87: No Such Thing As The Pajama Police

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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 from the North Wall Art Center in Oxford.

My name is Dan Schreiber, and please welcome to stage Andy Murray, Anna Chacinski, and James Harkin.

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, Czaczynski.

Yep, my fact this week is that the world's only Cornish pasty museum is in Mexico.

These planning permission things.

So,

why and when did it go up?

Well, so this is because there's actually a significant Cornish diaspora in Mexico because Mexico-nated miners in the early 19th century, a bunch of Cornishmen emigrated out there and they brought their pasties with them.

And pasties have been a delicacy in Mexico, and it's particularly in these two areas.

It's in the municipality of Real del Monte

and yeah, and a place called Pachuca, Pachusa.

I don't know.

Is there any Mexicans in here who are going to correct me on that?

No, cool.

But yeah, it's 4,500 miles away from Cornwall, and it is a Cornish pasty museum.

It was set up about five years ago.

What's in the Cornish Pasty Museum?

I feel like the clue is in the title.

Some medieval helmets and a Viking ship.

It's actually misnamed.

I mean, once you've seen a Cornish pasty,

you have not seen a Corsa.

Yeah,

it seems like it's partly a culinary school disguised as a museum.

There's pasty making lessons.

And in fact, so recently, I think in 2014, a team of Mexican bakers took a trip to Cornwall so they could pick up some new tips about how to make pasties, specifically the art of crimping, which is getting that little handhold bit on the side, right?

There is actually going to be a Cornish pasty museum in the UK soon.

There is.

Where will it be?

Orkney?

No, this is a guy called Malcolm Ball.

He's hoping to open what he's calling a planet Hollywood with a Cornish pasty twist.

And he said he started to research whether there's any visitor attractions in the UK focusing on the Cornish pasty and was absolutely staggered to find out that there wasn't a single one.

What

is the twist on the Planet Hollywood thing that it's got no celebrities, no memorabilia, and is just Cornish pasty?

There's going to be memorabilia, but it'll be pasty memorabilia.

Pasties.

Yeah.

um yeah so if anyone listens to this in a year i wanted to say please don't write in and say my fact was wrong it just will be wrong in about six months time because there is going to be a second pasty museum um but yeah the cornish had a really big influence in mexico so they also imported football in the 1890s i think it was about uh set up the first football team in mexico and in fact fifa's only football hall of fame is now in patchusa that little town in mexico oh really wow yeah i i was looking into the history of cornish pasties, and in the early days, both husband and wife would initial the husband's name onto the end of the Cornish pasty so that they knew it was their lunchbox, effectively.

So you could go, that's my Cornish pasty.

Look at my Darren is written on it, which is what it was.

And then also to test whether a good Cornish pasty is good as it can be is that they would drop it down a mine, and if it survives,

then they're like, that's a damn good Cornish pasty.

They dropped it down a mine.

They didn't drop it down a mine.

That's what the internet is.

People do say that.

That also implies that a good way to test for a good Cornish pasty is try and bite into it and if you can't then it probably is good.

The effect of dropping a Cornish pasty down a mine is much greater than biting it.

So if it does survive then it's inedible.

Yeah.

I read the other day that it's impossible to tell if an apple is ripe without biting into it.

But I'm not sure anyone's ever thought of putting it down a mine.

Just drop it down a mine.

Yeah.

The thing with

the initials on the pasty, what they used to do is they used to hold it kind of kind of upright and they would keep the initial at the bottom and then we'd eat it from the top.

And so you would always kind of have the initial at the bottom for the whole thing.

And then once you got down to the bottom with the initial, you would throw it away.

And you'd throw it for what they called the mining gremlins.

Oh, they called them knockers.

Did they?

Yes.

They were the sort of little people in the mines who, if

you gave them a bit of food, they wouldn't give you bad luck.

You also, some people say that they didn't eat the reason they have that handle bit, the crimped handle bit was uh to hold on to and that was discarded at the end because uh so corn was the the it had the largest tin mining um but it also had the largest arsenic mining there's a lot of arsenic down there and so these miners hands were covered in arsenic which they didn't want to eat so I think they chucked away the bit they held on to mined for arsenic yeah apparently corn was one of the country's biggest providers of arsenic did you not get your arsenic supplies from Cornwall yeah I do obviously I do but

and also they're throwing the food down into the arsenic mines before they eat it that can't helps.

Just pick it up, three second rule, brush off the arsenic.

They'd have a different second rule.

It takes a long time to get down to mime.

You know the chant that goes oggie, ogie, oggie, oi, oi, oi.

Yeah?

There you go, but not in that tone of voice, in like a different tone of voice.

So that chant is thought to come from the Cornish word for pasty, which is hogen or hogen.

And it's thought, and this again is probably just myth that's been passed down the generations, but that at lunchtime the wives would come to the top of the mines and they'd shout out, oggy, ogie, oggie, and the miners downstairs would go, oi, oi, oi, and they'd be like, all right, he wants it.

And then you do the drop test.

And then you'd drop them, and countless miners were killed by their

rock-hard pasties.

Cause of death, lunch, lunch, lunch.

I read a dictionary of slang from 1811, the Gross Dictionary of Slang, and the only thing for pasties that I could find is that to deliver a flying pasty meant to take a poo, wrap it in paper, and throw it over a neighbour's wall.

You didn't get that from a dictionary.

I was going to mention, and I thought it would be a bit too

juvenile to do, but since you bring it up,

I read a story about

someone's housemate who got evicted from the house because they found them eating a pasty full of poo

and they sucked.

Yeah, so here's the thing: he wasn't feeding it to anyone else, he was just minding his own business, having a pasty on his own in the kitchen, and then they said, We don't want someone eating poo pasty.

He said he wasn't feeding it to anyone, but she did make the good point that she didn't want to use the oven afterwards, which I think is totally fair.

Something else that's disgusting that goes into um Cornish pasties, they used to put jam at the bottom and meat at the top, didn't they?

And so that was so that you could have a full meal.

You'd have your first course there and your pudding at the end.

But there must have been a bit in between that was kind of jammy meat.

That was sorbet, yeah.

It was a nice palate cleanser

for the gourmet miner.

We're gonna have to move on to the next fag.

Soonish, if you guys have anything else.

Okay, can I just say a thing about museums?

I found this thing the other day.

Apparently, in 1846, a snail arrived at the British Museum.

Sorry, Kenneth.

As I read that.

And they said, you're late, where have you been?

Yeah, someone sent a snail into the British Museum and it was stuck onto a piece of cardboard.

And then they noticed four years later that the card was slightly discoloured.

They put it all into some warm water and it turned out that the snail wasn't dead.

And it woke up and it became really famous.

And it was like the most famous snail in Britain in 1850.

A tough competition in that year, actually.

What year?

1850.

1850, that was.

It was so famous, it was painted by John William Waterhouse.

Oh, what colour?

I just like that, that there was a most famous snail in Britain.

And Waterhouse, I like as well, because he painted pre-Raphaelite style, but like decades after, everyone didn't really want to do it anymore.

So he was like a post-pre-Raphaelite.

I think they just call them Raphaelites.

Have we got any more on this?

Should we move on?

Just, I think a good thing to look into if you fancy researching more about Cornish pasties is the British newspaper archive where I was reading up on other 19th century pasty stories.

And there were a couple of good ones.

So one of them was a travel writer in the Leeds Times in 1861 visited Cornwall and said of the pasty, the name is generally applicable to anything that by any stretch of the culinary imagination could be conceived as existing under a crust.

So he wasn't a fan.

And in 1889 two Cornish miners got trapped in a mine, so they were stuck underground and all they had to eat was four pasties that their wives had given them before they they got trapped underground.

They were trapped underground for four and a half days and they didn't even finish the pasties because

they were unfit to eat, apparently.

So,

this one's been on the ground for four seconds.

We can't possibly eat.

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Okay, I'm going to move us on to our next fact, and that is James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that 20% of people wake up wearing fewer clothes than they went to bed with.

Do we know who's removing them?

Do we know who's taking them off?

No, we don't know.

Well, we think probably them.

Okay.

Or the clothes fairy.

Well, yeah.

Well, there is one theory that

if you go to bed wearing pajamas and you wake up not wearing them, you've been abducted by aliens.

There's a website called AbductAnon, and it says how to tell if you've been abducted by aliens.

And that's one of them.

If you went to bed wearing pajamas and you woke up nude, that's one of them.

The other one is electronic appliances behave strangely when you pass by.

Another one is you have an uncontrollable urge to take vitamins.

Don't really understand that one.

Three out of three so far.

And the other one, I really like this, the scene of your abduction has been staged to look as if nothing happened.

So if you ever wake up in the morning and everything looks exactly the same, it's aliens, I'm afraid.

I was reading that when aliens do abduct humans, I don't believe it, by the way, but when they say they abduct them, the abductees say that when they get up there, the aliens do some probes, and they often have to do it in a sort of slightly inappropriate kind of sexual manner.

They try and transform their bodies so that they look as if they're comfortable sights to you.

So it just feels like, oh, this is quite a nice thing.

And the list of things that they dress up as, body-wise, is the Pope.

That's the thing that's most likely to put something up your ass.

And the other is a deceased relative.

And that's what they say will make you feel like, well, this is a pleasant experience.

I do this.

Do you?

I'm trying to

bring it back to the conversation before.

I wake up sometimes not wearing, if I ever

have socks on when I go to sleep, I'll wake up not wearing the socks.

Yeah, 30 minutes.

I'm so uncomfortable telling you that as well.

I feel like you've all been let in now.

You are wearing the sock on your penis, though.

Look, my room is drafty and cold.

And I'm a real man.

I don't wear pajamas.

Oh, God.

Do you actually wake up with no socks?

Yeah.

Thank you.

And I've got a friend and supporter in tonight.

So anyway, so this was a

survey by a memory foam mattress company called Ergo Flex.

And they said that socks are the most commonly removed item with 31% of people who remove things saying that they don't keep them on at night.

So you're in, you know, good company.

Good.

One of the other things they found is that the average length of time men wear pajamas before washing them is 13 nights, and women it's 17 nights.

Whereas we all know the correct answer is you're in for one night and then you incinerate them

and you buy a new pair.

So when you say you're a real man, you don't wear pajamas, is that.

Oh, we we so glossed over that.

I said whether that's a thing, because there was a survey done into who wears pajamas and who doesn't, and far, far fewer men wear pajamas than women.

So, I think it was something like 13% of men wear pajamas and about 30% of women do.

So, is this something in the male community that's sort of as emasculating?

I think it's thought of as being not the act of a real man to wear.

I've got six pairs of silk pajamas, I'm fine, but

one sock.

In the survey survey they did, people were asked what they wore in bed, and 1% of people said they had no opinion.

The aliens look after that stuff, to be honest with you.

The idea of doing things while you're asleep is called parasomnia.

And there have been examples of people doing various things: texting while asleep, eating while asleep is a bad one because you can put on a lot of weight.

Driving cars while asleep, there's one or two people who've done that.

And there was one sleep doctor who described how he treated someone who dismantled grandfather clocks while asleep.

There's, you know, you said people text in their sleep.

Yeah.

There was a the first example of someone using the internet while asleep was in 2008.

And this was a 44-year-old woman who,

in her sleep, she got out of bed, she went over to her computer, she logged in and she fired off three emails, one of which read, come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out.

Dinner and drinks, 4 p.m.

Bring wine and caviar only.

What an awesome dream was she having.

There's a really cool thing as well that they've noticed in recent times when they've been doing studies that anyone playing video games, so younger children and really cool, awesome adults,

they have an ability, they say, in their dream, to suddenly take charge and control the dream as if they were playing Call of Duty or something like that.

So they don't have nightmares because nightmares for them are a challenge where they can then slaughter dragons and sort out

it's called lucid dreaming.

Right.

Yeah.

The idea is that you keep looking at your watch during the day and then you start dreaming that you're looking at your watch and you realize that it's not moving and then you can realize you're in a dream as soon as you realize you're in a dream, then you can start doing things in there.

And there are quite a few people who can do it.

I've done it a couple of times, but only a couple of times my whole life I can remember having a lucid dream.

Wow.

It's really cool.

Yeah, I bet.

I just fly.

Just a quick thing on pajamas.

I was looking for information on astronaut pajamas, what they wear in space, whether they wear pajamas, where they take them.

And so I googled do astronauts, me need to type in wear pajamas, and the first thing that came up is, do astronauts masturbate in space?

So I clicked on that instead.

I found an article, there's a website called Quora, where people write their own answers to questions people post up.

And there was an article on Quora which gave an answer, and I just wanted to to read it out.

This is the answer on Quora.

This is at least the tenth time I have answered a question about sex, masturbation, or romance in space.

Please search before posting.

And he goes on, he gives the answer.

He says, Yes, each astronaut has a private sleeping area.

No, there isn't a space just for masturbation.

As though the guys at NASA would have built that into a session.

Well, we've got the sleeping quarters, the mess, the masturbatorium.

Sorry.

There was an article in the Daily Mail which said,

and I should have really looked into whether this could possibly be right, but it said it had interviewed an independent sleep expert who said that resist the temptation to strip off at nights when you're hot and muggy.

It's actually cooler if you wear pajamas because the pajama fabric draws sweat away from your body and will make you feel a lot cooler and more comfortable.

So doesn't that imply that whenever you're too hot, you should put more clothes on?

Can that be true?

I don't know.

It doesn't sound very true, does it?

It really doesn't.

Speaking of things that happen while you're asleep, a 64-year-old man has told how he passed out after a heavy night's drinking and woke up to find that his penis was missing.

Neighbours of Geraldo Ramos claim that he was attacked by a dog as he stumbled around the Dominican Republic naked while drunk.

He has decided to stop drinking.

Sounds like a good decision.

It sounds like a bit of a stable door and horse bolted decision, to be honest.

No, we're going to have to move on very soon.

Okay.

In China, people wear pajamas quite a lot.

In the evenings, people will just go out wearing pajamas.

And in 2010, they had pajama police in Shanghai to stop people from wearing pajamas because there was an expo in town town and they didn't want people to think that they were slovenly or whatever.

So they tried to stop anyone from wearing pajamas.

And they even had celebrities on T V um saying that the idea of going out in pajamas was backward and uncivilized.

But what's the definition of pajamas?

I just think that's really hard to police.

But I think they do like like in Japan, so in the survey that was done asking if people wear pajamas or wear something else in bed or sleep naked, the Brits love to sleep naked actually.

We're up there in the top naked sleeping countries, thirty percent of us, only twelve percent in the US.

In Japan, in the survey, it wasn't even a 0%.

It was just not applicable.

I think the Japanese were just like, I'm not going to answer that question.

That is disgusting.

So, yeah, they're not up for it.

Amazing.

Okay, shall we move on to our next fact?

Let's move on.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact this week is that there are people who mine for jeans.

They literally go into mines looking for genes.

Yeah, this is really amazing.

So

basically back in the day when people were doing mining, they would bring their genes down.

Levi's were made kind of specifically for mining and then for some reason, this is the bit I haven't worked out in the story, they would come up without their genes.

You know, it's warm, isn't it?

You've got to,

yeah, but there are lots of things left down there.

There are loads of silver mines in the American West which are just completely abandoned.

And so there is a thriving trade already in people who bring up old whiskey bottles because they were left down there when they'd been finished and collectors will pay good money for them.

So you can go down looking for them.

And then there is a guy, there are several of these guys.

One of them is called Michael Alan Harris.

And he found some old scraps of denim and he realized that a collector of sort of antique denim might pay good money for that too.

And

he has had an amazing run of going down with his father-in-law into these abandoned mines.

He's sold one pair of jeans he found for $30,000 to a collector.

And his father-in-law, really, really cool, he found the oldest ever pair of Levi's.

They're from 1873, which is the first year of production.

I don't think they've sold them yet, but those can sell for over $100,000, an intact pair of original, they were called waist overalls back then.

And I think he had an offer, didn't he?

And he said he doesn't want to sell them.

Yeah, he doesn't, yeah.

He said, I do have two daughters to put through college, so I might reconsider, but for now, I'd rather own a really old pair of jeans than have $100,000.

But this still doesn't answer my question.

Why were they going down to the mines and coming back up without their trousers on?

Well, I think the heat is one reason, actually.

But I think another reason is if there was like a pipe which had kind of leaked or something, they would take them off and tie them around pipes and stuff like that.

Because they were such a durable material.

They were kind of useful for anything, really.

Right.

Maybe bring down an extra pair of jeans, that kind of stuff.

Maybe that's what they did.

Yeah.

Okay, yeah, I haven't thought it through.

We don't have photographs of of miners emerging and just like naked from the waist down.

I do, but we'll talk about that later.

There are people trying to mine asteroids at the moment.

That's a big thing, isn't it?

There's a load of metals in asteroids.

And they think if they could somehow capture one and get up there and get all the metal out of there, then they'll be able to make a load of money.

Yeah, three quite big ifs.

Well, they reckon a single asteroid will be worth $60 trillion

if they could mine it.

It's a company called Planetary Resources, which is backed by James Cameron, the film director, and they're going to try and do this.

And I worked out that if they managed to get this asteroid, then he could remake Avatar every day for the next 1,000 years.

So fingers crossed, everyone.

Famous movie made in one day.

So another thing about mines and miners.

This is very cool.

There are some miners who are called ghost miners in South Africa, in the mines there.

They live underground and they're not official mine employees, but they sneak into the mines when security is distracted

and then they then live underground.

And they just look for ghosts.

I've mis-explained very poorly here.

So, yeah, they live underground, and their skin goes grey because they don't ever see the sun again.

And there's this whole economy because they can mine sort of extra dangerous bits which have been abandoned by the main body of the miners.

And so, where a loaf of bread might cost $1 above ground, to smuggle it into a mine, you'll pay $12 underground for it.

So, there's this whole secret economy going on under the ground in these mines.

Well, I mean, just in terms of underground economy, we talked about this, I think, on a podcast ages ago.

The Large Hadron Collider is actually used for smuggling fruit across from one country to another.

Because apparently, it's cheaper to buy fruit in where it's.

And they fire it through the large house.

Never makes it through.

That's how smoothies are made, just two bananas smashing into each other.

It's amazing they're so cheap, really, isn't it?

How expensive is fruit in France?

How many Higgs boson false positives did they get, which turned out to just be a pair?

Do we know?

Can I do something on jeans very quickly?

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Okay, a hipster's skinny jeans have filed a group of would-be thieves because they were unable to remove his belongings from his exceptionally tight pockets.

German Sense 27 told the New York Post they couldn't even get a finger in.

Come on.

Even though they appeared to him in the guise of the Pope.

And the squabbling thieves gave up after two minutes.

It was two minutes trying to get in there.

Wow.

Oh, the hips are just standing there going, yeah, take your time.

I know I'm safe.

There was a thing like that in Cuba, in post-revolutionary Cuba, there was a thing called the lemon test, where you would be stopped on the street by gangs of revolutionaries.

And they would, to make sure your trousers weren't too tight and cool and American-looking, they would try and get a lemon through your waistband and down through your trousers to

the hem of your trousers.

Really?

And if a lemon would pass through, then you were okay.

And if a lemon wouldn't pass through, then you got some on-the-spot tailoring.

Yeah,

they were very unpopular in Cuba, and you're not allowed to wear jeans in North Korea at all because they're a sign of American capitalism, aren't they?

But actually, that being too tight thing defeats the original purpose of jeans because so the word jeans is from Genoa where they were first designed and they were worn by fishermen

and they were worn specifically, they were designed to be easy to remove if a fisherman fell overboard.

So the point of jeans was meant to be that you could whip them off in the air in order that you didn't drown.

Yeah.

Why is he trying to take his jeans off?

I think they get waterlogged and weigh you down.

Oh, okay, yeah, yeah.

Have you ever tried to swim in jeans?

It's very difficult.

I've never tried to swim in jeans.

Actually, I have.

You did that survival test when you were at school.

You took jeans.

Normally, you have to go in pajamas, but Andy was just wearing one sock.

I aced that test,

and then I went back a second time to get the sock.

We're going to have to move on very soon to the final fact.

Anything before we go?

This is the most bizarre case.

The world's most expensive pair of jeans in a way.

Do you guys know about these?

The Pearson versus Chung jeans?

Right, so this is a lawsuit that was launched in 2005 when this judge called Roy Pearson, who lived in the US, took his jeans to be cleaned for $10.

And he took them to a dry cleaner as it was owned by South Koreans, Ki and Jinman, Chung, and they lost the jeans.

And he claimed that they owed him $67 million.

And

that was for things like the emotional damage, the mental anguish, the legal fees he had to pay to launch this court case.

And the £66 million he had in his pocket.

And this went on for years.

So it was only settled in about 2010, I think.

At one point, so Mr.

Pearson, because he was a judge, represented himself in court.

And at one point, he broke down in tears and had to take a break from testimony while questioning himself because he grew too emotional.

Also, they said, so at one point, they about a week after he launched the court case, they were in court, and the Chung said, Look, we found the jeans.

Okay, they were just in the back of the dry cleaners, and they brought the jeans into court.

And they were like, These are your jeans, aren't they?

These are your trousers, aren't they?

And he said, He insisted, These are not my pants.

I have in my adult life, with one exception, never worn pants with cuffs.

But we don't know what that exception was.

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All right, I'm going to move us on to our final fact.

Time for our final fact of the evening, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that Jesus had a monobrow.

No way.

Well, okay, yeah, good point.

That's a fair point.

So, basically, there's not many descriptions of Jesus out there.

We don't have any first-hand accounts.

We have one description, which it turns out was written by someone who never existed.

And that's

quite a classic description.

But there's a guy called Tom Shivers, and he's on Twitter.

So I highly recommend checking him out because he has an amazing blog, and he writes a lot about this stuff.

And he was looking through a lot of descriptions of Jesus in various different texts over the years, in ancient texts, and he found this constant line that came up, which was with eyebrows meeting.

So it happened in at least three texts.

There was the Coptic Acts of Paul and Thecla, and Paul describes him as a man small in size, bald-headed, with eyebrows meeting.

And there's a monk who also put it,

it's just countless accounts.

I say countless.

Three accounts that he found.

But potentially, Jesus had a monobrow.

That's very cool.

And I think that's a cool thing.

Yeah.

We don't, so the Bible doesn't really describe Jesus' appearance almost at all, does it?

There's one account in the book of Revelations, I think, where it says that his feet were like unto burnt brass.

Who knows what that means?

His head and his hairs were white like wool and white as snow.

This vision is usually considered to refer to Jesus in heavenly form, not his appearance during his earthly life, in that he had a completely white head, I guess.

But that's the only description I think that comes straight from the New Testament.

Yeah, no, there are a bunch of those descriptions where they say that his face was like the appearance of lightning and all these descriptions.

And I did think at the time, you know, if you were trying to describe what someone looked like to a police sketch artist, that is very unhelpful.

He had hair like wool, face like lightning.

You're attacked by a collage of weird random things.

There was a first century historian called Josephus who wrote that Jesus stood three cubits high.

And a cubit at the time, on average, because it was a variable measurement, but it was about 18 inches.

And three cubits is 56 inches, which is 4'8.

So I think it might have been Yoda all along.

The Gospel of Luke, this is like a gospel.

It was written, obviously, a long time after Jesus died, but there's someone called Zacchaeus trying to see Jesus preaching.

And he says, and he sought to see Jesus, who he was, and he could not for the crowd because he was low of stature.

I think with Zacchaeus, he was a small guy because he climbed up a tree to be able to see Jesus.

But he might have only had to climb up the tree because Jesus was so short.

You can still specify, yeah.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Much more detailed descriptions of Jesus come from Islam, which obviously was much later, but in Quran and Hadith traditions, they have lots of physical descriptions of Jesus because Muhammad, I think, met him when he went up to heaven.

And there are various other descriptions.

Often they contradict each other.

So, at some points, he's curly-headed, and at some points he's straight-headed, although he might have had like crimpers or something.

Also, he doesn't have a beard in the oldest portrait that we have of him, which is a Syrian one in 235 AD.

So, he didn't have a beard until about the fourth century in depictions.

He was based on like sort of classical Roman gods for the first few hundred years, wasn't he?

And he has sort of curly blonde hair and like completely well-shaven face.

Well I just think it's amazing how quickly we are told this is the image of someone from history where it must be quite hard to have known exactly what they look like and we just accept it and we never question it.

I mean Shakespeare by all accounts mustn't have looked like he does because the people who drew that of him, they didn't meet him.

He'd been dead for a long time.

Jane Austen, we only have one picture of her drawn by her sister who everyone said throughout her life was a crap drawer.

So it's just obviously not going to to look quite like.

She's going on the banknotes pretty soon.

And

the picture that they've chosen is a very prettified later Victorian representation of Jane Austen and it's not anywhere near like the picture that her sister drew of her.

So yeah, it's very, very inaccurate.

Another person who you wouldn't necessarily think looked as they did, John Wilkes Booth,

Lincoln.

He was described as the handsomest man in all America.

He wasn't that tall, but people said that it was made up for by his extraordinary presence and magnetism.

Whereas English political activist John Wilkes, without the booth, he was famously ugly.

He had a sloping forehead, hanging jaw, bad teeth, bad breath, a severe squint, and he was advised never to risk showing his face to a pregnant woman.

Oh.

Oh my god.

But he didn't kill anyone.

That's true.

Oh my god, who said that?

Was he under that sentence?

But he's my son, and I love him.

Who did say that about him?

I think it was probably one of his detractors

they they've never got a good word to say about you

do you want to hear some cool stuff about eyebrows yes please oh yeah okay um well this is more about facial expressions than eyebrows but there's an author called David Eagleman who is a great writer about science and neuroscience and there's a fact in his latest book which is just out that when people have had Botox they find it harder to recognize facial expressions in other people.

What?

Yeah.

So they've tested people who've not had Botox treatments and they've tested people who have had Botox treatments.

And if you have, it's harder for you to mirror their facial expression.

And it's harder for you to, literally for you to recognise what you're looking at on someone else's face.

So if Dan looks baffled like you do now, then I would kind of copy what you're doing and then I would empathize in your baffled.

Exactly.

But this is the other cool thing: is that married couples start to look like each other over time because they are constantly mirroring each other's facial expressions and they get the same patterns of wrinkles.

That is excellent news for me, but terrible news for my wife.

Also, I was reading eyebrows.

Eyebrows are the most essential bit of your head generally.

I'm going to go close second after brain.

Eyes, mouth, ears.

Your eyebrows are the 19th most essential bit of your head.

This is what I read.

And no, they were saying because for communication, the eyebrows actually, they do the talking when you're talking.

If you're talking to me,

not if you've kept your mouth on the tick box sheet.

If you were talking to me and you said like, oh, can you believe this?

With my eyebrows, I go, whoa.

So if I shaved my eyebrows, you wouldn't know what I was thinking.

Yeah, I think that's similar to the Botox thing, I guess, right?

Yeah.

I read somewhere that eyebrows evolved partly because they aid in sex differentiation in humans.

So people kept on accidentally trying to procreate with the same sex, and so they gave men slightly thicker eyebrows.

That did seem to be what they were saying.

And you just look at one of those two things.

But here's the weird thing about that, which I thought that was weird, but apparently, computers can determine someone's gender 96% of the time just by looking at the eyebrows and nothing else.

Kind of makes sense.

So we've kind of assumed that the monobrow is a negative aesthetic feature on Jesus.

Oh, you haven't?

No, no, no.

I think you said it a bit like that.

I think that's great.

I think people with monobrows are the great heroes of planet Earth.

They constantly.

Wow.

Again, a bold claim.

Well, it is the most essential bit of the head, Anna.

Don't you get that?

Who here has seen someone with a monobrow and hasn't just stared at the monobrow the entire conversation that they've been having with them?

And that says more about the person with the monobrow than it does you, the person staring, because it says to me that they're going, I know it's here.

I know it's here.

And I love it.

And that's, I really like that.

I think they're the bravest humans alive.

Well, so in

I'm going to call point of information on firemen and suit all trees.

It was weird.

My old list of best humans was one, people with monobrows, two, Jesus.

Now, Jesus has made his way to the top of the list.

It's very amazing.

So in Tajikistan, monobrows are attractive and sought after, aren't they?

So in women, especially.

And like markets in Tajikistan, you can buy this herb Uzma, which women will buy, and you can rub it on your brow to make sure you turn those two eyebrows into one.

And this is a desirable thing.

And I think that might be the only country in the world where the monobrow is genuinely desirable.

Well, there may be a turning.

So at the moment in the NBA, one of the biggest stars, and we're talking at someone who's in the kind of level of Michael Jordan of modern day, it's a guy called Anthony Davis.

And he has a monobrow.

And he has trademarked, basically, he's turned his monobrow into a business.

His monobrow has catchphrases that you are not allowed to repeat on any product.

It's fear the brow and raise the brow.

And he's turned his monobrow into an actual business now.

And I didn't know that you could trademark it.

I mean, he's so the quote from him is: I don't want anyone else to try and grow a unibrow because of me and then try to make money out of it.

How suspicious is this man of other humans?

What would Jesus have said if he had heard that?

But I kind of like, I slightly like the idea of trademarking because when I realized you could trademark a simple thing like that towards a facial feature or something, I thought, well, who else has done that?

And there's a guy, Michael Buffer.

He was a boxing announcer.

He was the person to say, let's get ready to rumble.

That's his trademark.

He has made, since he trademarked it, since he first said it and trademarked it, $400,000 American dollars from movies using it, from TV shows using it, songs.

Yeah.

How hard is it to come up with a different phrase that means basically the same thing and then not have to pay this guy $400,000?

Just say, let's get ready to tumble.

And then...

It's washing machine boys.

Let's go!

We're gonna have to wrap up really soon.

Have we got any final facts we want to throw in?

The technical name for the monobrow is Sinophris, just so you know.

And the founder of criminology, Cesare Lombroso, thought that Sinophris was a sure sign you were a criminal, and that's the founder of criminology.

One other thing as well,

you can tell if dogs like you because when they see you, they lift their left eyebrow upwards half a second after they first see you.

And that was a study done using high-speed cameras.

So that's one way.

What they do on greyhounds, and as they pass the camera, they sort of give a little, hey, how you doing?

Why high-speed cameras?

Just so that, because actually it's a very, very microscopic little like.

You can either see if its eyebrow is very slightly raised, or you can work out if you are the person that provides its food every day.

One of those two things will tell you if a dog likes you.

If a dog doesn't like you, it bites your penis.

No high-speed camera necessary for that one.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you want 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 Twitter.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James?

At Eggshate.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

And Chasinski.

You can email our podcast at QI.com.

Yep.

And if you want to hear any of our previous episodes, head to no such thingasafish.com.

We will be back again next week with another podcast.

Thank you so much for being here, guys.

Really appreciate it.

And we'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.

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