25: No Such Thing As A Randy Rat In Polyester Pants

28m
Episode 25 - Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Andy (@andrewhunterm), Anna (@nosuchthing), discuss rats wearing pants, pizzas on Venus, pillow fighting in the trenches and how to avoid incest in Iceland.




Listen and follow along

Transcript

From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab-grown diamond engagement rings to the U.S.

Explore Solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewelers behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our new Union Street showroom or explore the range at cullenjewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.

From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab-grown diamond engagement rings to the U.S.

Explore Solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewelers behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our new Union Street showroom or explore the range at cullenjewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.

We ran it on QI a few years ago.

Yeah.

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

There's no such thing as a fish.

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

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

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with three other elves, Andy Murray, Anna Chaczynski, and James Harkin.

And once again, we've gathered round the table with our favorite facts from the last seven days.

So here we go, in no particular order, our favorite things from the last week.

Anna.

My fact is that rats wearing polyester pants can't get erections.

How did they find this out?

So this guy, it was in 1993 and it was Dr.

Ahmed Shafiq and he dressed up 75 rats.

Can we just establish why he did this first?

Yeah, he wanted to see if polyester decreases fertility.

It's science, Dan.

Okay.

So, yeah, he split them into five groups, dressed one group up in cotton trousers or pants, dressed another group up in polyester pants, another group up in wool pants, and another group up in 50-50, which I think is what most people wear, right?

Right, yeah.

It's like 50% cotton, 50% polyester.

And yeah, they had to wear these pants continuously for six months, and then he shoved them in with a load of women, bondes,

female rats.

I mean,

No, maybe that was where he went wrong.

And none of the women got pregnant.

Sorry, yeah.

He shoved them in with a load of female rats.

And he found that the ones wearing polyester pants try to mount the females and their ability to penetrate them was significantly reduced.

And the idea is synthetic fabrics are bad for you, is that it?

Yeah, actually, that's cool.

So that's he said that, but I think that's controversial.

A lot of studies say wearing polyester boxes might reduce your sperm count, but how weird.

Yeah.

But then I read quite quite a good quote from a doctor saying, How come during the 70s and 80s, when everyone was wearing tight polyester clothes, suddenly the human population didn't decrease rapidly.

Yeah, there were a lot of advances in other areas as well.

It only worked in a world where the only variable was what kind of pants and trousers everyone was wearing.

Yeah, so anyway, he thinks the reason this happens, and the reason that it maybe happens in humans, but the reason that it happens definitely in rats, is that it creates kind of a static electricity around if you're wearing polyester type clothes.

So you've got electric genitals.

You've got electric electric genitals, yeah.

Sounds like a great band name.

And the sperm hate that.

And I found this out in a book called Bonk by Mary Roach, who we love because she writes excellent books.

So Bonk is a scientific approach to sex, but it's really well written.

It's a really entertaining read.

When I heard the fact, I read into this guy just very quickly because I wanted to see what kind of character he was.

And there was a great little thing that Mary Roach had found out: that he was Nobel Prize nominated.

But the thing is, she checked up to see if he was Nobel Nobel nominated.

And the rules of Nobel are that they don't reveal who the nominations were until 50 years after the nomination itself.

So you can go around, she's saying, put that on your resume, you can go around saying you're a Nobel Prize nominated person, and no one will ever know.

But he also performed the world's first bladder transplant.

He also did the same experiment on dogs, which I find, so I think he might have just really liked putting pants on animals.

He was quite clear in the study that he washed them every time they were soiled.

Rats do soil themselves a lot.

They urinate almost all the time.

Oh, well, that's a lot of washing then.

Yeah.

Unless it was just number twos that he was cleaning up.

But so rats urinate all the time everywhere to attract women, female rats.

They also wee on food to market as edible.

Standard practice.

Females will wee on a male that they particularly like.

Male rats will do the same to females.

Young rats will wee on older rats, and no one knows why they do that.

And dominant males regularly wee on their subordinates.

Non-standard practice.

No.

That's a lot of weeing to be cleaning up.

Do they have to constantly drink?

Incessantly in the pub, just downing pints.

Got a week on my guy.

So we don't know why they piss on each other.

I think the idea is maybe that it contains pheromones or something like that.

But it seems like such a blunt instrument to us because we don't know about whatever pheromones may be in it.

So they probably look at us going, oh, these humans, they make noises with their mouths when they're happy, when they're sad, to please people, to make people angry.

It's grotesque.

Why are they marking that urinal as edible?

Going back to Mary Roach, which the book Bonk, which is where you got the fact about rats in pants from,

I read it a few years ago, I think it was in the J series, and because you have to tenuously tie everything to the letter of the alphabet you'll study, mine was under J for jiggy, brackets, jiggy.

Other incredible facts from this book, Bonk.

I love this one.

In 1851, a gynecologist called James Platt White was expelled from the American Medical Association for inviting medical students to observe a consenting woman giving birth because his colleagues were so outraged by the idea of a male doctor looking at female genitals.

I was given birth to in front of a bunch of students.

What you really?

Yeah, it was pretty awesome.

Can you remember much about it?

Of course I can.

A lot of talk about how beautiful I was.

Oh, and the other,

two-fifths of the human penis is hidden beneath the skin.

Two-fifths.

Two-fifths.

It's like an iceberg.

Oh, and I think the other thing, which I've mentioned on this podcast before, is about the postage stamp penis test.

Well, say it anyway.

What is it?

In the 20th century, if someone couldn't get an erection, it was either going to be psychological or it was going to be physiological.

So, to test whether or not it was a purely bodily problem or whether it was all in the mind, they would attach a strip of perforated postage stamps around the base of the penis and then leave you overnight.

If it was a purely psychological problem, you would have an erection as you slept and the perforations would tear.

Whereas, if it was a physiological problem, you wouldn't, and you know, you'd wake up still with the.

The worst thing was when you woke up and your penis had been sent to barnstable

From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab-grown diamond engagement rings to the U.S.

Explore Solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewelers behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our new Union Street showroom or explore the range at cullenjewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.

Running a business online?

Look legit and own your own brand with professional tools from GoDaddy.

Instantly build trust with your customers and boost your credibility with an email that matches your domain so people know you mean business.

There's never been a better time.

Just go to godaddy.com slash GDNow and choose from a wide variety of popular domains to find one that's right for you.

Pair that with a professional email that works for all your business needs from daily communications to email marketing and everything in between.

That's a little price for a lot of credibility.

For a limited time, get a domain and matching professional email for just 99 cents a month for one year.

Go to godaddy.com slash gdnow and look legit with godaddy.

That's godaddy.com slash gdnow.

Again, go daddy.com slash gdnow.

There's never been a better time to choose the domain and email that's right for you.

New customer purchases only products auto-renew separately.

See terms on site.

Go daddy.com slash GDNow.

Okay, time for back number two, Andrew Hunter Murray.

Okay, my fact is that during the First World War, entertainments for the troops included organized pillow fights, wheelbarrow races, and wrestling on the backs of mules.

Sounds like fun.

It does sound like fun, doesn't it?

Wrestling on top of a mule?

Like two men on a top of a mule?

What I think it is, is two men on two different mules trying to push the other one off.

like low-key jousting but i haven't confirmed that so you may be right it may be it may be two men on one mule but that's that's a lot to put on one mule yeah um i do know you're not allowed legally to uh ride a llama what do you mean nobody's allowed to ride a llama um it's just in this country or

well uh again you test the limits of my knowledge do we have llamas in britain we do have llamas in britain they're farmed quite a lot but you it's really bad for them to ride them So they have quite weak backs, and you could load them up with a bit of weight, but really not very much.

And when you look at them, they've got got these lovely vertical high necks, and then quite a dip in their backs.

But you can easily see that riding them would be quite bad for them, actually.

Their audience rode them everywhere, they didn't care.

Anyway, yes, so

these were just the various things that were done to keep morale up among British troops, because obviously there's a lot of time going on between battles.

So, where did these fights take place?

Are they in the front line, do we think?

Just front trench?

I suspect a little bit further back.

Yeah, they probably didn't do wheelbarrow races in no man's land, did they?

Just going over the top with your pillows.

So, sorry, just so just this pillow fight that we only know about it because these are First World War diaries, which the National Archive have been digitising.

And you can go and see them at Kew and you can go and look through them.

They have hundreds of thousands of documents.

They have a copy of the Doomsday Book there, a replica of it, but nonetheless, it's very cool.

Wow.

Yeah.

Very good.

Hey, so, pillows used to be made of stone.

Did they?

Yeah.

Well, you wouldn't like a fight with those, would you?

When was this?

In the 70s?

These are thousands of years old.

So the very earliest pillows are Mesopotamian.

They're about 9,000 years old.

And they're made of stone and they're carved in a half moon shape so they can support your neck.

Some people think that it was just to stop insects crawling into your nose and mouth as you slept.

Okay.

On the day he died, Martin Luther King had a pillow fight a few hours before he died.

It's recorded in Andrew Young's biography.

Andrew Young was a really good friend of his, and the three of them were in the Memphis Lorraine Hotel.

And, yep, apparently Martin Luther King and another friend set upon this other guy with pillows and beat him up.

That's a pillow assault.

Yeah, it was a pillow assault.

Yeah, it was pillow abuse.

Japan actually has issued an official pillow for pillow fighting.

Oh, they're really into it in Japan, aren't they?

Yeah, yeah.

There's an annual pillow fight day in Japan.

And

if a pillow has a zip, if a pillow has feathers that you can choke on, if you're a fan of stone,

you know,

there's a lot of pain that can be brought on by a pillow.

The safest pillow you can use for pillow fighting.

Well, because it has no zip.

They've seen them coming, haven't they?

Yeah, but what feathers?

We're not allowed feathers anymore in a pillow fighter.

If feathers come out and you choke on a feather, you can die.

That's part of the joy of pillowfighting.

There's feathers everywhere.

Peter the Great of Russia

used a young male orderly's stomach as a pillow when he was travelling.

He would fall asleep and he would wake up an hour or two later completely refreshed.

Because he sometimes had convulsions, which might have been epileptic convulsions, we're not sure.

But when it became a proper convulsion, the only cure was to put him in the company of someone he found relaxing.

And so when he married his second wife, it was always her or another young woman.

He would just put his head in her lap.

She would stroke his head.

I just like the idea of him going to bed with his wife, saying, night, honey, and laying back on a man

at the top of the bed.

He has to sleep on the legs as well.

Hang on.

The chelon's too hot.

I need to turn it over.

If we go back to entertainment in the First World War, just because I know this is one of your boss's favourite things, Andy, The Wipers' Times.

Have you guys ever read The Wipers' Times?

Who's Andy's boss?

Ian Hislock, the other boss.

He's not John Lloyd.

Andy does his moonlighting at Private Eye.

But I think he did a documentary on The Wipers' Times, didn't they?

But I just find it amazing.

So in 1916, in the trenches, The Wipers Times was the trench newspaper, and it was a satirical newspaper, really funny, like Private Eye or the Daily Mash.

And it happened just because it was when they were in Ypres and they just stumbled across a printing press that was lying around.

And then they started distributing this newspaper.

It would do things like publish articles apologising for when the British shelled their own people.

And it was.

It's pretty subversive when you read it.

You read it and you think, how on earth did they get away with printing and distributing this to normal soldiers?

Because it was always salitious.

Given that they'd had their letters checked and they had to be read all the way through to check, they weren't saying anything negative about the war, but they were allowed to publish this newspaper, which is extremely negative about their experiences in the trenches.

It's kind of weird.

It's amazing.

I have one more really, one of my favourite facts about the First World War.

Okay.

They dug a section of trench to help people train for life in the trenches in Blackpool.

But they also took visitors around.

You could pay a penny and visit them.

They were called the Lose Trenches and be shown around by a soldier who was recuperating, who'd been actually at the front in France or Belgium.

Imagine spending all that time on the front line in World War I and then being sent to Blackpool.

I'm allowed to say that because I'm from Lancashire.

The record for the largest pillow fight ever engaged in was set in Chicago in 2013 and involved 3,813 people, but 4,500 pillows, which I think is cheating.

So, some people had two.

Yeah, I guess so.

Didn't know that was allowed.

Go check the old Japanese pillow fighting rules.

Just, this is pretty non-sequitur, but about world records, I just really like that thing about the world record custard pie fight.

The record was 253 custard pies thrown in the fight.

It would have been 255, but two of the pies were mysteriously eaten.

Not that mysterious.

That's quite small for a custard pie fight.

We could beat that.

We could beat that in the QI audience, couldn't we?

Yeah.

Don't know how the studio managers are going to feel about that.

Okay, time to move on to fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact is that the atmosphere on Venus is so hot that if you took a pizza out of a freezer there, it would cook in three seconds.

Wow.

Wow.

And would it cook all the way through, or would it burn on the surface and not cook in the middle?

Great question.

Because, yeah.

I imagine, yeah, there would be a certain rare quality of the inside.

Yeah, and singed on the outside.

Quite singed, yeah.

And this comes from

a talk by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and it was about his book, which was Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandries.

And he says in his book, I think, that it would take either seven or nine seconds.

But in this article about his talk, someone corrected him and said it would be three seconds.

Oh, okay.

I'm not sure what the correction was.

I think it might have been to do with the pressure or something.

I like when scientists come up with these sort of weird analogies.

Yeah, analogy.

It is good because someone might say to you, okay, it's 800 degrees Fahrenheit on Venus, but what does that mean to anyone?

Yes.

It's just a number, isn't it?

Yeah, but also,

if it's 800 degrees Fahrenheit on Venus, why are you having pizza?

You should have a nice ice cream.

Maybe a cool lemonade.

Yeah, and if you're in a refrigerator as well,

stay in the fridge.

It's boiling outside.

How are you powering this fridge?

Okay,

there are certain administrative problems here, but nonetheless, that's what would happen.

In fact, fridges,

in the Arctic, the Chukchi, I think, do this, and probably in Canada they do it as well.

They use refrigerators to keep things warm.

No.

Because if you have food outside, it'll freeze, but if you put it in the refrigerator where it's like three degrees, it'll keep it stopping.

Do they call the fridge the oven?

No.

For that

Speaking of weather on planets, do you guys know about planet HD189733B?

Of course.

So this is a planet that is 63 light years away from us and it rains glass sideways in 7,000 kilometers per hour wind on this planet.

I wouldn't like to play golf in that.

Do you know?

I actually tweeted this a few days ago and I think someone responded with that exact answer.

Yeah, it sounds like a cool place.

So it's got this deep blue hue, which they've worked out is a result of its molten glass, so it's silicate in the atmosphere, which is shooting down sideways.

Wow.

Have you guys heard about the mysterious light on Venus?

No, Daniel, we haven't heard about your mysterious light.

The ashen light, it's called.

It's a light that happens on the planet that scientists have been studying.

They have no idea what it is.

There's a lot of theories.

No one's decided what it is yet.

Herschel saw it.

Patrick Moore was a guy called Franz von Gruthisen.

I can't pronounce his name properly, but he believed that it was fires from a celebration of a new Venusian emperor being announced.

All these scientists have been looking at it over the years and we still don't know what it is, so it's a mystery and it could be lightning.

It's just a patch of light that just comes up and they have no idea what it is.

For a long time they did think there could be life on Venus because it's so covered in clouds it was really difficult to see with telescopes what was going on under there.

So it was only when they sent probes down that they realized actually there was no way anything could possibly live down here.

When the Soviet Venera program sent probes down there, the longest any of the probes lasted was 127 minutes before it

melted.

Really?

The surface of Venus is hot enough to melt an aluminium pan.

So I don't know what you're serving this pizza on.

Hey, you want to hear some stuff about pizza?

I got stuff on pizza.

Yeah, go on.

This was a publicity stamp by Pizza Hut in the early 2000s.

They claimed that they were the first company in the world to deliver a pizza to outer space because the company sent one on a Russian rocket to the International Space Station.

And then Yuri Usachov, one of the Russian cosmonauts living there, ate it.

And Pizza Hut paid about 700,000 quid for that.

So I think we can all agree, money well spent.

It is now that they've got this kind of promotion from the QI podcast.

Before they were wondering if anything had happened to it.

Yeah, but they paid all this money.

And in return, they got to do that.

Then they got footage of Mr.

Usachov flashing a thumbs up after eating the pizza and then for pasting the chain's logo on a rocket last year.

Do you guys know about Pizza Hut's proposal package?

No.

So this cost.

It sounds romantic.

It is romantic.

Cost $10,010.

It was a limited edition offer in 2012 and it came with a red ruby ring, a limousine which took you to your location of choice, flowers, fireworks, a photographer, and the cherry on the icing, a $10 dinner box.

What's a $10 billion?

It's like a box with a pizza in it and some cheese sticks.

Another thing that Pizza Hut has is its own perfume called Ode to Pizza Pizza Hut.

It smells apparently like a freshly opened box of pizza, although a professional smellologist, whatever we're calling them, actually said it smells like cinnamon, baby powder, and most overwhelmingly, feet.

Oh, they're not my favourite toppings.

Actually, speaking of will you marry me?

This is something I looked into for the last fact we were discussing for the Iceland fact.

But the first woman who ever placed a personal ad in a newspaper was immediately committed to an asylum.

Oh,

what did it say?

Did it say blah, blah, blah?

I'm going to kill everyone.

Marry me.

No, she was just committed to an asylum by the mayor.

She placed a personal ad in the Manchester Weekly Journal in 1727.

She was called Helen Morrison, and the first person to respond was the mayor who had her locked up in an asylum for a month for doing something so completely insane.

I don't believe that.

When was the last time you were in Manchester?

A mean bunch.

A few things about weather

on planets.

The Great Dark Spot on Neptune has winds of 1500 miles per hour.

If the winds anywhere on Earth, for instance, are more than about 120 miles an hour, it's no longer possible to stay upright.

And it's 1500 miles an hour there, so

10 times perhaps.

So you're telling us if you opened an umbrella, you would fly?

You would fly.

Well, you would certainly be thrown along the floor, if not fly.

Awesome.

Also, on Mars, the atmosphere is so thin on Mars that if you stood at the equator at noon, it would feel like summer at your feet and winter at your head.

Wow.

So crouch to eat your pizza, stand up to eat your ice cream dessert.

There'll be little clouds floating around your midriff.

Yeah, but it's very thin, so you wouldn't really see.

Would it be like being a giant on Earth?

Yeah.

Maybe.

I'm just trying to get a clear sense of what it would be like to be there.

I was looking at weird ways to cook stuff.

Okay.

Because, you know, pizza on Venus, a weird way to cook stuff.

Tips for other weird ways to to cook stuff.

If your oven's broken, poaching salmon in the dishwasher, apparently, what I thought works quite.

Have you does it work?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's great.

Wrap it in tinfoil.

Yeah.

Cook on top of your car engine.

You've got to drive for about an hour in your car for something to cook properly, like an egg.

But the other good way to cook something when your oven's broken is to put it in the middle of a compost heap.

And so there's a guy who likes to do this.

I was reading his blog, and it gets really hot in the middle of compost heaps.

So, in fact, once our compost heap in our garden set on fire, it was mental, and our garden came out.

It's hot but also composty.

Yeah, so maybe, you know, wrap it in foil again.

But this guy says, I quote, now, whenever I hanker for a real breakfast treat, I drop a few eggs in the compost heap in the evening and look forward to a morning feast.

Be sure when he says, drop a few eggs.

Running a business online?

Look legit and own your own brand with professional tools from GoDaddy.

Instantly build trust with your customers and boost your credibility with an email that matches your domain so people know you mean business.

There's never been a better time.

Just go to godaddy.com slash gdnow and choose from a wide variety of popular domains to find one that's right for you.

Pair that with a professional email that works for all your business needs from daily communications to email marketing and everything in between.

That's a little price for a lot of credibility.

For a limited time, get a domain and matching professional email for just 99 cents a month for one year.

Go to go daddy.com slash GDNow and look legit with GoDaddy.

That's godaddy.com slash gdnow.

Again, go daddy.com slash gdnow.

There's never been a better time to choose the domain and email that's right for you.

New customer purchases only products auto-renew separately.

See terms on site.

Go daddy.com slash gdnow.

Ready to buy a car, a home, or just want to take control of your money?

Your FICO score matters, and 90% of top lenders use it to make decisions.

Check your FICO score for free today without hurting your credit score.

Visit myfICO.com slash free or download the MyFICO app today.

MyFICO gives you the score lenders use most, plus credit reports and real-time alerts to help keep you on top of your credit.

Visit myfico.com slash free and take the mystery out of your FICO score.

Okay, time for the final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

And my fact this week is that in Iceland, there is a phone app that tells you if you're related to the person that you're hitting on.

Okay, I don't usually go to frozen food supermarkets to hit on people, but maybe you do.

Okay, the country, Iceland.

They've got a really small population over there.

Something like 320,000 people.

So many people were accidentally finding out, you know, in the bedroom chat in the morning.

So like, oh, so what do you got today?

Oh, I go to

my mum's barbecue.

Oh, I'm going to a barbecue today.

Oh, what's up?

Oh, my God.

Cousin Sue.

That's how it works.

It's my grandmother's birthday today.

Oh, me too.

Me too.

Weird.

Where do you live?

Just in the next bedroom, actually.

Weird, right?

Yeah, so

this is a really important app because they want to stop the gene pool from becoming incestuous.

And it's basically in a bar.

You both have the app on your phones.

You bump the phones.

Their motto is bump phones before you bump in the bed.

And the idea is that it then tells you whether or not you're related.

It's very clever.

That's great.

Isn't the feature, the specific feature in this app is called, I'm going to mispronounce this, Sifia Spellspiller, which is called the incest spoiler.

Yeah, it's got negative connotations.

It implies you're ruining something that could have been otherwise a beautiful experience.

Yeah, it sounds like you wanted incest.

Incest spoiler alert.

Incest.

It's what you would receive on your phone.

Incest spoiler alert, yeah.

That's so good.

But yeah, I just think that's I my what I really love most about it, other than like it's it's a very interesting app, uh, is the fact that apps are getting to the point now where we've just got so many options options of lifestyle choices via reading a little app that we, you know, my friend knew that she was giving birth because her pregnancy contraction app told her.

I mean, you figure you know, you could keep her phone.

You figure you'd know that anyway.

Yeah.

I don't know how that works.

Also in Japan at the moment, there's a new app which,

okay, basically, this sounds really weird, but there's a bra now in Japan that doesn't come off unless you truly love the person that you're talking to or that you're having.

Kind of like a chastity bra.

And the way that it knows that you do like the person is something in the bra that monitors your pulsating heart.

Your heart then sends a message to your iPhone where there is an app that releases the bra and then it can come off.

What about when you go to sleep at the end of the day and you want to take your bra off and you have to feign being in love

in order to go to sleep?

And also, faster heart rate.

What if you're being mugged and then your bra comes off?

Those photographs on roller coasters would be really interesting.

Everyone's bra brass, while we know.

I wasn't scared.

That's not what your breasts are saying.

There was an app in Azerbaijan in 2013 that would tell you the results of the election as soon as the results came in.

Unfortunately, anyone who downloaded it got a message the day before the polls opened saying that there was a massive landslide for the current president.

That's great.

That's great.

Wow.

Whoopsie.

There's a really good one I read about the other day called Run P, and it's an app.

And the idea behind it is, so you know when you're in the cinema and you're watching a movie and you really need the toilet, but it's a great movie, and you're going, I have no idea when I need to go.

So the app is you open it up and you type in the name of the movie that you're watching.

And people who have watched the movie before have put this into the app.

So if you're watching Guardians of the Galaxy, it will say, one hour, 28 minutes in, you're going to get to a scene that says that's like this.

Perfect time to go.

It's a boring scene.

It's not needed to know the rest of the plot.

So it tells you exactly in every movie where you need to go for a P.

That's good, so good,

yeah.

Wow,

okay, uh, incest, yes,

shall we talk about incest for a while?

Please.

Um, so in Hawaii, they used to um revere incest, and they had a system called Nia Upo'o, um, whose aim was to keep the royal lineage as clear as possible.

And the very top of their society was a kapu, and that was a product of a royal brother and sister.

And if you were the son or daughter of a royal brother or sister, you were considered a god.

Partly because you had seven legs and were blue.

Wow, weird.

Yeah, yeah, so in Russia, China, Ivory Coast, Spain, Portugal, and quite a few other places, it's not illegal to commit incest.

But in Korea, it's really illegal.

And actually, you're not allowed to marry anyone who's related more closely than eighth cousin.

Oh, my gosh.

Although, obviously, it's difficult to check that.

You're not allowed to knowingly do that, um but you by law I think you have to check that they're not second cousins.

In in South Korea you're not it was decreed in thirteen oh eight that if you had the same surname as someone else you couldn't marry them because of this incest taboo.

However, a fifth of people in South Korea have the surname Kim.

So there are all these people who might love each other very much and be very distantly n not related at all, essentially, but legally they weren't allowed to marry.

I think they've changed it now have they a little bit?

Yeah, they have.

In 1997 it was repealed.

But before that every so often they would just have an amnesty and say, okay, a few 10,000 of you can get married to each other.

Interesting, isn't it?

Yeah, that's very interesting.

Yeah, it is.

I was going to talk about Iceland.

Does anyone have anyone interested in Iceland?

I love

Iceland.

Have you been to Iceland?

Go back along.

Yes, I have.

I always think Iceland is like a geography teacher's best ever thing because it's got everything like water

earthquakes and tectonic plates and everything.

The geysers.

They also believe in elves, which is very exciting.

54%, I think.

54% in 98%.

Yeah, I remember because I only know this because John Lloyd told me this years ago.

He said that 54% believe in it, but if you get them drunk, something like 90% admit that they actually believe in it.

Which I really like.

That's great.

There was quite a good comment from an Icelandic academic who was saying, you say that it's geographically fascinating.

He was saying you can completely believe if you've lived there and grown up there, the earth is so volatile and moving all the time and wisps of smoke shooting up out of the ground and stuff.

It's kind of not surprising that people think there are spirits everywhere.

And there's a really sweet story of a politician, an Icelandic politician, a couple of years ago.

His car span off the road and he said that he was saved from any injury by elves and then a short while later they were going to build over the elf home and the elves lived in a nearby boulder and so the politician said no you can't do that and said we'll have to move the boulder that the elves live in so they they got someone who speaks to elves to talk to the elves who are invisible to most people and they said okay you can move our boulder but we really need to have a view of the sea and it's got to be on grass, because we like to keep sheep, also invisible sheep.

South-facing gardens,

and they did.

Invisible tiny elf-sized sheep.

You know, elves are human sizes, Icelandic elves.

Are they?

Yeah.

Oh, I see.

They look like people, but they're invisible.

Wait, they look like people, but they're invisible.

That is the only difference.

I didn't know they were men-size, as it were.

Shall we move on?

I was just going to say quickly, because I think it must be one of James's favourite museums, or whichever one of you loves weird museums.

Iceland has the Phallological Museum, and that has as well, which is the Penis Museum.

Penis Museum.

Say the real sorry, sorry, Ice map.

We mentioned penises too much.

I felt like we should use a different word.

Two-thirds of it's underground.

Well, you say that, but parts of it are invisible because it claims to have penises as well as penises of lots of animals.

It claims to have elf penises.

Oh, and do elf penises look like human penises?

Yeah, but they're invisible.

Oh, they're invisible.

So it's just a huge empty cabinet.

I've brought in my collection of elf penises.

I'm very disappointed that none of you've mentioned it yet.

I'm actually wearing my elf dick coat right now.

It's just a coat of penises, but you can't.

I wish you could see it.

Andy, why have you had your mouth open this whole podcast?

Come on, guys.

Get it together.

Okay, that's it.

That's all our facts.

Thanks so much, everyone, for listening.

If you want to get in contact about any of the things that we've been talking about on this week's podcast, you can get us on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy at Andrew Hunter Head, James at Egg Shaped, and Anna.

You can get me if you email podcast at QI.com.

Also, if you head to our SoundCloud page and you go specifically to the episode timeline that you're listening to, we often put extra notes up on the timeline.

So, if you want to look into any more stuff, probably most likely there'll be stuff up there.

So, do that, and we will be back again next week with another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Dreaming of buying your first car or a new home?

Knowing your FICO score is the first step in making it real.

With My FICO, you can check your score for free and it won't hurt your credit.

You'll get your FICO score, full credit reports, and real-time alerts all in one simple app.

Your credit score is more than just numbers.

It's the key to building the future you've been working toward.

Visit myfico.com slash free or download the MyFICO app and take the mystery out of your FICO score.

Time for a sofa upgrade?

Visit washable sofas.com and discover Anibay, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices.

With sofas starting at $699, Anibay brings you the ultimate in furniture innovation with a modular design that allows you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine washable sofa inside and out.

Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Liquid simply slides right off.

Designed for custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink-in feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Plus, our pet-friendly stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years.

Don't compromise quality for price.

Visit washable sofas.com sofas.com to upgrade your living space today with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Get up to 60% off plus free shipping and free returns.

Shop now at washablesofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.