No Such Thing As A Fish - 144: No Such Thing As Garlic Superman

Episode Date: December 17, 2016

Dan, James, Andy and Alex discuss historical ham sandwiches, edible passwords and why Jupiter is shrinking.

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 and I am sitting here with James Harkin, Alex Bell and Andrew Hunter Murray. 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 Murray. My fact is that in 1851, all of the 436,800 sandwiches sold on the streets of London were ham.

Just ham sandwiches. Just ham sandwiches. That's so obviously not true. Well, I think it is. Was it just ham or did they have like ham and pickle or ham and mustard or? Had some mustard. Okay. Had other sandwiches been invented at that point and they thought we don't actually like

those, we'll stick with ham. I think they have because I think they had cheese sandwiches because we've said before on this podcast, they used to be called bread and meat or bread and cheese. So I'll tell you, basically, ham sandwiching was a thing as in you didn't have a sandwich shop. You would be a sandwich seller and you have your own ham and you would boil it and then you would sell it from your cart. So it's quite hard to have a big range.

And we only know about this because there was a guy called Henry Mayhew who was a social investigator and he wrote this huge work called London Labour and the London Poor. And he calculated that that number of sandwiches was sold. And the only ones he came across were ham ones. So he's pretty amazing. This guy. He is. I hadn't heard of him.

He co-founded Punch, which was the original British satirical magazine that ran for hundreds of years. So might this have been satire we're talking about. And B Wilson, who's a food writer and her books are very good. She also has written an essay on the subjections. She said that all the sandwiches were ham. If B Wilson says it, then I do believe it. But even before he went and did Punch, he had the most ridiculous childhood.

He ran away from home when he was 12 to join the East India Company and worked on their ships. And then he came back and tried law and then he went into journalism, but 12. He ran away when he was 12. But you know how people used to die younger? Is it like dog years? Is 12 actually like 18 back then? Well, I guess kind of.

But also it was he ran away because he didn't want to follow the same career as his father. It's pretty early. What did his father do? He was a sailor. I think he was an accountant. Oh, well, I can understand that. He was a very fertile accountant because Henry Mayhew was one of 17 children. 17.

Wow. He did report on his sandwich investigation that one seller told him that sometimes cab drivers would offer to fight them for a sandwich instead of paying for it. It doesn't really feel like it would be a good idea. Well, it doesn't work in prep when I try it. Because as a sandwich seller, the best outcome is that you've won a fight. Yeah, and kept the sandwich. But you've had to fight someone not to lose a sandwich.

Exactly. It feels like it would be better for you to do nothing at all than to get involved in this fight. Yeah, I was saying no transactions. Yeah. This isn't the best ham based story from 1851. It was a good year, wasn't it? It was a very, very strong year. We should say what else happened in 1851.

Just give us a little bit. It's a great exhibition happened in London. And it was just ham sandwiches on the way. Well, didn't they have tin food as one of the attractions? I guess ham might make it. And also Moby Dick was published. I've got to say the best Moby Dick fact ever, which we all know because it was found by one of our colleagues, Ed Brooke Hitchens, this this last week, which is that he got

a rejection letter from one publisher saying, the whale is obviously a nice idea, but maybe you could replace it by something more popular. Maybe young voluptuous maidens. Why would you want to harpoon young voluptuous maidens? That's true. Doesn't make any sense. We've been like Carrie. We've just been a horror novel.

Hang on. Hang on. Dan, you said you had a better ham anecdote from 1851. Yeah. Well, OK. Alex, don't. We all did it in our heads, James. We all decided not to say it.

That's not how podcasts work, though. Yeah. So other news, Alex mentions the great exhibition Moby Dick, two other things that happened in 1851 is that the New York Times was founded and Reuters News was founded as well. So obviously a lot more outlet to report ham based stories were erupting that year. So Christmas in 1851. Have you heard about this? In London, it was a sort of super great giveaway to all the poor of London to feed them on

Christmas Day. And it was over 22,000 people who were fed in one single place. And that place was called Ham Yard and Ham Yard in London. They had benefactors from all the richest people in London who gave one one guy called Mr. Richard Cooper, supplied 200 pounds of beef. And they did a massive Christmas meal for all the less privileged of London. So over 22,000 people fed in one go by a very famous chef. He's often called the first celebrity chef, Alexis Sawyer.

And it was his idea and he put it together and he fed all these people. Wow. Yeah. I've been to Ham Yard. It's off Regent Street. Yes, still there, right? The best ham sandwich related story of the mid 19th century. OK, that's cheating a bit.

Well, it is. This comes from around 1840. So it's about 10 years before both of your ham sandwich stories. This is way better than if you've got predated. It's true. So the town of Swindon was invented by a ham sandwich. What? It was founded by a ham sandwich, let's say.

The story goes. I don't know if this is true. That Isambar kind of Bruno was on the railway and he knew that they had to found a town somewhere on the railway because they needed to have a stop there. And he started eating his ham sandwich and then he thought, well, as soon as I've had enough of this sandwich and I throw it out the window wherever it lands, that's where I'm going to start my new town. And it landed were currently Swindon is no way.

Hang on, because you'd have to stop the train immediately. Yeah, I go back and find and go back and find a sandwich. That is true. Unless you remembered. Oh, we were passing through Swindon when I threw my sandwich out of the window. I threw my sandwich out right next to that sign that says, welcome to Swindon. The Swindon was tiny. It was absolutely tiny before the railway arrived and then it became huge.

So there's another town sort of further south in which are called Marlborough. And it's absolutely tiny, but it could as easily have gone the other way. If Isambar Kingdom in Elford, you know, been a bit hungry or hadn't had a banana or breakfast and you wanted a bit more of a sandwich. Yeah. So ham sandwiches are still extremely popular. The British Sandwich Association says that ham sandwiches is the most popular sandwich in the UK.

Really, do you think they'll look back in 100 years at 2016 and think it was a great age of ham sandwiches as well? I think finally, back to the great times of 1851, they so this is this is an old survey. I can't imagine, though, it was 2001. I can't imagine in 15 years it's changed that much. But they said that the favourite filling wasn't ham, though. It was cheese, but a ham sandwich on its own, topped.

But the favourite filling. Yeah, I always like my ham sandwiches without ham, but with cheese. I think what they mean is what's your favourite filling? Well, if I'm having a sandwich, I love it if there's cheese in there. And they said, would you be happy with just a cheese sandwich? No, no, I think I'll go for ham. I think that's how the conversation. Wait, but the favourite filling is that because you have it outside sandwich?

No, you have it in the sandwich, but you might have it with ham, so you have a ham and cheese sandwich. So you're saying ham is not a filling because it's the base ingredient of the sandwich for anything extra filling? No, no, there's two questions. What is this bread added item in it? And you could have only one item in it. They've gone for ham sandwich that works best as a sandwich.

Yeah. What's your favourite filling to go in a sandwich? Oh, OK, well, if I'm having a ham sandwich, rather than pickle, I'll have cheese, but cheese is the favourite added on. What's your favourite filling for two slices of bread is ham? Yeah, of all the things that people have voted on in 2016, this makes me the most annoyed. Well, this is 2001. People say 2016 is a shit year.

Imagine you were presented with a lot of different sandwiches that had base meats in them, like, let's say, let's say, or no meats or like a salad or whatever. Base meat, like the alchemy of the sandwich world. There's base ten, which on them is different, and then base meat, which is what our sandwiches are based on. Turned ham into cheese. Two thirds of ham and cheese pizzas tested by trading standard

officers in Derbyshire failed to contain ham or cheese. No. Yeah. How many? Two thirds. Two thirds of the pizza? What it was is when people thought it was ham, it was actually turkey ham, which is made of turkey, not ham. And the cheese was often cheese substitutes. I'm not sure what cheese substitutes is, but it doesn't sound great. Ham, apparently.

So Henry Mayhew did a load of just to drag us back to Henry Mayhew for a bit. He did a load of calculations, basically. So he calculated how many sellers there were of each thing on the streets of London. So he calculated, for example, that there were 60 ham sandwich sellers in London, 200 baked potato sellers, 300 people who sell pea soup and hot eel. Six people apparently specialised in plum puddings.

Yeah. And he would work it out by estimating the number of miles of street in the city and then multiplying that by the number of traders he found per mile. Yeah. I think it sounds like the most fascinating book. I really want to read it. It's what's it called again? It's called London Labour and the London Poor. Yeah. And he basically documented 1851 in London, in down to every bit of clothing that people it would be like us

just going out on the street and just recording what's going on as a time capsule. And it's pretty amazing work. Very comprehensive. Really. Yeah. And it had a big impact. He pissed off a lot of people with this book, particularly the street traders. And they actually set up a street traders protection association against this kind of journalism, specifically because how they were presented in the book. They were presented like these sandwich sellers.

They're like, well, actually, we do have a bit more than ham. Yeah, exactly. Really? Yeah. Some of the ham sandwiches didn't even have ham in. Did they not? No. Just cheese. They had a bit of. They had a bit of beef dripping. And that was it between two bits of bread.

What is beef dripping? It's fat. Yeah, it's a congealed fat. When you've cooked beef, you get all the fat kind of drops down when you roast it. And then you can take that and you can kind of spread it on bread. And it's what people used to eat. That sounds like cheese substitute. It does, but it doesn't taste anything like cheese.

It tastes more like kind of fatty gravy. Oh, so delicious. Also, he collected a load of data with his brother, Augustus Mayhew. And yet, 20 years after the book was published, Augustus Mayhew was had up in court on charges of attacking a female peddler, a woman going on selling things. Really? And his defense in court was that people would knock on his door up to 38 times a day selling things. He just snapped.

And he said they were shouting things like, crockery or fine young rabbits or roots all are blowing, all are growing. Fine young rabbits sounds like a great band, doesn't it? Did you know there's a a latitude around the earth that's sometimes referred to as the ham belt? And it's 40 degrees latitude. And it's the it's not so much these days, but it used to be the climate at which all the best ham came from. So like Kentucky ham, Virginia ham, Italian prosciutto ham, Spanish Serrano ham, all of those places are along the same last students because the climate is sort of ideal for ham curing.

And it's not so important nowadays because, you know, you have climate control factories and whatnot. And it was discovered by Alexander von Humboldt. OK, it is time for fact number two. And that is Alex. My fact is that since 2003, the UK has eaten one and a half million pounds in cash. And when you say cash, are we talking two P coins or notes? So this is the Bank of England releases stats every year on the big graph. Alex got a massive graph on his research notes here.

So for people at home, what happens is we kind of do some research and we print it out on a sheet of paper. And we've got like little paragraphs that we might read out if something comes up. But Alex just has a massive graph. I'm concerned by the year to year trend. And I'm going to explain. You can submit bank notes that are damaged in some way to the Bank of England to get them replaced. And then they keep stats on them. So they release each year how many bank notes have been torn apart or accidentally washed

or contaminated or damaged by fire or flood. And the other category is chewed or eaten. And so each year they've released how many how many notes of each domination have been chewed or eaten and how much they're worth. And in total, since 2003, it's one point five million. OK, so I reckon when you said that fact, people were thinking that humans are eating these notes. But I reckon it must be mostly like dogs and stuff. Maybe, yeah, it could be babies could be babies.

Yeah, I mean, babies will put things in the mouth when they they will. But they don't have teeth. That's true. So they won't be chewing it and damaging it. I mean, some of them have teeth, don't they? Do you have to have teeth to chew? That's a good point. Can you chew with gums alone?

You could suppose you could ruminate the notes in your mouth. You could dissolve it. Yeah, I'd say a baby would be sucking rather than chewing. Yeah. OK, well. But you have to provide the the remnants of the note to prove that you had it in the first place. Because otherwise you could just write the backline and say you had it. But how do you do it? So what? You bring the dog? So you bring the little people to eat in.

So there could be plenty of notes that have been completely eaten, I guess. It's very hard to say. My dog ate 2,000 quid in 50 pound notes. Unfortunately, he ate them so thoroughly. But if you could tell me. No, they do send this, I recommend it. It's called the Mutilators Notes Service. And you post them in and you write a little explaining letter. And if they think it's legit, then I'll post you some money.

I could use that. I once got given an envelope of some money and you've been paid it for asking those questions in the House of Commons, haven't you? Excellent satire from the early 2000s. It's 90s, actually. The rest of you can look that up at home and have a really entertaining afternoon. Cash for questions. Anyway, sorry, God, God, then. So rather than opening the envelope the normal way, I opened it up

at the top end of the on the side. So I just ripped it open the short edge of the envelope. Yes, exactly. So I ripped it open there and I and then I got to the shop and it was closed and so I couldn't buy anything. So I went to my house, came out in the morning to buy the milk that I was looking to buy, handed over from the envelope, my 10 pound note. And the guy said, I can't accept this. You're missing the last like eighth of the note.

And what I had done and there was about 60 quid in this envelope, I had ripped as well as the envelope, all that final eighth of all the notes. And they had scattered all on the street and had to go around the street collecting the rest of my notes. Yeah, I found them. They were all day afterwards. Yeah. Oh, my God. Did you get the milk? I did. Yeah. I think that all of these bank notes were mostly eaten by dogs,

not humans or babies. Well, babies are humans, apart from baby dogs. So I think they're mostly eaten by dogs. In Montana, a few years ago, there was a news story about a dog called Sundance who ate five one hundred dollar bills that were stashed in his owner's little cubby hole. But the five hundred dollar bills were together

with a single one dollar bill, which it didn't eat. It's fantastic. Wow. This is interesting. Do you know where the first place to feature Queen Elizabeth on money was? So not Britain. It was not Britain. Yeah. Was it somewhere in the Caribbean? No. Somewhere in Africa? No. Australia? No. Canada? Yes. Yeah. What is that?

They had her when she was a nine year old princess. So prior to being the Queen and it was on the twenty dollar notes. And so obviously she wasn't on any money here. She wasn't the Queen yet, but they wanted to they wanted to give her some props over there. I'm not sure completely why, but they used her image. Yeah, that's cool. Speaking of notes in Canada, a few years ago, there was a rumor that all Canadian banknotes smelled of maple syrup

and people were kind of pulling them out of their pockets and smelling them and believed that they could smell maple syrup. And everyone on the internet was saying, yeah, mine smell of maple syrup as well. Mine only smell of it when I take them out my pocket and they've warmed up. So they must be something in the pocket. I keep on my maple syrup. Well, I think that must have been it or it was just like a weird hysteria because the Bank of Canada said that actually there's nothing in there

and we've tested ours and they don't smell of maple syrup. But they have got in trouble in the past as well, the Bank of Canada, because they did a new series of banknotes and they put a maple leaf on and it was pointed out that that maple leaf, that particular shape of maple leaf is from a tree which does not grow in Canada. That's right. It was a Norwegian maple rather than a Canadian maple. Right. And they said, actually, what we've done is we've blended together a load of maple leaves to avoid being regionally insensitive.

Well, that's all those Norwegians living in Canada. That's kind of like the Euro, though, because when they designed the Euro notes, they didn't want to favour any particular country's culture. So they got someone to take a load of famous bridges from all the different countries that were taking the Euro and sort of blend them into generic bridges. Yeah. So all the Euro money has fake bridges on it.

Yeah. So no one gets offended. But then an artist started building those bridges. It was an art installation rather than an actual bridge, but he started building the fake bridges over rivers in Belgium or something. That's a great idea. Yeah. Yeah. That's fantastic. It feels like odd, weird, reverse forgery, but not money. Yeah. Oh, this is a cool thing about currency.

So in, I think it was November or October, the Japanese financial services industry was considering regulating a new kind of currency, which was, any guesses? It's currency that James spends and the rest of us don't. Pokemon money? It's Poker Coins. So as far as I understand, you use the currency to breed imaginary monsters on your phone.

You use them to not buy monsters, but buy things that help you to find monsters. I see. OK. So you can't even buy Pokemon with them. You can buy facilities to help you. Well, you've got to catch Pokemon. Yeah. So it's like you can buy a net with a Poker Coins. Kind of. You can buy a lure.

That's spending real money on that. You can spend real money or you can find them in the game. OK. So we all do it like Temple Run, you know, when you spend money to buy more, you know, speedability and so on. We all do it, Andy. We all do it. OK. The Japanese Financial Services Authority is not considering regulating Temple Run coins. They are considering.

And basically, if they did decide to regulate it, I don't think I'm not sure if they'd come to a conclusion yet. Companies would have to declare all the unused currency that gamers have held and they'd have to secure it with massive deposits of real money. Wow. It's really interesting. Speaking of digital money, there's a landfill in Wales, which has an enormous treasure trove, like a very treasure.

And it's getting more and more valuable each year. So in 2013, it was worth four million pounds. And it's because there's a hard drive, which a man called James Howells threw away in 2013. And he realized after he thrown it away that he had a digital wallet on it, which had seven and a half thousand Bitcoin. And he got those in 2009 when they were worth nothing. But they now worth, 2013, they're worth about four million pounds.

And they're increasing a lot more since then. And so we don't know where it is. Somewhere around there. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So yeah. Get digging. Should we move on soon? Yeah. I have one thing that Motorola has invented in edible passwords. They call it an authentication vitamin. And it's a pill that you swallow.

And if you have your phone near you, it will wirelessly unlock it. Sorry, I'm a bit confused on how it works. So you swallow a pill. You swallow a pill that has a tiny microchip in it, which broadcasts a little signal. And that's a signal that will wirelessly unlock your devices if they're set up for it. So is it activated by the act of swallowing it?

No, no, no. You don't have to swallow it every time you put it in your phone. You put it in you. And then whenever you are around your phone, it's unlocked. But except for when you put it out. Yeah. So then you have to swallow another one. But why can't you just have it in your pocket? Because you could lose that or someone else could pick pocket you. Yeah.

Whereas you can't have it stolen from you if you beat. So what you could do is you could put the little chip that's in a noisester card and you could eat that. And then every time you're walking towards the gates and the tube station, it'll be like you're on Star Wars or something. And that is why, my Lord, I took a dump for the oyster barrier. OK, it is time to move on to fact number three.

And that is my fact. And my fact this week is that a day on the sun lasts both 25 and 38 Earth days. OK, you have to explain because it's always going to feel like daytime there, isn't it? Yeah, it's not really going to. Yeah, you're going to be confused. So because it's a massive gas body, it spins at different speeds. So the middle of it, the equator, as it were, spins around 25 days. That makes one day, but the poles go a lot slower.

So it takes up to 38 days for them to turn around. So I should say that there are fluctuations in these numbers, obviously. So 24.7 is usually the number given for the quickest bit, where the equator, where the middle of the sun is spinning around 38 is the top end bit. But I asked Alex and I saw an astrophysicist the other night, Dr. Lucy Green, and she said that's absolutely true, that they do have these different spins on them. Yeah, really interesting. So did Jupiter and Saturn, actually?

They also have differential spin because they're gas. Yeah, I found out the thing the other day, which I told the guys, but I haven't told you yet, so I'll ask you as a question. So let's assume that there are eight planets in the solar system. How many planets in our solar system orbit the sun? Of those eight, all of them. Ah, technically, if you go into a super technical reasoning, we orbit the sun because at the center of the gravity that's pulling us,

making us orbit the sun is in the middle of the sun. Jupiter is so large. It's so big that it's pulled the center of gravity out to above the sun's surface. So technically, they are orbiting each other. That's really good. Yeah, it's quite cool, isn't it? I had no idea Jupiter was that big. It also has a massively fast day, Jupiter.

Does it? So, yeah, it rotates every 10 hours. So daytime and nighttime each lasts about five Earth hours, which is really short. It's faster than any other planet. And if it was 80 times larger, which is not that much larger, it could have been a star, Jupiter. Wow. Yeah. What would have done to us?

Oh, I think we've been in big trouble. Yeah, issues, right? Probably. Hey, so I found this fact when I was reading a book called The Jupiter Effect, which is written by John Gribbin, who most people know is a massive popular science writer. He wrote in search of Schrodinger's cat. And this book is the one book that he wants people to forget about. So I apologize.

I'm glad because you've met John Gribbin, haven't you? I have, yeah. He'll be delighted that you're bringing this up. I'm really sorry, but it is out there. And it is it's a really well-written book, except for one thing, which it has a conceit of it, which is that basically there was going to be a ginormous earthquake at the San Andreas Fault on March the 10th of 1982 because they believed that all the planets were going to align

and it was just going to set off chaos on Earth, which never happened. It was a bestseller, though, but it didn't happen. And so he's kind of buried that book by writing about 200 more books to separate himself. He writes tons of books and they're all brilliant. They're all brilliant. Yeah. But yeah, do you think that's the reason he writes so many? I think just so it goes further down that bibliography list. I'm just going back to the sun very quickly.

Yes. What would happen if you replace the sun with a black hole? So there'd be less light for starters, less energy coming from it, you would think. Yes. So it all frees to death. And we would get sucked into it. No, there we are. That's finally the thing. Yeah, no, apparently. So the Oxford University science blog looks into this and they found that apparently the planets orbits would stay kind of much the same because if it's

the same mass as the sun, this black hole, then the gravitational field that produces is about the same as that of the sun, but it would be cold. And dark. The sun is obviously emitting loads of heat, but Jupiter, it was all my Jupiter, Jupiter radiates so much heat that it loses it faster than it gains energy from the sun, which means that it's shrinking about two centimetres a year. Yeah, two centimetres a year.

I mean, it's massive. So that's relatively quite small amount, but that's mad. Yeah. Are there planets out there that we've seen exoplanet style that would be just enough atmosphere, tall enough that a six foot person could stand in and sort of like run their life. But that's where the planet ends. Well, that's the only atmosphere. Yeah. So if you were to go to, I think it's Mars.

Yeah, they have a very, very, very weak atmosphere. And so it would kind of feel like winter at your head, but spring at your feet. Wow. Yeah. So so you kind of your head would be out of the atmosphere, kind of. So you have to what do you have to where do you spend Christmas? Do you have to go up a step ladder basically for Christmas and then for the summer, just lie on the floor, summer collection. Just lie down.

I have one more. Do you know what else is fueled by the sun? Superman, according to DC Comics, really know this because once he was bitten by Dracula and Dracula exploded. What science guys? I don't recall that bit of the Bram Stoker novel. Wait, hang on. Dracula by Superman, then Superman explodes. No, Dracula explodes because Dracula vampires don't like sunlight.

How do we know Superman isn't made out of garlic? OK, it is time for a final fact of the show. And that is James. OK, my fact this week is that in 1945, police in Halifax, Nova Scotia initiated a campaign to stop people from beeping their car horns in Morse code to signal out vile and filthy language. And what were they saying in the Morse code? Do we know? This is the weird thing, right?

So I saw this on a website called Boing Boing, which is one of my favorite places online. They have amazing facts and stuff like that on there. And it was a news cutting. And I'm pretty sure the news cutting is real because I found it in other places. But that's the only thing on the whole of the Internet that seems to give any idea that this actually happened. Now I see why you were throwing shade at my ham sandwiches.

In fact, you were trying to draw attention from your own sketchy sourcing. Yeah, fair enough. I just I don't know if it's true. If anyone knows any more, then do let us know. But I think it's a really it's a nice idea if it's not true, right? Yeah, it's I don't think it's the most eloquent way to swear at someone through Morse code. It takes a long time. It takes a very long time.

Oh, you're a dick. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. If you're in traffic, though, you do have time. So you might as well send a message. Yeah. You're relying on the person who is a dick knowing Morse code. Yeah. Yeah. It's quite funny because it doesn't sound like you're actually just bleeping yourself. Yeah. As you're swearing at someone. So this is 1945. That's right.

What kind of car horns were we at that point? What kind of cars were we at at that point? Well, we would have had cars that are not a million miles dissimilar to cars that we have now, the combustion engines. So maybe slightly bigger American cars, that kind of thing. Yeah. So the fifties is where I start to clock what a car is. OK, so imagine five years before that. Take off the tail phones. Yeah.

But they've had horns, like a horn sound since the very beginning of things with wheels on the road, haven't they? Yeah. So they predate cars. Yeah. And they weren't they originally outside the cars and people would walk alongside carriages with horns or they'd walk alongside cars with horns. What did you do if you were just walking, you had a you had a horn? I have. Yeah, I've read this as well.

Pedestrians carried the first car horns to warn cars. And then eventually they said, why don't we combine this with the car? I read that there was an early locomotive act and the idea was that cars used to travel really slowly and to warn people that cars are on the way. Someone would walk ahead of the car with a red flag. OK, so Andy knows everything about this. Yeah, is this true? Is this true?

Not really. OK, well, it's true that the act existed. The act existed. Yeah. And the red flag thing was used and you would have to have three people operating a vehicle, one to steer it, one to stoke the boiler and one to walk ahead, who was called the stalker with the red flag. Yeah, however, I think that when the act was introduced, cars were not a thing because it was in about the 1870s.

And by the time people started having personal cars, the red flag bit was not observed and had been repealed. OK, from memory. Yeah, that's how it went. So, yeah, I was looking online about sometimes in Morse code, you know, how on text messages, you know, lol for a laugh out loud, there's a long list of how they do abbreviations for longer sentences. So one of my favorite ones, and this is Goodbye.

So I want to see who gets this. If you were doing a shortened Morse code of Goodbye, it's DSW. Why would it be DSW? Don't, darling. No, DSW. Oh, you were doing the same for three words. No, it doesn't, actually. Then I'm not going to know it.

I would have thought I would have gone for see you because that would be shorter. Yes, it would have been. Yeah. So what's DSW? DSW. I can't actually pronounce it, but James will be able to, because it's his second language. Yeah, it's not interesting. It's Russian. Yeah, Russian. That's a goodbye DSW. Goodbye. And then humor is H-I, humor intended.

H-E-E is humor intended or laughter. We should we should absolutely start using these after some of our jokes on the show. I could just say H-I after one of my puns. Here's another thing I hadn't heard of. Hog Morse. Have you heard of Hog Morse? Hog what? Yeah, it's from. Hog Morse. Is that is it bad Morse? Is it like Pigletton? It's it's autocorrect.

It's basically autocorrect for when you're doing Morse. It's the most commonly made mistakes when you're doing Morse code. What does it mean? Is it like letters, which are similar or? Yeah, it's it's basically called after one example, home becoming hog. One example given in the literature is please fill me in becoming six nas, Femi Q. I see. So M E is going to be dash dash dot or something. But then G is going to be dash dash dot without a space.

Yes. Yeah. And so I guess it is the risk of everything going really out of kilter if you mix up something and then you get out of sync with the person receiving and they think your letters end and start in different places. And then it turns into golly goo. Yeah. So this was this whole fact about a kind of secret message being sent out. Basically, it's a rude secret message. So I found another example of this kind of thing. Another thing from the Second World War.

So Chinese engravers who are designing banknotes change the design of Chinese banknotes to score points off the Japanese who are occupying their country. Yeah. So for example, the one UN note, very, very common note, it has a picture of Confucius on it and he's he's making a gesture of prayer. Almost looks quite Buddhist, almost. And some engravers changed some of the banknotes they made so that Confucius is doing the classic sex mime where you use one thumb and finger on one hand and the finger on the other.

And for people at home, Andy is doing said mime. Yeah. Rade radio. Classic sex mime, as he put it. Yeah. So they did that. Here's a thing about signalling out violent filthy language, an article from the Daily Mail from a couple of years ago. Mother Lauren Walker had endured a day from hell at the hands of her son, Max.

The two year old had smeared their dog in butter and put jam in the DVD player. Then he decided he didn't want the fish pie. She had spent two hours making. So she then spelt out the C word in his alphabet potato shapes in the pitch. I don't know how that becomes news, but it must be a photo on Instagram that gets picked up or something like that. I was just fake. I was reading about and President Andrew Jackson.

He had a parrot that he taught to swear and apparently attended his funeral and started swearing really loudly. His funeral had to be taken out, taken out by the Secret Service. Bit harsh. I just opened up the coffin and chuck it in with him. There is an online service called eggplantsmail.com where you can send a message to your loved one. And the idea is that in emojis,

a aubergine is a signal for something sexual. And this company will send a real life aubergine to your loved one. And they'll inscribe a message on it. And it's supposed to be a signal. It's like doing a real life emoji. That's quite cool. It's quite good, isn't it? They describe themselves as 100% phallic, 100% anonymous and 100% disturbing.

And 100% out of math. OK, 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 have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, James at Eggshapes, Andy at Andrew Hunter M and Alex at Alexbell underscore. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at QI podcast,

or you can go to know such thing as a fish.com, which has all of our previous episodes. And you can also go to know such thing as the news, which is the news, which has all of our previous TV show episodes, a topical look at the week. At which week? All the previous weeks. All the old weeks. If you were really thinking to yourself, I'd love to know what happened in November and late October of this year.

Head to know such thing as the news.com. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye. Bye.