No Such Thing As A Fish - 1: No Such Thing As A Pilot Fish

Episode Date: March 8, 2014

A new podcast from the writers of QI, who discuss the best facts they've found that week. The pilot episode features Dan Schreiber (@schreiberland), James Harkin (@eggshaped), Anna Ptaszynski (@nosuch...thing) & Andrew Hunter Murray (@andrewhunterm) For more check out www.qi.com/podcast

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 We ran it on QI a few years ago, which was, there's no such thing as a fish. You didn't even know 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 the pilot episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden. My name is Dan. I'm sitting with three other QILs, James, Andy and Anna.
Starting point is 00:00:37 And each week we're going to get around this microphone and share our favorite facts from the last seven days. So in no particular order, here are the best things we found out this week. OK, let's start with fact number one that comes from you, James. I went this weekend to the Collider Exhibition, the Large Hadron Collider Exhibition at the Science Museum, which was pretty cool.
Starting point is 00:01:03 And I got a fact there. The Large Hadron Collider was almost turned off. I think it was turned off for a short amount of time. For what reason? What do you think? Because of the rewiring that needed maintenance. Maintenance, yeah. It is a lot more lo-fi than that.
Starting point is 00:01:19 Apparently they found a piece of baguette in the machinery. And in May, the temperature go up by seven degrees and they had to turn the whole thing off before they found the baguette. If you work with a French, this will happen. I always throw my baguette into the machine. That's how they do it. They're actually a pest.
Starting point is 00:01:36 But what they actually think happened is that a bird somehow dropped it into an event or something like that and it was found there. But some of the physicists who were there at the time actually thought that maybe it was a time-travelling bird sent from the future to the slightly experiment town. Well, it's just pretty cool. I love the idea.
Starting point is 00:01:54 I love the idea to seek for Emma. Or when they first saw the baguette, they're like, whoa, the Higgs boson is way bigger. Found it! It's here. It's all bread-like. That's why they turned it off. Job done.
Starting point is 00:02:08 The Higgs baguette. The Higgs boson is covered in tuna mayonnaise. Surely someone's marketing a Higgs baguette now in Paris. There was a guy who broke into CERN. He broke in. His name was, how would you say this, Andy? Elois? Elois.
Starting point is 00:02:27 Elois Cole. Strangely dressed man. He said that he traveled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world. So they've had a number of time-travelling incidents. Yeah, well, that was one theory that the reason we hadn't had time-travellers yet was we hadn't invented the Large Hadron Collider, which would presumably then be the machine that would get them back.
Starting point is 00:02:48 And you can't have time-travellers until you build the machines. That's why we haven't had them in the past. Well, here's the final sentence of this story. Mr. Cole, as his name was, was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva, but later disappeared from himself. Police are baffled, but not that bothered. Wait a second.
Starting point is 00:03:06 I should point out that Dad is on David Ike Doc. Just Google it, and that's the first thing that came on. But this is the talk boards. It looks like they've lifted this from. They have it from Crave. Which I don't know if that's any more reputable. There was a bit of worry at the time that the whole universe was going to end, wasn't there? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:03:25 They thought that... Because what they were actually doing was making very, very, very tiny black holes. And I think in people's minds, they thought, well, what if they get bigger? What if they get bigger? They suck at it. But I think what had happened, I might be wrong about this because I'm going off memory a little bit,
Starting point is 00:03:39 they, I think the scientists said that there was a chance of the world ending, but it was something like 10,000 billion, billion, billion, billion to one chance. Which is pretty much the chance of the world ending anyway in that kind of time. But I think they didn't help themselves by saying that. And so all people here is, what the world's going to end? There was a big switch on day. Do you remember? It was when the machine was first due to be switched on,
Starting point is 00:04:05 and then the BBC went to a wall-to-wall coverage of it. They wrote about it for private eyes. Everyone going crazy about it. And then it didn't work for another nine months. Oh yeah, I remember that. There was some slight problem in the workings. There was a story in the news this week about the spaceship that had been... Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it was a lot like that.
Starting point is 00:04:24 Is it called Atticus? Can you check what's the, it's satellite that we sent up that's been asleep for three years, and we sort of sent an alarm on it to wake it up yesterday. Yeah, and so there was a big thing where they're all waiting, and you could stream mission control in, was it Russia maybe? I'm not sure what country it was.
Starting point is 00:04:42 Was it America? You could watch it, what do you mean? You could watch mission control if they were waiting, because it was going to be switched on, and there was an hour window where it didn't come on. So they were waiting, and then tension started getting high. Yeah, so it was actually, it wasn't too long, but yeah, so there was 10 minutes where it was late waking up,
Starting point is 00:05:01 and I hadn't sent any signals back. And then they started to get increasingly tense, and if you watch the video which I now have, they suddenly start to panic, and it all goes really silent. And then it was actually 18 minutes late waking up, because what they think happened is, somehow the satellite put its alarm on snooze, and just postponed its wake-up call for 18 minutes.
Starting point is 00:05:21 And then, which is fair enough, you know? If you've been asleep for three years, you can't be expected to just bounce out of bed. I think it was Rosetta, wasn't it? Rosetta, yeah. Rosetta, yes. That's incredible. I think it has got an awesome solar system fact, haven't you?
Starting point is 00:05:35 Yes. Okay, now this is... Anna, you haven't heard this yet, so... No, I haven't. I'm prepared for your jotted drop. This has raised some controversy in the office, but let's go for it. Okay.
Starting point is 00:05:46 In 2007, the largest object in the solar system was... What do you think, Anna? The sun. No. So, it was a comet called Comet Homes, which was... The comet itself, the main body of it, is three kilometers across,
Starting point is 00:06:07 and it had this extraordinary explosion at the surface, and the corona of dust, they call it the Comet Coma, this is the name for it, was bigger than the sun. Wow. It was 1.4 million kilometers. Out of here.
Starting point is 00:06:20 It was. It was 1.4 million kilometers across. And that all counted as part of the body of the comet. It was 1% of the total mass of the comet, it's a huge dust, because the sun is emptier than we think it is. I think that was fair to say. Is it?
Starting point is 00:06:33 Yeah. I mean, it depends on your definition of the sun, really, because there's an argument that the sun is actually the size of the solar system, because that's as far as the solar... Like energy... As the light goes. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:06:46 The solar wind goes all the way out to there. There's particles from the sun that are getting all the way out to Pluto and beyond. So there is an argument that we all live inside the sun at the moment. Yeah. Well, if that's true, then the comet thing is not. The sun is the size that everyone else says it is.
Starting point is 00:07:04 This comet was bigger, briefly. I think it's only me who says that. What's the comet called? Comet Homes, as in... Big Boy. Oh, Comet. Okay. Big Boy.
Starting point is 00:07:15 They're scientists, Anna. They're not just doing this for the naming reason. That's what you would have called it. That's what I would have called it, I guess it's why I'm not a scientist. There's actually a body, Alex, I want to look this up because I can't remember what it's called, which is responsible for the official non-onculture
Starting point is 00:07:26 of everything in the solar system. And it has these, like, most specific rules about where everything has to be called. It's called, like, the Internet. It's a branch of NASA. So, for instance, one of its rules is that Martian craters that measure less than 60 kilometers in diameter have to be named after villages of the world
Starting point is 00:07:42 with a population smaller than 100,000 people. Wow. So they have to have... So, like, tooting. There's a crater called tooting. Because... It's so pleasing. And the other one, and this is...
Starting point is 00:07:52 I think it was a headline that James saw when he came around to my computer at it, is, there is to be no penis on Venus. This is your excuse. I saw there is no penis on Venus, and now you're making up a story. And I was hopefully Googling in case there was. In case...
Starting point is 00:08:10 I've been through it. There's nothing else to make. Come on, guys. Men are from Mars. Women are from the Venus. And yet there's no, like, only male on Mars. So you're not allowed to call anything on Venus after anything male.
Starting point is 00:08:27 So everything on Venus. And you've got everything. All the craters. Why? All the mountains. Venus is... I don't know. No, because Venus was female.
Starting point is 00:08:35 Venus is female. Except this was only introduced in the early 70s. And before that, they had named the highest mountain. Malapenas. Which is... Which is called Maxwell Mondays. Named after a male physicist. But so he's sitting there on Venus.
Starting point is 00:08:51 The only guy on the mountain surrounded by thousands and thousands of women. And yet you can't really think about it. Because he's a mountain. That's funny, isn't it? That is brilliant. That is amazing. Alpha ladies for the L series.
Starting point is 00:09:02 Alpha ladies here. Yeah. That is a hell of a lot. Lots of lasses. Yeah. The only man on Venus. Cool. Okay, well, let's wrap up.
Starting point is 00:09:11 Because we've got stuff to do. Okay, before we go, I just got to say, if anyone wants to see the Collider Exhibition, it's pretty good. It's a science museum. On until the 6th of May. It costs about $10 to get in. I highly recommend it.
Starting point is 00:09:20 And what do you get to see? Is it... It's just lots of facts about how it works. Yeah. And there's lots of interactive stuff. Yeah. And do us a favour. Bring a baguette.
Starting point is 00:09:29 Leave it there. Take a photo of some baffled scientists trying to work out how it got in there. Okay, fact number two. Anna, this one's yours. Yeah. So for the last month of his life, US President James Garfield
Starting point is 00:09:45 ate everything through his anus. That's a big claim, Anna. That is... We will get letters from a lot of people here. That is mine. Yeah. I mean, I wasn't there, but this is what the doctors tell me.
Starting point is 00:10:00 No, so James Garfield was, as everyone obviously knows, shot in July 1881. And he lived for a further 80 days. He was shot in the small... in the, like, small of his back and once in the arm. So doctors now say he would have been at our hospital about two or three days later. But obviously, because, um,
Starting point is 00:10:17 medicine was not quite as advanced as it is now. In 1881, they just invited, like, dozens of doctors to his bedside who all prodded around trying to find this bullet. They didn't know where the bullet had gone in his body. So they gathered around, prodded about, made him worse and worse. He stopped being able to eat.
Starting point is 00:10:33 And obviously, if you stop being able to consume food in those days, they just shoved it up your arse. And so that's what they did. So does that work? It does not work, no. So it was widely discredited in the early 30s. I think you get about an eighth of the nutrition from some of the food.
Starting point is 00:10:48 But there's some food that you can't absorb at all. What I love is the list of foods that he was fed in his mother. Oh, that's good, yeah. Beef bouillon, egg yolks, milk... Egg yolks! Egg yolks. Wait, stop.
Starting point is 00:11:02 Guys, egg yolks was only true for a while because I was reading the doctor at the time his report on it. So, yeah, he was fed egg yolks for a bit of time and then all the surgeons complained that it was causing annoying and offensive fleetus. And so they ceased feeding him egg yolks. So they stopped it
Starting point is 00:11:19 because it was annoying there. Not the other way around. Guys, I'd be quite happy to eat an egg with my mouth. That's alright by you guys. That's the thing as well. He wasn't shut his mouth. Presumably his mouth still worked fine.
Starting point is 00:11:40 Could he still talk? Yeah, he could still talk. The doctors were amazing. The main doctor who tried to save him was called Doctor Willard Bliss with two doctors. His first name was Doctor. It's really tragic.
Starting point is 00:11:58 You should go on with the litter because they did feed him good things. That's all I know about what he was fed in that time. I think maybe that was the only food. But he was also given whiskey and drops of opium and stimulants. Whiskey up his arse?
Starting point is 00:12:14 If you're in that sort of a state, at least you want a few drams. He was such a talented man that his party trick was he could write Latin in one hand and Greek with the other simultaneously. He campaigned for the presidency in more than one language.
Starting point is 00:12:29 Some places he campaigned in English, some places he spoke in German. He was disinvented. He was president for four months and then he was shot. And then he lingered for another three months. So it's like no matter what, you could write Greek with your left
Starting point is 00:12:43 and Latin with your right. But the fact you could eat through your anus will forever overshadow. It trumps it all. I actually looked up, because I thought, I knew Andy had said earlier that you had a list of things that he ate.
Starting point is 00:12:58 I thought it would be interesting to look up of what his favourite foods were. When I was there, I'd be like, I'm going to try and get you a sneaky dish on the side, you know. So his favourite food was squirrel soup. Really?
Starting point is 00:13:14 And actually, there was a guy called Crook and he really wanted to cook squirrel soup for the president, but they needed him to be a bit better. I think to the point where he was eating again with his mouth, that kind of good.
Starting point is 00:13:26 And they were given permission to shoot squirrels on the grounds of the soldiers' homes in order to get the squirrels in order to do it. And he loved milk, really loved milk, and there was a company called the Adams Express Company
Starting point is 00:13:38 from Baltimore, and they actually sent a cow to the White House so they could milk it every day so that he could get fresh milk while he was dying. Well, he was given a shot. He was given milk in the manner we've described.
Starting point is 00:13:49 Yeah. Yeah. Well, Andy, you were saying that Alexander Graham Bell was there while he was dying. Yes, so, I mean, I initially thought about phrasing this fact as Alexander Graham Bell actually killed
Starting point is 00:14:01 President James Garfield, and then I felt like there might be lawsuits from his family, but because they'd lost the bullet in his body, and because, coincidentally, Alexander Graham Bell had been developing the metal detector at the time,
Starting point is 00:14:13 they invited him along, and he tried to find the bullet in his body, but failed on account of the fact that he was on a bed with a lot of metal bedsprings, and so they obviously thought he'd been machine gunned down. They're everywhere.
Starting point is 00:14:33 There's nothing I can do. It's just incredible that, I mean, the genius of inventing a metal detector and then not thinking to remove the massive source of metal underneath the thing. That's incredible. I mean, you imagine, like, quietly,
Starting point is 00:14:47 Alexander Graham Bell was like, I think the president is a robot. That would have been his discovery. I'm not sure if James Garfield was a robot. He might have been a sea cucumber because they actually do eat through their anuses. Do they? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:15:02 They found this out quite recently because you know that they breathe through, you know they breathe through their anuses. They pull water in and then push it out and the oxygenated water helps them to breathe. And they thought, well, maybe they take in food there as well. And they found out that they have a gut in the middle
Starting point is 00:15:18 and they eat through their mouth and through their anus. So it comes in from both sides. That's pretty cool, isn't it? That is cool. That's amazing. And can they taste it? Do they have taste buds in their anus, do you think?
Starting point is 00:15:30 I don't know if they have taste buds in their anus. Well, James, you found out what else you can taste with, didn't you? Oh yeah, you can taste with your testicles. Well, here's the thing. You have taste receptors in your testicles. No one's quite sure what they're for, but you also have smell receptors in your lungs.
Starting point is 00:15:47 And the reason we do know why they're there because if you get a really terrible smell and your receptors in your lungs can smell it, then it'll close up your esophagus and stop anything poisonous from going into your body. But as far as I know, no one's found out yet why we have taste receptors in their testicles. Maybe someone will tweet me at Eggshapes
Starting point is 00:16:07 if you know why we can taste with our testicles. Okay, let's move on to fact three. That is James, your facts. So my fact is, in 2013, six people in the US named their child Mushroom. I mean, I just love that. I love the kind of thing which we do on QI, which is sometimes just get a load of data
Starting point is 00:16:32 and mine through it for the funny bits, which is where this came from, which is a big list of all the baby names in America. Mushroom. I mean, what would possess you to... I think it sounds quite nice. It does sound cool, actually. Mushroom. Mushroom.
Starting point is 00:16:47 Mushroom. Mushroom. It's sort of... Shroom. Shroom, for sure. It's better than fungus. Fungus doesn't sound nice. I think it's weird because I have a mild mushroom phobia. I find them very disgusting things. Well, don't look over your shoulder now, James.
Starting point is 00:17:04 It's just the way that they reproduce with spars and they grow on dead things and stuff. I think a lot of people don't like mushrooms. There's something dead about them. Yeah. And it's a weird one that I find because my friend hates mushrooms as well. And if I have a pizza with them, we have to remove them.
Starting point is 00:17:20 Well, you know them, Ash, who did the theme tune for our show, and Priyes. But you kind of have to respect a hatred of mushroom or a feared mushroom in the same way you respect someone's religious beliefs. I really feel like if someone doesn't like mushrooms, I really have to be like,
Starting point is 00:17:39 oh, okay, I appreciate that. I will remove it from any of the foods that we will have in this house from here on in. Yeah, it's true. Mushrooms are a big deal. Yeah, they hate it with a passion. It's a bit like vegetarianism because you're excluding an entire area of the...
Starting point is 00:17:57 Are mushrooms their own kingdom? Yeah, yeah. The fungi are a kingdom, aren't they? Yeah, fungi are a kingdom in the same way that animals and plants are. But if you think actually mushrooms are more closely related to animals than they are to plants.
Starting point is 00:18:11 Are they? No. Yeah, that's true. How? What animal-like activities do they take part in? Do you get packs of mushrooms hunting and hunting and mushroom? The mushroom approaches its prey.
Starting point is 00:18:28 Really slowly. I love names. I'm obsessed with... because I always find them particularly in pop culture. I mean, it's definitely been the rise of the celebrity world that suddenly... It's like celebrities are going, I've called my child mushroom.
Starting point is 00:18:47 What are you going to do about it? Everyone's like, well, nothing. Good. Catch you later. We'll do the same. Jay-Z's out. Yeah. Because my two favorite ones from recent times
Starting point is 00:18:56 are Jermaine Jackson of the Jackson 5 has changed his surname from Jackson to Jackson. So he's taking... With an apostrophe now. No, so instead of Jackson with an O-N at the end, it's U-N. So it's Jack's son,
Starting point is 00:19:14 because he doesn't want to be associated anymore with the Jackson band. And he held a press conference because he was talking about his new album, and he announced it as press conference. He said, by the way, I have changed my name from here on in. I want to be now known as Jermaine Jackson,
Starting point is 00:19:31 not Jermaine Jackson. And so they asked him, why have you done this? And he said, I want to talk about it. So we don't know his actual proper reasoning. Everyone just thinks that he wants to get away from it. I have this big list of American people's names, like baby names from 2013. And these are all male children
Starting point is 00:19:54 with five people named these names in America. So Vader. Darth Vader. That's a good name as well. And also Vader was a WWF wrestler. Of course. Is there anyone called Darth Vader? Just accidentally.
Starting point is 00:20:10 No, no, no. With a G. Don't worry. It happens all the time. Anyway, can I just pick up my asthma pump? So Vader. Yeah, so five boys called Vader. Five boys called Kestrel, which is quite a nice name. Kestrel's good. Five boys named Lucifer.
Starting point is 00:20:42 It means light bearing. I mean, they could have said that he started out well. He was an angel to start. That is weird. Five boys called Sophie. And also Romance and Naomi. They were boys with those names. Romance is quite unfair.
Starting point is 00:21:01 Obama's mum. Do you know what her name was? No. This really shocked me when I read this. I was reading his autobiography. Remember the time when he was initially being nominated? Everyone went on about his name. It was a big thing, his name. So I'm surprised no one picked up on this.
Starting point is 00:21:16 His mother's first name was Stanley. Stanley Obama. She was called Stan the Man at school. Actually, in the older days, names sometimes do change sex. I looked at the 1880 census. And there were 13 girls in America called Frank. Roosevelt.
Starting point is 00:21:39 Roosevelt had an aunt called Frank. One of the American presidents had an aunt called Frank. There were also 14 sessles and 46 johns. They were all female. Last year in America, there were 31 johns. Oh, they misspelled it. It's a tough word. And also there were 1,436 people called Israel.
Starting point is 00:22:02 64 called Israel. Israel. Israel, man. I also, I love people who have a name that kind of means that you can do a lot with it. Like Mike Love of the Beach Boys. So Love being his surname. He's obviously gone great.
Starting point is 00:22:18 I can put Love onto everything. So he's got four Unleashed albums. They're really bad. So the first album was called First Love. Second album was called... Second Love? Country Love. He missed a trick there.
Starting point is 00:22:31 Yeah. Then there was Looking Back with Love. This is great. That one was released. That one made it. So the third Unreleased one was Unleashed the Love. And then this is the best one at all. His fourth Unreleased album.
Starting point is 00:22:45 Anyone ever bash? What pun title do you like? Love Hurts. Ooh, that's good. Yeah. 15 Love. No, Andy. The Power of Love?
Starting point is 00:22:58 That's good, but no. There is the Love. We're just naming other songs. It can't still other songs. It can't still. Okay. It was Mike Love, Not War. We know someone called Diamond Love, don't we?
Starting point is 00:23:12 We do know Diamond Love. That's very good. Oh, and you had your friend's dad. I love this one. Okay, yeah. So this is Jenny Ryan. Yeah. Who's done a lot of work on QI in the past.
Starting point is 00:23:24 And her stepfather, I think, is called... He was called James Brown. And he got so annoyed with people making jokes about him that he changed his name to Dan Brown. Who then became the most famous after a long time. That's so good. I love that one. That's great.
Starting point is 00:23:47 Fact number four. Okay, fact number four is... I was talking to this historian the other day on Twitter. Because I don't know if you saw on Friday last week on Twitter, it just went nuts with people historians talking about Alfred the Great's bones being found. Because it's... We haven't found many monarchs, right? Generally.
Starting point is 00:24:09 Yeah. Well, we famously found Richard III. Richard III about two years ago. And so they're really excited because they dug up an area where they thought Alfred the Great was meant to be buried. Turns out he wasn't buried there. And then they went to a museum storage where they had a bunch of other bones that they assumed to be animal bones. And they found his pelvis bone now. So we have Alfred the Great's pelvis bone.
Starting point is 00:24:26 Or do we? They don't quite know. Where's the rest of him? We're not sure, but we have a pelvis bone. Which feels just really like, you know, all those like classic Jesus's grandmother's head and all those relics of the past. I have a fact about pelvis bones. Do you hear it? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:24:42 Weirdly enough. Absolutely. Okay, so there's a department in the Natural History Museum that if you find something weird in your garden or whatever, you can give it to them and they'll tell you what it is. And it's usually people who find what they think is like jelly from space or cryptozoology things. Jelly from space. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's what people think, you know.
Starting point is 00:25:03 What is it though? Okay, that wasn't my fact. So jelly from space is whenever there is a meter, right, people seem to find this jelly on the floor. And there's been for hundreds of years, people have thought that the two are to do with each other. Yeah. Nobody knows what it's from. It's called star jelly. And nobody really knows what it is.
Starting point is 00:25:24 There's lots of theories. There's jelly that we don't know what it is? I think, yeah. I've heard of it. I've heard of star jelly, but I've never researched what it is. You know about this mysterious jelly. Yeah, I've heard about it. And I thought, well, I'll just leave that be.
Starting point is 00:25:40 I'm sure. You can't be curious about everything. Okay, so as well as getting weird jelly, they also get what people think. Dragon heads. Yeah. And whenever they find a dragon head, it is usually the pelvis of a seabird like a puffin. Because apparently a puffin's pelvis looks like a dragon's head. That's great.
Starting point is 00:26:00 That's my pelvis. All claims of dragon heads turn out to be pelvis. Yeah, the ones that these guys get, yeah. Because do you know that this thing about, you find people thought that you would have one-eyed monsters. So they're like, what do you call these monsters with one eye? Cyclops. And the theory is that what they actually did is they would find the skulls of elephants. And where the, yeah, the elephant skulls actually look like they have a big hole in the middle,
Starting point is 00:26:26 like it would be one eye hole. And that's where the theory sometimes goes wrong. Well, the best thing that you've told me that I've been telling everyone for the past, I don't know, two weeks is that the majority of sightings, photos taken of sea monsters, turn out not to be sea monsters, but in most cases, the penises of grey whales. Because they mate at the surface. So grey whales, they always mate at the surface and they always mate in threesomes, two males and a female, which means that there's always one spare penis floating around the surface.
Starting point is 00:26:57 Sticking out at the top of the water. Yeah, if people Google this, if you're at home listening and you Google grey whale penis, you will see it and it does not work. It does. That's very important. But it's very true. I've looked at it and the majority of photos that you will see of people claiming to have caught a sea monster on camera, they just, they haven't.
Starting point is 00:27:15 But anyway, so on Twitter, when I was talking to Greg Jenner, Francesca Stavrocopolo, all these historians, they started off by going, wow, Alfred the Great, an interesting find potentially. And then they're all now saying, not so much an interesting find, like it probably will turn out not to be. But it got me, I just wanted to look into it because I didn't know much about it. And it led me to the story of how Richard the Third's bones were found recently. Yeah, so they were found in a car park in Leicester.
Starting point is 00:27:39 They were found in a car park in Leicester. So what I didn't know, we all know that exactly. It was a very big find. What I didn't know is the person who found it, Philippa Langley. Do you do, does anyone here know about Philippa Langley? So you do, James. Anna, do you know that?
Starting point is 00:27:52 No. Okay. What would you assume the person who found Richard the Third's bones does for a profession? You assume she was an archaeologist, although I have read something about her that tells me she's not. And also I assume you wouldn't ask me if she were. You're like Shirley. I'm going to go with an archaeologist. An archaeologist.
Starting point is 00:28:09 Yeah, so she's not an archaeologist. She's a screenwriter. She's been writing for the last seven years a story, a script about Richard the Third and she got involved in research. And so she started going to all the places where potentially Richard the Third was supposed to be buried. She went to Leicester and she went to a spot where it was a loose end. It didn't look like where they said he might be buried, where he was. And as she was leaving from effectively a disappointing trip,
Starting point is 00:28:35 another one over the course of seven years, she saw a car park on the side and got an uncontrollable urge to go inside. So she went into the car park and she was like, I feel like the king is here. But she left it. She went off. She came back a year later. She felt the same urge and she saw on the ground a gigantic R in red writing, just a huge R on the floor.
Starting point is 00:28:59 And she said, that's where he's buried. Now the R is a painted R for reserved on a car park. She's not a crazy person. And so she said it's here. No one believed her. She raised 34,000 pounds for them to dig it up. She got Channel 4 to come and film it and they dug in the spot and Richard the Third was there. And it was a psychic.
Starting point is 00:29:17 What was the word that I said to you earlier? A pre-sentiment. A psychic pre-sentiment. She just went, this is where he is. But what you don't know is that she's actually been going all over the country, digging up holes for 20 years. Anything that had an R on it. Every put hole.
Starting point is 00:29:32 So does that mean, Dan, that you believe that's psychic? No, not at all. I just think that's one of the most wonderful co- That story could not get any better. That a giant R, like an X marks the spot, but with the initial of the king. You know that the Ministry of Defense spent like 20,000 pounds trying to prove that ESP existed. Only like even in the last 20 years they did that. Really?
Starting point is 00:29:53 Yeah. Why were they trying to prove that? Well, I always think the reason they do it is because they think if it does, we want to be first. And they think the Russians are probably going into this. So is everyone else. We might as well have a go at it. I could have told them that it didn't. In fact, I tried to tell them really hard.
Starting point is 00:30:10 What was strange when they found Richard the Third, I thought, is we'd actually run on QI a few years ago and whether Richard had a hunchback. And we said, you know, he didn't. It was all made up by Shakespearean people who wanted to deface him after his death. But then when they found him, they found that he did have like an arch to his back. Yes. An S shaped spine is what they said. But no, I just find that fascinating because I love it when things are found by people
Starting point is 00:30:38 who shouldn't be finding the thing in question, but are convinced they're going to find it. I mean, that's the only instance. Is it maybe something to do with the fact that just like you usually do dig up ground, like either it's agricultural ground, so you dig it up, or you're like putting buildings in so you dig it up. So car parks don't really need foundations. So they're just things that haven't been discovered yet. Not sure.
Starting point is 00:30:57 Not quite a lot of discoveries. In fact, I think we should ask at some point the question, what vital archaeological discovery was made under a car park in Leicester last year? I want to say that was the body of Richard III last year. Oh, James, you fell right into that. Last year. Yeah. Last year.
Starting point is 00:31:20 No, no, I did. Yeah. Another car park in Leicester. Same team who dug up the Richard III after the psychic woman pointed them in the right direction, dug up this ancient Roman cemetery, which like revealed a whole bunch of stuff about how Romans used to bury pagans and religious people and Christians together. And yeah, just reveal this. Another car park in Leicester.
Starting point is 00:31:40 Why don't we just dig up all the car parks in Leicester? Yeah. So that one had Romans. Yeah. Dig up the helipads. You were finding King Harold. Cool. So that's our show.
Starting point is 00:31:56 Thanks so much for listening to No Such Thing as a Fish. If you want to find out more about any of the things on this show, you can go to qi.com slash podcast where we're going to have pictures, we're going to have expert bits of information and biographies of every single one of the elves who appeared on this show. And you'll find out about who's going to be appearing on our future episodes. If you want to tweet us individually to ask us about something we said, you can get me on at Shriverland.
Starting point is 00:32:19 James, you're on. At Egg Shaped. And Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And Anna isn't on Twitter, but we're going to try and get her on it at some point, but until then, if you want to get to her, at Quikipedia. So anyway, we'll see you again next week. And hopefully you enjoyed the show.
Starting point is 00:32:33 And join us again next time. Goodbye. Bye.

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