122: No Such Thing As A Sticky Shell Spoon

Running a business online?

Look legit and own your own brand with professional tools from GoDaddy.

Instantly build trust with your customers and boost your credibility with an email that matches your domain so people know you mean business.

There's never been a better time.

Just go to godaddy.com/slash GDNow and choose from a wide variety of popular domains to find one that's right for you.

Pair that with a professional email that works for all your business needs from daily communications to email marketing and everything everything in between.

That's a little price for a lot of credibility.

For a limited time, get a domain and matching professional email for just 99 cents a month for one year.

Go to godaddy.com slash gdnow and look legit with godaddy.

That's godaddy.com slash gdnow.

Again, go daddy.com slash gdnow.

There's never been a better time to choose the domain and email that's right for you.

New customer purchases only products auto-renew separately.

See terms on site, go daddy.com slash gdnow.

Teaching is rewarding and exhausting, but with trustworthy, AI-powered tools from Cengage, you can manage the chaos and make a bigger impact on your students.

Our tools give you real-time insights into student performance, help you pinpoint challenges, and provide personalized, scalable support without adding to your workload.

It's innovation that makes a real difference for you and your students.

Visit Cengage.com to learn how to teach with less stress and more impact.

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 Andy Murray, Anna Chaczynski, and James Harkin.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that farmers in Botswana have started painting eyes on their cows' bottoms to stop lions from attacking them.

So good.

We don't need anything more.

Time for fact number two.

Does it work, Andy?

Well, this is the really interesting thing.

This is in the trial stages at the moment.

So it's by a a British conservation biologist called Neil Jordan.

He works in Australia and Botswana.

So we're in Botswana here.

And

he wanted to trick lions into thinking that they've been spotted when they're sneaking up on a cow.

So

he's been working in the Okavango Delta.

And he did a trial last year where 23 cows had eyes painted on their bottoms.

They all survived.

And in the rest of the herd, there were 39 cows which were not painted.

And of those cows, three were eaten by lions.

So it's a very small sample size.

So he is literally, I wrote to him and said, Can you paint some eyes on my bottom, please?

And he, this coming Monday, in a few days, is going to Botswana again.

He's going to try a larger sample group.

And the idea is that it's a very cheap way of stopping a herd being eaten.

So the cost of painting a herd for a year is much less than the value of one cow being eaten.

It's not cheap if the cows value their self-respect, though, is it?

No.

It's probably a very expensive social sacrifice.

They look like elephants, actually, because of their tails sticking out between the eyes.

I'm going to put up a photo on my Twitter feed, Andrew Hunter M, and you can see what they look like.

They should teach them to reverse as well.

Have they taught them to walk backwards to make it really realistic?

You know, they did the same thing to people for the same reason.

So in 1989, I found this in an old edition of the New York Times.

In 1989, thousands of face masks were issued by the Forestry Reserve in India to a a bunch of people who were living near the Ganges, where tigers kept killing people, and the face masks were to wear on the back of their heads.

And they found that within something like a year and a half, nobody wearing the face masks on the back of their head, so that they had a face on the back of their head, got attacked.

Wait, so the way to avoid tiger attack is to look at it in the face?

Yeah, they won't jump at you.

Of course they will.

Tigers will obviously rather sneak up on you from behind.

I think they're not attacking you because you've got two faces.

It's like if you go to a supermarket and you don't buy the kind of

bananas.

Yeah, the bananas that look weird.

You don't buy them.

You only buy the ones that look nice.

There is a company which has started selling ugly fruit and vegetables

because they're cheaper.

They sell really misshapen, disgusting-looking tomatoes, but they're completely the same nutritionally.

They do it in France, I think.

Yeah.

And they just had a new rule in France to say that supermarkets have to give any food which is about to go past sell by dates to homeless people.

That's so good.

A lot of them did it anyway, but the law has come in now to say they have to.

I can't believe we don't all do that.

It seems so obvious.

Speaking of cows' bums, very quickly, have you guys heard of it?

I hadn't heard of this, so I apologise if this is very well known, but have you heard of cow blowing?

The idea is that they want to induce more milk from the cow, so what they do is they lift up the tail and they blow into its butt.

No, yes,

or vagina.

So it's one of the two.

It's always a common thing, isn't there, where people say, milking a cow, who was the first person to ever think of that?

Like, that must be one sick individual.

But then I would say it's an even sicker individual who first blows into a cow's vagina and then think, wow, they gave me even more milk I agree, I know, I don't but like, weirdly, it is done.

And Gandhi supposedly didn't drink milk'cause he hated this process.

So he was like, If you're gonna blow cows, I'm not gonna get involved.

That's one of his famous quotes.

Actually, it's attributed to him.

I think it might have been Churchill.

There is an actual quote, just for the sake of saying it, Since I had come to know that the cow and the buffalo was subjected to the process of fuca, it's called P-H-O-O-K-A.

Of course, it is.

This is all they do.

I had conceived a strong disgust for milk.

So it's called, yeah, it's called cowboy.

And wait, do you just have to get in there?

They sometimes do it with a tube.

Or they sometimes.

Sometimes with a tube.

I should have a touch of a title.

Oh, boy, you should watch YouTube videos.

They're amazing.

Sorry, Gary, we've forgotten the tube today again.

Oh, no, Gary, that's the wrong end of the tube.

Oh, Gary.

No, Gary, you're meant to blow.

It's also called insufflation.

And yeah, it's quite common in African countries in Kenya and Tanzania.

I think they do it quite a bit.

But you should watch videos.

It looks hilarious.

They just lift up the tail and thrust their noses right in there, don't they?

Because it's been around since Herodotus, who was the first person, the first.

I know, I know, it's not a great start, any scientific thing, but Herodotus described this happening in horses.

So he said that people would insert a tube into the mare's anus, then blow.

Not the mare,

oh yay!

So this fact is about bottoms.

Yes.

This is not the only bottom-related story in the week's news.

Yeah.

So I don't know whether you've seen this, but in the Times recently, there was a tiny article about a robot bottom, which has been invented for doctors to learn how to do prostate exams.

I'm very indebted to Tom Whipple, who's the science editor at the Times.

So he told me a bit about this.

It has prosthetic buttocks and an adjustable rectum.

The really exciting thing is what this is designed to replace.

And there is a system at the moment, which is that there is someone in the UK whose job is rectal teaching assistant.

He goes around the country lending out his bottom to prostate trainees.

Is there only one person?

There's only one person in the entire United Kingdom who goes around with his bottom.

And I've written to his people, but they haven't got back to me yet.

He has people.

He has people, yeah.

So is he furious that this robotic bum is now.

No, he's very glad, and he won't be losing his job because he is also very important.

It's just that he's quite overworked at the moment because just one of them

developed a robot assistant.

But he provides very useful feedback on what the procedure is like from a patient's point of view.

Presumably, he can't feel anything at this point.

And he can't possibly have the average rectum anymore.

I think this man's a bloody hero.

I really do.

Yeah.

How did he fall into that job?

That is incredible.

So, this guy probably doesn't suffer from another condition called dormant bottom syndrome.

What's that?

This is a real syndrome.

It's a guy called Chris Colber, who's a sports medical guy, and he reckons that the increased sedentary lifestyle of humans means you sit down all the time, and it means your gluteus maximus doesn't get enough exercise, and this the muscle isn't strong enough, and it means that other parts of your leg get a lot more stress, so your knees might get more stress, or your hips might, because a lot of work that would be done by your gluteus is not done by that anymore.

That's very interesting.

Wow, cool.

So, a good way to avoid the agonising knee joint pain.

I'm already getting age thirty is to stand up more, basically.

Do more squats, do more squats, and then you won't have dormant bottom syndrome.

That's amazing.

Have you guys heard of skipper caterpillars?

No.

No.

These are very cool animals.

Basically, caterpillars get preyed on a lot.

And one of the ways the predators find them is they trace them by their poo.

So it's bad as a caterpillar to be near your own poo.

But skipper caterpillars, they have a trick which they can do, which is to fling their poo as if from a catapult.

They have a flap under their anus and they build up blood pressure to build up pressure and pressure and pressure.

And then eventually they fling their poo.

They can fling it 40 times their own body length.

Wow.

So that's the equivalent of a human being able to throw their own poo 80 meters.

Wow.

You do get arrested for that as a human.

You should warn.

80 meters.

James, that's really easy.

Yeah, they know it is, but I'm talking like, okay, let's say

a discus world record is going to be around 80 meters, I bet.

Yeah.

That's a discus, it's not a problem.

They don't get to do the spin before you could throw it.

And they're going to flatten your poo into a discus shit.

Also, you're not throwing it with your own anus, are you?

Oh, that's true, yeah.

If it was the anus discus,

I think the record will be much lower.

It'll be a great spectator sport.

The shit putt.

Or the discuss.

Running a business online?

Look legit and own your own brand with professional tools from GoDaddy.

Instantly build trust with your customers and boost your credibility with an email that matches your domain so people know you mean business.

There's never been a better time.

Just go to godaddy.com slash gdnow and choose from a wide variety of popular domains to find one that's right for you.

Pair that with a professional email that works for all your business needs from daily communications to email marketing and everything in between.

That's a little price for a lot of credibility.

For a limited time, get a domain and matching professional email for just 99 cents a month for one year.

Go to godaddy.com slash gdnow and look legit with godaddy.

That's godaddy.com slash gdnow.

Again, go daddy.com slash gdnow.

There's never been a better time to choose the domain and email that's right for you.

New customer purchases only, products auto-renew separately.

See terms on site.

Go daddy.com slash gdnow.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that my top speed running in armour is the same as the top speed of a snowflake falling to earth.

How have you tested this?

No, so I read this in a study by Graham N.

Askew et al.

It's in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

And they said that a 38-year-old man can sustain a maximum speed in armour of 1.7 meters per second.

And I'm not quite 38, but I'm a bit out of shape.

So I reckon that's about my maximum speed.

And according to the internet, especially the Telegraph of the 7th of January 2010, the average snowflake has a top speed of 1.7 meters per second as well.

Oh, so you worked this out?

Yeah.

Because I was looking for the article when you mentioned this, and I couldn't find the scientific experiment where a man in armor raced a snowflake to a destination.

It takes the average snowflake an hour, the journey from the cloud to the ground.

Wow.

Yeah, it's an hour's trip.

Oh, that's all it is in an hour's run.

Amazing.

This is the fastest that a snowflake can reach, I think, rather than the average.

Right.

Okay.

It's the Hussein Bolt with snowflakes.

Yes, you're quite right.

Some of the things that are 1.7 meters per second have gone into the internet.

It's the speed when ponies tend to change from walking to trotting.

Nice.

It's the kind of average speed of a 100-metre freestyle racer during the 1972 Olympics, swimming.

And it's the speed that trapdoor ants trapdoor themselves away from predators because they can kind kind of jump away from predators.

But for them, that's really fast, isn't it?

Because they're tiny.

Yeah, exactly.

That's very cool.

1.7 metres a second.

I'm struggling to get a grip on how fast that is.

In miles an hour, is that like a really fast walk, or is it a small, short one?

It is.

You could probably run about twice that.

just under twice that speed without any armor.

Because actually armour isn't as heavy and awkward as people used to think it was.

There's this kind of meme of people in massive suits of armour hardly being able to move at all, but actually that's not true to life because obviously that would be ridiculous in a battle battle if everyone could just move very well.

And apparently, their swords weren't as heavy as we think they were either.

Because the other thing is the swords are these huge, like, incredibly heavy

weapons, and actually, they were never more than five.

Five.

Not more than five, I mean, that's quite quite low.

I thought five was quite heavy, actually.

Oh, I've been working out.

This is interesting because there was a study in 2011

which put knights on a treadmill or put people in suits of armour on a treadmill and they got tired.

They thought the one problem was that you're wearing a back plate and a breastplate and basically you can't take a huge breath in.

You can only take small shallow breaths which means that you do get quite tired quite quickly because you can't get enough oxygen to your muscles.

So

this new study seems to completely contradict that one.

I'm not sure.

I mean you say they got tired.

Did they put them on the treadmill at high speed for eight hours?

Because

we need to qualify at what point they got tired on the treadmill.

They went for 23.

They found it used twice as much energy as doing the same thing without armour in this previous experiment.

Well, actually, this experiment as well, they're saying, yes, definitely, it takes more energy and it's harder to walk at any speed in armour.

But actually, it's just not as much as you think.

Right.

Well, okay, so here's the thing.

You know, they have actual jousts these days.

I mean, there are genuine competitions which take place.

So there's one woman called Nikki Willis, but she jousts as,

oh, it's St.

Ratham, because she's from Streatham.

Well, she says she's of St.

Wreatham, so she's brilliant.

And she has just taken part last month in the first ever competitive joust between a man and a woman.

Oh, great.

And I didn't know this about jousting.

Do you know what you get points for?

I think it's where you hit them on the body, isn't it?

Exactly.

It's not knocking someone else off.

It's like a dartboard.

It's like a dartboard, yeah.

And the article I read said it was a pre-arranged thing, as though you have to, like in pool, where you name the pocket you're going to sink, and you say, right, I'm going to hit him on the shoulder or whatever.

I'm I'm not sure whether it's that or whether it is just like a dartboard where you get most points for hitting them in the helmet.

I thought in the olden days it was like treble twenty would be your helmet

if you got them on that thin line where the eyes are.

Jousting didn't really exist in medieval times, it was the Malay that was the big sport that they do, which the Malay was lots of people galloping towards each other.

And a bit of a sideline at these big Malay festivals would be the joust, which no one really watched and no one cared about.

And then, as these ideas of chivalry and this one knight ruling above everyone and attracting the best women and stuff came into the fore in Tudor times, then the joust took uh became the centrepiece of these tournaments.

I remember reading about the melee, wasn't it?

That

I read about one where it was like the French and the English were all taking part and then the French kind of cheated or the English cheated.

The English cheated but they copied the French.

So the English cheated by saying they weren't going to get involved in a melee.

I think this was in the 15th century stood on the side and went, oh you guys carry on and then as soon as everyone else was tired and lost all the fingers and stuff they kind of ran in in.

Yeah, there were several nations fighting.

I think that was it.

And the English just sort of hung around on the edge.

Maybe we should have done that in the Euros, just sat out the first few rounds and then the last few rounds.

Did it the wrong way round, guys?

Do you know what?

So, this is a cool thing.

The whole medieval thing got kick-started in the 19th century.

Yeah, kick-started back in this country, yeah.

No, it was in 1839.

There was a thing called the Eglinton Tournament, and it was this quite eccentric lord called Lord Eglinton who just said, I'm going to revive the idea of chivalry, chivalry.

We've been going without it for too long.

And he hosted this massive medieval tournament, but it was in Scotland, unfortunately, which meant that it was a total washout.

Like huge rains, huge storms, huge winds, and the whole thing was a disaster.

And the tilting yard had this huge roof.

There were huge crowds, and then it started leaking.

And basically, the crowds did not come back on the second day.

But he just had paintings done, which made it look amazing.

And then everyone else said, oh, well, this is great.

We should do this.

And if one looked at those, went, oh, do you remember the great tournament of 1836 or whatever happened?

Oh, cool.

You know, there are quite a lot of paintings of female jousters and knights in armour.

You were mentioning one earlier, and you think of you think of women as not having been really involved in that, but there were a few feet there are a few female knights in history.

You obviously think of Joan of Arc.

There's Joan of Arcade.

I would think of that lady in Game of Thrones.

There was obviously her, I think she was Brian of Tarre.

Yes.

Yep, 14th, 15th century Brienne of Tar.

Yep.

There was a noble woman called the Countess Jean de Pontievre.

But um there are quite a few medieval depictions of women in armour jousting and stuff, but it was thought to be improper to show them with something as phallic as a joust.

And so they'd show them in jousting tournaments carrying a distaff, which is one of those um needles that you wrap uh wool round when you're when you're sewing.

You would think that instead of painting the uh joust they paint like a vagina or something.

I thought you were going to come up with a weapon that looks like a vagina.

I couldn't think of any.

If I could have thought of one I would have said it.

I know.

There aren't other.

No.

It's harder because it's longer and pointier things is what is traditionally used in battles.

A bear trap?

That's pretty messed up, Ben.

Don't blow into that vagina.

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

My fact this week is that archaeologists have started throwing artifacts into skips because there is now too much history for them to store.

There's too much history.

They're finding too many bits of history and all of their backrooms are getting clogged up and they don't know what to do with them.

It costs too much to store them.

So they just have to throw them away.

What happens is you put it all in a landfill and then in another thousand years they come to this landfill with loads of different times of history.

They'll have some Victorian stuff, some Roman stuff and they'll think, wow, all these people live together

with T Vs and Time travel happened.

They cracked it.

This is one meeting point where they all.

Guys, we're screwing with the future.

This is terrible.

We need to leave notes in Landfill saying

this did not all come at one.

It's really interesting because they're being told lots of local community archaeology groups find things, they take them to museums, but because of lots of funding cuts, the museums then say we have no storage.

And then I think they have to give them back to the people who own the land it was found on.

Yes.

And those guys who own the land might just keep them in their house.

And if they die or move, then their inheritors or the next people might think this is rubbish and throw it away.

Yeah.

And

the museums have to charge.

It's like taking out a P.O.

box, as it were, for mail to be delivered to from somewhere that's not your house.

You pay for a box if you want something to be put in a museum, and that can range between £20 and £600.

So you're effectively saying, I'd like to donate this bit of history to you guys, but then I now need to pay to have it stored as well.

And people can't afford that.

So

just things are being thrown away.

That's terrible.

And it doesn't sound like people are finding full statues of Cleopatra and chucking them away.

I think it's obviously shards of pottery that do have amazing

inscriptions on them and so on, but they have lots of examples of it.

There was an excellent article on cracks.

And I love it when cracks does, articles written by someone with this job.

But there was this article on cracks by an archaeologist called Hadas Levine, and she's an Israeli archaeologist.

And she said they throw away about 65% of what they find.

And the bits of pottery, the only bits of pottery that are useful are the the bottom and the top because it's only at the lip and the base that you can really date it, and all the stuff in between, you just chuck it straight back.

Unless it's got, she said, unless it's got some really cool thing, like an engraving of a penis on it, and then obviously you can, because we love that.

They're very similar to us in that way.

Remember, Andy, you ages ago were telling me about the fact that there was a new train system that was being built.

And as they were digging, this was in Istanbul, I think, and as they were looking, there was just too much history.

Rome.

Was in Rome.

Rome is having another underground line built at the moment, and

they had to delay it three times now, because they keep finding oh well it's another massive barracks full of statues and you know ancient important stables and things like this.

So yeah, I think it opened with crossrail a bit as well, didn't it?

They kept finding things.

They kept finding plague pits when they first built the channel.

Yeah, I think there's a kink in I'm gonna say it's in the Piccadilly line, but obviously some people listening would know, but I think there's a kink in it which goes round a plague pit.

Yes, right.

That must be a classic problem of of anyone building

rail.

And I think, as we mentioned before, that with HS2, there was an archaeologist shortage.

And there still is.

If you're listening to this and you're wondering what to do with your life, become an archaeologist.

Or go around letting people put their finger up your bum.

There's a shortage in that, too.

It's just a binary choice now.

All other jobs are filled.

I went onto a website called, It's a Tumblr, called Archaeologist Problems.

And there's a few of those.

One of them is being asked if giants really exist, but their discovery is covered up by the museums in verse numbers.

Apparently, that's something they get asked quite a lot.

I thought I was being original with that question.

Archaeologist Joyce finding massive amounts of well-preserved artefacts in one small location, followed by archaeologist problems.

Said small location is a privy and the smell is stuck on your clothing, your hair, your field gear, everything.

So that's a problem they have.

Also, a problem they have is getting getting teased in Europe for sharpening your trowel and getting teased in the US for not sharpening your trowel.

Archaeologists can be so cruel.

Yeah.

But I think this is a good tip because, Andy, you're saying that people should become archaeologists.

Maybe if you're going to become one, then make sure you always sharpen your trowel in the US, but don't do it in Europe.

You better have got that the right way around, James, because you're responsible for the rampant bullying of all archaeologists henceforth.

If you're going to become an archaeologist, maybe become a US one so that if you get into a fight with a non-US archaeologist, you'll have a sharp trowel.

Yes.

So, just on things being thrown away by mistake.

In 2014, Bournemouth Council launched this new scheme where it was a food waste collection service, and you basically had your own little bin which clipped on inside your bin.

And then bin men accidentally threw away 100 of the little bins.

Doesn't that matter?

You know,

a huge number of coins get thrown away, coins that add up to a massive value.

So I was looking at a study which was called a statistical analysis of coins lost in circulation, and it said that in 1995, but I can't see why it would have changed much, the average one-cent coin in America had a 0.3 circulation rate.

So I think that probably means for every one coin that you put in circulation, you get 0.3 coins back.

So pretty much 70% of coins never come back in.

They just, well, you know, you chug a coin into like a pot and you never use it again, or it falls down the back of the sofa, down down a well, down a well, happens with pennies, especially.

So they've estimated that $3 billion worth of pennies go missing every year.

Every year, every year.

If you could get all those pennies, but you can't.

You can't, and I think it ceases to be legal tender after you pay 20p's worth of copper.

What?

Seriously?

Something like that.

It's 20-something P, I think.

So if you want to pay for something

and you want to pay just in pennies,

they can still accept it if they want to, but they don't legally have to accept it anything over.

I think it's 20 people, it might be more.

That is fascinating.

There are those machines now, though, in the supermarkets where you can put them in.

Yeah, they'd probably be there for about

3 billion.

I did, they have those in Australia as well.

And when I moved there temporarily and I was unemployed, I had no money, but my boyfriend had a lot of change lying around the house, so I went and collected it all up.

Collected or stole.

You went over at night when he was asleep

and collected it.

But yeah, I remember just feeling like such a weird person walking up to the bank with this enormous suitcase full of coins.

It was something like $400 worth of coins.

It was great.

It got through the next year.

Yeah, he's ridiculous.

He hoards it.

If he hoards it, it means he was collecting it, which means you stole it.

Look, he never noticed.

Did he also collect his television as well?

One American bloke, he walked around the town he lived in, and he would go on long walks every day.

And whenever he passed by a car wash, he would just feel in the chain slot in the vacuum machine.

You know, you pay a few coins and you get to use a vacuum machine to hoover the inside of your car.

He made an average of $5.60 per trip, and over a decade, he made $21,000

just from that.

It's actually still not enough to live on, is it?

Nope.

It's a really nice bonus.

But I'm also thinking

he could be using his skills for better use because what he's doing is he's putting his finger into a small hole and feeling around.

There must be another job that he can do.

I think so.

I can't think of anything.

Running a business online?

Look legit and own your own brand with professional tools from GoDaddy.

Instantly build trust with your customers and boost your credibility with an email that matches your domain so people know you mean business.

There's never been a better time.

Just go to godaddy.com slash GDNow and choose from a wide variety of popular domains to find one that's right for you.

Pair that with a professional email that works for all your business needs, from daily communications to email marketing and everything in between.

That's a little price for a lot of credibility.

For a limited time, get a domain and matching professional email for just 99 cents a month for one year.

Go to godaddy.com slash gdnow and look legit with godaddy.

That's godaddy.com/slash gdnow.

Again, go daddy.com slash gdnow.

There's never been a better time to choose the domain and email that's right for you.

New customer purchases only, products auto-renew separately.

See terms on site.

Go daddy.com slash slash GD Now.

Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at SF.com.

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

Yeah, my fact is that restaurants in 1950s Vietnam punched holes in their soup spoons to stop people stealing them.

It's amazing.

It's so weird.

So I read this in this, in an excerpt from this cookbook called The Faux Cookbook by Andrea Nguyen.

And yeah, she was saying under communism in the 1950s, a lot of people were stealing cutlery from restaurants, and so restaurants decided that they would punch holes in the middle of soup spoons, which she described as making the soup a lot harder to drink.

It had to be gulped down extremely quickly, because otherwise it dribbled all out of the spoon before it got to your mouth.

But apparently it was to stop people stealing it.

It's weird though, isn't it?

Because you would think either the hole makes it completely useless that you can't drink out of it, or it's still okay, in which case you can use it in the restaurant, but you can also still use it at home.

Exactly.

By the end of your meal, you've mastered the use of a holy spoon and you bring that home.

Yeah.

Well, they actually did it again.

I found one other newspaper article citing it being done in 1993 in Russia, in the city of Cheboxery, and it did conclude that this anti-theft device did not work.

So, this was saying that the anti-theft idea in this place was to put holes in the spoons, and then diners at the cafe were instructed to ball up pieces of bread that came with their meal in order to plug up the hole in the spoon.

Great idea.

It's amazing how much stuff gets stolen from restaurants.

I didn't realise this.

Jamie Oliver said he lost 30,000 napkins.

Oh, I don't know whether it was a month or a year now.

Oh, yeah.

There was some vast number.

His napkins have got like branded Jamie Oliver on them or something, don't they?

Yeah, it's Jamie Oliver on them, I think.

We mentioned the virgin thing before on Virgin Airlines.

He's got children, yeah.

I don't think we can make this out.

He's a virgin.

No,

Virgin Airlines had a similar problem years ago.

They had these little planes, salt and pepper shakers, and people kept stealing them because they just looked so cool.

And so they thought rather than combating it by stopping production of it or trying to work out how to stop people from stealing it, they ended up just having a little embossed thing at the bottom saying pinched from Virgin Airways and it became a huge marketing tool.

Everyone loved the idea.

So they were encouraging people to steal them.

This is like Oaxaca had an amnesty on stolen spoons recently actually because I think Oaxaca spoons are also quite distinct.

I think they're big and round and plastic.

They're very plastic aren't they?

Yes, and colourful.

So they had an amnesty where they said if you return stolen spoons, then we'll give you free food.

And there were posters up which said, sure, they're irresistibly bright, and some say ergonomically perfect.

True, there's no final ladle for your last mouthful.

But please, please, can we have them back?

The state parliament in Russia, the Douma, they had a lot of problems with people stealing cutlery in 2004, at least they did.

They were losing 30 to 40 spoons and 15 forks a week.

So they're losing that much per week.

And there was a guy, an MP called Sergei Glotov, and he thought that basically, because they didn't have a gift shop, whenever anyone came, they just thought, oh, well, I'm going to have to take something, so I'm going to take some cutlery instead.

Right.

When I went to Russia, lozhka, which is spoon, is one of the few words that I learned.

And people kept, over the course of the week, nicking me spoons from around the place.

Because you just kept saying lozhka, lozhka.

Yeah, I kept on saying lozhka, and then people found it very amusing.

And they gave me, I came back with about half a dozen spoons.

Wow.

Loshki, meaning spoons,

is also a musical instrument, I think.

The spoons, yeah.

Yeah, it's like the spoons, but they're like decorated and they're big.

I have some at home.

Nice.

You should have gone around Russia saying the words, learn the words for slightly more valuable, exciting words.

So I was saying diamond, diamond.

Diamond.

Dengue.

Should have learned that.

Yeah, so disappearing spoons seems to be a major thing to the extent that the British Medical Journal in 2005 published a report called The Case of the Disappearing Teaspoons: Longitudinal Cohort Study of the Displacement of Teaspoons in an Australian Research Institute.

And it was a study where they investigated the lifespan of a teaspoon and how soon it would be stolen.

And they worked out that the half-life of teaspoons was 81 days.

If you wanted to have an institute-wide population of 70 teaspoons in this research institute, you would need to buy 250 teaspoons in one year.

And their conclusion was that the loss of workplace teaspoons is rapid, showing that their availability and hence office culture in general is constantly threatened.

We suggest that the development of effective control measures against the loss of teaspoons should be a priority on national research agendas.

It's Fox in this office, isn't it?

Yeah, it is.

We need to get them to do another study on the other side.

Remember when you guys accused me of throwing away all our cutlery?

I still think you might have accidentally thrown them away.

I didn't do it.

As if they were an archaeological find.

And I'm an Australian, so this is matching up with this report that you've just read.

It is very odd, though.

So we, you know, like little things like coasters, the prime example is Byros.

Like, Byros just go.

Douglas Adams has this whole riff about, you know, they squirrel themselves away through space-time to their own dimension.

But it is bizarre.

I frequently put three Byros in my bag, and I end the day, and I've got none.

Yeah.

Where are they?

They're in my bag.

And I was collecting them.

I think it's basically anything that's low value, right?

So if it's low value, you don't really care about it, so it just goes missing.

Whereas if you had a really nice pen, then you probably would never lose it.

I was looking into other kinds of spoons that we've had throughout the years.

My favourite spoon so far, one I've not heard of, earspoons.

Have you heard of earspoons?

That's so cool.

Historical artifacts.

It's for getting wax out of your ears.

Yeah, pre-the q-tip.

It was you'd have a spoon with a little with a long handle, and you'd shove it down your ear and you'd try and dislodge the wax inside and come out with a nice spoonful of wax.

I think I have one.

Do you?

I think so.

We haven't been using it enough, James.

Sorry?

It went in a few years ago.

In the E-series of QI, we found out about these things.

And you can buy them readily online.

And I think, I haven't seen it for years, so maybe I haven't got it still, but I thought I bought one with a light on it.

So you can kind of go into the ears and kind of look at the other one.

I do see the problem with that.

But I think it's for other people if you're kind of digging.

Well,

if the light comes out of your eyes, you know there's no wax in your ear.

No, and also I remember reading that and I don't know if this is kind of a bit of a funny pages thing, but apparently ear wax picking of your loved one was kind of a bit of a fetish in Japan for a while.

Yeah, it does it feels like just a made-up thing, but I remember reading articles about it.

Here's the thing about spoons.

In 1909, the Huddersfield Examiner reported that there had been a competitive spoon cleaning competition.

Pretty cool.

That is such a good way to get everyone to do the town's washing it up.

Do you know what the first ever spoons were?

Do you know what they were made from?

Oh, wood?

They were made of shells tied onto sticks.

Says who?

Says my researchers.

Okay.

Okay, the Latin word for spoon is cocleare, and that comes from the word for that comes from the word for shell.

So I think that's the thinking.

Yeah, but you're not going to find any any sticks and shells tied together.

You can throw them all away with the office forks.

But you're not going to find that in an archaeological way.

So I can see the language thing, but even then, it could be the shape of it just reminds you of a shell.

Possibly, possibly.

Not sure.

Might you find it in a cave?

Just not tied together, but just sitting next to each other.

No, but you don't know.

You're always going to find sticks and shells next to each other.

When I go to the beach and I see a bit of driftwood in a shell, I know,

those are the ancient cutlery set.

You've got to use your imagination and it's kind of work, James.

So, do you know one of the oldest spoons that exists in this country is yes, it's my uh

sticky shell.

Sorry, there's an Andy's shell, and then hot on the heels of that, um, this is the only piece of medieval regalia we have.

So, stuff from things that were used in medieval royal ceremonies, and it's the coronation spoon.

So, the most sacred part of the Queen's coronation is when she gets anointed, which is when the Archbishop of Canterbury in private puts holy oil on her.

I think it's her breasts, her hands, and her head.

And

he uses this coronation spoon, and it's from the 12th century.

Wow.

Which I just think that's incredible.

It's almost a thousand-year-old spoon.

The breasts, it's seen.

In China, restaurants are pining bring your own cutlery movement because huge amounts of of cutlery get wasted.

So it's weird that we pick up plastic cutlery in a lot of the cafes that you go to, for instance, in London.

And it was worked out that they were wasting something like, it was something ridiculous, like 80 billion pairs of chopsticks a year in China.

And so in Beijing, there's a bring your own cutlery movement where a whole bunch of restaurants now, hundreds of restaurants across the city, don't serve cutlery.

And if you forget to bring your own cutlery, then you're buggered, I guess.

That's a really good idea.

It's a really good idea.

Yeah.

And they used to do it in medieval times.

Everyone would have to bring their own knife, didn't they?

You'd just have a knife on your belt, and that was the knife they used for meals.

That's exactly what we want in London, people walking around with knives.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to gain 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 M.

James, at Egg Shapes, and Czechinsky.

You can email a podcast at QI.com.

Yep, or you can go to at QIPodcast, that's our group Twitter account, or you can go to no such thing as offish.com where we have all of our previous episodes we'll be back again next week with another episode goodbye

let's be real life happens kids spill pets shed and accidents are inevitable find a sofa that can keep up at washable sofas.com Starting at just $699, our sofas are fully machine washable inside and out, so you can say goodbye to stains and hello to worry-free living.

Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics, they're kid-proof, pet-friendly, and built for everyday life.

Plus, changeable fabric covers let you refresh your sofa whenever you want.

Neat flexibility?

Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa anytime to fit your space, whether it's a growing family room or a cozy apartment.

Plus, they're earth-friendly and trusted by over 200,000 happy customers.

It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mess-proof sofa.

Visit washablefas.com today and save.

That's washable sofas.com.

Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply.