129: No Such Thing As Jack The Stripper

So, what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an organic valley farm.

Organic valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at ov.co-op and taste the difference.

From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab-grown diamond engagement rings to the U.S.

Explore Solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewelers behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our new Union Street showroom or explore the range at cullenjewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.

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 James Harkin, Anna Chaczynski, and Alex Bell.

And once again,

no!

No!

I'm back from Edinburgh!

I'm back from Edinburgh!

It's Andy Murray!

I don't recognize that name.

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

Starting with you, James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that Neanderthals wore capes.

Hmm.

Did they only wear capes?

I think they kind of did, and it seems like...

Is that a good look?

Is that a sexy look?

I'm just trying to picture it.

It's extra obscene if you're only wearing a cape, I think.

Do you think worse than nudity?

I think it's worse than nudity.

Well, no, it's worse than being naked with just socks on.

Like, that's what it is.

That looks terrible.

Having one item is always just a bit embarrassing.

Absolutely.

No, a cape's quite a good look, because you can wrap it round yourself and then do the big reveal.

So Neanderthals, they wore capes.

They did, compared to early humans who wore more like parkers or hoodies.

So the thing is, they found by looking at animal remains in early human settlements and Neanderthal settlements, and they found that the Neanderthals didn't really have the ability to make more complex clothing like the humans could.

All they could really do is get an animal skin and just wrap it round the neck like a cape, whereas the humans could kind of make more proper clothing.

And they reckon that this may be one of the reasons why the Neanderthals died out when the humans proliferated.

Kind of ironic that they donned superhero gear in order to wipe themselves out.

What a bunch of idiots.

I read a thing about superhero capes, and it was a physicist who'd done an analysis on Batman's cape.

He worked out that if, as in the film, he used the cape to help slow himself down, he would still have hit the building he was landing on at 50 miles an hour, which would have immediately killed him.

I don't think, I mean, I think we're assuming when we watch that, that there's some magical force holding him up, as well as just the sheer force of his cape.

But he is just a bloke.

Let's not forget.

Batman is a bloke.

He's not like Superman with superpowers.

He's just a guy with tons of money.

Oh, I kind of thought he had a little bit of extra magic power as well.

No, his sole superpower is material wealth.

Just, I thought the really interesting thing about this new research that's been done was the idea that early humans, the real superheroes of this story, had fur-trim hoodies, it's thought, or fur-trim coats, because what the researchers found is that certain animals were found at human sites that weren't found at Neanderthal sites.

So I think there were animals like weasels and wolverines that were found on the human sites, and they have like short hairs, and they're the kind of hair that you'd use to make a fur trim.

So they've got this whole mixture of fur, and if it's added to sleeves and the hoods of clothes, then it insulates you better.

How were they

sewing or putting stuff together?

Well, do you know that the oldest sewing needle was found around this time, around 40,000 years ago?

Really?

Actually, it was found more recently, but it was lost 40,000 years ago.

No, no, no, sorry, it was found 40,000 years ago, but immediately dropped again.

In a haystack.

But weirdly, it wasn't early humans or Neanderthals, it was Denisovians, who were a third group of hominids who kind of lived around the same time.

Were we the most clever of the bunch at that period?

They definitely had bigger brains than we did.

Ah, well, they had bigger brains, Neanderthals, but there is a theory that, because they had bigger bodies as well, and they had larger eyes too, so they had extremely good vision, but there's a theory that more of their brain would have had to to be given over to their visual cortex and to controlling their body as well.

So they were great at kind of gymnastics or seeing things from a long distance.

The Neanderthal Olympics were brilliant too.

And all the audience were five miles away as well.

But on the other hand, they couldn't do Rubik's cubes.

And obviously that

really got humans through the ice age when it was very boring to have entertainment.

Yeah, I think scientists have come forward in the last year slightly

not debunking, but saying there's no actual evidence to show that increased focus on your brain on eyesight or body size would mean that you had a less good higher cortex.

But it's certainly a theory.

That's the thing, it just changes all the time.

Probably everything we're saying right now is just going to be disproved.

Particularly with Neanderthals.

Every day there's a new story that says, oh, they were killed by bunnies or they loved.

Have you not heard that theory?

No, no.

Oh, they were killed by rabbits.

All of them know.

It has to do with the fact that they couldn't, I think, I'm gaining this in the sort of area of right.

Uh

their um main source of food also became the main source of food that rabbits were eating, and rabbits were eating all the food, and so they just ran out of food effectively.

So rabbits kind of took I don't know.

Here's the thing.

If you try to live off rabbits your whole life, you wouldn't be able to because they don't contain nearly enough uh nutrients.

Unless they've eaten all of your other food, and so they contain all the food groups now inside of their bodies.

Is this an all-you-can-eat rabbit situation?

Yeah, if if the only thing you could ever eat was rabbits, you would die.

No.

So you die quite quickly as well.

I'm not sure exactly what it is that you're missing.

I think it's a famous kind of thought experiment about rabbits in particular.

Really?

And lots of other things, presumably.

Or a rabbit's the only ones trying to screw us over.

Yeah, you could probably live just off Guinness.

Yeah, okay, don't do it.

They always say that, don't they?

They say, like, two pints of Guinness and three Mars bars will get you through the rest of your life.

But it doesn't sound

Irish people.

Did you know?

Because people always used to say, oh, drinking a Guinness is the same as having seven roast dinners or something, that there's the same number number of calories in a pint of tenants or a pint of Fosters as there is in a pint of Guinness.

Wow.

Didn't you?

I always thought there was way more in Guinness.

Yeah.

It feels like there's more when you drink it, doesn't there?

Yeah, it does.

Does it?

It's thicker.

I don't know.

You had a full pint of beer for your birthday the other day, didn't you?

Yeah, fruit beer.

I really like this clothing thing because it's sort of interesting in the knock-on effects that things have.

So if Neanderthals only had capes, as we're saying,

then they might have only been able to hunt during the very warmest bits of the day.

So that limits your hunting range time-wise.

It means you can't hunt in the morning or the evening.

Or it might have stopped them foraging further north.

Whereas if you've got humans in sort of parker-like fur things, they can hunt further north, that extends the range.

Or in that part of Europe, ambush is quite a good means of killing prey because you use the landscape and you wait for animals to come along and then you jump out and kill them rather than chasing them as early humans did in Africa, for example.

So if you're just just lying down in a cape all day, you can't do it.

You'll freeze.

Do you remember that book that came out called The Singing Neanderthals?

Yes.

Yeah, so this is a professor from Reading University called Stephen Mithen, and he believes that they sung a lot and they liked to dance, dance and clap, and they used to do it in their caves together.

They used to sing in groups.

I have read that book quite a few years ago, and I think, is it not also that he thinks that language came originally from singing?

Yes.

So people would just kind of sing and get rhythm, and then that rhythm and noise would turn into meanings, and then that meaning would turn into language.

I think that's what you're saying.

Yeah, yeah.

So, for that reason as well, the language part, he says that he thinks that they would particularly have liked rap music.

He says, I can see them rapping in my mind.

He thinks a lot of stuff, this guy.

Neanderthal males had one massive arm and one puny one.

No.

Like Nadal.

Like Nadal.

Exactly like Nadal.

Athletes, cricket, and tennis players in particular have upper arm bones which are much stronger in their dominant arm.

So all of us here, our dominant arm will be between 5 and 14% bigger.

This is the arm bone, the upper arm bone.

Bigger than on the other side, right?

In Neanderthals, the upper arm bone is 50% bigger.

than on the other side.

And this is only the case in cricket and tennis players in modern humans today.

So when you say Nadal, it's absolutely right.

And they thought that this was because they were doing spear thrusting, right, to hunt animals.

But actually, they got modern humans to sort of practice thrusting spears and measured how much energy it used.

And actually, that uses the non-dominant arm loads, too.

So, they reckon that what it is is processing animal hides, i.e., scraping laboriously away at the inside of animal skins to make them suitable for wearing your capes.

And we don't know if female Neanderthals had the same thing, because we haven't found female Neanderthal skeletons where both arms are present, but we have found male ones.

Do we know that female Neanderthals had two arms?

No, we don't.

No.

Which might be a reason why they died out.

Just one thing on capes: that capes were quite big in the Aztec world, and Montezuma, particularly, was into them in that every year he collected a tribute from his people of 2,560 of them.

The word escape comes from the word cape.

Does it?

Well, it's like when someone grabs your cape, but you could run away because you kind of leave them with the cape.

Then you're just naked if you're a Neanderthal.

That's actually.

Yeah.

According to the

Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, to escape is to ex-cape oneself, to slip out of your cape and run away.

Oh, that's cool.

Isn't that great?

Were there any famous villains that were known for that?

Like, I mean, like Jack the Ripper.

We've got his cape.

You know, was there any like just with a cape done up by poppers at the front or something that they just whip off and leave?

Well, just if that's Jack the Stripper, you're thinking.

But another kind of cape in the Aztec world that only Aztec rulers were allowed to wear was the hummingbird cape.

And so hummingbirds were sort of revered by Aztecs because I think of their tenacity and the fact that they'd attack things that were bigger than them and they wouldn't rest until they'd got what they wanted.

And so Aztec kings could wear capes made entirely of hummingbird feathers.

I think I've seen one of those.

Yeah, they're pretty spectacular.

I think there might be one in a museum in Hawaii or something.

Oh, really?

Like really yellow, amazing, kind of feathery cape.

Wow.

Hummingbirds, I think, are the are they the only bird that can fly backwards?

Yeah.

But yeah, one cape would take 8,000 hummingbirds.

How many?

It's quite impressive to catch, though, that many, though.

It is.

You'll probably see

sneak up at them from the front.

Elvis Presley famously used to wear a cape in the later years.

And the very first time that they had the idea for the cape, because the idea was that it was going to be used to reveal himself, not in that way, on stage, to the audience.

So it was a great way of hiding himself before they could see it.

Because you can still see the cape, obviously.

Yeah, I guess, but you're like, who's buying the cape?

I know they know they're at a Presley game.

All right, the thing is, is that with the cape, so he commissioned it from this guy who was in another bit of America, and so they made the cape and they sent it over on a plane, and Elvis put it on, and it was so heavy that as he walked forward, he immediately got dragged back by the weight of it and crashed backwards onto the ground.

Like, who did that in the VMAs last year or something?

Was it Madonna?

I think she just fell down forward.

Did she not get dragged?

No, she got dragged off by her cape.

She did.

Someone stepped on the back of her cape.

Maybe it was just a tribute to Elvis.

No one got.

Someone else who had a massive cape on stage was Liberace.

Oh, yeah.

Yes.

Famously.

He one time had such a massive cape.

He was brought on stage in a custom-made Rolls-Royce.

And then he took off his cape, which was then taken off stage by a smaller Rolls-Royce.

That is fantastic.

That's ridiculous.

I was looking at Sherlock Holmes because he wore a cape.

Yes, he was described as wearing a cape, and that he was illustrated wearing a very sort of famous cape.

I think it became famous because he'd worn it.

I don't think it was a famous cape that Sherlock Holmes adopted.

Who was this weird bloke inside my favourite cape?

Sorry, you're absolutely right.

He popularised that cape.

But

there was something really bizarre about the stories in that the man who was commissioned to draw the stories ended up not drawing them.

His brother sort of got the gig somehow instead.

But then he drew the man who'd originally been commissioned to draw the cape was then the model for the cape, which his brother then ended up drawing for the stories.

Was that a consolation prize thing?

Kind of.

His brother was like, oh, sorry he didn't get the gig.

Really weird.

These Victorian.

There was a coat with a cape built into it.

Yes.

Yeah.

I don't really understand it.

Is it just to protect you against rain?

Or

just fashion?

Yeah.

Must have been fashion.

Yeah, because I exactly.

I was trying to work out: was there a purpose to Darth Vader's cape?

And

a lot of people.

Because he's in space.

What's he doing with the cape?

There's a lot of anti-gravity going on.

That's not a useful garment to have.

A lot of people say that it was because of his authority and that a cape would suggest a military kind of authority for somebody.

But then, I don't really know much about star

wars.

But

it doesn't seem like they have a lot of problem with anti-gravity at any stage.

Which is, it's interesting, isn't it?

The one scene where I think you should see that is when he's flying, when Vader's in his own ship, because I imagine that's where anti-gravity kicks in.

But he must be sitting on the cape.

That's what I thought, because you don't see it in shot.

You're right, because they must have thought this through.

Well, they have, because look, there's a description on Wikipedia about his entire outfit.

So the outer cape was made so that it could block fire and acid jets,

helping to protect the suit's electronics.

Because remember, Darth Vader was part of robot.

Yeah, but the cape was so heavy, get this.

The cape was so heavy that it restricted movement, so he had difficulty lifting his arms over his head, which is why you rarely see that in the movies.

Really?

I can't really see a scene where that would have fitted in, is when he was the YMCA.

It's when he's at that football match on the Mexican wave comes around this way.

From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab-grown diamond engagement rings to the U.S.

Explore Solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewelers behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our new Union Street showroom or explore the range at cullenjewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.

Ready to buy a car, a home, or just want to take control of of your money?

Your FICO score matters, and 90% of top lenders use it to make decisions.

Check your FICO score for free today without hurting your credit score.

Visit myfico.com/slash free or download the MyFICO app today.

My FICO gives you the score lenders use most, plus credit reports and real-time alerts to help keep you on top of your credit.

Visit myfico.com/slash free and take the mystery out of your FICO score.

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

My fact this week is that when the first ballpoint pen was launched in the US, riot police had to be deployed to restrain the crowds.

It was the new iPhone of its day.

This was in 1945, and I actually read about this in a book I've just bought called Adventures in Stationery by James Ward.

And this ballpoint pen was brought to America by a guy called Milton Reynolds.

It was 29th of October 1945, and he launched it in a a department store called Gimbal's in New York.

And thousands of people came.

So I think 5,000 people swarmed Gimbal's department store, and 50 extra policemen had to be deployed as an emergency at the last minute because it was being swarmed so much.

So they cost the equivalent of $160 now, which is a lot, but still

they'd sold millions of

amounts.

Presumably they weren't the really crummy, cheap buyers that you were paying $160 for.

Well, even, I mean, that was a time of some hardship across the world.

Well, what he was thinking, actually, you say of some hardship.

A, they didn't work because he rushed them through, but B, I think he was thinking it's the end of the war, I need to launch it now, people want a treat.

Well, that war was terrible, but at least we've got a barrel.

It's almost worth having another war.

It was called the Reynolds Rocket, though, so there was a little bit of militarization going on in there.

He actually took out an ad uh in the New York Times to promote it, a full page ad.

That's how big they were promoting the thing.

And in it, he said that it was fantastic, miraculous pen, guaranteed to write for two years without refilling.

Yeah, and you got your money back if it didn't.

And a lot of people did, didn't they?

Yeah, loads of people.

Yes.

104,643 had to be replaced in the first eight months.

So I think, yeah, it had massive problems.

It was really leaky, or it would stop writing altogether.

It just wasn't a very good design.

And the reason was because he was a very competitive businessman.

So there was this chap called Laszlo Biro, who a few years beforehand had invented the Byro in Europe and he brought it to Argentina.

And word had reached America and this guy Milton Reynolds of the Byro.

And he really wanted to patent the design, which was just this round tip and this capillary action, which meant that you could write in all directions and the ink wouldn't bleed out onto the page.

Anyway, he tried to buy the patent for the design and it had already been sold.

And so he was so pissed off, he decided to rush through his own design before Byro could get his out.

So he knew that Byro in 1945, which was now run by a company called Evershard, I think, he knew that they were about to rush a design out, and so he put his out prematurely.

But the thing was that his didn't use capillary action, his relied on gravity, so Darth Vader wouldn't have been able to use it, for instance.

Indeed.

That's why you never saw him signing papers.

Actually, there is a theory which Andy was just pointing, so I bet he was about to say this, that there is no writing in the whole Star Wars universe.

Theory is a post-literary universe.

You just see people pointing at, you know, pressing buttons with little symbols on them.

Right.

Apparently, there are some scrolls that the Jedis.

you can see it in the background occasionally that there's a scroll there, but whether they have writing on, we don't know.

But also, you can see in this is getting too geeky now, but you can see in Raiders of the Lost Ark when they have the Ark of the Covenant, there are symbols on the Ark of the Covenant of R2D2 and C3PO.

So they've now put that in a suggested LucasArts timeline of the universe.

So a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, was remembered close enough on Earth that they knew about 3PO and R2D2.

So it's not that long ago.

So when you said this is too geeky, I was about to say, no, it can't be too geeky for this show, but

you've managed to do it.

So

one of the first big orders for Byras was by the RAF

actually during the Second World War.

So this was by the Laszlo Biro

inventor himself.

What's he called Biro?

I think it's originally pronounced Birru.

We've been saying it wrong all these years.

Probably Lashlo as well, isn't it?

Lashlo Biro, I think.

I think it's Biro.

Probably.

He was Hungarian.

Well, he was born in Budapest.

Right.

He was Hungarian.

Then he moved to Argentina.

So this is a really weird thing also about the way he invented it.

I mean, he had to flee the Nazis, and he went to Argentina, partly because he'd had a chance encounter on a beach with a fellow holidaymaker and told him about this great invention he had.

And the fellow holidaymaker said, oh, well, I'm the president of Argentina.

So

do you want to come and set up in my country?

And he said, thank you very much, I will.

And isn't that amazing?

It's extraordinary.

Yeah, they're on the beach and they're happy to be chatting to the Argentinian president.

He was the former president.

But then, really tragically, Biro never made much money from it because he had sold the patent to it very early on in the process because partly, I think, to get more of his family out of Europe.

I think his last shares were sold to get his family to Argentina.

Yeah.

I really love

the sound of this guy, Biro, because apparently, before he invented the Biro, he was a hypnotist, a race car driver, and a surrealist painter.

Wow.

That's awesome.

Sounds amazing.

And you'll like how he invented the ballpoint pen, Andy.

He was just sat there looking out of a window and he saw a marble go through a puddle and then it left a line of water on the ground and he thought, wait a minute, I could make a pen like that.

Did he now?

Yeah.

Because Andy, you really hate these ideas of serendipity in inventions.

I hate it.

I just think that often inventions are...

It's so much nicer, the story of a Bureau seeing a child playing with marbles and the marble going through the puddle.

And who knows, that may well be the case.

But often you get the whole...

Oh, yes, he had invented a whole load of fountain pens, and then one of them was dropped and it created a weird ball on the end of it.

And you thought, oh, I know.

Yeah, because Barrow didn't actually invent the ballpoint pen, or he wasn't the first person to come up with a patent for it.

No.

I think it was John Lauder

who had the first patent, and he wanted something that would be able to write on wrapping paper.

And he invented this thing, but unfortunately, it was just a rubbish design.

There were 350 ballpoint patents before Biro came out of the port.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah, from you're right, John Loud, in I think the 1880s all the way through to the 1930s.

The idea had been thought of a lot, it's just no one had made it work properly.

So it's weird that he had to wait for a marble to propel itself through a puddle.

Yeah, it is a bit weird, isn't it?

Considering there were 350 other inventions exactly the same as his.

It's bizarre.

It's almost as though that did not happen.

Have we ever talked about, just speaking of riots and police having to be called unexpectedly, about the girl who put a Facebook invitation up and accidentally made it public, not private, the Dutch girl, in 2012.

And she got 30,000 people responding saying that they would attend.

It was about a party, was it?

It was, yeah, it was about a party, but it meant to go to just her friends.

And apparently, you have some private setting on Facebook.

There's a movie about it, isn't there?

Is there?

Yeah, I can't remember what it's called.

Oh, no, it was based on that film, so that's why people did it.

And then they turned up in t-shirts saying Project X Haran, because it was in the town of Haaren.

And yeah, like

up to 5,000 people turned up and 600 riot police had to be called and the girl fled her home to somewhere else because she'd accidentally put this invitation on private.

It sounds absolutely terrifying.

Yeah, it happens quite a lot.

What, 5,000 people rocking up to an invitation?

My friend certainly doesn't mind partying.

You did say up to 5,000 people.

I mean, even at these parties is up to 5,000 people.

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

My fact this week is that not only was Lady Chatterley's Lover banned from Australia, but a book about the ban was also banned.

Yeah, so Lady Chatterley's Lover, famously a book that was banned in the UK, it was banned in Australia, many other countries.

And what happened was in 1960, eventually after, I believe it was 1929, it was originally banned.

So huge amount of time, and they finally got the ban lifted.

And it was such a weird trial.

Everyone who was at the trial reported about it at the time in 1960 because they had things like the fact that the jury who were forced to read the book weren't even allowed to bring the book out of the courtroom.

So the jury had to just sit in the jury room and read the book.

There was probably somebody really smug juror who got to the end of it first before everybody else.

Yeah, just did all the spoilers.

She shacks him.

That reminds me of something I read

that

in the 90s or late 80s, early 90s, um there was a pornographic T V channel called Red Hot Dutch, which came over to Britain because people could get it with their satellite dishes.

And there was a big kind of moral crusade against it in the newspapers and stuff.

And before the Parliament could debate it, they had to have a special viewing of the channel in the Houses of Parliament.

And apparently it was one of the most well-attended viewings of anything that they ever had.

I don't agree because oh, you're allowed to watch some really steamy hot hot Dutch pornography, but you have to watch it in a room full of MPs.

I'm not sure I'd like attending.

So, the really tricky thing when the book was going to be published is that this was all after a 1959 change in the law, which said that literary merit is a defence.

So, it was an extremely sexually explicit book.

It had been banned in 1929, but then this change in the law in 1959 meant that suddenly there is a possible defence, which means that it could be published legally.

And Penguin then announced, you know, for uh Lawrence anniversary, we are going to publish a huge run of this.

And they were intending to publish it for, I think, three shillings and sixpence, which is really cheap and would have put it well within the reach of working-class people.

So that was why the authorities, if you like, were spooked.

Yeah.

Because there was still the thing in law, which was an old Victorian thing, which was

it's all right for you to have something which is explicit and obscene and whatever, so long as only gentlemen can read it.

But once you do it so that the poor people can read it, then it becomes becomes a problem.

And it's called variable obscenity.

Really?

Yeah.

And so there's a very famous part of that trial where the chief prosecutor, who's called Mervyn Griffith Jones, asked the jurors to consider if it was the kind of book that you would wish your wife or servants to read.

And in the newspapers they all thought that was hilarious because, you know, this is the 1960s, we don't talk like that anymore.

But of course he was referring to the old Victorian law, which was is it something that working class people or women or whatever can read as opposed to gentlemen like me?

And so when they eventually lifted the ban and said it could be sold in shops, it's not dissimilar to the great Ballpoint Pen debut.

The shops were packed.

People were not writing, but it was chaotic, and it was mainly men who just heard so much about this book.

And copies that had been bought were then being resold just the hour later in Soho.

It's also a very quick read.

Yes, yeah.

But people were, it's almost like when a huge superstar comes into town, you know, scalpers buy up the tickets and resell them for a hiked price.

So in Soho they were hiking the price of these unread books that had just been bought in the London bookshops.

So just to just to bring it back quickly to the opening fact, so what ended up happening was that the ban was lifted and that was great and someone then went on to write a book called The Trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

And that book then got released here in the UK and it attempted to get released in Australia, but Australia had not lifted their own ban and so they decided to to continue to ban anything to do with Lady Chatterley and that was one of the books that wasn't allowed in.

So did this book have like excerpts from the original do you think?

Yeah, no, I'm not sure exactly what this book contains.

It's actually quite hard to find it online.

Well it's because you're part of Australian Dan.

Yes, exactly.

She's not allowed to read anything like this.

And yeah, what's really nice about this is that a group of Australians actually decided that they were going to sneakily import it and start selling it in shops and they did.

And that kind of created a a new conversation once they got caught because they were caught and the government attempted to prosecute them.

And they said this shouldn't be done, and a lot of other politicians agreed.

And as a result, that's what's kind of kick-started the whole thing about the relaxation laws of the obscenity laws in Australia.

So it's interesting.

Lady Chatterley itself did it here, and in Australia, a book about the trial did it in Australia.

It's kind of amazing.

You'd have customs officials taking banned books off people.

Apparently, when trains used to go from Europe into the Soviet Union, when they stopped on the border they'd check your passports and there'd also be a guy going through going Bibles and pornography!

Bibles and pornography!

And so you had to give up your Bibles or pornography.

Oh my god,

I know what it looks like.

It's just actually a very broadly interpreted Bible.

From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab-grown diamond engagement rings to the U.S.

Explore Solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewelers behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our new Union Street showroom or explore the range at cullenjewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.

Dreaming of buying your first car or a new home?

Knowing your FICO score is the first step in making it real.

With MyFICO, you can check your score for free and it won't hurt your credit.

You'll get your FICO score, full credit reports, and real-time alerts all in one simple app.

Your credit score is more than just numbers.

It's the key to building the future you've been working toward.

Visit myfico.com/slash free or download the MyFICO app and take the mystery out of your FICO score.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that Henry VIII contributed to NASA's spacesuit design.

Go on, how?

So he had a suit of armor, which was built for him in 1520 for a thing called the Field of the Cloth of Gold, this huge diplomatic jolly in France.

And in 1962, one of the teams working on spacesuits for NASA, a firm called Garrett AI Research, they visited the suit and the Tower of London sent the firm data on it and they sent photos of it because they were trying to work out how to build better suits which could completely overlap and completely cover the body.

And that was sort of something that went into their research.

Yeah, so cool.

So now you're going to have astronauts with massive cod pieces.

Yeah,

that'd be good, though, wouldn't it?

Great.

So good.

He did have a bigger one than everyone else, didn't he?

The king had to be shown with a bigger cod piece.

Indeed.

Women in subsequent centuries used to put little pinpricks in them, and it was hoped that that would make them fertile and bring them babies.

That's the isn't that at the Tower of London?

Yeah.

Were you there?

We were shown around the Tower of London.

No, when was that?

Oh, a good few years ago, I was shown around the Royal Armouries

with Molly Oldfield, I think, for her book, The Secret Museum.

And they have the copies there, and I think they have the actual one which the pins were pricked in.

Oh, really?

That's so cool.

Henry VIII had regular enemas from a pig's bladder, didn't he?

So I actually thought that this fact was going to be, I think I may have misread your email, that the spacesuit was designed on Henry VIII's bottom.

And so I did quite a lot of research into Henry VIII's bottom.

So I was also reading about his toilet, and they were really lavish, but I didn't really understand this.

I think this was from Lucy Worsley, maybe.

He said, Henry VIII's lavatory was lavishly covered in black velvet.

Its lid opened to reveal inside a padded and beribboned interior covered with the same material.

Oh, God.

Those ribbons are going to be very nice for one use of the eye.

That's a really good point.

I mean...

I think there must have been a hole in the middle, and maybe you had to aim well and just make sure you didn't catch the padding and the ribbons on the outside, maybe.

No.

Yeah.

It feels like with that many enemies, his aim wouldn't have been so good.

How long after someone dies is it not treason anymore?

So he got very fat later in life.

Yeah.

He was quite athletic when he was young, wasn't he?

But he got really fat later on.

And I read this: that there was a 2009 study by the Royal Armories that found that his waist was 52 inches.

Okay, that's by looking at one of his suits of armour.

But brilliantly, by coincidence, Queen Victoria's bloomers that went on sale in 2012 were also a 52-inch waist.

So they had exactly the same waistline, Queen Victoria and Henry VIII.

So this fact is also about spacesuits and NASA.

Did you know spacesuits these days are called emus?

That's what modern spacesuits are referred to.

So, in space, you need to go and get into your emu.

So, I bet you is unit.

Not bad.

Extra.

Yep.

What's it going to be?

I'll leave the next one to you, Anna.

Mission.

Mammary.

Nowhere near.

I'm going to put us all out of all of our misery.

It's extra vehicular mobility units.

Where's the V?

F Mu.

Should be.

Yeah.

Except there's not a bird.

But that's not a lovable creature.

If you want to study ants using an electron microscope,

you would look at them in a vacuum.

And to get them in a vacuum, you have to put them in a tiny little space suit.

No.

Well, they call it a tiny space suit.

It's like you dip them in surfactant, which is a substance which causes like a tiny little nano suit basically that they go inside.

And it actually can even repair itself if it gets broken.

But yeah, they call it a tiny little ant

is it individual ones for individual ants?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh my goodness.

I know.

That is so

incredible.

Have you seen?

I was looking at amusing-looking spacesuit designs from over the years, and NASA have tried some pretty wacky stuff.

But have you seen the AX-5 hard shell spacesuit?

We've seen the AX3, haven't we?

Yeah, we have, yeah, sure.

I knew you weren't up to date on this.

So the AX-5, the point was that you wanted to be flexible inside it, so that's often a problem in spacesuits, that you can't move around enough.

And it had a flexibility rating of 95%, which means that the wearer can move into 95% of the positions that you can if you were naked.

But what this basically means is if you look at that,

reverse cowgirl.

What are the positions that you can't get into?

I don't know actually.

Maybe they don't tell you in case you try and break it.

I'm not sure I can get into all that many positions, even when naked.

You might only have a 75%

thing even without the spacesuit on.

Oh, God.

And each year as I get older it gets less, doesn't it?

Look, it's a funny spacesuit.

It's not that morbid.

It looks like someone's inflated and

if I wear this 95% space suit, does that mean I can now get into ball positions?

No, certainly not.

I'm afraid it's not 95% of the average person's, it's 95% of your positions naked.

Your naked is 100%.

You could barely do anything.5%.

Don't buy it.

If only you could transmute your consciousness into an AX-5 spacesuit, then you'd be able to do more than you could today.

How many percentage do you think you could do wearing just a cape?

That's over 100%.

110.

I'm sorry.

Have you finished this?

I just need to to describe how this works.

Because it's ridiculous.

The AX5.

The AX-5, you know, we've got

the AX-5.

The AX-5 looks like a hugely inflated Michelin, man.

So essentially, it's like being in a giant bubble where it seems like you can pull most of your limbs out of the sleeves and sort of your legs out of the legs and move around inside it.

But it looks totally absurd, because it looks like you've put on a piece of clothing 20 sizes too big for you.

So they decided not to let it go.

But it's, you know, a good amount of roominess in there, just with your head hanging onto the helmet, and the rest of your body can swing around underneath it.

That's a good idea, actually.

Shall we wrap up?

Yeah, yep.

Oh, do you know what the French for cod piece is?

Le Poisson.

I thought you'd go down that road.

Le Pièce de Poisson.

It's not, it's brave, spelt the same as bragette, but with an R,

which seems to have so much room for confusion.

Braguettes for breakfast?

Oh, that would look brilliant for a French 16th century sitcom, wouldn't it?

Yeah, stupid bars.

Just put a braquette over your penis and get on with it.

Are you sure?

Madame's halfway through eating it.

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 at Schreiberland.

James at Egg Shapes.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

And Jaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep.

Or you can go to our group Twitter account, which is at qi podcast, or go to no such thingasafish.com, which is where we have all of our previous episodes.

Also, why not go to iTunes?

All of our first year of fish is up there now.

You can buy that too.

And we will be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

It's 2025, a new year, and the perfect time to turn your business dreams into reality.

Maybe you've been tossing around a great idea, but haven't acted yet.

Well, Shopify is how you're going to make it happen.

Shopify makes it simple to create your brand, open for business, and make your first sale.

With thousands of customizable templates, you don't need coding or design skills.

Just drag, drop, and go.

Plus, Shopify's social media tools help you connect all your channels and create shoppable posts so you can sell everywhere your customers scroll.

Managing your business is easy too.

From shipping to taxes to payments, Shopify handles the details on a single dashboard, letting you focus on what really matters: growing your business.

Established in 2025, it has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash Dax.

All lowercase.

Go to shopify.com/slash DAX to start selling with Shopify today.

Shopify.com/slash Dax.

As a mom, you know your home is where your family learns to love, where your little kids learn who they are, and where your bigger kids remember who they were.

It's where dreams are born and come to life.

Your home deserves a spotlight, and Everlights makes that happen.

Everlights is your permanent external lighting expert.

With Everlights, your home can become a princess castle, a summer oasis, or celebration celebration of even the littlest wins.

And with Everlight's limited time twenty percent off deal, you'll be the hero of your home and your checkbook.

Let's give your home some color with Everlights.

Go to myeverlights.com to get a free quote today.