No Such Thing As A Fish - 177: No Such Thing As A Barking Spy

Episode Date: August 11, 2017

Live from the Wilderness Festival, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the invention of crowd barriers, bombs that lecture their victims, and Volkswagen's biggest product [hint: it's not cars].

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the Wilderness Festival. My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and Anna Chazinski 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. We're going to start with my fact this week. My fact is that in 1957 America developed a shouting bomb that would lecture the enemy for three minutes as it dropped from the sky. When I get down there you're in such trouble, mister. This was a very rogue one mention in a new scientist article, I haven't been able to approve its existence

outside of this one article. There's no mention online at all is there? It's almost as if I made it up. I read also that apparently it would give instructions to the soldiers on the ground as well as the bomb came down you'd be able to hear what to do if you're a soldier. How long does it take three minutes to shout that? What I couldn't ascertain is does this bomb go off or is it merely a propaganda tool? So the idea is that it would be dropped from a plane from about 60,000 feet high and then parachutes would deploy and then as it was making its ascent or descent rather to the ground. We'll edit that to be correct. And much of the people in the airplane though it's coming back. This is the worst lecture ever.

Yes so the idea is that it would parachute down and then it would just and this is 1957 as it got to a certain height a tape recorder on the inside would switch on and it would play a tape through the speakers in the shouting bomb out to the general area and it could be heard as far as half a mile apparently. Wow and we don't know exactly what it said. Anna we don't know if it's real. But it's in New Sciences and I have to say the reason I think a lot of great pop science writers have these incredible careers like John Ronson and Mary Roach and so on they uncover these documents because there's so many of these abandoned plans for military weaponry where they thought oh this would be an amazing thing to do and it gets to the stage where it's about to be

approved and then it doesn't so I believe this is the same. They almost got this approved and then lost it at the last hurt. They are they I mean the ideas people were coming up with were all completely insane and there's so many of them every time we talk about this. Like I hadn't read about acoustic kitty which I think was a project that got a little bit further but that was the CIA around the same time in the 1960s and this was a Cold War project and the idea was that they wanted to spy on Soviet embassies and they were going to do it with cats and so implanted a microphone into a cat's ear canal and it had a radio transmitter at the base of its skull and put wire into its fur and it sounds a bit gruesome. They sort of cut the cat open and then

put batteries in its body and stuff apparently. That does sound a bit gruesome Anna. The cat was fine at this stage the cat was fine and then the idea was that the cat would be sent to where suspicious enemies were hanging out so they sent the cat to where they thought a couple of Soviets were in Washington and they let the cat out the van and it got hit by a taxi and killed immediately. But there was a robot dog that they did build and develop so this is I'm not sure if your bomb was DARPA. Have you heard of these guys DARPA so it's a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency basically they do a lot of the wacky stuff for the American military and one of the things they developed was a robot dog which would carry weapons around the battlefield and it's on four

legs and it's really good you can push it really hard and it won't fall over so it's stable okay and it trots around and it can go up hills and down hills but it was recently scrapped because it was so noisy it would immediately give away anybody's position on the battlefield just by its presence. Is it like a whirring noise or is it barking or what? It's a whirring they didn't build in a bark to give away the position. Can't he just take the bark away it wouldn't be realistic without that. Have you guys heard of bird's eye bomb? No. Is that a fish finger related thing? No so this is a pigeon guided missile and this was developed in World War II by a psychologist called B.F. Skinner and the idea behind this he was looking at pigeons and he was like suddenly I saw them as a device

could they not guide a missile and this genuinely was put into test he had the pigeon looking at specific images that might be the target during World War II for example a huge ship and he would have the pigeon peck the ship and every time it pecked the ship it was like yes that's your that's your goal it would get a reward or something like that the idea behind this missile is that in front of the missile there was going to be a little nodule that contained the pigeon inside and when they launched the rocket the pigeon would see the ship in the distance and start pecking the front of the missile and wherever it pecked is where the missile turned towards and that it would bring it to wherever it needed to go through the maneuverability of the pigeon neck and it got past

all the physicists and the military people but it didn't get past the budget so it would have worked we could have had how much does one pigeon cost there's a great military website called war on the rocks dot com and it's just fascinating articles about military history and future and development and everything and they're saying that in future it's much more effective than having one hundred million pound missile to have a swarm of geese which are robots which each has a small amount of explosive on it see what i mean yeah i think i haven't explained that as i couldn't i nor as clearly as i can see it in here so it's that's better than having one huge goose with a yes in this analogy the cruise missile is one massive goose and you're

saying you want a thousand tiny geese does it because it can scatter it further it can scatter even advanced defense and interceptor systems can't get all the geese can they no but what if maybe they should be like insects and like really really really small bombs that'd be good right yes how how yes it would how deadly a device can you attach to your average housefly yeah that's a good point there was a thing they did with insects which was um it was called the harassing annoying and bad guy identifying chemical system right now and what they would do is they put a chemical on a bad guy and it was attracting insects and so all the insects would fly near him and they'd know which one the bad guy was right no is that like an official government term bad guy

is that used i think in the american military they do use that a bit yeah if you put a queen b on a bad guy yes all the other bees get attracted to the queen bee that is the thing that happens yeah yeah you could slip a bee in his pocket when he's not looking yeah a queen bee a queen bee and then all the other bees are going to go and attack him do you guys remember that genuinely happened in the news last year where someone accidentally trapped a queen bee into the back of her car drove off and was chased for hours by this huge hive and she had no idea why is this grandmother going what the hell is going on there is one more dapper thing that dapper did yeah okay so after president kennedy was assassinated they had a thing which in private they called operation barn door

i we did not manage to save the last president but we do want to save the next president okay that was how they referred to it privately that was not the official name but one of their ideas for saving the president the next president's life in the event of an assassination attempt this is real was to put a fake bulletproof sunshade on his head you know the sort of sun visor things that you have but they said you would also have to spread fake weather reports to justify why he was wearing it so he would be out in the raid and they're going oh beautiful sunny day here that's amazing that's how they think these guys that visor is only covering a little bit of his body isn't it we cover about two percent of so what they should really do is give him her

bulletproof beekeeping suit yes and then spread information that there's a queen bee around yeah did you guys know just one weapon that the us is developing now so they're still doing some pretty weird stuff is a sticky foam gun so this is the idea is that it's a non-lethal thing that shoots sticky foam at the enemy and it lands on the ground and if you're driving something over it or even if you're running over it then you get stuck to it and you can't you can't continue to chase the enemy and this was actually tried in Somalia in 1995 when they were trying to evacuate people from there and so it's this taffy like goo that it shoots out it's shot from a hose it's designed to fix the person's feet to the ground at the moment it's at a stage where people's feet

can move faster than the glue actually works so the best that could possibly happen was if you hit a person's thighs his legs sometime stuck together but even then if someone manages to run up to them and go under their legs they'll be free i believe yeah that's the trick all right it is time for fact number two and that is james okay my fact is that earlier this year a book called 40 minutes late was returned to a library in san francisco 100 years late so cool is that the latest ever that are books no it's not um often people say that george washington is the lake tis never he well he didn't return it it was returned 200 years after he borrowed a book oh okay um obviously for obvious reasons he didn't return it himself um although what actually happened was they found

out about this book and they couldn't find the original and so they bought another copy of the same book and returned that to the library so it was a bit of a cheat oh that's a cheat it's a washington one yeah yeah that's the one that the whole internet says is the oldest return book but actually it was a completely different book yeah well do you know how when he took it out of the library he didn't even bother to sign his name he just got his assistant to write the word president and that's how they've assumed that it was him let's just imagine the president being that egotistical these days isn't it just an ordinary man it's hard to imagine a president visiting a library these days so what's the context of this oh yeah that's a good point then um so yeah this was

just a book that was borrowed in um 1917 by a lady called febe johnson uh and they um they found the book and they gave it back and um there was a fine of three thousand six hundred and fifty dollars that she owed or her family owed but they um waived that they always waived the fine they always waive it and i always think libraries are in trouble now they'd need that money this is what i think if you have a book which is like two weeks over and you need to pay two quid on it keep it for another hundred years they'll waive the fine what we need is an example where someone has taken it out returned it five years late and has given a lifetime sentence that's what we need just and then we'll all we'll all bring books back that's not what works best so they have amnesties at libraries all the time

and those work better for getting people to return the fines because people don't return them because they're afraid of the fine and then the fine gets worse and worse and you're more afraid so then you never return it but lots of libraries uh so last month sydney scrapped library fines from now until 2021 saying they don't work reminders work better please just bring the books back and they've had three times as many returned is that right yeah apparently there are 25 million books that are officially missing from uk libraries oh yeah and that would take at the current rate of publishing in this country it'd take 135 years for that many books to be published yeah but this is they think it might be more actually so they've uh they've looked at their records library records

and 25 million books are missing as in they've compared it to i think about 40 years ago and we've lost half the books but they looked at a bunch of Suffolk libraries and they realized that they had 10 000 books missing that weren't logged as missing so they've just haven't logged it into their it's just completely empty it's just an empty building and all libraries have said yeah we have the same thing we forget to log returns and stuff all the time so it's thought that we've just got way more than 25 million books that have disappeared wow this new patent's been filed by amazon for where they're going to put all of their stuff now including books uh so they've got their own sort of news warehouse library and it's underwater it's at the bottom of a lake no

yeah they're building this bubble warehouse all the books will be soggy no um no they're like those bath books that you get every book will be like that every book yeah so they're building this bubble warehouse underneath a lake right at the bottom and anytime an order comes in all the stock that's down there books or anything like kindles or tv's whatever you buy are going to be in these big canisters and if you've ordered it they're going to send the uh the item back up to the surface by releasing a balloon that will carry it to the top of the uh the lake i i mean i think we've all got the same question which is what advantage does this have over a normal land-based warehouse i would imagine real estate must be cheaper at the bottom of the lake yes yeah

because no one wants to live there do they and it's so weird that i did not ask myself that question my favorite bit of just general book news from the year great uh tori politician gabin barwell who wrote a book called how to win a marginal seat lost his marginal seat in the 27th general election oh god he didn't say how to win every marginal seat that's true you know you were saying that um you get library amnesties and um one of the ways you can take a book back and not be fined is by writing the most imaginative excuse you can think of and this is in san francisco which is this where this was fact was from james uh yeah that's right um so this in san francisco in 2009 they had an amnesty where they said if you turned up and you wrote down a really imaginative

reason why you had brought it back late then they didn't charge you do you have do you have examples well there are some so one of the women said uh this book was so nice it looked so posh on my shelf i couldn't bear to give it back it made me look really well read um one a group of people said they were too busy rescuing marine mammals that's quite good that's yeah that's yeah um one woman had bought out a book on romantic relationships because she was looking for some insight into how to solve her relationship problems um and she decided she keep it because she needed more advice than the library allowance had time to give her but three partners later she decided it wasn't helping and then returned it in 2013 a belgian professor analyzed a copy of 50 shades of gray from a

library in antwerp it tested positive for both cacain and herpes wow oh yeah but have they analyzed pride and prejudice for comparison because that just could be all of it the worst thing is that's the one fact you're all going to remember can can you get excuse my ignorance can you get herpes from a book because it's like a lot of tests to carry out when i get home do we need to move on short that's shortly yeah well if you got something before we do well there's a library in portugal which is partly stuffed by bats so i thought i'd better yeah no get that in um so what in what way are they partly quite uh it's

called mafra palace library so it's a beautiful ancient library it's about three or four hundred years old i think uh and it has a colony of bats living there who live behind the shelves and then when the library closes down at night they come out they fly out and they fly all over the library but no but they do eat all the insects that get into the library and the library apparently is full of insects so um the insects would be damaging the books but they can't damage the books because they've been eaten by the bats so every night the bats eat each bat eats double its own weight in insects yeah the only problem is that they also leave a thin layer of droppings over the whole library all right should we move on to our third fact okay it is time for fact number three and

that is anna yeah my fact is that the person who invented crowd control barriers did so because so many people were flocking to see his giant balloon this is this guy called nadar who i just found out about because there's a new book about him called the great nadar it's by a guy called adam begley um and he's sort of a multi-talented guy but he was the most famous photographer in france in the 19th century he was a caricaturist he was um a balloonist and he decided to build this giant balloon and attracted loads of people to come and see it and then so many people came to see it all these crowds flocked and flocked he couldn't take off so he was attracting like 200 000 people to one balloon take off it's a lot of people at one point he attracted i think

a quarter of the population of paris went to see him launch a balloon wow and so then he designed crowd control barriers which exactly the same design that we have today so this one was was it called the giant this one that you're talking about yeah the géant the géant yeah um it had enough room for 20 people in the gondola at the bottom of the balloon it also had a lavatory bunk beds a printing press and a wine cellar wine cellar in a hot air balloon yeah and a billiards table it was incredible they had six different rooms in the basket and yeah you could play billiards in it um they had when he launched it on its second attempt he took i think 12 people up and they all had a really posh dinner on the balcony on the balcony are you confusing this with the

cartoon up the movie up is this yes because a cello is that one that's on a different level isn't it what it was two levels it was two it was two levels two stories it was it was like a buck it was not like a bungalow in it was like two bungalows on top of each other he invented the double bungalow wow this guy is good the the thing is the first i think it was the first time he said it's very the maiden voyage of the giant everyone came to see it and how many people did he say it was it was 200 000 people but the inflation took so long because it was the largest hot air balloon that had ever been built that they were all really really bored well before it was full and as it took off they just suddenly silently watched it disappear into the sky they

didn't cheer at all as they were so angry that their time had been wasted oh really yeah a similar thing happened in Leicester in 1864 where they had a hot air balloon it took so long to go up everyone got a bit bored the police tried to sort out a little bit of a ruckus going on and then someone got hit and then a massive riot ensued and then the guy who was running the hot air balloon decided i'm not doing this anymore made the hot air balloon go down and everyone ran over burnt it ripped it up and then paraded it through the streets of Leicester wow and for a while people from Leicester were called balloon attics so no yeah for most of the end of the 19th century if you were from Leicester people would call you a balloon attic yeah why because if there was a riot happening

on the ground and i had access to a hot air balloon my instinct would be to get out of there quickly he just legged at this guy he was called Henry Coxwell and he was quite famous balloonist before he'd once gone up into the stratosphere to see how high he could go up in his hot air balloon and he went up and up and up and up until he went temporarily blind and passed out he lost all sensation in his hands but luckily there was one other guy in there who just before he passed out managed to open a valve with his teeth which made it come back down again what happened to his hands oh he had no sensation in them maybe yeah no sensation i see okay unlike your very you know nervous teeth or he liked a challenge yeah um i was reading about more about

this in the dar guy he's an extraordinary character oh he's the best he's my new favorite guy yeah he's beyond ballooning he's um a huge pioneer of photography so one of the things that he used to do in the hot air balloons was to effectively invent aerial photography so facing over Paris he used to go over fields and he did it hundreds of times because he couldn't manage to get the exposure on the camera right um because the balloon kept moving and obviously photos took a long time to to capture the motion and also what he didn't know at the time was the gas that was heating the balloon was getting away and putting soot all over so he'd come down and there would just be black photos completely and he'd be like i'm pretty sure it was daytime when i did this and that was

that was the reason for that and then he also invented underground photography so he's like he's hit every spectrum underground photography yeah he actually did it in we talked a few weeks ago on the podcast about the catacombs of Paris and he did it in the catacombs didn't he and so lighting with candles the area and then taking photos it's a bit much to say he invented underground photography he's just taking photos on the ground isn't he it's like the wind up radio it's not really an invention it's just two inventions stuck together and also i think you usually say he invented something when it's something we all recognize it's not that we've all gone god can you imagine the world without underground photography yes okay he took the invention of the camera

and he took the person who invented underground and he smashed them together and that's what he did but photography wise it is worth saying that thanks to him we have extraordinary portraits of some of the greatest figures of that period Jules Verne he did this gigantic caricature of all of them where he again kind of effectively invented that whole caricature grotesque large head small body thing he did a big 300 person line of all the most influential people in paris at the time or france generally and while he was doing it was taking too long because they came the most important ones came in to sit for their for their drawings so when photography was around he was looking at that going i could capture them and start doing them via this so he managed to

get Jules Verne he managed to get Victor Hugo he got Sarah Bernhardt he didn't get Bolzac because he thought that cameras would steal his soul so he said no to the photo right but some of the most important people and they're beautiful photos if you look at them online yeah they really are um he wasn't very successful actually his balloons were just crashing constantly and he kept going so there were first-hand reports of the giant balloon that he sent up where it uh the aim was that it would travel over loads of different countries so the first guests that got on they brought tour guides to various countries in europe and they brought their passports but you can't control where you're going so that's why you have to take tour guides to all of them get a visa for

everyone and this was pre-eu so they would have needed a visa wouldn't they yeah for every single border um but they didn't get very far so the first time they lasted 15 miles and then the balloon plummeted to earth and the wicker basket was bumped along the earth the second one actually traveled 400 miles so it flew over the netherlands and into germany but then Nadar panicked that the balloon was getting too hot from the heat of the sun so he started letting the air out and the winds took it and it crash landed into the ground and there are these descriptions of it bouncing across fields on its side everyone and it being tossed around bouncing through a wood it went towards a railway track the train driver did an emergency stop and Nadar said a couple of feet

before he hit them and then it just spilled everyone out and people were scattered across the ground like fallen apples being dragged along the floor for it was like for miles wasn't it he was yeah that's i mean you can't play billiards while that's happening had you it would make it a more interesting game possibly so you know how every invention is tested on animals before it's tested on humans is it yeah so space flight they send up the dogs yeah it's an insect's first yeah same is true of hot air ballooning they send up together in what the first hot air balloon flight a rooster a duck and a sheep um and it was thought the sheep would be most helpful because it's a land animal so the rooster and the duck are obviously used to soaring to great heights above the earth

but the sheep is more like the human so we can see if it you know explodes or whatever when it gets up there and did it no it didn't explode so what's the next phase after animal trials anyone human trials well not just any human trials condemned criminal trials so the next step was to send out a condemned criminal in the basket of the balloon to see if he exploded the only problem was that the only people who knew how to fly them were real experts because obviously it was a you know it was quite a tricky thing to do and very few of the qualified experts wanted to go up with a dangerous criminal in a hot air balloon which is a wicker basket which is tiny so hold on when the rooster and the sheep and the duck went up they also had a human expert with them flying the balloon

i am not sure because i always pictured it as just then so did i but i don't understand how i think it was and i think it was tethered it was tethered so you would wind it back down because you nearly you nearly just blew this thing wide open why didn't the duck ducks can fly why wouldn't it just go well this looks a bit of a dodgy way to travel i'm just gonna fuck off guys i'm out guys i think probably probably the duck was tethered to the balloon right just pretty rough the most ironic thing you can do is give up the power of flight but deny it the ability to actually fly away but worst thing if you're the sheep and the other two fly away you're thinking well maybe i could do it i'm not sure i don't think roosters

could really i i'm trying to remember the plot of chicken run and the extent to which chickens can or can't fly well it's not called chicken fly is it i read a really nice balloon story yesterday which is that in 2007 nasa had funded this project which is called blast and the idea is that they were going to fly it above the clouds in Antarctica for 40 kilometers high and for 12 days they were going to take photos by infrared of star formations in the sky so it was up there for via balloon 12 days this big satellite and then when the 12 days was done they were bringing it back down so they detached it from the balloon and it fell towards the earth and then parachutes deployed so they brought the parachutes and they landed on Antarctica and it was all fine

except just before it landed there was meant to be an electronic device that snapped away the parachutes but that failed as a result the parachutes were on the side and a huge gust of wind came and picked up the parachutes and they parasailed away from the researchers for 24 hours non stop they eventually found it 2000 kilometers away but they didn't find it for a year because apparently nasa likes to paint everything white and as a result it was just camouflaged 2000 miles away that's awesome wow and so were they kind of like when you drop a crisp packet and it gets taken by the wind and you're constantly going after it did they chase it for a while were they running after this thing when does that happen in your life you know when you drop a bit of rubbish yeah and if you've

ever seen American beauty you know the wind sometimes takes rubbish and you chase after it and you're always trying to grab it and it always eludes your grasp right so was it like that with the scientists constantly grabbing at it and it just darting away at the last moment not at all no have you oh it's nice that I cleared that up have you eaten all the crisps in this scenario are you trying to get the crisp back or are you trying to get the packet back trying to get the packet back because i'm not a filthy littler like some people handy what happened classic eco-conscious festival crowd honestly i if i dropped a packet of crisps i'd just open another one immediately i'm joking

just a full packet you've got a full close packet sometimes i open a multi-pack drop it it's gone do you know the very first ever balloonists to cross the english channel landed with no trousers on this is true it's a hundred percent true it's so exciting so and what stage did the trousers go right away almost to me no on entry no no no so um i think we may have done we may have mentioned this on qi i'm not sure but many years ago so they they were crossing the english channel it was all going great but then that they started to descend more rapidly there wasn't enough air in the balloon and they started getting really worried so so they immediately took up their trousers they first first they throw away the anchors on the side of the balloon yeah basically they

could see the white cliffs of dover they were going oh we're not quite going to get over those are we so they and so they'll have got rid of all the sandbags and stuff they throw away the sandbags they throw away the oars that they hope to steer with i don't know um then they throw away a propeller that they had with them for some reason and then eventually they had to throw away pretty much all the clothes they were wearing including their trousers and they made it they made it across and they landed with no trousers on did at any point when the panic was setting it one of the go who brawl this shit what are we doing with the oars of course we're going to crash into a mountain you dick so when they landed with our trousers did they all stay in the balloon refusing to get

for the press conference they said uh it does sound like an excuse though doesn't it what are you suggesting James i'm suggesting that they took their trousers off for another reason right and when the press turned up they said why have you done that and they said well we took our trousers off because of the thing and they said well did you throw anything else and they're like yeah we threw out all the oars okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Andrew Hunter Murray my fact is that Volkswagen sells more sausages than cars this is a hundred percent true it's unbelievable it's unbelievable i can't i can't believe i'd never heard this before this was sent in by the way by a guy called mike holden so mike if you're listening thank you so

much for sending us in in 2015 Volkswagen sold 5.8 million cars pretty good but they sold 7.2 million sausages but sausages are a lot cheaper they're yeah it's easier to make a sausage than a car that is true they don't make less money on the sausages is what i'm saying yeah but they'll have been fined less for cheating on the emissions of the sausages too so they also make ketchup as well don't they they make their own ketchup and you get sold in supermarkets yeah buy a pack of volkswagens i've read this apparently they have their own code they are listed these sausages as an official Volkswagen component which is one nine nine three nine eight five hundred a and car dealers will often give you a five pack of sausages if you buy a Volkswagen does that tip some people over

the edge into making their decision i think so they do it very tasty it's not that surprising that they sell more sausages than cars and if for every car you're giving away five sausages so they invented them to feed the workers didn't they yeah in the 1970s they came up with this new kind of sausage that they'd give their workers and then suddenly the workers said this is really good sausage guys you should sell it and they started selling it right and massive and they still give it to the workers though every day so um they have it at about nine in the morning it's curried sausage as well so it's quite the client taste for breakfast um so curried sausage big in Germany basically yeah do you know that Berlin has an entire museum devoted to curried

sausage does it has a curried sausage museum and i read some of the reviews of it i just wanted to share a review or two with you one of the reviews on yo 11 euros seems a steep price to pay for a small exhibit on the history and glory of curryvurst still gave it four stars it's a lot of fun then he added would i go back no but then he said in fairness he said because it's an exhibit that i doubt changes his content why would it so it's a roller coaster curryvurst was brought to Germany by the british really wasn't it what so it's sort of um in the you know we just try to claim everything but um so it was just after world war two and so

some of the allied soldiers there introduced curry powder and ketchup because we had a lot of curry powder we were into curry a lot of trade with india and then a german woman said oh that tastes really nice with the sausage and so she created curryvurst and in the museum i believe they say without the good old british we wouldn't have our staple dish today oh james is inventing the curry sausage no it's not an invention it's just putting curry and sausage together is it better than the wind-up radio as an invention would you say um well i haven't been to the museum you should go it sounds amazing four stars they've got a spice chamber with sniffing stations they've got um audio stations playing currywurst themes songs a virtual curry

versed making game called curry up uh and a sausage shaped sofa so um i went on to a website lovepark.co.uk and i was disappointed to find four stars won't be going back no it is it's not what you i think it's a non-departmental public body about the pork industry but they have some fun facts about sausages so for instance there are more than 500 recipes for sausage in britain you could have a different british sausage every day for 10 years wait you wouldn't live that long anything five five thousand don't you mean um that's a number of recipes but this is that was two kind of facts mushed together oh he invented a new fan and did you know that in 320 ad eating sausages was a sin and it was made a sin by the catholic

church because it was associated with pagan festivals wow and you just know why they were eating sausages at those no okay that's literally just me i was imagining a huge phallic ritual uh kind of no no i think you are you are completely on your own on this one i'm sorry yeah you're in a room of like 200 people i don't know you noticed it's surely one person here there was one bit of support i don't need your pity guys i'm okay with being allowed on this one and the other thing about pagans and sausages is i went on the internet today and googled pagan sausages and i found out there's quite a bit i was disappointed to find well there's quite a few people online who seem to think that the word jesus when said backwards is sausage oh it's kind of it's sausage it's sausage

so maybe that's a reason that it's an evil pagan thing sausage that's a huge that's like a da Vinci code moment isn't it jesus was a sausage can i tell you a little um story from the bbc news website all right it's it's it's news from northern island from last week court reporters were a little taken aback when a self-confessed sausage thief tried to get on first name terms with a judge at belfast magistrates court belfast man michael mcnally who has almost 300 previous convictions was jailed after admitting a new spate of shoplifting including the theft of 10 packs of sausages his defense

lawyer told the district judge fiona bagnell that mcnally had managed to stay out of jail for six weeks which he says is a record for him as he was led to the cells mcnally called out to the judge that's okay see you later fiona obviously crime is wrong but on another level what a guy that was how many packs of sausages he stole 10 packs of sausages because you couldn't possibly get through those before they went off could you you could freeze them freeze them eyes i'm more of a hand to mouth i never lose the freezer okay that makes more sense that's why you have such a crisp-based diet isn't it do you know how long the longest sausage was no

guys it was 63 kilometers long sausage christ what a huge sausage that's massive what was it was it like a mistake in the factory where they're meant to put the twist in between each one like i was off sick that day no the longer it was a deliberate thing it was it to celebrate romania day in romania um and it was yeah 63 miles long it was actually a bit disappointing they never spread it out all the way i don't think so it was all curled around but maybe they just didn't have a space long enough wow yeah how far would you get outside uh 60 kilometers from here yeah isn't that space yes yeah no it would be yeah if you stood the sausage up you might hit the international space station is that right yes

it is so that could be how they get there in future climb the giant sausage okay there was a story right you're australian yeah there was a story about the um so in australia when you vote you get given a democracy sausage this is what they call it so when you if you turn up to vote they have a lot of genuinely they have barbecues at every polling station in australia but you know during the last election there was a massive faux pas by both leaders this was in 2016 so malcolm turnbull the prime minister skipped the democracy sausage photo opportunity presumably because he thought it might look silly or something but get this i cannot get my head around this opposition leader bill shorten committed a faux pas when he tried to eat his

sausage and bun combination from the side rather than from the end wow brilliant what a monster how would you even eat a it's an exciting decision i'm calling it this is an invention hey we're gonna have to wrap up very shortly yeah so if you guys have anything before we go i have one last thing which is that during the election campaign uh in america the presidential campaign a hotdog stand in chicago sold a hotdog that they called the trump footlong which was actually a three inch long hotdog okay that is it that is all of our facts thank you so much everyone here if you would uh 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 account so i'm on at shriverland james at x shaped anna you can email podcast at qi.com at sausage jesus yeah or you can go to our group account which is at qi podcast um uh guys in the room we're we're going to be uh going on tour around the uk in october and november if you're free it'd be awesome to see you there our website no such thing as a fish dot com has the link but most importantly we've been going crazy writing what we hope is the best book that will ever be written in the world called the book of the year so we've given it a very ambitious title and it's out this november and it is a book that contains what we think are the most interesting things that

happened over the last 12 months there's a lot of sausage material there is so much so much but that's it guys thank you so much we'll be back next time see you goodbye you