278: No Such Thing As A Herring-Okapi Hybrid

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

It is the podfather himself, Richard Herring, who is joining us.

We're very excited to have him here.

Doubly excited because we got the chance to go on his show, Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast, which will be going out next week, the 24th of July.

If you're listening to it, as this show goes out this Friday, it's a week from now.

If not, find the 24th of July for Richard Herring.

And

so much more.

I mean, you're going to be doing the podcast in Edinburgh.

Yeah, I'm at the Edinburgh Fringe at the Newtown Newtown Theatre 1.30 pretty much every day throughout the fringe, and I'm off on tour around the country in the autumn and probably onwards beyond into 2020, I think.

So, yeah, go to richhane.com slash gigs, and you can find out where I'm coming from.

Amazing.

And most importantly of all, you've got a fact.

So we're going to start with fact number one, and that is Richard Harry.

Here's my fact.

Adolf Hitler had size 13 feet.

Which I discovered this week on my own podcast because I'm obsessed with the film The Cobbler, starring

Adam Sandler, yeah.

In which Adam Sandler inherits a magical cobbling machine.

If you're interested in this, Dan, just listen to any of Richard's podcasts.

It's literally everywhere.

In which, if he puts on the feet of the shoes of someone whose shoes have been cobbled on that machine, he turns into that person.

Oh, my wow.

Which is fine.

So I asked people who they would turn into, but you've got to have the same size feet.

So it's quite a hard question to answer unless you know.

Especially for Adolf Hitler.

Yeah, well, my guest said, you know, who knows how big was Adolf Hitler's feet, for example.

and we didn't know, but then someone googled it and it was size 13, which just seems

massive for what I thought was a very short man, but he's

five foot nine.

165 centimeters, but size 13 is like gigantic.

Stephen LaFrey has size 13 feet.

Does he?

Does he?

And he's what, six foot six?

And something like that.

Usain Bolt, he has size 13 feet.

Is he tall?

Usain Bolt.

Yeah.

Famously, yeah.

Is he?

It's hard to tell because they're

so fast, you can't see him.

Well, Meg Ryan, who is, I believe, the same height as Hitler, 5'8 ⁇ , I don't think that's the brush we can tar her with.

It's on her CV, it's the top line.

I believe I've written she's 5'8, and she has big feet.

She's got 11.

She wears size 11 shoes.

Wow.

Yeah.

Does she?

That's huge.

Is that a US 11?

Yeah, we'll be.

Hang on, that's completely different.

I take back a lot of my size.

I don't know if the Adolf Hitler 13 is US or

English.

Isn't there somewhere?

Isn't there.

Is it USA or Europe where they're in the 40s?

That's European.

Yeah, so that's European size.

I think the American size is

about one different.

Yeah, they're 0.5 or one different.

Okay, but what if Hitler's size feet is in the European measurement?

And actually, they were like pins.

That's a really good point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, actually, Rich, what is your source for this fact?

Well, Google.

Okay.

But then it did Google just say what size are out of Hitler's feet.

It says 13.

One says 13 and a half.

And then I found a 56-page medical report from the CIA that was based on the doctor who had seen Hitler over from 1936 to his death.

And it had a lot of facts on it, and I read it.

Did you say how many balls he had?

Well,

I was interested to look into that.

And it says there's nothing wrong with his genitalia, which is.

He had a farting problem from that medical report, as far as I could tell.

Yeah, he was very flatulent.

Was he?

Gastral problems in his tummy.

Catharal inflammation he had as well.

So he had a very blocked nose.

Oh, what a shit.

No, no,

I don't think we're making that noise.

Not yet.

Not about Hitler.

Poor old Hitler.

He was.

I did his BMI in 1936.

He came out at 22.5, which is a pretty good BMI.

I think that's...

I think that's my BMI.

Is it?

Yeah, you've got the same as Hitler.

It's not the top line of your CV, though.

I suppose.

I'm afraid it is.

But it's kind of weird because I started looking up the historical figures, and you can't find anyone's foot size.

It's something that's not really recorded very

yeah, you're right.

You can find celebrities sometimes, if they've got big or small feet.

You tried to look up a lot of celebrity foot sizes and you just found a load of fetish sites you were.

There are lots of people who have these websites where they're interested in celebrities' feet.

And I wish you.

I love how your voice slightly broke when you said that.

Well, I'm now embarrassed.

I was reading about celebrity shoes, and there's a little theory.

So I don't know if we can class Hitler in the celebrity pieces.

Yeah, we can put him in there, right?

So celebrities, when they go...

He's not going on celebrity, you know.

Get me out of here.

Yeah, yeah.

Hey, but he would now, that's the point.

All those that kind of level of politician, that's the way they become successful.

He would be all over this.

I think he's like the Harry Red now.

I think he's like the Anne Whitticomb

of his day.

Yeah, so a thing

that I read that certain celebrities do when they're going on the red carpet is they often wear much larger shoes than their foot size.

That's a common thing in Hollywood because, well, often when you're going out, you're wearing new shoes, aren't you?

And you haven't broken them in.

So if you're wearing a shoe that fits your your foot perfectly, you're going to get blisters, you're going to mess up your feet.

So when you're on the red carpet, there's often photos of celebrities who've got huge gaps at the back of their heels if it's a woman wearing heels.

No, and they will just fall off constantly on the red carpet.

It's all an episode of Cinderella every time someone walks down it.

It's just, it's a J-Lo does it.

Yeah, it's a thing.

No.

It's a thing.

Wow.

Okay.

Apparently, you know,

the more you say it, the more likely it will be to be true.

If there are any celebrities out there, please write in and let us know.

Everyone knows how everybody's listening to this show.

No, that's absolutely right and quite right from them.

Our feet are getting bigger, apparently, which I find really weird.

But there was a survey done in 1951, I think, and it looked into people's shoe sizes as well as other stuff.

And apparently, the average shoe size for a woman then was size three,

which is insane because I don't know any women with size three feet.

Kylie Minoke.

Kylie Minoke.

I don't know her, though.

She's probably listening, though.

So is it true that we're evolving that way because maybe only big-footed women are having sex and having children?

Yeah, big-footed women became incredibly sexy in the late 50s.

And yeah, we bred out the small-footed ones.

It was a great triumph.

The theory is, the explanation I read is that we're getting fatter.

And so we're pushing ourselves down on our feet.

And we're flattening our arms.

It is to do with body size increasing, they think.

I actually think those studies must have also been flawed because I don't believe shoe size has gone up three sizes.

So now the average for a girl is size six.

But it's not like we've all got tiny skeleton feet and massive, flabby fat and it's not about the fatness, it's about the arch being pressed down.

It sort of spreads out a bit.

So you do get wider feet as well, for example.

And also, the other reason is better nutrition.

If you're a child and you have better nutrition, you will just be bigger, and that means your feet will be bigger as well.

Dan, you were like this.

One retailer called it Bigfoot Britain.

Nice.

That is very cool.

I did do some, I got sidetracked doing Bigfoot research while I was doing this.

All the links came up, I had to read it.

You know, the investigation continues.

Wait, does Bigfoot actually have big feet?

Yeah.

Hence his name.

Well, I've never actually pictured his feet.

Does he have a big feet for a Bigfoot?

That's the question.

In the 50s, Bigfoot was just called foot.

Do you know who had the biggest feet of all time?

No.

It's the tallest man of all time who is called Robert Wadlow.

He had size 37 or 36 UK size feet.

He had real problems finding shoes obviously because he was the only person in the world with this size shoes.

And he's just imagining him walking past a Clark's sale and thinking maybe this time.

Well he when he was at high school he wanted to play sport.

He wanted to play basketball because he thought he could stand next to the hoop and just put his hand over the hoop to stop anyone from scoring.

But he couldn't get training shoes made quickly enough, so he could never play.

The speed kept growing.

When he's only standing by the thing, he just feeds off to better work.

Some socks.

I imagine.

Is there a rule that says you have to wear shoes?

There must be weird stuff.

There must have been worth building, making those shoes in order to have that guy blocking the hole.

We can win every game.

There could be some six-year-olds.

At worst, it's going to be Nil-Nil.

Yeah, you'd squeeze your feet in.

He should have done an Ugly ugly sister.

You can bend them over.

And apparently, most people do.

Surveys always say that something like 40% of women say they wear smaller shoes than they should.

Which, again, I'm very skeptical about because I don't really know anyone who doesn't wear their shoe size.

But do they just claim that their shoes are smaller than they are to seem more dainty?

No, because that...

No, because they're saying I've got big feet, but I'm wearing small shoes and it's really painful.

Well, you can't go to a shop and say, I'm size three, and they're just shoving it on.

Are you sure?

No, no, definitely three.

Well, they do.

That's the idea because people are embarrassed.

So, apparently, you reach a ceiling at nine as a woman.

I don't know what it is as a man, and however large your feet are above that, you just go for a size nine because it's too embarrassing.

Um, so a lot of people are.

I think men just like to have bigger feet, don't they?

They pretend that they're bigger because it's more masculine to have bigger feet because of that fictional correlation thing.

Yes, it's really interesting because I sort of vaguely assumed that there was something in the foot size to penis size thing, and lots of studies have just found nothing.

No correlation, rather.

rather.

There's nothing there.

It's all based on studies

where, so for example, a study of 104 men by University College London.

They measured penises when both soft and gently stretched.

And they

found no correlation.

I actually measure my penis on one of those shoe-sized penises.

What are you fitting it for?

You've been kicked out of so many plants and branches.

Okay, who around this table would go back in time to kill Hitler if you could?

Anyone?

Andy, you would not.

Yes, I would, Richard.

I wouldn't be because I understand the butterfly effect.

If you killed Hitler, none of us would exist.

Yeah, I read a Ben Alchin novel where this was the...

But like, all of those, none of the novels, don't get me into alternate histories.

None of them work.

If you change one thing in history, certainly that long ago, of that magnitude, especially, then nobody is the same.

Nobody who's alive now would be alive.

That's true.

Because

different people would have hooked up.

Different people would be alive and dead.

There'd be different children.

None of us would be.

Because my parents both met up over the love of Hitler.

Yeah, they were both buying Nazi memorabilia.

Because how many people went to war in the Second World War with one partner who then ended up having children with someone else because they were dead?

That's the first thing.

But even, you know, but just even if you meet someone a day after or have sex two minutes later, that's a different person coming out.

Yes.

That's true.

I just don't think that this podcast is about discussing these huge philosophical questions you've posed, James.

Okay, well, can I say that?

I'm already getting weirded out.

So the fact is that men are more likely than women to say that they'll go back to kill Hitler.

And the reason, according to psychologists, is men prefer utilitarian ideas and women prefer deontological arguments.

So men are more likely to do things that help everyone.

And women are more likely to think, well, actually, there are moral reasons why I shouldn't do this particular thing.

Never minding what the outcome is.

Also, it's always baby Hitler.

It's always when you go back and kill Hitler as a baby and women are going to go, no, I'm not going to do that.

Whereas I think a few men would like to do it.

Would you mind killing him?

Can I clarify I'm not in that category?

I would go back and honourably challenge Hitler when he was at his absolute physical peak.

Well what good's that going to do us?

He's just going to get annihilated.

How old did you let Hitler get to before you kill him?

I'd say

after his First World War service, I would say.

So that's probably too late because then the Nazi party.

I think you should aim for probably when you could just about beat him at your current.

So maybe when he's about 14.

I reckon you could beat 14-year-old Hitler.

He was pretty weak.

He's nasal, he couldn't breathe properly.

With those feet, though, he just crushed you.

Exactly.

Sorry, just to clarify, I would actually like to go back to Weimar, Germany, and improve the social and economic conditions to the point at which Hitler

had no grievance to exploit in the Turks.

Such a shame I'm going to cut this out.

Hitler was very unfashionable, apparently.

So I was looking into his clothes, starting with shoes and working my way up.

He was in 1946, I was going to say.

He was very unfashionable.

Probably more than he was quite the fashionable.

I'd argue he's still out of fashion a little bit.

Yeah, his reputation has never come back, has it?

He, even in his day, didn't wear very fashionable clothes.

So he had a sort of personal valet or valet who despaired of him, apparently.

There's this this really weird account from the valet of trying to dress Hitler and saying that he'd lay out new clothes for him every day that would suit him, and then Hitler always refused to wear them.

But then, weirdly, Nazi chic, as in wearing Nazi clothes, is a thing that's not outrageous in some parts of the world.

So, I didn't realise this in parts of Asia, so in Thailand, sometimes it gets to the news here that someone's got in trouble in Thailand because a class of school children will be wearing SS uniforms.

And it does happen, and it doesn't have the same associations there as it does here.

And there was an interview with someone in Thailand, I think, saying it's not really taught as an ideology, it's taught as an objective piece of history.

And so, Nazi outfits have become fancy dress.

So, it's fancy dress, yeah.

Okay, yeah, whereas they wouldn't wear like a Mao Zedong hat, that would be

very upsetting.

I used to wear that in Sydney.

What?

Hitler clothes?

No, not Hitler clothes.

We were only in Sydney last year.

Who do you think you are?

Prince Harry?

No, I went when I did a trip back to uh China when I was eighteen, I bought in Tiananmen Square uh one of those Mao communist hats.

Jesus Christ, Anne, that is a whole combination of bad things that you shouldn't have done.

I know, um and I well this is what's worse, I went canvassing for the Labour Party um just before I left the country to move here, and it was a really hot day and they only had one hat, so I wore that hat um while I was handing out the leaflets and yeah, they they asked me to stop.

They haven't been in power since then.

I can't picture the Mao Zedong hat.

It's a green like little army army hat with a red star on it.

Okay, I do know the one you mean.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no, it's not like a I love Mao Zedong kind of

cap.

Those SS uniforms don't say I heart Hitler.

That wasn't the uniform.

Excellent.

I had a Hitler mustache for a year or a toothbrush mustache for a year.

You did.

That was the first time I ever saw you.

It was one of our news for you, just sort of looking like Hitler.

Yeah, why was that again?

Well, I was trying to reclaim the moustache for comedy because Charlie Chapman had it before Hitler.

And I was just interested in why that symbol has taken the brunt of Hitler's you know disapproval because there was lots of things he did for having a BMI of 22 point whatever there wasn't that's not that you're not in trouble for that so why and that mustache was very popular before Hitler and Hitler obviously popularized it as well but a lot of a lot of comedians had it first so I was sort of just interested in the symbolism of it but then I also then had it for a year which was a

disconcerting

get very bad reactions from some people or not really and the worst thing that happened I mean most people laughed at you just the second you'd passed a few people looked a bit shocked and upset.

But the worst thing that happened was I was on Shepherd's Bush Green at about midnight one night walking along, and a man was coming out of a white van.

He saw me and went, Well done, mate, you're a man after my own heart, which was

just chilling.

Like, you know, he was sort of going, If only I was as brave as you, I would display my Nazism on my face.

Well, maybe I'm a Charlie Champion fan.

It could be.

So, you know, that's it.

It was all about not making assumptions.

But the show was about the importance of voting and an attempt to stop the rise of right-wing politics.

So, you know, I'm glad comedy works so well.

Just reminded everyone of what they were missing.

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

My fact this week is that in the indigenous Mexican language of Chalcatonga Mixtec, it is impossible to ask anyone a question.

How did the translation of your emergency questions book go down there?

I didn't sell any coffees out there.

Now it's explained.

That's what it is.

Okay, explain.

This is the.

Sorry, was that a.

That was a question.

Sorry, that's.

Explain, isn't it?

It wasn't meant to be so aggressive.

So, Anna, why don't you tell us what you mean?

Yeah, there was an order.

So these are researchers at a place or a company called Idibon, which is a language processing company, and they sort of coded, apply code to 239 languages to look at how they worked.

So to look at things like how you order subjects and objects and verbs and how a language makes clear things like an order or a negative or a positive or a question.

And Charconog Mixtec is spoken by about 6,000 people in Mexico and it was determined to be the most unusual language in the world.

So it shares fewer things with any other language than any other languages and there was no mechanism for showing you're asking a question.

So there's no way of saying are you alright as opposed to

you're alright.

But there's also

no difference between saying are you alright and you are all right.

You're a bit of all right.

They're not accidentally cracking onto each other constantly.

I was just trying to sex it up.

But there's no way.

There's no way of saying to someone,

Do you fancy a drink?

Would you like to get married?

And then would you like to have some children?

Which is presumably why only 6,000 people in the world speak it.

Yeah.

You have to just kind of.

Do you, Andrew Hunter-Murray, take this woman?

Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about.

It's very demanding because it's always it would all be you fancy a drink, you want to marry me.

So you're just you're the only people who are getting married are are very aggressive men and very pliant women.

Okay, I agree.

Why can't they just go up at the end of the statement to make a question?

That's why can't they I know they do tones, but that's with that I mean the problem in the UK is that people do that with non-questions now, don't they?

Yeah.

You go?

Just everything goes up at the center the at the end of the sentence.

But that would be the solution for these people to be able to ask questions.

But I guess it's not a problem.

I guess they could.

But they don't.

But they don't mind.

They don't want to ask questions.

They don't want to know.

They're very uncurious.

There must be one question they need, which is, are you asking or are you telling?

That's their question.

That's made for them.

All you need, you're right.

But that's one of the things which makes English so weird is that we flip order to make a question.

Yes.

It is true.

Is it true?

Yeah, yeah.

And then Japanese has, for example, the word you just add.

You just add a particle, and that is a magical transforming particle.

So ka is that in Japanese.

So so does ka.

It means is that that so?

Yeah, and that's much more common, isn't it?

So I think only 2% of languages do the word switching.

Dutch is another one, very unusual.

So we are quite special in that way.

Yeah.

Do you know what the second least weird language is?

Least weird.

Yeah, so the most normal after Hindi.

Hindi's the most normal.

How so?

Welsh.

There's a language called Puripecha, which is another Mexican language.

And the third least weird language, so the third most normal language.

Also Welsh.

It's, yeah, you're going to keep firing, are you?

I think it'll be Mexico, Mexico, Mexico for a while and then Wales eventually.

I'm afraid it's Ainu, which we've talked about before, but it's spoken by about 10 people.

So Japanese.

In Japanese in Hokkaido and Japan.

So that's one of the most normal languages.

It's spoken by about 10 people.

And then Hindi is the most normal language and that's spoken by what, nearly a billion people.

Yeah, yeah.

Hindi has one unusual feature.

that they've found and that is something called predictive possessions.

So you can say,

Anna has a glass of wine, or you can say, The glass of wine is Anna's, but you can't say Anna's glass of wine in Hindi.

You kind of have the possessive thing.

So that's the only thing that's weird in Hindi.

Have you guys heard of the Indonesian Riau dialect?

No, no, this is a great one.

So this is claimed by the linguist John McWhater to be the most economical language in the world.

So it's there's a phrase I am makam, and that just means chicken eat.

Okay, but it can also mean variously, the chicken is eating, chickens are eating, a chicken is eating, the chicken is eating, the chicken will be eating, the chicken eats, the chicken has eaten, someone is eating the chicken,

someone is eating with the chicken, the chicken that is eating, and when the chicken is eating, and a few others.

Who's eating with the chicken?

That's eating the same stuff as the chicken, or are they just

packing up seed?

I've been ordering at a restaurant as well.

Of the chicken.

Oh, well.

So you've just been eaten by a chicken.

It's a language of sitcoms, isn't it?

It is.

Yeah, yeah.

I wanted to eat with the chicken and you killed it.

So it's economical, but no one has any idea what anyone else means.

I think so, yeah.

Great.

That's incredible.

The really cool language I like is the Yipno language in Papua, which is where everything is conceived.

Everything directionally, when we'd say go over there or whatever, is conceived in terms of uphill and downhill.

So, for instance, if you're talking about

where the door is, you'll say, oh, it's just uphill.

Or if I was saying, oh, whereabouts is James now?

Oh, he's just downhill.

And everything is uphill and downhill.

So I am, if I'm downhill from you,

how do I know whether I'm uphill or downhill?

So there, they have, because it's quite a small place, they have a certain geography where everyone kind of knows where the highest point in the island is, the area is.

Everyone knows where the lowest point.

If you're talking about time, then the, oh, the fireplace is always downhill, apparently.

So if you're in a room, you have to check where the fireplace is.

So I guess behind me at the moment is the Thames.

So all of the land kind of goes towards the Thames.

So you could argue that I'm downhill of you, even if I'm not quite downhill.

Yeah, unless there's a fireplace on the opposite side of the room, and then that trumps the Thames.

And then you're uphill of sorry.

Fireplace is always the trumping card.

I think the fireplace is the trump card, yes.

Unless you're talking about time, in which case the past is always downhill and the future is uphill.

The future is uphill as possible.

I used to be a fireplace salesman.

On the Thames.

There's an Aboriginal language, which I was reading about that I didn't write down, but they judge everything by north, east, south, and west.

That's the direction of everything.

Yeah.

Wow.

I think, yeah, that's a lot of Australian Aboriginal languages.

It's easy to know, though.

Well, you have to know where you are.

You have to know where you are all the time at all times.

You can't do any other directions than north, east, south, and west.

But there was a study where they, or they did an investigation where they looked at an Aboriginal person who had then gone to a different country and they realized that instinctively that person still knew always what was northeast, south and west.

So they are instinctively orienting themselves.

Not sure.

Another language, another cool language.

Okay, so

this language is called Quiche and it was spoken by the Mayans in Guatemala.

And what I love about this is if you're speaking to children, normally humans would kind of in most languages would kind of talk a little bit higher, like a bit higher like that.

And if you're speaking to someone,

if you're speaking to someone who's a higher status than you, you speak lower.

But in their language, it's completely the opposite.

When you're speaking to someone of a higher status, you put your voice in a higher pitch.

I think that's amazing.

That's cool.

I want to do that.

When you meet the queen, it's all very nice to meet you.

And then it's, are you lost, little girl?

It's very creepy.

Creepy to voice.

I like there's a um there's a language called Tamayek or Tamajek spoken by the Tuareg.

And they

so 1984, there was the Prince song Purple Rain.

There was also the movie Purple Rain.

They did a remake of that movie 30 years later.

So the exact movie, it was just a remake in their language.

Unfortunately, in their language, they don't have a word for purple.

So the movie was released as rain the colour of blue with a little red in it.

Well the Piraha Brazil language, well someone claimed has no numbers or colours in it so my 20 month old son could go there and rule the place.

That's pretty much all he can do.

You can't play snooker can you?

No and they and also which I don't understand someone says but this is controversial it's the only language with no recursive no recursion in it, which is the ability to insert phrases into phrases.

But I didn't quite grasp what that meant.

What you can't you can't put a phrase in a phrase.

You can't say Daniel fucking Schreiber.

Is that what it is?

It's something along those lines.

I think that's something we should adopt in the English language.

These guys, the Pinahas, are really cool.

So their language is one of the most tonal languages in the world.

So it's different kind of tones as you're speaking.

And so a word which is hapapai,

you can pronounce that kapapai or hahaii or kaka ai.

It doesn't matter what the consonants are, it's just the tones.

And so it means that you could kind of talk with your mouth full, or you can whistle words and stuff like that, because it's just about the tones, it's not about the consonants.

Because it's like you've got blank Scrabble tiles that you can just put into the words as you wish, as long as you get the bits in between right.

Sure.

Yeah.

It is a bit like that.

So when I was saying ha papai,

it's the same as saying ai ai.

Right.

Or whatever.

So no matter what kind of tone you make, that's the thing.

That's very cool.

That's cool though, isn't it?

I like the Scrabble analogy though.

I think that really worked well.

Oh, thanks.

I understood that.

Cheers.

Sorry, Andy.

No, no.

I simply didn't understand it.

James, it simply didn't make sense.

It sure did.

This is about linguistics, right?

And so it's about language.

We're talking about language, how it's evolved.

Just get to your very tenuously linked thing.

Well, it's only because I was reading some Noam Chomsky stuff, who is obviously very related to how language evolves, and I I hate him.

Wow.

I think he's so miserable.

Too much wine for Anna.

Anna, we can't get another celebrity fuse.

She's not with Noam Chomsky.

It's always after two glasses of wine she sucks like a Noam Chomsky.

It's every time.

Fucking Noam.

Who feels the same about me?

It's fine.

But so Noam Chomsky is obviously like father of linguistics, this amazing like Einstein figure in the linguistics world.

So I was on this linguistics forum.

I was just looking up l how language has evolved.

And this forum put a big Chomsky quote at the top, and it was about the first article he'd ever written.

So he wrote his first article when he was 10 years old.

And it was about the

he was like, the fascist forces have conquered Barcelona, essentially the end of the Spanish Civil War.

And it was all about the spread of Nazi power and stuff.

This guy was 10.

So it's the top of this forum, this academic forum.

This person posts this quote from him and it's like, thoughts, guys?

And the comment immediately below it was, that sounds incredibly boring.

And then the comment below that was, when I was 10, I wrote about an evil jack-o'-lantern that terrorized kids on Halloween, but he had a heart of gold and was just misunderstood.

And then the entire rest of the thread is them analysing the jack-o'-lanterns.

It does sound a lot better, does it?

Doesn't it?

It sounds amazing.

You'd rather read that.

Definitely.

Yeah.

Good on them.

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

My fact is that King George III once went to a safety demonstration which involved putting the king in a house and setting it on fire.

Wow.

Yeah.

That doesn't sound very safe.

It's extreme.

Well, that was, I guess

that's the trick, isn't it?

With the safety demonstration.

You try and do something that looks unsafe and you say, I've tricked you.

You're quite safe.

And he survived, right?

The king survived for another 40 years, nearly.

He's the longest reigning king.

Is he the longest reigning king?

The longest reigning king, yeah, only Victoria and Elizabeth are both queens.

He's 59 years.

He was 59 years old.

Yeah, 60 days or something.

He was the king for.

Wow.

Wow.

Although, he wasn't very good at it, was he?

Well, he lost America.

He's been reassessed, I think, a little bit over the years.

I mean, I think he got a bad rap at the time.

Speaking of bad raps, have you seen Hamilton?

He's meant to be the best thing in Hamilton, King George XII.

Oh, he's so good in it.

It's not him.

He is dead now.

He is dead now.

So yeah, the extreme safety of the demonstration.

And his his long reign it couldn't keep him alive past the age of about 80 which he made it to a lot of stuff went on in his in i was surprised actually i don't i don't know very much about uh that that period of history even though i studied history and i was surprised how much happened in his reign and yeah he lost a lot of stuff

as well as the plot being the main thing which was actually very sad wasn't it um so he did go very mad he was dying his illness was diagnosed as flying gout wow

can i just say i think candy is desperate to tell us the story of this house on fire no no no we don't we can go into the broader sociological implications of his reign, but I d just it's such an exciting story about the flaming house.

Andy, please, back to the burning building.

Yeah, yeah.

Go.

How does that happen?

So I should say where this comes from.

This is a book called 1776, A London Chronicle, which is all about only stuff happening in 1776.

Very busy year, lots of innovations, lots of stuff going on.

The American colonies on the brink of being lost, all of this stuff.

And there was a scientist called David Hartley who had this amazing new way of making a house fireproof.

And it basically just involved putting iron plates in it all the way through, like a magician and a box, you know, whatever iron plates in.

So the king stood upstairs and flaming pitch destroyed the lower half of the house, and he was absolutely fine.

And this happened on the very day that the news reached London of the American Declaration of Independence.

So it was like it was a big day for George III.

Yeah.

Wow.

Wow.

Slightly spoiled the day, that didn't it?

It's a great day.

I've stood upstairs in a burning house and I'm fine.

What's been happening while I'm gone?

The guy you're just talking about, David Hartley, he has a sort of long-lasting legacy around the world.

And we're here in the West End.

He is the person who invented the fire curtain that goes down in front of stages.

He hated fire, didn't he?

What's his problem with fire?

Let the fire

have a few fires.

He was thought of as an eccentric because he didn't powder his hair when everyone else did.

Who, George III or David Hartley?

David Hartley.

David Hartley.

George III was thought as quite eccentric as well.

Yeah, that was one of the reasons.

He also wore stockings with the feet cut out because he thought it was healthier.

And that made you an eccentric in those days.

Wow.

Really?

That is interesting.

You didn't need to do much, did you?

To be called an eccentric now, you need to work pretty damn hard.

I've been trying for years.

Yeah, and the house became popular.

and was used throughout England.

You know, the plates method spread across the country, but then other methods took over which were more efficient and didn't involve putting huge iron plates all the way through the house.

And then the house, the original house, the test house, very sadly caught fire.

No.

Yeah, it had been extended beyond the safe bit.

You know, so there was an extension.

And so that extension caught fire and then collapsed onto the fireproof section.

And then that caught fire.

You needed some iron plates on the top to stop that happening.

Wow.

How do you talk a king into standing in a flaming house?

I don't know.

If he's mad, it's easy.

That's true.

They got the right king.

You're right.

Yeah.

And I think he was going a bit mad around that time.

He had a few bouts of madness through his life.

One of them was just before the French Revolution.

So that must have been sort of around

a bit later than that.

Yeah,

when he did start to lose his mind, at one stage in 1819, he spoke nonsense non-stop for 58 hours.

It was at Christmas time as well, that one.

Christmas, yeah.

You know, that happens at my house with my dad.

So

it also says it was a bit racist

going on about Brexit, and that's why that's not my judge.

Yeah, it di it sounds like he really, really suffered, and obviously it wasn't understood nearly as much at the time, so you know, he has this reputation.

But he he he did, obviously, a huge amount of stuff.

He was a very interesting guy.

He was a hobbyist, he wrote architectural journal articles under a pen name secretly.

Did he?

He was interested in all sorts of stuff.

Yeah, he had a huge

capacity for wanting to know what was going on in his kingdom, I think.

Yeah.

He had a weird marriage

to a woman called Charlotte, Charlotte of Mettlenburg-Strelitz, who was from this random German duchy.

And she

was,

she was very parsimonious, known for being parsimonious.

The only remnant we have of her is a dish called Apple Charlotte, apparently.

And that apple charlotte is a pudding that uses up stale bread because she didn't want to waste anything.

And she used to stamp butter with the royal signet so that the servants couldn't eat it to say, This is our butter, don't touch.

She was famously ugly, and there was a quote about her.

This is suddenly tipped over into personal abuse.

Sometimes I feel like women haven't taken enough flack in history, and

we've got to send some abuse their way.

So she was famously hideous.

And one of the nobility said that as she got older, this is a famous quote, that as she got older, the bloom has at any rate gone off the queen's ugliness since she fell off this carriage and broke her nose.

She's actually quite handsome.

Wow.

Yeah.

But he married her the day he met her, didn't he?

I think they were married on this day.

And he was baptised on the day he was born, George III, because he was two months premature, which at the time was like, you know, definitely you're going to die.

Yeah, but he survived.

But they had a very happy marriage.

He was faithful to her, which, you know, what's the point of being king?

If you're going to be faithful to your wife, that's

the point.

And they had like 15 children.

Okay, so

I'm just almost making this up, I think, but I thought that in his madnesses,

he actually did have affairs off the back of he was just in a hyper state.

He wasn't really aware.

He's quite old, though.

I think he was, when he properly was mad, he was like in his 70s and 80s, so I don't think he would have been much of a threat.

And he was blind.

So I think he might have...

Well, he had a lot of affairs with walls.

And he shook hands with the tree, didn't he?

Yeah, that's true.

He did.

He might have been having affairs with Flora and Fawnica.

Yeah, I don't know.

He definitely did get off with her a lot.

Yeah.

15 children.

Well, nine boys.

It's like he stayed faithful to one woman, had 15 children.

It's a real fuck you to King Henry VIII, isn't it?

It's like,

just sit with one and just keep plowing away.

And only one, I think, 13 of his children survived into adulthood.

Yeah.

But he later refused his daughters the ability to marry.

He was really happy with his wife, but I think he was so worried about them making unsuitable marriages that

only three of his daughters managed to marry in the end just because he was such a tyrant about it.

And he passed a law saying that if you were a royal aged under 25, you could not marry without the express permission of the ruling sovereign.

And that law stayed in place until 2013.

Really?

Yeah.

Whoa, yeah.

Yeah, I think he was skeptical about marriage because his sister's marriage had gone very badly.

So his sister was Caroline Mathilde, and she'd married a guy called King Christian VII of Denmark when she was 15.

And he was also quite mad and he hung her but he didn't like her at all the fifth his 15 year old sister so he hung her portrait in his lavatory as a show of how he didn't like his wife so his wife yeah his wife's portrait he hung his wife's portrait in the toilet and he was an obsessive masturbator he was wearing he was baby did he do it in the toilet is that why the portrait was there i think the toilet was the only one he didn't do it um really yeah he was so the his doctor He went to see doctors about this and doctors were always trying to stop him doing it, but he once entered a feast with his trousers around his ankles

and he had servants manacle him and then beat him with rolls of paper

and he visited England once and he visited all the brothels in London and then completely trashed St.

James's Palace and so that was the man that his sister married

King George III thought well marriage hasn't gone well for her let's protect women from further excessive masturbation

so he saw a doctor I'd love to hear the doctor transcript read that so the way to stop doing this is, okay, you're masturbating.

You're masturbating.

Yeah, just put it back away.

Okay.

So yeah, so we have lots of medicines.

We have like, okay, you're masturbating again.

We're just going to have to put that away again.

Okay.

You're doing very good.

It's difficult to stop.

You know, you've got to be some patients.

Hey, you don't need to tell me.

So Queen Charlotte, we were talking about,

she had a pet zebra who was presented to her by the governor of the Cape in South Africa.

And it was known colloquially as the Queen's ass.

And there was a massive scandal when the Queen's Guard were caught charging people to expose the Queen's ass to public view.

In 1764, and you guys are really holding this in very nicely.

The newspapers printed a story that the guard were charging people to see this.

And then Queen Charlotte later bred this zebra by getting a male donkey and painting the back of it white and black stripes so that it thought that it was a zebra's

ass, yeah, exactly, and it works.

Wow, I'm gonna try that with my own bottom.

I'm gonna put my own bottom, black and white, and see if I can get a zebra to fuck me.

It's what I'm gonna.

I've always been quite obsessed with having sex with the nikapi, which is like a

sort of armoury zebra-y kind of thing, but from behind, it's got a very nice, it looks like a sort of

a lot of things.

I was obsessed with the nikapi before.

I've been seeing the nikarpi quite a few times in Luncheon Zoo.

From behind, it's like it's got a very like leopard skin trouser, Right.

You know, so it looks like a lady's hindquarters, so that's nice.

And then I've realised as well, and a cup's got a very long tongue, so you could be there, and then they can't ever have to have sex with an animal.

That's it.

I don't think this sounds like an if-I-had-to situation.

I think there's too much thought that's gone into this.

If a camera have sex with me, I would paint my bottom black and white.

It's just the one I wouldn't mind.

Yeah, it's fat, Andy.

Do you struggle with that?

We've all got one.

Do they let you in London Zoo?

They do, they do.

I'm a member of London Zoo, so I can go anytime I like.

It's a new meaning for the word member of London Zoo.

Wow.

Good.

What is this?

Oh, you donate enough.

They let you masturbate freely.

What are you donating?

They're hoping I'm going to create a new hybrid creature that they can put in.

Imagine if it was successful.

Oh, God,

the herring zebra.

The herring Acabi.

Good, well.

Sorry, I've taken the tone down.

I've taken the tone down.

No, no, no, no.

Let's bring the tone back up.

It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that female hyenas say hello by licking each other's clitorises.

Crikey.

An uncompromisingly direct greeting, I would say.

I just now feel like we're giving Richard ideas for his next trip to the zoo.

Isn't that why the other the male hyenas are always laughing just out of sort of awkwardness and excitement?

Okay, so this fact was sent to me by text.

Anonymously.

Anonymously.

By Mr R.

Herring.

When we're on tar, there was no name attached, but but the phone number ends with 067, so you know who you are.

Yeah, that's nearly my number.

I confirmed it in a book called Wild Sex: The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom by Karen Bondar.

And yeah, it seems that it does happen.

So when females arrive and see each other, they stand in a parallel position, facing in opposite directions, lift their hind legs, display their fully erect clitorises to each other, and then they smell and lick them.

And this is because female hyenas have extremely large clitorises.

Do they ever smell them and not lick them?

Smell them.

No.

Sorry.

That's thought of as very awkward in the hyena world.

It's like, you know, when you give someone a high five and they don't give you a high five back, it's exactly like that.

Wow.

Yeah, so, and this happens between

females of different ranks, and depending on who licks first, depends on who is their most highest ranking.

And they have, they're like seven inches long, aren't they?

About seven inches long.

Yeah, clitoris is.

They're essentially a penis in appearance.

And they get erections, so when they're copulating, then they get erections.

And they also have a labia that's fused to look like testes.

It actually does seem a bit like zoologists have got the genders the wrong way around.

It does.

Except that they give birth through them.

And then they give birth through them, and so that clarifies things, yes.

And it's a horrific birth.

Yeah.

I think it's the only animal birth that's worse than humans, because humans are not very well adapted to give birth, because we've got our hips are too narrow and our heads are too big, essentially.

And so our birth is much, much more traumatic than almost any other animal.

But hyenas, it is worse because you are giving birth through a penis.

Yes.

There's two types of erect, which is very useful to know.

There's a social erection and there's sexual erection.

What I've got here, this is a social erection.

And now I've got, now I know about that.

That's a good thing to know.

Unless anyone fancies having sex, in which case it can just turn very quickly into a sexual erection.

So where does it

take?

If you're interested, it suddenly is a sexual erection.

In my case, I don't know if that's the case.

Where does it turn?

It turns just as you walk past the large ungulate section of the zoo.

It's very difficult for the males, the true males, to mate as well.

So they have to practice a lot because being able to get your genuine penis into this long clitoris is a tough gig.

It's like darts.

And so

it takes about two months' practice from male hyenas before you are able to penetrate properly.

Yeah, and they're like probably like crouching behind them and trying to point the penis the right way.

Two months of yeah, yeah, you say that, but George III's brother-in-law was practicing for a lot longer than that.

But 60% of hyena cubs suffocate on the way out.

No, no, yeah,

what?

Yeah, more than half because you're in this long tube.

Holy moly, it's cloudy.

There's all sorts of hyena mythology because of the because of the fact they're so weird.

So,

and just beliefs about them.

So, Pliny the Elder,

friend of the show, he said that

keep writing in.

He said that hyenas are capable of calling people by name because they're quite

weird.

They sound slightly human in the way they laugh.

Calling people by name and then killing you when you go outside.

So they will lure you out.

So you'll think someone's calling you.

Pliny.

Pliny.

Pliny the elder.

Pliny the elder.

Get that hyena out of here.

There's also in mythology, have you heard of werewolves?

There's were hyenas.

Oh, yeah, which is very exciting.

But they have a different thing.

They have, so your classic werewolf will obviously be a wolf.

Sorry, a human that turns into a wolf.

With the were hyena, it's often a hyena that turns into a human.

So at night time on a full moon, you might be talking to a human.

And they will not be socialized at all.

No.

Because they spend five, sixths of their time time as

hyenas.

Yeah.

So a penis might be a clitoris.

That's true.

Yeah, they're greetings.

You can tell you've met one

immediately.

As soon as they welcome to a party, you know it's them.

They must be disappointed how hard it's to find the human clitoris though.

What's going on?

It's not even here.

Oh, I guess a lot of sympathy from fellow men at the party at that point.

I know, right?

Walter Raleigh thought that hyenas were so disgusting that Noah refused to let them on the ark.

And the species was only resurrected after an unnatural copulation between a dog and a cat.

Okay.

It's not as terrifying as the Richard Herring London Zoo catty creature.

I've got some clitoris facts.

Yes, please.

Yes, please.

The clitoris is the only part of the human body that never ages.

A 20-year-old clitoris and an 80-year-old clitoris are identical.

So you can't count the rings.

I'm just going to say they get slightly bigger sometimes throughout life, but then they don't look...

They don't wrinkle, I guess.

That is a really good idea.

That's extraordinary.

Well, that's what that's, yeah.

And also, I was surprised clitoris, the word clitoris only dates for that, only dates back to the 17th century, is in something I read.

And then the word clit was only

came up in America in the 1950s.

So it took 200 years, 300 years for someone to shorten clitoris.

They were saying clitoris for a long time before someone thought, this is a mouthful.

Do we know if it had a...

Let's shorten it to clit.

Do we know if it had a meaning before...

But I think it is a Latin word.

And I did look that up a little bit.

I think it means hood in Latin.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, it does.

Yes.

So it would have had a different meaning.

Just a monk would, I guess, go around with a...

With a clitoris on his head.

Yeah.

I don't know what the Romans called a clitoris.

If they didn't call it a clitoris.

One would have thought it's related to the fact that women weren't thought to be.

they weren't thought to have any organs that would experience sexual pressure.

They weren't thought to have organs, weren't they?

They weren't thought to have organs that could experience sexual pleasure or anything.

But actually, that's often a myth.

Like they often did.

I think in ancient Greek, in ancient Greece, women often talked about the pleasure you get from sex.

So there must have been a concept of a clitoris.

Yeah.

What was it called, Greek?

Any Greeks listening?

Plenty, if you could ask your name.

Was it called a Whipple tickle or something?

But you always get that fact sense.

Well, that was supposedly what the G-Spot was going to be called.

Oh, was because it was Dr.

something, was it Beverly Whipple who came up with it?

No, it was a doctor.

His name started with G.

The reason the G-spot's called the G-Spot is because it's named after Doctor, it's something like Geisner.

Yeah, it starts with G.

Gavin.

I thought, should we call it the Gavin?

If I discovered I wanted to have my whole name, I wanted to be called the R spot.

I wanted to be the richie spot.

That's what I thought.

The Gavin.

It would stop serving its purpose immediately if you called it the Gavin.

Okay, that is it.

That is all 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 account.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

At James Harkin.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Rich.

At Herring1967.

And Shaczinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, that's right.

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

We have lots of blah, blah, blah.

That's not the website to go to.

Go to richardherring.com slash gigs.

That is where you will find all the upcoming dates for Richard Herring's podcast.

He's going to be in Edinburgh.

So all through August, he's going to be there.

It's got all of his tour dates.

And it's also got a link to the episode that we went on of his podcast.

It goes out on the 24th of July.

If you're listening after then, just go to his site.

You can find that episode.

We had an amazing time chatting to him about us generally.

He made us say weird things.

Check it out.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

We'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.