No Such Thing As A Fish - 148: No Such Thing As A Plummeting Moose

Episode Date: January 21, 2017

Andy, James, Anna and Alex discuss helicopter dung attacks, Sesame Street's Donald Trump and the best way to cover the smell of urine.

Hello and welcome back 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 Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm sitting here with Anna Tijinski, James Harkin and Alex Bell and we have gathered our favourite facts from the last seven days, so in no particular order here we go, starting with you, Anna. My fact this week is that the second President of the United States of America used to inspect London's dung. Why did John Adams go around inspecting dung? The reason he did it, he obviously was a farmer and he was inspected into the United States. He's most famous for his farming days, no sorry, it's obvious from his diaries that

he's a farmer, because he's from his diaries. Was it sort of 25th March did some more farming today? Is that what gives it away? That was my first clue, yeah, 25th March, milk to cow. When all the people of America let me get back to my farm? He was a farmer and so he was inspecting it to compare it to his own dung and he pointed out... So his own dung... This is not normal behaviour in a person. Andy's questioning. Is it absolute fruit loop this chap? It's amazing that they let a mentally unstable man become President of America. That will never happen again. He was a very stable man and had many stables of his own and he inspected the dung in order to compare it to the manure he kept on his own farm and

in fact he concluded that the manure on the edge where road, he wrote of it, this may be good manure but it is not equal to mine. So he had better manure, he had some manure from the Boston Marshes which he considered superior. And yeah, this fact was sent in actually by a guy called Mark David who sent me some of John Adams diaries and he said in his diary, in one of my common walks along the edge where road there are fine meadows belonging to a noted cowkeeper, plentifully manured. I have carefully examined the manure and found it to be composed of straw and dung from the stables of streets of London and then he goes through all the stuff that's in the manure so he's really gone through

it with his hands. I used to live up edge where road in that direction and it's not like that anymore. Do you ever find any of John Adams' dung lying around? I don't know who's it lying. It was on your doorstep though and it was on fire in the bag, that's the main thing. It wasn't John Adams' own dung just to be clear. He didn't take a poo by the side of the road and then inspect that. Well what if he had accidentally swallowed a tooth or something and he wanted it for his collection. As hypothetical situations go Andy? I don't know, I think you're most likely to swallow a tooth if you get punched in the face. And if you were wandering around inspecting poo on the streets of London you

might. And if I got punched in the face I'd be likely to poo myself. This is why I never go to boxing fights. It gets very messy. It absolutely stinks in there. He was a lawyer originally before he was president and I'm not sure if he was a farmer at the same time as he was a lawyer but he was a really bad lawyer. So in his first year he had one client and it took him three years before he won a case in front of a jury. I don't think it was a really long trial either. I think it was just, it took him a very long time. One thing he was a liar for was the Boston Massacre wasn't it? I think quite famously that. What was that? I think it was something like there was a crowd of people and there were some

British soldiers and the crowd started throwing snowballs at the soldiers. Was it snowballs? I didn't know that. And then other stuff as well like dead animals and stuff. And then the soldiers stopped. When snowball fights get out of hand. Is that a reindeer coming towards me? And then the the British soldiers got angry and shot them which is obviously worse than snowballs or reindeer's and they were arrested and I think Adams got them off. He did get them off. Not one of them went to prison thanks to his defence of them. Are we saying that he was kind of partly responsible for the American Revolution starting? I think he was certainly a player. And he was pro-revolution as well wasn't he? He just defended the Brits

because he wanted to uphold the rule of law so he thought they had a right to equal representation. Good man. When he was in Boston he also wrote political theory essays for the Boston newspapers under the nom de blume Humphrey Plough Jogger. Humphrey Turd Sifter was the first draft name. So Jefferson was his main rival and he fought Jefferson for the title of second president of the US and he won and then Jefferson beat him at the next election. And then when they both retired they spent the rest of their lives writing letters to each other. It should have been me. But didn't they during one of the elections didn't they really fight like really badly? I thought Jefferson called him a hermaphrodite or something. Yes he did. Yeah

they had a really, really vicious campaign. So Jefferson accused Adams of being a hideous hermaphroditical character who smuggled prostitutes into the country. So he said he was smuggling prostitutes in from England into America and he said that he was planning to marry one of the sons of King George and that he was a royalist. Which actually there could be some foundation to that because one of the things that Adams got mocked for when he was president was that he thought the president should be referred to as his royal highness or your majesty or something like that because he pointed out the presidents, you get presidents of golf clubs and other really tedious things and it wasn't a noble enough title. Yeah one

of his suggestions was his highness, the president of the United States of America and protector of the rights of the same. There you go. So we were talking about Adams and Jefferson being friends even though they called each other hermaphrodites and said there were English prostitutes afoot. They died on the same day and they died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 4th of July, what would it be, 1826 and they were both absolutely determined to stay alive until then and Jefferson died just after noon and Adams awoke soon after Jefferson had died and he was in a separate place at the time and he said with great effort Thomas Jefferson survives as though at least one of the architects

of the revolution is still alive even though he didn't know that Jefferson had already died and then he died a few hours later. And then do you think anyone, do you think there was a really awkward pause around his bedside when he said Jefferson survives? Should we tell him, is it cruel? Yeah I don't think, I don't think he ever knew, which is nice, he died thinking that Jefferson still survives today. On his dioriting and his prolific letter apparently Congress made fun of him because he went to Paris at one point and wrote a lot in his diary about how great the dung was, how much he admired the French aristocracy, all this kind of really effusive stuff about how great Paris was and then he sent it along with

his report of what was going on in Paris to Congress possibly accidentally, we're not sure whether it was supposed to be part of the report. It's diary! Just read it aloud and made fun of him in Congress. Like 12 year old girl in a big school. Wow, if anyone's mum's ever read their diary they can take solace in this probably the worst moment of his life when he realized that. I bet he never got over that, I bet that's why he had to become president was to erase the memory of his diary, oh god that's embarrassing. What was, okay so there was nothing too humiliating, it wasn't like oh dad walked in on me masturbating this morning, must learn to lock the door, there was nothing too awful in it. No, he said that one French gentleman, you won't believe the prostitutes

they have here in France. I think they complimented him a lot and one of the men called him the Washington of Negotiation. Oh and he wrote that down. He was like oh I really like him, he's so nice. That's like retweeting praise of yourself isn't it and then posting the retweet to Congress. Copying in Congress. We should move on but just one quick, anyone got anything on Dung or droppings? Yes. Go on, drop it in. Um, Bert Reynolds once dropped a helicopter full of horse manure on the National Enquirer. Did he? Yeah. Why did he do that? He, they'd been writing a load of stories about him and they weren't accurate so he decided, he said this, I thought it was only fitting, on Christmas Eve my pilot and I loaded my helicopter with manure from my ranch,

flew over the building and watched it cascade down their giant Christmas tree. Isn't that amazing? The children would have probably thought he was Santa Claus. You know there's a, there was a moose dropping festival in Talkeetna in Alaska. So is this for dropping mooses or for? Bert Reynolds flies over the town in a helicopter. No that's, but that's such a good question James and it's exactly the same question that confused PETA, the Animal Rights Organization. So it's, it was a festival that was cancelled in 2009 but it was basically where people used to throw moose droppings out of helicopters flying over the top and people took bets on whereabouts they'd land and would bet how close they get to a target

but PETA got confused and assumed that it did involve hurling moose slivers from helicopters. Looming them into a helicopter, coaxing the moose into an aircraft. Do you think they, every time they hear about animal droppings this is just what they assume. Okay we should move on so it's time for fact number two now and that is James. Okay my fact this week is that you can be blocked from getting a Swiss passport if your neighbours find you too annoying. So this has come about, this is a news article that's been quite recent and it is in the canton of Argao in Switzerland and there was a lady who is a vegan and she has been complaining about the way that cows are treated and various different things in

this area. Why does this weird man keep sifting through their manure? It's their own business. And the locals are not very happy with her because they think that she's invading their way of life and the rules say that when you apply for a passport your neighbours can give you a reference either good or bad and they've given her a bad reference and it's stopping her from getting a passport and so now it has to go to the next level so that she can apply elsewhere. She's lived there since she was eight and all her children are Swiss. But she's a really big campaigner and one of the things she campaigns against, she does campaign against putting bells around the cows next, she also campaigns against piglet

racing which is a thing that happens in Switzerland. I wonder if she campaigns about cow droppings. That's the thing that happens. Cows just walk over cliffs in Switzerland all the time. What? They walk off mountains and then the other cows think oh maybe, maybe Bessie found some better grass over there and then you get like up to 40 cows at a time just plunging off cliffs to their death. You would have thought the smart thing for her neighbours to do would be to give her a really glowing reference and ensure that she does, does have the ability to leave the country, wouldn't it? You're right because having a passport means that you immediately are forced to emigrate. It does allow you to leave though, doesn't it? That's the thing. Exactly. That's true. I think

actually she does have a passport for another country. Her nationality is Dutch so she must have a Dutch passport and she's got children there so she can remain. It's weird though, the law in Switzerland is that in order to apply for a passport you have to first become a resident of your local town basically. It's called Heemertort, Heemertort, Heemertort, Heemertort. Yeah so all the foreign nationals have to become a citizen of the town they were living in and they have to live there for at least 12 years and then up until 2003 the whole town could vote on whether they become new citizens or not. Would vote on whether someone could become a new citizen? Yeah absolutely so a whole town would vote on it and so until 2003 it was everyone in the town

then they realised actually people were just being a bit racist because they didn't actually know these people, they would just make a judgment based on which country they came from so they changed the law so that it's then a sort of committee when you get references from people who know them and they're judged specifically on them as a person. But it still means that it's really difficult to get into. There was a family in 2006, a family from Kosoz, a nice citizenship because one of the reasons was that they dressed inappropriately because they wore too many tracksuits around town and the other one is that they didn't systematically greet people, passing them on the streets. Now that is a weird thing so if you go to a party in Switzerland

when you arrive you have to go around the room saying hello and shaking hands with everybody else at the party. So there's a huge incentive to arrive on time because if you get there on time everyone comes up to you and says hello and you don't have to go around saying hi. Actually you want to go early don't you really? Yeah. So there's this kind of game theory going on about what time do you arrive. I would actually rather get there late because if you arrive first then that means all your conversations are going to be interrupted by the next arrival coming up and shaking your hand whereas if you arrive last you get all the handshakes out the way immediately and you can get on with your conversations in peace. That's my top tip for Swiss people out there.

It's very good. Yeah thank you. There's one woman who's been redacted, she's writing a book and the title of it is Selkia Nev or the lady who annoys. So she's embracing it that's nice. What about the cowbells though? Like they do they are incredibly loud aren't they? I think that's right. It's like they're like a hundred decibels aren't they? Yeah. And it's round your neck the whole time you can't get away with it. I just jump off a cliff. And I'd follow you. Just on passports there was a nine-year-old girl who recently got into Turkey on a toy passport. This was in it was in 2013 and she was from Wales and she had her own passport. She was traveling with her parents but she also had the passport that belonged to her teddy bear

unicorn her soft toy unicorn and her mum accidentally pulled that out instead handed over to the authorities who duly stamped it and let her in. It must have been roughly the same size and shape and colour as a normal passport. Which is quite a... Well they've got a unicorn on the front anyway. British passports. So actually... Oh my god I didn't know we had royalty visiting. Your Highness welcome to Turkey. Can we quickly talk about how until really recently Switzerland was rigged to explode if an army invaded? Yes I think we can because that's going to need a lot of justification. So since the Second World War, Switzerland's have had a really stringent plan for what would happen if they're invaded because they're a famously neutral country. The main kind of plan is for

everyone in Switzerland to withdraw from the cities and fight a guerrilla war from the Alps if an army was to evade. And all of the tunnels through the mountains and all the bridges were all rigged with explosives so that they could be blown up and it would be very difficult to get around the country, very difficult to get into the country and the mountains. And they have all sorts of other plans like they have enough nuclear bunkers for every citizen of Switzerland. So presumably this woman is going to be the only person who has nowhere to go. Passport please. Okay we've got to move on. It's time for fact number three and that is my fact. My fact is that there are people in the houses of parliament constantly looking for fire. You phrase that

like they're smokers and they're like, I don't have a like. There are 24 fire patrol officers who go around the house of parliament. They do it in shifts obviously and the Palace of Westminster is basically only able to be used because they're working. So if they weren't there then the building would not comply with the 2005 fire safety order. So they are easily the 24 most important people in the houses of parliament. So you say that the fire people have had to be installed because of this 2005 piece of health and safety regulation? I do say that. You do say that and yet I think that. Oh no here we go. Effectively crown properties are exempt from health and safety regulations so they still have to abide by them but you can't prosecute the crown properties for

not abiding by them. The only thing you can do is censure them. So if they don't abide by these rules it goes to this incredibly long process that you would go through usually where someone else might go to prison at the end or be arrested or fined but with the crown they just get a formal censure. Basically this is about how shonky the houses of parliament are. They're falling to bits aren't they? They really are yeah. There was a report in 2012 that said if it wasn't listed building they'd recommend demolishing it and starting again. Wow. Do they often find fires in their hunt? They do yeah. Do they? So there have been 60 incidents since 2008 which have had the potential to cause a serious fire. Yeah so that is completely insane. How incompetent are the

people in the houses of parliament? No need to answer that sort of question. Well it's just a very old building and there are lots of bits which are kind of fire hazards in which you know it's a huge place as well. There's a lot of kind of it was built obviously before electricity so the wires are all kind of bodged in to where all the flames are. Yeah they're really loose and there's loads of basically nothing gets uninstalled so anytime old wiring is replaced they don't take out the old wiring so there's just tons of flammable materials sitting there and there's loads of asbestos. I mean that's not flammable but there's like tons of asbestos. It's sort of everywhere it's not just in the walls like there's asbestos inside the light switches and things like that they just

shut it in absolutely everywhere. Of the 3,000 windows in the Palace of Westminster nearly all of them don't close properly according to this report. That's very bad. It was so badly built. I guess does that mean if there's a fire yeah more air will get in I suppose to make the fire worse. And I think the shutters don't open properly the windows don't close and the shutters don't open because I think they built radiators. I was reading the report on why it needs redoing and one of the things in it said that they built radiators in the nooks that are supposed to house the shutters at some point so now when you try to open the shutters there's a radiator in the way. Wow. Sometimes MPs miss votes because they get stuck in lifts. Do they? Really? Well it's happened at

least once. Yeah I don't know when I say sometimes I mean one time. The legislation only passed by seven votes and so it was like a chance of if more people couldn't get there. I mean if they'd all been in that lift. I used to work for an MSP in Scotland and he once pressed the wrong button on his voting thing and voted the wrong way in a vote that came down to one vote. Sheepish email to IT support. And then what terrible law passed because of that? So Scottish independence upcoming that's all him. No it was about green energy I think. I once worked in the House of Parliament for a while and on my first day someone came into the office I was working in and took off his shoe and threw it a mouse in the

corner because they have a really bad mouse problem. Really? Yeah. Wow what a... Oh hi. I'm usually cartoon based way to deal with that. According to MP Ben Bradshaw there is urine leaking in the House of Parliament specifically into his office. A couple of years ago he tweeted that urine seems to be pouring through the ceiling into my commons office for the second day running. There was some piping with holes in it in the in the room above him and the smell was only made bearable by his staff wearing strong perfume. Apparently the roof of the Hall of Westminster there aren't really sure why it's still up because they thought that it was originally built with columns because at the time during the 13th and 14th century we didn't think that they had the

technology to make a roof that was wider than the beams it was made of and it doesn't have columns anymore but they recently had a look at it and they think that there were never any columns so I'm sure as to why it's up there and how it's staying up. Is this going to be like in a cartoon when the building realizes that it couldn't be standing up? It's freewheeling in the air for a bit and then yeah. That's so weird. I know. So just on fire safety has anyone seen the fire safety slide that's been installed in Shanghai? No. So it's basically like a slide you see in a playground and it goes around the stairwell and when it's not in use then it's up vertically kind of attached to the the banisters. Why is it not in use? Who puts a spiral slide in a massive building

and thinks oh we won't bother using this? James this is not for the purposes of recreation it's a health and safety issue. The only time you would ever want to use the slide is in a case of a fire in which case it takes 14 seconds to descend the five stories. That is so cool. Is there a penalty for improper use? I'm almost certain. That is really 14 seconds for five stories. Well I was trying to work out I reckon I could run downstairs in less than that. You absolutely could not marry three seconds per story. Oh I don't know. I'd take four stairs at a time I could do it. I think you could fall that distance in that time. Okay it's time for our final fact of the show and that is Alex. My fact this week is that the Cookie Monster isn't allowed to eat cookies. Since it's diabetes

diagnosis. No why not? Well cookies are actually bad for the fabric that he is made out of so he actually eats rice cakes disguised to look like cookies disguised. I think he knows. But it would be quite a powerful message about childhood healthy eating if he did eat cookies and slowly you saw his skin degrading and rotting away over the next six months of the show. No? What to teach children that if you eat too many cookies your fur will fall off. I've never actually seen it but they're obviously are supposed to be educational aren't they and they're good at dealing with the heart-hitting issues. I think they're covering the Trump election as we speak. They did have a character called Donald Grump. So good yeah. Based on Donald Trump and it was when

the apprentice first became popular and he was a muppet with a bright orange coiffur who had the most trash of any grouch in the world and he had his name on every piece of trash in town. It was played by Oscar the Grouch and he's like I have more trash than you. I don't know who Oscar the Grouch is. All right he's the guy who lives in the bin. He's really grumpy. As I said never watched it but everyone else knows who Oscar the Grouch is. Yeah it's true actually Oscar the Grouch is quite even if you'd never seen it I'm surprised you'd never come across him. Have you come across Big Bird? Yeah so I've heard of Big Bird and I've heard of Elmo and I've heard of Burton Ernie but that's only because they're referenced in Friends which I have seen. And you must know the

cooking monster as well. I think I thought that was the same as Big Bird actually. He's appeared on every, like he's appeared on Newsnight, he's appeared on BBC Breakfast, he's done more political shows than most people in this country. The Jeremy Corbyn. Took a long time for us to get in the Jeremy Corbyn shine. Puppets don't have a sexual orientation and Sesame Street had to make that clear because apparently there are lots of rumours that Burton Ernie are a gay couple. Because they share a bed. Oh right okay so I can see where those rumours came from. Okay so there were rumours about that and they said they're just friends and puppets don't have a sexual orientation. They said they're puppets, they don't exist below the waist, they only have a top half.

Big Bird exists below the waist. Yeah I've seen, but he's not a puppet. And I guess unless he belongs to the 3% of birds that do have a penis, Big Bird will have a cloaca which he will press against the cloaca of other Big Birds. They are educational, presumably they've discussed the cloaca of Big Bird at some point in the show. So Big Bird is flightless and isn't it true, I read someone said this week that flightless birds have a bladder, is that right? Flightless, the only bird with a bladder is the ostrich. And that's because bladders are heavy and like birds can't normally have them because it would weigh them down. Yes. But Big Bird could possibly have a bladder. He could have a bladder, has anyone

ever seen him wee? Isn't Elmo the only non-human to testify in the court of law? Where did the defendant tickle you? No, it was during a campaign for increased funding for music programmes and he testified that there should be indeed that. Does he sing? Is he involved? Is he a musical? He sings. Yeah, they all sing. So there's a list of puppets that have been in Sesame Street and Muppets as well. But there's a list and there was one called Anna. This was in the Spanish version of Sesame Street and it says that Anna had a no-it-all attitude. Wow. Based on me, I'm not going to lie. But it's a justified attitude, isn't it? Alex Bell, there was one called Bell who was in the Brazilian co-production of Sesame Street

and Bell was an imaginative hot pink monster girl. Sounds about right. That's my online profile. And there was one called Murray Munster. Was there? Yeah, and he was the host of the Word on the Street segment and he was a boisterous red-orange Muppet. In the Nigerian version of Sesame Street, the star Muppet is called Kami and Kami is HIV positive to remove the stigma of talking about dealing with the heart issues. That's so good. I know. Another responsible thing they do is they make a whole separate programme called Talk, Listen, Connect and it's for Children with Parents in the Military and they broadcast that to them to teach them about how much they're going to miss their parents and how it's okay and how, for instance, like amputees

coming back from war zones, their children might be a bit traumatised by seeing that. And so there was a lovely story of a father who came back from Afghanistan, I think, and he'd had three of his limbs amputated and he was really worried and they showed him the Sesame Street video that had been made to educate his children about his condition and he burst into tears. Apparently he was so happy that he had a good way of communicating it to his child. Oh my goodness. Some of the Muppets are actually made of army surplus material. I watched them until commentary ages ago and I just remembered it. The Cookie Monster has a British cousin. Really? Called the Biscuit Bastard. You were half right. Oh really? It's the Biscuit Monster. Okay. Biscuit Bastard would be good.

That could educate children about how it's okay if your parents aren't married. That's hilarious. Does he actually feature on the American show then? He was only in one episode where he came to visit the Cookie Monster. Okay. Yeah. He was on holiday. Tried to get himself a job as Donald Grumps representative in Europe. We could talk about biscuits but do you think we're... I can I just say one thing about biscuits then? Yeah. Yeah. Dunking biscuits was originally done in wine. The first evidence we have of biscuit dunking was wafers that the Romans softened in wine. Wow. And before dunking in tea even there was dunking in beer because in the Royal Navy you would have hard tack biscuits that were really,

really hard and you couldn't eat them very well so people would dunk them in their beer to soften them up. Wow. That's very interesting. Wafers in wine. That reminds me. Are you allowed to dunk your wafer in your wine at church during communion? No. The idea of putting wafers directly into people's mouths, that came because they were worried that people would take them in their hands, hide them away and use them for magic potions. I thought you were going to say use them slowly over time, build their own Christ at home. I was reading about Simon Pope who's a biscuit designer and tester. Best job in the world. He's honestly, his job includes eating tasting biscuits from 472 packets of biscuits every year so he says he tastes 30 biscuits a day.

He says he often doesn't swallow them because I guess for health reasons so he says he'll nibble on them to check for things like taste, texture and firmness. He says he sometimes does have biscuits at work because it's important to test them in situ. I need to test this batch in Las Vegas I'm afraid. Travel expenses are enormous. He's in the plane, he's got a seat next to him which just has a packet of biscuits on it. Always going round the world hobnobbing. I think we might be done here. I think so too. Tim Deshing returns guys. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed it. We will be back again next week with another selection of our favourite facts. So until then,

it's goodbye from us and you can follow us on Twitter if you like. We are on James at Eggshaped Alex at Alexbell underscore. I'm on at Andrew Hunter M and you can follow our group account which is at QI podcast. Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com and I just quickly want to say I got very behind on some emails towards the end of last year so I really apologise if you've done that but I will try and get back to all emails henceforth. So if you haven't heard from me, okay, that will have a line from hundreds more emails. You can also go to our website which is no such thing as a fish.com. You can also watch our TV show no such thing as the news if you go to the website which is no such thing as the news.com. Okay, thanks again for listening and goodbye.

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