312: No Such Thing As Quentin Tarantino's Bambi

March 13, 2020 46m

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Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss dangerous Roman toilets, what shoes were thrown at a Bush, and the love life of a Lothario turtle called Diego.

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

And once again, again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with you Andy.

My fact is that Pompeii's new drain system is 2,300 years old.

Yeah so this is

in Pompeii they have a set of storm drains underneath the city that were several meters down so they weren't really affected when Vesuvius hit.

Well I don't think any storm drain would have been able to drain away that lava from Vesuvius.

That's a good point.

But yeah, so there's the system, which is they're 450 meters long.

They're quite big, so if you're a human, you can crawl along it without too much discomfort.

And it turns out they've been looked into, they're so clean and empty and well-built that they're going to be used again for modern public.

And they're looking into another stretch of 500 meters of drains just to see if we can open those up as well.

So this kind of system is for taking water that comes out of rivers or comes from the air and taking it down to the sea.

It's not so much for sewage

because this is what the Roman sewers were all about.

If you had a toilet in your house, it would probably go into a cesspit.

It wouldn't be attached to the sewage system.

Every now and then they could do, but the problem was there was no grating between the sewer and your toilet.

And so if you had a toilet and you attached it to the sewer, everything could come the other way as well as you said.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, that's great.

So that's why we know so much about their eating habits because they were just sitting in these cesspits because they had bizarre menus.

Like, we've discovered things that they ate there that include sea urchin, flamingo, and the only example of a giraffe leg in all of ancient Rome.

It's found in Pompeii.

I think it's the shops that they found.

Did they not look at the shops in Pompeii and they found all that stuff?

What do you mean they had it in the shop?

So there's a shop front with a giraffe leg

on the window.

In the window.

So obviously everything was kind of preserved quite well in Pompeii, right?

Because of the old volcanoes.

But they did a survey of 20 shops near Pompeii's gates, and they looked at what was in the shops that was preserved.

And they found, like Dan says, the shellfish and the giraffe bone, and also spices that came all the way from Indonesia.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

Because actually, if you reflect on it, it would have been weird if they'd found a full giraffe leg in the sewer that someone had excreted out, wouldn't it?

That would have been a painful session.

That's a hell of a log, yeah.

Oh, God.

Good point.

They did used to be terrified of things leaping back up, didn't they?

And there used to be rumours that there were demons that would jump up from the sewers

and get them.

giraffes with only a leg remaining.

And yeah, I think rats would crawl up quite often.

There is one story, and this is from, I think, about the first century AD, there was an author called Aylien.

Alien.

It's an A-E-L-I-A-N, all right?

He was not an alien.

He was a Roman historian, very serious guy.

We're not certain.

But basically, all of these cesspit toilets that James has just mentioned, they were kept in the kitchen quite frequently of the house.

So you'd literally have the hob, and then next to it, you'd just have a little wooden toilet seat, and you'd just do your business there.

It's convenient.

If you're in the middle of cooking a risotto and you can't step away for too long, it's very convenient.

And I think a lot of people who have flats in London can really empathise with this.

I was going to say, in my father, the flat I used to live in, the toilet is basically in the kitchen.

It's at the end of the kitchen, and the door's never closed.

Right.

Well, that's disgusting.

So,

okay.

Why is the door, that's your decision not to close that door?

It actually is quite annoying because when you close the door you can't open the fridge to access the freezer.

It's a really silly built system.

It's quite bad design.

Sorry, if you've closed the toilet door you can't open your own fridge.

The door handle gets in the way.

It was a cock-up in the construction process that no one's ever remedied.

Okay, so right, just stepping away from Anna's horrible, horrible life for a minute.

This author, Alien, he wrote about a merchant in a city because they were all suspected.

They didn't really have traps, You know, they didn't have any barrier.

So there was one merchant, a wealthy Iberian merchant, living in a city.

And every night there was this giant octopus that would swim up his toilet and it would come out into the kitchen and eat all the pickled fish that he had in the pantry.

That sounds like nonsense.

It's true.

This is the story he wrote.

Obviously, it may not be completely true.

And also, it's written by aliens.

Just in Pompeii, so we're finding out a lot more about it at the moment because archaeologists keep digging up new things.

And one thing thing they've just discovered quite recently is that Pompeian red, which is the walls, all if you go there, it's beautiful, stunning red.

Well, it turns out that's the wrong colour.

A lot of that was yellow, and it was as a result of the gases from the volcano that it changed the colour.

So a lot of Pompeii was red, but not as much as it is now.

Well, that's like much of the rest of Pompeii doesn't have any colour on it anymore.

So I think in the amphitheater, it used to be covered in stunning frescoes and sort of pictures of bullfights and chariot races and gladiators fighting each other.

And when it was excavated in 1815, so they excavated it and that had all been perfectly preserved for almost 2,000 years.

And within a few months, it completely vanished because as soon as it was being eroded and destroyed by frost and stuff, no trace of it was left.

So after 2,000 years, you just lift the lid on it and it goes away.

I have a fact about the amphitheatre.

Got one.

The Pompeii men were so rowdy fighting the neighbours in their nearby town that their amphitheatre got closed down for 10 years as a punishment.

Really?

Yeah.

Well, you mean like hooliganism and stuff.

Exactly, yeah.

Really?

Imagine that.

A 10-year ban from all sports.

Yeah.

That's quite a lot.

It's your dream, isn't it?

Yeah.

In the amphitheatres, what would they been watching?

I assume it was like gladitorial people killing each other.

You're not going to behave, but you're not going to watch people murder each other.

You're only allowed to murder each other in one place in the town.

Whenever you go and watch a sport, you don't automatically start doing that spot in the terraces, do you?

You don't go to the horse race and then you turn around and all the crowd are on horses.

Every time I watch stand-up with Dan, he gets up in the middle of the audience and starts reciting his eight-year-old jokes.

It's really awkward.

When you say eight-year-old jokes, do you mean jokes that an eight-year-old will be proud of?

No, they're jokes exclusively about eight-year-olds.

That's all of that material.

So do you know what people did when the volcano first erupted?

So there was one day where it was raining small rocks from the sky and it was, you know, clearly something had gone on and there had been an eruption.

Did they go to the um volcano and look at it like rubber neck it?

Ooh, I don't I don't think so, but the main thing that people did to protect themselves was to tie pillows onto their heads.

And they just walked around with pillows on their heads all day.

How clever?

And then a lot of people actually got away.

Most people who lived in the town escaped.

And then the next morning the pyroclastic flow came, which was at th thousands of miles an hour, I think, and that just blasted anyone who was still left in there.

But

the pillow could do anything?

No, the biggest pillow in the world would have protected you from that.

You know how we've got the famous plaster casts of people.

So you've seen them, haven't you?

Haven't you, Dan?

There's a famous shape.

So the ash covered bodies, and then there's a big hole where the body used to be.

But there's not just plaster casts of the bodies of the people, there's also plaster casts of the plants.

So this is just a secondary, very exciting thing that no one talks about.

But basically, it's a really good way of finding out what they were growing in their gardens because, as well as covering the people, the the ash covered kind of all the plants and the trees and the herbs and stuff and it got into their root systems and then the roots disintegrate and they poured plaster in when they excavated and now they've got a perfect plaster cast of the root systems of Pompeii.

That's so cool.

That's really cool.

Although I can understand why they went for the humans first.

It was so clever just making those, just discovering a hole and realising this is a person-shaped hole.

Do you think so?

Would you not think if you saw a hole that was in the shape of a person, you would know immediately that it was?

Or?

No, I got well, I guess if I was just digging downwards, I wouldn't automatically think this is shaped like a person.

I guess it's how quickly you see it.

You're right, actually, because I'm kind of imagining, do you remember that game show hole in the wall where celebrities had to make a shape and the shape of the body would come towards them?

It wouldn't be quite as obvious as that, would it?

I guess not.

Because you're excavating a whole plane of rubble and ash.

It's not a good game show.

It's quite a dangerous place to go to, Pompeii, still.

Yeah, for one bizarre reason, which is if you walk in the wrong spot, you might be blown up by a World War II bomb.

So it's unexploded bombs.

So this was in 1943.

The Allied forces had rumors come out that there was a lot of Nazis hodling up in Pompeii.

Because actually, I was going to say, what's the point of bombing a place which has already been destroyed by a volcano?

It seems a bit like Overcoming, doesn't it?

So that's what they thought.

They thought the Germans were there.

So these were rumors.

So they went over and they dropped 165 bombs over Pompeii, exploding a lot of stuff.

Nazis just had pillows on their heads.

Eight to ten percent of bombs that were dropped during the war is said to be unexploded when they land in a spot.

So they actually have found a few while excavating, looking for humans.

They suddenly come across, oh, that's a bit bomb-shaped.

Bomb-shaped people back then, weren't they?

Presumably, there weren't any Nazis hiding there.

So did they just drop a bunch of bombs?

It was completely wrong.

Yeah, it was completely wrong.

There was a few things like there was artillery and a few tanks, but they definitely weren't people.

It wasn't a camp.

So, yeah, so they found a few, but they expect that there's about 10 in total to find.

And so they're finding it in all the spots that are not open to the public.

They're sort of the areas that they're now excavating.

There is a link between the bombings of Pompeii and the eruption at Pompeii.

Happened on the same day.

And in the same place.

Really?

24th of August.

Wow.

Yeah, I don't know if that was chosen as a tribute act to the volcano.

I suspect not.

I suppose so.

All you can take from that data is don't go to Pompeii on the 24th of August.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Just because you mentioned bombs, and to take it quickly back to latrines, they used to explode sometimes.

So people in Pompeii were used to the odd explosion.

So they could explode up your bottom.

You'd be sitting on the opening.

So you've probably seen the latrines in ancient Rome where you'd have public latrine and you'd sit on this hole and it was that keyhole-shaped hole.

So you had a little

bigger opening near the bottom so you could get your sponge brush in, so you could wipe your bum with it.

But sometimes there'd be an explosion that would come up through that hole, and that was because of the mixture of methane and hydrogen sulfide, which caused explosions.

Whoa,

set fire.

You could always wear a pillow on your bottom whenever you got to the toilet.

Remind me not to come and stay at your place, James.

It's all right, I've left a mint on your pillow.

Oh, God.

And also, these public toilets, It was like 20 at a time, wasn't it?

There was loads of people there, and there was basically no privacy.

It wasn't like cubicles or anything like this.

But you didn't really need it because you were wearing a toga.

So you could hide your shame by covering yourself in a toga.

Yeah, because we have this impression that they really didn't care.

And I guess I don't think they did care about privacy nearly as much as people did subsequently.

But there is one latrine that's been found with a revolving door, or what we think was a revolving door, that was the animal.

That's what you could do with one of of those next to your fridge couldn't you

this is actually based on like a hole in the ground which they think they put a pole in and a door would just spin because what people were doing when it was a normal door was just leaving the door wide open because it stanked like shit in there and they wanted to aerate it but then people could just look in and so they included a revolving door so you couldn't leave it open but revolving doors we've said before they keep air in very effectively so it would have smelled worse yeah it probably would have smelled worse but you couldn't leave it open you were just stuck with the smell but at least you had your privacy okay okay.

You've got to make a sacrifice.

Sure.

We're going to have to move on in a sec to our next fact.

Have you heard of Unblocktober?

Well, you go around unblocking people's toilets as a charity service.

Is it that you just don't eat meat, so your stools are not quite as heavy?

It's not that.

Is that why people are vegetarian?

They're sick of the heavy stools.

Shout out a right girl ass leg the other day.

Oh, gosh.

No, guys, it's to stop fat bugs and to stop

whole sewage systems from being blocked up.

So they send you a resource pack for your workplace and home, and they advise you about how to improve the country's sewers.

And basically, it's all things like not putting oil down the sink.

Because when the oil clubs together in the sewers, it creates a fat burger and it creates a nightmare.

And they send you a list of things not to throw down the sink or the toilet, like nappies, which I would have thought was quite obvious.

But

wet wipes and condoms and cotton buds and butter.

But James says whose butter is what I'm saying to you.

Who's putting butter down the tile?

No one is, are they?

The only reason I could think of that is if you're buttering yourself up because you want to slip down there yourself.

To go and retrieve that wet wipe you accidentally dropped in.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that there is a factory in Iran that makes 2,000 US, British, and Israeli flags every month specifically for people to burn.

Wow.

This is really.

How quickly after buying them are you allowed to burn it?

Well, I don't think there are any rules in Iran against burning US flags.

I think it's positively encouraged.

But this was a report last month by AP, Associated Press, which was in all the newspapers afterwards.

And basically, it's about this factory in a town that looks like it could be called Come In, but I think it's probably called Hamin or something like that.

But it's in Iran, and they have workers who work really diligently, adding all the stars and the stripes and everything to all these flags, even though they know that as soon as they've made them, they're just going to be set on fire.

And the guy who runs a factory has said, in recent years, the production of US flags has tripled.

And what eventually happens to my products is on its end user.

So he's kind of washing his hands of what happens to it afterwards.

But this company is called Dibba Pacham Khamein.

And all I could find about them really is they have a nice Instagram channel.

Is it burning flags?

No, it's flags.

Oh, okay.

It's unburning flags.

Okay.

But no, I think this is what the owner's saying, basically, it's not up to me what people do here.

I'm not bothered.

I'm just going to give you the flag.

And if you want to burn it, then that's up to you.

He did also say, I hope there is a day that the flags we produce are presented as a gift.

Yes.

Which kind of feels true, although...

A lot of them are probably given as gifts today.

They're just given as gifts saying, hey, I know you want something to burn at the demonstration later.

But it's, yeah, and they make three kinds of flags.

One is for display purposes.

One is tablecloth flags, which is if you have a conference or something, and then the third is demonstration flags.

And that really spikes on days of national holiday, for example, because you want an American flag to burn on a national holiday.

So you're not supposed to burn the tablecloth ones, presumably, French.

No, no, no, that's...

Because that ruins a dinner party.

It's the town where Ayatollah Komini was born.

So that's why the town is called Komin.

Or maybe why he was called Komini.

Yeah.

And his house is now a major tourist site.

But it's not the only tourist site there because there are some caves nearby with some rock art with cup marks which may be up to 40,000 years old.

What?

Yeah.

What's a cup marker?

I am not completely sure what a cup market is.

So I'm always getting told off at home for putting my hot cup of tea on the table and leaving a mark.

And I'm always like, look, it'll erode eventually.

It'll disappear.

But if you're telling me they're 40,000 years old,

Christ, they should have used a coaster.

Yeah.

It's funny, isn't it, how people burn flags and find it offensive and stuff, considering that really no countries had flags until like the late 18th century, and most countries didn't have them until the late 19th and early 20th century.

It's really a modern thing, the idea of national flags.

You would get them on boats and stuff, but as a country, quite a lot of countries are really into their flags.

There are quite a few where the red stripe signifies the blood lost in war and stuff.

And quite a lot of countries don't allow you to burn them, whereas whereas America is fine.

Well, in America, they have a day for it, June 14th.

Absolutely.

It's the day that you retire flags.

So the idea is that you are meant to burn flags when they're over, and there's an actual day that you can save the flag for.

So if you want to burn an American flag, June 14th, that's the day.

If you want to be respectful.

Absolutely.

If you want to offend everyone, do it any other day of the year.

Yeah, the day before.

They do say in the flag code, don't they, the US has a flag code, and they say how to dispose of it, which is in a dignified way, preferably by burning.

But there are lots of other sites and lots of other companies which advise further on exactly how you should burn it.

And so, places like the Boy Scouts or flag sellers or the newspapers will say, What you've got to do is you've got to fold your flag up very carefully, place it in the very middle of a fire, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and then observe a minute's silence

as it burns.

The flag sellers say, and you must do that on the day after you buy it, and then buy another one immediately.

Have you heard of flag disposal boxes?

No, these are a thing in America.

They are specific specific boxes for your old flags that have become worn or weathered.

And you drop them in there and every so often a boy scout will come around and he'll open it up, take all the flags out and then burn them.

It's like a flag.

Respectfully.

It's like a flag.

And they have these in supermarkets.

Do they?

That's how big the flag is in the US.

It's basically like recycling.

You have your clear glass and your brown glass and then your flag.

Yeah, exactly.

That's so specific a thing to have.

Yeah.

You'd think there could be one collection day a year where someone just goes around saying, how many flags have you got through this?

Mate, there are so many flags.

There are so many flags in America.

It's like wine bottles here.

We have the huge pile of wine bottles at the end of the week.

They've just got, I can't believe we went through so many flags this week.

Do you get a bit embarrassed putting out all these flags and all your neighbours seeing, oh God, really went crazy last week?

We had a flag party.

We've got a flag problem, mate.

It did used to be illegal to burn the American flag, didn't it?

For quite a brief time.

So it was in 1968 when people were getting quite into it during Vietnam, quite into burning the flag in protest.

And it was made federal law that you couldn't do it.

And then in 1989, there was a guy called Gregory Lee Johnson who burned a flag.

It was like an anti-Reagan and anarchist sort of protest.

And he said he should be allowed to burn it.

It was violating his free speech, his freedom of speech, that he couldn't express himself by doing that.

And he won.

It was a quite a famous case, the Texas versus Johnson case.

He won.

And since 1989, it's been completely fine to burn the flag.

And what I found interesting was he's still going.

And

he's still doing the same thing.

He's still flag burning all over America.

And in 2016, he, this guy, Gregory Lee Johnson, was arrested during a staged flag burning at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

And the reason he was arrested, because obviously you can't be arrested for burning a flag, is that police said that he lit his pants on fire.

And there's an

utterly, no, I didn't.

They went, I a liar.

Anyway, I just want to say in Gregory Lee Johnson's defense and against all the news reports at the time, he didn't like himself or anyone else on fire.

This was just like classic US police bullshit.

And he actually got compensations of $225,000.

Hang on, Anna.

Did the Boy Scouts burn flags to dispose of them between 1960, whatever it was, 1969 and 1989?

They must have done that.

There must have been a loophole.

Yeah.

So it wasn't for the purposes of disposal.

That was sort of allowed.

It must have been, unless maybe they had an enormous flag pile up and didn't know what they were doing.

I mean, there might be a prison still with thousands of scouts in it.

We were all put away for life sentences.

They would have been able to get out of those scouts.

They've been trained.

This one, this badge, is for escaping Alcatraz.

Just a quick thing on flags and protesting.

Have you guys heard of the Danish protest pig?

No.

This is a pig that was basically bred in protest to the fact that during the Prussian rule in Denmark, there were bits of Denmark that were told they were not allowed to raise their flags.

So they bred a pig that had the exact colours of the flag as a sort of walking flag.

Yeah.

Red and white.

Yeah.

The colours of the flag, right?

Yeah, exactly.

It's probably kind of pinky and white if it's a pig, I imagine.

Yeah, it doesn't look like a flag when you see the pig.

I've seen pictures, but it obviously was just symbolic about it.

But yeah, that's amazing.

Yeah, it's just a nice little screw-you.

It's a relatively simple flag to replicate, I guess.

As opposed to the...

If you were the Seychelles flag.

Yeah, it was very hard to be really difficult.

What's the Seychelles flag?

It's just got lots of colours on it.

Right, got it.

Thank you.

Everyone laughs as if they all knew the Seychelles flag.

I know.

I was guilty.

Guilty as well.

I just assumed it would be.

Why wouldn't you pick it?

You've got to ask that.

You can't do the knowing laugh.

The people at home will be thinking, shit, maybe I should know the Seychelles flag, and they'll be hating themselves.

And then they'll look it up and laugh their ass off, and they realise it's a lot of fun.

It's almost like rays of light coming up from the bottom corner, and they're all different colours.

Yeah, James, we've got one on the wall right here.

A massive Seychelles flag.

Where do you think that's where we're recording from this week?

And it's facing the wrong direction.

That's the one we're going to burn after the show.

That's right, yeah, yeah.

So another thing which people use for protesting against America is shoes.

Do you remember this?

This kind of started, or one of the first people to do this was an Iraqi reporter called Mutaze Al-Zaidi, and he threw both of his shoes at George W.

Bush in 2008.

And it was quite good for one person, and that was the maker of his shoes, who could could then start selling them as special bye-bye bush models.

Amazing.

Did they come with grips so you could throw them better if George W.

Bush visited you?

They were just the same shoes but they just renamed them.

And in fairness to him the brother of the guy who threw the shoes said that actually he bought Iraqi-made shoes and this company who was selling the Bye-bye Bush ones was a Turkish company.

And apparently there was also a Syrian company who were claiming that they made the shoes.

But the Turkish ones was the one that took off, and they had to get a whole load of new workers in to make shoes because they were selling so many.

Wow, and yeah, he said that he saw it on TV and he said, I know that shoe anyway, that's definitely one of mine.

I wonder if people retrieve the shoes afterwards because it's not like burning something.

Once you've thrown your shoe at someone, do you then go and pick it up and put it back on?

So, do you know what happened to the shoes?

To the ones thrown at George Bush.

Were they taken by the Secret Service?

They were, but what did the Secret Service do?

Put them in Guantanamo Bay.

Waterboard

You will talk.

You've got a tongue.

You will talk.

No, they were, and it's exactly what we've been talking about with flags.

They were burned.

Oh, God.

And so that is one of the reasons why this Turkish company and the Syrian company and the Iraqi company could all say that they made them because they'd been burned, so no one knew exactly what they were.

Were they burned respectfully by a boy scout who had done up the laces first, tied them neatly.

Double knots, not that, yeah.

There is a record for the biggest flag, which is also a pizza.

Of course there is.

But was it flap?

It has to flap to be a flag.

This was actually just on a table.

This was a tablecloth.

It was the Stars and Stripes pizza, which they made with mozzarella and then dyed mozzarella.

That's cheesy.

I think we need to find the blue food.

They really tried and they just couldn't do it.

Blue M ⁇ Ms.

I think for the people who were ending up eating the pizza, they thought, yeah, I wouldn't do that.

But that was small, it was quite small, it was nine feet by four feet.

It was the size of the overall flag/slash pizza.

Yeah, okay, that doesn't shock me that no one else has thought to make a pizza flag.

It's an easily breakable record, though, if you're looking to break a record, that's what I'm saying, yeah, and go for a flag, which is quite easy to do.

Yeah, not the Seychelles,

and that's the low enough mouse.

We've all learned.

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

My fact this week is that the old word for intestines was ars ropes.

Are we trying to bring it back?

I love it.

I think it's, yeah, I think it's evocative, isn't it?

Yeah, the only issue is I don't talk about my intestines that much, so it'd sort of be a wasted swap.

If they were called ars ropes, you might.

I might bring them into every conversation.

So when was this?

This was in the 14th century.

So there's a great instance of it being included in the Wycliffe Bible, which was one of the first modern translated English versions of the Bible by a guy called John Wycliffe, I believe his name was.

No, Wycliffe Sean.

I'm pretty sure.

I've heard that name.

He might be right.

He's right, I think.

There is a link between John Wycliffe and Wycliffe Sean.

No.

Is there?

Yeah.

Wycliffe Sean was named after John Wycliffe.

Was he?

No.

Yeah, there's a tweet of him online saying, my father named me after John Wycliffe, the biblical scholar.

That's great, sounds amazing.

I know.

But I don't know why you've reversed the names, John Wycliffe and Wycliffe Sean.

Well, maybe his surname was Jean.

His surname happened to be Jean, and they thought this is an opportunity we can't miss.

I can't think of any other biblical scholars.

Martin Luther...

Was Martin Luther King named after Martin Luther?

He must have been.

Yeah.

I think people would have been called that because he was such a famous, heroic figure.

Well, so was John Wycliffe.

He was great.

So was Wycliffe Jean.

Ass Ropes Wycliffe.

Anyway, I think it was used to mean wreckham, right?

Specifically.

Or I think I read an encyclopedia from a couple of hundred years ago that was saying it was used to mean rectum, and then they sort of referred to the whole gut as being one continuous thing, which it is in a way.

And the end of it, at the end of the large intestine, the rectum was what they said for arse ropes.

And then they called the small intestines the small ropes.

But it wasn't a rope.

I mean, it's...

It's not a rope.

Your bottom.

You can see, well, you can see, you know, if you open someone up, you can see the ropes inside them of their intestines.

It's just so strange that they use that to mean your backside.

Well, it's a, you know, it's still a tube.

Yeah,

you're both making really good points.

A couple more arse words from the olden days that are obsolete.

Arse pos

was an obsolete word for a heavy fall on the buttocks.

Poss.

Ars poss.

Nice.

And arse winning was the money earned by prostitution.

Obsolete word.

Okay.

So we need to bring those back.

That's good.

So Pratt was also talking about your bum and your hip.

And I.

Yeah, I'd never known that.

So Pratt fall is off because of that.

Did not know that.

I'd never read that.

When you call someone a Pratt, you're saying they're an ass.

Yeah, or a hip.

Yeah,

could be, could be.

So just quickly, one more thing on John Wycliffe.

Yes.

So he was kind of a proto-Reformation person because he was an English scholar of the Bible, but he also disagreed with a lot of standard Catholic church practices like selling indulgences and praying to saints instead of just to God or to Christ.

And he was really unpopular in Rome for all these reasons.

So he died in 1384, really soon after his version of the Bible in English was published.

And then there was this church meeting called the Council of Constance, which was 40 odd years later.

And they were so annoyed with him still at this church meeting that they declared he should be dug up and his bones should be burned and then thrown into the nearest river.

No.

And it was done.

But was it done respectfully?

It was done very, very disrespectfully.

Wow.

And that's harsh.

I know this is harsh.

That Council of Constance, just quickly, they only met because there was a really embarrassing church situation where there were three popes at the same time.

That is a bureaucratic cock-up, isn't it?

It's a sitcom rated to get rid of that.

Yeah, there were two from 1378 onwards, and that was a bit embarrassing.

And then in 1409, player three entered the game that was pretending to be the Pope.

So one of them was, at least one of them was a pretender.

Yeah, so the council met to resolve this matter, and they did, but they also said, well, let's dig up Wycliffe while we're about, while we're all meeting, while we're here.

As a bonding thing, maybe.

On intestines.

Yeah, yeah.

The quite famous fact, the small intestines, what's the surface area?

Oh, it's something like a tennis court.

A tennis court.

It's not a tennis court.

That's what you get taught at school all the time, right?

The small intestines has this incredible surface area because it's covered in the little filly lumps and bumps and it's very windy.

And you're always told it's got the surface area of a tennis court or a football pitch.

And then a few years ago, scientists realized no one's ever actually properly measured this.

So they bothered to measure the surface area of the intestines.

And it was a bunch of Swedish scientists, and they actually worked out it's only 40 square meters, which is half the size of a badminton court.

Sorry, guys.

Pretty small.

Wow, that is small.

Yeah, I mean, it's still quite big to squeeze inside what is quite a relatively small body, but that's true.

They did think for a while, and I've not actually seen this disproven, that Russian people and Japanese people had longer intestines than anyone else.

Okay.

So, what it was, they measured some intestines back in the olden days, and they found that the Russian intestines were about five feet longer on average than anyone else in Europe.

And we think that probably the reason was because they had quite a small sample size.

And actually, your intestines, different people have different lengths, and that is, you know, they're quite different in size.

And they think probably they just got lucky that they got some Russians with big intestines.

But they blamed it on economic conditions, saying that they lived on a vegetarian diet and so they needed to grow longer intestines so they could eat all these vegetables.

Then, on the other hand, in Japan, there is a theory thought by Japanese people that Japanese people have longer intestines.

Okay, and I saw this really good article, Shame on Me, I can't remember where it was, where this person looked into this and they surveyed a load of Japanese students, and 65% of them believed that Japanese people had longer intestines.

And four of the people who they asked said that they were exactly 1.5 times anyone else in the world.

They had this belief, it's like a myth there.

But then this guy asked an actual doctor, and this doctor said it's kind of known in the field of, you know, cutting people up

that if you get young Asian women, they have extremely long intestines.

Okay.

And I just can't find any actual evidence of people other than these people actually measuring them.

So for all I know, it's true.

And the idea is that if you're on a vegetarian diet or that kind of diet, you might for some reason have longer intestines.

Now, obviously, this does sound like bullshit.

But it's widely thought in some parts of the world that that's true.

That's true.

So, koalas have really long intestines and they exclusively eat eucalyptus, and they have to break that down a lot because it's quite poisonous eucalyptus.

But that's over millions of years, so I don't know how quickly.

It doesn't take them millions of years to break down a bit of eucalyptus.

It's been a hell of a lifespan.

No, you are right um but it is definitely true that between individuals like my intestines might be way longer than yours or way shorter could they test it by presumably we could get you know some japanese people some russian people one of us to swallow something indigestible maybe some chewing gum or something and then we'll time how long it takes to come out and then whoever's probably doing it through ct scans or

you know just taking dead bodies and cutting them open maybe i don't know just by taking dead bodies and cutting them open i would struggle to get the wherewithal to cut open a dead body if we all tried it.

I thought arranging a CT scan was hard enough.

You know what?

I see what you're saying.

You're thinking of a practical way for us to do it because we know some Russians, we know some Japanese people, we could try it.

I thought that could be a first step, and then we'll think about the cadaver exhumation if that doesn't work.

Is that a thing, though, where we could race chewing gum?

No.

It's unlikely to be accepted for the Olympics 24.

Yeah.

Well, what do you mean is that a thing?

I mean there's a thing I just made up.

I was just wondering if there's a mean average speed of digestion.

Well there must be an average but people must vary I suppose.

Well because they've got five foot longer intestines yeah.

Yeah or you might have a narrower tunnel so that might your food might be pushed along it faster or take longer to get along it faster.

I know like Andy said it's not a spectator spot really is it's not much of one.

No but it's fun at a dinner party.

If you had a little GPS tracker inside the chewing gum let's say

Andy's making us away down there.

Yeah,

like a slalom ski route, and you had it up on screens.

I can see that being fun.

And they actually do that sort of thing now in medicine, don't they?

They send trackers down through your system.

It's quite a common thing to swallow something.

And they've got a new thing, which is, you know, how if you need to diagnose stomach issues, sometimes they'll have to do an endoscopy and you'll have to actually swallow something and it's quite uncomfortable.

And then they'll scrape the mucus from your stomach lining and then it'll get a sample of mucus and it'll work out what's wrong with you.

And now they've invented, and I think it's going to be released onto the markets in the next year or two a sort of hoover which you swallow and it does that for you so it's it's this tiny little capsule and you swallow it and it's got this amazing mechanism where it's got an opening at the top which is clamped shut by a weird like blob of wax but once it gets down to your stomach there's a magnet placed outside your body that triggers an electric current that melts that little wax pellet so it opens the sac up and then the sac can hoover up all the mucus in your your stomach lining, and then it'll carry it out like a little hoover bag.

And then you poo it out, and you return the hoover bag to the doctor.

They can tell you what's wrong with you.

That is fucking clever.

That's weird.

That's clever.

That is weird.

You know, bees,

they have expandable rectums.

Do they?

Yeah.

Don't we all?

Yeah.

Very good point.

Yep.

They're nothing special.

Okay, bees have extremely expandable rectums.

How expandable can they be?

Well, bees sometimes go into the hive for the winter.

Yeah.

And what they can do is they cannot have a poo for several months.

So some bees just stretch out their rectums between November and March.

They just carry around all their poo inside their bums for the last four months.

And then when March comes and it's spring again, they can leave the hive and then they have a poo outside.

They take an enormous copy of War and Peace or something and they say, I'll be a couple of days.

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

My fact this week is that researchers have 3D printed sex dolls for turtles

because this is what they do.

This was an article in the conversation about a researcher who was pointing out that we actually know surprisingly little about how a lot of turtles mate, and it's quite hard to study how they mate without disturbing them because you've got to go swim down with your snorkel and mask and watch them.

And so, what they've done is they've 3D printed decoys, and so they 3D printed these two decoy females.

And one of the things they were looking at was what's attractive in a female to a male turtle.

So they printed one that was your average size and one that was like the very upper end of the maximum size that a female could get to.

And they stick cameras on the turtles, sink them to the bottom of a lake or a pond or a river and see what happens.

And it turned out the large one, the big decoy, got twice as many visits and five times as many mating attempts

for the medium-sized.

That's very cool.

These are map turtles, right?

Yes, northern map turtles.

So they're really cool.

The reason that this 3D printing exercise worked quite well is because to mate, they all gather together into a massive orgy spot.

So this is every autumn, hundreds and hundreds will get together at the bottom of a lake and then they'll have sex and then they'll sort of wedge themselves under a rock so they don't float away.

And they'll basically go to sleep for five months, they'll hibernate.

And it's often under 50 centimetres of ice.

So they'll just be on the bottom.

And they don't breathe, although they breathe through their skin, they don't breathe through their mouths while they're doing that.

And they wake up in spring, first thing they do is mate again.

So they just have a long hibernation sandwich where the bread is the mating.

But that's why.

And the filling is the sleeping.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's a very big filling compared to the very thinned slices of mating bread.

I think you stretched this analogy enough.

I think it's willing to crack.

But anyway, that was why it was quite easy because you know exactly where to drop the decoys and there are plenty of them around.

And it's just really sad to watch.

Have you seen the videos videos of the little guys trying to mate with the females it's just awful knowing that the 3d printed females yeah it's just not going to get anything out of it

there's so much awesome 3d printing stuff that's going on so some scientists again with uh turtles they've been making fake uh sea turtle eggs and then burying them on the beach can you guess why is it so that because humans sometimes go and collect eggs and try and steal them bingo that's it is to it's to catch poachers.

Okay.

So you bury the fake eggs on the beach, and then the poachers come along and steal the decoys along with the real eggs.

But the decoys have GPS trackers in.

So then you just map where they're all going to.

Wow.

And if like eggs from two different GPS trackers end up in the same place, you think there's your hub of poaching, and you go there and make your arrests.

And if they accidentally eat the egg, we can then play that game that I really want to do of tracking the intestinal race.

Yeah, perfect.

I like the way that these people are poaching eggs.

Oh, yeah.

Isn't it?

So many people wrongly imprisoned.

Did you poach an egg?

Yeah, I did.

Did you guys see Spy in the Wild?

I actually didn't, but it was a series that made a load of fake animals and then sent them into animal colonies.

In the first series of it, they made a fake Langa monkey and then they sent it in to infiltrate a real Langer monkey society.

And then 120 gathered around it, and they were all really freaked out by this thing.

It looked exactly like one of them, but was not quite right.

And then it fell over because they were getting a bit boisterous around it.

And they all went really quiet because they thought, oh no, we killed it.

Oh, no.

Terry's dead.

And then they all were really silent and started hugging each other.

Oh, which I think is a sign of emotions spreading among this group because they thought they'd accidentally offed.

How did they think they'd killed it?

Just by staring it down?

Well, they nudged it and it fell over and it didn't move.

It's so interesting.

So, this was a guy, he works at the BBC or for the BBC with these programs called John Downer.

And he made a series ages ago where he didn't quite do animals.

He put cameras in boulders, he'd boulder cam basically.

And they thought that worked so well.

Why don't we try and make animatronic animals?

So they did a prairie dog, they did a walking crocodile, they did a female orangutan, and with each one they gave them a very specific trait that would help them survive in the wild.

So like the prairie dogs, the animals have they kiss each other a lot and so they have that ability to do that.

And there's a thing called the jump yip, which is a way of bonding.

And so they were able to make this do a jump yip.

Yeah, so they took all these traits.

Yeah, there was a spy puffer fish that they used.

It's incredible.

There's a meerkat smeared in feces.

That's right.

That's because they try to make it smell like the other meerkats by collecting their poo and then smearing their animatronic one with it.

So then a bee with a pile of poo in its palm.

Have you heard of these decoy deer they have?

I'm not sure if these are 3D printed, in fact.

I think they are kind of made by engineers and by sort of hunting experts.

But this is another way of luring poachers.

So this happens in Washington state and various different bits of the USA because finding poachers is unbelievably hard to do.

Because what you need is you need a wild animal and a poacher and a law enforcement officer all to be in the same place at the same time, which is really hard.

It's a nightmare.

So, they've started making these dummy deer and then putting them out in fields, and that lures the poachers to them.

But you also, whenever you put the deer out, you just have a wildlife officer who sits near it and waits for someone to pop up and shoot it.

And they've made them so good that they can now turn their heads, these fake animals, or lift their legs.

Nice.

Yeah, and so a deer costs about $3,000 to make, $3,000 to produce, right?

Because you need an animal skin and you need some mechanic, some sort of thing.

You need to kill a deer first.

So you kill the deer,

yeah.

Get the skin off it.

You hire a poacher to kill you a deer.

But once you've got that in place, you can make $30,000 in fines finding poachers.

Oh.

Yeah, there was one where they put it out, and within five minutes, a poacher turned up and tried to shoot it.

Because I was thinking, how do you guarantee a poacher is going going to find it?

You could be sitting there for weeks.

Well, if you put it near a road, that's quite helpful because obviously then they'll see it and they'll, you know,

they might stop the car and try and have a crack at it if they're not allowed to, if it's off-season or something.

So, yeah.

And they can be shot a hundred times without breaking some of them.

Really?

That's going to make the poacher suspicious on the 90th gunshot.

That's going to make that version of Bambi very long, isn't it?

Such a traumatic scene to be.

Bambi made by Tarantino.

Yeah.

I love decoy animals.

I like all the ways that scientists use them.

And I was looking at probably like the most kind of well-known, maybe widely used decoys, the duck decoy.

The classic hunters would have taken out ducks for hundreds of years because you plant a flock of fake ducks on a pond and then the real ducks flock to it.

And so I thought I'd look into this.

First of all, I didn't realize how many you had to bring out.

So when you went on a duck hunt in you know the 1700s, 1800s, then you wouldn't just take a couple of wooden carved duck decoys, you had to mimic a flock.

So, on your hunt, you'd take up to 500 carved ducks.

500.

You've got to plot this massive flock on your pond.

To catch one duck?

I don't know how they ever made a profit.

Does it make any sense?

To be fair, if I was a duck and I saw a party with 500 prets, I'd immediately want to join it.

Exactly.

And then you also had to have live decoy ducks with the 500.

Well, because they had to make the realistic calls.

So you'd have 500 quiet ducks made of wood, and then you'd have to have a couple of live ones that they'd keep on a lead, sort of in amongst them, to make the noise.

This all sounds untrue, doesn't it?

It's pretty sinister as well for the two ducks in the middle of these 500 dummies.

Luring their mates to their deaths.

That's incredible.

It's a rough gig.

We should wrap up soon, right?

Just a quick thing on turtles, tortoises.

You guys read that Diego the Hood Island tortoise has retired from shagging finally.

Finally.

This is