67: No Such Thing As The Hoo-Hah Monologues

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

My name is Dan Shriver.

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

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 fact number one, and that's my fact.

My fact this week is that Guantanamo Bay has a gift shop.

Pretty inappropriate.

Yeah, do we know if the prisoners can buy gifts?

Is it like they get let out once a week?

And they sell files and they sell

wire cutters and things like that.

Now, I've got a list of some of the things they do sell.

So Fidel Castro standing on a boom box with text reading rockin' in Fidel's backyard.

You can get golf balls, you can get candles, you can get a plush banana rat, which is a type of rat that they have on Guantanamo Bay.

So there's banana rats everywhere on Guantanamo Bay.

Are there?

They're otherwise known as Hootia.

You would normally call them Hootia, but they call them banana rats.

But do you know why they're called banana rats?

No.

Because they shape like a banana.

They eat bananas.

No.

They're radioactive.

They're very easy to peel.

They emit

antimatter.

No, but they don't really have legs.

No idea.

No, the reason is that they are called banana rats because their feces look like small versions of the fruit.

Cool.

Wow.

That's cool.

That's very interesting.

Just a fact.

I wouldn't love to be named after the shape of my poo.

No.

Not up for that.

Well, you'd just be called poo, wouldn't you?

No, you could be like raisins or

skyscraper.

Skyscraper.

It could be anything, anything, couldn't it?

So, oh, well, that's a cool fact.

I really like that.

They also have teddy bears that you have cropped T-shirts and they read, It don't gitmo better than this.

Gitmo being the abbreviation.

Yeah.

It's pretty crazy.

They've got things like Baskin-Robbins there, the ice cream shop.

They got McDonald's.

There's a Subway, KFC, Pizza Hut.

Yeah, I just I really like when you hear about military compounds or places, when you hear something out of place.

Andy has a great fact about the CIA.

It's the Starbucks.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

yeah, it's that the Starbucks in Langley, Virginia, the headquarters of the CIA, the baristas are not allowed to write customers' names on the cups.

Imagine if you went to Starbucks and they said what name is it and you said skyscraper.

That's an unusual name.

Where do you get that?

So Guantanamo Bay is on Cuba, obviously.

It is.

But

it's rented from the Cuban government.

Okay.

Except that Fidel Castro says that he never cashes the checks.

He says he's cashed one of them once and it was by mistake.

$4,000 a month.

Do you reckon he's holding them all up and then one day he's going to cash them all and hopefully bankrupt?

He has, isn't there a rumour that he stores them all in a drawer in his office desk?

Yes, he showed them off in a TV interview once.

And he says that the only one that got cashed was in 1959 during the actual Cuban Revolution when it was a bit confusing and

a mistake in the the payroll department or something like that.

Why was he doing the banking?

Why is Fidel?

I got really confused on my bank run that time.

But he also claims that the checks are made out to the Treasurer General of the Republic, which is apparently a position that ceased to exist after the revolution in 1959.

So this is a pre-revolutionary arrangement that clearly they haven't updated them on.

Guantanamo also has an Irish bar.

Does it?

Yeah, it has an Irish bar called O'Kelly's Irish Bar, which claims to be the only Irish bar on communist soil.

And so I thought I'd see if I could find any other Irish bars on communist soil.

And there is Huli's Irish Bar in Guangzhou, China, Gary's Irish Pub in Vientiane, in Laos,

and Bernie's Irish Bar and Restaurant in Saigon.

Oh, well done, so it's lying.

They're lying, yeah.

A lie coming out of Guantanamo.

Who would have thought it?

Imagine if that's what takes them down.

You know, there's a version of Guantanamo Bay on Second Life.

Ozer, really?

Yeah, yeah.

A couple of activists built it to show people what it is like there, basically.

So it's because obviously you're not normally allowed to go there.

It's forbidden for people who are not in the military or with very few exceptions.

So

they have constructed one.

People can volunteer to experience virtual prison there, see what it's like.

Wow.

Do you see what it's like, do you think?

No, obviously there's only so much you can really experience from your home.

But it shows you sort of the layout and it shows you what exactly

what happens.

Yeah.

Can I tell you one more thing about Second Life?

Yeah, yeah.

there's an actual prison on Second Life for people who are hacking into the world itself or sort of into the game or being digitally naughty, basically.

And supposedly, it consists of just a moonlit field full of corn, which goes on forever.

And the only things you can do in it, there's a tractor that you can ride slowly, or there's a black and white TV playing a film from 1940.

That's the only things you can do in Second Life Prison.

Wow.

How cool is that?

That sounds great.

Jimmy Carr,

so for any overseas listeners, a big comedian in Britain, he did a gig in Second Life.

Wow.

Yeah, and it was a live gig.

And during it, he's just standing there as a Second Life Jimmy Carr.

And you know, when you play those games like GoldenEye, and you end up just running into the wall and bashing against the wall, a lot of his audience members don't quite know how to stay still.

So while he's telling jokes, they're just walking past him, smashing into walls, flipping over in front of him.

That's very funny.

I was looking into, because I was just thinking of famous gift shops that I know of, and one that I went to not too long ago, and I think you can qualify it as a gift shop.

It's the Sherlock Holmes shop, and it's in Baker Street.

And I didn't realize that it's not at 221B Baker Street.

When Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock stories, that didn't exist.

The road didn't go that far up.

And so they've since built this bigger road

there, isn't it?

It was Abbey National.

So Abbey National was situated at 221B Baker Street.

And as a result, they hired someone to answer all mail to Sherlock Holmes.

Really?

However,

they just wrote back offering them very good personal finance logs.

I'm afraid I can't help you find your wife, but I can help you find a great deal on your insurance.

But so what ended up happening was in 1990, a blue plaque went up outside the museum saying that that was now 221B.

And so mail started going there.

And that started a 15-year dispute between Abbey National and the Sherlock Holmes Museum about who was 221B.

And now Abbey National was closed, and now 221B technically is the museum, despite the fact it's at 239.

So are we 221B or not 221B?

What else is that?

Have you heard this thing about the souvenir coins they've just done for Waterloo?

No, it is so cool.

So Belgium wanted to do these special commemorative coins for the Battle of Waterloo, right?

With this, there's a famous statue of a lion.

And they wanted to have that on it.

And they made 180,000 of these, but France forced them to stop because because basically other EU countries get a veto over it.

And France is a bit sensitive about Waterloo.

So the French said that it will create a bad reaction in France and you shouldn't do this.

But the Belgians found a rule, a tiny, tiny rule in the book, saying that any country can issue its own coins if they're in an irregular denomination.

And so they have just made 70,000 2.5 Euro coins.

Oh, wow.

With this with the design they wanted.

Oh, cool.

Yeah, and you can spend them across Belgium.

Can you actually?

So they have monetary value.

That's so cool.

So when the Duke of Wellington died,

all of his locks of hair were cut off to make souvenirs for people, including the Queen and, you know, like loads and loads of people.

Ah,

because people did used to just take weird souvenirs from all sorts of things, didn't they?

It wasn't like in the olden days, you wouldn't have gift shops.

People would just go and nick stuff, basically.

But Mark Twain wrote that when he went to Egypt, all he could hear was the tinkling sound of tack hammers as people chipped away at the monuments.

Wow.

So you'd just go to the the pyramids and people would just be taking bits off all the time.

That's all you could hear.

Really?

Yeah.

Do you know what would be amazing is if the pyramids were actually square.

This is just what's left.

Yeah, exactly.

That's amazing.

Oh, I bet that's true.

Is it true that they were covered in marble?

That is true, yeah.

Wow, that's astonishing.

Imagine seeing them back then.

Yeah, so what we see now, that used to have a marble casing around it.

Yeah, they used to be really shiny.

So it was like being pebble-dashed.

Yeah.

But more classy, I think.

I have a thing about souvenirs that are being taken that shouldn't be taken.

Oh, yeah.

So lots of people, when they go to Uluru, formerly Ayers Rock, in Australia, will chip off a bit to take home, as with Stonehenge, or as with other places, or as with the pyramids.

But there's an increasing trend of people posting them back because they feel really apologetic.

Or they suffer bad luck in their life.

And they think, well, it must be because I took that rock from Uluru.

And so they post it back.

And they get about one every day.

But the thing is, they return to the national park.

But before they get back to to the national park, they are quarantined.

Somewhere in Australia, there is a rock quarantine.

In case they've caught a disease while they've been abroad?

Basically, in case they have, as they say on the website, they say the threat of micro-pathogens being introduced by contaminated rocks from elsewhere.

Bacteria can affect rocks, can't they?

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, that can change the chemical composition of rocks, definitely.

But what are the, like, what's the fallout of if you introduced a rock to Australia?

I don't know.

Maybe there's

a spore or something which could wipe out a native plant.

Wow, any sort of thing?

I mean, they're just being ultra-careful, but I just think that's the funniest thing.

I mean, it's a barren desert where Uluru is.

Or if they've, because they don't like non-native species coming in, do they say, what if there's like a fox on the underside of the rock that no one's seen?

True.

Just clinkiness.

You've got to be careful of these kind of things.

I'm just imagining they put the rock back on Uluru and then go home, and then the next day the comment is disappeared.

It was just a note saying, suckers.

Yours, Mr.

Fox.

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Time for fact number two, and that is Chazinski.

Uh yeah, my fact is that the Natural History Museum is turning moths gay to stop them destroying the exhibits.

Yeah.

What?

Um well, they've got a moth problem.

Um they are destroying exhibits in the Natural History Museum.

So they in the Natural History Museum a lot of like things that have fur or feathers or things like that on it, I think moths are using it.

So it's not a lot of these things they can't eat, but they like destroy it and then make little nests out of it.

And yeah, so it's a problem, it's destroying the exhibits, and so they are using female hormones, they're covering male moths in female hormones to try and make other male moths attracted to them so that they waste all their shagging time trying to shag another male and they fail to produce you've only got a certain amount of shagging time that you can do that.

Sorry, I've just spent an hour and a half on that other male.

I was reading about because it's not just the Natural History Museum that's had this problem.

Lots of other museums have this problem.

And it turns out that there's one man who they call in to sort out all of their issues, and he's known as Bugman.

And his name is David Pinnager.

And I don't know if he's being brought in for the Natural History Museum in this case, but he is the man who you bring in when there's a moth problem, when there's any kind of insect problem.

And he's been giving talks for years.

The VNA, he gave a talk a few years ago, which was called Bug,

which stood for Beating Unwanted Guests.

So this goes back as far as.

Sounds like a talk for the security guards in the museum.

That was a talk given in 1993 at the VNA.

So this has been a problem since 1993, and they've been trying to combat it in so many different ways.

There are lots of

fruit-growing places,

possibly orchards, actually, now I think about it,

which have had the same problem with moths, and they've used the same solution.

They've also tried telling them gay.

Have they?

Or sort of, because it's not quite telling them gay, is it?

They're still straight, but it's disguising males.

At the Pitt Rivers Museum, they did a thing where they had a glue board and they put the pheromones of an equivalent a thousand female moths onto this glue board.

So all these moths were just going, whoa,

ladies, and then they were flying that way.

And he's getting

a thousand ladies because it kind of looks a bit like a glue board.

No, have you smelled them?

Oh my god.

It's such a, it's really funny as an idea.

Yeah, it is.

I can't believe it.

Dover Castle as well, sorry.

Oh, yeah.

Dover Castle as well had a thing which was they realized that all these insects, all these moths were being attracted to certain

wall hangings because the dye that was used in the paintings were mainly crushed insects and weirdly that was an attraction to them.

Yeah, they smelt dead insect basically and so they were attracted to that, so they had an issue with that at Dover Castle.

Apparently eighty-five per cent of male insects engage in homosexual acts but mostly it's accidental.

They just mate in the hope that they're mating with a female, but it doesn't really matter.

And there are loads of theories as to why.

So some people think that it's to practise mating, or some people think it's to dominate other males.

But flower beetles they found that they do this a lot, and they found that it doesn't improve their success rate with females.

But if a male leaks semen on another male and that other male later breeds with a female, the female's eggs can be fertilized by the sperm of the male that she never encountered.

And it's called sex by proxy, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly.

And the article about it said that males can inseminate females, quotes, without expending time or energy having sex with them.

Result.

But it does imply that the males just really want to have sex with the other males.

And so they'd rather.

Because I read that and I thought, they're expending time and energy mating with a male.

Surely you might as well just do it directly.

It seems a bit of a roundabout way of doing it.

Do you guys know the only other animal where a percentage chooses exclusively to have homosexual sex, even though there are members of the opposite sex available to them?

And that's domestic sheep.

Oh.

And I think it is 8% of male domestic sheep will choose to have sex with another male sheep rather than a female.

Which is weird, isn't it?

What is weird about sheep is that if you're a female sheep and you're going to have sex, what you do is basically stand perfectly still and then the ram comes and mounts you.

But if you have two lesbian sheep and they both want to have sex with each other, they naturally will just stand perfectly still.

So they just kind of stood there, kind of looking at each other, going, Well, are you going to do something or am I?

That makes it very difficult to spot lesbian sheep.

She's just not making the first move.

I don't know why I'm doing wrong.

Do Do they have to get a friend in the end to just lift them up and force them together?

Like, oh guys, enough of this pussy fitting around.

I was reading about moths.

Obviously, they're preyed on by bats.

That's a thing you have to watch out for if you're a moth.

They've learnt to create a sound which says that they're a different, much more disgusting-tasting moth.

Really?

Yeah, so they pretend to be the disgusting-tasting moth that they know bats don't go for, and then the bats don't go for them as a result.

So they've mimicked the sound, and as a result, you know.

It would be safer to mimic the sound of like a lion or something, wouldn't it?

Just because if you do get a really hungry bat.

But then, taking that bit further, that means every animal in the whole world should sound like a lion, yes.

Why don't they?

Okay, but you apart from a lion, which should disguise itself as you know, an inoffensive clump of grass

or a bit of Ulurura rock.

Here's the thing, though.

You've hit on something, which is that there is an actual moth called the Asian cornborer who mimics the sound of a bat to freak out females, and when they hear it, they freeze in fear.

And because the Asian corn borer is terrible at sex, it uses this sound to freeze the female so that he can use the opportunity to mate with her.

It's rhohitnal in the moth world, it's the rhohitnal of the moth world, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

So, here's the thing: you know, the word garderobe is like an old French word for a toilet.

Okay,

that's where the word wardrobe comes from.

And one theory as to why

that change happened is because you would keep your clothes in a toilet because the smell was so bad it would keep moths away.

Really?

Also,

all your clothes would smell like a toilet all the time.

Really?

I mean, I think it's the theory.

I'm not sure it's true.

You know how, James, you insist on ordering a panino when you go into a cafe rather than panini.

I do indeed.

Right.

In the same vein, do you also use the guarder robe wardrobe thing to excuse the fact that you put it in the wardrobe all the time at home?

Etymologically speaking, it's fine.

Nothing wrong.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the word marvellous has fallen in use from 155 times per million 20 years ago to only two times per million today.

So every 500,000 words you say, one of them will be marvellous.

Wow, marvelous.

If anyone says society isn't in decline, then I think we've disproved them here.

Yeah, so just about language changing and stuff, and it's a bit of a shame.

I think the word marvellous is quite a good word, and I think it's a shame we're not using it anymore.

Yeah, yeah.

With that kind of disappearance that it's like achieving right now, are we going to lose it?

I don't think we'll lose it, but it's just become old-fashioned, really.

But I think there is hope for marvelous, because words go up and down, don't they?

So the use of the word marvellous had its peak.

So it had its peak in 1886 and it's been declining pretty steadily since then, I think, except 1918 to 1925.

I was looking at a graph, had a big peak suddenly.

Really?

Yeah,

it was finished.

Things are a bit more marvellous than they were.

And then suddenly, ooh, this Hitler guy is looking

a little bit rowdy for my liking.

He's not looking very marvellous, is he?

So marvellous used to be a lot stronger.

It used to mean something that caused wonder.

So, it was a lot stronger than marvelous.

Or marvel wonder, I guess.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, don't steal the meaning of the word wonderful and attribute it to marvellous.

Civil war between the words.

Wonderful used to mean marvellous, it causes you marvel.

So, this all comes from a thing called the Spoken British National Corpus of 2014, and that's done by Cambridge University Press and Lancaster University.

And they take a whole load of kind of books and conversations and all that kind of thing, and they work out how often words are are used.

And then there was a load of press releases, one of which I saw this week.

I'm really suspicious about this project that they're on because

they're asking for people to donate recorded tapes of their conversations every day and stuff.

So they said we're calling for people to send us MP3 files of their everyday informal conversations in exchange for a small payment.

And I th is this just MI5 kind of being more obvious?

Can you record yourself talking about threats to Britain's national security?

Because a lot of that vocabulary is very specialised and we really need it.

Send it in, we'll give you a Fiverr and a short stint in Grantana Mobile.

There's a lovely gift shop.

So the other conclusions that they came to, other words that they said were going in and out of fashion, they said that the word cheerio

has yet to appear in conversations from this decade, which is a bit sad.

They said that old people still use it, but not young ones.

So I was looking, you know, Google has this amazing tool, which I've just wasted so many hours of my life on, where I can't even remember what the URL is but look up Google word tracker and it tracks the use of words over the last 200 years in all Google books

and when when they've you know how often words are mentioned so so the word loser reached its peak in 1807.

Whatever made you think of looking at one.

You knew you were going to be hanging out with us and yet you looked for loser.

A couple of other good spikes.

So the word happy has been in constant decline since the year 1800 until the year 2000 and then it's been increasing since then.

And then the Pharrell song came out.

Oh, that might have spiked it right up.

And Happy Feet, the movie, I reckon it must bring words back, just by popular movies and songs.

It must do, right?

Penis has been in steep decline since 1996.

Tell me about it.

And I used all my shagging time off in the early 80s.

Is it just that people are using other words?

I assume so.

It's probably that, yeah, maybe we've diversified in our, you know, in our synonyms.

Although, actually, we probably haven't, because we've always used countless synonyms for that, haven't we?

Vagina had a huge spike in eighteen eighty.

In when?

In when?

Eighteen eighty.

There was so literally that one year it was used four times as much as sort of before or since on average.

Oh, Mr.

Johnson, where's my vagina?

I think it was called.

Very much the Pharrell's happy of its time.

Does it say?

Does it say why it's fine?

It's it does it can't say why.

It's literally just a stat site that tracks uses in Google Books.

Okay.

So I have no idea why.

But you know, if anyone's got any theory.

In Google Books.

Yeah.

Oh, that's interesting.

Okay.

Um the Atlantic Beach Theatre and Comedy Club a couple of years ago um was putting on the vagina monologues um but got complaints about using the word vagina and so renamed it the who ha monologues

is there one word that you guys use that is not just used in day-to-day language that you wish would come back, but you do actually use?

Andy, most of the words Andy uses, I think.

Well, there is a word which I do really like, and it's, you know, megalomania is sort of it being sort of insanely thinking you're all powerful and you know getting it.

There is a corresponding word called micromania, which is a tendency to constantly belittle oneself.

Isn't that an incredible word?

Yeah, because it's a very common thing.

A lot of people, you know, especially sort of supposedly English people are very very self-deprecating there is a word for it micromania I really like that um there are really I've got some good words if you like from the M section of the dictionary actually one related to moths so macrolepidoptera and this is in the OED they are defined as the butterflies and moths which are large enough to be of interest to collectors

and there's also microlepidoptera which is the numerous moths which are mostly smaller than those of interest to collectors I didn't know that collectors were so sizest yeah you would have thought that the small ones might be more precious.

Yeah.

If they're all an 18th of an inch long, though, it's a bit tiresome having to collect them and you lose them in your pocket.

You could lie about your collection.

Look at my incredible solitary.

I know you can't see them, but they're pretty extraordinary.

The Mile High Club in the OED is defined as an imaginary association of people who have had sexual intercourse on an aircraft.

Isn't that great?

That is really good.

That's written by someone who's tried and failed.

I've only got one more word that I really like, which is babel avant, and it means one who makes feeble jokes.

Yeah, that's good.

Why'd you bring that up?

Just thought you knew you would be talking to us.

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Okay, time for our final fact, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that to prepare for China's National Day, 100,000 pigeons have anal security checks to make sure they're not carrying anything suspicious.

Like rocks from Australia.

So, China's National Day is the 1st of October, and last year th with a celebration involved releasing a hundred thousand pigeons in Tiananmen Square and they all fly up and fly around and it's very beautiful.

And this is according to I think the People's Daily, the sort of g government sponsored newspaper.

And a security officer said that they all have to be checked under their wings and their tail feathers and even their bottoms.

And they are then loaded into sealed vehicles and delivered to the square where they are checked a second time

and then sealed in the cages for before the release.

And supposedly the they were all checked at the Yutan City Sports Centre in Beijing and the whole process was videotaped.

So someone has a tape of this event, haven't they?

Wow.

Yeah.

Are pigeons a big worry?

Are they prone to treachery in China?

I have no idea.

Well, we have covered on the podcast before that they were used to smuggle messages and wasn't it to steal grain as well?

Yes, and to steal grain.

They used to steal grain from the Imperial grannery.

Yeah, you fly them in, they eat the grain, you fly them out, and then you squeeze them and they have to throw it up.

I think you feed them like alum or something and they throw it up.

Squeeze them.

No, whatever.

Yeah.

So this is something that happens.

So how many pigeons are they releasing on their National Day?

100,000.

Okay.

Wow.

I know that China is, the military has been training up pigeons.

It's been training up 10,000 pigeons to use as a reserve pigeon army.

So that would

provide military communications in the event of an attack and in the event of an invasion.

Apparently, they want pigeons to carry stuff back and forth.

Although they can only carry 100 grams of stuff, I think.

But if you put something on a USB, you can communicate a lot of stuff.

Oh, yeah,

100 grams.

That's true.

Really good point.

So, yeah, I wonder if those pigeons they were releasing were...

Was that part of the training?

Yeah.

But the interesting thing is, you know, when you release pigeons and doves at weddings and things like that, they're homing pigeons normally.

So they fly around, and when they're fluttering around beautifully around the venue or whatever, they're actually just getting their bearings.

Where the hell am I?

And then they shoot off in one particular direction.

That is them heading home.

That's a good business model, isn't it?

It's a really good business model.

Because they're reusable.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you don't need to transport them home.

No, exactly.

Yeah.

Someone who released 100 white pigeons very recently turns out as a massive pigeon lover, Mike Tyson.

Oh, yeah.

No idea.

Mike Tyson loves pigeons.

He actually says that the reason he became a boxer was as a result of one of his pigeons, because his pigeon was killed by a local bully, and the local bully really mauled one of his favourite pigeons, and so he got into a fight with him, and that's where he discovered he was a great fighter.

Imagine killing a pigeon and finding out it belonged to Mike Tyson.

Oh my gosh.

By the time he didn't know that he was Mike Tyson.

Mike Tyson didn't even know he was Mike Tyson.

Imagine that discovery.

You'd only be the one he discovers it on.

Exactly.

Pablo Picasso, as well.

He was a pigeon fancier.

Was he?

Yep.

And he named his daughter Paloma.

And Paloma is the Spanish for pigeon.

Oh, really?

Wow.

So he named his daughter Pigeon.

But he also named one of his pigeons daughter.

And then it got very confusing when his will was read.

So, pigeons are so good at getting home, and we don't know how, really, but we do know

they have a little bit of magnetic iron ore in their beaks,

and that helps them to sense the Earth's magnetic field.

And they also use their eyesight for the final stages of a journey.

And we know this because of a guy called Charlie Walcott, who he has spent 40 years attaching radio transmitters to pigeons and then following them in a single-engine plane to see them navigate and to see them go.

You can imagine this terrified pigeon saying he's still coming after us.

Wow.

It sounds like that old cartoon with dastardly and muttony in it, doesn't it?

It does.

And he puts frosted contact lenses on pigeons and then lets them fly home just to test whether they use their eyesight.

And they get most of the way towards home using the magnetic field and other things that we don't know about.

But then towards the end, they got confused because, and that's how we know that they need visual landmarks.

Just for the end.

Like having an autopilot on for the main flight and then for the landing.

Yeah, basically.

But they're also using some pigeons, have been found to be observing the use of roads and roundabouts.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

It's so cool.

So a pigeon will be flying above a road, it'll hit a roundabout, and if it was going to go left, it won't go left until it's gone around the roundabout and then

takes the appropriate switch.

How does it know which way to go around the roundabout?

Because I struggle, if I'm driving in Italy, for instance, to know which way to go around the roundabout maybe they just avoid italy

but what i mean is they must be following the cars right yeah possibly the cars go around maybe maybe it's the heat of the cars or something like that yeah yeah um but uh dove releases they date back to the middle ages because they used to have religious plays and um noah would release a dove

from the ark of course yeah and suppose i read this in a book about medieval theatre to stage the bit where the dove comes back they'd either use a dummy bird or they'd just attach a string to the real bird to sort of pull it back

Oh my god.

It's not going to look that natural, is it?

When you're pulling this flapping frantically dump and it naturally returns.

And it's got the olive branch cellotape to it.

Pigeons are one of only three birds, aren't they, that produce milk for their offspring.

Wow.

So pigeons, emperor penguins, I think, and flamingos, and they produce it in the,

is it the crop?

It's called crop milk, and the crop is like this pouch in the back of their throat, I think, where they, a few days before they give birth, they start making this milk and they sometimes stop eating to make sure that there's not indigestible grain stuck in the milk that the baby can't digest.

But I really like the fact that they sort of adjust the milk and turn it into baby food as the squab gets a little bit older.

Is it actual milk?

I don't think it is.

I'm not sure if it even contains lactose.

It might do.

But could you get pigeon cheese, is what I'm saying.

Right.

I read that the milk in quotation marks from pigeons contains more protein and fat than both human and cows.

Oh, yeah, it does.

So, if we did get a cheese.

Unhealthy cheese.

Maybe that's why we haven't done it.

You can think of a whole range of reasons why we haven't made cheese from pigeons.

I get a bit iffy about goat's cheese.

Never mind pigeon cheese.

The Pope has had to, because he often releases doves, he's had to replace them now with balloons.

Because birds kept attacking the doves.

So in 2014, he did it, and a seagull and a crow attacked the doves very fiercely.

And it's children letting them go, so it's immensely traumatizing for the children as well.

And then also in 2013, this is when we had Pope Benedict, that release was also ruined when a seagull attacked a dove and pinned it against a window pane.

And then the year before that, he was releasing two doves, and one of them perched beside the Pope and didn't move.

And then the second dove immediately flew back into his apartment.

And the article I was reading about it just said, to his credit, Pope Benedict seemed to shout Mamma Mia in surprise.

So, this was Pope Benedict, because Pope Benedict was German, right?

It's like he's moved to the Vatican and picked up the lingo.

Well, you know what they say?

When in Rome,

you know, the all RAF bomber planes used to carry a pigeon as standard.

How come?

They crashed in the sea, they would release a pigeon and they would attach the coordinates of where they had crashed into the sea, and loads and loads of pilots and other

crew on the planes were saved.

Were they really?

Yeah, they actually were.

That's really cool.

I can't believe this, they were on submarines.

Wow.

And some paratroopers had a pigeon in a sling on their chest.

Wow.

Yeah.

A lot of these pigeons were given the Dicken Medal, which is an award for brave animals by the PDSA.

And I think more pigeons have had that award than anyone.

Yeah.

I have a list of medal-winning pigeons in the Second World War.

Okay.

They included Tyke, Gustave, Paddy, Billy, Mary, Princess, Commando, Scotch Lass, and William of Orange.

Was Commando the naked one?

It also sounds like William of Orange has gotten the wrong list of your things.

I also have a list of Kings of England, which is Henry VIII, James II, and Winky.

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 we've said during the course of this podcast, you can get us on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at Egg Shapes, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, and you can also get us on at qi podcast on Twitter.

And you can also go to no suchthingasafish.com where we have all of our previous episodes.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

what we can do.

You go on to me.

I'll go on to you.

Let's be real.

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