62: No Such Thing As The Ugly Panda

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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 Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Anita's MP James Parkin and Andy Murray.

We're also joined by special guest Rufus Hound.

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, Mr.

Hound.

Well done.

Twice in its history, America has been run by a shepherd.

Wow, really?

So we got that fact through, and I have no idea what that means.

Yeah, I think what does that mean?

Twice, the resident of the White House has also been a keeper of sheep.

The first of them was Thomas Jefferson, who, when he lived on his plantation, had corn and wheat and tried to rotate them, but found that the soil was rapidly blitzed, essentially.

And then realized that sheep were the way forward, that they fertilized the soil, they were super animals.

And so, when he was president, he actually bought sheep with him to the White House.

And the ram that he was most pleased with in terms of the sheep that he thought would become America's sheep was a Shetland ram.

Now, in the early days of America, when we think of the White House, we're obviously thinking of something behind layers and layers and layers of security.

But it used to be a house, and you could walk on those grounds.

So the sheep were in the White House grounds, in the lawn, and whatever, but this ram was incredibly violent.

There are official letters from William Keogh, who states that he was left black and blue by this ram.

And in another letter, it transpires that actually a small boy boy was killed by one of Jefferson's.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

It's very hard to imagine that happening today.

Today with the White House.

But that's true.

Because I was looking into when George Washington, because obviously he was the first resident in the White House, and it was exactly like that.

Like, people could just come and go however they wanted.

And he had to put a law in that stopped people just wandering in off the street to go, hey, how's it going?

He said that he'd be doing work and people would walk in just going, hey, I was just passing.

Are you going good?

It seems to be going great.

Bill Clinton was attacked by a sheep, wasn't he?

Remember that, Andy?

We were talking about that earlier, weren't we?

Yes, and

I can't remember when he was attacked.

It was as a child, and he's ever since been scared of sheep.

Really?

Yeah, apparently.

He said it was the awfulest beating I ever took, but I don't know if that was before or after the whole Monica affair.

The other president was Woodrow Wilson.

Oh.

Who, when he declared war on Germany in 1917, the ground staff, by this point, they were ground staff of the White House.

And because it was, you know, we are one nation, he freed them to all join the American military

and bought sheep instead.

Because the sheep would nibble the grass and it would be a sort of cheap upkeep.

I mean, they can't sculpt hedges as beautifully as some expensive White House ground staff, can they?

Yeah, I read that they were as a replacement for all of his garden stuff.

How good are they at planting

a nice bed of roses?

Yeah, but to be fair, they are definitely much worse in a war

than in human men.

Very hard sheep spies.

Did you hear something?

Did anyone call him Woodrow Wilson?

Well, they should have done.

They were known as Wilson's Woollies.

Oh, nice.

And the ram of this flock was incredibly well known.

He was known as

Old Ike.

Old Ike,

yes.

Who smoked?

Well, who loved tobacco.

And anybody who dropped cigar butts in the White House grounds, he was mega beeline for that.

I don't think he smoked, really.

No, that was an exaggeration, you're right.

He was chewing the tobacco, wasn't he?

Yeah.

One interesting thing about Woodrow Wilson is he had a stroke

after the war.

I think it's in 1919 or 1920.

And his wife took over the de facto running of the country.

And she was in charge when the 19th Amendment was passed, which was votes for women.

Really?

She wasn't officially the president, but she was like a de facto president.

That's amazing.

Because that sort of invalidates the whole votes for women thing, doesn't it?

There wasn't even a man in charge of the woman.

Right, we're going to have to go back and recount all the votes

and recalibrate.

Who was the president who basically died post-his inauguration because he did an hour and 40 William Henry Harrison.

Yeah, yeah.

I hadn't heard of that until I read that.

Did you know about this, Rufus?

Well, yes, it was that he was already ill at his inauguration, but he stood outside for so long that it exacerbated the symptom and he kind of should have had a nice woollen jumper, shouldn't he?

Yes.

He didn't wear a coat or a hat.

Did he not?

He was being, I don't know.

No gloves.

He was trying to show.

Because there were all these reports that he wasn't strong enough, that he wasn't interesting enough, that he didn't do long enough speeches.

I'll show them.

I'll show them with my naked 10-hour speech in the snow.

I read as well, because I've just been looking into presidents at the White House and sort of interesting things that they did while they're there, so keeping sheep.

One, and this isn't properly confirmed, but a lot of people seem to think it's true.

Grover Cleveland used to piss out the window in the Oval Office.

Yeah, he just used to pop the window up.

Yeah, it's a rumour.

That wouldn't have been good when the public were just walking through the grounds all the time.

When you say it's a rumour.

Why are the sheep yellow?

What's going on?

Well, you know that you can find bright yellow sheep in Devon.

Yes.

This is one of the things I looked up was about sheep rustling.

That actually it's going through the roof.

Over the last 10 years, sheep rustling and what do they call it, rural crime has gone up something like 125%.

And whole flocks have been going missing.

But one of the things is if you take a flock of any kind of size, you actually need a field to put them in.

You know what I mean?

You can't just leave them in a lock-up.

So, there must be farms that are basically hiding these sheep.

And there's so much open green space, you know, where are they?

So, farmers have taken to dyeing their sheep neon yellow, neon blue, neon pink.

That way, if their flock ever goes missing, and then you know, five hills away or whatever, someone's like, I just saw a bright pink sheep

in the van.

This was a a news article in Turkey earlier this year.

There were some Turkish shepherds who were in a field, and they Turkey shepherds.

Wow.

They were in a field, and the field was next to a cliff.

And one of the sheep, there were 1,500 sheep in this field.

One of them walked off a cliff, and all the other sheep followed.

So all 1,500 sheep in this village climbed, fell off a cliff.

And the first 400 died,

but then the next 1,100 survived because they landed on the dead bodies of the sheep.

Oh my god.

I know that sheep are quite fluffy, but I didn't think they were that fluffy.

I think if you landed at speed on a sheep, you'd be really badly fluffy.

You would think so, wouldn't you?

They're not like clouds, you know.

But define fluffy.

Like, 400 of them had to die first.

Surely if you pile 400 hedgehogs of a cliff, like the 400 and first ones are going to basically be landing on meaty squelch.

Meaty squelch does make it sound like a less appealing prospect than the big ball of fluff I was visiting.

Have we ever mentioned on the podcast the idea that sheep just used to shear themselves?

What?

They just used to just, what and then got lazy.

They used to shear each other, is what you mean.

No,

they used to shed their

wool.

on their own and we've bred it out of them because we've wanted to make it a thing where we could do it when we want.

Well, sheep peeling is going to be a thing in the future where you kind of put a protein into the sheep and it makes the wool kind of detach itself.

And then instead of shearing it, you just kind of peel it off.

Is that like an apple?

And if you peel it off, can you throw it in the air?

And whatever letter shape it lands in is the initial of who you're going to marry.

But for trial.

I mean, I know e-harmony isn't working for you at all.

I've been through so many apples, it's just not working.

Do you peel it in one big chunk?

Yeah, I think that's the idea, yeah.

Or maybe you just make a tunnel out of the scratchy side of Velcro and run the sheet through and out bolt the other end.

Fire it through, just cannon it.

Could we get that?

For us.

For us.

Instead of getting your hair cut, you just inject something under your skin and then

you just peel your whole hair off and then it saves time.

I mean, middle-aged men around the world are spending billions of pounds trying to do the exact opposite opposite of the thing that you've just described.

Yeah, that's the most redundant invention.

Something to make men bold.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that there is a village in Russia where every single person knows how to tightrope walk.

Is it just a coincidence?

Like, they went in a pub one day, someone was like, Do you know I can do this really weird thing?

And then everyone's like, oh my god, me too.

Yeah, like they could all wiggle their ears or something like that.

That would be good.

No, this is a village called Sovkula Edin, and it's in Dagestan, so it's in the south of Russia.

And the population is about 400, and everyone knows how to tightrope walk.

And the most popular story of how it happened is that 100 years ago, the young men had to go to another village to find girls, and to do that, they had to go up and down a mountain.

And instead of doing that, they would set up a tightrope walk, and then they would do it.

But the most common, most likely explanation is it was just bad weather in the area, and they needed a fix to get over rivers and things like that.

And so they did it when the footbridges would get washed away, they would use tightropes.

But what's what's interesting is so you say 400 people there.

That it's I read the article as well and it's quite depressing because this guy's saying we used to have seven thousand people.

But they all fell off.

Actually, only the first 2,000 died.

No, but yeah, he's really upset because

this was the place for typewriter walking, and now it's endangered.

It's an endangered typewriter walking village, and he's saying we have no funding.

So if anyone wants to start a Kickstarter for them, they need money.

Actually, all the villages in Russia are pretty much empty these days.

Everybody's gone to the cities, and I think there's like, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of villages with fewer than a dozen people in them now in Russia.

I have a fact on that,

which is that there are 23 villages in the Krasnoyarsk region with only men in them.

Really?

Yeah, and the article about this from a Russian website says that several have only one resident,

which I don't know if that makes it a village or not.

I think that's almost been demoted to a hamlet by that point.

It's just a house, isn't it?

It's just a med city, yeah.

But weirdly, in all of those villages, top gear, absolutely.

But to the opposite of that, you said that's a town full of men.

There's a town of only ladies in Brazil called Nueva de Codereo.

I can't say it properly.

But

there's about 600 women in this town.

And the reason it's only women is that the men go away during the weekdays and they work and they only come back on the weekends.

And as soon as you hit 18 as a boy and you become a man, you have to leave the village.

So it's an entire town full of ladies.

And it's been advertised as like singles ladies looking at.

So are you suggesting we maybe build the tightrope between Andy's all-male village and your all-female village yeah I mean that's a long walk it's a long walk but you've really earned your woman at the end of it

I mean it's a long way but is it a straight line

there's this is just a village fact there's this little village in Kazakhstan called Kalachi where this sickness has just like afflicted the a quarter of the population which is a sleeping sickness where people keep inexplicably falling into brief comas.

So people keep on just falling asleep, they have complete memory loss, they're left with kind of dizziness, nausea, headaches, and no one knows what it is.

They just keep passing out.

It's near a uranium plant, so people are both about that.

But apart from that, it's a completely normal little village.

No explanation for these very sleepy people and these very bright yellow sheep.

I was looking into,

because I love that idea of everyone in the village does a thing.

So I started looking into villages and towns where everyone does that one thing.

And I found a couple.

So

one is that this is quite nice.

There's a town in Spain which is there's only 318 residents and they've all been scanned as 3D models.

Every resident is a 3D toy now.

And so you can go and look at the town of all the people living there just as 3D models, which is quite cool.

There's a really good one which was in Jakarta.

An entire town

basically the police took and decided to burn 3.3 tons of marijuana because they were like, we're taking this away.

They got an entire village high.

The wind blew the smoke.

And so this entire village were just off their heads for ages.

Have you seen that video of the BBC reporter trying to do the link next to the pile of burning heroin?

Wow.

I mean, Google it now.

Pause this podcast and go look at it.

He literally cannot hold it together past the first four words.

It's absolutely exceptional reporting.

So good.

Some stuff on tightropes?

Yes,

why not?

In fifth century France,

the tightrope walkers were forbidden to go near churches for some reason.

Was it in case they set up a line?

Because some people did go from Notre Dams to towers

between them.

That was a big thing in France.

No, it was mostly like the church used to look down on actors as well.

You can't look down on a tightrope walker or they're doing it wrong.

But the thing is, is that all the fairs were held near churches, and the fairs were the places where the tightrope walkers did their thing.

So basically, it was a ban on all of tightrope walking in the fifth century France.

Didn't work, did it?

We've still got it today.

Yes.

Does anyone else find it really surprising that it was only was it last year or the year before that someone walked on a tightrope across the Grand Canyon?

Seems like the most obvious thing you do

as a tightrope.

And then Nick Wolender was the first.

But it's so obvious.

It's so obvious.

I like the fact that they had to put a 10-second delay that was shown live, except that there was a 10-second delay on the footage, wasn't there?

Just in case something happened.

So I'd, I mean, I don't know what they would have done.

I guess they just black out the program and go, well, that's done.

On to the next.

So Nick Wellender is a very, very famous tightrope walker, but you know, he's from a family dating back generations of tightrope walkers.

So the Wellenders, Carl Wellender, was one of the most famous, but he was going in the 1920s.

And he set up the, one of the hardest things to do is a human pyramid on a tightrope.

Unsurprisingly.

So you have two walkers on a rope, one in front of the other.

They have a bar on their shoulders, and you have a third walker on the bar.

Wow.

It gets even better.

The Wellender family

did a...

seven-person pyramid, right?

So you have four men at the bottom going in pairs.

There are two lines.

So you've got a square.

They both have

a bar on each of them, and there are two men on the next level up on each of those bars.

Those two men have a chair between them on their shoulders, and a woman is standing on the chair or sitting on the chair.

And they did this for decades without incident.

And then in 1962, they did have an accident, and two of them fell and died, and one of them fell and was paralysed.

And the other four managed to cling on to each other.

Oh, the Willanders?

Yeah, of the Willanders.

They lost two Woolanders.

Yeah, they were a family.

What I like about tightrops is how basically they just make it as difficult as possible, like doing this human pyramid or going over a lion cage.

It's just like it's not enough that you're walking from one place to another.

You have to do something dumb.

On lions,

Blondin, who was one of the great tightrope walkers ever, he once did a tightrope walk with a lion cub in a wheelbarrow.

So he combined the lion and the tightrope.

But that was very dangerous, and he very nearly fell and died because it was lion cubs are not light, and neither are wheelbarrows.

And

obviously, the lion

will bend a bit, it'll dip in the middle because you've got a wheelbarrow and a lion cub.

What you want to have is a wheelbarrow with two giraffes in it with a neck sticking out either way.

Okay, I found someone called William Leonard Hunt who performed under the stage name The Great Farini.

One of his best ever tricks, this was in 1860, was crossing Niagara Falls with a washing machine tied to his back.

And I don't know what that would have looked like because in 1860 they didn't have modern washing machines.

It wouldn't have been a massive one like we have.

But in the middle, he stopped to wash several handkerchiefs.

And then when he got to the other side, he gave them to his admirers.

I don't know.

It feels like washing machines would have been bigger in those days.

Like

those massive ones which you open at the top and you shove all your stuff in.

Yeah, yeah.

Surely it was just like a bucket with a mangles.

I think

your idea of what these washing machines are

is like they're only ones that are up from the flintstones.

Pterodactyl with a mouthful of soap.

Is this the same guy or is it Blondin who did the tightrope walk over Niagara where?

That was Blondin.

Is it Blonden?

So he went over with his son strapped to him at one point.

With his manager, giving his manager a piggyback.

Yeah.

I read a report where they said that they didn't like the safety side of that because someone else could get hurt.

So could he instead cook an omelette when he goes out and he's not going to be able to do that?

He did, yeah.

But how did he cook it?

He had a little stove.

He had a miniature stove and he had a pan.

And to be fair, he didn't just fry an egg or something.

He made an omelette.

Chopped a few chinchives.

Oh, Needs Kumin had to go back.

Yeah, so it was only a little stove.

It's not like an aga he was carrying on his back.

No, no, it's in a full kitchen on his back.

So Nick Willenders says he refuses to use a safety net, says he never has done.

He's had to once because he had to by laws when he was going over Niagara Falls, I think.

And he says, my great-grandfather taught that safety nets offer a false sense of security, so I never use them.

I mean, how false is that sense of security?

Are they just an illusion?

Well, no, but I met Philip Petit once

years ago.

Philip Petit was the guy who walked the Twin Towers.

Oh, wow.

If you've seen Man on Wire, that documentary.

And so he came, QI used to have a building in Oxford, and he came and did a book signing there.

So you arrive.

Do you know what?

He starts all of his speeches on the top of a ladder.

So

he came in and he was like, Do you have a ladder?

And so we got him a ladder.

And so as everyone came in, he was just perched at the top of the ladder.

And someone asked him in the QA section, at any point when you were walking between the Twin Towers, did you think, oh my God, I'm going to fall?

And he got furious at them.

He said he doesn't acknowledge the idea of falling.

He said that just, you would never do it if that was even thought to be a possibility.

And then he said, and if I did fall, I would fly.

There's a thin line between confidence and mental instability.

Time for fact number three and that is Chaczynski.

My fact is that in Britain, pedestrians step to the right to avoid each other and in Japan they step to the left and nobody knows why.

It's just weird.

So it's totally yeah.

So it actually is true.

Like every country has pedestrians tend to like have a strong preference for stepping to a certain side when they're about to walk into another ped pedestrian.

But it bears no relation to like what side of the road they drive on or what side of the like what side of the road you're supposed to walk on.

Yeah, because in Japan they drive on the left as well.

Yeah.

So you would expect it to be the same way.

Yeah.

So you can get really obsessed, as I did, with pedestrian behaviour.

And I really do recommend reading the thousands of reports that have been put out, mainly by the two same guys.

So for instance, we act react differently if we are going to collide with someone on a staircase.

So, when we're walking along a pavement, we tend to only put into action avoidance behavior when we're about a metre away.

But if people meet on a staircase, they do it right at the start of the staircase.

So, you see someone right at the bottom, and you decide there, okay, I'm going to step to the right now to avoid them.

So, Richard Wiseman did a study about how quickly people walk in cities, and he asked people to send him data and whatever.

He found that the fastest city in the world for people walking 20 yards is Singapore.

And they, on average, walk at

10.55 seconds to walk 20 yards.

Copenhagen was the next.

London was about halfway down.

It takes us about 12.17 seconds to walk 20 yards.

And everyone's between about 10 and 17 seconds, apart from one place called Blantyre in Malawi.

I've been there.

Have you?

Yeah.

They walk at 31.6 seconds per 20 yards, which is more than twice as much as anyone else.

Oh my god.

They're just like really, like, very pedestrian.

Did you notice this when you were there?

So I went on Wikipedia to see what reason there could be behind that.

And it says the most conspicuous and dominant physical feature of the city is the numerous hills.

So it could be that.

Oh, what are you going to do?

They're walking up.

Surely that would average up.

There must be people walking back down here on the other side.

Just with things going right and left, I read a thing, and actually, Rufus, you might be able, you might know more about this because you've done a lot of stage acting.

Villains exit stage left.

Yes.

Is that a true thing?

It's in pantomime.

Okay.

More than in sort of all theatre.

But yeah,

obviously the Latin for left was sinister.

And so that's where we get things on the left being sinister.

Oh, really?

Yeah, all pantomime villains exit stage left and the goodies exit stage right or enter and exit stage left and right.

So is that how you spot the villain in a pantomime?

Because I've never been quite sure.

They're very exciting about that.

Yeah, it's a fine point.

Those are the clues you're looking for.

You're always leaving pantomimes, going, I liked it, I thought it was very powerful and ambiguous.

But yeah, so I read that even Herge with Tintin, he used to do that as well.

If you would face a certain way, so you would face right if you were progressing as a character, and then you would face left if things were suddenly going against you.

Yeah.

Didn't we do something about cowboy films?

Yeah, we did.

The good guys go from left to right, I think, on the screen.

In really this is in really early cowboy films, which is mostly, you know, it's yeah, and also usually the bad guy dresses in black, I think, and the good guy dresses in white.

Yeah, yeah.

That would have been a technical thing, wouldn't it?

Um and like a cultural thing, yeah.

That in black and white.

Have have you seen the old um make up that film actresses used to wear in black and white movies?

Oh, I think so.

They had like green paint on their faces and then the lips were like bright blue because the way it registered on old chromatic black and white film was that it looked most likely to be like red and

things were registered in that film.

That must have been so hard to act.

Is that why they're all a little bit less believable in black and white films?

Because Laurence Olivier is looking at some like fluorescent-based cloud and going, Darling, I love you very much.

You look ridiculous.

I read horses apparently are better at running if you have a racehorse than the humans.

Yeah, they're just

it depends over the distance.

That's true.

Yeah, there is an annual Man V horse race.

In Wales, isn't it?

Yeah.

And we kill it over the ten-yard dash.

But

we kill it.

Well then, obviously we win.

The way that that works is it's over it's round lots of tight corners, isn't it?

And so the horse struggles to get round those and there are bits of up and down and sort of it's it's quite it's it's done in a way that makes it almost equal between human and horse, which is quite exciting.

So, who has it always been?

I've been doing it for the first time quite about four or five years ago, didn't they?

I think it's generally the horse that wins.

Right.

But, yeah, apparently, if they go one way around the racetrack, it's an advantage to most horses if you suddenly sent them round the other way.

Oh, really?

Because, yeah, there's something about being right-footed.

Most horses are right-footed, so you learn like anyone knows if you've ridden that when you go into a canter, you have to get it on its right leg.

So, you have to, when you're trotting and you go into a canter, you have to sit down at the right moment.

Otherwise, you're on its wrong leg because they're right-footed.

right-footed.

Most of them are right-footed.

So, and you can tell it feels wrong if you sit down at the wrong time.

You can feel that it's really awkward.

Very weirdly, looking into pedestrian behaviour for this, I found an article on the Chicago Tribune website which said, In Britain, simply stepping off a curb means pedestrians walk a tightrope.

Not very interesting, but true.

Good link.

Well, if we're if we're doing sort of pavement-style behaviour, do you know why French actors say merde to each other?

No.

Ah, so we say break a a leg.

Do you know what break a leg means?

No, I don't know.

So the levers that lift the front curtain up and down, they're actually called legs.

And so if you got lots and lots of standing ovations and the curtain had to come up and down on them,

you would break a leg.

So when actors wish each other break a leg, that's where that comes from.

But French actors say merde

because if your run was going to be incredibly long, if the play was going to be a huge success, then you would have lots of people coming into the theatre.

And before there were pavements, the reason that we have pavements was that the horses would go in the road, and that's where all the poo would go.

And the pedestrians could walk on the pavement, and that was a raised thing to absent yourself from the poo.

But before that, you were just trampling in poo all the time.

So, if your play ran for a long time, people would be treading poo into the theatre.

So, French actors wished each other the mer, meaning drag a lot of you know,

hope that your theater is full of shit.

It's so great.

Who came up with, like, they must have had an actors' meeting that lasted about three hours going, well, the process is the horses are outside for ages, and so they poo and then we'll.

Probably, I doubt there was a meeting.

There wasn't a meeting.

I take that.

Someone who came in and said, okay, there's news from England.

They've got this new break a leg thing.

We need to get onto this now.

So they did experiments on again on pedestrians and seeing what distracts people.

And they gathered up people, test walkers, as they called them, into a virtual street crossing simulator, which I really like.

And they pumped in the noise of traffic uh through speakers and they measured how well these people crossed a virtual road while having a phone conversation.

Because obviously you don't want to test it in the real world with actual traffic, so fair enough.

But but it was a real phone call, so they were speaking to one of the scientists.

And they did look both ways when they were crossing this virtual road, but um they still were walking much more dangerously, so they had less time to spare, they missed more chances to cross safely, and they they had more close calls.

And this is, I love this.

Some even got hit by a virtual car, the researchers reported,

which is kind of the best car to be hit by, but still.

And it basically, they compared it with doing other things.

So listening to music seems to distract people much less, maybe because it's a song you know, I don't know, or maybe just because you don't know what the other person will say.

But also, it's it's as distracting to talk on your mobile phone as it is to do complicated mental arithmetic while you're crossing the road.

Right.

They have the same effect on your cognitive ability.

But this is why they banned being on the phone while you're driving.

Like holding the phone to your ear and things like that, wasn't it?

Because largely it seems that your brain processes language.

Like

the way in which your brain processes language interferes with your other processes in a way that listening to music doesn't.

Which is why

if you're studying, but you want music on at the same time, you should listen to classical music or dance music without a vocal.

Yes.

Because the moment there's a vocal, your brain

processes get confused.

In Chongqing, in China, they've now got a cell phone lane on pavements so that people who are using their phones go in that lane.

So I guess at least they just bump into each other.

Wow.

Some theatres in Broadway now have a cell phone section of seating so that you can tweet and look at Facebook while the show is on.

That makes so much sense.

No, it doesn't.

No, it does not.

No, I mean, it's abhorrent if you're a sort of pure theatre goer.

If you're on stage, yeah.

Actually,

there are some suggestions that producers are quite keen on this because people do spend time, it turns out, tweeting about how much they're enjoying the show and its bars and things like that.

So they've got roped-off sort of sections that, you know,

I'm anti-this.

I'm very anti-American.

I don't want to sound archaic and with Andy on this, but that's

disgusting.

The last thing anybody would want to be with Andy on it

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

My fact is that half of all California condors were raised by glove puppets.

So, condors are massive birds, and they're sort of 10-feet wingspans, and they evolved

millions and millions of years ago.

They're fantastic things.

They can fly a hundred miles a day looking for food.

But they were not very well suited to the 20th century.

They were shot a lot and they would fly into power lines and things like that.

And in 1987, there were just 22 left of these birds.

And they were all taken into captivity.

They were rounded up because they just weren't safe.

It couldn't be guaranteed that they'd survive.

And they were bred in zoos, and they were bred by puppets.

Why?

Well, the good thing about condors is that when they lay an egg, if you take the egg away, they assume that the egg has smashed on the ground or that it's not survived somehow, and so they will be able to lay another one within that breeding season.

And if you do that again, they'll lay another one the next breeding season quite quickly.

So basically, you can quadruple the number of eggs that they lay.

Oh, that's pretty cool.

But really piss them off in the process of the business.

It will annoy them.

But you then have three eggs that humans can raise, and you'll have the fourth egg which the condor parents can raise.

So that's what they did.

They took the three eggs, they incubated them, and when they were born, they made leather glove puppets.

And you have to look them up.

The pictures are incredible.

I'll put them on my Twitter.

And it's really weird seeing them interacting with also puppet-looking baby condors, which they look really rubbery and strange and odd.

Yeah.

And they drowned out the noise by playing the sounds of rivers and streams.

And they poked the puppets through a one-way screen so you couldn't see

the human behind.

One of the people who cares for them, this guy, I think, a quote from a guy called Ron Webb, who's a senior condor keeper, explained that he raises these baby condors with the help of a condor hand puppet.

And then he he goes on to say, the puppet is like a fancy glove.

Whoever needs an explanation of what a hand puppet is,

unless it's not a good one.

It is a fancy glove, isn't it?

It's not like I go to the ball wearing this.

Why, Contessa, your sooty is looking especially delightful this evening.

Hey, speaking of sooty, I looked into sooty because I was just going into glove puppet territory.

Do you know how sooty came about?

Does anyone know the origin story of that?

It was bitten by a radio active.

Wasn't it a gift?

No.

So a reality show on the BBC called BBC's Talent Night, effectively Britain's Got Talent back in the 1950s.

And on that show stood a man with a sooty puppet.

And he just, I don't even know what he did.

Wouldn't that have been Harry Corbett?

Harry Corbett.

Harry Corbett, yeah.

So Harry Corbett went on, he had Sooty, and he made it through the heats.

Yeah, he made it to the final.

Sooty is a reality TV star.

He's effectively the Susan Boyle of his time.

He got voted.

That was his act.

It was Sooty singing, I Dreamed a Dream.

Yeah, but

into Harry Corbett's here.

I've met Matthew Corbett, the son of Tim.

Matthew Corbett's son worked on QI.

Yeah.

Did he?

Ben Corbett worked on QI.

He was a sound technician at QI.

Yeah, ironically, given his family trade, he was involved in helping to amplify people.

Well, that's arguably what their parents say.

What's that you say, Sooty?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's just carrying.

Oh, that's.

I like that, huh?

And he listens, by the way.

Oh, hello, Ben.

Hey, Ben.

No way.

That's so cool.

So, condors.

The thing is,

all the condors which have been raised by these puppets, they started behaving really weirdly.

So instead of staying in the wild and doing condor stuff, they started posing for photos with, I mean, not posing, but you know, they started compliantly being in photos with people.

They started attacking hikers' shoelaces.

And they also started experimenting with group sex, which is not normal condor behavior, I believe.

Hey, who are you to judge?

Oh, yeah.

Normal.

Sure.

Geez, get over yourself, granddad.

So the theory was because they hadn't been raised wild by wild birds, that they didn't have proper role models for how to behave like a condor.

But the puppets,

the cranes, because they've also done it with cranes, and when they did the puppet-rearing with cranes, the puppet-reared cranes would often abandon their eggs days before they were due to hatch.

but really, really not long before.

So they just didn't have any idea of how to bring up

a chick the same way.

So to fix the situation, the humans had to start behaving like condors with these glove puppets.

So that's when they showed them the screens, but also they would sort of,

this isn't nice, but they had to sort of hit the child condors a bit, the chicks, when they misbehaved.

That must be the weirdest thing, slapping a condor.

And being paid, being paid to do that.

Because that's not a voluntary job, you know.

Can I explain a rabbit hole that I went down looking at the condors?

Was that the California condor went extinct in the world in 1987?

So I was like, oh, let's see what else went extinct in 1987.

Oh, cool.

And that led me to discover that there's this thing called de-extinction, which is the attempt to bring back

Jurassic Park, essentially, to bring back extinct species.

And this year was the fifth generation of the quagga.

And the quagger is a specifically patterned zebra which had gone extinct and and quagger became a slang term just to mean all zebras.

So the last quagger, that genuine quagger, died in 1883 in a zoo, but nobody realized she was the last of her kind.

And then it was realized that it wasn't a specific species as much as a subspecies.

So you could selectively breed plain zebras to have the same markings and

elements as a quagger.

And they've done that successfully, and now the fifth generation of quagga has been reborn.

And then I found a list of likely candidates for de-extinction.

So there's the Carolina parakeet, the passenger pigeon, which apparently was the most common pigeon in America and was largely just like if they saw one, they'd shoot it for a life.

Yeah.

That went.

The woolly mammoth, I think we've all been expecting that for a while while now.

And the thing that I had no idea even ever existed went extinct 10,000 years ago, the woolly rhino.

Oh, that sounds really cool.

Doesn't it?

Yeah.

Should have farmed those.

They're not more fish than sheep.

Just peel a rhino.

It would have been very hot, though, wouldn't it?

It must have been just hot.

Is that what made it extinct?

It's just too hot.

What's the use of this?

So, one thing about surrogates is for giant pandas they sometimes use rabbits.

So they'll put the like the giant panda clone eggs inside a rabbit so the rabbit could give birth to a panda in theory.

That's going to be one braggy rabbit mum at the school gates, isn't it?

And also.

That's my boy.

And not at first, because they're tiny and gross at first, aren't they?

So it would give birth at first and it was like a two millimetre tall lump of skin and the other rabbits are going to take the picture.

It's like a new version of the ugly duckling.

The ugly duckling.

The giant panda.

Yeah.

Speaking of, it once was a hideous rabbit with ears all stubby and short

and all the other bunnies in so many words said, Bloody hell, you're eating a lot of bamboo.

Oh my god.

Just back to condors very quickly.

They don't eat for days because they fly and they obviously go for huge meals.

So they'll look for the carcass of a deer or whatever.

And when they do eat, sometimes they go overboard on it, eat too much that they can't actually take off again.

Yeah, so that's true.

That's how they used to catch them in like South America and stuff.

They would put like a dead horse or something on the ground or a dead animal, and then the condos would come down and they'd eat so much that they couldn't eat anymore.

And then they wouldn't be able to fly because they were so heavy.

And then you just sort of run after them and wrap them with a noose and then pull them off.

And often, like, they try and fly and they'd throw up because they were so exhausted and so full.

Is that an evolutionary response?

Because the reason that that we want to we when we get nervous is supposedly because there's a

I think a reptile you know so the evolution of the brain is that we start off with a very simple brain and then we get a bit of the brain that becomes I think reptilian and then it becomes mammalian and it's basically layer on layer and that the reason we want to wee when we get nervous is you want to make yourself as light as possible so that when you start to run away you you can get further.

Would that I would think that would probably be the same with the condor, wouldn't it?

Like, you throw up because you want to, then you'd be lighter, and then you could arguably get away.

Well, there's some animals that throw up so that something chasing them will eat whatever they've thrown up instead of eating them.

A diversionary vomit.

So, when eating corpses, condors always start with their eyes and tongue, which is their favourite part.

You don't know that, it might be their least favourite part, and they're just getting it over with.

That's so good.

Eat your eyes and tongue, young lady.

Oh, God, I just eat the heart.

Hello.

There is a Reddit thread.

Do you prefer sex with or without a condor?

Which is a typo.

That's typo.

Did anyone reply?

Lots of people have replied.

Yeah, yeah.

With.

Love it.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Shriverland.

James.

At egg shaped.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Rufus.

I'm at Ala Chaczynski.

I've just always wanted her to say that.

I've listened to every episode.

No, I've got email.

It's like, come on, join Twitter.

Just for the neatness of this rapper.

Yeah.

Not allowed.

It's in my contract.

It's a thing now.

Yeah.

In which case, you could probably throw me out, Rufus.

Yep.

And Czezinski.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

And we'll be back again next week with another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

See you then.

Goodbye.

At Bright Horizons, infants discover first steps, toddlers discover independence, and preschoolers discover bold ideas.

Our dedicated teachers and discovery-driven curriculum nurture curiosity, inspire creativity, and build blasting confidence so your child is ready to take on the world.

Come visit one of our Bright Horizons centers in the Bay Area and see for yourself how we turn wonder into wisdom.

Schedule your visit today at BrightHorizons.com.

Life's messy.

We're talking spills, stains, pets, and kids.

But with Anibay, you never have to stress about messes again.

At washablesofas.com, discover Anibay Sofas, the only fully machine washable sofas inside and out, starting at just $699.

Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics.

That means fewer stains and more peace of mind.

Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric fabric covers, allowing you to refresh your style anytime.

Need flexibility?

Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly.

Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes.

Plus, they're earth-friendly and built to last.

That's why over 200,000 happy customers have made the switch.

Upgrade your space today.

Visit washable sofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life.

That's washablesofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may may apply.