285: No Such Thing As Giving Birth Up A Climbing Wall

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Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Phish.

Before we begin, we have a very big announcement.

Andy.

That is right.

The news is this.

We are publishing the book of the year 2019 at the end of October.

It's going to be a brand new book full of the most insane, wonderful, weird, brilliant things that have happened across the world this year.

And even better, there is zero Brexit.

That's right.

We've had...

any potential mention of Brexit redacted within the book itself.

We have a very special competition, don't we?

So if you pre-order the book, then you can win an amazing prize, and that prize is another copy of the book.

However, it's a very special copy because we're going to keep it in the office and we're going to scribble all over it and make silly jokes and just do lots of drawings and it'll be it's a unique prize that only you will have it is it's a window into our life in the office that you'll wish that you'd never opened when once you see how sordid and corrupt the whole thing is But that's what you're going to get.

You're going to get those doodles around the book of the year.

And it really has been so much fun to write this year.

There's been lots of incredible news that you will have missed because we've been overwhelmed with all this Brexit malarkey.

A man called Bud Weiser was arrested when he was trespassing a Budweiser factory.

I mean, it's just incredible.

Five guys were arrested at Five Guys this year.

Yeah, it's packed with just all the silliest stories from the news of the year.

So if you want to enter the competition, you just need to go to thebookoftheyear.co.uk and all the details are there.

One more thing, we will be doing some live shows around this book.

So if you want to come and see us live and hear all about the whole world except for Brexit, then come and see us.

And details of that you can find at no suchthingasafish.com.

Okay, on with the show.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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

Starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that Major League Baseball has an official mud,

which is quite cool.

What do they do with this mud?

They rub it on their balls.

Okay.

And this is from a great article in Sports Illustrated, which I.

You read for the article.

I read for the article.

I genuinely do.

So it's a profile of this man called Jim Bintliff, and he spends his life, basically, harvesting mud.

He's one of the world's only paid professional mud farmers.

Do you think there are a lot of amateurs?

No, you're right.

He's one of the most.

No, I think there are because you're not allowed to enter the mud Olympics if you are professional.

So a lot of people remain amateurs.

He's as shoot as chance at that.

It's true.

But he's doing very well, isn't he?

Well, kind of, yeah.

So the the Major League Baseball, they need 240,000 baseballs per season, and every single one has to have the shine taken off it so that the pitcher can grip it better.

And he has this secret location where he harvests buckets of mud.

And he won't tell anyone.

He won't tell anyone at all.

So, for example, he didn't even tell his wife until he'd been married for five years and they'd had two children together.

Not even after the first child did he think it's probably okay to tell my wife now.

Not wonder why he kept coming back with muddy shoes and stuff.

Covered in filth, yeah.

Well, she knows that he does it, presumably, but she doesn't know the location.

Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, there's a particular bit of the Delaware River.

And he's the third generation of his family doing this job.

Yeah, it's been going since the 30s, hasn't it?

It's mad.

And he has these, so he goes and collects it all at once, right?

So he'll go to the source, the secret source, and then he'll come back with a thousand pounds in weight of mud and store it over the winter and then sell it to baseball.

He cleans it as well.

He cleans the mud.

You don't want dirty mud, do you?

By the way, so he lets it sit and then he dilutes it and he strains it for six weeks and he drains it and it has to be nice and smooth.

And he used to just sell it in sort of buckets, but now he sells it in little plastic containers.

But it is hand-made mud, as it were.

And he has alibis for if people actually catch him in the act of doing it.

So he just makes stuff up, like he needs it for his rose bushes or for bee stings,

poison ivy, and so on.

But how is no one following him to find out where this location is?

Well, I think probably no one really cares.

Because surely what it is, is basically he has the monopoly over this mud, and he could probably get it from somewhere else and no one's ever going to say anything.

Or someone else could put the same mud in a pot without the brand and they probably won't be able to sell it for as much.

Well, it's not a market that people are dying to get into.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying, I guess.

He doesn't earn a lot from it.

It's very tragic.

Considering he's corded the market, basically, he makes about $20,000 a year in total from it.

Oh, my God.

I know to believe baseball must be in the billions and billions of dollars they make every year.

Every team basically orders about four cans.

I'm sorry, do we know why the team need the specific mud?

Why aren't they

good stuff?

The main reason this isn't going to answer your question, but just to say the reason why you need it is because it's really hard to throw a brand new leather ball because it'll just slip out of your hands.

And actually what happened was back at the start of the last century, someone actually died because a pitcher threw it and without the roughness you can't control it and he threw it it, and it just hit someone in the head, and they died.

And so, from then on, they decided they needed something to rough it up.

Oh my god, so Jim Bindle is saving lives every baseball season.

Yeah, yeah, let's say that.

Amazing.

And as you say, the generations that this has gone through, it's amazing.

So it was started by Lena Blackburn,

and Lena died in 1968.

So he handed it to his friend then, John Hasse.

And this is where the family comes into it: the three generations.

John Hasse then gave it to his son-in-law, who's got a fantastic name, Burns Bintleff.

And then Burns Bintleff gave it to one of his nine children, who is now Jim.

One of his nine children.

And also, he said, I was the only one of the nine children who expressed any interest in the family

business.

Everyone else left the state for some reason.

They all moved.

They had eight children.

They kept on saying, come on, Shawley, we don't need to have another.

Can you just take on the family business?

I think he's got one of his daughters interested in the trade now, so it might hit generation four.

Oh, no, has she hit adolescence yet?

I can imagine sort of a 10-year-old finding that really cool.

And by the the time you're 18, you think, actually, damned, I'm going to be an actress.

There's another trick for helping your grip.

So this is for holding baseball bats as well.

There's many tricks to help you have a firmer grip.

One of them is, and this is done by quite a few players, is to piss on your own hands.

No.

Yeah, this is an actual thing.

So there was a news report recently from a Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher called Jameson Tylon.

And

he had to go off, I think, during a match because of a cut in his middle finger it was really bad it was an open cut so he was he was told why not pee on your hands because that toughens the skin it will sting but it might get you back on the pitch

more like the piss bug pirates

more like that yeah

now there's no definitive truth wait a minute so can I just ask you're saying not to help you pitch you're doing it to stop the cut from is that right in this case they thought that the pee might heal the finger but generally if you want to toughen your hands you should piss.

You have a magic piss that just heals wounds instantly.

According to baseball players, we all do.

Yeah.

Right.

Just wee into an empty Nivea pot, and it's basically the same.

I think if you had done that, because George Posada, who was a catcher.

George Watada?

George Pissada.

George Posada.

Sorry.

And it's not normative determinism.

It's perfectly normal.

So he's a catcher, and Moise's Alou is a hitter, and they both avoided calluses, because you get calluses if you play baseball a lot by urinating on their hands.

Sorry, I'm still a bit perplexed about the function of urinating on hands.

Is it to help you hold the bat?

It's a moisturize basically.

Right.

Wow.

And so they haven't heard of any moisturizers that are commercially available.

But if you did get commercial moisturizer and you held onto the bat, it might slip out of your hand.

So I suppose maybe it moisturizes without making it slippy.

Yeah, possibly.

We can only speculate.

I notice you're always dropping your microphone whenever we're doing stage shows, so maybe this is something you could do.

Sure, sure, sure.

I'll just need a modesty screen at the side of the stage.

You are allowed to put pine tar on your bat as well.

That's that.

It's tar from a pine tree.

So you're allowed to put it on the handle bit of your bat so that the bat doesn't fly out of your hands.

And that's another safety thing because you don't want to just have people throwing their bats all over the

ground because that's really dangerous.

In American football, you're not allowed to put sticky things on your gloves, but people often do or often have and been caught, so that you can kind of someone throws the ball at you or to you, sorry, and then you jump up to catch it, and then it almost just touches one of your fingers, and somehow you manage to catch it.

And that's explicitly against the rules, but people have done it over the years.

But what happens when you go to kick it and you're trying to drop the ball

and it's just attached to your hand?

Or you go to shake hands with the opposition after the game or something.

Just something about baseball in the olden days.

Yeah.

So until 1887, so so baseball started like start of the 19th century, but until 1887, when you came up to bat or whatever the baseball term is as a hitter to bat, then you could request a high or a low ball.

You could basically ask the pitcher to put it where you wanted it.

Really?

You could say, can you put it sort of between my upper thigh and my lower thigh, please?

Or whatever.

And they had to do that.

Wow.

Yeah, it makes it easier, doesn't it?

Yeah.

It does.

Actually, quite a lot harder for the pitcher to aim it there.

That's amazing.

I mean, they do still have to hit it in that little zone in your hitting zone, don't they?

Yes.

It's I always think that's a bit weird.

Yeah.

Well, you can't just throw it in the opposite direction to where things are standing.

Or a hundred meters in the air above their head.

That's why my games never caught on.

Some stuff on mud?

Oh, yeah.

So, in the nineteenth century, mud in the UK was a really big problem, especially in the cities like London.

And it was always said that you could tell an Englishman abroad because he would be the one wearing turned-up trousers.

Oh, really?

And it wasn't a fashion, it was because if you didn't turn up your trousers, you get mud on them.

I see.

God, when people see hipsters now, when foreigners see hipsters, do they think it's just because we live knee-deep in mud?

They think, oh, yes, I was thinking you might be a time traveler from 19th century London, but you're probably right.

Maybe the hipsters all are that.

A lot of their features do speak to that.

Oh, I've got one really cool mud thing.

Do you guys know about the mud pot of California?

Nope.

So, this is this amazing thing.

It's a geyser, basically, but it's a bubbling mud geyser.

And it's called the Nyland Geyser.

And it's just at the southern end of the San Andreas Fault.

And it remained totally still, as you'd expect from a geyser, until about 11 years ago when it started suddenly moving.

And then it got faster and faster.

And by 2015, this kind of geyser, this mud volcano called the Mud Pot, was moving at 10 meters a year and increasing in speed.

At one point, it moved 18 meters in a single day.

So this mud volcano is just encroaching across America.

It's getting closer and closer to the Union Pacific's railway tracks.

And so they've had to build this massive wall.

They built a wall that was 23 meters high by 37 long to try and stop it.

And it didn't stop it at all.

It's just gone underneath the wall and it's got out the other side and it's still encroaching on the railway track.

No one knows how to stop it.

They've tried everything.

I have heard of that and they call it the slowest moving emergency in America, don't they?

I think it's technically technically a national emergency.

It is technically a national emergency, yeah.

Sounds like it'd be a great B movie.

Well, it's like the blob.

The blob, yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, it's dying for a Hollywood film producer to pick it up.

I like the way you said it's kind of encroaching across America when actually it's gone about 20 meters towards some train tracks.

It's gradual, but it will happen.

Yeah, you have to look out for those gradual things.

Exactly.

You know, keep your eyes peeled for the encroaching mud.

I have a fact about mud and sport, actually, but a different sport completely.

So, mud has changed the shape of football players.

So, it's soccer players we're talking about.

Yeah, yes.

So, soccer players

these days have much less mud to contend with, right?

True.

Because there used to be lots of pitches which were called mud baths, you know, where it just gets churned up and it's just a nightmare.

So, since they've had fewer pitches like that, which are just basically swamps, the shape of footballers has been changing.

And so, you used to have to be just very muscular to deal with those conditions, you know, just to run in that.

But now they're getting taller and leaner because they're just having to run a lot on this pristine grass that they've now got on the pitches.

So that has literally changed their shapes.

Interesting.

Good.

So Wayne Rooney is one of the last of his kind in many ways.

He is.

Yes, he would have done well in those swamps, wouldn't he?

Yeah.

I mean, I'm not saying that he looks like Shrek.

I'm just saying that he's a very strong man.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, he does look like Shrek.

He does a bit, yeah.

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

My fact this week is that in Brazil, women throw C-section parties where guests are served champagne and canopies while watching the host have a cesarean section through a viewing window.

And

that's a party.

It's insane.

From the home of parties as well, Brazil.

I know.

They have the greatest parties in Brazil.

Well, but I think if you're the originator of parties, then you always have to think outside of the box and do things that seem insane to the rest of us.

But these will be normal in 50 years.

Exactly.

They're just experimenting with the next great party craze.

Do you get served the canopies, but with a thick lid over them that you have to cut through and gradually extract like a sausage roll at a time from?

That's what I would do.

I would theme it like that.

Good, cool.

Yeah.

You should be involved in Caesarean party planning.

I think you'd be a welcome addition.

So this is the thing that happens.

It's quite a big deal, cesareans in Brazil.

It's a bit of a status symbol.

It's slightly about wealth.

And they're also very common.

So 56% of all births now are cesareans and 33% are elective cesareans.

So people who've just chosen to do that.

And that's compared to in the UK, I think only 10% are elective.

And even so, that's like the highest in Europe.

And so it's a big deal because you are welcoming a new human to the world.

So friends and family go to the hospital with the person who's going to give birth.

And there's a gallery that's specially built for the purpose very often.

So in Sao Paulo, I think there are a few of these.

And they even have frosted windows and then the windows turn transparent at the moment of birth.

That's so cool.

So you don't have to watch all the boring stuff like the being injected and having a panic attack, but you do get to see the baby emerging.

I would think you would turn them translucent or opaque for the moment of birth itself.

It feels a bit universal.

You don't see that.

So

I've been in the room for a cesarean section.

My wife had one with our son.

Weirdly, that wasn't the one you were there for.

No, okay.

But what they do is, so obviously you don't see everything that's going on.

They have a big sheet that hangs above the tummy, and you're on the other side of it with the top half of your wife.

It's a bit like a magic trick.

Do you pick the half of your wife that you are there with?

Yeah, you can.

You can.

I pick the top half.

That's good.

Good on you.

I should have picked the left half.

And then the baby comes up, and you see the baby, once it's been removed, come up through the top.

And I imagine that's the same with these viewing windows.

No, no, no, I think you can see the whole thing happen.

But it's not, I mean, I was reading a very funny entry in the Harvard Guide to Women's Health, which is just a very detailed description of all the ways you can give birth.

And one of them says, a screen is usually placed between the woman's upper and lower body so she does not have to view her internal organs.

I feel like we're missing the most amazing bit of this story.

I didn't realize we had windows that could go from frosted to translucent.

That is the most amazing bit of the story.

That's extraordinary.

It's just a beautiful, wonderful thing, isn't it?

You never really know until you see a window go from opaque to translucent.

Really, what a wonderful, wonderful thing it is.

In the, very sadly, in the poorer hospitals in Brazil, they just have lots of nurses who breathe incessantly on the windows.

There you go, and then they wipe them clear.

You know, in the really rich hospitals, you can change the furniture in the hospital suite if it clashes with the decorations that you've got planned.

There are some quite opulent ones.

Wow.

Fair enough.

They're actually designing a new one, I think, in Sao Paulo, which is going to be a 22-story high maternity ward.

And it's going to have very tall women giving birth.

Or who intend to sort of project their baby up into the air.

No, this is going to have a wine cellar and a ballroom.

Very cool.

There's one woman on the planet, and I think only one woman, who has given herself a cesarean.

Okay.

Wow.

I know.

She's a lady called Inez Ramirez-Perez.

She's Mexican, and this was in the year 2000.

She had six children already, so she had given birth before.

And her husband was at a restaurant, which didn't have a phone, unfortunately.

So she decided, right, I'm just going to go for it.

And she literally cut into her abdomen to give birth to the baby.

Wow.

She had experience butchering animals, apparently, so she sort of knew what she was doing.

That was amazing.

She drank pure alcohol, didn't she, to numb the pain?

Yeah.

Surgical spirit.

What was wrong with the old

normal exit?

Well, sometimes that doesn't work out

for various reasons.

Yeah, okay, so.

I think it, I don't know if this was her first choice.

Yes.

It probably wasn't her first choice to give herself a cesarean at home.

She probably tried the vagina thing first.

You're right.

I should have considered that maybe

she did the cesarean and then she looked down and thought

I've already got an opening down there.

Oh, I'm such a mug

you were saying who was someone was saying that she had a history in agriculture or something

butchering, yeah, sorry.

Um well actually the first known woman to survive a C-section was the wife of a pig castrator, Jakob Nuta, and that was in the 1500s.

This is the first documented account we have and apparently his

job of castrating pigs helps him to know a lot about anatomy.

He managed to take the baby out and then sew her up, and she was fine.

So, he did it.

Yeah, and she had five more children, including a set of twins, afterwards.

Wow.

Although the source I saw it in did say some sources question the reliability of this story

because it was first written about nearly a century after it happened.

But it's usually accepted as the first C-section where the woman survived.

This whole sort of craze of having relatives and friends watch you giving birth.

So that isn't a new thing at all.

It was done, we know it was done in France in 1778.

Marie Antoinette, she had a whole crowd come bursting through the door as soon as it was announced that she was giving birth and was almost crushed to death.

They were holding up bits of wool.

What?

Yeah.

So when she was giving birth, 200 people ended up being in the bedchamber

to witness the event.

Yeah.

So there was an obstetrician yelled out, the queen is going to give birth, and that's when the hordes of people started coming in.

But this happened all the time.

So Queen Mary in England, the wife of James II, she was giving birth in 1688, and that was, what, a century before, and there were 67 people in the room, which she thought was far too many.

And she actually asked,

she was so embarrassed that she asked the king to put his wig over her face.

So she was.

Is that the bit she wanted to hide?

Well, I guess it meant she didn't have to look at the 67 people in the room.

Yeah.

And if you put it on the other part, then the baby's going to come out with a hilarious wig on its head.

That would be amazing.

There was an interesting theory about the conspiracy theory was born off the back of this, which is the, and this was put out by the Protestants.

They thought that the baby was stillborn and that another baby had been snuck in.

Yeah, because, and that's why you would have people who saw the birth, right?

Because then you knew that it wasn't going to be, you knew that it was a proper birth.

But despite the 67 people in the room, there were theories put around that the baby had died and then been replaced by the baby of a nursing maid.

So all of that kerfuffle and all of the having a wig over your face while you're giving birth still didn't kill off the conspiracy theory.

There was a theory to have been smuggled in in a warming pan, which is like a

hot water bottle equivalent.

And as a result, there was a tradition where you would have to have someone sort of witness that the actual royal baby was the royal baby.

So when Queen Elizabeth II was born, our current queen, that was part of the thing.

There was someone standing outside.

Isn't it like the home secretary.

So it would now be Sajid Javid

just sort of lingering in the room.

Is it not?

I thought that was for all royal babies, or is it not?

Is it?

I think it's for quite a lot.

So I thought that stopped, though.

I thought it stopped with.

Well, it did stop, but the home secretary was there.

Not Sajid Javid, the then home secretary was there when Queen Elizabeth was born.

And then in 1948, she herself was pregnant.

And they were debating, should we invite the home secretary?

We've got a long guest list already.

Do we have the seating space?

So she wasn't involved in it.

She was then Princess Elizabeth, and she was not involved in the discussion.

It was the King, George VI, talking to his personal secretary, saying, should we have the Home Secretary along?

And Elizabeth said, I think we should have him along eventually.

She sort of piped up and said, no, it's important.

So they invited him.

But then...

awkwardness of awkwardnesses though they um the king's secretary his private secretary bumped into the canadian high commissioner and the canadian high commissioner said oh i hear there's going to be a baby i assume assume you're inviting representatives of all the dominions.

What?

And then, so that meant there would then have to be seven ministers who would probably be sitting in the corridor outside.

They wouldn't actually be in the room.

But they decided, no, we can't have everybody.

So it just was a party that got out of hand, basically.

So then that's when they said, no, no more Home Secretary.

So you didn't get to go.

Do you know that there's no good reason why we would give birth lying down?

And I know a lot of people don't.

There are various different positions.

But

the established position for thousands of years was in a chair.

So, a birthing chair, and you see birthing chairs since 1450 BC, so they've been around for like 3,500 years.

It does make sense.

Bit of gravity helping, yeah, precisely, and it's actually kind of more comfortable.

Is there a hole in the chair?

Yeah,

that's even cleverer, actually.

Think about it now.

They look like a toilet seat, but quite an ornate, nice toilet seat, because you don't want to sit on an actual toilet seat while you're giving birth.

And apparently, it replaced the tradition of sitting on your partner's lap or your birthing partner's lap while you were giving birth,

which I think sometimes people find useful.

And lying down, there's no particular reason that's any better at all.

The only reason lying down was introduced was in the late 19th century, which was this big change in childbirth practice when it went from being a female thing to a male thing.

So traditionally, men just weren't in the room at all.

Oh, sorry, right.

Okay, sorry.

I thought it was still a people thing.

Okay.

Oh, you've got a real shot coming with.

Right through that, urethra, mate.

Good luck.

But just to add a sort of modern birthing, I don't want to make a sweeping statement about this, but from what we were told and from people I know who give birth, it's not really, it's kind of a Hollywood thing that you think people give birth on their back these days.

Most are sitting up.

Most of these beds are put into a sit-up position, and that's how birth is happening.

You tend to see that propped up, I think, in films even, but it wasn't thought that you would do it without your legs on the ground, sitting on your wooden chair.

And the only reason then you were put on a bed and leaning back a bit is because birthing changed from being a female thing to a male thing, where a male doctor was let in because females weren't doctors.

And then they had to see inside the vagina to see what was going on.

So it's just to make it easier for the doctor that they can see it right up inside you.

It's actually quite fun when you go into rooms these days because it looks a bit like an escape room.

They have like

you can.

I love escape rooms.

I mean you were the James.

And there is an ultimate escape happening for the little guys.

It's like escape the womb.

Yeah.

Escape wombs, exactly.

And it's, um, they have, um, so they have bits on the wall that if imagine you were climbing a wall, a rock climbing wall, they have that so that women can hold on to it.

They just need to move around and do, they have bouncy balls everywhere.

Was that on the NNHS?

They have a climbing wall.

They don't have a

yeah, she gave birth 20 feet up.

Wow, and you had actually a baseball backstop to catch the baby, didn't you?

Have you heard of subfumigating?

No, but let's guess what it is.

Fumigation is something to do with

smoke.

Yep.

And sub means below.

Yeah.

So do you blow smoke below yourself?

Pretty close.

Is it blowing smoke up a woman's bottom to get the baby to come out of the vagina?

I mean, it's I think that

surely that's not how biology works.

It's not how biology works.

You're absolutely right.

But it's kind of...

It's not so far off, weirdly.

So this is an Anglo-Saxon thing where you have a pregnant lady and you want her to give birth.

So you get a load of disgusting stuff like cat poo and shavings of horses' hooves and fish eyes.

And you burn all of these on a big fire and then you bring in the mother to be.

And the idea is that her womb is so disgusted by the smell that it contracts and it pushes the baby out.

Wow.

Do we think it maybe works in some way?

Don't know.

I imagine at the time they did.

I imagine at the end of it they went, and that, my friends, is how biology works.

Wow.

Yeah, I don't know if it worked.

I can't think of how it might, but

I guess a strong physical reaction, like a smelling salt, but for a womb, like you would retch

your muscles.

Yeah, it might make your muscles contract.

Let's not try to justify sort of 2,000-year-old barbaric practices.

You never know who's going to start bringing them back in.

Plume up the vagina.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that when Samuel Johnson visited Paris, he worried that his French wasn't good enough, so he spent the whole time speaking in Latin.

So this is Samuel Johnson of dictionary fame.

And this is from an article in Oxford University Press, which is more about why elitist politicians such as Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg often drop Latin into their conversations and it's by a guy called Gordon Campbell who is a fellow in Renaissance studies at the University of Leicester.

So we'll get on to Samuel Johnson later but basically what he's saying is that during the Renaissance this became a really really common thing all over Europe and it's what kind of brought rich Europeans together and quite ironically now it's the British politicians who aren't particularly keen on Europe who are often dropping Latin into conversation and it all comes from the fact that the old British universities had this kind of pro-European stance.

Well the Renaissance was all about a revival of classical

everything, of classical everything.

That's why Renaissance it was the rebirth wasn't it of that era.

It was kind of throwing out the Middle Ages and saying we want to go back to the classical times.

Yeah and so he actually spoke Latin or by his account or was this by Boswell's account then it was by Boswell's account and

yeah of course we can't trust everything that he said, but it's like his official biography, so it's where we get most of our information about Johnson.

And he said that while he did go into France and spoke Latin with what he called wonderful fluency and elegance, his English pronunciation meant that no one understood a word he was saying anyway.

I read a blog called Latin Language Blog.

It's someone who just loves writing about modern day usage as well as old.

And he did a list of people who are alive today who can speak Latin.

Sort of a list of people you wouldn't expect who could.

You know, Penn and Teller, the magicians.

There was the silent one, and there's the one who speaks.

The silent one can speak every language on earth, but he just never says anything.

Exactly.

It is actually him who can do Latin.

He's not silent.

That's the thing.

He's just trying in his head to work out the right verb ending.

Tom Hiddleston, who is Loki in the Thor series and the Avengers series.

And Loki.

Loki is a Latin word.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Is it Norse?

No, as in Loki, as in a place.

Like.

Oh, yeah.

Sorry.

Come on, you actually studied Latin, didn't you?

Yeah, I just didn't realise that you were speaking about him in the

nominative, accusative.

And then two more.

Robocop, the person who played Robocop.

Yep, Peter Weller.

He teaches Roman and Renaissance art, and he supposedly can write or he studied Latin.

And lastly, 50,000 people in Finland.

Oh, you buried the lead there.

What do you mean?

Well, Finland, there's a lot of people who do.

In In fact, a thing that we're writing in our upcoming book is about how a radio show there used to do news bulletins in Latin.

And it's because there are 50,000 people there who can understand what's being said.

Samuel Johnson?

Yeah.

So Samuel Johnson was a great character, really, and quite a lovable guy.

He had all sorts of habits that I didn't know about.

So most famous, obviously, for his dictionary, maybe the most influential dictionary ever in the English language.

But as a person, he had these strange tics.

So so he had really ritualized movements.

So, for instance, when he was walking through a door, before he did so, he had to do this weird whirling and twisting motion and then perform multiple ritualized gesticulations.

And then, apparently, according to someone who knew him, as soon as he'd finished, he would give a sudden spring and make such an extensive stride over the threshold as if he were trying to wager how far he could stride.

And this was what he would do repeatedly.

He was very, very sort of superstitious, or some people speculate now he had OCD or something.

Some people think he might have had Tourette's.

Some people think he had Tourette's.

He talked to himself a lot.

He used to collect orange peels.

Did he?

Yeah, no one fully knew why.

They think probably medicinal purposes.

There might have been a craze or an idea that it could have helped you in some sort of...

But yeah, we don't really know.

But we do know he collected orange peels.

It could just be this slightly obsessive tendency as he had.

Yeah, touching every lamppost as he walked along Fleet Street.

Lots of things like that.

Did he?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's hard to know know if he just did that once or twice and then, you know, or if he collected an orange peel once,

or if he was Europe's foremost orange peel collector.

I mean, there's a big, yeah, we just don't know.

I was reading his dictionary.

Great.

I wasn't.

I was reading someone who's read his dictionary.

It was an article by them.

But

there's quite a few fun definitions in there that I'd never appreciated.

For example, sock

was something put between the shoe and the foot, very sort of basic description.

But then he would say stuff stuff like for a lizard.

He would describe it.

The definition would be an animal resembling a serpent with legs attached to it.

Like just a sort of...

That tells me what a lizard is.

Exactly.

And my favorite one, urinator.

What do you think he defined a urinator as?

Baseball player with a very good grip.

Yes.

No,

it was a diver, someone who searches underwater.

A diver was a urinator, exactly.

Yeah, so in this context, this article says urinator derives from urini, a Latin word to mean to dive.

There are lots of words that didn't get into the dictionary.

Into his dictionary.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, there's a whole Black Adder episode about him leaving out the word sausage.

Yes.

So

he has 42,000 words in his dictionary, which is obviously massive and a huge labor of love.

But at the time, the English language had between 250 and 300,000 words.

So

he missed out loads of biggies which were in big use, like nemesis, banknote, zinc, zinc

euphemism

yeah i can see the look on your face as you go down this list and you're thinking was big use the right phrase to use where's the biggie here um anus anus didn't get in

that's a biggie yeah biggie yeah um zinc you would think he would do because you'd think he'd be struggling for z

well there were no x words in his dictionary were there he just completely missed the letter x yeah and that was actually uh something of an improvement because previous english dictionaries missed W, X, and Y altogether.

Yeah, so he actually, he was improving by including...

Missed W.

Yeah, that's

it.

That is quite a big letter.

Yeah.

That's an enormous letter.

Yeah.

Well, I and J were combined in Johnson's dictionary.

Yeah.

They're all modelled up.

But that's true in Old English, isn't it?

It was more recent that J became a letter.

So maybe they spelt the W words with a U.

or with a V.

Yes, yeah.

You mentioned Blackadder as well.

So

in the episode of Blackadder, there's a big joke.

So Samuel Johnson's Johnson's in the episode.

He's just finished his dictionary.

And Black Adder tries to pick out words that aren't in there.

And the thing he picks out famously in the episode is Aardvark.

Aardvark's not in there.

And it wasn't in Johnson's dictionary, but it's not a word he missed out because it didn't enter the language until the year after he died.

Just a few more words that are in that book, in the dictionary.

Anatiferus.

Which means producing ducks.

Nice.

Okay.

Don't know what that means, what that's about.

He had a thing about ducks.

He wrote a poem about ducks.

Or a short, I think he did a poem.

It's a very easy word to rhyme with, isn't it?

It is.

And he had a filthy mind.

He also was the first.

One of the reasons the dictionary was so famous and such a trendsetter in the dictionary world was because he was the first person to use citations, to use quotations as examples of where words could be used.

And he used these really imaginatively.

So for fart, the word fart, it was written as fart, noun, wind from behind.

And then with the poem by a guy called John Suckling, who I hadn't heard of, which goes, Love is the fart of every heart.

It pains a man when tis kept close, and others doth offend when tis let loose.

It's a great, it's a lovely poem.

It's a lovely poem.

It's good.

Suckling was great.

Was he?

He was one of a group called the Cavalier Poets who were active around the time of the Civil War.

And they were Royalists, obviously.

But they all had great names like Suckling and Lovelace and Cary, and they had all these very romantic names.

Just one more thing on Samuel Johnson.

Yeah.

He was such a nice guy, so I had no idea that he lived in this kind of commune that he built up of people who were destitute and suffering in life.

So he had all these friends from various walks of life.

He lived with a blind woman called Mrs.

Williams, who actually he would take to various places and who he looked after and he funded her life.

He lived with someone called Robert Levette, who was basically his best friend in life, who was a guy who was a sort of a claimed to be a doctor, but had worked as a waiter in Paris and eavesdropped on doctors' conversations and become kind of an apothecary and didn't know what he was doing.

He had Francis Barber, who was sort of like a son to him, really, but he was a black boy, and this was in the mid-1700s, and Johnson left all of his money and his property to him, and that was quite controversial.

And the other people who lived with him thought, you know, how come you're treating him like one of us, like we're on an equal level?

And Johnson would say, if he ever needed anything, Johnson would insist that he, Johnson, would go out and get it and would never let anyone tell Barber to go out and get it.

And yeah, he sort of collected these people who were treated badly by society, lived with them all, funded all of their lives.

Apparently, very rude to people of his own social standing.

But anyone who had suffered in life, he took them in.

Very cool.

That's nice.

He had a patron who did not patronise him very well.

His patron gave him £10 once, and that was it.

Wow.

Wow.

I would say that is quite patronising.

It is, yeah.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that YouTube was created because one of its founders couldn't find an online video of Janet Jackson's breast being exposed at the Super Bowl halftime show.

That's amazing.

So

what I find really interesting about YouTube is it's not that that old.

No, right?

It's not.

Maybe that's just me being old.

No.

But it's like there was quite a lot of internet before YouTube came along, and it's amazing because it just seems like it was ubiquitous your whole life.

Yeah.

2005.

That's when we got YouTube.

And so the Super Bowl was in 2004.

There was this big moment.

I don't know if you guys remember it, but

it was a big moment.

It lasted a very quick.

The timing of it is so tiny of how much time Hernie Nipple spent on screen, but it's nine-sixteenths of a second.

I know that through looking it up, not through creeping.

Looking it up.

Not on your VHS pausing it.

But yeah, so

it was one of the co-founders who was called Jawid Karim who was looking for this video, couldn't find it, and thought there needs to be a better way of it.

Now, there was a second reason YouTube was created.

There are three creators in total.

The other two are Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

And they both were trying to upload a video when they were at a dinner party and found that impossible to do as well.

So the three of them got together and said there has to be a better way about this and that is how YouTube came about.

It's not the only effect that Super Bowl moment had.

So I think lots of people were surprised by what they'd seen and they wanted to find a way of watching it again.

So TiVo subscriptions where you could pause and rewind TV, they jumped exponentially.

And, you know, the DVR where you can record where you could record things from TV on a hard drive into your home, that became a thing as well.

So yeah, there were other consequences, but YouTube is probably the biggest by a long way, you know.

Yeah.

The first video ever on YouTube was by this guy, Javid Karim.

And it was called Me at the Zoo.

It lasted 18 seconds, and it's just him in front of some elephants saying, the cool thing about these guys is they have really, really,

really

long

trunks.

Does he say it like that?

Pretty much.

And then he goes,

he doesn't do it in a Bolton accent.

He doesn't say in his American accent.

And then he goes, that's pretty much all there is to say.

And if you think about the historical things like the first things, like come here, Watson, I need you, or whatever, you know, the first things that have ever been said in various media, and that was the first thing that was ever said on YouTube.

Yeah, and all it makes me think is he's not a man after our hearts, because that is absolutely not all there is to say about elephants.

No, every time I think that he is as well,

he is.

He has no social media, though, like a lot of them.

So, Java Karim has no social media at all, I don't think, except for his YouTube Sort of site.

Where what do you call it when you have a YouTube profile?

Channel, thank you.

YouTube channel, where I think he's only ever posted that one video.

And I think he dangled the prospect of another video in the last year or so, and people are very excited about that.

I'm just gonna show them the giraffes.

They have really, really, really

long

tongues.

Ah, you didn't think I was gonna say that, did you?

But yeah, actually,

he did return to the comments page of that video a while ago to make a big point as well.

Because

he's one of the three owners that kind of stepped back from it.

No one really knew that he was part of the ownership of it until it was sold.

And then it suddenly emerged that this guy was getting a huge cut of it.

People obviously knew it, but they weren't the Zuckerberg names that were associated with it.

Chen and Hurley, I don't actually know that well either, but people did recognize them as the creators.

And it was the fact that they tried to change the comments on YouTube

to be that you had to have a Google account in order to do it,

a Google Plus account.

You could only comment then.

And he didn't have one.

So he left a comment under his first video, the first ever video published on YouTube to say, what the fuck is this?

I don't have...

He used the F-word.

Really?

I mean, considering

Google bought YouTube of them for $1.65 billion.

And he made something like $67 million off it.

It feels like it's the least he can do.

Let them do that.

It's amazing.

That was about

20 months months from the first video being uploaded to being sold for one and a half billion dollars.

It was huge.

And initially, there was so little on there that you couldn't pick what videos you wanted to watch.

It just played them automatically to you.

How is that?

So like because let's say there's a hundred videos, you just had to cycle through the hundred videos.

Yeah, basically.

And there were so few on there that he, Kareem, put up lots of videos which he'd taken of 747s taking off and landing because there was just nothing on the site.

There were so few videos there, they posted adverts on Craigslist in LA and Las Vegas offering women $20 to put videos of themselves on the website.

Partly because they thought it would be a dating website.

They did, so it was meant to be a sort of follow-on from hotornot.com, which I can't believe is that old.

This was a follow-on from that, but do you remember that site?

I don't remember that, no.

Oh, wow.

Hot is the answer.

So hotornot.com was basically where you could upload photos of people and then other people could rate how hot or not they were.

It was not very woke, and neither was the idea that conceived YouTube.

So that was when they first came up with the idea of YouTube was when they thought, well, let's make a video version of this.

Because Hot Onot was revolutionary in a way we had no idea about at the time.

But I think it was basically the first instance that anyone could upload their own content and share and rate each other's content.

Isn't it amazing that we had Facebook initially started with Zuckerberg doing the thing where it compared

female university students.

Facebook mash, it started out as.

And I think that was partly inspired by Hot Onot as well.

Right.

So Hot Onot Sport helped to spawn these two huge things.

Yeah, but then do you remember ages ago on the podcast, we did the fact that IMDb was set up originally to log actresses with beautiful eyes.

So all of these big things that we have are actually these pervy men.

Well, when they put up the advert on Craigslist asking women to put up videos of themselves for $20 each, not a single woman replied.

And it was not hugely successful at first, just because there was so little on there.

And it only got big.

They went to a Silicon Valley party and they met a former PayPal executive, because the other two founders used to work for PayPal and he said, this sounds interesting, tell me more about it.

So they went to the bedroom of the host of this party, they turned on his PC and they watched every single video on YouTube, which at the time took half an hour.

How long do you think that would take now?

It would probably be like the end of the solar system, right?

I think it's something like they upload 100 hours of footage.

People upload 100 hours of footage every minute.

Yeah.

So I'm really bothering.

So actually it would go on for forever.

Forever, yeah.

It's definitely, yeah.

Oh, well.

That would have been a very different party.

I was reading, they did a list of which countries watch YouTube most per day.

Okay.

And I'm so annoyed at myself, I didn't get a timestamp on this, so I can't tell you what year this was.

But I assume it must be recent, at least since 2005.

Sure.

What country do you think came at the top of the list?

Is it absolute hours or is it per person?

Do you think?

90 million daily views is what the.

Okay, so I would say like India or China.

Indonesia.

Indonesia, yes.

I wouldn't say China.

Big country.

Lots of people.

Saudi Arabia.

Whoa.

Yeah, came at the top of the list.

Whoa.

Because it said there are so many restrictions on other websites there.

They don't get Facebook, Twitter.

Right.

This is their place for entertainment.

This is where they go.

Well, well, it is the third biggest channel in the UK.

As in, you've got BBC One, ITV, and then the next biggest one is YouTube, and the next biggest one is Netflix, Netflix, and then you've got Channel 4 and Channel 5 and BBC Two and all that kind of thing.

Really?

Yep.

So

the average British adult watches 34 minutes of YouTube a day compared to 37 minutes of ITV and 48 minutes of BBC One.

And I reckon if you went to under 30s, then it might be number one or number two after number three.

Yeah.

Have you guys heard of Petite Tube?

No.

Can you guess what it is?

Okay.

It's not a creepy thing.

It's a small version of YouTube because it's Petit.

Yeah, it's kind of

a YouTube just for Philip Petit, the guy who climbs across.

Go back one.

You're closer with your provision, right?

So it's.

Is it only really, really?

So it's videos of really small things, like thimbles.

That's really like thimbles.

Thimbles are small.

That's a small thing.

I forget what those giant thimbles they have these days.

No, it's okay.

Over a third of YouTube videos have fewer than 10 views in total, right?

So there is a website called Petit Tube, which only links onto videos videos which have had no views at all.

And you can click and refresh and there are quite a few.

It's a really nice idea.

Most of them are just clips of like family birthday parties or somebody filming their kid for 10 seconds.

But how to pronounce indelicate

I clicked on.

There's a clip of a pony eating grass for 10 seconds.

But these things will no longer be on that site right now because you've watched it.

I think they get taken off.

Although a couple of them had two or three views so I I thought I might have been played.

But they are, I mean, it's quite, it's quite sweet and quite weird, but also they are very, very boring.

Yeah, unsurprisingly.

You know how YouTube has a lot of meme stars, you know, internet meme stars.

So let's say one that died this year, Grumpy Cat, for example.

Keyboard Cat was a big YouTube star.

We all know Keyboard Cat.

It's quite a big thing.

The paws are going up and down on a keyboard as if they're playing it, and then there's music in the background.

It looks like it's the one with the stiff limbs.

Yeah, it looks like it's playing a piano, but it's not really playing the piano.

Yeah.

But keyboard cat is dead.

What?

Yes.

He died or she died in 1987.

No.

18 years before YouTube was invented.

What?

No.

Even I'm amazed by this, and I only just heard of keyboard platforms.

This is like the sixth sense of cat videos.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

So how has this cat appeared on YouTube?

The video was taken in 1984, the year I was born, and it was uploaded in 2007.

So it's like basically in 10 years time if they invent a new kind of medium where there's holograms that appear on tables and entertain you and then Dan is the most famous hologram entertainer because they use some of the videos that you've done and you become massively famous but you're well actually

when did Dan die yeah sorry

Dan's got seven years to live in the scenario

meant to say you don't look so well today

I suddenly don't feel it

I don't That is amazing.

I think you'll admit that simile got out of control, James.

From the start, it was overambitious.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said, you can get us on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunteram.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Shaczinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

That's right.

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

Do go there.

It's a very exciting time to be there.

Lots of things going on.

New book, lots of tours.

Get tickets for that, and you can find all of our previous episodes.

Okay, that's it.

We'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.