No Such Thing As A Fish - 191: No Such Thing As A Cannibal Squirrel

Episode Date: November 10, 2017

Live from Bath, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Calvin Coolidge's robotic horse, the inventor of email, and the language it's easiest to speak while drunk.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the Comedia in Bath. My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with Anna Chisinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with you, James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that it's easier to speak Dutch if you're drunk. As if you're a non-native speaker. Yeah, if you're Dutch you tend not to have too many problems in general if you're Dutch and you can't be absolutely hammered you have to be very slightly one pint kind of drunk and this is a study

that's been done recently and they got 15 native German speakers to talk to a Dutch person in Dutch and then they recorded it and they asked some Dutch people afterwards how did they do and the drunk people did a little bit better but unfortunately I did read on Reddit someone posted on Reddit that Dutch is basically like a German got drunk and can't speak properly anymore. There's a lot of slurred sounds in this flish-leer-leer. I didn't know you speak and you're not even drinking. Does anyone here speak Dutch? Wow. Have another drink and then see. Because I wonder if it's slightly by accident that when you're drunk you're just a bit more confident and you're saying work because they've had words that

are actually quite similar to English so the the word for apple is apple. The word for pear is pear. Wait someone does speak it down there. Who's who's saying it? You've gotten what I'm doing now. He owns a greengrocer's in Antwerp. I think that person has just understood the admittedly complex joke that you're doing right now. But yeah it wasn't so much remembering the words as much as they had better fluency and better pronunciation. That's what people said. And weirdly the people themselves didn't think that they were doing any better. You would think if you're drunk you have a bit more bravado but they didn't really have that. The people themselves thought I'm doing okay but actually the Dutch people

went that's amazing. But Dutch people are so English proficient. About 90% of people in the Netherlands speak really good English so it's quite hard to get conversations with people in Dutch. I went there earlier this year and as soon as you open your mouth and try to say hello or something I was you know apple. You're spotted a mile off and they immediately say oh hello how are you doing? What would you like? Do you want an apple? Do you want a pink lady or a russet? And it's very hard to... But actually this study was it was German speaking Dutch but actually there was a 1972 study which showed that Americans could speak Thai a bit better if they were a bit drunk.

Really? Yeah. I speak Mandarin much better when I'm drunk. And I do speak Mandarin. I grew up in Hong Kong and yeah I do notice that when I'm drunk I'm just awesome at it. There's no anecdote with that. I just want to sort of big up my language speaking abilities. Has anyone else ever noticed that about you or is it just that you think that... No I just tell it to people who don't speak Mandarin. I'm like whoa I am kicking ass right now in my Mandarin. But I can know because I was really bad as a kid. I was the only

kid in my year that when I went back to school had forgotten his name in Chinese. My gosh. Is it your name in Chinese? Dandab? Oh yeah. No. That was my nickname at school. This is so bad. I was called... So my name is Dan. Obviously I was called Dandan at school. And I thought that was a really cool nickname because everyone knew my nickname. And I was like wow that's so cool. And they'd be like older kids. Hey Dandan. And I only found out. It was about six years ago. I was living in England. I was in my late twenties. And someone on... I put on Facebook saying Dandan just

won a game against an old Hong Kong friend and someone wrote Dandan. You know that means testicles in Chinese, right? And I had no idea. No one told me. I wrote to my friends at school. My old school friends. I was like did you know I was called Balls this whole time? And they were like yeah did you not know? The whole childhood I thought I was cool and I was just a boy called Balls. And a boy called Balls who forgot his name every holiday. Yeah. And genuinely I would sit in class and I would be sweating because they'd be doing the roll call and I'd just go I have no idea what my name is and when it gets to it. And then there was one time that I thought my name was Sierbaugh but I thought it was Lawbaugh

which is Radish. So then I just got called Radish Balls or something I guess. So it's hard. So I'm very proud when I get drunk and remember my Mandarin. I think we should remember your name. I'm always impressed by that. But getting drunk can improve your skills in various ways can't it? So there's a snooker player Bill Verbenyuk. How do you say that? Verbenyuk. Verbenyuk. Like who's counting? He used to get really drunk. So he used to have six to eight pints before a match and then he would have one during each frame during the match and that made him play better. And everyone does always think that they play a bit better after a few pints. After a few maybe but not after. How many did you say?

Six to eight before a game and then during the game. How many frames are there? I presume there must be only about three. Well in the World Championship final which he never reached I don't think. I think there's like 34 or something. 37. I can see why he never reached that stage. But also the World Anti-Doping Agency bans alcohol from just five sports. Bans even from five sports. Motor racing. Motor racing is one of them, yes. So motor racing, power boating, air sports, motor cycle racing. So you can see why it bans drinking in those. It's a bit dangerous. And archery. And actually the reason it bans archery is that there was a study done in 1985 that found that drinking a little bit makes you slightly better at archery

and it's considered cheating. That's why that strong bow guy is so good isn't it? So in 2008 the Dutch voted the word of the year. Now all countries do this. All countries do this every year. But in 2008 the word of the year in Dutch was swaffelen. And according to Wikipedia swaffelen means to hit one's penis often repeatedly against an object. Didn't they start doing that? There was a trend for swaffelen in the Netherlands I think. It started in April 2008 when a Dutch student committed the act on the Taj Mahal. Now that. I mean that's not cool is it? I don't know. I don't think it is. I've never known what's cool. Given a list that'll be low down it. The words in Dutch are so amazing.

They're similar to German which has a lot of these compound words. We just strap words together like a glove is a hand shoe. Which I think is cool. So porcini mushrooms, and I'm going to mispronounce this, are ikhurnjesbrood which literally means little squirrel's bread. Peanut butter is pindakas or peanut cheese. Slightly less appealing. And see if you can guess this. Mule pier, mouth pier. Do you mean pear as in two or something? No I mean pear as in Dan's pier. It's a slap in the face. As it was for you guys just now when you realised what it meant. You know the little squirrel bread thing though. So I think that's pronounced aekhorn. And it's good that we don't have any Dutch speakers in the audience

so you can't correct me. Which is very confusing apparently because it's pronounced the same as aekhorn. So the word for squirrel in Dutch is pronounced the same as the word for aekhorn in English. That must be hard for cannibal squirrels. Well they don't get caught I suppose because they just say I'm going out to eat an aekhorn. And their mates go yeah fair enough. And then they eat their brother. I found a word it's Finnish but this is just a great description of a word that means a lot and it's a Finnish word about being drunk. Kalsayuchunit that is the feeling when you are going to get drunk home alone in your underwear with no intention of going out. Wow. So you just go I'm just going to have a kalsayunit tonight

guys. Yeah. It does make it sound like a choice which is nice. Did you know I mean this is so off topic but I read a study this week that said that if you refer to yourself in the third person it is a great way to de-stress. So if you're stressed out instead of going oh my god I'm really really scared about this show I've got to do tonight in Bath where I haven't done any prep for it. Then all you need to do for instance like random example all you need to do is you step back and you go Anna's really worried about a show she has to do tonight. Sorry James is really worried about a show he has to do tonight in Bath. And if you talk to yourself in the third person it de-stresses you and it genuinely works. I do

that quite a lot. You do. I've heard you do it. Yeah. You always go James. You sound very stressed when you're doing it. You always say James you idiot. That's what I do. Yeah. James is going to lock you in the cupboard. It's I'll be honest it's pretty messed up. I'm not stressed though. You're not. James isn't stressed that's what you say. I'll say what I want. Daniel is scared. So here's the thing about the Dutch language. Oh yeah. There was a guy called Johannes Garopius Bicharnus and he thought that Dutch was the original language in the whole world. Okay. And his logic behind this was that the word Adam sounds a bit like the Dutch words heart dam which means dam and hate. Okay. And Eve sounds a bit like you that meaning the eternal

barrel. Okay. And he thought that these two names were originally Dutch and therefore Dutch was a language of the Garden of Eden and therefore Dutch is the original word and then everyone just kind of stole words from them. Wow. That is a desperate man. He has too much time on his hands. He also thought that Antwerp was founded by Noah's kids after the big flood. They decided to go to this place which is basically below sea level. Wow. But on Noah's Ark there would have been some ants. So maybe they said oh we'll name the city after whatever gets off first and then the ants got off first. Sure. I mean I sound like I'm reaching here as well. I read a great fact about Adam and Eve the other day which is that they weren't really humans because they were prototype

humans so they were actually garden vegetables, both of them. So if you look at old drawings of them they're like they're like a groove in Guardians of the Galaxy like tree like characters. Can I just take you back to the beginning of this bit of yours where you said I read a great fact. But no, no, it's because it's like it's a fact that someone and myself believe that that is and so check this out as well because they were because they were root vegetables and they were like they they didn't they didn't have sex with each other but they had to procreate and secret societies are looking for what is known as a lost word because this it's a lost word and they're searching it for it because it's said to be so powerful that if said to the face of a woman

it would instantly impregnate her. That was the worst minute of my life. My god, so I was reading some real facts about language learning. No, the economist did this thing where they went in search for the hardest language to learn and it's really interesting, it tells you loads of cool stuff about various languages but they concluded that the hardest language to learn is this language called Tuyuka which is spoken in the eastern Amazon I think and the hard thing about that which I think would be a particular problem for us and for you is that the verb endings on statements require you to show how you know something so if you state a fact in the verb ending you have to say how you've known it so like the way the is there an

ending for according to secret societies? I think they'll add that. So there's no Tuyuka for citation needed. They don't need it. That's so cool. Yeah so like the phrase for the boy played soccer I know because I saw him play soccer is the played would be a different word to the boy played soccer I know because I read about it in a book or on Wikipedia or from a mad person on the street. All right it is time for fact number two and that is my fact oh god yeah and the word fact is brought to you very loosely today. So my fact is that American president Calvin Coolidge used to ride a robot horse inside the White House three times every day. It's now extraordinary. How did you learn this? I was talking to a root vegetable who uh so Calvin Coolidge 30th president of the

United States of America rode horses. There's a surprising amount of presidents who ride horses but Calvin Coolidge was allergic to horses so he was built this mechanical horse that sat inside the White House and he thought it was a joke that it was being given to him but he tried it out and he really loved it and it had two different options of it one was gallop and one was canter and he used to dress up as a cowboy every time he got onto it. Sometimes just the hat and totally naked um no yeah yeah he liked being naked a lot Calvin Coolidge um and get this check this out chew on this Murray. The the the horse was invented by John Kellogg who invented Kellogg's Cornflakes. Yeah he was outside of Kellogg's Cornflakes he invented a lot of things the the mechanical horse

he invented this really cool thing for if you're getting too hot in bed it was a tent just for your head that led to a sort of tent pipe that went outside your window so it just and you can see you can see pictures of it online yeah you know how like there's um sometimes windows just have a fan that like sends out that little yeah it was exactly like that and so you see pictures of people laying in bed with just a tent door open so they haven't zipped up and um just getting cooled by that idea. He invented the mechanical horse as you say he also invented a mechanical camel which was pretty much the same actually it was just had a hump he invented a kneading machine in which you would lie on it and mallets would pummel your bladder

and intestines and a colonic machine for enemas and they would fire gallons of water up your rectum gallons yeah gallons followed by eight ounces of yogurt afterwards that's quite a lot of yogurt as well sure it's not gallons no no no and I've seen a picture of it and they have multiple kind of bits coming out so it was for more than one person at once no yeah so you know how you don't like to sit even with us on a train Andy yes yeah imagine if we had to hang out while we were all having eight gallon enemas my imagination has shut down but horse machines were quite a big deal because horse riding everyone did it before the motor car so there were lots of horse riding exercise machines and then when bikes came along in the 19th century then cycling machines

became a big thing and I found an article on Timeline which is a really great website by the way and it's from a magazine called The Rambler in 1897 and it's this description of something that had been invented which was a stationary bike so it was a bicycle that has all the delights of outdoor cycling enjoyed at home and it was invented by a painter and what he'd done is he painted an enormous roll of outdoor scenery and he'd rigged it up to his cycling machine and he's he's attached the canvas to rollers and as he cycled the scenery rushes past him that's amazing that's so exciting outside because you can buy cycling machines now where you can see on a video like the Tour de France or whatever wherever you're going so this is basically that

this is that that's very cool I found a really similar thing okay so I think the the treadmill one of its first uses was four horses as in there were there were four horses to exercise before they were for people to exercise really yeah um so case in point the queen last year bought a treadmill for all of all the queen's horses but not all the queen's men um she's got a treadmill that 18 horses can walk or run on at the same time and I think the big question is could they put Humpty together again um but there were there were theatrical shows in London where they they would have live horses on stage in theatres in Drury Lane so they would have a massive stage obviously and then they did a huge spectacular show in 1902 which was I think it was Ben her it

was biblical epic and they had a massive treadmill and they had about a dozen horses on stage running galloping on a treadmill wow yeah while they wound a massive panorama beside like a chariot race wow very cool yeah that's insane that is really good the exercise horse since we're in bath I should say that the exercise horse is mentioned in Jane Austen um yeah is it yeah it sure is it's in Sanderton the novel that she didn't finish um but yeah she mentioned an exercise horse and basically in her day what it was was a chair which had lots of springs on it and so you bounced up and down on it like a trampoline it was a trampoline chair I found out a couple of facts about Calvin Coolidge oh yeah so he was famously a very quiet man and he became even quieter and I have one anecdote

about him here so this is during the presidential campaign in 1924 he was found found out by a reporter who said to him mr president what do you think of prohibition Coolidge said no comment will you say something about unemployment no the reporter pressed on he said will you tell us your views about the world situation no about your message to congress no and the reporter just started to leave and then Coolidge said wait and the man turns around and Coolidge says don't quote me that's good apparently he um would always he wouldn't let his children eat dinner unless they were in full tuxedo what yeah apparently and one night his son came home a little bit late he'd been out playing and he was a little bit late for dinner and he said oh what do I really need to

dress up can I not just go and eat dinner in this and they said young man tonight you are having dinner with the president we've mentioned him haven't we a few times on the podcast he um he used to like to play little pranks so he used to do a thing where when he was in the oval office um he used to press an emergency buzzer that meant the secret service would rush in because there was an emergency but he would press it and quickly hide underneath the desk and they'd come in looking for the president and be like oh Jesus he's gone and uh yeah well he loved to sleep so maybe he was just taking a nap uh one other famous thing about him was that he slept 11 hours a night and then he took frequent naps and long naps during the day and this is the thing people knew about him

so he said nothing and also he was unconscious most of the time and one of my favorite people ever Dorothy Parker the you know excellent witty literary figure of his time said when she heard about his death when someone told her he had died she just said how could they tell that's what he was famous for when he was awake he was a bastard I have to say this um when he went fishing he went fishing a lot when he was awake and he insisted that his secret service men bait his hook for him okay fine I mean it's it's a bit hoity-toity but whatever but then as the secret service guys were baiting the hook he would jerk the fishing rod and try and spear them in the finger with the hook and he really enjoyed he told people how much

fun it is to do that does sound like fun oh do you think like when it's how long ago was cool it's 100 years 20s yeah just that so like now we kind of hear all the fun stories of the things that he did do you think we'll hear fun stories in 100 years time about the current president we're hearing them now um he it's quite sweet his relationship with his wife who was famously a really outgoing gregarious person just called grace and so he was the absolute opposite of her and the way they met was when uh she was reading law and she saw him shaving in his house so he was in his bathroom having a shave and his window was facing out into the street and he was wearing just his

underwear with his suspenders around his waist you know like braces not female suspenders suspenders around his waist and he was wearing a bowler hat and so she saw him and laughed as you would and he looked around out of his window saw her tipped his hat and went back to shaving and that was a son of a relationship yeah i was looking at other historical ways of exercising and losing weight yeah and i found one online called the hallelujah diet and apparently for the hallelujah diet you have to ask yourself what would jesus eat oh okay so the idea behind this is that jesus if he was around now would probably be a vegetarian probably wouldn't drink you know he'd have quite a good diet and they stress on the website it's

not about saying what people actually ate in the time of jesus uh because according to them they obviously didn't have a great diet as jesus was constantly healing the sick you know that um jesus has a house waiting for him if he does come back in bedford so there's the um the garden of eden is said to be in bedford i'm not eden again this is why this is why i think called the panacea society and they believed that the garden of eden was in bedford and so they set up the society to make sure because if jesus came back for some reason he would go back to bedford and they bought a house for him which was a sort of semi detached i think um not even a detached house maybe it was a detached no actually no it's a

humble son of a carpenter wouldn't live in a detached house would he i've seen this place and it's a it's an end terrace in fairness but it's a terrace right okay yeah i would say that's semi detached an end terrace oh yeah okay but i also think that's why he's not coming back he keeps on going what kind of property have you got lined up for me that it's still the old terrace house in bedford i'll stay up here for the world but yeah i think they rented out to families but if he does come back i think there's a policy that he i don't know if they know that imagine the family receiving the phone call hello yeah mr sanderson you are not going to believe this but it's hard to believe that jesus would turf out a family from the house well he turned out the Pharisees from

the temple he was a turner outer anyway we need to move on guys all right it is time for fact number three and that is chasinski my fact this week is that a member of iceland's pirate party just injured her eye and had to appear on tv wearing an eye patch this is the nicest of all pirate related stories because it would be harrowing to hear she'd lost her lower leg and had to have a peg leg that's true it would have been awkward if you guys had laughed at that but fortunately it's just a kind of innocuous injury her one-year-old child scratched her in the eye so she had an injured eye she wore an eye patch in this debate and she clarified that it was not an old sea injury because the icelandic pirate party

are not about old sea pirates they're about more modern stuff yeah they're quite popular aren't they yeah they are popular there was a time a couple of years ago where they were the most popular party in iceland i think and now they're the third biggest i think in the last elections they might have got about 14 percent yeah yeah um but yeah icelandic elections they're really into them so the last election was last year and the government keeps collapsing it's like it's like saying that we're really into referendums it's not that they have a lot it's just that they like them when they happen so in 2016 the turnout was 76 percent which is the lowest turnout ever at an icelandic election wow which is quite impressive um and that was despite 10 percent of the country in

iceland was away watching the euros in the last election i think um when it happened yes so i was reading an AMA on reddit by the pirate party and they were asked about piracy and basically their idea is they think that everyone should be allowed to do whatever they want on the internet like just copy whatever they want and all that kind of thing and they don't think that should be copyright rules and they were asked on this reddit AMA whether they think they'd be actually able to do anything uh because other countries like the US or the UK have their copyright rules and surely iceland wouldn't be able to do anything about that and they admitted yeah okay maybe we won't be able to do anything about it they said no country is an island in a globalized world not even iceland

which really is an island um i was confused about this fact when i read it because i thought oh that's so ironic when i read it and then so a member of iceland's pirate party yeah and then i thought hang on is it ironic and i couldn't work it out and i was too embarrassed to ask anyone um so i googled if it was ironic and i found a website which if anyone else suffers from not knowing if things are ironic you can now go to is it ironic dot com and it's just Anna going no no and then Dan and Alanis Morissette constantly submitting requests yeah Alanis is resubmitting saying isn't it though yeah so you just it's just lists of things where people are going is is this or is this not ironic just a couple and i and i put your fact up as well to see and it's

got 50 50 at the moment um so the people vote on it yeah people vote on it so um Katniss from the Hunger Games is injured by getting burnt after becoming dubbed the girl on fire is it ironic 75 say it is not ironic yes torch tower in dubai caught fire i think all of these things are ironic but different there are different meanings of ironic guns won't be allowed come on there's situational irony there's dramatic irony there's all sorts all sorts yeah go on give it give us another one no uh guns won't be allowed at trump's nra speech that is ironic yes 63 agree with you the people are with me guys that's not ironic that's a sensible precaution just on iceland quickly um iceland has so many as you say scandals political scandals so the

the last prime minister had to resign because his uh he was caught up in the Panama Papers which meant he'd basically been hiding an enormous amount of money offshore which you'd think the pirate party would be fond of but they weren't happy but the basically when that came out when that story broke the number of people who protested it was nearly 10 percent of the entire population as in 10 percent of the entire country in basically one square wow yeah was it the same 10 percent who went to the euros i think it must have been yeah they just love to travel yeah um it's big pirate news this week i think or and certainly in the

last two weeks uh the pirate party just came third in the check elections and they got their most votes um that any pirate party has ever got in any election so it's big news that um they've been on party for less than 10 years so they're doing really well uh and as part of their campaign they kickstarted a solar-powered pirate boat to do all the campaigning um despite the fact that the Czech Republic is landlocked is that ironic Anna it's funny i'll take it in taiwan the pirate party wasn't allowed i think so um in 2012 there was an application to name a political party the pirate party um and it was rejected by the ministry of interior due to bad connotations um because pirates aren't known as good people no well there's a lot of pirates in the straits

around indonesia and singapore yeah and so the ministry of interior said that we think there might be confusion and people might think that you are real pirates so they were told not to do it but do you guys know so you know the pirate accent are yarr yes thanks don't know what's happened to these guys um do you know where that comes from the uh summer set everyone everyone went from summer set in devon and ran away to see that's exactly what it is not what it is it was popularized in the 1950s by a guy called robert guy newton who was a hollywood actor at the time and he was the person who was in pirates of pentance i think and he played pirates in a few films and he was from devon and he just decided i'll just really up my devon accent and so he

did that being a pirate and then people decided that that was what pirate sounded like that's where it comes from that'd be a damned lie but actually pirates they came from all over the place didn't they and apparently i read an article that says the most number came from london so really the more correct pirate apps accent would be kind of a cockney ish accent with a load of vows and these and isn't that what johnny depp has in uh what does he have it's a keith richards accent is that is that cockney yeah i think so yeah that's good it's kind of nothing extremely accurate movie and i met the lady who does the costumes for pirates of the caribbean last year and she says they always bring a um some wire wool to make all of the costumes old because you can't buy old

clothes well you can you can buy your clothes wow james that is a very elitist thing to think wow i mean have you seen what i'm wearing i obviously don't believe it um yeah no but as in um 17th century kind of well those those have mostly run out in the shops now i currently that to be there most charity shops do not have a long 17th century line yeah someone's grandpa's grandpa's grandpa's grandpa died and this is an erratic um so can you think of a pirate who went to eaton um not a trade question oh gosh i'll tell you shall i tell you captain hook did he captain hook is he's an old atonian no they were what is he really yeah in the first ever play of peter pan uh is made very clear that um he's he went to eaton

that's what so that's what jay and barry says yeah that's what jay and barry says in the original play in the actual play of peter pan captain hooks final words are floriat itona which is the school motto so there was a letter to the times in the 1930s and it said sir i see that the term pirate is being applied to the class of person who owns a wireless set without paying for a license is this not a misnomer of a too flattering nature unlawful though it might be piracy has at least the merits of some romance and has in the past called forth qualities of courage and even courtesy the person especially in these hard times who listens without paying for a license displays none of the daredevil virtues of a pirate he is a sneak and the term wireless sneak

would be more appropriate signed james hook eaton college um last year the largest salmon caught in iceland was caught by eric clapton ah sorry i i knew we were way off the iceland thing i know but i just had to mention that hang on the era clapton the era clapton i'm sorry to say but i actually called the lake that that happened at and it turns out that it was the biggest salmon at the specific lake but not for all of who would have thought that dam would be the arbiter of what was true and how do you phone the lake they got one of those novelty shell phones that is great fact checking that was preemptive fact check that's the most fact checkie i've ever had in my life all right we need to

move on to our final fact of the show and that is andy my fact is that the man who invented email later changed career to become a sheep seaman importer one of those two things has taken off um yeah who was this he was called ray tomlinson and he's the man who invented email i mean he later became a miniature sheep breeder but that involved the importation of a lot of of sheep he wasn't just randomly importing it just sorry when you say a miniature sheep breeder was he very small no he was massive he was massive no he was just he was a human he was a normal man so but he was a great man because he invented email and he is the guy who picked the at sign uh for the email address and it was very very clever because it

basically meant you could send an email to any computer and it was it was outside a network basically so we know our email is made well but this is before the worldwide web isn't it yeah exactly so you've got yeah you don't have a way of doing it and um it's very weird because until he invented email basically the previous means of doing it was you had to leave a message on the same computer and then someone else had to log in to see what the message was and that was email before him yeah which is not a convenient thing obviously so you would you would write the email on your computer yeah mail your computer to the person dear amazon i would like to buy a pair of your socks yes you send the computer they would yeah okay do you know how um brian

blessed tweets very loudly he has his tweets fax to him so and then he receives his tweets by fax he reads through them he calls his agent he answers it over the phone and his agent takes a note of it and then types out all the tweets at the end of the day to send back out um so the out symbol seems to be the thing that ray tomlinson gets asked about the most right and i think it's weird that we don't have a name for the out symbol and it's really we call it the amphora uh but no we all call it the answer we call it the answer yeah show of hands who calls it the amphora i've never seen fewer hands go off in a room but you can get me on podcast amphoraqi.com that's what i would say but no all of the countries call it something interesting so i think in um

is it in spain or is it a ciocciolo which is a little snail in russia it's the word for dog in norway it's called the sign of the meow which may be to do with the tail it looks like a cat curled up with its tail it looks like a cat curled up um so the um at the moment the movement of seaman the import and export in the uk uh is sorted out by the eu by the belay directive oh they're just sorting that out oh no i mean i just mean the rules uh yeah the rules for right for listeners at home daniel's doing some really gross miming but i don't think anyone's talking about how this is going to affect it after brexit are they what's talking about seaman i'm not but this is really important because you need to import seaman from different countries otherwise

all of your livestock is in bread yeah yeah um because like for instance in america they're importing a lot of bee seaman at the moment because they felt sorry bee bee bee seaman yeah so their bees are really struggling they're all dying and they need a new bit of um genetic material and so they get the bee seaman in from other countries and then they inseminate them into the bees but it's quite difficult if you get it through customs because they don't often see bee seaman coming through you're looking at me like i'm making this up how do you i didn't know bee had bees had seaman they do so each male produces one micro litre to put that into some kind of perspective a single drop of water is 100 micro liters so you need a hundred bees to produce enough seaman to be like

the one drop of water what's what's the purpose of that that fact i don't know what's the purpose of getting the hundred bees together and oh yeah that's imagine being invited to that party as a bee is it i want to know how they collect it because the ways of collecting seaman as a farmer are they're quite interesting there's one guy basically one man one man with with tiny fingers is it is it donald trump no it's michael weight 53 from scotland okay he's one of the few beekeepers who is inseminating queen bees by milking the bees and i've seen a footage of it you just have to squeeze the abdomen very gently oh wow it comes out because in um so in farming of larger animals

then they have dummies don't they so they have dummies of youth so for instance bull seaman it fertilizes 75 percent of the cows in this country i think uh because it's just much easier it's more convenient you mean imported imported seaman what fertilizes the other 25 percent of cows so i think there's a special word that you say sorry imported bull seaman imported bull seaman that comes in vials uh fertilizes dairy cows um but you need to be able to collect it um and so you sell dummies and you can look up you know dummies online and you can buy dummy sows for instance that you can get pigs to mount because you need artificial you need pig seaman to be imported as well and um it's really hard to collect because you have to get literally in there so

you've got the dummy sow but you have to swoop in there the last minute with your cup to collect it and that's why it's much more convenient to use a dummy because with an actual sow it moves around the pen quite a lot and so you have to chase it around because with a dummy it stays still at least but this is how a lot of farm animals are inseminated yeah there is another method which is that some males then mount other males and the other males are called teasers okay and then they're interrupted at the last minute by a man with a rubber tube oh my god who volunteers for that job I don't think I think it's paid guys we we need to wrap up at a sec have you got anything before we do I have something on

sheep breeding oh yeah uh Alexander Graham Bell was into sheep breeding um he noticed that some sheep have more nipples and others and he tried to systematically breed sheep with each other to get more nippled sheep uh and he wrote a paper in science in 1904 called the multi nippled sheep of Ben Bray okay and he managed to eventually they don't talk about this when they're talking about the phone do they he eventually yielded five and six nippled sheep uh and he thought that by if they have more nipples they'd be um more fertile uh but he was wrong about that they just had more nipples everyone knows the first phone conversation don't they you know Dr Watson come here I want you but no one recorded what came next which is I want you to read this paper I've done about nipples on

sheep all right should we wrap up guys okay that is it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our Twitter accounts I'm on at Shriverland Andy I'm Fora Andrew Hunter M James at James Harkin and Shazinsky you can email podcast at qi.com yeah or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or you can go to our website no such thing as a fish.com we have all of our previous episodes up there we also have a link to our new book the book of the year which is being released November the 2nd it's out in fact by the time you're listening to this and we're about to give on away to one of the members of the audience

because we asked them to send in a fact at the beginning of this show and Andy you've picked a winning fact yes this fact comes from Karis Rubinzer I hope I pronounced your name right and it's that the inventor of the bra had a pet whippet named clitoris so and just one last thing before we wrap up this this is such a cool venue we're so proud to have come up here to play it we've heard so much about it from our friends who have been here as well and it has lived up to what they said and you'll notice that on your seats you would have been given this thing which is save baths from being boring. Comedia is looking for crowdfunding

to make sure that it can be secured as a community led place so please if you can go to this crowd funder page help it out because I you know it's my first time to bath but I do know from doing comedy that venues like this do get shut down and they're really important and they're so good and that's how comedy in this country and it's the best country in the world for comedy still exists so please go to this and help them out we will be back again next week with another episode guys thank you so much for being here tonight we'll be out the back signing books and so on we'll see you then goodbye