177: No Such Thing As A Barking Spy

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Chaczynski.

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.

We're going to start with my fact this week.

My fact is that in 1957, America developed a shouting bomb that would lecture the enemy for three minutes as it dropped from the sky.

When I get down there, you are in such trouble, mister.

This was a very rogue one mention in a new scientist article.

I haven't been able to prove its existence outside of this one article.

Yeah, there's no mention online at all, is there?

It's almost as if I made it up.

I read also that apparently it would give instructions to the soldiers on the ground as well.

As the bomb came down, you'd be able to hear what to do if you're not.

Really?

Like, run?

How long?

Why does it take three minutes to shout that?

No, so what I couldn't ascertain is, does this bomb go off, or is it merely a propaganda tool?

So the idea is that it would be dropped from a plane from about 60,000 feet high, and then parachutes would deploy, and then as it was making its ascent, or descent rather, to the ground.

I'll edit that to be correct.

Imagine the people in the aeroplane, oh, it's coming back!

This is the worst lecture ever!

Yeah, so the idea is that it would parachute down and then it would just, and this is 1957, as it got to a certain height, a tape recorder on the inside would switch on and it would play a tape through the speakers in the shouting bomb out to the general area and it could be heard as far as half a mile, apparently.

Wow.

And we don't know exactly what it says.

I know, we don't know if it's real.

But it's in New Scientist.

And I have to say, the reason I think a lot of great pop science writers have these incredible careers, like John Ronson and Mary Roach Roach and so on.

They uncover these documents because there's so many of these abandoned plans for military weaponry where they've thought, oh, this would be an amazing thing to do.

And it gets to the stage where it's about to be approved and then it doesn't.

So I believe this is the same.

They almost got this approved and then lost it at the last hurdle.

They aren't.

I mean, the ideas people were coming up with were all completely insane.

And there's so many of them.

Every time we talk about this, like, I hadn't read about Acoustic Kitty, which I think was a project that got a little bit further.

But that was the CIA around the same time in the 1960s.

And this was a Cold War project.

And the idea was that they wanted to spy on Soviet embassies and they were going to do it with cats.

And so Vet implanted a microphone into a cat's ear canal and it had a radio transmitter at the base of its skull and put wire into its fur.

And it sounds a bit gruesome.

They sort of cut the cat open and then put batteries in its body and stuff, apparently.

That does sound a bit gruesome, Annie, yeah.

The cat was fine.

At this stage, the cat was fine.

And then the idea was that the cat would be sent to where suspicious enemies were hanging out, so they sent the cat to where they thought a couple of Soviets were in Washington, and they let the cat out of the van, and it got hit by a taxi and killed immediately.

But there was a robot dog that they did build and develop.

So this is, I'm not sure if your bomb was DARPA, Dan, but have you heard of these guys?

DARPA, so it's a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Basically, they do a lot of the wacky stuff for the American military.

And one of the things they developed was a robo-dog which would carry weapons around the battlefield.

And it's on four legs and it's really good.

You can push it really hard and it won't fall over.

So it's stable, okay, and it trots around and it can go uphills and downhills.

But it was recently scrapped because it was so noisy, it would immediately give away anybody's position on the battlefield just by its presence.

Is it like a whirring noise or is it barking or what?

It's a whirring.

They didn't build in a bark to give away the position.

Can't you just take the bark away?

It wouldn't be realistic without that.

Have you guys heard of a bird's eye bomb?

No.

No, is that a fish finger related thing?

No, so this is a pigeon guided missile and this was developed in World War II by a psychologist called B.F.

Skinner.

And the idea behind this, he was looking at pigeons and he was like, suddenly I saw them as a device.

Could they not guide a missile?

And this genuinely was put into test.

He had the pigeon looking at specific images that might be the target during World War II.

For example, a huge ship and he would have the pigeon peck the ship and every time it pecked the ship it was like yes, that's your that's your goal it would get a reward or something like that.

The idea behind this missile is that in front of the missile there was going to be a little nodule that contained the pigeon inside and when they launched the rocket the pigeon would see the ship in the distance and start pecking the front of the missile and wherever it pecked is where the missile turned towards and that it would bring it to wherever it needed to go through the maneuverability of the pigeon neck and it got past all the physicists and the military people but it didn't get past the budget so it though

we could have had pigeon guidelines missiles how much does one pigeon cost

there's a great military website called warontherocks.com and it's just fascinating articles about military history and future and development and everything and they're saying that in future it's much more effective than having one hundred million pound missile to have a swarm of geese, which are robots, which each has a small amount of explosive on it.

See what I mean?

Yeah, I think I haven't explained that as cleanly as I could have done, nor as clearly as I can see it in here.

Why, so that's better than having one huge goose with a

giant explosive.

In this analogy, the cruise missile is one massive goose, and you're saying you want a thousand tiny geese.

Got it.

Because it can scatter it further?

It can scatter.

Even advanced defense and interceptor systems can't get all the geese, can they?

No.

But what if maybe they should be like insects then?

Like really, really, really small bombs.

That'd be good, right?

Yes.

Yes, it would.

How deadly a device can you attach to your average house fly?

Yeah, that's a good point.

There was a thing they did with insects, which was it was called the harassing, annoying, and bad guy identifying chemical system.

Right now.

And what they would do is they put a chemical on a bad guy, and it was attracting insects, and so all the insects would fly near him and they'd know which one the bad guy was.

Right.

No.

Is that like an official government turn?

Bad guy?

Is that used?

I think in the American military they do use that a bit.

Do you?

But if you put a queen bee on a bad guy,

all the other bees get attracted to the queen bee.

That is the thing that happens.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

You could slip a bee in his pocket when he's not looking.

Yeah.

A queen bee.

A queen bee.

And then all the other bees are going to go and attack him.

Do you guys remember that genuinely happened in the news last year where someone accidentally trapped a queen bee into the back of her car, drove off and was chased for hours by this huge hive?

And she had no idea why.

It was this grandmother going, what the heck is going on?

There is one more DARPA thing that DARPA did.

Okay, so after

President Kennedy was assassinated, they had a thing which in private they called Operation Barn Door, i.e., we did not manage to save the last president, but we do want to save the next president.

Okay, that was how they referred to it.

Privately, that was not the official name of the thing.

thing

but one of their ideas for saving the president the next president's life in the event of an assassination attempt this is real was to put a fake bulletproof sunshade on his head you know the sort of sun visor things that you have but they said you would also have to spread fake weather reports to justify why he was wearing it

So he would be out in the raid and they're going, it's a beautiful sunny day here.

Right.

That's amazing.

That's how they think these guys.

That visor is only covering a little bit of his body.

It will cover about 2% of his body.

So what they should really do is give him a bulletproof beekeeping suit.

Yes.

And then spread information that there's a queen bee around or something.

Did you guys know just one weapon that the US is developing now, so they're still doing some pretty weird stuff, is a sticky foam gun.

So this is, the idea is that it's a non-lethal thing that shoots sticky foam at the enemy and it lands on the ground and if you're driving something over it or even if you're running over it then you get stuck to it and you can't you can't continue to chase the enemy and this was actually tried in Somalia in 1995 when they were trying to evacuate people from there and so it's this taffy like goo that it shoots out.

It's shot from a hose.

It's designed to fix a person's feet to the ground.

At the moment it's at a stage where people's feet can move faster than the glue actually works.

So

the best that could possibly happen was if you hit a person's thighs, his legs sometimes stuck together.

But even then, if someone manages to run up to them and go under their legs, they'll be free, I believe.

Yeah, that's the truth.

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Your ring, your way.

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Explore Solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewelers behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

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Your ring, your way.

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

Okay, my fact is that earlier this year, a book called 40 Minutes Late was returned to a library in San Francisco 100 years late.

So cool.

Is that the latest ever that a book's been?

No, it's not.

Often people say that George Washington is the latest ever.

He, well, he didn't return it.

It was returned 200 years after he borrowed a book.

Oh, okay.

Obviously, for obvious reasons, he didn't return it himself.

Although, what actually happened was they found out about this book and they couldn't find the original.

And so they bought another copy of the same book and returned that to the library.

So it was a bit of a cheat.

Oh, that's a complete cheat.

It's a

return one.

Yeah, yeah.

That's the one that the whole internet says is the oldest returned book, but actually, it was a completely different book.

Yeah.

Well, do you know how when he took it out of the library, he didn't even bother to sign his name.

He just got his assistant to write the word president.

And that's how they've assumed that it was him.

Let's just imagine the president being that egotistical these days.

Just an ordinary man.

It's hard to imagine a president visiting a library these days.

What's the context of this?

Oh, yeah, that's a good point.

So, yeah, this was just a book that was borrowed in 1917 by a lady called Phoebe Johnson.

And

they found the book and they gave it back.

And there was a fine of $3,650

that she owed or her family owed, but they waived that.

They always waive the fine.

They always waive it.

And I always think libraries are in trouble now.

They need that money.

This is what I think.

If you have a book which is like two weeks over and you need to pay two quid on it, keep it for another hundred years, they'll waive the fine.

What we need is an example where someone has taken it out, returned it five years late, and is given a lifetime sentence.

That's what we need, Justin.

Then we'll all bring books back.

That's not what works best.

So they have amnesties at libraries all the time.

And those work better for getting people to return the fines because people don't return them because they're afraid of the fine.

And then the fine gets worse and worse, and you're then you're more afraid, so then you never return it.

But lots of libraries.

Uh, so last month, Sydney scrapped library fines from now until 2021, saying they don't work, reminders work better, please just bring the books back.

And they've had three times as many returned.

Is that right?

Yeah, apparently, there are 25 million books that are officially missing from UK libraries.

And that would take at the current rate of publishing in this country, it take 135 years for that many books to be published.

But this is, they think it might be more actually so they've they've looked at their records library records and 25 million books are missing as in they've compared it to I think about 40 years ago and we've lost half the books but they looked at a bunch of Suffolk libraries and they realized that they had 10,000 books missing that weren't logged as missing so they've just haven't logged it into their history.

It's just completely empty.

It's just an empty building.

And all libraries have said, yeah, we have the same thing.

We forget to log returns and stuff all the time.

So it's thought that we've just got way more than 25 million books that have disappeared.

Wow.

This new patent's been filed by Amazon for where they're going to put all of their stuff now, including books.

So they've got their own sort of new warehouse library.

And it's underwater.

So the bottom of a lake.

Yeah, they're building this bubble warehouse.

All the books will be soggy, no?

No, they're like those bath books that you get.

Every book will be like that.

Yeah, every book.

So they're building this bubble warehouse underneath a lake, right at the bottom.

And anytime an order comes in all the stock that's down there books or anything like kindles or tvs whatever you buy are going to be in these big canisters and if you've ordered it they're going to send the uh the item back up to the surface by releasing a balloon that will carry it to the top of the uh the lake

i mean i think we've all got the same question

which is what advantage does this have over a normal land-based warehouse.

I would imagine real estate must be cheaper at the bottom of the lake.

Yes.

Yeah.

Because no one wants to live there, do they?

And it's so weird that I did not ask myself that question.

My favourite bit of just general book news from the year.

Right.

Tory politician Gavin Barwell, who wrote a book called How to Win a Marginal Seat, lost his marginal seat in the 27 general election.

He didn't say how to win every marginal seat.

That's true.

Do you know, you were saying that you get library amnesties, and one of the ways you can take a book back and not be fined is by writing the most imaginative excuse you can think of.

And this is in San Francisco, which is this where this was, in fact, was from, James.

Yeah, that's right.

So this in San Francisco in 2009, they had an amnesty where they said, if you turned up and you wrote down a really imaginative reason why you had brought it back late, then they didn't charge you.

Do you have examples?

Well, there are some.

So one of the women said, this book was so nice, it looked so posh on my shelf, I couldn't bear to give it back.

It made me look really well read.

A group of people said they were too busy rescuing marine mammals.

That's quite good.

Yeah.

One woman had bought out a book on romantic relationships because she was looking for some insight into how to solve her relationship problems.

And she decided she'd keep it because she needed more advice than the library allowance had time to give her.

But three partners later, she decided it wasn't helping and then returned it.

In 2013, a Belgian professor analysed a copy of 50 Shades of Grey from a library in Antwerp.

It tested positive for both cocaine and herpes.

Wow!

Yeah, but have they analysed Pride and Prejudice for comparison?

Because it just could be all of them.

The worst thing is that's the one fact you're all going to remember afterwards.

Can you get, excuse my ignorance, can you get herpes from a book?

Because if so, I've got a lot of tests to carry out when I get home.

Do we need to move on shortly?

Shortly, yeah.

Oh, have you got something before we do?

Well, there's a library in Portugal which is partly staffed by bats.

So I thought I'd better...

Yeah, no, get that in.

So what in what way are they partly?

Quite.

It's called Mafra Palace Library.

So it's a beautiful ancient library.

It's about three or four hundred years old, I think.

And it has a colony of bats living there who live behind the shelves.

And then when the library closes down at night, they come out they fly out and they fly all over the library

no but they do eat all the insects that get into the library and the library apparently is full of insects so um the insects would be damaging the books but they can't damage the books because they've been eaten by the bats so every night the bats eat each bat eats double its own weight in insects

yeah the only problem is that they also leave a thin layer of droppings over the whole library

All right, should we move on to our third fact?

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

Yep, my fact is that the person who invented crowd control barriers did so because so many people were flocking to see his giant balloon.

This is this guy called Nadar who I just found out about because there's a new book about him called The Great Nadar.

It's by a guy called Adam Begley

and he's sort of a multi-talented guy, but he was the most famous photographer in France in the 19th century.

He was a caricaturist, he was a balloonist and he decided to build this giant balloon and attracted loads of people to come and see it and then so many people came to see it all these crowds flocked and flocked he couldn't take off so he was attracting like 200,000 people to one balloon take off

it's a lot of people at one point he attracted I think a quarter of the population of Paris went to see him launch a balloon wow and so then he designed crowd control barriers which exactly the same design that we have today so this one was was it called the giant this one that you're talking about?

Le Gaon.

Le Géon, yeah.

It had enough room for 20 people in the gondola at the bottom of the balloon.

It also had a lavatory, book beds, a printing press

and a wine cellar.

Oh, wine cellar in a hot air balloon, yeah.

And a billiards table.

It was incredible.

It had six different rooms in the basket and yeah, you could play billiards in it.

They had, when he launched it on its second attempt, he took I think 12 people up, and they all had a really posh dinner on the balcony.

On the balcony?

Yeah.

Are you confusing this with the cartoon Up, the movie Up?

Yes.

Is it a cellar?

Is that on, that's on a different level, isn't it?

Well, it was two levels.

It was two levels.

It was two levels.

Two stories.

It was not like a bungalow.

It was like two bungalows on top of each other.

He invented the double bungalow?

Wow.

This guy is good.

The thing is, the first, I think it was the first time he saw it, it's the maiden voyage of the giant.

Everyone came to see it.

And how many people did he say it was?

It was 200,000 people.

200,000 people.

But the inflation took so long, because it was the largest Hosseir Blue that had ever been built, that they were all really, really bored well before it was full.

And as it took off, they just suddenly, silently watched it disappear into the sky.

They didn't cheer at all because they were so angry that their time had been wasted.

Oh, really?

A similar thing happened in Leicester in 1864 where they had a hot air balloon.

It took so long to go up, everyone got a bit bored.

The police tried to sort out a little bit of a ruckus going on, and then someone got hit, and then a massive riot ensued.

And then the guy who was running the hot air balloon decided, I'm not doing this anymore, made the hot air balloon go down, and everyone ran over, burnt it,

ripped it up, and then paraded it through the streets of Leicester.

Wow!

And for a while, people from Leicester were called balloonatics.

So

yeah, for most of the end of the 19th century, if you were from Leicester, people would call you a balloonatic.

Wow.

Why?

Because if there was a riot happening on the ground and I had access to a hot air balloon, my instinct would be to get out of there.

Let her air quickly.

He just legged it, this guy.

He was called Henry Coxwell.

And he was quite famous balloonist before.

He'd once gone up into the stratosphere to see how high he could go up in his hot air balloon, and he went up and up and up and up until he went temporarily blind and passed out.

He lost all sensation in his hands, but luckily there was one other guy in there who, just before he passed out, managed to open a valve with his teeth,

which made it come back down again.

What happened to his hands?

Oh, he had no sensation in them, maybe.

Yeah, no sensation.

I see, okay.

Unlike your very, you know, nervous teeth.

Or he liked a challenge.

Yeah.

I was reading more about this Nadar guy.

He is an extraordinary character.

He's the best.

He's my new favorite guy.

Yeah, he's beyond ballooning.

He's a huge pioneer of photography.

So one of the things that he used to do in the hot air balloons was to effectively invent aerial photography.

So facing over Paris, he used to go over fields.

And he did it hundreds of times because he couldn't manage to get the exposure on the camera right because the balloon kept moving.

And obviously, photos took a long time.

time to capture the motion.

And also what he didn't know at the time was the gas that was heating the balloon was getting away away and putting soot all over.

So he'd come down and there would just be black photos completely and he'd be like, I'm pretty sure it was daytime when I did this.

And that was the reason for that.

And then he also invented underground photography.

So he's like, he's hit every spectrum of.

Underground photography.

Yeah.

He actually did it in, we talked a few weeks ago on the podcast about the catacombs of Paris and he did it in the catacombs, didn't he?

And so lighting with candles the area and then taking photos.

It's a bit much to say he invented underground photography.

He's just taking photos on the the ground isn't he?

Yeah.

It's like the wind-up radio.

It's not really an invention.

It's just two inventions stuck together.

And also I think you usually say he invented something when it's something we all recognize.

It's not like we've all gone, God, can you imagine the world without underground photography?

Yes.

Okay, he took the invention of the camera and he took the person who invented underground and he smashed them together.

And that's what he did.

But photography-wise, it is worth saying that thanks to him, we have extraordinary portraits of some of the greatest figures of that that period.

Jules Verne, he did this gigantic caricature of all of them where he, again, kind of effectively invented that whole caricature, grotesque, large head, small body thing.

He did a big 300 person line of all the most influential people in Paris at the time or France generally.

And while he was doing it, it was taking too long because the most important ones came in to sit for their for their drawings.

So when photography was around, he was looking at that going, I could capture them and start doing them via this.

So, he managed to get Jules Verne, he managed to get Victor Hugo, he got Sarah Bernhardt.

He didn't get Balzac because he thought that cameras would steal his soul.

So, he said no to the photo

with some of the most important people.

And they're beautiful photos if you look at them online.

Yeah, they really are.

He wasn't very successful, actually.

His balloons were just crashing constantly, and he kept going.

So, there are first-hand reports of the giant balloon that he sent up where

the aim was that it would travel over loads of different countries.

So the first guests that got on, they brought tour guides to various countries in Europe and they brought their passports.

But you can't control where you're going.

That's why you have to stick tour guides to all of them.

Get a visa for everyone.

And this was pre-EU, so they would have needed a visa, wouldn't they?

Yeah.

For every single border.

But they didn't get very far.

So the first time they lasted 15 miles and then the balloon plummeted to earth and the wicker basket was bumped along the earth.

The second one actually travelled 400 miles, so it flew over the Netherlands and into Germany, but then Nadar panicked that the balloon was getting too hot from the heat of the sun, so he started letting the air out and the winds took it and it crash-landed into the ground.

And there are these descriptions of it bouncing across fields on its side, everyone in it being tossed around, bouncing through a wood, it went towards a railway track, the train driver did an emergency stop, Nadar said, a couple of feet before he hit them.

them and then it just spilled everyone out and people were scattered across the ground like fallen apples.

Being Being dragged along the floor for it was like for miles, wasn't it?

It was, yeah.

That's, I mean, you can't play billiards while that's happening, can you?

It would make it a more interesting game, possibly.

So, you know how every invention is tested on animals before it's tested on humans?

Is it?

Yeah.

So, space flight, they send up the dogs,

they send up insects first.

Yeah.

Same is true of hot air ballooning.

They send up together in what the first hot air balloon flight, a rooster, a duck, and a sheep.

And it was thought the sheep would be most helpful because it's a land animal, so the rooster and the duck are obviously used to soaring to great heights above the earth.

But the sheep is more like the human, so we can see if it, you know, explodes or whatever when it gets up there.

And did it?

No, it didn't explode.

So what's the next phase after animal trials?

Anyone?

Human trials.

Well, not just any human trials, condemned criminal trials.

So the next step was to send out a condemned criminal in the basket of the balloon to see if he exploded.

The only problem was that the only people who knew how to fly them were real experts, because obviously it was a, you know, it was quite a tricky thing to do.

And very few of the qualified experts wanted to go up with a dangerous criminal in a hot air balloon with a wicker basket, which is tiny.

So hold on, when the rooster and the sheep and the duck went up, they also had a human expert with them flying the balloon.

I am not sure.

Because I always pictured it as just them.

So did I.

But I don't understand how that was.

I think it was, and I think it was tethered.

It was tethered so you could wind it back down.

Because you nearly nearly just blew this thing wide open.

Why didn't the duck.

Ducks can fly.

Ducks can fly.

Why wouldn't it just go, well, this thing's a bit of a dodgy way to famble?

I'm just going to fuck off, guys.

Come out, guys.

Probably the duck was tethered to the balloon.

Right.

Pretty much the most ironic thing you can do is give a bird the power of flight, but deny it the ability to actually fly away.

But worst thing, if you're the sheep and the other two fly away and you're thinking, well, maybe I could do it.

I'm not sure.

I don't think roosters could really.

I'm trying to remember the plot of chicken run and the extent to which chickens can or can't fly.

It's not called chicken fly, is it?

It might indeed.

I read a really nice balloon story yesterday, which is that in 2007, NASA had funded this project, which was called BLAST.

And the idea is that they were going to fly it above the clouds in Antarctica for 40 kilometers high.

And for 12 days, they were going to take photos by infrared of star formations in the sky.

So it was up there for via a balloon, 12 days, this big satellite, and then when the 12 days was done, they were bringing it back down.

So they detached it from the balloon and it fell towards the earth and then parachutes deployed.

So they brought the parachutes and they landed on Antarctica and it was all fine, except just before it landed, there was meant to be an electronic device that snapped away the parachutes, but that failed.

As a result, the parachutes were on the side and a huge gust of wind came and picked up the parachutes and they parasailed away from the researchers for 24 hours non-stop.

They eventually found it 2,000 kilometers away, but they didn't find it for a year because apparently NASA likes to paint everything white.

And as a result, it was just camouflaged 2,000 miles away.

Isn't that awesome?

Wow.

And so were they kind of like when you drop a crisp packet and it gets taken by the wind and you're constantly going after it?

Did they chase it for a while?

Were they running after this thing?

When does that happen in your life?

You know, when you drop a bit

of

rubbish.

Yeah.

And if you've ever seen American Beauty, you know the wind sometimes takes rubbish and you chase after it and you're always trying to grab it and it always eludes your grasp.

Right.

So was it like that with the scientists constantly grabbing at it and it just darting away at the last moment?

Not at all, no.

Have you...

Well, it's nice that I cleared that up.

Have you eaten all the crisps in this scenario?

Are you trying to get the crisp back or are you trying to get the packet back?

Trying to get the packet back because I'm not a filthy litterer like some people, Andy.

What?

Yeah.

Classic eco-conscious festival crowd.

Honestly, if I dropped a packet of crisps I'd just open another one immediately.

Are you joking?

Just a full packet.

You've got a full closed packet.

Sometimes I open a multi-pack, drop it, it's gone.

Do you know the very first ever balloonists to cross the English Channel landed with no trousers on?

This is true.

It's 100% true.

It's so exciting.

At what stage did the trousers go?

Right away.

Almost immediately.

No, on entry.

No, no, no.

So I think we may have mentioned this on QI, I'm not sure, but many years ago.

So

they were crossing the English Channel.

It was all going great.

But then they started to descend more rapidly.

There wasn't enough air in the balloon.

And they started getting really worried.

So they immediately took off their trousers.

First they threw away the anchors on the side of the balloon.

Because basically they could see the white cliffs of Dover.

And they were going, oh, we're not quite going to get over those, are we?

And Sone got rid of all the sandbags and stuff.

They threw away the sandbags.

They threw away the oars that they hoped to steer with.

I don't know.

Then they threw away a propeller that they had with them for some reason.

And then eventually they had to throw away pretty much all the clothes they were wearing including their trousers and they made it they made it across and they landed with no trousers on

did at any point when the panic was setting in one of them go who brought all this shit

what are we doing with oars

we're gonna crash into a mountain you dick

So when they landed without trousers, did they all stay in the balloon refusing to get out for the press conference?

It does sound like an excuse though, doesn't it?

What are you suggesting, James?

I'm suggesting that they took their trousers off for another reason.

Right.

And when the press turned up, they said, why have you done that?

And they said, well, we took our trousers off because of the thing.

And they said, well, did you throw anything else?

And they're like, yeah, we threw out all the ores that we have here.

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that Volkswagen sells more sausages than cars.

This is 100% true.

It's unbelievable.

It's unbelievable.

I cannot believe I've never heard this before.

This was sent in, by the way, by a guy called Mike Holden.

So Mike, if you're listening, thank you so much for sending us in.

In 2015, Volkswagen sold 5.8 million cars, pretty good, but they sold 7.2 million sausages.

But sausages are a lot cheaper.

Yeah, it's easier to make a sausage than a car.

That is true.

They'll make less money on the sausages, is what I'm saying.

Yeah, but they'll have been fined less for cheating on the emissions

of the sausages, too.

They also make ketchup as well, don't they?

They make their own ketchup, and it gets sold in supermarkets.

You can buy a pack of Volkswagens.

I read this.

Apparently, they have their own code.

They are listed, these sausages, as an official Volkswagen component, which is 199.398.500A.

And car dealers will often give you a five-pack of sausages if you buy a Volkswagen.

Does that tip some people over the edge into making that decision?

I think so.

They're both very tasty.

It's not that surprising that they sell more sausages than cars then, if for every car you're giving away five sausages.

So they invented them to feed their workers didn't they?

Yeah.

In the 1970s they came up with this new kind of sausage that they'd give their workers and then suddenly the workers said this is really good sausage guys.

You should sell it and they started selling it and it became massive.

And they still give it to the workers though every day so

they have it at about nine in the morning.

It's curried sausage as well so it's quite an acquired taste for breakfast.

So curried sausage, pig in Germany basically.

Yeah.

Do you know that Berlin has an entire museum devoted to curried sausage?

Does it?

It has a curried sausage museum, and I read some of the reviews of it.

I just wanted to share a review or two with you.

One of the reviews on, yo, 11 euros seems a steep price to pay for a small exhibit on the history and glory of Curryverst.

Still gave it four stars.

It's a lot of fun.

Then he added, would I go back?

No.

But then he said, in fairness, he said, because it's an exhibit that I doubt changes its content.

Why would it?

So it's a roller coaster.

Curry Verse was brought to Germany by the British, really, wasn't it?

Sort of.

In the, you know, we just try to claim everything.

But, so it was just after World War II, and so some of the Allied soldiers there introduced curry powder and ketchup because we had a lot of curry powder, we were into curry, a lot of trade with India.

And then a German woman said, oh, that tastes really nice with a sausage.

And so she created Curry Wurst.

And in the museum, I believe they say, without the good old British, we wouldn't have our staple dish today.

James, is inventing the curried sausage.

No, it's not an invention.

It's just putting curry and sausage together.

Is it better than the wind-up radio as an invention, would you say?

Well, I haven't been to the museum.

You should go.

It sounds amazing.

Four stars.

They've got a spice chamber with sniffing stations.

They've got audio stations playing Curry Wurst themed songs.

A virtual Curry Wurst making game called Curry Up.

And a sausage-shaped sofa.

So I went onto a website, lovepork.co.uk.

And I was disappointed to find.

Four stars.

Won't be going back.

No,

it's not what you might think it's a non-departmental public body about the pork industry But they have some fun facts about sausages

So for instance, there are more than 500 recipes for sausage in Britain You could have a different British sausage every day for ten years

Well, wait you wouldn't live that long

five five thousand don't you mean that's a number of recipes, but this is that was two kind of facts mushed together.

Oh, he invented a new fan

And did you know that in 320 AD, eating sausages was a sin.

And it was made a sin by the Catholic Church because it was associated with pagan festivals.

Wow.

And you just know why they were eating sausages at those.

No?

Okay.

That is literally just me.

I was imagining a huge phanic ritual kind of.

No, no, no, no.

You are completely on your own on this one.

I'm sorry.

You're in a room of like 200 people.

I don't know if you've noticed.

Surely one person here.

There was one person.

Yeah, I'm here.

I don't need your pity, guys.

I'm okay with being alone on this one.

And the other thing about pagans and sausages is I went on the internet today and googled pagan sausages.

And I found out there's quite a few...

I was disappointed to have

quite a few people online who seem to think that the word Jesus when said backwards is sausage.

Oh, it's kind of

sausage.

Susage.

Susage.

Susage.

Sussage.

So maybe that's a reason that it's an evil pagan thing.

Susage.

That's a huge.

That's like a Da Vinci code moment, isn't it?

Jesus was a sausage?

Can I tell you a little story from the BBC News website?

Alright,

it's news from Northern Ireland from last week.

Court reporters were a little taken aback when a self-confessed sausage thief tried to get on first-name terms with a judge at Belfast Magistrates' Court.

Belfast man Michael McNally, who has almost 300 previous convictions, was jailed after admitting a new spate of shoplifting, including the theft of 10 packs of sausages.

His defence lawyer told the district judge Fiona Bagnall that McNally had managed to stay out of jail for six weeks, which he says is a record for him.

As he was led to the cells, McNally called out to the judge, That's okay, see you later, Fiona.

Obviously, crime is wrong, but on another level, what a guy.

Can't say how many packs of sausages?

He stole ten packs of sausages.

Because you couldn't possibly get through those before they went off.

Could you?

You could freeze them.

Freeze them?

I'm more of a hand-to-mouth.

I'd never use the freezer.

Okay, that makes more sense.

That's why you have such a crisp-based diet, isn't it?

Do you know how long the longest sausage was?

No.

It was.

Guys, it was 63 kilometres long.

Sausage, Christ!

What a huge sausage!

That's massive.

Was it like a mistake in the factory where they're meant to put the twist in between each one?

Like I was off sick that day.

No, the longer, it was a deliberate thing.

It was to celebrate Romania Day in Romania.

And it was, yeah, 63 miles long.

It's actually a bit disappointing.

They never spread it out all the way, I don't think.

So it was all curled around.

But maybe they just didn't have a space long enough.

Wow.

Yeah.

How far would you get outside

60 kilometers from here?

Yeah.

Isn't that space?

Yes.

Yeah.

No, it would be.

Yeah, if you stood the sausage up,

you might hit the International Space Station.

Is that right?

Yes, it is.

So that could be how they get there in the future.

Climb the giant sausage, Sam.

Wait, how long was it?

When did you Google the words climb the giant sausage, James?

Okay, there was a story, right?

You're Australian, Dan.

Yeah.

There was a story about the...

So in Australia, when you vote, you get given a democracy sausage.

This is what they call it.

What?

So if you turn up to vote, they have a load of genuinely, they have barbecues at every polling station in Australia.

But, do you know, during the last election, there was a massive faux pas by both leaders.

This was in 2016.

So, Malcolm Turnbull, the Prime Minister, skipped the democracy sausage photo opportunity, presumably because he thought it might look silly or something.

But get this, I cannot get my head around this.

Opposition leader Bill Shorten committed a faux pas when he tried to eat his sausage and bun combination from the side rather than from the end.

Wow.

What a monster!

How would you even eat?

It's an exciting decision.

I'm calling it this is an invention.

Hey, we're going to have to wrap up very shortly.

Yeah, so if you guys have anything before we go, I have one last thing, which is that during the election campaign in America, the presidential campaign, a hot dog stand in Chicago sold a hot dog that they called the Trump Trump Foot Long, which was actually a three inch long hot dog.

Okay,

that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much, everyone, here for

any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our Twitter accounts I'm on at Schreiberland James at egg shapes Anna you can email podcast at qi.com

at sausage jesus

yeah or you can go to our group account which is at qi podcast um uh guys in the room we're we're gonna be uh going on tour around the uk in october and november if you're free it'd be awesome to see you there our website no such thingasafish.com has the link but most importantly we've been going crazy writing what we hope is the best book that will ever be written in the world called The Book of the Year.

So we've given it a very ambitious title.

And it's out this November and it is a book that contains what we think are the most interesting things that have happened over the last 12 months.

There's a lot of sausage material in there.

There is so much sausage stuff.

But that's it, guys.

Thank you so much.

We'll be back again.

Goodbye.

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