36: No Such Thing As A Game Of King's Footsie

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We ran it on QI a few years ago,

which was there's no such thing as a fish.

No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life.

It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

And once again, we've gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here they are.

Chaczynski, fact number one.

My fact is that if you got into an argument in 18th century Abyssinia, you could resolve it by blaming everything on the camel.

The camel?

On the camel, yeah.

We're all arguments about who had eaten the hay.

I think it turned out that all crimes were perpetrated by camels.

If you blamed it on the camel too much, he's bound to get the hump.

Hey, how long have you been planning that?

Yeah, so this was first recorded in Bruce's travels into Abyssinia to discover the source of the Nile.

And this book was written between 1768 and 1773, and it was his travels around Africa trying to find the source of the Nile.

And he observed this tradition.

Wow.

So what exactly does it involve?

So what he said was he came across a town where the townspeople had been fighting for several days when it was agreed upon by the elders of both parties that nobody had been to blame on either side, but the whole wrong was the work of a camel.

And so, the townspeople rounded up this camel.

They chose a camel at random, I guess.

You can't round up one camel.

Well, it was a very clever camel.

It was a criminal camel.

It was seized, and everyone in the town gathered around, and one by one they speared the camel.

And he records that they upbraided the camel with all the wrongs done.

So they told the camel everything it had done wrong, shouted at it for a while.

Each one of them speared it, and then apparently retired fully satisfied as to the wrongs they had received from the camel.

So, yeah, there's quite a long history of blaming things on animals, isn't there?

Like scapegoating, for instance, is a famous one.

There was a case in St Kilda, I think, where a great orc was accused of being responsible for a storm that had ravaged St Kilda.

It was captured and put on trial and found guilty and stoned to death.

This is a real animal, presumably.

It's like a bird, right?

A-U-K is a bird.

It's now extinct.

That was one of the first things I ever researched for QI was the Great Hawk, because I joined during the G-Series.

They used them for everything on St Kilda, didn't they?

Yes, they used Fulmers and Gannets and orcs, and they ate porridge for breakfast, which was sprinkled with Great Hawk shavings.

They used to go and kill them in their thousands, and men would just walk around because they're flightless.

They would go to the islands where they flocked, and they would just go around clubbing them to death because it saved ammunition.

So you didn't have to waste bullets killing them.

And then the last one was seen

floating out at sea in the mid-19th century.

And that was it.

It's never been seen since.

Wow.

Awkward.

Oh my god.

Ancient Egyptians used to, when they felt they'd been particularly sinful, used to sacrifice an animal and lump all their sins onto this animal, then sacrifice it, and then they'd sell it to foreigners.

They'd sell it to Greeks or other foreigners because they didn't want to eat the sin on sapien.

So is that this where we get the scapegoat from?

Is that right?

No, the scapegoat.

The scapegoat is from the Torah, from Jewish folklore, I think.

And what they would do is on the Day of Atonement, the Jewish high priest would lay his hands on a live goat, confess all the sins of the children of Israel, and then send it away into the wilderness.

It's like a Santa Claus who just gets the naughty list, but then has to deal with it.

The ancient Greeks used people for this kind of purpose, didn't they?

So they would have a person, I think it was often a disabled person, who they would, again, they'd pile all their sins upon this person and send him into exile, and that would be that person taking their sins away.

And he was called a pharmacos, which is where we get pharmacy or pharmaceuticals is from, because he would remedy the sins of

a community.

Yeah, it's amazing.

Yeah, it's quite a cool word origin and sort of unpleasant.

Was there a reward for it beforehand?

Did you live quite well before you were cast out?

Yes, you did.

You used to be treated as kind of blessed and cursed.

So they'd be preserved and they'd be like, they'd be hosted around the village.

Does that not make it worse?

Because, like, the difference between being sent into the wilderness and just having a normal life is one thing, but the difference between that and having a really great life is even worse.

Yeah.

Well, Tom Hanks explores this theme in the film Joe vs.

the Volcano, I believe.

If you remember that one, in there, no.

I didn't know that was a great philosophical

tree tides of a film.

And the QI's gain was Newsnight Reviews last, wasn't it?

Camels?

Does anyone have anything about camels?

I do.

Go on.

Google.

You know, Google Maps.

I do, yeah.

I've had a map.

So Street View.

Yeah.

They've had one camel with a camera on its back walking the Liwa Desert.

That's good.

Yeah, it's basically a camel has mapped one of the deserts, one of the great deserts.

One camel.

Just one camel.

That's a lot for a camel to do.

Yeah.

His name's Rafia.

That's a great name.

Yeah.

150 kilometers southwest of Abu Dhabi.

And yeah, just went.

Is it all on its own?

How does they know?

How do they direct it?

Well, in the picture that I've seen online is a dude walking it.

You can train camels to go in certain directions by giving them food.

If they go in one way, and then they'll keep going there because they think that's where they'll find food.

And that's a way that they transport drugs across the Sahara.

Oh, yeah.

They train these camels to walk from Western Africa all the way up to the Mediterranean.

They train them and train them and train them.

And then they put the drugs on the back of the camels so they don't need any human assistance at all.

So if they get caught, if the camels get caught by the police, then there's no humans to.

No, but again, camels getting blamed.

Because the camel's going to be the one that takes the wrap.

Camel milk is more nutritious than cow milk, isn't it?

Is it?

Yeah.

I don't know why they don't drink it in Australia, for instance, where they've got more camels than anywhere else.

Well, they're all feral.

But they started selling it in America.

Why wouldn't you?

Yeah, they do, and I think they're trying to make it into a baby milk as well.

Australia sells camels to Saudi Arabia.

Does it?

Yeah.

Saudi Arabia also imports sand for use in construction.

Exactly.

So the Saudi sand isn't good for construction, whereas the Australian one is.

And also the Saudi camels are for breeding and racing, whereas the Australian ones are good for meat.

I was looking into just general excuses because I do like that.

That's the scapegoat, but it is also just a fantastic excuse to sort of say, let's no longer argue about this stuff.

And so, okay, some of my favourite sporting excuses.

This one comes from US sprinter LaShawn Merritt.

Oh, yeah.

He was banned because he did a drug called D-H-E-A.

I'm not going to try and pronounce the longer version of that word.

But he claims it wasn't to improve his performance.

He claims, this is a quote: I was trying to make my penis bigger.

He didn't realize that they had this kind of drug in it.

It was to improve his performance, but it's just not his spotting performance.

Yeah, it would probably not help his spotting performance at all, would it?

Still, it could be worse.

It could be a high jumper.

This is an interesting thing.

I don't think you know how a high jump works.

Do you think that's a good job?

You leave that behind, yeah.

Here's another one.

So, okay, there's a cyclist called Tyler Hamilton who.

Do you know about this one?

I know him.

Okay, so he got busted because they'd found someone else's red blood cells, his blood, which suggested that there was all this thing about replacing your blood and stuff.

His claim was that it was his unborn twin.

Oh.

He said that his mother had a twin who died.

Weirdly, medical authorities have said that that's plausible.

That could definitely happen.

It's called chimera-ism, isn't it?

How is it?

And the idea is that you

had two babies, and then at a a very, very early stage, one of them was enveloped into the other one.

It could be even just when it's a few cells.

And it means that you can...

Sometimes people who have one eye, which is a different colour, that could be due to chimeraism.

But also, yeah, it's really interesting, actually.

Yeah.

Okay, so blaming people.

Blaming your mistakes on other people is socially contagious in the same way that a yawn is.

So they've done studies and they found that when you watch someone else blaming someone, then you will blame someone yourself.

And that's more likely to happen.

Wow.

So there can be a culture of blame.

Yep.

That's amazing.

Also, you just mentioning yawning has made me yawn now, so thank you for that.

Actually, I think it was probably Dan's talk.

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's 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.

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Okay, time to move on to fact number two.

And fact number two is my fact.

My fact this week is that in ancient Greece, they used to play with yo-yos.

Now, I know that everyone in this room is not as surprised by that as I am, but I just aren't.

It's amazing.

It's great.

Yeah.

Oh, okay, because James and Anna seem to know that.

But I saw this.

I went to a Wikipedia page.

I thought they just played with Xboxes.

They actually called them Kai boxes.

Exciting.

That's exciting.

Very good.

There's a vase, and there's an illustration on this vase of someone from ancient Greece, a boy, playing with a yo-yo.

And I looked at that and I was like, what the hell is that doing there?

That's really weird.

It's so out of place in time for me.

I was saying to James earlier, I feel like that's like, if I was looking for evidence of time travel and I didn't, you know, didn't know stuff about history, which now I know it's not time travel, but if I didn't know that that was like, I think that's the only one there is, that jar, I think.

And I don't think we have written evidence of it.

So, and I don't think Yo-Yo has reappeared until quite a lot later.

So maybe he was a time traveller.

Wow, and he made onto a vase.

It makes you think as well that if you did get put back into ancient Greece as a time traveller, then I know I have no uses, but I do know how to walk the dog and rock a cradle in yo-yos.

I would instantly be Mr.

Popular.

You'd be on all the vases.

I'd be on all the vases.

To be fair, though, we only have that one vase because almost all the vases in the world have been smashed from that time.

By yo-yos.

So maybe it's that, maybe every single vase in

Greece had a yo-yo on it.

Yeah.

But they do think it appeared in ancient China way before.

There's three locations that they kind of say it could belong to.

Ancient Greece, ancient China, and the Philippines.

The Philippines is less so of a strong argument, except for the fact that they call it the yo-yo, and that's where America adopted the word yo-yo from.

But in Philippines, they used it as a weapon.

We thought on QI, certainly, that yoyos were never used as weapons, and we got quite close to running it as a general ignorance on the show, and I don't think we did in the end.

But then I read something by President Aquino III of the Philippines, and he reckons that they do have evidence that it was used as a weapon after all.

So, according to the president, it's true, but we still really don't think it.

He said that their version that they used was large and with sharp edges and studs and attached to thick 20-foot ropes for flinging at enemies or prey.

I've heard a different etymology for yo-yo, which is the it was known in France in the late 18th century as the jujus de Normandie, which just means a little toy.

So, that's another possible one.

Okay.

It's one of those, again, you look into the history of it and suddenly it starts appearing everywhere.

Napoleon's army, it says online, the fought with yo-yos.

No, he just used to play with them in the kind of downtown.

Yeah, I read

that yes.

Napoleon played.

I mean, surely that's a myth.

There are paintings of, yeah, the Napoleonic army, aren't there, with yo-yos.

Almost all pictures of people playing with yo-yos in the 18th, 17th centuries are adults.

And it was a really fashionable thing to do.

Like, you get Parisian ladies in the 18th century playing with yo-yos, don't you?

As they're walking along with their little parasols and their smart clothes.

I think it was quite true.

I found it.

I just didn't know it was such a big deal, the yo-yo.

It was a big deal when I was a kid.

Yeah.

Yeah, me too.

In the 80s, late 80s, when I was a kid, it was massive in school.

We all had yo-yos.

Same in the 90s.

Well, it was voted the biggest fad toy of the 20th century because every childhood has had a yo-yo being a big part of it.

Yeah, there was a massive one in 1988, and the company that made this particular type of yo-yo sold a couple of hundred in 1987 and more than half a million in 1988.

Wow.

How come?

It just became became a massive fad, and everyone in every school had to have one.

The company that made them was called PMS International.

It's a really pissed-off woman looking for something to occupy her kids.

You used to be able to become rich and famous for Scalextric in America.

Really?

Yeah, it was massively popular.

In the 1960s, they used to show live tournaments on US TV.

And there were more slot car facilities than there were bowling alleys in America.

That's in the 1960s.

And today there are none.

No way.

It's a slot car.

So it's like, so

it's the same thing.

It's just like.

It just slots in on a little, sort of plugs into the track.

Another famous toy car, maybe the most famous toy car.

Yeah, go on.

Brum.

Brum.

Oh, wow.

He's a cartoon from the 90s.

Brum, the little car who goes on adventures.

He's not a busy car.

What's the tire?

Yeah, it's a cartoon.

It's about Hot Wheels.

They were quite famous.

Yeah, Hot Wheels.

I was going for bigger, I was going for the cozy coop.

You know what I mean, right?

No, it's fine.

It's the red and yellow car.

Oh, yes, you'll have that as a kid.

As a kid, that you sit in a car.

Life size for a kid.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, one of those.

So that has been the best-selling car in the US.

It was throughout the 90s.

And

the last source I have was from 2008.

In the US and the UK, it sells more than any other makeup car.

That's great.

Wouldn't that be great if that was the rescue plan for General Motors?

Well, we've actually got a new model.

We are very excited.

It's going to reinvigorate the American car industry.

Well, it's not a long way from smart cars, are they?

That's true.

Yeah, but they're closer to Flintstone cars as well.

Well, that's similar to the fact that Lego is supposed to be the largest tyre manufacturer in the world, isn't it?

You know, you can buy a Lego Nazi concentration camp.

Yeah, you can.

Yeah, it was designed by an artist, and I think it was bought by the Warsaw Jewish Memorial Museum or something.

And so it's not meant to be a

commercial product.

I don't think so.

They've said that Lego people are getting angrier as the years go on, aren't they?

Can I tell you about Twister?

Yes,

I love Twister so much.

Is it an ancient Greek?

This is not an ancient Greek game, no.

That would be great.

It's on the other side of the vase, but they've never looked at it.

Well, they have ancient Persian rugs with the circles on them.

So, okay, the inventor is a guy called Rain Guya.

Rain Goya, I think is his name.

I don't know how to pronounce it.

But he wanted to call it Pretzel, although one of his initial names for it was King's Footsie.

But the thing is, it tanked when they first sold it because people thought it was risque.

Did they sell it as sex in the box or something like that?

Well, other people complained, supposedly, that the other manufacturers, or possibly the bosses at the other firm which made it, and they were going to give up.

Sears didn't want it for their catalogue.

And the one last ditch attempt they had was to get it on a TV show.

And the PR firm, Pushing Twister, got it onto the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

And he played a round of it with Eva Gabor, who was a sex symbol at the time.

and the next morning, the queue was 50 deep.

And they sold 3 million that year.

Wow.

And

it suddenly took off because of that one appearance on TV.

It's weird when, because toys, if they take off, they really take off.

Especially toy helicopters.

My little, I went to see my little niece recently, it was her birthday, and I was shocked that there's a whole new toy that's dominating everything, and it's looms.

Looming is the biggest thing.

Is that loom band like that?

Giants, breathing looms.

Yep, and you use rubber bands, and you loom bands to go around your wrist, you make necklaces, all that.

It's the biggest thing.

Go walk by any kids' shop at the moment, look in the window, it's all looms on display.

Get this: in 2008, the National Toy Hall of Fame awarded oldest toy to the stick.

Also, the cardboard box is in that Hall of Fame as well.

Yeah.

Imagine at Christmas, and your parents go, Good news, we've bought you something from the Thai Hall of Fame.

Time for back number three, and that is Andy.

My fact this week is that most honey beehives in the USA live on trucks, on flatbed trucks.

They do not live in fields, where you might think, or in stationary apiaries.

Most bees in the USA are driven around and rented out so that they can pollinate plants.

They never find a home, they just, the truck is their home.

I think sometimes, I don't know about how it happens during winter, but I think during the summer season, there are billions of bees being driven all over America,

and they stop and they're released to pollinate a crop, and then they go back to the hive in the evening, or whenever it is they finish doing all the pollinating, and then away they go.

It's part of colony collapse, is it?

It's partly because of that, yeah.

Although colony collapse has slowed down, they're not sure why, but even so, a third of all bees in America die each year.

They think it's because of these chemicals used called neonicotinoids.

I thought bees would die within a year.

They lived in a huge house.

Well, the lifespan is really variable depending on how hard they work.

So I think in

as with people,

we're all in our late 80s.

I think worker bees in hot weather, where I think they have to work harder, have a lifespan of about six weeks.

And then if it's a cold year, then they can last for about 10 months.

They move around slowly, don't they?

They're sort of sluggish.

The other thing I read about old bees is if you give them a job that normally young bees do, then their brains stop aging or even reverse aging.

They get younger.

It's like doing Sudoku for them.

Yeah.

Apart from I don't think the young people are doing Sudoku these days.

If you started playing with looms, then your

brain would go down.

Or if you teach an old bee to play Call of Duty Advanced Warfare.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool.

And their brain chemistry can change, can't it?

So I think honey bees do lots of jobs.

So there are certain like worker bees are just workers and

droin bees, et cetera.

But honey bees do lots of jobs, and when they switch from one job to another their actual brain chemistry changes and I think they're one of the only animals that's known to do that in order to adapt them to the other job.

But they do, so we do need them to pollinate our crops, don't we?

I think they pollinate a third of the world's crops.

They're responsible for $20 billion worth of food production in America alone, I think.

Don't flies pollinate flowers more than bees do?

No.

Well lots of other things do as well.

So there are 20,000 species of bee, which no one, and the honey bee is the one that gets all the press.

So the agave plant, which tequila is made out of, is pollinated by bats.

Yeah.

The cocoa plant is pollinated by midges.

Are we about to go through all the plants?

This is my

pastime moment.

Never been invited to a party again.

Are you drinking tequila?

Oh, I can't help but noticing you're eating an almond.

I wonder if I could tell you about the pollination of the almond.

It's a peanut, fargov.

There There is a bat.

If you're listening to this, stop what you're doing and Google the tube-lipped nectar bat because it has the longest tongue proportional to its body look of any animal.

It's longer, I think, than the animal itself, or it's two-thirds of the animal's length.

And it has such a long tongue, it has to keep a bit of it in its rib cage.

And they specialize in pollinating and drinking the nectar from these flowers with incredibly long trumpets.

So that's what they have to do.

They have to have this unbelievable tongue.

Wow.

I found a great headline to do with the trucks carrying all the bees.

Oh, yeah.

And the headline is this.

It's someone who made a connection.

Why are so many bee-carrying trucks crashing?

Apparently, in the last few years, there's been serious problems with these trucks that are carrying the bees overturning on the road, smashing down and releasing millions of bees into the road.

Just millions swarming everywhere.

Presumably that happens mostly, not on motorways, but on bee roads.

I enjoyed that.

So they crash, they crash.

Yeah, they crash and they release all these bees.

It causes hell for them.

And there was a really funny thing of there's been like two to three of these major crashes, millions of bees throughout.

And then one time another truck came along that crashed, but it wasn't carrying bees, it was carrying honey and it filled something like two hundred gallons of honey, which attracted just

thousands of swarms of bees, and so they had another bee crisis on their hands.

And then you can't you have to get them the right ones back onto the truck when you fix the truck and you have to separate them.

Pliny had a theory that if honey bees were caught outdoors at night and they had to camp out basically and they would sleep on their backs to protect their wings from the dew.

Ah.

Which was rubbish, right?

It was rubbish.

Yes, it was and remains rubbish.

Oh god, see, that's how

impressionable I am on my page.

But not true.

Have you heard of the superhero, the Red Bee?

No.

He's one of the worst superheroes of all time.

I love him.

His identity is Rick Raleigh.

He's an assistant district attorney in Oregon.

And his modus operandi is to put on a red and yellow costume, and he has trained bees with which he fights Nazis.

And this is from the Wikipedia page for the Red Bee.

His favorite bee is named Michael and lives inside his belt buckle for use in special circumstances.

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

Okay, my fact this week is the Sacramento Police Department get at least one call a week from people stuck in the world's largest corn maze.

That's really funny.

Wow.

I could tell by the way you laughed.

No, it was.

I just like the thought of it, of just the phone ringing in the station.

So, how big is this corn maze?

It's 63 acres in size.

So, what do the police do when they're called?

Often, the police will get into the maze and then they themselves will have to call

the bigger police

until it's kind of like a conga line that they eventually find them.

I think they just calm them down, really, because it's mostly that people are like freaking out a little bit because they're stuck.

Okay.

And then, presumably, the owners of the maze can then go in and sort it out.

It must be a nightmare being like, okay, we shot at six.

It's nine o'clock now.

They're still in there.

We shot it.

Yeah, we should at six, but last entry is at nine.

Thirty in the morning.

That's when you know you're in a serious mood.

There was a guy in England who had a maze.

It was quite, it wasn't like a big like corn one, it was a smaller one.

And he was mowing it.

He was mowing the paths.

And he got to about halfway through, and then he realized he had to go to his daughter's school thing.

And so he had to leave, but he couldn't get out of his own maze.

And so he just used his lawnmower and just plowed straight through and gave himself an exit.

Oh, it's the world's worst maze now.

Yeah, exactly.

He said, I've just found the article.

He said, I'd already had feedback suggesting the maze was tricky to negotiate before I became lost myself.

Next year, I think I'll make it a bit easier.

Next year, I'll listen to the bloody feedback.

But yeah, mazes in general, they're pretty good, aren't they?

I love mazes.

I haven't been to a maze for ages.

I don't think I've I've ever been to a maze.

Really?

Yeah.

Let's all go to Hampton Court.

In Germany, mazes are called Ehrgarten or Error Gardens.

Oh, yeah.

How good is that?

Yeah.

That's good.

But there used to be so mazes grew out of labyrinths, is that right?

Yeah, so a labyrinth is a maze with only one entrance and exit, so you can't get lost in it.

You just go straight and you come straight back out again.

Lots of mazes have surely got only one exit and entrance.

Do you mean the path?

Yeah, that's the one.

There are no dead ends.

Yeah, so you walk in and you keep walking, you get to the middle, and then you get back out again, and there's no way you can't turn left or right, you just have to go in that direction.

I see.

Because, yeah, there's all the stuff about the labyrinth at Crete with Theseus in the Minotaur.

But you wouldn't get lost in that.

You wouldn't even need a thread.

So, was the labyrinth just effectively a more complicated walk?

Like, what was the purpose behind it?

So, actually,

it does look nice, but people used it for

religious reasons sometimes, or because it's a very particular pattern.

One way that you could do it is you would walk in, and on the way into the centre of the labyrinth, you would be thinking about your problems, and then on the way out, you would think about your solutions.

It was supposed to be a contemplative thing.

Apparently, like also, Norwegian sailors would

go through these mazes just before they went, and it would be good luck.

So, they used it as a charm thing sometimes as well.

I read

another theory, either symbolising the hard life of an early Christian or showing the entanglements of sin, or my favourite,

it would be like doing a mini-pilgrimage if you committed a small sin.

Go to Hampton Court.

But like, that's cheating, because labyrinths are quite fun, or mazes are quite fun.

But I think it's like go and have a long walk and think about what you've done.

I suppose so, yeah.

That's it.

Go on a long walk, but stay within

sight of me.

Yeah, we close at six.

I think they've they've found a maze in Peru that's more than three thousand years old, I think.

So it's in the Peruvian Andes, and it's beneath Charvin de Juanta, which is this ancient site and the whole maze is underground and they think that it acted as a ceremonial like massive and disorienting acoustic chamber because if you go down into it the way that it's built means that you're when your voice bounces off the walls madly and like if someone else in another part of the maze you can never find them and you think they're coming from a different direction and if you're above the maze it sounds absolutely terrifying and they found at this site all these uh kind of trumpet things and if you blow the trumpets it sounds sounds awesome.

It's like a like a torch I think.

Yeah, I think so, yeah.

So you get lost in this maze, and also sounds coming from everywhere.

There was an old Scandinavian punishment called the Cave of Roses, and that was you would go into a dark cave, and then they would throw a load of poisonous animals at you, and you just have to stay there for a while and then come out and hopefully not be bitten.

Really?

It's a bit like I'm a Celebrity kind of thing.

Cave of Roses is a misleading title.

They all have misleading names, torture equipments, because you very rarely get one called the excruciating foot cutter offer thing.

There's one called the pear of anguish, oh, yeah, which is something

and it gets put into your mouth, and then I think it's expanded and it hurts your door terrible.

Or it's heated, and you know, it's all but the pear, you know, oh, pear, oh, I'll have a pear of anguish, not so good.

Yeah,

if a judge has a bit of an eye for the amateur dramatic side of things, he's sent, I sentence you to eat a pear.

Of anguish,

people make mazes into weird things.

In fact, I think I sent you something recently, Dan, of um, Brian Blessed's face was turned into a maze/slash crop circle.

That's right, yeah.

That's really great.

Yeah.

In the November 2004 election in America, a farmer carved giant faces of John Kerry and President Bush into his cornfield in Pleasant Grove in Utah, which I just think when farmers do that, you're ruining your crops, right?

Yeah, they do it

to bring in tourists and stuff, don't they?

Do you reckon they make that bad?

Yeah.

Let's all go and see John Kerry's massive face

in a place formerly known as Pleasant Grove.

By studying sheep in mazes, they found that when left to their own devices, sheep tend to turn to the left.

When left to their own devices, when they're not constantly being bothered.

Will you just leave me alone for a bit so I can think?

Okay, I'm going to go left.

You can make an infinite maze in a finite room if you use virtual reality.

And they've made these particular types of virtual reality.

It is, but it's quite clever.

They've made these particular types of virtual reality and the illusion is so strong that people keep walking around and they don't realize they're going around in circles.

So you're walking around in one room, but it feels like you've walked miles, but actually you haven't.

That's

really cool.

That is clever, isn't it?

That's really cool.

That's because I saw a thing online about a Japanese janitor who had drawn a maze.

Did you read about this?

Yeah, I do kind of remember it.

His daughter dug it up in amongst his papers, just found it.

But it was a piece of paper, and she put it online.

And everyone listening, if you want to see something amazing, just go look at it.

It's the most intricate,

and she sells it now, she sells prints of it because it's so beautiful.

And when you said infinite, and it was in virtual, I kind of thought, oh no, when you look at this, this looks like it just goes on.

You know, when people say, like, the coastlines are it's the idea of fractals, so that the closer you look in at something, it just gets more and more complicated.

So it's just infinite in terms of yeah, wow.

But to be fair, I bet that the corridors were pretty dirty.

No one can find anything in the school anymore.

I found out about ways you can navigate if you are lost just in an urban area.

Okay.

One great way of doing it, satellite dishes almost all point in the same direction.

In Britain, they almost all point to the southeast.

Wow.

Yeah.

Also, going downhill is normally towards a river or the coast if you're in a coastal place.

And if you're lost in the morning, you can find find a station by going against the flow of people, because everyone's going to work from the station if you're in the centre of town.

And if you're lost in the city, or you might be going towards a huge fire.

It's not a perfect system.

Let's end with some stupid reasons for calling 911 or 999.

There was a man who received a letter asking him to attend a hospital appointment on Tuesday, the 6th of February, and he called 999 to tell them that Tuesday wasn't the 6th.

Yeah, so I think the Cornish police force released a top ten list of the most ridiculous emergency calls they'd have.

And I think three of them were bird-related.

And so one of them was a woman saying, I can see a really rare bird sitting on top of a telegraph pole.

Who shall I ring?

I read a thing on, it's doing the rounds on the internet at the moment.

It's not particularly funny because it was a lady in distress, but it was a really interesting thing where she called up 9990911 and she goes, Hi, I'd like to just put in an order for a pizza, ham and cheese.

She said, Something, pepperoni.

And they go, Sorry, ma'am, this is this is the police.

She goes, Yeah, I know, I'd love to get a ham and cheese, please, so please.

And they go, Well, uh, sorry, you know, this is the police?

Yep, so can you, can you, uh, do you need me to tell you my location, or do you know, have you got it?

And they go, do you know, is there something going on there?

Yes, there is, yep.

How long will that be?

Okay, ma'am, we'll, we'll just find your location, we'll be there very soon.

Yep, quick hurry.

Um, we'll, we, we're very hungry, kind of thing.

Like, she kept

the famous phone call that uh that the guy who took the phone call released.

It was a domestic abuse call, and

they tracked it and they worked out that that guy had gotten in trouble before twice for domestic abuse.

So they were like, This is definitely a sincere call.

That is really and well done for the operators, realizing

in June of this year, a woman in Birmingham phoned 999 because she was unhappy with how many sprinkles she had been given on her ice cream.

And they were all on the wrong side as well.

Maybe she phoned 99.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you very much for listening.

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this show, you can find us on at QIPodcast.

You can also get us individually on our Twitter handles.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James at Egg Shaped, Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna, you can email podcast at qi.com.

And yeah, that's it from us.

We're going to be back again next week with another episode.

No such thing as a fish.

We'll catch you then.

Goodbye.

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