59: No Such Thing As Old Mother Bastard

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

And this is our UK general election special podcast, the only UK general election special podcast out there that makes absolutely no mention whatsoever of the UK general election.

So once again, we've gathered around the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order.

Here we go.

Starting with fact number one: James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that the first thing

was a parliament.

So the first thing called a thing.

The first thing called a thing was a parliament.

This is an etymology thing.

An etymology.

I think you mean an etymology parliament.

Okay, so let me get this right.

The oldest known parliament which is still going is the Althing, which is in Iceland.

It's been going since the 10th century.

And that was called Althing from the Icelandic, which they used for a a parliament.

And then in Old English, they used this word thing to mean a parliament as well.

And then they used thing to mean a place where people got together and decided on laws and stuff like that.

And then a thing was something you brought to the parliament if you had a problem, like it was your, you know, my thing is that my neighbour is stealing my goats.

And then a thing became any old thing, and then it became what it is today.

That makes sense.

Yes, yeah, makes total sense.

Hugh.

The journey of the state.

Yeah, so basically, I thought we'd just talk about the history of parliaments and Icelandic parliaments in particular, because Iceland, like I said, was the oldest ever parliament.

It was 930.

And it was basically everyone would turn up to this particular part of Iceland.

It's actually the place where the North American and the European continents are right next to each other.

You can jump from one to the other.

I've been there.

It's quite cool.

Oh, wow.

And that place is called Thing Velier.

And

yeah,

it was going from 930 to 1799, then it was abolished for a few years and then reinstated in 1844.

And it's been continuous ever since.

I like the simplicity of the Icelandic terms, like having it in Thing Field, and didn't they used to make their decisions on Law Rock, I think, which is in the middle of Thing Field when they met originally.

Yeah.

Oh, that's so good.

I do really like Icelandic politics mainly because of one character that I've come across and looking at this.

So Andy's shaking his head.

John Gnar, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know if I'm pronouncing his surname right.

Did you read about John Gnar?

No.

John Gnar is fantastic.

He basically set up a satirical party called the Best Party.

Yeah, the idea of the Best Party was that he was just going to challenge all of the things that he thought was wrong that politicians were doing.

So part of his political promises was that he said that everyone would get free towels and swimming pools.

Oh, that's good.

Yep.

A polar bearer for Reykjavik Zoo.

Okay.

All kinds of things for weaklings.

What do you think that means?

I don't know, but I'm voting for it.

And he wanted a Disneyland there as well.

But he actually got in, which is really exciting.

He's like a post-punk guy as well.

When it's Gay Pride Day, he dresses up in drag.

One of the problems was with the free towels.

He did it just as a joke.

But then when he got in, he realised that actually they had to make a lot of cuts because there have been really bad economic problems in Iceland.

And so he couldn't give free towels to people after all.

So he he couldn't keep as much.

He actually doubled the price of towels.

They asked him about it, and he said, Yeah, I had to raise everything that could be raised, all service fees, and no free towels.

In fact, double the price.

Wow.

My favourite thing of all about him is that upon being elected, he said that he would not enter a coalition government with anyone who hadn't watched the series The Wire on HBO.

So, another good thing about Icelandic politics,

they had the world's first openly gay head of state.

And that was Joanna Sigurda Dottia.

And she was a lesbian and she was head of government from the 1st of February 2009.

She's pretty cool.

A few other things that Iceland's really good at, they've had more Nobel Prizes per capita than anywhere else.

Apart from there's a few very, very, very small places that have a few more.

If there's only one guy in the country,

that's what I want, a country where 100% of people have a Nobel Prize.

They have the most expensive Big Macs in the world.

Why are they so expensive?

Just because you've got to get all the food over there, and also it's to do with

their currency being very, very strong.

Yeah, everything's quite expensive in Iceland, isn't it?

How much are we talking?

We're talking 5, 10.

Well, last time I got the figures, which was a few years ago now, and they've had a few troubles since then, it was $6.67 each for a Big Mac, and that was compared to the equivalent of $3.32 in the UK.

Oh, wow.

So it's twice as expensive.

Is that with fries?

It was made by meal.

Okay, well, I don't know.

I don't know.

Do you know about Icelandic horses?

No, no.

No.

They're very cool.

Are they?

Yes, and they're very lonely.

It's the most isolated breed in the world, so you're not allowed to import a horse into Iceland

ever.

Okay.

You can leave if you're a horse, but once you leave, you can't go back.

No way.

Yeah, because they are worried about the Icelandic horses getting diseases

foreign horses infecting them.

This is supposedly one of the oldest laws in the world.

It was supposedly decreed by the ALFING in 982.

982.

Which, I mean, no one's quite sure because the records are obviously quite scant.

But

it's quite difficult because they lost about 70% of their horses in 1782 because of volcanic ash poisoning.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, so there were slim pickings there.

But they have recovered since 1782.

Yeah, it's difficult with Icelandic history because it kind of morphs into the sagas quite a lot.

So until the 1980s, the Icelandic sagas were taught as history.

Well,

a lot of them are historical, though.

So they found, for instance, the history of the fact that it was Icelandic people who first got to America.

There's archaeological evidence which exactly backs up what was in the sagas which said that.

I think it's kind of half true and half madey-uppy stuff.

That's kind of like Sweden.

Have we ever mentioned the fact that Swedish kings, about eight or nine of them, are fictional because they come from their legends, don't they?

So Swedish King Charles the, I want to say 16th or 17th is actually only the eleventh king.

Here's another old law, speaking of parliament and laws, as you were.

Since 1313 it's been illegal to wear a suit of armour in the houses of parliament, and it still is illegal.

Is it?

So you can't do that.

Why not?

I guess because it would have seemed like a declara, like like maybe a declaration of war, like you were going into.

Although, weirdly, it's illegal to have a suit of armour there, but they do have still

in the cloakroom for the MPs, and also in the lifts, they have hooks for your sword.

In the lifts?

Apparently, there was a guy who went to Palasbara recently in the lifts.

Remember in the 14th century, they had those lifts that people used to put their sards in.

The invention of the lift, post-date, swords going out of fashion.

You would have thought

by about 200 years.

You don't know what's fashionable in the houses of parliament.

They're still very in.

And also, how long is the journey of the lift?

Yeah.

They're like, oh, I'm just going to take the sword off for the duration of it.

Well, it's a very old lift, so they were slurring those days.

How old is it?

In the 14th century.

No, I don't know.

I think it just must be a customary thing.

Apparently, quite a lot of plastic swords are

hooked onto the hangers in the cloakroom.

What's going on with plastic swords?

There is the idea that you...

Have we mentioned this before, that you're not allowed to die or that it's illegal to die in the House of Commons?

Yeah, that's not true.

This is not true.

So you can die there.

Of course you can.

Who's going to stop you?

Most of the it's illegal to die.

No, no, no, but the sorry, not illegal, but it's not recognised.

But it is.

It is, so you can die in Parliament.

No one actually knows where that myth even comes from.

Oh, really?

Okay.

Oh, you're fighting about etymology, speaking of the English Houses of Parliament, the origin of the phrase in the bag, I think one of the best estimates of where that comes from is from the partition bag, which is the bag that is hung on the back of the speaker's chair.

Is this not true?

I don't know.

You're looking at me really weirdly.

I don't reckon it's true, because I just think it comes from there being bags.

Like, where's that pig?

It's in the bag.

I don't mean to be.

I mean, maybe it's true.

Maybe it's true.

Where's that pig?

I can't tell you because there's just no phrase.

phrase.

Wait, so what's it?

So so in Parliament it's I should clarify I mean the metaphorical meaning of in the bag to mean um this thing that I wanted to happen is gonna happen is from a par in Parliament there's a bag that a velvet bag that hangs over the back of the speaker's chair.

And it was if you wanted to lodge a petition in Parliament and you were too shy to announce it out loud, then you dropped a little petition paper into the in the bag.

You'd be like, it's in the bag.

Wow.

That's very cool.

Just a theory.

Just an etymological theory.

Where's your petition?

In the bag.

No, that's the pig bag.

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

Yep, my fact is that one of the largest majorities in a Brazilian local election was won by a rhino.

So a rhino got elected.

A rhino got, well, annoyingly, she didn't get elected.

So this was a rhinoceros called Kakereco, who was a rhino at Sao Paulo Zoo, and this was in 1958 at the council elections.

And she just got this massive majority.

So this campaign was started by a bunch of students a few days earlier who managed to get her added to the ballot paper.

And 100,000 people voted for Kakereco, and the second highest number of votes anyone got in that election was 10,000.

But she didn't get elected into office in the end.

Why does?

Oh, because she's a rhino.

Some little detail of bureaucracy which bans rhinos.

The person who came second got in.

Yeah.

Doesn't Kakareko mean rubbish as well?

Yeah, it means like pile of rubbish.

And that's because she was

because she was a really formless baby when she was born, which does seem kind of harsh.

Apparently, she was really ugly, though.

The zookeeper was really harsh about her, in fact.

So the idea was that

we're voting something so hideous and ugly and stupid, and yet it's probably going to be better at this job than

a politician.

Well, I hope she had a very scathing acceptance speech.

To everyone who doubted me along the way, I'm coming for you.

So, on animals being elected to things,

I can highly recommend the Wikipedia page list of non-human electoral candidates, which is very strong.

Can you hear some examples, please?

Well,

I'm quoting directly here: there's New Zealand's McGillicuddy Sirius Party is the name of the party, that entered a goat in a local election.

And then it says, but their attempt to have a hedgehog stand for parliament was unsuccessful.

Also, in 2001, a Daxon called Saussise or Sausage was a candidate

in Marseille in the municipal elections there.

And he got 4% of the votes, which is a lot more than quite a lot of fringe candidates get.

And then a few years later, he went on their equivalent of Big Brother, which is called Secret Story.

Oh, I remember that, yeah.

And

because the point is that when you enter, you have to have a secret.

And his secret was that he was a candidate in an election.

He had to enter under an assumed name, so he entered the house with the nickname Secret.

That was his nickname.

But if the whole house was about every single candidate having a secret, didn't they all have the nickname Secret?

The presumed secret.

Exactly.

What else was on that list?

I've got one, if you want.

Yeah,

there was a sock puppet called Ed the Sock, who attempted to run for the Fed Up party during the Canadian federal election of 2011.

How did he fare?

He attempted to run, so I don't think they allowed him to.

It's a shame.

Actually, one of the people who's running against Ed Miliband in this election for the official Monster Raving Looney Party is called Nick the Flying Brick.

But he's not a brick, he's a human.

Oh, okay.

Imagine the disappointment when you thought he was a brick.

You voted for him, and then it turns out to be a human.

Or maybe it's a pleasant surprise.

It was like, God, I voted for a brick because it was the lesser of two evils.

He turned out to be a person.

It was great news.

Yeah, I only voted for you because of the housing crisis.

Since you mentioned the Monster Arabian Uni Party, so going back to the Kakareko Rhino fact, Canada's equivalent of the Monster Avian Uni Party was called the Rhinoceros Party.

Canada's equivalent of the.

Is that just a coincidence?

No, it's not.

It was named after Kakareko.

So they had some quite funny policies.

In the 80s and 90s, they determined to repeal the law of gravity to provide higher.

Yep.

Didn't succeed, so far as I know.

Although we are doing this on the ceiling, which maybe

they said they'd provide higher education by building taller schools.

They said they'd count the thousand islands to make sure America didn't steal any.

And then they had this platform, this election platform, in 1984, the Rhino Party of Canada, where they declared war on Belgium.

They said they declared war on Belgium because in an episode of Tintin, a rhino had been blown up, and it turned out that rhino was Cornelius the Rhino's grandmother.

And Cornelius the Rhino was the nominal leader of the Rhino Party of Canada.

And so this fictional rhino was the

real rhino.

Yeah, but his grandmother was a fictional rhino.

Yeah, I don't know how that happens.

So yeah, they said they declare war, and then the ambassador to Canada from Belgium decided, so he made an announcement saying, I saw I had a crisis on my hands, and they declared war, saying the only way they wouldn't actually go to war war with Belgium was if

Belgium handed over a case of mussels and a case of Belgian beer to the rhinoceros, delivered to the rhinoceros's hindquarters, as they said.

And the Belgian ambassador to Canada actually

made an announcement saying, I will hand this over.

I don't want to create an international crisis.

And they turned up in Montreal and they all met and they had a really great day eating mussels and drinking beer.

And war was averted.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

Thank you.

So we should really declare war on anyone who we want free beer from.

Everyone, the champagne region?

Yeah.

They've been pissing me off for a while.

Just about Brazil, which is where the Rhino was elected, and funny people getting themselves elected, I find this so extraordinary.

Recently, I think this year or last year, the highest number of votes ever recorded in a congressional election in Brazil has been recorded and won, and this was won by a clown called Tiri Rica, and so he's just been elected to Congress for Sao Paulo.

And yeah, he's got the highest number of votes ever received by anyone in Sao Paulo.

His election platforms included, or his slogans included things like, if it can't get any worse, vote Tiri Rica.

What does a federal congressman do?

I really don't know, but vote for me and I'll let you know.

If elected, I promise I'll help all Brazilian families, especially mine.

And he's just a complete joke and got more votes than anyone else in Sao Paulo has ever.

Sounds amazing.

Yeah, they really like jibbing at the proper election candidates, don't they?

Yeah.

Presumably, quite hard canvassing as a clown because you're constantly saying to people, shake my hand.

You don't want to be holding babies too much.

I was really surprised by the fact that as someone who I've read tons of comedy biographies, comedians are largely my heroes, and so many comedians go into politics.

There's a lot of in America at the moment.

Al Franken, he was a Saturday night live writer.

He's now a politician.

Eddie Izzard has said that he wants to run.

Russell Murrand seems to be Al Murray currently in the election we're not talking about.

He's doing stuff.

I was surprised, though, there's an old comedian in America called Gracie Allen.

Gracie Allen was one of the top comedians of her day in America, household name.

And she ran.

She went on a 34-city tour.

She was running for president.

She ran as a candidate of the surprise party.

She had

a kangaroo as her mascot.

I love that, the surprise party.

I also also love the way you delivered that really deadpan.

I thought that was just a normal party name.

Yeah, you could have other ones, couldn't you?

Like the sex party?

No.

Why was that the first thing that came to the message?

The fancy dress party.

Yeah,

the house party.

Which is actually about housing.

Very important.

Yeah.

But this is my favourite thing, just relevant to a conversation we had earlier.

So she had a kangaroo as a mascot, and her slogan was, it's in the bag.

Isn't that great?

So speaking of famous people becoming going into politics, of course, Ronald Reagan was a famous actor before he became president.

But when he was running, the T V stations couldn't show his films because if they did, they would have to allow equal time to the other candidates.

So, if he has a movie which is like ninety minutes long or a hundred minutes long, the other guy has to have a hundred minute party election broadcast.

I think they should tr they should ha force one of the other guys to make a film

to be in a western all of a sudden.

That's a great idea.

Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State was called Donald Reagan, wasn't he?

Yeah.

So weird.

Okay, one similar thing, which is

some animals vote in their own elections.

So they're not getting votes in our elections, they're doing their own things.

So monkeys have police.

No, they don't.

Well, they have their equivalent, let's say.

So they have peacemakers who, when there's trouble, will kind of come in and sort it out.

Well, it sounds like they're more like

UN peacekeepers.

Yeah, they are a bit like that.

But, unlike the UN peacekeepers, they're democratically elected.

And inferior monkeys bare their teeth to a more dominant member of the group to get elected.

Wow.

Once they're elected, they have responsibilities such as breaking up fights.

And if you remove the peacekeeper from the group, then all sorts of nonsense happens.

And everyone goes crazy.

That's amazing.

Another animal who votes sometimes is buffalo.

So if you have a load of buffalo in an area and they need to decide which way to go, they'll all kind of stand up in turn and like do a little stretch thing and then they'll sit down and then put their head in a certain direction.

And then once everyone's done that, whichever direction is the most common, the most democratically chosen, is the direction they'll go.

That's amazing.

How do they...

Can they see?

They can see, yeah, they have those.

I mean, how do they see how everyone else has voted?

Because normally you have someone looking over.

Yeah, you're right.

I don't know if they have like a person collating the votes.

Yeah.

Can you spoil your ballot by shoving your head in the ground or something?

Yeah.

Okay.

Has anyone got anything else before we move on?

Just speaking about political animals, like you know, non-humans.

So I got really into reading about David Cameron and George Osborne's pets and their relationships with each other.

And they really do have a fascinating relationship.

So basically, there's the official mouser, isn't there, traditionally, who is the Prime Minister's cat, who's supposed to keep the mice out of Downing Street.

So that was Cameron's cat, who is called Larry.

It was reported last year that David Cameron has rebuffed calls for Larry to resign because he's too lazy.

There was a Prime Ministerial dinner recently and a mouse appeared at it.

So Larry's obviously not doing his job.

There were photographs taken of Larry, who was just lying asleep in the corner for the entire duration of that dinner.

So Larry.

Fat cats in government.

But

George Osborne's cat, Freya, was astray and is an awesome mouser.

So, ended up sort of taking over from Larry, and Larry and Freya became joint mouses.

I think Larry was sort of you know the face of cabinet mousing, but Freya was doing all the hard work and catching all the mice.

And Freya used to appear all over London and used to have to be.

Hang on, why don't Freya used to appear all over London?

She just liked to wander, she used to be a stray person.

All right, sorry, I thought you meant election events and things like that.

It does kind of sound like the Cheshire Cat as well, doesn't it?

It just appears.

It also sounds like, you know, when a president or a prime minister is visiting your house, the sort of Secret Service come into a swoop at the house, and then Freya comes and does a mouse hunt for her.

It's good, Cameron.

You're good to go, mate.

No, mice here.

Larry, uselessly see me in the booth of the car again.

Yep, classic Larry.

So Freya was once found wandering the streets of Vauxhall by a woman at about five in the morning who was working for a homeless charity who was trying to help out homeless people who were sleeping rough.

So she found Freya and she called up the number on Freya's little colour and was like, Oh, it's the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Come and pick up your cat, please.

And she was quoted as saying, I did find it slightly ironic that I've been up at 5 a.m.

trying to help 24 people who've been sleeping rough in Newham and we couldn't find anywhere to send them.

And then this cat gets chauffeur-driven home.

And she did use it for some strong political satire as well.

She tweeted, found on the streets of Vauxhall, not everyone is as lucky as Freya.

George, please stop cussing homeless services.

So if you want to make a hard-hitting political point, I think find an MP's cat.

And then

also sounds like Freya needs a Twitter account to rebuttal and say, oh, what, so I'm not worth going back into her house?

Because she kind of sounds like she's pissed off at Freya.

You're right.

She's taking out on Freya, who's really the victim.

So Freya's now been sent away to the countryside because they got a dog.

I think that means Freya's dead.

That's another euphemism, isn't it?

Oh my god.

I bet that's true.

All the news reports say that she's been sent away and looked after really carefully by a member of staff in the countryside because her family got a dog.

Stupid nation

with the classic lie.

That is terrible.

Okay, time to move on to fact number three.

That's my fact.

My fact this week is Finland's parliament sometimes makes decisions in their sauna.

Oh, political decisions?

Political decisions.

Or just decisions like, shall we get out now?

No, they love saunas.

They love saunas.

So they have a sauna in the parliament, do they?

Yeah, they do.

Their parliament has a sauna.

They just absolutely love saunas.

I found this amazing speech by a guy called Mr.

Perti Tostilla.

He's a Secretary of State, and he gave this speech at the International Sauna Congress, which they have, and this was in 2010, and it was actually in Tokyo that he gave this.

So I'm just just going to read you a bit of his speech.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are about three million saunas in Finland, more than one for every two of the 5.3 million Finns.

And did you know that Finland is a country where there are more saunas than cars?

Practically all the houses in the rural areas have saunas of their own.

It's hard to imagine a Finnish summer cottage by a lake without a sauna.

And he goes on into talking about how Nokia has built saunas for their employees and their company's gyms.

He said Finns carry their saunas with them wherever they go.

All the ninety eight, yeah, they all the ninety eight Finnish diplomatic and consular missions in different parts of the world have their own saunas.

Okay, so sorry, physics.

Our representatives here in Tokyo take pride in their two saunas.

The Embassy sauna in Tokyo was the first Finnish sauna built in Japan, but certainly not the last one.

I'm sure there are many Finnish saunas in today's Japan, and the Japanese guests and friends keep queuing to them.

They love saunas.

Yeah, I gathered that speech actually.

Although apparently this was a

statement made by not a statement, a comment made by Olly Rain, who's a Finnish politician who's serving as European Commissioner for Financial Affairs.

And he said that with increased emphasis on gender equality, it's becoming harder and harder to have political discussions and meetings in saunas, because they are naked saunas, so Finns don't gender mix their saunas.

Men will sauna in a different sauna to women.

I guess there is something nice about doing a debate with all your clothes off, because it's like you're naked, you're kind of letting yourself be shown as you don't have anything else around you.

There's a story about Caesar.

I mean, I don't want to see it in the British Parliament, particularly.

Yeah, let's not introduce it to podcasts or anything.

What do you mean?

There's a story about Caesar doing that in the Roman Senate, I think it was.

Someone said, He's got a knife

in Crocodile Dundee.

And he lifted up his toga to show his thigh, where you would apparently keep a knife, and there was no knife there, so that was the point.

But that's pretty saucy.

It is saucy.

It's saucy.

He could have done with the knife considering what happened later, to be honest.

Khrushchev

that is, you know, ancient Roman satire just doesn't cut it on it.

What were you going to say?

I was going to say that during the Cold War, Khrushchev visited Finland for the President of Finland's 60th birthday and the two of them stayed in a sauna until five in the morning and they came out and they'd resolved a whole bunch of international issues.

So

Khrushchev came out and expressed his preparedness to support Finland's desire to integrate and cooperate with the West, which was obviously quite a radical thing for Finland to want to do at that stage.

So yeah, stay up till 5 a.m.

in Asauna with the Soviet and they will give you concessions.

That's a long time to be in a sauna.

I mean they might have gone at 4.30 a.m.

I actually don't know the start time.

So that Prime Minister would have been Erho Kekenen, right?

Yes.

So the good thing about Kekenen is in the 78 elections he won, obviously.

And they had a thing where they read out the vote count on the radio.

As in, they read out who everyone in the country votes for.

And they did it in groups of five.

And so there's like this long-standing kind of joke in Finland, which is like Kekenen, Kekenen, Kekenen, Kekenen, Kekenen.

Kekenen, Kekenen, Kekenen, Kekenen.

Can you imagine that?

That must have been the best radio.

Well, not the best, but you know.

That is mental.

Did they just not have any creative programming ideas for a few weeks?

I think it was to

show that there wasn't any dubiousness or anything.

They're saying, right, here are all the votes, we're going to count them all.

Oh, yeah, you can't lie and add an extra kekinen on the radio.

It must have been very hard to read out as well.

Because presumably, if you lost count halfway through,

oh my god, imagine the announcement.

I'm sorry, we're going to have to start again.

Or if they're this time, definitely, definitely.

You know what they say?

Ninth times the charm.

Kekanen, Kekanen, Kakanen.

So, when this is true about them taking them overseas, so when Finnish troops have peacekeeping jobs overseas, they take a sauna with them, even if the country they're going to is boiling hot.

So, when they got to the Sinai Desert in the 1950s,

they built 35 saunas, including one which had wheels.

And in the Golden Heights, they made sure that both the Israeli and Syrian ambassadors had access to.

Maybe, though, you could use it if you're in the desert, you could kind of go in there to cool down.

Maybe.

It feels like a waste of water, doesn't it, in the desert?

You're piling water into your sauna.

No, I just think it's kind of like the fact that

people in the North Pole use refrigerators to keep things warm, to stop things from freezing.

That is amazing.

So it's kind of like that, isn't it?

Yeah, that is very cool.

There's actually a hot tub in the South Pole, a natural one.

A natural one?

Yeah, it's basically there's a volcanic-y sort of area on one of the islands of the South Pole, and the water is naturally heated.

And so people actually go, people who are stationed there, go and actually sit in this natural hot tub.

And the Italians over there bring their own jacuzzi anyway, because it's like, well, we'd rather have our own one.

The jacuzzi brothers

used to make planes and propellers.

Did they?

That was their original line of work.

I guess it's jacuzzi, really, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And yeah, then one of them had a son who was very ill and needed, I think, the sort of massage qualities that a jacuzzi would have.

And so they rigged up a very, very basic jacuzzi, just kind of a length of pipe bubbling through some water to help his son.

And it kind of took off.

I like their planes.

So, in Austria, there's a town called Linz in Austria, and there's a health and fitness centre there that has had to deploy undercover naked security guards to infiltrate its saunas.

They're not under much cover, are they?

They've got to stop hanky-panky going on in the saunas, so they're employed to sit there naked in the saunas.

And then, if people start fondling each other, they have to be like, I don't know where they keep their badge or their proof of identity.

Women traditionally gave birth in saunas.

Did they?

Yeah.

Can you stop saying, I know it's the way we're supposed to say it?

No, I can't.

I never will.

I never will.

It makes me feel sick.

Sauna.

Sauna.

Women traditionally gave birth in them because the walls of a traditional smoke sauna were lined with soot and that had kind of bacteria-resistant properties, supposedly, which made them a bit more hygienic than

you could just line the walls of a room that's a comfortable temperature with soot.

So, in Moscow, earlier on this year, a man got his testicles stolen while he was in the corner.

Yeah.

Wow.

He was.

You put them down.

You put them in the little lockers, and you think they're going to be safe.

You've got to put your pound in the locker.

It's a false economy not to put the pound in the locker.

Was it in a mistake?

Did someone else leave their own testicles?

And you just picked up the wrong pair

later on walking down the street.

These aren't mine.

I lose trailer bit.

Should I hand them in?

It might have been.

Can you describe them any better?

Oh, their testicles.

So, look, it actually sounds like a really horrible night for this guy.

He started out in a bar, and this woman approached him as I was talking to him and he explained to the news station that was interviewing him.

We drank a beer together and then she suggested we go to a sauna.

They went to a sauna and the next thing he remembers is waking up early the next morning.

At first the only items he noticed were missing were

or his towel.

Seriously, at first the only items he noticed were missing were his cell phone, tablet, computer and some money.

It was only later when he undressed at home that he noticed

the incision in his croin.

Oh, my God.

Do you ever get the feeling you're missing something?

I've got my phone.

I've got my keys.

I've got my wallet.

Oh, my God.

I know.

That's a terrible story.

It is really terrible.

The news station did report, though.

Do you remember that he chose to go into a sauna with this woman?

He'd been at a bar, and the news station reported.

That's not a crime!

Oh, God, I do feel bad for making jokes about that now.

Poor man.

I know, I really hope he's not listening.

I think he's laughing.

Wherever he is, he's going

at every dinner party.

Jeff, tell your bulb story.

Come on, you want to say.

Oh, it's so boring.

No, no, these guys haven't heard it.

Come on.

How did he not notice?

They said that it had been done by a medical expert.

The doctor said that it had been done very professionally.

Yes.

Wow.

You can get apps that tell you how to do that anyway these days.

So I mean whoever stole his phone.

This is why

they were about to just leave with the phone in the wallet and then they were like, what's this out?

Oh wow.

You can.

This is why those ads always tell you to check your testicles every few months.

Sucks.

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

My fact is that in British electoral history, eight candidates have been awarded awarded no votes at all in a general election competition.

Competition.

And the whistle's blown.

The gates are up.

So, this fact comes from a book, which I don't know if you guys have heard of it.

It's called The Book of Heroic Failures by Stephen Pyle, and it's such a classic comedy book.

It's the official handbook of the not-terribly good club of Great Britain.

And when it was first published, it contained an application form to join the club, and you had to give your main area of incompetence and then a subsidiary area of incompetence.

And the club was shut down after it received 30,000 applications for membership and was therefore too successful to exist.

And before that Stephen Pyle, the author of the book, was himself expelled from the club for publishing a best-selling book.

So this the first hero to achieve this was a guy called Lord Gavach and he was standing as a Liberal candidate in Reigert in 1832

and turnout was about 66%

which was about 151 people in that constituency at the time.

And of the 101 people who voted, everyone voted for the other guy.

But there's a note in the electoral records, because I look this up and it says, Lord Governor was proposed without his knowledge.

I haven't been able to find any more.

So he didn't really have a chance to campaign if he didn't know that he was a candidate.

In Ghana in 1992, there were candidates who got zero votes, quite a few of them, even though they'd voted for themselves.

And so they didn't know how, obviously it was the allegations were of electoral electoral fraud but yeah yeah well so they

so they actually went up and said I've got zero votes and yet I voted for myself how is this possible you're allowed to vote for yourself yeah you're allowed

supposedly in old American elections in the 19th century you weren't actually allowed to enter the polling building does that ring a bell with anyone did you just have to make a paper airplane out of your thing you had to pass it through the bars into the building and there'll be all kinds of crowds gathered outside isn't that bizarre that is bizarre I need to check it you say bars it's and that's just reminding me of you do have pubs that are polling booths, don't you?

In the UK.

Because anything can kind of be a polling booth.

Normally, it's schools or

churches.

Can you say there was a bedroom?

Yeah, there's one person who there's a polling booth in the son's bedroom, and they take the bed out and take all the furniture out and they're just like a local because they don't have a local pub or whatever.

I think that's amazing.

It's in Rochester or somewhere else.

It's kind of selfish, isn't it?

If you're going to do that, put it in your own bedroom.

Are you going to bother voting?

Nah.

My six-year-olds really got energised about this election, though.

That reminds me of the fact that the division bell still rings in a couple of pubs in the Red Lion and another pub near Westminster, doesn't it?

We should say what the division bell is.

Yeah, so the division bell, which in the Houses of Parliament calls MPs to the House to vote.

So that still traditionally rings and still does ring in pubs near the Houses of Parliament, so that MPs who are drinking pints can be like, oh, whoopsie daisy's got to be at the in the House of Commons and cast my vote in five minutes.

Apparently, when the division bell rings in the pubs, tourists in the pubs think that it's fire alarms and frequently evacuate the building.

Which is another advantage of going to those pubs.

Yeah,

tourists leave.

Yeah, great way of getting a seat.

This is quite a weird thing.

Control of stir so if there's a dead heat in an election, then it gets in a general election in a constituency, then it gets decided by either the toss of a coin or drawing straws, I think, or cutting a deck of cards.

So, twice running in 1988 and 1992, the local council has been decided by cutting a deck of cards.

How weird is that?

That's so cool.

I really hope it was the same person who lost both times.

This time I'm going to do it.

Oh, too long.

Someone's break this deck.

That's like Hong Kong.

I got this from, I have a feeling this is James's fact.

I got it from our Squire database.

Political candidates in Hong Kong, if they finish in a dead heat, the election is decided by luck of the draw from a bag of numbered ping pong balls.

I think they have ping pong balls in, where do they have that?

I think in like the national

bad news, you've lost the election.

Good news, you're a millionaire.

I think they have it in Florida.

And in it's either Texas or New Mexico, there's one place where they do it from a hand of poker.

It must be Texas.

Yeah, Texas hold them.

But that's a game with skill, innovative.

It's they deal one hand, and it's

the New Mexico, is it?

There you go.

Yeah, because you couldn't have.

It would be good if you could have games of skill, like whoever's best at boggle

probably should be an MP, actually.

Strip chess.

Plastic sword fight.

That's how we do it.

Okay, so just on some bad candidates in elections.

Oh, yes, please.

Have you heard of Bill Bokes?

No.

He was a lieutenant commander in the Navy and he was also the worst election candidate ever.

Um he campaigned in twenty eight elections and got seven thousand seven hundred votes in total.

Wow, which is not very many.

He lost his deposit all twenty eight times.

In nineteen fifty one he tried to stand against the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, but he accidentally stood in Waltham Stowe East instead of Waltham Stowe West.

His party was called the Land, Sea, Air, Road and Public Safety, Democratic Monarchist, White Resident and Women's Party.

Oh, yeah.

It was quite racist, unfortunately.

But he um he was he campaigned against mostly against uh traffic accidents and in favour of road safety.

And he bought an old voxel which he painted black and white to make it a mobile zebra crossing.

A mobile zebra crossing, which I love.

That's how people would climb over the top of his car.

So, yeah.

And w in 1952 his election campaign involved fitting his car with a mast and a mainsail, at which point point he was arrested and fined for using a vehicle for advertising purposes in the centre of town, which you weren't allowed to do then.

Yeah, and he said, once I am nominated, I don't go back to the constituency.

For one thing, I can't afford to.

He sounds great.

He's, I mean, brilliant.

You know, very funny.

There's a great story I really like about a guy called John Wilkes.

He was running, he stood for Parliament in Berwick-upon-Tweed.

But people, a bunch of people who heard this, and they were the opposition, they were like, no way are we going to allow this guy to get in.

So they sailed up the east coast to Scupper's plans.

They basically chartered a boat, got into it, and headed up to ruin his chance.

So they were going to vote against him?

Yeah, they were going to vote against him.

But he found out about this, and he bribed the captain of the ship.

So instead, the ship took them to Norway.

But he still lost anyway.

He lost anyway.

Yeah, he didn't.

Despite that tactical genius that he shows.

So here's something else from the Book of Heroic Failures.

Would you like to hear hear about Mad Jack Mitten?

Oh, yes, let's hear about him.

You don't want to hear the other options?

No, no.

All right.

So, John Mitten was a 19th-century aristocrat, and he was extremely eccentric in a lot of ways.

But one of the things that he wanted to do, everyone in his family got elected MP for Shrewsbury.

I was just

a thing he did.

If you were in that family, how many did Shrewsbury have?

Loads.

Loads.

So his father had done it, his grandfather had done it.

So his campaigning seems to have mostly mostly consisted of him walking around his constituency with £10 notes stuck on his hat.

And people could just come up and pick them off.

And someone else would replace, you know, he had an assistant to replace any notes that were taken off.

He spent £10,000 doing that, which was a fortune back in the day, an absolute fortune.

He won the seat by 384 votes to 287.

All these people are going cheapscape.

I want only to £20,000.

And then on the first day he attended Parliament, it was hot, and he found it boring, so he left and he never went back.

Not nearly as interesting as walking about town covered in £10 notes.

That's a weird job, isn't it, for his assistant?

What do you do?

I'm the £10 note replacer on my boss's hat.

We don't really have any vacancies for that at the moment.

That's literally the only thing I can do.

So another 19th-century MP who I like is, well, he was...

From 1784 to 1830, the MP for Devon was a Tory called John Bastard, Bastard, who was then followed as an MP for Devon by his nephew, Edmund Bastard.

But what I like about John Bastard is that...

His name?

Oh, I hadn't thought about that.

It is quite a funny name.

Yeah.

No, Edmund Bastard, sorry, inspired the nursery rhyme Old Mother Hubbard.

Why do they call it Hubbard?

Because you can't teach children the song Old Mother Bastard.

How did he inspire it?

So, yeah, his sister-in-law was someone called Sarah Catherine Martin, who he instructed to run away and write one of your stupid little rhymes when she was behaving badly in the town or something.

She was going out with a philandering with a man she shouldn't have been.

So he told her to go away, write a stupid little rhyme.

She wrote Old Mother Hubbard, and that was that.

Is that inspiring someone to write something?

It was her muse.

Who's the mysterious other person on your list?

Oh, that's the Earl of Leicester, the fifth Earl of Leicester, who was a member of the House of Lords.

He didn't say anything for 22 years.

He was going to speak about capital punishment, and then he changed his mind.

So that's all we have.

He turned it into a yawn at the last minute.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you want to get in contact with us about the things we've said over the course of this episode, you can get me on at Schreiberland, James, at H Shaped, Andy at Andrew Hunter and Anna you can email podcast at qi.com and you can also send just general stuff to at qi podcasts those are all on twitter we've got lots of episodes for you to listen to if you head to no such thing as a fish.com you've got all the backlog there also if you want to sign up to our newsletter you can go to qi.com slash fishmail we are going to be back again next week with another episode we'll see you then goodbye

together

You hold on to me.