No Such Thing As A Fish - 211: No Such Thing As A Photograph Of A River

Episode Date: April 6, 2018

Live from Edinburgh, Dan, James Anna and Andy discuss dinner party etiquette for 5-year-olds, ugly American shoes and divorcées falling down the stairs.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from Edinburgh! My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that's my fact this week, my fact is unmarried people are more likely to fall downstairs than married people. And previously married people fall down more than both of them.

It does, it's not just because they're like, it's my phone's ringing, my phone's ringing, get it? Because you're single, you're kind of, you know. Yeah, you're ready for the thing. I don't think we know why, do we? We don't. So I read this in a Bill Bryson book called At Home, which is a fantastic book, and he references in the chapter, which he writes about stairs, that he read this one book, the

only book that is a sort of academic look at staircases, and it's by John Templer of MIT, it's called The Staircase, Studies of Hazards Fall and Safe Designs. Yep, and I have also read this book, there it is. That's it. It is the first theoretical, historical and scientific analysis of the stair, according to the blurb. It is pretty hard going. And actually, that was a little joke for you, staircase enthusiasts out there, because the

going is the width of a stair, and all of my humour will be staircase-based for the rest of the show. John Templer's at home pissing himself, what do you know about that? I mean, there's diagrams, there's loads of tables and stuff like this. Tables? What are tables doing in a book? There's about three or four good facts in the first four pages, and then the rest of it is just unbelievably tedious.

Did he lead with the unmarried and married people? Yeah, it's right near the start. Another thing he says is that notable missteps happen once every 2,222 stair uses. Minor accidents happen every 63,000 uses. Disabling accidents every 734,210 uses. Rural treatments every 3,616,667 uses. And deaths every 513,947,300 uses. And that was one of the least-boring.

Do you know why all these accidents happen? According to him, it's because every staircase is a compromise between going up and going down. Right. Yeah. You have staircases which, just for people going up, can't you? Oh, no, that would be decadent, wouldn't it? His point being that, how would you get down again as well, think of that?

I'd have two in my house. Oh! Bloody duck. I would have a fireman's pulp or a slide. I know. Wait, sorry, what do you mean by a compromise? Who's compromising with whom? Who's negotiating here?

A perfect staircase would be a staircase that would be able to adapt itself to whether or not you were going up or down for the length and the height and so on. They're built in one way which plays advantage to either going up or going down. Very different skills going up and down a staircase. Very different. And actually, in this book, there are figures about how a staircase was if you're going up or down. So if you're going up, there's a different wearing out of the stair than if you're going

down. I would have thought the wearing would be the same on all staircases unless you've just got a huge stockpile of 10,000 people at the top of the stairs at some point. At some point, everyone who goes upstairs does come down the same stairs. I think there are a few like, for instance, if you've got stairs coming up at a dock, say for instance, people might use it for getting off the boat, but to get on the boat they might use the pier. I see.

So there are a few little things like that. It's very interesting actually, Anna. And that is, that's the origin of that saying, isn't it? What goes up stairs must come down stairs. Yes. Women fall downstairs more often than men, or admit to falling downstairs more often than men. So 38% of women compared to 28% of men said they'd fallen downstairs or upstairs or

tripped on stairs in the last year. And also weirdly, this was a study that was done by the British Woodworking Federation who relied on, for all rigorous scientific studies, and their study also found that the northeast of England, so it was a study that discovered England, the northeast is the most at risk of falling downstairs. So 48% of people there said they'd done it in the last year, whereas Yorkshire and Humber, directly next to the northeast region, had the least incidences, 26%. What's going on there?

It doesn't make any sense. I don't know, mate. I saw a really cool invention the other day because a lot of people are trying to work out how to stop people if they do fall over from properly hurting themselves. So there's this new invention that they're trialling at the moment, which is like a big belt that you wear, and it senses that you're falling over. It's sort of like this is a movement that's not being expected, I've gone as a belt, I've gone over that way, and what it does is it inflates these massive airbags.

Speaking of stair-based inventions, that sounds awesome, there are scientists at Georgia Tech who have invented some stairs which walk you back. What that doesn't make any sense. What's happening? I understood all those words, but... Well, I've tried to sex it up a bit, and I don't think it's succeeded. Basically they're stairs which, as you walk on them, they store your energy, and then when you walk the other way, so when you walk down, the gravitational force of you descending

stores energy in the stair, and then when you walk back up, it springs you up every step you take. That's so dangerous. Every move you make. When you go back up, it's 37% easier on your knee than it would be normally, so that could be huge. Yeah. And there are shoes that have just been invented to stop people from falling over, which I

think sound a bit less dramatic and embarrassing than the airbag solution, because they're just shoes with a battery on the back of them and a sensor, and they sense when you're starting to have your body weight in the wrong position, and they automatically start a little motor that slides the shoes backwards, so it stops you falling over backwards. Wow. Exactly. Like moonwalking, but only if the option is falling over. That's amazing.

And the person who invented them said, it's great because it's not as noticeable as having a stick or a zimmer frame, which some people don't want to have because it makes them feel like they've lost some ability, and they just look like completely normal shoes, which I watched the video and they've got a large motor on the back of each shoe, so... Can I just ask about the staircase giving you the lift again? So presumably if you were walking down, it matches your body weight and type for the spring it gives you on the way back up, right? So if I go down the staircase, but then my son walks up it, is he not going to be lobbed?

Because in 1948 an elephant climbed up the stairs at the Eiffel Tower, and then climbed back down again. So imagine that. Are you serious? Really? Oh, wow. That used to be a thing that people did in the Eiffel Tower. They used to just climb up the stairs in funny ways.

There was a guy who did it in stilts, quite famously, a baker. And then when Hitler took over Paris in the war, suddenly all of the lifts stopped working and they said, oh no, you're going to have to walk up the stairs now. And he was like, oh, I'm not going to do it then. They would jeopardize, weren't they? The resistance cut all the lift cables in the Eiffel Tower, and there's someone who admitted to it in the end, he wrote a book and said, it was me, I cut the cables in the Eiffel Tower to make the Nazis look like idiots.

At the time, they just said, oh, no, it's just not working. And then the day after he left, they're like, oh, it's working again. Jeremy Corbyn can climb four flights of stairs faster than anyone else in the Labour Party. I know, that's not true, is it? Prove me wrong. The fact that the Labour Party's wasting time figuring this out does you a long way to explain it. Why are you saying that?

Is it a race they do or something? He's not saying it. It's according to his deputy, Tom Watson. He just said he can climb. Yeah, but Tom Watson can't do it that fast, can he? No, but he didn't say it was just faster than me, Tom Watson. He said anyone else, I think in the parliamentary party, not the 500,000 strong membership. But maybe...

Anyway. Do you know the most number of stairs climbed on your head? What? Oh. So you're on your head, you're like doing a headstand, and then you have to bounce off onto the next step, and you keep going up, and how many can you do in a row, what's the world record? 15.

15. 6. It's 36. Do you know what the most stairs tumbled down in a stunt fall is? Oh, cool. Do you reckon it's more or less than 36? It's more. I'll say less.

No, you were wrong to say that. It was 134. Ooh. Yeah. Do you know what the most consecutive stairs climbed while juggling a football is? Oh, Jesus. No. What part of the book where it stopped being interesting now?

It's 4,698. Sorry, that was climbing stairs juggling a football, but it's a bit of a cheat because he just went up the same 18 stairs lots of times. Wait, juggling a football? Yeah. No, no, no, with your feet. Like, keep your feet. Oh, that, sorry.

I thought you meant he was juggling one football with his hands. I think I could do that. I don't think you could. I don't think you could go up 4,600 steps, no matter what the football's doing. And one more, most consecutive stairs climbed while balancing a person on your head. Ah. So you're walking up, and it's like as if there's a mirror on your head because there's another person directly above you.

But are they standing on their head on your head? Their head is on your head, and they're upside down. Right. What's the number? 90. It's impressive. 90. Yeah, yeah.

More than the guy who just did it on his head. Yeah. Wow. I would say that is much easier. They're still doing it on their feet. He has a man upside down on his head. Well, these, do you guys know about competitive stair climbing? No.

Which is, this is really a growing sport. So it's like an official sport. There's this global circuit of competitive stair climbers. They call themselves the most difficult sport that no one's ever heard of. And it's basically, they have these events all over the world where they race up really tall buildings. The three main races are in the US, the Empire State Building Sears Tower and US Bank Tower. And they have this, the big Facebook group, and they call each other stepbrothers and

stepsisters, which is real clever. But they take it super seriously. So like the men shave their legs and shave their heads, so they're more streamlined going up the stairs. They wear gloves. That can't make a much of a difference, can it? Because you're in a stairwell. Yeah.

There's not going to be that much air resistance. I guess some. Yeah, yeah. There's still air, isn't there? There's still air. One thing they say is that the air in stairwells is actually quite bad. So you get this really bad smokers hacking cough as you're going up, because the air's really dry.

So they recommend that you suck on a fruit sweet or a lozenge as you're running up, which I would have thought is a massive choking hazard, as your sprinting upstairs. You must be absolutely exhausted by the time you get to the top. It's really tiring. That's true of a lot of spots, though, actually. Yeah. And then at the end of this, you've got to climb on top of another set of stairs on podium.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you think some people kind of cheat and at the end, they pretend they've come second and then they race to the top one of the podium at the last minute? Corbin? We need to move on to our next facts very soon. You guys got anything before we do? This is massively off topic.

Yeah. Just, I was reading about going upstairs two at a time and there's a Guardian... That's quite on topic, actually. Well, just you wait. There's a Guardian notes and queries, you know, where they get questions from the public, and they're really interesting questions, and one of them was, is taking the stairs two at a time good for us? And I looked up a few other notes and queries things.

One of them is, is it actually possible to take a photograph of a river because it moves? So, you know, what have you photographed? Right? That's genius. It's genius. That's not genius. That's genius. It's never there again.

That bill of water is never there again. But that's true of time. Like, if I take a photo of you now, then time has moved on and you're going to be older than you were. That's a very popular answer, actually. There are a couple more. Is it okay to do the crossword in the newspaper for cafe customers? Is it weird to be talking to myself so much?

And how many layers of paint would I need to apply to make opposite walls touch? Wow. I think the last layer is going to be quite hard to do, isn't it? Do you paint yourself not into a corner, but into a... All right, let's move on to our next fact. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that there's a tanning salon in St Andrews called Suntandrews. Now, don't get too excited, guys, because when I say verse, it's T-H-E-R-E apostrophe

S and it's short for there was because I checked Google Earth today and it's not there anymore. Wow. It's now a tanning salon called Abbottetan. What? I don't get it. Abbottetan? Abbottetan? Oh, Abbottetan.

Abbottetan, yeah, Abbottetan, actually. It's still not great though, is it? No, it's not. Well, it's no Suntandrews. No. Which is genius. It is. But this is just a fact.

This was told to me by our colleague Ann Miller, who used to live up here, used to live in St Andrews. And I just think it's awesome. And I thought we could talk about maybe Suntands and tanning salons and stuff like that. We should. Although, I think we should say for Ann Miller's sake that I don't think she's ever been in a tanning salon. I don't want people to get the impression that she was on the sunbed every day. She's just got an eye for a pun, hasn't she? She's got an eye for a pun.

She's been in the tanning salon. Yeah. There's a cool pun one in Edinburgh, and maybe you guys will know if this still exists. So there's a property shop, and it's called The Property Shop. And right next to it, someone set up a cafe called The Property Shop. And so that just... It's the same company. It's in Stockbridge, isn't it?

So it was an estate agent, and it was the same guy said, let's have a cafe as part of our thing. On Suntands, I found out that... So obviously getting a suntan is bad for you in lots of ways. And there's no way of getting a tan without doing damage to the skin, as in the protection that you get in the future is the damage that you do, except that there is a team at Massachusetts General Hospital, and they have invented a drug which you can take,

which will give you a suntan with no sun. Wow. And this is amazing. It produces melanin, which is the thing that protects you from skin cancer, and it could provide the Alexia of tanning, a red-haired tan. Oh. Yeah, you could have. Because people with red hair, they have a genetic mutation which disrupts the process

and makes it very hard for people with red hair to tan. This could create... That would be great. That's very cool. Do you know, because it is bad for you, and there's been a lot of publicity recently about it, you have to get your fingerprints checked in a lot of tanning salons. So the tanning salon, the tanning shop,

which has a lot of branches over the UK, you're fingerprinted, and if you've come in and get before that day, they don't let you in. Oh, really? Wow. That's quite good. Tanning salons and airports. But actually, people didn't really care about, like,

Suntands today for ages and ages and ages, because basically having a suntan meant that you were poor and you worked outside, you were a labourer. And so it was always thought that if you had light skin, it was better. But then Coco Chanel accidentally got tanned when she went on a Mediterranean cruise in 1923. And suddenly, everyone thought, this is the thing that we all need to have now.

It's quite a relatively new thing. Yeah. You know, when Suntands got popular after the Coco Chanel incident, then obviously a lot of merchandise popped up around them. And Popular Science wrote an article about all the weird suntanning technologies that have been invented since kind of the 1920s, 1930s. And there were some crazy stuff people were doing.

So in 1938, it wrote about a rotating sun tub, which is basically a tent that you brought to the beach. And it had, like, huge wooden kind of structure that you had to bring to the beach and you erected it. And it followed the sun's movement, so you lay inside it and you had a little steering wheel. And so you could steer the tent to point you towards the sun at all times. And that's a really good idea.

It's incredible. Yeah. So you're in the wooden structure. Yeah. But there's a gap of sunlight for your body. Exactly. But are you kind of steering it towards the sun, or does it do it automatically?

You have to steer. But you've got to do something. Otherwise, it's just boring. Fair enough. You can get bacon smelling sunscreen. Why would you want that? Well, because lots of people like bacon. Yeah.

According to the website of this thing, science has shown us that 10 out of 10 people prefer the smell of bacon to coconut. Sorry. Can't argue with science, Andy. 10 out of 10, including vegetarians and vegans. The smell, the smell of bacon. Is this another study done by one of Jeremy Corbyn's cabinet?

Very questionable. Last year, KFC sold sunscreen which smelled of KFC. Yeah. It would protect your skin while the real fried chicken scent leaves you smelling delicious. They had 3,000 tubes, and everyone was disappointed because they sold out in two hours. But luckily, they learned the lesson,

and that was the last time KFC ever ran out of anything ever again. Speaking of artificial tanning, sometimes people can overdo it, and I just wanted to share this headline from the mail. A young mother claims she was housebound for a week after a fake tan fail left her looking like she'd bathed in chocolate spread, with pals even mistaking her for a brown leather sofa.

That is... I mean, what? Like, guys, stop sitting on me. What are you doing? Did it change her whole body shape? I don't know. It's interesting the methods that people used to go about to try and get a tan back in the day,

and I read about one which I think people still occasionally try, which is to use teabags, so what you do is just put a lot of teabags into a hot bath and you would get in the bath and you would allow that to cook you into a cup. Have you put the milk in first? They didn't say in the article. I heard that that was done in the wall,

where women wanted a tan, but obviously there's no way of getting a tan because you can't go on holiday in Greece anymore. Well, the big problem that people... These are the Nazis. I knew I hated those guys. But the thing I read is that for people who try it these days, when they do it in a bath,

they come across the same problem, which is how do you tan your face because that's above water, and in order to tan it, you need to be underwater for a long time. So a bunch of people bought snorkels, which they tried, but that was just weird then.

I think once you've got as far as getting in a bath with a load of teabags, looking weird with a snorkel is at least your worst. I think it's always a point where you go, no, too far. And so what did they work anything out in the end, or did people just don't do it anymore? Well, the person in the article had a very white head

and regretted the whole experience. But yeah, you then just do it outside of the bath. You just leave teabags all over yourself. It's a thing. Well, they also used to have milk spray because people thought that milk could tan you better and stop you from burning, but give you a really nice tan.

And there were motorized milk sprayers that groups of mainly women in the 1930s would carry to wherever they wanted to tan on holiday. And like it was this big engine, and then you stood in front of it and it just showered you with milk. And then you got a nice, even tan. I like this the Daily Mail that spoke to some people

about how bad it is that Brits love to get really burned. And it found that eight, 10 million British people said that they burned every time they went on holiday, which is a large proportion of the population. And the person in the Mail interviewed to talk about this was a spokesman for Superdrug, a chemist, and he was called Martin Crisp. Nice.

We're going to have to move on to our next fact soon. There's a planet called Kepler-13AB, where it rains sun cream. What brand? It's kind of a titanium oxide precipitation, but it only falls on the dark side of the planet, so it's completely useless. Oh, wow.

Just quickly, I was looking up some beauty salon stuff. Oh, yeah. You know tanning salons. Do you guys know about snail salons? No. So snail slime is the new thing in beauty treatment. It's really popular in places like Thailand and Japan, in Italy it's popular, and people who are running snail farms,

because snails are obviously eaten all over the world, are diversifying their farms, and they hand select a few snails on the farm to be transferred to the salon, and then you book a session in the salon as a woman, you lie down and you get a few snails on your face, just crawling all over it, and the claim is that it heals like your acne or scars

or it slows down aging. I've actually tried this. Have you really? It's good. The service is unbelievably slow. All right, let's move on. Let's move on to our next fact. It's time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that during the second mobile, the US government considered making all American shoes deliberately ugly. So this is a thing to do with rationing. They were very low on rubber, very low on leather, and they thought, well, how are we going to do this? Eventually they decided to introduce shoe rationing. They said everybody can only have three pairs of shoes a year,

and if you wanted extra pair of shoes, you had to fill in a really long, complicated form saying why you want more shoes. But you could only, as a manufacturer, make four colors, and you could only have two different tones on a shoe. So rationally it was introduced, but the alternative plan that they did consider,

I think before detecting it, was let's just make shoes really, really horrible. So people don't want to buy them. Exactly. The four colors that they were allowed were black, white, army russet, and town brown. Town. Town, town.

Like a place where people live. Oh, tower. No, town, town. Town. Town. You know, where people live in a tower. Sorry, I heard towel. Like, I think you rub yourself with.

No, town. Town. Town. Town, yeah. Like a city without a cathedral. Yes. Right. Ah, yeah.

Ah. Why didn't you say so? So do you say that two-tone colors on shoes weren't allowed? That was the maximum. Oh. You couldn't have three-tone shoes. Really? I saw that you could only have single-tone.

You couldn't have double-tone. Oh, okay. Maybe wrong. You weren't allowed boots taller than 10 inches, and you weren't allowed heels taller than two and five-eighths inches, and you weren't allowed fancy tongs. Oh, yeah. No.

Fancy tongs? Sorry. No. Tongs? Like a tongue. Tong. Tong. Tong, yeah.

Sorry, it's my accent. I know I do say the word tong wrong, but it's the thing inside your mouth that you licked off with. I don't have to say this forever now, and I say it from now on. Sorry, now it's a word that means an object. But when you say tongs, you are referring to the thing on your shoe. Sorry, yes.

You're not saying you're not allowed elaborate tongs in your mouth. No, that was the thing. They were rationed during the Second World War. Fancy tongs. There was another thing where you could get a cheaper version of a shoe that would cost you less of your ration coupons, your clothing coupons that you had, and it was a shoe that was designed with a wooden sole.

So the problem with that is you get no bend as you're lifting up your foot, like any shoe that anyone is wearing in this room has, and so you would have to reinvent the way of how you walk with your shoe to avoid... At the moment, you're kind of waddling left and right. Is that how they did it? I mean, I'm putting myself into the place of the person with the shoe, and that's how I feel. The shoes don't bend, is that the problem?

Yeah, because it's a wooden bottom. Just like a clog. I mean, with many with clogs. Like a clog. Thank you, Anna. People with clogs get around okay, don't they? Nope. What they then had to do is in order to make that a bit more of a useful shoe, they then cut a bit and they put a hinge in so that you could then walk, and the hinge would allow you the bend.

The problem is, is that while you were walking, the hinge would collect stones, and so you would be stuck in the hinge position in a sort of leaning forward position, like the Michael Jackson lean. Yeah, because he invented shoes, didn't he, that let him do that lean? He did. I think he owned a patent for those shoes. Yeah. And they were, they kind of, I think you're allowed to say,

there was a bit in the stage and he kind of slotted them into the stage so that he could lean right forward, and he owned the patent for that thing. Which is weird, because that's not really inventing a shoe. That's inventing a strap on the floor of a stage to put a shoe into. I thought though it had weights in it as well. I thought that it literally, you moved in a certain way, it kicked in a weight into function so that when you lent forward, that would balance you as well.

Yeah, might be. I don't. I've not followed the Michael Jackson shoe patent paper close enough. Do you know you can get shoes for your shoes now? What? This has been shown off at, I think, Paris Men's Fashion Week in the last couple of months, is shoes for your shoes have been designed. They've been designed by a Chinese fashion designer called San Quans,

and it's sneakers that then have kind of an outer layer, which is a sandal, and you can velcro the sandal on and off. And it's so that, you know, if you're going out on a dirty street and you've got new shoes, you don't have to get the shoes dirty. Yeah, but what about your outer shoes? They're going to get dirty, aren't they? Yeah, that's true. The person did comment.

He said, we haven't got the triple layer stage yet, but who knows what the future holds? Well, I can tell you what it holds. A fourth layer, and then a fifth layer. God, it's never ending. Well, so that's a big thing in Japan, isn't it? So in Japan, it's very impolite to wear your shoes into someone's house. Everyone takes off their shoes as soon as you get to someone's house

or a restaurant or whatever, and they give you a pair of slippers. And it's very nice, and you walk around the restaurant in the slippers, and it's great, except that when you go to the loo in the restaurant, they have to take you out of your normal slippers and put you in special toilet slippers. And there's a real risk of social embarrassment that once you've been to the toilet, you then forget to take off your toilet slippers. Because they're very different, they look very different.

So one writer said he walked back into a fancy restaurant wearing a pair of bright yellow slippers with a duck having a poo on the toes. And that was the design. And that was a picture of a duck having a poo on the sole. Yeah, it was. In 13th century Italy, so do you know my favourite fact about shoes?

I've said it loads of times. And that is in the 14th century, it was made explicitly illegal in France to make shoes that were shaped like penises. Yes. Okay. I found out quite recently that Queen Mary made it illegal to make shoes shaped like vaginas.

No way! Oh my god, your two favourite facts can get married! That's so nice! Or at least have sex with each other. So this all began in 13th century Italy and there was a thing, it was the cult of the Virgin Mary and basically everyone... What better way to pay tribute to the Virgin Mary?

Well, it wasn't like the Catholic Church hated it basically, so it was like a cult. It wasn't just a thing, everyone liked the Virgin Mary, it was a culty thing. And they suddenly became really, paid a lot of attention to the form of the perfect female body, which was supposed to be what the Virgin Mary had. And so they invented these shoes

and they were called duck spill shoes, they were really wide. They were covered, they were heavily padded, they were covered in hair like material and they put slits in them and you wore pink hosiery and as you walked it was supposed to look like a vagina. Wow, that is amazing. And this was high fashion in 13th century Italy. No.

And then when Queen Mary came to the crown in Britain she wanted to curry favour with the Pope and so she banned them. It was supposed to look like a vagina. Yep. Why? It was a hairy shoe that had a little slit, which looked pink sometimes. Hang on.

It's just a lot of me, guys. Yeah, sure. So were the penis shoes a response to the vagina shoes people saying sort of as a prank? No, no, no. My understanding is it's a complete coincidence that these two things happened. Complete coincidence?

I believe so. That's amazing. I don't know. The gender war was fought in a very different way in the Middle Ages. Some other World War II shoes that I found is there's a shoe that they were sort of invented to trick the enemy.

So the shoe would leave, the footprint of the shoe would leave a bare footprint. So it looked as if one of the locals had been in the area as opposed to a soldier who had a big boot. So on the bottom of the boot was just the shape of a foot. But locals wore shoes. This was Southeast Asia. Okay, yes.

I should have said the place. Did they make the footprints in the opposite direction to where you were walking? That would be clever. That would be very clever, yeah. We've said before some people did that, supposedly Australian outlaws put their horses shoes on backwards.

So you don't think, oh, Ned Kelly's been through this way. Whereas actually, Ned Kelly had been through this way, but he was heading the other way. But this is also in Bhutan, they say that yetis have the ability to take their foot off and put it on that way round. That's an actual yeti fact. I do know the fact about animals in the shoes.

This was a few years ago. Scientists put boots onto dung beetles to find out how they cope with heat. This is so cool. So dung beetles, they find a ball of poo and they roll it around and every so often, when it gets to the really hot bit of the day, they climb up on top of the ball of poo

and then they rest there for a bit. And scientists wondered, is that because it's really hot on the sandy desert where they're walking around? So if you put boots on a dung beetle, you will theoretically find out whether that's the reason. And the scientists put, I think it was little silicon shoes on the dung beetles

and they said afterwards, it turns out it's very, very, very difficult to shoe a dung beetle. But they did, they managed it, they got the boots on them and it turns out, yes, when you have boots on as a dung beetle, you stop much less to climb onto your ball. So that is why. Could it be that they don't want to get on their dung

in case they get shit on their shoes? Oh yeah. They're actually working on a set of new outer shoes for the dung beetle's inner shoe. I read that in Palau, there's a tradition of when people go into the reef and they're going fishing and so on, what they do is they take a sea cucumbers

and they squeeze the internals of the sea cucumber out completely so the guts and everything go out and then they wear the rubbery shell on the reef so they don't cut their feet when they're in the reef. Improvised nature shoes. Why not just put some wetsuit feet on before you start diving? No, this is in Palau where they don't have... Oh, they just don't dive?

Yeah, they're just fishing and so on. The sea cucumber can eviscerate its organs, that's the thing that they do, but they stay alive after they do that, so this feels a bit... Oh God, they stay alive while you're wearing them. What? Well, they can stay alive because they regrow them

and what they do is they kind of send out their organs and then hopefully the fish eats the organs and they can swim away. Oh my God, can you imagine at the end of the day being a sea cucumber going, you're not going to believe what happened to me today? But also, the anus of the sea cucumber, which is where you're putting your foot,

they have fish living in those anuses, so you might get fish in your feet as well. That's all right. You've caught a bit of the meal already then. I think if you've got your foot in a sea cucumber's anus, the fact that there's another fish present there adds very little to the overall horror of the situation. I could do it like, you know, in shopping centres

where the fish eat your dead skin. Exactly, it's exfoliating as well as being protective. Sounds great. I've had that once and all I could think while I was having it was reincarnation and just looking at the going, what the fuck did you do in your last life that you have come back to eat my feet? I had it once and I think I've told you guys this,

but I had it once in Cambodia and they had to ask me to take my feet out of the pond because you put your feet in with like five other people and my feet are so disgusting that they were all coming to my feet and no one else was getting their money's worth. It's a real, real actually low point pride-wise for me. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Chizinski.

Yeah, my fact this week is that the Etiquette experts, Debrets, run classes that teach five-year-olds to have strong handshakes and navigate dinner parties. And this is, so I don't know how many people know about Debrets but they is basically a sort of guide to being a posh person, I guess, and they started publishing their Etiquette guides in the 1700s and they still go on today and it's kind of teaching people how to perform well socially

and they recently started doing these classes which are called signet schools and it's meant to be for six to twelve-year-olds, I think, but actually there's been such a lot of demand that they're letting in five-year-olds and yeah, they teach them to do things like shake hands well and perform well at a dinner party and talk to grown-ups and it's to teach children of primary school age,

of early primary school age, social ease and confidence and charisma and charm to guarantee that they are both invited back to the next play date and successful in interviews. In interviews? Who's interviewing a five-year-old? You know, business is getting really desperate. Well, I've just opened another 19th century factory that I need. Like school interviews, I guess. Yeah, I guess.

So there was a report by one of the mothers who'd sent her child on this and at the very end of the piece she wrote about it she gave her review of the whole experience. She said, the pleases and thank-yous trip off the tongue and despite the occasional poop joke and a little light nose-picking,

he's become really quite charming. But you do pay for it. So I think it starts at about £650 for two hours to send your five-year-old to this, but yeah, one woman who wrote a blog said... You'd have to have a really strong handshake at the end of that. I want a proper bone crusher. And that's just the start.

So the woman who wrote the blog paid £780 for two hours to get her handshaking son back. They saw her coming, didn't they? The normal price is £650 to you, £780. You know, the breads offer advice on eating bananas. It turns out, I think we're all doing it wrong, according to the breads. Apparently, if you're seated at the table,

the correct way to eat a banana is to peel it, then use a fork to cut the flesh into bite-sized pieces. In other more informal situations, we recommend peeling bit by bit and breaking bite-sized bits of the banana off. That's not the way to do it, is it? Do you always see on the internet that you're supposed to eat bananas upside down, aren't you,

because that's the way that monkeys do it or something like that? I always break it. I always open it in the middle. I actually do do that. I open it in the middle and then take the banana out and then eat it without the skin. Right. You're a psychopath. Hang on. Do you mean you snap it in two?

No, no, you get the banana and you kind of make a little hole in the middle of it and then you open it up and then you pull the banana out and you eat it. I'm sure there are other people who eat bananas. And then you reattach the skin to make it look like a whole banana. You put it back on the shelf

and then you leave the supermarket. There's actually... Debrex has a whole section on difficult foods. If you go to the website and it lists all the difficult foods to eat and so one example is grapes which I always thought were quite an easy food but a grape... Show off.

They're very strict. They say don't pick individual grapes from a bunch. You have to use... You have to remove a small bunch from the big bunch and then eat it from that using either your fingers or grape scissors. Grape scissors. I've seen those.

I've been to a cutlery collecting man's house and he showed me his grape scissors. They're really... How do they differ from normal scissors? They do not. Are they quite small? Yeah, they're not massive shears. You know, they're small, yeah.

Wow. I struggled anyway with my stalk. Did he have... Because Debrex also says that if you're eating oranges then if it's semi-difficult to peel you should cut it in half and eat it with a teaspoon which I never considered doing at all. I don't think anyone does any of this stuff today, really.

No. I have eaten a banana with a knife and fork once and it was actually very nice, so... Yeah, but that wasn't because of the way you were eating it, though. They would have tasted the same if you had done my psychopath way of eating it. No, I'll tell you what. It made me pace myself and enjoy it.

Was there a special... Rarely do that with a banana. Was there a special reason that you decided to try that? Yeah, it was really odd. I was on British Airways coming back from New York and they came and they put a banana down and a knife and fork and they walked away. And...

So I thought, a better challenge accepted. So DeBretts also do... They've got some rules for polite social networking. Okay. So one they say is, this is, I'm guessing for Facebook, think before you poke.

That's their first suggestion. Always wait 24 hours before accepting or removing someone as a friend. The delay will help you gather your thoughts, which is just great philosophy, generally, isn't it? 750 quid for that one. That actually is a price. 750 quid and it's for 13 to 16 year olds.

No way. We're just giving it away for free right now. Guys, you have got lucky. This is an absolute bargain. The guy who started DeBretts was called John DeBretts. And he began his career with DeBretts Peeridge, which was a book about lords and ladies and stuff like that. But he got into a huge argument with the guy

who actually roped it and he went bankrupt twice. And he only managed to survive thanks to taking a huge amount of money from his wife. Really? Which they don't teach you that in DeBretts, do they? They do not. It's encouraged. They're very strong on Peeridge, though.

And actually one of their most frequently asked questions, one of the most frequent questions that's written into DeBretts is how to address the royal family, as if really anyone's coming up against them personally. But they've got very detailed instructions as to how you address them. And apparently if you're writing to... So if you're writing to the queen,

then you have to open your letter with, may it please your majesty. And then you have to begin the next sentence with, with my humble duty. But then if you're writing to other members, it tells you all the initials that have to come after everyone's name. So let's say you're writing to the Prince of Wales, if you're writing to Prince Charles,

if you're writing to his or her Royal Highness, and then on a new line, you say, for example, the Prince of Wales, and then these are the initials after his name. KGKTGCBOMAKCDQSOPC. That's all the things he is. It's so great. Wow.

GCB is, he's a great master and principal knight of the most honorable order of the bath. And that's about how they used to bathe knights. So when you were knighted in medieval times, you had a bath first thing you did. And then if you're a great master of the most honorable order of the bath, it's about bathing when you become a knight.

Wow. Isn't that cool? That's very cool, yeah. He's the only great master. Good for him. I was looking up general etiquette things. There's a book by an author called Henry Hitchings, and it's called Sorry,

and it's about English people and their manners. And he just lists advice from throughout the ages. Because etiquette varies, obviously, depending on your society. So for example, in the 15th century, the Duke of Gloucesters Usher advised that one should not scratch one's codpiece in public. What? Unassailable.

Erasmus, the medieval writer, advised that one should cough to disguise a fart. Erasmus, actually, that book that he wrote, it was about children's etiquette, wasn't it? And it was the best-selling book in all of England in the 16th century, apart from the Bible. No way. And some of the other things he said was,

do not be afraid of vomiting. It is not vomiting, but holding the vomit in your throat that is foul. I disagree strongly with that, actually. If you cannot swallow a piece of food, turn around discreetly and throw it somewhere. I bet they don't teach that on your 650-quick course, either.

Actually, weirdly, the opposite, so how times have changed, they say a dinner party is an unexpected piece of gristle or something that may be chewed to no avail. It is polite to be brave and try and swallow it anyway. Children's trokall things!

Well, you know, you've got to suffer for etiquette. I'd love to see the difference between Erasmus and the breads. That would be really awesome. Another one, do not move back and forth on your chair. Whoever does that gives the impression of constantly breaking or trying to break wind. Well, James...

I think... Hey, we need to wrap up very soon. You guys got anything before we do it? In Victorian times, women were advised to pinch their fingers so the ends would be nice and pointy. When did the fingers make a plaster scene? I guess so. It was just to think you were meant to have nice pointy ends

with your fingers nice and tapering, not sort of flat cut off fingers. And one writer said that if your fingers are bad, or bad fingers, then just pinch them lots of times all the time. And women were advised, and this is a thing that happens today, I believe, to fill old gloves with cream

and then put on the old gloves full of cream and then you go to bed at night. And that's the thing that still happens. Does anyone hear it? Someone said yes. Yeah, see all women's voices. This is a conspiracy that's kept from men. No men know about this. Guys, what kind of cream is it?

I think just any double cream. This is a thing... I told my girlfriend about this and she said, Andy, we all do this all the time. You've never paid any attention to anything. Why do you think the bed is full of cream every morning? I've never heard of it, but I'd be so creeped out if my partner was wearing gloves in bed.

It's so weird. I think they've just done a murder or something. That is quite something, isn't it? But then you're just going to have nice hands, but what about the rest of your body? You should really be wearing a full body suit and covering it all in cream. With a snorkel to keep you breathing.

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. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin.

You can email podcast at qi.com. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. Or you can go to our Facebook account, or no such thing as a fish.com. It's our website. We have everything up there from tickets for upcoming tour dates. We have our book link and all previous episodes

that we've ever done. And also, just quickly, we asked you guys to send us in your favourite fact. We've picked a winner, and the winner is going to get a copy of our cassette. So, we have the fact here. The fact is from Douglas Wood, and the fact is this.

At the first Robot Olympics held in 1990 in Glasgow, the English competitor was disqualified from the climbing event because of inappropriate behaviour in front of children. It tried to mount the Russian robot. So, we're going to be out of the back. Come and say hi. If you want a cassette, please do get one.

That's all from us. Thank you so much. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you again. Goodbye! Thank you!