321: No Such Thing As A Frothy Beer

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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 Anna Chaczynski, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, James.

Okay, my fact this week is that if you were to take a corn on the cup and remove each kernel in a row while saying she loves me and then she loves me not, then she will always love you not.

Right.

No.

Yeah.

How many, how many, that's quite a long version of that game, I'm guessing.

Well, it's row by row, right?

Row by row, yeah.

So it's not that long.

It's long and disappointing for any lovers doing it.

There's no jeopardy.

It's just a guaranteed lose.

There's an argument that it's not quite as romantic as sitting wistfully in a field taking petals off a flower, just going to your fridge and grabbing an old corn on the cob.

But this is basically, I mean, the fact is that there are an even number of...

kernels on every row of a corn on the cub.

The best way to check it yourself is to get a corn on the cob from your fridge or your supermarket, cut cut it in half widthways, and then look at the sliced part, and you'll get a circular cross-section with the inside of the cob surrounded by corn kernels.

And then if you count those kernels, there will always be an even number.

Sometimes it's kind of difficult to see because you might have a little runty kernel where

the bigger ones have kind of squished it out of the way, you know, like if you lose a tooth and everything kind of squishes back in that direction.

But it'll always be true, always an even number, and it's due to the way that corn on the cobs grow.

And by the time you finish this process, not only does she love you not, but she's had enough time to escape as far away from you as possible.

That's true.

Is it even possible to peel off a row?

I really wanted to try this, but

I hate sweet corn and I've never touched corn on the cob so I don't know if a row can come off all in one row.

No, but like I say, if what you do is cut your corn on the cob in half, then you'll be able to see the cross-section and you'll see the row itself and then you can just pluck off the individual kernels if you want.

So you just have to say she loves me not and she loves me really slowly as you're plucking each individual kernel yeah or

i mean if you start with she loves you not then she loves me then she loves me not then you're fine but it's just basically there's an even number i mean what what more can i say and it's because of the way that they grow if you were to look at it you'll find most of them have like 14 16 18 something like that yeah and apparently this is just a a big old well-known thing that people who are into corn or growing corn uh you know know about and it used to get hit the news i think sometimes it still does it hit the news if someone finds an odd-numbered kernel.

Like I found a newspaper report from 1949.

It was sort of local rather than national news, but it was all capital letters.

Freak ear reported

in an Iowa newspaper.

Wow.

So did you know?

So I read a piece.

I was trying to find out other...

you know, secrets of corn.

And

I read a Huffington Post piece which was headlined, five myths about corn you should stop believing.

Oh,

Well, lower those expectations, they're much less juicy than I would have thought.

Because one of them is that corn is unhealthy, which I didn't think it was.

I was firmly of the opinion it was mostly most of my days vegetables.

Better than a magnum.

Yeah, better than a magnum, exactly.

Although, kind of a similar shape.

But one of the myths is that we can't digest sweet corn.

Oh, which I think I do believe.

Yeah, I believe that.

So you can digest that.

I've seen it.

I've seen it, Andy.

Well,

okay, here we go.

Well, it does have large amounts of insoluble fibre, but you can digest the inside.

So the inside is pure starch, so you digest that.

But the outside is just a husk of cellulose, which is not digestible.

So it looks like you haven't digested it, but you have.

Can I just say that if you're taking your feces and taking out the carton kernels saying she loves me and she loves me not,

you might get lucky and have an odd number, but I think it's unlikely you'll get lucky in any other ways.

Well, you haven't heard how I met my wife.

That's very cool.

Andy, when you say the outside, the yellow skin, I guess, bit is made of cellulose, so you don't digest it.

But presumably, the ones that come out the other end are the bits that you didn't chew.

It's not like you've digested the inside and then you've remade the perfect shape of a piece of sweet corn, but with just the air dry.

You're right.

If you chew it with your teeth and obliterate the yellow outside, you won't be able to notice that.

Although it will still be there because that's the fibre which is not soluble, which will come out.

But you won't be able to see if you're shotting sweet corn, then it'll all go straight through you.

Yeah, absolutely.

I don't know if people do that.

I don't eat it.

If it came in shots, I think you might eat it.

Yeah, you're right.

You know me so well.

If you found an odd-numbered cob and you were a slave in America in the 19th century, you could earn your freedom.

Apparently, this was, well, there was one instance of this.

It was in an 1838 Farmer's Cabinet magazine, and it said that a slave owner said to his slaves, if any of you finds an odd-numbered cob, I'll be so astonished, I'll free you.

And so this slave came to him two years later and said, I found one.

And the master was just like jaw on the floor, said, okay, please tell me how you did that.

You must have cheated.

And so the slave said, okay, look, you have to promise to free me anyway.

And then he explained that he'd gone and he'd tampered with it.

And if you tamper with them very early on to remove that one of the rows, then it'll grow in a way that that row disappears.

And so the master freed him, but kept the cob and displayed it at dinner parties from then on as an amazing anecdote that there was an odd-numbered cob.

This was entertainment in the 1830s.

Cool.

Yeah.

Anecdote was so terrible then.

I mean, Abny, we are doing a podcast entirely based on the fact that you don't get odd-numbered corn of the cobs.

So that's true.

That's true.

Long live the terrible anecdote.

I didn't realize how much corn is used in daily items like products that we use every day.

So I didn't realize, for example, if you eat corn for dinner before you go to bed, you're cleaning your teeth again with other corn

because bits of it that are broken down are put into toothpaste.

So

yeah, so

if corn wasn't in toothpaste, it's not obviously not for all toothpaste, but if it wasn't in there, it wouldn't have that sort of sweetish taste.

It would taste more like soap.

So they use it as a flavoring.

So it's from the sorbitil, which is a glucose derivative of the corn.

So yeah, we're cleaning our teeth with corn as we go to bed.

That's very interesting.

Yeah, not all of the corn is necessarily sweet corn, right?

I think.

So in America, sweet corn that you would think of as corn on the cob stuff, it accounts for only 1% of all the corn grown in America.

And the rest of it is stuff like field corn and all that kind of stuff is used in industry, perhaps for this.

I'm not sure which one is used for toothpaste, but to feed animals and things like that.

It's unbelievable.

So there was a great article on the Atlantic website, which was about, it was about a woman actually called Christine Robinson who is severely allergic to corn.

She had no idea what she was getting into when she got this allergy.

She thought, oh, well, I won't be able to have corn on the cob or, you know, tacos made of corn.

It turns out everything has corn in the USA.

So table salt has corn derivatives sort of put in it.

Iced tea, bottled water, sometimes have minerals which is processed with corn.

You can't have bottled water.

Supermarket meat, bagged salad, fish, grains, fruits, tomatoes milk all of these things are sprayed with lactic acid which is made from corn sugars no um if she's traveling she can't wear a wetsuit unless she knows that it hasn't been washed in a detergent that does not contain corn

she she says she loves diving

she said she can't dive if her partners on the diving trip have been eating corn chips i mean it sounds like the most

i know i mean If you went to a diving place and they said, here's your wetsuit and you said, excuse me, you just got any card on this, they just think you're insane.

I know.

I know.

It's in everything.

Wow.

Yeah.

It's astonishing.

Poor woman.

Geez.

I like the way you said she had no idea what she was getting into, as though she sort of elected.

I know, it's so unfair.

I misspoke there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

There's a corn belt in America.

You can drive for 1,500 miles and only see corn.

She must hate that.

Yeah, I don't think she goes there very much.

Yeah, that's the great American bottom, isn't it?

That's what it's called where most of the corn is grown in America.

That is funny.

It's the floodplain of the Mississippi and basically there were glaciers there and they all retreated and it was a great vast bit of extremely fertile land and it's known as the Great American Bottom.

And is that name related to the fact that sweet corn comes out of your bottom still intact?

It can be amazing looking.

I mean, it can be so beautiful, can't it?

It's a shame.

It's disgusting.

But there.

it's great.

I'm gonna defend corn here, by the way.

I love corn.

Look, you're wrong.

But that's okay.

Don't feel bad.

Fair enough.

But I do like some of the non-yellow variety.

God, you're an easy one to beat in an argument, aren't you?

1-0 Tzaczynski.

So, sweet corn can come in loads of different colours and lots of varieties.

It's a bit like we were talking about different types of pear a couple of weeks ago, but corn you can get in bloody butcher variety, shaman's blue, the country Gentleman.

And the best variety is this one called Glass Gem Corn.

Look it up.

It was originally bred by this old man, this 80-year-old man, who's half Cherokee, and he wanted to get in touch with his Native American roots, and it was extremely important to Native Americans.

And so he started growing lots of different varieties of corn and experimenting and cross-breeding them.

And he bred this glass gem corn, and it's rainbow corn.

Have you guys seen this?

It's every little bit of corn is a different colour, and it's bright red, purple, green, blue, yellow, orange.

It's absolutely stunning.

Not very edible, but.

Oh, that's the problem.

I was wondering why we haven't seen that in Tesco's.

Yeah, it's the edible thing.

But it looks great.

Hey,

you know the movie Interstellar?

Yeah,

Christopher Nolan movie.

That cost $165 million to make.

And to help pay back that money, Christopher Nolan sold corn.

Wow.

How much did he sell?

I haven't got the exact number, but

if you've seen the movie, you know that it's largely set in a cornfield.

There's huge scenes of cornfield.

And rather than doing that by CGI, Christopher Nolan consulted with Superman director Zack Snyder, who'd also grown corn for his movie, to say, where's the best place to grow corn for your own movie?

So he spent £100,000 by finding a location in Calgary in Canada, which was next to a mountain range.

And they grew the cornfields from scratch for the movie.

And they were told that by the time they filmed it that the corn wouldn't be usable, but it turned out it was.

So Christopher Nolan sold off all the corn to help pay back his movie.

Imagine if you're at your local vegetable market and you had Christopher Nolan trying to flog you some sweet corn.

It would be very surreal.

Except I don't think you'd recognize him actually, so maybe it wouldn't.

Would you?

He would have to tell everyone he was Christopher Nolan every time.

And you wouldn't believe him, would you?

Well, most people would say, who's Christopher Nolan for a start?

It would just You go home and say this weird sweet corn dealer kept trying to tell me his name today.

You would think that someone who worked in such a high-profile job to begin with would go into pear growing, not into sweet corn manufacturing.

Can we pause?

I'll quickly listen to last week's episode.

Do you know that today's sweet corn is 1,000 times larger than it was 9,000 years ago?

Wow.

That's quite a lot bigger, isn't it?

1,000 thousand times.

You mean the individual pieces or the cobs?

The whole thing.

But I think the individual pieces would be a lot smaller as well.

Maybe not a thousand times because they would be invisible to the human.

Yeah.

I think they used to be two centimeters long, the cobs.

And then, so I didn't find that fact, James, but I did find that farmers started selectively growing it.

And it was, you know, a very early plant to be domesticated.

But according to the source I read, within 6,000 years, the farmers had got it from two centimeters long, a cob, to 2.5 centimetres long.

Very

slow rate of return.

Wow.

And how long did you say that was?

6,000 years.

Do you think, like, after 6,000 years,

you must think to yourself, it might not be worth carrying off.

Yeah.

But that's only because we know where it's got to these days.

Back then, that might have looked freakishly off.

That might have been like, whoa, Guinness World Records, get over here.

But how did they even...

that's so infinitesimal.

How do you pass on the wisdom that you have to keep breeding it?

Because if you're talking to your granddad and he's saying, look, your cob, look at it, that is half a millimetre bigger than mine.

You're very lucky.

I can't believe they bothered.

You wouldn't notice.

You wouldn't just look at a corn of the cob and go, well, this is one-tenth of a millimetre bigger than normal and then plant it, would you?

I can't account for it.

I honestly, I have no working to show on this fact.

Native Americans used to worship Corn Mother

because corn was so important to them and she was very interesting.

So the myth of Corn Mother was that she would feed hungry tribes with corn and the story there are various stories about how she came into being and what people did with her.

One of them is that she fed a hungry tribe with corn and saved them all but suddenly one of them realized how she was doing it and the way she did it was she rubbed her body really really hard until her skin crumbled off and became sweet corn and they they were so grossed out by that that they sent her away.

Or I think in some versions they killed her.

But she was so nice that they said, We're going to kill you, because that's really rank what you're doing.

And she said, Okay, but here are special instructions for how to leave my corpse to make sure it keeps growing corn for you guys.

Wow, wow.

Self-sacrificing women.

And in another one, she gave them all corn, but then one of the members of the tribe had sex with an ear of corn that looked a lot like a vulva, and she was so offended that she ran away.

Hmm.

She loves me not.

Call on the knob, more like.

Actually, it was that joke that offended her, and then she ran away.

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

My fact this week is that Mayan gods include Flying Scab, Gathered Blood, and Pus Demon.

They've actually got a lot of gods

and about 800, I think.

But these are some of the best.

These are their underworld gods.

So I should be clear, these aren't sort of good guys.

These are the guys in the underworld who represent things like disease and death.

They're the bad guys.

They don't sound like good guys.

They don't.

It's quite obvious from the names, isn't it?

But you're a hell of a job for a PR person, isn't it, when you're called a blind scout pus demon.

These are mostly Mayan gods that were worshipped when the Mayan Empire was at its height, which, and I think it sort of started to collapse and disintegrate around the 10th, 11th century, but there are still Mayans alive today.

There are about six million or seven million Mayans in Central America, and they

believe in these gods.

And I really like the story of these particular ones because they're involved in the creation story of Mayan mythology, whereby there were these twins, these hero twins, and who had their own weird creation story, actually, where they were born because a decapitated head spat on their mother and impregnated her.

Anyway,

they ended up.

There were so many different ways of getting pregnant in the old days, weren't there?

It was like sex education classes must have been really dumb.

If a swan comes near you, watch out.

It might be zeus.

I'm like going to get IVF and hearing all the options.

Thumbing through the magazine.

What would you go for?

I don't think you'd pick the decapitated head spirit.

I think that's one of the cheaper ones.

Anyway, so these hero twins went to the underworld and they took on the gods and tried to defeat the gods of death and disease.

And they were also things like jaundice demon and bloody teeth.

And this is all written down in their holy book, which is called Popal Vu,

and has been passed down.

But yeah, they beat these gods.

They partly beat these gods by playing lots of ball games with them, which is why then in Mesoamerica, ball games were such a big, important part of their lives.

Anyway, the twins beat the underworld gods, and then the twins became the sun and the moon, and the world was born, and everything was fine.

Oh, that is a good story.

Happy endings.

They worked in pairs, right?

These actual gods, as well.

So it's not just the twins who came down, but you would always, so you'd have them working to do a specific thing.

So flying scab and gathering blood were two that worked together, who would sicken people's blood.

So I'm guessing sepsis kind of stuff.

Pus demon and jaundice demon would cause bodies to swell up.

Bone staff and skull staff turn dead bodies into skeletons.

Sweeping demon and stabbing demon hide in the unswept areas of people's houses and stab them to death.

That's quite a specific one.

Hang on.

Sorry.

If your house is so unswept that can conceal a big enough demon to stab you to death, I almost think you deserve to die for bad housekeeping.

But I think these gods were, in some ways, metaphors for overcoming illness and death.

And I wonder if there's a slight hygiene message in sweeping's demon and stabbing demon.

I don't know, but this was all oral tradition until the 16th century when it was first written down.

So there might be some sort of...

I do think it must be, right?

It must be like people telling their kids you better sweep the corners properly, otherwise you're going to get stabbed to death.

That's what my mum always told me.

And yeah, I now look in the corners every night, six times.

What happens, though, if you're away on holiday?

You come back, there's a big lot of dust in the corner.

Who are you sending in to deal with that employee?

Who's the least favourite kid in the family?

Sorry, Dan.

I feel like you had a last pair.

I did.

They're called Wing and Packstrap.

So not great names.

You know, you had a really strong theme going and then Packstrap.

Do you know anything about them?

They cause people to die coughing up blood while they're out walking on a road.

Oh, so what's the public health message there?

Don't leave your house.

Yeah.

Don't leave your house.

One famous thing about the Mayans is that they predicted the world was going to end in 2012.

Oh, yeah, supposedly, or that's what a lot of people thought, right?

So this is the fact that the Mayan calendar has a thing called a Bactun,

which is 20 cycles of their calendar, and it's equal to 394 years.

And there had been 13 of them since the start of the calendar, the particular calendar, and we were getting to the end of that cycle.

Okay, because after 13 they would start again.

And so people thought that, oh, that means the world's going to end because previous times that that had happened the world had ended according to Maya mythology but we only have one text which refers to the end of that bactun which was in 2012 and it said that it will be the display of bolonyokte that's what would happen on the 21st of December 2012.

And we all remember that, right?

Well, I looked into Bolonyokte.

Bolonyokte.

I looked into him and we don't really know much about him.

We don't really know who he is.

It seems like he might be the god of the nine steps.

And so what I thought it might be referring to is on the date of the end of the world, that was the day that Gangnam style by Sai was the first video to reach 1 billion views on YouTube.

So that is going from 999,999,999 up to a billion.

So that's like the nine steps.

If you get what I mean, and this is the great, the great display of the god of nine steps was clicking up from 999, 999, 999 to 1 billion.

So I think that might have been what they were predicting, the Mayans.

You have blown this wide open.

Lengths you'll go to to prove the Mayans right.

There was

a lot of people did genuinely get concerned that they were correct in their prediction in the lead up to 2012.

So there was an Ipsos poll, which is a sort of global poll-taking company, and they polled 16,000 adults in 21 countries.

They found that 8% of them had an anxiety or fear over the fact that it was going to be true, that it was going to end.

Um, and in one case, one sort of quite highly publicized case, two reality stars who were together, Heidi Montague and Spencer Pratt, who uh were from the Hills in America.

So that was a massive reality TV show back in the day.

They got so rich off the back of subsequent things that they managed to do from their publicity on that show that they wrapped up 10 million American dollars, but they thought the world was going to end.

So they spent it all before it got to 2012.

What did they spend it on?

Do we know?

Yeah, it was random stuff.

So they just started leading a very extravagant lifestyle.

So he said, I would give my friends $15,000 for their birthday, just cash.

I would buy people cars.

Every valet I met, I gave them a couple of hundred pounds tip.

I would pay people $200 just to open doors for us.

And yeah.

So he said, here's some advice.

Definitely do not spend your money thinking asteroids are coming.

The world did not end.

Thanks.

So they lost.

Thanks, mate.

Valuable advice.

How ironic that two reality stars had not a single grip on reality whatsoever.

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

My fact is that in pre-industrial Sweden, some people used slugs as grease to lubricate their cartwheels.

Hmm.

So this is all based on a paper that was published in the Journal of Ethnobiology, and it's titled Black Slugs as Grease.

And it was quite a recent paper.

It's to describe this old custom that goes back to the 18th century.

It was known to go back at least to then.

I'm sure it goes back further.

It's by Ingvas Fanberg from Uppsala University.

And people would sometimes use other methods.

They would use tar.

They would mix in lard from swine or fat from boiled animals' feet.

So none of these methods of lubricating your cart axles are especially nice sounding.

but sometimes you would not have those things available and you would need to cast around and pick up a slug and some wagons actually had a slug tub hanging behind them

where you if you would just put it just pop in a slug shove another slug on the wheel is that what they did right yeah basically and you just this poor slug you just have to mash it up basically because they're so slimy that they produce excellent lubrication between the uh between the wheels and the axle right yeah so they did mash them up because i thought they could do it where they just put a slug on a wheel and they leave it to crawl around the whole wheel absolutely oh that's a really good sustainable way of doing it, isn't it?

Pop it back in the tub slug tub.

Yeah, you're right.

No, I wish that would be the children's book version of this story, Anna.

This paper was a way of trying to use

popular ethnology because they put out an appeal on radio to say, have you ever heard of this?

Have you done it?

And it turns out it was done into the 1940s and people listened to this radio show in Sweden and they phoned in.

Yeah, and all over Northern Europe as well,

including Colchester in Essex.

No.

Yeah.

There was someone who wrote in from Colchester and said that in the 1970s, children who lived near a railway line would go to the railway line and gather slugs and sell them to the workforce on the trains so they had something to lubricate working wheels.

No, but that's afraid.

I know, it's just a leaf.

It's in this paper.

It's in this paper.

That's the workforce being kind to the kids.

That's the workforce going, oh, yeah, that's so helpful.

Thanks so much.

And then using their industrial lubricant.

Apparently, yeah.

Apparently there was a um there was a rumour in Denmark that German glass blowers would use black slugs to smear on their frying pans when they made pancakes instead of using oil.

So yeah.

Is that a s is that a sick burn on the German glass blowers?

It's hard to tell isn't it?

Yeah.

They said that they used badger lard or bacon rind or they used slugs if they couldn't get any of those.

Badger lard.

I mean, badger lard does sound harder to get hold of than a slug.

It does.

It does sound like it could appear in a high-quality restaurant now.

I can really imagine it being a Michelin London restaurant with pancakes with badger lard and slug slime.

There were some

places.

Oh, it's Nordic countries as well, actually.

Children would sing rhymes to slugs.

Does that help them produce more slime?

I don't think so.

I can't remember what...

Oh, I can't remember.

Can we hear one of the rhymes, Sandy now?

No, I've forgotten it, and I'm definitely not going to look it up so that I can...

You've forgotten it, but you committed it to memory

at some point.

Shall I tell you?

Shall I do it?

Oh, yeah, I'm certain my pronunciation will be terrible, but this is just reading it as it looks.

So, sneagel, sneagle, snore,

rak ut dinala nga horn, saka dufa'en skapa korn, hem tildina unga unga ibuat.

And that means snail, snail, snot, reach out your long horns and you will receive a bushel of barley to take home to your kids, your kids in the nest.

Oh,

that's lovely.

Yeah, isn't it?

So then they'd give the snails a bushel of barley?

I think it was just...

It was just...

Nursery rhyme.

A bit of

the extra detail at the end, the kids in the nest.

So you give it to your kids, the kids in the nest.

Yeah.

It's a sort of, I know where you live kind of statement.

Wow, I didn't think it was quite that worrying.

It feels aggressive to me.

Does slugs make nests?

I don't think these children know what's going on.

So many holes in these rhymes.

Good point.

Yeah.

Slugs are very

right-hand side-centric.

So all the shit that's really important to them, in fact, is on the right-hand side.

They've got their breathing hole, which is the pneumostome, which is, if you look at a slug, you can see it.

It's so cool.

It's just like a big gaping, what looks like a wound in their head, which is what they breathe through.

But they also have their genitals, I I think their anus and their genitals are towards the front of their body because they evolved from snails and snails have to have all of that stuff at the front because if it's stuck in their shell you're just pouring in your own shell and so they've got their anus and their genitals at the front all on the right hand side as well But I think that would be a really exciting plot point,

everything being on the right-hand side thing.

If you had, let's say, a slug hospital drama and you've got the slug spouse turning up and, you know, the doctor slug says, I'm so sorry, Mrs.

Slug.

One half of your husband's body was completely obliterated by the accident with the cart

and then

which half was obliterated the left half oh well that's fine and then you know there's Japan there which half and then the credits roll I love it

Anna though surely there must be some use to the other half this slug otherwise all slugs would evolve into being half a slug That's true.

That's absolutely.

Well, maybe they're on the way there.

You know, in a million years' time, slugs will only be half a slug.

And everyone will always say, I wonder where the other half is.

You know, some slugs eat birds.

Go wrong.

No.

Nature's reversed itself.

They're eating birds.

It's actually a bit of a problem.

I think researchers in Poland were the first ones to discover this.

And they looked in birds' nests where there are little chicks being, you know, nestlings.

And they saw a slug there.

They were like, no worries, just a slug.

The mum will probably eat it.

Came back a few days later, and the birds had been eaten.

And it turns out that slugs will gnaw away at little chicks in nests.

And the mothers don't even stop them from doing it because, well, we think they haven't really evolved this defense mechanism yet because it doesn't happen often enough that they've evolved.

So they just watch these slugs gnaw away using their radula, which is their tongue, which is covered in little teeth, and they eat the little birds alive.

Wow.

I have to say, the fact that it doesn't happen very often is not an excuse for the bird mum.

I would say if that happened once, that requires intervention.

I agree.

I think that's evolution going wrong.

If you don't automatically know, if you see a slug eating your baby, you should stop it happening.

What I think is quite interesting is that this nursery rhyme said, Bushler Barley to take home to your kids kids in the nest.

It doesn't say kids in your nest.

So maybe these children in Denmark knew about this kind of behavior of slugs going on.

This is like the time you proved the Mayans right earlier this episode.

Amazing.

So slugs used for lubricants.

Lots of other things have been used for lubricants lubricants in the past, haven't they?

Seaweed used by people in Japan for thousands of years.

If you get red seaweed and boil it up, it gives you this liquid called carogenin.

And it's extremely gelatinous and slippery.

And it's been used as lubricant for forever.

James, are you talking about tribology here?

Am I?

I think you are.

So tribology is the science of friction and lubrication.

And it is such a recent science that it was only named in 1966.

Wow.

But it covers basically everything.

Everything you can imagine.

All mechanical processes have friction and lubrication elements in them.

So there's geotribology, which is about tectonic plates and glaciers.

There's nanotribology, which is in computer disk storage.

There's biotribology, which is hip joints and how they work and how replacement hips can stay working for longer and everything.

And we met a tribologist when we were in Vienna.

You know what?

I was just about to ask that.

Was he not the guy who said he coined the word tribology?

Well, I've come across different accounts of who coined it.

I've heard that a guy called Peter Jost also did.

But we met Friedrich Franck, who is a senior tribologist in Vienna, and he was great.

Yeah.

Kept slipping over, didn't he?

Yeah, but his cart, his cart outside was so well oiled.

That's amazing.

Well, I believe him.

He's our friend.

Yeah.

Yeah, let's go with him.

All right.

I think that's how loyalty works.

I was reading about nose grease.

Oh, yeah.

Do you know about this?

No.

So the oiliest and greasiest bit on the human body is the little bit that's connected between the nose and the face.

And it's got so many uses.

Observatories with telescopes would use it to sort of minimize the scratches on the surfaces of the telescope.

It would be really effective for that.

And if you ever have a beer, this is just for a tip.

Next time you have a pint of beer, if the the head of the beer is too much, you can take your nose grease and you can stir it into the head

and it will make, it will dissipate it.

Have you tried that really quickly?

Not yet, because I read it this morning and I thought it might be.

So we read once on QI that if you take earwax and put it into beer, then that will also make the bubbles go away.

And we were going to do it on the show, but no one thought to try it.

And then on the day of recording, we actually got some beer and we thought in rehearsal, let's just quickly try it to make sure it works.

And it really did not work.

It didn't work.

We just ended up with bubbly, earwaxy beer.

Oh, well, Dan, I can't wait to go out for a nice pint, all of us, when this is all over and just see you rubbing your nose into your glass.

I'm not going to put my actual nose in the glass.

Why?

Cut out the middle man of the figure.

That's what I said.

I don't think we produce enough grease, do we?

We're all stroking this bit of our nose.

I can see you're all doing the same as me.

Sorry, so this is the bit of your nose?

Because Dan, when you said between the nose and the face, I thought you meant on the inside.

I couldn't work out what you meant, but you mean the outer bit below your eyes.

I think it's specifically the bit between, like, let's say your cheeks and your nostrils, like that little, the little indentation there.

The side bits of your nose.

Yeah, those are greasy bits.

Yeah.

It's very soft, actually.

I'd never noticed before, but it is quite soft, but I still don't think it is enough to be stirring usefully into anything for culinary purposes.

I think if if you've got a telescope and a tiny little aperture, then I can see it might be useful for that.

But if you're going to do it for a pint, you're probably going to have to go around the whole pub getting bits from everyone's nose to give you anything.

By coincidence, I have these two things next to me.

This is really a coincidence, but I could test it out.

Oh, you could test it out.

That is a beer and a glass.

There's no way we're not going to demand you this now.

It's zero alcohol, though, so I don't know if that might not produce a head.

Yep.

Oh, there we go.

Get my nose.

Okay, so here's the beer.

Just poured it in.

Here's my nose.

Oh.

This all stacks up so far.

Okay.

So,

wow, look at it dissolving immediately.

Look at that.

Oh, look at that.

It is disappearing.

This is a good tip.

If you're a barman and you ever pour a bad pint, just get some grease off your face, dip your finger in.

Look at that.

Okay, that actually, that is quite impressive.

Now, we do need to see it with the control where you're not using the grease.

Maybe next week's.

Yes.

Next week's pod, yeah.

Tune in.

Cool.

That was good.

Nice.

Yeah, well done, though.

Good experiment.

Well proved it.

I've got one more fact if we have time for one more on this one.

So I just read a story that happened in 2002 about a case of grease causing a lawsuit.

So a man sued a pub for slipping on pork chop grease.

His name was Troy Troy Bowrin.

And the story says

a man who slipped on a trail of grease left on a pub floor by a patron wearing pork chops on his feet was awarded more than £23,000 yesterday by an Australian court.

So many questions.

Yep, Troy Bowren, he broke his arm.

He was at the Janelle Inn in South Sydney.

And

this was back in 1997 that the incident actually happened.

And basically what happened was another guy there called Ross Lukok had won the meat, the pork chops, in a raffle, in a pub raffle.

But then the pub refused him service at the bar because he was barefoot.

So he returned a short time later with the chops strapped to his feet and walked around everywhere, even playing pool in the pub.

And poor old Troy Bowrin was then walking along and they hadn't cleaned away the grease left behind and slipped on it and successfully sued both the pub and the man wearing the pork chops on his feet.

This guy was Australian, you said.

Wow.

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

My fact is, in 2019, 69 pilgrims made a journey from the CERN Abbas Giant, which is that nude chalk man that's carved into the hillside in England, to CERN in Geneva, or, as they put it, from the Large Hardon.

to the large Hadron.

So this was a pilgrimage that happened April last year.

69 pilgrims got on a double-decker bus after starting a sort of pagan druid style ritual at the CERN Abbas Giant.

They went through Italy and stayed in a place called Damonher, which is a community that's up there.

And then they went through to Switzerland where they ended up at the CERN Large Hadron Collider and they performed another bizarre pagan ritual there.

They wanted to imminentize the Echeton, which is the idea is that they wanted to bring the beauty of the afterworld into the current world.

So heaven basically brought into the world.

That was all very interesting, Dan, but the main bit I got from that is that they went from England to Geneva and went through Italy.

That's not, it's not on the way.

This sounds like more of a jolly than a pilgrimage, if I'm being

skeptical.

I think you're right.

Most pilgrimages aren't on a double-decker bus either.

But yeah, so this was done by someone called Daisy Campbell, and it was told to me by a friend of Fish, Fish, Dr.

David Bramwell, who is an author and he was actually part of the group of 69 pilgrims, except that he didn't go with them, but he was one of the 69.

He was at the CERN Giant.

Wow, so we know that not all of them were there?

Yeah, I'm guessing so.

69 feels like it's a crucial number, though.

Or was that just happy coincidence?

You know, because it's not.

No, intentional.

I guess you're right.

Maybe he was number 70.

And I'm pretty sure, though, he said he was 69.

Yeah.

If he's number 70, it ruins the joke.

So yeah, can't go.

Yeah.

We should say they were doing it for a joke, right?

So they are quite funny.

And when you read the write-up, it's obviously a very humorous thing they're doing, this pagan thing.

Yes.

And they call themselves Discordians, which is a sort of faux pseudo-religion started in the 60s.

And it's sort of based around chaos.

And like, chaos is important as order and stuff like that, right?

Absolutely, yeah.

And but they are, a lot of people who are druids do it, and they do, they do buy into a lot of magic and folk.

But yes, it's all done with a great tongue-in-cheekness about it.

Can we just quickly mention this place that they visited in Italy?

Because it's incredible.

I'd never heard of this, Dammon Ho.

Grammel's been there before, hasn't he?

Yes, he has, yeah, many times.

I want to go.

It's an extraordinary place.

It's a community that was set up by this one guy who claimed that he was the pre-incarnation of an alien from the future.

So the the idea is that there was a panel of aliens talking in the future about the destruction of planet Earth, and they pinpointed it to the fact that Earth lost its way in life and became a very negative place and destroyed itself.

So he thought, I'm going to stop that.

Yeah, James?

It's just Andy's looking quite skeptical about this story.

Yeah, a little bit.

Well, wait till you hear where it goes, Andy.

You have an air bully.

So he pre-incarnated by thousands of thousands of years and landed himself in the Italian hills.

And he set up this community.

And

they decided, under the cover of darkness, to build a temple to time travel that would help save humanity using just their hands, largely to begin with, and then eventually drills.

And to look at pictures of it, highly recommend it.

Look at Damonhurst.

It's one of the most beautiful things you'll ever see.

It's such a good.

So, this is aside from that, it's obviously just a bunch of crazy people, but these temples are unbelievable.

And they kept it a secret for 15 years, didn't they?

So, this little community in Italy digging 100 feet underground under a mountain, and it was only in 1992 when someone reported them to the police.

The police went.

And to be fair to the police, the police said, Oh, you've made some really, really nice, huge temples inside a mountain.

Good on you.

Let's open it up to the public.

I'm just thinking that when they were digging into this mountain in northern Italy, did they not come across the hundred thousand apples that are in there?

Just as one more call back to last week, yeah.

So, they pit stopped stopped there.

They saw the temples and then they went on to CERN and to, yeah.

I don't understand anything that's been said in the last five minutes.

Well let's talk about the chalk Abbas Giant then.

So the CERN Abbas Giant, we should say, is 180 foot tall, naked man with a club and he has an absolutely enormous penis.

Yes.

Yes.

Is that fair to say?

Didn't always used to be as big.

No, that was, I know, this is the crazy thing.

This is the

sort of area 51 of Britain, is this chalk giant's penis, which used to be tiny.

No, it used to be normal sized.

It's a normal 12-foot long penis.

It was 16 feet long, which is a normal size for a giant that size.

So basically, he was like, he was 200 feet tall and he had a 200-inch penis.

So it's the same as a six-foot-tall man having a six-inch penis.

So it's, you know, it's a completely normal size.

But then in 1908, chalk cutters merged his penis with his belly button and made it seven feet longer which now makes it look completely out of proportion.

Now if that wasn't a chalk cutter trying to compensate for something I don't know why the phrase compensating for something was ever invented.

But do you know who found out about this

disturbance?

Because

it's been ascribed to a few different people.

Some people say it was done in the 50s by contractors and other people, you know, blah, blah, blah.

Or locals did it.

But Rodney Castledon is a kind of freelance archaeologist and he developed a system of working out where the soil had been disturbed.

And he said, I've made a trial run down the phallus and obtained electrical measurements indicating a joint.

So he worked out that the penis had definitely been extended to the former belly button.

And then the National Trust, who owned the site, they had to decide whether to give the certain abbas giant a penis.

penis ectomy penis trim reduction cut reduction

thank you a penis reduction And they decided not to do it.

I guess because it's been 100 years since it was extended and it must be, that's now what it's like.

And also because of the adverse PR that it would have created, I think, for them.

Yeah.

It's like squatters' rights at that point.

Yeah.

They do top it up every 25 years or so, give it a sort of makeover.

And it's 17,000 tons of chalk that's used.

No, no, it's 17,000.

17.

What am I talking about?

Yeah, Yeah, sorry.

It's 17 tons of chalk that is used.

17,000.

Very sorry.

What a penis that would be.

The white cliffs of Dover are no more.

He's still an upstream survives.

But yeah, every 25 years, except for when there's problems.

So they had to give him a nose job at one point because erosion had been too unkind on him.

So they.

Maybe he was just trying to defoam a beer.

Did you read the report of

the last job they did?

Because it's volunteers who do it.

So

there are dozens of people who go and they trim the grass verges, because obviously it's cut into a chalk hillside.

And they interviewed the National Trust Man.

because some chalk figures have now been redone in concrete, which is obviously easier, but actually, obviously, it's not very historical and

it's a bit lazy.

And the National Trustman

called Martin Papworth said, I think there would be an outcry if we tried to cut corners, says Papworth, who, ironically, is here to help cut the corners.

It's really good.

Yeah.

It's high quality gems.

So we don't fully know when this was made, right?

I always assumed this was quite ancient, but there's a lot of suggestion that it dates from the 17th century because that's the first mention that we get of it.

And a lot of theories about why it came about.

One is that it was a sort of satirical piece on Oliver Cromwell, and they believe that there are missing bits from it.

There used to be a dismembered head at the bottom and a cloak in the other arm that's not holding the club, but no one truly knows.

Because a lot of sources do claim that it's older, don't they?

There was an article in the Independent that casually referred to it as 2,000 years old.

But it seems impossible that this thing would have existed for 1500 years and no one mentioned it until 1694.

I mean, surely someone would have written down at some point.

By the way, we've got this massive naked man on a hill.

There's a land survey in 1617 that talks about this hill and doesn't mention the massive naked man.

And it just seems like if you were to buy a house and the survey came back and it didn't mention there was a massive naked man on the side of your house, you would complain, wouldn't you?

Yeah, definitely.

You would.

You would.

There is one theory I've heard, and I like this so much.

So the people of Dorset were interviewed about it in the 18th century.

And this was, I think, a local reverend who was a bit of an amateur historian taking this record from the locals.

And the people there at the time said that it represented a giant who had stolen sheep from the people living nearby for his own food.

And then he'd lain down to rest in this field.

And the villagers had killed the giant in his sleep, and then they'd put an outline around him, meaning that the chalk giant would be a literal crime scene chalk figure.

Please draw in cop shows.

When you have a murder and you see the chalk line on the floor, they don't put the penis in there to show you how long it was today.

The final indignity.

That's brilliant.

It has been covered up for other reasons in the past.

So in the 19th century, classic Victorians, they apparently let foliage grow discreetly over the penis, so you couldn't see the penis in the Victorian age.

And then in the war, we covered up the Cern Giant and all of our other chalk hillsides, I think.

Which, if you were listening from abroad, you should know that England, the south of England specifically, just has this weird habit of drawing massive chalk figures on hills.

And then come World War II, we had to sort of like paint a lot of them green or cover a lot of them in grass and stuff because they're quite obvious.

Yeah, you didn't want the German bombers to be able to use them as a navigation, like following the direction of the penis, Bristol this way.

Yeah.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this show, you can find us on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at James Harkin, Andy, at Andrew Hunter Rem.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

Check out all the stuff up there.

We've got all of our previous episodes and links to certain items of merchandise that we've re-released.

And yeah, guys, we do, as we say always, hope you're staying safe.

Do stay at home.

Still, we'll get through it.

It's not ended yet.

We don't know when it'll end, but we're saving lives by not leaving the house.

So I hope your family and you and your friends are well.

And we'll see you again next week for another episode.

Goodbye.

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