249: No Such Thing As A Pint Of Wine

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Hi everyone, Welcome to the bit in between Christmas and New Year, where you're not really sure what day it is and you've eaten way too much turkey.

It's Friday, so that means it's a no such thing as a fish day.

And what do we have for you today?

We have the 2018 clip show.

All the best bits from this year that didn't quite fit into the actual episode.

So it's all new.

You've never heard it.

They're all times when we were just too silly, too stupid.

People were making mistakes.

There's loads of outtakes.

And we'll see you with a brand new episode in 2019.

So please enjoy it.

On with the show, ho ho!

No,

okay, my fact this week is that it might look like Anna is drinking a pint of lime and soda, but that is a pint of wine.

It's not.

And this is this is not a podcast.

This is an intervention.

We love you.

We're worried about you.

It's not a pint of wine.

It was a pint of wine.

There was only one wine glass in the green room, genuinely, and Andy hogged it.

So I had no choice.

Andy practically threw it at me, saying, no, no, no, it's fine.

I'll use this.

Okay, none of this could go in the podcast.

So according to Old English folklore, if you dream of gathering nuts, then that's a bad omen.

Oh.

There's an old English proverb, which is, a good year for nuts is a good year for babies.

Very true.

Very true.

Can you guess why that is?

Eat lots of nuts.

Nope.

Do they come?

Did people used to think that when a nut fell from a tree, it cracked open and a baby came out?

No, they weren't idiots.

No, it's because gathering nuts was like you could do it undercover as like a way of meeting people of the opposite sex.

Oh, I see.

So you're like, oh, we're just going gathering nuts.

And then you'd plant your seeds.

And there's a thing, here we go, gathering nuts in May.

Yes.

And May is springtime.

So do you think that could be a sexy...

Well, weirdly, that doesn't make any sense because,

no, not your theory.

I'm not rubbishing your theory.

I think it's a really good theory.

Thank you.

The rhyme itself, obviously, if you think about it nuts aren't falling in may are they i don't know well you know in autumn they follow the autumn yeah yeah right okay well cool let's all shake you know suburbs murray

you do know what happens in autumn

conquers actually yeah

nuts yep there you go with half a second's thought we could have avoided this

i didn't so here we are i think we're all pleased we had to go through it though um so what's gathering nuts in may so actually it's thought that it's the knots of may which is something something that they use to refer to Hawthorne.

So they're just gathering Hawthorne, but that could have been a sexy thing to do as well, I think.

Did you know that the first ever aircraft carrier was for hot air balloons?

No.

It was in the U.S.

Civil War, and they were used for reconnaissance, and it was called the General Washington Park Custis.

It was a converted coal barge, and it had its deck cleared, and it was used specifically to store lots of the Union hot air balloons.

That was the first ever aircraft carrier.

That's very

cool.

But it was, it didn't fly itself.

No, much like a normal aircraft carrier today.

They just fly at the sea.

They just bob around on the ocean.

Excuse me, this aircraft carrier is not flying at all.

I'd like a refund of my $50 billion.

I've only ever listened as far as the word aircraft.

The story of the first nativity, I found quite sweet.

So it was created by Francis of Assisi.

It was in 1223.

That was the first ever nativity scene.

And it was because, you know, he was the patron saint of animals, wasn't he?

He was always shown with loads of rabbits crawling all over him and stuff

in a nice way.

And

he wasn't constantly deluged with rabbits and fighting them off and having to kill them just to get a bit of sleep at night.

Why would these rabbits leave me alone?

Drowning in rabbits.

Yeah, when he got up for air to gasp for air, he said, let's make a nativity scene because at that time the Bible was read out in Latin in church at Christmas and no one knew what anyone was saying and he really wanted it to become a bit more relatable for people and for them to actually understand what was going on.

And so it was done with real actors, or well, probably not professional actors, real people.

It was done in a village in Italy and it involved a manger and a real ox and a real donkey.

And he, quite sweetly, it had a wax model as the baby Jesus.

And he tried to explain as he was giving the sermon that this was the baby Jesus, but he was so overwhelmed with the motion that he couldn't say the word Jesus.

So, in the first nativity scene, the word Jesus wasn't said.

He just kept on saying the babe of Bethlehem and couldn't get it out.

Yeah, but then it really took off from there.

And the hay from that very first nativity scene was then taken away by all the onlookers and fed to their farm animals.

And apparently, it cured them of all their malaria and other diseases.

That's how you cure it.

That's how you do it.

Magic hay.

Horses can only breathe through their noses.

I didn't realize.

Can they?

As opposed to their mouths.

Yeah.

Sorry, yeah, of course.

No, as opposed to their anuses.

I know.

I don't know where I was going with that.

I saw you realising halfway through that question what the alternative was.

I suppose when you see one, a horse in the cold and it's breathing, it is kind of the.

It comes out of the nose, doesn't it?

It's always the nostrils, isn't it?

Yeah.

So don't tape up a horse's nostrils or anything.

I won't.

No, okay, yes, you were going to.

I have to leave.

Churchill used to listen to translations of Hitler's speeches on a gramophone and he would play back the bits where Hitler mentioned him by name.

Did he?

Yeah.

That's very trumpy, isn't it?

Yeah, it is.

Yeah.

It is a bit.

Why did he do it?

What a launcher.

Yeah, is it just an ego trip?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I regret mentioning it.

I was looking at some strange driving rules that you can infringe abroad in this country, but I didn't realise this thing about parking rules in various countries can get so complicated so in various countries but particularly in sweden you have this system that they call datum parkering which is about parking on alternate sides of the street depending on the date so if there's a certain sign on lots of streets and what it means is if you see this sign then on the morning of odd dates then you're not allowed to park on the side of the street where the houses have odd numbers

and on the morning of even dates you're not allowed to park on the side of the street where the houses have even numbers.

And so if you park in the evening and it's going to be there the next morning, you have to plan for the next morning that it will be on the right side of the city.

I mean, it just sounds like a way to get money off foreigners, doesn't it?

That sounds a bit like that, the system in Paris that they have where only

on white Wednesdays, like Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, odd-numbered license plates are allowed access to the housing.

Yeah, they did that in Central or South America.

It might be in Mexico City.

And what happened was just people bought two cars.

So they bought two cars and

they were always old cars because they had to buy two.

So they had to be cheaper.

So the pollution went way up.

But it it is this odd numbers houses thing seems to dictate as well in other countries.

In Belgium, for the first half of the month, you can park on the side of the road with odd house numbers, and the second half of the month with even, which is kind of a hassle if you have to jump out of your car and run up to the front door and check the house number.

It's amazing.

I'm 100% certain.

In fact, I know I've parked in Belgium.

Yeah, it's not every road.

There'll be a sign and it's a special sign that they all recognize.

There's not even any words on it.

That's just a random image

that you definitely want a foreigner scratching his head,

giving away money.

When I went to New York, someone was telling me that the parking is actually surprisingly, if you're a resident in kind of Manhattan, it's actually surprisingly easy and cheap to park outside your house and costs fairly nothing.

And the only rule is that you have to, once a week, you have to, your car has to be out of the space for two hours while they clean the street.

It must be the same two hours for everyone, right?

Otherwise, there's a poor street cleaner who every time he sees a car leave has to jump in there.

Wait a minute.

That can't be true, right?

There's no way for two hours every week, every single car in town starts driving.

It's not the same car.

I'm sure there's a rotor of streets where you know there's like one, two hours.

All your neighbours turn up.

Hey man, parking thing again.

Yeah, let's all go, shall we?

He's got two hours, like a sort of like caning Santa to cover all of Manhattan.

It can't be done.

I'd like to see that sitcom about that guy.

No,

I think a Christmas Festive film where he has to do it in one night.

Picture if you type on a keyboard and you're typing something and you don't look down.

You're one of those people who's got amazing words per minute.

So they did a study in a university where they got people to type 70 words per minute.

That was the goal.

Can you get that fast?

And everyone, 94% of the time, managed to do that.

They then did a second test on them, which was,

can you now write out where everything on the keyboard is?

QWERTY, can you write out the placings?

And all they could manage was at tops 15 of the letters of the alphabet they had no

they had no idea where the rest were and it's all because it's all automatic memory something's going on the fingers are doing the dancing at that point and that's really interesting that's like you know when someone says what's your pin number if someone's you know playing with your card and often you have to go up and say oh i need to type it in you have that right yeah it's like that it's exactly like it's in your fingers The magic is here.

That is the finger brain.

Like, this isn't a fact, but that is the worst feeling, isn't it?

Where your fingers stop remembering and then you just, you've lost it.

There's no way to get your number back.

Then it's just it's all over.

You're right.

Is that just me?

That's not just me.

No, no, that's me too.

Because

I look away as well.

I'm like, oh, come on.

And then when it's wrong, you're like, oh, you were my last.

Like, this isn't even my laugh.

Beth,

asshole.

And that's.

Then they say, Sarah, step away from the ATM machine.

Maybe it falls out when you cut your nails.

It's just a theory.

Just a theory.

Something else that rained down to Earth Earth was the Earth's core.

Whoa!

The Earth's core is made of iron.

And the way that it got there, we think, is a massive meteor comes in, hits the Earth, vaporizes, goes into the sky, and then rains down and eventually seeps into the center of the planet.

Oh, so it tunneled its way in.

Kind of.

Well, it's denser, isn't it, than anything else around it, and that's where it goes there.

So that would have been iron rain, molten iron rain.

Yep.

Wow.

Need a strong umbrella.

Yeah.

There was another dog called Rolf, it was a terrier, and he spoke through tapping his paw against boards, each letter of the alphabet represented by different taps.

So if you ask them, all dogs are called Rolf.

Yeah.

It's a real dad joke, that one.

I read about a Bible-themed amusement park, which is in Buenos Aires, Tierra Santa.

And

it was meant to have like roller coasters and stuff like that.

They didn't end up doing that.

So it's a lot of sort of plastic Bible scenes that they've made.

So the scale down has gone quite a bit, except for their one centerpiece for the whole thing, which is that they have in the distance with a hill a 40-foot-tall animatronic Jesus that comes out from the side of the mountain every hour as part of the resurrection.

He resurrects every hour a 40-foot Jesus

out the side of a mountain.

But he wasn't resurrected as a giant.

No, but he's really far away, so maybe he looks really close

when you see it.

Wow, that sounds absolutely terrifying.

Do you know where the largest Jesus statue in the world is, just as a bit of trivia?

I would have said in Rio de Janeiro.

No, there's a taller one in Svybodzin in Poland.

It's called Christ the King.

It's 108 feet tall and it has a Wi-Fi transmitter in its crown.

Wow.

Just like the real Jesus.

Any stuff on King Louis XIII of France?

Got some stuff, yeah.

Because he did not comb his hair until he was nine months old.

Well, he probably didn't do it at that age.

But no one combed his hair until he was nine months old.

And no one washed his legs until he was five, and

he had his first bath at the age of of seven.

It starts somewhere.

So, sorry,

did they start with his legs?

Or had they washed the rest of his body and then they didn't get to his legs until he was seven?

They washed his legs first when he was five in tepid water.

And then when he was seven, he had his first bath.

And at that stage, everything was clean.

Yeah.

It's not like until he was five, they only just quickly dunked him in the bath, but they were holding his legs, so obviously you can't wash the legs.

No, you just didn't wash anything.

So they didn't wash anything.

So it was in the time when washing was seen to be perhaps not great for you.

Yeah.

His hair's combed.

What more do you want?

At one stage, he boasted that he takes after his father and he smells of armpits.

Yeah.

He was a smelly man.

He was.

But he had a horrible upbringing.

I think his parents might have just not washed him out of spite.

He was a very, very sad man.

I grew to really like him.

And so his mother tried to keep the throne for as long as possible.

So he was made king officially, I think, about age nine.

But his mother was desperate to stay regent and hated her son.

And so she would humiliate him or keep him out of power.

So once, when he was 15 and he's king, he's in front of his court, she just stood up and slapped him in the face

just to tell him off.

Another time, he tried to attend a meeting of the royal council that he was supposed to be holding.

And whereupon the source I was reading said, Whereupon she took him by the shoulders and threw him out of it.

So she was real harsh.

And she also forced him to sleep with his wife.

So So, well, you know, almost every historian concurs that he was gay

and he never had any mistresses.

He never showed any interest in women, showed a lot of interest in men.

And he was married off to Anne of Austria, who was confusingly a Spanish queen when they were both.

That must have been so annoying for her, always being asked, so what's it like in Austria?

My parents just had a silly sense of humour.

She, Anne of Austria of Spain, came over.

Her brother Dave of Denmark.

Yeah, she came over to marry him, and he had to be physically carried into the wedding bed because he was desperate not to sleep with her and he was really freaked out.

And two nurses were there to monitor the act and make sure it happened because otherwise you could sort of get an annulment and that would ruin the alliance between Spain and France.

And then he ran out of the bedroom as soon as he'd done it and refused to even enter it or eat with his wife or speak to her for about six months.

Wow.

He had a regiment of Croatian mercenaries that he liked.

Who were actually from Portugal.

And they are famous for what reason?

Because their uniform.

Ooh.

The cravats.

Because they wore cravats, they wore neckties.

And because kravatska is Croatian for Croatia, they became known as cravats.

And that's where we get the word from.

Of course.

That's so cool.

And he was also big on wigs.

He was sort of the original.

Yeah, he was a big wig.

He was the original wig wearer.

I see.

In the way that cravats sort of became fashionable, he brought them back in, wigs, back into fashion as well.

So he was thinning in his hair and he wanted to disguise that.

And the surrounding friends all thought, we want to help you out and not make you look like you're the only person wearing a wig.

So they wore wigs as well.

And then that spread and everyone was wig wearing again.

And Anne of Austria popularized hot chocolate.

Did she?

Yeah, she brought it over from Spain.

And it became an instant status symbol.

And they said that only the aristocracy were allowed to drink it.

And that was true for a while.

And then after a while, everyone was allowed to drink it in France.

I know I've said this before.

It is easy to see why they had a revolution if they're saying only we can drink hot chocolate.

Yeah.

I'm amazed it took 100 years after this.

There is a theory that there is a bonus track hidden in The Last Supper.

What do you mean?

It's that the bread rolls on the table are a musical arrangement.

Come on.

And

if you play the bread rolls from left to right along the Last Supper, it plays a tune.

So presumably people have done this.

Yes, I clicked on it earlier today and it said video unavailable.

So we don't know what the tune is now.

No.

I have actually heard it.

Yeah, and

it's a tune that does work.

So I'm not making this up.

No, you're not making this up.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I'm not sure.

I I mean, the guy who discovered it is insane, because it's not real.

It's not a real thing.

He's looked at bread rolls and thought, that looks like a quaver.

Like, that's not a

thing.

Did you guys hear about the countdown thieves in 2009?

No.

So these were some, I think I might have read this in the Daily Mail.

But these were thieves that the police were hunting for who were stealing letters from shop signs in Norwich.

They did it to seven stalls over three nights, and they were stealing specific letters.

And then one of them was caught on camera and was overheard saying, I'm just trying to spell my own name.

And so then the police released the fact that they were looking for people who might be called one of these names: Sam, Danny, Alan, Lloyd, Glynn, or Manning.

Can they realize they're planning to turn in Manning?

We'd fallen on hard times.

I once tried to convince Dan Schreiber that one of the lines in the English national anthem was, Oscar Pestorius.

Everything else sort of seems to rhyme with that.

And he was like, that's not true, surely.

Surely.

And like, I was like, when is he going to pull out his phone and Google it?

And he pulled out his phone.

He's like, it's not true, right?

And I was like, no, of course it's not true.

You're not going to do it, I think.

He sounds like an idiot.

Yeah, what a moron.

I discovered a few things that genuinely surprised me about both ears and what we can hear and what we can't hear.

So first thing that shocked me is that when we're asleep, our ears are still listening.

Isn't that weird?

Well how do you think loud noises wake you up?

I assumed that that was some sort of like secret knock to let in.

Like it's just if it's at a certain loudness then maybe then you get woken up.

But I did genuinely think that when you went to sleep you sort of just shut down and your ears kind of just went, okay, I'm taking the night off as well.

You are alone in thinking that, I think.

Yeah.

Really?

So let's move on to my next amazing fact.

Apparently, when, this is a noise that we can't hear that we make on our own.

When you rub your forefinger and your thumb together, you make an ultrasonic signal.

That is so,

it's it works so clearly that people often use it to detect whether a bat detector is working.

So you rub it against a bat detector and that will give you a signal.

So anyone listening, I'm doing it now, if you just go to your bat detector and I wonder if over a podcast I can set it off.

Well, do you know that's

so sorry?

Do you, I mean, James.

Sorry, what is a bat detector?

Yeah.

Who has bat detectors?

People with bats.

What do you mean in bat detectors?

I mean, that's detecting the ultrasonic sounds of bats like a scientific instrument.

Must be.

Yeah.

But yeah, that's.

Dan, for the listener at home, Dan has been rubbing his finger and thumb by the mic for about 30 seconds now.

And if I could get...

And your home will be full of bats.

Did you know that Laughing Cow is comte?

Cheese?

What do you think?

Which I love.

Sorry, I don't know, comte.

Oh, soft cheese.

Maybe.

Soft cheese.

No, maybe this is just a thing that we have in my family because I love it.

It's like really creamy, nice European cheese.

I don't think your family are the only people you've had.

I don't think there's a special Tuzzinski family cheese.

Titzinsk cheese.

Wow.

Wow.

It was a hard one, and I tried it, and it didn't work out.

Chizinski.

Yeah, that's the obvious.

Shit.

Shit.

The great pigeon race disaster was something that Anna posted about on the QIBODS a few years ago and that I read about.

Do you remember that?

I love it.

I couldn't believe I've never mentioned it before when all the pigeons disappeared.

Because there's an extremely famous pigeon race.

Sorry, extremely famous among pigeon fancies.

And it's between Paris and London, isn't it?

Well, it's between France and the UK.

And it was in the 80s or 90s?

It was from Nantes to the UK, to the people's homes in the UK.

And yeah, there were 60,000 pigeons taking part, and 90% of them disappeared.

It never happened.

Like, every year before that, they'd all arrive back.

There's a theory that there was a Concorde flight that was going over the channel at the time, and that disrupted their magnetic impulses.

Sorry, what year were we in?

97.

Oh, okay.

So quite recently.

Yeah.

And there was one guy called Tom Roden who lost his winning champion pigeon, Whitetail.

And five years later, the pigeon was on his doorstep.

Yeah.

Oh, no way.

Five years.

I want to see the movie about my husband.

Five years.

That's incredible.

Do you think he opened the door and just went, where the hell have you been?

Have you heard of Bristol's Punctuation Banksy?

This is an amazing guy.

He was active at least until last year.

So

he goes around just correcting poor punctuation.

And there was an interview with him recently.

He has built himself a device he calls an apostrophiser, which is a very long-handled bit of kit, which allows him to either cover over an apostrophe which shouldn't be there in a sign, or add one in if he needs an extra one.

And someone said to him...

What he was doing was probably illegal, going around mucking around with businesses' signs just for having an apostrophe in the wrong place.

And he said, I'm sticking on a bit of sticky back plastic.

It's more of a crime to have the apostrophes wrong.

He's wrong about that, isn't it?

But he's been going since 2003.

Wow.

So, yeah.

So he's been getting away with it that long.

Yeah.

How has he not been apprehended?

How misspelt is Bristol that he's still in operation?

Is he only correcting the word Bristol?

Yeah, imagine if he thought that Bristol had two S's in it.

He's like, they've got it wrong again.

I think it's not a full-time job.

It's also not a job, no opinion.

But he is called, as you say, the Banksy of Punctuation or Apostrophe Avenger.

So he's got, you know, cool names.

They feel ironic to me, those names.

They feel self-given.

Yeah.

There is a National Punctuation Day in America.

And CNN interviewed the guy, he's called Jeff Rubin, who set it up.

He used to be a reporter.

And CNN wrote that he grew increasingly frustrated as he spotted errors in the newspaper.

They quoted him, I would sit at the kitchen table with my red sharpie, screaming obscenities, which would upset my wife.

she encouraged me to find another outlet for my aggravation

so he set up National Punctuation Day oh good on him

I mean good on yeah it's better for his wife sort of I wonder if that has solved his quite deep-seated character flaws that I'm interpreting from that story but

whatever he had to do

they had things called dog dramas in the 19th century early 19th century where the dog was like the hero of the play so they would usually have other human actors but the dog would do the the really heroic things.

There was one where the show ended with a dog jumping in the pool of water and saving a child.

But what would often happen is mischievous theatre goers would throw meat onto the stage to distract the nuts.

It's so funny.

Thus drowning a child, but

it's all good fun for the audience, isn't it?

So you know the idea of just going back to the fire of London, did you guys know that the sort of there's a worshipful company of bakers, it's sort of the union of the bakers, they apologised officially for it.

Did they?

Yeah, 320 years later.

After the legal threat has diminished.

Well, it's never too late to apologise, said the then Lord Mayor of London, who was called Alan Davis.

Do you guys remember Alan Davis?

That must have been only 18 years ago.

I remember the guy who was in QI.

Yeah.

It's still in QI, by the way, in case people hear it.

Yeah, he used to be the Mayor of London.

Yeah.

No, no, but Alan Davis, I think around 1986, this would have happened if it's 320 years after 1666.

1666.

And

I did work that out.

It did take ages.

I was as close as I come to sounding intelligent.

Yeah, they apologised officially for it.

That's good that they admitted to it, finally, because at the time, the French and the Dutch were blamed all across town, and loads of French and Dutch were arrested.

And I think...

Just beaten up.

And yeah, beaten constantly.

So we were at war, or Britain was at war with France and the Netherlands.

There was thought to be Protestant plots everywhere.

And so I think there was a French woman who had her breast cut off because people thought what she was carrying was like explosive devices and it was just

some chickens and chicks.

She was carrying some chickens and people thought they were fireballs.

Wow.

You would have thought in the process of chopping off someone's boobies, you would find out that they weren't fireballs, they were chicks, wouldn't you?

Yeah.

You've gone too far then.

You've got to go through with it.

You're right.

There are parallels with our current political climate, unfortunately.

Have we progressed?

Yes.

Progress is the big breast cutting off of the 21st century.

Yeah, it's the horrific metaphor that we find ourselves in.

Wow.

In 2010 in Belgium, there was a guy who was experimenting with the idea of solving the problem of pigeons pooing all over cities.

So massive problem, poo on your head, poo on car windows,

poo on your head.

And so

what he's attempted to do, and I don't know if this has actually worked, but he's attempted to create a special bacteria that when it's fed to the pigeons, it metabolizes, and when they defecate, what comes out is not poo, but a soapy-like substance.

So they end up cleaning your head,

shampooing your head, and cleaning the streets.

You don't want to squeeze a pigeon over your head in the shower.

Yeah, so the idea is that...

Can't make them poo soap.

That's not fair.

It's not fair, but it's probably possible.

But I just can't.

Where's the waste product going?

I mean, there's poo in that soap.

Yeah.

There is poo in that.

It's pooey soap.

It's pooey soap.

Yeah.

I suppose what they're saying is, okay, so there are soapy molecules in there,

which will attach to the pooey substances, and when it rains, it'll be easier to flush away.

Does that make sense?

That feels like, I forgot that poo has to come out at some point.

So yeah, that must be the logic.

Unless these pigeons are just growing bigger and bigger and bigger, and eventually they just explode with their own feces.

It presents more problems for cleaning up a city.

It certainly does.

This wasn't just a mad guy.

Like, they were given a grant by the Flemish Architecture and Design Committee and Ministry of Culture.

Like, it was a funded proper science.

You would go to the Ministry of Culture, though, wouldn't you, if you had this slightly strange idea.

That's true.

The name of the science people.

There is a thing.

This is another amphipod, which this is originally about.

And it's called, and I'm going to take a run-up at this, Pseudamphithoides incaveria.

It lives in the Caribbean and it eats seaweed.

And this is another really sort of just a weird kind of defense mechanism in nature.

So the seaweed that it eats has chemicals which deter fish, same deal, gives off toxic chemicals.

But the amphipod, it doesn't just eat it, it also makes a little house for itself out of this algae.

And it has...

Out of its own food, I guess, right?

Yeah.

Like a gingerbread house kind of thing.

Yeah, exactly like that.

And so, exactly like that.

And it swims around with its head and front legs sticking out of this.

It's more like a sleeping bag, I guess.

It's more than a sleeping bag.

It's a gingerbread sleeping bag.

Yeah.

Or

like a ham sleeping bag.

Like a hammock.

Like a hammock.

You guys are going to be so surprised by the laugh that comes after that when the podcast comes out.

I don't remember that being nearly as funny on the night.

A lot of pigeons are being smuggled out of Syria at at the moment.

Wow.

So, because Syria was the world leading pigeon breeding place, so in the Middle East, they say, you know, all the best pigeon breeders are Syrians.

And now they're getting sent over the border because, obviously, it's not safe for them to be there anymore, and pigeon fanciers in Syria can't keep them anymore.

And so, there are lots of collectors who are going on these kind of death-defying missions to get them.

There's a guy who's spent $5 million on Syrian pigeons.

This is a guy called Nasser, who's a Jordanese, Jordanian, who's Jordanian.

And there was one instance where 70 pigeons were killed when they were being smuggled across the border and they got caught in a fight.

So, yeah, it's taken its toll on the poor pigeons.

But yeah, they are really valuable there.

That's amazing.

Akbar the Great, who was a Mughal emperor around there in the 16th century, he always travelled wherever he went with his personal colony of 10,000 pigeons.

10,000?

What?

What?

They're only small.

I can have 10,001 rooms, please.

I think they all got their own rooms.

No, maybe not.

But they could, like, some of them were really beautiful.

Some of them could do tricks and tumble through the air.

Some of them pooed so.

But it's a whole thing.

Did he name them all?

I don't know.

I doubt it.

No.

He probably named his favourite ones.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That is impressive.

Imagine taking a register every day for that.

Do you guys know what's happened to actually the original manuscript of The Origin of Species?

On The Origin of Species?

No.

So it has various drawings on it.

So, for instance, it has a drawing of a green fish with pink legs and fins and a bright blue umbrella.

And this, it's covered in these doodles.

And this is because Charles Darwin was a really fun dad.

So he wrote The Origin of Species.

And then he gave it to his kids and was like, well, I'm done with this now.

I've had this idea.

Have that.

And it's covered in his kids' doodles.

Cool.

And so you think we read the book and thought maybe one day animals will evolve to have an umbrella?

Yes.

Yeah, maybe actually Darwin discovered a lot more than he led on.

But, you know,

we wanted to keep it secret.

Yeah.

So he put around the story, oh yeah, my kids just drew that weird creature with 15 legs and

an umbrella growing out of its fin.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it was actually him who drew it and he was backtracking on his own illustration.

That's what I'm saying.

Darwin drew all these secret animals that didn't exist.

Because he thought if they don't believe that relatively plausible evolution stuff, they're never going to believe in the umbrella fish.

Another Canadian thing: well, do you know what the national animal of Canada is?

Which I think is a bit rough.

It's a beaver, yeah.

I just always think it's such a great thing to have bears.

I would have picked that.

But it's really controversial, they're not really into having the beaver.

It's been debated whether they should ditch it since the mid-19th century.

And in 1964, I was reading a lecture that a Canadian historian gave that complained that the beaver is representative of English Canada rather than French.

And that means that it represents a pretty intelligent animal on a rather low level who is very fond of work and has not much idea beyond that.

So that was his impression of what the English element of Canada had given to the country that the beaver represented on its ditch.

What would the French area want in?

I'm not sure actually, what would the French

animal be?

Not a beaver,

something with fur that was cute that we would kill.

Yes, a bear.

Yes, a bear, yes,

or a seal puff.

Lovely.

But

aren't we reintroducing beavers to Scotland at the moment?

Isn't that happening?

Is that a happening thing?

And very interestingly, when they introduced wolves in the various parks in North America, particularly Yellowstone,

it had this extraordinary effect of increasing the beaver population, which no one had considered, but it just is sort of another example of how interrelated everything is, is that the wolves slightly kept down the elk's stroke moose, and they didn't go as far south and they didn't eat the young vegetation on which the beavers

relied relied to

make their to sort of fluff up their dams.

So they thrived because of the but miles, you know, a thousand miles north where the wolves were was affecting the beavers in the south.

Wow.

You couldn't have predicted that really couldn't.

Yeah, it's marvellous.

It's like a butterfly effect in a way.

It is.

So I wish I'd mess with it.

Yeah, but

another Canadian thing, one more thing, poutine.

So this is.

Yes, nice, delicious.

Food.

Yeah, gravy, sort of gravy on...

Gravy on chips with curd

on it.

Right, and they give it a posh-sounding name to convince you.

It does sound like LEG's name for a lady part.

Well, the thing is, in the French party speaking Canada, it's kind of unusual sounding to them because in France you don't call Vladimir Putin Poutin because in France Putin means prostitute.

Of course Poutin, yes.

Poutin, yeah.

So in France they all call him Vladimir Poutine and so in Canada they have have like a Vladimir's Poutine restaurants and things like that.

Very good.

Do you know when the Queen takes her Christmas decorations down?

Never.

Never.

She's one of those weirdos who has them up all year round.

No, she waits till February.

No, February the 6th.

And it's actually, it's quite sweet.

It's in honor of her father who died on that day.

And then they do these weird things when they have their Christmas dinners.

So this year, Megan Markle will be weighed before she has her Christmas turkey.

as will all of the royal members.

They do this thing where they weigh them.

They all stand on a weighed.

It's not just the members, though,

the people as well, right?

Sorry.

I'm ashamed.

Yes, they will be weighed.

So

they weigh the full humans and they...

They then have the meal and then they weigh them afterwards again to see whether or not they've been well fed enough.

That's the symbolic idea of them.

You have to eat the most, you have to gain the most.

I don't think it's a game, I think it's just

a tradition.

And also, the queen likes to wear, this is again, this is like you say, a lot of this stuff is put out there.

Who knows if it's true from their official sources, but she likes to wear the paper crown from a cracker.

That's her thing.

Does she?

Quite a nice image, isn't it?

It's really nice.

Wouldn't it be great to rig up Prince Charles's cracker so that there's never a crown inside?

You hold on to me,

and I'll hold on to you.

Let's tie the hand together.

Show what we can do.

You hold on to me.

I'll hold on to you.