26: No Such Thing As A Yeti Fact

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We ran it on QI a few years ago.

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

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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's James Harkin, Andy Murray, and on fact-checking duties today, it's Anna Chaczynski.

And we've got a special guest joining us today.

He's my favorite comedy writer.

We're very excited.

Simon Rich from New York, here on a book tour.

Hello.

Thanks so much for having me.

This is super fun.

Yeah, thanks for coming.

So you're here.

You're only here until tomorrow, unfortunately.

Short trip, yeah.

Yeah, but so Spoiled Bratz, new book, a collection of short stories, one of which is being adapted into a movie by Seth Rogan.

Your previous book, The Last Girlfriend on Earth, being turned into a sitcom currently, coming out next year.

You used to work for Pixar, Saturday Night Live, and you're under 30.

How the fuck did you do this?

Well the books are really short, the books I write.

They're almost more like pamphlets.

And also the font is really large.

The margins are wide.

Sometimes it'll just, like in between chapters, there'll just be a few unnecessarily blank pages just to kind of pad it out.

So

that's the biggest trick.

Cool.

Okay, well

let's kick into our show.

So we're going to go fact number one, and we're going to start with you, Simon.

Cool.

So my fact is about Coco, Coco,

the gorilla who knows sign language.

And according to my research, over the course of her lifetime, she has owned and cared for three pet cats.

Yeah.

So, and how did she get these cats?

It's a good question.

Well, I know that she actually, because she speaks sign language, knows a thousand words in sign languages.

And apparently, they asked her, what would you like for Christmas?

And she said, I would like a pet cat.

It's a good thing she doesn't know flamethrower.

Or the word for freedom.

Right, or freedom.

A thousand words isn't that many, though, is it?

Is it not?

I know more than a thousand words.

See, I thought I know more than that in just numbers.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, good point.

But if you take the thousand words you use most often,

they probably cover almost everything.

And then it's specific ones after that, like hammock or thrombosis or whatever.

So, you know, or whatever.

Maybe they're in your top thousand, I don't know.

But it'd be lovely to see the thousand words you use most often.

Yes.

It would be really cool.

I have that list in Russian, actually.

What that you use?

No,

I was trying to learn Russian, and I still am, but not very well.

And I thought one way to do it would be to get the thousand most popularly spoken words in Russian, and then try and learn them all.

Well, that's how Dr.

Seuss wrote Cat in the Hat.

Oh, really?

Yeah,

he...

got a book that was a list of I think the first 100 words that children learn how to read and he almost as an exercise decided or as like a shamelessly cynical marketing pool

he decided I'll write a book using just those words.

He had very big fonts as well, didn't he?

Yeah, absolutely.

Did he not do a thing where one of his books was a bet with his publisher that he could write a book with fewer than 50 words or something like that?

It might be

a bit of a problem.

But a lot of his stories are, it's hard to tell if they're true.

Like he spread a lot of mythology about himself in his time.

He said that he used to get all of his ideas from a small town where they made the cuckoo clock.

He used to go there and they'd give him ideas.

But he was also a mummy hunter, which is interesting.

Yeah, he used to go with his wife and go mummy hunting.

Was this

late 19th century, early 20th?

Early 20th.

Dr.

Seuss, he would have been later, right?

Oh, later.

Yeah, because

I know he was a cartoonist during World War II.

So it must have been before or after that.

It's amazing that even then you could still go mummy hunting.

Well, they used to dig up mummies and crush them up and sell them as medicine in jars.

Where?

Just, you know, around.

Like Brooklyn?

Yeah, and like the valleys.

Oh, no, there's a book that says that the kings of England, lots of them were cannibals because they consumed human flesh in the form of mummies, grand-up mummies and things like that.

Yeah, they thought it had some sort of curative property.

Wow.

Anyway, back to Coco the Gorilla.

So Coco asked for a pet cat.

And also was quite deceitful.

Coco basically, one day, this is a story I read about Coco the Gorilla.

They came back to where Coco is, and

a sink had been ripped out of the wall.

This is my favorite Coco story, too.

Oh, well, tell it then.

Tell us.

Right, yes.

So a gigantic sink had been ripped out of the wall, and a 2,000-pound sink.

And the scientist confronted her and said, you know, who ripped out this sink?

Signed, who ripped out this sink?

And after the long pause, Coco

signed Janice.

And Janice was one of the lab assistants who was

a 21-year-old 95-pound woman.

And Coco tried to pin it on her, and the scientist signed to Coco.

I don't believe that Janice ripped out sink.

I think Gorilla ripped out sink.

And Coco had to sort of hang her head and admit what she'd done.

And she signed Coco ripped Sink, bad Gorilla Coco.

Because I read that she blamed the cat as well.

Oh, wow.

She was always pinning things on that.

Is that why she wanted the cat to just disguise her crime?

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

She needed an a stooge.

A stooge.

But that's actually.

I read about another story about Coco.

Apparently, so she has a name for a human, which is Nipple.

And

she, at least, three former keepers have claimed that they were pressured into showing their breasts at the gorilla's request.

That's right.

This Coco was kind of like an evil tyrant.

It seemed like she got whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, and there were no checks and balances.

And she was constantly making the scientists disrobe.

Yeah, Coco knows what's going on.

Absolutely.

Maybe the cat she wanted was a white fluffy cat which she could stroke, which dictated her to man.

Yeah.

She's quite old now.

She's 30 or 40 years old.

How long human gorillas live till?

I think that's a reasonably advanced age.

I think maybe

longer than that, evidently.

I mean, captivity in the world differs.

Yeah, they live longer in captivity, I think.

The oldest known primate that's non-human, I think, was Cheetah out of the Tarzan movies.

Oh, yeah.

Because it lived in captivity in Hollywood somewhere.

Obviously, we don't know how old every single primate is, but this one in particular lived to about 70 or something.

Really?

Yeah.

It was a Hollywood lifestyle there, isn't it?

Yeah, Cheetah was an artist, right?

It's the same with Bubbles, Michael Jackson's monkey.

But Bubbles had a rough end.

He ended up in a sanctuary far away from the glitz and glamour.

Yeah, yeah.

Michael apparently never visited.

Although, I've read this thing where they said that he always thought of Bubbles as his first child and added that he hoped the Jackson children would keep in touch with their stepbrother after he's gone.

So he did love him, but he got too aggressive.

He got too big, apparently.

Apparently, when chimpanzees get too big,

that's pretty strange.

Can you imagine Bubbles in that animal sanctuary with the other chimps trying to explain what his

childhood was like?

I mean, what a, what a,

how would anyone believe it?

He would have been the Michael Jackson of the chimpanzee world.

That's right.

Yeah.

My grandmother used to own a chimpanzee in Cambodia.

Really?

Was it your half-brother?

It was named after me, actually.

Is it?

Yeah, it was called.

They call me Chumps.

That's my nickname I had as a kid from them.

And they named me.

It sounds like you were named after the chimpanzee.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, they had a gibbon as well, and they kept in this cage in this restaurant.

They had a restaurant in Cambodia where.

It's not like a pick your own gibbon thing, is it?

No, no, no.

No, they were just

shit.

It was an amazing restaurant because they used to have a massive menu, but everyone kept ordering the goulash.

And what they discovered was that one of the chefs kept putting marijuana inside, which is legal there.

So they got rid of the whole menu, and it was just a goulash.

marijuana place.

That's what my grandmother.

But they

had to give away the chimpanzee because she got sexually frustrated with the gibbon in the cage and ripped its arm off.

Very sad.

Oh, wow.

Ripped its arm off.

That's what I'm saying.

That sorolateral doofy.

Wow.

Well, they're freakishly strong, and

they've evolved to

go for vulnerable parts of another primate's body.

So

they will rip off the genitals of male rivals and throw them

hundreds of feet.

Throw them.

Yeah, oh, yeah.

Because then you're simultaneously killing your enemy, and also you're expunging his genetic influence on your drive.

Very much the John Wayne Bobbits.

kingdom.

Very efficient

form of violence.

God, imagine you just walking through the forest as an explorer and this gorilla cock smacks you in the face as you're walking along.

It's a rough day.

It's a rough day.

Aren't gorilla testicles only about an eighth or a sixteenth the size of human ones?

So only the penis is a very small gorilla penis.

But that's because they do all the establishing supremacy with their muscles, isn't it, with their body?

There's no need for sperm competition because they, you know, once you're a male gorilla and you get a harem, then you're away.

You don't need to worry about competition from other males in that sense.

And you don't need a cool car.

You can just kind of show up.

Yeah, I think it's something like a male silverback gorilla's erect penis is a quarter of an inch in length or something like that.

I think you might be right.

So like a normal-sized penis, right, guys?

Like an

average male penis.

Okay, should we wrap up with this one?

Yeah, yeah.

Anna, we should go to you.

Do you have anything you want to add?

Yeah, a few things.

So, a long time ago, you guys were talking about the a thousand most commonly used English words.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yep, so I've got a list of them here, and I just thought I'd read them all out.

The, the, and, you're right.

The of and and.

Yep.

How much time have we got?

I know the three most common nouns are time, person, and year.

Yes.

Anyway, um, the first 25.

Shut up, James.

Don't care.

It's my role now.

This is my moment.

The first 25 words in the thousand most frequently used words make up a third of all printed material.

Just 25 words.

The reason Coco knew what a cat was before she had her pet cat, her two favourite books were The Three Little Kittens and Puss in Boots.

And so she looked at those pictures and knew the word for cat.

I don't know what I'm talking about.

I don't know the three little kittens.

Neither do I.

You should have talked to Coco.

Anyway, they first of all tried to give her a stuffed toy that looked like a cat to fob her off, and she was really pissed off and made it clear that she needed the real thing.

So they got her the real thing.

And she named it all ball.

Did we discuss that?

No, we didn't.

So she named her first kitten.

Obviously, she only has a thousand words in her vocabulary, which it turns out isn't enough for a good cat name.

So she called it all bull.

Because apparently, according to her owners, she likes to rhyme in sign language.

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Time for fact number two, and that's my fact.

My fact this week is according to Yeti experts.

Oh god.

Yeah.

It is easier to escape a female Yeti than a male Yeti because female female Yetis have such long dangling boobs that before they can chase you, they need to chuck them over their shoulders like a scarf.

Otherwise they may trip on them and bang their head.

James, you're looking skeptical.

That's a fact.

Yeah, it's a fact about something that doesn't exist.

It's a fact about something that no one has ever seen, yes.

But it's a fact that comes from Captain John Noll.

Captain John Noll was the guy who first broke into Tibet under a guise because you weren't allowed as a Westerner into Tibet.

And he was the first person to see Mount Everest and think we need to climb that.

He came back back to England and he pitched it at the Royal Geographical Society and that's what led to the Mallory expedition and he was on the Mallory expedition.

He was the official photographer.

Do you think they said, oh, I'm not really sure that sounds like a good idea?

And then he said, oh, no, there's giant monkeys with enormous breasts.

Yeah, you.

Exactly.

He might have.

I don't know if he believed in the Yeti.

That might have been a...

That was a bit of a myth that he brought back with him.

But it's a fact.

It is a fact about something that...

People who believe in the Yeti believe.

If you were talking to someone who believes in a Yeti, right here in this room, and you said, Did you know this?

I'd say, Yeah, of course.

It's a weird one, though, isn't it?

Because it's a fact that that is believed amongst people who believe in it.

Yeah.

It's like a different world of facts.

It's like a second subspecies of facts because it is a Yeti fact, but it's not a real-world fact.

I think it's a person fact.

Person facts.

Yeah, it's a fact about what people believe.

So, do you know about the $10 million Bigfoot Bounty TV show?

No.

Okay, it was on a very small American channel.

I can't remember which one it is, like a satellite channel or a cable channel.

And there was a number of teams, and they every week tried to find evidence of Bigfoot.

And whoever found the least evidence each week would get kicked off until there was only two teams left.

So how did they classify the least evidence?

They had a team of experts who would explain that.

And

the final two, whoever got the most evidence, if they could find evidence of Bigfoot, then they would win $10 million.

Did the prize go unclaimed?

It went unclaimed.

At that point, I know Bigfoot is something of a recluse, but if I were him, I would go in and make a deal and say, I'll take five.

You take five million.

I'll pose for one picture.

But hang on, the premise of this show is that if you find most or least evidence, you're either saved or kicked off.

But if at the end of the show, the people who found most evidence had found no evidence, and therefore the 10 million went unclaimed.

Then all the other teams are like...

They found even less than no evidence.

That's the premise.

The 10 million was underwritten by Lloyds of London, probably as a

joke.

Oh man, I'd love to see the look on their face if they found Bigfoot.

What a rough

shareholders meeting that is.

We're in the red this quarter.

They found Bigfoot.

We're sorry.

They did, quite recently, there was a study done of creatures claiming to be Bigfoot or the Sasquatch, and they took 57 samples of hair that people had sent into them saying this is Bigfoot or this is a Sasquatch.

One of them was a piece of fiberglass, so that didn't get used.

But they managed to get down to about 30 where they didn't know what it was immediately.

And of that 30, they turned out to be cows, horses, raccoons, or sometimes bears.

But they think that they might have got two samples from previously unrecognized bear species or hybrids.

So they might have discovered new species by doing that.

There's plenty more to find out there.

We live under this weird assumption that we've discovered everything.

Right, and in in the ocean we've barely cracked the surface, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

The ocean is...

I think we've done something like 6% tops.

We've definitely mapped Mars better than the ocean.

The thing that I liked most about this Yeti fact, other than it's Yetis, and I love Yetis, is that I just love its advice to escape.

It's escape advice, and I love escape advice because I think it's the best kind of weird, handy advice that you probably will never need to use, but it will always stick with you.

If you know this fact now about female Yetis, this will not leave you for the rest of your life.

I found this thing of like the best way to, in Chinese mythology, to escape a vampire is to make sure you have bags of rice on the ground because they count.

They're obsessive counters, apparently, vampires.

Yeah, so they

do you spill rice.

You spill rice, and as they're chasing you, they have a dilemma where they're like, ah, and then they count the rice.

They have that in Eastern European...

vampire culture as well like you put sand on the on the doorstep and they won't come into your house because they'll just stand there counter what we're saying is that all vampires have obsessive obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Yeah, like that one off Sesame Street, who goes, Von.

Ha ha.

Is that where it came from, the count in Sesame Street?

No,

I think that was just a pun on the word count, probably.

Oh, yeah.

If you wanted to escape being an Aztec prisoner, Andy, I know you like you know this fact, you like it.

If you were a slave, sorry, in Aztec times, the way to escape was to run away from your master in the middle of the market and step in some human excrement.

And if you did that, you were no longer a slave.

Really?

Yeah, that was the rule.

It was quite a loophole.

It implies either that there was a lot of human excrement around, or that it was very rare.

Maybe there was, actually.

There was quite a lot because

their sewers went alongside the town walls, kind of thing.

But the other thing was: if someone tried to stop you from being a slave, and someone noticed that, then, sorry, if you stopped someone trying to escape, then you became a slave.

So no one ever stopped them.

Once they started running away, everyone went, oh, nothing to do with me.

I think that gives people a fair chance.

Yeah.

I respect that.

Really great story that I like about a sort of a moment of needing to escape.

The guy who set up MI6, Mansfield Cumming.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

He's great because you assume that he would be the ultimate spy.

There's this great story where during World War I, he went into Germany, disguised as a German soldier, infiltrating a German camp, but got busted immediately because it turned out he didn't know any German.

Immediately at the gate.

He could have at least learned and he was like, yeah.

If he'd learned 25 words, he would have been a good person.

He would have spied.

Yeah, yeah.

He used to do this thing.

He had a wooden leg, but no one really knew at the time that he had a wooden leg.

But in meetings, if he got bored with what anyone was saying, and no one knew he had this leg, he used to take a massive knife that he had on the desk and just stab himself in the leg.

And everyone would go, whoa!

And then he'd just take over.

As I wanted to say.

That's what I do with my wooden genitals.

After that.

You rip them off and throw them 100 yards.

You should see people's faces.

We should probably wrap up on this one as well.

Anna, have you got anything to add?

Just a couple of small things.

So on Yetis, you were saying that it's if you're being chased by a female Yeti, you're in luck because they've got these big breasts that get in their way.

But apparently, according to Yeti experts, you're also likely to be able to escape a male if you run downhill because it's got long hair that blows in its eyes when running, so it can't see well.

Oh, I have that.

So.

And just the ocean floor.

Estimates are that we've only discovered 10% of what there is to be discovered in the ocean.

Although, if you're talking about mapped sea floor that's in the public domain, we've only discovered 2% to 3%.

But apparently, so much of the information about the ocean is completely classified and shrouded in secrecy, according to National Geographic.

7% of what we've discovered about the ocean, no one's allowed to know because it's so highly secrecy.

Well, it's genuinely classified.

Yeah, it's all military classified information.

Right, because I guess they have the gadgets that go under there, so it's proprietary information, right?

Yeah.

What, so they wouldn't want it, so they don't want to share that technology?

Right, probably, right?

It must come down to that.

Yeah, yeah,

because nobody's claimed it, nobody's claimed that

chunk of the earth.

They have drones, lots of drones, ocean drones now, which is so cool.

They have whole generations of little robots, and their only job is to measure or assess one thing, and you just set them off, and they can go all over the world.

They're always beaming information back.

Yeah, well, like Google spiders, yeah, in a way, yeah.

Wow, it sounds amazing.

Sounds made up,

yeah.

Okay, on to fact number three, James.

Okay, my fact this week is the Karma Sutra suggests 64 arts to practice alongside sex.

They include solving word puzzles and teaching birds how to talk.

Yeah, that's weird.

I just assumed it was just all sex party.

No, not that much sex in there at all, really.

In that case, I am a lot sexier than I realise.

I'm getting pretty good at the Telegraph Cryptic Crossword.

That's amazing.

There's yeah, 64 of them.

Some of the others, Tattooing, The Art of Making Beds, Playing on Musical Glasses Filled with Water,

Knowledge of Mines and Quarries, and The Art of Cockfighting.

Or are these dating ideas before you get to the actual portion of the book about sex?

No, it's...

Why not visit a mine or quarry?

Why not play musical glasses filled with water?

Yeah.

But so what was the book then?

What is it?

Okay, the book is it was written in the third century by a celibate celibate monk, and he was bringing together all of the different writings from beforehand that were about sex or about

the art of mating in humans.

So, where does teaching the bird to speak from?

These are things that if you do those, it will

improve your general life and also your sex life.

Oh, okay.

Sort of like a holistic approach.

Yeah,

there are nine pages on how to look after your wife, and 26 pages detailing how to seduce other men's wives.

Well, it's harder, to be fair.

It's harder.

It needs more.

Well, here's one way to seduce other men's wives from that.

It's called pocket, no pocket.

First, take the heart of a mongoose, then the fruits of a fenugreek plant, and gourd, and some snake eyes.

Mix them all together, cook them over the fire, and then put them in your eyes, and it'll make you invisible.

And then you can go and find another man's wife.

What?

In the comments.

Have we mistranslated invisible for blind?

Yeah.

God, times were great back then.

If a recipe at the beginning of a thing says take the heart of a mongoose,

just the very first ingredient.

That's like the equivalent of like preheat the oven at 350 degrees.

Just the most basic instruction.

Yeah.

There's a papyrus, an Egyptian papyrus, which has a load of things that when it says snake's blood, what it's supposed to be is some kind of fruit juice or something.

And when it says crocodile excrement, it's supposed to be some clay, clay a special kind of clay from ethiopia so they use these words even though they didn't really mean oh it's all coded yes james has a theory that um because

in a lot of contraceptive they say that the ancient egyptians use crocodile dung as a contraceptive yeah but you and i think it was just actually a piece of clay from um abyssinia or from ethiopia and they used to make it into um what do you call these a pessary and stop people from being able to impregnate you that way.

But you get it in all the lists of facts.

It's like they use crocodile dung dung for contraception issues.

These are always pretty unlikely.

Yeah, all euphemisms.

It's always I of Newt, right?

Isn't it?

Yeah, exactly.

There's poor newts, you know?

Can you imagine them trying to piece that together?

What is going on?

What do they want from us?

Why do they want us?

God, so that would be amazing, someone in that period taking it literally and going and actually getting the heart of a mongoose.

Maybe what did you do to our fucking mongoose?

That means pencil.

Get a pencil.

Everyone knows it's a little bit.

That would be very embarrassing to serve that, you know, witch's potion up and

filled with all the literal ingredients.

It would explain a lot of fancy cookbooks today as well if Heston Blumenthal is actually using a series of elaborate metaphors and he just wants us to make spaghetti bolognese.

That's true.

But he's saying, take liquid nitrogen.

No, I mean, I mean ice.

Yeah, so what else is there in the Karma Sutra?

So the Kama Sutra was discovered by Richard Burton, who did the first British English translation.

Yeah.

We should say not Richard Burton the actor.

Richard Burton the Victorian explorer.

That's right.

Yeah, not that Richard Burton.

Who is the most extraordinary character?

Yeah.

Seemingly fictional when you read his life story because of the amount of things that he did.

Spoke like thirty languages.

There's probably too many that I've made up there.

Yeah, he did speak a lot of languages, but I'm not sure how well he spoke them all because he translated the Kama Sutra from Sanskrit and whenever he was supposed to translate the word dildo, he put statue instead, which kind of changes the meaning of some of the things in there.

Yeah.

He also,

instead of writing about penises and vaginas, because he was writing for Victorian audience,

he would call the penis Lingam, which was Sanskrit for Wand of Light, and he would call the vagina Yoni, which was Sanskrit for sacred temple.

Wow.

So it's place your wand of light into the sacred temple.

So it must read like a Harry Potter book when you read his version of the Karma Sutra.

Do we have more sort of

ancient love guides outside of the Karma Sutra?

I've never really never really heard of an Egyptian one.

I don't know.

Is there?

Yeah, I can't remember what it is.

Oh, there's one called the Turin Erotic Papyrus.

Genuinely, there's the Turin Shroud, and then from about 2,000 years before that is the Turin Erotic Papyrus.

And it's a series of blue drawings, basically.

Yeah.

I don't think it's meant quite as a love guide.

I think it's more to titillate and things like that.

Okay.

There was that great, I can't remember his name, Anna, you might be able to find it, but in the Natural History Museum, they have effectively what is an erotica book.

It was during a Shackleton trip

where the guy who was studying penguins

witnessed the insane love life of penguins, and he found it so dirty that all of the bits where he had to describe the actual sexual acts, he put into what was it, Greek,

so that you had to be a real scholar to actually.

I don't think it was in a code.

I think it was a code on top of ancient Greek.

So they cracked the code.

And then even after you've cracked the code, it's still in ancient Greek.

It's still in ancient Greek.

If I saw something coded in ancient Greek, I would, man, I would assume the worst and translate that.

Yeah, I'd jump right into that.

Probably it was a lot harder to access in the old days, wasn't it?

You had to crack the code and then translate from Greek and then it's about penguins.

So the Kama Sutra again, they have a section on oral sex.

Well, it starts off saying, oral sex is very, very terrible and you shouldn't be doing that kind of thing.

And then they have quite a few pages on how to do it.

Like how this is what you definitely shouldn't do.

Whatever you do, don't do this.

And then don't do it this way, and don't do it this way.

Wow.

It's a bit like during Prohibition when

they used to sell winemaking kits, and it would be grapes and whatever.

And it says, Whatever you do, don't put this alcohol in these grapes, and don't crash them down or whatever.

For a long time,

theater in New York City was against the law unless it had some kind of higher moral purpose.

Oh, yeah.

And so pretty much every show

during the sort of P.T.

Barnum days was

a show, like

a sexy melodrama, and then at the end, a stern, matronly woman would come out for 30 seconds after two hours of this and say, like, don't do what you've just seen.

And that would kind of be it.

That's kind of funny.

And they were referred to as moral lectures.

Wow.

And people would start to file out, you know, as the woman came on.

Yeah,

I'd rather have that at the beginning, I think.

Would you?

Yeah.

Does that not spoil the rest of the movie?

No, because then you forget about it once the sexy melodrama starts.

Well, during the

before

there's a few decades where

film was really closely regulated by the United States government and one of the things was you can never portray a criminal in the positive light

and you can never show them

getting away with their crime.

They always had to be punished.

And so there's a lot of films where basically they get the girl, they get the money, they get the fame and the glory, and then just inexplicably gunned down.

As they acquire a stern, matronly lady.

The same woman.

And then she, you know, points at the camera and nods.

And you get the message.

And she draws her finger across her throat and gestures down there.

Yeah.

But it's all these hilarious, like, tacked on endings.

Right.

You were just mentioning P.T.

Barnum before.

My favourite P.T.

Barnum thing is that when people used to go to his circuses, you would pay your money, pay $2, go in, and then there would be a big sign saying, this way to the egress.

And everyone would go down there, not really that realizing that egress means exit, and they'd go straight out and they'd have to pay to go back in again.

And then they probably wouldn't ask for their money back because they were too humiliated to admit that they didn't know the word egress.

I thought it was a female eagle or something.

Oh, that's great.

Well, he

was brilliant.

Oh, he was, yeah.

He invented the skylight, I believe.

I think he's the first person to, yeah, the American Museum in Manhattan.

That should probably be fact-checked.

But yeah, the first person to burn electric lights at night for no pragmatic reason other than self-promotion.

So the original New York City skyline was just the word Barnum.

That's fine.

And like a shapeless void.

But the museum burned down, didn't it?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

It burned down big time.

I wonder if, yeah.

And then later on,

he had spent a long time building an opulent palace for his house, and that burnt down the day after completion.

Yeah, he built a kind of sort of like a Xanadu type place, like a gigantic mansion, and it burned down almost immediately.

And then weirdly,

this is all in Connecticut where he sort of retired after his long career.

And I think Bridgeport, Connecticut, he, I think, became mayor of the town.

So

he had his whole like small town political career towards the end of his life.

It used to be a problem where things burned down, didn't it?

Like there was a lot of

innovative.

We just haven't solved that problem of a building burning down yet.

But in theaters, it used to be because they used to light things up with

fire all the time.

And there was a few that burnt down in in Covent Garden quite a while ago, and then they had to put the prices up.

And people protested against the prices going up because they had to pay for this damage.

And they protest.

They riot?

They rioted for days and days and days, and they were known as the OP riots because people wanted the old prices.

And so OP is old price.

And people would just stand there while they were trying to do the play and just go op, op, up, up for like hours on end.

Tough crowd.

I know.

That's a rough night.

I always think the worst would be the actors on stage during the Lincoln assassination.

Just like, man, how do you get the audience back after that?

Okay, Anna, have you got anything to add?

Yep, a couple of things to clarify.

So the guy you were talking about who wrote the sexual habits of Adeli Penguins was Doctor George Levick, who was the surgeon and medical officer for the British Antarctic Expedition led by Scott in nineteen ten.

Yeah, it was suppressed for almost a hundred years, ninety seven years, and was only made public in 2012 because it was considered too crude for society to handle.

I think, did we mention that on QI, that the penguin thing?

I think it might have been on the show, in which case he kept it secret for more than 100 years until 2012, and then the next year we put it on national television.

Yeah.

Sorry, Victorians.

Any stupid sensibilities.

In a way, you should have.

If you'd only published it then, we'd all have forgotten about it by now.

Yeah, exactly.

Things in the Karma Sutra.

So something that Burton, you're right, he did mistranslate it a lot of the Karma Sutra.

He downplays women's positions.

So, in the Karma Sutra, women, there's a lot of equality in there, a lot of gender equality, which obviously he didn't approve of, being a Victorian man.

And so, for instance, there's a bit in the text that advises that the wife of an unfaithful man should scold him with sharp language.

And Burton just inserts the word never into that.

The wife of an unfaithful man

should never scold her husband.

So, it's just a minor change in this

editing decision.

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Okay, time for the final fact of the show, Andy.

Hello, my fact this week is that there are more than 15 trillion tons of water above the Earth now, at any given moment.

Isn't that amazing?

That's a lot.

Yeah.

Is it a lot?

15 trillion tons?

I guess it is.

I think so.

It's hard to imagine such a big number.

I know what you mean.

It's a small proportion, a very small proportion of the total amount of water on the planet, obviously.

But nonetheless, it is a vast amount.

It's too big to compute, really.

But this is

the really cool thing about clouds.

So the average cloud weighs about 400 tons, it turns out.

The average cumulus cloud.

So

individually, all the droplets.

Because why don't they just fall?

Well, they are.

They're always falling.

But the air inside the cloud is moving upwards faster than they're falling.

So it's like a slinky on an escalator.

If you can imagine that.

Yeah.

And the water droplets are so tiny.

They're 0.01 millimeters in diameter.

A billion of them would be the the same size as a sugar cube.

Wow.

And they're very fast-based out.

When you say a slinky on an escalator, do you mean an escalator going up?

Yeah, I do.

I've never had that image in my head ever.

It's always stairs with a slinky just going down, but presumably the slinky can stay.

Yeah, that's what.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's a strong image.

I've never had that in my life.

A perpetual motion machine.

Yeah.

We cracked it.

Hey, guys, we cracked it.

There we go.

If only we could think of a way of the escalator going up without any inputs of energy.

Oh, I forgot about that.

Oh, cynical, cynical.

I still say we pattern it.

The size of the tiny aerosol droplets in a cloud is one micron in width, which is the same width as a human sperm.

Wow.

Okay.

And a normal male penis is just slightly bigger than that.

Right?

But the sperm is the smallest cell in the body, isn't it?

Or just about the smallest cell?

It's very close to it.

Everyone says it is, but I don't think it is, really.

But it's down there.

It's pretty small, but blood platelets are pretty small.

I think it's not the smallest.

It's generally said to be the smallest.

But the female egg is definitely the largest.

Definitely the biggest.

If I had the biggest egg in all nature, it would be like a bird's egg, probably like a ostrich egg.

Yeah, those things are big.

What used to be the elephant bird egg, remember the one that David Attenborough found?

The egg of it.

It looks like a giant ostrich.

And

it's the largest an egg can be.

All right.

Before it gets too thick that the thing inside can't crack out of it or that it just couldn't form to begin with.

The ovum is called the ovum.

The ovum, sorry, I meant the ovum, not the egg.

Like a chicken's egg.

Because that's vast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I'm just thinking about that egg.

The giant bird egg.

Do we still have the elephant bird?

No, no, it's extinct, but we do have the egg.

It's kind of like when you go to Mongolia and you find dinosaur eggs.

They just found a new dinosaur.

Did you guys see that?

Yeah.

Gigantic.

Yeah, the biggest elephant they've ever found.

Hey, they say it's 12 times as big as a T-Rex.

What?

Yeah.

I heard that in the Guardian this morning.

Yeah, 12 times.

It is scary when you see the photos of these giant, like, like thigh bones, which are twice the size of a person.

But did you know that most of these dinosaurs had feathers?

This is the new theory.

They looked like

people are, yeah, people say they basically looked like giant chickens.

It makes them a little less intimidating.

Jurassic Park needs a whole

CGI.

Someone will do it at some point.

For the 20th anniversary, they'll come up with all feathers on on every dinosaur.

Velociraptors, I think.

And Velociraptors were tiny, weren't they?

They were the size of, I think, large chickens or small dogs.

Somewhere in between those two.

Yeah.

Cloud juice.

Do you know what that is?

Cloud juice.

Cloud juice.

Yeah,

rain.

Well, yeah, it is, pretty much.

You and your fancy words.

This is a Bolton thing.

No, it's not very much not.

It's bottled water that you can get in Claridge's.

And they sell it in a menu like wine.

And it's collected on a plastic roof on a tiny windswept island off the Australian coast.

And it's the most expensive bottled water ever to arrive in the UK.

Wow.

How is it sold as being better than normal bottle water?

The trade winds come off the ocean, and it's supposed to be much purer because there isn't any pollution on the rain.

It's weird, isn't it?

Because it's just H2O.

There are ways of purifying water.

You just need to boil it and condense it, and then you've got no impurities at all.

Yet we have this idealised water in our heads.

Yeah.

I want some so badly.

Yeah.

Don't you guys want to taste that?

I bet it's great.

Let's all go to cloud juice.

Let's get sushi on the way.

Let's get them to sponsor this thing.

Yeah.

It'll be sweet.

We'll be swimming in cloud juice.

Cloud juice.

It sounds hot.

It doesn't sound nice, though.

It's not a nice name.

Yeah, why do they call it cloud juice?

Cloud water?

Lovely.

Cloud juice?

Yeah.

It's a bit claggy.

It's a sky muck.

But there's also, you could get beer where the water comes from glaciers, and that's supposed to be like better and purer.

Oh like ice wine as well, which is wine where the grapes are frozen and so all the sugar is pushed into the remaining bit of the grape which isn't frozen and then you crush that grape.

So it makes a much sweeter wine.

Okay, so have you heard of Cloud9?

Yes.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, this is really cool.

Cloud9 is not the highest, most elegant floaty cloud there is.

Cloud9 is actually at the very bottom of the height scale in the International Cloud Atlas.

It's like high fog, essentially.

Oh,

it's cool.

It's cumulonimbus.

So cumulus are the fluffy ones, nimbus are rainy, and that's that's cloud nine, yeah, yeah.

If you want really high, elegant clouds, uh, you want cloud zero, which is Cirrus, and that's the stuff which is just ice crystals in the sky.

It's just millions of ice crystals floating together.

Yeah.

Did they like change the numbers or something?

Is that why we say Cloud 9 is?

No, they were all.

So the famous system was invented by a scientist called Luke Howard, which is all the Latin names, cumulus, nimbus, stratus.

Cirrus is lovely.

It means a curl of hair.

It's really, because does, it looks beautiful like that.

But

he came up with the system, and

the poet Goether was so impressed with this incredible classification job that he dedicated four whole poems to him.

And he praised him for bestowing form on the formless and a system of ordered change on a boundless world.

You know, back in the day when there weren't names for different types of clouds.

But this is really cool.

The year before Luke Howard came up with his, that was 1802, there was another French scientist called Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

He came up with the system.

And he came up with his when he was ill in bed, looking at the clouds floating past his window.

And they had en voil, which means hazy, atroupe, mast, pomlais, which means dappled, and groupé, which means grouped.

Was that the same Lamarck who came up with evolution at the same time as Darwin?

Same guy.

Yeah, so he was off on a couple of things.

Yeah.

But unfortunately, no one paid any attention to his system.

And the next year, along comes Fancy Boy with his Latin, and away you go.

But they believed him about, you know, giraffes stretching their their necks out until they were alive.

People bought that for a while, right?

Yeah, yeah.

There's still some people.

There's still some people who think that Lamarckism will come back one day.

There were some studies in the last few years that mice can pass their memories on to their grandchildren.

And if that was true, if that turns out to be true, that would be Lamarckism.

Why is that Lamarckism?

Right, right.

Yeah, it's such a mad idea.

Saying you can pass on learnt traits.

It was fear, wasn't it?

They associated a particular smell with fear, and two generations on, the mice which had had no contact with their grandparents exhibited the same fear.

Okay.

Which is, if true, unbelievable.

So it's not, but it's not like us getting, you know, you and me suddenly talking about the war.

No, no, no, but the fear had altered their genes.

Just like those memories came down.

No, but the fear had altered their genes.

So

they were afraid of the smell of, I think it was lavender.

My favourite experiment, live experiment, is they

hooked

a mouse's

his pleasure sensors in his brain with an electrode to a button,

which he could press in order to send a jolt of endorphins

into his system.

And he he he kept, you know, predictably, he kept p pressing the button.

And he pressed it so incessantly that he forgot to eat and he forgot to drink.

And his limbs eventually atrophied to the point where he had to just press it with his face.

Oh, my God.

And then he died ultimately of starvation.

And no one stepped in?

No, they just let him go with it.

That just sounds like one of the Saw movies or something.

And then I read another one about they took a bunch of mice and they

played them classical music, and they took a bunch of other mice and they played them rock and roll and they they mixed them together and the the rock mice uh ate the classical mice.

Okay, shall we wrap up on this?

Anna,

have you got anything you want to add?

So the largest dinosaur ever found has been discovered.

It weighed as much, they estimate, as 14 African elephants.

It's seven tons heavier than the previous record holder.

It was found in Argentina, so that's pretty impressive.

And it's about 20 meters tall.

Which reminded me of a thing I read, and I think it was a new scientist blog.

If anyone saw the first episode of this series of Doctor Who, where the T-Rex was the same height as Big Ben,

the largest known specimen of a T-Rex that we have is four meters, and Big Ben is 96.

So.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things we've been talking about on this podcast, you can reach most of us on Twitter.

I can be got on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At egg-shaped.

Simon, you're not on Twitter, are you?

No, no, dice.

Sorry.

Oh, my God.

How?

Why?

You know, I just...

Yeah, it's just, it's just, my level of coolness is just too high.

I just know it would consume my entire life if I was on social media, so I just steer clear of all of it.

Fair enough.

Okay, but if you can't get him online, but you can get him in bookshops.

That's a good link.

Yeah, so Spoilt Brats is out now, but also all of his books.

Last Girlfriend on Earth, Elliot Alagash, What in God's Name?

Yep.

And then there's two in America, if you're listening in America.

There is Free Range Chickens and Ant Farm.

Good memory.

That's amazing.

They're all amazing.

There's no notes in front of him.

He's just doing this.

Yes, I remember that.

I really appreciate that.

I've read all the books.

This is not a lie.

I'm a massive fan.

I think he's the best comedy writer out there at the moment.

So get Simon's books.

You can find us all on Twitter.

Anna, you're not on Twitter still.

Yeah, I like the fact we discuss this a lot and no one's ever suggested that I'm too cool to be on Twitter over the 20 episodes we've had where you ask one of them.

I'm not cool enough.

Yeah, double standards.

Okay, that's it for this week.

We're going to be back again next week with another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Go to our website and you can find all previous episodes.

And we'll be back again, yeah, in seven days.

See you then.

Bye.

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