333: No Such Thing As Fingerprints On The Avocados

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Hi, everybody.

Before we start this week's show, we have to let you know that it is a special summer compilation of all the most wonderful stuff that for time, space, and legal reasons, we have not been able to fit into shows over the last few months.

Hang on a second.

So, we're releasing a whole show that was legally dubious.

This is the end of No Such Thing as a Fish.

We're going to be sued by Figs, the people who run the Fermilab, Russia.

All of these things are mentioned in the show.

And my catchphrase this week is balls, balls, balls.

So, listen out for that.

Is it?

In what context?

You heard it a few weeks ago.

You'll hear it again shortly.

No, no wonder that was cut.

All right, on with the show.

Bulls, balls, balls.

There's a theory that we only have hands because of figs.

I believe it.

I believe it.

It's that our hands evolved as tools for assessing whether figs are soft or not.

Okay?

So this sounds insane, but it's a proper theory from a Dartmouth paper, okay?

And what chimpanzees do in the wild, they squeeze fruit just like we do in a supermarket to work out whether it's good.

Don't do that, Andy.

Oh, yeah, okay.

Don't do that now.

Yeah, fine.

They squeeze fruit like we used to until four months ago in a supermarket.

And that might have helped us develop fine motor control because...

chimpanzees get a massive advantage from being able to squeeze fruit because it they can do it four times faster than if they have to detach it bite it and then assess it right so they can tell much faster like birds and monkeys, they have to rely on visual information or on oral information, i.e.

eating a bit of it.

So chimpanzees have an advantage there.

Do they ever do the thing where they squeeze it a bit too hard, they put their thumb through it, and then they try and bury it under some other figs and pretend that they haven't touched it.

This is why you shouldn't squeeze stuff in a supermarket, guys.

Every time you squeeze an avocado, it's making it bruised for the next person who comes along.

Or if you put your thumb through it,

eventually it'll be perfect, though.

Eventually it's perfect for the 40th or 50th person who touches that avocado.

Exactly.

I mean, there are so many fruits.

You've got to do the squeeze test.

So I can't believe they've never used supermarket fruit in crime solving because every item is covered in fingerprints.

Just a thought for the Met.

Great.

It's not as if they're getting to a crime scene and they're going, should we dust the avocados?

No, no, don't waste your time on that.

What do you mean?

I think what Anna's saying is you go to a crime scene, you find some fingerprints, then you go to the nearest Tesco and you dust all the fruit.

yeah exactly sorry sorry that does work and then you cross-reference it with the cctv of who's been in the supermarket it's a genius idea everyone goes to the supermarket apart from the icado killer um they would get away with it for years

there's a lab in uh it's is it called fermi lab now the the part of physics guys in america um it was called the national accelerator lab back in the day and in 1971 they were testing their particle accelerator um so you know it has huge 13 ton magnets all the way around this four mile ring.

And they noticed that it kept failing and it kept messing up because the magnets were kind of being pulled into the vacuum tubes and they were leaving these little metal slivers inside the actual tube which is meant to be all empty.

So how do you get inside those tubes to empty them out?

How do you gain access?

Do you cover yourself in butter

and then slip in?

Well you're too big to go in.

You have to send something into the tube.

A child?

A ferret.

A ferret.

A ferret is always a bloody ferret, isn't it?

It's always.

Into a particle accelerator.

They got a ferret called Felicia for $30,

and

she didn't want to go.

She had to be trained with progressively larger tubes because they just started off by putting her at this 300-foot tube.

And she said, I'm not going in there, obviously.

And then she's a talking ferret.

A talking ferret, and she was still only $30.

Wow.

She could only talk after she came out of the particle accelerator.

They don't know what happened in that.

Yeah, but then

she pulled it through and then they were able to attach a cleaning swab and they clean it properly.

Very sadly, she died the following year.

But knowing that she'd been of use to mankind, which is what ferrets want.

Well, so she was at a sanctuary.

I think she might have died, because do you remember we talked about how female ferrets die if they don't have sex for a year?

Come on, if you've just been in a particle accelerator and you can tell that story, you're getting a lot of sex.

Hey, garden gnomes, are they basically the replacement of hermits?

Did we do them out of a job when the garden gnome was invented?

There's debate.

I believe there's debate about this.

Right.

Some people point out that they live in your garden and they're bearded and weird.

And then other people say, no, that

they are flamboyant and they're like showing off and they're clearly not like hermits at all.

They're just both kinds of people who like to live in your garden.

I don't believe they're flamboyant.

I can't believe we've stolen this debate from Newsnight.

Well, I found, because I just very quickly, when I was reading about hermits and they said that gnomes had replaced them,

I discovered that one of the most notable producers of gnomes was a man called Tom Major Bell, who was the Prime Minister John Major's father.

Really?

Really?

Yeah, he was one of the most notable.

And so he had a company called Majors Garden Ornaments.

Major's Garden Ornaments.

And yeah, and that took them from being quite a sort of not well-to-do family to becoming middle class.

I mean, effectively, gnomes are the reason that John Major became prime minister.

Wow.

I mean, I'm speculating there to a huge degree.

I think that's right.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

Didn't he then become a acrobat or something?

No.

Yeah, he wasn't.

That was his previous career.

That was his whole life.

He was a circus performer and an acrobat.

I'm sick of people laughing at me in my circus job.

I'm going to get into a serious career.

And that's supposedly where this is just a bit of trivia, but supposedly where David Bowie got Major Tom from because he saw on a poster Tom Major.

So Major Tom of the Space Oddity song.

But yeah, so Garden Gnomes gave us a prime minister.

Wow, it really does take David Bowie down a few rungs of cool knowing that that song was written about John Major's dad.

Well, actually, I don't know if he'd want that broadcast.

Here's what's even weirder.

The first ever David Bowie song was The Laughing Gnome.

That was his first single.

Wow.

Yes,

just suddenly realized that.

Yeah.

Spooky.

Well, there's that church as well that I think we all probably know about, which was called The Sand Covered Church.

And what was special about that?

So this is in Cornwall, and an encroaching sand dune, or just a whole cover of desert, was heading towards it.

And this church slowly got covered up and covered up by sand that it got to the point where no one could get into the church itself.

So they were constantly having to dig the sand away to get through the door.

There's a story that the vicar was once lowered once a year via a skylight into

the church so that he could perform a once a year sermon.

I actually can't find any sources for that except for QI.

So I don't know.

When was this done?

Was it recent?

Or was it 19th century?

No, 19th century, yeah, yeah.

And it's a very old church.

It still stands.

There's a sort of restored version of it, which is just the steeple sticking out of the ground now.

And the rest of the church, presumably, still carried on.

What series of QI was it on?

Was it before I started?

Yeah, no, it was actually part of the Telegraph articles that used to be written by QI.

Oh, yeah, I used to write those.

Okay, yeah.

Your name's not on this one.

All right.

Luckily.

Can I just ask, Dan, if the vicar's being lowered in through a skylight to give a sermon, to whom is he giving that sermon when presumably no one else has entered through the door?

He's a missionary converting the death worms.

I have a feeling it was a a symbolic thing.

They had to do it once a year to sort of claim that it was still a church.

It was something along those lines.

It wasn't to a congregation, though.

I think that would really increase the church attendance, which is a worry often.

If your vicar flew in through the roof every time he gave you a sermon, like that's cool enough that I might start going to church.

Yeah.

Did you know, this is just on the Public Health England report.

So there was this report in 2017 that said you've got to reduce sugar in cereals.

But I read the report and bizarrely,

it divides food into various categories and Kit Kats and penguin bars are not chocolate bars

weird fact I found yeah they're biscuits oh is this this is normal news to you guys is it no no I just I just was making a leap to what else it could be I kind of half agree that penguins maybe aren't chocolate bars but I feel the same cats bang on chocolate bars

yeah look at the kit kat chunky yeah

it specified two finger kit cats actually so it could be that the kit kat chunky was elsewhere still a best kit.

It also cited under chocolate confectionery as an example the chocolate lollipop, which I don't think I've ever had.

Is that a thing?

Sounds great.

I have.

I've never had one.

I have some in my house, some chocolate lollipops, and I have a big bowl of dum-dums in my house.

Like, there's about probably about 200 in there, and some of them taste like chocolate, and they're the worst ones.

I thought you meant dum-dums, the explosive bullets used in the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.

I was going to say, James, editor's bit out.

I thought you meant pacifiers, because I've got a shitload of those.

Dum-dums, you know, they're like, what are they called?

Chupper chops, but American versions of chopper chops.

Okay.

Sonny Bucks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Fair enough.

Have you guys heard of the Golden Mole Award?

No.

No.

No.

Okay, so

this was set up in 2016 by NPR and specifically inspired by the fact that the Golden Mole does have this rainbow shine on its fur and doesn't know it.

And they talk of it as being accidental brilliance.

The fact that they have no idea it's there, they are accidentally brilliant.

And so the Golden Mole Award for Accidental Brilliance was set up by NPR.

And the idea was to award scientists who made accidentally brilliant discoveries when they weren't looking for the thing that they found.

So for example, there was a biologist called Shelley Adamo who was trying to study the stress levels in crickets.

And in order to do that, she introduced a predator, which was a bearded dragon.

And the idea was the bearded dragon was meant to just scare them by being around them and she could suss out the stress.

But the lizard accidentally passed on a virus which infected the crickets.

And the crickets

it gave the crickets this insane libido and they started mating.

And it was suddenly discovered that it was a parasitic aphrodisiac.

And they had no idea that this lizard would ever have the ability to pass on something like this to crickets and make them have sex.

So accidental brilliance as a discovery and it champions all of these great moments for scientists who've had these little situations.

And it happened in 2016 and it's never happened again.

I don't know why they stopped it.

It's such a wonderful idea for an award.

Oh, I thought you meant the so the awards never happened again.

Sorry, yeah, the awards, the golden mole awards, as far as I can tell, have only been awarded in 2016.

And then that's it.

They retired it as a...

And do they have any theories about why it's an aphrodisiac?

Because it could be like, you know, if I was there with my partner and then there's a huge herd of lions coming towards us on the horizon, which I guess is the equivalent, I guess you'd think, Sod it might as well, right?

Get another shag out before we're torn to shreds.

Is that what they're thinking?

We don't know.

No, I think Dan justified it was a parasitic organism which jumped from the dragon to the crickets.

So that's one theory is the organism.

But is the other theory that you only live once?

No, no, you're right, you're right.

Screw Shelly Adamo and her biology degree.

We should have the anatozinski.

That's probably why they stopped the award because everyone just went, well, that's a stupid theory.

Your theory about a parasite, I know you found an actual parasite in the crickets, and I know you can see that it came from the dragon, and I know that you've given it to other crickets and they do exactly the same thing.

I know all that.

But what about

clearly the crickets are just going, carpe Diem, get on it, literally.

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This experiment

We didn't quite go into it then, I think, right?

So

basically what they had was like like a big perspex circular tank with two walls so the sand dunes could go around the circumference of the circle, right?

And they could kind of chase each other and it was like a wind tunnel that sent it round.

But the guy who did it was called Carol Batsick or Carol Bachik and he works at Cambridge University.

And the reason that he did this experiment is he was just looking at one sand dune going around his thing.

And he's thinking, this is boring.

It's like

it's taken to get any kind of

data.

And so, what I'm going to do is I'm going to double my capacity and put two sand dunes in, and then I could get twice as much data.

I'm just going to do that.

And then, when he did that, it started a new experiment that he hadn't intended to do, which was to see how the two interact with each other.

Do you think when he proposed that, people said, You're Batschick crazy

because his name is Batschick.

Sounds like, yeah, yes.

I thought of it immediately when you said batshik, and then your explanation was so good, but I didn't realize it would be that long.

And so gradually, that became less and less point in making the joke.

It's good you've shown us your workings.

Yeah, and it's nice that you held on to it.

I think it's important to explain why you don't get a laugh when you don't.

His name sounds like a colloquial term for COVID, really.

Batsick.

We should all just say we're Batsick.

It's just more catchy.

God, if I wasn't going to cut at these chill cats

in 2005, Alaska Zoo had an elephant which

was very.

She was kind of overweight because she was in captivity.

She couldn't walk.

She, you know.

So they had a problem here.

So how would you solve that?

You would give her a treadmill.

Exactly.

They built the first, and as far as I can tell, the the only ever World's Elephant Treadmill.

Wow, wow.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah.

They got a company which does heavy-duty conveyor belts for mining and they put that together.

22 feet long.

It could support this 4,000 kilo elephant.

Wow.

And this was September 2005.

The headline was, Now to get the elephant on the treadmill, okay?

The next headline from the same website was, Elephant scorns her treadmill.

Oh no.

She hated it.

She never got fully onto it once.

Wow, I can kind of empathise with that.

Everyone hates treadmills, don't they?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And she was later moved to a sanctuary in California.

But guess what happened to the treadmill?

It was used for different animals.

Mice, but like 5,000 of them.

You're kind of close in a way.

It was bought by a dog musher.

Oh,

for

his whole dog team.

That's close.

God, that's a fat dog you've got.

I don't know how that's managing to run across the Arctic.

If it's the same weight as an elephant.

No, it's a full pack of dogs.

No, it's a pack of dogs because it's a 22 foot long one.

It's big.

It's a pack of dogs, that makes sense, not one obese dog that they were trying to bring the weight down.

Okay, yeah.

They had one particular one, a Russian mission actually.

So this is after the fall of the Soviet Union.

They kept hurling probes at Mars.

And the Mars 96 Russian mission was carrying 200 grams of plutonium and it was going to use it as a power source, but obviously an incredibly radioactive element.

And it messed up, as so many of those probes do.

And so while it was trying to escape the Earth's orbit, it failed and it broke apart.

And then there was just this satellite carrying plutonium, which would be incredibly dangerous if it broke up anywhere on the planet, that was spinning around around the Earth.

And all the countries of the Earth were kind of watching it like

watching.

a roulette wheel and at one point they thought I think it's going to land in Australia it's going to land in Australia and Clinton like Clinton, called up John Howard in Australia and said, okay, I'm really sorry.

I think you're going to be hit by some plutonium.

We'll help you out.

Don't worry about it.

And then it sort of missed Australia.

And then the official report went out that it landed in the Pacific Ocean, which was weird because about 200 people in Chile said that they'd seen something burn up in the atmosphere and crash into the ground.

And they've now sort of admitted that it's probably somewhere on the border of Chile and Bolivia.

And if you see something,

don't do anything with it.

It's a bit like past the parcel, isn't it where it just keeps going round and keeps going around and you don't know when it's gonna stop yeah like the earth is just or actually it's more like do you remember those games where it's like a water balloon and you keep passing it around to everyone and eventually it blows up in your face or something no

no how is the water balloon exploded in this

like is there explosive i think it's in like I think it's in like a piece of plastic or something.

I don't really know.

You know what this is?

This is a game which you could buy when I was a teenager or younger and we weren't allowed to have it.

So I only saw it in adverse.

Oh no wait, I think I remember the adverse because I think in the middle of the water balloon is an unstable isotope of uranium and that might decay at any point which will make the balloon go pop.

Quickly some stuff on wrestling or not?

Oh well.

Some funny wrestling nicknames.

Yeah.

Oh okay.

There's lots of lists online of good wrestling nicknames.

Jimmy Wang Yang.

Nice.

I haven't heard of him.

Beaver cleavage.

Amazing.

Beaver cleavage.

Beaver cleavage.

Are these desirable attributes for a wrestler?

Why do you want a beaver cleavage?

What even is that?

Is there a dam on it?

At the time, there was a TV show called Leave It to Beaver, apparently.

I don't know what it was about, but apparently his name came from that for some reason.

Have you heard of Balls Mahoney?

He was another wrestler.

His fans would shout, Balls, Balls, Balls, while while he punched his opponents.

Where did he punch them?

I haven't got that written down.

Because it feels like a request, doesn't it?

Can I just mention the possibly real-life animal whisperer who Dr.

Doolittle was based on?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So we're actually not sure about this, but his life resembled Dr.

Doolittle's in a way.

And it turns out that it could be that Dr.

Doolittle is the same person as Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde.

No way.

Wait,

he's three people?

That's so funny.

If he drinks one dose of the potion, he turns into Edward Hyde, a psychopathic murderer.

But if he drinks two, he turns into a sort of charming animal doctor.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Cool.

But he keeps on mixing up the potions, and that's where the essential property of Dr.

Jekyll, Mr.

Hyde, and Dr.

Dolittle, the original text, lies.

Isn't Mr.

Hyde like almost an animal creature in himself?

So, like, he would be able to talk to him, to his animal self.

To himself.

That's why he had to invent Dr.

Dolittle to talk to Mr.

Hyde.

No, none of that's true, except for the fact that we think both characters are based on a Scottish surgeon called John Hunter, who was one of the leading surgeons of the 18th century.

He was very famous.

And this is just based on similarities in his life.

So he really liked animals and he was also a grave robber.

So the grave robber thing is a bit more Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde, and the liking animals thing is a bit more Dr.

Dolittle.

It's weird how they don't mention the animal talking in Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde, and they don't mention the grave robbing in Dr.

Doolittle.

So weird.

They're just different genres, aren't they?

But Hunter had over 3,500 animals.

Oh, and

some of them were dead.

Wait, and

were most of them flies?

I mean,

narrow it down.

That would be cheating.

He had one dog, one horse, and then 3,498 flies.

He had more good ones than that.

He had two leopards.

So he lived in Leicester Square.

And he had two leopards who lived in his garden and once got loose and ended up in a fight with some local dogs.

And he

had to restrain them.

He kept a pet bull bull in his house, which he used to wrestle for fun,

which was great.

All in central London.

Yeah.

All in central London.

He used to live in the there's a pub that I think is called the Moon Over Water or something like that, which is on Leicester Square.

And that was his house.

And at the back of his house, he had a massive sort of place where he cut open bodies and stuff like that.

I think if it's the right person I'm thinking of.

I think it was.

Yeah, there's that place where he cut bodies and then where he talked to his pet rabbit next to it.

It was nice.

He actually did keep a lot of bees, so maybe that was where some of the cheating came in, Andy.

One of his friends explained that he befriended the bees and especially the less well-known kinds.

And this is the guy who might have been Dr.

Doolittle.

And I did read that he died of heart disease that was complicated by syphilis, which he may have given himself when he inoculated his own penis in his studies on gonorrhea.

To get syphilis from yourself is pretty bad, isn't it?

That's annoying.

I mean, that's an excuse, isn't it?

When you go home to your wife and she says, where did you get syphilis from?

Think quick, think quick, think quick.

Oh, I inoculated my own penis with gonorrhea.

Damn it.

Where did you get the gonorrhea from?

Shit.

I'm trying to get rid of chlamydia.

Oh, God, damn it.

Just one more loofah thing.

I found a really fun loofah patent.

So I was going through all the patents looking for loofah, the word word search loofah.

And so there was one in 1889.

So this is just when they were taking off.

Someone invented the loofah loofah sock puppet.

And the idea is that, you know, loofah's full-size, they can't get into those hard-to-reach spots.

So behind the ears, for instance.

And so a little sock puppet loofah was invented.

You could scrape behind your ears.

Oh,

yeah.

And similarly, more than 100 years later, what sounds like something very similar was invented.

In 1994, there's a patent for a finger-mounted toothbrush.

Also a great idea.

Stick a bit of loofah over the other finger.

I've seen those.

Don't they sell those in motorway service stations?

There we go.

Maybe it took off

quite a few times.

Yeah, quite a few times I've been stuck in sleeping in a service station and I've had to get myself one of those toothbrushes.

Your marriage is on the rocks, isn't it?

That's incredible.

It's thought that the patent itself says toothbrushes require a certain amount of dexterity to get in the mouth and it's easier if you just use your finger.

But some people will have short fingers and long mouths.

No, come on, Andy.

I can touch my back tooth, just about.

Not many people are going to have such short fingers or such long mouths that they can't reach some of their teeth.

That's a very small amount of the population.

But isn't the point that the toothbrush, like, if your hands are dirty, your toothbrush is clean.

Whereas if you're going to get to the very back of your mouth, you've been rolling around in a loofah field.

Well, that's true.

You know, wash your hands, guys.

If we've learned anything for the last three months.

I will give you, Andy, that this wouldn't work on crocodiles, for instance.

But I agree that most humans are correctly proportioned.

Or Tyrannosaurus rexus.

So difficult.

What about a horse walks into a bar and the barman says, why the long face?

And the horse says, it's because I've not been able to clean my teeth for a week because of this new hoof brush I've got.

It doesn't work.

Just while we're talking about sort of other bizarre transportation from the early days, I was looking into the 1920s.

I found a motorized baby carriage

that was used in England.

This was to get that, so that had on the back a sort of nurse chauffeur who would stand on what was a motorized baby carriage.

So you can see pictures of it where the baby is laying in a bassinet and they're standing on the back as if on a little platform.

And it had an internal engine, which they said was really nice for sort of creating a little buzz and hum.

You know how babies fall asleep in cars?

It's kind of giving it that kind of vibe.

And it could go up to four miles an hour.

So people would just be nurses on the back traveling with their babies yeah did the nurse stand on the back was it like being on a segue or something or were they walking exactly they were standing on the back yeah yeah um when was that done so yeah it was in england so it was in the 1920s

yeah 1920s and i found this one other thing which um i think this is one of those prototype things we have a photo of it i don't think it got anywhere very far but there was a man in la who wanted to sit while walking So he wanted transportation to do that.

So he effectively invented a unicycle, which was instead of, so he sat on a seat, but instead of it leading to a wheel, it led to two other legs that when he spun the pedals would walk the legs underneath his legs.

So he was sort of eight foot tallish and these legs, which had proper shoes on, would be walking underneath him, but he would be sitting.

and pedaling

he's pedaling the legs with his own legs yeah yeah so he's using his legs to pedal some legs that are below him.

So it's all the disadvantages of cycling, but with the pace of walking.

Yes.

Basically all the worst parts of cycling and all the worst parts of walking

in one.

Not too long.

So Mozart, when he came to London,

was actually a bit of a disaster because he was brought to London with his sister Nanel and his father and they kind of launched this big promo campaign to make him the sort of superstar child along with his sister.

And people just didn't believe it, they just refused to believe a genius that young could be that talented.

And

so, there was a sort of promotional backlash.

Everyone in the papers was like, You're just a hoaxer, you're a fraudster.

Can't be true.

So, weirdly, he ended up playing in a pub in London.

You know, this sort of thing

he played for the king initially, and then by the end of his time in London, he was playing in a tavern.

That's a good open mic night, isn't it?

You guys love that.

Yeah, imagine going on after Mozart.

Some owls do farming.

They cultivate other animals to eat.

Did you know this?

No.

You know about the burrowing owl?

I'm sure you've come across it.

It burrows on the ground instead of living in trees like an idiot.

But it has a little burrow and it takes dung into its burrow and then eats the dung beetles.

So it slightly cultivates dung beetles so that it can have something to eat.

I don't think it burrows though, does it?

It steals burrows.

The burrowing owl does not burrow.

It's a big old misnomer.

Goodness.

It nicks other animals' burrows, so it's

burrows.

It's a burrow burrow.

It should be called the burrowing owl.

So it will live in the burrows of prairie dogs or badgers or squirrels.

Owls never make their own nests, they're very lazy.

And they collect, yeah, they collect all this dung.

So not only does it nick these people's homes, but then it collects loads of poo and piles it up at the entrance to attract the beetles.

I think it's quite a clever idea, isn't it?

Because if someone steals your burrow and then you go and try and get it back, but they filled it with poo, you're probably like, all right, fine, you can have it.

Fair enough.

Yeah.

There is one other L which does this, which is,

I haven't found too much more evidence of this.

I've only got a little bit, but it's the little L, which I can only assume based on its name is absolutely massive

because it and it stashes meat and then supposedly grows maggots from the meat.

Oh, really?

Or lets maggots develop in the meat for its own food.

Yeah.

Wow.

Because that's more like one line in another article.

To me, that's more like farming because the other one is more like fishing for dung beetles, isn't it?

You put some dung out and the dung beetles come along and you

reel them in.

But this one is actually growing maggots.

That's like farming.

That's incredible.

We should stop propagating the idea that maggots can grow on something.

You know, that idea was debunked about 200 years ago, I think, guys.

But what if I got this lion's corpse in my living room and I'm just waiting to get the bees out of it

what a neat joke about Tate and Byron yeah exactly you're gonna have to look up golden syrup cans to get that everyone

during World War II the BBC banned Pericomos deep in the heart of Texas during work hours so you weren't allowed to play it from nine to five and the reason was that it's got a little bit where people clap along and they were worried that people who were working in ammunition plants might might clap and drop the bombs

that was amazing i mean was it the case that if you dropped a bomb it exploded because if so i think they need a better health and safety on the bombs you're right it doesn't feel like that would happen

another ammunition factory has exploded based off one person dropping a thing i suppose probably it was just that they it was distracting the workers rather than they might blow themselves up i don't know i think bombs are you're encouraged not to drop bombs aren't you that's That's yeah.

I imagine if I got a bump that came over from Amazon, I hope on the box it would say, do not drop.

Confusing though when you're in a plane actually ready to drop the bomb and you see that little label.

Yeah, before

champagne came to the world, before Dom Perignon started selling his champagne, we always drank Perry and that was it was fizzy, basically, I mean, baby champ tastes a bit like champagne.

It's like almost the same thing.

And we were drinking it 150 years before champagne was invented.

It used to be one of the main drinks.

Don Pere in Yon, right?

So good.

Yeah.

Not working directly.

Sorry.

Hey, I read a cool pie fact the other day.

Sorry for the tangent.

Just very quickly, but pie, if you look at it in a mirror,

it's

3.14

spells pie.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well done.

It's good.

It's great.

Welcome to the party.

It's exciting, isn't it?

I didn't know that.

I remember the first time I learned that.

Yeah.

It was quite a day.

Sorry.

We were just talking pie and mirrors.

And I bought something completely relevant.

Four backwards.

Four backwards.

Oh, I guess it looks a bit like a P.

Yeah, I see.

We love it.

I think we're just saying that we, because you sort of like sometimes have seen that, done that in school and been really excited by it when you're 11.

I'm just excited that you're having that moment now.

Well, I went to a Steiner school.

Yeah.

if you put the number 58,008 into a calculator and turn it upside down, spells out boobs.

Get out.

No, I didn't know that one.

I did know that one.

I'm all over boobs and boobless and boobies.

They teach boobs at the Steiner schools.

They do.

That's what we got.

Do you know the saying, bringing owls to Athens?

Yeah.

It's like bringing coals to Newcastle.

Yeah, it's a much classier version of bringing coals to Newcastle because the owl was the emblem of Athens.

And so.

I say bringing samovars to Tula.

Do you?

It's like bringing samovars to Tula.

That's just another version of that.

I don't know where Tula is and I'm not 100% what a Samovar is either.

I thought you were talking Latin, but I've just realised that that's...

I think it's in, is it in southern Russia?

I don't know.

I actually don't know where Samovar is either.

Might be in Georgia.

Where Tula is?

I think Samovars are everywhere.

I don't remember anyone's bought a Samovar.

I think what is clear is that I'm using this phrase, which I don't understand at all.

There were some happy endings in P.T.

Barnum's acts, right?

So there were a few nice stories.

There was a woman called Katie Brumbach, who became known as the Great Sandwina, who was just amazing.

I actually can't believe she existed.

So she was a famous strong woman.

She came from a circus performing family and she trained to be strong from an early age.

And she beat Eugene Sandow in a fight.

So Eugene Sandow, I actually don't think we've ever mentioned him, but he was the champion strongman of the 19th century.

He was like the first strongman, wasn't he?

You know, if you ever see pictures of these kind of really muscly people holding up barbells, he's basically what they're all based on.

Yeah, I think the actual trophy for the

Mr.

Olympia is based on his body.

Yeah, he's the father of modern bodybuilding.

Wow.

There you go.

Well, it should have been this lady, the great Sandwina, because in 1902, she'd heard all this chat about Eugene, and she did an act where she'd call men up from the audience and invite them to fight her and they all thought they could beat her and none of them could and Eugene Sandow fought her or they actually had a competition to see who could lift the biggest weight and she won so there was a 300 pound weight which is like a 22 stone man like if you're that overweight there's a documentary about you kind of level and she raised that up above her head I think with one arm and Eugene couldn't even get it up like over his chest.

That yeah, that is really amazing.

That is incredible.

It's unbelievable.

Because you can imagine being able to beat someone in a wrestling match because you have different skills or something, but lifting weights is like literally just muscle mass, isn't it?

Really?

That's all it is.

So wow.

She met her husband after kicking his ass in a wrestling ring.

He was one of the people who accepted the challenge to try and fight her.

And his memories are basically walking into the ring and then nothing and then blue sky above him.

So she knocked him out and they fell in love afterwards.

And yeah,

she had a loving relationship with him.

Yeah, 52 years.

I wonder how much he had in the decision.

I do, yes.

Yeah.

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Just one more thing, and we probably won't use this, but it's so interesting, I just want to say it.

And that is that one more thing is that skates, you know, the fish,

they use incubators on their eggs so they lay eggs like some fish like sharks for instance they also do it they lay these things called mermaids purses which are essentially their eggs and the skates they intentionally put their eggs next to hydrothermal vents which is a bit at the bottom of the ocean where heat comes out like volcanic heat and they deliberately they don't put it directly next to it because it would boil the eggs they put it just the right distance away that it accelerates the the speed in which the eggs

kind of

grow.

That's genius.

Essentially.

And so they have their own artificial incubation, even though they're fish.

And if you have left it a little bit too close, then you can just do the old take the top off egg and soldiers.

Soft-boiled egg.

What would you dip in if you were in the water?

You'd have to get some sort of passing trip.

Your soldiers,

your bread's going to be soggy, isn't it?

I always think, so there's been this debate about whether we need sharp knives, like pointed knives at all now.

And this is a point that I think Louis.

God, Ada, for fuck's sake, we have this conversation literally on a weekly basis.

Amazingly, you've...

I can't believe you're using this as an excuse to bring up this argument again.

You've cut it out every time, James, and if you keep cutting it out, I'll keep for a year.

So here's the debate, listeners.

Please take your votes.

It's thought we don't really need the pointy end of sharp knives because we don't really use that.

We use the sharp bit.

But when do you use the point?

Now, James, weirdo James, shoves the pointed end into his tomatoes to cut them up.

What I say is, just use a serrated knife.

Well, you know what?

Literally yesterday

I stabbed someone with a pointed knife.

I know.

I was cutting some sourdough bread and I stabbed it before I did the cut and I thought Anna would not approve of this.

There is a pear called A Stinking Bishop.

Do you know that one?

No.

Is that related to the cheese?

Exactly.

So those two things are related, and how are they related?

Same bishop.

Poor guy, poor stinky old bishop.

Kind of, but not really, though.

Okay.

Okay, so is it.

You often eat, if you're in the 1970s, apple and

cheese on a stick.

You do.

So is it related to that?

No, it's not that.

It is that stinking bishop cheese is made with peri that's made from the stinking bishop pear and that's how it gets its name.

Oh cool.

The pear came first and you make some peri, some alcohol out of it and then you steep the milk and the cheese in that stuff and it helps it.

you know helps the bacteria grow and that's how you get your cheese that's very very cool there was there was a story as well about a guy who accidentally swallowed one of those um iPhone headpods.

I'm wearing one right now, these new earphones.

I noticed you're only wearing one down.

Where's the other?

I am that guy.

We'll see in two to three days what's happened to the other one.

Yeah, so he swallowed it, and then you can do a tracker thing where it can locate your headphone.

I've not actually used that yet.

And he apparently, he says, heard the beeps from within.

And he passed the headphone, and it still worked, and it still had 40-ish percent left on it by the time it came out.

No way.

That was amazing to me.

That was not an Apple product then, surely.

They were offering trips to go and see the Titanic recently, I think.

In fact, there was supposed to be a sort of tourist thing this year, which I imagine is not happening anymore.

But this is Stockton Rush, is this guy who's, I think he's like the CEO, a guy called Stockton Rush.

He's the CEO of something called Ocean Gate Expeditions.

And he's offering tourists week-long trips to go down in submersibles to visit the Titanic.

And it's the first time since this couple got married that they've offered it to anyone.

So they used to until I think about 2012.

And each seat costs $105,000, which is exactly the inflation-adjusted price of a first-class ticket on the Titanic.

So that's nice.

Or it did initially if you liked that sort of symmetry.

But then he actually had to raise the price because he realized that it wasn't expensive enough.

I never realized it was that expensive to go on the Titanic.

That's an incredible amount of money to go.

unbelievable, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's huge.

First class, I guess.

They were talking about.

Yeah, I know what you mean, but 100 grand to go on a boat.

Mad.

It's not just, James, it wasn't just a boat.

It's not just going out on your mate's boat.

It was the boat.

Anyway, it had to be postponed this trip, first of all, because it's supposed to leave from the coast of Canada, and it's a Norwegian ship that he's got to take these tourists out in so they can go down to the Titanic.

And there's all those weird shipping rules.

So Canada suddenly said, Oh, wait, your ship's going to be flying a Norwegian flag.

You're not allowed to leave our coastal waters flying a Norwegian flag.

So he's put hundreds of thousands of dollars into this expedition.

And then there's a flag issue, which Shadi Meni had to postpone.

Take the flag down.

What's his problem?

I would have thought, just repaint it, paint a maple leaf on top of it.

I've got a feeling that the rules are a bit more complicated than that, Dan.

I think when you have a flag of a country, there might be some paperwork to fill in rather than just going, fuck it, I'll put a different flag up.

I don't know.

Sometimes the simplest solution is the one that's disregarded.

I'll give them a Zoom call.

I'll consult.

Where's Wally Books?

Yeah.

You know those things where he's in different parts of the page and it's a very busy page.

They are based on a German trend called Vimmel Builder Books, which is literally a teaming picture book.

And the idea of those was, originally, you would have a picture with loads of stuff stuff happening in all the different parts of the page and it would be a child's job to kind of make stories up about all the different people who are living in the different parts of this page and so it's like a really creative way of teaching children how to use their imaginations yeah isn't that great it's cool wow so we've dumbed down where's Wally well we've triple dumbed it down because we think they kind of come from paintings by Bosch and Bruegel and you know those amazing pictures like the Garden of Earth Deep Lights or whatever it's called where there's just stuff happening everywhere It's kind of based on those.

Cool.

And then we just looking for some idiot with a stripey jumper.

And sometimes there are loads of other people wearing stripey jumpers in the same page.

So crazy.

Why are they all at the beach if they're wearing stripy jumpers?

It doesn't make any sense.

In real life, Wells Wally at the beach would be really easy because he's the only one in a jumper.

That's true.

That's true.

Where's Wally at the you haven't played the master edition, which is where's Wally nudist edition?

Very popular in Germany, though.

My favorite animal that lives on sand dunes is the Saharan silver ant.

And that's because this is one of the fastest ants in the world.

Maybe the fastest ant in the world.

It's so fast.

It can run at 855 millimeters per second, which believe me in that ant world

is super fast.

I was going to say, I can run at 855 millimeters per second, just about.

Yeah, well, can you run 108 times your own body length in a second?

No, I don't think I can.

Yeah, exactly.

Can you do?

He does 47 strides per second.

Okay, so that is Michael Johnson, the old runner who he had a kind of weird way of running where he did lots more strides than normal people.

And even he only did four steps per second.

And this guy did 47 per second.

So it's like, you know, those cartoons where you just see the legs going around in a circle.

It's a bit like that i didn't know michael johnson did that did it look really weird when you watched it yeah did it look like he had an extra pair of legs he was famously he had that he ran in a different way than anyone else so he ran really upright and he moved his legs really really quickly presumably in really small smaller strides like a ballerina tiptoeing across the stage smaller strides yeah can i ask a question about

michael johnson for example if okay if you came up with a new way of running and let's say let's just say that you came up with a way of doing forward cartwheels or forward rolls that happened to be faster than any other sprinter on the planet, would you be allowed to do that?

It's

easy to use your hands.

It's a fast breeze flop, isn't it?

Oh, you mean if can you use your hands to run?

Yeah.

That's a bit different than what I was thinking.

If you ran on all fours, like kids sometimes do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Actually, no, I think you can, because if you're in a running race and you fall over,

like let's say you're in a steeple chase race where you're jumping over hurdles.

If you fall over and your hands touch touch the floor, you're not disqualified, are you?

No, you're not, yeah.

So

yeah, I imagine if you want to run

with all four, give it a arms and legs like a racehorse, I think you'll be able to.

I'm sure I said before that I invented a new way of doing the walking race,

which I believe is faster than the way that they do it in the Olympics.

Wow.

It's extremely long strides and you move your hips a lot.

And I reckon it's faster than anyone can walk in their style.

But if I do it for about 10 seconds, I get unbelievably tired.

I think it might just not be very energy efficient, but it might be just that I'm terribly unfit.

So

it's out there.

If any professional walkers want to hit me up.

Is there a 100-meter walk sprint?

Unfortunately,

the shortest distance they go, I think, is about 20 kilometers.

And the longest distance I've ever gone in this technique is about 20 meters.

We could set it up though.

Why don't we set up when we're all allowed back together, you versus Andy, Andy cartwheeling his way to the end and you

walk sprinting your way to the end and down and I'll be popcorn.

It's a shame if you have invented that new kind of run like Michael Johnson has that you have to expose it.

There's no way that you can wear like a box around your leg so that everyone's just going, what's he doing?

Yeah,

we can't work out why he's so much faster.

Well, you could wear a saron.

Maybe that's what David Beckham was doing because he he was a very fast footballer, wasn't he?

Maybe that's why he wore the sarong to conceal his trick of doing seven more steps a minute than anyone else.

But I think the problem is if you're wearing a sarong in the Olympics and you're running, then people will just assume you're on a unicycle.

And so, yeah, they're probably not true.

Right.

That's what they'd assume.

You'd have to ritually take the sarong off at the end of the race to show that you had no wheels under there.

Yeah.

It's not, you just, you should just ban it altogether.

Sarongs, I think, in running races.

It's not worth the hassle.

Yeah, it's quite a tight wrap as well, a sarong.

I've put on a long skirt.

It's quite thick material.

You're swimming in the face in it by.

You need the massive box.

That's what you need.

A massive box

covering everything below the waist.

Does anyone have anything else on sand tubes?

No.

I got one fact about pears, which I think is quite amazing.

Do you know the phrase, it's all gone pear-shaped?

Yeah.

That phrase dates back to 1983, is the earliest we have an example of, and it was used in the Navy.

And

the phrase, it's all gone Pete Tong, is only four years younger.

Wow.

So

it's all gone Pete Tongue was from 1987 and It's All Gone Pear Shaped is from 1983.

There's a four-year difference.

Amazing.

Isn't it great that?

Yeah.

I wonder what was going so wrong in the 80s that they needed so many other ways of saying this is

screwed up.

Thatcher, Thatcher.

There you go.

Another time that a pair was an insult was this amazing period in 19th century France where it became this massive political meme.

This is the coolest thing.

So, this is in the 1830s.

There was a famous caricaturist and political satirist called Charles Philippon.

Charles Philippon.

And he started publishing offensive pictures of the king, and he was taken to court for insulting the king.

And he said, How do you guys know that's the king?

Look, I've even put someone else's name underneath it.

And they were like, Well, it looks like the king.

He said, Oh, well, that's you know, you've made that assumption, not me.

And then,

to demonstrate you could interpret anything as looking like the king, he drew a pear, and then he showed in four pictures how a pear could gradually transform into the king's face.

And anyway, which is a pretty cocky thing to do in court, and he didn't get away with it, and he was sent to prison for a while.

But this became a meme for the king.

So, like, all these caricaturists and all these magazines published pictures of pears, and that was a byword for how crap the king was.

And it was really hard to prosecute because they're just drawing pears.

Yeah.

And eventually, they cracked down on the pear image.

And so, what this guy did was he started writing.

So, at one point, they were told to stop drawing pears.

And if you had a publication and you'd had like a legal thing saying you weren't allowed to publish something, you had to publish that legal thing to be like, sorry, we did wrong.

So, he published what they'd been told by the government, but he published the text in a pear shape, which looks really beautiful.

It's a real slap in the face.

So good.

He's asking for trouble, that guy, isn't he?

Yeah, I guess.

He is.

And he was shut down.

Another pear that looks like another sort of leader is the new

mini Buddha pears.

Have you seen those?

No.

This is a guy in China.

He's a farmer.

He spent years and years doing this, where he's been creating molds where the pear grows inside the mold.

And for years, he's been trying to get it to look like a baby Buddha.

And he's succeeded.

He's got 10,000 of them, which he brought over to the UK.

And you look at them, and it's like a little squished together Buddha, but it's a pear.

And it's,

why?

I would imagine it's easier to sell a pear that looks like a Buddha than a pear that looks like a pear.

It's just cool.

It's just cool.

And actually, you know those soda and alcohol bottles where you get a pear pear inside.

Oh, yeah.

I was trying to work out vaguely.

How do you get the pear inside?

And the answer is you grow the pear inside the bottle from the tree.

So that's how they do it.

Yeah, they hang the bottle upside down and they weave through the branch and they allow it to grow inside.

Then they cut that off.

And

that's how they get it in the bottom.

That's crazy.

I didn't even know about the phenomenon of pears in bottles, but I'm still excited to know about how they do it.

That's so cool.

Yeah, it's not massive, but you do see them occasionally.

And they do the same thing with ships and bottles, don't they?

You get the tree and then you put the branch in.

The ship freeze.

You should call those pears.

I can't believe it's not butter.

Yes.

Beautiful.

Well, that's the kind of thing we cut out.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our collection of offcuts for this week.

Thank you so much for listening.

We will be back again next week with another episode.

Until then, you can get us on our Twitter accounts.

So I'm on at Schreiberland.

James is at JamesHarkin.

And Andy, you like saying yours?

I do.

It's bulls, bulls, bulls.

Wow, really committing to that.

It wasn't worth a commitment.

It's at Andrew Hunter M.

At Andrew Hunter.

Yeah, or you can go to at no such thing, our group account, or go to our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

We have all of our previous episodes up there, as well as links to bits of merchandise we've released over the years.

Okay, guys, we hope you enjoyed that, and we'll be back again with another regular episode.

We'll see you next week.

Have a good one.

Goodbye.

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