46: No Such Thing As An Apostle Called Scrotum

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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 Cover and Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Andy Murray, Anna Jaczinski, and James Harkin.

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

Starting with fact fact number one, Andy Hunter Murray.

My fact is that there have been three top 50 songs in the British charts which have been sung exclusively in Latin.

Well, I bet you own all three of them, don't you?

Yeah, I do.

Just a mixtape of three Latin songs.

Yeah, one of them actually made it into the Alan Partridge movie last night.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which was Gaudette by Steel Eyes Span, which is a religious song.

Unfortunately, they're all a bit religious rather than an ABBA song, which they just happen to fancy doing in Latin.

I didn't know we got religious songs in our chart, in our pop chart, in our top 40 pops.

Yeah.

They're just choirs.

Constantly.

Anyway, the other ones, one was from Avita in 1976, which is choral in Latin.

Another was a recording of P.A.

Yezu from Andrew Lloyd Weber's Requiem.

That's a fantastic song.

So two of these are, is the other one from Avita, you said?

Yes.

So two of them are Andrew Lloyd Weber songs.

Two of the three Latin songs are Andrew Lloyd Weber, right?

Avita being an Andrew Lloyd Weber.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there you go.

Well, well done.

Well done, Drew.

So yeah, it's it's it's just interesting, the sort of the things that get into the pop charts over the years.

Yeah, yeah.

And it was it's easier now to get things in the pop charts because you can just everyone can download something at the same time and then it can get in the charts.

Whereas in the olden days you actually had to release a record or a C D or something for it to get in the charts.

Because these days you could get a very popular person on the radio saying everyone download a Latin song and it would just get in the chat.

Yeah, you're right.

It doesn't need to be.

The Taylor Swift album that came out last year, they accidentally, on the iTunes downloads, included a track just of white noise.

And because it just went viral, everyone bought it and it went to the top of the charts in Canada.

Every other white Canadian must have been so angry.

Yeah.

Alanis Borisette going, this is ironic.

So you know that the Mel Gibson film, The Passion, was in a mix of Aramaic and Latin.

Yeah.

It turns out that the Latin that they used in The Passion of of the Christ is Church Latin and not Classical Latin, which means the entire thing is an anachronism.

That's funny.

I'm really, really pleased by that.

Do they pronounce their Vs as W's?

I don't know.

I don't know how much we do know about the pronunciation of.

I think the general consensus is that Classical Latin it was pronounced as a W and then Church Latin it's a V.

And if they screwed that up, they fell at the first hurdle.

Yeah.

So some chat trivia.

Yep.

Which day of the week has had the most

songs written about it?

So it's in the title.

Oh, okay.

Monday.

Yeah, Monday.

That's the obvious.

I'm going to go with Friday.

Oh, well, you're all wrong.

It's Sunday.

30 songs with the word Sunday in.

So 30 songs with Sunday in, 23 with Saturday, 11 with Friday, which is a third.

And only one song, this is in the Billboard charts, has ever been written with the word Thursday in the title.

You won!

Yeah, Sweet Thursday by Johnny Mathis in 1962.

Okay, this is my favourite fact about the charts.

Go on.

It is that Paul McCartney has had 200 songs in the charts.

So either Beatles songs, wing songs, solo songs, songs of these written for other people.

If you take the amount of time

and accumulate all the time that those 200 songs have spent in the charts, they add up to 32 years.

Right.

That's amazing.

He's had songs in the charts

for a longer period than I've been alive, by two years.

That's pretty good.

That's insane.

And do you know who I found out that fact from?

Who?

President Obama.

Wow.

What is President Obama just tweeting factoids?

Yeah, he's going.

Yeah, he runs OMG.

They've just signed him up.

Yeah, yeah.

Good for him.

No, Paul McCartney won the Gershwin Prize at the White House where they do it, and he gave a speech and he said, here's an interesting fact about Paul, and then told that.

I see.

Do you think that was original research from Theo?

Own research.

I have a a thing about Latin, which I wanted to tell you because I really, really like it.

When Pope Benedict XVI resigned, one of the journalists who broke the story only got it because she could understand the Latin in which he made the announcement.

And as a result, she got the scoop before anybody else.

Her name was Giovanna Chiri.

She must have been very cheery about that.

It was a weird one, wasn't it?

Because he was just doing a general talk to about six or seven journalists, and they were just talking about basic stuff.

They all understood what he was saying was being translated.

And then he spoke that bit in Latin, that particular bit.

She was the only one who got it.

And she kind of pre-announced it without confirmation.

She was lucky she was right, because

she was a bit like, I'm not sure if he did, I'm pretty sure he did just say that.

Did that word mean resign or olive?

Yeah.

He just wanted an olive, guys.

But it's an interesting thing.

Because Latin in the Vatican, obviously, is still a big thing.

They're constantly updating because of all the new words that we have.

Have we spoken about that particular thing?

Like, words like dishwasher are now in the new Latin dictionary, and so are World Wide Web, there is.

World Wide Web.

And they're quite behind if they've only just updated it with dishwasher.

I mean,

iPhone.

And Rush Hour, which I don't know when that movie made it to the Vatican, but it's only just got it in this one that's been released.

Speaking of Pope Benedict, have we spoken about the fact that he released a top, he released a Christmas album, didn't he?

A Christmas music album.

And he, so in 2009, before he resigned, he released a Christmas music album.

It was Prayers Set to Classical Music, and it was with Snoop Dogg's record label.

What's it?

Wow.

Yeah, Geffen Records.

Snoop Dogg collaborates with a lot of people like that.

He did a song with Buzz Aldrin.

A lot of people like the Pope.

So the Delai Lava, Delai Lava.

No, Buzz Aldrin.

Just like people who are not in music is what I meant.

Yeah, old people who.

He likes to be on Coronation Street, didn't he?

The Pope.

It was in the news a while ago that he was going to be on Coronation Street, but I don't think he ever did.

I think we would have heard.

Yeah.

I was reading that J.K.

Rowling's

obviously the Philosopher's Stone was released in Latin.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And so he's Harrius Potter is what the book was called, and it was the Philosopher's Stone one.

They also translated it into ancient Greek, and apparently it's the longest ancient Greek text to have been produced produced since 3 AD.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

That's what I read.

Wow.

And also, this is interesting.

The book, The Order of the Phoenix, when that came out, so just going from the idea that we had three Latin songs in a British chart, in France, when the book came out, they did this thing where they didn't pre-give the book to different countries to translate it.

They basically had to wait for the English book to be released, and then they started translating the Harry Potter book.

So it was a big rush to sort of which country could get them quicker for the demand.

In France, they couldn't wait for the book to be translated.

So Order of the Phoenix is the only

non-French book to hit number one in the French bestsellers list in France as a book.

That's great.

Just on the Order of the Phoenix one as well, there was this thing in Venezuela where they knew the release date was going to be about six months after, five months after, the release of Order of the Phoenix.

They couldn't be bothered waiting, and some guy just translated it on his own and released it, and people bought it.

But it, by all accounts, was the worst translation because it's packed with sentences.

This is a genuine sentence from it.

Here comes something that I am unable to translate.

Sorry.

And then later on, after another sentence, there's a bracket that said, I'm sorry, I don't understand what that means.

It was just totally littered with the translator music.

It makes it sound actually a bit more terrifying.

If you're describing something, it's like this thing is so awesome, I can't even put it into words.

It's like another version of Voldemort.

He cannot be named.

Literally, I can't name it.

Sorry, guys.

Do you guys know the only New York Times bestseller to be written in Latin, best-selling book to be written in Latin?

No, we don't.

Can you give us a clue?

Is it Winnie the Pooh?

Yes.

There was a version of Winnie the Pooh in Latin, wasn't it?

It's Winnie Ille Pooh.

Yeah.

Winnie Ille Pooh.

It was on the bestseller list for 20 weeks.

That's pretty good.

Yeah.

It's a very, I imagine there's not much vocabulary in it, so it's probably quite good for teaching children who are learning Latin.

Although the Grinch, so the Dr.

Zeus, three Dr.

Zeus books have also been translated into Latin, which I would have thought would be.

Wait, Dr.

Zeus or Dr.

Seuss?

Because that would be for Greek, if anything.

I don't think Zeus was a doctor.

I think he had bigger fish to fry.

Taking his medical soice as well.

Dr.

Sois.

But if I said Dr.

Sois, people would call me a dickhead.

Yeah, so I'll say Dr.

Seuss then.

Dr.

Seuss, I always say.

I say Dr.

Dr.

Ross.

Anyway, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and two others have been.

In fact, okay, I'll tell you the two others and see if you know what they are.

I assume some of you will.

Catus petasatus.

The cat in the hat.

Correct.

And weerent owa.

Exclamation mark.

Wiret puna.

Two exclamation marks.

Green eggs, green ham.

Nice.

Green eggs and ham.

Green eggs and ham.

Yeah.

Very good.

Studied it till the age of 18, still didn't get the cat in the hat one.

Katos is a tough one.

Yeah, it really is.

Katos really threw me as well.

The Latin Wikipedia has 94,000 articles, does it?

Which is amazing when you think about it.

Yeah, I mean, that's much more than many other languages.

In fact, I wonder where that features in Wikipedia language are like.

And you can get Facebook in Latin as well.

Instead of the like button, there's a Mihi Placket button.

It is pleasing to me.

Do you know the other languages that Latin almost, you know, was the Latin tribe was vying with before they became the Romans, you know, when they were just a tiny tribe in southern Italy.

They were really cool names.

Volskian, Oscan, and Falliscan.

These were just other languages doing the rounds in the area.

Falliscan sounds like it comes from Phallis, doesn't it?

Yeah, it sounds penis language.

Okay, well, I'm sure they got a lot of that at school.

They don't need any more of it from you guys, especially given that they lost to the Romans.

Embarrassing.

Anyway, Germany, I think, is the only country to have had a number one song in Elvish.

Lord of the Rings.

Yeah, it was the Enya track.

Director, producer, promoter, whatever this is called in the business, decided that her musical ideas were too complex and interesting to get across in any language that existed.

So they wrote a new language for her, in which some of her other songs are sung.

Ah.

Which is called Amarantine.

That's Enya's language.

Got her own language.

Hey, you know how we were talking about dishwashers earlier?

Yeah.

The Latin for dishwasher,

and obviously we all know I'm terrible with words, but it's something like escariorium as the first word.

Something like that, it's not correct.

Lavatory.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Lavatori is a

larvae, it's to wash.

It means to wash, yeah.

Yeah, a lavatory was, I think, an ecclesiastical room for washing in, in a church or in a monastery, or that kind of thing.

A lavatory was a room where you go have a wash.

Who do you think was the first person who took a poo in there and transformed it from,

oh,

Father Dave, what have you done?

It was time the room branched out.

That's what happened with all the words.

Someone just like, Dave, Father Dave, this used to be a place where we just had a bath.

Now the defecatorium's completely ruined, Father Dave.

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Okay, it's time for back number two, and that is Jasinski.

My fact is that the way to recognize the Buddha is to look out for his webbed feet, a tongue that can reach his ears, and withdrawn genitalia.

That's a good excuse on a date.

No, no, no, it's not small.

I'm just I'm the Buddha.

I'm the reincarnated Buddha.

Oh yeah, then show me your tongue, because I can get on board with this.

So yeah.

These are some of the 32, these are three of the 32 lakshanas or special bodily features of the Buddha, and they're what a proper representation of the Buddha must have that make him the perfect being.

So the perfect being has these features, as well as various other things, like 40 teeth rather than 32,

ankle bones that are hardly noticeable, and an excellent sense of taste.

It is an amazing list of characteristics that the Buddha had.

I mean, this is Buddha original as well, Buddha classic, if you will.

Had thighs like a royal stag,

a ten-foot aura, and the area below armpits well-filled

with hair.

Or

yeah.

So, wait, are there 32 of these?

There's 32, but then they're.

They're not well filled with.

I think well filled with flesh, maybe.

There's an additional 80 extra little tiny things if you wanted to look at.

And what's really weird is they point out that the extra 80 things are just like, you know, you've confirmed it's Buddha.

You know, his tongue can wrap around his ears.

He's got these web feet.

It's definitely Buddha.

But if you just want to make doubly sure that it's him, there's these 80 extra things.

And I read through the 80, and they are quite simple.

But then one is he can fly.

Which that feels like it should be the first thing.

That'd be the first thing I'd ask him.

Yeah.

And they're so mixed as well.

Like, one of them is he has a protruding nose, number 28 of the extra 80.

And the one before it is, he has the strength of a thousand elephants.

No, no, no, he doesn't.

He has the strength of a thousand crore elephants.

And crawl is 10 million.

And so he has a strength of 10 billion elephants.

Sorry, that was my mistake.

But I mean, the the Buddha, 10 billion elephants.

That's the kind of strength that he's putting.

To be fair, once you're strong enough that you can pull 10 elephants, the extra just feels like showing off.

Yeah, you're right.

Number 75 in this list of 80.

So he is either completely bald or has a full crop of hair.

No in between, though.

No coma.

So what I like about this list is that it's not only just what he was, but if you were looking out for Buddha as a reincarnation,

these are all the things that he would have still.

And I was looking into reincarnation just generally because we haven't had a reincarnation of the Buddha, but we obviously have the Dalai Lama.

He's a reincarnation of, so he's the 14th, I believe.

He's threatening, and I don't know what the latest update on this is, but he's saying he might not reincarnate anymore.

Just to stick it to the Chinese.

Yeah,

he's going to put it up as a vote.

That is petty.

He's going to take a vote on it.

Well, yeah, this is the last, you know, that may have changed in, you know, how.

He was speaking about it in September last year.

So it's very recent.

Yeah, they might not do it.

But it's so interesting the way that they do find the reincarnations.

Did I not, like, give the give a child some of the old Dalai Lama's possessions and see if he likes them?

Yeah, so there were a bunch of possessions that were given to him, and he was picking them up, saying, oh, this is mine, this is mine.

It tends to be.

But that's.

If you give children anything, they say, this is mine, this is mine.

But there's a bunch of things

on the ground.

There was a kid who was told that he was a reincarnation of a Lama, and it was down to a few things like he was able to identify the colour of the previous Llama's car

and the mileage.

What's in the glove box then?

Some tic-tacs and my gun.

The next Dalai Lama is the guy who stole my car.

We did a deal.

Can I just ask a question about this, right?

Yeah, so this guy is supposed to be the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.

No, no, sorry, of another.

There are lots of Lamas that you can be.

So Panchen Lama or something.

Yeah, yeah.

So,

like, for example, it's been confirmed that Stephen Seagal is the reincarnation of a

17th-century Buddhist spirit called Chungdrag Dorje.

When you say it has been confirmed.

By the community of the Dalai Lama.

By evidence, Andy?

By evidence.

Sorry?

Right?

Yeah.

So he's not obviously the Dalai Lama, but he is a.

China tried to make their own Lama, didn't they?

I thought it was their own Dalai Lama.

They said, right, okay, the guy that you guys have chosen in Tibet isn't the real one.

We're going to have a lottery to choose which is the real one.

And they had a lottery.

They put a load of names in an urn and pulled one out, and it was a child.

How did that go for them?

Is he being raised now?

It's still there.

Could I just mention yogic flying?

Yes, please.

Because I like it.

Yes.

So you know there was this big nineteen fifties movement, the Transcendental Meditation Movement, and it was a group of people who uh took on the idea of the power of the frog, I think it's called, in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, and it's the idea that you could reach a state of meditation where you can fly.

And famously there was the Natural Law Party in the eighties, um, where they tried to get into politics and they would do this flying thing.

Doing the flying thing.

Um yeah, so it's quite funny when I think there's video footage of the groups that tried to do it.

The Beatles were quite interested in it.

And yogic flying has three stages.

And stage one is hopping, and stage two is floating, and stage three is flying.

No, I could be stage one of those.

The key breach point is between one and two, though.

Right.

If you've got two, your three is probably going to be fine.

So the transcendental movement itself admits that no one in the modern era has yet got beyond stage one.

Keep at it, guys.

Do you guys know, have you guys heard of Drukpakunli?

No.

He was a a Buddhist master in the 15th century.

He was the guy who brought Buddhism to Bhutan.

Okay.

And he had pretty wacky methods of enlightening people and pretty wacky Buddhist practices.

He mainly tried his methods on women, and so he had the title the Saint of the Five Thousand Women.

Among other things, women would seek his blessing in the form of sex.

He's called the Divine Madman, is that the guy?

He's sometimes called the Divine Madman.

His penis is called the Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom.

Yeah, I've been anointed by it.

Oh, you have, haven't you?

What?

What do you mean?

What?

I've been to a,

what do you call these?

Like a temple of his, and as you go in, there's a priest with a large wooden phallus, and he sort of puts it on your shoulder like knights in you, like the queen would.

Well,

the queen would.

But then it's supposed to be like a fertility thing.

God, Bolton's changed since I was last there.

I must say.

Where is he?

Who's in the Bhutan?

Okay, cool.

Put Nakra thing.

That's amazing.

That's what he does.

He's been anointed by the phallus.

What is it called?

The thunderbolt of...

It's the thunderbolt of flaming wisdom.

It had the power to turn women into deities, but I guess that was the real thing.

I don't think James is a god.

But what happens is you walk into this temple and the priest approaches you with a giant phallus.

I imagine the first time that happened, it was probably Brother Dave again.

Well, the houses around here, they paint phalluses on their walls as well.

Around there?

Around this area in Bolton.

If you go around there, there's shops that sell local produce, and they all have big pictures of penises on the walls.

People draw those on walls around near where I live as well, actually.

I don't know.

Do you guys have a religious connection?

Yeah, apparently.

On your front door.

Yeah.

What a devout place we are.

Maybe that's what the Buddha meant when it says withdrawn genitalia.

It's withdrawn genitalia.

Oh,

my goodness.

Fantastic.

Cease the podcast.

Stop the podcast.

Hi, everybody.

It's Andy here.

Sorry to cut into the fact again that's happening.

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Alright, carry on with the podcast.

Okay, time for fact number three, and that's my fact.

And my fact this week is that the whoopee cushion was invented by a Roman emperor called Basi Anus.

Now, that is just...

I've never heard of this emperor.

So the Roman Emperor Elagabalus, he is

the famous.

That's his name.

His birth name was Basie Anus.

Now, I'm sure it might be pronounced Cassianus, something like that.

But when you read it and you find out he invented the whoopee cushion,

I just don't know how.

You can't let that go.

Yeah.

Basi anus.

What describe the whoopee cushion?

Well, it was obviously a prototype to what we have now.

It was in development hell for nearly 2,000 years.

Prototype.

He just used to bring a cushion that had air in it, and he would bring it to his dinner parties.

And he was only 14 or so at the time.

He was a very young emperor.

And it just used to be his little party trick, his little.

And it let out air while he was there.

That's all we know about it, really, isn't it?

Yeah, didn't it sink them?

It could be rather that they were at a normal height and then just got lower and lower and lower as it went on.

I don't know if it made a farting noise.

It might have done.

Yeah, I think it's.

I mean, anything full of air where you've got something coming out of a sphincter, it's going to make a noise.

Especially because it had to come out slowly, I guess, because they had to sink gradually.

It would be one of those squeaky farts.

Yeah.

That went on forever.

All dinner.

Oh, this is still embarrassing.

Another thing Elagabalus did to dinner guests, apparently, is suffocated a bunch of dinner guests under loads of rose petals.

Really?

He was a bit of a bastard, but yeah, I think that's quite an imaginative way to go about murdering a dinner guest if you do want to do that.

That's true.

Did he mean to, or was that actually...

He actually just wanted them to go home.

It was kind of his way of hinting that it was late, that he was tired.

Yeah.

He locked them in a room, didn't he?

And they had a fake ceiling, and he dropped out all these rose petals, but there were so many of them that they all suffocated.

But he didn't mean them to.

I thought he was trying to kill them.

I don't know.

He was a total dick, though, wasn't he?

Yeah.

Like, I don't know much about him, but from what I've read,

he was a real bassy anus.

Yeah, he wasn't a nice guy.

He had all these.

It's one of those ones where the stories are half funny as well as the bad bits.

Like, he kind of just used to go and prostitute himself

in bars and dress as a woman,

and he purposefully tried to piss off people so that they would beat him up because he had a bit of a fetish about being beat up.

And he's a very odd character.

The weirdest thing I read is that he wanted to have his dick chopped off.

Right?

And so he went to a doctor and the doctor said, I don't want to do that.

And he said, no, do it.

And apparently they really like thrashed out the conversation.

And the compromise, and this from what I read, they said they compromised on, he was circumcised.

That's a hell of a compromise.

That's a huge compromise.

I made a massive concession, too.

That is kind of level one of the three levels of chopping your penis off this day.

Wait, what's the third one?

I think the third one is the full choppy.

Absolutely.

Total loboff.

That was the second one.

I don't want to know.

I don't want to know.

Right.

Yeah, so interesting character.

Yeah.

And again, it's another thing where just even if it, like, for me, the enjoyable thing of the fact is that he was called Basie Anus.

But actually the initial thing of the whoopee cushion being invented as far back as then is like on a previous podcast when I found out that yo-yos were being used from that period as well.

It just it's so out of place to me to think that a whoopee cushion was that far back in time as a practical joke as well.

Yeah.

You know the whoopee cushion when it had its first twentieth century um origin wasn't actually called a whoopee cushion.

It was called a musical seat in 1926.

And it didn't really make a fart noise either, so it wasn't very good.

But it didn't make music.

Well well in the catalogue it says sounds like you sat on a cat it made this weird little scream um that was quite upsetting to hear apparently like a screeching cat or a crying child um and they it was invented and then and it then initially it was called the poo-poo cushion or the boop booper doop

these are not good names but when they hit on the name whoopee cushion which was only in 1932 that was after the slang term whoopee and making whoopie is a slang term for having sex so the whoopee cushion is named after sex so it was a sex cushion

So who made that cushion?

That's what it's for?

Yeah.

Well, there was a hit song in 1928 called Making Whoopee.

Yeah.

And I think it was called the Whoopee Cushion a few years later.

And I think Whoopee then became just having fun after that.

And then it became like a...

That makes more sense.

So

Soren Sorensen Adams, who was a very famous joke developer.

The SS Adams code, loads of stuff like the insect in an ice cube and the

flower that squirts stuff out.

Yeah, all of these really classic jokes.

A lot of them were invented by him.

But he turned down the whoopee cushion initially because he thought it was indelicate.

And then he realized his mistake soon after it was to become a big success.

And he made his own one, which was called the Raspberry Cushion.

Okay.

But he also invented the joy buzzer.

Which is the hand buzzer as well.

Exactly, yeah.

Okay, I just want to you know when you shake hands with someone and there's a buzzer in it and it's a little electric shock or something.

It's actually just a vibration, isn't it?

It's not electric.

But I just want to read you this.

It was modeled after another product, the Zappa, which was similar to the Joybuzzer, but did not have a very effective buzz and contained a button that had a blunt point that would hurt the person whose hand was shaken.

So just a mini knife, basically.

Got you really good with that one.

Yeah, I'll get the bandages.

What a funny brank.

I just stabbed you in the chest.

Just stand underneath all these rose petals.

Hey, smell my flower.

It's a gun.

So, Sorenson Adams, he started off

with itching powder.

Always sneezing powder.

No, sneezing powder, it wasn't.

And he worked for a company that made this whatever product it was.

And they had this dustless left over from the product.

And he noticed that people were sneezing from it.

And so then he thought, oh, this is a great prank.

I can make this and sell it.

And he started selling loads and loads of this sneezing powder and became really big.

It was called Kachu.

And his first year, he sold $15,000 worth.

But 25 25 years later, the FDA banned it as a toxic substance.

So, for all that time, he'd been poisoning people as well as making them sneeze.

Oh, wow, it was genuinely toxic.

Oh, that's quite funny.

That is health and safety got mad.

Another thing they used was itching powder, wasn't it, in World War II?

And it came, there was an idea to plant itching powder on Nazis in various ways.

And on the instructions that were given to people who were trying to infiltrate and plant this, it said, the greatest effect is produced by applying the powder to the inside of the underclothing.

So, I don't know how it was intended.

Yeah, exactly.

I think when they were pitching that in the meeting, they said, okay, so let me get this right, you've made it right up to a Nazi.

You got your gun on you.

Okay, now I want you to take out the gun and just use it to apply a bit of the itching powder to his underclothes.

Be careful.

In World War One, they had sneezing powder, the Germans, this is.

And it didn't do you that much harm apart from it made you sneeze, so it made you take off your gas mask, and then they'd be able to get you with the other stuff.

Oh cheeky.

Okay.

Why do you take off your gas mask when you sneeze?

You don't want to get spit on it.

I think it was like it would kind of just get in their eyes and in the nose and stuff they just needed fresh air.

Okay.

Okay.

Wow.

The man who invented the fart machine, much later than the whoopie cushion, he tried to record the sounds with his friend.

His name was Fred Jarrow.

And he and his friend John Blackman who was developing it, they tried to record it by going into a recording studio after having eaten lots of fart-causing foods like cabbage and beans and things, and they said it didn't work.

It didn't sound right.

What did the people around them say?

You're never using this recording studio again.

What did they use in the end for the sounds?

A synthesizer.

Oh,

wow, okay.

Like, my old Yamaha didn't have a fart button of it.

So, like,

am I just not understanding how synthesizers work?

And also, here's the thing: a synthesizer uses recordings of sounds that it kills.

So it must have got it from somewhere else originally.

Yeah.

All right, I don't know the full details on this one.

I'm going to fess up.

I think they used existing sounds and slowed them down and sped them up.

Made them.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

That makes sense.

One more prankster was Jim Morin in America, who was born in 1907.

He lived until 1999.

He was called America's number one prankster.

And he did lots of

fun, crazy pranks.

Like he

walked a bull through a China shop once and he did this kind of thing.

He also also looked for a needle in a haystack in 1939, and it took him eighty-two hours before he found it.

No, but who's that?

A Joe Comb.

Joe Com himself, isn't it?

It was near the bottom and slightly to the left of centre.

But this I love so much about it.

Pranksters tried to set fire to the haystack five times while he was in it.

Outpranking the pranksters.

Jokes on him.

Kinda.

How do you fail to light?

Well, you know the saying.

It's like trying to set fire to a haystack.

How did he know the needle was in there?

I think he put it in there.

Was he just like fingers crossed?

Okay, he definitely...

So if he put it there.

Yeah, that's a very good point.

Well, he must have thrown it in and then it must have fallen.

No, I think he would have got a friend to put it inside.

I'm amazed he had friends.

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Okay, time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the oldest known purse is decorated with dog's teeth.

Okay.

So it's a very old bling.

This is found in a grave dated to 2500 BC

and it was a leather pouch decorated with dog's teeth in a nice little pattern.

But over the years the leather has disappeared so that all was left was the teeth.

Cool.

But they've kind of worked out that it

must have been a purpose.

It was a purpose rather than a dog.

It was decorated in the shape of a dog's mouth.

And next to it was like a bum bag with decorated with dogs'

skeleton.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

I guess they used what they could find.

Yeah.

What were they carrying back then?

I don't know, really.

You would carry, let's say you'd carry more dogs' teeth.

Something valuable, or some food, or some, you know, a tool or something.

Yeah.

So this is according to Harold Staubel, the senior archaeologist at Germany's Saxon State Archaeology Office.

And he thinks that it was very fashionable at the time to decorate these handbags with dogs' teeth

because he says that not everyone was buried with them.

It was only people of high status who were.

So it must have been quite

good.

High status people who are catching dogs.

Yeah.

Maybe that was a sign of yours.

I mean, what meant high status 3,000 years ago?

Yeah, where what civilization are we talking about?

What's the meaning of

Stone Age?

Bronze Age, Stone Age.

I do like that we've humans have wanted to adorn ourselves since as long as we know they've existed, basically.

And we've just fine out the kids.

And the snails as well did, didn't they?

They had little trinkets and stuff they were buried with.

Yeah.

Like I think the oldest, I think maybe until 2006, the oldest jewelry we had was was snail shells, weren't they?

From about seventy five I want to say seventy five thousand years ago.

Um and we found them in a in a cave in South Africa.

Um and it was just like little holes drilled in snail shells which they think they used to hook them into their some bit of their body.

Um in the Bible Judas is specifically identified as the guy who was carrying the purse.

See?

Yeah.

Well he was given money uh in the purse wasn't he he was given thirty pieces of silver in that purse.

I thought that was it what wasn't it his name

sorry go on well he took it if um if Jesus was given anything um so it says in uh John's Gospel Judas had the purse into which was put whatsoever was ministered to Christ so it was the he was the he was the banker as always when playing monopoly as in the Bible don't trust the banker

he's cheating

a good actual version of Monopoly

where you have to betray one of them one of the other players who's then crucified

that must be why so Judas Iscariot the name Iscariot comes from the Latin scortea, which is a purse or a bag used to carry money.

So maybe that's the market.

Do you think that's where the word squatum comes from?

I wonder.

I bet it is.

So was he Mr.

Moneybags?

I guess he was Mr.

Moneybags.

Or Mr.

Scrotum.

No wonder he was resentful.

Guys, it means money bags.

You'll see.

You'll see.

Yeah, yeah, Judas.

Yes, yeah, yeah, Scroty.

Well, Scrotums have been used as purses.

Have they?

They use them like in in Australia you can buy like kangaroo scrotum purses.

That's right, that's really big at the moment, yeah.

Is it?

Yeah, it is, yeah.

Apparently, the best one is a W-shaped kangaroo scrotum purse.

And that is kind of, if you can imagine the two bits where the testicles go, rather than being attached like web toes might be, they're kind of more

like a W shape.

Is that so you can keep different things in the different?

I think it's just because they're rare.

It's like one in 10,000 kangaroo scrotums shaped like this.

It's like a lucky four-leaf clover, except for the kangaroo.

Speaking of designer handbags and stuff like that,

women's handbags are much, or women's bags are much more expensive than men's bags, no matter what they look like or anything.

So

there's a purse blog run by someone called Amanda Moll, and she looked at all the different

things that you could buy, and she found that for two bags, which are virtually identical, one for women and one for men, the woman's one cost $2.96 a cubic inch, and and the men's one costs $1.54 a cubic inch.

And they're pretty much identical.

So the idea is basically they just charge more because it's aimed at a woman.

So on designer bags, Louis Vuitton apparently burns all of his bags that he's made that year.

Not him personally.

He gets someone to burn all the bags he's made that year so that they don't get sold on the cheap the next year because it devalues the items.

Wow, so all the ones that haven't been sold in the shops.

So first of all, they have an in-house private Louis Vuitton sale for Louis Vuitton staff, so people can buy like slightly reduced price, but they keep tabs on who's bought them so they can track them.

So if one of them appears on eBay, Louis is going to be like, you put this on eBay, that's not cool.

So you can give one as a gift, I think.

And then he burns all the rest, make sure, doesn't devalue the brand.

That is insane.

It's pretty mental.

Yeah.

That's why he's never made anything of himself.

Are there any other careers in which he would just set fire to all your stuff at the end of the day?

Well, it kind of reminds me a bit, not setting fire to it, but a bit like what De Beers did with diamonds in that they deliberately don't sell sell them to keep the prices high.

They used to do that.

I don't know if they're doing it.

And grain, I mean it's the same thing with grain, isn't it?

To stop grain prices from going nuts.

I'm not very good at understanding this.

Don't we have huge stocks of grain that go rotten every year.

Like butter mountains and all that kind of thing.

Yeah.

There is a New Year's ritual somewhere where you

write down you make little pieces of paper sculpture basically on which you have already written things that you didn't really enjoy about last year and then you set fire to them at midnight.

It's quite fun.

I tried that one, yeah.

Did you?

Set fire to the house that was so much that you were unhappy with.

Yeah, so the year always begins with a big insurance claim.

And then that's the first item in the next year's list.

That's a thing in China as well, that you write down a confession and you do it on three separate bits of paper and then you light the confession up and it's it's it's a way of almost a priest saying right that you're not.

That must be bad if your lighter runs out and you've written something really dodgy on the piece of paper like, oh my god, I'll go.

I'll go.

Is there a reason why it's three, do you know?

I'm not sure.

I saw it on the Carl Pilkington Idiot Abroad.com.

I thought it was because you grew up in China.

You know, the handbag originally meant a bit of luggage for a man.

The original handbags were for men.

Yeah.

And then it only became a women's specific item in 1841, I think, didn't it?

Yeah, it's really recent.

And do you know who invented it?

The guy who invented the handbag also invented butterscotch.

Wow.

Samuel Parkinson.

Yeah.

Wow, that is two cool things to invent.

It is, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah, it is cool.

So he came from Doncaster.

It's from Doncaster.

Well done, Doncaster.

What bags are from Doncaster?

It's from Doncaster.

Yeah.

Well done in.

And yeah, so he introduced handbags as a women's item, specific women's items, because before women only had those reticules, which are like those tiny drawstring bags that you could basically fit an earring in.

And he said he wrote to a designer and was like, My wife needs to travel on a train.

My wife.

From Doncaster.

So I looked up a few of the oldest things that we know of in particular different fields.

So the oldest copy of a gospel was found inside the mask of a mummy.

Wasn't that really recent?

That was really recently.

Yeah, really recently that was discovered.

And it was basically they made all these things out of it, it was made out of papyrus, which were then basically turned into papier-mâché.

And all kinds of different things were used.

All kinds of texts were used to make mummies' masks.

So, there were business papers and just personal letters or biblical documents, like the

something for them to read.

It was the Google glass of its day.

God, that would be awful.

I'm getting so tired of this.

Yeah, and then you were.

In the beginning, shit.

Will somebody turn the page?

Sorry, go on.

And so Greek text, things like Homer's Odyssey, would be used as the contents of a Papier Mache papyrus mask.

Wow.

That's so strange.

You never think of that.

What did they make it out of?

Yeah.

That's really interesting.

It's just any old paper, it seems.

They just use it.

And they can read it now by taking the mask apart.

It's like today's headlines are tomorrow's Papier Mâché mummy masks.

Yeah.

It's probably a saying in those days.

Yeah, and when you go to the fish and chip shop, they give you a mummy's mask.

The world's oldest human footprints outside Africa.

Anyone get any guesses on where they are?

Just on the border, leaving Africa.

They're on a beach in England.

Yeah.

They were in Norfolk.

Hang on, they're on a beach where the tide just never came in and washed them away.

Basically,

it's quite tricky.

They were indentations in the,

not in the rock, but in the

sand.

Yeah,

it's not like the beach.

The water is just missed in 30 millions of years.

No, it's really hard.

I read an entire article about this, and it's kind of vague, but they were on the beach.

They have now been washed away, but they were indentations in the beach somehow which resembled footprints.

I have no idea how they dated them as well, but they are eight hundred thousand years old.

That's the amazing thing.

I thought it was basically the idea of mud and then the mud dried and kept them and then a beach uh what they discovered was the sand on the beach kind of disappeared and revealed them.

Yes, that is that's something

that's not that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eight hundred thousand?

Yes.

That is amazing.

But there are places in the UK where you can see um footprints of dinosaurs in the same way which have been like where the the uh mud's hardened.

It's sky.

Amazing.

It's so cool.

And they they only had a very short space of time to get to get imprints of these before they were washed away by rain and by the effects of the waves.

And there it was one adult and five children with him.

And that's all we know about these footprints or this this family or whoever it was.

Wow.

Yeah.

How cool is that?

It's good.

So dogs' teeth were used as currency in Papua New Guinea until as recently as 1960.

What?

Yeah.

That's good.

That's amazing.

In 1876, we know how what you could get for so many teeth.

You could get a bride for a hundred dogs' teeth.

That was like the price of a dowry.

Wow.

Are dogs really, like, there's not many there?

Don't know, really.

I guess.

Because, like, if you're going out for dinner and you're going, oh, we should probably pick up the bill tonight.

How many dog teeth

should we bring Rover with us just in case?

Like, could you, was it special type of teeth?

What I think it is, and I might be wrong about this, but teeth have been and animal bones especially been used forever as things to like cut or to you know they they're useful tools because they're hard and you can do things with them.

So I reckon it's quite often currencies are made out of things that are useful and then they trade them and then they become a currency.

So I bet it's probably something like that.

Okay, that's interesting.

Although when you say a hundred dogs' teeth,

that is ambiguous.

Is it the teeth of a hundred dogs?

Oh no.

Oh is it a hundred teeth?

Where's the apostrophe in that?

Where's the apostrophe?

Yeah, no, it's a hundred teeth.

A hundred teeth.

Come from dogs.

So you don't want to accidentally murder a hundred dogs and realise you only needed to do three or something.

Darling, we're rich.

That's great.

Have we got any more?

Shall we wrap up?

I'm done.

The oldest penis

in the world.

The oldest penis is 100 million years old.

What?

Is the penis the music?

What dinosaurs?

It belonged to an ostracod, which is an early kind of crustacean, and it was found on a a fossil of that.

And

some scientists found it and they analysed it.

One of them was Professor David Sivita of the University of Leicester.

And it was on a tiny marine creature, which was about one millimetre wide.

I'm not sure whether that was the penis or the whole animal.

But

the one millimetre penis.

Yeah.

And the

withdrawn.

It was the Buddha.

But he says that it doesn't have one penis, it has two.

So the earliest ever penis that we've got is from an animal which had two of them.

Wow.

Bizarre.

That's great.

That's cool.

Yeah.

Nice.

I like it.

Yeah, me too.

Shall we wrap up?

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 about the things that we've said over the course of this show, you can find us all on Twitter.

I'm on at Shryraland.

Andy.

I'm at Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At egg-shaped.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep.

And we'll be back again next week.

Also, if you go to qi.com/slash podcast or no such thing as a fish.com, you can find all of our previous episodes that we've done.

Have a listen, and we'll be back again with another episode next week.

Goodbye.

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