I thought I'd check if she was in Britannica today, and her husband is, and she is not as far as I can see.

She's mentioned in the article on women's history.

This is the the online one I'm not in the office so I can't check the actual you've got them behind your head at the moment Andy so we could check them but yeah as far as I can see she's not in Britannica at the moment wow so let's get her in yes Mary Beard

that's great I mean that's not great that she's not in but that's great that

story you told the story you told is great

wow shall I just see if she's in quickly yeah so she Charles Austin Beard I think is in he's in the online version for sure.

They'll both be under B.

If she died in 56, they're not going to be.

What year is that in?

And he's got...

Yeah, you've got three.

Which is way later than 1956.

This is the new Encyclopedia Britannica.

It's not the old ones.

Founded 1768.

Yeah, 1991.

Fine.

Right, Beard.

I'm on Bittersweet, Bible, Beryllium, Berlin Walls.

This is a great podcast.

This is such good content.

Andy reads the Encyclopedia Britannica, but only the title.

My word, Beard, Charles Austin, yes.

Then, next article is on Beard Lichen.

She's not there.

Oh, it's disgrace.

Not lichen Mary's.

I read an article about the origins of golf.

This was in the SPM magazine, but they spoke to like

proper historians from Scotland because that's where people think it began.

And the idea is there's a bit of land in between the sea and the bit you can farm, which is called the links because it links links the two bits together and you would kind of keep sheep there or you keep rabbits there or stuff like that keep animals but it's quite a boring job and so people would start hitting balls around and what this article said and I haven't checked it yet but it was well sourced is that the bunkers you know there's like the sand traps that you get on a golf course they were formed by sheep who would hide behind little hillocks because the wind was so bad in that part of Scotland and they would kind of lie down and over years and years and years they would make deeper and deeper holes, which would get filled with sand.

No!

And he said that the first greens, so the greens where you're putting are really flat and they're easy to just hit the ball along the ground, reckons they could have been rabbit warrens because a rabbit warren would be the rabbit would put a hole in the ground for it to go into and then it would flatten around the area around the warren with its feet to make it flat.

And he reckons that that's how those might have started.

Stupid rabbits gave us golf.

That's amazing.

And who designed the golf clubs?

Was that the badgers?

or

that would have been the Beavers, right, who were making the dams and they just had spare bits of wood.

There we go.

Of course.

I mean, that's...

Do you hold to that, James?

I don't believe it at all, but it was really well sourced.

And sometimes when things are unbelievable, but they're said by people who have authority, you kind of have to believe them a little bit.

Absolutely.

Plus, that's making a really good Disney film.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's quite a boring Disney film if the length of time that James is describing has to take place.

You know,

even

a montage will be annoying.

It's just sheep laying down for a very long time.

I don't know.

If you watch that for, like, okay, you have to watch that for 100 years, but at the end of the movie, you get a game of golf.

That's exciting, isn't it?

That is true.

Yeah.

One thing more boring than watching a sheep lie down for a hundred years.

Oh, shit.

There's a game of golf in the end of this.

Do you know the fastest-eating mammal

alive?

Is it?

I thought it was the star-nosed mole.

Star-nosed mole.

We did it in September.

Anna, we reported this last week.

We did this last week.

Can't it observe and swallow a piece of prey in something like 120 milliseconds?

Yeah, something like that.

And that's even quicker than a human can react to a red light.

Oh, yeah.

So that's about 670 milliseconds.

Off the top of my head, yeah.

So top of the head, top of the head.

If they will insist on recording episodes when I'm not there, then it's going to happen.

Isn't the organ organ on the front of a Stardoz Mole's face 12 times more

sensitive than a clitoris?

I believe so.

I believe so.

And it's easier to find.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I'll tell you what, since we recorded last week, I've tested that out, and it's true.

Yeah, we did that last week.

Sorry.

Well, I'm going back on holiday then.

Don't worry about it.

A giraffe would be a good thing to hang in a tree because you can sort of flop the neck over on one side.

And it's quite convenient.

It's like like its own coat hanger yeah yeah yeah that's true yeah that's nice yeah you could eat it from either side so you know that lady in the tramp spaghetti scene imagine two of them gnawing their way up to a kiss the leopards and the giraffe

yeah

i don't i don't want to be the one that ends up with just that scrawny neck and the other one gets the four legs and a body i guess maybe it's a race to the body it's a closer race on the leg side isn't it

there's not much meat on those legs is there no Although I don't, I think the legs are longer than the neck, actually, and you've got to get through

in a giraffe.

Really?

Come on.

Yeah, I reckon.

Legs are long neck.

I can't imagine things very well, but I've surely a giraffe, it's famous for having a long neck.

But

there's four legs, so if you stack the legs up on top of each other, they probably exist.

I don't mean the legs stack four legs.

You mean a single leg is longer than a giraffe neck?

Okay, I never, never ever Google in this podcast, but I'm going to do it now what a giraffe looks like.

like.

The only reason they're famous for the neck thing is because other animals don't have the long neck, guys.

Other animals have the long legs, so we don't go on about it.

Sorry, who here is voting that the neck is longer?

Because I am.

I'm saying front legs longer.

It's pretty close, actually, is it?

Yeah.

I mean, I'm not willing.

I'm looking at Google images and I'm not willing to make a call on it.

Oh, my God.

No, yeah.

Okay, interesting.

I'm looking at an illustration, sure.

And then there's a bouncy castle one next to it, which has much shorter legs.

Guys, they're the same length.

The average legs are six feet long, the average neck is six feet long.

Sorry, I went to actual facts rather than pictures.

I know how we're supposed to do things.

What a coincidence, though.

Yeah, isn't it?

That your legs are the same.

Imagine, would you rather have a neck that was the same length as your legs or legs that were the same length as your neck?

Easy answer for a giraffe, is what we're saying, right?

They've got it just right.

Wow.

Oh, that's nice.

So nobody wins and nobody loses.

What a happy ending.

What about the tail?

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with me, you can go onto Twitter and you can message me at James Harkin.

If you'd like to speak to Andrew, you can go to his Twitter, which is at AndrewHunterM.

Dan Schreiber is also on Twitter.

His Twitter handle is at Schreiberland.

And Anna Toshinsky is still not on Twitter, but you can get in touch with her by going to your email server and putting in the address podcast at qi.com.

If you have something more general to say, you can go to the group Twitter account, which is at no such thing.

And if you would like to learn anything else about us, you can go to no suchthingasoffish.com.

And that is also the place where you can get tickets to come and see us live on our massive tour.

It's going to be really, really exciting.

It's going to be a first half, which we have not yet written, so God knows what it'll be, but it'll be definitely a load of fun with loads of facts and loads of silliness.

In the last tour, I sang Baby Shark for anyone who wasn't there.

I definitely won't be doing that this time.

But the second half will be a normal podcast, but it'll be the full unedited version.

So you'll get all of these kind of silly bits that you heard in today's compilation.

You will hear them live and for real.

And probably a lot of things that will never, ever, ever, ever make it to air.

So if you want tickets for that, then go to no suchthingsofish.com or you can actually go to qi.com slash fish events.

It'll take you to the very same place.

We will be back, well rather, they will be back with a very special guest next week.

And we as a group will continue making these podcasts every single week as we have done for the last 380 weeks and as we will continue to do so until they don't let us do it anymore.

We'll see you soon.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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