140: No Such Thing As Books For Pirate-Children

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

My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anna Chaczynski.

And once once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that a pub in London has just renamed itself the Bill Murray.

However, because they couldn't get his permission, they had to name it after William Murray, who was King Charles I's whipping boy instead.

Yes, so this is a this is a pub in Angel, North London, and they wanted to give tribute as a fact that they were renovating the pub and renaming it.

But there's a law that you can't name a thing like a pub after a living person unless you get their absolute permission.

Yeah, so that's why they needed his permission.

Which I did not know.

Oh, okay.

That's why you don't see pubs called like the Piers Morgan everywhere.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Did he try to get Bill Murray's permission?

Yeah, they did quite a few things.

They found a friend of Bill Murray's brother who they got in contact with.

Bill Murray famously doesn't have an agent, but there's a number that you can call him on and propose projects.

And he

or offer parts to, presumably, presumably, that's the main function of it.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

His answer phone is his agent, and he listens to them.

So I think they left a few messages on that.

And they were going to take an ad out in the newspaper in the local city where he lives so that he might see it just in the paper.

But then they thought that's a bit creepy.

Yeah.

So they didn't do that.

He's such a fun guy, Bill Murray.

He's always crashing random people's parties, isn't he?

Yes, yeah.

He's a bit of a legendary character in that sense.

Do you think it's because he assumes he's been invited but hasn't got the invite?

Yeah, he went to a 22-year-old Norwegian student's party, I think, and then started doing the washing up halfway through it, which is such a massive sacrifice if you've ever washed up anything at a student's party.

That's amazing.

Yeah, it's one of those things where there's a lot of these stories, and the assumption is that they're all fake.

And so, actually, there has been a site that's set up where you can share your personal Bill Murray stories.

I think it's called BillMurrayStories.com.

It's a good name.

Yeah.

It's confusing, though, right?

But so, yeah, so like all these stories, it turns out they are true.

Are people constantly submitting stories about William the childhood whipping boy of Charles I?

Actually,

you should explain what a whipping boy is.

Yeah, so being non-British, I had never heard of a whipping boy until I heard about William Murray.

And it is unbelievable.

The idea of a whipping boy, this is back King Charles I, so he was 1600s.

And what would happen is, as a child, if the prince was naughty, there was this rule where you couldn't hit them and you couldn't make them be disciplined off the back of a slap or anything.

So they had a best friend who was called the whipping boy.

If they did anything bad, that best friend would get beaten for it.

They tried to encourage friendship between the whipping boy and the young prince so that the prince would have an incentive not to behave badly.

Do you know what an even bigger incentive would be if the prince actually just got whipped every time he behaved badly?

But the divine right of kings.

It's an absolute kicker.

So that was it, wasn't it?

It was because kings are ruled by divine right and so no one's allowed to punish the king except God himself.

Although Charles I did later go on to be punished in a very very big way by Parliament.

Oh yeah, he wasn't able to nominate Bill Murray to be executed in his place.

I struggle to find evidence that much whipping was done with the whipping boys and whether it was a bit of a nominal thing,

an idealised thing.

And actually it was a really privileged position, wasn't it?

So he eventually was given a...

great estate somewhere and they often were knighted or became important members of the nobility.

There was a historical society I read about where they had a debate about whether William Murray actually liked Charles I or not.

And they did a big debate and they all voted that he would definitely not have liked Charles I.

Well, because he was getting beaten up every time.

Yeah, sorry, I forgot about that.

Because let's be honest, all kids are little shits, aren't they?

So what you would do is just, you would always at least be threatening your friends that you're going to, I'm going to do something naughty and you're going to get beat up for it.

You would, and actually, even if I'd do it to my best friend if I was 10, even if it was your friend.

Friend doesn't mean much when you're 10 10 years old, except someone to be tortured.

What?

Right?

Let's explain why you've made no significant personal relationships in your life, Anna.

I discovered another role, which you three might know, but I think non-Brits won't know.

The necessary woman.

Yeah.

The necessary woman was someone who was effectively a personal cleaner to the king and had what was seen as a very, very important job of emptying the

chamber pot.

The chamber pot.

The toilet.

That was seen as like a high privilege.

But the title was The Necessary Woman.

Is there anything more necessary than someone tipping the poo out of your toilet?

No, there is not.

So there's also a whipping father in existence.

Yeah, I'm surprised that I hadn't come across this.

But this is a Christmas character who is a French Christmas character who accompanies St.

Nicholas on his rounds on St.

Nicholas Day on the 6th of December.

And St.

Nicholas, tradition has it, goes around and dispenses nice stuff to children who've done well.

But he's also accompanied by the whipping father, the père foit,

who judges whether or not a child's been naughty, and if it has, whips it.

Where is this?

France and Belgium.

Wow.

And is Santa cool with this?

Feels like he should step in.

Santa's pro, yeah.

Santa is an ass, like, if you think about it, because he is deciding on whether people get gifts or not.

Yeah, who made him like moral

of what's right and wrong?

He has the authority.

Yes.

Father Christmas knows he has a list.

But he only checks it twice.

Like, loads of things I've checked twice, and then the third time i've realized it was a mistake that's true most of the job of father christmas is data entry

and then there's a brief couriering service at the end of it can you imagine that you're you're given this amazing role of being sanched you didn't realize that for 364 days it's advanced it's excel it's all spreadsheets there are columns check one check two

presents delivered child whipped question mark

just while we're on whipping boys and people people being punished for things that aren't their fault so this kind of extended into adulthood as well so Henry IV of France he uh became Catholic or he had a ceremony with the Catholic Church in 1593

but he obviously had to do penance so what he did instead he sent two ambassadors to Rome and he said to the Pope look if I've done anything wrong just punish these guys will you and these two ambassadors were beaten on the steps of St.

Peter's while singing the miserare

by the representatives of the pope

yeah Oh, so the Pope didn't even go out and beat them himself.

He sent bloody representatives out saying, if you need to be beaten, please let my representatives do it.

Yeah, the Pope is very much the father of Christmas in this situation.

So some other William Murrays.

Oh, yeah.

So we've got Bill Murray, haven't we?

And we've got The Whipping Boy, William Murray.

There's William Murray who wrote the Peter and Jane books.

Do you remember those?

Those children's books.

80 million of these were sold around the world, and they're extremely kind of simple books like Peter Plays with the ball, Jane Climbs a hill, stuff like that.

He worked out that 12 words make a quarter of all words used by children.

Wow.

And they are A and He I in is it of that the to and was.

And so he wrote all these books to kind of just try and teach you those words first.

Because if you can get those ones nailed, then the other twenty thousand that you learn just

immediately.

Please tell me he wrote the books just including all of those words, which is just a sequence of prepositions and conjunctions.

No nouns, no verbs, just...

You can say, that was I, if you're a pirate child.

Yeah, so that would be page one.

What have you got for page two?

Ooh, that was she.

But she isn't one of them.

There was a guy called William Murray who invented vacations.

Oh, wow.

What do you mean?

The concept of vacation.

Yeah, so he was American and there's a mountain range called the Adirondax.

And he used to take people up there to go walking.

And it used to be that you would call it holiday, the British people called it holiday, but he called it kind of vacating your home and going to these mountains.

And so he kind of coined the word vacation to mean a time when you go away.

That's very cool.

Yeah.

Vacation really sounds like an advertisement to burglars, doesn't it?

Actively saying, I'm emptying my house for the week.

I think it sounds medical.

Do you?

Yes.

Like vacating your bowels.

Yes, I'm afraid so.

I'm afraid so.

What?

It's like you're talking to your unnecessary woman.

I'm afraid I vacated.

Once again, it's not the kind of vacation you were hoping to have with me.

Okay, we're going to have to move on to our next facts soon.

Can we just say a couple of things about pubs?

Yeah, yeah.

So, bizarre coincidence: the pub with the longest name in the country is in the same town, but the pub with the shortest name in the country, which is Staley Bridge.

And I think this is actually like it's almost in Manchester.

But yeah, isn't that weird?

So it's got the Q in, which is just a Q, and then it's got the longest-named pub in the country, which is the old 13th Cheshire Astley Volunteer Rifleman Corps Inn.

Also, there are four pubs in the UK called the Blob Shop.

If that's a derogatory reference to women's menstrual cycles, then I think

it's okay.

I'm afraid it is.

Oh, that kind of vacation again.

I got this fact from Tradle, the comedy website.

They reported on the fact that they were changing the name, and at the bottom of the article, they had a link link to other comedian-named pubs.

So these were all in the UK.

There's the Eric Bartholomew, and that's in Morecambe, and that's after Eric Morcombe.

Very lovely.

There's The Four Candles in Oxford, which is a tribute to the Ronnie Barker, The Two Ronnie sketch.

Charlie Chaplin has one in Elephant and Castle, but it's being demolished.

But in the article, they point out that it might not actually be missed because the online reviews for it include Unremitting Horror and What a Shithole.

Oh, that's all go.

Yeah, well, I think it's been demolished now, unfortunately.

Yeah.

Very quickly, in 2013, a glittering ceremony to reward pubs and clubs in Wigan for preventing night scene violence ended in a fight.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that it is impossible to paint a picture with the world's world's blackest black and the world's pinkest pink.

Just because it's a really bad clash.

It would be, wouldn't it?

Actually, I think they go very nicely together.

Why is it impossible?

So the pinkest pink has been invented by an artist called Stuart Semple, and he sort of has control of this pigment.

But the blackest black is under control of another artist called Anish Kapoor.

And Anish Kapoor doesn't want anyone else to use it.

And so Stuart Semple has said, anyone can use my pink apart from Anish Kapoor when you go onto his website to buy it you have to promise that you are not Anish Kapoor you are no way affiliated with Anish Kapoor you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor to the best of your knowledge information and belief this paint will not make its way into the hands of Anish Kapoor it's such a nice idea so basically everyone in the world can use the pink apart from Anish Kapoor and only Anish Kapoor and no one else in the world can use the black.

Yeah, it's very cool.

So the way that they measure the blackest black is that it's how much light it absorbs and reflects.

And this blackest black absorbs all but 0.035%

of the light that you shine on it, which is very black indeed.

And the previous record was 0.04, so it's kind of incrementally increasing.

They can only make tiny amounts of it as well, so he can't really paint a huge amount.

When he started, they could make two square centimeter patches of it.

Definitely a mural.

No.

But it's made of these stems of colour, which are really, really, really tall and not at all wide.

So it's like the forest of palm trees, basically.

When you say really tall, you mean not really tall.

I mean tiny, absolutely tiny.

Sorry.

What I mean is they're 300 times as tall as they are wide.

And so

one of the guys said it's like splitting a hair 10,000 times to make one of these things.

And then when you shine a light in it, it gets reflected all around inside this forest of pine trees, basically, until it gets absorbed and dissipated as heat.

So the light turns into heat because it can't make its way out.

The moon absorbs 88% of the light that hits it, so it only reflects 12% of visible light.

So the moon, which always looks obviously white to us or bright, silvery, actually is the colour of worn pavement.

And that's because it's against an extremely dark sky.

Isn't that right?

Actually, comets are even more absorbent of light.

Only 2 to 4% of light is reflected.

So actually, they're extremely dark, but again, they're against a night sky, so you can kind of see them better.

To compare that, a lump of coal is about 8%.

They're four times darker than a lump of coal.

That's amazing.

So that's the moon is almost the colour of a lump of coal, really.

Pretty much, yeah.

Yeah.

On pink,

I've got a question for you guys.

What colour is pink?

It's like a mixture of white and red.

No.

Oh.

Pink is dark yellow.

Yeah, originally, if you go to the...

Originally.

Originally.

The revamp.

So I was reading this book called The Accidental Dictionary.

It's by Paul Anthony Jones, otherwise known as Haggard Hawks, on Twitter.

And in it, he points out that back in the mid-15th century, pink was a yellowish or greenish-yellow lake pigment made by combining a vegetable colouring matter with a white base.

So originally, that's what pink was defined as, as

a dark yellow.

What's interesting as well is they're not quite sure about the etymology of the word pink, but there's a lot of theories, and one of the theories is that it comes from a German word, which is pinkeln, and that means to piss.

So the colour of dark urine.

And that's why a sits pinklet is someone who sits down to go to the loo.

Oh, and that's why during the World Cup or the Euros, when they were in Germany, they had a problem with football fans urinating everywhere, and they called it the pinkle problem.

Okay.

It was also very manly.

It used to be very masculine.

So pink was seen as a version of red, which was a kind of a warlike colour.

And so pink was the colour that men would wear and I think there's a quote even from 1918 a trade catalogue in 1918 which recommends blue for girls clothes for young girls clothes and pink for boys clothes

because blue was the colour of the Virgin Mary as well so you'd have pink pink for boys blue for girls yeah even in 1927 I found a thing from Time magazine there was a princess who'd given birth and they said oh we were hoping for a boy but unfortunately we've painted you know we painted the nursery pink to get ready for it and unfortunately it said girls we've got to repaint the nursery well she's a princess as well that's yeah

true, yeah, it's really strange.

If you're a flamingo and you're pink, like a little bit pink, I'm talking about the modern-day colour pink here.

If you're a little bit pink and you've got a mate who's really pink, your mate who's really pink will be more popular than you.

The more pink you are, the more popular you are as a flamingo.

How do you get more pink?

Eat more algae, right?

Okay, so it's I mean, that's really achievable.

It's something to aim for, at least, isn't it?

Yeah, this is a study by Paul Rose at the University of Exeter.

Paul Rose.

Rose.

Oh, yeah.

Just on flamingos, you guys all have to watch David Attenborough's Planet Earth 2, and I don't know if you guys have seen it.

Did you see the one this week?

It focused on some flamingos which live up in the Andes, I think.

They're the flamingos that live higher than any other flamingo in the world.

So it's one of these places which is extremely hot in the daytime and extremely cold overnight.

And the lake they sit in freezes overnight.

And they just stand there and it freezes over their legs.

And then in the morning, they have to spend a couple of hours pulling their legs out of the ice and then trying to walk to the the shore and then falling back into the ice.

You would think that one flamingo would have worked out maybe that we should go and sit on a tree or something.

I don't know.

It happens every night.

I mean, come on guys, stand on the bank.

I think we've said before that the inside of their eggshells is pink.

Oh, okay.

The yolks of their eggs is pink.

I think we've mentioned that before on this podcast.

Also, we only mentioned this on the TV show, so a lot of the podcast listeners might not have heard this, but we got sent in a news story that Australia has one flamingo.

Is that right?

Was it the flamingo?

Yes, was it the flamingo?

Yeah, one flamingo, and it's

like 85 years old or something.

Really old flamingo.

Hey, if you want the accurate version of that fact rather than the misremembered one, you should watch our TV show.

No such thing as the news.

Yeah,

absolutely seamless.

I didn't know I was being advertised to, and yeah, I found myself watching the show.

I saw flamingos earlier this year for the first time in my life.

That's time in your life.

Yeah.

Oh.

Sorry.

I've grown up in South London, do they not have them in St.

James's Park?

All right.

It's literally England in St.

James' Park.

It's probably 500 metres away.

They don't have flamingo in St.

James's Park.

Okay, clearly, all right.

I saw them in Spain for the first time in my life.

The first time I've been to Spain.

Go on, tell us to St.

James's Park.

Are you sure they went flamenca?

The women dancing.

Flamingos.

The women stuck in ice overnight.

They lay pink eggs, did you know?

So it was in the 19th century.

It was when they installed all the birds for the first time in the parks and they brought over these beautiful exotic birds and they put them in there.

And people went along in their hundreds to throw stones at them to kill them.

No.

Yeah.

That was a huge...

And it was like, you know, it was like a coconut shire at a fair.

They would cheer whenever they got an especially big or beautiful one of the birds with a stone.

Yeah, they killed them by the dozen.

Just on colours.

Do you know how purple was first made?

By the Murex snail.

Oh, no, I I mean made by humans, synthetic purple.

This was first made by a guy called William Henry Perkin, and he was the first person ever to synthetically make colours.

So we used to get colours from natural dyes that existed in the world, like from beetles or shells or whatever.

And this was in the 1850s, and he accidentally made purple while trying to cure malaria.

And so that feels like a game for the world in one sense, but a loss in another.

He was trying to synthesize quinine, which would help cure malaria, and he failed to do it.

But then he was rinsing out his flask with alcohol afterwards, and he realized that it created this purple solution.

And that meant that he could make purple.

And that was vital because dye was so expensive.

Before,

9,000 mollusks were needed to create one gram of Tyrian purple.

One gram?

So,

$1,000?

No, surely not.

So apparently, one gram.

I know.

I know.

I can't, but.

Surely that would have got you a toga or something.

So you own.

No, I think a toga was many, many thousands.

Well, you need a million mollusks to get a single Roman toga.

I just I don't believe it.

Only royalty ever wore purple because they didn't have enough mollusks in the world for anyone else.

Did the world just used to be completely full of mollusks?

There were trillions and trillions of mollusks everywhere.

Yeah, it did.

Have you heard of International Klein Blue?

Just while we're on the invention of colours, and while we're on patented colours as well.

So Yves Klein, famous artist in the 60s, and in 1960, Klein patented a colour which he had kind of helped to develop.

So this is not the first time someone's patented a colour.

And he called it International Klein Blue.

And he did a series of shows where he splashed it on nude models in a series of kind of artistic events that The Guardian described as sexist even by 1960s standards.

Wow.

But that colour, Klein is dead now.

The colour lives on.

Do you know where?

I think something that's blue.

Yeah.

A blue man group.

The blue man group.

No, you're kidding.

Paint themselves.

Blind me, Dan.

Whoa.

Name something blue.

He came with that straight away.

International Klein Blue is the colour they paint themselves.

So was Yves Klein the one who had an art exhibition?

He was in his blue phase.

And everyone came and there was just no art anywhere.

And they just drank the champagne and left.

And they're all like, where the hell's all the art?

But what he'd done would put something in their drink, which made their urine blue.

And so the exhibition was when they went for a pee afterwards.

Yeah, it's so cool.

That's very cool.

He's not the only person to have invented a blue.

There's a new blue on the scene.

There's the.

Yeah, it's called Jay-Z Blue.

It's Jay-Z who invented a blue.

Or he had his team of designers.

You would think that the band Blue should have invented a new blue.

Yeah, that would have been clever.

And then for the painting instructions, it could just say Dabba D-Dabba Dike.

Can I just say, you should think Eiffel 65 should have invented a blue?

Now your joke makes sense.

So Jay-Z Blue, just very quickly, it's a silverfish color.

It has tiny flecks of platinum in it.

And the idea is that he wanted his own color because he's going to be releasing a lot of Jay-Z Jay-Z edition style things like jeeps and motorboats and he wants Jay-Z blue to be the colour, the unifying colour.

Pink should make her own pink, shouldn't she?

Oh yeah.

It's a great idea.

I do know something about Jonathan Green and his dictionary of slang.

But it's about pink.

So I was reading through all the entries on pink in that book and there was a gang in Ireland in the 1700s called the Pinkin Dindies.

And what they were, they were a gang of rich young men who liked causing trouble and they liked getting into fights.

And the way they would get into fights with people is they would cut off the bottom few inches of their scabbards on their swords.

So basically, the bottom inch or two of their sword is poking out at the end.

And then they'd slowly prick people that they were next to with their swords to make them angry and get into fights with them.

Do you think it's pinking like pinking shears?

I bet it is, isn't it?

That's a pink point.

And then was there a spin-off called the Pinky Dindies who did it with their pinky?

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

My fact this week is that at least 30% of the cocaine in America arrives by submarine.

This is amazing.

That is amazing.

Or gets there via submarine.

So I didn't know about narco subs, but they're a big deal.

And so a lot of the cocaine in America comes from Colombia, and it tends to be transported by submarine to Mexico, and then I think often makes it overland from there.

But I also read something in Time magazine which said that in 2009, experts estimated that 70% of the cocaine that was leaving Colombia left Colombia in narco-subs.

Wow.

So it all goes away in submarines.

How cool is that?

They've not bought the submarines off navies.

Like, they're not old submarines.

They've made these submarines.

So they're sort of homemade submarines.

I'm sure there's engineers that are very qualified to make it, but...

They're pretty cobbled.

They make them in the jungle and they're quite cobble together.

Yeah, they're not.

Yeah, imagine just traveling that far underwater in a thing that...

There was one they found where the flippers to control the rising and sinking of the submarine were controlled by go-kart steering wheels.

So they're quite steampunky.

And there are pictures online, amazing photo galleries of these things.

With the periscope on one of these submarines, it really is basically two CCTV cameras facing in opposite directions with a perspex bubble over the top.

Like, they're really rudimentary cobbled together things.

That would work?

It would work, yeah.

But actually, the advantage of them being cobbled together is that most of the time, when they've reached their destination, they sink them.

Earlier on this year, there was an instance of this, I think, in March when the US authorities caught a narco sub which had 5.5 tons worth of cocaine in it, which was worth $194 million.

And the people on it, they immediately scuttled it, so they sunk it.

And that means you can't really get them for anything because the cocaine is now on the bottom of the ocean, so you don't really have any evidence that they were smuggling cocaine.

And then, as a Coast Guard, you have to save them.

So you get these three bedraggled coke dealers onto shore.

I know what that's like.

We were just having a swim.

About half of Somali pirates are immediately freed when they get back to shore.

How come?

It's very hard to find people who are willing to try them and imprison them for the right length of time.

It's hard finding evidence.

Yeah, it's really maddening for the authorities.

Wow.

Yeah.

So you just get a lift back to shore, you get a free meal or two.

And there's not evidence enough that you've got the skull and crossbone flying.

I need more than that to it.

You've got a parrot on your shoulder.

Submarines used to have their own newspapers.

Did they?

Yeah.

There's a whole book of extracts from sub-mariners' newspapers.

Did they not get quite wet in the delivery process?

Well, the.

That's a hell of a paper round, isn't it?

No, how did it work?

They would just print them on board.

They did not.

Sub-mariners would write and produce their own newspaper.

Sub-editor.

Actually, they had a newspaper in the trenches as well, didn't they?

Yeah, Wipers Times.

Yeah.

You know about that.

I don't know about that.

Well, there was a group of soldiers who found an old printing press and they just repurposed it and started printing.

And it's really satirical.

So Ian Hislop and Nick Newman of Private Eye wrote a TV thing about it, which has now become a play, actually.

And it's, yeah, it's travelling around the country.

But it was very satirical, like loads of.

And it was, well, it was Wipers' Times, wasn't it?

Because it was Ypres.

It was a mispronunciation of Ypres.

So it was them trying to have a laugh.

It's funny.

In the face of real horror, it was...

So the Flammenwerfers, the flamethrowers that the German troops were using, would cause horrible, horrific disfigurement and injury and death.

And yet, in the Wipers Times, they ran a little advert for these Flammenwerfers.

It started off with, is your boy a practical type?

It's really, you know.

During World War II, there's submarines around Japan that would swim along and look for a bed of pistol shrimps.

Because pistol shrimps make tons of noise by snapping their claws really, really loud.

And by going on these, it meant that the Japanese sonar couldn't find them because they would just hear the pistol shrimp.

Did we only find that out after the war, or did that

start looking for pistol shrimps?

I I only found that out on Reddit just now.

So I don't know.

So breaking news.

None of them are still down there.

No, it came out after the war, I think.

I think it was quite a long time after the war.

I think it was in the 70s or something when they first studied it.

That's very clever.

Yeah.

Do you know what you get called if you're on a submarine in the Royal Navy, but you're not a submariner?

You get called an oxygen thief.

Gosh.

I know, there was a really interesting article on The Guardian about life on a submarine.

They told the author, do you know we've got a badger on board the the submarine?

We picked it up at this point and we're feeding it and looking after it and finding enough food for it.

And it was not true.

But this guy, the writer said, I was really starting to believe that there was a badger on board because you have to entertain yourself.

You have to come up with sort of jokes and games and ideas.

And it's a very menace.

But in a time when you're calling non-submariners oxygen thieves, you wouldn't think you'd have a menagerie of animals on there.

That just reminds me that we might have said this before, you sometimes get penguins towards the North Pole because sailors have taken them as pets in the South Pole and they kind of just bring them up and then they get a bit annoying and they just let them go.

You imagine people who are in the Arctic are responsible geographers or environmentalists or something, not people who just like yoink a penguin up and take it with them.

Don't tell me if you went sailing down the South Pole and you saw a penguin there, you wouldn't go, oh, I might just.

I don't deny that, but I'm not qualified to be doing that job.

That's why they keep on turning down your application, isn't it?

Yeah, the sole purpose of visit.

Pick up a penguin.

Can we talk a bit about drug smuggling?

Yeah.

So JFK Airport has a drug loo, which is specifically for people who've been suspected of drug smuggling to go to.

When they pick you up, they x-ray you.

And if it looks like you've got drug cylinders in your body,

they say go to this loo because it automatically washes the pellets of drugs, which people expel.

Whereas in the old days, officers had to manually sift.

This is the new, basically the modern-day necessary woman, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yes.

Yes, it is.

It's the auto-toilet, which just washes the packets and says, right, there you go.

But what if you say, I don't need to go?

And then they say, well, like, how long can you hold off claiming constipation before you actually go?

I don't know.

They'll just wait.

So they'll just wait.

Yeah, I don't think they say, well, he's past the half an hour, so nothing we can do.

Mary Roach says that on long flights, so Mary Roach writes these great books, and she wrote one called Gulp about the

gut and the stomach and everything.

She says that on long flights sometimes flight attendants will pay attention to who doesn't eat anything because if you've got 50 heroin capsules swallowed, you don't want to eat anything and often you've taken anti-diarrhea medication to keep yourself bunged up and you don't want to do anything which will cause you to go to the loo.

Because obviously if you poo out all the heroin on the flight, it's a big problem.

Just one thing on smuggling drugs across the US-Mexico border and this was that people come up with various imaginative imaginative ways of getting drugs across the border so they make catapults very often

sometimes they make bits of air propulsion that can fly them over and then there was someone who was found in 2012 just trying to drive a bunch of cocaine over the border in a jeep Cherokee but there's a huge fence so they made a makeshift ramp on either side and they drove up one ramp and then they got stuck in their jeep on top so there are some really good pictures you can look them up of a Jeep just hovering on top of a fence and then the police eventually turned up and there are two guys just trying to get this Jeep down from on top of a fence.

There was a politician who was one of the early people to say there should be a big wall between America and Mexico.

Luckily, that idea went pretty quickly.

But he decided, as a publicity stunt, to get an elephant and a mariachi band to cross the border to sort of prove that you can get anything through.

To prove that you can get anything through.

He was called Raj Peter Bhakta, and he also, as well as being a politician, had appeared on The Apprentice in America.

Really?

Wow.

Everything is connected.

Yeah.

Also, one last thing on so people who have to smuggle drugs on their bodies.

So the practice of putting them at your bottom is called rectal stuffing.

Is it the technical name for it?

Just like a whole technical, I mean, rectal's technical.

Yeah, okay, well, you just wait.

Thanksgiving meal.

Sage and onion or rectal.

But the website PopSight did a whole piece about this practice and the sort of trickiness of it because

obviously the rectum stores feces and then when it's stretched enough, it sends a signal to your nervous system saying you have to go to the lunar.

But they interviewed a chap called William Whitehead from the University of North Carolina who's an expert in these things and he says that you might actually be able to increase the capacity by putting drugs up there and end up with what he called a mega rectum.

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It's time for a final fact of the show, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that in the Greek Odysseus myth, he escapes the Cyclops by hiding under one of the Cyclops' sheep.

In the Apache version of the same myth, he escapes by hiding in the anus of a buffalo.

I like that the Cyclops Cyclops is a shepherd.

Yeah.

I just never thought of him doing sort of menial tasks or sort of like running a farm.

And it must be bad because he can't judge the distance of his sheep because he's only got one eye.

Oh, yeah.

So he doesn't know how far away they are.

So that Father Ted joke about the size of a cow, that would actually be a reality for him.

Yeah, he doesn't get that joke.

Right.

Yeah, it makes sense.

This is a myth that goes back, and there's a French anthropologist called Julian

Dehy,

who has studied myths, and and he's studied a particular ethnic group who have gone around the world for thousands and thousands of years.

And he reckons it goes back 18,000 years.

And there's always the same version of the story: human goes into a monster's house to steal something.

The monster gets home and he has a herd of wild animals, and he finds the humans, and he locks the humans in somehow.

And then he waits by the door for the man to kill him as the humans start to leave, and the humans escape using the herd of animals.

So in the Greek version, they blind him and then they hide under the sheep and the Cyclops feels the sheep as he goes out.

And then in the Apache version, the hero gets into the anus of a buffalo.

I mean it does the same job, doesn't it?

It does the job.

It does the job.

But actually there is some cave painting in south of France in the cave of the Trois-Frère.

So there's a picture of a bison with an extremely distended rectum.

And they think that that might be part of this story as well.

So actually it's not just the Apaches, it it might go back to ancient

Stone Age European times.

Is that picture the sequel of that bison's life story?

Once he got back out, and there's another bison going, How did you get like that?

You will not believe it.

There's another theory that there are two main families of myth.

They're called the Laurasian and the Gondwanan, and they're named after the two big supercontinents.

And he reckons that one branch of humanity went north about 40,000 years ago out of Africa, right?

And they, all of all the sheep ana stories, all of those come from there, right?

And as that group moved around, so that's in Switzerland, it's in Scandinavia, it's in North America, it's in Greece, and lots of those myths are about kind of the creation of the world, the rule of the gods, the rise of man, the end of the universe.

That's it.

The ones who went south and became, for example, the Australian Aborigines are a completely different family.

They're all about a world which already exists.

The world already exists.

It's about the rise of man or the invention of man.

Yeah, but both families have one thing in common, which is the massive flood myth, where humans are punished in some way.

That's the linking myth between these two huge groups.

Most places have, most ancient civilizations have a flood myth, which is so curious.

There's the Babylonians, they found on cuneiform, sort of,

it was the measurements for...

effectively an ark, a Noah's Ark.

Wow.

This is in Babylonian cuneiform time.

It was like a coracle, wasn't it?

It was more of a circular thing rather than the biblical one, which is X cubits by Y cubits by Z cubits, which is more of a square.

Yeah, they actually rebuilt it.

there's a documentary you can see irving finkel who's a british museum curator actually managed to decipher the exact measurements and they they tried to rebuild it very sci-fi to be a sphere as it are

yeah it's true just going back very quickly to talking about how would the apache have managed to have get this myth um it's so interesting that like In recent archaeology, we keep learning more and more about cultures colliding way before we realize.

And did you guys see that story about the ancient Greeks?

They're looking at the terracotta warriors, and they're suddenly suddenly thinking that ancient Greek artists were involved in helping in the making of

the terracotta army.

And I asked a historian friend if that had any credence to it and he said, absolutely.

It looks like very convincing.

It looks extremely convincing.

And this is way before Marco Polo.

This is way before the first time we ever thought that they'd had proper contact culturally.

Wow.

I've seen the terracotta warriors.

Yeah.

I saw them in London.

Well,

they're just in St.

James's Park.

People used to throw things at them to knock them over.

Oh, really?

So you went to where they actually are.

I went to Xi'an in China.

Their natural habitat.

Their natural habitat.

And they're in these huge, long.

It's much bigger.

It's bigger than a football pitch.

This massive long hangar that you see them in.

And they're in trenches and they're all lined up facing the same way.

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.

And they're finding more and more, aren't they?

They're finding terracotta acrobats and terracotta jugglers and sort of this whole society.

Yeah, they know that they've probably unearthed, I think it's something like a tenth of how many they actually believe they're going to be unearthing over time.

They've just been doing it really slowly.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

It's so cool.

And the first Emperor's tomb, which supposedly is a Mercury lake on the inside, because he was obsessed with the Elixir of Life and that Mercury was the main thing.

They've found a spot that they think might be where he's buried.

And using detection, the Mercury levels suddenly go

up on the dial, like really high.

So they think they might have found where he is buried and where it could be true, the myth of the Mercury Lake.

That's very cool.

That was a really good impression of a Mercury detector, by the way.

Woo!

Do you just quickly, do you know what colour the sheep were that Odysseus escaped on?

In my head, they're

blue.

You're actually quite close.

You're closer than James.

They're violet-coloured.

Really?

If you believe Homer.

So, this is this weird thing about the Odyssey where all of his descriptions, his colour descriptions, don't really equate with what colours are.

So, like, the wine-coloured sea, honey is described as being green,

Hector's hair is dark blue

and yeah the sheep are described as being violet in China there are blue sheep which are in secluded bits of China and they constantly try to make documentaries on them but the government the government

they're now documentary makers making documentaries about the documentary makers just sheep going no comment

I think what it is is that there are certain areas of China that have been closed off by the government for people going into and it just so happens that where they believe the blue sheep are, it's in a territory where you're not allowed allowed to go.

So they can't get access.

I only know it actually, because remember, Molly went over to China to make a documentary.

Right.

They were.

To try and make a documentary.

Again,

they couldn't, the whole thing fell apart as well while they were there.

But they were looking for blue sheep.

That's what.

So that's Molly Oldfield, who was one of the researchers for QI.

Yes.

You can still see, I was going to say you can still have a bath in, but you can't, but you can still see a bath that featured in the Odyssey.

Wow.

Isn't that cool?

So this is a bath that Odysseus' son is bathed in, and it actually still exists.

So it's in Pylos, which is on the western coast of Greece, and you can go and see it's a bathtub of Nestor, and it's still there.

It's been around since 1300 BC.

This is all fake, right?

So the story of what Homer's writing about, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are actually two, I think, of a series of eight stories of the whole Trojan wars.

And only those two survived in full, but I think there are six more in fragments.

And the Trojan Wars really happened.

But then, obviously, they start getting crazy gods involved, which starts to become a bit fictional.

But yeah, Nestor's Palace existed, and Nestor's bathtub existed.

Okay, there are ruins of Troy that they've discovered, aren't they?

So they know that it was a real place.

Yes.

And that there were loads of cities which were destroyed or burned down or, you know, fell in war, and then they built another one on top, and they've got a kind of layer cake.

Yes, because I think the person who discovered Troy initially got in loads of trouble because, in order to discover it, he destroyed an equally valuable layer of archaeology on top of it, which he just chucked away.

And then that's book nine in the series.

So, in Greek mythology, a lot of

weird and wonderful stuff happens.

And particularly, Zeus turning himself into things in order to get off with women.

He turns himself into someone's husband, which at least kind of makes sense.

Then he turns himself into a swan to get off with Leda.

Then some rain.

Was it not a golden shower?

It's described as a golden shower.

Which used to be called just pink shower.

And that's for Perseus, isn't it?

Oh, I read Danai.

Oh, to make Perseus.

Sorry.

To make Perseus.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Then as a bull.

So this is really interesting.

He disguised himself as a bull to get off with Europa, right?

And Europa is the mother of King Minos of Crete.

So King Minos of Crete, his mum has had sex with a bull.

But then his wife, Pacify, falls in love with a bull.

which is a punishment from the gods because he tries to trick them and send them an inferior sacrifice.

It's never worth doing in the Greek myth.

They always find out this is an inferior sacrifice.

They never don't tread.

So not only has his mum got off with a bull, his wife has now fallen in love with a bull.

It just must be so embarrassing for him.

It's a real curse.

Imagine what bad luck it would be if you're trying to make an escape and you happen to pick the wrong bull's anus to climb into.

It turns out.

And you find your mum in there.

Yeah.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James at X Shaped.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, or you can go to no such thingasofish.com, where you can listen to all of our previous episodes.

You can also go to our group Twitter account and send us a message on that.

That's at QIPodcast.

And also, you can go to no such thingasthenews.com, which is our current topical news-based TV show, which is currently still going out on the BBC every Wednesday night on BBC2 after Newsnight.

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

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Hi all.

Okay.

Look, James and I admit that maybe there aren't any flamingos in St James's Park.

Our further research tells us.

Now, what we need to do about this is either, you lot, if you have any photographic evidence that there have been flamingos in St James's Park, you need to send it to us quickly so that we feel vindicated.

And if you don't, and it turns out there aren't any there and there never have been, and we were confusing flamingos with pelicans because we're idiots, then you just have to never ever tell Andy that he was right.

Okay, see you next week.

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