215: No Such Thing As A Chihuahua Dog Sled Team

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Hey guys, just before we begin this week's show, we have a little announcement to make, which is that we have something for you to look at.

That's a bit disgusting, aren't you?

Well,

I wouldn't say so, Jay.

It's appropriate.

No, it's a wonderful kind of behind-the-scenes video of

life on tour.

A documentary behind the gills.

Behind the gills, exactly.

So why aren't you wearing any trousers?

We don't have time to get into that now, Anna.

The point is, we've released this thing

and it's our tour, isn't it?

We filmed loads of stuff for it, loads of behind-the-scenes interviews and videos of us backstage getting ready.

Yeah, it was super fun.

We had a great time on tour, and we just filmed some of the chats we had, some interviews where you can learn some deep, dark secrets from our casts.

Childhood photos, that kind of thing.

Yeah.

So it's been available in the UK for a little while.

So hopefully, all you guys have got it.

But if you haven't, then get it now.

But the big news is it's now available in America.

So if you go to Amazon, if you go to Google Play, if you go to iTunes, you'll be able to get hold of it now.

That's true.

Or you can just go to QI.com/slash Gills, where you'll find all the links.

Okay, where are my trousers?

On with the show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you this week live from Devil!

My name is Dan Schreider, and I'm sitting here with Anna Czaczynski, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin.

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, Czaczynski.

My fact this week is that every competitor at the world's longest dog sled race brings about 600 spare pairs of shoes with them.

And they're for the dogs.

This is amazing.

So this this is the i've ditterod race which happens in alaska every year um it's very long it's uh roughly a thousand miles through alaska and yeah the dogs have to wear shoes and so uh by the rules of the game they actually have to bring eight extra shoes on the sled with them so at any one time there have to be eight pairs of dog shoes on the sled i was gonna say on a pair of dog shoes is that four shoes or two shoes

yeah

i i didn't know how to word this um but it's so it's a pair is for the front pair, and then you have a second pair for the back pair the way I see it.

Does dogs have different foot sizes on the front sets to the back sets?

They can do, they can do, they can do, yeah.

Sometimes they do, yeah.

So, if you're buying, if you're buying your dog shoes,

then number one, you're insane,

but number two, you have to, you have to get both sides measured.

What's the biggest difference between the back shoes?

Are there some dogs with tiny, tiny front paws and then massive back paws?

That would be a penny fair.

Like a penny farthing, but in dog form.

Like a kangaroo on all fours, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I believe not.

Again, facts get in the way of an otherwise pleasing bit of whimsy.

So I didn't actually look that much into the size range of the dog's shoes.

I will say that the mushes who are the guys...

Are we calling them mushers or mushes?

Mush.

Someone says mush over there.

Yeah.

I'll call them mushes.

So these are the dudes who are riding the sledge.

This is the guy who's riding the sled or the woman who's riding the sled.

They usually make the dog's shoes themselves, so I guess they can tailor into each dog's foot size.

And like I say, in the rules, per dog, you have to have eight extra shoes on board the sled.

And so, yeah, they usually bring over a thousand pairs of shoes, like 1,300, 1,400 shoes.

And then the dogs have to drag the weight of those shoes as well, don't they?

I guess.

Yeah, yes.

They do kind of change them like that, though.

So you know in Formula One, you have pit stops where you go and you get filled up with petrol.

That's what happens.

You have your pit stops on the sled race where you go and you have to change your dog's shoes.

That's amazing.

The guys at the side, they bring in 16 trees for the dog to piss against.

I know that some drivers, mushers rather, they bring 3,000 little booties for the dogs as well.

Because you've got 16 dogs pulling each sled.

I think that's right.

Is that 64 feet?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What happens?

Do they lose their shoe on the run or do they wear through?

Why do they need to change?

It gets worn through.

So the reason they have shoes, it's not because of the cold or anything.

Dogs' feet are very good at managing the cold, so it's totally covered in ice and snow.

But the reason they need it is for the kind of lumps and bumps and the grit and the sharp bits of ice that might get stuck in their paws.

And so that wears away at the shoes, and just you know, they're running pretty hardcore.

That's cool.

That's fun.

I read a really cool thing about the because this is a big event that happens annually and it brings people from all over the planet to come and compete.

And in 2010, the event saw its first ever Jamaican team entering it.

Yeah, he's yeah, he's called Mushunmon, that's what he calls himself, and he, yeah, he's uh, he's been competing for years.

It's his nickname, isn't it?

Yeah, no, it's his, he calls himself that, that's his nickname.

Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah, is this because I thought there was one guy called Newton Marshall.

That's what that's him.

So, do you know the amazing thing about Newton Marshall?

It's such a cool story.

So, basically, in 2014, there was another sledder called Scott Janssen, and he came off his sled and he was really, really badly injured, but he was off the track, and he didn't know if anyone was going to find him.

And Newton Marshall came by on his sled and he noticed that this sled had been overturned and that someone was really badly injured.

Like he'd been seriously concussed, he'd broken his ankle.

And so he went and he saved him.

This guy called Newton Marshall went and he raised the alarm and he sort of made him a little bed in the snow and they waited for him to be saved.

And he was rescued.

He was fine.

So that was what Newton Marshall did.

But the bizarre thing about this is that two years earlier in the same race, Scott Jansen's dog had collapsed and he'd had to revive him with mouth to snout resuscitation.

So he'd been as good as dead for five minutes and Scott Janssen is a funeral home director so he said I know what dead looks like.

That dog was dead.

But he gave him mouth to snout and the bizarre thing about this is that the dog was called Marshall.

So

he saved a Marshall.

What are you suggesting?

I genuinely don't know.

I think what I'm clearly suggesting,

what's clearly happened is the dog Marshall has been reincarnated in the person Marshall who's then come to save him as a thank you for saving the dog.

The dog had subsequently died.

I know.

And

the human will be, you know, a one-year-old.

He wouldn't be in his.

We don't know all the answers.

Also, I find it a bit weird that just because he works at a funeral home, this guy, that he should be good at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

And people brought in and he's like, we can still save him.

Give me five minutes.

Wouldn't trust that guy.

My favourite musher is a guy called John Souter.

And he thought, you know what, all these guys are doing it wrong with these huskies.

I'm going to do it with poodles.

Wow.

And so he got some poodles to carry his sled or to pull his sled along.

He brought them up with Huskies.

So they kind of learned what to do with the Huskies.

But unfortunately, they all got frozen feet.

Because the Huskies have got special padding, haven't they?

And now it's banned, and you have to have only certain types of dog that you're allowed.

It used to be that you could have any dog you wanted.

But surely there weren't many winners from the Chihuahua team.

So do you know what the ideterod is based on?

It's based on an event which happened in 1925 called the Great Race of Mercy.

And this was a real crisis.

So there was a town in Nome which had an epidemic of diphtheria and it was beginning and it was, you know, people were starting to die.

A few people had already died and the nearest anti-toxin was a thousand miles away in 1925 there were only three planes in the whole of Alaska and they were elderly unreliable biplanes so they couldn't be guaranteed to get there so they went with dogs and there were hero dogs and hero mushras who got the antitoxin a thousand miles to the town of nome

and the uh the guy who approved this the governor of alaska who approved this his name was scott bone

so there's a coincidence

i'm not saying he was a reincarnated dog dog.

And

afterwards, the lead dog, Balto, he became a celebrity.

He was as famous as Rintin Tin or Lassie or all these other celebrity dogs of the 1920s.

And the mayor of Los Angeles awarded Balto a bone-shaped key to the city.

I've got a couple of favorites, favorite racers.

So this is two people, a guy called Dallas and a guy called Mitch.

They're father and son.

And they seem to have this ongoing rivalry.

So in 2012, Dallas CV became the youngest winner.

He was 25 years old, and he won it.

In 2013, his father became the oldest ever winner.

This went on, so Dallas kept on winning it year after year.

In 2016, he broke the record for the fastest time it's ever been done, so he did it in eight days and 11 hours.

And in 2017, the following year, his dad broke the record again, did it in eight days and three hours.

And actually, that year, the son, Dallas's dogs, turned out to be doped.

Now,

they were weirdly, they were doped with tramadol, which everyone agreed would not be of any benefit at all.

Surely they get a nice night's sleep at the end of the day.

But yeah, I should say his father was not a suspect for doping his son's dogs or anything.

Well, this year he decided he didn't want to do it right because he got

they said that basically he doped his dogs.

He said, I definitely didn't do it.

Someone else must have done it.

And he wasn't happy about it.

And now he's kind of pulled out.

Oh, is that why he didn't do it?

I believe so, yeah.

And it was done so much slower this year.

It was like nine days something.

It was rubbish.

Yeah, well they've been.

But actually, I should just say,

a lot of people don't like the dog sledding, don't they?

They think it's kind of cruel.

Because a lot of the dogs get sick, some of them die.

We all die.

How'd you like to pull a sled?

Well, we all die.

You might as well just pull a fucking sled.

I'm just saying, life is hard.

It's a lot harder if you're pulling a sled.

That's a good point.

Sorry, yeah.

Well, the other thing is, there's lots of things that can happen.

I mean, they do die.

One of the worst things they get is scrotal and penile frostbite.

Yeah?

No, no.

I'd like to announce I'm pulling out of the next year's eventual.

And then I thought I would check to see if humans can get frostbite on their penises.

That's why you went to Iceland

to see what's going on.

Not why mum shopped there.

Well, apparently, according to the internet, the classic account of humans getting frostbite on their genitals is from the New England Journal of Medicine in 1977.

And there was a doctor called Melvin Hirschkovitz, and he went running in very cold weather.

And he got that.

And it's notable.

The paper is notable because at once he writes about what happened.

And at one stage, his wife comes home and finds him standing legs apart in the bedroom, nude below the waist, holding the tip of his penis in his right hand and turning the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine with his left hand.

I was just looking up weird dog competitions and there's a magazine called Veterinary Practice News and it has an annual x-ray competition awarded to dogs who've eaten the weirdest things.

And so recently one of the winners was Lola, a seven kilo tortoise who'd eaten a turtle pendant.

But I think tortoises aren't dogs, are they?

No, sorry, it was just pets, just pets.

Sorry.

But my favourite one was the Rottweiler.

I don't want to see one point the sled.

My favorite one of these winners was the Rottweiler who had swallowed her owner's wristwatch, but the alarm was still on, telling her when to take her insulin.

So she had to listen to the dog to find someone to take her petals

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

My fact this week is that 3,000 feet up a mountain in France is a block of sandstone commemorating the exact spot where the author Victor Hugo's parents conceived him.

Yeah, it's

this was revealed that that was the spot where it happened in a letter written by his dad, who bragged about it a lot.

It was at the top of this mountain called Mount Donon in France, and he made it to the top.

And it was years later, this wasn't done in his lifetime, but years later, a museum curator thought, I've got to commemorate this, and brought a sandstone, and it's there to this day.

It was kind of a prank, wasn't it, by the guy from from the museum in the 60s, was it?

I think it was like a practical joke in the 1960s.

But did you know that Victor Hugo denied that that was where it happened?

Because he was kind of ashamed of this mountain being a mountain that wasn't super famous, not everyone knew about it.

So, whenever he retold the story of when he was conceived, as we all do, he

made lots of little changes.

So, there'd been a Celtic temple on Mount Donon, and he changed that to a Roman temple of love.

And he changed the mountain range to the Alps, because everyone's heard of the Alps, and he made it Mont Blanc, because that's 3,000 feet taller.

And so his version of that.

He was a storyteller.

That was what he did.

Yeah.

You're running the risk of frostbite to the scrotum.

If you try to conceive at that altitude.

He told a lot of stories, obviously.

Namely, Linda.

He knew it was a rubber.

Yeah, fine, fine.

He claimed that he and his wife, Adele, had sex nine times on their wedding night.

And the Telegraph wrote that apparently she lost her taste for intercourse after that first night.

And I'm not surprised.

Well, he was a sex addict, wasn't he?

Yes.

He was constantly going to brothels.

He almost had a sort of like breakfast sex and then lunchtime sex and dinner sex.

It was almost a menu on a day-to-day basis with Victor Hugo, to the point that he was so popular amongst the brothels of Paris that when he died, the brothels of Paris closed down for the day so that everyone working there could come to the funeral procession to pay tribute.

I read one account, and I'm not sure this can be true, but the prostitutes of Paris drape their vaginas in black crepe paper.

What?

That's according to a guy called Edmund Goncourt who was there at the time.

Whoa.

How did he know?

He can't have tested them all.

So, what happened was when he died, everyone thought he was going to die, and then he kind of stuck around for a few weeks.

And so, people came to Paris expecting for him to die, and they were going to celebrate his life.

But he went so long, more and more and more people came.

And in the end, there were a crowd of two million people at his funeral, which was more than the normal population of Paris.

Wow, it was rammed.

And everyone, because he was like a famous, famous, you know, sex addict or whatever, and you know, he was a partier, everyone just got drunk, everyone had sex.

There was the story that always happens that people say that nine months later there were loads of babies born.

So people were saying that, you know, during the funeral, everyone was just having sex everywhere.

There was a parade at his funeral, and it took six hours for it to get to the end.

And there were delegations of different professions there.

So there were veterans, civil servants, writers, animal lovers, school children, suffragettes.

Sorry, can we go back?

What?

Who's was animal lover a formal profession?

Who's paying for that?

But apparently the suffragettes got really annoyed because they were behind the gymnasts in the department stores.

They said, we deserve better than this.

Wow.

But it was just after his 79th birthday.

So he had an 80th birthday party on his his 79th birthday as he was entering his 80th year.

And for that one, half a million people just walked past his house as he sat outside waving at them.

And then the next day, because that was his apartment in Paris, they changed the street name from where he was living.

So it got changed to become Avenue Victor Hugo.

So his remaining days, he lived on the street named after him.

And he would say that he wanted all the future mail that came to him to be addressed to Mr.

Victor in his avenue, Paris,

and that would make it to him.

He said he wanted a pauper's burial, a pauper's funeral, and he obviously had the complete opposite.

But I'm not totally convinced he wants it.

There's one biography of him which kind of seems to suggest that he was obviously famous for being a proponent of

helping out the poor.

And Les Miserable is all about the awful conditions people lived in, but he really liked people to know it.

So, for instance, apparently, he liked people to ask him why he was wearing his coat inside out because then he'd say to them, I just wear wear it inside out rather than buying a new one and then i can give that money to the poor and he really he really liked to invite this kind of wanker

I know, right?

Apparently, according to this person, he actually left in his will what the biographer describes as an exiguous sum, a very small amount in his will to the poor because he knew how rumors work and he knew that that would become an enormous amount within a short amount of time.

Apparently, he was so famous when he was living in Guernsey that admirers would save the pebbles that he walked upon when he was walking across the beach.

Wow.

So they were like, he's still on that one.

I'll take that.

Wow.

Yeah.

Apparently.

I mean, it doesn't sound very true, does it?

Is it from, did he tell us that?

Or

it's hard to tell.

He was paid in a very unusual way for Les Miz because he said, I think, to his publisher, his publisher said, how much do you want?

And he made him quite a high offer.

And he said, no, that's not enough.

And he said, I think he said, I'd like to be paid more than anyone else has ever been paid to write a book and I'll give some to the pub

um but the publisher didn't have the money to pay it was I think the equivalent of about three million pounds which is a huge amount of money and the publisher didn't have that money so he had to borrow all of that from a bank So it was kind of a private finance initiative novel, basically.

And then the publisher just borrowed in the assumption that it would pay off.

And it did.

Yeah, it was huge, wasn't it?

When it was published, people turned up with wheelbarrows to buy copies of it.

What?

How big was it?

It is a big book.

And wheelbarrows at the time were very small.

But what happened is you would go in, if you were a worker and you could get some time off and you could afford to get the book and you could queue up and get there in time with your wheelbarrow, then you could sell it to your friends and you could make a massive profit on it.

It was like ticket talenting kind of thing.

Yeah, wow.

He was quite arrogant though, wasn't he?

Like I said, he wanted to be paid all the money in the world and he used to, he was a party animal.

So he apparently used to have 30 guests around to dinner every single night, right up until he was 80 when he died.

But he then did, at these big dinner parties, used to spend the whole time talking about how great he was.

He would say, There is only one classical writer in this country.

One, do you hear?

Me.

I am the only one.

I know the French language better than anyone else alive.

And then he would.

Sorry, I just asked if you wanted red old white wine.

And then he'd catalogue all, like, Bulzac and Racine and all the other great writers and explain why they were not as good as he was.

There was one time when he wouldn't talk about himself in these parties and that was when he did his party trick which was putting a whole orange into his mouth and then thrusting as many pieces of sugar as possible into his cheeks and then scrunching it all up, swallowing two liquor glasses of kish and then opening his mouth and saying, I've just eaten it all.

So that was his trick.

He could eat an orange and a load of sugar really quickly.

Awesome.

And people still talk about his novels.

We're going to have to move on very shortly.

The guy who wrote the lyrics for the musical of Les Miz, he was a guy called James Fenton.

He wrote the first lyrics.

Lots of people had to go at the lyrics.

But when he was given the book and told, hey, why don't you have a look at the lyrics for this, turning this novel into lyrics?

He was on a three-month trip looking for headhunters in Borneo.

And it was a really heavy book.

And he said that he spent three months in a canoe reading Les Miz.

And every time he finished a chapter, he threw it to the crocodiles so he could save a a bit of weight in the canoe.

That's very cool.

Did you know he trended on Twitter in 2014 for a kind of related reason?

So he trended on Twitter and not in a good way.

It turned out, the BBC reported this, that he was suddenly, Victor Hugo, was receiving all these death threats on Twitter and he was being called lots of stuff.

He was called the son of a prostitute.

His daughter was called a big bitch.

And

it turned out what happened was one of his poems had been set in a French baccalaureate exam, and they were so annoyed about it because it's so imaginable that all the students got online afterwards.

They got him trending.

Isn't that?

I think you know you've made it when you're getting death threats on Twitter 200 years after you died.

Okay, it's time to move on to fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is in the event of a zombie apocalypse, only one country will survive, and that country is North Korea

really

yeah

and so this is a study by some mathematicians in Brazil and they've kind of done a model of what's gonna happen and it's gonna be like a straight fight between human and zombie and the zombie's always gonna win but if you get a human with a gun like in the army then the human might win and they've worked out that what you're gonna need is 47 soldiers per 1,000 capita in order to survive and there's only one country with that many people and that is North Korea.

And they have also the advantage of being completely separate from everyone else, so it's going to be difficult for the zombies to get in.

The borders are very, you know, guarded and stuff like that.

So if the zombies come, that's where's the best place to go.

Oh, right.

In all other circumstances, don't bother.

I was reading, my assumption is if you were killed by a zombie, it would be through your brains being eaten and you being attacked.

According to Max Brooks, Max Brooks is an author who wrote the zombie survival guide.

He wrote the movie World War Z,

the book rather, World War Z, which was made into the Brad Pitt movie.

So he studied in a very serious way what he thought would be the way that you would be most likely to die in a zombie apocalypse.

And his main reason for anyone's death is that you would die from explosive diarrhea.

And it's because water would become so scarce that you would be forced to drink from puddles.

Puddles are very dangerous to get water from.

You can see why they don't make most of the zombie films about the whole explosive diarrhea puddle issue.

Yeah.

I wouldn't watch them.

I did look up because there are so many zombie films and they're quite cheap to make obviously because all you need is some willing extras with a load of you know makeup on and a lot of them are quite low quality but I went through a list of all the zombie films I could find online.

I just want to share a few of the titles because they're great.

So I mean there are your classic things like Boy Eats Girl, very clever.

There's Erotic Knights of the Living Dead.

There's Flights of the Living Dead, which is a plane-based zombie film.

My favorite one.

I like the explosive diarrhea one, Schites of the Living Dead.

I've got a third one, it's not as good as that.

It's called Poultry Geist, Night of the Chicken Dead.

I had a tiny little nugget about the World War Z movie, by the way, that was made, which is just a cool bit of trivia, which is that one of the actors in the movie was Peter Capoldi.

And Peter Capaldi was cast as a World Health Organization doctor.

So he was a who

doctor.

Wow.

Yeah.

And what it was is that the filmmakers had inside knowledge that he was going to be announced as the doctor.

This was before Doctor Who.

And so it's a subtle pister egg.

Yeah.

Oh, and none of us guessed based on that.

We We should have known.

It was staring us in the face.

People, scientists and people at universities are always kind of writing analyses of what happens in a zombie apocalypse.

It happens really in a lot of places, and I think it's kind of a way of engaging people and making something sound fun when actually it's a paper about statistical projections.

That can be fun, Anna.

Which, for a lot of people, is fun.

But one example of this was the University of Ottawa a few years ago published a paper with an equation in it explaining how fast we'd have to deal with the zombie apocalypse.

So the paper's called When Zombies Attack Mathematical Modeling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection and one of the paper's authors, the professor in charge, was called Robert J.

Smith question mark.

And

it turns out that the guy who wrote this paper has put a question mark on the end of his name.

And I looked him up and if you go to his academic page on the website at the university, he says, yeah, that's not a typo.

I really do have a question mark on the end of my name.

Do you have any idea what it's like to live with such an incredibly common name that you'll never ever show up on Google?

But

I had to do something.

How do you think he pronounces it?

It's Robert Smith.

Yeah.

Robert Smith.

Definitely.

Or he might just say question mark at the end, maybe.

Yeah.

But he then also says, I did go to his page.

I saw this as well.

He then follows up by saying, how do you stick out on Google?

He then goes, actually, you still don't stick out on Google when you put a question mark.

So it hasn't really worked.

I like the one who he wanted to stick out against who was Robert Smith.

We've got a bit of good news in the zombie war to come.

Good.

We're going to win.

It's going to be fine.

It's going to be absolutely fine.

We're going to win within about a week, guys.

Okay.

Did someone boot the fact that we're going to win the zombie war?

Have a look at your priorities, mate.

So there's an article by a scientist called David Mizojevsky, and he said that nature nature would destroy zombies before they could destroy us.

So obviously all animals will be packing away at them.

They're dead.

They're not very fast with their reactions.

But the main thing is microorganisms would go to town on them.

Bacteria, fungi, molds, insects, flesh-eating beetles.

I think it's a bit cocky for you to say we're going to win in that situation.

Our allies in the microorganism world

will join us in a coalition of the live.

That's a really good point.

That's such good logic.

They can decompose a rabbit right down to the bones in a week.

So

they'll go to town on these things.

Mizievsky, he did say that in his kind of world, animals can't get the same disease that humans were getting.

Do you know what I mean?

So the animals can't become zombies in his kind of idea.

If the animals can become zombies as well, then it's a whole different ballgame.

Sure.

If you're getting attacked by zombie microorganisms,

that is not a great movie either, I must admit.

There's someone someone else who's published advice on how to escape zombies, how to survive a zombie attack, is the CDC, the Center for Disease Control in America.

And this was obviously kind of a PR thing to try and get people actually onto their website so they learned how to survive genuine crises.

But it's quite funny because if you do go to the site now, they've got a zombie preparedness page, a zombie preparedness blog.

They've got a zombie preparedness booklet for educators that they will send out.

But they don't really conceal their true purpose very well.

So the tips they give are things like: stock up on water, food, and other supplies to get you through the first couple of days before you can locate a zombie-free refugee camp.

Brackets, or in the case of a natural disaster, it will buy you some time to get to an evacuation shelter or until utility lines are restored.

Close brackets.

It's always like, you know, first aid supplies in case that horrible zombie bites you also will come in handy in a tornado or a hurricane.

One other thing that might might help us if the zombies attack to win is the reverse zombie tick.

Oh, okay, this is an animal, a little tick, and if it bites you, it makes you allergic to meat.

And so, the idea is what we might do is kind of work out what makes that happen, and then we can inject it into the zombies, make them allergic to eating us, and then we're saved.

But just because the zombies got hives doesn't mean that you're not then a zombie.

Yeah,

Do you guys know that zombies make an appearance in Amazon's terms and services conditions?

You know that when you go and you sign that massive 26,000.

Yeah, we all read it.

Well then this won't be a surprise.

Someone did read the whole thing and they discovered that there's a passage in it which reads, However, so it just comes into this.

However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that cause human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain, or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.

That's in Amazon's actual terms.

That's very fun.

Fun conditions, yeah.

Is that it feels like they're testing us to check we're reading them.

Exactly.

And as the news of the last two months has taught us, nobody has read any of this.

We need to move on shortly.

There is

just on animal zombie sort of

parasites and the way they spread, there is a fly called Apocephalus borealis and it lays eggs inside bumblebees.

And the amazing thing is that the infected bee then stops working and it starts acting like a moth.

It starts being flying around lights and this kind of thing

while the parasite is preparing to burst out, basically.

But that means that there are zombies.

Oh!

Very cool.

It's a very forgiving audience tonight.

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

My fact is that the 1930s actor George Arlis once booked himself into the left luggage office at Charing Cross as a parcel in order to escape people who wanted his autograph.

What a guy.

I'd never heard of this guy before.

But he was very famous at the time.

And he wrote in his memoir that he was being chased by people who were desperate for his autograph.

And so he said, with presence of mind worthy of a great general, I thought of the left luggage office.

It was just behind me, close to the platform.

I turned to the man in charge and demanded the right to book myself in as a parcel.

I paid my two pence and the man took me over the counter and I was saved

he took him over the counter

it's amazing what you could get for two pence in those days

he was I hadn't heard of him either and he was he was very famous in his time he was the first British actor to ever win an Academy Award for leading actor yes he he won it as well for playing Benjamin Disraeli the British prime minister and he then won it again a few years later for playing Benjamin Disraeli.

He played the same role and got given it twice.

He was the first person to do that,

reprising a role and getting it a second time.

And was that one was silent, wasn't it?

And then the other one was a talkie thing.

That's right, yeah.

And he also, Victor Huguerie, was very egotistical as well.

He had to do a court appearance once.

He was called to just a court hearing and get to give a testament.

And he called himself himself the world's greatest living actor.

And to explain his statement, he said, you see, I'm on oath.

So he was a real kind of dick.

I really like Victor Hugali.

I really like his action.

There was one other instance of his egotism that I read about was in a film called The Man Who Played God, which was about a concert pianist who then fell on hard times.

But he stuck to the script totally, except there was one bit of the script where the line was

someone came up to the pianist after the show and congratulated him on the performance and the line was so glad you liked it and he changed it to so glad you liked me and

someone's just gone through the script in the film and gone oh he changed that didn't he

So on autograph hunting, autograph collectors, I didn't know this.

There is a magazine called Autograph Collector, which is all about collecting autographs, how to do it, how to get different people and various tactics and things like that.

And they do a lot on the history of autograph collecting too, because some people sell them, obviously.

Some people collect loads and loads of them at the same time.

And they described one incident in 1934 when the Australian cricket team came to England and in those days they had to get the ship to England to play the Ashes and so on.

And the junior batsman, Arthur Chippenfield, had to spend almost the entire journey on the steamship forging on bats and on sheets of paper the signatures of the rest of the team who couldn't be asked to sign piece of paper.

luckily that was the last time the australian team did anything fraudulent

and we will be touring australia in may

so

tickets as they weren't available but some have now come available it's really odd

wow And there was an autograph hunter, quite a famous one,

in his little area.

He was called Tommy Scullion.

He was an Irish grocery driver and he

and his family are in tonight

he devoted his whole life to getting um to getting autographs he had more than 40 000 in total wow he had picasso he had franco he had charles manson he had the cray twins also he wasn't discriminating

in the whole good v.

evil metric

I'll be honest, there's not much good in this list.

But he left a will in the end.

He died quite recently.

He He left a will and he bequeathed his collection to the village museum.

Unfortunately, in his hometown, there was no village museum.

So they auctioned it instead.

They have, these people have been around so much longer than I imagined, autograph hunters.

So they were particularly prevalent in the late 19th century, early 20th century, and they were thought of as a total scourge.

So if you look back in old newspapers from the early 1900s,

they're written about in such an awful way.

There was an article in the New York Times in 1901 that said autograph hunters excel in ways that are dark and tricks that are vain.

Mark Twain hated them.

Mark Twain had a letter pre-printed that explained his refusal when people wrote to him for an autograph.

And the letter explained that if he answered all these requests, he wouldn't have time to get anything else done.

And also, the asking for an autograph is asking for a sample of his writing.

And he's a writer.

So you're asking for a sample of his own work.

And he said it wouldn't be fair to ask a doctor for one of his corpses to remember him by would it

what

what a stupid analogy corpses are not the work that doctors produce

well some very bad doctors

I just made this

feel free to try the mouth to mouth the mouth to mouth will not work

Two more things about your statement.

Oh God.

Yes, Your Honour.

Firstly, sometimes artists can help people with their art.

There was a, I read that Mozart used to, when he was walking the streets, if he came across someone who was homeless asking him for money, there's one instance that's recorded where he didn't have anything on him, but he was so quick at writing music that he got a paper and pen, composed a new piece, gave it to the person, and said, there's a music publisher that will give you money for this, so take this there.

That's point number one.

Point number two is that...

That's amazing.

Mozart.

Yeah, Mozart.

Tubious, yeah, someone's shouting out Tubius.

But no, the other thing is that,

so you said that Mark Twain said this, sent them this letter saying, I'm not going to sign you a signature.

Steve Martin, the comedian, actor, he does the same thing, but in a positive way.

So he doesn't do signatures either.

What he does is if you meet Steve Mardin, he gives you a card, a business card that's pre-signed, and on it is written the words, this certifies that you have had a personal encounter with me and that you found me warm, polite, intelligent, and funny.

That's great.

And that's what he gives everyone who meets him.

Last year, there was a collection of Beatles autographs which sold for £2,000,

even though three of them were fake.

Okay?

And the reason they sold for £2,000 is that they were all done by John Lennon.

Oh, good.

Cool.

Because in the early days, sometimes they weren't all there or anyone, those who were just fake it.

Yeah.

That's cool.

So he was doing a prank at the time, presumably.

Well, he kind of got them almost all right.

He got George and Ringo bang on, but he didn't really bother with Paul.

Even in the early days, the signs were there.

I went onto eBay to look for the most expensive autographs at the moment.

The most expensive one when I checked, which was a day ago, was £351,493.85.

And it was.

Looks like you're going to guess, Andy.

Is it someone alive or dead?

Dead.

Male or female?

Male.

Hancock.

Henry VIII.

No.

Got.

God.

God.

God, God.

You've tried the two biggies.

I mean, George Arless.

You're just not going to guess.

Okay.

Who is it?

Actually, I think he's dead.

Hugh Hefner.

Yeah, he said that.

£350,000.

Yeah, yeah.

So he's

Hugh Hefner.

I know, I know.

It's a number one edition of Playboy with his signature on.

But that is £351,000.

Bob Dylan signed handwritten lyrics to Like a Rolling Stone, only £140,597.54.

It's still a lot of money, guys.

Don't be too outrageous.

A lot of people are going, oh,

sure, lose change.

But a fifth the price of the Hugh Hefner one for £70,000, you can get the Apollo 11 space-flown US flag signed by all three astronauts on the Apollo 11.

All right, that actually we could share between us all.

We bring in a tenor each, we can do it.

And then we'll have to have an incredibly complicated timeshare.

And the lowest prices 75p an EastEnders signed photo of Simon Williams

who plays Hugo in EastEnders he's actually got an exclamation mark after his name

actually

I've never heard of him we ages ago when our vinyl came out we went we we went to a record shop and did a signing at a record shop and we did a few signatures on on ones that they hadn't sold that they were going to keep online in their store so we we checked if they were still in stock online They were.

The unsigned, unsigned vinyl was £19.99.

The signed vinyl was £20.

We are worth between us one penny.

Wow.

I will be signing that to the show tonight.

Just on the astronauts Apollo 11 thing, one of the things that was a contingency for the families of the Apollo 11 space mission was that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins signed a lot of signatures to give to their family so that if they didn't make it back, the families could sell the signatures to make money to keep the family

going okay.

They signed hundreds of signatures going, if we don't make it back, sell these and this will help my family continue.

Yeah.

Stephen King.

That's very sad.

It's not sad.

They were okay.

Oh, don't spoil it for me.

He's only one tape for 30 years.

He's only on Apollo 10.

The next one's really good.

It is one of the few where the sequels get better and better.

We're going to have to wrap up shortly.

There's one amazing story about autographs that Stephen King tells.

I was watching him give a talk on stage about this thing that happened when he he was 26 years old.

And he'd never been recognized and asked for an autograph before.

It was in his early days.

And he was in a restaurant, and he was really sick.

He was really ill.

He had some kind of horrible stomach bug.

And so he had to be really close to the bathrooms at all times.

And at one point, he had to rush to the bathrooms.

And he went in, and I don't know what kind of weird restaurant this was, but there were no doors on the bathroom, on the toilet stools.

So he just had to have his stomach complaint in full view of the rest of the bathroom.

And so he went in and he he sort of explosively shat all into this toilet.

Zombie, zombie.

Telltale sign.

And he did this, and he's feeling terrible.

He was saying he was on this toilet, the door open, thinking things can't get any worse.

And there was a toilet attendant in there who he said was about 108 years old.

And while he was in the middle of this awful experience, the toilet attendant came up to him with a powder paper and a pen and said, Aren't you Stephen King?

Can I have your autograph, please, mate?

So Stephen King gave his first requested autograph on the loo while having diarrhea.

Very cool.

Thank you.

Okay,

that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

James, at James Harkin, and Czezinski.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at No Such Thing.

We have a Facebook group as well, No Such Thing as a Fish, or you can go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com.

We have everything up there from our tour dates upcoming, from the book, the link to our book that you can buy.

We've also got a link to our new tape that we've just released, and we're about to give one away.

It's the only one we have here in Ireland.

And you guys sent in your facts at the beginning of the show.

We've picked our favorite facts.

So the winner is going to get this.

So, andy i believe you've picked the facts yes the winning fact tonight is from kieran dowling are you in

great where's winner

the fact is the fact is that adolf hitler's brother alwa used to work at the shelbourne hotel in dublin where he was known where he was known as paddy hitler

From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy goal to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad-free top podcasts.

Included with Prime.

Download the Amazon Music app today.

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