71: No Such Thing As A Somersaulting Long Jumper

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Hello

and

welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish this week coming to you from the literary arena in the Latitude Festival.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with three other QILs.

It's Anna Chaczynski, Andy Murray, and James Harkin.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

And we're going to start with my fact this week.

My fact this week is that the world record for horse long jump is shorter than the world record for human long jump.

That just can't even be true.

That just is so obviously not true.

It's unbelievable.

No, it's absolutely true.

But here's the weird thing:

horse long jump, did anyone know that existed?

It was an Olympic sport for one year.

I have a question about the horse long jump.

Did they have to do it with a human on their back?

Yes.

Well, then, of course, they're going to, like, if you put a, if you put a horse on a human's back.

Yeah.

That's not a fair comparison, though.

You need to put something, so it'd be like strapping a child to your back, maybe.

Okay.

Which wouldn't be allowed, I guess.

No.

But listen, horses, okay, how many people here, just by show of hands, are surprised that humans can jump further than horses?

Yeah, pretty much everyone.

And when you say surprised, none of them believe you.

Okay, so this is absolutely true.

You can go online to Wikipedia.

So this was in the 1900s.

You and your niche sources for these factors.

So 1900 at the Olympics, they did the horse jump.

The guy riding the horse was called Constant van Langhendonk, and his horse was called Extra Dry.

And he jumped as far as he jumped about six meters and that's not actually the horse record so that was just their first ever attempt at the Olympics everyone said let's not do that again let's move on let's never speak about this but the world record as it stands was set in 1975 by a horse the horse was called something and what was it called

Something.

The horse was actually called something.

That was the actual name of the horse.

By Mr.

Andre Ferreira and they jumped 8.4 meters.

So that's the horse record.

The human record is is 8.95 meters.

Yeah, and that was set in 1991 by a guy called Mike Powell.

It's still holding to this day as the longest human jump.

What about height?

Can we jump higher than horses or can they jump higher than us?

I don't think horses can go higher, I reckon.

Can they?

Yeah.

Well, I've looked it up.

Oh, really?

And there is an official high jump record for horses, and it's 2 meters 47.

And the official high jump record for humans is 2 meters 45.

Oh, it's 200.

So they can beat us by 2 centimetres.

Wow.

But do they know that we're asking them to jump really high?

There's the problem.

There's a big fence in the way that gives a bit of a clue.

Yeah.

They just don't have the competitive urge.

They don't know that they need to win.

That's true.

But the thing is with human high jump is it...

There was a massive difference, wasn't there, when Dick Fosbury came in and did his Fosbury flop, which is going over backwards.

And until then, the record was a certain amount, and then it went massively up in a really short amount of time.

And what's interesting with him is he was the in the American, he won gold in the Olympics in 1968, but by 1970 he wasn't even in the Olympic team anymore because everyone else had seen his tactic and gone, that's amazing.

And he wasn't even that good a high jumper.

Really?

It's just the technique.

Yeah, just the technique.

That was the only thing that did it.

He wasn't even that good.

So long jump was almost the opposite, right?

Because the long jump record, until it was broken by Mike Powell in 1991, was held for, I think, a record length of time in in the Olympics.

So it was broken in 1968 by Robert Bowman.

And he just did this incredible long jump.

So the record up until then had been 21 feet and three-quarters of an inch.

And then in 1968, he jumped 29 feet and 2.5 inches.

And he jumped so far that they couldn't record it properly because they didn't have the equipment to stretch that far.

They didn't have the equipment to stretch that far.

Yeah.

I don't know how advanced the equipment has to be in order for you to buy another one metre ruler to measure the upstream.

So I think he jumped 29 feet the thing is with long jumps is they reckon some people reckon I don't know if it's true some people reckon you could go further if you do a somersault while you're jumping that makes sense but there's a rule that says you're not allowed the rule is very clear it says the jumper's head has to stay in a superior position during the jump so your head has to be always the highest point but why has someone done it and then they've gone further well they said that it was maybe due to it being dangerous but the actual reason that they said they jumped uh banned it when they did is that nobody would jump a puddle in this way.

So apparently that's what we're doing.

With a long jump, it's just a way of jumping a puddle.

Good Olympic reasoning.

Do you want to hear something else that happened at the 1900 Olympics?

Yes, please.

Men's underwater swimming.

So start underwater and you just keep going until you have to come up.

And you get a point for every second you're underwater and you get a point for every meter you swim underwater.

It was never held again because of, and I quote, a lack of spectator appeal.

Actually, they're kind of bringing that back, you know, because they found that swimming underwater is quicker than swimming freestyle.

Yeah, yeah, it's called the fish kick.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's the first time they found a new swimming stroke which is faster than freestyle, the first time it's happened in hundreds of years.

Yeah,

it's literally moving your hips really, really far and moving your arms around.

You look like a fish when you're doing it.

Yeah.

There's another, so horse long jump has been abandoned

as an Olympic sport.

There's a list of other Olympic sports that we no longer do.

This is my favorite one: Solo Synchronized Swimming.

And that was for three Olympics.

Just one person in a pool with music, loving it.

And eventually they thought it's just not working for us.

That's amazing.

That's so cool.

Another thing they had at the 1900 Olympics was, so they were really into horse events at the Olympics, I think, and they had the mail coach

event, which was basically who can deliver post the fastest.

And was so it was a four-in-hand mail coach event, and it was four horses on a mail coach.

And, you know, you've got your letters, and it was a race.

And the guy who won it, actually, was the guy who then went on to found the Orion Express Company, weirdly.

So he was the guy behind Orion Express Trains.

You'll have seen some of my work in the Olympics.

That's very cool.

Have you heard of Margaret Abbott?

No.

She was an art student from America.

Right.

She won, in the 1900 Olympics, she won a nine-hole golf tournament, but she didn't know it was an Olympic event.

She died 55 years later, still not knowing that she was America's first female Olympic champion.

Wow.

I know!

No one told her at any point.

How did she get into the Olympics then?

I don't know.

There are all these sort of weird half-Olympic events, so the male coach, I think, they've decided now it wasn't a

technically an Olympic event and all of this stuff.

There's all this kind of shadow Olympics.

And the horse high jump, I think, at that same event was decided it didn't count as an Olympic event, but the horse long jump did.

Because horses jumped, I think they jumped just over six foot at that.

Oh, did they?

Yeah.

So the modern Olympics, you know, it disappeared for a long time.

Obviously, someone brought it back.

And the person who brought it back, one of the main people, was a guy called Baron de Couberton.

So Baron de Couberton decided when he set it up that he was going to award an Olympic gold.

So someone won this in the Olympics for literature.

Right?

So there was a whole arts category that happened with the Olympics, which they've since dropped.

But so they did it in all different things.

They did it in sculpture, architecture, in poetry.

But do you know who won the poetry award?

No.

He did.

Did he?

Did he?

He was no good at sports, but he set up the Olympics and he's like, well, how am I going to win a gold medal then?

And so he set up poetry and then he did a poem himself and he won a gold medal.

Guys, I really, really think we should have a poetry competition in the Olympics.

I know it's kind of sporty, but you know.

Yeah, it was meant to be the whole thing.

1948 was the last, that was the last London Olympics before 2012.

That was the last time they had architecture and was it?

Yeah, sculpting,

town planning.

Town planning.

I've got the town planning.

There was an Olympic medal for town planning.

Yeah, but it was solo town planning.

That was very important.

So they also had it for painting and graphic art.

So I've got the gold, silver, and bronze winners of the 1948 painting and graphic art competition.

So in at bronze was a guy called Alex Digelman from Switzerland who won it for his graphic art world championship for ice hockey poster.

Silver was Alex Digelman from Switzerland for World Championship for cycling poster.

Gold medal to no one.

That is a bronze music.

And then they just didn't award a gold medal.

That is brutal.

Can you imagine losing to nobody?

So the art, the the Olympic art had to be art that was about Olympic sports.

Yes.

Presumably.

Everything had to be about the Olympics.

Imagine having to tell him that he won silver and he'd be really excited and he'd say, oh, that's great.

I'm so made up to have one silver.

Who got gold?

Yeah, little thing, Alex.

There is an interesting thing.

They did a study of faces of people who are doing races, who do running races in the Olympics.

And they could tell how happy people were by how smiley they were on the podium.

And anyone who came second was much more miserable than whoever came third.

They found that out.

Because the people who came second, presumably, are really upset because they just missed out on gold.

And the people who came third are, well, I got something at least.

Yeah.

You told us, okay, James told us this great thing the other day about Usain Bolt.

What was that quiz question that you said about him breaking the 100 meters?

Oh, yeah.

Well, his fastest ever 100 meters is a lot faster than world record.

And that's because the second half of his 200 meters, he'd already had a running start.

And so I think he beat nine seconds for 100 meters, Hussein Bolt.

But he was already running.

He was already starting.

He had a really start, yeah.

But when he broke the one hundred meters world record, he had one of his shoes untied.

One of his shoelaces untied.

No way.

That's how good he is, yeah.

That would be so distracting.

How did he not stop?

I'm sure he wasn't looking at it the whole time going, Should I deal with this?

Did he stop and tie it up?

Yeah, he still broke the record in spite of stopping to tie it up.

That would actually be double knot or.

Yeah.

When he does 100 meters, his feet are touching the ground for I think two seconds

in the whole race.

Wow.

Yeah.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

Do you want to know something else about the long jump in ancient Greece?

This was so hard that you were allowed to have weights, so you held these weights and you sort of threw them behind yourself as you jump forward.

Also, the ancient Greek long jump was so tricky that you were allowed to have a flute playing so you could keep time with it as you did your jump.

That was their concession.

We know this is really hard, so we'll give you a flute player to make it a a bit easier.

What, so the flute played a rhythm and they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The flute would play in time so that you could make your jump.

I do feel like between flute playing and steroids, you'd probably go over the latter, wouldn't you?

We understand this is hard.

You can have an orchestra accompanying you.

Awesome performance materials.

We're going to be tested for flutes, obviously, for lyres.

Yeah, all kinds of stuff.

We're going to have to move on to our second facts.

Does anyone have anything else before we do?

No?

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Okay, time for our second fact and that is Chaczynski.

Yeah, my fact is that every time Alfred Hitchcock had a cup of tea, he always smashed the teacup.

That was what he did.

Always.

Well, apparently every morning he'd have his cup of tea before he went off to work and he'd drink the tea, smash the teacup, go to work, he'd drink tea in the studio, throw teacups at the wall and it was just his tea drinking habit.

He sounds very difficult, doesn't he?

He's a madman.

He was a madman.

Someone wrote a biography recently about him saying he was doing it to remind himself of the the frailty of human life.

So he throws a tea gub against the wall and thinks, oh, that's like me dying.

But he just did it.

He used to smash.

He used to punch light bulbs out quite a lot on set as well.

Yeah, yeah, he did it.

That's how he turned off lights.

Yeah, yeah.

He turned the light on and then he just punched it until it stopped giving out light.

And actually, speaking of horses,

he was really good friends with Gerald DeMaurier, who was Daphne De Maurier's dad.

And

Gerald DeMaurier was an actor.

And at one point, point, Alfred Hitchcock, while Gerald Damaier was out on stage performing a play, Alfred Hitchcock, somehow, and nobody knows how, had a horse delivered to his dressing room.

So Gerald came back, you know, at the interval or whatever, while he was performing, went into his dressing room, and there was a huge horse there.

And he didn't know what to do with it.

And no one knows how it got there, and I don't know how he removed it.

He was a bit of a prankster, wasn't he?

He loved practical jokes, yeah.

One of the things he used to do was he would get into a lift with a friend of his who who told amazing stories.

And then he would start to tell this incredible, incredible story.

And then, as soon as the doors opened, he would get just about to the punchline and then walk out so that everyone else in the lift is like, no, what happens?

But he also stopped the lift just by jamming his arm into the doors, then levering them open and getting out, even if it was between floors.

Classic hitch pranks.

So I think the most impressive prank.

I don't know if this is impressive or if it makes him a bad person, but

there was.

I know what I think already.

Yeah, but you were a bit of a prude.

So

he was one of his employees on set one night, he said, I bet you a certain amount of money.

I think it was just, I bet you a pound that you won't agree to be handcuffed to a part of this set overnight.

You don't have the balls.

I'm going to turn all the lights off.

And so the stage hand was like, oh, a pound?

Yeah, maybe it was more than a pound.

It was still only the 60s.

Yeah, yeah, I can do that.

Sure.

And so Alfred was like, yeah, great, fine.

Have a drink to celebrate.

Gave him a brandy, spiked his brandy with a lot of laxatives, handcuffed him to the set.

They all went home.

They came back the next day.

There was a man there in tears, covered in shit, having soiled himself all over the set.

Now, do you think that makes him fun?

Or do you think it maybe makes him a bad person?

Call me Captain Prudy.

I'm on the fence.

He did then give him a bonus.

Oh, great.

Yeah, but this is a good sort of bar of what his comedy was like.

The BBC uncovered some archive interviews that they did with him recently from a while ago when he was alive.

And

all the interviews after he died are so boring.

So it turns out that Psycho, the great horror, when he made it, he thought he was making a really good comedy.

Absolutely true.

He thought he was making a comedy and he thought people, he was parodying the genre, but he did it so well and he took it so into such an obscene territory that it got taken as a property.

He did it so well that it wasn't funny.

Is that what a stand-up comedian could say?

Yeah.

So good, no one else.

According to Hitchcock, that's what he said.

Psycho was intended to be a comedy.

You know, when he released, when he first released Psycho, he bought up or he got his PA to buy up all the copies of the novel Psycho that he could find in America because he didn't want anyone to give away the ending.

Yeah, he would do that with all of his films.

He bought up the rights so you couldn't see them in the cinema after the cinema run had ended because he only wanted people to see them in the cinema so he would stop them from being broadcast after that.

So for about 30 years nobody saw Psycho in the cinema after, you know, until after he died.

Really?

Psycho is the first film to feature an actual shot of a toilet flushing.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

1960 was when it was made and still before then so taboo and it got all these terrible reviews which were partly based on all the murders and partly based on I can't believe they showed a toilet flushing.

This is outrageous.

It had never been seen on screen before.

I like the way you say so taboo, it had never happened before, as though obviously if they had been able socially, it had been socially appropriate to do a toilet flushing, they would have included it in all the films.

There just aren't that many scenes in films where that's an appropriate thing to show.

Yeah, you're right.

You're right.

Something else fun he did.

If you went on holiday and you were friends with Alfred, he would.

He would murder you hilariously and then give you a bonus.

If you went on holiday, he was actually completely harmless.

He would just leave some extra large furniture in your house for when you returned.

He sounds so, so awful.

Speaking of things that were only used once, Justin Bieber never wears underpants twice.

Does he not?

I googled sort of famous people who may not use things twice.

And I...

Oh, were you googling Justin Bieber, no underwear?

I discovered that the Queen is not allowed to appear in a public.

I guess if she's going to open a library or

launch a new Starbucks latte, she can't appear in her underwear.

She can't be seen in the same costume that she's worn previously.

Otherwise, what happens?

Well, I think it's just they don't want it to happen.

And she has a stylist who has a spreadsheet of every single bit of clothing that she's worn to an appearance, and they make sure that nothing matches up.

And they've given every bit of clothing a code name, like buttercup, for a yellow dress.

But she's been going a long time, like the Queen, so there must be not many clothes left.

She's going to be just turning up in a romper suit.

So the headline is always, if Kate Middleton wears an outfit twice, they say, oh, she's recycling her outfits.

Exactly.

So you never see that with the Queen because of the great spreadsheet that they've made.

And so this guy, Stuart Parvin, he's the guy who for 11 years was the Queen's personal.

He dressed her, he picked all the clothing.

He said in this interview that she has someone employed specifically to wear her shoes before she wears them.

No way.

Yeah, so someone just wears the Queen's shoes and

sweatshirts.

Yeah, so they're comfy.

Yeah, so they're comfy for when she has to wear them for the first time that she goes to a.

So the only person who can have that job is someone who has exactly the same size and shape feet as the Queen, I guess.

Yeah.

I read the other day, I don't even know if it's true, I read that Prince Charles has his shoelaces ironed.

Iron ironed.

That's nonsense.

No, I don't know if it's.

It might not be true, but I did read it.

Only if he buys curly shoelaces, like fun ones, which you can get as a kid.

Like curly fries.

They're slightly more expensive.

Curly fries, yeah, yeah.

So, smashing things.

Should we go on to that?

Smashing crockery.

The Greeks do that, don't they?

Yep.

Yes.

Well, actually, they don't really do it.

It's kind of discouraged in Greece these days.

They prefer people not to do it so much, not just for the austerity reasons.

No, they don't really think it's a good idea.

But when they do do it, what they do often is, I believe this is true, they'll buy lots of kind of semi-broken plates, like they've already got little cracks in them, and they'll have like 19 of those and then one real plate, and they'll kind of run the real plate along the slightly broken ones to make it look, this is real, this is real, and then they'll smash them all on the floor.

So often one of them won't properly smash, because that's the real plate, and the other ones aren't really real.

Hang on, sorry, what qualifies a plate as real?

As in it's got like cracks, it's like um like a stunt plate.

You can't still put food on it, presumably.

Putting food on it, I'm afraid.

Stunt food.

But apparently, before they smashed plates, they used to throw knives at the feet of dancers.

I'm going to have to move us on to the next act.

But if you have anything more, go for it.

Just one thing.

It's quite famous that Turing used to chain his teacup to a radiator.

Alan Turing.

Alan Turing, yeah.

So the

great computer scientist.

During in Bletchley Park, he used to chain his cup to a radiator so that no one would steal it.

Well, not like to mess with his teacup or anything, like Alfred Hitchcock torturing his teacups.

Okay, cool.

But everyone thinks of this as a kind of a weird sort of way that he's quite eccentric.

But a few years ago, they went round to Bletchley Park and they were draining the lake to try and find some

Enigma machines.

And when they drained the lake, they found a load of cups in there.

And apparently, Turing's assistant used to just go around with his cup and then just wander around and throw it in the water.

So actually, he was quite right to chain it too because people just used to steal it all the time.

Yeah.

Wow.

Maybe that's why Hitchcock did it to prevent theft.

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

My fact is the Romanian equivalent of comparing apples and oranges is you're comparing grandmothers and machine guns

because

those are much more different than apples and oranges are.

Apples and oranges are really similar.

And there have been studies done on apples and oranges.

Well to see how similar they are.

There was one study in the British Medical Journal in 2000, and it's kind of a joke study, but still.

And he did this whole table of similarities and differences between apples and oranges.

Both round?

Both round, yes.

Both fruit?

Yeah.

I can keep going.

No, no.

So in the colour table, it says oranges, orange.

Apples, depends on variety.

Can be juiced.

Oranges?

Yes.

Apples?

Yes.

And he goes through this whole list of similarities between them.

Yeah.

Wow.

And they are really similar, it turns out.

And so, why is it grandmas and grandmothers and?

I don't know.

I think they've picked two very, very different things.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

They've just done better than we did.

Slightly more imaginative than we are.

Another thing they say in Roumania is: it's like comparing cows and longjohns.

My favourite one when I was trying to find sort of interesting sayings, there's a Spanish proverb, and this is the Spanish proverb: there are no ugly 15-year-olds.

I don't know in what context you would ever say, well, you know, in prison, as they say.

Well, Your Honor,

I think the court and the jury will agree.

All children are attractive.

Do you want to hear some more Romanian phrases and guess what they mean?

Oh, yeah.

Yes, please.

You take me out of the watermelons.

Is it like something you say to a lady who really kind of blows your mind?

Yeah.

You give me butterflies.

No, it's the the opposite.

It's you're making me really angry.

Because obviously, where do we all want to be?

Among the watermelons.

Yeah.

You take me out of the watermelons.

Stop this.

That explains the problems I had in that Romanian nightclub.

My face has fallen off.

Is it literal that one?

No, no.

I'm surprised.

I'm so surprised.

I'm surprised.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you've put snot in the beans.

Is that something you might say to Alfred Hitchcock?

It just means you've made a mistake.

It's just a fun way of saying you've made a mistake, but it's not in the beans.

I have made a whip out of shit.

It means I've done a lot with a little.

I've made a really good effort, considering I've got limited resources.

Like making a purse from a salesir kind of thing.

I've made a purse from a salesir and a whip out of shit.

A whip isn't a spaceship.

I mean, it's...

Not the most complicated thing you could manufacture.

Okay, you try making a whip

out of shit.

I have a friend who lived in South America who powered electrically his entire home out of a huge pile of manure in his back garden and you're saying making a whip squidging poo into something that could hit someone is like turning something tiny into something fantastic.

I just would question the logic of that one.

They are quite illogical.

In Germany, they say you have tomatoes on your eyes to mean you're not seeing what everyone else can see.

But why tomatoes?

it's always fruits and apples, especially.

So, in Spanish, I think they say when you say you're going to walk around the block, in Spain, you'd say, Let's walk around the apple, take a walk around the apple.

Wow, I don't know why.

That's great, it's weird.

In Colombia, to confuse two things, it's a bit like

what we were saying before, but you would say he confused shit with face cream.

That is a mistake, it is a mistake, yeah.

Or one of Alfred Hitchcock's hilarious pranks,

And if you, in Sweden, if you

if you're talking about someone who hasn't really had to put in much effort to achieve what they've achieved, you say he slid in on a shrimp sandwich.

And that means he got here really easily.

Which, actually, not that easy to slide on a shrimp sandwich.

You have such wart priorities about what's easy and what's hard.

It's easy to slip on a shrimp sandwich.

It's very hard to compress turds together to make a working whip.

Indiana Jones's whip wasn't made of poo.

We don't know that.

I think we have very different skill sets.

Slipping is very different to sliding.

So you can slip on it, but sliding in, that implies that you're skiing into

the piece.

I will concede that skiing on a shrimp sandwich will be hard.

I think that would be quite difficult.

Are any of these...

Are any of these actually said in these countries?

It's a weird one, that, because we occasionally do this kind of thing on QI, and when we ever say it, we'll say, okay, in Thailand, they say the hen sees the snake's feet, and the snake sees the hen's boobs, and that means two people who know each other's secret.

We'll say something like that on QI, and then everyone in Thailand will email us and say, No, we don't say that at all.

Yeah.

Well, I think it will be said, and I think it's just people.

Like, I haven't heard every phrase that gets used in Britain.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's right.

If there are people from Sweden, or Spain, or Germany who know that we're wrong, please do, heckle.

So, just like we were talking about grandmothers and

machine guns right at the start, so maybe a few things about guns.

Yeah, yeah.

You know how old you have to be to get a firearms license in the UK?

Is it 12?

It's 14.

Okay.

Do you know how old you have to be to get a shotgun license?

No.

You have to be two.

No way.

And the reason you have to be two is because an adult needs to sign for you saying they've known you for at least two years.

And I can confirm you is a fit and proper person to own a shotgun.

What?

Really?

It's so good, that, isn't it?

Yeah.

And there's loads of people under 10 in the UK who have shotgun licenses.

But you can't buy a shotgun until you're a certain age, although an adult could buy you a shotgun.

Does anyone here have a shotgun license?

Just that child on the front row?

How old are you?

19.

So you've had it for 17 years.

You must be very good.

The person who invented the first portable automatic machine gun was a guy called Hiram Maxim.

He's kinda a bit famous.

And he was arrested in old age.

He also invented the traditional mousetrap that people use.

He was arrested in old age in 1913 for harassing Salvation Army workers with a pea shooter.

But better that than the machine gun, I guess.

I read a story about him, which was that when he invented the machine gun but was testing it out in his neighborhood, he went to all his neighbours saying,

sorry to bother.

At 3 p.m.

today or whatever time, he said, I'm going to be testing out my new machine gun.

If you could open your windows, the noise is so great in this vicinity, it will smash all the glass in your house if the windows are shut.

Could you?

That's really considerate.

Yeah, he sounds like a nice guy.

I think he showed off the gun.

There was an early demonstration of the machine gun, and he was, because it was Queen Victoria who was the queen at the time.

And one of the things he did to demonstrate how cool it was was he blasted with the machine gun the letters VR for Victoria Regina into a brick wall.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was the thing.

Would you trust a man who said, I'm going to be practicing with my machine gun this morning?

Can I ask that you open your windows for me?

I mean, it doesn't really make any difference whether you do or not.

We're going to have to move on.

Let's be real.

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So, time for our final fact, and that is James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that replacement eyelids can be made from foreskins.

I told you they would groan.

I told you.

Wait, has this actually been done?

It's been done, yeah, it has been done.

You might lose your eyelid, for you might get a disease, or it might be burned.

Someone might be practicing with a machine gun next door.

Exactly, and then the problem is your eyelid is kind of really thin kind of skin, and so it's really hard to find replacement skin from around the body.

And there are a few different places to get it, but the foreskin works particularly well, and people have had their eyelids replaced with foreskins.

Do they?

What do they get to replace their foreskin?

Do they get another foreskin from somewhere else?

No, it's like a pyramid scheme of foreskins.

If your foreskin is on your eyelid, are you circumcised?

Or is that, does a foreskin have to be fully removed, or does it just have to be removed from its original position?

That's a very good question.

I feel like I've got to let you down.

I don't know the correct answer.

Well, you should reread the Torah, because it must be in there somewhere.

Just quickly, before we get into Fal Skin Valley,

if you don't have a, this is really, really cool.

If you don't have, if your eyelids don't work,

so the eyelid is there and it's intact, but it doesn't operate, the muscles don't work to move it,

one way that doctors can fix it is they take gold thread, and because they use gold in the body, because it doesn't react with anything, it's inert chemically, and it's the thread they use is a hundred times thinner than a human hair, and they thread it through the eyelid, which gives it a bit of stability and it stiffens it.

And what that means is it's stiff enough to open and close the eye, but you have to do it by hand, so you just do this.

You just put your hand up, and then you go, Yep, I'm awake.

Or whatever it is that you do.

Isn't that incredible?

Yeah, that's good.

So you can wink at someone by just going.

It's amazing.

I read this thing, this isn't really related, but one of the early buttock augmentation surgeries.

The guy who invented buttock augmentation basically took a breast

kind of silicon thing from a breast and just put it in someone's butt.

That's basically the way he did it.

But the problem was it didn't really

look like a bottom.

So he left the nipple on.

Is that what it did?

And so what they did instead is they managed to get something that was better sculpted and put it in between the gluteus maximus and I think the gluteus minimus.

And so it actually looks a bit like a buttock.

And this was the first proper real buttock augmentation surgery.

But the problem was that it kept slipping.

And so what you could do is someone would go, oh, your buttock slipped.

And and then you could actually lift it up and put it back in place.

But how far down did it slip?

It could go down.

Sorry.

It could go quite far down the thigh, I think.

Oh, my God.

Interesting, that, isn't it?

Yeah, that's amazing.

I wonder if you'd still say someone had a nice ass if it was just halfway down their calf.

I read about the first penis transplant the other day, which they've successfully done.

Have they?

Yeah, and they knew they could do it for a long time, and this guy wanted to have it done.

The only issue was that for four to five years, it was I guess to the tail end of four years, they couldn't find a donor.

That's very reasonable.

I heard

that they used a middle finger once for a penis transplant.

No, I've read this and you're all looking and I've got no evidence either, I've forgotten all the sources, and I read it five or six years ago.

It's already quite bad when someone gives you the finger in the street, isn't it?

If it was also attached to the groin, it would be ten times worse.

No, some stuff on, let's say some stuff on eyelids to keep it clean, shall we?

Pioneering French surgeon Ambrose Parre,

if you had itching eyelids, he suggested washing your eyelids in urine,

but only if the urine had been kept all night in a barber's basin.

Okay, it's very specific, isn't it?

Do you have to have the consent of the barber, presumably?

You can't just wee in a barber's basin and then go in the next day.

Oh, yeah, sir, I've been using basin four.

Hope you don't mind.

My eyelids are itchy.

Do you want to hear another really interesting body part replacement thing?

Yes, this guy is great.

Okay, there's a Finnish computer programmer.

His name is Jerry Jalava.

And in 2008, he lost a finger.

He lost his third finger in a motorbike accident.

So he replaced it with his penis.

No, he didn't.

Oh, God.

Yeah, his typing has not improved.

No, but everyone was saying, oh, it's so annoying for you, because you type for a living, don't you?

Because you're a computer programmer.

It's going to be really annoying for you.

And he said, Yes, yes, it is gonna be really annoying.

And eventually, he decided to do something about it, and he built himself a prosthetic finger.

Not only that, it doubles up as a USB drive.

So all he has to do, he just peels back his prosthetic fingernail, and

he can just plug into a computer.

No, no, no one can ever just plug in a USB into a computer.

Sorry, he turns it upside down.

And so

he can store two gigabytes of data in his finger, and he can even remove the whole finger and give it to someone else if if they need to store a file or something.

How cool is that?

That's amazing.

Yeah, what a great guy.

I don't know if I'd accept that.

If you ask them if they have a spare USB.

Oh, yeah.

Cool.

I think it's a great idea.

Another on eyes, and yeah, like replacement surgery.

You know, if so, in 2009, I think it was the first instance of this, a woman who'd been blind for nine years had her eye replaced with her tooth.

And she could see again.

And so sometimes people are having surgery to get their cornea cornea replaced with their tooth.

And they make so uh they drill a hole in the tooth and they make a little lens in it.

And then they have to implant it in a different part of your body because the lens needs to properly fuse, I think, with the tooth, first of all.

So they implanted it in her shoulder for a while.

This is her tooth.

And then they can put it in the eye.

If you Google image it, it's very weird.

But there are people who've had their teeth in their eyes and they can see properly and they just line it up with the retina and it's people who've got corneal problems where it's gone blurry.

That's amazing.

It's crazy.

It's so bizarre.

You can pat someone on the shoulder and on the eye and on the tooth at the same time.

That is so incredible.

I think that's the main benefit.

That's what they say they're all pleased about.

We're going to have to wrap up soon, so should we...

James,

okay, well, just on what you were saying,

you can get stem cells these days can do all sorts of things.

And people, there was a lady who kind of injected some stem cells into her wrinkles around her eyes because she wanted to get rid of the wrinkles and it was hoped that it would grow back.

And then suddenly, whenever she kind of winked her eyes, she heard this bony clicking,

and it turned out that

it turned out that a bone had grown in her eyelid.

I know.

I've got some light, entertaining stuff out for skids if anyone wants it.

Oh, hang on, on eyelids quickly, because I've always wanted to know this.

You know that thing when your eyelid involuntarily twitches?

Yeah, like you have a twitching eyelid.

So that's called

blepharospasm or blepharospasm.

And so

it's usually fine and harmless.

Some people have it so badly that their eyelids get locked shut.

And a cure that was proposed for that in the late 1700s was by a Dr.

Gerald.

And he suggested.

He certainly doesn't sound like a real doctor.

If any doctor only gives you their first name, that's a real danger sign.

Like Dr.

Nick in The Simpsons.

So Dr.

Jez advised that people who had this problem where their eyes were clamped shut because their blepharospasm was so bad,

don't try and cure the spasm, drill a hole in their eyelid so that they can see through it.

I actually don't know if anyone had that done, but it's lateral thinking.

I hope not.

Also, blepharospasm are playing on the obelisk stage at 9 p.m.

tonight.

Secret gigs, so check it out.

They're very good.

Foreskins, humorous foreskins?

All right, there's a bit.

Bit PG-13, but

some cosmetics are tested on foreskins.

Oh, yeah.

But ones that have been removed, if someone is circumcised when they're born, the hospital normally sells the foreskin.

There is a man out there who's been circumcised, and his cells have been used and grown, and grown, and grown, and grown, and grown, to make an entire face cream company.

But here's the thing:

there was a whole anti-cause when people found out that foreskins were being used for cosmetics, there was a huge anti-foreskin movement that tried to stop it.

And it turns out Oprah Winfrey has released foreskin products.

Not for your foreskin, for like foreskin face products.

And

this is a great product name, foreskin.

That's brilliant.

Yes.

So obvious.

Yeah.

But so that's the amazing thing about it.

It's not as if they're carting off lots of foreskins to turn into face cream.

It's one singular foreskin that they've been using for 20 years.

Well, they can't get there.

You can use them for up to, yeah, I think 40 years.

Because it's just the cells in there are very unusual.

They're like stem cells in that they can be grown and used in lots of different ways.

And they're

incredible medically.

Yeah, it's insane.

We're going to have to wrap up in a sec.

So if anyone's got anything, a final fact they want to throw in?

Nope.

No?

We're good.

Okay.

All right.

That's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thanks so much for

listening.

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

I'm on at Tribaland.

Andy.

And Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At eggshaped.

Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yeah.

Go to no such thing as a fish.com.

We've got 70 episodes up there.

Thank you so much for being here, guys.

That was that was fun as hell.

Come here, guys.

Let's be real.

Life happens.

Kids spill.

Pets shed.

And accidents are inevitable.

Find a sofa that can keep up at washable sofas.com.

Starting at just $699,

our sofas are fully machine washable inside and out.

So you can say goodbye to stains and hello to worry-free living.

Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics.

They're kid-proof, pet-friendly, and built for everyday life.

Plus, changeable fabric covers let you refresh your sofa whenever you want.

Neat flexibility?

Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa anytime to fit your space, whether it's a growing family room or a cozy apartment.

Plus, they're earth-friendly and trusted by over 200,000 happy customers.

It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mess-proof sofa.

Visit washablefas.com today and save.

That's washablesofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.