261: No Such Thing As A Chocolate Train

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Hi, everyone.

Before we start this week's show, which was recorded live in Ofcom, we want to let you know how you can come to one of our live events.

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And this is very exciting.

We've just announced two more dates.

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You know where they are.

Yes, I know.

That was me trying to fake not knowing.

It's Paris and Berlin.

Paris and Berlin.

Wow.

Yeah, we're so excited.

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But no matter what, we hope to see you there.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this week's show.

Again, recorded live in Ofcome.

Okay, on with the show.

On with the podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from Ofcom.

My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Anna Chacinski, Andrew Huntson-Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, James.

Okay, my fact this week is that there is a man in the poll who can lick his own forehead.

And the reason I'm laughing to myself is because I know what he looks like.

So, if you're at home listening to this, then do Google it.

And if you're in Ofcom sat in front of us, then here's what he looks like.

We told you at home it was worth googling.

It's so weird.

What's so bizarre about him is that when you hear you can look at his own forehead, you immediately think, oh my god, he makes his tongue really long.

And little do you know, he makes his face really tiny.

Yes.

It's a little bit of both because he does have a really long tongue.

You can sometimes see pictures where he sticks out.

It's really, really long.

He's basically, he's a 35-year-old bus driver from Urlabari in Nepal.

And he says that he tries not to do this too often because he scares the children.

Yeah.

Well, he says he's not been allowed to do it at work when he's on the bus.

He says that A, the children get scared.

And then with, he talks about adults.

He says, even adults can lose consciousness

when they watch me in action.

Oh.

But can you guys lick your nose with your tongue?

No.

It's quite rare, isn't it?

Oh, wow.

Wow.

Again, at home, just Google pictures of people licking their nose with their tongue and you'll see what that is.

I didn't realise it had a name, so 10% of people can do it, including me.

But

it's called the Gawlin sign.

Didn't know it had a medical term.

You haven't tried doing the full forehead.

I think I have to work up to that.

It's really interesting, though, because it...

So this guy is kind of...

Gerning, are we saying?

It's, you know, gurning the sport where you scrunch your face into an amazing shape and you surprise people and win awards.

You know, gurning the sport.

Gurning, yeah.

The Olympic sport of Gurning, yeah.

So at the British and world, obviously Gerning Championships, because nowhere else does it,

makeup is banned, but manipulation of false teeth, if you have them, is permitted.

And it really helps if you don't have many teeth.

So this guy in Nepal has only one tooth, I believe.

Oh, has he?

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

And there's a Going world champion called Peter Jackman, not to be confused with Peter Jackson, who he's won the championships four times and he had all of his teeth removed so that he could improve his technique.

Really, yeah.

Yeah, really?

Yeah.

There's an organiser that said age definitely helps in the competition because your skin is much looser when

you age.

It allows you to manipulate and crease up in ways.

So you have an advantage if you're older.

And I should say this world championship or British championship for the whole world, but only British people take part.

And in fact, only people from Cumbria take part.

Even the people of Devon look down on the power chunk.

You know, in 2014, the two runners-up were both Swedish.

Oh, were they?

Oh, okay, I didn't know that.

But it takes place in the Egremont Crab Fair.

And they say it's been happening since 1267.

The fair, it seems, might have been happening since then on and off, because we know that King Henry III granted a royal charter for a fair.

We think probably the Goening hasn't taken part for all that time, although there is a newspaper article in 1852 that says it's an ancient practice.

So it has definitely been going on for a long time.

Yeah.

I was reading an obituary of a guy called Lenny Wells.

This is an obituary in The Guardian.

He died in the year 2000, and he was known for gurning in various TV adverts.

He was very good at gurning.

It said, Although he was also a keen rugby fan and devoted family man, it is for the unique rubberiness of his lips and cheeks that he will be most fondly remembered.

And

there was one,

then they interviewed people who'd taken part in contests with him, and one of the guys said, This one time, Gordon Blacklock, another competitor I'm sure you've heard of, another gurner.

Gordon Blacklock was a head-on point, but then Lenny stepped up and pulled a face like a rhino's anus.

I tell you.

Is that a technical term?

I tell you, the audience went bizarre.

Love to hear the commentators.

I'd like to know it's coming up the back like a rhino's anus.

There was, in fact, the, I think, the greatest champion of all time is Anne Woods, who has won the woman's gurning title 28 times.

That's 28 years of gurning.

She missed one crab fair when she was expecting a baby.

Probably polling a lot of faces then as well, I guess.

And in 2010, she collapsed after four minutes of intensive gurning and had to be rushed to hospital.

So there are injuries that happen in this sport.

And actually, Anne Woods died quite recently as well.

She died in 2015.

And I read her obituary and it said that she always entered the Gurning Arena to the tune of You're Gorgeous by Baby Blood.

Arenas.

Like how many people are going to watch this thing?

We've mentioned before Mr.

Ugly from Zimbabwe.

So there's an annual Mr.

Ugly competition in Zimbabwe, which is very similar to the Gerning.

And in 2015, there was a huge controversy because the guy who won it, the runner-up, who was a previous winner and had been thinking he would win it again, the runner-up said, it's not fair.

His ugliness is based on the fact that he's got a lot of teeth missing, whereas my ugliness is natural.

And the winner said, you know, yeah, suck it up.

You know, he said they should just accept I am uglier than them.

He can only suck it up if he's no teeth.

Get your teeth removed.

Have some commitment.

Like, you know, the aforementioned champion.

Get them out.

um on tongues because this guy can lick his own forehead um there's some new research has found that weightlifters have stronger tongues and runners have better tongue endurance than normal people

isn't that amazing that

why

do they I've actually never watched weightlifting.

Do they have a little tiny little weight that they lift with their tongue while they're doing the big ones with their arms?

What they thought is perhaps it's because you're working out more, all of your muscles are stronger.

But actually having good tongue muscles is really important because it keeps your airways open.

So, if your tongue is stronger, then it means it keeps your airways open, and maybe it's better for running, better for keeping more oxygen in your body, stuff like that.

I think it's a very specific thing, the way you pronounce tongue from your part of the world, and it just takes so long to get over the fact that it's tongue, and you're just thinking, Well, my fire tongues are perfectly strong.

I don't know why.

Do you genuinely own fire tongs?

Of course, I don't have a fire.

I just jab the radiator with them sometimes.

Giraffes have good tongues, really good tongues.

Their tongues are half a metre long

and at least, I think.

Half a metre.

So that's what that's longer than my forearm.

Wow.

How much do we see?

Is that outside or is that?

No, no, it's not outside, so quite a lot of it goes back into them, I think.

But, you know, there's a decent amount outside.

Have you seen a giraffe

lick a leaf off a tree?

Can they lick their ears?

Yes, they can lick their ears.

Yes.

And they're also black or purple with their tongues, and they think that's because they spend 12 hours hours a day with their tongues out and they would be sunburned on them if they didn't have sun protection.

So that's why they have black tongues.

Dark tongues.

I was just really self-conscious about saying that word now.

There was a doctor in the, I think the 19th century, there was a big debate over how you could prove that someone had died.

And there was a, I think he was French, doctor called Laborde.

And he said that you can save people who only appear to be dead.

You know, they've fallen into a swoon or they might be unconscious, but they are revivable.

And he said the way to do it is to pull their tongue rhythmically for three hours.

He can do that for two hours and 59 minutes and then they go,

he swore, he swore that he'd done this.

He said he'd save people doing it.

He said he'd saved an unconscious cow and a bulldog that had swooned.

And he invented a tongue-pulling machine, which was, you know, which pulled the machine.

And there was an assistant whose job was to turn the crank and pull the tongue throughout.

Oh my god.

I know.

So, he resigned because he was bored, and he was replaced with an electric tongue-pulling machine.

So,

there's a hockey player called Brad, an ice hockey player called Brad Marchand, and he has been ordered to stop licking his opponents.

He's done this more than once, but the most recent person he licked was opposition player Ryan Callaghan.

And Marchand has been described in his official biography as the little ball of hate.

Well, is that the sorry, the liquor or the licky?

That's the liquor who was that.

And basically, it's his job to kind of start fights and stuff like that.

That happens in hockey.

But the guy who he licked said, I don't know what the difference is between spitting in someone's face and licking it, which is quite a good point, I think.

And then the person who did the licking said, well, he punched me four times in the face.

It's six and a half a dozen, isn't it?

Do you know how you stick your tongue tongue out when you concentrate?

Or you may have done as a child, but I definitely did, and it's much more common in children.

And I was reading an article by a neurologist who said he thinks he knows why we do this.

And it's partly because if you're already reconcentrating, number one, it's because it stops the distraction of taste or texture within your mouth.

So if you just hang your tongue out, I guess it's not really touching anything, it's not tasty or touching anything.

But number two, he said, it's because breastfeeding babies stick their tongue out to push their mother's nipple away when they're full.

And so that's what we're doing when we're concentrating.

We're saying, leave me alone.

I've got stuff to be getting along with now.

Wow.

I'll be honest, next time I stick my tongue out, I won't be able to concentrate quite as much as I could before.

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

My fact is that in 1903, you could buy a gramophone record made of chocolate, which you could play a song on and then eat the disc.

And somehow we have lost this technology.

But I think the technology was never great to start with, was it?

You could play a song on a piece of chocolate.

That much is true.

You can play it a couple of times.

I mean, they weren't great turntables either, because they were designed for chocolate records.

But so

this was made by a company called the Stolverk Chocolate Company, and there were tiny turntables and small chocolate records.

It was for children, basically.

It was a children's toy.

And you could play the song a couple of times, and then when you got bored, you could just eat the song.

And I think, did they put foil on the chocolate, didn't they?

And it was was the foil that they put the ridges in, which acted like the record, and then you could peel it because you don't want to be you know degrading your chocolate as you play your record.

No, quite.

And you say that it was a children's toy.

It was advertised in the French magazine La Nacho, and it specifically said, This is not a toy.

What kind of miserable person do you have to be to pretend your chocolate gramophone record is not a toy?

Did it take off?

No.

Presumably, you don't have any chocolate records.

Did you think you were the only one in the world who hadn't picked up on this technology?

It's got a massive chocolate record collection.

I'm from Australia.

Maybe it hasn't reached yet.

Maybe we're getting it next year.

No, but you know, sometimes in the annals of history, you can have 50 years of chocolate records.

You know, the Beatles were released on chocolate, and then it goes.

I think it might have been sort of a limited edition thing.

And they tried lots of other chocolate-based things, this company.

So they also produced Stolverk.

They produced a chocolate clock and a chocolate train.

which I think chocolate train was a toy

not a train not a phone train people weren't going around in chocolate trains from Edinburgh to London

what a whimsical world we could have lived in

I'm afraid there's more delays someone's eaten the mode of transport again

there must be a better way

all the all the sleepers are Twixes and there are kit hats over the main rails and

there are little Malteses puffing out of the train.

Oh

nice.

Okay.

It's nice.

We all want to live in this world now, don't we?

Yeah, very cool.

It's not real.

It's not real.

But there were toy trains.

I'm not quite sure how they worked.

But yeah, a chocolate clock?

I don't understand how that works, because that's not a very useful clock.

That's not going to last a long time.

No, no.

So this is why they didn't take off.

Actually, I didn't even look up what the oldest piece of chocolate still existing is.

There must be some.

They keep finding bits of chocolate from the Antarctic expeditions.

The Antarctic expeditions um

just back to gramophones there is a gramophone that still is in antarctica it's been there for over a hundred years scott of the antarctic took a two gramophones with him two gramophones yeah he was a idiot wasn't he i mean

i don't even claim to feel sorry for him

wow i can imagine them in the tent at the end it's like we're so cold and hungry can we eat the gramophone

you brought the chocolate one right?

What was he thinking?

He brought hundreds of records.

That's amazing.

Yeah, and so the idea was, because obviously they were in the hut for ages.

So Sherry Gard, who wrote The Worst Journey in the World, he said that after dinner every night, that's when the records would go on.

And one was left there, and one made it back.

I've seen it.

There was an exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London.

I went to see it.

And they've actually made an album of the best of songs that went along as a record.

But they couldn't play the records when they were out in the middle of nowhere because they had no

because they had Scott's hut, so it was in the hut.

So it was before they went properly out in the middle of nowhere.

You could have wind-up gramophones as well.

The winding.

Okay, Captain Oates, I know your hands are very cold, but would you mind taking them out of those gloves to wind up the gramophone just one last time?

And then I promise you can go outside.

So this is

quite a cool thing.

You know the new five-pound notes, the plastic ones?

Yes.

You can play a gramophone record with a five-pound note.

As the stylus, do you mean?

Yeah.

So you set the record spinning.

There's footage online of someone doing it, and it doesn't produce a brilliant sound, and

you need an amplifier and stuff, but you can do it.

You could probably use that five pound note to buy an actual stylus.

Do you know that?

I couldn't believe this.

There were basically iPods in the 1920s.

I don't believe that either.

The word basically did a huge amount of heavy lifting there, didn't it?

What did they have?

These were things called Miki phones or micy phones.

They were little music players.

180,000 of them were produced in Switzerland.

And they were basically tiny little music players, like gramophones or phonographs, that you could carry around in your handbag.

And they measured two by four inches.

And the only tiny thing about them was that they measured two by four inches when they were packed up.

But then whenever you got somewhere, it was quite a complex assembly job to build a 10-inch record player.

So it couldn't play straight away.

But even so, these portable

tiny little music players.

Very cool.

Very cool.

Edison, when he sort of came up with the phonograph, which is the precursor to Gramophone Records, I guess, he thought that their main use would be, or one of their main uses would be phonographic books, which will speak to blind people, he said, without any effort on their part.

It's basically a podcast.

It's an audio book or a podcast, yeah.

The phonograph recorded as well, didn't it, as playing.

I think that was a point of that.

And one of the main things they used it for was to record the last words of the dying.

Wow.

That's so much pressure on someone who's dying to nail your last words.

And then, what if you don't go for another hour?

You've just got to sit silently going,

It would also make you very paranoid, wouldn't it, if you just felt a little bit peaky and then your wife started getting the gramophone rigged up in the corner?

Honestly, darling, it's a cold.

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

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

My fact this week is that in the early 1700s, the most popular British guide to the history, language, and culture of Taiwan was written by a man who didn't speak the language, had never been there, and knew nothing about it.

This was in 1704, and this was, well, I say Taiwan, so it was Formosa then,

which was what it was called, and it was called The History of Formosa.

And it described in huge detail the practices that these people, who would have seemed so foreign to the people of Britain, the practices that the Formosan people got up to, their language and everything.

It was written by a guy called George Salmanatzar, and it was completely fake.

He was a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Frenchman who'd never left Europe.

And to this day, we don't really know what his background was or what his real name was, because George Salmanatsar was a fake name.

And he just made this up.

He convinced them that his pale skin and his appearance of being like French and his French accent were because in Formosa the upper classes live in underground palaces so they never see the sun.

Which, so he'd never got that's a good excuse, though, isn't it?

Really quick thinking, yeah.

So he had this big showdown with the Royal Society of Scientists, and they were all questioning him for ages about, right?

So, okay, if you really are from Formosa, what about this?

So, Edmund Haley of Comet fame asked him, How long does the sun shine down your chimneys?

and that's a really revealing question but no come on like if you went on holiday to Spain and they said to you yeah but Andy are you really from England how long does the Sun shine down your chimney

I'd be stuffed wouldn't I exactly yeah so how is he supposed to know because that answer would have revealed if he knew where it was on the planet did he have an answer to it he said we have bent chimneys so the Sun doesn't shine down them

it's a good answer brilliant spiraled wasn't it spiraled chimneys yeah yeah he's amazing character character.

He said of Formosa that the men walk naked except for a gold or silver plate to cover their privates.

He said that they executed murderers by hanging them upside down and shooting them full of arrows.

And annually, they sacrificed the hearts of 18,000 young boys to gods and priests to eat their bodies.

Yeah.

Which people did say to him, if that is true and they sacrifice that number of people, you're not going to have any people left on this small island.

And he didn't have a good answer to that.

But he said Formosans always sleep upright.

And he actually then saw this through because he had to live the habits of them.

He must have regretted that.

He used to, I think he sort of sat.

So he said a lot of Formosans sleep standing up.

And then he used to leave a candle on in his room so everyone could see that overnight he was still erect in his chair because he was a Formosan, so he couldn't sleep in a normal bed.

Bizarrely, he said that they all eat...

food raw, things like fish raw.

And he was saying that Formosa was part of Japan, which is a bit weird because it was actually belonged belonged to China then.

But he said it was part of Japan.

So that's strange that he kind of predicted sushi 300 years before it happened.

Well, so he got basically Formosa was his third go at trying to convince people he was from somewhere else.

So he was originally from France.

His first bash at it was saying he was Irish.

So he would go around saying, I'm Irish.

But the thing is, everyone knew the Irish.

So they'd be like, oh, so what do you?

And he was like, I have no idea.

So he quickly bats stuff up on him.

Oh, have you been to the dog and duck in Dublin?

Yeah.

Then he said he was Japanese.

And then that failed on him as well because Japan was getting too much.

People had been traveling there too much.

He needed to find somewhere else.

Formosa was the third one that he finally landed on, which was useful to him.

Another time in Formosa, there was a lot of Jesuits, Catholic missionaries, and they knew everything that was happening there.

And so when he came along, they were going, no, no, really, that doesn't happen.

But weirdly, because no one trusted Catholics at the time, they all trusted this one guy over all the Jesuits who were saying, no, this is bullshit.

That's so funny.

Well, at least the reputation of the church has recovered, so that's

but we should emphasize that this was a big deal, this book.

Well, he wasn't just a weirdo with a pamphlet, this was a book that was so believed that he lectured.

He was invited to lecture on Formosan culture and language at Oxford University.

So, he invented the entire language, alphabet and all, completely new alphabet.

Linguists studied it to see how consistent it was and agreed it was definitely a language to the extent that it remained in lots of language books until the mid-19th century.

And people were still saying this.

People weren't doing GCSE Formosa, were they?

Can I tell you quickly just something amazing about Formosa itself?

So, Formosa, now Taiwan.

If you were in Formosa, Taiwan, and you dug through the ground and you dug all the way through the earth onto the other side, the antipode as it's called,

you would land in a place called Formosa, Argentina.

Is that right?

By total coincidence.

Not by a coincidence, surely.

By coincidence.

Yeah.

There's no relation that, as far as we can see, between the two places that you would land.

Yeah, there's a place in Argentina called Formosa.

I mean, let's all definitely Google this after the show.

That is incredible.

If that remains in the episode, that means it is true.

And that is unbelievable.

If not, you're welcome, everyone.

An exclusive.

It would be around Argentina, so that does make sense.

So we are in Devon at the moment, and it seems like Devon is a bit of a hotbed for absolute fantasists.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, so Andy, you definitely know about Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, don't you?

He was from Devon.

Was he?

Okay.

Yeah, so he was he did a fraud saying he was a Tibetan monk, and that was still happening in the 1950s.

He was saying that.

He said that he came from Tibet, he made up a language.

When they gave him actual Tibetan, and said, Why do you not recognize this?

He said that he'd been so badly tortured during the war, he'd blocked out all knowledge of the Tibetan language.

And then afterwards when they realized he wasn't actually Tibetan, he said, oh no, no, no, actually I was possessed by the spirit of a Tibetan monk after I fell out of a tree in London while trying to take a photograph of an owl.

Yep.

He was, his name was Cyril Hoskins, and he was an unemployed surgical truss manufacturer from Devon.

who claimed to be an incredibly ancient and powerful Tibetan monk.

And he wrote 15 books.

He wrote Travels with the Lama and

Lamaras and Dalai Lama.

And then he wrote one Living with the Lama, which was dictated to him by his cat,

Mrs.

Fifi Grey Whiskers.

And then he moved to, he later moved to Ireland and then Canada, blatantly for tax reasons.

Kind of lived there.

Yeah, he was great.

Yeah, and then back in the 18th century, you had someone called Princess Caribou, who was also from Devon.

Okay, and she turned up at someone's house near Bristol, speaking speaking a fake language and said she was from somewhere in the east.

And again, she was from Devon and she made the whole thing up.

She was from, I looked into it, I spotted that as well today.

She was from somewhere that is a 30-minute drive from where we are right now, a little place called Witheridge.

Oh, hello.

Yeah?

But even the people of Cumbria look down on the people of Witheridge.

But it was a sort of tradition that travel writing merged into fiction from about 1600 to 1900.

You couldn't quite tell.

There was basically three categories.

There was Gulliver's Travel Style, this is a fictional travel account, and then there were proper travel journals.

And then there were loads of people who were just kind of making stuff up, but pretending it was true.

And there was the travels of Sir John Mandeville.

Actually, so this was much earlier, but he was almost the precursor to all of these.

These appeared in about the 1360s, and they were taken as legit travel books for over 300 years.

So Christopher Columbus used them as a complete reference book, like all the great travelers of later ages did.

And they covered China, India, present-day Indonesia, and they told these amazing stories of like islands, first-hand accounts of people who had the bodies of humans and the heads of dogs, or people whose mouths were so small that they had to suck all their food through reeds because they just had a tiny hole for a mouth.

And he said, all the Mongols eat their fathers as soon as they die.

I went, oh, okay, great.

That was the thing that Salmanazar claimed.

He claimed that he said he was divorced and that he was a reformed cannibal because in Formosa, husbands were allowed to eat their wives if there was adultery that had happened.

If their wives had committed adultery, there was always a lot of cannibalism going on in these stories, weren't there?

It was like the idea of weird foreigners would eat humans.

Although the guy who you're talking about, John Mandeville, he found one group of people whose only source of nourishment was the smell of apples.

And he also found that in Ethiopia, all the people had only one foot, but that foot was so large that it shadowed them from the sun.

Oh, how does that work?

They would lie on their back and hold their massive foot.

Oh, wow.

It was awful when they wanted to go bowling.

That's pretty cool.

We should evolve like that.

This is slightly off topic, but P.L.

Travers, the writer of Mary Poppins, she was into a lot of people.

She had one massive foot, didn't she?

She was into a lot of esoteric stuff, and she went on a trip at one point with a spiritual guru who she looked up to, where they were searching the earth for a giant footprint that was said to be made by an intergalactic giant who used Earth as a stepping stone as he was hopping through the universe.

And she was convinced there was a giant footprint that would be

in a comic.

I don't know if that's writing.

Sorry, when was she writing?

What, 30s, 40s, 50s?

Yeah, yeah.

But she was part of a very big spiritual, very lobsam rampault.

People believed any shit, didn't they?

Until almost now.

Yeah, you're right.

Everyone's making really fact-based, sensible decisions these days.

Thank God we've come so far.

It's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that ahead of breeding season, Iceland publishes an illustrated catalogue of the country's most eligible sheep.

Yeah, so this is called the Ram Registry.

It's an annual catalogue that they make available.

It It starts online, then they do a physical publication.

And

it profiles in this, in the last year that's gone, 44 rams.

They do color photos, they do pedigrees, breeding.

It's all these stats.

It tells you everything you need to know.

It's a 52-page catalogue.

They have an obituary section for rams that have passed away, who were...

I think if Tinder had an obituary section, it would be more interesting.

Yeah, it's true.

But it has stuff like how many they're expected to sire.

It's just it's the ultimate guide that you need for when it's breeding season you want, I want that, and that's how they that's how they spend their money.

This thing is 20 years old, this registry.

It's well established.

There's a ram in this year's called Strumper, and Strumper, they say, the farmer who owns him, says Strumper, he is aware of his environment and knows exactly what's expected of him.

He doesn't call himself a Strumper, he calls himself an exotic dancer.

But they get they get graded for leadership as well so there are these there are these sheep which are called flock leaders and they automatically act as leaders to the rest of the flock and they um that's very important because they go off into the mountains and you need a uh ram in charge who sort of um you know when the weather's going to be bad when they can foretell the weather so when they think the weather's going to be bad they lead the flock to shelter and safety yeah and the sheep which are the particularly intelligent sub-breed are called icelandic leader sheep because they show leadership

I don't think that's why but it's a very nice coincidence isn't it

and then but the thing is unlike day snaps they never get to meet the lady um sheep do they because basically it's a sperm donor kind of thing

so even when they're swipes on they're just like oh no all you're gonna get is my sperm oh my god thank god tinder doesn't run like that

I've never used tinder but uh is that not how I used to but I never just popped my sperm in the post

anyway swiped right on me I think that might be a relief for a lot of women on Tinder

thank God a cup of sperm there's a picture of me with a lot of stamps skirts I'm ready

first class male

wait is that first class male both ways around

but they're they're into sheep aren't they in Iceland

they have three times as many sheep as people and they have this amazing ceremony every

winter So, basically, the sheep in Iceland, they have this weird farming system where all different farmers, different herds of sheep, are free to roam with each other up on the mountains.

So, they all intermingle, which is a massive hassle when it comes to bringing them back down to put them in your pen because they're all mixed up.

And so, they just recruit everyone.

So, if you're a tourist in Iceland at you know pen time and uh it's got a name, I think it's called retir time,

uh, and then you go and you help round up sheep, and you have to shimmy them down the mountain.

You put them into this big enclosure with a central bit in the middle.

And then you they've got little marks on their ears that show which farmer they belong to.

And if you see a mark, you grab it by the ear or by the scruff of its neck, you lift it up and you chuck it into the bit of that enclosure.

Do you lift it up and chuck it?

Do you lift up and throw it?

And it's very strong.

All right, actually.

The sheep are really

like they're really perfect in Iceland, aren't they?

They don't have any kind of other genes.

They're like, they've been there since the Vikings and they've never had...

All right, Captain Arian over there.

No one's sullied these genes.

Well, this is what they think.

They think that because they've been there for the whole time, they're not sullied by any other blood.

And in 1878, they imported a single English ram into Iceland, and they had to kill 60% of Icelandic flocks.

What?

Because they spread disease and parasites to the flocks.

English tourists, best of the world.

They love eating the sheep as well, obviously, because

sheep are eaten.

But there's there's a thing called svith, which is half a sheep's head, that's a delicacy, um, and they make sour testicles and brain jam.

Well, they so I've found out the best way to eat the boiled sheep's brain, which is something that is a real delicacy, and this is because there's an MP, I think he might have been the foreign minister or the home secretary or something.

He's a guy called, uh, why didn't I practice this name before I came on stage?

Uh, he's called Osser Scarfioyenson.

Osser Scarfioyensen.

Well, I think he's safely anonymous.

That's the main thing.

He's not sat at home going, why are they talking about me, is he?

No, he's not.

Wouldn't want to be that guy, who were real.

But he was, in 2013, he was served some sheep's brain at a party.

And he said, this is amongst the best boiled sheep's head I've ever had.

They stuck to my gum as proper heads should.

And so that's what they're supposed to do.

They stick to the gum.

And then he was asked, really, but was it the best?

And he was like, okay, look, it wasn't the very best.

The head should have been more fermented.

Because we from the West Fjords prefer our sheep's head so fermented that we can drink the eye out of the eye socket.

So that's the that's what you're going for.

Wow.

Goodness.

In 2018, two men in Iceland summoned the police and the Coast Guard after they'd seen a polar bear on a peninsula, and that's obviously incredibly dangerous because they really don't come near humans very often.

Eventually, after a lengthy search, the search was called off, and the men admitted it may just have been a large sheep.

It's just a lot closer than they thought.

It's understandable.

I know how to artificially inseminate a cow based on researching for this podcast.

Cool.

So, this is obviously about pairing sheep up with each other so they can make properly.

And dairy cows, you do the same thing.

So, I think 75% of dairy cows in this country,

when they have to be inseminated, they get inseminated just by semen rather than the actual bull.

And for some reason, I found myself reading this really in-depth farmer's guide to how to do it.

And what I didn't realize was you, so you get a semen gun, which you put the semen in.

Imagine you bring your semen gun to a gun fight.

Damn it.

You bring your semen gun to the insemination fight, and but what you do is you have to so there are two entries into a cow.

So as much as you're humans,

yeah.

You've got the

oh, sorry.

There are three.

Oh, sorry, there are three.

We're in Devon.

Something tells me you're not the biggest expert in this room on the number of ways into a cow.

I know the people at Devon know all these secret ways, but there are two entries.

There were two entries into the back of a cow, officially.

And so, you know, one is the rexon,

as we all have.

Professor, let me write this down.

Children, will you be quiet?

You've got the rexum, and then you've got the sex tubes, and they're different.

All right, the cervix.

But what you do is, amazingly, when you're inseminating a cow, you obviously have to stick the gun in the cervix.

But the way you navigate the gun into

the uterine horns, as they're called,

is you have to put your other arm that's not holding the gun into the rexum.

So you, it's so amazing.

And they say you shove your arm into the rectum, insert your arm into the rectum,

get someone else to hold the cow's tail aside while you do this.

That would be a bold farmer who tried using one foot

to pin the cow's tail.

This is the worst game of Twister I've ever played.

It says left-hand sex tubes.

Anyway, look.

It just feels like this lesson isn't going to end.

So

you essentially use your rectum arm to navigate your semen gun, which is in the vaginal canal, and you push it through.

So

you've got your arm in the rectum, and it's pushing against the other canal so that it gets into the uterus.

And it's called recto-vaginal insemination.

And that's a lesson over.

Enjoy.

Okay,

that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, please don't.

But if you insist, I'm on at Shriverland, Andy.

I'm Andrew Hunter Reb.

James.

I'm James Harkins.

And Chacinski.

The authorities should email

you can email podcast at qi.com.

Yeah, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thing as a fish.com.

We have all of our previous episodes up there.

We have links to our upcoming tours.

We have YouTube videos of Anna showing how to inseminate.

Thank you so much.

Good night.