147: No Such Thing As Burrito Party Boy

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Things a Fish coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Anna Dushinsky and I'm here with Alex Bell, James Harkin and Andrew Hunter Murray.

Once again, we've gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order.

Here we go, James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1683 some people were ice skating in the Netherlands when the ice broke away and they floated all the way to Essex.

Yeah, well, did not happen.

No way.

Well, it happened according to some people.

So this is from a book called The Thames and Its Tributaries by Charles Mackay.

It's an old book.

And he says it's reported that this happened.

He says that some skate sliders upon those large icy plains were unawares, driven to sea and arrived living, though almost perished with cold and hunger, upon the sea coast of Essex.

Okay, and you know what?

I don't really believe it, but it is a kind of thing that happened, and it's kind of related to the mini-ice age that happened in the 17th century when it got really, really cold, and basically the sea was freezing, and all the rivers were freezing, and they had these frost fairs in London, and there was lots of crazy stuff that happened.

Whether this happened, I don't really know, but I believe it.

Because I want to.

Did they put a sail up?

Yeah, how big was the ice shelf?

Well, that one sentence that I said is the sum total of all the information I have about this fact.

Did they accidentally cut the raft off with their skates?

Well, what used to happen is they would people would have these fairs on the rivers and then they would try and keep them going as long as possible because they were so much fun.

But then as the kind of ice got less and less and less, it would break up into icebergs and then people would get stuck on these little ice flows.

And that definitely did happen.

Yeah.

They also tried to keep them going because they were quite economically important.

So the London Thames frost fairs happened partly because when the Thames freezes over, all the trade from the sea has to stop.

And like on one occasion, I think it was two months that the Thames froze over.

So

all the people that are usually working on the docks and stuff like that had nothing to do.

They had no income all of a sudden.

It was all the ferrymen as well.

And they were really cheeky.

So what they did, they would guard the access to the river basically because there are ladders and slipways.

It's not just a case of walking straight out onto the river.

And they would charge you two or three pennies to climb down the ladder and get onto the river.

And then they they'd charge you another penny to leave.

Even if you left up the same ladder?

Even if you left up the same ladder.

Really?

And you can't talk to the ticket inspector in the office and ask if you can get a refund on the oyster card.

There's no office.

There's no oyster card.

I don't know about the incentive programmes they had to come and use the same ladder again.

What happens, though, if you spend your last penny on a bit of, you know, candy floss or something?

And then how do you get off...

You have to stay on the river and so you float off to the Netherlands or something.

They must have been so exciting, though, the Thames River Fairs.

and partly because there weren't that many of them.

So this little ice age, I think you were saying, was in the 1700s, but it sort of spanned from the 13th century to the 19th and reached its peak then.

And there were only five Thames Frost Fairs, I thought, in that period, where properly the Thames froze over and all industry moved onto the Thames.

So it must have been so thrilling when it happened.

Yeah.

And they had like, you know, an elephant walked across, didn't it, in the 18, was it the 1814?

1814, yeah.

The last one, yeah.

But what happened was the elephant walked across the river right next to Blackfriars Bridge, which seems unnecessarily dangerous, doesn't it?

When you've got a bridge literally there,

a bit of a slap in the face of the bridge builders.

They are kind of dangerous, because there was a bloke who, because a few people died falling through the ice, really, really few compared with the number of people there, but one of them was a plumber who was carrying a load of lead across the river on the ice, and he, you know, clearly got to a weak bit of ice and fell in.

But apparently,

if that happened, a load of people and tents would just get dragged into a hole, which just sounds terrifying.

It it did happen on a couple of occasions, like just a huge chunk of ice and tents, and people would disappear.

There was one time when the ice broke up, and it was there were things attached to a local building, and then the ice broke up and kind of drifted away and pulled this building down.

Oh, yeah, I think it was a pub, wasn't it?

And it was when a ship had been anchored to a pub near Rotherhythe, and they just tied it around the beam of the pub, and then it dragged the pub down with it when the ice cream was down.

Like when you take your dog to a pub and leave it outside and tie it up to the side, but it's the world's strongest dog,

Clifford.

Yeah, they put a cable around the beam in the middle of the pub, and then they put an anchor in the cellar of the pub to keep it there.

Attached to the chest population.

I mean, you're just asking for the pub to be ripped out of its mooring.

Kind of, yeah.

Five people died, though.

Apparently, the highlight in 1814 was they roasted an entire ox on the ice, and this guy called Ivan Day has replicated that and says it takes 24 hours to spit roast an ox, and it would feed 800 people.

It's also interesting that you could light fires.

Apparently, a lot of the tents, like the shoemakers' tents and things, had fires in them to keep the people inside warm.

And that worked somehow and didn't melt the ice.

Because it was really thick.

They also had a lot of souvenirs which you could get, right?

But basically, they just had tat and books and toys and things that had been made.

in London and they just took them onto the ice, put a label on them saying sold on the icy Thames and then sold them for three times as much.

I'd buy it.

Wow.

Yeah, well there was one book that was made in the Frost Fair.

It was called Frostiana or a History of the River Thames in a Frozen State and the entire book was typeset and printed at a printing store which had been set up on the Thames.

That is this is cool.

I haven't heard of any other book which was printed at the place that it's about and then sold there as well.

Do you know they had ice brothels?

Did they?

Yeah.

Sounds very uncomfortable.

There were sex tents on the ice.

Nice.

I know.

It was written of one woman.

The heat of her buttocks made such a great thaw, she had leaf to drowned the man of the law.

So

it's really sad.

It's probably not going to happen anymore.

I mean, obviously it hasn't happened for 200 years.

But the reason it happened in the first place was that it happened near the old London Bridge, right?

And that had loads and loads and loads of arches.

So it was really annoying for river traffic because the archers meant you couldn't get big ships through there.

And as a result, that slowed the flow of the water down, and it meant that

it was froze over much more easily.

It actually sped the flow of the water up.

What slowed the flow of the water down was that the Thames was much wider and shallower then because it hadn't been embanked.

There was no embankment.

So what the old London Bridge did was the arches were were much narrower, which meant that it was much easier for a block of ice that was floating in to get stuck and sort of form the beginning of a dam, which ice could then form across.

I reckon that we have the technology now to freeze the Thames if we wanted to.

I was gonna say, it would be really cool if we did it again by just injecting nutrients or something.

Yeah, it probably costs quite a bit, but Sadiq Khan, come on.

I don't know if that one penny entrance and exit fee is gonna pay for the technology of freezing the entire Thames.

They used to play sports while it froze over on the Thames.

They played football, for instance.

They also played donkey racing, nine-pin bowling, throwing at cocks.

Sorry, just to go back, because I read about the nine-pin bowling, and I want to know when they added the extra pin to throw it.

I like the way that I went nine-pin bowling and throwing at cocks, and it was nine-pin bowling that you had a problem with.

My understanding of nine-pin bowling and ten-pin bowling, and this is going off really old knowledge, is that they banned nine-pin bowling for gambling, and then they kind of put in an extra pin to try and get around the law.

I see, very clever.

Throwing at cocks actually sounds like it's the same as nine-pin bowling really, doesn't it?

It does, but with cocks instead of pins.

Yeah, it's like an upgrade.

That's pretty much what it is, apart from so you get a chicken and you throw stuff at it.

That's kind of how it happened.

Nice.

There was also shooting at pricks.

Wasn't that?

Yeah, it's not the same as throwing at cocks.

It's kind of shooting at pricks is an old name for a kind of archery, apparently.

What was the prick?

I imagine it must be the sharp bit at the end of your arrow.

I would have thought that as well, but you don't shoot at that arrow.

You're right.

Are they throwing the board towards the arrow?

No, a prick is an old word for a small indentation or something.

That makes sense.

It's like a needle prick or a pin brick.

So that's what you would aim in for, the little indentations.

Cool.

In 1540, the word prick was a term of endearment for a man.

So instead of darling or sweetheart, you would say my prick.

Is that because of the penis uh thing uh because prick I'm sure has meant penis for quite a long time yeah I think it has I think it's Shakespearean-ish isn't it yeah and you you you say watch a cock I do say cock you say that all the time not all the time constantly saying it to me

well in the 1960s a spare prick at a wedding was a bit of British slang for someone who is embarrassingly out of place in a particular situation okay I think that's worth

but not somebody with their cock out

that would be I mean that would work as well, isn't it?

You wouldn't be out of place like that.

That's standard fair at weddings, isn't it?

We have just been to Dan's wedding, and I don't remember much of that going on.

Oh, you're in the wrong room.

So, Russia was quite used to these kind of things.

It wasn't as exciting there.

They were accustomed to their rivers freezing over and having big fares and stuff on them.

Still are.

Still are.

I've skied on the Moscow River.

Have you?

When I went to St.

Petersburg, I saw a wedding actually happening on the frozen off too.

It was amazing.

It must be quite hard to stand up, go down the aisle.

Everyone's sliding around.

Or to see the bride.

Yeah.

Well, that's.

She's floated off to Finland.

And I've accidentally married a snowman.

Okay, moving on to fact number two, and that is from Alex Bell.

My fact this week is that former Argentinian president Carlos Menem had such a reputation for bad luck that people would touch their left breast or testicle while shaking his hand.

I find the while shaking his hand a bit pretty insulting.

I think they used the other hand.

I understand, but it's fairly obvious what you're doing if your hand slides into your pocket

as you're shaking hands with the former president of your country.

Yeah, absolutely.

This guy is extraordinary, many.

Yeah, we should call him the unnameable because it's bad luck to say his name.

So he's like Voldemort in many ways.

Yeah, except people instead say things like Mendez or Menen, where with Voldemort, you don't just say Voldetrom.

It's true.

So he's supposedly not allowed to attend football matches, Argentina team football matches, because in 1990 in the World Cup he visited when they were playing and he approached the goalkeeper, Pumpido, to shake hands.

And this was ages ago, so clearly the myth was established even then that he was cursed.

The goalie refused to shake his hand because of the curse.

He just sort of put his hands up and said, oh, you're not going to know.

So then Menem laughed and he gave him a pass on the knee.

And in the match that followed, A, Argentina lost, and B, the goalkeeper fractured his knee.

How do you bat someone's knee?

It's such a stretch to get down there?

He was probably aiming for the left testicle.

Do you know that witchcraft is explicitly banned in Malawi, I think it is, in football?

Is it?

Yeah.

As in it's in their rules that you're not allowed to.

Really?

I don't think it's explicitly illegal in British football, but I did write to a referee about this to find out what the truth is.

He hasn't replied, weirdly enough.

But I reckon that it would be ungentlemanly conduct, a yellow card and an indirect free kick.

I don't think that matters though if you've just turned stoke into pigs.

Football is full of these superstitions though.

It's all you do something once, you win a match, and then you have to do it every time.

Yeah.

Scoring goals.

So there was another Argentinian guy, Carlos Bilado.

In the quarterfinals, the goalie had to pee on the pitch because they were about to have a penalty shootout and there wasn't time for him to get back to the dressing room and have a pee there.

So his teammates all surrounded him in a wall.

He had a pee on the pitch.

And then he blocked two shots and Argentina ended up going through.

So the next match.

Every time there was a free kick and they made a wall, he peed against them.

Next match, Bilado made him pee on the pitch again because he thought it would be lucky.

Did it work?

It did not work.

They did not win the next match.

You're going to be under pressure, aren't you?

Like with 60,000 people watching you.

So, yeah, back to Menem and the reasons that people think he's bad luck.

I like the fact that he shook the hand of the world powerboat racing champion who was called Daniel Schioli in 1989, and immediately Schioli's boat crashed and he lost his arm.

But then Schioli became an MP for Mr.

Menom's party.

Michael Schumacher, I think, he shook his hand, and then Michael Schumacher was immediately shunted.

Yeah, but then he narrowly won the next race.

And if that's the curse of Menim, is that you win by slightly less than you're normally accustomed to.

I think it's not much much of a curse.

Yeah.

He's also known as the father of the devastating 2001 economic collapse, which is a pretty

heavy title to be taking.

If you want to be the father of anything, it's not that.

Menem did become famous for his womanizing as well.

So he married a former Miss Universe when he was about 73.

Bad luck for her.

Bad luck for her.

I like, this is confusing.

So there was an article listing

all of his bad lucks, and it ended on this.

So it went through all these people that he's cursed.

It ended by saying, the night before the 2000 US presidential elections, the unnameable, as in Menem, is said to have called his good friend George W.

Bush to wish him good luck.

Need I say more?

I mean, George Bush won that election.

Actually, he's won that election despite losing that election, so it's incredibly good luck.

My favourite thing about him is that his surname is a palindrome.

That's pretty much all I like about him.

Which means that he has something in common with ex-Cambodian president Lon Null.

Wow.

Who, as far as I can tell, is the only head of state ever to be a complete palindrome.

Really?

That's really good.

Do you think they meet?

Well, they have a little club.

Yeah.

In the middle somewhere in Panama.

Yes, in a canal in Panama.

In a man in a canal in Panama.

In his election campaign, one of the ways he won is that he swore he'd throw the Brits out of the Falklands.

And then as soon as he did win, he started really trying to ingratiate himself with Britain.

To the extent that he angled desperately, according to The Guardian, for an invitation to Buckingham Palace, So many times did he announce that he had been invited to London that the Foreign Office eventually had to let him come.

Which I didn't know you could do that.

If you just announced repeatedly that the Queen's invited you to Buckingham Palace, she's eventually forced to let you through the door.

No, you work for any party.

I'm coming tonight.

I'm really looking forward to coming tonight.

It's going to be great.

Hey, everyone, let's go to this party.

I think that would work.

Yeah.

Do you think it would?

Well, you're playing by a rule that other people don't recognise, or rather, you're not playing by rules that other people do recognise.

Yes.

So if you just say, I am invited to this party, people will be embarrassed, even though it's nothing to do with them.

It's all you embarrassing yourself.

The embarrassment will reflect on them.

Okay.

And you'll be like, yeah, fine, whatever.

It doesn't affect my life so much if they come to my party.

Yeah.

And I don't want to look like a rude idiot.

Weirdly, I did get a letter from the Queen yesterday asking if I wanted to attend her private reception next week.

I found a really questionable list on Quora, I think it was, of some other superstitions in a discussion by some other people.

I like the way you said the word word quora in a real undertone in the hope that people might miss that as a source

my favourite ones were um apparently it's bad luck to leave your purse lying open on the floor because that means that you'll lose money obviously

somehow related also if you eat watermelon with a glass of red wine you will die and apparently loads of argentinians just like that's just a proper wives tale that people are like don't do that you'll die i've heard things like that not just in Argentina because it used to be I think that you would have foods that were very hot foods and foods that were very cold foods.

And even if they weren't necessarily hot or cold, they were felt that that's the effect they would have on your body.

And the watermelon would be particularly cold and icy, whereas the wine would warm you up.

And it would think that the two opposites would kind of clash and go.

It's Friday the 13th today, which is one reason we might be talking about superstitions.

And there's a vet in Australia that has a promotion for Friday the 13th where it's discounting its neutering for black cats.

Oh,

we've got a black cat.

I could fly to Australia and save loads of money getting it neuters.

Is the aim so that there are fewer black cats?

Because some people think they're bad luck.

I think they're good luck.

It depends which way they cross the road.

If they cross from left to right, it's one.

And if they cross from right to left, but is it different in the UK and the rest of Europe?

That's a really good point, it must be.

And also which way you're going on the road as well.

No, you're coming towards the cat.

So if it crosses from your left to your right, it's one.

It's relative to you.

Whereas someone walking the other way will experience opposite luck based on the movement of the cat.

Right, okay.

You know left and right is always relative.

Yeah.

That's the thing about it.

Oh, yeah.

That is the interesting thing, that it's impossible or there's not very many ways to explain to an alien, say, which is left and which is right if you don't have a similar field of reference.

Yeah.

I'd have more important things to talk about.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

I bet you'd freeze up if it actually came to it.

Yeah, I'd be very nervous.

I'm not good with new people.

And you're a whole new species.

So I'm really looking forward to coming to your planet.

Yeah, you've said that five times.

Okay, we should move on to fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that Isambar Kingdom Brunel once spent six weeks with a coin stuck in his windpipe as a result of a magic trick that backfired.

Did he?

He did indeed.

Yeah, so I found this.

I was, for some reason, I was looking him up in the British newspaper archive, a bit bored, and I found an obituary for him from 1862, and it said the closest he came to death was when he was trying to impress his children in 1843.

Thank God.

This is not very far from his actual death.

The closest he came to death was one second before he died.

The second closest he came to death.

I'm sure they issued a correction the next day.

He was trying to impress his children

by doing a magic trick where he swallowed a half sovereign coin and then brought it out of his ear but instead the sovereign landed in his windpipe.

So what happened?

So what happened was he had chest pains for a while and quite bad coughing and he, because he's an engineer as we know, possibly the most important thing he ever designed was a contraption in order to extract it.

And I couldn't find any diagrams of it but apparently it was a movable platform with hinges on it which I think he strapped his body to and it bent his body over at an 80 degree angle and then he was repeatedly struck on the back and the idea was that this would dislodge the coin.

so he tried this out and it almost killed him one time so they didn't do that again and then he took six weeks having various doctors fiddle about with him one of them tried to get forceps in there and pull it out but he nearly died again and then eventually he went back to the contraption but this time with an incision cut in his throat and he bent himself over on this contraption he designed and there was this incision on his throat which was you know when you have like a tracheotomy that was allowing him to breathe and so he then managed to choke the coin up and as it was rising up through his windpipe, he was still able to breathe because the incision was there in his throat.

And he coughed it up.

And he actually did say that the moment when he heard the gold piece strike against his upper front teeth was perhaps the most exquisite moment of his whole life.

Wow.

It was a really famous thing throughout the country.

The the Isn't about Kingdom Brunel coin thing.

Everyone knew about it because he was very famous at the time.

So for example, um there's a famous uh Victorian historian called Thomas Babington Macaulay.

And when he read the good news, supposedly he ran along the street yelling, it's out, it's out, and everybody knew what he was talking about because he was talking about the coin.

It's an incredible story.

Yeah, it is.

It is so ingenious the way he got himself out of it.

Yeah, and crazy that he got himself out of it and that, you know, all these doctors tried and then he just built a machine.

Yeah, is he clever for getting himself out or is he stupid for getting himself into it?

I'd say a bit of both.

Technically, he got itself out of him.

That's true, yeah, yes.

But yeah, I was actually looking him up because I visited recently the Brunel Museum in Rotherhythe, which if you are passing is really cool.

It's absolutely tiny and it's the Mark Brunel Museum.

So it's about the Thames Tunnel, which is the first ever tunnel that was built under a river.

And it was designed by Mark Brunel and Isambar Brunel, his son, helped him out.

And it's a really cool place.

Go there.

It's an amazing story.

It was like an unbelievable feat of engineering.

And that's where he came third closest to dying as well.

I got an extract of the description of the the conditions that the workers put up with there.

They were showered in raw raw sewage and dodged flames from ignited methane gas whenever they worked.

It was the worst job in the world.

They only worked four-hour shifts because they collapsed after four hours and then would be replaced by men who were still breathing.

And then they would work for four hours and then be replaced by another shift.

And they were constant, there were five floods, I think.

Yeah.

In one of which Brunel was down there and nearly died.

And

it's just insane that they carried on.

Why did they have showers of raw sewage?

I think because it was constant leaking in the Thames was

coming in.

It was disgusting then.

He so you know when it froze up, would it just be like frozen turds everywhere?

Oh, God.

I guess it would have been, right?

Bumpy skate rink.

Yeah.

I guess you have snow on top as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So he brought a lot of this on himself in the tunnel.

So he nearly drowned three times, right?

He fell into a water tank once.

That could have happened anywhere.

Exactly.

So that's not so bad.

But then there was a time where he was with a party of influential visitors in a rowing boat and he was trying to freak them out by rocking it from side to side.

Fell in, nearly drowned.

And there was the third time, the most deadly time, which we've just talked about,

was because he was told, you shouldn't dig through there, that's soft mud, that'll bring the river in.

And he said, no, it's fine, don't worry about it.

And he did.

And he dug through that bit.

River came in, the ceiling collapsed, and he was pulled to safety.

But six members of the evacuation crew died.

Just quickly on the tunnel, something else you should look up is the painting that's been done of the banquet that they had inside it.

So one time when it flooded to celebrate the fact that everyone hadn't died and it was still going, they held this enormous banquet and they invited all of high society there.

That is asking for trouble, isn't it?

It was like, everyone almost died.

What shall we do?

Let's get all of society back in the tunnel.

Apart from anything else, you're basically asking for the Riddler to attack.

Well, it looks very exciting.

Nobody died, so crisis averted.

No, and it looks amazing.

And they used to have stools, so what did happen in the tunnel was they had lots of little market stools running all the way through it, and it was a tourist attraction.

It was much like the ice fairs, and people would have to pay a few pennies to go into the tunnel.

And they'd walk through it.

Come Come and see the death tunnel of death.

He also built an atmospheric railway, i.e.

a vacuum railway

pumped along by pressure.

Can we refer to it as the atmospheric caper, which is what they called it?

It's the best name in the world.

That's so cool.

It didn't really work, unfortunately.

So basically it would be huge pipelines pumping out air to create a vacuum to push the train along with atmospheric pressure.

But it's it's such a cool steampunky reason it failed.

The technology needed the air pipes to be sealed with leather flaps, right?

They needed to be kept supple and moist, so they needed tallow kind of fat to be sort of smeared on them, right?

Unfortunately, rats like eating tallow, so they ate a load of the flaps and stopped the system from working.

So, yeah, the system, the design was perfect.

It was just the environment that it was made in.

Exactly.

And it did work for seven months to successfully carry people from Exeter to Plymouth, I think.

And there is a pub now in a place called Starcross called the Atmospheric Railway, which sounds all modern, but that was from the mid-19th century.

Really?

Yeah.

You'd be expecting a really atmospheric piston.

We should say the good thing about the atmospheric railway, the reason he made it is because you don't need to carry your fuel with you because there would be fuel planted along the way.

So that the way the vacuum was created was through piston action.

And every three miles, the pistons were fueled by steam, by little steam sheds.

And so you didn't need to have all this heavy fuel that you carried with you on your train.

So it would be efficient.

But then we found electricity and we didn't need any anymore.

So, Mark Brunel, great engineer, Isenbard Kingdom Brunel, great engineer.

So, it's gone through the family.

There is another direct descendant of Brunel called Molwenna Wilson, who made a craft made entirely out of folded paper and managed to sail it on some water.

Great engineering, great engineering, right?

It's

completely made out of paper, apart from the keel,

which is made out of wood and polystyrene.

And the keel.

I mean, what even is a keel?

It can't be that important, right?

That's pretty cool, though.

Yeah, no, it is good.

That's awesome.

Does she charge people two pennies to get in it and sail across the river?

Then does she rock it from side to side?

That's really tarnished my view of Ismarkina Brinano.

I was thinking of him as an absolute child.

Well, he was a bit of a slave driver.

Like, a lot of people died on the huge tunnel he built on the Great Western Railway.

Box tunnel.

The box tunnel, that's right.

Yeah, supposedly about 100 people died in the date of that.

And he supposedly did it so that the sun shines down it on his birthday.

I read that that was a myth, though.

Well, did you?

We worked it out, and we think it's pretty much not far away from being true.

Oh, really?

Whether he did it on purpose or not.

We actually asked the railway company if we could go and check it out.

And they said, no, there's high-speed trains going through.

But why can we ask you not to do his trespass on our railways?

Yeah, so they wouldn't let us, but we reckon that at least it should pretty much work.

Do you know one thing he did do in the box tunnel, speaking of high-speed trains, is he used to quite like driving the steam train sometimes and he was driving through the box tunnel once next to the driver and he was the one who was driving the train and he suddenly saw a big obstacle in front of him, too late to break and avoid it.

And so James Bond put his foot down, like went full steam ahead and just blasted straight through it.

That's what happened to our researcher.

And it turned out that it was a carriage from another train that had accidentally fallen off the train and been left on the track and he just blasted it into smithereens, plowed right through it.

He was an action.

All of his work actually came from the time when he nearly drowned in the Thames because he went to convalesce for ages and ages in Clifton, near Bristol.

And that's where he got hired for a load of jobs because he was thinking and writing and designing all the time he was convalescing.

And at Clifton, so they had the two towers of the bridge.

They didn't have the main body of the bridge, but they did have an inch and a half thick metal wire rope going across the gorge by the time while he was still alive.

And he went across in a wicker basket on a pulley and it jammed while they were halfway across.

And if you started rocking it,

if you've seen the Clifton Gorge, you know that is terrifying because it is so high, it's instant death if you fell.

And he looked up, took off his hat, climbed up to the pulley, unjammed it, and they continued along the way.

That's the fourth closest he came to do.

Actually, the foundations of the Clifton suspension bridge were invented not by him but by a lady called Sarah Guppy, who gave the plans to Brunel for free because she believed that women must not be boastful.

Wow.

Yeah, there's someone's written a book basically saying that Brunel was not nearly as good as we all think, and he didn't design the Clifton suspension bridge.

Hardly any of it was related to his original design, even by the time it was fully made.

I think it was pretty good.

Well, read the book, Andy.

I certainly haven't, but I read an article about it.

Okay we should move on to fact number four and that is Andy's facts.

Yes my fact is that to deal with violent or drunk people Japanese police carry massive futons and roll the offender up in them to calm them down.

This is fantastic.

They genuinely do it.

They turn criminals into burritos.

And would that calm you down, do you think?

I think it would.

If you're rendered completely immobile and you're just sort of in your comfy futon, on, I would, yeah, I'd calm down.

Yeah, like when you put a bag over a horse's head and it stops.

Yeah.

Stop doing that, Alex.

So, this is from a podcast which is called My Perfect Country.

Each episode is about a country that is doing something right in a particular aspect of law or society or whatever it is, and you're doing it perfectly.

So, for example, this is about very low crime and particularly gun crime in Japan.

It's almost impossible to get a gun in Japan.

You have to do exams, you have to score more than 95% on a rifle range test.

So if you do get a gun, at least we know you'll be incredibly accurate.

Yeah, there's no attempted murder charges ever.

So that's what they should do.

If you get less than 5% in the rifle range, they should give you a gun.

Help yourself.

Yeah, and as a result, there were six occasions last year when the Japanese police fired their guns in total.

And in 2014, there were six gun deaths.

I mean, they just don't really have them.

That's good.

We do have very similar stats with

police people firing guns.

Yeah, so anyway, this is about Japanese policing methods and how they

roll people up.

Yeah.

It's from the sushi tradition, basically.

I think someone looked at some sushi and thought, wait a second.

Why don't we carry massive bits of seaweed around with us?

What if that bit of cucumber was a violent offender?

Yeah,

I think it would be quite awkward as a police officer if for this very occasional time when you get a violent offender, because like you say, there's not many guns, but you always have to carry a massive futon around with you.

They are slightly smaller in Japan, aren't they?

So, futons are a big thing in Japan.

A lot of people sleep on futons, and they're not like I imagine, which is kind of a proper sofa that turns into a bed kind of thing.

They're just like a sofa.

Yeah, they're not juves.

Sorry, they're more like juves than mattresses, aren't they?

Basically, kind of.

It's pretty supportive.

It's a thin mattress that you sleep on.

But do you know what else gets a futon in Japan if you want it?

Is your wallet?

So, there's a futon company.

Yep, it's a futon company called Nakategawa Futons, and they've started making saifutons, which means wallet futon, and it's made of high-quality cotton.

It includes a little cover, like a duvet cover for your wallet, and it includes a pillow for the head of your wallet, whichever end of your wallet is the head.

It says it's been blessed from priests at a shrine in Tokyo.

And if you want to go, like, if you want to go more expensive, you can order a little bed that comes with it.

I'm going to go out on the limb and say this company is not going to last very long.

Do you see the amount they charge for these futons?

They cost about 115 quid, give or take.

So the futon and bed is 340.

So then you've got nothing to put in your wallet.

Oh no, it's hilarious.

They are beautiful though.

Look them up.

I mean, I'd be tempted, but then I'm a sucker for

stuff like that.

Have you heard of the Boroboroton?

No, this is a legend, which is like an evil spirit described as a tattered futon that comes to life at night and it's basically part of a group of uh these kind of demons these spirits called uh sukumogami they're basically all household objects that either they're possessed by spirits or ghosts or if you use them constantly for 90 to 100 years they eventually become sentient

and they will be they'll be fine and they'll just kind of do like they'll just behave like normal household objects unless uh they're feeling ignored or needless in which case they will come to life and try to strangle their owners and they'll float around through the house or they will throw noisy parties with other members of the family so you'll get all your household objects having a party and they're trying to kill you but how do you how do you stop a violent offender futon

wrap it up with a drunk person

um so the police in north wales a few years ago this is in 2010 they hired a troop of actors to pretend to be drunk did they it was to do a sting on a load of pubs in north wales they had about 50 pubs they wanted to check and see if they'd serve people who were obviously inebriated so they hired a troop of actors to dress up as drunks, and they gave them all the clothes and costumes as well.

Like they gave them shabby jackets and monkey trousers and shoes, and they said, go in, pretend to be absolutely blind, drunk, and see if you can get served.

Wow.

But then you couldn't prosecute anyone because they're not drunk.

I don't know.

I imagine you could arrest on those grounds.

And you don't think so.

No.

I mean, neither of us has tried it.

Well, I used to be a landlord.

You used to be a landlord for a pub.

I had a personal landlord's license, yeah.

But is that like having a drinks cabinet?

Is that just in your house?

No, it's personal landlords because we've all i've got one of those it means i could go to any pub and be officially by law the landlord of that pub so about 15 years ago they changed the law it used to be that you the building had the license right but then they changed it so that the landlord had the license the reason they did it i think is because they had a lot of chain pubs and stuff like that and i used to be an accountant for a pub company and i did my personal license and so it meant that if there were like landlords on holiday i could go and work in the pub as the landlord in fact I wouldn't even have to work.

I could just be sat there while other people were doing all the job, but I'd be kind of the one responsible.

Wow.

You'd be saying, Yeah, you can leave your ship outside.

Yeah, but the cable's ram here.

That's fine.

That's good to know.

We should use that.

I'm not anymore.

It's slapsed.

I mean, it lapsed 15, 20 years ago.

It lapsed.

You're a pointless friend to us then.

They have for drunk people on the streets of the UK, they've trialled drunk tests.

They don't have drunk people on the streets of the UK.

They're all acting.

This is always my line.

It's just the Amdram capital of the world.

No, they have drunk tanks now, and the idea is that you get people out of AE and you stop clogging up ambulances with drunk people.

And they've trialled this in Bristol, and I think they've trialled it in other places as well.

And in 2014, for instance, over one weekend, it kept 15 people out of hospital.

Because what they do is they had a mobile drunk tank, which is just a lorry, which, if someone's really drunk and thinks they're really ill and collapses, you shove them in the lorry and then let them have a nap.

That sounds like a a party.

I mean, I would

getting drunk and they'd be putting in a lorry.

That's brilliant.

I think these people might have gone past the fun part of drunk.

Oh, that is going to be the most, it's going to be full of vomit and pierces.

It's going to stink.

Oh, my God.

Do you reckon they have futons in there?

Everyone's rolled up in a futon.

Actually, they are just big futons made of metal, then.

It's the same principle.

Yes.

I mean, you can say anything's a futon made of something else, can't you?

This building's a futon made of bricks.

Excuse me, I've got a complaint about this sandwich it's just a futon made of bread and cheese

you know you can buy um speaking of bread and futons and all that kind of stuff um you can buy a towel which is deliberately created in the likeness of a flower tortilla

um so you can wrap yourself up like a burrito that's really good people

and sexy too is it oh yeah that's weird because the people who invented this um they're a collective called ampersand friends and friends or something uh they told the Huffington Post that they were inspired by the fantasy of being a human burrito.

Wow.

It would be weird if they said that we were inspired by the collected works of Shakespeare.

It makes sense.

You are right, of course.

But odd reading of Hamlet there.

Actually, there is a guy who's addicted to being rolled up in carpets.

Is there?

Yeah.

Maybe he's part of this collective.

I think he might be the inspiration for it.

He's a guy called Giorgio T.

He didn't want to be known by his full name.

He's in New York and he loves rolling himself up in a carpet and having people tramp on him.

That's charming, that's the most charming addiction I've ever heard of: rolling up.

And now he hires himself out to parties and rolls up in a carpet and women just trample all over him.

He particularly likes women and he gets paid for that.

He doesn't go naked, does he?

People will pay up to $200 for him to perform for him.

Yeah, I mean, it's lovely, isn't it?

When your weird, perverted fetish can turn into your jar.

Well, if anyone would like a burrito boy to turn up at their house.

Okay, that's all of our facts for this week.

If you want to get in touch with any of us, you can get in touch on Twitter.

Alex is on at Alex Bell underscore James at egg-shaped Andy at burrito party boy

or if we don't use that at Andrew Hunter M, we're using it.

And if you want to listen to any of our previous episodes, you can go to no suchthingsafish.com.

That's all for this week.

We'll see you again next week.

Bye-bye.