48: No Such Thing As A Pokemon-Playing Goldfish

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting with James Harkin, Andy Murray, Anne Miller and a special guest today.

It's Victoria Corin Mitchell, who joins us because our three elves have been on OnlyConnect, battling it out in the big competition.

They've got their quarterfinal match coming up this Monday, the 23rd of February.

And so we thought we'd get Victoria in to

reveal how little she knows about

the Elves' possible exit from the series.

I understand.

Don't worry, it cuts both ways.

You You can laugh at what I don't know.

Yeah, okay, so once again, we have gathered round with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go, starting with Victoria.

My fact is

that the actor Charles Hawtrey hoarded bedsteads in his house, thinking that one day he would make his fortune from them.

That's so good.

So, okay, Charles Hortree, massive British comedy actor.

Carry-on films, that was a big thing for him.

Charles Hortree was particularly known for the carry-on films.

I don't know if he ever did anything else.

He had a very particular acting style.

Let's just say it was good news for him that the carry-on films came along.

Even though he was wonderful, an extremely talented, very funny man, I don't know if people clamoured to see his Hamlet.

He and Clint Eastwood weren't vying

in the same roles.

But if people have seen the Carry-On films, yes, he's the sort of slender camp fellow in the glasses.

Yeah, I wonder if he thought they were they really expensive bed poles, do we think?

or

what how the collection started I don't know I mean I like to think maybe he one day accidentally bought two bedsteads when he used one

I might as well start a collection now and he's come up with that he I mean he did like a drink that is a thing that's owned about Charles Hortree he did so it's possible that the original bedstead hoarding fortune wheeze was hatched in a moment of not entire so bright

but you sober up at some point don't you yeah but

well I don't know if he did ever.

No, but probably he sobered up, thought, what am I doing with all these?

I've better have a drink and work out how I'm gonna get rid of them.

And then he gets drunk and he thinks, this is fantastic.

Look at this collection.

I need more.

Maybe that's what it was.

Or it's a brilliant idea.

So I've got some money.

I'll buy a drink.

No, I'll buy a bedstead.

It's an investment for the future and I can look at it in my house.

Maybe that was like,

every time I want to have a drink, if I won't, I'll buy a bedstead.

That was his AA meeting buying.

Yeah, that was a long time ago.

He was supposed to be quite miserly, wasn't he, Charles Hawtrey, I read.

Apparently, he brought sacks of carrots from Yorkshire to Kent's because they were cheaper to buy in Yorkshire.

And then he would bring them all down south.

Not to sell, this was for his own personality.

Just for his own, yeah, to eat.

And also, he kept his money in the Royal Bank of Scotland because he thought that Scots were more likely to look after his cash carefully.

Wow.

Well, had he lived a little longer, he would have been thoroughly disobedient of that notion.

It's quite a good.

I like

miserliness, though.

Miserliness is quite a good vice.

There's something quite sweet and old-fashioned and funny about it, of the things that can be wrong with people.

I read a sentence about Charles Hortree, which I like so much.

So the first half isn't fun, but it picks up a lot.

From there, he spiralled into reclusion and paranoid fantasies, buying a cottage on the south coast and filling it with brass bedsteads and rent boys, one of whom burnt it down after Hortree wanted to pay by check.

Oh, yeah.

You see, now that's where

brass bedsteads are a better investment than, for example, first folios of Shakespeare.

Because if a rent boy is going to burn your house down

as an act of payment revenge,

it's the bedsteads that are going to come out unscathed.

Right.

It's just going to be ashes everywhere, hundreds of beds.

Gleaming in the remains, the bedsteads.

His checkbook stub must have been amazing because you have a little stub, don't you, to write what you've been spending the money on.

Yeah, no.

So it just went bedstead, bedstead, red blind, bedstead.

He was quite macho though, Charles.

It's nothing I read about him.

I don't know very much about him at all.

I was just a big fan of him in the films, but that he used to get drunk and play cards on set.

And that does make you think of sort of Oliver Reed or Robert Mitcham or something.

When you think of like a drunken gambling card-playing actor, you don't think of Charles Horton.

You think of him sort of sorting out his kind of butterfly collection.

But no, so I wonder if

his carry-on persona was just completely fabricated.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, some stuff on collections and things like that.

There's a guy called Chevalier Jackson who collects things that he retrieves from people's throats.

Is he a surgeon?

Actually, he's dead now.

He's an old surgeon.

So he has nails and bolts and binoculars and a medallion that says, Carry me for good luck.

Sorry, binoculars.

Yeah, like miniature.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, I think it's a bit more.

They'd have to be mini, wouldn't they?

Why have you all got old miniature?

Oh, yes.

We're like, that you're always swallowing.

Why would you?

Actually, I've never seen a set of binoculars so small that I've thought to myself, I could swallow that.

I think you get ones that you can fold up as well, can't you?

Yes.

I don't know.

Fold up and tuck in your cheek.

What was that thing about cheeks and hamsters that you found?

Oh,

so they x-rayed a hamster while it was eating.

So they stuffed their food into these pouches.

Their pouches go all the way back to their hips.

So when they shove the fruit in, they just shove it and shove it, and the hamster pouch goes all the way back to their hips.

You know, greedy things.

That's extraordinary.

Like where their legs are.

Yeah.

That's where I assume they'd be, but I'm not afraid of the bread.

I think all mammals have hip bones.

I would say.

Whales have hip bones, which I'm not sure if we've mentioned on this podcast.

No, I don't think we have.

Whales have got hip bones.

And also, sometimes they'll grow legs, like kind of a vestigial leg from the side of the body.

Was it whales who...

Yeah, so we knew they came on land at some point, but didn't like it and went back to the sea.

Yeah,

I still can't get my head around that.

I don't.

And then we're like, nah.

So this guy's Chevalier Jackson.

He says that parents who feed peanuts to children without molars should be hung-drawn and quartered.

He's very, you know, very serious about not putting things down children's throats, basically.

He says people should chew their milk, by which he means you put it in your mouth and you swish it around so saliva can get around it, and then you could drink it.

Do many people well, I suppose he would know.

Would people

he wouldn't choke on milk, I don't think.

If it's off milk, he might.

Yeah, he refused to cheer on his football team as he thought it would damage his larynx.

And he only ever ate postage stamp-sized sandwiches for lunch.

How many did he have?

Mine.

My DA sandwich.

Were the huge stamps that he had, novelty.

Commemorative one.

It is a tiny slice of bread with a single lettuce leaf in between.

There's another guy, a librarian, called Graham Barker.

He has a world record for collecting belly button fluff.

How hotly contested is this record?

I don't imagine there are many submissions every year.

Well, it's true.

Does he turn up and defend his title?

Well, he's been doing it for 26 years, so if you want to start now, it'll be a long time before you catch up.

Is it all his own?

It's all his own.

Oh, it's all right.

I reckon you could beat the record pretty quickly with a door-to-door ramp.

Wow.

Yeah, you could do a Kickstarter for it, couldn't you?

So, this guy, Graham Barker, who says he is not obsessive, vows to continue until he is no longer capable.

He says he harvests it every night and places it in a clay pot.

Harvests?

Because normally harvests provide nice things like grain, tiny.

That's an annual harvest festival.

People sing celebratory songs.

I think probably the latest the new thing to collect is data about yourself.

That's the hu it's a huge trend, isn't it?

People have charts,

you know, you can wear smart watches and things that measure your blood flow and your energy and your calories and your expenditure and every yeah, your steps, everything can be just laid out so neatly.

It's hard to imagine anyone wanting to buy that off you in the future, though.

But maybe that'll be instead of the collected letters, it'll be the collected glucose expenditure of P.G.

Woodhouse or whatever that we see in shops.

Do you know the last thing Charles Autry did?

No.

Oh, yeah.

He threw a vase at his nurse who asked for an autograph.

That was his last act.

Yeah, but if he's dying, you shouldn't really bother a pro-man.

I mean, she said it was an autograph.

It was an autograph on the bottom of his paper that said, I leave my nurse everything.

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Okay, time for fact number two.

That is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1937 you could visit Romford Dog Track and watch cheaters racing.

You don't mean people who've been taking dope.

No, this was a guy, an explorer called Kenneth Gandarda, who brought a dozen cheaters from Kenya to the UK so that they could watch them race and bet on the outcome.

Surely it's difficult to get a cheetah to chase an electric rabbit.

Yeah, that was the problem, actually.

They did find that that was the problem, yeah.

I mean, the thing would be to release prey.

Yes, I mean, that would be amazing.

Yeah, that was the problem.

Basically, they weren't really interested in racing, and so it only happened twice, and they just gave it up.

Wow.

But the amazing thing about this fact, which you told me, was that it was at this point that they realised greyhounds weren't the fastest animals.

Yeah, until that it was thought in Britain at least that greyhounds were the fastest animals in the world.

But then they brought the cheetahs in and they just shaved so much time off their records that they realised that their cheetahs were fast animals.

Well, the cheetahs, they could hit 68 miles an hour?

Sorry, 65 miles an hour and 43 for the Greyhound.

I think they can go up to about 100 kilometres an hour.

And it was often thought that that was impossible, and maybe it was a myth, because it was only one ever

study that ever proved that.

But then they've started putting tracking devices on collars on cheetahs in the wild, and they found that it is true after all.

Oh, they were saying as well, and I don't understand this, but they're saying that cheetahs, when they accelerate, they change gears, like a car changing gears as they're running.

They suddenly just

they go into a different stride, a different

gait.

And yeah, I just love that.

They change gears mid-run gears.

It's kind of like a horse walking,

then it trots, then it gallops, canters.

But so they were saying with greyhounds, it's what they do is they then change the number of steps that they take as they're running, and that picks up the speed.

Whereas greyhounds take exactly the same number of steps no matter how fast they're going.

So the feet just get like crazy fast, they don't understand.

Like a cartoon.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But that sounds incredibly glamorous.

And I've been to to a few dog tracks.

It's not a glamorous night out of meeting under cheaters, though.

That is quite James Bond.

Sounds very Vegas.

It is.

This guy, Kenneth Gandhardauer, was quite glamorous himself.

He once brought a male cheater on a leash into Queen's Club, whatever Queen's Club is, I don't know what that is.

Is that not the tennis club?

Oh, yeah, it probably is.

Yeah, yeah.

And it was rubbish.

It didn't return a single serve.

It was very fast, but when it got to the ball, it killed three ball boys.

The other thing is that they couldn't negotiate tight bends, the cheetahs, apparently, like greyhounds can.

I read that they just cut the corners.

Did they?

Yeah, ironically, making them cheetahs in the race.

And they were marketed as cats v dogs, which is such a great idea.

But were they racing against greyhounds?

Yeah, sometimes.

I quite assume they were racing against each other.

You have five greyhounds and then one cheetah.

And

so the greyhounds, I think, all chased after the hare.

And the cheetah did it a couple of times, but then it quickly realised this is a mechanical hare.

Yeah.

There's nothing out of it.

Are the greyhounds not freaking out?

That there was a cheetah next to them on the track.

I've been petrifying.

But what happened?

The cheetah would often kind of just stay at the back and be like, oh, I'm not really bothered.

And then something would catch its eye, and then it would speed up and then go miles faster than the greyhounds.

So it'd be like a proper underdog victory, you know, like in a movie.

It would be right at the back and

this would be the move if you were having this.

But if you knew that a race was going to be, you know, five dogs and a cheetah, the thing to do is in the car on the way to have a friendly bet with the person who would say, listen, I'm going to take trap seven.

I just I love it.

I just I want trap seven.

I love the number.

And you'd have the person would be all right, because obviously they've got if they've got six spots and you've got one, you're in great choice.

You'd have the bet and then when you got there and they saw it was a cheater, they'd feel tricked and then you'd sell the bet back to them for a huge sum.

Oh, yeah.

And then the dogs would all race off and the cheater would go, well I can't be bothered with it.

I mean that's a win-win.

It's what they call going all green.

You know,

you're betting and laying at the same time, so every outcome is successful for you.

You could definitely negotiate a position where you're winning whatever just because you know there's a cheater in the race.

This is that thing about winning both ways.

I read about this guy called Brian Zembic, who bet his friend

his pal $100,000 that he would get breast implants for a year.

And he did it.

But he still has them.

This was about eight years ago.

But this was the moronic thing about Brian.

This is what I want to say to Brian Zembic's friend.

This is

exactly the kind of proposition bet you have to never take.

Prop Prop bets, which is, you know, on certain sort of outcomes that might be under a person's control.

You can take a weight loss bet, you know, certain sort of thing.

Whether or not someone will get breast implants, he just will get them.

The guy says, I bet you, you know, bet me I won't do that.

I think this is a ridiculous.

Because I think what happened here, basically, is they've paid him to do it, haven't they?

Because, like you say, if you give him enough money, he will do it.

And they've just found the price that they're going to get.

You have a lot of that.

Yes, I want a better guy.

But it's not really a bet.

James Dempsey, Flushy, they call him, he's a very good poker player.

But I had, as it were, a bet with him that he wouldn't turn up to the World Series of poker wearing an outfit that I'd selected for him from the mall.

And he accepted the bet.

But things we both knew, I knew, I can't remember what we bet, $500 maybe, I knew he would wear anything for the money.

And he knew that I was happy to pay $500 to see him walk into the room dressed in.

You know, I just had a fantastic afternoon going around the hall, flying by terrible sort of glittering hats.

And I didn't go for something really outlandish, like, you know, a costume.

I went for something that would make him look like a real tosser to other people.

So I think it was like a t-shirt with a straight flush on it, and a kind of sort of Vegas tourist hat.

But also, I mean, he also had to factor in, you know, it's a $10,000 tournament, and he needs to have the sort of peace of mind to sit down, dress like that, and have everyone think he's a real idiot and play anyway.

But that's a different because there's prop bets, you know, the famous ones, the ones who are always great at the sort of the trickster gamblers, like Titanic Thompson and, you know, Amarillo Slim and people who tricked people into bets that weren't really what they sounded like.

So the famous, for example, Titanic Thompson once, you know, he bet with a guy, there was a watermelon truck was going past, and he would bet how many, oh, I reckon there's, you know, 40 watermelons on that truck.

And the other guy said, you know, 100.

But of course, Thompson...

had paid the man to drive past

the watermelons on the truck.

Or Amarillo Slim had a lot of them.

He had a bet once, you know, he bet a golfer that he could hit a

golf ball further than him.

And the guy, he never met this person.

He's like, what kind of idiot is this nibbet?

And Slim said, yeah, but you know, I'm choosing the golf course.

That's fine.

And he, and, you know, but they chose their own course.

So the golfer picked his favorite course.

He hit the ball and then they went to Slim's choice and it was a frozen lake.

Of course, he said, he hit the ball and it sort of skittered for miles, miles, miles, miles.

And that kind of thing, that's rather beautiful.

You know, someone's just been done.

They haven't looked at the small print.

Yeah.

Okay, that's enough facts.

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Yeah.

Well, on with the show, eh?

On that bombshell.

Okay.

Time for fact number three, and that is and.

Yep.

In 2010, the US military built a supercomputer out of 1,760 PlayStation 3s.

Wow.

How is that even possible?

It's not okay.

It's not possible anymore.

They basically got really lucky.

So basically, Sony did an upgrade, so you can't mess with PlayStation 3s.

They got really lucky, sorry.

You got really lucky.

What would they?

They bought the PlayStation 3.

They're like, I'm just going to do it and we'll see what happens.

There's no method to this.

It was a LAN party that got out of hand.

Yeah.

And then, yeah.

So basically, they wanted to build the supercomputer, and at the time, PlayStation 3s cost $400, but the equivalent computing power would be $10,000 each, and they needed, obviously, $1,760.

It's quite a lot.

So they got all these PlayStations, wired them up together, and they hacked them.

So they're all joined together and they're running off Linux, which is rather than running on PlayStation games.

And then, yeah, it's used in the US military, they're using it to track stuff, and it was a very good thing.

I mean, it definitely was either that or

someone said to that department, I see you've ordered 70 numbers for PlayStation 3.

I went, yeah, no, yeah, that's because we're making a super confusion.

They had to do it, which would be brilliant.

But when they did it, it was the 33rd biggest computer in the world when they completed it.

I saw a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world.

And the number one is called Tiane 2.

It's in China.

And that means Milky Way because it can do as many calculations per second as there are stars in the Milky Way.

But the interesting thing I thought is it's been number one for four years.

And it's a lot faster than the one below it as well.

It's like double.

But you would kind of think that because of Moore's Law or whatever, that it would

get faster and faster, but this one's been number one for all that time.

The other thing I love about that list is that a lot of supercomputers sound like they belong on gladiators.

So there's like, I went down and so there's Titan, Falcon, Lightning, Falcon, Shadow, Crystal, Crystal, Mac Man, Maverick, and Supercomputer System for Statistical Science Eye.

He was a great gladiator.

I won't hear a word said against him.

Also, the 192nd most powerful supercomputer is called Gordon.

Good, it's a good, solid name.

The famous one's Watson, isn't it, who won Jeopardy a few years ago, if you remember that.

He obviously doesn't do that anymore.

And so he's now making, he's working as a chef, coming up with new dishes.

So he takes all of the different menu, all the different dishes and all the different ingredients, and he mixes them up and supposedly uses his intelligence to make new dishes.

What has come up for awful.

Terrible.

And how does that differ from a seven-year-old?

Well, it differs in that it can't do it very well, and a seven-year-old probably can.

There was an article in New Scientist, and they tried to get some of the dishes that it had.

One of them, a creme frache, had been replaced by a glass of milk, and another one, the tuna bake, had replaced the tuna with a kilo of goose meat.

Oh,

no one ever wants even a small amount of goose meat these days.

I was watching Watson's actually appearance on Jeopardy, and everyone's like, Oh, he makes a gaff two minutes in because Watson repeats the same answer someone else had already given.

I was like, We're still being beaten by a machine, they would let that one slide.

Yeah, and they can, presumably, computers can make a limited number of gaffes at the moment.

They can't be involved in a race scandal, and they can't.

That's one we'll know we'll have artificial intelligence is when when the first computer is forced to resign over an indiscreet late-night tweet.

I started looking into PlayStation.

So, okay, here's a really odd thing I found out.

Grand Theft Auto.

I don't know if you guys know that.

It's made in Dumb Defense.

Yeah, yeah.

Is it?

Okay, so Grand Theft Auto V,

officially, so far, just up until this point now, is the most successful franchise ever.

Think of anything.

Harry Potter.

Grand Theft Auto V, when they released it, on the opening 24 hours, it sold sold 500 million copies.

What?

500 million pounds worth of copies.

Yeah, yeah, not 500 million.

Copy one person in 12.

Yeah, yeah, so everyone in the world.

24 hours, and that makes it officially the biggest franchise.

I saw something great yesterday.

You know, Playmobile, these little

plastic toys.

The fastest-selling Playmobile of all time came out last week, and it was a Martin Luther Playmobile toy.

Martin Luther.

Yeah.

Oh, wait, no.

Martin Luther, the extreme Protestant.

Yeah, that's the one.

Yeah.

It was released to mark the 500th anniversary of the publication of 95 Theses on the Power and Ephacy of Indulgences.

And they sold 34,000 in 72 hours.

I've got a lot of fun.

I love them.

Why is Playmobile

doing a celebratory Martin Luther 16ery doll?

I mean, do they do a lot of

dolls or just someone they're absolutely bloody love?

The new chief executives are a massive fan of our folks.

I like the new farmyard range, but.

And it's worked.

It's amazing.

I know.

I saw an amazing, there's a movie shop around the corner in Covent Garden, and they have all the kind of, you know, just classic movie merchandise and toys, a lot of action figures.

And there's an Apollo 13 toy there.

And Apollo 13 is my favourite movie.

And it's a car that appears in the movie.

And I thought, who the hell is buying the car?

Apollo 13.

Apollo 13, the one with Tom Hanks Goes to Space.

Yes.

Is your favourite film?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Of all the films that were ever made.

Way, way, don't you?

Don't ask him for his top five because it gets worse.

I thought your favourite was Grown-Ups 2.

Grown-ups 2, Mean Girls.

No, Apollo 13, because I love the story.

I just think it's the greatest story.

But your favourite ever.

I remember a poll once coming out about the greatest albums of all time.

And number two was the White album from the Beatles.

And number one was Stars by Simply Red.

And maybe when people vote in these things,

you literally have just written down the last album you bought, haven't you?

That's a quick question, though.

When's the last time you heard Stars by Simply Red?

Because that is a fantastic album.

My favourite album is just a recording of Martin Luther.

It is.

Maybe they've looked at Lego with the Playmobile thing, and they've thought, because Lego have diversified so much into robots and all these historical.

You can buy a Lego UN building.

Where you can just sort of have meetings in it.

That's brilliant.

In the 50s, there was a Barbie who came with a book which said don't eat on the cover.

Seriously, yeah.

I think it was a dieting Barbie or it was a model Barbie or something.

I mean, it was a

supercomputers.

The world's fastest supercomputer, who I mentioned earlier, uses 99% of its volume to

keep it cool, correct?

I did just go to the Museum of Computing, so I wasn't sure.

Oh, yeah.

Is that where you found this fact?

Yeah, I went to the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley last weekend, and it was so, so incredible.

If everyone's free, it's half an hour out of London.

It's amazing.

And they've got Colossus,

which actually runs.

They let it run and we watched it go.

They've got Witch was the oldest computer that you could see being programmed.

So as it does its

functions, you see all the different bits lighting up and making whirring noises.

They've got this amazing computer memory from the 60s.

It's like whole crates of memory and it's worth like twenty bytes.

And it's just, yeah, so it was amazing.

I always think it's a bit sad the way the first great thing invented in some some field is so rubbish.

I think it's sad.

It's like seeing old very old buildings which were the absolute, you know, they were the best thing in defence 500 years ago.

It goes back to your first boyfriend, isn't it?

And you go, at the time, that's so exciting.

That was like someone to send me a Valentine's card and you go, wow.

But then you look at the later upgrades.

Yeah.

How did I?

Yeah.

We had Buzz Aldrin on Museum of Curiosity and there was this amazing moment where we gave him one of those singing birthday cards and he was, you know, it was a Wallace and Grommet one.

He just opened it.

And the point that we had for him to hold this and open it was that there was more computing power in that card than there was in the lunar module.

You're just trying to make him feel bad about himself.

Well, yeah, he was like,

he threw the card onto the table.

He went, Can this card land on the moon?

Okay, so.

I mean, it can.

You just have to put a bunch of it.

And it can land on the moon.

Not to make him feel worse, but.

My other favourite video game fat is that in 2014, a goldfish played Pokemon.

What?

And totally going to train up the office goldfish.

I don't know what that sentence means.

So Pokemon's the video game where you do remember Pokemon in the 90s or something.

Yeah, but Goldfish didn't play it, don't they?

No, it did.

It did.

It did.

I think it knew what it was doing.

They put it in a tank

and it had a web count.

If it swam left, the character went left.

If it went right, the character went right.

And apparently, after the first few hours, it was reported that the goldfish had chosen his first Pokemon, a Tormander.

He'd named it AAABBK and won a fight against a squirtle.

That doesn't mean it was playing Pokemon.

Pokemon.

Maybe it knew.

It was swimming about.

But it's not got any hands, so it would need some sort of motion detection.

That's probably right.

Inside its head, it was going, damn my lack of hands.

I would have chosen a better name, an A-A-B-B-K.

My name is Terence.

I crave Pokemon.

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Okay, time for our final fact, and that is Andy.

My fact is that in 1552, a man in England managed to shoot himself to death with a bow and arrow, which I think is a Darwin award before the fact.

How on earth is that even possible?

Well, his name was Pert, Henry Purt, and he was a gentleman, he lived in Nottinghamshire, and he was trying to fire an arrow straight up in the air.

History doesn't record why, unfortunately.

But he drew the bow to its full extent, and then the arrow lodged.

And while he was leaning over to look,

it managed to unlodge itself, and he died the next day, unfortunately for him.

The next day?

I mean, he didn't, yeah, I mean, he had an arrow in his head for a couple of hours.

Yeah, but I just, it's quite an achievement because obviously with handguns, you know, accidents happen.

But with a bow and arrow, you have to be doing it quite badly wrong

to kill yourself that way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But that's the thing.

Coroners in the Middle Ages have recorded 56 accidental deaths from people at archery who were standing too close to the targets or who just went and collected arrows at the wrong time, which had already been fired.

I think it's a bit unfair to say that the people were standing too close to the targets.

It's more the guy who shot didn't hit the target, really.

Yeah, I mean, it depends how bad the archer was.

You're right.

Do you remember the Olympics?

There was an archer who was like a very famous celebrity, Gina Davis.

Gina Davis, Gilmore and Louise.

Yeah, she didn't quite make it into the Olympic team.

She placed 24th out of 300 people.

I mean, that's, you know, I didn't quite make it onto the Olympics.

Do you know what I think?

If there's a linking

theme to this episode, it's the sort of tragedy of the transience of an actor's life.

I mean, you've got Charles Hawtry hoarding the bedsteads, Gina Davis desperately trying and failing to make the Olympic archery team.

I mean, even the supercomputer has branched out into cookery.

Yeah, that's true.

You do realise this isn't only connect.

We're not looking for a link between all of them.

You just believe in Singapore going, what the hell are you going?

I have her onto the fourth thing.

I'm just saying, I want to go next.

Still one point available.

So, some mortality things.

There was a Greek philosopher called Philatus of Kos

who studied erroneous word usage so intensely that he wasted away and starved to death.

But we all do know somebody like that.

Yeah, you can't leave till you get us into it, right?

Somebody who's such a pedant.

Are you looking at me, Andy?

Someone.

Captain Panino.

James won't let us say panini because it's a plural.

He'd say one panino.

If you order a panini, he will make you eat two of them.

Yeah.

Plurals are fat.

McKinnon.

Oh, you would say you order a panini.

A panino.

I would say, I would.

You say, no, no, I'm sorry.

You can't say a panini.

That's a good idea.

Okay, all right.

Finally, someone who agrees.

I can't really ask about four years.

No, no, no.

I think it feels so plural to you.

Would you say, can I have a panino?

I do.

James does.

I think he is.

No, I would be trapped between not wanting to be grammatically incorrect and not wanting to sound like a wanker.

So.

That's a rather, I think I'd have to find some middle ground.

See, this is the kind of argument we have today.

James is wasting away at the moment because we're like,

I found some stats in Australia.

Contact with a hot water tap is more deadly than a venomous spider in Australia.

What?

Again,

I'm sorry.

If you're a man that will go into a sandwich shop and say, I want a panino, I'm going to point out to you that it isn't.

More people might die as a result, but that doesn't make the hot water tap more deadly than the poisonous spider.

You must have seen the later series of I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, where they have to be locked in a cage with a hot water tap.

It's the big series back home.

Australia's worst taps.

Most dangerous tap this week.

He's taken out six men.

Wait, so they would scold them to the point of death?

Yeah, basically that.

Wow.

Yeah, being scolded to death.

Is it only Australia?

Australia is the only place I have figures from.

I've not heard this.

This isn't like a cultural thing that I was told at school.

No, I think it's more that people think bugs and things and sharks are really deadly, but actually the amount of people they kill.

Yeah, that's the amount of people who like chocolate.

Very, very few people die of venomous spiders in Australia because they have anti-shaped.

But I mean, isn't there a difference between a kill and stupidity?

And like the taps not trying to kill like that's a good point actually.

Yeah.

In the Middle Ages they would have put the tap on trial as a deodant.

As a witch.

Yeah.

Yeah.

As a satanic object.

If he kills someone.

What was the word you said?

A deodand.

What's that?

So it's like they would have trials in the Middle Ages.

If like a bough of a tree had fallen on someone, they would put the bough of the tree on trial and

I found a brilliant one on the QI talkboards that between 1658 and 1663 there were four deaths recorded in the parish of Lamplu in Cumbria for the cause of death, frightened to death by fairies.

That's an inexperienced coroner who wants to cover his back, basically.

Well, they've changed the rules now that you can't die of natural causes in the UK.

So they have to put something down on your death certificate for the first time.

Fairies to put modules in the throat.

Something.

This is quite a nice thing.

The first ever funeral flowers were 13,000 years ago, which I find

fascinating.

How would we know that?

Well, they found Stone Age graves.

There's a Mediterranean culture called the Natufians.

I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing it.

Twenty Natufians listening.

But they built the first cemeteries.

So before that, there were only scattered bodies, which had been buried, but they were the first people where we found 100 bodies in the same place.

So we think that's the cemetery.

And archaeologists have found, I think, the remains of flower beds, which would have been around and underneath the bodies as well.

So that's the earliest evidence we have for the use of flowers in a

funeral ritual, if you like, which I think is amazing.

I think that's rather nice actually.

Um and they were the first people who had a feast.

First ever feast was the Natufians.

And it consisted of seventy one turtles.

No, sorry, seventy one tortoises.

I when I was a kid, they so in Hong Kong they used to tell us that you w it would be vertical burials

of space.

Have you guys heard of that?

I have heard of that, yeah.

Um a lot of people live in cemeteries in Cairo.

I mean they live in cemeteries because there's such a a housing problem that thousands upon thousands of people, and the city has these enormous cemeteries.

It's where

that always blows, like when we found out there's this thing about 30 million people in China live in caves.

They're just housed in caves.

And when you hear that, I just always think,

I kind of thought I just knew where everyone was.

And then you discover there's just all these people living in these extreme locations.

That's a big number for a cemetery.

Yeah.

How many people do you expect there to be living in the city?

Well, just none.

I just saw.

I mean, the fact itself was already starting point.

Twelve.

Twelve.

Was that worth the money?

Yeah, this is about the right number.

Actually, there is a fact about...

Is it Brookwood Cemetery just outside London?

If all the bodies came back to life and became zombies, the population would be higher than Southampton.

Really?

Yeah.

Because so many people...

Really gone a long way to come up with that fact.

I'm sorry, it was me.

Just Le Panino.

I mean, given the unlikelihood of all of the bodies coming to life, and here's my favourite fact about Southampton.

Southampton once, and I think this was in sometime in the 80s or early 90s, Southampton came second in a poll of the most boring towns in Britain.

Oh, yeah.

What was brilliant about that is it wasn't even interesting enough for you to go.

I mean, whatever one, there's something remarkable about that place.

But Southampton's so boring, it's not even the most boring.

That's brilliant.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thanks so much for listening.

If you want to get in contact with any of us, you can find us on Twitter.

I'm on at Schreiberland and.

At Miller underscore and.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At EggShaped.

And Victoria.

At Victoria Corrant, which isn't even my name anymore, but the new one is too long to change.

Can you put just an M at the end?

I'd put a name in my tweeting name.

I mean, listen, you all talked about supercomputers, and I've pretended to know what they are, and I don't.

You probably can change your Twitter name,

but I don't know how.

Okay, if you want to hear all of our previous episodes, you can head to no such thing as a fish.com.

They're all there.

There's about 48 of them.

And we'll be back again next week with another episode.

Thanks for listening.

See you then.

Goodbye.

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