No Such Thing As A Fish - 21: No Such Thing As Testicle-Retracting Sumo Wrestlers

Episode Date: August 8, 2014

Episode 21: This week in the QI office, Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Andy (@andrewhunterm), Anna (@nosuchthing) and Alex (@alexbell) discuss freedom kissing, hippo castration, iceberg cowboys and whether or not we should blow up the Moon.

We ran it on QI a few years ago, which was, there's no such thing as a fish. There's no such thing as a fish. No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish. 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 four other elves. I've got Andy Murray, James Harkin, Anna Czazinski,

and on fact-checking duties, Alex Bell. So once again, we've gathered around the microphone with our favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order. Here we go. Anna, fact number one. My fact is that made in Germany, product labels were originally intended to put people off buying the product. It was a law pass in England in 1887, which forced foreign companies

to put labels saying where the product had been made on their items because British companies were worried about German knockoff products flooding their market and being cheap and tacky. Typical inferior Germans. Exactly. They're poor manufacturing base. Terrible footballing skills. Brownie was mainly to say the Sheffield cutlery industry. Obviously, it's ironic, because made in Germany very, very quickly became a stamp of very high quality.

It's a true fanter, is German? It became popular during Nazi regime. It wasn't invented specifically for it. Oh, I thought Hitler commissioned it. I thought he wanted like a German soft drink. That's what people think, but it became popular then, but it wasn't invented specifically by Hitler. That would be surprising.

I find it very weird when countries decide that their products have to be patriotic or like, you know, the classic thing during the war in Iraq when America and France fell out of freedom fries became the thing. And I love the story of freedom fries, because it was one guy, it was a Republican chairman called Bob Ney, and he renamed the menus of three congressional cafeterias with freedom fries. That's how it started. And then it just spread from there.

Yeah. And he didn't need to tell anyone about it because he has control over the cafeterias. So he just said, this is happening. And so they changed it. It's not amazing. He has control, yeah, fascistic imposition of freedom based. Yes, yes. I did read a reference to supposedly French kissing.

A couple of real zealots decided they were now going to do only freedom kissing. That caught on either. I read something. Freedom toast as well for a French toast. He also, he also changed that on the menu and that didn't get as much press. I don't know why. Freedom bread. You can make a substitution for anything, which is French. New freedom movie starring Gerard Depadu.

Yeah, dawn freedom, of course, famous for his comedians. Apparently they boycotted French's Mustard, even though it's owned by a British company and it's named after an American guy called Mr. French. That's right. He actually came out and said, please don't boycott us. It's just, it's the surname of our family. Have you guys heard of Star Spangled Ice Cream? Yeah.

We heard this. This is brilliant. So it was conservative Americans had an ice cream company and they gave their ice creams punning names. So for instance, the mint ice cream was called smaller govern mint. So can you guess what the chocolate ice cream was called? During the bombardment of Afghanistan, well, it was called Chock and Awe. Even better, the vanilla ice cream was called I hate the French video.

But it's right to the point. Just back to the freedom fries thing very quickly. It was really nice. There was a counter. So when people were doing the freedom fries thing, there was a cafe in Santa Cruz, which changed their menu of fries to impeach George W. Bush fries, which is a really nice response to that.

Speaking of labels, there are these American handbags, Tom Bin handbags, and they have washing instructions in English and French that were made during the Bush era. And the English ones are perfectly normal. And then when you read them in French, they say, do not bleach, do not dry and dry, do not iron. We are sorry, our president is an idiot. We did not vote for him.

All the banks. That's great. That's lovely. In the First World War, this exactly the same thing happened with all German named products in the USA. So Sauerkraut was called Liberty Cabbage. And that was renamed as a result of a delegation petitioning the Federal Food Administration.

They said that sauerkraut consumption had decreased by 75% since 1914 over the course of the war. And they said, look, we've got 400 tons of it in New York alone on our hands. Please rename it so that we can actually sell some of this stuff. Cool. Yeah. German measles became Liberty measles. Yeah, some more fun. Although that's sort of on the fringe of, you know, freedom, kissing or whatever.

I was thinking about on Germany, because obviously made in Germany now is something that's associated with high quality. And in fact, the obverse to my original fact, which is that made in Germany was imposed on the Germans by the English. Now, the EU regulations are saying that labeling should be more accurate. So if actually most of the work on a product has done in Bangladesh and the most expensive part comes from India, then you're not allowed to say made in Germany because you're a German company.

And Germans are saying that's really unfair. One of the reasons people buy our products is because it says made in Germany because they're really good. Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying the German economy is great. And maybe there's something to do with the fact that their word for borrow is the same as their word for guilt. So they obviously have really, really good borrowing rates. Personal borrowing is very low.

Because it's shameful. It's shameful. Every time you borrow, you get a you have to say the word guilt. That wasn't really round the bat way. It was, wasn't it? Good. I think I wanted to inform people about the EU regulation at the same time as rounding it off when no one can say you didn't do that. I think I did.

So I was looking into made in China as a as a label. I was really surprised by stuff that they produce. Eighty five percent of all artificial Christmas trees are from China. Already other things that are made in China. The U.S. uniforms for the 2012 Olympics. Really? Yeah. And also in 2008, police in China said they discovered a factory making free Tibet flags.

Yeah, but they apparently the workers at the factory said they thought they were just making colorful flags. They didn't know the significance of them. So the made in China label is exactly the same as made in Germany as in Japan. Forced it on the Chinese to say to discourage people from buying Chinese products shortly afterwards. No way. I quite like funny labels on stuff. And I just remembered that the iPod shuffle when it first came out on

its little safety label said, do not eat iPod shuffle, which was useful. My sister bought a pram for her first kid, Sophia. And this is a huge box. And on the side of the box, it has a picture of a baby saying baby, not included. I can't tell if it was a joke or if it was. All right, we should wrap up on this one. Alex, have you got anything to add? Going back to soft drinks.

Fanta was invented actually by Coca Cola because they couldn't import their syrup into Nazi Germany. So they were trying to make up a drink using the leftovers that were available. OK, time for fact number two. And that is my fact. And my fact this week is in 1991, a professor at Iowa State University proposed that we could solve virtually every problem of human existence by blowing up the moon. Not every problem. This is what he said.

Not losing the remote. I think that was included. I think he went literally through. Wow. So what problems are we solving and how? Well, the problems range from weather problems to famine to disease. Now, it has been pointed out by most scientists alive that this is not the case. It would not solve the problems. In fact, NASA was saying that if we did blow up the moon,

most likely part of the exploded moon would come back as a meteorite impacting on Earth and causing sufficient damage to extinguish extinguish all life. So actually, slightly the reverse effect of what he said. No, it kind of would solve all our problems to be gone. We wouldn't have any problems anymore. That's true. Yeah, he thought and his name was Professor Alexander Abion. His idea was that you would do it remotely from Earth. So you would put explosives into the moon and just push about.

When do you say that? In 1991. Oh, right. It's quite recent, then. Yeah, yeah, enough to know that. Yeah, he's dead now, unfortunately. And his children say that he was a very sane man. So this is not this is not as if he was a lunatic. He was a very much loved mathematics professor at his university. There have been a lot of wacky suggestions about how to save the world over the years, haven't there?

Some of them you've got to admire, and apparently they some of them could work. So one idea is that we wrap Greenland up in a blanket. You guys read this? No, no. So the problem is so all the all the greener's ice is melting. That's obviously a bit of an issue. So in 2009, a bunch of geoengineers covered Greenland in this big white blanket and it's meant to reflect the sun. So it means that the sun doesn't heat up and melt the ice.

And it was surprising and successful, more successful than predicted, but it would cost about a trillion dollars to do it to the entirety of Greenland. Pretty weird. It's strange that putting a duvet on something would cool it down. Yeah, you think it would just melt it. In a hot country, if you go on, if you've got the sun blazing in on you and you've hide under a duvet, I think Greenland is not a very hot country. No.

That's a fair point. So does the theory work or not? Yeah, it did work, but it's just that it's way too expensive to be a tool feasible. Yeah. My favorite fact about Greenland is that until quite recently, 10 percent of the whole population lived in the same apartment block. What? No. One. One percent. Was it one percent? Yeah, something like 400 people out of 40,000, I think. Yeah, something like that.

Isn't that cool? Yeah, that's really cool. Block K, I think, or something like that. Block P. I got that completely wrong, didn't I? I knew there was a fact in there somewhere. So did we work out what kind of problems he was going to solve? It was one of those things where he kind of just made the statement. He didn't publish a paper on it or anything. He just kind of loosely gave the territories.

And it was stuff like the weather pattern. He didn't really go into it. Tides. Tides have been cut off at high tide on a beach. He's always a nightmare. That's always a nightmare. That's going to stop. Yeah. Losing your remote. That was a big part of his decision. Would there be any tides left without the moon?

Yeah, because the sun does has tidal forces. There are solar tides as well. Yeah, it just would mean that it would be high tide at midday every day. Everywhere in the world where you were, if it was midday, it'd be high tide. Oh, that's so boring. It's like decimalization, isn't it? So dope. All those tide timetables that would have to be reprinted as well.

The crazy pounds, shilling and pens, world of the moon. The mollusks, reproductive organs grow and shrink according to the phases of the moon. So if there was no moon, would they stay big or stay small? It depends when you blew up the moon. Yeah. So they'd be a powerful lobby from the mollusk community to blow it up when they were big.

Is that like the wind changing when the moon blows up your face? Your testicle will remain the same size forever. I think we shouldn't be too judgmental, though, should we, because I think he, Abyon, is that what he was called? When he died, he said those critics who dismissed my ideas are very close to those who dismissed Galileo. And it was true, you know,

when Galileo was thinking that. So maybe 300 years when the moon's just in shattered pieces across the universe. I don't think Galileo ever proposed blowing up the moon. It wasn't smart enough. Poor me, Captain Sceptical. There was a plan to do a nuclear explosion on the moon. Wasn't there by America as a show of might to the Russians?

Wow. Yeah. It was like a PR exercise. God, that is fascinating. Sort of pointlessly exploding something. Yeah. I mean, it wouldn't have blown up the moon. It would have just made a bit of a flash. The idea was the Russians would look up and go, oh, my God, they blew up a bit of the moon.

They must be a lot better than us. Oh, they've got terrible aim. Were they trying to hit us there? Maybe you're up. Come on. They can't hit a bundle. I, of course, shaking my head because I know that is going to say something about yetis or vampires.

No, it's my favorite book of recent times that I purchased, which is called Who Built the Moon? And it's a really lovely theory that the moon is artificial because back when the rocks were originally brought back from NASA's Apollo 11 mission, the geologists who were studying the rocks said... This says made in China. No, they said that basically the moon is just,

it's such a weird thing, the moon, the way it sits, the position it sits in, the perfectness of the distance between the sun and the earth and just all the features that it allows for the tides and all that, it's easier to prove it doesn't exist than to prove it does exist. There are people called eco-sexuals. Do you know about these guys?

What's an eco-sexual? Is it people who like having sex with the planet? Yes, in a way. There are people who have married the moon. Oh, wow. There were also people who married the earth and they interviewed these people and they said there were 450 of us

and we're all married to the earth. Has anyone had a divorce to the earth because they fell on top of the moon and had them on? Don't fix it. Because actually these people who married the moon and married the earth, they also married the Appalachian mountains and some snow in Ottawa.

I'm tiring of these people. And when they go to Spain later this summer, according to the news report, they plan to marry some hunks of coal in the city of Gijon. Hunks of coal. These people are alive now. So they're all sluts basically.

Just putting themselves out there, left, right and centre. Imagine the wedding ceremony though, where you've got the person standing on one side of the altar and the entire earth on the other side of the earth. Where do the guests sit? Or a mountain range. You might now kiss the snow. The wedding ended tragically early when the groom melted.

So could we survive without the moon? Is that at all possible? I doubt it. There would be earthquakes, wouldn't there, and volcanoes. One theory is that the earth's rotational axis, as if it just disappeared, that the earth's rotational axis would go way off and provoke drastic climate change.

Oh yeah, because doesn't the moon stop us from wobbling? Like there's a natural wobble of planets and because we have the moon, it steadies the earth. And without that, I think it would cause dramatic climate change. Probably like what happened to Mars. Oh really? So like hasn't, we would end up with no atmosphere.

We're so lucky to have the moon. Yeah, thank you moon. Then your friend Dan is trying to destroy it. No, he wants to help. There's an amazing thing, and Alex you'll probably have to help me find the proper facts about this, but there was a story about when Apollo 10

went around the backside of the moon. So you know how you lose contact with the earth because you can't get any signals. It's like O2 on a regular day. It's like this terrible signal. So they have a few minutes behind the moon and the astronauts in Apollo 10, as they were going around the moon,

they started hearing this amazing orchestra and they couldn't explain it. And what's really interesting is it's only recently that they've declassified these papers and the conversation that they had was they were going, we can't tell everyone back on earth that we're hearing this because they just won't believe us. That will be our career over

if we suddenly claim to hear this orchestra. Took them years to work out what it was. It turns out that it was a beam that was coming off from Saturn, I think it was. Alec, you might have to help me on that one there. I found a video about the phenomenon and it obviously happened, but I can't find anything about an explanation.

Eugene Cernan described it several times as an outer space-eat style type music. He probably just swallowed his iPod Nano. Patrick Moore was a keen musician. Was he? He was a Glockenspiel player. Xylophonist, don't confuse Glockenspiels and Xylophones. He played a really fun prank in 1976 on April the 1st

because obviously he did his radio program, what was it called? Sky at Night. Sky at Night, but on April the 1st, 1976, Patrick Moore told a radio audience that unusual planetary alignment would cause people on earth to weigh a little bit less at 9.47 in the morning and that if everyone jumped in the air,

they'd experience a strange sensation of weightlessness. Lots of people did it and they immediately called up the radio to say, hey, it happened, I felt it. I was weightless for a second. Yeah, people claim they actually levitated. Yeah, yeah. That's great.

It's such a good hoax, I love it. I like the fact that the first player to play golf, probably the only person to play golf on the moon, Alan Shepard, missed it on his first attempt. Kind of enjoyed the fact that- He missed his shot. Yeah, he missed his shot. To be fair, he was in a spacesuit,

which I guess it's hard to tell, a golf ball. One thing I really, really like is that when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first landed on the moon, they just landed at NASA, got in touch with them and ordered them to eat a meal and go to sleep. Can you imagine having just landed on the moon and being told to go to bed? Let's have a nap.

Yeah, let's have a nap. Can we get to the moon? This is what we do. We don't deserve to be contacted by other species. Okay, time for fact number three, and that is James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is something I read on MentalFloss.com, and it is that,

in New York City until 1925, drivers going east or west stopped at an amber light and drove on green, while drivers going north or south drove on an amber light and stopped on green. So it was like a traffic light that had no back? Yeah, you could see it from all different directions. But you'd have to know whether you're going east or west or north or south, which sounds...

But in New York, I suppose that's easier than London, which has no grid system for most of it. Easier, less easy than just saying across the city, red means stop. Why did they do, they must have had a reason for splitting it up like that? I don't know, I think it's because they use the same lights for people going in each directions.

So when it was on amber, these guys could go, and when it was on green, these guys could go, but it was amazing. That's so mental. Good thing there were no diagonals in New York as well. What the hell do they do? Similar kind of thing, in London, the circle line on the underground

used to be owned by two different companies, i.e. the clockwise bit was owned by one and the anticlockwise was owned by another. And you had to get a separate ticket from a different office. Sometimes the companies would try and sell you a ticket so you'd go around 30 stops their way rather than go back three stops with the other company. That's genius.

Sounds like Journey Planner on TFL. I can't have to take seven items of transport to get there. Who is, Alex, was it you yesterday who was saying that the most popular tube journey is Covent Garden to Leicester Square? Oh yeah. It's the most popular one and the shortest isn't it? And the shortest.

The most commonly traveled. Unless you take the anticlockwise route, in which case. It's been a long way. It's been really getting your money's worth, yeah. During the Cultural Revolution in China, they wanted to change it so that green meant stop and red meant go, because obviously red was a much more positive color

in those days. It's very strong. What I love about the Cultural Revolution, that fact about how they tried to kill all the sparrows because they were eating all the crops. Do you remember that? I think that was the Great Leap Forward. Was it?

Yes. It was under Mao, yeah. So what did they do? There were like half a billion sparrows in China and they had a scheme where everyone was encouraged to kill them all. And so everyone killed all the sparrows and then that's great

because they're not eating the crops anymore but they didn't realize that actually the sparrows were eating all the insects that were eating the crops. So they got rid of the sparrows and then all the crops died because they were eaten by insects instead. Fools. People never anticipate introductions and culling.

People never seem to anticipate the natural knock on everybody. No, exactly. Even though it happens every time. Yeah. I really like that guy who wanted to introduce to America every single bird mentioned in Shakespeare. Oh yeah.

He introduced tons of them and one of them is now the biggest pest in America and I can't know which one is. Is he called Skylin or something like that? Yeah, something like that. You change Skylin or something like that, yeah. I have an amazing sparrow fact that I found yesterday. I'm so glad this has come up.

I've read this in a Carl Sagan book. I was in Foils and just flipped it open to random page and it was that sparrows testicles are a millimeter long and weigh one milligram. Oh. So I tweeted that yesterday and Kace Molliker who is the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam's head curator, he got back to me saying

that in April and May the sparrow's testicles will grow to the size of a kidney bean. Wow. From a millimeter. Oh my days. That's like a, what's that? Like a thousand times. At a full moon.

I read yesterday that also on the testicle news. Oh yeah. That was on the website. So I read that hippos can hide the testicles around their body. What? Like on their shoulder? Yeah.

Yeah. What they can do is they can retract them up to a foot inside their body. And the reason that they do it is because when hippos used to fight each other or when hippos do fight each other, they often go for the testicles. And so it's evolved as kind of an evolutionary way

of moving the testicles out of the way. And it's a real problem if you're trying to castrate them. Boop. Can't believe hippos have beaten you guys to it. You surely wish that you'd evolved that far. WWF wrestlers do it. That's the, okay, right. This is, this goes back to Ian Fleming.

Cause in one of his books, I think it's in, you only live twice. Bond's getting his instructions from him and says, be careful of summa wrestlers in Japan because they can all withdraw their testicles into their body. Oh, why be careful? Watch out for those testicle retractors.

You'll die of shock. There are some non testicles where you expect to see testicles, Bond, just prepare yourself. But can they? I don't think so. So humans can't, no, but can't you, I've not tried, but I thought the idea was that

they sort of shoved them into themselves. If I had a half hour with you, Andy. And I had a lot of determination. But the fact that I'm kind of, we've slightly jumped past, which I love way more is that hippos kick each other in the balls in life. No, no, can bite, bite.

Bite their balls. Oh, wow. Because if you think about it, it's a good, if you're fighting someone for sexual reasons, as in you're trying to get the lady hippo, then a good way of going against the guy is to bite his testicles off because then he can't mate with the female.

Two birds, one stone. So you sort of cripple him and also... One bird, no stones. Two birds, yeah. I think we should maybe go back to traffic lights. Yeah, sure. I was reading about the history of signs and when the two people who standardised signposts

in the UK, it's pretty thrilling reading, were Joach, Keneer and Margaret Calvert in the 1950s. But one of the things there was uproar about when they were standardising signposts was signs had usually been in capital letters and their proposal to put them in lower case, apparently, caused outrage in the signmaking community. Are they in lower case?

They're up a case now. I can't even... Lower case. Are they? They decided because it's easier to read from a distance because capitals can look all sort of the same. If you're at a distance. Oh, that's good.

And they were tasked to find the most boring font available to them so it wasn't distracting for drivers. And what did they go with? And it's called motorist font. That doesn't sound boring to be fair. I like the way that before they standardised it, they would have weird, like, signs. There was...

The sign for schools used to be a flaming torch of knowledge. It's brilliant. I want to live in a country where those are the symbols. It's great, isn't it? But imagine driving up the road and you see a flaming torch. The school is not the first place you think. Danger, fire, turn around.

I mean, actually, the sign for schools... Statue of Liberty, straight ahead. The sign for schools now, the girl in that picture is... Or children crossing is based on the woman Margaret who standardised the schools, which I don't know how it's based on her because it's the most generic girl picture ever. Yeah, and the sign for farm animals is based on her family cow,

which was called patience. So now we know that the cow on those farm signs is called patience. Wonderful. Alex, have you got anything to add? Yes, a couple of things very quickly. It was Eugene Sheiflin in 1890, who released a load of birds in Central Park.

They were all made from the Shakespeare. He let bullfinches, chaffinches, nightingales, and skylocks into the park, but it was the starlings that he released... Starling. ...which have now grown to about a population of about 2 billion. Wow. In British Columbia is the second largest producer of blueberries and they just eat all the blueberries.

Sounds good for the night there. It was in You Only Live Twice that Bond was being taught how to be Japanese and his teacher told him that some of us can retract their testicles, but it's as far as I can tell a complete myth. Yeah. It's nothing like officially doing it or otherwise. Again, half an hour with me and Andy in a room.

OK, time for a final fact of the show, and that is you, Andy Murray. My effect is that there are companies which lasso icebergs to stop them hitting oil rigs. That's really good. How cool is that? That's very cool. So when you say lasso, do they do the cowboy thing

if they just throw a rope at it? They just throw a rope and they say yee-ha, and then they brand it which doesn't work because... It melts. It melts. It's not exactly like the cowboy thing, but basically a ship circumnavigates an iceberg with a rope. See what I mean?

So it ties it on at one point, it goes around the circumference and then reattaches it and just tows it. You don't have to tow it more than a few degrees, of course, to ensure that it doesn't hit an oil rig. But it's really clever. And half the battle is in knowing where icebergs are and checking how they're floating, and so they observe the sea rather from the skies

and check what's moving where. If any icebergs do need to be moved, then they either... Then they call a cowboy. They call a cowboy, yeah. That started with the Titanic, didn't it? It was the fact that the iceberg hitting the Titanic led to them going, we need to monitor these things now, and they started putting in place the system that we now have

to work out where they all are. The International Ice Patrol, which I just really like as a name. Fantastic organization. Yeah, that's good. But I like the fact that after the Titanic, just a bunch of guys in boats were sent out to check where icebergs were, so I assume they just kept crashing

into icebergs and going, there's one here. Got another one. You know, they have a photo or two photos that they think potentially was the iceberg that the Titanic crashed into. It's got red paint along the side, so there's two icebergs that definitely had paint, and so the pictures were taken just for that reason

because they thought, oh, wow, how curious. They didn't know that the Titanic incident had happened, which sounds weird, but true, the two boats, it was a German boat, they had no idea. I read an amazing article on Wired, which was a biography of the iceberg that hit the Titanic, as much as you could speculate. They reckon it started in Greenland.

Basically, every year, there's about 15 to 30 icebergs that are carved from the glaciers, and they reckon only about 1% of those make it to the Atlantic, and then they gradually melt, and so they eventually disappear. So had the Titanic been going a few years later, it might not have been there at all. I kind of like the idea of the iceberg then going on

to live a normal life with an eco-sexual husband. Well, it would also have been 3,000 years old, because when it fell as snow onto the Arctic, it would have been packed, and then very slowly moved out That's an interesting life to have nothing happen for 3,000 years, and then you run into the Titanic. His mates must think he's super cool. That's the thing, they were saying it was probably born

as an iceberg, roughly at the same time as Tutankhamun. That's so nice, that was happening, and then it just found its way down to the Atlantic, and eventually just hit the... I guess it could be like, say, some sweat from Tutankhamun went up into the atmosphere, it turned into snow, fell down, waited there for 3,000 years, and then hit the Titanic.

So what's the claim is that Tutankhamun sunk the Titanic? That should be your fact, Andy. That is that conspiracy. But that was the big thing, that there was stuff from... It's a huge myth from back in the day that Tutankhamun's stuff from the Howard Carter finding was on the Titanic, and it was the curse that brought it down. You guys must know that.

That was one of the classic childhood myths. Other children were told bedtime stories. Dan was told conspiracy theories in his cradle. Praised in terror. The thing is, Dan, little Dan, the lizards are behind it all. Sleep well. It is weird to think that you might have molecules of water that were in the Titanic iceberg in you now.

Do you guys know about the world's largest iceberg? No. It's about the size of Jamaica, about half the size of Wales. And it carved off in the year 2000. And they think that there's probably still bits of it that haven't melted down. Wow. Was that an Antarctic one?

Yeah, it was called iceberg B-15. Catchy. They don't have very creative names, icebergs. Like hurricanes. They have B-50, D-12, D-14. D-12? Do they rap a lot? They do. Yeah.

I was looking at oil rigs. America's third largest oil field is LA, and it's completely concealed. Most oil fields you picture are like those big pylons. LA is full of secret oil rigs. So LA started sort of hippifying around, I think, the 1930s. And people who had built these huge oil rig buildings, they're disguised as normal buildings in LA,

and they're all over Hollywood. Wow. There are just buildings all over LA, which look like normal concrete buildings. And inside, they're sucking up, you know, hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil. Very much the transformers of the oil industry, aren't they? Yeah.

Towing an iceberg. Yeah. We've done some computer models to see if it's feasible to tow an iceberg from the Arctic down to Africa to give people drinking water. And they think that you could take an iceberg from Newfoundland to the northwest coast of Africa. It would take five months and would retain more than 60%

of the iceberg's mass. If it was the cheapest way, it might have been tried. They did try it. Yeah, it was tried. Wow. Yeah. In the second half of the 19th century, smaller icebergs were routinely taken up to Peru

for refrigeration in the brewing business. Oh, from the South Pole? Yes, from the South Pole. So where do they keep them? Is there like an African harbour where they just have loads of icebergs? It must look so bizarre. It's not only icebergs that we're lassoing. NASA is investing in a project to lasso an asteroid

using a robotic space lasso. Lassoing an asteroid into lunar orbit to make sure it orbits the moon so that it hopes that by 2025, we're going to be able to use it. Astronauts will be able to use it as a way station from which to extract consumables on the way to Mars. That sounds like the worst idea I've ever heard. We've already established that losing the moon

would solve all our problems, and now we're saying, let's bring another moon in. Yeah. A moon for the moon. OK, that's it for this week's podcast. Thanks everyone for listening. If you want to get in contact with any of us, you can do so on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland. James. At Eggshaked. Alex. At Alexbell. At Andrew Hunter M. And Anna. You can email me on podcast at qi.com.

Or you can go to our qi.com slash podcast page where she and Alex compile all of the extra stuff that we've been talking about from this episode. And we're going to be back again next week with another episode. So stay tuned. We'll see you then. Goodbye. OK, everyone else has left, apart from me and Anna.

We're the only ones left in the office because everyone else has gone to Edinburgh. But if you want to see any of the guys in Edinburgh, you can see Andy. He has two shows. One is called Ostentatious. And the other is called Foliadeur. And they are improvised comedy shows.

And Dan will be doing his one hour show, which is called Cock Blocked from Outer Space. And he will also be producing the Museum of Curiosity Live. So if anyone is in Edinburgh, then go and catch those. You're sure what we can do. You hold on to me. I hold on to you.