317: No Such Thing As Panic Buying Frankincense

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Hello and welcome to another working from home episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast not coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Shriver.

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

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Anna.

My fact this week is that when people accidentally swallow coins, their stomachs sometimes punch holes in them.

I think this is so cool.

It's quite a new thing.

I'm not suggesting you should swallow a coin to test it out, but...

Anna, when you say it's quite a new thing, do you mean in the past when people have swallowed coins, it's not done that?

Yes.

Wow.

So

you didn't mean that coins are a relatively recent human invention and we didn't have the capacity to swallow them until 8,000 years ago.

I didn't mean that.

No, people have been swallowing coins since time immemorial.

It's just that our stomachs have evolved, is what you're saying.

Exactly.

In the last 20 years, our stomachs have completely changed.

No, that's not what's happened either.

Coins have changed, though.

So this was a problem that was discovered in America in the 90s.

And it turned out that copper coins have been swapped for copper-covered zinc coins.

And if you swallow copper, then your stomach acid doesn't really affect it.

It can just go through, come out the other end.

But if you've got zinc in there, the stomach acid finds it much easier to chip away at it.

And so doctors were finding in the 90s they were x-raying kids, who said they had stomach problems, for instance, and they saw these kind of discs with lots of holes in them, like really neat holes punched in them, and they didn't really know what they were.

And turned out they were coins, but made of zinc.

And they had the holes punched.

Wow.

And so,

how cool is that?

Yeah, it's amazing.

How come it doesn't dissolve the entire coin?

Why is it so neatly just punching holes in it?

Well, I would guess that the copper that the zinc coins are sometimes covered with can erode a bit with use.

So, I think sometimes bits of copper will have come off on parts of the surface and not on others.

And if the acid can get through the copper, it can suddenly penetrate through the zinc.

So, it'll be on the bits of the coin where the copper hasn't been eroded.

I think

it's clever.

Very clever.

Isn't there a country where coins have holes in them already?

I'm sure.

Yeah, loads of countries.

Yeah,

there's a a square hole.

I'm sure there's a country which has either a square or a round hole.

It's probably one of the two in the middle of it.

Yeah, I can't remember which country, though.

It's really annoying.

Well, but the way they manufacture those is they get someone at the Royal Mint to swallow every single coin.

Very hard to process.

It's very hard to retrieve them at the end, though, isn't it?

It's Horrible Dogs like the worst fruit machine ever where the money comes out of the end, but you're not really excited by it.

Yeah.

You are getting, though, a square hole out of a round hole at the end of it.

Yeah.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah.

That's cool.

Oh, oh sorry.

Have you seen that?

I think Wikipedia's Twitter feed tweeted it this weekend.

Have you seen it?

It's like a toilet in Japan.

Is it in Japan?

Where it can recognise you by your anus.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Isn't that amazing?

What an amazing bit of technology.

Is that James?

You sit down.

Welcome back.

And it just, all the cameras can look at your anus and just say, oh, that's you, James.

What possible need is that?

So if you hear next door in a public toilet, if you hear a toilet going, oh, no, no, no, not you again.

That's the next thing when they become sentient, isn't it?

Is it useful for...

What is it useful for?

Is it so that if you've got lots of people in the house and you're trying to monitor your health, but you don't want to get confused between...

I think it is like that.

It's like, you know, having a Fitbit

on your wrist and it can tell what's wrong you but the thing is with the toilet you can't really carry it around with you so it needs to and lots of people use it so it kind of needs to know who's using it at any one time so it can look at your feces and decide what's wrong with you maybe maybe for maybe for crimes they could use it as you know anal recognition you know we might be able to bust criminals by this well it would save a lot of very embarrassing police lineups wouldn't it

um they should call this thing a fit fit butt.

That's what they should call it.

They've got to do that.

They've got to do it.

Anyway, so

that's what we've got to say about coins, I guess.

What I just wanted to say, the fact that zinc reacts with your stomach acid is quite an interesting thing.

So in 2015, they invented this new technology.

It's like you kind of take a pill, and the pill has like a tiny motor in it.

Cool.

And the motor is activated.

It's made out of zinc and it's activated by your stomach acid.

So the zinc reacts with your stomach acid and generates like hydrogen bubbles.

And then those bubbles mean that it can act like a torpedo and it fires through your stomach so that it gets into your stomach wall and it can kind of lodge there and it can put stuff into your bloodstream.

Oh wow.

Isn't that amazing?

Awesome.

So it's a motor that's only activated when it reacts, when the zinc reacts with the

hydrogen, did you say?

It's zinc reacting with hydrochloric acid, creating hydrogen bubbles.

That's so clever.

Genius.

And that, isn't that what the Alanis Morissette album Jagged Little Pill is about?

That is.

It's weird though because this technology was only invented in 2015 but that album came out in the 90s or something.

She's got real foresight though.

Yeah.

She accidentally didn't patent the invention.

She released it as lyrics.

Oh, how ironic.

Have you got any more on this, Anna?

Just quickly to share some advice.

Piece of advice number one is just don't swallow coins just because you want to be able to thread them on a string or whatever.

And when I say accidentally, I guess I'm talking about children.

It's mostly them who swallow coins.

So maybe they're doing it on purpose, but they don't know why.

But the current medical advice is to doctors, if you're looking at an x-ray and you see some coins in a stomach, is that if it's just a coin that's sort of intact, you can just leave it, send the patient home, and it'll probably pass.

But if it's a coin with scalloped edges or holes in it, then you should endoscopically remove it because that implies it's been there for a bit too long.

And it's decided to sort of bed down.

That's a bit of medical advice out there from an amateur to the expert.

An enthusiastic allure, though, Anna, right?

Absolutely.

But stomach acid is amazing, isn't it?

The power of stomach acid.

If you swallow razor blades, again, don't do it because they'll slit your throat on the way down.

But if you do and survive it, your stomach acid can just break them right down.

Wow.

That's incredible.

It's more acidic than battery acid.

That is amazing.

So, crocodiles, they can secrete stomach acid 10 times faster than any other animals, which is this amazing...

I mean, when you think about that, that's nuts.

And it's because they do it, because they have these massive meals every so often and they need to break them down.

And they have, instead of, you know, we've got an aorta, the blood vessel in our bodies, they've got two, one of which supplies the heart, but one of which is a special one, which goes to the stomach.

And when they eat, the brain, the crocodile's brain signals the heart and it says, don't send any blood to the lungs, just pump it all to the stomach via the special superhighway.

And then

lots of carbon dioxide builds up in their blood because none of their blood is going to the lungs.

So the carbon dioxide is not getting out of their bloodstream.

But what that means is that the stomach takes that blood, which is full of carbon dioxide, and it pulls the carbon dioxide out to create more acid.

So that's how they make it.

And they can digest gazelle horns and hooves, and they just eat anything, and it can just be broken down.

It's because they've got this magic method of making it.

That's incredible.

That's so cool.

So is it sort of, it's like dual purpose because the vessel is first of all going to the stomach to help it out, but also the increased carbon content of the blood can then be used.

They're very clever on amazing.

That's amazing.

Do you know stomach acid is the reason that when you do a number two it can sting?

Is it?

Because,

yeah.

I thought that was really interesting.

So it doesn't just eat away at your stomach lining because we've got a very protective layer of mucus in our stomach lining.

But if you've got a particularly bad lump of turd then and it comes out and it really brightens because I just saw them you went so polite for number two

and then you're like okay now what's another polite synonym for that I forgot all the words for all the other words

lump of turd fecal matter

then there's a little bit of stomach acid still left on the outside of it and your rectum isn't protected from it.

Is that right?

That's not in all cases where it stinks though is it?

Like, if you have a curry, that might be due to the chilies or something.

That is also due to chilies, probably, yeah.

So, that's a potent combination, the stomach acid and the chili, I guess.

That would be a painful stool.

Yes.

See, there's the word you should have used, Anna.

Stool.

That's a classy, classy way of saying it.

Penguins, king penguins specifically, they are like the reverse of crocodiles.

It was a crocodile thing I said just now.

So king penguins can basically turn themselves into a fridge, their own stomach on the inside, they can turn it into a larder because they sometimes have to provide an emergency meal for their chicks and they, as a result, don't want to digest any of their food.

And so they stop producing stomach acid, basically.

And that means that the food just and then they just have these fish in their guts for up to three weeks on end, which they can then regurgitate

undigested.

That's how they do it.

Isn't that mental?

Wow.

Amazing.

And do they keep it at sort of refrigerator temperature, do we know?

Because otherwise, we'll end it

quite rotten.

I think if you're a penguin,

everything's a refrigerator temperature.

You're right.

Well, they do, Anna.

They do kind of have antibacterial chemicals which they can secrete inside themselves to preserve the food.

So that's how they stop it rotting.

I mean,

yeah.

So if your fridge, you know, you lose power in your fridge, but you've got a penguin lying around, you can store your food in there.

Yeah.

Great.

So my favorite stupid swallower, I think, is Chris Foster.

Chris Foster from Bournemouth University, who in 2008 was out on a night out with his friends who decided that he was too drunk.

So tried to take him home to his room.

And to stop them from doing this, he swallowed his room key.

And he had no memory of this, but woke up the next morning.

And his friends were all like, mate, you swallowed your room key last night.

What are you going to do about it?

And apparently I like the detail that apparently one of his friends tried the Heimlich maneuver on him because you can really imagine the drunken 12 people going, someone Heimlich him, just sort of practically crushing him.

So yeah, he went to hospital and said, I think I swallowed my key last night.

And indeed he had.

And he was sent home and passed the key 31 hours later and put it back on the fob.

Wow.

A happy ending.

And actually, it would have a slightly bigger hole in the key, so it'd be easy to get get it on his butt, right?

Absolutely.

That's why he did it.

It's very clear-thinking drunkenness.

My favourite swallower, sorry, just we seem to be playing a game of my favourite swallower,

would probably be a guy from the 19th century.

Have you heard of the human ostrich?

No, I haven't heard of the human ostrich.

This was a thing.

And in fact, it's not even just one person.

There were loads of acts whose standard thing was the human ostrich, where their trick was just swallowing cutlery or glass.

and they were kind of an adjunct to the sword swallowing fraternity um and that was just what they did so there was a guy called alfonso who would eat glass and cork and cotton and wool it sounds more like sort of sword swallowing apprentices or interns you know you start off with a teaspoon up to a dessert spoon that is how that is how you learn to swallow a sword though start with a teaspoon first well gotta be something a bit bigger than that it's really so i've been reading the files of the ssai which is the sword swallowers swallowers association international and they were surveyed about their their work and there were 46 of them who got surveyed because there are only 100 or 200 people in the world who do this for a living and the 46 people between them between them had swallowed 2,000 swords over the previous three months.

Half of them had swallowed more than one sword.

Five of them had swallowed 10 swords at a time and one person had swallowed 16 swords simultaneously.

Simultaneously.

Simultaneously.

I know, I know.

And they all got asked about their tips and tricks.

And it was a study in the British Medical Journal that they were surveyed for.

So it was trying to work out what injures them.

And it turns out it's...

Stubbed toes, actually.

I was just thinking, right, you don't see swords much these days, do you?

I mean, people don't use swords much for their original purpose.

So I just wondered if you're a sword manufacturer, what percentage of them get swallowed compared to.

Are you tempted as a sword manufacturer to just start rounding off the edges to make it slightly easier for these guys?

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm thinking.

If you're a sword manufacturer, you might as well go for where the market is.

Yes, right?

What?

Make them taste nice, maybe.

Yes.

Like a flavoured condon, but with a sword.

Well, they have a sheath, don't they?

Swords.

Yes, they do.

But the person is the sheath.

That's interesting.

The aim, they said, is to become a living scabbard for the sword.

Is that right?

Yeah, and because the aim, really, I mean, when you're swallowing a sword, the aim is not to swallow.

Swallowing contracts all the muscles all the way down.

This is a disastrous thing to do.

It's a misnomer, isn't it, really?

It really is.

So we should call them living scabbards, I think.

And that's actually what the wealthiest knights in medieval times used to have, isn't it?

One of their servants would be

there at their hip.

And the wealthier the knight you are, the more swords your living scabbard can accommodate.

So it's like choosing a golf bag, eventually.

Anna, when you sent us this fact, you sent us a link to New Scientist, I think, which was your evidence for it.

And so I went on to New Scientist and searched for swallowing.

And actually, I found some stuff about sword swallowing as well.

So there is a book that they talked about, which sounds amazing.

I'm definitely going to buy it.

It's called Memoirs of a Sword Swallower by Dan Mannix.

And it was published in 1951 and it talks about all sorts of things but one of them is that people used to swallow giant corkscrews

so

I know right so this is amazing the way that you do it is you put the corkscrew down into your throat and you're kind of twisting it round and as you're doing it you're making your pharynx which is like the bit of your throat behind your mouth you're making it kind of jump up and down with a muscle

and then you twist it and then you make it jump again and then you twist it and then you make it jump again and you can get the whole corkscrew down your throat.

Isn't that amazing?

Dude, that's the step above, isn't it?

Step above sword swallowing.

And do you know what they could also swallow?

Is a duck's penis, couldn't they?

Yes, they could.

What if they wanted?

What a decabare act that would be.

What an excuse when your wife comes home.

I'm a living scabbard.

Do you know what?

I think a a lot of wives, if they came home and find their husband doing that and they said, I'm going to start a career as a giant corkscrew swallower, they would wish that they'd just been fallating the duck.

That'd be my position.

Oh, God.

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

My fact is that soldiers in the Russian army weren't issued socks until 2007.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Well, they didn't go around the world fighting barefoot, did they?

They didn't get.

No, no, they're not hippies.

They're the opposite of hippies in the Russian army.

They're very, very tough people.

But they didn't have

the socks that we know and love today.

So

was it a case of bring your own socks kind of thing?

No.

They were issued with footwear for between the shoe and the foot.

But the thing that the Russian army wore for centuries, actually,

were these squares of cloth called port Yankee.

I hope I'm pronouncing that right.

They had cotton ones for the summer and warmer flannelly ones for the winter.

And they came in a square and you had to do this little elaborate dance of wrapping them around your foot.

But the thing is, they had lots of advantages.

So they were cheap to make, they were very easy to wash and dry and mend.

And if you got a hole in it, it didn't matter because there were several layers to them.

So one hole, you know, is not a problem.

So there were lots of advantages.

Yeah, so I asked my father-in-law who was in the Russian army actually

about these and he said, yeah, they're pretty good actually, because

one thing is the boots they would give you were extremely unflexible.

So let's say they probably wouldn't fit exactly the shape of your foot.

In fact, they almost certainly wouldn't.

But what you could do with these wraps is you could kind of stuff a little bit here, stuff a little bit there, kind of do it on two layers here and on one layer there.

So it would make your foot fit exactly in the size of your boot.

You can turn your foot into whatever size and shape you need it to be.

Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah, exactly.

I watched a video online of someone wrapping their foot up with one of these and the process was very intricate.

It it was like swaddling a baby

you you have to really tuck it under bits and make sure it flips over this other bit so they're wearing a bag over their foot really an elaborate bag over their foot rather than a fitted sock yeah i mean well it's a sock but a bag but a foot bag that's true a sock is more of a bag than these squares of cloth actually in a sense i suppose because it's

comfortably fitted to one's foot it feels less baggy but yeah but socks are really important if you're in the army right they're super important

So in

World War I, for instance, they needed socks for their troops.

And so they got people to knit them.

Because in those days, the way you made socks was by knitting them.

You didn't have the big manufacturing processes that you have today.

And the problem with people knitting socks is not everyone is particularly good at knitting.

Oh, God, I would pity the soldier who had to deal with one of my socks.

It would be hell.

You'd go barefoot.

So, for instance, there was one army, one person in the army who wrote a poem.

And it said, thank you, kind lady.

Your socks are some fit.

I used one for a hammock and one for a mitt.

Very good.

I thought he was going to finish saying one for my shit.

I thought that was going to be the...

And that's why you're not the poet laureate.

I know.

We should never have submitted that rhyme to you

when they asked.

It's so hard to define sock when you start researching it, isn't isn't it?

It's like they've sort of existed forever, or they've only existed for 100 years, depending on how you do it.

So

I love the sort of variety.

And I found that as I was really trying to get to grips with the history of them, they've climbed up and down the leg like nobody's business over the last 2,000 years.

It's so weird.

So you've got like, I think the oldest sock is from about 2,000 years ago and it's kind of looks like our socks today, except it has, it was for a sandal.

And so it's like those socks that have a different bit for each of the toes like it has one bit for the big toe and then a separate bit for the rest of the foot but then they sort of climbed up the leg gradually so they'd get longer and men were wearing breeches when it got to about the 14th 15th century so their trousers as it were would get shorter and shorter and then eventually it got to a time in the 1400s where socks had turned into tights that basically revealed the ass and your tunic or your breeches had become a jacket and there were all these laws about who was allowed to show their bum and who wasn't because the the sock was basically the full leg covering by that point and then they sort of descended again and got lower and lower until we have what we have today which is the short sock and trousers so they're just they're up and down all the time do you know what that that sounds like the progress of the korean war uh up and down the korean peninsula do you remember because originally the the north had made its way almost to the complete south of the island and then there was a huge troop surge and it they got pushed back almost to china and then it stabilized stabilised around that.

Is it the 38th parallel?

That's where they kind of came to the...

The 38th parallel.

So maybe our socks will eventually stop at that parallel on our leg, which I guess would be the knee.

Yeah,

that's the parallel I'm trying to draw.

And it's a parallel I regret drawing

increasingly.

People used to be killed by their socks.

In the 19th century, they were a real hazard.

There were lots of warnings about them.

This was in the age when dyes were quite dangerous.

Dyes were deadly.

And people used to complain constantly that certain types of socks, particularly the brightly coloured ones, would leave them with these massive ulcers or swollen feet that they couldn't get in and out of their boots and sort of pussy sores.

And people would get infections from them and die.

And it got to the stage where, in about the 1850s, men were recommended to only wear white socks because if you had socks that had been dyed by certain types of dye, like a lot of them contained arsenic, which wasn't ideal, then you were risking your very life.

Wow.

In fact, the telegram.

First, your socks get dyed, and then you get dyed.

Again, another reason why you're not poet laureate.

We're just coming up with a lot, aren't we?

But they didn't actually kill anyone, did they?

I don't think there were any recorded deaths where the cause of death was put on the former's socks.

I didn't find the death certificates, but there were certainly journalists who said that they'd been killing people.

And you can imagine with infections, people weren't very good at staving off, you know,

infections climbing up the body.

And socks advertised themselves for decades afterwards as special, wow, new non-poisonous socks.

They won't kill you.

That was the thing.

Did they?

Yeah, there are Victorian ads.

In 2015,

someone invented a pair of socks which were powered by urine.

Right.

First question.

Why do you need to power your socks?

Can you not get around without powering them?

Good, great question.

Thank you.

It feels like almost the only...

Oh, no, no, it's not the only question.

There's another quite important question coming up about the urine power.

Yeah.

So what these are kind of designed for is if you are, let's say you're going for a hike or you're out and you get lost or you get into distress

and you need to send a signal to some people, but you've forgotten your phone and your, you know, Pedra or whatever else you were going to use to summon them.

Oh, basically, you're only wearing a pair of socks.

You've lost everything.

All your other clothes have gone.

Yeah.

You've woken up from a nightmare.

You're shocked Shocked to find yourself.

So what do you do?

You're naked.

You're lost.

All you have is a pair of socks.

You just piss.

All you have to do is piss yourself.

And these, when filled with urine and activated by your footsteps, they can send a little message to any prospective rescuers because they've got these tiny fuel cells which are turned on by fresh urine and the movement of your feet.

Why do they have to do that?

Why do they have to include the footstep bit?

Surely you could just like, I don't know, spin them around or something.

Why do you have to put your pissy socks back on?

I don't think you need to take them off in the first place.

You just need to carefully wee down your legs.

Just piss on your feet, yeah.

Okay.

Wait, you're claiming I think that would be very difficult, especially as a woman, to actually manage to wee into a sock whilst wearing it.

Actually, for a man, most of the challenge is not pissing on your feet.

And who's this?

Who's this notifying, Andy?

Is this like some unit that's been sent up by the authorities?

Okay.

Yeah.

Like, you know.

You know,

Prince William, when he worked for Mountain Rescue, he used to talk about getting the urine sock alarm every few

days, didn't he?

Yeah, so it means that it just proves that you're still alive and that you're worth rescuing.

Are you at that stage?

At that point, are you really worth rescuing?

I think I'd probably rather not be rescued rescued at that point.

I was just thinking when you said they had adverts for socks that don't kill you.

You don't see many adverts for socks these days, do you?

No, that's true.

You just assume you're just going to buy them, I guess.

Yeah.

It's usually when they do stunts, isn't it?

Stunt advertising.

So Ted Baker did an advert a few years ago, which was they started selling socks in odd pairs.

So they would sell you, instead of just two socks per pair, they would sell you three because there was a report of how we lose an odd sock.

We always have an odd sock.

So, why not give you an extra sock so that you've always got a pair on the go?

Yeah, that's quite clever.

I find that very annoying and discomforting, actually.

Yeah, me too, actually.

That was very stunty.

Yeah, they had a sock amnesty.

You were meant to bring in that one odd sock if you were able to buy the pack of three.

Because basically, what happens is as soon as you buy these three socks, you immediately have an odd sock.

Yes.

So, if you buy two,

if you buy two of them, then you don't, then you have three pairs pairs of socks.

But then you can just buy three pairs of socks, aren't you?

Yeah.

No, but there is a thing about sorting your socks, which is how amazingly difficult it gets as soon as you have

any reasonable number of interesting socks.

So if you have, so and there are two problems with sock matching, which is if you have more than one pair,

which I do, sorry, brag, hashtag brag.

One of them is follow Peslo.

But if you have more than one pair, firstly, you need to pair more socks, obviously.

But secondly, there is a larger pile of unmatched socks that you have to hunt through, right?

So if you have five pairs of socks, it actually takes 25 times longer to match than one pair of socks.

Okay?

This is by an algorithm.

Allegedly, if you have 100 different pairs of socks, right, it would take 10,000 times longer to sort them than one pair of socks.

No, I don't don't believe that.

And that's worked out that you're obviously sort of paring them down every time you find a pair.

Yeah, I mean, I assume the algorithm's done its job.

I think so, but they haven't done trouble.

Towards the end, it gets easier.

Yeah, it does get, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

But the answer, obviously, is to only buy one kind of socks and just buy a hundred of those.

Yeah.

Hey, Andy, I've got one more question about your piss socks.

Oh, God, God.

James raised a point there before, which is sometimes it's difficult for guys

to

aim properly and that could land.

So has there been any cases where the authorities have busted into someone's house because

they're pissed on their socks?

Yeah,

not as far as I know, but what a great question.

Sounds like you haven't really done the research here, Andy.

Just talking about the fact that there's no sock advertising, I really like fun socks.

And so I'm quite surprised that people don't, you know, companies don't make a bigger deal out of them.

And I especially feel sorry for men when they have to wear suits or like quite bland

matching outfits.

I know you're all wearing like cartoon-themed tops today, but we're working from home.

That's the only way that you can really express yourself, right, is by wearing stupid socks.

So I was looking at some stupid socks and I hadn't realized something that I think a lot of Canadians are aware of, which is that Trudeau engages in sock diplomacy a lot.

And so every sort of diplomatic event he goes to, he's wearing a different and appropriate pair of socks.

And it was particularly apparent when he marched in Toronto's gay pride parade, wearing a rainbow-striped pair, but printed with the words Eid Mubarak, because it was also Eid, the end of Ramadan at the time.

Wow.

And they were made by a Toronto-based company.

Unfortunately, unfortunately, nobody noticed any of that because he was also blacked up at the time.

I have one fact about, which could have gone into this fact or the previous one, okay?

Okay.

So in 2014, there was a great Dane in Oregon which was found to be in some distress, and his owners took him to the vet.

And if you combine this fact with the previous one, you know what I'm about to say.

But they found he'd been swallowing socks.

And they found it.

It's all really just now about guessing the number of pairs of socks that he's wearing from our perspective.

How long do you think it would have taken to match the socks that he had eaten?

I reckon the maximum number of socks that a great Dane can eat before you notice and take them to the vet is 16.

Okay.

Okay.

Pairs or individuals?

Individuals.

Because I guess they wouldn't necessarily swallow them in pairs.

Go on.

Any other guesses?

I'm going to say one.

One sock.

Wow.

Okay.

Great Danes are great.

So they can fit probably quite a lot.

I think 30.

30 socks.

I've got to say, Dan, my ex had a dog who won set a sock, and we had to get the sock out of it,

which was an interesting day for us.

But I'm not sure that the international press would have been particularly interested in

eating one sock.

Or you missed an opportunity in reporting your story, James.

Yeah,

no, that's very good tactical thinking from James.

So, thank you, Dan, for just guessing one sock, because normally I was assuming you would do your usual thing and guess that you've eaten 5,000 socks.

Exactly.

I was going to say 100,000.

This dog had eaten 43 and a half socks.

Wow.

Yeah.

And they had to do a sock ectomy on it.

And in fact, this became news because it was published in the trade magazine Veterinary Practice News.

And they had a competition for the animal which had eaten the most unusual thing.

And this great Dane won.

Brilliant.

But there were some other runners-up in the competition, which included a frog in Texas, which had eaten the rocks from its rockery, and a dog in Florida, which had eaten a kebab.

Now, that doesn't sound interesting but it had also eaten the skewer.

Oh.

Oh God.

That's gotta hurt.

Okay it is time for fact number three and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that in 2016 a man won the lottery for the second time using the exact same numbers that won it for him the first time.

That man's name is Larry Gambles.

And he hasn't changed his name since he did this.

No, no, this was his name.

He also libncing around fields like a sheep.

He's not Larry Gambols.

Oh, that's a different guy, I think he is.

This is Larry Gambols.

He's from Madison, Illinois, which is a small place south of Chicago.

And he won a million dollars in 2016 as part of a lottery.

And the numbers that he used were the same numbers that he used nine years ago when he won 50,000 in a different lottery.

So they worked twice for him.

And yeah, he obviously made the news because he...

Because of his name.

Because of his name.

You know, it's not like a great Dane in a sock.

He was asked if he had any advice on how to win the lottery, which is a great question for a journalist to ask.

And he said, pick your favourite numbers and stick with them.

It worked for me.

So there you go, guaranteed sure-fire way of winning.

I would argue that that's bad advice, though, right?

Because unless your favorite numbers are numbers that no one else likes, which is pretty unlikely, statistically, you're more likely to like the number seven or the number three or whatever.

Yeah.

You want to be choosing numbers that no one likes.

You want to be choosing horrible numbers.

Yeah, because then you get more.

Well, there was an article I was reading which was saying that in each national lottery draw, 10,000 people on average choose the numbers one, two, three, four, five, and six.

And given the amount of most jackpots, which is about four million, that means even if you win, you get 400 quid.

Yeah.

Oh, Oh, wow.

Because it has a split between those people.

Mad.

I reckon that that serves you right for being so unimaginative.

Agree.

I could not agree more.

Also,

I know the number of combinations is so massive that, and I know that that is as likely a combination of numbers as any other.

Is that correct?

Like getting those one, two, three.

However, I think we could all.

It's not going to happen, is it?

It's never going to be one, two, three, four, five, six.

It just is not.

You're right.

Of course not.

Imagine the scandal.

Statistics be damned.

It would be a complete scandal.

It would be outrageous.

Actually, you know who got the first ever lottery ticket in the UK?

I think it was John Major.

Oh, yeah.

Prime Minister.

Did they not say that he was worried that he was going to win or something?

Yes, he hoped he wouldn't win because if he won, he would have to give the money back.

And he knew that his wife would be furious if he won and then had to give back the money.

Imagine if the first ever national lottery, right, it came up.

And I don't know if you guys remember it.

You're probably too young.

I remember it because I was 16 and I could buy tickets, it was really exciting.

But imagine if the first ball that came out was one, and then it was two, and it was three, and four, then five, and six, which is equally likely, it could have happened.

I think that would have been just the end of it, no one would have trusted it ever again.

It would have been a scandal, no one would ever buy a ticket again.

And then John Majors in the corner wouldn't be able to buy six tickets because he is absolutely the sort of guy who would have hit those numbers.

He is

it's as likely as any other combination.

I find the sticking with the same numbers thing really weird because I found a headline in the Telegraph.

This just made me laugh so much.

It said, Millionaire Lottery winner dreamt numbers 28 years ago.

And this was a woman who

these numbers came to her in a dream in 1989.

And then in 2017, they came up.

Did the dream tell her that it was 2017?

Or had she just got around to it?

No,

she'd been placing the bets every single week on that on that number.

There's no way.

My grandmother does that.

My grandmother keeps the same numbers.

Oh, I think I do see the logic in keeping the same numbers once you've decided on them because then if the numbers do come out, you feel like, oh, they were my numbers and I should have put the bet on this week and I didn't do it.

Yes.

Once you've started doing that, it's see the logic behind not stopping.

My grandmother says that she didn't buy them one week and that was the week her numbers came up.

I just don't believe that.

I just don't believe it at all.

But that's a story in our family.

She says it.

The other logical fallacy that people have is that they look at the numbers and they're out by just one and you're like, oh, I had 45 and 46 came out.

But apart from the fact that each ball is not related, they're just numbers.

But of course, there are twice as many numbers that are one away from your number.

as your actual number.

So you're twice as likely to be one away as the actual number.

That's a really good point.

I hadn't thought about that.

Andy, you were saying about the person who came up with the number through a dream.

Did you hear about this guy in Spain in the 1970s?

No.

No.

So the way it works in Spain is you could go around the shops looking for specific numbers.

They printed out the numbers and you would choose whichever one you wanted.

And

this guy decided that he wanted a lottery ticket ending in 48, 4 and 8.

So he went round all the shops and eventually he found a ticket and he bought it and he won the lottery.

And they interviewed him afterwards like they always do.

And they said, oh, why, you know,

what was your secret?

And he said, oh, well, I was looking for this 48.

And they said, oh, why were you looking for the 48?

And he said, well, I dreamt of the number seven for seven straight nights.

And seven times seven is 48.

So good.

And it worked.

A man who really deserved to win.

Have you guys heard of Stefan Mandel?

You may well have done researching people who've won the lottery lots.

So he was a Romanian economist, and he ended up winning the lottery 14 times

because he worked out

that

what he would do is he would form a syndicate and

he grew up very, very poor in Romania.

He wanted to earn some real money.

And he would find a lottery, and he would wait until the jackpot for the lottery was bigger than all possible combinations of tickets.

So if you bought you know, every single number.

So that only applies to certain lotteries, obviously, because if you did it for things like the Euro millions, it will be so expensive to buy tickets for every combination.

But he so he formed this syndicate and he waited and then he would just buy every single ticket.

But the main tricky thing is the logistics of it.

So he had a team of people in Melbourne.

He moved to Australia and he found a lottery in Virginia in the USA which had enough money in the jackpot.

So you could print your own tickets at the time.

So he printed off one ton of tickets.

He had to ship them all the way to the USA from Australia.

He waited for the jackpot to be right.

And then

on a certain week in 1992, the jackpot hit $15 million.

And he said, this is the week.

We need to go for it.

But he had to form a team of people to take 1.4 million tickets to a shop and queue up, pay for them, get them processed, so they're registered as being properly bought.

And they had three days to do it, 1.4 million tickets.

He hired couriers who had tens of thousands of tickets each and almost all of them got through but there was one batch of tickets 140,000 which weren't registered there was one ticket which wasn't bought

it was one two three four five six

and so when the when the time came they were so stressed obviously yeah if the jackpot was in that one combination of numbers they would have missed out thankfully they got it and they won how much was it then that ended up being divided as in how much did each person get do they get enough to make it worth that obscene and absurd hassle i think a lot of people did not get enough to make it worth the hassle uh but i think he got several million dollars and he moved to vanuatu the pacific island so yeah but everyone got some money everyone did win you know okay worth it i was just thinking if you did buy all the tickets apart from one then basically your odds of it being a complete disaster is the same as my odds of winning the lottery if i only buy one ticket isn't it yeah that's just a true way of looking at things.

It's just always showing us the new angle.

That's the odds of

losing the lottery in that case, isn't it?

Yeah.

I read about another guy in Melbourne, actually.

As you said, that guy was who won.

And he sort of often appears on articles about

luckiest man in the world.

And that's this guy called Bill Morgan, who was in the 90s.

He had a bad accident, actually.

And this ends happily, by the way.

That's why people say he's the luckiest man in the world before you start getting upset.

So he had an accident where he ended up dead for 14 minutes.

Oh, right.

Sorry.

He genuinely.

I thought that was a very short story.

He ended up dead for 14 minutes, like clinically dead, but they resuscitated him.

He, you know, and twice.

He was in a coma for 12 days.

They were advised to turn off his life support twice because they were like, he's going to be completely brain dead.

But he woke up completely fine, turned out, didn't have any brain damage at all.

So he proposed to his girlfriend straight away.

She said yes.

And to celebrate, a bit of a lowbrow way of celebrating, but he bought a scratch card and he scratched it off and he'd won a car.

And so he was delighted about this.

And he and the local news, very, very local news, I guess, got in touch.

But I mean, it was quite a big story because he'd been in this coma and he'd suddenly come out and he'd won this car.

So the local news came.

Did the local news did the local news also accuse him of being lowbrow for celebrating coming out of his coma?

I think what I meant was it was quite an underwhelming way to celebrate buying one scratch card, you know?

Okay.

Look, fine.

It's a perfectly decent way to celebrate surviving a coma and getting engaged, buying a scratch card.

I know what you mean, because it's like if you get engaged, it's sort of saying I am happy to be with you, rather than I wish for a dramatic change in my life circumstances.

So it's a slightly slightly there's a bit of side eye to it if you say let's let's try and change everything.

Such a bit of an insult isn't it?

Right now I've doomed my life let's try and find something that can possibly resuscitate it.

Anyway, this film local film crew came to film his delight and they asked him to reenact the moment that he'd won the car and so they got him to buy another scratch card and scratch it off to reenact.

Oh my god I've won a car.

And then he looked down at the scratch card and he went, oh my god, I've won $250,000.

wow and they were like wow you got the line wrong mate and uh his other scratch card won him 250 grand yeah and he immediately dumped his fiancé

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

Okay, my fact this week is that Zagreb has a museum of hangovers.

Its inventor was inspired when a friend woke up one morning with an unexplained bike pedal in his pocket.

So this is a guy called Arino Dubiakovic who was a university student in Zagreb in Croatia and he said that he told journalists that a friend spoke about how he woke up with a bicycle pedal in his pocket and I thought as I listened to him why not set up a place, a museum, with a collection of these objects as stories that will illustrate in a funny way these evenings of drunkenness and the hangover the next day.

And rather than just thinking it, he actually went and did it.

And this is a thing that now exists in Croatia.

It's amazing that it's a real place.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It sounds really cool, doesn't it?

The idea of it is that when you go inside it, it recreates your drunken journey home.

So it's room by room.

You start in the bar and then you go onto sort of graffiti-lined walls that emulate a street, and then you get to storefronts and then a garden, and finally your bedroom.

That's the end of the museum.

Finally, you swallow your house key.

They have a chalkboard in there where it features the beginning of a sentence which is I woke up with and then you can write in your answers of you know the worst thing you've woken up with when you've had a hangover and answers in the museum at the moment or when this article was written include two stray dogs a lot of pumpkins and and I saw the girl who wrote this one eye Now this is very frustrating because I saw there was like video footage of inside the museum and you see this girl right one eye but you only see her in profile so I couldn't find out if she was lying.

But it could be that you've lost one of your eyes so you've woken up with one eye or that you've woken up with someone else's eye in addition to your own.

An extra eye.

It's either one or three eyes you've got altogether isn't it?

Yes exactly.

Yeah.

Which would you prefer?

Oh

I should think three.

I don't know, that implies you might have done something awful though.

Does it?

I think that waking up with only one eye implies that something awful's happened.

I think it depends if you'd rather harm yourself or someone else, James.

Maybe that's the difference between you and me, you know?

Well, one other difference between you and me is I assumed I've just found the eye, and you think that you've done something awful to someone to get it.

I assume I've gouged it out of a love right now.

I'm trusting, James, that you're happy with the three-eye option, yet the three-sock option, you seem to have been very hesitant.

Well, what I'm thinking is if I find three more eyes, then I might have to get better eyes.

But, James, that will take longer to match them all up.

Yeah, you're absolutely a big pile of eyes that you have to match with.

Not if they're all the same colour.

As long as you've got all blue eyes, you're fine, right?

Yeah, that's true.

So if you're ever going to be gouging out people's eyes, why not go for people with the same eye colour?

Just a little tip from an amateur to the professional murderers out there.

I think I would definitely hope for the chance that I had done something horrible over the guarantee of having lost an eye.

Because

I trust my drunken self not to take someone's eye.

Yeah, but you take a gamble on not having removed someone's eye by force rather than the guarantee of having your own eye gun.

But there may be an inflated sense of my own

generosity and pleasantness when drunk.

Well, yeah, because you and I went on a big night out quite recently, Andy, didn't we?

We did.

We were the last two men standing at the end of that night out.

And James, you've been missing three fingers ever since.

So, drunk hangovers.

Yeah.

They're not fun, are they?

No, and they're very damaging.

So on average, 200,000 British workers turn up to work hangover every day.

And I imagine in these days of lockdown, more than that.

And

there's been a couple of papers that have pointed out it's weird that not more research has gone into it because it has a massive impact on the economy and on society.

Like that number of people being quite debilitatingly ill on a daily basis is losing the country a lot of money.

And I was reading one editorial in the current drug abuse journal, which says it's really surprising we haven't come up with a cure because of these consequences.

And it speculates that there's probably ethical reasons.

So people basically think a hangover is kind of your punishment.

You got drunk.

You can stop getting drunk and then not have hangovers.

But the journal points out that people assume a hangover is punishment that will prevent similar drinking episodes in future.

However, there is no scientific evidence that supports this assumption.

Whereas during the hangover, people often state they will never drink again.

This has never been found to happen.

It's true.

That's true.

The way I like to look at it is you're kind of borrowing some fun from the next day, right?

So if you go out drinking on Friday, then you're borrowing some of Saturday morning's fun and having it on Friday night.

So you have more fun on Friday, but then on Saturday, you just feel like not fun at all, right?

That's a really good way of looking at it.

Oh my God, that's an amazing way of thinking about it.

But that explains, because I'm very keen on deferring gratification as far as possible.

Which probably explains why I'm not a very big drinker is because I think, well, I'd rather have no fun at all tonight in the hope of having lots tomorrow.

Well, what you could do is play the lottery like a friend of mine does where he buys a lottery ticket and then he doesn't look at it until the next week until after the next week's draw has been made and he's already bought next week's lottery ticket and what that means is that he always potentially has has a winning lottery ticket in his wallet.

So he's always got a potentially lottery winning ticket on him.

Yeah exactly.

Is he a happy man or is he a bit weird?

It's you isn't it?

It's him.

Oh God.

I was reading about a pretty spectacular hangover that happened in China.

There's a guy called Jiang Wu who was staying at a bed and breakfast in Qingdao.

He had fallen asleep in what he thought was his bed and breakfast, but actually turned out to be a shipping container that was being loaded the very next morning onto a cargo that was going to set sail for Los Angeles.

So he woke up inside the container.

He luckily had his phone on him, was called his friends.

He couldn't get through to a bunch of people, called the police.

Eventually, they worked out where he might be by tracking the phone, and they found him in a stack of cargo containers that were reaching 60 feet high.

And they had to go through

and log about and if he had not if he'd not woken up if it had been a few hours later I think they said he would have been on his way to Los Angeles

it's a free holiday

the quality of Airbnbs in this city you mentioned Dan must be so low

maybe they have extremely luxurious shipping containers yeah maybe yeah

I actually have a favourite hangover that I've I've I've thought it's my favorite hangover for a long time and I'm so glad I get to share it.

It's Alexander the Great.

I think he had the best hangover of all time.

So this is in 330 BC and one of his greatest conquests was he conquered Persepolis.

It was the Persian capital and they've been building up to it for ages.

It's this huge historic moment and it had a magnificent palace or series of palaces and they had hundreds of years worth of great Persian art and sculpture and writing and lots of treasure.

It was the proper jewel of the empire.

So anyway, Alexander the Great storms in with his troops, takes over this empire.

It's the capital.

Massive moment.

And then, so according to one account, everyone got really pissed, as you do, celebrating, absolutely hammered.

And apparently, the drinking was far advanced and drunken madness took possession of their minds.

And then, according to various accounts, either Alexander and his assistants decided, or this woman decided, who was one of their mistresses,

decided that what they should do is they should just burn the whole place down.

So she said, wouldn't it be really funny if you got us, a bunch of women, to burn down this amazing Persian city that's taken so long to build?

And they, giddy with wine, decided that would indeed be absolutely hilarious.

And they burnt down the entire place.

And so I just love the idea.

Alexander the Great woke up the next morning in his newly conquered palace in the city and went, oh my god, what have I done?

Wow.

And that's it.

He destroyed the great and we'll never have that.

We'll never have the great jewel of that Persian Empire.

They need to make that into a movie, a sort of historical version of the hangover, the movie, just to see what his 24 hours were post that.

Whoa.

The ancient cures are so much fun for hangovers.

So there was a big thing of wearing a wreath of flowers in your hair.

If you did that while drinking, doctors thought that had curative properties and that you might not get the hangover the next day.

Did they have to be specific flowers?

Do you think that's a good thing?

I think they probably would have been, because that was a big thing, wasn't it?

You know, this will cure this and so on.

But

we know that the treatises about this were written, we just don't know what was in them because we just have references to them.

So we don't know exactly which flowers worked for which drinks.

It's not very helpful, is it?

I know.

It's a lovely idea as well.

Everyone just in the pub is wearing a wreath of flowers on their head while they get battered.

Yeah, that's quite nice.

There was being boiled in a coffin and then buried in hay.

Was.

Which is less nice.

This is an alpine, old alpine tradition.

I've read about it in this book, which I really want to get the full book.

It's by a guy called Shaughnessy Bishop Stool.

And he's written a book called Hung Over, The Morning After, and One Man's Quest for the Cure.

And he basically went on this quest of getting drunk every single night in order that he could test out any occupies.

And he tried this one where, which is traditional, where you lie in this kind of wooden coffin in a dark room and you're shut in, and then this lady scoops boiling water into it till you're really hot and then you get lifted out and chucked into a massive pile of hay and then covered up with hay and then she digs you out and you're good to go.

It's worth a try isn't it?

It's worth a try.

Does he report what it's like?

Did it work?

He says it's it's he felt sort of euphoric afterwards but he didn't actually seem to say that it definitely works but he did come up with a hangover cure in this book and I trust this more than anything because no one's come up with a proper hangover cure except this guy who said the only solution to the proper hangover symptoms of nausea and headache.

Basically, so we don't really care about tiredness and stuff, that's just like snap out of it, have a coffee.

But nausea and headache, before you go to sleep, take milk thistle for your liver, and then you take an amino acid called N-acetylcysteine, apparently, which is inhaled as mist.

I looked it up, you can inhale it as mist.

Then take vitamins B1, B6, and B12, and some frankincense.

If you do that,

where are we going to get all this stuff?

I thought you might be growing it in your garden.

I think it'd be easier for me to find a coffin, some hay, and a Swiss lady.

Yeah.

Anna, I love the fact that in a time where we cannot buy tomatoes or pasta, you're recommending people go out and get themselves some frankincense.

If you go to Tesco, the frankincense aisle is completely empty at the moment.

You should be able to inhale it as a mist, so just go and buy a packet of mist in your local shop.

There hasn't been as much of a run on mist as there has been on eggs, for instance.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

At James Harkin.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

And Chaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

You can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

Do check it out.

We have all of our previous episodes up there, bits of merchandise.

There's a lot of stuff to check out.

Do go.

Anyway, we'll be back again next week with another episode.

In the meantime, we do really hope that you're all doing okay, that your family's okay, your friends are okay.

Please stay indoors.

We will get through this.

And thanks for continuing to listen to us throughout this whole process.

We'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.

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