195: No Such Thing As A Hummingbird With A Greggs Steak Bake

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Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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

My name is Dan Shriver, and I'm sitting here with Anna Chacinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that the first loop-the-loop roller coaster closed because so many riders were passing out.

That's the end of the show.

They were passing out.

They were passing out.

This was, so it was on Coney Island, it was in 1901.

And what it was, it was a loop-the-loop.

I don't know if you would notice this today.

If you look at a loop-the-loop, they're not circular, they're kind of like elliptical things.

And the reason is, if you have a circular loop-the-loop, it basically kills you.

Really?

Yeah, this one is called the Coney Flip Flap, and it was giving people

it was...

Is that rude in Manchester?

I know.

So the Coney Flip-Flap produced 12 Gs of gravitational force.

What is that?

It's about 9G is like the maximum that air jet pilots, fighter pilots ever go up to.

Oh my God, exactly.

So the biggest, the craziest roller coaster today, I think, is 6G.

And this was 12G.

I mean, it just...

Basically, you went on it, and more often than not, you passed out, or you got whiplash, or whatever.

And they made more money charging spectators to watch the frightened riders.

You just put on someone you don't like.

Oh, no, I bought you the ticket.

Go on, mate.

You take it.

I'll see you in a bit.

It's so funny, right?

I actually read, and I've only just noticed this is the case looking at the year in my notes, but there was a roller coaster in France in 1846 that did have a loop, but it was just a cart on a track, but it went fast enough to have a loop there.

And there were lots of reports about it, but people who operated like fairgrounds or the equivalent then were prone to exaggeration.

So first of all, all the news stories at the time reported it as going at 150 miles per hour, which is as fast as the fastest roller coaster today.

So that's impressive.

They tested it at the time using soundbags, eggs, and monkeys.

And

yeah, apparently they had loops up to 12 meters high, I read, in a book called The Incredible Scream Machine.

But the book also points out that the makers were prone to massive exaggeration.

They could snap riders' necks.

That is bad.

It put people off.

You don't want the photo to be going off just at that moment that your neck snaps, do you?

I think embarrassment is the least of your worries at that moment.

And those, I think the French ones, it was a one-person loop the loop.

So it was just you in the sled.

You go down the thing, loop loop the loop, your neck breaks, and then the next person comes in.

The next person still gets on.

This is a really cool thing.

Okay, so Coney Island, they had a load of roller coasters, and one of the first ever ones, I think it was called the Switchback, and it was founded by a women's underwear magnate called LaMarcus Thompson.

Oh, yeah.

And it was a moral mission because Coney Island was full of, you know, alcohol and other, you know,

immoral attractions.

I really struggled not to say the word prostates there, didn't I?

But

It's great that you avoided it, though.

And he made

a roller coaster, but the thing about it was it went at 10 miles an hour, which is not especially fast, and it had to be hand-pushed.

So

workers would push it to the top of the first hill, everyone gets on, it then goes down a big slide and then slides along a bit, then stops, everyone gets off, workers have to push it to the top of the next hill, everyone gets back on again.

Oh, wow.

Did you say it was an underwear magnate, though?

Yeah.

And it was was a moral mission.

Because I would have thought that actually setting up a roller coaster is an extremely good way to advertise your underwear, isn't it?

Because the way it works, often it's on display.

I don't think I've.

I don't think I've.

I think I missed that one at Thorpe Park, and I.

What?

Where have you been taken?

My mum used to dangle me out the window by my ankles and then tell me we've been to a theme park.

Yeah.

This guy, Lamarcus Thompson, is his name.

He was the inventor of it.

And as Andy's saying, it was about morals, but specifically, he invented it to stop people from being tempted by Satan, specifically.

So he was worried that Satan would get people and he thought this roller coaster would bring them back to Jesus.

That was genuinely the idea behind the invention of the Coney Island roller coasters.

That's cool.

So another licentious kind of theme park.

This one hasn't actually opened yet.

They were hoping to open it this year in Brazil, but they haven't opened it because of the political problems there and financial problems.

But it is a sex-themed amusement park called Erotica Land.

Okay, it had penis-shaped dodgeums.

Oh.

But one should be a penis-shape and one should be a vagina-shape, right?

So when you crash, it's like, oh, that's sexy.

Is that sexy?

James, at Erotica Land, everything is sexy.

And the locals were really worried, and they thought that maybe like all of the people going to this theme park would just end up having sex all the time.

But the guy who was behind the project, Moro Moro Murata, said that no one would be having sex in this theme park.

But if attendees do want to take things to another level, they can go to a nearby motel, which we will operate.

Do you know the sort of king of roller coasters, the great lord of roller coaster design, is a guy called Ron Toomer.

He died a couple of years ago, I think in 2011, but he couldn't go on roller coasters himself.

So he got extreme motion sickness.

But he's the person who's pioneered every roller coaster design, you know, any kind of spin, loop the loops, all that kind of stuff.

And he himself said, riding roller coasters never really appealed to me.

I rode once or twice, and that was enough for me to get a general idea of what it felt like.

Wow.

Then he just designed like 93 roller coasters.

And he also designed the heat shields for the Apollo spacecraft missions.

No.

Yeah, I sure did.

Wow.

Wow.

Have you heard of a guy called Richard Rodriguez?

No.

He's so cool.

So he has spent his whole life pretty much on roller coasters, i.e., in 2007 he spent 17 consecutive days and nights in Blackpool on a roller coaster

17 days and nights.

He slept on there.

He ate on there.

He took a five-minute break every hour just to shower or go to the loo.

He'll throw up presumably.

But he's been doing this since 1977.

Wow.

And he keeps on breaking his own record.

In 1977, he did four days in Coney Island, and he trained himself by sticking his head out of a car window for hours on end.

Like a dog.

Do you know what the oldest operating roller coaster is?

The oldest continually operating one?

No.

And the only reason I mention this is that I used to live in Melbourne, and I went on this with my mum, and we went on it, and we came off and said, That is the most painful, uncomfortable experience of either of our lives.

And it's because it's a roller coaster that's over 100 years old, and no one's ever done anything to it.

It's in Luna Park in Melbourne.

Oh, yeah.

And it's been continuously running since I think about 1905.

But it's a horrible experience.

Is it because your skirt was up the entire time?

A few years ago, Thorpe Park, they asked the public for donations of their own urine to help make an authentic smell for their new horror movie themed ride.

And if you have strong feelings about that, you can just send your own donation to the park management.

Were they just going to spray it in the air to give it a sense of...

I don't know.

I think it was a publicity stunt, to be honest.

There must be rules about that.

Although, who would write the rules?

Who would think of passing?

Yeah,

someone going, I know it seems really far-fetched, but I just want to write this rule because I reckon just possibly someone's going to ask for the public's urine for roller coasters.

I know it seems niche.

I don't know why.

Can we put it in the big rule book?

Is there a big rule book?

Yes.

And so, just going back to this loop the loop.

Yeah.

So it was, did I say 12G?

I think it was 12G.

And that is pretty much as much as you can manage as a human, or that's what people thought.

But then there was was a guy called John Stapp who decided to make himself a sled, which basically went really, really, really fast and then just stopped.

And he wanted to see how much g-force the human body would be able to stand.

And this was important, it was in the 1940s.

It was important because new aeroplanes were coming, and they needed to know what people could do.

And they thought that actually most people would maybe kind of die around sort of 12 to 15, something like that.

But he managed to do 46.2 G.

No.

Whoa.

Yeah.

for one instant, his body weighed 7,700 pounds.

What?

Yeah,

wow.

Do you know how you do it though?

If you ever do need to withstand huge amounts of gravity,

you so I was reading this in a article about how jet pilots prepare for it, and the way they get prepared is they're put in this chamber at the end of a really long arm that's spinning round and round, and they're trained on how to deal with it.

And what you do is you have have to strain like you're doing a poo, and you make sort of a hick sound.

So you've got to sort of,

and that prevents the blood from flowing away from the brain too fast, so it means you can remain conscious longer.

And the guys who can tolerate lots and lots of g-force are called g-monsters.

Oh, cool.

I've seen that contraption.

So they sit at the end, they spin round and round.

I've seen it, I've seen Brian Blessed do it.

Was he straining?

No, well, so no,

he was training to be an astronaut in Russia because they said they were going to send him up to space.

There's footage you can see if you want to see it, it's on YouTube.

He gets into it and he's saying, you know, I've been built, I've been up Everest, I'm built to last in this thing.

I have a body and lungs bigger than anyone else, I'm amazing.

And he sits inside and it starts and immediately he's just there going,

It's the funniest thing I've ever seen.

It's just a terrified blessing going at GeForce at astronauts going and going,

but that's actually also what he looks like when he's straight in on the title.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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Should we move on to our next fact?

Time to go on to fact number two and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that America has a national grocery bag packing competition.

And this is a huge deal in America.

They They get crowds cheering and gathering, and people film it.

And it's just people who work at checkout tills packing groceries into a bag.

That's it.

And is it to see the fastest person to do it, or the most groceries packed in a bag?

The criteria are so strict.

I love it.

So you all get the same stuff, like you and your fellow competitors.

So we would all get the same items,

but they vary hugely in terms of weight.

Some of them are fragile, some of them are very dense.

And the criteria you get marked on is speed, but also bag building technique style weight distribution between bags attitude and appearance attitude

but um they're really strict so one person uh finished really really fast but his bags weighed 17 and 21 pounds and the woman who won her bags weighed 19 and 19 pounds she got it dead on wow yeah and did she know the weight of the objects prior to putting it in no no no you're just doing it wow you're just feeling it smelling it hot yeah yeah it's so good well you don't need to smell it to work out how heavy it is.

But that would be attitude.

That would be attitude points.

Yeah, that's about 12 kilos.

I won't drop coins for attitude if someone sniffed my shopping while they were back here.

I once shopped in,

I lived for three months in Kosovo because my grandmother was living there.

And there was our local grocery store, which took an hour each time, even if you were buying like six items, because they didn't have any price tags on each item.

So the person at the counter would pick it up and stare at it for ages and never spoke out loud, but I could see they were going, if I were a can of baked beans,

how much would I be?

And really thought about it and then slowly packed.

So I feel like that's good attitude.

So there's one contestant from each state in America.

There are 50 competitors out there.

If there are two really good bagpackers in your state, then they have to have a bag off.

That's true.

And they call themselves bagfleets.

Oh, like athletes.

Yeah.

Right.

Bagthletes.

It doesn't quite work, does it, as wordplay?

If you win, your store where you work, your home store gets a gold-plated cash register.

How useful.

Oh, my God.

Sorry.

It's quite good.

If robbers come into the store and they ask for all the money from the tilt, you're like, stupid robbers.

But the Washington State Competition has a guy who is called a bagger whisperer.

Again, doesn't quite work, does it?

But he's a store manager and he's coached a couple at least of successive champions.

Yeah.

It's not quite as impressive as being a horse whisperer because horses don't speak English.

And so it's really amazing that you could communicate with a horse.

Communicating with someone who bangs shopping, I mean, I find that quite easy when I'm in the shop.

Put it in the bag.

Look, look how she is actually putting it in the bag now.

As well, so the really elite ones are called bagthleetes.

But actually, they're all called baggers, aren't they?

They all call themselves baggers if they do this job.

And I went on to Urban Dictionary to find out any other meanings of the word bagger.

Go on.

No, just.

A flamboyant member of the Tea Party.

in America is known as a bagger.

It's a derivative of the word tea bagger and it describes the costumes.

It describes the costumes with tea bags that the members wear.

But it does also say sometimes it is used as a derogatory name because it also depicts a unique sexual act

and you can fill in the rest yourself.

Did you know the first time that you could bag your own stuff was in 1916?

So this is the first self-service grocery store.

So before 1916, you had to go into a shop with your shopping list and you had to to give it to the person who worked in the shop and say, go and do my shopping for me.

And then you waited for them to bring it to you, which was really time consuming and you needed lots of clerks to go and do it.

So in 1916, the first self-service shop was set up, what we would call just a shop, and it was called Piggly Wiggly

in Tennessee.

And no one ever knew why he called it that.

The founder was someone called Clarence Saunders, and he launched this shop with a beauty contest and he gave free flowers and balloons to all the kids who came.

And he never explained why he called it Piggly Wiggly.

He did once was this where he said he just thought it was a funny word so people would talk about it he got asked yeah why is it called piggly wiggly and he said so people will ask that very question

sorry so you're saying 1916 for that because i was reading in 1929 was in america the invention of the grocery bag as a as a paper bag And it was a guy who invented it called Walter Daubonaire.

And he woke up in the middle of the night.

He had a vision in the middle of the night.

and he woke up and he went bags and

because he had it.

He had it.

I like the way he kind of does this.

Yeah.

And then he's getting, I've got nothing to breathe into.

Yeah, yeah, good point.

So he woke up, he went, he went, bags, and he woke his wife up and he said, bags.

And she, and they had a shop, a grocery shop, and he went down with his wife early in the morning.

And the thought he had was to have these,

a brown paper bag and to punch holes in both sides to put the strings in and so they did that they put strings in so that it was handles and then that day they started selling them and people went nuts for it they sold them incidentally very uh sort of full circle for five cents you know so it was you bought it for what we've now returned to wow yeah but um so he sold them everyone went crazy they were buying more bags than they were the actual stuff in the grocery store and then they ran out of bags they bought more bags and then she sat there customizing all the bags with magazines and newspapers so she cut out pictures that she thought were really nice and she stuck them to the side of each bag and just sold that and then he filed it as a patent and he became a multi-millionaire over the next couple of years and they were the largest manufacturer of grocery bags in America for a very long time I think I've made that bit up but they were

that feels right doesn't it so that yeah just just quickly do you know what people had before they had shopping bags

this is

so cool.

Before you had a shopping bag, some people, not everybody, but a lot of people, had cornucopias.

So, you know, in sort of old paintings, you have these horns of plenty, and it's full of fruit and lobster and wild grapes and everything.

Yes, people would take...

Like a big, big horn.

Like a big horn, it was wicker, and you would take your horn of plenty to the shops.

Oh, wow.

How cool is that?

Why don't we all have horns of plenty?

Why have we been cheated from our birthright?

I think we could have a new business, couldn't we?

Yes.

Like, according to Dan, this other guy made billions.

Yeah.

If we start making horns of plenty for life,

would you buy a horn of plenty?

I think if you come up with any business idea starting with the phrase, according to Dan,

you need to be really careful.

Plastic bags, when they started,

the marketing was so confident that it was going to change the world.

This is from the Baker-like Corporation, who were the first first people to put out plastic bags.

They said, and this was literally their PR, that this bag had transcended the old taxonomy.

How do I say that?

Taxonomy.

Taxonomy.

Taxonomy.

Thank you.

Yep.

Always good to have an edit point.

Had transcended the old taxonomy of animal mineral.

I said.

Really close.

So what's it again?

Taxonomy.

Taxonomy.

Taxonomy.

I mean, soft pedal it.

Taxonomy.

Yeah.

They said it had transcended the old taxonomy of animal.

That's going to be awkward to edit with that massive cheer.

I guess the people of Manchester just really love taxonomy.

Darling, did Manchester invent taxonomy?

Come on, Dat, you've got to get to the end of this.

We've lost it.

This would better be fucking good, then.

Jesus.

The Bakelite Company said that it transcended the old taxonomy of

animal, mineral, and vegetable, and now we had a fourth kingdom whose boundaries are unlimited.

That is cool.

Yeah.

Okay, it is time

for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact is, one of the things you need to know in order to become a British citizen is who introduced shampoo to the UK.

It's an actual thing that you get asked.

And who was it?

Well, his name is Shaykh Dean.

Shoo Slow, get out.

His name is Sheikh Deen Mohammed.

He was a Bengali Anglo-Indian traveler, inventor.

He opened the very first curry house in the UK.

It was in London.

But he also opened up these amazing things called the shampoo baths of the UK.

There were shampooing baths where you would go in, and it was basically a massage, and it was all sorts of oils, and it was like a spa.

It was a bathing spa.

And

weirdly, that is a question that you get asked when you're sitting down to work out if you're allowed into the UK as a citizen.

Have you seen the list of questions?

Yeah, I mean, they're unbelievably hard, aren't they?

Like, literally, no one would be able to get any of these answers.

Yeah.

It's like you have to know what year was the Battle of the Boyne just off the top of your head.

It was 1680.

Get out.

Do it.

1680.

I don't know when it was.

You get out.

Anna, you're going to have to carry the show from this point onwards.

In the previous version, it was worse in the past.

In previous versions of the test, you needed to know 49 different websites and 36 telephone numbers, including the phone phone number for the National Academic Recognition Information Centre.

You still need to know, there are still five telephone numbers on it, so they have pared it down, but you still need to know the phone numbers for the House of Commons,

the Welsh Assembly,

and the Scottish Parliament.

But weirdly, in the five telephone numbers that you need to know, 999 is not there.

Nowhere.

Hello, is that my MP?

There's the burglar in my house.

I'd like to know what you're going to do about about it.

Oh, fine.

I'll ring the Welsh Assembly.

Unbelievable.

I read one question that's in it.

Apparently, it used to have this question.

Suppose you spill someone's pint in the pub.

What usually happens next?

Punch up.

I rather think that that depends.

The answer in London will be very different from the answer in Manchester, I think.

What happens in Manchester?

Well, why don't you try it tonight?

Is it a quaint local custom that if you're a newcomer to the city, you have to spill as many people's pints as possible?

Yeah?

That's right.

Okay, great.

Any stuff on shampoo, maybe?

Yeah, yeah, sure.

This is just interesting.

The word shampoo is kind of an Indian, a Hindi word, and it comes from shampna, meaning to knead, and it comes from the same word as chapati.

No way!

Just an interesting thing.

I got completely distracted and I started looking at how

people's hair and how animals clean themselves.

Because if you you don't shampoo, eventually your hair gets back into a kind of balance.

Well, actually, I tried that.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah,

for QI, right?

Yeah, for QI, I tried going six months without washing my hair.

I remember that.

And it does not work.

Yeah.

And his wife was not happy.

Well, this was before I was married.

Actually,

I was single, actually.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

And actually, around the same time, I read something else, which was that if you put an onion in your shoe and walk around, then by the end of the day, you'll be able to taste it in your mouth.

And that doesn't work either.

Wow.

But it does probably explain why I was single.

James, there are so many reasons.

So when

a fly cleans itself, right, it combs itself, it sort of combs its body, and it's got hairs sticking out of it.

When they clean themselves, the particles that have gathered on them are catapulted off the hairs at a thousand

G.

What?

No.

Well, it's a thousand times the acceleration of gravity.

Is that G?

It is, yeah.

Probably mistyped a zero or two.

But do you know how cicadas keep themselves clean?

This is so cool.

They have on their bodies tiny, tiny nano-scale pincushions that mean that when a bacteria bumps into them, the bacteria explodes.

Whoa, and what that cleans them through the explosion.

Well, it doesn't clean them, it just means they don't have a bacteria on them anymore.

That is so cool.

Not if you're a bacteria.

Sure.

Yeah, Yeah, no one ever speaks up with a bacteria on the cicada side.

Actually, the reason we need to wash our hair, I think, is quite interesting.

It's that we have all these sebaceous glands and they secrete oil into our scalp, and so it gets really oily and gross.

And it's to waterproof.

So our scalp is quite waterproof.

Our face also has quite a lot of them.

So that's quite waterproof.

But we don't have any of these glands on the palms of our hands or the soles of our feet.

So if you grow hair on the palms of your hands or the soles of your feet, you don't need to wash it as a consolation.

I have hair on my feet.

I've got like hobbit feet.

So not on the soles of your feet.

Not on the soles.

Yeah.

No.

The soles of your feet are hairy.

Hang on, are we quibbling over what soles mean?

I think so.

The bottom bit.

Okay, no.

My God.

Okay.

We should move on to

our final fact.

You guys ready to go to the final fact?

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

Yes, my fact is that if your metabolism was as fast as a hummingbird's, you'd need to drink a can of Coke every minute to stay alive.

Whoa.

It's this hummingbirds have the most incredible metabolisms that we can't imagine.

So they process sugars so fast that they need to drink one 12-ounce can of fizzy drink.

No, no, the equivalent of.

Sorry, yeah.

Imagine seeing a poor hummingbird get back to its nest with a 16-pack of coke.

And a quarter of an hour later, I'm back to the bloody shops.

But that is, if

we had to have the equivalent to survive, then we'd be eating or drinking 202,000 calories a day we'd have to eat to stay alive.

So they have to visit 2,000 flowers a day.

It's a lot.

Yeah,

I read 1,500 flowers on obviously another website every day.

And what I liked about that is it's approximately the same number as there are Greggs in the UK.

The human flower.

But what I worked out is with all the calories that they get and everything like that, if you were a hummingbird, it's the equivalent of going to every Gregg's in the UK and eating half a steak bake in every one.

Coincidentally, I've never managed more than half of a steak bake.

Yeah.

Am I a hummingbird?

No.

Wow.

Hummingbird hearts are so cool.

They beat 10 times a second, and that's quite slow for a hummingbird, despite being the size of a rubber on the end of a pencil.

What?

That's the size of hummingbirds.

No, the heart, just the heart.

Oh.

Sorry.

But they're small, though.

The rest of them are small.

They're not six-foot-tall animals with hearts the size of a rubber on the end of a pencil.

They would be fainting all the time.

But so

their heart beats up to 1,200 beats a minute, which is very fast.

But when they, and even when they're resting, it's 500.

And as a result, at night, just to prevent themselves from dying overnight, basically every night they go into a coma and their heart slows down to 50 beats a minute.

50 beats is still pretty fast.

It's like hibernation.

It's like hibernation.

You can hibernate literally every night.

You can prod them and they won't wake up.

Obviously don't.

Yeah.

but yeah.

They also, just all the figures that you read about hummingbirds, you really have to think about and process.

So their wings flap up to a hundred times a second.

That is completely insane.

And as I read it, I think I must have written it wrong.

Yeah,

no, you haven't.

I read it in the National Geographic.

And so, I should say, by the way, that this came from an amazing article on hummingbirds from the National Geographic sometime in the last year.

So you can't get it anymore, but it was really good.

But that's, I mean,

something quite cool that researchers have done to work out what their visual perception is like is they've worked out how they respond to optical illusions.

So this again was in the National Geographic and they got one of those optical illusions that is a spiral of black stripe with white stripes in between it and when you spin that round it looks like it's moving away from you and they put a test tube full of hummingbird food sticking out of it and so the hummingbird gets its beak in and it's got its little forked tongue that drinks from the test tube and then when they start spinning the spiral the hummingbird just like humans do thinks that the spiral is moving away from them and because they can fly backwards they reverse out of the test tube because they're like sorry they think it's moving towards them so they reverse out of the test tube

so they do have the same eyesight as we do and also they're kind of idiots they kept backing away from their food

They've got really interesting legs as well.

They basically, they've got almost like display legs in that they're sort of, they're attached to them, but they can't walk on them.

So land and they can't walk and they can't hop.

So they're just there for like standing purposes.

What do they do?

They can do a sideways thing.

You know, when they can like, so like, oh, God.

No, no, no, no, no, because I don't know how to describe it, but you know, so like they'll like land on a branch and then they'll just be like,

they'll do that thing.

A shuffle.

For anyone who's listening to the podcast, Dan shuffled sideways.

That was the word he couldn't think of, so he had to stand up.

Can I just say as well, for them, that's called a leck and it's a mating dance.

And I can kind of, well, I'm not sure I can see why.

I can see that.

That's how I met my wife.

Hey, hey, then.

I see.

Yeah, that's how they, and they do that on a

stick attached to a tree, a branch.

They do that on a branch.

Their mating only takes half a second, beginning to end.

What do you mean, only?

And the courting only takes a few seconds as well.

And they dive.

Yeah, they do, don't they?

To impress women, they go up high, then they dive at 60 miles an hour down.

And they also make chirruping sounds.

They tweet, but not with their mouths, with their feathers.

So all hummingbirds make a different chirping sound, and it sounds exactly like bird tweeting, but they're doing it with their tail feathers.

So it's when they swoop, the way that they vibrate as they go through the air makes a certain noise, and it's really beautiful.

And as a Smithsonian put it, imagine if you could sing with your ponytail or your beard.

That is what it's like to be a hummingbird.

That's pretty cool.

And that singing, to us, it just kind of sounds like a chirp, right?

It is a nice chirp, but it's just a chirp.

But if you slow it down and play it into a computer, they can hear real levels of complexity that humans can't hear.

Levels of complexity, yeah.

Like what?

Please, I just want to stop drinking Coke.

God,

just let me slow down.

So there is only one known piece of DNA in vertebrates with the ability to taste sweetness, and hummingbirds don't have it.

So even though they're drinking all this nectar stuff, we don't think they can taste sweetness.

Oh, really?

It's tragic.

I think there's a theory, though, that they modified...

So we have a bunch of taste receptors.

We all know now

sweet, salty, a bitter, sour, and umami.

And as we all agree, umami is the kind of pointless weird one that no one knows what it is.

It's savory, isn't it?

Yeah, it's savoury.

And they actually think that hummingbirds have adapted their umami gland, and that's evolved to taste sweetness over the years.

Which, what that might mean is when they're going around tasting all these flowers 1500 times, it actually tastes like a Gregg's steak bake.

Did you structure this whole part of the podcast to come back around to that?

So, they've got really fast metabolism, don't they?

And I was trying to work out the other end of metabolism, super slow metabolism.

And sloths have extremely slow metabolism.

And obviously we know them as a very slow animal.

So

they have an extraordinarily slow metabolism.

But

they, so I started just, this is very off topic, but I started reading about sloths because I thought, why are they moving so slow and what goes on?

It turns out I think they're meant to be water-based animals rather than in the trees.

Because when you put a sloth in water, it can swim three times as fast as it can move when it's outside of water and it can hold its breath for over 40 minutes underwater wow which is 20 minutes longer than a dolphin what yeah that is amazing and they're just stuck up there on that stick attached to a tree yeah it's like

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 account.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Scasinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can get us on our group account, which is at no such thing.

Or you can go to our website, nosuchthingasoffish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes.

We also have a link to our book, The Book of the Year, which we're about to give a copy away to someone in the audience here live at our Manchester audience because we asked them to send in a fact Andy you've got the winning fact I certainly have Dan and it's just on my phone which is turning on so I'd like you to fill for about 15 seconds please

okay picture right I've got it I've got it I've got it all right

okay this is today's winning fact it's from Evie Hull

In 1993, San Francisco held a referendum over whether police officer Bob Geary was allowed allowed to patrol while carrying a ventriloquist's dummy called Brendan O'Smarty.

All right, we're gonna have your copy of the book out there, guys.

We're gonna be out at the back with our book of the year.

If you want to buy a copy, we're gonna be signing copies out there.

Please come and say hi.

Thank you, Manchester.

That was awesome.

We'll see you later.

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