306: No Such Thing As Heavy Snuggle-Pupping

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Your ring, your way.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome to this week's episode of Fish.

We have a very exciting guest on this week.

Yes, is it Andy?

It's not Andy.

Oh, yeah, no.

Andy is still a guest.

We consider him a guest of the show.

But no, he was busy this week.

I suppose what I'm saying is Andy isn't here.

Yeah, that's effectively.

But I still, I feel the guest thing.

No, very excitingly, we have the founder of QI, John Lloyd himself.

He's been on a few times.

This is the guy who gave us not the nine o'clock news, black adder, spitting Image.

He helped create Mr.

Bean.

He co-wrote two of the original radio episodes of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Yes, he exec produced our short-lived television show, No Such Thing as the News.

Which he says is the highlight of his career.

I don't know if he means the ending of it or the experience itself, but he's now turned himself into a music manager.

The band that he looks after is called Waiting for Smith.

And if you hang out, listener, to the end of this episode, we're actually going to play a track from Waiting for Smith, their latest song.

You don't have to listen to it all.

You can fast forward the whole episode.

Just get straight to the song.

No, no, experience the show without our guest, Andy, and see how it feels and give us feedback on what you think.

Anyway, he was a fantastic guest.

It's always amazing to get Lloydie on the show and have a listen at the end.

And yeah, enjoy the show.

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, Anna Chaczynski, and Chief Gnome John Lloyd.

And once 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, John.

Right.

Well, my fact is that when the the Greek government put a tax on swimming pools in 2008, only 324 Athenians admitted to having one.

A search by Google Earth, however, revealed the actual number, 16,974.

It's incredible.

It's barefaced, isn't it?

According to the IMF, more than half of all Greek households pay no income tax at all.

Wow.

And Greece has got the largest black market in the whole Eurozone, accounting for 21.5% of its GDP.

There's a reason for this, I believe.

When I was in Greece last year, somebody explained why this is, why the Greeks are so poor at paying their taxes.

Because for a thousand years, they were part of the Ottoman Empire, which they absolutely hated.

And it was considered a patriotic national duty not to pay your taxes.

What, and they just haven't caught up with the history that the Ottoman Empire fell apart a hundred years ago.

I think there are some traditions that you really want to bring back immediately, and maybe paying tax is not one of them.

Maybe that's a bit lower down on the list.

You're right.

I love these pools because it feels as if they were prepared for this Google Earth search because they all hide them with camouflage.

How do you hide a pool?

Okay, so they have floating tiles that they put on the top of their pool.

Very clever.

Yep, they have army nets, so they camouflage it all together.

And some even...

paint the interior of their pools to mimic grass.

Wow.

That's brilliant.

It's extraordinary.

So the first Google Earth search said, no swimming pools, but an extraordinary number of army army nets in people's garden for no apparent reason.

The Greeks have a really good history of paying tax, though, because in ancient Greek, they had a really good system of paying tax.

And that is that the assembly in Athens would pick the richest people to pay tax, the top 300 in some cases.

And they would just say, you have to pay for this parade and this battleship and this whatever.

Really?

And they all agreed.

They even competed to spend as much money as possible because it was a real kind of thing where you would get respect from people and gratitude and if you were one of the people who paid tax it really increased your standing in the community and people really liked you for it so everyone wanted to pay tax.

Everyone wanted to be in that 300.

I wonder if you got your name stamped on the event as well like the Livius Parade.

You did, yeah.

The more you paid, the more likely you were to get your name on something.

So this is kind of like those philanthropists who, I don't know if you mentioned, after Notre Dame burned down, the philanthropists who really wanted to donate millions and then it turned out they kind of only wanted to do it if the bell was renamed, you know, the ex-person will remain as bell.

Trump Bell of the Ikea wing of Notre Dame.

They're not the worst taxpayers in the world, the Greeks, though.

The Chinese, only 2% of Chinese pay any income tax, and in Pakistan it's 1%.

I mean, you wonder how these countries operate.

Especially China, which operates entirely as government.

Yeah.

I suppose it's just hard to get into those hard-to-reach spots, isn't it?

We've all had that itch on our back we just can't quite fit

I was I was kind of nervous researching this topic because my Google searches were like amazing tax dodgers and we're coming up to the end of the tax year but um I find tax dodgers quite fun the way that people got again researching them right researching them just

it's my accountant there Jimmy

yeah no um uh early England taxes like the 1700s there were so many great ways that people tried to get around all the taxes that were being thrown at them.

So um there was tax on bricks, for example, in houses.

So one of the dodges that they used to do was people just used to use bigger bricks.

So you use less

for a house, yeah.

That's a great idea, you could just use four bricks, one for each wall.

Exactly.

And then they caught onto that, so they eventually taxed big bricks as well.

Did it by weight.

That's actually a bit like with cheese.

You know the origin of big cheese wheels is based on the fact that cheese used to be taxed by number of cheeses in Switzerland rather than by weight.

And so people would just make bigger and bigger giant cheeses and that's why we have them.

And now the average Emental is three feet diameter and weighs 220 pounds and uses one and a half tons of milk because it just gets the same amount of tax as a mini one.

As a mini baby bell.

A baby bell, yeah.

I was just looking at the quite famous case, the Jaffa cake case on tax.

So you know there's always this debate.

The biscuits.

Cake, the cakes or biscuits debate.

And that originates in 1991, I think it was.

And it's because cakes are traditionally in a lot of countries actually are not subject to VAT sales tax whereas biscuits with chocolate on are because cakes were seen as a necessity because it used to be you know your working household would make a cake but yeah in 1991 McVitie's insisted Jaffa cake was a cake and they so they agreed it had biscuit tendencies but then had to argue overall that it had more cake elements and as part of the like in court as part of the evidence for the fact that it was a cake McVities baked a one-foot diameter Jaffa cake to show this is actually a cake And the courts concurred.

And it's been a cake ever since.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

That is amazing.

Do you know the difference in cakes and biscuits?

How do you tell?

How do you tell?

Because when they go stale, biscuits go soft and cakes go hard.

Yeah.

Oh, that's cool.

But they didn't have the time to sit in the court for sort of three weeks watching the Jaffa cake go stale.

This is also actually the case with gingerbread men.

So a gingerbread man counts as a cake and counts as a biscuit that's exempt from tax because it's got no chocolate on it until it has a certain amount of chocolate.

So, if you've got a gingerbread man just with eyes but naked, no tax on it, but then it'll cost 20% more if it's got one button.

No.

Yeah.

One button on its shirt.

Who in their right mind is adding that one button?

I don't know.

These people are missing a trick.

It's odd that the

people who are best at paying taxes are Americans, strangely enough.

Oh, yeah.

That slightly surprised me.

81 to 84% of Americans don't cheat on their taxes compared to 68% of Germans and 62% of Italians.

Are these self-reported self-reported figures?

But it is really shocking actually how much tax avoidance goes on.

Not just Apple and Amazon.

Amazon has not paid any federal taxes in America, even though it makes profits of billions.

And there's $8.7 trillion worth of the world's wealth hidden away in tax havens by the rich.

Well, that's a lot of money.

Isn't it something like the fifth biggest country in the world, if it was a country, isn't it?

Something like that, I think.

The sixth biggest in terms of income.

The tax haven country, whatever we're calling that.

Where is that?

Sounds great.

Do we know where it is?

It's very wealthy.

It's wherever you want it to be.

The UK is king of tax havens.

I mean, we've got more than anyone else in the world.

Yeah, exactly.

We talk about Greece and whoever, but

British, the Cayman Islands belongs to Britain.

The Virgin Islands belongs to Britain.

Bermuda.

Bermuda.

Isle of Man.

Yeah.

Channel Islands.

Channel Islands.

Bolton.

Bolton.

Bolton.

Didn't realise you were tax exempt there.

We're a bit like those villages in China.

It's very difficult for the tax man to get down to Bolton.

Tough itch to scratch, Bolton.

So one of those honest Americans is Warren Buffett, who's been paying income tax since he was 14.

Wow.

He had a paper round.

And in 1944, he paid...

tax of $7 on an income of £592,

which would be equivalent to about £8,000 today to a pretty enterprising £14-year-old.

That's a lot of newspapers, isn't it?

Yeah, another guy guy who paid seven pounds tax was the longest-serving Prime Minister of Pakistan.

He's a guy called Nawaz Sharif,

who was in office for nine years on three separate occasions.

At one point, he had a personal fortune of two billion pounds, but over a period of several years, he paid only just £7 in tax.

Wow, the seven quax.

I mean, why would he bother to pay any?

It's like, yeah, this is it.

I'm fessing up here.

This is your full seven quid back.

Shall we say some stuff on swimming pools?

Yeah, sure.

Let's do that.

So

do you know, name something that you're not allowed to do in a swimming pool?

Urinary.

Have a poo.

Come on, Christian.

Are there any signs on the walls to say you can't do that?

No, that's true, which is why I always challenge them

when they attempt to get your ball.

Okay, name something that's explicitly told you're not allowed to do on the wall, Charlotte.

Petting.

Petting?

Petting?

Yeah.

Not allowed.

I mean, who uses that word anymore?

Right.

So why do they call it heavy petting in the swimming pools?

Yeah, because surely it's just snogging or kissing or whatever, right?

Well, the reason is in the 1920s in America, they had some things called petting parties, and high school students would go to swimming pools and they would kind of kiss and cuddle and whatever.

They would never have sex in there, but they would be getting very, you know, close.

And people disapproved, and so they would have signs saying no petting on the swimming pools.

And that has kind of kept over for, you know, almost 100 years now.

now and you still get heavy petting

signs even though you don't have these parties anymore but you might have them if they took the signs away and that's yeah so is that what a petting zoo is

it is i had a traumatic childhood actually repeatedly taken to those places

to a heavy petting zoo

they were also these petting parties they were also known as necking parties mushing parties fussing parties and snuggle pupping parties snuggle so i really think it should say on the swimming pool no snuggle pupping.

There's no snuggle pupping.

Which there won't be because everyone will feel too sick to pet anyone at the phrase snuggle pupping.

Because there are no signs actually saying no urinating,

public swimming pools contain up to 20 gallons of urine,

enough to fill a dustbin.

And the proportion in hotel jacuzzis is up to three times worse.

Whoa.

Why are people doing it more in a jacuzzi?

Because the bubbles make you want to go, don't they?

Do you think?

Well, I think someone knows.

That study where they found out there was, did you say 20 gallons

of urine?

It was really clever how they did it because it's quite difficult to work out how much urine there is in a swimming pool because often the chlorine would change it into other compounds or whatever.

But they found a compound in urine that doesn't react with any other chemicals.

And that is called acisulfane potassium.

And it's a sweetener that you get in lots of like diet drinks and stuff like that.

And if you put, if you urinate that into a swimming pool, nothing can get rid of it, so it'll stay there.

So they could take an amount of water and see how much of that was in, and then work out there were 20 gallons of urine from that.

Hang on, are we all urinating this sweetener?

I think they took an average of how much people would.

It's in a lot of foods, it's not just in soft drinks, it's in most stuff.

And that 20 gallons, as well as being a dustbin, it's approximately 120 wine bottles worth of urine in each swimming pool.

In each swimming pool.

And they sell it in Aldi, don't they?

That's a terrible slam.

Aldi has a really good wine selection, genuinely.

I'm sorry.

They win all the awards.

Did you know this thing that another thing they could use, and I think they do in some places, silver has got the curious property of sterilizing water.

So they could use silver instead of chlorine.

That would be only more expensive, though, wouldn't it?

You need only tiny amounts.

You need only 10 parts per billion.

Wow, 10.

And it's completely safe.

That's great.

So in the Olympics, whoever comes second could jump in the pool after the race and then clean the pool for the next race.

Yes.

That's really good.

You know when you smell that really strong smell of chlorine in a pool.

You quite like it actually.

And you think, okay, and some of you you get high off it maybe, or you think there's too much chlorine in this pool.

Do you know what the problem actually is?

My nose is too sensitive.

No, it's that there's not enough chlorine.

So this is, I actually learned this from Dr.

Carl wrote this in one of his books, but if it smells too strongly of chlorine, it means they haven't put enough in because the smell that you're smelling is actually when the chlorine reacts with the nitrogen from things like urine and sweat and dead insects and bacteria and stuff.

It combines with it and it makes these chemicals called chloramines.

And the smell comes from this particular chemical called trichloramine.

So that's very volatile, so you start smelling it.

If you add more chlorine, then it keeps reacting and it moves on through the chemical process and the trichloramine goes away.

That's incredible.

Isn't that amazing?

The smell that I really like is actually dead insects and urine.

That's correct, yes.

That seems true to form, knowing you.

Did you know that Clint Eastwood used to dig swimming pools for a a living?

Or was he a very enthusiastic gravedigger?

He was quite successful, quite young, and he was sacked by Universal Studios because his Adam's apple was too big.

What?

What are you talking about?

What do you mean?

You're testing us now, aren't you?

That can't be true.

Well, it is true.

It was on IMDb and on www.clinteastwood.net.

Oh,

where I also found the fact.

His name is an anagram of Old West Action.

It's quite good, isn't it?

That's really good.

Wow.

I actually am now thinking of Clint Eastwood and he has Big Adams Apple.

You can picture it in the middle of it.

He doesn't stop him from digging holes.

He wasn't sacked from the grave digging.

No, no, he was sacked from the movies.

Oh, right.

And then he had to get another job.

You're going to scare the mourners.

It was swimming pools.

It wasn't grave.

When did the Adams Apple thing come in?

Sorry, I've lost it.

In the 50s.

He was fired by Universal.

That was at the start of his career or the end of the case.

Yeah, he'd been in a couple of sort of B

And then the Adams Apple, they suddenly noticed, hey, that guy there.

Oh, my God.

It was horrible.

It was like they started having 3D movies, didn't it?

And people thought they were going to poke that guy.

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

My fact this week is that some pterosaurs had heads that were more than four times the length of their bodies.

No.

How big was that, Adam's hypothesis?

They are such stupid-looking creatures.

So, the pterosaurs were pterodactyl is often often used as kind of a word for the pterosaur.

Pterodactyl actually is not a thing.

The pterodactylus was a type of pterosaur.

But yeah, they were the first flying species, and they started off about 250 million years ago with heads nearly as long as their bodies.

And they just extended and extended until you got some pterosaurs like the Quetzalcoatlus where the heads and the necks were at least triple the length of the torso so it took up over 75% of their bodies.

It feels like if you're a flying animal having a massive head that's three times bigger than everything else is probably going to be a problem.

You just tip plumb out the sky all the time.

There's been this real mystery about how they figured it out, RE center of gravity and generally their massive size.

And one of the ways that they did it was by having a very light head.

So they had these openings in front of their eyes in their skulls called the antorbital fenestra, which is the window in front of their eyes.

And we don't really know what was in it, maybe a gland or muscle, it might have just been a big air cavity.

And this sometimes, this huge hole in their skull was so big that it could, in some of them, it could fit their entire torso through it.

Because they didn't put their torso through it.

But if they stopped too fast, would it shoot out through it?

Yes, exactly.

They literally turn inside out.

Like a jumper you have to put back the right way around.

That is amazing.

And also, one reason that we know they had very light heads is because the bones were very light right yes so the bones were quite thick in places but there was a big gap of air in the middle and then the actual edges of the bone were like one millimeter thick and that means it's really hard for us to find pterosaur fossils because they just kind of wash away or they crumble up and there's hardly any of them in existence yeah i read one article i don't know if this is true of all pterosaurs, but one person said you could put all the fossil material of pterosaurs that we've ever found in one handbag.

No.

If you were to crush it all up.

And that's because it's so thin and so weak.

There's not that many of them as well.

It could be that they were talking about a specific species.

I couldn't quite tell from the.

You could believe that, though, if you powder it all, put it in a blender.

I've seen some big handbags.

Yeah.

That's why they check your handbags at the Natural History Museum when you're.

That's why.

In case there's a pterosaur in it.

Yeah, excuse me, sir.

Is this all of the fossils of pterosaurs we've ever found in history in your handbag?

Oh, busted.

Pterosaurs?

Not dinosaurs.

No.

I'm sure everyone around this table knew that, but I didn't, so it's worth saying for the people at home.

Yeah, not dinosaurs.

And also, birds didn't descend from them, which again, I think everyone says birds descended from dinosaurs, and you think, well, it must be the flying type, but yeah, not at all.

Birds descended from things that could not fly when the dinosaurs were around.

It's really amazing, that, isn't it?

And I read as well that the largest thing which survived that attack from a meteorite, not an attack, it wasn't a meteorite.

It wasn't wasn't malicious.

You make it sound deliberate.

He was just flying through the universe and the earth got in the way.

It's not the meteorite's fault.

But the largest thing that would have survived was around 44 pounds.

And that today would be about the size of an American beaver.

So anything bigger than a beaver would die.

Anything smaller than a beaver, some would die, but some would survive.

And the things that turned into birds were not just the small dinosaurs, weirdly, it was some of the medium ones that were eating seeds.

Okay, because when there's like a nuclear winter, because the meteor hits and nothing can grow, the seeds can still live underground.

And so these little dinosaurs could go and still eat the seeds until everything got better.

And they were the ones that survived.

Wow.

And I wonder if that's, I think that's why today, like, birds, which are the things that survive from there, are the things that eat seeds.

Okay, yeah, that's really cool.

One thing that's descended from those guys are woodpeckers.

Oh, yeah.

And I just found what they do with their heads.

They bang their heads into trees at speeds of about 15 miles an hour, up to 12,000 times a day.

Whoa.

I mean, what must that be like?

Yeah.

Why don't they get headaches?

It's just.

We found this out for QI once.

I know they've got a weird tongue, haven't they?

Yeah.

It's kind of wraps around their brain, doesn't it?

Yeah.

I think they've got fixals or some kind of padding or something.

They've got some kind of special brain casing.

Yeah.

It sort of wobbles around in jelly.

It is amazing, though, isn't it?

Another headbanger is Deathwatch beetles, which repeatedly bang their heads on the floor to attract mates.

I've tried that, it doesn't work.

Done work back.

Oh, no.

Death Watch Beetle.

That's a metal band.

Deathwatch Beetles.

It's a metal tribute beetles fans.

I've got some.

I

decided to run a search for four times.

What things are four times as much as...

Oh, yeah.

Let me ask.

So there's some quite good ones in here.

So spider's milk, but you didn't know there was any, but some spiders produce milk.

And spider's milk contains four times as much protein as cow's milk oh wow

they're hard to milk though aren't they i reckon like you get more from a cow's udder than you do from a spider's udder just go and said milk the spiders i'll be back in two months when i've got enough so uh and chimpanzees expend four times as much energy walking on either four or two legs than humans do Wow.

It's really hard for them walking, yeah.

I wonder why that is.

Exhausting.

I don't know.

They've got huge upper bodies, haven't they?

That must be tiring.

Yeah.

The T genome is four times longer than the coffee genome.

So that's discovered by Chinese geneticists.

And this one is astonishing.

Almost four times as many people are murdered as are killed in wars.

Wow.

Isn't that a shock?

Yeah, wow.

Yeah.

I mean, some of us would say that being killed in a war is murder.

All right, Jeremy Corbyn.

Okay.

I'll get that out.

Well, we've had a lot of guests today, Jimmy Carr, Jeremy Corbyn.

Actually, on pterodactyls, they were also a bit hairy, some of them.

They had what is called ptero-fuzz.

I found in a thread, in an email thread that I sort of found archived between paleontologists.

But yeah, they found hair fibers on some of them.

And they also think this might be what helped them be able to fly to do with insulation.

But they were sort of fuzzy or fluffy.

That's really cool.

That's quite cute, but not on the wings.

I think just on the bod.

Just the fuzzy bod.

Bat wings.

They were were also the babies.

You know what they call the baby pterodactyl or pterosaur?

No.

Flaplings.

Yeah, flaplings.

Nice little word.

And so they were first identified by a guy called George's Curvier.

George Cuvier?

George Curvier.

George Cuvier.

At what stage reading that census did you realise you were at George?

Do you live in Corngard?

Sorry, who was George Curvier then?

George's curvier

was

a scientist, and he was the person who discovered, or firstly identified, the flying pterosaur in 1809.

And he said that in 1812, he said that they were unlikely, we as humans were ever unlikely to find any animal as large as that.

And then 10 years after he died, we discovered dinosaurs.

Oh, what a shame.

He was the first person to say that they flew, but the first person to describe them in any way scientifically was Cosimo Collini, and he was most famous for being Voltaire's secretary.

Yeah, so weird.

That's so cool, isn't it?

Such a weird two worlds colliding.

Yeah.

His little hobby.

I wonder where he was secretary, because Voltaire,

just down the road from us in Covent Garden, he used to live there.

Oh, Voltaire.

Yeah.

I think probably in France.

That's where he lived most of his life.

Okay, cool.

I think Cuvier discovered, you said 1809.

I think it was 1801, wasn't it?

Yeah, and it's Curvier.

Sorry.

He was also, I mean, not only did he see the baby, he was also the person who was the foundation of all Darwin's theories.

He was the person who realized that animals could become extinct.

I have one last thing before we move on, which is, did you know that there are pterosaurs in the movie Citizen Kane?

What?

So this is really worth checking out.

So obviously, Citizen Kane held up as one of the greatest movies ever made, Orson Welles.

He had an incredible script.

He had an incredible cast.

What he didn't have was an incredible budget.

So for a lot of the movie, they had to reuse certain things from other movies.

And there's a scene in the movie, and I've watched it, where they're at some sort of party that's on a beach.

And in the background, to show a sort of jungly background, they had to borrow footage from King Kong or son of King Kong because they couldn't afford to do it themselves.

Yeah.

So, in the background, you see these giant pterosaurs forming away.

No way, no way.

Spoiler all that, that's what Rosebud is, the name of his pet pterosaur.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the world's first casino had a rule that you could only gamble if you were wearing a tricon hat.

So this was in Venice.

It was in 1638 and it was called il ridotto, which means the private room.

And ridotto was actually a word which was used for like illegal gambling clubs at the time.

But they closed them all down and everyone was very upset about it.

But they said, no, don't worry, we're going to make an official one that you can all go to.

So by the rules, everyone's allowed to go there.

You're all allowed to gamble here.

Don't worry, you'll all be able to still gamble.

But if you do want to gamble, you're going to have to wear a tricon hat and a mask.

And tricon hats and masks are extremely expensive.

And so actually the poor people couldn't do it anymore.

So these were the kind of masquerade masks that you would go, weren't they?

Exactly.

Really sorts out your poker face problem, doesn't it?

When you're gambling, to have a surprise mask on.

How could they have called anything?

I guess usually they don't cover the lips, do they?

They're sort of.

So if your tell is a big passage.

Because they normally do say that your tell is in your eyes.

Not like...

Do they?

Yeah, not pulling faces with the arm.

But the masks, you can see out of the mask.

You can still see people's eyes.

Yeah, you can see it.

Well, yeah, I didn't know the eyes were the tell.

I've been looking in the wrong bit.

You've been looking at the nose.

Yeah.

His nose hasn't moved.

It's still there.

Talking about the casinos in Italy, Italy, in 1963, Sean Connery, I just couldn't believe this fact, but it's

there.

He successfully backed the number 17 three times running at the St.

Vincent Casino in Italy.

Yeah.

You heard that story?

I have heard the story.

I know that to be true in a way.

But it did happen to be that there was a lot of press there.

It was basically a publicity stunt by.

No, you think it was a publicity stunt, but I like to believe it.

Yeah.

Although he put it it on 17 twice beforehand and it didn't work, didn't he?

It does seem like he was like, oh, something's going wrong.

But yeah, basically, most people these days think it was a publicity stunt because it happened to be the week before his movie came out and he was with all the press and everything like that.

So I saw a bit of footage the other day, totally unrelated to it, but to this fact.

I just happened to be watching it.

I'm convinced it must be a publicity stunt, but I can't see anyone that says it was.

Muhammad Ali, when he was up against Sonny Liston, he taunted to get the fight and to really get at him.

He kept showing up at his house in a bus and yelling through a megaphone at three o'clock in the morning, getting him out of the house, just infuriating him.

And there's footage of Sonny Liston at a table in a casino rolling dice and Muhammad Ali beside him just yelling at him, I'm going to take you down, doing all his Ali stuff.

And just out of nowhere, Sonny Liston pulls a gun out of his pocket and he fires it at Muhammad Ali.

And you see footage of Ali running out and everyone freaking out.

And then it turns out that the gun only has blanks in it.

And he fires a couple of shots into his jacket and then just goes back to rolling dice.

And everyone's fine with it.

And it moves on.

He must have crapped himself.

I found this great line from Stephen Wright about gambling.

In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number.

Do you know that all the, you know this, you all know the fact that all the numbers on a roulette wheel added up together?

No.

They add up to 666.

Do you know?

Yeah.

It's a bad sign.

People should know not to enter casinos.

But I actually did some research on roulette for this series, the R series, and I was reading into the number zero quite heavily.

And did you know that zero was banned on roulette tables in this country in the, I think it was the late 60s?

Really?

Yeah, so.

So it sways the odds too much in favour of the casino.

Well, it sways the odds in favour of the casino at all, basically.

So, like you'll know, if you go to a casino today, they all have a zero and they absolutely have to, otherwise, a casino wouldn't be able to come off making money because there are 36 numbers and you're given odds of one in 36, but there's this zero on.

Sometimes there's a double zero or a triple zero if you're really being ripped off.

But yeah, in the 60s, in 1967, the lawlords, like the equivalent of the Supreme Court, decided that they didn't approve of this.

They thought it was unfair that the casino would have any advantage, and they banned zeros from roulette tables.

Wow.

And Scotland Yard policemen would go round casinos and check for zeros on tables and then close them down if they had them.

And how long did that last for?

It lasted a year.

And then they realised that all casinos were saying, well, we're not going to do business anymore.

And people like casinos.

And so they changed that law.

That's amazing.

I was reading a thing that apparently something that's experienced by quite a few casino goers is if they sit down at a slot machine, they'll sometimes sit on quite a damp chair.

And that's because very, very dedicated gamblers who've been playing on a single slot machine for ages and know that if they leave, it might be the next one that wins, don't go to the toilet.

They just go in their trousers.

It's a big thing.

Sort of urinated,

urine-covered seats is a big problem in casinos.

Is it really?

Yeah, yeah.

It's well, so a big problem.

Well, I've never noticed it when I've been to casinos, I must say, but I can believe that.

I think, do they wear like adult diapers and stuff?

Well, this is, yeah, there's new products that have been made specifically for casino goers.

It's called Player's Advantage.

Yeah, and the idea is it's a diaper that gets you an additional 10 to 12 hours of continuous play.

So

you can put, you know.

Well, you've got to take a long, hard look at your life, haven't you, when you're buying

Gambler's Advantage or whatever.

Yeah.

The roulette wheel, we don't really know who properly invented the modern one, but a lot of people think it was Blaise Pascal, who's the mathematician who's like the father of probability, really.

And the idea that a lot of places say, I don't know if this is true, that he was trying to make a perpetual motion machine, which would make it a really bad game of roulette, wouldn't it?

Very dull, the ball just goes around and ever and ever and ever.

Well, the diaper would come in handy in that case.

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

My fact this week is to promote his new product, the inventor of Vaseline would demonstrate his invention by dipping his hands in in acid and then healing the burn wounds with the balm.

Dedicated to his product.

I'd buy it after that.

Yeah, well.

How quickly does Vaseline work?

So this is, okay, so we've mentioned this guy very briefly ages ago on the podcast.

His name is Robert Chessebrew, which does call him Cheeseborough.

I really want to call him Cheeseborough.

And I googled how to pronounce his name a bunch of times and it came up with Chessebrew.

Okay, let's call him Cheese.

Cheesebrough is way better.

So yeah, Robert Cheeseborough.

He patented the balm, Vaseline, in 1872.

So he had this new invention.

He'd spent 10 years experimenting on himself to see that it would work, but for the time it was hard to convince people that it had any practical use.

So he became one of those traveling salesmen and he went to department stores all over New York where he would arrive at the location and do a demonstration.

The demonstration consisted of him dipping his hand in acid or sometimes holding his hand over an open flame, burning himself and then putting the balm on and then showing his other hand that he had done a demonstration on the day before, and how it had healed it up.

Yeah, so it was one hand at a time.

Oh, wow, so it was the blue peter of its day.

Exactly as one I made earlier.

Exactly.

There's a lot of trust in that demonstration, though, isn't there?

Yes, yeah.

Because it fit, I mean, you're trusting that he had done that the day before, and he's not just every single day putting his one withered hand on some acid.

I bet it was his left hand always that he put it acid, isn't it?

That's true.

Yeah, but so he did that and used to travel all over.

It was real frontline salesmanship from old Cheeseboro.

He would he had a horse and cart, didn't he?

And he would give away samples.

And apparently this is the first time people gave away samples of any products.

Wow.

That's a very good thing.

I don't know if that's, it doesn't sound true, does it?

It sounds like someone else must have thought of it, but this is the first example that we've found.

So he used to, Chesterborough or Cheeseborough or whatever his name is,

he

used to have a distilled sperm whale oil business.

Yeah, and that started becoming redundant because the oil industry became huge yeah and he was basically going bust and he used his very last few dollars to go to Pennsylvania and he was going to get a job in the oil industry and he noticed all these oil workers were always complaining about the stuff called rod wax which is a black gunk that gooed up the drill heads and they kept having to clean it off and he got curious about this and he took a bucket of it home and he thought because if they got wounds and burns and cuts and things they smear it on it seemed to get better

I don't think it's got healing qualities actually but what it does it keeps the dirt out of it.

That's one reason it's good for you.

Yeah, and keeps moisture in, doesn't it?

He was fascinated by this.

He took this home, and as Dan said, he spent years and years experimenting to turn it from this black goo into this very clear, almost translucent balm.

And did you know he was a Brit?

No, I know he was American.

No, he works in America, but he was actually a Brit.

And Queen Victoria used Vaseline.

We don't know why.

She was a big fan.

And she actually knighted him in 1883.

But unfortunately, the sword slipped off his shoulder.

Because he did used to cover himself in it.

That's the one thing that we mentioned.

Yeah.

He thought that it was just this amazing thing that would cure everything.

And he thought there was some special stuff in it that would make him better.

And he got pleurisy and he covered his whole body in it.

And he did actually get better, but probably not because of that.

Well, he had a, yeah.

He lived to 96.

And he got sick in his late 50s.

And he hired a private nurse who was instructed to rub him down, whole body rub down in Vaseline every day.

Come out of that job.

And he ate a spoonful of it literally every day.

And

he attributed his longevity to exactly that.

Yeah.

I mean, you would if it's your big business, right?

You would

say that.

Yeah.

He was secretly taking a lot of sort of morphine and paracetamol.

But

I dug out some other uses of Vaseline apart from the obvious.

Oh, yeah.

So it has been smeared on fish hooks to lure trout, treat nappy rash and toenail fungus.

It's used for staunching nosebleeds, removing ring marks from furniture, it's dabbed on cheeks by actresses to simulate tears, removing makeup, protecting gun barrels, shining patent leather shoes, lubricating slide rules.

That's a that's a neat use actually.

That's a euphemism for anal sex actually.

And then uh moustache wax, sunscreen, anti-fouling for boats.

It's used by ear, nose and throat surgeons to combat nasal crusting.

You don't want to get nasal crusting when you're under the knife, do you know?

I like the one I really like is it's supposedly used in boxing before a fight so that a punch doesn't quite land on your face, it sort of slips off.

You see them put it on the cheekbones, don't you?

Yeah, and they're not allowed to do it mid-fight.

And some people are caught doing it so the coaches will come over and subtly Vaseline their face up.

In American football,

if you're trying to stop someone from getting to your quarterback, you're not allowed to hold them.

That's a big thing.

You're allowed to block them, but not hold them.

And so people would put Vaseline on their whole bodies so that when you're putting your hands out onto the chest to block them, they just slip away from you.

Wow.

But the defensive people, they kind of go against it by putting like drawing pins in their gloves and like thumbtacks in their gloves so they can grip on even better.

Is that allowed?

I don't think it is allowed.

It doesn't sound allowed.

But I think people still do it.

Wow.

John, you're a director.

You've done a lot of advert directing, right?

So do you know about the fact that it's used as a technique to make a sort of soft focus effect?

Yeah, so they smear Vaseline on the lens of a camera.

They'd say literally that, put some Vaseline on the lens.

Yeah, it's extraordinary.

It's used in a lot of softcore porn.

You know, you get that sort of thing where it's like a dreamy look around the face of the actress or whatever.

Yeah, I can imagine.

And I didn't know you had such a strong career in the porn industry before you were.

Absolutely.

He was lubricating slide drills before you were.

But so they use it in Star Trek, for example.

Anytime that Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, would see a girl that was going to be the girl of the week, as it were, they would use this soft focus on

the time that it looks as if he's gone misty art.

Yeah, I just think I sort of remember that in Star Trek.

And Doris Day, the actress, used to have in her contract that close-ups when she got older all had to be done in soft focus because she was too worried about her the lines on her face and so on.

Yeah, so there's movies with her and Rock Hudson where Rock Hudson is in clear shot as a close-up cut to Doris Day.

She's in the street and it looks really odd.

That is so weird.

Yeah.

They also, I just found one use on smearing over glass.

One use for it related to that, if you're a burglar, was uncovered in 2012 when someone went around burgling apartments and people realised at the state he was doing the same thing every apartment he burgled, which was smearing Vaseline over the opposite apartment's peephole.

So that when they looked out of their peephole, they couldn't see him.

And I don't know why he thought they couldn't open their own doors.

He thought, who's that dreamy guy

in the house?

Harrison Ford would never rob a home.

Oddly, you should mention me in commercials and Captain Kirk in the same paragraph, Danny.

Because two of the ads I shot were actually with William Shatner.

Oh, really?

Yeah, in LA for Kellogg's.

Yeah.

Really?

He was great.

He was such a good guy.

I got on really well with him.

Very, very funny.

Really?

Did he demand the Vaseline for every shot?

Oh, just one interesting thing about Vaseline, something else that it was very important in the invention of was mascara.

So, modern mascara was invented when a woman called Mabel Williams, this was in 1915, she sort of singed her eyebrows and eyelashes in a kitchen fire and she wanted to make her eyelashes look longer again.

And so, she came up with this homemade technique of mixing ash and coal with Vaseline.

And then she'd apply it to her eyelashes and you you know, did the trick.

Her brother Tom, weirdly

watching her, spying on her, and decided to try and recreate this and commercialize it.

So he used a friend's chemistry set, mixed it all together, made modern mascara, and named it after her, named it Maybelline.

No, that's Maybelline?

That's your name?

That was really good.

Yeah, that's great.

That's cool, isn't it?

Very cool.

So, speaking of burns,

there is one

thing that's used for treating burns, and that is poo shakes.

And that is like a milkshake but it's made with poo and this is in New South Wales and it's the Port Macree koala hospital and obviously they had a lot of fires in Australia recently and a lot of the koalas got burned and they found that by feeding them these poo milkshakes the koalas are getting better a lot quicker and it's basically your old gut bacteria thing so when you're a baby koala you eat pap which is a mixture of digested half digested food and bacteria is created in their mother's gut and comes out through the cecum, and the Joey eats it.

And so, what they're doing is they're trying to come up with a way of imitating this by making these poo milkshakes and they give them to the koalas, and it just helps them to put on weight, it just helps them to get generally better, and that makes the burns heal more quickly.

Okay, because it sort of builds up their immune system against the burns.

That's treating burns from the inside, which is such a cool inside-out.

Yeah, my favorite

Burns-related story is

in the 1940s, and scientists wanted to come up with a pain scale.

They wanted to create the pain unit, the dollar,

and they decided the way they were going to do this, the way they were going to measure pain and work out the scale, was by taking women in labor and then burning them repeatedly and then asking them to compare the sensation of being burned to being in labour.

And the women were keen to do that.

They were like interested.

They tended to be the wives of the doctors and the nurses.

They were like, yeah, fine, I'm going to be in pain anyway.

And so they'd have these women who are in labor going through contractions.

And then they just burn their finger with a lighter and say, how bad is that compared to your contraction?

And the women would be like, yeah, about

the same.

And then it got worse and worse.

And they found, they said that the problem was that as contractions progressed, the women became less good at coherently describing their feelings.

So the researchers had to make inferences about their pain based on their behaviors.

Oh, I think when she told me to go fuck myself.

I'll put that down as a temp.

But that's amazing.

It's the idea a bit like how, you know, if you have a splinter and then you break your ankle, you forget about the splinter.

Is it that kind of thing?

It's not that idea.

The idea was that they thought that going the peak of labor was maximum pain.

So that would be max on the scale.

And then they wanted the women to sort of quantify and be like, oh, that burn is about a tenth as bad as the labor pain I've just felt.

But women got less and less good at perfectly rationalizing that pain.

Do you know before QI was a thing, I used to have a little email group, six of us there were in the group.

And

we used this thing called the quite boring challenge.

Do you know this story?

No, no.

And the idea was one of us would nominate every week a subject about which nothing interesting was or could be known.

Okay.

And I started, and I nominated Chelmsford because I grew up near Chelmsford.

And I spent a week researching Chelmsford.

And there are fascinating facts I came up with.

And

one of them is this, is that the largest Burns unit in Europe is in Chelmsford, in Essex.

And for 30 years, the Conservative MP for Chelmsford was Simon Burns.

He was knighted in 2015.

He's a second cousin of David Bowie, bizarrely.

But because he was educated at Worcester College, Oxford, where he got a third, he's known by his friends as third-degree Burns.

There it is.

It's amazing when those QI facts come together.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland, James.

At James Harkin.

Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep.

And John, you're not on it either.

You're like Anna.

I'm not social media at all.

Yeah, you too.

Copycat.

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

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

We have links to our behind-the-scenes documentary.

And actually, before we go, we're going to play out with a nice little song because, John, you're now the manager of a band, Waiting for Smith.

Yeah.

And we've got their single here.

Yes, I am the manager.

My name is Brian Ego, Lovely Boys Very Talented.

And their latest single is called So Much Love.

Okay, well, we'll see you all again next week.

And just play us out now.

It's Waiting for Smith with So much love.

I went down like a domino.

I've seen things you don't wanna know.

And I've heard off people that never grow.

I know my pain, it is a gift.

I've felt the plug from the offering.

And I'm ready for death when it comes to me.

So can't you see?

So much love, so much love.

Feeling in my arms and legs and toes

for you.

This is so much love, so much

I promise you I will try to keep you feeling light

I promise you I will try to keep your wings aflight

I promise you I will always,

always go speak the truth I promise you that our lives will always feel well used

So let the walls tumble down And let the love break in

In that last happiness And from there we can begin Then let me break down your fears And let the love pour through

In that last happiness for me and you

So come on and let me through

So much love, so much love Feeling in my arms and legs and toes

for you This is so much love, so much love So why won't you let me through love?

So much love, feeling in my arms and legs and toes

For you This is so much love, so much love So why won't you let me through?

Come on, come on

Come on and let me through

Come on, come on

come on, let me through.

Come on, come on,

come on, let me through.

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