57: No Such Thing As A Hoverhorse

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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 with Anna Chacinski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with fact number one that's my fact my fact this week is that monorails were originally horse drawn that's really great it's like the ultra modern with the not very modern at all yeah exactly it's the future but there's a horse attached it's like

everything i always wanted spaceships are the same thing i know yeah exactly i've always wanted to know if like back in that period there were books that were just called like when will i get my hover horse like because they hadn't yet known about the next bit of technology

yeah I don't and the thing I really love about it is all the main new inventions coming out at that time even household stuff that was run on QI that vacuum cleaners used to be horse drawn as well just everything was horse drawn we should say why because that sounds insane oh yes they were yeah they were really really really big is the idea and they had the vacuum cleaner would pull up outside your house and they would send in tubes yeah who were inside the house and it would it would suck all all the dust.

And the tubes were see-through, so you could see all of the crap coming out of the house, which is quite cool because then you just like see what your neighbors, all the crap that's in the floor.

Yeah, you don't want to drop embarrassing stuff on your floor.

So you might end up doing that thing of making sure all the stuff that's vacuumed looks really expensive and nice, you know, just for a nosy neighbor.

I've got a few more, it doesn't matter.

I don't know if you've seen it, but the Jacksons have some very expensive-looking dust.

So, when are we talking?

What era?

This was in 1820 and it was a guy called Ivan Elmanov and this was in Russia.

The 1800s,

like when you think about all of these horse-powered things, it just feels like it was such a productive time for horses.

They had a lot of jobs that they seemed to have gone through like a job recession recently.

Because they were doing monorails, they were doing,

obviously, fire engines, they were doing trains.

They were everywhere.

And there was this amazing revolution.

Actually, before I mention this bit, they were used in plays.

The first Ben-Hur play that they did on Broadway was done using real horses on treadmills on the stage.

Yeah, on these treadmills, and they were attached to these poles so that the horses couldn't get loose and go into the crowd.

But they wanted to make it a spectacle when the audience was watching the chariot races.

That was quite a spectacle, isn't it?

Yeah, it's incredible.

So, all these horses were lying, bolting like crazy on a movable floor so they weren't making any ground.

And it toured the world.

It was a huge, huge play.

So, they were in plays as well.

Do you think the Grand National will ever just be on treadmills?

Wow it's not a bad idea.

Well it's not a great idea is it?

What's wrong with it?

One disadvantage for instance is you only have a very small amount of place where people can watch.

But on the other hand everyone there gets a really good view of the whole race.

You don't see the horses go by in a flap and then you have to wait another five minutes.

You watch the whole race, yeah.

Yeah, you see the whole race.

No jumps.

That's a problem.

Not with my revolutionary moving hedge treadmill treadmill system.

It'd be like an okay go video, wouldn't it?

Monorails are very old-fashioned in a way.

So the official monorail well, I don't know how official it is, but the monorails website I looked at.

What was the website?

It's monorails.org, I think, or monorails.com.

It's one of the two.

But th there are lots of theories that the guys who run that website have about why monorails are not more popular, why we're not all on a monorail all the time.

And they've said that like the there is one theory that they espouse that people actually make a lot more money out of railways or that more groups of people stand to make a profit out of railways.

So that's why they've been keeping monorails down.

It's the same reason we don't have those everlasting light bulbs.

Right, yeah,

so light bulb manufacturers will go out of business.

Or the idea that Gillettes supposedly have come up with a blade that never dullens, but they won't sell it because then people stop buying blades.

Yeah.

I don't buy it myself.

But they also say that another problem is that people think of monorails as being a bit eccentric or quaint.

So it's the Disney problem is what you've got.

You know, that they go around Disney World or Chessington World of Adventures.

And, you know, they're not serious.

They aren't that serious, though, are they, really?

I like them, though.

But it's like someone who rides a unicycle just going, oh, I don't know why everyone's not riding unicycles.

It's because they make money out of that extra wheel.

It's also because it's much easier to ride a bicycle, mate, and it's much easier to make a train.

It is, monorails are really unbalanced, like unicycles aren't.

Well, they're very hard to balance.

They're not because they have saddlebags kind of below the level of the tracks.

Andy, you have to admit that is more complicated and difficult than just having two races.

See the trains people have got to you, Andy.

Winston Churchill once drove a monorail.

Did he?

Yeah.

For a jar bus.

Not for fun.

Oh, no.

In 1910, this is before he was Prime Minister.

It was at a Japan-British exhibition.

And the Daily Mail wrote it up and said it was as interesting to him as a new toy would be to a child.

And he liked it so much that he then persuaded the Prime Minister and the Chancellor to come and have a go.

And he put loads of money into developing it, and he was hugely enthused.

And then the money ran out eventually.

That was a nice simile, as interesting as a toy to a child.

And I have some other similes here.

As useful as a coal man on a maglev monorail means like as useful as a chocolate teapot or something like that.

A coal man on a maglev monorail.

Yeah, because you don't need to put coal into a monorail because they run on magnets or whatever.

There's a list of some other as useful as a which I found online.

So these all are things that are useless.

As useful as a warm bucket of spit.

Or like one of those really handy cold buckets of spit.

Tons of use.

And another one, this is my favourite.

As useful as a hat full of busted assholes.

So that's a little hat full of busted assholes.

That's a little phrase that you could use.

Wow.

Wow.

Have you guys heard of tumour monorails?

Ooh.

These are really cool.

It's a medical innovation they've come up with.

So it's still in the very early days.

But they're very tiny nanofibers which scientists want to use to put into the body to persuade cancer cells to move along them because it mimics the paths that cancers use to get around inside the body.

So they latch on the cancerous cells.

They get them to other bits of the body, which is either where scientists can cut them out more safely, as where it's less dangerous to operate, or they can even, they've tried experiments actually moving them out of the body, and this is just on rats they've tried, and into a toxic gel.

Isn't that incredible?

You have a little

rail comics coming out of your face, and you just watch the little train tootle out.

Wow.

How do they persuade the cancer cells to get on board?

Do they have very cheap fare?

It just looks like it looks to the cancer cells, I think, like the way that they get around.

So they just assume, oh, this is the route that we're going to go on.

Isn't that unbelievable?

That's so cool.

And you thought monorails were bad.

I take it back.

That's awesome.

All right.

Anyone got anything else?

San Diego Wild Animal Park opened in 1972 with a monorail around the park, like a lot of things do.

The railway was called the Wagasa Bush Line.

Everyone thought Wagasa was like an African name or whatever, but it actually stood for who gives a shit anyway?

They couldn't think of a name.

Oh, wow.

That feels like the end of a long meeting.

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Okay, time for fact number two, Andy Murray.

My fact is that the Great Smog of 1952 was so bad that blind people led sighted people home from the train station.

The sighted people just could not see where they were going.

It was completely impossible.

That's brilliant.

That's amazing.

So the Great Smog is the most extraordinary, I think it was a five-day stretch in London specifically, but it later spread across the whole of the UK.

Okay, so what was it like people burning things in their houses or factories?

Yeah, a bit of a mix.

So people were using coal, but they were using very dirty coal, which had lots of sulphur in it, and factories were also belching out lots of sulphur dioxide, which then turned into sulfuric acid in the air.

So, and all the dirty coal, normally the coal fumes would have just gone into the atmosphere and spread out, but there was this layer of cold air above London, which sort of formed this

bubble, if you like, of warmer air inside, and everything just turned back towards the ground and mixed with moisture.

So, would it have been hazardous to your health to breathe in this smug?

Very solid.

They think now that 12,000 people died and 100,000 became ill.

Wow.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

There were 19 people.

I'm not sure if this was the same great smug.

It might have been.

19 people were drowned after unwittingly walking into the Thames.

Yeah.

Because they couldn't see where they were going.

So you couldn't see your feet, could you?

By the end of it.

And bus conductors had to get out of buses and have flames in front of buses to guide them down the street because

it was about three feet of visibility.

And librarians, I find this a really funny image.

Librarians, so it got inside buildings, and library workers reported walking through stacks of libraries and turning a corner along the library corridor and suddenly bumping into a huge waft of smog that was just sitting in their library.

Yeah.

Just hanging in as a column, it's just hanging out.

It sounds like something out of the way.

It's amazing.

I'm trying to check out a book.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because

I read Saddler's Wells.

They had to stop a play midway through because so much smog entered.

But I love that idea of Sat suddenly being like, whoa, the production levels on this play it's phenomenal look at this and they had to abandon dog racing because the dogs couldn't see the hair so they just had to presume the people couldn't see which dog won either so everyone demands their money anything yeah um and they had to cancel football matches because nobody could see the ball you just kick the ball and you that's it everyone's looking for the ball for then you know for half an hour i've been to football matches where they had to be cancelled for fog really yeah and it's interesting when you're like a fan because often you're behind a goal and you just can't can't see anything on the other side of the pitch and you just hear a massive cheer from the other side and you've got no idea whether it's a goal or a save or whatever.

I like this as well.

So tr obviously very dangerous on the railway lines because, you know, there are workers on the railway lines and if you can't see a train.

So train engineers, what they would do, they put little explosives on the line itself which would go off as the train went over them, like a cap gun basically.

I like those things that kids throw on the floor to make a little danger.

And then that would make a noise so then that they would notify the workers that there was a train coming slowly along the tracks and they could get out of the way.

Oh, wow.

But that must have been, because a smog like that wouldn't,

this must have been a really productive time of people going, okay,

blind people are now offering their services to walk people home at tube stations.

The train people are going, okay, we're going to lay down.

It's very home alone, isn't it?

Like, everyone's like trying to reinvent how you can get by in a city where you can't.

It seems like a 1980s movie to you, isn't it?

Well, just think about it.

Like, no one would have been prepared for an entire city to be totally just.

And actually

it was kind of semi-common wasn't it?

That they would have these kind of things.

This was the worst by Miles, but pea supers were kind of common at the time.

Yeah.

Pea super being...

Pea super just being the nickname for the for the fog because it was as thick as pea soup.

And it was greenish, apparently.

It was like a greenish yellowish.

It had lumps of ham in it.

Yeah.

Blicking the air.

Yeah.

No, you're right.

It would have been a time of ingenuity, but also like the roads were covered in abandoned cars because people just could not see to drive.

Well, speaking of ingenuity, they have quite bad smog in China at the moment, especially in Beijing.

And the Chinese state media came up with a number of benefits of smog in China.

Has anyone seen these?

Yeah, they're really good.

So one, it unifies the Chinese people, which is quite good.

Which is kind of what you were saying, Dan, about, you know, everyone gets together and has to, it's like against a common enemy.

Yeah, if you excuse the 12,000 or so deaths, it's kind of a party when you think about it.

My big, massive smoke machine.

It's like the beginning of Matthew Kelly's Stars in Their Eyes.

That's what it is.

Tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be falling in the Thames.

Another one was, it makes people more knowledgeable, brackets, of things like fog.

Sure.

And also, apparently, it makes people funnier.

Oh, it's because of the dark humour that comes with it.

But obviously, if you do come up with any jokes, don't put them online because the party will find you.

Yes, even in the smog.

yeah actually there was a fire in beijing in 2013 at a furniture factory and no one noticed it was on fire because the smog in the city was so bad whoa

that's terrible i know well the thing in china as well in beijing particularly is that the goby is kind of really encroaching on china at the moment so not only so smog and fog must be a massive one but they get huge sandstorms now like they have sandstorm warnings on the weather now And they started this plan.

Do you know about the Great Green Wall of China?

I do not.

Yeah, they've been building this huge wall of

effectively a forest wall.

Yeah, where they're going to try and stop the desert from encroaching and capture all the sand as it comes in.

So it's like sand versus smog at the moment, like an alien versus predator for 21st-century China.

Yeah, they're taking each other on.

Yeah.

You compare everything to bad 20

films.

Yeah, like Shark to Puss versus.

In China, in 2013 alone, Chinese consumers spent the equivalent of $140 million on anti-smog devices, which is not great because I think...

Where are they?

Atti-smog devices?

Oh, they're sorry, they're just those smog masks that you see a lot of people in China wear.

Only about a fifth of them work, which is kind of a shame.

But it's been adopted into their fashions because a couple of years ago on the catwalk, the people on the catwalk had to wear smog masks just because.

And a designer decided to make smog masks suddenly fashionable.

So he's called Yin Peng, and his 2015 collection includes fashionable smog masks, and they look so cool.

One of them looks like the Shredder.

Is it the Shredder who has it?

That's from Teenage Minister.

Yeah, one of them looks a bit like Darth Vader.

Are they all films from the 70s and 80s?

Yeah.

That's the theme he's going for.

Yeah.

This is the thing.

Hong Kong and China are very good at doing that kind of thing where they try and convince the public that it's now fashionable.

And when Stars came out, a very similar...

When Stars, remember when Stars came out?

That was most fashionable.

Was that another 90s film?

Yeah.

So everyone was wearing the masks to stop themselves from having the coughs.

And there were like huge rappers singing about SARS and stuff.

They tried to make it a pop culture thing so that people felt comfortable and cool wearing SARS in your eyes.

It's better than dancing with the SARS.

On, can I say another thing about sight?

Yes,

vision.

Do you guys know about forbidden colours?

No.

I can't believe I didn't know this.

So we can't see all the colours that are available for us to see.

For instance, reddish-green.

You can't see reddish-green with your eyes, but that does exist.

And you also can't see yellowish-blue.

So that means that you can't see a colour which is in equal parts getting more red and more green at the same time.

Because our cones, which are our receptors which see these colours, will, if they're exposing themselves to, let's say, the red part of reddish-green, then they will shut down the green bits of the receptor to allow you to properly see the red and vice versa.

But we could have eyes that could allow us to see both.

And some people think there there was an experiment done in 1983 which tried to make people see both.

And there is a test you can do, and some people claim that they can see these never-before-seen, never-before-described colours.

So if you just, if you look up forbidden colors or impossible colors test, you'll see it online, and it's a yellow square next to a blue square, and there are two white crosses in the middle of each one.

And if you stare at that for long enough, apparently you'll see a colour that has never before been seen before you.

I read a great thing about tiger beetles, which apparently is that they can run so so fast that they go blind.

Isn't that one?

What?

Yeah.

Is that like exceeding the speed of light?

They exceed the speed of information, I guess, to their brain.

That's really funny.

They don't gather enough photons to make a picture of their prey.

So they end up having to stop to let their brain catch up.

So they're like in pursuit running, and then they'd have to just pause so their brain can suddenly bring the visuals passing.

Yeah.

Sometimes they'll stop three to four times before they actually catch their prey.

They're like the opposite of pigeons, because pigeons could see a huge number of, as it were, frames per second.

Yeah.

So we did that thing ages ago on QI, that a film in a cinema to them would look like a slideshow.

They would find it incredibly boring.

Yeah.

And this has been used by some people to explain why pigeons don't get out of the way as fast as we think they should if we're driving towards them or cycling towards them.

It's because they're seeing stuff more frames per second, so they can wait for longer because we're in the fake.

Yeah, but that's not true.

I crash into them all the time.

So whatever this amazing sense is, which means they can escape quicker, it's not working.

I cycle into pigeons quicker.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that on the 24th of March 2015 the temperature in Antarctica was higher than in Malta, Madrid and Marrakech.

So book your flights now.

That is extraordinary.

How old is it?

It was the record temperature in Antarctica so far, and it was 17.5 degrees Celsius.

And in all those three places, it was around 16 degrees.

Wow.

Yeah.

So does that mean you could go out in a t-shirt?

Yeah, you could.

That is.

This was on the corner.

It's not like in the absolute South Pole.

It was on Antarctica, but not right down in the centre where it probably was pretty cold.

Pretty nippy.

You can always go out in a t-shirt.

That's true.

No one's stopping you.

No one stopping you.

Yeah.

It's true.

They have that thing called the 300 Club, don't they?

Do you know that?

You sit in a sauna at 200 degrees Fahrenheit for as long as you can stand, and then you go out and run around the pole naked.

And the idea is that the difference in temperature is 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

And also that you pass through all 24 time zones

in the nip.

Do you need to do passport checks at all of those different borders?

No, obviously not.

You don't get passport checks at time zones.

No, but the parts of Antarctica are claimed by different countries, so theoretically, they could barriers.

No one respects that, though.

Like, no country, they'll be like, This is ours, and everyone's going, it's not.

But that's true.

It's like Britain's saying, Oh, this bit's ours, and then everyone else is going, No, it's not.

But this is ours.

Norway's going, no, this bit's ours.

Everyone's like, No, not really, but this is ours.

There is a, I thought there was a treaty of the Antarctic which said no one owns it, but only about 50 countries have signed it, and it's probably countries which don't have large claims stakes.

Yeah, Equatorial Guinea.

Yeah, that's cool.

We'll sign it.

We're going to record that.

We'll be the bigger person here.

In order to bolster their claim to the Antarctic, Argentina sent a seven-month pregnant woman to Antarctica to give birth.

So the first baby born

in Antarctica was an Argentinian baby called Emil Marco Palma, and that was in 78 or possibly 79.

Yeah.

I remember it was 78, I think, because it was the same year I was born.

I mean, I don't remember it from when I was born.

Even then, James was finding facts.

I remember reading it and thinking that could have been me because the first test tube baby was in the same year, Louise Brown.

It's a big year for celebrity babies.

Wow.

You could have been so special James.

I know.

Well people say I am.

Your mum.

She's a good woman.

So it's that this idea that it's hotter in Antarctica isn't to say that it's always hotter in Antarctica.

They logged the record cold temperature last year as well.

So it's not to say that everything's warming up exactly by that amount.

It's a lot more complicated than that.

But of course, this is all probably down to climate change.

Right.

Big year for Antoctica breaking its own records constantly.

And there's a guy online, he's called Maximiliano Herrera, and he's a climatologist.

And he has a list of all the extreme temperature records for every nation on Earth.

It's a brilliant website.

You know, if you like data, go there.

And he's found that in 2015 so far, five nations or territories have set or tied all-time records for the hottest temperature.

Wow.

And they are Antarctica, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Wallace and Fortuna Territory, and Samoa.

Have you seen the hottest temperature ever recorded was in America, I think.

It was

somewhere called Furnace Creek Ranch.

But on the Wikipedia, it says...

Is that just a coincidence, that name?

Well, on the Wikipedia, it says in brackets after it, formerly Greenland Ranch.

I assume that they changed it after that, but I'm not sure.

How come I've been there?

Is that not in Death Valley?

Yeah.

Yeah, I've been there, yeah.

Yeah.

Hot?

Was it?

Yeah, there was a sign saying you must not go out of your cars after 10 AM or something because it was so hot.

Everyone was ignoring it, of course.

And that people were like frying eggs on the floor and stuff like that.

Not hygienic.

That's something people never talk about when you talk about frying eggs on a car bonnet.

It may work, but it's not hygienic at all.

No, they I don't think they generally eat them straight afterwards, do they?

Oh, do they not?

What do they do with the eggs?

Throw them away, man.

What's the point of that?

I know.

What's the Terrible waste.

I mean, you could heat something in a wrapper, like a microwave meal, for example, on the bonnet of your car, and then at least it would be hygienic.

That's dealing with Anna's problem.

Dan, please tell us the microwave fact that you told me yesterday.

Oh, yeah,

I saw this online on National Geographic.

There's been a pulse that's been detected.

A microwave

from space, supposedly.

It could be a pulsar or aliens even?

Since the 90s, they've been thinking, what the hell is this thing?

It's been a big mystery, and it would come by every so often.

They'd log it, and no no one would know what it was.

And they've dealt with this kind of thing with space before: mysterious signals that they eventually find out.

So they've continued the search to find out what it was, and they've had a breakthrough.

They now know what it is.

The microwave signals were coming from a microwave,

basically on-premise.

Anytime someone used it, it would send out microwave signals, it would register it, and that was Mystery Solved.

They would always send the same pulses that were two minutes long, and then a 30-second gap, and then another two minutes.

Mysterious

every time.

Is that, did you say, since the 90s?

Yeah, and I think it's neighboring microwaves as well, houses around.

It was at Parks Observatory.

That's where it was.

Wow.

That's a good fact.

I love that.

So there has been some really weird weather this year in America, especially.

So they've had down the west coast, for instance, San Francisco has recorded its first ever January without rain, I think.

And then on the East Coast, it's been ridiculously snowy, this everlasting snow in places like Boston.

And they've realised, scientists have realized it's because of the blob.

What?

Which is, it's this warm mass of water.

It's a thousand miles long and it's sitting off the coast of, off the west coast of America in the Pacific Ocean.

It's 300 feet deep and it's not cooling off and it's been there for about a year and a half and it's just sitting there like hot, not hot, it's about seven degrees Fahrenheit above the water around it and not cooling like it usually would.

And so this is causing these crazy weather phenomena all across America because of the blob.

That's amazing.

I've never heard that.

That's amazing.

Yeah, that's cool.

So, here's a weather thing for you.

Go on.

What killed a third of Napoleon's army on his way to Moscow in 1812?

Yes, it was the cold snap, wasn't it?

It wasn't, it was heat stroke.

What?

Yes.

No.

Yeah.

That's not what I learned in school.

It was just as much of a problem.

Don't get me wrong, cold was also a big problem later on, but no, there was an enormous heat wave which killed a lot of the soldiers who died.

Was this going for an Antarctic-style let's break two records in one year?

How do you know what to wear in the morning?

Yeah, quite.

It's a nightmare.

You go invading Russia in layers always, that's what they say.

And so you can take them off if you have to.

I've got a fleece, but there's a crop top underneath here.

Don't worry, I'll be fine.

There's an incredible image of the journey to and from Moscow, and he starts out with 400,000 men, a very, very thick line.

And it shows where he goes geographically, what the temperature is along the way.

By the time he gets there, he's got 100,000 men.

By the time he gets back, he has 10,000 men.

Yeah, that's incredible.

It's one of the best uh infographics they would call them these days but it's a very very classic chart i'll try and put it up on my twitter yeah um because it looks unbelievably cool wow yeah um oh sorry go on no i was just gonna say i do love how weather in places that you antarctica is the one place that on this podcast is constantly mentioned that blows me away in terms of the facts.

Like the fact that fires.

Fire's a problem there.

Yeah, it's a huge problem.

So they have a fire service there.

Interesting you say blows me away.

It's got a serious wind problem at the moment because of global issues.

Oh, does it?

Yeah.

I read that it suffers from horizontal avalanches, but I think that's a kind of a description that people who are out there, it's not as dangerous or as crazy as it sounds, but they describe the idea of a horizontal avalanche.

I'm guessing it must be wind smashing.

That's weird.

So, this is another thing that's happened in America.

I think that's called an ice shove, and that's it's an or it's also known as an ice tsunami.

And it is where wind will, for instance, in a frozen lake, wind or weird water movements cause the ice to just move like a very slow tsunami onto the land.

But it happened last year in Minnesota and it's so weird.

People just woke up and this huge wall of ice was just creeping into their houses and creeping up.

If you watch it, it moves at about a centimeter every couple of seconds.

That is still scarier than smog though, isn't it?

Yeah.

Like imagine walking through a library and there's a big load of ice shapes.

Yeah.

Have you heard of spontaneous snowballs?

No.

This is a very similar thing.

Right.

Basically, it's when snow rolls up and forms a snowball on the ground spontaneously because of the wind.

And they have a hollow centre and they can be huge.

They can be up to a foot in diameter.

And it's when you have a crust of old snow which is covered by a thin layer of new snow on top.

And if the conditions are right, a small bit of snow gets rolled along by the wind and it gathers more as it goes.

And they have a hollow centre.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

Very cool.

I was looking at places in Antarctica.

There are some quite good place names.

Oh, I was literally just about to say this.

Oh, you're good.

No, no, no.

Take it in turns.

Do one each.

Okay.

Let's see who runs out first.

Okay, okay.

All right.

Yeah, yeah, let's go.

So, gotta pick my favourites now.

Nipple Peak.

Okay.

That's gonna be hard to beat.

Yep.

Knobhead.

Wait a minute.

Are we doing names or just insults here?

Knobhead's good.

I will raise you dick peaks.

Similar theme.

Asses, ears.

Nice.

The Office Girls.

No one knows why.

Shag Nasty Island.

Football Mountain.

Shapeless Mountain, which is really interesting because it was named that mountain.

What was named that because of the inability of the discovering team to agree on what its actual shape was.

So much so that Shapeless Mountain was a confusing thing that when they went to climb Shapeless Mountain, they climbed the wrong mountain because they assumed it was Shapeless Mountain and they ended up naming that mountain that they mistakenly climbed Mistake Peak.

Yeah.

I think I've only got Mount Cox left and then I'm out.

Guys, these names are about as much used as a hat full of busted assholes.

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

My fact is that Tonga's official finance minister was also its official court jester.

This is this guy, Jesse Bogdanov, who was employed as their financial advisor in 1994, financial advisor to the government of Tonga, and he was, I guess, he got a promotion.

Actually, he decided he should be a court jester.

It was at his own suggestion as financial advisor.

He said, why don't you make me your court jester?

Because my birthday is April the 1st.

So it seems like the obvious thing to do.

It's not much of CV, that, is it?

Why should you get this job?

Well, my birthday's on April the 1st.

It would have been better if it turned out his birthday wasn't on April the 1st.

And that was a trick.

Maybe it was.

He wasn't a very trustworthy character.

Slanderous.

I hope he's not listening.

He did lose the country about $25 million as their financial advisor.

Oh, really?

Yeah, there was the Tonga Trust Fund, which he was given to manage, and he invested it all in squirty flowers,

massive shoes.

Yeah, and the big shoe index fell off a cliff a few months later.

So all those little cars and all the bits.

It was basically that.

He invested it in questionable places and it disappeared.

Lost all their money, and he had to flee the country.

So he fled the country.

He left the country and he can't return now because he says he fears for his life.

I think some Tongans who who put their money into this fund were pretty angry when he lost it all.

But as Court Jester, he was quite fun.

He used to play saxophone at royal events and he wrote a poem about the king.

And yeah, he was generally an entertaining chap in that part of his.

That doesn't sound like a lot.

Saxophone.

Saxophone, for heaven's sake.

The funniest of all instruments.

So where is this guy now?

He's in America.

He's changed his name to Jesse Dean.

He's the founder and sole practitioner of a company called called the Open Window Institute of Emotional Freedom in California.

And he does offer hypnosis as part of it.

So he can't go back because he's terrified for his life.

But is he a wanted man there?

Not openly.

I thought he was forced to pay back a million dollars.

He was forced to pay back a lot of money, and he still has to pay part of his income to Tonga, but he never admitted any liability.

Right.

It was very nice of him to pay it back then, isn't it?

Jolly nice.

Out of the goodness of my heart.

Jolly good.

So we should should say Tonga, because a lot of people won't know much about Tonga.

Yeah.

Tonga is 171 different islands.

Okay.

Right.

And they're spread over 700,000 square kilometers of ocean.

It's hugely spread out.

But only 36 of the islands have actually got permanent inhabitants on them.

Right, okay.

Yeah.

So lots and lots of them are empty.

They used to be called the Friendly Islands, didn't they?

That's nice.

They were originally called that because James Cook was given such a friendly welcome when he arrived there in 1773.

But legend tells that unbeknownst to him, when they were having a big feast, the only reason he departed unscathed was because the chiefs could not agree a plan on how to kill him.

So I've been to parties like that.

They must have been kicking themselves after he left.

Yeah.

They must have been so close.

Okay, so we're five to four in favor of decapitation.

Please, can we.

Yeah, it's amazing that there isn't just a okay, if we don't decide on anything, here's our fallback.

Like, how do you not have a plan B of basic death?

Between 1918 and 2006, Tonga had only two monarchs.

Very long reigns.

Do we know who the current one is?

No, nobody knows.

People have been looking into it.

The current one is George Tupo VI.

What do we know about George Tupo VI?

Almost nothing.

Oh.

But I believe we know some interesting stuff about George Tupo V,

who was quite a fun character.

He used to own the island's only power company, brewery, and mobile phone company.

He got rid of them eventually.

That sounds like he was having a fun time.

Sounds like an entrepreneur.

I like it.

Was he just making drunken phone calls all the time?

Is that his life?

He also, I think it was him, wasn't it, who insisted on being driven around in a London black cab everywhere.

And the reason that he gave with this was because a London taxi has the right proportions to make it easy for you to get in and out whilst wearing spurs and a sword.

Wow.

Which I think is why we all ride around in them sometimes.

That's why I never use Uber.

Just can't get my sword out of there.

I've got a couple things on jesters.

I don't know if anyone does.

So, one thing that surprised me is that I just probably very stupidly assumed that all jesters were male back in

the 1500s, the old times.

But jestress was an occupation as well.

That's cool.

Can I just say that is definitely not the stupidest thing you've ever assumed, Anne?

Okay, good.

Keep going.

So, La Jard Dinaire

served as Mary Stewart's jestress in 1543.

And she was there for a very long time, and she got paid very well.

She even got paid four pounds of snow every summer.

Not being paid very well.

I reckon you believe the PR that she believes.

It wasn't cocaine, was it?

Because if it's cocaine, then four pounds is a lot, I believe.

I think that was bonus money.

Four pounds of snow, three pounds of skag.

Yeah.

It was seen as a refrigeration thing.

Yeah,

I can see that that's useful, especially in the spring, like having a bit of you know a bit of snow in your in your underhouses to keep things cold.

Yeah.

I suppose so, yeah.

Tycho Brahe, we've mentioned him before, he had his own jester,

who was a little person,

a dwarf,

and it was his own personal jester who Brahe thought possessed psychic powers and he used to make him sit under the dinner table while he ate dinner.

And in the source I read, I think it was an I09, which I do like as a source, but it said, his jester had to sit under the table while he ate dinner.

Probably best not to speculate why he had him do this.

I don't think that was a necessary comment.

Yeah.

Didn't Tico Brahe die because he refused to leave the table?

Did she?

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

When he needed to pee and he never left.

So maybe the jester had enough of him and then kind of held onto him and stopped him from leaving and made him die.

Oh, that's weird.

I'm speculating a little here.

My other, my favourite jester that I've learned about about recently, Percio of Heidelberg.

Have you heard of him?

Perccio of Heidelberg, 18th century in Germany.

His name actually was a shortening of an Italian for why not.

So Pacquio.

So he was a dwarf, and he was famous for his ability to drink.

And anytime he was offered a drink, he would say, Pacquio, which was his name.

Why not?

And he would keep drinking.

That was basically his main entertainment.

He would just be drunk the whole time.

And he supposedly lived into his 80s, so it didn't kill him.

But yeah, that was his that was his one main thing.

There must have been times where his name was and where his catchphrase was quite annoying to him.

Hey do you want to put this snake on your leg?

Percio.

Do you want to punch in the face?

Perccio.

Because Saint Chrysostom defined a fool as he who gets slapped.

Really?

Yeah.

It's a good definition, isn't it?

That is a good definition.

It's also kind of misleading because fool the role of fools in let's say Tudor Tudor courts and late medieval courts was to be the person who could insult the monarch but get away with it, wasn't it?

I like the trick that King James VI of Scotland's jester, George Buchanan, played on him.

So James VI was really lazy about signing official documents and he just signed them without reading them.

And, you know, George kept nagging him, like some annoying wife, to actually read the documents, and he wouldn't learn.

So George the jester eventually went to James and made him sign this document, which had tricked him into abdicating the throne and giving it up to his jester.

And then he took the document away, he walked back into the room, said to the king, oh, could you just get up off your throne for a second?

And then he, the jester, sat down on it and said, I'm king now, by the way, showed him the document.

And apparently, King James VI always read his official documents after that.

But the jester was brutally decapitated.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy, I'm at Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At Egg Shaped.

Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

And we are going to be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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

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