273: No Such Thing As A Scuba Diver Covered With Meat

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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 Sheffield.

My name is Dan Shriver.

I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andrew Huntson-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, as a child, the naturalist Frank Buckland learned to differentiate different kinds of animal urine by taste alone.

What a guy.

How did this happen?

Well, so he was the son of another naturalist, a guy called William Buckland.

This is Victorian we're talking here, 19th century.

And

William Buckland was an amazing guy, and he, you know, taught his children lots, and they grew up surrounded by animals.

So instead of having a hobby horse to ride on, they had a dead crocodile.

And as part of his education, he learned about different kinds of animals.

And is that so you know which pet to tell off when someone weeze on the floor?

Oh, yeah.

Who did that?

I'm just going to check.

Freddie?

That's a very good idea, yeah.

Because they had loads of animals around the house.

Right, for instance, William Buckland, he was a naturalist, like you say.

He liked experiments, he likes to do that kind of thing.

So there was one time he was in bed and he was thinking about fossil footprints, because they just found all these new footprints.

And he came up with an idea of how they might be formed.

So he woke up his sleeping wife and asked her to prepare a slab of dough in the kitchen so he could get his pet tortoise to walk across it so he could have a look at the footprints that it made.

That's so cool.

And they, so Frank's house, William's son, Frank's house, seems like it was riddled with animals.

There was an account from 1877 of a journalist who went to visit because he was quite famous.

And he said they opened the door and they immediately retreated because there was a jaguar in the doorway with monkeys seizing its tail and denuding it of fur.

And then the butlers were like, don't worry, he won't hurt you, it'll it'll be fine there was a jackass a laughing jackass which I think is a kookaburra their word for a kookaburra chasing live mice up and down a glass jar with a battalion of cats waiting underneath and there was

a battalion

and there was a parrot that kept on calling cabs from the front window as soon as they arrived

but apparently was equally ready to hail an omnibus if they so desired

yeah i read a story of a guest i believe it was with frank might have been with william but um they tripped over in the night down the staircase over a hippopotamus that they weren't expecting.

Yeah.

What?

Yeah, I'm not, was it alive or dead?

The hippopotami.

It was a dead baby hippopotamus, and it was a small child, and she fell all the way down the stairs.

And he was like, be careful, you could have damaged that.

It sounds like their whole life was just incredible adventures with animals, because Buckland, both Bucklands really, were popularizers of science as well as...

actual researchers and scientists.

But he wrote lots of memoirs and lots of exciting books which sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

So, for example, one account he gave, he was trying to make a cast of a three-meter sturgeon, but he could only borrow it for one night, so he had to do it really fast.

And he had to get it.

So, he woke his wife up.

Yeah.

He had to get it downstairs and into the kitchen.

So, what he did was he tied a rope around its tail, because it was really heavy, it was three meters long, he let it slide downstairs in front of him and sort of pulled the, you know, pulled the rope tall.

Oh, my God.

And unfortunately, obviously, sturgeons are very, very slippery, and it got away from him and it crashed down the stairs and it smashed into the kitchen.

And these are his words.

He said, This sudden and unexpected appearance of the armor-clad sea monster bursting open the door instantly created a sensation.

The cook screamed, the housemaid fainted, the cat jumped on the dresser, the dog retreated behind the copper and barked, the monkeys went mad with fright, and the sedate parrot has never spoken a word since.

And we just couldn't get a taxi from then on.

Well, he used to chase the cook around the house with a dead goose squeezing its voice box to make it squawk at her.

Was this in childhood?

No, no, as a grown-up.

As a grown-up.

Yeah, as an adult.

We should say that you've already mentioned that these guys were scientists, but these were like proper scientists.

These two guys really were

sharing notes with Darwin about ideas.

They were properly famous in their time.

Although Frank didn't believe in evolution.

No.

Actually, neither of them did.

But Frank especially didn't believe in evolution.

And to prove it, he did a lot of interviews with Pongo the gorilla, after which he deduced that the creator had drawn a vast line between human and monkey.

So he wasn't getting much out of the interview, I don't think.

I reckon Pongo went away and thought the same thing.

I'm sure.

But he did like to eat animals as well, didn't he, Frank?

So he deliberately moved closer to London Zoo so that he could eat them as soon as they died in the zoo.

Because he liked to eat animals that were all different animals, not just like, you know, meat that we might do.

So, Frank and William, didn't they?

Yes, they did.

Yeah, yeah.

When he was living near the zoo, a panther had died.

And so, that for him was like, I've never had panther, I really want to try that.

So, he wrote, this is from his writings.

He said, I wrote at once to tell his friend who worked at the zoo to tell him to send me down some chops.

It had, however, been buried a couple of days, but I got them to dig it up.

It was not very good.

Culinary advice no one needed.

But he kind of had a...

Also, he was obviously doing this before lots of animals became endangered.

So slightly different times.

It's still gross.

It's still gross.

I'm not saying it's not gross.

I'm just...

But he, but there was a purpose behind all this mad eating that he was doing, because he helped to found this thing called the Acclimatization Society.

And they said, well,

people need food to eat.

They need protein.

Turkeys and pheasants are not native to Britain.

They were introduced and they've been a brilliant success.

What else can we introduce that will be?

Because they were worried that the population was going up and we won't be able to feed ourselves right now.

Exactly.

So they just had banquets every year where they tried all sorts of stuff and said, what can we introduce?

Because after Brexit, we'll all be digging up the panthers, won't we?

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

My fact this week is that in the 1980s, Romania lifted up and relocated dozens of buildings, often with their residents still inside them.

So why on earth did they do that?

Well, so this was in the 1980s in Romania and mainly in Bucharest.

It was under Ceaușescu who wanted in classic dictator fashion to create this enormous palace for the people which involved bulldozing basically the entire city and he destroyed hundreds of buildings.

It was very devastating because it was a really picturesque town which was sort of flattened but there were a few heroes who thought, okay, rather than let him destroy these buildings, let's quickly move them.

And so they got to work and they moved dozens of of almost a dozen churches and they moved lots of other buildings, including a hospital, a bank, and sometimes whole apartment buildings, which they just move up, like pick up and shift a few hundred yards with the people still inside them.

They must have told the people inside, mustn't they?

They did, although there was one occasion where

people have been told that they were going to be moving their buildings at 9 a.m.

And so most of the residents thought, I'll just pack my suitcases.

and get out for that little period.

And it turned out it was 6 a.m.

So they all got up at 9, looked out their windows, and were like, oh my god.

This was mainly one guy, wasn't it, who came up with the idea who passed away just this year.

And

I'll attempt to say his name, and then Anna can say it correctly after me.

Eugenio Lodal Shokku.

Wow.

I mean, you got the first letter of his name completely wrong.

It's an I, not an L.

One time.

Oh, that's an I.

Okay.

Yodachescu?

Yeah.

Yeah, Yodichescu.

Eugenio Eugenio Yodachescu.

That's who I said.

And

so he died this year, very sadly.

And he got the idea for it because he hated the idea that this was a rescue mission.

These were meant to be demolished.

And he thought that's unacceptable.

A lot of these were very beautiful churches that he wanted to survive.

And so he was sitting in a restaurant one day and he saw a waiter passing by carrying on a tray the drinks that he was bringing to a table.

And he looked at that tray system and he thought, that's how we could be doing this.

And then he started a search for the largest waiter in the world.

Yeah.

You sounded so much like Jeremy Clark's in no way.

He didn't do that.

He built some rail tracks.

He basically built them on mini railways, didn't he?

So he could sort of roll them along into their new areas.

So if you go to Bucharest now, then you can see these old buildings sort of hiding behind the huge, ugly new Soviet ones.

There'll be a lovely little church suddenly.

And so actually that parliament that was built, you know, that everything else was being demolished and moved to make way for, it wiped out one-fifth of the historic center of the entire city.

That's how big it is.

And it took a third of the country's budget for several years, a third of the budget of the whole country.

And

so it was planned by Ceaușescu, but the chief architect, Anka Petrescu, was only 28, and the BBC described her as arguably the world's worst architect.

Oh, I've seen that.

It's not that bad.

I think it looks quite nice, actually.

One of the buildings that they did destroy and didn't move was Brenkovernesk Hospital.

And the reason they did that is quite long-winded.

So basically, David Steele, who was the leader of the Liberal Party in Britain, gave Ceaușescu a pet dog, who Ceaușescu absolutely loved.

Okay, so he made the dog a corporal in the army.

I mean, he was a dictator.

He did crazy shit like that.

And then they went to this hospital, and the hospital had had problems with rats, and so they got cats in the hospital to chase after the rats.

And then the dog came in and got in a big fight with one of the cats.

And then, because he'd been injured by a cat, Ceaușescu went, I'm afraid this hospital has to go.

And the very next day, the order came in for the hospital to be demolished, all because this corporal dog had been beaten up by a cat.

At what point do you realize you are the bad guy?

When you're.

Wow.

I mean, this dog was called Corbu.

He was really loved by Ceaușescu, so much so that the Romanian ambassador in London used to go to Sainsbury's every week to buy Winnelot Prime to send back to Bucharest in a diplomatic bag.

Wow.

Yeah, he was crazy.

He used, and in fact, the guy Yurichescu got permission to move all of these buildings, but Ceaușescu was so impatient to knock them down that he knocked a lot of them down, even though they were supposed to be moved.

And there was one that he wanted to knock down, but all the workers refused to do it.

It was this beautiful old church.

I think it was medieval.

And so he had to release people from prison to employ them to knock down this building.

But his palace was incredible.

So his palace, which he called the People's Palace, I think, or Palace of the People, which is one of those ironic titles, its Union Hall featured two huge spiral staircases.

And that was so that he and his wife, Elena, could descend simultaneously from different sides of it.

And also, he made them rebuild the staircase twice that he was supposed to walk down because he was really short and very paranoid about his height.

So, as soon as they made the steps a bit too hard for him to stretch down, he was like, no, get rid of it.

It makes me feel small.

Wait, how short was he?

He wasn't a borrower.

There were a thousand steps to descend one meter.

That's amazing.

I mean, that's still there as well, isn't it?

That they'll ignore that stuff.

Yeah, God, yeah.

I've got one more fact actually about Ceausescu.

So, yeah, as we've said, not a nice guy.

Had 20,000 political prisoners.

Really, just such a bad guy.

He ruled that you had to have at least five children or face a fine.

Wow.

I know, five.

Five, that's a lot.

But so he has had a state visit to Britain.

He had a state visit to Britain in 1978, and it was a big political thing because, you know, we were trying to

pry Romania away from the Soviet Union, and they were kind of semi-independent of that.

But anyway, it was very embarrassing, and it was, you know, it was the most embarrassing state visit until last year um

and anyway so that you know it was awful but during that visit is one of my favorite and ever anecdotes happened which is that uh Queen Elizabeth hid in a bush with her dogs to avoid him

she really didn't want to have him she'd be having a terrible time and then she was walking her dogs in Buckingham Palace Gardens and she saw him coming the other way and she jumped into a bush amazing He was really paranoid that people would poison his clothes.

So he only wore clothes that had been under constant surveillance.

He also, when he met Queen Elizabeth, he washed his hands with alcohol immediately after shaking her hands because he was worried that he'd been poisoned.

Wow.

What?

You'd have to be pretty top level to recruit the queen to be an assassin.

It's always the person you least expect.

Wow.

Just on buildings in Romania.

Yeah.

The weird thing about this is this wasn't the only instance in which people in Romania were in buildings that were suddenly moved.

So

there was also a separate project in Alba Iulia, which is another city in Romania, where there was this big Soviet actually apartment block.

And he, Ceaușescu, then wanted to build this huge boulevard.

And he happened to want to build it right through the middle of this Soviet apartment block.

So the only thing to do was cut it in half and shift one half to one side of the road and one half to the other.

Apparently, it was very smooth.

It took five hours and 40 minutes, and one woman put a glass of water on her balcony throughout the whole thing, and none of of it spilled.

Wow.

Very impressive.

But sometimes, because they move buildings on rollers in other countries too.

Yeah, it's rare, but it happens.

So in Boston in 1869, that long ago, they had to widen a street.

So they had to say to the hotel on the street, Can you just move back a bit?

And it took three months, because obviously it was a 19th century.

But over that time, the first floor businesses and lots of residents stayed in place during those three months.

And the amazing thing was the plumbing and gas services stayed on because they had flexible tubes.

No,

that's so cool.

But it's so confusing if you're going to visit your friend who you haven't seen for a couple of months and you find yourself knocking on an empty space where the door used to be.

That actually happened.

There's a place called Hibbing in America where they had to move because there was a mine underneath the town.

And there were a few things that happened.

So there was a woman who went into labor in one town and then gave birth in the other town because they moved the whole town along.

and because they moved the entire town house by house to this new place

they put it back not exactly in the same way as they left it and so people who had like grown up there came back you know 30 years later and they're like i'm sure there used to be a co-op there that's so good that's amazing there was in uh in america in 2016 um they wanted to knock down rosa parks house um they wanted to demolish it and no one was really sticking up for it and there was one artist who said we can't let this happen So he bought it for $500 American.

And this is in Detroit.

And he said, we have to keep this house.

So he looked to people to sell it to to say,

can you now take on the costs and maybe we can relocate it?

But no one took it.

So he had to bring it home with him to Berlin.

And Rosa Parks' Detroit house was dismantled and rebuilt in Berlin and was sitting there for about two years.

And it went back to America.

And then I think it might have to move back to Berlin because they don't want it again.

What?

Yeah, this is absolutely true.

So the house was completely dismantled, shipped to Berlin, and sat in the backyard of this artist's house.

Wait, why is it now having to go back there?

Surely, if they don't want it a second time, you've just got to chuck it away.

She won't mind.

He wanted to get it back there, so he kept saying, Let's get it back there.

That's so annoying for a woman

whose kind of main claim to fame and publicity and her big moment was not moving from a spot.

I wonder which is frustrating.

Which is the back of the bus out of Berlin and America?

We're going to have to move on very shortly to our next fact.

I just got one little thing.

It's just that, so I was trying to find out what the biggest thing you can move a thing on is.

Okay.

So do you mean the thing on which the thing is?

Or the thing which is on top of the thing which you're moving?

The lower thing.

The thing supporting the bigger thing.

These are all great Google search terms.

So just it's just a cool thing.

So NASA, they have to move sometimes a launch tower.

And I didn't know the launch towers ever moved, but sometimes they have to drag them around.

And

they've got a thing which is called a crawler, a crawler transporter.

I've never seen those.

And it's massive.

Okay, so you have to have a degree in engineering just to drive it.

There are only four qualified drivers on the planet.

There are only two of these things in the whole world.

And you only drive it for 35 minutes, even if you are one of the drivers, and then you have to swap with someone else because it's just so mentally exhausting driving a NASA launch tower which weighs five million kilos so it's big

one gallon of petrol gets you about 15 yards

is it like a maximum speed limit of like one mile an hour or something yeah if that it's really slow

so are there there are just petrol stations literally just back to back all the way

constantly pulling in and out and in and actually just one super quick building removal in 1903 there was a mansion called the captain Samuel Brown Mansion in Pennsylvania, and it had to be demolished because they were building a railway.

And a descendant of the original owner said, Would you mind rather than demolishing it, just moving it 160 feet up that massive cliff next to it?

That would be really nice.

And so they, for some reason, the authorities agreed to this.

And so 160 feet is quite a lot, almost sheer cliff.

So they had to excavate the entire cliff and they put these giant shelves in it.

So they put four enormous shelves and then they lifted it up on winches, one shelf at a time, that were powered by horses.

They needed 20,000 beams to do it.

So pulled it up onto one shelf, plopped it down.

Horses had a rest, pulled it up onto the next one.

And it eventually cost more than the original house had cost to build.

And then extremely soon afterwards, it was completely destroyed in a fire.

Embarrassing.

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

My fact this this week is when at home, Freddie Mercury slept in a queen-size bed.

So nice to know that.

This was Freddie Mercury's final home that he lived in.

It was in London.

He bought it from a big banking family called the Whoare family, so he referred to it as the Whoare House.

His partner Jim Hutton, who was with him for about the last seven years of his life, and he gives a fantastic description in this book he wrote, memoir, about his time time with Freddy called Mercury and Me, in which he describes the top floor of Freddy's London house, which was three rooms that were the walls were smashed down and made into one big room.

There was a big dome and he said in the corner was Freddy's queen-size bed.

And yeah.

And do we know if it was deliberately chosen for the wordplay?

No, it probably wasn't.

It's just a nice little detail that is skitted over as he's describing the room.

Yeah, yeah.

I have read that book as well.

Or I got it on Kindle and then I just searched through it for references to beds.

But you've read it.

Yeah, yeah.

The only other reference I could find to how he liked to sleep was that when they went to Japan, he embraced the way of life of the Japanese and liked to sleep on the floor.

So he really liked sleeping on the floor.

But he didn't really embrace it as far as learning the language because he only learned two words in Japanese, domo and mushy-mushi, which he said at every opportunity.

Freddie Mercury was a very interesting guy.

I found that he once had a verbal spat.

This is one of the famous stories about him.

He once had a verbal spat with Sid Vicious from the Sex Pistols, and he managed to infuriate Sid Vicious by deliberately misnaming him Simon Ferocious.

Did he have four extra teeth?

He did, yes.

Did he have four extra teeth behind his first teeth?

Really?

Is that why he had such protruding

front teeth?

Yes, it is.

Because he used to be called Bucky Balsara.

That was his nickname at school, because Buck toothed.

And he was born Farrok Balsara.

He was born in Zanzibar.

His parents were originally Indian, weren't they?

And so, yeah, Faroq Balsara, Bucky Balsara.

Yeah, he never got rid of them because the worry was it would affect his vocal cords.

He had such a fantastic range.

So his problem in life was, do I go for vanity or do I go for what I love, music?

And he went for music.

So Queen was very famous for having big, extravagant parties.

And there are lots of lurid stories about, you know, dwarves with cocaine on their heads and all this stuff.

But Roger Taylor, the drummer, said said another thing they had at their parties.

I can't believe this.

They had basically a specific party consultant.

He said, we had a man whose job was to find unusual people.

And in America, he hired a guy whose thing was to lie on the ground, covered in these great big cold meat collations that Americans love.

He would be completely covered by meat, and then he would shift and make the meats move.

The idea was to freak people out.

I can imagine that freaking me out.

I had a load of Greg sausage rolls on a table and suddenly one of them wiggled around.

Wow, so just draped in salami.

He was just lying on the ground covering meat and this huge pile of meat would start sort of writhing around.

I think that's a great party trick.

But surely people can tell.

If I went to get meat off something, I think I could tell if I was getting it off a plate or a person.

But was it so

hard?

He was so covered in meat.

So covered.

He was completely covered in meat.

I can't say.

That was his thing.

How did he breathe?

Did he have like a straw coming out through the meat?

He must have done, right?

I imagine you would have to have a straw.

Yeah.

Always look out for the straw.

If you see a big pile of meat.

Yeah.

Or he could have had a scuba gear on.

With a full.

Yeah, with a full tank.

But then you'd need even more meat to cover the oxygen tank.

And the flippers, of course.

You'd roll up bits of salami.

And use them as the strawberry.

And then breathe through them.

Brilliant.

Yeah.

So do you know that the Bohemian Rhapsody, the movie that's now one all these Oscars...

Why do you want to stop talking about Meat Man?

He's

the single greatest party band we've ever heard of.

What was I thinking?

Sorry.

Apparently there was also a woman who offered for $100,000 to decapitate herself with a chainsaw.

What?

I'm not sure they had that at the party.

I don't think so.

That's quite a low price for doing that.

It's kind of a relevant price, isn't it?

What's she gonna spend it on?

Maybe some blue tack.

Sorry.

Sorry, Danny, you were saying.

Sorry, if I could just mention a fact.

So Bohemian Rhapsody,

Rami Malik was the actor playing Freddie Mercury, but it was originally

in production for many, many years, in pre-production rather, and Sasha Baron Cohen, Ali G, was meant to play Freddie Mercury, and he got fired because he wanted it to be the more the meatman party kind of stuff going on and the decapitation.

And they said, no, we need to do it differently.

But he said this interesting thing, which was he was talking to one of the members of the band, didn't name who, but he said, the person, the band member, said, you know, this is such a great movie because it's got such an amazing thing that happens in the middle.

And Sasha said, well, what happens in the middle of the movie?

And he said, well, you know, Freddy dies.

And so Sasha went, but what happens in the second half of the movie then?

Like, that's why people are there to see it.

They're there to see Freddy.

And they said, well, you know,

they then see a band that goes from strength to strength.

So the original idea was that we were going to watch how Queen sort of became who they really were post-Freddy.

Really?

Yeah, and I'm not sure that, I mean, they've done some good things, but the only real fun thing I could find

musically from Brian May, who was the guitarist, was that in 2003, he set up a band with Brian Blessed.

I mean, that's good.

Here we go.

Yeah, they were part of an animal rights group to protect the badger.

Is it a good

song?

Yeah, yeah.

They were called Team Badger.

And

they released a song which was called Save the Badger, Badger, Badger.

And then they formed another band with David Attenborough and Slash, the guitarist from Guns N' Roses, and this to create a supergroup.

This is Brian May, and they were called The Artful Badger.

And

they released a song song dedicated to Badgers called Badger Swagger.

I'll be honest, I want to watch this film.

I would have had it where in the second half, Freddie Mercury, Vampire Freddie Mercury comes back, but he's got extra teeth, so he's more of a risk.

But we should probably say, since Brian May's on topic, that he is a really cool guy in his own right.

So he finished his thesis, his doctoral thesis.

Maybe you guys know that he's a physicist.

And he wanted to do physics, and then he got involved in this whole queen shenanigan.

But he went back to doing his thesis and in 2007, then he submitted it.

It's a survey of radial velocities in the zodiacal dust cloud.

And he submitted it 37 years after starting the research, which is actually harder than most theses because you have to catch up on the intervening 33 years of research, which would have been quite a lot.

But he was studying a super interesting thing.

So, zodiacal light is this, it's a misty cone of light that appears a few hours before sunrise in the east or a few hours after sunset in the west.

And it's what we call false dawn.

So, we've all kind of seen it, and you often think it's sort of a town on the horizon or something.

It's actually the reflected sunlight sort of shining off scattered bits of dust in the solar system.

And they only worked out really what it was a few years ago.

But yeah, that's what his whole thesis is on.

And he just did it.

Very cool.

I prefer this team badger stuff.

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Okay,

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

Okay, my fact this week is that according to people who make their livings walking on fire and walking on broken glass, neither is as painful as walking on Lego.

Amazing.

This is true.

So

this was an article from the Smithsonian.

They were talking to a guy called Scott Bell who is a former fire walking world record holder and he now runs a company where they do walking on fire, walking on glass and walking on Lego.

And he still does the glass and the fire, but he refuses to do the Lego stuff.

No way.

And basically, the reason is that walking on fire, as long as you do it quite quickly, is not that bad at all because the conductivity of the coals is not so great.

The glass, if you walk on it, they really make it very, very small.

And so when you step on it, it kind of moves around underneath your feet.

But Lego do not move at all.

And so, and they're really hard and they're really pointy.

And I don't need to tell you guys that it's fucking painful when you stand on them.

And so when you're walking walking across them, there's nowhere for them to go.

They just stay there and they just dig into your feet.

And they're really, really painful.

And so he refuses to do it.

It's a really good article, the Smithsonian.

Because they talk about how much mass Lego can withstand before it crumples or goes.

And every single brick can withstand a mass of 400 kilos before it even starts moving.

What it means is that, you know, that scene in Die Hard where Bruce Willis is crawling over broken glass?

If he'd been crawling over Lego, that would have been a really exciting scene.

Just the glass bit in that article, they got that confirmation that it hurt more to go on Lego from a cabaret performer called Bazoo the Clown, spelt K-L-O-U-N.

So this is a guy who juggles balls of barbed wire and he lets people staple dollar bills to his chest.

He also walks on glass, and he confirmed Lego is just way worse.

There is a thing called the Lego.

Well, I think there are some crazy YouTube people who did a thing where they did a Lego treadmill challenge.

So you're running on a treadmill, but people in front of the treadmill are pouring Lego from a bucket onto it.

And it just looks like the worst thing in the world.

That's a really good prank to play at the gym, isn't it?

If you want to do it.

So you can't walk on Lego, but you can swallow it, can't you?

So swallowing, you're basically fine.

That's why if I need to walk into a room where a child's been, I always walk in on my mouth.

This is that they put holes in the legs of Lego pieces.

Sorry, they put holes in the heads of Lego pieces so that if kids swallow them, they can still breathe.

And in fact, to really check this is okay, there were six scientists a short while ago in the UK and Australia who swallowed Lego pieces themselves to allay parents' fears that it would be a bad thing.

So they all swallowed these heads and they said that they all had different techniques.

So they had to swallow the heads and then work out how long they took to come out the other end.

I mean, they didn't work it out, they just waited for it to come out, and that was the amount of time.

Well, no, but the working out comes from the search because searching through your own feces can be quite difficult.

And they said they all used different techniques, so they used chopsticks or forks.

Some of them squashed their poo into a Ziploc bag so that they could find the Lego piece in it if it was there.

And it's sorry, does everyone else not put their poo in a Ziploc bag?

Andy always hangs it on a tree as he walks around the town.

Must be so confusing if you had corn for dinner the night before.

They actually literally said this.

They said they didn't eat corn because that would be too confusing because there's little yellow bits.

Dan, you're a born scientist.

And anyway, there were six scientists, and for five of them, the Lego head came out within three days.

What happened?

What about the other one about the six?

Dead.

Yeah.

Yeah, but you've got a five and six chance.

No, it just never came out.

But we think he came out.

We think he didn't, he or she didn't.

He didn't look in the bag properly.

He didn't look in the bag properly.

Yeah.

But they all survived the experience.

Because you were just thinking for the rest of your life.

I wonder if it's still in there.

The face would gradually get sadder and sadder as it stayed in you.

Everything is not awesome.

There is one awesome Lego thing.

There is a crab who lives in a shell made of Lego.

Is there?

Only one known to science.

How did he get the shell?

He wouldn't have built it himself.

So where did he get it from?

He lives at Legoland.

Really?

He's called Harry the Crab, and he's a hermit crab.

And they're the ones who move into empty seashells.

So

the staff there, they made him a shell out of Lego, and they gave him the choice of lots of shells and the Lego one, and he chose the Lego one.

Really?

Yeah, and there are videos of him online just scuttling around with his Lego house.

Very good.

That's so sweet.

If you work at Legoland, you're known as a model citizen.

Nice.

So they call themselves?

That's great.

That's good, though, isn't it?

What if you employ a criminal?

Can we still call them that?

I didn't know where the name Lego actually came from, like the origin of it.

So it means play well in Danish, which I think we maybe have mentioned before, but I didn't know that it was the result of a competition in 1934 by Ollie Kurt Christensen, who's the person who basically invented Lego.

And he came up with a competition to name the new company that he was setting up, the toy company.

And he opened it up to lots of friends and family and people in his business and employees.

He offered up a bottle of his own homemade wine as a prize.

Oh, wow.

So, at the end of it, the winning entry was the name Lego, and it was his own entry.

Cheers.

I have this weird echo in my head of you saying he offered a bottle of his own urine.

I think because we've been talking about Frank Buckland and about the same thing.

Did I say his own urine?

No, you didn't say it.

You said his own homemade wine.

No.

But homemade wine is another way of putting it, isn't it?

Well.

Very true.

Gio, this is just, I found this quite fascinating because I don't understand maths.

But

if if you have you know what a qualifier

how are your Royal Institution Christmas lecture series coming on?

So if you have a

piece of Lego that has eight studs in it, and then you had six of those, the combination of connecting those six different pieces to an eight studded Lego brick is over 915 million possibilities of how you can make those combinations.

Yeah.

All the Lego in the world could build you 10 towers to the moon if you want to go with nine friends.

That's

hang on.

Each of you climbing up one piece of Lego.

One Lego tower.

Sorry, one Lego tower, but it's one piece wide.

I believe so, yes.

I'm not doing that.

I don't think the integrity would hold.

I would rather have one tower ten pieces wide.

Yeah, and then just have people follow you up behind you.

That makes a lot.

I'm going to redo my architectural plans for this.

You do not understand math.

So they did a study quite recently, another one, where they put a bucket of old Lego bricks inside a washing machine and just let it run.

They let it run for 70 minutes of 40 degrees Celsius and they then took it out to see what had happened.

And they found that some of the bricks had just automatically stuck together.

Cool.

This is really cool, right?

So they found that

quite a lot of two bricks had stuck together, but then there were some, as many as six or eight of them had stuck together.

And what people who did this study said, now it's a bit of a stretch, but they said that it was a bit like the primordial soup that happened at the start of life.

Whoa!

And the building blocks of life are like the building blocks of Lego, and maybe all of the RNA and DNA and proteins all came together in the same way as Lego.

It is bullshit, isn't it?

Oh, wow.

In a way, we are all washing machine Legos.

Yes.

Imagine Imagine if you put a bunch of Lego in the washing machine, opened it up an hour later, and there was a massive pirate ship or something.

If you did it enough times, that must happen.

That's the new infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters, isn't it?

Infinite washing machines with infinite amounts of Lego inside will eventually form a pirate ship.

We're going to have to wrap up and talk about it.

I've just got one more fact about treading on things you don't want to tread on.

Okay, yes, please.

It's a fact from the news this week, and weirdly, it involves Ziploc bags.

So in Cheshire, this week, a resident in Middlewich, he was really annoyed about the amount of dog poo around.

And he's 47, he walks his dog, and he decided there was too much dog poo about.

So he said, I'm going to turn it into a competition.

And he told the local newspaper, I had a spare £20 note that I did not need, so I put it in a Ziploc bag and hid it under some dog poo,

and then notified his local neighbours and community.

Oh my God.

He said, I posted it on Facebook, and a lot of people got back to me.

The woman who found it said she had been looking for quite a long time.

I did not shake her hand.

Shall we wrap up?

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 account.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter.

M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Shaczinski.

You can email podcast atqi.com.

Yep.

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

We have everything up there from upcoming tour dates through to all of our previous episodes.

Thank you so much.

Good night.

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