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 Shriver.

I'm sitting with James Harkin, Andy Murray, Ann Miller, and a special guest today is Victoria Corin Mitchell, who joins us because our three elds have been on OnlyConnect, battling it out in the the big competition.

They've got their quarter-final 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's possible exit from the series. I understand.
Don't worry, it cuts both ways. You can laugh at what I don't know.

Yeah, okay, so once again, we have gathered around 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 Hawtry

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

That's so good. So, okay, Charles Hawtree, 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 Caroline 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 needed one.

I might as well start a collection now. And he's come up with that.

I mean, he did like a drink. That is a thing that's odd about Charles Hortry.
He did.

So it's possible that the original bedstead hoarding fortune wheeze was hatched in a moment of not entire sobriety. That's possibility.
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'd better have a drink and work out how I'm going to get rid of them.

And then he gets drunk again and thinks, this is fantastic. Look at this collection.
I need more. Maybe that's what it was.
Or it's a brilliant idea. It's like, 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 look at it in my house.
Maybe that was like a bad idea.

Every time I want to have a drink, I won't, I'll buy a bedstead. That was his AA meeting plan.
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 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 disabled by that notion.

It's quite a good.

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 Hawtrey wanted to pay by check.

You see, now that's where a brass bedsteads are a better investment than, for example, first folios of Shakespeare. Because if a rent boy is going to burn your house

and an act of payment revenge, it's the bedsteads that are going to come out unscathed.

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

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. So you know, so it just went bedstead, bedstead, red blind.

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 Hortrey, do you? You think of him sort of sorting out his kind of butterfly connection.

But no, so I wonder if that, you know, that his carry-on persona wasn't 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.

He's 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 I've had a lot of fun.
They'd have mini, wouldn't they?

Why have you all got all 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 cheeks.

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

so they x-rayed a hamster while I was eating, so they stuff their food into these pouches. Their pouches go all the way back to their hips.
And then they shove the food in.

They just shove it and shove it and the hamster pouch goes all the way back to their hips. Yeah, they're greedy things.
That's extraordinary.

Like where their legs are. Yeah.

That's where I assume they'd be, but

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 talk. 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 rip 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, yeah, 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

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

If it's off milk, you 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 size sandwiches for lunch.

How many did he have?

Were they huge stamps that he had?

Novelty. Commemorative one.
It was a tiny slice of bread with a single lettuce leaf in between.

There's another guy, a librarian, called Graham Barker. He has the 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?

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 his own.

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.

That's an annual harvest festival.

People sing celebratory songs. I think probably the latest new thing to collect is data about yourself.

It's a huge trend, isn't it? People have charts.

You know, you can wear smartwatches and things that measure your blood flow and your energy and your calories and your expenditure.

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.
New goal. Yeah.

But maybe that'll be instead of the collected letters, it'll be the collected glucose expenditure of PG 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 every year.

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

No, this was a guy, an explorer called Kenneth Gandhar Dower who brought a dozen cheetahs 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 was the problem.

I mean the thing would be to release prey.

Yes, I mean that would be amazing. Yeah, that was a problem.
Basically they weren't really interested in racing and so it only happened twice and they just gave it up. Wow.

The amazing thing about this fact, which you told me, was that it was at this point that they realized 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 the cheetahs were fast animals. Well, the cheetahs, they could hit 68 miles an hour?

Sorry, 65 miles an hour and 43 for the greyhounds. 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 were saying that cheetahs, when they accelerate, they change gears, like a car changing gears as they're running. They suddenly just

go into a different stride, a different

gate. Yeah.
I just love that. They change gears mid-ridge.
It's kind of like a horse walking and then they walk, 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 it does sound incredibly glamorous. And I've been to a few dog tracks.
It's not a glamorous night out there letting out of cheaters, though. Yeah.

Danny's quite James Bond. Sounds very Vegas.
It is.

This guy, Kenneth Gandhardawa, 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 wasn't. It killed three ball boys.

The other thing is that they couldn't negotiate tight bends, the cheaters, apparently, like greyhounds can. I read that they just cut the corners.
Didn't they?

Yeah, ironically, making them cheaters 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.

Why did you 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 else. Are the greyhounds not freaking out? That there was a cheetah there

on the track.

It would be 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.

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, when 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. Is it that thing about winning both ways?

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

he bet his pal a hundred thousand dollars 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 this is what I want to say to Brian Zembic

Exactly the kind of proposition bet you have to never take prop bets which is you know on 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

in a The guy says, I bet you

bet me I won't do that. I think this is a ridiculous thing.
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 he's doing.

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, buying 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

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 that are always great are 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 um amarillo slim had a lot of them he he had a bet once you know he he bet a golfer that he could hit a a golf ball further than him and the guy he never met this person but he's like what kind of idiot is this and he bet and slim said yeah but you know i'm choosing the golf course that's fine and he and uh 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.

So he hit the ball, and it sort of skittered miles, miles, miles, miles. And that kind of thing, that's rather beautiful.
Yeah. You know, someone's just been done.

They haven't looked at the small print. Yeah.

Okay, that's enough facts. Let's have an effort.
All right.

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10 whole percent. Do we have any facts about 10%?

10% of people are left-handed, give or take. Oh, yeah.
Is that right? Yeah.

Well, on with the show, eh?

On that bombshell.

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

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 3 anymore.

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 lot of fun. I mean, it definitely was either that or

someone said to that department, I see you've ordered 79

PlayStation 3 supercomputers. I went, yeah, no, yeah, that's because we're making a supercomputer.

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, Mac Man, Maverick, and Supercomputer System for a Statistical Science Eye. He was a great gladiator.

I won't hear a word set 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 with this? They're awful. They are 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 a 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 he's 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 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.
That's made in Dumpty. Day.
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 more than one direction.
Harry Potter.

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

500 million pounds worth of copies. Yeah, yeah.
Not 500 million pounds. Copy one person in 12.
Yeah, yeah,

yeah. 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 toy.

Yeah, that's the one. Yeah.
It was released to mark the 500th anniversary of the publication of 95 Theses on the Power and Ephesy of Indulgences. And they sold 34,000 in 72 hours.
I've got a second

people

doing a celebratory Martin Luther 17

doll. I mean do they do a lot of

dolls or just someone they are absolutely bloody loves? The new chief executives are massive fan of Martin Lolly.

I like the new farmyard range but

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 favorite 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 worry.

Don't ask him for his top five because it gets worse i thought your favourite was grown-ups too grown-ups too mean girls no apollo 13 because i love the story i just think it's the greatest story but your favourite ever that's 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.

Man, I read it. It is, it is weird.
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 historic.

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 I mean it was

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'm not sure. Oh, yes.
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, which is 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 20 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 field is so rubbish.

I think it's sad. It's like seeing very old buildings, which were the absolute, you know, they were the best thing in defence 500 years ago.
You go back to your first boyfriend, isn't it?

And you go at the time, that's so exciting. That was just someone to send me a Valentine's card, and you go, Wow.
But then you look at the later upgrades, and 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 pretty pissed off at that.

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 it on the floor.

And it can land on the moon. Not to make him feel worse, but.

My other favourite video game fact is that in 2014, a goldfish played Pokemon. What? And totally going to trade up the office goldfish.

I don't know what that sentence means. So Pokemon's a video game where you.
Do you remember Pokemon? Like the 90s? Yeah,

it didn't play it. No, no, it did.
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 the Goldfish had chosen his first Pokémon, a Tormander. He'd named it AAABBK and won a fight against a squirtle.

That doesn't make it playing Pokemon. Maybe it knew.
It was swimming about. But it's not got any hands, so it can't, it would need some sort of motion detection.
But that's probably right.

Inside its head, it was going, Damn my lack of hands, I would have chosen a better name, an AABK.

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 Pert, 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,

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, Delmar and Louise. Yeah, she didn't 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 Olympic team.

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 Hortree hoarding the bedsteads, Gina Davis desperately trying and failing to make the Olympic archery team.

Even the supercomputer has branched out into cookery. Yeah, that's true.
You do realise this isn't on the connect. We're not looking for a link between all of them.

You definitely even sitting there going, what the hell is this?

I have, we're onto the four thing. 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 until you get the sentence right. Somebody who's such a pedant.

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, mechanic.

Oh, you would say you order a panini. A panino.
I would say I would.

No, no, I'm sorry. You can't say a panini.
That's hard. Okay, all right.
Finally, someone who agrees. I've only asked about four a year.
No, no, no.

Thank you.

Feels so plural to you. Would you say, can I have a panino? I do.
James does. I think he has.

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

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.

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 tapestry.

You must have seen the latest series of I'm a Celebrity Get Me Me Out of Here, but 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 fewer.

Very, very few people die of

spiders in Australia because they have antsy. Yeah.
But I mean, isn't there a difference between a kill and stupidity? As in like the taps not trying to kill.

That's a good point, actually. Yeah.
In the Middle Ages, they would have put the tap on trial as a deodand. 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 s 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 Lample 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 So they have to put something down on your death certificate first to

put the noculars 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 do 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. To any Natufians listening.

But they built the first cemeteries. So before that, there were only scattered bodies which had been been buried, but they were the first people who where we found a hundred bodies in the same place.

So we think that's a 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.

And they were the first people who had a feast. First ever feast was the Natufians.
And it consisted of 71 turtles. No, sorry.
71 tortoises.

When I was a kid, they so in Hong Kong, they used to tell us that it would be vertical burials in space. Have you guys heard of that?

I have heard of that, yeah.

A lot of people live in cemeteries in Cairo.

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

It's where I 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 would you expect there to be living in the city? Well, just none. I just thought.
I mean, the fact itself was already starting on.

12.

12.

Was that what I was doing?

Yeah, I think it's about the right number. Actually, there is a fact about, is it Brookwood Cemetery just outside outside London?

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

Really gone a long way to come up with that fact. I'm sorry it was me.

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

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

What's brilliant about that is it wasn't even interesting enough to be a poll. I mean, whatever one, there's something remarkable about that place.

South Lambshire'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

Andy. At Andrew Hunter M.
James. At Egg Shaped.
And Victoria. At Victoria Corran, 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've put a name in my tweeting name. I mean, listen, you all talked about supercomputers, and I 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 suchthingasafish.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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