78: No Such Thing As An Ugly Pair Of Eyes

LBTV and EZ!

Your night in just got legendary.

Legends.com is the only free-to-play social casino and sports book where you can spin the reels, drop parlays, chase the spread, and hit up live blackjack without leaving your couch.

Slots, sports, original games.

Legends has it all.

Win real prizes and redeem instantly straight to your bank.

Legends is a free-to-play social casino.

Void the prohibited.

It must be 80 plus pay responsibly.

Visit Legends.com for full details.

Get in the game now and score a 50% bonus on your first purchase only at LegendsWithaZ.com.

So, what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an organic valley farm.

Organic valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at OV.coop and taste the difference.

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

This week, coming to you from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, my name is Dan Schreiber.

Joining me as ever are the three QI Elves.

Please welcome to the stage: it's Andy Murray, Anna Chaczynski, 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, James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that Las Vegas hosts an awards ceremony for people who make awards.

What do they get?

They get a gold obelisk.

It's the Awards Awards and Personalization Association, and they celebrate things like Best Trophy, that gets an award.

Best plaque, that gets one.

Best plaque.

Best plaque.

And best sandblasting.

That's one.

What is that?

I didn't look it up.

Yeah.

The US and Canada industry for awards is $3 billion a year.

That's how much people spend on awards.

And that, I worked it out, is enough to give every person in the country a three to five inch resin trophy in the sport of their choice.

That seems a much better way of doing it.

Just do away with all the games and sports.

Just give everyone a trophy.

Yeah.

That'd be great.

That's amazing.

That's because, well, they are hugely money, aren't they?

The Oscars, we might have talked about this before, the Oscars, the party bag that you get if you're attending the Oscars is extraordinary.

It's worth something like $120,000 per bag.

Last year's or the year before's came with every female who'd attended got in their party bag a genital stimulator I think or so no it was it was surgery that can be performed on you in order that you have better orgasms and every woman who attended the Oscars got a little voucher for one of these surgeries

so yeah it's good it's better than the party bags of youth

yeah it's not a balloon and a bit of cake wrapped in the tissue is it

mind you I think you'd be in trouble at a child's birthday party

I started looking up some other award ceremonies that the UK has based on this fact and you might like to know that there is a British kebab awards where categories include best newcomer kebab restaurant

and outstanding contribution to the kebab industry

which this year I'm sure we all know was won by Edmonton Meat.

How are the acceptance speeches for that?

You just have to slowly turn around as you make a speech.

Another award ceremony that they have, which I think the prize for this is enormous given the nature of it.

So the

smelly foot contest, the Reiki Foot Competition, for which it's called the Sneaker Contest, the Sneaker Contest.

And the winner every year gets $2,500 as well as two nights' stay in New York and a trip to a Broadway show, which just for proving that you're fucking.

Having smelly feet.

Yeah.

How's it judged?

It's the panel of judges.

I can tell you how it's judged because I actually coincidentally googled this as well.

They check the condition of your heel of your shoe, the sole, the tongue, the shoelaces, the odor of the shoe, which is tested by a group of people, one of whom is NASA's sniffer.

No!

The guy who smells everything before it goes up in space.

Oh, this guy's crazy.

This guy's incredible.

He literally, he has the most sensitive nostrils on our planet.

Nothing goes into space unless it goes under his nose and he goes, yep.

that's the only way it goes into space.

If he doesn't like the smell, it does not go to space.

This is the most powerful set of nostrils on our planet.

And he gets tested four times every year where they put beakers of different smells under his nose.

Some contain no smells, some contain a tiny trace.

And if he fails, he loses his job.

He has never failed.

He's got the best nostrils on the planet.

And even if he did fail, he's got a lucrative sneaker judging career to fall back on.

And so the other thing that these guys do in the competition is that the entrant has to give a verbal response to the question why he stroke she feels that he stroke she has rotten sneakers and how they got that way.

And last year's winner, Can Young Hiss, answered the question with, I bike and high coffin.

I've worn them through mud and also through chicken, pigeon, goose and dove poop.

And I also don't wear socks.

So that was her answer.

Oh, the sock bit got you.

That was the.

Oh, yeah, and you get into the Hall of Fumes, don't you?

The Odorita's Hall of Fumes if you win it.

That's a very clever contest.

No, that's actually true.

There wasn't just me making a really bad show.

That's where you go.

Supposedly, the original trophy was an ancient Greek word, and it comes trophine is what it was originally.

And it was when you hung your dead enemy's armor on a tree after a battle, so everyone could see that you had won.

Yeah, amazing.

Have you guys heard of the Golden Collar Awards?

No.

Which are a really big deal, apparently.

Every year there's an award ceremony that follows the Oscars for the best dogs in films.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you get the same category.

So you get the best dog in a theatrical film, which I think the dog in the artist won it in the year I was reading about.

R.I.P.

just passed away.

Oh, yeah.

Sorry.

It's not breaking news.

It happened ages ago, just no one knows because no one cares.

It's not like a.

Well, after his death, he might have taken part in the UK's Good Funeral Awards.

Which is a real thing.

Categories include cemetery of the year,

embalmer of the year,

major contribution to the understanding of death.

Whoa!

Wow.

And the final category, my favorite, is gravedigger of the year.

That's real.

What is it to dig a good grave?

Yeah.

What are the qualifications?

Is it like quantity or quality?

Strength or speed or

depth.

Depth?

I mean, because there's a famous term that sort of gives it a sort of bottom ceiling, as it were.

Six deep.

I don't like the phrase bottom ceiling at all.

No.

Okay, we always lose that at some stage, but it's a bit early today.

Very early tonight, yeah.

So speaking of bottoms,

something you could do with your bottom relating to awards ceremonies is be a seat filler at the Oscars, right?

And I think we should try and do that.

But so I think you can only get the job if you work for PWC, which sponsors the Oscars, or if you know someone involved.

But it's because if the camera pans out to the audience and, like, you know, Liv Tyler or whoever's famous these days goes to the toilet, then it looks like there's an empty seat.

And so you've got to wait there in the wings.

And as soon as a famous person stands up, then you've got to run into their seats, sit next to George Clooney for a bit.

But you're under strict instructions not to interact with any of the actual invitees.

This isn't funny, but I had that at the National Television Awards.

We went on stage and then people came in our seats, and then afterwards, afterwards, we had to.

I used to do that job weirdly.

That's how I met everyone at QI.

I was.

Are you told, because I would have thought if I'd gone and got an Oscar and gone back and someone had stolen my seat, I'd just be like, what the fuck are you doing in my seat?

I was reading an article about the Oscars, and they make about, I think it's about 50 every year.

Yeah.

And you're not allowed to sell them either, are you?

I thought you had to offer them back to the Academy Awards first for a dollar.

And then if the Academy Awards are like, oh, we can't really afford that, then

you can put your Oscar on eBay.

We'd love to afford it, but unfortunately, we blew all the budget for this year on buying every woman who attends magic vagina surgery.

I have a few recursive things.

Can I say those?

So this is an award ceremony for awards.

There's a village called Boughton on the Water in Gloucestershire, and it has a one-ninth scale exact exact replica of the village inside the village.

But that replica also has a village inside of it, and that replica has a village inside of it.

And the recursion stops after level four.

Well, five, if you include the original village, but yeah, it's got five villages inside a village, inside a village, inside a village.

Have you guys heard of Alice Brady?

No, who won an Oscar in 1938.

She won the Best Actress Oscar in Best Supporting Actress in a film called In Old Chicago.

And she was unable to make it.

So I think she was either on holiday or she was sick.

Everyone knew she was unable to make it.

So, someone went and picked up the Oscar in her place at the ceremony.

Turns out, no one knows who that person was.

She hadn't sanctioned that at all, and someone just walked off with her Oscar.

No one's ever found out where that is.

Wow, who that guy was.

They just need to search for a person with vaginal surgery.

Check it against all the records.

Quite hard to search for that coin.

Oh, you guys are not googling hard enough.

So, what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an Organic Valley farm.

Organic Valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at OV.coop and taste the difference.

School's back, and so are the sweet moments.

Right now at Crumble, you can get a chocolate chip four-pack for just $9.99.

Freshly baked, warm, and packed with melty chocolatey chips.

Perfect for after-school snacks, study sessions, or family time.

Order in-store, online, or through the Crumble app today.

That's a chocolate chip four-pack for just $9.99.

Only at Crumble.

Shall we move on to our next fact?

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

My fact is that Napoleon loved roast chicken so much that his household chefs were constantly cooking some in case he decided he wanted any.

Which is my personal aim for my life.

I think that's when you know you've made it.

But so is this, I mean, is there a lot of is chicken sort of really, if you read a Napoleon biography, is it just everywhere?

It's just constant mentions of chicken?

Barely a page goes by in the seminal, 700-page Napoleon biography.

He was more chicken than man by the end.

No, I don't know.

It's just something, there was an article about it recently which I spotted.

This was at his palace in Paris, the Tuileries, and just chicken was constantly being cooked on a spit because he was very erratic in the way he ate.

He would have meals at odd times of day, and he was not a breakfast, lunch, and dinner sort of man.

Once when he went on a journey from Cairo to,

oh, where was it?

I think Suez, he just took three roast chickens wrapped in paper as his provisions with him.

So, yeah, he loved it.

Found out quite a cool Mussolini had a code word that he used to tell his wife whenever he was doing something at the table and he didn't want his mother-in-law to know what he was doing.

What was he doing at the table?

Is it the same as what these people were doing at my award ceremony?

Sure, yeah, I should clarify.

Yeah, it's once he left the table that he started doing the thing.

So he loved jeweling with swords.

He was really obsessed with dueling with swords.

And so he got into fights all the time with people over over just minor little things.

And he would say at the at the breakfast table to his wife, this was the line, today we are making spaghetti.

And that was code to say, today I'm going outside to fight another man with swords.

And I.

But like, what happened if he actually was eating spaghetti one day and then some guy just came at him with a sod because he thought it was the code.

Yeah, I know, it's a confusing code.

I agree.

And also, I bet, like, at the same time, the mother-in-law, because she was living with them, would probably be going, ooh, spaghetti tonight then.

And no matter what was the plans for dinner, it would suddenly be changed because Mussolini wanted a fight.

You've just got a cooked man's hand here.

What happened today with the spaghetti?

How many secrets did he keep from his mother?

Did he have a code for I'm going to enslave a nation and then go to war with various other nations?

Was that now?

I'm going to feed the cat.

Yeah.

Just as a side note to this fact, I found a website all about rabbits during the course of my research called Napoleon Bunny Part.

Just

so you knew.

Was Napoleon once not attacked by rabbits?

There is this story, yeah, and it's hard to know what's um propaganda.

It's been explained as his like biggest ever defeat, that he was attacked by bunnies on a on a battlefield and had to run away or something.

Yeah, I thought it was when he was visiting Egypt, possibly.

Um but yeah, he was he was mobbed by rabbits uh when he was out uh hunting or shooting.

Um people always think he's afraid of cats, don't they?

Which I don't think is true, but I think they're confusing him with Napoleon III, his nephew, who used to have to jump onto a table if a cat entered the room or like like try climb up the curtains to avoid it.

That's the one thing cats can do, climb up curtains.

That's weird.

Not a smart man.

That's why he doesn't have the

kudos at his uncle does.

Josephine's dog really hated Napoleon.

Yeah.

And apparently during their wedding night it bit him on the leg while he was asleep.

Not during the

so they had a problem with animals, didn't they?

I wonder if his actual rest of his life has actually distracted us from the fact that he was the one human on earth who animals all hated unanimously and that we've been blinded to that actual real extraordinary fact about a man.

There was another Napoleon, I think one of the very last members of the Napoleon family, Jerome Bonaparte.

Jerome Bonaparte.

It's true.

They moved to New York.

Or the fact that they did, guys.

Stop it.

Stop it.

They escaped after the

fall of Napoleon, lots of his family members with lots and lots of money.

And one of them died, Jerome Bonaparte, I think it was, died after tripping over two entangled dog leads while out on a walk.

Oh my god.

Yeah.

Well, also, he had problems with horse riding.

I'm loving this theory.

I really think you might be right.

So, some historians speculate that the reason that he lost at Waterloo is because he had incredibly bad hemorrhoids, which was a serious problem for him that repeated throughout his life, and that he couldn't sit on his horse throughout that day, which is true.

So, I think we don't have any evidence that he rode his horse.

And so, he couldn't survey the battlefield properly, and he couldn't ride his forces into battle.

He had to stay backstage because he couldn't sit in a saddle.

It was too painful.

And there we go.

That was the end of everything.

So he just couldn't get high enough.

I mean, he wasn't that short.

This is a sort of myth that he was short, wasn't it?

Yeah,

he was kind of short.

He was, I think he was an inch taller than Sarkozy.

Okay.

But at the time, he was taller than the average Frenchman.

And he was taller than Nelson, I'm sorry to say.

But it is weird how often I was reading a thing of first-hand sources about Napoleon, and it's weird how often people point out his small stature, given that we say that he was above average height.

Maybe he just seems small.

You know when you see someone who like seems like they're small but actually they're six foot.

Maybe he's just had a very small demeanor.

I don't know.

Why were people always going on about it?

Can I tell you someone else who likes chicken?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Is it is it I, James, like chicken.

Uh no, it's Stacey Irving from Birmingham of course.

She eats chicken nuggets.

It's the only thing she eats, chicken nuggets all the time.

She has twenty a day that she shares with her boyfriend.

And doctors have warned that it's very, very, very bad for her health just eating chicken nuggets.

I mean, that's, if she shares them, she's not having 20 a day.

I mean, she is kind of like, it is really bad for her health.

But the newspaper article said, a less serious consequence of her craving is that she's struggling to store all of the free toys that come with the fast food meals.

So she might be dying, but yeah, where's she going to keep those toys?

What is it?

The world's largest chicken nugget is twice the size of the world's largest chicken, I think.

Whoa, really?

But wa imagine finding that in the box.

Someone else actually, you'll probably know this, Gary Watkinson from Huddersfield.

Oh, of course, he is.

Yeah, yeah, he only eats beans on toast.

That's the only thing he ever, ever eats.

And it's forever since he can remember.

But he actually said the beans on toast thing is only more recent.

Before that, it was just beans and toast separately.

And then, like a second Einstein, one day, a moment of inspiration.

Yeah, Yvonne Wake from the Nutrition Society said, Gary is probably not constipated.

I read a, so just on the subject of leaders and food.

So a lot of leaders get given international gifts all the time.

I'm thinking in particular of the American presidents.

Two pandas were given to Nixon, that kind of thing.

I discovered that LBJ, Lyndon B.

Johnson, was given by an unnamed source, a Chinese chef called Mr.

Wong,

who just rocked up to the White House door and he used to, there's all these reports.

No one really knew what he was doing there.

Mr.

Wong just lived with them during his term.

They were trying to go to the holiday retreat that they go to, and they couldn't find Mr.

Wong because they were bringing him because he decided to play hide and seek with the president.

And they eventually found him behind some curtains

after like a good long search.

He was hiding from a cat, to be fair.

But presidents aren't allowed to accept gifts that are worth more than something like $5, so he must have been an extremely cheap man.

I don't know.

Did you know that, fittingly,

someone bought, so Napoleon has two of those hats that survive, the Napoleonic hats, and one of them was bought for £1.5 million last year, and it was bought by a chicken mogul.

It was bought by this Korean guy who owns a chain of chicken fried chicken restaurants, the Harim Group, which I think provides fried chicken to the people of Korea.

So on things of Napoleon's being sold,

in 2006, one of Napoleon's teeth was sold for £11,000.

In June this year, a couple of months ago.

A single one of Napoleon's hairs was sold at auction for £130.

And I think we've said before on this podcast that after he died, Napoleon's penis was removed and mummified and has passed through several hands and has been auctioned several times.

But I have a theory that someone out there is reassembling Napoleon.

I think the hair thing is a small victory for Napoleon against Wellington because so later on the hairs obviously depreciated in value because in the 90s a lock of Napoleon's hair sold for £3,680 at auction and I think in the same year Wellington's hair only got £598.

So that's quite a nice like balances out the record between those guys.

A penguin named Napoleon Bolapart has fallen in love with a Wellington boot.

Can you imagine if we don't know really what reincarnation is, but everything is conscious and that's them actually just having a sort of sorry about that past life.

I hope you're well.

They never met, did they?

Did they not?

Never met.

But,

so once the English had defeated the French, Wellington had an idea that he presented to the British government that was disgust that rather than send him into exile, they build him a house really near Wellington's house, somewhere on the British coastline, and they live near each other and they just hang out and exchange like strategic tips and anecdotes.

I mean, what a great idea.

Who kaiboshed that plan?

Because that sounds fantastic.

We've said on the show that Wellington was obsessed with Napoleon.

He bought all of Napoleon's stuff after Waterloo, and he hired Napoleon's ex-cook.

The mysterious and everlasting, Mr.

Wong.

I'm going to have to move us on in a second.

Has anyone got anything else?

I've got one last thing.

It's not particularly interesting or anything, but

it's just hard sell-down, please.

Sometimes you read a sentence, you think, that's the best sentence I read today.

So it's just this.

Stalin loved loved bananas and would be furious if you served him a substandard banana.

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

My fact this week is that IMDB was originally just a list of actresses with beautiful eyes.

It just started as

this little list that the guy created, and he just thought, I need to put together a list of all the actresses that I think people need to know have beautiful eyes.

And then people started going to it and adding adding other lists and then IMDb grew out of it.

And it was called Those Eyes to begin with.

That's the original name.

Wow.

The words reported is Cole Niebman brought together two things to turn them into IMDb.

And people often say IMDb grew out of this list of women with beautiful eyes.

And what he brought together was, one of those things was the list of actresses with beautiful eyes.

And then the other thing he brought in, just as a little add-on, was a list that someone else had created, which was a movie ratings report where participants were asked to rate movies on a one to ten scale.

But it was mainly based IMDb on the actresses with beautiful eyes.

I mean it sounds like the actresses with beautiful eyes was kind of a random irrelevant list that just you know happened on Sunday.

He sort of put them all together.

He records the details of every film that he sees and he has done since he was 13 years old Cole Needham and he has seen this was 18 months ago so he's seen more since then but at that count it was 8,505.

That's one film for every 48 hours since he was born.

Wow.

And his favorite film is Vertigo.

Really?

And that's why it always tops the charts.

Yes.

Because he's rigging it, isn't he?

Because it's a good film, but you know.

I read an article that said that he and his, it was a quote by him.

He said that he and his wife love going to the cinema and they watch a film together every Tuesday lunchtime.

But what it sounds like is they do do that, but the rest of the time it's just him watching loads of other movies.

So it's more like my wife has begrudgingly agreed to come to the cinema with me once a week, otherwise we would never see each other.

When he was a boy, he rented out the film Alien, and he watched it every single day for a fortnight.

Wow.

That's a waste of his time.

He needs to be getting through these films.

He can't.

Well, he said that recently there are so many more good films being made these days.

It was just that at the time, that was one of the best films ever made, and it was so huge.

It is a fantastic place.

I actually do a fair bit of QI research by looking at the IMDb Did You Know section.

I love reading the user reviews because the honesty of it is just...

Here's my favorite one.

I haven't even read further than the title of this review, but it was for the movie Batman and Robin, and the headline was, I lost faith in humanity.

Signed the Joker.

Do you know what is the bottom-ranked movie on all of IMDB?

No.

It's called Jurassic Shark.

It's from 2012.

It's got a rating of 1.5%.

And here's what it is.

It's when an oil company unwittingly unleashes a prehistoric shark from its icy prison, the Jurassic killer maroons a group of thieves and a beautiful young female college student on an abandoned piece of land.

How did they manage to screw that up though?

Because that sounds like such a winning.

Okay, I'll give you some others in the bottom like 20 or something.

The hotty and the naughty from 2008.

Oh, the Paris Hilton movie.

Oh, is it?

Apparently, apparently.

Apparently.

I think we found out why it's not at the absolute bottom.

Do you know the so there's one film on IMDb which isn't marked out of 10, which is Spinal Tap.

And the IMDb page marks that its rating is marked out of 11.

So it gets eight out of 11.

Which and then which actually really affects how good a movie it is and the overall rating.

Yeah, that's really annoying because I worry that people haven't noticed and they're giving it an eight thinking that's out of ten and that's eighty percent, but it's not.

It's obviously X percent that I'm not going to patronize you by working out here myself right now.

But

it's a lower percent.

Yeah.

It should be higher than 8 out of 11.

I read a cracked.com article about the most depressing IMDb pages.

And their top one was someone called Leslie Bremer.

And she's only had nine roles in her whole career.

They include Girl in Bikini, Shower Girl, Party Girl, and Girl Leaving Room.

She's only had one named part in her entire career, and it was she played Sandy in a movie called School Spirit.

But on IMDb it says, in several scenes, actress Leslie can be seen wearing a necklace with the letter L on it, despite the fact that her character's name is Sandy.

I'm going to have to move us on in a sec.

We're going to power through to the last one.

Anyone got anything else?

I looked up IMDb's current poll of actresses with beautiful eyes.

And it's just a list.

It's really weird.

So there are lots of people who've submitted their own lists, but like their own curated ones.

But this one's a poll which takes others, users into account.

So the top 20 is all people like Cameron Diaz, Rachel Weiss, Natalie Portman, other people like that.

And then Joan Platwright is in there, who I don't know if you know who that is, but I mean, she's 85 years old.

She is a kind of famous stage actress.

She's often in things like Inspector Morse playing a servant woman.

And does she have really nice eyes?

I looked really hard, and to be honest, I found it hard to see what they're talking about.

Everyone's got nice eyes.

I mean, just eyes are nice, aren't they?

Yeah.

How are you?

You know, you can say someone's got nice hair or not very nice hair, but you look,

eyes are just nice to look at.

Everyone likes looking at an eye.

I've seen some bad eyes.

Have you?

Or some really bad eyes.

I have a couple of facts about eyes if you want them.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Fact number one, eyes are lovely.

Fact number two,

the first person known to have had blue eyes was, we know who it was.

So it was 7,000 years ago.

It was a caveman living in Spain because it's a mutation.

So everyone who's got blue eyes can trace their ancestry back to that particular

influence.

I wonder if everyone just went to that caveman and went, you have beautiful eyes.

And then Andy went, everyone has beautiful eyes.

From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab-grown diamond engagement rings to the U.S.

Explore solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewelers behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our new Union Street showroom or explore the range at cullenjewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.

It's that time of year again.

RVing is a time to make memories and see the country.

It's the time for a great adventure.

But don't let your good times be interrupted because you don't have power.

If you have a fifth-wheeler travel trailer, you might have an empty space that is ready for a generator.

Use that space wisely so you're not limited to plugging in at campsites or worse, stuck completely without power because no campsites are available.

When it's time for your journey, you can have all the power you need with a Cummins RV generator.

To see the latest updates from Cummins, follow Cummins RV on Facebook or Cummins Lifestyle on Instagram.

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

Yes, my fact is that the word fascinate literally means the embodiment of the divine phallus.

Certainly, the sense in which I use it all the time.

So, this is the etymology of fascinate.

It comes from the Latin word fascinum, which was either fascinus, the phallic god, which we who we know very little about, or it was a fascinum was a phallic object that you carry around for good luck, which they did a lot of the time.

It's like to ward off the evil eye or something like that.

Yeah, exactly.

So, the verb fascinare in Latin was to use the power of the phallus to either ward off the evil eye or to hypnotize someone in an evil manner.

So, if you're fascinating somebody, you are using the power of the phallus

in order to cast a spell on them.

This is what Dan was doing at that award ceremony.

Yeah.

So, I spent most of today googling penises are fascinating, and

it's a lot out there.

All penises are beautiful, aren't they?

well back in back May last year James and I were in the office alone together and

we kind of ran out of conversation and this is kind of

this is really not the time nor the place for this people need to know

so we kind of just ran out of conversation and James just in a way to sort of just spark up conversation just looked up to me and said, hey, do you know that there are over 600 guys in the world with two dicks?

Like, and as if that was like, oh, good, we're back in.

We have a more conversation going.

And I googled it, and there were, yeah, there were 600 men in the world who have two penises.

And on Reddit, there's that website, Reddit, they have that thing, AMA.

And AMA, Ask Me Anything.

One of the most successful things I ever had was someone coming on saying, I have two penises, ask me anything.

It is one bit where in an interview, he's talking about it.

He says, the most upsetting moment for him was a girl he dated.

Seriously,

he was over one night stands, and they dated for three months.

They were just kissing and cuddling.

She finally was ready.

I put it off for another month after that.

But when it came down to it, I told her that I was built different from other guys.

So I was sort of slightly built different.

She said she didn't care.

I revealed them to her and she said she definitely cared.

If only she had known that all penises are beautiful.

There was a guy,

they used to do freak shows in the 19th century, and there was one guy called, I think he was called like Dos Santos or something like that.

And he was known as the man with two swords.

And he used to show himself off as a man with two penises.

And he married a woman called Blanche Dumas or something like that.

Was she called Two Scabbards or something?

No, she but she did have two vaginas.

Yeah.

What?

There's someone out there for everybody.

Okay.

This was a fact about etymology.

Oh, yeah.

Yes.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Yeah, back to Roman penises, at least, because that's more highbrow, I think.

They were more highbrow then.

So they used to, at the age of nine days, Roman boys would be given an amulet with a phallus inside it,

and that was to ward off the evil eye.

That was the point of it.

And they'd have to go around wearing this amulet with a phallus inside it until they came of age.

So they weren't as obscene as they are now, or they weren't seen as being obscene because of this whole good luck thing.

Yeah, and also getting rid of this evil eye, it was really thought to be a really serious thing.

There's a Roman mosaic of a phallus ejaculating into a disembodied eye.

Wikipedia described it as a relief.

So that, have you seen the relief?

I've seen it.

So it's a.

It's pretty.

It's so weird.

The phallus has its own penis which is doing the ejaculating.

So it's a lovely stone-carved relief, as James says.

And I think it's in Turkey, and it's a phallus with back legs, and then there's a smaller penis coming down from it, and it's shoot ejaculating into an eye with a scorpion on top of it.

Amazing.

I like the penis with the little penis.

It's like that village in Gloucestershire.

I mean, not exactly like that.

Roman prostitutes sold things called coliphia, which were little bread rolls shaped like penises.

Did they?

Yeah.

You don't get that in Greg's, do you?

We should clarify that Gregg's is not staffed exclusively by prostitutes.

Yes, I would like to clarify.

That's why you keep getting injected from Greg's, James.

So there's a theory that the reason we don't know very much about Fascinus is that Christians tried to eradicate from our collective memory all the weird stuff that the Romans were interested in, like this, because they thought they were a bit prudish.

But there's another god called, has a really good name called Mutunus Tutunus.

And he...

Sorry.

I was mid-sip and then...

That's the best name I've ever heard.

Yeah, yeah.

What was it, Annas?

Mutunus Tutunus.

Muti Tuti.

Nobody ever called him.

and he was sort of a god of fertility.

And so there was a tradition in which there would be sculptures of Mutunus Tutunis, and he had a large phallus because that was what he represented.

And it has been written that Roman brides to prepare themselves for marriage would have to straddle the phallus of Mutunus to prepare themselves for the upcoming intercourse.

He was a dildo.

Mooti Tutti, the first dildo.

If that's not in the goodie bags at next year's Oscars,

you're going to turn down your award.

This person is called Fascinus, and another word that comes from this guy, whose name means penis, is fascist.

Yeah,

because originally it came from fasci Siciliani dei Levatori, and the word fasci came from meaning a group, and that that originally was like a bundle, but it also had the same kind of connotations as something large and whatever.

And that was where the word fascist came from.

Fascist rods of office, literally, that Roman officials carried to show their authority.

So basically, all fascists are dicks.

I, the rest of you, didn't really get into that.

Audience of fascists here tonight.

I feel like I'm going to be making a lot of spaghetti this evening.

I read, I discovered a new martial art discipline today.

It's called 99 Power Qigong.

So it's part of Qigong.

It's one of the rarer practiced bits of Qigong and martial arts.

Its other name is Iron Crotch.

Men of a certain age suddenly need to start attaching lots of really heavy things to their dick and allow it to just get some exercise.

I think that's the kind of thing.

There's a guy called Master 2.

He goes around the world teaching people how to do this.

He's described on his website as a graceful man who moves like a swimming dragon with sudden bursts of thunderous gestures.

But what he's mainly known for is that he can tow trucks with his penis.

What's wrong with a tow rope?

I ask you.

Well, I'm just only mentioning it in case anyone's looking for an interesting Christmas gift to give to someone because you can buy Iron Crotch the DVD, which is like those exercise DVDs that you get.

And it comes with a rope and a hook to hook.

And you'll be able to find that on no suchthingasafish.com this Christmas, along with your motunus-tutunus still-do

and a free copy of Jurassic Shark.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

James at Egg Shapes.

Czezinski.

You can email a podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to no such thingasafish.com we have all of our previous episodes up there we're also doing a tour around the uk so if you want to go to the website you can see all those tour dates there we will be back again next week with another episode thank you so much for being here guys thanks for listening at home see you again next week goodbye

hold on to you