54: No Such Thing As Domesticated Furniture

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Speaker 2 Hello

Speaker 3 and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast. This week coming to you from the Soho Theatre in central London.
My name is Dan Schreiber.

Speaker 3 I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andy Murray, and Anna Chaczynski.

Speaker 3 And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Andy Murray.

Speaker 3 My fact this week is that when you have a tattoo lasered off, you end up pooing it out.

Speaker 3 That's what happens.

Speaker 3 Does it still have the same design on the poo?

Speaker 3 So yeah,

Speaker 3 this happens. So when you have a tattoo, it goes into the middle layer of the skin, which is called the dermis.
And when it's lasered off,

Speaker 3 the beams of light, they heat up the ink and it breaks down into tiny particles. And those go into the bloodstream, and then they are excreted via the liver and the digestive system.

Speaker 3 And that's how they get out of you.

Speaker 3 I just think that's amazing. Yeah.
I mean, that says something about how little you want the tattoo anymore, doesn't it? It's a sort of a sort of statement.

Speaker 3 So do you know what tattoos are made out of? Like the ink? Do you know where that comes from? Okay, well, there was a lady on Facebook who got a tattoo of vegan on her inner lip.

Speaker 3 And then her friends pointed out that actually most black ink of tattoos is made from burnt animal bones.

Speaker 3 Oh, God, she's going to see that every time she looks in the mirror. Every time she eats anything, she's going to get a little.

Speaker 3 That's the worst spot.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you can get vegan tattoos, but they're very rare indeed. Right.
Yeah. The oldest tattoo we know of is on a lip, isn't it? It's a tattoo of a thin pencil moustache

Speaker 3 tattooed onto the upper lip of a seven thousand year old mummy from Chile. Wow.

Speaker 3 What, like a little French kind of? I'm not sure if it has the gap down the middle that a pencil moustache is supposed to have, but I didn't do they have to have a gap down the middle? Don't they?

Speaker 3 No, I don't know.

Speaker 3 All right, yeah.

Speaker 3 Speaking of someone who's never been able to grow a moustache. I don't know.
Dan?

Speaker 3 That's a mustache. Yeah.
My grandmother has tattooed eyebrows. That's awesome.

Speaker 3 Does she like permanently look surprised?

Speaker 3 I don't know where her original eyebrows went though. That's what I don't know.
Does she poo them out?

Speaker 3 I did think you were going to say your grandmother had a thin pencil moustache.

Speaker 3 Quite a cruising to share. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So the thing on tattoos being quite sort of the stereotype of them being for sailors or for criminals or whatever it is.

Speaker 3 The headline, Tattoos are not just for sailors anymore, has appeared in print every decade since the mid-nineteenth century.

Speaker 3 Every decade there's the rash of articles saying they've entered the mainstream, that here they are. So today more teachers have them than members of the armed forces.
Really?

Speaker 3 By fourteen percent to nine percent. But it used to be like ninety percent of sailors had tattoos, wasn't it? Something like that in the nineteenth century probably, like yeah.

Speaker 3 And um one thing that it was good for was it meant that you could um identify a sailor who had drowned because you'd be able to identify them by the tattoos. And they were actually used in that way.

Speaker 3 Sorry, you could tell that he had a tattoo that said, I have drowned.

Speaker 3 He has a lot of tattoos. The first one says, help.
The second one says,

Speaker 3 the third one says, blah, blah, blah, yeah.

Speaker 3 And the other thing that they thought, the sailors, is if you had hold tattooed on your knuckles on one hand and fast on the other hand, then it would help you hold onto ropes better.

Speaker 3 One way you could stop drowning as a sailor, apparently, was to have a pig tattooed on your knee and then a cock, as in a rooster, tattooed on your right leg somewhere.

Speaker 3 And they had a saying that was pig on the knee, safety at sea, a cock on the right, never lose a fight.

Speaker 3 Which is weird because neither of those animals can swim.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 fight very well. Speaking of cocks and tattoos.
Oh, God.

Speaker 3 Sometimes when I want to find out some facts for this show, I'll go back to the old QI talk boards and see what I wrote in the past.

Speaker 3 And I searched for the tattoos and I found something that Dan posted in 2005. Really? And this is what he said.

Speaker 3 He said, I was told today that if a man was to have a tattoo done on his penis, then he was entitled to free tattoos for the rest of his life from anywhere in the world in any tattoo parlour.

Speaker 3 No questions asked.

Speaker 3 This is what used to pass for QI research back in the day.

Speaker 3 So I have a confession.

Speaker 3 It's not just my grandmother with a tattoo.

Speaker 3 Well, I had a look, and there are one or two tattoo parlours that will claim that they will do that, whether they will or not, I don't know, but it's not everyone in the world all the time.

Speaker 3 It's a very difficult thing to Google, by the way.

Speaker 3 Very easy to Google. It's very difficult to forget.

Speaker 3 I shouldn't have gone and Google images really today.

Speaker 3 But I found a story about a 21-year-old from Iran who paid a tattoo artist to put the letter M for his girlfriend's last name and the Persian phrase for good luck with your journeys on his penis.

Speaker 3 And he felt pain for eight days, and then his penis became permanently semi-erect, so he couldn't get it to go down. He lived with it for three months before getting medical help.

Speaker 3 And doctors tried shunting the penis to drain excess blood. I'm not sure what shunting is.
Shunting,

Speaker 3 weirdised it.

Speaker 3 And then it didn't work. And so the patient decided he was fine with the condition and declined further treatment.
Wow.

Speaker 3 Wow. Wow.

Speaker 3 At the turn of the. So they were quite a high society thing, weren't they, in the 19th century?

Speaker 3 And at the turn of, so in about 1900, a New York newspaper estimated that 75% of society ladies in New York had tattoos. 75%? Yep.

Speaker 3 What kind of tattoos? Like practical ones or

Speaker 3 practical tattoos. Yeah, I'm going to back your left.
No, no, no, no, no, you do. Don't back away.
Step up.

Speaker 3 You get medical tattoos. And we knew that some of the oldest tattoos ever, which are 5,000 years old, 3,000 BC.
We found bodies where there's a body in the Alps which has tattoos over his joints.

Speaker 3 And they looked at the skeleton, and he had osteoarthritis in those joints. So it's like a kind of actual colour.
This is the Iceman, in fact, isn't it?

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. That's what I meant by it, actually, because the Mercury astronauts, apparently, as well.

Speaker 3 No, no, no, but I looked into whether or not astronauts had any tattoos, because I just thought that they seemed like the type of people that would. And majoritarily.

Speaker 3 I feel like I'm saying a lot of things that it's just me agreeing with.

Speaker 3 Mercury astronauts, they would have them in just like sensor locations basically for whenever they had to monitor their health so they knew where they were.

Speaker 3 They would kind of like putting a bit of tape on the ground as a mark for an actor.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there was a guy who was arrested by Canada's border services agency with the letters H-A-T-E on his knuckles, and he claimed that it stood for happiness all through eternity.

Speaker 3 It's very good. Quick thinker.

Speaker 3 One woman used an internet translation to translate I Love David into Hebrew. She later discovered she inadvertently had the phrase, Babylon is the world's leading dictionary and translation software

Speaker 3 on her back

Speaker 3 forever.

Speaker 3 But she doesn't have a free account with Babylon forever, so

Speaker 3 David Beckham has Victoria Beckham's name misspelt tattooed onto his body in Hindi. Yeah.
Oh dear. And Samantha Cameron has a tattoo.
Does she? Yeah, she's cooler than all of us.

Speaker 3 Hello, Dan's grandmother. Sorry.

Speaker 3 Is it a practical tattoo?

Speaker 3 It's a dolphin on her ankle. Is that practical? That's practical.
No, that's cool.

Speaker 3 Was that just a holiday that she took once?

Speaker 3 With dolphins. To a dolphin.

Speaker 3 To a dolphinarium. No, just you go on holiday and you get a tattoo.
No, I don't meant as like, oh, has anyone got a camera? No? Oh, can it quick tattoo that dolphin so I can live this memory forever.

Speaker 3 Yeah, sorry.

Speaker 3 Oh, good. There's an American guy who has over a thousand tattoos based on Disney characters, including all 101 of 101 Dalmatians.

Speaker 3 Which I don't.

Speaker 3 They must be tiny, though.

Speaker 3 With the Dalmatians. Well, there would be no.

Speaker 3 Some of them is life size, but I mean

Speaker 3 how many divide a single, you know, the area of a body by a thousand. It's not much room you've got.
Yeah, so I mean, I think it is to scale, but it is scaled down.

Speaker 3 And he has a system, so he has all the bat, all the evil characters are below his knees, and all the undersea characters are below his belly.

Speaker 3 So I don't know, but then all the evil characters aren't under the sea, so I don't know how he works that out. Wow.

Speaker 3 Anyway, he gets him copyrighted by Disney. Like, Disney's allowed him to do it.
Oh, really? He's the only person who's got a lot of people. Why is it illegal to do a Disney tattoo?

Speaker 3 I think when you've got that many of them. What would they do? Make you poo it out? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 We're going to have to move on to our next fact. So, if anyone has anything more that they want to add?

Speaker 3 On mistakes in tattoos,

Speaker 3 John Carew, who's a footballer. Yeah, John Carew.
John Carew.

Speaker 3 He got a tattoo saying he wanted to say my life, my rules. So he got mavie, me regle,

Speaker 3 but he got the accent wrong on regle.

Speaker 3 He got an acute accent instead of a gruff one which translates as my life my menstruation

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Speaker 3 Okay, it's time for our second fact of the evening, and that fact is Chaczynski's.

Speaker 3 Yeah, my height is that the man who invented the airship used to hold dinner parties with 10-foot-high chairs so that his guests could experience the joy of flight.

Speaker 3 This guy, this amazing Brazilian guy called Alberto Santos Dumont. And first of all, he decided to have them hanging from the ceiling, which you could understand was more reminiscent of flight.

Speaker 3 But on one of his first dinner parties, he put all his guests hanging from the ceiling, and the ceiling collapsed. So he's

Speaker 3 all the funerals of the previous guests. Weirdly, no one wanted to come to the next party, and the ceiling was fine.
Yeah, so the wake will be at mine. I've organised a nice dinner.

Speaker 3 Wow!

Speaker 3 Yeah, he was great. He was an inventor.

Speaker 3 He grew up on a plantation in Brazil and he invented a toy motor-powered functioning aeroplane, which was quite a long time before the first aeroplanes were invented in the late 19th century.

Speaker 3 And then he moved to Paris and became a celebrity because he invented the airship, which attracted attention.

Speaker 3 And used to invite celebrities and royalty to his house and have these wacky dinner parties. And they'd have to mount their seats on ladders.
And

Speaker 3 he was so famous in his time that the Times said, when the names of all those who have occupied outstanding positions in the world have been forgotten, there will be a name which will remain in our memory, that of Santos Dumont.

Speaker 3 What was the name again?

Speaker 3 He does sound like an amazing guy. He sounds unbelievable, actually.
As in, he had his own airship in Paris when no one else had any means of flight. He was just flying around the streets of Paris.

Speaker 3 He would just stop at a cafe, tether it, and then go down to the cafe, then say, well, so you like it, and fly off. This is in the late 19th century, early 20th 20th century.
He just did it.

Speaker 3 What was he tethering to?

Speaker 3 Rooftops. And lampposts and things like that.
It wasn't huge. When you look at photos of it, it's not a massive airship.
It's not the size of the R101 or the Hillsborough.

Speaker 3 No, it's a one-man airship, I think. A personal airship.
It's unbelievable. He would go past ladies' bedrooms and they would throw their underwear out of the window at him.

Speaker 3 No, that's how famous he was.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. He was also super generous.
So he was responsible for the first woman ever to take flight because there was a princess.

Speaker 3 She was a princess of some foreign country who came to visit Paris, took an interest in his airship, said, I wouldn't mind going up one of those, and he taught her to fly one.

Speaker 3 And then he had her flying one through the streets of Paris, and he cycled below, shouting her instructions as she did so.

Speaker 3 And this was the first woman to fly. Wow.
God, I actually, it sounds way worse to think of men throwing their underwear at her.

Speaker 3 Oh, Jesus.

Speaker 3 He invented other things as well. I know the 10-foot chair.
No one talks about it. No one mentions the 10-foot chair.
We've all all got one.

Speaker 3 No, he invented a set of motorized skis to get him back up a mountain.

Speaker 3 Really? And he invented a slingshot which would throw life belts out from sinking ships so that everyone could have a life belt.

Speaker 3 He also invented a racing airship which was similar to his airship but he never raced it because he had no one to race against.

Speaker 3 That is so sad.

Speaker 3 He could have just made two, couldn't he?

Speaker 3 Yeah, can I bring it to dinner parties very quickly?

Speaker 3 I just want to talk about my favourite dinner party host from history, which is William Buckland. He's a very exciting character.

Speaker 3 He studied fossils and he was a geologist, but he also went on this massive mission to eat every single thing in the animal kingdom. He was just like, I need to have everything.

Speaker 3 So if you went to his house for dinner, you would end up having things like elephant's trunk or mice on toast was his favorite thing.

Speaker 3 And he knew food so, like, he knew animal food, everything about them so well that he was once invited to go to this church where they thought a saint's blood was on the ground of this church.

Speaker 3 And he came over there and he had had a look at it, and he was like, Because it was just this patch on the ground and oh, it's the saint's blood.

Speaker 3 He leaned down, he licked it, and he came back up and went, No, it's bat urine.

Speaker 3 He just knew. But also, the worst guest to have at a dinner party in that respect, because he went to this party, which was Lord Harcourt.
He's the Archbishop of York.

Speaker 3 And at the dinner, Harcourt was like, I've got this amazing relic that I want to show you all. And he brought out what was the heart of Louis XVI in a box.

Speaker 3 And within seconds, Buckland just grabbed it and he ate it. But you say, worst dinner guest ever.
Very few dinner hosts bring the heart of a dead king to the table.

Speaker 3 I would say, worst dinner host ever. Okay, here's another dinner party thing.
The christening of Louis the XIV's grandson. He created a cake.
Sorry, there was

Speaker 3 a great chef called Antoine Carême who created a cake. And the cake was made out of almond paste, pastry, and clockwork.

Speaker 3 I love clockwork. I love it so much.
And it's so hard to get these days in pastries. Every Every Gregg's I go into.

Speaker 3 They had clockwork because this cake on top of it had a baby duke entering the world through a Mazipan vagina.

Speaker 3 That is quite a centrepiece, isn't it?

Speaker 3 So it was him. It was celebrating him.
The child. It was a model of his mother.
Giving birth to him. Yes.
Through Mazipan with clockwork. Don't get lie, Greg's do you? No.

Speaker 3 Wow. I was reading that back in the day when furniture was just suddenly being introduced to the idea of us having it in our homes and stuff.
Wait, wait, wait. I know.
So here's the next thing.

Speaker 3 When furniture was being introduced to the idea of having it in our arms. It was quite a shop for furniture.
It wasn't domesticated until the 1500s.

Speaker 3 The beautiful days when, you know, freestanding chaises would just roam the belt.

Speaker 3 It's a wild chair these days.

Speaker 3 There are only 400 Louis Catolle's tables left in the wild.

Speaker 3 Sorry, sorry, Dad. Oh no, that was my fact.

Speaker 3 No, they. Apparently when we started introducing furniture,

Speaker 3 covers would just be put in the middle of the room as opposed to against the wall now. And dinner tables, we didn't used to have legs to dinner tables.
You would have people come and sit.

Speaker 3 If you were having a party, there would be a big board like this that you would bring out and you would put it on your legs. So they'd just be sat on your legs.

Speaker 3 And that's why, apparently, there were boards, and you would be a boarder.

Speaker 3 And apparently, boarders who stay in your house, that's why they're called boarders, because they would be part of the legs that would hold the table up. You'd probably hold the table up.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you'd hold the table up with your legs.

Speaker 3 I read this in Bill Bryson's book at home, and he used to say that carpets, before we used to walk on them, you'd just have them on your wall and you'd go, it's my carpet.

Speaker 3 And if you had a special guest, then you'd take it down from the wall and you'd put it for them to walk walk on. And chairs used to be against the walls.

Speaker 3 You would have chairs against the walls because at night, when you didn't have electricity, you would not trip over stuff in the middle of your room.

Speaker 3 But if you had chairs all over the shop, then you might hurt yourself. Where are you going?

Speaker 3 You should be asleep. They would get up halfway through the night, wouldn't they? Because people used to sleep in two different sections and then get up and have sex or

Speaker 3 do the crossword and you're confident or not.

Speaker 3 Oh, we're going to have to move on.

Speaker 3 Shall we move on? Has anyone got anything else? I quite like the inactivity chair, which has recently been invented, which is a chair with only two legs.

Speaker 3 And it is basically so that you live in fear while you sit on it and

Speaker 3 to constantly be doing a balancing act. And I think the idea is that you can exercise while also being seated, but it sounds awful.
Anyway, invest in one if you're looking to improve your health.

Speaker 3 I always think I'm not afraid enough when I'm sitting down.

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Speaker 3 Okay, time for fact number three. That is my fact.
My fact this week is that a new scientific study has concluded that there are too many scientific studies.

Speaker 3 It's basically the study was saying that it's doing a thing now where so many studies are coming out in science that it's diminishing the attention that gets given to an actual good study because it's drawing headlines away from them and studies are going so sort of minute into these little, I don't know, like,

Speaker 3 there's great ones that we've read in the past, that we've talked about in the office and stuff, a study that showed that the fish herring, that they fart to communicate with each other.

Speaker 3 That's how they talk. And that's a study, and that might get in the way of saying...
Yeah, but that could be a good study because you might want to know if there's a load.

Speaker 3 So I think it was in Scandinavia somewhere, they heard a load of bubbles underneath the sea, and they thought it might have been like a Russian submarine or something like that, but it turned out to be herrings communicating by farting to each other.

Speaker 3 And if you hadn't done the study, you wouldn't know that that was a thing. So probably saved World War II.
Russia and the whole world.

Speaker 3 Okay, so that was a bad example. But

Speaker 3 there are lots of studies

Speaker 3 that seem to be taking attention away. So it's the idea that we forget as well.
Yes. So

Speaker 3 we might have cracked everything five years ago. but just not noticed at the time.
And now we're carrying on and on with more studies.

Speaker 3 And we do do some irrelevance to, not we personally, but the Royal Society of Chemistry last year published 11 steps on how to make the perfect cup of tea, which definitively determined after releasing this paper that you are supposed to put the milk in first to avoid denaturation of the milk.

Speaker 3 We actually have big arguments in the QI office about how to make sea

Speaker 3 and I can sense a lot of anger. I know!

Speaker 3 Oh my god, that was the most British thing ever.

Speaker 3 There was a palpable, it wasn't a hiss, but

Speaker 3 it was an intake of breath, wasn't it?

Speaker 3 I think we all felt that.

Speaker 3 So I am with the breath intake because I always think that's a travesty to suggest you put the milk in first, but that is what they say. That's a safer way to do it.
It's also explained in this study.

Speaker 3 Safer.

Speaker 3 Three more tea deaths in Walford Stove.

Speaker 3 So the single most downloaded paper in the history of the journal, is it PLOS Medicine, P-L-OS, is the 2005 paper, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.

Speaker 3 It's quite good, isn't it?

Speaker 3 So there's a guy who's written a lot of studies about falsehoods in science, and his name is John Ioannidis. And as a boy, he was already doing research on research, as it were.

Speaker 3 He was doing meta-research. And when he was a child, he came up with a love numbers system to work out how affectionate he was about his own family.

Speaker 3 He said, My mother was getting 1024.42, my grandmother, 173.73.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he said basically that all the statistics in all these papers are a bit dubious, etc. But then a lot of people have said actually his statistics are a bit dubious as well.
So

Speaker 3 controversial. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It is certainly,

Speaker 3 I assume he was talking about like

Speaker 3 propagation bias or so propagation bias is a major problem in scientific studies, isn't it?

Speaker 3 Because only positive results tend to be published and about 90% of studies that are done actually yield negative results which aren't as headline headline-grabbing.

Speaker 3 And there are journals now which are like the Journal of Negative Results, which is just people who have done experiments and gone, we found nothing,

Speaker 3 nothing has been achieved here.

Speaker 3 And there was also a guy called Mark Schreim at Harvard who wanted to see how easy it would be to get something published.

Speaker 3 And so he published an article and he made one up using randomtextgenerator.com.

Speaker 3 And the article was called Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Speaker 3 And it was by Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles.

Speaker 3 And he submitted it to 37 journals over two weeks, and it was accepted by 17 of them. Wow.

Speaker 3 Pinkerton A. LeBrane.

Speaker 3 It's nominative determinism, isn't it? Because you have a name like LeBraine, you're going to be a scientist.

Speaker 3 There is a journal called Brain, isn't there? Do you remember that?

Speaker 3 There's a journal called Brain, and there's a guy who used to be the head of Brain who was called Head.

Speaker 3 Henry Head, it was. And then he left Brain, and then when he left being the head of Brain, Head was replaced as the head of Brain by a guy called Brain.

Speaker 3 There's a website called Retraction Watch, which is fun because they pay attention to people quietly retracting their research when it turns out to be wrong. Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 That is fun. Yeah, it was set up by these two journalists called Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, and they're absolute heroes.

Speaker 3 And the top one or two retraction holders are both anesthesiologists, for what it's worth. And there is one scientist in Japan who has had to retract 183 papers out of 212.

Speaker 3 Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 Stop publishing him so much.

Speaker 3 But his name is Captain Orson, so I assume it must be right.

Speaker 3 So I went onto dailymail.co.uk and searched for according to a recent study just to see if there were too many, really.

Speaker 3 And here were the first five things I found.

Speaker 3 Even sharks can be shy, according to a new study.

Speaker 3 We have covered on the podcast that sharks can have friends, so let's not

Speaker 3 be. Let's not be a shy shark.

Speaker 3 Study reveals the tactics we use to avoid being heard on the loo.

Speaker 3 Oh, that's great.

Speaker 3 Any tips for them? Any tips?

Speaker 3 I only read the headline. Sorry.
Another one was: bump in the night, send in the wife. One in five men pretend to be asleep when hearing a possible intruder, according to a recent study.

Speaker 3 Fortunately, fortunately, it's almost always furniture.

Speaker 3 But they have a place safely by the wall.

Speaker 3 We're going to have to move on. Okay, one more thing.

Speaker 3 I looked at other things that there's too many of.

Speaker 3 And there was a study done that said

Speaker 3 three-quarters of viewers of television have cited confusion over the proliferation of choice as the reason they miss shows. As in there's so many channels, they always miss TV shows.

Speaker 3 Okay, they're just flicking desperately between yeah, and they can't find the right one.

Speaker 3 So I had a look at all the different channels on

Speaker 3 my TV system on Sky, and I found one which I'd never seen before. It's pavershoes.tv,

Speaker 3 and it's Sky Channel 669.

Speaker 3 And their programmes include Sensational Sandals,

Speaker 3 Pretty in Pumps, and Classic Clogs.

Speaker 3 Sounds like the best chuggle ever that. I can QI on this.
That's great.

Speaker 3 That's 669.

Speaker 3 But in the UK, it's 667.

Speaker 3 It's a shoe-size chug.

Speaker 3 All right, we're going to have to move on to our final facts.

Speaker 3 How did the shoe material go, Ed?

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Speaker 3 Time for our final fact of the evening, and that is James. Okay, my fact is that you should never pick up a desert tortoise.
If you do, it can pee itself to death.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so what they do is they store urine in their bladder, which they can then draw upon because they live in the desert, so they need as much water as they can get.

Speaker 3 And if you pick them up, they can get so scared that they will evacuate their bladder, as in wet themselves, and then they can die of dehydration.

Speaker 3 Yeah, really. Because they keep

Speaker 3 something like 40% of their body mass is kept as the urine that then translates into a sort of like rehydrated water. Not rehydrated water.
It's really, really diluted, I think.

Speaker 3 So it's not too acidic, or it doesn't damage the... But it's just a way that something can live in the desert, but obviously then they don't expect people to just come and pick them up

Speaker 3 and then they die. But yeah, desert tortoises, pretty cool.
They live around the Las Vegas area, around Nevada, around there.

Speaker 3 They dig basins to catch rainwater, another way they get water, and they always know where they are.

Speaker 3 And whenever it looks like it's going to rain, they're always found next to these places that they've dug, waiting for the water to come so they can immediately drink it.

Speaker 3 And weirdly, this is really strange. Humans are not so likely to die when they're in the, you know, children or teenagers or whatever, and you get more likely to die as you get older.

Speaker 3 But weirdly, desert tortoises

Speaker 3 are less likely to die as the time goes on. The older they get, the less likely they are to be.
Yeah, yeah, so that's why they live for so long. And that's the like tortoises do live for a long time.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And that's true of these things.

Speaker 3 One was so old. I read this in.

Speaker 3 And apparently, there's a bit of contention about whether or not this is true or not. But one of Darwin...

Speaker 3 I'm ready. What we'll do is we'll cut that out and put it at the start of every fancy.

Speaker 3 Basically, there was a tortoise called Harriet, which belonged to Charles Darwin. So, the contentious bit is, did that belong to Charles Darwin? They're not fully sure.

Speaker 3 But Harriet had a bit of a travelled life after Darwin or whoever got her, ended up in Australia's zoo and ended up being looked after by Steve Irwin.

Speaker 3 So, Steve Irwin and Charles Darwin are connected within one lifetime. Wow.
Yeah, that is really cool. There was a tortoise called

Speaker 3 There was a tortoise called Adwaita, who lived to the age of 255.

Speaker 3 And that meant that this tortoise was born before the USA existed, and their death was announced on CNN.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 So there's some quite good footage of a tortoises snip each other's bums like dogs because they secrete pheromones from like the cloaca or from that area and there's quite good footage of a

Speaker 3 female tortoise crawling over a lettuce and then secreting her scent as she goes and then a male tortoise really enthusiastically trying to have sex with the lettuce because

Speaker 3 it sucks. Lettuce was used to, they did think it was an aphrodisiac, didn't they? In ancient Egypt, they did.
Tortoises and people did, yeah.

Speaker 3 It's because it they used to grow quite tall. They used to have wild lettuce, which was really tall, and it wasn't like our normal, boring, modern lettuce.
It was quite exciting.

Speaker 3 And it secreted a white sap. It secreted a white sap, and it tasted peppery, and it was, yeah.
And it was a stem, and it secreted.

Speaker 3 Lettuce used to be better.

Speaker 3 Apparently, tortoises can use touchscreen technology now.

Speaker 3 They can touch things. No, so

Speaker 3 they because no, because they found that tortoises are actually a lot more cleverer than they believe them to be originally. For example, in mazes, they're fantastic in mazes.

Speaker 3 They can remember multiple destinations in one single route, which often rats can't do. And now they're teaching them to use touchscreen technology to

Speaker 3 create Spotify lists. Help great music.

Speaker 3 Because they've got great tastes in music, which Captain Orson published in his recent paper.

Speaker 3 I haven't seen the retraction list. I don't know if it was in that.
But he,

Speaker 3 so if they need more food

Speaker 3 and they give them grapes and apples and stuff, they press the right button that highlights itself. So they go into a cardo

Speaker 3 and just more lettuce, more lettuce, more lettuce.

Speaker 3 Oh, by the way, apparently, I've always been confused between what a tortoise and a turtle is. Oh, yeah.
And so I'm just going to say it in case everyone here doesn't know the difference.

Speaker 3 But a tortoise has feet and a turtle has flippers. Okay.
So now we know that's a very good way of and so I thought they should have been called ninja tortoises because they have feet. Oh yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh yeah.

Speaker 3 God, I think you've redeemed yourself now.

Speaker 3 What was amazing about that was it took ages for everyone to go, that wasn't as dumb as it definitely sounded.

Speaker 3 So on ways of staying hydrated in the desert where there's no water and no rain,

Speaker 3 there are lots of very cool ways of doing it. So, there are some beetles which,

Speaker 3 when night is just turning into day, they stand very still and they let fog condense on their bodies and then they can drink it because it slowly coalesces onto them and then they have enough water to get them through the day.

Speaker 3 The name for these beetles is fog stand beetles.

Speaker 3 Someone thought that was the best name on that day that they could come up with.

Speaker 3 Every time you see animals and their names, it's always like, who gave there's a tortoise called the big-headed tortoise.

Speaker 3 Like, that was a very small creative meeting.

Speaker 3 Well, he told me he was the best tortoise.

Speaker 3 Here's some

Speaker 3 some other tortoise names while we're here. The pancake tortoise, the geometric tortoise, the impressed tortoise,

Speaker 3 who hangs around with a big-head tortoise, I guess.

Speaker 3 And this guy I really like him the wolf volcano giant tartar

Speaker 3 just sounds like the full best themes

Speaker 3 yeah he's got a really good PR manager

Speaker 3 other ways of so other desert animals that have like good ways of storing their water are so roadrunners urinate out of their eyes

Speaker 3 like they're kind of not seen that in the cartoon

Speaker 3 they it's how they excrete their salt because you use a lot you use up a lot of water you lose a lot of water when you urinate so they just lose it through their eyes.

Speaker 3 Also, mountain goats, you've got to be really careful now, apparently, in areas of mountain goats, like in North America, because they really like human urine because they've realised they don't have a natural salt, a natural thing they eat that provides them with their salt.

Speaker 3 But they have worked out that mountaineers wee and that has salt in it, and so they will spot human mountaineers and follow them until they go to take a wee.

Speaker 3 And then they will sometimes mold them in an attempt to

Speaker 3 drink their

Speaker 3 excretion. Yeah, you've got to look out.
Where do they mall? No, I don't want to know where they're going. Don't turtles pee through their mouths? Some species do?

Speaker 3 Some of them do.

Speaker 3 And there are some, the Fitzroy River turtle breathes through its anus.

Speaker 3 It's a really cool turtle. It's Australian, I think.
And

Speaker 3 yeah, it is. It's in the Fitzroy River.
And it lives in water, which has a lot of oxygen in it. And

Speaker 3 its cloical orifice goes two-thirds of the way along it, and it gets 68% of its oxygen through its bottom. Wow.
Which A lot. Did you know a tortoise was once the fastest animal in the world?

Speaker 3 No, it wasn't.

Speaker 3 It really was.

Speaker 3 No, are you talking? I can, I guess what you're talking about.

Speaker 3 Jay, tell it. No, is it the space thing? It is the space thing.

Speaker 3 So smart. Okay, come on, you can tell.

Speaker 3 Looks like we've got a big-headed tortoise in the room.

Speaker 3 I'm very fast.

Speaker 3 This was in 1968, and the Soviets sent out a spaceship

Speaker 3 from Kazakhstan with with a tortoise on it, and it was the first animal in deep space. And it travelled round the moon before returning to Earth seven days later.

Speaker 3 So for that short amount of time, it was the fastest animal in the world. There were also wine flies, mealworms, and a few other things, but that was the main one.

Speaker 3 That was the headline grabber, wasn't it? Poor mealworms going, I was there too.

Speaker 3 But they were the first life forms as well to get around. to the moon.

Speaker 3 So your fact was about things wetting themselves in a way, and we don't know why. There's no evolutionary reason why a lot of animals wet themselves when they're afraid, and it's really weird.

Speaker 3 So, gazelles wet themselves when they're being chased by lions, not very useful. Well, one theory is that it might send the lions off because they have the scent somewhere else, right?

Speaker 3 I think that's one theory. Don't they? Surely, they chase the scent until they reach the bottom.
Yeah, so you pee, and then the lion will stop and go, Oh, there's a smell of gazelle pee there.

Speaker 3 And then, I mean, that's just one theory. Yeah, what it is with humans when you get shocked, I think, is like somehow your brain gets overridden by the shock.

Speaker 3 And normally, your brain is like, you always want to pee, and your brain's saying, no, don't pee, you're on stage.

Speaker 3 But you're shocked so much that you end up wetting yourself. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's weird. There's a bit of the brain called the Pontine Mixturition Center, which is constantly saying, let's go, let's do it.

Speaker 3 Really? Yeah, when your bladder is full, it makes the decision to empty the bladder.

Speaker 3 But the prefrontal cortex always overrides the desire.

Speaker 3 But when you get really, really, really stressed, the limbic system overrides the prefrontal cortex, and so the signals get confused, and then you know,

Speaker 3 it's all cold and you're ashamed. But we don't know why.

Speaker 3 It's long to start off with.

Speaker 3 We're gonna have to wrap up. Okay, one more thing? Yep, go ahead.

Speaker 3 Okay, so there was a guy whose tortoise had a swollen penis and he didn't have the money to pay for the operation, and so he went on to one of these Kickstarter style things and he needed 200 pounds and he reached his target in less than 24 hours.

Speaker 3 And he went over, he went up to 555 pounds in the end. People really clubbed together and paid for it.
And

Speaker 3 when you gave your money, you could put a little note about what you wanted to say.

Speaker 3 One person said, I hope he gets the repair done soon. I know what it's like having an enlarged penalty.

Speaker 3 That is not so nice.

Speaker 3 But at least he gave some money.

Speaker 3 We hope that turtle's doing well. And we're going to have to wrap up.
So that's it. That's all of our facts.
Thanks so much for being here.

Speaker 3 If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said, you can get us all on our Twitter account. So I'm on at Schreiberland, James.
At Egg Shaped, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M.

Speaker 3 Jasinski. You can email podcast at QI.com.
And we've got about fifty-three episodes up on no such thing as a fish.com. You can listen to those previous episodes there.

Speaker 3 We're going to be back again for our final live show at the Soho Theatre next week. And yeah, we'll see you again next time.
Goodbye. Thanks so much.

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