58: No Such Thing As Van Gogh The Elephant

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

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

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

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

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Czaczynski.

My fact is that Kaiser Wilhelm once lost a valuable arms contract for Germany because he slapped the King of Bulgaria on the bottom.

This was a thing he did.

He liked to slap people on the ass.

And so the King of Bulgaria was Ferdinand at the time, and he visited.

And apparently, he was wearing his colonel's uniform, which had been made when he was a bit slimmer.

So he'd put on some extra weight, and he was leaning out of the palace window in Germany, and Kaiser Wilhelm noticed that his unmentionables were tight, and so he slapped him on the arm.

So his unmentionables are another word for trousers, are they?

Well, I think it was.

So the historian says he noticed that his unmentionables were tight, so when he leaned out of the window, he presented a mark so tempting that the Emperor administered a resounding spank on the sacred seat of the king.

Anyway, he was very, very angry, and he then awarded an arms contract to someone else that had been going to go to Germany as a a result.

So Prank kind of backfired.

Yeah, but he did, so he was a big bottom slapper, wasn't he?

He loved to slap bottoms.

He is.

Yeah, I read that he had a secret society, the White Stag Dining Club.

So the idea behind that is that when you were trying to gain admission, you'd have to tell a vulgar joke and then present your butt to the Kaiser, who would then slap it.

And then you were allowed in.

I read he smacked you on the bum with the flat of his sword.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, which is a bit important to get the flat.

Yeah, absolutely.

Another death tonight of the White Stag Dining Club, where the king cut yet another man into

was with Ferdinand?

Was that with his hand, or was it?

That was with his hand.

So the flat of the sword was the white stag dining club, but just casually with acquaintances, it was the flat of the hand.

So just explain, Anna, who Kaiser Wilhelm was.

So Kaiser Wilhelm, as you correctly pronounce it.

Kaiser Wilhelm II

was Kaiser of Germany, was king of Germany until 1918,

when there was a revolution that

eventually led to the rise of the Nazis, etc.

Kaiser Wilhelm II was also the colonel-in-chief of the Royal Dragoons at the start of the First World War and didn't turn up, obviously, for duty because he was the Kaiser of Germany.

So

there were lots of things like that, because the royal families were so mixed up.

So he was the cousin of George V, the king.

Wasn't he the cousin of this guy who he slapped on the ass as well?

Or they were related.

Yeah, he was a king.

Well, Ferdinand.

Yeah.

He was the cousin of Nicholas II, the Tsar of Russia.

It was this incredible time when everyone was related to each other.

Yeah.

Well, that's always been royal families in Europe, hasn't it?

True.

They love the old incest.

He was.

He kept some weird company and he was into some quite camp activities.

There was quite a famous incident when he was being entertained, so he liked to dress up.

He had like 400 different military uniforms that he liked to dress up, and he changed outfits four or five times a day.

He redesigned the German military uniform something like 37 times in 17 years.

He was just obsessed with it.

Love dressing up.

I love that idea that you know you get armies who don't really know if they're all on the same side

because they've had a redesign.

Yeah.

Wait, are we supposed to be killing you?

Why are you wearing marches collection?

We're now in June.

Apparently,

whenever he ate plum pudding, he always wore the uniform of a British admiral.

He was insane.

He was totally insane.

And he hit other people as well in public.

So he hit the Grand Duke Vladimir, who was a Russian Grand Duke, on the back with a field marshal's baton in 1904.

Wow.

I mean, he was quite wild.

He didn't really respect anything.

On bum slapping, so for Chinese lunar new year, then Taoists visit this temple where they go to get ritually slapped or whipped.

So men are slapped and women are whipped by the temple staff, and that means good luck all year round.

And thousands of people go to this temple to get slapped every year.

Wow.

On the bum?

On the bottom.

According to the church, it is an okay thing to slap your child's bot.

Is it?

Bop?

As long as you've got a bot.

Come here.

Give us your bop.

Wait, is this.

This was the Pope.

But the Pope has also said, if you make fun of my mum, I'll punch you in the face.

What?

Yeah, he did.

Didn't you see that?

No.

He said this was after the Charlie Hebler thing.

He said, if you make fun of my mum, you can expect a bunch.

And then he sort of joshed with the cardinal standing next to him, sort of miming, hitting him on the face.

Oh, okay.

Was it a metaphor for if you make fun of religion, then people will attack you?

Yeah.

So

Asda's buttock slap has been copyrighted, no trademarked.

So you know the adverts where they go they have a little jingle and then someone slaps it.

Yeah, like that, yeah.

So for the purposes of advertising meat, fish, poultry, game, coffee, tea, bread, agricultural, horticultural, and forestry products and other items,

you can't use a buttock slap unless you're Asda.

Did you say forestry?

Forestry products.

You can't sell a tree with that.

You can have a bit of a tree.

We all know that's the best way to sell a tree.

Please buy a tree.

You can feel it right in your back pocket.

Is the slap suggesting you're hitting your wallet?

Yeah, it's like

I've spent not that much money, so I still have some money left in my back pocket, and now I'm going to slap it.

But also, I don't keep my money safely in a purse or wallet.

I keep it in loose change in my pocket.

That's the other implication.

So it implies you're a bit fun as well.

And you've got.

See, I never read into that second meaning.

I have to say, I thought Dan asking about the first meaning was quite obvious.

I thought it was like a dance.

Everyone at Asda has a fun arse.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I just thought it was everyone needs a thing.

You can't explain it sometimes.

You know, you ask a band why they called their band name that, they don't know.

I thought maybe Asda were like, we don't know why we're hitting.

But it's working.

Get complete rights on that.

Those dickheads trying to sell trees, get them away.

This is ours.

Got to stop buying woodland from Asta.

Okay, here's the thing about the Kaiser.

So he had like an intimate circle of friends and confidants, and apparently, one count

they were quite sycophantic.

And so one count allowed himself to be led before the Kaiser, imitating a poodle with a marked rectal opening.

I don't know what that means.

What does that mean?

I don't really know, and actually, I don't really want to know.

Is that that he's imitating the marked rectal opening of a poodle?

Or is the rectal opening separate to the poodle imitation?

There are some dogs where

you can see their bums.

Yes, you know.

Is that what it is?

I think so.

The ones with their tails up.

Yes.

But I wouldn't build that into a fancy dress costume.

No.

Just in case someone else comes as a poodle with a marked rectal opening.

Also, there wasn't really a mention of a costume, was there?

It never says he was imitating.

And that's a very broad spectrum of maybe.

He also liked to sit sit on his horse behind his desk'cause it made him feel like

a warrior when he was doing his

his homework or his tax return or whatever he did.

Yeah, did he have a high desk?

Or did he have a tiny horse?

Shell and pony.

Or did he just have a long pen?

Those are the only options I can think of.

He um he led military exercises, so he you know, which is just training exercises for the whole army.

But obviously whenever he did that, he was was so hyper-masculine and so in charge that the commander on the other side had to basically throw the military exercise and say, oh, you've won again, Kaiser Wilhelm.

Well done.

You know that

really awesome character from history, Annie Oakley.

Do you know the story about Annie Oakley?

So she was part of the Buffalo Bill touring group and she had the amazing shot.

And she was asked to shoot off the ash of a cigarette that was being held in the hands of Kaiser Wilhelm.

And she did it.

So, from a distance, she took a shot and she managed to knock the cigarette in half in his hands.

And people say that had she killed him, that may have prevented World War I.

And she actually wrote to him much later requesting a second shot when she found that out.

But he didn't respond.

When did this guy die?

1941, I think.

Yeah, it's kind of amazing that he got away, he managed to live through the rise of fascism.

And he lived in, what country did he live in?

He lived in the Netherlands in exile for a while.

And he kept writing to Hitler.

At first, he started writing to Hitler, congratulating him on winning various battles with my armies in a sort of, look, we're on the same team, you're using my military.

And Hitler was kind of like, what are you talking about?

You've been missing for 20 years.

I overthrew you.

And eventually he got quite angry.

So it's a bit like I loosened the top of this jam jar lid and all you had to do was just

hating Hitler and the Nazis.

He did.

And there was a thing about his funeral in which he wanted no swastikas at his funeral, but apparently his funeral was just completely surrounded surrounded by the funeral.

I think I might ask for that at my funeral

that box you can tick when you're.

But surely that's a surefire way of ensuring your funeral is stuffed with swastikas.

So you wouldn't ask for no swastikas unless you wanted them, Chase.

What are you doing?

Guys, no birthday this year.

I don't want a birthday.

No birthday presents, please.

Okay, especially no swastika wrapping paper.

Sucks.

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

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

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

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

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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No code needed.

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

My fact is that beware of pickpocket signs attract pickpockets.

They shouldn't make them so pretty.

They shouldn't festoon them with wallets and burses.

So why would that happen?

This is because they have them in public places.

You've probably seen them wherever you live, is that they have big signs saying beware thieves operate in this area, or beware there are pickpockets nearby.

And pickpockets like to hang out near those signs because as soon as someone sees that sign, they will immediately pat their pocket or their trousers or wherever they're keeping their personality.

Is that because they're just filming Aztec adverts?

Don't steal my stuff.

And so then the thief knows exactly where your stuff is and he can follow you.

And so if you see one of those signs, the thing to do is not go, hey, let me just check my wallet, it's still where it was.

Yeah, so the pickpockets, one of the things they do is this has been studied by a neuroscientist who says basically what they do is totally overload you with information.

It's not just about where their hands are.

They're up close to you and they're distracting you, they're talking loudly to you, they're arguing with you, they're touching bits of your body,

slapping a bum.

They just completely overload you.

This is particularly with stage pickpockets, but the same principle applies.

And it's basically because our brains can't do more than one thing at once.

So they, yeah.

So if they're like touching your bum, you're like, why is he touching my bomb?

And when you turn around, they've taken your hat off.

Yeah, well, he's already in your jacket pocket or something.

In 2009, a Russian bank employee gave over $80,000 of cash to a woman who had hypnotised her in the bank.

Wow.

I think that I am not sure about that.

It feels like she might be the accomplice, do you think?

No, I just think that I was hypnotized is often a very easy excuse for mistakes that one has made.

So women

in the pub at the time.

I left the whole bank unattended.

She hypnotized me to go to the pub and stay there all day.

No, I don't know how she did it either.

I read a great robbery story that was in the news, I think, a couple of days ago, which was a guy, he robbed a local grocery outlet and managed to get away.

They kind of knew who he was, though, straight away.

So they were chasing him.

But when he was caught, the kind of defenser going, it wasn't me, was totally knocked out by the fact that he was carrying carrying the money that he stole in a canvas bag that he drawn a massive dollar bill from.

The huge classic, like, what are you, the riddler from 1960s Batman

who carries bags like that?

It's like a double bluff.

This is the last place the police will think to look.

I hope in prison that they gave him a special outfit with arrows all over it.

There's apparently a school of the seven bells.

Have you guys heard of this?

No.

For which there's no actual verification because people don't admit to attending it, but it's rumoured to exist in Colombia.

And the final, it's called the School of the Seven Bells because the final exam tests the ability to noiselessly remove items from the pockets of a jacket rigged with bells to make sure that you can do it without distracting anyone's attention.

How do they know when it's time for another lesson at the School of the Seven Bells?

Can I tell you briefly about this guy called Apollo Robbins?

Yeah, go on.

Okay, so he was the subject of this New Yorker piece, and I'll put it up on my Twitter, which is Andrew Hunter M, which is it's and he is a stage pickpocket, and he can steal anything, basically.

So he met Penn of Pen and Teller, and Pen said, okay, go on, steal something from me.

And he wasn't wearing, at the time, Penn was wearing a sort of sleeveless outfit and some shorts, so that's quite hard, obviously.

There's

less clothing to steal from, so we're fewer pockets.

So he asked Penn, okay, take off your wedding ring, put it on a bit of paper, and trace the outline with it.

So Penn takes off his ring, he puts it on the paper, he gets his pen out of his pocket, and it won't write anything.

The reason being, Apollo Robbins is holding the cartridge from inside the pen.

Wow.

Yeah.

Okay, I have an even better pickpocket than that guy.

Go on.

Are you ready?

So this guy is called Wang Hong Bo,

and he's from Zhengzhu.

And he has been caught, well, he's been caught, so not that good, but he's been caught using chopsticks to pickpocket people.

Okay?

And he was photographed lifting the phone from a woman's woman's pocket with chopsticks while she was cycling through Shakesham.

That is skillful, isn't it?

Wow.

Do you know cool pickpocket flang?

No.

So they have a whole range of terms and exciting ways to describe it.

And some of that's mentioned in this New Yorker piece, actually.

So kissing the dog, which is making a mistake, not in a Kaiser Wilhelm Poodle way.

That's a mistake where you're letting the victims see yourself.

It's always a mistake, and the guys will have a way.

And there's skinning the poke, which is taking all the cash out of a wallet you've nicked, and then you get rid of the fingerprints and you throw it away.

And teams are called whizmobs, a team of pickpockets.

It's called a whiz mob.

A whiz mob.

Yeah.

That sounds like a whisper.

Sounds like something out of Sonic the Hedgehog or something.

It doesn't sound like a serious criminal organisation.

Yeah.

It's all quite Victorian, though.

There were some old Victorian or maybe Edwardian names for criminals.

Remember those?

Swaddlers was one, which was people who were Methodist preachers whose accomplices pickpocketed the congregation.

They were known as swaddlers.

What?

A few others.

Bully huffs would hang around brothels, surprising and threatening the customers by claiming that the woman they were in bed with was their wife.

That's very clever.

And then extract money from them that way.

Tatmongers were card sharps.

And body baskets were women posing as sellers of pornographic books to disguise their real game, which was stealing linen off washing lines.

Well,

it's an obvious disguise, isn't it?

You come to the door, would you like to buy some erotic literature?

No.

Okay, do you mind if I leave through your garden?

In the 15th century, Ambrose Paré, who was a famous doctor in the 15th century, saw a beggar in Paris who was begging him for money and who did so by, I don't actually know if I can put this out, it's so gross.

Who did so by,

she begged by lifting her skirts to reveal a prolapsed rectum it was a horrid sight he says it was over half a foot long leaking pustlite fluid over her legs and garments but his companion then attacked the woman and said you're a big faker you don't look sick enough to have a prolapse rectum you have to be pretty confident that you're right in that situation don't you I know prolax rectums and that madame

beat this woman to the ground and eventually she was forced to reveal that it was actually the prolapse rectum of an ox that she put inside her eyes.

So it was actually a prolapse rectum.

It was and it wasn't prolapse rectum.

Well I bet he felt pretty silly then didn't he?

That's not a human prolapse rectum.

It was the prolapse rectum of an ox.

Yeah, that she'd put up her own bomb though.

I think if you've gone to trouble.

If you've gone to the trouble of doing that, I really think you've earned your 50 cents or whatever.

Definitely.

But the lifting of her skirts as well.

She could just have a sign saying Prolax Director, please help.

Wait, so if you saw someone with a significant direction, that's probably how she started.

She's like, no one is buying this at all.

Except Andy.

I can show it to you.

No need.

Absolutely believe you.

The thing is, though,

I would pay 50p

not to see a prolax pronounced director.

That is a fair point.

She should have done that.

We should move on.

I've just got a couple of police things.

Policemen in Grenada are now wearing their Twitter handles on their uniforms now.

That's not very good protection if that's...

Weirdly, it's a kind of way of saying to the community that you are not going to allow us to get away with anything as much as we're not going to allow you to do that.

So it's like a policeman having their own name or their number on a badge or something like that.

Yeah, so you can tweet them and you can tweet because everyone in the town now, the police cars now have their Twitter handles.

They're starting to do this in America now, police cars with Twitter handles, so that people can make direct contacts and just let it be such a big thing.

It's not all on Twitter, though.

Like, maybe there's like get Constable Harris on Twitter campaigns.

Maybe.

That's true.

And you can add them in so you can say, I'm currently being beaten up by Constable Harris.

Yeah.

Is there like a really old school cop called Nigel or something who has his fax number on his arm?

One other thing is that Scotland's police force have had to ban a lot of words from their Facebook page.

So this is where social media has gone against them slightly.

So they have over 139 words that they don't appear now on their page.

They swear words mostly.

A lot of swear words, but then they include pigs.

So if you have an issue with a pig, that actually won't make it onto the page.

Someone stolen my bacon.

If your name is Fanny, you can't write to them.

Yeah, because Fanny is now a banned word.

Teabag.

Banned word.

Is this in Scotland?

Yeah.

Lots of people are called Fanny in Scotland.

I know, it's a big issue.

So basically, the way to be a criminal in Scotland is to steal pigs off people called Fanny.

There's nothing they can do.

Acab is also banned.

Sorry.

Because all cops are bastards.

And so is Bacon fucker

god they're so sensitive aren't they what about mr john bacon fucker though what about his wife fanny bacon

and their son tea bag

okay time for fact number three and that's my fact my fact this week is that no one is quite sure how to say the name Louis Armstrong or Louis Armstrong.

No one knows.

Oh, right.

So it's either Louis or Lewis.

Yeah, Sean Armstrong, though, right?

Was Sean Armstrong.

Yeah, but I mean, it's an insane thing that we don't know.

I only found this out because I was on Louis slash LewisArmstrong's house.org.

It's like a major website for him.

And someone asked, how do you pronounce the name Louis or Lewis?

And they go into this whole reasoning where they say that he in songs used to say Lewis.

In interviews, they would say Louis.

His friends would claim that he was called Louis.

But then his wife used to call him Louis.

And then things got really confused because he then got called Satchmo and popped.

No one knows.

There's no agreed opinion.

Despite the fact that we have so much footage of this guy, we have so many audio recordings.

No one knows.

But he never says, it never breaks off from a solo, does he?

By the way, it's Louie.

Exactly.

But there's a famous song called Hello Dolly, and he sings the line, this is Lewis.

So everyone was like, oh, so it's Lewis, that makes sense.

But then later in the song, a waiter says, this is Lewis.

So suddenly everyone's Lewis in the song.

So, that was the one bit that suddenly in America, you would normally pronounce it Lewis, wouldn't you?

Like St.

Louis, the town, and stuff like that.

So, it feels like it should be Lewis to me.

Oh, yeah.

I don't know.

I think one of his biographers said that he told him that only white people call him Louis.

Right.

And that.

Well, his wife, his wife called him Louis.

Was she white?

Don't think so, no.

Oh, well.

Was this the wife he married a prostitute, didn't he?

He did, yes.

Well, because he had a marriage.

He had a couple of wives, I think.

Yeah, he had four.

Oh, right.

Yeah, but he had a couple of wives.

Twice.

There's another thing, just with his name not being decided on.

They also later found out that he wasn't born when he thought he was born.

And so he thought he was born on the 14th.

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

He thought he'd been born.

He'd just come out of the womb.

Yeah, and he was born.

And they were like, no, you've not been born.

He's not been born, you know.

Because he thought he was born on the 4th of July, 1900.

But it turns out he was born August 4th, 1901.

Oh, wow.

Now all of his kind of big fan groups celebrate both birthdays.

So he's a bit like the queen now.

He's got more than one birthday per year.

Are they just two different people?

One of them is Lewis, one of them is Louis.

One is August Louis.

They were both fantastic jazz players.

So he did only get married a couple of times.

It's just the other guy got married a couple of times as well.

He was obsessed with a particular laxative, Louis Armstrong.

It's called Swiss Chris.

And it got sold by this American dietitian called Gaylord Hauser.

And Louis Armstrong would give whole interviews about his diet and about how fantastic this laxative was.

And he said the first time I tried it, it sounded like applause.

He said I had to crawl back to bed.

He would know what applause sounds like as well, wouldn't he?

And he would post fans

cards.

He had his diet device printed on cards to post back to any fans who wrote to him asking about it.

And then he had specially printed cards which had him on a toilet on the front of it.

A picture of him on the toilet and then

holding the bottle of Swiss Chris in his hand.

He would send it back with a free sample of Swiss Chris.

This is how devoted to it.

And then I think there was a slogan on the cards, wasn't there?

And he had this slogan printed saying, Satch says, Leave it all behind you.

Yeah, that's right.

And he never accepted a penny from endorsing them ever.

Really?

He was never paid.

He just loved it.

He loved it so much.

He took a lot of diarrhea.

Yeah, every day.

He took it every day.

Okay, so

the Voyager probes, which they sent up with a record on, which contains sounds and images about Earth.

That includes Louis Armstrong music.

Does it?

Yeah, it also has some Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and it has a Peruvian wedding song, which sounds good.

An address by UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldhelm

and a recording of the Azerbaijani Bagpipe Orchestra.

I hope they start with the Bach and the Beethoven.

Hey, you haven't heard the Azerbaijani thing, have you?

I've heard bagpipes.

It was meant to as well have a Beatles song, and all the Beatles said yes to it going on, but the record label said no.

And the rumour is they said no because they thought if suddenly there is life out there, we don't have rights to these planets that will then be using the song, which is it nuts.

Yeah, I've signed contracts that say, like, in all universes and resort rights.

Do you think maybe when the aliens come down to invade, the first thing they're going to do is go, yeah, can you take us to your bagpipe orchestra, please?

We are massive fans.

So, on mispronunciation of names,

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a great poet, obviously,

he said the following of his name.

And I can't tell whether he was taking the mickey or not, I'm not sure, but he said, I think that the word Coleridge, and he brackets amphimacron, long on both sides, has a noble verbal physiognomy.

It is one of the vilest Beelzebub cries of detraction to pronounce it Coleridge or Coluridge or even Coleridge.

And in his own poems, he rhymes it with Polar Ridge, Scholar Ridge, and The Whole Ridge.

The Whole Ridge.

That's a great nickname.

It sounds like his wrestling name, doesn't it?

So he's saying anything.

Yeah, but he rhymes it with everything.

Anything goes, but.

He rhymed it with anything, but he also said to say

long on both sides, which are Coleridge?

No, but that's the third way he said don't pronounce it.

Coleridge.

I've no idea how he wanted it.

Can I just say as well, why is he putting his own name in his own poems?

Oh, you know, for fun.

Yes, it's like a rap artist now.

Yeah, yeah, that's what he was doing.

So, you know, the word ask, or you might say ask,

and then

some people in London say aux.

Yeah, why is you ax me?

Apparently, people have been making that mispronunciation for more than a thousand years.

What?

It's not a modern thing at all.

That's fantastic.

What was there to ask people about back then?

What was there to arcs?

Would be like...

Can I borrow your arcs?

That was arcs.

Can I mention something about trumpets very quickly?

Please do.

Okay, so obviously Louis Armstrong, just to wrap it back around, played trumpet very famously.

They found a trumpet in Toot and Carmen's grave.

Did they?

So not only just his socks, that we've got to say that.

That's where he's got the word Toot in his name.

But yeah, they found a trumpet in Toot and Carbo's grave.

I really like that.

Was it from that age, or was it just something that was left there by the original ex-Howards?

I was charged when he broke in.

Oh, we've got to go back.

I left my trumpet.

Why'd you bring a trumpet?

I was actually just coming to do a gig.

I went to the wrong venue.

It turned out.

You thought he was on the pyramid stage at Glasgow.

Oh, my God.

You know who else was a jazz star?

Romano Mussolini, which I think we might have mentioned on the show.

Mussolini's son, that is, right?

Yeah, he was a jazz pianist, and he started under an assumed name, as you would, because it's such a drag that your dad's the square fascist dictator.

But then in the 1960s, his ensemble got acclaim and he reverted to his real name.

And he brought it popular.

Well, because the Mussolini name had been rehabilitated by them.

That's a terrible time to thrust that on your band members as well.

You'll notice on the banner I've brought a little tweaking I've done.

The article I read about him, I mean, he played with Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington, and the article I read said, although he shied away from his heritage,

he wrote a memoir called in 2004 called Il Duce, My Father.

Yeah.

He says that Mussolini was a caring father.

Oh, really?

Not that that makes a difference, I'd like to stress.

I don't know, it's changed my opinion about him.

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Okay, time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is: the man who holds the Guinness World Record for the lowest voice can hit notes that are so low, only elephants can hear them.

How do we know?

How do we know that?

We can, well, computers can hear them

as well as elephants.

But yeah, actually, other large animals would be able to hear them as well.

But yeah, below human hearing range.

He can hit a note which is eight octaves below the lowest G on a piano.

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

I know.

And he did he say that he can't really hear them?

He would he can kind of...

He can't hear them at all, can he?

No, he can't, but he can kind of feel a vibration through his body when he when he does them.

That's amazing.

Wow.

Yeah.

How how can he sing so low?

He has vocal cords which are about twice as long as a normal person.

As a normal person?

Sort Sort of like 12 feet long

dangling behind him or something.

Like prolapse rent.

No, sorry, those are my vocal cards.

And he takes his money back.

Yeah, so yeah,

he can feel it coming through his body.

Which is actually, you will get that with astronauts in space.

We can pick up sounds from people people on the moon, but it's usually the vibrations going through the body of the astronaut because there's not enough atmosphere for the waves to propagate.

Oh,

yeah, so the vibration of the helmet brings the sound through.

Wow.

So they talk by touching helmets if they couldn't talk to each other via...

I don't know if they do that, but I guess they could do that, yeah.

Yeah, no, I don't think they have done that, but I think

they could.

Well, it's the other thing is why you hear your voice differently from a recording to what you hear in real life.

Because you hear it through your body.

You're not hearing it as other people hear it, which is through the air.

You're hearing it through your face.

So, does it sound deeper to you?

It does sound a bit deeper to you, yeah.

Because it's the vibration, I think so.

Yeah, yeah, because we do fancy, um, like we're attracted to people with deeper voices, aren't we?

Well, women are attracted to men with deeper voices, apparently because it signifies a larger body size.

And apparently, a study has shown men are attracted to women with higher voices, but I'm very skeptical about that.

Well, there are a lot of women with very husky voices.

Yeah, and people love that.

Yeah.

Well there was a study that found that people men with lower pitched voices had higher numbers of sexual partners

but people with more attractive voices actually also have lower sperm quality.

Is that because they're putting all their effort into their voice?

Inside the body there's a guy going, Yeah, don't worry about the sperm, let's turn all our attention to the voice.

Did you just do a like slight Italian accent for the thing inside your body?

That controls you, which is an Italian guy.

He feels like he has an Italian inside breaking out.

I like to stress it's not a Mussolini.

So elephants can tell the difference between different human languages.

So they could tell which language this guy was singing in at his incredibly low

income.

How do we know they can tell?

They've tested two different African ethnic groups on elephants, and those are the Camba, who are basically farmers, they don't really hunt elephants, and the Maasai, who often hunt elephants.

And they're afraid of

um and they were recorded saying the same phrase, uh look, look over there, a group of elephants is coming, and then that was played to elephants.

And when the Maasai said it in their language, the elephants got spooked, um but only

uh Maasai men who are the guys who do the hunting, because women and children of either group it could be the way that they're saying it though, right?

Because if you're a hunter of elephants, you're going to say, Look over there, there's some elephants, we can hunt them, whereas if you're a farmer, you're like, Oh my god, look, there's some elephants coming.

They're going to trample our crops.

Look, there's some elephants coming.

Xron.

I hadn't thought of that.

I think it's evidence, though.

It sounds like a pretty good study.

But that is a good point.

But that also suggests that they understand the words that are being said as opposed to the tone, right?

What?

They heard the word elephants and go, oop, that's us.

Sorry, guys.

My ears are burning.

They can also, elephants they've recently discovered can point, can't they?

And they're the first

animal that's not a top.

They can recognise pointing of humans.

So if a human points to a bucket that has food in it, then they'll go to that one rather than the other one.

And they're the only animal who aren't apes who can do it, and lots of apes can't.

But they think elephants might point with their trunks.

So they thought that their moving their trunks around is just, you know, for gags, shits, and giggles.

But actually, it's thought that they might be pointing t at each other with their trunks.

Fantastic.

That's cool.

Elephants can also recognise themselves in the mirror, can't they?

And in fact, I think, sorry, this is what we don't think anything else can do that's not from the ape family.

So I retract the last ape thing, but they can recognise themselves in a mirror, and if you put a dot on their forehead, then they will, and they see themselves in the mirror, their reflection, they will try and get the dot off their own forehead rather than like an idiot, like all other animals, trying to get the dot off the forehead of the reflection in the mirror.

Oh, okay.

So, well done them.

Yeah, that's quite cool.

Also, do you remember that

because they paint, don't they?

And that was an incredible thing.

Incredible that he was an elephant.

Is that right?

No,

that's why he sold so few paintings of his own in his lifetime.

Negotiating.

It was very messy when he cut off his ear.

Sent in that huge package.

There was this amazing footage that came out years ago of an elephant using a paintbrush, painting an elephant.

And basically, everyone was going, what the hell is this?

And it turns out that they were being trained in very cruel ways to be able to do it.

But they can do it and they can memorize every single movement that they need to do in order to paint this thing.

Everyone thought this was a hoax, and I think it was Richard Dawkins who went out to find out about it because he thought this is impossible.

And it's absolutely true.

They've trained these elephants to hold a paintbrush and paint canvas drawings.

And you can buy elephant paintings online now that they do.

They're extraordinary.

Don't buy them.

Sounds like you've been doing it.

It's cruelty.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's massive cruelty, but like the video footage is extraordinary to watch an elephant doing something with such precision as well.

Amazing.

I've got something about voices.

So, you know that the biggest hearing range of any creature

is not a bat.

It's a bat's prey creature, though.

It's a moth.

Is it the greater wax moth?

It is the greater wax moth.

How on earth did you know that?

I just know stuff like that.

Yeah, it's like it can hear something really, really a noise that bats can't make or something.

That's it.

In the course of evolution, it has evolved a greater hearing range than the noises bats make.

So most of bats' prey creatures can't hear them because

they just get eaten out of the air and they have no defence against it.

But the moth has evolved such a massive hearing range that

it

does.

Not only can it hear everything the bat does, it can talk to other wax moths in higher than a bats' range.

It's very cool.

That's so good.

That also

feels like quite a good insult for some reason, saying, I can hear noises you can't even make.

It's true in humans that your hearing of high noises decreases as you get older,

which is why they had those mosquito sounds outside shops, which were to disperse teenagers, very, very high-pitched sounds.

But people of my age wouldn't be able to hear them because my little sillier in my ears have died out.

It's also useful if you want to talk about sex in front of your grandparents.

You could just do it like this.

How cloud would you like to go for a quick shake right now?

It's already gone here.

Koala voices are really low, aren't they?

They're 20 times lower than you'd expect from their body size.

They're about as low as an elephant's voice.

And that's because the organs that make the sound is an organ that no other animals have.

It's got,

I think they've got two vocal pouches instead of one, which most creatures have, two vocal folds.

They're weird, aren't they, koalas?

They're just

talked about.

They're just weird.

Like, they have the longest cecum of any animal, which is the small intestine, I think, or the large intestine.

And their brain is really tiny.

Well, the brain is not

incredibly small, but it is very unfolded.

So it doesn't have much intricacy in it.

And as a result, it's got a very, very low surface area.

They are so stupid, Cornelius.

It feels like they were made by a kind of trainee.

Yeah, because I think it sounds like the brain and the vocal cords got confused because the vocal cords are very folded and the brain is very unfolded.

So he obviously thought one was the brain in its neck.

The little Italian inside the koalas

was drunk when he made them.

Mama Mambia, what have you done?

There is a black hole which does the deepest noise of anything in nature.

And it does a B-flat, which is 57 octaves below middle C.

So this guy that we were talking about before was eight octaves, and the black hole is 57 octaves.

And if you wanted to play that on a keyboard, you'd need a keyboard more than 15 meters long.

And it's only for that one note as well.

Can elephants even hear that?

Who are you playing that?

Elephants cannot hear that.

Wow.

Yeah, who is the black hole playing to?

Yeah.

And you wouldn't, you would need something to reach it with, like Kaiser Wilhelm's pencil.

Oh, an elephant's trunk.

Maybe that's why

they have such long trunks.

It's so that they can play the wider pianos that are necessary.

Do you guys know about, or do any of you do, this vocal fry?

Do you engage in vocal fry?

No, I've not even heard of it, not knowingly.

Well, you might do.

So vocal fry is the lowest human register.

So, the guy with the highest pitched voice on earth, for instance, is singing in his whistle register, which is the highest register.

Which, actually, the person who has the highest pitch of singing in the world goes much higher than the highest whistle in the world.

And anyway, the vocal fry register is your lowest register, but it's become really fashionable and people have started doing vocal fry.

And it's that thing, 66% of college women do it, for instance.

And it's this thing where people talk like this, you know, like American girls started talking like the Paris.

Yeah, exactly.

Paris Hilton does it, I think, and Keisha with a dollar sign in her name.

And apparently, it's really bad for your vocal cords.

It sounds like a strain.

Yeah, it's bad for your vocal cords, and also it's bad for you in job interviews, something like 85%.

No kidding.

I just thought you had some kind of horrible disease or something.

I wanted job.

I don't understand it.

Wait, so it's not a low.

Because it doesn't sound lower.

It is lower, yeah.

I don't understand lower.

And apparently, this is everyone's doing now in America.

Yeah, interviewers Interviewers are saying, we don't like this.

Stop.

Stop it.

Stupid.

Mid-interview.

I do not like this.

But that's how I took it.

Just stop.

Mr.

Spielberg, just stop.

Okay, we're coming to the end of the interview now.

Is there anything you'd like to ask me?

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thanks so much for listening.

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said, you can get us on our Twitter handles.

I'm on at Shriverland,

James, at Egg Shapes, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna, you can email a podcast at QI.com.

And we will be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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