103: No Such Thing As A Boa Constructor

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you live from Leeds.

My name is Dan Schreiber and please welcome to the stage.

It's Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray.

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 fact number one, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that Tchaikovsky used to hold his head when conducting because he was afraid it would fall off.

So, this is apparently he was he used to get so nervous when he was going on stage, and there was so much going on in his head that he genuinely thought, no, this is definitely gonna fly off halfway through the game.

So, he would sit there, or stand there, rather, and have his hand just resting.

Yeah, I thought that it wasn't true, and I went on the internet, and a few people said that they thought it wasn't true, but then I found one of his best friends actually said that he did do this.

So, although, lest you trust Dan too far when you first told this to me last week and you told me where you'd read it, it was in a book of fiction, wasn't it?

It was in a movie called Still Crazy, which stars Bill Nighy and Billy Conley.

And he said that.

But yeah, so it turns out a lot of people do say that it might not be true.

And they only say it because Tchaikovsky is one of those guys where people love to build myths around him for some reason and create stories about him.

And that was one possibly.

But as James says, we found a source.

Well, he was a massive star, wasn't he?

He was one of those classical musicians in the 19th century that was the equivalent of what's a famous band?

Wonderful was he the Justin Bieber of his day?

The Justin Bieber of his day yeah when he went to America to do a performance a few performances in New York people used to cut out pictures of his face in newspapers and send them to him and say please sign this

and which is really creepy but whatever for a guy who thinks his head's gonna fall off as well to get it

yeah you're right that was harsh it was harsh he was a troubled person but I think the clues were there.

So when he was first going to America, he was writing this diary of questions he had to ask when he got there to make sure that he didn't screw up or die.

And there were three questions, and it was, is it safe to drink the water?

Fair question.

Where can I do my laundry?

Fair question.

What sort of hats do people wear?

Oh, wow.

But that's interesting, because his death is to do with a glass of water, isn't it?

Yeah.

Supposedly, yeah.

Yeah.

He supposedly died of cholera, didn't he?

Yeah.

That's what they think, although maybe he committed suicide.

Yeah, they're not sure.

Or it might be that he, so I think, because he was really paranoid about drinking about clean water, as evidenced by his to-do list when he got to America.

Really paranoid about cleanness of water his whole life, and then he suddenly drank a glass of tap water in the middle of a cholera outbreak.

So people think maybe he did that on purpose.

There was one other time when he supposedly tried to commit suicide by walking into the Moscow River and trying to catch pneumonia that way.

Yeah.

That's unusual, isn't it?

Evelyn Waugh tried to kill himself by swimming out to sea, but then he got stung by a jellyfish.

And

he he didn't like that one bit.

So he I think he thought, dying's probably even worse than this.

So he swam back.

That was before he wrote anything as well.

We wouldn't have any Evelyn Waugh.

I started reading something about Tchaikovsky, which is that he always had this kind of slightly uneasy relationship with the sound of the violin because as a child he had had this nightmare that he was being rubbed against a block of you know rosin, the stuff that the

yeah, and then I realized this was a humor piece from the New Yorker.

This was not true.

All the other stuff about Tchaikovsky is so crazy that you would think.

It does kind of sound like it could be true, doesn't it?

He once went to Berlin Zoo and saw a boa constructor being fed a large rat.

A Boa constructor.

Those boas don't make themselves.

A boa constrictor, yes.

A boa constrictor being fed a large rat, and he screamed, ran away, started shaking all over, and he had to be in bed for a week.

Yeah.

Pathetic.

So this thing about his head falling off is kind of an example of what they call glass delusion, isn't it?

Yeah.

And it was a really popular delusion for about 300 years.

Glass had become like this massive material that everyone was using.

And it was just the, it was almost a standard mental issue of the day that people had, that they thought they were made of glass and they were going to shatter if they fell over or whatever.

And then it got replaced by cement delusion a bit later.

Really?

Yeah, it did.

Cement delusion was a real thing.

But when was cement invented?

Well, the Romans made cement.

They did.

They made a kind of cement that we don't really know exactly what it was anymore.

But the real kind of proper time that cement was really popular was in the 19th century, and that's when cement delusion came in.

And actually, it always seems to be that people get deluded by whatever is the main kind of technology of the day.

So people think that the internet's out to get them or whatever.

And there's one that last year was the first ever known case of climate change delusion.

And it was where a guy wouldn't drink any water because he felt guilty about taking it from the earth.

Well, maybe if we all had that attitude, we wouldn't be in the pickle we're in

King Charles VI of France.

Charles the Mad.

Wasn't he?

Well, he was known either as Charles the Mad or Charles the Well-Beloved.

Which suggests the PR people found out about the first nickname.

But he he thought he was made of glass, and he would keep pieces of iron in his pockets because he thought that would protect him if anything bumped into him or if he accidentally bumped into a doorway when he was going through it, so he would be defended against it.

Yeah.

So I think it was real.

There is a thing where your limbs can randomly fall off, though.

What?

What?

What?

It's auto-amputation, which is when a limb decides to amputate itself.

And the most...

When a limb decides to amputate itself.

That's a very Dan sentence, and it sounds sounds weird coming from Anna.

The most common form makes it sound less dramatic.

The most common form is dactylosis spontaneous, which is when your toes spontaneously fall off.

And they don't know why this happens, but it's like a ring of tough tissue forms around the base of your little toe.

And weirdly, when it happens, it usually happens on both little toes at once, and it starts squeezing and squeezing your little toe.

And eventually, your little toe falls off, and they don't know the cause of it.

And so eventually it's hanging by something called a pedicle, and then it sort of just drops off.

And we don't know why it happens.

It's more common in the tropics, but that's the only clue we have.

Oh my god, wow.

Does anyone else have that thing where you read about a disease and then you automatically get it?

I am so sure my little toes are going to fall off now.

I found out a thing about sort of worry and fear.

So the Pintupi people of Australia, who are an Aboriginal people in Australia, supposedly they have 15 different words for fear.

And this drops up a lot.

And they're all specific kinds of fears.

So I'm going to pronounce this, don't write in, but

nini waringu.

Even I'm writing in.

You try saying it.

Nyinyi wararinyu, I think, is a sudden fear that leads one to stand up to see what caused it.

That's cool.

Yeah, that's cool.

So you're going to read the other kind of 45-year-olds.

That's the only one I've found confident proof of.

That's the only one you can ever pronounce.

We should move on to our next fact soon.

Anyone got anything before we do?

I have one last thing.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Which is it's not really related.

It's about classical music, but I found it through looking for things about Tchaikovsky, which is that shock waves from the front of trombones move faster than the speed of sound.

Whoa.

Really?

I'm in the middle to say it.

Bullshit.

No!

Well, I refer you to bbc.co.uk.

They've measured that it sort of builds up in the tube of the trombone and it leaves the front of the trombone at about 1% faster than the speed of sound, these pressure waves.

And so if you're sitting in front of the trombones, if you're in an orchestra, it can be a nightmare.

And sometimes people have protective clothes.

I don't think anyone's that close to a trombone that's going to be a worry and a gig.

If you're in an orchestra.

Oh, sorry, the person with the music.

Sitting in front of the trombone.

I thought you meant the audience.

It's like, oh, these are great seats.

Wait, so people in the orchestra wear protective clothes to stop themselves getting battered by the shockwaves.

Some musicians who are sitting directly in front of the trombonists have protective screens between them and the trombonists.

That feels so passive-aggressive, that emotion.

If I were the trombonist and I sat down, I realized someone's put a big screen up in front of me.

All right, let's move on.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that asthmatic otters can be taught to use inhalers.

So

there is an asthmatic otter in Seattle Aquarium.

He seemed to have contracted asthma after the wild fires got near to him when they had bad fires in Washington State.

He was called Mishka,

this otter, and they used food to train Mishka to kind of go up to this little inhaler thing, and he would press it with his nose and then get a little bit of asthma medicine.

It is the most adorable fact of all time.

It really is.

I quite like the whole thing of offering food to get them to heal themselves through a bit of medication.

There's another otter that I read about called Eddie, Eddie the Otter.

And Eddie had problems with his, he basically was developing arthritis in his elbows.

And so they needed to get him to sort of exercise all the joints constantly.

And so what they did was they set up a basketball ring and they had, they rewarded him in fish every time he got a shot in.

So they'd give him a basketball and I swear to God, this is what this says.

Eddie was slam-dunking

into the ring.

He was loving it.

And he's now got a contract, hasn't he, with the NBA?

Speaking of otters that could be six foot tall,

there are giant otters in Brazil.

In the Amazon, there There are otters that are up to six feet long and they're called giant otters.

So there are only 5,000 left.

And in captivity, they have killed people.

People who fall into their cages.

Oh, you're killed by an otter.

Yeah, but a huge otter.

They're really powerful looking things.

They're also really, they can be really vicious, though.

So they can attack.

On the outside of killing people, they can also.

That is the tip of the iceberg.

The otter family, they're part of the weasel family.

And I was watching a David Ashmore clip the other day and there was a weasel that was about three inches long and and it killed.

Now, it doesn't sound that impressive, it's a rabbit, but it was ten times its size.

It was the biggest rabbit I've ever seen, ten times the size of it.

And they wrap themselves around the necks of their prey, and then they just squeeze them, and then they bite them in the back of the neck, and they're done, and they can take prey ten times the size of them.

Wow, yeah, so they're not so cute.

So, I read a book called Otter by Daniel Allen, and if you want otter facts, it is such a good book.

So, otters used to be sacred to the Zoroastrian people who lived in Persia, so modern-day Iran.

There were 18 possible penalties for killing an otter in ancient Persia with the Zoroastrians, which included you would have to then go and kill 10,000 frogs, 10,000 snakes, 10,000 worms, 10,000 corpse flies, whatever they are.

And whoever did it, he would also have to carry 10,000 loads of cleansed wood to a sacred fire.

And he would lose all his wealth, his property, his land, and he would have to give up his daughter to godly men.

Wow.

In Japanese folklore, otters can shapeshift.

And so there's stories that they kind of live in moats around castles and they could turn into a beautiful woman, invite a man over and then eat and kill him.

I thought you were going to say people are waking up and being caught next to an otter.

I swear to God, she was a beautiful woman last night.

And also, they can shapeshift and fool people into engaging in sumo against a rock or a tree stump.

When St.

Cuthbert, he was a seventh century saint, and when he walked into the sea one night to pray, and when he walked out, two otters approached him and warmed his feet ceremonially by rubbing themselves on him and breathing on his feet.

Hot air.

They were probably just trying to dry off, I imagine, and his feet happened to be there.

I'm sure he's interpreted it as an affectionate move.

But when they come out of the water, they have to rub themselves on a lot of stuff.

And this must be the most annoying thing.

Coastal otters who live in the sea, every time they are in the sea and then they come out of the sea, they have to then go and have a shower in fresh water somewhere because if they keep the salt on their fur for any amount of time, then it ruins the waterproofing of their fur.

So they live in the sea, but every time they get out of the sea, they have to find some fresh water immediately and wash the salt out.

Wow.

How annoying is that?

Yeah.

Do you guys know the surface area of an otter?

I mean,

roughly, obviously.

So

what would you say?

About one square metre.

No, no, including the hairs.

Yeah.

Wait, do you?

The surface area.

Well, yeah, if you take the total surface area, including the hairs.

And I know that they have 70,000 hairs per centimetre squared, so a quick bit of calculation.

Let's say there are about

10 tennis courts.

A million car parks.

No, what is it?

What is the size of whales?

About the size of a hockey rink.

That doesn't have.

That's probably

like the size of a shoe or something.

I don't know.

So

they've got more hairs on them than any animal in the animal kingdom.

So if you had to go go total surface area the size of a hockey rink, which is which is pretty amazing.

Yeah, I read that they the sea otters have the densest because they spend their whole lives basically in the sea.

They mate and they eat and they sleep and they feed.

They spend almost all their time floating on their backs and they have up to 165,000 hairs per square centimetre.

That's the densest you get.

But I think that's more than a human has hairs on their head.

One thing that's interesting about sea otters is they use tools.

So they can get stones and they can crack open shells to get the food inside.

But there are people whose job it is to be an otter archaeologist and they want to go and find the tools that the otters use so they can see kind of how they've evolved.

So a normal archaeologist would go and find old human tools, but there are people looking for old otter tools.

That's cool, isn't it?

That's really cool.

But the problem is that a stone, like after they've broken the thing, they just kind of drop it to the bottom of the ocean and it just looks like a stone then.

Yeah, it's not like now they have spanners and seed drills and stuff and we need to look at where they started.

We're not going, we all have to start somewhere.

So how does a single archaeologist able to do that?

So what they do now is because they can't really work out which stones are used by otters and which aren't, they get like...

They just get some stones that are probably these.

No, what they do is they get like old ancient otter skeletons and they look at the teeth and they see whether they've used like that if they had to use their teeth to open the shells, then they'll be cracked.

And if they didn't have to use their teeth then they won't be cracked and so you can tell when they started using tools.

Wow.

That's amazing.

They also have they smell in we think they smell in quite an incredible way because they can't technically smell underwater.

The water stops the smell particles from being able to get to their nose.

So what it's thought that they do, what we've seen them doing is they blow a snot bubble out of their nose while they're underwater and then they blow it out towards some what they think is some prey and then they immediately suck it back in again.

So they get the scent of the prey into the air in the snot bubble and they suck it back in and they can smell it.

No way.

That's incredible.

That's apparently what they're doing, and that's how they smell if it's prey they want to eat or if it's just a bit of rock.

That's so cool.

We should move on to our next fact very soon.

Anyone got anything before we do?

Some stuff about asthma very quickly.

Yeah.

Yeah, sure.

So Thomas Penny, who was an English entomologist, thought that if you took crushed wood lice, that would cure asthma.

Something that actually can cure asthma is roller coasters.

Or it can't cure it, but it can relieve the symptoms.

It can make you forget about it for three minutes.

Yeah, this is an Ig Nobel study, actually.

And they check people's kind of breathing ability, breathing, not breathing.

Not on the roller coaster, Davis.

The buttons are down.

Three minutes, that's about right.

So they check their breathing ability before and after, and just before, because of the stress of going on the roller coaster, it got a bit worse.

But then afterwards, somehow the pleasurable stress seems to have kind of relieved the symptoms of asthma quite a lot.

Really?

Which is quite good.

Good tip.

Yeah.

Just on difficulty breathing, otter mothers teach their kids to swim by doing what all of our parents did when we learned to swim, which is just like forcibly ducking them underwater

in order to make the...

So baby otters are born not being able to swim.

And you can watch videos of mothers training otters, and they drag them from the rocks into the water and then they pull them along behind them and they let go of them like when you're riding a bike for the first time and they sort of start sinking a bit and so the mother has to go up and get them and then to get them used to being underwater for long periods of time they just like duck these baby otters underwater and hold them there.

I had some very difficult experiences growing up.

My dad was an otter.

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

Yeah, my fact this week is that your appendix can be turned into a sphincter, if you like.

No one's forcing you.

I think you're going to have to explain.

Yeah, so I just think this is incredibly cool.

What I guess what medicine and surgery can do.

So appendixes can be really useful now.

It can be repurposed for other reasons inside your body.

So for instance, if you need bladder replacement surgery, then the surgeons go in and they take a part of your intestine to make a little bladder out of it.

And then they take your appendix and they reform it into tissue that builds a sphincter muscle that can contract and means that you're not going to be incontinent, which I think is incredible.

You take your appendix that's sitting there relatively uselessly, controversial claim,

and you turn it into something really useful that stops you wetting yourself all the time.

I think that's amazing.

And it happens a lot in surgery.

You can use appendices for various things.

You can turn them into other things.

You can also turn them into the uretha.

If you've got a problem with your uretha, you can replace that by reshaping an appendix.

If you are hosting a child's birthday party but you've run out of balloons,

an appendix will make a poor but acceptable substitute.

Weird you should say that because

the Aztecs used the bowels of animals to make balloons.

Or they blew into them.

I mean

and then they kind of tied them and

I don't think they did shapes out of them.

But that is true actually.

I think that is true.

And I read in one place that apparently when they ran out of kind of cats or dogs, what did they use?

They used humans because they had loads of human sacrifices and loads of dead humans, and they would use the insides of humans to make balloons.

I have read that.

Happy birthday, son.

Here's your grandparents' organs.

Oh, my God.

So you, Dan, have millions of sphincters.

And so does everybody else.

Millions as strong.

I guess I should point out that the sphincter I'm talking about is not the sphincter that you're imagining.

Go on.

Because we do have a lot of sphincters.

Yeah, so we've all got an A-list sphincter, as it were.

But there are millions of them throughout your body.

So you have sphincters all the way through your digestive system.

A sphincter is just a ring of muscle which can expand or contract to allow anything through it.

So you also have them in your blood vessels.

All your veins and capillaries have tiny, tiny, tiny sphincters which widen or constrict depending on where needs blood in the body.

Is it millions?

I thought it was like 60.

Well, I looked into it a lot.

I haven't got enough.

They've counted a load of ones.

So they've counted the one that goes from your esophagus to the stomach or from the stomach to the small intestine, but

they haven't counted the ones in the blood vessels.

And obviously,

some of them are so tiny.

So, I'm not sure that there can be a proper audit.

Wow.

But you've done your best.

So, I say, Milli, maybe it's thousands, I don't know.

So, the word sphincter comes from an old word sphingine, which means to squeeze.

And another word that comes from that is sphinx, as in the big kind of animal in Egypt.

Egypt, yeah, that's the country.

So, the official plural of the word sphinx is sphinges.

So, that's one for you all to use.

Sphincters are blowholes.

Whales blowholes, sphincters.

Yeah, any kind of muscle that kind of contracts.

In your pupils, the muscles which can allow your pupils to expand or contract their sphincters.

And you have two in your anus?

Inside and out.

You have an internal one which is involuntary and an external one which is voluntary.

In most cases.

Also, koalas, koala pouches are like kangaroo pouches, but they're upside down, which feels like a design flaw.

So when they're raising their young, they're in this upside-down pouch, which, if they didn't have the sphincter, which acts kind of like an elastic band or like a drawstring to keep the baby in there, the baby would just drop out of their pouch.

So they clench their sphincter, and then the baby stays in there.

So the appendix?

Should we talk about that?

Yeah, why not?

Yeah.

So lots of theories.

We didn't know about it until 1522 because in the ancient world, the doctor Galen, who was just the doctor, and his stuff was the only really anatomical stuff we knew about until the 16th century, he only dissected monkeys, and monkeys don't have an appendix or appendices.

Do they not?

Yeah.

So that's why we didn't know it existed.

Wow.

Yeah, although what happened when it burst?

Presumably people would have got appendicitis.

Yeah, people got it, but they just didn't know what it was.

No, exactly.

That's pretty cool.

Dissection was really a big no-no, as long as you weren't an Aztec, I suppose.

There's a thing I read today about

when Australian explorers go to the Arctic, they have to have their appendix taken out.

So it turns out that that's n not necessarily true.

They do encourage it.

But there there is Werner Herzog made a documentary about the people who live out there and and the the ones who choose to stay out when it goes into the real inaccessible months.

And they have to make the decision if they're going to stay out there.

The appendix needs to be taken out, as do wisdom teeth.

That's a thing that that's the only way that they can.

There was a guy, wasn't there, who had appendicitis when he was in Antarctic.

Leonid Rogozov.

I was going to say he was Russian, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, so this is 1961, and it was a Russian trip to the South Pole, and this guy, Leonid Rogozov, got appendicitis.

He happened to be a surgeon, which was useful.

And he said, look, I think I'm going to have to take out my own appendix.

And he wrote, what I find incredible is he's in total agony.

And the night before he did the operation, he was writing his diary.

And he wrote, it hurts like the devil.

I have to think through the only possible way out to operate on myself.

Anyway, he took his appendix out and he had three assistants, one to hold the lamp, one to hold the mirror so that he could see inside himself, and then a third person in case one of those two fainted.

I want to be that guy.

He said though, um, he...

So the mirror wasn't actually that helpful, it turned out.

So he ended up doing it by feeling around.

Oh, that's right, because it was all back to front, wasn't he?

He had the mirror there, but he kept going one way, but like shaving the wrong side of your face or something.

Yeah, which I think was harder than he imagined.

So he thought it's probably easy if I just feel.

And then he ended up tearing a bit of his gut at one point, and he had to sew that up mid-operation.

And what he said afterwards, when he was talking, when he was interviewed about it, he said, I felt so sorry for my surgical assistants.

They stood there in their surgical whites, whiter than the white themselves.

Poor them.

The Daz doorstep challenge was actually

grounded that day.

Oh, do you know what

so this is sort of this fact was sort of about repurposing body parts for different things.

And if you have a tummy tuck,

they use the fat for breast implants.

So they read it.

Even if you don't ask for it, I'm afraid.

Waste not, what not.

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

My fact is that the founder of Crufts designed special train carriages for celebrity dogs.

So in the 19th 19th century, Crafts was founded in the, I think, 1891.

But before, there were loads of dog shows before Crafts.

And before these train carriages were invented, what they would just do, they would put the dogs that were going to the dog show in special boxes, which were then strapped to the underside of the carriage.

So they would arrive, not in good nick, not really ready for a dog show.

So he designed these special deluxe train carriages for dogs.

And they had a row of kennels inside, and they had zinc flooring, and they had water troughs, and they had drainage, and they had two seats for attendants.

So, like cabin crew.

Is zinc flooring the height of luxury?

I had dream.

I was part of, I don't know, maybe for dogs, or for maybe it's seen as cleaner, or maybe it was then.

Yeah, the guy from Crofts, Charles Croft, he was actually, was he kind of a showman or a dog biscuit manufacturer?

He was a dog biscuit manufacturer.

In London, there was a very famous building.

I think it was the first ever dog biscuit factory ever, and it was called Spratz.

And that's where Charles Croft worked.

He started there, and he was working on the biscuits, and he was so good.

He had ideas about marketing, and he turned it into the first sort of major brand of biscuits.

They put logos on it and so on, so people knew about it.

Yeah, exciting.

There's a rumor that Charles Croft never owned a dog in his life.

Yeah, I've read it.

And he sort of put it about during his life that he never owned a dog.

And his wife said, yeah, because we couldn't show favoritism for one breed or another.

And then in his posthumous memoirs, it turned out he had a St.

Bernard.

Yeah, he had a massive St.

Bernard, didn't he?

Yeah,

that sounds very rude.

Quite hard to hide that, the dog.

I'm surprised you kept it secret so long.

That's very true.

So Cruft was a genius at making money, basically, and putting on these big shows and putting on even bigger shows and just really exploiting his audience and his market.

So I read that this was what he did in the early days of Crufts.

I'm quoting here.

He introduced a system where competitors would pay to enter their dogs and make additional payments if they wished to take the dogs away each night of the competition and then pay again if they wanted to take them away early on the final day.

Wow.

So basically, it's not free to enter or leave.

God, did many people run out of money and just have to leave their dog there forever?

Is there a huge lost property office of dead dogs that are 75 years old?

I just think that's an inspired system.

It also applies here tonight, guys.

Craft also founded, Charles Craft, the guy who founded it, also founded a cat show.

Did you know that?

Yeah.

But quoting from, I think, his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, it failed to live up to commercial expectations.

It doesn't feel like cats would like to be shown.

Oh, I read a thing about cat shows, and there was a lady who was giving advice for this.

There is a cat show called The Supreme Cat Show, which is such a good name.

And she enters cats for it all the time.

And she said the main grooming things are brushing the coat through with the comb, making sure the underarms and the bikini area are combed.

Whoa.

Oh my gosh.

And washing the cat's face.

It's pretty weird, yeah.

So the prizes in craft are really small as well.

Do you know the maximum prize, cash prize that you get?

No.

It's £100.

So

it's a token thing.

Yeah, right.

You also get a big silver cup, but you're not allowed to melt it or anything.

And

a lot of royalty have won craps, haven't they?

A lot of royalties now.

Do they come in disguise?

Queen Victoria entered as Shih Tzu

and won many years running because everyone was too afraid to say that's the queen.

Yeah, and so you can make money from endorsements and from

pimping the dog out for stud or whatever.

I don't know what it's called, but they have sex with other dogs and then you get better dogs.

um but

do you know what the prize was in the first modern dog show which was in 1859 in newcastle uh no the prizes were all guns

it was it was a really rural farming based competition it was there was a cattle show and they said why don't we add a dog element to this cattle show and so the prizes were all guns um i do you know if you get a train in the UK that you don't have to pay for your first two dogs to come on but your third one you do yeah so you get two dogs free, and then your third one you've got to start paying.

Really?

Yeah, and every additional dog you bring on.

Yeah.

But I read also that if any other customer objects to its presence on the train, you are obliged to move it to another area, according to bylaw 16.

Oh, yeah.

Try saying that when the purple's got its teeth in your leg.

I object to this according to bylaw 16.

I just have a cool train, if you want to hear that.

I have a cool train.

What are you sexy?

So the

Scheinen Zeppelin in 1931 was a German train, and they wanted to make a super fast train.

And what they wanted to do was put a huge propeller on the back of the train.

And it would go super, super fast down the tracks.

It's a brilliant idea.

But it never went past the prototype stage because they found out that the propellers would kill people who stood too close to the tracks at train stations.

Oh my God.

I've read there's a new idea of most complaints that come about the way that trains function.

One complaint is the fact that too much time is lost when they're trying to stop, when they stop at a station and people are getting on and off.

The other one is about internet access.

So one of the plans for a new train that they've been designing is to design a train that never stops but still picks up passengers.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

It's incredible.

So it just goes high speed.

It's just high speeding along.

And then what they do is everyone boards another train and the other train chases the train that's going to the place, docks onto it, everyone casually walks over, docks off it, and goes back to the uh to the station.

That's one proposed idea for a new train.

That sounds about as sensible as James's massive, slicy fan.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for being here.

Um, if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast, you can find us on our Twitter account.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James at Egg Shaped, Andy at Andrew Hunter M and Shaczinski, you can email a podcast at qi.com or you can go to our group account which is at qi podcast and also go to our website we got no such thingasafish.com that's where you go and we have all of our previous episodes up there thank you so much for listening at home thank you all for being here at leeds that was awesome thank you so much we'll see you again next time goodbye

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