53: No Such Thing As A 3000km Tall Statue Of Liberty

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Hello,

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.

I'm sitting with the three regular elves.

It's James Harkin, Andy Murray, and Anna Chaczynski.

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

Starting with you, Andy.

My fact this week is that Finnish budget meatballs have so little meat in them that they have had to be renamed balls.

In Finnish, pyori kuita, probably pronouncing that wrong, which translates as balls.

But the thing is,

this is not entirely fair.

It's due to European labelling requirements.

Basically, all the meat has already been cut off the animal, and the stuff they use to make the cheap meatballs is

reconstituted.

Yeah, mechanically reclaimed meat.

But they are 50% animal.

They're just not 50% stuff which you can genuinely call meat,

like a chop.

So they have had to rename them.

I didn't realise meat stopped being actual meat.

I thought, as soon as it's come from an animal, that's it, you're meat for life.

I know.

So Finland has the world's oldest piece of chewing gum as well, doesn't it?

Or it had.

That was where it was found.

It's a 5,000-year-old piece of chewing gum.

Wow.

It's made from tar made of birch bark, and it was found by a 23-year-old archaeology student.

It had tooth marks in it.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wait, wait, wait.

Did they say where it was found?

In Finland.

I was hoping it would be on the bottom of the world's oldest chew or something like that.

Did you guys know that in weird ingredients in food, sand is in a lot of what you eat?

And it's just, if you look at sandwiches.

And I'd never thought of that.

Not them.

No.

Soup.

If you have a soup sandwich.

Sure.

Oh, yeah.

Are they in soup?

If anything that so it's down to silicon dioxide, which I guess we kind of all know is sand, but you never really think about it.

So it's

put on ingredients lists.

I checked my soup in my cupboard as anti-caking agent, brackets silicon dioxide, and it's just sand.

And they put it in like

in grated cheese so it doesn't stick together.

Yeah, exactly.

And there was a guy, an artist from Chile called Marco Evaristi, and he mixed fat removed from his body by liposuction with ground meat to make meatballs.

Did he?

What?

I bet trading standards got involved, didn't they?

Did he eat them or did he serve them to someone else?

I believe he definitely displayed them in a gallery because he's an artist.

I have a feeling he might have fed them to his friends.

Oh, wow.

Did he tell his friends?

Yeah, I think they knew.

Right, otherwise that would be a bit of a bad trick, wouldn't it?

Yeah, well, that's the end of friendship.

Why have we had no Christmas card this year from the Jacksons?

We haven't seen them since May when I fed them my own body

ground up with meat that I found.

I found a few things on when you said this fact, I just love whenever someone is forced into having to rename themselves something new because the thing they were saying was not true or it was just they were stuck in a thing.

There's a great one, it's actually in one of the QI books of the fact books, which is that

there's a place in Australia called Shark Bay, but it was renamed Safety Beach

to attract more tourists to it.

First, they changed the name from Shark Bay to Shark Beach, and they still weren't getting many people in.

Guys, maybe it wasn't the Bay Beach thing that was putting people up.

Well, what else could it be, Frank?

I was reading an interview with a Greek brewer, a Greek beer brewer, who was complaining about the fact that his beer that he's trying to brew keeps being pushed out of the market by Heineken, which basically dominates the Greek beer market.

And his beer only has 5.5% of the market in Greece at the moment.

And it's called vagina beer.

And I just keep thinking, is this interview going to mention at any point the fact that perhaps a bit of rebranding might work?

Another one that's a favorite of mine,

there's a sushi bar in Montreal that got forced to change its name by a judge, a high court judge,

because...

So the name that they gave it was fuckyo sushi.

F-U-K-Y-O sushi.

And it looked like there was a moment where they were going to try and defend it because it's a genuine Japanese word, and you know, it means good fortune in Japanese.

Uh, it's also in a karate stance, apparently.

It's also the main complaint that people give at the restaurant when they have a luggage of food,

but they, yeah, so their downfall was the fact that they have a Facebook page and they started saying, We have other ideas for bits on the menu that we want to put up.

And this really was their downfall because the other bits on the menu were a fuck you two roll,

a fuck me roll, a fuck you all roll,

and my favorite, the fuck your mama roll.

Wow.

They've changed it.

I like that, so they were embracing it, trying to embrace it.

I think it was a joke from the beginning, yeah.

Okay, back to balls.

Okay, in the early 20s, there was a law case between Uncle Luke's mint bowls, these guys who make these little confectionery things, and Uncle Jack's mint balls.

And Uncle Luke was saying Uncle Jack shouldn't be making mint balls, etc., etc.

And the judge decided that the term uncle could not be copyrighted as there are millions of uncles around the world.

And he said, Uncle Jack is just as entitled to offer his bowls to the public as Uncle Luke.

Wow.

My parents are in tonight.

So, some facts about Finland?

Oh, why not?

Finland is a brilliant place.

They have.

Damn it, I had that one too.

They like strange competitions in Finland.

So they have the Mobile Phone Throwing World Championships,

the World Air Guitar Championships, the Wife Carrying World Championships,

swamp soccer, and the finals of that are called the SS World Championships.

And I think it's too late for that one.

Actually, there was, just speaking of SS, do you remember Southend on Sea?

Their traffic wardens, I think, had a uniform which had SS on.

Had to change it because of too many complaints.

Yeah, they could could have had SOS very easily just by paying attention to the on.

That's true.

Finland's also got an ant nest sitting competition that you do.

What?

It's basically the idea behind it is there's a bunch of ant nests and you sit your trousers down, you sit on it and

and then you wait.

The last person to leave is the winner.

Wow.

Wow.

There's one of the champions of the mobile phone phone throwing competition is also a hammer thrower, which I quite like, as if you're hammer throwing, you don't know what to do in your off-season, you just go to the window of bone-throwing championships.

But also, in the wife-carrying championships, then there are various different positions in which you can carry your wife, and people debate over which one is the most efficient.

And there's one which is Estonian style, which is if you have the wife's legs over your shoulders and hanging down, which makes you wonder what kind of weird racism was happening, Ari Estonia's sexual practices, whenever that was named.

I think it was because the first people to do it were Estonian, but it is the most popular, popular,

it is the most popular style, and it's the one that the winners always use these days.

It's the best one.

It's like a Foxbury flop of white carrying.

There must be every year someone comes in with a rogue new position.

They've got their wine,

and everyone gets nervous, going, What does he know that we don't?

And then they fail every single year.

Estonians going, ooh, yes, we did it.

That was a good Estonian impression, by the way.

There's a boot-throwing world championships also held in Finland.

And for an interview, they asked asked the two-time organizer, not the two-time winner, the two-time organizer of the championships.

And they have their own official throwing boot.

So you can't use another boot, you can't use a non-regulation boot.

And they have all kinds of, they have anti-doping regulations, and people are being kicked out of a boot throwing competition for drugs infractions.

Booted out.

They also have mosquito killing championships.

That is how many mosquitoes you can kill in five minutes using only your hand.

Wow.

Are you allowed to use your other hand?

I think you have to go and find them because it's like there's a lot of mosquitoes in the Arctic, aren't there?

Yeah, do you have a tiny, tiny gun dog to go and retrieve the corpses when you've killed them?

No, you're being silly, I think.

They must have so many gold med like potential gold medalists in Finland who are like, have the Olympics brought up the wife cat?

No, damn it like Finland would wipe the Olympics clean if these were allowed in if they didn't just have normal spots in the Olympics well there's always in the news reports of like whoever's won the mobile phone carrying or the wife carrying or whatever it's always it was won by a Finnish man this year as if anyone else is really going there

also you can't call your friends to tell them you've won which is a bit of a nightmare

Oh, we met, James and I met a guy, just speaking of throwing things, we met a guy two days ago who he's a scientist who, part of his major study, and he published a paper on this and he's really proud of it, is that he throws snails for a living.

Yeah, yeah.

So he chucks them over his garden fence and then he waits two years to see if they come back.

And he knows if they've come back because he puts Tipex dots all over them.

And then he chucks them.

He puts one Tipex on if one, whenever he gets one in his garden, he throws it over into, there's like a railway that goes next to him.

So he throws them over onto the rail.

Onto the tracks.

But then every time they come back, he puts another dot and another dot.

And I think there was like one with 17 dots on it in the end because he just kept coming back and coming back.

And he doesn't use slugs because the TIPEX doesn't hold on there.

So he has no way of doing it.

Sorry, we're going to have to move on.

But yeah, do you want to.

Another cool thing they have in Finland is fines.

All of their fines are dependent on your salary or your income.

And so there was a Nokia executive in 2002, for instance, who was fined 116,000 euros for going at about about 40 miles an hour in a 30-mile an hour speed limit or something.

It feels like the mobile phone throwing was invented by Nokia, don't you think?

Because he's like throwing away, oh, you're gonna have to buy another phone now, aren't you?

Do you know what Nokia used to make?

They used to make gas masks.

Really?

Yeah.

The Finnish army used Nokia gas masks until 1995.

Oh, cool.

That is good.

Can imagine you've got your gas mask on.

We need to move on.

I've just got one last thing, which is that the movie, just going back to meatballs, the movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in Israel was retitled, It's Raining for Luffle.

It'd be good.

In Finland, they've renamed it Cloudy with a Chance of Balls.

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

Yeah, my fact is that Queen Victoria's acquaintance once had to apologise apologise to her after her pet jaguar killed three of the Queen's pet deer.

Wow.

Which I just think would have been a really awkward moment.

It's bad planning, though, isn't it?

Where can I leave the Jaguar?

Just put him in with the deer.

You're not going to believe what happened.

Yeah, I do.

It's an amazing sentence.

That is the closest sentence to...

the kind of otherworldliness of royalty when you're having to apologize that you're jaguar

but this woman wasn't she wasn't a royal, was she?

No, she was, by a weird coincidence, she was Bosey's aunt.

Do you guys know Bosey, like Oscar Wilde's lover's aunt?

So, and she was an amazing character.

She's called Lady Florence Dixie.

She was an explorer.

She was a raging 19th-century feminist.

She picked up the Jaguar in Patagonia when she was chased up a tree by a Jaguar mother.

And she was in this tree, and she had to shoot the Jaguar mother dead.

And then she felt bad for the baby Jaguar.

And so she brought it home.

And she recounted all this in a letter to Charles Darwin, in fact.

Whoa.

They were correspondents.

She did correctly.

This is such a name-drop of a story.

I was at Queen Victoria's because my son is dating Oscar Wilde.

And

anyway, Darwin, the thing is, is that is.

Could you put any more?

She was well connected.

Yeah, wow.

What I love about her is the guy who she married.

You know, this guy?

He was called Sir Alexander Beaumont Churchill Dixie, and his nickname was Sir ABCD.

Good guy, though.

I know another one of his nicknames, actually.

So they were known in court circles, apparently, as Sir Sometimes and Lady Always Drunk.

I think she enjoyed a good time.

I actually don't think Queen Victoria would have liked it very much because A, her jaguar killed Queen Victoria's beloved pet deer and was then sent to a zoo.

But also, her, you know, John Brown, Queen Victoria's lover of her later years, Lady Florence Dixie, claimed that she'd been attacked by Irish transvestites in the grounds of Windsor Palace and demanded that that be investigated.

And so, John Brown was sent out into the wet cold, and he died about six months later of a cold he caught out doing that.

Oh, really?

Six months later of a cold he caught wow, that is a big cold.

Not a good immune system.

Mega man flu.

I really, so I've never looked into Queen Victoria before.

She was such a badass.

She was so cool.

Yeah, she wore crutchless underwear.

She did.

She wore quite.

I saw her.

I feel you might be googling the wrong person.

Are you googling Victoria's secret?

No, she.

How is that badass?

That's only badass if you're horse riding or something.

I'm just not.

It's not like hard ass.

I'm playing it fast and loose with the word.

I was building up to the word badass.

Go

I saw that Fiona Bruce on Antiques Roadshow.

They were showing that they were selling them and they were like, This is a crotchless bit of underwear.

Actually, what happened was when she died, her underwear was auctioned off to people, I think.

And she had enormous bloomers.

Like, she was very big by the end of her life.

In fact, the circumference of Queen Victoria's waist by the time she died was larger than her height.

Wow.

Which is quite impressive.

So she was technically the wrong way up for the last years of her life.

Very sad.

Very sad.

Do you know the first thing she did after her exhausting five-hour coronation ceremony?

She ran upstairs to wash her spaniel.

Which was a spaniel.

She had a spaniel called Dash or Dashie and she loved it so much.

She loved all her animals a huge amount, actually.

She was, when one of her dogs died, she had to be sedated.

She was so upset.

And she had a parrot called Coco, which could sing God Save the Queen, which was a fun, fun trick yeah that is the most arrogant thing I've ever heard of anyone doing with their pet I think no I think her family taught it to sing God save the queen and then they they you know they revealed it to her and she was delighted you know okay fine she and she and Albert had huge arguments as well they had they had not They're painted as having had a very, very rosy marriage, but actually, she was very angry with him.

She was having children all the time.

She at one point had nine children under 15 years old, which is a lot.

And she was just constantly busy having children.

And so Albert had a lot of the responsibilities of state farmed out to him.

So he did a lot of dealing with parliament in his life.

But she was very angry about that.

He had to go and put notes under the door apologizing when he'd wielded too much power.

But so, like, I, because she has the reputation of the famous quote: We are not amused.

And so it's attributed to her, but there is no direct evidence that she ever said it.

And the thing that we have from her staff and family, they are on record as saying that she didn't say it and that she was, in fact, immensely amused.

That's such a lovely PR push.

Actually, she was immensely amused.

No further questions.

Okay, some things on pets, maybe?

Okay, yeah, okay.

So, um,

Rudolf II, the Habsburg emperor and king of Hungary, he had a pet lion, and he had his horoscope read by Tycho Brahe,

a friend of the show,

who told him that the king and the lion had the same star sign.

And so, when the lion died, Rudolph shut himself in his room, was convinced he was gonna die as well, and he died three days later.

Because Tycho Bryan, we've talked about him before, but he was a serious scientist who understood that astrology was all complete bollocks, but it was how he made all his money, wasn't it?

So, he kept on, poor guy, his whole life, having to feed these guys lies.

He should have got a pet tortoise or something,

but it would have been-you can't throw someone to the tortoise, can you?

During the Civil War, another friend of the show, Prince Rupert of the Rhine,

were very popular with

dead people.

No, he had a poodle called Boy, who he trained to cock his leg and urinate on Q whenever the name of his enemy, Commander Pym, was spoken.

So whenever he said his enemy, the dog would urinate.

And the people thought that he was Satan in disguise, this dog.

The enemy thought that.

And they thought he was immune to bullets and could catch bullets fired at Rupert in his mouth.

Rupert's had some he's had some good PR dogs.

Really good PR.

People did believe amazing nonsense, didn't they, back in the day?

Yeah, it wasn't true.

It wasn't true.

No, no.

Oh, sorry, you go.

Darlie used to have a pet ocelot who he took everywhere with him.

And if the ocelot urinated on one of his paintings when he was painting it, he would charge the buyer more for it.

He would charge the more.

Charge the buyer more.

Oh, right.

When he saw the painting, he'd be like,

my ocelot weed on this.

So that's a 10% increase on the price.

Joint work.

Wow.

The first budgies cost as much as a house.

Budgie your house, budgie.

Darling, I really think we need to go for the house.

Come on, we've got to get on the budgie ladder.

They just need ladders.

In the 19th century, in 1845, say, they cost about 50 quid, which for a working man was an annual salary.

And there was a budgie boom as well when value shot up because demand outstripped supply so much because they had to be brought over from Australia.

Do you know where I found out the budgie costing as much as a house thing?

Jeff Capes, former Britain's strongest man competitor, Jeff Capes, now keeps budgies.

He's the president of the Budgie Society.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

I was looking into royals with pets because

I just think it's so bizarre because they do get given a lot of...

presents which end up being exotic animals and stuff.

And Henry III of France, he had this thing where he used to carry, so he had pets, he had three dogs, and he used to carry them in a basket around his neck, like a big bit of bling, and they used to bark at people they didn't trust, and he'd be like, get away from me.

If they didn't like the person, the dogs would bark them away.

But I was, so I looked into the Tower of London because I've met through stand-up a guy who is the raven master.

of the tower of london who does stand-up as well weirdly it's crazy he looks after the ravens he lives there he's that that's his job he does stand up he has dick jokes it's amazing right and but basically the tower of london has extraordinary animals or at least did back in the day they had a a polar bear.

Apparently, it was a white bear.

No one knows for sure.

I can't see anyone else.

Yeah, and it used to swim in the Thames, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, it was kept on a long...

That was Henry III of England, yeah, wasn't it?

It was kept on a deliberately long lead so it could go for a swim.

I went to the Tower.

Not many visitors to the Tower in those days, were there?

Well, it's very confusing because it sounds like the animals had a lot of liberties.

I went to the Tower of London's website and they have a whole page on the animals that used to live there and they included they had monkeys which the monkeys were actually they lived in a a furnished room so you could go and visit these monkeys and it says be amused by their antics and human-like behavior um but they were removed eventually because uh one of them tore a boy's leg off in a dang in a dangerous manner

which makes it sound like the first time they did it it was kind of quite funny and they're like you did it safely this time so we're gonna we're gonna keep the boys coming into the room but you are on a warning now

um we're gonna have to move on uh But any last minutes?

I just have a pet fact.

In 2004, a man called Jake Perry owned the Guinness World Record Holder for the world's oldest cat.

In 2005, that record was broken by another one of Jake Perry's cats.

This man has owned the two oldest cats by chance.

Or he's lying about how old they are.

Or he painted the first one a different colour.

The other one, it died.

The other one died.

They counted the number of rings.

They were old.

It's terribly sad.

They have to chop the cats down to find out how old they are.

That's how the first one died, and the second one died over.

And yeah, he said he feeds his cats bacon, eggs, asparagus, broccoli, and a cup of coffee every morning.

And they smoke 40 a day.

Yeah.

They just, they're long-lived.

They're just full of spirit.

We're going to have to move on to fact number three, and that's my fact.

My fact this week is that the Statue of liberty originally wore a headscarf so the statue of liberty was originally designed for egypt and it was originally meant to be at the mouth of the suiz canal it was going to be standing there with a torch in hand it was going to be a peasant lady and it was gonna it was all designed it was all ready and then egypt had a financial situation where they couldn't afford it anymore and the guy who was called um bartholdi he was an architect he was so distressed that he had this colossal thing that was going to be built that was no longer built he went back to france he was french and he then said, Why don't we make a new similar, very similar-looking thing for America?

And that became the Statue of Liberty.

So, originally, it was meant to be a peasant woman standing at the Suez Constance.

You said torch in hand, actually, the head of Egypt, when he agreed to it, wanted the torch on the head rather than the hand, which would have looked a bit weird, wouldn't it?

It's interesting because it was, um, it, it's, it represents so much for America.

And this guy, obviously, when he was trying to get it made in America as well, he had to deny so much about the fact that it was originally meant to be for Egypt.

And everyone was like, but it feels like you were definitely pitching this in Egypt for a long time.

Totally different.

Yeah, and so they kept bringing up stuff like, well, okay, how about the fact that when you've now repitched it to us, you still want the Statue of Liberty, not on what we now know as the classic stand that the Statue of Liberty is on.

He wanted it on a pyramid.

They just did a really bad job of losing the Egypt connection.

And then they said, they said, but it's literally the same design.

You've got a torch being held up and he was like oh okay sure so how the hell am i meant to design a lighthouse effectively without a torch being up there for the light forgetting to point out that in both of the designs the lighthouse element of it was in the head

so again he just kept shooting himself uh in the foot yeah you talked about the um you talked about the kind of plinth that it's on yes that was paid for by america right yeah so france paid for the statue and america paid for the plinth but america couldn't get any money for the the plinth.

And so they had a big sort of campaign to try and get it.

And there was a company called Castoria who made laxatives, who offered to give all the money if the name of the laxative would be displayed on the top of the statue.

Wow.

It's a very different kind of liberty, isn't it?

Free and easy movements.

So

the original sort of garment, the peasant garment, she was designed to be a slave.

But the slave was called,

the word for it is a fella, right?

F-E-double L-A-H.

And one of the main conspiracy theories about the Statue of Liberty, I'm straying into your territory here, Dan, is that the model for it was a man.

And we don't really know.

A lot of people say that the model was

either Bartoldi's mother or

the face was modelled on his mother, but we don't know.

And what you're saying is that they heard that it was a fella and they thought,

that's where I think it's come from.

Oh, that's cool.

There was a really good book written last year, I think, about the Statue of Liberty, and I can't remember what it's called, but the woman who wrote that did hypothesize that he based the face on his brother who committed suicide i think um whom he really loved and it does look like a very masculine face if you look at it it's a man i wouldn't say that so it's a man in a dress but the the

the only uh evidence actually as far as i could find that it was based on his mother is the fact that um someone later on after it had been built went to the opera or went to a big sort of arts event with him and his mother and when his mother came in this guy was like and I turned around and I was like, whoa, it's the Statue of Liberty.

And then he said that to people, and they're like, oh, that must be it.

So I don't know how credible he is.

The idea of the Statue of Liberty was actually by a guy called Laboulai, who was a friend of Bertoldi.

And he said in a dinner, and this was in a newspaper article of someone who was at that dinner, that it should be a statue that can be seen from the shores of America to the coast of France.

That's big.

That is a

big, big statue.

So some of the guys at QI.com/slash talk,

Posital and Zed Ziggy, worked out how high it would have to be in order that you'd be able to see it from France.

And it would have to be more than 3,000 kilometers high.

How high?

I'm an idiot.

How high?

So, the International Space Station, for example.

Yeah, the ISS goes around what, like, three or four hundred kilometers high.

So, it's like another

ten times that much.

Massive.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

Thomas Edison of

electricity fame

wanted,

he suggested putting a massive disc inside the statue so it could deliver speeches from inside it all across New York.

Yeah.

So like it's talking to you.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And no one took him up on it, thankfully.

It's weird to think of her as it, as originally brown or kind of golden, yellowish brown for the first 25 years, obviously, being made of copper, it was supposed to be this shining golden statue

because we so obviously picked her green.

And Bartoldi wanted her to be gilded in solid gold.

I think at first he tried to petition the American people to raise loads of money to do that.

And I think they said, We've already raised quite a lot of money.

Thanks very much.

He had real trouble funding it.

He tried to get her image copyrighted so that every single image of her that appeared, he'd get money for it, which was quite in the 1880s, was quite a modern thing to try and do.

And he failed.

Do You used to be able to, they had fundraising dinners as well where they would desperately try and raise money because all they needed, they had the statue, all they needed was the pedestal and you could buy a meter-tall version made of ice cream at these dinners.

Fun.

He sold his signature.

And Bartoldi sold it 3,000 times to raise money for it.

And the only way they eventually got the money was by crowdfunding, basically.

They printed in, Joseph Pulitzer printed in his paper the name of everyone who gave, even if you you gave a penny to it, they would print your name in the paper.

So, A, it raised a huge amount of money, and B, people bought the paper because they wanted to see their name in it, so circulation rocketed as well.

So, it's quite clever.

This guy sounds amazing.

It sounds like he started copyright laws, Kickstarter.

This is really advanced thinking.

So, I went on to TripAdvisor to see what people thought of the Statue of Liberty.

And there was one guy called H.

Jammer, and he didn't like it very much, actually.

He said, It was bad because I don't like the site.

It's just a statue, nothing else.

The tour was bad, and I ordered food at the court, and the person sneezed on my burger.

I really don't get it.

This was the worst trip ever.

One star.

We're going to have to move on to our final fact.

You guys got anything more that you want to add to that?

No, that's not it.

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Time for a final fact of the evening, and that is James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that a polo mint takes 42.5 minutes to dissolve if you stick it up your nose.

And firsthand QI research is the best kind.

Own research.

I actually when I read that I stopped on the way to get polo mints

so for the rest of the show I might have one.

We've only got 15 minutes left so just have half.

While he's doing that, I'll explain the point of this fact.

So this was a fact given to me by my mum actually, which is quite nice.

And she found this study.

It was by a guy called Dan Leopard.

And he's an ENT specialist at the University Hospital of Wales.

And he wanted to see how long it took.

For people at home, Dan is inserting candy into his nose.

I'm being put off here.

No, he studied five different popular sweets favoured by children and saw how long it took to dissolve in the nose.

And the idea is, he put them up his own nose.

And the idea is that when children get things stuck up their noses, it's kind of hard to get it out.

And it's quite a, you know, not a very nice thing.

But he thought if they dissolve quickly, then maybe you don't have to go through that whole thing, you just let nature do its thing.

So, actually, it's quite an important study, even though it's a bit dumb.

I like that.

How's that going over there?

Everything smells great.

Actually,

it's actually quite

like I know that's not the point of it, but actually, it's making my nose feel like I'm getting more air.

Okay, so other sweets.

Skittles take 37.5 minutes to dissolve in your nose, Smarties 32.5, and Tic Tac's 27.5.

So I'm now extremely skeptical about this study because one of my friends is here who stuck a sour Skittle up her nose

once.

On a day to day?

Not for a day, actually, just for fun, I think.

And apparently, it was extremely painful.

It started exploding in her nose.

She tried to push it out and it ended up in her eye socket.

All the weird sour acid was streaming out of her nose and like bits of her eye socket were falling out of her face and stuff and she managed to get to A and E, I think, which implies that it does take longer than that.

Maybe sour squittles have a different disease.

Oh, you're right.

I don't think this is really important to say at this point, but don't try this at home.

Although, quick update, it feels smaller.

Oh, gosh.

Actually, I can feel the tight.

It's smaller.

So about polos, did you know that if you snap a polo in open in the dark, then it glows?

I didn't know this, and I couldn't try it at home because it was daytime when I read this.

And nobody knows why.

So it's this thing called triboluminescence that if you turn all the lights out, snap a polo, they think it's about electrons suddenly rushing to a certain point of the polo.

And it happens with polos, it also happens with cellotape.

If you whip cellotape off its roll really fast in the dark, then it will glow at the point where it's being whipped off.

And it also emits x-rays.

And they did an experiment last year where they managed to get an x-ray of a researcher's finger by just the x-rays emitted by cellotape.

He just looked off cellotape and he managed to get an x-ray through that off his own finger.

How cool is that?

That is cool.

Very cool.

So when you go to hospital in future, they'll just have a massive roll of cellotape.

Just stand in front of the cellotape, please.

Or a polope.

I have something about smelling things and noses.

So when people who are asthmatic smell something that they think is going to cause them an allergic reaction, they will have an allergic reaction, even if the thing they're smelling doesn't cause an allergic reaction.

Oh, wow.

right.

Yeah, and it's because you from when you smell something, it goes to your brain before it goes to your lungs, as it were, the signals of what you've smelled.

And they tested 17 asthmatics, exposing them to a rose-smelling chemical for a quarter of an hour.

And nine of them were told it would irritate their asthma, and the rest were told that it would calm them down, and that's exactly what happened, even though it was the same stuff.

How cool is that?

No allergies are all in the mind.

No.

These people should stop making.

it.

It's the opposite of that.

It is in the mind, but the mind is also a real thing, basically.

In some people, yeah.

They have,

another one of my friends is a pediatric nurse, and she recently changed hospitals.

And as part of the showing her around the new ward, she works in AE.

Part of showing her around the new war, they were like, and this is where we keep the metal detector.

And they have now, in a lot of pediatric AE wards, metal detectors because it's a much easier way and less expensive way than an x-ray.

If a kid comes in and says, I've eaten like 17 marbles, not marbles, things made of metal.

That's called a marble detector, yeah.

You just go down their body.

Oh, that's clever.

Because this in this paper of the polo thing, they did say that if a child states they have inserted a sweet into their nose and it cannot be visualized, one must believe that there is indeed a sweet and not an inorganic or corrosive object.

In other words, you have to trust the kid, otherwise, if he says it's a sweet and actually it's something bad.

But I also want to know what these mystery sweets are that no one can visualize.

Well, when they're in your nose.

I've never heard of this kind of sweet before.

Can you describe it?

No.

So

I read a report that there was originally we thought that the nose had about 10,000

ways of smelling.

We could smell 10,000 different things.

And that recently they looked into it again and like, oh, we got the number a bit wrong.

It's actually a trillion.

Which

bit of a discussion?

Well, to be honest, we got bored counting halfway through.

At the moment, obviously.

All of us except Mike, who can go in.

How can we know that?

It seems like such a high number.

I have no idea.

I have no idea.

Dan can only smell mint at the moment.

Second update, definitely getting smaller.

Wondering if it might just fall out on its own accord.

Stay tuned.

But

it got me thinking about how, because I've always thought, like, you know, they test people for how good their hearing is, and eyesight you can see quite well.

And I thought, smell, that must be, we must have humans who have amazing smell.

And there's a guy, actually, who his job, and it's one of the most important jobs in the world, I think, this is his job title.

He's NASA's Sniffer.

Right?

NASA has a sniffer who smells everything before it goes into space.

This is how powerful his nostrils are.

If he doesn't like the smell, it doesn't go.

Literally, his nostrils are the gateway to off-planet activity.

Because

if you put something up into the International Space Station and it starts to smell after a few months, then that can be

out.

So his nose has the ability to smell the tiniest of smells so he can see if that smell exists and if it's there.

it can then eventually turn into something bigger.

But so his job, he's tested every four months to see with a bunch of tiny little test tubes, and one some of them have no smell, and some have the tiniest smell.

And if he fails, he loses his job and he still has a job.

He's got the best nostrils on earth.

Do you think he can smell all trillion things in the world?

I have no idea.

I just don't know how you.

I mean, maybe they can try very, very similar things and you can smell the difference between them.

I have some things about things that get stuck up the rectum.

Oh, God.

Which, Dan, you're lucky this wasn't my actual fact, otherwise

that would have been a very different experiment.

The 1995 Ig Nobel Prize in Literature was given to two surgeons who made a study called Rectal Foreign Bodies, Case Reports, and a Comprehensive Review of the World's Literature.

And here are some of the things that they found that people had put up their bottoms.

I might, I'll stop halfway through this, I think, when it gets too much.

But seven light bulbs, a knife sharpener, two flashlights, a wire spring, a snuff bottle.

Sorry, we're the second flashlight to try and find the first.

We've just got dozens up there now.

This is not the same rector.

He's a different rector.

So,

11 different forms of fruits, vegetables, and other foodstuff, a jeweler's saw, a frozen pig's tail,

and then one patient's remarkable ensemble collection, including spectacles, a suitcase key, a tobacco pouch, and a magazine.

A magazine?

If you forget your handbag, I mean what are the super

it does sound like he was going on a journey, but he's got everything he needs.

Mike, where's your bag?

I don't need a bag.

Why does he need a suitcase key if his rectum is acting as his suitcase?

Must need that key inside the case again.

Wouldn't that be the best day of your life if you were one of those immigration officers who puts the glove on and heads in to find some drugs?

It's like, oh, what is it really Mary Poppins?

That's no version of Mary Poppins I've seen.

Goodness me.

We're going to have to wrap up very

quickly.

James, give us more.

What have you got?

Okay,

one way that you could get out of being in the army was to pretend that you had polyps of the nose.

And this is like a little tumor inside your nose.

And if you had it, you wouldn't get in the army.

And so people pretended, and here's a quote: Attempts have been made to simulate this

affection of the nose

by introducing the testes of a cock or the kidneys of a rabbit into the nostril and retaining them there by means of a small piece of sponge which is sometimes impregnated with fetid juices

but if it's that or war you know I'll fight in the war

frontline Murray I'm not a violent man but I'll take the war please

and another thing I

We were talking about the Ig Nobel Prizes before and we're currently doing a bit of a tour with Mark aren't we Mark Abrahams, who's in charge of those.

And so I asked him about this, and he sent me a paper from the Journal of Medical Hypotheses called Ejaculation as a Potential Treatment of Nasal Congestion in Mature Males.

Where are you ejaculating?

Well, apparently.

According to the abstract, its emission phase provides vasoconstriction and nasal decongestion, which I must say I've never noticed myself.

Your nose clears up when you're having sex.

That's what this is saying, yeah.

You do have erectile tissue in your nose, so maybe it's that.

Speak for yourself.

I have a normal nose.

Maybe this is for adolescents listening.

That's a good excuse for when the mum walks in, I think.

I just had a blocked-up nose.

We've already established that Andy's mum is here tonight, so

it's like I have a blocked-up nose.

Oh, that's what all the tissues are for.

Okay, we're going to have to wrap up.

Should we quickly find out how my polo is doing in my nose?

All right, so

God.

Talk amongst yourselves.

It's still huge.

It's still massive.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thanks so much for listening, everyone.

If you want to find out more about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, you can get us all on our Twitter handles.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

At eggshaped.

Sorry.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

And Czazinski.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

We're going to be back again next week with another episode in the Soho Theatre.

Thank you so much for coming to our show tonight.

We'll be back again next week.

See you then.

Have a good night.

Goodbye.