160: No Such Thing As A Sausage Jacuzzi

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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 am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anna Chacinski and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order.

Here we go.

Starting this week with my fact.

My fact this week is that at rush hour there are more people under the ground in London than there are above the ground in Edinburgh.

Wow.

Wow.

That's great.

Now you don't mean dead people do you?

No I don't.

I mean rush hour.

I mean the London underground system.

There are more people on trains below the ground than there are people in total every day.

Actually, you might have underestimated that because did you count people living in basement flats?

No, I didn't.

You didn't.

I bet there are even more people.

What about dead people?

Yep, that's whole.

Yeah, we can't go there.

Actually, you know, you just said dead people and vaguely about population.

I found out this week that the thing about their this is probably something everyone else knows, but the thing about there being more people alive today than had ever lived in the past is so far wrong.

It's ridiculously wrong.

So, you know, you always hear that fact.

And I think there's something like

about 100 billion people have been alive on Earth, and obviously, there isn't nearly that many people alive today.

And so it's just rubbish.

I don't know where it's come from.

Wow.

Anyway, sorry, back to your point.

Busted a myth right at the top of the show.

That's so exciting.

Is this people on the London Underground?

Yep, this is People on the London Underground.

I read this fact in a Bill Bryson book called The Road to Little Dribbling.

It was his last tour of the UK.

It was a follow-up to Notes from a Small Island.

And in it, he's on the London Underground.

He got the fact from Time Out, which is a magazine in London.

And in it, it said that daily there are 600,000 people on the London Underground.

And the population of Edinburgh is something like 460,000.

Isn't it at any given moment on the underground?

Well, we thought that, and that's when I sent you guys that fact, but then I took it to our calculations master, James, and said, is that possible?

And James worked out that that can't be right, but you said that it would be right for rush hour.

Yeah, I think the maximum that you might get at rush hour would be about 600,000.

And do we think the population of Edinburgh is around 500,000, something like that?

Yeah, just under, yeah.

I looked at some other 600,000s at the moment.

And Ed Sheeran's Shape of You

just passed around 600,000 downloads quite recently.

But it's also been streamed 121 million times since it was released.

No way.

Yeah.

And it's three minutes 50-something long.

And so, if you add up all of those streamings together, it takes you to 893 years that people have been listening to that song.

And so, if you go into the future 893 years, then that's 100 years after Wally

is set.

And it's the time when scientists estimate that the radiation levels in Chernobyl will be back down to normal.

That long for Chernobyl to be back?

Well done, Ed Sheeran.

Well, that's what I say.

Thanks for clearing up Chernobyl.

I've understood.

But, I mean, if we go by what happens in Wally, it doesn't look like a place to inhabit anymore.

But it's 100 years after Wally, so maybe.

It sorted itself out.

It sorted itself out and got back down.

Okay, that's what happens.

That's the sequel.

I've got a quibble with your fact Dan.

Uh-oh.

Sure.

Half London Underground is overground.

Oh, yeah.

So I'm just forestalling people right again.

Really, Half of it is.

More than half.

More than half.

God, how did we not think of that one?

We didn't think of that bit.

Yeah.

Wow.

Oh, sorry.

I've been keeping that under my hat as a sort of cool thing to bring up, which wouldn't necessarily invalidate the whole section.

But let's face it, at rush hour, no one's in those weird outer bits.

Yeah, exactly.

Weird outer bit half.

The tube does go, it goes much further.

I got offered a stand-up gig ages ago, and it was in zone nine, which I didn't know existed, but I was like, sure, I I can see it on the map.

It took something like two hours to get there.

Yeah.

And when we emerged from

the train, because as you say, some of it goes overground, we emerged, and there were cows in my window.

There was literally a field with sheep and cows.

You can see that on the tube.

It used to go even further.

Sorry, you had a joke.

I was just going to say this sounds like a really hot gig you were at, Dan.

Thousand-seater

barn somewhere.

You couldn't hear all the boos because of all the moos.

No, it used to go even further than that, though.

The Metropolitan Line, which I think is the one that goes up to Zone 9, and most stations don't have a Zone 9.

Metropolitan Line used to go 40 miles out of London.

Wow.

Used to go all the way to Aylesbury.

We should say for overseas people, Covent Garden, where we work is in Zone 1.

And then if you get a bit further out of London, North London, like Gamdenmork, Zone 2.

Now what comes after that, Dan?

So, interestingly, if you go to where I live, it's zone three.

So, is that further out or closer in than zone two?

That's just that's one further out, okay, yeah, but two further out than zone one.

So, yeah, it's um, and then it works its way out to zone nine.

Wow, yeah, that's great.

There's quite a few in between that, but we don't have time.

What are the ones in between, cool?

So, you've got four,

five.

Um, if you go out to one of the far zones, um, so this will be a number higher than four and five even,

you can get to the station Roding Valley, which is the least used station on the entire underground.

And they have about 712 passengers a day.

Okay,

and it's not as many as Edinburgh, but it is the same population as Ilmington, the highest village in Warwickshire.

Is it?

Exactly the same population.

According to the 2011 census.

So how are they getting from Ilmington to

Rodding Valley?

I see what you mean.

It's not the same people.

Ah, that was confusing.

One person who does live in Ilmington is Les Wexner, who's the man behind Victoria's Secret.

Wow.

Is he?

Not Victoria, the train station in London, though.

No.

What is Victoria's Secret?

Well, it's actually 65 metres underground.

Did you know that over 47 million litres of water are pumped out of the underground every day?

Are they?

Yeah, because it's that far down, it's below lots of water, lots of water in the ground, and it keeps on pouring in.

They keep on pumping it out.

Where do they pump it out to?

Zone 10.

I don't know.

That's really cool.

So it's pouring in.

You never see it, do you?

No,

they do quite a good job of keeping it away from the public sections of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Quite impressive.

There are rivers that go through some of the stations, aren't there?

Yeah.

Sloan Square, if you look above the platform, there's a tube, and that tube has a river in it.

No way.

Yeah.

What is it called?

It's not the fleet, is it?

It's...

No, it's the Westbourne.

The fleet goes through Farringdon.

Right.

And they just look like sewers these days.

But they used to be rivers.

They used to be London's subsidiary rivers.

So there's not like pedalos and stuff.

Only pedalos for rats.

Very horrible.

And you can go to certain shops in central London where the owners have, in their basement, they've dug through the ground and you can see the river passing.

Really?

Yeah, yeah.

So they sort of do it as an attraction that you can go and see within their shop, the rivers of London that no longer exist.

Yeah.

When they were building the New York subway, the guys who were building it were called sand hogs because they dug through lots of sand.

And I was reading a newspaper report from 1916, and it was about this guy called Marshall Maby who was working in the tunnel to like dig the subway, and there was a pocket of compressed air, which suddenly kind of escaped so he's like got this big shield up in the tunnel in front of him and they're using this shield to like push forward and make the tunnel bigger and he said he saw an 18 inch pocket of air suddenly appear and it sucked him towards it whoa he was sucked into it he was blasted up through the ground so he was blasted up through 12 feet of riverbed and then blasted up through the river itself and then hurled up 25 feet in the air above the river.

He wasn't grinding through earth, 12 feet of earth, was was he?

Yeah, that's what riverbeds are made of.

Yeah, it's less plausible.

It's more plausible for him to be blasted through 12 feet of earth than 12 feet of concrete or steel or whatever.

No, no, no, I was thinking, was it just a tunnel?

Like it was a hole that he was blasted through.

It just happened to be going.

I don't believe it, Anna.

So here we go.

Let me.

There's a whole interview with him and everything.

There's a nice interview with his wife saying, it's okay, he's fine.

He's looking forward to going back to work.

This is what the New York Times said at the time: there's a pocket of compressed air to prevent the river's bottom from caving in.

So they have some, I don't know how that works,

but somehow

it happened, guys.

And this compressed air got loose, and he saw an 18-inch hole.

And before he knew it, he was being sucked towards it.

Two of his colleagues actually also got sucked in, and they did perish.

And he

survived by blasting up, putting his arm out in front of him, and blasting up through the river.

So I took over through the river.

12 feet of riverbed.

and then got shot through and then out in the air.

Then there's enough force left over shot through the river itself and then you had 25 feet in there.

25 feet.

The New York Times is a very wretched thing.

What year is it?

Yeah, at what date was this?

February 1916, all right, not April.

Yeah, it was a little bit insane.

But there you go.

There's a picture of the guy.

Pictures don't lie.

What, mid-flight or mid-flight?

That's extraordinary.

Did you say that was in New York?

Yeah.

It was soft ground, so that's why they were called soft ground.

Oh, well, if it was soft ground, I see.

Yeah, it was still a river, but 25 feet after 12 beds of

I was imagining him being carried up in the bubble of air, like in a kind of submarine or something.

That would make sense.

Oh, my God.

Do you know what the underground was used for during the Second World War?

It was hospitals.

I thought bomb shelter.

Yeah.

That was definitely used as bomb shelters, but also the central line was converted into a fighter aircraft factory.

Ah.

Really?

It stretched for two miles.

And it had its own train system.

I don't know if it was the actual tube trains.

How did they get the aircraft up the escalators once they've done that?

Well, what they did is they had some compressed air and they would just blast them up into the sky.

Isn't that amazing?

And that was an official secret until the 1980s.

I'm with Adder actually.

How did they get them out?

Well, piecemeal, I imagine.

Or they had a lift or something.

Right.

Did you know that Roosevelt had his own station, underground station built?

Or there was an underground station built underneath the Waldorf Astoria, which is the really famous hotel in New York.

And it was just for people staying at the Waldorf Astoria.

So it was one station, and if you didn't want to go with the plebs to Grand Central Station or, you know, one of the proper tube stations, you could just get a lift underground in your hotel.

And it said, if you brought if you brought your own carriage with you, so if you had your own carriage

for beeping for those who had the carriage.

What do you do?

You attach it to the back of the tube stick.

And Roosevelt put it.

This is sounding nearly as plausible as your man.

Am I just coming up

to the riddle?

Did I spend the morning hallucinating?

Oh, Anna, you've got Dan's notes there.

So, this is in this research research done by this guy called Dan Brooker, who's looked into this.

He's a tour guide on the New York metro system.

And he said the FDR used it to hide his disability, so people didn't have to see him kind of walking from the tube.

And so, there would be trains that led to this private underground station that could fit his big armor-plated car, which would then drive off the train onto the platform and straight into the elevator.

And then his limousine would be lifted up the elevator and

backed out into the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Station.

So, he would drive into an elevator.

Yeah.

In a limousine.

And there's already a big lift.

But then you get to the lift and there's actually a plane in there and he's like, oh, I'll wait for the next one.

I don't know, Anna.

Yeah.

So,

yeah, this researcher says it, but it was definitely then.

Roosevelt definitely used it to hide his disability.

They used to have first class and third class on a couple of London Underground lines.

Did they?

But no second class.

Very weirdly.

Ah, see, that's why I had to explain the zone system earlier.

It's a very good example of numbers being left out.

Yeah, and you would have to wait at particular bits of the platform, depending on what class ticket you had.

Why did they not have a second class, I wonder?

It was because there's a stipulation in a Railway Regulation Act in the mid-19th century, which said all train companies have to offer third-class accommodation so poor people can afford it.

And then eventually they just got rid of first-class.

So now all the London Underground carriages are third class, basically.

Are they?

Well.

Would you say that's stretch?

I suppose that might be true.

It's a bit of a stretch.

They definitely got rid of first class on the lines where they had it.

Do we know if they had any luxuries in that first class?

Yeah, you did.

You had two gas lamps instead of one.

It's a bit like that from the other week where you could have two kestrels in first class.

Should we move on seen?

We've probably gone enough on that.

I have one story about an underground man.

Sure.

Sure, why not?

So, this is a story from 1998.

It's the report of

a man who broke the record for the length of time spent in a wooden box underground.

Okay.

Well, more than dead people.

No.

For living people.

For the living people category.

He was called Jeff Smith.

He was 37 years old and he beat the European record of 101 days.

He stayed underground

for 150 days.

And the record that he broke was set by his mother.

Oh my god.

How many days did she do?

She did 101.

And he beat her.

And then the landlord of the pub in the garden of which he was buried underground for three months

said,

when his mother did it, he was seven years old.

He's now 37.

And for the last 30 years, it's been his ambition to go and bury himself in a box.

Did he have some awful rivalry with his mother?

I don't know.

I think he was proud to keep the family record alive.

and what does it how do they um how do they keep him alive so he's obviously got air tubes

air tube food tubes they'd probably just pour like peanuts down a tube or something because he's in the pub well do you remember there was there was a um

the sort of um there's a book we have in the office from a friend of ours john bonderson called buried alive and they used to make caskets for people who were petrified of being buried alive so one uh had an ability that you could ring a bell if you woke up in your casket and um while you were waiting for them to dig you out, it had a tube where they could send a sausage down.

No, so he had an air tube, and he said, through the air tube inserted in the box, I am very pleased to have reached this date.

My mother would be proud of me.

If you were in that beer garden and you had a few pints, you would start pouring beer down his throat.

The beer would be the last of his worries going down that tube.

That's a good point.

Oh, well done for not drowning, I guess it's that's saying.

Imagine if you were one day away from getting the record and then a massive air bubble

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

Okay, my fact this week is that every month, the same number of people on average Google how to make love as how to make slime.

Yeah,

I only know one of those things.

See you which one?

Slime.

Yeah.

Sometimes they could be the same thing, guys.

That's true.

I know how to make slime.

So this is an article on Mondovo.com, which is a digital marketing company, where they looked at the 1,000 most asked questions on Google and checked how much an advertiser would have to pay for someone to click on their adverts for them.

So if you look at the most Google question, which is what is my IP, an advertiser would be $0.12

per click.

And when is Valentine's Day would be $12.33 per click.

So that's what they were looking at.

But really, I just want to talk about slime.

It is weird, though, that I hadn't realized there's this slime craze at all.

And maybe that's because I'm not a young child or a parent, but there is, and there are all these stories in America of glue shortages, which people are saying are rubbish.

But it is true that Walmarts have had to say, look, we have run out of glue in some of our stores, and we are trying to keep up with demand as quickly as possible because kids have just started making slime all over the place.

That's amazing.

And there are Instagram accounts run by teenagers which have got hundreds of thousands of followers, and it's just them glooping slime and touching it and making the gloopy noises with it.

And there are all these different slime accounts, and there are slime confession accounts, which apparently post drama about other slime accounts saying so-and-so didn't invent this new kind of angel slime or crunchy slime or whatever.

But that doesn't sound like a confession.

That sounds like slime accusations.

Yeah, I get.

What happens on slime confessions?

I admit I didn't make that slime account.

Yeah, okay, it's just the rebuttal.

No, slime confession.

It's just sort of secondary accounts posted.

And you get asked, because people just put their fingers in the video touching the slime, and they get hundreds of messages from people saying, Give us a face reveal, is what it's called.

Oh, and show your face.

Do you ever get the face reveal?

I think people are a bit wary of showing their face, especially because they're teenagers.

They say, I don't want to show my face to 100,000 people.

Just look at the slime.

Really?

That's almost what the majority of YouTubers are.

I mean, that's the age where.

These guys are only about the slime, Dan.

They're not there for the fame.

They're not there for the recognition.

They're not there for the slime light.

Hey, oh!

Is it broken?

We've broken the podcast.

It's finally happened.

Yeah, it's incredible.

That is amazing.

I didn't know about that, actually.

I hadn't seen that in my googling of slime.

Yeah, it's for 2016.

It was the

top 10 how-to searches in the world.

Or it may have been in America, but I think it was the world.

How-to.

And all the others are like how to file my taxes or how to, I don't know, whatever else.

And then it's how to make slime.

So they are also divided by region, so you can find out what people are googling how to do in various places.

So Sheffield wanted to know mostly how to pluck your eyebrows.

People in Cardiff and Leeds wanted to know how to work out percentages.

And in Bradford, the most common how-to search was how to age lace.

How to age?

That was the most common

thing people wanted to know how to do.

In Bradford.

In Bradford, they're all about lace in Bradford.

Aging lace.

What is aging lace?

I guess to make it look older than it is.

Or Or is it telling how old it is?

Oh, yeah.

That does feel to me like one or two people googling a lot, doesn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

I've forgotten again.

It's interesting because...

All this slime was very much part of, I guess, more James and my childhood than you two.

But the toys that we all had all used to have them.

Teenage Muta Ninja Turtles used to come with it because they were born out of ooze, so you used to get this little slime with it.

The Ghostbusters toys you used to get with slimer.

Yeah, slimer, exactly.

It was such a huge part of toys.

I don't know if it is so much these days.

That was gunged vintage.

Like,

get your own back with Dave Penz and Phillips.

Oh, yeah.

Would always evolve an adult being gunged.

Wasn't it more like putty?

So the slime I remember getting was more like putty with toys.

That's the farty one.

That's the one that you go

when you put your finger inside.

I don't think I got the slime.

That was the yeah, the slime was the predated,

did it?

Farty putty, yeah.

Okay.

One theory about why why kids like slime so much, especially in the 90s and early 2000s, is because it was a time when kids stopped going outside.

And when, you know, kids in the 60s and 70s would go out, they'd be messing around with bits of gunge and the, you know, bits of mud and all that kind of thing.

And then this was a generation that didn't really play out, so they were indoors a lot, so they had to make do with gunge.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

Don't know if it's true, it's a theory there.

It's a really good theory.

Yeah, I like it.

The first film I could find that contains the word slime in the title is a film called The Slime People from 1963.

It was not very well received.

It got 2.5 on IMDb, and apparently, according to Wikipedia, it was infamous for its extensive use of fog machines with the fog becoming so thick towards the end that it's virtually impossible to see any of the actors.

It starred this guy called Robert Hutton, who only got work.

Robert Hutton apparently only got work this is according to this random book on on films he only got work because he had a startling resemblance to Jimmy Stewart and when Jimmy Stewart was called up for World War II he was just casting lots of films that Jimmy Stewart was supposed to be in because he looked like amazing that's really good that's really good

have you guys ever seen the blob

Yeah, so the blob is one of the first ever B-movie sci-fi horror films.

And it's one of Steve McQueen's first ever films as an actor.

I did not know he was in the blob.

Yeah, and it's about, basically, it's about a blob which uh comes down from space and it starts eating things and it just absorbs things and then gets bigger and so the producer has just died

uh it's kind of like a slime basically is the blob it's sort of this sentient ooze which just swallows things yeah but these days there is still blob fest every year in a town where they shot loads of it and you can eat blob burgers

and you can pay a small fee and you can run screaming out of the cinema that everyone runs screaming out of in the film when the blob oozes into it.

What if you want to keep watching the film?

You can't.

Do you know that the blob was based on a true story?

No.

No.

Yeah.

No, it really was.

But I can only give you dance notes.

It was a local report somewhere in America.

Some weird substance had been found that was kind of jelly-like, probably natural, I guess.

It probably is like frog spawn or something.

But the FBI were brought in to investigate it and then it was in the local news and then it got in the national news and then they turned it into this story.

Wow, I didn't know that.

That's very cool.

Did it eat people in real life?

No, no.

I think that was a fictional adaptation.

So in Paris in the 19th century, they used to have fruit orchards and they used to use snail slime to put branding on their apples.

No.

Yeah.

So all you would do is you'd grow an apple on a tree and put it in a paper bag.

So it was very pale when it grew.

And then you take the paper bag off and you get a stencil and you put snail slime in the stencil bit.

And then you would let it grow a little bit longer and the rest of the apple would go a nice colour but the bit where the snail slime was wouldn't go the colour and so you could have little brands no way that is amazing

that is so

why did we stop doing that i don't know we should bring it back we should bring it back we invented sticky labels and it's better than having a apple full of snail slime

and having to individually bag every apple on your tree

that is why we didn't do it your own i just think that that is incredible though yeah um Snail slime is a non-Newtonian fluid, which we've talked about before.

So it's a fluid that doesn't really act in the way you'd expect something like water to act.

And the reason that's really good for snails is that when they excrete it, it helps them stick to the ground when they're staying still and root them in the ground.

And then it helps them move when they want to move, because under pressure, it becomes really lubricated and it becomes really slippery.

Yeah, they use it as a slide along.

Like a hoverboard.

I was thinking like a water slide, but yeah, sim similar.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's probably better, actually.

Yeah.

But they're not hovering, are they?

No, but they're not touching the earth.

But neither are you if you're wearing shoes.

These are my hover boots.

So loads of people have started using snail slime for beauty.

Are they?

This is a big trend now.

So there have been some spas which have let snails crawl over your face for a fee.

You pay the fee, not the snails.

I read once that at the Battle of, I think it was the Battle of Cressy, they use snails to crawl over the wounds of people on the battlefield because it has antibacterial stuff in it.

Oh, well, the enemy's getting closer.

Come on, come on.

Well, they have methods of getting slime out of snails now because they used to do it in quite a cruel way.

They used to put them in water which had lots of salt and vinegar in, and they'd freak out and they'd slime loads because it really hurt them.

But now they've developed, in Italian snail farms, a special steam bath.

It's like a spa for snails is how they're pitching it.

I bet that's not how it really is for the snails.

It is.

They're in these domes, which are full of steam, and apparently they're snapshots.

They take the shell off, put it in the locker.

Where do they keep the pound coin?

So it's quite nice that people in spas are using slime from snails, which have themselves been to a spa already.

That's so nice.

And then the people excrete sweat, which they then give back to the snails to rub on their faces.

Okay, it is time for fact number three.

That is Chaczynski.

My fact this week is that Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone used to be used as a washing machine.

And this is

another true fact of mine this week.

So Old Faithful is this geyser in Yellowstone National Park, which is very famous, gets quite reliable when it erupts, so you can go and see it.

And I've seen it and it's amazing.

And in the 1800s, when people visited Yellowstone, and it was often soldiers, because there are a lot of soldiers placed in the area, then they would chuck their soiled or their dirty clothes into the crater of the geyser, and then it's very hot in there, so it would get all shummied around in there and then blasted out.

And it's essentially, I think it was about 90 degrees, and it erupts every 80 minutes.

So it's like putting your clothes on a 90-degree cycle for 80 minutes.

Yeah, and that's big knit.

That's not suitable for woollens as well.

90 degrees is too hot.

They did say, all the travelers said that you had to not put your woollen clothes in there because they would actually get shredded up a little bit, I think.

Yeah, they get completely torn to shreds.

They would smell of rotten eggs as well, wouldn't they?

Yes, because it stinks of sulphuric rotten eggs all over the shop.

Someone did acknowledge that it wasn't that good a way of cleaning clothes.

So

there was one book I was reading about the history of Yellowstone said many articles that go into her chambers never came out again, so geezer laundering was often seen as an enterprise both futile and costly.

Wow.

And they would, I mean, I've been to see that as well, and it's really an explosion, isn't it?

So they would have gone flying.

Yeah, yeah.

I would do it, definitely, but with some old t-shirts and things like that.

Well, you shouldn't do it.

It's very clear, you shouldn't put things in the geysers in Yellowstone.

Really?

They make it very, very clear.

I've never been, so I think I'm clear.

I think I'm allowed to do it.

No one's told me not to yet.

But when you go, because you have to stay on the wart boards, don't you?

Yeah.

And then you'll see just just like a hat here and a shoe here that have just either blown over or...

Oh, really?

Do you think that is people trying to emulate this, though?

I don't think so.

No.

Or is it left over?

Because stuff used to get sucked down and disappear, so it might be 150-year-old shoes left over from these soldiers.

It might be.

They mostly look like baseball caps from the current era.

Okay.

This is an amazing fact.

It's incredible.

You could wash the dishes by dropping them into like Mount Etna or something, and it'll shimmy them around and then explode them out.

Well they tried to wash dishes in geezers as well.

Did they?

They tried everything with them.

It's truly bizarre.

Surely you would know that they would smash on being blasted out.

Well for instance you would get some geezers which are just like a puddle of water with which it's just kind of bubbling.

Wouldn't necessarily be firing out massive amounts.

Yeah was it specifically Old Faithful?

No, lots of geezers they did this in.

So there was one geezer that was called the handkerchief geezer because you'd chuck your handkerchiefs in.

Right.

And people used to chuck in soap just to make them explode, I think.

Did they?

Or I think that would prompt them to explode.

Yes, it does.

It gets between the molecules in some way and actually causes geysers to explode.

It's mad.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

It's really odd.

I was reading about the fact that

they have discovered that Yellowstone, this is quite a while ago, Yellowstone is actually what is classified as a super volcano.

Because the whole thing effectively is one massive volcano.

It's very scary because the last time it went off,

it produced so much ash that you could have covered New York State in, I think it was 20 meters of ash.

And I'm not sure if they've actually verified this, but I think this is the main theory.

There's the Gallatin Mountains, and suddenly, in between the mountain range, is a 60-mile to 70-mile gap of mountain.

It's just missing, it's not there.

And they think it was from the explosion that happened, it just wiped out 60 miles.

So, do you reckon that mountain kind of flew up somewhere and landed somewhere else?

Yes.

Do you know what happens when lava explodes out of a volcano?

People do.

People do.

Does it go up and then cool down and then fall down like pumice kind of stuff?

Kind of, but some of it, a third of the liquid rock falls back into the volcano.

Does it?

So it goes in just straight up and back down again.

Wow.

Yeah.

Can I just read you really quickly one last anecdote?

Basically the only research I did for this was people putting stuff in geezers for fun.

So just one last anecdote which I really enjoyed, and this was from a guy called Norton, who was a travel writer.

He was one of the first people to write about visiting Yellowstone National Park.

And he went with a rich companion who he nicknamed Prince Telegraph, because he owned all these telegraph lines, and he was obviously some posh toff.

And so, Norton recorded that Prince Telegraph couldn't be bothered to wash up the crockery on the day that it was his turn.

So, he dumped it in a small, shallow-looking geyser and smoked a pipe by the side of the geyser in the hope that it would wash the crockery.

And the geezer suddenly suddenly started spitting and like whirling all the contents of the crockery around.

And they, so the rest of the group, hadn't realised that Prince Telegraph had done this.

They just heard this shout from him and they turned around and saw him.

He was making an agonising cry for help.

They beheld him with his hat off and eyes peeled, dancing around his dishpan in a frantic attempt to save the culinary outfit.

He would plunge his hand into the boiling water, yell with pain, and out would come a spoon, another plunge and yell, and a tin plate.

And apparently he just kept on throwing his head down into this water and scrambling around, and all their crockery got sucked into the geyser.

You've got to let it go, mate.

Yeah, I would say a spoon is not worth it for losing your hands.

Also, if it was a porcelain plate, maybe, but a tin plate, you're going from hot to hot to hot.

Yeah, yeah, but he's taken all their crockery.

What if they're stuck in Yellowstone without anything to eat off?

Yeah, I guess they'll have to have finger food from then on.

It does have a trout jacuzzi.

Is this like your sauna for snails?

Yeah, Andy is starting up a whole spa for different animals, aren't you?

You've got the weight room for a camel.

Does it have different settings?

Like, can they turn on the bubble when I like that too?

What it is, is that sometimes there are little eruptions in this trout jacuzzi which stir up lots of crustaceans and

other little insects that trout like to eat.

And so the trout know that this is happening and they swim around whenever there's a little upburst of liquid.

So it's like having a jacuzzi where like sausages come out of the house,

which would be the best jacuzzi in the world ever.

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

My fact is that there are three world's largest porch swings in Nebraska, Louisiana, and Ontario, and none of them is on a porch.

Okay.

This is a fact that was sent in, actually, sent in by a guy called Jeremy Michael Voss on Twitter.

And there are lots of porch swings, which are supposed to be the world's largest, and you can see them all, and they're nowhere near a porch.

Surely we've measured them.

Yeah, I was going to say the same.

Surely we know from all those pictures which is the biggest.

Not quite, but they're sort of all.

Similar size.

They're all identical in size.

It's very weird that someone wouldn't.

It could be that one's the tallest, one's the widest, and one's the

whatever the other DP pieces.

Could be that no one could be asked to measure them because they're just big porch swings.

Professional measurers have better things to do.

Yeah, I don't actually know which of them is the largest, but there are all these sort of world's largest things all over the place, and there are lots of conflicts between people, aren't there?

So, how large are they?

And I don't mean the exact measurements.

I mean, if I was sitting on one, is it like when you go to those places where they have big chairs and big tables, and you're meant to look like a.

Which places are these, Dan?

You can go to places that make you feel like one of the borrowers where they have just giant furniture.

Can you?

Yeah.

Dan is looking at me like there is one of these places on every corner.

It's weird that I've never been to one.

Sort of know what you mean.

The world's largest chair is a really epic battle between lots of different places.

It started in 1905.

Strap yourselves in, this is going to be a long anecdote.

It started in 1905 and Gardner, Massachusetts erected a 12-foot tall chair.

And then a place called Thomasville, North Carolina made one that was 13 feet six inches and then those two places just got more and more bigger and bigger chairs.

Eventually there was an 18 foot chair in Thomasville but then the war happened

and then after the war there were variously largest chairs in Bennington, Vermont, Washington DC, Morristown, Tennessee, Binghamton, New York, Wingdale, New York, Anniston, Alabama.

And Anniston, Alabama had the biggest chair until 2001 when it was destroyed by a storm.

So, all these other towns in America had all the biggest chair at various times, but now the world's biggest chair is in Italy and it's 65 feet tall.

65 feet.

Wow.

Yeah.

And it could be even bigger if it wasn't for that dastardly war that interrupted them.

That's the most that anyone's ever glossed over the Second World War.

He was telling the biggest story.

Is that the word?

James, is the one that's in Italy?

Is Is that in a place called Manzano?

Yes, that's it.

Because I have a fact about it, which is, I can't believe this.

Is that a third of the world's chairs are manufactured there?

They might do, though, because some, like in China, where there's sock city and there's, like, there's some villages and towns that just decide that's what we do.

Everything here is chair-based or sock-based.

Yeah, but if you think about how many chairs there must be in the world, everyone in the world on average is going to own at least a chair, aren't they?

Yeah.

But

how many chairs are you sitting on right now?

Well, one, yeah.

How many socks are you wearing?

Well, yeah, I do see your point.

Yeah.

But there are, is it three?

No, I do see that point.

But

like around this table, there's more than what two chairs per person.

Yeah, that's true.

And also, there are just two, there's too much variety in chairs for them all to be coming from the same factory, whereas socks are the same.

I don't think it can be.

Socks aren't all the same.

I mean, not even the two that I wear in other.

So there is a thing in America.

A lot of these are roadside attractions where they would try and get people into your town or whatever.

So there are a few world's largest balls of twine.

Oh, yeah.

This is a huge thing.

On Wikipedia, there's one entry about the world's largest ball of twine, and this is what it says.

It says, the world's largest ball of twine in Corker City was built as a response to the Minnesota town of Darwin's efforts to grab the title.

That reads very much like someone from Corker

is unhappy with Darwin.

And they usually, the ball of twine, is it usually just one person, really, isn't it?

Kind of just

like over years and years and years, just making these balls of twine.

It is weirdly pointless.

What a great life.

Everything we do is a little bit pointless, isn't it?

I think this is all pointless.

We're all going to die in the end, aren't we?

No, but I'm not sure I want to continue doing the podcast.

But this is always the thing.

The thing I find very odd with a lot of these, like the world's largest chair, chair, is it's not a chair.

It's a model of a chair.

No, but it's still a chair.

You can sit on it.

Yeah.

What about the world's largest banana, which is a model of a banana?

No, no, because that's the world's largest banana.

No, no, no.

That's that's different because you'd have to make the inside of a banana out of bananas.

I see.

I think I see the distinction you're drawing, and I think it's fair.

Thank you.

Oh, I was coming around to you all.

So this guy's made the world's largest knitting needles, he claims.

They're 13 feet long, and I actually don't think they are knitting needles.

Wait, but

what disqualifiers it?

Because you can't knit for which.

I shouldn't.

I use of the thing for the thing.

I bet he has done some knitting.

Like the world's largest job.

Exactly.

Yeah, the world's largest.

In the knitting needle one, I often see these things.

I see these things because we spend a lot of time on the internet, but I have often seen the world's most largest functional knitting needle as an actual record.

Right, that's interesting.

Okay, now I'm intrigued.

It's so weird how niche our knowledge is that I mentioned the world's largest knitting needle, and James has often come across the world's largest functional one.

What are our lives?

They're just pointless escapades to the death, Anna.

We've very established.

Marching towards oblivion with our giantness of bigger jobs.

Australia has a load of these things.

There's an incredible Wikipedia page about the big things of Australia

is what they're called.

And there are about 150.

What's the famous as a big pineapple, I think?

Yeah, they've got the world's largest artificial prawn, the world's largest artificial trout, artificial banana, artificial eagle.

That's weird.

I thought I'd been to the world's largest artificial prawn.

But it wasn't.

I've never been to Australia.

Bizarre.

I thought it was in...

Maybe it's a touring prawn.

It's pretty big, James.

It could probably have made it across in the time since you've seen it.

I thought it was in Florida Keys, but on

the way to think about it, it might have been a crayfish.

That is so embarrassing.

There's one of these things done.

There's one thing.

It's called the big A as Rock, right?

And it's a 1 to 40 scale model of A as Rock.

Which way is the scale?

It's smaller.

Oh, right.

So Wikipedia points out it's technically not a big thing, as it is substantially smaller than the item it's modeled on.

Can I bring it back to swings quickly?

Yeah.

It was a very big year last year for the swing,

2016, because the swing was inducted into the toy hall of fame.

Oh, that's it.

Yeah, they induct a few things in one go.

So

the little peoples, I don't know if you know that, it's a type of toy, it's made by Fisher Price.

That was inducted.

Dungeons and Dragons was inducted.

The little people, they've tied for the most nominations because there's a big final round and then they pick three.

So the Magic Eight Ball ties with the Little People for the most nominations of something that's not made it into the Hall of Fame.

So the Magic 8 ball is still isn't in there.

Still not in there.

Yeah.

And then when you shake it, it goes not looking good.

So the swing was up against this year.

This is who it had to beat to get into the Hall of Fame.

It was up against Uno, the card game.

Oh, yeah.

It was up against Care Bears.

It was up against Rock'em Sock'em Robots.

I don't know if you remember that.

Transformers.

Colouring books.

Oh, they're an adult thing, really, these days.

Yeah, that might have disqualified it.

And Bubble Rap.

So

it managed to defeat Bubble Rap.

Bubble Rap's not a toy, I wouldn't say.

In the past, they have put the stick into the Toy Hall of Fame, haven't they?

Yeah.

Yes,

that got awarded the oldest toy, I think.

Or the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Yeah,

something like that.

Yeah.

But yeah, so the swing has finally made it in.

Have you guys heard of Keiking?

What is Keiking?

It's competitive swinging in Estonia, and it's a really big deal, and it's the coolest thing ever.

I could barely watch it, so it's swinging, but all the way over.

So they're solid swings, aren't they?

They're solid, yeah.

So they're on poles, but the challenge is to have as long a pole as possible on your swing.

But what?

So the

instead of rope coming down, they're like big knitting needles.

I understand now.

But it's terrifying, right?

Because as you swing up, your feet are strapped onto the swing.

But as you swing up to the point where you're almost going over the top, you just, as you can imagine, you hang upside down there just before you fall back.

Oh, yes, those, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they're ridiculously high.

So the world record at the moment is a sort of knitting needle of 7.03 meters.

So that means that you'd be hanging upside down 14 meters high, which is about five stories high.

Yeah.

You could almost get up to the world's tallest chair from up there.

So there's some orangutans in the Netherlands in the Unhans Dieren Park Greenen, which I've obviously pronounced wrong, which is a zoo, and they've forgotten how to swing in trees because

they just didn't have any trees where they were living.

So they've forgotten how to do it.

But then they got them some trees and they were like, great, we've got some trees, but now the orangutans didn't know how to swing in them.

So they hired an Olympic gymnast

to swing in the trees

and to try and show them what to do.

That is incredible.

The idea is to encourage them into doing that.

Is it for not exercise?

Like, why do they want them to do it?

Well, yeah, because that's what orangutans do.

They kind of.

That's what you want from a zoo, isn't it?

When you see an orangutan, you want it to be swinging.

Does this woman dress up?

Is it a woman or a man?

That's a guy.

Does he dress up as an orangutan when he's teaching them?

I don't think he does now.

But that would make sense, wouldn't it?

I really hope they come back in a few months and the orangutans are all landing, you know, perfectly in the possibly.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said, particularly the man shooting 25 feet into the air,

you can get in contact with us on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland, James, at Egg Shapes, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Jasinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep.

And you can also get us on our group Twitter account, which is at qipodcast, or you can go to to our website, no such thingasafish.com, where you can find all of our previous episodes.

And you can also find our tour dates.

We're going on tour in November all over the UK.

So have a look there, get some tickets.

We'll see you there, or we'll see you here back again next week with another episode.

Goodbye.

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