No Such Thing As A Fish - 105: No Such Thing As Pancakes For Perverts

Episode Date: March 18, 2016

Live from Newport, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss tweeting chickens, litigious hyenas and peer-reviewed romantic comedies.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Newport. My name is Dan Schreiber, and please welcome to the stage, it's Anna Czazinski, James Harkin and Andy Murray. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that grumpy from the seven dwarfs is not nearly grumpy enough.

Sounds like an opinion. It is an opinion, I'd say, it's the opinion of some researchers from Duke University in North Carolina, and what they did is they looked at a load of movies that are aimed at children, so they would be rated U in the UK. They split all the characters up in class, so you have your upper class, your middle class and your lower class, and they decided that the depiction of working class was unrealistic and that the seven dwarfs would not be singing cheerfully as they walked down to the mine. So James, who were the scientists?

They were just people at Duke University in North Carolina. To be honest, they are, you know, they're cartoons aren't they? You don't really expect them to be all that kind of realistic, but scientists don't like it when you get things wrong. In the Lion King, the hyenas in the Lion King are the bad guys, and some of the artists for the film spent two days observing hyenas in the hills above the campus of where they were, and the scientists who were with them said, look hyenas are good guys, don't depict them as idiots, as evil people, and they did, and then one of them sued this thing.

One of the hyenas, one of the hyenas. No, not one of the hyenas, no. That is litigious, and I think they are evil as a result of that. No, that wouldn't be very realistic either, would it? No, it was one of the scientists sued you. I would watch that film, though. It was one of the hyenas from the original film, Suze the Mane. You know there's the Lion King III, which is like, so the Lion King's sort of based

on Hamlet, and then the Lion King III begins with Timon and Pumba, the comedy characters, and they're based on Guildenstern and Rosencrantz in the original thing, but then the Lion King III is based on Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are dead, the Tom Stoppard play, but no, it begins with Timon and Pumba watching the Lion King I in a cinema, this is how the Lion King III begins, and they say, that's not how it happened, we're going to tell the story of how it actually happened, and it's all the other bits, so it's Guildenstern and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, but from the perspective of Warthog and Amirket. Amazing.

It's one of the seven dwarves, so originally they have no names, in the Grim Brothers story they have no names, and then when Disney did the famous film in 1937, they had about 50 potential names for the dwarves, which were slowly whittled down, and the rejected names included Jumpy, Deafy, Hickey, Baldi, Puffy, Stuffy and Awful. I actually made a list of my dream seven dwarves, these are all on the Disney potentials list as well, there's Slutty, Hotzy and Chesty, which I think obviously a bit of a threesome, and then Awful, Goopy, Snuffle and Biggo Ego. I think that would be a better seven dwarves.

Chesty. Chesty. Chesty. Cut me someone with a cuff. Cuff. Cuff. Yes. I actually read that when they picked Dopey as one of the characters that people working

at Disney said to Walt Disney, that that's not a good name to use, because this is meant to be an old tale, and Dopey is a relatively recent hip name, and so people will think that that's not a good name. Oh yeah, because like Dope just meant good, didn't it? Yeah, exactly, and so Disney said, well it's not a new name, it was used in a Shakespeare play, so they went, oh okay, of course, sorry. He made that up, it was never, it's like yeah, it's right here, Dopey or not Dopey. I actually once lost a school quiz off the back of a question of name all the seven dwarves.

We got six of them, and we were stuck on the seventh, and my friend, my best friend Dan suddenly went, oh my god, I know it because it's my dad's name, so it's, what's his dad's name? Sneezy. Yeah. His dad was a rock star in Australia, a really big rock star called Doc Neeson, and he goes, I know it, now, Doc is not his dad's real name, so what he ended up putting on the paper as the seventh dwarf was Bernard, and we were looking at him, he sure is definitely a grown

up, everyone's like, oh, I like the dwarf. So there's some controversy about this fact, because obviously, as a study, some would say it is fatuous, the word has been used, while I was around this table, studying this kind of thing and drawing these conclusions, so I was looking at other potentially fatuous studies, and so there were two studies, one in 2008 and one in 2013, looking at how films can affect people psychologically, and so whether we should be worried about the effect of Hollywood films, for instance, on society and ourselves, 2008, there was an Edinburgh University, recruited 100 volunteers, and the study deduced that fans of romantic comedies

have a stronger belief in predestined love, and they have more unrealistic expectations for relationships, so romantic comedies, bad, give us unrealistic expectations of relationships. 2013, there was another study, looking into exactly the same thing, found that there is no correlation between people who are interested in watching romantic comedies and people who have unrealistic ideas about love, so really, you can make a study say whatever it is you want to prove. It'd be good if the leads of those two papers got together and then had a beautiful relationship. That's the thing, I know that sometimes they do seem like they shouldn't have been done,

but I love the studies that make no sense. Here's a great one I really like, this is from 2005, this is what the study was about, our way objects are tougher to see, and they confirm that to be true, swallowing more than one magnet is dangerous. There is, I think it is a problem with kids, because magnets are sold down as office stress relievers, I think, and yeah, apparently, sure, but if you swallow one it is bad, but there are hundreds of people who have meted to ERs in America every year, kids who have swallowed two of them, and obviously that really screws up your intestines, because

as soon as you swallow the second one, they try to find each other in your insides and disrupt everything else in the meantime. So that is quite bad. That is amazing. We need to move on to our next fact. Does anyone have anything before we do? I can give you one more study that's kind of a bit fatuous, but also about Disney stuff, so they did this thing where they had men watching movies, and they had some which were

sad movies and some which were happy movies, and the happy movie was The Jungle Book, which would make everyone happy. So they made them watch This Jungle Book, and then they took swabs from their armpits, and then they gave the swabs to women and asked them to smell them, and smelled all the different armpits of people who have watched all the different movies, and they found that people who had watched happier movies, when you smell their armpits, it makes you smile more. What?

I mean, you can't be smiling much, because you are smelling an armpit swab. Yeah, it could be more of a grimace. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact this week is that the ancient Romans had party bags. So in ancient Rome, if you went to a dinner party, at the end of it, you would be given a thing called an apophoreta, which literally means a take away, so they invented takeaways as well, and we know about them because there was a poet called Marshall, and he wrote a whole book about them.

It's 221 pairs of lines, and it's everything, the things that were given away. So they included toothpaste, whips, seashells, bladder footballs, or I think, I translated this right, a pastry penis. Don't get that in Greg's, do you? That's true, and he said, even if you consume every part of it, you will not be the less pure. That's good. So you had this huge range of things you could be given at the end of a night, it was very

exciting. Wow. You could also take your food away at the end of a night after Roman parties, couldn't you? They had a doggie bag. They had doggie bags. They were the inventors of the doggie bag, which is unbelievably cool. I think it was called a map.

You had to bring your own doggie bag sometimes, I think, so it was called a mappai, or a mapper, I guess, in the singular, and it was a piece of cloth, and you'd bring it, and if you had leftovers, you wrap them up, and you take them away with you. Wow, that's really interesting. I remember reading once that there were a lot of houses in Rome, which were above shops, and if you lived in one of these flats, they were quite low-roofed, and they didn't want people, like, their shops to catch on fire, so you weren't allowed to cook in them. And so if you wanted to eat anything, you had to get everything take away.

Really? Yeah. Wait, it's just a fact. That's amazing. Yeah, it's good that, isn't it? So you'd want to go to these parties all the time to bring your doggie bag home. So what were the parties like back then? Were they wild?

Were they raucous? I think they varied, like, parties today, then. Right. The more I looked into it, they had hot tub parties, I found out, which I didn't know about. Did they have toga parties? But they didn't wear togas most of the time, did they? No.

I think they wore tunics. Yeah, I think they hated them, didn't they? They had to wear them every now and then, but they were really awkward to wear. Was it not... Roosevelt had a toga party, because people took the Mickey out of him and said that he was acting like a Caesar, and so his wife kind of threw a party, as if to say, like, as if to cock a snook to the man. I believe that happened.

He was the man. What are you talking about? You're right, yeah. To the little man. Yeah, Roman parties. It's a good question. One of the things that I've always thought would have been awkward at Roman parties is the fact that everyone had to lie down, and so at dinner parties, everyone lay down

as we know, and you'd have a couch arrangement where there would be a couch or a bed on three walls of the room, and you'd have the hosts on the middle couch, and then the top guests. There were seating plans, so I think they also came up with seating plans, and the most favoured guests would get the couch where you had the better view of the host, and you had a really nice view out of the building, and then the less favoured guest just got a view of the wall, and you had to lie down, and you lay on your left arm and ate your food with your right arm. It just sounds really uncomfortable.

So another thing that Roman's invented was the concept of deal or no deal. In that, this is invented by the Emperor Augustus. He asked his guests to bid sums of money for pictures when they were faced to the wall, so you had to bid a sum of money on a picture, which you couldn't see the value of it, and I gather that that is what happens. That is exactly the same. So that is, and then they turned the painting round to reveal it at the end. Cool.

That is amazing. That is deal or no deal. That is deal or no deal. Wow. And he was amazing, because he did this thing where he said, you also, when you went to a dinner party with Augustus, you would pay for a token, and it was inscribed with what you might get, but they varied hugely, so you couldn't really see what was on the token before you bought it.

So again, it was like a blind auction. That's like a lucky dip. Like a lucky dip. And so you could either get some gold or you could get a sponge, so it was really varied. And then a later Emperor, Elegabilus, he gave out things called Lucky Chances, which were these special spoons, and it was inscribed with what you'd won, and it might say ten on it, and you'd redeem it, and they'd say, oh, you've won ten pounds of gold, or it might be that you won ten flies or something, so it really varied.

And they started giving them out at the Colosseum. And when they had a lottery at the Games in the Colosseum, you just won a token, and you'd redeem it and see what you'd won. Wow. You might have won ten bears. How terrifying to have the ten, yeah. You'd wonder, ten times I have sex with your wife, or it could be anything. You shouldn't ever run the lottery.

We need to move on to our next fact. Anyone who got anything else? I can quickly tell you that there is eight hundred and eight million pounds spent on party bags for children's parties in the UK every year. Wow. Eight hundred and eight. Million. Apparently the average bag is worth seven pound fifty, which I think means there's a hundred

and seven million party bags, which means every child gets thirty each. So it goes to thirty parties every year. Every year? Yeah. I did not know thirty people when I was seven. Certainly not thirty would have had me to a party. And apparently two per cent of a thousand parents surveyed in one survey said that their child had received an iPod in a party bag.

Wow. What? No. Who were they serving? People in Chelsea Mansions. I read an American news article, a mother called Sherry Jameson, who was left speechless when she had a birthday party for her son, her six-year-old son, and guests took back the birthday gifts they'd given him when they found out there were going to be no party

bags. The article reported about a party goer who asked her to remain anonymous, saying, a lot of us feel cheated. The kids had fun, but it was a really bare bones event. It's not like she had a bouncy castle. She's since received emails and texts from guests who felt it would be in poor taste to take their gift back at the party, but who are now getting in touch to demand to be refunded the full price, including tax of their present.

Including tax. Let the tax go. Let's move on to our next fact so we don't run out of time. So it's time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Ernest Hemingway once stole a urinal from a bar saying that he'd pissed away so much of his money into it that he owned it. I can tell you from experience that very rarely works on landlords. Steve, this is on all your furniture.

Yeah, so this was a bar that he used to go to all the time, and it was moving. It was closing down, and so he just went in and he just took the urinal off, and he brought it back to his house. And James, I know you've been to Ernest Hemingway's house. I have been there, and the urinal is still there. Really? Yeah, it's still there. You can see it.

And when you go to Ernest Hemingway's house in Key West, they make you go on a tour around there, and that's one of the things they tell you that this is the story. His urinal is now in the garden, I think. Yeah, that's right. It's in the back garden. And it's been turned into like a fountain, or it's a nice centerpiece. I think it's quite a nice urinal, actually. If my memory serves, it's quite big and kind of made of big stone, and it's kind of got

flowers on it and stuff. I think it's quite nice. Wow. Hopefully. How did he get it out of the bar? Because I wouldn't know where to begin taking your urinal off the wall. He was a big manly man, though, Andy, and you know, you were... I understand.

...going your wine over there. You've made yourself very plain. He was a big guy, though. You're right. He was obsessed with boxing. He used to take on people half his age, saying, and probably, you know, same size as him, but they assumed being younger, they could take him out, and he would win. He had his own boxing ring in the back garden.

It was next to where the urinal now is. And he went off to the Spanish Civil War to act as a correspondent, and while he was there, he had an affair with another woman, and his wife wasn't very happy about that, so she sold his boxing ring and bought a swimming pool, and that swimming pool cost $20,000 in those days, which now is hundreds and hundreds of thousands, and when he came back, he had one penny in his pocket, and he said, you've taken everything I've got, have this last penny, and he threw it down, and it's still there under a bit of glass, and you can see it if you visit.

Oh, good. We've preserved the remnants of his childish, spoil-brat tantrums forevermore. Yeah. Just on his manliness, I love this image. He wrote Standing Up, always. He wrote... He would write in a pencil. He couldn't be wearing a shirt, so he had his shirt off, wore baggy shorts, and they

were held up by a leather belt that he'd taken off the body of a dead German soldier that was inscribed with the German, the Third Reich kind of insignia. Wow. That's cool, isn't it? A half-naked man with a Third Reich belt standing up and writing some novels. I think we know your type. Just on the pub fights thing, I read that he went out drinking with James Joyce, and that James Joyce would get into fights and then say, Hemingway, deal with this, because

he was too drunk, Joyce was too drunk to stand. This is according to Hemingway. I have a fact about Ernest Hemingway, which is that Hemingway was part kangaroo. Have you got dozens of notes there? No, he was. He was part kangaroo. Go on. He broke his arm in a car accident, and the surgeon tending him bound his bone together

inside his body with kangaroo tendon. Wow. Yeah, and that wasn't an innovation just for Hemingway, that was at some point a standard medical procedure to put a bit of kangaroo inside you. That's so cool. It feels like the tendons would be kind of stretchier, doesn't it, and bouncier. I wonder if they were... It might be why they used it.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. But anyway, he was. It's not like all bits of a kangaroo are bouncy, James. It's true. They're not made of rubber. Do you know when he was a young boy, Ernest Hemingway, when he was a young boy? His mother used to dress him up as a girl because she didn't want a boy, she wanted a girl, and so she used to dress him up as a girl and call him Ernestine.

That backfired very badly, didn't it? It really did. But it was up until like he was six years old, he was going around. She grew his hair long, and he had to pretend to be the twin sister of his older sister. Wow. Yeah. They're a pretty weird family. I read he didn't like his name.

He didn't like being called Ernest because it was like the hero of an importance of being Ernest by Oscar Wilde. Oh, really? He was upset about that because that was... And that was why he objected, because he thought Oscar Wilde was an effeminate? He thought Oscar Wilde was an effeminate, and therefore that he shouldn't be called Ernest. He had huge problems about wanting to be incredibly masculine and sort of hypermasculine.

Yeah, he did. He was a really seriously odd guy. He was also, honestly, go home and spend two hours researching Ernest Hemingway because you think, as I was saying to James yesterday, as you're reading about him, you think, I have not lived, this man has lived, and in so many ways. One of the ways was that he was incredibly accident prone, it seems, so he had this old kangaroo malarkey in his arm. He had a plane crash in 1954, so he was on safari with his wife.

He was in Uganda, and his plane crash had to crash land, and they had to choose whether to crash land on an elephant trail or in a big crocodile pit. Those are the only options. There's not even a tiny strip of land in between the elephant trail and the crocodile pit. What are we on? What did they pick? No, they picked the elephant trail. They landed in the elephant trail, and then he, his wife, and the pilot of the plane

had to sleep there overnight because they were surrounded by elephants, blocked in by these elephants. So they were both quite badly injured, and the next day they were rescued by another plane, so they boarded this other plane, which caught fire, and also crashed the following day. Where did that crash into, like, do you want to go to the snake pit or the wildebeest? Sanctuary. I would pick the wildebeest sanctuary they'll become, they'll be looked after. Maybe we could adopt one.

What word comes after wildebeest for that joke to make sense? What about the hyena there? What about that? Actually, hyenas are quite nice guys. I actually read a thing about wildebeest the other day that I was going to try and use for a made fact. The scientists are saying that they were looking at ancient wildebeests, and apparently ancient wildebeests, they evolved a trunk, like a longish trunk, so that they could gossip with

each other. Yeah, because they needed to tell each other, like, do you see Jeff over there? Like, they needed to do tiny little bits of gossip, and they couldn't do it with their normal wildebeest face. I feel like you're paraphrasing a study. It's what it said, it said gossiping. Do you know where Hemingway's biggest scar came from? So he had this big scar on his forehead.

It was the most prominent thing you'd notice about him in his later life, and it didn't come from the car crash, or from the two plane crashes, or from the motorbike accident he had when he was in Germany. Or the wars that he was kind of in? Any of the wars he covered. It came from a time he was in a bathroom, and he pulled a chain thinking it was the toilet crash, and it accidentally brought the whole skylight down on his head. And that's what gave him this massive scar.

And whenever anyone asked him about it, he was really reluctant to say it's from a toilet skylight. So the two plane crashes, there was an interesting thing that actually happened in the time between the first plane crash and the second plane crash, which was he and his wife were reported dead, and it got spread around the world, and obituaries were printed the next day, and so he had the rare thing of being able to genuinely see the obituaries to his life. And then the next day he got on a plane, and then that crashed again. And that led to severe trauma, which his best friends think is what led to the end of his

life, for him killing himself from that second plane crash. I think it just ruined the rest of his life. But again, you know you were saying just what an insane character, what a big life. He, during World War II, was hunting Nazis, despite not being enlisted into World War II, and he did it from his boat, and his boat was set up. It was a fishing boat. It had direction finding equipment. It had a machine gun.

It had grenades. And he went out hunting Nazi U-boats. He used to practice with his son trying to take down U-boats with grenades by throwing them at turtles. I think that was very unfair on the turtles. A, you're implying they're Nazis, and B, a U-boat is a lot tougher than a turtle. But that's what he did. We need to move on to the final fact very shortly.

Anything before we do? Just quickly. He had 52 cats, and he taught one of them. So this is his exact words. I have taught Uncle Wolfer, Dillinger, and Will to make a pyramid like lions. Sorry, what? Well, I think he taught his cats to make a human pyramid. I'm not sure.

Like lions, do you? Yeah. And then he said, and have taught friendless, that was the name of another of his cats, have taught friendless to drink with me, brackets, whiskey and milk. But even that doesn't take the place of a wife and family. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the night, and that is Chuzinski. Yeah, my fact is that the official medical diagnosis code for being struck by a chicken is different to the official medical diagnosis code for being pecked by a chicken.

So this is the international classification of diseases, the ICD, and every thing that could go wrong with you has an ICD code, so it's now enormous, and every possible injury that's ever been reported has this code. So yeah, there are codes for being pecked by a chicken and struck by a chicken, completely different codes. There was one new one added in the 70s, which was bitten by an orca. So there's contact with non-venomous frogs. That's one sucked into a jet engine.

And injuries cause one knitting and crocheting. So all of these, if you go to a doctor or an ER, then they'll write down, you'll say, oh, my knitting needle just jammed into my thigh, and then a non-venomous frog landed on it, and they say, oh, there are two codes for that. Hold on, and write them down, and then they've reported it. What is the code for? It was pulling on what I thought was toilet chain. It turned out to be skylight.

There would definitely be one for that. There is one for fall-off toilet. That's W18.1. Just to let you know that. A few others, just because it's a 1,593 page PDF, and I read through the whole thing. Fall from a non-moving, non-motorized scooter is W05. Fall into buckets of water.

Not trip over bucket of water, but fall into bucket of water. That's W16.22. And S30.862 is insect bite on penis. That's amazing. Long list reading. This is my favorite one. V91.07, burn due to water skis on fire. Don't smoke on water skis.

See the signs? I was reading an interview with someone, so there's a brilliant article in the New Yorker about this, and they interviewed someone who's involved in deciding the new classifications, because they quite recently upgraded it and expanded them. And it sounds quite frustrating. She said, you're in this meeting room and you're debating

all the things that could possibly happen as well, and asking if you should also have codes for them. And so she was saying, a question was raised on what codes would apply if a mother was given the wrong baby to breastfeed. It was stated that that would be outside the scope of ICD coding. So they do have some limits, don't they? I read a thing about breastfeeding just this morning, which is that in the 19th century in America,

if you had what's called agalactica, which means you can't produce milk for your baby, the way that they would treat it is to put a pancake on your breasts. As a milk substitute? I don't have milk in it, has it? That's true. I don't know what they thought it would do, but you would put a warm pancake on the breast, and then when it got cold, you'd put another warm one on

and keep doing that for a couple of hours. What would they do with all the cooled breast pancakes? Just make some new pancakes out of it. That's very wasteful. You could give them to... Pervert. Just three pounds will buy four pancakes for a pervert. I was reading about the fact that not only do they have these codes

that they can write for proper medical use, but there's a lot of medical slang that gets used, which patients, because doctors are telling people at home, they're putting it on the internet, people are wising up to the fact that they use this kind of slang. So, for example, one PFO, pissed, fell over. That's what they'll put on the paper as a thing. They'll put brothel sprouts, which is genital warts.

I really like that. Brothel sprouts. Very clever. I was reading about the fact that some doctor board now needs to tell doctors not to do this anymore, so they sent out a mass email and different hospitals are doing this. It's really funny the fact that when they say it, this is a quote from it, although acknowledging that slang is likely to continue to be used, it should be kept to a minimum.

So they're like, well, we know you're going to do it anyway. Yeah, but there's a whole pretfo, patient reassured and told to fuck off. I have read articles like that, and some doctors go on there and comment and say, no, we don't do this at all. But then others go, yeah, we do. I've got two close friends who are doctors, and both of them say they do it all the time.

I was reading a thing about bills of mortality, which were these lists that got published in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it was a record of how people died basically in your parish, for example, and every week the parish clerks would record who had died in the parish and how they died, but they weren't medically trained, obviously, because they were clerks, so a lot of the causes of death are really quite vague. So they include things like, this is for how they died, griping in the guts, we don't know,

stopping of the stomach again, and suddenly... Another, this is my favourite from the bills of mortality that I managed to read, was cancer and wolf. Sometimes you can't know what got them first. Another one just said... Planet. Guys, we need to wrap up fairly soon-ish, so if you've got any more.

I've got to think very quickly on chickens, which is, so this fact was about the medical code for chicken, and it just reminded me that I was reading about a, there's an Australian fast food chain called Chicken Treat, who currently have a chicken doing all of their tweets. So it basically, it's in its cage, they put a computer in there, and they've put the food onto the keyboard, and so the chicken packs the keyboard for the food,

and it starts typing stuff out, and Guinness World Records have said that if it manages to type a five-letter word, and it's a successfully, it reads as a word, then it's going to go into the Guinness World Records as the first non-human to tweet, so far it's only managed three letters. What was the word that it tweeted? Bum. Anything more before we wrap up?

Why couldn't you ask us to follow a chicken tweeting the word bum? Okay, that's it, that's all of our facts then. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shribeland, James. At Egg Shaped. Andy.

At Chicken Bum. And Chazinski. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our website, nosearchthingasafish.com, where all of our previous episodes are, and you can also go to our Twitter account, which is at qipodcast, and send us all a message. Thank you so much for listening at home.

Thank you so much, you guys, and Newport. Thank you so much, it's been awesome. We'll see you again next week, goodbye!