No Such Thing As A Fish - 125: No Such Thing As An Upside-Down Grand Prix

Episode Date: August 5, 2016

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss forte-pianos, spring-loaded hairstyles, and the not-so-gentle lemur.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andy Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Andy. My fact is that 18th century hairstyles included The Spaniel's Ears, Mad Dog, and The Drowned Chicken. These are all dudes that you could get.

And do we know what they look like? I haven't been able to find what these ones look like, no, but there are so many insane styles. I suppose we can imagine what a drowned chicken looks like. Yeah. Imagine that would be a desirable hairstyle, some kind of punishment. Yeah, a dog as well. It's bed hair basically, but you're drooling.

Yeah, exactly. The Spaniel's Ears is that hairstyle that you see loads in 18th century paintings where women have their hair flat on top and then curled down the sides. Oh, okay. It looks like you've got Spaniel's Ears. There's also, there were two others around that time called, one was called The Chest of Draws, and the other one was called Sportsman in the Bush. Nice.

What was that? What did that entail? It'd be so fun to, if time travel was ever cracked, go back, not look into what it was and just ask for that sit down and see what you get. That would be such a cool dare for history. So exciting. There were loads of really fancy styles, particularly in France. And I did read a theory that the French Revolution was partly caused by Marie Antoinette's crazy

hair. Okay. So, well, she had a royal hairdresser called Leonard Otey. And he made these incredibly fancy hairdos for her, with a few other people. And the ladies of the court all followed suit. And that led to some of the earliest attacks on Marie Antoinette in pamphlet form. So obviously it wasn't the entire cause, but it was like a symptom, basically. I guess it represented her wealth compared to anyone else's, not wealth.

The most famous is the Coiffure à la Belle Poule, which is a French ship and it had just beaten an English ship very heavily in a battle. And so she got the ship in her hair. Not the actual ship that was in her neck. Yeah, the full thing. Very impressive. Did they shape her hair into the shape of a boat or did they construct it with plywood or what?

What you do is you get your hair and then you put a load of cushions sort of on your scalp and a metal frame and then you can build up your hair around that. And then you put in a load of other hair as well. And then you put in a model of a ship and it had rigging and it had little model sailors on it. And the conversion of this that you can see, which was Elton John's 50th birthday, he went as Marianne Toonette with the ship in a wig. It's huge, ginormous.

And the only reason I know that is I met a prop maker who made the Holy Grail for the Indiana Jones movie. He also made the ship for Elton John's wig. Really? Yeah. And it came with a little pipe that went down into his clothing that every time he pressed, little cannons had little bits of smoke. Shoot out of it.

So it looked like he was shooting cannons. So the thing is, it's apparently it was huge to carry. So just to give an idea of how heavy those things must have been, Elton John realized he couldn't get to the party in a car. He had to go in a removals van. So it's the only way he could get to the party. What? Yeah, it was so heavy and the driver went the wrong way.

So they were stuck in the van for over an hour and a half and he got so frustrated with it. He tried to cancel the party. They did used to have to dismantle their hairstyles when they got into carriages. I think Marianne Toonette used to have someone who would have to take off the top layer of hair so she could fit into a carriage. Well, there's loads of accounts of all this stuff and some of them I think are not true because some of them they only have mid 19th century sources and it's all about the late

18th century. So for example, this is a story that I think is not true because the earliest source I've found is 1862, but there was a guy called Bolaard who allegedly invented a thing called the mechanical coiffure, which when you pressed a spring, it would lower by a foot. If you wanted to get into a carriage, then you press the spring again and it goes up. And it was if you were talking to a grandmother and you wanted to be respectful and not have a crazy head, you could just lower it quickly. I would be really useful if you went to a theme park and you had to be a certain height

to get on the rides. Yeah. I'm speaking of carrying hair around. Obviously, your wig was a massive commodity back in the 18th century. I was reading about hair theft and there's amazing accounts of what happened in the 18th century where people would be walking along and suddenly their hair would just disappear, their wig would just disappear in a crowd. And what they reckon it was were guys who were sort of tall, burly men who were carrying

a butcher's tray over their shoulder that contained a small child inside the butcher's tray. What? And the small child would peek out, quickly grab the hair, the wig, head back into the butcher's tray. So by the time the person turned around, there was just a burly man with a thing on his shoulder. That's because wigs were really expensive. Yeah.

So it wasn't really expensive to get these hairstyles done as well. And so I hadn't quite realized how long they would stay in place. Unless you were Mary Antoinette, who I think asked for a new hairstyle every day, you put it in place and you kept it there for a few weeks. You basically kept it there for as long as it took to go really moldy because the stuff they used to keep it in were things like animal fats, weren't they? So I think they would end up getting really moldy and smelly and you'd get a lot of kind of creatures in your hair who are attracted to the substances you used.

But people would have these hairstyles in for two or three weeks and they just have to sleep with their heads propped up on lots of pillows. Wow. I was reading just a little bit about other fashionable things to be wearing in your hair. There were things like if you're a fun woman, you'd have lots of fake butterflies in your hair to show that you're a fun woman. Apparently wives of officers wore entire squadrons perched on their head to show that they were an officer.

It's not real. Yeah. So not real squadrons. In miniature, I believe. I would have liked to see a woman with a squadron of soldiers in her hair getting into a fight with a woman who had a ship in her hair. I'd like to see little soldiers try and get onto the ship. That would be my target.

But you can't have infantry versus the Navy. I mean, it's just, you can just fight, can't you? You know. I don't know whether there were rules in war. I guess that is true. But if you were a general and you say, OK, there's a ship over there, I'm going to send my infantry in. This is the reason I wasn't allowed into the army.

And Roman brides would have their hair cut into six sections or braided into six sections. And each of the locks had to be separated with a spear that had been used to kill a gladiator. Oh, wow. And for best results, you would still have the blood of the gladiator on the spear. The best results leave in for two and a half minutes and ensure that a dead gladiator's blood is on the tip of your spear. That can't have been every wedding. I think it was very high profile.

High society weddings. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, fair enough. The Puritans, they like short hair, of course. But there was one Puritan called William Prynne. And he said that people who had long, curly hair, like mine, were unlawful, effeminate, vanglorious, evil, odious, immodest, indecent, lascivious, wanton, disillute, hoarish, ungodly, horrid, strange, outlandish, impudent, pernicious, offensive, ridiculous, foolish, childish and

unchristian. I say that as a fair description of you. I don't think you're horish. Everything else stands. So get this. This is very cool. Before hairdryers, electrical hairdryers were invented, what you could have was a stoneware hairdryer.

And it was like a hot water bottle, but for your hair. Right. So you would fill it with boiling water, and then you brush it through your hair, and it allegedly dries it in a few minutes. Pretty clever. Yeah, I guess it would. Like ironing your hair. Have you ever ironed your hair?

No, but I imagine that would dry it quite fast. I am not joking. I used to iron my sister and her friend's hair. We'd get an iron out, and it's very hard because you've got to go quite close to the scalp. I'd burn quite a few scalp because you don't want it to kink when it goes off the edge of the... That's best results, though, is to have a little bit of your own blood through the hair. Yes, that's what I said.

Would you try that on me later so I look a bit less horish? Absolutely. In the 19th century, furniture used to be covered with macassar protectors. So macassar was the popular hair oil that was so widespread that if you invited guest fans, you knew that your furniture would end up covered in it. And so you could buy these special... Yes, and in theatres... Yeah, anti-macassars are called.

Yeah. You know, the little lacy thing on a train seat... Behind your head. Behind your head, yeah. Behind your head. That's because, obviously, when you get on a train, you want to put your macassar on so that you look great when you get to the other end. I didn't know that.

Have you noticed that whenever you get on a train, there's never any macassar on the chair? Yeah. That's due to the anti-macassars. Well, that makes sense now. Everything's falling into place for you now, Dan. I'm so unobserving. The entire world has basically been built around the need to avoid getting macassar everywhere.

My favourite hair in history was the hair of Chief White Eagle. He had the world's strongest hair, and he used to be dangled under an aeroplane by tying his hair to the bottom of an aeroplane. No. Hang on. So it would take off? At what point do we think he discovered that he could do that? Well, he also jumped from planes with his hair attached to parachutes.

That is so cool. So he would let it open, and his hair was the string? Yeah. I think there were also strings. Not the short parachute, presumably. There were longer strings attached to his hair, but his hair was basically the thing attaching him to the parachute. When was this guy active?

I'm not sure. It sounds like he was in a military capacity. He was hanging from planes? He was early 20th century. What military application could that have? All right, chaps. We've got the mission. We need to take out the ship, but we've only got a plane to do it with.

Can we not send in the infantry? Frade not. They all drowned last week. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the 1959 Formula One championship was won on foot. Wow. Start to finish? No.

Not start to finish. So there's a great Australian Formula One driver called Jack Brabham. The story behind it is that he was making this final race that was going to win him the championship. He was on his final lap, victory was in sight, and suddenly he ran out of petrol. The car just came to a total halt, and that should have been the end of the race for him. Instead, he got out and he pushed the car all the way to the finishing line, and he came in fourth place, but that was enough to win him the championship. Jack Brabham is the only person to have won a Formula One race driving one of his own cars.

Yes. Because he later went into making cars and developing them. Right, it's not just his run around, but he used to take them. No, no, no. A little Ford focus that he had, yeah. Yeah, he's kind of one of those characters, so he's an Australian, and he kind of describes when he came over to England in order to start racing for the Formula One, that they treated him as a kind of really backward character from Australia,

and so every single championship that he won, everyone assumed that he was going to lose. So the third one, which he won in his own car, everyone thought he was past his peak, thought he was too old to do it anymore, so he came out to the starting line to his car. He walked out with a fake long beard and a walking stick, and acted like an old man all the way to his car, and then went and won that championship. What a cool guy. Yeah.

One of his cars was called the Brabham BT46, and it had a massive fan on the back of it, and this fan would move the air so that it sucked the car down to the track, and it made it a lot more aerodynamic. And he used it for one race, which he won, but all of the other drivers complained about it, and they said it wasn't fair that he had it, and they didn't, and also that the fan kind of picked up stones off the track

and shot them at the following cars, and then after the first race, he agreed he would never use it again, even though it wasn't technically against the rules. Already? Good sport. So this is the thing. The formula in Formula One is the set of rules that all drivers have to stick to, and I found a friend of mine, my friend Max Ferman, works at McLaren,

and what he said, this is so cool, is that basically the whole aim is to create downward force on the car, so they're all built like the opposite of a plane's wing, which is designed to lift you up. You have to get it as low as possible to make it as aerodynamic as possible, and above a certain speed, the cars are so good at creating the downward force that they could drive upside down along the ceiling of a tunnel. That is crazy.

Why are they not doing that? Yeah. Why have we not seen that? We would be watching Formula One, many more of us, if that was an aspect of it. And there's a new Mario Kart that does that kind of stuff, and yeah, it's very exciting. So you're saying the idea is already there? Well, I'm saying we've seen the future.

We've seen what it looks like. It does work. The transition from Mario Kart to Mario Kart ceiling works. But yeah, why are we not doing it? I don't know. Well, I guess it's probably not very safe. It's probably not very safe. It does work, but then what happens if you hit a stone

and you suddenly lose a bit of downforce? It's true. The downward force, and generally the pressure applied to Formula One drivers, is very extreme, obviously. So the force when it's at its maximum is about five times their normal weight of force on their bodies. And that means that the exercise that they have to do most frequently is on their neck.

If you're a Formula One driver, the thing you focus on constantly is on neck exercises. So they have all these ways of making sure that they are able to take this kind of pressure. I think there's a particular Formula One helmet that one of the trainers designed, which is surrounded by pulleys. And so the driver wears the helmet, and then his trainer pulls all the pulleys in various directions. And the driver has to practice kind of counterbalancing that with the force of his neck. They should just walk around with a massive ship on their heads.

It is amazing though. I would assume that the training would be just getting a car and drive around the track. That was my assumption. But you read about the training that all these Formula One guys have to do. And it's a mixture of skiing. It's a mixture of swimming. Well, you never know if your car runs out of petrol on the slopes of that. The other thing I didn't know is that they change gear constantly

about up to 4,000 times the race. Really? Yeah, I just thought they sat there and put their foot down. They're constantly changing gear. It's once every 1.3 seconds in the Canadian Grand Prix. No. How annoying must that be? And the actual change of gear is 50 times faster than you can blink.

That is better than your standard manual car gear change. Have you ever seen the wheel? The actual steering wheels these days. Yeah, it's like a console. It's like a console. Yeah, there's about 70 buttons on it. And little knobs that they just turn and... Do you know the best button?

No. It's the button to deliver drinks. The ejector seat. It's none the ejector seat. It's deliver drink to my mouth now. You're kidding? They've all got a little tube going into their mouth and they have a button where they press and it delivers them a drink.

When you just said deliver drink to my mouth now, that sounded like Anna in a bar. Yeah. And where can I get one of these little console things? I don't think Whiskey's in it. I think they can probably fill it with whatever they like. They probably don't fill it with Whiskey though. So one guy who probably would have liked this

was a motor racing driver called Duncan Hamilton. So in 1953 he was in the Le Mans 24 hour race, but in qualifying he had the same number as another car and got disqualified for having the same number as another car. How did that happen? Well, just an admin problem, I guess. That's a real pain in the arse. Anyway, so they went out in the town in Le Mans

and got absolutely shitfaced. And then the organisers during this time thought, actually that is quite harsh. Let's let them back in. So his bosses went to the bar to try and find him and he's kind of slumped over a bar somewhere and they're like, come on, come on, we've got to do the race. And he's like, well, I'm not sure I'm okay to do this.

And they're like, no, no, come on, come on, come on. And so he took part, absolutely, driving the Le Mans 24 hour. This is in 1953. And every pit stop, the crew started giving him coffee to try and sober him up. And then after about, you know, a dozen of these pit stops, he said, no, stop giving me coffee because it's making me shake.

And so instead they started giving him more brandy. Very clever. Stopping from shaking. And sure enough, he won the race. Whoa! That's incredible. That is, we do not condone that, by the way, on this podcast, on the normal roads, but wow.

Here's the thing. So that's the wheels, right? Have you heard about their helmets and how good they are? Because they're unbelievably, because they have to experience severe impacts without buckling. So they have to withstand a flame, a huge torch of flame for 45 seconds without it getting unbearably hot inside.

So they're testing that way. Imagine the work experience guy and he's like, what am I doing today? Well, just put this helmet on. Oh, is it the fun drinking one? I'm afraid not today. I love Bernie Eccleston's ideas to improve Formula One. He always comes up with like,

I think they're just sound bites, but they're usually pretty funny. Oh, really? So one of them was that he said that they should have fake rainstorms halfway through each race. He's like, why rely on the weather? Why don't we just, for 20 minutes, put sprinklers on all the tracks so there's a fake rainstorm?

Yeah. What to make it fair? It adds a bit of unpredictability to it because in Formula One, often, I think it's just people driving around struggling to overtake each other. He's suggesting making it unpredictable by ensuring that the same thing happens in every race.

Yes, but you never know when it's going to happen. Oh, wow. So it'd be, oh, cool. Yeah, and maybe you would give the teams like 10 minutes head start. It's like, it's going to rain in 10 minutes and everyone's like, oh no, not again. Did he say anything about maybe there being a section

in every race where the floor suddenly disappears and you need to ride the roof in order to get? No, but I'm sure if he's listening. Do you know, they have to test wet tyres, obviously, the wet weather tyres. Oh, the tyres are so cool. They can clear 60 litres of water away from the tyres in one second.

Wow. That's how fast they're going and how much water they're coming into contact with. Isn't that amazing? And they're full of nitrogen, aren't they, rather than normal air? Are they? I think so.

Because if you put normal air in, then you're more likely to get water vapour and the water vapour, when the tyre heats up, can kind of do unpredictable things. But if you have nitrogen, very inert, it'll be absolutely fine. So that's something they have in common with crisp packets, which are also full of nitrogen.

Instead of air, because air will make the crisps go off, because the oxygen will react with the crisps, nitrogen isn't in gas, doesn't affect the crisps and Formula One tyres. So, Bernie, another tip for a possible challenge in the race, you have to have at least one tyre made of a crisp packet. And then the driver can just press a button on his wheel, which says, deliver crisps to my mouth.

OK, it's time for fact number three, and that's James. OK, my fact this week is that the earliest known mention of the Balalaika is of someone being arrested for playing one. When was this? OK, this was in 1688. Oh, wow, they're that old? Oh, yeah, probably older, but this is the first mention of them.

And this was two peasants who were called Savka Fyodorov, and Ivashko Dmitriev, who ran up to a gate, antagonised the guard while singing and playing the Balalaika, and then got arrested. Oh, really? Wow, imagine if those two guys could know that more than 300 years after this event, people in the future will be talking about it,

and making fun of them. The next mention was in 1700, and there were two coachmen who were chased by the servant of the magistrate and beaten with their own Balalaika. Oh, wow. Are they very solid or would they smash? They've got corners, haven't they?

Yeah, they're triangular. So a Balalaika is a stringed musical instrument, a bit like a guitar from Russia, which has got a triangular bass, and the triangular bass is supposed to give it a slightly different timbre and a slightly different sound to normal instruments. So why does everyone hate people

who are using Balalaikas in the early days? Well, I think it was a protest instrument. In the olden days in Russia, they didn't like people playing music in general. The Russian Orthodox Church really basically said you shouldn't be playing any instruments, and so what they would do is, if they caught you playing a Balalaika,

they'd basically steal it off you and then crush it and just burn it or whatever, and then people would just remake them because actually they were really easy to make, and that's one theory why you have these triangular basses, because a triangular guitar is easier to make than a round one, and so that's one theory as to why Balalaikas are triangular.

It's the same as with derrily cheese. It's just easier to make the cheese in triangle. Also, I hated by the Russian Orthodox Church. Absolutely, yeah. You know that June 23rd is International Balalaika Day. Yeah, I did read that, but then I'd never heard of it being an international citizen, and I asked two Russians,

if those have heard of it either. Well, the sentence was right after saying that it's International Balalaika Day. Also said, no one cares. It's just a day that no one cares about. Every day is International Day of about 20 things that no one cares about, isn't it? It's true, yeah.

Just on the fact that they were a rebellion instrument, I, through this fact, learned about this group of people that I'd never heard of before, but who sound really interesting, called scomerocks, and they were the people who were most associated with playing the balalaika, I think, traditionally in Russia. And so, this is one of the reasons

the government didn't like the instrument, because scomerocks were these gestures, actors, singers, and their whole modus operandi was really going around and satirizing the church and state. And they sound great, and they seemed to go on for a couple of hundred years, just going from town to town,

performing and taking the piss out of the government and the church. Yeah, often exposing themselves at festivals. That's one reason they were not liked. Because they were just... I think the word might come from the same root as scaramouche, which was the character in Comedia dell'arte.

And they were basically just... Is that guy from that Queen's song as well? Yeah, but he is. Is he literally like that? That's where they got the word from, yeah. And these were basically just... peasants would have parties like this, and they did it all over Europe, not just in Russia,

not just in Italy, but everywhere. It's sort of odd that they all had the same instrument, because if I was a scomerock, I'd turn up with something different, like a piano or a violin. But then I'd reveal, actually, I'm still here to make fun of you. I think it's an odd...

Pianos, of course, yet to be invented. Well, wasn't the predecessor to the piano forte called the forte piano? Oh, yeah. Was it? Yeah. Was it just an upside-down piano? You had to play it upside down in a tunnel while going

150 miles an hour. So, piano is short for piano forte, which means quiet, loud. And what they were looking for was a percussion instrument which could make quiet noises and loud noises at the same time like a guitar could, because all the other ones, like harpsichords and an organ,

you can really only kind of play loud for an organ and play it for a harpsichord. Yeah, very boring music. I was just thinking, just like the Formula One thing, if we think of that technology, wouldn't it be cool if there was an extra key on the piano that the pianist could play,

and it delivers a bit of drink to them as they're playing on the charters? This is an old joke, but I genuinely heard you just say, wouldn't it be cool if there was an extra key on a piano that a pianist could play? I heard that. I heard that. If you're playing at both ends of the piano, really low notes and really high notes,

but you need to play at middle notes. Didn't Mozart sometimes play with his knees? Did he? I could have swung. There's pedals that were knee-operated. And I think Mozart played one of them once. Just on Balalaikas, there seems to be a rumour in a lot of Russian media

that Balalaikas have been banned in the US, which is a totally unfounded rumour, and I'm not sure where it came from. So a lot of Russian people complain that the US has completely banned Balalaikas, which is not the case. I think it's not an extremely common fallacy, but I think it comes up on news articles

every now and then. Every international Balalaika day, that's not the fact yet. I did read a debunk of it, which pointed out, no, they're not banned. They've never been banned. It's just that there's no market for Balalaikas in the USA. Do you know instruments are banned on television in Iran?

Which I didn't know at all. So you can't show musical instruments on state TV. And there have been a couple of occasions, I think, where TV channels have accidentally contravened this rule. So there was one where someone started singing on Iranian TV, and then

they began to play the piano. But as soon as they started playing the piano, they had to cut off the program. He was playing it with his penis. If you have an orchestra shown, then only the singer can be in front of a curtain. And then the rest of the orchestra and all the players are behind the curtain.

It's really interesting because it's thought to be some sheer clerics think that it's an act that's forbidden by Islamic law to show musical instruments in public. Another weird instrument that was invented by a Russian Theramen. So the way you play it is it has antenna which sends the vibrations of your hand

so you don't touch the instrument while playing it. You can be sort of a decent distance away, can't you? And your right hand controls the pitch, so your right hand is controlling the notes that you play, and your left hand controls the volume. And it's rigged up to know this, this instrument. And it sounds really lovely. It sounds kind of like a very high-pitched violin

almost like a human voice. Like a lot of instruments, it sounds lovely if you know how to play it. I imagine if I just started waving at one, it would be worse than you'd ever heard. It would be banned immediately. Have you seen the badgermen? It's a Theramen crossed with a stuffed badger.

OK, sure. It's not in mass production. I think there may only be one of these things. Why did you see it? I saw it on the internet. Theramen was an amazing guy. He invented a load of really cool stuff. He invented a technique

called interlace which improves the quality of a TV signal, which is still used in TVs today. Wow. It stops it from flickering. He also invented a thing called the thing. And it was a it was a seal, an American seal.

Not an animal seal, but a seal of the United States. And there was a eavesdropping device inside it. And it hung for seven years in plain view on the US ambassador's Moscow office. And they managed to listen into everything

that was said for seven years until it was accidentally discovered by some British guy, I think. But this technology that he used in it was amazing. It's called RFID Radio Frequency Identification. And it's the kind of stuff you use in oyster cards or contactless

or say you have a key card to get into a hotel room. It's that technology which he invented. Oh wow. It was originally used for spy. Eventually he vanished, didn't he? It was invented by the Soviets one night in 1938.

Really? Never returned. Didn't realize he brought one of the instruments along, James. What did you think this patchy was next time? OK, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is Chizinsky. My fact this week is that lemurs and lorises like their liquor are as strong as possible.

And this is from a new study that's just been done. And it was a study that was done on the slow loris and the II lemur. And they found that if you give them a range of alcoholic drinks that differ in their alcohol content they always go for the strongest one.

And in fact they'll have twice as much of the strong alcohol as the rest. Do you feel an affinity to these animals Anna? I always did. The slow loris is so adorable and say the same about me. It's about 5% is the highest. So it's like getting stellar instead of carling.

Precisely. There's just the more alcohol the better. And we don't know why because you would have thought it would put you at a disadvantage because once you get drunk then your motor responses are damaged and your concentration isn't as good and you would have thought you're easy prey.

But on the other hand then you get calories from alcohol. So it seems like they've developed a tolerance for alcohol over the years. Yeah, they don't get that drunk do they? They certainly didn't in this experiment, no. It's interesting how many animals like alcohol, which even insects, I was reading a report

about entomologists often use beer as bait for moths and butterflies when they want to catch them for something. Yeah, fruit flies love alcohol as well. Fruit flies go nuts for it and they actively get regularly drink until they're drunk and they'll be

wobbling around and they won't be able to fly properly. I did read an article about them though that said that males who have not mated are more likely to get drunk than the males who have mated in fruit flies. It's certainly true in my experience. If males who have been rejected, they drown their sorrows.

Yeah, alright, alright. Let's not go on about it. And also fruit flies that get drunk but they massively lower their standards so when they're mating they'll suddenly mate with anything. So as soon as a fruit fly gets a bit pissed it starts trying to mate with fruit flies of its own sex. Can we just move on from this?

So the slow loris is just about the only venomous mammal. As in it bites you and it transfers venom to you as opposed to poisonous where if you eat it you get poisoned. So it's really odd though because it keeps its venom

in an elbow patch and to poison you it has to lick the inside of its elbow where it's got these glands and it secretes the poison from there and then it's got the venom in its mouth and then it swills it round in its mouth with its own saliva and that activates the venom making it really dangerous.

They've only killed one person documented in medical literature. And that was someone who went into anaphylaxis, wasn't it? Yeah, exactly. And there are all these videos of them online being tickled and it's supposedly really adorable. What they're actually doing is lifting up their arms to try and get to their venom glands. Well what I was going to say, if you're going to put

a venom gland anywhere don't put it on your elbow which is famously the bit that's hardest to lift in the whole body. It's a really good point. That sounds like a funny joke from God. The slow Loris' expense. Do you know the gentle lemur is one of the most aggressive lemurs there is?

No. It's weird. It's based on a weird etymological thing where it looked a little bit like a marmoset whose name was hapali and hapali means gentle and so it was called the gentle lemur. That's a complete bastard. In captivity

they're really vicious. What do they do? What levels of viciousness? They'll key your car. You love to go near your car, they'll key it. It'll just be rude online. Finishing points. Trolling. Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shryerland, Andy at Andrew Hunter M, James at Eggshaped and Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account which is at qipodcast or go to no such thing as a fish.com where we have all of our previous episodes. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye. You