166: No Such Thing As A Courgette In Your Ear

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

My name is Dan Schreiber and I'm sitting here with

Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Chacinski 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, Andy.

Thank you.

For that incredibly forgetful introduction.

My fact this week is that chickens eggs turn from pointy end first to the blunt end first just before they come out.

Like a baby.

Like a baby.

I don't know if babies have a pointy end, but

when a baby's getting ready...

Yeah, I guess that is the pointy end.

So when you're getting ready to be born, babies will go into dive position.

Well, most babies do.

Although I was a breech, as was my brother.

So I wonder if chickens have the same thing where sometimes you get a breech one where...

Awkward eggs.

Awkward eggs, yeah.

And sometimes they have to cesarean it out because it's the pointy end first and it's just too difficult.

Yeah, which seems counterintuitive, doesn't it?

So why do they come out that end first?

I don't know.

Because once you get past the most rounded bit, it probably just fires out.

It's exactly like a baby.

That's why it's harder with a baby when they come out eggs first because you have to push hardest right at the end, don't you?

Babies should come out like, you know, like in the pencil position.

Like a pencil dive.

Or like a diver the other way around with

the hands in a diving position.

That'd be good.

That's how I imagined Tom Daly was born.

My waters are broken and there's lots of room.

Judges, hold off an eight.

I was talking about Tom Daly the other day.

I have a theory that, and it might not even be a theory, it might be a fact, but if you were a diver and you dive off high boards, half of your training must be just walking upstairs.

No, it's not a fact.

No, I think that's a fact.

What do you mean by training?

Well, because if you're not used to walking up stairs, like Anna and I walked up some stairs the other day and I almost died,

you lose your energy.

And he's got to now do a dive once he's at the top of there.

And those boards are really high and they're really steep stairs.

But they are elite sports people, not like you walking up the stairs at Covent Garden.

But they must, they must, part of their training must be like climb up some stairs.

It must be.

There's no possible reason why you wouldn't train them to climb stairs all the time.

Actually, Dan, elite divers have chairlifts so they can conserve their energy.

There we go.

Dan, do you understand that if you get fit at one thing, sometimes that means you're fit at loads of other things?

So if I become like a champion runner, I'll also probably find it easy to go upstairs.

I don't disagree with that.

I don't think I think it uses different muscle groups.

Yeah, but have you seen these divers?

They're like super fit.

I'm not saying that.

They're not like flabby ass

people trying to get up the stairs, are they?

I'm annoyed that I've been bounced into the position of now supposedly saying that divers are not fit.

You know, because all those competitions where they take a a rest halfway up, don't they?

They have to sit down.

Now, if the whole point of diving was to make the biggest splash possible,

then you would have a lot of out-of-shape people climbing up.

Yeah.

And then that would be a problem.

Yes.

Because they might not make it to the dive.

Well, that would be part of the...

That's part of the competition, then.

So you have to be big enough to make a massive splash, but not big enough that you can't get to the top board.

And that's the two tensions.

Yeah.

Sumo diving.

I'm surprised this isn't a thing.

You're right.

Yeah.

So, hang on, you're saying that, do you mean half the time that divers spend training?

I'm just saying I didn't factor in that that's half the gig getting up to the board.

But then I think if you wanted to be an elite diver and you spent half of your training time climbing up and down stairs and only half of your training time learning how to actually dive, then probably

you would.

But no, Dan's right, they must do.

How long does it take to get up those stairs?

30 seconds.

Once you're at the top, how long do you spend faffing around getting ready for the dive?

Probably about 30 seconds.

They're probably catching their breath again.

They're not all, that's not why all training happens, of course, with divers.

They do a lot in mats and stuff like that.

It's a lot of gymnastics and stuff.

Yeah.

Didn't know that.

Oh, so I see you're just saying they spend half their time because to practice, they do have to go up the stairs.

Whereas Dan's saying they actually need to practice going up the stairs.

If you got there and you'd only had time to complete the first half of your modules,

you just got to the top of the stairs.

Just look down and go, Holy shit, I am not doing that.

Anyway, eggs.

Something about the man who discovered this.

The man who discovered, I'm just to remind you of the fact that chickens' eggs turn from pointy end first to blunt end first just before they hatch.

He was an egg scientist.

He studied birds and birds eggs.

And he was called Heinrich Wickmann, Wickman.

And he found out by marking the eggs with a pencil up the birds just an hour before they laid the eggs.

So he inserted a pencil.

Into the bird's cloaker.

I know.

Anyway, I got this in a book called The Most Perfect Thing.

It's a book all about birds' eggs by a guy called Tim Burkhead, and I do recommend it.

It's a really interesting book.

An egg shape is

that specific shape is the most pleasing shape that it could be to us.

So they've done some brain tests that look at the kind of surface curvature that humans find most pleasing.

And across all societies, it's that exact curvature.

So if it goes more pointy or more squashed, then we don't enjoy looking at it as much.

And I think it's because we've evolved to think that that's what a healthy bit of tissue development would look like.

But what's interesting is that different eggs are different sizes for different birds, aren't they?

So, is this a chicken egg you're talking about?

Chicken egg, yeah.

But they're often quite, you do get more rounded eggs, but you don't get like really long, thin ones very often.

Because then the bird that was born in them, like maybe a snake's egg would be like that,

a stick bird would be like a flamingo egg would be like that.

Yeah,

um, but you do get round ones, you do get round ones, yeah.

Who do round ones?

But some other birds.

Some other birds.

Yeah, do they?

There was a theory, I don't think this might not be true anymore, but the idea that the egg-shaped ones don't really roll out of nests very well, and the ones which are more rounded are ones that lay eggs on the floor.

So they might not fall out of trees as likely.

Are you going to debunk that theory?

I've read a debunk, but I didn't look into it properly.

There is something in this book about it as well, actually.

I can't remember chapter and verse.

Yeah.

They could have done,

in order to find it out with modern technology, a sort of x-ray video.

Because do you remember there's that incredible photo of what a kiwi bird looks like just before it gives birth?

I used to have that picture on my wall.

I found it so itchy.

We just love the curvature so much.

Well, it's just because you're looking at it going,

is this a kiwi with an egg in it, or is this an egg?

with a kiwi over it?

It's both, really.

It's both.

They're both the same size.

Are you inside your clothes or are they outside of you?

I think think it's James.

It's both.

Is it?

But yeah.

That's why my mamma.

The equivalent, if a kiwi bird, when you see this picture, and I highly recommend Google this picture.

Kiwi bird.

Yeah, I'll put it on my Twitter.

I'll put it on Accui Podcast as well.

It's the equivalent to a human giving birth to a four-year-old.

That's how big the egg is.

And they're often wearing jumpers and things, and that would be especially scratchy and difficult.

Lego, Lego, jamming into you on the way out.

Did you know that mammals evolved milk in order to wet their eggs?

Well, I don't even understand that.

Hang on.

I know.

Like cooked chicken eggs?

We didn't evolve milk so we could poach a good egg in it.

Why eggs?

So millions of years ago when our ancestors were still laying eggs, they didn't have shells.

So they had like quite a porous membrane and that meant that they would dry out really easily.

And so we evolved milk, people think now, in order to like put it over the eggs and make sure that they didn't get dehydrated.

And then we realized, evolution realized, that quite a good use of this milk would be as a way of transferring some nutrients into the offspring in our egg.

And so, we developed more and more nutrients in our milk and then kept putting that in the egg.

And then, eventually, that our milk became so nutrient-filled that it became just something we could nurture a baby with.

That is cool.

Wow.

I was reading that you can know what colour an egg's going to be from a chicken by looking at its ears.

Chickens don't have external ears, do they?

They have earlobes.

They have earlobes.

Do they?

Yeah, prominent.

You'll have seen them.

I think maybe you just didn't think of them as being earlobes.

Yeah, so if they have white earlobes, they'll have white eggs.

And if they have red earlobes, they'll have brown eggs.

This, the article stresses, is not always the case.

Right, right, okay.

But they do say that it's something that people have noticed more often than not.

It's almost always the case, I think.

You can tell.

It's going to be a colour similar to the earlos.

Andy is imagining a chicken with human ears.

Yeah, and it's disgusting.

Yeah.

Have you ever seen a chicken?

Do you know what a chicken is?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

I just was, because this is your fact.

So I was just checking you had googled chicken before you

came in here.

Yeah.

I think it's not the first thing you see when you look at a chicken, though, is it?

You see the feathers and you see the beak.

It's not the initial.

And sometimes the little feathery trousers, you know, the little spurs they have.

Those are pretty cute.

Oh, yeah.

Those with the big

cowboy's toad.

It's not like elephants where the first thing you see is the ears.

The first thing you see on an elephant is the trunk, James.

Well, I'm looking from the side.

Yeah, it's facing away from you cockettishly.

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Okay, it is time to move on to fact number two and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the former Prime Minister of Georgia has started taking famous trees from around his country, digging them up and then planting them in his own garden.

He's like, he's personally digging them up.

He's digging them up.

It's amazing.

So, for our book, which is coming out in November, I was reading about the world geopolitical situation, and there's things happening in Georgia.

There's elections in Abkhazia where they're trying to get out of Georgia.

And while I was reading that, I came across this guy, and I can't believe I've never heard about him before.

He's called Bidzina Ivanishvili, and he's taking trees from around the country and either driving them or putting them on a ship and then taking them to his house and planting them.

And he says, It's my hobby.

I really love big trees.

Giant trees are my entertainment.

How many famous trees are there in Georgia?

Not as many as they used to be.

So, this is the thing.

He reckons that it's a good idea because before the people who had the trees on their land might not have been properly looking after them.

And so, if he puts them on his land, then he'll be able to look after them on his arboretum.

But ecologists are sceptical.

Oh, he does say, doesn't he, though, that he'll plant 10 trees for every one that he takes away.

Or I think at least he did that for one of them.

He did that for this giant tulip tree.

It was a 650-ton tulip tree.

Whoa.

I thought tulips are like small.

Yeah,

I thought they were as well.

I guess this is just one 650-ton tulip.

Yeah, well, you know, it's context, actually.

It's all in the way the photo is done.

So you know the fields of tulips you see in the Netherlands, those are actually all massive.

Well, you do see the old windmill, though, so maybe Dutch windmills are absolutely massive.

They're even bigger.

Maybe he's just duping them all.

Maybe he's told them it's a tulip tree.

So he's like, oh, I'll just give you these extra tulip seeds.

You can have ten of them.

Have as many as you want.

This guy, he does sound amazing, though.

He is incredible.

And he's got this mansion, hasn't he, which is kind of disgusting if you look it up.

And it's basically the James Bond mansion.

It's like a giant glass spaceship.

Yeah.

And

it's on a mountainside, isn't it?

So it overlooks the capital of his country from a mountainside.

Yeah.

So the indie went and interviewed him.

And when he went there,

he said, there are eight different breeds of peacock, and I have them all.

So he does, he really likes collecting loads of stuff, basically.

Yeah, he has loads of animals, doesn't he?

He has zebras,

what else?

Kangaroos.

Kangaroos.

Penguins.

Penguins.

He is also rumoured to have a shark tank.

He does.

Yeah, he does, because he has to keep importing loads of salt for it all the time, I think.

Like gallons of salt.

Apparently, in the hallway of his house, he has a work by Gilbert and George with a slogan that says, Say fuck off to rich bastards.

His net worth is $4.8 billion.

Yeah, I think his net worth is like 50% of the GDP of Georgia, isn't it?

It's between a third and a half, depending on which source you read, but it is, yeah.

Well, he sounds like the right man to be the former leader of the country, doesn't he?

If he is basically the GDP of Georgia.

Well, indeed.

Yeah, that's true.

Just quickly on trees in Georgia, because I don't think I'm going to get another chance to get my trees in Georgia fact out.

Well, we'll probably have one next week.

Yeah, it's possible.

You could put it in the book.

Oh, yeah.

Well, just in case I don't do that.

So basically, Georgia breed Christmas trees, and you know the tree that we call the Nordman fir, and it gets called the Caucasian fir.

It's basically the famous Christmas tree in Europe, as in 45 million gets sold all around Western Europe each year.

These trees are grown elsewhere, but they're originally from Georgia, as in the seeds that grow them are all from Georgian Christmas trees, and people in Georgia climb up them, and they're massive, okay, so it's quite dangerous.

There are fatalities every year.

They collect the cones, which have got the seeds inside them, and then they sell the seeds to places like Denmark.

And then Denmark actually does the work of growing and selling the trees.

But Georgia misses out because obviously you need loads and loads of pine cones and then they get sold for much more.

It's like drugs, you know, it starts off quite cheap.

But the street value of these trees is massive.

So the Georgians, I think, they want to break into that and start growing their own trees.

Say no to pine cones, kids.

Hey, while we're just on Christmas trees, did you guys know that elephants floss using Christmas trees?

Have you guys heard that?

No.

I don't think that's true.

It's true.

It's true.

Elephants floss using Christmas trees.

Well, at least that's what I read.

In Germany, they've got this tradition every year.

So they give their Christmas trees to the elephants at the zoo, and people just hand over their trees, and the elephants eat them.

They can get through like three trees a day, but they also have been seen flossing with them.

So I guess flossing...

the tree out of their teeth.

Holding it with their trunk and then in and out between their teeth.

Yeah, I mean, I haven't seen any pictures.

They must be because they don't have opposable thumbs, do they?

So it must be with their trunk.

That's the only prehensile part of their body.

Yeah.

But it's weird that you would try and get a tree out with a tree and how would it not be?

Would it not be that that tree would get stuck?

Oh, yeah.

Then you get a slightly larger tree.

There's the elephant version of the old woman who swallowed a fly.

It's the elephant who flossed with a Christmas tree.

Yeah.

Eventually has to swallow a tulip tree, which is just the biggest on earth, apparently.

Speaking of trees, by the way, very quickly, we have just discovered that there are more trees on Earth than we thought there were.

So there are now 427 million hectares more trees than we thought there were on Earth.

How many did I think there were?

427 million hectares less than the number you've got in your head.

Yeah, so minus that from whatever you've had.

To put it into context, by the way, that is, if all that tree, the new tree, was put into a place, a single place, it would take up 60% of the surface of Australia.

That's actually kind of less than I thought it would be.

Yeah.

But no, that's is that only the bonus trees that we've got?

It's not all the trees in the world, is it?

Yeah, yeah, that's the extra bonus trees.

So we can't just go nuts and start cutting down all the trees because we're the Prime Minister of Georgia, or the ex-Prime Minister of Georgia.

Yeah, what it does mean is that he's got a lot more to collect now.

But he's not collecting every tree.

He's just collecting individual examples.

Is he collecting all the trees in the world?

No, it's just the famous trees.

Oh, we don't know, do we?

Because we only know where he's got to so far.

We don't know where he's going to start.

Because maybe he's starting with the most famous, but his list includes every single tree on the planet, and he's just working his way down.

Down to the least famous tree.

Exactly, yeah.

What is the least famous tree?

Nobody knows.

Well, only he knows and his mother.

Did I ever tell you guys that my dad, so I used to live when I was born in Hong Kong, we lived in an island just off Hong Kong called Discovery Bay, and my parents lived in this house, and next door to them, their neighbor, had a tree in their front yard.

And my dad used to love this tree.

He just used to think, I want one day to have a tree in my front yard as well.

And so he went out, he got really drunk one night, and he came back, and he doesn't really remember what happened, but in the morning, my mom went outside, opened the doors, and went, Roger, what have you done?

And he quickly jumped up and he saw what he must have done in his drunken state, which is clearly he was walking home.

He saw the tree, thought, God damn it, I want that tree.

So he dug it up and he brought the tree over and he planted it in our front yard.

But what he had failed to do was to cover up his tracks.

So he saw the tree planted beautifully in our yard with a huge trail of debris and dirt leading to a gigantic hole sitting in our neighbor's front yard.

Amazing.

Do you know, I think actually, even without that trail of earth, your neighbor might have just about figured out what was going on there.

I know that swing.

Wait a second.

You're saying that your dad, when drunk,

on his way home, dug up a tree.

Presumably, he was just on his way home, so he wasn't carrying his spade with him.

So the implication is he dug it up with his bare hands.

Also, I can only imagine Dan's dad likes trees that are tree-sized, so it must have been pretty big, right?

Yeah, so he dug up this tree with all he thought, I want that tree, went home, got the spade.

Well, home was just next door, so it was very convenient.

He could have got the spade.

He could have dug it up with a carton, he got his kebab in.

Yeah, you're right, because in Australia, all

kebab cartons are made of reinforced steel

in case of burning your hands.

Well, anyway, he put the tree back so no one needs to press criminal charges or anything.

I don't know if the guy ever noticed, by the way.

My mum woke up really early in the morning.

Unless he was a very late riser, I think you probably noticed.

So your dad maybe replanted it before this guy woke up.

He maybe wake up and he's like, this is orientated in a slightly different way.

That swing was on the other side.

That poor guy has had mental health problems for the rest of his life.

Just had a nervous breakdown.

He actually invented the character of Groot for the Guardians of the Galaxy film about a mischievous tree.

Just quickly, while we're talking about moving trees, whether illegally or legally, or you know, with a polystyrene carton, if you don't have a polystyrene carton to hand, you can get these unbelievably cool things, and they're called tree spades.

So they're these massive boxes, right?

And they look like a big sort of space egg.

And you surround the tree with it.

I don't know quite where you de-uncouple it and surround the tree.

And then what it does is it has these massive round-edged blades which dig into the ground, very carefully lift up the entire tree, roots and everything, and then they can tilt it sideways and put it onto, for example, the side of a van or whatever.

That's so cool.

And then

probably on the back of a van, not the side of a van.

Yeah, yeah.

That's amazing.

That sounds like it's given it a pot.

Like the egg shape underneath has created the pot exactly standard.

And the really cool thing is they've been doing this for hundreds of years, or at least I think 150 years.

And they were doing this in Brooklyn, but just without the big mechanical element.

But they still had these cool devices to...

So without the mechanical element, it's just a spade.

Well,

yeah, it is.

But they have spades.

Yeah, they have spades.

Yeah, the spade.

The spade goes back 150 years.

Not a lot of people know that.

No, they have these big tree-moving wagons.

Oh, right.

Wow.

So they put them onto the wagon sideways, do they?

Yeah.

Because the Prime Minister of Georgia, the ex-Prime Minister of Georgia, didn't do that.

He sent his sticking upwards.

No.

Yeah, so there's some amazing pictures online.

I'll try and put them on my Twitter.

There's one where he has a tree on a kind of a raft, and he's taken it on the Black Sea, and it's just sticking up on this raft.

They look incredible.

You should look at the picture.

It's incredible.

If you took it from someone's land, you wouldn't necessarily know he was stealing it.

It just might look like, oh, it looks a bit further away today by tree than it does.

Exactly.

So then he took them along the coastline of the Black Sea, but the coastline of the Black Sea is really shallow, and so it got stuck there.

And so he then had to make a new road to take the tree along and then that road collapsed so he had to make a new road and also one time he took a tree on the highway and it was a magnolia tree and when he was taking it it got stuck on a eucalyptus tree that was growing on the side of the road so it just got entangled.

Did it take the eucalyptus tree with it?

Was it just like a tree chain?

Buy one, buy one, get one tree.

It's a hell of a lot of hassle, this hobby of his, isn't it?

Yeah, his wife's probably saying you need to collect something smaller.

Or maybe he's just getting drunk every night and finding these trees in his garden everywhere.

Just because you mentioned Christmas trees earlier, I was reading this amazing story about the Christmas tree shipping industry, which used to be huge in the US.

They used to ship hundreds of Christmas trees on ships, and there was this particularly famous ship called the Rouse-Simmons ship.

And it used to carry thousands of trees.

And then in 1912, it had this very famous accident and it sank.

So it was carrying 5,500 trees from Michigan to Chicago across Lake Michigan.

And it was captained by this guy called Shernaman, who was so famous as a Christmas tree importer that people called him Captain Santa.

And

he used to go, he used to land in Chicago and he really liked giving out Christmas trees to the poor and people who couldn't afford Christmas tree.

What are you like?

It doesn't quite make sense because Santa arrives after the tree has been sorted out.

Basically, Santa doesn't bring the tree down the chimney.

Maybe Captain Santa comes and sorts that out.

Captain Santa's like Santa's boss.

Santa's just Lieutenant Santa is his full title.

They should give him his full title.

It's very confusing.

It is.

That's so cool.

So Captain Santa

used to do this.

And then there was this awful, there's a storm that sunk the whole ship and it killed everyone on board and all the trees sunk.

So for years afterwards, fishermen on Lake Michigan would catch huge Christmas trees.

But what I quite like is, well, first of all, his business partner who would always wait in Chicago with him was called Claude Winters.

Quite nice nominative determinism.

Wow, yeah, and also Captain Santa Claude Winters.

That's one letter away from Santa Claus Winters.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

Anyway, just the other bizarre thing about this accident was that the Captain Santa left a message in a bottle when he knew the ship was in trouble and he corked it using the small piece of a cut pine tree from one of the trees that was on board.

And he left this message and it got picked up.

And the message just said, Everybody, goodbye.

I guess we're all through.

Leaking bad, God help us.

Leaking bad, that sounds like the new Netflix show, doesn't it?

It's about the White House.

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

My fact this week is that US military medics use longer needles than normal because soldiers are often too buff.

for the regular ones.

I think this sounds like a boast by the American Army.

Yeah, it does, doesn't it?

Yeah, you should see the size of our condoms.

It's just a bit too convenient.

That is a common thing, isn't it, in armies that they send like enormous condoms.

We saw Jimmy Carr the other day, and he told us that story about Churchill.

Oh, yeah.

There was a gun where they had a sheath kind of thing put over it, and it was made by Durex.

And so it was like a condom, but it was the size of a machine gun.

It was to stop the gun jamming or freezing in close conditions.

And so what they did was they got a big consignment of them and then Churchill supposedly said, well, let's label it British condoms small.

So let me give you a bit of background of where I got this fact from.

I'm reading a really good book called Grunt by Mary Roach.

And she went around looking at all innovations going on in the military and classic Mary Roach investigation, finding out very much what we love, you know, the quirky facts about certain things.

So this book's military.

And she spent time with a bunch of medics.

And this was told to her that basically a lot of the soldiers are so muscular, particularly around the pecs, and they often need to give them injections when they're out in the field for collapsed lungs.

And they were finding in autopsies when they were doing it later, because in autopsies,

they all get an autopsy.

Any soldier that dies gets an autopsy.

When they were going to check out the collapsed lung and putting the needles in, none of them were reaching.

And they thought, ah, this is no use for the field.

So needles, I don't know if it's all the needles, but certainly there's a lot of needles that are extra large, long needles.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

They also have to make bigger needles for obese people, I think.

Do they?

Right.

They did a study

with some obese people, and they put the needles into their buttocks

to see if the stuff would get to the muscles.

And they found that in less than a third of the patients, what they injected was getting through to where it needed to be.

So they need to start making needles, which are now longer for obese people as well.

It's terrible if you've got a fear of needles.

Yeah.

Although, so a good way of combating a fear of needles has just been developed.

This should never have any Western medicine.

No, because if you get acupuncture, you've really got into the.

No, if you've got a fear of needles, scientists have developed this thing, which is a pill that's covered in needles that you swallow and that injects you from the inside.

What?

And that's to get you over it.

And this is really cool.

So I think this has been tested.

It was tested on pigs the last time I read about it, but it might have been updated.

And it was to administer insulin.

And basically, it's these little pills, and they cover them in tiny needles, and then they have an outer coating of the pill.

And when the pill gets into your stomach, then the outer coating of the pill dissolves.

And all these tiny needles prod the lining of your stomach and they administer the drug straight into your bloodstream.

But do you have to pass the needles out later on?

I think so, but they were talking like one millimeter, less than a millimeter.

I don't know, that still sounds painful.

Maybe they dissolve.

Maybe they do dissolve.

Maybe they're really tiny.

Well, here, okay, here's a less painful one if you don't want to swallow needles.

This is used.

I don't know if it's if it was, this is just the trial I was reading about, but they definitely have developed this and it has been used.

So instead of having a morphine needle, let's say, in order to numb you,

you can instead now have a lollipop.

Wow.

Sticking into your mind.

No, yeah.

Yeah.

That sounds like it'd be more painful than it needed to be.

I would rather have morphine if I were in pain than a lollipop.

Well, interesting.

Actually, on any day of the week, I'd rather have have morphine than a lollipop.

Interesting.

So

it's not your classic lollipop, obviously.

They call it the fentanyl lollipop.

And it's basically the drug.

So it's got a drug in the lollipop.

You eat it and it absorbs through the tongue and the mouth.

And that's really fast, apparently.

So it spreads really quickly.

And they can also tell when you've had too much.

So because you're sucking.

Because you go...

Exactly.

Because if it does go into, you know, it's a painkiller.

It first goes into your tongue.

It's going going to be like at the dentist's, isn't it, where you can't talk.

Yes, exactly.

You must numb your tongue.

But they can obviously, if they see that enough of the drug has been put into the patient, they can stop putting more by simply just taking the lollipop away.

And then you're just going to be crying.

Because

there was an art installation once of a guy who gave babies lollipops and then took them off them and took photos of them crying.

Oh, yeah.

That's quite controversial.

Well, unsurprisingly.

Unsurprisably.

Have you seen one of these lollipops, James?

Yeah.

Do you know where the word

syringe comes from?

Syrinx is a thing in a bird, which makes it like a larynx.

Ooh, it is from the word syrinx, but I didn't know that bird thing because syrinx was in Greek mythology.

She was...

No, he.

Look, she.

Syrinx, she was a nymph, and she was being chased by the god Pan, right?

And then she disguised herself as some water reeds.

Okay, clever, but not clever enough because Pan then chopped the reeds off and blew into them to make a whistling sound.

And that's where he got his pan pipes.

But it's also where the word syringe was taken from because it's a long thin tube of something.

That must be where the syrinx of or a syrinx of a bird comes from because it's the whistling sound, and that's what they use to make their tweets.

There we go.

I have some things on muscles.

Oh, cool, yeah.

So, there's a guy called Zheng Jingquan in China who holds a world record for pulling the largest vehicle by pressing a rice bowl onto his abdominal muscles, creating a suction and then attaching it to a vehicle and pulling it.

How large was the vehicle?

It was 3,305.5 kilograms, and he pulled it for 10 meters.

Wow.

Just through suction that adhered?

It adhered to his muscular abdomen.

I would have thought that there would always be, because you're not flat enough to be able to, for the suction thunder.

Zhang Jingquan is.

I'm really impressed by that.

That's incredible.

I think he did it to impress people.

It's worked like a tron.

It's half worked, I'd say, Anna.

Yeah?

And it has worked on you.

I'm not impressed.

You're not impressed?

No.

He's pulled a three-ton vehicle using suction on his abdomen.

I think that's a very bad way of trying to pass your driving test.

I think if only he'd.

I told you, he wasn't trying to do that.

He was trying to impress people.

Oh, I see.

Well, he hasn't done that either.

Okay.

Did you guys know one fact about the US military?

Yeah, sure.

And their pens?

Do you know they all use the same pen?

Just the one pen

for sharing this.

Sorry, General McMaster's got the pen today.

Do you mean pen as in thing you write with or that you keep animals in?

Yeah, the pen they write with it's called a Skillcraft pen.

It's the same company that's been making their pen since I think

the 1920s.

But apparently, every American listening will apparently know what it is.

It's used in war zones.

It's designed to fit into U.S.

military uniforms.

And

it's designed not to be so impossibly large that it doesn't fit into a normal human pocket.

All right, yeah.

So they've got this pen that fits snugly into their uniforms.

It's specifically designed that it can do that.

It can stand in for a two-inch fuse.

Apparently, it's designed for that.

I don't really know how a pen does that.

What?

It comes in handy during emergency tracheotomies, which I think a lot of pens can do that.

No, pens can't do that, you know.

Oh.

Oh.

Yeah, there's a study done, and actually, most pens are not suitable for tracheotomies.

Well, guys, you better get the skill craft if you feel like you're going to need one.

So is it where you put a pen?

Okay, a pen.

Yeah, you'll see it in movies sometimes.

Someone's choking, and then someone goes, ah, I'm a surgeon, and here's a biro, and I'll stick it in your neck, and you can breathe through the pen kind of thing.

But anyway, if you're ever in that situation, it probably won't work.

Oh, but it will be quite stabbed in the neck, unless you have one of these special

skill crafts.

Exactly.

Anyway, more legends about this pen.

So, the main thing about it is they're all manufactured by blind workers.

So, it was set up, I think, during the Great Depression, as a way of giving work to people who would otherwise find it really difficult to find work.

So, everyone who works in the factory makes this doesn't have sight.

And there are 16-page specifications for exactly what the pen has to be able to do.

It needs to be able to write continuously for a mile and in temperatures of up to 160 degrees and down to minus 40 degrees.

All quite important for the army if you've got secret messages that you need to get.

I don't know when you're going to be in the army and you have to write a line that's a mile long.

Well, maybe you need to show your troops the way to the nearest base.

Yes, and it's a mile away.

Wow, that sounds amazing.

It's surrounded by legend.

Apparently, the length of the pen is equivalent to 150 nautical miles on Navy maps, and that makes it easy for people in the Navy to navigate because they use that pen and they know that that equals 150 miles on the map.

I mean, they could just look at the scale of the map, I guess.

But sometimes.

Because 150, if it was 100, I could see that almost.

But 150 isn't that round a number.

Do you know what I mean?

But they need to stay quite mentally alert, so it's important to test their math skills

at the same time.

But presumably, they're two inches long, because they can be used as a two-inch fuse.

Yeah, maybe there's a bit that's detachable.

But actually, two inches is quite a small pen.

Maybe five centimetres long, and that obviously would fit snugly inside the average soldier's uniform.

Five centimetres

is about that long, which is a short pen.

It is.

It's more like

a Ladbrook's pen or an Argos pen.

Yeah, an Argos pencil, yeah.

So they're not that short.

Right.

It must be a detachable bit.

Okay.

Okay.

Anyway, I just thought I wanted to know about the Skillcraft pen.

It's great.

That's so cool.

I have one more thing about needles.

So, you know how mosquitoes bite you?

Yep.

Yeah.

They've got six different

needles, which I didn't know.

Really?

Yeah, so they have this really complicated multi-part drill bit.

So they have two which drill through the skin, right?

They have two more which hold the edges of your skin apart.

And there's a fifth one which drops saliva into you to stop your blood clotting.

And then there's the sixth one which actually sucks the blood up.

Wow.

But that's not even the cool thing.

The cool thing is, how much volume would you say of blood a mosquito can fit inside it?

Well the hand gesture you're making is about large melon size.

So

compared to the size of the mosquito,

so I would say it could fill

50% of its body.

50% of its body.

Okay.

Four-year-old child.

Okay.

So if you look at

ticks on

a thousand percent of their own body

worth what a mosquito does.

Mosquitoes can fit 10 times as much blood into them as the size of a mosquito.

Not through swelling up.

Wow.

What they do is, as her gut fills up, the female mosquito separates the water in the blood she's sucking up from the actual red blood cells, and she squeezes the water out of her bottom so she can fit more red blood cells, which is the good stuff that you can get.

So does that mean that when a mosquito's biting you, it's also pissing?

Well, it's your blood, though.

It's the water from your blood that isn't.

It doesn't matter when you're urinating, it doesn't matter.

It's like, oh, this isn't urine because I was drinking orange juice earlier, on.

Yeah, it's orange juice, officer.

It's just orange juice I'm pouring away here.

Please don't arrest me.

Also, at that point, is it a mosquito with blood in it, or is it a lot of blood?

With a mosquito in it.

It's actually both.

Is it?

Yeah.

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

My fact is that if you drew a dot in indelible ink on your eardrum, it would appear on the outside of your ear within a few weeks.

Are you using the Skillcraft pen?

So beloved by the US Army.

Yeah, also.

I was just thinking the Skillcraft pen would be good if you wanted to put it in the cloaca of chickens.

Specifically designed to fit in the chicken cloaker.

Yeah.

And in a human.

And also a chicken's cloaca, if you put it on a map, it's exactly 150 kilometers.

If you don't have your pen.

God, it messes up the map.

So, how does it work?

What do you mean?

It's amazing.

What in the ear?

So, the way the eardrum works is that the skin grows outwards in a spiral because it needs to carry dead skin out away from the eardrum and then to the outside world where it falls off.

And it grows at about the same rate as fingernails, I think.

What?

And so, the skin starts off in your eardrum, and then it's carried out, picks up earwax, picks up all the dust, transports it outside the ear, falls out.

Same speed as continents move.

Oh, yeah.

Because they always say that's the same as a fingernail, don't they?

They do.

Wait, so, and also, it's a bit like a conveyor belt system.

Exactly, it's exactly what it is.

All the skin on your body, does that originate in the ear?

Or does it

start?

Is there a barrier where it stops growing outwards?

If you drew a little dot on your eardrum,

then it just moves around the body.

You'd have it if you want to get a tattoo very slowly.

How did you get that?

I'm not saying that the body is built from the eardrum outwards.

It just falls off.

You leave it behind.

But it must fall off at a certain point.

Yeah.

How far out of your ear before it falls off?

On your foot.

At the end of the big toe, it falls off.

That's why your socks are always full of loose skin with dots on them.

them.

No, it just actually most of it is reabsorbed, actually.

I think most earwax is reabsorbed back into the body before it reaches the outside.

So I'm confused about this because obviously you get earwax in the ears, and this is related to the eardrum

produced at the eardrum, earwax.

But earwax is actually mostly dead skin.

Yeah.

It is, yeah.

Okay, that's what was confusing me because, yeah, I didn't know what it was made of.

So it's got this kind of waxy stuff, but it's basically the big mass of it is bits of dead skin skin from your eardrum.

So it's produced by these glands inside your ear, which I think are in the sort of outer ear.

So the dead skin spirals up a bit and then picks up the sticky substance from these glands.

And it's got like fatty acids in it, it's got cholesterol in it, other fats, and it also has alcohol in it.

So I really wanted to find out what the exact alcohol content of earwax was and then work out the equivalent of a pint.

But I can't.

How much earwax would you have to eat before you went over the legal limit?

Yeah.

Poor policeman who pulls you over.

You've just got a mouth full of earwax.

You know those medical trial things that people go and do to test things out?

Imagine being that the gig you get.

How much would they have to pay you to agree to eat enough earwax to get you drunk?

Well, we don't know how much it is, you see.

For all we know, it's just like one little tiny bit of earwax is enough to put you over the limit.

Let's say a shop glass full of earwax.

Right.

Well,

we'll negotiate, but I'll start at 10,000.

10,000?

I'd do it for probably a tenner.

Come on.

What?

What?

I was going in the other direction.

Too late.

We've agreed that my one's the one.

Okay.

I think Canna's currently leading the bid at the moment.

She is.

I reckon we can crowdfund 10,000 and 10 pounds.

And then you can both do it.

So Japanese mothers clean out their kids' ears with these ear ear rakes.

They're called nuni kaki.

And then when Japanese people grow up, they really like the feeling feeling of it.

And so you get ear salons where you go and you pay quite a lot of money to go and have your ears cleaned out, same kind of thing.

But the thing about this is, if you start, which all of you will have read, when you start looking up ear wax and ears, there's not a single medical professional worldwide who doesn't say straight away, do not put anything in your ear.

It's really, really bad for you.

Yeah, but then weirdly, we're all putting our fingers in our ears while we're talking about this.

Yeah, I mean, I just did it then.

I did, didn't I?

And I don't

wonder if people listening to this are also putting putting their fingers in their ears and it's the kind of thing that you just automatically do like you know some kind of social things that are they're catching you know like a yawn kind of thing.

Yeah I bet.

I spoke to a doctor once he said you should never put anything smaller than a courgette in your ear.

And the thing was obviously you can't fit one of those in, but you shouldn't put anything else in.

That is exactly the case.

That's probably true of most like holes in your body.

You shouldn't put anything smaller than a courgette into them.

A couple of years ago, they found a cat abandoned in Norfolk, right?

Some people found an abandoned cat, and it had three ears.

Really?

Were they all belonging to it, or had it just

eating a mouse as it was?

It had this extra ear

on its left-hand side, in front of its other ear.

Can you guess what they consider calling it?

Oh, um.

It's really good.

Okay.

Ear, kitty, kitty.

That's very good.

Very good.

Ear, kitty, kitty, kitty kitty, surely.

Sure, yeah.

Well, no, it'd be ear, ear, ear, kitty.

Shall I tell you?

I'll tell you what they called it, and then you see if you can guess why.

They thought about calling it Captain Kirk.

Okay.

Because he had a wild frontier or something.

It's an old joke, isn't it?

Where do they go in Star Trek?

The Final Frontier.

The Final Frontier.

The Final Frontier.

Oh, yeah.

And they considered calling it that, and then they called it Brian.

After three years, Brian.

Is that the worst hamburger turtle in name?

Speaking of cats, in 1968, New York vet Robert A.

Lopez wanted to discover whether it was possible for the ear mite, which you get in cats, to infest humans.

So he removed some mites from a cat's ear, mixed them with his ear wax, and then introduced them into his ear.

And it turns out they can infest people's ears.

Really hoping for a no in this study.

Really hoping for a no.

Wow.

So it was extremely painful.

You know, it was loads of sounds in his ear all the time.

They traveled deeper into his eardrum and they got louder and louder.

By the third week, he was completely deaf in the ear.

Oh, my God.

In the fourth week, the mice activity was 75% reduced, which is good.

But he could feel the mites crawling across his face at night.

On the inside or the outside?

Across the outside of his face.

Probably try to find a new ear.

And so he finished that and then did the experiment two more times.

With his other two ears

and found that the effects diminished, which he said that maybe his body found an immune reaction against the mites.

That's good.

So there are two ways of avoiding suffering from cat mite infestations: either infest yourself repeatedly or just don't do it in the first place.

There was a woman who had a spider in her ear, didn't she?

She had a live tarantula in her ear.

You're thinking of the nursery rhyme, I think.

Yeah,

because it was the fly first.

There was an old lady who put a fly in her ear.

I don't know why.

Now she can't hear.

No, there was.

There was a woman who had a live tarantula removed from her ear.

She inserted the coggettes to get rid of it.

okay that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

James at eggshaped.

And Anna you can email a podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at qi podcast, or go to our website, no such thingasofish.com.

We've got all of our previous episodes up there.

We have a link to our tour, which is happening in October and November.

And we also have a link to our book, The Book of the Year, which is coming out in November.

Check it all out.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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