282: No Such Thing As A Bored Shrew

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week, coming to you live from Copenhagen.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Czechinsky, Andrew Hunt and Murray, and James Harkin.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with my fact.

My fact this week is that when 11-time Grand Slam tennis champion Bjorn Borg came out of retirement, he returned using a wooden racket and was coached by a 79-year-old karate expert from Wales.

Wales.

Three years later, he retired once again, having failed to win a single match.

Amazing.

This fact was told to me by a friend of ours, the singer of our theme tune, Ash Gardner of MPRES.

He'd found this out, and it's absolutely true.

It was a huge comeback.

He, for some bizarre reason, didn't get a tennis coach.

He found this 79-year-old karate expert called Ron Thatcher.

Yeah, he he was called Ron Thatcher, but he preferred to be known as Tia Honse

and Borg called him the professor

and this guy Ron Thatcher he would always be accompanied by two ballerinas

Always always

He had a massive hearing aid and He would always wear white and he always sat 15 feet away from Borg while he was playing watching him through binoculars

Wow.

Was he qualified in any way to be a tennis coach?

He was like a life coach to a lot of people in Hollywood at the time.

And Borg, of course, when he did retire, he kind of went onto a bit of a playboy lifestyle, didn't he?

So he was 26 when he retired, and then he came back age 34.

And people said at the time that the wooden racket thing, they said it was like showing up in Iraq with a musket.

It was just such a controversial decision to make.

But he was determined that the old ways were the best.

Because, yeah, that was the old way.

And then they went to graphite rackets.

And so he thought, let me bring back this.

I mean, basically, it looked like he was doing a Karate Kud movie, doesn't it?

He was using the old ways.

He had a karate expert.

Yeah.

It is odd to watch, because you can watch that one of the first matches that he spectacularly lost when he came back.

And it's just, it's a lot slower.

It's like watching sort of a five-year-old tap it back over the net and then a professional tennis player smash it in their face.

Yeah, the first game was in the Monte Carlo Open, wasn't it?

And he lost in straight sets to a guy called Arezi who then lost in the next round to Ivanisovich who lost in the next round to Steve who lost in the next round to Pripich who lost in the next round to Becca who then got to the final in the next game and lost to Sergei Bregeria so you could definitely argue that Borg was by far the worst player in the whole game

But he was one of the greats.

I mean, it's worth saying for anyone who follows tennis now or is just aware of famous tennis names like Djokovic and Fedora, Bjorg was he was huge.

Oh, him and McEnroe and their rivalry is the great rivalry that is alongside Nadal and Federer, really.

And their big game in 1981, the last big game that Bjorn Borg really played in the US Open was Seminole.

And that was also the last time that two players really used wooden rackets.

So the two of them were two of the very last people on tour to use the wooden rackets.

Everyone was doing the modern stuff by this time.

But he was very upset by it, wasn't he?

So he lost to McEnroe at Wimbledon in 81 and then at the US Open final two months later.

And he was so upset that he, and this is like unheard of, he just fled the court.

So the moment he lost that game, he ran off the court, he disappeared, and there was panic.

And there was particularly panic because there had been death threats against him called in to the you know to the courts a few hours earlier.

So all the staff were like, where the fuck has he gone?

A, he needs to be here to accept his silver trophy, and B, is he dead?

Follow that car, and the man in the white suit, and the ballerinas.

Their rivalry was actually made into a Hollywood movie not too long ago, which was called Borg versus McEnroe.

What a brilliantly weird name.

Well, they renamed the movie for Nordic Country.

So it went from Borg versus McEnroe to Borg.

Oh, wow.

That's brilliant.

No interest in McEnroe.

So good.

I was trying to find out about

why tennis players have so many rackets.

You know, because you see them, they turn up a court with this huge number of rackets, and you'd think they wouldn't need that many.

And so I started googling why do tennis players have, and the options that it fills in automatically.

The first one is so many rackets.

Second one is skinny arms.

Okay, yeah.

Some of them do, sure.

Big thighs is the third one.

Why do they have big thighs?

Big calves is the next one.

Fifth one, shoes.

Why do they have shoes?

Why do they have shoes?

Jesus Christ.

And what's the answer?

I don't know.

You didn't read it?

What kind of researcher are you?

That's amazing.

Well, I mean, Borg had a good reason for taking loads of rackets on tour, and that's that he just snapped the strings constantly because he had a mad racket stringing thing.

So his rackets were strung at enormous pressure, at 80 pounds of pressure, which is very tight.

So that just means they used to snap constantly.

He once went through 60 rackets during one French Open game.

What?

60?

It's disruptive to the game.

That would put you off.

But he wasn't a smasher, was he?

He didn't smash his own rackets.

No, no, he was smashing.

Oh, no, far too boring for that.

No, it's just because they're too

tightly strung.

But he had this coach called Lenart Bergelin, which I'm sure I've mispronounced.

Apologies.

But Lenart Bergelin was totally devoted to him, so he'd sleep in a room with all of Paul's rackets so that he could be woken up whenever one of them snapped.

Because if one of them snapped, you had to leap out of bed and cut all the other strings so that you didn't warp the frame.

And so he said, like many times on tour, he'd just spend his whole night, you know, waking up, jumping out of bed quickly cutting all the strings of a racket going back to bed it's amazing some more stuff on bad tennis yeah yeah there was a game in Florida in 2002 in on Amelia Island it was between Anne Kramer and Jennifer Hopkins it was a first round match and there were 29 double faults

in the game.

But then they realized the reason was that the groundsman had put the box in the wrong place

and made it three feet shorter than it was supposed to be.

That's incredible.

Wow.

But surely tennis players can adjust to where a line is.

That's their thing, right?

Yeah, so I suppose they all started at the start, these faults.

Yeah, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And also, you wouldn't adjust because you'd think it can't be possible that this tennis court is randomly three feet.

How long?

Three feet is shorter.

It can't be that they've made this three feet shorter.

I must have just overhit it.

I'll try again.

Yeah.

I've got a fact about tennis balls.

Oh, yeah.

So to get to Wimbledon, the ingredients that go into a tennis ball cumulatively travel 50,000 miles.

Okay, wow.

So

what's the big killer there?

It all go well, the clay comes from South Carolina, the silica comes from Greece, the zinc oxide comes from Thailand, all these things make their way to the Philippines, the wool has to go from New Zealand to Gloucestershire in England and then back to the Philippines.

Well, they just hit it back over there, it just comes back over here.

And then then other ingredients are bought and the tins are shipped from Indonesia and then the whole thing has to go over to Wimbledon.

50,000 miles.

I have some a couple of other eccentric tennis players if you're interested in that.

These guys are from the real tennis days, so it was before modern tennis.

There was a real great eccentric, a Frenchman called Labay, it was his nickname.

And he was he always played completely topless, but he had a red ribbon around his head and a red ribbon around his belly.

He once played with a shoe horn, you know, that you used to take your shoes off and won against someone else.

Whoa.

He once played with, for a bet, he played with a man riding on his back

and he won.

Did the man also have a racket?

No.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That would be relevant.

That would have been great.

And he also once played with a donkey fastened to him.

And again, the donkey didn't have a racket there either.

Wait.

I mean, so he was standing beside the donkey there.

He was tied to a donkey.

And he still won.

He still won.

Who was he playing?

Was he playing babies?

I don't know who he was playing.

And there was another guy called Charles De La Haye who played in full military uniform with his racket in his right hand and a musket and fixed bayonet in his left.

See, I would deliberately lose to him.

Yeah.

And there was another guy called Raymond Masson who would play anyone who challenged him but promised to jump in and out of a barrel between every shot.

A barrel?

A barrel.

So he had a barrel there.

He'd play a shot, jump in the barrel, jump out, and then play the next shot.

And these are all from a book about those strangest tennis matches in history by Peter Seddon, I should say.

And these were in ye olden days.

It's in the late, mid to late 19th century.

Wow.

That was incredible.

There was

the best tennis player in Britain at the turn of the 20th century, one of the best, again, a real tennis player, was a guy called Eustace Miles.

And so he won an Olympic medal in 1908.

He was also a squash champion.

He was amazing.

And then he also became sort of the leading health fad promoter.

And he sort of popularized vegetarianism.

So he set up the biggest vegetarian restaurant in London.

All the suffragettes used to go there because they love vegetarianism.

Overlap there.

And yeah, so he had this restaurant.

But what I like about this restaurant is that he was convinced that uric acid was really bad for your health.

This was a fad in 1908 or whatever.

And so

the first sort of, you know, these days when you have V for vegetarian next to an item on a menu, the first instance of that was in his restaurants, and it was F U, which meant free from uric acids.

Nice.

Just on tennis players and food, in 2012, there was an article that came out that said that Djokovic had bought the entire world supply of donkey cheese.

Yeah.

Donkey cheese.

All the donkey cheese.

I mean, I know.

Oh, go on.

How much donkey cheese is being made?

It's quite big in Serbia.

He's Serbian, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, he's Serbian.

Yeah, it's quite big donkey cheese in Serbia.

I think it's called Pula Pule or something.

Yeah, that's it.

He has a restaurant chain, and he wanted to have this brilliant cheese.

This cheese is very expensive, and it's made from donkeys.

It takes 25 liters of fresh donkey milk.

Oh, sorry, it's not made from donkeys, is it?

It takes 25 liters of fresh donkey milk to make a single kilogram of this cheese.

And so they produce a certain amount a year.

And Djokovic just went in, bought it all up, and yeah, it was.

You knew that donkeys and tennis players had such an interlinked history.

I've got one last thing, which was I was looking into Bjorn Borg's retirement and then obviously his return to the game.

But I thought, okay, what did McEnroe do when he retired?

This big rivalry?

Where did he go?

We all know what he does now.

He's a commentator and he plays on the scene for the older generations.

But when he retired, his plan was to become a musician.

He thought he was going to be a massive musician.

He spent years playing with a band and he pulled out of finishing his first album.

So there was an album that was going to be recorded and released.

And there's not been many reviews that I could find other than a bartender of a bar that he played in who said he couldn't sing to save his life.

And one person who has heard the song was Liam Gallagher of Oasis.

Oh.

Yeah.

Oasis were playing in America.

And after the show, a very drunk and I think stoned John McEnroe came up to them and said, do you want to smoke some spliffs?

Let's go back to where he was.

So they said, yeah, John McEnroe, amazing.

Not in that voice.

They would never talk talk like that.

Holy moly, John McEnroe.

Yes, please.

So they went back to

where he was.

And apparently, so Liam Gallagher sings the song that he played to them in a totally stone state.

And I don't know if it was air guitar or real guitar, but the way Liam does it is, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

You cannot be serious.

Do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

You cannot be serious.

Was it in or was it out?

That was his song.

Wow.

And sorry, you don't know when you listen to this, you couldn't tell if it was air guitar or real guitar.

Because I'm no musician, but I feel like even I can distinguish between those two instruments.

Look, we need to move on to our next fact.

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It is time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that shrews cope with winter by shrinking their own brains.

So.

I don't think anyone believes you.

Yeah.

They do.

Shrews, common shrews we're talking about.

That's the species they're.

Alright, that's no way to talk about them.

When you say cope, is it a sort of boredom thing or is it a survival thing?

It's a boredom thing.

Well, cope sounds like...

How interesting is life when you're a shrew?

They're not coping with the boredom of winter.

They're coping with the cold of winter.

Just cope is a, you know, I cope with you telling me things.

Wow.

And it does shrink our brains, believe me.

Why do they do this?

Why do they do it?

Well, because it's cold, as I think I may have mentioned.

So,

this is a thing called the Dernil phenomenon.

It was discovered by a Polish scientist called August Dernel in the 1940s.

They have, you know, they run very, very hot shrews.

Their heart goes at 1500 beats per minute.

So

they are incredibly fast-lived animals and in winter they need a lot of uh food all the time but in winter it just helps them if they reduce their own body size yeah so like sorry like shrews most animals would kind of bulk up wouldn't they before winter and then kind of sleep but they can't do it because their metabolism is so high if they tried to eat loads of stuff they would just burn it all off yeah so they shrink the on average they shrink by 17%

and they're they're about also they're they're quite a lot brain they're 10% brain by mass which is most more than almost any other mammal and so their bones and their heart shrink by about 20% and it makes them stupider as well.

So scientists it's genuine truth scientists have done experiments on them

They

always do their exams in the summer like us don't they

Yeah, they used shrews in spring caught in the spring and the summer and they put them in a box with some food in and they just went to the food Then they tried it on winter shrews with small brains and they just moved around aimlessly not moving towards the food No, but it's because in winter they don't travel very far, so they don't actually need spatial awareness in the winter.

So

it saves time.

That is amazing.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

They are very small shrews.

So the shrew is the smallest mammal, the Etruscan shrew, and it's tiny.

It's 1.8 grams, the weight of a playing card.

And it's like a tiny little, well, they're not rodents, actually, I don't think, are they?

But it's a tiny little mammal.

And the Etruscan shrew, actually, its prey is cricket, so its main prey is crickets.

And crickets defend themselves in this really cool way.

So they do like a karate kick.

So I think by the description that I read, they sort of crouch so they're head, they're almost doing a headstand, so they scrunch up their body and then they spring one of their back legs outwards like a karate kick to kick the shrew in the face.

And so as soon as the shrew interrupts a cricket, it immediately recoils its face, because otherwise it gets kicked.

Wow.

Well,

they've actually been taught that karate move by a 79-year-old tennis instructor

from Wales.

My favourite shrew is Thor's Hero Shrew.

There was already a hero shrew, but they found another one and they call him Thor's Hero Shrew.

And according to an article in Nature, it can support the weight of a full-grown man on its back.

Yeah, wow.

It doesn't sound true, does it?

According to the article, this is in 2013.

It was in Nature, and it says it's the equivalent of a human holding up a space shuttle.

I would love to see someone, a full-grown man, just moving slowly along the street.

Oh, has he got those wheelie shoes?

No, he's got a shrew, actually.

I have a favourite shrew.

Oh, do you?

Yeah, we all do.

The elephant shrew.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, elephant shrew.

So elephant shrews were named elephant shrews because they have these flexible noses, which sort of resemble an elephant, looks a bit like an elephant.

But then

are they not shrew they're not shrews, are they?

Well, it turns out they did actual analysis on them, discovered that they're not shrews, they're not true shrews.

And actually, genetically, they're closer to an elephant than they are a shrew.

By weird coincidence.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So actually, I don't have a favorite shrew.

You've got a favorite elephant.

Yeah.

Anna?

Favourite shrew?

Favourite shrew.

I like a desert shrew.

So a desert shrew has defecation stations.

That's just a fun name, apart from anything else.

I know.

I just like that they know how to rhyme.

No, they haven't called them that.

We have.

But everyone poos in the same place and it's away from where everything else happens, so it doesn't sort of contaminate it.

And their feces is corkscrew-shaped.

Wow.

So they can open wine with their poo.

Would you like to taste the wine?

No.

I've got a favourite shrew.

I've just got one further shrew that we haven't talked about yet, which is the short-tailed shrew.

And they have a really cool feeding mechanism.

So they like insects.

They like to eat insects.

And they eat them over the winter, but they want to store them in their nest for weeks on end because sometimes they might run out.

So

what they do is they have toxic saliva and they bite an insect, which then falls into a coma and gets paralyzed.

And the shrew drags it back to its nest and it just keeps it in there for weeks and weeks.

And every time one of its bits of food starts moving and waking up, it wakes up and goes, oh, a shrew, and then the shrew bites it again and just knocks it out again.

That's horrible.

That's your favourite shrew?

That's absolutely terrifying.

Life is tough.

That is a horror film.

You've been abducted by a shrew and you're constantly paralyzed.

The moment you think you're escaping.

You call it Shrews Day.

Just on winter survival tactics, so a lot of animals have kind of amazing ways of surviving in the winter.

Hedgehogs, I didn't know, when they go into winter hibernation, they reduce their heartbeats from 180 beats per minute to very low, so sometimes sort of an average of maybe 10 to 20.

To very low.

No, an average of 10 to 20, but they can go down to two beats a minute.

Whoa!

Impressive, right?

And also the the red-eared slider turtle, which is the most common turtle pet, really, I think.

It doesn't hibernate, it does a thing called brew mating, which is like hibernating, but occasionally it wakes up to have a quick drink and then goes to sleep again.

But they survive under, so they'll survive in water.

They go underwater and then it'll ice over and they'll survive under the ice without breathing at all, so they cannot breathe for weeks.

They just extract oxygen from the water with their bottoms, with their clovackers

and just suck it out.

So So, our brains shrink, human brains shrink.

When you go past the age of 40, your brain shrinks at the rate of 5% per decade.

I know.

I know.

You can tell the relative age of everyone in this audience

by where

the noises came from.

If you saw me in the green room earlier on, there was some food in the corner, but I was just wandering around there.

I had no idea where it was.

There's lots of stuff about whether we could be shrunk.

So there's a...

There are.

Cool.

Do you mean all of us?

Like, I say all of our whole body.

Not everybody's in our whole body shrunk down.

Yeah, all of us, whole body.

Right.

So there's a Dutch historian called Ana Hendrix, and he has proposed that humans shrink themselves down to the size of chickens because we would consume only 2% of the food and drink that we do now.

Yeah, there was a movie about that, wasn't there, last year?

Downsizing, yes.

And

it would really work.

So this guy is.

It would work.

Well, so one

bit of science, It would work.

What would it do to our houses?

What would it do to our...

We don't reach anything.

Yeah, fair point.

Okay, so that's a very extreme.

You probably have to have one normal-sized human next to you at all times.

Right, yeah.

Like bringing you things down from the top shelf.

We've got that.

That's babies.

Wait.

Does he say how we might do this shrinking?

Look, I think it's more of a thought experiment at the moment, but

other people have proposed.

So someone else has proposed a similar thing.

Even if, let's say we all make ourselves just 15 centimeters shorter.

How are we going to do it?

Well, it doesn't matter.

Just selective breeding, I guess.

No, hang on.

And then what's the great thing that happens?

We just consume much less.

Even if we make ourselves just 15 centimeters shorter, we can all just mutually do that, okay?

And all just agree, we're just going to be shorter.

That would be, men would have 23% less mass and women 25% less.

That could offset a lot of climate change.

We could save save the planet by just being slightly shorter.

By chopping our heads off.

By just chopping our heads off.

Well, I feel like I've been duped now because Andy said yesterday, oh, I've looked into a bit of how we shrink ourselves stuff.

And so I spent a lot of time looking at whether Honey I Shrunk the Kids was a feasible prospect.

And I went on a website called overthinkingit.com,

which is really good.

They debate at length whether this could happen.

Apparently, the theory behind it in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, if you remember, was that it the idea is you reduce the electron cloud size of a person, which basically means you reduce all the empty space between the atoms.

So, you know, we're mostly empty space.

But then this would, I know this is going to surprise you, but this would not be realistic.

Because then you've taken out all the empty space, but you've got the same mass.

So you're a tiny person, smaller than an ant, with the same mass.

Imagine an ant as heavy as an adult human.

And so

you definitely can't walk, you can't talk, your vocal cords don't work, you're too small to absorb any of the molecules you need to absorb.

And actually, so this is some nerds online speculating, and

they said you have very small electron orbitals.

So I think the electrons are very close to the center of the atom, so no bonds can properly form between atoms.

So denser atoms,

which the tiny people have, will be replaced or diffused so that the kids would either evaporate or just naturally grow back to normal size.

So that's the realistic ending of that film.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that according to U.S.

intellectual property law, you are not allowed to hold any copyrights if you are the Holy Spirit.

it's true.

This doesn't affect anyone in this room, I don't suppose.

No.

It's from the Compendium of U.S.

Copyright Office Practices, chapter 300, which is online and I've read.

Did you read all the preceding 299 chapters?

I did not.

And it says that the U.S.

Copyright Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants, or anything created by divine or supernatural beings.

and then it gives specific examples such as a photograph taken by a monkey, a mural painted by an elephant, a piece of driftwood that has been shaped and smoothed by the ocean

and an example, this actually happened, an application for a song naming the Holy Spirit as the author of the work.

So this is a genuine thing.

Someone has tried to do this and they said we're going to have to make a law against that now.

Right.

But what's the problem it creates if you say I wrote this with the Holy Spirit?

I suppose the problem is who collects the royalties.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't see that.

I think they're just saying, stop saying that the Holy Spirit wrote this song.

You obviously wrote it.

I'm Mr.

McEnroe.

I do love it, though, when a religious thing is treated as sort of a mundane, real thing.

I read in 2011 a poll found that 52% of Americans approve of God's job performance.

Wow.

It was a poll that was.

How many percent did you say?

Sorry?

52%.

52%.

Wow.

That's not much higher than Donald Trump's approval rating.

No.

Well, there was a thing about another copyright religious thing in 2003.

A U.S.

Legal Review magazine examined whether Jesus had any chance of holding copyright of his revelations.

And it concluded that if Jesus wished to claim copyright protection for himself for all his revelations, he would be legally entitled to copyright protection.

So that's good.

That is good.

That's going to be huge news for Jesus.

He'll be enormously relieved.

All right, I'm coming back.

He just went up in a strop because people kept nicking his ideas.

Is this at all based on that story a couple of years ago where a monkey took a photograph and it was determined that they couldn't claim copyright for that?

It's a reference of one of the examples, yeah.

Got it, yeah.

Because so that was a macaque, wasn't it?

To the guy, a photographer called David Slater left his camera in Indonesia, and some macaques came up and found it really interesting and took hundreds of photos, none of them in focus.

And

then he, I think, Wikimedia said that they could use them and refused to take them down.

He said, but it belongs to the monkey and it doesn't.

So sorry.

But did you know?

So we always talk about how we kind of deal in facts.

So we often say you can't copyright a fact.

So obviously anyone can use this in any way they like.

But actually, that's based on the idea that something that you can copyright has to be a creation, something that you've created with your imagination that's original.

But there is a tweak to that in copyright law, which says that you can also copyright something that's been achieved by sweat of the brow.

And it's called the sweat of the brow doctrine.

And this is just so this is basically about lists of facts.

So if you've gone out into the world and you've just collected lots of facts and put them in a list, if you've sweated enough from your brow, basically,

then you can kind of have a copyright as a reward for the hard work you've gone through.

Wow.

So there we go.

We should go back over all our last weeks.

How do they know how sweaty you are?

Yeah.

We can feel each other's foreheads after the show.

Determine.

So this is a weird thing.

So in the USA, work goes into the public domain once the author's been dead for 70 years.

But you can fall foul of depictions of those things which have been copyrighted.

So Frankenstein, Frankenstein's monster,

is out of copyright because Mary Shelley has been dead for a long time.

But Universal, the movie company, they invented a look for him.

So if you describe him as having green skin and a flat head and bolt through his neck, you're breaching copyright on their idea of what Frankenstein is like.

Right, okay.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

A similar thing is the Tarzan call.

That is a trademarked call.

I'm sorry, I don't don't know that call.

How does it go?

Yeah, okay.

I might remember it.

I'm afraid you are in breach of copyright.

You only did half of it though, didn't you?

Well fortunately I did it in the voice of Liam Gallagher.

You only did half of it and it's a palindrome that call.

Yeah, if you turn it around it's exactly the same the other way around yeah

but there's there's an actual description of what you are legally not allowed to do if you were making that call to make you legally in trouble um and so they they write it down so it's a 10-step call

if you if you get it to that then you're going to get sued so it's one a semi-long sound in the chess register two short sound up an interval of one octave plus a fifth from the preceding sound three a short sound down a major third from the preceding sound four a short sound up from major third from the preceding sound.

Five, a long sound down on one octave plus a major third from the preceding sound.

Six, a short sound up one octave from the preceding sound.

Seven, a short sound up major third from the preceding sound.

It goes on for ten steps.

I can't believe you gave up at seven.

I mean.

Well.

I just...

I just thought spoiler alert in case no one's read the legal ramifications.

So there's some new copyright laws about to come in, I think, think, in the EU.

It's either just coming in or it's about to come in.

It's going to force online companies to immediately take anything down as soon as you say that you've got a copyright against it.

They don't have to check or anything.

As soon as you say it, they're going to have to take it down.

So a lot of people online are a bit worried about it.

It went through by just five votes, but ten MEPs admitted later that they'd been confused and pressed the wrong button.

And it turns out, and I didn't know this, if an MEP presses the wrong button in a vote, they're allowed to say afterwards and have the record amended, saying, I actually shouldn't have voted for that, but the law still has to stay as it was.

Yeah.

Wow.

I have to say, I used to work for a politician who did that once on a flagship policy of the party that I worked for, and he was the one deciding vote, and he didn't understand how the system worked, and he pressed the wrong button.

It was awesome.

And that was Brexit.

Yeah, So Mr.

T

owns the copyright,

and we're very honoured tonight.

I can't believe he flew all the way over.

Mr.

T owns the copyright to I Pity the Fool, and he makes money from that catchphrase and sells it, but he does not own the copyright to the name Mr.

T

because that is owned by a company in Illinois which makes a foam T-shaped scrubber.

And one other thing about copyright that I think is quite interesting is this, I think, is a new law, came in in 2014, which is that you can mash up someone else's work to create something new without permission now.

So, you know, when you get mash-ups like Cassette Boy Online, where you take David Asherborough's voice and you put it over some other hilarious footage,

you know what I'm talking about, right?

But you can reuse the copyrighted material as long as it's for the purposes of parody, caricature, or pastiche.

And so if you do that and then you're taken to court, then it's up to the judge to decide if it's funny enough.

So you've got to have a judge with a sense of humor.

That's extraordinary.

The craziest lawsuit I think I've ever seen in terms of a trademark that continually sues people is, you know, the iHeart New York t-shirt, iHeartNY?

That is owned by New York City.

And they are constantly suing people for doing parodies and knockoffs of it, because you would think that that's just an open design that can be used.

In 2005, they had, I think, over 3,000 lawsuits going to sue people.

Yeah, and then there was a coffee shop owner in New York who wrote, I tattooed on his fingers, I coffee cup, NY, and they sued him.

I mean, it's stuff like this.

This is how crazy it gets, and this has been reported, so I have to say this with a caveat, but the guy who actually designed it,

who was a very famous designer in America, he designed the DC logo as well.

He tried to do a commemorative version of September September the 11th when it happened to reflect it, and they told him he couldn't or he would be sued.

Like, that's how crazy it is.

You cannot be serious.

Is that a John McEnroe?

That's John McEnroe's catchphrase.

Yeah.

That's going to cost us a lot of money there.

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

Chaczynski.

My fact this week is that in the 18th century, you could hire a professional canary trainer to expand your canary's singing repertoire.

Sometimes your canary is just not up to scratch.

You got to get a private tutor in.

And this was the 18th century, 18th century, and 19th century.

Canaries were an incredibly popular common pet across Europe.

And I read this in a book called The Animal's Companion, which is a book that's just come out.

And they were super fashionable, but they were fashionable because of their amazing songs.

So if you got a canary that was a bit of a dud in the singing department, then you could hire what was called a sifle,

if you were French, and then they'd teach them to sing.

So it was a human who would.

It's not another canary, yeah, it's a human.

Yeah.

Wouldn't that be nice?

It was basically, they had these really little musical instruments, didn't they?

And they were called bird flageolets.

And they're really, really tiny little flutes.

And what you would do is...

You don't give the canary the instrument.

Yeah.

Do you?

No.

So what happens is you get your canary, it's just been born, you wait for a little while, and as soon as he starts to chirp, then you realize that that is a male because it's only the males who chirp.

And then you take him away from all of his mates, put him in a cage, and cover it in a canvas so he doesn't have any other influence from anything else and then you every day just go in and play a little

and then he learns from that whereas he would have learned from another canary in the past yeah right

they're very good learners the the story goes that it was discovered sort of in the 1700 early 1700s how brilliant they were when one canary started mimicking the sound of church very distant church bells playing in the distance and another canary apparently that belonged to a tax collector started incorporating a clink sound into its songs for the clink of money falling into his sack of cash.

No, they're good.

They come from the Canary Islands, Canaries.

So that's where they were first imported from by the Spanish, who had the Canary Islands, and that's hence the name.

So the Canary, it's so confusing.

The Canary Islands are named after Canis, dogs, but then canaries, the birds, are named after the islands.

But the Spanish would only ever export the males so they could have a proper monopoly on them.

So they started exporting them in the early 15th century, but you could never breed them.

Well, you couldn't for a long time.

Yeah, not so.

It was only the males who could sing, so they were the only ones people wanted.

But it's such a good scam because if you only give males, then no one else can get them, right?

Exactly.

But some rogue females got out there and people managed to breed.

The Germans, I think, actually, it was the Germans who undercut the Spanish trade because of their, well, it said like they were just very organized about it.

They found one female and they were like, right, let's turn this into a good business.

And suddenly

the Spanish sailors weren't doing so well.

There was apparently, I'm not sure this is true, but in 1622, there was word that a Spanish vessel had been stranded on Elba, the Italian island, with a cargo of male and female canaries, and they had escaped.

And people sailed specifically from Tuscany to Elba just to catch some canaries because they were worth their weight in gold.

There used to be a hangover cure in ancient Rome.

Did they?

Yeah, if you were really hungover, you would have a deep-fried canary.

And

that can't be

yummy.

Deep-fried, yeah,

yeah, okay.

It was the

foundations of Scottish food, um,

but yeah, no, a deep-fried canary would be what would help.

It was thought that they could help lots of illnesses, wasn't it?

Like, so famously, they were used in mines because they could tell when there was gas there because they would kind of faint before humans would.

But also, the miners would use it to almost blot out.

If you had, like, like an illness you would kind of rub a canary of yourself and the hope was that it would kind of suck out the illness

I don't think it worked poor canaries it's worth a try I think those ones in the mines are so interesting do you know the last ones officially in British mines were in 1986 it's quite a recent tradition

yeah and there was a device created in fact in 1896 which could revive them and it was a special canary cage and on top of it there's this big vial of oxygen.

And as soon as the canary collapses and faints, you say, okay, well, it's not safe, so we better get out.

But also, let's just turn a little wheel, and it releases the oxygen into the canary's cage and revives it.

Cool.

Isn't that sweet?

So, do they keep the canary in the cage down there, or you have to save the canary on your way up?

You have to pull it back up with you, I guess.

You pull the canary back up, and then you put it in the cage, right?

Yeah, no, the canary was always in a cage when you went down there.

It's in a little cage.

It's not loose in a mine.

That's a recipe for disaster.

Of course.

I don't know if sweet is the right word for saying they save their lives.

That's a nice.

It's better than the alternative.

Because

if the canary dies, you can no longer rub it on your horrible body to cure your disease.

But you can still eat it deep fried.

Oh, yeah.

Bad news, the mine is dangerous.

Good news, lunch.

They didn't have maybe the best lives when they were being sold.

So because canary training and canary selling was such big industry, then

they would literally make these tiny little cages which would just fit one canary.

And it was proper industry.

There were some places like in the Harts Mountains in Germany in the late 18th century where

the whole industry was about breeding and selling canaries.

And children were especially good at making those cages because they're very intricate and they've got tiny little hands.

So they made these sweet little cages and they had not a nice life.

But if you were a

bird trainer, then you were very worried about the spread of disease amongst your canaries because if they all die, then your industry is gone.

And so apparently, every few days, you'd book a room, a few rooms in an inn, and you'd go in with all of your cages and you'd release the canaries into the few rooms while you scraped out the cages for a day.

And so if you're the innkeeper, you're just aware that three of your rooms have just got a thousand canaries living in them.

I think you're aware when you try and clean it the next day, aren't you, really?

Wow.

The region of a bird's brain, which is responsible for song, this is in songbirds, it's four times bigger in males and females.

And also, like a shrew, it shrinks and grows with the year.

So when they're doing the breeding season, their brain will get bigger so that it can do the singing.

And then when they're not doing the breeding season, it'll get smaller.

That's amazing.

That's really cool.

So you've got to pick the right time of year to go to a canary gig because the sets.

He doesn't remember the hits.

just wandering around bumping into stuff

do you want to hear about the most famous British budgie ever

but we're gonna have to wrap up shortly he was called Sparky Williams and he was born in 1954 and according to obituaries I've read he spent six years working as a character actor

He was in TV ads, he knew 550 words, a disc with his voice on, 20,000 copies were made of it, and he could do two voices.

He could do Newcastle and Refined.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on Ad Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Shaczynski.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep.

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

We have everything up there from our previous episodes to upcoming tour dates to bits of merchandise.

And that's it.

Thank you so much, Copenhagen.

We'll see you again.

Good night.

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