148: No Such Thing As A Plummeting Moose

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Hello, and welcome back 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 Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm sitting here with Anna Tuzhinski, James Harkin, and Alex Bell.

And we have gathered our favourite facts from the last seven days, so in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Anna.

My fact this week is that the second president of the United States of America used to inspect London's dung.

Why did John Adams go around inspecting dung?

The reason he did it, he obviously was a farmer and he was inspecting

a little known fact.

He was also the President of the United States.

He's most famous for his farming days.

No, sorry, it's obvious from his diaries that he's a farmer because he from his dairies.

Was it sort of 25th March, did some more farming today?

Is that what gives it away?

That was my first clue.

Yeah.

25th March.

Milked a cow.

When will the people of America let me get back to my farm?

He was a farmer, and so he was inspecting it to compare it to his own dung, and he pointed out.

So his own dunk.

This is not normal behaviour in a person.

Well, Andy's questioning.

He's an absolute fruit loop, that's true.

It's amazing that they led a mentally unstable work to become president of America.

That will never happen again.

So he was a very stable man and had many stables of his own.

He inspected the dung in order to compare it to the manure he kept on his own farm.

And in fact, he concluded that the manure on the Edgware Road, he wrote of it, this may be good manure, but it is not equal to mine.

Wow.

Yeah, so he had better manure.

He had some manure from the Boston marshes, which he considered superior.

And yeah, this fact was sent in, actually, by a guy called Mark David, who sent me some of John Adams' diaries.

And he said in his diary, in one of my common walks along the Edgeware Road, there are fine meadows belonging to a noted cowkeeper, plentifully manured.

I have carefully examined the manure and found it to be composed of straw and dung from the stables of streets of London.

And then he goes through all the stuff that's in the manure.

So he's really gone through it with his hands, properly getting in there.

I used to live up Edgeware Road in that direction, and it's not like that anymore.

Do you ever find any any of John Adams' dung lying around?

I don't know whose it was.

It was on your doorstep, though, and it was on fire.

Bang, that's the main thing.

It wasn't John Adams' own dung, just to be clear.

He didn't take a poo by the side of the road and then inspect that.

Well, what if he'd accidentally swallowed a tooth or something and he wanted it for his collection?

As hypothetical situations go, Andy.

I don't know.

I think you're most likely to swallow a tooth if you get punched in the face.

And if you were wandering around inspecting poo on the streets of London, you might.

And if I got punched in the face, I'd be likely to poo myself.

This is why I never go to boxing fights.

It gets very messy.

Absolutely stinks in there.

He was a lawyer originally before he was president.

And a farmer.

I'm not sure if he was a farmer at the same time as he was a lawyer, but he was a really bad lawyer.

So in his first year, he had one client, and it took him three years before he won a case in front of a jury.

Wow.

Yeah, I don't think it was a really long trial either.

I think it was just, it took him a very long time.

One thing he was a lawyer for was the Boston Massacre, Massacre, wasn't it?

I think quite famously that.

What was that?

I think it was something like there was a crowd of people and there were some British soldiers and the crowd started throwing snowballs at the soldiers.

Was it snowballs?

I think so.

And then other stuff as well, like dead animals and stuff.

And then the soldiers shot when snowball fights get out of hand.

Is that a reindeer coming towards me?

And then the

British soldiers got angry and shot them, which is obviously worse than snowballs or reindeers.

and they were arrested.

I think Adams got them off.

He did get them off.

Not one of them went to prison, thanks to his defense of them.

Are we saying that he was kind of partly responsible for the American Revolution starting?

I think he was certainly a player.

Wow.

And he was pro-revolution as well, wasn't he?

He just defended the Brits because he wanted to uphold the rule of law, so he thought they had a right to equal representation.

Yeah, true.

Good man.

When he was in Boston, he also wrote political theory essays for the Boston newspapers under the nom de blume Humphrey Plowjogger.

Wow!

Humphrey Turdsifter was

his first draft name.

So Jefferson was his main rival, and he fought Jefferson for the title of second president of the US, and he won, and then Jefferson beat him at the next election.

And then, when they both retired, they spent the rest of their lives writing letters to each other.

It should have been me.

But didn't they, during one of the elections, didn't they really fight like really badly?

I thought Jefferson called him a hermaphrodite or something.

Yes, he did.

Yeah, they had a really, really vicious campaign.

And he accu so Jefferson accused Adams of being a hideous hermaphroditical character who smuggled prostitutes into the country.

So he said he was smuggling prostitutes in from England into America.

And he said that he was planning to marry one of the sons of King George and that he was a royalist.

Which actually, there could be some foundation to that because one of the things that Adams got mocked for when he was president was that he thought the president should be referred to as His Royal Highness or Your Majesty or something like that because he pointed out the presidents you get presidents of golf clubs and other really tedious things and it wasn't a noble enough title.

Yeah, one of his suggestions was His Highness the President of the United States of America and protector of the rights of the same.

There you go.

Yeah.

So we were talking about Adams and Jefferson being friends, even though they called each other hermaphrodites and said there were English prostitutes

afoot.

They died on the same day and they died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 4th of July,

what would it be, 1826.

And they were both absolutely determined to stay alive until then.

And Jefferson died just after noon.

And Adams awoke

soon after Jefferson had died.

And he was in a separate place at the time.

And he said with great effort, Thomas Jefferson survives, as though at least one of the architects of the revolution is still alive, even though he didn't know that Jefferson had already died.

And then he died a few hours later.

And then, do you think anyone, do you think there was a really awkward pause around his bedside when he said Jefferson survives?

Shall we tell him?

Is it cruel?

Yeah, I don't think he ever knew, which is nice.

He died thinking that Jefferson still survives today.

On his diary writing and his prolific letter writing and diary keeping, apparently Congress made fun of him because he went to Paris at one point and wrote a lot in his diary about how

great the Dung was.

Yeah, that was a great time how much he admired the French aristocracy, all this kind of really effusive stuff about how great Paris was.

And then he sent it along with his report of what was going on in Paris to Congress, possibly accidentally.

Like, we're not sure whether it was supposed to be part of the report or not.

Diary?

Just read it aloud and made fun of him in Congress.

Just like a 12-year-old girl in a foreigner.

Wow, if anyone's mum's ever read their diary, they can take solace in this probably the worst moment of his life when he realized that had happened.

I bet he never got over that.

I bet that's why he had to become president, was to erase the memory of his diary.

Oh, God, that's embarrassing.

What was okay, so there was nothing too humiliating.

It wasn't like, oh, dad walked in on me masturbating this morning.

Must learn to lock the door.

There was nothing too awful in it.

No, he said that one of the French gentlemen

you won't believe the prostitutes they have here in France.

I think they complimented him a lot, and one of the men called him the Washington of negotiation.

Oh, and you wrote that down.

And he was like, oh, I really like him.

He's so nice.

That's like retweeting praise of yourself, isn't it?

And then posting the retweet to Congress.

Yeah.

Copying in Congress.

We should move on, but just one quick.

Anyone got anything on dung or droppings?

Yes.

Go on, drop it in.

Burt Reynolds once dropped a helicopter full of horse manure on the National Enquirer.

Did he?

Wow.

Why did he do that?

They'd been writing a load of stories about him, and they weren't accurate, so he decided, and he said this, I thought it was only fitting.

On Christmas Eve, my pilot and I loaded my helicopter with manure from my ranch, flew over the building, and watched it cascade down their giant Christmas tree.

isn't that amazing the children would have probably thought he was Santa Claus

you know there's a there was a moose dropping festival in Talkeetna in Alaska so is this for dropping mooses or for Burt Reynolds flies over the town in a helicopter

no that's but That's such a good question, James, and it's exactly the same question that confused Petta, the animal rights organization.

So it was a festival that was cancelled in 2009, but it was basically where people used to throw moose droppings out of helicopters flying over the top.

And people took bets on whereabouts they'd land and would bet how close they'd get to a target.

But PETTA got confused and assumed that it did involve hurling moose, live moose, from helicopters.

Looting them into a helicopter, coaxing the moose into an aircraft.

Do you think they, every time they hear about animal droppings, this is just what they assume?

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Okay, we should move on.

So it's time for fact number two now, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that you can be blocked from getting a Swiss passport if your neighbours find you too annoying.

So this has come about, this is a news article that's been quite recent, and it is in the canton of Aargau in Switzerland.

And there was a lady who is a vegan, and she has been complaining about the way that cows are treated and various different things in this area.

Why does this weird man keep sifting through their manure?

It's their own business.

And the locals are not very happy with her because they think that she's invading their way of life and the rules say that when you apply for a passport your neighbours can give you a reference either good or bad and they've given her a bad reference and it's stopping her from getting a passport and so now it has to go to the next level so that she can apply elsewhere.

She's lived there since she was eight.

Yeah.

And all her children are Swiss.

Yeah.

But she's a really big campaigner.

One of the things she campaigns against, she does campaign against putting bells around the cow's necks, she also campaigns against piglet racing, which is a thing that happens in Switzerland.

I wonder if she campaigns about cow droppings.

That's the thing that happens.

Cows just walk over cliffs in Switzerland all the time.

Do they?

They walk off mountains and then the other cows think, oh, maybe Bessie found some better grass over there.

And then you get like up to 40 cows at a time just plunging off cliffs to their death.

You would have thought the smart thing for her neighbours to do would be to give her a really glowing reference and ensure that she does have the ability to leave the the country wouldn't it you're right

because having a passport means that you immediately are forced to emigrate i think it does allow you to leave though doesn't it that's the thing exactly that's true although i think actually she does have a passport for another country her nationality is dutch so she must have a dutch passport and she's yeah she's got children there so she can remain it's weird though the law in switzerland is that uh in order to apply for a passport you have to first become a resident of your local town basically it's called uh hematort

hematort hematort hematort We'd pick the right one.

And yeah, so all the foreign nationals have to become a citizen of the town that they were living in, and they have to live there for at least 12 years.

And then up until 2003, the whole town could vote on whether they would become new citizens or not.

Would vote on whether someone could become a new citizen?

Yeah, absolutely.

So the whole town would vote on it.

And so until 2003, it was everyone in the town.

Then they realized actually people were just being a bit racist because they didn't actually know these people.

They would just make a judgement based on which country they came from.

So they changed the law so that it's then a sort of committee and you get references from people who know them and they're judged specifically on them as a person.

But it still means that it's really difficult to get into.

There was a family in 2006, a family from Kosovo, who was a nice citizenship, because one of the reasons was that they dressed inappropriately because they wore too many tracksuits around town.

And the other one is that they didn't systematically greet people passing them on the street.

Now, that is a weird thing.

So if you go to a party in Switzerland, when you arrive, you have to go around the room saying hello and shaking hands with everybody else at the party.

So there's a huge incentive to arrive on time because if you get there on time, everyone comes up to you and says hello, and you don't have to go around saying that.

Actually, you want to go early, don't you, really?

Yeah.

So, there's this kind of game theory going on about what time do you arrive.

Yeah, I would actually rather get there late because if you arrive first, then that means all your conversations are going to be interrupted by the next arrival coming up and shaking your hand.

Whereas, if you arrive last, you get all the handshakes out the way immediately and you can get on with your conversations in peace.

That's my top tip for Swiss people out there.

It's very good.

Yeah, thank you.

This woman who's been rejected, she's writing a book, and the title of it is Selki Enerve, or The Lady who annoys

so she's embracing it that's nice yeah yeah great

what about the cowbells though like they do they are incredibly loud aren't they

it's like they're like a hundred decibels aren't they yeah and it's round your neck the whole time you can't get away with it i'd just jump off a cliff

and i'd follow you

Just on passports, there was a nine-year-old girl who recently got into Turkey on a toy passport.

This This was in 2013, and she was from Wales, and she had her own passport.

She was travelling with her parents, but she also had the passport that belonged to her teddy bear unicorn,

her soft toy unicorn.

And her mum accidentally pulled that out instead, handed it over to the authorities who duly stamped it and let her in.

It must have been roughly the same size and shape and colour as a normal passport, which is quite a well, they've got a unicorn on the front anyway.

British passports.

Actually.

Oh my god, I didn't know we we had royalty visiting, Your Highness.

Welcome, welcome to Turkey.

Can we quickly talk about how, until really recently, Switzerland was rigged to explode if an army invaded?

Yes, I think we can, because that's going to need a lot of justification.

So,

since the Second World War, Switzerland have had a really stringent plan for what would happen if they're invaded, because they're a famously neutral country.

The main kind of plan is for everyone in Switzerland to withdraw from the cities and fight a guerrilla war from the Alps if an army was to invade.

And all of the tunnels through the mountains and all the bridges were all rigged with explosives so that they could be blown up and it would be very difficult to get around the country, very difficult to get into the country in the mountains.

And they have all sorts of other plans, like they have enough nuclear bunkers for every citizen of Switzerland.

So presumably, this woman is going to be the only person who has nowhere to go.

Passport, please.

I've got this unicorn passport.

Okay, we've got to move on.

It's time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact is that there are people in the Houses of Parliament constantly looking for fire.

You phrase that like they're smokers and they're like, they don't have a light.

There are 24 fire patrol officers who go around the house of parliament.

They do it in shifts, obviously.

And the Palace of Westminster is basically only able to be used because they're working.

So if they weren't there, then the building would not comply with the 2005 fire safety order.

So they are easily the 24 most important people in the houses of parliament.

So you say that the fire people people have had to be installed because of this 2005 piece of health and safety regulation.

You do say that.

You do say that, and yet

I think that

effectively, Crown properties are exempt from health and safety regulations, so they still have to abide by them, but you can't prosecute the Crown properties for not abiding by them.

The only thing you can do is censure them.

So if they don't...

now abide by these rules, it goes through this incredibly long process that you will go through usually where someone else might go to prison at the end or be arrested or fined.

But with the Crown, they just get a formal censure.

Basically, this is about how shonky the Houses of Parliament are.

They're falling to bits, they really are, yeah.

There was a report in 2012 that said if it wasn't a listed building, they'd recommend demolishing it and starting again.

Really?

Wow.

Do they often find fires in their hunt?

They do, yeah.

Do they?

So there have been 60 incidents since 2008 which have had the potential to cause a serious fire.

Yeah, so that is completely insane.

How incompetent are the people in the houses of parliament?

No need to answer that, so we're talking.

Well, it's just a very old building, and there are lots of bits which are kind of fire hazards, and which, you know, it's a huge place as well.

There's a lot of kind of, it was built obviously before electricity, so the wires are all kind of bodged into where all the fire is.

They're really loose.

And there's loads of basically nothing gets uninstalled.

So anytime old wiring is replaced, they don't take out the old wiring.

So there's just tons of flammable material sitting there.

And there's loads of asbestos.

I mean, I know that's not flammable, but there's tons of asbestos.

It's sort of everywhere.

It's not just in the walls.

There's asbestos inside the light switches and things like that.

They just shoved it in absolutely everywhere.

Everywhere.

Of the 3,000 windows in the Palace of Westminster, nearly all of them don't close properly, according to this report.

That's very bad.

It was so badly built.

I guess does that mean if there's a fire, yeah, more air will get in, I suppose, to make the fire worse.

And I think the shutters don't open properly.

The windows don't close and the shutters don't open.

I think they built radiators.

I was reading the report on why it needs redoing, and one of the things in it said that they built radiators in the nooks that are supposed to house the shutters at some point.

So now when you try to open the shutters, there's a radiator in the way.

Sometimes MPs miss votes because they get stuck in lifts.

Do they?

Really?

Well, it's happened at least once.

Yeah,

I don't know.

When I say sometimes, I mean one time.

The legislation only passed by seven votes.

And so there was like a chance of if more people couldn't get there.

I mean, if they'd all been in that lift.

I used to work for an MSP in Scotland, and he once pressed the wrong button on his voting thing and voted the wrong way in a vote that came down to one vote.

that sheepish email to IAT support.

And then, what a terrible law passed because of that.

So, Scottish independence upcoming.

That's all him.

No, it was about green energy, I think.

I once worked in the House of Parliament for a while, and on my first day, someone came into the office I was working in and took off his shoe and threw it at a mouse in the corner because they have a really bad mouse problem.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow, what a

really cartoon-based way to deal with it.

According to MP Ben Bradshaw, there is urine leaking in the Houses of Parliament, specifically into his office.

A couple of years ago, he tweeted that urine seems to be pouring through the ceiling into my Commons office for the second day running.

There was some piping with holes in it in the room above him.

And the smell was only made bearable by his staff wearing strong perfume.

Apparently, the roof of the Hall of of Westminster, they aren't really sure why it's still up because they thought that it was originally built with columns as at the time during the 13th and 14th century we didn't think that they had the technology to make a roof that was wider than the beams it was made of and it doesn't have columns anymore but they recently had a look at it and they think that there were never any columns so they're unsure as to why it's up there and how it's staying up.

Is this going to be like in a cartoon when the building realizes it's going to just be standing up?

It's just three wheeling in the air for a bit and then yeah.

That's so so weird.

I know.

So, just on fire safety, has anyone seen the fire safety slide that's been installed in Shanghai?

No.

So, it's basically like a slide you see in a playground, and it goes round the stairwell.

And when it's not in use, then it's up vertically, kind of attached to the banisters.

Why is it not in use?

Who would a spiral slide in a massive building and thinks, oh, we won't bother using this?

James, this is not for the purposes of recreation.

It's a health and safety issue.

The only time you would ever want to use the the slide is in a case of a fire, in which case it takes 14 seconds to descend the five stories.

That is so cool.

Is there a penalty for improper use?

I'm almost certain.

But that is really far

14 seconds for five stories.

Well, I was trying to work out, I reckon I could run downstairs in less than that.

Absolutely, you're not married.

Three seconds per staring.

Oh, I don't know.

I take four stairs at a time.

I can do it.

I think you could fall that distance at that time.

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

My fact this week is that the cookie monster isn't allowed to eat cookies

since his diabetes diagnosis.

No, why not?

Well, cookies are actually bad for the fabric that he is made out of.

So he actually eats rice cakes disguised to look like cookies.

Disguise.

Yeah, I think he knows.

But it would be quite a powerful message about childhood healthy eating if he did eat cookies and slowly you saw his skin degrading and rotting away over the next six months of the show.

No, what to teach children that if you eat too many cookies, your fur will fall off.

I've never actually seen it, but they obviously are supposed to be educational, aren't they?

And they're good at dealing with the hard-hitting issues.

I think they're covering the Trump election as we speak.

They did have a character called Donald Grump.

No way.

So good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Based on Donald Trump, and it was when The Apprentice first became popular.

And he was a Muppet with a bright orange coiffure

who had the most most trash of any grouch in the world.

And he had his name on every piece of trash in town.

He was played by Oscar the Grouch.

And he's like, I have more trash than you.

Get it.

I don't know who Oscar the Grouch is.

Oh, right.

He's the guy who lives in the bin.

He's really grumpy.

As I said,

everyone else knows who Oscar the Grouch is.

It's true, actually.

Oscar the Grouch is quite...

Even if you'd never seen it, I'm surprised you'd never come across him.

Have you come across Big Bird?

Yep, so I've heard of Big Bird and I've heard of Elmo.

And I've heard of Burt and Ernie, but that's only because they're referenced in Friends, which I have seen.

And you must know the the Cookie Monster as well.

I think I thought that was the same as Big Bird.

He's appeared on every like he's appeared on News Nights, he's appeared on BBC Breakfast.

He's done more political shows than most people in this country.

And Jeremy Corbyn.

Took a long time for us to get in the Jeremy Corbyn shime.

Puppets don't have a sexual orientation.

And Sesame Street had to make that clear because apparently there are lots of rumours that Burt and Ernie are a gay couple.

Because they share a bed.

Oh, right.

Okay.

So I can see where those rumours came from.

Okay.

So there were rumours about that and they said they're just friends and puppets don't have a sexual orientation.

they're puppets, they don't exist below the waist.

They only have a top half.

Bird exists below the waist.

Yeah, I've seen.

He's not puppies.

And I guess, unless he belongs to the 3% of birds that do have a penis,

Big Bird will have a cloaca, which he will press against the cloaca of other big birds.

They are educational.

Presumably, they've discussed the cloak of Big Bird at some point in the show.

So a Big Bird is flightless, and isn't it true?

I read someone said this week that flightless birds have a bladder.

Is that right?

Flightless, the only bird with a bladder is the ostrich.

Ah, and that's because bladders are heavy and birds can't normally have them because it would weigh them down.

Yes.

But Big Bird could possibly have a bladder.

He could have a bladder.

Has anyone ever seen him wee?

No.

Donald Grump has the bladder.

Isn't Elmo the only non-human to testify in the court of law?

Where did the defendant tickle you?

No, it was during a campaign for increased funding for music programmes, and he testified that there should be indeed that.

Does he sing?

Is he involved?

Is he in musicals?

Yeah.

He sings.

Yeah, they all sing.

I hope.

So there's a list of

puppets that have been in Sesame Street and Muppets as well.

But there's a list.

And there was one called Anna.

Hey.

This was in the Spanish version of Sesame Street.

And it says that Anna had a know-it-all attitude.

Wow.

Based on me.

I'm not going to lie.

But it's a justified attitude, isn't it?

Alex Bell.

There was one called Belle, who was in the Brazilian co-production of Sesame Street.

And Belle was an imaginative hot pink monster girl.

Sounds about right.

That's my online profile.

And there was one called Murray Monster.

Was there?

Yeah.

And he was the host of the Word on the Street segment.

And he was a boisterous red-orange Muppet.

In the Nigerian version of Sesame Street, the star Muppet is called Kami, and Kami is HIV positive to remove the stigma of

people talking about

dealing with the heart-ishing issues, yeah.

That's so good.

I know.

Another responsible thing they do is they make a whole separate program called Talk, Listen, Connect, and it's for children with parents in the military, and they broadcast that to them to teach them about how much they're going to miss their parents and how it's okay.

And how, for instance, like amputees coming back from war zones, their children might be a bit traumatized by seeing that.

And so, there was a lovely story of a father who came back from Afghanistan, I think, and he'd had three of his limbs amputated and he was really worried.

They showed him the Sesame Street video that had been made to educate his children about his condition.

And he burst into tears.

Apparently, he was so happy that he had a good way of communicating it to his child.

Oh my goodness.

Some of them up is actually made of army surplus material.

I watched it on a documentary ages ago and I just remembered it.

The cookie monster has a British cousin

called

the Biscuit Bastard.

You are half right.

Oh, really?

It's the biscuit monster.

Oh, okay.

Biscuit bastard would be good.

That could educate children about how it's okay if your parents aren't married.

That's hilarious.

Does he actually feature on the American show then?

He was only in one episode where he came to visit the cookie monster.

Okay.

He was on holiday, tried to get himself a job as Donald Grumps representative in the year.

we could talk about biscuits, but do you think we're I can I just say one thing about biscuits then?

Yeah,

dunking biscuits was originally done in wine.

Um the first evidence we have of biscuit dunking was wafers that the Romans softened in um wine.

Oh wow uh and before dunking in tea even there was dunking in beer because in the Royal Navy you would have hard tack biscuits that were really really hard and you couldn't eat them very well so people would dunk them in their beer to soften them up.

That's very interesting.

Wafers in wine, that reminds me.

Are you allowed to dunk your wafer in your wine at church during communion?

You're not, no.

The idea of putting wafers directly into people's mouths, yeah, um, that came because they were worried that people would take them in their hand, hide them away, and use them for magic potions.

I thought you were going to say, use them slowly over time, build their own Christ at home.

Um, I was reading about Simon Pope, who's a biscuit designer and tester.

And so, Best job in the world,

it's honestly his job.

So, his job includes eating tasting biscuits from 472 packets of biscuits every year.

So, he says he tastes 30 biscuits a day.

He says he often doesn't swallow them because, I guess, for health reasons.

So, he says he'll nibble on them to check for things like taste, texture, and firmness.

He says he sometimes does have biscuits at work because it's important to test them in situ.

I need to test this batch in Las Vegas, I'm afraid.

Travel expenses are enormous.

He's in the plane.

He's got a seat next to him, which just has a packet of biscuits on it.

Always going around the world hobnobbing.

I think we might be done here.

I think so.

Two finishing returns, guys.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

We hope you've enjoyed it.

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