275: No Such Thing As A Squashed Microbe

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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 Oxford.

My name is Dan Shriver and I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andrew Hunter-Murray and James Harkin.

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

Here we go.

Starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that hippos sometimes poo into rivers so much that all the fish downstream die.

This is

such cool science.

This is, yeah.

Not if you're a fish.

Yeah, not if you're a fish.

This is a horror story if you're a fish.

True.

So quick shout out to the scientists who did this.

The team who did this was scientists Chris Dusson and Amanda Subuluski.

And hippos poo a lot into rivers.

Basically, pooing is one of the main things that hippos do.

And they do it for all sorts of purposes, communication and mostly to get it out of their bodies.

Mostly for pooing purposes.

But it's technically called organic matter loading.

That's what I call it.

Surely it's unloading.

Depends what you're if you're loading the the river, I guess.

Oh yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I don't know.

No, you're right, you're right.

Well, I'm not sure I am.

But

so they eat a lot of grass and they eat it at night because it's cooler when they're out of the river feeding.

And in the daytime, they wallow in the river to stay cool.

So this was on a river called the Mara between Kenya and Tanzania.

There are 4,000 hippos living in this river.

and these hippos deposit 8,500 kilos of waste every day into quite a short section of river.

And

it turns into this huge sludge at the bottom of the river.

And then in the dry season, the river shrinks and dries up a bit.

But then when it rains, this massive tidal wave of hippo poo gets churned up and all of this sludge gets washed down.

And it doesn't have much oxygen in it because of all the bacteria which have been, you know, consuming the poo.

So the water, the oxygen levels in the water plummet, all the fish die.

So it's bad news if you're a fish, but it's good news if you're something that eats fish.

And don't mind a little bit of pooey aftertaste.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's definitely sending that back if you're at a restaurant.

The fish looks great.

It's just the hippo shit all over it.

So things like storks, vultures, crocodiles, hyenas, they eat these fish really quickly once they die off.

And actually,

the researcher says if you weren't there to see it, you wouldn't know it was happening because it happens so quickly that they come and eat all this stuff.

It's a really good way of the nutrition cycle almost happening through the ecosystem.

They had to, the researchers who did this, it was in Kenya, wasn't it?

And they couldn't do it themselves.

They couldn't go and analyze the poo themselves because hippos are very dangerous.

They're the most dangerous of the large mammals in the world, actually, in Africa.

So they kill, estimates seem to vary between 500 and 3,000 people in Africa every year.

But so the researchers didn't really want to go near that.

So they sent in some boats and they got advice from a Maasai guide who said, Disguise your boats as crocodiles.

And so they disguised their boats as crocodile heads, which went around collecting data on their poo.

That's amazing.

Because they get along quite well, hippos and crocodiles.

They do, but actually, it's a bit of a relationship that seems a bit skewed towards the hippo in that the crocodile just needs to be a bit passive when it comes to a hippo and them interacting.

I've seen footage of a baby hippo using the back of a crocodile basically as a teething ring just to...

But they do sometimes eat eat hippo babies.

It's quite bold for it to be chewing on a crocodile as a ring because they do occasionally flip around and swallow a baby, which I imagine doesn't happen with a natural baby's teething ring.

So this is

very rarely I'd be.

You'd have a very strong case.

Yeah.

There's a few products on Amazon with one-star reviews going, hate my fucking kid.

It's actually what brought down Toys R Us, isn't it?

But yeah, in this case, it's because the children, obviously, they could take on.

It's when a mother is babysitting near a crocodile and they're watching the biting going on.

So the crocodile has to just put up.

Just take it because they're like, I don't want to start anything here.

I think I read that a hippo can bite a crocodile in two, which doesn't sound plausible, but they're very, very powerful jaws.

They have very strong jaws, don't they?

They can easily snap a boat in two if they want to.

Like a, you know, not a cruise ship, but a robot or something.

Yeah.

Just back to the organic matter loading

thing.

So

the thing they do, which is really communicative with other hippos, is that they use their tail as a propeller and they spray it over a very wide area.

Spray their poo.

They spray the poo over a wide area because their tail is going round and round and round like a propeller.

Like shit hitting the fan, isn't it?

It is exactly that.

That's it.

Yeah, they do seem to spray it around willy-nilly.

And they use it for flirting, don't they?

This spraying.

So

both sides, both genders flirt with their feces.

So the males will mark their territory with this big spray of poo, which they can spray a couple of meters with their tail.

And then the female, if she's impressed, will respond by turning round to face him with her ass, so to not face him, and to and then she'll do the whizzing, the poo whizzing, and it's called submissive defecation.

Do you know that hippos can't get cholera?

And they think that one of the reasons is because they throw their poo around so much.

So I surmise if humans start throwing their poos around

eventually

thousands of years and millions of deaths,

you'll have humans who are covered in poo but can't get cholera.

Look, no one's saying that it's going to be great to start.

It's like Brexit.

No one's saying that it's going to be great to start off with,

but eventually.

The cholera's...

Well, because it moves the poo far away from them.

Well, because they have a lot of contact to the bacterium or whatever.

If they could get cholera, they'd be dead.

Is that right?

Right.

So they've got some sort of immunity.

Yeah.

Okay.

Because they do eat it as well, don't they?

God, really?

Babies eat their mother's feces because they have that unfortunate thing which some species have, where babies are born without any functioning intestines.

They don't have any live bacteria in their insides.

The only way they can get that is to eat their mother's poo.

So as soon as they're born, they've got to start

showering down on that.

Tough time.

We briefly mentioned hippo testicles before.

But I found out just a little bit more about them, so I thought we should return to that wellspring.

So there's a great article in Discover magazine which is headlined, why it's nearly impossible to castrate a hippo.

So

the problem first of all you're going to get pretty close to it.

That's true.

Can't do that with a remote-controlled crocodile shaped boat.

Although you would be able to use the charge to

but the but it's a bit they are a problem in some places obviously because they are a bit of a pest.

They're very prolific breeders as well so they can produce 25 calves in 40 years so before you know it you've got loads of hippos.

So the problem with castration as a you know to spread it across you know loads of hippos in a pest area is that their testicles are hidden inside their bodies

and there's a paper in the journal Theriogenology which names all the difficulties in castrating hippos number one the penis is apparently discreet

I've used that excuse

It's just being polite

And also the testicles are not in the same place from one hippo to the next, so they can vary by up to 16 inches between different animals.

So if you cut in, trying to remove the hippo's testicles, they're not there.

So a game of pin the testicles on the hippo could lead to

pretty much stick a pin anyway.

You're correct.

And the problem is that they can retract further during surgery, which we've said.

They can retract them further into their body.

They can flee the surgeon's knife.

And also, it's very hard to anesthetize a hippo.

I mean, there are so many problems.

Just don't do it.

Don't do it.

Don't custrate them.

Although they are a pest, as you say.

And they are particularly a pest, of course, in Colombia, right?

So this hippo is known for really hanging out in Africa, but Pablo Escobar in Colombia had this zoo.

The Pablo Escobar, massive Colombian drug lord, obviously was shot in 1993, left behind his massive menagerie of weird animals.

And they got rid of most of them.

But people didn't notice at the time, I don't think, that he had a bunch of hippos living in his lake, in his ponds.

Didn't notice.

Didn't spot them.

Didn't spot them.

They looked like rocks.

And

so and they've bred and it was eventually everyone's attention was drawn to this in 2007 so he died in 1993 2007 fishermen started like you know calling the local council or whatever it is um and reporting

my fish tastes a bit like hippo shit

Sales have really plummeted.

No, they kept calling up and reporting creatures with tiny ears and huge mouths.

And they genuinely didn't know what they were, these people, and they were hippos.

and so now there are about 60 of them that are just living in this tiny area in the rivers and lakes and apparently you'll be in this nearby town and you'll see a hippo just wandering down the road

wow scary it's very exciting it's very scary um we're gonna have to move on in a second um i've got i found an interesting thing the first pharaoh of the united egypt was killed by a hippo He was called, yeah, King Menez.

And we only know it from a single line, as far as I can tell, by a historian called Manetho, who just simply wrote, Menez was the first king he was snatched and killed by a hippopotamus and nothing else we don't know

we don't know the circumstances we don't know what he was doing at the time what a legacy yeah we do know what it's like to be swallowed by a hippo or to half swallowed

because there was a guy a few years ago called Chris Broughton who was on the Zambezi and basically he said before he knew it he was inside a hippo he said I was aware that my legs were being surrounded by water but my top half was almost dry.

I seemed to be trapped in something slimy.

There was a terrible, sulfurous smell like rotten eggs, and a tremendous pressure against my chest.

My arms were trapped, but I managed to free one and felt around.

My palm passed through the wiry bristles of the hippo's snout.

It was only then that I realized I was underwater, trapped up to my waist in his mouth.

Wow.

Isn't that amazing that we know what that's like?

And then he managed to get himself.

He wriggled as much as he could, managed to get free, and there were people there who could drag him away.

Wow.

So his arm was going up through the hippo's airwaves and out of its nose.

Yeah, no, through the that way.

He had to reach further into the hippo and then back out through.

No.

I thought he was coming up through the nose, out of the nose.

He clambered his way out of the ear in the end.

Yeah.

Thank God he didn't go through the anus, he would have been propelled.

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

My fact this week is that there are monks in India who avoid going out in the rain in case they splash through puddles and upset the microbes in them.

And these are Jain monks and people who follow Jainism.

So, you know, Jains are the people who basically don't believe in harming any living creature.

And this goes right down to all bacteria, which basically live in everything and on everything.

And so as soon as the monsoon comes, you're not allowed to leave your house if you're Jain because that you might immediately be killing stuff because they believe that these tiny creatures, which they called nagoda, and they believed in hundreds, thousands of years before we even discovered microorganisms, they believed that these tiny creatures existed sort of everywhere in puddles, in damp environments.

And if you touch them, then they're going to get upset, even die.

And so they can't go out in the rain.

And if you hurt them in any way, then you go to hell.

Is that the idea?

You just won't be reincarnated, I don't think, as well as you might have.

It's not as bad as hurting a human, which is a higher being, but it's still not ideal.

So these guys are the ones who sweep the streets so that they don't stand on any like insects and stuff?

Is that right?

And they wear masks so they don't inhale them.

And they don't go out at night because you men someone said they don't go out at night because you can't the light's not good enough and so you can't see what you're eating and so you might think you're eating a piece of bread, but it could be a bunch of small insects.

Which

I'm no gourmand, but

I I think I can tell the difference.

It's incredibly hard life being a Jain.

So Jain monks, you know, it's an older sister religion of Buddhism.

So they're very, very, very keen to avoid the pleasures of the flesh.

Extremely keen.

So Buddhist monks shave their heads.

Jain monks pluck out their hairs one by one in a deliberately painful ceremony.

Buddhist monks beg for their food.

Jain monks are not allowed to beg.

They're not even allowed to beg.

There's a hand gesture you can make, a bit like they arch their right hand over their shoulder, which I think is like this.

It's kind of like the beginning of I'm a little teapot.

And that's to show hunger, but they cannot directly ask for food.

Oh, really?

But then if you do that gesture, then people do sometimes give you something, don't they?

Yeah, people say that's, oh, he's hungry, yeah.

Yeah, because there is the thing, there are basically two main variants of Jainism, and one is called Digamba, and one is Shfetamba.

And the Digambas are the sky-clad or naked Jains, and they are not allowed to own any material possessions.

And this is if you really strictly adhere.

So this is the monks and the nuns.

So they have to be naked all the time if they're those monks because you're not allowed to own clothes because they're material possessions and that causes some.

You can have an iPhone though, can't you?

Obviously you can have an iPhone.

Where would you keep it?

Let's not go into that.

Could you rent a tuxedo for example?

Because then you don't own it.

You don't own it.

You just rent it.

Oh yeah.

But how would you pay for it?

Good point.

No money.

I don't know if tuxedo rental existed 3,000 years ago when they sort of founded it, so maybe they've updated it.

But those ones can't even own a bowl, so they have to ask for water by cupping their hands, and then it all slides through their fingers before they can drink it.

I think they're allowed to drink from gods, aren't they?

Are they?

I think so, yeah.

I think one sect is, are the other sects?

I believe so.

Wow.

Well, because the other sect,

which are allowed to wear clothes, are still only allowed to wear white, aren't they?

And this thing about how they don't want to hurt any animals,

if you look back in the stories of their history, there were 24 Jane Ford makers.

They were the prophets who kind of started the whole thing.

And one of them was so bothered about not harming anything at all that before he was born, he floated perfectly still in his mother's womb, sending not so much as a ripple throughout the amniotic fluid to avoid harming his mother.

Wow.

So thoughtful.

They're the epitome of thoughtful.

They're what we all should strive to be.

So some of them wear a mask to stop inhaling insects, but there's controversy about the masks because some people say that it's a good thing to wear a mask because the breath from your mouth is hot, and if you don't wear a cloth, you might scorch microscopic beings in the air, kind of like Godzilla.

Kind of.

He didn't wear clothes either.

He didn't wear clothes.

So some people say that if you do wear a cloth, that might be a bad thing because your breath is moist and that might give rise to microorganisms in the cloth.

And then there will be more living and dying because of you breathing.

So they'll die when you handle it.

So, problem.

It's a tightrope, isn't it, that you've got to walk?

And it's slightly tougher for women, although I will say, I think they have much more egalitarian views than a lot of mainstream religions.

And generally, they're kind of great.

But they do have this slight thing where if you believe in the naked Jainism, the sky-clad Jains, then women can't quite attain proper enlightenment, proper nirvana.

And that is because women can't be naked because it's inconvenient for them, apparently.

I don't understand why it's more inconvenient for women to be naked than for men to be naked.

Seems equally inconvenient.

But also, so one, women can't be naked because it's inconvenient.

And two, women can't be naked because they are intrinsically harmful.

And this is actually

based in the understandable belief that women's periods kill loads of creatures as they happen.

So, as, and I don't know what it is, I think maybe they think it's a sort of

body farm advert.

Well, that was the idea.

Menstruation was basically the death of thousands and thousands of these tiny organisms.

And so you couldn't quite achieve nirvana as a woman, but you could come still quite close.

I've got a tangential fact about Jainism, and it's actually to do with a lot of Eastern religions.

So we may have mentioned before that swastikas are quite big in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and they're big in Jainism.

And I found out in the course of researching this, I didn't know this, in the year 2013, and in fact a few years since then, there was a day called Learn to Love the Swastika, which was aiming to rehabilitate the swastika because it's an HTML.

It seems to be working.

We've seen a lot more of it these days.

It's going really well.

But to raise awareness of the symbol and its history as a peaceful symbol, tattoo artists around the world offered people free swastika tattoos.

This is true.

This happened.

And there were lots of articles about it.

And there was a report from Le Journal Internationale, which said this.

When a BB journalist questioned one of the tattooists about the probability that neo-Nazis might take advantage of the event, the latter answered that even if that was the case, these people will leave with a symbol of love on their body.

You've just got to let some things go, don't you?

I think you've got to leave the swastika behind.

There was a guy in America that I read about years ago who

went through World War II and he lived in, I believe it was Ohio in America, whose name was Adolf Hitler, and he refused to change his name.

He ended up becoming famous for people going, you know, people interviewing him saying, why have you not changed your name from Adolf Hitler?

And his response was,

I'm not going to let one guy

ruin the good name of Adolf Hitler.

Just on microbes, sorry, I thought it was a distraction.

Just on microbes,

I was looking up lots of stuff about microbes because of the puddles and microbes in them.

Did you know that Oregon has an official state microbe?

No, I didn't know that.

Why is it?

It's baker's yeast.

Because it's very important to craft brewers and craft bakers, if they exist.

But lots of states have discussed having a state microbe.

And I think so far, Oregon's the only one which said.

Well, they've got the best one, haven't they?

They've got a good one.

There are other good ones.

So Wisconsin proposed in its parliament Lactococcus lactis, which is very crucial for cheese production, because you get a lot of cheese in Wisconsin, but that didn't get through.

Hawaii suggested a bacterium which was found on a native shrub, but then there was a rival camp who wanted a different state microbe and was a huge argument in the Hawaiian Parliament about some people said, No, we want this one which lives in a symbiotic relationship with a squid.

And all the people who wanted the shrub ones said, Yeah, well the shrub lives in Hawaii.

It's native to Hawaii and the squid lives everywhere.

The squid one is vibrio fish scary, isn't it?

I love that microbe.

They should definitely have gone with the other one.

Oh no, I like the other one actually.

Oh here we go.

Alright let's take this outside.

The one on the bush.

And they've got in such a massive row that they scrapped the whole thing.

Don't we think America hasn't got its priorities straight?

Feels like they've got bigger fish to fry.

We're going to have to move on very shortly.

Can I just talk about how you can kill a microbe if you really want to?

Yes.

Because they're a pain in the ass, and antibiotics are struggling.

And so people have been really looking into how else we can kill microbes.

And they're quite hard to squash.

So, actually, this is something that James probably have got wrong because they're so small, obviously.

They're like a thousandth of a millimeter that you can't, they'll get into a crevice before you can properly squash them.

So there's a scientist called Elena Ivanova, and she works in Australia, and she's worked really, really hard to create surfaces so smooth that bacteria will just slide off them without being able to hold on.

But

some of them can still cling on, so that's failed.

And she was really panicking about what I don't know how to kill these microbes, they're still clinging to my slidey surfaces.

And so, she wrote to another scientist and asked if he had any ideas, and he said, try the cicada wing.

And what on earth?

But she got a cicada wing, so you know, cicadas, they took a wing off.

Uh, and it turns out that if you put a bacterium onto the wing of a cicada, it gets punctured all over, spills all its guts out, little bacteria guts, and it leads to a quick death.

And gecko skin is even better.

It's really, really it is hard to kill them, and it's it's really hard to kill them by stamping.

You can do it if you really put a huge amount of pressure on them.

You can't kill a bunch of people.

No, you can't.

You can't.

If you press food, there's a process called pascalization, and if you press food with 87,000 pounds per square inch,

you just make all the bacteria go pop.

I'm not coming to your restaurant.

We serve extremely flat food at extremely competitive prices.

How heavy is that?

Sorry?

87,000 pounds?

It's a lot.

It's more than all four of us put together.

Okay.

It's a lot more.

Yeah, by a submarine.

But it depends how we arrange it, right?

So if I was wearing one stiletto shoe and you all climbed on my shoulders, then I think that that might be enough concentration of weight.

If we were all hippos

and that, yeah.

Yeah, but it's not a good idea to do it.

So Science ABC, they looked into it and they said stomping around your house in a bid to sanitize or sterilize your floor is a bad idea.

Honestly, you don't want your family to see you and think you've lost your mind.

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

It is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that during the Second World War, while American pilots were flying over enemy territory, not only were they shooting at that enemy, but they were also often making ice cream at the same time.

How were they doing it?

They weren't just churning it while they were...

No, exactly.

So this was a big thing during World War II that I'd never read about before.

Ice cream was massive for the troops.

It was to help them with calories and sustenance, and it was a food that got banned by most other countries.

Britain, for example, banned ice cream during the war.

Yeah, as a sustenance thing.

As a rationing thing, basically, basically, because it's sugar and we don't need to use all that sugar.

Yeah, exactly.

They suggested a carrot on a stick as an alternative.

That didn't go down.

The stick.

The carrot is the stick.

What's the point of shoving a stick up a carrot?

Just so it looks like an ice cream.

I'm just saying that carrots can be used as a stick because carrots don't melt in the same way that magnums do.

Yeah.

You would have been court-martialed at this point, mate.

Just stick with the program.

It's a waste of sticks.

Surely we need sticks for the war effort.

Do you know weaponry had come on quite a lot faster than that?

This is come on war.

All in the stick battalion, follow me.

So, what this was is that they were constantly making ice cream in very creative ways during the war.

And one of the things that they discovered is that you could take a sort of drum, put all the ingredients inside of it, and attach it to the back of a plane.

So, as you flew over, you were reaching about 30,000 feet up in the air.

Very cold up there.

So, you had the coldness to make it freeze.

But also, the vibration of the engine, the machine guns going, were churning all the ice cream product around.

So by the time that you'd sort of, you know, downed some enemy planes and landed back on your aircraft in the ocean, you could go and have a big scoop of ice cream off the back of your airplane.

There was a guy called Jay Hunter Reinberg who was one of the first people, maybe the first person to do this.

And the first time he put the ice cream too close to his engines so it couldn't get cold enough.

So it was a bit like goopy.

They still ate it of course but then the second time it he flew um 33 000 feet over palau and so he went high high high enough so it was really really cold and the good advantage of that is number one it meant that the ice cream froze but number two it meant that none of the japanese aircraft could shoot him because he was so high and so they just kept shooting at him and the bullets couldn't reach him so he was just like watching it all going on below him

Wow.

Yeah, I kind of didn't realize how easy ice cream is to make.

I haven't haven't tried it.

I have just read about it still, so maybe it's not.

Yeah, it sounds from at the moment, it sounds like you need a plane.

Imagine if you got your pilot's license just for that.

But you can, I was reading a, like, there was a thing in the New Yorker by someone who said she went to a friend's house and the friend said for dinner.

And the friend said, great, who's for ice cream for pudding?

And everyone was like, yeah, great.

And so the friend went away and she came back and she had one Ziploc bag and then another much larger Ziploc bag.

And basically she filled filled the small Ziploc bag with vanilla extract and sugar and then she closed that and then inside the larger one she filled that with ice and salt and salt is the crucial ingredient for making ice cream isn't it?

And then she shook the bag about a bit, got tired, passed it around the table so it's quite a fun past-the-parcel kind of dinner party experience and by the time it got back around to her that's ice cream.

But it's because ice and salt makes an endothermic reaction, so it sucks all the heat out of your Ziploc bag with vanilla in it.

This doesn't sound like a great party, I have to say.

So just other things that during World War II they used ice cream for.

The U.S.

Navy, so in order to get ice cream to a lot of people, they had a lot of the Navy ships that were out and about.

There was one specific ship which they spent a million dollars converting at the time, which was effectively an ocean ice cream factory.

And it just, that's all it did.

It created ice cream.

It could do 10 gallons every seven minutes, and it would just go to various different Navy ships and deliver them ice cream.

Wow.

I was just looking at that amount that it could do.

It's the equivalent of doing one Ben and Jerry's tub every five seconds.

Wow.

Did it need to only be in extremely rough seas all the time to churn it up?

No, because you've got the engine kind of going around the propellers and stuff like that.

Oh, so it was still powered by the engine.

Yeah, and also the enemy could always hear it coming because of the chimes and things.

It was a flawed system, yeah.

But there's reports, apparently, of these boats, or these ships, that when they were attacked by the Japanese, if a torpedo hit it, there are a few accounts of sailors before they were abandoning ship and jumping overboard, running to the bit of the ship that had the ice cream, scooping as much as they could into their helmets, eating that, and then jumping off.

So just a quick, you know, bowl of ice cream before.

That was in the USS Lexington, which had a lot of ice cream on board, wasn't it?

Yes.

Yeah.

This is, I should just very quickly say I've gotten a lot of this information from the Atlantic online.

Well, but you've put the ocean.

Yeah.

I speak to oceans.

Just on, you mentioned the chimes just now, James.

So there used to be, I didn't know this, in the UK, I believe, 250,000 ice cream vans.

And as I say that, that sounds insane.

Today there are fewer than 2,500.

And one of the main threats to them is, can you guess?

The sun.

Yes, yes.

Kind of, I guess.

Yeah.

Children growing up.

Yeah.

But more come to replace them.

That doesn't make sense.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Is it the health code people?

Yeah, all of these are really good answers, but there's one thing that you haven't mentioned yet.

Double glazing.

Because you can't hear the chimes if you're double glazed.

Yes, in 2017, the head of the trade body, the Ice Cream Association...

By the way, awesome, said that new homes are so energy efficient, they've got double, sometimes even triple glazing, and children might not hear a van right outside their house when it's playing the chimes.

So they launched an app for smartphones smartphones called Van Toot,

which alerts you on your phone with an electronic jingle if there's an ice cream van nearby.

That's really cool.

That's so cool.

In the 1980s in Glasgow, there was an ice cream war between two gangs who were selling drugs and stolen goods from ice cream vans.

Ooh.

Yeah.

So it was really a drugs war.

No, James said it was done from ice cream vans.

Well,

it was quite serious, actually, but it was all in the news and everyone was having to go at the Strathclyde Police because they weren't solving all these crimes.

And the local newspapers called the police the serious chime squad.

Oh.

They should have called for Magnum P.I.

Ah.

There he is.

Very strong.

Do you know that the jingle, the jingle used to be, before it was playing music, it used to be a man shouting hokey pokey

because, and it's really cool that is the Italian for o chepoke.

So it's a bastardization of that.

And o chepoke means oh, how small?

I have heard that a few times as well.

Because about a tenth of Italian immigrants in the 1890s were selling ice cream, weren't they?

Yeah, I think about 10%.

Well, about 10% were vendors, and they were basically all ice cream vendors.

And so that came about.

But in the 19th century, so the ice cream wars is not the first time it's been associated with vice because in the 19th century, ice cream parlours became a very big thing.

This is especially in America, and it was because women basically weren't really allowed to go to places on their own unless they were chaperoned.

And this started becoming more and more of a thing as the century progressed.

So, you'd turn up to a restaurant, and they'd be like, Where's your chaperone?

and then they'd kick you out.

And so, they sort of came up with ice cream parlours, which became a place that women were allowed to hang out by themselves.

And they were called parlours to kind of mimic the homey, cozy life that we ladies ladies desire.

But they, of course, turned into hotbeds of vice immediately.

So there was all this disapproval because it was thought that without formal chaperones, women were just turning up and keeping awful company and like going out with really bad men.

And there were rumors about ice cream drugged with passion-exciting vanilla.

And

lots of there was one one journalist who wrote, I think, in the New York Times, that he went into an ice cream parlour and he saw a man and woman deep in conversation who are evidently man and wife, though not each other's.

It's amazing that vanilla was so, because that's the shittiest of all the flavours these days, isn't it?

Very raunchy back then.

Yeah,

Olive a hornetto, please.

Nice.

You could say.

Yeah.

You could.

You could.

You could.

We're going to have to move on shortly.

Before Cornets, they used to sell ice cream in penny licks.

And these were little, this was in London, and they used to sell them in little glasses.

They're like glasses, but they're a little bit bigger.

And they're almost like Sunday, what you put sundaes in.

What they would do is they would give you your penny liquor, put ice cream in it, and then you would return it to them, and then they'd give it a quick wipe, and then put some more ice cream for the next person to do it.

Sometimes not even a wipe, right?

That was bad for the bacteria.

And that is why ice cream cones kind of became quite popular, wasn't it?

Yeah, because they were banned in 1899 because they were causing the spread of tuberculosis.

Right.

That's bad.

And then the cone came about, and it was a huge deal.

So, this is at the 1904 World's Fair that the ice cream cone was invented.

Well, so there were instances of it appearing kind of in a few cookbooks in the 19th century, but it was suddenly made popular at the World's Fair.

And it was this huge thing, the 1904 World's Fair.

So, if any of you have ever seen Meet Me in St.

Louis, and I don't know why the song is pronounced like that, but it was about the World's Fair that was in St.

Louis, and it was a huge deal.

So, they had sort of like bears made of prunes at the World's Fair and they had just what everyone's always wanting

what's the point of the bear made of prunes everyone loves a prune yeah true a bear's an exotic thing there you go I think they did actual snarling they had a massive landscape sculptured entirely from butter they were showing the new refrigeration technology so they had um they had a milkmaid milking a cow but all of it was made of butter

and they had Roosevelt on a horse Teddy Roosevelt the president at the time on a horse what was he made of peaches It's all butter.

It's all butter.

But anyway, sorry, they made the ice cream cone there because there was ice cream on display and no one had thought of eating it like on the hoof.

And then they realized people wanted to try it.

And so a nearby waffle vendor curled his waffle round into a cone shape and said, try this.

And hence the cone was invented.

But there's this great historian who's really looked into this.

And she's found seven different people who claim to have invented it at that one fair.

There was a Syrian guy, a Lebanese guy, a Turkish guy, someone from Ohio, all saying they'd done it.

But that's there was born the ice cream cone.

Well, it's a simple history of the ice cream cone.

Do you know that it's better to eat ice cream by licking it than with a spoon?

This is a theory.

And the reason is that the flavor in ice cream is released when the fat content comes out of it, and that comes when it warms up.

And because your tongue is warmer than a spoon and it's got a larger surface area, it's better to put it on there there and then it kind of melts and you get the flavor.

Whereas, if you do it with a spoon, then it's still cold when it goes in your mouth and you don't get all the flavour because you swallow it before you can.

Just a tip?

Just a top tip.

Yeah.

There's a guy who can tell the difference between 12% and 11.5% butter fat in ice cream.

I bet he gets invited to a lot of parties.

He's an official ice cream taste tester, and he was called John Harrison.

He was the ice cream taste tester for Dryers

from 1980 to 2010, so for 30 years.

And he had his tongue insured for $1 million.

In fact, the company had his tongue insured for $1 million.

They always say this:

we've insured your tongue for $1 million.

What's the risk?

There isn't a gang of roving tongue thieves.

It's a very precious tongue.

I'd get it if I could.

He would not.

No.

And before you can explain what that means, it is time for fact number four.

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Our final fact of the evening is James.

Okay, my back this week is that in 1997, a town in Saskatchewan held a referendum on whether the end of a toilet paper should hang under or over the roll.

And luckily, that was the last time anyone ever asked a stupid question by means of a referendum ever again.

So this was a local election in Saskatoon, which is in Saskatchewan, and they were trying out new voting machines basically.

And so what they wanted to do was have a trial question which was nothing to do with any kind of politics and wouldn't kind of get people riled up.

And so they said,

what do you think should be the official town microbe?

The question was, are you in favor of toilet paper in all public washrooms being installed with the loose end coming up and over the front of the roll?

And the answer was 80% over.

Okay, and so they said they didn't want it to be political.

Oh, we've got a few over fans in here.

Oh, okay.

That was definitely 52% over.

In Sunderland, they feel completely the other way about it, all right?

But yeah, one teenager did a science project about it and did a survey and found that liberals usually go for over while conservatives usually go for under.

Really?

So actually it was quite political after all.

And

was it enacted?

As in, did all public washrooms follow the overwhelming mandate of

I think it became the rule but they I'm sure there isn't the person who goes around checking the mole.

So it wasn't legally binding.

Far be it from me to criticise the people's choice but I think they got that absolutely wrong.

Oh really?

The toilet roll thing, that's insane.

And there's no wonder liberals go for the over-the-top because over the top wastes so much more lu-roll because it easily gets you know detangled.

More?

Yeah, it absolutely does.

It falls down more easily, especially if you've got a cat.

It's not cascading down.

Like, no,

if you've got a cat,

if you've got a cat, or if you get home drunk,

guys, guys,

what was the moment that no such thing as a fish really ended?

Wow, I feel tense.

Some more referendums that have happened.

Oh, yeah.

Well, since that one works so well.

No, but it's really interesting.

So lots of America is really big on this.

So in the USA they have extra referendums kind of attached to votes that they're having.

So you might have a state or a national election and you'll just append a few extra votes which are yes-no things normally.

So and some of them are quite fun.

So in 2006 Arizona voted on whether to give a million dollars to a single resident chosen by lottery simply for voting.

To encourage turnout,

we'll get a million dollars.

It was called the Arizona Voter Reward Act and they rejected it.

Classic.

Oh really?

Yeah.

Classic human.

They think, what if it's not me?

There was a great one which was in Castlewood, Virginia, and this was in 1997.

And the question for the vote was, should we exist?

And

they decided they shouldn't.

And they no longer do.

What are you talking about?

Well, I think it was quite a tiny community that was right next to a bigger community, but it came with a lot of extra taxes off the back of existing.

So they said, let's not exist.

They abolished themselves and became part of Russell County.

Yeah, but they had literally only existed for a couple of years, right?

They'd signed this big petition saying, oh, we want to exist.

We want autonomy.

We want a government.

Great, let's do it.

So they bloody did it.

And then straight away they were like, taxes?

What are you talking about?

Fuck off.

And

literally, immediately, the second administration they put in power was this mayor called Roy Castle, Castle whose whole platform was to abolish their existence.

Wow,

so people are able to change their minds and have another vote a bit later if they feel like

by the way, this show isn't going out for about three months, so fuck those if any of those

you'll be able to trade this for food this episode of the podcast

You'll be able to be all sitting around your carrot sticks at home

It's on a stick.

It's on a stick.

It's on a stick.

I mean, you can make carrot into sticks.

That's the weird thing.

There are just some other good referendums.

In 1993, San Francisco had a referendum, and it was on whether one specific policeman could patrol with a ventriloquist dummy.

And

they got pretty into this.

So this is this great guy called Bob Geary, who was a community policeman, and he was given the remit to make policing more creative and ingenious.

And he did that by spending a lot of money on a big wooden ventriloquist dummy and going about and practicing he properly learned how to do it.

He got all these tapes, he practiced in front of the mirror, and he called it and he called it Brendan O'Smarty as sort of like a flip on the idea of a dummy.

And he dressed it up in police uniform with a water pistol, patrolled the streets, and then eventually the person in charge of police complained and said he had to leave it in the car.

And so he got enough signatures for a referendum.

And it happened.

And bizarrely, the result, I find this so unfathomable, the result of the referendum was just 51% to 49% in favor.

Who are the 49% voting against a policeman having a dummy?

I reckon it's probably the other policeman who, when they call for backup and Brendan O'Smarty rocks up

with his water pistols.

Hello, there's a very, very, very small fire that needs putting out.

Can you send Brendan?

He costs $1,700, which in 1993 was not nothing.

Yeah, but he already owns it, so he doesn't need to buy a new one, does he?

I guess not.

No.

Still, I'm part of the 49% saying no to an officer's mother.

It was to entertain children, wasn't it?

On patrol.

To entertain people, I think.

And he did manage to apprehend criminals with it.

No, no, no.

Apparently, there was more than one suspect that he took down with the dummy in one hand and the suspect in the other.

Are you kidding?

No.

Did he do good cop, bad cop with the dummy?

Look, I'm managing to hold him off you, but I can only restrain him for so long.

Let me Adam, let me out of the way.

I'm gonna, he's gonna shout, let me Adam, let me Adam, while I'm drinking a glass of water now.

There was another, just speaking of entertainers, in Sao Paulo, there was a Brazilian clown who was called Tirrica who won an election and he was was going for federal deputy, and this was in 2010.

It was a question as well, which was, does anyone really want to know what happens behind government doors?

That was simply it.

And everyone went, yes, someone's going to tell us the truth.

And it won him the election, but he was a clown.

And did he reveal?

Did he?

I should have read the rest of the article, really.

Can I talk about House of Lords votes?

Because they're quite weird.

So, first of all, so lords aren't allowed to vote for MPs, which is fair enough.

There was actually quite a good article looking at

funny voting comments over the years.

And apparently, in 1948, then someone in America said that he got in touch with the Houses of Commons because he was interested in the qualifications for voting in England.

So he called the reference library in the Houses of Commons and he received the following pronouncement.

In Great Britain, any adult 21 years or over may register and vote except peers and lunatics.

And we make an exception for the latter if they have a moment of lucidity.

That moment was in 2016.

Well, they can't vote for MPs, but they do have their own elections, and they're often quite weird.

So, in 2016, there was a by-election in the House of Lords.

It was to replace a Lib Dem peer called Eric Lubbock, who was actually a very cool guy who wanted to leave his body to Battersea Dogs Home to vary their diet.

But that's

besides the point.

Anyway, he died, so someone had to replace him.

And the only people qualified to vote to replace him are the other Lib Dem hereditary peers, of which there were three, and there were seven candidates.

So they had a proper election where three people voted for seven candidates.

Wow.

It might be the only election where there are more candidates than voters.

That's really good.

There was, in 1862, there was a referendum in Greece because the people overthrew King Otto and decided to hold a referendum to decide who would take his place.

There were 240,000 votes counted, and the winner was a guy who got six of them.

And that's because the Greeks voted 95% for Prince Alfred, who was British, but Britain, France, and Russia had signed a treaty saying that no person from any of those countries was allowed to take over.

Okay, so the guy who got six votes was William of Denmark, who took over and duly raided for 50 years.

Did he say how many votes the first guy got, Alfred?

He got 95% of 240,000, so I'm sure you can work that out.

Yeah.

There were 93 people who voted for having a republic rather than any king at all, and there was one vote to bring back King Otto.

I wonder who that was from.

We're going to have to wrap up in a sec.

Oh, I've got one last fact about presidential elections, which is just not really on referendums, but this was sent in by someone in the audience tonight, someone called Charlie Gennis.

Jennis?

Hi, yeah.

And it's this.

It's that in the 1948 U.S.

presidential election, the Democrats commissioned a Papillé-Mâché donkey, which was designed to have smoke belching from its nostrils to make it look impressive and intimidating.

Unfortunately, all the smoke came out of its back end instead.

Amazing.

Sounds a good fact.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Honduran.

James.

At James Harken.

And Czezinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep.

You can go to our group account as well, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We've got everything up there from our previous episodes to upcoming tour dates.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much.

Good night.

Let's be real.

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