52: No Such Thing As A Worthless Bucket Of Urine

Spreadsheets, clunky software, a hundred different logins just to run your business?

There's a better way, Odo.

One simple, connected platform that handles sales, inventory, accounting, and more.

So you can focus on growing, not juggling.

Make the switch today at odoo.com.

That's odoo.com.

Hi, everyone.

James here.

I just wanted to start with an apology.

Unfortunately, the audio is very bad in this episode.

Some of our microphones failed, so we only had one mic, and you'll be hearing it from that.

So it's going to be a bit tinny, a little bit like we recorded in a toilet.

But that's kind of back to our roots because that's what most of our early ones were like.

But enjoy the show anyway.

We think it's a good one.

Get through the audio.

Next week will be much better.

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 here with Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray.

This is our one-year special.

It's our birthday.

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

Starting with you, Andrew Hunter-Murray.

Hello.

My fact is that the route for the Hong Kong Ultra Marathon is to run up and down the same stretch of road 25 times.

This has been in the news a bit recently.

It's because it's just happened, the first ever ultramarathon they've had on this route, for want of a better word.

And it's 31 miles long, because apparently anything longer than the standard 26.2 is an ultramarathon, which I think is cheating, because I think it should be at least double.

And I say that as someone who's never run more than 200 meters.

And that was at Sports Day.

And I came fourth.

Out of four.

Out of four.

So yeah, that's it.

So how far do you say it was?

It's 31 miles.

Oh, yeah, because normally ultra-marathons marathons are more like 100 miles.

Oh, 100 miles, 200 miles, whatever.

But if they had done that here, there probably would have been suicides as border.

I read that, actually, sorry, I read that if you run 200 miles, it's less tiring than if you run 100 miles.

Right.

That can't be true.

Yeah, apparently what happens is when you know it's going to be much longer, your intensity is much lower, and so you take your time a lot more.

And they found that people who do the longer ones feel better at the end.

So you're just saying you do it much more slowly.

You're saying it takes.

You conserve your energy better.

You walk it.

You gape jog.

When you get jogged.

So the thing about this marathon is that everyone's been describing it, particularly people doing it, as the most boring marathon possible because of the repetitions.

And I was looking into boring marathons.

And there is an annual boring marathon.

What?

Yeah, there's an annual boring marathon.

There's an ultra-boring marathon.

And it's actually apparently quite exciting.

It's just it happens to take place in a town

boring Oregon City.

Yeah.

Which is an actual place and their motto is the most exciting place to live.

They are they're twinned with a telecolf dull in Scotland.

Yes yeah yeah yeah they have a an annual dull and boring day which is I think it was August 9th.

Someone worked out recently the most boring day in modern history.

And it was April the eleventh, nineteen fifty four.

Oh yeah.

So a bad time.

It was a that a scientist developed a computer program to work out the day where the least interesting stuff happened.

It included a general election in Belgium.

So sorry, Belgians.

The front page of the New York Post was two cops attending a conference on juvenile delinquency, front-page news.

So they put that into a machine, right?

And it's generated.

So it was like three million bits of information.

300 million.

Was it 300 million?

It was.

Wow.

So they said, find us the most boring day.

They came up with this date, April 11th, 1954.

I read this as well.

Side note to it, which actually caught my eye more than the fact itself, is that the guy who was a Cambridge scientist, he was a computer programmer,

his name is William Tunstall Pedo.

You changed his surname, wouldn't you?

I was trying to research the fact.

I got so sidelined.

Do you think you're keeping that?

You know, Charles Dickens came up with boredom, as in he invented the word.

Yeah, I've read his books, yeah.

Oh,

Charles Dickens!

Um yeah, it's in Bleak House.

He says someone is bored to death by marriage.

So maybe it means only because we people just assume that's what it meant.

Maybe it meant thrilled.

Boredom means thrilled.

So what people say to me when I'm talking to them in the pub and they're saying, I'm so bored.

They're actually saying they're thrilled.

Is that why you keep going on and on?

There's a tribe in Papua New Guinea called the Baining and they value work as the highest ideal.

The best thing you do is work.

And they have been called unstudiable because of their failure to do anything interesting.

So harsh, isn't it?

And there was an anthropologist called Gregory Bateson, who said, who spent 14 months attempting to study them in the 1920s before giving up entirely.

They don't even like sex, is that right?

They don't like it very much.

No, they don't like it.

But they do have kids, but often a lot of adoption because they don't really want to have kids.

Wait, where have they adopted from?

Must be neighbouring tribes or something like that.

I don't know.

But they also don't like play because it's a natural state of children and they don't like children.

And they sometimes they will punish their children who are playing by putting their hands in the fire.

What?

That's not boring.

That's an exciting thing to do as a kid.

I think the most boring sport ever, the the most boring sporting event ever was the cycling event of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic.

Okay.

Where it involved people watching two people who are cycling head to head sitting still on bicycles for more than an hour.

But were they exercise bikes?

No, it was that, you know, it's the sprint cycle when it goes head to head and you know they often like hover at the start of it.

Because I think is it a slip stream thing?

So because they want the other person to start cycling first so they can get in their slip stream.

And these two guys just had this standoff when they went on

just still on the bikes bouncing on the bikes for over an hour bouncing on the bikes though that's pretty hard

yeah i know impressive

that sounds exciting to me because you constantly be wondering it always goes

the commentator had to leave um

something else to get on with

excitement was too much

handle this do you know that the uh the way they induce boredom if scientists want to test boredom obviously there are definite ways of doing it so to do pain, they put your hand in a bucket of icy water.

And to do boredom, they make you copy out the phone book.

That's

the official way of doing it.

But if they want to really test you, they just make you read the phone book.

So you have to focus on it and really concentrate.

But it improves your

creativity.

So even the phone book does.

Well, being bored.

As

induced by this in the experiment they did.

So they tested, they had people who could just copy numbers out of a a phone book or not do that.

And at the end of that, everyone who'd been in it was asked to, this is the test, think of as many uses as they could for a pair of plastic cups,

which is apparently a test of divergent thinking and how crazy and creative you are.

And people who'd been reading the phone book or copying it out were much more creative.

They'll like throw them at the person who told me to read the phone book.

And there's a scientific test, the boredom proneness scale, that's come up with by two psychologists, and it's 28 statements which you have to agree or disagree with.

And it consists of statements including: I have projects in mind all the time, things to do, or much of the time, I just sit around doing nothing.

If you can do that successfully, I don't think you're easily bored.

No.

I sometimes read my own phone book and test myself on people I've forgotten who they are.

Who is Rose?

Who is that?

Does anyone else do that?

One yes, one yes, thank you.

I did a terrible thing the other day.

I got a message on my phone from someone saying, hey, how's it going?

And you know that terrible moment when you haven't got their number and you're like, oh my god, the message is so familiar.

I definitely know who this is.

They're going to hate.

So I have to do the old classic, sorry, it's a new phone.

I haven't got your number.

Who is it?

And the person wrote back going, it's Sheila.

And

so I did the lamest thing that I've done in the years, I wrote back going, sorry,

I'm Australian.

There's a lot of Sheilas.

Which one are you?

She didn't write back.

I found

the most boring.

It's very unfortunate.

There's a resort in Switzerland.

And I was a bit confused because it's described as a village and resort.

So I have a feeling the village is a little bit more.

It's like a ski resolve.

Yeah, and it's been described as the most boring resort in Switzerland.

And you know, when it's like, oh, I had a nice time, all of their things, it's just, this is so dull, this is a dull place.

And the tourist board there released this statement.

They said that they think they got this title because their quiet village has nothing,

does nothing, and offers nothing.

And then they added, we think that's a positive.

But so they've combated it now by going, they had a meeting and they're like, how do we sort out the boredom levels of our of our town how do we make it exciting and vibrant and they started a um a stone skipping competition

which they're now trying to make a worldwide thing but then they found out that another similarly dull town also decided the way to combat boredom was to set up a skimming stones competition so they had to call them and say could we do the qualifying round before they get to it

so you can't even go and see the finals

okay some stuff on ultramarathons yeah yeah, yeah.

Okay, so ultramarathon athletes sometimes have all their toenails removed.

Before or after?

Before.

Not during, but like between races.

So

you'll end up, you'll run and you'll have real problems with your toenails and they'll get worse and worse.

And then they get better.

And then once they've been a problem once, they get worse and worse all the time.

And so, yeah, quite often they'll have them taken off completely.

What?

It reminds me of that.

How?

Yeah, how?

How do they take him off?

Do you want me to show you?

They would surge it, the head surgeon would do it.

That's not a method.

I wanted a method.

I think it's a yank.

And the other thing that happens in ultra-amarathon people is their body gets in such trouble because they're really, really pushing it that they are insatiable and want to have lots and lots of sex.

Apparently.

This is according to one of the athletes

who I met in a pub.

Yes, he was boring, but I couldn't help myself.

No, he said

he says that when a person is in dire straits like that, sex becomes a priority because naturally we want to perpetuate the species.

We want to procreate.

So it's like we're in such trouble, we're about to die, we need to have kids quickly.

That's what he said.

Wow.

Okay.

Marathons were considered so dangerous that they weren't supposed to happen again, weren't they?

In

the 1902 Olympics, or was it 1904?

1904 Olympics.

It was decided because it was so badly done that one guy, so the doctors drove in front of them along this dust track and like

one of them did.

One of them collapsed, had like a pulmonary failure or something, collapsed very nearly died because he'd inhaled so much dust.

Another one, the guy who won in the end, collapsed and had to to be picked up and was given strychnine, which is that pesticide that we now use on crops to try and stimulate him, and then some brandy.

At that time, it was a useful stimulant that didn't do anything except slowly kill you.

And then there was the guy who won initially, who was called someone Laws, who decided he couldn't hack it after about nine kilometres and jumped in a car, passed by, waved all the other athletes, jumped out at the other end, sprinted to the finish line, the 50 yards, and won.

50 yards.

And then there was no one nearby, presumably.

because I would stop a mile back.

I was just thinking.

Well, what he claimed was when he was taking his trophy, and someone did say, By the way, I did see you drive

most of the way.

He did say he'd always been meaning to give it back, it was just a joke.

But that is the kind of thing you think I'll claim this, and if no one says anything, I've won.

And if they do, I'll just say I was kidding.

Anyway, yeah, Samstrong was going to do that, doesn't he?

That was just a joke, guys.

Have you heard of Rosa Ruiz?

No.

She won the 1980 Boston Marathon.

She's a 23-year-old New Yorker, and she was very, very fast.

She was the third fastest time ever recorded for a female runner.

And she was completely sweat-free and composed when she crossed the finishing line.

Obviously.

No one saw her during the race.

None of the checkpoints, none of the other runners.

Photographs of the race, she was nowhere.

She was so fast they couldn't get her in the summertime.

She not cast off subway.

She just

got subway straight across.

Does it count though if you're still running while you take all these shortcuts?

If you ran to the subway and just had to

count.

Just on the spot, on the train.

I was running.

I just got created with it.

But again, she just jumped back in half a mile before the end.

Which seems very cocky.

Yeah, it does.

Mind Mind you, often in subways, you have to run up a lot of stairs.

I reckon that's more tiring.

That was nice.

We've got to move on very soon to the next fact.

Can I just quickly give a few Hong Kong things?

Yeah,

so because I'm born and raised in Hong Kong, and there's...

Can I bet money on a Hong Kong fact that you will say in the next 20 seconds?

Oh, okay, yeah.

I'm just wondering if there's a Hong Kong fact about Bruce Lee to follow.

No, there's not.

Oh my god.

Although there is a good Bruce Lee fact.

See how that you've made it.

You've made it true.

Why did I do it?

No, He was the 1958 cha-cha champion in Hong Kong.

There you go.

How many people have it?

How's he work?

Yeah, so one thing I discovered was that after the handover happened, there were a lot of things that the Chinese admitted to doing that they were sort of tricking the British colonialists about when they first arrived.

And one thing was the names of places in Hong Kong.

And I've been to a lot of these places and I had no idea that their translations meant what they are.

So for example, there's a place called He Siwan.

So when the British were like, oh, what's this called?

They went, oh, it's He Siwan.

That translates as Vagina Discharge Bay.

Vaginal Discharge Bay.

There's New Shiwu, which is Cow Shit Lake.

And Dao Tao, which is penis head rock.

And these have been on signs in Hong Kong for ages, and they've started changing some.

So Foreign Devil's Sex Organ has now changed.

That's become Pyramid Rock.

And Oral Sex Corner is now Swimming Dragon Cape.

Oh, that's really cool.

I had no idea when I was there.

Did you guys have any more that we...

That's really what?

Yep.

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

Yep, my fact is that the meter is wrong.

Typical announcement.

Everything's wrong, we can't see.

I hate it.

What on earth could that mean?

So, the meter, it was determined that the meter, so in a guy called Pierre Mechat, was a French astronomer.

In the 1790s, he determined that he would create a, they decided to go to a decimal system, and the meter would be the unit of the system, and it would be exactly one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the North Pole.

So, he went on this big tour to measure out arcs of the Earth and stuff and do calculations to work out what a metre was.

And there was a slight error in his calculations, a slight problem with one of his bits of equipment, and he was 0.16 of a millimeter out for every meter.

The meter we use now, he realised that he'd gone wrong and so he tried to draw people's attention to it, but at that point they were like, we've made all these like meter

sticks, we can't just go and unmake them.

And so it just stayed that way.

So he

I mean but that's so unscientific for how science usually works.

Well we've made them

it's just gonna have to be it.

Sorry, I heard that he went back to where he had made the original mistake later in his life and he wanted to correct it, he was on this campaign to get it corrected.

And he got to where he'd made the mistake, where he caught malaria and died.

It just goes to show, never check

your working.

He kept getting arrested, didn't he, when he was doing all this stuff?

Because it was during the revolution, and people thought that his,

what do you call these things?

His instruments were weapons, don't they?

Yeah.

So it just kept putting him in prison all of a sudden.

Yeah.

And it was that, but that was actually a good thing.

Well, was it good or was it bad?

It was when he was in prison that he realized he'd got it wrong.

He got I've got nothing else he had to do except recheck my calculations.

And when he did that he realized it was wrong.

But then it didn't do much good.

So in fact there was in 1875 there was the Treaty de la Maitre or the Treaty of the Metre in France.

Thank you.

Saved me ten valuable minutes.

I was going to leave it.

I mean I remember you were here

And that decided to consecrate his wrong meter into like being the actual metre.

So to say actually Meshan's metre is the proper metre.

The metre is now going to be one metre and not 0.61 six of a millimetre long.

And so they created the standard metre at this conference.

So they had to create an exact replica of the wrong meter, but this time say this is now the right meter.

But they couldn't just take his wrong one and say this is the standard meter because that had been wrong.

Does that make sense?

It didn't.

But yeah.

I'm still on Troti de la Metre.

And so before this happened in 18th-century France, there were more than 250,000 different types of measurement in France.

What?

I know.

How many people were there?

Was it just...

Just different weights and measurements and...

250,000.

Yeah.

It's a lot of that lit.

They were talking a bit really arrogant, weren't they, when they wanted to go to the decimal system and there are a lot of people saying, I can't believe you think you can just make the whole world abide by your ridiculous system.

But obviously they did.

Japan went metric in 1924 and no one noticed or did anything about it and they had to do it again 40 years later.

Oh my god.

Well I think the US has tried to a few times.

In the 1960s they were saying let's do it and they've just never got around to it.

And now because there are three countries that are metric, aren't there?

So Burma, Liberia, and the US, but Burma's about to go Imperial now.

So it's about to just be US and Viberia.

About to be metric, sorry.

Sorry.

It's just the Liberia and Amber.

Yeah.

Wasn't there that great.

I don't know the full fact.

I hope you guys do, which is that, of course, that's complete the facts.

Mount Everest, when that was originally measured,

what was it, 29,000 feet?

Yeah.

So

they worked out exactly how tall it was.

It was 29,000 feet.

But they thought that if they put that as the actual number, people won't believe them.

They would think they just rounded them up.

And so they put an extra two feet on top.

So they called it 29,002 feet.

Yeah.

Can you imagine?

You've just done this incredible thing.

You've measured the greatest mountain, the highest, tallest mountain in the world, and it's a perfect number.

And you can't tell them that it's that

because no one will believe you.

Poor guy, you must be like, I can't fucking believe my luck.

That's nuts.

I really like mistakes.

I think history, definitely, some of the things that we find as an everyday thing, like the meter, is as a result of a mistake.

One of the things that almost seems to have come out of being mistakes is phosphorus matches, the head of matches.

The only reason, I mean, we may have got to it eventually, but the actual reason that we did end up getting to it is because a guy in 1675 called Hennick Brand got obsessed with the idea that he could make gold by converting buckets of urine into gold.

So in his basement, you have 50 buckets of urine going, I'm on to a winner here, and it went all soupy and it went all waxy, and it just didn't at all go goldy.

If he had a cleaner, he must have had to have a look on every single bucket.

Please leave.

But so, but the weird byproduct of him doing this is that it actually led to

tubs of urine.

Yeah, well, no, the tubs of urine did this waxy substance that he ended up having, sort of lit up when light was making contact with it, and they were going, what is this?

And they realized this was a way of making fire.

And so actually, each bucket became way more worth than gold.

So he actually exceeded the amount of money that he would have made from turning that into gold.

Isn't that a good thing?

If I shine a light.

No, no, it's like

setting light to it.

Oh, right, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you know the first matches were a yard long?

Seriously, the first sold matches.

And the guy who invented them sold 168 in something like three years.

And they were a toy for rich people.

And they were also incredibly dangerous because once you'd lit it,

it was more like a home science kit almost, it wasn't a practical thing.

But once you'd lit it, the globule of flaming stuff had this amazing tendency to just fall to the ground and set fire to whatever you were standing on at the time.

I guess because they weren't very practiced at lighting matches, so once you've got a lot of time.

No, not under a yard long as well.

That must have taken two people.

Yes.

Yeah.

Good for bonding.

Maybe that's why they did it.

I don't know.

Before the 19th century, there was a unit of measurement which was called a lot.

How many was that?

It was a bunch.

No, it wasn't.

It was the 30th of a pound.

So it was an awful lot.

That's great.

The word acre used to mean an open field of no particular measurement.

A yard comes from.

Saxons used to wear like a girdle.

It comes from the same origin as gird, doesn't it?

Because it's from a belt that people used to wear and then they take it off to measure something when they needed to.

No speculating as to what.

And

what?

I don't know.

Some people understood.

How big big is this corpse?

So there are some other good units of measurement.

The Garn, you all know the Garn.

Garn is a unit of measurement that measures space sickness.

And it's named after, he was the first US politician to go into space, actually.

It was named after Senator Jake Garn, who was so sick during his space mission that now it's meant one garn is considered very space sick.

That's great.

That's like the Mini Helen.

What's that?

The Mini Helen is the amount of beauty you need to launch one ship.

It's weird.

Lots of units of measurement that we have are quite similar.

So there's a Japanese measurement called, I'll mispronounce this, but Kanejaku.

It's an obscure one, as in it's not used anymore.

But it's about the same as an English foot.

And both of those things are about the same length as the average man's foot.

So it's a sort of, you know, common origin for lots of these things, which is quite cool.

Like the cubit is the distance from it, what is it, your elbow to

the beginning of your hand.

So you would send out someone with a big arm to buy cloth in ancient Egypt because they will be able to get more cloth for their money because they have bigger arms.

It's just one guy with a really massive arm.

Yeah, yeah.

Just one more, like one huge arm.

It's amazing that we took so long to get to grips with the fact that all humans are different sizes and we can't base a measurement system on

human body.

There's one called a

Piette de Roi, which is Charlemagne introduced.

It was supposedly the size of his foot.

It wasn't.

He was just trying to standardise things.

So it was bigger than his foot or smaller than his foot?

I don't know.

Well, I don't know what size his foot was, but I also don't know what size the thing was.

So it could be, actually.

Yeah.

I think it was.

You know what they say about men with indeterminate sized feet?

Can I just say very quickly, just as a side note, every time that we've said, oh, what's that called?

Someone from the crowd has gone, it's called that.

You're going to get this at any other comedy gig, where the audience are treating it like a pub quiz.

Are you hearing that?

Yeah, can you not hear it every time?

Every time.

Listen out, it will be there.

Just quickly, the carrot, it's kind of interesting, the carrot measurement for diamonds is from carob seeds because they thought people used to think that all carob seeds weighed exactly the same amount.

So that comes from the game word.

They don't weigh the same amount.

Like

who was it?

Was it Bach who weighed out 60 coffee beans for each cup of coffee he drank?

Oh, yeah.

Sorry, he didn't weigh out.

He counted them out.

Yeah, it was one of them.

It was Bach.

It was whoever wrote the coffee cantata, which I think was Bach.

He wrote a whole thing in praise of coffee.

Who was it?

Fucking told you.

Um guys we're gonna have to move on to our next fact.

This is Mars.

And the next fact comes from that lady in the audience.

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

Okay my fact this week is that St Andrew's Aquarium has three meerkats called Churchill, Admiral and Sheila's Wheels.

I love that Sheila's Wheels meerkat.

They also had a Viva and Direct line but they both died, unfortunately.

Because I'm doing the credit punch.

But yeah, meerkats and funny names.

Wow.

Questions.

First of all,

does an aquarium have meerkats?

Because they've realised there's no such thing as a fish.

Wow.

They had this little bit.

It's a brilliant aquarium, by the way, but they had this little bit of rock where they didn't have anything to put there.

and they got offered some meerkats from another snooze.

And they said, Yeah, great.

Meerkats, why not?

Everyone loves meer cats.

So, you, I mean, just you actually.

Yeah, you went with that's how you found this out, yeah.

Yeah, did you meet the meerkats?

I did meet the meerkats and fed the uh, what do you call these things?

Penguins,

and saw all the different fish.

Yeah, it was great, really, really good.

Definitely recommend it.

So, why are they named the

oh, so they were named uh by someone on Facebook, and they thought they were such great names that we named them that.

Wait, they know their existing names, don't they?

They were allowed to name them when they were born there and they were allowed to name them.

My head admiral has a tiny jacket with epaulettes.

And the main two are called Kate and Wills, and the others are named after members of

the royal family as well.

And they have a penguin who is called Andy Murray.

Yeah, they do.

And it's a female.

And all the other penguins are named after the Murray family.

Not your family.

A tennis player.

Yeah.

Interestingly, that the Meerkats are named after Caitlin Wills, because Meerkats, too, are threatened by inbreeding.

So Meerkats, when they're fighting, they line up in a line and then just charge at each other.

Really?

Yeah, like a...

Like a horizontal line, like a key.

Like a horizontal line.

And so it's like one against the other one and and they just charge into each other.

And that is how naval warships fought in the old days.

So presumably Admiral Person.

Very good.

And one way they stop

fighting each other is because they get a lot of their thing from scent.

They rub Vick's vapor rub on the meerkats because then they can't smell each other and they don't get angry with each other.

But they also can't smell who's related to them.

No, but that's a good thing.

Because they recently had one meerkat who was completely segregated.

They just were like, we don't want you.

And they named the meerkat Oliver Twist because he was orphaned.

And one of the guys there had to look after Oliver Twist.

And that was the sentence.

He said, we're going to completely cover them in Vix,

what's it called?

Vapor Rub.

Vapor Rub.

And we're going to cover him as well.

And that will allow him back into the group.

Because they won't know that he wasn't smelling the same as us.

It just reminded me of a brilliant thing that I read this week.

You'll have all read, I'm sure, a new scientist, which is that when you shake shake someone's hand, you smell your hand afterwards because you're trying to get the scent of the person who you shook hands with.

And all humans have been doing this forever, and no one's ever noticed.

Not me, I can assure you, I don't do that.

They videoed a load of people in a room shaking hands and counted how often they were touching their faces around the nose and mouth, and it was a certain number.

And when they shook hands, it always went up.

It's amazing.

That's incredible.

I've been watching my boyfriend over the weekend.

We found various instances of we'd like to play a lot of board games, shake hands after them.

And then I've watched him, and he holds his nose after he shakes hands with me.

Yeah, which I've not taken to his side.

On meerkats, they're the only animal we've observed aside from us who we've seen employing proper teaching methods to teach their young how to hunt.

So because they hunt individually, the young can't just follow their parents around to see how they hunt.

So the parents bring back dead animals and then explain to their kids how to dismember them.

Um another thing meer cat mothers do is they kill the children of other meerkat mothers so that those mothers will breastfeed their own children so that they can go out and have fun.

Nice guys.

So they turn that mother into a babysitter'cause she's back dating anyway.

So she'll be like, Okay, you're gonna go after my kids and I've killed yours.

I'm gonna go out in the town.

They are they're horrible.

They're not good pets apparently, according to some websites, uh because they can be very cruel to each other, aggressive to people they don't know, and they smell quite ferrety.

Like you to be an honor?

I was reading about aquariums and I read about London's very first aquarium, which was the Royal Aquarium.

You guys heard about the Royal Aquarium.

It was basically it was 1903,

sorry, just before 1903,

because it was pulled down in 1903.

It had huge tanks, it was ginormous, central London, and the reason it was pulled down and didn't do so well is that all of these giant tanks contained no fish.

They were completely empty because they marketed it as having sea life, so they needed salt water, and they realized how expensive that was, and they couldn't afford to actually put the right amount of water in there with the relevant fish.

So people used to come and just look at tanks of water

with the promise that one day that there would be fish in them.

I don't think that was the first one, because the first one I think was at London Zoo.

Oh, yeah.

which would have been, where did you say yours was?

1903.

It was taken down.

London Zoos opened in the mid-19th century and it was called the Aquarium, but it used to be called Aquavivarium, which is a cool name.

And an aquarium was originally a watering place for cattle.

So you see sometimes troughs where people used to let their horses and cows drink and it has aquarium written on it and it looks like the worst aquarium in the world, but it's not.

So did they call it Aquavivarium so as not to be confused and have cattle turn up

hoping for a drink?

And then they had this thing called Aquarium Mania.

Have you heard of this?

No.

This is so cool.

Sounds great.

So there was a guy called Philip Henry

Gosser.

We can edit that as appropriate.

And he was one of the pioneers of basically allowing fish to survive.

Before that.

Basically, everyone went about killing all fish.

And he was like, no, this is wrong.

We should let them survive.

He came up with a system whereby you could keep fish in a tank and they would get enough oxygen and you need plants in there and you need to get oxygen in.

But suddenly everyone started getting aquariums.

So people got them set into their windows, some people, or put into chandeliers just hanging from the ceiling.

Some people built a bird cage into an aquarium so there would be a bird living in there surrounded by fish which it could never eat

Torture.

Yeah.

They've made a Nike trainer into an aquarium, Nike designers now.

They've transformed it into a...

I don't know how functional it is as a trainer anymore, but it looks really cool.

If you look it up,

they've turned into a warmer.

In the base of the shoe, do you mean?

The whole shoe is an aquarium, so it's around the edge of the shoe.

They filled it with water and put some fish in.

Wow.

That's incredible.

That's quite some of the fish.

Wow.

That's weird.

Also, there's the world's smallest aquarium, isn't there?

That's...

Well, is that not it?

Yeah.

It's not even a full shoe.

a heel.

Um I think this one is 24 millimetres high.

So

it's for zebrafish.

It's this guy, Anatoly Kanenko, who just designed, like, he's a designer, his job is designing tiny things.

And so he's created the world's smallest book.

That's useful.

It's the width of a human hair.

Is it advice on how to keep your new zebrafish?

Just a few things.

Oh, have you got?

I was just going to say, did anyone see the giant male octopus this week that was trying to escape from its aquarium?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Did anyone read what the aquarium?

It was an aquarium in Seattle, the aquarium owners said.

So there was this octopus that's crawled up the sides of its aquarium and it's clutched at the outside and it's got some of its tentacles on the outside and it's trying to get over.

And aquarium officials say the octopus named Inc.

was not attempting a jailbreak, but simply learning to embrace his new home with all eight arms.

It was not an escape attempt, they said,

whilst putting the lid back onto

so some things about name changes and product placements and stuff like that.

Oh yeah.

So Aussie rules footballer Gary Hocking changed his name by Deepol to Whiskers one year because he was paid a lot of money by them.

There was a Tongan rugby star Eppie Taioni who changed his name to Paddy Power.

And you can you can change the name of your your stadium and stuff, but it doesn't always work out.

The MLS side, Colorado Rapids, has changed their their stadium to Dick's Sporting Goods Park, but everyone calls it the Dick.

I like changing your name by Deepol as well.

I like all that kind of stuff.

So there was a guy called Gary Brett from

Potter's Bar.

Potter's Bra has changed his name to Potter's Bar.

He changed his name to Mr.

Hong Kong Fuy.

Okay, and he said, I've loved Hong Kong Fuye since I was a boy and always wanted to be named after him.

I'm quite serious.

I'm quite serious about being known as Mr.

Fuy.

My wife was a bit upset, but she should be honoured to be married to a number one super guy who's quicker than the human eye.

And then there was a guy called Nigel Dial who changed his name to Mr.

Toasted Tea Cake.

And he said, some people can't believe it, especially because I don't even like tea cakes that

She thought it was a nice name.

It must be so hard that if you love stupid names, that you've got to go to the

name changes.

The deep hole.

The deep hole.

And you must be in the queue going, okay, this time it's just going to be Brian Smith.

Change it to Brian Smith.

And you're saying hi to the guy in front of you.

Oh, what are you changing your name to?

Oh, Rainbow, Sun, Shine, Moondust.

God damn it.

And then you get home to your wife, she's like, Is it Brian Smith?

It's asked Macadang Dang.

I can't help myself.

I just.

It must be so hard if you love a name.

At least you're now married to a number one super guy.

There's a guy called Sean Hennessy who changed his name to Nigel Bottomface to win a bet with his friends.

And he said, My mum was furious.

But at least I got a night out in Chelmsford.

You're the sad life there.

We're going to have to move on, but do you you want to go one more?

Oh, I've got some quite funny stuff on advertising.

Okay, so the Churchill dog, so one of the fish called Churchill, let's start this back.

The Churchill dog was initially a real bulldog called Lucas who had to be sapped after one advert because he refused to hold a phone in his mouth.

He refused.

Oh no.

Oh, we are going to have to move on.

We're going to have to move it on.

So we move on to our final fact of the evening, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the only ancient Egyptian socks that we know of all belonged to Tutankhamun.

Is that awesome?

When Howard Carter went into the tomb, he found a lot of stuff, a lot of gold, a lot of walking sticks,

and he found three pairs of socks.

And what's amazing is that up until finding these socks, there had been no depiction of socks in ancient Egypt Egypt whatsoever and I can't believe that that wasn't the headline they wore socks

also because he wore sandals it means that he was a socks in sandals

which is very exciting

do you know what he had painted on the bottom of his sandals

this is cool he had the faces of his enemies painted on the bottom so that wherever he walked he would be crushing them into the dust.

Yeah, but except there was a lot of sand so that would just be great branding because you'd see the hardy everywhere.

That's like the ultimate marketing brand.

Yeah, they have that, so there were some socks that I think those weren't found intact, were they?

They were reconstructed from the evidence that they had, but the oldest socks found intact.

No, no, no, they, sorry, in his tomb, they found three that were completely intact, and then they found three that weren't, but they think that they must have been socks.

They were the other pairs.

Yeah, so he actually had six pairs, but three didn't make the 3,000-year period of time

since past.

They also found a bottle of perfume, speaking of the 3,000-year period of time,

which still, when they took the lid off, it still smelled.

I think it smelled like

something rotten.

No, it smelled nice, it smelled like something like chamomile or vanilla or something after 3,000 years.

He was also buried with his own baby clothes, which I think is quite sweet.

Oh, yeah.

I wonder why.

There was actually a few toys.

Weirdly, there was a boomerang.

Yeah.

Well, they used them to hunt.

And they used lasso's as well.

Did they?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool, wasn't it?

Australia.

Yes.

It does sound like the Alpak from...

Yeah.

Wow.

And he was buried with 413 what were called Shabzi figures.

And these were little slaves that he would take into the next life.

Because often people think that if you were the slave of a pharaoh and your pharaoh died, then you'd have to kill yourself and be buried with him.

Or be buried alive with him, which is even worse.

But that never happened.

It It was actually little models of you that you would

he was also buried with, James was telling me, an erection.

That was exactly what he was.

Yeah,

he had a 90-degree erection.

That's 90-degree.

And he's the only known pharaoh, as far as I know, who was buried that way.

And no one really knows that.

James has studied the field extensively.

There was a guy called George Glidden who was going to unwrap a mummy in front of a load of people.

He was a bit of a charlatan, but he did have a mummy, and he was going to unwrap them.

And he said it was a princess, a princess mummy.

And he claimed that he knew that.

He knew her identity.

She was the daughter of an Egyptian priest.

He knew that because he had deciphered the hieroglyphics on her sarcophagus.

And then he unwrapped her, unwrapped her, unwrapped her in front of a load of people.

And then they realised actually that it was a man.

And the princess had a rather large penis.

That's where we get the fairy tale from, the princess and the penis.

He was in Boston this, and he explained that his error was due to the poor handwriting of the star-profits.

A bad Egyptologist always blames the hieroglyphs.

That's funny.

Have you heard of Mummy Pettigrew?

No.

Mummy Pettigrew was a guy called Thomas Pettigrew, and

he just unrolled loads of mummies all the time.

He was an Egyptologist, and he unrolled 14 of them.

And he would do a six-part lecture series, and he would always save the unrolling for the very last lecture in the series to build up to it throughout it.

And I just have found one sentence about it which I wanted to share: which is that Pettigrew's dramatic, erotically tinged unrollings became so popular that at one gathering, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself got squeezed out of the room.

That is the most disturbing you to make.

And then later on, he was asked to turn a Victorian duke into a mummy.

The Duke of Hamilton was obsessed with mummies and he said, will you mummify me after I die?

Oh, after he died.

Yeah, yeah.

And he did it.

But unfortunately, he didn't fit in the sarcophagus he'd had built, so they had to take off his feet.

Yeah.

When they were excavating Tutan Carmoon's clothes, no, actually this was later on when they decided to recreate all his clothes.

Then the person who was recreating them decided to tell her students that the only way they could work out exactly how he'd worn them was by trying them all on himself themselves.

So the students of this archaeologist got to just trying all Duke and Cummins clothes and they worked out that something they thought was a headdress was actually a pair of these things to be worn on the arms to form the wings of a falcon.

That was what he went around with.

Well I don't know how you worked that out and it sounds a bit like they were just pissing him out and like

what's on their arm and went, he probably did sick.

He was a very strange shape.

They think he

can come in.

They think he had a congenital disease or something because his hip measurements were extremely large.

It was sort of out of proportion with the rest of his body.

And we don't know why.

Well, much like Caton Wills, it was inbreeding.

Talking about

Caton Wills.

Yeah, no, his parents were brother and sister.

I really like the...

So when you were saying the thing of unwrapping the mummies, that was a massive craze that the Victorians went through where they suddenly were just digging up lots of mummies and using them for virtually everything.

Railroads used to use them as fuel.

That's not true.

I promise that's not true.

Oh, it's okay in America then.

Mark Twain said that they did, and we think he was taking the Vickey.

Oh, okay.

He is a virtual trainer.

Wait, so how about the time traveller guy who went to King Arthur's court?

That's not a...

Oh, man.

I've got some terrible news for you about Phil and Ted Spoger's journey.

How about Mummy Brown?

Is that true?

I think Mummy Brown is true.

Mummy Brown is amazing.

Mummy Brown was, if you haven't heard of it,

it was a paint that artists would use.

It It was ground-up mummy that would lead to a brown, and they would use them on their paintings.

And a lot of people didn't, they just thought it was a cute name, and then someone explained, no, it's an actual mummy, and a lot of famous artists actually got quite disturbed by that and buried the rest of the paint,

giving it an honourable burial.

Because they just thought, well, there was a lot of stuff about curses going on back then, and they didn't want that.

But yeah, paint.

I can't believe that.

It's extraordinary.

Yeah, and they used it as like a panacea as well, that they would use this mummy and then they would take it as a medicine for any illness.

I think they used it, people in Thebes used it until the 20th century to heal bruises, which is amazingly cavalier, considering it's just a bruise.

Yeah, why do you need to heal?

You don't need to heal a bruise.

You could get an imitation mummy as well if you didn't have the real thing.

And so you would...

Here's the ingredients.

Take the carcass of a young man, some say red-haired,

not dying of a disease, let it lie for 24 hours in clean water, cut the flesh into pieces, and add mare, a little aloe, and imbibe for 24 hours in the spirit of wine and turpentine.

It doesn't sound artificial to me.

It sounds real.

Yeah, it's real, but not old.

Okay.

I was looking at

interesting burial sites and burial rituals.

So the Vikings they were buried on ships, obviously, but not at sea.

And I read a really interesting theory that because they were often buried with decapitated animals.

So the Osburg, Osburg Viking ship, which is one of the most famous Viking ships that's been on earth,

it was this woman, she was buried with 10 decapitated horses and I think a couple of decapitated dogs.

And they think this is because

they had the ships on land, but to get to the underworld you had to sail.

It was in order to create a river, a convenient river of blood from your decapitated horses on which you could sail to the underworld.

Yeah.

Grotesque.

And also, so the first evidence of a ritual burial is from 28,000 years ago, of like a burial where people were sort of buried with items and it seemed like they believed in an afterlife.

And it was two young boys and they were buried with mammoth tusks over two yards long, but they'd been straightened.

And we don't know how they straightened them.

So they were, we think they boiled them and then straightened the mammoth tusks into, they were four feet long and just straight

tusks.

I changed my will.

As soon as I get

that's what I want.

I want ten decapitated horses and straightened the millet tusks.

I read a thing that I want as well for death, which was that I was reading about...

It's weird when you read someone's death and you're like, ooh, I want that.

It sounded really cool.

Utsie, who was the oldest ice man that we found, he was made of ice.

I don't know what period he was from, but he was complete and they found everything on him.

They found a bag which had magic mushrooms in it.

They found he had shoes.

He had socks.

He had socks.

But what's amazing is that they found him complete.

And what they don't point out is that they have found other people who are complete.

But Utzi is a rare case because he was just a hawk.

Sorry?

Utzi.

Utzi.

Not the Q ⁇ A.

Thank you, though.

Again, these are the kind of heckles that we get.

At junglers, it's like, you're shit.

Our crowds.

Ertsy, dickhead.

Did I say it right?

Ertzy.

So Ertzy was found as a full body, but then I read about these other deaths where they found other people.

And basically, because of the way that tectonics and just the way that things shift, they found full bodies, but people have been splattered and cartoonified.

You know, at the end of Roger Rabbit, where he splats and he goes into long form?

They found people that are like just fully huge humans in a huge long...

Like a book of pressed flowers.

Yeah.

Like some pressed human books.

And that's how I want to go.

They just look great.

We're going to have to wrap up.

We've got only a couple more minutes.

Is there anything else you guys want to add?

One third of the world's socks are made in a single city in China.

The way.

Yeah, way.

That sounds like it's called.

But they get one third.

They come in pairs.

Andy.

What is one-third of six?

Two.

We are going to have to wrap it up.

So, I'm just going to end on that.

Thank you so much, everyone.

Those are all of our facts.

If you want to hear more from our show, we've got probably online.

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said, our pronunciations,

you can get me on at Tribaland on Twitter, James, at Egg Shapes, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Okay, so that's it.

We'll be back again next week with another episode from Soho Theatre.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you so much, guys, for being here.

We'll see you again next week.

Have a good night.

We're going to go upstairs and get very drunk.

But if you'd like to join us, that'll be awesome.

So yeah, hang around for a beer.