No Such Thing As A Fish - 107: No Such Thing As Gorillas On The Beach

Episode Date: April 1, 2016

Live from Glasgow, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss spagnostic pastafarians, mystery pool pooers and the world's first speech bubble. ...

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from Orenmore in Glasgow, my name is Dan Schreiber, and please welcome to the stage, it's Anna Chazinski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with my fact, my fact this week is that in Utah, it is illegal to wear a hat in your driving licence photo, but you can wear a colander. Yeah, one of those pasta strainers, you can wear them. It's genuinely true, and it obviously pisses off the authorities whenever someone says it's
Starting point is 00:01:13 my right to, and the reason they say it's their right to is they say they can do it on religious grounds. Yeah, is it Pastaferianism? Pastaferianism. Such strong name. How many people know about Pastaferianism? How many people are Pastaferians? Did someone just say you're a minister? No! What? If anyone would like to get married tonight. Which you can do, can you do it here in Glasgow, can you get married? The legislation that brought in same sex marriages last year, part of that was to allow non-traditional religious groups to perform weddings as well. I'm not quite sure. Wait, you're a minister mate, you should have that covered. Dan, do you know I'm a minister of the priest of the church of the
Starting point is 00:02:04 Latter-day Dude. What? Yeah, I signed up online. It's a very, very stringent thing you have to go through, you go onto their website, you put your email, it's basically signing up to a mailing list, but they say that then you're a minister in the church. What do you get to do? Apparently it's something... What do you get to dood? Dood you take this woman? I dood. I don't think you're taking my religion very seriously. Sorry, sorry. So it's from a movie with the dude, I don't know, I've never seen it. It's like a Jew hasn't read the Ten Commandments. And when I signed up I vowed to uphold the principles of doodism, to take it easy, to be easy going to everyone I meet and to keep my mind limber. And I had to promise
Starting point is 00:03:03 that the ordination was for me and not for someone else or my dog or whatever. That's very cool. That's amazing. Wow. So what about pacifarianism? What's that all about? It was started in 2005, wasn't it? And it's people who are protesting against teaching intelligent design in schools in America as an alternative to evolution. And so they created their own kind of God, which was the spaghetti monster. Yeah, and it's becoming, this is the thing, it's becoming quite a large religion to the point where people are ministers and are wearing colanders on their head because that's the religious headgear that they wear in the photos. And they even have now, it's gone so far that there are some people who aren't quite sure
Starting point is 00:03:44 whether or not they believe in the flying spaghetti, the spaghetti monster. So most pacifarians believe that he is tomato based, whereas others believe that it is pesto or cream. And they're called spagnostics. So I'm a fact about things that are not hats. I wanted to find out things that are not hats that have been used as hats. So I googled the phrase worn as a hat, specifically that. And it turned out that in 2002, a 17 year old girl wore a chameleon as a hat through Manchester airport and was stopped by the customs guys. The Telegraph said, despite its abilities, a camouflage itself by changing colour. The chameleon attracted the attention of people at the luggage carousel. And she'd flown all the way from Dubai with this thing on her head.
Starting point is 00:04:47 And it was a very endangered species. So they took it off her and sent it to a safe house and eventually sent it back, I spoke. There's an Australian guy who once smuggled a snake in his underpants to Bali on a plane in the early days. On wearing odd things on your head. I wouldn't put a snake in my pants. Sorry. Sorry. Please. I think this is a fruitful thing to pursue. I would probably put it in those ice cream lolly containers. I'd put it in the ice cream lolly container and then I'd put the handle on, you know, the lid on. Right. I don't think anyone knows what you're talking about. Guys, you know when you're making a lolly and you pour the lolly stuff into the mould and then you put the mould in the freezer, I'd put it in one of those.
Starting point is 00:05:40 But that would be quite a small snake. Yeah. You should see my lolly moulds. That is not the first time I've heard you use that. It won't be the last. So there's a guy in America. Yeah. Who decided to wear a colander on his head for his gun licence and the police took his guns away. That's what you have to do to get your guns taken away. He said, I was told I was mentally competent and I've never misused my guns or intend to do so. So it's a real kick in the guts that if I was told that I was to go for another photo with a colander on my head, my guns will be taken away again. So apparently, if you wear a colander on your head for your gun licence, they're going to take it off you. And he said he's going to wear his colander on his head for his
Starting point is 00:06:33 driving licence and he said, what are they going to do? Take my car away? I think probably they will. Yeah. I read an account that someone in Russia got the first ever licence. I think they were the fifth person worldwide to be officially allowed to wear a colander on their head because of this flying spaghetti monster thing. But it said that this person, if he was driving, he had to be wearing the colander at all times because you have to look like you do in your licence. I think he wore a knitted colander as well. Yeah, it's not an actual colander. It's just a knitted one. On driving licences, there's a guy called Jared Hayams who lives in Victoria in Australia who's been fighting with authorities for five years now for the right to have a penis drawing as his
Starting point is 00:07:20 signature on his driving licence. And he said, this all started, he was registering for a change of electoral address and he thought this would be funny rather than sign it, I'm going to draw a cartoon penis, which is quite a good drawing of the cartoon penis actually. And he said, I was receiving letters and phone calls telling me I couldn't have that as my signature and I thought, that's interesting, why not? A signature doesn't have to be you writing your name, it just has to be a mark that you produce that can look the same every time. So if you can draw a consistent penis picture, that's your signature, I'm with him on this. Well, I think he's getting away with it, I think it might be on his driving licence thing now. And I think he's been signing my front
Starting point is 00:08:02 door all the time. We need to move on fairly soon to the next fact, anything else? There is a guy, there's a Swedish artist, I just love this guy, he's called Frederick Sacker and he painted the picture for his driving licence, right? So he did a self-portrait because you have to submit a likeness and a photo, but it doesn't have to be a photo of you, it just has to be a photo that looks enough like you that if someone looked at it, they thought, oh, that's him. So he did a self-portrait, he took a photo of the self-portrait and he submitted it and the authorities said, fine. They were very cool about it, they just said the picture we have received looks like any other photo, so we have had no reason to question it and they'd let him do it. I mean, they're
Starting point is 00:08:48 accepting colanders and penises now, so I find that unsurprising. Can I just, there's a problem with driving licence applications in the US and this was raised by a woman in Florida last year, I think, when she'd had, she got her driving licence renewed and she'd had it for a few months and she started noticing people were treating her a bit weirdly, so she tried to stay in a hotel and she couldn't stay, they wouldn't let her stay, she went to Disney World and they said, I'm sorry, we can't let you park here, we can't let you come in and eventually someone checked her driving licence and pointed out that they'd accidentally labelled her as a sexual predator rather than an organ donor. Whoa, that's a different kind of organ, I think. Apparently those two boxes are just
Starting point is 00:09:34 right next to each other. What box is that though? It's not like there's an other interesting fact section on my driving licence, there's no trivia bit on your passport, you know. It's not like Andy says lolly-mulled enthusiast. Should we move on to our next fact? Sure. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Andy. My fact is, there was a Victorian job that consisted solely of pushing people into the sea. This was a real thing, these people were called dippers and so it's all to do with Victorian swimming etiquette basically, so they were quite strict about segregating sexes for reasons of modesty and decency. You would have these people whose job it was to push you quickly into the water so that your modesty was preserved as a woman, I think it was mostly for female
Starting point is 00:10:33 swimmers. Yeah, yeah, so these bathing houses that they used to go into, that's the thing that got taken into the... So to go swimming, you had to go into a special cart on wheels, then they would take horses, attach them to the cart, the horses would drag the machine into the sea, you would change and then you would dive in off the end. Yeah, you'd mostly go nude because, and I'm hoping that you guys can confirm this, swimming at the beach and these big laborious things with horses bringing you down there were invented before the swimming suit, so everyone went naked and they're like, how do we get around this naked thing? Let's build a massive house and then we'll get a horse and we'll bring it in. They just didn't have swimming clothes. I think they did have like
Starting point is 00:11:19 woolen swimming suits, but they got quite heavy. Everyone was drowning. People did swim naked at the start of the Victorian period, but then about halfway through everyone got a little bit prudish as we all know and that's when they had these kind of houses and things, I think, right. Because swimming in the Victorian era at first was really more for medical purposes than holidaying purposes, wasn't it? And so I think sometimes some people thought you had to be dipped in three times in and out and it was quite important how quickly you got dipped in, how many times and that could cure you of TB or flu or whatever you had. Oh wow. Yeah. And they were really unpopular as well. People hated the Dippers. So somebody said they were the most horrid looking creatures I ever
Starting point is 00:11:57 beheld, good heavens, to be dipped by one of them and sourced like a condemned puppy or kitten. I was looking into swimming around the world now because I thought, oh, I wonder if different cultures have different ways of going to the beach and if you live in China and you go to the beach, how would that be? In China, there's a big new fashion with swimming costumes and I'd not heard of this and maybe you all have, but called the facekini. So it's basically they wear what effectively is a nacho libre mask over their heads because they don't want suntans. It's a big kind of no-no there to have a suntan. So they wear these Mexican wrestling masks and they go to the beach. So if you go to the beach in China, it's just packed with wrestlers. If you wear one of those,
Starting point is 00:12:45 can you go naked on the rest of your body? Because it doesn't matter. Because no one knows who you are. So this is the thing. A lot of people do it now. It's not about the tan anymore. It's about an anonymous state at the beach. You can do what you could hang out whatever you want to hang out and just go and do whatever you want and no one will know who you are. That's they actually did women used to wear masks in the 16th and 17th centuries for exactly that reason. It was a fashion thing. So women of high society would go around in masks and they'd often wear them in bed and that was to stop your skin being exposed too much to sunlight and stop yourself getting a tan because it was unfashionable. Wow. Yeah. Do you know it was illegal to be topless in America
Starting point is 00:13:21 in the early 20th century and people were arrested for it? As a man or a woman? As a man, sorry. How sexist am I? I just assumed by Tobias I meant all men. Yeah, in 1935, 42 men were arrested for being topless in Atlantic City and people who were arresting them said we will have no gorillas on our beaches. And yeah, it was a thing. It was thought very improper. The man who invented the lava lamp was a nudist, wasn't he? Yes. Yeah, he used to make videos of women swimming underwater naked and then presumably went from there to lava lamp. Obviously. The logical jump. Do you know what's happened to bathing machines today? Do you know what happened to them? No. They are now, they were repurposed into those bathing huts that you get at the back of beaches.
Starting point is 00:14:13 So they just took the, they wheeled them back off the beach as it came as people thought actually it's more sensible for us to wear a swimming costume. They wheeled them back to the back of the beach. They took the wheels off and now that's why they're fashionable because bathing machines were transformed into that. Oh, someone last year built a new bathing machine. Incredibly exciting. This is the first one built for 100 years. It's on the coast somewhere, obviously. I think it was in Margate and he raised about £30,000 on Kickstarter and it's really cool. It features one of the little special features that you used to get on bathing machines, which was a modesty hood, which is this little canvas tent and basically the end that's facing the sea.
Starting point is 00:14:53 You kind of lower this canvas hood almost all the way to the water so that you can have even more privacy as you get in. Yeah. That specific awning was invented by a guy called Benjamin Beal and he's often given credit for inventing the entire concept of the speech house, the bathing house, but all he did was the awning and he just got all the credit. That is outrageous. I'm so glad that you are rewriting everyone's assumptions about this guy. Glad we've righted that wrong. I know you all thought. Fuck Benjamin Beal. I was reading about there's a because obviously people love swimming and there's a lot of beautiful places in the UK to go swimming. There's one absolute, if you look at photos of this place, absolutely beautiful and it's called the Lagoon
Starting point is 00:15:42 of Buxton. Absolutely stunning, but it's really toxic. It's really dangerous and so they're doing everything they can to stop people from swimming in it, but because it looks so beautiful, people just ignore the signs and keep going in. So one sign that's up there, it says warning, do not enter water due to high pH levels. This can cause skin and eye irritation, stomach problems, fungal infections, such as thrush. It says that inside there are car wrecks, dead animals, excrement, rubbish and still people keep going in. They keep going in for a swim and they're getting quite ill. So what they've had to do in the end, they've had to dye the lagoon black so that people now go, oh that looks disgusting. So they've altered a beautiful place. I wonder how beautiful
Starting point is 00:16:24 it can be when it's full of car wrecks of excrement. Oh look at that beautiful turd floating by. Ah the serenity. There are swimming pools in New Zealand which are being terrorized by mystery pooers. This is terrorized. This is terrorism in New Zealand. Yeah it says swimming pool, one is in a place called Middlemarch, but there are a couple who've experienced it and there were three feces incidents in a week so they think it was deliberate. There was one incident where this was in a Invercargill splash palace pool so avoid that. Where there was a huge... I don't know it sounds beautiful. No James, I went and I got thrush. Yeah so this place is full of shit and Andy's vaginal infections. Well it said there was a large amount of human waste deposited into the
Starting point is 00:17:26 deep end so everyone was evacuated and moved to the learners pool and then they were evacuated from that when it was discovered the learners pool was also full of feces. Alright let's move on to our next fact. Okay it's time for fact number... it's time for fact number three and that is Chazinski. Yes my fact is that Desperate Dan stopped eating cow pie because of mad cow disease. He gave up cow pie which is his favorite food so that was really sad. Yeah I think it was in 1996 and sources vary and I can't find the original comic strips but I think he started eating aunt Aggie's vegetable and fish options as a replacement. But the cow pie is he ate so the thing with mad cow disease or CJD is that the danger was eating strange bits of a cow wasn't it and Desperate
Starting point is 00:18:20 Dan did used to eat the whole cow because it had like the horn sticking out and the tail sticking out so I would say if anyone was in danger of contracting it it was probably him. We should say for listeners overseas and things like that who Desperate Dan is just in case people don't know so the Britain's two biggest comics ever called the Beano and the Dandy and the Dandy Starred cover star Desperate Dan who was a cowboy and he was this huge guy and like he did amazing things he had to shave with a blowtorch because he was so tough and he pasted his hair by firing a pistol through it and it's just part of this amazing tradition of really really great comics and really imaginative things. I read these when I was a boy and they're so good. He used to smoke
Starting point is 00:19:05 through a drain pipe he used to use a drain pipe as a cigarette or a pipe I think didn't he and it was a dustbin full of rubbish at the end of it which I think he lit and smoked. He was pretty hardcore. He was. He had a gun he had to give that up as well in the 90s or the 80s for political correctness god mad so I don't know how he parted his hair after that maybe he went for. I think he had a water pistol after that. Okay yeah that makes sense. He sounds a lot better than the guy who was in the first episode of the Beano called Harry Dan and Harry Dan was an old man whose long white beard usually saved the day and in the first episode he used his beard as a sail to win a boat race and you could rescue children from downwells. I'm sure he did. I think I can see why Dennis
Starting point is 00:19:49 the Menace took his took his top spot after a short while. There's amazing factors in there about Dennis the Menace which is that they so there were two Dennis the Menaces one is an American version and then what knows the British version and they were both created in the same year independence of each other they had no idea that they were being published they both have the red and black costume they both were called Dennis the Menace I think it might have even been in the same week I think it was really really yeah and it's often used by people trying to explain coincidences and why they're not surprising that you in a world where infinite things can happen you expect the old coincidence so actually when we discovered that we should have gone well yeah obviously
Starting point is 00:20:26 mad things will happen yes and just move on it's not amazing at all in fact. The other argument about that is that ideas have a time so maybe there was some other children with spiky hair in some other cartoon and other people with red and black and other people called Dennis and the same thing came with calculus when Leibniz and Newton all came up with at the same time it almost did exactly the same time and it's like well was it a weird coincidence or was it just the time for that? Dennis the Menace's dad now has spiky hair in fact the Beano did an extremely exciting reveal a few years ago which was that they showed on one of the bits of comic strip a photograph of Dennis the Menace from the 80s and they had Dennis's dad saying look that's a
Starting point is 00:21:09 picture of me so it transpires that Dennis the Menace is actually now Dennis's dad oh I don't know when the switch happened. Wait they used a photo of Dennis the Menace from the 80s Dennis's dad said that used to be me yeah but there's no plot line where Dennis grows up in the 90s and his father's a son. That's like that is stupid. I'm so angry. Anyway sorry he's changed his hairstyle Dennis the Menace's dad so they've tried to upgrade the Beano to make it more realistic and the case is now that we live in a happier time where parents don't all abuse their children and kids don't all hate their parents and so Dennis's dad is now he has spiky hair and he's a bit cool and groovy he's a little bit like I used to be a rebel too.
Starting point is 00:21:57 Yeah is there an authority figure who's still the enemy though because that was always the thing it was always anarchy you know the bash street kids always like teach was the enemy yeah I think the teachers are still quite bad but um this is cool the guy who draws the bash street kids this is a niche fact now for people who read the beat when they were he's called David Sutherland and he's drawn that comic strip since 1962 53 years he's drawn over 2000 of them well here's a weird one as well Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys so the lead singer of the Pet Shop Boys between 1975 and 1977 he worked as an editor for Marvel UK so his job was to anglicise all of the all the things that were americanised in in the original comic and his main job was to look at
Starting point is 00:22:45 all the points of say like cleavage or two shorter skirts pointing out and then they had to draw over the cleavage and readdress it because we had different indecency laws over here so before Pet Shop Boys he was stopping cleavage from getting into the comic books of there was a big thing in America in the when was it oh it was in the 50s 50s and 60s where they had a censorship of comics they might have even banned it banned them for a while but they definitely censored them and there's a guy called Frederick Wharton who wrote a pamphlet called seduction of the innocence where he complained about all these comics and what they were doing to children and he said that batman and robin were obviously homosexual and porky pig was an open invitation
Starting point is 00:23:25 to buggery now i i i have never got that from the cartoons what was this man's name he was called Frederick Wharton and he was a psychiatrist so he should know actually okay i think there might have been a little bit more going on in the worven brain just just on that subject though with porky pig um they uh there's a very big uh porn website in america called porn hub and they recently looked into the analytics of the most search for words within people go on they put in a word like like um milf was a massive one in a lot of american states stuff like that they found that in nebraska arkansas and tennessee the number one search term was
Starting point is 00:24:10 cartoon another fact in south london it was lolly mold um what what while we're on this um i i read a list of uh characters in the bino okay um and they included um little dead eye dick dick deep down daddy neptune cocky dick wandering willy sticky willy and polywaddley doodle and her great big poodle oh that's amazing so every single one of those is an invitation to buggery if Frederick had been around and open not a private invitation to buggery it's on the billboard in the center of town on facebook it is this is an open event do you guys know what the world's
Starting point is 00:25:10 first comic strip is um bio tapestry uh it's very funny a lot of good comedy in there if you want to see it no i think so i think russia me a comic strip is uh it's a series of cartoons that are sent out to people's homes so the bear tapestry was just in one place you didn't receive it through the letterbox so uh which have speech bubbles and people talking and the first one was made in glasgo and it was the glas well done uh it was the glas go looking glass and it was in the in 1825 it had its first issue and the first comic strip in it was called the history of the coat and it was it was the adventures of a coat going from one owner to the next that's really cool that's really cool yeah um and also it had a lot of heart-hitting satire it had a lot of bitching about the
Starting point is 00:26:02 english in it um even though it was set up by a english guy who'd had to flee london because he was in so much debt so he went to scotland and was obviously like okay cool i like i like these guys he made a thing a comic strip which partly bitched about the english and then he racked up so much gambling and drinking debts in scotland that he had to flee again back to english and so it stopped um do you know who invented the speech bubble oh controversial i've got a theory what's yours my theory is that it's 650 bc and it was the meso americans early central american people are they of super fame or is that meso have i pronounced that right just in case we get letters it does it mess oh all right i don't think any of them are going to write to you now
Starting point is 00:26:53 but they have little speech bubble they have drawings of people and they have these tiny little sort of arrows showing that like to a dagger drawing and it shows that people are slagging each other off in the in the drawings yeah and that is a speech bubble is sort of signifying abuse and do you agree with that anna i do agree with that probably yes uh you know super ted you know that his first language is not in fact english it's welsh what yeah super ted's first language is welsh it's a welsh cartoon and when it first went out it was in welsh and they uh they just dubbed it into english uh we should move on soon have you have you guys got anything else before we do i quite liked the quote from uh you and
Starting point is 00:27:34 kerr who was a uh sorry you won kerr how did i not see that i'm not really doing my job properly i wrote down the name you and kerr i didn't notice i'm so embarrassed yeah so you wanker is a is a top guy at dc tomson which makes the bino and the dandy and uh he was there's an interview with him semi bemoaning how they've had to go a bit politically correct so corporal punishment smoking and racial stereotypes are now taboo it does limit us in a way but we get to be slightly ruder than in the old days a bit more bodily functions instead we know that's what the kids laugh at now the stupid kids not laughing at the racial stereotypes anymore all right let's uh let's move on to our final fact of the night
Starting point is 00:28:33 and that is james harkin okay my fact this week is that the oldest sperm is worm sperm mostly because i just like the cadence of it um but we found some 50 million year old sperm cells not us at the podcast you leave us out of it i was swimming in buxton um yeah 50 million year old sperm cells and they have been found in an an Antarctic worm and they were in a fossilized cocoon so that's because normally so sperm cells are so small and delicate they normally die and they don't get fossilized uh but these ones did get fossilized and they're the oldest ones that we have and they're from worms 50 million years wow sperm had evolved
Starting point is 00:29:24 at that point or is this is this the first proof we've had that it did evolve uh i don't know about that actually but yeah i suppose there was no evidence that they'd that they'd evolved at that stage yeah kind of been does it still function there is a sperm that's worked after um 23 years i think so the world's oldest baby is 23 years old this is an Australian guy who uh got quite ill and he was i think 15 years old at the time and he decided to save his sperm before he was gonna have some kind of operation he survived his problem he uh grew old he got married and then i think the operation that he needed at the point meant that he could no longer produce sperm so he had this sitting there uh from all those years ago and they used that and it worked and so
Starting point is 00:30:11 he has a kid from his from his sperm from when he was 15 it was like frozen in a lab it wasn't just sitting there because you have to freeze it properly don't you have to freeze at a really low temperature like the freezer temperature will not do yes as a man who spends a lot of his time apparently by refrigerating thinking i'm now thinking that lolly mold sounds like a disease it's the touch of lolly molds don't you worry um there are sperm smugglers as well who are freezing sperm smug smuggling is happening in it's not spuggling that's what they should call it isn't they should call it just spuggling or something yeah um so what's with people smuggling sperm like yeah uh bull sperm and uh bull semen no uh this is in prisons uh so people who are in prison who
Starting point is 00:31:02 aren't allowed to have contact with their wives um are smuggling sperm so there's a baby who was born to um regina granato in america in 1999 even though her husband had been in prison since 1987 he was a gang leader um uh gangster and yeah this baby was born because she'd smuggled in a cryogenic sperm freezing kit wow and given it to him and then he'd spurned into it and then she's given it yeah that's that's the that's the verb that's what you do yeah but she smuggled it in because they're not allowed to touch each other so she smuggled in the kit the only people who the prisoners are allowed to touch uh in uh i think it's in pennsylvania are people under the age of eight who were allowed to give their parents a hug so she brought her husband's nephew in and gave him the
Starting point is 00:31:56 cryogenic sperm freezing kit so that he could hug his uncle his uncle could uh slip the kit out from his coat pocket uh i was uh i was googling uh worm and sperm there's a lot of amazing things but they're so disgusting this is a really hard topic to talk about because okay so for example uh there's there's a type of worm a female worm that when after she's been spermed into uh she can then decide that she doesn't like the sperm so then she puts her face into it and sucks out the sperm and just spits it away so wow yeah it's just a kind of worm this is a kind of worm yeah so this worm does it it just goes no i'm not having that and goes in takes sucks it out and so it's got to the point where the sperm i think has evolved now to be a bit savvy to it so
Starting point is 00:32:50 it has this little clinging stuff inside so actually it's like you need to properly suck because it's hanging on because that's amazing yeah it's like an arms race between the two uh sexes in the species yeah yeah because the scaly cricket i think the male scaly cricket has to copulate constantly it can copulate more than 50 times in three hours or something because the female scaly cricket for some evolutionary reason that's beyond us her response when he does copulate into her is to take it out immediately and eat the sperm so it's very rare you slip one through she just goes she thinks you're feeding her wow yeah okay i found a flat worm and buckle up guys it's called macrostomum histrix right and if it is lonely and if it can't find a mate um they're all
Starting point is 00:33:40 hermaphrodites so they have both kinds of genitalia if it's lonely it can stab itself in the head with the sperm-filled hypodermic needle to inseminate itself how we've never seen it doing it but scientists left certain worms on their own and they and they then came back later and they found oh they've got a lot of sperm in their head but how did it get there and it these worms had it sort of injected themselves because they can sort of um fertilize themselves using their using sort of both uh bits of genitalia and yeah and they hatched and they had hatchlings they call that selfing do they do they have selfing sticks um there is a ground louse um that reproduces by slapping one giant sperm onto a female's back
Starting point is 00:34:37 um and its latin name is zyrotypus impolitus you know larger animals tend to have smaller sperm the way the I think the study was done on this really recently to try and work out why and it's quite interesting so um fruit fly sperm is the largest sperm in nature I think an elephant sperm are very small so I think a fruit fly sperm is about a thousand times bigger than an elephant sperm at the top of my head something like that and uh it's because if you're a big animal then the sperm have further to swim and so in order for them to have a chance to succeed you've got to produce more of them to make it more likely that one of them is going to finally get to the egg and if you produce more of them
Starting point is 00:35:22 it takes up more energy so you can't make them as big whereas if you're a little fruit fly it's like the sperm it's easy it's about got about a centimeter to go and so you can produce a few giant sperm oh and um people who are more attractive uh men wise um have worse sperm so men who are attractive to women tend to be men with deeper voices who are a bit more manly who evolution has told us we should be attracted to because they've got more testosterone but actually it's a trade-off so if you fed all your testosterone to building yourself ridiculously large biceps or penis or whatever then you see that room in the gym i mean i assume that's what they were doing
Starting point is 00:36:08 so yeah keep going that's it so that's it so there's too much testosterone going to making lifting weights with your penis or whatever so it's you don't have enough left over to make healthier sperm i find that really surprising i can't believe that testosterone is spent on attractiveness in that sense well i suppose if you're spending on attractiveness then you're going to attract more mates and so there's a higher likelihood that you'll be able to fertilize one of them so it's almost like uh okay well never mind the less attractive people will give you some better sperm instead so that the one mate you finally do manage to seduce you've got a higher chance you leave my wife out of this
Starting point is 00:36:50 well goodness haven't we learned a lot tonight okay that's it that's all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said please don't in this particular episode we could be found on twitter i'm like at schreiberland james at egg shaped andy at lollymold lover at chasimsky you can email podcast at qi.com yeah or you can go to know such thing as a fish dot com all of our previous episodes are there uh thank you so much for listening at home clad's go that was awesome thank you so much

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