330: No Such Thing As An Antarctic Vindaloo

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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 James Harkin, Anna Trasinski, and Andrew Hunter Murray.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Anna.

My fact this week is that golden moles shine in all the colours of the rainbow and they'll never know it.

Oh

sad.

It's what a tragic fact to open with.

Is it because they're They're stupid?

They don't even know their moles.

Is this the reason?

They don't know their moles, they don't have a concept of colour, they don't know what a rainbow is.

There's a lot of reasons why, but it made me wonder if there were things that we don't know about.

Do you know what I mean?

It's like, and we're not smart enough to know what they are.

So it could be that there are amazing colours that no one knows what they are that we give off or smells.

Yeah, so dogs are doing a podcast saying, Did you know humans smell exactly like

rotting mushrooms and they'll never know it.

They've got the word dickhead written on their foreheads.

Anyway, so back to the old moles.

I read about them in this fantastic article in the London Review of Books.

It's by Catherine Rundle, and this is about the golden mole.

And it's the first known iridescent mammal.

So iridescent means it like it shimmers like, you know, when you spill petrol or in soap bubbles or a pigeon's neck.

So they have this amazing fur, which is a very specific structure, which reflects and reflects light in a way that causes this rainbow effect to happen, but they are totally blind.

So usually iridescence in nature is for attracting mates or maybe warning off a predator to suggest that you're poisonous.

But this serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever.

They're underground almost the whole time.

They do have eyeballs, weirdly.

We think the optic nerve isn't really functioning anymore.

They have eyeballs, but their eyeballs are covered with skin and fur, so aren't doing that much good.

So yeah, they'll never know.

And then we think that it's possibly to repel water, this particular sheen, or it could be to help them skid through holes when they're digging holes in the sand.

They can go really quickly because they have these amazing, like, scale-like things on them.

Uh, but the colour is just a byproduct of that, right?

Yeah, it's one of those accidental bits of evolution, which are surprisingly rare, exactly.

So, they've evolved to have this very specific structure to make them slippery.

And it happens that that's all rainbow as well.

So, they live in the deserts of southern Africa and I've seen videos of them and how they travel through the sand.

But what's really funny is when you're watching the videos is they swim through the sand very close to the surface so you know where they're going.

It's like someone trying to escape jail by digging a tunnel under the outside but doing it right at the surface.

So you always know where they are.

But they're really cool the way they the way they hunt because I think we may have seen the same thing Dan.

They come out of the ground and then they hunt because they're blind.

They they hunt by listening to the animals passing nearby, and they're mostly eating little insects and things.

And the thing is, they can hear a lot better through sand than they can through air.

So they'll just completely plunge their head into a pile of sand just to check where their prey is.

And then

they'll get a hear of its footsteps and then they'll move that way.

It's really funny.

They have, in your ear, you have three little bones, you might remember, like the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup.

And their hammer is massive.

It's like Thor's hammer inside their head.

It's 10,000 times bigger than our hammer in our head.

And the way that this helps them is when there are vibrations that come into their head, it resonates and it makes a sound way, way louder, which means they can hear specific frequencies really, really well.

And so they can hear the frequency, which is about the same as wind rustling through grass.

And they can hear that specific frequency really, really well.

So when they're going around, they can just listen to where these tufts of grass are.

And why is that useful?

Because that's where the insects live.

so they just hear this specific sound of wind going through grass they know exactly where it is and they head straight for it and they get their termites it's so clever

not not so useful in the deserts of southern africa what do you mean well it's sandy yes but they have they have little tufts of grass in the desert right and in those in those tufts of grass that's where the termites live the termites don't live in the sand they live underneath the grass where there's a little bit of soil so that's exactly where they need to get to there aren't many of them around you're right, but it would be pretty silly for them to evolve this incredible ability in a bone 10,000 times the size of ours if they lived in a completely featureless environment.

It would be,

it would be stupid if they evolved so they could only hear ice cream bands, for instance.

Because you don't get many ice cream bands there, but you do get tufts of grass.

Yeah.

God, I bet they'd kill for an ice cream band, though.

That's true.

There's one part of their body that's a lot smaller than the bone in their middle ear,

which is massive.

It's their penis.

Oh, here we go.

So, this is the disadvantage of being a golden mole, and it's very important to them.

So, there is a hottentot golden mole, that's one of the species names, and females prefer males with bigger penises.

And the reason for that is that they have no other means of differentiating between males.

They're all underground, they're all blind, there's no way of telling who's an appropriate mate or not, apart from penis size.

And the whole penis is approximately a millimeter and a half long.

It's not huge.

Proportionally, is that okay?

It's still quite small.

It's still tiny.

Proportionally, it's still small.

It is quite, yeah.

And they don't even have a scrotum, so they can't be judged on that.

So the whole penis is between 1.2 and 2.5 millimeters long, which is a tough.

I mean, just to be clear, we're not judging them on anything, are we, Andy?

Well, speak for yourself.

I am.

Judge, judge, judge.

There's not many people Andy could judge on this particular metric, but the one millimetre penis golden mole.

you betcha

those idiots with their even smaller penises

just

oh my god um i was reading the other day in fact this might have been something that was written by you andy i'm not sure about scrotums

and about how um all mammals used to live

sorry

has andy been publishing scrotum papers in the background of this podcast

It's about how they're much too big, actually, scrotums.

And they make perfectly reasonable penises look small.

Right.

It was about how all mammals used to live,

used to be nocturnal and used to hunt at night.

And

the reason was, one of the reasons was it was much colder at night.

And if you were in the daytime, it was too hot.

And if you didn't have a scrotum, your testicles would be inside your body and they'd get get too hot.

And so one of the things that allowed mammals to live during the day was scrotums because then the testicles hung outside, which was a bit cooler, which meant they could spend time in the sunshine.

Oh, wow.

So without scrotums, we'd all be living at night.

That's very cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Great theory.

Was that one of your papers, Andy?

You don't seem to have a very good memory of it, but it was.

To be honest, I write so many papers about the scrotum, but it's hard to differentiate them.

Do they even like mating, though?

Because they're super super antisocial.

In fact, all moles are already antisocial, aren't they?

But golden moles don't hang out together at all.

Massive loners.

And I think they're quite bad parents.

Again, in common with normal moles, which after when their kids are just a couple of weeks old, I think they literally take them in the burrow, they shove them up to the top, and then they seal the entrance.

So their baby is just then stranded.

They've got a bugger off.

You could say the golden moles, they are the massive loners with the tiny boners.

That's how you can remember what they are.

Yeah, that's a tagline.

That's what you're chanting as you go through the desert bullying them, isn't it?

Yeah, moles, like actual moles.

You're right, they're really, they are loners.

They don't like to go anywhere near each other.

And each animal has a territory which is about the size of a football pitcher.

Whoa.

That's a lot, isn't it?

For one mole.

That is a lot of

real estate.

That's insane.

We should say, yeah, the golden mole is extremely mole-like, and I think it should be a mole because it does everything that moles do.

But it's actually not an official mole.

It's miles away from it on the taxonomic tree, and they're more closely related to elephants than they are to moles.

And in fact, according to the Wikipedia page,

it's at the moment classified as a chrysochlorodite, but that's under review.

So we're kind of unclear where we put them on the evolutionary.

What does that mean?

It just means that they're classified as something, but we're not really sure where they are.

And, you know, we might move them to another bit of the tree.

The Wikipedia page on them is really good.

I don't know who wrote it, but some real expert.

I guess you would have to be an expert on the golden mole to write about it.

No, but some of the, you know, it's it's, I just shout out to Wikipedia because it's very clearly written and comprehensive.

It also has this fact, which I loved.

They have only one toe on each forefoot, which has evolved into the shape of a pickaxe.

And all the other toes on their front feet have kind of withered away.

So they are so efficient at digging through the sand that they need to get.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

And that actually is a bit different to moles, isn't it?

Because moles have those kind of big paddles on their feet where they push through the sand.

But the golden moles, because they swim more like a shark, they've got to be slippery.

Yeah, they're sometimes known as the shark of the dunes, aren't they?

Are they?

Yeah, and I think that's because, like Dan says, they're so close to the surface.

They've probably got one of their pickaxes sticking up.

So you can, or maybe even their one millimetre penis sticking up out of the sand.

So you can see that's when we're doing backstroke.

I just got one thing on moles.

In 1519, a community in Italy launched a massive court case against moles on the grounds that they were damaging crops.

And you can read the full sort of transcript of what the attorney's arguments were against and for the moles.

And so the attorney for the defense of the moles, the moles couldn't come to court, so the attorney spoke for them in absentia, said they confer all these benefits.

So they destroy noxious insects, for instance.

And he eventually argued successfully that if they are sentenced to be exiled, they should be found a suitable place of abode and have safe conduct on the way there to secure them from harm from cats and dogs, etc.

And the judge is there, and you can read his ruling where he did, in fact, agree the moles were to be exiled, but they were given safe conduct.

And any pregnant mole or mole with young children had an extra 14 days to leave the community.

There's no evidence as to how this was actually enforced afterwards.

Quite often what happened with those kind of things is they would say, okay, well, let's say, for instance, rats.

There are rats here.

We need to get rid of them.

So we're going to make a law to say they have to go within 14 days.

And then when they haven't gone in 14 days, they go, okay, well, we gave you a chance.

We're now going to exterminate you.

It's like killing God's creatures, isn't it?

You have to give, because

you shouldn't be destroying too much of God's creation without having legal authority to do it.

Mole prison would be amazing though.

That would be a really fun thing to film because obviously they'd all just tunnel away immediately.

Yeah, that would be a...

The Great Escape would be a much longer film.

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

My fact this week is that Mozart and Beethoven both compose music for an instrument made entirely of glass.

It was invented by Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin invented what was an incredible instrument, hugely popular in the 1700s and so massive that it was used by some of the biggest composers of the day.

I had no idea there was a connection between Franklin and, say, Mozart and Beethoven.

That's like,

you know, here's...

Come on, Franklin's connected to everyone.

He was the Giles Brandreth off and stuff like that.

I mean, he knew everyone and he did everything.

So, Dan, why don't you tell us about this glass instrument?

Was it like a violin made of glass or a drum made of glass?

That would work.

Yeah, so it's called an harmonica and effectively it's kind of like a glass piano.

So Franklin in the 1700s was seeing a lot of people play glass bowls that are tuned to notes, which you still see a lot of people doing.

You know that thing with the wine glass, if you lick your finger and

you run it over the lid and it's...

Yeah, basically when the conversation dries up enough in a wedding, everyone starts doing that, don't they?

Yes, exactly.

And so he thought this is really beautiful music and you can see people making tunes out of it.

The problem is, is that if you were going to play that at a gig, you have to line up 50 glasses.

It's not practical because you could smash one and suddenly that's your C note gone.

So what he did was he created an instrument whereby he had a glass blower in London turn it into effectively like a piano that you play.

And just to say when you play it, it works by a foot pedal, right?

So he made it horizontal.

So usually you'd have the glasses standing up vertically, so you have to hold them down with one hand.

And we've all done it at dinner parties but he put them horizontally and attached them all in a row and then you spun them around constantly with a foot pedal so I think you just had to sort of if you touched it with your hands it would be constantly spinning but then I can't work out where you put the jar of water

I must watch a video of it because you've got to keep moistening your hands to keep it working.

So presumably you have to keep dipping like a finger ball.

Yeah, you have to do that.

Although quite soon afterwards, there was a new version that was made, like an improvement, where there was a little trough of water underneath the glasses.

So when they span, they kind of got moistened by themselves, which was quite clever.

That's very crazy.

That's crafty.

It went from being a hugely popular instrument to suddenly a lot of controversy because people started noticing a few things about it and reporting that it was sending people mad.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

Yeah, and that

in some cases, a few deaths were off the back of, supposedly off the back of it.

And suddenly, books were publishing that this was a dangerous instrument.

And then suddenly, they were saying it was the most dangerous instrument in the world and its reputation

Yeah, it's extraordinary it basically fake news took it down as an instrument and there was a lot of theory that possibly there's a bit of truth to why people were sent mad which was off the back of the instrument itself and licking your fingers on an instrument.

No, okay.

So the theory was that there was there were crystal bowls and they were they were on this harmonica spindle and they they contained some lead and some people thought maybe the lead from the bowls, because you can play with both hands.

If you haven't broad enough span, you can play 10 notes at the same time.

It's quite impressive.

And people thought you can maybe absorb lead into you,

into your fingers.

That kills you.

Blah, blah, blah.

Lead poisoning.

However, it has also been pointed out that this is unbelievably unlikely.

Because at the time that the harmonica was being played, doctors widely prescribed massive doses of lead for various ailments.

Food was preserved with lead oxide.

Food was cooked in lead pots.

People drank from lead vessels.

Like, the main main lead risk in the 18th century was not the glass harmonica, the spooky instrument.

Yeah,

I think it's just because it was spooky.

It

makes a really ethereal noise.

And also, it was used by podcast favorite Franz Mesmer, wasn't it?

So he used to go around mesmerizing people.

We've talked about him before, hypnotizing people.

And he used the harmonica because it does make this very ghostly noise.

And so it was associated with hypnotizing ladies.

It's always ladies.

all part of the constant 19th century panic that anything women did that might be slightly challenging or might slightly encroach on the world of men must send them mad and cause them to faint so they should be banned from doing it.

But actually all the best players of this instrument were women right?

So

the first person to publish a book about it was called Anne Ford.

She published it in 1761.

She was married to a friend of Gainsborough who was called Philip Thickness, which is quite a good name.

And she was the person who actually came up with the idea of turning the glasses into an actual instrument.

Whether Franklin took the idea from her and did it, or whether they came up with it independently, I don't know.

But there was also someone called Marianne Davis, who is the most famous player, probably in the whole of Europe.

And she went around Europe and taught it.

And like Mozart met her, and

Mesmer, I think, watched her play and then decided to bring it into his mesmerization and stuff.

So she was super famous.

Yeah, there was a double Marianne.

It was a Marianne sandwich, although not with anything in the middle, because she was the one who popularized it in Europe.

And then maybe the best player of ever was this German lady called Marianne Kirch-Gessner.

And Mozart, towards the end of his life, wrote lots of stuff specifically for her on the Harmonica.

And actually, when he died, he was in the middle of writing her another piece.

And she was very famous.

She was another Jars Brandis.

She sort of knew everyone, like Goethe and Haydn.

But she, maybe there was some truth to the Harmonica cursing people because she had caused her nervous breakdown.

Yeah.

In fact, all of the people who played it in the 18th century, all dead.

That was a good line.

But Marianne Kirchgessner was assaulted by Napoleon's soldiers in 1806, and she never really recovered from that.

So that was more the cause of her nervous breakdown, I think, rather than

the instrument.

There's a great

line about it from 1786.

This is a German player called Karl Rülig.

He said that the harmonica could make women faint, send a dog into convulsions, make a sleeping girl wake screaming through a chord of the diminished seventh, and even cause the death of one very young.

And that was the guy who played it for a living.

Look at my recommendation.

I think someone actually did die, didn't they, at the time that someone was playing a Glass Harmonica, and it was like a cause and effect thing.

Everyone was like, oh my God, it must have been Glass Harmonica that caused it.

And that was like the start of the big sort of banning it.

They banned it in churches and stuff like that, didn't they, in Germany?

So, Dan, you mentioned that franklin picked up this glass harmonica idea by watching people play musical wine glasses and he actually did that in britain so in britain and ireland this was an extremely popular musical instrument before franklin made it vaguely acceptable to the rest of the world there would be concert halls that filled out with people just spinning their fingers around wine glasses and the most famous player was this amazing guy called richard puckridge or Puckridge.

You know, there are various spellings.

But have you guys read about him?

He's amazing.

He's amazing.

I love him.

He's the best.

He's super fun.

So he was the self-proclaimed inventor of musical glasses.

He

spent, he had all sorts of crazy ideas for how to make his fortune.

So he designed wings for human flight.

Don't think they took off.

He said he had this idea, he wrote this paper about how you could regain youth by injecting yourself with the blood of young maids.

And so he recommended blood transfusions between young maids and anyone over 60.

Just on that.

So when he came up with that idea, people took him quite seriously, some people, and there was a big kind of hoo-ha in the burial industry and the funeral industry because they were like, well, if people are going to live forever, then what are we going to do for a living?

And so he supposedly agreed that everyone who was having this treatment would sign a contract that as soon as they reached 999 years old, they would have to pay a funeral company for the price of a burial.

Wow.

I think they discussed that in Parliament, didn't they?

That was their token nod to what's such a funny idea.

But what do the funeral people do for the first 900 years?

So weird.

I think they discussed that in Parliament, didn't they?

That was their token nod to

his ridiculous idea.

I liked, he had an account once of doing a concert where three hours before the performance, he was going to do a concert on his glasses, which are obviously quite fragile, and three hours before the performance, a large, unmannerly pig entered the room and smashed the whole machine to pieces.

That's an excuse for somebody who hasn't done the homework, hasn't learned the piece that they're going to need to play.

They have a brilliant brainwave.

They think, get me a pig.

Sorry, a pig ate my instrument.

It's like,

there was another thing I saw.

It was a newspaper article.

He took out an advert to apologise because he'd done a concert that everyone thought was terrible.

And the advert said, Mr.

Pockrich takes this opportunity to apologise to the public for their disappointment.

He added a glass too much to his instrument.

And I can't tell whether that means he put one glass in there and it meant all his notes were off, or whether it's a euphemism for, I got really pissed and I couldn't do the concerts.

It sounds like it's that.

It's that, yeah.

That's true.

That's so good.

Another banned instrument during the early 1900s was the saxophone.

Nazi Germany banned it.

They saw it as a symbol of jazz.

So it wasn't that it was turning you into a different mental state.

It was purely that they didn't like it at all.

But churches banned it as well in the early 1900s.

The Vatican banned it in 1914.

And I just love, I've never thought of a saxophone being in the Vatican church.

No, sort of busting out a solo.

What an image.

But yeah, they banned it.

So maybe we'll never get to see it.

Obviously, there was the thought that it suggested and promoted sexual dancing.

So

that was a thing that they wanted to avoid as well.

That is like a church sort of banning gangster rap in churches, though, isn't it?

It's like people going, yeah, we weren't going to do this anyway, guys.

Don't worry about it.

It's like me as a 14-year-old banning supermodels from my birthday party.

There was never any prospect.

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

My fact is that envelopes used to be made of clay.

Wow.

That must have been a hard job being a postman in those days, right?

Yeah.

So this is, um, we're used to envelopes being made of paper, obviously.

That's what we think of as the classic material for them, but it's not.

It's not the original.

So this is

in Babylonian era times in 2000 BC, give or take.

What you would do, if you were writing a message to someone, you would write a message on a clay tablet, and that would dry, and then that would be the thing that you were sending.

But you wouldn't send that just open because anyone could read it.

So you needed an envelope, and to make that, you would put more wet clay over the tablet, press the ends together to seal it, and then you put the whole thing in a kiln, bake it, and then you send that massive baked package of clay and the recipient has to smash it open, the outer envelope, to receive the tablet that's on the inside and that's what you do.

That's a pretty exciting way of opening a letter, isn't it?

Smashing it with a hammer.

Yeah.

I always think like sometimes I rip the end off an envelope to get the inside rather than opening it up with the seal.

And I always think I'm pretty cool when I do that, but this is even better.

Just imagine, this is next level.

Yeah.

Imagine what fun you would have had in ancient Babylonia.

But people's birthdays must have been interesting.

You just spend about six hours beating away at clay.

There really aren't very many samples of these things around because obviously they were designed to be smashed on delivery.

There are some, thank goodness.

Yeah, because Piers Fletcher, the producer of QI's, got one.

Has he?

Yeah, he bought one when he was in, I think he was in Iraq or something, many, many years ago, but he bought one.

It's dated to 2028 BC.

He knows when it's dated to.

And he says you can see the thumbprint left of the person who put it in the kiln on the thing, which gives it some kind of human touch.

But he says that it was an invoice for a consignment of animal fodder, which is not exactly the most exciting thing, because none of us can read Q neophon, which is what it was written in, right?

So he might as well have said it was a love letter to someone or something.

They very rarely were, though, weren't they?

It was all accounting.

I'm glad you clarified why he has it because genuinely I thought that was just a dig at Piers Fletcher's age because he is a middle-aged man.

I just thought you were claiming that's how he got it.

He got it for his 21st birthday.

He's got a few of them, yeah.

Didn't it used to be the case as well that a lot of these, and it was Sumerian and Babylonian, wasn't it?

And they'd have the same stuff written on the outside as on the inside.

So a lot of the time they were used as a protection against fraud.

And so these were the very oldest ones.

Basically, you'd have a record of a transaction, like I've sold you this many bumblebees for this many dinars, and you put that in your clay, and then you sealed it up, and then you wrote exactly the same thing on the envelope.

And the way it worked was when the recipient got it, if there was a dispute over whether the envelope had been tampered with, then you smashed it open to check the inside.

That's okay.

So it was to make sure they were the same inside and out.

Because otherwise, you could melt the clay, soften it, and then change it.

Put an extra zero on.

I wanted this many D Not very craft.

Or this many bees.

Exactly.

Yeah,

it's very open to this beef.

You get a lot of envelopes that you can see in like postage museums that have got holes punched in them.

And that's because they used to fumigate them when there were pandemics and when there were diseases going around.

So, like, for instance, when there was yellow fever around, people would put little holes in and they would fire like formaldehyde gas or smoke or whatever to try and kill the kill the pathogens.

And if you send a letter to any zip code in America that begins 202, 203, 204 or 205 then it will be irradiated before it gets there and that's because they're the zip codes of Washington DC around the federal agencies and they go to a special place where they're put on a conveyor belt and they've fired radiation at them which will kill any bacteria, any viruses, anthrax, all that kind of stuff.

Then they're aired out and then they're sent.

So if you're Donald Trump and you get a letter, it's going to be quite faded and crispy and a little bit yellow.

That's all his mail is going to be a little bit like that because it's gone through this process.

Yeah, it's so cool.

And that was a response, wasn't it, to the anthrax spores that they were put in the post in Washington in about 2001.

And five people died and, you know, there were lots of facilities contaminated.

So this is kind of their way of dealing with that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Apparently, people who work at the Royal Mail say one of the serious problems they have, the sorters who have to sort through the envelopes, is that people don't seal their envelopes.

And there's lots of complaining about this online, and they say it's very annoying because often you have to match a card with its envelope and it's hard to do.

I imagine there are lots of sort of missent things where the wrong card's been put in the wrong envelope.

And they don't know why people do it, but there's speculation that it's based on the old paper rate.

So this was something that was abolished in 1969.

But I believe Piers Fletcher, formerly mentioned sender of cuneiform tablets, Does remember it he's posted about this on the forums before and this was if you wanted to send printed matter like newspapers or pamphlets it was just a hate me so it was a reduced price but you had to send it an unsealed envelope and then the postman would open the envelope check that you hadn't put anything other than a newspaper in there and then you know seal the envelope up after that and if you sent a sealed envelope then you'd have to pay extra so there's the idea that there are still some people out there who think that maybe you'll only have to pay a halfeny if you leave the envelope unsealed but yeah cheaper.

Who is still paying a halfpenny for their stamps?

Other than Piers Fletcher, producer of QI, who is doing that?

It's hard to say.

On the kind of unexpected antiquity of things, you know the window envelope?

And that's the one where you've got the little plastic window so you can double up.

You don't need to write the address on the envelope because it's part of the letter that you're being sent.

You're not going to tell us they did that with cuneiform tablets, are you?

No, I'm just, when do you think that was invented?

Well I would say in the 50s.

Thanks James.

Good guess.

The 90s.

90s?

Brilliant.

Even better guess for my purposes, Anna?

I think I've got window envelopes at my house from before the 90s.

I feel like I'd be cheating because I also researched this.

Okay, okay.

Well, hey, Anna, who was writing window envelopes to you when you were two years old and you were needing them?

I was a very professional toddler.

They were designed, first designed in 1901 and patented in 1902.

They're older than powered flight, which I find very weird.

You find it impressive that we had the technology of windowed envelopes before.

I've got to say, Andy, do you think the Wright brothers, when they first flew at Kitty Hawk, everyone went, yeah, but it's not a windowed envelope, is it?

Come on, mate.

There is a guy in Sweden who's scared of them.

He has a phobia of window envelopes.

Really?

Yeah, he was in court a few years ago.

Basically, he'd been driving his scooter unregistered and without a license.

And so they sent him letters saying you need to pay a fine or whatever.

But he says he had a phobia of window envelopes.

And so he never opened any of them.

And the court partially ruled in his favor, saying he didn't know what was inside them.

And, you know, he just didn't like these official things.

He thought it might be something really bad.

And he did get all the money together for the fine, but then this massive pig came into the room and ate all the money.

Well, speaking of eating, you used to be able to eat the windowed envelopes, didn't you?

What?

In the original 1902 patent,

just the window bit was made of rice paper.

Yeah, don't eat the whole envelope.

Don't eat the whole envelope, absolutely not.

But that would solve a lot of problems today because they really irritate me because they're not recyclable, are they?

Because you can't recycled.

They are, they are recyclable.

No, this is one of the big modern myths of society.

It's the biggest.

God.

Anna, what have you done?

You've destroyed literally millions of windowed envelopes.

I know because you've been getting these envelopes since you were two years old.

They are recently.

I always ate the window.

Price paper is not see-through, I don't think.

It's almost see-through, but it's not really see-through.

So I think they weren't as good probably in the open days, the original patent.

It was quite translucent

rather than transparent.

Also, if it gets wet, it just disintegrates.

Another flaw.

Well, then you can see the address better.

So that's actually quite useful.

Do you know you used to be able to buy stamps from post boxes?

Wow.

This is another era that producer of QI Piers Fletcher might remember.

This was in the 1930s.

And

again, quite short-lived.

He does actually listen to these podcasts, can I just say?

I know he does.

He's going to be so excited.

James is going to talk about my Babylonian cuneiform.

Come around, family.

Come round.

Everyone, sit down.

Come around, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, great-great-great-grandchildren.

Well, as you'll remember, in the 1930s, post boxes were stamp vending machines.

And if they had the word stamp engraved on them, you could put a penny in and you automatically got two stamps out of it.

But they actually were abolished because they kept on just eating people's pennies and not dispensing the stamps.

Nice idea, though.

Very cool idea.

Can I tell you my favorite envelope story from 2020?

Yeah, of course.

We've all got one.

Yep.

So this was in Ohio.

A man called Dan Kane

went to the post office to pick up a letter he was expecting from the College Avenue Student Loan Company.

His daughter's tuition fee.

It was a loan repayment scheme that he was doing.

So he went to pick up the letter.

And when he got there, he was told that there wasn't one letter for him.

But due to an administrative error, the college had sent him not one, but 55,000 letters of the exact same letter.

Wow.

There were 79 bins of mail that contained roughly 700 copies of the exact same letter addressed to him, and he had to bring them home.

He had to take them home with him.

Yeah.

And when he got home, he opened it up to

actually get the amount because he needed to pay back this loan and worked out that the company had accidentally used the wrong interest rate and they calculated the payment wrong.

So they were going to have to send him another letter with the wrong amount.

amount.

That's amazing.

Yeah, and he worked out that roughly it would have cost them about, or someone worked out, it would have cost them $11,000 American dollars to have posted

mail.

Imagine how much worse that would have been in the days of clay envelopes.

Do you want to know what my favorite story from 2015 about envelopes is?

Yes.

Oh, yeah, we're all good.

I'd sort of rather have your 2020 one if you need.

I'm afraid I don't have one.

In 2015, there was a guy in Gloucestershire who got a Christmas card that just said England on the envelope.

He was walking down the road and the postman said to him, I don't suppose you're expecting anything from Germany are you?

And he said, well, I've got a few friends in Germany.

And he said, well, do you want to have a look at this?

It just says England on it.

And he looked and on the back, it was the address of his friends in Germany.

And he opened it up and it was a Christmas card from his friends in Germany.

And he said, how did you know it was for me?

And he said, and the postman said, oh, I was just wandering around.

I've just been asking people.

I've been asking millions of people.

It was from Christmas 1993.

And he'd finally made it to that town.

Isn't that amazing?

And what they reckon,

this is what they reckon happened.

Probably it used to have the correct address on.

And then it said England at the bottom, but maybe it was on a label.

And the label peeled off.

So it got to the right area.

It got to the right post office, but it hadn't gotten the actual final address on it.

And so this postman goes, Well, I might as well just try everyone that I see and just ask just in case.

And he managed to find the right person.

I'm just sort of imagining a guy with a beard down to the floor in ragged clothes who lost his job 25 years ago, just stumbling down the road.

Is it you?

Yeah, I've found him.

He eventually opens it when he's desperate, works out it's for him.

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

My fact this week is that in 1939 America made a huge vehicle to drive across Antarctica.

Unfortunately they put no tread on the tires so it couldn't drive on ice.

Amazing.

It's so cool.

It's a thing called the snow cruiser

and they knew that they wanted to drive across Antarctica and they knew that they would need something absolutely massive to do so because they wanted to drive it out somewhere and then do a load of experiments when they were in there and so they invented this enormous machine it was in the middle of america where they invented i think somewhere near boston

and they had to get it from boston to the boat and then from the boat to antarctica and then from the antarctic boat to the middle of antarctica to do these things and they got it all the way to the antarctic and they realized that the wheels were just spinning around whenever they tried to go anywhere They added some chains to it to try and get a bit of grip and that was slightly better.

But they found out that the only way they could get anywhere was to drive the whole thing in reverse and so they drove in reverse for 92 miles to the middle of the Antarctic and they got there and they could start doing some experiments but they couldn't really get it back and so they ended up just leaving it there so amazing incredible which poor person had a horrendously cricked neck after eating that so bad isn't it no you can just drive anywhere you i mean you can just drive backwards can't you don't need to look around it's antarctica What are you going to bump into?

You're going to bump into penguins or big lumps of ice or something, right?

It just sounds hilarious, the process of getting it there in the first place, right?

There's this photo of transporting it because I think it left from Boston, but it was made in Chicago, maybe it was transported from Chicago.

And so to get to Boston, it had to drive and it just drove along ordinary roads.

And there was this huge pile up because there's this giant 55-foot-long, its wheels are twice, three times the height of a normal car just sitting in the middle of a motorway all the cars around it like what the hell is this yeah they stopped in a place called framingham in massachusetts on the way and they just stopped it in the middle of the road and so there was a traffic jam of 70 000 cars behind it just get a pass wow

um it was cool it had a plane on it it had a biplane on the roof for research so it needed to carry a thousand gallons of fuel just to fuel the plane and then it needed obviously thousands more gallons of fuel all over it.

And it had to have two spare tires, but the tyres were 10 feet tall.

So they were just in the back.

Yeah, each tire had to be transported by a dog sled, I think.

Yeah, there's a brilliant picture on the Atlantic website of 14 dogs pulling a single tire that just shows how big it was that they had to do that.

And they had to go backwards as well.

That was the really difficult thing for the dogs.

Yeah.

And

in that article, actually, there is a photo of it abandoned just after they decided, look, we're not going to take it back.

And then there's a later photo where it's kind of slightly buried by snow.

And then there's a final photo where it's almost completely buried by snow.

And there's like a little hatch where people can go in and out.

And then someone went back

like in the 40s to see if it was still there and they could find it.

And actually, it was kind of, they could still use it, really.

I mean, they couldn't really use it much in the first place, but it was still kind of working.

And they found it again in the 50s, in 1958.

But now they literally don't know where it is.

And it's probably covered under some snow, or it might have drifted off on an iceberg or something.

But we literally don't know where this thing is.

Wow.

It's amazing.

Maybe some penguins have made it into a home.

Oh, that would be nice, wouldn't it?

So lovely.

Yeah.

There's one theory that the Soviets knew where it was and they went back and stole it.

Why?

It's useless.

Guys.

Do you know the first motorized vehicle in Antarctica, as far as I know?

No.

It actually went with Shackleton.

Oh, really?

Yeah so this was in his first Antarctic expedition in 1907 and it was an Arrol Johnston car which were the makers of the first cars in Britain.

It was basically a big bit of PR for the car so quite inconvenient for the actual expedition.

It did have it had skis and it had special oil that didn't freeze and it had a silencer on the exhaust that doubled as a foot warmer so it siphoned the warm air around to the front to where your feet are.

But they took it with them and so they had to bring it on the boat.

They had to unload some of their crucial supplies and equipment from the boat to make room for this car.

They brought it with them.

They got it off the boat, put it on the snow.

And much like James's vehicle he mentioned, they started spinning the wheels and they just went deeper and deeper into the snow.

They thought, okay, we'll tug it with this for a bit.

Maybe we'll get it working.

They lasted two miles of pulling it along with them before Shackleton's crew went, can we just leave this chat behind, please?

And they abandoned it in the snow.

But yeah, first car in the Antarctic there was a car in the Antarctic from a Shackleton very recently it was Patrick Bergle who was Shackleton's great grandson you guys must have read about this it was a modified Hyundai Santa Fe but he actually did manage to get it working right so they said that the only modification was that they made the tires really really big and really really loads of air inside so it was as much as you could like it could roll over your foot and you wouldn't feel it.

That's how much air was in the tires, and that meant that it would never sink into the ground.

And I imagine they had a lot of tread on there as well.

And they said that basically this is exactly like a normal Hyundai Santa Fe, apart from these tires.

But then they did say, Oh, there is one other modification that it runs on jet fuel.

But the reason is because jet fuel doesn't freeze quite as easily as normal fuel.

Aha.

But would that in that kind of atmosphere

lessen its punch when you put down the accelerator?

Yeah they went only on average about 20-25 miles an hour I think on the same time.

But that must have taken ages.

Did they go all the way across?

They went 5,800 kilometers across.

Whether they went to the very end, I think they might have gone to the middle and back.

I bet that was dull.

I bet it was exciting for the first couple of hours.

And then old Shackleton's great-grandson thought, what was my granddad thinking?

Didn't he work in tedious?

He's a marketing executive, this guy.

Yeah.

He's not a Pundra Explorer.

Nah.

He just had to sit in a passenger seat of a car to be there for a few weeks.

They've basically gone, we have a car which can do this.

Anyone can do it, really.

Who can we get to do it?

Does do any of them have any relatives left, the people who went in the first place?

But they did have one thing.

Sorry, just on this really quickly.

They did have one thing where they had a number of these vehicles going across and they had to be roped together because, like you said, there can be crevasses.

And apparently, one of them did fall into a crevasse, but luckily it it was kind of roped to all the other cars so they could pull it out.

So it was kind of dangerous, I think.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

That's very self-sacrificing of the other cars.

I'd be because it could happen the other way, right?

If the crevasse is big enough and you're in the front car and you've made it over and then you're dragged back in by the tailgators.

What?

Come on, Anna.

I mean, you're a team going across the Antarctic.

You're not like, I don't have.

Fuck it.

I'm in the front car.

The rest of them can do what they want.

I think we've learned in the touching the void episode of No Secretary Fish, who's cutting the rope.

Yeah, I don't have the right attitude for polar expeditions.

This fact was about driving backwards.

I found the guy who's driven backwards for the longest time.

Okay.

There is a taxi driver in India called Harpreed Dev who has driven everywhere backwards for about a decade now.

He's a...

Does this mean that at the end,

on your meter, on your taxi, he ends up having to give you money at the end

um so he's been issued with a special government license to drive anywhere in reverse in his home state and he has a he has a big old siren on his cab to warn people but it's so surreal seeing footage of him just driving around backwards all the time he's reversed the gearbox so he's got you know five gears in reverse and one forward and he says that the only disadvantage to this great career he's got is that he gets frequent pains in the neck, extremely bad back problems, and suffers what he calls severe vomiting.

Oh man, I know.

The worst thing about that with the severe vomiting is he's facing in the direction of his passengers, isn't he?

You'd pull the glass window across.

I definitely must have missed a detail there.

Why is he driving backwards, sorry?

No, you didn't.

No, you did not miss a detail.

He thought it would be fun and he thought it would be a fun gimmick.

And then, despite the dangers of it, the government of the area also thought that was a great idea and gave him license.

Yeah, yeah.

I think

if one person is doing something extremely weird and dangerous, but everyone else knows he's doing it at least, then everyone else can mitigate their actions to help him, right?

It's written on the side of the cab that this is a backwards taxi.

I think you can see that when he's coming towards you.

Yeah, he did try to drive backwards to Pakistan to promote peace, but he did not have the permission to cross the border, so he was somehow.

again.

Right.

We were talking about people going across Antarctic

a few seconds ago.

The first person to walk solo across Antarctica only brought one pair of underwear from the entire 38-day trip, and unfortunately, he shit himself on day 16.

I'm impressed he held it in that long.

Day 14 of Antarctic journey, going great so far.

Day 15, still absolutely not regretting my underpant decision.

Day 16, Oh, no.

The thing is,

before he set off, he did an interview with Business Insider and he said that he was only bringing one pair of underwear and he was going to use the weight that he could take.

He was going to use it for food.

So he's like, I don't need the underwear.

I just need food.

Which kind of makes sense without the idea of retrospect.

of realizing that it didn't.

And what happened was it was the food that was a problem.

Obviously, it is always the food that's a problem in that situation.

But

he shouldn't have taken vin de la

he took he took these things he was called colin o' brady and he took these um 1180 calorie colin bars that had been made especially for him and so they had loads of protein loads of good stuff in them and he was just going to eat these bars all the way across but one morning he just got the munchies and he just started eating all of these colin bars they contain coconut oil nuts dried cranberries, cocoa powder.

And he decided to eat just loads and loads of them.

And he had about 2,000 calories worth in one go, which is about the equivalent of eight Big Macs.

And then the next morning, well, you all know what happened.

Wow.

That is not exhibiting the kind of self-control you expect.

But he, old Colin, is a very controversial figure in Antarctic law.

He certainly is, yeah.

Because so he claims to be the first person to have crossed the Antarctic fully unassisted and unsupported.

So, that originally went to this Norwegian guy called Borge Auslan, and that was in the 90s, I think.

But then they changed the definition to say that unsupported had to mean without even a kite.

So, Borge had used a kite on like two occasions, very, very briefly, to get himself sort of out of snow drift.

Can we just explain how that works?

Because it sounds like he's just having a bit of fun with a kite.

That's really fun.

Was he allowed to take his yo-yo with him,

Sorry, it's for transport.

It's not like you stop, you fancy a hobby.

So I guess you're on your sled or whatever, and you harness the wind that's going in the right direction to pull you along with your kite or to help you, to give you a bit of extra oomph.

And he travelled a lot further to do his trip than O'Brady, who's just done his.

And a lot of people see Bourguay as the person who really achieved this.

And O'Brady's quite a self-promoter and he's written this book where he says everyone said it couldn't be done and National Geographics interviewed everyone who advised him.

They were all like, no, we told him it's pretty simple.

Yeah, pretty straightforward.

And it was like, there were times I was told they wouldn't be able to rescue me.

And then someone's done an interview saying getting rescued in the Antarctic is kind of like ordering an Uber these days.

You just, you just call someone up and

get you out of there.

It's very hard to see on the Uber map though, because against a featureless white background, he could be two minutes away, it could be three days.

Unfortunately, there's a huge shit stain in the snow next to him.

He cleaned his pants.

You know, you were saying about you could use the wind with these kites.

Do you know how you can tell which way the wind is going in Antarctica?

No.

Well, there's a few ways you can just put your lick your finger and hold it up.

Not if you want to keep the finger.

That's true, yeah.

One almost foolproof way is to look at which way the penguins are pointing.

So if there is a storm coming in Antarctic, the penguins will drop to their bellies and they will point their beaks in the direction that the wind's going to come because they know that there's a storm coming and they don't want to get blown over.

I was reading this.

This was an Antarctic scientist called Lizzie Meek who was writing about this.

But isn't that cool?

You can just see which way the little penguins are pointing.

That's really funny.

Do you know who the first person possibly to set foot on the Antarctic continent might have been?

Was it QI producer Piers Fletcher?

This is so random, but I just came across this in my notes that I found ages ago.

There was this amazing discovery in the 1980s where some bones were found in Antarctica.

And until then, we thought that the very first Antarctic landing was a sealing expedition in 1820.

And they found these bones and they've dated them to somewhere between 1815 and 1825.

And they are the bones of a 21-year-old indigenous Chilean woman, which is just extraordinary because no one had gone near the continent, we didn't think until then and suddenly there's this young Chilean woman there no one knows where on earth she's come from or how she got there there's a suggestion that maybe the sealers who were European sealers had found someone from Chile who would know more how to survive in that kind of environment and taken her with them then left her but we just have no idea wow I just find that incredible mystery yeah I found a page on Wikipedia which is the list of crimes in Antarctica because as we were saying before, there's all these sort of, you know, to the point where you can order an Uber to get rescued.

There's all these research stations that are planted.

I don't think you can order

to get rescued.

Yeah.

No.

Well, it'll arrive backwards.

That's the thing.

It will.

Sorry, what I meant is it's the point of you could almost, in theory, it's sort of got that sort of dense with places.

And yeah, so there's all these, you know, research units where scientists are hauled up for ages.

And as a result, there's a big list of the crimes that they've committed, which is always really hard because they're isolated for so long.

But the first crime on the list was from 1959.

And it was in a Soviet research station.

And it was between two scientists who got into a massive argument, then fight over a game of chess.

And it just got so heated that the guy who lost became enraged, was said to have picked up an ice axe and attacked the guy.

And it's really hard to tell, actually, whether or not the wound was fatal, because there's two different stories that have been presented as a result.

Some say he survived, some say he didn't.

But afterwards, chess games were apparently banned on all Soviets, Russia, Antarctica.

That really feels like not the main issue.

Keep hold of your axes.

All need for weapons and courage.

Chess.

No.

No, but I just like that.

I like the little communities that are out there that you rarely hear about.

In 2014, there was a scientist who decided to launch his tinder app while he was out there and he matched with someone in that on antarctica um yeah unfortunately there were a helicopter rideaway 45 minutes and they were leaving the next and they just get an uber

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy?

At Andrew Hunter Ebb.

James?

At James Harkin.

And Anna?

You can email podcasts at qi.com.

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

It's got links to merch that we've released.

It has all of our previous episodes.

Check it out.

Anyway, as ever, we hope you're all well.

We hope you're all safe.

And thank you for continuing to listen to us in these crazy times.

We will be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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