125: No Such Thing As An Upside-Down Grand Prix

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 Anna Chaczynski, Andy Murray, and James Harkin.

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, Andy.

My fact is that 18th century hairstyles included the Spaniel's Ears, Mad Dog, and The Drowned Chicken.

These were all do's that you could get.

And do we know what they look like?

I haven't been able to find what these ones look like.

No, but there are so many insane styles.

I suppose we can imagine what a drowned chicken looks like.

Yeah.

And it's hard to imagine that that would be a desirable hairstyle.

Some kind of punishment.

Yeah, dog as well.

it's bed hair basically but yeah you're drooling yeah exactly the spaniel's ears is that uh hairstyle that you see loads in 18th century paintings where women have their hair flat on top and then curled down the sides oh

it looks like you've got a spaniel's ears there's also um there were two others around that time called one was called the chest of drawers and the other one was called sportsman in the bush nice

what that was what did that entail it'd be so fun to uh if time travel was ever cracked, go back, not look into what it was, and just ask for that, sit down and see what you get.

That would be such a cool dare for exercise.

There were loads of really fancy styles, particularly in France.

And I did read a theory that the French Revolution was partly caused by Marie Antoinette's crazy hair.

Okay.

Brilliant.

Well, she had a royal hairdresser called Leonard Oti, and he made these incredibly fancy hairdos for her, with a few other people.

And the ladies of the court all followed suit, and that led to some of the earliest attacks on Marie Antoinette in pamphlet form.

So obviously it wasn't the entire cause but it was like a symptom basically.

I guess it represented her

wealth compared to

not wealth.

Yeah.

Well the most famous is the Coiffieur à la Belle Poul, which is a French ship and it had just beaten an English ship very heavily in a battle and so she got the ship in her hair.

Not the actual ship that was broken her name.

Full thing.

Very impressive.

Did they shape her hair into the shape of a boat, or did they, like, construct it with plywood?

What you do is you get your hair, and then you put a load of cushions sort of on your scalp and a metal frame, and then you can build up your hair around that.

Okay.

And then you put in a load of other hair as well.

And then you put in a model of a ship.

And it had rigging and it had little model sailors on it.

There's a modern version of this that you can see, which was Elton John's 50th birthday.

He went as Mary Antoinette with the ship in a wig.

It's huge, ginormous.

And the only reason I know that is I met a prop maker who made the Holy Grail for the Indiana Jones movie.

He also made the ship for Elton John's wig.

Really?

Yeah, and it came with a little pipe that went down into his clothing that every time he pressed, little cannons had little bits of smoke shoot out of it.

So it looked like he was shooting cannons.

So the thing is,

apparently it was huge to carry.

So just to give an idea of how heavy those things must have been, Elton John realized he couldn't get to the party in a car.

He had to go in a removals van.

So it's It's the only way he could get to the party.

Yeah, it was so heavy, and the driver went the wrong way, so they were stuck in the van for over an hour and a half, and he got so frustrated with it, he tried to cancel the party.

They did used to have to dismantle their hairstyles when they got into carriages.

I think Marie Antoinette used to have someone who would have to take off the top layer of hair so she could fit into a carriage.

Well, there's loads of

accounts of all this stuff, and some of them I think are not true, because some of them they only have mid-19th century sources, and it's all about the late 18th century.

So, for example, this is a story that I think is not true, because the earliest source I've found is 1862.

But there was a guy called Bollard who allegedly invented a thing called the mechanical coiffure, which when you press the spring, it would lower by a foot.

If you wanted to get into a carriage, then you press the spring again, and it goes up, boop, like that.

And it was if you were talking to a grandmother and you wanted to be respectful and not have a crazy head, you could just lower it quickly.

That would be really useful if you went to a theme park and you had to be a certain height to get on the rides.

Speaking of carrying hair around, obviously your wig was a massive commodity back in the 18th century.

I was reading about hair theft and there's amazing accounts of what happened in the 18th century where people would be walking along and suddenly their hair would just disappear.

Their wig would just disappear in a crowd.

And what they reckon it was were guys who were sort of tall burly men who were carrying a butcher's tray over their shoulder that contained a small child inside the butcher's tray.

And the small child would peek out, quickly grab the hair, the wig, head back into the butcher's tray.

So by the time the person turned around, there was just a burly man with a thing on his shoulder.

That's because wigs were really expensive.

Yeah, right.

Incredibly expensive stuff.

So it was really expensive to get these hairstyles done as well.

And so I hadn't quite realised how long they would stay in place.

Unless you were Marie Antoinette, who I think asked for a new hairstyle every day, you put it in place and you kept it there for a few weeks.

You basically kept it there for as long as it took to go really moldy, because the stuff that they used to keep it in were things like animal fats, weren't they?

So I think they would end up getting really moldy and smelly, and you'd get a lot of kind of creatures in your hair who are attracted to the substances you used.

But people would have these hairstyles in for two or three weeks and they just have to sleep with their heads propped up on lots of pillows.

Wow.

I was reading just a little bit about other fashionable things to be wearing in your hair.

There were things like if you're a fun woman, you'd have lots of fake butterflies in your hair to show that you're a fun woman.

Apparently, wives of officers wore entire squadrons perched on their head to show that they were an officer.

Yeah, so not real squads.

In miniature, I believe.

I would like to see a woman with a squadron of soldiers in her hair getting into a fight with a woman who had a ship in her hair.

And I'd like to see the little soldiers try and get onto the ship.

That would be my target.

But you can't have infantry versus the navy, can you?

I mean, it's just you can just fight, can't you?

You know, I wonder whether there were rules in war.

I guess that is true, but if you were a general and you say, okay, there's a ship over there, I'm going to send my infantry.

This is the reason I wasn't allowed into the army.

Roman brides would have their hair cut into six sections or braided into six sections, and each of the locks had to be separated with a spear that had been used to kill a gladiator.

And for best results, you would still have the blood of the gladiator on the spear.

For best results, leave in for two and a half minutes and ensure that a dead gladiator's blood is on the tip of your spear.

That can't have been every wedding.

No, it wasn't.

I think it was very high-profile.

High-society weddings.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, fair enough.

The Puritans, they like short hair, of course.

But there was one Puritan called William Prynn, and he said that people who had long, curly hair, like mine, were unlawful, effeminate, vainglorious, evil, odious, immodest, indecent, lascivious, wanton, dissolute, whorish, ungodly, horrid, strange, outlandish, impudent, pernicious, offensive, ridiculous, foolish, childish, and unchristian.

I said that's a fair description of you.

I don't think you're whorish.

Everything else stands.

So get this.

This is very cool.

Before

hair dryers, electrical hair dryers were invented, what you could have was a stoneware hair dryer, and it was like a hot water bottle, but for your hair.

Right.

So you would fill it with boiling water

and then you brush it through your hair and it allegedly dries it in a few minutes.

Pretty clever.

I guess it would.

Like ironing your hair.

Have you ever ironed your hair?

No, but I imagine that would dry it quite fast.

I am not joking.

I used to iron my sister and her friend's hair.

We'd get an iron out, and it's very hard because you've got to go quite close to the scalp.

I burnt quite a few scalps because you don't want it to kink when it goes off the edge of the hair.

That's best results, though, is to have a little bit of your own blood through the hair.

That's what I said.

Would you try that on me later so I look a bit less whorish?

In the 19th century, furniture used to be covered with mikasa protectors.

So mikasa was the popular hair oil that was so widespread that if you invited guest rounds, you knew that your furniture would end up covered in it.

And

you buy these special yes, and in theatres, anti-makassas are called.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, the little lacy thing on a train seat can be like behind your head, yeah.

That's because obviously, when you get on a train, you want to put your makasa on so that you look great when you get to the other end.

I didn't know that.

Have you noticed that whenever you get on a train, there's never any mikasa on the chair?

Yeah, but I don't know.

That's due to the anti-makassas.

That makes sense now.

Everything's falling into place for you now.

The entire world has basically been built around the need to avoid getting makassa everywhere.

My favourite hair in history was the hair of Chief White Eagle.

He had the world's strongest hair.

And he used to be dangled under an aeroplane by tying his hair to the bottom of an aeroplane.

No.

Hang on, so it would take off?

At what point do we think he discovered that he could do that?

Well, he also jumped from planes with his hair attached to parachutes.

That is so cool.

So he would let it open and his hair was the string?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think there were also short parachutes, presumably.

There were longer strings attached to his hair, but his hair was basically the thing attaching him to the parachute.

When was this guy active?

I'm not sure.

It was early.

It sounds like he fighting, it was in a military capacity, he was hanging from planes.

It was early 20th century.

What military application could that have?

Alright, chaps, we've got the mission.

We need to take out the ship, but we've only got a plane to do it with.

Can we not send in the infantry?

Afraid not.

They'll drown last week.

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

My fact this week is that the 1959 Formula One championship was won on foot.

Wow.

Start to finish?

No,

not start to finish.

So there's a great Australian Formula One driver called Jack Brabham.

The story behind it is that he was making this final race that was going to win him the championship.

He was on his final lap.

Victory was in sight.

And suddenly he ran out of petrol.

The car just came to a total halt.

And that should have been the end of the race for him.

Instead, he got out and he pushed the car all the way to the finishing line.

And he came in fourth place, but that was enough to win him the championship.

Jack Brabham is the only person to have won a Formula One race driving one of his own cars.

Yes.

Because he later went into making cars and developing them and so on.

Right, it's not just his run around that you can.

Little Ford focus that he had, yeah.

Yeah, he's kind of one of those characters.

So he's an Australian, and he kind of describes when he came over to England in order to start racing for the Formula One, that they treated him as a kind of really backward character from Australia.

And so every single championship that he won, everyone assumed that he was going to lose.

So the third one, which he won in his own car, everyone thought he was past his peak, thought he was too old to do it anymore.

So he came out to the starting line to his car.

He walked out with a fake long beard and a walking stick and acted like an old man all the way to his car.

What a guy.

And then went and won that,

won the championship.

What a cool guy.

One of his cars was called the Braben BT46, and it had a massive fan on the back of it.

And this fan would move the air so that it sucks the car down to the track and it made it a lot more aerodynamic.

And he used it for one race, which he won, but all of the other drivers complained about it.

They said it wasn't fair that he had it and they didn't.

And also that the fan kind of picked up stones off the track and shot them at the following cars.

And then after the first race, he agreed he would never use it again.

Wow.

Even though it wasn't technically against the rules.

Already, good sport.

So this is the thing.

The formula in Formula One is the set of rules that all drivers have to stick to.

And I found a friend of mine, my friend Max Fuhrman, works at McLaren.

And what he said, this is so cool, is that basically the whole aim is to create downward force on the car.

So they're all built like the opposite of a plane's wing, which is designed to lift you up.

You have to get it as low as possible to make it as aerodynamic as possible.

And above a certain speed, the cars are so good at creating the downward force that they could drive upside down along the ceiling of a tunnel.

That is crazy.

Why are they not doing that?

Yeah.

Why have we not seen that?

We would be watching Formula One, many more of them if that was an aspect of the future.

And there's a new Mario Kart that does that kind of stuff.

And yeah, it's very exciting.

So you're saying the idea is already there.

I'm saying we've seen the future, we've seen what it looks like.

It does work.

The transition from Mario Kart to Mario Kart ceiling works.

But why are we not doing it?

I don't know.

Well, I guess it's probably not very safe.

Yeah, I know

it does work.

But then what happens if you hit a stone and you suddenly lose a bit of down force?

It's true.

The downwards force, and generally the pressure applied to Formula One drivers is very extreme, obviously.

So the force when it's at its maximum

is about five times their normal weight of force on their bodies.

And that means that the exercise that they have to do most frequently is on their neck.

If you're a Formula One driver, the thing you focus on constantly is on neck exercises.

So, they have all these ways of making sure that they are able to take this kind of pressure.

I think there's a particular Formula One helmet that one of the trainers designed, which is surrounded by pulleys.

And so, the driver wears the helmet, and then his trainer pulls all the pulleys in various directions.

And the the driver has to practice kind of counterbalancing that with a force of his neck.

They should just walk around with a massive ship on their heads.

It is amazing, though.

Like, you'd assume that the training would be just get in a car and drive around a track.

That was my assumption.

But you read about the training that all these Formula One guys have to do, and it's a mixture of skiing, it's a mixture of swimming.

Well, you never know if your car runs out of petrol on the slopes of

the other thing I didn't know is that they change gear constantly, about up to 4,000 times a race.

Really?

Yeah, I just thought they sat there and put their foot down.

They're constantly changing gear.

It's once every 1.3 seconds in the Canadian Grand Prix.

How annoying must that be?

And the actual change of gear is 50 times faster than you can blink.

That is better than your standard manual car gear change.

Have you seen

the wheel?

The actual steering wheels these days.

Yeah, it's like a console.

It's like a console, yeah.

There's about 70 buttons on it and little knobs that they just turn.

and do you know the best button

is the button deliver drink to seat.

It's not an ejected seat, it's deliver drink to my mouth now.

They've all got a little tube going into their mouth, and they have a button which they press and it delivers them a drink.

When you just said deliver drink to my mouth now, that sounded like Anna in a bar.

Yeah, and where can I get one of these little console things?

I don't have whiskeys in it.

I think they can probably fill it with whatever they like.

Yeah.

They probably don't fill it with whiskey, though.

So one guy who probably would have liked this was a motor racing driver called Duncan Hamilton.

Okay, so in 1953, he was in the Le Mans 24-hour race, but in qualifying, he had the same number as another car and got disqualified for having the same number as another car.

How did that happen?

Well, just an admin problem, I guess.

That's a real pain in the arm.

Anyway, so they went out in the town in Le Mans and got absolutely shit-faced.

And then the organisers during this time thought, actually, that is quite harsh, let's let them back in.

So, his bosses went to the bar to try and find him, and he's kind of slumped over a bar somewhere.

And they're like, Come on, come on, we've got to do the race.

And he's like, Well, I'm not sure I'm okay to do this.

And they're like, No, no, come on, come on, come on.

And so, he took part

absolutely ship first driving the Le Mans 24-hour.

This is in 1953.

And every pit stop, the crew started giving him coffee to try and sober him up.

And then, after about a dozen of these pit stops, he said, No, stop giving me coffee because it's making me shake.

And so, instead, they started giving him more brandy

to stop him from shaking.

And sure enough, he won the race.

Whoa!

That's incredible.

Guys, we do not condone that, by the way, on this podcast on the normal roads.

But wow.

Here's the thing.

So that's the wheels, right?

Have you heard about their helmets and how good they are?

Because they're unbelievably.

Because they have to experience severe impacts without buckling.

So they have to withstand a flame, a huge torch of flame, for 45 seconds without it getting unbearably hot inside.

So they test him that way.

Imagine the work experience guy, and he's like, What am I doing today?

Well, just put this helmet on.

Oh, is it the fun drinking one?

I'm afraid not today.

I love Bernie Eccleston's ideas to improve Formula One.

He always comes up with, like, I think they're just sound bites, but they're usually pretty funny.

Oh, really?

So, one of them was that he said that they should have fake rainstorms halfway through each race.

He's like, Why rely on the weather?

Why don't we just, for 20 minutes, put sprinklers on the s all the tracks so there's a fake rainstorm?

Yeah, to make it fair.

It adds a bit of unpredictability to it because in Formula One often I think it's just people driving around struggling to overtake each other.

He's suggesting making it unpredictable by ensuring that the same thing happens in every race.

Yes, but you never know when it's gonna happen.

Oh wow.

So it'd be oh cool.

Yeah, and that maybe you would give the teams like ten minutes head start.

It's like it's gonna rain in ten minutes and everyone's like oh no, not again Did he say anything about maybe there being a section in every race where the floor suddenly disappears and you need to ride the roof in order to get it?

I'm not sure if he's listening.

Do you know they have to test wet tyres, obviously, the wet weather tires?

Oh, the tyres are so cool.

They can clear 60 litres of water away from the tyres in one second.

Wow.

That's how fast they're going and how much water they're coming into contact with.

Isn't that amazing?

And they're full of nitrogen, aren't they?

Rather than normal air.

Are they?

I think so.

Because if you put normal air in, then you're more likely to get water vapor.

And the water vapor, when the tyre heats up, can kind of do unpredictable things.

But if you have nitrogen, very inert, it'll be absolutely fine.

So, that's something they have in common with crisp packets, which are also full of nitrogen instead of air, because air will make the crisps go off because the oxygen will react with the crisps.

Nitrogen is an inert gas, doesn't affect crisps and formula one tyres.

So, Bernie, another tip for a possible challenge in the race: you have to have at least one tyre made of a crisp packet.

And then the driver can just press a button on his wheel which says deliver crisps to my mouth.

Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that's James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the earliest known mention of the Balalaika is of someone being arrested for playing one.

When was this?

Okay, this was in 1688.

Oh, wow, they're that old.

Oh, yeah, probably older, but this is the first mention of them.

And this was two peasants who were called Savka Fyodorov and Ivashko Dmitriev, who ran up to a gate, antagonised a guard while singing and playing the balalaika, and then got arrested.

Oh really?

Wow.

Imagine if those two guys could know that

more than 300 years after this event,

people in the future will be talking about it and making fun of them.

The next mention was in 1700, and there were two coachmen who were chased by the servant of the magistrate and beaten with their own balalaika.

Are they very solid or would they smash?

They've got corners, haven't they?

Yeah, they're triangular.

So a balalaika is a stringed musical instrument, a bit like a guitar from Russia, which has got a triangular bass.

And the triangular bass is supposed to give it a slightly different timbre and a slightly different sound to normal instruments.

So why does everyone hate hate people who are using balalaikas in the early days?

Well, I think it was a protest instrument.

In the olden days in Russia, they didn't like people playing music in general.

The Russian Orthodox Church really basically said you shouldn't be playing any instruments.

And so what they would do is if they caught you playing a balalaika, they'd basically steal it off you and then crush it and just burn it or whatever.

And then people would just remake them because actually they were really easy to make.

And that's one theory why you have these triangular basses, because a triangular guitar is easier to make than a round one.

And so that's one theory as to why Balalaikas are triangular.

It's the same as with Dairy Lee cheese.

It's just easier to make the cheese easy.

Also hated by the Russian Orthodox absolutely.

You know that June 23rd is International Balalaika Day?

Yeah,

I did read that, but then I'd never heard of it, being an international citizen.

And I asked two Russians, and neither of those have heard of it either.

Well, the sentence that was right after saying that it's International Balalaika Day, also said no one cares.

It's just a day that no one cares about.

No one celebrates.

It's International Day of like about 20 things that no one cares about, isn't it?

It's true, yeah.

Just on the fact that they were a rebellion instrument,

I, through this fact, learned about this group of people that I'd never heard of before, but who sound really interesting called Skomaroks.

And they were the people who were most associated with playing the Balalaika, I think, traditionally in Russia.

And so this is one of the reasons the government didn't like the instrument, because Skomaroks were these jesters, actors, singers, and their whole modus operandi was really going around and satirizing the church and state.

And they sound great, and they seem to go on for a couple of hundred years just going from town to town, performing, and taking the piss out of the government and the church.

Yeah, often exposing themselves at festivals

for the reason they were not liked

because they were just-I think the word might come from the same root as Scaramouche, which was the character in Comedia dell'Arte.

And they were basically just.

He's that guy from that Queen song as well.

Yeah,

it is.

Is he literally?

That's where they got the word from, yeah.

Yeah.

And these were basically just peasants would have parties like this.

And they did it all over Europe, not just in Russia, not just in Italy, but everywhere.

It's sort of odd that they all had the same instrument, because if I was a Scomerok, I'd turn up with something different, like

a piano or a violin.

But then I'd reveal, actually, I'm still here to make fun of you.

I think it's an odd.

piano is of course yet to be invented well a um what's the thing before wasn't the harpsichord the predecessor to the piano forte was called the forte piano oh yeah was it yeah was it just an upside-down piano you had to play it upside down in a tunnel while going a hundred miles

yeah so piano is short for piano forte uh which means quiet loud and what they were looking for was a percussion instrument which could make quiet noises and loud noises at the same time like a guitar could Because all the other ones, like harpsichords and an organ, you can really only kind of play loud for an organ and quiet for a harpsichord.

Yeah, very boring.

Very boring music.

I was just thinking, just like the Formula One thing, if we think of that technology, wouldn't it be cool if there was just an extra key on the piano that a penis could play and it delivers a bit of drink to them as they're playing one of the concertos?

I know this is an old joke, but I genuinely heard you just say, wouldn't it be cool if there was an extra key on a piano that a penis could play?

I heard that.

I heard that.

If you're playing at both ends of the piano, really low notes and really high notes, but you need to play at the middle note.

Didn't Mozart sometimes play with his knees?

Did he?

I could have sworn there was one very early kind of piano which had pedals that were knee operated.

And I think Mozart played one of them.

Just on balalaikas, there seems to be a rumour in a lot of Russian media that balalaikas have been banned in the US, which is a totally unfounded rumour, and I'm not sure where it came from.

But so a lot of Russian people complain that the US has completely banned balalaikas, which is not the case.

I think it's not an extremely common fallacy, but I think it comes up on news articles every now and then.

Every International Bala Laika Day, I certainly protest about the fact that I did read a debunk of it which pointed out, no, they're not banned, they've never been banned, it's just that there's no market for balalaikas in the USA.

Do you know instruments are banned on television in Iran?

Which I didn't know at all.

So you can't show musical instruments on state TV.

And there have been a couple of occasions, I think, where TV channels have accidentally contravened this rule.

So, there was one where someone started singing on Iranian TV and then they began to play the piano.

But as soon as they started playing the piano, they had to cut off the programme.

He was playing it with his penis.

If you have an orchestra shown, then only the singer can be in front of a curtain, and then the rest of the orchestra and all the players are behind the curtain.

It's really interesting because it's thought to be

well, some Shia clerics think that it's an act that's forbidden by Islamic law to show musical instruments in public.

Right.

Another weird instrument that was invented by a Russian is the theremin.

So the way you play it is it has an antenna which sends the vibrations of your hand, so you don't touch the instrument while playing it.

You can be sort of a decent distance away, can't you?

And your right hand controls the pitch, so your right hand is controlling the notes that you play, and your left hand controls the volume, and it's rigged up to know this, this instrument.

And it sounds really lovely.

It sounds kind of like a very high-pitched violin, almost like a human voice.

Like a lot of instruments, it sounds lovely if you know how to play it.

Yes, yeah.

Yeah, I imagine if I just started waving at one, it would be the worst thing you'd ever heard.

It would be banned immediately.

Bill Bailey plays them.

Yeah, have you seen the Badgerman?

It's a theremin crossed with a stuffed badger.

Okay, sure.

It's not in mass production.

I think there may only be one of these things.

Where did you see it?

I saw it on the internet.

Theremin was an amazing guy.

He invented loads of really cool stuff.

He invented a technique called interlace, which improves the quality of a TV signal, which is still used in TVs today.

It stops it from flickering.

He also invented a thing called the Thing.

And

it was a seal, an American seal, not an animal seal, but a seal of the United States.

And there was an eavesdropping device inside it.

And it hung for seven years in plain view on the US ambassador's Moscow office.

And they managed to listen in to everything that was said for seven years until it was accidentally discovered by some British guy I think.

But this technology that he used in it was amazing.

It's called RFID radio frequency identification and it's the kind of stuff you use in oyster cards or contactless or say you have a keycard to get into a hotel room.

It's that technology which he invented.

Oh wow.

Which was originally used for spying.

He eventually vanished, didn't he?

I think he got taken away by the Soviets one night in 1938.

Really?

Never return.

Didn't realise he brought one of the instruments, the lawn, James.

What did you think this badger was next turn?

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Chaczynski.

My fact this week is that lemurs and lorises like their liquor as strong as possible.

And this is from a new study that's just been done.

And it was a study that was done on the Slow Loris and the II Lima.

And they found that if you give them a range of alcoholic drinks that differ in their alcohol content, they always go for the strongest one.

And in fact, they'll have twice as much of the strong alcohol as the rest.

Do you feel an affinity to these animals, Anna?

I always did.

You know, the Slow Loris is so adorable, and people often say the same about me.

So I kind of guess they.

It's about 5% is the highest.

Okay, so it's like getting stellar instead of curling, precisely, yeah.

It's just the more alcohol, the better, yeah, and we don't know why, because you would have thought it would put you at a disadvantage because you once you get drunk, then your motor responses are damaged and your concentration isn't as good, and you'd have thought you're easy prey.

But on the other hand, then you get calories from alcohol.

So, it seems like they've developed, uh, evolved a tolerance for alcohol over the years.

Yeah, they don't get that drunk, do they?

They certainly didn't in this experiment, no.

It's interesting how many animals like alcohol, which even insects.

I was reading a report about entomologists often use beer as bait for moths and butterflies when they want to catch them for something.

Yeah, fruit flies love alcohol as well.

So just on insects, fruit flies go nuts for it, and they actively get regularly drink until they're drunk, and they'll be wobbling around and they won't be able to fly properly.

I did read an article about them, though, that said that males who have not mated are more likely to get drunk drunk than the males who have mated in fruit flies.

It's certainly true in my experience.

It's males who have been rejected, they drown their sorrows.

Yeah, all right, all right.

Let's not go on about it.

And also, fruit flies that get drunk, but they massively lower their standards.

So when they're mating, they'll suddenly mate with anything.

So as soon as a fruit fly gets a bit pissed, it starts trying to mate with fruit flies of its own self.

Can we just move on from this?

So the slow loris is just about the only venomous mammal, as as in it bites you and it transfers venom to you

as opposed to poisonous where if you eat it, you get poisonous.

So it's really odd though, because it keeps its venom in an elbow patch.

Yeah.

And to poison you, it has to lick the inside of its elbow, where it's got these glands, and it secretes the poison from there.

And then it's got the venom in its mouth, and then it swills it round in its mouth with its own saliva, and that activates the venom, making it really dangerous.

They've only killed one person documented in medical literature.

And that was someone who went into anaphylaxis, wasn't it?

Yeah, exactly.

And there are all these videos of them online being tickled, and it's supposedly really adorable.

What they're actually doing is lifting up their arms to try and get to their venom glands.

Well, what I was going to say: if you're going to put a venom gland anywhere, don't put it on your elbow, which is famously the bit that's hardest to lift in the whole body.

That's a really good point.

That sounds like a funny joke from God.

At the Snow Loris's expense.

Do you know the gentle lemur is one of the most aggressive lemurs there is?

No.

It's just weird.

It's just based on a weird etymological thing where

it looked a little bit like a marmoset whose name was Hapali, and Hapali means gentle, and so it was called the gentle lemur.

It's actually a complete bastard.

In captivity, they're really vicious.

That's really funny.

That's hilarious.

What do they do?

Like, what levels of viciousness?

They'll key your car.

If you let them get near your car, they'll key it.

Just be rude online, stuff like that.

Yeah.

Trolling.

Yeah.

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've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shri Reland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At eggshaped.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at qipodcast, or go to no such thingasoffish.com where we have all of our previous episodes.

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

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.