No Such Thing As A Fish - 130: No Such Thing As Train Jam

Episode Date: September 10, 2016

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss toe wrestling championships, the ghost of Arthur Conan Doyle, and trains armed with lasers.

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 Treiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Chizinski, and James Harkin, 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 my facts, my fact this week is that on July the 13th, 1930, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle headlined a show at the Royal Albert Hall despite having died six days before.

Did he get booed? You couldn't be booed off stage, could you? You mean died in a physical sense, not died in had a really bad gig sense. Yeah, so basically what happened is that six days previous Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had actually died, and his family were very spiritual, and they knew that they were going to be reunited with him in some way, and they thought, why don't we put on effectively a family reunion gig at the Royal Albert Hall, and they did it as a partial memorial as well, so it was billed as a memorial, however, the star bill at the top was that there was going to be

a clairvoyant coming along, there was going to be an empty chair on the stage at the Royal Albert Hall, and his spirit would be summoned to give a message to say, it's all good, I'm on the other side. And it was, right? It came, it rocked up. It showed up, six and six thousand people came to see it as well, six thousand people crowded the Albert Hall, some numbers put it up at ten thousand, but apparently it doesn't seat that many, or stand that many.

If you fit ghosts in, presumably it's got a theoretically infinite capacity. No, I don't want to be captain skeptical, Anna, but what do you mean he turned up? Oh, well we have recorded evidence that he turned up. What I read about it is that the medium Estelle Roberts claimed that she'd seen Doyle sitting in his chair, and she conveyed a message from him, but apparently only his wife heard it, and everyone else was overpowered from a massive blast on the organ that was playing. It was an oddly-typed blast of organ, to mean that no one else could hear what was being said.

Was anyone playing the organ, or was it an organ played by a ghost? There was an organist build on the actual playbill, so yeah, it was just the organist being an idiot. No, I think the idea is that they wanted to keep the message in the end a bit private, and so they did that. It's really odd, the total moment that everyone waited like two hours for. Yeah, it's absolutely bizarre that they try and cover up the clear words of Arthur Conan Doyle speaking from Beyond the Grave.

Just quickly, the medium, Estelle Roberts, she had a spirit that she used to talk to called Red Cloud, who's a Native American. He wrongly predicted that World War II wouldn't happen, and that it would all be fine. She said that, and then obviously he was wrong. But they did manage to catch him on photo once or twice, but it turned out always to look exactly like her wearing a hat. We had to predict that World War II won't happen, so how would a very specific, unnecessary specific prediction?

I think a lot of people predicting it might happen, and Red Cloud was like, no, it'll be fine. Conan Doyle's spirit guide said the opposite. So Conan Doyle and his wife, Jean, they had their home in Sussex, they had a spirit guide called Phineas, who, I'm quoting here, regularly predicted global catastrophe, and he also advised them on when they should move house and things like this. Supposedly, on one occasion, Jean asked the local station master to reschedule a train that Arthur was going to take, because her spirit guide had said it'll be better if the

trains moved, actually. I think it might have fitted with her diary. Did they reschedule it? I don't know. Because he was a popular man. You never know. Yeah, maybe. But he was a doctor before he became a writer, and he had almost zero patients.

His first one, when he set up in Portsmouth, was a man who walked in, and so Conan Doyle said, oh, come in, come in, really excitedly, showed him straight into his consultation room, sat him down and said, I can tell already by the way you're coughing that you've got some bronchial problems. And the man said, no, sorry, I'm just coughing, because I'm a bit nervous. I'm here to collect the gas bill that the previous tenant didn't pay off. And thus the Holmes method was born. So Conan Doyle very famously believed in fairies, and he believed in contacting the dead, and

all of his family were very much a part of the same belief system. There was a Time Magazine article that was published on the 21st of July. It was basically reviewing the gig, but it was also giving the background and the lead up to it. So they said that when Conan Doyle died, these are the words in the article, Sir Arthur's family cheerfully buried him, because they were like, well, we'll see him in a few days anyway, so that'll be fine. And it was really interesting in the period between the gig happening, they got lots of

messages from people saying that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had got in contact and left them messages. And the Sun said, we believe the people that they're not lying, that spirits got in contact, but their spirits themselves are pranksters on the other side, and people are like, what do you mean? It's like there are prankster spirits who are pretending to be Conan Doyle, and it's not our dad. It's just someone else.

I think this is quite a pervasive thought for people who believe in seances and about spirits. There are a lot of pranksters. There's a really excellent book by Hilary Mantel, one of her earlier books called Beyond Black, where the idea is that seances are all haunted by these bastard pranksters who are always just throwing shit at you and pretending to be your dead mum and then biting you in the face and stuff. But you would only really need one ghost to exist, and he could do the voices, if it

was like a John Cullshaw ghost or something, who could do the voices of all the dead people who are ever there, if there's just one prankster. So the thing about the medium is getting it wrong. This was a huge part of the relationship between Doyle and Houdini, Harry Houdini, the escapologist. They were friends, and Doyle believed, and Houdini didn't. And Houdini spent a lot of his time cheerfully unmasking fraudulent mediums. And then Doyle talked Houdini into going to a seance, because Doyle's wife was a medium. And she said, Houdini, I've got great news, I'm in contact with your mother, who's died.

And they talked him into it, and then he went along. And then Houdini's mum wrote a 15-page message to Houdini. Unfortunately, it was in perfect English, whereas Houdini's mum spoke almost no English. And it opened. And it started with the sign of the cross, and Houdini's mother was married to a rabbi. And it was just, yeah. It wasn't very well done. It wasn't very well done.

And that did break up their friendship, really, didn't it? Completely. Which is a shame, because they had one of these very good sparring relationships, where Houdini was constantly trying to convince Conan Doyle that he wasn't magic, and Conan Doyle was constantly trying to tell Houdini that Houdini was magic. And then they sort of really fell out over this. So you just properly didn't believe him that these were tricks? Yeah, he kept saying, Harry, honestly, you've got amazing powers.

Embrace it. And Houdini's going, no, this is how I do it. But yeah, he called Conan Doyle's beliefs hogwash and applesauce, which I enjoy his insults. Before he was an escapologist, he was the wild man, and he would live in a cage and eat pieces of meat. What's he? Yeah.

He and his wife were absolutely broke, and they had to do anything they could to get work. So that was one of the acts that he had. Oh, my God. Would he then break out of the cage using type-ins? No. That was the thing. No.

Oh, my God. So have you heard of Marjorie Crandon? No. She's one of the best ever fraudulent mediums, and Houdini had this huge vendetta against her. She performed very scantily clad, and on one occasion, supposedly, she emitted ectoplasm from her vagina. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. That's kind of what happened. Yeah. Well, was she embarrassed by that? Or could she? I don't think so. Usually, it comes from your ear or your nostril, right? Well, it basically comes from anywhere you hide it.

Yes. So you get a load of ectoplasm, and it's made out of egg whites and wood chip or whatever, and you hide it in your various orifices around your body, and then it comes out of there. Wood chip? And so I think it's made of wood chip, isn't it? Like sawdust. Sawdust. Really?

Yeah. Butch was awful, which she was pulling out of. I mean, it's... I'm imagining Butch was awful. It's like in testines. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you would pull flags out of a top hat or something. Yes.

Did she do that? If you replace the flags with lamb's intestines and the top hat with a vagina. That's exactly... I'm never booking that lady for my children's party again. So yeah, so Houdini cancelled his own shows to travel across the country to attend her séances and try to debunk her. I found a really cool séance thing. The connection between Alcoholics Anonymous and séances.

So Bill Wilson, who's the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, he was massively into séances. He used to go to them all the time, and he had in his own house, he had a spook room, and the spook room is where he would go into, and that's where he'd chat to spirits. And actually, he claimed that the famous 12 Steps that Alcoholics Anonymous has, he actually... He wrote this in his autobiography as well, that he got led to creating that as an idea because he was talking to a 15th century monk called Boniface. Oh yeah. Is that Boniface?

Yeah, St. Boniface. And that's why Step No. 7 of the 12 is... Yeah, so he... And so it was the idea of sitting around in a room, around a table, and sharing things, and that led to a very similar situation for Alcoholics Anonymous. Really? I didn't know that. Do you know who named Ouija Boards?

Parker Brothers? No, Ouija Boards named Ouija Boards. So Ouija Boards were... They became quite popular. Seance became very popular in the 19th century, and people started using something like a Ouija Board in about the 1880s, but it didn't have a name, and about four investors got together in 1890 and decided, you know, they had to find out a name for the Ouija Boards. So they called it one of their spiritualist sisters, and they gathered around it,

and they asked the Ouija Boards, what do you want to be called? And it spelled out Ouija. The fact that it's also the words for yes in French and German. No, that really is irrelevant, I think. I think that's a myth. No, you're right, Anna, your theory's much better. So the truth was that the woman, the spiritualist, who said that the board had spoken to her, was wearing a locket at the time, a picture of a woman who was called Ouija.

So it's thought that she got the idea from that. I've never done a Ouija Board. I've never done any of this stuff. That's too scary. That's not quite the reason I haven't done it. They used to use Ouija Boards for contacting alive people, mostly, didn't they? During World War I, I think, they were used to contact soldiers on the front. So families would say, how's it going over there?

And then the soldier would supposedly talk to them. Were they not rumbled when their sons came home from war, and their mum was like, how dare you speak to me like you did last year? Mum, you've lost it. I believe you've flung all that ectoplasm across the room. I didn't even know you had a vagina. MUSIC OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chuzinski.

My fact is that Dutch trains are fitted with lasers to fire at leaves on the line. That is amazing. Is it how I imagine, so it's like... I'm imagining actually a steam train at the moment, but it's got a massive laser on the front, and it's firing like green lasers at, and then kind of vaporising them. Yeah, it's just like that. It's got a giant pair of eyes shooting lasers 100 metres ahead.

No, it hasn't. Sorry, guys. They're a little bit smaller than that. It's definitely the same principle, but they're tiny little lasers that are attached to the wheels, and they just shoot and vaporise leaves on the track just in front of the wheels. So they're quite small, but this is still in trial stage, I think, and it started in 2014. And it's because leaves on the line, it's a massive problem,

and it's just a more efficient way of cleaning them up. So other ways of getting leaves off the line, like jets of water or jets of sand cause a bit of damage to the line, and because lasers have a really tiny wavelength, they get absorbed by the leaves, but the rails are completely unaffected by them. So you can fire a laser at a rail forever and ever, and nothing will happen.

I think the first time they started investigating this method was in 1999. Yes. And the original laser burned at 5000 degrees Celsius 25,000 times a second, but the vibrations of the train meant that it wasn't accurate enough. So that was one of the problems at first. It was just killing randomly. And after thousands of deaths,

they decided to rethink. No leaves killed. Trees prospered as humanity perished. So the guy who came up with this idea was a man called Malcolm Higgins, who was a Royal Navy Lieutenant Commander, no experience in lasers and no experience in trains. No, because he was in the Navy.

Don't use him that much on ships. And he was just into the radio one day, I think, and thought, leaves are the line. I bet I know what could fix that, a laser. And he looked into it and set up this company called Laser Thor, and it turns out it is better than the other methods in a lot of ways, but you're right, because of the slight wobble of trains, the lasers sometimes misfire,

whereas if you fire a jet of water, it just gets anything that's in its way. In the Dutch version. And so it seems like it's working like a dream. We haven't said why leaves online are a bad thing. Yeah, they are. No, why? Oh, why?

Right, so they turn into a black mulch, don't they? Sorry, Andy wanted to say why. I thought you were asking me, but you just wanted to show off that you knew. Sorry, forgive me for bringing you back to the same. Go on. If I could showboat for a second, I could read out a fact.

Yep, no, check the stage. So what happens is, when you've got a leaf on the line, the previous train goes over it and crushes it, the leaves release a thing called pectin, which is the stuff that the food industry uses as a gel to make jams and jellies.

So that's what happens. So it means it slows down the deceleration of the train, so basically the train can't break very effectively and that's dangerous, so they have to go much more slowly. So what happens is, when you're driving by lasers of the leaves, is going to reduce the quantities of jam

available to us. I think that jam companies don't principally source their jam from railway lines. The jam harvest every year is little children running along railway lines scooping up the lot. On the supermarket show,

you've got strawberry raspberry train. So they are a huge problem and I do feel bad for things like Network Rail where 4.5 million hours of passenger delays roughly a year are caused by leaves on the rails. The cost of repairing tracks because of leaf issues or repairing trains is 10 million a year

and then another 5 million for the vegetation management. And the only reason they were there in the first place is because people who were building railways wanted to protect people who lived nearby from the sound, so they planted lots of trees next to them and turns out that was a real ball ache. You know, these aren't the only lasers

that are used on trains. This is a train that shoots out lasers that we have in the UK. It's called the Flying Banana. This is an Arthur Conan Doyle hallucination. This is real. It goes all the way up and down the UK rail networks and what it's doing is checking the quality

so using lasers and cameras of the tracks. They're making sure that the tracks are just still as strong, still as good. Why do they call it the Flying Banana? Because it's yellow. Oh, okay. So it looks a bit like a banana. And they mean flying and going quickly

rather than actually flying. Sounds like a flying banana to me. Exactly. Do we know if it's curved? We don't know. I know it won't be because how would it go in the tracks? The one thing about trains is they have to be straight. You can put a banana on wheels. It's only the wheels that need to be straight, James.

That's true. If you put a big enough axle and gauge on a standard banana, you could have a train that was just a banana on wheels. Yeah, I agree with that. But on the other hand, if you're checking the rail, you really want it to be pretty much the size

and shape of a train. You're too small as well. You don't get bananas the size of trains. I'm going to take the example from the Navy man and I'm going to set up a company. I should say the real name of that train is the New Measurement Train. I can see why they had to come up

with a nickname for it. So it checks strength in the joints and overhead cables. It's the maintenance train, basically. Do you know what the fastest train ever in North America was? It was called the M497 Black Beetle. It was basically a normal train

that they put two jet engines on and fired it down the tracks. Cheating. Well, it is. But for a while, it was thought that this might be the future and they did it in Russia and they did it in America. But the problem was, basically, if they crashed, everyone died.

Yeah. So it was incredibly dangerous but they did go really fast and they do technically work. Isn't that how all trains work, that if they crash, everyone dies? No. Do you think everyone's died

in every single train crash? I always make sure to get off before the last stop because I assume it just goes into a wall. Well, we've talked about the phrase, haven't we, getting off at Gateshead. Getting off at Gateshead is a slang because Gateshead is the second last stop on the line

before Newcastle. I thought it was for premature ejaculation. I think that's being thrown off the train at Gateshead, whether you want to leave it or not. LAUGHTER Oh, wait. Sorry, go on. I should just finish off this. Basically, the reason is

because you've got two massive engines on and it's going so fast and there's a lot of fuel and any kind of accident is going to be pretty fatal. Should we do some stuff quickly on lasers? Do you know what the world's largest laser is? No.

The world's biggest laser was made in Osaka University in Japan and it has the power of 2,000 trillion watts. That's two Peter watts. It's a very short amount of time that it does it and that's a billion times more powerful than floodlights in a football stadium.

It's about the same as all the power that the sun gives to London every year. Whoa! And what they do with that is they fire it for a very small amount of time on some matter and it turns it into plasma and plasma is what we think

it's a state of matter and it's what we think 99% of everything in the universe is made out of but we can't really make it on Earth because it's quite hard to make unless you use this massive laser. So we're just trying to turn the remaining 1% into plasma as well. The more desperate 1%

it's still clinging on. That's very cool. Can I tell you about my favorite laser out there? It doesn't exist yet. It's been proposed but I would love it if this was made. So there's a lot of debate about the fact that we're transmitting stuff into space and people like Stephen Hawking

has said, let's stop trying to tell any potential life out there that we're here because they might use us as a resource. It's oddly, it appears in the news a lot that we've just been seeing Independence Day 2. It does make sense because of all the life forms in the universe, let's assume there are others

it's pretty unlikely we're going to be the smartest and you know what happens when smarter so-called communities reach less smart communities. The less smart ones get pushed around. I personally experience it every week on this podcast. So two astronomers at Columbia University have taken this seriously and they've developed

the idea of two lasers that we would put out into space and what we would do is we would blast a continuous 30 megawatt laser for about 10 hours once a year and what that would do is it would cloak us into invisibility from any outside planet so we're looking for light emitting

and whatever it is that you look for, it's like an invisibility shield and it wouldn't use that much energy, it would only use about 70 American homes worth of energy for that one 10 hour blast for a year. So just 70 families in America just have to do without television now that's surely that wouldn't work.

What would these aliens think? They've managed to see all the way over to where we are but there doesn't seem to be a planet there despite the fact that all the gravity of all the other planets seems to say that there is a planet there. Suddenly their episode of friends just cuts out I suppose there's nobody there

I must have cancelled it I think if they're smart enough to get to kind of look over here then they're smart enough to realise that that was a trick. That's true unless they haven't spotted us yet. I thought you were going to say two big lasers one saying piss and the other saying off.

Okay it is time for fact number three and that is Andrew Hunter Murray My fact is that to avoid catching malaria you should carry a chicken with you at all times a live chicken it can't be a KFC bucket Are you sure?

Is it because it's something to do with molecules that it gives off? Yeah so there have been some scientists from Ethiopia and Sweden who've been doing trials on this and they're preparing more trials at the moment they did experiments where they suspended a live chicken in a cage near people sleeping

under a bed net Did they warn the people sleeping or did those people wake up in the morning and freak out? They warned them So it's a particular kind of malaria or mosquitoes Anopheles Arabiensis and it's been discovered they avoid chickens

and so the scientists are working on extracting the chemicals from the chickens which give off the chickeny smell and then you'll just be able to spray this around and you won't get malaria which is cute And then you'll smell of delicious chickens Then people will start eating you instead worse

So this is about how great chickens are and all the things they do for us that we don't give them credit for That's incredible Do you know you get some chickens which are half male and half female Really? And they're split down the middle All the cells on the left hand side

are male and all the cells on the right hand side are female So they have coxcombs on one side and sort of big fighting spurs that male cox have and on the right they have much daintier more hen-like features So do they lay

half eggs? I don't know That's an amazing question Great If you're not really hungry They could just eat half an egg They look different Their plumage is completely different

It's amazing They're called bilateral gynandromorphs I think you get them in butterflies I've seen them in butterflies as well So half of them look like they're one colour and half of them look like another colour I think chickens can change their sex I remember hearing about a fighting cock

once who was a female and then changed their sex half way through or the other way around But then all the it was the other way around because then all the cox would see this and think oh well this is going to be easy

but actually she had all the aggression of a male cock and were just absolutely killed So it turns out you should pit a fighting hen against a fighting cock Yeah but they just don't have that kind of aggression They're just like hens Another possible cure for malaria or sorry not a cure for malaria

a malaria prevention trick is spiders So there's a spider that prays specifically on the anopheles mosquito which is the jumping spider and it's been found that they're attracted to smelly socks or smelly human clothes like smelly underwear and so there's a thought that you could leave

your smelly clothes just not wash your clothes leave them in your house attract jumping spiders into your house and by having them there and instead you'll just be infested with spiders Wow that's amazing Isn't that interesting because they used to eat spiders webs to get rid of malaria which presumably didn't work at all

Yeah I don't think so They used to give you tablets full of spiders webs and you would take those and they would help and there was another thing that you would carry around wall nuts I think empty wall nuts with little spiders inside them and that would supposedly stop the malaria from getting you

Of course none of these works in the 20th century in Italy they thought the thing would go for the very early 20th century they thought the mosquito would bite the wall nut or the spider inside it and also I read that around the same time in Italy a doctor would sew

a live millipede into the clothes of the sufferer without telling the sufferer and that would also stop them from getting malaria somehow So people walking around with live millipedes in their clothes have no idea Did you know that you can and Japanese students have recently fertilized a shop bought chicken egg and grown it into a chick

which I thought wasn't possible What do you mean they So this was to see if they could grow embryo outside of it shell completely There's video of this again online and these Japanese students literally bought this egg cracked it into a cup fertilized it so they bought

the required sperm I guess male sex stuff to fertilize it That's what we call it And they fertilized it they covered it with sort of cling film and it grew into a chick isn't that weird so you could watch it you could watch all the vessels develop

if you look at the video you can see this egg that you would fry in a pan turn into a chick That's extraordinary No they don't start as yolk in all cases right No the yolk is what feeds them Food yeah okay right Cool

We and chickens both eat chicken yolk Oh yes Well we and cows both drink milk What We and sharks both eat fish Mind blow Yeah if you look in an egg there's like

a little tiny bit attached to the yolk and that's what would be the actual true egg and the rest of it is just for Well you sometimes get little red bits don't you have the yolk yeah yeah Speaking of male sex stuff So

female chickens they have sperm storage tubules these are called SSTs they can keep male sperm alive inside them for up to 15 weeks That's cool It's way longer than mammalian sperm can survive a lot of animals that do

that it's so that they have a choice whether to what's the word fertilize it yeah whether to fertilize it's true of hens and they can eject inferior rooster sperm after sex Brilliant I want to see that They generally They eject up to

80% of the stuff they receive No thank you I want to see a rooster have sex with a hen and go was that good for you and her go yeah yeah it was great it walks 10 meters down the road and then it gets splattered and she goes just kidding it was terrible

Okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is James Okay my fact this week is that all of the sandals won by the Pueblo people of New Mexico had enough space for six toes Wow

Did any of them have six toes or was it just a very bad shoemaker I just couldn't count Why why So 3% of them had six toes which is a lot higher than normal Yeah normally it would be probably less than 1% and it was

the fact that they thought that people with six toes were especially good and they were revered and they were thought to be great and they were associated with important rituals and things like that and so having six toes was good and so researchers who have looked at the place where they live have found

loads of sandals, loads of sandal shaped stones loads of pictures of sandals and all of these have an extra toe Wow that's incredible So even plans of the other 97% were pretending they had six toes Maybe they did Yeah maybe they had like little fake toes

that they used to stick on Yeah a little bit of Play-Doh Can I just ask when were they around Okay so they've been they're actually still around the descendants of these people they're Hopi, Native Americans are supposed to be descended from them but these particular times that

looking at an area of a canyon in New Mexico they were living around 700 AD 800 AD just over a thousand years ago and the other thing is that they found that it's about 3% of the population had six toes

but it could be actually that it wasn't that high the bodies that we find are ones that have been especially buried and it might be just the more revered people who have been buried so maybe they had a normal incidence of toes but we just know about them more because we only see the special people

They've found a skeleton haven't they where the foot which has six toes has a special ornamental anklet worn around it as if to say check out my six toes and the other foot which has only got five toes on it has no such decoration it was more another strut of evidence that I did

this was a revered trait You know how you're saying it might attract the opposite of sex Not the opposite of sex The opposite of sex Sex But is there anything in genetics that if your mum and dad had six toes that you're in any way likely to inherit six toes

really it's a genetic trait So we could actually just within one generation make new different humans If we forced six toes and six people to breed with each other in a kind of weirdly awful dystopian way I guess we could

If we decided it was more practical for humans going forward to have six toes we could actually just do that within It takes a long time I don't think in one generation you're not going to have to Clarks don't need to worry You know who else has six fingers Pandas They all have this sort of extra little

thumby protrusion on the opposite side from their first thumb It helps them to grip bamboo and it helps with support and things like that. That's pretty cool Is it that it's not really a true finger they call it a pseudo thumb It's like a bony protrusion so you can't wiggle it

but it serves the purpose that a thumb would be able to serve doesn't it? It grips I think people have said that if we were to pick a sixth digit that another thumb on the other side would be the best one to have That would be fantastic If you do lose a finger or a thumb you could get a toe transplanted

which is quite common now quite a common treatment for losing a finger It's mostly to replace thumbs isn't it? It's mostly to replace thumbs. I quite like this interview with the guy who had it done who said there's an operation which involves two surgical teams one is to lop off the toe and the other is to prepare the thumb area

to have the toe attached and he said afterwards the worst part of it was them taking the toe off which seems quite obvious to me that that would be the worst part as opposed to them putting it onto the hand but this was first done in 1897 by this Austrian surgeon called Carl Nicoladoni

and it wasn't as successful but it did work in that he was able to turn a toe into a thumb and he did it by connecting the man's thumbless hand to his foot so the man had to... They've done that the wrong way haven't they? I think if you're going to replace your thumb with a toe

what you want to do is take the toe from the foot and put it on your hand not take your hand and put it down That's what he had to do because he had to get the toe sort of used to being on the hand before he detached it from the foot so the man had to go around for a long time because if you put the toe on someone's hand

he's going to go, oh it's so high up here they've got to get used to it It's like this hand's just coming to stay for a while Wait, the guy's come down to meet the in-laws basically What exactly did the guy have to do? Here's what the guy had to do he had to bend over have his thumbless hand sewn onto his big toe

and then that allowed the big toe to get accustomed to being sewn onto the hand The big toe wasn't detached No, the big toe wasn't detached so the man had to spend a few weeks bent over with his hand attached to his foot, yes So we'd be like, come on Jeff we're off we're off

We'd be like, come on Jeff we're off I'm just tying my shoe I'll be there in a minute You've been tying your shoe for three weeks Jeff But it won't do you any good in terms of acclimatising surely if your toe is still attached to your foot

Well, it's apparently it did work You might attach the blood vessels for instance and they might be still attached in one place but also attached in the other place I think that was it, yeah If you look at images online

of people who've had their thumbs replaced by toes it's pretty easy to miss You could very easily meet someone talk to them, shake their hand and not notice that this replacement is done It is one of the most amazing operations Do you think you'd mention it if you saw someone and you thought that looked like

that looked like a toe on their hand? No, because it's the embarrassment it's like saying to a woman that you think she's pregnant and she might not be What you were saying Anna about putting your thumb on your toe it reminds me of

shoulders knees and thumbs We've got to do it because Barry's here today and she's still sing along Go on James It reminds me of in the olden days when they used to do have a nose job so you had to have a new nose put on there

and they would put skin from your arm to reconstruct the nose but you had to have the blood supply from your arm at the same time as it's growing on your nose so you used to have your arm attached to your face

while the skin would grow over your nose so you would have people whose arm is attached to their nose for weeks on end and there was one famous guy in Italy who had this done but he didn't want to be having his arm over his nose the whole time so he had his servant's arm used

to stand watch and so his servant had to walk around with his arm over his boss's nose the whole time Wow, that's harsh I hope the servant never washed his hands to get him back Just on toes, have you guys heard

of the world toe wrestling championships? No, it takes place in the UK and it's an annual event, the current champion is Alan Nasty Nash he won it in 2015 I'm not sure if the 2016 event has happened but it's basically

exactly what it says it is it is just toe wrestling and they treat it very seriously each toe is inspected Make sure it's not a thumb Yeah, so the contestants have their toes examined by a qualified nurse before being given clearance

that it's an unmodified toe and that it can do it and it was invented basically by four guys who were drinking and just so annoyed that the UK just was never good at winning international sports so it was never just a champion who was from the UK so they thought

let's invent a new sport It's only a matter of time before we teach the continent how to play this game and they come over and start beating Do they have weight categories in toe wrestling? So is it you know, little toe v little toe It's always big toe v big toe, isn't it?

Yes, and it's also it's also men vs men women vs women so there's no clucky second toe which took on a big toe because that is a screenplay waiting to be written But you can watch videos online and they all come across like WWF wrestlers, they take it really seriously

and so some of the people in the top 100 at the moment you do have There are not 100 people who do this Sorry, maybe just top players There might be 100 Alan Nasty Nash, as I mentioned before current champion and then there's a guy called Paul Beech

whose nickname is Tomonato Oh, very, very good name It sounds like what happens when the characters out of this little piggy went to market grew up I think that's what they're all doing now This little piggy went wrestling This little piggy became a thumb Okay, that is it

That is 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 have said over the course of this podcast you can reach us on our Twitter accounts I'm on at Shriverland, James at Eggshaped, Andy at AndrewHunterM, and Shazinski

You can email podcast at qi.com Yep, or you can go to our group account which is at qipodcast or go to our website, no such thing as afish.com where we have all of our previous episodes Just got one more bit of news to tell you which is that as of this week we have changed over to

AudioBoom, AudioBoom you probably know we have hosted a bunch of awesome podcasts and that's where we're going to be now If you listen to us buy a SoundCloud this might be the last episode that you hear on there and you're going to have to find somewhere else some other app to download our show on If you do listen to things like iTunes

or anything like that, that's where you get our show from don't worry, it's going to be exactly the same you don't need to push any other buttons this is just specifically for the SoundCloud people That's it from the show Off with the show SoundCloud