144: No Such Thing As Garlic Superman

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

My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with James Harkin, Alex Bell, and Andrew Huncher Murray.

And once again, we have gathered around round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order.

Here we go.

Starting with you, Andy Murray.

My fact is that in 1851, all of the 436,800 sandwiches sold on the streets of London were ham.

Just ham, sandwiches.

Just ham sandwiches.

That's so obviously not true.

It can't be true.

Well,

I think it is.

Was it just ham or did they have like ham and pickle or ham and mustard or?

I had some mustard.

Okay.

Had other sandwiches been invented at that point and they thought we don't actually like those, we'll stick with ham?

I think they have because I think they had cheese sandwiches because we've said before on this podcast, they used to be called bread and meat or bread and cheese.

Yeah.

So I'll tell you, basically, ham sandwiching was a thing, as in you didn't have a sandwich shop, you would be a sandwich seller and you have your own ham and you would boil it and then you would sell it from your car.

So it's quite hard to have a big range.

And we only know about this because there was a guy called Henry Mayhew who was a social investigator and he wrote this huge work called called London Labour and the London Poor.

And he calculated that that number of sandwiches were sold.

And the only ones he came across were ham ones.

So...

He's pretty amazing, this guy.

He is.

I hadn't heard of him.

He co-founded Punch, which was the original British satirical magazine that ran for, God, hundreds of years.

So it might this have been satire we're talking about.

No, it's not.

And Bea Wilson, who's a food writer, and her book's very good, she also has written an essay on the subject.

And she said that all her sandwiches were ham on.

If Bea Wilson says it, it, then I do believe it.

But even before Lee went and did punch, he had the most ridiculous childhood.

He ran away from home when he was 12 to join the East India Company.

Wow.

And worked on their ships.

And then he came back and tried law, and then he went into journalism.

But 12, he ran away when he was 12.

But you know how people used to die younger?

Is it like dog years?

Is 12 actually like 18 back then?

Well, I guess kind of, but also it was he ran away because he didn't want to follow the same career as his father.

So it's a pretty early stage.

What did his father do?

He was a sailor.

I think he was an accountant.

Oh, well, I can understand that.

He was a very fertile accountant because Henry Mayhew was one of 17 children.

Was he?

17.

Wow.

He did report on his sandwich investigation that one seller told him that sometimes cab drivers would offer to fight them for a sandwich instead of paying for it.

That doesn't really feel like it would be a good idea.

Well, it doesn't work in prep when I try it.

Because as a sandwich seller, the best outcome is that you've won a fight

and kept your sandwich.

But you've had to fight someone not to lose a sandwich.

Yeah, exactly.

It feels like it would be better for you to do nothing at all than to get involved in this part.

Yeah, say no transactions.

This isn't the best ham-based story from 1851, I have to say.

It was a good year, wasn't it?

We should say what else happened in 1851, just to give it some extra expression.

Yeah, sure.

A great exhibition happened in London.

And it was just ham sandwiches on the way.

Well, didn't they have tinned food as one of the attractions?

I guess ham may have.

and also Moby Dick was published.

I've got to say the best Moby Dick fact ever, which we all know because it was found by one of our colleagues, Ed Brooke Hitchens,

this last week, which is that he got a rejection letter from one publisher saying the whale is obviously a nice idea, but maybe you could replace it by something more popular, maybe young voluptuous maidens.

Why would you want to harpoon young voluptuous maidens?

That's true.

That doesn't make any sense.

I would have been like Carrie.

It would have just been horror novel.

Hang on, hang on.

Dan, you said you had a better ham anecdote from 1851.

Yeah, well, okay, Alex.

We all did it in our heads, James, and we decided not to say it.

That's not how podcasts work, though.

Yeah, so other news, Alex mentions the great exhibition, Moby Dick.

Two other things that happened in 1851 is that the New York Times was founded and Reuters News was founded as well.

So obviously a lot more outlet to report ham-based stories were erupting that year.

So Christmas in 1851, have you heard about this?

In London, it was a sort of super great giveaway to all the poor of London to feed them on Christmas Day.

And it was over 22,000 people who were fed in one single place.

And that place was called Ham Yard.

In Ham Yard in London, they had benefactors from all the richest people in London who gave one guy called Mr.

Richard Cooper, a supply 200 pounds of beef.

And they did a massive Christmas meal for all the less privileged of London.

So over 22,000 people fed in one go by a very famous chef.

He's often called the first celebrity chef, Alexis Sawyer.

And it was his idea, and he put it together and he fed all these people.

Wow.

Yeah.

I've been to Hamyard, South Regent Street.

Yeah, still there, right?

Still there, yeah.

The best ham sandwich-related story of the mid-19th century.

Okay, that's cheating a bit.

Well, it is.

This comes from around 1840, so it's about 10 years before both of your ham sandwiches.

Oh, this is way better than if you've got predated it's true.

Um, so the town of Swindon was invented by a ham sandwich.

What?

Um, it was founded by a ham sandwich, let's say.

The story goes, I don't know if this is true, that Isenbard Kinden Brunel was on the railway and he knew that they had to found a town somewhere on the railway because they needed to have a stop there.

And he started eating his ham sandwich, and then he thought, Well, as soon as I've had enough of this sandwich and I throw it out the window, wherever it lands, that's where I'm going to start my new town.

And it landed where currently Swindon is.

No way.

Hang on.

Because you'd have to stop the train immediately.

Yeah.

And go back and find a train.

And go back and find the sandwich.

That is true.

Unless you remembered.

Oh, we were passing through Swindon when I threw my sandwich out of the window.

I threw my sandwich out right next to that sign that says, Welcome to Swindon.

But Swindon was tiny.

It was absolutely tiny before the railway arrived, and then it became huge.

So there's another town sort of further south in Worldshire called Marlborough, and it's absolutely tiny, but it could as easily have gone the other way if Isn't Buckingham Runel had, you know, been a bit hungrier or hadn't had a banana at breakfast and he wanted a bit more of his sandwich.

So ham sandwiches are still extremely popular.

Are they?

Oh, yeah.

The British Sandwich Association says that ham sandwiches is the most popular sandwich in the UK.

Really?

Do you think they'll look back in 100 years at 2016 and think it was a great age of ham sandwiches as well?

I think finally, back to the great times of 1851.

So this is an old survey.

I can't imagine though, it was 2001.

I can't imagine in 15 years it's changed that much.

But they said that the favorite filling wasn't ham though.

It was cheese, but a ham sandwich on its own topped.

But the favorite filling.

Yeah.

I always like my ham sandwiches without ham, but with cheese.

I think what they mean is, what's your favorite filling?

Well, if I'm having a sandwich, I love it if there's cheese in there.

And they said, would you be happy with just a cheese sandwich?

No, no, I think I'll go for ham.

I think that's how the conversation went.

Wait, but the favorite filling, is that because you have it outside the sandwich?

No, you have it in the sandwich, but you might have it with ham.

So you have a ham and cheese sandwich.

So you're saying ham is not a filling because it's the base ingredient of the sandwich.

You don't for anything extra is a filling?

No, no, there's two questions.

What is there's bread added item in it, and you could have at least one item in it.

They've gone for ham sandwich.

That works best as a sandwich.

Yeah.

What's your favorite filling to go in a sandwich?

Oh, okay.

Well, if I'm having a ham sandwich, rather than pickle, I'll have cheese.

But cheese is the favourite added on.

What was your favourite filling for two slices of bread?

Is ham.

Yeah.

Of all the things that people have voted on in 2016, this makes me the most annoyed.

Well, this is 2001.

People say 2016.

Imagine you were presented with a lot of different sandwiches that had base meats in them.

Like, let's say, let's say, or no meats, or like a salad or whatever.

Base meats.

Like the alchemy of the sandwich world.

There's base 10, which our numbers are just on, and then base meat, which is what our sandwiches are based on.

Turned ham into cheese.

Two-thirds of ham and cheese pizzas tested by trading standards officers in Derbyshire failed to contain ham or cheese.

No.

Yeah.

How many?

Two-thirds.

Two-thirds of the pizza?

What it was is when people thought it was ham, it was actually turkey ham, which is made of turkey, not ham.

And the cheese was often cheese substitute.

I'm not sure what cheese substitute is, but it doesn't sound great.

So Henry Mayhew did a load of.

Just to drag us back to Henry Mayhew for a bit, he did a load of calculations, basically.

So he calculated how many sellers there were of each thing on the streets of London.

So he calculated, for example, that there were 60 ham sandwich sellers in London, 200 baked potato sellers, 300 people who sold pea soup and hot eel,

six people apparently specialized in plum puddings.

Didn't they?

Yeah.

And he would work it out by estimating the number of miles of street in the city and then multiplying that by the number of traders he found per mile.

Yeah.

I think it sounds like the most fascinating book.

I really want to read it.

It's what's it called again?

It's called London Labour and the London Poor.

Yeah, and he basically documented 1851 in London down to every bit of clothing that people it would be like us just going out on the street and just recording what's going on as a time capsule.

And it's pretty amazing work.

It's incredibly comprehensive.

Really, yeah.

And it had a big impact.

He pissed off a lot of people with this book, particularly the street traders, and they actually set up a street traders protection association against this kind of journalism,

specifically because how they were presented in the book.

They were presented, like these sandwich sellers, they're like, well, actually, we do have a bit more than ham, actually.

Yeah, exactly.

Really?

Yeah.

Some of the sandwiches didn't even have ham in.

Did they not?

No.

Just cheese.

They had a bit of...

They had a bit of beef dripping, and that was it, between two bits of bread.

What is beef dripping?

It's fat.

Yeah.

Sort of

a congealed fat.

When you've cooked beef, you get all the fat kind of drops down when you roast it and then you can take that and you can kind of spread it on bread and it's what people used to eat.

That sounds like cheese substitute.

It does, but it doesn't taste anything like cheese.

It tastes more like kind of fatty, gravy.

Oh, so delicious.

Also, he collected a load of data with his brother, Augustus Mayhew, and yet, 20 years after the book was published, Augustus Mayhew was had up in court on charges of attacking a female peddler, a woman, going around selling things.

And his defence in court was that people would knock on his door up to 38 times a day selling things.

And he just snapped and he said they were shouting things like, crockery, or fine young rabbits, or roots, all are blowing, all are growing.

Fine young rabbits sounds like a great band, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Did you know that there's a

latitude around the earth that's sometimes referred to as the ham belt?

And it's 40 degrees latitude.

And it's the uh, it's not so much these days, but it used to be the climate at which all the best ham came from.

So, uh, like Kentucky ham, Virginia ham, Italian prosuto ham, uh, Spanish Serrano ham, all of those places are along the same latitude, and it's because the climate is sort of ideal for ham curing, and it's not so important nowadays because uh, you know, you have climate control factories and whatnot, but um, yeah, and it was discovered by Alexander von Hambelt.

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

My fact is that since 2003, the UK has eaten one and a half million pounds in cash.

And when you say cash, are we talking two people coins or notes?

So this is the Bank of England releases stats every year on the IAMZ graph.

Alex's got a massive graph on his research notes here.

So for people at home, what happens is we kind of do some research and we print it out on a sheet of paper and we've got like little paragraphs that we might read out if something comes up.

But Alex just has a massive graph.

I'm concerned by the year-to-year trend.

I'm going to explain.

You can submit banknotes that are damaged in some way to the Bank of England to get them replaced.

And then they keep stamps on them.

So they release each year how many banknotes have been

torn apart or accidentally washed or contaminated or damaged by fire or flood.

And the other category is tudor-eaten.

And so each year they've released

how many notes of each denomination have been chewed or eaten and how much they're worth.

And in total, since 2003, it's 1.5 million.

Okay, so I reckon when you said that fact, people were thinking that humans were eating these notes.

But I reckon it must be mostly like dogs and stuff.

It could be babies.

Could be babies.

Yeah, I mean babies will put things in their mouths, won't they?

They will, but they don't have teeth.

That's true.

So they won't be chewing it and damaging it.

I mean, some of them have teeth, don't they?

Do do you have to have teeth to chew?

That's a good point.

Can you chew with gums alone?

I suppose you could ruminate the note in your mouth.

You could

dissolve it.

I'd say a baby would be sucking rather than chewing.

Yeah.

Okay, well.

But you have to provide the remnants of the note to prove that you had it in the first place, because otherwise you could just write to backloan and say,

what you bring the dog?

You bring the leftovers again.

So there could be plenty of notes that have been completely eaten, I guess.

It's very hard to say my dog ate £2,000 in £50 notes.

Unfortunately, he ate them so thoroughly.

But if you could send me.

No, but they do send this.

I recommend it.

It's called the Mutilators' Notes Service.

And you post them in and you write a little explaining letter.

And if they think it's legit, then I'll post you some money.

I could have used that.

I once got given an envelope of some money.

And

you've been paid it for asking those questions in the House of Commons, haven't you?

That's excellent satire from the early 2000s.

Thank you.

It's 90s, actually.

Yeah.

And the rest of you can look that up at home and have a really entertaining afternoon.

Cash for questions.

Anyway, sorry, go on.

God done.

So rather than opening the envelope the normal way, I opened it up at the top end of the on the side.

So I just ripped it open.

The short edge of the envelope.

Yes, exactly.

So I ripped it open there.

And

then I got to the shop and it was closed.

And so I couldn't buy anything.

So I went to my house, came out in the morning to buy the milk that I was looking to buy, handed over from the envelope my £10 note.

And the guy said, I can't accept this.

You're missing the last eighth of the note.

And what I had done, and there was about 60 quid in this envelope.

I had ripped, as well as the envelope, all that final eighth of all the notes,

and they had scattered all on the street.

I had to go around the street collecting the rest of my notes.

You got the bag, yeah, I found them.

They were all day afterwards, yeah.

Oh, my god, next morning, did you get the milk?

I did, yeah.

Um, I think that all of these banknotes were mostly eaten by dogs, not humans or babies.

Well, babies are humans, apart from baby dogs.

Um, so I think they're they're mostly eaten by dogs.

In Montana, a few years ago, there was a news story about a dog called Sundance who ate five $100 bills that were stashed in his owner's little cubby hole.

But the $500 bills were together with a single $1 bill, which it didn't eat.

That's fantastic.

Wow.

This is interesting.

Do you know where the first place to feature Queen Elizabeth on money was?

Oh,

so not Britain.

It was not Britain.

Yeah.

Was it somewhere in the Caribbean?

No.

Somewhere in Africa?

No.

Australia?

No.

Canada.

Yes.

What is that?

They had her when

she was a nine-year-old princess.

So prior to being the queen, and it was on their $20 notes.

And so obviously she wasn't on any money here.

She wasn't the queen yet, but

they wanted to give her some props over there.

I'm not sure completely why, but they used her image.

Yeah, that's cool.

Speaking of notes in Canada, a few years ago, there was a rumor that all Canadian banknotes smelled of maple syrup.

And people were kind of pulling them out of their pockets and smelling them and believed that they could smell maple syrup.

And everyone on the internet was saying, Yeah, mine smell of maple syrup as well.

Mine only smell of it when I take them out of my pocket and they've warmed up.

So they must be putting something in the note.

And I keep the pocket I keep all my maple syrup in.

Well, I think that must have been it, or it was just like a weird hysteria because the Bank of Canada said that actually there's nothing in there and we've tested ours and they don't smell a maple syrup.

But they have got in trouble in the past as well, the Bank of Canada, because they did a new series of bank notes and they put a maple leaf on and it was pointed out that that maple leaf, that particular shape of maple leaf, is from a tree which does not grow in Canada.

That's right.

It was a Norwegian maple rather than a Canadian maple syrup.

Right.

And they said, actually, what we've done is we've blended together a load of maple leaves to avoid being regionally insensitive to all those Norwegians living in Canada.

That's kind of of like the Euro, though, because when they designed the Euro notes, they didn't want to favor any particular country's culture.

So they got someone to take a load of famous bridges from all the different countries that were taking the Euro and sort of blend them into generic bridges that were taken.

Yeah, so all the Euro money has fake bridges on it.

Yeah, so no one gets it.

But if an artist started building those bridges, it was an art installation rather than an actual bridge, but they started building the fake bridges over rivers in Belgium or something.

That's a great idea.

Yeah, that's fantastic.

For odd, weird reverse forgery, but not money.

Yeah.

Oh, this is a cool thing about currency.

So in, I think it was November or October,

the Japanese financial services industry was considering regulating a new kind of currency, which was...

Any guesses?

It's currency that James spends and the rest of us don't.

Pokemon money?

It's poker coins.

So as far as I understand, you use the currency to breed imaginary monsters on your phone.

You use them to not buy monsters, but buy things that help you to find find monsters.

I see.

Okay.

So you can't even buy Pokemon with them.

You can buy facilities to help you.

But you've got to catch Pokemon.

Yeah.

So it's like you can buy a net with a Pokecoin.

Kind of.

You can buy a lure.

That's spending real money on that.

You can spend real money or you can find them in the game.

Okay.

So.

But we all do it.

Like Temple Run, you know, when you spend money to buy more, you know, speedability and so on.

We all do it, Andy.

We all do it.

Okay.

The Japanese Financial Services Authority is not considering regulating Temple Run coins, though.

They are considering regulating Technician.

And basically, if they did decide to regulate it, I don't think, I'm not sure if they've come to a conclusion yet.

Companies would have to declare all the unused currency that gamers have held, and they'd have to secure it with massive deposits of real money.

Wow.

That's really interesting.

Speaking of digital money, there's a landfill in Wales which has an enormous treasure trove, like a hidden buried treasure, and it's getting more and more valuable each year.

So in 2013, it was worth £4 million.

And it's because there's a hard drive which a man called James howells threw away um in 2013 um and he realized after he thrown it away that he had a digital wallet on it which had seven and a half thousand bitcoin and he got those in 2009 when they were worth nothing but they now worth 2013 they're worth about four million pounds and they're increasing a lot more since then and so we don't know where it is in the

yeah right yeah so yeah get digging um should we move on soon yeah i have one thing that uh motorola has invented an edible password they call it an authentication vitamin and it's a pill that you swallow if And if you have your phone near you, it will wirelessly unlock it.

Sorry, I'm a bit confused on how that works.

So you swallow a pill?

You swallow a pill, it has a tiny microchip in it, which broadcasts a little signal, and that's a signal that will wirelessly unlock your devices if they're set up for it.

So is it activated by the act of swallowing it?

No, no, no, you don't have to swallow it every time you're on your phone.

You put it in you, and then whenever you're around your phone, it's unlocked.

But except for when you poo it out.

Yeah, so then you have to swallow another one.

But why can't you just have it in your pocket?

Because you could lose that, or someone else could pick pocket point, yeah.

Whereas you can't have it stolen from you if you've eaten.

So, what you could do is you could put the little chip that's in an oyster card, and you could eat that, and then every time you're walking towards the gates at a tube station, it'll be like you're on Star Wars or something.

Yeah, and that is why, my lord, I took a dump on the oyster barrier.

Okay, it is time to move on to fact number three, and that is my fact.

And my fact this week is that a day on on the Sun lasts both 25

and 38 Earth days.

Okay.

You're going to have to explain because it's always going to feel like daytime there, isn't it?

Yeah, it's not really going to, yeah, you're going to be confused.

So because it's a massive gas body, it spins at different speeds.

So the middle of it, the equator, as it were, spins around 25 days.

That makes one day.

But the poles go a lot slower.

So it takes up to 38 days for them to turn around.

So I should say that there are fluctuations in these numbers, obviously.

So, 24.7 is usually the number given for the quickest bit where the equator, where the middle of the sun is spinning around.

38 is the top end bit.

But I asked Alex and I saw an astrophysicist the other night, Dr.

Lucy Green, and she said that's absolutely true, that they do have these different spins on them.

Yeah, really interesting.

So, did Jupiter and Saturn, actually?

They also have differential spin because they're gas.

Yeah.

I found out this thing the other day, which I told the guys, but I haven't told you yet, so I'll ask you it as a question.

So let's assume that there are eight planets in the solar system.

How many planets in our solar system orbit the Sun?

Of those eight, all of them.

Ah, technically, if you go into a super technical reasoning, we orbit the Sun because the center of the gravity that's pulling us, making us orbit the Sun, is in the middle of the Sun.

Jupiter is so large, it's so big, that it's pulled the center of gravity out to above the Sun's surface.

So technically, they are orbiting each other.

That's really good.

Yeah, it's quite cool, isn't it?

I had no idea Jupiter was that big.

It also has a massively fast day, Jupiter.

Does it?

So, yeah, it rotates every 10 hours.

So, daytime and nighttime each last about five Earth hours, which is really short.

It's faster than any other planet.

And if it was 80 times larger, which is not that much larger, it could have been a star, Jupiter.

Wow.

Yeah.

What would it have done to us?

Oh, I think we'd be in big trouble.

Yeah, issues, right?

Probably.

Hey, so I found this fact when I was reading a book called The Jupiter Effect, which is written by John Gribben, who most people know is a massive popular science writer.

He wrote In Search of Schroedinger's Cat.

And this book is the one book that he wants people to forget about.

So I apologize.

Because you've met John Gribben, haven't you?

I have, yeah.

He'll be delighted that you're bringing this up.

I'm really sorry, but it is out there.

And it's a really well-written book, except for one thing, which it has a conceit of it, which is that basically there was going to be a ginormous earthquake at the San Andreas Fault on March the 10th of 1982, because they believed that all the planets were going to align and it was just going to set off chaos on Earth, which never happened.

It was a bestseller though, but it didn't happen.

And so he's kind of buried that book by writing about 200 more books to separate them.

It's true.

He writes tons of books.

And they're all brilliant.

They're all brilliant, yeah.

But yeah, do you think that's the reason he writes so many?

I think just so we could correct down that bibliography list.

Just going back to the sun very quickly.

Yes.

What would happen if you replaced the sun with a black hole?

So there'd be less light

for starters.

There'd be less energy coming from it, you would think.

Yes.

So we'd all freeze to death.

And we would get sucked into it.

No, there we are.

That's finally the thing.

Yeah, no, apparently, so the Oxford University Science Blog looks into this, and they found that apparently the planet's orbits would stay kind of much the same because if it's the same mass as the Sun, this black hole, then the gravitational field it produces is about the same as that of the Sun.

But it would be cold and dark.

The Sun is obviously emitting loads of heat, but Jupiter, we were talking about Jupiter.

Jupiter irradiates so much heat that it loses it faster than it gains energy from the sun, which means that it's shrinking at about two centimeters a year.

That is what?

Yeah, two centimeters a year.

Yeah.

I mean, it's massive, so that's relatively quite a small amount, but that's

mad.

Are there planets out there that we've seen exoplanet style that would be just enough atmosphere tall enough that a six-foot person could stand in and sort of like run their life?

But that's where the planet ends.

Well, that's the only atmosphere.

Yeah, so if you were to go to i think it's mars yeah uh they have a very very very weak atmosphere and so it would kind of feel like winter at your head but spring at your feet wow yeah so so you kind of your head would be out of the atmosphere kind of so

you have to what do you have to where do you spend christmas

Do you have to go up a stepladder basically for Christmas and then for

summer just lie on the floor?

Summer collection, just lie down.

I have one more.

Do you you know what else is fueled by the sun?

Superman, according to DC Comics.

Really?

I know this because once he was bitten by Dracula and Dracula exploded.

What?

Science, guys.

I don't recall that bit of the Bramstoker novel.

Wait, hang on.

Dracula bites Superman and then Superman explodes.

No, no, no.

Dracula explodes because Dracula vampires don't like sunlight.

How do we know Superman isn't made out of garlic?

Okay, it is time for a final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1945, police in Halifax, Nova Scotia initiated a campaign to stop people from beeping their car horns in Morse code to signal out vile and filthy language.

And what were they saying in the Morse code?

Do we know?

This is the weird thing, right?

So I saw this on a website called Boing Boing, which is one of my favorite places online.

They have amazing facts and stuff like that on there.

And it was a news cutting.

And I'm pretty sure the news cutting is real because I found it in other places.

But that's the only thing on the whole of the internet that seems to give any idea that this actually happened.

Now I see why you were throwing shade at my ham sandwiches fact.

You were trying to draw attention from your own sketchy sourcing.

Yeah, fair enough.

I just, I don't know if it's true.

If anyone knows any more, then do let us know.

But I think it's a really, it's a nice idea if it's not true, right?

Yeah.

I don't think it's the most uh eloquent way to swear at someone through morse code it takes a long time it's a very long beep be beep beep beep beep oh you're a dick kind of yeah yeah if you're in traffic though you do have time so you might as well send a message yeah you're relying on the person who is a dick knowing um morse code yeah yeah it's quite funny because it does sound like you're actually just bleeping yourself yeah as you're swearing at someone

so This is 1945.

That's right.

What kind of car horns were we at that point?

What kind of cars were we at at that point?

Well, we will have had cars that are not a million miles dissimilar to cars that we have now.

They're combustion engines.

So maybe slightly bigger American cars, that kind of thing.

Yeah, so the 50s is where I start to sort of clock what a car is.

Okay, so imagine five years before that.

Take off the tail.

But they've had horns, like a horn sound, since the very beginning of things with wheels on the road, haven't they?

Yeah, so they predate cars.

Yeah, and they were originally outside the cars, and people would walk alongside carriages with horns or they'd walk alongside cars with horns.

If you were just walking, you had a you had a horse.

Yeah, I've read this as well though.

Pedestrians carried the first

car horns to warn cars and then eventually they said, why don't we combine this with the car?

I read that there was an early locomotive act and the idea was that cars used to travel really slowly and to warn people that cars were on the way someone would walk ahead of the car with a red flag.

Okay, so Andy knows everything about this.

Yeah, is it true?

Is this true?

Not really.

Oh, okay.

It's true that the Act existed.

The Act existed,

and the red flag thing was used, and you would have to have three people operating a vehicle, one to steer it, one to stoke the boiler, and one to walk ahead, who was called the stalker with the red flag.

However, I think that when the Act was introduced, cars were not a thing

because it was in about the 1870s.

And by the time...

people started having personal cars, the red flag bit was not observed and had been repealed.

Okay.

From memory, yeah, that's how it went.

So, yeah.

I was looking online about

sometimes in Morse code, or you know, how on text messages, you know, lol for laugh out loud, there's a long list of how they do abbreviations for longer sentences.

So, one of my favorite ones, and this is goodbye.

So, I want to see who gets this.

If you were doing a shortened Morse code of goodbye, it's DSW.

Why would it be DSW?

Don't, darling.

No, DSW.

Oh, Oh, you were doing something for these things?

Does it stand for three words?

No, it doesn't actually.

Oh, then I'm not going to know it.

DSW.

I would have gone for C-U because that would be shorter.

Yes, it would have been.

Yeah.

So, what's DSW?

DSW.

I can't actually pronounce it, but James will be able to because it's his second.

Das Vedania.

Yeah.

Isn't that interesting?

It's Russian.

Russian Dos Vedania.

I see.

That's a goodbye.

DSW.

Goodbye.

And then humor is H-I humor-intended.

H-E-E is humor-intended or laughter we should we should absolutely start using these after some of our jokes on the show I can just say H I after one of my puns

here's another thing I hadn't heard of

hog morse have you heard of hog morse hogwarts yeah it's from

hog morse is that is it bad morse is it like pig Latin it's it's autocorrect it's basically autocorrect for when you're doing Morse it's the most commonly made mistakes when you're doing Morse code what does it mean is it like letters which are similar or yeah it's um it's basically called after one example home becoming hog one example given in the literature is please fill me in becoming six nas fimi q I see so M E is going to be dash dash dot or something but then G is going to be dash dash dot without a space.

Yes, yeah.

And so

I guess there's a risk of everything going really out of kilter if you mix up something and then you get out of sync with the person receiving and they think your letters end and start in different places and then it just turns into gobbledygook.

Yeah.

So this was this whole fact is about a kind of secret message being sent out, basically, and it's a rude secret message.

So, I found another example of this kind of thing.

Another thing from the Second World War.

So, Chinese engravers who are designing banknotes changed the design of Chinese banknotes to score points off the Japanese who are occupying their country.

Did they?

Yeah.

So, for example, the one UN note, very, very common note.

It has a picture of Confucius on it, and he's making a gesture of prayer, almost, it looks quite Buddhist almost.

And some engravers changed some of the banknotes they made so that Confucius is doing the classic sex mime where you use one

thumb and finger on one hand and the finger on the other.

And for people at home, Andy is doing said mime.

Great radio.

Classic sex mime, as he puts it.

Yeah, so they did that.

Here's a thing about signaling out vile and filthy language.

An article from the Daily Mail from a couple of years ago.

Mother Lauren Walker had endured a day from hell at the hands of her son Max.

The two-year-old had smeared their dog in butter and put jam in the DVD player.

Then he decided he didn't want the fish pie she had spent two hours making.

So she then spelt out the C-word in his alphabet potato shake skin a bitch.

I don't know how that becomes news, but it just makes me laugh.

It must be a photo on Instagram that then gets picked up or something like that.

It's fake.

I was reading about

President Andrew Jackson.

He had a a parrot that he taught to swear, and apparently it attended his funeral and started swearing really loudly.

His funeral had to be taken out.

Taken out, like, taken out by the Secret Service.

It's a bit harsh.

I just open up the coffin and chuck it in with him.

There is an online service called eggplantsmail.com

where you can send a message to your loved one.

And the idea is that in emojis, a aubergine is a signal for

something sexual, and this company will send a real-life aubergine to your loved one and they'll inscribe a message on it.

It's supposed to be a signal, it's like doing a real-life emoji.

That's quite cool,

that's quite good, isn't it?

They describe themselves as 100% phallic, 100% anonymous, and 100% disturbing.

And 100% add at math.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Shriverland, James at Eggshate, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, and Alex at Alex Bell underscore.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at QIPodcast, or you can go to no such thing as a fish.com, which has all of our previous episodes.

And you can also go to no such thing as the news, which has all of our previous TV show episodes.

A topical look at the week.

At which week?

All the previous weeks.

All the old weeks.

If you were really thinking to yourself, I'd love to know what happened in November and late October of this year, head to no such thingasthenews.com.

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

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.