72: No Such Thing As A Bacon Telescope

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Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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

My name is Dan Shriver.

I'm sitting here with Anna Czaczynski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Czazinski.

My fact is that the first item to be sent via New York's pneumatic tube postal system was an artificial peach, and the second was a live black cat.

An artificial peach, that's the interesting thing.

It was a huge, oversized one as well.

It's quite a leap, really, because you would think you'd go from artificial peach to real peach to artificial cat to real cat, but they just missed out a few steps.

Yeah, they got overconfident.

Yeah.

But the cat did survive.

Did it?

Bizarrely.

This story comes from the reminiscences of a postal worker called Howard Wallace Connolly.

He self-published an autobiography in 1931, and he worked for the Postal Service where New York was building its pneumatic postal delivery system, which is a system of pneumatic tubes, underneath New York.

And so he recounted the big launch of this pneumatic tube, which was an exciting event.

So there's a guy demonstrating the pneumatic tube, going, look how great this is.

This is coming from the other side of town, and there's this opening of the pneumatic tube, and something shoots out from it.

He opens it up, it's an artificial peach, and then a second thing shoots out of it, he opens it up, and a cat jumped out and looked really scared and tried to get away, and then they grabbed it.

I read, though, that they had a basket waiting for the cat, so someone knew.

This was pre-planned, it wasn't like a cat.

The cat hadn't leapt in of its own accord.

Cats get into places that they shouldn't get into.

I read just this morning, you know the famous scene in The Godfather, Marlon Brando stroking a cat that comes up onto the table?

That was a stray cat that just jumped on and Brando improvised with it.

Yeah, it's one of the most famous scenes in cinematic history.

What about that one in James Bond where he's stroking a cat?

The villain was meant to be the cat, and then Blofeld just walked on.

The cat started improvising.

It was a stray villain.

101 Dalmatians was just called One Dalmatian.

100 Strays just walked in.

By the way, though, London, 40 years before

New York had this pneumatic tubing, London had pneumatic tubing.

Do you know what the first thing they sent on their trip was

a novelty foam strawberry

followed by a live bear.

No, it was the Duke of Buckingham.

Was he just a stray Duke of Buckingham who just won the day?

Pneumatic tube sounds amazing.

They sound unbelievable.

It's the best thing ever.

So basically the way they work, just to quickly explain, although I'm sure people mostly know, is that it's a big pipe and you have to put a cylindrical tube in it and this and you put whatever you want to send inside the cylindrical tube, and the cylindrical tube is propelled down the big pipe by the force of compressed air or by a vacuum so that it's sucked into the vacuum.

And people thought this was how they were going to deliver posts.

So there was a time in the late 19th century in New York where I think a third of all posts was delivered by a pneumatic tube.

It kind of still feels like the future, doesn't it?

It's so futuristic.

I think, well, it sounds like it is going to be a part of the future now because Elon Musk, the billionaire of PayPal and who's been doing SpaceX and so on, he's now building a pneumatic ride to get people from San Francisco to LA.

Whoa, and it's going to take half an hour.

I think he suggested it.

Is he actually building it?

So, this was from an article two years ago.

So, actually, yes, I don't know fully if he's stuck with it.

His idea is that it'll take 35 minutes to go from San Francisco to LA, right?

But the current designs, there's no bathrooms in there.

So, you just kind of strap yourself in, and if you want to go, it's tough.

And let's face it, I've read that you travel at 800 miles an hour.

That's really good.

So, you would be wetting yourself wouldn't you that's true have you heard of william murdoch he was the guy who invented this in the uk and he is unbelievably cool so um he invented pneumatic tubes uh he invented gas lighting basically when he was 23 years old he walked 300 miles to birmingham to ask for a job with james watt the steam engine pioneer he got the job partly because he had an interview with uh what's business partner matthew builton the reason he got the job was because builton was fascinated by murdoch's wooden hat

he had a hat he'd made himself out of wood.

And he wore it 300 miles as he walked to Birmingham.

And then he said, Can I have a job?

Because it's a talking point in an interview, clearly.

He also invented a steam gun, which fired lead bullets, and he invented a steam cannon.

And this is on his Wikipedia.

It just says a steam cannon, which he attempted to use in 1803 to knock down a wall in Soho.

That's all it says.

It seems to me, and I don't want to put this guy down, but he's just adding steam to lots of other inventions.

You're a Luddite.

I think this guy's amazing.

I want to add steam to everything.

There are some modern-day applications of pneumatic tubes, right, which are also quite fun.

Go on.

They're really common in hospitals.

That's one of the few places I think where they're still used regularly for quickly transporting medications up and down floors and around hospitals.

So that's quite interesting.

Also, a salmon cannon, so that's quite handy.

Pneumatic tubes are used to propel salmon in America now over waterfalls because sometimes there's a problem with salmon because we've built a lot of dams and so they can no longer get up the river to lay their eggs at the top of the river.

So we shoot salmon

through the air.

Do you know how birds kind of sit by the river and they wait for a salmon to jump out and then kind of grab it?

They must be going, what the fuck was that?

But if you work out

whether it's going to land at the other end, you're just sitting there with your mouth open waiting for the salmon to land at it.

There is a restaurant in New Zealand called C1 which has food delivery pipes and they fire out burgers to tables in pipes.

I went to in Abu Dhabi Dhabi there's a restaurant which is a roller coaster restaurant and you sit and your food gets roller coaster to you.

So the food gets to do a really fun roller coaster ride.

Yeah.

Well no it's a time because it's attached to Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi which has the fastest roller coaster in the world.

So it's just a little bit of a Does Only Food get to enjoy that as well?

Only vegetables allowed?

That restaurant in New Zealand, the owner said that the tubes would be locked until it had delivered the actual canister to the table.

And he said, and I quote, a canister of that speed could take someone's hand off.

We certainly don't want to be known for that.

There is also a restaurant in Bangkok called Cartron, and they send their food by catapult to the table.

So the chickens are cooked in the kitchen, loaded into a catapult, fired across the restaurant, and caught on a spike by a waiter riding a unicycle.

No, no, no.

The health and safety required to have a man on a unicycle holding a spike riding around a restaurant with chickens being fired at him.

What if he doesn't catch it?

He always does.

He always does.

James is the PR man for this movie.

Someone got decapitated by a chicken.

We don't want to be known for that.

I looked into cats this slide, but

just off the back of it being a black cat.

It was the first.

Read something crazy this morning.

Cats are lactose intolerant.

No.

Yeah.

I had no idea.

They drink milk.

Yeah.

Well, no, we give them milk and they drink it.

They don't know not to drink it, but they technically, majority, are lactose intolerant.

So but they do keep lapping it up.

Yeah, yeah.

But they're so they're quite stupid then.

Because most animals, if something makes them sick, they avoid it.

Yeah, weird, hey.

That's why funny how dogs are allergic to dog food.

Yeah, I know.

Cats can be allergic to humans as well.

Can they?

Yeah, in the same way that humans can, like, cat fur can make you sneeze and

make your eyes water, cats can get allergic to their owners.

My god, I have definitely been feeding our cats the wrong things then.

Chopped up human.

With a side of milk.

No, I really feel terrible.

Yeah.

I read as well that so whiskers are obviously very important to cats.

I didn't realize they had whiskers on other bits of their body that were just important.

So they have whiskers on the back of their legs.

Really?

Yeah, so they use it for if their sight is bad at night.

That's the thing.

So for their hunting prey that might be below them, they have it on the back of their legs.

That's really cool.

I found that out on Pussington Post,

which is like a

cat news

website.

I thought Pussington Post was a magazine that was banned in the 90s.

I've just clicked on the Pussington Post, and the headlines are unbelievably good.

Cat interrupts cross-stitching.

Irish police take care of exceptionally cute kitten found by roadside.

Marmalade's epic birthday party.

This is amazing.

There was an inventor called Joseph Sturtzel in 1908,

and he proposed a system of larger pneumatic tubes to transport freight.

I know Andy's still laughing at the Pussington Post, but I think we're just going to ride on past that.

Catman from Japan walks nine cats in a stroller.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Go on.

We've got to stop letting Andy have a laptop during these.

Yes.

It's becoming a child here.

This is why I feed my cats milk.

So they stop ruining the podcasts.

Yeah, so this guy decided that people could be transported in pneumatic tubes

in Chicago.

So in 1908, he erected these pneumatic tubes and then to prove it to people, like shooting that you could shoot people underground,

he said, I will demonstrate for you

and here's my young son Robert to do that.

And he laid his little son down and there's a really good picture of it.

If you look up Chicago Daily News pneumatic carrier, there is a terrified looking ten year old boy lying down in a cylinder about to be shot.

Extremely fast through a tube.

And it was okay?

Not sure, actually.

Let's look into it.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be host.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that scientists have made algae that tastes like bacon.

I'd eat that.

Did you?

Yep.

Have they made it for fish to make their lives a bit more enjoyable?

That'd be good.

That would be so nice.

Yeah, why did they make it?

They've made it because it's a possible new kind of superfood.

It's a kind of algae called dulse.

It's a bit like seaweed and it tastes like bacon, but it's high in protein and it has twice the nutritional value of kale.

So it means that if you're a vegetarian, or maybe we'll all be vegetarians in the future, we'll be able to eat this stuff and still have the delicious, delicious taste of bacon.

But the texture of algae?

What is the texture of algae?

Slimy, I reckon.

Yeah, slimy, squishy.

Well, seaweed is a kind of algae,

and that you know, that tastes good sometimes.

Yeah.

I mean, it tastes like crunchy salt.

Yeah, it's delicious.

Oh, yeah, it's delicious.

Yeah, I love seaweed.

Bacon flavoured seaweed.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's really nice.

Yeah, but I just like this kind of idea of like food science and creating weird flavours.

And I think probably it's the future, isn't it?

Definitely.

I mean, we definitely are going to need to spend a lot of attention on turning vegetables into things that taste like meat in the next couple of years, I think.

Because I think we will all be vegetarian quite soon.

Fortunately, I won't be alive then.

You all have died of cholesterol overdose.

I was looking at what algae actually is.

Oh, yeah, what is it?

Well, there's no generally accepted definition of algae because it comes from lots of different phyla, and there is just biologically it's loads of different things, I think.

But I had no idea how cool it is.

So, 70 or 80% of the oxygen in the atmosphere comes from marine plants, and those are almost all algae.

Wow.

So, people think that a lot of the oxygen comes from plants photosynthesizing, but it's actually blue-green algae that photosynthesising.

Yeah, it's amazing.

You can even make algae into oil.

They found a way of doing that.

Yeah.

A new kind of technology, and they think that might be the future of biofuels.

Yeah, I think they found that it's twice as efficient as

biofuels that they make on land.

I think it's about twice as efficient as that,

or you can use half as much as you can.

And also means you're not using up the land, which you can then use for making delicious bacon.

Another cool thing that you can do with algae is they've recently discovered that it absorbs light in a really unusual way, and blind people can have their sight restored by introducing an algae gene into them.

Basically, you introduce to these people a gene that encodes this light-sensitive protein, which is one that only algae has,

and then you introduce that gene into the retinal cells of a blind person, and their sight can be restored.

That's amazing.

Yeah, it's cool.

Also, do you know the animal whose eyes are the best to transplant into a human face?

Cats?

That would be awesome.

Or like goats, which have rectangular pupils.

That would be really fun.

It's sharks because they have surprisingly similar eyes to ours.

No way.

Does that happen now?

Yeah, it does.

Isn't that incredible?

People are going around with sharks' eyes in their face.

I would like to have shark nose transplants so I could smell blood from 500 miles.

And you would look so great as well.

Here's another thing that they're using algae for.

They've worked out that algae might be perfect for making batteries.

So I just can't see how you would squish algae into the back of a T V remote.

No, there's probably more science behind it than just taking the seaweed.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm just the same way that you can't can't just shove algae in someone's face to stop them from being blind.

There is a sea slug that eats algae and then it can steal the genes from the algae and it can then photosynthesize and it can run on solar power rather than eating stuff.

Is clever.

So if we ate that sea slug, would we be able to photosynthesize?

Shoved it in your face.

Is there any way that we could steal that technology from the sea slug so that we could photosynthesize?

You couldn't do it just by eating the sea slug, but theoretically I suppose you could kind of splice some genes.

Do you want to have you always wanted to be able to photosynthesize, Andy?

Imagine if everyone photosynthesized so that we were all producing oxygen.

Yeah, no, it would be used to just producing couple of things.

You'd only need half of us, wouldn't you?

I could photosynthesize and my wife could just respire in the normal way, and then we'd have a net no gain or no loss.

Yeah.

Wow.

I was looking into food science.

Shall we talk about that as well?

So food science-wise, one thing I really liked is dog food is tested on humans.

Really?

Yeah.

Had no idea.

So you can have, this is a job.

Anyone who makes dog food, that is a job.

And I found the salary ranges between 34,000 American and 117,000 American per year.

It's not just the money, though, it's the shiny, shiny coat that you get.

What you'll be doing is not only testing it, you're developing it as well.

So here's the thing that they say.

More salt, more salt, like that kind of thing.

Their thing is that they say dogs will eat anything.

What dogs will like though is what humans will quite like.

So when humans eat dog food they'll go mmm would I feed that to myself?

No, so I won't feed it to the dog.

So that's kind of the mentality.

That's a very strange bit of reasoning to assume that humans and dogs have the same sense of taste.

Their point is you can't reliably ask a dog to go, no, that's no use because dogs will just eat it.

Yeah, so who cares what their food tastes like?

All those adverts where they say nine out of ten dogs prefer pedigree chump, they should actually say nine out of ten humans prefer pedigree chump.

Do they have them on all fours on the floor in the lab?

They don't wear name tags.

They've got dog collars around them.

Why don't you check the Waffington Post and see what they say?

I bet that's what they're doing.

That must be real.

Check it out.

That has to be real.

I have a serious quibble with this fact.

Dog food is not manufactured to be something that humans want to eat.

Otherwise, we'd just give them human food.

Have you ever tasted dog food?

I have smelt it, and I do think you can tell a lot from a smell.

Yeah, absolutely.

But people ate dog food during the Second World War when human food was in very short supply.

Right.

Yeah.

So you're using that as evidence that humans do enjoy it?

Well, no.

Maybe it's evidence that these guys actually know of an imminent war that's coming and that we're going to have to be returning to dog food.

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

My fact is that telescopes have a new telescope smell that can break them.

So you know new car smell?

Yeah.

Where you have the lovely smell of a new car.

You get the same with a telescope in space.

You even smell things in space.

Yeah.

So there's not many molecules, aren't they?

Not many molecules, but I imagine that they they give off the molecules.

If I was in space with my massive shark nose, I might be able to smell it.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So this is something called outgassing, which is where if you've built something using particular chemicals, they give off volatile chemicals.

They're called VOCs, volatile organic compounds.

Unfortunately, telescopes telescopes are so sensitive these days that if they give off the chemicals it can literally break them and all the

VOCs get stuck on the optical surfaces of the telescope and that ruins what you're seeing through it.

So yeah.

What you're saying they're called VOCs.

What's that stand for?

Volatile organic compounds.

Oh right, bacon has them as well.

Really?

Yeah, he has 150 volatile organic compounds that contribute to bacon's meaty aroma.

And these compounds are given off by bacon, but but they're not really given off by ham or gamma or whatever.

And that's kind of why bacon is so much tastier.

I'm not sure why, but yeah.

It's also why you don't give any space telescopes made of bacon

yet.

So, about smell, okay.

You can smell danger,

okay?

Everyone has this ability, or most people do.

Volunteers who couldn't tell the difference between two similar smells, so it's like bacon and bacon-y smell,

bacon and facing,

then, if they were given an electric shock from one of them and then not the other one, then later they could distinguish the two different smells.

Because they remembered the electric shock that they had.

That is really cool.

Right.

But wait, what does that have to do with smelling danger?

I thought you meant if I'm walking on the street and there was a mugging going on behind the alley,

I couldn't see it, I could smell danger.

Yeah, it's not quite smelling.

So it's not quite.

Oh, what a shame.

Whereas if you had been approached by two people who smelled very, very similar and one of them had mugged you,

later on, you'd be able to tell which of the muggers there was.

Actually, don't they say that when they do line-ups with police,

you know, when they do a police line-up and they bring someone who is at the scene of the crime, something new that they've started trying out is to get them to close their eyes and go purely by the smell, because smell's actually a really big thing.

Wow, I was going to ask if there have been any police line-ups which only used smell and completely dispensed with the visual element of it.

If you were blind and you were mugged, maybe that would be a thing.

Maybe.

They smelled of oak, you know, something like that.

Were you being mugged by a tree here?

That'd be a great line-up.

Five men, one tree.

I know who it was immediately.

No, I don't need to do the smell test, honestly.

Smells of oak, like a wine as well.

The man who mugged me, I'd say he was five foot nine with notes of citrus.

He was fruity, full-bodied.

Go on.

No, after you.

I was just going to say that the only scent to win an EU trademark is the smell of freshly cut grass, and that was registered by a Dutch perfume company, and it uses it to give tennis balls their aroma.

When we did this fact, I was like, I'm desperate to know what that amazing smell is when you click open on YouTube of tennis balls and it smells so delicious.

It's the best part of a game of tennis.

And I couldn't.

How good are you at tennis?

Anyway, the company that sprays these balls for the smell of freshly cut grass has trademarked that smell with the EU.

That's very cool.

Yeah.

Smells in space, we were talking about because of this telescope.

There's an artist called Carrie Patterson who wants to send messages to aliens but include smells in them as well.

So the idea is, you know, we would send like these messages with pictures of humans or which planet we're from and stuff like this.

She thinks that we should send smells as well in case the aliens are particularly good with smells, like a dog or

a shark or whatever.

She wants to send smells of animal blood and feces.

That's a good welcoming message.

Anytime.

I see you've moved into the neighbourhood.

But even if we send nice smells, how do we know that their excrement doesn't smell like freshly opened tennis balls?

And therefore, this would be a huge insult.

Yeah.

Also benzene to show our global dependence on the car.

And the blood and feces is to show that we have like carbon-based life forms.

This explains why that got left on my doorstep the other other day.

Someone was trying to explain to me that we're carbon-based life forms.

Oh, that's great.

Telescopes?

Yeah.

Yeah.

There is a telescope called the Ice Cube Telescope.

I don't know if you guys know about this, which is buried a mile under the ice in Antarctica.

And yeah, that's cool.

It's the only one that's looking for gravity waves.

It's looking for neutrinos.

It actually has.

So I think the only place that we had detected neutrinos was from the sun until a couple of years ago, and then they used this telescope to find, detect 28 neutrinos under the ice in Antarctica.

28.

They built a telescope and buried it a mile deep for 28 neutrinos.

That's right, yeah.

What are neutrinos?

They're totally neutral particles that were theoretical for ages.

Yeah, and that fired out from the sun, and there's billions of them passing through your body every second.

Wow.

And also, they don't really react with anything.

Yes.

Wow, wow.

Just very quickly, we should say how they fix the new telescope smell breaking it problem.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

They use a spray paint made of this chemical called zeolite, which I'd never heard of before.

It doesn't absorb the chemicals that are given off, it adsorbs them, which means it reacts chemically and binds to them.

So, yeah.

They clean telescopes, or they clean telescope mirrors using snow spray, don't they?

Firing a spray of very fine snow particles.

Oh, right.

So not that stuff that you spray on your window to make it look festive.

No, not the stuff you spray on the Christmas tree.

That would ruin the telescope.

It's got a ghastly mix-up, and that has been another $500 million.

Because the intern in the office heard a QI factoid on the podcast.

Just do these guys a favour and polish this.

No, they spray special snow, which is made of carbon dioxide at the mirror, and then it freezes and creates little snowflakes.

And then, when the snowflakes slide down it, it takes any little tiny particles of dust and dirt with it.

That is amazing.

That's very cool.

That is very cool.

You know, the

you know Gene Shoemaker, the very famous, spotted a lot of comets, I think famously the one that impacted on Jupiter.

I saw there was one called Schumachalevi, which went past the Earth a few years ago.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

So

he worked a lot with his wife, Carolyn Shoemaker,

to find all of these comets out in space.

Do you know how they found all these comets?

Using what?

A telescope?

No.

Microscope.

Really?

So they would take all the images from the telescope, but they were so grainy and so small that they would use a microscope.

And using the microscope, that's how they would eventually spot all of the comets.

Wow, that's really cool.

Yeah.

Mirrors are obviously a really vital part of telescopes now.

And I read

that.

If you put a mirror half a light-year away from Earth, and then you looked at it through a telescope, you can see a year into the Earth's past.

How cool is that?

We should plant a mirror half a light-year away.

The great thing about that is, whenever I look in the mirror in the morning I always look so old.

There you go.

So you would look a year younger.

Maybe put it even further away, James.

For you I would say maybe a few light years away.

Sucks.

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We the man to be home.

Winner, best score.

We the man to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com

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

My fact this week is that there is a museum in North Korea that has a scaled-down replica of the world's largest table.

From what I'm told, it's been scaled down to the size of a normal table.

So, this fact actually got sent in to us via our email, podcast at QI.com, and it was sent to us by a guy called Ian Kimball.

And he said in episode 50, we'd started talking about my favorite table, which was going to be a side podcast, Anna Chaczinski's favorite tables.

And he was in North Korea, and he went to a thing called the National Friendship Exhibition.

And that's basically an exhibition where they show all the presents that have been given to North Korea by countries around the world to show to the North Koreans how loved they are by the rest of the world.

And he wrote a blog about it, and in this blog, he included, amongst the other things in his list, the table.

And it's one of these things where I've been googling it, and I can't actually find verification that the table exists.

So I'm taking his word for it here,

which is a bit dangerous, but I don't know.

I think first-hand research sounds about right.

Yeah, exactly.

I tried to find out what the largest table in the world is.

And there are a few different records.

So there's the longest table in the world, which was broken this month.

It was broken in July 2015.

Sorry, the table was broken.

No, sorry.

The record was broken.

It was 1500 meters long.

There's an iftar table, which is the meal for when Muslims break Ramadan, they're fast.

It's a very, very, very, very long table.

Excuse me, can you pass the salt?

And there's also the largest desk in the world, which is in a New York marketing firm's office, and which can seat 125 employees.

Wow.

Yeah, and it goes through the entire office and it ramps up, and it's sort of made from a single piece of resin that was poured into the cast or however.

Wow.

So, you know, there's a bit here where a certain department sits, but then it banks up to the floor above and then swoops around.

And it's very, very cool.

It's so cool.

Yeah, it's really cool.

So you can get an app now, which is a tourist guide to North Korea.

So it's a North Korea travel app.

It's not condoned by North Korea, it's built in Britain.

And it contains genuinely quite useful advice about traveling there.

So they, for instance, talk about the Rajin Zoo, saying, best known as World's Worst Zoo, where the attractions are three ducks, a turkey, some elusive foxes, and a drawing of a monkey.

They've also actually.

A drawing of a monkey.

That's a great, great zoo.

It saves on feed, doesn't it?

It definitely does.

If you've got a drawing of a monkey, you just need to give it a, you know.

A drawing of a banana.

Just on this North Korea app, it just has some other good travel advice you can get.

It suggests that you bribe your guide by bringing him really good quality alcohol, and then he'll be more likely to give you a better tour.

But it does say don't ask your guide any difficult questions because guides will be blamed for tourists who cause trouble.

So if you've been guided around North Korea, yeah, don't start a fight or anything.

And it acknowledges, it says, most of the guides will be aware of the inaccuracies of their government's line on things, but try not to embarrass them by challenging them.

I think that's fair.

It's not polite, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nod and smile.

It describes the People's Army Circus as a circus that you can visit.

They've got a drawing of a clown.

It says, this circus very rarely features any animals, but does almost always feature an anti-American clown show.

An anti-American clown show.

What, if that's your bag?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I would be interested to see what that involves.

Yeah.

Something about weird museums.

Yeah.

You were saying.

In Kansas, you can find a place called the World's Largest Collection of the World's Smallest Versions of the World's Largest Things,

which is a traveling museum.

Wow.

What happens is they find out about a world's largest thing and then they document it, usually by going to visit it, and then they make a tiny version of it.

Damn it, I thought you were going to say then they make the machine from Honey Ice Front the Kids and fire it at the thing

and take it away with them.

God, those were great films.

They were fantastic.

Rick Moranis.

Yes.

So to make these smaller versions, they say that they have to find find materials that are most appropriate, but that they can find.

So the world's smallest version of the world's largest ball of rubber bands is made of miniature rubber bands.

And weirdly, the world's smallest version of the world's largest otter is made from a dashened figurine cut in two, filled in with modelling clay.

Wow.

Sounds great.

Very creative.

Another museum, and I've mentioned this previously on the podcast, that in Georgia that there was a museum dedicated to Elvis, in which one of the displays was maybe Elvis' toenail.

This lady

found it in a carpet when she was at Graceland in the jungle room, and she got to the ground because she wanted to feel where Elvis would have walked.

And she came across this toenail and thought it must be his, but she can't verify it.

But she put it into her own Elvis museum that she's opened, which is called the Louder Milk Boarding House Museum.

It contains 30,000 Elvis Presley artifacts.

Possibly 29,900.

I mean, how many of the others?

Well, maybe this belonged to Elvis.

It appeared slightly near him on one occasion.

Well, she has a vial of sweat.

She has a wart.

And actually, a lot of people, she says, come to her and say, Could you donate the wart to science so that they could clone Elvis?

And she says, It wouldn't be right.

He wouldn't be happy.

Which is rich coming from someone who's collecting body parts.

I believe actually Elvis himself is in that museum.

Well, a drawing of him.

Potato potato.

But if you cloned him from a wart, wouldn't he just be an enormous wart?

With funny hair.

I don't think that's quite how cloning works.

When they cloned Dolly the sheep, which came from a bit of a mammary gland, it wasn't just an enormous sheep mammary gland.

Yeah, exactly.

Big woolly breast.

She also has Elvis hair button, which has the hair of Elvis in it, donated to her by Elvis' barber.

Next to it, she also has a cease and desist letter from selling Elvis Presley hair buttons.

She started manufacturing and selling them, and legal action was threatened against her.

Or did she put sort of one hair in each button or something?

Exactly.

Oh, come on.

Yeah.

The old Boat Store Cafe in Cornwall has the Museum of Celebrity Leftovers.

Oh.

And their exhibits include an actress called Mia Vasikovska, who I've never heard of, a clogette from her soup is on display there, and there is a piece of Prince Charles's bread pudding, which he chose to leave unfinished one time, and a few other exhibits.

Wow.

Oh, God.

I think I really like these little museums.

I think they all serve an interesting, unneeded purpose, but yet I'm happy they exist.

I'm not sure they're all museums.

Well, one day, because like, you know, for example, they have bits of hair from in the Smithsonian, I think it is, from 14 presidents.

And, you know, at the time that wasn't.

Are they bits of hair or are they just hair that was found in a carpet vaguely near somewhere where they gave a speech once?

All belong to Elvis.

Yeah, well, it's interesting what is a museum and what isn't, because a museum is just a collection of interesting artefacts or culturally significant artefacts or historical artifacts.

So yeah, these are definitely museums.

There's a museum in

Tasmania, and I can't remember what it's called, but it's a museum that's made up entirely of stolen tiny little bits from other famous bits of museum exhibits.

So it's really

okay.

That's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

At Egg Shaped.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

And you can also get us on at qi podcast.

That's our group Twitter account.

Or go to no such thingasofish.com where you can see all of our previous episodes and have a listen.

We will be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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