324: No Such Thing As Mambo No. 2

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Hello, and welcome to another working-from-home 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 Shriver.

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

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting this week with my fact.

My fact is, sand dunes are brilliant at social distancing.

Okay, topical.

Very topical.

So they're safe.

Sand dunes are inanimate objects.

Okay, so I would suggest that if they're two meters apart, they will always remain two meters apart.

Is that as in they're they're not moving, are they?

They sand dunes do move, they constantly are traveling through the desert.

They are a body that falls over on itself and and travels.

Uh, so yeah, sand dunes are constantly shifting, and that's why when deserts encroach on places, you've got these giant waves of sand dunes that head towards you.

It's like an army.

But scientists in Cambridge University have sort of simulated, they've built an experiment whereby they've been able to study the movement of sand dunes, and they've discovered that basically they do communicate with each other in in you know inverted commas communicate with each other by sending signals to not encroach on their patch so they don't collide we still fully don't understand why it is i mean it's pretty extraordinary the latest theory that they've come up with is it's much like if you're in a boat and there's the wake of the boat pushing the water back behind you it's pushing the sand dune behind it to keep it at a regular distance.

Although we should say, because otherwise I think people will be confused, when you say collide and it's a mystery why they don't crash into each other, obviously the main reason they don't crash into each other is because they're moved by winds and air currents.

And so you don't get one moving in one direction and another moving in the opposite direction and them galloping towards each other very often.

So when we say crashing into each other, it's almost always one sneaking up on the other or, you know, how, you know, how calm one of them doesn't go a bit faster than the other.

And it does seem to be, doesn't it, that the one in front slow...

effectively slows down the one behind.

Exactly.

And it's worth saying that there are different speeds, though, to sand dunes.

So a big sand dune is much slower than a smaller sand dune.

And when I say much slower, I do realize we're talking by centimeters per year.

But they do travel at different speeds and even the smaller ones will respect distance.

gradually as of as some kind of communication is told.

Again, it's all theories.

So is what you're saying, like a little guy will go really, really fast until it gets a certain distance away from the big guy and then it'll go, okay, now I'm going to respect the distance and I'm just going to slow down to your pace.

Exactly.

And then then they move at the same pace.

It's not gonna crop up as a plot line in the fast and the furious films anytime soon basically.

The slow and the very very placid.

They do kind of go to sleep though each night and wake up each morning.

Again, this is a metaphor.

But

because of that there's a big big temperature change.

Obviously they're mostly in

beachy and deserty environments and especially in the deserty environments it's way warmer in the day than at night and that big temperature difference stirs the sand quite a lot.

And

at noon, the sand dune kind of wakes up and the little winds are generated by the temperature difference and the increasing temperature, and they move the surface around.

And that can be another thing that moves the dunes

a few meters a year.

So is it possible to tell the time if you're in the desert by looking at a sand dune or not?

I mean, I think you'd look at the color of the sky, possibly.

It's completely dark.

I think we know what time it is.

That's the most amazing nomad skill you could have.

That'd be really good.

I was reading the other day that if you're on a mountain and you want to know how high it is, you can tell it by getting a bottle of Coca-Cola and putting some mentos in it.

You know that trick that they often do in America where you kind of put your mento mint in there and then suddenly it sloshes up.

If you're on a mountain and you have those two things, you can put the mento inside the coke and the amount that it slushes up is

can tell you the height of the mountain.

Do you know why?

It's to do with the air pressure, I think.

It's amazing that Edmund Hillary ever made it to the top of Everest without his Coke and his mentos.

Do you need to have quite a big bottle, presumably?

Because

is it the more it goes up, the higher you are?

Or is it an inverse relationship?

Well, here's the problem, Anna.

I didn't really read properly.

So if we were going to go on a hiking expedition next week, I'm going to have to do a bit more research.

I guess the air pressure, is it air pressure?

It's air pressure, yeah.

Yeah.

Didn't your coke freeze at a soden height, though?

Would it freeze if you're on top of Mount Everest, which is the highest mountain?

How are they drinking?

Maybe they're taking up one of those thermoses that you carried soup in on a school trip when you were young.

Exactly.

I can't believe you had soup in a thermos on your school trips when everyone else had sandwiches.

Andy, it's actually an incredibly traumatizing childhood memory.

I don't want to talk about it.

It was the worst thing ever.

It's incredibly embarrassing.

It always spilled everywhere on the coach.

No one would want to to sit next to me.

God, I hate my mother.

What was she thinking?

This experiment,

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

So basically, what they had was 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.

But the guy who did it was called 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.

But what's really interesting is it's pretty much impossible to actually make a sand dune in the lab, right?

For years and years, they said it was impossible.

This experiment gives a kind of an idea of what a sand dune might do, but of course, the difference between that and an actual massive, you know, meters and meters high sand dune could be quite different.

And so, in Mongolia in 2007, they got a bulldozer and flattened a whole lot of the desert and they set up an experiment to see a sand dune being made from scratch.

Wow.

But surely even the longest PhDs don't quite last long enough to genuinely watch a sand dune form from nothing and then move, do they?

Or did they just sit in the desert for decades?

They just sat there for decades, yeah.

They pass it on to their children actually.

Wow.

It's like a sourdough starter.

Well not unfortunately.

Just as it happens, what they learned was exactly what everyone thought would happen according to the experiments they did in the lab.

So they did all these experiments and it turned out that what happened was exactly what everyone thought was going to happen, which

is annoying in a way, but in another way, at least they've proven their theories are correct.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Did you know the second highest sand dune in Europe is in Wales?

Is it?

It's a place which is nicknamed the South Wales Sahara.

It's 800 acres of sand and the dunes get up to 200 feet tall, which is actually

massive.

Yeah, yeah.

It's so sandy there that Lawrence of Arabia was partly filmed there

as a stand-in for Arabia.

Yeah.

The tallest one's in France, isn't it?

I think I've been to it.

Yeah.

Have you?

Yeah.

The tallest one in Europe.

How do you look down it?

Actually, I've been to the tallest one in the world as well.

That's in Peru, I think.

And I've sandboarded on it as well.

Cool.

How do you go about that?

You pay money and

they take you on a dune buggy and they do lots of tricks over the sand dunes and then they take you to the top of one of the biggest ones and they put you on what is less like a snowboard and more like a tea tray and they tell you just to go to the bottom and to make sure that you tuck everything because I didn't stand up on it I kind of like bodyboarded down it and they tell you to hide all your limbs otherwise they'll get chopped off and stuff it's like surfing

what environment are you going through

that's what they said

they said like if you don't tuck your arms in then you'll probably lose them.

Wow.

Anna, you'll remember tea trays because your mum probably gave you one to

serve up your afternoon tea on on these cool trips.

Actually, sand duning, what are you calling it?

Sandboarding.

Sandboarding can be quite dangerous.

Well, that's what they said.

What kind of injuries?

You lose your arms and legs, I told you.

You can, obviously, it might find that when you get to the bottom of the sand dune, then all your limbs have dropped But you can find, this is incredibly rare.

They didn't know it could happen until 2013, but you can just fall into one.

So

have you read this extraordinary story?

No, obviously not.

Otherwise, I wouldn't have gone sandbarning.

This happened in 2013.

It's in a place called Mount Baldy, which is on the side of Lake Michigan in Indiana, and it's a huge sand dune.

It's 126 feet tall, and it swallowed a boy.

I'm just going to say right now, just so everyone's not traumatized, the boy ended up okay.

But he was running up to the top of the sand dune with his mate and his dad to then run down it or do James's trick.

And suddenly he disappeared.

And his dad looked around and he'd gone.

And his friend said he just fell into the sand and got swallowed.

You would, even...

If you're not Dan, you would immediately think Mongolian death worm, wouldn't you?

So that was the conclusion they all jumped to.

They spent weeks looking into that to no avail.

This is amazing.

Bizarrely, by chance, there was a geologist who was walking by and she saw dozens of people on the side of this sand dune just digging away in the sand saying, this just swallowed a small boy.

We need to get him out.

And one of the people, they heard the boy say from deep within the dune, help me, I'm scared.

And this geologist was like, that is rubbish.

That's totally impossible.

And she just walked on, went home.

And then even though she heard the child.

She didn't hear the child.

No, no, she didn't hear the child.

She just got told by the people digging.

She thought, no, that kid's just playing hide and seek.

Anyway, it turned out they saw these tiny little holes in the sand that kind of went through, and it seemed that they were leading towards some massive cavity underneath it, which he just dropped into and then it got immediately covered up.

And they excavated and excavated.

After three and a half hours, they managed to find him hidden in a cavity in the sand dune 12 feet underground.

And he was unconscious and like really cold.

and he spent a couple of weeks in hospital and amazingly recovered but they had no idea why sand dunes shouldn't swallow anyone up and this geologist hated herself so much for not believing it had happened at the time she's then led this amazing study she's called Erin Argielan and she's found out that it's from hollowed out trees so the sand dunes galloped along as they do and it's galloped over these old trees that have rotted then from the inside and been encrusted with fungus so it's just got these tubes so it's got these weird channels leading down through it but they don't you can't see the openings in the in the surface so it looks like nothing wow that's really cool don't sound there's there's another thing that they might swallow apart from six-year-old boys

which is there was a city built uh in tunisia for star wars and not the original star wars films i'm talking episode one the phantom menace the true original um but in 2013, there were lots of news reports and I haven't, annoyingly, I haven't found what happened after these reports, but it was reported that that location city built for the Phantom Menace, which is called Moss Esper in the movie, was about to be buried by a giant crescent-shaped sand dune.

And this was really good news, actually, not only because it removed evidence of the Phantom Menace from the face of the earth.

Also, because it was hard for scientists to measure sand dune movement because it's very hard to to find a fixed measurement point because it's it's a nightmare when you're in the desert you think oh well has this moved 50 meters or has it not moved at all we don't know because there's nothing else here apart from more sand but this was obviously very useful because it was fixed in the ground and they could kind of look at where it is and compare it to the movie and say okay on this date it was in front of this part of Star Wars universe and then it was yeah but they would they would have to watch the Phantom Menace though to do that that's true and no scientist has been found yeah that's a PHP you really don't want to do.

I'd rather stand in the Mongolian desert for 20 years.

One famous thing about sand dunes is that they make this singing noise.

And Marco Polo wrote about it in the 13th century.

He said that he heard eerie sounds coming from the sand dunes around him, and that the logical conclusion was that he must be in the presence of evil spirits.

Wow, cool.

But it has to be really specific sand, doesn't it?

You can't just go on any old sand dune.

There aren't actually many in the world that do it, but it's got to be a very fine type of sand.

And I think it's the same sort of mechanism that you get on some beaches where the sand really squeaks.

And I'd never really had this before, and because in Britain we have beaches that I love, but that are objectively quite crappy.

So I'd never seen it before until I went to visit Bruny Island off the coast of Tasmania at Christmas.

And there, every time you put your foot down, it sort of shrieks at you like it's hurting.

You feel kind of bad for it.

Yeah, it is weird, creaky floorboard sounds, isn't it?

As you're walking along.

So you can't sneak up on someone on a beach.

It's actually a very good mechanism to deter.

That's why you moved here, isn't it, Dan?

Because you just kept getting caught in Australia.

We've been giving sand dunes very mixed messages in this country lately because we've been trying to get them to stop moving for years and building fences around them and people sometimes cover them in oil, which is very unpleasant, which sort of like weighs them down.

And we plant lots of vegetation on them.

So if you go to the coast, you'll see vegetation planted.

And then, suddenly, conservationists have turned around and said, Oh, hold on, sand dunes are supposed to move.

This is like kind of nailing a horse to the floor.

And so, now we're just

which is, and they don't do that because horses are supposed to move.

And so, now we're trying to get sand dunes moving again.

And the National Lottery has given four million pounds to get sand dunes moving again.

Wow,

they've set up a new app, haven't they?

The couch to five meters

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that according to a recent publication, people from the north of England are more than twice as likely to be naturally funny than people from the south of England.

Sounds like a very scientific publication.

Who conducted this?

Oh, I didn't write that down.

I can't remember.

Was it nature?

I can't remember.

It was the Beano.

It was the comic the Bino.

But who knows comedy better than the people who write the Beano?

That's what I want to know.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

So what were the details of the study?

They were scant.

It was the analysis of famous British comedians carried out by statistician Dr.

Jeff Ellis.

And he looked at all the different comedians and what their particular attributes are and then he surveyed people to say how funny do you think these people are and I think thanks to the fact that Peter Kay comes from the north of England and people like Peter K

we came at the top

and you guys are all not as funny yeah didn't he also say that Geminis are more naturally funny than Leos

I didn't read that bit because I'm not a Gemini I only cherry-picked the bits that specifically said good things about me

okay

I think there's a study did also say that and can I just say as a Leo from the south of England I'm just honoured to be here

People who are born in a city are supposed to be funnier, and you were born in London.

I was.

Is that, again, is that according to apparently professional statistician Jeff Ellis, who must be questioning where his career's gone right now?

The Beano is pretty dry these days if they're having to resort to statistical analysis of famous comedians.

We should quickly say there'll be a lot of international listeners who might not know what the Beano is.

This is the longest-running comic in the UK, and it is famous for having created Dennis the Menace, the British one, not the American one.

And

it has a sort of sister publication called Dandy that has Desperate Dan.

And so, a lot of iconic British characters came out of this.

Desperate Dan was named after you walking along a beach, wasn't it?

Depraved Dan was the character's original name.

Deported Dan after

I was caught.

You mentioned Desperate Dan in the very olden days, so it feels right that we're correcting the balance now.

I think he had to give up eating cow pie, didn't he?

Oh, yes.

Because of mahat disease.

We all have a friend who used to work on the Beano until quite recently.

Really?

Matthew Highton, a comedian, excellent comedian, I should say, also from the north of England, very funny guy.

He used to work for the Beano.

Yeah, that's right.

And he's still part of the Beano WhatsApp group, where everyone sends each other messages about the Beano.

And I asked him if they had any facts.

And so, do you want to hear some facts from the Beano WhatsApp group?

So, the Beano offices in London are on Fleet Street, and it is where people believe that Sweeney Todd was supposedly had his barbershop.

And so, they get loads of tours of people who want to see the kind of dodgy, murdery parts of London always go to the Beano offices and have a look around.

They don't go into the offices, they go into like the alleys next to the office because that's where Sweeney Todd is supposed to be.

One of the biggest pranksters of all time, Sweeney Todd.

Well, he didn't have cow pies, but he did have people pies, didn't he?

I guess.

Yeah, yeah, probably the inspiration for Desperate Dan.

Who knows?

I found out in my Peanut research a niche fact that definitely international listeners won't care about, which is the breed of dog that Nasha is.

Because if you look at Nasha, he's just sort of like a big frizzy lump of black with some legs sticking out.

And he's actually a very rare breed.

He's an Abyssinian wire-headed tripe hound and he's a very rare breed of dog from the mountains of eastern Africa according to the Beano website.

They're world famous for their thick black coats which are as strong and tangled as barbed wire which is weird because barbed wire actually when it's erected is not tangled at all but they're also famous for their strong

I suppose bits of it are you're right the barbed bits are aren't they?

Sorry Anna are you are you just being silly?

This isn't a real kind of dog is it?

Yeah of course it is.

They're also famous for their strong teeth that can chew through concrete and smash bricks.

Did you know that Nasha can speak real people words, but only on Halloween?

Ooh.

Again, well, this breed of dog is particularly famous for that.

They are extremely rare now.

The American Dennis the Menace, we've mentioned before, the beautiful coincidence that they both appeared at the same time, these two characters with the same name and both wear red and black costume.

And American Dennis the Menace, I was looking into how he came about, his origin story, and he was actually inspired by, and this is the story that's told, in 1950, when the artist Ketchum was drawing, his wife came in to interrupt him to say that their own four-year-old son, Dennis, had just demolished their bedroom by putting fecal matter that he'd found in his underpants all over the room.

and declared him a menace.

And so he thought, ooh, that sounds like a good character name.

So he went, helped to clean up the shit off the walls, and then created Dennis the Menace.

Because there there was a song a few years before both of these characters came along that was quite popular called Dennis the Menace from Venice.

And most people think that the reason that they came at the same time is because they were both inspired by this song, which had become quite popular.

But the Pooh on the Wall story is quite persuasive.

The Pooh on the Wall story also features in the music hall song, doesn't it?

So I think it might have taken the same trajectory.

Yeah, I think the creators of the British version of Dennis said that he was inspired by that musical song.

And actually, I looked up the lyrics of this song, although I can't find the melody, and I really want it.

Dennis the Menace from Venice is a gay gondolier with gold rings in his ears, and he's a massive player.

So, the whole song is about how he's this gondolier who seduces other men's wives down the canals of Venice.

At nine in the evening, he dines with a blonde, at ten, he has got a brunette.

At midnight, you'll find him with some ginger gal, and he teaches them all how to pet.

Wow, it sounds a bit like Mambo number five, doesn't it?

Another song

which originally ended up with the protagonist smearing his poo all over the walls.

Mambo number two, they had to rename it.

There was, it's obviously a lot of the humor in the Beanote is really lavatorial.

And there was a plan in 2017 to do a Beanote takeover at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

And what they wanted to do was amend the they've got a cast of Michelangelo's David there and they wanted to tweak it so that it would fart as people passed by.

And I can't find any evidence that it happened because there was fury in the museum that there was going to be it was actually genuinely irritating to people.

And one there was a memo doing the rounds about the plans and somebody replied and insider from the museum said, frankly, some of the things in the memo are disgusting.

While it's important to encourage children to visit, farting statues are not the way to do it.

What's What's going on?

So Beano launched in 1938 and there's not many copies left of the original issue.

But by weird coincidence, I saw one the other day.

A friend of mine, yeah, called Ollie Driscoll.

He's a cameraman for, he works on movies like the latest Jurassic Park movies and Touching the Void and the Fast and Furious movies.

Back in 1999, he bought the Beano first issue for £6,000.

Wow.

And as far as he knows, it's the only issue that has the toy that it came with, the free toy, which was a mask.

Oh my God, he has it.

You know the guy who has that.

Yeah, he has it.

He showed it to me.

Yeah.

And he has it in mint condition and he's up for selling it.

So if anyone wants to buy a very expensive comic book magazine, he's got it for sale.

Dan, I'm really interested because I read a bit about that thing and it said that it came, it said the toy that it came with, it called it a whoopee mask.

And I obviously only know the whoopee cushion, but presumably this is not a mask where someone has to sit on your face at eviction point.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think maybe whoopy, is it possible whoopie had a different meaning to it backwards?

I think it didn't fart.

I've seen a picture and I can't see where they would have got the farting mechanism into it.

So

it's just glasses.

Do you know what the oldest comic strip in the world is about?

No.

This is what's established recently as the oldest sort of Western comic book.

And by comic book, it's like something that's mass produced and it has speech bubbles and released every week every couple of weeks it's called looking glass and it ran for three editions and it was the adventures of a coat being worn by different people

is it about that there's a gogol story about a coat isn't there it the overcoat or the great yeah the overcoat the overcoat it was not um based on a goggle a gogol story it was pre-that it was 1825.

Wow, maybe Gogol based his story on the comic.

On the history of a coat.

I just can't imagine two people had the same idea about doing a story about an overcoat.

You're right.

Well, we don't know this one was an overcoat.

It might have been an undercoat.

It was just a coat.

What is an undercoat?

I don't know.

It's just something I made up that would be the opposite of an overcoat.

Anyway, it had characters like Billy the Bully and Ranting Dan.

And this was, you know, 200 years ago.

Dan, you're getting an absolute pasting in this.

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

My fact this week is that in 1943, German troops who were rescuing Mussolini had to seize control of a tourist funicular railway so they could ride a cable car to the top of the hill and pick him up.

So cool.

What an awkward journey in that funicular railway cable car it must have been with the two elderly tourists and the 20 Nazi goons.

Who refused to budge and get out of it?

No, we paid for our ride and we will damn well take it.

So

what was he doing at the top of the hill?

That's a good question.

He was just hanging out there.

So I didn't know this had happened.

But when Mussolini was deposed by his own people, because they finally realised that he was shit in every way, in 1943,

he was arrested by his own council and they sort of took him prisoner and they moved him around to a lot of different places.

And then eventually they plopped him at the top of the Gran Sasso d'Italia, which has a lot of very high mountains in the Apennines.

And it's only reachable by cable car.

And Hitler, who's a fan of Mussolini, heard about this, sussed out where he was, and ordered this rescue operation.

And so, in order to rescue, the plan was send some troops there and pick him up.

And so, yeah, they had to seize this cable car and just because they go quite slowly, cable cars at the best of times.

And I reckon in 1943, very slowly.

Just imagine the rush and the frenzy.

Yeah, which is so it's a funicular cable car, which is where they have the two counter balances.

So they'll have two cable cars, won't they?

One on one side and one on the other.

But it was a crazy operation, this Mussolini rescue.

It was part cable car-based and mostly glider-based.

And so the plan was for these 10 tiny little glider planes to land on the top of this mountain, which they'd sort of done some reconnaissance on and thought they'd seen a big meadow they could land on, which turned out to be a massive rocky field.

So they all crash-landed.

Some of them were quite badly injured, ran in to pick up Mussolini.

And one of the SS commandos apparently vomited inside his glider which made it very unpleasant to travel in for the rest of them.

They were so flimsy, these tiny little gliders and the pilots were so nervous about it because of that that one of the pilots in one he couldn't see out the window because it was really blurry so he got a knife out and he just jammed a hole in the fuselage so he could look out and then pushed the fuselage out so he could look out of the plane.

Wow.

And then they picked him up.

They sort of and they sort of gave him up quite

sort of, okay, take him, that's fine.

Like no bullets were fired.

It was, and Mussolini requested that as well.

He said, please, no one, no one shoots.

And yeah, it was quite a peaceful operation.

And they didn't get him out by the funicular, did they?

He no, they were planning was an idea to get him out by a funicular, so they were planning to land a plane at the bottom of the funicular that he could just board, but the plane crash-landed and lost a wheel on landing.

So instead, they got him out by a small light aircraft from the top of the mountain, didn't they?

Got it.

Okay.

Which also sounds crazy.

And your wife's a pilot, so maybe she could say how unstable this is, but they were terrified about leaving because it was a really light aircraft and it was overcrowded to the extent that Mussolini, who was six foot four, massive guy, sat in the passenger seat.

And then the guy who was in charge of the operation, Captain Scorzeni, was wedged in the luggage compartment behind and underneath the seat and

way too heavy.

So it like careered down this hill, bumped down this hill, which wasn't the kind of surface they wanted, and then did a nosedive off the edge of a precipice.

And they only survived because the pilot realized that he'd have to leave it in freefall for a while so they in order to get up the requisite speed you could then pull the plane up and start flying it away.

Mussolini was

a bad dude, I think we can all agree.

He was also a British spy for some time.

Yeah.

He was hired by the British in 1917 and he was given a wage by MI5 to help keep Italy fighting in the war.

Because in the First World War, they were on the same side as the British.

And that was about £6,000 a week.

So, you know, he owes a lot of his early success to MI5.

That's a huge amount of money.

Yeah, is it modern day that much, or was that that much at the time?

Modern day that much.

Yeah, it was £100 a weekly wage at the time, which is about £6,000 now.

Okay.

You don't have to buy a second-hand car

or, well, you know what £6,000 is.

You don't need to eat it.

Well, you can buy the first edition of the Beano for that back in 1999.

Terrible news.

Italy has dropped out of the war, but I did secure this.

Check out my whoopee mask, guys.

I think we've briefly mentioned before that his son, Romano, was a jazz musician.

Oh, yes.

And a famous jazz musician, more or less in his own right.

I just wanted to add on, I found a memorial article about him in The Atlantic, and the headline was, he made the refrains run on time.

Ah, nice.

Funiculars.

Are great.

I made a list of all the funiculars I've been on as part of my research.

How many?

And I've been on.

Only six is not enough.

But one of them was closed when I visited it, so it would have been seven.

So can you just quickly re-explain for maybe some of the audience listening to this show who might not understand what a funicular is, what it is?

Sorry to do that.

We obviously all know.

So

it's a little railway,

which is,

normally they're designed to go up and down very, very steep hills.

So if you've got, you know, it's a very steep mountainside, it's a great way of getting up and down there with not too much,

you know, without going round and round the houses.

So it's a direct line.

And usually one car is ascending while the other is descending.

So there are two.

And sometimes there's just one line and the cars are going towards each other and they're about to hit each other.

And then just at the very middle of the line, the line branches off into two and they go around each other and then use the same line again.

That's a very efficient way of doing it.

And the reason they're really useful is because you're using the weight of one of your trains to pull the other one up.

So, as one is descending, it's pulling the other one up.

So, you need a lot less energy.

That's the crucial thing about them is the counterbalancing.

And they still use a little motor, so they still need to be able to pull themselves up the hill.

But it's so much counterbalance, yeah.

So, you're using basically the potential energy of one to pull up the other one.

Um, but like Anna says, you do need some

it's not a completely perfect um system of uh

potential motion, so you do need uh

you need a little leg up.

Apparently, sometimes you can make them move just by having enough people in the cabin.

If you crush enough slightly overweight people in, it can just weigh its way down.

So that's an insulting moment when you step into a funipula and finally they're like, thank God, we've got them.

Okay.

It's like I was once in television studios in London and there was a load of people in the lift.

And I needed to get in the lift as well.

And I got in.

And as soon as I walked in, it started beeping and said, sorry, too much weight in this lift.

So I had to walk out and get the stairs while everyone else got the lift.

Yeah, that's awkward.

That's very unfair, but it's just because you were the last one in.

It's only really insulting if you get in and the guy who's running the lift says, all right, well, you six people are going to have to leave, I'm afraid.

I was once on an aeroplane.

I don't know if I've said this before, but I got an aeroplane in, I think it was in Hawaii or somewhere.

It was somewhere where it's a small aeroplane.

And they made me move to counterbalance the weight of the plane.

And they said, excuse me, sir,

can you sit over the wings?

I'm not a particularly overweight man.

You're not at all.

Andy, I want to know the last time you went into a lift that there was a man running it.

I only go into a lift which has an operative.

Yeah, it would have been longer ago than the last time I was in a funicular, which was in Hastings last year.

You know, when you said you've been in six funiculars, does that include going up and going down as separate ones?

Oh, okay.

If we're doing that, I've been in 12 12 funiculars.

But they are, I mean, I find them kind of weirdly lovely.

Again, I'm a bit of a funicular obsessive.

Not that much of one, because I've only been in 12/6.

Funicular and moss, they're your two loves, aren't they, Andy?

Pretty sad, isn't it?

If you imagine a funicular overgrown with moss, and that would be my dream,

but I just, they are very cool.

Um, and

I find them quite weird because obviously they're only usual in very hilly or mountainous places and so you get loads of them in seaside resorts like Scarborough has five really wow.

Yeah, or it has had five at various different points.

Hastings has two.

Do you guys know the song about funiculas?

The

really famous one.

Funiculi funicula

from the 1880s.

Do you know it?

No,

you would know it.

If you heard it, you would know it for sure.

It's like a really famous Italian song.

Like, it goes, da da da da da da da da da da da da.

Funiculi, finicula, finiculi, funicula.

Finiculi funicula.

So it's really, really famous in the 1880s.

And Richard Strauss was on holiday in Italy and he heard this song and he thought, because it's such an absolute banger of a tune, isn't it?

He thought this must be like a really old, like classical Italian song.

And so he put it in one of his compositions.

And then the guy who actually wrote it, who was living in Italy, heard this and he was like, that's my song.

What's going on?

And so he sued Richard Strauss for the money for his song and he won as well.

So it's, and as far as I can see, it's like one of the oldest examples of someone suing for someone stealing their songs.

Wow.

Cool.

Isn't that cool?

That's amazing.

Do you know Ireland has one cable car?

Just one, eh?

It's just got one.

One cable car.

It takes people from Cork to Dersey Island, which is just off the coast of Cork.

And it's the only way of getting to the island.

And there was outcry a few years ago when it was announced that no longer was the cable car allowed to be used to transport cows.

Now,

this is actually a serious problem because a lot of the Dersey Island industry, which admittedly is quite small, I think it only now has two permanent residents.

A lot of the industry is quite cow-based, quite cattle-based, and the cable car is tiny, it can fit one cow.

So when they were moving cows over, the farmers,

when they were moving the cows across, the farmers would have to put them one at a time in this one cable car.

There are great pictures of them disembarking.

And then would they have to like sometimes put the cow across, but then send some corn back and then put a chicken back in and send that back?

Yeah.

There were so many awkward trial runs where the chicken was dead, the cow was dead and they could only plant corn.

That's so amazing.

Just water shoulder you could squeeze in.

You could go and lie on top of the cow.

Man, it's pretty small.

You could maybe squeeze in an Italian fascist, but that's

I've got a new favorite cable car as a result of researching this fact.

It's a cable car.

I want to know what your old favorite cable car was, but we'll come on to that.

Well, my old favorite one was the one I got in Hong Kong, which took you across mountain ranges to go to Ocean Park, which we used to get most of my childhood.

Astonishing cable car.

But that's been superseded by a mountain cable car in South Germany, which takes you to the top of a mountain called the Wank.

I've been there.

I've been to the Wank.

You've been to the Wank?

I mean, of course.

Of course, I guess.

So you've been on the Wank Bahn.

I have been.

I have watched ski jumping at the Wank mountain and I've watched Andreas Wank, the ski jumper, jumping at the wank mountain.

I think that's right.

It's next to Garmisch Patenkirchen, I think.

Yes, that's correct.

So, yeah, so to get to the top of it, if you want to take the quick way, you get the wank barn, and the wank barn leads you to the top.

And there's a wank house at the top as well.

Can I just say, Dan, the wank barn sounds like the disgusting sequel to the song Love Shack.

It's a little known place where you can get together with yourself.

Yeah, so yeah.

And also, if you go regularly, you can get a wank pass, which gets you a sort of year-round permit to get the cable car.

Wow.

It's a pretty rough place to clean, isn't it?

It's poor cleaning stuff.

Coincidentally, I'm banned from all six of the funiculars I've been on.

But not the other six.

Oh, God.

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

My fact is that in medieval Germany, bad musicians were tied to an instrument called the flute of shame.

That doesn't sound like much of a...

I mean, was it a massive flute?

It was.

It was a flute.

I think everyone knew it was the flute of shame.

And that's, as always, that's where the shame comes from.

So it's called the Schandflot

or Schantflotte.

And

so this is a, it a metal device with a collar at the neck, so it was clamped onto you, and your fingers would supposedly be clamped to the keys.

Not really a flute, more of a clarinet.

I've written flarinet in my notes, which I like,

but that's just a mistake.

So there are a couple of these things only in existence.

One of them is in the Medieval Crime Museum in Rothenburg, and another is in the Amsterdam Torture Museum.

And so there's a, I couldn't quite work out if these things, you know, were real or if they were Victorian reproductions, but I did find a paper in the journal Torture,

which is all about other,

it's about other shaming instruments.

And there were definitely things like the neck violin, which could be attached to you, and you might be put in the in a pillory, you know, you might be tied up somewhere with this wooden violin, again, attached to your neck by a kind of iron band.

I saw a picture of that.

It doesn't to me it didn't look like a violin at all.

I think they just called it that because it was on your neck, didn't they?

Exactly.

There are some violins get locked in.

There are some which definitely look like violins.

Oh, okay.

Because the flute one does look like a flute.

That's why it confused me.

Or clarinet, you know.

Or clarinet, yeah.

Or clarinet, you know, it's one of those.

Do you have to play it while you're in it?

I mean, accounts vary.

Some people say you'd be sort of put on and walked around a bit and you'd have to, you know, go, yeah, I am a crap musician.

Oh, Oh, it is the perfect instrument for feeling sorry for yourself as well, the violin.

So that's quite obvious.

I asked Greg Jenner about this, whether he thought this was a real thing or not.

And he asked Dr.

Eleanor Jenega, who is at Going Medieval on

Twitter, who's a medieval historian, and she isn't sure.

She thinks that it might be one of those inventions that were, as she puts it, retrofitted, as in

more of a Victorian idea.

On the German Wikipedia, it says, in recent times, the Schandflut is often presented as a punishment for bad musicians, but like the neck violin, which also resembles a musical instrument, it served to punish various minor violations of the legal system.

So not for musicians, but just a more general kind of punishment like the stocks kind of thing.

So I guess we just don't really know, do we?

It's kind of...

Yeah.

So the violin definitely seems to be a thing.

But not necessarily for musicians, perhaps.

No, no, no.

It seems to make more sense that they'd be used to punish an actual crime.

But they did used to make punishments fitting with the crime.

So maybe if you'd stolen a violin or beaten up a violinist.

It's waiting for a long time if you make a massive metal flute for someone to steal a flute, isn't it?

It's like, surely it'll happen eventually.

What did they steal?

Oh, they stole some bread.

Okay, have we got a massive bit of metal?

Still waiting on the flute.

Not only did they have the neck violin, but I saw as well that in one of these museums, the Crime Museum in Rotterdam, that they've got a double neck violin.

And the idea of the double neck violin was, according to the little caption that goes with

the item, is that it was for arguing couples.

And they would have to walk around with them on, sometimes with bells attached, ringing.

The idea was that they would walk in shame until they resolved their argument.

So it was just a quick way of making them actually talk to each other and shaming themselves into an understanding of their points.

And why is there a violin hanging between them?

It just seems seems like the totally irrelevant part of that setup.

Well, it's romantic.

Oh, so when they make up, they can do a little serenade.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like when someone comes to your table while you're having dinner and plays a song for you.

Fair enough.

So just on flutes, is it flutist or flautist?

Flautist.

Okay, one vote for flautist.

It seems to be that in America it's flutist, although one of the greatest ever players, Julius Baker, he has said it should be flutician.

Jesus.

Like a beautist.

It sounds like someone who cures a flute.

I've always said flotist.

I thought that was the

I think it is the standard in the UK, definitely.

Me too.

I think that's because we're British.

Dan?

Yeah, I'm not a good one to ask.

I only just found out through James that I've been saying pianist wrong this whole time, that it's a pianist.

Okay.

But flutes are four times as old as farming.

Are they?

Yeah.

People were just eating flutes for the first 30,000 years, weren't they?

They found these bones with holes in, didn't they?

And the holes are the correct distance apart to make you think that they must be a flute.

I'm a little bit unconvinced by it, I must say, but that is like, yeah, that's

what so there's one which I think they are more convinced by, which is 35,000 years old, and there's one which is a bit of a borderline case, and that's the one I'm basing this on, which is 43,000 years old.

It could be unbelievably good luck that there are these holes in it, or it could be

there are a lot of bones.

Some of them must have holes in it the right spaces.

But the 43,000 year old one is the leg bone of a cave bear, which is an incredibly epic

thing to make.

I know.

Imagine the combination of skills that you need to be a flute player 43,000 years ago.

You need to be able to kill a bear, but also to have the finesse.

Yeah.

That is incredible.

I think we can safely say that the coolest guy in an orchestra or girl, which is not a difficult thing to be, I know, know, but is definitely the person who's playing the bear's limb.

In 1969, there was an Australian park ranger and he heard the sound of a flute playing in the park.

And it turned out that it was a bird called the lyrebird.

And the lyrebird can copy people's noises.

And, you know, you sometimes see them on like nature documentaries where they're making the sound of drills or something like that or mobile phones because they've copied them.

So he heard heard this bird that was singing a tune that sounded just like a flute.

And he did some research and he found that 30 years earlier, there was a flute player who'd lived near the park with a pet lyre bird.

And he used to play the flute to this bird, and then he let the bird go free into the forest.

And what he surmises is that that bird then taught the song to all the other lyre birds.

And so, what we're hearing now in the or in 1969 in the forest was like a recording of a 1930s song that that guy had played on his flute.

And it was that song about the Dennis the Menace from Venice, wasn't it?

We should make full orchestras out of birds to save us having to carve all these instruments out of bare limbs.

We could just train up lyre birds to play everything.

Or, like, Beyoncé should release her next album purely on birds.

On a bird.

Okay, just one thing going back to medieval punishment very quickly.

In medieval Ireland,

the the punishment for masturbation was penance of 120 days so you had to do your hail marys and our fathers and stuff for 120 days and for a priest it was a penance of a full year every time you masturbated you had to do that and that is according to the penitential of cominianus

uh which is pardon

the penitential of cominianus um there was a guy called kominianus uh and he wrote that these rules about.

Wow.

So I'm getting a bit of interference.

What was he called, James?

Sorry?

He was called.

He was also sometimes called just Cummian.

Just call me Fred.

Guys, just call me Fred.

If you wanted to Latinize his name, it was Cumminianus.

Wow.

I bet he didn't want to Latinize his name very much.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James?

At James Harkin.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunteran.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

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

We have everything up there from all of our previous episodes to links to merchandise.

So thanks for joining us this week.

As ever, we hope you and your family members are still doing well and you're all safe in these crazy, crazy times.

And we thank you for continuing to listen to us as well during this pandemic.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

So we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

At Bright Horizons, infants discover first steps, toddlers discover independence, and preschoolers discover bold ideas.

Our dedicated teachers and discovery-driven curriculum nurture curiosity, inspire creativity, and build lasting confidence so your child is ready to take on the world.

Come visit one of our Bright Horizons centers in the Bay Area and see for yourself how we turn wonder into wisdom.

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When you think about businesses that are selling through the roof, sure, you think about a great product, a cool brand, and brilliant marketing.

But an often overlooked secret is actually the businesses behind the business making selling simple.

For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify.

Nobody does selling better than Shopify.

They're the home of the number one checkout on the planet and the not-so-secret, ShopPay, that boosts conversions up to 50%,

meaning way less carts going abandoned and way more sales happening.

Businesses that sell more, sell on Shopify.

Upgrade your business and get the same checkout All Birds and Skims use.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/slash start selling.

All lowercase.

Go to shopify.com/slash start selling to upgrade your selling today.

Shopify.com/slash start selling.