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The following show you're about to listen to is slightly different to the ones we normally do.

This show was a live one recorded at the Aces and AIs bar in Tufno Park a couple of months ago and rather than being our four favorite facts, it was the favorite facts of the audience.

So we did no prep for this at all.

It was the first time we'd heard a lot of these facts so it's a a bit ropey around the edges.

But stick with it because we think it's a really funny one, and I hope you will enjoy it.

We're putting it out this week in preparation for our Edinburgh Festival shows, which begin next week.

Hello

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

This week, coming to you live from the Aces and AIDS bar in Tufno Park.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray.

And once again, we've gathered around the microphone, but this time it's not with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

It's your favorite facts.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with...

Okay, you were told to put your name.

This person's not putting a name.

That's an absolute disaster.

Why don't we?

I reckon people are going to remember what their facts were.

That's true.

Max Walker.

Wicked.

Okay, Max.

So my fact is about the Scrooge effect, which is if you make somebody think about death,

they then increase how charitable they are.

And also, when they do donations, they then get more satisfaction from it as well.

Oh, wow.

That's good.

Okay.

Do we assume because they're thinking, I really hope someone gives money to charity when I die so that it's not as bad?

No.

I think that's what people suspect, yeah.

It also makes people spend more on material goods in general.

Okay.

What is this famous effect called where you buy something green?

So you're doing something really good for the environment.

And then because you've done that, then you do something really not very nice afterwards.

It's called moral licensing.

Okay.

It's where you let yourself do something bad.

So this sounds a bit like the opposite of that, I suppose.

You're a reminder of something bad that's going to happen to you.

So you then do something good.

Yeah.

Whereas moral licensing, what's a good example?

If you don't have a shower to save water, later on, you'll leave the hob on longer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or you'll fill up the kettle slightly less than normal so it uses less energy and then you'll go out and brutally murder three people.

Yeah.

Moral licensing.

Weirdly, today I read a story about a show that has been named the worst show of all time.

Is it which show?

In which the prizes were all charity prizes.

And the idea was that it was four celebrities and it was a show hosted by a comedian back in the day called Jackie Gleason.

And the idea was that if the celebrity got the question right, a bunch of care packages would go to their choice of charity.

If they got it wrong, it would go in Jackie Gleason's name.

So it would look like he was this amazing dirty.

He was just like, wow, this Jackie Gleason guy is incredible.

I care so much.

So here's the thing.

The show was terrible.

It was absolutely terrible.

And it got canceled after two shows but the second show and as far as I know this is the only time in history this has happened the second show was Jackie Gleason sitting on a stripped down set and it was half an hour of him apologizing to the audience at home the entire second show was him going we totally messed up that was horrible we can't believe we did that to you we can't believe we spent so much money on it and then they cancelled the show but it's known as the worst show of all time yeah that sounds tedious

It is really interesting, the stuff that has a psychological effect on you that you're not realizing.

And they're always doing studies, sometimes quite dubious about it.

But there's that study that says that if there's pop music playing in a shop, I think you're more likely to spend more money.

And also, the fact that they start playing classical music in places that are high crime, haven't they?

Because then it stops people, it deters people from committing crimes, apparently.

Tube stations, yeah, and dodgy parts of town.

Play classical music at people.

Okay, should we go on to the next fact?

Yeah, yeah, go for it.

Cool.

So I think it's from someone called Coralie or Corali.

Ah, yes.

So if you could pass that over, I'll also read a tweet at the same time.

Yeah, go for it.

So we have a tweet by someone called at Ollie Granger, and they said, my fact is that if you like grilled cheese, you'll have 32% more sex.

Ollie's in tonight.

Oh, hi, Ollie, Ollie.

Was this an experiment you did yourself?

It was on BBC News.

Oh, is it?

Amazing.

And is that going to turn into a sexy food now when you're sort of like bringing a date home and going, grilled cheese,

champagne, oysters, rare bit.

Okay, let's move on to Coral.

Is it Coralie or Corali?

Coralie.

Coralie, what was your fact?

In 1567,

the man with the longest beard

died when he tripped over it running away from a fire.

Okay.

When you trip, it's quite easy to get back up straight away, right?

Depends where you trip.

It was a fire next to the Grand Canyon.

I think this guy with the beard, I think I've heard about him, and I think he used to tuck his beard in a pocket, didn't he?

In a little pocket, and he used to tuck it in there so that he didn't trip over.

And presumably this time the fire was on, and he sort of put his hands in the air, knocks his beard out of his pocket,

and then trips up.

Wow.

I'm speculating.

And I accepted that as truth.

Anytime James James tells me something, I'm like, whoa, okay, that's cool.

That's knowledge now.

Abraham Lincoln had a beard famously.

Yeah.

Not for most of his life, though, did he?

The reason he grew a beard, I don't know if people know about this, is because a young girl wrote him a letter saying that if he grew a beard, then some of her brothers would vote for him.

And because he'd made a speech or he'd made a statement in some way saying, I think it's so like reminiscent of kind of Shoreditch trendy people today.

He said a thing saying, do you think people might think I'm a bit pretentious pretentious if I grow this beard now, this whole whiskery thing?

And this girl wrote in saying, look, I've got this brother.

He's saying he won't vote for you unless you have facial hair.

And so he did it.

And then he met her a few years later at a station, didn't he?

And said, this beard's for you.

Wow.

It was a different time, wasn't it?

It was a more innocent time.

The 1860s.

I just to move on quickly, there's a really good tweet here that I got from at Finneyland, which is that in 2009, two French mayors declared the same street one way, but in different directions.

That is such

a fantastic moment in history.

I remember that happening actually.

Do you?

Yeah, was it in near Paris or something?

Yeah, it was in Paris, yeah.

Yeah.

And it was like a big argument between these two mayors, and they just decided, right, we're going to do it.

My uncle used to be a mayor in Bolton.

Did he?

Okay, yeah.

What did he declare?

Well, he was defiance of his counterpart.

He declared that this was actually when he was a councillor rather than a mayor, but they wanted to build some houses in Bolton.

And

no one wanted them to build these houses.

And they tried to stop them, but they couldn't stop them because they had the law on their side.

And my uncle thought, well, we can't stop them, but what we can do is we can rename the streets things that they don't want to put houses on.

And so they came up with the idea of making Diarrhea Drive

and Hitler Grove.

And they were genuinely, they actually had plans that they were going to make these streets.

But then in the end, I think someone backed out.

Just on the subject of

things being named Hitler,

there used to be a guy who lived in Ohio.

He was living around World War II.

His name was Adolf Hitler, right?

And he was living in America, in Ohio, refused to change his name.

And when the guy asked him, why have you not changed your name?

He said,

I'm not going to let one guy

ruin the good name of Adolf Hitler.

And so he kept the name.

And I always, for years, I've known this as a kind of QI-ish kind of thing.

And I've never kind of thought to think of whatever happened to his dream.

Did it work?

I looked into it.

Ohio in America is the only place now that has Hitler-named landmarks.

They've got a Hitler lake, they've got a Hitler church, they have a Hitler park.

It worked.

It worked.

Hitler brought the name back around.

Wow.

Because what was he?

What was he like?

Give me two months, I'll bring this back.

This will be a fine name again.

Hitler did have nephews in Liverpool, didn't he?

Yeah.

And one of them,

one of his nephews,

wrote an article in 1939 with the headline, Why I Hate My Uncle.

He gives you really bad presents at Christmas.

Shall we move on?

Yeah, let's move on to our next fact.

Okay, our next fact is from

Otti.

No, oh, sorry.

No, Diane.

They are similar, to be fair.

Diane DuPont?

Is that a name that you can use?

Yeah, that's you, I think.

Oh, can you pass the microphone over?

Okay, so while you pass that on, I'll read one of these facts that we have.

From at Apatu.

And they said that Canadian $1 coins are called loonies and $2 coins are called Toonies.

That's really cool.

That's a good name.

I'll tell you something about Canada.

Margarine was illegal in Canada

from around 1880 to around 1930, something like that.

What was the reason?

It was a very powerful lobbying from the dairy manufacturers.

They wanted it to be banned because they thought that they were taking away the butter business and they banned it and then they brought it back for a little time during the First World War because they needed something cotton the bread.

But yeah, for a long time.

And actually in some parts of America as well.

In Maine, it it was, I think there were seven states where my dream was illegal at the start of the 20th century.

Yeah, Wisconsin.

Wisconsin.

Wisconsin.

And people would smuggle it over the border.

They had to dye it blue.

They had to dye it blue.

They had to dye it blue.

What?

Blue and pink.

Even come in bags, little dye packets, so it's not to be confused with butter.

Wow.

So once again, this is just an example of the type of audience that we have when we do a comedy guest.

Most other gigs, it's just people going, you suck, get off.

We have corrections in a told-off sort of manner.

I wrote a tweet earlier, and I got corrected on it in four different ways

within 10 minutes.

Two mathematical, one simple counting thing, which I hadn't done, and one scriptural.

Pretty good.

That's great.

Does this lady, Diane, stroke, Otto, stroke, whatever your name is?

Have you got a mic yet?

I do.

Cool.

What was your fact?

The Danish word for 58 is actually short for 8.520s.

58 is what eight?

Eight and a half three twenties.

It follows like a Roman logical numeral logic.

That's quite it's semi-similar but much more complicated to French, isn't it?

Which does, you know, um

catrevant or whatever.

This is much better.

I need brackets to understand that.

Yeah.

I lit I'm going to put it out there.

I literally don't understand what that means.

I'm not even going to attempt to try and comprehend it.

Did anyone try that maths quiz that was all over the news yesterday, that logic quiz?

It was good, wasn't it?

It was um was it in Sweden?

Uh, no, Singapore, S countries confusing them.

Uh, we could do this whole thing in call and response, like a

queen gig.

So, what was it?

It was a logic.

It was a logic puzzle.

It was where a girl and her two friends were, she was trying to make them guess when her birthday was, and she told one friend a date of her birthday, and the other friend the month of her birthday.

And then there's a conversation where, I mean, you look it up, I'm not going to give it to you.

Yeah.

Do you want to hear a really lame logic joke?

No.

Tough.

It goes, it's not mine.

Three logicians walk into a bar, and the barman says, Do you all want to drink?

And the first guy says, I don't know.

And the second guy says, I don't know.

And the third guy goes, yes.

I don't think it's that type of crowd, James.

I know.

I'm going to go for that kind of stuff tonight.

Yeah, the logic material didn't quite work out.

It's a good one.

Okay, I have another fact here, and it doesn't have a name.

Oh, it has a name on the back from Josephine.

Josephine.

All right, so while that's making it over, here's another fact we got from Twitter: from at ITimPilgrim.

Jelly babies were originally marketed under the name Unwanted Babies.

Oh

no!

That's a good fact.

Okay, Josephine, have you got a microphone?

Yes.

What would you like to tell us?

A rhinoceros beetle, its towing capacity is the same as a man lifting nine male elephants over his head, apparently.

Wow.

Yeah.

Are they doing it to show off or is it like a...

Because

I've not even lifted one elephant.

I could.

But I've just never felt the need.

Wow.

That's, yeah, I mean, it's...

Well, the idea with this, with insects, is actually it's because

if you're a lot smaller, it's a lot easier to do stronger things, and that's because your muscle strength depends on the cross-section of your muscle, which is a two-dimensional thing, and your size is a three-dimensional thing, and so it goes up quicker because you're multiplying it three times rather than two times.

I've not explained that very well.

No, no, that's good.

I've always felt inferior to ants because of this kind of thing, and that's it's it's not because of that kind of thing,

they work in a team.

I mean, ouch.

There is one thing which is, and it's, I think, the strongest organism in nature, and

it's even smaller than the rhinoceros beetle, but it's gonorrhea.

Gonorrhea can tow something like 100,000 times its own weight,

which is probably why it's so successful.

Not from our perspective, but it has these filaments all around it called pili, which it sort of crawls along things with them.

And it has this huge, huge pulling capacity.

It's very cool.

Wouldn't Andy make the most fantastic STI doctor?

Just as you're getting the news, so you got gonorrhea.

Interesting fact, actually, about that.

Do you know which, Dan, which is your strongest muscle in your body?

What would you say?

My

tongue?

Tongue muscle?

It's a reasonable guess, but it's wrong.

So the strongest, absolutely, will be your ass, your gluteus Maximus, and that's pretty much because it's the biggest, got the biggest cross-sectional area.

But the biggest by

actual, like, not by size, but the biggest by like square centimeter, is not in your body, but it is in Anna's body.

It's the uterus is the strongest.

Your uterus is actually very weak.

Sounds like a challenge.

Let's

get your uterus out.

Let's do this.

Every live show, every live show, he does this.

And a uterus has the strength equivalent of a crossbow.

Now, I don't understand what that means.

I mean, medieval castles, when besieged,

did not go to the uterus cabinet.

So, is that saying if we rigged up an arrow somehow to our uterus, then we could propel it further than a crossbow?

Not really.

A crossbow is much bigger, so it's like per square area.

It's actually quite balanced.

that is a good fact.

Just while we're talking about the body quickly, I've developed a new thing on

Dan, I have to tell you, from the diseases perspective, it's doing great.

No, it's just this, it's an odd new thing.

I've just, in the last six months, every time I wake up, I'm woken up by the sound of my own body from my face going,

every time I wake up now, like I swear to God, every morning, every morning I've I've woken up going,

what's happening to me?

That's my question.

I don't know what's happening to you, but have you considered donating to charity?

Swearing.

There was a man in America, I don't know what made me think of this, who was, I think he was executed.

And what happened was they thought that he'd had sex with a pig.

And the reason that they thought

he'd had sex with a pig is because the pig had given birth to a piglet that looked a bit like him.

Even though he knows it's not true, that's the most insulting thing.

There's no win in that whatsoever.

That really reminds me of a story that I remember Richard Madeley of Richard and Judy telling years ago.

He went up to a woman in a bus stop and he went, Bill, hi.

And this woman turned round and went, What are you talking about?

He said, Bill, right?

He was like, We knew each other at school.

And she was like, no, I'm Jane.

And he said, oh, sorry, you just look so much like Bill.

I assumed you'd had a sex change.

And it was you.

Bizarre thing to do.

Say what you like about Richard Maidley.

He's confident.

Shall we move on to our next fact?

Okay, this fact is from Chris R., who is at Naxfish.

Do we have Chris?

R.

Hello.

It's fine.

In the meantime, shall I share my favourite fact that I got via email?

Because I assume it's from someone who wasn't on Twitter.

Lauren Gilbert.

In 1958, Khrushchev went to Beijing to meet with Mao.

Mao proceeded to suggest a meeting while swimming, knowing full well that Khrushchev couldn't swim.

Aides instantly appeared with water wings for Khrushchev, and the meeting took place with Mao swimming up and down and Khrushchev flailing around in his armbands.

What cool image is that?

Okay, who has the microphone?

Hey, hello.

Hello.

Go for it.

Right.

The police department in Cambridge, Massachusetts, requested that when the Harvard Bridge between Cambridge and Boston was refurbished in the 1980s, that the graffiti on it was maintained by the people who created it because it became useful in identifying where accidents were on the bridge.

So they would say, by the penis.

It was quite a nerdy graffiti, to be honest.

Oh, yeah.

Of course, it was an MIT prank.

Got it, okay.

My favourite fact about graffito or graffiti is...

Well, which is it, James?

Which is it?

This is about graffiti.

And it is that there was a Christian group, I think it was in the south of France, I think, and they were

cleaning up graffiti.

And they were doing it because they were very nice people, and they started cleaning and cleaning and cleaning.

And then only afterwards did they found out they'd actually cleaned off a load of prehistoric cave paintings.

My God.

How did that?

I mean, surely there's a difference that you can tell between.

That is true, although they think that a lot of prehistoric cave paintings were done by teenage boys, actually.

And a lot of French graffiti is of buffaloes being killed.

Sorry.

Can I read out?

Because we got sent in.

So we got an email when we said we need facts for tonight, and we got an email from a lady called Lauren Gilbert, who we just had this fact from Anna about Khrushchev,

which is that, so she gave us 10, and this was my favourite one.

I'm going to read it out exactly word for word what she's written.

F.

Scott Fitzgerald bitched to Hemingway that his dick was too small, then went to the bathroom and Hemingway looked at it and pronounced it fine.

He had a terrible injury, didn't he?

I'm going off memory here.

Hemingway had a very bad shrapnel wound, possibly in the First World War, which

dealt severe damage to that region, the top of his thighs and his

parts and private parts.

And

there is a theory that that's why he was so about the big game hunting and the fishing.

So when Fitzgerald showed him, it it was sort of like half hanging off and bleeding a bit.

And he went, looks absolutely normal to me.

You're doing fine, mate.

Look at that.

Oh, dear.

Okay, let's move on.

Steve Aykroyd, where are you?

Okay, can someone give the microphone to Steve?

There we are.

Steve, what is your fact?

So, the name Garrett is now, as of 2013, less popular in the UK, that's by people born within that year, than both the name Thor and Loki.

Wow, what?

That is incredible.

Wow.

But Gary actually isn't like, isn't an old name, is it?

The first Gary was a country singer, wasn't he?

Someone's going to shout out who it was.

Gary Cooper.

Gary Cooper, yeah, that's Gary Cooper.

He was the first person, pretty much, I think, called Gary.

And I think he might have been named after a place called Gary in America.

In Indiana.

In Indiana.

You see?

The world expert on Garys is in the audience.

Sorry.

So

what other name knowledge do you have then?

It's kind of limited to basically that, and I definitely learned it from a different podcast.

I apologise.

You brought someone else's back from another podcast to our show?

Good.

Do that more.

I thought I needed to raise the bar.

How many people in North Korea do you think are called Kim Jong-un?

Do you know the answer?

In French?

It's correct.

There's only one person called Kim Jong-un because he made it the law.

No, he made it the law that everyone else who had that name had to change their name to something else, to Gary.

To be fair, I don't reckon there are many Queen Elizabeth II in Britain.

Yeah.

I guess it would be Elizabeth Windsor with all the Elizabeth Windsors would have to change their name.

Does anyone here know anyone called Elizabeth Windsor?

There we are.

See, nobody knows anyone called Elizabeth Windsor.

And that is a scientific experiment that just happened right in front of your eyes.

I got sent a fact by someone for tonight, and it was a fantastic fact.

It was really good.

But I got so distracted by his name that I forgot to write his fact down.

So I don't have his fact now, but I do have his name.

And his name is Andrew, his surname, GoToBed.

As one word.

He's called Andrew GoTobed.

And he goes by Andy.

And he has a middle name, which is William, but he goes by Will.

So Andy will go to bed is his full name.

Isn't that great?

I found something about names the other day.

This is just completely random now.

But the first

the first teacher of the English language in Japan was called Ranald MacDonald.

Why did he move to Japan?

That's such a good thing.

That's great.

Okay, another one.

Let's keep going.

Yeah, let's pick another fact sent to us by Twitter.

This is from at 83 underscore bis.

When the tooth of a mastodon was found in North America, it was identified as the tooth of a giant.

Now, that's very exciting to me because if you've listened to this podcast,

I talk a lot about Yetis and so on.

I've worked out that's the period I should have been born in.

When someone's finding a big thing and going, well, it's obviously the tooth of a giant.

That's right there.

That's when I should have been born.

I would have been the man who went, it was clearly a giant.

And they were going, Mr.

Schreiber, you are.

Well, there was the other thing, the first dinosaur bone, which they thought was a scrotum of a giant, and they called it scrotum humanum.

And it turned out to be a megalosaur, I think.

But by the strict rules of nomenclature, they should still call it scrotum humanum because you're supposed to call it the first thing that you called it.

Are you?

Wow.

Wow.

So.

Megalosaur, I still call it a scrotum humanum, actually.

But you, as we've ascertained, call it graffito.

So

we know what you're like.

That is true.

Sharks' teeth, when they were discovered, fossilized sharks' teeth.

Sharks obviously go really many, many millions of years back.

And often their teeth are the only bit of them which survives because they are all all cartilage.

They don't have any bones.

So

we only really know about fossil sharks or ancient sharks from their teeth.

But they were thought to be dragon's teeth, unsurprisingly, and they were crushed into powder and sold as a medicine.

Wow.

Yeah, and people still take bits of shark as medicine to this day, but they shouldn't.

Please don't do it because it doesn't work.

If you've just got a dead shark, then you're not any better.

Okay, another one.

Esther Clark.

I really like the fact that people say alcohol is not a solution, but according to chemistry, alcohol is a solution.

That's very good.

All right, so you like the chemistry jokes, but you don't like the logic jokes.

What's going on?

I hope you don't work at an AA centre.

That would be.

All right, alcohol is not the solution, except of course that it is the solution.

Okay, okay.

Something's dissolved in something to make it alcohol.

You could have pure alcohol, but but it's really hard to get out of.

Most alcohol is in water.

So alcoholic drinks are the solution.

Yeah.

Pure alcohol is not.

Pure alcohol is poisonous.

Well, that's very responsible.

So you're not advocating pure alcohol.

No, I think that's okay.

So I think if you put water and alcohol together, like 40% is about the best kind of solution for alcohol and water.

And the person who found that out was Mendeleev, who did the periodic table.

And I think he did it for his dissertation or something like that.

And he worked that out, so he was the first person to do it.

How did Mendeleev work out that 40% was the best?

He was a chemist, and he tried lots out, and that was it.

Yeah, so there's note notebooks increasingly spidery and slurred towards the 55 to 45.

That's the age.

If the giant age is the age you should have been in, I should have lived in the age where you could just drink loads of alcohol and claim you're a chemist.

And this also reminds me of another brilliant fact that was sent in by email by Lauren, I think, which was that the first ICBMs, the ballistic missiles, placed by the USSR outside of the USSR, which are placed in East Germany, could never have been used because the soldiers in charge of them drank the rocket fuel because it was made of alcohol.

Oh, no.

That's like with the when...

It was, they sent up a bit of bark from the tree that Newton was apparently sitting under when he had the apple and he realized the idea of gravity.

they sent that up into space with an apple.

And the idea was that they were going to drop the apple and they were going to drop the bit of bark together so that they could experience a lack of gravity.

So it was a very exciting moment, but they forgot to tell some of the astronauts why the apple was up there.

And so they ate it.

And then they were like, okay, time to do the experiment.

And they were going, what?

Experiment?

So they ended up doing the experiment with a bit of bark and a pear that they had.

No one likes pears on the International Space Station.

Shall we move on to another fact?

Yeah, Andy, you've got one, I think.

Yes, I have.

This is from Adam.

Hey, Adam.

Okay, so pass the mic off.

And while we're doing that, I got a tweet from someone called Olivia Annie, at Olivia Annie.

And she sent me this fact that Bucharest and Budapest are the fifth most mixed-up places in the world.

And she didn't say what the first four were.

Okay.

Surely Slovenia and Slovakia.

Yeah, you wouldn't assume at all.

I don't know what the others are.

So I googled it and I found there was a site called Bucharest notbudapest.com

which collects all the different times when people have mixed it up.

And Iron Maiden, Moor Chiba, Metallica and Lenny Kravitz have all mistaken Bucharest for Budapest on stage.

Cool.

Okay, where's the microphone?

The wages in Chelsea and Fulham are so high that it's the only constituency in the UK where the average wage is higher than the wage of their MP.

Wow.

So their MP is like the working man.

I know something about it,

I think it's the constituency of Kensington, which is nearby.

It's not a million miles away.

And it has the highest proportion of miners, as in M-I-N-E-R-S, in any constituency in the country.

And it's.

What?

Because it's a lot of people who own mines, basically.

So occupation mining.

Okay, let's move on.

Let's try and get some more in before we finish.

So Chris, who where is Chris?

Okay, so Apollo 13 nearly ended in disaster before it even got to space because of a malfunction that happened.

But a second malfunction occurred that saved the ship from being destroyed.

What?

Did it fix the first malfunction?

Yeah, pretty much.

Watch!

That's very rare.

Good thing we have an astrophysicist on the panel today.

That's when I should have been born.

The Age of Space.

That's incredible.

That's amazing.

So, okay, so because there's Apollo 13, my favorite movie of all time, there, it genuinely is.

Is it a real thing that happened as well as the movie?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's not your favourite event of all time, is it?

It kind of is, actually.

No, because to me, Apollo 13 is the greatest story ever told.

You have a tin heading out into deep space.

An explosion happens.

They're told they have something like an hour left of oxygen and they're going to die.

And everyone on the Earth and three men in a tin can have to solve it.

And the only way that they can get back home is to go that way towards the moon.

It's insane.

And they made it home at Spoiler Alert.

They made it home

alive.

And that is incredible.

And then obviously there's a big line in the movie where as they're going up, there is a malfunction and they say there was a glitch.

What was the line?

It was something like...

Yeah, so they say we've just had our glitch for this mission.

We just had our glitch for this mission, not knowing that there was gonna be this explosion.

Obviously, why would they have known?

But this is an interesting fact as well about glitches and things going wrong when you go into space.

There was a book called Moondust, and in it, someone from NASA was saying that on a good, successful space flight, 99.99%

of things work, which means a a typical ship is six million parts.

That means on a good flight, they expect 6,000 things to break as they're going up.

Did you just do that in your head right then?

No.

I was trying to style that out, and my mouth didn't let me.

6,000?

Yeah, that's incredible.

6,000 things.

Can you imagine any other job on the first time you use something?

6,000 things break.

If I was running it, I would take 6,000 very tiny, very breakable glass plates and I'd smash all of them as we set off, and then presumably everything else would work.

I don't think you understand probability at all.

Just another fact about things going wrong in space.

My wife told me this today, in fact, and that is that the two biggest disasters in rockets in Russian history both happened on the 24th of October on different years, but they happened on the same day.

And so, to this day, in all the rocket fields and stuff in Russia, they always turn all the electricity off and close everything down on that day just so it doesn't doesn't happen again.

Really?

Wow.

There are lots of Russian cosmonauts and astronaut superstitions.

So lots of things have built up over the years of the Russian space program.

So I think on the final drive to the

what is it, the lift-off point, the to the rocket ship?

To the rocket ship, thank you.

On the final drive,

the astronauts will get out, they'll stop the car, they'll get out, and they'll have a Wii against the right back wheel, I think it is, of the truck.

That's because Gagarin did that the first time.

What if you get performance anxiety and you can't go?

I presume.

It's like, yo, we need a launch.

I'm trying, I'm trying.

But F.

Scott Fitzgerald's going, what the fuck is that?

Hemingway lied to me!

Okay, should we keep going?

Yeah, let's see.

This one is from Sophie S.

Where are you, Sophie S?

Oh, right in the corner.

So let's find another fact while we're doing that.

Okay, so here is a fact from at the underscore image smith.

And that is, if you wanted to recreate the entire Lego movie with actual Lego, you would need 15,080,330 Lego pieces.

Well,

I mean, yeah, but why would you want to do that?

We've got the Lego movie and it's the best thing that's ever been done.

Yeah exactly.

Have we got the microphone?

Yes.

So my fact is when a dog enters a room it knows what's happened two hours before.

What are you talking about?

Did you learn this fact from me?

Because I don't think.

So he knows what food was on the floor and who was in the room before and is it through smell or through

smell.

But it can't tell anyone.

That's so nuts.

Oh,

tell me that Mike was here.

What are you saying, buddy?

Mike was here.

I think he's hungry.

Oh, no.

What a curse.

What a curse.

The idea is that once we got dogs, our brain shrunk, isn't it?

Oh, yeah.

And that is because when we were hunting, we needed to be really good at picking up scents and really good at hearing things, etc., etc.

And so then we got dogs and domesticated them, and then we didn't need to smell those things anymore.

And so that smell bit of our our brain shrunk.

And then we didn't need to hear things, and so the hearing bit of our brain shrunk.

And it's been shown that humans that were around before dogs were domesticated did have bigger brains.

Yeah, wow, that was busted.

Just a fact.

There is a thing about anteaters, which is that

when anteaters eat ants, they don't digest the ants that they eat.

The ants digest themselves.

Because the anteaters, they don't have the proper acid in their stomach.

But ants, obviously, have lots of formic acid inside them.

So they just digest themselves.

Wait, so they do that as a kind of like

Harry-Carry kind of thing?

No, they just.

When they die because they've been eaten, they start to produce this formic acid, and that then mulches the whole load of ants down.

So anteaters have now, again, got rid of that unnecessary bit of their digestive system, which they don't need anymore.

That is actually a bit like, and I actually, I think someone also wrote this fact down today that baby pounders can't digest eucalyptus, can they?

But it's koalas.

Sorry, sorry, pandas.

koala, potato patalas.

Whose fact was that?

Come up here quickly and say it.

Was that baby koalas can't digest eucalyptus when they're first born, so they have to get the bacteria from their mother's kind of poo to be able to digest eucalyptus.

I don't reckon humans would be able to digest stuff without the bacteria in their stomachs.

And you get the bacteria from your mother through their breast milk.

Yeah.

So, like, a baby probably wouldn't be able to digest, you know, Ben and Jerry's ice cream.

Damn it.

Isn't that weird that that's the most indigestible thing I could think of?

Yeah, yeah.

You think, what's the thing that's least like baby food in the world?

Colder milk.

You could have said steak or salmon on crude.

We actually put out on Twitter, we said you could win two tickets tonight if you come up with a fact, which is,

who was that?

Was that you?

Can you just yell out your fact?

Because it's about Ben and Jerry's, isn't it?

Ben and Jerry's milk comes from massaged cows.

What?

So, and I read into it, basically Ben and Jerry's, they have a big farm and they really look after their cows, including before they milk them.

They're just like, how are you today, sir?

Ma'am, I guess.

That's not milk.

And that's why I was kicked out of the bull rats.

Who's got the microphone?

We had another fact coming out, didn't we?

Oh, no, we don't.

Let's go.

Oh, no.

Okay, Anna.

No,

I think it's another Anna.

Hey, there's another Anna at the front.

Okay, let's find another fact from our Twitter list.

Okay, so.

I got one here.

Oh, go.

At Timote underscore Johnson, the motto of the Salvation Army is blood and fire.

They were very unpopular for a while.

People really didn't like the Salvation Army.

Maybe that was the branding issue.

No, they were, I mean, they're a Christian organization.

And I think it it was William Booth who set up the Salvation Army, and he was known as the General.

He was an incredibly organized and strict man.

And there was another army which was set up in opposition to the Salvation Army called, I think, the Skeleton Army.

Oh, yeah.

And they made it their business to disrupt the Salvation Army in all their good works.

And they were bastards.

They were, yeah, they were really unpleasant people.

And they threw rocks at them and they threw, you know, burning stuff at the salvation.

Whenever they turned up trying to help, yeah.

Wow.

Not funny, but you know, but with their motto, flowers and candy.

Should we go?

I don't know what we should.

Actually, Tom's is better.

Well, why don't you tell us both and we'll decide which is the better fact.

So since 1945, all British tanks must come equipped with tea-making supplies.

That's fantastic.

That's an excellent fact.

That's how I imagine you exist in life, Andy.

You're in a tank and there's tea in there.

Yep.

That's bad, weak, milky tea, by the way, if it's Andy.

But anyway, that's an office issue.

This is office stuff.

This is why I say you can't work in a team.

You're constantly throwing shade on my tea.

The worst thing is the milk came from Dan.

Let's hear the second fact.

Yeah, okay.

No, also, I've read that all

that

JCBs are so popular as digging machines because they all have kettles inside them that was the main feature wasn't that they dug better wasn't that they could carry more stuff they just have a kettle on board yes so you can make a cup of tea yeah i see

so was the rival fax yeah

i didn't know it was a rival fax

it is now uh okay so uh joseph stalin had um uh some Russian scientists attempt to create uh an ape-human hybrid because he thought it would be useful uh in Russian industry and would be able to better withstand pain.

And how are you you getting on, Dan?

Whoa!

I call a foul.

How far down the process did he get?

Well, I I d I don't know, but they enjoyed the dinner, but the bedroom was a complete disaster.

But it was ultimately a failure.

And he had

no

I mean, he had the scientist who was leading the project exiled to Kajakstan for failing.

Wow, that's tough.

Because he probably didn't want that project in the first place.

There was a prediction, you know, these cool old predictions they have of how life is going to be in the 21st century from 100 years ago, and they're always either spookily right or ridiculous.

And one of them said that we won't have to drive our cars anymore.

This is from, I think, the 20s, but I'm going off memory.

We won't have to drive our cars anymore because we will have a race of hyper-intelligent monkey butler creatures which will do the driving for us.

That's the only thing we'll have taught them to do.

This ties in nicely with a Twitter fact that we got sent by a guy called Ewan Taylor, which is, sorry, this is Facebook.

In 1953, NASCAR driver Tim Flock raced for eight races with a rhesus monkey named Jocko Flocco

as his co-driver.

So maybe he was trying to start the revolution there or the evolution.

I don't know, whichever.

Let's do one more and we should wrap up.

Why don't you choose Anna?

Yeah, Anna, go for it.

Yeah, sorry.

I think I forgot about the whole fact-choosing thing.

Okay.

It's from Steve.

Steve, yeah.

About particle accelerators.

Yes.

This is the kind of crowd in which we could have two Steve's who both brought a fact about particle accelerators.

Very true.

Okay, let's read something out.

I've got one.

This is from at TBUK2.

Dubuck2.

It's a Twitter name.

You may have already done this one.

A consultant urologist at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton, Somerset is named Nicholas Burns Cox.

He's my friend's dad.

No,

really?

Hello.

Did you send us that fact?

No,

oh my god.

That's cool.

Very cool.

I'm from Taunton.

He's really nice.

Wow.

My mum's from the Taunton Vale.

Yeah, it's a nice place.

Can I just say we're focusing on the wrong bit of the facts again?

Taunton's nice, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bridgewater said more or that.

Oh, no.

Who is it?

A urologist's granddaughter or daughter owns Napoleon's penis now, doesn't she?

What?

I think Napoleon's penis has been bought and rebought over the years and disappeared, and then it was left with a urologist who died and he left it in his will to his daughter.

Yeah, there's a lot.

So there's a lot of famous historical male penises that have been passed down through families, sold in order to fit.

Just male penises.

Yeah, just the male words.

Any male uteruses there?

Napoleon's was described at auction as a mummified tendon, which is quite a delicate way of putting it.

But it was an inch long.

But it was described by Scott Fitzgerald as a very, very good size.

Okay, okay.

Last fact, final fact is from Steve.

So the only man to ever stick his head in the path of a particle accelerator accelerator not only lived to complete his PhD

but also seems to have not aged since the accident.

What?

Wait.

What was the accident this week?

It was in 1978.

What?

So

Anatoly Bukorsky was a researcher at something that I can't remember the name of because I'm in a basement and my notes have vanished up there with the Wi-Fi.

Yeah, think how we feel.

Yeah, I know.

Basically, he was a researcher at an institute trying to complete his PhD,

and it was time to fix the particle accelerator.

And he stuck his head in it.

Yeah.

And the safety was apparently not working as well as it should have.

And all of a sudden, the particle accelerator fired and a beam passed through his head.

And he...

According to his own words, he didn't feel any pain, but he did see a light brighter than a thousand suns.

Yeah.

Wow.

And the left side of his face is pretty much no wrinkles.

Is he begging to shove the other side of his head into there?

Because presumably that's.

He's actually been interested for

Western scientists to come over and say and hang out with him and say what's going on in my brain, but he can't afford it.

Wow.

I think we'll go.

Yeah.

This is crying out for a kickstart.

We'll go.

Spacey dyno man and the logician.

All right.

Well, let's wrap up the show and visit him.

Thank you so much, guys, for coming to this experiment tonight.

We know it was going to be chaotic, but actually, I'm just putting this out there as someone who edits stuff.

That's going to edit down really awesomely.

That'll be a great three minutes, folks.

Yeah, yeah.

But thank you so much for coming.

I'm going to do the ending of the show.

That's it.

That's all of your facts.

If you want to reach any of the people who said their facts during the show, you're all probably on Twitter or on Facebook.

Hunt them down and question their sources.

We can be got on our regular Twitter handles.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter, and James.

At Eggshapes and Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

And we will be back again next week with another episode.

Thanks so much.

Have a good evening.

Goodbye.