86: No Such Thing As Ghost Nipples

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andy Murray, and today's special guest is the author of a new book called Male Obsession.

It's Mark Mason.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with you Andy Murray.

My fact is that for the Queen's coronation people dressed up as television sets.

So this is I read this in an article by the historian Kate Williams in The Observer and it seems to come from a a book of policemen's memoirs.

The f one of the first female beat police officers wrote a book of memoirs about her experiences and she describes it and I think a couple of other sources say it as well.

So, this is because it was such a huge thing for it to be televised.

Televisions were bought in huge numbers across the country for the coronation.

I think 20 million people watched, and on average, there were 17 people watching each TV set.

And you think of TVs at the time, they were tiny, you know, screens a few inches from corner to corner.

So, you would just go to the person in your street who had a TV and you were in the middle of the day.

Yeah, exactly.

Do you know what went up in sales as well?

So, TVs went up massively in sales, and so did massive magnifying glasses so that they could magnify it so that more people could come and see.

Really?

I got that from Kate Williams' Twitter stream.

They were specially made, weren't they?

They made special rectangular ones that were made to fit onto the front of the casing for your television, which, of course, in those days was a big piece of furniture.

Yeah, they made them specially tuned.

That is fantastic.

The thing about TVs going up in numbers is definitely true.

But in 1950, there were 400,000 TV licenses.

In 1951, there were 700,000, and in 53, there were 1,100,000.

So they did go up when the coronation was on, but actually, they had been going up for quite a long time.

So it wasn't just the coronation that caused a big increase in TV sales.

Right.

I think it's true that the one part of the ceremony that wasn't shown, because it would be seen as too.

You know, there was a big debate about whether you should be televising something like this full stop to demean the occasion, but they didn't show the actual coronation moment where the crown's put on her head.

I think that was actually tradition, though.

Because I read about this, where they hold the canopy above her head, and it's a secret part.

No one knows what happens in that part.

I think I have a good idea, which is that the crown goes onto the head.

No, no, because there's more, because there's the spoon, and the spoon.

You have to explain.

The Archbishop of Canterbury spoons the queen.

Or king.

So is it only the Archbishop and the Queen under the canopy at that point?

They make a den.

All we know is what we can make out from the silhouettes of the flashlights going on on the inside.

But there's definitely a spoon.

That's what we've seen.

So the ceremonial spoon comes out.

Okay.

And oil is poured.

Anointing oil.

Anointing oil.

I think.

Yeah.

And so, and apparently, it's the only surviving thing from the Middle Ages.

This is part of the tradition.

It's the only thing that's made its way through.

He anoints her forehead, her breast, and her hands.

Are you saying that during the coronation, the Archbishop of Canterbury aisled up the Queen's breast?

According to what I read, yeah.

What is definitely true about the Archbishop of Canterbury on that occasion, 1953, was that he had to give the Queen a push to get her started.

When she practised,

she pinned heavy curtains to her shoulders to simulate the coronation robe.

When it came to the real thing, the coronation robes were even heavier than she expected, and she couldn't get me, because she's quite a small woman, she was 20, whatever she was then.

She said to she whispered to the Archbishop of Canterbury, give me a shovel.

I think the exact phrase was to get me started.

That's it.

Give me a shovel.

Wow.

That's very cool.

More on the Archbishop at the time, who was a very interesting guy, George Fisher.

So he was dead against it being televised

for a number of reasons.

He thought it might demean the occasion, and he really wanted people to join in for the hymn if they were watching at home and stand up for the homage part of the ceremony.

And there was so much debate about this all across the country.

One MPR said in the House of Commons, might there even be something unseemly in the chance that a viewer could watch this solemn and significant service with a cup of tea at his elbow?

I love the fact that they installed extra toilets in the Abbey because there were so many guests and also TV crews and everyone working on it.

They installed extra toilets at the Abbey and then did a sound check to check that if by chance they were all flushed at the same time, the BBC's microphones wouldn't pick them up.

Wow.

Wow, that's preparation.

And the choir boys were given packed lunches containing peanut butter and marmalade sandwiches to have the opposite effect from

making them go to it.

They wanted to bung them up so they wouldn't need to go to the toy.

And they were also given really big drinks canisters so that once they'd had their drink, if they needed to refill that drinks canister, it would save them having to be.

That's so good.

Did they find out what the sound of 200 choir boys peeing into a canister sounded like?

Could the BBC Mics pick that up?

I think this is quite well known, but I didn't know it.

Keith Richards was one of the choir boys at the coronation.

Well, I'm afraid it turns out that Keith was certainly a great choir boy, certainly sang for the Queen, but they think a couple of years later it wasn't actually at the coronation,

which is so disappointing.

Has no one asked him?

They have, but no one can understand the answer.

I think he would have been six.

Well, he was born

a bit younger.

This is where my inner nerd comes out.

He was born December the 18th, 1943.

So yeah, he would have been nine.

So he would have been the right apes, though.

Oh, yeah, he was certainly in the ballpark, but not in the abbey.

That was so nerdy, Mark, coming onto our podcast.

Well, if anyone has not read Keith Richards' autobiography, it is fine, in my mind, it's the best book of.

No, mine's just out.

It's the second best book.

No, yours is out as well.

It's the third best book of the 21st century.

We got two out this year.

And it's the fourth best book.

Keep going.

There's one cool bit of the coronation which

didn't happen for Victoria.

In fact, Victoria was the first person that didn't happen for.

So, have you heard about the Queen's Champion?

No.

Okay, so in medieval coronations, and Victoria's was the first coronation this didn't happen for, so everyone before then it happened.

The Queen's Champion or the King's Champion is a noble.

And for the post-coronation banquet, this person would come in in full armor and throw down his gauntlet and then challenge anyone to a fight if they said the sovereign was not fit to rule or didn't have the right to rule.

Wow.

I didn't have to bring that back.

It's so good.

I reckon Brian Blessed is born now.

Yes, exactly.

There is still a Queen's Champion.

So it's a hereditary position, even though they don't do it at coronations anymore.

He's called Francis, and he's a chartered accountant.

His full name is Francis John Fane Marmion Dimmock.

And as far as I can tell, as it's a hereditary title, he is the current Queen's champion.

How does he look?

He just looks like a nice man.

You can't actually tell how he looks because he's wearing a full suit of armour of all types.

What can it do?

Do we know it's in the counts at South?

Clunk, clunk.

Who challenges the Queen's rag to rule?

Of course, the one thing that did happen at the Queen's coronation dinner that hadn't happened before was that her mother, as she became the Queen mother, wouldn't let her have too much to drink.

She said, Remember, you have to reign all afternoon.

She didn't want her daughter getting drunk at the lunch.

And also, of course, coronation chicken was invented for the occasion.

That's where it gets its name.

It was specially created.

Although, it's very similar to Jubilee chicken, which was invented a few years earlier for the Silver Jubilee of George V.

Oh, is it?

Which is basically chicken with mayonnaise and spices and pretty much exactly the same thing but then they let's say reinvented it for the coronation.

So I always call it Jubilee chicken when I go.

Can I have a Jubilee chicken panino please?

Do you know that on that day when they dressed in as TV sets, that's not the only thing that they dressed as?

No.

They dressed as Mount Everest as well.

Yeah,

yeah.

Well it had been conquered the day before.

Exactly, and the news had come through, so they were celebrating a number of things, and Mount Everest was a massive celebration, so people were dressed as TV sets, and Mount Everest.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

What a big news day.

Yeah.

Everest and a coronation on the same day.

That's massive.

Yeah.

Do you know there's a conspiracy that we didn't,

that Hillary didn't get to the top of Mount Everest?

Really?

Yeah.

And it's actually really interesting, the reason why.

So the way that the news got broken to the British public was via a journalist called James Morris, who has changed sex and is now Jan Morris, one of the most famous travel writers alive.

Now, Jan Morris got the scoop, was there when Hillary came down, when he said the words, we knocked the bastard off George,

and got the scoop.

Now, here was the thing.

She didn't know how to get, or he at the time didn't know how to get the message back without it being infiltrated and then spread around the world because he wanted the scoop.

So what he ended up sending was a coded message that he'd pre-arranged to be sent back.

And this was the message that actually went back.

The message went, snow conditions bad, stop.

Advanced base abandoned yesterday, stop, awaiting improvement.

So the message was to say that they haven't made it.

Wow.

And people actually think that he was telling the truth then.

What message did he send if they didn't make it then?

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the World Puddle Jumping Championships bans fizzy drinks in case they improve participants' performance.

Talk us through the science behind it, James.

Talk us through the.

Well, it's weird because on QI we have said that fizzy drinks don't make children more hyperactive.

And in the World Puddle Jumping Championships, it's usually children, in fact, it's always children taking part.

But they think that if you give them fizzy drinks, then they will become more excitable, more hyperactive, and it could enable them to jump higher and make bigger splashes than other competitors.

And they don't want to encourage people to drink fizzy drinks because it's not good for you.

And so they've decided to ban it.

I think that's very sweet.

Apart from the ban element of it.

It could be a placebo thing, couldn't it?

If you've heard your parents and read in the news that it makes you jump better, then that could happen.

Well, what we've said on QI, and I can't remember quite the science behind it, is that the children actually act exactly the same, but it's the adults who then kind of fuss around them and think, oh, they're hyperactive, they're hyperactive.

And when you get someone who's watching the events happening who doesn't know whether or not they've had fizzy drinks, they can't tell the difference with the children.

How do they monitor it, though?

Like, how do you test for fizzy drinks?

Is it a P sample?

I think they just ban them from the general area of the competition.

So, maybe you could, like, stock up on Red Bull the night before.

The night before.

Yeah, that's true.

Well, I was reading the Metro, the Metro newspaper covered this, and the line they used was, This is not the first time sporting contests have been marred by doping associations.

Lance Armstrong was tripped for seven

short fronts.

So what they do is it's based on height of jump, enthusiasm, distance of splash, and stickability, which is the amount of mud which clings to each competitor.

All those different things.

My favourite element of that is enthusiasm is being marked.

That's basically code for, as with any event where you're giving prizes to kids, the one that looks most likely to burst into tears if it doesn't win, gets the win, because

you just don't want to see.

It'd be good in the Olympics if the most enthusiastic competitors got to live in.

In the Tour de France, they'll give it whoever is the the most aggressive on the day, they'll give a prize to even if they don't win.

Really?

Yeah.

What's someone who's like kicked other feis

off the track?

No, aggression in this case means that you're making attacks earlier and trying to move the race onwards.

Yeah, right, okay.

The whole notion of jumping, forget all this thing about cricket being in the Olympics.

I want the campaign to put the standing long jump back into the Olympics.

Because it used to be in until 1912, I think.

And the record is still going, even though not in the Olympics.

The record for the standing long jump was broken earlier this year, 23rd of February 2015.

The Dallas Cowboys cornerback did a standing long jump of 12 feet two and three quarter inches, which is the length of a snooker table from a standing.

But then the other bizarre thing about the standing long jump is that it is a condition of entry to serve in the Brazilian police.

To serve in the Brazilian police, you have to do a stand.

If you're a man, you need to be able to do a standing long jump of 2.14 meters.

If you're a woman, 1.66 meters.

Wow.

There's no way I could do that.

That's great.

That's incredible.

I couldn't.

What do you reckon you could do, standing long jump?

Shall we do it and then

say what our scores were?

Okay, we're going to do a quick cut here.

If we do this for a while here,

about two meters.

That was really fun.

Right, anyway, thanks.

So we're still recording, and we found out that Andy is the best at the standing long junk by about five centimetres.

Yeah, I mean, and we all reckon we were getting around two metres, so we don't think we can get into the Brazilian.

But only by a few centimetres, so if we work on it, we might be able to do it.

Did we make it into the Brazilian ladies' army?

Yes, we did.

1.66.

Get in!

All right.

Okay, I want to do some things about drugs and performance-enhancing drugs.

So, Peta Corda, who's a tennis player, he tested positive for the steroid nandrolone in Wimbledon in 1998, but he blamed it on having eaten too much steroid-fed veal.

Okay,

but it turned out that if he had eaten enough veal to be tested positive, he would have had to have eaten 40 calves a day for 20 years to have such a high level.

And there was an Olympic gold medalist called Dennis Mitchell who tested positive for high testosterone.

And he claimed that it was because he consumed five beers the night before and had sex with his wife four times.

That's ridiculous.

No one can have five beers.

If I was the real guy and I was being investigated, I like to think that I would have tried to prove that.

And when the investigators were coming around, I would have ordered a load of calves.

I've been constantly eating a calf just all over my house and my garden full of calves.

This park where they had this puddle jumping thing is called Wicksteed Park.

That's right.

And Wicksteeds make playgrounds.

Yep.

And did you hear about the guy, Charles Wicksteed?

Yeah, this this is incredible.

This is the best thing about the fact, I think.

He invented the slide and the swing.

Two things.

Two things.

Two things.

That was a good morning, wasn't it?

Yeah.

He invented the slide.

Give us more details here, Andy.

Well, people say that he invented the modern slide.

Now, I have found a source which disputes this and points out there are a couple of earlier things in New York which look a lot like slides.

So it's possible that he didn't invent the very first slide.

He definitely came up with a version of it for his park.

And he also invented the modern swing, which you get in playgrounds.

And his first version, have you seen it?

No.

The top bar is almost four meters off the ground.

It looks incredibly dangerous.

Yeah, you can, there's photos that have been on earth.

I don't know if you've ever seen the sort of extreme swinging.

It's kind of like that.

I think I have seen extreme swinging.

Just Google that, anyone.

You didn't grow up in the suburbs and not.

But what he kind of also pioneered was the idea of the playground and this park where the puddle jumping competition was held is the park where the first ever playground right was built and he used pipes from World War I and he turned them into swings so they became the first swings and you can see the first slides as well they're really interesting the first slides were polished planks of wood with no sides you just went down a plank of wood risking a broken leg and splinters yeah so exactly yeah and kids you can see them going down it and it's just very dangerous they were also gender segregated were they one for boys and one for girls Yeah.

He said later on that was an old-fashioned notion,

he realized that was an old-fashioned notion, and he abandoned that

segregation.

And so they know where the oldest modern-day swing then in the world is, and it's not in the park, it's in the backyard of Charles Wicksteed's home, which they discovered not too long ago.

And it was his prototype.

And so now that we know officially the oldest swing in the world, it's so cool.

It's still working.

Still working.

No, it is.

It's not like an iPhone that goes out of there.

Okay, time for fact number three, and that is Mark.

My fact is that the shuttlecocks used in professional badminton are made using real goose feathers, which are always taken from the bird's left wing.

Wow.

So I kind of knew that it was taken from an animal.

I thought it was duck.

I think ducks can be used in your defence.

Right, I don't think that's the stupidest mistake anyone's ever made.

But I didn't know the left's wing.

Yeah, well, apparently, use if you get them from the left wing it makes the shuttlecock spin clockwise.

If you take them from the right wing it makes the shuttlecock spin anticlockwise and they're obviously used to playing with a clockwise spin and that's why they keep using those wings.

So if you have one which was half with feathers from the left wing and half from the right wing, would it not spin?

It would go completely yeah, it would be a completely haphazard shuttlecock.

So if you took the feathers from a bird's right wing and put them on its left wing and so it had two left wings.

You'd be arrested.

But you're right, they do take them from a live animal because animals will regrow them.

So I don't know if they keep harvesting the same bird to get more shuttlecocks out of it.

But it does apparently cause the bird in the goose incredible pain when they're taken out.

But they do then regrow.

You know, when someone does, I don't know, your eyebrows.

Yeah.

That in itself is a bit like, oh, that's quite painful.

Imagine, like at the bottom of feathers, it's almost sticks.

Well, I think it's more akin to pulling out toenails rather than any hairs, isn't it?

Danimon, that's probably.

I read this incredible fact, which is if a bold eagle loses a feather on one of its wings, it will shed the corresponding feather on the opposite wing to maintain balance.

Now that

isn't that amazing.

That's the sort of thing that fundamentalist Christians will pick up on to show that there is a God.

That's just astonishing, isn't it?

Wow.

How quickly would it do it?

I reckon just straight away.

So if you happened to be plucking a bold eagle and you took one out, you'd just see another one go on the other side.

That would be useful if you're like a turkey plucker or something.

Yeah.

And you'd only have to do half the time here.

Do they pluck it out, their own feather, or do they can they selectively shed a single feather?

I believe that's what I read.

Now, I actually don't believe it myself, but that's what I read in a reputable source.

Heat magazine.

Oh, Pluckers Monthly.

That was a very big mistake at the news agents that I ended up with that.

I wonder how many feathers a goose can give, because the professional shuttlecocks always use 16 feathers.

I read that they only use four feathers per goose.

Per shuttlecock, really.

I think that's what I read.

This is where Dan's cheekily boyish grin is causing it.

Is he winding us up here?

No, that's what I read.

It's no more than four feathers from the same goose for the same shuttlecock.

I've heard that once the shuttlecock is made, if you want to alter the spin that it's giving it, if it's spinning too much, you can either take the feathers out or bend them over or snip the end off the tuttle.

Is that a way to cheat in badminton if you kind of snip the feathers a bit and it'll make it spin more or less like the flake game?

I watched a video online where a scientist was talking about how you can cheat in badminton, and that's one of the things that you're not allowed to do.

If you bend the feathers in, you get way more speed.

Something you do with wind resistance.

Because the speed is the other incredible thing about a professional shuttle cop.

You know, you think fast bowler in cricket, two or three of them have reached 100 miles an hour with accredited shows.

And Brett Lee's done it.

And Darren Goff, brilliantly, when they first started using speed guns, came into the dressing room.

He said, I just bowled at 150 miles an hour.

And they said, no, no, it's kilometers an hour, Darren.

You got it wrong.

But so that's that.

Then the tennis players, I think, are up to about 150, aren't they?

A really heavy server in male tennis will do 150.

Shuttlecocks, 200 miles an hour.

Wow.

When it comes off the racket, 200.

How can how can a human possibly do that to a tennis?

It's unbelievable.

It slows down pretty quickly, though.

It does, but that's almost literally what it's designed to do.

Like most other sports will design somebody to go faster.

This is designed to slow down.

So I don't know if Americans use the word shuttlecock that much.

Maybe they do because I'm not American, but I've read that they call them birds instead.

And the reason they did that is because they didn't want to say the word cock.

That was a thing that

the birds, cocks, were called, what are they called now?

Roosters.

Roosters, yeah.

The supposed etymology is from shyness, basically.

Oh, that's lovely.

It's a bit like, and it's very appropriate that we're sitting here in the postcode WC.

I know this because the new book's themed around postcodes.

Evelyn Moore used to have a friend who refused to call the WC postcode in London WC.

She always used to insist on saying West Central because she said WC had indelicate association

Do you guys know about the Miller Place Panthers high school badminton team?

These guys have got the longest winning streak in team sport history

and from spring of 1973 until April the 12th, 2005 they won every single game.

A winning streak of 504 consecutive victories.

Wow.

Yeah.

But the obvious question is who beat them?

It was another team nearby.

I haven't written down who it was, but it was another team nearby.

They beat them 10-5, I remember.

And that was the end of their streak.

But they've done quite well since then.

They've gone back to winning ways, I understand.

Unfortunately, we've heard of neither of them.

Which means the fame-level crossover hasn't yet worked out for either of them.

If you go onto the Wikipedia page for Miller Place, which is a connoisseur in America somewhere, they are on that page.

So I think they're locally quite famous.

Locally, probably.

But this also means that it's a badminton team, therefore they have a new player replace.

Because that's even more impressive that it's not one singular person person or two people.

It's are they a school team?

Yeah, school team.

If it was one person who'd been winning for 32 years,

I think the school administration should get involved because that student is being failed by the education system.

These 10-year-olds are useless.

That's why he kept winning.

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

And my fact this week is that the ancient Egyptians had a porn papyrus.

Yeah, so this is a bit of a mystery, this papyrus.

It was found in a cave.

It definitely has scenes of sexual nature, and no one is quite sure whether or not it was used as actual personal use stimulation or whether or or not it was a joke and it was poking fun of the of the rich and and the powerful at the time.

They're not quite like a sex manual like the Karma Sutra.

The Karma Sutra, yeah exactly.

So it's called the Turin Erotic Papyrus and they have no idea what it's for but they're still trying to find out.

I want more details on what's in it.

What's depicted?

Oh, so there's a lot of just sexual scenes.

There's a lot of men and women doing stuff.

The first third of it is not sexual at all.

It's just animals and birds doing various things.

Like all porn.

There's always, you know.

that's the equivalent of the washing machine.

You need the guy to an eye.

Yeah, you need him to

establish a scene.

Looks like that chariot's broken.

Okay, so papyrus is a plant that they made early paper out of, and that's why we get the word paper.

They used papyrus for other things as well.

They used it for mattresses, they used it for chairs, tables, baskets, sandals, ropes, boats.

Apparently they used it for tampons.

Wouldn't be particularly, you know, it's very rough, so it wouldn't be particularly nice, but they softened it by soaking it in the Nile first.

Wow.

But it was like this kind of material that they used to do.

Sort of a wonder material, like the plastic of the day.

Exactly, like that, yeah.

Dead Sea Scrolls are written on papyrus.

One fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls is called 7Q5, and some people think it's an early part of the New Testament.

But they've managed to work this out despite the fact that only one word is fully legible on this fragment, and that word is is and.

Well that just clinches it, doesn't it?

It's and with a capital A, and apparently the Gospel of Mark quite often starts sentences with and.

God, that's good sleuthing, though.

Yeah, or made up stuff.

Ancient Egypt,

they actually prepared for sex in the afterlife.

Did they?

Yeah, I didn't know this.

They actually properly, it was like a thing that they had to consider.

And so men had false penises attached to their mummies, and women had artificial nipples.

Can we just say what the mummy is in this case?

Sorry, yes, to themselves.

And women had artificial nipples.

Did they?

Yeah, sort of like ghost nipples.

Yeah, and they would become fully functional in the afterlife.

That was the idea that they would sort of be.

It's optimistic, isn't it?

Thinking that an artificial penis will be useful once you're dead.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not useful at that time.

It's just kind of going off trust a little bit.

These days, if you ask for an artificial penis to be put in the coffin with you, especially if it was an open casket.

I'm starting to feel very sheltered now, in my knowledge of HN, because I went there earlier this year and was pleased to went down to

Tutankhamun's tomb, and they discovered honey down there.

Honey is the one food that never goes off, and they discovered some honey that had been buried with Tutankhamun, however many thousands of years ago.

That's what my guide couldn't confirm.

Some of it was kept for the rulers of Egypt at the time, you know, whoever was in charge earlier this century.

Sorry, early 20th century.

And yeah, they did take some, and I think they must have sampled it to check that it was okay.

I bet it was disgusting.

It must have been, right?

Yeah.

Let's say you've got a jar of honey.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you left it in a sealed dry room for 2,000 years.

What's going to happen to it?

Nothing.

It'll just be honey, wouldn't it?

I'm also now, so your minds are so dirty, they've started to corrupt me.

I'm wondering whether the honey was part of a preparation for sex in the afterlife as well.

I think honey would last.

Do you?

Yeah, okay.

If we have a 2,000-year-old jar of honey and a modern-day jar of honey, you can have the 2,000-year-old one.

I'll sell it for more modern honey.

Are we allowed to go back to porn or not?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Go for it.

It's such a ridiculous thing, and porn is the anyone involved in making it knows it's the most un-erotic thing that you're doing it with a film.

And famously, in Don't Look Now, when Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie were supposed to have done it for real while they were filming the love scene, Donald Sutherland says, if you've had a film crew around you, you'll know how unerotic it is and how difficult it would be to do it.

But the notion of the fluffer, I found out recently, apparently it's a myth that the fluffer exists at all.

For those of you that don't know, the fluffer is, and I guess it's normally a woman who's paid to ready the man for his performance, to get him into a physical state where he is ready to perform.

And that's just a complete myth.

If you're a male porn performer, you're expected to be ready.

And if you're not ready, then you won't get the job.

And also, I love the fact that the people who clean the london underground lines overnight when the tubes shut overnight they're called fluffers as well so i think there is only one true job called the fluffer and it's the one that cleaned the tube oh imagine your disappointment when you find out when you applied for fluffer and you're down in the london underground

i i was i found another egyptian uh book that uh is has been sort of a mysterious book that we haven't quite cracked and decoded um and they've recently they think they've managed to decode it properly and this is Macquarie University in Australia.

I think they've managed to do it.

And it's 1,300 years old, this text.

And they think what it turns out to be is that it's a book of spells.

Some of the spells that they've translated include a spell for someone who is possessed, someone who is annoyed at you, there's a spell for that,

that a woman might conceive, and when someone has a magic on them.

You've got a magic on you.

I like that this is someone who is annoyed at you.

Yeah.

I think that's a fantastic spell.

And you can just do a magic on them, and then they'll not be annoyed with you.

Exactly.

That's great.

There's another one called the Greek Magical Papyrus.

And that

gives you explanations for ingredients in other magics, as you might call them.

So if a magic spell asks for a head of a snake, it's actually a leech.

And if it asks for crocodile dung, it's Egyptian earth.

And if it asks for lion semen, you should use human semen.

But for the magical spells.

So people often thought that these magic spells that they were doing had like the head of a snake in or lion semen in, but actually they were much more normal objects that they were doing.

Thinking back in those days, who would want the job of collecting the lion semen?

Yeah, no, I mean now they do it straight from the testicle, I think, don't they?

They'd knock it out and collect the lights.

No, I think the lions have a fluffer, don't they?

Isn't there a thought that the idea of them changing the words or changing the terms is almost the copyright of its day?

It was the secret ingredient to Coca-Cola type thing.

Is it?

Yeah, that's what I read with Babylonian.

It's semen.

It's the secret ingredient of Coca-Cola.

For legal reasons, I think we've got to say that Leia.

I think they found that from Babylonian June Forum that they thought that they were like, look at all these odd ingredients.

And they realized that they were coded words, kind of like the Jan Morris code from Everest, so that no one could steal the proper incantation and the ingredients for it.

That's great.

This is just quite interesting.

Next year, Playboy,

No More Nude Women in Playboy.

They're getting rid of it, so it's all going to be sort of tasteful, tasteful in quotation marks, what they think is tasteful.

But you always say that you read that for the articles, Dan, don't you?

No, I collect old ones because they, yeah, Hunter S.

Thompson used to write for them, and Woody Allen and Gracho Marx, and yeah, extraordinary comic articles in there.

And now I can read it again for the articles.

Very exciting.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on Twitter.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James?

At Edge Shaped.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Mark.

I'm at Walkthelines LDN.

There's details of the book.

If anyone wants the book, it's M-A-I-L, male obsession.

Yep, male obsession.

And

the idea is that you go around the country to all the postcodes and you find out it's basically a book full of amazing facts along with a journey around the UK.

It's a book full of British trivia, British history, British weirdness that's been going on, and it's using postcode areas as the device.

Yeah, the 124 postcode areas, at least one fact from each postcode area.

Yep, awesome.

That's out in the shops, go get it now.

And if you want to listen to any of our previous shows, you can go to no such thing as a fish.com.

If you want to come and see any of our live shows, we've also got a page there with all of the events.

There's a lot that we're doing.

We'll be back again next week.

See you then.

Goodbye.

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