29: No Such Thing As Terrestrial Sweetcorn

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We ran it on QI a few years ago,

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

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 three of the regular elves.

It is James Harkin, Anna Chaczynski, and Andy Murray.

And once again, we've got our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and here they are in no particular order.

James, starting with you, what's your fact?

Okay, my fact this week is that the head of the International Chess Federation believes that chess was brought to Earth by aliens.

And he should know.

Yeah.

What kind of evidence does he have for that?

He has first-hand evidence because he was abducted by aliens in 1997 1997 and shown around the galaxy.

And they told him the earth is set to collide with the planet Nibiru, killing us all if mankind does not cleanse its aura by playing more chess.

In an interview in Time magazine, that was.

What's his name again?

Mr.

Ilyumzhinov.

He's a politician as well.

He's the head of the Kalmykia province of Russia, and he has friends such as Chuck Norris, and he was friends with Saddam Hussein.

Was he friends with David Icke?

He should be.

Why do these political guys, all these sort of like eccentric characters, always have an American action hero as a good mate?

They all have, you know, Chuck Norris being his mate or like Kim Jong-un having Dennis Rodman.

I guess it's like a trophy friend.

Trophy American mate for some kind of buddy movie that may erupt one day.

Any biography movie done of a big political leader of our time is effectively going to come out like rush hour.

Chuck Norris, just quickly on him, I read this thing whereby he, despite being in violent movies, hates that his kids would have to watch violent movies, but they all want to watch his movies.

So he does this thing where he edits out all the fight scenes from his movies and lets his kids watch that.

And I cannot think of anything more painful than watching a Chuck Norris movie without the fighting scenes.

Yeah.

Do they think that he's in a load of 26-minute long feature films?

Just back to this guy, Mr.

Ilyam Janov.

He said that aliens gave us chess.

That's one thing.

But he also said they gave us something else.

Anyone know what it is?

No.

Is it a technology or an illness or a body part?

No.

Sweet corn.

He says they gave us sweet corn, but he says it was a different civilization that gave us sweet corn.

Maybe the Aztecs or the Incans or something.

And are they threatening the world with destruction unless we eat as much sweet corn as humanly possible?

Do you know what?

He's been more asked about the chess donation from space than he has the Suitecorn.

I can't find anything else.

You know what, guys?

I was really hoping this was going to be about chess.

Oh, let's go into chess.

Let's go into chess.

Can I tell you a fact about chess?

Yes, please.

In 1999, Gary Kasparov, obviously, great chess champion, played the world at chess.

Oh, yeah.

He played 50,000 different people from more than 75 countries in one game.

So they all submitted votes on what move they should take as a team.

And whichever move received most votes was the move that the world made against Garry Kasparov.

After four months, the the game ended at move 62, when 51% of the world team voted to resign.

Wow, 49% must have been livid.

Yeah.

But they weren't even acting on that.

So 50,000 people, but they weren't even on their own, even as 50,000.

They had four chess experts guiding them, acting as world team coaches and suggesting moves and strategies.

So even with expert help, 50,000 people cannot beat Gary Kasparov.

Gary Kasparov, when he so famously, he obviously had the two matches against Deep Blue, the supercomputer, the latter of which was in nine, so he won the first one, which was a set of six games, and then in 1997 he played another set of six games.

And in the first game of the six, he won, but he basically had a mental breakdown after it had finished because the computer had done what he thought was a completely ingenious move that even he couldn't understand.

So Gary Kasparov was winning, but the computer moved a rook in a really random position, and Gary Kasparov couldn't work out why that possibly would make any computing sense.

So suddenly he went, oh my god, I can't work out the logic of what this computer is doing.

It must be better than me.

And that was the last game that he ever won against the computer because he became so frightened that, oh, this has superhuman intelligence.

And actually,

one of the computer engineers admitted to Nate Silver 15 years later that there was a bug in the computer and it just resorted to randomly moving a piece totally at random.

It would have been better if someone had just moved the horse in the wrong way or something.

It's like, Yes, that would have been more amazing.

Just knock the table over.

Oh my god, you can move a horse three up and five across?

No one told me this.

He thought he thought it was a sign that there were humans intervening with the computer.

He oh yeah, and he thought they were there.

Just about your thing about Kasparov versus the World, Andy.

I can go one better on that, which is the he the first ever world chess champion was called Wilhelm Steinitz.

And he was a great player and he was he beat everyone and then he started to slightly lose his marbles a little bit and he um challenged God to a match.

And he would play God quite often.

Uh and he quite often beat God and he got so much better than God that he would start giving God like a pawn extra to try and make it a bit more even.

Wait, when you say he beat God,

it was God playing.

Well, I think he was like maybe slightly schizophrenic, so he was getting the getting the moves himself and go, Oh, God did that, oh God, you idiot

And so so he would be God, and very sadly, he ended up in a mental asylum and died penniless.

But he was the first ever chess champion called Wilhelm Steinitz.

There is a debate about whether chess makes you mad or not.

There's a really good Nabakov quote about the fact that everyone who plays chess must eventually go insane.

But my favourite chess player is this guy called Natan Sharansky, who is now an Israeli politician, I think, but he was a human rights campaigner in Soviet Russia.

And he was a childhood chess prodigy, and he was put in a Siberian prison in 1977 for nine years.

And he said chess kept him sane.

So he was in this tiny, freezing-cold cell, was hardly given any food.

It was completely dark.

There was absolutely nothing in the cell, just stone.

And he just played chess in his head against himself for nine years and said that that was the only way that he survived it.

Why they kept him sane?

Wow.

I think it's in Iran.

They banned the, you know, when you get the pawn to the end and you can turn it into a queen.

I think they banned that move because it promoted bigamy, because then the king had two wives.

Surely it would be be promoting transvestism.

Are you assuming that pawns are men?

Yes, I am.

Are they?

I don't know.

I'm comfortable with that.

Queens used to only be able to move less, like they could only move one space in any direction.

Yeah, they were rubbish.

They were the worst.

And then they could move like knights for a while for some reason, which is kind of bizarre because you would have thought knights can move like that because they're horses.

Queen could do it too.

Sorry, just your logic is like, well, they're on horses, so that makes sense.

Actually, it's never struck me that that doesn't make sense.

Does it the knights can move too forward?

Horses can jump over.

I think a horse is a good one.

Yeah, they can jump, but there's no particular reason why a horse c would move two forward and one to the side at the same time.

Do you guys, when you play Monopoly, are you going, Okay, I'm going to get the car because that moves faster than a hat?

This is a bit too much logic.

Oh, yeah, the battleship, blow up the iron.

Yeah.

Have you seen?

They brought out new pieces for the Monopoly board.

Yeah, they brought in a cat last year, didn't they?

Yeah, they've got rid of the iron, or the old boot, possibly, and replaced it with a cat.

But sorry, go on, Andy.

Sorry, just on the monopoly thing.

The cat won a vote, a popular online vote, and it beat a robot, helicopter, diamond ring, and a guitar.

And one of the guys from Hasbro said, I think there were a lot of cat lovers in the world that reached out.

They're always bloody reaching out to them.

Robot should have won.

Robot should have one.

King Canute, who we all know, turned back the waves.

He once had a chess game with an Earl of his called Earl Ulf.

And he did a move, I think it was a knight's move, but he realised it it was a bad one, tried to take it back.

Earl Ulf said, No, you can't do that.

It turned into a massive argument.

Canute tipped up the table, went off in a huff, and then had Earl Ulf killed.

Wow.

Napoleon got really angry playing chess.

Well, according to one account, Napoleon got really angry playing chess against the mechanical Turk, didn't he?

Yeah, we should explain who the mechanical Turk is.

Yeah, so the Mechanical Turk was a fake chess machine that existed between 1770 and 1854.

And it was theoretically, it was this robot that was dressed up like a Turk, and it managed to beat Napoleon, Franklin, Babbage, other famous people at chess, and it sort of toured the globe.

And it was this Turkish man with a huge box on which he had a chessboard that he apparently played by some robotic power.

So I don't know why no one ever said, Hey, can this Turk play without the huge box?

Because inside the huge box under the chessboard was obviously a guy who was controlling the chess piece of the city.

So why does that box keep sneezing?

Yeah.

What?

Maybe this is why the robot's not allowed on the Monopoly board.

All the games it's been banned from.

In case Napoleon puts him to death.

But yeah, at one point Napoleon, I think, wrapped a shawl around the mechanical Turk's head so that he wouldn't be able to see the board, which obviously didn't make a blind bit of difference.

There was another famous chess player who always had excuses.

And he'd lost five games in a row.

He was 5-0 down.

And he said, oh, the first one I lost because I I had toothache.

And the second one I lost because I had a headache.

And the third one I lost because I had rheumatism in my legs.

And the fourth one I lost because I just wasn't feeling very well.

And then they said, well, why did you lose the fifth one?

And he said, what?

Am I expected to win every game?

That was like when David Hay, after his match, where he lost.

He's like,

you know, it's...

I twisted my ankle this morning.

And that was his excuse.

No, he broke a toe.

He broke a toe.

Oh, I broke broke my toe, and that really affected how I punch with my arms.

I just wish I'd learned.

Oh, is he a boxer?

Oh, come on, that's all right.

Yeah.

What, your toe?

Yeah.

Yeah, you can't move.

It can be really painful.

No, he was.

He was fine.

Can I just say, if David Hay's listening, I believe you.

Oh, me too, actually.

Sorry, David.

I know, but I don't know who you are.

I thought you were a chess player.

Come on, let's bring weedy chess player Hay over here.

This is rash,

This will break his other toe.

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Okay, time for fact number two, and that is my fact.

My fact this week concerns the Greenland shark, which is a shark I didn't know existed until a few days ago.

And what I love about it is the Greenland shark is so slow that it basically needs all of its food to be asleep in order to eat it.

Because otherwise, if it can move, anything can outswim it because its fastest speed is one mile per hour.

Why is it so slow?

Because it's in cold water and so it needs to preserve all of its energy and so on.

They can do little bursts of speed, can't they?

The sharks?

They can, but when they say, when they, in everything I've read, I could be, if someone out there knows any different, because I'd love to know,

apparently, with the bursts of speed, they can only get up to about 1.6 miles an hour.

So that's their burst of speed.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's not so much a burst, is it?

They're amazing looking.

They're 20 feet long as well.

They're huge.

Yeah, they're ginormous.

So it eats seals, the Greenland shark.

And the problem with eating seals is that it's fine if they can manage to get the seal, but the seal can swim at two miles per hour.

So it's always just in front of this shark who's given it its all, going on.

It's not always just in front.

It's always increasing its distance.

That's true.

That's true.

A mile every hour.

So basically, they have to wait to find a sleeping seal.

And here's the thing.

The seals, their main predator, are the polar bears up on the ice.

And they would rather be in the ocean and risk being asleep because they can probably have a good sleep, notice a shark on its way, and by the time it wakes up, it can still get away.

Yeah, you could press snooze quite a few times before it gets you, couldn't you?

Yeah.

But they're extraordinary creatures, just generally.

Their skin is poisonous.

I don't know if I've read about that within any other sharks.

Not the rest of them, too, their flesh as well.

Sorry, that's yeah, yeah.

So they're completely poisonous.

We couldn't eat them.

And do you know what it does to you if you eat it?

Do you know the effects it has?

What's the poison?

So the poison is trimethylane oxide.

And so if you eat the flesh of the shark, that has the effect of extreme drunkenness.

Does it?

So, if you manage to not eat too much, then you can just get really pissed off.

Oh, so it's like licking a toad, except if you don't like drugs and you like alcohol.

Yeah, exactly.

Wow, like a hallucinogenic toad.

You can lick this shark.

Looking, I think you'd have to nibble.

You can cook it, though.

There are ways of preparing it properly.

But it's a very disgusting way of cooking it.

You have to bury the meat in the ground for

these, is it?

Yeah, for six to twelve weeks, and then you expose it every so often and you thaw it out, and then you freeze it again.

Then you have have to hang it up to dry for several months, and then you finally cut it into bite-sized cubes.

Wow, I think in order to eat that, you'd have to be pretty drunk, wouldn't you?

Yeah, and it says that the end product, which is called a hekarl or hakarl, is a delicacy, which is the universal way of describing foods that are horrible but rare.

They can live.

These sharks can live up to 200 years, they think.

No, that can't be right.

Yeah, this is what they say.

They know this because

scientists have said that they can live up to roughly 200 years of age.

They know this because they measure how much they grow per year, and they only grow about one between half and one centimeter per year.

And so they found them the size of great white sharks, and they've made an assumption that that's how large they can get.

It's really weird how little we know about this shark as well.

They were only first photographed in 1995, and the first bit of actual footage of them is from 2003.

So they're kind of this new species to us, really.

It was actually thought that sharks in general died in their 20s, but then they did radioactive

tests on them because the radiation that went from the nuclear tests into the environments meant that you can test how old things are.

And they found that sharks now routinely live into their 70s.

Wow.

Wow, okay.

Yeah.

That's such a strange thought, isn't it?

An elderly shark.

They have found inside the Greenland shark, haven't they?

Some pretty impressive animals, given that they move so slowly.

They found reindeer and they found really fast-moving seals inside it.

A lion.

A cheetah.

A polar bear drink.

A polar bear found inside one of them.

Which is is weird.

They basically eat everything because they don't have many options of living things to eat because everything can swim away.

They're genuinely, they're scavengers.

If they see something dead and it looks edible, they will eat it because that's

their three options are: it's either asleep, it's dead, or it swam into my face.

Those are their three eating options that they have.

I want to talk about some slow chases.

Okay, yeah.

So, in, I don't know when this was, a few years ago, there was a news report of a guy called Mr.

Smith who stole a JCB.

And then he drove off at 10 to 15 miles an hour.

The police were called.

They started chasing him, but then realised that he was just going and they couldn't stop him.

And so the policeman got out and chased him on foot.

And he said, I was able to keep pace at a fast jog,

which is quite a good police chase.

And I was also reading about this really cool thing called the Marathon de Madoc, which is a French marathon, and it's known as the world's longest marathon.

And it's a full 26 miles, and there are 23 wine stops on the way.

And a lot of these wine stops.

Did you just pause to complain?

No.

Sadly not.

No, it's where you drink wine.

And they stops also offer specialties such as steak and ice cream.

when you get to stop and at 23 miles there's an oyster stop so you can have some oysters.

And according to the organisers, this marathon has the most medical support of any marathon in the world.

Wow.

Of course, yeah.

And no one's ever finished it.

Come for the steak.

Stay for the heart attack.

Are the slowest animals?

The sloth is obviously a good guy and can only move at three meters per minute.

But I think that's fine because it can do so much other cool stuff.

So it can spin its head 270 degrees, which I didn't know.

Exorcist style, quite impressive.

Yeah, James is trying it now.

You've got about 40, I would say 40 degrees you've managed.

Oh, come on.

No, you've got about 90.

Certainly went over 90.

But I didn't know the sloths were so sedentary that algae grows on their coat and they use it as camouflage.

Well, I think they're justifying that after the fact.

No, this is camouflage.

Meant to do it, guys.

Totally meant to do it.

They eat it as well, don't they?

The algae.

There you go.

Multi-purpose.

This leads to a brilliant, interesting thing about sloths, which is the two-toed variety, I think, they climb down from the tree to defecate, and that uses up 8% of all their energy, which is a lot of energy just to go to the toilet.

It's actually terrifying, though, to be 12 shits away from death.

Which uses 8% of your energy.

Oh, yeah.

You will be counting in your head.

That's four.

That's like you could see the energy bar at the top of Street Fighter.

That's how you can break that down.

You'd have to really conserve it, wouldn't you?

And do they know it?

I need it.

I can hold it it for another six hours.

But it's been 11.

Okay, time for fact number three, and that is you, Trasynski.

My fact is that in the 19th century, you could be committed to an asylum for novel reading.

No.

You're caught reading a novel.

You're a banged up.

Was it specific novels?

I didn't say, actually, it was just so this is.

Well, I found records from West Virginia Asylum from between 1864 and 1889, and Pennsylvania State Lunatic Hospital are just two sources that I found, which give lists of reasons for admission.

And one of them is novel reading.

Other reasons for admission into the West Virginia Asylum in that time period include kicked in the head by a horse, bad whiskey, and imaginary female trouble.

Don't know what that is.

Hysteria, I guess.

But imaginary.

No, there's a separate one.

Hysteria is totally separate, and menstrual trouble is separate.

An imaginary female.

Trouble with the wife.

It was only men.

You're not married.

Get to the asylum now.

Actually, speaking of that, so in the other asylum, the Pennsylvania Asylum, novel reading was cited as a cause of lunacy in two patients.

One man was admitted for mortified pride, but the most common cause of admission, so the most common illness or the most common reason for going mad, for which 226 patients were admitted in one year in 1866, was just trouble.

Yeah.

I got trouble.

It's an incredible list.

It includes things like the war, which is another reason for admission to an asylum.

Yeah.

Do you reckon that's PTSD?

That would be

Shell Shock or something.

Shell Shock, might be

two more of my favourites from that list.

One of them is tobacco and masturbation.

Are those paired together?

Yes, they are.

There's a separate one for masturbation, and then tobacco and masturbation, I believe, is a different quote.

There's a lot of them.

There's masturbation and syphilis, suppressed masturbation, masturbation for thirty years, and my favourite, deranged masturbation.

That's your favourite what?

Hobby.

Yeah, this is like a list of our weekend.

It's my to-do list.

Masturbation also thought to be caused by novel reading in the 19th century.

Yep, I was reading an extract from a book called Disease, Insanity, and Deformity, written in 1860, and it said, masturbation often caused by novel reading.

And the way you can spot masturbation in somebody, so obviously it's a terrible sin.

I know how to spot it.

I don't need a guide.

It's hard to identify.

Give me a line up.

I'll spot the guy.

It's number four.

You can tell because he's got tobacco.

How do you really spot it?

You can spot it by sunken, ghastly eyes and clammy, greasy skin, irritability, eyes averted when they meet ours, basically all the symptoms of being a teenager.

Oh, and I had a good, Sorry, I have a good thing in the.

This was in 1869, and it was an essay by the Reverend J.T.

Crane about novel reading, about why it's so bad for you.

And there were loads of different reasons.

Mostly it's about encouraging imagination, and obviously, that's not to be encouraged.

But one of the things says that a novel reader is merged in the hero of the story, handsome in person, brilliant in mind, endowed with every

excellence, and bearing a name of at least three syllables.

So basically, if you read novels, it makes you think you have a name of three syllables.

He soon imagines he is desperately in love with some little damsel in the neighbourhood.

He begins to canvass her, she turns him down, and eventually he commits suicide.

And that's apparently, if you read novels, that's what will happen to you.

To every person who read a novel, really.

It is extraordinary, but we don't realise that the novel was a new form

in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

But it's extraordinary.

You don't.

Yeah.

But it's extraordinary to think of a world in which novels were unknown, and then suddenly people were writing these books.

There they were, yeah.

Yeah, and it was a lot of worry, of course, typical to the time about the effect on young women.

Oh, it was all about women.

How they would imagine themselves to be, as you say, James, heroines and things like that.

And that would lead them to abandon their studies, their wholesome pursuits.

Actually, Jane Austen mounts a very lively defence of novel reading in Northanger Abbey.

She says they contain everything that's excellent in mankind.

Yeah, she did have a vested interest, though, being in novel writing.

writer.

She was fires.

Oh, you've blown the lid right off this one, James.

Get it in private eye now.

Not just women, because what about Goethe's Sorrows of John Werthe?

I like that it's Goethe's Sorrows of Werthe.

Yeah.

I do like that.

No, but

that was a novel he wrote, wasn't it?

Yeah, it had to be a lot of different things.

The main character commits suicide.

One of the characters was very distinctively dressed.

I can't really remember.

It was like he had yellow trousers and a red jacket or something.

He commits suicide, and then everyone supposedly copied him.

And there were two thousand suicides in Europe blamed on that novel.

God, wow.

So they are dangerous.

Stay away from the novels.

Okay, we've got to move on.

Anyone got anything else to chuck in?

Yeah, just some really good stuff about how they dealt with the mentally ill in the nineteenth century.

So when you were put into your asylum for novel reading, some things that you could have done to you were so freezing cold showers and shaved heads were often administered because it was thought that you could release the madness through your head.

And you'd have an application of blisters where your skin was burnt a lot, so you blister up.

So a blister would be prescribed.

But the funnest, I think, are whirling chairs.

So these were what they sound like, really, where you get sat in a chair, tied to it, and it spins around and round, around, around, and it's supposed to send your madness propelling from your body.

So there's a great account, for instance, in 1822.

Did you work?

Yeah, worked like a charm.

Work like a dream.

In all the accounts I've read, I've read tons.

It's always no improvement, no improvement.

Oh my god, they never caught on.

If there was a transcript of just like the doctor's kitchen where they all met during the day, they would sound way more mad than anyone who was in that asylum.

How's your day been?

I put him on the whirling chair to propel his madness out of him.

How'd it go?

It didn't work.

I don't know if we've got a faulty chair.

I don't know what's going on.

Just the conversations would have been insane in there.

You didn't whirl him fast enough.

Let's be real.

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

Hello, my fact is that the Japanese Yakuza Crime Syndicate has its own website, which has a theme tune designed to attract new members.

Wait, so just very quickly, because I don't know much about them, this is like a real kind of like menacing mafia-like.

Yeah,

except that there's a lot of acceptance of them in Japanese society.

And

it's not illegal to be a member, but it is illegal to do obviously a lot of the activities, which is extortion or rackets of one kind or another.

So they have a very interesting racket, which is basically large-scale bribery, where they buy shares in a company enough to get them to a shareholders' meeting where they can speak in public.

And then they just find dirt on the company's executives, get in touch with them, and say, if you don't pay us a significant whack of money, we will come to the shareholders' meeting and read out all this terrible stuff about you.

And so they do it.

And the only effective method against them, apparently, is to have everyone's shareholder meetings on the same day so that

they can't be everywhere at once.

So now 90% of companies on the Tokyo Stock Exchange have their annual shareholder meetings on the the same day now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it's very weirdly sort of half-accepted.

And then they they they see themselves as not being criminals, they see themselves as having a proper code of honor and having, you know,

and they sometimes are do I mean, whether it's a cynical act or not, they, for instance, in 2011 were some of the first people to get to the tsunami,

the tsunami-affected areas with aid, weren't they?

And in 1995, the same thing in Kobe when the earthquake hit.

They think that if the Yakuza hadn't hadn't arrived in time with their aid, then there would have been much, much more damage done because other agencies couldn't get in fast enough.

So they're controversial because they're not totally unpopular.

They've got this thing.

I read that they have

a 12-page exam now for all of their members.

Just to make sure, because they keep getting in trouble for kind of rookie errors and the way that laws are changing and so on.

I think it's because they don't mind doing their big racketeering and stuff, but they don't want to get in with a brawl or just like a

lame, like a parking fine or something like that.

They're trying to stop them doing the small things.

But that's what's really funny because, um, in a normal exam, if you were doing that for normal people who just live quite a sort of legal life, it would be stuff like not parking your car in a certain spot.

The stuff that they have, the topics that they cover, are dumping industrial waste, which is just realism,

and vehicle theft, which is normal.

I love that dumping industrial waste.

Yeah, it's nice.

They also have a newsletter that they do.

Yeah, as well.

Yeah.

And it's, it's, what, do you want to?

No, no, you go go for it.

Um,

so it goes only to the regular members.

You have to be a proper full-time member to get one of the newsletters.

But that's 28,000 people.

And it's

articles,

motivational articles from the management about the difficult times we're going through, and that's going to pick up soon.

Haikus, articles on fishing,

entreaties to perform good works.

So I think it's designed partly as a little propaganda thing because they know that people outside the yakus are also going to read it.

And hey, these guys, they sound like pretty fun.

We should go angling sometime with them.

Did you go onto their website that you were talking about?

Yeah, I did, and it's very old school.

It looks

like it's a little bit different.

You can translate it into English, can't you?

And a lot of it is about anti-marijuana saying that marijuana shouldn't be allowed in the country and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

The Banished Drugs and Purify the Nation League is

the front for it.

Isn't there a branch of it that is quite anti-drugs, though?

And it's called the Yamuchai something.

There is a branch of it.

The Yamaguchi Gumi?

Yeah, the Yamaguchi Gumi is genuinely quite anti-drugs, or parts of it are very anti-drugs, aren't they?

Yes, yes, they are.

So they're selective about the crimes they commit.

They are, exactly.

It's more a kind of power extortion racketeering thing.

I should say where I got this fact from.

It's from this magazine called Delayed Gratification Quarterly, which is a very cool magazine because it's all news from three months ago, which has been filtered and written about really carefully.

And there's this incredible photo feature, which you should check out by a guy called Anton Custas,

who was allowed into the syndicate for two years to photograph them.

And their tattoos are extraordinary.

They often don't get a say.

Oh, we'll put these up on the side.

Yeah, they're extraordinary.

And if you Google Anton Custas, it's K-U-S-T-E-R-S, then you'll find his photos of them.

Right.

This magazine just sounds like an excuse for a newspaper that was very slow getting to the press.

I know,

it sounds like if Greenland Sharks made a newspaper.

I did genuinely try and get hold of Delayed Gratification Quarterly on Monday last week, and they said, come back on Wednesday.

It's not in yet.

Excellent.

Yeah.

Hell's Angels, another, well, the U.S.

Department of Justice considers them a crime syndicate.

And anyway, I was reading a news story on them the other day where a German student mooned a group of Hell's Angels and hurled a puppy at them before escaping on a stolen bulldozer.

So he ran outside, presumably, where every single one of their Harley-Davidsons was sitting and thought, I need an escape vehicle.

I need to get away from these guys real quick.

Bulldozer.

He must have thought that the dog would distract them somehow.

Well, it must have, because he was stopped by the police, not the Hills Angels.

Perhaps they thought they didn't really care that much and they'd rather go on drinking.

Do they have a theme tune as well?

Oh, speaking of the theme tunes, have we got, did you manage to find the Yakuza theme tune?

So here it is.

So the lyrics lyrics are, with nothing but my courage and this body, I'll trust myself to the life of a Yakuza and follow this path I've decided on.

Wow.

It's not as jingly as I was hoping it would be.

No, it's not really as jingle.

I was hoping it was more like an advert trying to get you to a KFC or a McDonald's or something like that.

Yeah, I'm not signing up after hearing that.

It should be like, don't be a loser, join the Yakuza.

James spent the whole podcast planning that.

So speaking of theme tunes, did you guys know that Salmon Rushdie wrote a theme tune once?

For a TV show we all know and love?

Nope.

He wrote a theme tune.

It was titled The Best Things Begin With B,

and it was for the Burnley Building Society.

He wrote the lyrics to it.

You can dream a little, you can dream a lot, but the best dreams of all are the ones you've got building in the Burnley.

That is fantastic.

And I can't find any evidence of it online.

I reckon he goes through the internet every day and makes sure he deletes every reference to it.

That's great, though.

I didn't even know Burnley had a Building Society.

There you go.

It didn't do its job.

Apparently, he was very bad in advertising.

The one thing I know about Burnley is they drink more Benedictine than anywhere else in the world.

Do they?

Well, the best things in life do begin with B.

Yes.

They drink it in Benny and Hots, which is Benedictine and Hot Water, and it's a specific club, especially in a certain area of Burnley, and they all drink Benedictine.

Oh, really?

And then invest their money very sensibly.

Yes.

That's what they're into.

There was something else.

Oh, yeah.

He worked, he came up with the slogan for fresh cream cakes, naughty but nice.

Yes, he he did.

And he also invented the word irresistibubble for aero chocolate bars.

That was pretty cool.

So that obviously prefigured a lot of his magical realism later on.

Yeah.

Can I tell you something about theme tunes?

Yes, please.

Okay, I have a couple of things about theme tunes which I really like.

So, you know, the theme tune to Desert Island Discs?

Yes.

Yeah, da-da-da-da.

Very nice.

It was inspired by the view over Bognar Regis.

Was it?

Yeah.

The composer wrote it, looking across the lagoon towards Bogner.

It's called the Blue Lagoon or something, isn't it?

Yeah, it is.

Sleepy Lagoon.

Sleepy Lagoon.

Yeah.

It kind of makes you want to go there.

Good old Bognar Regis.

It gets a really bad rap, doesn't it?

It does, yeah.

And it shouldn't, as you say.

It's like just a quick interjection.

Waterloo sunset was originally called Liverpool Sunset, wasn't it?

Because it was about the beauty of a sunset over Liverpool.

Then it was changed because I think the kinks felt that Waterloo might resonate with more people.

Burnley sunset would have been better, wouldn't it?

Burnley Sunset.

The best things in life begin with B.

Salmon Rushdie's working on his sequel now.

And Burnley Building Society Sunset.

Did you know that the Star Wars theme tune has lyrics?

Well, no.

Yeah.

What are the lyrics?

So, okay, basically, there was a holiday special that was made that George Lucas has since said if he had enough time and a hammer, he would go around smashing every pirated copy out there that still exists.

And it was basically the story of Chewbacca going home for Chewbacca Wookiee Day with his family.

During it, it had all these very surreal moments, and

all the actors from Star Wars were in it, including Princess Leia, who then sings the Star Wars theme tune with lyrics.

Yeah, and the lyrics are roughly: we celebrate a day of peace, a day of harmony, a day of joy, we can all share together joy.

So, really boring lyrics, but

it's a really nice thing to know.

Lyrics are out there for that song.

There was an.

I don't know if it's right to call this a theme tune, but early American presidential candidates, they would have songs associated with them.

Oh, yeah.

They kind of are like theme tunes.

So John Quincy Adams was the president in 1828, and he was the incumbent, and he was facing Andrew Jackson.

So

John Quincy Adams

he didn't write it, but a song penned on his behalf was called

Little Know Ye Who's Coming, and it warns of fire and slavery and pestilence if John Quincy Adams loses the election.

The lyrics are fires are coming, swords are coming, pistols, guns, and knives are coming.

If John Quincy not be coming,

that's quite good.

And then he lost the election by a landslide.

So

was America overtaken for the next hundred years by fire and brimstone?

It was not.

You were just, you were talking about presidential theme tunes.

I really like the fact that was it Bill Clinton's one of the Democratic conventions when Bill Clinton was incumbent?

It was originally going to be the theme tune for the convention was going to be Mambo number five until some smart person pointed out that it contains a little bit of moniker in my line.

So they changed that.

I think Bill Clinton used to go up to ladies and go, the best things in life begin with a B.

That's very funny.

Have we got any more on this?

So there was a gang of counterfeiters that tried to con the Bank of England a few years ago out of £28 billion.

And they did that by claiming to have a collection of £1,000 and £5,000 banknotes.

According to the news article, the audacious plot was foiled by the fact that the £1,000 banknotes had not been legal tender for more than 60 years, and the £500,000 version never existed.

My Roman coin scam is going to go really badly.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much, everyone, for listening.

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the stuff we've been talking about, you can head to at QIPodcast on Twitter as a main stop.

But if you want to get to us individually, I can be got an at Shriverland, James, at egg shaped, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna, you can email me on podcast at QI.com.

Why are you chuckling?

I don't know.

It always, when you say it, the fact that you're not on Twitter and then you say an email, it sounds as far away as like, say, a fax number.

A telegram.

Yeah,

Telegram.

You can, yeah.

Okay, that's it.

You can also head to our website, no such thingasafish.com, where we've got all the previous episodes of this series that we've made so far.

It's about 27 episodes.

Otherwise, we'll see you again next week for another episode, and catch you then.

Goodbye.

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