123: No Such Thing As A Molten Lava Football Pitch

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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, and I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin, and Andrew Anjamuri.

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 a group of scientists is currently making their own lava

pretty cool so there's a load of scientists who are they're at the University of Buffalo's Center for Geohazard Studies and they want to study what it's like when lava and water meet because it's something that you don't get to study a lot in the wild in the natural world but it's really important as well because when lava and water meet, it gets really, really explosive as opposed to only, you know, normal lava explosivity.

And so they are making their own stuff.

And they melt

10 gallons of basaltic rock at a time in a furnace at 2,500 degrees.

Is there not a thing about water and lava meeting which is related to the Leydenfrost effect, one of James's favourite effects, I think it's which is when two substances of vastly different temperatures meet each other, and it means that the water isn't caused to boil straight away because this this layer of gas suddenly forms between the water and the lava.

And I think that might be what makes it so explosive because this layer of gas forms, and then eventually that layer of gas collapses, and then this massive explosion happens.

Do you know where they could have gone to see lava meet water?

No.

1973.

They went to 1973.

There's an Icelandic town called Vesmania.

I'm pronouncing that wrong, obviously.

But in 1973, they had a volcano erupt, and the lava was heading towards this town, which was quite far away and what they decided to do was they got water cannons and they pumped billions of gallons of water at the lava that was approaching to stop it and they did it for months on end and it eventually did stop and so the town was saved.

Some people would say it is harder for scientists to build a time machine and go back to 1973 possibly even than making their own lava.

It would have been a better fact though.

Wasn't there a town, was it in Spain or Italy where there was a volcano going off and the villagers kind of made a trench so that the lava wouldn't go into their town.

Yes.

But instead, they directed it into the next town.

Oh, yeah, yes.

It was in Sicily.

It was when Mount Etna exploded.

The village was called Catania, and they dug an artificial breach to redirect the lava.

And the really cool thing is, do you know how they kept cool?

They wore wet sheepskins while they were working.

But the villagers who they redirected the lava flow to then redirected it back to this other place called Paterno, and the Paternians just sent it right back their way.

No.

So funny.

Do you know how to tell

if a volcano explodes whether you're really, really, really in trouble?

No.

You look up at the spout of lava that's coming out of the volcano and if it's moving left or right, you're absolutely fine from your perspective.

If it appears to be staying still, you're in trouble.

Well, because presumably that's coming towards you.

Because it's exactly on the same axis as you.

It could be going directly away from me.

Well, it's not, James.

It's going towards you

for being annoying.

I find it amazing that volcanoes are made of lava.

I never really thought of that.

I thought, oh, they're just made of rock that's sticking up, and then the lava comes out of it.

But they're made of either lava or lava and ash in manners building up over millions of years.

I thought what was amazing is: do you remember the tunnel going through the Alps?

The Gotthard tunnel.

Yeah.

Do you remember that?

And how, when they went through it, some of the time the rock was really hard and then some of it was crumbly like sand.

You always think of a mountain as being like solid all the way through, but it's amazing that there are gaps in there and little crumbly bits.

It's like a trifle.

I I think

that you said there are bits, you said because we did it on No Such Thing as the News, there are bits which were as soft as butter.

Yeah, but I can't believe that.

Actually, you can't believe it's butter.

You'd be so annoyed if you were building on that mountain, or you're trying to get through that mountain, and your mate got the butter bit, and you've got the granite bit next to it.

So, you've turned up with a massive boring machine, and he's just got a butter knife.

Actually, speaking of tunnels, there are lava-related tunnels on the moon.

Oh, this is the best thing I've read this week.

So amazing, yeah, and I can't believe I didn't know these existed.

So we discovered this quite recently, I think, that the moon has these underground tunnels, and they were formed by lava flows 3.5 billion years ago.

So lava would flow, and then it solidifies on top faster than it solidifies underneath.

So the top creates this roof, and then underneath the roof is hollowed out as the lava flows through it.

And so there are these hollow lava tunnels.

And one of the ways we know this is because they have things called skylights in these tunnels, which is where a bit of them fall in.

And then we see this hole that's suddenly created, which shows us this tunnel underneath.

It's so cool.

The reason that scientists are really interested in it is because the idea of building these moon bases that always get proposed one day we'll have a moon base.

They actually think, so part of the problem with moon bases is all the radiation coming in.

And they think that these tubes could lead to these sort of underground bunkers where we could put the bases.

So they're now looking into these tubes and they've got probes that have been flying over that have been sussing them out and trying to learn more.

So exciting.

Yeah, it's so weird.

Amazing.

You know how

we've been discussing in the office recently the football and Iceland has a lot of volcanoes.

Well, the Icelandic football team until the 1950s played and practiced on lava.

They played on gravel, which was made of crushed lava.

Wow, that's great.

No wonder they're good these days.

More impressive to do it on liquid lava as it flows out of the volcano.

That would be pretty cool.

Because also if you put your foot on lava, it's so hot that it sets fire to your foot.

So, that would be quite cool.

You'd look like one of those cartoon characters that has your shoes on fire.

No, that would have been a very impressive.

I mean, it's not a practical.

In cartoons, you do see people falling into lava, but that would never happen because lava is quite thick and gloopy and more viscous than humans.

Would you just fall onto it?

You'd fall onto it and set on fire.

Right.

Rather than kind of going, no, and kind of the last thing you see is your arm going into the lava.

Yeah, that's.

What about the end of Terminator 2, spoiler alert,

where Arnie, of course, goes into the liquid steel?

Well, is he not a robot?

He's made of metal.

Yeah, so it's slightly different.

It's a bit different.

He'll have a different density to humans.

They have researched it, Andy.

They're not just making stuff up on the top of their heads.

Does he ever swim in Terminator?

No, he doesn't.

That's why.

I was reading Mark Commode in Simon Mayo's book, and they were talking about movie endings that don't quite make scientific sense.

And one of them, they say, is that Lord of the Rings right at the end.

For Frodo to go in the volcano, that wouldn't be possible because you would just explode from the heat.

Sure.

Is that true?

How dense are hobbits?

I mean, these are all made up things, aren't they?

I know volcanoes aren't made up, but they're in a fancy world, so they could have.

Tolkien could have specified that in Middle-earth, volcanoes are a bit colder.

Oh, yeah, that's true.

Now, you do have cold volcanoes.

Have you heard about this?

No.

Are you talking about fountains?

there is a volcano called gelai volcano which is um near lake natron which is in tanzania and their lava is made out of natro carbonatite and it has a different melting point to normal rock which means it's a lot colder than normal volcanoes i mean it is 510 degrees celsius so it's not that cold but it is that's like half the temperature of a normal volcano.

Bring a jumper, you're saying.

I'm visiting.

If you're going to wear wet sheepskins, then you'll be better off at that one than at a normal volcano.

It's a great tip.

Okay.

Although you do get ice lava.

Really?

What?

How cool is this?

Not on Earth, on other planets, but

in the solar system, there are ice volcanoes, also known as cryo-volcanoes, and they throw up not molten rock, they throw up water or ammonia or methane in liquid form.

And then it's so cold on those planets that it freezes almost instantly and crashes to the ground.

And so that happens on Pluto, it happens on some of the moons.

That's very cool.

Has anyone seen a mud volcano?

Nope, no.

I saw some of them in Romania last week.

You kind of drive up to the top of like a mountain, it's kind of a flat plateau, and then you just have this bubbling mud, these little pits of bubbling mud, and then they kind of spurt out a little bit and then roll down the hill.

And it's just, yeah, it's a really awesome, unusual thing.

It sounds like you'd expect some kind of slime monster to emerge from it.

Yeah,

is it dangerous?

When you go there, they tell you not to touch it, but because it's in Romania and they don't really seem to bother about health and safety too much, it's not like in Britain there would probably be fences and you won't be able to go within a mile of them, but actually you can go right up to them.

And that's why you're missing a hand this week.

That was actually eaten by the slime monster.

Okay, here's the thing.

The largest volcano in the world,

any guesses as to which or where it is?

In the world.

Yeah.

Is it underwater?

You love underwater.

It's underwater.

It's called the Tamu Massif.

It's a thousand miles east of Japan, underwater.

It is equivalent in area to the British Isles.

It is 120,000 square miles in area.

It's a volcano.

It's not active, thankfully.

But it's so gradual, the slope on it, that if you were on the seabed, you would not be able to tell which way it was towards the top.

It's really, really, really, really, really gradual towards the top.

But

it does slope, and it is the size of Britain.

You know, scientists have made lava before.

No.

A couple of years ago, they made lava by heating up rock.

This was scientists at Syracuse University, and it took them 70 hours to heat rock and turn it into lava.

And once they'd done it, they made the world's hottest barbecue.

It's hard enough, isn't it, to make sure that the outside of your chicken wing is not burnt and the inside's cut.

It's going to be charcoal on the outside and completely raw on the inside.

Apparently, there was a chef called Sam Bompus who was present, and he said it was the best steak he'd ever had.

Yeah, right.

Oh, he's always going around saying that, Bompus.

Okay, so just quickly, this is about

making things artificially.

Do you know what the hottest temperature that humans have ever made is

7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit.

And what's that in centigrade?

It's only 4 trillion degrees Celsius.

I don't know what either of those numbers mean.

But, like, is that hotter than.

To give you an example, that's 250,000 times hotter than the sun.

Is that gas mark 75 million.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the word Timbuktu means woman with a sticky out belly button.

So, this is a book that I'm reading at the moment called The Badass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer, and it's a brilliant book, and this is just the first fact that I found in there when I started reading it.

And nobody really actually knows why it comes from this phrase.

There's some thought that it might have been the goddess that they look towards.

What I kind of thought is maybe it's just a belly button thing and it could be that it's in some kind of depression.

I think Timbuktu's in like a depression, so it could be like it's the belly button of that area.

Although then that would be a real innie, wouldn't it?

Yeah,

so unless you're looking at it from the other side.

From inside the other house.

You're right.

No, I think there are some disagreements about the translation.

It could be large belly button rather than sticky out belly button.

It's one of these kind of nobody quite knows, but this is the most likely.

That is a condition, isn't it?

There's a medical condition which gives you sticky outie belly buttons.

Is there?

I think it's not.

Yeah, and it's known in the area.

It does happen there.

So possibly there was a woman.

I read actually on a Reddit thread, and I couldn't verify it, that someone said, as per my source, brackets, the 1996 Guinness Book of World Records.

So if anyone's got that, check it.

The longest Audi ever recorded was 11.9 inches.

Oh, come on.

If someone's really screwed up the umbilical cord, you have to like a smell, but that's not how it works.

A lot of people think that an LT belly button is where they've cut the umbilical cord, but it's not.

It always gets cut a couple of inches away from the stomach, but then the muscles seal themselves off, and that bit of skin just dries up.

And I don't know where it goes.

I mean, there have been 90 billion of those things since humanity evolved.

But you think there's some kind of a pit somewhere.

There must be somewhere.

Shed belly buttons.

But it's like, for instance, everyone's toenails are always growing and people trim them.

But it's not like there's a massive cave of toenails in the world.

Shows all you know, James.

Never

mind.

So, um, Timbuktu.

Yeah.

Do you know what it's twinned with?

This is rather nice.

It's twinned with Hayon Y.

And um when it was announced, um someone from Hay said Timbuktu is the oldest home of the written word in Africa.

It has a large number of private and public libraries housing ancient Arabic and African manuscripts.

Hayon Y is the second-hand book capital of the world.

It's basically the same.

Actually, Timbuktu had a few, was twinned with a few, and actually, obviously, that makes you not a twin as soon as you've got more than one.

Yes.

You can't be tripleted with.

It's amazing looking into Timbuktu because I genuinely knew nothing about it.

I know the only thing I knew about it was that it was a lyric in an Oliver song.

Go to Timbuktu and back again.

That's the only thing I knew about it.

And it turns out that it was this incredible cultural hot spot for knowledge in Malaysia.

Well, that's why it's so good that it's twinned with the second-hand books or in the world.

Because actually, it's right, they do have loads of manuscripts.

And this book is about a guy who tried to take a load of manuscripts away from Timbuktu to the Malian capital, Bamako, because they were under threat by Islamists.

Yeah, and it's an amazing story, isn't it?

It's a great story.

And they genuinely did it.

So Islamists were coming into Timbuktu, and they thought, we bet they're going to try and destroy our libraries because they had hundreds of thousands of really valuable manuscripts.

And lo and behold, a short while later, a few months later, then the libraries were sort of razed to the ground and they'd managed to save and smuggle out of the country more than 300,000 manuscripts.

Only a few hundred were left.

So, everyone thought when these libraries collapsed, oh no, that's all gone.

And then these guys came out of the woodwork saying, Don't worry about it,

we got rid of them.

And where are they now?

I'm not telling you

because this goes out on the internet.

So,

did Timbuktu have a big collapse to the point where I read a 2006 survey of 150 Britons?

34% did not believe it existed.

So I've actually got the survey here, and this was reported by the Sun under the headline, Timbuktu?

Oh, God.

But anyway, the survey, I think this is the survey we're talking about, Dan.

It was in 2010, and it was of 18 to 30-year-olds.

Okay.

Okay.

And of them, maybe it was the same, maybe it was different, half thought that Timbuktu was made up.

Ten percent thought that Kazakhstan wasn't real.

A third said that Atlantis was somewhere in Greece.

And one person thought that France was in Spain.

But actually, for a long time, Timbuktu people weren't sure whether it existed.

It was kind of a half-legendary place in North Africa.

And because Europeans didn't really go to North Africa, a lot of people went to try and find this so-called city where great education happened.

And gold reserves, right it was quite famous for its gold a few hundred years ago exactly uh the first westerner um in modern-ish times to try and find it was a guy called john ledyard and when he went he'd never been to africa he didn't know a single word of arabic and when he got to Cairo he had a bilious complaint and decided to treat it with sulphuric acid and took so much that he immediately died.

Whoa!

Hang on, so he was just trying to find it, he didn't make it.

He was well he got as far as Cairo and then he saw some

what he thought was Gaviscon, but was actually

If only he'd known a single word of Arabic, namely sulphuric acid.

It's not the first word you learn though, is it?

You have to get quite deep into the textbook.

It's right at the back of the phrase book, isn't it?

It's in the medical section.

You just do hello and where is the toilet and stuff like that.

He probably could have done with where is the toilet at something like that.

Do you know about the first Westerner to get to Timbuktu?

No.

He was called Gordon Lang.

Okay, he got there in 1826.

And he was a Scot, and he was an adventurer, basically, about 30 years old.

And there was this huge competition between Britain and France to get to Timbuktu.

And they obviously had a head start because they're closer.

Yeah, because they're in Spain.

Yeah.

He said to his parents, I shall do more than has ever been done before and shall show myself to be what I have ever considered myself, a man of enterprise and genius.

Right?

So big claim.

This is from a website called greatbritishnutters.blogspot.

Amazing.

So he got to Tripoli, immediately proposed to the British Consul's daughter, and she fell in love with him, and they got married.

And then he said, Right, I'm off to Timbuktu.

He thought it would take him a few weeks.

The temperatures were huge, right?

120 degrees Fahrenheit.

The food was patties of dried fish and camel's milk.

Bandits everywhere.

One night he was attacked in his tent by bandits,

as he was sleeping, hacked at with swords.

He got 24 wounds, 18 of them serious.

Next morning, he still said, Put me on my camel.

So he was strapped onto a camel for 400 miles, seriously injured.

Kept going, right?

It took him over a year to get to Timbuktu.

He finally got there after, you know, recuperating, all of this stuff, and it was abandoned and poor.

It wasn't this great centre of learning anymore.

And then two days after he left, he was murdered in the desert by bandits.

It was an incredible, sort of awful journey.

And do we know if he thought it was worth it or?

We don't know.

Was he glad he went?

It wasn't what he was looking for, which is, like James says, this amazing centre of learning with universities and gold and books.

You know, it wasn't like that anymore.

There's got to be a moment on that trek when you've been strapped to a camel and you've got hack woods from giant swords that you're thinking, did I make the right call?

Just at least for a minute, he must have had doubts.

Just a second.

Yeah.

Do you know when we started thinking of Timbuktu as that semi-fictitious, far away place?

I know.

So you know how we say today, oh, we'll send him to Timbuktu, because, you know, it's just.

He's constantly saying that, right?

I'm constantly hearing it.

It's actually an Oxford English dictionary definition in its own right.

The word

a long distance spice.

So it's been in use since Lady Duff Gordon, the English writer in the 1860s, was in Cairo and she was getting really fed up with the fact that Cairo was being sort of

gentrified, so lots of other British people were coming there.

Precisely,

cereal cafe.

That was exactly her problem.

So she wrote a a letter back from Cairo saying, it's growing dreadfully cockney here.

I must go to Timbuktu instead.

And that was the first reference of, you know, got to escape to a more distant place than this.

Yeah.

So the idea that Timbuktu, the name, meaning the sticky outy belly button, I started looking into what places, how their names were derived.

So it's thought that maybe Canberra means women's breasts.

No one quite knows where Canberra comes from in Australia.

Yeah, they think it means meeting place as well because it derives from an Aboriginal word, but actually.

But often they would meet at women's breasts at the Aboriginal breasts.

So it's very confusing if there's more than one woman in the bar where you're meeting.

Manchester's named after breasts.

Yeah.

Is it?

Yeah.

The man in Manchester comes from mam, like mammeries.

And it's because of the hills around Manchester.

Oh, so it should be called Breastchester.

Yeah, Cheschester.

And then this is my favourite.

This was named after someone.

There's a place

called

Anushaven.

I'm probably pronouncing that wrong.

I don't think you are.

I think I am.

It could be Anushaven.

Or it could be Anus Shaven.

But the thing is, is that this place is in Armenia, and it's named after a World War II hero called Dr.

Anushaven Galoyan.

Anushaven actually sounds like another cupboard in your house, Andy.

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

My fact this week is that lovers' hearts beat in sync.

Gross, gross, guys, gross.

This disgusting fact comes to you courtesy of research that was done by the University of California, Davis, in 2013.

And it put couples in a room and it monitored their heart rates, and the couples weren't touching each other or speaking to each other.

So they were married.

Speaks the married man.

Right, so these couples didn't touch or speak to each other, but it was found when their heart rates were monitored that their hearts were beating in sync and their breathing really closely matched.

And then they, in this experiment, they mixed the people up a bit.

So they put males and females with people that they weren't in a couple with, so just like strangers in the room with them, and their hearts wouldn't beat in sync.

You know, other things that synchronize, or other occasions on which heartbeats synchronize.

This is quite cool.

So mothers and infants, their heartbeats synchronize when they're just looking at each other.

So

a mother with her own baby, basically, also choirs their heart rates rise and fall at the same time.

And they think that is a breathing thing as well, because some bits you need loads of breath for, and when you breathe, then your heart rate goes up.

Well, and also, dogs and their owners sink heartbeats.

Yeah, according to research by Pedigree Charlotte.

I know.

I love when you read where that research has come from.

It always is, yeah.

Although I don't know how that helps with sales.

Well, what was interesting about that study was it basically said that when dogs are reunited with their owners after separation, then both those beings' hearts start beating faster, which isn't necessarily them sinking.

It's presumably more likely them being quite excited that they're seeing each other again.

Here's a cool thing about heart rates.

Obviously, different animals hugely faster and slower, depending.

And I think we may have even said before that so sperm whales have about nine beats per minute, shrews 835 beats a minute.

If you put a whale in a room with a shrew, what happens then?

They synchronize.

If they're lovers.

The whale speeds up to 400 beats a minute and immediately dies.

No, okay, this is the really cool thing.

So the whale and the shrew's hearts both deliver over the lifetime 200 million liters of blood per kilo of body weight.

Right?

So it's exactly the same rate for both animals.

So in both animals, each gram of tissue over the animal's lifetime receives 38 liters of oxygen.

How weird is that?

This is a stupid question, but is that true proportionally for most animals?

It's not just those two, basically.

This is a sort of a rule of life.

Yeah, it's true of all mammals, I think, pretty much.

But humans don't work in the same way.

So it was thought for a while that all mammals have the same number of heartbeats in their lifetime because the shorter-lived animals beat much quicker and the longer-lived ones beat much slower.

And it does kind of work a little bit, but it doesn't work with humans.

And I think the reason being that we have really good medication and stuff, so we live longer than we probably should do.

But it's about a billion heartbeats.

Most mammals, with some exceptions like humans, get a billion.

So it might still be worth getting into a relationship with someone who has a very slow heart.

With a sperm whale, in an attempt to extend your life.

But if you got, let's say in the future, we manage to do heart transplants, is it a case of confusing a single heart that how many times it's personally beat, or is it responding to the body?

As in, if you take a heart that has had no beats and put it in the body of someone who's coming up to a billionth beat, will it reset the clock?

The heart will keep going, yeah.

I mean, if the heart's beaten a billion times, then it'll be much more tired than that.

Yeah, but it's not that you can get to 90 years old and then put a child's heart in your body and you're going to live for another 90 years.

Someone's got to tell Rupert Murdoch that.

But let's say that it's a heart collapse that you had that leads to your death.

Would it eliminate the chances of that happening?

Well, it's certainly true that if your heart is in trouble, you can have a heart transplant.

That will help.

But did you know this?

You can transplant your heart into someone else and still live.

No.

What?

Okay.

So, this is a medical procedure.

It doesn't happen very often.

But say, for instance, I needed a heart and lung transplant from another person, from Anna, say.

But Dan needed to transform.

I didn't sign anything, by the way.

And then Dan needed a heart transplant.

What they can do is, because the heart and lung coming from Anna would be better working together, they can give me the heart and lung from Anna, and then I can give my heart to Dan.

So I've actually transplanted my heart and received from another person.

It does occasionally happen.

Do I then give my heart and lungs to Anna?

Yes, where am I getting my heart?

I'm the one who can make it in this question.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

You're the person who's a donor.

Why doesn't

Anna just give me the heart?

Why were you the in-between?

I really need, let's say I really need a lung transplant, but the lungs will work better with a heart of Anna's.

So Anna's lungs will work better with Anna's heart.

So I will get the heart and the lungs, but my heart will then go to you because you need a heart.

Yeah, got it.

And your lungs are fine.

Right.

So why?

And the sacrificial lamb.

Why am I not involved in

Do you know that laughing can increase your heart health?

So start cracking those jokes.

Yeah, it vasodilates your blood vessels, so it increases the width of your blood vessels, and it means that you can pump more blood around your body and increases them by 22%, which is actually really significant.

How much do you have to laugh for that?

Just more than

you can instigate.

So they've also found that happiness can actually damage the heart as well.

It's all to do with...

So there's thing, it's called the takotsubu cardiomyopathy, a broken heart syndrome.

It's the idea of broken heart, and then you just kind of convince your heart, and in very rare cases, you convince it to the point of you dying.

And they've recently found that happiness can trigger the same thing.

So

it's a rare condition, but happiness has the same effect.

It suddenly puts the heart into a kind of oddly stressed position, and that can lead to death as well.

Wow.

So happiness can be dangerous.

Is this why, when you're in love, sometimes your heart feels uncomfortable?

That's just surely that's just the adrenaline nerves and adrenaline.

It's just interesting that the sort of physical sensations of emotion, like why should it be in the chest?

Why on earth should I feel anything in particular there?

Because that's about fight or flight, isn't it?

And what's excited and

he sends Valentine cards with bitches and legs.

You make my ankle beat twice as fast.

You are my anus haven.

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

My fact this week is that this year, Hugh Hefner sold the Playboy Mansion.

It comes with 30 rooms, a pool, a tennis court, a zoo license, and Hugh Hefner.

So comes with Hugh Hefner.

You get to keep Hugh Hefner in my life.

I don't don't like that at all.

The idea being that he is now allowed to just live in this house until he dies.

That's the part of the deal that he did.

He ended up selling it to his neighbour.

And I think they've known each other for a long time, so that seems to be an okay thing.

But yeah, so it's been sold.

And it obviously back in the 60s and 70s was known as the kind of Disneyland of sexuality, basically.

It was the Disneyland of misogyny.

Yeah, exactly.

The Disneyland of misogyny.

But now it's sort of very dirty, very

run-down.

Yeah, you mean dirty, not just sexually, it's literally dirty.

It literally is

contained a pipe organ.

It does contain.

That's not a euphemism, sorry.

Imagine Hugh Hefner asking if you want to see his pipe organ.

But yeah, so he's in his 80s at the moment.

Do you guys know where he is going to be buried when he does pass away?

Is he one of these people who wants to be buried like on top of Marilyn Monroe or something?

He's being buried right next to to Marilyn Monroe.

He bought the plot right next to her.

Yeah.

That's weird.

She was the first ever cover girl for Playboy.

And he's been obsessed with her his whole life.

Oh, well, it's not weird at all.

Just qualifying the weirdness.

To put it in context by saying he's obsessed with her.

It sounded like he had a healthy professional disinterest in her when you said that he bought the cemetery plot next to hers.

What a coincidence.

I thought you were going to say that he was going to be buried in...

Because one of the places that the Playboy Mansion has is a pet cemetery.

Did you know that?

It has a pet cemetery, which presumably is where all the bunnies are buried.

Very good.

Thank you.

If I ever have a heart attack, send Marian.

But yeah, that one of his girlfriends had a whole bunch of small dogs, didn't she?

And then the women who lived in the mansion said that they would be summoned to his bedroom every Friday, and that's when he would give them their allowance, which I think was $1,000.

And when they went to his bedroom, they had to wait for the first ritual, which was him scraping all the dog poo off his bedroom floor.

Oh, Oh my god, I'll stop it there.

It's too sexy.

In 2011, this was a story that happened.

100 people fell ill after going to a party at the Playboy Mansion, and they think it was because there were bacteria in the Whirlpool spa.

Because they forgot to scrape the dog poo off it.

I thought this was interesting.

40% of all of Playboy's income comes from China.

China, you don't mean they sell terracotta like what they sell tea sets.

They sell some of them.

Yes, exactly.

So, yeah,

in China, the country.

And the interesting thing is that the magazine is not sold in China.

So they license the bunny logo completely for things like perfumes, things like track suit clothing.

I always used to see that in Hong Kong.

You would see kids wearing Playboy outfits.

But because in China, it doesn't have the sexual connotation.

In fact, they completely rebrand it out there to be a more family-orientated thing.

What is it, basically?

It's just a big brand.

There was a lady called Chloe Woodall who bought some Playboy for Her VIP body spray from, I think it was Asda Online, but it got substituted for It's a Dog's Life, Pet Care, Kind and Gentle Shine Spray.

And she said, I do have a Staffordshire Bull Terrier, but how did they know that?

You know, this really old idea that people used to say that they would read Playboy for the articles?

There is one edition of the magazine that can genuinely be claimed to have been read for just the writing, just for the articles, and that is something that's been published since the 1970s, the Braille version.

They take out any of the nudity, so it's not as if they've made like 3D pictures or anything.

It's purely words, and it's purely the articles.

I think it was the first magazine that came in Braille, wasn't it?

Was it, really?

Yeah.

Private Eye used to have, and I think still has, an edition for partially sighted author blind people.

Private Eye actually has an interesting connection with Playboy.

Peter Cook went over to America to ask Hugh Hefner for funding for Private Eye.

According to the official Peter Cook biography, Peter Cook, for anyone listening overseas, is one of Britain's biggest comedians.

Hefner totaled a piss-off, according to this biography.

But it also meant that one of the best stories that I love about Peter Cook happened in this period.

He was at the Playboy Club, and there was this guy trying to get in, and the bunny at the front didn't let him in.

So he started yelling into the whole club, going, Do you know who I am?

Do you know who I am?

And Peter Cook went up to him and he then yelled to the rest of the club, I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, this gentleman doesn't seem to know who he is.

Does anyone know who he is?

So, the Playboy mansion that they sold is not the first Playboy mansion.

There was one in Chicago, the first one.

It had 70 rooms.

It had a swim pool.

It had all sorts of stuff.

And now they've turned it into three family homes.

So you can actually live there.

I think students live there some of the time.

And it had a brass plate on the door with the Latin inscription.

Under your Latin's quite good.

Do you want want to translate this?

Si non osculas nolli tintanare.

If you don't osculas, look.

No, it must be something like shake, like oscillate, right?

Is it if you don't have an orgasm, you're not excited or something like that?

Si non osculas noli tintanare.

Tintanare?

Don't impersonate tintin in this building.

So tintanare is ring, as in ringing a buzzer.

All right.

And so si non osculas noli tintanare.

If you're not shaking, don't ring.

It's close, but it's a rhyming thing.

Osculas.

Swinging.

Swinging.

If you don't swing.

If you don't swing, don't ring.

Yes.

And Latin put to good use, finally.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, it's horrible, but it's great.

Is the magazine still going?

Yeah, it is.

They made a big change last year, which is they've stopped doing nudity.

That's the latest move.

I think they're just not working anymore.

Is it sort of a brand?

Is it now going more towards the brand thing?

I think so, yeah.

I personally read it just for the party hosting tips.

Before a party, scrape all the dog excrement off the floor.

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 be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy at Andrew Hunter Ebb, James,

and Shaczinski.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at qipodcast.

And you can also go to no such thing as a fish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes.

We're going to be back again next week with another episode.

Goodbye.