235: No Such Thing As Trousers For Spiders

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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, and I am sitting here with Anna Jaczynski, James Harkin, 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 my fact this week, my fact is that a message in a bottle that was thrown off the Titanic as it was sinking was found one year later washed up on a shore in Ireland only a few miles from the home of the man who threw it.

That's it's pretty extraordinary.

So this is could be that he just dropped it on his way to the Titanic.

So this is a this was a 19-year-old.

He was called Jeremiah Burke.

He was from Glenmire, County Cork, in Ireland.

And

the way that they were able to verify the bottle, because there's been a lot of forgery bottles that were claimed to be

people trying to make money,

this bottle was a bottle of holy water that his mother had given to him as sort of good luck thing.

And he used one of his own shoelaces to tie it up as he threw the letter and the bottle overboard.

I keep saying this didn't fucking work, mum.

Maybe send me a better good luck charm next time.

Yeah, so the message has a date on it.

It's slightly unclear.

So

it could be the 10th, 12th, 13th.

We know that it's sunk on the morning of the 15th, but so I don't know why he would have

at the best of times, I don't necessarily know what date it is straight away.

I think as you're going down with the Titanic, maybe you're going, what date is it, guys?

What date is it?

Asking the person next to you who's cleaning off dear life.

Sorry, do you know what date it is?

Is it Monday?

But yeah, so this bottle washed up, and I've looked at it on Google Maps.

It is literally just a couple of miles separate where the area of where they lived right to this shore.

And it was found by a coachman who found it.

And

I didn't get to the bottom of this bit of the story, but presumably knew the area, knew the people in the area, and thought, ah, this guy, you know, he said, Burke of Glenmare Cork.

I know this family.

I know the Burke's.

I'm going to see if this is him.

And so delivered it to the mother, who a year later received this bottle.

You could argue that it was a hoax.

At the same time, it's only been reported in the last few years properly again since it happened because they've been lending it to a museum.

So they didn't sell it.

It didn't go through auctions.

It's been a family heirloom since.

Yeah, I suppose the natural currents would take it there anyway, wouldn't it?

I suppose so.

Yeah.

It's kind of the obvious place for it to end up.

So where did the Titanic launch from?

Liverpool, was it?

Or it went from Southampton, then I think it went to France and then it went to Ireland and its last stop-off was in Ireland, I think.

Was it?

Okay.

Ah, I didn't know that.

All right.

But But yeah, that is such a weird coincidence.

But it's so weird how many messages in bottles, or maybe it's not weird, how many messages in bottles do get tossed overboard and found.

And there are so many great stories.

So, another really good message in bottle coincidence that I liked is that in April 2012, a UK fisherman called Andrew Leaper was fishing near Shetland and he found a message in a bottle, and it was a note that had been dropped at sea in 1890.

And it was one of those that wanted to investigate ocean currents.

So, oceanographers were always doing this to investigate where the messages ended up to see what the ocean currents were like.

Anyway Andrew Lieper found this message in a bottle in 2012 and so it was and it was really nice because that meant it was the 315th to be put in that log started in 1890.

So 315 of those messages had been retrieved.

And it's still going.

The log is still

keeping the log going.

Some incredibly bored researchers still sitting there having to

sit down every 40 years.

But what I liked about this guy was was that he then broke the record for that's the longest wait anyone's ever had to read a message in a bottle.

And the previous record holder had been his mate, Mark Anderson, who'd broken it in 2006 in the same boat.

So how weird is that?

So he's friends with him and he did, like, Lieper did an interview with the papers when he then broke his friend's record.

And he said, my friend Anderson is very unhappy that I've topped his record as Anderson never stopped bloody talking about it.

I mean, if anything screams, hoax, I'm more suspicious of of that one than I am of that one.

In 1954,

I was just looking up other bottles that have been chucked in, had been chucked in rather than found.

Guinness decided to do an advertising promotion, and they threw 50,000 bottles into the ocean with messages in Guinness bottles, which I find unbelievable.

So it's known as being Guinness' longest advertising campaign yet because they're still turning up.

But I can't believe that would never be allowed today.

Just dumping 50,000 bottles in the ocean.

It's illegal in a lot of places.

It definitely is.

Yeah, well, it definitely is.

So you'll get fined in Canada for $5,000 if you throw a bottle into the water.

And we found this out because there was a story this year of a guy called Harold Hackett from Prince Edward Island.

And he's thrown an estimated 10,000 messages into the ocean since he started.

And he said he has to retire because he doesn't want to get arrested.

Well, not arrested, but fined.

Good.

I don't know.

If that's all his life meant to him, throwing messages in bottles into the ocean.

I have limited sympathy with someone like, like it was my life dream to pollute the ocean and I can't believe that the government is walking like in the 16th century it was also illegal to open a bottle if you found it.

Yeah, I never found evidence of that.

No, I think that was a fair.

Is this the whole Queen Victoria having a

Queen Elizabeth having an uncorker of messages?

I think she did have that because it's mentioned in a Victor Hugo novel.

I think that was the first mention and that was like two a hundred years later.

She can't have had an uncorker.

But that's not at least a modern invention, is it?

No,

I think fake news still exists, even if Victor Hugo is penning it.

That's true.

In his novel.

His fictitious novel.

I don't know how many Victor Hugo novels you've read, but there is a lot of extremely boring, technical, true stuff in there.

Oh, really?

Literally, you'll get like three chapters on the sewage systems of Paris.

So okay.

I know James's resentment comes out about the fact he's been reading the same Victor Hugo novel for a year now,

which is genuinely true, right?

How's it going?

If anyone here remembers us talking about Victor Hugo, it was probably about six months ago.

Yeah, that was on our 2018 tour at like...

Yeah, and I'm still reading Leigh Visarabler.

The latest sort of modern instance that I read of this uncorker comes down to a 1978 book called The $12 Million Dollar Note by Robert Krask.

In it, there's true stories and then there are also hoax stories.

And the thought is that this was in the book as a hoax story, but it got mixed up in all the reviews and so on when people were talking about this is a true story and then this is a hoax and that's why it's it's spread.

So, the idea, just to explain, that she had an official uncaker of bottles, because Queen Elizabeth I didn't want anyone else uncaking bottles that contained secret information.

So, a bottle was found, wasn't it, that was thrown from a Navy ship, supposedly, that had military details that were very important.

As in, if anyone was throwing bottles over, they would often be people who were in the Navy or doing official work for the government, right?

Checking out currents and stuff like that.

So, they didn't want just anyone to be able to read them.

And I don't know.

I know what you mean, and I think you're right to be skeptical.

And it's probably not true, but I don't think it's necessarily true that we're saying that one person had this as his only job or anything.

It could be someone who was part of the royal household who had also had this job.

He's cream of the stool on the side.

He's official

uncorker of various royal things.

Yeah, so this idea of doing scientific experiments for the sake of finding out ocean currents and stuff by dropping messages in bottles in actually serves a purpose, which seems so weird to me.

So there was this guy, George Parker Bidder, who threw a thousand bottles into the North Sea in 1906, and he promised a shilling reward for anyone who found the bottle and then sent it back to him saying exactly where they'd found it.

And in fact, one woman found the last one in 2015 and she posted it back to the address.

And the company in Plymouth that was still monitoring it had to then track down a shilling, an old shilling,

looking on eBay and old antique coin collectors to send her.

That's so funny.

Actually, the first ever message in a bottle possibly might have been for that reason, which was supposedly Greek philosopher Theophrastus, who wanted to prove that the Mediterranean was fed by the Atlantic.

And so he put bottles in the Atlantic and saw them go around the corner into the med, and he could prove that.

Again, this is just slightly not sure if this is true or not.

And did he leave a message saying, whoever finds us, can you tell me the location?

Pretty much.

Yeah, that's the idea.

That's cool.

And he saw them go round the corner, didn't you say?

I think, again, this is possibly not true.

But he would have put them in the water, and then there would have been, like Dan says, a message saying, contact Theophrastus on, you know,

Athens Square.

There was a thing on the US government nautical site which said that a lot of the nautical maps we have now are based on those messages.

So in the 1950s, I think loads of messages in bottles were put in the Gulf of Maine.

And all the maps we have of all the different ocean currents there are basically based on where everyone picked all those messages up and where, and you know, then they sent back saying, Hey, I'm here, I've just found this.

And that's where a lot of ocean maps come from.

And now we've got like satellite technology and stuff also.

I think quite recently, I'm sure we must have mentioned this, but there was all those rubber ducks that fell off a tanker, didn't they?

And they floated around everywhere, and we got loads of data from that.

Yeah, really.

That's still happening.

I think they still wash up every now and then.

Yeah, they do, yeah.

So I read an article, there was a great mental floss article all about messages and bottles and then the article veers away because this isn't technically a message in a bottle but it's a pretty extraordinary story so I'm just gonna read it anyway this happened in 2001 there was a girl called Laura Buxton and she was coming up to 10 years old she released a red balloon into the air she lived in stoke on Trent in England and on the balloon she wrote please return to Laura Buxton and on the other side of the balloon she put her home address so they released it into the air it disappeared a few weeks later 140 miles away, the balloon hit a hedge when it came down.

And

the person who picked it up saw the name and saw the address and immediately went, what the hell was going on and went to his neighbor because his neighbor had a daughter who was 10 years old who also had the name Laura Buxton.

So it landed exactly with the same age, same name.

The person, they got in contact and they were saying, what an amazing coincidence.

Let's meet up.

So on the day of the meeting, the two girls, independently without having decided what they were going to do, both came in the same outfit.

They both had a pink sweater and were wearing jeans.

Jeans.

Oh my gosh.

Wow, what are the odds?

This is just collecting all the coincidence that happened in the moment.

They were both roughly the same height, which was

two girls the same age and roughly the same height.

So they were tall 10-year-olds.

So they were very surprised.

Like, oh, you're a tall, 10-year-old.

Tiny little coincidence.

Yes,

I like pizza.

They both had brown hair.

They wore it in the same style.

They both had three-year-old black Labrador retrievers.

They both had a grey pet rabbit, not on them.

They left them alone.

They both brought, they did bring their own guinea pigs, which were the same colour and had the same orange markings on their hind quarters.

This is mental floss.

So I know it sounds like I'm reading an April Fool's thing, but this is...

But also, like, if that was in a local news story, I'm a journalist in a local news story in Stoke-on-Trent.

I would go and go, come on, give me some more.

What have you got?

Did they have a dog?

Yeah, okay, what?

This is on local as well.

Yeah, exactly.

What color hair does she have?

Brilliant.

Nice one.

Can I just say this is, I don't know why these two are being like this.

They must have woken up on the wrong side of their bed.

Because that does happen sometimes.

Sure.

I mean.

Coincidental things.

I suppose you could say the law of large numbers means that there's enough things that happen in the world which aren't coincidental that some coincidental things do happen sometimes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thousands of Laura Boxers pick up fan balloons every day.

Yeah.

Happen not to be wearing the same clothes.

I think we should still get excited by coincidences.

I know it's like, oh, this could happen anyway.

It's still amazing.

Yeah, I think maybe we did get out of bed on the wrong side.

But on the other hand, did you not, when you're a kid, release loads of balloons with notes on them and never get a single fucking reply from anyone?

Yeah, is that that's what you're projecting now?

I've never done it at school.

It was a very common thing for people to do when I was a kid.

We don't do it now anymore because it's like bad for the environment, but they used to be really in vogue to do that.

Didn't know.

You'd write a note on your thing.

We would used to go to Tiggy's for our birthday every year, which is an Italian restaurant in Bolton, and then we'd get a free balloon and then we'd write a note on it.

Yeah, yeah, same.

Every birthday party.

Some bastard in Bolton was shooting them down, I think.

Does Goose got a shed with thousands of labels and dead balloons with James Harkin's name on?

Um, there was what there was one person, the one girl who did it, and it landed in the back garden of Buckingham Palace, and the queen sent it back.

Did she remember that?

She was called Elizabeth Windsor, wasn't she?

And she was a 90-year-old girl from Bookstan.

And they both turned out wearing crowns.

You've got a beeping to do.

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

My fact this week is that the original mastermind chair was specially modified to have detachable arms, quote, in case a contender is too large to fit between them, unquote.

Oh, okay, so we're going to explain what Mastermind is for non-British people.

Yes, so it's a long-running quiz show.

It's been running since 1972.

It's a very like paired-back quiz show.

So it's a dark studio.

You have a person asking questions and you have four contestants and they each come up to a chair one at a time and the chair is the kind of the famous symbol of the show.

And each contestant asked a specialist subject.

So you prepare a specialist subject.

So if you know, for example,

Titanic facts and everything about it, you would get quizzed in a very quick space of time everything about the Titanic.

and the more points you get you win.

It's like an expert quiz.

Yeah, exactly.

And it was based on a guy who was in the war, in the Second World War.

He was an RAF gunner, and he was captured in Germany and questioned by the Germans.

And it's kind of supposed to be almost the same way that he felt at the time, which is you've got a big light on you that are asking you questions again and again and again to kind of put you under as much pressure as possible.

Yeah, yeah, his name was Bill Wright.

And yeah, exactly that.

He was a prisoner of war.

And he thought, oh, this will make a great game show when

he was being interrogated by the Nazis.

And interestingly, he says that in Germany, so you were asked three questions, which is name, rank, and number.

And that's still the thing that in Mastermind, it's name, occupation, and specialist subject.

He took the rule of three that they, and he directly associates it with that.

And when they started it, Magnus Magnusson, who is the original host of the show, and his name is, he's Icelandic, so that's an Icelandic name, Magnus Magnusson.

Do you know what his dad's name was?

No, I don't.

What his dad's first name was.

Yeah, it was not Magnus.

No, so.

Because he changed it.

Yeah, in Iceland, it's supposed to be your surname is son of your father.

So my dad's called Michael, so I should be James Michelson.

Right.

But his father was called Anna.

Sigurstein, wasn't he?

Sigurstein.

So he should have been Sigurst Steinssen.

Yeah.

But actually, his father was called Sigestein Magnusson.

And in Scotland, of course, you have the same surname as your father, so he had to keep the same surname as well.

Okay, wow.

That's very interesting.

So, yeah, so Magnus,

usually you'd be a quiz host or, you know, you'd have a title like that.

His title when he was doing the show was The Interrogator.

So that's what he was introduced as.

So it was completely tied into his experience.

And he was actually a Nazi as well, wasn't he, Magnus Magnusson?

He was, yeah.

Was he?

No.

Oh, geez.

No, he was in the National Officer.

I thought I missed that paragraph when I was reading into this.

Do you want to know what's weird, though, is that another little link in that I know from our friend who was on Mastermind, so Ian Dunn, who's a big fan of QI and who we know, he went on Mastermind and he said when you fill in the forms when you're saying what your specialist subject should be, it's called the Mastermind SS form.

They have at the top.

You're kidding.

That's very funny.

I read on Wikipedia they have a list of a few subjects that have actually been rejected.

A few of the ones that have been rejected include routes to anywhere in mainland Britain by road from Letchworth.

The banana industry, not allowed to pick the banana industry as you're.

Not allowed to pick it.

Nice.

Orthopedic bone cement in total hip replacement is another.

And the last word on the wiki is perfect squares up to 99 squared.

What is a perfect square, Dan?

It's 9,801.

But

that's one point.

But in recent years, I read in an article that subjects like Faulty Towers, Black Adder, Roald Dahl, Harry Potter, so

they've been ruled out because so many people have picked it that they've run out of questions, basically.

They don't know what else to ask about Black Adder that's not been done before.

The thing with Harry Potter is that last year, 262 people wanted to do it as a specialist subject on Mastermind.

That's according to producer Mark Helsby.

The first three winners were women, which was quite bizarre because far fewer women than men have ended up winning the titles.

Not because women are less clever, because of centuries and centuries of systemic oppression, blah, blah, blah.

But

you're not totally bought into that.

I would say that your specialist subject is not feminism.

Look, I believe it.

It's just a long explanation to go into.

But yeah, the first three people who won were women, and then in 35 years, it's been eight women and 21 men who've won it.

But after the first three years, everyone was speculating: is a man ever going to win Mastermind?

Can we talk about the chair very quickly?

Yes.

The chair was voted in a survey for House Beautiful magazine as the second greatest chair, basically, of pop culture.

Oh, can we guess the first?

Yeah, have a go, yeah.

Okay.

Just one extra bit of context.

It was voted as the second most iconic chair of the 20th century.

I was going to say the wool sack in the House of Lords or whatever it is.

Is it a sofa from Friends?

No, it's not.

Okay, so it's.

Is it in pop culture, right?

Is it the chair?

The singer.

No, it's in.

Okay, so I'm going to say it's the 1960s.

It is a chair that made the newspapers because it was a scandalous

it was a scandalous chair, basically.

Scandalous chair.

Elvis.

Elvis?

Did he have a chair?

Didn't he?

So if you just said Elvis.

Did he die on the toilet?

He died on the toilet, yeah.

They often call it the throne.

Yeah, that's true.

Well, no.

Is it the chair that Liza Minelli sat on in that film?

Is that 96?

No, it's not, but it's interesting.

Have a think in your head about what she does with that chair, and you might get to it somehow.

Chicago, you're thinking.

She sits backwards.

Does someone sit backwards on it in an iconic way?

Is it Marilyn Monroe?

Basically, no, that's it.

That's it.

Christine Keeler.

Yeah, we go.

Perfumo.

Perfumo.

Yes.

One of the most.

So that got voted the Christine Keillor sitting backwards on a chair as the most iconic.

Very much that was more about Keeler than the chair.

Except in its time,

most comedians would parody that shot and still do of being naked on a chair that way round in reference to that.

So I think for that reason, that chair is the concept of the chair.

Yeah, exactly.

I think, yeah, I can picture the picture you're talking about, which I think means

it counts.

We'll allow it.

So the last chair on Mastermind was given to Magnus Magnusson when he retired.

And they've got a new one now, which, like Alex says, has these detachable arms.

It is an Eames soft pad.

It was designed in 1969, and it was designed by Charles and Ray Eames, who are basically the best chair designers in the history of the world.

It's very trumpish of you.

I have these chairs.

They make great chairs.

They are the famous.

They're the big names in chairs.

They were a husband and wife couple, and they made loads of mass-produced chairs.

And the first thing they ever mass-produced was a molded plywood leg splint for World War II, which they gave to all the soldiers, and it was molded on Charles's own leg.

And they sold 150,000 of them.

So there were soldiers all around the world walking on an exact replica of his own leg.

Wow.

That's amazing.

That's good, though, isn't it?

That's incredible.

My favourite TV chair

is the chair that was in the audition room when Robin Williams went to audition for the role of Mork,

Mork from Ork on Happy Days.

So I think then that span off into Mork and Mindy, didn't it?

But the producer was a guy called Gary Marshall, and Robin Williams came into the room, and he was unknown at the time, walked in, and Gary Marshall told him to take a seat.

And immediately, Robin Williams went to the chair and stood on his head on it.

And Marshall immediately hired him, saying he was the only alien who applied for the job.

So wow.

It's cool.

Those stories are quite dangerous because it encourages literally everyone to go into an and really break the mold.

And can you imagine sitting there for hours after every single person comes in and does something really annoying with a chair?

You're the only one who sat on the chair.

That was the test.

Do what I tell you.

We're not looking for actual aliens.

We need an actor.

We need someone who's going to be easy to work with to do the same performance time after time in multiple takes.

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

My fact this week is that one competition at the Highland Games used to be pulling the legs off a cow in order to win a sheep.

They're really hard in Scotland, aren't they?

Because when I was at school, you used to pull legs off a daddy long legs, but in Scotland, they pulled legs off a cow.

It sounds like a metaphor for ruining something, because a cow is more valuable than a sheep, so why don't you just keep the cow and leave the legs on?

So the cow is dead at this point, I should say.

So it's not as awful.

Still quite awful.

Yeah, it's pretty horrible.

It's It's still ideal.

It's a strength test, and it would be impressive if someone could twist the legs off a cow with his own bare hands.

Emotional strength test as well to witness what you've just done to this poor case.

If you ever see Anna in the countryside and you want to impress her,

tug the legs off the nearest quadruped.

This was actually invented in 1820, and I don't think it was that long-lasting, but the idea of the contest was invented by a guy called Aleister MacDonald, who was a clan chief.

And apparently, he was just this really cool,

eccentric vibrant clan chieftain character.

In fact he was who the character of Fergus MacIver in the Waverly, Walter Scott's Waverly novel was based on and yeah he said let's do this that'll be fun and the first prize is a fat sheep.

Okay

and the reason it didn't last probably is because it was extremely difficult.

Yes.

I read one I don't I think it might have happened maybe once or twice in one or two different ones but the one that I read was in Invergarry

and there was only one man who succeeded after struggling for about an hour.

As a reward he received his sheep and a eulogistic speech from the chief.

Nice.

Has anyone been to the Highland Games?

No, I have

been.

Yeah, it's really awesome.

It's really good.

It's almost like a fate.

The one that I went to is like a village fate.

But then you've also got these incredible things happening with people throwing these massive weights like really, really high.

Like really high.

This is the big logs.

The bigger tossing.

The caper tossing, yeah.

The capital.

The main one I saw they were like they had these kind of you know like kettlebells that you would use in a gym and we're throwing this over a big big big high height.

Wow.

I was really impressed.

Is it kind of like um high jump?

Is there a is there a bar?

Yeah, so it would get higher and higher and higher every time.

And the caber toss is not about how far you can toss it, it's about you have to toss it so that it lands at 12 o'clock, so it lands upright.

So you got it's got to stay up in the air for like an hour and a half if you're jumping in the morning.

Depending on time you throw it.

Don't throw it at 9 a.m.

It's not, yeah.

As in it lands like facing away from you as it were.

So it needs to do a full rotation 180 and then land exactly facing away from you

perpendicular to the earth.

Yes.

So it would be extremely hard to pull the leg off a cow, right?

I think they twisted.

People tend to just say twist quite a bit.

And is that how you pull a if is that?

I think that is how you would do it, yeah.

I think so.

Let's say you want to pull a chicken leg off a chicken.

Yeah.

You tend to give it a twist while you're pulling, don't you?

I can see what you're saying, actually.

I can picture that now.

Do you know the ideal shape for a cow in the 19th century?

It's got four legs for a starters.

Well, unless it's kind of square.

Because I can't really picture cows because I can't picture anything.

But if I ever had to straw one, I'd draw it particularly square for an animal.

Yeah.

And that's if you picture drawings in the 19th century, then cows would be vast and very square.

And there was a lot of competition between members of the nobility and landowners about getting the right shape for your animals.

So yeah, if you look at cows, cows, they don't look like real cows.

And the actual, the size of a cow between 1710 and 1795 increased by a third.

So people were really building up their cows.

Sorry, what were the dates, Ada?

Between 1710 and 1795.

So that was when they started getting big.

So it's only a couple of generations.

Yeah, absolutely.

But cows were supposed to be rectangular, exactly rectangular.

Sheep were supposed to tend towards being oblong.

And pigs, the ideal shape for a pig was a football shape.

Well, what kind of football?

As in those days, was FA regulation standards, black and white, next again.

I think rounds of if you get pictures of pigs, very often they'll be the picture with their stomachs literally on the floor, like a pot-bellied pig.

Because eventually they turn them into footballs, didn't they?

Yeah, exactly.

Pigs bladders, footballs.

Yeah.

So, why were the cows square?

Was it because usually when you make things square, it's so you can stack them, but I don't think they pick out the cows.

A bit more in the locker.

No, this was just getting them bigger, and that was the shapes they tended towards.

I read, just going back to the history of the Scotland Highland Games,

I read that the very first one, so they don't know exactly where the first one occurred, but it is believed that one of the first early venues was at Feteresso.

And technically, it's a few miles south of the Scottish Highlands.

So the first one may be...

In the lowlands.

It's in the lowlands.

So it's actually the lowland

games.

That's a really good fact, if it's true.

If it's true, yeah.

Unfortunately, as the article says,

if it did happen there, it predates recorded history.

We'll never know.

Because really the first one, which is kind of a modern style, was in Brema in the early 1800s.

And it came at a time when the Scottish were kind of finding themselves.

And that's when all that kind of tartan...

It did exist, but it was when it was properly became formalised in the last idea.

It's quite an informal type thing.

There aren't the Highland games, or there weren't the Highland games.

Yeah, it's more just like a festival type thing, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah, at various times over the summer, every place will have one.

And it's weird, it's not just these, like anytime I've thought of it, I've thought of throwing these giant logs and, as you say, the kettlebell style weights, but they do stuff like biggest bowl of porridge, you know, as a competition.

And there was one that was made in 2010 that set the record, which is it was 690 litres of porridge.

So it feed 2,000 people.

It was judged by Goldilocks, who said, this porridge is too small.

And that's all tourists as well, isn't it?

No Scottish people have ever been to the Highlands.

And

you know who used to go to it, Billy Conley all the time.

And as a result, he used to bring his best mates along, who happened to be famous comedians as well, one of which who went was Robin Williams.

Just to bring old Alien chairman back into the conversation.

Yeah.

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

My fact this week is that you can cure your arachnophobia by drawing pictures of smiling spiders.

So good.

I'm actually going to try this.

You're arachnophobic.

Yeah.

Yeah, me too.

Do you need to draw

like a nude, a life model kind of thing?

Do you need the spider there?

Well, they are always usually nude.

Spiders.

They can't get trousers with eight legs.

If you drew like a sexy photo of a spider, would that make it less scary?

Like a profumo sitting on a chair.

Four legs every sign.

So, this is a clinical hypnotherapist called Adam Cox.

He is British or he practices in Britain.

And he encourages his clients to draw brightly coloured smiling spiders with big eyes.

And he says that it reduces their feelings of anxiety towards the arachnids.

But so does it cure you in a you're presumably it's not like okay I'm gonna be encountering a spider in the next five minutes.

I'm gonna quickly draw a picture of a smiling one to no it's a long-term therapy so people are going week after week and drawing more and more spiders, and eventually it makes them feel less anxious.

It maybe sounds like the early stages of a very severe phobia treatment.

So, as in, you can't even, because you know, there are some phobias where you can't even say the word of the thing you're scared of.

Yeah.

And the idea of drawing a spider is probably really scary and horrible.

And thinking about the details of it is probably part of the problem.

Well, I am an arachnophobe, a little bit, not as much as I used to be as a kid, but I would always find it really hard to see a picture of them on

in a book.

And even now on the internet, I find it quite hard.

I have to scroll past him.

Me too.

Really?

Yeah, just get it out of shot and just read the text.

It's pretty hard to research this.

But so what's interesting as well is there was a study that was done in Queensland, in Australia, and along with a UK university in Sussex.

And they were saying that if you have a fear of spiders, if you have arachnophobia, you are more likely to see a spider, as in you're hardwired, as I say, to notice the threats.

So if you were out in Queensland and you were walking through the bush, if I'm walking with you and I'm less scared, I might not see a spider that's obviously there, but you are on edge waiting to see one.

Yeah, actually, it just

is almost logical.

I do have a problem with movement in general.

So if I see any movement out of the corner of my eye, it really freaks me out.

And the reason their movement is particularly weird, because I think we mentioned recently, actually, how they move by hydraulic pressure.

But I didn't realize it was all spiders move in that way.

So when they stretch their legs out, they're not doing it with their muscles at all.

They're pumping blood out through their legs, which is why they move in that weird, jerky way.

And that's why when they die, they always shrivel up because the pressure disappears.

So they shrivel up.

So basically, when they run, they have to have an erection in every one of their legs.

That's exactly it, yeah.

It's very quickly getting hard and then not getting hard over and over and over again.

Yeah.

Their genitals are hydraulic as well, by the way.

So yeah, they operate with some hydraulic pressure.

And also, they obviously have this really cool thing, spider penises, where they can keep on having sex without the spider.

So there are quite a few spiders, like the orb web spider, which will start having sex with a lady spider and then detaches its penis to get away because I watch the football.

I have to take a call.

I'm so sorry.

I'll be back in a minute.

You have this.

Exactly.

And it's actually more effective without its spider attachment.

As soon as the spider leaves, the penises tend to eject about 70% of their sperm after that.

So they keep pumping sperm out, even when the spider's gone.

Wow, wow.

I was looking into general phobias because obviously there are so many phobias out there.

and I found this long list just to see which ones are actual phobias, because there must be a phobia for everything, but there's a limitation, obviously, on ones that have been given names.

So, the ones that I found that I thought were quite interesting that have actual names assigned to them, there's a phobia for the fear of opinions.

That's very interesting.

You'd be just fearful.

I'm not really sure what I think about that.

There is the fear of flutes.

When you say there is,

as in a guy on the internet decided to attribute names to no, so this is a big list that a guy wrote

on Wikipedia.

Not Wikipedia is called something like

phobia, weirdphobias.com is like that.

I think that's a really difficult thing, isn't it?

Because there's a list of millions of them.

There's like a fit someone wrote one about a fear of a duck secretly looking at you or something like that.

Yes.

Which is obviously not true.

Then on the other hand, there are such weird ones that are true, it's really hard to tell which ones are and aren't.

So like fern phobia is definitely a thing.

Is it?

Being scared of ferns.

I think quite a few famous people have got that.

Fern cotton, which is very difficult for her.

Yeah, because she's scared of cotton as well.

Yeah, and fear of like holes and stuff like that is really common.

Yes, I've heard of that one.

Hypophobia.

Fear of chins?

Do you reckon that's a real one?

It's hard to imagine why, but that's what I mean.

It's hard to say what it is and whether it isn't.

Yeah.

You know, a guy had his arachnophobia accidentally removed quite recently.

So you can get rid of it accidentally, but it does involve really invasive surgery.

This was a guy who'd always been terrified of spiders, and then also he got an illness where he started having seizures.

And so, he went in for an operation to get rid of his seizures, and they had to remove a bit of his amygdala.

The surgery went really well, but he woke up and he found just two slight changes to his character.

He had this stomach-lurching aversion to a very specific kind of music.

So, when he heard it, it was a music on a particular advert, he was terrified, just hated it, and he was no longer remotely afraid of spiders.

That's really useful.

I have a fear of invasive brain surgery, though, so it's a bit worse than my fear of spiders.

There's an organization, a charity organization in the UK called Triumph Over Phobia, Top UK.

One of the managers is called Trilby Breckman, and Trilby Breckman runs self-help groups.

He sounds like a really cool guy.

And he said, we once had a guy who came to us for six weeks and never said a word.

He just sat there.

Then eventually he managed to say, I've got a social phobia, and then ran out of the room.

So good.

But, I mean, we shouldn't be laughing.

What are we listening?

And this is new attention.

Who the hell recommended group therapy to a guy who has a fear of social environment?

It's okay to laugh because he came back the following week, and within a year, he was running groups by himself as well.

And now he's got a fear of being alone.

He has to stay in the group all the time.

I was looking up what, because I was like, what are spiders scared of?

Because, you know, everyone's scared of spiders.

Most spiders are terrified of ants because ants contain formic acid, which is really bad for spiders.

And a lot of them will run for their lives if they see an ant, as it were.

That's like a quote, like a researcher said, they sort of run away.

But in the University of Canterbury found that

they even run away from, some spiders will even run away from another species of spider called a jumping spider,

the gregarious jumping spider, which pretends to be an ant.

That's its defence mechanism.

And it scares away other spiders.

So it hides its legs.

I think we said that they hide two of their legs, don't they?

So, some species of spiders do that and pretend to be ants, and that scares other species of spiders who are scared of ants.

So, as someone who's scared of spiders myself a little bit, if I was to dress as a massive ant, do you think they'd all kind of just leave me alone?

Possibly.

So, the spiders in

the TV series I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, must be feeling good this year because they're going to be missing a big ant on set this year.

Very good.

Why do you think you should never pick up a tarantula?

Because

I hate them.

Because I might shit myself, and if I shit myself, no one's going to hang out with me anymore.

You're right, that makes your social phobia even worse.

Because you'll scare them too much and they'll die.

It's similar, so it's for their sake.

So their abdomens are incredibly thin, and one little touch on the abdomen with your fingernail could split it open and they'll spill their guts all over the place.

So you can't just tickle it on its tummy or anything.

They hate a tummy tickle to stop doing that.

And if you drop a tarantula, it'll almost certainly die.

Really?

Yeah, this is the advice of the

British Tarantula Society, which is a bit of a QI favourite, I think, because it was founded in the 1980s.

But the woman who founded it was called Anne Webb.

That's going to make watching Home Alone again a more harrowing experience, knowing that that tarantula that gets loose and gets dropped and stuff.

I mean, they must have had a stunt spider dressed as a tarantula, if that's the case, because he would have...

burst open in some of the scenes.

I think you're assuming too much knowledge of Home Alone from some of us.

I can't immediately remember the tarantula scene.

Oh, he jumps on his face.

The only thing I remember is Kevin with his hands to his face screaming because he's been left home alone.

Yeah, that's so you've memorised the poster.

Sorry, I'm going to have to correct you again.

He's not screaming because he was left home alone.

He's screaming because he put aftershave on his face.

Yeah, he can't.

Was he?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he was pretending because he saw his dad screaming like that.

I don't think so.

And then it's

used suggestively in the poster to make it look like he's screaming at the two robbers who are either side of him in the famous poster.

In the context of the film, film, he's never screaming.

I have an extremely clear, extremely fake memory.

His mum screams, his mum sits up on the plane and goes, Kevin!

That's that's he doesn't say no, he doesn't say Kobe.

Why would he say his own name?

It doesn't make any sense.

I still think you're right, though.

What about in Home Alone 2?

Does he do it there?

No, because he's lost in New York in that.

Although she says Kevin again, yeah, in a scream.

You know, in Ed Vadmonk's The Scream, doesn't he do it?

No, that's actually just put hand to shape, guys.

Yeah, yeah.

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.

At James Harkin.

Alex.

At Alex Bell.

And Chaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account at no such thing, our Facebook page, no such thing as a fish, or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

Alex designed it.

Thanks, Alex.

Has everything links to our tour, our new book.

It's got a behind-the-scenes documentary called Behind the Gills, which shows how we act on tour.

It's a lot of ironing, and

everything else of all our previous episodes and so on is up there.

So check it out, no such thingasafish.com.

We're going to be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.