7: No Such Thing As The Loch Ness Monster

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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 No Such Thing as a Fish.

This is a QILF podcast coming to you from our offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Shriver.

I am sitting here with three other QILs, James Harkin, Anna Schazinski, and Andy Murray.

And once again, we're huddled around our microphone, and these are the best facts that we found out from the last seven days.

So, in no particular order, here we go.

Okay, fact number one, we're gonna start with you, James.

Okay, yep, my fact this week is a computer game has been invented that takes more than a lifetime to complete.

Is it digitized Monopoly?

Oh yeah, because remember that thing we found?

There was a computer simulation of Monopoly, and they found that something like 12% of all games will go on indefinitely.

Which is not true, because...

It's much more than that.

What do you mean?

So with Monopoly, how would it go on?

Everyone would own a certain portion of the board and it would just keep going on.

Terry Pratchett has a computer game in in his book, which is called Journey to Alpha Centauri, which takes over 3,000 years to play.

And

it's just, you know, the screensaver, the very old-fashioned screensaver with just the moving dots for a spaceship?

It's that with a counter counting down for 3,000 years.

And at the end, a dot appears in the middle of the screen and it says, Welcome to Alpha Centauri, now go home.

And someone has actually made that.

That's a very rough game.

We're going to find out about this eternal game.

Okay,

this came from the Design Museum.

I went there this weekend.

It's It's the Design of the Year 2014.

It's a competition for all the best design things, and this was the thing that I thought was most interesting.

But the idea is it's kind of an art installation, and they're asking questions like, what happens to digital things after you die?

If you die halfway through that game, can you pass it on to another person to finish off the game?

Is that possible?

Or maybe this game is designed for mobile phones.

What happens when mobile phones are obsolete?

Will the game carry on?

So they're asking those kind of questions.

Wouldn't it be dispiriting to to

find out that your great uncle had bequeathed you his high score so far in this game that you just had to keep on playing it for the rest of your lifetime as well?

To my first son, I leave all the property, and to my second son, I leave this game.

Hey, do you guys know how many hours of games are played per week on Earth by humans if you tallied up all the hours?

I'll say 100 million.

100 million hours.

Yeah, I would say I'm going to go for 2 billion.

Okay, I'm going to go for just 24 hours.

Actually, 24 hours.

44 hours.

Yeah, and I think most of humanity is out on a walk.

Okay.

The answer is 3 billion hours.

Oh, so we are close.

I say I'm close, but actually I'm a billion out.

Yeah.

Feels close.

So gamers are supposed to be good at using drones, aren't they, for war?

Yeah.

And also surgeons.

Surgery.

Yeah, if they play computer games, it's supposed to help them with keyhole surgery and stuff like this.

There's a lot of job opportunities coming up for gamers now, which didn't exist before.

When Robert Ballard discovered the wreck of the Titanic, probably in your head you have an image that he was in a submersible trawling through the ocean.

But he was in a submarine, but they would send down drone submarines, as it were.

And obviously, you need someone to operate them.

And this is a quote from: he said, I would not let an adult drive my robot.

They don't have enough gaming experience.

So, with this game, did you actually play it?

I prodded at the screen a few times, but I couldn't really work out how to play it.

Oh, okay.

Maybe that's why it takes lifetimes.

The first lifetimes.

What the hell is this thing?

I've just some of the other things that this design of the year.

They had the first car that's been able to drive 100 kilometres on one litre of petrol.

It looks really cool, it's a bit like a James Bond card, it's very sleek.

And in order to help their

aerodynamics, they don't have wing mirrors and instead they have tiny cameras.

They had talking lampposts.

Is that useful?

They were popular.

Stop that.

Stop that.

Bad dog.

They were in Bristol last year or the year before, I think.

And the idea is that, say, you had a rubbish bin and it was full, then you would be able to talk to your rubbish bin and say, you're a bit full.

And he goes, oh, sorry, I'll make sure I sort that out.

And then it would get emptied.

So it's a way of the community kind of dealing with stuff like that.

It's a really interesting thing, isn't it?

There's this guy, have you guys heard of Dmitry Itzkov?

No.

So he set up this thing called the 2045 Initiative.

Basically, he's a Russian mogul who thinks that he wants to remove our minds from our bodies, essentially, so our minds can live forever.

Well, that's never gone wrong in any films.

In these.

I think it seems very promising.

So, by 2045, he really thinks that we'll have our minds decoupled from our bodies and he's going to live forever.

And he's 100% certain of this.

And we'll have holograms and we'll be able to shop in department stores for the body that we want that most suits our purposes

and live for eternity.

And he met the Dalai Lama to discuss it, who apparently was really supportive, according to their website.

The thing is, at the moment, the computer capability isn't enough to simulate a human human brain, is it?

Yeah, 2045 seems ambitious.

So I have something about things that run for longer than you'd expect.

Okay.

Because off the back of the computer game, one of Norway's most popular recent TV shows has been a seven-hour train journey in real time across Norway.

Might be quite beautiful, actually.

Yeah, it was.

So they broadcasted it in 2009, and over 20% of the population tuned in at some point to the show.

Wow, in Britain, that would just be like 45 minutes of sat outside Milton Keynes.

Keynes.

I've watched that.

I've seen shots of the Norwegian one.

It's gorgeous, rolling countryside, the snow and the furs, and it's all beautiful.

And yeah, here it would not be so nice.

And they keep doing this.

They've done 18 hours of fishing for salmon.

And then they had a 12-hour knitting night.

And my favourite is National Firewood Night, which was in February last year, which was inspired by a Norwegian book, Solid Wood, all about chopping, drying, and stacking wood, which sold as many copies as 50 Shades of Grey in Norway.

Oh, there are different kinds of people, aren't they?

And the first four hours of National Firewood Night was a discussion of firewood, and then the next eight hours was a live fireplace being filmed for eight hours.

And they had 60 complaints.

Half were complaining that the bark had been put facing up, and the other half had been complaining that it was put facing down.

How close all the people are the same?

Just picking up on this idea of things that go on for an extended amount of time, so there's obviously the game where it takes a lifetime or more than a lifetime to play uh there's a lot of musical pieces that do exactly that as well john cage famously has a piece uh it's called organ squared slash a s lsp it's a musical piece um which was written in 1987 for an organ uh the piece itself lasts 20 to 70 minutes um but it's going to finish it's going to go for about 639 years ending in the year 2640 and people you know the next note is going to be played in a few years time and people will go and watch that note be played in this continuing.

My God.

That sounds good.

Do you know they use John Cage to teach beginners piano?

Because a lot of his pieces are very easy, technically speaking.

It's like piece number one, don't play anything.

Especially 4 minutes 33, that's one of the easiest things to play.

There's a lot of people who accidentally play a note during that four minute piece.

No, no, you've got it.

I see where you've gone wrong here.

You've a classic mistake.

Did you guys know there's this game called ESP?

And I don't know if this actually exists anymore.

I couldn't get the website to to open.

But basically, two people simultaneously tag a picture with keywords.

And if you tag it with the same word, then you get a point.

And that's how they tag a whole bunch of Google images.

Oh,

wow.

Yeah, I thought what you said.

I thought what you were going to say is that people around the world are all playing this game and they're going to see if two people say the same thing at the same time and then see if there is actually ESP going on.

I don't think it counts as ESP if you're both shown a picture of a table and you both want a table.

Call me Captain Skeptical.

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

This one's my fact.

The fact is that 2013 was the first year since 1933 that there hasn't been a sighting of the Loch Ness monster.

So there's huge worries in the Loch Ness monster community because they think Nessie's dead.

Or that she's just learned to be a bit more surreptitious after hundreds of years of being cognitively spotted.

She's figuring it if I just stay underwater.

No, I think they're worried.

I think think, because I think Nessie is a friendly animal, doesn't mind being spotted.

A lot of people like Nessie.

Very much so.

It's not an aggressive animal.

In fact, in 2005, there was a triathlon in Scotland where all of the athletes took a £1 million insurance deal out in case of being attacked by the Lopiness monster when they were swimming across the loch.

And

the community came out saying that's a ridiculous thing to do.

If anything, she would join in.

And she would beat them because she's a great swimmer.

They're obviously saying that the Loch Next Monster is friendly because she hasn't killed anyone in the last 70 years.

But there is a slight logic flaw there, isn't there?

You're saying that maybe she only needs to eat once a century.

No, I'm saying she doesn't exist.

Every year, William Hill, the Bookies, they do an actual competition.

It's a photo competition where they award money to the winner who's provided the best photographic evidence of Loch Ness Monster.

And this is the first year where

they had to disqualify all three entries.

The first one was obviously a duck.

The second one was a wave.

And the third one, on closer inspection, just wasn't even the lock.

It was just another body of water.

So I have a theory of what's happened to Nessie.

Oh, yeah.

Well, it's not my theory.

This is the theory by Britain's High Priest of White Witches, Kevin Carlyon.

And he says, I personally believe Nessie is a ghost of a dinosaur who has been regularly seen in the lock.

But the spirit of the creature has been so exploited in recent years, I decided to carry out an exorcism, hence, no sightings of the monster.

So, he's saying that he has personally killed off Nasi.

Yeah, he just thinks that people have been busy.

Yeah, people have been messing around with this spirit of a dinosaur, and he wanted to set it free.

I really like the mythical creatures that we come up with.

There are so many of them in Britain.

I don't really know if other countries have them to the same extent.

But my favourite, I came across in, I'm reading Our Mutual Friend at the moment, and I've decided to read all of the footnotes.

And if you're ever reading, I think Dickens especially, but like read all the footnotes, they're so interesting.

One of them made reference to the dunn cow, this vicious beast that was slain by Guy Earl of Warwick, who was one of these like pre-medieval British heroes.

And yeah, it was just this cow, and it produced an everlasting supply of milk.

And eventually, it got annoyed that people were like milking it, milking it, milking it.

It ran away from its farm in Shropshire, and eventually, Guy, Earl of Warwick, who seems like a sort of St.

George of the 10th century, went out and had to slay the cow.

Yeah, you say St.

George, but slaying a cow is not quite as impressive as slaying a dragon, is it?

Although he did also slay a dragon, which was it must have seemed like a step down when it's going on.

It's like a difficult second monster syndrome.

If you go to Warwick Castle, certainly until the 90s, I'm not sure if it's still there because I haven't seen it, you can see the rib of the dun cow that the king ordered

should be put in Warwick Castle.

Is it big?

Bigger than a normal cow rib?

Yes, it is bigger.

They think that it's actually an elephant tusk.

I mean, sceptics think that it might not be the rib of the giant dun cow.

That's even better.

It's cooler, though, if this was found in Gloucestershire in a field.

Instead of saying oh it's a great crazy magical cow,

why has this elephant been there?

Maybe that's what they meant by a giant cow.

Because you know that the initial photo taken in 1933 of the Loch Ness monster, the very famous photo, they think that that's an elephant.

Oh, in the lake.

Just to justify you that's that's it.

There was a circus in town at the time.

Elephants, as we've seen in David Attenborough documentaries, do go swimming and when they do they use their trunks as snorkels and if you look at the photo it looks exactly like an elephant trunk.

Do you guys remember that story in 2011 where police in Southampton went on the alert because there was a tiger sighting in one of the fields, and then there was a gust of wind that blew it over, and it was a cuddly toy.

There was a lion scare in the 70s in Britain, which turned out to be a paper bag.

Well, I remember the details.

There was a lion scare only last year that turned out to be a large cat.

So, Anna, you were saying you're not sure if other countries have similar kind of monsters.

Yeah, go on enlightenment.

So, I have one or two here.

So, the Lake Okanagan in Canada, they have a monster which is very similar to Nessie.

And every year they give a $50 prize to anyone who can shout loud enough to wake the beast up.

So everyone stands on the side of the lake, yells, wake up, wake up!

And if anyone can wake them up, they get $50.

And they go home with the same $50, don't they?

And yet, no winners, I think.

Isn't there a fact...

You told me years ago, I seem to remember, that there was an animal similar to the Loch Ness monster that had protection policy on it in a different country.

Yeah, in Sweden that was.

It was the Storcio monster, I think you pronounce it.

And it was classified as an endangered species in the 80s or sometime like that.

Yeah, because as a result of that, direct result of that,

the Thatcher government actually put the Loch Ness monster on the animal protection.

Oh, really?

Yeah, they were going to do exactly the same.

They were going to do what Sweden did, but they decided that that was one step too far, so they would just put it in.

Actually, there was a document that was put in front of Thatcher, or Thatcher's main people, which was they wanted to bring two blue-nosed dolphins over from America to search for the Loch Ness monster.

Really?

Yeah, it never got passed, but this was the Tory government.

What would happen when the dolphins find is it like Flipper?

They'll come back and go.

I'd like to know.

What's the Flipper?

Well, speaking of Hollywood people, what about Charlie Sheen?

He went looking for the Loch Ness Monster.

Dude, you know what?

You know, you're saying that there's this guy who exercised the ghost.

Charlie Sheen's getting a lot of stick from the Loch Ness monster community because they think...

The Loch Ness Monster doesn't like two and a half men or maybe they're binge together.

He went into the Loch Ness with a fishing hook and a and he attached a leg of lamb to a fishing rod and tried to catch it on an old wooden boat.

You know what?

Call me Captain Sceptical, but I don't think that's any less sensible than trying to exorcise its ghost.

Or look for it in the first place.

Okay, time for fact number three.

This is your fact, Anna.

Yep.

So my fact is that the French government forced Madame Tussaud to make models of her friends' decapitated heads.

Yeah.

Poor old Madame, it's kind of like how her career started.

Was that during the Revolution?

Oh, exactly, yeah.

It was during the terror.

And the story goes that she actually had her head shaved and everything, and they were ready to decapitate her as well because she was friends with the royal family, and she had like various mates in high places, and she'd made wax models of a lot of them.

And just before they dropped the guillotine, they were like, actually, you come in handy because we want to make these death masks of our victims.

And so she writes in her memoirs about having to sift through these piles of heads, decapitated heads, pick them up, have them on her lap, and

making models of them.

Yeah, I read an account of it, and I kind of got the impression that it turned into something she really enjoyed.

Yeah.

I mean, she had no choice, but you know, when you kind of just get used to something, you know, it's your job, you're now waxing heads for a living?

It was like a treasure hunt, effectively.

She was going, my God, look, this is the bloke who was in the paper last week, isn't he?

Marie Antoinette's like.

I'm never coming on an Easter egg hunt review.

Look, if you just get used to it, you'll really enjoy it.

Was Madame Toussaud the only wax work person at the time?

I don't think so.

I think she just made so it had been going on for hundreds of years.

I think she was just very much a self-made woman.

Well, my understanding of Madame Tussaud is that she was an apprentice to a doctor and he would make wax bits of internal organs.

Is that right?

Oh, yeah.

Was his name Curtius?

Yes, Curtius.

But there's a theory that he may have been her father.

Oh, really?

Her biological father, yes.

Scandal.

I know.

Her mother's husband was killed two months before

Madame Tussaud was born.

But there is a theory that he was her natural father.

Because I heard about this guy that he made most of his money making erotic wax miniatures.

Is that true?

I don't know.

No, I didn't see that, really.

That cast kind of an odd light on him having this 15-year-old girl making wax models for him in his little office.

Creepy.

She was obviously talented, though.

When she was 16, I think, she made models of Rousseau and Voltaire.

I love Voltaire because Voltaire had a statistician friend who figured out that this lottery that the French government was proposing as a way of it making money, actually,

if you bought up all the tickets of it, you were guaranteed to win more money than you'd spent buying the tickets.

So, Voltaire bought up all the tickets of it in this French lottery and became the equivalent of a millionaire today and never had to work again.

I don't know if this is completely true, but with Madame Tussaurs these days, when they do a wax work of someone, there's no contracts or anything.

And technically, I think people could request for it to be taken away.

They could say, I'm not, I don't want to be done as a wax work, but everyone just finds it such an honour that they're fine for it to be done.

Yeah, I think you would, wouldn't you?

Some people put a few clauses with it.

So Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson have both said,

you can do me, and it's fine, and people can take photos, but no press are allowed to take photos of the wax work.

Because then they'll start using that

as press shots.

And so they've said you're not allowed to.

They're good, but they're not that good.

Tom Cruise spotted again in Madame Tusor's waxwork piece again.

He just loves that page.

I find it very interesting who they pick, who the pool of people is, because now it's almost all celebrities.

Although every monarch since George III has had a waxwork made of them, so

every King and Queen of England.

Off the top of my head, Ian Duncan Smith is the only leader of the Conservative Party not to have had a wax work.

Oh no, that's just because he's the most likely, isn't it?

Well, it takes a while as well to make the wax work, and he wasn't leader for very long.

So I imagine by the time they booked the appointments, he was.

Do you know Jenny Ryan, who

works on QI a few years ago?

Well, she had to ring up Madame Tussaud for another reason to find out which was the most groped wax work at Madame Tussaul.

And she found out that it was Brad Pitt.

And the way they find out is they work it out by which is the one that's taken in for maintenance the most of.

Because presumably he would have had to have been taken in for maintenance constantly.

They had Hitler in a glass box, didn't they?

Because they were worried that he was going to be repeatedly attacked.

And in fact, and then he was beheaded, in fact.

Yeah, someone ripped his head off.

Was that before or after, or when was that?

2008.

Oh, 2008.

It's not lunatic to have made one during the war, I suppose.

I think he had his mate in the 1930s, the first one.

Really?

Yeah, I think it was made for pairs.

Gradually, they moved it from an honoured place with other statesmen to the ground floor to the Chamber of Commerce.

Then eventually in the loo or something like that.

There's also, there was a rumour going around that Gary Barlow was melted down into Britney Spears.

So he was angry with Britney Spears.

But it turned out that wasn't true.

He was taken away.

He was taken out after Take That had finished.

But he was brought back when Robbie Williams and Take That got back together.

But it meant that he's kept in a warehouse in the interim, and apparently there's a warehouse with all these fallen waxworks.

Yeah, which is kind of it's like the uh like the end of Raiders of a Lost Ark and I don't know who were in there.

That is the stuff of nightmares, I really think.

Imagine being locked in that warehouse.

It's just going to be old people from the 80s, isn't it?

Yeah, vanilla rice is in there.

I read as well that

some people are so enthusiastic about being turned into a waxwork that they just do as much as they can to help out with the authenticity of it.

And Boris Johnson, when he was turned into a waxwork, he gave on the spot after they measured him the clothes that he was wearing.

And he left naked.

That was his excuse for why he was found wandering the streets of London naked.

But if you visit Boris Johnson at Madame Two Swords, have a look at the bottom of his trousers because you'll notice that there's a rip, and that's a rip from a bike chain from when he was riding over to be measured.

What a PR stunt.

Ivan is I love cycling act.

That is the best cockney rhyming slang I've ever heard, PR stunt.

Boris Johnson is a quick point.

Apparently in the past five years 123 pairs of false teeth and one false leg have been left behind in Madame Tussaw once.

One set of false bones.

What?

What?

Who leaves their teeth?

Yeah.

I don't know.

123 pairs.

Five years.

It's a lot, isn't it?

One last fact about wax works and wax in general.

It's possible to fire lasers at a fly's brain and make it have sex with a ball of wax.

Not only possible, it's great fun.

For the fly or for you?

I suppose if the fly doesn't know that it's having sex with a ball of wax, so that we'll feel stupid afterwards.

Yeah.

We've all been there.

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Okay, final fact of the show, and we come to you, Andy.

My fact is that during the Normandy landings, the Allied forces dropped dogs by parachute onto

the battlefield.

Why did they do that?

The UK deployed parachute dogs in the Second World War, which were used to identify minefields and to keep watch and to warn of enemies.

Yeah, you know when you say identify minefields, does that basically mean wander over a minefield?

They were sniffer dogs.

Yeah, yeah, they could smell them.

And they, so, yeah, there were three, uh, initially just three sent over, uh, Brian, Monty and Renee.

And Renee, I think, was the only female parachutist in the British Army during the war.

And they were sent in with the 13th Lancashire Paras.

And one of the articles I read, it said they were called paradogs, brackets short for parachuting dogs, which I love.

But the War Office had made radio appeals in 1941 for people to give up their dogs for the war movement.

And basically, lots of people used it as an opportunity to just get rid of their dogs.

So they had thousands sent in, and lots of them weren't suitable.

So were they trained to pull the parachute at the right time?

I think the parachutes opened automatically.

Because they were the right shape and size,

they were given the same parachutes that the paratroopers used to drop bicycles over the battlefield.

Oh, which they all...

Sorry, Andy, are you saying a dog is the same shape as a bicycle?

And size, and if you pedal it right, they're the same effect.

That's a very good point.

The first training was to jump out of the plane with a bit of meat in your pocket.

And then I think for someone else to throw the dog out of the plane.

No, no, no.

It's actually slightly crueler than that.

They used to starve the dogs.

And so what they would do is they would hold the meat outside the plane so the dogs would be from.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How else are you going to get a dog out other than throwing it?

Yes, yeah.

But they're not cruel.

I think eventually they got used to it though, didn't they?

You do get used to it though.

I remember watching a really interesting documentary a while back about, I think it was 12 paratroopers from from the Second World War who they did their first parachute jump and they were obviously terrified as you are when you throw yourself out of a plane for the first time.

Really, really nervous.

And then obviously they did it for the subsequent five years, got really used to it, not scared at all.

Didn't parachute for fifty years and this documentary picked up on them when they were in their seventies and eighties and said, Do you want to do a parachute jump again?

Let's see how it is.

And after fifty years, not a trace of fear in them and it's like this thing where the way to get over a phobia permanently is to do it repeatedly and you're cured for life.

So fifty years they didn't parachute and they all just blas a

up in the plane.

When When you're looking for illustrious decapitated heads, you get used to

it.

So I have something else about people dropping stuff by parachute during the war.

During Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia they dropped sheep and bulls by parachute and the reason was they needed food, they were in the desert and what's the best way of doing it?

You can drop meat down, that's fair enough, or you can drop live animals and then they can butcher them themselves whenever they need the meat.

And so that's what they did.

They dropped the bulls and the sheep.

They attached them to modified harnesses and parachuted them down to the soldiers.

That is amazing.

That must be the biggest thing that's ever been parachuted.

A bull.

I read that in parachutes actually during wartimes

people as well as you know you would look out for it because of enemy but you would also be looking out for it because parachutes the the material was such a collectible it was it was a thing that everyone yeah yeah like apparently if it was a silk one that would be they come in little triangles and you would turn them into underwear

Otherwise they had no underwear.

Oh, it's like a new meaning to go in commando.

I love, have you guys seen the footage of Franz

Rachel?

Yeah, were you watching that poor guy who developed a parachute suit, I think, starting in 1910.

And I just love the fact that he, so he made this parachute suit, which he decided was going to be useful, effective and work.

And it just didn't work, consistently didn't.

And he threw various dummies wearing it off from various heights and they all just plummeted to the ground and died a dummy death.

And then he tried to throw himself off there at like 10 meters high sort of levels,

fell, broke his leg.

And so he thought, well, this has gone well.

I'm going to ask if I can throw myself off the Eiffel Tower wearing it.

And so, yeah, he did and died.

And you can watch it.

You can watch it on YouTube.

It's an extraordinary bit of footage.

That's amazing.

I didn't realise that it had gone so badly before he decided to jump off the Eiffel Tower.

Just to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Did he jump off the viewing platform at the Eiffel Tower?

Yeah, because some take

and that's quite low, isn't it?

Yep, that's quite

surprised if maybe if he'd jumped from higher, it might have worked.

That was what some people said.

Some people claim that his parachute, it looked like his parachute suit suddenly blossomed at the last moment, the last split second, but I actually can't.

I've watched the photography.

That sounds like a wily coyote and roadrunner thing, doesn't it?

He splats down and then the parachute opens to be lands.

He had the most amazing moustache, though.

I wondered why the moustache didn't save him with the air resistance.

It's so good.

One of my favourite facts about D-Day landings is that 4% of the sand on the beach today in Normandy is made up of tiny metal particles left over from artillery explosions during the attack.

No, 4%?

That's a lot, isn't it?

Yeah.

Did you guys read that in the year 2000 someone tried to replicate Leonardo da Vinci's, who was one of the first people to design a parachute?

Oh yeah, it was like a triangular one, was it?

Yeah, it was um I think it was a it was a bunch of triangles and anyway it definitely had wood involved.

So in his design it was like some sort of cloth and wooden things holding it together, wooden planks holding it together.

So, someone tried to recreate this in the year 2000, but used modern materials and said it worked.

And it was this, like, it was all over the news saying, We don't know how Da Vinci's design works, this guy survived.

But he used cloth and modern materials.

I feel like if he built a parachute out of wood, it would never have worked, would it?

I don't think it would work.

Yeah,

um,

the official, I guess, first parachute jump, as far as we know, the first public one, so it was done by by Louis Sebastian Lenemond in Montpellier in France.

And his very first jump was off a tree holding two umbrellas.

Cool.

That was the very first parachute jump.

So do we not count the Malmesbury monk Aylmer of Malmesbury, who was the 11th century monk who flew 200 metres when he jumped off the top of Malmesbury Abbey?

He was airborne for 15 seconds, they've worked out, because they know where he landed and where he took off from and how high it was.

And he just made a bunch of wings for himself on his feet and his hands.

And he said if he'd remembered to make himself a tail, then

he would have been unharmed.

And that actually seems to be true because it gives you an equilibrium and means that you're giving me a really good thing.

The fan workman always blings his hands.

I'm so skepticalised.

I think that sounds very true.

And people would have thought him a fool when he did that.

And yet, a few hundred years later, we are throwing dogs out of planes to help identify mines.

Still doing it.

2010, German Shepherds were being flown in and dropped over Taliban regions

to spy on the Taliban.

To spy!

They have little cameras on them.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah, German shepherds.

I like the idea, I like the fact that in the war it was German shepherds that the British were dropping on Germany.

I mean the Nazis not as well.

You traitors!

That reminded me that there's always countries that find an animal and then arrest it for spying.

That happens all the time, isn't it?

Yes.

Was it Saudi Arabia, or I'm making this up, Saudi Arabia that arrested a coconut for spying?

I remember I find that I don't know.

I think that's amazing.

I find you guilty of spiding.

You ought to be broken up and put in cocktails.

There was a bounty on his head.

Okay, that's all that there is for this week.

Those are our facts.

Thanks so much for listening, everyone.

If you want to get in contact with us, you can do so by going to our Twitter handles.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M James I am at Eggshaped Anna still not on Twitter but you know what let's get you on this week otherwise you can get Anna in the meantime on at Wikipedia please do go if you enjoyed this podcast to our qi.com slash podcast page Anna and Alex have been putting together these amazing pages they have all the links to the stuff that we're talking about videos that go with what we're talking about it's a great page go to it and we'll see you again next week so thanks everyone for listening and we'll catch you again bye

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