382: No Such Thing As A Waiter Made Of Potatoes

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Your ring, your way.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that Cheryl Tweedy is the only member of Girls Aloud who doesn't share her name with a type of potato.

And is that deliberate?

Is that a snub from the potato community?

I think perhaps not.

I think it's just a coincidence in the world.

In fact, it's not even a coincidence because one of them doesn't share their name with a potato.

If they all share names with potatoes, that'd be an incredible coincidence, but as it happens, one of them doesn't.

I've not seen this come up anywhere on the internet, James.

This is not from Oh My God Facts, right?

No.

What is this?

This is from my weird brain.

So I was reading an article about potatoes and I noticed there was a banana potato and an almond potato and I thought that was kind of weird.

I wonder if there's lots of other foodstuffs that are actually potatoes.

And so I found a list on Wikipedia of potatoes and started working my way down it.

And I found one called Nadine.

And I remembered that there was someone called Nadine in Girls Aloud.

So I thought, I wonder if there's other potatoes named after people from Girls Aloud.

So I found a website with all the world's potatoes on it and searched all the names.

And there's a Kimberley and a Nicola.

And there is Maria Sarah.

So Sarah is in that name, which I think counts because, especially, because Sarah, well, Sarah Harding's mother is called Marie, so that's like a

we're not going for the mums of the members of Girls Allowed.

Well, it's an even more of a slam that Cheryl doesn't get one.

They're heading into mum territory and not giving Cheryl.

Yeah, that's true.

Sarah's got hers and her mums, yeah.

There is a Cherie potato, so that's quite close.

But yeah, I'm not really trying to say anything important about the world here, just there's a lot of types of potato and there's a few members of Girls Allowed and they kind of, some of the names overlap.

But I think it's maybe because there's lots of potatoes that are named after women.

So there's like Annabelle, Anya, Augusta, Barbara, Cara, Charlotte, Desiree, Juliet, Linda.

I mean, that's just me listing names of potatoes now.

Yeah.

There's an Anna potato.

Is there?

Yes, but there isn't a Dan, a James, or an Andrea.

So Anna is the Cheryl Tweedy of No Such Thing as a Fish.

She's a reverse Tweedy.

Yeah.

Reverse Tweedy, yeah.

I'm the non-you're the Cheryl.

No, no, no.

She's the Cheryl in that her position in relation to potato naming is unique among the members of no such thing as a fish.

Yeah, James, I'm just curious, was this the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board ahdb.org.uk website that you got your potato names on?

No, it wasn't actually.

Is that where you got your potato names from?

Certainly is.

And they've, I mean, I don't know if this is a comprehensive list.

I suspect it's not because there are thousands of potato varieties, but there are romantic ones.

So there's Excalibur,

Lionheart, Mayan Twilight, Moulin Rouge is a kind of potato.

So these are all the kind of sexy ones.

There is also...

In what way outside of their name are they sexy, Andy?

Just in their name.

Literally, just in their name.

But they don't have shapes that are sort of...

Ooh, that's a hot potato.

The Amorosa potato is not shaped like something especially sexual.

No.

But I do hope that on the back of this podcast, you've changed the meaning of the phrase hot potato

to just literally mean a hot potato.

There is another Girls Aloud and Potato link,

which is the only one I've found.

And this is solely because of Googling off the back of James's Fact.

But Nadine from Girls Aloud, is she Nadine Coyle?

Yes.

She loves or loved when they were doing their gigs to eat a potato before going on stage.

And in one of the interviews she did with the magazine,

she listed the top five ways she liked to eat a potato.

Okay, now I'm just going to run these past you, because this is important.

The top five ways Nadine Cora likes to eat a potato are, see if you can spot the floor here, mashed,

chips,

roast,

jacket,

and new.

Yeah.

Now, new is not a way of eating a potato.

She means a kind of potato.

She means boiled potatoes.

I call that.

She should have said boiled.

If you go to a restaurant and you order new potatoes with your steak, you know what you're going to get.

Yeah.

You're not going to get chips.

They go, oh, actually, you know, you ordered new potatoes.

These are chipped new potatoes.

I think Andy's right.

Nadine's clearly a potato connoisseur.

She's going to be devastated when she hears this episode.

Her interviewer's just asking her questions about potatoes because she's Irish.

Good point.

I think she must have brought it up first, but she would have a potato before every show for a decade.

Wow.

Whether in any of her five favourite methods or her four favourite methods and one favorite kind of potato.

The restaurant Central in Lima in Peru has 50 different ways to prepare potatoes.

Are you going to give us...

Have you read the list?

No, but I have been there.

Okay.

What kind of potato did you go for?

Inside-out potato or something?

They kind of just give you what you get.

It's like a menu.

But there was one dish that was just potatoes in lots of different ways.

So like one of them was quite salty and one of them was bread made out of a potato and one of them was something else.

So cool.

James, did you visit the International Potato Center while you were there in Peru?

You know what?

I didn't.

I was on holiday and even I will draw the line at dragging my wife tonight.

You absolutely you don't draw the line.

That's well within your line.

He's just sitting there regretting it now.

Okay, fine.

I didn't know it was there.

Exactly.

The truth comes out.

No, it's, yeah, there's an International Potato Center.

I managed to find a slideshow of interesting potatoes that they have online.

And it was

quite a sort of journey going through the slides.

They have a potato that they like to show, which is called the Yana Pina potato.

And that's nicknamed the weeping bride.

And the idea is that the potato needs to be peeled properly by a to-be-wife so that the mother-in-law can see that they've got the skills.

to peel the potatoes as such.

It's a very lumpy potato.

If they can get past all of the bumps and the crevices, it shows that they can navigate a potato.

That's interesting.

Peru takes his potatoes very seriously.

They have got the International Potato Center.

Yeah.

Then they have occasional turf wars, don't they, with Chile?

A lot of international potatoes, the really big hitters of the potato world, come from an island, I think it's Chiloe, which is off the coast of Chile.

And potatoes are so popular there that some people will carry a potato in their pocket to ward off the spells of spiteful neighbours.

There was a guy called André Contreras Mendez.

He died in 2014, but his kind of lifetime's ambition was to go around Chiloe just trying to find unusual potatoes.

Because in Chiloe, you had a lot of people who kind of lived on their little homestead and you would have lots of elderly women who would look after the potatoes and then they would pass down the seeds of their potatoes to the next generation, to the next generation, to the next generation.

So if you didn't have someone going around kind of collecting the seeds and saving these types of potato, then when the generations died with the last old lady, then the potatoes would two die.

Okay, very cool.

What kind of a name is Chiloe if it's part of Chile?

I mean, they've literally just dropped a potato-shaped thing into the middle of the world.

Seriously unimaginative day.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

Mr.

Potato Head has rebranded.

Big news this year.

Okay.

He's just Potato Head now.

Or in fact, they are just potato head to be more inclusive of the brand because the potato head family is a whole family.

I don't think I realised that.

Yeah.

Have you not seen Toy Story?

Oh my god, there's a Mrs.

Potato Head right there in Toy Story, isn't there?

Yeah.

He just steals the attention so much.

I think it was that the overall brand was called Mr.

Potato Head, and now the overall brand is Potato Head.

And they made a big thing about saying, look, you can still buy a Mr.

Potato Head within the family of Potato Head.

It was a really

crazy media panic of the most predictable type.

Every headline saying, Mr.

Potato Head's gone gender neutral.

And even though the press release that's gone out is on every Mr.

Potato Head packet, it says Mr.

Potato Head to make it clear that's who you're buying.

They're just saying, look, we can't call a whole brand Mr.

Potato Head.

That's like my whole family just being named after my dad.

Actually, I suppose that's what surnames are.

But like, you can really imagine that press release going through the entire company and everyone just going, this will be fine, won't it?

No one's going to take offense to this.

You know, the biggest Mr.

Potato head in history, I guess you could say, is a guy who we've mentioned once before, who's Antoine Augustin Parmentier.

But he's the guy who rehabilitated potatoes in France.

They were seen as being incredibly dangerous,

even though people were eating them in Germany at that time.

And

he

made them popular by this long PR campaign to get French people eating potatoes.

But it was partly because France was already looking for an excuse to eat potatoes, if you like, because they had had failed grain harvests and things, and there were big worries about this.

And there were prizes to identify alternative sources of nourishment.

Such a cool era when the government would just say, there's a prize if you can think of anything we can eat.

And he wrote an essay on potatoes, and it won.

And then he hung out with friend of the podcast, Benjamin Franklin, and was telling him all about these great things called potatoes.

And then he ended up hosting a dinner, Parmentier, where everything was made of potatoes.

What, like the chairs, the table, the door, the house?

For God's sake.

Kind of like this restaurant James went to.

Everything on the plates was made of potatoes.

So they served fish that was actually made of potatoes.

And then they drank vodka, which was distilled from potatoes.

That sounds like a very bland meal.

I don't know if salt was allowed or not.

I think that's that's a big part of the...

Every bite is disappointing.

I agree with Anna.

Plot twist on every moment.

The fork is made of potatoes.

What?

My plate is made of potatoes.

The waiter is made of potatoes.

The potato waiter.

And then you look down at your own body and it's, I'm a potato.

Potatoes, outside of Mr.

Potato Head, as Anna was mentioning, being in the news, it has had quite a lot of press since the pandemic started.

I was looking just in, you know, news items to see where it's popped up.

Quite a few headlines.

Woman accidentally turned herself into a potato for video meeting and couldn't figure out how to fix it.

Do you remember that?

She was, yeah, Lizette Ocampo was her name, political director at People for the American Way.

And there was a filter on her Microsoft Teams app which turned her into a potato.

She couldn't change it, had to do the entire meeting as a potato.

We're speaking potato.

Microsoft have developed a filter that knocks out potato chip noises from your conversation.

This is another headline.

When you're talking on Microsoft Teams.

What noise is potato chips making?

So if you're...

Sorry, what I meant is if you're

like crisps.

Exactly.

So if you've got your hand in a bag of crisps and you're talking, it will knock out that noise because the AI has recognized that noise.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it kind of filters it out.

So you can, you know, as everyone does, eat potato crisps during meetings.

Stop calling them potato crisps or potato chips.

What do you mean?

What are you doing?

But they are crisps, all right?

Oh, Anna's about to strike a nationalist tone.

She's just saying, please just say crisps, I think, is what she's about to say.

Just crisps.

Just call them what we've always called them.

Okay, I was just really trying to drill home the potato connection, even though obviously they're still connected without the word involved.

Oh, I like that.

You're helping the kids out.

Yeah, fair enough.

I just wanted to make sure.

And then in 2020, last one that I found was the inaugural Potato Photographer of the Year prize.

Oh,

yeah.

that must be a hard job because they're quite hard to catch in the wild aren't they

always hiding behind a bush exactly nature's moles yeah

um yeah it's a it's an annual award that's happening every year now going forward a thousand pounds to the winner and you send in

yeah you send in your picture of a potato that you've taken it's a very creative thing so the 2020 winner went down to a potato getting a lockdown haircut so it's it's obviously quite stylistic and artistic a lot of these photos.

Some of the potatoes are actually potatoes in the wild or people planting potatoes or going through fields.

I would have gone for, instead of a haircut den, I would have gone for a Shakespeare King Lear, but with potatoes.

And you've got a potato Duke of Gloucester having its eyes removed because that's what happens in the place, but alert.

Oh, because you call those things eyes on potatoes.

Exactly.

And in King Lear, the Duke of Gloucester is blinded.

Okay, well, 2022 Potato Photograph of the Year competition.

Here we come.

Have you guys heard of the ketchup and chips plant?

No.

No.

Is this an actual plant?

This is an actual plant you can buy from a company called Tom Tato.

And on the top, above ground, it's a tomato plant.

And below ground, it's a potato plant.

Tomato chips.

So you can get from one plant your chips and your ketchup.

Amazing.

That's so good.

And when you say chips, James, sorry, can I just clarify what you mean?

Potato chips, sorry.

sorry, not potato crisps.

Speaking of chips, though, can you guys guess what the egg and chips plant is that you can buy from the same company?

Egg and chips.

It's a chicken which lays a potato.

Oh, beautiful.

It's GM food gone mad.

That would be great, but this is a plant.

Oh, okay.

But before we get to it, Andy, quickly, that definitely, if we get a photo of that, is Potato Photographer of the Year 2022.

No question.

Yeah.

An egg and chips plant.

So

it's got to be a potato below ground.

Yeah, you got there.

Halfway there.

Chickens don't grow on trees as a single tree.

It'll be that, Saddam.

Is it an aubergine?

It's an eggplant.

He's got it.

He's on auxiliary plant.

He's got it.

Nice.

Aubergine above ground, potatoes below ground.

So good.

That sounds like one of those sayings.

Aubergine's above ground, potatoes below ground.

It sounds sounds like I'm this in the streets, but I'm this in the sheets.

I'm an aubergine above ground, but I'm a potato below.

That's actually horrible.

That is disgusting.

I'm not sure you want the potatoes to be this, but.

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With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewels behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

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Your ring, your way.

Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that's my fact.

My fact this week is that dissecting cadavers doesn't put you off your food.

In fact, fact, it actually makes you hungrier.

Do you mean dissecting?

No.

Say it normally.

Sorry.

Dissecting.

Dissecting.

Yeah, it's how it's pronounced, guys.

So fun fact for listeners, we had a chat before this episode recording started about how to say the word dissecting.

And it turns out that dissecting is when you're only dividing something into two.

Yes.

But dissecting is only what pedants say.

So in James Bond movies, when that laser is heading towards him to cut him right in half, the villains should be saying, no, Mr.

Bond, I expect you to be dissected.

No, dissected.

What?

Are you kidding?

Because that's in tune.

He would be cutting tune back.

No, Mr.

Bond, I expect you to dissect.

Yeah.

No, he doesn't want James to dissect something.

Dissecting is an active verb.

So, Dan, what about these cadavers that I hear so much about?

Yeah, sorry, that is disgusting.

Let's go back to your fact.

People get hungry with dead bodies.

Is it because it's meat?

Like they're like literally cutting up meat?

No, it's not quite that, although it's a possibility that that's involved as well.

What it is, is that in order for students, medical students, to practice dissection on bodies, the bodies have to be preserved and they're preserved in formaldehyde.

So that's a chemical that helps for them to stay fresh and they can go through and they can practice all sorts of things.

Now, there's a phenomenon which has been reported by so many doctors online.

And I was told this by a doctor friend and I happen to have two doctor friends.

So I asked another one, have you ever heard of or experienced when you were dissecting a body a thing called formaldehyde hunger?

And he went, oh my God, I didn't even know that was a thing.

Yes, I've had that that entire time.

And everyone online talks about it.

So the idea is formaldehyde does something to you where it makes you extremely hungry.

And if you look online at medical students talking about it, they talk about it's not just a hunger.

They get starving to the point where as they're wrapping up, they all start talking about what they're going to eat, they exchange menu ideas.

And one of them's like, wait a minute, this guy had nine fingers when he came in.

It seems to be pretty widely acknowledged.

I couldn't believe that all my doctor friends hadn't told me about it before when I asked them.

They were all like, oh yeah, of course.

Yeah, you're starving.

Absolutely.

All you want to do is bite the head off that dead body.

It's like, well, why haven't you mentioned this before?

It's very weird.

There was a study in rats, wasn't there?

Like, there always has been.

And they injected rats with formalin, which is where you get formaldehyde and you put it in water.

And

when they gave these rats formalin, it increased how much sodium they took in.

So they really craved salt.

So that is a tiny bit of science which suggests that it might be true.

But obviously, for obvious reasons, one of which being that formaldehyde is toxic.

and carcinogenic.

They haven't done the experiments on humans yet.

Yes.

They do think that formaldehyde might cause sick building syndrome, which I've never heard of, but which is what it sounds like.

The building syndrome.

Oh, okay.

Apparently, it's not what it sounds like.

To be fair, that is exactly what you made it sound like.

Sorry, yeah.

I've just seen how you could hear that.

It's where people get sick in a building.

Sick person in a building syndrome is the full name.

And it's because formaldehyde has loads of uses I didn't know about, but one of them is as glue on wooden furniture.

And if you're in a building which has lots of that, you can get headache or you can get nauseous.

And they found in a study in Japan in about the year 2000 that you can scatter lots of tea bags about the place.

And if you do that, it'll soak it up and you will get less ill.

Soaks up about 60 to 90% of the formaldehyde in the air.

Really?

You just scatter them around the building.

That seems to be what they did, yeah.

That feels risky to me.

As a tea lover,

I would think, oh, great, someone's left out some tea bags for me.

Yeah.

I'll just brew these up.

If you just see tea bags on the floor, you just pick them up and think, well, I might as well use them, Dee?

It depends.

It is context-dependent, but it's mostly dependent on how recently I've had a cup of tea.

And if it's been more than half an hour, I'll probably pick it up.

I was looking into the history of dissection and how medical students have been doing it over the years.

And I was reading a fantastic book called The Butchering Art, which is by Lindsay Fitzharris.

And in the intro of her book, it just paints this amazing picture of what it was like in the 19th century in London when dissections were done publicly.

So you would go into a theater and the rafters above where people could observe medical students would be packed not only with medical students, but random people off the street who were just fascinated with what was going on.

They had to have people come in and make way and push people back so that the surgeon had enough space to actually do the operation.

Like that's how tight it was.

And there would be heckles as they were doing it if people were in the way.

So someone's doing surgery, and people are going, heads, heads, saying, get your head out of the way so I get a better view of it.

All right, no, this is what we want you to cut off next.

Elbows next, shoulders, knees, toes.

And it was, you know, this is a thing that used to be public entertainment.

It went back all the way to the Renaissance, where it was actually sort of billed as public entertainment to the point that when they were doing it, they would often have someone playing the flute to a dissect

to a dissection that was going on in

the theatre.

Wow.

I thought you'd seen a ghost just then.

I did.

And I thought you'd seen it in one of our Zooms.

And I thought it was like behind my back or something.

I was all scared we've got you mispronouncing things.

I feel terrible.

Like, this is an abusive relationship.

It does sound amazing, the shows that were on.

And they were mostly in the winter, in the European theatres, because it was just too hot in the summer and they needed to make a dissection take a couple of weeks.

A full dissection would take weeks.

But I really like the rules that you had of who was doing the cutting up.

So in Padua, there was a lector, a sector, and an ostensor.

Those were the three jobs that you would have.

And a lector was a lecturer who was lecturing while it was going on.

The sector...

as you might guess, is the barber who's doing the cutting up, the barber surgeon who's doing the operation.

And the ostensor is just pointing to the bit of the body being dissected at the moment,

which feels like being the kind of sheet music turner rather than one of the two men.

It might be the most important one because otherwise people don't know which bit is the arm and which bit is the leg and stuff, right?

You're right, you're right.

I guess I'd just focus on which bit the surgeon was clearly cutting.

You would have thought that's an unnecessary second pointer to have when you've got the knife as the first pointer.

Have you guys heard of Susan Potter?

No.

So Susan Potter, in the year 2000, she was 72 years old and she donated her body to medicine.

And she has died now, unfortunately, but they cut her body into 27,000 slivers each one thinner than a human hair and then photographed each side of it each side of each slice and now she is like a virtual cadaver which medical students can use whenever they need to do any studying that's unbelievable so is that is it so that you can be scanned sort of at any you can just see what's going on at every single level and I suppose that's yeah it's like a 3d tour of the body right

exactly that so you can like see the inside of your liver or you can see the edge of your liver or you can see any any part of the body and the really interesting thing about it is when she donated her body she'd just been in a major car accident so she was in a wheelchair and people thought that she only had a year to live and she continued to live for another 14 years after that and kind of became quite friendly with the doctor who was going to do all the work and they interviewed her quite a lot during that set 14 years and now the plan i don't think this is available yet but in the future, the plan might be that if you're a student looking at Mrs.

Potter's kidneys, you might, like Siri, ask her about her kidneys, and she could say, Oh, I've had these kidneys for 72 years and blah blah blah.

And you would even be able to hear the voice of the person

whose body you're looking at.

That's incredible.

They should make it that she just does constant small chat with them while they're trying to do it.

You seem a very clever boy,

your parents must be very proud of you.

Wow.

Makes you hungry, doesn't it?

This

do you guys know?

So public dissections obviously stopped hundreds and hundreds of years ago, or hundreds of years ago, rather.

But there was one performed publicly in London in 2009.

Oh, yeah, I think I remember this.

And

that's right, yeah.

Gunther von Hagens, and it was filmed for Channel 4 and it went out.

And so Gunther von Hagens, he's the guy who in Piccadilly Circus in London, there used to be a giant Ripley's Believe It or Not, museum.

And it's now this thing called Body World exhibitions.

And he's worked on this method, which is called plastination.

And plastination is the idea of taking certain body fats and tissues out and replacing them with silicon so that the body doesn't deteriorate or smell.

And so you can go inside and you can see all these dissected different things inside.

It's pretty gross.

And in 2009, he did this big show for Channel 4 where he had a body that was donated, dissected on TV, handing out to the crowd who was sitting there in their hundreds bits of the body to look at closer on little plates as it was going around.

Yeah,

he was told that this was illegal and that he was going to be arrested.

In fact, police were there in the room to make an arrest if they thought that it went into a territory which was dubious, but he didn't get arrested.

Sorry, police are not trained for that kind of decision.

They sent them inside the rip police, believe it or not, a shop were like, okay, watch this weird, creepy shit happen.

If you think it's a bit dodgy, arrest them.

what are they looking out for what are they looking at like if he kills someone else and starts disacting them then you definitely slap the cuffs on him it's got to just be that his thing is he's now quite ill in 2011 he got diagnosed with parkinson's and so his plan now is that he is going to be turned into one of his bits of art and is going to be in this piccadilly circus body world as an exhibition just as part of the display and it's his wife who's going to do it to him and she doesn't want to do it so he's granted her a year of not doing it.

But then she has to.

That's not a grant of anything.

That's a year of worrying about this thing you have to do, apparently.

Also, she doesn't really have to do it, does she?

I don't think you can make that statement in your will saying, I want someone to cut me up and plastinate me after my death.

She said that he said to me, Angelina, you were entitled to freeze me down to minus 25 degrees for one year.

But after that time, you really need to put your hands on me because otherwise I will get freeze burn.

When he gets down to minus 25 he'll be Gunter von Hagendas.

Please release that as an ice cream Hagendaz if you're listening.

Please.

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

My fact this week is that on the day that the border between Spain and Gibraltar opened, the key to the gate didn't work and they had to call a locksmith to let people through.

Wow, I love this.

It just sounds like such an awkward moment.

And I kind of love the fact, like, borders just being physical gates.

So the border between Spain and Gibraltar was closed by Franco in 1969 and no one could really cross until 1982, December 1982, when it was reopened.

And I was listening to an interview with a guy called Tito Bellejo Smith, who is a Gibraltarian, and he was there at the time.

And he said it came to midnight when they were going to open the gate.

And he first said there was this argument between all the top officials over which one of them was going to open the gate.

Eventually, the head of customs seized the key, said, I'll do it.

But the key didn't work.

And they couldn't find the right key.

And eventually, they had to call a locksmith.

So he claimed.

So funny.

It's weird that the border was closed.

Was it a power political move by General Franco?

He was quite famous for that, wasn't he?

Franco.

He loved a power move.

He did.

He was pissed off with Gibraltar.

Spain has a history of being, and there was a referendum, I think, in the late 60s about whether Gibraltarians wanted to be British or wanted to have Spanish sovereignty.

And it's the most astonishing vote result ever because

no vote rigging, no corruption, but 96% turnout and 99.6% of people voted to stick with British sovereignty.

Quite similar to the vote in Crimea as well, wasn't it?

Which was

no vote rigging, no corruption, just a massive, massive win for one of the sides.

Both equally valid.

But yeah, only 44 people

voted to have Spanish sovereignty against 12,138 who voted to be British.

So Franco was kind of pissed off and he got more and more hardline in terms of who could cross the border and when and trade between the border, between Gibraltar and Spain.

And then he just shut it down, built a big fence.

And literally, it's amazing when you hear about it.

I hadn't realized that Gibraltarians just couldn't get across.

You could get a boat to Morocco and then sail all the way around.

But there was an interview with a guy who just said, you know, it was 15 when they opened the border and it was the first time I'd ever seen a cow.

Because I went across and they had farms on the other side.

Wow.

Oh, my God.

Because it's tiny.

Imagine being stuck there.

It's like 2.5 square miles.

Yeah, it is tiny, isn't it?

But a lot of it's rock.

Yeah, it is a lot rock.

But when you see, I watched a video earlier because I thought, I wonder what it looks like.

All the descriptions just talk about about rocks and tunnels and caves and so on.

I thought, okay, it must be quite barren.

And actually, the high street looks very much like a high street you'd get in the UK.

There's McDonald's, there's shops everywhere, it's bustling.

The issue is it's so tiny, and there is so little flat surface on Gibraltar that, you know, when you're sometimes going driving on the road and a train's coming and you have to stop because the train intersects with the road, the airport runway intersects with their busiest main road, Winston Churchill Avenue.

So they have to stop all the traffic to let an easy jet plane land

and then they can start again.

Well, when they opened that bit of road, which was actually later the Winston Churchill Avenue bit, that was in 1985.

Because even 1982, it was only the pedestrian border that was opened.

They wouldn't let cars drive across, and there were loads of limitations on it.

Then 1985, they opened the road border, and I think they learned from the 1982 mistake because they did a practice run.

So earlier on on in the day, they did a practice run, and it was a good thing because since they'd shut it, the Spanish had laid two coats of tarmac on their side, and so the gate was completely jammed shut on their side.

That's amazing.

They had to get a pneumatic drill and a workman to remove it.

It's a really strange place, and I think it occupies a big space in the sort of the British imagination because it was this big outpost of empire.

It changed hands so many times, didn't didn't it, between various different nations who were all claiming it?

It's the site of the longest ever siege in British or English history.

The Great Siege of Gibraltar went from 1779 to 1783.

There were huge French and Spanish naval and land forces attacking it, about 30,000 troops on that side, only about 7,500 British troops.

And they tried starving the British troops out, launched these huge assaults.

There were tourists watching the final Franco-Spanish assault who just assumed it was going to be a complete walkover.

Everyone applauded as the French and Spanish took their places to start the bombardment, and yet it withstood that.

So it occupied this big space in the imperial imagination, I guess.

So, as we said, this place, Gibraltar, has just constantly been under siege.

There's always been attempts to take it over and shift the ownership around.

And one of those times was in World War II.

And this was a point where Winston Churchill had his eye on Gibraltar and wanted to make sure that we, as the Brits, kept hold of it.

And one of the things that happened is that there's an old superstition in Gibraltar for the British that if the Barbary apes that live there left, kind of like how if the ravens left the Tower of London, Britain's reign over it would fall.

So Winston Churchill made a specific request to make sure there were always 24 of these Barbary apes on the island, even shipping some over to make sure that they had this.

So I read this on Winstonchurchill.org, and he sent a directive to the colonial secretary saying the establishment of the apes on Gibraltar should be 24, and every effort should be made to reach this number as soon as possible and maintain it thereafter.

And as a result of this directive, the army appointed a non-commissioned officer who is the officer in charge of the apes.

And they had to just make sure that the apes were looked after, they were maintained.

It was a role that was held by a guy called Sergeant Alfred Holmes for 38 years.

No way.

He must have just thought, this is a relatively easy army post.

No one is shooting at me.

I just have to make sure none of the apes die.

Yeah.

Kept on pretending, oh no, it's actually very difficult to get them to breed.

I'm really struggling here.

Do you think he was in charge of making them breed?

It sounds like he was in charge of bringing up their numbers.

Mostly bringing them in from another country rather than making them shag each other, I think.

Look, it's not, I don't know why he did those 38 years.

But you've got to say, I don't know.

There was a lot of resources being stretched in a lot of ways during World War II.

And was shipping 20 monkeys from Africa to Gibraltar really the best use of our time and effort?

There was a big plan to invade, wasn't there?

It's called Operation Felix, the German plan to invade.

But there was a big turf war between Hitler and Franco.

Franco said, no, I only want Spain to invade.

And, you know, Spain was technically neutral, although it was the most Nazi neutral country you could possibly imagine.

It was literally a fascist country.

And so Franco decided to stay neutral.

But everyone thought it would be incredibly easy.

An aide to the governor thought it was impregnable as a poached egg.

And the Spanish thought it would take literally 20 minutes to invade if they ever actually bothered.

How overcooked is this guy's poached eggs?

I think the point is that it's not impregnable, right?

Frankly, so like a poached egg, it will just fall apart as soon as you pierce it.

Exactly.

James has understood the methodology.

I completely missed his point.

I was saying there's no way we can get in.

That makes a lot of sense because it does feel like the Nazis missed a trick.

It's a piece of piss to get to.

It's really small.

It's the entrance to the Mediterranean.

I don't know if we've said for any sort of confused American listeners, it's not just a random place.

Or any other country who might not know where Gibraltar is.

Just because America's quite far away.

Yeah.

Actually, Anna, America's a continent, not a country.

I think you mean you are so people, just to correct you on your geography there.

Look, I was just trying to help, and I know I've got in trouble now.

So yeah, it's really important.

Why didn't he go for it?

Because, wasn't there a plan?

Because like an egg has lots of holes, tiny, tiny holes in it, so that the chick can breathe on the inside.

The Rock of Gibraltar has lots of little holes and caves.

And wasn't there a thing where we put some soldiers inside one of those holes?

Yes, there was.

There was a cave which was set up so that if the island was overrun, a crew of six soldiers only could stay behind, spy on the enemy movements and then report back.

So they had a year's food and water.

I mean, I don't know what happens after the year is up.

They had exercise bikes, which I love, and that was going to power the generator they used, I guess, to run the radio and stay in contact with Britain.

But what a situation that would have been for those six left behind, the only troops not discovered.

It's amazing, isn't it?

That is awesome.

And the idea was that if one of them died, they couldn't take them out because that would tell everyone where they were.

So they were going to bury them.

underneath the floor in one of these caves and that was the official plan.

Oh my gosh.

Really?

Well you can't put the formaldehyde on because then you'll use up your food supplies quicker than you want to.

Wow, that feels like it must have been the seven worst people in the British Army.

The guy who's guarding the apes and the six people they shove in the caves on Gibraltar.

They're like, we've got to do something with these guys.

Just to go back quickly to the blockade of Gibraltar by Spain.

It was quite interesting because before that happened, before the Second World War, basically, Gibraltar was sort of Spanish in character, even though it was British territory.

Everyone spoke Spanish, it was Spanish culture, Spanish families.

You know, you'd have one half of your family on one side of the board, the other half on the other.

It was almost indistinguishable.

And what one of these guys who I was listening to an interview with was saying was that the blockade hardened Gibraltarians' attitudes.

So it did completely the opposite of what Franco wanted, because he shut the border.

And suddenly, everyone in Gibraltar went, well, screw you then.

And they did really well.

And obviously, they've got this access to the Mediterranean and they had all this food imported.

And so before the war, I think a third of marriages were intermarriages between Spanish and Gibraltarians.

Everyone spoke Spanish, like I say.

Now, most people in Gibraltar don't even speak Spanish.

So you don't grow up speaking Spanish.

And there's no intermarriage.

They have completely turned against Spain.

So

shot himself in the foot.

And the keys have been quite a historical thing, haven't they, in Gibraltar?

Because over history, especially in like the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, they only had a certain number of doors that you could get into the country with and they had special keys that they would lock it up every night and they would have the ceremony of the keys like they do in the Tower of London did they

yeah and during the Great Siege which Andy was talking about

the governor who's called General Sir George Augustus Elliot apparently he would have his set the one set of keys and he would carry them everywhere he went no matter where he went he always had this set of keys on him and it was rumored according to the website i read it was rumored that he slept with them under his pillow at night.

They're massive keys.

That must be a rumor because it would be an incredibly uncomfortable night's sleep to you to put.

I could just about put my house keys under my pillow because I don't live in a medieval fortress.

Do you put your keys under your pillow when you go to bed?

I'm just saying I could.

I'm not saying I do.

I'm not telling you where I keep my keys.

I try James.

I was just thinking you might get robbed by the tooth fairy.

Freaky weird teeth this guy has.

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

My fact is that Aristotle's masterpiece was written more than 2,000 years after Aristotle died.

Wow.

Yeah, a late bloomer.

How much formaldehyde did he apply to his body to stay quite that active?

This is a 17th century book, Aristotle's masterpiece.

It's a sex manual in a way.

It's also a pregnancy manual, childbirth manual, all sorts of facts about human reproduction and generation and all of this.

And it's got nothing to do with Aristotle.

It's completely bogus as a title.

But it was popular to put Aristotle in the title of your book because it was a pseudonym that got used often for sex books because it was kind of known that he'd written a bit about reproduction.

And so if you put Aristotle in the title of a book, that made it quite sexy.

And was it like people actually thought it was by Aristotle, right?

It wasn't like it was just the title.

It was kind of claiming to be by him.

I don't think it did claim, but I don't think anyone seriously thought it was by him.

Apart from anything, it kept getting updated every year.

And most people knew that he'd been dead for quite a long time.

So I don't think anyone really thought it it was by him.

But yeah, like you say, Aristotle was like a reference for sex, basically.

There are a lot of plays where people use the word Aristotle to mean sexy times.

A bit of How's Your Father.

Yeah.

It's pretty amazing, because it was published in 1684, and it was immediately a massive success.

It was pirated immediately as well, despite the fact that they tried to copyright it and say an official publisher was releasing the book.

But it was reprinted all the way up until the 1930s.

And in the middle of the 18th century, there were more editions of this in circulation, this book, than all of the other works that were on reproduction combined.

Whoa.

It's insane.

What does that mean?

I saw that written down, but I couldn't work out what it meant.

It'd be the equivalent of what to expect when you're expecting outselling all the other books on the subject combined together.

They still had more in circulation.

And it was, Aristotle had this real rep for being sexy.

So the book Aristotle's Problems was published in 1595, which sounds like a fun agony uncle book.

It was mostly, you know, lots of Q ⁇ A's about sex and reproduction.

So questions including what is carnal copulation and how are hermaphrodites begotten and other really important stuff that you needed to know.

It was exactly the format of the book that we've released this year, Funny You Should Ask.

Exactly the format, but quite a different

content, wasn't it?

No, I was reading it.

Sexy You Should Ask.

I was reading it and looking at the number of questions that are the same in that as funny you should ask and there are quite a few.

It's probably like it made me think, how great that humans have been curious about the same shit for so long.

We didn't have we didn't have how are hermaphrodites begotten in Funny.

Okay though

I did try to get that one in and it's not acceptable.

There are a few sort of areas that we we didn't cover.

But like why do we sneeze?

Why do you have only one mouth but two eyes?

Why is spit white?

Why do we like sweet tastes so much more than others?

Why do men and women get ticklish when you tickle their armpits but nothing else?

I really thought,

this guy is, whoever wrote this, not Aristotle, is a man after our own hearts.

Pseudo-Aristotle.

Yeah.

That was, this is a whole field of study, is books that claim to be by Aristotle, but are manifestly not.

And the author, the collective author of those is known as Pseudo-Aristotle.

Which I love.

Basically, everyone had a copy of this Aristotle's masterpiece, didn't they?

They were really, really popular.

I was chatting to Ross McFarlane, who works at the Wellcome Library, and they have quite a few copies of this book there.

And the ones that they have are quite small.

They're printed on very cheap paper.

You can tell that they're things that were mass-produced and that people would just own.

One thing that would happen is sometimes as they get towards the end of a page, the font would get smaller and smaller and smaller so that they didn't have to have another page at the end of it.

And you would see often people would write things in them.

So there was one where they recorded all the births of their children, for instance, in there and stuff like that.

So yeah, it was

very quotidian.

That's such a good idea.

This I conceived successfully with Brian doing this.

This one didn't work, tried it 12 times.

Because there are these rules all the way through, which are obviously loads of them are complete haulicks, you know, that male children sit on the right-hand side of the womb and girls sit on the left.

Not true.

If you want to test whether your child's a boy or a girl, drop a drop of milk into a basin of water.

And if the milk sinks to the bottom intact, it's a girl.

If it spreads out and disperses, it's a boy.

That's not true.

You'll be amazed to hear.

Like, I can't believe that this book survived until the 1930s because a lot of it is just pure baloney.

Yeah.

Well, but it's entertaining, baloney.

If it's entertaining, you'll read it, right?

That's true.

And it's sexy baloney.

Sexy baloney.

Yeah.

But with what James is saying about writing down the children and their birth dates,

there's been a few cases where the book has been useful to prove things for people who've lost documentation.

So this book made it over to America and in 1832 in Tennessee, there was a guy called Edward Weitt who was trying to get a pension in connection to his military service in the Revolutionary War, but he had lost his discharge papers and so he needed to prove his age, but he had no way of proving his age.

And what the court records as his submission of proof was that this book, Aristotle's Masterpiece, was brought in by him, and it had in it his birth date as recorded by his parents in it.

And that persuaded the court that he was born when he said he was born, so he could get the pension.

Sorry, why were people recording his birthday in the book?

Well, that was the thing.

Parents used to write stuff all in the book, so you would record your children's birth dates in it because it just was a it was a place to put it.

It was the reproduction book.

Why not mark it down there?

You could say that, you know, he didn't have his discharge papers, but that he had his parents' discharge papers.

Oh, dear.

And that's a joke about his conception.

Oh, yeah, because obviously it's...

Do you have discharge papers, Andy?

What is it like?

What are you like in the bedroom?

There's a lot of paperwork.

It almost feels like some of that stuff is a lot better than actual Aristotle was writing, right?

Because Aristotle,

well,

he was a genius for his time.

I think it's fair to say he got quite a lot of things wrong, but he did get a lot of things wrong about women in his writings.

He thought that blonde women were better at getting orgasms than non-blonde women, and that the orgasm was very important for conception.

So he thought that blonde women would be able to conceive better than non-blonde women.

He thought that women's discharge was very important for procreation.

And so he spent a lot of time, according to the article I read, trying to separate out female fluids.

And he thought that if women ate pungent foods like garlic or peppers, they would be able to conceive better.

I've found it's definitely a hindrance rather than a help.

He thought that women had fewer teeth than men.

Look, that is just a fact, James.

You can't argue with nature like that.

And he thought that women are more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive, more compassionate, more easily moved to tears, more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and strike, more prone to despondency, less hopeful, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, more retentive of memory, more wakeful, more shrinking, and more difficult to rouse to action than men.

Okay.

More shrinking.

I mean,

there was a lot of wrong stuff in there, and it's quite strange that that's it.

It's weird because there are a few things in there that you're like, oh yeah.

Yeah.

And it's got a whole melange of compliments and insults.

It would be hard to know how to take that list, wouldn't it?

It's probably best not to say that women are like X and men are like Y in general, perhaps.

Even if some of them are compliments.

Let's just not say that.

I'll take the compliments.

Fuck it.

You take what you can get.

But is it possible?

I mean, this guy was slightly clever, wasn't he?

It was kind of a big deal.

Is it possible that back in the day, women just did have less teeth?

I read a really good article

of, there was a guy called H.L.

Levy who was trying to rescue Aristotle's reputation for misogynism because everyone thinks that he's misogynistic.

And he basically said, well, maybe it's not that he was misogynistic.

Maybe he just got all these things wrong about women because he got quite a lot wrong about everything.

Yeah, right.

Because he did quite get quite a lot wrong.

He must have got stuff wrong about men as well, right?

Presumably.

Yeah.

Like, I think he said that men with bigger penises would be less good at fertilizing women because that gives the sperm more time to get cold on their way over.

Okay, that does sound like something he said on a one-night standard.

I think that makes sense because I've successfully had two children and

it's not about the size, guys.

I feel like we should say that also Aristotle, unlike some of the more fun but more wild ancients that we talk about,

is still discussed today extensively in philosophy.

He's one of the great philosophical pillars and his idea that everything is in balance.

So, the idea of a virtue is the exact equidistant between two extremes of vice, things like that, are still discussed a lot.

So, let's give the guy some credit.

He was a bit sexist, he believed some crazy stuff, but he was a great philosopher.

Thought that the aurox, which is the thing which turned into cows, thought that they projectile pooed

1.8 meters away from their bums, and that the poo's burned like fire to get rid of predators.

It's not completely implausible.

He thought that an earthquake, he thought that the tremor of an earthquake was either the earth farting or you know that shiver when you pee sometimes.

He thought it was the earth's equivalent of that kind of shivering pee.

Sorry, what's the shiver when you pee?

I don't.

It's not a thing that everyone gets, but it's a relatively common thing that some people like get a shiver down the back of their neck when they urinate.

Do they?

Wow.

Okay.

Sounds like someone else is urinating onto them.

Should be up and been reading the wrong texts?

Like that saying, don't piss up my back and tell me it's raining, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

And he thought eels spontaneously generated from mud.

But as we've said before, eels is a tough one.

Eels is a really tough one.

Yes.

Yes.

Another one in this constant wrangle with me trying to defend this obviously very ancient sexist, but who was a genius, is the eels thing is evidence that he was an empiricist.

And that was amazing at the time, where his tutor, Plato, and everyone else was just like, come up with theories and then we'll say they're true because they make sense.

And Aristotle said, Should we actually look at what's some stuff that's happening and start describing it instead?

So, yeah, and then he went to Eels and said, Well, they don't have any genitals, which, to be fair, we thought for another 2,000 years, you say.

But that didn't stop Dan from having two children.

Dan's paperwork was all in order, though.

It's mostly about paperwork I find in the bedroom.

He did, and there were things which,

and again, this is the counterweight to all the absolutely true stuff James has just said.

So, for example, he observed that hares can become doubly pregnant, which wasn't believed to be true for centuries after him.

You know, hares can become pregnant while already pregnant, as it were.

They can do that again.

He did think that elephants couldn't bend their knees and that they always had to sleep upright because they couldn't bend down.

Look, this is a grudge match between James on one side and Ron Andy on the other, saying that Aristotle was an idiot or a genius.

This is the thing I'm not sure about, though, Anna, because I thought that he didn't do actual experiments, as in he was an empiricist, but

he didn't do the scientific method to that extent.

But he gathered a huge amount of data and then kind of extrapolated and inferred based on that, which is still obviously a massive step forward from just saying any old stuff.

And it was an attempt to categorize and sort things, which also obviously is a massive cognitive leap forward.

So he divided animals into 11 grades from highest to lowest, highest, unsurprisingly humans.

And he said, you know, the best and the highest animals in nature are the ones that give live birth to hot and wet creatures.

And that the worst animals, the lowest grade of nature, lay eggs, they don't give birth to live young, and those are cold, dry eggs, and that those are the worst.

So I imagine chickens.

No, chickens are warm, aren't they?

Chickens, eggs are warm.

I suppose like lizards?

Yeah, I think it must be something lizardy, something reptilian.

I really love just thinking about

how he was, you know, co-opted by all these people over the years, how he still is co-opted today.

And if you look up Aristotle and look up articles that have been written about him, they'll just apply his philosophy to everything.

So how Aristotle is the perfect happiness guru, Guardian article.

Should we cancel Aristotle, New York Times article?

Sure.

It is useful, that thing that you said, Anna, about every virtue being a tightrope between two alternating vices.

That is quite a clever idea.

So the idea is, for example, that bravery is a tightrope between cowardice on the one hand and being completely foolhardy on the other side.

Between those two is the golden virtue, golden mean

of being brave

when necessary.

Part of that theory was that basically everything that is extant kind of fits in its own niche, right?

And that there wasn't a beginning to the universe and there isn't going to be an end to the universe.

It's just everything just existed.

And, you know, the worms are where they should be and Aristotle's where he should be and everything's, you know.

Yeah, yeah it was also an attempt to justify the social structure of Greek city-states vis-à-vis slavery and yeah it was a it was a it was a justifying

it's just the way things are guys was kind of how you could simplify his position too look I don't want a worm revolution any more than he does

The Aristotle's problems that you were talking about before, which Anna said is basically the same as Funny You Should Ask.

Each chapter begins with a poem.

and I wonder if we should bring that for the next Funny You Should Ask book.

We should start each chapter with a poem.

So, for instance, this is one of the chapters.

Thus, man's most noble parts described we see, for such the parts of generation be.

And they that carefully surveyed will find each part is fitted for the use designed.

The purest blood we find, if well we heed, is in the testicles turned into seed.

Do you think that might work for our next QI poem?

That's absolutely beautiful.

I think that stonic testicles does stick out a bit there in the poem, doesn't it?

It's difficult, isn't it?

Because the poem is about testicles.

So you do need testicles.

It's like Wordsworth's daffodils poem.

The word daffodil really sticks out in that poem, I have to say, but it's about daffodils.

So you're memorable.

Yeah, memorable.

I didn't see the testicles coming.

That felt like a twist to me.

Oh, don't twist the testicles.

Well, if you do, you won't see them coming.

Okay that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

James at James Harkin and Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

We do have everything up there from previous episodes to links to our upcoming tour.

Check out where we're playing in the UK and Ireland and do come along because it's going to be awesome.

All right, guys, we'll be back again next week with another episode.

We will see you then.

Goodbye.