No Such Thing As A Fish - 164: No Such Thing As A Poo Powered Plane

Episode Date: May 11, 2017

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss second-hand spacesuits, Jeremy Corbyn's luxuriant beard, and North Korea's flying taxi service.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anna Chazinski, and once again we've gathered around the microphone only this time, we've got a big announcement to make right at the top of this show. We are releasing our first ever book. What? I forgot to mention that to you, actually.

One of the last to know everything in this office. You're not involved. So yeah, No Such Thing as a Fish, we're releasing a book, we've signed a deal, and the book is being released in November. If you're hearing these words, you can pre-order it now. Go to Amazon and click the button. It's a book that... Click the button.

There's the button. Click the button. And click the button. The button. It's on the front page. The big button in the middle of the page saying, buy the fish book now. I think what you want to do is go to qi.com forward slash shop, and we're going to have a link there that you click on, which will take you to the page where you can pre-order

the book. And it's going to be called The Book of the Year, and it's going to be about the year that's happening right now, and it's by us, go to Amazon or go to qi.com forward slash shop, and you'll be able to pre-order it. Yeah. And it's just going to be packed with all the most interesting stories that we found from 2017. This is one that I want to get into the book.

Mafia members in Sicily have been banned from becoming godfathers. So this is an archbishop who has said that at baptisms, if you are involved in the mafia, you are now not allowed to become a godfather. Here's one that I've got. When they voted for the UK general election, there was only 13 MPs that didn't vote for it, and one of them did it because it was going to interfere with this honeymoon. Okay, this is one that I'd like to get in. This is something that's been revealed in the last couple of weeks, and it's that a

Norwegian slow TV show that follows migrating reindeer has had to be suspended after the reindeer stopped moving altogether. I've gotten a fact that I'd like to get into the book, which is that Jeremy Corbyn has won seven elections for parliamentary beard of the year. Really? Yeah, and it's practically unparalleled in modern history. Is he the current reigning champ? He's the current Labour leader.

Yeah, it's depending on when you're listening to this. Is that what he spends all his time campaigning for then? Yes, he spends all his time. He won the actual beard of the year quite a long time ago, I think. As opposed to the niche parliamentary beard of the year. Yeah, I think that's like a qualifying round. I hope I make the regionals. He made global beard of the year.

Oh, I think it's British beard of the year. It's British beard of the year. He is the reigning champion, yes, and he won, I think, with 64% of the vote last year, which is slightly more than he won that year's leadership contest with. When is the next championship? It'll be this year. So in time, I meant month, is it in time for our book? I think it will be in time for the book, so we'll be able to announce whether he's won

it a record seventh time. Let's hope so, because if we had a book of news of 2017 and we weren't able to get in the results of beard of the year, it would just be a joke. Sorry, I think it'd be parliamentary beard of the year. Yeah, so that's it. The book's going to be just packed with all that sort of stuff, and we thought we would spend this episode not telling you our most interesting fact that we've learned over the last seven days, strictly from all of history, but we would pick something that we want to

go into this book and pitch it to each other. So that's what we're going to do, starting with you, Andy. My fact that I would like to get into the book is that ideas proposed for the US border wall include a trench full of nuclear waste, a one-way mirror, and three million hammocks next to each other. What? Three million hammocks? Yeah.

That is not so much a serious proposal, but... No, because you could just go under them. Or over them, depending on how high up the tree they're tied. Ah, so are there going to be trees along this border? I think it's not a fixed proposal yet. Right. I think you could plant the trees. You'd have to have something to attach the hammocks to.

Yeah. Is the idea that you get to a hammock, it looks so comfortable, you lie down, have a nap, and you never make it across? I think that's the idea, yeah. There is an artist whose name is Jennifer Meridian, who's proposed that one, she's proposed also a wall of pipe organs and a wall of lighthouses, thousands and thousands of lighthouses. So this was a big push, wasn't it, for proposals to be sent in. So they had a little five-day window where you could submit your proposals, and then

they're going to pick around 20 finalists in about a month or so, and they're going to build prototypes of their sections of the wall. How are they going to build a prototype of the nuclear waste one? Just a little bit of depleted uranium. Yeah, exactly, yeah. I don't know. But the one-way mirror is a very interesting idea because you can see Mexico from the USA, but they can't see you.

Yeah. What's the point in that? I have no idea. You could still see someone approaching if they were going to try and climb the mirror. And you don't know if you're approaching from the Mexican side, you don't know if anyone is watching. Okay, I thought it was just that the Mexicans go towards and go, oh no, it's just exactly like here, we might as well say.

There are loads of proposals. One of them has a monorail going all the way along the top. Oh yeah, like a hyperloop they're calling it, right? Yeah, but it's a monorail. Is it a monorail? Yeah, okay. What's the difference between those two things? One sounds super futuristic, and the other sounds like a monorail.

We've all seen that episode of The Simpsons. I read the rules for the proposals, the idea of what the wall needs to withstand. It needs to withstand attacks from, here's the quote, sledgehammer, car jack, pickaxe, chisel, battery operated impact tools, any kind of handheld tools, and not only does it have to sort of deal with the impact, but it should be able to deal with it for up to four hours. So specifically. Four hours.

Four hours of a sledgehammer. Meanwhile, there's some bloke next to you who has a chisel. It's like, why do you need to specify the chisel when you've also got the car jack as matching into it for four hours? We've made it car jack proof, but there's a chisel weakness unfortunately. It's like the Death Star, there's going to be just one little weak spot. So it's a very stupid idea, obviously. And they want it ideally to be 30 foot tall, and so all the proposals.

So it's a 30 foot tall mirror, it's quite cool. He's become more flexible on the 30 foot thing. Yes. I think he's gone. He's had anything over 18 feet, 90 feet, okay. One of the problems is that they obviously need to build the wall on their side of the land, on the American side of the land, but there's a lot of American landowners who have houses and property that go on the other side of these rivers and bits of land generally.

So to build the wall, he's actually going to be sealing out a lot of Americans and they're going to be stuck in Mexico unless they sell their land. So he's trying to buy the land back from them for the government. He knows there's going to be problems, so he's planning to effectively go into legal war with a lot of Americans over this. So in 2006, they started building a load of walls at various points, and there were 442 lawsuits that were reviewed by CNN from the time, and 93 of them are still open. And that was for a much shorter wall.

Because also in 2006, I think George Bush approved a virtual wall. I think we've talked about the idea of virtual wall before, but he worked on that. The project was shelved in 2011, and it cost a billion dollars. Sorry, is that a billion real dollars or billion virtual dollars? It's sadly, I think it's real dollars. But the thing about the virtual wall was that it worked by a system of sensors that were supposed to be able to tell where migrants were crossing the border, but apparently it was really ineffective in windy conditions in misty trees and plants for people.

It was constantly thinking that animals crossing the border represented suspicious activity. One person has proposed leaving a four-inch gap at the bottom of the wall so that little animals can cross. One problem is that there are 111 species which cross the area currently proposed for the wall, and so lots of them will struggle to mate and breed and live a fulfilling life. I wonder if all the animals will then evolve to be four inches tall, like tiny buffaloes going over the range. I've got an idea.

What about this? You kind of make a very slight incline for about two miles out, and it just gets more and more inclined, inclined, inclined, inclined, and then on the Mexican side it's a sheer drop. Do you know what I mean? Like a cliff. So from the American side, it just looks like a normal bit of landscape. It's just like a ha ha in an English country garden.

Exactly like that, yeah. Well, that's a bit like the apparent border between North and South Korea, right? Really? Which I didn't know about. North Korea claims there's a wall dividing it from South Korea, and that the US and South Korea built this wall a few decades ago during the Cold War, and they say on their side it's got like little crenellations where guns are, and it's got checkpoints along it, and it's this big wall, and then it says on the other side, on the South Korea

side, it's just covered in turf and grass, and so nobody knows that it's there from the other side, and the US and South Korea totally deny that they ever built this wall. There's evidence. Someone did a documentary, I think, where they claimed to be showing pictures, so we've got no idea if North Korea is divided from South Korea by a wall or not. I saw a photo of, because there are doors on the border where the North Koreans and South Koreans have police, and they open up to either let people in, and when they open up the door, if it's a police officer opening the door on the South Korean side, the rule is that

another South Korean officer has to be holding onto them, because they might be pulled through by the North Koreans. There's photos you can see online where they're like holding, like by the arm, another South Korean police officer opening a door. Yeah, it's amazing. That's so funny. Do you know the first ever demarcation between America and Mexico when they first decided to do it?

They just drew a line. Really? Drew it? Just drew a line on the floor. What, like a fork? A bit like, you know, like in old sitcoms where you would draw a line around half of the house and they were allowed only on your side and the other side. What were the marker pen?

I don't know what it was with. I guess it was just a line in the sand. Paint's probably right. It's a bit sandy. Yeah. Well, that's true. You can't paint sand? You can't paint sand?

Well, you can move the line, which is quite handy. Our country looks a bit smaller today. And then they just started making fences. And the reason they made fences is because they didn't want Mexican animals to go into American territory because they had like diseases and stuff like that. Really? Yeah. So it wasn't for people.

And when they made it for people even, it wasn't to stop Mexicans from coming in. It was to stop Chinese immigrants from coming in. Really? Yeah. So was that like the start of the 20th century or something? It was during the Depression, I think. So yeah. So last week, Congress approved spending for replacing existing fencing, which is different

to building a new wall. There's a strong argument that this is never going to happen. So they approved spending to replace existing fencing along 20 miles, which is 1% of the border, and to add gates to existing barriers, apparently. So it'll be, I think, slightly more porous, the border than before, because it'll have gates. But anyway, Sean Spicer got into a massive row with the press because he was saying, hang on, that stuff was a fence when you described it in January.

Literally exactly the same structure you were calling it a fence. And he said, no, it's a wall. It's definitely a wall. He got really touchy about it. That's clever, though. It probably cost a lot less to just have a chat with the OED and bribe them to change the definition of the word wall. To a line of paint in the sand.

But if you just do like they did with the North and South Korea thing and just say there's a wall there, when there isn't a wall there. I don't think that's beyond Trump's. You're right. He can do it. It would be unbelievably cheap to do. Yeah. All he has to do is say, hey, guys, we did it.

We made a wall. And everyone goes, there's no wall here. He's like, yeah, there is. Yeah. What do you want about? You're a wall. There was a design that someone came up with in 2009. So well before Trump was even thinking about being a candidate, which was a barrier which

is lined with burrito carts. So it's a proper wall and barrier. But along the ground, like those, you know, those desks you have to meet people in prisons to visit them so you can have a bit of conversation with them. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a barrier there which is permeable. You can see through it and you can pass things through it.

Burritos. And you can pass burritos through. Who's passing to who? I imagine you're selling burritos. Probably the burrito seller to the burrito buyer. Yeah. Okay. But it can go both ways.

Yeah. Because money could go the other direction. Exactly. And if there's hot dogs in the other direction, you could do that. Yeah. Okay. So it was an American professor called Ronald Royale and he said the burrito wall accommodates for a food cart to be inserted into the wall.

Seating is built into the wall and food, conversation, or a bi-national game of futzi can occur across the border. Wait a minute. So you can play futzi. So they must be, maybe that's that four inch gap. Yeah. But you know, there is like, there is an existing wall in various parts, of course. And over there, they sometimes play volleyball.

No. Historically they have, yeah. And they'll sometimes have poetry competitions like rap battles. Wow. But volleyball, you wouldn't be able to see which way the ball was going until it was on your side of the wall. That's why the Americans want a one-way mirror to win at volleyball. No, really.

It hasn't touched the ground over here. Okay. It is time to move on to fact number two and that is James. Okay. I think we might have some North Korean stuff in this book. Oh, yeah. In this book of 2017, very much in the news. And so here's my North Korea fact.

North Korea's national airline Air Corio owns 10 times more taxis than it owns aeroplanes. Taxis. Yeah. They only have 15 aeroplanes and I found that they've recently branched out into taxis and I found that they have about 150 taxis. And what we think might have happened is there's a load of sanctions obviously against North Korea, so they're not allowed to fly to as many places as they used to be. So they need to find other ways to make money.

And one of the ways they're doing it is branching out into things like soda and cigarettes and in this case taxis. And this is quite a famous airline, isn't it? Because they're famously rated one star. They're the only one-star airline in the world. Yeah. But not for danger, for quality of service, which is important to emphasize. I think there's only been one fatal accident on Air Corio and that was 1983.

That was a car crash. That was at a time when the airline was called CAC, so CAAK. I suspect that's how you pronounce it. But yeah, it's perfectly safe. It's just the service is very bad. Do they ever drag people off planes who've got a perfectly legal ticket? But the in-flight entertainment sounds like fun. Oh yeah.

You get patriotic songs sung by the band Moran Bong and I looked into Moran Bong a bit more and he actually put them together. Did he? Like Simon Cowell of North Korea. Yes. Wow. No, he put them together and they are 20 members and they're all young women and they're all quite senior military ranks as well.

So sometimes they perform in uniform and sometimes they perform in miniskirts and high heels. Multitalented. Yeah. You don't want to get the wrong costume when you're going to war, do you? Although there was that military march in North Korea a couple of years ago which showed the female soldiers marching and they were all wearing really high heels. Do you remember? Oh yeah.

Extraordinary. You've got to appreciate because it's quite hard to walk in high heels, isn't it? If you can march in them, then they're good soldiers. I think that's quite a good policy. Right, because if you can do well in high heels, then you're definitely going to do okay in your trench boots. But they've got songs, sorry to be obsessed with Moran Bong, but Moran... The tracks they sing include Let's Support Our Supreme Commander with Arms.

We think of the Marshal Day and Night, the Marshal is Kim Jong-un. They also play the theme from Rocky and My Way. But with the original lyrics or...? Don't know. So. Sorry, I feel like I went on an extended route about Moran Bong there. So is it a solid 20 people or are they on a rotational...? No, they're solid.

And then they disappeared for a while. And then they came back with no explanation. Like take that. So a lot of the news with North Korea has been their missile tests. Their most advanced missile is the Musudan. That's the Musudan, not the Musu Comet Dan. And they've done eight attempts and it's failed six times. Okay.

So that's a 75% failure, which is a worse failure percentage than Sunderland have had this year. Sunderland have failed to win 67% of their Premier League matches in the bottom of the league. Wow. And I believe Donald Trump has actually dispatched a fleet to Sunderland. If someone starts doing well, should we be concerned? I don't think that's going to happen. So the weapon that the US would use if they were going to launch a strike on North Korea's nuclear facilities is this thing called a MOP, which stands for Massive Ordnance Penetrator.

It is a £30,000 bomb and it can smash through 200 feet of earth or 60 feet of concrete before it explodes. Oh my God. What before it explodes? 60 feet of concrete. How does it do that? It's what I mean. Is it just big and it's heavy or is it got a drill on the front? It's a bit like, do you know when you're drilling on the ground and you get a pocket of air and it fires you?

I know. I know. I don't want to say it, but listeners of a previous episode will notice a similar sounding bit of bullshit from Anna. It's using that same technology, though, but in reverse. What it is done actually, it's got a little chisel on the front of it. I just want to say I've had multiple people write in and confirm that story was true about the guy being sucked through the earth and this one is also true. This one's blown through the earth, not sucked, but it's the same general event.

Does it have an explosive as it hits the earth, which is a sort of first explosive and then as soon as it's lower, then it has a big... I don't actually know how the technology works. That's a really good idea though. It's a mini explosion. Yeah. I thought it was more like a drill, like it dives down so hard into the earth, it just penetrates it. 60 feet of concrete. 200 feet of earth. Yeah.

So yeah, that's a hill. It could get through a hill. Yeah. That's mad. Remember that I said that if you cornered a badger on the street that it could... Sorry? I don't remember that, Dan. So hang on, you're in a street and you've cornered a badger. Yeah.

It's a street corner. Yeah, I guess it's a street corner. You're in a cul-de-sac. In a cul-de-sac, yeah. A badger doesn't know where to go. It is a concrete street. The claws of a badger are so sharp that it can grind its way through the concrete floor to get away from it. So you're suggesting they put a badger on the end of this bomb and then it drills down really hard. Or just badger claws so it just slices through the ground.

There are also plants that can go through concrete, aren't there? Like you can get weeds and you can get fungi and stuff that can actually grow through concrete. So if you weren't bothered about how long it took... That's true. A plant on the end of your bomb and then when it lands... It would have to be a negative geotropic plant because it's digging downwards. Oh yeah. It has to be all with roots that are more than 60 feet long.

This year, a guy called Kwang Song Han became the first North Korean to ever score in Serie A in Italy, which is the top league in Italy. So he scored against the goalkeeper who he beat was Joe Hart, the England number one goalkeeper. Oh. Yeah. Not the one who was fired for eating a pie. He's not England's goalkeeper, no. He's Sutton United's goalkeeper.

I'm confusing Sutton United in England. There's a fact that I hope makes it into the book, which James found about that goalkeeper who got fired for eating the pie. Do you remember it? He got a new job, didn't he? But apparently what it was... His first job after it was that he was a food taster for... A Tex-Mex restaurant.

A Tex-Mex restaurant. Post being goalie for Sutton. Anyway, so it's quite good that England's goalkeeper is the first goalkeeper ever to let in a goal for a North Korean in Serie A. Maybe they might spare us when they sweep the power. In gratitude for that. They were also, actually, speaking of North Korean sport. On the nuclear testing site, their main nuclear testing site,

which is just outside Pyongyang, I think a US satellite the week before last spotted a volleyball game being played. Really? So that's nice that these guys are having fun and they're off time. Yeah, right on the site. Are you sure that wasn't by the border wall that you were talking about between South and North? There is no wall then.

Oh, there is no wall. Wow. I think if volleyball was going on there, it's a fucking wall. It's a wall on one side and then a two-mile gradual decrease on the other. So you hit the ball over the wall and then it just keeps rolling and rolling and rolling and you have to walk two miles to collect it. I got a couple of things about just general airline news from around the world. Singapore Airlines are flying now not using your classic air fuel,

but cooking oil. They're flying using cooking oil. Yeah, they are. So this is a thing that they are trying to reduce aviation emissions and they've launched this thing. It's called the green package and it's powered in part by sustainable biofuel, which is used from cooking oil. So if you're ever flying Singapore Airlines, there might be a moment

which I never will be for how long. Sorry to be a fossil fuel stick in the mud. I do it. Is it extra virgin or are we talking sunflower oil? Oh, I don't know. No, not sure. Because you only want the high quality stuff, I think. That's true.

Do you remember there was that bus in Bristol that was poo powered? Yes. It was going to be running on... Would you rather travel on a poo powered plane or an extra virgin olive oil powered plane? Oh, wow. Yeah. Given the choice.

As long as they both work, it doesn't really affect your flight, does it? It might do. Do you not think the fumes, if the fumes could seep up through the carpet, you'd certainly rather the oil. I rarely go on aeroplanes to think, oh, I can just smell kerosene the whole way. No, but you do get the smell of it on the runway, don't you? When you're crossing from the terminal building sometimes

to go into the plane, you can smell a bit of fuel there. Oh, yeah. If it was a stank of poo, I probably would go with the cooking oil. Whereas, yeah, delicious cooking oil. Yeah. Cool. I got another one, which is... I'd love to get this in the book.

It's my favorite character that I discovered in the last year or so. It's the Iraqi transport minister. So airplane news from him that happened in the last month is that while flying in a plane, as a passenger, with 200 other passengers on board, he went to the cockpit and said, I would like to land the plane. He said, OK, I guess we have to let you.

You're the Iraqi transport minister. He's quite a powerful guy. He could just do that. Was it an Iraqi plane? Yeah, yeah. OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it wasn't like on British Airways coming in.

Imagine if John Prescott, during the new Labour government, had tried to land the plane. I've done a poo and I'd like it to power this plane. So apparently they let him take control of the planes to land the plane. They said it was almost fatal. But fortunately, the captain managed to get back

into the controls in time in order to stop them from dying. Why did he let him? I'm sorry, this whole guy's the transport minister. He's an important guy. You don't see, yes. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe he's a massive deal. So, OK, this is a quote from the pilots.

I don't know either. When you're on a plane, you don't go, right? Who's the most important person here? Well, you know, I'm actually the mayor of Swindon. OK, you can land it. This is a quote from the pilot post the event. The minister did not do a good job. He slammed the front of the plane into the ground.

All Iraqi planes in the future will have to have a fake cockpit, basically. The minister turns up. OK, it's time to move on to fact number three. And that is my fact, which I am pitching to get into the book. And that fact is that all NASA astronauts are wearing hand-me-downs. Now, when a bigger astronaut,

when they grow up enough to fit into the suit. Yeah, exactly. No, this is a new story that's just come out, and that's a fact that sort of emerged from it. It's that NASA has suddenly realized that of all the functioning spacesuits that they have for their astronauts to do their, when they go outside of the International Space Station,

they're running out because they only made a batch of them and they haven't made any more. So they're really running low on them. And every time a new astronaut goes up, they're basically using a hand-me-down. They're using a previously used astronaut suit, space suit. And yeah, so they've got, I think, 17 more missions. And let's say the backpack alone that's part of the suit.

They've only got 11 of those that are left that are functional, and they don't think they're going to survive in order to finish all of the missions. And so they've got more missions than they have suits, basically, at this point. I think if you don't have the suit, don't go on the mission. I mean... Well, we booked it in now.

It'd be a shame to cancel. Last year, NASA had what they called a very tweedy, a poop challenge, which was asking for designs to go to the toilet in your space suit. But it had to be a hands-free, in-suit toilet device, which could work for up to six days. The main winner, and I don't have the full details, but it was a small, crotch-based airlock.

Okay? To poo through? Well, I don't think that's the answer. But you could apparently stick things in through it, which I do not understand either. I see what it is. So it sort of hangs off your bum, and then you press a button, and it opens it,

and you poo into it, and then you press a button. It's on the crotch. It's not. It's a bit like a burrito wagon. What happens is the poo goes in one side like a burrito, and then closes up, and then someone opens the other side, and then takes the burrito out. Okay.

Not eating at your Mexican restaurant. Well, the Susan United goalkeeper said it was very nice. Anyway, yeah, I'm sorry. I don't fully understand the designs of the winner, but there were three winners. One was that one. The second place was, it's just words here, an air-push urinary girdle.

I don't know. The third place was kind of an external catheter thing. Okay. Yeah. Actually, on airlocks, non-fecies-based, the new spacesuit that they're designing now and that they're hoping to get out before they have to cancel all these missions

is going to cost $4.4 million. And one of the most important innovations on it is that it has got what's called a suit plate interface port, which basically means that you don't have to go through an airlock anymore to leave the spaceship, because you just dock into your suit. So the suit is docked to the outside of the spaceship, and then you just walk into your suit.

No. And then you don't have to go through, because usually you have to go through an airlock, dock onto the floor, go through an airlock, and then go into a space station or whatever. That doesn't sound like a good idea. That's like, why don't you change into your scuba gear underwater? If something goes wrong, if anything goes wrong in space

and you're exposed to the vacuum of space, you're dead in seconds. You'd have a couple of minutes. Yeah. Come on, Dan. What? Chill out. A couple of minutes to put a suit.

That really takes about 45 minutes to put those suits on. Is the spacesuit part of the outside of the ship, though? No. So I don't think it's like you put it on and then there's just a big hole in the ship as you leave. But does it bury a clothes behind the suit? I'm not sure. So this is what the woman said who designed them.

She said it allows astronauts to enter and exit the outfit by docking with the vehicle. So I'm not sure exactly how it would work, but I'm sure they've worked out a way of sealing the vehicle behind them. I think that's pretty cool. You would hope. Does that sound cool?

Yeah. I was reading a thing about, so in the news of the last few weeks, Peggy Whitson, who is the commander of the International Space Station, she broke the record for the longest time. An American has been in space. She already holds a number of other records for being in space. And she's commanding it for the second time as well. And she's an amazing person.

And they did a broadcast between the International Space Station and the White House, the Oval Office. So Trump and Ivanka and another astronaut. Why was Ivanka there? She's everywhere. Why? She's pretty important. She was going to fly the thing.

Yeah. So there was a chat that was going on between them. And you could see both at the same time. And there was this moment, which they're a bit confused about. And they're not sure if Trump was joking. They were talking about, he said, when are we going to get to Mars? And Peggy said, well, you know, we're doing all these amazing bits of research up here and down on Earth.

And we think by 2030s, we could start getting to it. And he said, no, I think we need to do it in my first term. It'd be disappointing if it's in my second term, but that's still OK. And so she was like, aha. And but then people at NASA are like, was that like a JFK moment? Did he mean that? Do we have to get to Mars in three years? So yeah, I don't know.

But we've got nothing to work. It was a weird broadcast because at points, I watched most of it. It just suddenly gets bored. It just looks quite bored talking to astronauts in space. And he also looks like he's thinking, I wonder what studio in Hollywood they're filming this in. Like, I imagine he's a moon landing denier. And he just thinks, yeah, you're not there.

I know about you guys. They actually discussed the urine thing, didn't they? He asked about how are you? Wait, the Trump urine thing or the astronaut urine thing? He actually might have lied in his answer given that because they discussed the astronaut urine thing, they avoided the Trump urine thing, actually. And about the recycling the urine. So they drink recycled urine when they're up in space.

And she said to him, it's really not as bad as it sounds. And he said, well, that's good. Glad to hear it. Better you than me. So one of the problems is that with these suits, the ones that are breaking. So one of the ones that broke not too long ago, it started letting the water supply in and the astronaut potentially could have drowned inside his own suit. They had to get immediately back into the International Space Station

and take all the stuff off. So that's one of the big problems is as soon as something goes wrong inside the suit, taking this astronaut out of the suit in time to save them does take a super long time. I'm really surprised it takes so long to make them. You would think like, okay, we need one before 2024. It can't be beyond the realm of man to be able to do that. That's true. If you have a million quid, you would think you'd be able to do it.

From Kennedy announcing, we're going to go to the moon to get into the moon. It was about nine years. We're now saying that it'll take us roughly that long to make a suit. Well, we're going to Mars in three years. No one's going to have any suits on. Mars mission ends in immediate disaster. No one could have foreseen as they stepped out. Okay, it is time for a final fact of the show, and that is Chazinsky.

Yes. My fact that I would like to get into the news book is that as of last week, whenever state media in Tajikistan mentions the president, they now legally have to refer to him by his full title, which is the founder of peace and national unity, leader of the nation, president of the Republic of Tajikistan, His Excellency, Emomali Raman. And they have to do that every time they mentioned him.

They can make cough after it and say, Whanker! So I think this might be the only news book that comes out this year that has a full section on Tajikistan. So get it for that. Apparently it takes 15 seconds for it to scroll along the screen on the news, which is like if you're trying to show a news bulletin, the president's announced, 15 seconds is a long time to have one name scrolling for.

But apparently you're allowed to say leader of the nation. Like if it's really a short bulletin or something, you're allowed to say leader of the nation. That's nice. That's nice to be informed, isn't it? Please just call me leader of the nation. Well, they've speculated. I think this is something the BBC picked up and it was reported by Radio Azad Lik. And it was the director of Tajik State Radio who made the announcement and he just said the mandatory use of the full title is required by law and didn't elaborate.

So I think, and I think we're still just speculating going, I think you're probably okay if you say leader of the nation sometimes. We'll only find out when someone tries it. Yep. So, Emma Marley Ramon, the president of Tajikistan has been... Say his full name, mate. Sorry, the founder of Peace and National Unity. He is a very undemocratic guy.

As in in May last year, he made people vote over whether he should be president for life. He won, remarkably. That's not undemocratic. No, you're right. He won 94.5% of the vote. Well, they like him. Yeah, they better. Because there's a lot of human rights oppression, a lot of torture and things like this.

They're 149 out of 180 on the free press listing. Wow. So pretty low down. Yeah. And he's passed a law which gives him immunity from all criminal charges for life, which is exactly the sort of thing that normal honest guys always tend to do. Yeah. So he's banned a few things generally that I've just got...

Obviously, he's done that if he's making news outlets call him by that full name. One thing he's blocked is YouTube. YouTube not allowed there anymore, mainly because of a video that went online of him dancing drunkenly at a wedding and singing karaoke really badly. Yeah, so he said, okay, this needs to... So he's banned the whole website? YouTube, yes. Come on, we all would do that.

Yeah, I would. If I had the power, there'd be no Facebook, no YouTube, pretty much nothing. No, it's not all banning things that he does. We should say he has taken a lot of positive steps too. So police in Tajikistan have been told that they have to go to the theatre once a month, but on different days. So there isn't one incredibly large audience on one day. I don't know how they coordinate all going on different days.

If they all go on the same day, there's going to be no police around. That's true. Apart from in that one theatre. Imagine your bad luck if you go to rob that theatre. I could have literally robbed anyone else in the country. But it's meant to be to help their spiritual and moral awareness. And there is a photo going with the news story of these incredibly bored looking men in suits. It is just because, though, the interior minister, who's called Ramazon Rahimzoda,

just went to the theatre last month and said, Oh my God, this is really fun and likes it. And so said, I think everyone should do it. He just went and thought it was good, thought they should do it too. I quite like that. Imagine if everything Theresa May didn't enjoy it, we all then had to do. Would that be good? Oh, we're all going fucks unseen.

Come on, guys. Another thing that he has put in place as a ban is that so everywhere in Tajikistan there are pictures of him, giant billboard pictures of him, and he's ordered that in all of the smaller towns and cities, any mayor or anyone who's in the position of power there has to take down the picture if they're in it with him, because he doesn't want to be associated with giving them the publicity of friendship on. Yeah, so he said, and the way that they did it was they called up all the local officials on the phone

and they said, Hi, are you the local official? Yes, I am. I have a message here from the president. And then they played a voice recording of him down the phone line to them, where he says, you are no longer allowed to have my photo up if you're in the photo with me. And so it's an audio message they played down the phone to each person that they called up. That is embarrassing. That's so weird.

It's a bit like when you split up with your ex, but you kind of like the photo, so you kind of get rid of them from the photo. Is it like that? Yes. Or when you call up their best friend and you play a recording of yourself down the phone at them saying, I want my stereo back. I want the careless whisper CD. Wow.

And it's like that. Do you remember during the coup in Turkey, President Erdogan appeared on TV, but it wasn't him appearing on TV. It was someone holding up a phone on the camera while they were mid-skyping him. Yeah. That's not actually one other thing that we'll probably go in the book is Mellon Shaw, just speaking of people appearing in weird technological ways. Mellon Shaw was voted out of the French election in the first round,

but was the very left-wing candidate. It was appearing by hologram, so he was appearing in seven or eight states at once. But it wasn't even a hologram, I found out. It was a, what was it called? Pepper's Ghost. It was called Pepper's Ghost, which is a cooler name than hologram. So he's like Tupac. Exactly.

Tupac did the same thing, and it basically means you appear in a similar way, but it's two-dimensional, whereas a hologram is three-dimensional. But it's basically a hologram. It's not a hologram. It looks like one. It doesn't understand what I'm saying when I say it's basically that. Yeah, but you know what I'm saying when I say monorail, but it's a hyperloop. Yeah, I think we understand each other.

Oh, I just know it's got very tense. I'm just saying maybe if he used a hologram, he might have got to the second round. Mellon Shaw did campaign partly via computer game. What? What? Like infiltrated Diddy Kong Racing. No, his supporters. He was quite tech-savvy.

It didn't do as much good as it could have done, but his supporters developed a computer game called Fiscal Combat with a sort of K-lack in Mortal Kombat. And you played Mellon Shaw in it, and you had to go around finding businessmen and then shaking them up and down. And as you shook them up and down, coins flew out of their pockets, and you were taking tax from the wealthy. It doesn't sound fun to me.

I've played it. It is quite fun. Is it? Yeah, because it's exactly that 2D style. It's pretty good. I mean, James, you're the only person left alive still playing Pokemon Go, so I don't know if you're a good arbiter of what is fun. Well, I'm going to be trying to get some Pokemon Go facts into this book.

We were almost late just for the listeners. We were almost late to the meeting for our book deal because we thought James was in charge of the Google Maps leading us the way to the building. In fact, we were following a man chasing down Pokemon. Well, we got the book deal, and I got an Onyx. Something about elections in Tajikistan, actually, which is quite interesting.

You can run for opposition, but there was no real proper opposition in the last election. The closest person who came to being a proper opponent was someone called Oynahol Baba Zarova, which is a cool name. So what you have to do to be eligible to run as a candidate for election in Tajikistan is you need to get 210,000 signatures to be eligible to run. So let's just put this in context to remind you how the British system works. In the UK, you need to get 10 signatures to be a candidate for election.

Just 10 signatures for your constituency. In the US, if you want to run for Senate, you need between 1,000 and 2,000, I think, in most places. Sorry, between 1,000 and 2,000, or between 1,000 and 2,000. It's got to be over 1,000. Yeah, and in Tajikistan, which only has a population of 8 million, you need to get 1 in 40 people in the country to sign saying that you should be a candidate.

And she still managed to get 202,000. And she was 8,000. 8,000 short. Oh, my God. That is nuts. I think I'd forge a few. Yeah. I mean, I'd duplicate a few.

I think it might get you in trouble with this guy. He's not going to check them all, is he? I can take a linear view of it, I'm sure. That's such a slap in the face. That is incredible. And she's a super cool woman. Look her up. She won an award given by Michelle Obama

last year or the year before, like most influential good people, women in the world or something. Oh, really? But yeah, hard luck on her. Yeah. Tajikistan has the cheapest pint of beer in the world that you can buy. Really?

Yeah, 30p per pint. That's pretty good. Yeah, 30p. That's quite good. And I think the second cheapest is 36p, which is made by Bhutanese monks. So that's the next cheapest one. He's not right.

I think so. I drunk beer in Bhutan, and I remember it being quite expensive. Well, you got overcharged, mate. You funded it the whole night. They saw you coming, didn't they? I'm pretty sure it was expensive, actually. Maybe only one. Six quid for a pint.

Yeah, sorry. We have to bring in for Tajikistan. Another thing Tajikistan has, which is kind of cool, is the world's most dangerous tunnel. Yeah. That sounds great. That sounds awesome. It sounds kind of cool, I'd say.

I did say kind of. In what way, and who decides that it's the most dangerous? I think just the general public. So it's nicknamed Death Tunnel, I think. And the reason it was built, it was built in, I think it started being built in 2007. And the reason it was built was because before that you couldn't drive from north to south to Tajikistan

having to cut through Uzbekistan. And Uzbekistan is not very friendly to Tajikistan a lot. So it was actually quite a dangerous trip if you had to go visit your mum in the north to go there. So they built this tunnel. It's five kilometres long. And it opened up a few years ago, but it had no lighting. So it's pitch dark in there.

It's got massive potholes. It has falling rocks all over the place. And you actually have to sign a form before you go into the tunnel saying that you understand the danger of driving through this tunnel of being hit by falling rocks or something. It's got no ventilation at all. Oh, I think it's got maybe one fan right in the middle. And so that means that it's filled with exhaust fumes.

So visibility is only a few feet. And this does mean that if you break down, for instance, in the middle of it, you will get carbon monoxide poisoning within a very short amount of time. So people who are driving through this tunnel say they get dizzy and nauseous as they do it because it's so blocked up with carbon monoxide. But it is a great way to get from north to south to Tajikistan.

How long is it, sorry? Five kilometers. That is quite a long way. It's a long way. I think they are improving it. There was a thing last year when they said they have... They've got an extra fan. Yeah, they're improving it.

You no longer have to sign the form. OK, that's it. That is all of the potential facts that are going to be making it into the book. Again, it comes out in November. Do go to Amazon right now and click the big button on the front page. Or go to...

Or go to Amazon and look up The Book of the Year by no such thing as a fish. Or go to qi.com. That's right. And it's going to contain everything from all the scientific discoveries that have happened this year through to stuff like Tajikistan presidents,

to Trump's wall, Trump generally, North Korea, Kim Jong-un. We're all on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, James. At Eggshaped, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com.

Or you can go to our website. No such thing as a fish.com. We've got all of our previous episodes. We're going on tour in November. We're not only going to record a show, but we're going to be bringing our book with us. The book that you can buy The Book of the Year. Go to Amazon now or our website.

We'll see you next week. Goodbye. You can't mention the fucking off.