28: No Such Thing As A Man-Eating Clam

What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo and Juliet, created by the Emmy-winning writer from Schitt's Creek and Top Music's number one hitmaker, playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts.

We ran it on QI a few years ago,

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

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

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

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with three of the regular L's.

It's Andy Murray, Anna Chaczynski, and James Harkin.

And once again, we've gathered around with our favourite four facts from the last week.

And here they are, in no particular order.

Andy Murray.

My fact is that over a hundred people used to watch King Louis XIV get up and get dressed every day.

Did he know they were there?

Yes, he did.

So was it like a window to say?

No, people would come into his bedroom and watch him.

Hundreds.

It's a ceremony called the levee, as in the French verb for getting up.

And it was kind of to ease the king into the day.

That would be quite good if you got up in the morning and brushed your teeth and you got a big round of applause.

That would really help your day start.

Yeah.

And people came to see him while he was having his breakfast.

So a few people would come in when he was still in bed at 8 o'clock, and he would be woken up and his nurse would kiss him, his childhood nurse, and his chamber pot would be removed.

And then this ceremony started which took an hour and a half and he would have his hands washed in wine.

He picked a wig.

He was given his slippers and dressing gowns.

His hand washed in wine.

Yeah, yeah, he washed his hands in wine.

Why would he do that?

No idea.

Stinky hands the whole day.

Spartans used to wash newborn babies in wine.

It was one of the first things that happened to them as they got a bucket of wine all washed in them.

Wow.

So sometimes he would just go to the corner and have a wee in the chamber pot pot with no embarrassment or inhibition.

Well we've done on this podcast, haven't we, how he liked to defecate in public.

Was that him?

Was that him?

Yes, that was him.

I think like to is an exaggeration.

No, he liked to.

Architects at Versailles suggested that toilet cubicles are becoming, you know,

alamo.

No, I like to put them in public.

The really amazing thing is the bit where they dress him.

So two officials took the sleeves of his night shirt and started to pull it off him, while another courtier brought a fresh and pre-warmed shirt to the king, and then two other people, this is four and five, had to hold up the king's dressing gown as a curtain so people didn't get a glimpse of

you know so quick question back then how do you pre-warm something do you hold it over an oven do you

think near a fire or maybe you can warm up irons can't you and then you can press the iron or it might have been worn by someone for a little while yeah that's what i was thinking well because if it was a fire then you're gonna get the wood smell this guy must have been the smelliest man just the smelling of that what that sounds like is he wakes up and he gets dressed as a walk of shame like

smelling of booze and fire I read something about microbiomes this is off topic but what it is is if you go into your house you leave microbes everywhere and they're specific to you So my house will have a certain microbiome and then you'll have one that's completely different.

But the interesting thing is if I if we went to stay in a hotel you would only have to be in that hotel for 24 hours before the microbiome of that hotel room is indistinguishable from your house.

Wow.

That's how much they all go from one place to another.

If only, like dogs, we could use them to mark our territory, then we'd claim ownership of everywhere.

Then we might have a bit more of this planet than we already do.

Is that what you're saying?

I'm getting sick of the swans taking bits of my land.

By right.

Going back to Louis, I really like the fact that, so it's part of the levee ceremony and the, is it the couche ceremony when he goes to bed?

Yeah.

Does that not mean

just just means go to bed?

There was a couch ceremony, yeah.

Yeah, that he obviously had his private chamber where he actually slept, and then he had his bedchamber where all of the people used to do all this stuff.

So he would be woken up in his private chamber at, let's say, 7:30 a.m.

and then escorted to the public chamber, which also has a bed in it, and have to sit in bed and sort of fake that he was being woken up out of bed.

And then to go back to bed, he'd have to have this whole couch ceremony around him.

They take his clothes off, they put his nightgown on, he climbs into bed, they kiss him good night, they tell him a little rhyme, does a fake snore, and then he has to get out of the display bed and walk down the corridor to his private bedchamber to actually go to sleep.

And Louis XV really didn't like these ceremonies, and so he would get up in the morning and go hunting for a couple of hours first, and then sneak back in and pretend to go to sleep.

That's amazing.

That's so good.

It sounds like a real hassle.

What if you just want to get downstairs?

Yeah, it sounds like a complete pain.

Did anyone else get it?

Was it just specifically him?

No, his descendants did.

It lasted for centuries.

Oh, sorry.

No, what I mean is

anyone outside of the king.

Well, what I read is that some of his courtiers who came to that ceremony had their own levee ceremonies in their own house earlier in the day.

Oh my god.

I'm the dresser of the dresser of the dresser, of the dresser, of the dresser of the king.

And it caught on, so it became fashionable with Charles II in England, I think.

So the French really went for it, and then we picked up on it.

And you used to be able to watch kings eating as well.

They used to have public galleries you could walk through.

I can't remember which historian it is, but someone calculated that Louis XIV would have eaten between getting up and going to bed 30 different dishes in the course of the day.

Just constantly being fed.

His life sounds like it sounds like Salvador Dali has designed his life.

The surrealist nightmare.

Do you know about the washer woman's rebellion in the time of Louis XIV?

This was the introduction of chocolate in the court of Louis, and it was a new thing.

People were drinking chocolate.

When the washer ladies first saw the brown stains on the fine white damask table napkins, they refused to touch them.

I mean, going on what Anna said about Louis XIV's behaviour in the corridors of Versailles,

probably

a reasonable assumption, yeah.

And the other interesting thing about Louis XIV that I always like is this guy called Eustache Dager.

So, this is a prisoner of Louis.

He was transferred from prison to prison all over France for 34 years.

He had to wear a mask the whole time, a black velvet mask.

He was told that if he said anything other than food or water, he was to be killed on the spot.

And no one knows who he was or anything like that.

And there's loads of conspiracy theories in French history about whether he was Louis's twin brother or he was the son of the King of England, and hence the man in the iron mask, the brilliant Leonardo DiCapriola.

Is that who he is?

He's the man in the iron mask.

Well, that's the idea that Dumas had came from that.

He popularised champagne, didn't he?

Him and Dom Perignon got together, decided they loved wine from the champagne region, even though it wasn't ever fizzy in his life.

He was a real guy, yeah.

Dom Perignon, he was a monk, yeah.

Domi.

That's like nachos being invented by Mr.

Nacho.

No, by a guy called Ignacio.

Oh, it was nacho for sure.

Oh, that's good.

King Louis XIV probably only liked champagne because he thought it got the germs off his hands better.

Yeah.

Well, I should have said that.

This is great wine, Dom Perignon.

I love it.

He took it as a cure for his gout, which hops and work.

That's right.

But the bane of Dom Perignon's life was the fact he couldn't get these bloody bubbles out of champagne well enough.

So, you know, they would try to make it as flat as possible.

And it was only after Louis died that people decided to start drinking it sparkling.

I have a cool fact about champagne.

Go ahead.

Which is that in the days before toughened glass, bottles used to explode explode at the slightest provocation, and you had to wear an iron mask to go into the wine cellar.

And wine champagne makers would lose sometimes up to a third of their bottles because, obviously, it can be a chain reaction.

If one goes, then all the others around it might go as well.

So, yeah,

you see these incredible outfits that they had to put on, big, heavy gloves.

Oh, no, someone's ordered champagne again.

Put the radiation suit on.

Yeah.

Louis XIV ruled for so long that his successor was his great-grandson.

He outlived his oldest son and his oldest grandson.

He ruled for 72 years.

I like Louis.

What else has he done?

He wasn't a nice guy, particularly, and he was extraordinarily lavish.

I mean, he robbed his own people in order to fund his spending habits.

And in fact, that's where we get another piece of etymology: the word silhouette.

So that comes from Louis XIV's reign because Etienne de Silhouette was the finance minister.

And so he was the guy who organised to tax the people a lot, and especially the rich, so that Louis could have expensive habits.

And And you're wondering how the hell we got a silhouette from here.

That meant that rich people who used to get their portraits painted couldn't afford to do that anymore.

And their replacement for that was just having silhouettes of themselves drawn.

And it was called silhouettes because it was like it became a byword for on the cheap because we can't afford this anymore.

So he, as well as there being a man called Dom Perion, there was a man called Silhouette.

Etie de Silhouette and Dom Perignon were hanging out with Louis together.

There's another book that needs to be written.

Like Burns, Side Burns, and named after a guy called Burnside.

Yeah.

He was the first head of the NRA, Burnside, wasn't he?

Don't forget Hank Krispy Kream.

I thought it was Crispy Cream.

That would have been a lot better.

Anyway, yeah.

Sorry to derail it with that.

There's a man called Silhouette.

Yeah, I like that.

And the only image we have of him is a Silhouette.

Is that right?

No.

I feel like you heard me say his name.

Stop this.

I'm pretty sure everything is.

That is exactly what I did.

What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo and Juliet, created by the Emmy-winning writer from Schitt's Creek and Pop Music's number one hitmaker, playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts.

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

Okay, my fact is that there is an original Picasso that no one will ever see because it was eaten by the dog.

By the dog?

Was this in the dog?

Was this in

Picasso's jazz friend?

The dog.

There was a dog called Lump, who was named after the German word for rascal.

The dog lived with Picasso for six years, and one day he drew a picture of a rabbit, which, if it was still around now, now, it would be worth tens of thousands of pounds.

But the dog carried it into the garden and ate it.

Because he thought it was an actual rabbit?

Because we've all seen Picasso's paintings, and they're not as realistic as that would imply.

That's true.

That's true, yeah.

Didn't Picasso...

Maybe he was a bit of a dodgy character who was lying about the whole dog thing.

He was a bit dodgy.

He was purported to have stolen the Mona Lisa at one point, wasn't he?

Wasn't he the prime suspect?

He was definitely interrogated about it.

And now I think he's the artist with the most works of art stolen of any artist.

I think there were something like 1,100 works of Picasso, original Picasso's around the world.

So if you spot them.

All stolen by dogs.

Oh, yeah.

He did burn a lot of his work when he was younger because he was too cold and too poor to afford proper heating.

And he had all these sheets of paper with drawings on, and he just burnt them.

Wow.

Do you remember hearing that thing about Picasso?

That he had two mistresses and they came to his house and they said, Oh, you have to choose between us.

And he said, No, you need to fight it out.

And then he just sat there and let them fight.

Brilliant.

The only man who could get away with that.

Yeah.

Wow.

And you can hang your clothes up over there.

Corner of the room.

Sotheby's once won a $20 million contract to sell a collection of Picasso's and Van Gogh after they won a game of scissors, paper, rock.

Hold on, sorry.

Sotheby's won the game of scissors.

I don't understand how to do it.

Oh, it was them versus Christie's, and they'd both gotten the contract at the same time.

They didn't know who was going to get it, and so they just did a game of rock, paper, scissors.

All of them, all the staff lining up opposite each other.

Mr.

Sotheby against Mr.

Christie.

Mr.

Christie and Mr.

Sotheby won.

Steinbeck's dog ate his first draft of Mice and Men.

Really, really?

Really?

Yeah, that's happened.

Oh, wow.

Do you know where the rumour of the dog eating one's homework first came from?

No.

Apparently, it's from, I think it was 1901, and it was in a Welsh village, and there was a stand-in vicar, and he was reading out his sermons at the end, and then he felt like his sermons had been too short, and he hadn't prepared enough.

So he went back into the vestry to talk to one of the clerics afterwards and apologised and said he dropped some of it on the way, and the dog ate half of his sermon.

If you are interested in dogs, the Wikipedia list of individual dogs is unbelievably good.

It's divided into actors, athletes, faithful dogs, working dogs, other heroic dogs, dogs of unusual size, which is divided, I kid you not, into small dogs, heavy dogs, and tall dogs.

Also, space dogs is one of them.

Okay, yeah, like a and so on.

Intelligent dogs, notorious dogs, ugly dogs, unique dogs.

What's a unique dog?

Every dog is unique, Dan.

Famed by proxy to us

on the list, yeah.

Unique dogs.

Did you see that in the news this week about the Russian biggest lender in Russia?

If you get a mortgage with them, you get a free cat.

I heard they lend it to you so that you can be photographed with it in your new home.

Well, there's supposed to be a thing about good luck in Russia.

I don't know if it's quite true, but the first to go into a house should be a cat.

Did you know that builders used to wall up cats inside buildings that they were working on?

No, I didn't know that.

They've been found found when you do renovations, you often find a mummified cat in the walls of a property.

Well, they also put shoes in, didn't they, in the walls?

Yeah.

And there's a guy who collects all the times when they've been mentioned and has a big long list online of all the secret shoes that are in.

Is that just for fun?

Is that some sort of in-builders'

superstition?

The first cat mentioned in an English witch trial wasn't black, it was white and spotty.

Was it?

And was that bad at the time?

Are they sure it wasn't a Dalmatian?

Well, the reason.

How good were they at identifying?

Well, the reason they knew it was a witch's cat is because it would talk to her and it was called Satan.

Two obvious flues.

Apparently, white cats with blue eyes are deaf.

Yeah, most of them are, I think.

And also, almost all tortoiseshells are female.

What?

Yeah.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

Just back to the paintings very quickly.

There's also a painting that we do have, but we're never going to see the proper original of.

It's the three Bronte sisters sitting in this painting.

And it was painted by Bramwell, their brother, and it's the only drawing that we have of the Bronte sisters.

The interesting thing about it is that Bramwell used to be in it.

He painted himself into the drawing, but he lost confidence in himself.

So he painted over himself by putting a pillar.

Just this huge pillar

randomly in the painting.

And it was only when they looked closer at it that you could see, you know,

peeking out there.

Yeah, a sobbing man.

Yeah, yeah, a crying man behind the pillar.

That's a bit like, I think it's Bruegel's painting, Massacre of the Innocents.

It was commissioned by a king, but he wanted to make a political point about how inhumane this massacre had been.

So the painting looks like a beautiful snow scene, and there's just piles of snow everywhere, and snow drifts falling down everywhere, and children playing.

And then, if you look, they've done x-rays of the paint.

And if you look behind all the snow, there's countless dead bodies everywhere.

Oh, wow.

There was the painting that they just found recently.

They did a restoration on this painting, which was of a beach scene.

And there was a crowd of people standing around it area.

They didn't know why.

And then when they restored it, it revealed a beached whale, like a ginormous whale, just laying there, which has obviously come onto the shore.

What, and someone had painted over that?

It was seen as being a bit unfashionable and a bit weird to have this big whale in the paintings.

On whales, there was a news story recently, and apparently this happens quite a lot: of when you get a big beached whale, it can fill up with gas and it gets like really, really inflated and really tense.

And then, if you slightly prick it, I mean, you've got to kind of break the whale in order to dispose it, it completely explodes.

And so, there's footage of whales that explode their innards all over some videos on YouTube.

Some really good, really entertaining videos, yeah.

I have the best thing about beached whales.

I've been reading this book, Whale's Bones of the British Isles, by a guy who has spent 30 years travelling around, finding whales' jawbones in arches and things like that, and as gateposts and as umbrella stands and all of these things.

In 1897, a whale was stranded near Bournemouth and it began to make this terrible smell.

And according to the newspapers, one Somerset farm labourer climbed up on top of the body and declared, I've come 40 miles to see this here whale, and I'm going to walk from his head to his tail.

He started on his walk, but the carcass had for some days been undergoing a softening process.

And the surface giving way like rotten ice, the adventurous labourer sank into the blubber and was subsequently extricated from his unpleasant surroundings, a sadder, if not a wiser, man.

Okay, time for pack number three.

That's my fact.

My fact this week.

During World War II, the US Navy diving manual contained detailed instructions for what to do if eaten by a giant clam.

Wow.

Yeah, die with dignity.

You're supposed to basically, you're supposed to have very heavy-duty scissors and cut its muscles from inside the mouth.

I like it, because it was you who originally found this fact.

And when I said it to you yesterday, I was like, oh, where did you get this back from?

You were like, oh, it was a book.

What was it called again?

And it took you a few seconds, a few beats.

And you're like, oh, yeah.

It's called Eaten by a Giant Clam.

Didn't even open the book.

Joseph Cummins, if anyone wants to read it, great.

It's a natural science.

But actually, the way to get away from a giant clam is just to pull your hand out because they don't close fully, do they?

Yeah, so you can't be eaten by a giant clam.

Yeah.

There is a crustacean they found recently.

I can't remember what it's called, which its teeth are the hardest known substance that nature produces.

It's got these black jutting out teeth.

Wow.

Maybe I should.

I'll see your teeth and I'll raise you.

Ray Winstone.

We should say, we are a far bigger threat to giant clams than they are to us.

We've overfished them horribly, and so now they're critically endangered in lots of places.

It's amazing how long they take to grow as well.

It takes them 11 months to get to just a couple of inches across.

And then to get one up to the weight of five pounds, it takes seven years.

So really big ones that you see on the ocean floor could be 50 years old or

70 or 80.

They've seen it all.

They've seen it all.

Well, they've seen a very, very tiny bit of it all.

The largest giant clams in history can be found under London.

Wow.

Really?

Yeah.

They're fossils.

They're not still alive.

Inoceramus, they're called, and they can be found in the Cretaceous Galt clay underneath London, and they were as big as two meters in size.

Wow.

So the height of a door.

I think the largest one ever found was in Japan and it weighed 730 pounds, which is about as much as four adult men.

Which is big enough that you can understand why people slightly thought it was threatening.

But it's quite fun to Google.

If you do a Google book search for giant clams and then you refine it to the 19th century, that is quite entertaining because there are a lot of books of popular science which warn of the dangers of being eaten by a giant clam.

Journal of Popular Science from 1896, which talks about how if you're diving, a slack line or pipe may fall into the jaws of a giant clam, which close over it and hold the diver prisoner to his death alone in the dim ocean depths.

The biggest pearl ever found was inside a giant clam, the pearl of Lao Tzu, and it was found by William Cobb.

And he claimed that when they found that, it was a guy was killed by a giant clam when they were trying to find the pearl.

Yeah, I read that account.

Yeah, apparently what had happened was this guy, he was a Dyak diver, and he went down, grabbed a hold of the pearl, it closed, and then he wouldn't let go of the pearl, and he stayed there and drowned.

Do you know about the oldest clam ever?

Unsurprisingly, we only know because we killed it, because that's what we do.

A group of researchers in Iceland, they fished a load of clams up, and it turns out that he was 507 years old when they dug him up.

He was born in 1499.

Isn't that amazing?

What would have been happening in 1499?

Well, they called it Ming because that was Ming dynasty China.

Henry VIII starts to the Tudor dynasty.

Yeah, Henry VII had been king for a little while.

The Battle of Bosworth was a recent memory.

1485, was that?

Yeah.

I mean, you probably didn't have the recent memory of the Battle of Bosworth.

You've got no evidence he actually fought there.

That's the thing, true.

It'd be the one sort of like longevity diary that if you got hold of, it'd just be boring and so dumb.

Oh, mate, you went through a lot, and we've just got

filtered some more.

Yeah,

year 396 grew another ring.

Yeah 397.

Females in one, oh, sorry, females is wrong, obviously, because they're hermaphrodites, aren't they?

So they are male and female, but they can't fertilize themselves, so they just spurt out their eggs and sperm into the water, and they let them find each other.

But they can eject in one egg ejection 500 million eggs, which is quite impressive.

Whoa.

So there's a lot of

born eggs.

98% of them do start as men as well.

And then they just transfer into whatever sex they want to a bit later.

Leeches do that as well.

Speaking of sea life, actually, I would urge people to look up blue lobsters.

So I didn't realize that one in two million lobsters is born bright blue.

And so this is really exciting for lobster catchers when they come across them.

And they are like properly bright blue.

And then one in 30 million is bright yellow.

Which I think is

go on a hunt.

What gives the random mutation?

Okay, right.

If you search on the Wikipedia for unique lobsters, you'll find them.

Again, a massive list.

Tall lobsters, heavy lobsters, space lobsters.

Space lobsters.

That's a movie I'm watching.

The smallest species of giant clam is called the boring clam

because it bores into the coral.

Oh, this is also cool.

They found the fossil of not a shellfish from a long time ago, but a shark from a long time ago, which they think ate shellfish because it had these massive toothplates, which it probably used to crush things like giant clams.

It was a 10-meter-long shark.

They found it in Kansas, the fossil of it.

Isn't that amazing?

Just back very quickly to the fact that the Royal Navy did put How to Escape a Giant Clam into their booklet.

I do love when you just read stories of silliness that seem silly to us, but maybe made sense at the time to the people.

And I've got this story here, which is an old QI fact, but it's that in 1993, an Army bomb disposal unit was called to investigate a suspicious-looking package outside the TA unit in Bristol.

They blew it up with a controlled explosion, but only to discover that it was a parcel of leaflets explaining how to deal with suspicious packages.

That was excellent.

Yeah.

Whoops.

Yeah, I like funny labels and unnecessary labels on products like I think we talked before about the do not eat the iPod shuffle, but

there are other good ones.

There's

a packet of screwdrivers, which is sold in America, where there's the warning at the top says not to be inserted into penis, which is quite

useful.

I don't believe it.

I don't believe it.

Why don't you believe it?

You think you should.

It clearly belongs there.

And he runs to the bathroom.

By that logic, almost everything in the world should have that label on it.

Except possibly medical swabs.

And even they should be labeled only sometimes in certain penis.

We've covered before that Alfred Kinsey, the sex was certainly good.

Yeah, yes, we have.

Okay, all right, all right.

Maybe it didn't say on his toothbrush too light.

Or maybe as where he gripped it, it wore away the do-not over time.

No one wants this label.

Since you've been What if Juliet got a second chance at life after Romeo and Juliet, created by the Emmy-winning writer from Schitt's Creek and Pop Music's number one hitmaker, playing October 7th through 12th at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts.

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Okay, time for the final fact of the show and it is Ericinski.

My fact

is that 100 used to be 120.

What do you mean?

Ah, well, that's a great question, Dan.

I mean that, well, I mean a couple of things.

So the word 100 derives from an old Norse word, hundrath, which literally meant 120.

And when people referred to 100 throughout the Middle Ages and up until the 17th century in a lot of cases, they actually meant 120 because we worked, especially before the 14th century, on a duodecimal system or a base 12 system rather than a decimal system as we do now.

So everything was divisible by 12.

Is it true that they said a small hundred when they meant a hundred?

Yeah.

And they said a hundred or a long hundred hundred or a great hundred for a hundred and twenty.

Yeah.

It's so weird.

So when you saw like the Roman numeral C throughout medieval times, that would usually refer to 120, not a hundred.

But it wasn't actually that regular.

And so a hundred can mean various different things depending on what you're referring to.

So if you were counting drinking glasses or gunpowder weight, then if you said a hundred, then that would be a hundred.

But if you were counting eggs or pins or fish, if you said a hundred, that would be a hundred and twenty.

But then there were some commodities for which it was neither.

So apparently in Roxburghshire and Selcookshire, 100 sheep or lambs was actually 106.

You are amazing.

And it was 100 for dried fish in some places was actually 160.

And if you were talking about onions and garlic and you said 100, it was 225.

So God knows how the hell anyone knew how much they'd ordered of anything.

Interestingly, a thousand comes from exactly the same etymological root as 100.

So 1,000 literally means a strong hundred.

And again, in medieval times, a thousand was 1,200 usually, because it was a strong hundred, it was ten times a hundred, which was 120.

So to be clear, it wasn't.

It could be 12 times.

Yeah, so it's not.

So I was going to say, to be clear, it wasn't a completely geodecimal system.

It was sort of a half and half.

So it wasn't all divided by 100.

I think we've established this was not a system of any

at all.

It didn't have a lot of binding logical rules to it.

This is why no one got anything done until about 1800.

And then we all sorted out the numbers and we found coal and then we got on with the Industrial Revolution.

There is a tribe in the Amazon.

It's the Manduruku.

Manduruku tribe.

And they only count up to six.

And as soon as they get up to six, the next number just becomes many.

So if you're having like a dinner party and it's like, how many people are coming?

Oh, it's many.

It's like, cool, I appreciate that, but I need to set out some chairs.

James, what's the thing about Chinese use...

It's a counting system in China and they use all the bones.

Each knuckle is worth three things because I think you have like three lines on your knuckles or something.

And they can count up to about a million with that.

The Venerable Bede had a good way of counting.

He could count to a million by moving his hands up and down his body.

And I felt that

the excuse of every 16 year old boy.

Just counting.

His number for 90,000 for instance was represented by grasping your loins with your left hand with your thumb towards the genitals.

There's a great one called the Yupno in Papua New Guinea.

It's a Aboriginal tribe.

And they have a counting system that goes up to 33.

But they use their body, like the way that we use our fingers to count to 10.

They go further.

But there's a logical kind of step for each one.

So they count to 10 on their fingers, and then their toes take them up to 20, then their ears, eyes, nose, and nostrils take them to 27.

And then their left nipple is 28, right nipple, 29, belly button 30.

And I like where this is going.

It heads into man territory.

Left testicle, 31, right testicle, 32, penis, 33.

So women just can't count as high.

They get up to 27, unfortunately.

They're stuck.

Well, they've got nipples.

I know, know, to 30, to 30.

That'll be fantastic in bingo calling.

Right testicle, 32.

I've just found the fact of the Chinese and counting using their finger joints.

So it's not a million that they can get to.

It is one less than 10 billion.

Cool.

I think the last few things that we've just said come from a book called Alex's Adventures in Numberland.

It's by Alex Belos.

And his book is extraordinary.

I haven't read his new one, but the first one is amazing.

To drag it back to hundreds for a minute.

100 weight was 112 pounds.

Still is.

Still is, yeah.

Yeah, but only after the 15th century, and before that, it was 108 pounds.

Oh.

The whole thing is a nightmare.

Yeah, it really is.

Yeah.

So when we get up to 10, when we're counting up to 10, we think we use the decimal system of counting.

But if we properly did it, 11 should be 1 teen, and 12 should be 2 teen.

But we say 11 and 12 because we used to work on a semi-deuro decimal system.

Also, the number 100 is the sum of the first nine prime numbers.

Yeah, that's weird.

Between two and twenty-three,

and all the seven in between.

Add them up, you get a hundred.

Cool.

The other thing is that if you add up all the numbers on a roulette wheel, they add to six, six, six, which is a nice little fact as well.

So you were saying that the word 100 came from old Norse, and that's it meant 120.

We still spoke Norse in the UK until the 18th century.

Did we?

In parts of the UK speaking Norse.

That's amazing.

In the 1701, I think it was a census, or there was certainly a report in 1701, and they said that there were still a few monoglot Norse speakers who couldn't speak any other language apart from Norse.

That is so cool.

Well the thing is like Shetland was belonging to the Norse people for a long time and they pawned it to Scotland in the 15th century or something like that.

So theoretically they could buy it back if they wanted to.

Wow.

In the Roman army, you know being decimated

is where one in ten men is killed.

What I didn't know before is that it was a punishment.

For

treat reward.

Good news, boys.

I thought it happened in war that you lose one man in ten, you say, oh god, the the Legion was decimated yesterday.

Terrible result.

But no, it's a punishment.

But there was a minor punishment, which is called being sentimated, which is where one person in 100 is put to death, and they choose it by lot.

And the reason it's a punishment for everyone, isn't it?

Because one in 10 of you're decimating as a general is killed by the other nine in ten, so it's a punishment for everyone, I think.

So nine people had to stone one of their people to death.

Oh, dear.

You know a word that doesn't exist, but does exist?

Zillion.

It exists, exists, but there's no numerical.

No, it's just a random, like, when you want to come up with something unfeasibly big.

Yeah.

There used to be a children's magazine called Zillions, and the Wikipedia entry for it just says it existed for several years until 2000, when it was folded into its parent magazine, Consumer Reports.

Isn't that amazing?

Happy 18th birthday.

Here's Consumer Reports.

Okay, that's it.

That's all our facts.

Thanks so much, everyone, for listening to another episode of our show.

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we said over the course of this episode, you can find us all on Twitter.

Andy, you can be got on at Andrew Hunter M.

James at Egg Shaped.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

And Anna.

I'm on podcast at ui.pal.

It's an email address, not a Twitter handle.

Hashtag getAna on Twitter.

Okay, so thanks for listening.

We're going to be back again next week with another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, and we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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