13: No Such Thing As A Funny Nazi

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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 QI elves, Andy Murray, Anna Chaczynski, and on our fact-checking duty today, James Harkin.

Once again, we're gathering around the microphone to share our favorite facts from the last seven days.

And joining us today is a special guest, a comedian from Belgium, Levin Schryre.

Hi.

Hi.

How's it going?

Well, very good.

I'm here, so that's great.

Yeah, we're very excited to have you here.

Levin is basically the Stephen Fry of Belgium.

You have a show out there called Skryra and the Creation, which is a a panel show in which you have sort of comedians as well as interesting guests from all sorts of categories.

Wine tasters, that's the one I saw.

Yeah, yeah, it's a panel show.

It's much like UI.

I think secretly I want to make UI in Belgium.

And now I have to find a channel that wants to host it.

I just remembered you got to headline the gig at CERN, right?

Yes, that was last summer.

I was performing at CERN, which was absolutely amazing being a physicist stand-up comedian.

I could do all my geeky jokes.

That's great.

Alright, shall we kick into it?

Should we get fact number one on the way?

Okay.

Fact number one.

We're going to start with you, Levin.

Yes, my fact is that during the Second World War, the Nazis employed two official Nazi comedians.

That's a stodashig.

Yeah, they were called Tran und Helle, and they did funny sketches.

And I think Tran was the fat, stupid one.

And then Helle would be

the perfect man.

There's a few still on YouTube, but I must warn you, they are utterly not funny.

That's so surprising.

Yeah.

Well, they all have this war propaganda scenarios.

Like, I remember one where Tran was sitting in his living room and he was reading a biography of Churchill that was given to him by his Jewish neighbor.

But luckily, Helle arrived and said, Tran, what are you doing?

That's all lies.

And that was about it.

That's the punchline.

That's the punchline.

This is why central government shouldn't get involved in comedy writing.

That's right.

But they stopped these shows before the end of the war because the German people watching this were all sympathizing with the stupid fat guy and not with this impossibly perfect Hellet.

And they were even the stupid comedian was banned from the Nazi party because of this.

Yeah, they're really not funny, are they?

I watched one of them which sounds really similar about where he's listening to the radio and he's being told by Heller to not listen to Western broadcasts.

And he trans says, I think I can make up my own mind about what's the truth and what's not.

And Heller goes, no, no, no, you can't.

You don't understand, you wouldn't understand any of this.

You have to be told by the state what's right and wrong.

And when you're watching it, you're going, Well, this tall guy who's saying, You have to be told by the state what's right and wrong, is obviously the bad guy here.

And clearly, I like the short, fat bloke who's going, Can I just listen to whatever program I want, please?

So it was bizarre that they didn't realize.

But they didn't call non to yeah.

Yeah, sometimes they try to do a punchline.

And well, it's always a bit pathetic when they're trying, even more

when there's no punchline.

I remember one where Tram was using all his his bread coupons, even though he didn't need them.

And he had all this old bread in his kitchen.

And then Hella was coming and said, You can't do this, and what do you do with it?

Well, I give it to the chicken.

You can't give it to the chicken, and the other Germans need this bread, and this war is hard on everybody.

And then Hella said, But what about the chicken?

And that was it.

Again, you totally sympathize with the chicken when you listen to that.

It's a really endearing perspective.

War was hard on the poultry.

It's interesting in wartime how comedy is used in propaganda.

I was really shocked by the number of Walt Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons that were made featuring Hitler and Bugs Bunny in the same sketch.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there were scenes of Daffy Duck on the top of Hitler smacking his face and knocking his mustache off him and stuff.

I found German anti-Nazi jokes from the war.

I found them very interesting.

So one joke in Berlin during the last months of the war was that in Berlin the optimists are learning English and the pessimists are learning Russian.

Or another one,

two people conversing, one says, What are you going to do after the war ends?

Well, I'm going to finally go on a holiday and I'll take a trip around Greater Germany.

Oh, yeah, what are you going to do in the afternoon?

That kind of thing.

Some of them kind of still

funny, I think.

When the RAF is in the skies, the Germans take cover.

When the Luftwaffe is in the sky, the Allies take cover.

When the U.S.

Air Force is in the skies, everyone takes cover.

Which, you know, kind of still applies.

But the Nazis banned apes from making the Hitler salute.

Yeah.

On pain of death, for, I think, both ape and the person who trained the ape.

During the early 30s, there were a lot of satirical comedians who made fun of the Hitler salute.

And

some animal trainers in circuses trained their apes to give a Hitler salute.

Yeah, and they'd dangle the food, wouldn't they?

So that they had to just reach their arm up at that percentage.

And the Nazis unsurprisingly took quite a dim view of that and then made it punishable by death.

By death?

Yeah.

Were any apes ever executed?

Do you know?

I don't know.

I got it from a book about humor in Hitler's Germany, and I d I haven't found any concrete examples.

I think ten years ago, a man was arrested in Germany for training his his dog to do the Hitler salute.

Really?

Yeah.

That's quite impressive.

Ten years ago, I think, and and he had trained him, and he was walking around a park, and every time he he would he would pass a foreigner, he would uh command his dog to do a Hitler salute.

Wow,

fair enough, arrest him.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Um I Rod.

Did you know England in 2004 had a state jester?

No.

Yeah, we have a state jester.

It's a guy called Nigel Roeder.

And he won a competition to become the official

state jester, but there was too many complaints.

So he got his title removed.

What are they complaining about?

Oh, the sour grapes that they haven't been given.

Yeah, yeah.

It basically said that the English heritage should not be allowed to use the title of state jester.

A lot of people were just like, he can't be the state jester.

We're all jesters.

Well, it's less funny when it's a state comedian as well.

Apparently, Eric Idol says that Prince Charles asked him to be the official court jester and he said no.

The mayor of Reykjavik is a stand-up comedian.

Really?

Yeah.

Well, they had a very very rough time during the financial crisis in Iceland.

And then he started a mock party.

He said like, yeah,

all these old politicians, they've all failed.

And he started a mock party.

And I think he wanted an ice bear in the Iceland Zoo.

Well, the Iceland Zoo at this point only has, I think, a cow and a rabbit.

He wanted to

legalize drugs, but only inside the parliament building.

Right.

That was his program.

That's great.

And he won.

And has he carried out any of his promises?

No, I don't think so.

I don't think there's an ice bear there like all the others.

Yeah, but

he surrounded himself with very good advisors because he realized that, well, I can't do politics.

I know nothing about it.

And he's doing very well.

People are very happy with how he rules the daycare.

That's great.

Wow.

And then the mayor of London is a comedian of sorts.

Yeah, I've noticed.

Well, Eddie Izzard wants to run in 2020.

Indeed.

So, you know,

could be a running thing.

Could be.

We should move on.

James, before we do, have you got any facts you want to chuck in?

You were talking about the Walt Disney and Warner Brothers propaganda.

Donald Duck was in De Fuhrer's Face, where he breaks down after experiencing a nightmare where he has to make do with eating ridiculous Nazi food rations, such as a smell of bacon and eggs, coffee made with one bean, and a slice of stale bread.

Wow.

And in Commando Duck, Donald Duck by himself destroys an entire Japanese airbase.

That sounds amazing.

Anything else?

Yeah, Levin was talking about the dog who was doing the Hitler salute.

I found it on the Daily Mail website under the headline Howl Hitler.

And they arrested this guy whose dog was doing the Hitler salute.

And spokesman, Eva Marie Koenig, said, We are retraining him to stop him raising his leg too high.

He doesn't have anything that would make him interesting to right-wing extremists.

However, we think he will quickly find a new owner because he is so famous.

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Okay, time for fact number two.

This one's my fact.

So, this fact is that the Philippines Basketball Association, which is the second oldest in the world after the NBA, have 10 teams in total, and their names include the Rain and Shine Elasto Painters, the San Miguel Beer Men, and Tolkien Text Tropang Texters.

So, it's a lot of teams with no integrity at all, just selling out constantly in charge.

Well, it's just how it's done there.

It's not selling out.

It's just

that's the way that they are.

Like, if you watch boxing matches these days, most boxers have adverts painted on their back.

There's a guy in America who's selling his last name now.

So companies can bid.

And the highest bidder will be the company name that will become his official last name.

He did it last year for one company, and now he's called, I don't know, James McDonald's or something.

And now he's doing it again because it was only for one year.

And I think he gets some $50,000 out of it.

How do I think the only benefit for these companies is in the newspaper coverage that a man is changing his name?

Because no one sees, you know, Kevin Budweiser and thinks, I must go and have a beer.

We had a football team in Belgium, which was sponsored by Quick.

Quick is

the Belgian McDonald's, like Burger King.

And they had one player called McDonald.

And so he was running on the field with this Quick logo on his back and then McDonald a moment.

When I was looking into the Filipino basketball stuff, because it's a huge sport there, they absolutely love it.

But I suddenly remembered that Dennis Rodman had been out there a few years back.

Dennis Rodman was in the Chicago Bulls.

He famously was married to Carmen Elektra, and he's been most notable in the news recently because of his relationship with Kim Jong-un.

But when he went out to the Philippines to play in sort of one of those Americans versus the Philippines basketball matches, He met up with his estranged dad, who he hadn't seen for 40 years, who's been living in the Philippines for all these years.

He's had 29 children to 16 different wives.

And his name, this is his birth name, Philander.

Spelt exactly the same, just exactly the same.

It's Philander Rodman.

He lives out there and he runs his own burger shop, which is called Rodman's Rainbow Obama Burger Restaurant, in which you can get different colored buns.

Apparently, they're really good burgers.

Try them out.

There are really good names all over the Philippines.

I think the president and his sisters have nicknames including Pinky, Nunu, and Ballsey.

Well, there's the classic Cardinal Sin, who was the main cardinal for years.

I think he's passed away.

Yes, he died a few years ago.

Yeah, yeah.

There are amazing sports names all over the world, though.

They're so fun.

Remember, I think in 2005, there was a sudden rush on sales of the Peruvian football team Depotivo Wankers shirts in Britain.

And there's a quote from the club spokesman who just came over and he was like it is very strange everyone in Britain seems to think we have a funny name

the Wanka are just like Peruvian peoples it's not a funny word they decided to remember when they were in danger of being relegated they decided to change their football ground to the highest town in the world which I think is called Cerro de Pasco and I probably haven't pronounced that right but it is 4,400 meters above sea level and normal people can't really breathe there or do anything and so obviously these guys are used to it so and they were accused of cheating because whenever a football team came to play them they all just kind of started collapsing and having very quick meltdowns.

Yeah, they still got relegated, so it did not work.

Well, that's amazing.

My favorite basketball fact is somewhat the same.

It's the Spanish basketball team had to return their gold medals of the Paralympics in 2010 because their IQs turned out to be too high.

They had a basketball competition for the intellectually disabled, or what do you call it?

And so the Spanish completely cheated for being, well, for having too high an IQ.

Too high an IQ.

That's amazing.

Which is not normally an accusation level that many sports people say.

I'm sorry.

That's the boy who was picked second last, speaking consistently for 13 years of school.

Do you know

the guy who invented basketball, John Naismith?

His middle name is A, and they don't know what his middle name means.

And the family have said, we think he just put it there.

Like President Ulysses S.

Grant?

Yeah, yeah.

Possibly.

It's just an S, isn't it?

It's just an S, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But one of the discoveries that they've made about this guy is the influences that they reckon that led to the creation of basketball, including a game called, has anyone heard of this?

Duck on a rock?

Does anyone know?

I've seen that referenced as being one of the inspirations, but what is it?

So the idea was that you would have a bunch of kids playing it, you would have a rock, a big stone, on a tree stump, and that would be the duck.

And you had to knock the duck off the rock.

One person had to stand and protect the duck and make sure it's not knocked off the stump.

The way you knock

the big stone off the stump is by throwing rocks at it.

Big rocks.

So effectively, it's a kid's game where you are having stones chucked at you in order to protect another stone.

So this is what James Naismith played as a kid that led to him partially inventing basketball.

I think that sounds fun.

Really?

Yeah.

Stones?

I'd have a size limit on the stones you could throw.

So he used a peach basket at first, and they kept using it.

That was in 1891.

They kept using peach baskets until 1906, I think.

But they realized really early on to drill a hole in the peach basket and then you'd poke a stick up through the hole so you could poke the ball out.

When you figured out that you can make a hole, and then you

let's just make a small one, yeah, just for a stick, that's big enough.

I think it might have been, though, apparently, he had a really tense relationship with the school janitor because they're all his peach baskets, and he kept on having his peach baskets with holes in them.

So, I think maybe it was that like to appease the janitor, he was like, Okay, I'll just do a small one.

So, a hole that's big enough for a stick, but not big enough for a peach.

Yeah,

exactly.

That makes sense

in Japan.

They like to turn games into an official sports.

I I only I I read it today that they have official rules for pillow fighting now.

So they have and there's an offi there's now an official pillow fight association of Japan.

There's a referee, so them there must be rules.

And I think it was a Japanese guy who once tried to get hide and seek as an official Olympic game.

That's correct.

Other ones we had on the show were were uh toe wrestling.

Yeah, and then of course there's the very famous I think it's even British the the very famous sports called ferret in your pants

what is it well it's very simple you have to you have to close your the your trousers at your ankles and then you have to put a ferret in your pants and then you have to close the trousers around your waist and and well then you just wait you just then you have to wait you just wait for the rest of your life and you have to set a world a world record and ferrets ferrets normally bite and they they don't let go so the best way to do this is to to wait until it bites.

And of course, they like the soft bits more.

They say, don't pull them loose because they will bite again.

Just leave it.

Yeah, just cope with the pain.

Well, it's very easy to say that, isn't it?

Yeah, just leave it.

It's fine.

What are you complaining about?

It'll get worse if you pick it.

And the world champion is very proud that after his world record, he had three more kids.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

That's pretty impressive.

All right, let's

wrap up on this one.

James, have you got anything to add?

The guy who sold his name that Levin was talking about is uh jason surfrap.com, uh formerly known as jasonheadsets.com.

I'm not sure what his name was before that.

Uh I was looking for the rules of pillow fighting.

Uh I found the Pillow Fight League of Toronto.

Um they have a few rules.

Their rule one is women fighters only, no exceptions.

First rule.

And their last rule is loading a pillow with a foreign object such as a brick is strictly forbidden.

And then just finally I found a newspaper article from 1992 about ferrets.

This was in the town of Newtown in mid-Wales.

This is a group of vigilantes, and they'd had a lot of crime in the area.

And they said, Our plan for keeping law and order is simple.

Anyone we catch in the act of committing a crime, we'll frog march off to the hills where there's no one to hear the screams.

We'll hold him down and slip Fred into his trousers.

Okay, let's move on to fact number three.

And Anna, that's your fact.

Yeah, my fact is that if you get a zebrafish drunk and put him in a tank with other zebrafish, the sober ones will follow him around.

But in a conga line.

Yeah.

So you're doing a bit of a dance.

Yeah.

So, yeah, they brought, so the way they've made zebrafish drunk before, they're quite useful fish to study because they're translucent, so you can see what's going on in their bodies without having to slip them open.

But the way they do it is they put drop alcohol into their tanks and then then they take the zebrafish out of the alcoholic tank, drop it in with other zebrafish, and another one.

And yeah, turns out they all follow him around.

And why are they following?

They're not entirely sure.

So if you get a zebrafish, it's just like humans, really.

They get more lively and they move faster and they seem not as afraid of threats and stuff.

And so everyone just follows him about because he seems like a cool guy.

Follow that fish.

Yeah.

Follow that fish with no fear.

We've been following him ours now.

No, we're still here in the town.

Okay.

That's cool.

I read a story about a drunken moose.

They found it entangled in an apple tree.

Yeah, I saw the pictures.

Yeah, it did.

It's an amazing photo.

It happened in Sweden, right?

Yeah, it's an amazing photo.

How did it get drunk?

It got drunk off eating apples.

So the apples were fermented.

But it happens a lot that animals get drunk from eating fermented fruit.

There was once a documentary where they were showing a drunk elephant, and then afterwards, turned out that the documentary makers just made him drunk, just gave him alcohol.

Wow,

there's a myth that elephants drink,

that they get drunk from the amarula fruit, which comes from the marula tree.

And I've found that it's probably not true,

well, unfortunately, or fortunately, either way, but that they would have to eat so much of the fruit.

And also, they eat it.

I mean, every animal near a marula tree loves the fruit, so they eat it as soon as it drops.

Some elephants even push over the trees to get to the higher fruits.

So it would be far too quick for it to ferment into enough alcohol.

Is it a myth about koalas and eucalyptus?

Do they get high?

Dolphins get high on a by chewing puffin fish.

Really?

Yeah.

A puffin fish has has a poison that comes out.

So

when it's bitten, it blows up and it ejects a poison.

And dolphins are big enough, so they just get high.

And when they find a puffin fish,

they hand it to each other.

Like students with joints.

Yeah, they hand it to each other and then they hang upside down in the water and they're just

tripping.

Wow.

Tripping dolphins.

Is there footage of that on the last one?

Yes, it was filmed.

Oh, we must watch that.

It was filmed by the BBC and it was seen for the first time because they used cameras that looked like sea animals.

So they built a camera that looked like a sea turtle and the dolphins were not disturbed.

And this was not seen before because they don't do it when they're humans around.

Yeah, bro.

It's too paranoid.

Yeah, I guess so.

On drunk animals.

Yeah.

And drunk elephants specifically.

Elephants do get drunk quite often in India, apparently, um an elephant expert in Assam claims, um because of uh Indian rice wine, and I don't know why they keep leaving it out, but um elephants love Indian rice wine and so they've stampeded villages and got their rice wine and stuff.

Um and there was an occasion a few years ago, I think maybe in two thousand and four where they got really drunk on rice beer and they ended up knocking over an elec electricity pole and four of them got electrocuted.

So it's dev drinking is dangerous, not just for for humans.

But it's not dangerous for another animal called the pent-tailed tree shrew, which lives in Malaysia and it's frequently drunk, as in much drunker than humans get.

It's several times over the legal limit to drive, for example, even if it wasn't, you know,

tree shrew.

But the equivalent of about nine small glasses of wine is what scientists think based on tree shrew biology and also the effect of the nectar.

But they don't get drunk in the same way that humans do.

They don't show the same effects behaviorally.

So some scientists think that we might be able to harness the power of the tree shru to drink.

So, why we would want to harness something that allows us to drink and not get drunk is beyond me.

I don't think that's something that humanity is crying out for.

But yeah, that's really cool.

I think they pollinate the plant by doing this.

And so they'll go keep going back to the bar and getting another sip.

And slow lorises do it as well.

That's cool.

I love slow lorises.

Yeah, the slow loris, I think, is the only mammal that is both venomous and poisonous, and it's the only primate that's venomous at all.

They produce poison in their elbows

and then they lick it and they have it in their teeth and then they'll bite you with it and they'll inject the poison into you.

Wow.

So

it's not quite venomous because usually you're producing the venom in the same place where you're

giving it to your victim.

Yeah, that's so cute.

Got such a cute reputation.

Yeah.

Don't let it bite you.

We had on our show we had a venomous centipede that eats bats.

Yeah, it's 30 centimeters long and it hangs from the top of a cave and when a bat flies by it just catches them while they're flying and then eats it complete in two hours I think.

That's amazing.

And we had it on the show and I threw in a piece of chicken and it just ran for it and just grabbed it.

I hate centipedes so much.

I think they're my least favorite animal.

Yeah, I don't like them at all.

What about millipedes?

I don't like I like them.

I've been reading about legs and centipedes move very fast because they're hunters and millipedes move nice and slowly and gently because they're scavengers.

They're not interested in chasing down prey.

So I think it's that centipede movement that I don't like.

Fair enough.

The one that Levin was talking about is called Scolopendra gigantea

and it's been found in London, the bat-eating one.

Great.

I bet it's been found in southwest London, hasn't it?

Fortunately, no, it was found by Stuart Hine, a guy who we've met from the Natural History Museum.

It was reported to him, and it was climbing up someone's living room wall.

Wow.

A bite of this centipede is described as 30 beastings in one place.

for a human.

So it's not lethal for a human, but it's extremely painful.

James, if you tell me where the living room wall was, I will never go to that postcode in London.

We could invent the sport centipede in the pants.

Alright, shall we move on?

The misconception about koalas

getting high on eucalyptus,

savethekoala.com.

I'm not very happy about that at all.

They say the myth possibly arose as a way of explaining why koalas sleep for up to 22 hours a day.

They need more sleep than most animals because eucalyptus leaves contain toxins, which kind of sounds like they are getting a bit high, but they're very adamant they're not.

That's so sweet that they're trying to defend them from accusations of drug addiction.

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Boilers are not just taking drugs and getting high, okay?

They're good boys.

Okay, let's move on to our final fact of the show.

And Andy, it's you.

Okay, the youngest woolly mammoths are older than the oldest Egyptian pharaohs.

Mammoths were walking the earth while there were pharaohs in Egypt.

And after about a thousand years of pharaohs as well.

But yes, the last mammoths died out in about 1500 BC.

So they were around a lot longer than we think.

Actually, that was actually when the pyramids had been built, hadn't they?

Yeah.

Sounds like a great B movie.

Pharaohs and mammoths.

Yes.

Yes.

We're coming to theatres near you.

Yeah.

But presumably, there weren't any woolly mammoths in Egypt.

No.

There's no pharaohs riding a woolly mammoth.

No.

The last ones were in the Arctic.

In the Arctic.

They were on a place called Wrangell Island, which is amazingly named.

It's now part of Russia.

A few people believe they're still around actually.

Yes.

Yeah, they were allegedly seen in northern Russia, I think, three years ago.

There was a YouTube clip, but then it turned out to be false, of course.

But you have this

niche movement of cryptobiologists who think that there's many large animals that we haven't found yet, such as Bigfoot, of course.

But they also believe in the mammoth.

Well, I mean, it's really interesting because we do, when you say, yeah, there might be woolly mammoths out there, most of us just go, that's impossible.

But they have found countless numbers of extinct animals that turned out that haven't been extinct.

And we had a, in a future podcast coming out, we spoke to an explorer called John Blashard Snell who went out to look for a mythical mammoth elephant and managed to find it.

And it was thought to have been extinct.

And turns out it wasn't.

And I can't remember, does anyone remember where he looked for that?

Nepal?

Yeah, Nepal.

That was it.

It's a different kind of Asian elephant.

Yes.

To the one everyone thought.

To the one that everyone thought.

Yeah.

Yeah, you have this cartoon by XKCD, the internet antoonist, and he has this timeline and he says that now that everyone is carrying a photo camera or a video camera everywhere, the odds of finding Bigfoot are getting pretty slim because we had all these messy photos from a big distance, but everybody has a camera everywhere now.

So if it exists, we should see it the coming 10 years or it just is impossible.

Or it's not, yeah, yeah.

Oh speaking of fakes, in 2003, a museum in Leon Sea abandoned its plans to display a 150,000-year-old four-foot-long woolly mammoth tusk after a second opinion from a geologist identified it in the length of Victorian drainage pipe.

So it did not.

They were using tusks for pipes.

That's fantastic.

I think at this point that

the DNA that they found in frozen mammoths is good enough to clone them.

They found woolly mammoth blood and muscle tissue.

inside the bodies, which is a big step towards it.

But just the so many difficulties of cloning beyond the Thoracic Park problem, finding a host, finding an organism similar enough.

But they did clone the ibex, the Pyrenean ibex.

But that was an animal which had died out in the 90s, and they managed to clone one, and it survived for seven minutes.

the one that was born.

Yeah, and then it had lung problems and died as a result of them.

But they managed it.

And what animal carried it?

I don't know.

Okay.

And maybe, I suppose, a similar ibex?

We had a guy on Museum of Curiosity, the radio show that we do.

He's a primatologist called Volko Sammer, and he was saying one of the dangerous things that you're not allowed to say out loud is that actually humans and great apes could actually still copulate and have a child.

There is a story that in Belgian Congo there was a mix of a bonobo and a human.

Really?

Yes.

But it's it's completely unchecked.

One of the most famous biologists in Belgium is very fond of this myth and really wants to find it because

I think technically that would mean that we are the same species.

No, that's only if

the children can have children themselves.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I am 3.5% Neanderthal, by the way.

What?

You've actually, you know that for certain?

Yeah,

I had my DNA tested.

I am 3.5% Neanderthal.

Wow.

Is that above average?

I think the average is 2.5%, yeah.

So

I'm a bit more stupid than average.

Cool.

No, I'm stronger.

Sorry, I'm not sure.

I'm considering opening jars.

The place where you test it, when they send the results, they also have a suggestion of buying the t-shirts.

Two and a half percent Neanderthal.

So for every percentage, they have a t-shirt.

So they have maybe one or two.

Ten percent Neanderthal.

How high does it go?

I don't think it goes up to ten.

I think maybe five or something is the highest, and the lowest is maybe one and a half or something.

Five is quite a lot.

Yeah, I'm surprised by that.

Yeah, but I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

Hey, did you know that with woolly mammoth tusks, that if you cut them open, like if you slice in between, you can tell how old the woolly mammoth was by the rings.

Like a tree.

Yeah, you can count the age of a woolly mammoth by its rings.

The same thing is true for the earwax of whales.

What?

Wow.

Yes.

So

a whale is a mammal, and of course, because of the high pressure, the water would get inside the ears.

And

evolutionary, they developed a plug of earwax inside their ears to keep the water out.

And it grows every year.

So

when they find a dead whale, they just cut open the earwax plug and they can count the earrings in there.

Wow.

Lovely job.

Brilliant.

And

they can even find chemicals in the rings.

So they know in what year it was exposed to certain chemicals and that.

James, you want to add anything?

The ibex was surrogated in a domestic goat.

And that worked okay.

One quick more earring fact.

Yes, yes, yes.

You might have heard this.

The oldest tree in the world,

I think there's this wood in California where they have really old trees up to 4,000, 5,000 years old.

And one guy was testing them and he had a special drill.

You had to drill into the tree and then take it out and you could count the yearrings.

And it was a very expensive drill, it was a new one.

So he put it in the tree and then he couldn't get it out again.

And then one of the guys there said, ah, let's just cut down the trees.

There's lots of them here and cut them down.

And then he took this sample and he started counting and found out that this was the oldest tree ever seen in the world

that he had just cut down.

And

the other oldest living tree is in another state.

So they were very angry because now the other state had the oldest tree in the world.

And he had to quit his job and he moved to studying lakes.

And I'm always wondering.

You can't cut down a lake at least.

Well, I'm always wondering if he ever studied the Aral Lake, which is slowly drying up.

Of course.

It might be his fault too.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thanks so much for listening, everyone.

If you want to get in touch with any of us about any of the things we've said in this episode, we can all be got on Twitter.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy?

Andrew Hunter M.

Anna?

I am.

Still not there.

Got an email address, though.

Okay, what's your email address?

I'm just going to give it out.

Okay, well, thanks.

Cheers.

You can get Anna, though, on At Wikipedia.

She's often on that.

James, what are you on?

At Egg Shaped.

And our special guest, Lebanon?

At Levinskier.

Great, fantastic.

We're going to have lots of these videos and links and all that sort of stuff we've been talking about in this episode up on QI.com slash podcast.

So if you want to check out anything there, and we'll be back again next week.

Thanks, everyone, for listening to this episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Goodbye.

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