291: No Such Thing As A Quintruple-Cooked Chip

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Czaczynski.

My fact this week is that one of the women about to take part in the first all-female spacewalk has spent the last eight years hand-rearing a flock of geese.

Wow.

And not in preparation for this.

This isn't part of the preparation.

It does sound like it.

It sounds like she's going to take the geese with her.

Yeah, she's flying up on the flock of geese, which would almost work because they're geese, which are famous because they can fly higher than any other bird.

So they're the bar-headed geese.

But not in space.

I think space would be pushing it even for them.

Yeah.

So this is Jessica Meir, and she's due to do a spacewalk on October 21st, and she's going to do it with with Christina Koch and it's going to be the first all-female spacewalk.

She hasn't always been an astronaut, she's a physiologist and the reason she's going up into space is to look at how space affects people's bodies and in the past she's only ever really looked at this in animals and so one of the things she looked at is the bar-headed goose because it flies so high and so she wanted to know how it can survive for instance in oxygen which is a third as much as oxygen here at ground level.

And so yeah, she realized that the only way you can look at that and look at how their physiology responds to proper sort of Everest height level conditions is by putting them in a wind tunnel and blasting them with wind and reducing their oxygen levels and putting masks on them and stuff.

And all of that really freaks geese out.

And so you can't really do that to a bunch of geese that you've just picked up.

And so she realised in order to study this, she'd have to rear geese from the egg so that they trusted her.

And so she did.

And the pictures are amazing, aren't they?

I've seen the pictures.

There was an article by Ed Young, right?

Well, you read this as well.

And they have a picture of her with all of her little geese around her and she just looks like mother goose kind of thing.

As soon as they follow her around and everything, right?

Yeah, it looks pretty fun because they imprinted on her.

I think we've probably said before that there are a lot of birds which if you're the first thing they see and if you nurture them as a youth then they think you're their mother.

Yeah.

And so they love her.

She trained them to fly by scootering along on her motorbike scooter thing and they all flew next to her.

But well I'm sure you read this in the piece too.

It's when they got separated, like if a car came in the other direction, they'd freak out and fly off and then they they would just land somewhere and they would search for anyone who looked like the lady they thought was their mother.

So one of them just started following people in and out of a supermarket just on the ground.

How similar do you think you'd have to look to this lady?

I think if you had brown hair, I think that would do it.

One of them landed in a hockey field and started chasing players around the field because they thought it was all a small.

It was brilliant.

And yeah,

they had to wear a backpack and goggles, didn't they?

Or no, was it a mask?

It was a little mask.

Yeah, a tiny mask.

Yeah, it doesn't look as comical as you might be imagining.

I sort of imagined biggles or something, but it's tiny little goggles.

And yeah, and they would blow nitrogen into their face so that they could see what it would be like with low oxygen conditions that they would otherwise be flying at.

And even then, they didn't all cooperate.

So they're quite stubborn, and fair enough, if someone shoves you in a wind tunnel and takes away your air.

Seven of them cooperated, seven out of twelve.

So she did these experiments in the wind tunnel.

Yeah.

And what did she find?

She basically found out that they are really well adapted to these strange conditions.

So, first of all, they've got better hemoglobin than the rest of us.

So their hemoglobin is just better at taking in oxygen.

They've got much more densely packed blood vessels.

They've got bigger lungs and they take deep breaths.

So if you see a goose flying that's sort of panting, it's likely to be a bar-headed goose.

Okay.

So how did NASA find her and then decide to train her as an astronaut?

Well, I read that she was an aquanaut before she was an astronaut.

Okay.

She worked for NASA in the Extreme Environment Missions Operations 4, which is known as NEMO.

And they went to the Antarctic and they studied Emperor penguins and elephant seals to see how they deal with cold weather and deep diving and things like that.

But she didn't have to raise any elephant seals from the egg.

I would love to see the penguins following people around the Mahocars.

That would be great.

She did dive with them a lot, so maybe she was a sort of mother figure.

So are you suggesting, James, that maybe it was a bit of a typo on NASA's part?

They meant to type astronaut, they typed aquanaut, she felt too rude to say no, and that was it.

I think you're absolutely right.

So spacewalks,

the man who did the first ever spacewalk, Alexei Leonov, he died very recently.

He died within the last fortnight or so.

And he had a terrible time when he went into space.

And specifically when he walked in space.

So he just had to put a camera on the airlock and record it with the camera on his chest and then not die.

And that was all he had to do.

You're making it sound like it's not difficult.

No, no, no, no, it's very difficult.

But he even muffed that up, the fool.

But his body temperature went up and up because obviously you're in a spacesuit and I think that sort of reflected the heat inwards rather than letting it radiate outwards.

And it was so inflated, his spacesuit, that he couldn't even reach the camera on his chest.

You know, he was just this sort of Michelin man floating around in space.

And he was so big that he couldn't get back in the airlock.

Yeah.

Yeah.

and his hands slipped out of his gloves, and his feet slipped out of his boots.

So he was just inside this very big space suit.

I know.

It must be like Mr.

Blobby.

It was like Mr.

Blobby in space, basically.

And so he had to deflate himself, didn't he?

He had to allow some of the pressure out, but as a result of that, he got the bends like you would if you were coming back from scuba diving.

So that complicated things even more.

Yeah, he said it was incredibly difficult to squeeze in, wasn't it?

And you had to go sort of head first, which you weren't supposed to.

And because the deflated, the losing the pressure meant that you i'm not sure it was exactly the benz but it's like it involves sucking the oxygen out of his suit so he was basically risking suffocating himself for the sake of trying to get back in otherwise he would have died of course otherwise he would have died i suppose so yeah it's really you've got to do it but also he couldn't say anything he couldn't say this is going disastrously wrong because he knew that other nations on earth were listening in yeah so you're kidding yeah so he didn't say anything he's great yeah

this is awesome i'm just gonna stay up for a few more minutes i love it so much and then when he came back to Earth, he landed 2,000 kilometers away from where he should have been.

And he had to kind of make his way back.

And the Russian government said that he was on holiday.

Yeah.

But I actually saw a movie about this whole thing called Spacewalker.

It's in Russian, but I think you can get it in English with subtitles.

And I watched it, I think, on the South Bank.

And Leonov was sat in front of us.

No.

Yeah.

No.

So he was at the same screening as us.

And they did a Q ⁇ A afterwards.

And they said that when they did the premiere in Moscow, there were two women sat next to him and one of them was saying, you know, do you think he's going to make it?

They were whispering to each other, do you think he's going to make it?

Do you think he's going to make it alive?

And the other one went, well, I think so.

He sat right on.

But it's an amazing movie.

It's so tense.

That's incredible.

It's brilliant.

That apparently was one of the feedback.

things that were given from an audience member who saw a premiere of Apollo 13.

You know, they do test screenings.

One of the things was classic Hollywood endings.

They survived this improbable trip at the end as if that would really happen in real life.

That's hilarious.

Did they do the bit in the film where they apparently dropped a cauldron down to them?

So they were in the deep snow in the Urals, hellish, worst place to accidentally land.

And they'd waited three days.

And then when the rescuers arrived, apparently, because they were very cold, they dropped a huge cauldron of boiling water from a helicopter down into the snow for them so they could climb in and warm up.

How fun would that be?

I guess so.

I guess it would be fun.

It doesn't sound fun climbing into a cauldron of boiling water.

They're boiling.

It wasn't boiling.

Sorry, it had cooled down on the dark.

Did they they play sort of witchy noises around the cauldron as they lowered it?

Yeah.

But it was also, the place they landed was a wolf and bear-riddled forest, apparently.

And it was also bear.

It was mating season, so all of the bears were particularly aggressive.

So are the little hybrid bear Leonov children out there in the Euros?

We're dropping a load of fur from the helicopter.

Just put the fur on.

You'll be fine.

Apparently, it was because of this that I read this fact ages ago that astronauts used to be given a gun because if they landed in enemy territory or somewhere dangerous and they i mean it's a short-term solution to a problem it creates more problems than it causes if you have an astronaut landing and then trying to shoot his way out of america or whatever it's not for people landing in america

sorry it's stop bears from shagging you

um Leonov's uh Leonov survived and he made it into

but he was in he was in another movie as well was he he was in 2001 a Space Odyssey

His breathing, the recordings of his breathing were used by Kubrick in that film.

That's true.

Really?

He was quite a creative chap, wasn't he?

He was an artist.

Yeah, I've seen an exhibition of his work as well in Moscow.

Really?

Yeah, yeah.

Was he good?

Yeah, really good.

He does, predictably, mostly do pictures of space, which I guess you would if you'd seen it.

If you'd been right out there.

Look, if it w if these things have been painted by someone else, I might not have enjoyed it quite as much.

But he is like, in Russia, he's so famous.

Or he was so famous.

Like, only Gagarin would be more famous.

in space terms.

And he insisted on bringing up pencil and paper didn't he in his first space trip and so he drew the first pictures in space and drew kind of portraits of his fellow astronauts and drew the first sort of sunrise in space and he tied together all his pencils to make sure they didn't all float around and get lost.

That's so cool.

It's very clever.

Cool guy.

Did he tie them together in a bundle or did he tie them together end to end?

So you had a sort of train of pencils.

I think it was a train.

I thought it was a train.

Yeah, because if you did them in one bundle, you won't be able to draw anything because you just have all the points at the same time.

You can draw 10 things at the same time.

Yeah, but they'd all be the same thing.

Just on

why spacewalking is so exhausting, it's partly because so it's frequently just home improvement is what they're doing on the ISS these days.

They're just adjusting things and fitting new things.

But every time you turn a spanner, for example, on the outside of the ISS, your body turns the opposite direction because of the lack of gravity.

So it's really knackering just to hold your whole self in space with one bit of you while you're turning a spanner with the other bit.

That's a problem we don't have down here.

Well, the other problem is, of course, is that you're going around the planet every 90 minutes.

So he did a...

five hour plus spacewalk and that's one of the other things you've got the sun directly on you for half the time and then you're back into ice cold of the universe for the other half and so that's where the sweat and then you go into absolute shivering storms as well that's according to scott kelly the astronaut.

I read once, oh gosh, I can't even remember who it is, or hardly anything about it, but there was a guy, I think, doing a spacewalk, and then like a flap of his spacesuit kind of came off, but it didn't expose his body, but exposed some part that wasn't supposed to be exposed, and he got the worst sunburn-like a massive triangle of sunburn on his back.

No, I think so.

It's so vague, that memory.

What an amazing tan mark to have.

You try and preserve that.

Just back to Mir, the astronaut, not the space station, who is rearing the geese, who's at the top of this fact.

She's not the only astronaut who's gone to space with the help of birds to get her there.

Peggy Whitson.

who is by all accounts the most experienced astronaut today.

She was the head of the ISS.

She spent 665 days in space in total.

That's enough to go around Mars and back.

Hypothetically, she made that trip with the time she was there.

And she got there because she only got a pilot license when she sold sold chickens that she was raising for two dollars each that eventually built up enough money for her to get her pilot's license which led her to becoming a NASA astronaut

is it true that what was the reason behind her not being able to do the spacewalk in the first place oh yeah that was earlier on this year

yeah that wasn't Jessica Mir but it was the person she's spacewalking with Christina Koch and this is in our book the

probably written a book this year

is it called the book of the year 2019 that's what it's called yeah available in all good bookshops from a couple of weeks' time.

And so, this is news from our book from this year.

The first all-female spacewalk was supposed to happen quite a few months ago, and it had to be cancelled because they didn't have NASA didn't have a spacesuit that fitted.

And this was Anne MacLean, was the other astronaut who was supposed to do it with Christina Koch.

And it turned out when it came to the day, she trained in large and medium spacesuits, but she realised she didn't feel comfortable in the large one.

And old Christina was hogging the medium one, so Anne said, all right, we'll let Mann do it.

That That killed that for a few months, and now it's happening.

And is it because your body changes?

I think I read this, your body kind of changes when you're in space, and so you can never quite tell whether you'll fit into something until you go.

Wow.

Yeah.

And so she had done a spacewalk and a medium one, exactly.

So she knew that at least that would work.

But do you get smaller in space?

Oh, no, she just didn't have access to a medium seat.

You don't drink in space.

You're just further away.

You get taller in space.

Yeah.

Because the gravity's not pulling

down to your feet all the time.

Yeah.

I didn't realize it was only two women doing a spacewalk.

And that's all, obviously that is all female, but when I read all female spacewalks...

You've got every woman on earth.

No, I just imagined like five or so, like roughly the same as Girls Aloud.

That scene in Endgame when all the girl superheroes come in that slightly.

Because you wouldn't say if you had like two singers like Pepsi and Shirley, you wouldn't say they were an all-girl group, really, would you?

You would say Girls Aloud are an all-girl group.

Definitely.

So what's the minimum number of all for anything?

What about sugar babes?

Would you say they're an all-girl group?

I actually would.

I think three.

I think three.

The thing is, we're not calling it, can I just clarify an all-girl spacewalk?

It's an all-female spacewalk, guys.

I think it should be called a both-female spacewalk.

The only both female spacewalk.

I don't know if it was the same ring.

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

My fact is that the Netherlands has a restaurant where if you move tables, there is a chance you'll end up in Belgium.

So this is a place called Baal,

and I'm sure I'm pronouncing that correctly, so don't write in.

And it's between the Netherlands and Belgium.

The town is basically in the Netherlands, but there are lots of enclaves, which is, you know, a patch of land inside another country, and those are Belgian enclaves inside the town.

And some of these borders pass through living rooms, for example, or restaurants, and the laws are observed there.

So there was a time when the licensing hours meant that you had to stop drinking in one country, but not in another one.

And so everyone would have to get up from their tables at some point in the evening, if they wanted to keep drinking, and then move across to the country where you could keep drinking.

It used to be that the legal drinking age, I don't know if it still is, it was sixteen in Belgium and eighteen in the Netherlands.

That's great.

So would you s well, like, can I see some ID?

And they'd say, Can I show you my ID over there?

I've actually been to this town.

Have you been?

Yeah, Baal Hertog and Baal Nassau.

I went just because I'd heard

something.

That's the kind of thing you do, Mark.

Basically, I went on holiday with my ex around Belgium and the Netherlands and dragged her to this town,

which she was not impressed by, but I was really impressed.

Because I did read that there's not really much there.

There is not.

Yeah.

There really isn't.

You get off the train and you wander around and you look at all the borders and stuff.

And I had a wandering round looking for pornography shops and fireworks shops.

Oh, whoa.

That's what I do when I'm on holidays.

Are they separate shops or do they sell both things?

No, so what I read before I went here is that pornography is more legal in the netherlands and fireworks are more legal in belgium and so they're in separate parts of this town but when i went there i actually couldn't find either again still more clues till the end of this relationship

did you see there's one house where so a lot of the border doesn't affect massively houses because the border will go halfway through the house but there's one with a door where the border goes right down the middle of the door so that's very cool because what they have on it is they couldn't work out which side which country it belonged to for an address um so it actually has two doorbells either side of it so you ring it if you want to be on the Belgian side and then you ring it yeah and it's got two addresses so on the ground they have these crosses which kind of show you where the border is rather than lines they're kind of like crosses with a dot cross with a dot cross with a dot and some of them go directly through the doorway and then also like all the houses have little flags on that are either Belgian flags or Netherlands flags so you can tell which country you're in and you can walk down one street and you can cross through five borders in less than a minute.

Wow.

Yeah.

Although I couldn't tell with the house where it goes through the door, because the way you normally decide with a house which country it's in is by the doorway.

And often people, or sometimes people on the border apparently, have moved their doorway to be in a more tax-friendly country.

I couldn't tell which country this house counted as being in for tax purposes, so I'm kind of here to highlight some possible tax evasion.

But it claims that it's in Belgium where the Netherlands guys come and vice versa.

Sure, you're right.

Such a cop.

So if you are sitting at the table in the Belgian bit, you're allowed to build a house within 300 meters of a pig farm, which you're not allowed to do if you're sitting at a table in the Netherlands bit of the restaurant.

Who builds a house in a restaurant?

Yeah, I think.

Come on, Andy.

You're taking the restaurant bit too far.

Slightly out.

If you're on the Belgian side, then fine.

Okay.

Yeah, and they have two phone systems and two police forces and two fire services.

The fire service thing is really interesting.

Did you read this?

No.

So the Belgian and Dutch fire brigades have different size hoses.

Okay, they have different

thickness.

And so, they had problems with the fire hydrants because the fire hydrants are different in the Netherlands than they are in Belgium.

So funny.

And so, they appealed to the EU for money to kind of get all the hoses standardized and stuff like that, but they didn't do that.

And in the end, the fire departments had to invent these adapters that could take you from one hose pipe to one fire hydrant and vice versa.

Amazing.

That's so cool.

Isn't that cool?

That's really good.

Just necessity as a mother of invention.

Okay.

They applied to be the well apparently both places applied to be to UNESCO to be a World Heritage Site

because of their complex cartography, but I don't think they have won that because as you said James and you've been there, there is nothing there.

It was quite a few years ago when I was there but yeah, it really was quite boring.

One fun thing you could do there apparently but I couldn't find if this is possible but the border goes through the middle of a road at one point.

So if you're driving on one side and the speed limits in Belgium is different to the Netherlands, you can drive, you know, twice as fast.

But as far as I can tell, the speed limits are the same.

Yeah, that would be a very different speed limit, which was double.

That is, I mean, the truth is that these two countries are very similar in many, many ways.

And they're in the EU, which makes them even more similar.

One of them should leave the EU, and I think that would then make it quite exciting.

I don't think we need any more excitement about borders and people leaving the EU.

We've been talking about this place in Belgium and the Netherlands, where it's not really an issue, this place being there because the countries get along well.

But there was a serious problem between India and Bangladesh, which had 80% of the world's enclaves in it until a couple of years ago.

And so that meant there were 106 Indian enclaves in Bangladesh and 92 Bangladeshi enclaves in India and multiple counter-enclaves within them.

So you'd have India in Bangladesh and India.

And also it had the world's only counter-counter enclave.

So there was a bit of India, inside a bit of Bangladesh, inside a bit of India, inside the whole of Bangladesh.

So on this border between India and Bangladesh, there's a town called Hilly, H-I-L-I, and some houses lie on the border.

So you can enter the front door in India and leave the back door in Bangladesh.

Wow.

And policeman Anna or police person Anna would be very interested because basically it's just a place where people do a lot of smuggling.

I would install myself inside that house and stop anyone from moving from the kitchen to the front

at all times.

But I think it has been solved now because it was a serious problem.

And for instance, if you're in an Indian enclave in Bangladesh, then you wouldn't be allowed to travel outside of your tiny sphere into Bangladesh without a visa or a passport.

But to get a visa or a passport, you have to go to India proper.

And you can't get to India without crossing through Bangladesh.

So people were just trapped there.

And it was a major issue.

And I think in 2015, they finally swapped all their land back.

So this is getting ridiculous.

We never explained why this place in the Netherlands and Belgium is how it is.

And it's basically due to the lords of Breda and the Dukes of Brabant.

Brabant?

Brabant?

I think Brabant.

Brabant sounds good, yeah.

Brabant, yeah.

And they basically just swapped land with each other over many, many hundreds of years, these two families.

And that's why you've got two places.

One's called Baal-Hertog and one's called Baal-Nassau.

And the Baal-Hertog comes from the Dutch word meaning duke.

And the Nassau comes from the house of Nassau, which was the aristocratic house which Breda in that time.

And they just swapped?

Yeah, they kind of just kept swapping things.

People would run out of money, and the other people would buy some of your land, and then you would buy some of their land back, and stuff like that.

And eventually, after the Second World War, no one could really work out anything, but they found some old maps which said how it all fitted in.

I think that's right.

But it just, I find it unfathomable that when we reached the age of visas and passports and technology and the EU, they didn't say, should we now disregard the pointless, stupid whims of these weird Renaissance dukes and do it like a normal person?

It was the same in India.

The reason it happened in India was because there were Maharajas who were just playing cards and chess and waging bits of land between them, apparently.

Or it was obviously at the whim of local lords saying, Oh, look,

fine, you can have that bit of land if I can shag your wife or whatever.

Well, you could argue the modern-day nationhood in a lot of the world is down to whims of dukes and so on, couldn't you, basically?

But it's just the tourism.

Imagine the Harkins of the world not visiting places like this.

They would fold in minutes.

Right.

I hardly think there are millions of Harkin-like people going to these places.

Yeah, how rammed was it when you were there?

I was just looking at some weird borders, interesting border disputes or territorial disputes.

And I didn't know about this place called Bir Tawil, which is a really big patch of land, so it's over 2,000 kilometers squared.

It's a patch of desert.

It's between Egypt and Sudan, and I believe it's the only place in the world which is not claimed by any country.

As in Egypt claims it belongs to Sudan, Sudan claims it belongs to Egypt.

Nices than wants it.

The unwanted son of geopolitics.

Yeah, this poor little lump of desert.

It's terrible.

Is it just really crap?

Really shit.

How crap must it be?

Why do you not want that territory though?

Well, it's because basically there were two there were two accords which drew up the territory and decided who it belonged to.

And one of them decided that this place, Bir Bir Tawal, belonged to Egypt, and another place called the Halaib Triangle belonged to Sudan.

And then the other accord said it was the other way around.

And the Halaib Triangle is great.

It's on the coast.

It's a nice patch of land.

It's much bigger.

So they both really want that.

So if either of them claim the other place, they're sort of implicitly saying, I don't want the nice triangle.

So they can't.

So if anyone wants it, it's going free.

So it's not much there, though.

It is just, it's even less there than

It's on James's next holiday destination list.

I would go.

I think you can't, I think you're not supposed to go there.

I don't think there are, it doesn't sound like there are many fireworks or pornography shops, though.

So disappointing.

Just one more thing about borders.

In China, trains crossing from Mongolia at the town of Erlian, they have to wait, and the passengers all have to wait inside the train while the wheels are changed.

Oh, really?

Different gauges.

Different gauges.

The tracks in China are narrow.

Classic used to have that in Australia.

Huge issue between the states of Australia because there was a massive dispute between, I think it was South Australia and Victoria, maybe, about the gauges.

No one wants to give up their gauges.

I can understand it in two different countries, but come on, Australia, get your act together.

It's the same country.

Sort your shit out.

My friend, I spoke to my friend who lives in China yesterday, and she's just been to visit South Korea.

And she went to the DMZ and she looks with binoculars or a telescope over the border and saw, I think we've discussed before, the peace village, you know, the fake village in North Korea.

So, yeah, I think

we've mentioned this.

Oh, well, she actually, again, James, she did say it was really crap, but it sounds like you would probably enjoy it.

That would not stop me, honestly.

I know.

Have you spoken about their negotiation room, the North Korea-South Korea negotiation room?

No.

This is for where they meet to sort of just discuss along the border, but the room itself is along the border.

So there's a table in there, which is cut in two, which is one half belongs to the north and one to the south.

Why did they feel the need to cut it in two?

I guess guess it's a symbolic, this is our table and this is your table.

Because it has legs in the middle because otherwise surely the table's just falling over each other.

It's a long table so yeah, it must have enough legs either side.

What if you drop your pencil and it rolls over into North Korea?

That's why they always tie their pencil with a load of strings.

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

My fact this week is that in order to stop drought, an Indian village married two frogs.

two months later They had to be divorced because it would not stop raining

This is this is a thing that was done out there this year

This was in a place called Bhopal and they were divorced symbolically because the rain was just causing total destruction in the area They obviously couldn't find the frogs that they needed because I believe they must have been left back into the wild.

So it was could they not have just found the one in the top hat and the one in the veil?

They were divorced by proxy.

Yeah.

Yes, Yes, yeah.

Wow, well.

Technically, they're probably still married, I would say.

Yeah.

Wouldn't you say?

They don't know it, though.

They don't know they've been divorced.

They don't even know they're frogs.

But they'll be out there living in sin.

But this is a thing that's done a lot over in India.

They have marriages of frogs for rain a lot.

And they really go to town with the sort of the whole process of setting up a wedding.

So they send out invitation cards.

They had custom clothes made, wedding clothes for the frogs.

You would have to make custom clothes because they don't sell them off the rack.

Such a good point.

What they actually have to go through, it's not just they just take any old frogs, they actually have a procedure that has them inspected by the zoology departments that are local to them.

And after the selection process, they bring them together to a hotel.

In this case, that where I read a story, they got married on a tricycle.

And yeah, and then they all go out for celebrations afterwards.

This is what they do.

Have you seen a picture of this supposed tricycle?

No, no.

Was it a custom-made tricycle?

I think it's a human-sized tricycle.

Really?

I think they were taken to the venue on a tricycle.

I don't think the ceremony took place on the tricycle.

It would be ridiculous.

Yeah.

That's not good wedding inspo at all.

I think if you're not old enough to ride a proper bicycle, you're not old enough to get married, personally.

That's just my old

opinion.

Very harsh.

I don't know.

I think that's uncontroversial.

So they got married to please Lord Indra, who is the Hindu god of rains.

And Indra was, he's kind of a weird god.

So there was a goddess, a very beautiful goddess called Ahalya, which also means perfection.

And she was married to another god called Gautama.

But Indra really fancied her, really liked Ahalya, and so decided to disguise himself as Gwatama to have sex with her.

And then, as always happens, he got found out.

And so Gautama cursed him to be adorned, his body to be adorned with 1,000 vaginas.

Ooh, what?

Wow.

Yeah, that was his curse.

I didn't see that coming.

I thought he was going to get turned into a frog.

I thought the same thing.

No,

a thousand vaginas.

The very opposite.

He got turned into a different animal because Gautama thought, okay, a thousand vaginas, actually, that is a bit much.

You know, it was bad what he did, but a thousand vaginas, that's a bit much.

Can we guess?

So he swapped the vaginas for eyes.

So he was adorned with a thousand eyes, and he became...

I would guess a peacock.

Correct!

And that's why peacocks have so many eyes on their tails.

They used to be vaginas.

Right.

Really, did they?

But not functioning ones, more decorative vaginas.

I suppose so.

Okay.

Even if you had a thousand functioning vaginas, it's hard to get through them.

It would take you a long time to get through them all.

It would be easy to get through them all.

You'd try.

You'd definitely set yourself that challenge.

But then keeping track is a nightmare.

You'd have to have some sort of sticker system or some sort of.

You're basically a colander at that stage.

Limey O'Reilly.

We should say not everyone in India believes this frog stuff.

The top comment on the Times of India, when they reported the story, top comment was, stupidity has no limits, as has been proved by the people and the journalists covering the story.

So I think even in India, it is a thing where people go, oh, right, yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's pretty rare.

But it's definitely, you know, it's related to Hinduism.

So it's apparently that God Vishnu once took the form of kind of an amphibian,

and sometimes a fish, but maybe that's also kind of sometimes a frog.

And so that's where it comes from.

So it could well be a symbolic thing rather than, you know, it's just like a prayer, really.

And they do get decorated, like you think the frogs sometimes get a wedding ring, or they get cloaks put on them, or sometimes little

veils.

And there was one person who remembered being taken to a massive

customer made, all custom made, assumed custom made, unless otherwise stated.

There was one girl girl who remembered when she was younger being taken to a massive frog wedding.

Females.

A wedding for a massive frog.

I was at a massive wedding for normal size females.

Actually, they could use a normal shop-bought veil for that one, which is great.

It was one of the few.

Yep.

I didn't get the frog size.

It was a frog wedding that was attended by about 70 people.

And the frog's head is streaked with vermilion powder, like women's heads are when they get married in Hinduism.

So that's called Sindor, that red powder that you smear over your parting.

So the frogs get that.

And yeah, wear lipstick quite a lot.

Put lipstick on a frog.

But isn't that a saying that you can't put lipstick on a frog?

On a pig.

Yeah, or a hog.

Sometimes.

Is there saying that you can put lipstick on a pig?

No.

Well, you can, but it doesn't make it look any better as well.

Right.

That's what the point is.

Because there's another one about rolling a turd in glitter.

Yeah.

And you can.

I mean, I would say you can do all these things.

You can.

You can put lipstick on a pig, but you can't make it drink.

That's how it goes.

And you can actually buy a thing that makes your poo glittery as well.

Can you?

Yeah, you eat it, and it goes through your system and your poo comes out glittery.

Gosh.

Yeah.

What a useful thing to buy.

I actually was going to submit a fact for another week's podcast, but I'll just say it now, which is that echidnas have glittery poo.

No.

What?

Yeah.

They have sparkly poo and it's only because of the...

Well, can you guess why?

Well, it must be something they eat.

Yep.

They're Australian echidnas, aren't they?

Yep.

Yeah.

So what is us...

Is it like when the New Year parties happen in Sydney?

Massive party, loads of glitter, eat it, shit it out.

Very nut.

It's a very good theory.

It's not that.

Okay.

Is it something something luminescent or phosphorescent?

Fireflies?

No, it's ants.

It's ant exoskeletons.

When they crunch them up in their body, because they love eating ants, so they sparkle and they make it have glittery poo.

Beautiful.

Yeah.

That's great.

Do you guys know that during the 90s, well, 1990, the Prime Minister of New Zealand appointed someone the official wizard of New Zealand?

So they had an official wizard, and he's only retired a few years back.

And the reason he's relevant to this is because he, quite famously in 1988, went and did a rain dance for a small town that had a drought called Waimate.

They had a drought for six months.

And he went there and he brought with him four buckets of water, a horn, an umbrella under which he had a little red demon, a large bass drum, his magic staff, and a mug of beer.

And he performed a rain dance, and it started torrential raining within two hours.

Made international news.

And this was their official weather dance.

I mean, he's definitely checked the weather forecast before deciding when to do this.

Yeah, well, no, so six months, and it was part of a festival, and the festival was not going to be held, but actually, it turned because of the drought, they weren't going to have it in this farm, but they thought it's actually a nice place for people to meet up.

Let's have a fun little rain dance thing going on.

The wizard rocks up, does his dance, two hours later, rain.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

It's incredible.

Paint me skeptical.

So for instance, this week, the Pope tweeted something about praying to the saints, but he put hashtag saints.

And when you do that on Twitter, sometimes it thinks you're talking about the American football team, the saints.

So it puts a little symbol of the American football team.

So he tweeted, we should all pray for the saints with the American football team.

And sure enough, this week they won.

Well, there you go.

There you go.

It must be related to this Kiwi guy.

The Pope is the official wizard of lots of people, really, isn't he?

He is.

Good luck getting excommunicated for calling him the official wizard.

Yeah, because a lot of people are able to do that.

I think in Nigeria, there's a particular problem because people charge for the services of being rainmaker.

And the clever trick is you do sort of check what the weather's going to do.

And you're sort of a bit loose.

So if it does rain two hours later, maybe three, maybe four, maybe a couple of days, you can claim it, can't you?

Yeah.

But I was reading, there was in the Journal of Iranian Studies, there was actually a list of stuff that individuals in Iran can do in different parts of Iran to bring on rain.

There are a few things you can do.

So rain-making individual ceremonies include sticking pieces of dough to the back of a sheep.

If you've got those two things

are you talking about dough as in the thing you make bread from or a female fear

because that is quite disgusting and harrowing.

Don't just cut a deer into small pieces.

It's the bread.

It's the bread stuff.

Leave the deer alone.

You can also steal the tripod of a widow.

The tripod?

Yeah, I think that might be a cooking thing rather than a photographic thing.

Okay.

I imagine.

Or you can ride on a tree branch as on a horse.

And actually, if that tree was a bit wet and you jump up and down on a tree branch, it does cause it to sort of rain under that tree, doesn't it?

A little sharper.

But then if your branches are wet, why are you doing away?

Shall we finish?

Yeah, I've just got one slightly interesting thing.

There's been a mystery which is to do with sea snakes, which is how they live in, and particular species are the yellow-bellied sea snakes.

It's a reptile that lives in the open sea.

So it needs fresh water, but it's living in salty sea.

How does it do it?

And there's a new study that's been done, and it's still in sort of trying to prove this theory entirely.

But what they think is the way they get fresh water is that when it's heavy raining, there's a thin lens of the rainwater that sits on top of the ocean.

And that's where they go and rehydrate themselves.

So they go to the surface, yeah, and they drink from this little sort of like having a top

of lemonade on your beer kind of thing um

it's like ordering a lager top but you don't want any of the beer exactly yeah that sounds like me

and you're inside the beer do you think that a lager top you just drink the lemonade at the top and then the rest of it's just old beer then it's just not because what is it because they put a tiny yeah so you never heard of that they have a full beer and

they don't fully fill it up there's like a tiny little centimeter at the top that they fill with lemonade to it.

It takes the edge off a little bit.

Takes the edge off.

And famously, beer is much denser than lemonade, so the lemonade just sits on top.

Well, how does it sit there taste-wise the whole time?

Answer me that.

You can't.

Okay, it is time for fact number three.

Wait, are you talking about?

Wait, we've done fact number three.

We have done fact number three.

Damn it.

I'm going to get you out of this.

Damn it, okay, okay.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that Sainsbury's sells triple cooked chips which you then have to cook.

It's not really a fact.

This is such a stupid fact.

It's not really a fact.

It's great.

I was just

more of a sort of ad or spawn than a fact.

It's more of the start of my stand-up set.

So what it was was one of the other elves, we're doing the R series of QI at the moment, and one of the other elves, Matt Coward, posted a thing about refried beans about how refried beans aren't fried twice.

And he said, why would you fry anything twice?

And I was like, well, you do fried chips twice to cook them.

And then someone said that Heston Blumenthal triple cooks his chips.

And so I wanted to see if anyone quadruple cooks their chips.

And my Google just found this.

I'm this fact.

And so triple cooked chips are a thing that was invented by Heston Blumenthal in the 90s.

And you can buy them.

So you put them in the oven and they cook.

So they're quadruple cooked chips.

As far as I can see, there is no quintruple cooked chips.

I was astonished how you found this fact because the link you sent us to show that this fact was true was a Twitter question that someone called Sam put to Sainsbury's.

And this was back in 2016, I think it was, or 2017.

It had one like and they replied to him with, yes, you have to then recook it.

And I thought, Jesus, James's research levels are insane.

I trolling.

I'm going to read everything on Twitter just in case that happens.

Yeah, did you hear his method?

He typed quadruple cooked chips into the internet.

There aren't many results for that.

I've giving away all my tricks of researching QI here.

But no, actually, the Sunday Times said that Heston Blumenthal inventing triple cooked chips was arguably his most influential culinary invention.

Wow.

Okay.

And it gave them a whole new lease of life, they say, chips, that is.

And the way that he does it is he kind of cooks them by simmering them in water, and then he gets rid of all the water inside them using a sous vide technique.

I'm not sure exactly what that means.

Well I know what sous vide means but I don't know what the technique is.

Or he does it by freezing them and then he deep fries them and then he cools them and then he deep fries them again at a really high temperature.

So they get really crispy on the outside and really fluffy in the middle.

And then you shove them in the oven, forget about them

because you're drunk.

And then they're just like charcoal.

But they're all right as long as you have a lot of ketchup with them.

So I didn't know how chips.

Why chips are nice, basically, until researching this back.

What do you mean?

Why are they nice?

So it's exactly because of that.

So it is when you deep fry chips, what happens is you've got, obviously, you're just potato chunks, you know, that's all they are originally.

But then, thanks to the magic of cooking, so when they touch the oil, all the moisture on their surface immediately vaporizes and that immediately forms this dry, hard layer on the outside.

But the moisture inside that layer is trapped, and that's when it steams the flesh of the potato, and that's what makes it fluffy on the inside, and obviously it's crunchy on the outside because of the sort of hard oil layer.

But you need that shell to form instantly, otherwise, the moisture will seep out, and then you'll have, you know, basically a dry, all-the-way-through stick.

So, that's a disaster.

And it's only batter and potato starch which can form that instant hard layer

when you're cooking.

Yeah, so that's why you don't need to batter chips, and it's why you do need to batter lots of other stuff, is because batter's the thing that forms that sealed layer and makes it cook on the inside as well as the outside.

Mind you, a battered chip would be fucking delicious.

I actually saw someone tweeting about battered chips this week.

It was just completely not even part of this research.

I just saw it and I just thought that is fit.

Yeah, yeah.

That does make me worry about your Twitter habits actually.

You are going too deep.

That's really interesting.

And on the Heston thing, the way that he kind of gets rid of the water by freeze-drying them, this is a technique that has been done by Peruvians for over a thousand years.

So they invented freeze-drying for potatoes.

Because basically, you live in Peru, if you're at very high altitude or you have like droughts quite often because of El Niño, you're not always going to have potatoes all the time.

And so they had to find ways of keeping them when they had problems.

And the way they did it was take them really, really high up mountains and they would freeze them and the water would come out of them and it meant that they wouldn't rot so quickly.

Yeah, that is very interesting.

And it really is amazing because it's like almost a millennium before we invented the technology.

But the next next thing they did, once they've frozen them and they've lost a lot of their moisture, and then they trampled them underfoot.

And so sometimes they still do this and it's really, really successful.

So you lay them, lay all of your chips on the ground, or your potatoes on the ground.

They didn't have chips, potatoes on the ground.

And then as a family, you trample them or as a little village, you trample them all down and you squeeze all of the moisture out.

And once you've trampled them all, that moisture is so squeezed out that they'll last for years.

So as James says, you know,

you lose a few potato crops, you're fine.

You also don't want to eat them because your horrible uncle has just walked all over them with his big, sweaty feet.

Yeah, you only have them in times of real, real weather.

But that's actually how cheesy chips were invented.

I wonder then if they have...

So obviously they have farms on the ground level, but would you then have farm plot, as it were, up on the mountains?

That's a bit in Peru.

Yeah.

Yeah, you would.

Actually, you would have people living at different altitudes.

Okay.

And they would.

They would come up with different varieties of potato that would grow in all these different altitudes.

And that's why in Peru I think they have something like 200 different types of potato in the country.

They have more types of potato than anywhere else

and they invented the husbandry of it.

Not husbandry, the growing of it.

They invented how to grow potatoes really.

And it's because when you were in Peru you would pay your tax in potatoes or a few other things but they would all be crops and so you needed a way that everyone would be able to grow potatoes because everyone needs to be able to pay their tax and so the government would almost come up with ways of the people in high altitude growing potatoes so that that they'd be able to collect tax from them.

Oh, really?

But then the government just has loads of potatoes.

But then, of course, the government then gives the potatoes out to people, and you know, people who can't grow potatoes get potatoes and they give them goods and services.

Got it.

It's a currency.

It's a potato currency.

It's amazing how many potatoes there are.

As you say, and they're still finding them.

Like, James and I once met a potato hunter who's discovered new species.

She was on Museum of Curiosity.

She works at the Natural History Museum.

Yeah, still finding new tomato and potato species all over the world.

Yeah.

Cool.

Why do we get stuck with the same old Maris Piper or Tesco value new potatoes?

Well, one reason is because the potatoes are trademarked by companies.

So PepsiCo.

is filing has been filing lawsuits against farmers in India who have been growing their special types of potato that they use for lay potato crisps.

Very controversial.

I know.

But I guess if you've put a load of research and development into,

genetically making a better potato.

You know how pro-capitalism you are.

Hey, I read The Economist for a really.

No, it is.

I mean, it's a real proper argument, isn't it?

Like, we wouldn't have those amazing potatoes that

can grow and feed so many people if they didn't know they were going to get money back for them.

Yeah.

Shouldn't there be a thing where, um, like you have with patents with medicine, where you can have it for 10 years and then it's released to the world?

Yeah, that would be a good idea.

It's a thought.

Unleash the potatoes.

Unleash them.

Speaking of big capitalist fear moths, McDonald's,

it's fries in America, not vegetarian.

Really?

Yeah.

So chips used to be often cooked in beef tallow.

Beef fat la delicious.

Really good ones, I guess, probably often are.

And so McDonald's fries used to be cooked in beef tallow.

And then there was this huge crusade, which I think we've mentioned before in the 1980s, which was anti-sap fat.

So it was saying beef tallow is really bad for you because of the saturated fats.

So McDonald's started cooking them in vegetable oil, and they realized they tasted way worse.

And so now what they do is they coat it in beef flavouring before it gets sent off to the McDonald's to be cooked.

In America only, or in America, and it was hard to confirm where else, definitely not in India, because McDonald's doesn't resell meat in India, obviously.

In the UK, on the McDonald's site, it does say that their chips are vegetarian.

Right, okay.

But in America, definitely, you're coated in beef powder.

But just another quick tip of something yummy to eat.

When we're talking about battered chips before,

I've had battered halloumi chips.

Oh, yeah.

Best thing I've had in years.

Just a little tip there.

They are good.

They're relatively common, but they're quite common.

What?

Really?

It's pretty standard hipster lunch.

Two North London elitists over here.

Sorry.

In 2018, last year, British chips got shorter by three centimetres.

What?

What?

I know.

There was a chip, There was a terrible potato crop.

And they're usually, potatoes are usually the size of a small brick was in the article I read.

If you can imagine such a thing.

But obviously,

if the bricks get smaller, the chips get smaller.

And the potatoes that were harvested were smaller last year because of this terrible potato crop.

And

the Telegraph interviewed Cedric Porter, who was the editor of World Potato Markets magazine.

And he said, this was the hottest British summer since 1976, which any potato person will tell you was an almost mythical year.

He said, it is still talked about in potato circles.

It is.

Wow.

Do you know what we should have done is sent our chips to space?

Right?

Make them taller.

Yeah.

That's a great idea.

Perfect.

And actually, did you read this about how to make chips in space?

No.

So the European Space Agency used its centrifuge and a specially made deep fat fryer and they made fries.

Wow.

And they found that the sweet spot for the best chips was about three times the Earth's gravity, which is about the same as you would find on Jupiter.

And if you cook chips there, you get their absolute perfect crispiness and fluffiness.

But if you go anywhere over three times the Earth's gravity, the fry begins to lose its structural integrity.

Wow.

I can already see Heston looking up for next spaceflight to Jupiter.

It is amazing because I read that too and they built a rotating industrial fryer to simulate up to 9G.

Wow.

But

they did feed the students normal chips and then 3G chips.

And they found that student volunteers were unable to tell the difference between normal and 3G chips.

Sorry, 3G chips sound like they just have a very good internet.

Can I just say this is going way back, but you know, you were talking about Andy chips shrinking in size.

Yeah.

Did you see who wrote that article?

I think that was in the Telegraph, wasn't it?

I didn't see who wrote the article.

Well, it was a guy called James Crisp.

Wow, wow.

Just thought worth mentioning.

And then, in the research for this, the next thing I researched was about the first crisp recipe.

And this was actually in the early 19th century, and it was in a book called The Cook's Oracle.

And it basically told readers to like peel potatoes, cut them into shavings round and round, and then dry them with a cloth and fry them in lard or dripping, so first chip.

And that was by Dr.

William Kitchener.

Wow.

Big day of nominative determinism.

Thank you.

I found out about a man called Eric Rimm.

What was he responsible?

Yeah, I don't want to know what he was doing.

Where was he putting chips?

He is a very distinguished nutritionist, but he, I think, so the U.S.

Agriculture Department lists a serving of French fries as 12 to 15 fries, which is very small, obviously.

And he prompted this huge controversy online because he was responding to this.

And he was just saying, yeah, portions are massively bigger than they were in the 50s and he said I think it would be nice if your meal came with a side salad and six French fries six well a lot of people said I don't want six French fries I want more which is fair that's not even a handful it's not even a handful no depending on your hands but no

I mean I have normal human-sized hands

He also advised, so he prompted that controversy, which is one, you know, grenade into the conversation.

He also said, diners should ask how often a restaurant changes its oil, because if you repeatedly heat and then cool and then reheat the oil, that can create very unhealthy fatty acids in it.

Oh, really?

So next time you go to McDonald's or Burke,

you've been at the counter.

I'll ask, excuse me, how long ago did you last change the oil?

You can in McDonald's confirm by McDonald's staff, ask always for fresh chips, by the way, because apparently there was some rumor that the only way to get, like, you know, when they've got loads of chips lined up and they just give them out, sometimes they're a bit cold.

And there was a rumor that you had to ask for unsalted chips, and that was the only way to induce them to make a fresh batch because they all had salt.

Apparently, you can just go in and say, I'd like some freshly cooked chips, and they will just do it.

Can you say, I'd like you to change the aisle and then make some chips?

You can try.

Ketchup is banned in French schools on any foodstuff apart from chips.

No.

It's more of a guideline than a ban, but it's basically: if you're a French school person,

a school child,

then you basically can't have ketchup.

Because I know, Anna, you will have ketchup on literally anything.

Yeah, you've got to have ketchup on anything.

But only on French fries, they're allowed it.

Well, sorry, France, no more holidays to you.

And it's to protect traditional Gaelic cuisine.

That's

very French.

It is.

And just to clarify, I don't holiday in French prep schools.

But do you know why ketchup is so delicious?

I assume because of the large number of unhealthy ingredients in it.

It can deliver sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami, so all the tastes all at once.

Wow.

Basically, lots of sugar, lots of sour stuff.

Nice.

So you would have thought that might be too much.

But

if you put five different foods in your mouth all at once, sometimes they don't go together.

But it just works if ketchup is next.

You need to stop shoving all that food in your mouth at the same time.

I have just a very, just, to me, this was very interesting.

It's to do with Sainsbury's, which this fact started off as.

Can I just say, I'm sure other supermarkets sell this kind of stuff as well.

I just happen to see it in Sainsbury's.

Are the worst supermarkets?

Am I right?

But no, just quite cool.

Sainsbury's was founded less than a 10-minute walk from where we are right now recording this podcast, Drury Lane in London.

Yeah.

That's where the very first shop was by John James Sainsbury.

It was in 1869, so it's the 150th year this year.

And by the time he died in 1928, 128 shops were opened around the UK.

And he was a total obsessive with his work.

And his last words were said to be, keep the shops well lit.

He was thinking about it right till the last second.

Wow.

Yeah.

His last words were, do you have a Sainsbury's card?

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

James at James Harkin and Czechzinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

You'll find many things up there from previous episodes to upcoming tour dates.

There's a behind-the-scenes look at us on tour called Behind the Gills that you can download.

We'll be back again next week.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

and I'll hold on to you.

So it's time to get together.