45: No Such Thing As A Travelator In Ancient Rome

Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

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

My name's Anna.

I'm joined today by fellow QI elves James Harkin and Andrew Hunter Murray, and also a special guest today, historian and horrible histories writer Greg Jenner, who has a book to plug, correct?

Yes, plug, plug, plug, plug.

It's called A Million Years in a Day and it's out like now.

And it's quite good.

It's quite good.

It is good.

Some of us have read at least bits of it.

It's amazing.

I wouldn't go that far, but it's all right.

It's above average.

I would say it's definitely sort of top 70 percentile.

You know, like, you know, it's a 2-1.

Okay.

A high 2-1 book.

Buy it.

Okay, let's get on with the show.

And for fact number one, let's go to you, Greg.

Okay, so my fact is from my book because I am that unimaginative.

And my fact is, in the 1960s in America, there was one particular bus route that was only 35 miles long, but during that time, passengers passed through seven different time zones.

Wow.

That's amazing.

How does that work?

Right, so it's fairly complicated, so I'm going to have to give you probably a bit of context.

Okay.

So this is all to do with daylight saving time, which is something we have here, of course, in Britain, and it's a familiar concept to all of us.

But it was an idea first put forward about a hundred years ago by William Willett, who was a mustachioed Englishman.

He was also the ancestor of Chris Martin from Cold Play, you know,

who wrote clocks.

Exactly, there we go, see?

So he put that forward in about 1909, I think.

And he was arguing for trying to get more daylight into the time.

And so everyone went, well, this is a nice idea in principle, but it sounds very complicated.

We're not going to do it.

And then in 1915, he died and everyone was sort of mocking him and the idea was going nowhere.

And then Germany picked up with the idea and said, This is a brilliant idea.

We will do this.

They did it during the war, didn't they?

They did it during the war.

And it was like it saved them energy.

Yeah, because that extra hour of daylight meant you didn't have to burn loads and loads of gas and oil, and that could then go to the war effort.

When he died, did everyone miss his funeral by an hour?

So as soon as Germany adopted it, Britain very sheepishly went, Yeah, maybe we maybe we should do that as well.

And it became known as Willett time, which is like hammer time, but with mustache, I think.

And anyway, it then spread around the world.

And America adopted it.

And the problem with America is it's a much bigger nation than Britain.

And so America has loads of time zones and it's too big.

And so the government says, all right, come on, let's be sensible here.

We're a federal nation, so each state can decide if they're going to opt in or opt out.

And then the problem is that each of the states then said to the towns and cities, okay, you guys can also decide if you're going to opt in or opt out.

And so 28 of the states opted in to DST, and then the various cities would then decide, oh, we can do it, we're not going to do it.

And so what happened is you ended up with this incredibly chaotic system to the point that in Idaho,

shops that were next door to each other might be on different times.

So in the same building, you could literally go next door to the corner shops again.

That's amazing.

So this was in the 1950s and 1960s.

Until 1966, this was happening.

I just want to say, how did it work with the two shops that were next to each other?

It reminds me of a place I went to called Bal Hertog on the border of the Netherlands and Belgium.

Oh, yeah, the exclave place.

Yeah, so there's loads of exclaves and the border between the two countries is really, really complicated.

And they have the lines you can see on the pavements, you can see where the lines are.

So you can walk from Belgium to the Netherlands, then back into Belgium, then back into the Netherlands again.

And it's something like the Netherlands rules on selling pornography are supposed to be so much better than Belgium.

So all the pornographic shops are in the Netherlands and all the fireworks shops are in Belgium.

Even though they're in the same town, they're all put in different buildings.

I mean, I think, I mean, that's a mad idea, isn't it?

But I think certainly kids in Michigan go to Canada to go drinking.

I think it's 18, his legal age in America at 21.

This is, in fact, there was a golf club set up on the border of the US and Canada during Prohibition as a way for Americans to be able to drink.

So the drinking club within the golf club was on the Canadian side of the border.

So you could enter the golf club in America and then you kind of wander over to the Sidewood Shadow Pub, go drinking.

That's a brilliant idea.

Yeah.

But so I think William Willits, one of the reasons people thought he was crazy, because his system was quite complicated.

So he was suggesting going forward by 20 minutes of daylight a day, right?

Yeah,

which is very complicated.

I think he suggested, I can't remember exact details, but he suggested changing the clock something like six or seven times a year.

Yeah.

Which is just a bit too much faffing.

And also, people had only just got uniform time.

Because until sort of the coming of the railways, every town in Britain had its own time.

I think Bath and Bristol were, I think, about seven or eight minutes behind London.

And so when the trains arrived, that became chaotic because people missed their trains, obviously.

And then William Willet turned out and went, Hey, guys, what if we all changed our clocks loads and loads of times?

You know, really annoying dates.

And we'd all get an hour back.

It was the railways which actually made the first time zone.

It's called railway time.

Railway time.

It's so cool.

And all the really interesting legal implications over what could happen.

So if babies were born at the same time, but in different places, that you know, a whole inheritance could be changed.

Because technically,

the child had been born earlier, therefore, was got the will and inheritance or whatever.

So all of this happened only because of

fast-speed communication.

So trains, telegraphs, that kind of thing.

The amazing thing is, I mean, so I'm going back to my original fact, this 35-mile route, you had to change your watch, I think, every

eight minutes.

I mean, did people actually do that?

I don't think so.

I mean, I think, you know, maybe if you're really into timekeeping.

Yeah, I bet there was some really nerdy schoolboy.

But it's just sort of this amazing idea that you'd get on a bus, and it was only 35 miles.

It's between Moundsville, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio.

And during that time, you would pass in and out of time zones, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

What you guys were saying about different towns having their own times, that was in America as well.

And

in the 1870s, North America had 144 official times in all the different towns and stuff.

144.

Yeah, and if you went from Washington to San Francisco and you wanted to be this nerdy schoolboy who changed his watch watch all the time, you'd have to change it over 200 times.

No way.

But in fairness, it's a long journey, and you need to do something to take up the time.

The podcast had not been invented to be listened to in traditional.

No Sudoku yet, it's just watches.

But I mean, the problem with timekeeping is a really ancient one.

And this is something I sort of tried to cover in the book: is that the ancient Egyptians were trying to work out what time it was via the stars and via solar clocks.

But

back then, there was no standard 60-minute hour.

Is it true that in the Middle Ages they used to

have, say, 12 hours in a day, and that would be from sunrise to sunset.

And so, if it was a longer day in the summer, then the hours would just be longer.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, there were scholars who kind of went, hey, guys, I think we should have actual equal hours, but it didn't really work.

There's no point being smug if you're stumbling around in the dark.

That's so interesting.

So, when it seemed like in the summer term, the hours were going really slowly because you were waiting for the holidays.

It's because they were.

Yeah, yeah.

Because until the invention of like gaslights and stuff, when people actually could have artificial lighting, people just went to bed when it got dark.

How did people know how long it was?

Like, how did they know in advance?

Sand timers and water timers.

The ancient Chinese, the medieval Chinese, had clocks that you could smell.

So each hour was a different incense.

So it burned down.

And so you'd be like, oh, it must be lunchtime because I can smell ginger.

What's for lunch?

Ginger.

So yeah, the history of timekeeping is really, really confusing.

It wasn't until I think the 14th century that it was a Muslim scholar, I think in Syria, who came up with the first equal hours clock.

Before that, we would have played out with things like woman's hour.

Yes.

Welcome to Woman's 72 Minutes.

It still is really complicated, time zones and timekeeping and everything, isn't it?

Like some countries have the most eccentric systems.

So I live in Australia, they have various bits of Australia that have it in half-hour increments rather than in hour increments.

And some places have it in a quarter of an hour increments.

I think there's a town of 200 people in Australia which has decided to be GMT plus eight and three-quarters.

Brilliant.

So the town of Bloody Awkwardsville, Australia.

I'm trying to work out.

So, how many time zones do we think there are in the world?

So, if you just count an hour.

They're divided along 15 degrees across the world since the 1880s, I think it is.

So, there should only be 24, I think, basically.

Except there are 26 because there's a little group of islands which decided to put themselves to, because they did more trading with America.

Oh, really?

They decided to join America's time zone.

So, if you look down the international date line, it's got a really weird kink in it.

It's not a line at all because it scoops these islands in.

Is that Samoa or American Samoa or or Turkey?

No Samoa is different.

Samoa is the one that went in 2011, it decided to go back a day, didn't it?

So it missed out the 30th of December 2011.

Sorry it went forward a day,

but I did get an extra day on the 4th of July 1882?

1892.

Use it wisely.

Yeah.

So I reckon what would happen is everyone would celebrate the day before because it's like a big event.

Everyone would be hung over to hell on that day and no one would do anything on that day at all.

And then the next day they'd go, what do you do on your extra day?

Oh, I just stayed in in bed.

Yeah.

I love there to be like a Doctor Who episode that's set in the lost days.

Oh, but don't exist.

Oh, yeah.

Some sort of weird quasi-universe where.

Watch that.

That's great.

Yeah, I don't actually watch Doctor Who, so I don't know how it would work, but it would be.

It's like that.

Like that, basically.

In fact, that made a lot more sense than a lot of the Doctor Who story.

Anyone else?

Some things on buses.

Oh, yeah, buses.

As soon as we were talking about that at the start.

So there is a bus driver in Moscow called Alexey Volkov, who is known as the Punisher because he deliberately rams people who cut him up.

Really?

Wow.

When you say cut him up, do you mean people who stab him with a knife?

I'm afraid not.

If you've driven in Moscow, it's like

everyone's cutting you up all the time.

That is a weirdly visceral metaphor, isn't it?

Yeah.

For just someone driving in front of you a bit close.

Yeah.

Gonna cut you up.

Cut me up.

I wonder if there's ever been a confusion in a police station on that account.

If anyone's ever got a really long prison sentence unnecessarily for just slipping in front of someone.

All I did was cut him up, Gavin.

At Bright Horizons, infants discover first steps, toddlers discover independence, and preschoolers discover bold ideas.

Our dedicated teachers and discovery-driven curriculum nurture curiosity, inspire creativity, and build lasting confidence so your child is ready to take on the world.

Come visit one of our Bright Horizons centers in the Bay Area and see for yourself how we turn wonder into wisdom.

Schedule your visit today at BrightHorizons.com.

Alright, now it's time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that if a predator gets too close to a limpet, the limpet will lift up its shell and then stamp on the predator's foot.

How cool is that?

So how fast does it do that?

Because I think of limpets as being quite slow moving.

They are slow.

They generally get about a metre away from their home before going back.

Brilliant.

That's a big outing.

Yeah, it's a long weekend for a limpet.

And they have to get back before the tide comes in.

So, you know.

Why do they leave their home then?

If they're only going a metre, what are they looking for?

They are looking for food.

They are hungry for algae.

They love an algus.

The other thing is,

they'll stamp on your foot if you go too near them, but they only have one foot, don't they?

They're just a foot, that's all Olympic.

They are the foot, but they've got the shell all around them.

So that's the painful bit.

So the muscle, their foot muscle is in the middle, and then obviously the shell, you know, crunching down between the predator and the rock.

Things like starfish like to eat them.

Yeah, I don't think they can do it very fast, but it's called mushrooming.

why is it called mushrooming?

Mushrooms don't stamp on you.

I suppose when they go up on their foot and the shell is around them, they look like a mushroom if you from the size.

But that's just that's just a theory.

I don't I don't know that's true.

Yeah.

And so yeah, anyway, they move across, they go commuting, basically, for algae.

And they move across very, very slowly.

And they have this tongue called a radula, which they scrape over the rock, and it's got 1,920 teeth on it.

Whoa.

Yeah.

With hardened with iron compounds.

Basically, if these things ever decide to grow bigger, we are stuffed.

The compound is called Gerthite, I think.

Is it?

Named after Goethe, the author.

Well, it's quite a long story.

So it was named by a guy called George Lentz, who was a friend of Goethe.

And if you read any books, it says that it was named in his honour.

But actually, these two guys fell out quite early.

He introduced Lentz to his sister.

And we don't know, his sister was married, and we don't know what happened.

But then a little bit later, Lentz was kicked out of the court of Weimar.

And then later on, Lentz then named this mineral after Goethe,

but it says it's in his honour, but these two didn't get on.

And so I think that it was named against him because he didn't like him.

And it's this thing which is found in the tongue of a limpet, but it's also found in mud.

And I think he was like literally making his name mud.

Nice.

It's a good theory.

It's a good theory.

Yeah.

It's a limpet then.

Limpet.

Bear commute sounds thrilling.

Yeah, it is.

But doesn't algae come to them?

No.

Right.

Well, in a way, yes.

I think they filter water through their gills, but they do also definitely go across the rocks in search of food very, very slowly.

They also migrate limpets.

How far?

Not very far.

A few metres.

About a metre, yeah.

But in the winter.

Do they go south for winter?

Three metres.

They move up the shah so it depends which direction the shah if you ever see a flock of limpids in a v shape that's where they're migrating it's for better aerodynamics that is making it exactly

so the so when they and when they go they leave a trail of mucus behind them right um when they go across scraping the rock with their tongue and getting all the algae up off the rock but then the mucus they leave behind them actually encourages more algae to grow on it but that's basically farming they are encouraging more food to grow in the path they have been in

yeah so not only is it it's quite advanced farming If they're rotating, are they enclosed?

Well, it's not called by harvesters, is it?

They do get subsidies from the EU government.

So they have a butter mountain.

An algae mountain.

Right, here's a question, and you may know the answer to it.

I'm going off topic here, but how many bacteria would you have to have before you could see them in a lump?

What would a mountain of bacteria look like?

It would look like a lot of pus, basically.

Really?

How do you know that?

Just before we get on to that, how do you know it looks like a mountain of weird diseases, Jason?

I think I might have read that in one of XKCD's things, either in the book or on their website.

Surely it would depend on the kind of bacteria.

Some of it

isn't the same.

I think it would look like a big shimmery,

silvery, greenish, bluish.

So like the blob from like the classic Hollywood movies in the 60s or whatever.

But I mean, James, it sounds like he's actually done some research on this.

I've said this before, the blob is based on a real police report.

I might have said this before, actually.

Really?

Yeah.

It was based on a police report in America in the 1950s about a mysterious blob.

Which turned out to be a giant cluster of bacteria.

If you haven't seen The Blob, it's such a good film.

It's got Steve McQueen in it.

Yeah.

A really, really young Steve McQueen, and the blob eats everyone.

Oh, spoiler alert.

Spoiler alert.

So it just swallowed things up and digested them.

Yeah.

There's a great bit where a farmer gets angry with it and fires a gun into it.

That's not going to work.

That's terrifying.

It doesn't work.

It doesn't work.

Doesn't work.

It just eats the bullets.

It gets a traction bigger.

Again, guys, spoiler alert.

Sorry.

Come on.

Yeah.

We were talking about bacteria.

Yeah, there's a bacteria that you can see, I think.

The biggest bacterium, I think, might be nicknamed Conan the Bacterium by the

newspapers.

And I think it's visible to the naked eye.

I think it is.

It's one of them.

I believe so.

That's amazing.

We've mentioned in one of our books that bacteria can get viruses.

Viruses can get viruses.

Viruses can get viruses.

Big viruses can get small ones.

They found a big virus.

It was in a cooling tower somewhere in the UK, I think.

And it was a massive, massive virus.

And then they found another one, and it was orbiting the original virus and it's called Sputnik they called it really

again it might be a newspaper nickname I don't know it's supposed to be a satellite virus yeah just going round and round it if you dropped a load of bacteria right out of a plane okay how much a blobs worth yeah a blobsworth say would they fall or would the air currents be enough to just keep them up there forever oh interesting that's what a cloud is Andy it's just a load of bacteria

well a cloud needs something to for the water droplets to nucleate around, and sometimes that would be bacteria, imagine.

Yeah, I imagine.

It would usually be like dust or sand, but I bet it could work with bacteria.

They've just done a trial of cloud seeding, or they've done a study of studies of cloud seeding, which is where you drop a dividing crystal from a plane, and then

those are the tiny, tiny crystals which the water droplets form around, and then you get rain or snow.

And they found that it does have a small positive effect.

They don't think that it's currently good enough to deliberately do anything to the weather.

Like, you could probably make a difference, but it's not reliable enough.

Yeah, you can't just wake up and go, go, it's a sunny day.

That was me.

That was my cloud seeding.

We did cloud seeding just before summer this year, and we're very proud to report it's been a barbecue summer.

Can you tell?

We haven't done any limpet research yet.

I've got lots of limpet research.

Okay, let's hear some of that.

I'm keen to talk about limpets.

Um, limpets are all the there's basically no such thing as a limpet,

which is good, yeah.

So, limpets uh don't really exist.

Um,

I think they do, Andrew.

I think they don't because it's just a name for aquatic snails with basically conical shells.

That's all it is.

It's a very informal term.

You know, lots of different things that we call limpets come from different

phylums.

There's a thing called a common limpet, isn't there?

I think.

Yes, there is.

And that will be a specific species.

That's very informal.

That says wear jeans and

doesn't take its shoes off when it comes in.

The word Wikipedia describes limpets.

It's exactly how I've just described it.

This is where I got it.

You missed off the bit that it adds.

So a limpet is a common name applied to aquatic snails with shells broadly conical in shape, rather like the conical Asian hat, which I've never

seen Wikipedia open with a simile.

Nor a slightly racist simile.

No.

What's the conical Asian hat?

Target the bell.

You know, if you took a slightly racist picture of someone from Asia from the 1950s, and they'd be like a rice farmer with the hat.

Oh, really?

A broad, like lots of shade, because if you're working outdoors as a rice farmer, then it keeps the sun off your head.

Yeah.

So starfish eat limpets, don't they?

Or try to?

They do.

And the way starfish sometimes eat things is they sort of make their stomach go to them, I think, rather than them going to their stomachs.

So I think starfish expel their stomachs out of themselves and then swallow them up into their stomach.

So I guess, like, a limpet, when it's trying to defend itself, might stamp on a starfish stomach.

Is that what it does?

I assume that happens.

I assume there are starfish stuck by the stomach somewhere by a limpet.

Have you heard of starfish wasting disease?

No.

Yeah, it's very sad.

It's a disease which is kind of getting a bit bigger at the moment, and it basically gets starfish to waste themselves by ripping their own arms off.

Yeah.

They rip their own arms off.

Yeah.

How do they rip off the last arm?

The arms continue to crawl around for a while after they've ripped them off.

It's pretty creepy.

Maybe they all gang up and rip the last one off as well.

Did I hear on

a podcast or maybe an episode of QI about a plant that's so painful when you touch it, a guy tried to sh a guy shot himself.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, it's a gimpy gimpy, and it's so painful you just can't even tolerate living anymore.

Yeah.

Maybe that's how it works.

But didn't he use it accidentally as loo paper?

He did, yeah.

It was in Australia.

This is a report in Australian Geographic.

And yeah, this it stings so much it's like being electrocuted.

Electrocuted on the bum.

Yeah.

That's horrible.

He picked it up, wiped himself, and in so much pain, he shot himself.

Wow.

Well, speaking of people who've electrocuted their bums, that's reminded me of one of my favourite ever stories from history.

And it was a fairly famous guy, actually.

So this is Alexander von Humboldt.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

He was mega-famous, wasn't he?

He was like a proper famous...

He was a polymath.

Exactly.

So Enlightenment scholar, proper Prussian chap.

Does he have more things species named after him than anyone else?

Really?

I feel like maybe he does.

I think he's got a lot.

Darwin sounds like it would be more, but I'm not sure.

He did loads of research in South America.

And in his 20s, he got really obsessed with electricity because it was kind of Galvani had just been electrocuting stuff, and everyone was going, electricity is the new, that's the new thing.

And so one day, he and his assistant were sort of wondering, I wonder what electricity does to dead things.

And they found, I think, a dead bird and he reanimated it with electricity, and it came back to life after 10 minutes.

And he went, oh, amazing, brilliant.

That's electricity can revive the dead.

It probably died of heart disease or something, and it restarted the heart, and the heart was bleeding.

Or maybe it was asleep.

It just woke it up.

But having electrocuted the bird, he then thought, well, electricity is clearly amazing.

I wonder what else I can electrocute.

I know myself.

And so he put one electrode in his mouth, and then he inserted the other one into his anus, and then electrocuted himself.

And one of my favourite ever quotes in history is his description of the outcome.

He put it about four inches into his rectum, and he describes it as this: The introduction of a charge into the armatures produced nauseating cramps and discomforting stomach contractions, then abdominal pain of a severe magnitude, followed by involuntary evacuation of the bladder.

What struck me more is that by inserting the silver more deeply into the wrexum,

having evacuated my valves, I thought, I'd stick that further in.

More deeply into the wrexum, a bright light appears behind both eyes.

So he basically went, ow, this is really painful, and I've pissed myself.

But what if I keep going?

And then he just basically had the sort of blindness behind his eyes.

That is a scientist.

And then what about when he went deeper?

I see what you mean.

It's like he saw a bright light.

I was kind of picturing lasers coming out of his eyes.

But I think what he's describing is basically just like flashes of electricity.

You can find his, you know, like pure blinding.

And the lovely thing is that that didn't put him off electricity at all.

He then went to South America and did various research where he came across, I think, an electric eel.

And the first thing he did was just shove it up his ass.

Thankfully he didn't do that, but he did pick it up and go, zzza!

All right, you try.

Gave it to his assistant who went, zzza!

And gave it back to her, and they'd electricate themselves all day long with just testing how painful it was to be electricity in fucking.

They used to put eels up horses bums, didn't they?

So you would go to market and you would want to sell your horse, but you want people to think it was better than it was.

You put either some ginger or an eel up their bums and it would make them more lively.

You should never look a gift horse in the mouth, but you should look in the anus, just in case.

I think the Romans also used electric eels as a cure for headaches.

I don't think

memory says, I think

that might work.

I think, well, because they definitely had eels and they were really interested in eels.

They used to have man-eating eels in their ponds and slaves used to be thrown into them.

Man-eating eels.

Really, really aggressive.

Well, really aggressive eels that would just eat any flesh.

And if a Roman aristocrat didn't like a slave, or if a slave had broken a nice cup or something, he'd

thrown to the eels and eat him.

Do they have cups?

I suppose they must have done.

They did, yeah.

No, but they have, I think of them having an empire.

You're not bothered about the man-eating eels, but.

Wait, cups, you say.

Yeah.

No.

Oh, but they had aqueducts.

We've got all this water all the way here from the mountains.

Right, everyone, get your hands together.

It's time for the tea.

What I mean was.

Oh, God.

I don't think of them having cups with handles.

I think of them having little handle-less goblets, things like that.

But actually, I mean, there was one very famous Roman and aristocrat who was so in love with his eels, his pet eels, actually, that he put earrings on them and painted their faces like a lady.

Apparently, when the eel died, he cried bitterly, you know, more so than when his own sort of slaves or family died.

But when the eel snuffed it, he was really lucky.

All the cute Roman buzzfeed pictures were not of dogs in jumpers, they were of eels with makeup on.

That's creepy, really creepy.

Animal defense mechanisms.

Have we ever talked about the pygmy sperm whale?

I think I'd remember.

We talked about all those three things separately, but I don't think we've talked about the combo.

Okay.

So, A, it's really quite sweet.

It's tiny.

And B, as a defence mechanism, it's another animal that shoots syrupy stuff out of its anus, which things that are trying to chase it kind of get stuck in and disoriented by.

It's a d it squirts a deep coloured syrup into the water and spreads it around with its tail, so it like mixes it around like paintings.

It's a feces though, isn't it, right?

Is it feces?

Well, if it's dark and syrupy and coming out of its anus.

I always say if it looks like feces, tastes like feces, it's probably feces.

I prefer to call mine syrup.

Um, and yeah, swishes it around in the water like a painter mixing his paints.

Um

like Like a really weird painter,

like Tracy Amini mixing her paints.

So, time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

And my fact is that after landing on the moon, Buzz Aldrin worked in a car dealership where he failed to sell a single car.

I'm not surprised if he's selling them on the moon.

Yeah, exactly.

To be fair, they would have had a massive mileage on the clock as well.

And they only sell one type, which is a rover.

He came home first, right?

Sorry, after returning from the moon, Barz Aldrin worked in a car dealership and failed to sell a car.

Yeah, so this is this.

So I was in Beverly Hills, and he worked there for six months.

I think it was a Cadillac dealership.

But I was reading this really interesting article about how, after Barz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, a year later, almost no Americans knew who they were.

They completely slipped out of the public eye.

Yeah, nationwide surveys done.

The New York Times ran a lot of them.

And yeah, one in 12 or one in 10 people would be able to name Barz Aldrin or Neil Armstrong.

That's unbelievable.

It's weird, isn't it?

Yeah, that's so weird.

Yeah, and they think it's at the time.

So, one theory is that at the time, because it was like a race between the Soviets and America to get to the moon, once they'd got there, it was like, well, we've done that now, we've won that race.

Tick box, moving on.

And another theory put forward is that neither Buzz Aldrin nor Neil Armstrong are particularly good orators.

And so this guy thinks that because they weren't able to maximize their experiences and they just kept on saying, yeah, it was really great.

How good an orator do you need to be to say, I've been to the moon?

Because that is an arresting opening line.

Yeah.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, I've been to the moon.

So he didn't sell a single car.

Surely, like, even crap salesmen sell like one car a year.

He must have been really bad.

Yeah, people presumably came in wanting to buy a car.

Yeah.

If you go to a Cadillac dealership, that's what you're in the market for.

Yeah.

Well, they just talked about the moon the whole time.

Yeah.

And then they left, forgotten what they got in for.

Damn it, what did I mean to get in that Cadillac dealership?

I think it was an anecdote about the moon.

yes it was but no I think he was quite depressed after he landed on the moon for a while wasn't it him and Neil Armstrong were both very disappointed for a while at the fact that they'd been forgotten if you google Buzz Aldrin car

the first thing that comes up is Buzz Aldrin cardboard cutout

and there are some great reviews of it online I want to tell you about a couple of them

Great product.

I accidentally scared the wife as I set it up in the living room and was adjusting the support when she walked in.

She actually thought it was a real person for a few seconds.

Is this why people didn't think he was a good orator?

Confusing them.

Yeah.

Neil Armstrong, did you know that his hairdresser sold a lock of his hair and Neil Armstrong sued him for $3,000?

Really?

Yeah,

he went back to his barber and found out his barbara had just been selling locks of his hair.

My hair definitely sue her.

Yeah, I think I have as well.

It's a bit weird, isn't it?

I think, what was it?

Harry Stiles from One Direction vomited out the side of a car and the vomit went on eBay for thousands of pounds.

You're not allowed to sell biological biological stuff on eBay.

Cost me a fortune in delivery.

But we've long since venerated, like, you know, the saints' bones, you know, the finger of St.

Peter or whatever.

Like, people have always wanted little bits of body for that.

So it's a holy vomit.

It's a secular relic, basically.

It's a secular relic.

It's Pierce Truing Gum has gone on eBay in the past.

And Elvis's cup of water,

the guy sold the water, but not the cup.

Genius.

So he was keeping it.

He was from ancient Rome.

There's not many of these around.

Who owns the hair when you go to the hairdresser and then they cut it off and then you leave the shop?

Where does it?

I think if someone cuts your hair without your permission, that is technically assault, I believe.

Really?

Yeah, I think so.

I think so.

But if it's your hairdresser, then that's obviously you're giving your hairdresser.

Yeah, I mean, if your hairdresser is cutting your hair without your permission, then you need to have a good odd look at your life.

How is it at the back?

Are you like, I did not give you permission for that?

They used to sell hair from hairdressers to wigmakers.

They still do.

Yeah, they do.

You can sell your own hair.

There are nuns who sell their hair.

So that implies that it belongs to the hairdresser.

Yeah.

I mean, in ancient Rome, blonde slaves were very fashionable.

You get German and British blonde slaves, and they would be bought almost exclusively to have their hair, which you would then cut off and turn into a wig for fashionable Roman ladies who were maybe brown-haired.

Wow, that's so strange.

Okay, so some people who have gone on to do different things.

You know the TV show Gladiators?

Yes.

So I went on to, I found a website of Where Are They Now?

of the Gladiators.

And there's a few people.

One of them was Shadow, and he had a bit of a bad time afterwards.

His lowest point was he was arrested for attempting to use an elderly person's bus pass despite being 43 years old.

That was his lowest moment.

Yeah, he sadly had like a drug addiction, but he's got through it now and he's a rehabilitation counsellor.

Good.

There were three members of the Gladiators team in the 2000 movie Gladiator.

Really?

Isn't that just amazing?

Did they misunderstand the job application?

They're getting the gang back together.

Timing up with a huge puddle sticks with other pillows in either end.

That's amazing.

Guys, stop demanding a travelator.

Didn't exist in ancient Rome.

Yeah, Rockets, Rio, and Rebel.

I don't even remember those names.

I remember Rebel.

I don't remember Rocket.

Who is Rocket?

Isn't he a salad?

What?

Some stuff stuff about salesmen, because that's what Buzz became.

There was a survey done in America.

They took a load of unpleasant things and they asked people whether you preferred this unpleasant thing or Congress.

You mean American Congress, not sexual Congress?

Yes.

Okay, cool, cool, cool.

Can be the same thing in some cases, I suppose.

Yeah, I suppose so, but then you would probably be fired for impropriety at work.

Yeah, quite a bit.

Unless you're Bill Clinton.

So they were given used car salesmen or people in Congress.

And 32% of people preferred Congress and 57% of people preferred used car salesmen.

Wow.

But that's a bit of a strange thing to ask, because do you prefer them in the abstract?

Yeah, it is.

Would you rather

have one to supper?

Exactly.

I'll give you a list of some of the other things that they gave.

Would you prefer people preferred all of these things to Congress, okay?

Root canal surgery,

head lice, the rock band nickelback.

That was quite close.

That was a good one.

That is extreme.

That is a real colonoscopies, traffic jams, cockroaches, Donald Trump, France, Genghis Khan, and Brussels Sprouts.

Genghis Khan is my favourite.

That's amazing.

What do you prefer, Congress or a 13th Century Warlord from Mongolia?

How many people are really hating Genghis Khan these days?

Really?

What I really loathe is that Genghis Khan.

You know what?

I think we should let it lie now with Genghis.

Do they do any combos?

So did they say, would you rather have Congress or a colonoscopy from Genghis car?

Used car salesman.

Yeah, I don't know anything about them.

No.

No, except they're generally unpopular.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

That's just the trope, isn't it?

Because Matilda's dad is one, isn't he?

Yeah, yeah.

Buzz Lightyear was a used car salesman.

Or they knew cars.

Buzz Lightyear.

Buzz Aldrin.

I said Buzz Lightyear, did I?

That's fantastically weird.

I actually kept on booting Buzz Lightyear.

Yeah.

Yeah.

God, that was such a sense of that.

And he was a bit annoyed about that.

Was he?

Yeah, but he wasn't.

Buzz Lightyear was furious about being associated with Buzz Aldrin.

Some low-rent.

Buzz Lightyear has been to Infinity and Beyond.

And Buzz Aldrin's just gone as far as the moon.

I can totally understand.

Ready to prove you're the ultimate IT pro?

Take on paths to power, navigate challenges, conquer quests, and find the wizard of light.

Are you up for it?

Play now at eaton.com/slash paths to power.

Alright, moving on to our final fact, which is from you, James.

Okay, my fact this week is also from Greg's book.

Great.

Excellent book.

And it is about the Catholic sect called the Cathars.

And the Cathars get their name from the fact that they are thought to be pure, like Catharsis.

But during the Middle Ages, some people thought that they got their name Cathars from the fact that they liked to kiss a cat's ass.

If they did like to do that, it is understandable that people assume that was where the name came from.

I don't think they did like that.

So just making that clear.

It was said that they did, but of course.

Was that just rumour-mongering by a rival sect?

It was rumour-mongering amongst the whole of the Catholic Church, really, because everyone hated them.

Why did everyone hate them?

They were very popular in the south of France at the time.

But

they had different views to the rest of the Catholic Church, one of the main ones being that there were two gods, one good one and one evil one, like a Satan and a normal God.

And that was something that was completely thought to be a terrible thing by the Vatican, and so they tried to put them down in any way they could.

And it wasn't just by killing them, it was also by saying that they liked to kiss cats' asses.

Would you rather be killed, or would you rather I told people you like to kiss cats' asses?

Which would you prefer, Congress or Congress with cats' asses?

They were so it was also spread, I think, that they were sodomites, wasn't it?

Which was really unfair.

That was like the most common accusation that was levelled at them because they didn't like se I think sex from the front was how I read it described somewhere because they thought all sex to procreate was sinful because I think they thought that bringing anything into a world that was so full of sin was was not a good thing.

So people just went, Well, if you're not having sex from the front, you must be doing it from the back.

And we're against that.

In fact, I was wondering, because I came across this researching your fact, where the word bugger comes from.

In Bulgaria.

Yes.

I think it was either the Catholics or there was another sect that was similar in Bulgaria.

The bugger mills, was it?

Yeah.

And they were the same.

They were like, we're so pure, we don't believe in having sex to procreate.

And so everyone went, well, that must mean that you're having anal sex, and that's where we get bugger.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

I did not know this.

It's a weird, it's an interesting time as well, because they're sort of around the 1200s, 1300s, and so forth.

And so they are kind of this hot new sect that's gaining momentum.

Hot sex.

Hot sex.

They seem to be quite an ancient sect as well.

Suddenly they gain momentum.

Yeah.

And I think they end up being a bit of a

bit too much of a threat to the Catholic Church.

And so the Catholic Church used both violence, horribly murdering all of them, and then also propaganda.

Because

the best way to destroy someone's credibility is to basically just stop.

Unless they really did just read an advert that said hot new sex.

And then it was next to an advert advertising hot new sex.

And they got confused between the two.

And one was an anal sex ad, one was a.

magazines do you read?

I read, and I so I don't know if this is true of the Cathars.

There was one blog that said it was true of the Cathars, and it was definitely true of the Manichaeans, which were quite similar, also a dualistic sex.

They believed that there were good, heavenly particles that were trapped in plants and trees.

And they thought that the way we could get the good heavenly particles to go back up to heaven, it was our human duty to eat plants and trees and then expel their heavenly air by farting and burping.

And by every time you farted or you burped, then that was sending the good particles back up to heaven where they belonged.

So you were doing your godly duty.

Would you fart in the direction of heaven?

Maybe you had to, yeah, stick your bum in the air.

Maybe that's where the other rumours came around.

Our farter, who art in heaven.

Hallowed be thy name.

Wow.

Those sound like an interesting bunch.

Yeah.

They had quite good gender roles, didn't they?

They thought that you would be reincarnated all the time, but they thought that men could be reincarnated into women and women could be reincarnated into men, so they didn't really see any difference between the two sexes.

Yeah, because this is a period in history where women get a bum deal probably.

I think it was the cats that were getting a bum deal.

Exactly.

It's Eve who is responsible for the fall.

Adam was just like a slightly clumsy human who was a bit taken in, but Eve is the one who gets punished.

So she has a menstrual cycle given to her and pain enduring childbirth.

So It's a kind of slightly misogynistic theology.

We took a lot of flack.

But the ultimate villain in the Bible story, so yeah, Adam was okay, Eve was kind of evil, but obviously the real bad guy in Genesis was a snake,

according to most people.

But there was a Christian sect called the Ophites, and they were snake worshippers, and they actually believed that the snake was a good guy because God was trying to withhold from Adam and Eve the truth and wisdom about the world.

And the snake was there and offered the apple and said, Look, and revealed wisdom and truth to them.

Their equivalent of the Eucharist was they'd arrange bread on a table and then they'd have to charm a snake and lure it to the table and then they'd kiss the snake and then they'd eat the bread.

So that could be what we were doing in general.

Kissing the snake doesn't sound well first of all it sounds like a euphemism and second of all it doesn't sound like a very good thing to be doing.

Sound dangerous doesn't it?

Yeah, it sounds like that.

Maybe that's why the sect died out and didn't make it as well.

Just stick to this lovely eel wearing mascara instead.

But in America at the moment that there are sort of, I think there are kind of cults, or maybe not cults, but sort of slightly extreme Christian sects where they do do snake charming and snake worship I think in the deep south I think

for the same reason I think that's where that comes from

there's definitely a similar place in Greece

if I can find it yeah it's just south of Macedonia hey

that again sounds like a euphemism yeah exactly there's this thing they do on a Greek on the Greek island of Cephalonia and it's to celebrate the falling asleep of the Virgin Mary which is apparently just the death of the Virgin Mary and there's this village where every year a whole bunch of snakes enter the church and slither up to the Virgin Mary, whose statue is at the front, and then slither onto her heart and the snakes and then slither away.

And apparently, it's bad luck if they don't do this every year.

So before World War II broke out, the snakes didn't do it.

And I've tried to find a journalist who's been there.

Because that is a massive turn-up for the history books.

Everyone thought it was the Poland thing, but no.

It was snakes and things you learn on this podcast.

And the Cephalonian church.

But if anyone's been there and seen the snakes do this thing every year, slithering into the church, then I want to know about it.

When is it?

I want pictures.

15th of August.

I want to go to it.

Another sect that I like is the Carpocratians,

second-century religious sects who I just like because they thought that you would be reborn constantly.

They believed that man had to experience everything that was possible to experience on earth.

So had to pass through every condition of earthly life before we could go up to heaven and didn't have to reincarnate anymore.

So they decided that they had to just do as much as they could, like commit as many sins as they could in their lives, you know, sleep as many people as they could.

There always seemed to be good stuff, actually.

So they just lived this incredibly hedonistic life, saying, the only way I'm going to heaven

is if I tick off.

It's fun, isn't it?

Although there are a lot of things that can be done in a human life, and not all of them are fun.

You know, tax return, that's quite boring.

So I think they might have just sort of sidestepped that a little bit of the argument.

I think it's just drinking and sex, actually.

Well, the other thing is, you have a list of everything that there is possible to do, and of course, you put the sex and the drinking at the top and the tax return at the end.

It's the people who live till 120 years old who are going, oh shit.

I'm up to tax returns now.

That's an amazing bucket list though isn't it?

Everything that could ever happen ever.

Okay kissing cats anuses.

Yeah.

One group of things that do kiss cats anuses are other cats because when you have a newborn kitten it must be stimulated to urinate and defecate so its mother will lick its anus to stimulate that.

That's good, isn't it?

I'd forgotten that.

That's really.

So they wouldn't know to urinate.

If a mother forgot to lick its kitten's anus, the kitten would just explode with ways.

Like Tycho Brahe.

That is a niche reference.

That's very good.

I've forgotten that.

There'll be people listening to this who got that reference.

We talked about him.

Tycho Brahi.

Tycho.

I remember talking about him.

He was a Danish astronomer.

With a silver nose.

With a silver nose.

He lost the tip of his nose in a duel.

A pet elk.

Die falling downstairs drunk.

Yeah, which is amazing.

And then one other thing about kissing the anus of a cat.

Kiss the anus of a black cat is a name of a band from Ghent.

From Ghent?

Yeah, they sound good, don't they?

Wow.

But that's a good name for a band, Kiss the Anus of a Black Cat.

Yeah.

Yeah, it means not signing up to your lab.

Maybe do you think that was a nod to the Cathars?

Do you think a nod to witches, I think?

Yeah, I was going to say, because demonology and heresy at the time, it was believed that Satan would take the form of a black cat.

That's right.

Which is why it was believed that

the kissing of the bum hole that the Cathars were alleged to have done was believed to be worshipping Satan.

I think you know that you're worshiping the wrong guy when he makes you kiss his anus.

Yeah, it's like this other sect at drinking and having sex all the time.

Why am I kissing a black cat's anus?

Well, that is an obscene fact.

I'm done.

Speaking of anuses, oh good.

I do have a link because I want to talk about etymology that that we've got wrong

and that we should start spelling things like sovereign differently.

So we've added the G into sovereign wrongly because that comes from the Latin super anus, which means highest one, and there's no G anywhere in that.

And we've just assumed at some point that it's related to reigning, and so we've called it sovereign.

We should be calling the queen the super anus of the.

Superanus.

Yep, she's the super anus.

That we cannot broadcast.

I am in favour of free speech.

Can I just say, as well, that sounds like the best superhero ever.

As well, this is insane.

I don't know what he does.

He fires lasers out of his eyes.

Okay, that's all our facts.

Thanks very much for listening.

If you want to get in touch with any of us, you can get hold of us on our Twitter feed, some of us.

Andy, yours is.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At egg-shaped.

Your Twitter feed.

At Greg underscore Jenna.

And you can email me at podcast at QI.com.

And Greg, what was your book again, which is out this week?

It's called A Million Years in a Day.

Curious History of Everyday Life from Stone Age to Phone Age.

So it's like a history of all the stuff you do in a day and where it comes from.

And it's great.

It's all right.

Thanks very much for listening.

We'll be back again next week.

Goodbye.