381: No Such Thing As A Safe Toothpick

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from one very disclosed location. It is the QI offices in Covent Garden.
We are back.

My name is Dan Shriver. I am sitting here at a very comfortable two-meter distance from 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 there is a type of glue that was developed specifically to help strong men grab onto giant stone spheres.

So cool. So strong men competitions, this is where you see them basically lift these giant boulders, don't you, up onto platforms?

Yeah, so if you imagine on British television between Christmas and New Year, there's nothing else on TV apart from World's Strongest Man, which is the best show ever, where they get these enormous men like pulling trucks and doing all sorts of stuff.

But like you say, one of the things is called the Atlas Stones.

And there's a substance called spider tack that was invented by a part-time strongman and part-time molecular biologist called Mike Caruso.

He smashed all the test tubes.

And yeah, basically, he was carrying these big boulders. And one of the big problems is actually gripping them.
As someone who's lifted a giant boulder myself, I could definitely say that.

I think I mentioned it on this before, that in Iceland, I was lifting some giant boulders. Might come to that later.

But anyway, so

he was struggling to grip them. So he took some rosin, which is that stuff that if you play the violin, violin Andy for instance you put on your bow to make it yeah I'm just helping you here

yeah I feel comfortable and then he added some polymers to the rosin and he can't disclose what kind of polymers are in it he calls it special sauce and he came up with this incredibly sticky stuff now he sold about 10 of these a year so it wasn't really a big deal but it's come up really recently because it's basically spoiled baseball because baseball pitchers who throw the ball have discovered it and if they put it on their hands it makes the hands able to spin the ball a hell of a lot, which makes the ball impossible to hit.

And so, it's come into the news recently that this stuff exists.

Yeah, because so it is a big controversy at the moment in baseball because batting averages are at the lowest they've ever been, and they think it's because specifically of this kind of glue and other glues that are being brought in.

But it's just a whole new era of baseball where everyone's striking out, and yeah, yeah, there was um the Yankees have got a pitcher called Garrett Cole, and they signed him on a nine-year deal for $324 million in 2019.

He was the best pitcher ever.

They had to pay all this money for him. Sorry, they signed him for $324 million.

Yeah. Over nine years.
Wow. Over nine years.

It's only about $40 million a year. Come on, Anna.
Exactly. Cheapskate.
Sorry,

sorry. But they asked him if he used Spide Attack, and he was really, really evasive in this interview.
It's amazing. He's like, oh, I don't know how to answer that question.

The question was, Do you use spider attack? And he said, I don't know how to answer that question.

And there's a suggestion that his form has gone really badly down in the last couple of weeks because they've now banned this spider tag.

And all the commentators, I'm not saying it's true, but all the commentators are saying that it's because they've stopped him from using it. He's suddenly turned into a terrible pitcher.
Interesting.

What's amazing, though, is that the inventor, this Hulk Bruce Banner guy, half chemist, half big monster,

he doesn't quite know how they're using it in baseball because it's too sticky a substance. He doesn't like baseball.
Right.

Yeah, there's an amazing interview with theathletic.com by Stephen Jay Nesbitt, a journalist. And he found this guy and he asked him, you know, what do you think of this?

And he goes, oh, I had no idea it was popular in baseball. I don't watch baseball.
In fact, I don't watch any sports. I'm too busy to watch sports.
So he didn't realise that he spoiled this spot.

That's very interesting. Is it cheating to use glue when you're trying to lift up a stone sphere? Do you guys think that's a good thing? Good question.
Good question. Yeah.

I think no, because I think the whole purpose is the weight of it.

I think obviously you could lose grip, but I think we're trying to look at who can hold things that are really heavy as opposed to who's got good grip on an object.

I would say part of holding things, a crucial part,

is

grip.

I think you're right.

It's often a lot of these stones are in Scotland, aren't they?

It's rainy a lot there, so that must make it a lot harder to lift the stone. Does rain make it harder? I figured that would give you more grip.

It's because like, you know, know if you put your hands on wet surfaces don't our hands go a bit yeah that's that's actually why cars can stop so easily in rainy conditions.

No but what I'm saying is our hands adapt

they go wrinkly it gives you handhold grips natural handshold

I'm not sure it's proven that the reason our hands go wrinkly is for grip. I know that's one of the dominant theories.

Imagine if there was one really strong man and he was the strongest in the world but he's a real butterfingers

and so he lost every single tournament for that reason. He's got no fingerprints.
Yeah.

He can't lift anything, but he can commit crimes.

So someone else wins a trophy and he steals it off them. Exactly.
It's a series.

They're also called manhood stones, aren't they, sometimes?

And there seems to be a very important one in Iceland, which may indeed be the one that you've lifted. Have you lifted the Hoosafeld stone? Yes.

Oh, no, I haven't. No, the Hussefell stone, no.
Oh, that's the biggie. You just lifted any old stone in Iceland.
The Hussefeld stone is just one stone that you carry from one place to another.

It's in someone's garden or something I think.

I think it's been used as a strongman's stone for over a century and before that it was used as a gate to a goat pen in Iceland. Wow what a promotion.
I know.

Huge.

Well maybe preferred being the goat goat checker. Sure.
But that's the big one that people go and lift if they want to.

Right. And there are also four more in a place called Djupalonsadur

where there are four different sized stones. I have mentioned this before, whichever whichever one you can carry would depend on where you would work on the boat.

And the people who lifted the heavier one would be in the more difficult rowing place, but they would get more of the catch. So they get more fish when it came in.

So where are you in the boat? Well, I'm not very strong.

There's one called Useless, which is 23 kilograms, which is relatively easy to lift. And then there's one called Weakling, which is 54 kilograms, which I could lift, but I found extremely difficult.

And it was the grip, genuinely. Like, you could kind of get it on your knees and lift it up quite easily, but just getting your hands around it.

And then the other two, half-strength, which is a hundred kilos, and full strength, which is 154 kilos, barely could move them. Like, the big one literally couldn't move it.

I mean, that's that's really heavy. Is there anything for like is there a stone which would give you an administrative role on the docks not being on the boat at all? Just a little pebble.

Yeah, it exists for some sardines every day. The thing is, when I did it, there was um it was really raining, and I always used use that as an excuse that, oh, it was really slippy and stuff.

But now you mentioned that my hands would have gone wrinkly. That's no excuse anymore.
You should have held on longer, yeah.

If you want to try Atlas stones at home, you can buy Spider Tack online, and you can also buy Atlas stones online. I found one 75-kilo ball, which was £200,

£50 shipping. Because presumably you need a strong man.

That's so exciting. Do you know what one of the hardest things about being a strongman is?

Well, the lifting of things. You'd think the lifting, that's pretty bad.
But according to Lloyd Reynolds, who is a strongman and an NHS physio, it's driving up and down the British Motorways.

Oh, yeah. These long drives.
Basically, travel is the biggest problem for strongmen. When they get on a plane, their seats, they're like, our butts are too big.
We're way too bulky.

So air attendants tend to sit them if they can in their own row so that the other person next to them is not getting squished.

They try and give them as many brakes to stand up and stretch and move around. Interesting.
Did I ever say the thing on here? I don't think I did.

About, I read an interview with some discus throwers, and they're really big guys, especially around the shoulders.

And whenever the American Olympic team goes to the Olympics, the discus throwers always sit next to the long-distance runners because the long-distance runners are so skinny.

And presumably, they must be sat on the side of the dominant throwing arm, right? Because

that's a bulky arm. Maybe that's why they are always pulling planes and cars.
They just can't fit in them. They've got to get it up there.
They're picking someone up.

There was a World Strongest Man competition which was in Botswana in 2016 and all thirty competitors had to get on the same plane from Johannesburg to Botswana.

And apparently there was one of the competitors, Brian Shaw, has won World Strongest Man four times. Pretty big guy.
He's six foot eight, he weighs thirty-one stone. Wow.

And when he was on the plane, he couldn't fit into the loo and he had to take aim from outside.

That's amazing.

Was it a number one or a number two?

It's a big old manhood stone coming out, didn't you?

Do you know who is the world's strongest woman at the moment as of 2020? No.

It is someone we've mentioned on the podcast. Is it Courtney Olson? Yeah, Courtney Olson.
It is Olga Liaszchuk, who was the former holder of the watermelon crushing record before Courtney came along.

Courtney, wow. Yeah.

I saw a really good interview with her because they asked her about her diet and she says she prefers newborn babies.

It was a joke, it's a joke,

of course.

And there's a brilliant video of her carrying a 200-kilogram yoke. So a yoke is like what a milkmaid would hold, like a stick across the shoulders with two heavy weights on it.

And she's walking, supposedly, with this yoke, but she's going so fast, the judge, who's not carrying anything, can't keep up with her.

She's amazing, honestly. Incredible.
Wow. The other thing they carry is fridges famously.

And so this it's a classic strongman test, 1977 first World Strongest Man contest. Have you guys ever seen the video of that? No.

So it was the first one ever and it wasn't really a thing being a strong man and so no one really knew how to train for it.

Everyone came from a real range of backgrounds, usually like some kind of sport. But Franco Colombo was the one of the competitors in 1977 World Strongest Man.

And he was famous at the time for blowing up hot water bottles until they exploded.

Other feats of strength like that. Worst house guest ever.

That's pretty. I mean, that's a different kind of strength.
Yeah, it's good, isn't it? He could also bend steel bars, but the problem was he was much smaller than the other competitors.

He weighed about 100 pounds less than most of the other competitors. And they hadn't safety tested the fridge race.
And you should look it up if you can hack it.

They start with fridges on their backs and they start running. And within about two strides, his leg snaps.

Oh no.

This is like a type of warfare over again. So he's fine.
He's fine. There's an interview with him in hospital later.
He's like, that was a bit of a bitch. And they canceled the fridge race until 2004.

And now they have a crossbar and a fridge on each side to balance the weight. But it is an unbelievable thing to watch.
Presumably, he had immediate access to a bag of cold peas to put on the fridge.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that the first animated puppet film used insect corpses as the puppets.

Wow.

That's pretty creepy, but very cool. This was a sort of one of the founders of animated film, Władysław Starovich.

He was an entomologist, started out as an entomologist, Polish entomologist, and moved into animation. This was at the turn of the 20th century.
And so he loved insects.

So at one point, he was director of the Museum of Natural History in Lithuania. And in 1909, he decided he wanted to make a film that just showcased how cool the stag beetle was, his favorite insect.

And he wanted to show two male stag beetles fighting over a mate. But when he tried it, they died under the sort of glare of the film lights and their legs sort of melted off, whatever.

So he thought, okay, this isn't going to work. So he removed their legs and he exchanged the legs for tiny little wires attached to their thoraxes.

They are not alive at this point, attached to their thoraxes. And then he filmed frame by frame them fighting and moving, like stop motion.

So he was also, some Russians say, for instance, because he was born in Russia, Russians sort of claim him as the father of stop motion, although there are some rivals for that.

But yeah, he would move the insect's leg a millimeter and then show it again, and a millimetre and show it again. They're all online and they are phenomenal.
Oh, they're captivating.

I mean, his whole catalogue of work is online that you can see.

But yeah, these insects, these beetles at the time people who watch them i read this in one place i haven't been able to find the actual reviews that say this is true but they it was so convincing what he did people thought it was basically amazing insect training i i found one of those reviews

it said in 1911 the trainer must be a man of magical endurance and patience so yeah and and he didn't give away the secrets of how he did it either he wanted to keep them his deek so he also hinted that there were gears and pulleys at work and that he i mean he was really he was definitely keeping his secret um yeah it was definitely advertised at least in Britain, for some reason, it was advertised as trained insect puppets on films.

It would draw more attention than dead things I've strapped wire to.

Interesting that the Russians claim him as their own because his whole family hated Russia.

Because he was born around Moscow, but he was taken to Kaunas in Lithuania, in modern-day Lithuania, because his father didn't want him to be too Russian. Really?

And so he stayed with his grandfather in Kaunas.

And he was expelled from school for skipping the Orthodox Mass which was like a Russian church So he didn't really want to be part of that because his father had kind of taught him to be like this and he invented a shooting range in his house which had moving figures and one of the figures was General Moravyov who was like the famous Russian general who kind of put down the November uprising and whenever you shot him he would kind of fall down and then be hanged by his neck.

Wow. And his grandparents forced him to take it down because they knew that if the local police saw it, then they would probably take him away and stuff.
Yeah, it's not going to do it.

It's hard to spin that as

it's an ode to your great work. Yeah, that's as a child.

So you can see where he got all the kind of moving parts of his in the society.

Yeah. That's awesome.
And he was Polish as well. He seems to have claimed lots of different nations, but his parents are Polish, hence Poland and Russia had a bit of an awful relationship.

He changed his name at some point, didn't he, as well? Was that in connection to that?

That was when he moved to France because obviously it's a bit of a I'm glad Anna pronounced his name at the start which Starovich is not so hard but how do you pronounce his first name?

Fortunately it's my granddad's name so I know it's Vrodyshrav. Vladisvrav.
I think that's probably incorrect because I'm sure a prolitionist nick and writing it correct me.

It's right because it's got that L with a line through it which is like pronounced like a W a little bit isn't it I think or something. Fradishrav.

But yeah he moved to France and he changed his name to make it a bit easier for people to pronounce I think to Ladislaz Starovich. Yeah.
Did you?

I'm sure you guys read loads of the descriptions of the movies. I really like the cameraman's revenge.
Did you see this one? This is so good. So, Mr.
and Mrs. Beetle, a married couple, they're bored.

They became less realistic over time, didn't they?

So, Mr. Beetle meets a Dragonfly, who is in the middle of an affair with Mr.
Grasshopper, right? But Mr. Beetle is so sexy, he steals away Mrs.
Dragonfly from Mr. Grasshopper.

Grasshopper, the cuck in this scenario, is furious, but he's also a cameraman, okay? And he films Mr. Beetle's affair with his ex, Miss Dragonfly, right? Anyway, Mr.
Beetle and Mrs.

Beetle, they're eventually reconciled with each other, and they, you know, they get back together and they say, let's go to the movies. But the projectionist at the cinema is Mr.

Grasshopper, and he puts on a movie called The Unfaithful Husband, which is footage of Mr. Beetle having it off with Miss Dragonfly.

I have some questions about this, about Beetles and dragonflies having sex with each other. That's unrealistic, surely.
It's kind of fan fiction, I guess.

That's a lot of plot for what were, I thought, like 30-second movies back in the day.

How long is this? This was his, this is his magnum opus. This is his citizen cane.
Yeah, I don't know. But anyway, I think it was a bit longer.
A few minutes, yeah.

It's about 13 minutes, I can see now. Oh, okay.
I think his magnum opus came a bit later, wasn't it? It was The Tale of the Fox, which was the first feature animation film, so it's over an hour long.

Oh, wow.

And that's what I find interesting about that is it's based on a Goethe story called Reineke Fuchs, which is based on a much much older kind of medieval story called Reynard the Fox.

And Reynard the Fox is basically it's a fox and a wolf and the fox is very sly and amoral but he's very charismatic and he always gets into trouble and you have all these medieval stories about this fox doing naughty things but eventually a bit like Dennis the Menace kind of get in his way in the end.

And these tales have been going since the 12th century And in English, they're called Reynard the Fox, in French, they're called Renard the Fox, and Renard is now French for fox.

And so, the French word for fox comes from this character from medieval history. Isn't that interesting?

Yeah, fox the fox. Cool.
That's awesome. And in that one, he so he got adept at making other animals, didn't he? Not just insects.

And in fact, everyone else seems to say he worked completely alone, which he did. He didn't like outside influence, and he turned down Hollywood because he wanted to do do it all himself.

But he didn't like outside of his family assistance. But his wife was a tailor, I think, and his wife made a lot of the animals for him.

And his daughter directed and wrote a lot of his films with him. But in

Reynard the Fox, he made, like, I think he made some lots of animals out of different animals. Seems really weird.
Like, the lion was made of deer skin, I think. And

we're just

really mixing it up. Wow.
But it's very adult content.

Animation was not for kids back then. It's kind of funny.
Yeah, and they, again, that one, look that up online. The animation is phenomenal in that.
It's absolutely extraordinary.

And as you were saying, James, it was the first animation. So it beat Snow White, which is seen as the seminal opening animated movie of Hollywood.
It beat it by eight months in coming out.

So this guy was a true pioneer who's sort of been lost to the annals of history slightly. Do you want to hear the least relevant fact that I found in the research for this section?

It's about art and insects and drawings, right? And filming. So this is a sports related fact.
In fact, it's a newsy one.

There is a team of two men whose job is to go along the length of the route of the Tour de France. And their job is to draw butterflies out of penises that people have graffited on the road.

They're called the Eraser Men, Les Effaceurs. And this is a great article about them on the Roulette website.
Basically, you're filming from above, aren't you? The Tour de France.

And people go along the route every year writing insane graffiti. They draw a lot of syringes because they're implying that the cyclists are all.

There's loads of messages, like alle, a la Felippo, whoever, like whoever's, they put messages for their favourite riders, but I've never seen a penis.

Well, that's because the Les FSA are doing their job.

And every hundred meters or so on the route, apparently, there's a penis, and they have to transform it or they make it unrecognizable if they can't do a decent butterfly.

Are the testicles the two big eyeballs? I am.

I would think that

the wings might be relevant there. But they're versatile is what I'm saying.
And they changed the syringes into ladders and you know they they just

pointed it on the top of that ladder. Is that the fireman's hole imagine? Turn that into the Empire State Building instead.

Oh my god damn. We've got thousands of miles of road to go and you're saying do the Empire State Building.
We've got 40,000 windows on it. Oh my god damn.

Who's paying them to do this? I think it it's either the broadcaster or the organisers. The organisers of the Tour de France.
Yeah.

I know. They use hundreds of litres of paint.
It's tough. It's tough work.
Wow. It's not as tough as actually cycling in the Tour de France, is it? But sure.
I don't know. It must be stressful.

I don't know how far ahead of the Tour de France we are.

Come on, come on. I just need to do the proboscis on this butterfly.
They're catching up.

This movie, The Tale of the Fox, which was by Starovich, we said was one of the early animations. It was the first feature animation puppet film.
There were a few older feature animation films.

The oldest that we have, which is still extant, is called The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, and it's by the German animator Lotte Reiniger. And she used a system a bit like shadow puppets.

I don't know if you guys have seen, in fact, I know you have seen, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1.

I know we've seen it. Well, I'm just looking at it.
Yeah, look around, yeah. I've known you for long enough, and you've definitely seen that.
We're all wearing our sorting hats.

There's a bit where they tell a little short film inside the film called The Tale of the Three Brothers. It's that kind of style.

And yeah, this woman called Lotta Reiniger, she made this animation technique and she made loads and loads of movies. And the first one she made was in 1926.

What I like about her is that she later married her creative partner called Karl Koch,

but she kept her name Lotta Reiniger so that she wasn't called a Lotter Koch.

I'm not sure that was the reason she did that.

It's gotta be.

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

My fact this week is that the man who popularized toothpicks in American restaurants did so by paying Harvard men to eat at fine establishments and then shout at the waiters if they were told wooden toothpicks were not available.

So, this is yeah, it's a sort of

cheeky promotional tool to get your product bought.

This was a guy called Charles Forster and he was a guy who had seen when he was overseas in Brazil toothpicks being used by many people in South America.

He thought this is something that should be done here. So he went back home and he managed to design the modern-day toothpick, the really cheap little wooden stick that we find in most places.

That is Charles Forster's invention. And

once he had the invention, he thought, How can I convince Americans that they need this in their mouths? Because it was seen as sort of a bit crude. No one was really interested in it.

So he used to pay people,

particularly sort of very rich people like Harvard men, to go in, cause a ruckus, and then they would threaten to never eat in the establishment again.

And once they left, the next day, Charles Forster would either himself or send someone else there going, Would you like to buy a box of wooden toothpicks?

And the owner goes, Of course, yes, thank you.

Why didn't the owner ever go hmm how suspicious a bunch of harvard guys randomly kicked off a huge fuss yesterday about this i mean you'd see it coming well he would sometimes go in first as well so let's say there was a shopkeeper he would go into a shop and he would say to the shopkeeper look would you like to buy some of these new i'm selling them toothpicks you could buy a few boxes of them and the shopkeeper would say i'm not interested and then he would hire a young person to go into the shop ask for some toothpicks not be able to get any because the shopkeeper had said no then he would go back the shopkeeper would say all right i will have some toothpicks then the the young people would go back in, buy the toothpicks, return them to Charles Forster, who then has the toothpicks back again that he sold to the shopkeeper in the first place.

But then he reused the toothpicks. Yeah, he would resell them then to the shop, which to me means he's making a loss.
Yeah.

If there's a markup in the shop, he's losing that amount of money. But I can only assume he then sells in bulk after that.
He's like, I will sell you 20 boxes.

I hope so, because if not, maybe that's why this guy wasn't the biggest financier ever. But yeah, it feels like a risk, but I guess it was a risk that was worth taking.

A lot of gullible shopkeepers and restaurateurs around in those days. He claimed his toothpicks were made of the choicest part of the white birch log.
Which sounds

like he's getting one toothpick per log.

Really?

I'm just going to find the exact part of that birch tree.

But no, you make millions and millions from each one, don't you? Yeah. And he did this all in a bit of America called Strong, which is in Maine.

And for a long time, that was the toothpick capital of the world, as they called themselves. So 95% of all wooden toothpicks manufactured in America were out of Strong.

So we're talking something in, you know, around the World War II period, 75 billion toothpicks per year were being sent out. That's too many.
That's too many.

There was a thousand people living in that town at the time. So that meant each per year they were making 75 million toothpicks.

That's a lot. 75 billion? They can't, what were they being used for? They mostly went to waste, surely.
Given the world's population, that would be every person using 25 per year.

But I'm sure they weren't as evenly distributed as that. No, and back then much smaller.
I mean...

I like the fact that we're talking about strong in Maine. Strong Maine.
We were talking about Strongman earlier.

Strongest Maine. When the demand declined for toothpicks, when people realised we don't need 1,000 each per year,

they tried to innovate because obviously these factories in Strong, suddenly they didn't know what to do. And so they tried to come up with new versions of toothpicks.

And one of them was they would make it square in the middle so that when you put it on a table, it wouldn't roll off.

I clearly

don't know how clever it is, Anna, because I think that it's never been a huge problem for me. Is you put your toothpick down on the table.
Enough for me.

How wonky are your tables that a single toothpick is rolling off? Just adjust the angle that the toothpick is on and that'll solve the problem.

My housemates get really pissed off because I'm a compulsive toothpick user.

I probably go through about 10 a day and they are all over the floor because you put them on your desk, yes, it's a bit of a wobbly desk, it falls onto the sitting room floor, get a new one, it's an issue.

And I can't believe these didn't take off. I can't believe you were questioning how many toothpicks were needed per day.
I know. Ultimately,

10 a day.

Apparently, he wasn't even very good at making stuff, Forster. I think he was just a good businessman, wasn't he? Like, he requisitioned shoe peg makers to make toothpicks.

And apparently, they used the same skills but see that seems so weird to me because a shoe peg was something that attached the like heel of a shoe the base of a shoe to the top of a shoe and so it's got to be quite thick to do that right that's like when you've got to attach two bits together in diy yeah it's got to be like a dowel like a thumb exactly and then they turn that into a toothpick that seems if you're using a toothpick to hold your shoe together your shoe's coming off but it's an easier i guess it's an easier technology to adjust it was probably one of the closest things to an actual toothpick that existed or could be made at the time you wouldn't take someone who who made telegraph poles and then get them to make toothpicks because that's a bigger change, isn't it?

You're right.

And they were often missing teeth back then, so maybe the gaps were a lot bigger. Yeah.
Great point.

I was reading a book which was called The Toothpick by a guy called Henry Petroski. Did you guys come across this? It's one of those great authors who just picks one item.
Cool.

Yeah, and he just tells the whole history of the object. So obviously Charles Forces invented the sort of very cheap disposable toothpicks.
But toothpicks have been there throughout history.

Royals have used them, but everyone sort of had a really spectacular toothpick that they could use over and over again. Wow.
They would often wear it in a box around their neck on a chain.

Yeah, you would carry your toothpick. That's there's in this book, he claims that there is definitely evidence that that during the Renaissance that used to be done.

Like people used to carry their knives around and stuff. Did people just have a load of cutlery attached to their body the whole time? Spoon on the nose.
Yeah.

There's an anonymous painting that was done called Queen Elizabeth as an old woman, which shows her wearing wearing multiple chains around her neck and one of them which would have had her toothpick in.

And we know that she had toothpicks because in 1570 there's an account of her having received a gift of six gold toothpicks, as well as, and this seems to have disappeared from sort of day use, toothcloths.

Never heard of that. A little cloth for your teeth.

I guess instead of a brush, did you just like hang with your teeth over your wearing? Yeah, maybe, yeah. That's so cool.
Anna, you should get one of these things to hang around your neck.

You can just keep one toothpick in there. Problem solved.

I think that's a really good idea, because at the moment, I replace the toothpick back into my huge bowl of toothpicks that I keep in every room, and then you don't know which one you last used.

It's not very hygienic. Are you kidding? No.
You put it back in the...

I don't think that's the point of the toothpick holder. Other people find that weird, but it seems so wasteful to just use it on.
Absolutely.

There's a toothpick mystery that I think has been in the back of everyone's mind since the day you first saw one of these toothpicks. Okay.

You know, the toothpicks, which are called Japanese toothpicks, and they have little grooves at one end. Oh, yeah.

Those are the fancy ones in my mind. They're the fancy ones, exactly.
Usually you see them in maybe a nicer restaurant.

And why do they have those grooves? So they don't roll as easily off the table. Grip.
Increase your grip.

Avoid stabbing yourself in the gum. Grip, very good answer.
Rolling, don't know if that's because they're not that, the grooves aren't going that way, so I don't think that would help. Okay.

What they're for is, they are for snapping the end off to indicate that the toothpick has been used, which you would not need to do if you were me, but a lot of people would like to say, this has been done, don't use it.

And also, someone pointed out, and I don't know if this was in mind when they were designed, but you can then use the end you've snapped off as a stand.

So another problem I always have with toothpicks is that the end is lying on a table or a chair or sofa and that gets dirty, right? Whereas if you...

It sounds like it does in your house, I don't know.

If you prop it up with its other end that you've snapped off, isn't that so clever? Yeah, I know. It's really clever, yeah.

People think that you shouldn't use toothpicks though, right? A lot of dentists say you shouldn't really use them. What?

Because they can pierce your gums and give bacteria a chance to get in because they're quite spiky, especially the wooden ones.

It's not like you're using them wrong. Well, the American Dental Association suggests not to use them.

They say you should use there are certain better, like softer toothpicks that you can use rather than those wooden ones.

Writer Sherwood Anderson died because he swallowed a toothpick. Okay, that is using it wrong.
But it's one thing to just poke it into your gum, but to eat the entire thing.

Well, in fairness to him, it was from a martini, so. Okay.

Oh, so the olive, presumably, he was going for that. He must have really been thirsty.
He must have been rushing to the bar. Can't wait to get that first drink.

I'm just going to drink the whole thing in one time.

And there was a study in the New England Journal of Medicine about someone who swallowed a toothpick and nearly died. It had been hidden in a sandwich.

By which I don't think someone had actually hidden it. I think maybe it was holding the sandwich together and he hadn't noticed it.

But the problem is, because it was made of wood, all of these scans, you couldn't see it.

And even when they gave him a colonoscopy, they couldn't see it because it's so small. And even when they did surgery, it was really hard to see because the hole was so, so tiny.

And it was only eventually when they were doing the surgery, they kind of found the toothpick lodged in his artery and they realized that that was the problem. Oh my gosh, his artery.

This is a huge intestinal artery. Would that come out if it made it to his stomach? Would that have come out in

it's not guaranteed to.

So this year, there was a report of Man in in japan he'd swallowed a toothpick and he had months of pain in his back and leg and it had been stuck in his uh basically in his rectum and it was a seven centimeter long toothpick he'd swallowed by mistake but this so this does happen apparently in the 1980s in america alone 8 000 people a year were being injured by toothpicks but not swallowing right that's no by swallow by no a lot of swallowing they just injured and got the meat for table and it landed on them yeah

presumably injuries could be from accidentally poking your throat too too hard, or like, what are you putting it on your throat for? Well, it's going in your mouth. You might make a mistake.

You might miss your mouth. You might miss your mistol.
It's quite hard even to get to the back molars, to be honest. A lot of people use it.

I mean, I think Q-tips were invented because the guy who invented Q-tips saw his wife using a toothpick on her son or daughter's ears to pick out.

So, like, you know, people do use a topic. I think, in fairness, they were putting a bit of cloth on the end of the toothpick.
It wasn't just shoving in the spiky.

Oh, okay, because I have done that with a toothpick.

Wow. Yeah.
This is. Not my children on me.
Right.

Are you really? Yeah. Inside your ear.
Yeah. I don't know.

I think I've got to say the personal hygiene of all of both of you. Thank you, James.
Thank you. You wish it was more than two metres now, don't you?

Um but n there are lots of this is this is a huge problem. There was a dentist who was interviewed by an outlet called Shaw News, he was called Jamie Bell.

He said more people choke on toothpicks than on food, which I find extraordinary. I saw that, but I can't be true, can I? Absolutely not.

I mean, okay, but there was an analysis uh of toothpick swallowing cases which had made it to medical journals, because obviously most toothpick incidents probably don't make it to a medical journal.

But of the ones which make it to medical journals, 10% are fatal of toothpick swallowing incidents, which is a lot. That's scary.

And of all of the cases which have made it to the journals, half the patients didn't know that they'd swallowed a toothpick. So it seems like it's easier to do.
So Anna... Check yourself.

But I think it's with what we were saying before.

I've been to a few restaurants where to hold a big burger together, a toothpick goes in and it goes in a bit too far and you find yourself hitting on a toothpick as you're biting into the burger like that's where that's where the yeah they've obviously been fashionable throughout history

in terms of having them sticking out of your mouth very very cool it is cool very cool look was very cool

you're a bad boy basically is that why cowboys are doing it it's to signify they don't value their own lives

so 1870s it was extremely cool for people to be chewing on toothpicks apparently every third woman in a particular area of Boston had one sticking out of her mouth at any one time.

Well, this was Charles Forrester's boom, right? This was as a result. This was the moment, 1870s, when it erupted.

But even before that, people obviously went around doing it.

I was reading a 16th-century book of kind of table manners, and it advised: do not go around with a toothpick in your mouth like a bird going to build his nest, or stick it behind your ear like a barber does his comb.

Which obviously implies

people are doing that. Yeah? Have you guys heard of Stan Monroe? No.

Stan Monroe, ten years ago, his wife had a few operations, but while she was having her operations, Stan Monroe needed to take his mind off things and so started to build stuff out of toothpicks.

And he has built the most buildings out of toothpicks of anyone in the world.

He says the quickest one he had to do was the Washington Monument, even though it's really big. One toothpick.

Yeah.

It's more than one toothpick. The Eiffel Tower is four, just going up to the same point.
They're very, very intricate. He uses actual blueprints to make them.
Wow.

They're all built one to 164 scale, every single one. Wow.

And what's really cool is that he read that the workers on the Empire State Building, when they did the real Empire State Building, they used to carve their wives' names into the buildings.

And so in all of his toothpick buildings, he has his wife's wife's name somewhere in them. How sweet.

Well, like carved into a toothpick. I guess possibly into a few toothpicks.

Because otherwise that would be quite small. But yeah.

Well, there is this guy called Willard Wiggin, who we've actually mentioned once before, ages ago, who does tiny sculptures. And one of the things he does is he sculpts into individual toothpicks.

And he'll sculpt famous people. So he did, back in the year 2000, he did the Beckhams.

So David Beckham is one toothpick, Victoria Beckham is the other, their kid was the other and I mean it was tiny and it took him a week I think Will Biggin is he the man behind the Impossible Micro World

in Bath

they had a touring exhibition it was the most incredible thing I've ever seen it was so good did you have to do something through microscopes and stuff yes you do you do he has

sorry I didn't see the Beckhams I don't know if they were in that exhibition but I remember he did a horse a statue of a horse dancing and the statue itself was balanced on the head of an ant which was in the display case.

Wow. He's unbelievable.
I wrote to him once but he never wrote back. He might have done but his letter was so small.

Just a tiny toothpick through your letterbox.

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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show and that is Andy. My fact is that there is a blue plaque in London which has its own blue plaque.

Pretty cool. Yeah.
Why does it? Why? Well, the original plaque, plaque one, as I'm going to call it from now on, is to Isaac Newton. And it was his home when he was the president of the Royal Society.

It's in German Street, which is quite near Piccadilly in London. And the building was rebuilt and it was finished in 1915.
And the plaque was reattached.

But it then had a supplementary plaque attached saying this plaque was, you know, reattached. It's not round, the bonus plaque.
Plaque two is rectangular. Okay.
They are both blue.

No. And I should say I got this from someone I know, Will Noble, who had seen it in the works of Mark Mason, who we know.
He is a brilliant person. He's been on collection and has been on fish.

Yeah, yeah.

Now, my understanding of blue plaques, the English Heritage blue plaques, is that to earn a blue plaque, you need to have made a significant and positive contribution to society.

And I would be interested to know what contribution that plaque made to society.

You know, can I get a plaque?

I mean, how easy can it be I think maybe that was before the rules were tightened up so English Heritage took over in about the 1980s they took over from the London County Council and the London County Council took over from maybe the Royal Society of Arts the first people to do it were the Royal Society of Arts it's been through about four bodies have had the responsibility of putting up blue plaques and English Heritage are now

just in London the ones they do and they are if you like the original maybe the best they're certainly the most stringent in their requirements because there are dozens and dozens really stringent, isn't it?

Like the first thing you need to do is die. Yeah.

And then you need to have been dead for 20 years. Yeah.
Yeah. So get in there early.

And then someone has to nominate you. But you're only allowed to nominate one person a year if you're a member of the public.

So you can't just send loads and loads of... What about this person? What about this person? What about this person? And then it goes to a panel of 12 people,

including a few historians like Rosemary Hill and David Olisoga and people like that. And then they decide.
And then you have another problem because you have to find the owner of the building.

And sometimes they don't reply to your emails or they don't want, you know, they don't want to. Or they write back, but tiny,

you can put up a tiny plaque of the size of a button.

But yeah, some people don't want them on their house, do they? Bizarre. I mean, surely, out of sheer selfishness, I guess it would increase the value of the building.

Well, there was an interview with Howard Spencer, who's in charge of English Heritage, and he said that it does increase the value of your house for sure but not by enough.

He said you'd be better off modernizing a bathroom than trying to get a blue bag.

But in the same article I read there was an interview with Caroline Mitvok who is a researcher who lives on Wimpole Street which is where Frederick Treves who was the surgeon of the Elephant Man lived and she says it can be quite annoying because you get tourists kind of stood outside gawping at your the front of your house and when you're trying to come in with your bags of shopping you don't want to go around them so yeah it is there are frustrations.

And also they're so strict about the rules. And there was a complaint a few years ago.
Someone had wanted a plaque to Elizabeth Taylor. Okay.

And they had written back saying it's not yet 20 years since she died and we are not, as a result, going to consider her.

And the guy who had made the suggestion had kind of promised to Elizabeth Taylor that he would try and get her a plaque. And he said, it's so annoying.

They should just waive the rule because in 20 years, all the fans who would have paid attention will themselves be dead and no one will pay any interest.

And I would have thought that's kind of the point of why the 20-year rule exists.

He's identified the reason for the rules. And

going, yes, thank you for confirming we've made the right decision.

Although there was one person who called Philip Jones who was a trumpet player who died in 2000 and people think that he probably will have a blue plaque in the end but the problem was they had to wait 20 years and that would mean that his wife who's still living would probably never get to see it.

So you know you can see in a way that it would be nicer for some people to get it at their end. Yeah.

Yeah it would be nice but I'm afraid it's not the point of a blue plaque to make everyone's Tom, Dick, and Harry's wives happy.

It's meant to be someone who's making a lasting contribution to the world. And if everyone's forgotten you after 20 years, then I'm afraid you don't deserve it.

Okay, well, if you want one, you can just buy one yourself.

It doesn't really matter. I mean, there's nothing to stop you from just buying one on your own house.
Absolutely.

I did find a blue plaque that went to someone who had only died 12 years before receiving it. Who? Was this in the olden days? No,

this is in modern days.

I say someone, it's an animal. Dolly the sheep.
Oh, but in sheep years. In sheep years, exactly.
It was actually 60 years.

Did they only make the one plaque for Dolly?

Idiots. Yeah, that's in the Society of Biology in Edinburgh at the Roslyn Institute.
Okay.

There can't be many quadrupeds who have plaques.

I think the only other one that I could find was the dog who was the dog of the HMV painting, his master's voice dog

but Nipper yeah yeah Nipper's got a plaque somewhere are these all proper this is an English heritage I think there are probably quite a lot of other pets there's a couple of bipeds I know humans are bipeds as well but feathered bipeds plaques which are pigeons who were like during the World War II kind of gave messages and stuff in World War I

that's really cool but not English heritage or English heritage not sure there's even fictional characters that get given blue plaques

so I was reading that one person who's real, Charles Dickens, has so many, he's got like 44 plaques around the UK, you know, so many places he went to and wrote a book there and so on.

So scattered across the UK, he has them. But even his characters have some plaques.
So Market Square in Dover is where David Copperfield apparently rested on a doorstep and ate a loaf. And

that has a plaque. I have to say, I think that's insane.
So there is a guy called Mike Reid. Oh, well, Mike Reed, the DJ.
Oh, yeah.

He is the chairman of the British Plaque Trust, and a few years ago he made a sizzling intervention in the debate.

He said there are way too many plaques, and he quoted that one down from David Copperfield saying this is madness. Or that there are plaques where, you know, there's a hotel where J.R.R.

Tolkien stayed for a couple of nights. You know, he had a weekend break.
But again, like Anna says, these aren't the official English heritage ones, is that right? That's correct.

Yeah, none of them are. So those Dickens ones, like Dickens does not have 44 English Heritage plaques.
So basically, I don't really count plaques as plaques unless they're English Heritage ones.

I think they're not blue plaques. They can be blue.
But

they're not capital B, capital P, blue. They can't be the colour blue, but that's obviously completely different to it.
I mean, blue plaques can be brown, can't they?

Yes, the original blue plaques are brown. Yes, very confusing.
Howard Spencer said that we have no copyright on the colour of plaques. That's fair.

We just ask people, try to make your style of plaque a bit different than ours. Wow.
And some people do, but some people really don't. Some people don't at all.
Why would you?

If you're going to put your own plaque on your front door, are you going to make it look as much like those as possible?

The way to tell, by the way, if you are a blue plaque spotter and you really are like Anna and you think only the English Heritage ones are the true plaques, then look for the screws because official blue plaques do not have screws.

They're kind of flush onto the stonework and the fake ones tend to be screwed on. Good to know.

That's a really good tip. What did you guys do about Frank and Sue Ashworth? The blue plaque team.
Oh, the makers, yeah. Yeah, the makers of the only plaques.

So they've been doing English Heritage's blue plaques since 1984 when they took over from the previous guy who died, but they got the recipe that he'd been using, a very specific recipe.

How many years did they have to wait until they were given the recipe?

And yeah, so it was the widow of the previous person who gave them the recipe, and they're so great. They live in Cornwall, they're hoping to hand down the business to their son, Justin.

There's a great video, I think it's on the English Heritage site, of Sue, the mother, and her son, Justin, who I guess they've been training up. And it's just a great family bickering session.

So they're obviously doing a documentary about plaque making. He's making this plaque, like doing the engravings.

She's giving the interview to the camera, saying, I'm very aware of how important it is not to interrupt while people are concentrating. You know, I try really hard not to interrupt Justin and Frank.

And then literally, Justin starts talking about what a perfectionist he is. And she spends the entire time interrupting him, saying, I'm so sorry.
I'm sorry. You're doing a bit.

Oh, I just think the lettering is a bit thick. Sorry, sorry for putting it is a bit thick there.
It's just annoying to have to pare it down, isn't it, Justin?

It's so sweet. It's so funny.

oh they're really sweet they're lovely um also the other person who fits into this scheme apart from the ashworth family is a man called trevor ramsey from sunderland did you find out about him no he is the man who fits all the blue plaques and he's done 200 of them in the last 16 years

yeah and he is the one who creates the hole in the wall so it fits perfectly flush and yeah as james says it can't be screwed on. There has to be a perfectly sized hole in the wall.

And he hangs the curtains as well. I always wondered who did the curtains.
I love the curtains. I didn't know there were, so there's a big reveal moment.
Oh, yeah,

always. There's always a reveal.
You know, those curtains where I now declare this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.

So, and I just never knew who made the curtains. No, I think not very many people do.

I think you're not going to get laughed out of a pub if you say, do you know, I'm so embarrassed to admit this, but I don't even know who makes the curtains of those plaques.

Another hack question in tonight's pub quiz.

Everyone gets it. The first ever plaque doesn't exist anymore.
The first plaque put up in London. And it was to Lord Byron.

And the house was demolished. It's now the central London John Lewis.

And we don't even know which house it was because I think there's no clear evidence as to which house Byron actually lived in. It was very early in his life.

But it was destroyed in a bomb in the war, and then another one was put up. Wonder if you'd be happy that it's now selling overpriced crockery.
Yeah. Okay.
Someone's not tried the everyday range.

Truly the spirits of Byron lives on.

Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we 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 get us on our group account, which is at no such thing, or go to our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there, as well as links to all of the places that we are going to be going to on our upcoming UK tour. Do check it out.
Please come see us live.

It's going to be awesome. But otherwise, we'll see you again next week with another episode.
Goodbye.

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