269: No Such Thing As Singing The Sport

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the Lowry in Salford.

My name is Dan Shriver.

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 fact number one.

And that's my fact this week.

My fact is that in 17th century Europe, people used to sing each other the news.

That's how they got the news.

It would be sung at their face.

There's been a theft!

Like that.

That kind of thing.

No, this is the thing.

In the 17th century, illiteracy rates were so high that if they did publish newspapers, no one was really buying them because they couldn't read them.

So what they ended up doing was they were taking classic classic ballads of the time, but then applying just the news of the day to them.

And so people would go on the streets and they would start singing the news and people would memorize the songs that they were singing and they would pass it on and pass it on.

and that's how the news got around and so it was for everything from political news to um you know sentimental stories religious news royal rumors medical advice did they do like an unfinally at the end with a dog on a surfboard or something

um they did have a uh a paywall so people people plugged uh the ballads so there were guys going around selling the ballads and they would uh they would sing them to the audience on the street corner to drum up interest but they would not sing the last verse so you didn't know how it ended so there was that thing where it goes grey on the website.

But it took this execution ballad.

How often was it?

He pulled his head out just in time.

Well, it is a bit like the internet today, isn't it?

Because so they had these sheets that you could buy the sheet music if you wanted to, and then you could share it on the streets by singing it.

And then it gave you ideas of morality and stuff like that.

So it is a little bit like reading the news on the internet and then sharing it and then commenting on it.

Yeah.

Except it was just a lot more gruesome.

I mean, they were kind of disgusting in their taste.

I don't know if you've heard any of the news over the last few years.

The fact that I'm not on social media makes that an unreliable comment.

But there was one.

So there was a French song, in fact, which was set to a really fun tune, apparently.

So they were like quite upbeat.

And it was about a Huguenot whose execution got interrupted because the people thought that they weren't being harsh enough by just chopping his head off.

Or hanging him, sorry, they were hanging him.

And so the people dragged him to a dung heap and mutilated him.

And this ballad went, the little children all got together yelling and singing joyously, having a great time, pulling out his innards to throw them in the fire, removing his guts and organs, and then a dog swallowed his heart.

There you go, there you go.

Doesn't even rhyme.

I think it rhymed in French, to be fair.

But they used to as well, not just report the news, but in the execution ballads, this moral thing that James is talking about, they used to then do verses from the perspective of the person who was killed, guillotined, or hanged.

And that's where the moral would come in.

They would suddenly, it was as if the news was reading a quote from someone, but that quote never existed.

So they would be saying, Oh, I lament what I did, and I wish I had not done it.

And oh, what a silly sausage I was.

And

that was the way of saying that everyone was upset about the crime they committed.

Mortal life, I will depart, and then a dog will swallow my heart.

And then you end.

Yes.

It was really good.

It was really good.

Born in the wrong century, mate.

But they so and the nice thing was it was tunes that everyone knew so they used green sleeves for a load of ballads because you know you couldn't say you couldn't get people to sing a news if they didn't know the tune.

That's so appropriate because didn't Henry VIII write that song?

No.

No, that is a myth.

So it's completely

just a...

No, no, no, there is a there is a rumor that he did.

Yeah.

It was written around the same time as him.

So he wrote it.

I don't know what

the thing is, if we think we have fake fake news now, I mean, this was out of control.

So it was mostly kind of overheard gossip and rumors because so people having to sort of eavesdrop on diplomats and things like that and talk to people who talk to people who've been at court.

And so there was even a proclamation in 1672.

Charles II, in fact, issued a proclamation to restrain the spreading of false news, which is just very prescient.

But there was even ballads about how they shouldn't write ballads that were so full of fake news.

There was a whole ballad that was taking the piss saying, All the ballads we hear these days are full of stories, stories, lies, and stories, a pox on your newsletters, they lie both and flatters.

They are but a trap to weedle men in.

Wow, there are some there are some Manchester ones, so I've read quite a few of them, and they include things like these are all ballads that were real: The Spinner's Lamentation,

Victoria Bridge on a Saturday Night,

and Johnny Green's trip from Oldham to see the Manchester Railway.

Sounds fun?

I found a 17th century song, not telling the news, but just a ballad that survived the times.

And the title of it is Kentish Dick

or The Lusty Coachman of Westminster.

And it was a story about a guy who moved to London and he would go around wooing women and he would trick them into believing that he was going to be there for all of their life.

And he would sleep with them and they might get pregnant and they thought they had a whole life with him and then he would just disappear and that the the whole song was teaching a moral and they has a line in it where the town seeks to sever from him that unruly limb.

And then he was just called Kentish after that, wasn't he?

Do you know that under the Town Police Clauses Act of 1847, it's still an offence to publicly sing any profane or obscene song or ballad in the street?

Is it?

Yeah, so you're not allowed to do it.

Oh.

So, Andy, sorry.

Oh, no.

We could have performed citizens' arrests on all the people of Newcastle last night.

And when I was looking that up, I found this, this isn't on topic at all, but I found out that there is a pub in Whitehall in London called the Silver Cross Pub, which is technically the nation's only legal brothel.

Really?

Because it was given a license by Charles I, which has never been revoked.

What?

And they have an upstairs room that you can hire.

Yeah.

Just another fact.

That's actually the sponsor for this week's podcast.

I was looking at some other ballads and what they were written for.

So a lot of them, maybe

the most popular type were drinking songs.

And they used to be plastered up in pubs.

And this is particularly in Britain, in England, especially.

So in England, ballads were written on single sides because they had to be used as wallpaper in various pubs.

Whereas on the continent, they were double-sided because they were pamphlets.

But they had these drinking ballads, and I read one of them which was at the end of every verse, it would say, Oh, we've had this one drink, now bring us another.

So every verse was, you had to down your drink and get another one.

And it had 13 verses.

So

one song, you had to drink 13 pints.

Whoa.

Yeah.

There were quite a lot of sort of heartbreak ballads as well.

That was another big genre.

So

I Am a Bachelor, Isn't It Sad?

was the title of one of them.

Or Or Each Has a Lover But Me.

Daddy Come Home.

I don't think that is actually a single one.

Jack and His Nuts, possibly a relation of Kentish Dick.

And my favourite is Nancy, I have lost my wig.

What a great song.

That's awesome.

You were saying, Anna, about how they got these ballads and they put them on the wall in the pub.

They'd often put it on the doorpost of the inn, and they used to call that posting.

And that's how we eventually get the phrase posting a message on the internet.

It's from the same story.

Wow, so you basically had posting things on the posts outside the pub, and then you went to like newspapers were called the post, and then you would have postal services, and then you had posting internet things.

Wow, it's awesome!

The phrase dick pic comes from Kentish dick.

It used to be he would do a wood cut of his penis.

Don't say cut,

don't say wood.

I mean,

It's all very wrong.

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

My fact is that pound for pound, a 33 gram finch can bite you 320 times harder than a T-Rex could.

Yeah, but pound for pound, actually.

So there's not many pounds in a finch, is there?

No.

There's a lot in a T-Rex.

That's true.

So this is like

there's

good news in various ways because it turns out the finches are small and T-Rexes are all dead.

So it's, in a way, we're fine.

It's win-win.

Yeah, win-win.

But this is a study that has just been done into bite force.

And it's that is, you know, we know roughly what the T-Rex could chomp.

So if it bit you, it was the equivalent of 13 grand pianos landing on you.

Whoa.

Yeah.

That's a brilliant cartoon, isn't it?

Yeah.

And an

I'm not sure.

So they could bite really, really hard.

There's no no one's disputing that.

But there's they've there's this study has measured hundreds of different animals' bite strength and

this tiny finch, the Galapagos finch, has a very powerful bite relative to its body size.

So it yeah.

Yeah, I read that it's um the if a finch were scaled up to a T-Rex's size, its bite would be 320 times stronger than that of a T-Rex.

Um and a T-Rex had a bite force of twelve thousand eight pounds.

So the finch would have a bite force of 4 million pounds.

Whoa!

And a rocket has 5 million pounds of thrust.

Wow.

I don't think this is realistic, Andy.

Yeah.

I'm just so concerned now that someone involved with Jurassic Park 29 or wherever we are is listening and is like, I've got the climactic moment to the next film.

A giant finch thunders on,

swallows the T-Rex.

That's what the author said.

This is Reading University, and they they said the king of the dinosaurs would be no match for a finch in a fight if they were the same size.

Oh my god, the idea of finch-sized T-Rex is very cute, isn't it?

Well, they do know what baby T-Rexes look like now.

So they just look like small T-Rexes.

Yeah, pretty much.

Right.

No, they've done a picture of what they might look like, and they're really cute and fluffy, and they have normal-length arms compared to the T-Rexes have small arms, but they have normal ones.

So at some stage in their puberty, their arms just became small.

wow or they keep growing but their arms have stopped yeah

yeah yeah or that their arms become small it's like it's it's all relative it's one of them it's all relative

so if a finch bought if it bit me on my finger yeah what would that feel like your hand would explode

It would hardly hurt at all.

Not at all, really.

It's basically, it's the thing with ants being able to carry massive things, isn't it?

If things are small, it's much easier for them to do things in impressive ways.

That's true.

Sorry.

That's my Tinder profile.

You don't understand.

Pound for pound, this is like having sex with a T-Rex.

Yeah.

Good.

File that under things that aren't going to work.

But they have just looked into T-Rex adolescence and discovered some quite interesting stuff about it.

So they have adolescence, kind of like humans.

They have found out how old T-Rexes would grow to.

It was about 28, and their adolescence happened between 14 and 18.

And that's where they just had their massive growth spurt.

And the way they can tell this is because they look at the growth rings on them.

So they study growth rings on ribs and they have mineral deposits that are laid down every year as they grow.

And so then you can count, you know, at what point they grew a lot suddenly.

So like they're like like trees

that's the analogy i was going for yeah

i i was um looking and there's a um there's a museum um which is uh the museum of astrias and it's in uh spain and they have a um a model of a t-rex and it's the weirdest thing and this is a museum that they invite children to and adults and it's a family day out and the

The structure of it is they're showing two T-Rexes mid-copulation.

They're having sex.

So the female T-Rex is it's a doggy style basically position of these two giant skeletons.

And the weird thing is there's no reason for it because we don't even know how they have sex.

There's just no point.

They're just speculating that that's what it is.

But when you go in there, there's a T-Rex taking another T-Rex from behind.

It's crazy.

They have started putting feathers on them in museums, which I appreciate.

I went to a natural history museum in Tasmania recently because, you know, they discovered that most dinosaurs had feathers.

And so they've had to go back through all the old bloody museums and pin feathers to all their exhibits and they're doing it.

Do you know that T-Rexes got mouth ulcers?

No, really?

Yeah they did.

So they looked at microbes in coprolites in T-Rex poo and they found that they have the same kind of microbes as birds get and it gives them mouth ulcers.

So we think that probably T-Rexes have mouth ulcers.

That's amazing.

So finches,

so this is the thing also about adolescents, actually, adolescent finches.

So teenage finches, they learn how to sing, zebra finches, they learn how to sing from their fathers and they get taught this incredibly complicated set of tunes.

But we have recently discovered, so most animals learn kind of by rote, they just listen to repeat, listen to repeat.

What's really rare in the animal kingdom is learning via social cues.

So if I was singing my song and my father sort of gave a sign of approval or disapproval, and, you know, that's how they do it.

But they don't learn from their fathers.

They learn from their mothers.

And the way they learn is their mothers kind of give the signs of finding them attractive

so they they do what's called fluffing up which is a signal that a female likes a male song and basically the the young finches sing and if they get the song close to their father's song the mum fluff is up fluffs up and basically she's saying that's just how your father wooed me That's kind of nice.

That's like a mum sending their son off to the proms, sorting out his hair before he leaves or something.

But making it look exactly like his father's hair and saying, I find this attractive and I want you to look like it.

It's a combination of sweet and creepy.

It's back to the future, isn't it?

It's back to the future.

They also, when they're tiny, the finches, they have a very amazing ability for feeding at night.

These are the baby finches, and they lose this as they get older.

They have these little nodules that glow in the dark.

They're these blue nodules that suddenly glow so that when the mother is looking to feed them, she can specify which ones are where where and not lose any food in the process.

How cool is that?

Very smart.

That's amazing.

They glow in the dark.

And on their singing, they have another very clever thing they do when they sing, which is started to happen since global warming became a thing.

And this is that zebra finches sing to the embryos in their eggs.

So the mothers will sing into their eggs and their singing will be a warning about the temperature outside.

And this tells the embryo inside the egg how much or how little to grow.

So, if it's getting hot outside, which it often is now, then the zebra finch sings a song to its embryos going, It's pretty warm out here.

That's

don't grow too big.

There's been an armed robbery in Trevstone.

I was just gonna say, we've had them sing in the news, and now we're having them sing in the weather.

We just need someone singing the spot, and we're there.

The vampire finch, do you know

these days?

They have very sharp beaks and they peck at the skin of boobies and they drink

and they drink the blood out of these booby birds and it even breaks into the booby eggs and drinks the contents.

And sometimes it does it with humans, sometimes it will try and peck on a human and try and get at the blood as well.

But not the human eggs.

No,

that's a very difficult thing to do, isn't it?

Don't know how it's got there.

You've got bigger things to worry about.

It's a slow process of trust gaining over many months.

You start with the boobies.

This fact is also about biting.

I found a couple of things about biting.

This is just a bit of a useful thing to know.

And it's something that science are looking into at the moment because I think it can be applied in the long term to mosquito sprays.

But mosquitoes,

if a mosquito is biting you, If you slap your arm or wherever it's biting, if you slap there, it sends vibrations up through to the mosquito.

And when they leap off, they associate the smell that you have with what just happened there, the fear that they might be killed.

And the reason that mosquitoes land on us is they're attracted to a smell and they remember this smell.

So it turns out that if you do that, you're going to put the mosquito off for 24 hours.

That same mosquito won't come back and land on you.

It might be a different one, but it will think, I might get killed if I go back to that smell.

Because it remembers the smell of your body.

Exactly.

So they think that's a threat.

I can't go back there.

That might kill me.

So all mosquito products at the moment are trying to work out how they can get what we manage to do with our pheromones and our body smell into that in order to stop.

But next time you've got mosquitoes around, just slap yourself a lot and you'll be all over your body.

Just slap yourself silly.

And yeah.

That kind of implies that the next mosquito repellents are just going to be lots of little slappers that we have to pin to our bodies,

like little mousetraps all over us, constantly smacking us.

I'd rather be bitten.

Oh, okay.

Just personally.

For everyone else, it lasts for 24 hours.

That's really good.

Yeah.

Do you know what makes our...

So humans, we have a certain bite quotient.

We have quite a strong bite.

But do you know we probably could bite much harder than we do?

But what would you think holds us back?

What do you think determines how hard we bite?

How good our muscles are in our jaws.

So.

I say willpower.

Yes,

I think.

James is wrong, Andy's more wrong.

This is...

I just think socially it looks awkward if you're biting harder than

we have a winner.

There we go.

No, this is an experiment that was done by a guy called Dr.

G.E.

Black.

This was actually in 1933, so it was a long time ago.

But he invented what he called a nathodynamometer.

And this was basically, he put some rubber pads on this steel instrument he designed and he got a thousand people to bite down on it.

And he worked out that the restrictive factor on how hard you can bite is not your jaw strength, it's your teeth.

So the people stopped biting when they said, my teeth really hurt.

And actually, if you think about it, when like your jaw more power than your teeth are able to withstand, so if you just man up and deal with the tooth pain, willpower, that's what it says.

Yep, you're right.

I amend my response.

You're correct.

Thank you.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the most polluted city in the world is Kanpur.

It is nicknamed the Manchester of the East.

I've lost them, guys.

Unbelievably risky.

What were you thinking?

So, I mean, this is true.

It's the particles in the air.

It's especially particles with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers, which basically means soot.

And it's because of the tanning industry.

And there's a local wind called the Loo of Kampur, which gives them really bad dust storms.

And it's, yeah, it's really, really bad.

But the reason that they call it the Manchester of the East is because obviously Manchester used to have extremely bad pollution.

And also, it's kind of an industrial town and Manchester is one of the most famous industrial towns because it's such a great city.

Nice.

Good score.

Great backtracking.

You say Manchester used to have quite bad pollution.

Let's face it, it still does.

So I actually thought this would be a thing where we went, oh, and it's such a misnomer because Manchester's fine now.

And I was on, if you look at air pollution rates, I always thought London was the worst, but actually, topping the list from last year is Port Talbot in Wales because they've got big steelworks.

And then second is not, in fact, Manchester.

It is where we are right now, which is Salford.

Scunthorpe and Salford joint second.

And you know what's third?

This is really weird.

The third most polluted place in Britain.

Nope.

Gibraltar.

What?

Well, I'm sure it won't be for long.

That is because half of the world's sea trade goes through the Gibraltar Strait.

And so all of those polluting particles are coming from the sea.

And they have no countryside around there.

It's just that literally that little rock, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly.

Just pools in there.

Those poor monkeys.

So the term acid rain was coined in Manchester in 1872.

Friedrich Engels, who lived here for a little while,

described it as a place of filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness.

And he described it as hell on earth.

But in fairness, at the time, it was when Manchester was really growing, and people had come over from Ireland, and the cotton mills had just started, and it was not a great place to live, unlike now.

Although, having said that, there was a pub for every 139 residents of Manchester.

Nice.

Wow.

And one in 40 of the city's population was arrested for drunkenness within a single year.

Wow!

Whoa!

That's very good.

I found a different thing that Engels observed when he was in town.

1845, he was around.

He was amazed to discover that there were flourishing piggeries in every back street in the city.

Yeah, still, you haven't been around today, have you?

Yeah, but it was very useful.

And in fact, that was the case all over the country.

It wasn't just Manchester.

Is a piggery just where you're farming pigs?

It's a pig.

It's a pig.

It's whatever tiny space you keep a pig in, it's a piggery.

It's dependent on the presence or absence of a pig.

If it hasn't got a pig in it, it's just a small yard.

Are you claiming that if you've got one pig, you've got a piggery?

Yes.

Really?

It's not a thriving piggery, is it?

I would say it's on its last legs, that's a piggery.

Yeah, but it's a very good waste disposal unit.

All rubbish goes into the pig, and the pig eats everything, and then you eat the pig.

Yeah, perfect.

It's a slightly slower way of eating lots of rubbish, basically.

Just on

city nicknames, this

so this is about a city nickname, and Manchester used to be called Cottonopolis.

And you say it wasn't a good place to be, but it's always very much swings and roundabouts in the 19th century.

It was also extremely wealthy and kind of an awesome place to be because you could make money.

But I was reading an account of someone who was traveling around Manchester for the first time in the mid-19th century and loving it and you know saying you know it's so brilliant and people are all about the cotton mills and he kept on asking to be seen to be shown around a cotton mill like given a tourist visitor tour and they would never let him because they were so paranoid about everyone else stealing their technology because they had the best cotton technology so they weren't allowed in in 1871 32% of all the cotton in the world was made in Manchester Wow

on the planet a whole planet I just think that's incredible yeah so there were there were gangs as well because obviously obviously lots of people moving from the country to the city, lots of people in a cramped space, you get gangs.

And

are people familiar with the scuttlers?

Is that a thing still?

Not still.

Okay.

They are not thriving.

Just like the piggery.

But they were a gang who really plagued the city in the late 19th century.

And they had a very distinctive look.

They had a fringe which was called a donkey fringe.

And they had neckerchiefs which told you which gang they were in, which was quite smart.

So you could see the stripes or the spots and say, oh, you're with that gang.

But the way they started, the scuttlers, it started with a historical reenactment society that got out of hand.

No.

This is...

A historian called Andrew Davis has written a book about this.

This is what it says about the book.

Davis has identified the trigger point for scuttling as arising from the reception of the Franco-Prussian War by the schoolboys of Ancotes.

Young boys recreated the battles on the streets of Ankotes using the categories of Catholic, French, and Protestant Russian to reflect their own allegiances.

The game very quickly evolved

into a widespread vogue for street battles.

And it just turned into gang warfare.

Wow.

The worst place to go was on Deansgate, wasn't it?

That was where they all hung out.

And the absolute worst place was a hovel on the corner of Hardman Street and Deansgate, which today is a Waggamamba's.

Ah, wow.

Turning on downhill.

I have a

sort of modern Manchester fact.

I imagine everyone here will know this, so apologies to the crowd here, but people at home and overseas won't know this.

But we all know Manchester United and Man City as the football teams.

And in 2011, they were awarded the third ever annual Jelly Donut Award.

It's done by the Accredited Language Services.

They award the best translation errors each year.

And when the Man City stadium was the Etihad Stadium, Etihad in Arabic means united.

And no!

Yeah.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah, so Man City suddenly we're playing in the Etihad.

That's such a good fact.

I love it.

You know, Xi Jinping came to Manchester in 2015 and visited Man City.

And he visited the stadium and he was given a copy of the rules of football as a gift because football being something that was invented in England.

And so he was given a copy of the rules that were drawn up in 1863.

and in exchange Xi Jinping gave us a copper representation of a figure playing kuzhu the football-esque sport invented in China 2,000 years ago.

Wow.

Feels like a bit of a slam.

Just on world leaders, do you know that Manchester United was literally hours away from being owned by Colonel Gaddafi?

Really?

Yeah, so not the whole thing, but a huge percentage, 29.9%.

It was the guy who brokered the deal to the Glazer family who did take over.

He said it was hours away from not going to them and going to Gaddafi instead.

Bad luck, guys.

What might have been?

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

My fact is that dogs over 35 centimeters tall are banned from Beijing.

There's a height restriction.

They all get measured.

If they're too tall, they've got to go.

So China has this bizarre history with dog laws, and this one was passed in 2003 and it was about what breeds of dogs and what kind of dogs are allowed in Beijing, in the center of Beijing, really, and then in bits of the rural districts.

If you're taller than 35 centimeters and a dog, not allowed.

If you are on a list of 41 breeds that they listed, you're not allowed.

So like setters, greyhounds, mastiffs, holding the sheep dogs, those really cute, shaggy things, band, collies, also

dalmatian, all the classics.

all the classics

chow chows which i had a chow chow and a chow chow is a chinese dog so that's weird i thought chow chows were quite small no chow chows they're like the chew bucka looking guys on the other side

and they're um they used to be warrior dogs um for the chinese armies and so they're very revered there so that's bizarre that they're on that list but could you get your dog to for example sit so it's shorter than 35 centimeters tall oh yeah you don't change your height when you sit down like

but they could do that wiping bum shuffle that they do and just walk like that.

What about you could give it a haircut?

So you could...

I bet if you shaved a sheepdog, there's tiny under all that.

The whole point is that these breeds are banned no matter how tall they are.

I reckon you wouldn't recognize a sheepdog if it was completely shaved of all as well.

There are some breeds that would be allowed if they're under 35, but not if they're over 35.

So you could shave them.

But if you're right on that cusp, I don't know if they'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

There was a crackdown.

They cracked down properly on this in 2014, and there were all these owners of pets that were suddenly told they were outlawed who were having a bit of a disaster.

The government said, Why don't you just give your pets away to shelters?

And obviously, people didn't do that because that's a weird thing to do to your dog of 10 years.

But there is a lot of luxury stuff for pets.

So there's this weird division between the Chinese government, which is cracking down on animals, and then

there are lots of tiny dogs, and those are treated very luxuriously.

It's a really popular thing in China.

So there are play centers just for dogs, which have got indoor swimming pools, and ball pits, and obstacle courses.

There's pet acupuncture.

That's quite a big thing.

And there are dog hotels which have dog cinemas in.

Yeah, and the films are specially designed for dogs' eyesight.

I don't know what that means.

So I think they see stuff more frames per second than us, about twice as many.

So maybe they have many more frames per second in the film.

So this is why dogs don't get very captivated by television when you put it on.

Another reason is that they're very, very stupid animals.

But it looks to them like a series of photographs one after the other, so I guess this is, yeah.

So if you suddenly fast-forward a movie on your TV, are they like, whoa, what is this?

In Dorset, there is a spa hotel for guinea pigs.

What does that entail?

Well, for £16, you can get a pedicure.

£16?

£16.

That's pretty good.

Well, you need to pay for the hotel, but this is just an extra on-the-side thing.

Oh, sorry, I thought this was a nice B ⁇ B for a guinea pig.

Well, they don't eat much B.

And they don't need a very big B.

So for your £16 anyway, you get a pedicure, you get two washes with lice shampoo, anti-lice shampoo, you get a haircut, a towel dry, a massage while watching a movie, and a snooze.

Wow.

You have to pay for a snooze.

That is a rip-off.

In China, people are very into their dogs.

But they've worked out recently that the city-dwelling millennials are responsible for 70% of pet spending in China, which is actually quite weird because millennials is basically people born in the 80s and 90s, which is pretty young to be spending a lot on pets.

But they think it's because they've been, this is what the economist said, they've been lured away from their families and friends by jobs in the big cities, meaning they're incredibly lonely at this point.

A lot of people single.

The air is very bad outside, as previously discussed.

And it's extremely easy to stay inside and just watch stuff on the the internet.

It's nice to have someone with you when you do that.

And by the way, there are 200 million unmarried people in their 20s and 30s in China, which is, if you think about that as a proportion of the world population, it's a lot of single people.

200 million in 20s and 30s.

Yeah.

Wow.

Single.

Yeah.

It's a lot.

They're all sitting there with their dogs inside.

This woman said, I live alone, and it's nice to have little Yui waiting, all happy to see me when I get home.

And she said this as she flicked through photos of cats on her iPhone.

I just feel like there's a social problem that we need to address.

Yeah.

Wow.

Just on dog sizes in Japan.

I was being told earlier by Ash Gardner, who wrote our theme tune,

when he was in Japan, there were parks there, and I started Googling this after he said it.

Yoyogi Park.

It's in Japan.

And what they have is they want to make sure that dogs that go to the park have a great experience.

So there is a weight and size category for dogs.

of which bit of the park they go to.

So they separate the big dogs from the little dogs, and the little dogs and the medium dogs hang out together and they all play.

The big dogs have to go to another section, so yeah, they're separated, so no fights break out amongst the dogs.

I think that sounds a bit sort of like sizist.

I think that sounds good.

I think it's segregation.

You pro-segregation?

No.

I just don't like very big dogs or small ones.

Look, never mind.

Never has anyone backed out from an action so quickly.

Dogs are much less clever than humans like to think.

So there are lots of people who think that dogs are very, very clever.

And the science doesn't really bear it out, unfortunately.

And I can feel the room slipping away as I say this.

But so dogs, for example, can't recognize themselves in mirrors, which some animals can do.

And on lots of measures, they're about the same as pigeons.

Well, they can't fly either.

And they can't even fly.

Useless.

But the doctor who carried out this work, Britta Ostaus, she did work about 10 years ago, which showed that dogs were cleverer than cats.

And she got a big backlash then from all the cat owners, saying, My cat's as clever as any dog.

And now she's done this research.

She's got a backlash from dog owners.

And when she published this study and it was printed in the Times, there was lots of backlash in the comments section.

One Times reader wrote, We once had a beagle who could open the refrigerator with his paws.

Case closed.

Just on the idea of having small dogs,

there is concern to be had when you do hang out with just small dogs.

In America recently, there was a warning when there was a big storm that hit Cleveland with 50 mile an hour winds there.

The Weather Bureau released a statement saying, can everyone please be careful?

These winds are huge.

And things that can happen are trash cans will go missing, trees will fall, and dogs will go flying.

And

yeah, they did a small dog warning.

And it's the idea that when the winds pick up so high, they get lobbed off into the air and if you're not holding onto them by leash, they will disappear.

And if you are holding onto them by a leash, you've got an amazing kite.

Now they did do this slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it is based on real incidences that have happened in America.

Stories that you can read up on.

For example, a 72-year-old couple or 72-year-old lady called Dorothy Otley.

She lost her chihuahua.

She's called Dorothy.

Come on.

And she lost her chihuahua toto in a tornado.

Did she live in Kansas?

Wow, yeah, I didn't notice that.

No, it was a six-pound chihuahua called Tinkerbell.

And

they're mixing their movies in.

Yeah, this is cross-children movie.

They were, yeah,

they were walking around and a 70-mile an hour wind came and it picked Tinkerbell up and it took her off in the wind and they couldn't find her.

And what they actually ended up doing is that they hired a pet psychic called Laurie.

Okay.

Right.

Well, they had my sympathy for a good long time there.

Laurie said you have to stop looking in lowlands when you were.

Was Laurie a pet who was also a psychic?

No, no, no.

She was a psychic of pets and she was also a third generation psychic.

So she was

the granddaughter of original psychic.

Yeah, as well as that.

There's a lot of nepotism in psychic careers, isn't there?

My father was a fraud, my grandfather was a fraud.

And so she said to them, you need to look up.

And so the volunteers started looking outside of the swamp and up the hill, and they found Tinkerbell.

And so my point is, you will lose a dog in the wind.

Right.

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 Treiberland, Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Chaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing.

You can go to our website as well, no such thingasoffish.com.

We have everything up there from all of our previous episodes to upcoming tour dates to anything that we've released.

Thank you so much, Salford.

You've been awesome.

We'll see you again.

Good night.