239: No Such Thing As The Queen Maaaaaaary

October 19, 2018 32m

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Dan, Anna, Andy and Alex discuss why wombats have the best bums, how to build an extension on a cruise liner and Who Do You Think You Are?'s rejected celebrities.

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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 Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Chacinski, and Alex Bell and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with fact number one and that is Czezinski.

Yep my fact this week is that the inventor of the Venn diagram also invented a machine that automatically bowls cricket balls.

Wow.

Yeah,

you can see how the two cross over because the Venn diagram is circular.

Well, there are circles in it, right?

And cricket balls are circular, I suppose.

Yeah.

So I think that's where he got the inspiration.

So does that mean that you could draw a Venn diagram of cricket-related inventions involving balls in one circle and Venn diagrams in another circle?

And then in the middle, you've got this guy who invented both.

So that's not a Venn diagram.

Because you've just fallen into the biggest Venn diagram trap that the internet ever creates, which is that really annoying thing where it has, as you've just said, this thing plus this thing equals John Venn.

But that's not what a Venn diagram is.

Is that a eulogium?

No, it's a nothing.

It's just a thing the internet makes up.

Okay, do I really have to explain Venn diagrams together?

Yes, please.

So I guess let's imagine you've got two circles, and one circle is a set, so a category, and there's a bunch of stuff in that category, let's say animals.

And then you've got another circle, which is another set.

Things called Barney.

Exactly.

And then you have...

This is difficult because I don't know if we're counting Barney the dinosaur as as an actual animal.

No,

I think we need a third Venn diagram circle, which is fictional soft creatures.

All fictional and real animals ever created.

There we go.

Then you can get Barney in the middle.

So the thing in the middle has to belong to those categories.

So for your thing to work, John Venn would have to be a type of cricket ball or whatever and a type of Venn diagram, neither of which is.

Okay, but what about inventors of things that are round to do with round things and inventors of things that to do with cricket?

And he invented both because cricket balls are round and Venn diagrams are round.

Oh, no, but they're not to do with cricket, are they?

We've really got sidetracks.

It's amazing that John Venn worked it out with this level of complications.

But he didn't call them Venn diagrams, which I didn't know.

So they are a subcategory of Euler diagrams, things where you're representing information in circles, but they don't have to be linked.

And then Venn diagrams are Eulerian circles, but where there is an intersection between the two.

They're Euler diagrams, aren't they?

I'm not sure his name was Euler.

Yeah, you're probably right, actually.

But yeah, the other, it is a thing that people confuse as well.

I think the difference is that the Venn diagram, if you imagine the three intersecting things, it can include empty sections.

So let's say you've got two circles, and one of them is mammals and another one is birds, and they're intersecting.

You have to have that middle intersection, even though there's no such thing as a bird that's also a mammal.

Okay.

So he is said to have invented this diagram in 1881.

That is the date that's put on the first time that he came up with the concept.

So I was looking into 1881 just to see what other scientific inventions happened that year, and it was an amazing year, really.

A lot of things happened.

So Charles Darwin published his final scientific book, which was called The Formation of Vegetable Mold Through the Actions of Worms.

It's not exactly under the deathly hallows, is it?

The first modern cesarean section was performed in 1881.

Was it?

Yeah.

Wow.

Alexander Fleming was born in 1881.

And then lastly, Carlos Finley, who was a Cuban doctor, was the first to propose that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes rather than direct human contact.

That's a huge moment because that resulted in a lot of lives saved.

That's fine.

Imagine being a journalist in that year.

It's a big year.

A tiny baby has been born

in Venn penicillin.

There are lots of really nice tributes to Venn, John Venn.

So in the Cambridge College where he taught, there's a stained glass window, which is a Venn diagram.

It's got three circles of overlapping stained glass, and in the middle it's much darker.

So it's kind of half double glazed and then half single glazed.

And then a bit of it's triple glazed because there are three circles.

Wow, that must be really warm.

Yeah, that's.

So, yeah, do you know what college he went to?

Was it Gonville and Keys?

Yeah, he went to Gonville and Keys, and he did a couple of other things in his life.

So, first of all, I should explain, he did invent the odd thing, and one of them was this automatic bowling machine for cricket balls.

And the weird thing about this was that he invented it, and the Australian cricket team had come to visit Britain, and they visited Cambridge, where he was at the time, and he whipped it out.

He was asked to get out his cricket bowling machine to entertain them, and it automatically bowled out Australia's best batsman four times running.

So, that was the glory days of English cricket.

But another thing he did, which I love, it's almost about the only other sort of thing that goes down in his biography, aside from all his mathematical stuff, is that he, with his son, compiled a book that was a biographical list of all known students, graduates, and holders of office ever to go to the University of Cambridge from the beginning of history up until, well, he only got until 1751 before he died.

So that was 136,000 biographies of people that he wrote.

What a dull

book.

How did he find out those little biographies of all of these people?

Yeah.

It was incredible.

School reports?

Yeah, I guess so.

They must have had some sort of records.

I mean, if anyone's going to have records, it's going to be like a really old university that has had like a consistent way of doing things for years and years and years.

You think they obviously had something, otherwise, it was just him and his son going.

What do you reckon?

Mike Smith did.

Do you know something else that has a Venn diagram on it in tribute?

Is if you live in Clapham in London, or you've ever been to Clapham, there's Venn Street, which you might know, it's got Venn Street Records on it, which I really like.

And that's named after not John Venn, after his grandfather, who happened to be the Reverend and erector in Clapham.

And it does, so the sign for Venn Street also has a Venn diagram on it in tribute to the rector's grandson who invented the diagram.

If I was a town planner and I wanted to celebrate John Venn, I would build a sort of double roundabout shape like a Venn diagram.

It'd be really, I mean, there'd be quite a lot of accidents, probably.

Yeah, the middle of the diagram would just be Carlton's crap by laughing.

Carlson drove on this way.

Carl's drove on this way.

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

My fact this week is that if you want to increase capacity on a cruise ship, you just simply have to cut it in half and add a whole new chunk of ship.

That's done.

So weird.

Yeah, I've seen an amazing video of it.

What they do is they take these cruise ships and they dock them and they just literally slice down the middle.

It's obviously a spot where the original design says if you ever need to cut this into two, this is where it happens.

What is it?

Like a sort of scissor symbol and a docky line all the way around the ship.

And so they cut it in half and they separate it and then they just insert the chunk that they would like to go inside and push as if it's a the meat to a ship sandwich close it up and and then it's ready to go and it's fully functioning how extraordinary it's the first problem i have with this is that all the rooms in a hotel or a cruise ship are numbered so you're going to get room like 17 18 18 p 18 c eatenc because

otherwise they're not going to make any sense i bet they just renumber the rooms yeah you can just take the numbers off can't you probably i'm sure they make removable numbers you do have to unscrew them but they've got people to do that

in many ways this is the smallest part of the operation

Yes.

But they do they rename the ship usually when they change it as well.

I'd love it in Queen May.

You've got to come up with something that fits.

So yeah, I mean this was done with a ship which was called the Silver Spirit.

That's one example.

And they extended it when they cut it in half.

They put in a 49 feet chunk into the middle of it on the subject of cruise ships and slicing massive sections out of things.

Disney owned a lot of cruise liners and they also have an island in the Bahamas.

They bought it and it's one of their destinations for their cruise ships.

But it's sort of, you know, like a very sort of shallow, sandy island with a lot of shallow kind of beach around it.

So it's too, you can't get the cruise ship anywhere near to it.

It's not like a sort of a steep kind of, you know, cliff into the sea.

So what they did was they basically cut out an underwater parking space for their cruise ships.

They just dug a massive trench that goes up towards the island so the cruise ship can just sort of reverse into it and go right up the island.

And so if you look at it on Google Earth, there's just a kind of a rectangular dark patch of ocean right next to it.

It's amazing.

It's so cool.

I'll post a picture on my Twitter feed.

I found a cruise ship for Dan.

Whoa.

Because we've been thinking of sending you away for a while.

Thank you.

Have you guys heard of conspiracy cruises?

Dan's nodding, but he's not allowed to talk about it.

Never heard of it.

These are.

I can't believe this exists.

Go to the website.

It promises to deliver to anyone who's interested the truth about all these things.

And it lists the truths that it'll deliver.

So it's the truth about global warming, fracking, HIV, vaccinations.

Then it gets weirder and weirder.

So fluoridation, forbidden archaeology, JFK, September 11th.

You're welcome onto the ship by Captain Elvis Presley.

What is it?

They're telling you the truth about Star Wars agenda.

Do you know what that is?

That's to do with the,

not the movies.

There was a President Bush, I think he was talking about it a lot, the idea of of having satellites that were able to shoot down through the atmosphere.

Basically, militarizing space.

Yes, exactly.

Okay.

Oh, God.

Imagine booking for the real truth about who Luke's father really was.

Dressed as C-3VO.

I think that person would get along perfectly well with everyone else on board.

The good news is that you don't have to have any vaccinations before you go on one of these cruises.

It sounds so weird.

Where does it go?

So it goes all over the place.

They go to various places over there.

Permuta Triangle.

That's the one place that doesn't get out here.

They're not crazy.

Costs $3,000.

Why don't these people don't have this money?

A popular mechanics journalist went on it because he said he read about it and thought it would be really fun and thought, you know, you could go with some other kind of jokers and discuss stuff and said it was terrifying.

So everyone's really serious there, has taken it very seriously.

He ended up being chased out of various conference rooms because I think they suspected him of something, having to flee down corridors from people chasing him and shutting himself in his room.

You know, they have, as well as conspiracy cruisers, they have 80s music cruises.

So they have whole cruises where just musical stars from the 80s perform.

So there was a great write-up of one which mostly focused on Tony Hadley of Spandal Ballet.

And he said, I saw an advert in the paper last year for music cruises.

I couldn't believe it.

There was Huey Lewis in the news, Pat Bennett, Crosby Stilson Nash, and Alfie Bo.

I phoned my manager and asked, why am I not singing at sea?

He said, Don't worry, Tony, I'm already on it.

And

this does happen a lot now, not just for 80 stars.

So the band Weezer have a Weezer cruise and they invite a lot of bands on.

There's a comedy cruise as well.

It was just a bunch of comedians would go off on this cruise and they were the entertainment.

That sounds like hell on earth.

Yeah, it really does.

I'd throw myself in.

Actually, speaking of comedians, there's a really good story about a cruise ship comedian from 1991.

Have you guys heard of MTS Oceanus, which sank in 91?

No, no.

So this was a huge cruise ship.

It sank, and the captain and his crew were the first people off the ship when it sank, straight away.

Bad form.

They'd very bad form.

They didn't even make an announcement over the talloy saying we've crashed.

That was a real foe party.

So they basically, the passengers heard this explosion on the ship.

Nothing happened for ages.

So they went to check where the captain was supposed to be, and he was gone.

He'd left the ship unmanned.

And all his crew had gone.

And the only person left to save him was the ship entertainer called Moss Hills.

And he saved everyone on the ship.

It's this great story where he rescued the 571 people.

So, first of all, he worked out how to use a ship's radio to phone a May Day thing to say, we're in trouble.

You're a comedian, he's got microphone experience.

Is this thing on?

You ever been on a cruise and there's a massive explosion?

Maybe it was.

He just performed some comedy, and the people at the other end thought, God, we better save those poor passengers.

But yeah, these helicopters came, and lifeboats were used to rescue them and he rounded everyone up and got them onto the lifeboats and organized it and he and his wife and his fellow deputy entertainer were the last people off the ship.

Do you know what happened?

So I was looking up ship launching ceremonies.

Oh yeah.

And these things happen with cruise ships as well.

The first water to touch the ship is caught, sealed in a bottle and then displayed in the captain's office.

How do you catch?

I don't know.

What a great point.

What if you try to collect the water and there's a fish in it?

Do you think you'd tip the fish out or do you then, because that would be quite a good outcome, wouldn't it?

Because at least you don't have this tedious bottle of water in your captain's office.

A lovely little memento of the environmental damage your massive cruise ship does to the ocean.

Okay, fine.

We're looking on the bright side, are we?

Just you mentioned ceremonies.

I didn't know about the line crossing ceremony.

Do you guys know about this?

This happens on the...

So when you tell a really inappropriate joke on a cruise ship and they're all like, no, mate.

No, this is the line crossing ceremony is not that.

It is when you cross the equator.

But this is the thing that happens on a lot of cruise ships.

They do this ceremony.

and in the navy they do this ceremony and in also like in merchant navy they do this ceremony and it's been happening since at least the early 1800s and Darwin had it done to him for instance so on the beagle it's really funny to read his diary from there because he really looked down on it and was like come on I'm a bloody scientist I'm not down for all this kind of banter it was an initiation thing where you had to do lots of as he described it extremely disagreeable and unpleasant things so there was a lot of simulating sex acts in the olden days and stuff I think really yeah and you what you're told to do is well first of all, you get kind of, well, what happened to Darwin is he got battened down in the hatchways in the dark until he was super hot, and then you get dragged up by the crew, and you have to go to the court of Neptune.

So it's basically you have to go to Neptune and be accused of your crime, and you're known as a polywog until you've...

passed the equator successfully and then you become you know a seasoned traveller and yeah so darwin was trapped down and then dragged up onto the deck and then he had buckets of water thrown over him he was blindfolded he was made to stand stand on a plank above this huge bath of water, and then they tipped him in.

Um, he's when he thought it was the actual sea because he was blindfolded.

Oh, probably, yeah,

that was a funny trick to play.

That is funny, yeah.

Um, on walking the plank, there's a Norwegian cruise ship which has a walk the plank experience.

Oh, they make you walk the plank.

Well, I think you volunteer to walk yourself along, and that and it's an eight-foot-long plank, but you do it wearing a safety harness.

Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, so you just slam into the side of the ship when you drop.

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

My fact this week is that Stephen Mangan, Michael Parkinson, Eamon Holmes, and Cherie Blair have all been dropped from the TV program, Who Do You Think You Are?

because their ancestry is too boring.

Were they dropped mid-programme?

They were, yeah, pretty much.

No, they were signed up to do it because the program approached you and said, Would you like to do the programme?

And you sign up and say yes and agree to do all the things.

And then they start researching.

And then at some point, they went back to these people being like, actually, you know what?

Let's leave it because it's going to be rubbish.

The good news is that their full stories made a new series called Who Cares Who You Think It What?

It was very funny because it sounds like they have to be quite diplomatic when they tell them.

So with Sherry Blair, one of the producers said, we spent hours locked in rooms with Sherry's publicist, secretary, manager, personal assistant.

Eventually, we had to say, you are very interesting, but we don't have a show.

But it's amazing because Cherie Blair is a booth and she is a descendant of John Wilkes Booth, as in it's her.

John Wilkes Booth.

Yeah, who killed Abraham Lincoln.

Wow.

Yeah, so it's not a direct descendant.

It's John Wilkes Booth's uncle was Cherie Blair's direct ancestor.

And surely there was enough in there alone.

She was really disappointed, wasn't she?

It is kind of sad.

All these people were, in fact.

I think she was disappointed.

I think Michael Parkinson might have said he was really sad as well.

He said he was gutted.

He said it's the one show that he would have been happy to have been on.

You know, it was the only show of all the celebrity-based programmes that he actively wanted to take part in.

Not even Parkinson.

He didn't even go that way.

Jesus.

Stephen Mangins is really funny because they found out that all of his ancestors were from the same place in Ireland.

And the same very small place in Ireland.

His mother and father grew up in adjacent villages on the west coast of Ireland, but they never met until they both happened to come to London and then meet each other there.

I think that's so interesting that your whole family can be from one tiny spot.

Yeah.

I would love to see a program done on Japan's emperor, you know, the imperial family in Japan because they have a family tree that's traced back so far that it goes into mythological characters.

At that point, I would say you've lost the trace.

Yeah.

Yeah, but they believe it in Japan.

So it's a part of the official family tree and it goes into effectively, you know, people who are up on clouds.

But where's the crossover point?

That must be a crossover point.

Yeah, we know we know where it is.

Person, person, person, god.

Yeah, 660 to 585 BC was the life of Jimmu, who was an emperor, and it's from there, and his wife, Isukeori.

They both have family trees that disappear off into mythology with amazing cloud-flying emperors.

I like the fact that you say it traces back so far that it goes into mythology, as if you actually think that if you go back far enough in history, you will come to mythological creatures.

It'd be great to be the kids of the, like, well, my father is a thunder-throwing god, and my mother is from Suffolk.

And how do they meet?

And there's also, the Goodness Book of World Records actually acknowledges the longest lineage of a family tree that is traceable.

Yeah, it's called the Lurie lineage.

That's the Lurie family.

And it includes people like Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber.

I don't know who that is.

Sigmund Freud, one one of the most famous men in history.

And Martin Buber.

Every son just wants to suckle on his mother's boobies.

Oh my God, this is crazy.

This lineage traces back to Jahil Luri, a 13th century rabbi in breast litter.

In Brestlikovs.

In Breast Lit.

Wow, Freud is just steeped in all boobies.

Although, of course, when you trace stuff back far enough, as we've said before, then

you all unite around the same person.

We're all related to Martin Buber.

We're all Martin Boober.

Aren't we all boomers at the end of the day?

There is there was a lot of this mythology stuff in the past, wasn't there?

As in there was a theory that the British royals were descended from Brutus.

Was there?

Yeah, but Brutus and it all dated back to the fall of Troy.

Okay.

That was the thing.

There was a Brutus who, the Roman Brutus was descended, and not the Caesar Brutus, there was an earlier, more mythological Brutus, was descended from the people who left Troy, the Trojans when they left after the fall of the city, and that through Brutus, that's how it descended to to the English monarchs in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Yeah, that was the myth.

Well Cherie Blair is related to Brutus.

Junius Brutus Booth, the father of John Wilkes Booth, who was named after Brutus from the play.

Oh really?

And he was a very famous actor and what's very interesting about him is that he also attempted to assassinate a president.

A tried to assassinate a president?

Well he sent a letter to President Andrew Jackson.

He demanded that he pardon two pirates and he refused and he there was a threat of assassination if he didn't.

And he got caught for it.

But yeah, isn't that weird?

His dad was attempting to, yeah.

Well, like father, like son, you know, you know what you grow up with.

You're often influenced by it, aren't you?

Just on Cherie Blair's family, Tony Booth was her dad.

Yeah.

Not a difficult one to trace back, obviously, but he was a famous actor.

You got the discovery scene.

Can't believe you didn't find out the Tony Booth thing, guys.

It's right there.

He was an actor who was, he was famous.

He was in Until Death Throwers Part and various other things.

Weirdly, he had bit parts in East Enders and Emmerdale, and he played the same character in both, which is a tramp who acts as a spiritual guide to one of the characters.

Cool.

Presumably the people who made which was it, Emmerdale and East Enders.

Yeah.

Presumably the people who made, say, East Enders, saw the tramp giving spiritual advice to one of the characters in Emmerdale and thought, we've got to get this tramp.

But do you know what other films he did, Tony Booth, which I didn't know?

And it's just such a weird idea.

It's saucy films, isn't it?

It's such saucy films.

So he did the Confessions of of series, which was in the 70s.

And it was like Confessions of a Window Cleaner, which embarrassingly was the top-grossing British film of 1974.

Yes.

And it's sort of comedy sex film.

Yeah, a lot of boobers in there.

Lots of boobers.

He was in all of these Confessions of a Driving Instructor.

And the plot is, as you would predict, a window cleaner goes around shagging lots of housewives

and having freetons and stuff.

But he's on the other side of the window.

That's the tragedy of the window cleaner, isn't it?

Yeah, but he can drill a hole because they have

drills famously window cleaners.

Welcome to those just cleaned or flying through the drilling service, too.

Yeah, I could do it with some air.

The lapse mechanism's broken, so yeah, drill through it.

Thanks.

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