No Such Thing As A Fish - 212: No Such Thing As A Hipster Pharaoh

Episode Date: April 14, 2018

Live from Belfast, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss smuggling pasta, the Queen's tri-annual review and the designer chickens of Silicon Valley.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Belfast! My name is Dan Shriver, and I am sitting here with Anna Chasinski, Andrew Huntsman Murray, and James Harkin, and once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, James. Okay, my fact this week is that there are a number of chickens in California that have their own personal chefs.

I think you'd live in constant fear as a chicken, if you had your own chef. One day he's going to run out of stuff in the pantry. Oh, they've been giving me a lot of sage and onion recently. Mr Chicken, tonight for dinner? You! Yeah, that's very exciting. So this is specifically in Silicon Valley, and at the moment there is a chicken mania happening in Silicon Valley.

Special chicken can cost $350, and normally they cost about $15, their coupes are controlled by smartphone apps, and basically it's kind of a status symbol in Silicon Valley to have your own chicken. Wow! Are they special chickens in any way? Are they amazing, you know, amazingly all-naked chickens? Some of them are pretty good, actually, I have to say. I'm not sure I'd pay $350 for one, but they are pretty good.

So they're specially bred for desirable personality traits, so the ones that are particularly... What? What? What is a personality trait in a chicken? Well, you know. Picks the ground. So for instance, if they're gentle enough for a child to cuddle, so rather like an angry chicken, you wouldn't want to put that near your child, they don't have those.

There are some that are rare, there are some that are beautiful, according to the article I read, and some of them have special, highly coveted, coloured eggs, and they're called Easter Eggers, and they give you blue eggs, and they're really, really good ones, those. That's really cool. They also, I read, a lot of people keep the chickens in their house, like they're a cat or a dog, and they call them lap chickens, because they come and they sit on your lap and you can just stroke them, and the way that they make sure that they don't defecate all over the house is they put them in diapers.

So there's special chicken diapers that you can now buy, and I went to a website that sells these chicken diapers, because... And you're wearing them tonight. No, there's a few good websites that do it, actually. There's one called My Pet Chicken, and there's one called Pampard Poultry. Pampard Poultry is very nice, so you can see them, they're all nicely designed, they sit around the bum of the chicken, like a diaper, but they not only sell diapers, they also sell saddles on chickens, and it's mainly...

For people to ride chickens? No, yeah. That's what I thought, but it turns out what it is, is that when a chicken is having sex, from the behind, the male is really aggressive and pecks away at their back, so it's a sort of blanket that sits over the back of the chicken so they don't lose all their feathers when the male is just... So it is when they're being ridden in a way. Very true, very true.

They also... My Pet Chicken has a very exciting device, basically a lot of people have problems if they do have a chicken in their house where it does cock-a-doodle-doo a lot, so they have what on their site, they called cock-a-doodle-don't, and cock-a-doodle-don't is a new contraption that goes around the neck that stops it from crowing, from roosting. And... How does it stop it? It goes around the throat, it strangles the chicken.

It's a bit questionable, I'm not sure my PetChicken.com is... Did you not just say this is a very cool contraption? Can we edit that bit out, because that's staying in, isn't it? Sure is. And if you pay an extra amount of money, $12 more, it only costs $18 for it to happen. They say it doesn't hurt the chicken, but if you... The rooster, if you do it for $12 more, you can buy a bow tie that goes around. Absolute bargain.

Just $30, you can choke the chicken in a classy bow tie fashion, how nice. Nothing more classy than a dead chicken with a bow tie on. You do get some incredible looking kind of designer chickens now, though. I mean, just Google some designer chickens, they're stunning. But I think my favourite is the I Am Chicken, it's A-Y-A-M, and it's described by breeders as the Lamborghini of chickens. And you can see why, so you might have seen it, it's that chicken that's black, completely black from head to toe.

It looks like it's been dipped in oil, so it's big, it's crown, it's comb, it's legs, it's feet, and the weird thing is, like it's eyes completely black, but the weird thing is it's fully black on the inside as well, which I didn't realise, so all of its organs, all of the meat in it, all of its flesh, all of its bones, everything is black. And so if you then eat this chicken, it's the meat itself is black. The only thing about the chicken that's not black is it lays white eggs. And they're just, they're incredible. And there's this I Am Breeder in America who's got a site where they sell them, and they

say they're very, very good-natured as well. So I think a New York magazine wanted to meet one, and the review said, the rooster patiently allowed himself to be draped with million dollar jewelry and trust with red ribbon while being photographed under bright lights. Which again, is an amazing looking chicken. People are doing some weird shit with their chickens. Yeah, of course your website is going to say, our chickens are extremely friendly. No website selling you these chickens is going to say, our chickens are real bastards, actually.

So I was looking up chickens in Silicon Valley, because it's a massive trend at the moment. There is a company at the moment that is trying to disrupt eggs, okay? So they're trying to make, they're a food startup thing, they're called Just, and they make eggless scrambled eggs out of mung beans, but the other thing they've started doing recently, they've started making chicken nuggets from chickens which are still alive. What? And so there's just like chickens with bits missing. Well, kind of.

So they took some cells from the inside of a chicken feather, so they took one feather from a chicken called Ian for the record. I don't know, it's a perfectly normal thing. So they took some cells from the inside of the feather, and then they cultivated them and they fed those cells on plant proteins, right, and they turned those into a big mass of chicken meat, they grew those into chicken muscle, and then they had a barbecue where they served up chicken nuggets, and Ian was present walking around on the table while he was being eaten by these people.

Presumably surely he was there with a megaphone saying, this is an outrage. Yeah, it's very, basically people in Silicon Valley are mad, that's all we need, that's all we need tonight. Yeah, you can go on a tour of Silicon Valley called Torda Coop, where you just see all of the chicken coops that they have, because they're unbelievably expensive, some of them can cost up to like $20,000, and one owner at least plans to transform his coop into an Airbnb for humans once his chickens die, that's how ornate it is. My parents had chickens, there's no way I'd want to sleep in the same place that those

chickens were sleeping, that's disgusting. Would you share the coop with them, or do they vacate, like Airbnb, I guess they vacate and leave you a croissant and stuff when you stay there presumably. They're basically dead, and they've been eaten, they're long gone, and they probably clean it, and you know. Oh, that's actually not how Airbnb works at all. Thank God. Yeah, some other weird stuff that people in Silicon Valley are doing, so there's been

a lot lately about what people in Silicon Valley call biohacking, which I just find a really amusing word, because what it means is stupid diets, but they call it biohacking because it sounds really smart. But all the CEOs of all the big companies are into this, and weird kind of diets. So there's Jeffrey Wu, who's a CEO of, he's actually CEO of a biohacking company, and he got all his staff to do a full on seven day fast, and they all had to wear glucose monitors that are designed for diabetics, and it inserts pinpricks into your skin, and it measures your blood elevated ketones, which is a way of checking how much fat you're

using and stuff. So he makes all his staff go, staff themselves for seven days to make sure they're burning enough fat, and it elevates your mental acuity and things like that. But they're all kind of going on silly teenage girl diets, and claiming it's biohacking, and so it's okay. I read about Jeffrey Wu, because he started this thing, there's a drug that people in Silicon Valley take, which is, the idea is it's a cognitive enhancing drug, and so it's a brain drug effectively, and it's called new tropics, which is an old idea that was

back in 1972 that that term was coined, but the idea is you take it and it makes your brain get stimulated. So he runs a company where he provides these drugs. Everyone's on these brain stimulant drugs in Silicon Valley, if they're working with Jeffrey. But I don't know, if it's making you want to pay $350 for a chicken, I'm not sure how smart they're making you. Actually, the chickens control the company that makes the drug.

Have you met our CEO, Ian? There is very, I've read about a hobby, because the hobbies that people have in Silicon Valley, people do various weird sports and stuff, because there's a lot of mountainous terrain. Have you heard of ride and tie? This is so cool. So it's a mountain race involving two people and one horse, but the rule is only one person can be touching the horse at any given moment. So you get on the horse, and you ride for a couple of miles, and your friend runs, and

then you tie the horse up after a couple of miles, and then you start running, and your friend catches up to the horse, gets on it, rides it, overtakes you, and then... And you have to get off after two miles, you can't just go on the horse for the whole length of the course. Oh, that's a much better idea, actually. Yeah, again, see, they're reinventing the wheel, just going for a ride on a horse. That's pretty cool. I think it does sound kind of fun, it sounds quite intense.

Yeah, really fun. Why wouldn't you just go on the horse alongside the person who's running? Horses can run faster than people can run. Famous, I mean, that's why it's those guys who do the Grand National. Yeah. That's why no humans have won that, have they? They've never even qualified for it. But actually, there is a horse versus human race, isn't there?

I think it's in Wales every year or something. Yeah. Like, sometimes the humans do win, but it's on a really twisty course with, like, you know, stairs and lifts. Yeah. Things that horses can't do. But on drugs, actually, all Silicon Valley CEOs are also doing LSD at the moment. And again, the legal reasons, I think, not all.

Sorry, yes, definitely not all. Yeah, but bloody most, right? But it's micro dosing, so they take a tenth the amount of LSD that you'd usually, not you, but that one might usually take to get a proper hallucination, and apparently the effect this has is that it increases alertness and energy and stuff, and it's another way of them, I guess, kind of biohacking themselves, taking a bit of hallucinogenic to make themselves more switched on. So the other thing that's been in the news is, like, raw water, have you seen all this?

Yeah. Basically, people are drinking water that's come direct from source and hasn't been decontaminated, which is really, really a terrible idea. There was an expert who said, almost everything conceivable that can make you sick can be found in water. So a lot of it contains animal feces, there are terrible diseases. You can get hepatitis A, you can get cholera, you can get E. coli. And this expert, they asked him about it, and he said, you can't stop consenting adults

from being stupid, but we should at least try. That's amazing. We're going to have to, sorry, we're going to have to move on to our next fact soon. I was just going to say that I was reading a quote from Mukande Singh, who's the founder of Live Water, which is one of the big raw water startups. And so they don't trust all the chemicals that go in the water that we drink. And he said, so we have things like chloramine and fluoride in our water. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it's a mind-controlled drug that has no benefit to

our dental health. I'll go there, he's a fucking conspiracy theorist. Just one more thing, Apple have built a new campus in California this year. It's made completely out of glass, and the idea is to encourage an open working environment. And on the very first day, seven people were taken to hospital through walking into a toss. It's so good. OK, it is time to move on to fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that the Victorian cat burglar, Charles Peace, could supposedly disguise himself

just by changing the shape of his face. So he was a real guy, and before we go any further, he was a really unpleasant guy. He was a burglar, and he was a murderer as well. He killed two people. For a while, he was the nation's most wanted man, but he had this incredible gift, supposedly, for just moving his face into a slightly different shape, and he would think, where did he go? I just can't imagine how that would work. I know, neither can I, but supposedly he was very rubbery face.

I suppose like Mr Bean kind of thing, like Rowan Atkinson maybe. Well, Jim Carrey, when he was in the movie The Mask, the people who were doing the CGI said they had to spend way less than they anticipated, because his face was so elastic that he was able to contort it, and it looked like CGI had been done already. But it's not like it doesn't look like them. It's not like Rowan Atkinson and Jim Carrey can avoid all publicity and attention by just contorting their face quickly. Rowan Atkinson could be in the front row. So this guy, Charles Pease, he was an extremely interesting man in lots of ways, so he...

He was really famous at the time, wasn't he? He was very notorious, and he had a missing finger, which you would think would have identified him, but he cleverly got around this by using an entire prosthetic arm, which apparently is less inconspicuous. Yeah, the guy with three arms, sure. He's got the right number of fingers, but he's got one extra arm. He was executed, wasn't he? He was. And he told the clergyman who interviewed him in prison just before his execution,

he said that he hoped that after he was gone he would be entirely forgotten by everybody, and his name never mentioned again. Yeah. Sorry, mate. But also, within hours of his death, the first ballad of Charles Pease was on sale. Was it? Yeah, and the biography was ready for publication even before he was dead, so that's how famous he was. Wow, and also his executioner was very famous as well.

It was a guy called Marwood, so he was executed by probably Britain's most famous at the time executioner. People would go, he was a celebrity of execution, and to the point where he had a popular rhyme that people used to sing about him, which was, if Pa killed Ma, who'd killed Pa, Marwood. That was the... Oh, that's very clever. That's really clever. Yeah. So clever.

I read, I mean, it's a bit gruesome, but in the British newspaper archive I actually read one of the articles from the time about when he was executed, and it's darkly amusing because he does what any of us would do, which is he keeps trying to put it off, so you'd like to say, and he said his prayers, and thanks to everyone who was ready to go, and then he went, actually, I'm really thirsty, could I get a drink of water, please? And they were like, no, I don't think so, and they said, hold on, I've got one more thing to say, and this article goes on and on, and he keeps on going, wait, wait, wait, I've just got one more quick thing before we, can I...?

And the person who he killed was a policeman called PC Cock, and what was interesting is because he did kill this guy, he was basically caught doing a burglary, and he killed a policeman, but luckily for him, the police simply picked up the nearest Irishman they could find. They charged this Irishman with murder, and then apparently Charlie attended the trial dressed as a vicar, and made... Of course he did. With his three arms. He played all 12 members of the jury at various points, I don't know if it's to anybody.

And he made loud remarks from the public gallery to the effect that the evidence was merely circumstantial, so he was the guy who did it, and he was like, this guy's not guilty, man, this guy's not guilty. But he wasn't willing to say, it was me, I did it. No, you're right. He's halfway there, conscience-wise, I think. Yeah, yeah. He admitted to it in the end, when he was found guilty of the other murder, he admitted to

the earlier one. Yeah, that's what I read in the article that I read is that he did admit by doing that that it was him. I read this, by the way, on a website called executedtoday.com. Every new day, a new execution to read up on about, if you're looking for a cheery read, executedtoday.com. He did once have a really good comedy moment, where he was imprisoned loads of times, I don't know how he had time to do any burglaries, and one time he was put in a train and was

being taken to a prison, and he was coming out of works up on his way to this prison, and he jumped off the train to escape, and a warden on the train grout hold of his leg as he jumped off, and apparently he bounced along on his head with the warden clinging to his elbow for a few, like, hundreds of feet, until eventually he wriggled out of his grip, and then the train stopped and they turned back and picked him up again. Should have worn a third leg. Speaking of him and legs, his father was a one-legged lion tamer. Yes.

It's quite a family is what we're saying. What's amazing as well, there is no more detail about his dad other than that one sentence. No. His life, that's all that exists now, that's all we know. We can't guess how he lost the leg, I think, but it's only a guess. He was very bad two-legged lion tamer, wasn't he? If we're being sticklers for facts, he started as a collier and lost his leg when he was doing mining, and then became a lion tamer, as he would.

So when you said there was no other information online, it was just... Well, it wasn't on ExecutivesToday.com, yeah. He would give a shoemaker after being a lion tamer, which I really love that. Okay, there's a lot of stuff online, I get it. Sorry, was he a one-legged shoemaker? Was he a one-legged shoemaker? That's incredible, everything half price. So he was apparently irresistible to women with his, you know, three arms and...

Take your hand off me, and that one, and that one. But I suppose if you can change your face all the time, then you can... If you don't like this one, I've got others. I've just done my last boyfriend, he had three arms. Weirdly, the new one's got three arms, too. So he got married, and then he moved to London, and he got married again, but he lived with his previous wife as well, who he called his mother, and it seems that the second wife didn't know that who he called his mother

was actually his first wife. Wow. Oh, for a Victorian Jeremy Kyle show. That's amazing. Welcome to Jeremiah Kyle. That's incredible. That's true. Well, I mean, a lot of...

We should say, actually, at this point, because I said it's true, a lot of it is clouded in myth, isn't it? Because he was so famous, and he was famous as like a Robin Hood kind of character, so there were lots of stories about him. According to people at the time, this is what happened. He lived with his wife and his mother in Peckham, and they used to have parties attended by all the rich people in Peckham, which they were at the time.

And... And they're on now, since Del Boy won the lottery. And then what would happen is Charlie would get called out on some urgent business during the party. They would carry on the party, and then when all the guests got home, they would be burgled. Wow. So good.

So just on disguises, because this guy was disguising himself a lot, I tried to look up other people who had great disguises. So there was a guy, a bank robber called Willie Sutton, and he was very crafty, because he was known in life as Slick Willie, and he in... Come on now. He in... In 1947, he escaped the Philadelphia County Prison,

where he was being held, and he escaped dressed as a prison guard, and he was so crafty that the searchlight on the prison wall found him, but he was dressed as a prison guard, and he just shouted, It's okay. And then kept coming. That's so good. So good. Yeah, so I was looking at some other good disguises,

more modern burglars have tried. Did you guys read about the guy, I think, last year, who dressed as a tree to rob a bank? Which branch was it? So this is a new Hampshire, and this is a guy who walked straight into a bank, and he just... there's pictures of him, there's CCTV. He had kind of leaves duct taped to his kind of face and bits of his body.

He looked almost nothing like a tree. But he walked in, and he said, You know, your money, and they gave him money, but then on CCTV, someone immediately recognized him, because he'd only covered about a quarter of his face with bits of twig, and said that's Bob or whoever it was, and he was caught. Wouldn't it be great if there was a police lineup of genuine trees and just him? Do you know how you can tell an officer from MI5?

They're spies, are they? So you wouldn't be able to tell them. But there's a good chance that they will be dressed as a beggar, because this is a very good way of keeping surveillance on a building, because a lot of people ignore the beggars or the homeless, and walk on by. And one guy from MI5 said that for operations, he would use my own clothes soaked in my own urine to compliment that cover. So it is proper deep cover.

Wow. I didn't see that James Bond film. Ah, Bond, we've got you these. There, your trousers covered in your pits. Just on spies, did you guys see the news today that you know how every country at the moment is sort of sending their Russian spies out, so Britain sent the Russian spies out? New Zealand said that they would do the same,

and then added, actually, we can't find any. That could be that they're just really good spies. That's the thing. There are some weird new trees outside the Russian embassy, but... A lot of people cover in their own pits. Do you know the CIA has a chief of disguise? So this is a real post in the CIA, and there is someone who's just retired as the chief of disguise. She's called Johanna Mendes, and she said this in an interview.

I can't tell if she's joking or not. I think she's being serious. She said that one message the CIA might use to send a message to someone would be to shave a pet, tattoo a message onto it, and then pass the animal on once the hair has grown back on the animal. Yeah, that's a historical thing, I think. Well, I've heard it with, you know,

ancient creepers shaving the head of a snake. I think the Spartans might have done it. But I'm very much like how you're shaving a hamster and writing things. I think you'd go for a snake, and then you can't shave a snake. Imagine if you wrote on, let's say, I don't know... It's going to be something big. If you got to the end of a dog and then you ran out of words, so you had to append a hamster to a dog.

It's not the immediate messaging service of texting, is it? It's not. If it's way compromised, burn everything and get out of the country. Okay, it's time to move on to our third fact, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that if the British treated their monarchy the way that the ancient Egyptians did, Queen Elizabeth II would have to run around a racetrack every three years to prove she was still fit for the job.

So the idea of this is that in ancient Egypt it said that what they used to have was a festival called Hebsed, and after a pharaoh had reached 30 years in ruling power, were they still fit to run it? That was a big question, and in order to prove that they were still fit, they would have to run around the complex of where they were living, and usually it was a racetrack, and they would do it with a sort of animal tail that was hanging behind them,

and everyone came to watch it. And the first time you did it was after 30 years, but then it was every subsequent three years because they thought you might lose it in those three years' time. So if Queen Elizabeth II had to do it, she would have done it 13 times by now. And we don't actually know why they did it, do we? No.

We're not quite sure. There's a few different theories. One theory that I quite like is that there was an original thing they did where once you're in office for 30 years you would just get killed, and then some smart pharaoh went, well, what if I do the running thing instead? Or maybe they were trying to kill him and he was running away. But some people think that. Other people, it's just like it proves that you're fit enough to do that.

Yeah. I read it was a thing as well where it was sort of, it was directly related to the afterlife, and by doing it you were building up, as it were, bonus points. I don't know what for, but you know like how Mario collects coins, and like it was just bing, bing, bing, and it would do something for your next life. Yeah, I didn't see that theory.

Another idea is they were out running gold age. That was, or out running death, that was another theory. But you did, they did really have to collect all the right stuff for the afterlife, didn't they, Egyptian pharaohs? They're burying them with such a hassle. It was like going on a holiday for the rest of your life, so you had to pack everything you possibly needed. So all ancient Egyptian royals were buried with many breweries,

so they had all the alcohol they would need for the afterlife, which is quite good. So it's like a really good source of how we know how they brewed beer and stuff in ancient Egypt is because if you look at all the tombs of people from 3,000 years ago, they all had a little brewery in them. They all had micro breweries. They all had a micro brewery. Bunch of hipsters.

With their beer and little beers. I like to, have we said before that they used to have slaves specifically to keep their wine cool, to fan their wine, which I don't know how well it worked, but they just go around with the fan fanning the wine. Well there was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh called Pepe II, and he used to have a thing where there were so many flies that would hit you in ancient Egypt, and it is said that what he did was to make sure no flies ever landed on him.

He always took with him a servant or a slave who was coated completely in honey so that any fly would immediately sit on that. I learned that from horrible histories. Pepe II, he was, he reigned for 90 years, so it seems like he did this running thing 20 times. He reigned for 90? 90 years, yep. Yeah, they can't decide if, because it comes from one source.

They think it might be that he reigned for about 64 years. On the beards thing, they would always, they would shave, and then they would wear a false beard, which is supposed, I think it was an imitation of the gods, because I think they said that Osiris, the god, had a beard just like this, and so if you shave and you put on a false beard, just like this. Yeah, so there was a female pharaoh, wasn't there, and she always wore a fake beard, had a sex shirt or something.

Yeah. So the queen, if she was ancient Egyptian, would have to wear a fake beard as well. Yeah. And on a hatch upset, there has just been a new image of her discovered. This is very exciting, brand new archaeological discovery, and a new image of her has been found in Swansea. Really?

Yeah. It's been in storage for 40 years at Swansea University's Egypt Center, and they were just having a standard teaching session going through a few of the images, and one of the professors, his name is Ken Griffin, he was examining it, and he thought, that's hatch upset, and it's very hard, because they're all wearing a beard and normal male clothes in these depictions, so it's very hard to spot it.

What's she doing in Swansea? Was that where she summered, or...? Weird. I don't know. We should say that a lot of the information that we have about ancient Egypt comes from Greek sources, so a lot of it comes from Herodotus, and who was a good historian in a lot of ways, but then was sometimes a bit fanciful.

But I really like this, which I think is Herodotus, about, I'd never read this before, about the Persian king Cambyses, who defeated an Egyptian pharaoh called Sametik III, and he defeated him using his knowledge of Egyptian culture, specifically the fact that Egyptians worshipped cats, which is quite well known. So what he did was, he was attacking the Egyptians,

and he had this big army, but then rather than actually attack their army with his army, he took a bunch of cats hostage, and then he released them onto the battlefield as his front line, and actually he had sort of backing them up, a bunch of dogs, sheep, ibises, and whatever other animals the Egyptians hold dear, and the Egyptians just surrendered.

They said, well, we can't kill any of those, because they're precious to us, and they gave in. How many cats was it? It was quite a lot, right? I think it was many. Because that is quite, I mean, looking after cats like that, and keeping them all in one place, and making them stand in a row. Yeah. I think he deserves it.

I reckon that's why they ran away. They're like, this guy is a cat whisperer. Yeah. I read a thing, if we're talking about pharaohs and the weird things that they got up to. There was one guy called Pheros, and he... It's a pharaoh called Pheros. Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, so the gnar was flooding, and he got very angry about that, so he went down to it, and he threw a spear at it, as if to say, get down, and thought he could puncture it, maybe. And the gods were furious that he did that, so they blinded him, and as a result, he couldn't see, obviously, he was blind, but he really wanted to. So he spoke to, I believe it was an oracle, and said,

I want my sight back. And she said, what you have to do is you have to wash your eyes with the urine of a woman who has never slept with anyone but her husband. So he thought, that's easy. I'll just use my wife's. She's... So it didn't work. Yeah.

She got in a lot of trouble. I mean, that's just not going to work anyway, though, is it? There is no medical way that washing your blind eye and urine is ever going to work. You say that, but he got every woman in town to come, and he sampled their... I thought he put it in. Yeah.

He sampled their urine, and one eventually worked, and he got his sight back, so egg on your face. Urine on your face. It's like the original Cinderella, really, isn't it? It's pretty charming. Touring the land. We in my eye, we in my eye. No, it's not this one.

James Bond turns up. I think I can help with this. We're going to have to move on shortly to the next fact. I just have a fact about running, that I've wanted to say for a while, and that is that in ancient times, in ancient Egypt, they didn't know what your spleen did, and so they would often remove it in long-distance runners

to make them run faster. What? This is amazing. This is genuinely true. They basically, it was like a big organ, and they thought, if they got rid of it, maybe they'll just be a bit lighter, and be able to run faster,

because they didn't know what it did. Does it work? Well, let's give it a go. Is Paula Radcliffe missing a trick here? So here is the amazing thing. In 1922, some scientists at John Hopkins University removed the spleen from mice, and they ran faster.

Wow. And no one quite knows what causes a stitch, but one theory is that it's too much blood going to your spleen. But yeah, apparently, you know, it's possible that by removing your spleen, you might not have a stitch as much. Of course, everything that the spleen does, you'd be in trouble for.

I don't know if this is how you two are feeling on the other side of me, but I feel like we're all looking at you, partly thinking what a stupid idea, and partly thinking, but what exactly does the spleen do? Yeah. I think we're going to need to check

the British cycling team for spleens at the start of the next season. But what does it explain yourself? What does it do? I think it's part of your immune system or something. Someone will probably... 50 people will come up and tell us after the show, and then lots of people will tweet me,

but I think it's something to do with your immune system. Can I tell you one quick thing about an Egyptian pharaoh that I like? The pharaoh is Sosostris, who whenever Sosostris conquered a city or conquered an army, if it had been a particularly easy conquest, then the first thing he would do was he'd go up to all their pillars

and draw a female genitalia all over them to imply that they were a bunch of cowards, which I know is very anti-feminist, but it is also quite funny. Wow. Okay. It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Chazinsky.

Yeah, my fact this week is that people who smuggle drugs one way across a Sahara desert often smuggle pasta the other way. And this is pasta smuggling. It's a big deal. I read this in The Economist, and so they did a little investigation,

and it turns out that if you're trafficking drugs, you have these big trucks that take them away, and you need to drop off the drugs, and then you've got empty trucks, so you might as well fill them with something, and so they stuff pasta in them, and the drugs go north over the Sahara, and then they fill them up with pasta

in countries like Libya or Algeria, and then they subsidize pasta prices, so it means that pasta is much cheaper there, so they shove their trucks full of tagliatelle, and then they drive them back down through the Sahara and deliver them in places like, you know, more southern places, like the Ivory Coast, or places like that.

Yeah, Senegal and Senegal in Mali as well. Yeah, and The Economist spoke to an expert who reckons that by weight, pasta is the main product by weight that smuggled across the Sahara. Wow, just because you can make a profit on the other side. Yeah, exactly. You might as well, right? Yeah.

But still driving a truck full of pasta by yourself across the Sahara desert, it must be a canal I need life. LAUGHTER APPLAUSE Mixed, a mixed reaction. Did you say how they weigh marks on the way back? They stick spaghetti sticking out of the desert

in the sand. Right. They're going from Libya to Senegal. Yeah. They're putting bits of spaghetti in so they know how to get back to Libya. Yeah, exactly. But how do they see it? I don't know. That's the worst colour to put as a weigh marker on sand. It is. It is weird, that bit did confuse me. I wondered if they maybe tape lots together,

so at least it sticks up like a pole, because spaghetti isn't that long, unless it's very different in West Africa. But also, when they're going the other way, do they stick, like, cocaine in the... LAUGHTER They had pasta guilds in Italy, and they were fighting over the right to make pasta,

and Pope got involved. And the Pope was just trying to sort out tensions, and he made a decree in 1641 requiring that all pasta shops be at least 25 yards apart. Really? So if you see two pasta shops that are closer than that apart, then that's basically their ex-communicated, basically. Wow. Just to stop them fighting? Yeah.

Do you know in Italy, and please shout if you're Italian or you're fluent Italian, and this isn't true. I think it was in the New York Times, but in Italy, there's a specific word that refers to pasta without salt, and the word is sciocca, or scioccia, and it also means silly. So that's the word for silly, which is also pasta without salt.

That's a stupid idea. And in the 19th century, they made pasta by getting huge troughs full of dough, and they would trample them like wine, like wine grapes. And that's how you made it. Really? And the king of Naples wanted to modernize and wanted to find a new way of doing it, and the only way he could find of doing it

was a huge mechanical man with bronze feet. Last year, officials in Sudan seized more than 70 ewes with sexual organs sewn onto them. What? Sorry, can you... So a ew is a female sheep. Thanks. And they sewed on male sheep's sexual organs onto the female sheep. And that's because you have to pay a lot of tax...

Sorry, you have to pay a lot of tax. Seems unfair. One has to pay a lot of tax for female sheep because they're really good, and they can make lots of baby sheep and stuff, but actually male sheep are not that important. And so if you're sending male sheep across, then you don't have to pay the tax.

So they did it. It's got the female ones and just put little, like, soaps and cock-and-balls on them. Obviously it didn't work in the end because they got caught. No, it didn't. They got caught. But we only know the time they got caught. This might have been happening for centuries. It was called owling, actually, wasn't it? Sheep smuggling. That's a version of owling,

which was sort of the main version of smuggling that existed in England specifically from about the 1300s until the 1800s because they didn't want other countries to be creating their own wool, I think, and so a lot we smuggled wool out of England. But confusingly, called owling, we don't know why, probably to just bewilder customs officials.

Weirdly, I found someone which combined smuggling and pasta in another sense. It turns out to be a very disappointing story, I'm afraid. In 2012, there were smugglers who tried to smuggle 4 million fake cigarettes into the West Midlands, and they did so by hiding them in a pasta consignment, and I was really excited, and then it turned out that they just hid them behind Cannelloni, actually,

but they just hid them behind boxes of Cannelloni, rather than what I assumed they had done, which was put the fake cigarettes inside Penne. I kid you not, I was so excited about that story. I'm glad you took us on your emotional journey there. Thank you. Wasn't it a strong and a fact without the emotional journey? That's the problem, no. I was reading about a modern smuggler who I really like,

a guy called Robert Cusack, who's a Californian, and he was flying home from Thailand, he'd been on holiday in Thailand, and he was undergoing a routine inspection at the airport when an exotic bird flew out of his bag, which was awkward, and so they searched his bags and they found 50 birds, and they also found 50 orchids, and then the security official said,

do you have any other contraband to declare, and he immediately said, yes, I've got monkeys in my pants. They pulled down his trousers, and he did indeed have two pygmy monkeys down his pants. I've got a modern smuggler as well called Jasmine Clare, and she was caught off the back of a tip that was given to the Homeland Security. It was anonymously given, saying that there would be

a possible smuggling activity taking place in the vicinity of a bed and breakfast called the Smuggler's Inn. So they took it as a real tip, as opposed to thinking that was a bad joke, and they set up a surveillance there, and they eventually saw someone who was doing the smuggling. It was Jasmine Clare, it turns out.

They were alerted to the fact it might be her because the car that arrived had the vanity license plate, and it was a smuggler, and it was her, and she had blocks of cocaine, nine bricks of cocaine. That's incredible. Smugglers are in Smuggler on the license plate. It's the boldest double bluff I've ever heard. Sorry, it didn't work.

I became a bit obsessed with trying to find out, I think we're all familiar with the term budgie smugglers. I get which are those very tight swimsuits worn in Australia and elsewhere. I became obsessed with trying to find out if anyone has ever actually smuggled a budgie, it was a very long search, and it was a hard search. I tried typing in the Latin name of the species,

that didn't yield anything. I did find a paper called The Smuggled Budgie from 2010 for exciting etymology paper about the origin of the word budgie. Nightmare. This emotional journey is amazing, isn't it? I did find a guy in Cuba in 2014 who, this was pants-based as well,

he was detained trying to board a flight to the USA with 66 birds inside his trousers. He made it through the metal detector, obviously, birds are not made of metal. So he's doing great. But there were loads of bulges in his trousers and he was stopped in the airport and when the police, the authorities at the airport stopped him,

he said, okay, you got me. I am concealing a pigeon as a gift for my grandson in my trousers. I presume he thought they would say, okay, fine, no questions asked, go on your way. But the police forced him to remove his trousers and they found dozens of finches and hummingbirds hidden inside his trousers and his pants. And sometimes when people smuggle rare birds,

they have to tape their beaks shut so they won't sing like a canary. But also, some people who smuggle them have their beaks facing inwards on the crotch region. It's like a massive hostage to fortune. Why would they do that? They're very small and I think it's the best place to hide them. It is pleasant, who knows.

It'll be happening in Silicon Valley within a fortnight of this podcast going out. I read about that guy in the article specified that the two birds next to his genitals were dead. I don't know what kind of weird toxicity was happening there, but... Wow. I killed two birds with one bone. LAUGHTER

We're gonna have to wrap up. OK, 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. And Chasinski. You can email podcast at qi.com. Or group account at no such thing. Or our Facebook page, no such thing as a fish. Or no such thing as a fish.com.

It's our website. We have everything up there from links to our tour dates. We have our previous book that we released. And we also have a link to our new tape that we've released. And we're about to give a copy of it away right now to one of the members of our audience here in Belfast. Yeah. So if the person who wins it,

if you can give us a shout when we say your fact, and the winner is, Anna. Yeah, so it's Natasha Riley. Are you here? Yeah, come and get us at the end. This is the fact. When filming the battle scenes for Game of Thrones, filmed in Northern Ireland, of course,

the fighting was so intense that they had to create a safe word in case someone got hurt. So the safe word for Game of Thrones is banana. That's awesome. That's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much. Good night.

Thank you.