135: No Such Thing As Queen Of Clean, The Sausage Machine

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Alex Bell, Andy Murray, and Anna Chaczynski.

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

Starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that scientists have developed barcodes for zebras.

No zebras.

They've also developed a separate and identical system for zebras.

We'll get on to how to say the name of the thing in a bit.

But this is a team of scientists at Princeton.

And what they've done is this is a particular species of zebra called the Grevies zebra and it's the rarest of the species of zebra and they've persuaded volunteers to take 40,000 photos of different animals and the scientists have then used this software on them because they've all got completely unique strike patterns and it combines barcode technology and facial recognition software and so you can now identify an individual animal from it.

Levin Skyro, who's been on as a guest, he has a show in Belgium and one of the games, because when you go to a supermarket in Belgium, They give you a scanning gun to take around now So you can just scan as you go along the items and then you hand the scan gun in at the end and then they tally up what you have in your badge as well

So he convinced the supermarket in allowing him to have him and his friends have barcodes printed up on t-shirts and they ran around the supermarket like laser quest

and were trying to scan each other's shirts and they had to collect all the kills as it were.

Very cool.

Yeah, very cool game.

And at the end they're like, well I got three zebras.

It's really, I had no idea this is how it works, but each gap and space combo is a number.

And so each digit is a combination of seven black and white bars.

So to say one in a barcode, it's white, white, black, black, white, white, black.

You put those all together, so it's slightly thicker, white and black bits.

And that is.

It's kind of like Morse code.

Did you read about the guy who invented it and how he came up with it?

Well, it was several people who kind of developed it, but one of the people in charge of kind of developing the idea was a guy called Norman Joseph Woodland, and he was thinking about it when he was at the beach, and he drew a sort of Morse code pattern in the sand, sort of by doing dots and dashes,

poking them in the sand, and then pulled down those dots and dashes into bars and came up with a barcode.

But then the developers turned it into the shape of a bullseye, so the first barcodes are actually bullseyes.

Oh, yeah, and then they took up loads of space, didn't it?

So it's actually much more efficient to just go with the long line.

Yeah.

You know that guy, Joe Woodland, who you just mentioned, Alex.

One of the pioneers.

Supposedly, he came up with the idea indirectly because of the Atlantic City mafia.

Go on.

Okay, so he got the idea when he was at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and he was doing a master's degree there.

And he hadn't originally wanted to do a master's.

He wanted to start a business where he made a music system for lifts.

And he wanted to set up this whole firm.

And his father said, no.

The mob control the music and lifts.

You in Atlantic City or on the east coast of the USA.

You're not allowed to go into that because they'll get you.

So instead he went off and did a master's and came up with a barcode instead.

What a weird industry to decide to control if you're a mouth music.

They had a whole race.

It wasn't just lift music that they control.

That feels like it was really like the mobster's baby brother.

They needed to give him something.

Have you seen that in Venezuelan supermarket since last year, you've had to scan in your fingerprints to get

to buy anything?

Because, so you know, Venezuela's going through a very horrible time at the moment and there's a lot of food shortages, and so the government's had to ration stuff.

And people have been panic buying things.

Like, they'll just buy in loads of grain or loads of cigarettes or whatever it is that they think the country is going to run out of.

And so, in order to stop them doing that, supermarkets have installed fingerprint scanners.

And when you buy something, you have to provide ID, you have to give your name, your address, your date of birth, and you have to scan in your fingerprints so they can make sure that you haven't been overbuying.

Whoa.

If you just want a loaf of bread.

I was looking into other animals with codes on.

So in 2010, farmers in Summerby painted QR codes onto their cows.

So to try and raise awareness of their website, this is dairyfarming.com.

Well, it's worked.

My god, best website ever.

I spent all afternoon on it.

It's really good.

There's videos of new dairy farm technology.

There's a there's a farmer's dairy diary, which I quite like.

Did you read it?

Yeah, I did, yeah, there's a cow of the month as well, little profile on the cow of the month.

And there's like, there's also like what it's like to live as a cow and like you can follow the journey of milk.

It's a really good site, I genuinely recommend it.

So the cows are writing the diary?

No, the cows make the videos.

They put cameras on the cows and then the cows go around and make videos.

What do you say make videos?

What the cows?

They don't like edit or do anything like that.

They just gave a cow a video camera.

They did that recently.

Did you see there's a small island?

I can't remember where it is, but Google Street View has not got to them yet.

And they're quite furious because they've learnt that Google Street View is a fantastic way about getting tourism because a lot of people just go, wow, this place looks amazing.

We should go.

So they've attached cameras, their own cameras, to the heads of sheep and goats, and they just have them walk through.

And they've been taking photos.

So, this whole island's being mapped by sheep now.

But all sheep do is eat grass.

So, presumably, all you're seeing is this place is full of grass, full of close-ups of and also sheep follow each other, so you're just going to get a lot of the same pictures.

Just a lot of sheep's bottoms of grass.

Yeah, tourism has plummeted.

Also, unnaturally low down as well.

Yeah, so it's not practical.

Yeah,

also on barcodes,

embryos are going to get them.

They're developing these at the moment, and this is to stop baby swap disasters, because there are always a few news stories every year where people end up with the wrong baby.

The barcode doesn't go on the embryo.

It goes on the egg.

One goes on the egg or on the sponge.

On the sponge.

Oh, barcoda sperm.

Well, they're on it.

It has to be a nine-minute scan apart from anything else.

The scanner goes off 500 million times.

No, I don't want to won.

Here's the thing about buckoes.

When they were introduced in

the 70s, I think the first item bought with the UPC, which stands for Universal Product Code System, was a bit of chewing gum.

But it was really hard to introduce, because obviously you need hundreds of products to have barcodes in order for it to be worth anyone's while.

And also, they didn't used to come on the packaging.

So you used to get the food into the shop, and then you would have to stick on the barcodes.

The shopkeepers had to glue them onto the boxes, and then you could scan them.

I mean, that's not really that weird because a lot of reduced foods in supermarkets come with a fresh barcode.

So, yeah.

But people were frightened of them initially.

In the 70s, people thought that they'd be blinded because there are lasers involved.

Oh, yeah.

Blinded by the scanners.

By the scanners.

Yeah, I mean, if you scan them a barcode, that's a bit.

Yeah, but it is quite alien, isn't it?

If you're used to someone just ringing up goods at the till or, you know, a label which says 50p, this weird stuff is.

I mean, I'm not frightened of them.

I'd like to make that very clear.

It was the 70s.

We'd landed on the moon.

I don't know how petrified.

I don't think witchcraft.

People running out of supermarkets screaming.

No, we landed on the moon before we had the barcode.

That's weird.

That is odd.

It feels like the moon is the landing is the last thing that we should do.

In fact, I'm not sure we should have landed there yet, even.

Funny that you mentioned the devil because the Universal Product Code is part of a big devil conspiracy.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

It begins and ends with some sort of easy identifying lines so that the lasers kind of know where the code begins and ends.

And that resembles a 666 on either side.

No, there is.

There's a six and a six.

There are three sixes throughout.

They're not quite sixes.

There are sixes as well in the barcode, obviously.

But at the beginning, they're just markers that look like sixes.

They're not quite sixes.

And there's the guy who developed the product code, George Joseph Lara, has got a section on his website where he addresses this constant accusation.

He says, there's nothing sinister about this.

They resemble sixes.

It's simply a coincidence.

Like the fact that my first, middle, and last name all have six letters.

If you'd like to ask me anything more about this, sacrifice a lamb on your lawn at night.

He does say I will not be answering any questions of this as of October 2000 or something.

There's a section on his website.

Like the video that you remember Ringo Starr?

Oh yeah.

Peace and love, peace and love.

Peace and love, peace and love.

I'm not answering any more fan mail as of this date.

Peace and love, peace and love.

The thing is, I genuinely believe that Ringo Starr gets quite a lot of fan mail, whereas I really struggle to believe that this man is just inundated.

Or if he is, it's the same two mad people and he can just block their addresses.

I was trying to look into how zookeepers identify different species of animals, say they have a bunch in a cage, and what do they do to do that?

Sometimes they have training to teach them the difference between, say, a rabbit and a giraffe.

Exactly.

It's only better resourced zoos, though.

And I didn't find anything.

But this is the only reason I wanted to mention this: is that there's a great hashtag that you can find on Twitter, which is hashtag zookeepers problems.

And it's just really fun because zookeepers around the world just put up their problems.

So a few I have here

from Yummy Teese at Yummy Tees.

I have way too much lemur pee in my hair right now.

From Jillian Erzar at Jillian Erzar.

Punched in the Vag by a tortoise.

Hashtag Zookeeper Problems.

How slow is Jillian?

Zebras cause the most injuries to US zookeepers more than any other animal.

Are those injuries caused when the zookeepers mispronounce their names so egregiously, just like Andy did earlier?

Yeah.

Because I think that's...

What did I say?

Hey, zebra.

That's going to be

the only kind of feedback we'll get about this episode is people saying, why on earth does Andy say zebra?

Yeah.

Is it a problem?

It's going to be.

Believe you me.

Potato, potato, zebra, zebra.

Yeah.

Zebra?

No.

No, it doesn't sound right.

So why are they injuring horses?

Well, because they're wild animals, but people think they're like horses.

So I think that it's just you're more likely to be injured.

So have we not domesticated the zebra?

It's impossible to domesticate a zebra.

What?

They're really.

In fact, there's only one person I've found who managed to even slightly domesticate them, and that was Walter Rothschild.

Have you heard of him?

Yes.

He is an amazing man.

He was

late 19th century, early 20th century.

He was a zoologist, naturalist.

He had the most amazing collections of animals.

He collected tens of thousands of butterflies.

He was a Rothschild from the banking dynasty, the Rothschilds, so he was seriously wealthy.

He didn't care about any of the banking stuff.

All he wanted was to collect animals.

And he had a carriage harnessed with four zebras, and he rode it along Piccadilly and into the forecourt of Buckingham Palace.

Oh, I think I've seen a photo of that.

Yeah, it's really one of these sort of historical photos that gets trotted out a lot.

I'm surprised that we still haven't.

It seems to be one of those evolution questions that we haven't solved yet of why they have the black and white.

My favourite theory, I just can't believe this, is that it cools the zebra down because air might move more quickly over the black bits of skin which absorb light.

and then more slowly over the white stripes which reflect it which might make little convection currents around the zebra to cool down i cannot i cannot believe that's true well i i mean first of all i think think that God slash Darwin is looking down on the zebra debate and going, you guys are overthinking this.

So I just thought it would be fun.

After the theory that God slash Darwin is looking down right now, only one of them will be looking down right now, if they're right.

In fact, it's either both of them or neither of them.

Oh, that's right.

Sorry.

So you are right.

Yeah.

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

My fact this week is that Agatha Christie was once turned away from a party held in her honour.

Nice.

I think we've all had that.

Yeah.

Was she too drunk?

No, she was too shy, actually.

That was the problem.

So this is in April in 1958.

The mousetrap, which is the play in London that is based on the book that she wrote, became the longest-running production in the history of British theatre, so most performances ever.

2,239 performances.

And there was a big party in the Savoy Hotel.

And so she turned up, all dressed up, and

went to the party room.

The guy at the door didn't recognise her, and she was so shy that she just got very embarrassed and went and sat in the lounge and have a drink by herself for most of the evening.

She'd been asked to turn up early, hadn't she, by Peter Saunders, who was the producer of Mousetrap, who said, Avoid the press by turning up early and you can sneak in early.

And I think when she did that, she couldn't get in until the party actually started.

Oh, so she did make it into the party?

She did get into the party, yeah.

Because I read an account account in the British Newspaper Archive from the stage newspaper in 1958, and it was an account of the speech that she made.

And Richard Attenborough actually gave this interview about what she'd said, and she just stood up.

It was one of the shortest speeches in theatre history.

She said, Well, darlings, I think we'll get a few months out of it.

So, yeah, which is weird, because at that point, she'd already got 10 years out of it.

In 1972, to exacerbate her shyness, there was another party held in her honor, because there seemed to be constant parties held in honor of someone who was very shy.

It's like a form of torture.

But in 1972, she turned up to the party and she forgot her false teeth because she was in her 80s at that point.

And so none of the guests were allowed to speak to her except her very closest friends because she didn't want to open her mouth.

And did that cure her shyness?

Does it cure your shyness if nobody speaks to you?

I suppose it might do because then you have to go and speak to other people.

Can you imagine?

You're a shy type.

You've plucked up the courage to go to your party.

You know everyone's going to want to talk to you and you haven't brought your fucking tea.

oh man yeah it's a tough moment

it's a tough moment

so um i was reading this mousetrap um uh play when she died the rights went over to her grandson matthew pritchard and there's been this big thing where he's been in a bit of a fight with uh wikipedia because wikipedia often whenever they put the uh a novel or anything they'll often do a really detailed plot analysis of what goes on and mousetrap famously has a plot twist right at the end and it's up there And so he's been trying to get them to take it down.

And it's very funny, because even on the Wikipedia, they now acknowledge that he's trying to do it.

But so he hasn't won.

Wikipedia says this is just information.

It stays up there.

But it's interesting, this plot twist, because the plot twist has to be a little bit different.

Hang on, wait.

Are you about to?

I'm not going to say it.

But the plot twist has become famous for being a plot twist.

And so I, for one, know what the plot twist is because...

of people saying, oh, there's this famous plot twist where this happens.

I've never actually experienced the actual twist.

And I reckon the majority of people know what the twist is without ever having actually had the twist happen to them, which is a shame.

I don't know what the twist is, so I'm not going to go on the Wikipedia page.

I kind of feel like it would be sporting of them to take it down.

Well, there is, surprisingly, or rather unsurprisingly, on Wikipedia, there's a page you can go to with huge discussions from all the Wikipedians about the attitude they're taking towards spoilers.

That sounds like a really fun reading.

It's surprisingly well.

It's a sunny Saturday afternoon.

Yeah, I mean, it depends on the role of an encyclopedia, doesn't it?

Is the role of an encyclopedia to tell you everything about the ending of all plots?

Or is the role of an encyclopedia to pique your interest so you want to know more?

I think it's the first one.

To find out what zebras really are, you'll have to come and see the stage show.

Do you know how she described herself?

She said she was a sausage machine.

Sausage machine.

Yeah.

Why?

Not a sausage party.

Vital difference.

No, this was at a time of her life when she was writing two books a year.

She said, I'm a sausage machine, a perfect sausage machine.

There was one year where I think she wrote seven books, plays, and collections of short stories.

Right.

Yeah, insane.

So

if anything, she's a mystery novel machine rather than a sausage machine.

But I think it was a metaphor rather than her actually just describing what she was doing.

And that was what made her so brilliant as an author is she never, you know, she sometimes would not literally describe the things she was doing.

That's what I love about her novels, all those sausage similes.

Yeah.

Is that the plot twist from the mouth scrap?

Yeah.

The lead character is a sausage all alive.

It was in the drawing room with a sausage.

I like the idea of her at the press conference where she's giving the interview saying, The thing about me is I'm just a sausage machine, a perfect sausage machine, and every single journalist trying to suppress that snigger as they wrote it down.

Especially saying it without any teeth in as well.

Do you know where she did a lot of her writing?

On paper?

On paper and in Iraq.

I didn't know this.

Her second husband was an archaeologist and a really eminent archaeologist.

And

she went out and did a load of digs with him.

So there are loads of stories that happen in exotic archaeology dig sites and that kind of thing.

Well, there are a fair few at least which do.

And that's why.

She was a very keen archaeologist, wasn't she?

In the second part, like she herself got into it as well as her husband.

And she said to her husband, there's this sort of famous anecdote where she says, I just wish I knew a bit more about this kind of pottery pottery stuff.

And he says, do you realize you know more about this ancient pottery than any other woman alive in the world today?

Because it wasn't really studied by women at the time.

Right.

You know, it was quite a closed shop.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

If you go to the British Museum, you can see a bunch of artefacts that he uncovered.

I think he made a particularly important find in Nimrod, which is an ancient Iraqi city.

He found a bunch of sort of 3,000-year-old artefacts, and they're in the British Museum.

And because she cleaned all his artefacts, you can go and see stuff that's been cleaned by Agatha Christie.

That is so cool.

Isn't that cool?

So the British Museum says the reason these have probably been preserved so well over the last hundred years is because they were perfectly cleaned by Christie.

They called her the Queen of Clean.

They called her the Sausage Machine.

Queen of Clean, the Sausage Machine.

I was looking into other people who've been turned away or kicked out from their parties.

Nirvana, kicked out of their own Nevermind Release Party.

Wow.

What did they say as they walked away?

But yeah, they.

It's really odd though, because you read what they did when they got there.

Basically, they started tossing around a watermelon and they effectively started a food fight and they were told to leave the release of their album.

That's a pretty hardcore food fight to start throwing an entire watermelon into Sheera.

Yeah, I can understand if it was lobbed at someone's face that that might be.

Yeah.

Start with mashed potato or something.

I've got a fact about parties.

Yeah.

There are schools in Japan for how to have a party.

Oh no.

Yeah.

Oh, cool.

Because it's not really the done thing, because most people live in very small homes, so you don't really have parties where you have loads of people around very much.

So there is this group which has been set up called the Home Party Association, which teaches you how, and there are three levels of certification.

First one, you just have to send them about 22 quid and pictures of a party that you have thrown.

Second one, level two, you have to attend five hours of lectures in how to throw a party and you have to write an essay and that costs about 200 quid.

The third one costs about 450 quid for all the training and you have to successfully host a party attended by the examiners of the school.

Oh my god.

Get this, get this.

The failure rate is 90%.

Whoa!

No shit, any party attended by examiners is gonna be crazy.

By definition, inviting your teachers to a party ruins it.

Oh my god.

What they should have taken tips from is the party of the century in the 20th century.

And I'd never heard of this, but it's this party that apparently is the party of the century.

It was in 1951 it was thrown by someone who was known as Charlie who was heir to some great Mexican silver fortune and it sounds incredible and it's been remembered in great party history, great party law as the greatest party ever thrown and so I love that.

You said a bunch of stuff there that doesn't exist.

Great party law,

big book of famous parties

mentioned at every party.

It's great

encyclopedia of party legend.

I never throw a party without reminding all my guests of the greatest party of the century in 1951.

If you guys had attended these Japanese lectures, you'd be highly...

What happened at this great party?

So this is what happened.

It took place in the Palazzo Labia in Venice.

Oh no, okay, it sounded good.

You weren't wrong.

It was called the Bal Orientale or the Bal Orientale, depending on which pronunciation is correct.

Sorry, an oriental ball inside a labia.

Yeah, that's correct.

The host wore sixteen inch platform shoes, so uh he was six foot ten, so he towered above all of his guests.

He changed his costume sixteen times throughout the evening.

Um and the roof of the place had a garden designed by Dali, and Dali actually did attend.

Dali attended and Christian Dior attended and they came dressed up as each other.

That's just a fun little uh little trick.

Um it was a costume ball, but Orson Welles's costume didn't arrive on time, so he had to wear just a normal suit, which is very em embarrassing for Orson.

He was himself.

That's quite a good costume for a party.

Yeah, he should have just claimed he wasn't Orson Welles.

Daisy Fellows was there, who was a very famous

I think journalist or socialite at the time, and she it was the first time anyone had ever worn leopard print, so she started the trend for wearing leopard print in the West.

It was the first time a Western person had worn leopard print.

This party is sounding better and better,

isn't it?

So many people threatened to be Cleopatra that it had to be up to the host to settle who was going going to come as Cleopatra.

It's going to be Cleopatra.

Anonymous phone calls.

Someone going to be Cleopatra at your party.

Americans who hadn't been invited, because it was so famous it was happening, they sailed over and arrived in the Lido nearby in their yachts just in the desperate hope of getting an invitation.

So there were all these wealthy people's yachts parked in nearby coastline and Lidos just in the hope that they get it.

Doesn't it?

sound incredible?

I've never heard of it.

But who's Charlie?

Just a super rich guy.

No one really knows anything more about him.

That's amazing.

Sounds very good.

It sounds kind of Great Gatsby-esque, doesn't it?

So Great Gatsby-Tby.

What was the period of...

Was that

slightly later than that?

It was

20s, really.

Truman Capote threw a party as well, which was to tie in with the publication of In Cold Blood.

And that, apparently, in America was the big party of 1966.

Yeah, so it was dubbed the night Capote made 500 friends and 15,000 enemies because the invitations were so coveted.

The idea that he was saying no to people to come to this party created more enemies than the people who ended up coming, liking him.

And everyone wore masks, so it was, you know, no one who knew who anyone was there.

Frank Snatcher was there, apparently.

Lauren Bacall, apparently, no one knows.

They had a mask on.

The only person without a mask was Andy Warhol, who just decided not to wear a mask because it's so arty.

And yeah,

that's like when Brian Cranston went to Comic-Con and he wore a plastic mask with his own face on and no one recognized him.

That's really good.

That's funny.

Are we sure Jim and Capote didn't just invite a few thousand randomers off the street, put masks on them, take photos, and then point at the various photos, going, That's Frank Sinarcher there?

Skepticism from the woman who told us this cock and bull story about the greatest party in 1951 ever told.

I don't like being faced with this Capote competition earlier.

Salvador Dali once said, I am never alone.

I am used to being with Salvador Dali always, and that, for me, is a permanent party.

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

My fact this week is that different species of dolphins babysit each other's children.

So, this is some research that was done a while back and reported in the Marine Mammal Science Journal.

And it's about bottlenose dolphins and spotted dolphins and how they work together and they do loads of stuff together.

And one of the things they do together is leave their children with each other.

So, when dolphins dive deep to hunt squid, for instance, their kids, young dolphins, can't dive that deep, so they leave them with someone to care for them.

And these two species, it's the first instance of species properly cooperating in this way.

It would be great if you could get an animal babysitter just for your kids.

What kind of animal would you pick to babysitters?

Presumably, not dolphin.

Not zebra either.

Well, dolphins are very well qualified.

If you give the kids armbands and drop them in the sea, then get a spotted dolphin to live on.

I don't know.

They're a bit sexy towards any human they come into contact with, aren't they?

Dan speaks from personal experience.

I don't know.

Anytime I've read about people with dolphins, there always is a sort of weird humping going on.

Because I feel like you want to tell a sexy dolphin.

No, no, no, no.

I just, I just, anytime I've read about dolphins,

but then maybe I shouldn't be googling those particular keywords.

Yeah, I think you're hanging out in the wrong section of the library.

Do you know that dolphin nipples are secret?

In that they're sort of.

Even they don't know about dolphins.

secret,

they're hidden.

They have these abdominal slits, and the nipples are kind of inside the slits, the mammary slits they're called.

And also, the penis of the male dolphin is the same.

It's in a slit, and it sort of can poke out, but it can retract within the slit as well.

So it's not

external.

Yeah.

I read an article title that was called Dolphins Have Scary Hand-like Penises.

Did you read that as well?

Well, I did, but I've read a debunking of it.

Ah.

But you say, what have you...

No, I just they have a retractable retractable penis.

And the idea was that they use it to find things.

If they're near a sort of a surface area, they'll use it like humans in the dark use hands to find their way around things.

I'm afraid that's not quite true.

I've read a thing by a science writer called Justin Gregg, who's a bit of an expert on these matters.

And there's a myth that dolphins have prehensile penises, and that doesn't really make any sense because prehensile, like prehensile tails, which can be used to grip and grab things and wrap around around things yeah um they can extend it and they can retract it and they can bend it in different directions to help with mating um but they probably can't pick up keys for example yeah but that's enough if you give someone directions with that kind of you can give someone directions with it if you really tried hard yeah oh so that's not too far off it's not too far off yeah yeah yeah

so this this is an interesting thing they have such control because dolphins like whales they have pelvises because they evolved from land animals which got bored of being on land went back into the sea right so all the muscles which attach to their penis and give them this control so left right in out that kind of thing um they are directly attached to the pelvic bone and one scientist said it's like operating a trick kite where you pull two strings and pulling left and right makes it go in a loop-de-loop but i don't think wow that's quite a specialized i don't think dolphin penises can do a loop-de-loop you're talking about the secret nipples it's really interesting how the babies drink the mother's milk.

So they have a tongue that they can turn into like a little straw.

You know when you kind of like loop your tongue over, and some people do that, yeah, oh, yeah, like that, they do that, and their tongue has little fingery things on the end that kind of go into the nipple and act a bit like a zip, like they kind of latch on to make it a little bit of a seal.

Because it is difficult because they're drinking milk underwater, so it's liquid and liquid.

Oh, yeah, well, otherwise, it would seep out, yeah, exactly.

And it's got the consistency of milkshake, apparently, in the milk, and um, and yeah, it lasts about five to ten seconds.

But it smells

really, it smells of fish, probably

a milkshake that smells of fish.

I imagine everything smells of fish in the ocean, but can't they only taste salt?

Ooh, yeah, I think you're right.

Yeah, I think that is true.

They lost all their other taste busts.

And they lost the sense of smell.

They used to have it when they were on

land.

And then obviously in water, you don't need to smell the air.

And then their nostrils moved above their head to become the blowhole.

I just, I want to know about the middle of that process where the nostrils were moving north.

The awkward adolescent stage where they had their nostrils on their forehead.

Yeah.

The unicorn look.

Yeah.

It's bizarre, isn't it?

It's so bizarre.

You know, dolphins' grandmothers sometimes feed them.

So, and they employ wet nurses, I think.

It's underwater.

They're all wet nurses.

There's a theory that

male dolphins can tell when female dolphins are pregnant because they take, we know they take a special interest in females when they're pregnant.

And there's a theory that's because they have the capability to use ultrasound so that they can do ultrasound without having to make an appointment at a sonogram.

What?

So do they see them and go, oh, it's a boy?

Like, don't tell me.

I'm trying not to look.

I feel like we quite, in Dolphin Escape, that would be quite rude, actually, to look at someone else's.

Don't look inside my wife's stomach.

Yeah, it's like having x-ray specs all the time.

Yeah.

Imagine

imagine taking your wife to the ultrasound and it's just a dolphin.

You'd be like, oh, great, we're in good hands.

Except they're not.

Because we have this impression that dolphins are really nice, but some dolphins, some male bottlenosed dolphins kill newborn calves,

which is not nice.

Why do they do that?

They do it.

It's really grim, actually.

They do it because it frees up the females for mating.

Because if a female has a newborn calf,

she will be looking after the calf for some years, she won't be interested in having any more offspring.

Whereas if

the males have killed off the calf, then within a few months, she might be ready to mate again.

Do they have to, I don't know if we would know this, but do they have to do it sort of behind while the mother's away on a trip?

No,

on a trip.

On a holiday.

Well, babysitting's going on, presumably.

They just kind of mob the mother, and so the mother will try and protect her calf, and often will succeed in protecting her calf from the males and get away with them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then the mother's fine just to mate with that dolphin again.

They get over it, don't they?

Pretty fast in the animal world.

They've got to procreate and they're not healthy family situations.

It's not.

I think, actually, I think bottlenose dolphins might be the bastards of the dolphin world.

Because actually, this initial fact was about bottlenose and spotted dolphins looking after each other's children.

But the only instance they've found is of spotted dolphins looking after bottlenose dolphins' children, not the other way around.

And actually, there's quite a lot of instances, as well as them cooperating with each other species-wise.

Bottlenose dolphins will just force their way into a group of spotted dolphins and start shagging the women in them.

And there's nothing that the spotteds can do because they're half the size.

Yes.

Yeah.

They just go take their women.

So actually, they're kind of bullies.

Bottlenose bullies.

There's evidence in marine research centers that kind of manage large areas of water with lots of species species in that when dolphins get bored of all the human toys and things that they use baby sharks as volleyballs, which is definitely bullying.

Well,

that's how dolphins kill baby dolphin calves.

They toss them out of the water or they will hold them under the water too, because dolphins need to come up forever.

Have you guys heard of a wolfin?

It's a whale dolphin.

Half whale, half dolphin.

It's amazing.

How big is it?

Is it a massive dolphin?

It was in between the size of the two.

Because it was a false killer whale, I think they're slightly smaller than killer whales.

It must have been so bad for it though.

It's just so awkward.

Like who do you hang out with?

You're way too small for the whales and you're way too big for the dolphin.

Sell it to Pixar.

Sell it to Pixar, Alex.

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Okay, time for our final fact of the show, and that's my fact.

My fact this week is that Sylvester Stallone's mom is a bum reader.

That was a bit harsh.

There's no way to speak about this.

This is something she is very proud about, according to her website, which she has taken down, and we had to search very hard to verify.

This is the kind of fact you get when James Harkin is away for a week from a podcast.

It's what slipped through the net.

I know.

This is my only chance.

This is called rhompology.

Why didn't they call it astrology?

Oh,

nice.

Yeah.

Okay, so for anyone who hasn't heard of rhompology or astrology, the newly coined.

Indeed, those people exist.

Surely everyone's familiar with the art.

What they do is rumpologists look at people's bums and they make predictions off the back of the creases, off the back of any

creases are there.

There's one.

Do you have to spread?

Like, how much detail is this?

Well, it depends how far into the future you want to see.

Your future is very dark.

But yeah, so I was reading about this.

I actually found out about this because I was emailing an author called David Bramwell, who wrote an incredible book called Number Nine Bus to Utopia.

And he's also the maker of a podcast and a live show called The Auditorium.

And so he puts on these nights, and he had a rumpologist speak at one of his events.

And I thought, what the hell's a rumpologist?

Googled it, found out that Jackie Stallone, Sylvester Stallone's mum, has done it.

And she's done it to the point where, even on her website, again, this is quite hard to verify because it's been taken down.

But suggestions, sort of little echoes of a past website through reading on Reddit and so on, suggests this, that she used to charge $600 and you would send a printed copy of your bum to her and she would read your bum digitally, as it were.

I love that a printed copy of your bum.

How does one print one's bum?

Now, with 3D printing, you probably can print your bum.

You probably can.

Oh, I think that was the perfect excuse for all the office parties whenever someone was caught sitting on

the copy list.

No, no, no.

I want to know about my business prospect for the next year.

But according to Wikipedia, Jackie Stallone has claimed to predict the outcome of presidential elections and the Oscar winners by reading the bottoms of her two pet Doberman pincers.

So it doesn't, it works on animals as well.

Yeah,

she's reading animal bums.

And it doesn't seem it doesn't, so it's one thing to send you a picture of your own bum and get your own future, but for some reason these two dogs have the future presidential elections in them instead.

What I've read is that.

Sometimes they're just born lucky.

Like, what are the odds of her having those dogs as well?

Yeah, amazing.

Yeah.

Dan, you briefly read out from the Wikipedia on rumpology just there, which is surprisingly restrained, actually, in what it says about this ancient art.

But I did want to read out one paragraph from it.

The American astrologer, Jackie Stallone, claims that rumpology is known to have been practiced in ancient times by the Babylonians, the Indians, and the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Although she provides no evidence for this claim, Stallone has been largely responsible for the supposed quote-marks revival of rhontology in modern times.

It's the most sceptical paragraph I've ever read about anything.

The idea that it's going in and out of vogue as well.

I knew that the ancient Romans would have

spent their time on it.

Just to clarify how you print a bum, because I just feel like people are going to have been wondering.

And she does tell you, did you see what she said you can do?

No.

You can henna your bum and then you sit on a piece of papyrus, she says, because I guess she's trying to enhance the ancient origins of the directors.

So you sit your newly wet henned arse on a bit of papyrus and then you blow it dry or whatever and send that off to her and she can read the imprints.

She doesn't even need the physical papyrus.

That is fantastic.

So it's like potato prints, but with your arm.

It's very skilled of her not to need the original bump.

I mean, it's amazing.

Isn't it incredible?

Yeah, I guess that's what you pay your $600 for, don't you?

Where do you get papyrus these days?

Is that in Ryman's?

Is that readily available?

Yeah, you're right.

It's hard.

It's next to the 80 GSM.

It's in papyrus.

Papyrus is really good, though.

I mean, it lasts a lot longer than our paper.

Well, that means all the paper from our time, this current bit of history, is going to go, except for these bits of papyrus that just have R scripts on them.

Little is known of the civilization of the early 21st century, but they accurately predicted every single thing that has come to pass.

So here's the thing.

The ancient Babylonians also believed that you could predict the future.

And they believed it was by the liver.

That was the part of the body they thought was really significant.

But how do you know which bit of the liver means what?

And they had a model liver.

So you would kill a sheep,

get a special priest, get

the liver out, and he had a special wooden liver.

Or there were even some special bronze livers.

And it says, look, if this bit is discolored this way, then

you're...

Yeah, it's hepatology.

No, sorry, not hepatology.

I'm sorry, that is the medical study of the liver.

It's not hepatology.

I think that's going to be the thing that gets most feedback at.

I wrote my Z pronunciation earlier.

I'm not getting liver surgery in the next 10 years.

I'm going to correct it right now.

It's hepatoscopy, and it's a branch of hairuspacy, which was the Babylonian and Etruscan study of various organs, which spelt out your future in some way.

But yeah, it was really popular, wasn't it?

A common way of telling the future.

And in fact, an example, a very famous example of hareuspacy was

in Caesar, Julius Caesar.

So So, do you know the way the Eides of March was predicted?

Was

because of this practice.

The Beware the Eides of March, famously that Julius Caesar was told to do, and he was told this by a Haruspacist, who is someone who looks at the entrails of animals to tell the future.

So, I think it was the entrails of a sheep which informed the Haruspacist to tell Caesar to beware the Eides of March.

And that was recorded by, I think, Suetonius.

So, here's the things.

Isaac Newton himself did a lot of future predicting.

Yes.

And

he was very interested in learning about the nature of God.

It's so contrary to the modern image of him.

He devised a chronology of all the great events before his life, and then he did a chronology of the future as well.

So he predicted a thing called the tribulation of the Jews, and he predicted that a thousand years of peace are going to begin in 2370.

And part of it was based on the life cycle of the locust.

I mean, it was seriously out there.

No, but that's also quite scientific in a way.

The idea of taking a load of data and trying to find trends based on kind of things that happen in the world.

No, that's the kind of thing that conspiracy theorists do.

It's not scientific.

It's taking a load of data and making it find the trends that you want it to find, I think.

Or finding evidence.

It's not just

making future predictions on, say, what's going to happen with climate change will mean based on past data.

Like, that is science, also.

There's good ways and bad ways to do it, but it's two sides of the same coin.

Yeah.

I was reading about one of Thailand's leading fortune tellers

whose name is Luck Rakanithes, and he says that the fact that his name is Luck, which means luck in English, is complete coincidence.

There was an interview with him recently

where he runs this system now, which is not like a call center, where people just literally ring in and they get their horoscopes or they get told what lottery numbers to choose or whatever.

He's a multi-multi-millionaire, so hundreds of thousands of people call him every month.

And the way he did it was he just memorized a bunch of astrology books when he was a child and then regurgitates it.

But he spoke to Channel 4, I think, in the last couple of years.

And Channel four asked him how he finds it just reading people's futures and telling them what's going to happen to them and he said i want to change my life i'm not kidding i'm so bored of going places with people shouting teacher look at my palm tell me my fortune he's basically completely well i don't think he ever believed it but he's now gone these people are all idiots who are asking me what's going to happen to them and he acknowledges there's no point in asking me if you're going to get rich you need to get rich using your own brains i can't tell you what's going to happen to you you actually have to just go out there and make it happen for yourself.

He should sell that device over the phone to people.

Perhaps he is, yeah.

I don't think he'd make much money.

Press one for an angry rant.

Press two.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would 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 Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

Alex at AlexBow underscore.

And Chaczinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to at qi podcast, that's our group account, or you can go to no such thingasoffish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes.

We'll see you again next week.

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