250: No Such Thing As The Mysterious Chamber

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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 Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, 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 you, Andy.

My fact is that in 1833, the pyramid at Giza was almost dismantled by the Pasha of Egypt so that he could use the stones to build a dam.

That's brilliant.

That's amazing.

And why did he not do it in the end?

He was talked out of it.

Someone said, are you sure you want to destroy the most ancient site in the world?

So this was in 1833, and it was when Egypt was Ottoman ruled, so it wasn't a local Egyptian ruler exactly.

And he was called Muhammad Ali Pasha.

And he, you know, did a sort of cost-benefit analysis, or he commissioned one from a civil servant to see how much it would cost.

And the civil servant was a Frenchman, and he thought maybe it wasn't a good idea for the pyramid to be destroyed.

And his name was Linol, Louis Maurice Adolphe Linol, and he was really young.

It was one of his first jobs.

But I think he, you know, the story goes that he thought maybe this isn't a great idea.

So he came up with this cost-benefit analysis which said, look, this is going to be quite expensive, and some of the stone isn't quite right.

And I know it's pre-cut, and I know that's really convenient, obviously.

But maybe don't do it.

They did actually take some blocks, didn't they, from one of the pyramids?

Yeah, it was one of the great pyramids, wasn't it?

You can see that big gash down the side of it.

So it was the pyramid of Menkauray,

and it was a guy called Sultan al-Aziz Uthman, and he was in the 12th century, and he decided to demolish the pyramids because he thought that they were not according to his religion, let's put it that way.

And they took a few stones every day, and after eight months, they gave up after just, like Dad says, just this tiny little gash on the side of the pyramid, because they just realized that these things are absolutely massive.

So I was looking up people visiting the pyramids, and because this is about them in the 19th century.

So it turns out that people have been...

scribbling on the pyramids for many, many years.

And Flaubert, Gustave Flaubert, a great French writer, visited Egypt in 1850 and he was so annoyed by all the graffiti everywhere.

He wrote to his uncle, he said there was a huge number of imbeciles' names written everywhere.

And then he went to Alexandria, he was really excited about Alexandria, and then he wrote back saying, A certain Thompson of Sunderland has inscribed his name in letters six feet high on Pompeii's column.

It can be read a quarter of a mile off.

There is no way of seeing the column without seeing the name of Thompson.

This imbecile has become part of the monument and is perpetuated with it.

Yeah, I saw that.

And then I also thought, well, let me see if I can find out who Thompson from Sunderland is.

So I was googling for, I spent quite a lot this morning doing this, actually.

But I tried to find people called Thompson from Sunderland around that time.

And what I reckon is there was a shipbuilder called Thompson.

And he started his company about 15 years before this happened and eventually became quite a big shipbuilder in Sunderland.

And my guess is that is the kind of person who would leave Sunderland and go to Egypt, to Alexandria, where this was.

And maybe, maybe that was an advert for Thompson of Sunderland rather than him writing his name because it's in such big writing, it's six feet high.

Yeah.

That would make quite a lot of sense, I think.

And also, if he's a shipbuilder, he's got the tools to do it, probably.

Yeah, the Victorians, when they were touristing all over it, they got much more access than we did.

So they would be able to climb up all the time.

And that was actually what they did.

And they had picnics on top.

So there are lots of pictures of Victorians with big picnic tables and drinking champagne on top of pyramids.

Way more fun.

Well, during World War II, that's one of the only stories I know of my grandfather during World War II.

He was very young, but he got into it by lying about his age.

And he was a post deliveryman, and he used to go past the pyramids every day on his run.

So he was stationed in Egypt.

And on days when there was not much post, he used to go and just sit on the pyramids and have his lunch and just watch out.

Yeah, so even then, World War II, I guess, you know.

See World War II.

Yeah.

Because they did the same thing in World War I.

The Anzacs, they were there and they used to have races up the pyramids.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Which are quite hard to climb.

It looks like little steps, but obviously when you're there, they're really big, the logs.

The first European visitors, they were offered sharp objects to make their own marks by Arab guides, as in, you know, to write your little graffiti and stuff like that.

Cool.

You don't get that anymore.

Yeah, that's like Stonehenge.

They used to do that.

Yes, they did.

Yeah, we used to mention.

You got given a pickaxe and a

chisel.

Yeah, not a pickaxe.

I changed them all.

I went to Stonehenge at one of these times where they let you go before all the tourists tourists get there.

And if you even look like you're slightly touching one of these stones, they are not happy at all.

They're really, really.

And even if you try and

imagine someone was to do this, try and hide behind one of the stones so that the people in charge can't see you.

They quickly run around to make sure that you're not touching anything.

Those druids are pretty nifty, aren't they?

Don't end up in druid prison.

What is it?

They chop your hands off?

Well, I never touched it, Anna, so I wouldn't know.

Of course.

Of course not.

A lot of inscriptions on the pyramids are from the Greek Roman period

there is one which says I visited and I did not like anything except the sarcophagus and then another one says I cannot read the hieroglyphs

exactly there's in the article that I read which was admittedly from the Daily Mail they said that it was quite similar to trip advisor in its day so

What I find the most amazing thing actually about the pyramids is that we don't know what's inside them still.

So we've gone to outside of the solar system and yet still in the main pyramid in Giza we don't even know what's inside it.

There was that discovery last year that

there's a massive chamber inside it.

There's a cavity that's 30 meters long and it's above the what's called the Grand Gallery.

So there's like two like rooms, chambers where they thought the king and the queen were probably kept, although they were all stolen, so we're not totally sure.

And then they've just done this technique where they use these sensors that send these particles called muons and see what directions they're bouncing off the pyramid in.

And there's this massive chamber we don't know about.

And I actually think, which is what one Egyptologist said, that that's where the bodies are.

Because they said that they think, because they put lots of kind of fake things in there anyway, because they really wanted to deter robbers.

So they said, oh, yeah, this is the king's chamber here.

But actually, I bet.

Maybe that's where the aliens are.

Exactly.

And the aliens, well, hanging out with king and queen.

Yeah, of course you would.

This new chamber that they found, isn't it the case that it's so mysterious that they can't even call it a chamber?

they call it the void or something like that well I think they're doing that to pique your curiosity rather than it's so mysterious they just know it's a big they're not allowed to call it a chamber it's not a chamber it doesn't it doesn't fit the word when I read when I was gonna read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets I'm like well where's the secrets of chamber it should be called the void of secrets

I was

do you know what mummy wheat is Mummy wheat yeah no so we've covered I think before the mummy craze where in the Victorian times people had mummy unwrapping ceremonies and they had brass bands accompanying it and it was all very exciting and amazing people like Mummy Brown and Mummy Whoever or Mummy Pettigrew.

So mummy wheat was wheat that was grown from seeds which had allegedly been found in mummies' bandages.

And this was a craze.

People got really excited about wheat that was allegedly from 3,000 years ago growing into proper plants.

And there were all these articles published about, for example, ancient cobs of corn.

Because, you know, oh, we've got ancient Egyptian sweet corn growing.

And obviously, it was almost certainly not true.

You don't want your food ancient most of the time, do you?

I can see it's kind of exciting.

They'd also, when they're mummifying people, I think, you know, you learn in school that they put a hook up your nose and they take your brains out and stuff.

And they also took your eyeballs out and they often replaced them with various things.

So they replace your eyeballs with shells or with linen, apparently, or with painted onions.

Various of the most famous furrows were found with just painted onions instead of eyes.

Cool.

It's quite quite weird.

That is cool.

They're quite fun.

Like kind of a snowman or something.

What vegetable is most like an eye?

They didn't have carrots for noses, though, did they?

Well, we don't know.

They haven't checked it out.

I was quickly looking into...

Because this is a famous monument that was almost destroyed, if this guy's planned went forward.

And I was looking at other monuments that have almost been destroyed.

So the Colosseum,

that got hit by lightning in the year 217, which caused huge destruction.

And as a result,

they just started pillaging the actual Coliseum.

So, two-thirds of it went, and then something was put in place to say, stop, this is now, we're keeping this as is, so we got to keep that.

The Washington Monument was almost destroyed even before it was fully made, when all the materials were being donated.

The Pope donated a beautiful rock to go to it.

But there was a group in America.

He's got so much stuff.

Generous, man.

You're humble, though.

Humble.

I'm sorry, I'm so humble.

I can only give you this nice rock.

Yeah, it was Pope Pius IX, and he gave a rock.

I'm so pious, I'm so pious.

And it was a party that were known as the Know-Nothings, and the Know-Nothings tried to prevent it.

So they, yeah, so what they did was they stole the rock that the Pope gave and they dumped it into the Potomac River.

And then eventually, further down the line, the Know-Nothings became the actual company that were building it and bankrupt them so that they weren't able to do it.

And eventually, got there, you know, they weren't able to stop it.

Can I just ask, is this amazing rock that the Pope gave still in the river?

I think they got it out.

I think they eventually found it.

Yeah.

Because you're not going to leave a Pope's rock in a river, are you?

Yeah,

they think some people within it admitted to where it was and where they'd thrown it.

After all, that's that one river.

There's all these normal rocks around it.

The one so beautiful.

It's wearing the hat, I think.

So, what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

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Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that psychologist Herman Rorschach thought his test wouldn't work on teenagers as they were the same as psychopaths.

Yeah, so this is uh the man who invented the Rorschach ink blot.

If you can think of any time you've been shown some weird ink blots, that's the man who created

them have at some stage in our life.

Yeah, when we've had our psychological testing, we've all done that, right?

Yeah, And

he, yeah, it was a thing that he wasn't sure how it worked.

He wasn't sure if it worked, but he definitely thought it couldn't work with teenagers because it just was, they were too, particularly 14-year-olds, they were just too unpredictable and it was just too similar in characteristics to a psychopath.

What are the characteristics then in a 14-year-old that he thought made them similar to a psychopath?

I think it's emotional turbulence and it's a crazy mixed up time and there's all sorts of stuff going on and things are changing, you know?

Things are changing, growing.

Yeah, you guys need to have some more psychological testing.

Um, yes, so um, I think he did think it worked, but like you say, he didn't know why it worked.

Um, but a lot of the people in Germany at the time did not think it worked, uh, and they called his blobs crude.

We got the blobs, what are they called blobs?

This is taking me right back to my own teenage years, having your blobs called crude.

And he very sadly died at the age of 37, 37 yeah which as an over 37 year old is absolutely heartbreaking uh and but then it was the year after he died that they kind of got a bit of um recognition in the community and still today I suppose we don't know if they work or not probably they don't really but he didn't think they worked for detecting personality types really in the way that they are kind of sometimes used today so we should say the Rorschach test it's when you get shown an ink blot and it's sort of a mirror image because it's when paper's been folded over with wet ink and then you're asked what you see in it.

Do you see a cow?

Do you see someone being brutally murdered?

Do you just see a blob?

And he invented this.

He's a beautiful, beautiful stone at the bottom of a river.

All right, Pope, get out.

We've got more patience to see.

If that was sort of the result,

this person is the Pope.

Two options.

Imagine whenever you had to get a new Pope.

That's what they did.

They got this Trojan test and just waited for someone to say that, Christ, Christ, pointy hat, wafer.

He's the Pope.

But yeah, he didn't think that it determined whether you were the Pope or whether you were a smart person or a horrible person or whatever.

He just thought it could diagnose schizophrenia.

So he was a psychiatrist and he just noticed he'd been really into these things as a kid and he noticed that schizophrenics had different responses to them than normal people.

So he just thought, you know, you could spot a schizophrenic.

Yeah, he was so into them, by the way, that as a child, when he was at school, his nickname was Inkblot.

Not that actually, as a word, it was Kleck.

But that was, yeah.

So it was a children's game originally.

It was called Klexography, and he got nicknamed Kleck, and you just you did exactly the same thing.

You poured ink on a bit of paper, you folded it, and then you saw what images you could make.

It was like looking at clouds or something like this.

I didn't really get this, so it's not about whether you see, as Anna says, a murderer or a flower in the image.

He was really interested in what kind of things people saw.

So he said there were three categories, which were form, movement, and colour.

So form is whether you see a donkey or a bear or a knife or whatever.

And then movement is whether you see, you know, a donkey offering a man a sandwich or something.

Or whatever.

A dancing woman.

Yeah, a dancing woman is better than a donkey offering a man a sandwich.

But his main interest in all of this was whether the answer was good or poor.

So he basically, he thought, right, I think these look like particular things.

And if you see something which is broadly moth-like and you say a moth or one of another...

you know, reasonably appropriate answer, then you're probably fine.

And if not, then that's maybe problematic.

That's a problematic indicator for your personality.

Yeah.

And we should also say that it's not a case of putting ink on a bit of paper and then folding it over.

The blots are actually quite specific, aren't they?

Yeah.

So they have to look blottish, because if they look deliberately crafted, then people might think, well, there's a specific answer that I need to go for.

But also, he didn't want brushstroke, so it looked like someone had painted it.

So they're quite specific.

Yeah, and what's amazing, this was 1921 that he created them.

So they really kicked off in 37, but they're still used to this day.

And it's the exact same 10 ink plots that he created in 1921.

So, even though maybe people are thinking, oh, we can advance this as an idea, they still have not gone any further than the 10 he created.

Yeah, so if anyone shows you them, don't say, for instance, television, because there was no televisions then.

Don't say iPhones, because there were no iPhones.

You have to think, I need to go for something that was around in the 1920s.

So, like the end of the war,

the Wall Street crash, you might just say

an iPhone or a television, they'll say this man is insane or prophetic.

Yeah.

Have you guys done it?

I did.

I've done the first few.

You didn't have the patience to do the full ten.

Well actually I wanted to save myself in case I need to be tested in future with a Rorschach test because they got really funny about people.

So they were published in a book in the 70s and a lot of doctors who believed in them and used them said, this is going to to completely screw up our results because it came with answers of what to say and what not to say.

Yeah, I did it today.

Did anyone else do it today?

We did it of a Christmas dinner last year.

Oh, did you?

Yeah.

So, what did you, did it give you a pissing?

I got taken away by a dinner.

I can't remember, actually.

But it was just like, you know, these days, a lot of people use it as like a parlor game, don't they?

Yeah.

I don't know, maybe up in your household.

We just get pissed on Christmas Day and eat pudding.

But I'll do the Raulschach test this Christmas.

Maybe it's more fun.

Well, I did it today, and it gives you a sickness percentage at the end of how sick it thinks you are.

You did the BuzzFeed version.

Yeah, you didn't do it.

You won't believe blob number seven.

But no, I got 66%, which it says is a little worrisome.

Well, do you know how many out of the 10 were worrisome?

Because there's a very specific way that you're supposed to do it.

So the proper test is there are 10 things.

And if you get...

more than four images classified as worrisome, then it is, you might be verging on schizophrenic.

And then less than four is fine, and the average is two.

So if you look at the graph, so it might be that if you got 66%, you saw three images that were worrisome, but that puts you right in normal.

Right.

So you don't know how many you got out of ten?

No, it was it wasn't BuzzFeed, it was something not as classy as that.

It didn't really have any kind of

viruses like anything like that.

They tried it on computers, on robots, didn't they, quite recently?

They gave a load of inkbots to robots.

Robot one saw one and said it was a mask.

Robot two saw one and said it was a pin.

Robot three said it meant isolated.

And robot four said this is the Rorschach test.

Wait, I'm a minute.

Imagine if you went into the psychologist's office and said, what do you see here?

I see the Rorschach test.

I just say that for every single answer.

Poor old Robot 3.

No one's worrying about him, though.

Sounds like he needs some help.

Yeah.

Good point.

So I looked at some other psychological tests from the 20th century.

Okay.

And some of them are pretty weird.

um so there's the rosenzweig picture frustration study from 1978 and this is really fun so it gives you lots of cartoon images and it's um people who are in frustrating situations all men by the way people in frustrating situations all men and one bubble from the other person who is the frustrator in all of these cartoon scenarios is already filled in and you have to fill in your response as the man who is being frustrated so can i it would it be like someone whose car is being given a ticket by a traffic warden or something like that?

Exactly, yeah.

So there's an example of someone on a train and someone, a woman is saying to him, Here's the newspaper I borrowed.

I'm sorry the baby tore it.

So these are, I think, relatively minor frustrations in the lives.

If you punch the baby, then you're fine.

You have to fill in the cartoon bubble.

I'm about to punch that baby.

Is that what you say?

Yeah, that would that would be a conc a mark of concern.

I mean what page of the newspaper was it cut as long as it wasn't the uh crossword, that would be pretty bad.

okay so you would write was it the crossword page he taught if it is I'm going to punch the baby

yeah or the sports pages

or actually the T V review I wanted to read that yeah so there was that one which sounds uh pretty good there was the nineteen forty two make a picture story test this is really fun so it gives you sixty seven little

pe little people

in on paper who are cut out and there are all sorts of different people and there are humans, and there are ghosts, there's a superhero, there's a one-legged man, there's a cocker spaniel, there's a policeman, there's Santa Claus, there are women, some women clothed, some women naked, and you have to make a scene with them, and then you make up a story about the scene, and the psychologist analyzes the scene.

The first thing that came into my head was, you know, do you remember the Benny Hill show?

So the naked woman is running, and then Santa Claus and the one-legged man, and the cockspaniel are all running after him.

Sorry, so what does that mean?

I think that means that you fell into a coma in the 70s and you haven't been able to update your memory ever since.

Personality tests did get really popular around that time, though.

It was sort of the 40s when the Rorschach test and other stuff became a thing, and the idea of a character making you good at your job.

And so, in the 50s, people would often get tested on their personalities when they were applying for jobs, but they were looking for different stuff in the 50s.

It was that era where everyone was quite grey,

and the traits that people wanted as employers were things like being really hardworking and diligent, very loyal, very conformist.

And in fact, in the early 50s, the Navy put out a handbook with the proper way to deal with a dissenting colleague, if you're in an office or a conference or whatever.

And this is what it said.

So if a colleague dissents or disagrees, fail to hear his objections.

Or if you must hear them, misunderstand them.

The aim is to make him feel like he belongs.

It just seems a bizarre way to achieve that.

And then it says: if he persists, ask him to clarify his position, and then ask him to clarify his clarification, etc., etc., until our lad is so hot and bothered that he's worked himself into the role of conference comedian.

So basically, ignore, ignore, ignore, humiliate.

Was that the British Navy?

Yeah, it was the Navy.

This is the best way to deal with colleagues.

Actually, ignore, ignore, ignore, humiliate does seem like your role on this podcast

to the rest of us.

It's the only book I've ever read is this Hunter.

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

My fact this week is that Robert Falcon Scott's dying wish was for his son to get into nature.

Peter Scott went on to found the World Wildlife Fund and designed its panda logo.

Very, very cool.

How nice is that?

So

this is when Scott was in the South Pole.

He was stuck in his tent.

He was 100% sure he was about to to die.

So he thought he'd write a few letters, as you do.

And his last letter was to his wife.

So it's 1912.

He's cold in a tent.

He's managing somehow to get his hand around a pen.

And he says to his wife, make sure when you're raising our son, make the boy interested in nature.

And that boy was Peter Scott.

And yeah, he founded the WWF.

Very exciting, this fact, isn't it?

Because two sort of seminal things, polar exploration and conserving animals, are connected.

And I had no idea through one generation.

Well, two generations.

So, Robert Falken Scott, we should say, he made it, didn't he, to the South Pole with his team, but they weren't the first there, they were beaten by the Norwegians, and then on the way back, they were close to a depot, but they were only about 10 miles away, and then he died.

And he wrote all these letters in the tent just as they were dying.

Yes, and the letter says, Make the boy interested in natural history if you can.

It is better than games.

Although he was quite good at games in the end, because he won a bronze medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics in the O Jolly Dinghy class of sailing.

So he was a dingy sailor.

That was one of the big hitters, wasn't it?

Yeah, in the Olympics.

Well, he's the reigning bronze medalist, isn't he?

Because they never did it again.

It was the one and only time the O Dinghy got an outing at the Olympics.

So that's a cool record.

He's an amazing character, Peter Scott.

Never properly heard of him before, but someone who's, at one point, I think in the UK was a household name.

A lot of older listeners might actually go, yeah, of course we know who he is.

He was on a lot of natural history TV for the BBC.

In fact, back in the day, he was on the very first colour TV program from the natural history department.

And that was in 1968.

It was called The Private Life of the Kingfisher, and he narrated it.

Oh, I see.

Because kingfishers are quite colourful, because you wouldn't go for the private life of the zebra or something like that, would you?

They've deliberately chosen an animal which is quite colorful.

Yes.

Well, just on that point,

it is said, I got told this by my friend Simon Watt, mentioned it years and years ago on this podcast, but supposedly one of the reasons for picking the panda as the logo for WWF was the fact that it was black and white.

So printing costs when they were printing out the, you know, with headers would be cheaper.

That's clever.

They could have just picked something really, really small, like a microbe, and then it would just be a printing just one dot.

That'd be cheaper, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

It would.

It's a bit less evocative, isn't it?

Yeah, it saves the dot.

Yeah.

It's important, though.

One other thing he did, he gave the Loch Ness monster a name, a proper scientific name.

He called it Nesitoras rhombopteryx,

allegedly so it could be registered as endangered, which

I guess it is.

Now, if I'd said he'd given him a proper scientific name, you would have jumped down my throat there and said, it's not real.

I know what you mean.

I think

it was a joke, was it, or not?

I don't know if he was joking or not.

Well, you know, there was that whole thing about the name that he did give it.

So it was an ancient Greek name for the monster of the nest with the diamond-shaped fin, and that came out as...

Mr.

Duras Rhombopteryx.

Yes.

And supposedly, when someone looked into it, they found that there was an anagram of monster hoax by Sir Peter S.

Oh, well, in that case, it probably was a joke.

Well, no, I mean, I mean, anagrams, you could, you can, James always is saying this, you can make anagrams out of anything.

Well, we did say this in a recent podcast, didn't we?

We did a load of anagrams, anagrams, and people can be very clever in anagrams and find meaning that isn't necessarily there.

Why would he say it's got diamond-shaped fins?

Yeah.

Yeah, that made it much easier for him to put Monster Hoax by Sir Peter S.

Yeah, sound that right.

I think he believed it.

Well,

he did send a proposal to Buckingham Palace asking if he could name Loch Ness Monster after the Queen, Queen Elizabeth II.

So it was going to be called Elizabeth Nessie or something along those lines.

But the first name Elizabeth for the Loch Ness Monster.

And supposedly the Queen did consider it, but the people of Buckingham Palace said,

no, no, no.

No, thank you.

So I should say where I got this fact, by the way.

It's from a new book that's just come out called What a Hazard a Letter Is.

And it's sort of about all the letters in history that either were never sent or that were never properly received or we only found years later.

It looks like a really, really interesting book.

I've only read a bit of it and I got this from a review.

But there's another piece in it, actually, which is about the composer Eric Sarty, which I really liked it's kind of tragic but amusing at the same time this is so Eric Sarti had this six-month relationship with an artist called Susan Valadon and then she broke up with him and that was the end of it as far as anyone knew and then when he died 30 years later they went into his house and they found just thousands and thousands of letters that he'd written every single day to her but never sent love letters so he died and like he literally spent 30 years writing love letters and then he so they they got in in touch with Susan, still alive, like, hey, Eric had a thing for you.

And gave her all these letters.

And she immediately burned them.

As you would.

As you would.

And was probably very delighted that that relationship ended when it did.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

Got out of that one in the nick of time.

One last thing.

Peter Scott, just to mention again how incredible his career was, one of the other things he did was during the war, he designed camouflage ideas for painting on the side of ships so that you could camouflage a ship in the ocean and they worked so well that two ships that were painted with the same camouflage crashed into each other

yeah so uh and one of them was called HMS broke so yeah not the best name to that's something to name a ship but yeah it did break you know how soldiers used to all dress in very bright colours and then camouflage what well you know the British Army the bright red uniforms in the 19th century and then that was because most battlefields were so covered in smoke from guns and chaos that you couldn't, it wasn't dangerous to troops to dress them in bright colours.

I didn't know.

So if you had an army, a duke leading a regiment,

he got to kid it out and he would pick whatever colour he liked, basically.

They'd like football kits, right?

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

And you wanted something flashy.

And then as the smoke started to clear from battlegrounds, it suddenly became obvious that having everyone dressed in bright red is probably not a good tactic.

I just wonder if there was a period where all ships were extremely bright colours.

And I suddenly thought, maybe this isn't a great idea.

Yeah, I guess so.

About football kits,

there was once a football game, which I don't know if you'll remember, you probably won't, but it was the first time Man United had worn their new grey kit.

And then halfway through the match, they realised that they couldn't see each other because they were camouflaged against the crowd.

So they just kept passing to the crowd because they couldn't see each other.

And then at halftime, they had to swap all their shirts back.

Is it an advantage, though, if the other team can't see you?

Well, in American football, they have rules that the pitch has to be a particular shade of green.

And that's because there was once a team who had a blue jerseys and they painted the entire grass blue so the other team couldn't see them.

I love the idea that if in war you have a home and away kit and

you know you're losing against the invading army when they suddenly change their kit to home.

Uh-oh.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that a traditional hangover cure in Mongolia is the Mongolian Mary, which consists of tomato juice with a pickled sheep's eyeball floating inside it.

Is either bit meant to be more helpful, or does it have to be combined?

So, I think

the traditional helpful bit is a pickled eyeball because that goes back supposedly to Genghis Khan times.

The tomato juice obviously doesn't because they didn't have tomatoes in those days.

But actually tomato juice I think would probably help your hangover.

So that probably today is the active ingredient, although the traditional thing is the eyeball.

But if a load of you have a hangover, obviously it's very labor-intensive in sheep.

Yes.

Because then you have to kill a lot of sheep.

You don't have to kill them.

You can just put an onion in the place of the eyeball.

And I learned this from Malmo's Disgusting Food Museum, which I went to a couple of weeks ago and tried lots of disgusting things.

Did you have the hangover?

I did have a hangover, but I didn't eat anything.

I didn't have any of this.

Actually, I did have a hangover on that day, which was very bad because I had to eat things like bull's testicles and shark meat marinated in urine and rotten fish and all that kind of stuff, and three penis wine, which that did help the hangover a little bit.

Did it?

Yeah, because it's got alcohol in it, and it's like hair of the dog.

It's like penis of the dog, and of the seal, and of the deer.

Here's the thing, though.

You went to this museum, and traditionally, museums, you don't touch the exhibits, but you went around eating them.

And so

is this more a restaurant than a museum?

No, so these days a lot of museums, they are hands-on, aren't they?

As in

you can kind of do little bits and pieces with the exhibits.

And in this place, they have a particular tasting table at the end where you can taste all the things.

Or not all the things, but just a few of the things that are on display.

And lucky me, they put a lot of extra stuff on for me.

Which not everyone gets to have.

So not everyone gets to have the bull testicles.

Not everyone gets to have the rotten egg with a fetus in it, you know, that I managed to have.

But yeah, it's a really good museum.

It's in Melmode.

They've just announced that there's a new one about to be opened in LA.

And they're hoping to go around the whole world, hopefully, one day soon.

So wherever you are in the world, you might be able to try some of this.

delicious stuff.

It's quite exciting because the museum was founded by Samuel West, who also founded the Museum of Failure, which how often do people found more than one museum?

So it had things like failed Donald Trump games and so on, but was such a success that he's had to keep it going.

And this is his second museum.

It's very exciting.

The only person I can think of is the person who founded both the Natural History Museum and

the British Museum.

Yes, I think you're right.

Sloan?

Yes, Hans Sloan.

So he's in quite high,

you know, there's just that guy and the guy who did the Disgusting Food Museum.

Yeah, it's pretty good.

It's very funny because he talks about it.

I've read an interview with him about setting up this disgusting food museum, and he has to sample a lot of the stuff that they get in.

And he's just in his story, just constantly vomiting.

It's just like, I just, he doesn't like it.

You know, it's not as if it's like a weird fetish.

He really doesn't like it.

He can't like this stuff.

It's just not very nice.

The only thing that was quite nice was the bull testicles.

That was all right.

I had durian fruit, which smells disgusting, but it actually tastes kind of okay.

Everything else is just objectively quite disgusting.

Well, so he makes a point that a large part of taste is to do with with your psychological take on it.

So if you think something's going to be disgusting, your mind sets itself ready to vomiting.

So he uses the example of Vegemite, which is the first time he had Vegemite, he hated it and thought it was horrible.

Then he went to Australia and at a party, it was served on two bits of toast, two slices to him, and he saw children eating and he thought, oh, this must be how you neutralize the taste.

And he started eating it.

Now he loves Vegemite.

Vegemite is in this museum.

And the guy who showed me around, who's this guy's co-owner Andreas, he said that

it caused almost like a diplomatic spat with Australia because as soon as the Australians found out that Begemite was in this disgusting food museum, they were absolutely, you know, really upset.

World War III.

I really like the idea of Sweden and Australia going to war with each other because it's mostly a commuters' war, isn't it?

You've shown us videos of you at this museum, James, and you look like you're having a really, really bad time.

Can I just say, I had a really, really great time.

Yes.

But the thing is, I just, you know, I'm not going to say no to anything.

I'll just do whatever, you know.

And also, he was very much peer-pressuring me into trying absolutely everything.

He was like, well, if I try it, then you have to try it.

And of course, he works here and has this stuff all the time.

It's not really fair.

But yeah, I opened some Surstrumming, which is like a fermented rotten fish,

which we once had on QI, but we weren't allowed to open in the studio.

And actually, according to their lease, this museum, they're explicitly not allowed to open any of the cans inside the museum so we had to go outside we had a crowd of people watching me open this first

yeah and then you did have to recoil from it didn't you is that the one where you had to recoil it's unbelievably disgusting yeah it just smells of everything rotten that you can think of like you know bin juice and rotten fish and you know vomit and everything you can think of it just smells and tastes a bit like that right

and all the tickets to the museum are printed on a sick bag.

And in the first three weeks of opening, they had 11 cases of visitors vomiting after trying the exhibits.

Only 11, which is a very good thing.

That's not an achievement, isn't it?

They must be looking for vomits.

They are.

And they said if it's just like a wretch, it doesn't count.

Or if it's spitting out, it doesn't count.

It has to be an actual vomit from the stomach for them to count it and

to get the tally up.

So they have one of those boards, like blah, days since last venue.

Penis is quite common, though, as a hangover cure, isn't it?

Is it?

You sort sort of read about the traditional hangover cures.

So it's often

dried, dried and shriveled.

I think a a Sicilian traditional hangover cure is bull's penis actually.

So you also have to be a bull, uh dried bull's penis.

Um but in Bolivia it's also a famous thing, bull penis soup, bull pizzle soup is a thing that people say they have with hangovers quite a lot.

They actually had a bull penis at this museum, but I couldn't taste it, but they it was like a hands-on exhibit, so you're allowed to touch the bull's penis.

Were you impressed?

Did you congratulate the bull?

That bull sadly never made it.

Wow, I've been looking up other hangover, disgusting hangover cures.

So

Pliny the elder,

our old buddy,

he recommends various things.

So he mostly recommends things to stop you from getting drunk in the first place.

For example, roasted wild boar lungs will do.

Or if you don't have a wild boar, if you have the ashes of a swallow's beak and mix it with with myrrh and put that in your wine, that stops you getting drunk in the first place.

Okay.

But does ruin the wine, doesn't it?

A little bit, yeah.

The gladiators used to eat ash for energy.

On ITV.

No, it was like they used to take it out of the hearth and then they would mix it with presumably wine, I guess.

And then that would supposedly help them after a hard day's

gladiatoring.

That's awful.

Get home after a hard day's gladiatoring.

Darling, what have you cooked me for supper?

I'm exhausted.

Here's some ash.

With some wine, Anna.

No, that's absolutely fine.

So, John of Gadsden in the 14th century had advice for if you drunk too much.

He said that if you're a man, then you should wash your testicles with salt and vinegar.

And if you're a woman, you should wash your breasts with salt and vinegar.

Was he a salt and vinegar salesman?

If he worked in a local chippy, he'd over ordered.

And he said, you can also eat the leaf or stalk of a cabbage with some sugar which does sound like the better option he should have put it first so these days i guess you could just put your testicles in a bag of salt and vinegar crisps and that'll have the same effect absolutely but don't do it in tesco's

um duck embryo is another thing that's eaten so this is balut yeah so i had that balut did you balut is how you say it okay

yeah i had that in the museum um to be honest

I kind of chickened out a little bit.

Ducked out, you mean?

Ducked out.

I did did duck out, yeah.

And when they weren't looking, I only took a bit of the egg part of the balut and didn't have any of the embryo part because I thought that was a bit beyond the pale.

You cheater.

You found your line, though.

Well, to be honest, if anyone was watching, I probably would have done it.

Because I am extremely bad with peer pressure.

But yeah, I did taste it.

It just tasted like...

I've had 100-year egg before, and it tastes a bit like that.

So it's slightly rotten eggs.

It tastes like, yeah.

Slightly rotten.

You would have thought after 100 years

that rot had really penetrated.

Yeah, it tastes like sulfurous eggs, like, you know,

sulfur.

Farts.

Eggie.

Farts, yeah.

Eggy eggs.

What were you saying?

Was there anything else about Balutor?

No, that that was a hang of aqueur that apparently works.

So it's it's duck embryo, isn't it?

It's broad alive, and then you eat it in the shell?

You eat it in the shell.

It's not shelly, presumably, at embryo stage.

And you eat with the bee, can you tell the beak's there?

You can tell it's there, but it's not crunchy, I don't think.

And there was a Filipino lady who works at this place, and she absolutely loves it.

She's like, My whole family eats this.

This is not weird.

I don't understand why people think this is weird.

The Philippines are declaring war on Sweden immediately.

Well, they do have, for instance, haggis.

Do they?

Yeah, they have.

Weirdly, they have like haribos.

Not haribos, but like other gelatin sweets, because they're like, well, you know, this is made from gelatin from bones of animals.

This is kind of, if you think about it, it's kind of weird.

It's all just, it is just perspective, isn't it?

I mean, the things that we find weird other people eat, we eat equally weird stuff.

I would say so, apart from, you know, like urine-soaked shark is objectively strange.

Yeah, I think.

What's the urine adding to that taste?

Well, it adds a uriny taste to it, I must say.

If you were to have that and any other food in the whole history of time, you would know which one had been soaked in urine.

Yes, okay.

So, their rules are, just to quickly go, they have three rules.

It has to be considered disgusting by some people around the world, so not necessarily people eating it.

It has to be genuinely eaten by people as a choice, not through necessity.

So it's not things that you can only have because you have no other food.

And it must be not a food stuff invented just for tourists.

Right.

Because that does happen sometimes, of course.

On the fact that it's kind of all about perspective, this sort of thing, there was an FT journalist who went to China in 2011 and went to Shaojing and was investigating what Chinese people thought of cheese brought over from Europe.

Because obviously, not very much cheese is eaten in the East.

Very many of them are lactose intolerant.

A lot drink milk now a bit, but cheese is not really a a thing.

So brought over a whole bunch of cheeses, and they find that disgusting.

Or these people who worked in a restaurant found it kind of gross, the idea, and then ate the cheeses.

And it was a lot of blue cheeses, very strong blue, which interestingly they thought was fine.

So they thought that's okay.

And they said it was quite similar to a sort of rotting bean curd dish that they saw.

I've had that as well, rotten bean curd, and it does, it does taste quite cheesy.

Does it?

Yeah, they said it was a similar taste.

So, weirdly, the only one that they all said that's absolutely disgusting is an animal stench that haunts your nose.

Baby Belle.

Is it Primula?

What a callback.

Yeah.

The multi-podcast callback.

That's one of the best.

It's not.

It's Brie.

Which is very interesting to us.

It obviously is quite mild Brie.

But to them, it's just something they're not used to.

They quite disgusting.

I remember reading somewhere, and I don't know where it was, so I think this is true.

But the idea was when Europeans first went to Japan, especially, that was the one overarching thing about it was that we smelled of milk and cheese and stuff like that.

Is that right?

Yeah.

They say that in China as well.

Like all the time they'd be like, oh, Milky Boy's here.

It's a smell that emanates off a white person.

And China, the Milky Bar kid is not a good thing.

No, it's fine.

It's just you can smell it.

It's just a smell they all identify.

Do you guys know there's an iron brew sausage?

And James just choked on his.

I just choked on my drink because I'm so excited.

An iron brew sausage.

So basically, this was invented a few years ago by a guy who said, what a great hangover cure this would be.

By a genius.

Hang on, we have had a debate at the point.

Oh, no, Andy.

Whether combining two existing things counts as inventing a new one.

I will accept a lot of things in this podcast, but for you to say that an iron brew sausage is not an invention that we're all coming out for.

Okay, sure.

It's pretty simple, actually, but still an invention.

You replace all the water in the sausage-making process with iron brew, and he says it's a brilliant hangover cure.

One guy said he felt like he'd gone to heaven after tasting it, according to the inventor of the iron brew sausage.

And I really want to try one.

I do as well.

If you are people who make iron brew sausages, do get in touch.

I'll just go.

We'll advertise.

Free.

Hang on.

Is it all the water involved in the process?

As in, has it grown the crops that feed the cow?

Has the cow been drinking iron brew from a trough?

It has to have rained iron brew.

Has the farmer had all the water in his body replaced with iron brew?

Yeah, he's Scottish.

Okay, that's 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, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James,

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna.

You can email a podcast at qi.com.

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

There's a very exciting new banner on there showing you the link to our 2019 tour.

There's lots of tickets going.

We'd love to see you guys there.

You can also buy our new book, Book of the Year 2018, and you can also find all of our previous episodes.

Okay, that's it.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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Upgrade your business and get the same checkout All Birds and Skims use.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/slash start selling.

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Go to shopify.com/slash start selling to upgrade your selling today.

Shopify.com/slash start selling.