42: No Such Thing As A Bloober Reel

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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 Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting with the three regular elves: it's Andy Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Chaczynski.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Czezinski.

My fact this week is that Franz Kafka once convinced his entire family that Einstein's theory of relativity was going to cure his tuberculosis.

Right.

How is that going to work?

It's a good question.

I can't exactly tell you, but I can tell you how it was claimed it was going to work.

I'm not sure I understand it, but essentially, the plan was that you would take a cruise, according to this spoof article that he sent to his family, you take a cruise heading east in the direction of the Earth's rotation,

and this would enlarge your body, and that would close the cavities in your lungs that were causing these problems.

And by enlarging your body and gaining weight by taking this easterly cruise, then you'd be cured.

And he actually said that there was a company in Prague that was fitting out hospital ships specifically for this purpose.

Unfortunately, I think the holes would get bigger as well.

That is one of the many flaws in the claim.

Is it in Superman where he flies round the world and slows down the rotation?

No, he turns it backwards.

He spins the world backwards, which reverses time, which stops his from Lois Lane from dying in a car crash.

I don't think that would work either.

But wouldn't it also turn back the thing he had just saved?

Because he saves the world first, and then he has to turn the earth backwards to save the girl.

But

it would also undo his own saving of the world in the first one, so he'd be in exactly the same thing.

Well, is that similar to the fact that

I've wondered if when you sail back westward, is that going to, I mean, is your TB going to return?

Do you then have to stay in China?

Does everyone with TB have to end up in China?

I think if you keep travelling east, you're alright.

Okay, you have to keep going forever and ever.

Do we know their reaction, the family's reaction, when he returned to the joke?

They were really devastated, yeah.

That's not usually how good jokes end, eh?

That's how good

jokes always end.

Someone being very upset.

Joke fail.

But Kafka was amazing, wasn't he?

Oh, Kafka is the most hilarious character.

He wrote letters obsessively all the time, which is great.

So we've got this, and I think, as most people know, he hardly had anything published in his life.

I think he published 450 pages of work in his life, and on his death.

Metamorphosis was, wasn't it?

Yeah, Metamorphosis was.

A few stories, the trial wasn't.

And then on his death, he said to his publisher, wrote him that famous letter saying, Make sure you burn everything I've written.

And obviously, instead of doing that, it was all published.

Yeah, so his publisher was called Max Brod.

Yeah.

And Max Broad kept all of his papers and then was in a really weird sort of menage menage a trois relationship with a woman called Esther Hoffa and her husband Otto.

And when he died he gave all of Kafka's papers to

Esther Hoffer, who then gave them to her daughter.

And her daughter now lives in an apartment full of cats with all of Kafka's papers in the corner.

And basically

they think they're all going to just get demolished by cat pee.

And we'll never be able to read them.

So everyone wants to get these Kafka papers so that we can read these amazing stories.

And she's like, No, they're mine, and my cats are going to pee on them.

And there's a lot of people that are like, Because I think the British Library or the or maybe the Bodleian is keeps claiming that they actually have the right to them, and there's some ambiguity in what Kafka said.

They should get them, yeah.

And everyone also keeps trying to get rid of the cats, and so they keep going in the council and saying, No, we're going to take these cats, and every time they take like 20 cats away, another 20 arrive, and they just keep coming like an ultimate cat label.

Maybe they just love Kafka.

Kafkat-esque.

Never mind, Kafka.

So, the whole burning all of your work post-your death.

Why?

I think because, so it's actually estimated that he burnt 90% of what he wrote during his life, Kafka.

So we only have 10% of what he wrote.

But he was a real perfectionist and he hated himself.

He was really self-loathing.

So I think he thought that nothing that he ever wrote was good enough.

And I mean, I guess maybe some of it's quite revealing.

Like, he wrote this letter to his father.

He went on holiday for two weeks intending to write, and he ended up spending the entire two weeks writing a letter to his father, this incredibly long letter about everything his father had done wrong.

And it was all his father sounds like a terrible person.

So it was accusing him of doing stuff like his father would say, No one's allowed to speak at the table, the table is for eating, but his father would incessantly speak at the table, no one's allowed to swear, but his father had the foulest mouth of anyone he knew.

He was terrified of his father, and he wrote him, they spent two weeks writing this letter that he never sent him.

Another letter that he wrote that I quite like is he wrote a 16-page letter asking for a promotion when he worked at the Workers' Accident and Insurance Company.

The thing about his father and the dinner table,

Kafka liked to have the diet called Fletcherism.

You know that one?

So that's where you just keep chewing and chewing.

You chew every mouthful a hundred times until it goes.

Yeah, until basically there's nothing left in your mouth and it all turns into mush and you can't.

What's the point of doing that?

By having larger things in your body, it makes you put on more weight.

Whereas if you chew it all, it makes it go through your body.

Because it'll be more broken down, won't it, by your saliva.

Yeah.

So they used to, for instance, they used to have dinner parties like Fletcher's and dinner parties where they would have a timer.

So everyone would have a mouthful and they would have like a one-minute timer and everyone would choo choo-choo chew and then they'd be like,

okay, next mouthful, and then you do that.

Wow, really?

Coming to parties, 7 p.m.

on the 4th, carriages, 9 p.m.

on the 12th.

Fletcher was really cool, actually.

He thought that by doing his particular style of diet, you would only defecate once every two weeks.

And he said that it would smell like warm biscuits.

And also, apparently, he carried around a sample of his own feces around to illustrate the wonder.

Wow.

That's true.

Hopefully, he didn't carry it in a biscuit tin.

He also got really into Muller's.

He was into fads because he was really self-conscious about his weight.

He was afraid of his own reflection because he thought he hated the fact that he was so ugly, which he actually wasn't.

But he got really into Muller's exercise fad, which was, I think, probably the first real big exercise fad.

This guy called Muller telling you the exercise you should do every day.

Was that like naked exercise?

That was the naked exercising.

So he always appeared in a loincloth and said people should just wear the tittle.

And he would go skiing in Sant Moritz and a loincloth and stuff.

And people were a bit sceptical about how beneficial this was to anyone's health.

But

he was devoted to that.

That's fantastic.

I was looking into sort of just famous authors and their quirky ways of writing.

So Kafka, obviously, just going for massively long loaders.

It's really enjoyable to find out that everyone doesn't find writing as easy as you assume that they did.

Some of the biggest authors, so

Victor Hugo, he was so bad at writing and concentrating and needing to be in the.

You know, you always have that, oh, I need to get out of the room and do something more important.

He used to lock away all of his clothes to avoid the temptation of going outside.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, yes.

He often had a chauffeur who he'd give the clothes to and say, on no account, give me these clothes until I've done my work.

And

he did eventually start wearing a shawl.

I think people would walk in and be like, oh,

Was there a Greek writer who shaved half of his head?

And the idea was that he would be too embarrassed to go out in public, and so he would stay in and write.

I can't remember who that was.

Wow.

It's a nice idea.

These are all universally bad ideas.

That's the interesting thing for these great writers.

Yeah, because if you can't resist the temptation, you end up wandering the streets stark naked with half a head of hair, and you're in an asylum.

But the half of the head of hair is okay, because if you were desperate enough, you could just make sure that you were facing one direction wherever you went.

As long as you kept that spot, no one would know.

Just on writing practices.

I didn't know this about T.S.

Eliot, who, similarly to Kafka, left instructions.

He didn't want his life written by anyone.

He left instructions there should be no official biography of him.

And I think Peter Ackroyd's just written one, but he basically wasn't allowed access to any of T.S.

Eliot's private letters or any of his life, so it's quite difficult.

He made it up.

Yeah, I think he just made it all up.

So maybe this is made up.

But no, T.S.

Eliot used to put very pale green makeup on his face, and nobody knows why.

He wore very pale green makeup.

People have speculated it was to look like a corpse, although I don't know why he'd want to do that.

Maybe it was just a fashion thing.

T.S.

Eliot, who's he?

The greenface guy.

Maybe

he was just always insanely jealous.

Maybe it was that.

Oh, yeah, just constantly.

What are his poems like?

I haven't read it.

Are they just like,

she's with him again?

Yeah.

Did you see the green cat in Bulgaria this week?

It was in the news.

No, yeah.

Yeah, there's a green cat in Bulgaria.

It's like bright green, and everyone's like, whoa, how on earth could it be a bright green cat?

Is it like some kind of science experiment gone wrong or something?

But apparently it likes sleeping in a tub of green paint.

Right.

How long did it take them to work that out?

Not so long.

Yeah, okay.

Victor Hugo, I think this is right, kept

an extremely detailed diary of all the women he slept with.

Did he?

Yeah, but it was, I mean, it was extremely detailed.

It was like a spreadsheet with lots of different columns and lots of different.

That's kind of a woman's worst nightmare.

That's like

the curator at the Natural History Museum.

He does that, doesn't he?

Have we spoken of that again?

No,

did we talk about this on the podcast?

He used to collect

after every sexual conquest a single hair of pubic hair of theirs.

Yeah, after he after he.

Sorry, we should specify this is not the current curator of the Natural History.

No, no, no, no.

You just said the curator, Dan, but I just want to avoid any potential.

Oh, no, I mean, as in the one that we've spoken about before, he was a curator.

I can't remember his name.

He used to collect

just one sprig.

I seem to remember sprig of pubic hair being the word used.

And he would file them in colour and date, and he did a proper curator's job on it.

So they were going through all his files after he died, and they came across this kind of collection of pictures.

Can you visit that at the Natural History Museum?

It's not on display at the moment, though.

It's a real shame.

It should be, though, yeah.

It should.

It's very distressing.

Other writers and their weird writing habits.

There was a writer who was a huge American novelist at the sort of early 1900s, Thomas Clayton Wolfe, who always used to write on a refrigerator because he was so tall, which just seems like he's rubbing in people's faces.

Little magnet letters.

Yeah.

It took him a long time to get a novel out, though.

Imagine sending it to the publishers as well.

There are 300 fridges outside.

Kids rearranging it.

This novel just seems to say, bum, bum, wee.

Just going back to Kafka, if we can.

Yes.

So there was a biography of Kafka written a couple of years ago by a guy called James Hawes, and he caused controversy because he wanted to talk about the pornography that Kafka had.

And apparently he was saying that Kafka was into hardcore porn, including images of hedgehog-style creatures performing fellatio.

Hedgehog-style creatures.

Yeah, so like creatures that look a bit like a hedgehog, but like porcupines, maybe.

I don't know.

We'll just say porcupine.

I think they're like half human, half-hedgehog things.

So he was a furry.

Isn't that what a furry is?

Yeah.

Kind of.

I'm not sure he dressed up as them.

Okay.

But then the German

scholars then said, well, this is obviously rubbish.

This author in Britain is just a prude, and these hedgehog kind of things are just not pornography at all.

They're just high art.

Oh, yeah.

And he said that comparing those illustrations to hardcore porn is like comparing a poem by Henrik Heine with an advertising slogan for McDonald's.

So basically, this isn't hardcore.

You should see our hardcore.

Come into the back room.

I'll show you something.

Since we're on the subject, I was reading a book about the history of London and sort of London and Weiss, basically, and it had titles for 19th-century pornography, which were quite something.

So The Spreeish Spouter, or Flash Cove's Slap-Up Reciter.

I mean, that is a good title.

The Jolly Companion and The Story of a Dildo.

It sounds like it could almost be a girl's name.

You'd see it on the shelf, and you think, oh, the maiden a dildo.

Well, it might have been the story of a dildo, as in the story of Alan Dildo.

We don't know.

So I spoke about on a previous podcast just on this subject about monster erotica.

You guys remember?

So

it's an amazing.

I spent the weekend looking more into it.

I've downloaded a number of kids.

But the interesting thing was, and they're all on Kindle, you can get them.

There's this whole world of Monster Erotica, and you would figure that who the hell's reading this?

No one's reading it.

Kafka's reading it.

Kaska was reading it.

That's who he was reading.

It turns out some of the authors are making up to $30,000 a month.

If this is an advert in a sidebar saying how I earn $30,000 a month working from home, that's it's a con.

Clearly, the whole $30,000 is coming out of Dan's bank account.

Kafka used to laugh uncontrollably at his own jokes, which is weird.

Indeed.

Another thing which I think he would have found funny, because he had a really morbid sense of humour, hence the a spoof letter to his family convincing them he wasn't going to die, which I don't know if I mentioned this, but he did die of T B quite young,

shortly after sending them that spoof article,

was that while he was writing The Hunger Artist, which was a story about starvation, he was writing that as he was dying of T B.

And during the writing of that about someone who can't eat, his throat closed up and he's not being able to eat anything.

So it's sort of like his body was trying to give him the visceral experience of what he was writing about.

Well,

my first job was interviewing women with acid reflux

for a market research company.

And after four days of doing that, my boss and I, both doing the same interviews, we both got the symptoms of acid reflux on the same night.

Coincidence, no.

One more thing about letters.

Gordon Brown apparently liked to write letters to people in the X Factor.

And

he wrote basically for a few years, I think it was while he was prime minister, he would write to people and say, Oh, I thought you were very good, or I thought you were.

I remember this, yeah.

Yeah,

he wrote to one guy, Daniel Evans, a 38-year-old swimming pool cleaner, and said, On a personal note, can I say that the next time Simon says you are only supported by the over 60s, you can tell him I disagree.

He was 57.

Wow.

Thanks, Gunn really helping my case.

Yeah, was he really a massive fan?

Apparently.

No, it sounds like some kind of sad political stunt that his stupid PR advisors told him to do along with smiling like a maniac in order to ingratiate himself with people, doesn't it?

Yeah,

I'd like to think it was real.

Oh, I've got one more thing about the writing process.

Okay, so

there's an inventor who James, it turns out, has met called Dr.

Yoshiro Nakamatsu.

Have you met him?

Yep, so you've met him.

Okay, so he's responsible for 3,300 inventions, according to him, James.

He claims to be the most prolific inventor of all time.

Yeah, he patented the floppy disk.

He had many of his greatest ideas when he was close to drowning.

And when you say many, it means obviously this is a guy who's shouldn't be in a pool.

And so basically he

also invented scuba apparatus.

On bands.

So he realized that in order to have good ideas, or at least what works for him, is that he needs to be at the bottom of a pool simulating the idea that he's about about to drown.

And he had developed one of his inventions, an underwater notepad.

So he'd start jotting ideas down as he was on the brink of death and then swim back to the surface and come out and go, block me disc, Morris.

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Okay, time for fact number two, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact this week is that dead geckos still stick to walls.

It's just pleasing, isn't it?

Just a nice fact.

And this was tested by a team of scientists who stuck a gecko.

Well, they didn't stick a gecko on a wall, they just let it climb up one.

And then killed it.

And then killed it.

Did they really?

That's how they did it.

Yeah, it was induced death rather than waiting for the gecko to die of natural causes, which would, to be fair, have slowed the experiment down a great deal.

So it's really interesting.

How come you don't see loads of dead geckos on the walls all the time, and they're not filling up all the walls?

You do.

Every lizard wallpaper you see, that's actually real lizard wallpapers that you see.

You know, yeah, very fashionable.

Well, it lasts not forever.

It lasts until a while after they die.

At least half an hour after they die, they can still be there.

Quick question.

You know how we've been...

Because Andre Geim,

who is a professor,

he came up with the idea of a...

Nobel Prize winner?

Yeah, Nobel Prize winner for graphene.

Going to change the world.

He does these Friday night experiments.

One of the things that he's invented, in which he's trying to make better, is a glove which acts like a gecko.

It's called gecko tape, I believe.

You can climb up a wall.

The only issue that they have with it is that unlike a gecko,

the little hairs, which is what they are using, so spider hairs and gecko hairs, that's the kind of technology that they're trying to harness,

it clogs up, and so you start slipping and you start going down.

My question is, get a big enough gecko.

Why can't you create a glove where a live gecko is on the actual end of the glove and you climb a wall

with four geckos attached to your hands and your feet?

There's no reason.

There's no reason at all.

Has anyone tried?

Yeah, there are ethical reasons, definitely.

Oh, hang on.

They're baking them.

Well, they can climb walls and killing them while they're there.

We don't know.

We're already in dubious territory.

That's for scientific purposes, not Spider-Man purposes.

This would be for military.

Alright, we should say how they can do it in the first place.

So it's very, very clever.

Every square millimetre of a gecko's foot contains 14,000 little hair-like structures.

And as they climb up the wall, they basically push these into contact with the wall, and they use something called the van der Waals force, which is so cool.

It basically disrupts the balance of electrons and protons in atoms.

So, the hair, as it's pushed towards the wall, it pushes all the electrons of the first atom of the wall to one end, right?

So, it pushes them to the other end.

So, that atom is next to the one next to it, and it repels all the electrons to the other one, because like forces repel.

That means that you've got an atom with all electrons at one end, and an atom with all protons at one end, and they then are attracted to each other and stick together.

That in microcosm is how the gecko climbs up walls.

And they can support 20 times their own weight.

I think

they've inspired a kind of super glue, the way it works.

They've designed superglue based on that.

There is a type of super glue that's based on that and the thing that mussels use.

So mussels will attach to rocks using a kind of like cement.

And they've mixed that kind of cement technology with the Van der Waals technology of the Geckos, and they've got a new adhesive called

Gecko or something like that, which is supposed to be a super duper amazing

but also works underwater, so it could be used for

elastoplasts that won't go fall off in the bath and stuff like that.

That would be very handy.

That would be really useful.

Compared to they haven't got on that yet, but I don't think the elastoplast industry would allow it.

No, they make their money from people constantly losing them in the bath, put a new one on.

So it's like a conspiracy theory.

Yeah, you're going up against big plaster there.

I wonder if there's a technology that we've not yet harnessed in the.

You know, when you lick an icicle and your tongue sticks to it?

Yeah.

I mean, that's a very good, sticky little thing that we haven't really harnessed.

Do you think it's like 20 times your own weight?

Do you think you could hang off.

Have you seen Dom and Dommer when they're trying to figure out?

I have, yeah, but I don't know if that.

They did a lot of scientific research.

There's about five people trying to pull Jeff Daniels' tongue off that.

Okay.

Look, it's really cold outside today.

Yeah.

That wall is very cold.

Put your tongue in it.

We'll kill you, and we'll see if you still stick around.

Good work.

On geckos,

there was,

do you guys remember that woman earlier on this year who claimed that she'd given birth to a gecko?

Oh, yes,

in Indonesia,

and her and a midwife both reported it.

She thought she was going to give birth to a child, and when it came out, it turned out that it was a lizard coated in mucus and blood, apparently, slithered out of the birth canal.

And I don't know why the midwife had to help with that.

It seems because it was quite easy.

Oh, yeah, of course.

Those damned adhesive feet.

But then they became the target of this witch hunt in Indonesia because she was accused of witchcraft.

So, why would you make that hoax?

Why would you pretend you'd given birth to a lizard?

It must be like the Kafka joke.

She thought this is going to go down a tree and then it got revealed.

Eventually, that kind of backfired.

Wow.

Geckos lick their own eyes to keep them.

They can't blink.

So they just go around licking their own eyes.

Oh, yeah.

Isn't it that they don't have eyelids?

They've got a sort of clear film over their eyes, but they don't have movable eyelids, I believe.

Is that right?

You have three eyelids, Dan.

I've always thought you looked a bit weird.

What do you mean?

Three eyelids on each eye.

Do I?

So the one that goes down, the one that goes up, and you have another little one.

There's a little kind of flap of pink in the corner of your eye, and that is what used to be your third eyelid, and now it's only a little tiny flap.

That's very coincidental, because geckos have three eyes.

Do they?

They have a third eye, which is a little light-sensing.

Oh, a pineal one.

Yeah, pineal eye.

I'm trying to think of how to describe it, really.

What does pineal mean?

Okay, so basically, it is,

they are cells which will

sense light.

And their outgrowths are the pineal gland, which is in the top of your head.

And I think the idea is that they can then sense the change in light above them.

So if any kind of predators come from above, then they'll be able to sense them.

I think that's right.

Yeah.

And they've done tests on people where, and I don't think this is a pineapple thing, but where completely blind people can tell whether a light is on or not.

Because they hear someone click the switch.

No.

There's a type of gecko called the Moorish Gecko and they change colour.

They are delicious.

They change colour if you put them on a surface, but unlike a chameleon, they change colour to be the same colour as a surface.

Oh, they genuinely camouflage themselves.

Yeah, exactly.

And these geckos, say you put them on a yellow surface, they'll turn yellow.

But if you blindfold them, they'll still turn yellow.

Uh because it's not their eyes that are getting the sensors, it's um some kind of light sensors in their skin that are doing it.

That sounds amazing.

So if you put the blindfold around their s kind of stomachs, then they won't be able to see it and they won't be able to change.

That's not a blindfold though, is it?

It's a

stomach fold.

Can they do patterns?

I like can you put them on a picture of Marilyn Marilyn Monroe and have like that appear on a gecko.

Very sexy.

You're fulfilling a long-standing fantasy of Dan's here, which kind of gecko

looks like Marilyn Monroe.

It's a monster arrival.

Very much the kafka of the office.

There was a gecko discovered in 1877.

A British lieutenant colonel called R.

H.

Bedam found it in India and then it disappeared.

And we just rediscovered it 135 years later.

We stumbled back upon it.

Same one.

The J.

Paul Ground gecko.

Very old, very bored.

Hasn't had any company for a long time.

Might miss the colonel.

Okay, can I tell you something about adhesion?

Yeah, I think you will like.

Okay, this is in 2008.

A campaigner against a third runway at Heathrow attempted to glue himself to Gordon Brown at a Downing Street reception.

He's called Danglass.

That'd be terrible because you'd have to spend the whole Saturday night watching X Factor.

So he was about to receive an award from the Prime Minister for his campaigning work, and then he stuck out his super-glued hand and touched the Prime Minister's sleeve.

And

Downing Street later said there was no stickiness of any significance.

But the amazing thing is, he'd smuggle this in in his pants.

And he said afterwards, I just glued myself to him, and after 20 seconds, he tore my hand off.

It really hurt.

He tore his hand off?

He's a tough man.

Wow, put him around.

He had to give a couple of tugs before it came away.

He was just grinning about it.

He didn't seem to take me seriously.

And then later on, he was allowed to stay at number 10 for 40 minutes after this happened.

Wow.

And when he left the building, I'm quoting from the BBC article about it here.

He tried to glue himself to the gates of Downing Street, but was prevented from doing so by a police officer.

I didn't have much glue left by that point, he said.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the active ingredient in the first ever homeopathy treatment was the blood of Thomas Beckett.

Wow.

So, this basically, when Thomas Beckett died, he was basically a saint straight away as soon as he died, and everyone thought he was great.

And they had his blood as a relic, but they only had a small amount of his blood.

So, the way that they could give it to lots of different people was to put a tiny drop in an enormous vat of water and then take bits of that water and give it to people, and it supposedly would be able to cure everything.

Which, as far as I'm concerned, is pretty much homeopathy.

I agree.

And it's

supposedly

just a few years after he died,

from the time that they started doing it to a few years after, something like 703 miracles, supposedly.

Yes, but that was over the whole, I think that was over a 10-year period.

And in just one year, a couple of years later, 100,000 people visited the

low hit rate.

So it's quite a low hit rate.

But I found another report saying it was that you would drink the water, this homeopathic water that James has mentioned.

And also, there were cases reported in which it was used for the magical detection of thieves and even for extinguishing fires, which

was the sane as thieves.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a miracle.

The holy water put out this fire.

I was thirsty before, and now I am not thirsty.

I was dirty before.

I was too hot before

this magical substance.

Can I tell you about these, just really quickly, about those monks?

Yeah, please.

So one of them was called William of Canterbury, of the two monks who was writing down the channel.

Because this was in Canterbury.

That's where he died, right?

That's where he was buried, anyway.

Because he was the Archbishop, and she was killed there.

And that's part of Canterbury Tales as well.

He is the journey.

Oh, to visit.

The end point is Thomas A.

Beckett.

Right.

Or Thomas Becket, not A.

Beckett, right?

Thomas A.

Beckett is a later edition.

He never really had the ah.

It was the same with A.

Dildo.

He was called Dildo.

If he was on Twitter these days, he would be at Thomas Beckett.

Yep.

I always feel sorry for Henry II in the Thomas Beckett incident because he said, didn't he, famously, well, people claim that he said, Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest or some other phrase like that.

And that is the kind of thing you say when you're slightly pissed off with somebody and what you're not asking your friends to do is actually go and brutally murder them.

I wonder if they came back and were like, well, we did it.

He's like, you did what?

Did what?

Yeah.

Oh, my God, guys.

Simon Sharma reckons that

that's not the right phrase.

That's a really neat phrase.

And the biographer at the time, Edward Grimm, wrote in Latin, and

the translation is, What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a lone-born cleric?

Which is not catchy.

But actually, there's no way of saying he's not saying they're go and kill him, is he?

No.

Although he is

even more ambiguous.

But he is actively saying that

the people who work for him have a responsibility to go and seek vengeance isn't he in that quote he's saying you're crap because you're letting us exactly pull over me and i bet they got told off for doing it it's one of those bosses just never happy one of them had to go and fight another crusades for 14 years to say sorry just to say sorry yeah

yeah oh wow well henry was was i think whipped by 80 monks yeah like he asked for that

really requested it not he was asking for it

yeah he was like he wanted to be penitent so he asked to be whipped by these monks yeah and they they just said sure that's not weird.

We'll do it.

It was more common at the time

to

request for monks to whip you.

You're making it sound weird now.

One thing, I read a really peculiar thing about him, peculiar to me, but then clearly I find things like being whipped by 80 monks peculiar.

So maybe this is

a very normal thing.

I read that on his death, the monks at Canterbury discovered that he wore a hair shirt and it was infested with lice.

These were under his vestments.

What's a hair shirt?

That is a special shirt made of very coarse animal hair that you put on under your normal clothes and it scourges and irritates you and

to keep you together.

Oh, so it wasn't like a nice comfort thing.

No,

it wasn't.

Do you not wear those?

What do you wear when you go to be whipped by 80 people?

Thomas Beckett was voted the second worst Briton of the last thousand years

in a poll by BBC History magazine.

Who came first?

Chat the Ripper.

Wow, so that's quite harsh, considering that he wasn't really a murderer.

Considering that everyone loved him as well.

Yeah.

He wasn't a murderer.

No.

There are lots of other murderers.

I'm surprised by Jack the Ripper.

What?

I'm surprised by Jack the Ripper being voted the worst Britain.

The worst of all time.

Of all time.

Who would you go for?

I don't know, but like.

Like Jeremy Markson.

There are.

There's a theory he got his name, Beckett, from Beck, which means beak, because he had quite a prominent nose, and that was maybe a family trait.

And that's where his family had got the surname from.

It's just a theory, but

it'sn't that humanises him a bit.

Thomas Beakey.

When he was killed, he'd just got back from a six-year-old I was going to say six-year holiday.

He'd actually been exiled

in fearing his life, but still.

That's how he was marketing it to his friends.

So he was away for six years because he was in fear of his life.

Yeah, he was.

He was right.

When he literally arrived back, he was killed.

He came back under an amnesty because he had had a huge power struggle with the king, and then he got back under an agreement, and it was all going to be fine, and then he started excommunicating a load of people

who he'd specifically agreed he wouldn't, or the king had asked him not to.

Okay, so that was the reason that he was killed.

Back on your word.

On homeopathy, the guy who came up with it and called it homeopathy, and came with the original theory for it, who was Hahnemann.

He thought that coffee was the thing that caused he went through a phase of thinking that coffee caused huge numbers of diseases.

And he said the thing that was wrong with coffee, and the reason you know it's bad, is'cause coffee drinking makes everything pleasurable and you know that in life you're supposed to suffer as well as experience pleasure.

And uh you sort of get drunk on coffee and you enjoy everything too much and that's not how it's supposed to be.

So he says even in the corporal functions, which in a natural state of health are accompanied by rude and almost painful sensations, now operate with an astonishing facility and even with a species of pleasure.

What is he referring to when he talks about corporal functions?

It sounds a lot like he's referring to the fact that you've suddenly got chronic diarrhea as soon as you have a coffee and it sounds to me like he was just a constipated man.

Sounds like he's got IBS.

Yeah, it does, doesn't it?

Accompanied by rude and painful sensations.

Yeah, it's IBS.

Yeah, good diagnosis.

So, George VI received homeopathic treatment when he was trying to get his speech right.

So, in the king's speech, he had that, but it wasn't in the movie.

Oh, so what did he have?

What did they give him a ground-up word diluted heavily?

How did they?

Just a very short word, yeah.

With lots of silence, it was a medicine called hypericum, and he was so appreciative of it that he named a racehorse after it.

So quite appreciative.

Don't name a child after it.

King Hypericum.

Probably best.

I saw it, I was looking on a forum about just, I guess, these kind of miracle relics that are out there.

And

someone was asking an interesting question, which is,

these relics used to sort of perform or

give miracles in quite a sort of large volume in the early days.

And the question was, as time passes, do relics perform less miracles just because, like the gecko on the wall, after half an hour, it will fall off?

Has it got a period of battery running out of it?

Exactly.

Does it have the ability to do it for so long?

And everyone obviously said no on the forum.

But yeah, I just like that as a question.

Do they run out of steam?

Do they run out of steam?

Yeah.

Well, because you just, I love, this is my favorite thing about this part of history is with these kind of relics.

Like, it does sound like everyone was a superhero back then, and we've lost the ability to be superheroes.

I found a thing that James posted on QI, the forums, years ago.

I found it this week.

This is really funny.

So, this is someone's superpower from back in the day.

The Times reported that Sonora Ana Murano, the luminous woman of Piranho, she suffered from asthma, and as a result of the asthma, emitted a blue glow from her breasts as she slept.

Many doctors came to witness the phenomenon.

Yeah, Ben.

But apparently, I'm not sure if there's ever an answer to why she had.

Is that a superpower?

Are we counting that as a superhero?

Well, I mean,

you know, it was

a luminous breast woman.

What if you're lost in the.

She piled up with T.S.

Eliot and his green face that you go on,

you know, join a circus.

If that's the Times, I guess that's not as old as I thought it was.

No, it's quite.

I remember that.

I don't remember it happening.

I wasn't posing as a doctor or anything.

No, but I remember reading about it.

I think I read it in Fourteen Times, actually, so it must have been only ten in the last ten years.

Yeah.

I'm not sure how real it was.

Blue boobs.

Bloobs, for short.

Bloob are reel is after they finished filming a film, they just superimpose blue breasts onto everyone.

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

And my fact this week is that in 2013, a group of people attempted to crowdfund London's first ever UFO museum.

They needed a million dollars, but unfortunately, after 30 days of pushing and trying to raise money, they only managed to get $370.

I mean, a million in 30 days is very ambitious, but also that is what?

That's $10 a day they managed to raise.

It's almost like the kind of people who are putting this together have unrealistic ideas not based in reality.

Yeah, they only got four pledges, really, from people, and someone, one, it felt like one of them was their mom.

It was like, you know, like when you set up this thing, and it's like, oh, please support my thing.

Always, your parents come in first.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, but I mean, it looked really interesting.

What was going to be in the UFO museum?

Well, I think it was going to be UK-based UFO stuff, of which there is tons.

The biggest ever sighting of UFO, like a big UFO incident, was in the UK.

Yeah, but I didn't get the actual saucer, did we?

We don't have the UFOs.

Is it just a lot of mad people telling anecdotes, sort of stuck in rooms in the museum saying, I saw this really scary thing in the sky?

Yeah.

Well, what would be really great is that you go in and you don't see anything and you come in and you go, we saw nothing in there.

And then they say, yeah, there's the men in black at the end who wipe your memory.

That's a really cheap way of making a.

That's a brilliant idea.

So there is a...

There's not a UFO museum that I can find in existence, but you know, I assume about...

Are there UFO museums all over the world?

Yeah, there's one in Roswell.

Oh, the Roswell one.

Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

What's in there?

It's all, I guess I'll put like

a dummy of an alien, and that will become as famous as what could be the real alien, because enough people have seen it.

Yeah, that's what they do.

So there's a cryptozoology museum in Maine, and it seems like they do the same thing.

They just keep making models of made-up animals and then saying, isn't this amazing?

This is what a Yeti would look like if it was a thing.

Yes.

But it does sound quite cool, the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland.

They've got thousands of exhibits and like bits that are claiming to be bits of Barnum's Fiji mermaid.

I kind of want to test you on whether you know what all these made-up words are.

I know the mermaid.

Yeah, the mermaid.

You can see a few of them at the British Museum.

So these are the.

Yeah, so these are the ones that are half monkey, half fish sewn together.

Yeah,

they are, they're right.

They're just inside on the right-hand side of the British Museum.

I think we've talked about them before.

Yeah, I think that's a good question.

We've talked about them in relation to P.T.

Barnum,

who had a load of them.

One of his other tricks was he said, I have a cherry-coloured cat in this bag.

And it it was just sleeping in some cherry paint.

No, it was just a black cat.

And he said, Some cherries are black.

Wow.

That's quite good.

Yeah.

I kissed a girl by the mermaid in the British Museum.

Sorry?

Just remember.

That's the worst Katie Perry song I've ever heard.

I kissed a girl by the mermaid.

It sounds weird.

You know that half monkey fish thing.

Where did you kiss her?

Just next to the mermaid.

A first date.

So, Dan, do you know what this is?

So, this museum contains loads of hair samples of the abominable snowman and Orang Pen Deck and Yowie.

It's not a single pew from each one.

I think it is.

And there's also a letter from the actor Jimmy Stewart, who's one of my favourite actors.

So, this disappoints me if it's true.

A letter from the actor Jimmy Stewart is on display as he is linked to the Pang Bok Yeti hand mystery.

A hand.

Yeah.

How is Jimmy Stewart linked to this?

There was a hand which supposedly belonged to a Yeti.

But yeah, he was very obsessed with Yetis and he managed to get his hands on this.

There was a review of this museum, and the guy said, quite frankly, we have more creepy things in my living room than they have in this museum.

And then he gave it five stars.

Another museum in America, the Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum, which is in Plano, Texas.

This was a guy called Michael Bowden, who was an exterminator, and he has dead cockroaches dressed as celebrities.

Have you got any examples?

Yes, Ross Peroach

and David Letteroach are two.

I think he's also got a Liberochi, hasn't he?

Oh, yeah.

It's in a little gold cape sitting at a tiny piano.

Yeah.

So this guy's experience with the bazaar, I'm reading here, began in the 1980s when he held a contest to find the biggest cockroach in Dallas.

He later travelled the country judging cockroach fashion contests as a promotional stunt for an insecticide company.

Well, you wouldn't do it as anything else, would you?

You wouldn't do it as a serious investigation.

I like the way that he's had that job and he's turned it into something awesome, like a museum.

I bet the insecticide company is annoyed.

He sort of went a bit off-piste.

He did.

That's very funny.

Daniel, I have a question for you.

What shape was the first ever flying saucer?

Ooh.

There's a clue in the word saucer.

So it was round like a saucer.

No!

I tricked you.

What they're trying.

No, the word saucer, why it was called flying saucer, is because it skipped across the sky like a saucer.

Like if you were skimming a saucer.

That's why it got called that.

It was actually

crescent-shaped, like a boomerang.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Is that why we can't keep them?

Because they always go back to where they came from.

Oh, yeah.

Why there aren't any UFOs in the museum?

So do we know anything about the people who started this?

Are they

genuine believers in

alien UFOs?

Yeah, well I'll give you the basic blurb that they wrote.

Our team includes people of sound mind who wanted to go to a UFO museum one day close to home in Paris, London and Berlin and realized that they had to travel thousands of miles to visit such a place.

When you have to start off something by saying, where of sound mind, obviously it's like.

Well, I think they think sound mind means they hear voices in their head.

We already have access to material from a former UFO museum, but to open a new place today that would look modern, one would need much more material and to purchase new equipment.

We've even found a few perfect locations to rent in London, but there are many other issues to solve first.

We need your support to do more research, produce more information boards, mannequins, videos, pictures, computers, etc.

We truly believe this is a unique, exciting project that would attract a lot of people, and we need your help and support to make this become a reality.

That was their basic blurb.

No mention of what would be in there.

Have you heard of Kick Ended?

No.

No.

It's a side project to Kickstarter, which a man has set up, which is all the projects on Kickstarter which have made nothing.

Okay.

And they include

the book So Long Constipation.

It's a toilet book.

Anyone who doesn't have two or more easily passable bowel movements a day will benefit from reading So Long Constipation.

Have you seen those adverts for anti-constipation medicine which say instant overnight relief?

No.

It really doesn't sound like that one, does it?

You might want to clean your teeth in the morning.

Total immediate relief wherever you are.

Uncontrollable relief everywhere.

Sorry.

So long constipation didn't get a single pledge.

No, nothing.

Do you know what else didn't get a single pledge?

Is someone called Henrietta needed to raise $6,000 to fund her comedy show called Please Love Me.

Oh, God, nothing.

Nobody.

Zero.

If you're at the Henrietta, we love you.

Another quite good idea that I might have donated to was the Little Eats.

Did you read that?

Which is a guy who has invented a food that is dog food and human food.

Which, if you have a dog, there always.

You can eat dog food, can't you?

Yeah, and dogs can eat human food.

I don't know how.

Can you eat dog food without really hating it?

Yeah, well, no, probably not.

It's probably not tasty, but I think you can eat it.

Yeah, I remember.

Didn't you work a thing about a supermarket?

There was a fact that I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but it's something like there is enough food in a supermarket for a single person to stay alive for 56 years, and it's something like 67 years if you're willing to eat dog food.

Oh, yeah.

I'd eat the dog food early on, because you don't want your last year to be the worst year.

You'd save the Harabos.

Yeah, it would.

That's a really good idea.

Yeah.

But then if you get saved after like five years,

why did you eat the dog food first?

Yeah, there'd be psychologically a lot of questions going at.

Yeah.

Can I just take it back to museums for a second?

Because I just did a search on the sort of weird museums of the world.

And there's so many great ones.

I don't know why they exist, but I'm so glad that they do.

The giant shoe museum.

I don't know if you count it as a museum.

It's a single exhibit wall.

Is it a shoe?

No, it says here to see the museum's collections, visitors must drop quarters into a coin box and then look through stereoscope viewing slots that reveal views of a variety of giant shoes, including size 37.

That's American size, though.

Yeah, but that was worn by the world's tallest man and the world's largest collection of giant shoes.

The world's tallest ever man, William Wadlow.

Yeah.

Was he called?

No, Robert Wadlow.

He was a shoe salesman.

That was his job.

Was he?

Because he had to get really, really big shoes because they didn't make them that size.

He went to the company and they said, yeah, sure, you you can have them for free if you go around and sell them.

And he did.

But why would anyone else want to buy a size 37 shoes?

It was an example of what great worksmanship you have because you can make such a big one, then surely you can make little ones as well.

Right, okay.

That's very cool.

So, Minnesota's Science Museum has the contents of a former museum inside it, which was called the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices.

Oh, yeah.

Including the prostate gland warmer, the vibratory chair, and the rectorotor.

You just picked three at random there, aren't you?

France has four museums devoted to foie gras.

Wow.

I mean, they didn't want more than the first one, actually, but the people behind the museum just kept stuffing them down their throats.

That's good.

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 spoken about over the course of this podcast, you can get us on our Twitter handles.

You can get us either on at QIPodcast or on our individual ones.

I am on at Schreiberland.

James at Egg Shaped.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

And Jasinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep.

Or you can also head over to no such thingasafish.com and you can find all of our previous episodes on there.

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

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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