233: No Such Thing As A Sexy Question Mark

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, James.

Okay, my fact this week is that on their birthday, every beefeater at the Tower of London gets a gift of a free bottle of beef eater gin.

On their birthday, singular.

So do they all...

They only hire people born on the 20th of September.

They're like racehorses.

They all get their new age on the 1st of January.

No, it's every beefeater on that particular person's birthday.

They get one bottle of gin.

And the beef eater gym brand is nothing to do with the beef eaters.

But I went to the Tower of London this week and I spoke to my friend Andy the Beefeater and he said that basically the beef eater gym brand have got so much out of the beef eaters over the years that it's the least they can do to give them a bottle of gin every year.

It's very sweet.

So did you go to the beef eater pub?

I went to the, it's called the Keys and it's the pub inside the Tower of London.

Yes, I did go there.

That's very cool.

That's cool.

Yeah, I was reading about it.

So there used to be a lot of pubs in the Tower of London.

This is the last remaining?

There's just one left, which means if you fall out with any other beef eaters, if you have beef with them, you have to go to the same pub all the time.

That's terrible.

There's a sitcom.

Sure, I would watch that.

In fact, there's a soap opera set in the Tower of London pub.

You're right.

You're right.

Because they get up to quite bad behavior sometimes, and they have done traditionally.

So, I always thought of beef eaters as these sort of like eminent bastions of like British stateliness and other words like that.

But actually, they were historically used to kind of be drunkards, I think, in the 18th century.

They were known for creating havoc and for illegally subletting their rooms out to other people.

They would just randomly sell on the post of beef eater to make a bit of extra cash whenever they wanted.

Yeah, they were known as scoundrels.

You could only do that once.

Like once you sold it, it belonged to the other person and then they might sell it on afterwards.

Yeah, unless you stole it back from them in the night.

Yeah, I'm not sure exactly how it worked.

I think you basically got money off them and then they had the ceremony.

And the ceremony to become a beef eater, you get a little little kind of cup a little pewter cup and you drink some pot and you do a toast and then you're a beef eater basically yeah imagine if we could just sell our jobs to other people you can if you want I mean well I'm in talks with a few guys

Alex Bell is pretty interesting

in the toast it's a reference to that isn't it because they do the toast with the port and then I think the thing they say when they're toasting a new beef eater is is it may you never die a yeoman warder so they're officially called yeoman warders and that's because the idea was if you made the mistake of dying in an office then you've been an idiot because you hadn't sold it on in time and made that extra cash yes exactly it's like dying after or not selling a house in the years before you die to go just on a rampage with the money is that what you're gonna do considering you do have a son yeah

good point

um and they were really unpopular in loads of ways so as well as selling their jobs a writer historically said they have gradually assumed to themselves the more lucrative occupation of stopping everybody who wishes to visit these objects of our national pride and glory and forcing themselves upon them as their guides.

So the guards would just say, Hey, do you want to guide a tour and pester you until you gave in and gave them some money?

Yeah.

So Andy the Beefeater gave us a guided tar this week.

And I got to say, if you do go to the Tower of London, do get a tar from the beefeaters because they are amazing and they know all sorts of stuff.

But you were duped into paying for it to a one issue.

He's robbed you.

I read this thing about the beef eaters that so I think London, anyone coming here, there's a famous fact about the cabbies, the black cab drivers, having the knowledge.

It's one of those things.

They have to memorise every single road in London, and that's a test they take.

There's a similar thing that happens with the beef eaters.

They have to memorize what's known as the story.

And it's 900 years of the Tower of London's history.

They need to know it word by word within six months of passing their probation after being sworn in.

Yeah, but you now get these Uber beef eaters who come in and they just read the story off their Kindle on the phone.

I don't think we know why they're called beef eaters, do we?

There are lots of theories.

The story we were told on the tour was that it was because they were paid in beef, which they know definitely is true, or paid in meat, which they know definitely was true, and that the people outside kind of thought, oh, look at these guys eating all that meat.

And so it was like an insult kind of thing.

It makes sense.

I mean, and they're part of the queen, the royal household.

They eat lots of meat.

They ate lots of beef.

I've seen other people poo-pooing like crazy that story oh right so it just it just makes so much sense it seems to be like one of those things that you can't really poo-poo it's like yeah they ate loads of beef and they're called beef eaters do you have a better theory you've read there are i've read two or three there's one which is sort of it's from the french buffete which is a different word meaning something else yeah that's clearly nonsense isn't it what why because that is such a convoluted way to get to the word beef eater rather than just they ate loads of beef i think eating and were paid in it is probably something who gets paid in it but we know they were paid in it we We know that they were, yeah.

We know they were given a stipend of beef, which most people weren't able to eat at the time.

And we know that people took the piss out of the royal household for having because they ate so much beef around that time.

I think Andy's right.

There's so many holes in this

chess card.

I just don't believe it.

But it could be.

I just don't believe it.

You know, it could be that it came from something else and then it was helped by the fact they ate lots of beef.

Yeah, exactly.

It could have come from buffet and then I'm not buying it.

So what was buffer tea?

But there are beef eaters today.

The ravens eat raw raw beef.

They get fed raw beef from Smithfield Market.

They probably eat beef still.

Wait, are you going to explain your definitely more plausible, weird French origin compounded?

I did read this and I thought, well, that's clearly bollocks.

So the thing is, the beef eaters began, they're called the Yeoman Guard of the King or Queen, right?

Well, they're called the Yeoman Warders, which is part of a larger group called the Yeoman Guard.

And they're kind of the bodyguard of the King or Queen.

But it started at the battle of bosworth in 1485 when henry the seventh won the crown and all these guys who'd helped him who were from this northern regiment he brought them in and they became his bodyguard but henry the seventh will have been an english-speaking king so if it was further back in norman times you can kind of see where the french thing might have come from Yeah,

whereas Henry VII actually hailed from Wales.

Did he?

Yeah, the Tudors were all a Welsh family.

Is there any Welsh word that sounds a a bit like B feater?

Taffeta?

It could have come from B featers.

Like Betty.

Yeah, like the B.

You know a feet, like you accomplish a feet.

With a B.

Yeah, with a B.

B-racing or something.

Yeah, exactly.

So maybe they were famous for their B-Racing back in the day.

Ah.

And they got known as the B-feeters.

That's good.

Maybe the B's were the original Ravens, you think, that they trained.

Or maybe there was originally another group called the A Feeters, who did lots of feet.

Exactly, yeah.

And then they kind of died out and then the B Featers came in.

Bingo.

The less good features who could never go onto the A team.

Maybe.

I'm just saying, there's a lot of explanations.

You're right.

Did you see when you were in the pub, James?

I wonder, there's apparently a framed photo of Rudolf Hess.

I took a photo of it.

Did you?

Yeah, of his signature as well.

Yeah, he sort of signed, they asked him for a pin-up photo, basically, because he was a senior Nazi who was imprisoned there briefly in 1941.

I think he defected.

Everyone else was taking photos of all the pictures of B featers and stuff, but I clocked the signature of Rudolph Hess and thought, I've got to get a photo of that.

Well, you've got a large collection of Nazi signatures, but

instantly you recognised it.

See that cabinet behind the fake bookshelf in your house, right?

Okay, that makes sense.

Did he defect?

Because it sounds like when he was there, a lot of people collected his signature, and that feels odd.

I think he flew over with his family

to Scotland via Norway.

Yeah, I think he came over.

I think typically there weren't many Nazis arrested during the war on the German side.

But he was prisoner, wasn't he?

I realized Hess had defectors.

He wasn't just drinking at the pub.

If you defect, they don't just say, oh, great.

Well, welcome to Britain.

Here's your home.

Yeah, no, he was in jail at the end of the day.

And they arrest you, and then they sort of ask you a few questions.

Yeah, yeah.

Are you sure you're Rudolf Hess, that kind of thing?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But then he did get tried after the war, didn't he?

And committed suicide in prison, Hess.

I'm not saying it's a happy ending to the story.

Right.

But also, let's not waste too much sympathy on the guy.

So

you've got the Rudolph Hess.

Everyone else is doing beefeeders.

Did you see the framed photo of Bruce Willis?

I didn't see that.

Did you not?

I saw a framed picture of the Duke of Edinburgh.

Okay.

I didn't see Bruce Willis.

Well, it says amongst the things that you'll find there, there's a ceremonial axe, which is in the corner, so that photos of guests like Bruce Willis and Tom Clancy.

I don't know what Tom Clancy looks like.

No one does.

So so that's the one.

That's true, and you've got face blinder, so actually.

I would recognise Bruce Willis, perhaps.

Right.

If I was stood next to someone who said that's Bruce Willis.

No, I didn't see that, but I wouldn't.

You know, there's lots of pictures there.

Yeah.

Do they have pictures of their final prisoners?

Because they should do, and actually, I didn't read that they did.

But their last prisoners were the Cray brothers, weren't they?

Were they the very last prisoners?

Yeah.

Wow.

My series is so odd.

It's such a weird coincidence.

Well, it's because of their national service, right?

Yes, no, I know, but it's odd that it's them.

Yeah.

That it's someone famous.

Yeah, exactly.

So this was in 1952 before they were famous.

And they had just

where are they now?

And they'd failed to report for national service and they'd been on the run for ages and then they'd been caught by a policeman who was like, you didn't report for national service.

And I think they punched him.

Yeah, and I think their regiment was based at the Tower of London.

It's at the Tower of London.

Yeah, which is bizarre.

And Cray Brothers, for any overseas listeners, they're the very famous mob London gangsters.

They're our godfathers, basically.

Played by Tom Hardy and Tom Hardy in that movie.

That's right, yes.

Yeah.

Here's a tenuous link.

You mentioned the Duke of Edinburgh just there.

I did.

So the Duke of Wellington,

a completely different Duke.

So the famous Duke of Wellington, the one who won the Battle of Waterloo, he was the constable of the Tower for 26 years after the Battle of Waterloo.

Wow.

And he completely changed it.

So he did this huge reform program.

He stopped people selling their jobs as beef eaters.

And he drained the moat, because lots of people were getting cholera, basically, because it was so, you know, sort of stagnant.

And he also closed the Royal Menagerie, which used to be based at the Tower of London.

And he closed it because people kept being killed by the animals.

Oh, really?

You used to just be allowed into the monkey room.

There were no barriers.

But the monkeys wouldn't eat you, would they?

Well,

they might nibble on you.

That's kind of it.

The account was that a monkey tore a boy's leg, quotes, in a dangerous manner.

Wow.

Yeah.

An assistant keeper accidentally let a lion and two tigers into the same room and they started killing each other.

A wolf escaped and ate a terrier.

There was just constant accidents happening because there were these wild animals there.

And so when that guy came in, that's basically when they count the beef eaters from, really.

Beef eater number one was that guy and then beef eater number two was his mate and then so on so on.

They don't really have records for the previous ones because they were so often sold between people.

But from that that guy to the present day, there have been about 400 beef eaters and that is fewer than people who have been in space.

Wow.

Wow.

Have any beef eaters been into space?

Not to my knowledge.

So the guy who is the constable, he historically was allowed to keep all livestock that fell from Tower Bridge into the river.

So anything that fell from the bridge into the river, he was allowed to keep it.

Again, that sitcom is going to be

a great episode where the constable is trying to push livestock off the tower bridge into the river.

And for every foot of livestock that stumbled into the tower moat, he received one penny.

Quite hard to retrieve a cow from a moat, I would have thought.

I think you've earned it if you do that.

Wait, so if a donkey puts one foot into the moat, you get one penny.

One foot in the moat, it could be the name of the sitcom.

I believe that's right, yeah.

You mentioned Ravens before,

the idea that they would be fed beef from an, what was it, an East London?

Smithfield Market.

Smithfield Market.

So the Tower of london one of the employees there and i'm not sure if he counts technically as a yeoman warder but he's the raven master yes he is he is so he is a beef eater so yeah so they hired this guy who his whole family lives there they have a house and he just has to look after these ravens because of an enduring myth that if the ravens left the tower of london england would fall that's basically a ceremonial role just to fulfill this little myth and i've met him he's he's a really cool guy i've done a stand-up with him we did a stand-up

Yeah, Chris, he was really cool.

He must have a lot of very relatable stories.

Did he bring his ravens?

Because ravens are very good at talking.

Are they?

Yeah, corvids are famously the best birds at kind of being able to form almost human sounding like words, and they're extremely clever.

And so he's trained them up to do some quite cool stuff.

I thought he was getting bigger laughs than I

roundtable for.

This guy's grabbing!

Bring a small pig.

That was a genuine problem, wasn't it?

When there was the

royal astronomer stationed at the Tower of London while they were waiting for the Greenwich Observatory to be built.

And this was John Flamsteed, the first royal astronomer.

And while the observatory was being built, he was trying to do his astronomy at the Tower of London, and the ravens kept pooing on the telescope.

And so he said, Can you please remove all the ravens?

And King Charles was going to.

I think it was Charles II was going to, and then said, Oh, no, I've heard that the crown will fall.

But for him, it will have been quite close to the last time the crown fell, right?

Charles II?

Yeah, I suppose it was.

So he's just come back.

He's just restored the crown.

I can understand why he's worried.

He's paranoid.

You're right.

It's totally understandable.

Like these days, I think no one seriously expects that if the Ravens go, then no, Andy's looking at me like he does.

Well, this guy would be out of a house and a job, Chris, if they go.

Well, they do disagree with him.

He's got a stand-up career to fall back on.

I should add, it was a night of historical talks.

He happened to be very funny, and it was mainly stand-ups doing it.

His talk was on Jack the Ripper.

So it was a bit dark, actually.

Jack the Door the Ripper, more like.

He's an expert in crows.

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

My fact is that the economic activity of the Roman Empire can be measured by studying thousand-year-old ice in Greenland.

Wow.

Wow.

That is mad.

Amazing.

It's so cool.

Okay, so it takes a tiny bit of explaining.

So a group of scientists have released a new study which is all about measuring the Greenland ice sheet.

There's a miles thick ice sheet covering a huge amount of Greenland.

And we know when ice forms because we know how much snow falls and it packs down and it becomes ice and it gradually gets deeper and deeper.

So the scientists have been studying the period between 1100 BC, 3,000 years ago, and 800 AD.

And they've been measuring the chemicals in there.

And one thing we know from that time in history is that Rome was making lots of coins.

And the production of the coins, the coins were silver, but they produced a lot of lead pollution because they were using ore which contained lead.

That lead wafted all the way across the world.

It ends up in Greenland.

It gets rained down, packed into the ice.

And since 1999, scientists have been measuring the lead levels corresponding with exact years in history.

And they can produce documents now showing that, for example,

when Rome devalued its currency in 64 AD, there was less silver in each coin, so there would have been less lead produced, so there's less lead in the ice.

It's extraordinary.

It's nuts.

It's really good.

It doesn't help people in ancient Rome who want to know whether to invest in things.

No, it doesn't.

Sadly.

But yeah, they follow, I think they've debunked a thought that when the Roman Republic fell, the economy was booming.

And they've actually worked out that when it came to the fall of the Republic, the lead amounts in the ice actually show that it was undergoing a bit of a recession.

And stuff like when Rome took Carthage, they got all the Carthaginian mines, so suddenly they were mining a hell of a lot more silver.

And you can see that exact year of the Carthaginian invasion from looking at the ice.

How far away is the distance that we're talking here from the mines to the ice?

It's thousands of miles.

Thousands of miles.

It just shows you how strong wind is, doesn't it?

That's my main takeaway.

Well, I just, if you think about it, no, I'll tell you what's weird.

The prevailing wind in the world goes from Greenland to the east because of the jet stream.

So how is it going?

It must be going all the way around the world.

All the way around the world.

I don't know about that, by the way.

But

it makes sense, right?

But it's like, you know how as well how there are sheep in Wales that have been affected by the Chernobyl radiation.

Like that's carried through the wind.

And in the lake districts.

And in the lake district, it's just wind is, you know,

and that got there even faster than this 2,000 years.

Wait a minute, though, Chernobyl,

also to the east of the Lake Districts in Wales, but that didn't go all the way around the world.

So maybe my jet stream theory.

It feels like wind might be more complicated than just the one big gust going around the world.

There might be a couple of different directions.

I think this is very powerful flat earth evidence.

Yes, I'll probably be shouted down in the comments about this.

One explanation for it going the wrong way is, as one person pointed out, this is the hypothesis at the moment, but for instance, it ignores the fact that China existed and was doing quite well around that time.

As I think Western scientists and historians always have a tendency to do, and it could well be that China was just producing massive amounts of silver or lead or whatever that was influencing it.

But we don't know, but it could be that something was coming from the east to affect it.

But it does seem to fit in with these things in Rome, doesn't it?

So, for instance, there was a plague, the Antonine plague, which they think they're not sure what caused it, but lots of people died.

It might have been smallpox, it might even have been Ebola.

And this was in between 250 250 and 262, when 5,000 people a day were said to be dying.

And the amount of lead being produced then obviously went down because people had more pressing things on their minds.

But they assumed 250 AD, who was it?

Christians.

They assumed it was to do the Christians, and so they basically sought out as many scapegoats as they could, and they kind of executed a load of clergy and stuff like that.

Wow.

Did it work?

Did it work?

Well, we no longer have Christianity

on that.

A lot of people think because it was so persecuted during this plague, that kind of made Christianity a lot more solid as a religion.

And that's kind of one of the main things that made it such a worldwide religion in the end.

Wow.

There you go.

Bully someone and make them stronger.

Yes.

No.

Don't bully someone.

No, don't bully someone.

But if you are being bullied, you'll come out of it stronger.

Okay.

Is that right?

That's the healthier message.

Yeah.

So just quickly on this whole Greenland ice lead thing, have you guys heard of Claire Patterson?

Is she the Venn diagram in all of all those words?

She's a he, actually.

He was a scientist.

He was an amazing guy.

I wish we could do a whole podcast on him.

He was trying to find out how old the universe was in the 1950s.

Okay, so that involves calculating how fast uranium decays.

But he found massive lead contamination everywhere he went.

And it drove him mad.

There was all this lead showing up that shouldn't have been there.

He tried and tried and tried to build this incredibly lead-free lab, basically.

He scrubbed everything.

He cleaned everything for years.

He founded, basically, the first ever clean laboratory.

And he proved that lead in petrol was bad.

Ah, was that him?

Yeah, he was the guy who demonstrated later in his career that modern Americans had 600 times as much lead in their bodies as ancient Egyptians.

All thanks to leaded petrol.

Wow.

Yeah, and so as part of this research, he went to remote spots in Greenland and Antarctica and measured the lead much further down.

So this is one of the stories of the last two millennia is massively increasing amounts of lead.

And that led to all these efforts.

It led to all the efforts to cut lead out of petrol, for example.

Really?

Yeah.

Because the person who invented putting lead in petrol was Thomas Midgley, and that was a really good invention because it stopped knocking in engines.

Right.

So when it first happened, everyone thought, this is an an amazing event.

Oh, just putting lead in there, that solves this massive problem.

Yeah, there used to be all these little explosions in a car engine, basically, is when you put kerosene in.

Okay, and that's the thing.

And it's called knocking, and they tried hundreds of different experiments and chemicals to try and get rid of the knock.

And once it did, that was huge.

It made cars a real thing.

Wow.

Yeah.

This guy sounds awesome.

Yeah, he does.

But it's a very bad view.

We should say

lead is bad.

Lead is bad.

Well, isn't it true that a lot of people put the fall of the Roman Empire down to lead in their pipes?

Poisoned.

Their plumbing was there.

Yeah, their plumbing was made of lead, and so they were lead-poisoned, and that supposedly killed off a lot of the rich people.

I don't know if that's true.

Well, I've heard so Roman miners, they knew that lead was bad because they shielded themselves by covering their mouths with animal bladders, incidentally.

So a lot of people knew that lead was bad for you, but they still kept the pipes being out of lead.

I think some people said, even at the time, are we sure about this lead stuff?

And everyone said, no, no, no, it's fine.

Would people at the time have died a sort of, they would have just slowly got ill and it would have looked like, oh, you've got a flu, and then it, or would it be instantly

symptoms of lead poisoning?

Yeah, I think you go a bit mad, don't you?

I just wonder how long it would take if someone, sinister, had re-plumbed.

Rudolph Hess re-plumbed the city of London with lead piping

out to the supervillain death to subtly change

every single one.

How long?

There must be better ways.

But how long before we would notice?

There's the fat bags alone in their eyes.

It could be done.

A supervillain rises to prominence in Thames water, right?

Yes.

And slowly starts saying all the replacement pipes have lead in them.

And then 40 years later.

No, it's really weird.

Your body thinks that lead is calcium.

It mistakes the two chemically and it absolutely shreds you on the inside.

It gets in the way of all your neurotransmitters and sends them crazy.

It weakens the blood-brain barrier, so you're more vulnerable to...

It has about 30 different horrible effects on your body.

Well, so your body tries to to do the same stuff with it as it does with calcium like build your nails and things like that

yeah do you have bones made of lead we start drawing with our fingers

there's no lead in pencils done

okay i'm not sure i don't know um i don't know the full details yeah anyway it wouldn't be super efficient though you couldn't guarantee to wipe everyone out what an infrastructure-based bond movie that would be over a period of several decades i just wonder at what point would someone know like hang on i think what london is suffering from is everyone's being poisoned by lead i'm looking forward to this movie called lead finger

he does all this in london but also can write things with his finger

um i have a few things about uh

great things found in ice um so in southern yukon um they have had ice melting uh recently and there's a big patch that's melted and underneath it they found all this caribou dung that's been sitting there held in the ice now what's interesting is there is no caribou that exists in southern Yukon, but what it's done is it's confirmed one of the oldest oral history stories that have passed down from the First Nations people, as it says in the article, the First Nations people of the area who claimed that the land used to be roamed by caribou.

So they did these tests on it, and they've discovered that some of them are hundreds of years old, the dung, some are thousands of years old.

So an oral history that's made it all the way through that was thought to be wrong has been confirmed.

Yeah.

Frozen deer in ice are actually a bit of a problem now, though, aren't they?

So there was that thing last year, I think, which was about the permafrost melting in Siberia.

And when the permafrost melts, then it starts exposing, and this is because of global warming, it exposes the dead bodies of things that have died of bad diseases.

And I think it exposed a reindeer who had anthrax poisoning.

And it had anthrax poisoning in 1895, but it released the anthrax back into the atmosphere.

And I think someone died of anthrax poisoning, actually.

Really?

Yeah.

And now scientists are saying that, you know, as it melts and global warming advances on us, then it's going to release all sorts of old stuff.

Like bubonic plague is going to smallpox.

Strike out smallpox is going to come back.

Yeah.

That's a good sequel for your movie, Dan.

Yes.

Next movie, the supervillain moves to Siberia with a hairdryer.

No, comes back.

The largest hairdryer in the world.

No, he comes back here selling ice cubes to everyone in London.

They melt in the house.

Yeah.

And everyone dies when they have a cup of water water.

Why are all these films set only in London?

Because it's James Bond.

He's British.

I really like this fact, okay, because it's sort of a historical thing being revealed by science, and it's kind of an exciting crossing of those two academic worlds.

And something quite similar to that was, you know, the Saddleworth Moore fires this year.

So that was in the Manchester area, obviously.

One side effect of those fires is that it's going to release all of this long-lost pollutant from the Industrial Revolution because it's, I know it's exciting.

We're we're all gonna die in some way notice the people in North Manchester yeah just my family really yeah I'm really sorry about that you should give them a call

but the reason for this is that the peat is an unbelievably good store so you know people talk about peat being a really good carbon store so it holds it for hundreds of years it's also a good store of other substances and pollutants and then the fires just set fire to it all and release them all into the air so we're getting to now inhale that deliciously smoggy stuff that the Victorians have.

Well, it kind of rained down, I guess, right?

I don't think you'll be able to see see sort of bits of 19th-century coal falling out of the sky.

I mean, sometimes you get that, don't you?

Like, when it's been like it picks up sand from the Sahara and it rains down in

mind got a bit more snoggy, but you won't be able to tell it's 19th century coal, particularly.

There won't be a top hat raining down with it or a pipe.

Hey, that could be the third film in your trilogy, Jan.

Yes.

Pete Finger.

Pete Finger, yeah.

No, he's a sex offender from Norch Tale, I think.

Now, in this, you would need the villain to

create a gust of wind that sends all the peat from Manchester to London.

But could he maybe do this with his giant hairdryer?

Yes, okay.

So, all right, so the villain of the second film survived into the third.

Because last week we did mention that they're looking for a new director of the Bud films.

I think we're on cementing our pledge to become that.

Time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the umlauts that are used for the band Motley Crew are purely decorative.

They're not intended to have pronunciation.

However, when Motley Crew first performed in Germany, the crowd didn't know that and chanted Motley Krew!

Motley Krew!

Fantastic.

Now, this was tweeted by Quickipedia a couple of days ago, since we recorded, and we needed proper verification on it and we got it from Tommy Lee the drummer of Motley Crew or Motley Cra

who said ha ha truh Nick

to someone who asked him on behalf of us so yeah we've got confirmation yeah that they were mudli cra it's very exciting because the metal umlaut is purely decorative motorhead had it as well

maximo park maximo park um

And yeah, so that's very, very exciting.

It's a proper verification from a real source, which is also awesome.

I was looking into Tommy Lee, if you don't know who he is.

So he is the drummer of Motley Cruise.

He was married to Pamela Anderson.

Married to Pamela Anderson, responsible for the leaked porn video as well.

I don't know if he leaked it, but famously, her porn video, there are two, he is one.

God, this is a real trip down memory lane.

Yeah, yeah.

Jeez.

It's like one of the first celebrity stories I was aware of.

You were the boom operator for that film, weren't you?

I was, yeah.

I thought for about 15 years that Tommy Lee was the same person as Tommy Lee Jones.

And I used to watch Men in Black and be like, I can't believe this guy.

With Pamela.

Yeah.

He does have a surname, Tommy Lee, but he doesn't use it.

And I only just learnt it before we started recording.

It's bass.

And I reckon he doesn't use it because he's the drummer.

So that would have just been confusing.

Very, yeah.

Whereas just shoving umlauts left, right, and centre that aren't supposed to be pronounced is absolutely fine.

So it's just a convention in metal bands, right?

Well, I guess not just metal bands, because I just learnt as well that Jay-Z used to have an umlaut in his name.

Wow.

Yeah, he over, I guess,

well, he doesn't specify, he just said I used to have an umlaut, and he uses punctuation quite oddly.

He had a hyphen to begin with, he got rid of the hyphen, his latest album came back, he not only came back with a hyphen, but in all caps as well.

So Jay-Z is now shouting at you.

And he admitted that he used to have an umlaut.

Do you know I think we should have an umlaut in our name, or maybe some kind of punctuation?

I think we should definitely.

It seems like a sure-fly way to make yourself sound hard, basically.

Is there no such thing as a fish?

No, because then we sound like we're from Yorkshire.

There's no such thing as a fish.

Fine line between heavy metal and Yorkshire.

Has Jay-Z ever done an autobiography?

He has, yeah.

Is it called J to Z?

It's not, and it should be.

Why is it not?

And I'm pretty sure it is an A to Z as well.

You're kidding.

Yeah.

No.

No.

I'm pretty sure it's.

Who does an A to Z of their artobiography?

That's quite a fun idea.

Matt Lucas did it.

We should write an A to Z book.

Yeah, but you do have yourself B as Bond, but what do you do before that?

Oh, yeah.

Antenatal, I guess.

Nice.

Yeah.

It's not as good as the movie ideas.

We should

stick to another sequel of those.

So on the metal umlaut, the first band to have an umlaut was called Amon Duel, the second.

That's A-M-O-N-D, U umlaut, U umlaut, L, and then two I's.

But that is fair enough because duel is a Turkish word which has umlauts in it.

And the first band to give itself a spurious umlaut was Blue Oyster Cult.

Oh, yeah, of course.

Yes, yeah.

Which

letter?

Over the Owen oyster.

And the longest

continuous umlauted word in the world

is ya.

So

J-A-A-A, all of which have umlauts above are.

It's Estonian and it means the edge of the ice.

So when you get to the edge of the ice, you know,

that's good.

So yeah, punctuation.

So I think we've covered before the Interra Bang, maybe on QI, which was that was something that actually appeared on typewriters in the 60s, which was a question mark and an exclamation mark that were elided, which means you're asking a question, but like, are we going to the cinema today?

in a really excited way.

I had a really sad childhood.

That was the kind of thing that got me excited.

But another thing that the language has always been hunting for is ways ways to show irony, right?

So people have always been trying to invent bits of punctuation that show you're being sarcastic.

And actually, the first person who suggested a way of doing that was a guy called John Wilkins.

And do you remember John Wilkins?

Nope.

No.

He is the guy who also was the first person to plan to put a man on the moon and designed a rocket for it, Oliver Cromwell's brother.

Yes, in law.

So was he suggesting that ironically?

It was a one-big joke that got out of hand.

Yeah, he also wrote, his main thing was he wrote this huge book on how to change the language, and he said you should have an upside-down exclamation mark to show irony.

They call that the sark mark, don't they?

They do, yes.

The sarcasm.

Yes.

Just on another symbol that didn't kick off, I read this fact, and it's hard actually to verify it.

So it'd be interested to know if anyone can get to the bottom of this.

But Haggard Hawkes, who's a fantastic Twitter account and has a few books, put this up saying that in 1580, English printer Henry Denham proposed using a reverse question mark so a sort of mirror imaged question mark to indicate when a question was rhetorical which would be very useful if you were an author would it yeah yeah it would no no no

um so we think that this might we're not sure if this is true right because we've not found anything earlier than the 90s 1990s of evidence for it although denim he did invent two different types of question mark one for yes-no questions and another one for questions that begin with WH, like why, where, what.

So he had two different question marks for those.

What was that for?

Why do you need a special question mark to let you know the question begins with WH?

In case it's been such a long sentence that you can't remember the word that began with it.

Well, I think the reason that we don't still have them is because they're not that useful.

But he was the first person also to use semicolons with any kind of regularity.

He didn't invent them, but he was the first one to use them regularly

And consistently.

He also invented the word parathesis for brackets, which later became parentheses.

Oh, wow.

Oh, he had a huge influence.

Yeah, so he was a massive kind of punctuation dude.

Huge in that world amongst all the greats.

Well, semicolons, I didn't realize some people really hate semicolons, basically.

So George Orwell, he hated them so much, then he wrote a novel called Coming Up for Air.

It was one of his early ones, I think, and he put no semicolons in.

But then he was a bit worried that no one would notice that he hadn't put any in so he wrote to his publisher saying I haven't put any semicolons in here

so childish I know one of the great writers yeah yeah Hemingway as well very much so played with the rules of punctuation but he only did so with the claim that he knew it so well that he was able to go beyond

the acceptable I think that's quite normal yeah I think that's quite a standard I would say people like Hilary Mantel and Rachel Cusk do that but it's because you can feel they've got such a good grasp of it that they're they're mastering it rather than just spewing nonsense onto a page and then going, oh yeah, it's just because I'm so familiar with the art.

Yeah, yeah.

So William Blake would sometimes put a full stop in the middle of a word.

What a maverick.

Is that because it was to be read and he wanted the punctuation of a word to be broken up?

I don't know.

He also saw a lot of angels.

So

he might have been taking dictation from them.

Guys, the punctuation point I need all the time is a question mark colon.

And I can't believe this isn't a thing.

When you're writing an email and you're like, what about these points?

And then you give a list, and I always put a question mark followed by a colon.

And it looks stupid.

I think that's the most essential piece of punctuation, and no one's ever come up with one as far as I know.

So how are we going to fix it?

Is it a question mark with two dots at the bottom?

Sideways on loud at the bottom?

No, but a second dot underneath the first dot.

So it's raised up.

Like

a sideways mouth.

Yeah, what about a second dot in the middle of the round bit of the question mark?

Like an eyeball.

Like an eyeball.

Or a nipple.

Let's make the question mark a bit sexy.

I think dots at the bottom makes more sense, doesn't it?

We could call them question norcs.

Okay, no.

Oh, God.

Maybe not.

That's descended.

That's actually making quite a highbrow point initially, actually.

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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Shazinski.

My fact this week is that traditionally, Indigenous Hawaiians had personalized chants for their genitals.

And that's unusual to the Hawaiians.

This is

so amazing, all of this stuff about Indigenous Hawaiians and what they associated with their genitals, which I spent a lot of time reading about this week.

But I should say, I read it initially on the BBC.

It was such a cheat.

It was a series of amazing sex facts from around the world.

And I saw that and I couldn't believe I hadn't heard it.

That's not a cheat.

This is that not a cheat?

No.

Felt like a cheat.

You're not allowed to get your facts from anywhere.

I actually went to Hawaii to try and find something and I didn't find anything.

I went to Hawaii, stood in the airport and did a chant about my genitals.

Not allowed back in the United States.

So

this started being recorded from sort of the 18th century when Cook and others went to Hawaii and yeah, it turns out that indigenous Hawaiians would give their genitals a name or their parents would give their genitals a name almost as soon as they were born.

And they'd also design, they'd also write a song for them and sort of have a story around their genitals.

And it's called the mele mai, the genital chant, and it describes that individual's organ.

So you had to, sorry, you had to name your child, and then you also had to name your child's genitals.

It's hard enough to find a good name for your child, isn't it?

Have you reckoned they had books?

The perfect name for your child's genitals.

I named my child's genitals after his grandfather's genitals.

One example that I found was Queen Liliuokulani's Mele Mai, was the story of her vagina and it was called Anapau, which meant frisky.

And it was about her frolicking genitals that went up and down, apparently.

And so, yeah, they used to frolic.

I think the source of the Beeb article was this paper by a guy called Milton Diamond, who studied a lot of Hawaiian sexual

traditions and culture and things about nudity as well.

So this is really weird.

Nudity was not sexual.

No.

In almost all contexts.

You only started wearing your clothes over your genitals when you hit puberty and that was out of respect for your genitals.

It's amazing.

But nudity for adults was symbolic of death or punishment or lamentation.

And if you were seen nude outside a ritual context, it was widely assumed that you had gone mad with grief.

Yes.

So it's not as sexy.

It's really not.

New dispeat is very sad places in Hawaii.

It could also be used as an appeal for forgiveness, this paper said.

So if someone's done you a wrong, then the way you ask for their forgiveness is by taking all your clothes off and following them around until they forgive you.

Turn up outside their house at three in the morning.

Please forgive me.

Please take me back.

I've done that actually.

This is my Hawaiian heritage.

Do we know if this is no longer being done?

Was this for traditional old indigenous people?

So what happened was when the Europeans came to Hawaii, they saw all this stuff happening, but then they soon cut it all out because it wasn't very Christian.

So there was a lot of taking over Hawaiian culture and enforcing Western.

And then Hawaiian indigenous people have tried to take a lot of it back, but I think it's obviously quite difficult because it was lost for about 50 years.

So there was a meeting where they go, the penis chant, do we want that back in?

I'm good, I think.

So, like, for instance, hula dancing is probably one of the most famous things in Hawaii.

And Captain Cook said it was perfectly easy and graceful.

He thought it was amazing.

But when the missionaries arrived, it was officially suppressed.

Have you heard of penis blowing?

Yes.

No, I don't think you have.

I've seen that Tommy Lee video.

It's a sequel to Man in Black.

Okay.

This is odd.

This was a daily ritual for a Hawaiian infant, which is where the members of the family would blow on the penis, just you know, just with a stream of air.

And it was to prepare the foreskin for a kind of micro-circumcision ceremony.

And it would normally be an aunt or a grandmother who did the blowing.

But lots of relatives were qualified to be the blower if you didn't have any aunts, so that's fine.

Wait, so what were they blowing onto it?

Sort of microphone?

No, they just blow to protect it in their mythology.

Yeah.

Okay.

And this is a really common thing.

And there were lots of people, even well into the 1980s, for example, who had this done to them in their childhood.

Yeah, and in fact, there was a story, wasn't there, about a man who...

It was totally non-sexual, we should say.

Yeah, completely.

There was a story about a man who was annoyed because he'd married a Hawaiian woman and he left her mum to babysit their child and came back and found her doing this.

It was like, why are you blowing on my child's penis?

And apparently the mother-in-law was like, well, I have to.

Otherwise, it's very bad luck.

And was really worried about the baby's health if she didn't.

But it does seem weird, actually, if you haven't explained that beforehand.

Yes, yeah.

I like it's another gust of wind fact going into the

because maybe it does have it.

Interestingly, you can tell the economic activity of the Roman Empire from discarded foreskins of Hawaiian children.

Oh my god.

The author of this paper

is called Milton Diamond, as you mentioned before.

And the only thing that I could find of

interest outside of him writing this paper, so he wrote a lot about sex and gender and so on.

He had a big feud with a man called Money.

So Diamond and Money

had a big feud, and they famously got into a punch-up at a conference in Dubrovnik.

So Money had written a book called As Nature Made Him, The Boy Raised as a Girl, and mentions it in this book, This Fight.

And there was a lot of chat about transgender at the time.

And so that's where they fell foul of what they thought definitions were.

And yeah, there was a fight.

Although Diamond claims he doesn't recall being punched.

But yeah, that's the only thing with Diamond.

He is really hard, isn't he?

I have some stuff on chance.

Great.

So this, I just thought this was really interesting.

I'd never heard of it before.

But have you guys heard throat singing?

Oh, like Mongolian singing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I didn't know that.

It did not sound like that

It actually does sound a bit like that.

But I didn't realise that they're creating multiple notes.

Yeah, they do harmonies, don't they?

Yeah, with one throat.

So yeah, this is like Mongolians and some Inuits, and it's called a Tuven overtone technique when it's done in Mongolia.

And they can get up to six simultaneous notes to come out of their mouth by doing this special throat singing technique, which I did not have time to look properly into how exactly it works.

So all I can tell you is it involves opening and closing the vocal cords until harmonic resonances appear.

And I think if you go faster and faster, different resonances come

and you make different noises.

But it's really cool.

And then there's this one other really cool way of throat singing, which is this is an Inuit culture, it's called the Katajak.

And two women stand face to face, but super close, so their lips almost touching each other, and it's like a duel, a singing duel.

And so it goes really, really fast.

One woman says one note or throat noise, and then the other one has to respond to it, and it goes faster and faster, and they use each other's mouths as kind of resonators, basically.

And it only ends when one of them like collapses laughing or runs out of breath, and they can go on for hours, and it looks so cool.

That does sound like tooling banjos.

Yeah.

So, what you were saying is, so you've got two people with their mouths open, and I'm making a noise into the other person's mouth, and because they've got a mouth there, it's resonating the exactly, and it makes a sound sound good.

It's resonating in your mouth at the same time.

Well, straight after you, yeah, exactly.

Straight after you.

So they're using your mouth as a musical instrument.

That is so crazy.

That's weird.

I know.

It's fun, isn't it?

Have you heard anything?

Yeah.

Wow.

And it sounds cool.

Sounds weird.

The throat singing the normal stuff, the Mongolian stuff sounds a bit like Diderido's, doesn't it?

It does, yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, gosh.

Six notes?

Six notes.

Stop doing that in my mouth, Dan.

Can I quickly mention?

Because naming of genitals is a practice that still does go on.

There was a survey that was done in 2015, and it got reported in many places because it was a genuine survey, and they found that 73% of men have given their penis a nickname.

Is that right?

Yeah.

59% say that it was a woman who came up with their nickname for them.

So the survey was commissioned by a men's retailer called Giacomo.

So this is a survey done through them.

So, okay, let's get a few nicknames.

I can't think of anything that's not rude.

Terry.

So,

the top five.

Give us a what letter does it begin with?

T.

For

Terry.

Terry, is it one word?

It is one word.

And

think sort of.

Terminator.

Think what?

Gods.

Thor?

No.

No, because that's just someone with a lisp

and also a venereal disease.

Phoenix's thorn.

Sorry, this isn't a god.

I was trying to put us in the ancient Greeks.

Oh, right, so when you said it's a god.

Oh, Theseus.

No, Troy.

So Troy?

Yeah.

Yeah, weird.

Dr.

Doolittle.

Is that one?

No, it's not.

That's a shame.

Russell the muscle is.

Russell the muscle.

Yeah.

It's not a muscle.

It's an organ.

Organs can have muscles in them.

Your heart's an organ.

It's loads of muscle.

Good point.

But there isn't a muscle in the penis.

No.

Well, I've been working out.

I've also been kicked out of the chair.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Triberland and my penis is on.

The table right now, Dan, it's going off.

Stop blowing on it.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin and Shazinski you can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or you can go to our facebook page no such thing as a fish or go to our website no such thingasafish.com as i said last week we've redone it it looks really awesome it has everything up there from ticket links to all of our previous episodes to our new book that's coming out you can also get a behind the scenes documentary that we made called behind the gills that's up there a link to that so uh go there find everything And if you want to hear us again, we'll be back again next week.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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