309: No Such Thing As The Best Bubble

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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 Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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

Starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that there is a 16th century exercise manual which recommends exercises including running, tennis and loud reading.

So two of those sounded quite sensible.

Running and loud reading, clearly, but what is about tennis?

It's not good for you.

No, so this was actually posted on Twitter by our colleague Justin Pollard, who's a historian.

And it was an article which was based on something found by Joan Fitzpatrick, who was reading a dietary by Sir Thomas Elliott.

It does sound like someone with a speech impediment saying the word diary there.

Yeah, no,

it is a dietary, and it's called The Castle of Health.

So it's about all these different ways that you can gain health in your life.

And there is a category of exercise called strong or violent exercise where he recommends all these things you can do, like digging heavy soil or doing resistance training which is like he I don't know if he invented this but basically you have to lift up your arms to the sides

while your friend is trying to hold them in place.

I don't think he invented most of it because it was all from Galen wasn't it and from the classical people.

He was kind of translating what the classics had said.

There was another guy called Lineker.

Not Gary Lineker, I don't think, because it's spelt different.

But he was doing the same thing at the the same time, but he was translating Galen from Greek to Latin, because he wanted doctors to be able to know this stuff, but he didn't want normal people to be able to tell what was wrong with them.

Whereas Elliot thought, no, everyone should be able to know what's wrong with them.

It's basically the googling what's wrong with you of its day.

Yeah, I think we like Elliot, right?

Yeah, really.

Sure.

He did.

Well, one of the things.

Just to finish off the original fact, one of the things he recommended was loud reading, which allegedly would blast away excess humours.

You could blow into wind instruments as well if you you wanted to help your intestines work better.

Yeah.

Yes, also singing or crying.

Crying.

Crying.

I didn't agree that.

Yeah.

It says crying.

And I did look into crying to see if it's good for you.

And according to this, it is admittedly from Quora, so I'm not sure how true it is, but it was sourced.

They said if you cry for an hour, then you would use up 78 calories.

And I worked out that's about the same as 40 grams of ice cream.

So if you cry for an hour and eat 40 grams of ice cream, you're on a level playing field.

No one's one's ever cried for an hour and eaten that little ice cream after it.

Can I just quickly say one of the things he recommended in this text?

Because we were saying that he's recommending things in English to make them clear for normal people.

Yeah.

I just want to read a sentence to you from the text.

As touching things preceding exercise, as much as it is to be feared, least by vehement exercise, any of the excrements of the belly or bladder should hastily be received into the habit of the body by the violence of the heat kindled by exercise, also least something which is whole by heaviness of excrements or violent motion.

So he just goes on and on and on and on.

And he sent us the magnet.

That's about a third of the way through that sentence.

Do you know what that's about?

I think one of the things he's saying is you should warm up so you don't shit yourself when you exercise.

Yes, he is saying that.

And he also, because he got this from Galen as well, he's saying that you should always go to the toilet just before you exercise.

And the reason is if you don't do that, then the exercise will kind of drive your waist deeper and deeper into your body and you'll never be able to get rid of it.

Oh no.

But the body's not a never-ending pit.

If you drive your waist further and further down, it does emerge from the other end.

That's what we know now.

But no, did he think it would go into your legs?

I don't think so.

Surely it was deeper within you, deeper into the middle of you.

It wasn't like that, so when you get older and you've got those swollen feet.

Yeah.

That actually is based in some truth because if you do go for a run, you quite often get an attack of diarrhea about 40 minutes in, don't you?

Okay.

Do you?

I don't.

No, I don't either.

It's a very common thing.

It doesn't affect everyone, but it affects a large proportion of people.

Maybe one quarter of the people in this room, for instance, I guess.

It's a bit like that time you told us that when anyone drinks coffee they shit themselves.

Again, these are all hypothetical.

They're just things that I've read.

I have read up a lot on this sort of thing.

I guess Paula Ratcliffe, but I thought that was a fairly solid poo.

Oh, God.

From what I read.

I've never run anywhere for longer than 37 minutes, so I've actually never had this.

There you go.

Just add an extra three.

James did an you did a half marathon recently.

I did.

I ran for a lot longer than 37 minutes because I didn't run very fast and I didn't shit myself, which was the main thing I was aiming for, really.

Made some money for charity, didn't shit myself.

A good day all round.

Thomas Jefferson used to cure his diarrhea by riding horseback.

And I believe without a saddle.

And that was, yeah, he claimed that cured his diarrhea in the first bout that he had.

Wow.

Really?

What did the horse claim?

This Thomas Elliott, he was a bit of a professional suck-up because his first book that he wrote was called The Book of the Governor, and it basically just said how great kings are.

Oh, really?

Yeah, all the way through.

It just says, Oh, aren't kings amazing?

And then a few years later, he got a job from the king who sent him as his ambassador to the Emperor Charles V.

Yeah, so his job was to basically negotiate the divorce with Catherine of Aragon.

So he was working for Henry VIII, and he was one of the people Henry VIII sent to Europe to say, look, the the Catholics in Europe are already pissed off with me.

Can you make it all okay?

And he failed, and the Church of England was created.

But he was also quite cool because he was a supporter of learned women, which was quite unusual at the time.

This is a thing he sort of got from Thomas More, but he wrote a book called Defense of Good Women.

And the idea was at the time, a lot of people thought it was quite bad for women to learn to read or be educated at all, quite dangerous for them.

But he said, in his book, Defense of Good Women, it's good for women to be educated so that they can provide intellectual companionship for their husbands, which is a step in the right direction, guys.

The reading out loud thing being good for your health was quite a persistent idea.

So I came across a thing written in 1816 called The Code of Health and Longevity, which is another basically exercise manual book.

And it also said that loud reading and speaking are often good substitutes for other kinds of exercise.

And it says, hence, the longevity of schoolmasters, because they don't really move around very much, but they do speak loudly a lot and

it also says that because speaking loudly is a healthful exercise it's one reason why women require less bodily exercise than men since they are often more loquacious Okay, I've got a lot of sexist facts today.

I didn't realize until researching this fact that reading aloud at parties and social gatherings was a thing that we used to do.

Yeah.

I wonder if I get all these looks on the tube.

But no, it's such such a wonderful world to me, the idea that you would sit in a room and someone would just read to you and you would all join in.

And there's all these examples of, in the 1700s particularly, women in correspond letters correspondences sending each other recommendations for types of book to be read out loud while they were doing certain things like knotting work, for example.

Apparently

Boswell's Tour of the Hebrides is a fantastic book to be read out loud.

When you're just tying knots and pieces of string while you're knotting

knotting work.

But yeah, there's many examples of good books to be read for situations.

Sorry, we're sure it's not knitting.

It said knotting, and so I assume that was a 17th century.

Anything that's not knitting is knotting.

No, good call.

It's one of those things that I just assumed, oh, that's a weird hobby at the past.

I don't need to look that up.

Yeah, maybe they were all sailors, these women.

They could have been making rope.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is this what you're talking about?

That in

factories they would have people reading to them.

They used to do that as well.

Yeah, yeah.

There was a cigar, Monte Cristo cigars, in fact, are named after the fact that it was the favourite book to be read out in the factory at the lectern.

Yeah.

Wow.

So that's what they say.

The guy who took over it rebranded the company, and one of their favourite books was The Count of Monte Cristo.

You'd have to work there a fuck of a long time to get through the whole book.

I really want to quit my job, but he hasn't even got out of prison yet.

That's better, though.

You want to have a long read to keep the factory workers entertained if it was called the very hungry caterpillar cigar company you'd have a lot of very bored employees

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

My fact this week is that scientists in Georgia just blew a six metre wide soap bubble.

Wow.

Well what room did they do it in?

That's not not the first question I was thinking of asking.

I just thought that's wider than this room, I think, the room we're recording in now.

And it's probably wider than most of the rooms I um in my home.

They actually they had to have a special extra large room built just for this bubble.

I can't believe you don't have a job as an interviewer on national television.

Thank you.

We're cutting live now to Andy who's on the scene.

Presumably this wasn't the room.

Prince Andrew, what room was it at Peter Express that you were in?

Come on, main restaurant, eh?

All right.

So what room was it in?

It was

outdoors.

It was outdoors.

Yeah, I believe so.

Riskier for a bubble, though, but potentially faster.

But at least you can get one that big.

Yes.

Outdoors, the biggest room of all.

I think it was that.

I've certainly seen him practicing outdoors, although I didn't see where they did the real thing.

But yeah, outdoors on the ground.

So this was a study published in Physical Review Fluids.

And one of the authors was inspired when he went to Barcelona and he saw street performers blowing these.

You know, they have those massive bubbles that kids love.

And they don't blow them, they sort of weave them.

You know what I'm talking about.

With sticks and a bit of rope in between the sticks.

With sticks and rope.

And he thought, how on earth does something so thin stay together when it gets so big and there's that pressure on it?

And so they tried to blow a massive one, and they did.

And they worked out the way of doing it.

And it's not very interesting if you don't know a lot about fluid dynamics.

Is this the biggest bubble ever made?

I believe it's the biggest soap bubble ever made.

How big can bubbles get?

I mean, how big is your room, first of all, but then how big can they get?

Is it like they can get...

I think we don't know a maximum.

Well, there are records.

So Guinness keeps a lot lot of records okay so 2015 the record was broken then I don't know if this new six meter one has beaten it but the largest bubble then was 3400 cubic feet in volume and that I genuinely have written down is about the size of a classroom it's probably why I was asking about the room thing

but the the weird thing about that is how do you measure because it's not perfectly round and it's not and an independent adjudicator from Guinness needs to turn up and measure it and what they did is they photographed it just as it was finished and And then a scientist independently used photographs from, I've written this down, orthogonal angles, orthogonal angles, which is a term I've never heard before.

But basically, I think photograph from a lot of different angles and you build up a picture of how big it is.

How big do you say that one was?

That was 3,400 cubic feet.

Yeah, so this one that Anna's talking about was 100,000 liters.

So do you, Matt.

And they said it was big enough to swallow a Volkswagen beetle.

Wow.

Nice.

That's big.

That is big.

You know,

as you're saying, there's a bunch of bubble records.

I think my favourite one I found on the Guinness site is Most Bubbles Blown with a Tarantula in the Mouth.

That's an existing

record.

Did you watch the footage?

No, I saw a photo.

There's a video of this guy who loves this tarantula, but he loves bubbles as well.

And he just pops his tarantula in his mouth and then blows bubbles with...

Is the tarantula allowed to help blowing?

Because you've got two people blowing, aren't you, really?

That's true.

Has he really broken the record?

It's the weirdest weirdest record attempt you've ever seen because he's just got a tarantula sitting inside his mouth live and it's his pet, it's his favourite.

And then he blows bubbles for a while and then it just crawls out of his mouth onto his hand.

And what was the previous record?

Were there lots of previous records?

Was this something that many people have done?

You've got 119 bubbles blown in 30 seconds.

Surely he could just do one and he's broken the record.

Why bother?

There's also most people put inside a soap bubble in 30 seconds and that's 13.

And this brings me to an important point which might speak to what Andy said before about the Guinness bubble.

So, the putting inside the soap bubble, again, it's one of those ones on sticks where you sort of people jump inside it and it's woven up through them.

And that's not a bubble as far as this study was concerned.

Okay.

Because, well, the bubble just needs to go all the way around, be a full sphere.

So, I don't know if the one that broke the record was still being blown out of the aperture.

But I think the bubble needs to be self-contained,

complete.

And it's an example of science being very clever, the fact that bubbles will always try and be a sphere.

So if you've got a piece of string and you're told to lay it out on a table with the biggest possible area, then you'll naturally put it in a circle.

So if you've got a piece of string of the same length, a circle is a shape which will give it the biggest area.

And in the same way, the bubble kind of knows that.

Well, one of the first people who studied this was a guy called Antoine Plateau.

He is probably the world's first bubble scientist.

And he worked out that not only do bubbles always turn into spheres, if left on their own, if you put them together, they always join at an angle of 120 degrees.

What?

And again, there's mathematical reasons why this is the case.

It's all about packing and stuff like that.

But this guy, Plateau, is really amazing.

He had problems as a child.

He lost his parents and he had mental problems.

And so they sent him away to the country to get better.

Unfortunately, it was June 1815 and they sent him to the village of Waterloo.

Oh no.

Oh my god.

I know.

And so he was there when the battle was happening.

But then...

Was he all right?

He was fine because he managed to live to be a bubble scientist.

And the best bubble scientist there ever was, probably.

Well, his career started very well, didn't it?

Plateau, but then, unfortunately,

just kind of very good.

Very good.

And he did his bubble work despite being blind, a lot of his work, because when he was older, he was blind.

He lost his sight in an experiment to see how long he could look at the sun.

Oh, no.

Oh, my God.

The Guinness World Record of its day.

Yeah.

Just an experiment.

Oh, that's awful.

Yeah.

But I mean, he's one of the greats in this field.

He doesn't sound like that smart a guy, does he?

He really doesn't.

Because Newton did that as well, didn't he?

Yeah.

Looked at the sun for too long.

And he reported that his eyes hurt afterwards and he went blind for a couple of days.

And so I don't know why people continued to do it.

And Newton was an idiot.

He used to put bodkins in the back of his eyes to see if he could look behind them.

Fucking moron.

Do you remember, I think I might have told you guys that I used to go on stage every day after a bubble performer.

Did you?

Yeah, when we were doing ostentations at the fringe, the act before us was the amazing bubble man.

Cool.

What did he do?

Unbelievable things.

Were they big?

Was it the number of bubbles?

Was it the size, the shape?

You name it.

Were the tarantulas involved?

No tarantulas that I saw, but I only ever saw the last 10 minutes of his act.

How big was the room?

It was quite a big room.

It was.

He always demanded playing huge rooms, even though he was only about two or three people audience.

He did incredible.

He did bubbles that he stabbed and then they survived, or he would make bubbles inside other bubbles.

Oh, yeah.

He would do bubbles filled with smoke.

Wait, I've made a bubble inside another bubble.

Like, every child who's had bubble mix has done that.

What?

That's hard.

Wow, that's so embarrassing, Andy.

Less time reading, more time blowing bubbles than it did for you.

That's what I would recommend.

Anna was in one corner of the playground blowing bubbles, and Andy was doing his Jane Austen improvisation on the other side.

Did he spill some of his bubble juice on the stage and you kept slipping on it?

Because it would be slippy, wouldn't it?

It was very slippy, but he always mopped up very carefully afterwards.

But it was, no, it was a messy old thing.

Yeah, they call it bubble juice.

Do they?

Yeah, the bubblers do.

Like the people who like bubblers.

The people who like bubbles are called bubblers.

Or if they really like it, they're called bubble heads.

And they call their juice bubble juice.

I think if you're being called a bubbler, you must like bubbles enough to be called a bubble head.

Maybe not.

Come on, mate.

In all these subcultures, you need levels.

That's true.

Yeah.

You have to.

How are they going to fall out over stuff?

So I quite like bubbles.

Does that make me anything in this world?

I don't think so, no.

Yeah.

It's like saying, I've read all the Harry Potters, and someone says, what house are you sorted into?

And you say, oh, I haven't done that.

You're not a Potterhead.

You're just a reader of Potter.

Okay.

That's a good analogy.

Yeah, that was pretty close.

And I am fine with that.

Are you fine with not being a bubble head?

No, I'm living.

Then you better get into it because it is quite a big subculture, the bubblers.

And this actually.

It's getting bigger all the time, isn't it?

I think it's going to burst at some point.

So they were consulted heavily in the study that I mentioned at the start of this fact when the physicists were looking for advice on how to blow the best bubbles.

All these nerds suddenly, their use became apparent.

You know, because they're always exchanging, like, this is the best liquid to use, this is the best juice.

Juice.

Sorry.

Sorry.

This is the best juice to use.

And actually, do you know what the the best soap is?

No.

No.

Well, it's not surprising, actually, if you've watched the adverts.

Imperial leather.

Oh, it's not imperial leather.

It's very liquid.

It's very liquid.

This is actually according to another study I read.

So studies on bubbles just abound.

It's a huge area.

And it's a 2006 paper called Giant Soap Curtains for Public Presentations.

And it's...

Soap curtains sounds disgusting to me.

I don't even know what it's supposed to be, but it sounds disgusting.

They're also very ineffective soap curtains.

I had a pair of soap curtains once.

They kept out almost none of the light.

And there was always a rainbow outside.

So this, it was actually quite good.

It was by some physicists who first of all said, the question we're always asked is, are we paid to do this?

No, we're like high-level researchers.

We're just doing this to spread the word.

And it was saying soap curtains are a really good thing to engage kids.

So it's basically like a huge soap bubble, but it's very flat.

It's drawn between two big poles.

And you sort of wash soap down it like a waterfall and it creates this constantly moving long bubble.

Anyway, they looked into it and they said the best washing up liquid for surface elasticity is a Procter ⁇ Gamble, which is marketed as Dreft in Europe and Dawn in the US and Fairy in the UK.

But if you're in France, terrible news, doesn't contain the crucial ingredient that makes it elastic.

Does it not?

So you can't blow such big bubbles in France.

What is it?

Can you add it to it?

I don't actually know what it is.

I think it's probably some long chemical word.

But yeah, you'd have to add it.

You'd have to order your own from elsewhere.

Oh, my God.

So desolé.

On the bubble Wikipedia,

they also asked what's the best bubble juice in the FAQs.

And the answer is not quite so clear-cut.

It says everyone has a different definition of the best bubble.

There is no actual best juice because what one person defines as the best bubble may not align with how another person defines the best bubble.

It feels like there's a divorce behind that statement.

Is there a bubble...

Do you mean like a separate mini Wikipedia for bubblers?

Yeah, so these guys from Georgia, who Anna was talking about, they went into a big online community of bubblers, like Anna says, and I think one part of it was the bubble Wikipedia.

Yeah, so cool.

So cool.

And actually, bubbles is really important.

If you're studying it, bubbles are really important because when you work out how they exist, it can help you in glass making, it can help you in other industrial processes.

I read one article that it helps in building lab-on-a-chip bubble logic devices.

I don't know what they are.

For all I know, there might be 100 in my phone.

And also artificial viruses for vaccines.

You need to learn about bubbles if you want to make those.

I found one other bubble that is not on Earth, it's in space.

These are two super bubbles

at the center of a distant galaxy that are massive cavities filled with gas, and they're full of charged particles.

And the particles are 100 times stronger than we've even made at CERN.

100 times stronger than any particles found on Earth in terms of their charge.

Oh, okay.

Their charge is stronger.

One of these bubbles is 3,600 light-years across, and the other one is 4,900 light-years across.

Think of the size of room you'd need to.

Wow.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

What happens if they pop?

Don't know.

But yeah, Neptune's orbit around the Sun is less than one thousandth of one light-year across, just to put that in perspective.

Into a perspective that you still can't even begin to understand

yeah cheers me that helped one other space bubble that's uh dangerous to humans is the space bubble that we create so astronauts in the international space station when they go to sleep when they exhale they build this bubble of carbon dioxide that sits in front of their face that can be very dangerous so every astronaut when they go to sleep they have to sleep with their head near an air vent because they need that bubble pushed away from them otherwise they can suffocate on it wake up with huge migraines potentially die.

You could just sleep with a very long straw in your mouth.

No, because then the bubble would start at the end of the straw.

You're just moving the problem.

Imagine if you were a NASA designer.

It was a really long straw, though, I'm sure it would be fine.

What if you had you went to sleep and you invented this thing?

It's like a tiny straw, but as the time goes on, the straw gets longer and longer and longer.

That's a good idea.

That's a good idea.

It's a Pinocchio straw.

Yeah.

Oh, you are lying after all, aren't you?

Absolutely right.

So good.

This thing sells itself.

One more thing about bubbles, which I really like, is penguins.

We're not quite sure how they do this, but we think they basically blow bubbles out of their beaks, and then the bubbles go onto their body.

And when they're swimming, it means they can go quicker through the water because the bubbles mean there's less friction with the water.

Really?

And that's the only way they can get the speeds where, you know, a penguin kind of swims up and then can jump out of the water onto the land.

They won't be able to do that if they didn't have bubbles around their whole body.

Wow.

And there's an idea that we could make ships with a load of bubbles around the hull and then that could cut fuel consumption by about 15%.

That's worth doing.

Very cool.

Get penguins to dribble on our ships and then we're set.

Just tie one penguin at the front of every ship

with a straw.

Could get bigger as well.

Yeah, put it in the place of that pointless fit statue of a woman that's always at the front of ships.

Put it back in the ship.

It was the last time you saw a ship.

It was the last time you got a ferry to France.

I only travel on Viking ships.

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

My fact this week is that before she became famous, Marilyn Monroe was named the Artichoke Queen of Castroville, California, Miss Cheesecake by Stars and Stripes magazine, and queen of the radio plane company, where she worked assembling military drones during World War II.

So cool.

A little interesting career moment from her.

She would have had a lot of early prizes before she became the true Marilyn Monroe.

Yeah.

Was she even caught Marilyn Monroe at that point?

She wasn't.

She was Norma Jean at that point.

She was at the time she got the artichoke queen.

Yes, that's true.

Yes.

Because that was at a time when she wasn't famous, but she was almost famous.

Because she was on a promotional tour for diamonds.

There was a guy who was selling diamonds, and he also was a movie star promoter.

He wanted to promote his store by getting a young starlet in.

He asked this starlet called Doreen Nash if she would do it.

She said yes.

She cancelled at the last minute, and then Marilyn Monroe came along and did it instead.

But she was famous enough that she was doing autographs and stuff.

Yes, exactly.

She was at that point, she was given the sort of honorary role rather than having to compete for it.

She became the queen of the artichoke.

Yes, right.

What actually happened is she was in another, she was in some like room or something.

And some guys who were like a room,

Tell me more.

And there was a load of artichoke salesmen who just saw their chance and then ran over to her and gave her a sash, held a load of artichokes, took a photo and that was it.

There was nothing else happening there.

So these other things that Marilyn Monroe or Norma Jean did before she became super famous were really they were in the 40s, weren't they really?

And she, her first small break, I reckon, was probably in World War II when she was working for this kind of, as you said, it like a drone company where she was so what they did was they had these remote control planes, which the Americans wanted to use for basically reconnaissance, I think.

And she was spraying the parachute, the mini parachutes for these planes.

Is that right?

And target practice, too.

Some of them were used for some of the drones were just for anti-aircraft gunners to have a go on.

Okay.

And, okay, because then you don't have to fly the drone as far away as you'd have to fly a full-size one in order to get the corresponding target practice.

You don't have to kill a pilot every time you're doing anti-aircraft training.

The best of both worlds.

So many advantages.

So, anyway, there was this idea that people should start photographing women who were working towards the war effort as part of this PR campaign, pro-war PR campaign.

And she was one of these women photographed, and that was her first small break.

And the person who instructed this campaign to happen was one Captain Ronald Reagan.

Was it indeed?

So Marilyn Monroe may never have existed.

if it weren't for Reagan.

So when Marilyn Monroe first became more famous, one of her things they tried to sell her as was an mmm girl.

Okay.

That's MMMM girl.

And that was in response to Anne Sheridan, who was a previous actor, actually still there at the time, but she was known as the oomph girl because she had a lot of oomph.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

And when people said, well, why are you calling Marilyn Monroe the mm girl?

Her publicists said, well, it's because whenever she goes to Detroit, that's what people say.

Whenever she walks past, they all go, mmm.

Detroit, why Detroit?

Well, according to their publicists, it's because people in Detroit can't whistle.

What is this story, James?

That's what the publicist said.

Why didn't the publicist just say her name is Marilyn Monroe?

Mmm.

I know.

And her middle names are Margaret Michael.

It's a really stupid story.

That's why I bring it up.

People in Detroit can't whistle.

It sounds like the panicked lie of Boris Johnson talking about his hobbies.

I was looking a bit into her first marriage, which is probably her least known marriage to a guy called James Doherty.

And they were married for four years in the late 1940s.

And he went on.

So he always said that he never claims to have any insights on Marilyn Munro.

I never knew Marilyn Munro.

I knew and loved Norma Jean.

Spelt with an extra E on the end, by the way, which no one ever does.

So Jean was spelt J-E-A-N-E.

But he had a weird career.

He went on to work for the LAPD for basically his whole life, where he helped to found and train, and like he was the lead trainer of America's first ever SWAT team.

Was it?

You know, like a SWAT team, like elite police marksmen who go into like hostage situations and stuff like that.

He also,

when he was working as a policeman, at one stage, he was doing crowd control at the movie premiere of a Marilyn Monroe film,

which was the

asphalt jungle.

Wow.

Seems a bit heavy-handed to dispatch a SWAT team to a Marilyn Monroe movie.

Well,

that must have been really painful for him because he was never allowed to actually watch a Marilyn Monroe film because his wife banned him.

I think you would be a jealous of you if you were

the second wife to Marilyn Monroe.

But he had a really awkward incident when in the 1950s he was asked to be on a reality TV show which was to tell the truth.

It was called To Tell the Truth a Game Show and they had a segment which they do on Buzzcocks which where they bring sort of a number of people out and you have to guess which one of them is the real ex.

Yeah, yeah.

And the contestants had to guess which one is the real ex-husband of Marilyn Monroe.

Did they guess him?

Do you know?

I actually don't know if they guessed him right.

What I do know is he lied to his wife so he could be on the show.

And when she found out, terrible lie, because obviously she was watching TV and storming.

And there was only one channel at the time.

Incredibly stupid lie.

So when she found out, she threw a pan at him.

Oh, wow.

She threw a pan, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, they did do that in those days, didn't they?

Throw pans at each other.

Yeah.

So this fact was partly about Marilyn Monroe being artichoke queen.

Yes.

I found out a few other

queens,

food-related queens that America has.

There's a great article in the Wall Street Journal which described the national pork queen, the Ohio Queen of Beef, and various other queens.

And this is a thing where they all face off against each other to be missed agriculture.

So

it's like a massive derby of queens of different foods.

Did they fight each other with massive cuts of the meats that they're eating?

Who would your money be on?

Would it be on the bacon, the sausage?

I'm thinking a big cow corpse.

Yeah.

Queen of Beef.

It's going to be the queen of beef.

If you could wield one of those, you're unbeatable.

Definitely.

Because you're not going to be in much trouble up against the egg queen, which is another one of these queens.

There's a corn queen, wheat queen, separate lamb and wool queens, which is very weird.

Anyway,

they have to be,

you know, there's a sort of element that they're all quite good-looking young women, obviously, because that's one of the things they have there.

But they also have to give speeches on the products they represent.

And they have to converse while being watched by judges about their chosen products and the judges are looking to see who best represents farming spirit.

Okay.

And then the winner gets crowned queen of agriculture and goes around speaking about agriculture and how important it is and all of this.

Yeah.

So if you're the egg queen, do they ask you just questions about eggs or are they asking because you're actually representing the whole of agriculture so you'd need to know about beef and lamb and wool and everything.

I think in these regionals you only have to answer questions.

on your specialist food.

I'm not certain, but I think that's it.

Yeah, if you're promoted to queen of agriculture, it's it's like if you've just been home secretary for years and then you become Prime Minister or something.

How do you know about all the other departments?

It's a really big step.

It's a huge step.

I don't think they should be allowed this kind of responsibility.

I think you should have to be every single minister before you become prime minister.

And every single queen.

I think Boris Johnson needs to be a sausage queen before

he.

Actually, never mind.

Sounds like a bit of prison terminology there.

It does.

Yeah, industry queens have been quite a big thing for about 100 years, haven't they?

I think they kicked, which are mascots for certain industries.

And I think we covered them a bit in the Q series of QI.

We did, yeah.

But it's.

If it's gone out yet, I'm not sure if it's gone out yet in that episode.

Might have done.

You may have seen this or you're about to see it on QI.

But they were people who represented their industry.

So you'd have a coal queen or a railway queen.

And there's actually, we did cover the sausage queen who was 15 years old.

And they were so important and considered such diplomats for their industries that they did things like this 15-year-old sausage queen was put straight on a train to Moscow in 1936 to meet Joseph Stalin and talk about how great British sausages were.

Did she have sausages to present?

Stalin must have done.

I suppose so.

I've seen a picture where she's sort of wearing sausages around her neck and on her head and stuff.

It's a very odd picture.

Oh,

that's a weird crown.

She's wearing a sort of hula skirt made of sausages.

Yeah.

As Stalin, you would have to think these people are trying to take the piss, aren't they?

Yeah.

I'm in charge of Russia and they're sending their sausage queen.

Apparently, it did great diplomatic.

Well, that's one of the main reasons that Russia eventually joined our side in the Second World War.

It thought it was because of her.

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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 there is a salamander in Bosnia who hasn't moved from the same spot since 2010.

And we're sure it's alive?

Well

I'm not sure it's currently alive.

I'm sure it was alive in 2018 when they last checked.

It might have moved since then but I'm assuming if it stayed in the same place between 2010 and 2018 it probably is still there.

Yeah.

Is that fair to assume?

I think so.

Although

in the study that was done there was a suggestion that they can't be positive it hasn't moved.

It might have gone away away and just returned by the time they go back.

Every time they checked, it was always in exactly the same spot.

Yeah.

But that doesn't mean that it's sneaking off and then when it sees them coming, it runs back in.

Yeah, it's like the Toy Story toys.

Exactly.

As soon as they see the kid come back in the room, obviously they're going to be back in the same place.

Back to your places, yeah.

Okay.

So this is an olm.

It's a white

salamander.

It's known in Bosnia as the human fish because it has a pink skin colour.

And there is a couple of scientists in Budapest whose names I'm not going to try and pronounce.

Gurgly Balash, maybe?

Gurgly Balash.

Joking on water or something.

It's a strong name.

Imagine it's not that at all.

Like you've just completely, someone said, hey, you're on the no such thing as a fish podcast this week.

Come listen.

James.

Well, imagine he was once asked to introduce himself and his name's just Balash, but he was just swallowing a mouthful of water at the time.

Well, actually, I mean, he was diving into the water to inject

these ulms with a pigment.

And each ulm they injected with a different shape of pigment.

And then every now and then they'd come back and see where they were.

And the idea was to see how much they're moving.

And it turns out that most of the ulms move less than 10 meters.

And about five meters per year was typical.

And the most active olm they found moved 38 meters in 230 days.

And then the guy who I'm talking about was found in exactly the same spot after 2,567 days.

Wow.

More than seven years.

It's really amazing.

And the other thing, I mean, ohms are incredible

because they can survive a very long time without eating.

Yes.

And they've got, I think, they've tested some because they have a lab in France because they're very endangered these things.

And one ulm is known to have survived 12 years without eating anything.

They just like one little crustacean comes along and they just gobble it all up.

They can eat it whole, and then it'll just take them all that time to digest it, and they'll just sit around doing nothing until the next one comes along.

Well, thinking.

I think they're meditating.

They're all sitting there just going, ohm.

I've actually seen olms in my life.

In the pale flesh.

Yeah.

I went to Slovenia.

And in the Postiana caves

they have this.

You're underground.

You're in this incredible cave system and then they've just got this booth.

It's so weird seeing this metal booth and it's like a terrarium for these odds.

And you can look at them and they keep them there partly to educate the public and partly to conserve them.

And they're there.

Did you see them move?

No, I didn't see them move.

They stayed very still.

In fact, I have a prop with me which I've left downstairs related to this.

Great.

Shall I go get it?

Is it going to be good radio?

No.

Get it.

He's going to get it.

Oh, my God.

Okay, well, while Andy's away,

don't say anything more about Olms.

Andy just said, because you can't hear him, he said, don't say anything more about Alms while I'm gone.

I want to get the prop.

He's gone to get the prop.

So, what are we going to say about Andy while he's away?

Who is going to replace him

in the next few months?

If you want to replace Andy on No Such Things A Fish, then please write to to podcast at qi.com.

Yes.

Qualifications?

Great props.

Always bring your props with you.

It's very important.

Okay, so Andy has returned.

Please.

He's going to turn the heat on.

Is it something that can't survive in higher temperatures?

Kind of, because it's a model ulm.

Okay.

So,

Dan, do you want to explain what Andy's just put on the table?

Yeah, so it's a soft toy penis.

It's an olm.

If your penis has four legs down, then you really need to get that looked at.

Yeah, it's a little soft toy olm.

I just brought it because I bought it at the caves and I wanted to show you that.

It's really cool.

I mean, it is quite phallic.

It is.

This is a lot bigger than the ones they have in the caves.

These are tiny, and they've really beefed this up for the plush toy version.

Well, you've just turned the heating off, so it'll probably get smaller in the next few minutes.

Anyway,

we couldn't do it without me bringing in the soft toy.

It wouldn't have worked.

This whole podcast wouldn't have worked without you bringing this soft toy.

Maybe you should put a picture of the OLM on your Twitter account.

Does it have a name?

No, it doesn't yet.

I would call it Sherlock Ulms.

Brilliant.

Very strong.

Terrible at solving crimes.

If you can't move,

it's like eating.

You just have to hope a crime happens directly in front of you.

So what more can we say about olms?

Well, David Attenborough loves them.

Does he?

So he picked them in 2012 as one of the 10 endangered species he'd take on his own personal arc.

And guys, we're not even there.

I guess we're not endangered.

This is so weird because I have a salamander-related Noah's Ark fact.

Okay.

Which is that.

So this is not ALM-related, so this is just a brief step away from Alms.

But

there's a giant salamander in China, which is absolutely massive.

They're about five feet long.

They weigh about 60 kilos.

And the very first fossil of it found was one of the earliest fossils discovered by humans.

Okay.

And it was named Homo diluvi testis, which means human witness of the flood, because people didn't know what this salamander fossil was.

And it was thought to be a person who had died in Noah's flood.

Wow.

And if any of you at home thought it meant human floodballs, then that's just, you know, learn your Latin better.

Not just at home.

Most Chinese salamanders are eaten in some parts of China.

I think they are on the...

They're endangered.

They are endangered, so don't do it, kids.

But they used to eat salamanders in the southern USA, especially in times of poverty.

And there is one theory that the term hush puppies originally referred to a salamander.

Because a hush puppy, before it became like a type of shoe, is it?

Hush puppies?

Yeah.

It was like a tiny bit of food that you would eat.

And the idea was that these salamanders were also known as water puppies.

And the hush came from the fact that people didn't want to know that they were eating this stuff because it was a poverty food.

Oh, really?

It's either that or it was like a little bit of food you gave to a dog to keep it quiet.

It could be that as well.

Hush puppies.

How did that become a shoe?

Well, no, it's the branding as a dog, right?

I didn't know that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't really know that.

So, sorry, is the branding about to make your puppy hush, kick it with this shoe?

No, no, no, no.

The adverts were controversial at the time.

Just one more thing about the giant Chinese salamander.

It's very cool because it also generates glue.

And this is really glue that might be actually very useful.

So it secretes this mucus, and it will secrete the mucus if you gently scratch it, apparently.

And so researchers have been investigating this to see if it can be used as a medical adhesive.

And apparently, it's a more effective medical adhesive than any other naturally occurring glue found in the world.

And it's much more flexible than synthetic adhesives.

And so they think that maybe we could use it to seal wounds in the future.

So, people who are good at Latin, who are all of our listeners,

but not me, would know when I say that salamanders often have mental glands where on their body they would be.

It comes from the Latin mentum, not mens.

So, mens is mind, but it's from mentum.

Mentum.

Is it a joint?

Their tongue.

Oh, their chin.

Their chin.

How did you get that?

Yes, so they have mental glands from the Latin mentum meaning chin, and they secrete pheromones.

So when salamanders want to have sex, the male rubs his chin on the back of the female and he secretes the pheromones onto her back with his chin.

Oh, nice.

And then that gets her in the mood.

Very sexy.

Yeah, very.

Very sexy.

I didn't find out how olms

mate themselves.

I mean, I guess it's hard if you don't ever move from your spot.

They mate, I think they're some of the only amphibians, if not the only amphibians that mate internally rather than laying eggs.

Is that right?

Okay.

So I think they have actual sex, which is nice.

Yeah, I think they do have a period of activity where they just suddenly all just go, okay, let's do the stuff we need to do in just one go.

Yeah.

That's great.

Yeah.

That's like a Saturday morning, just get everything out of the way, and then the rest of the weekend you can just relax.

Exactly.

So just on salamanders, they're a type of salamander, right?

And I didn't realize there was this persistent belief throughout all of history that salamanders are fireproof.

And

from ancient times, people, there was this rumor that salamanders are born from fire and they're totally resistant to it.

They're so cold, they can just walk through fire.

It was also thought that asbestos was salamander hair, because you know, asbestos looks kind of hairy and is fire resistant.

And so everyone thought that asbestos was just the shed hair of salamander.

I mean, it only takes one experiment.

Bizarrely, Pliny actually did it and it was proven to be incorrect, and he went on to believe it.

This mustn't be a salamander there.

That's what he thought he was disproving.

And it was so persistent that even in the 19th century, people still thought salamanders were fireproof to the extent that you had human salamanders, which were popular entertainers, and they would perform at fairs.

And this was across Europe.

And their trick was they wore these big asbestos cloaks.

So a lot of them probably ended up quite ill.

With these big asbestos cloaks and gloves and shoes, and then they'd walk through bonfires.

And they were called human salamanders.

Cool.

And their trick was: it was most impressive if they'd take a raw steak into the middle of a bonfire and then they'd stand in there and then they'd come out and the steaks cooked.

Hopefully, they're not quite clever.

They could have the human olm in the other part of the circus just kind of sitting there,

just not waiting for the crowd to come past.

We laugh, but I mean, literally, people do that in Covent Garden, don't they?

Human statues, the human statue, that's true.

I'm going to start calling them human olms.

Yeah.

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 Shriverland.

Andy at Andrew Andrem.

James at James Harkin.

And Chaczinski.

You can email.

I forgot, I don't know.

I was waiting for the old to give his Twitter account.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

Go to our website as well, no such thingasafish.com, check out all of our previous episodes.

We'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.

Oh, I meant to say Ulms Under the Hammer.

Say it now, quick.

Ulms Under the Hammer would be a good TV show.

Yeah.

Olmly Connect.

Yeah.

Ulms and Gardens magazine.

It's just pictures of Olms and Gardens.

Olm Sweet Ulm.

It's a recipe.

You'll find a place to put that in, I think.

I'm sure I'll find somewhere.

You know that bed at the end where I put all the really shit jokes?

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