256: No Such Thing As A Puddle Photographer

When disaster takes control of your life, ServePro helps you take it back.

Serve Pro shows up faster to any size disaster to make things right, starting with a single call, that's all.

Because the number one name in cleanup and restoration has the scale and the expertise to get you back up to speed quicker than you ever thought possible.

So, whenever never thought this would happen actually happens, ServePro's got you.

Call 1-800-SERVPRO or visit ServePro.com today to help make it like it never even happened.

What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo?

And Juliet, the new hit Broadway musical and the most fun you'll have in a theater.

I got the ID,

created by the Emmy-winning writer from Schitt's Creek and pop music's number one hit maker.

And Juliet is exactly what we need right now.

Playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts.

Tickets now on sale at BroadwaySanjose.com.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anna Chaczynski.

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 fact number one and that's you Anna.

My fact this week is that Harvard Business School recommends companies locate their headquarters in rainier places because it makes employees more productive.

And that's why our output is so massive here.

This actually goes against what people think.

So they, as part of the same study or a similar one, they asked people what they thought, what effect they thought bad weather would have on productivity.

80% of people said they thought it would decrease it.

Turned out they did this big study in a Tokyo bank and they found that employees processed loan applications much faster.

So that's something that requires a lot of focus and concentration much faster and more quickly on rainy days than sunny ones.

And it was because when they investigated it, that nice weather causes more cognitive distractions, i.e.

people sit in their offices fantasizing about what else they could be doing.

Yeah, they worked out the effect is so great that if it's a sunny day versus when it's rainy, that $937,000 is what they would have made if it was continuously rainy, basically.

This particular

size of the business.

It's not like you could have an ice cream van and you would make a million quid, especially not when it rains.

I think in actual fact, ice cream vans is one of the few businesses where sun is better.

Well, this doesn't all go well for my wealth chain of ice cream vans, does it?

But weirdly, my sister and brother-in-law had, they've just left Abu Dhabi, but they had an ice cream business out there as a side business, and it was a little ice cream shop by the beach.

And they couldn't operate it in summer.

It's so hot in Abu Dhabi, it can only function in the winter.

Well, because it all melts, yeah, it's just too hot outside, it gets up to 50.

But sure, is it the is it that people don't really go outside?

Yeah, yeah, right.

Oh, right, okay.

So it's not like the ice cream melts.

Well, it's not like if you buy an ice cream, it instantly vaporizes.

I demand another.

where is this one

um one thing I found is uh so this was from the same uh article that this came from which is I really like this Campbell soup that company they advertise based on the weather so when the weather is bad in particular cities they buy more advertising space because they know that people will want cozy warming food

so like a nice thick country vegetable soup on cold days exactly and maybe a light broth on some gaspacho on a hot day thin mist of ice cream

That's brilliant.

It's weird.

It's so cool.

When it's cold and everyone has flu, they could have chicken soup because everyone likes flu.

They have a flu index as well.

Do they?

Yeah.

So they made, yeah, they made a thing.

So the thing Andy's talking about is called the misery index.

And for them, it's actually a happiness index because it means more sales.

And when the misery index goes up by 5%,

then they cue a chicken soup advert on the radio.

And then that was so successful, they've got a flu index now.

So as soon as there's a flu outbreak,

wow, that's really incredible.

They must be praying for Spanish flu to come back or something.

They're not evil.

No, you're right.

They're just selling soup.

You know, if it's very rainy, there's what type of business it's actually good for.

Umbrellas.

Ponchos.

Yeah.

Oh,

I've opened it.

People who take photographs of puddles.

The three main rain-based businesses.

I'll admit I ran out after two.

You make a million more dollars a year if you take photographs of puddles in the rain.

Newspaper editors the world over, get me some puddle photographs.

I was actually talking post-rain.

Oh, yeah.

Comes and rain in the towels.

To dry things.

Towels are good.

Yeah, no, helicopter businesses do very well, particularly for orchards, because when there's a huge amount of rainfall, certain things, certain vegetables, certain grapes get so saturated that they need to get the the water out immediately.

So they hire helicopters in and cherry orchards will will have helicopters just hovering over them and drying off all of the grounds

to get it back on the road.

So really cool.

The helicopter business.

Do you know the kind of weather that one study found is the only type of weather that really has an impact on your mood?

So I can give you the weather categories, or do you want to make it?

No, really.

When the earth is hit by a meteorite and this rain of

metal falling from the sky, firestorms.

People don't mind at all.

They just go about their day.

We're We're very stubborn.

Okay, give us some options.

So, this is a study in the 1980s, and it found the best predictor of mood was in a certain type of weather.

The options are that they looked at sunniness, temperature, raininess, wind, humidity, and

it's not going to be the last one.

Can I bet on the last one?

Can I bet that it is the last one, which I think is mist?

Because I think mist always affects my mood very much.

Is it in a good way or a bad way?

It sort of just makes me feel spooky.

Does it?

Yeah, you know, you look along, along, you can't see anything.

It's a bit spooky.

That's true.

Yes, it is quite exciting.

You feel like you're in a Victorian novel.

Yeah, so that's the main effect that I think.

I'm going to say it's wind

because it makes me feel more agitated because the molecules around me are so agitated, they kind of somehow make me feel a bit on edge.

Yeah, I get that.

I think it's got to be one of these two.

I'm going for sunniness.

Sunniness makes me a dickhead.

It's why I had to leave Australia.

I was a right ass all over there.

But now I'm sort of a bit more calm.

But I get in a horrible mood when it's way too hot.

Do you?

Yeah.

Oh, no, so you're not talking about sunniness, you're talking about temperature.

Oh, yeah.

Right?

Because it can be sunny.

It's sunny today, for instance, a beautiful sun today.

That's true.

Okay, so here's being a bit of an asshole today.

How do you explain that?

It's just being a bit of a tricky thing.

Okay, so yeah.

So, well, you've listed almost all the things except the one that it is.

Humidity was found to be the only one that has a significant impact on activity and mood, and it's because people feel very sleepy and they can't concentrate.

Which is true, right?

When you you go to a humid place, you feel really gross.

Kind of, but I so I grew up in Hong Kong, which was all humid all the time.

It's established, you're always a dickhead now.

I've never thought how this weather has really molded me.

Did you find your concentration improved when you came here?

Mate, I'm not the good case study to ask about.

The wettest day of the year on earth, whatever day it is, what percentage of the rain from the year do you think falls on that one day?

Okay, so a normal, if there are 365 days it would be a bit less than 0.3 percent on an average day

so i'll say one percent triple yeah the average i'm gonna say 35

love it love great day for the puddle photographer

he's a billionaire uh it is 8.3 percent wow that's a lot it's about 12 of the earth's rain falls on a single day what day is that day we don't know it's different we don't know surely that's the one one day we would definitely know.

The same day every year.

I know.

Oh, yeah, right.

I meant when was the last time that we...

No, it's always the third Tuesday after Easter.

And 50% of the Earth's precipitation falls on the 12 wettest days of the year.

Wow.

That's amazing.

Isn't that amazing?

It's incredible.

Wow.

That's really cool.

It'd be so great if it was the same every year.

And we could just do a 12-day, what was it, 12 days?

12-day.

12-day-long hibernation or something.

I wonder if it happens in a period of the year though because lots of countries have big rainy seasons so there must be a likelihood of it being well the paper um the article where I read this it said one key question the researchers wrote is when during the year these extreme precipitation events are likely to occur so I think basically they don't really know when it's going to be but they'll try and work it out just on rainy conditions as in preparing for rain have you heard of the rain shader no this is a new kind of umbrella which has been invented in the last few years and it is designed to solve the problems of...

What are the problems of umbrellas?

They get in people's eyes.

They get in people's eyes.

Oh yeah, that's the one.

That is one actually.

That's the main one.

Yeah, that's a really good one.

And there's one more.

You'll never have one on you when you need it.

That's not the one I'm looking for.

They break the

people take them if you leave them in the front of a store.

Umbrellas are awful, aren't they?

If it's really windy, you might blow away like Mary Poppins.

Yep, that's yeah.

She doesn't blow.

Have you seen the film?

She's not trying to help them out and suddenly, against her will, she's blown away into another land.

That's why the sequel's only 17 minutes long for a sad.

Yeah, opening lines where sorry about that.

Where were we?

No, it's that you know when you tilt it all the water can fall off onto someone else.

Oh can it?

That's a small problem.

You can hold it upside down.

What?

So the rain shader is this new, it basically looks like a motorbike helmet, but in umbrella form.

So it's white, it's open at the front, and then at at the back it's really low it's like wearing a big helmet that's sort of cut out at the front so that means you can't ever poke someone in the eye with it that's really good that's good no i don't think that would turn inside out either so i think it's solving more problems than i think it might yeah yeah

um

in harvard business school yeah um there's a paper that they wrote quite recently called toxic workers

And this is about superstar workers who outperform their colleagues by two to one or more, but who are awful to be around.

And they want to work out whether it's useful to have these kind of amazing workers or whether they do way too much harm than good.

What do you think?

Interesting.

What do we think of James?

The question we're being asked.

Apparently, according to them, it's better to hire two average employees than to keep one superstar on

payroll.

Do you guys know about the this has always been one of my favourite studies, the Harvard Grant study, which is this massive, it's famous longitudinal study, and it's followed 268 people for 80 years.

So it started following them when they were at Harvard, and it studies every tiny aspect of their lives.

And so it's told us so much about the decisions that you make and the personalities that you have, what impact that has on your life.

It's like an unbelievable level of detail.

So it measures things like the size of moles on their body and how many teaspoons of sugar they have in their tea and the hanging length of your scrotum.

And then they they sort of follow them and they eat that hanging length, guys.

As opposed to when you've got it pinned back.

Not going to trip over it.

No, just

so they measure all this and they find out, you know, are they successful?

Actually, JFK was one of the people who was originally in it.

So he was successful, but actually quite unlucky.

And at the moment, I think there are only about

not many of them left now.

Obviously, I think there were 19 left a couple of years ago.

All the ones with the longest scrotums, and that's the interesting thing.

If that was true.

It was the sole predictor of how you do in life.

No, because they all tripped over and concussed themselves years ago.

What they basically have found, or what the person who's in charge of it now says is the most important discovery, is that

your relationships are the most important predictor of health, mental and physical, but literally the most important, more important than cholesterol, more important than diet.

It's, you know, the warmth of your relationships.

And that dictates how much you'll earn in the end, and it dictates how successful you'll be and how happy you'll be.

Very good.

There we go.

Or it could just be that rich people can buy relationships.

Yeah, I think it's that.

What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo?

And Juliet, the new hit Broadway musical, and the most fun you'll have in a theater.

I got the I don't know the time!

Created by the Emmy-winning writer from Schitt's Creek and pop music's number one hitmaker.

And Juliet is exactly what we need right now.

Playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts.

Tickets now on sale at BroadwaySanjose.com.

Starting a business can be overwhelming.

You're juggling multiple roles.

Designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life.

But for millions of businesses, Shopify is the ultimate partner.

Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the US.

From household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started.

Build a stunning online store with Shopify's ready-to-use templates.

Boost content with AI-powered product descriptions, page headlines, and enhance photography.

Marketing is easy with built-in tools for email and social media campaigns.

Plus, Shopify simplifies everything from inventory to shipping and returns.

If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify.

Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com/slash try.

Go to shopify.com/slash try.

Shopify.com/slash try.

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

My fact is that when they are mating, male cuttlefish can flirt with one side of their body and simultaneously pretend to be a female with the other side of their body.

It's a really weird thing they do.

So, cuttlefish are mollusks in the ocean, aren't they?

They're kind of molluscs.

And they're a bit squiddy and a bit octopus-y.

They change the pattern of the skin all the time for camouflage, but they do it for lots of different reasons.

So, they might do it to avoid predators, or they sometimes do it even to catch prey.

But one thing they do is when they're courting,

male cuttlefish display, you know, courtship patterns to females on their bodies, but they don't want other males to fight them.

So they simultaneously make the back half of their body display a female pattern.

So a male who's standing behind the flirting male will think, oh, that's just two female cuttlefish having a chat with each other, and he won't get in the way.

But if it looks like it's a male chatting to a female, they might try and break it up.

But won't.

Is there no chance that the male cuttlefish will start flirting with the back of

the female camouflage?

That sometimes happens.

Yeah.

Because that would just be.

that could just be a long cue.

Well basically, yeah, that does happen.

So um

some males have harems of females which they guard jealously from challenges and other males disguise themselves to look females, sneak in, have sex with the real females and then sneak out.

But sometimes the disguised males look so good that the the alpha male will guard him as part of his harem.

So you can have a harem which has mostly males in it that's unbeknownst to you, all pretending to be females.

But they only look good from the back.

So they're just never never going around the front.

Strictly arse-based references.

They are amazing.

They're incredible.

They also have two prehensile tentacles, I think, on the front, which sometimes they hide.

They've got pockets under their eyes where they put them when they're not using them.

Get them grab stuff.

What's under their eyes?

Such a great place to have a pocket.

They're so weird.

It's so weird when you don't.

Because octopuses, I think we all know, are quite weird.

So when you talk about them, it's kind of...

But this is all all just like, what is this animal?

Are we just joking?

Are we lying?

It's got pockets under its eyes, turns its butt into a woman.

Like, come on.

The most amazing thing about cuttlefish, which people maybe know, and David Attima is very good at showing, is that they're disguises, right?

So they disguise themselves even better than the octopuses that can do it and other things.

And they can do it within a few milliseconds.

They can just change colour and they can give themselves stripes, like you say, kind of courting patterns.

It is incredible.

They can, as well as changing the colour, they can change from smooth to bumpy the skin.

Oh, wow.

which is a really cool idea yeah so they mimic the object that they might be camouflaging but not just colour but also the yeah the texture like covering yourself in warts something yeah exactly if you want to pretend to be a witch

a lot of those on the bottom of the ocean actually um i read it as they have the equivalent of hundreds of cocktail umbrellas under their skin so they can they have all these structures that they can sort of lock upright to make themselves look knobbly basically if they want to look like coral, for example.

And that camouflage, they can freeze it and lock it in place for up to an hour.

So they're changing it all the time, but they can just go, okay, I'm going to stay like this for an hour now.

Wow.

They're really weird and really cool.

It's crazy.

Yeah, and also these changes are to do with their mood and whether they're hungry or scared or whatever.

So you can look at the colours on a cuttlefish and work out what it's feeling.

That'll be useful in humans.

Good.

They can do a chessboard pattern?

No, they can't.

They can.

They can make themselves look exactly like a chessboard.

Why?

For when they need a camouflage next to a game of chess going on.

Because they can do the bumpy stuff as well.

Well, so you're saying they can do the pieces?

They can have an actual game on their own body.

That would be amazing.

That's very cool.

So can you explain the chessboard thing?

Why would they do that?

Well,

they've been tested by scientists.

There's no natural chessboard pattern, but it's just to show how versatile they are.

It's incredible.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And they can.

Richard Hammond, who used to be on Top Gear.

He could also do that.

But terribly, sadly, he doesn't know the rules.

It's a real shame.

No, he, as one of his shows, they put a cuttlefish in an underwater lounge, which they'd mocked up, which had also like a zebra-pattern sofa and stuff.

They were just putting a cuttlefish.

And that was in Richard Hammond's house, did you say?

No.

Sorry.

How does he come into this?

He was making a show and it was about cool animals or something.

and it featured an under they created an underwater lounge with all this stuff.

Richard Haven's lounge is not underwater.

And so, okay, so they perfectly mimicked a chessboard.

That is so cool.

It's really bizarre.

I mean, it wouldn't be perfect.

Don't get excited.

No, but I mean, I'm actually more excited by the experiment that we are taking non-underwater-based objects and seeing if they can mimic that, because you wouldn't naturally see that.

Yeah, I'm interested that they can...

I didn't realise they they could actually mimic stuff that they'd never seen before.

There might be half a dozen cuttlefish in this room now.

We don't know.

This entire building is cuttlefish from top to bottom.

My favourite cuttlefish is the bottom-dwelling flamboyant cuttlefish.

We'll say that again then.

The bottom-dwelling flamboyant cuttlefish.

God, if you've got something dwelling in your bottom, you don't want it to be flamboyant.

It's the only mollusk with a quadrupedal gait.

That's amazing.

Yeah, that is incredible.

The way they hunt is cool.

So they've got, if you you look at them, they look exactly like the oods from Doctor Who, and I know only Dan will know what I'm talking about, but that's what a lot of them look like.

And so they've got these sort of big long funnels on their nose.

And the way a lot of them catch prey is by blasting their funnel at the sand, and they'll blow up a prawn that's having a nap.

Wow.

And it just shoots up into the

prawns.

They don't have a nap.

I suppose they must do, right?

Everyone's got a nap.

Yeah.

They hunt in the day and prawns are nocturnal, so they're often asleep in the day.

What a horrible way to wake up, being blasted out of your bed into the mouth of a nude.

One thing about cuttlefish that might also be known is they give us sepia, they give us basically the look of Victorian photographs.

What?

Yeah, sepia ink.

So they have an ink sac.

There are three things that develop when they're in embryo.

The first three things develop are their two eyes, weird-shaped eyes, and then their ink sac.

And that's a defence mechanism, so they blast out ink as a last resort if they're being chased.

And that's where we get sepia.

It's our main source of that colour.

Still to this day, or the original.

Yeah, I think it's a good thing.

Wow, that's amazing.

So sepia is like that browny colour, isn't it?

Yeah, isn't it?

Yeah, that you put over photographs to make them look

Victorian

photo.

But wait, sorry, did that get used in the Victorian photo process?

We needed cuttlefish ink.

Yeah.

That's incredible.

That's amazing.

They're a handy, handy little guy.

You just wouldn't think there would be enough cuttlefish to make enough sepia for the Victorian photo industry.

There's so much cuttlefish.

And also, probably wasn't that big a industry in those days.

Oh, yeah.

It's not like mobile phones where everyone's got a camera these days.

That's true.

Anyone can be a puddle photographer these days.

All the art has been lost from the trade.

And it's not like every time you put a CPU filter over your iPhone photo, a cuttlefish has to die.

We've moved on.

There's no, like, when you go to Snappy Snap's huge tank full of cuttlefish.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that William of Orange's favourite drink was cock ale.

Which was?

Which was a drink.

It's made of ale with a cock in it.

A cockkerel, a rooster.

And it was, they put the rooster in when it was being brewed and the idea was that it would put something into the mix which would give you virility and it was like the red bull of its day almost.

And actually, the first known recipe for cock ale was in 1669, and it was written by a guy called Sir Kenel Digby.

Oh, yeah.

Who people who know the podcast might remember his father, Everard Digby, for kidding, who was one of the gunpowder plotters.

Everard

makes a return.

This is so exciting.

Yeah, Sir Kenelm Digby.

He wrote a lot of

cookbooks, and he invented bacon and eggs as well, actually.

Sorry, I think we give pigs a lot of the credit for bacon and chickens the credit for eggs.

He just invented putting them together.

That is his eggs.

I think if we cooked and ate me, for example, I wouldn't be able to claim credit for the recipe.

No, that's fair enough.

Yeah.

That's fair enough.

The recipe of this: take eight gallons of ale, take a cock and boil him well.

Then take four pounds of raisins of the sun well stoned, two or three nutmegs, three or four flakes of mace, half a pound of dates, beat all these with a mortar and put them in two quarts of the best sack.

I don't know what sack is.

And then, when the ale hath done working, put these in and stop it closed six or seven days, and then bottle it.

And after a month, you may drink it.

Wow.

So it's a bit like a mulled cock ale, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I think sack is a kind of wine, isn't it?

I think like sack.

Maybe fortified wine, I'm not sure.

Well, there's a there is a theory, which is a terrible theory, it can't be right, but

I know what you're going to say.

Yeah, I've read this theory.

Yeah, because they were adding, you know, this new element, ingredient to something that shouldn't be there.

Cock ale was effectively the origins of cocktail.

It's just not true.

It's not.

I'm saying it's a theory.

Where do you think it came from then, cocktail?

Oh, there are different.

I can't remember.

There are other bad theories as well, but that's worse.

Here's another bad theory.

So a cocktail used to be a horse with a docked tail because it looked a bit like a cock's comb.

And then it became a word for a horse of a mixed pedigree.

And then it became a drink because it had lots of mixes of different drinks in it.

That's one theory.

And H.

L.

Mencken thought that it came from the French coquetier, meaning egg cup, because you would drink it out of a very small cup cocktail.

Oh, I like that one.

That's my favourite so far.

I think none of them are true.

Yeah.

I can't believe we know who made bacon and eggs for the first time.

We've just kind of danced over that, but that's huge.

That's a big deal.

That's a big deal.

Someone else probably would have done it.

And actually, he was just writing down recipes, right?

So

he didn't invent.

I don't think he invented cock ale either.

I think he just wrote it down.

Okay.

Recipes were simpler then, weren't they?

You just wrote bacon, eggs,

and you went down in history.

No, they're really complicated.

Lots of them.

So there's a 1739 cock ale recipe in a book called The Complete Housewife, which is one of the first big household manuals.

And it starts with: take 10 gallons of ale and a large cock, the older the better.

But then you had to stamp on it in a mortar until its bones were broken.

Oh.

It said parboil the cock, flay it, and stamp him in a stone mortar.

My mortar's not big enough to be stamping around in.

Do you need a bigger mortar?

Another weird ingredient for old drinks.

Cider in the 16th century used to have sheep's blood added to it.

Cornwall sheep's blood.

I wonder at what point they realised that it's just nicer without the sheep's blood in it.

That one day they'd run out of sheep's blood and they just made cider.

You were laughed out of the pub if you suggested.

Do you think we could?

Yeah, so the sort of precursors to beer seem to all have been mulled spice beer.

I think our kind of beer that doesn't contain any spices and flavours is the anomaly in history, really.

So you see all these recipes for kind of heating up beer.

They always were adding cinnamon and cloves and nutmeg and ginger.

Another thing they added almost always, if you look back to beer recipes, if you look in all old books and stuff or from the 1600s, 1700s, toast.

So they always put toast on top of beer, didn't they?

Floated it.

Yeah, so they'll say like, you know, do this.

It's like a crouton in a soup, basically.

Like giant croutons.

Yeah.

I'd like a crouton.

In a pint?

Well, I like beer and I like croutons.

There we go.

It seems likely that I'd like both these things.

I think you'd love the 1600s.

It's hard, though, isn't it?

Most beer glasses, most pints are not quite big enough for a full slice of toast to float on the surface.

No.

No, but these beers were fitting entire roosters in them.

The vessels were big.

What was the point of the toast?

Well, one recipe I read explained why the toast was there.

It said it claps the white waistcoat on a cup of good drink.

Oh, brilliant.

That's really clear.

Thank you.

Yeah, great.

Oh,

yeah.

The white waistcoat.

Oh, well.

We all understand that.

I was reading about just the consumption of alcohol in the 1600s, and I found this thing that Parliament passed.

It was an act that I'd not heard of.

It was the Act to Repress the Odious and Loathsome Sin of Drunkenness.

It was because everyone was just getting so drunk all the time.

The wording of that is just stunning.

Yeah.

So,

yeah, so hops, which were medicinal plants,

they'd been added to beers, and I think that was a way around of

saying that you were doing it for medical purposes as opposed to it being, yeah, just getting drunk.

Oh, yeah, and they didn't like hops.

In Britain, they really didn't like hops.

So, when we talk about a beer from thousands of years ago, it's not beer like we know it.

So, beer, to be classified as beer now, has to be made with hops.

But they only actually came to England in the 1400s, I think, from the the Netherlands.

And everyone thought they were a bit poisonous and they were a bit weird.

So that's, you know, it's the plant that adds the bitter taste to beer.

And actually, the first person to describe hops scientifically and talk about how they were used in beer was a woman.

It was a Christian botanist and abbess who was called Hildegard of Bingen.

I've heard of her, actually.

Yeah, she was a big deal.

She was quite revolutionary in the beer industry.

Did she see lots of...

Oh, I can't remember about her now.

I think she saw lots of visions and stuff, didn't she?

Is that the same Hildegard?

Oh, maybe not.

Is there more than one Hildegard?

Can't be that many.

There was one who saw lots of visions and then wrote one of the first books or something.

Maybe it was a different one.

Yeah.

No, it might have been her.

I don't know.

She was big.

She wasn't actually a fan of hops, even though she knew how they were used.

She said, they make the soul of man sad and weigh down his inner organs.

Whoa.

That's kind of what it feels like after seven pints.

There is a thing,

I can't remember exactly what it is, but in Germany you're only allowed three ingredients in beer to this day.

Really?

I think it's hops, water and what would it be, barley?

Barley, yeah.

And I think that it's really strict and they've had hundreds and hundreds of years of rules about this.

So there was the Brauordnung in 16th century Bavaria where you weren't allowed to make beer between the 23rd of April and 29th of September.

So no brewing allowed because

breweries caught fire very easily because they were all made of wood and uh there were lots of coal fires to heat them up so it was it was bad for fires so they banned it but they you had to have cellars to store beer from the winter so that you could drink it in the summer and the breweries stored them in big underground uh cellars and then above ground they planted trees to keep them shady because they wanted to keep the cool in the cellars and then they started adding tables and gravel to these

above ground tree areas and that's the beginning of the beer garden.

Oh, wow.

Really?

So yeah, the beer garden comes from this ban on brewing in the summer.

And it was actually for beer, really, the beer garden, not for us.

Yeah, we're in someone else's garden.

Yeah.

Better rid of the beer.

So just speaking of German beer, you know Pilsner?

Yes.

You know where that name comes from?

I thought it was a place or something, is it?

So it is a place.

It's from Pilsen, which is one of Europe's first beer brewing capitals.

And Pilsen, it was called Pilsen when it became this beer brewing capital.

And that is because that was the German word for henbane, which is like a really deadly poisonous plant.

But they used to put that in beer all the time.

So they would brew beer with henbane.

Does that not make it really?

I mean, that is really

poisonous.

Yeah, it's very dangerous.

What were they doing with beer for hundreds of years?

Let's put cockerels in it.

Let's put sheep's blood in it and poison.

There was no...

No wonder they went three ingredients.

That's it from now on.

But a little bit of poison?

No.

No.

It gave you hallucinations.

If you managed to escape death, it was quite fun.

So that's where Pilsner comes from, is after Henbane, because that was a crucial ingredient of deadly beer.

Whoa, very cool.

Just one last weird origin thing.

So you mentioned that that beer brewing book, you mentioned earlier, a beer brewing book was for a housewife.

Beer brewing was like sort of solely a women's thing across the world wherever beer was brewed until pretty recently, until basically the 15 1600s when hops actually came in so the ale wife is a thing because it was always the woman who would do the cooking beer in the house brewing the beer women would control the breweries for instance in ancient Egypt they all had their own breweries women would be in charge and so they were the main became the main beer sellers and barmaids still in sort of Dickensian novels and women so women would start making surplus beer because they'd been making it for the home and then they would go and sell it so they'd put greenery over their doors and in some cases, they'd put a broom up against their door, which signified that you were selling beer.

And they would stand on the corner and they'd advertise their beer by wearing a tall hat.

And

they would often have a pet cat who would chase the pests away.

I'm just a cuttlefish.

Well,

is that a theory?

This is where the witch image comes from.

Yeah, so the tall hat said, I'm the beer-selling lady, I'm the ale wife.

And they all had cats.

They had a cat to to chase away pests because otherwise they ate the grain with which they made the beer.

They were all testing out crazy ingredients like Eye of Newt and stuff.

Yeah,

the test was hallucinogenic.

There you go, stirring it around in their cauldrons.

Or their massive mortars.

Yes.

Yeah.

Oh, my goodness.

And thence came the witch.

Really?

Wow.

Yeah, it's a thought that I haven't made up.

What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo?

And Juliet, the new hit Broadway musical and the most fun you'll have in a theater.

I got the I Netheart!

Created by the Emmy-winning writer from Schitt's Creek and pop music's number one hit maker.

And Juliet is exactly what we need right now.

Playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts.

Tickets now on sale at BroadwaySanjose.com.

Starting a business can be overwhelming.

You're juggling multiple roles: designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life.

But for millions of businesses, Shopify is the ultimate partner.

Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S., from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started.

Build a stunning online store with Shopify's ready-to-use templates.

Boost content with AI-powered product descriptions, page headlines, and enhance photography.

Marketing is easy with built-in tools for email and social media campaigns.

Plus, Shopify simplifies everything from inventory to shipping and returns.

If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify.

Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash try.

Go to shopify.com/slash try.

Shopify.com/slash try.

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

My fact this week is that after five months of forensically analyzing the indents made by a pen on paper, Dorset Police managed to recover 26 pages of lost words by a blind novelist who hadn't realized that her pen had run out of ink.

That is

quite remarkable.

Yeah, it's pretty extraordinary.

This was an author called Trish Vickers.

It was her first book that she was writing.

She had gone blind through diabetes, and she decided that she wanted to pass her time by writing a book.

So she created a system and she did it longhand with pen.

She created a system where she had elastic bands along the paper.

She would write out the pages and then her son would come at the end of the week and he would transcribe them onto a Word document or whatever he chose.

So he came one week after she'd had this burst of inspiration.

She wrote 26 pages, but he discovered these blank pages sitting there.

And it turns out the pen had run out.

She was devastated.

He was devastated because she'd written such great stuff.

And it is quite funny and it's incredibly funny

thank you james for pointing that out

yeah so she was very upset and um they got in touch with the police to say can you do anything about this and um yeah and they arrested the pen manufacturer

Yeah, so actually it's very sweet at Dorset Police Station, someone said they would look through the pages with the special light that they use for forensics to see the little markings that the pen would have left on the page, the little dents.

And they spent five months.

Now, it wasn't five months of intense analysis.

The burglars in Dorset at the time were just having a field day.

It was, I believe it was one person who did it on her lunch break for five months.

Although, if you're a burglar, having a field day is probably a very bad day for you.

Burglars call it having a house full of electronic equipment day.

But so she managed to get the book done.

It was called Granifer's Legacy.

Sadly, she actually passed away before she could hold a physical copy in her hands, but it was published two hours prior to her passing away, the physical copies.

Yeah, so she just missed out by two hours.

She knew it was being published.

She knew, and I think she held a proof in her hand.

So I thought that the only method, you know, when you make indentations on paper,

you can kind of read it, or you can shade over it with a pencil, and that kind of shows up because it doesn't, the pencil shading doesn't fill the indentations.

Do you know how the police do it?

They have a special wand.

So, first of all, they don't do the pencil thing, do they?

Because that could damage the evidence.

Right.

But they have this device they've invented called an electrostatic detection apparatus.

And they basically, documents which are charged with static, a piece of paper charged with static, builds up more charge in the furrows where the pencil is indented, or the pen is indented, than on the flat.

And even

really microscopic, non-visible to the naked eye furrows exist.

So they put the document document on this plate and then they pass a wand charged with electricity over it and then they apply this mist of toner and the toner just gravitates towards the furrows and you fill in a page of writing that way.

Wow.

It's basically a magic wand.

So they sort of they sort of charge up the indents

that have got all the static.

That's insane.

Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah, super cool.

It's quite similar to fingerprinting, right?

That kind of process, where with fingerprinting you can kind of do it yourself.

So apparently a really good substance for putting over fingerprints so you can see them is raw cocoa powder.

If you want to do it, you can use raw cocoa powder or talcum powder.

But you're not going to have the database of the entire country at home, are you?

All you're just going to see is a fingerprint that you can't really recognise.

Yeah, but you can definitely, if it's like who took my chocolate bar, you can definitely get your family's fingerprints, I reckon, and in your room and then compare them.

It's a real insight into Alice Childhood.

Yeah, definitely would have done that.

The

system, the magic wand system that you talked about um is called the electrostatic detection apparatus ESDA and it was invented by two DJs.

Wow, cool.

Um they were called DJ Foster and DJ Morantz.

They weren't disc jockeys, it was just their names.

Oh, okay.

I was thinking they were bored in the booth one day.

No, it it's just a coincidence that they had the same two initials and I thought it was quite funny.

That is very funny.

It was a good setup.

You had us going.

You had us going in the first half.

We did not see it coming.

And I was thinking, those are pretty boring names for DJs, aren't they?

TJ Foster.

Can I just say one more thing on ESDA?

So ESDA is kind of famous because it's what...

Do you remember the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad got into a lot of trouble for faking people's confessions?

The Birmingham pub bombings.

Oh, yeah.

They got...

The Birmingham Six?

Yeah, they got released because of that.

And it was using ESDA that they found that the police were making these fake confessions.

Oh, really?

Ah, very cool.

That's funny, but true.

Val McDermott actually has written a book on forensics, which sounds really good.

I was reading a summary of it.

So she's the

sort of crime writer, isn't she?

Of fiction, yeah.

Yeah, of fiction.

But this is a factual book.

And so there's loads of good facts in there, but there's the story of the arsonist called John Orr, which I didn't know about.

He was quite a big criminal in the 1980s.

He was basically a fireman and who ended up being done for burning down loads and loads of houses.

Because if you're a fireman, you know how.

So I think he was suspected in more than a thousand fires in California.

And he was eventually caught.

He was caught partly because of forensics.

So they matched a fingerprint on one bit of sort of half-burned match that he'd used.

Wow.

But he was also caught.

So do you think they went, we've got a match?

And they went,

yeah, we can see that.

So good.

There was two hours of confusion there

between Laurel and Hardy, the fire.

So, another thing that tipped them off that he might be responsible was that he'd written a novel called Points of Origin that contained a highly detailed description of the same fire that they were investigating.

Bore several striking similarities.

And also, the fire that he was done for in 1984, everyone who investigated it said this is an accidental fire, and he kept insisting that no, it was arson.

So, it's like he really had this desire for people.

Do you think he was one of these people who deliberately set fires so they can go and put them out?

Because that does happen.

We did that.

It's called something like hero syndrome.

Maybe.

Well, he's not a hero now.

He is serving a long jail sentence.

Very much a zero.

Nice.

That's what the judge said when he passed the sentence.

You were in a zero.

I would love to be one of those comedy judges that just said something funny just as setting them down.

I didn't know that comedy judge was a career, actually.

Is that a thing?

Yeah, well, it's not.

No, you don't apply to be the comedy judge.

You're just a regular judge who happens to have a bit of fun.

There was that guy who got done for,

he got done for something, but he loved the Beatles, and the judge sentenced him using as many Beatles lyrics.

Oh, that's so naff.

What did he do?

I can't remember.

Maybe he stole from the tax man.

Yeah.

Brilliant.

Yeah, you probably were.

It was probably a cry for help.

You may have have had a hard day's night in your hello submarine.

Wait, was the criminal fan of the Beatles?

Yeah.

Okay, got it, got it.

So it was kind of like the Beatles were sending him down.

That is really harsh.

You shouldn't have used your revolver

for other big albums.

It's getting dark.

Yeah.

You've got a rubber soul.

Yeah, because you know, it's like a bad soul.

Oh, a robber's soul.

A rubber soul.

A robber's soul is better.

A robber's soul.

A robber's soul is better.

I mean, none of of these are good, are they?

Oh, the comedy judges focusing.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

James, at James Harken, and Jasinski.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep.

You can go to our group account at no such Thing or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We have links up there for our upcoming tour.

You can also find all of our previous episodes there.

We will be back again next week with another episode.

Thank you so much for listening.

Goodbye.

What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo?

And Juliet, the new hit Broadway musical and the most fun you'll have in a theater.

I got the ID!

Created by the Emmy-winning writer from Schitt's Creek and pop music's number one hit maker.

Ann Juliet is exactly what we need right now.

Playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts.

Tickets now on sale at BroadwaySanjose.com.

As a mom, you know your home is where your family learns to love, where your little kids learn who they are, and where your bigger kids remember who they were.

It's where dreams are born and come to life.

Your home deserves a spotlight, and Everlights makes that happen.

Everlights is your permanent external lighting expert.

With Everlights, your home can become a princess castle, a summer oasis, or celebration of even the littlest wins.

And with Everlights limited time 20% off deal, you'll be the hero of your home and your checkbook.

Let's give your home some color with Everlights.

Go to myeverlights.com to get a free quote today.