27: No Such Thing As An Egg And Cress Portsmouth

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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 Treiber.

I'm sitting with two of the regular elves, Andy Murray Murray and Anna Chaczynski, and we have a special guest today.

It's the co-host of Antony, this, Helen Zaltzmann.

And once again, we've gathered around with our favourite four facts from the last week, and here they are, in no particular order.

Okay, fact number one, and that's you, Helen.

Yes, I discovered that LOL, the acronym that people now use to signify the fact that they're weak-minded and words are inadequate for their own needs,

used to mean not laugh out loud or even lots of love, but little old lady, which uh it doesn't come up that much now in uh Twitter and TechSpeak, but uh it was a medical definition and they had a whole list of little old lady-related abbreviations like uh lollinad, which was little old lady in no apparent distress, which you would think, why did they need to note the absence of distress, or you would just note the fact that she was distressed.

And uh lolfodigabub, which stood for little old lady, fall down, go boom.

That's a very common complaint, isn't it?

The exploded old.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, you have to be very careful because some of them are unstable.

Is this a thing like the medical slang?

The thing the doctors used to write on charts?

Is that where it comes from?

Because there's a story that keeps on surfacing about the three-letter acronyms your doctor uses, like FLK means funny-looking kid.

Ouch!

I think they've not been used for a very long time.

No, my friends use them, they're doctors.

No.

Yeah, they're still a newsmate, yep.

I found another LOL, which was through NASA.

NASA, when they were sending all of their missions, they had sort of, I guess, I don't know if it's right to call them primitive computer systems, but they had a thing called core rope memory, which was basically a read-only memory style computer that they used.

And it was made in factories by effectively little old ladies.

And it's called lol memory, and it means little old lady memory.

And yet, little old ladies, often their memories are really erratic.

You know, they'll remember childhood, but not things that happened last week.

That's literally the worst style of memory you want to send on a mission to Mars.

My grandmother was always calling me by one of my brothers' names because she just couldn't remember.

Yeah.

Imagine if Hal on the 2001 Space Odyssey was Lol.

This was a little old lady.

What's your name?

Do you want a biscuit?

I can't do that, Brian.

Or Sydney.

Whatever.

Morse Code had a list of official abbreviations written up in 1878.

And it's quite funny because you look through them, so it's called the Phillips Code.

And it's obviously like if you're transmitting Morse code and you want to speed things up, there are a few things that you say a lot.

So you need to...

So he assigned them a number rather than spelling it out.

So they're kind of obvious stuff, like five is have you got business for me?

22 is wire test, 23 is all copy, 88 is love and kisses.

That's the only one that's like that.

All the rest of them are.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a shame it wasn't higher up the rankings.

No, it wasn't.

It also sounds like the most boring bingo callers in the world.

Yeah.

Number five, wire test.

Love and kisses.

That's great.

I also was, because this whole idea of finding words that were used for different meanings previously I read this blog written by Anne Curzon who's a language expert and she was talking about how different words and what they were previously used for so the word guy

to mean a guy do you know where that comes from it's not from guy fawkes is it according to her yes really yeah it comes directly from guy forks ow it seems too obvious to be it does i think i would have assumed that and then there was going to be a twisted weird answer

and then somehow and it was mainly in america that it picked up that it just became guy but it was off the back of guy fawkes according to her it's weird that it's in america it picks up given that it is a fundamentally British they have no investment in Guy Fawkes and also it suggests that they think all men are merely effigies of humanity.

Well it's certainly set fire to it's true it's true but they must it must have been like the original action man I guess in America but it was called Guy so it was just like okay this is this is a guy this is a guy I need a man

to all your action men no I'm just saying action man's called action man right he's not called mark like it's it's an action man and this was a guy toy you got your guy toy what is action man's real name?

I don't know if Action Man has a name.

That is a great question.

That is a brilliant question.

We're raising more than we're solving today.

Yeah.

I hope it's something really embarrassing.

Walter.

Yeah.

Wayne.

Wayne Mann.

Man is definitely his last name, yeah.

I've got a real name for Action Man.

Yep.

Right.

This is in the TV series from 1995, who is a man suffering from amnesia, who is appointed leader of Team Xtreme fighting against the evil Dr.

X.

He later learns his real name is Matthew Exler.

Exler.

Yeah, E-X-L-E-R.

Not a good name.

Is this TV series canon in the Action Man

genre?

According to Action Man Wiki, his name as an Action Man toy is Matthew Exler as well.

I learned a good thing of things that other things used to be called while we're in this category.

Oh, yeah.

So sandwiches, I've been researching, because obviously they're named after but not invented by the fourth Earl of Sandwich.

He was only called Sandwich because his great-grandfather, the first Earl, was given the chance to choose a town for the peerage to be named after when he was given a peerage.

And he chose Sandwich because it's where his fleet was anchored.

He was a big admiral.

And he originally didn't want to choose Sandwich, but he chose it because his first choice was Portsmouth, and there was already a Lord Portsmouth, and he had a bit of an Argybargie about who would get to be the Earl of Portsmouth.

So we could all be having Egg and Crest Portsmouth today.

How cool is that?

That's very cool, yeah.

It works at Portsmouth.

I can imagine saying that.

It actually is more of a sensible word than sandwich.

Ham and cheese Portsmouth?

Yes, peas.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that worked.

Much more inviting.

Yeah, that felt very good.

Just jumping on Portsmouth, something that should have had a different name as well.

Gandalf the Grey.

Wasn't going to be called Gandalf the Grey.

What was it going to be called?

Action Man.

He was going to be called Action Man Grey.

He was going to be called Bladderthin.

Which is not what you should call an old man with a beard.

Bladderthin.

That probably trouble.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, B-L-A-D-O-R-T-H-I-N.

That was a name that was eventually given to a dead king who's mentioned just once.

I'm not surprised he's mentioned just once.

Sladder thin.

No, readers didn't go for that.

Won't bring him back.

Yeah.

So I enjoy the battle of emoticons, where the first emoticon appeared.

You know, so I think we researched some of this for QI last year.

This is related to Lols, right?

And everyone sees the link.

Yep.

Yep.

So there was a smiley face, apparently, in a transcript of a speech by Lincoln, which is just a semicolon and a closed bracket.

So Winky, yeah.

Yeah.

We have won the Battle of Gettysburg.

Winky.

Wink.

Wink.

Does that mean he has one or he's not?

I just changed the history books.

That might be the most revealing thing a document has ever shown.

That was history altered.

That's the equivalent of fingers crossed behind your back.

Or not in the Constitution.

So I think it's a typo.

But now there's one in 1648, which someone has found in a 1648 poem.

It's called To Fortune by Robert Herrick.

It has the word smiling yet, and then it has a colon and then a closed brackets.

And it is in brackets, so it's probably also a typo.

But the first actual emoticons, definitely emoticons, were in Puck, weren't they, in 1881?

We'll put this on the website.

What's Puck?

Puck is a humor magazine, a statistical magazine in the 19th century.

And so basically, it was in a joke about how they didn't want to keep paying cartoonists.

So there's quite a funny little paragraph they say where they say, Cartoonists are totally overrated.

We don't need your stupid, overpaid, overvalued art.

We can create art just with our typewriters.

And then it gives you a smiley face, a grumpy face, face, a bored face, and a surprised face below created with typography.

And they're the first

smileys.

1881.

And yet you would think that back then, when it was a lot harder to type than it is now, because keyboards were quite beefy, and before that, scribes had a lot of words to you.

You'd think that emoticons would have been more expedient then than they are now.

Now it's easier than ever to type a word, and yet people are

blind.

Yeah, so you're saying they were justified in 1881.

But now, no.

Get over it, people.

Yes.

Bio Tapestry could have saved a big drawing of harold just do a winky face actually originally meant has been shot in eye

maybe that like an hour in an eye is just typography for winky face back in those days that's all he was doing

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Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We demand to be quality!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at Broadway SF.com.

Okay, time for fact number two, and that's my fact.

My fact this week is, according to researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University, listening to Billy Connolly can substantially increase your tolerance to pain.

Wow.

Is it because after you've listened to Billy Connolly, everything else seems insignificant, or is it that Billy Connolly really distracts you from the pain and makes you feel more positive?

It's a positive thing.

It was basically an ice bucket challenge.

They put patients' fists into buckets of ice and they found that when they were listening to Billy Conley, it actually increased the length of time that they could keep their hand inside there.

So it distracted them.

It distracted them and it made them sort of enjoy having their fist in a bucket of ice.

This is directly from an article that announced the findings of these scientists.

It's from April 7th, 2003.

So Boffins have proved that laughter is

Buffins opening.

So immediately, very much a pejorative.

Yeah.

What do these bloody dweebs find out then?

Okay.

Nerdburgers have proved that laughter really is the best medicine with some help from Billy Connolly's stand-up routines.

A team of scientists discovered that the Big Yin's patter acts as a painkiller.

Psychologists compared people's pain thresholds while listening to music, comedy, and doing mental arithmetic.

The Glasgow Caledonian University team claims vintage Connolly,

only vintage, apparently.

None of his news.

None of the new stuff.

Increased tolerance of pain by up to three times.

I completely buy this, actually.

It was a three-year study.

The weird thing is that things were different for men and women.

So for women, the most effective pain relief was not actually from the comedy, it was from hearing their favorite music.

If you're allowed to choose your own music, that has an also beneficial effect on the kind of pain.

It's the gateway theory, isn't it?

Is one theory of pain that by blocking the pain from getting through with another stimulus.

Yeah.

People could be listening to this show whilst having minor surgery to take their mind off it.

I don't know if our chat about doctors at the beginning is going to get us into hospitals now.

In the, I think it was around 1910 or 1915, a woman had a grapefruit-sized tumor removed from her ovary.

She had the surgery on her kitchen table and even though anesthesia existed at that point, she didn't have any.

She just sang hymns to stave off the pain.

Wow.

Did it work?

Were they quite well?

She's dead now.

This hymn has gone very high-pitched and shrieky, I guess.

No, it's definitely in the notes.

Yeah, tip for dentists and people carrying out minor surgery.

Turn to hymn 454 in your books.

Nearer my God to thee.

Oh, no, not nearer my God.

There's no evidence that the surgeons forced anesthesia upon this woman just to shut her up.

It'd be super distracting, wouldn't it?

And also, it means she wouldn't be still.

Yeah, Iris.

Dental surgery, that would be really irritating, wouldn't it?

There are amazing things which can increase your tolerance to pain.

They've tried smells on people and morphine.

They've tried working in a team.

So they tested on rowers.

They tried rowers from the Oxford Boat Race squad and they they put them in a team and they had a higher pain threshold when they were working together or when they had been training together than when they were separate.

So so we're gonna perform surgery on you, but if all your friends also agree to have surgery performed on them at the same time, it's gonna be better for you.

Maybe it just seems ruder to moan when you know that everyone else is uh feeling the same pain as you.

Can I tell you about one guy football match, FA Cup final, Manchester City, Birmingham in 1956?

The goalkeeper from City was called Bert Troutman.

He broke his neck after diving for the ball ball and played on.

He made a series of crucial saves, and his team won 3-1.

Wow.

I know.

A 2006 study found that people with migraines, people who get migraines, have 20% more sexual desire.

There you go.

Again, is it to take their minds off it?

It's painkilling.

It's just about taking your mind off it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tonight, dear, I've got a headache.

Hop on.

Hop on.

There was quite a good 2008 study at Stanford.

It showed traumatic pictures to its study participants.

And I just like it because it sounds like a traumatic study to be involved in.

And found that if you encourage the participants to make jokes about the traumatic thing you were watching, then it decreased their negative feelings about it.

And if you encourage them to make positive jokes, it really decreased their negative feelings about it.

So they were shown pictures of, this is the list, ranging from car accidents and corpses to aggressive animals and dental exams.

God.

But I'm so impressed that the study participants could make funny jokes.

If someone says, make a positive joke about that picture of a dead person now, I'm quite impressed they could all do it.

The thing is, they're kind of like mock the week in that sense.

Okay, time to move on.

Time to go to fact number three, and that is Chasinski.

My fact is that the first woman to cycle around the world learned to ride a bike the day before she set off.

Well, she probably figured she could pick it up on the mission.

Yeah, you got long enough.

Yeah, for my practice.

All I like is that in the 1890s, the records for round-the-world travel and the records for cycling around the world were both broken by women, which is quite unexpected.

Nellie Bly was a woman who wanted to imitate Phileas Fogg and do Round the World in 80 Days.

She did it in 72.

Who was this woman who cycled around the world?

She was called Annie Cohen Kopchowski.

She was originally Latvian.

She was 23 years old at the time, Jewish, married mother of three children, lived in Boston, and she just decided she was going to do it.

So she was such an amazing character.

So she was a real raconteur.

She told amazing stories.

So it's very hard to know, actually, what if her story is true and what's not.

But she said, you know, I got on a bike the day before, had two lessons and set off.

And she claimed she did this because she'd heard these two men in a bar make a bet that no woman could travel around the world on a bike.

And so she decided to challenge them.

And she was offered a $10,000 reward if she made it, which she did.

So she got that.

Interestingly, when she did it, she wasn't called Annie Cohen Kopchowski.

She was called Annie Londonderry because she got sponsorship from Londonderry Spring Water.

So they paid her $100 to change her name and have their branding on the back of her bike.

That's hilarious.

It's good, isn't it?

Wow, so it dates back a lot.

Yeah, so much further than I had realised.

Yeah.

When you're cycling around the world, what are the rules about crossing water?

Could you do the least amount of land cycling possible and just take a boat for most of the way?

And it's a good thing.

She did, she did it.

She did do a lot of boating.

You would have to, really, because of oceans.

There was a very snarky thing that was said about it when she got back, which was they said she travelled around the world with a bike, not on a bike.

She was the first woman to travel around the world with a bike.

Ellie Bly did not take a bike.

Still a record, guys.

And she made up a lot of things about her life, didn't she?

She said that she'd studied medicine for two years, and she was a married mother of three, and she was sold in the newspaper stories as an unmarried and childless woman.

Maybe she just wanted to get away from the kids.

Have any of you been following the progress of Mr.

Ballsey, who is a man who, in order to raise awareness of testicular cancer, of which he is a survivor and currently in remission, is pushing a giant inflatable testicle across the United States from Los Angeles to New York.

It started on the 3rd of September, so he's done a few hundred miles and he's got 4,000 left to go.

And he's been through some deserts, so he's quite lucky that the testicle hasn't punctured yet.

Well you can shelter in the shade of it though to protect himself from the heat.

How big is he?

Six feet diameter.

And he's just rolling it along.

He's rolling it along.

And if you meet him along the way, then you can write things on the testicle.

Great.

That's great.

That is so funny.

Mr.

Ballsey sounds like a good Mr.

Man as well.

Mr.

Ballsey went for it.

He didn't care.

Was he called Ballsey originally, or was he sponsored by the Bullseye company?

His name is Thomas Cantley.

But yeah, Andy, you were saying she made up fantastical stories about her life, this woman.

And it was partly, I think, how she funded her trip.

So she'd sell her stories and she'd give lectures along the way and stuff.

So a few of the things she claimed was that she spoke several languages, that she'd been to a whole bunch of countries that she definitely didn't go to, that she'd hunted tigers with Indian royalty she was almost killed by what she called asiatics because they thought she was an evil spirit she fought in the Sino-Japanese war in 1895 where she fell through a frozen river and ended up in a Japanese prison with a bullet wound in her shoulder and then she was attacked by highwaymen in Marseilles amazing she was just a brilliant storyteller people loved it not surprisingly well you would wouldn't you if no one was there to check you wouldn't just say yeah it was fine yeah I stayed in an okay hotel it was yeah you're right do you think the men in the bar who were betting that a woman could never cycle around the world did you think they existed or were they just a fiction to get her to do this trip i don't know you can imagine men betting that i thought the idea was that the they were just making those kind of bets and she thought oh yeah that's because they call it the the age of round-the-world bets no one's ever traced the men um she made them up yeah

but nonetheless very cool i found a lady called juliana booering was the first lady to cycle actually around the world and the rules and it was in 2012 which staggers me i know yeah it's weird isn't it?

You would have thought they'd done it ages ago.

When we say actually we mean without taking a boat motor the way which to be fair is what Annie Landoneri did or a plane.

So there are official rules about it.

I think these must be Guinness World Record rules.

You have to cycle the same distance as the circumference of the earth which is 24,900 miles.

You have to go in one direction and start and finish in the same place.

So you are allowed to go by sea and air but do you have to cycle at least 18,000 miles of the route.

So that's the rules.

And she actually, Miss Booring, she had only been been riding a road bike properly for eight months, which is not quite the same as, you know, learning the day before, but still, it's not much.

Yeah, she's not pro, is she?

Wow.

Yeah, I thought 2012 was late.

When women started cycling, obviously it was very controversial in the 19th century because it was thought of as an inappropriate thing for women to be doing.

And a New York newspaper released a list of rules for women cycling, a list of advice, which included things like, don't try to ride in your brother's clothes just to see how it feels.

Don't scream if you meet a cow.

If she sees you first, she will run.

And don't use bicycle slang.

Leave that to the boys.

Bicycle slang.

Bicycle slang.

It was a very hoardy subsect of language.

Yeah, it was.

What about things like how not to flash their bloomers?

And...

Well, they weren't supposed to wear bloomers at first, but then they started because they were much more sensible attire than...

I think people wanted to keep women wearing proper clothing rather than changing for cycling.

So they sold special lightly boned corsets for ladies, like those of the American Lady Corset Company which offered $100 of free bicycle insurance with every biking corset sold.

Oh so that came with the bike.

Oh insurance was a massive thing.

You used to get insurance if you read the Daily Mail.

You would have insurance against railway accidents.

If you could prove it you had a copy of the coupon from the paper on you when you were maimed in a railway accident, then you would be given £100 of insurance.

Wow.

Wow.

What a handy thing to have around.

Yeah.

I love the original title of the bicycle because it wasn't originally called bicycle.

I mean there was a more primitive version of a bicycle called the Velocipede.

Yeah.

Isn't that great?

Velocipede.

Velocipede.

Yeah, it sounds so much speedier and cooler.

Yeah.

I thought you were going to say they didn't want women to cycle because it was dangerously liberating.

It was.

Well, it was that.

You can move around more, you can move to the next village and find maybe another man, not the man that your uncle wants you to marry.

The thing that I love about Annie Londonery is she just, it's of that period.

I mean, I think we still have people like that living today, but when you read stories about them, it's like, oh, I'm going to cycle the world.

Oh, I don't know how to cycle kind of thing.

It's just these brilliant eccentrics who just went off and did these huge

endurance feats.

Like Mary Kingsley.

I look at her and just go, what an extraordinary person.

She just went off and did it in a time where she was told you shouldn't be doing that.

She was an explorer, wasn't she?

Yeah, she was an explorer.

Yeah, yeah.

She went to West Africa.

She used to do this thing.

Whenever she would rock up to a tribe that would just, you know, not necessarily had any contact.

And she was told, in the majority of these places, they will just kill you on site and her thing was she just didn't care she just used to run into the villages and just yell don't worry it's only me

and she never she survived them all it's amazing um on round the world stuff a another another random connection the first ship to travel around the world twice was called hms dolphin it was in the 1760s but it was captained by lord byron's grandfather um and he was the same guy who named and claimed the falkland islands so when he was on hmm dolphin he bumped into the Falklands, went, gonna call these the Falklands and King George, they're yours.

He was very accident prone.

He was called Foulweather Jack.

That was his nickname.

And whenever he went, he had an amazing, unerring knack of sailing into massive storms and hurricanes and tempests.

Really?

Yeah.

So you can imagine the crew's delight when they saw him walking up the gangplank.

Oh, great.

Hey, guys.

This is going to be fun.

Hey, have you all brought your umbrellas?

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Sucks.

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We the man to be home.

Winner, best score.

We the man to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We the man be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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

Okay, my fact is, when squirrels are attacked by snakes, they increase their blood pressure so much that their tail gives off more infrared radiation and it makes them look bigger.

That is really cool.

Just the tail or the rest of the squirrel as well?

Just the tail, really.

Yeah.

I should specify this is with Californian ground squirrels, and it's when they're dealing with rattlesnakes.

Now, rattlesnakes can see an infrared, and so when they are confronted, they heat up their tail, deliberately, they increase the temperature, and then they wave it in the snake's face.

To the snake's infrared sensing organs, it looks as though there's a much larger creature there.

And when they see other snakes, they don't do it.

They do wave their tail around, but they know that other snakes.

The rattlesnake can see an infrared.

Yeah, they know the rattlesnake can see infrared, even though the squirrel can't see an infrared.

It knows the rattlesnake can.

And when it meets a gopher snake, which can't see an infrared, it doesn't do it.

I mean, it doesn't know it can see an infrared.

It's evolved to learn that the rattlesnake doesn't just.

So maybe it's just a coincidence, a happy coincidence.

But as Helen says,

it doesn't see a huge animal.

It sees a small squirrel with a gigantic tail.

Is that what's happening?

And they're scared of tails?

They can't.

They're snakes, for goodness sake.

They've got their tail.

They've got leafal tails.

There's a type of squirrel where its genitals are 40% the length of its body.

So I wonder whether rattlesnakes.

I'm not bothering it.

And that squirrel can autofallate.

Yeah, it gives itself a good idea.

Oh, my goodness.

That is a good claim.

I saw a photo of it, and its testicles are 20% the length of its body, and it's just outrageous.

If you see them in infrared, they're twice as big as that.

Yeah, I think

these are South African ground squirrels.

Someone worked out that if they were humans, they'd have a 35-centimetre scrotum.

That's inconvenient, isn't it?

Yeah.

On a bicycle, especially.

Apparently, in 2007, in Iran, they arrested 14 squirrels on suspicion of espionage.

Wow.

That's wonderful.

So, wait, what were the squirrels doing in Iran?

Well, they thought that they'd been all kitted up by the enemy to go in and do squirrel espionage.

Were they kitted up?

What, with magnifying glasses?

Tooled up squirrels.

They've got a killer cart, they've got rations.

Because if I found a squirrel carrying an Enigma machine or something, I would actually be suspicious that something was going on.

Yeah, but

someone is going to a lot of effort for a YouTube viral, certainly.

Yeah.

Animal defense mechanisms are extraordinary, though, aren't they?

Because some of them are obvious, like making yourself yourself look big.

But others them, like

there's a the horned lizard in Texas can shoot blood up to five feet out of its eyes, but then it's lost a third of its blood, so it's not exactly 15 feet, is it?

Has to go up and collect all the blood out of the body.

Yeah, but you wouldn't, you wouldn't have it.

If I was, you know, picking my own fish in a restaurant tank and one shot blood out of its eyes, I'd probably pick a different fish.

Fair enough.

Sea cucumbers, well, they shoot their internal organs out of their anuses.

You think, well, that's really going to scare an enemy, isn't it?

Oh, look, I've had a prolapse.

Get away from me.

They shoot their intestines.

I mean, that's intestines.

That's a pretty severe bullet to get to the face.

It's a bold move.

It is a very bold move.

How do you get them back in?

Is it like on a spring?

They just grow new ones.

They just grow new ones.

Oh, really?

They take ages.

Fair enough.

It's how cucumbers roll.

Cool.

There are squirrels which can do other things as well.

So one of California ground squirrels, they chew on old skins from rattlesnakes and then they lick themselves and their pups.

And this makes them smell half like a squirrel and half like a snake and it means that the snakes leave them alone and they've tested on snakes.

They've given them stuff that smells like squirrels, like snakes, and then this half and half mix and they only go for the stuff which ta which smells exclusively like a squirrel.

So that's how they protect themselves.

Other ones have ultrasound.

Squirrels are incredible.

What was the thing you were telling me about eagles the other day with squirrels?

Oh yeah, they are if they're being hunted by a bird of prey they will go round and round a tree very first to disorient the bird which will sort of just start spiraling and then crash into the branches of the tree and be embarrassed and have to leave because of its embarrassment.

And they're just, they're amazing.

That sounds like something out of a cartoon.

It does, doesn't it?

Sure.

Squirrels vs.

Rattlesnakes does seem like a classic cartoon setup.

Oh, they've got to do that.

In the like alien vs.

Predator series, in their whole series of films, they've got to do squirrels versus rattlesnakes.

Yeah, and it wouldn't be much worse than the most recent Alien vs.

Predator films.

So is it definitely that it's not an intimidation thing to the rattlesnake?

It's that they think it's bigger?

Because I read a thing where it said that what it in fact does, it says to the rattlesnake that I know that you're there.

Ah.

Rather than being a sort of like, whoa, that's a big squirrel.

Better not mess with that one.

I don't know if they know exactly what effect they think they're having on the rattlesnake.

Whether it's attack or defense or anything like that.

But it seems to have the desired effect.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

It would just probably shock them.

In the same way that cats do it.

I mean, lots of animals do it, don't they?

That's why we get goosebumps.

Well, they think.

So we look bigger.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it's not the most functional defense method.

All the hair, right?

It's a hangover from when we were covered in hair.

Okay.

People think

all the the hairs rise up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And therefore, you look slightly bigger and more intimidating.

I mean, I agree.

It's a shit defense mechanism.

Well, you look like you've just been blow-dried.

Yeah,

and that's scary.

Yeah, that is scary.

He looks after himself.

I bet he knows a fight.

Yeah, that's true.

Speaking of things that shoot out of the eyeballs, so the toad you were just talking about, do you guys know about the Mongolian death worm?

No.

Okay.

So no one's technically seen a Mongolian death worm.

Okay, the made-up death worms.

Yeah, the cryptettes and Brian Blesser.

They don't exist.

It is encrypted.

There are people in Mongolia who claim to have seen it.

It's definitely a cryptid.

But what I like about it is its defense mechanism is that it can shoot acid from its eyes and lightning bolts from its ass.

What?

Yeah.

Yeah.

This made-up creature can shoot lightning on.

Sorry, who came up with this?

It's a Mongolian fiction.

Fiction.

Right.

Yeah, that is incredible.

We should be able to utilise that in science somehow.

Lightning bolts from the ass.

Lightning from an anus.

It's like Dan's crypto corner, isn't it?

Every week.

And if you spot where it is, you let us know and you'll win a book.

It's a particular kind of ant that can shoot a nuclear holocaust out of its back.

There is a termite, though, that explodes if you're eating it.

So if it gets eaten by its prey, it kind of suicide bombs itself and it takes out the prey that's eating it.

There we are.

And see, through fiction, we found our way back to fact.

Yes.

Can I tell you one more thing about squirrels?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so there are Arctic ground squirrels and they hibernate for eight months months of the year but when they're hibernating their body temperature drops to minus three degrees celsius which is the lowest body temperature any mammal has ever been recorded as having as in right in the middle its core is minus three how do they do that well some fish do the same thing it's called being super cooled and they they live in sub-zero temperatures but the they know how the fish do it because they have a kind of antifreeze in their blood but the the squirrels don't don't have that so they have no idea how they do it.

Also on squirrels, they plant more trees than humans do because 74% of the nuts they bury, they forget where they put them.

Wow.

Idiots.

Idiots.

Because they're too busy auto-filating.

Goosebumps, which we weren't talking about.

Grey books.

R.L.

Stein.

Excellent.

He tweeted me once.

That was the most exciting moment.

Well, I tweeted him first.

He tweeted that.

Did he just tweet you saying, woo!

Sorry, Anna.

Sorry, it's a bit of weird, bumpy textured.

But goose bumps are called hen bumps in French and Spanish, chicken bumps in Dutch and Chinese, and duck bumps in Hebrew.

But there's a real poultry theme.

There's definitely a poultry theme.

Everyone's got the same idea, and they've just got to cite different ways with rigging.

I think cold turkey has something to do with that as well.

When people are coming off drugs, they get massive goosebumps, and people are like, well, that's like when you've got a turkey that you've plucked.

Oh, really?

Okay.

Turkeys which have been plucked do look like that.

Like

heroin addicts.

Recovery nutticks.

Pete Docherty's.

Look.

Put Pete in the oven for four hours.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thanks so much, everyone, for listening to the show.

If you want to talk to any of us about the things that we've said during the course of this episode, you can get us all on our Twitter handles.

I'm on at Schweiberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

Helen, Helen Zaltzman.

And how can they follow the podcast?

They can go to answermeethispodcast.com for all of the podcast information they want about that podcast.

Yep.

And Anna.

You can email podcasthatui.com.

Okay, still not on Twitter.

You can also go to our website and hear all the previous episodes that we've done.

That's on no such thingasafish.com.

And yep, we'll see you again next week with another episode of No Such Thingasa Fish.

Goodbye.

Hey, everybody, one more thing before we go.

If you live in the UK and you have a television, tune in to BBC Two at 8:30 p.m.

on Monday night to watch Only Connect, where you can watch the QILs James, Andy, and Ann take on all of the country's best boffins, geeks, dorks, nerd burgers, all of our favorite people.

And you can see how they do.

We'll be tweeting it and following it live as it goes out, so you can talk to us as it goes along.

And yeah, let's see how they do.

Catch you next week.

We don't stop now.

Hey, I'm Eric Ripke, Showrunner of the Boys, here with my friend Sean Ryan, showrunner of the Night Agent.

And on this episode of Creator to Creator, we will talk about the madness of making a TV show.

Listen to Creator to Creator, wherever you get your podcasts.