No Such Thing As A Fish - 213: No Such Thing As Panda Gladiators

Episode Date: April 20, 2018

Live from Reading, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the world's first waterskier, Harvard for pandas, and the the record-holding mat holder called Matt Hand.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Reading! My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Anna Czazinski, Andrew Hunter 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 the world record for most beer mats flipped and caught in one hand is held by a man called Matt Hand. It's stunning.

It's incredible. It just can't be true, can it? And it is, we didn't believe it when he sent it to us. And I'll send you the link to the Guinness World Records and there it is. So guys I got in touch with Matt Hand today, he is a lovely man by the way and he gave me a list of all of his world records and I sent him some Q&As and asked him some questions and he sent me some answers. The first thing I want to say is I asked him, when you brought the world record for beer

mat flipping, did you consider the aptness of your name for that record? And he said, and I don't know if this is true, he said, I actually changed my name to Matt Hand after I brought the record. No. What? That's why he said, I don't know if that's true. What's his real name? He didn't say, I said that can't be true and then he mysteriously didn't reply to my next

email. I put two questions, he answered the other one and didn't answer that so I don't know if it's true. But the mat is only one tee. So it could be that he did because he's a performance artist actually. He lives in Berlin now, he lived in the UK for a while, he lived in Nottingham when he did this and he kind of thinks that breaking a world record is a bit like a work of performance art.

He's basically saying that people want to make the mark on the world and there are lots of different ways of doing it and one way of doing it is by getting in the Guinness Book of Records. That's true. And a lot of the things that he does, he invites people to watch him try and break the world record. So he had the world record for the longest table tennis rally for five hours, eight minutes and 22 seconds and he sold tickets for that.

Wow. Did he sell tickets for that or did he put them on sale? I suppose you wouldn't know how long it was going to last, do you? That's true. Like if we did a world's longest podcast now, on how long people would stay? Well, the doors are locked and we're about to find out. Start the clock. There was a sort of rash of grape catching records in the 80s and 90s.

That was a big thing for a little while. So there was a guy who dropped a grape from a 38-story building. What? He had got his friend. His name was Paul Tevilla and he says, I think he may have written this, it was launching him into grape catching fame. It's his website, but yeah, 38 stories, a red grape from 38 stories, he caught it in his mouth.

No. That's amazing. I would argue that once you've got that higher, it doesn't really matter if you go higher, does it? Because it's going to reach its terminal velocity of a grape. I mean, that can only be a few floors. So I reckon I could do one floor higher. If I can do that, I reckon I could do one floor higher.

Is it a site thing? Is it maybe at 39 feet? It doesn't say how many grapes were around him smashed on the ground when he caught it in his mouth. That's the thing, yeah. He could have dropped 300 at the same time. That's true, actually. Because when Matt Hand beat this world record for a number of beer mats flipped and caught,

it was 112 that he managed. 112. Jesus. Sorry, not at the same time. Yeah. What? Yeah. No one's got hands back.

You know what? It does sound a lot, doesn't it? But I suppose that's why it's a record. If I said, you know, if I say Usain Bolt ran 100 meters in 9.7 seconds or 9.5 seconds, you'd be like, 9.5 seconds? If I said he did it in two minutes, you wouldn't be impressed at all. But if you said he ran it... I'd say, why is he famous?

If he did it in one second, this feels like a one-second 100-metre sprint. 100? I'm not sure. That's as tall as you or I. No, it isn't. A very thick beer mat. But he took a lot of times to do it, is what I was going to say, because you were saying about the grape thing.

He took more than 100 attempts. And I said to him, did you ever consider giving up after more than 100 failures? And he said, failure is a redundant concept in conceptual art. A great quote from a great man. I only looked at beer mats for this. Oh, cool. Yeah, let's call beer mats. I know a lot about beer mats now.

Did you know that the original beer mats were for... They were coasters for sliding wine around. And this is the thing. The first time the word coaster was used was in 18th-century Britain, and it was for moving wine around after the servants had been dismissed. So if you're having kind of a posh dinner, then at one point you dismiss the servants and you dismiss the women, and so there was no one to hand the wine around the table. And so this thing was invented, which you still have today, which was the thing that

slides the decanter around the table. And it used to have little wheels on the bottom, so the men drinking their brandy could just nudge it to the other end of the table. And that's where it's like coasting, like you're... Coasting, yeah. On the coast of the table, because it would go around the edge of it. I heard that the original beer mats used to be placed on top of glasses. And then, because the idea was to keep insects and so on and poison out of your...

I don't think... It wasn't poison, was it? I'd been watching a lot of Game of Thrones recently. But yeah, and then it slowly graduated to the bottom of the glass. It wasn't slow. It was one fell... Was there ever a period where it was in the middle of the glass on the side? This...

That is true, though, to an extent, is the kind of invention of beer mats comes from German tankards, which used to have lids on them, and you would kind of... They were lids on a hinge on top of the beer, which stopped it spilling, so it stopped it messing up the table, and you would kind of flip the lid with your thumb, like you kind of do with milk jugs now. You still get those in Germany, don't you? Yeah, yeah. And then people would not be wealthy enough to have the lids, and so the coast is migrated

down to the bottom. But I just... It's just incredible to think people... Who was the first genius to do that? To look at the coaster and say, I know where that should go instead. Yeah. There's no poison around. There are no insects around.

I'm going to try it. It's incredible. There is a beer mat which orders a drink for you. So it's been invented by some German researchers, and it orders a new drink for you when it senses yours is running low. It sounds really good. It measures the weight of your drink and the weight of your glass. Right.

Yeah. Is it when it's empty or when it's sort of a quarter full? Because... I don't know. The song was Drink Fast to the Nothers, Andy. Yeah. And what if you don't want another drink? Does it just keep ordering it?

Sorry, I don't understand. Do you know one thing that I thought was quite interesting, which is the reason that beer mats kind of became very popular is the invention of refrigeration. And so people had ice on mass. Like poorer people had ice because you could have a fridge now. And then that meant that a lot of condensation happened on drinks, and so that meant the condensation dribbled down the edge and meant you needed a beer mat. So a lot of them are made in Germany, aren't they?

I think the biggest beer mat producer is in Germany still. And the people who make beer mats, they also make the pretend wood circular discs that are found in packets of camembert. And also the thin sheets of board found at the back of some wardrobes. It's good that you can kind of do a few different things. Yeah, it's really clever. I'm versifying. Although I read that and I've never seen a sheet of board at the back of my wardrobe.

Have you ever? No, Anna's gone straight to Nalia, doesn't she? Yeah. But this place is amazing. So this is the cats group in the Black Forest in Germany, isn't it? And they make an unbelievable number of beer mats. So it turns out we go through loads. They make about 75% of the world's beer mats, which amounts to 5.5 billion a year.

They can make 12 million beer mats in one day, which is so many beer mats. That's too many to flip, isn't it, even for this guy? He couldn't do it. Their website says, the very first thing you see if you go to the cat's website is, you could argue that we only make one thing, a material based on wood pop, but we do do that one thing outstandingly well, which they do. And my favorite thing about their factory is that they have what they call a debarking machine.

So beer mats are made from kind of pulped wood that's like sent through all these processes and then can be flattened out. And the debarking machine is where they put huge tree trunks and it's like a giant washing machine and they close the door and they just spin it round and round and round. And then the bark will gradually comes off, which I think is just really cool. Another thing you can do with beer mats is you can make little towers with them, can you? Yeah.

You can put them like a playing card so you can make them on big, big towers. And they have world records for these as well. But what the sad thing is, if you get one that you think is a world record, then the only way you can tell is by knocking it down. You have to knock it down to get the record. And that is to prove that there was no adhesive used when you were building it. So the world record was 300,000 coasters to create. Sorry.

Whoa. No way. Absolute way. How tall is that? Well, if you think that a hundred is the height of you and me. Yeah. That's the size of the Chrysler building, that's massive. I mean, I just don't believe that.

I just flat out can't believe that. I mean, it's the most amazing achievement ever known to me. It's written on sars on this piece of paper, so it must be true. It was a Guinness World Record by Sven Goebbel. Cool. The Goebbels famously strong on propaganda, James. You should know that. This will be the thing to rescue the family name, I know it.

We're going to have to move on shortly to our next fact. Can I just tell you one more thing about beer mats? Yeah, yeah. So in 2004, some Christians tried to find the 11th commandment via beer mats. So this was a push by a bunch of Methodists, the Methodist church, to find the 11th commandment and they advertised for it on beer mats. This was an attempt to attract the young to the church. And they produced 250,000 beer mats saying,

please let us know what you think the 11th commandment should be. And it was really controversial, so a lot of other Christians said that we didn't need an 11th commandment. There was someone called the Reverend John Roberts who said that 10 were enough. And actually, if we lived by those 10, we wouldn't need this kind of gimmick. But the Reverend who planned it said that he hoped that people would want to collect the drinks mats, discuss them with friends, and use the quick and popular meeting of text messaging to tell us their ideas,

which is sweet. And so they did this and there were a list of winners. So there was more than one winner? There were like five winners. So what do we have to not do? So the 11th commandment is, it's a toss up between, thou shalt not confuse text with love. This is my favourite, thou shalt not consume thine own body weight in fudge.

Very nice. That's a hard one. We're all sinners, we're all sinners, James, we've all done it. I reckon I could get through life not coveting my neighbour's arms. OK, let's move on to our second fact, and that is Andy. My fact is that pandas have their own Harvard. So, it's done in silence in the room. It's true that pandas have their own Harvard.

So this is from a magazine I read called Delayed Gratification Quarterly, which I kid you not, is so good, it arrives every three months, and the news is at least three months old and it's riveting. So they ran a feature all about the practice of rewilding pandas. We train a panda that's been born into captivity and you train it to survive on its own in the wild. And they have something which the scientists who work on this call, Panda Harvard, because they gradually get moved through training camps

to wilder and wilder arenas. So from the completely... So they start in like panda kindergarten. Exactly. And then they work the way through panda primary school, the secondary school, 6th form. Yep, and then panda Harvard. And it's this 200 hectare dojo where they do their final training

before they go out into the world. It's true. Are you sure you didn't watch Kung Fu Panda? So the training programme involves finding water independently, finding natural shelter, staying vigilant, identifying enemies and avoiding danger. And if they fail any one of the elements of the course, they get busted back down to panda school.

Yeah, and if they pass panda Harvard, they are released into the world and only, I think, seven pandas have ever passed. Really? It's hard to pass, isn't it? Because it is very important that we... Well, there's a lot of effort that goes into trying to make panda survive in the wild and make them breed. And if they're not going to survive, it's pointless.

So I think in their enclosures, they're given a stuffed leopard at one point that's put into the enclosure. And if a panda runs up to the stuffed leopard and sniffs it, it fails forever. It's in captivity forever more. Can you never? Yeah, yeah, it's not allowed out. It's done.

Well, you could learn that, can't you? Well, if you don't show the instinct, I'm afraid you're out. You have to be able to climb as a panda. You have to master the solo climb. And if you can't do that, you fail, because that's the only way pandas can escape predators, because they're generally quite slow. Solo climb? Would you watch... I would watch panda gladiators like a shot.

But it is hard. And that leopard is stuffed full of leopard excrement, so it smells like a real leopard. OK. Yeah. And their eyesight is so bad that if they react correctly to a fake leopard, they'll probably react correctly to a real leopard. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, the thing is that the humans all dress as pandas, don't they? Yeah. So if you're like the equivalent of the professors in Harvard, they're all dressed in black and white panda suits that have been smeared with panda pee and feces. Yeah. There are a lot of people wondering what happened to their lives

working in the prolonged pandering closure. But yeah, that's true, because they're never allowed to come into contact with anyone that resembles a human, are they? And they're always watched by 200 closed-circuit cameras. So it's a bit like panda big brother. Ah. Would you watch that? I would.

Would you watch basically any TV show that had pandas instead of humans? I'd definitely watch panda driving school. So some of them get really good, though. So, for example, there were two released in November 2017 very recently. They were called Bashi and Ying Shui. And they got so good that they spent several days on the run in the wildest enclosure. And their human handlers had to lure them back with treats.

There's a thing where they've noticed that a lot of pandas in the wild immediately start acting in ways that they really wish they acted in enclosures. For example, mating is a big thing that's a problem in the zoos and so on, which they've got no libido and they can't manage to get them to mate. There's been in China not too long ago in Chengdu, they've been testing new methods about how to get pandas to start building a libido and mating. And one of the things that they've been testing is they've been playing

panda porn to pandas on a TV. I would not watch porn if it was pandas. But that's a genuine thing. So they have a TV in the enclosure and they've filmed pandas having sex and they just have that on a loop with the sounds and so on, with pandas watching it, hoping that that turns them... I don't think it really works that well, does it? No, no, it doesn't.

They tried loads of different things, they don't... Hardly anything works. Have they tried storylines, like a panda turning up who's a plumber when her husband's out? She's thinking about a divorce anyway. I don't know who fitted this bamboo. Another thing they tried was artificial insemination, which was pretty bad actually,

because the male pandas had to be anesthetised and then stimulated into ejaculating with the help of an electric probe placed in their rectums. Look, there's no shame in that, James. He's on past the Andy Panda hybrid baby we're expecting in nine months' time. No, panda females often... Pandaru Murray, sorry, sorry. No, no, it's alright, I think it was a worthwhile interruption.

I mean, panda females often give birth to twins, but they can't look after more than one baby, which is the great tragedy of pandas, so they let the other one die, which is really sad, but yeah, because they are literally incapable of looking after two children. They're so not meant to survive, but in captivity the twins get a surrogate mother, so there's a person who's dressed up as a panda

who acts as the twins' mother until it's ready to survive in the wild, and then it's fine. Margaret Thatcher didn't like pandas, turns out. No. They've just released some documents under the 30-year rule, and it's her being asked by some press people, would you share Concorde with a panda? That sounds like it's just a random question that she was asked by some.

Would you rather share Concorde with a panda or the Royal Train with a llama? They actually wanted her to get into Concorde with a panda, didn't they? Yeah, they did. Because panda had to get to wherever she was going at the same time, and they thought it would be a good kind of press thing, didn't they? Yeah, and she might have a picture taken with it, and she wrote back saying,

I am not double underlined taking a panda with me. Pandas and politicians are not happy omens. We don't know why. Wow. How tragic. Such a well-loved figure. We suddenly find out that she didn't like pandas. But it was too slightly with panda diplomacy, wasn't it?

So there was the whole thing of handing over pandas as presents to the West, and it turns out that that stopped in 1984. We now have things where if there's a panda in a zoo, it's on loan. It's like a... And it costs them any country that has them about a million a year now in order to just keep the panda in their own zoos. And that's official. Any panda around the world, if it's from China.

They all belong to China, don't they? Yeah. And if they give birth, that baby belongs to China as well. Do you know the first panda that left China left it as a dog? So is that like a disguise or something? Sort of. It was this amazing woman. This was in the 1930s.

It was actually quite a long time before we stumbled across pandas in the West and decided we wanted them. In the 1930s, a woman called Ruth Harkness, her husband died and he'd been determined to bring some pandas from China to the US. And so she pursued his aims. She found a baby panda. She fed it on like human baby formula. She tried to bring it back and get the ship from China back to the US.

But when she tried to board the ship, they said, you've got a panda with you, you can't take a panda. And so she stayed with it in quarantine overnight and refused to go on the ship without it. And eventually they said, we just don't know what to do because the paperwork does not allow for pandas. And so the panda left as one dog, come at $20. And that was the records in China show one dog left China in 1936.

That's so cool. It is true actually that we didn't really know about pandas in the West for a long time, did we? I think it was 1969. What? Until then, for about 50 years, they were effectively encrypted. They were like the Loch Ness monster. Like people knew that they, people were saying that they existed but no one had seen one in the West.

But in the US in the 1930s, there was like a panda mania. Sorry, I should have said 18. 18. Oh, 18. 1969. Well, we've landed on the moon. Now it's time to nail this panda myth once and for all. You can see the Great Wall of China.

What's that on the Great Wall of China? Speaking of panda dogs, have you guys heard of panda cows? No. This is very cool. This is a genuine thing that happens amongst breeders of miniature cows. There's a certain group of people who, because it's a black and white animal, try and breed a panda cow, which is to have the black and white fur markings to match exactly how a panda would have it.

And there's only between 30 and 40 on the planet. And there's a number of animals that they try this with in different various fields with rabbits. There's an impossible rabbit that people try to breed. And one of those things is in the cow world is panda cow. Wait, so they're not trying to mate a panda with a cow, obviously. They're trying to breed a cow that has the markings of a panda. So it has like the black eyes. It has the black eyes.

It has the stripe right around, which is very hard to get. Sorry, I zoned out. Why are they doing this? You zoned out? Just in the middle bit where you... I think Andy was speaking for a lot of the audience. Jesus. But just why? Because it's hard.

Yeah, because it's an impossible task. So if you manage to do it, it's an incredibly rare miniature cow that you can sell for hundreds of thousands, possibly, if you wanted to. We need to move on shortly, guys. Just one more thing about rewilding and introductions to the world. You might have seen the story. It's about a gannet called Nigel, who has just died this year. And he became famous because he spent the last four years

courting a concrete decoy gannet, which had been put on his island. They were trying to lure more gannets to the island. And this was a huge effort. They put loads of concrete gannets on there. And they were 80. And he got a girlfriend who was made of concrete. And the researchers researching him called him Nigel because he had no mates.

I know. And he died just as three real living birds joined the colony. And he decided he didn't want to go and mate with the actual living female birds. And he stayed with his concrete girlfriend until he died. I think that's quite romantic, actually. It is romantic. I respect that. There's also...

Well, you're going out with that bollard at the moment, aren't you? There's also the black-footed ferret, which was once thought extinct, which we're trying to bring back into the wild. And there's a conservation centre in Colorado for this ferret. So it's extremely rare. And again, they have this kind of school to try and prepare them for the wild and survive there. And you have to prepare them for predators and for mating and stuff.

And so for the black-footed ferret in Colorado at their kind of prep school, they have stuffed raptors that swoop down on one of the human keeper's arms that they have to defend themselves against. They also have a robo-badger, which is a mechanized... I would watch that film. It's a mechanized badger. And they drive it around the pens of these black-footed ferrets. And they hope that the black-footed ferrets would instinctually try and avoid it

and run away from it. And it turned out it didn't work. The ferrets immediately started riding on the back of them. OK, let's move on to fact number three. It's time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the American flag was designed by a 17-year-old student and his teacher gave him a B minus for it. So this was back in 1958.

This is when America had 48 states. Back when the panda was still a distant myth. OK, 1958. There was a student called Robert Heft, and as part of a school project, his teacher wanted them to make something that inspired them. And he decided that he wanted to make an American flag, but he wanted to make an American flag that had 50 stars on it because there had been lots of talk about Alaska and Hawaii joining estates.

So he handed in his project to school. He'd re-sewn one of his parents' flags with two extra stars, and he sort of moved it around so it made sense, and it was a lovely design. And his teacher said, there's only 48 states, you idiot. This is ridiculous, and gave him a B minus. So he then said to his teacher, well, I'm going to submit this flag if the states get added, and if I submit it and we get it made the official flag, will you remark me?

And he said, yeah, sure, whatever. A year later, President Eisenhower was calling him up to say, we've made your flag the official flag of America, and he had his mark remarked to an A. Really? Yeah. That's because I read, which is flawed, obviously, that he was marked down for lack of imagination,

which I actually would agree with because all he did was add two stars to the existing flag. But okay, he was adding the new stars because a lot of people did submit their entries, didn't they, to Eisenhower, when it was discovered that new states were going to be added, and a lot of the other suggestions are better. And there is a book called Old Glory, the other suggestions in them. So the question is, who's a teacher that would give this boy a B minus? What Pratt would do that? Stanley Pratt is the name of the teacher, who did that,

and very kindly gave him an A. But this guy, Heft, he also designed a 51-star flag, just in case another state joins the union. Sadly, he died recently. And all the way up to 60, actually. Yeah, so he's kind of thought, well, I nailed it with a 50. That's amazing. But what are the 60?

So Puerto Rico is supposed to be the next one, if that, you know, they're trying to get enough. Yeah, right. And then probably Russia. Newt Ginrich, when he was running against, I believe it was Bill Clinton, or was it George Bush, he proposed that he wanted a new star on the flag within his tenure as president, if he made it, which was going to be the moon. He believed that was genuinely, he sat in a press conference near NASA, and he said, I want the moon to be it.

And I realized the only way you can get it on the place is if you have 13,000 votes. So we need to colonize Mars and the moon, get 13,000 people on there. But he was saying this in a serious way. And yet he still feels like a great loss to the presidential race, isn't he? I mean, I would have voted for him. This is not as uncommon as you think. So the Australian flag was based on a design submitted by a 14-year-old. Yeah, and there were loads of designs submitted.

And one of them, I really wish we'd seen this, was a team of native animals playing cricket. So like the wallabies are fielding and the ostrich is bowling. The kangaroos holding a wombat. Yeah, that was in 1901, wasn't it? Early example of crowd sourcing, and there were loads of really cool entries. So there was one entry that had a kangaroo with six tails to represent all six states. Another one apparently weirdly had what was described as a fat kangaroo aiming a gun at the Southern Cross constellation, which seems quite weird.

But in the end, the thing that won, a variation of which exists today, is something that five different people submitted, which again shows lack of imagination. And also they had to split the prize money five ways. So they should have gone with a fat kangaroo. Right. There is actually, and I think we've mentioned it before, there is a flag that has a gun on it for a country, Mozambique, which has an AK-47 on its flag. Yeah, there was a campaign to get rid of it in like the early 2000s. And actually the Mozambique president said no, it kind of represents our past

and the struggle that it took to get there. Because the red on a lot of flags represents blood. And especially in a lot of African flags, the red represents kind of the bloodshed that it took to gain independence. And the green represents like the fertility of the land and stuff. But all those colors mean really significant things. Almost no flags have purple on them because purple was such a rare color for such a long time. So I think we've mentioned before, it took, in the Roman times, only emperors?

Yeah, emperors were purple togas because it was made out of snails and it took 10,000 snails to make a gram of the dye. It was very, very rare stuff. And they take ages to get into the machine as well, don't they? That is good. So maybe if there's some new countries that come along, they might go for purple. Yes. They should.

You know when the American, so the Stars and Stripes came along, when America came along, and obviously a star is added for every new state. But in, so it was 1793, I think the original flag came about and it was the 13 colonies and it was 13 stripes and 13 stars. And then in 1795, two stars and two stripes were added because Kentucky and Vermont became states. And so initially it was supposed to be a new stripe was added each time. And it was only in, so of course then after that,

in sort of the 30 years after that, loads and loads of new states came. And I think it was Munro, President Munro, who said in 1818 we had to stop with the stripes thing because we can't fit that many stripes on a flag and said we'll go back to 13 stripes and then any number of stars. That's so funny. It's good, isn't it? We might have 50 stripes on the flag right now. But the thing is they kind of didn't really care about their flag for quite a long time, didn't they?

Really, the only reason they got it is because US ships needed one to sail into foreign ports. So they needed a flag for that particular reason. And it's not the kind of big sort of nationalistic thing that it is now. It was just for that really. They had a load of different versions at the time as well for on ships. So they had one flag which was just a pine tree. So it's just a blue background and a pine tree. And that was because pine was a major export from the US to Britain.

And a bit like the Boston Tea Party, there was a big riot about pine at one stage. The Boston Tree Party. That deserved more than that, guys. I don't know. We need to move on shortly to the last one. Oh, I have a flag hero. Okay, go on. Such a cool guy.

He was the US flag expert. As in, he was called Whitney Smith. He was so obsessed with flags. The term for the study of flags is vexillology. He came up with that word and he got flak for it because it's half Latin and half Greek. Vexillum is Latin, ology is Greek. Yeah, I'm with the rest of the world here. Okay.

Well, he said, I've been criticised because it combines Latin and Greek, a barbarism. But I say, I was a teenager. And we all do crazy stuff when we're teenagers, don't we? And he designed the flag for Guyana because he was so keen to know what the country's new flag was going to be when it got independent, that he wrote to the president and said, what's your flag going to be? And the president wrote back saying, we haven't thought about it. We've been busy becoming independent.

Any ideas? And he said, yeah, how about this? And then they accepted that. That's really cool. So cool. But I read that they didn't tell him, so his sister reminisced that he had no idea he just sent off this thing, which I think he drew a design and his mom knitted it into an actual flag and sent it off.

And then a few years later, the whole family were like, oh, that's weird, the Guyana flag. It looks a lot like the thing that we designed. And he wrote to the government and said, that looks like my flag design. And they said, I've been trying to get in touch with you for ages. That's awesome. Similarly, I read that Nelson Mandela, when they were designing a new South African flag, the person, there was thousands again of designs. And the person that they went, this is the one to go for, fat it through so that they

could see it. But when it came through, it was black and white. So Mandela had to send his team out to get crayons to come back and color it in to show him exactly the style that it was in. That's true. Because actually, that wouldn't have been a good symbol for a nation sharply divided into black and white. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show.

And that is Chizinski. My fact this week is that the inventor of water skiing started out being pulled along behind a boat standing on his head on a wooden chair. This is the original water skiing. This is the guy called Ralph Samuelson. And I think I read this in sports illustrated in like a really good long weed piece. He did. But yeah, this is in 1922.

He was in Minnesota on Lake Pepin, which is part of the Mississippi. And he just got really into sort of putting big blocks of wood in the water and standing on them and being pulled along behind boats driven by his brother. And he experimented with lots of different things. And he especially liked to ride while either balancing on a friend's shoulders or standing on his head on a chair. So that's what he did. He's like the opposite of a beer coaster in that he started the wrong way up and then

he ended the right way up. Yes. Yes, I think people often call him that. Actually, he started off on an ice boat, didn't he? Because that would freeze over a lot. So they had an ice boat that would go through the frozen water and he would go on actual skis. And then he thought when the ice went away, he thought maybe I could do this on the water

because it's just hot ice. Could I have a glass of tap hot ice, please? With some cold ice in it, actually, if that's okay. And he didn't patent it, did he? No. Someone else swooped in and did. Yeah, it was Fred Waller who patented it. And his product was called Dolphin Aqua Skis.

And Fred Waller also invented widescreen motion pictures. Really? What is that? Yeah. Just like Cinerama kind of thing. Oh, wow. What I quite like about Ralph Samuelson is when you're water skiing, any new move that you do is often through the chaos of falling over and recovering and getting back up.

So there are many moves where people tripped over and they landed on their bum and suddenly they're like, wow, I'm still on my bum. This could be a move. And then they get back up to their feet. So Ralph Samuelson, as well as inventing this water skiing on two skis, he was one day on the two skis going along and the wake of a boat came over and he got launched into the air and one of the skis left his feet and he landed back down on one ski and put his foot on the front of it and suddenly invented the one ski slalom that happens on water skiing.

So it was just, yeah, just all by accident. Was he, was he creating? Yeah. And I mean, he invented a kind of water skiing, which I imagine exists now. It's just being pulled along by a plane. So he actually got quite a lot of publicity for a very short period of time in his little town. People used to come and watch him do this.

He would get over a thousand spectators and he would charge admission and stuff. A bandstand was set up for him and they used to accompany his performances on skis. But then this guy called Walter Bullock, who was a pilot flew into Lake City, which is where he lived. And so Ralph Samuelson said, can you pull me along behind your plane? And he did. And he went at 60 miles an hour. And the first time he was pulled along behind his plane, it was like a ski plane.

So it was going along in the water and the propellers of the plane blew water into his face like bullets hitting him. He said, like hitting in his face, but he's too scared to let go because it's going too fast. So that would be dangerous. And so eventually he was jerked out of his skis and pulled along on his stomach for about 50 feet. And even then he said, my first thought wasn't for my safety, but for whether I'd lost

my swimming suit. But then it was 1922 when he first started this and in 1927 he unfortunately broke his back in a construction accident and he never skied again. But then weirdly a fall from a tall ladder would later cure his back problem. That just doesn't feel like something that happens, does it? No way. You know in like cartoons where you bang your head and you lose your memory and then you bang it an even number of times and it comes back.

It feels like that, right? But this is genuinely what happened. Fall from a tall ladder. It's not, we should say that is not NHS guidelines. Have you heard about the water skiing elephant? Only one elephant is ever known to have water skied. It's ever known to have water skied. It was in the 1950s.

She was called Queenie and she did it. Actually, I did know about that and there were two. There was a previous one called Sunshine Sally. Well that is interfilm research for me. I just assumed. It's really cool because it sounds cruel but it's not. It probably is. Yeah, you've put an elephant on some skis.

They're outside of the normal environment, aren't they? Yeah, I guess so. But it looks very sweet when they're doing it. How does it work? Do they go off a jetty or do they start in the water? They're basically standing on quite a long thin platform. They're not on two separate skis. They're basically on a boat, aren't they?

They're basically on a small boat being tugged on behind a larger boat. Okay, right. So Queenie's skis were made out of two huge pontoons. So they did look like two giant water skis. They were kind of welded together so she could stand up. But she was quite cool. And she used to go to rallies for the Republican Party. Did she?

Because they have the elephants as their symbol, don't they? Oh, okay. That's why. That makes so much sense. So there were protests from animal rights campaigners. And this was in the 50s and the 60s. And then a local county chairman, Edward Flaherty, was asked what he thought about the protests.

And people saying that she shouldn't be water skiing because it was unfair. And he said he thought the protests were a Democrat plot. Oh. That actually maybe they were. Yeah, it could have been. So I was reading about, because there's many different types of basic water skiing that you can do.

So you've got water skiing, you've got wakeboarding, and then you've got barefoot skiing as well. And what's interesting is the different speeds you need in order to get purchase on the top of the water. So wakeboarding is the easiest. 20 miles an hour is the one that you need. Then there's 30 miles an hour. And that's for actual water skiing.

And 40 miles an hour is for barefoot skiing. So that's where you need insane speed. But then people have taken it further now. So there are records for people. There's a Guinness World Record for people who ski on their hands now. So what they do is they put their legs into the pulley rope bit that you hold on usually with your hands. And then they go down on their hands.

And there's a world record, which was set in September of 2013. And that was someone handskied for 2,956 feet, which is amazing. There's another world record where someone jumped from a helicopter 67 feet in the air, landed, and then went barefoot skiing straight away, which you can see on YouTube, which I've seen as well. And the world record for the longest jump ever done, this is on water skis for a jump, is 312 feet. And that is still held by a guy called Freddie Kruger.

And I went online. He would have been good at the hand skiing. Yeah, he would have. I went online because I thought, I've never heard anyone else called Freddie Kruger. And I went to Wikipedia and there's notable Freddie Kruger. He's quite famous to water skiing when I think. Is he right?

Well, there's only three. Well, he's doing good for the name of Freddie Kruger because there's only three. There's him. There's a guy from the movie. And then there's a guy called Frederick Wilhelm Kruger and Nazi official from the Third Reich. So he's...

Oh, no. This will rehabilitate the Freddie Kruger name. I know it. Barefoot water skiing is very cool, though. And it's... So you're really good at barefoot water skiing if you have flat feet, I learned, which is quite nice for flat-footed people

because I have quite a fight... And if your feet are 10 feet long, then it's amazing. But you don't want your toes to go in. As toes to nose, they call it. But I've got very high arches in my feet and I always feel quite smug around my flat-footed friends. But actually, I would be... I know it's a weird reason to be arrogant.

But a flat feet is much better. And also you can get third-degree burns from it. So this is an interview with George Blair, who was a barefoot skiing champ in the 70s and 80s, I think. And he barefoot skied for three minutes, which is an extremely long time, and you're going so fast and the friction is so extreme that he got third-degree burns

and he couldn't walk for days and days. You're surrounded by hot ice, and yet you get third-degree burns. That's crazy. You know Swan's windsurf? Did they? Yeah. Sorry, I know it's not water skiing, but it is windsurfing.

But it is windsurfing. No, they do. They arch their wings over their back and they can travel at three miles an hour, which is very fast for them. And it's way faster than they could go with by paddling. Not as fast as they can fly, though. No.

No, it's not their best means of getting from A to B. True. But it does save them a bit of energy. And this I did not know about Swan's. They can run at a top speed of 22 miles an hour. I have a feeling that is not true. That's their top speed, James. It's not their bottom speed.

It's the top speed. Usain Bolt's very top speed ever over the course of 100 metres was 23.35 miles an hour. So a Swan could very nearly catch Usain Bolt. Wow. If at the end, if he stuck his neck out, he might actually manage to... It's all about the finish, mate.

I think there needs to be really strict rules because they can't use their wings. I think that's the important thing. You mustn't be allowed to use your wings when you're raising Usain Bolt on foot. But if you're running at the 100 metres, you're allowed to wave your arms around and get the molecules out of the way.

Why don't they, actually? I think, well, they go like this, don't they? Oh, that's true. And not great for a podcast, I must say. If you were sort of... If you were doing this and kind of flapping the air past you... Yeah, like a front crawl while you're running. Basically.

It must be better. It must be better. Because it's like air is just like very, very thin water. Oh, gosh. Future Olympians are gripped right now. Hey, we need to wrap up shortly. Yakskiing, have you heard of this? No.

Yakskiing. So this happens in the Indian Hill resort of Manali. And it's a tourist attraction. So it's really only tourists that do it. I'm sure the locals don't really do it. But your skier is at the bottom of a slope. He's attached to a rope with a pulley and there's a yak at the top of the slope.

And the yak... You then shake some nuts at the yak. And for some reason, that makes the yak leg it down the hill. But of course, he's attached to you with a rope. And so you fly up. It's like the most amazing ski lift ever. Wow. And you've got an enormous speed.

And it was a sport invented by a guy called Mr. Dorji who has the advice, never shake the bucket of nuts before you're tied to the yak rope. That actually is the 11th commandment. You know that. Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James.

At James Harkin. And Zhizinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. We have everything on there from our tour dates upcoming. We have our links to our books.

We have all the episodes that we've done over the course of our four years. And just quickly before we wrap up this week's episode, we asked the audience here in Reading to give us their favorite facts. So we're going to give away a cassette to the winning fact and please collect it from us at the end of the show in the foyer. So the winner, the winner is Justin Potter. And we really like this fact. It is when Alan Jones won the 1977 Austrian Grand Prix,

they didn't have the Australian national anthem. Instead, a drunk man played Happy Birthday on a trumpet. That's amazing. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Reading, thank you so much. Goodbye. Thank you.