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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.

This time coming to you from the Tradle Comedy Book Festival in Camden, London.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

And this week, all of our facts are coming from the new QI book, 1411 QI Facts to Knock You Sideways.

So here are the four facts that we entered into that book, and in no particular order, here they are.

Fact number one, James.

So my fact this week is: Viking names included Desirous of Beer, Squat Wiggle, Lust Hostage, Short Penis,

able to fill a bay with fish by magic,

the man who mixes his drinks, and the man without trousers.

But so, okay, when you say that these are Viking names,

were there more than two sometimes in a ship?

Was it like did you have to be like, Do we have a surname here?

Because we've got two short penises on the boat right now.

I don't know about that.

They did uh there's a great long list of them.

These come from names of people actually from the sagas, from the Icelandic sagas and the Norwegian sagas.

And these are the kind of nicknames rather than actual first names, I think.

Did you find out anything about the specific, like a squat wiggle?

Do we know what that is?

What is it?

Is it some kind of

what it is?

Well, I can tell.

I don't know.

I assume the person who was called it did it.

Squat wiggle.

Squat and wiggle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is that that thing you do on the dance floor where you like go down to the floor and then up again?

That I do on the dance floor.

Yeah, or in the office sometimes.

We all find it a bit weird.

I think it's like when a dog wipes its bum on the ground, on the carpet.

You know, it does that

little squat wiggle.

So you know how Native Americans name their children after the first thing they see after they give birth?

Do they?

Yeah, do you think Squat Wiggles' parents saw this dog doing the thing on the floor?

Wait, what?

Really?

Yeah, that's the idea.

I've always thought that was a myth as well.

Yeah, sure, it's a myth.

Wait, So someone gave birth next to a sitting bull and that's how people

were like, oh, jumping badger.

Oh.

Is that literally what it was?

Well, that's the idea.

I don't know if it's really ideal.

I think some I think it depends what um what uh kind of what nature of American you were, what tribe you were from.

Some of them named their children, uh I think the Miwok tribe named their kids after how the s nearest stream looked when they gave birth.

Oh really?

Yeah?

Probably a limited number of

adjectives.

Yeah, wet, wet, muddy, muddy, wet.

Is that where the band got the name from?

They were all in the Miowok tribe.

I hope the short penis and the man without trousers were friends with each other.

I hope one named the other.

I found out a few more of them.

They're all from

the Land Nammabok, which is a medieval work about when the Norse went to Iceland and settled it.

And so there's a load of, it's a bit like a doomsday book.

There are loads of records of people and where they live and all of this, and a few more of them, same name, same source.

Harm Fat

Arson Victim.

Generally.

That was a name.

Arson victim.

A person in trouble or in disgrace.

But I think that's inaccurately transcribed.

And able to remain warm in winter.

That sounds like a euphemism for fat, doesn't it?

It does.

Able to remain warm in winter.

One of my favourite ones is King Ragnar hairy britches.

We might have mentioned him on QI, actually.

A few people know him.

He got his name because his wife made him hairy trousers from animal skins, and they were supposed to protect him in battle.

They were magic trousers.

Wow, really?

Yeah, magic trousers.

Did they work?

Did they work?

Well, we're using them.

I like that.

You know that situation when you're in a room and someone comes up to you who you blatantly know and you've forgotten their name?

Oh, yeah.

I'd love to see that scene in Viking times.

That'd be amazing.

Short penis?

No, sorry.

Ugly?

Nero's face.

Dickhead?

The dickhead.

You look like a dickhead.

I'm sorry.

It's just.

You're right.

Maybe they were more catchy in Norse.

Did you?

Yeah, they're quite long-winded, aren't they?

Yeah, they're not.

That's actually a name of a person.

Long-winded.

Yeah.

I feel like I'm stuck on a dinner table with long-winded.

The word gun is Norse.

How weird is that?

The

gun.

Yeah.

And it's because

there's an inventory of weapons from the Tower of London, which is in 1330, and there was a ballista, a big sort of projectile device, which was called Lady Gunhilde.

So Gunhilde meant war or battle.

So that's where.

So even though they weren't really around at the time.

Were they?

Guns.

No, no, Vikings.

Vikings.

I had a moment of crisis of confidence about when they were.

When did you say?

13th century?

Yeah, you're fine.

You're safe.

Safe ground.

Something else invented by the Vikings or from that area.

This is one for you, Anna.

Sarcasm.

Well, thanks, James.

Yeah, great.

Ready to give for a while.

No, the concept, according to Klanz Gruber, the Danish ambassador, whose name also sounds made up,

he says that the Danish and the British have a similar sense of humour with our sarcasm and the way that we make jokes, and so he reasons that it must have come over with the Vikings.

Do you you say Kans Gruber?

No.

Klaus Gruber.

Klaus Gruber, sorry.

I thought it sounded like Hans Gruber, the baddie, and Diehard.

Wrong for the Die Hard fans?

Does his name have a good meaning in English?

Do we know?

Like, makes up questionable theories?

We get quite a lot of surprising number of words from the Vikings, don't we?

And they're all quite negative, which might be how like pillage and something like pillage and hell, I think, and weak, skull slaughter, anger, dirt, fuckles.

It might be that I've gone through them and chosen the most negative ones for the purpose of my point.

Muggy?

Muggy?

Is that negative?

I guess so.

It's never a good thing, is it?

No.

Berserk?

You've got to come outside, it's so muggy.

Feeling too dry.

So, what about Berserk?

That's something to do with bears, is it?

So, Berserk, the Berserkers were the Viking warriors who were just insane, weren't they?

And they they think that um either they worked themselves up into some kind of meditative trance'cause they were so like forced themselves to be so angry that they became vicious warriors or they were just on drugs.

Anyway they were called berserkers, which is where we get the word berserk.

Yeah.

Um th there's one theory that actually Vikings weren't worse than anyone else, but the only reason that we have only bad stories about them is because they attacked monks who are much more literate than them.

And so the monks were the people who were writing things down and they wouldn't write anything down.

That's a written that's a proper theory, yeah.

Oh, that's great.

And modern equivalent is like writing something rude about Mark Zuckerberg a few hundred years from now.

Your name will be mud.

That's very cool.

I so, I mean, what I love about this obviously is we're talking about silly names.

And I had a fact to just tell you guys, I had a fact that I tried to use on a previous podcast, which got rejected in the office,

which was that 40% of all penises are in America.

And it's the surname.

It's the surname penises.

You can go on our website and it tells you where they all are.

40% in America, fiver in Britain.

And the most popular name?

Short.

There must be someone whose name is Shorty Penis.

Well, there was one guy called Penis Penis Penis.

No, yeah.

No.

Actually, that was a popular name because it was in the...

No, it wasn't a popular name.

That's a computer error.

That cannot be.

No one.

Was it hyphenated?

It was.

No, no, it was just pure penis penis.

So you think two penises momentary?

Penis penis was also a very popular name, next to penis, penis, penis.

So it's a double barrel surname, obviously.

So this surely must be people filling in online forms with rude words.

Surely.

I don't know.

The most popular is Bob Penis.

So I don't know.

An actual name.

They didn't let me do it on the show.

Not going to get in this week either.

Did you guys, speaking of stupid names, and kind of Vikings, there's a Swedish couple who are being fined because they've failed to r register a legally approved name for their child and they've presently called their child um I don't know how to pronounce this it's brufsksl one one one one six.

And apparently

it's pronounced albin, but it's a series of consonants.

And um so they were told that they weren't r allowed to register that as a name for their child, and so they said they were willing to change the child's name to to A, the letter A, which also wasn't accepted.

And so they've been fine.

But yeah, their explanation was that the naming of their child as such was a pregnant expressionistic development that we see as an artistic creation.

That's not really going to cut it when he's been bullied in school.

Did you see today?

There was an article in the paper today, and I can't, so maybe someone here will remember it.

The number one hacker, internet hacker in the world, they managed to crack his code and get into all the places he'd been hacking because his personal password was his cat's name with 123 at the end.

It was just in the news.

The worst thing was his cat was called password.

Wayne Rooney had his

computer hacked, and his password was Stella Artois.

You're not helping yourself when you're him with the stereotypes, are you?

When you're doing that,

other beers are available.

Interesting naming traditions.

So, the Amazonian Amondawa tribe, when you say you get your name at birth, and then when your younger sibling is born, you have to give your name to that sibling and take on another name.

And you have to constantly change your name throughout your life.

And that's the tribe that doesn't have a concept of time, so they're really interesting because they don't have any words for like day, week, month.

And so, the only way they distinguish time is by the stage of life that you're at.

So you get a new name for whatever stage of life you're at.

So if you graduate, you're called like a history degree.

I don't know how many history degrees they're getting, but.

Wait, do you have to change your name until your parents have their last child?

If I'm understanding that right, so yes, you do.

As soon as one of the family changes the name, often the rest of the family also has to change their name.

So even if you were 30 and your parents had another child, all right, that's not likely.

Wait.

But you could change your name sort of 10, 20 years later.

I guess Sharpenus must have been really hoping that his parents had a bit of a child.

Come on, guys.

We're not going to do it, son.

You inherited your father's traits.

I'm not going there again.

Yeah.

My favourite pop star name change.

I've done a few in the podcast, so I can't say it out loud now, but one I discovered recently.

Michael Bolton.

That's not his real name.

Michael Bolton's real name is not Michael Bolton.

What is it?

It is Michael Bulletin.

He lost an O from it, a single O, and he lost it.

And there's another singer called Michael Bolton, who's a country singer in America, who they keep asking him, like, obviously you're trying to make a career in music and you're called Michael Bolton.

Why have you not changed your name?

And his answer was, why should I change it?

He's the one who sucks.

Very strong principles.

It's not going to work in the sales, but

I found a thing about Viking mice.

What?

I'm just.

Right.

Well, bear with me.

No,

there is such a thing as Viking mice.

So all the mice in

Scotland and Ireland and bits of Wales are Viking ones because they're directly descended from Norwegian house mice.

And they came over with the Vikings.

And they were much more effective than the

weedy Anglo-Saxon mice.

And that's how they think they know that the Vikings lived in Scotland and Ireland first in enough density to support house mice, because the house mice only live somewhere where you get quite a dense concentration of people.

So that's how they know that the Vikings were hardy enough to live there is because their mice went there with them and they lived there in enough numbers to support them.

Viking mice is amazing.

Vikings are quite cool.

So they have a god of skiing.

Didn't they like?

In fact, they have a god and a goddess of skiing.

They have the god of skiing who is Ullur, U-double L-R, always always pictured with skis and a bow and arrow.

And then the

proper skiing equipment, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hey, are you going out on the slopes?

Don't forget your bow and arrow.

Yeah, goddess Skarde.

They weren't in a relationship or anything, but yeah, she was the same, always on skis, always bow and arrow.

And she married

another god called Njord, and they split up because they had a bitter fight about the fact that he loved the coast and she loved the mountains and skiing.

So that's in Norse mythology.

And Skarde is where the word Scandinavia comes from.

That's a good name.

Goddess of skiing.

That's cool.

So the Vikings had quite a cool way of making fire,

fire that could last a long time, where

they collected fungus called touchwood from trees and then they would like bash it down and then they lit it.

Oh no, then they boiled it in water for a few days and then they lit it and instead of catching fire properly it just just kind of

what's it called?

Kind of smoldered, and then it would last a few days, and it would be, you know, a useful fire that they could take on ships and stuff.

Just acts a nice way.

I was reading today that

fire is a problem on Antarctica, apparently, because you wouldn't think it, would you?

Oh, really?

Because it's cold.

Is that what's melting at all?

Well, no, because it's so dry and

a lot of wind, which can blow the fire somewhere.

So if you, yeah, it's one of the things they're most worried about on Antarctica is fire.

And they have a fire department.

How does it sound like?

There's a fire brigade on there.

Really?

Yeah, yeah.

Antarctic fire department.

Because the driest place in the world is in Antarctica, isn't it?

It is.

There are these valleys,

dry valleys.

You haven't had any rain for two million years.

And even then, it wasn't much.

Bit buggy.

We need to move on, guys.

We'll do anything interesting.

But any last things you want to get in?

I just have one more thing about a different type of Vikings.

It's a bit sad.

The Minnesota Vikings, I'm an American football fan, and and there was a Minnesota Vikings fan who vowed to let his beard grow until his team won the Super Bowl.

And he died in 2013 with a 38-year-old beard.

So sad.

We salute him.

Yeah, what a dude.

I found one last fact that I want to add, which is from

we're at the book festival.

It's from our new QI book.

This is the fact, and it's to do just with names.

Johnny Cash's estate once refused permission for his hit Ring of Fire to be used in a commercial for hemorrhoid cream.

Just wonderful.

Good decision.

Should we move on to facts?

Sure, yeah, let's go.

Okay, time for fact number two.

That's my fact.

And as we said at the top, all of our facts come from this new book that we've done.

There's 1,411 facts in this book.

I, after much, much work, only managed to get one fact into this book.

Wait till you hear it.

And

this is my fact,

and it concerns the model Jordan,

otherwise known as Katie Price.

Why did you only get one in?

They were all about Jordan.

All 900 dance submitted were about Jordan.

So, my fact this week is: You Only Live Once is Katie Price's fourth autobiography.

And that's on page 334.

That should be on page three, shouldn't it, really?

Oh, yeah.

Is there any sign in it that she's aware of the irony of it?

Like, is it a humorous, ironic comment on modern-day celebrity autobiographies that she's making?

Of course, there is.

It's Katie Price.

Have you read it?

No, I a bunch of it.

No, in fact, I'm pretty sure she hasn't because she was promoting her new autobiography, her fifth autobiography, and they asked her, Where does it pick up from?

And she said, it picks up from the amazing ending of my last book, which I think was about when I broke up.

No, I stopped reading it there.

I was like, you cannot say where I think about your own life in a book.

Like, that's unacceptable.

But that's, yeah, I just love it.

You don't get Hilary Mantel going, I think, was Cromwell, was he dead yet?

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure what happened to Winston Smith.

Anyway, ask me how the books.

Katie Price has written more books than Shakespeare wrote plays.

Well, Shakespeare didn't write any plays, really.

No, no, you're right.

Katie Price hasn't written any books.

They should meet.

They should meet.

They would get along like a house on fire.

No, but she's admitted it.

She has admitted it.

She had a quote when she was talking about her book.

She said, I'm not going to lie, I don't sit there with a typewriter and write it.

So this is someone who still thinks you write a book with a typewriter.

I don't want to knock her, by the way.

Like, we don't do that on this show.

I don't want to knock her.

But apparently, it's full of good facts.

They did.

They did.

Yeah, Edwin's laughing because you said knock her.

Yeah.

So

this is another thing that she.

So Katie Price, I mean, there was an interesting thing.

It actually has gone out on the latest QI book.

Sorry, no, it's on the latest QI episode about Katie Price, which is that she outsold all of the Booker list, didn't she, at one point?

Yeah.

I mean, so she sells massive, which is insane.

But all of them are ghost ridden.

She's admitted that they're ghost-ridden, and ghostwriting is just ginormous now.

Ghostwriting is so big at the moment, this is insane.

They've started outsourcing it to other countries.

So they go to the Philippines for ghostwriting now.

Celebrity autobiographies get sent to the Philippines and they have people that just cannot be true.

Are they good at writing ghostwriting in the Philippines?

Yeah, why not?

Quite a lot of people do admit to not reading their autobiographies, don't they?

I think Neo McCammell did as well.

Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan.

What did he say?

Oh, he had a great book.

Oh, I was like,

He said, I know that many of you are looking forward to reading this book, and so am I.

So am I.

Cool.

Oh, I hear it's very good.

I can't wait to read it.

Yeah.

Naomi Campbell.

Models obviously don't like to read their own autobiographies.

No.

Barry Manelow didn't write the song I Write the Songs.

That's another Baron Reagan.

That's true.

That's an actual fact.

The first ever autobiography was Ghostwritten.

Well,

the first ever autobiography was.

The Bible.

The first one.

I don't know.

Jesus is authorized.

I don't think you meant to call God a ghost.

It was Holy Ghost written.

Holy ghost written.

That's what the Holy Ghost was for.

What purpose do you think it served?

Nobody knows.

The other two are so obvious in their roles.

He's from the Philippines.

No one knows him.

No, the first autobiography in English was written by someone called Marjorie Kemp, and it was written in the 1400s.

And she was an illiterate woman who wrote the whole thing in the third person.

And so she she said it.

Have you?

Have you?

Yeah.

What?

I did an English degree.

And they make you read a lot of what?

Yeah.

It's not very good.

Oh, huh.

It's really not.

I'm not here to knock Marjorie Kemp, we don't do that on this podcast.

She spends maybe three or four hundred pages crying and weeping and praying and

all the words are smudged on the page.

Can't read this.

Yeah, it's very hard going.

It's really with her'cause she imagines herself uh married to Jesus and lying in bed there with him, and it's a very strange text in lots of different ways.

Yeah, that's not funny, it's just true.

She was from Lancashire, wasn't she, I think?

She was afterwards, yeah.

Was she like a wise woman or something?

Yeah, she was like a prophetess

who had a religious awakening.

It's very interesting, but at the same time, it's also quite boring.

A surprising amount of people used to do ghostwriting, so Mozart used to do ghostwriting.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, he'd write, he would be commissioned by other people, they'd put their names to it, Mozart would then provide the music for it.

Yeah.

Charles Dickens' very first book.

It was a book that he ghost wrote for a clown called Grimaldi.

Just going back to Mozart, when he first played in Europe, he was very young, like nine years old or something, and everyone thought he was a dwarf in disguise.

It's true.

Really?

Yeah, it was written that they thought he was.

Does that look amazing?

What you're going to say is, if you're going to disguise a dwarf, you you don't make him the same height, you make him taller.

That is a good point.

That's true, that is true.

How do you make him taller?

You can't stretch a person as part of a disguise.

Stilts.

Although, or put him far away on a hill so no one can tell.

With a small piano, right?

Gary Brown started as a stilt walker.

Gary Brown started as a dwarf.

She just stretched him on the rack for 20 years.

Someone who did stretch his body is Superman.

Remember that?

Yes, that's true.

Yeah.

So, as part of Superman's disguise, he puts on his glasses, but he can also make his spine two inches smaller.

So he kind of goes smaller.

So that's

when he becomes Clark Kent.

Yeah, that's right.

When he's

shorter as Clark Kent, so people for extra realism don't tell.

I mean, he's not real.

That was going to be my fact next week.

Damn it.

I have a few good

titles of autobiographies which I just really like.

Colonel Saunders wrote one called Life as I Know It has Been Finger Licking Good.

Leonard Nimoy wrote one called I Am Not Spock and then a follow-up called I Am Spock.

I've read them both.

Have you?

Really good, highly recommend them.

Book Festival.

Read them.

Dan and I sit next to each other reading Ironspock and Marjorie Kemp.

And Judge Judy, anyone know Judge Judy?

American two.

Sort of weary assent.

Judge Judy wrote one called Don't Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It's Raining.

Which is apparently an American idiom.

It's sort of

don't lie to me.

Have you?

Don't piss up my back and tell me it's raining.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

Stop it.

Might be a Bolton thing.

In Bolton, it's necessary to say that.

In 2010, a man was caught masturbating to Alan Sugar's autobiography

in Crawley Library.

The man was cautioned and banned from returning to the library.

Was the book cleaned afterwards?

No more information.

Wow.

In 1979, Gerald Ford released his autobiography, and Betty Ford, his wife, was releasing hers at the same time.

And his was called A Time to Heal, the autobiography of Gerald Ford, and hers was called The Times of My Life, which obviously sounds much more fun.

And

so that year, for Gerald Ford's 64th birthday, Betty gave him a t-shirt that read, I bet my book will outsell yours.

Which is quite sweet.

And did it work?

And it did.

Doing it by a long way.

Wow.

Yeah, so good prediction.

Yeah.

And then next year, the t-shirt said, told you.

Yeah.

And then they divorced.

No, they didn't.

Alec Baldwin wrote one which sold 12 copies in its first month.

Which is amazing.

And it has an amazingly bad title.

It's called A Promise to Ourselves, Colon, A Journey Through Fatherhood.

Yeah, that's the nice idea.

Isn't it true that the Bronte sisters, their first book of poetry, there were three of them wrote it and they only sold two copies.

Yes.

So they didn't even buy one each.

In the first year, it took a year to sell two copies.

Unbelievable.

Yeah.

Well, they live together.

You can share.

Yeah, you're right.

I like the fact that autobiographies used to be called apologia, didn't they?

So when you look back to antiquity, then it was always apologia, which was sort of apologising for what you'd done wrong, which seems like much more what people should do, rather than, you know.

It was kind of false modesty.

Yeah, it was.

It was usually a justification of what all their critics had aimed at them and explaining that it was yeah.

But Augustine as well, who a lot of people say is the first autobiography of kind of a non-classical age,

his was just called confessions and that was his explaining all the stuff he'd done wrong and not even stuff that he remembered.

So chapter one of Augustine's autobiography was him saying, when I was a child, I don't really remember it very well, but I know I will have committed loads of sins and for that I'm really sorry.

I feel terrible about it.

Don't know what they were, but I'm sure I did.

Really, really bad.

Sorry, guys.

Wow.

Yeah.

No.

John Henry Newman, who was an eminent Victorian, wrote one in 1864, which is called Apologia Pro Sua Vita, or Apology for His Life, which sounds very sarcastic.

Sorry about my life, guys.

Adolescent.

We should move on.

Yeah, we're going way over.

Anything else, Andy?

No.

I got a couple of interesting things which I didn't know, which is, so there's a number of things that are happening.

You have ghost writing, which is obviously just ghostwriting someone's autobiography.

There's a term in the music world which is called a hummer.

And a hummer is someone who takes claim of having written a tune on a movie.

So like back when Charlie Chaplin used to make his movies, he always said written, directed, music by.

He would go around, so he'd walk up to a musician who he'd hired and go,

good luck.

And then he would take claim for having written that song.

And that's called a hummer.

A hummer is someone who takes claim for a song off a hum that they'd done to say.

Hang on, because they hummed near somebody who wrote something.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

No, no, they would hum an initial tune and say build on it, and then they would do it.

So it's ghostwriting, it's fake.

And also, I was really surprised by this.

There's script doctoring, which is done as well for Hollywood movies, and obviously that is done a lot of the time, but I didn't know these famous people were involved with it.

So, Tom Stoppard, we all know Tom Stoppard.

Tom Stoppard was a ghostwriter in the movie sense, so script doctor for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

What?

For the Born Ultimatum, and for Star Wars 3 Revenge of the Sith.

Oh.

Isn't that amazing?

It's amazing in the way that I don't believe it.

No, it's true.

Is that true?

Yeah, it's absolutely true.

And also, Carrie Fisher, speaking of Tom Stoppard and Star Wars, Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia of Star Wars,

actually goes through most of Tom Stoppard's plays.

Yeah, Don Canadian.

She did script doctoring for Sister Act, Lethal Weapon 3, Last Action Hero, The Wedding Singer,

and she wrote all of Tinkerbell's dialogue in Hook.

Well, Carrie Fisher's on the Christmas episode of QI this year, isn't she?

Yeah.

Well, if I'd have known that, I'd have got her to write the script instead of spending all that time there.

It's true.

Okay, we should move on.

Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is Jaczinski.

Yeah, my fact from the book is that William Morton, father of anesthesia, first experimented on himself, but kept falling asleep before he could describe the results.

Day nine, very optimistic about it.

That's amazing.

Yeah, he loved experimenting on himself and various things.

So, this was in the

late 1830s, 1840s, and he was experimenting with ether.

And he

also experimented on his wife's chicken.

He cut off its crest to see if it would be in pain, which she said that it wasn't.

Psychopathic.

What are you even doing this morning?

I was just cutting Bears off apples saying that it was painful.

Well, how does he know as well?

He's like, did that hurt?

No?

Okay.

I'll keep going.

He spoke chicken.

That was just one of his gifts.

Yeah, he experimented on a goldfish on the pet dog, on various pets, on his students.

We're not still cutting things off, are we?

Yeah, just decapitated.

No.

And yeah, because people tended not to want to volunteer themselves.

But eventually he had to get a volunteer because he did keep falling asleep.

So once his wife walked into the room and found him unconscious on the floor and had to rouse him, and he'd been asleep for about twelve minutes, and he said he thought he probably would have died had she not interrupted.

So his wife went through a lot.

So his wife said, he was obviously quite a strange character, loved these kind of grotesque experiments on himself and things around him.

His wife said,

Never shall I forget my sensation as a young bride at sleeping in a room where a tall, gaunt skeleton stood in a big box near the head of the bed, which I just like as the image of coming home on your wedding night and going, What's that?

Is that going to stay?

Just his human skeleton that he kept by his bed.

Amazing.

Yeah, deal-breaker, I would say, but whatever.

Well, once you're already married, it's too late.

Yeah, another evening.

Picky, picky, picky.

But yeah, so it says in the book Father of Anesthesia, and he's quite controversial.

So if there are any Horace Wells lovers out there, I understand that Horace Wells was the guy who experimented with nitrous oxide, which turned out to be more effective in a lot of ways as an anesthetic.

But he was unfortunate because it seemed to be working, so he decided to do a public demonstration of how effective an anesthetic this was in 1845.

And he slightly misjudged the amounts he had to give and the length of time he had to give it for.

And this public demonstration ended in the screaming, hysterical, agonised fit of the person in question.

So everyone went home and said, well, this is rubbish, isn't it?

Let's not try this.

I don't know that.

A lot of surgeons didn't really like anesthetic at the start.

No.

I'm not sure if I said this before, but there was a Russian surgeon called Nikolai Prigov, and he didn't like using laughing gas because he was accustomed to the screams and reactions to pain of his patients and found it much more difficult to operate on an unresponsive body.

Yeah, but apparently, he wasn't alone.

Like, a lot of surgeons like to know that if you prod this bit, someone screams, they know it's not painful.

They said it guided the scalpel.

Yeah.

And a lot of people.

Oh, don't go there, okay.

Yeah, there was a French surgeon called Magendi who thought it was ridiculous, all this experimenting with anesthetics, because he said the pain was essentially irrelevant and it was barely worth noting the pain of actual surgery.

And I've looked into him and he was never operated on.

So I don't know.

But then a lot of religious, a lot of Christians thought that it was what God intended for us and that it was kind of anti-Christian to suffering and bearing children.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Wow.

Very controversial.

Before they had

before Morton got involved, and kind of before Wells got involved as well, they just had laughing gas shows, which just travelled the country across America.

So supposed professors would travel from town to town giving lectures and then just put people under laughing gas.

And then people would laugh and then stagger about and then fall over and talk rubbish.

And

yeah, and it just happened on the pavement.

And it was at one of these that Horace Wells noticed that someone had a painful accident and didn't flinch.

And so he thought, oh, well, I'm going to go and try this.

Try this out on people.

And the next day, he had one of his own wisdom teeth taken out under the influence of nitrous oxide.

And that's what set him off on the whole.

Wow.

It took a long time, didn't it?

Because when was

what's he called laughing nitrous oxide?

Humphrey Davy was, that was the 1790s, wasn't it, when he was dealing with laughing gas?

And it wasn't until the 1840s that, so for ages, they just laughed for 50 years, just going, there must be a use to this

at the moment.

I read a really good, so James has got us a subscription to the British Newspaper Archive, which if anyone um wants to I would highly recommend because it's so fun.

So I looked up

in these days

James Argan out yeah, no.

So there was a letter written to the Liverpool Mercury in 1824, and this was in the era when a lot of people were going to shows and having nitrous oxide tried on them.

And it was by someone who'd been to one of these shows and he'd tried nitrous oxide.

And he wrote a letter to the paper saying, describing it, saying the sensations somewhat resembled those I've experienced when coming in for a share of superfine wine.

Which wine it most resembles, I cannot determine, but if you or any of your friends are anxious to have the point settled, you have only to send me a few specimens of superior champagne or burgundy, and I'll let you know.

What a guy.

I'm really obsessed with people who do self-experimentation because

it feels like it was a long-gone era where they were doing it, and now you look at the news almost virtually every day and it just seems to be going on more and more.

People just going into their own world, not asking for permission.

The guy, Barry Marshall, won the Nobel Prize.

One of your countrymen.

Yeah, an Australian, fellow Australian, won the Nobel Prize for trying to...

Try to explain that you will know this better, so why don't you just say this?

Yeah, a lot of people will know it, I guess.

So he won the Nobel Prize because he proved that stomach ulcers were caused by a bacteria called

Heliobactor pylori, I think it's called.

And he found that out by testing himself, by giving himself this bacteria.

He and then he turned out that he did get these stomach ulcers, and then he took some antibiotics and it got rid of them.

It's not all stomach ulcers, but it's a lot of them.

Yeah, but he effectively should have died off the back of what the medical community thought would happen to him.

So he just went, Screw it, I'm going to drink a Petri dish from bacteria myself, and I'm going to do it to myself.

I really admired that, but it has been going forever.

And my favorite ever self-experiment story is back from 2000 BC.

It's from the Ming Dynasty, and it's a guy called Wan Hu from China who decided to become the first ever astronaut.

Announced he's like going to be the first ever astronaut.

When was it?

It was Ming Dynasty.

Good grief.

Yeah,

so he decided he was going to be the first ever astronaut.

They didn't have rockets then, did they?

What they did have was fireworks.

So

they had some rockets.

So he sat on a chair and attached to the chair

47 rockets.

He had 47 attendants candle ignite the 47 rockets.

There was a massive explosion and neither Wan Who or the chair were ever seen again.

So they might be in space.

Well,

it could have worked.

It could have worked.

I'm glad they didn't do that in the movie UP.

That would have been pretty good.

The press announcement from Pixar.

Sorry, we really cocked up this time.

Try to send a character into space.

He's dead.

The chair's gone as well.

Very sorry.

No,

no one really agrees that this definitely happened.

It's definitely apocryphal.

But at the same time, there is a crater on the moon named one who

is created by his impact.

There's a crater, and yeah, I've spoken to my friends.

Okay, some more self-experimenters.

Herbert Woollard and Edwin Carmichael did some experiments in 1933, and they wanted to know how it felt to put certain pressures on the human testes.

And so they

placed weights on the testes and they explained how it felt.

So I'll give you some of the things they said.

300 grams slight

discomfort in the right groin area.

550 grams definite discomfort in the testicular region followed by a dull ache in the right lumbar region dorsally.

Shall we stop now?

No, let's keep going.

I don't know, I'd like to stop though.

We're going on.

And then, when they got up to 850 grams,

there's a quote of what he said, and he exclaims at once, that is quite different from the left side.

Wow.

Good understatement.

So, speaking of crushing testicles,

do you guys know know Auguste Beer?

No.

Who, so he's someone who

pioneered the cocainization of the spinal cord in like 1898, which is where you inject cocaine into your spinal fluids and it has a numbing effect and it was quite successful.

So he and his assistant, Auguste Hildebrandt, decided to try it out.

First of all, his assistant was supposed to try it out on him and used the wrong size syringe for the needle, which meant that he injected Auguste's spinal cord and his spinal fluid just spouted out all over the room because it didn't fit.

They were like, Well, this is useless.

And then he was drained of all his spinal fluid, so they couldn't try that again.

So they switched places, and the assistant agreed to have him inject his spinal cord.

I would not switch places with someone whose spinal fluid I'd just wasted.

I would feel very bad about that.

So they did it, and it was quite successful.

It was very successful.

He lost all the feeling in his legs.

And so to

check that it worked,

August kicked, stabbed, bludgeoned, and burned his shins, plucked out his pubic hairs, stubbed out cigars on his leg and then crushed and tugged his testicles.

Yeah, that's what happens.

This is for my spinal fluid, he passed it.

But they said so he felt nothing, so they thought this has been great and they celebrated by getting really pissed and smoking loads of cigars.

And they woke up the next day and apparently it was awful and they felt like hell for bio Vegas goodness.

Apparently that's a common side effect of loss of cerebrospinal fluid, I guess, combined with quite a bad hangover.

Whoa!

Yes, we shouldn't have had that seventh line of cocaine into our spines last night.

I think it was the seventh that did it.

Whoa.

We need to move on.

Can I quickly tell you about one more?

Another self-experimenter.

This guy is unbelievable.

In 1804, he was an American student called Stubbins Firth.

What a name.

And he wanted to show that yellow fever was not contagious.

And so he he did so by

inhaling the vapor of sufferers' simmering black vomit.

He then injected the vomit into his own veins and into cuts on his arms, despite the fact that a dog he had injected had died within minutes.

And then he smeared his body with patients' blood, sweat, and urine and drank patients' saliva, blood, and vomit.

He didn't catch it

because the samples came from late-stage patients who were no longer contagious.

All right, okay, let's move on to our final fact.

Time for a final fact, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

Okay, my fact is that

Chessington World of Adventures banned animal onesies to stop the animals there getting confused.

So,

did they genuinely get confused?

We're all confused by Animal Onesies, aren't we?

So they weren't confused that it was another animal that was similar to it.

It was just a what you bird.

They just thought what you did.

That's a poor fashion choice.

I don't know why you've gone for that.

It was a temporary one to stop the.

They had a new giraffe and a new rhino, and they hired bouncers.

And if you went in an Animal Onesie, apparently you were going to be given a grey boiler suit to put over it.

So it was just temporary.

Which would make you look more like a rhino.

And a big pointy hat.

Why?

We don't know.

I don't know.

Chief exact says.

But New Scientist, there's an article in New Scientist about this.

They asked an animal expert, and she said certain colourations do give warning signs to other animals, and also that movement is the trigger.

So big cats get interested if someone limps past their enclosure because they look weak.

And then she said, possibly the worst thing you could do is limp past the lion enclosure in a zebra print outfit.

What about climbing into it?

Also bad.

Also bad.

Yeah, sorry.

Second worst thing, limp past.

Yeah.

Since 2012, the company Kigu, who make onesies, have sold twice as many panda onesies as there are pandas.

That's a sad fact, isn't it?

But

it is easier to make a panda onesie, to be fair.

So, yeah, I'm just saying you don't have to put two panda onesies together and then leave them for five years or whatever.

A panda onesie is more keen to jag each other, is that what you're saying, than pandas.

Much easier.

Well, they did, have we talked about the zoo in China that tried to disguise uh really crap animals as really great animals

in the Henan province?

I feel like we might have to they tried to dre they dressed up a Tibetan mastiff as an African lion,

rats posed as snakes, dogs dressed up as leopards,

and in an effort to save faith, um, the zoo's animal department chief claimed the real lion had been temporarily sent to a breeding facility, although they didn't explain why there was a mastiff dressed up as a lion in the lion's enclosure.

They also said, by the way, we've got Mozart playing tonight.

You should come and see him.

They do, but they do.

When you start to Google zoos and people dressing up as animals, most of the articles that come down are from the idea that it's the zoo people who are dressing up.

So there were pandas, talking of pandas.

They had a small baby panda that was born and they wanted to put it into the wild.

So all of the zookeepers dressed up as pandas, so they didn't think that there was human contact going on.

So maybe it does actually confuse the animal.

I don't know.

It might do.

I'm not giving them much credit.

Animals are very good at recognizing each other, aren't they?

A lot of animals are.

So I think we talked about wasps last week, that they can recognize each other's faces.

So if you put wasps in a maze and you show them a photograph of one wasp's face that leads to something bad and one wasp's face that leads to something good, then they learn the wasp's face and learn to go that direction rather than the bad wasp's face.

I don't know what happens when they meet those wasps in real life and have,

oh, you asshole, you kept leading me down a bad way.

But yeah, sheep are really good at recognising each other, which is weird because they all famously look the same.

Now you're being sheep racist.

I'm a sheepist.

Yeah, if you show sheep,

so I think they experimented on 50 sheep, and if you show them a picture of one sheep, like two a couple of sheep faces, then they can always identify the one that's associated with something good, or 85% of the time I think they identify the one that's associated with something good.

So, yeah, I don't think animals are being confused by humans dressed in furry skins.

All right, well, then in a different case at a zoo in Tenerife, they have a thing, they do this in zoos now, where they dress up

certain members of the team as an animal and get them to try and escape the zoo.

And the costume bits.

The costume bit is just to add effect and fun for them to do.

Sorry,

in case

it's to test if a gorilla escaped from an enclosure and it started running out, how they could have an emergency.

Yeah, exactly.

They have an emergency routine if something escapes and they have to make sure that they know what they're doing.

Yeah, but

a guy in a gorilla suit can't rip someone's arm off.

So they add extra realism by ripping someone's arm off.

Yeah, they do.

Well, what happened in this case is one of the zookeepers wasn't told this was happening, saw the gorilla escaping and shot a tranquilizer dart into the person.

Genuinely,

this was this year, and they had to bring them to hospital and bring them back too.

That's amazing.

So, evidently, animals are better at noticing humans dressed up as animals than humans are.

Yeah.

In 2008, if you rang up Dublin Zoo, you would get an answer phone message saying: If you are calling to speak to Mr.

Rory Lyon, C Lion, G.

Raph, or anyone similar, please be aware that you are a victim of a hoax message.

Yeah, or perpetrating one.

That's me.

That's exactly what I would do if I had thought of it.

So I really like the history of zoos as well.

So when London Zoo was first opened, it was obviously much more wild west-y than modern zoos.

So they just had, they thought they would use zebras to pull people around in passenger carts and carriages and things.

You could play with the bears sometimes.

They just let you play with the bears.

And they didn't have proper vets, you know.

They just.

And also, sorry.

Play with the bears.

Yeah.

That's never going to end well, isn't it?

And they died in their hundreds.

A female seal disappeared two weeks before the grand opening, and they only found it two days before the public first arrived.

I don't know whether.

How does a seal escape?

Sketchy on detail here.

I don't know if it escaped the zoo or just was in the zoo, but not.

But in the lion enclosure.

The very first animal at London Zoo was a griffin vulture called Dr.

Brooks, who was named after the anatomy teacher who had donated him.

And his job used to be to eat the corpses when they were finished with.

But then he had retired, so he didn't have a fresh supply of money.

The corpses of the children who had been sent to play with the bears.

No, sorry.

We're in a different place.

Dr.

Brooks' anatomy school.

He would dissect bodies, and then afterwards, the vulture could have the rest.

But after he retired, no more bodies.

So he said, Well, I have to find a home for the vulture.

Wow.

Yeah.

One in eight British adults owns a onesie, don't they?

That's in one of our bank books.

So Dan owns.

From us, Dan owns half of one.

Yeah.

Is that true?

Yeah, just anyone here.

Show of hands.

Show of hands?

Oh, that looks about right.

Wow.

About one in eight.

That's about ten.

Yeah, ten of a hundred.

I think that's like 30%.

That wasn't ten.

Wasn't that?

No, it wasn't.

Any animal ones?

Which

Wait, someone in the front row is wobbling his hand because he's not sure if it's Doddilla.

Good question.

Well, yeah, yeah.

He's not a vegetable or an animal, is he?

This is interesting.

This is onesie hour.

You know, when you find yourself looking up really, really hopeful stuff for QI research, so today I found myself looking up at one point animals dressed in human onesies in the desert.

Oh, please tell me that you found one.

If you can find anything, my god, if someone finds one, that would be good.

There's a sloth onesie you get.

If sloths get manged, then you have to shave them from head to toe, but they need to remain warm.

And so they've designed sloth onesies.

There you go.

Actual onesies for sloths.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah, no, that would be the worst human onesie.

Okay,

well, also the worst for if you're trying to show a sloth escaping a zoo, because you could literally go home, come back the next day, and they've moved a meter.

Like, that's not the animal escaping.

Sloths have lots of beetles living in their fur, so the onesies would have to be thick enough for all these beetles to live in.

And moths and all sorts.

You must be the worst onesie buyer.

You're returning it to the store.

I'm sorry, but this is not an accurate description of how slow.

Where are the beetles?

What the hell's going on here?

It's a fucking joke.

I made several attempts to lure beetles into my

found that few of them found it enticing prospects.

Churchill had a onesie.

Winston Churchill.

Yeah.

Yes.

He called it his siren suit because air raid sirens, he spent a lot of the war, Second World War, working underground in the cabinet war rooms.

And he had it especially designed.

I don't, people have dressed this up so they say he invented the onesie, which he did not.

That's not fair because it's like an adapted boiler suit.

But it was auctioned recently for thousands and thousands of pounds.

Really?

Yeah.

It wasn't an animal.

It wasn't an animal.

Can you imagine?

You know what?

Churchill had a dog onesie.

When Churchill talks about his black dog and people that team depression, it's just

my black dog's back again.

I'm imagining the dog onesie going, oh yeah.

Okay, Chessington, Chessington World of Adventures.

Chessing World of Adventures.

They imply a lady who looks very nice called Lisa Britton.

And her job is a birds and the bees consultant.

And

because I have questions for her,

well, that's she's there to help children or immature adults

and to tell them what's happening when they're walking past and animals are having sex.

Is she all over?

Do they walk around?

Does she know when the animals are having sex and rushes?

I see her with a bank of CCTV screens.

Wait, the sea lions are at it.

I must go.

She says she's most in demand around three species:

the monkeys who have no shame and wave their monkey hood around as part of their courtship,

the lions because it's a noisy affair,

and the tortoises because it's a very slow process and they are not discreet at all.

That's amazing.

I printed out the page for the history of Chessington Zoo because they have a little timeline on their website.

And I just want to share three entries with you from three different.

It's a very interesting site.

It was a Civil War place, then it was an ale house, lots of stuff.

Anyway, 1991.

Following the development in 1990, there weren't any new attractions for 1991.

1992.

1992 was another year of little investment.

1993,

Fifth Dimension closed at the end of 1993.

I've never been.

Is it fun?

Is that a fun place?

Well, it's pretty great.

91 and 93.

It is fun.

It's great fun.

There's a theme park I discovered, Dolly Land.

Have you guys heard of Dolly Land?

Is it Dolly Parton?

Yeah.

Dolly Parton has a theme park, which I didn't know.

Quick guess.

Oh, it's got, sorry, Dollywood, of course.

Dolly Landon is a very different place.

Dolly Pans.

And I am not allowed back there.

Dollywood, I'm so sorry.

That's so awesome that you knew that.

Dollywood, anyone want to have a guess of the opening hours of

it's ten till seven.

It genuinely is.

Missed opportunity.

I don't know what they were thinking.

Hey, listen, we we need to wrap up really soon.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Uh do we have any more final facts we want to throw into this?

I quite like, if we're talking about theme parks, I didn't know what the first ever roller coaster was or the original roller coaster.

So you're nodding.

Are you thinking Russia?

It was

thinking Laura.

No, Russia, 1700s.

They had the...

1700s.

Yeah, 1700s.

They had Russian ice slides.

And it was this fad in Russia that went through all the 1700s.

Catherine the Great loved them.

She had loads of them installed on her own property.

And what they were were, they were the structures that were up to 100 feet tall, and they were what they sound like.

So they were, you climb up a ladder 100 feet and there's an ice slide and you just slide all the way down it.

And people would have them installed in the halls of their stately homes.

So you'd go into a stately home, there's a huge ice slide in the middle.

That's so cool.

Yeah, and then the French during the Napoleonic Wars saw these and thought that's really and tried them and said that's super fun.

And then they went in.

Yeah, that was the predominant emotion in Moscow in 1812.

Well, they burned the city and we're starving.

These ice slides.

So the French brought them back and then built the world's first roller coaster and called it Russian Mountain.

Yeah.

Homage.

Homage.

Good fact.

Good fact.

All right, that's it.

That's our facts.

Thanks so much for listening to that.

That was.

We went on way too long.

But yeah,

for those listening to this and not in the room, if anyone in the room wants to ask us anything afterwards, we're going to be selling books downstairs.

We're going to be hanging out downstairs.

So join us.

That'll be awesome.

If anyone listening listening wants to ask us any questions about the things we've talked about, we're on Twitter.

My hash, no, not my hashtag.

I do have a hashtag though, as well.

I don't.

That'd be the lamest.

Hey, my hashtag is.

That would be terrible.

Hashtag Dollyland.

Yes.

Oh, yeah, it is a land.

Yeah,

my Twitter name is at Schreiberland.

James?

At egg-shaped.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Anna.

Podcast at QI.com.

Yes, or you can get us all together at at qi podcast.

That's our Twitter handle for the whole of us.

We're going to be back again next week with another batch of facts.

Thanks for listening and we'll see you again.

Good night.

Goodbye.

Good night.

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