304: No Such Thing As A Phantasmic Foot

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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 Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Jacinski.

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

My fact is that in Britain alone unnecessary emails create nearly 24,000 tons of carbon every year.

Wow.

Yeah.

See and you guys always give me crap for not replying to my emails.

I'm the most environmentally conscious of us.

To be fair Dan, the number of emails that you send which are completely pointless,

outweighs the fact that you don't send many.

Yeah, you were actually, we often don't get emails in reply to the important stuff from you, and then we'll be like, Dan must be away from his computer.

And then suddenly you'll be like, hey, guys, did you see this ridiculous meme no one gives a shit about?

It's like, okay, okay, listen.

I didn't want to.

How was you not?

This has gone against what I was hoping it would be.

So, what this is, this is a calculation done by an energy company called Ovo.

And they looked at the carbon footprint of an email basically.

So the figures vary but it varies between one gram and three or four grams.

It's not very much.

But they did also look at how many unnecessary emails are sent each day.

For example people writing back to just say thanks and sending that email through the system.

Is that unnecessary?

Well it depends how it depends how good your manners are I guess.

But

if we're agreeing that that's a sort of superfluous thing, then what they want us to do is to add a little signature to our emails saying something something like, this is a thanks in advance.

So then that sounds really passag to me, honestly.

It's like, hey, Andy, can you please do your QI scripts by the end of the week, thanks in advance?

Sounds like I've said you better bloody hell do it.

That's a really good point.

Well, that would be better than what you normally say, which is you better bloody hell do it.

So, but the really cool thing about this researcher is that the man who advised them on this is a man called Mike Berners-Lee.

And you might know that surname.

He's the brother of Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web.

Yeah, yeah.

Can we we just quickly go through how it does it?

So is it carbon or carbon dioxide?

Is it from big servers processing the information?

It's from all these things.

So it's from, for example, using electricity in the first place, the cost of running a computer network, the cost of keeping all the data on servers and traveling across the planet.

So the whole thing,

you know, using your computer while it's on to send us emails.

It's very hard to quantify, obviously, but there's a rough figure.

And the calculations, they depend on how important the email is a little bit, because let's say I I send an email back to Andy just saying thanks or lol or whatever, then you don't spend much time reading it, and so it means that it doesn't use up as much electricity, and so it means that the carbon footprint is lower.

So, for instance, over 70% of emails that are sent are spam, but they only use up 22% of your carbon footprint, and that's because you hardly ever read them.

They go straight into your junk folder and then get deleted.

So, it's like a one-way system.

It's only the making of it that uses carbon, the reading.

Unless you're over the age of 78 and you're a woman living alone who's just donated to a million phony charities so far.

This, Mike Berners-Lee, has written a book about carbon footprints and the amount of carbon used for lots of different things.

It's called How Bad Are Bananas?

The Carbon Footprint of Everything.

And one thing that is bad as well as bananas was the 2010 World Cup, which he says cost us 2.8 million tons of CO2.

And to put that into perspective, it's the equivalent of every man, man woman and child in the UK having 20 cheeseburgers oh

okay that's not the equivalent in terms of obesity rates or anything but in terms of carbon usage yeah exactly the amount of carbon

or 6,000 space shuttle flights good football world cup but it was a good world cup right it was worth it

totally worth it mike writes a lot of articles online as well so he has an article series that's called what's the carbon footprint of dot dot dot so it's things like the carbon footprint of say the iraq war he's he's looked at all the numbers and made an estimate um and then this one's a bit of a guilty uh sort of you don't need this really the carbon footprint of the heart bypass operation i don't think you need to be thinking about offsetting when you're on your way in it's going to end up being two heart bypasses isn't it if you wake up and they go do you know how many planets you've ruined with that it's 1.1 tons wow is that bad

um yeah it's not it's not any carbon footprint it's not great it's all relative it is all you know all right lots of modern life creators if you think about one email, it's one gram.

Right, okay, that's a good perspective.

Yeah, but if you obviously, if you sent an email saying, can I book a heart bypass in, then that's only adding to the footprint.

So here's one.

If you have a BLT sandwich and you want to lower your carbon footprint, which one ingredient should you throw away?

The bacon?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Throw away the bacon.

It's the tomato.

The tea?

It's the tea.

Okay, this is nuts.

Tomatoes require so much heating and lighting of greenhouses that apparently their carbon footprint is higher than the bacon.

No way.

Which I find extraordinary.

No.

But what if I just get buying tomatoes from a very hot country, many, many miles away, and it just gets flown over by jet?

That's exactly.

It doesn't need to be a greenhouse.

Is it a private jet that your tomatoes are being flown over?

Just one tomato.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, no, it's one small bunch.

One of those sort of bags.

I mean, that I can't.

That is amazing.

I find it extraordinary.

There are a few sort of counterintuitive ones.

Like, apparently, a New Zealand lamb, if you imported a New Zealand lamb to England to use, there's less carbon output than a British lamb because the rearing is so much more that even if you include the shipping, the lamb is far less if it comes from New Zealand.

Really?

And is that just because the natural climate requires less input?

Yeah, it must be just all the procedures that they're doing.

Because I would have thought that lambs are not that hard to rear.

They're one of the few things that the British climate is okay with rearing without ridiculous carbon input.

Lamb and beef do have, they're the two highest meats with although that's, I think that's total ecological impact, but a lot of that's carbon.

They are, but I'm amazed that the New New Zealand lamb is somehow requiring less carbon.

I mean, they send a lot less emails, don't they, in New Zealand for lambs?

It's

mostly just letter writing for the lambs still.

Do you know what the third meat is?

So the first is beef, second is lamb.

Pork?

I actually think the second is pork.

Okay.

And this thing has a bigger carbon footprint than lamb.

Chicken.

No, it's crustaceans.

So I can't believe this.

I always think of crustaceans as such an ethical thing to eat in proportion to other meat.

But they use a huge amount of fuel compared to other seafood.

So most seafood has a carbon footprint a bit like chicken, but shellfish is up there with beef in terms of its footprint.

I'm so delighted.

Oh, you hate it, don't you?

I hate eating crustaceans, but it's just because I'm a bit fatty.

Now I can say it's because I want to save the environment.

Oh god, as if you didn't have enough moral high ground.

Do you know one thing?

It has an insanely high carbon footprint on practice.

Oh god, I mean, yeah, I mean lots.

Okay.

Having asthma.

Is that because you're breathing out lots of carbon dioxide?

It's not.

It's not that.

Okay, again, I don't feel comfortable causing people with asthma to hyperventilate with guilt.

No, no, no, but

I used to have asthma, and I don't have it anymore.

Was that an ecological decision?

No, but I did used to have it, and I used to have those inhalers.

And you know, they use a gas called hydrofluoroalkane, which is a propellant.

That's what squirts the medicine out.

You know, it's like a little gas cartridge.

Those inhalers account for 4% of the NHS greenhouse gas expenditure.

Those inhalers alone, alone, 4%.

Isn't that massive?

So, if you replaced one in 10 of those inhalers, you would reduce carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by 58,000 tonnes.

What can you replace them with?

Do they have like e-coal ones?

There are more ecological ones, which some people can have.

I think not everyone, but yeah, 58,000 tonnes, just to replace one in 10 of those, you would say.

The NHS actually had an incredible carbon mistake quite recently, didn't they?

Just speaking of them, so did you read about this?

They had an email storm in 2016 where 186 million useless emails ended up being sent.

So

this is the history of email storms is so fun.

So basically, this apparently is the industry term for when someone accidentally sends an email to a huge mailing list.

And in this case, it was the IT guy who was sending a test email.

He sent it to 1.2 million employees.

And then they all replied all, saying, please unsubscribe me from this list.

And then there are other ones who replied all saying, stop replying all, everyone, stop replying all.

And eventually it ended up being 186 million emails.

And I believe it took down the NHS mail system.

There was a very funny quote from a spokesperson, the NHS digital spokesperson, who said, Some users have experienced short delays in the NHS mail system this morning, but the issue has been resolved.

But she did have to dictate that over the phone because her email still wasn't working.

Blousers.

So next time the NHS gives you shit about your heart bypass.

2016, mate?

There's a guy called Joey M.

He lives in Rhode Island, and he has the world record most number of unread emails in his inbox.

Oh, wait, can we guess?

Yeah.

In the thousands.

What?

2,000.

Unread.

2,000.

I'm pretty sure these two dads are equal to that.

Okay.

58 million.

Can I go ridiculous and say a billion?

A billion?

We're going to say a billion.

4 billion, 294,967,256.

And he evidenced it by uploading a video onto recordsetter.com, which allows you to, if you think you've done more keepy-uppies than anyone else, you can put a video on this site and it will show you.

And he showed it on his phone, just deleting one message to get down to just over 4 billion.

What?

Well, isn't that amazing?

Is he extraordinary?

Is he on a lot of mailing lists?

Does he work for the NHS?

And there was a survey done by Adobe quite recently about emails that says 55% of people, whenever they get to zero inbox, say it's relieving, 22% say it's amazing, and 10% say it's impossible.

And the only reason I bring up this survey is because they categorise people into boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z, and they put millennials starting in 1977, which makes me a millennial.

So that's the only reason I bring it up as a long build up to emphasise that you're a millennial.

That That was a fair.

Place for the record.

I was going to ask you about that skateboard you're holding.

So just one weird bit of carbon news.

So in 1981, Ronald Reagan made this speech, made this statement where he said trees produce more pollution than automobiles.

So he said that and people thought, well, that's very funny.

And probably some idiots believed him and he probably set the world back by about 100 years.

But he said this, but trees do emit greenhouse gases.

So they emit loads of methane.

And And we've only just discovered this.

It was in 2014.

There was this huge methane surplus in the atmosphere.

People didn't know where it was coming from.

And this woman went to the Amazon and tested its trees and figured out they're all pumping out methane.

They're all farting.

They're all farting.

Tree farts any other than the atmosphere.

But this isn't a problem, is it?

It's definitely, definitely offset by the amount of CO2 that they're absorbing.

And so we don't want to get rid of the trees, guys.

Trees are good.

Thumbs up.

But it is a thing that we need to work out why they're doing it.

And so it might be more in wetlands, which have a lot of methane within them that they're pumping out so maybe we don't plant trees on big piles of methane for instance right hey remember we had that fact a long long time ago about every tree I think it's in Melbourne that has an email address

yeah that's a bit of a oh my god they're really shooting themselves in the room aren't they

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

Okay, my fact this week is that hot dogs are called hot dogs because people used to to think they contained dog.

And did they?

No, don't think so.

No, I don't think so.

So this is something I read in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The word hot dog appears to be college slang from America in the late 19th century.

And according to the OED, who cite the Oxford Companion to Food and Drink and the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, the reason people called them hot dogs is one, they were hot, and two, they had this weird meat that they didn't know where it quite came from, and it might as well come from dog as come from anywhere else.

Yeah, in fact, I think that it could have been in there.

So, I got two into these three people called Gerald Leonard Cohen, and I don't think he's related, and Barry Poppick and David Shulman, who have devoted over 20 years of their lives to working out the root of the phrase hot dog.

And so,

they're into it.

And Gerald Leonard Cohen says that, scandalous but true, some butchers even hired dog killers in the US who would go and club some dogs and stuff them in sausages even though it wasn't it wasn't legit he's found some instances of that and then they'd sell the carcass to the butcher um and yeah i think what was it 1884 that they started calling sausages dogs and then they added the the hot in the 1890s i read a bit about gerald leonard cohen and barry poppick they've written a 300 page book about the origin of the phrase hot dog

and he does this he publishes his own journal which is called comments on etymology uh the circulation is under 100.

You have to write to him and send him money, and he will then send you a copy of this thing.

He once wrote a 167-page paper on just the word jazz.

He is a serious etymologist.

And he is, we should say, also a professor.

So he's a professor of foreign languages at a university, so he does make an income other than from these hundred subscribers.

But he said, I think he was interviewed, and he said, what else am I going to do with my time?

Go skiing?

I'll probably get hurt.

So I guess I've got this research.

good point.

I'm supposed to go skiing this weekend.

Well, I suggest you instead devote two decades to researching hot dog machines.

I reckon the first hot dogs must have been quite good, actually, because the phrase hot dog, which means like something which is really awesome, is only one year younger than the word hot dog meaning the food stuff.

So, they had hot dogs for one year, and then people thought it was a word that meant this is great.

That's Mickey Mouse's first words.

Is it?

Here it goes, hot dogs.

He pluralizes I'm so glad we've done this because I've always wondered in It's a Wonderful Life when the James Stewart character says hot dog and it's when it's something totally unrelated to hot dogs has happened.

Same as he said that.

How odd.

Some people were annoyed about it.

So they started, well, one of the early sites they were sold was Coney Island.

Is that in New Jersey?

No, it's New York.

New York, yeah.

Sorry, it's Coney Island in New York.

And they were so annoyed by the association with hot dogs, thinking they were a slightly lower class thing, that in 1913 the Chamber of Commerce passed a law forbidding the use of the phrase hot dog on signs.

Really?

You weren't allowed to have a sign-up saying hot dog.

I think, was that because of the implication that there might be dog meat in them?

I think it's a big week.

What's that?

They don't want that.

So, we were in New York not too long ago, and I went for a walk one day to Central Park, and hot dog vendors everywhere along the roads.

And I was just reading that in order to park their hot dog vending machines in these spots, do you know what they pay?

The prices there.

So, just to

just okay, American dollars just to be there to park per year, let's say.

Per year, just to park there.

I'm going to say it's probably in the region of 10,000 US dollars.

I would have said about the same.

15, let's say.

15.

I'd say they pay in kind, and it's like 10 hot dogs a year

with mustard.

Okay, so there was one guy who was parked on Fifth Avenue, East 62 2nd Street, very near Central Park,

289,500

for his annual.

Yeah, and that's that is, he's got to get that to to break even obviously because he's got to push and then everything is proper from there.

But they all managed to do it, yeah.

Because hot dogs in New York sell for $10,000 each, I guess.

Exactly.

That is quite a lot of money.

Yes.

So on average, they have to pay the city $200,000 each year.

I've never been to one of those stands and got a hot dog, and now I feel incredibly guilty that I've been driving these poor people out of business.

Do you know one thing that doesn't have to park that is associated with hot dogs?

Have you heard of the Wiener Mobile?

Oh, I maybe have.

I'm not sure.

I've never been for a ride in the Wiener Mobile.

I haven't.

Not a chat up line.

So, you know, Oscar Mayer is a big hot dog company.

They have a fleet, a small fleet of Wiener Mobiles, which are cars shaped like hot dogs, which have been going since 1936.

Obviously, they've changed them, you know.

But basically,

they were a huge promotional thing.

So they would hand out hot dogs, small hot dogs, from inside the big hot dog, because the car is shaped like a hot dog.

And they would hand out things called Wiener whistles to children.

So that if a child ever saw the wiener mobile they would blow their whistle and attract other children to come and get a hot dog it's like the opposite of an ice cream van you're getting the kid to do the job for you yeah exactly and they train their drivers at a place called hot dog eye and then once you're in once you're in like star fleet academy for hot dog eye you uh you drive around the country it's mostly sort of students and things they hire uh and you drive in pairs and one person has to drive and the other one has to wave to people which is called riding shot bun shop bun yeah shot bun and sometimes they let you in and they ask you to fasten your meat belt.

Wow, that's disgusting.

I think if someone's driving around picking up children and telling them to fasten their meat belt.

It's a car shaped like a sausage.

Your defence lawyers go, it's not looking good, mate.

But he blew up my Wiener whistle.

There's only ever been one accident involving a Wiener Mobile, and one of them rammed into a house.

Imagine that coming through the window.

Yeah, it'd be like a battering ram as well.

Take the whole thing down.

Another famous hot dog company in America is Nathan's.

Okay.

And that's a really good story about them.

So there was another hot dog maker on Coney Island called Feltman's, and they were really, really huge and really, really popular.

And they had what some people said was possibly the largest restaurant in the world, which just sold hot dogs.

But then they had a guy who came to work for them who was a Jewish immigrant from Poland called Nathan Handworker.

And Nathan Handworker was working just slightly Andy what are you laughing at?

Handworker is a funny

name.

Yeah but he wasn't masturbating people he was spending his week slicing buns

okay so sounds like masturbating people to me

He was working as a bun slicer and then he decided well what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start my own company

and he needed to get some money together so he lived entirely on hot dogs for a year.

He ate nothing but hot dogs and he slept on the kitchen floor of this place.

So he got all the money together and then eventually he started his own business and then undercut Feltman's by selling his hot dogs for half the price and became what's quite synonymous as well as Oscar Meisner and as well as Feltman's, but kind of synonymous with hot dogs in America now.

Wow.

But he did have to have quadruple hot bypass dogs as well as.

Oh my god, the carbon felt.

So that's the big competition, isn't it, in America?

They have Nathan, it's called Nathan's famous hot dog eating contest.

And the men's champion is a man called Joey Chestnut, who's won it nine times.

His all-time record is eating 74 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes.

That's 7.4 a minute, if my math is correct.

Yeah.

And there's such rivalry in the thing.

But you have to eat the buns as well, don't you?

You have to eat the buns.

You have to eat the buns.

Otherwise, you haven't eaten the hot dog.

You've eaten the dog.

Yeah.

That's true.

They'll come with the hot.

It's not hot.

It's not the bread.

It's not the bread.

Oh, the bread's keeping this dog warm.

It's not like a blanket.

I'm on the Atkins start.

I'll just have the dog, please.

But the previous champion was this guy called Takeeru Kobayashi from Japan and no one had ever eaten more than I can't remember what it was, like 20 or something.

And then he walked on stage in 2001, he ate 50.

It completely revolutionized the sport and the art.

But what was his thing?

You know, in like the Fosbury Flop, you changed the way that you jumped over the high jump.

So one was his training method.

Right.

His training method was he would practice drinking three gallons of water in 90 seconds, meaning that his stomach got used to expanding very quickly.

Can I say I tried to do that once and was extremely, do not try that at home, extremely sick out there.

Send us your videos of you not trying it at home.

Oh my goodness.

I was just like vomiting water for ages afterwards and why did you join to enter this competition?

No, it wasn't.

I was young and it was a bet.

I see.

Well you're a millennial.

That's the kind of crazy thing they do.

So the other thing he did, he invented this method where you split each hot dog in two and you force both ends in your mouth at once because your mouth is wide enough for two hot dogs.

Right, I cannot believe I ever thought of that before.

What?

I don't understand.

So you chop each hot dog in half halfway along, so you've got the two ends, and then you just shove both ends in your mouth at the same time.

Really?

And they call this the Solomon method, which is an allusion to King Solomon because he once threatened to split a baby in two in a biblical story.

Exactly, yeah.

And it's a very highbrow contest, isn't it?

So you get a lot of these biblical and classical references.

Wow.

Two parents were arguing over who got custody of a baby, and Solomon said, Well, we'll cut the baby in two.

No, you didn't.

No one ate the baby.

Right.

Baby eating contest.

It's in John, part one, what was Evan.

One of the parents said, oh, that's fine by me.

A good idea.

Let's split the baby in two.

And the other one said, no, don't do that.

And then King Solomon said, well, you should probably have the baby.

Is that what happens?

I think that's right.

I think that's right, yeah.

Yeah.

That's amazing, but so obvious.

I would have split it.

I don't want to claim that I would have won this competition, but I think I would have had a chance.

Because obviously you put it in half and shove it in both sides.

I would say into three parts.

Well, I was just going to say, where do you stop?

Is it possible to cut into three, four, five, six, or seven parts?

Well, how wide is your mouth?

Well, you're looking at me.

The people at home don't have this option, but I don't think I could fit.

In fact, I'm not sure I could fit two in mine.

I'm not.

No, maybe

you're a two-man, three-max.

I think there's a point at which there are diminishing returns from cutting your hot dogs into an increasing number of pieces before you put them in your mouth.

Still with a knife and fork on the first hot dog of the competition session.

Those guys are going to feel so stupid as you cut it into the hundredth piece.

I'm going to get this whole thing in my mouth.

Do you know that the Pentagon used to have a hot dog stand?

And there was a rumor which the tour guides still tell to this day when you get taken around the Pentagon.

And it got taken down in 2006.

But during the Cold War, apparently the Russians were convinced that some amazing stuff was going in their secretive conversations because people would meet there.

So apparently they they had two missiles aimed at this hot dog stand the entire time of the cold war and that was the that was the rumor no one's ever imagine if a missile hit how many pieces those hot dogs would be in

you'd be able to stuff them all in you go stop strategizing for the next tournament

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

My fact this week is that the oldest recording we have of a poet reading his own poem is of Robert Browning, who forgets the words to the poem halfway through and ends the recording with an apology.

That's amazing.

So this was in April of 1889.

This is only a few months before he died.

And Robert Browning, I think he was at a party and it was being held by the artist Rudolf Lehman.

And he had with him one of those Edison wax cylinder talking machines.

And he got Robert Browning to recite his poem, which was called How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to X.

I?

No, X.

No, it's X.

Yeah, like Aix-en-Provence.

Yeah.

Andy was just doing his LEG impression.

Aye.

Is it really?

Yeah, I did it.

I

listened to it.

I memorised it when I was 10.

Did you?

I did.

I had to do it for a recital competition and I...

Oh, you, this actual poem, The Browning?

This poem.

Did you get through it without apologising?

I did better than Browning did.

Wow.

I got through it.

And then I was rereading it, and I was so ashamed at how little of it I could remember.

I think

all I could remember is, because it's such a good poem, actually.

It's done galloping.

You never really know what the good news is.

And it's got this great rhythm of horses just galloping from Ghent to X.

And all I remember is, they galloped, Dirk galloped, we galloped all three.

You know what?

You're embarrassed that you couldn't remember much of it.

I still think that's pretty impressive.

I think you almost got further than Browning himself as well.

No, you're right.

And the pace, when you listen to him speak it, and this is online, so if you go on YouTube and put this in, anyone listening can actually hear the man himself.

It does feel like it's an old western.

He's sort of galloping.

It's this fantastic pace to it.

But he only gets to a few lines in, and he suddenly says, I'm most terribly sorry that I can't remember my own verses.

But then adds, but the one thing I will remember all my life is this astonishing sensation produced upon me by your wonderful invention.

And then you hear people cheering for him in the background.

That's a real politician's answer the way he says it.

I can't remember the poem you specifically asked me to read, but one thing I can remember.

It's an amazing pivot.

It's an incredible pivot.

Yeah.

And so one nice thing about it was that there were a lot of people recording at the time, but supposedly he was one of the first notable people to pass away so soon after the recording.

And it was a year after he died when they had a memorial for him that they played his voice at the memorial.

And they said it was like him coming back from the dead.

It was this eerie thing that no one had ever experienced before.

I think it was the first time that anyone's voice had been played or any one notable person anyway, after they died.

Which, that must have been pretty weird, right?

Yeah, that must have been weird.

But also, it's kind of embarrassing.

I say, please don't play the recording, right, cocked up after I'm dead on my anniversary.

Yeah, you know,

they're all just pointing and laughing.

Well, some of his relatives did say it was embarrassing that they played it, did they?

Yeah, not everyone was happy that it was there.

The fans, it was at a Browning society gathering in London.

They were all huddled around this.

There were societies.

There were societies decades before he died.

Maybe not decades, but certainly in the last decade before he died, there were people meeting up, and he found that embarrassing.

Oh, everyone was so embarrassed all the time.

But his funeral was a ticketed event because he was so popular.

I think it was, yeah, it was Westminster Abbey where his funeral was held.

They got over a thousand applications, and the Dean of Westminster wrote saying, everyone has been trying to get into Browning's funeral.

I've had to really limit it to people who had a really good reason to be there.

Really?

Yeah, wow.

Do you know he because he wasn't popular throughout most of his life, and then he did get very popular towards the end, and all these people wanted to go to his funeral.

And also, he sparked a fashion for dressing in brown.

Did he?

No.

He did.

Just after he died in America, he sparked a brief fashion for dressing up in brown items of clothing.

Just because he was Carl Browning, he didn't dress in brown himself.

No, it was just the name.

Yeah.

Wow.

What did they do when Dickens died?

A lot of arrests.

Do you have any more on that about how that came about?

No, I sorry.

I've only found it in one place.

And sorry, it was before he died.

It was 1979 to 1980 when he just released one of his very popular works.

1979, wow.

So Thatcher was just a bit of that.

It was 1879 to 1880 when he just released one of his popular works.

Wow.

His romance with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who he they became husband and wife, and she was way more famous to start with than him, was really interesting because started, it started as a correspondence, and she was housebound, and she was an invalid, and her father was extremely strict about who she did and didn't see, despite the fact she was also a famous poet, which I don't really understand.

But he started writing to her, and they started a passionate correspondence.

And then they eloped and got married, and they had a son who they called Penn.

Yeah, he was actually called Robert as well, but they nicknamed him Penn, and that's all they called him.

No, he was called

Weideman or Wiedemann.

Robert Wiedemann.

Yeah, but the reason they called him Penn is because he couldn't pronounce the word Wiedemann as a baby.

Ah.

Well, not as a baby.

He couldn't pronounce anything as a baby.

He's like, wow, wow.

They had massive arguments about how Penn should grow up.

Did you read about these?

No, no.

So

basically, he wanted the child to grow up looking sort of very blokey, Victorian, you know, wearing trousers and having his hair cut short.

And she wanted petticoats and shoulder-length ringlets of hair.

And she won, maybe because she was more famous or more authoritative.

But basically, until the child was 10, he wore petticoats.

And then, as soon as she died, when Penn was 10 years old, Robert had the child's hair cut really short,

dressing her differently.

It was a big bone of contention between them.

But he turned out quite different to what she would have wanted then, because he so he did have this quite fae upbringing, and he slept in her room until he was 12.

And I thought, I thought, hang on, I thought Elizabeth Barrett Browning died when he was 10.

It was a really tragic last two years.

Really?

Very traumatizing for him.

Oh, well, I've got until he was 12, so we'll fact-check that.

But he ended up this real kind of, well, what is described in one of his biographies, in one of Browning's biographies, as a beefy and beery, middle-aged man in knickerbockers with a reputation for promiscuity.

And also, his home, his house, was just a filthy pigsty.

He had people around for parties, and so his house was nicknamed the Palazzo Pigsty,

Pigsty Palace.

And, well, he was called Pen.

It's like a pig pen.

A pig pen.

Pen's pig pen.

He was a painter, but I think not a great one.

And apparently, his penchant for painting voluptuous female nudes did not encourage sales in Victorian England.

Well, he was a sculptor, too.

Oh, was he?

Yeah, one of his very few sculpted works is of a woman communing with a python.

And it's quite sexy.

It's called Dryope or Dryope Fascinated by Apollo.

But during the sculpting process, the python tried to strangle the model that he got.

And he then had to shoot it.

Oh, my God.

The python.

Yes.

Wow.

I know.

Do they ever paint portrait outtakes?

That would have been just a stunning.

It's interesting, the idea of his voice coming back from the death at his funeral.

I find interesting because he was one of the people who was very against spiritualism.

He used to sit in seances because Elizabeth was really into seances.

And this was the time where Arthur Conan Doyle was into it and so on.

And Houdini

was into it.

Houdini was a skeptic.

Yeah, he was a little bit of a sound.

Seances, they just sound like all the most famous people in the world were at seances.

like you just go along to a normal seance hoping to speak to a relative, and then suddenly, like, Houdini stands up.

And after Conan Doyle stands up,

Browning's there.

Well, they were going for the rich people, weren't they?

Yeah, the mediums.

Well,

this was a very famous medium.

It was called Daniel Dunglass Hume.

Dunglass.

Dunglass.

And Dunglass wasn't, he was Daniel Hume, and he added Dunglass.

And it's so weird, isn't it?

Because it looks like it's a misprint of Douglas.

It really does.

And

he was someone who was very famous back in the day.

And he used to do all these seances.

And one seance he did was with the Brownings.

And they were sitting there.

And he was really skeptical, Robert, and Elizabeth was really into it.

And Daniel Douglas suddenly said, your son, who passed away, who was very young, is here with us.

And there was an apparition that was near them.

And they were going, oh my God, this is amazing.

And it's so great.

Browning went, this is not, this is not my son.

And he grabbed the apparition and it was Hume's naked foot that was hanging in the air.

Such a good story.

The barefoot,

woo!

Very embarrassing.

Literally put his foot in it.

But the thing was, he didn't have a son.

No, he didn't have a son.

Yeah, there was no dead son.

At least do your research.

As a medium, do the very basic research.

If you're going to claim the dead sons, come back, make sure there's a dead son.

Yeah, especially where the people around the table are really famous.

And you could probably have just gone on to Wikipedia and chat.

Every QI person's favorite poem by Robert Browning is Pippa Passes.

And that's because it contains the lines: Sing to the bats, sleek sisterhoods, full compliance with gallantry, then owls and bats, cows and twats, monks and nuns in a cloister's moods.

And this is because

he thought that the word twat was a kind of headdress worn by a nun.

He had taken this from a 1660 satirical poem called Vanity of the Vanities, which says they talked of having a cardinal's hat, they'd send him a soon, an old nun's twat.

And he'd read that and thought, well, they can only be talking about the headdress.

It can't be anything else.

That's amazing.

So it must be that.

And he put it in his imagine putting it in your own person.

So good.

And what's great is the only reason we know that is the OED itself chased him up to say, do you have some sort of secret etymology about this that we don't know of?

Nope, nope, just fucked it up.

Did the OED tell him, you know, what you've done here?

Well, they must have said, we're approaching you because twat doesn't mean that.

Or they might have just said, we're interested in your

anyone who heard that poem, the very first time he read it out, has gone to him, Robert,

did you just say non-stwat?

He doesn't need to wait for the OED D to come over.

He's the laughing stock of the whole town.

Oh, but for a while he would have been going through his town going, oh, lovely twad, as he pointed to a nun's head.

It's so annoying because it's such a good word for rhyming with things.

Yeah, you're right.

Well, actually, you could have said hats.

There you go.

It would have worked.

The meaning would have been the same.

Perfect.

Love it.

Apparently, well, I mean, so his poems at the time were known for for being kind of impenetrable and impossible to understand.

And, you know, really great poets read them and did not get what he was on about.

So Tennyson said of his poem Sordello, which was an early one before he'd become a bit more accessible, Tennyson said he only understood the first and last lines of the entire thing.

The first line is, who will, as in who will read this, who will may hear Sordello's story told?

And the last line is, who would has read Sordello's story told?

And the in-between was nonsense.

And then Henry James, another great author who you would have thought would understand most things, said he was comforted on hearing Browning read his poems himself to an audience that, at least, if you don't understand them, he apparently understands them even less.

Wow.

Henry James writes some of the most complicated sentences in the whole of English literature.

He's so hard to read.

And if he didn't get Browning.

But Browning's like, why did Henry James come up to me and call me a non-strat?

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

My fact this week is that in 1948 in Idaho, leftover World War II parachutes were used to drop beavers out of airplanes.

For any particular reason?

No, just for just, yeah, why not?

You know, you've got to do something.

This was post-war, and people were feeling kind of elated in America because they won.

And they started moving to this place in Idaho called Payette Lake, near a place called McCool.

And there were beavers there.

And beavers get in the way of humans sometimes because they sort of build dams they disrupt water flows and they just change the surrounding environment so the people wanted them out and there was this guy called Elmo Hater who worked for Idaho

he really did not like Sesame Street did he

it was spelled differently but he did have a problem with puppets he worked for Idaho Fish and Game Association and he knew of a place called Chamberlain Basin 200 miles away which he thought was perfect for beavers.

And he also knew that World War II had just ended and there were all these leftover parachutes.

So he was like, Let's

marry the two.

Okay.

And he did.

Well, he tried, he actually tried taking them to this place by horse and carriage, first horse and cart, because there were no roads going between the two destinations.

And the horses hated the beavers.

So apparently, horses, if you put two beavers on their cart, they freak out.

Did you read his phrase about it?

He wrote this gorgeous phrase.

He said, Horses and mules become spooky and quarrelsome when loaded with a struggling, odorous pair of live beavers.

Spooky and quarrelsome.

Spooky and quarrelsome.

So the horses didn't like the beavers, beavers didn't like the horses.

And so this guy dropped them in the boxes into the forest instead.

Yeah.

Have you seen the footage of it?

Yes, yeah.

It's amazing.

It's awesome.

Yeah.

So this was only uncovered quite recently, right?

So

it was lost for a long time.

We knew there was footage, but no one knew where it was.

It's been uncovered a few years back, I think.

And you see the beaver being packed into this box, which is a sort of bite-proof box.

It's not locked down.

So, the idea is that they're sort of holding it shut, and the weight of

heading towards the ground is what's holding it shut.

As soon as they land, it can open up and the beaver can get out.

But they don't drop from a high height, it's a really quick descent.

It's like only 100 feet or so.

It's really crazy.

I have no idea how they survive the impact.

Well, they were very happy.

I think there were 76 that were dropped, and 75 survived.

And it was, because they tried it at first.

There's the story.

That one, it was very sad.

That one somehow jumped out.

Opened the lid of the box.

Open the list.

But they had one training beaver.

They did.

They called Geronimo.

And they would.

That was the, I think that Geronimo has the record for the beaver who's done the most parachute drops in the world.

I think even if he'd only done it twice, that would be a record for the most parachute drops from a beaver.

But he was this.

Imagine if you told him that now.

You mean I didn't have to do it there's other 350 times.

In fact, I'd argue if Geronimo had only done it once he would have had the jite record.

Well he was this old tough old male and they thought he's going to be our practice dummy.

They used dummies first and then they thought we need a live one and every time he climbed out of the box someone picked him up and then eventually he got so used to it that as soon as they saw him approaching he'd crawl back into the box of his own accord ready for the next jump.

It's like wow.

So sweet.

He's fine with it.

Beavers are beavers are cool, aren't they?

So cool.

Great.

Love beavers.

What do you love most about them?

Well one thing is this stuff I didn't know about called Castorium.

I hope I'm pronouncing that right.

What, their anal secretions?

Well, that makes sense.

What do you love most about beavers?

They're anal secretions.

So, it's right, let's just clear this up.

It's not anal.

Is it not?

It's not their anus, it's just extremely near their anus.

They have these glands,

and if you lift up the tail, it's really close to the bum and it produces a kind of scent.

It's this kind of brown slime.

It's not feces, it's just very near the feces.

But it smells heavenly.

And

it smells so good, and it's a product of their diet, of the bark and the leaves they eat.

And it's very hard to get hold of.

You have to knock a beaver out and then basically milk its anus.

No,

it's not the anus.

It's not the anus.

You're milking it wrong, no.

Oh, no.

I wasn't castarimolar.

That's all the slime I've got.

But it used to be used to flavor vanilla.

It used to be a legitimate product.

So NPR investigated whether it's still used.

And it turns out that there is a schnapps in Sweden which does still use it.

Really?

But it's so expensive to produce because there's only a limited number of beavers.

And the global consumption these days is only about 132 kilos a year.

Anna, what's your favourite thing about beavers?

Now you've stolen the Castorian thing.

This is a disaster.

My favourite thing is related.

It's the beaver myth that was pervasive for about over a thousand years, which is that if you're hunting a beaver, it would bite off its testicles and throw them at you and then run away

and people just used to think this

do you know what i don't have any first-hand proof that it doesn't happen I think we assume it's a myth now.

This came up in a text called A Physiologus in the second century AD and it's based on the same thing, the castoreum glands, which people thought were its testicles because they look very similar to testicles.

And people used this delicious smelling fragrance as medicine and as various other things.

I think women used to sniff it like snuff.

And so beavers knew this is the idea.

And they were like, well, this guy's hunting me.

He only wants my testicles.

So he'd bite them off and chuck them at the hunter.

And then the hunter would give up.

And as the myth went, if the hunter continued chasing, the beaver would turn around, display his empty testicle area and be like, Look, there's nothing for you here.

That's really interesting because I read an article that said that in the 17th century, beavers' testicles were used to cure toothache.

And when minced, they add a delicate flavour to tobacco.

But now I realise it's not the testicles, is it?

Yeah.

It's these anal glands.

It is, and I think the Algonquins and other American, Native American tribes, used to have it in tobacco because it made it taste delicious.

In fact, I believe it used to be used to flavour camel cigarettes and a few other types of cigarettes.

I think they used to use castorium.

Yeah.

Camels and Winston's.

That was it.

Yeah.

Used to have

beaver secretion.

How many beavers would you you have to knock out and milk to get this stuff?

It just is amazing.

I mean, there must have been a lot of

camels.

If you're getting the good stuff from the beavers,

you should have been sucking on a beaver.

Dan, your favourite thing about beavers?

That's a Robert Browning poem, isn't it?

Sucking on a beaver.

Yeah, but he did think it was a lawyer's sleeve.

Dan, favourite thing about beavers?

I like that they have a second set of lips.

So

they've got their normal lips just hanging out there in the front, then they've got their teeth, and then they've got another set of lips sitting right behind.

No.

Yeah, and it's for when they've gone underwater and they've picked up a nice bit of wood and they're coming back up.

So obviously they've got to bite into the wood, but you bite into the wood, your lips are open, you're letting the water in.

Second set of lips

stops the water coming into your body.

It's a classic.

How much lipstick must they get through?

Nightmare.

Because do you remember in the B-series of QI, we were looking into beavers and we sent Molly Oldfield, our good friend, to look into what beavers' lips look like.

And she went onto the internet and googled it.

Oh, no.

And she suddenly was a lot less innocent than she was at the start of the day.

Do you think base, you know, base one and base two and base three and base four?

Do you think base one for beavers is snogging their first lips and then base two is snogging their second lips?

And then I think you've got two base threes as well.

Base three is she showed me her nun's headgear.

But hang on, James.

What's your favorite thing about Beavers?

You've never asked me.

You've been asking all of us.

I know.

Let me think.

You must be so confident you have an obscure one that you allow three people.

I don't.

Okay, what about this?

My favourite is the movie Zombeavers.

Yes, he's done it.

He's done it.

Which I found on IMDb.

Cool.

which is about zombie beavers.

What I like about it is they mention in the script about a Giadia lamblia parasite, which is actually beavers actually have it.

And they used to think that it gave people something called beaver fever.

It might actually be, it can infect you.

I saw a review of it that says, zomb beavers is not a total wash, and seen at night under the right combination of low expectations and controlled substances, it may even seem better than it really is

and also when i went on to imdb it said that people who like zombievers will also like zoom bees which is

when a strange virus quickly spreads through a safari park and turns all the zoo animals into zombies oh

zoomies i thought it was going to be a zombie bees yeah exactly ah well actually spoiler alert at the end credits after the end credits of zombievers there's a brief segment that shows a bee feeding on the corpse of a beaver, and the bee flies back to his hive.

The implication is that it's become a zombie.

Brilliant.

We've ruined it.

We've got a sequel.

That's so exciting.

Yeah.

Sort of ruined the film for me.

Won't watch it now.

It's my night ruined.

One other thing about beavers,

for a beaver, the days in winter are longer than they are in the summer.

For a beaver, what?

What?

What?

They're nocturnal.

Is that it?

They are.

Yes, they are nocturnal, but that's not why.

Imagine if James was just trying to make the idea of a nocturnal animal just sound really exciting to me

how can we rebrand this repackage it this this is literal it's literally the days are longer in the um in the winter and that is because they live underground in their dams in winter and without any signals from nature they don't know when the sun's going up and when the sun's going down and so their circadian rhythm changes and they end up living on 27 hour days in the winter winter when they're living inside their dams and then when they come up in the summer they live on normal days because of the sun going up and down.

Wow.

Isn't that amazing?

I cannot believe that, given that, that zombie was your favorite thing about beavers.

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 Triberland.

Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

James, at James Harkin, and Anna.

You can email our podcast at QI.com.

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

We got everything up there from our previous episodes.

We don't have upcoming tour dates, but we have a video of us on tour.

If you want to see that, it's called Behind the Girls.

Do download that.

We'll be back again next week.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

They got married and they had a son who they called Pen.

He was actually called Robert as well, but they nicknamed him Pen and that's all they called him.

No, he was called

Weideman or Wiedemann.

Robert Wiedemann.

Yeah, but the reason they called him Pen is because he couldn't pronounce the word Wiedemann.

They also called him Penn because they did some tests and they found out he was mightier than a sword.

Are you going to keep that in?

Good.

Otherwise, we'll quit right now.

That's why I left the gap up.

Sorry, we could have let that hang.

Life's messy.

We're talking spills, stains, pets, and kids.

But with Anibay, you never have to stress about messes again.

At washablesofas.com, discover Anibay Sofas, the only fully machine-washable sofas inside and out, starting at just $699.

Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics, that means fewer stains and more peace of mind.

Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric covers, allowing you to refresh your style anytime.

Need flexibility?

Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly.

Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes.

Plus, they're earth-friendly and built to last.

That's why over 200,000 happy customers have made the switch.

Upgrade your space today.

Visit washable sofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life.

That's washable sofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.