368: No Such Thing As The Knipper And The Corpse
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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 Tashinsky, James Harkin, and Andrew Hunter Murray.
And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.
And in no particular order, here we go.
Starting with you, Andy.
My fact is that after his death, Anton Chekhov was brought back to Russia in a refrigerated railway car labeled Fresh Oysters.
So was he on ice?
Oh, I don't know if he was actually on ice.
I know that he was
pre-chilled.
Before that, I think he...
Well, he was chilled because the last thing before he died was he had some champagne, which would have been cold as well.
Oh, yeah.
So
this is all, yeah, this is in 1904.
He was 44 years old, very young to have completely, you know, revolutionized Russian literature.
And he was in a spa in Germany because he had tuberculosis.
And the doctor arrived.
And when the doctor arrived, because things were nearing the end, his tuberculosis was really bad at this point.
He sat up straight and he said to the doctor, Ich Stauber, which is I'm dying.
And the doctor just said, Let's have some champagne.
Because there was the German medical convention, which was that if you can't do anything for the patient, you just get them some champagne.
And that means they know what's going on and so do you.
Okay.
That's interesting.
But he didn't really speak very good German, right?
Atolchekov.
And so I find it quite interesting that he'd picked up this one.
He must have known that he might need that phrase soon.
He didn't know he was going to die.
So he said before he boarded the train to Germany, he said to his friend, I'm off now.
I won't see you again.
I'm going to Germany to die.
So I suppose he was prepped to check out the I'm dying phrase as soon as he got there.
Because he, yeah, he was a medical doctor, wasn't he?
So he sort of, his whole life was sort of, he saw the little hints of what was going to happen in his near future.
He thought he would try and go to the spa to sort it out.
It didn't work out.
But what's amazing is he got given this big flute of champagne and he downed it all in one go.
And then he sort of laid back.
And after a few moments, that was it.
He was gone.
What an ending.
Wow.
well, they say that, but I mean, you don't down a massive flute of champagne without there being at least a little burp at the end, do you?
Probably just before he went, there would have been a big belch, I reckon.
Yeah, the account that we have is from Olga Nipper, his
wife, uh, then widow.
And she sort of says it was very calm and very peaceful.
And he sort of laid down, turned his head, and passed away.
But there are other accounts that were written that didn't come out for years and years afterwards by another kid who was in the room who was assisting the doctor.
And as James said, there was a sort of great burpee groan.
Oh, yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
Okay.
Knocks out the poetry of Olga's account.
Old Olga declined to mention that.
She was one of Dennis the Menace's pets, wasn't she?
Well, his body then went to Moscow in this train which said fresh oysters on it.
But when he arrived in Moscow station, there were people kind of waiting for his body because he was a big, famous hero in Russia.
But apparently, this is what I read.
When he came back, there was another person who'd died the same time called General Keller.
And the state had organized a big sort of funfair for his body returning and a military band and a parade and stuff.
And so a load of Chekhov's fans just started following General Keller's funeral procession, thinking it was Chekhov.
Which is
in the refrigerator rollback car next to it, labeled Fresh Scallops, and there was a bit of mayhem.
Um, yeah, it's a comedy, it's a faulty tower-style comedy mix-up where you want Basil Faulty to expose at the end what he thinks is a pile of oysters and is actually the corpse of Anna.
It's so weird that you mentioned that because I was thinking about Faulty Towers already for a different reason related to Chekhov's death, which is that after he died, they put him in a laundry basket, which is kind of like the episode The Kipper and the Corpse.
It is.
This one
was based on Faulty Towers.
And what was his wife's surname?
Kipper.
Oh, my God.
Yes.
Are we blowing shit wide open again?
Oh, no.
Let's have a week off blowing shit wide open.
Too late.
There's no such thing as the Knipper and the Corpse.
But they couldn't fit him in properly because obviously he was...
He was a little stiff by the time they tried to fold him up.
And laundry is more flexible than Chekhov.
And so he was in a half-sitting position in the basket.
Oh, my God.
Pretty undignified i know and it was it was to hide him from the other guests basically so it's more dignified than you know how you uh fold laundry by two people holding each end of it walking towards each other you can't do that with chekhov can you
no way
It's really nice as a witness account of someone accidentally passing them as they were trying to sneak Chekhov out
in the laundry basket.
Yeah.
And he said, I walked behind the man carrying the body.
Light and shade from the burning torches flickered and leaped over the dead man's face.
And at times, it seemed to me as if Chekhov was scarcely perceptibly smiling at the fact that by decreeing that his body should be carried out in a laundry basket, fate had linked him with humor even in death.
Oh, that's so nice because I was just going to say, I reckon Chekhov would have loved that way of editing because he was kind of a comedy-loving guy.
He would have really enjoyed that.
And I suppose that guy saw the same thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He started out as a comedy writer, really, didn't he?
And a comedian.
He thought he was a comedy writer at the very end as well, but not everyone else agreed with him yeah very confusing is that the thing where like with the cherry orchard he was he was insistent the cherry orchard was a comedy and um the famous director who put on the first production was konstantin stanislavsky who insisted it was a tragedy and staged it as such and it's kind of sad because it's the last thing that was put on before he died and chekhov was furious that it hadn't been interpreted as a sort of a farce i think it's amazing because you have um Chekhov, who's like one of the great short story writers and playwrights of history.
And then you've got Stanislavski, who's one of the great theater producers ever.
And, you know, he's where the Stanislavski method comes from.
And, you know, when American actors are doing the method, that's basically the Stanislavski method that they kind of brought over to America.
So you've got two greats who came together.
And Chekhov wrote this play.
And on the front page, it says comedy.
It says a cherry orchard, a comedy.
And then Stanislavski writes back to him going, I think it's a tragedy, mate.
It's like, how can you say that to the writer?
How can you say, I don't think it's a comedy?
I think it's amazing.
Bald.
And then
Chekhov wrote when he first saw this play, he wrote, How awful it is.
An act that ought to take 12 minutes at most, lasts 40 minutes.
He has ruined the play for me.
And Stanislavski wrote, The blossoms had just begun to appear when the author arrived and messed everything up for us.
It's like, these two were greats.
And they just couldn't agree.
I think it's amazing.
That's incredible.
And then in between there is Olga Knipper, who acted in all of Stanislavski's versions of Chekhov.
And that is how, yeah, that's how Chekhov eventually.
So it was a situation where he probably didn't want to see the plays, but he had to see the plays because he was madly in love with this girl and get closer to her.
And because they eventually married after she'd done, I think, four of his plays or so.
But that must have been so awkward because I think the Cherry Orchard was after they were married.
And she must have been so torn between these two people.
I mean, do you think she would do one scene serious and one scene comedy?
Yeah, maybe when Eva Chekhov came into the room, she'd put on a red nose and some big shoes and go.
Yeah.
She bizarrely, she acted in the Cherry Orchard in 1904.
She was Madame Ranovskaya, who's basically the main part.
Controversy over who was the main part.
So 1904, and then she did it again in 1943.
Same part.
Wow.
That's got to be one of the longest gaps between the same role.
She was 36 for the first and 75 for the second.
That's correct.
she outlived him by a really long way because he died in 1904 and she died in 1959.
Do you know what I find the weirdest thing about Chekhov is that, as we were saying before, he's this huge author and he's today he's still considered to be one of the all-time greats.
I kept reading in a few places that just he's sort of under Shakespeare as the person with the most film adaptions and plays that are on.
And I can't, I haven't seen any of his stuff and I can't think of a single short story.
And I just find that fascinating that I read a lot i see a lot of things yet this guy is second to shakespeare his plays get put on a lot i would say and they definitely in london you would get it we had tickets to watch the seagull just before lockdown we never got to see it in the end with um
what's the name from game of thrones amelia clarke was it oh yeah yeah but yeah his plays are excellent i love those but honestly dan and anyone he was in my top three favorite writers I would sometimes say he's my favourite writer.
His short stories are heaven.
You'd sit down and read one of those before you read and plowed your way through the Merry Wives of Windsor.
Definitely.
And good news, they're quite short, Dan.
I read vlog books.
I read
just for this, I read, what's it called?
The woman and the dog, is it called?
The woman with the dog.
The woman and the lap dog or whatever.
Yeah.
And I've tried to read it in Russian because, you know, I'm learning Russian a little bit and I'm kind of okay.
And the standard of writing is quite simple.
It's quite easy to read.
It's like he has lots to say about the human condition and about, you know, love and the way that people react with each other.
But actually, it's in really nice, easy to understand writing.
I can read big words.
I can read.
Big words, James.
We should say that not everyone respected him quite as much.
So Tolstoy hated his stuff.
Tolstoy said that Chekhov is an appalling playwright, but at least he's not as bad as Shakespeare.
So he was preparing the two, but slightly, he also really hated Shakespeare.
But actually, they were good mates, weren't they, Tolstoy and Chekhov?
Yeah, they were.
I think he said that right to his face.
He was like, well, I hate this, but at least it's not as bad as Shakespeare.
And he loved his short stories.
So Tolstoy used to, his daughter, Tolstoy's daughter said that Tolstoy used to make them read the short stories aloud at dinner and his early funny stuff.
And the daughter said that Tolstoy, my father, was usually a good reader, but with Chekhov, he was often quite unable to go on, so infectious did his helpless fits of laughter become.
And he would sort of laugh until he cried.
And he, I think he was one of the people who said, why doesn't Chekhov understand that he's just a great comedy writer?
You know, stick to that.
Right.
And he just knocked them out as well.
That's what I love about them.
He decided he wanted to be a writer because he needed to support his family.
And he just, it was only over about 20 years that he wrote all these things, like 700 short stories or something.
And they were all literally just like, okay, we'll get this out to the.
to the Moscow Times, to the St.
Petersburg Times.
Every month or so, you would have at least two or three of Chekhov's stories in there.
They'd be all under different pen names, so you didn't know they were all from from the same person.
Well, someone who I've become a bit obsessed off the back of Chekhov now is a lady called Constance Garnett.
Now, this is just what a remarkable story.
So it's really thanks to her that we have Chekhov in the English language, as well as Tolstoy and other great Russian writers.
She sat down with a Russian dictionary, having not spoken a single word of Russian until the age of 29, and she translated all of these books.
And that is how the English-speaking world got introduced to all of these people.
And just a remarkable person.
She is.
She's such a weirdo.
She just randomly decided to withdraw and devote her life to that.
And yeah, changed 20th-century literature, I guess, because all literature was then influenced by the Russian greats.
And she churned it out too.
She did like hundreds of Chekhov stories, all of Turgenev, all of Tolstoy's novels, almost all of Tolstoy, all Dostoevsky.
Oh my God, I hope she started with Chekhov.
Ease her way in.
And the reason she started is because she had a difficult pregnancy in 1891 where she was kind of confined.
So she thought nothing else to do except learn Russian.
And she did.
And then in 1894, she just abandoned her husband and her toddler, went to Russia and hung out with Tolstoy for a bit.
And it's like, can I start translating in novels, please?
Amazing.
Yeah.
And she didn't start easy.
You know, one of the first translations was a religious and philosophical piece by Leo Tolstoy, which was called The Kingdom God is Within You.
I mean, a really hardcore first thing.
And she had terrible vision at the end.
So she kept translating sort of into her late life, but she would have someone sitting there reading it out while she translated.
So she sort of had assistants alongside her helping her to do it.
And the reason that they became so popular around the world is because
she was from a publishing family.
Her husband worked in publishing as well.
And she was able to press them as really cheap books so people could afford them and they could just get out there into the wild in a way that people could buy them affordably.
That's that's the real reason that they had traction into the wild.
By Lou Free.
I tried to find if there's a single removals firm in the UK called Uncle Vanya, and I can't find one.
Jesus.
And I think, what a gap in the market that is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What about a,
is there like a really happy tree surgeon called the Cheery Orchard?
That's good.
Yeah.
So many gaps in the market everywhere.
Are these gaps in the market or just terrible jokes?
I would trust a removal's firm called Uncle Vanya.
I think these guys are going to look after my books.
Okay.
His nickname in the UK was Willie Wetleg.
Really?
T.H.
Lawrence nicknamed him Willie Wetleg.
Willie Wetleg.
Willie Wetleg.
I don't know why.
But audiences in the UK were not wowed by early Chakov plays because they didn't like the lack of obvious plots or clear meaning.
Some of them are quite non-committal and there isn't a definitive answer.
That's right.
I read a review in the Daily Express from the Time which said that the Cherry Orchard was a silly, tiresome, boring comedy.
There is no plot.
The orchard is for sale, and certain dull people are upset because it must be sold.
Wow.
It's a decent summary of the plot.
Oh,
is it?
So, this is coming from someone who, as I say,
hasn't read any of Chekhov.
Was the idea that it it was all character studies and just amazing dialogue and sort of insight into the human condition
there's quite a lot of social commentary a lot of stuff about um kind of aristocracy can we spoiler the can we spoiler the cherry archer or are we going to get into i don't think i don't think we're going to go for the ending
there's big messed up families having crazy philosophical debates and then shagging each other and um getting angry and making up stuff like that you know it's like neighbors we haven't even mentioned chekhov's rifle or chekhov's gun oh yeah it's impossible to find out if chekov actually owned a gun because whenever you google the phrase chekov's gun it only comes up with the dramatic principle that he kept saying which is if there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act it has to go off uh in the second pretty and he said different versions of it but that's broadly it don't introduce a plot element that's a big heavy thing and then not play it out but i kept on trying to find out if he did have a gun yeah why have
what why
why try and find that out yeah well i think that's interesting it's relevant did he have it checkoff's gun?
Was it real?
Yeah.
Was he, you know, could he really talk about guns or had he never seen one in his life?
And he's, you know.
Exactly.
Was he bluffing?
Yeah.
Sorry for trying to do my homework, Dan.
Sorry.
Sorry.
I don't know why I questioned it.
No, I was just curious if there was an extra thing about it that I didn't realize.
Here's a pointless fact about Chekhov.
The seagull in Russian is Chaika, it's called.
That's Russian, but it's not Russian for seagull.
It's just Russian for gull.
Because actually the play is set in the middle of Ukraine or Russia, nowhere near like a thousand miles from the sea.
And so, yeah, we just translated it as seagull, but really it should be gull.
That's probably bloody Constance Garnet, isn't it?
Bringing her seagull-based thinking.
See, that's a good fact to look into, Andy.
That's the kind of thing you should be focusing on.
That will absolutely delight ornithological fans because, of course, there is no such thing as a seagull.
Yeah.
And there's no such thing as the seagull either.
There you you go.
Nice.
Yes.
Did you guys spot that thing about the theory that he didn't die of tuberculosis and how they've been looking into they've reopened the case?
They've reopened the case.
Have they gotten into it?
Come on.
This, this was a thing whereby.
Did he drown in a bed of oysters?
Suffocated in some laundry basket.
He
supposedly died of a brain hemorrhage.
And this was, this was scientists took some proteins that were on his shirt and they analyzed it.
And
they think what showed up sort of suggests that the tuberculosis was a lifelong thing that he had under control, that it was manageable, but actually he was suffering from huge pains of a brain hemorrhage.
And yeah, so they just analyzed this is, and this is only a few years ago that they managed to get these samples.
And that's the theory.
Do they dig them up again?
Yeah, it's a good question.
It was on his clothes.
So I assume that maybe the clothes must have been saved as relics.
Yeah, got it.
It's not what you want when someone says of a historical character, he actually didn't die this way.
What we want is he was murdered by his furious lover,
by a gun, which may or may not have belonged to him.
If they accused his wife of killing him and she didn't really, she could say, I was dud up like a clipper.
My word.
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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.
Okay, my fact this week is that earlier this year, a woman reported that she was bleeding from her eyes whenever she was on her period.
Is it I a euphemism?
No.
Is that okay?
None of that sentence is euphemism.
You wouldn't say eyes plural, would you?
That's mental.
Yeah.
So does the, I mean,
so many, yeah.
I'm just waiting for the questions and then I'll tell you.
But okay, can you buy eye tampons?
You cannot buy eye tampons.
No.
Oh well then I feel really sorry for that.
Is it the same is it the same blood that's kind of traveled through the body and up out the eyes?
Okay.
Like if you if you squeezed her by the tummy.
That started off as a reasonable question so I'll answer it.
There is a thing that it that can happen called vicarious menstruation.
And it seems to be a kind of hormonal thing.
We're still not exactly sure why it happens, but it means people can bleed from different parts of their body when they're on the period.
So, you people have been documented as bleeding from the nose-that's quite common, like nosebleeds, the nipples, the intestines, the skin, things like that.
It's extremely, extremely rare.
But earlier this year, this is a report in the British Medical Journal.
There was a 25-year-old who visited an emergency room, and she was having blood coming from her, like near from her tear ducts when she was on her period.
And there's also a thing called hemolacria, which can make blood come out of your eyes.
There's lots of different things that can cause that.
So that could be caused by, you know, abnormality of the sinuses, problems with the tear ducts.
There's lots of things that can cause that.
But the doctors went through everything that that could have been and realized it couldn't be any of those things.
And they think that this is vicarious menstruation and hemolacria put together.
And this is the first time that it's ever been reported in any medical journal.
Now, it seems to be quite benign.
They can't see any other problems from it.
It's just a thing that happened.
They gave her some hormonal therapy, and it has gone away.
So, it seems to be a hormonal thing, like the vicarious menstruation would be.
But that's it.
This is a thing that happened.
Extraordinary.
So, it's not her womb wandering around her body.
We're not about to say Aristotle was right.
We're not going to say that.
Oh, that would have been the biggest shit to blow wide open of all.
Everything.
Parent, I've read that there was a 1995 study that found that 18% of fertile women do have some blood in their tears.
Is that
trace amounts of blood?
Yeah.
7% of pregnant women, 8% of men, 18% of fertile women, and then post-menopause, no women have it.
Oh, I see.
Hallelujah.
So it's a small study, but interesting.
So you can cut down that phrase, blood, sweat, and tears.
You can just say blood and sweat.
Well, tears and sweat.
Yeah.
That's good.
That's going to save us all some time.
Well, I did also say that some people can sweat blood due to vicarious menstruation.
So you could just say blood.
Oh, oh, great.
Much easier.
If anyone ever says to you, blood, sweat, and tears, just go as tautology, mate.
It's wasting your time.
Do you think,
and I'm sure you don't.
uh that groups of women living together start to experience synchronized menstruation.
Oh it's what people say, but I think I've read things that say that that's not true.
But anecdotally, so many people, whenever I've said that to them, have said, well, it is true.
So I don't know what you're talking about.
Yeah, I saw that as well.
Medically, according to the reports, not true.
I know so many women who've told me that that's what's happened with them.
So who do we believe?
I think the larger, more recent studies, which say it doesn't happen.
But I reckon
that's what they were saying to Aristotle back in the day, weren't they?
They're saying, I've spoken to lots of women and they say that their wombs do not move around their body.
And you're like, Nope, nope, this is what the scientists say.
Studies have shown.
Yeah, I think the largest and longest studies have found no evidence for it.
There is plenty of random overlap that might be seen as synchrony if you look at it through a shorter time window.
So there are plenty of reasons why you might think it is happening.
But no, I think it's a confirmation bias.
I think it just overlaps enough that every four months it happens, and they go, oh my God, we must be synchronizing.
Right.
Okay.
But it does happen with lions.
That's the key.
So maybe
everyone you've asked has actually been a lion.
Do you guys think, and I don't think you do, but do you think that bears are attracted to menstruation?
Ah, attracted how
just as in sexual.
Come closer to what?
Yeah, yeah.
Well,
Fenella's cousin was once told to escape a forest because the guide found out she was menstruating and was like, you got to get out of here now.
And they just left her on her own.
Yeah,
she had to leave the wood at her husband's stage.
And she was like, no, no she's never found again she's now living in a gingerbread house
wow really that's amazing and what did she get attacked by a bear don't know
no because i have a feeling james is about to say that that's a myth
well it is a myth but i'm still a bit worried about this guy tall where they just say anyone who's menstruating get out of here now and you're on your own
There was a study relatively recently done where 15 used tampons were presented to male black bears that were feeding in a garbage dump uh and they found there was no uh reaction uh from the bears i mean at least at least they had the courtesy not to go oh get out of my face but all this study says to me is that bears prefer garbage dumps to used tampons.
It doesn't necessarily mean that, but yeah.
Could be the second best thing on the menu.
A lot of different tribes think that periods will attract dangerous animals.
I think the Wari people of Brazil, the women wouldn't be allowed to go into the forests when they were on their periods because jaguars would be attracted to them.
And they weren't allowed to have sex either because then jaguars would be attracted to the men who were out hunting because they'd have sex with someone.
Oh, wow.
It's like it follows.
It's like it follows.
Cracking film and a niche reference that some people will get.
But they also have another really cool practice, these guys.
Or this is actually a thing I was reading in the 60s about them, so it might have changed.
But whenever a mother was on her period, her whole family, her husband and children, all painted themselves with red food coloring.
So you all painted yourselves red.
Wow, that's just amazing.
That is such a good idea.
Weird, right?
I think we should bring that in.
Kind of a hassle.
Bit messy.
You could paint a lot and food coloring only comes in those tiny, tiny vials.
Yeah,
so what you could do is paint yourself in the new Pantone shade called Period,
which they brought out relatively recently.
It's very red.
It's very, very red.
It's not blood red.
It's just red, red.
But they brought it out, according to them,
so people can own their period with self-assurance to stand up and passionately celebrate the exciting and powerful life force they are born with, to feel comfortable, to talk spontaneously and openly about this pure and natural bodily function.
And by having some red paint, that will help us to do that.
But I think if we all painted ourselves red, we'd definitely be able to do that.
Yeah, yeah, I feel liberated already now.
Paint my wall in period.
That makes a big difference if you go to a property website and they say, well, this, of course, is a period property.
A lot of period features.
Oh, my word.
Sharks also don't go for menstruation.
Do they?
They, no, they like fish, it turns out.
I mean, this was a thing that, this is a thing that is also thought, I think, like the bears, you know, know, they've got a great sense of smell, sharks.
And,
you know, if you are menstruating and you're in the water, maybe you're going on a swimming with sharks experience.
It might lead to trouble.
It turns out, really, they're like the chemicals in fish blood.
And they have a good enough nose to detect fish from human blood.
And also, menstrual blood is mostly not blood.
It's mostly, you know, the lining of the womb, it's secretions, there's trace of blood, but it's not.
Yes, yeah.
So feel free to go swimming with sharks.
If you're if you're hanging out on the edge edge of the water, worried about it.
Don't be.
Has anyone heard of the sanitary products known as sphagnikins?
No, no, they sound a bit scandy?
No, okay.
It's not scandy.
The name comes from what they were made of,
sphagnikins.
Sphag, sphag.
Swags?
Oh, like sphagnum moss.
They're moss, aren't they?
Sphagnum moss.
Oh.
So they used to have the sphagnum moss girls, which were images that they used to advertise sanitary products products made from andy's favorite material moss wow there you go the sphagnum the the the the mosque
yeah they were known as the sphagnum moss girls wow when were these ladies around uh it was the middle of the 20th century i can't moss can't do is there's nothing moss can't do
lovely um one thing that's a quite a hot potato in a lot of countries is the tempon tax and um in germany in 2019, there was something that was actively done about it in order to raise awareness.
So it's taxed as a luxury good.
This is in 2019 at 19%,
which is ridiculously high in comparison to so many other things, say like books, which are only charged at 7%.
So there was a brilliant book that was released called the Tampon Book, which had inside of it 15 tampons, which were sold so you could buy them for much cheaper than you would a normal pack of tampons in the tax sense.
And they sold 10,000 copies once they released it.
So it was sort of becoming a best-selling book in its own right.
But yeah, tampon tax has been a horrific thing that we've still not solved.
Didn't the UK just pass something though?
Which, yeah, I think they have just passed it, haven't they?
In the UK.
I know you get free sanitary products in schools as of very recently in the UK.
Now you do have to be a pupil.
Damn it.
I say this for a bitter experience, all right?
Have you got any boss?
Has anyone got any boss?
Just standing on the school gates.
Or on the school roof, scraping off.
Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.
My fact this week is that touch screens can now be operated using muffins.
Oh, wow.
Finally.
Wow.
Okay.
So this is a discovery by a scientist in Belgium called Florian Heller.
And he realized that the electrical field of a capacitive touchscreen could be altered by using different materials.
So usually it would be your finger or it'd be a type of metal, hence styluses.
And he discovered that if you used a fresh out of the oven muffin, that the moisture was enough and the humidity was enough that it could be electrically conductive to this particular type of screen.
Okay.
So it can recognize it being touched.
And that's the kind of one that you have on your phone.
Most of them will be capacitive, aren't they?
Capacitive, yeah.
I did then spend most of my research time going around my bedroom seeing how many objects work me too.
Actually, not round your bedroom, round my house.
I did wonder what the you were doing in here.
Go on more.
There was nothing surprising.
It's not very exciting.
I mean, it's obviously stuff that you know conducts electricity.
Although I was quite excited that my spider plant does.
Wow.
So
if my spider plant became conscious, it could hack into my phone.
Okay, let me give you some examples and see if you can guess whether they work.
A grape.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
All right.
A plum.
Yes.
No.
Oh, I think you're kind of right as a group because it did work, but it didn't work very well.
A piece of alpaca poo.
No.
Oh, my God.
You opened up our trophy in order to
a year or so ago, we got an award in Vienna, which was a small vial of alpaca poo.
I opened it up and took up one of the little currents of poo and tried to use my phone with it.
Did it work or did it not work?
I'd say yes, there was a current with your current.
Yeah.
It did not work.
It did not work.
An egg.
Which
boiled?
Yeah.
Just an egg.
Just an egg from the fridge.
Oh, no.
No way.
No.
Not in shell.
Not in shell.
You're right.
A damp egg.
Damp egg.
No, I don't think that's.
I'm going to say yes.
Oh, definitely.
Yeah, I did.
Put a bit of water on the egg and it worked.
So anyway, thanks for listening to my TED Talk.
That's things that.
Wow.
What an insight to your brain that you went from egg to damp egg.
Like most people
would have moved on to the next object.
But one thing that's really interesting, and I did try this in my house, but actually I read it on the internet, is a battery.
So if you try and use a battery to operate your phone, it will only work if you use the negative side of the battery.
And if you use the positive side of the battery, it won't work.
And that is the explanation really of how these things work because you have a tiny little electrical difference in your finger.
And that's what the phone can tell.
You know, it's very, very slightly charged your skin.
And that's how it can tell the difference.
So there's not a current, it's not like there's a current obviously running from the ground through you to your phone.
No, it's like, you know, if you have static electricity
because because you've been walking on a carpet or you've been rubbing a lot of balloons against something,
then you get a little shock.
Um, well, that shock actually happens all the time.
You always have that kind of tiny difference in electricity in your body, like the inside of your body is positively charged, and the outside of your body is very slightly negatively charged.
And that's what the phone can tell.
Yeah.
So it's just connecting a circuit.
It's like putting the crocodile clip on the circuit when you're at school.
Your finger is literally connecting that little circuit.
It's like putting the damp egg on the
stop saying damp egg.
But is this so?
When you don't have, you know, when because some people, or sometimes your finger doesn't work on your phone, it's really annoying.
But is that due to your having more dead skin, for example?
So if you've got really thick skin, does that damage it?
Yes, Andy, do you have zombie fingers?
Some people have this.
I don't, but if I was a lumberjack, for example, I might do.
Yes.
You're working for my company, Cheery Archard.
Exactly.
You'd need to get yourself a stylist.
What is Dumby Fingers, Anna?
Well, it's for lumberjacks.
It's particularly suffered by lumberjacks and guitar players as well have it.
And yes, if you've got very colourless fingers, so they're very dry, so they're not conducting as well.
The recommendation is lick your finger.
Or if you are one particular one.
Just use a dumb peg.
Just use a dumb peg.
You can't quite get because it's not very pointy, is it?
One woman got a refund on her Chromebook because she insisted that it just did not respond to her fingers at all okay so i didn't know this this is really cool when they were making the iphone they still didn't have the keyboard touchscreen worked out the year before it was launched and they developed this technique to work out what you're going to type next to kind of predict it so if you hit t on your phone yeah the phone they they know that you're likelier to hit h next because of the word the for example and there are all these probabilities they can work out so when you've hit t what they call the hit region around around the letter H on your phone keyboard, it grows a bit
so that it stays the same size to your eye and on the screen.
But beneath it, the technology knows that.
So there's this hit region around H, which swells a bit.
And then once you've hit T H, the hit region around E will swell a bit.
So there's this quivering, pulsating map that we can't see.
What if you wanted to write Tug or something?
Like, would it...
Does it mean you're more likely to make mistakes with more unusual letter pairs?
I think that's what it means.
But fortunately, we don't write tug much.
So, like, there are no words, are there?
There are no words that begin TG, I don't think.
Uh, no, I might try typing TG on my phone now.
What if you were typing the word cat gut that's got a t
brilliant?
I actually type that more often than the word the.
Do you know who invented the touch screen?
Who?
No, uh, it was a man called Bent Stumpy.
Um, who
Stumpy?
Stumpy.
I'm going to put a first name for Mr.
Stumpy.
He was an engineer at CEN and he was working with someone called Frank Beck.
And Frank Beck asked Bent Stumpy to solve the problem of to build some hardware for an intelligent system which in just three console units would replace all the conventional buttons and switches.
Sorry, I was just reading that.
But basically, they wanted to get rid of all the buttons and switches and replace them with a new system.
And Bent Stumpy went away.
And a few days later, he came back with three different solutions.
One was a trackable.
One was a programmable knob.
Don't know exactly how the knob was programmable.
And the other one was a touchscreen.
Wow.
He should be the Steve Jones of the time.
They probably said to him, listen, we'd love to make you global famous, but the name's just not going to work, mate.
No one's going to buy this product.
And he wouldn't give it up.
He wouldn't give up the name.
No.
Stumpy is
S-T-U-M-P-E.
i think it's stumpy it could be bent stump i'm not sure i think bent stump much better that was the only option he offered them he was like okay i'll make it bent stump my final offer the first time that was used was in air traffic control right when when that came along and then it just wasn't used in anything else for 30 years so it was in 1960 literally the mid-60s 1965 um and air traffic controllers used it and they called it a touch wire display and it must have been so advanced in 1966 as an air traffic controller.
There was one wire that's attached to a computer that's getting into information about when all the planes are landing and what time and what platform
or whatever runway
they land on.
And then the other end of the wire would connect to the screen.
And then the bottom of the screen, wherever you touched it, would touch a specific bit of wire that would transmit information back and forth.
And they were doing this for 30 years.
And yet it wasn't until really the 80s, the late 80s, 90s, that it was incorporated into other tech.
It's amazing to think that Jimi Hendrix could have used a touchscreen if he had worked in air traffic control.
But he couldn't have because he was a guitar player, so they wouldn't have worked with him.
Oh, my God.
Brilliant.
Yeah.
Stuff on muffins or not?
Ooh, if you've got, yeah.
So the British Museum might have been established as a result of a muffin.
What?
So you might know that the British Museum was established by Sir Hans Sloan.
After he died, all of his collection were put into this new museum because he had been collecting these loads of weird things like antiquities, rare books, all sorts of stuff.
He kept them in his house and then when it got too much in his house, he bought a house next door and put it all in there.
And he had loads of friends, loads of famous friends who would come and
have dinner with him and have a look at his amazing stuff.
But once he was visited by Handel and Handel apparently put a buttered muffin on one of his rare books.
And Sir Hansloan was absolutely furious about this.
And he was like, I can't have the place where I have my dinner parties in the same place as the place where I have all my rare stuff.
So he bought a new place out in Chelsea and he put everything in there and it became a little museum of its own rights rather than a house.
And then it was all the stuff from there that became the British Museum.
Wow.
Well done muffin.
Do you think Handel was just being very ahead of his time and trying to operate what he thought was a kindling, basically
touchscreen muffin?
Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna.
My fact this week is that in 2012, Southwest Airlines agreed to fly a single butterfly 2,000 miles after it overslept and missed its ride.
Oh, it's adorable.
It is.
What a good service to have offered.
This is a problem that had arisen with this butterfly, spotted by a woman called Marilyn Manos-Jones.
She was in Albany, New York, and she saw in her garden a monarch butterfly.
And she happened to be a butterfly expert.
So she knew that it was, well, she was watching it from like metamorphosis stage, and she knew it was metamorphosing too late.
So often, when the caterpillars go into their chrysalis stage, they'll sometimes wait out too long, emerge late, they'll emerge a bit damaged, a bit unhealthy if they're slow to develop.
She expected it to be like this and a lost cause.
But it came out big, hearty, healthy, she said.
And she knew that its swarmmates had already flown south because that's what they do for the winter to get some warmer climates.
And so she panicked and she thought, well, this guy isn't going to survive the winter up here in New York.
So she rang up Southwest Airlines, obviously.
And she said, can you carry this guy to Texas, please, where it can cross the border into Mexico and join its friends?
And they agreed.
So, what did they give it a seat?
And, you know,
I think they made it share her seat, which is, I guess, you do that with babies, don't you?
Yeah, you can put them on your lap.
If there's a problem with the flights, when you're flying, you have to put your own gas mask on before you put your butterfly's gas mask on.
Yeah,
that's absolutely right.
Would have been hell to put a gas mask on it because it was wrapped in about 17 different layers.
So they packed it up in this like glass scene, which is like very light, transparent paper, in an envelope made of that with a damp piece of cotton.
Then they put it in a Tupperware, then in another container with an ice pack to keep it cool and calm, stop it panicking.
And then they put that container into a bag that was padded out with layers of newspaper and towels.
And it sat on her lap and flew all the way down to San Antonio and then popped out, joined its friends and flew further south into South Mexico.
Do we know it made it?
Or do we just have records up to the point at which she released this butterfly and then it got eaten by a bird immediately?
Exactly.
Yeah.
She released it and then we believe it probably survived, although we don't have confirmation.
It hasn't sent any postcards.
But did she have to find the swarm in this bit of America?
So she just let it off assuming that it would cross the border on its own and finish the
it's a big risk.
No, no, I get that, but it's sort of not seeing it to its, you know, it's if you're trying to return it.
It has to be a missing.
There needs to be a point at which you give up on this story and you give up on the salary.
Like, this is not practical.
You can't
fly all the way to the swamp.
It's like one of those easy jet flights.
Sometimes, to get to Barcelona, you have to go to an airport that's 200 miles from Barcelona.
Everyone knows that.
Yeah, I think I'm with you, Dan.
She's lazy.
You've got it.
You've got to see it through.
He could just be propping up a bar in Texas still.
I think she's actually gone above and beyond what was required.
And I think if we all did this, it would, you know, forever be a disaster.
It would be exactly what Greta Thunberg would say.
But we're talking about one single instance where she did three quarters of the trip
and has no idea if it paid off.
There's no end to this story.
I don't think she should have done it either, Dan.
No, I know.
So why do three quarters?
It makes no sense.
I think that this is a wonderful, heartwarming story that Pixar need to get on immediately.
You know, the butterfly that's left behind in cold New York and has to get to San Sydney.
Yes.
Yeah.
It was.
Has a champion who says, I'll get you there, but then only gets them three-quarters of the way there and says, all right, off you pop.
That's a twist halfway through.
That's the low point.
Yeah, most of the way through the film.
In all those films, there is a low point, like when Paddington leaves his family temporarily in Paddington one, or when Paddington is sent to prison in Paddington two.
Or I could go on.
You can get, we must have said before that you can get butterflies that drink tears of animals, but also humans.
But you also get blood-feeding, sweat-feeding, and tear-feeding butterflies.
So for these butterflies, that woman who was bleeding out of her eyes, it must have been.
It's a banquet.
It's a banquet.
It's a banquet.
It's a three-course meal.
It's one of those world buffet grills where you have 20 different cuisine styles all served at the same buffet.
Exactly.
The blood ones are quite interesting because they will actually pierce your skin
to get your blood.
Generally not with humans, generally with other animals, although it can happen with humans.
And what they think is they evolved from fruit-eating moths and butterflies, and they would pierce the skin of the fruits to get at the juicy stuff inside.
And they evolved into blood-drinking moths and butterflies.
So will they just be drinking the blood of little ants and stuff?
No, they'll drink like proper, they'll drink proper mammal blood for sure.
It's only the males who do it.
And it's the same with tears actually, only males will drink the tears of animals.
And that's because they're trying to get the sodium from the animal, which can be in the blood or in the tears.
But the females, they get the sodium directly from the male during mating.
So they don't need to get it from the other animals.
They get it through the
secondhand.
They get secondhand sodium.
Yeah.
I read this amazing thing about monarch butterflies, which astounds me.
And this is part of actually their big migration that they do when they're going south.
And it is the fact that they have to, at one point in this huge journey, they have to cross Lake Superior.
And Lake Superior, biggest lake in the world, it's ginormous.
And that is a huge moment of the trip where they really have to go gung-ho on it.
And this really odd thing happens that biologists have been looking into for quite a long time, which is they all fly in this sort of straight line.
And then out of nowhere, they take a turn to the east and they fly east for a while and then they turn back flying south again.
And they haven't known why and they're still not completely sure.
But the latest theory is that it's a memory of the past from old days when they were traveling down.
And there used to be, there must have been a jutting out mountainous bit
in Lake Superior.
And it's a memory that this is where we take a right.
I remember when we used to go on holiday when I was a kid and my dad would drive us many, many hundreds of miles to where we were going on holiday.
And he'd always be driving around going, I'm sure there was a service station around here.
Exactly.
So they think there was something there that was blocking the path for generations and generations.
And then it went, but they still in their head go, oh, this is where we take a right to get away from the blocky thing, even though nothing is there.
There would be evidence, wouldn't there, that there had been a mountain here or something?
Yeah, I mean, there would be, right?
You'd think, but they can't explain.
They just don't know why they take a right there.
That's amazing.
Yeah, wow.
That's so cool.
The species evidence of a previous mountain that must have been missing for a while now.
Yeah.
It must be some thousands of years.
Where's it gone?
Yeah.
That's very cool.
I wonder who's in charge of the satinav there.
Who's jabbing the muffin at the
I don't like jabbing the muffin at all.
That's the phrase.
So, how many butterflies do you think there are in the Natural History Museum?
Dead ones, I mean.
Okay.
I guess.
Three.
A thousand.
Oh, come on.
Three thousand, three.
Twenty-five.
It's fifty thousand.
Fifty thousand.
You're going to have to go quite a lot higher than that.
Oh,
500,000.
7 million.
Keep going.
100 million.
No, no.
No, you went too far.
There are
8,712,000 dead butterflies and moths in the Natural History Museum.
They're in glass-fronted cases that, if laid out on the floor, they would cover around 30 football pitches, which is about 10 times bigger than that ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal.
Oh, my word.
Which, at the moment, is a very on-topic reference, but probably in two weeks' time, everyone will have forgotten it.
The collection began with Walter and Charles Rothschild, who are amateur entomologists, and they gave more than 2 million butterflies and moths to the Natural History Museum.
It's too many.
You don't want that many.
Well, maybe, but Walter Rothschild used to say that of the 2 million, more than 2 million butterflies, he didn't have a single duplicate in his entire collection.
Oh, come on.
It can't be true, right?
I've got like packets of football stickers with a duplicate in the same packet.
It can't be true.
2 million with no duplicates.
Amazing.
Wow.
That's so good.
Absolute rubbish.
Some of them have bullet holes in them, don't they?
Because
this is how they used to collect butterflies in the olden days.
Yeah, even at the turn of the 20th century, even they were still doing it.
So the specimen that the Natural History Museum has, of for instance, the largest butterfly in the world
was collected by shotgun in 1906 by a guy called
Albert Stuart Meek, who sounds not very meek if he's going around machine gunning butterflies down.
How big was it, Anna?
Because you can get quite big butterflies, right?
This one has a 20-centimetre wingspan, and the biggest of its kind has a 26-centimetre wingspan.
That's very big.
It's a biggie.
Still
feels like a shotgun would obliterate it.
They use special ammo.
I mean, I'm sure you can just get a net.
It feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but they use special butterfly-friendly ammo.
Not friendly to the butterfly itself, but friendly to the shape of its wing.
There are people who aim to wipe out butterflies, like the New Zealand government.
They are the first, New Zealand is the first country to eradicate a butterfly within its own territory deliberately.
A single species or all?
A single species called the great white butterfly, which they eat the rare cresses of New Zealand.
I didn't know that was a problem in New Zealand, but get this.
Out of 79 kiwi cresses, 57 are at risk of extinction, and these bastard butterflies are eating them.
So the New Zealand government said, no, we are going to destroy this butterfly in New Zealand because it's plentiful elsewhere in the world.
So they conducted 263,000 searches.
They offered a bounty
of $10 for every dead great white butterfly you turned in.
What if you don't like bounties?
Then you get a galaxy or a twirl.
And they released wasps that hunted them.
And they did this for about four years, this
savage butterfly hunt, and they found no more.
They declared that they had won.
Makes them sound like really bad guys.
And I'm happy because the New Zealand government has got a lot of good press the last year and a half.
And it's about time someone brought them down as butterfly murderers.
Yeah, what year is this?
Is this pre-Jacinda or or is this going to be a stain on her career?
No, this is 2010 to 2014, I think, that the campaign was happening.
It didn't sound very Jacinda.
It's not a stain, it's the rare cresses.
Think of the rare cresses that are on the verge of extinction.
Cress.
Of all the fucking things you can kill a butterfly boss.
Cress.
I got a surplus of egg sandwiches without it.
Just very quickly, back to the original fact, 2012 was when this story happened, when the butterfly was taken by a plane.
It was a bit of a big year for taking singular animals that were migrating and were left behind
in the news.
So there was a story in England, this also in 2012.
A cuckoo was found badly injured in a garden and was transported by British Airways, along with the person who found it,
to Turin to join the migration of the other cuckoos that had already set off.
And they knew that it was the last of the cuckoos to fly away because it was tagged.
So while the butterfly was being flown almost to Mexico, this cuckoo was being flown to Turin to meet up with the migrating cuckoos.
And then, over in Russia, again in 2012, there was a migration of endangered Siberian white cranes that weren't quite finding their way.
So, Vladimir Putin got into a motorized hand glider and dressed up in garb that sort of emulated the white crane and tried to steer them unsuccessfully, unfortunately.
But he was flying above them, trying to get them to follow him and start migrating.
But then Putin said, you, Crane, and then they misrepresented it and ended up going into Crimea.
Very strong.
Animal.
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.
James.
At James Harkin.
Andy at Andrew Hunter M.
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 you can go to our website, no such thing as affish.com.
All of our previous episodes are up there.
Also, check out all of the videos from our 28-hour comic relief marathon.
They are now all online, all 35 videos.
Have a watch and please do donate to the cause if you can.
Comicrelief.com/slash fish is where you'll find our Just Giving page.
It will really help some people out.
All right, we'll see you again next week, guys, with another episode.
Goodbye.
