No Such Thing As A Fish - 22: No Such Thing As A Magic Camel Filter

Episode Date: August 14, 2014

Episode 22 - This week in the QI office, Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Anna (@nosuchthing) and Andy (@andrewhunterm) discuss how to post a human, ancient ham, apes using iPads and the definition of Wales.

We run it on QI a few years ago, which was, there's no such thing as a fish. There's no such thing as a fish. No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Treiber. I'm sitting here with the regular three elves, Andy Murray, Anna Chasinski

and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones to share our favorite facts from the last seven days. So again, let's do it. Our favorite facts, James. My fact is that in 1903, a man called W. Reginald Bray posted himself. Wow. How? How?

He stuck a stamp on himself and walked down to the post office and said, I want to be taken to to a house, which happened to be his own house. And they took him. Yeah. Was it a slow day for him? Finished his book, didn't really know what to do. He was he was a bit of a wag, a bit of a practical joker. And one of the things he did was he read through all of the post office guide and worked out what the smallest and largest things he could post were.

So he discovered that the smallest item that he could post was one B. And so he posted that. And the largest was an elephant, but he couldn't find an elephant. So he posted himself. What year was this? 1903. 1903. It sounds like because there's so many examples of people just testing the limits of the posting system,

like just a bunch of practical jokers going, how far can we push this? So as a guy who sent an entire building's worth of bricks because he was building a bank in a different city and the cheapest way was just to send the bricks via the post. Oh, my God, were they individually wrapped? No, I think that's what I hoped they were. It would be a brilliant admin job for someone when they're sticking the stamps on and putting them in.

Yeah, Alex would love that. Yeah, he would. He sent them at 40 at a time. They must have not introduced weight limits then. That must have been when they did it by size. That's when they introduced the scales. That's when they brought it in. Two hundred pounds per day became the limit that they then imposed. There's a weird history of people posting themselves.

It's not just this guy. There's been a few since a guy called Mr. Seng, I'm not sure where he was from. He decided to post himself in a sealed box and he thought it would just be a 30 minute journey. But they put him in the wrong pile and he was stuck in there for three hours. And he didn't make a hole in his box so he could hardly breathe. And when they cut him out, he passed out.

And when they interviewed him in the newspaper afterwards, he said, I tried to make a hole in the cardboard, but it was too thick. And I didn't want to spoil the surprise by shouting. Wow. That's real dedication to a surprise. But then he couldn't really jump out and say surprise because he passed out. And was it a good surprise or was it like he was a burglar and he was going to jump out and then round sack a house?

Well, there was a guy who posted himself. What was it now? OK, so there was a guy who decided he wanted to cross America and he was called Mr. McKinley. I don't know what his first name was. And he decided to be better to go in a box because he could charge the postage to his company rather than paying for the ticket, which you have to pay for himself.

That's how I get to work every day. Same thing. Yeah. Sorry, go on. Yeah, you're always arriving by second post, aren't you? All snap. I wouldn't mind, but I'm by far the latest of it every day. So he built the five hundred and fifty dollar freight charge to his employer and climbed into the crate.

Of course, by being in a plane, he was lucky he was in a plane which was like a condition and stuff. But a lot of them is very dangerous because they're, you know, it's very cold and you can die in there. Do you know you used to be able to send children by post? Really? Yeah, you used to be able to post children around the place. Until 1920, was it in the US anyway? Yeah, I think it was banned officially until around then.

But you would buy the stamps and you would put the stamps on the child's jacket and then the child would sit in, for example, the mail van of the train. And they were a bit of post. And you could I think you could lump all your posts together because there are pictures of children with posts strapped to them and then they turn up and be like, not only do I come. Just going back to W. Reginald Bray. Oh, yeah, he has his own website, which I didn't know.

He's amazing. Yeah, but the website is absolutely fantastic. He collected a lot of autographs. So he he sent thousands of cards out to people asking them to be returned autographed to the Pope or his local railway station master. And on the website, it has this lovely line, which is over the years, Reginald amassed over 15,000 autographs declaring himself the Autograph King, a title that was undisputed by his peers.

Just imagine him saying, anyone going to challenge me? No. Imagine you were like his pretender. I think you wouldn't tell him that you had all these autographs and then you go up to him and go, excuse me, are you the guy who's got the most autographs in the world? Would you mind just signing that? And then when he signed it, you have him beat.

Yeah, you have won over him. Oh, that's good. That's very cool. Yeah. The Ig Nobel people, Mark Abraham's and the improbable people, they tried to send a helium balloon through the post and they wrote the address on the balloon and then took it to the post office. And when they weighed it, obviously it has negative weight. And so they were like, well, we're not going to pay you postage.

I think you should pay us postage. They balloon was refused reasons given transportation of helium and not wrapped. So I don't think you're not allowed to transport helium anyway, because it's explosive, isn't it? I mean, it was wrapped. They were wrapping helium in a balloon in a rubber. That's true. Yeah. So one of the most common questions that gets asked to the US postal system is can you mail a dog? Oh, they get this question all the time, says Spokesperson Sue Brennan.

The answer is no. Can't mail a dog. No, the whole point of postman and dogs is that they don't get along. Can you imagine a dog in a sorting office? Actually, they've worked out how many for some reason they've only done this in Germany, but 3,000 postmen a year are bitten by dogs in Germany and 2,255 pairs of trousers are torn, resulting in eight million pounds worth of medical bills. In 2001, the German post office started teaching dog psychology to postmen.

It's just it's just a permanent ongoing war. That's what postman. Yeah, that's the dog. Except the postmen are not allowed to carry weapons. And dogs are? Well, they are weapons. Oh, that's that's no, mate. That's like saying it was it Joe Lewis who had his his fists designated a weapon or was it Jackie Chan?

I've always heard about this and I've never believed it. Is it true? I think when you say you've always heard it, I think it's me literally repeating it most days. Jackie Chan told Whoopi Goldberg and a number of others on the view that when he's in America, he is considered his fists to be a an illegal weapon. Do you get all of your facts from the view? Actually, no, I don't because they're a bit. I remember watching an episode where they were talking about the possibility

that the moon landings didn't happen, that it was a hoax. And Whoopi Goldberg was going, I don't want to like speculate about the truth about it. But all I'm saying is, you know, who was filming Neil when he went down on the ladder? Who was holding that camera? I don't want to speculate. It's like Whoopi Goldberg got her nickname due to her childhood flatulence.

Oh, yeah, she was a big farder. Yeah, whoopi. Yeah, that's right. It's good. Yeah. And she worked in a morgue, didn't she? She might mention putting makeup on corpses. And when she walks in, everyone's like, what's that smell? Yeah. Not a lot of people just woke up and walked out.

Who was it? Did someone send a load of wasps and you can make wasps go to sleep and they were sent on a flight and the flight was delayed or something and they all woke up? You can still buy parasitic wasps through the post and they're for like pest control instead of using pesticides. You can use them. And then what do you get mailed to you to get rid of the parasitic wasp infestation that you've now got?

And then you get a spider to catch the fly. Fly, yeah. There was always a big flaw in that song because cows don't eat dogs. Very true. OK, time for fact number two. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that the oldest edible ham has just celebrated its 112th birthday.

So how do we know it's edible? Oh, because it's quite a famous ham. It first came to prominence when it celebrated. 100th birthday and someone has since bought it. And I guess any time it has a birthday now, people mention it. So I wanted to dispute this claim because my local butcher, Mr. Feller, the best butcher in the world, you guys should all go to him. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Are we sponsored by Mr. Feller now? I have been past Mr. Feller's place in the cover market and I can confirm there is a very old ham in the winter. Yeah. So he claims I think he bought it in 1993 when it was 101. It cost him 990 pounds, but he said he would have paid at least five grand for it because it was so special. It is now 125.

He says. And he says that. Now, when he bought it from the auctioneer that was selling off, they said they weren't sure it was edible, but he's the butcher he should know. Why is he not in the news? Why is he not? It hasn't been proven, hasn't been officially verified. Is this like the autograph guy?

Like no one else can be bothered. They're like, yeah, we have way older ham, dude. But like we don't need the title of world oldest ham. I think he's above that. Yeah. Wow. Well, that's similar to the world's tallest man who I think was certified the word world's tallest man. And then he refused to do the tests anymore.

So they stripped him of his title. And I think there is another man who is now officially the world's tallest man, but actually is slightly shorter than the previous man. Why did he refuse to be remeasured? He doesn't want the hassle of being the world's tallest man because when you're the world's tallest man, people come to see you as if you're an attraction. I remember reading this odd fact about the idea that there are no children in the town.

Not because he's scared them away, but just because there's too much hassle to have a super tall guy and kids in the same town. I can't remember the exact fact, but it was operation. He is the size of a U tree. Old things that have been eaten. A German pensioner who received a tin of American lard 64 years ago in an aid package has only just tasted it after discovering that it is still edible. Oh, wow.

I just didn't want to throw it away, said Hans Feldmayer, 87. See, that's the spirit which makes people keep ham for decades when it's just not a very nice ham. Yeah, in 2005 we found a 4,000 year old bowl of noodles in China. It's quite like they're still in the bowl and that settled the debate because there's quite a heated debate, I think, between Chinese, Arabs and Italians over who first came up with the noodle and that's the oldest evidence of a noodle. So China's got it at the moment.

Yeah, speaking of well-preserved food, there's obviously the kiviak, the Inuit food, which is made from orcs that are preserved in the hollowed out body of a seal. Yeah, so you stuff them in there for seven or eight months and they're completely preserved, then you get them out and eat them. Apparently they're pretty disgusting, but that was them. But I do quite like the Wikipedia page, which is, so it's called kiviak. At the top of the Wikipedia page it says not to be confused with kiviak person. So sometimes I think Wikipedia goes overboard with their clarifications there.

I don't think anyone's looked up there and made kiviak and gone, hey, you never told me you have food stuff that gets preserved in a seal skin for eight months. Isn't there a thing with camels whereby if you have poisonous water, you get the camel to drink it and then it vomits it back up and that makes it drinkable? Have you heard about this? I have not heard that. Why is it drinkable because a camel has thrown up in it? Because it filters it?

There's something about it's poisonous food or it's water or it's... First website I'm getting is Six Dangerous Urban Survival Myths About Ports. Actually, I'm reading this page now and it doesn't mention Dan's insane camel theory. Wow, this is really interesting. You shouldn't necessarily cut open those big barrel cacti. The odds are that the inside will be tough and fibrous, the water contained will not be abundant, and also there's a greater chance the water inside will be bitter and acidic,

which could induce vomiting, diarrhea and cramp. Oh, well at least if you vomited someone else could drink it. Imagine having a magic vomiting camel which would purify anything. Yeah, I think I've got it wrong somewhere. I think it's to do with food. Google food, camel, vomit, survival. If anyone knows about this camel weird survival tip, then send us a message at Tribaland or... I read a thing about how we have been making attempts to create food that lasts longer.

So obviously this ham is kind of an anomaly in that it's very old and that's very notable, but in the army because they obviously have to have food that's nicely preserved, but they want people to eat well, they've been attempting to make interesting long-lasting foods, and sandwiches is one of the big things. Most soldiers apparently want sandwiches. They've currently made a sandwich which can last for two years and not go stale or soggy, and the people who made it are trying to work what they're calling an immortal peanut butter

and jelly sandwich. That's the dream. So we can be at war forever. Hooray, that's what they want. One soldier said they're the best two-year-old sandwiches I've ever eaten. Did you know that they fill all crisp packets with nitrogen instead of with oxygen so that the the crisps don't go off? Instead of with air.

They don't put air in. They get rid of all the oxygen in the packets to keep them fresh. Yeah, Ash was telling me. Ash, who is the lead singer of Emperor Yes who did our theme tune, he was saying that when sparkling water is transported overseas, they take the bubbles out and then they put the bubbles back in. When they reach their country destination. Has no one heard this?

You could know. Okay, if anyone listening can help me out. Is that what still water is? They forgot to put the bubbles back in. That's when the bubbles have ended up in a different country. I do know that when they make decaf coffee they send they sell the caffeine to soft drinks companies to put into soft drinks. Isn't that amazing?

I would love to know what caffeine looks like. Isn't it funny how you said that and I just accepted it and when Dan said his I just immediately thought it was rubbish. It's the boy who cried wolf writ large. Okay, it's time to move on to fact number three and that is Chazinsky. Yes, my fact is that orangutans like playing on iPads but gorillas do not. Really? Yeah, so this actually started as an April Fool's joke by the sun

and the heading of their article was Planet of the Apps saying how gorillas love playing angry birds. And yeah, good old son always one step ahead with the wit and it gave the idea some guy who worked at Milwaukee County Zoo read this article and thought hey actually Apps for Apes good idea and started showing gorillas iPads but they didn't like it because so gorillas feel threatened by direct eye contact and face-to-face contact so they do a lot of their interacting sight in a side long way

and so that doesn't work very well with iPads because you can't really see it properly and then as soon as you look at it you feel like the birds trying to attack you and they smash it. There is a thing about gorillas and eye contact. There was a zoo that gave out these glasses, do you remember that? And they were glasses with pinholes in so you could still see them but they had pictures of eyes looking in different directions and the idea was you would look at the gorillas but the gorillas wouldn't know that you were looking at them.

Yeah, I think it's Rotterdam Zoo isn't it? And I think I might have been after a woman got attacked by a gorilla. The only downside it seems is that so they play on these iPads about half an hour but if you give it to them to hold they have smashed quite a few in the past so the zookeeper or the staff have to hold the iPad while the orangutans play on it. That's right, I think I read the average length of an unsmashed iPad left alone with an orangutan is 15 seconds.

That's the limit. Well which is actually the battery life as well. I really really like orangutans, I think they're brilliant. They're solitary apparently so they spend all of their time, they know their neighbours by sight but avoid all contact with them so in that sense not unlike Londoners but they also make a lot of noise to advertise their whereabouts so that they can avoid each other.

It's something rather beautiful and tragic about that isn't it? Just everyone going around saying here I am, don't come near me. British, they're British. They've come up with the idea of showing orangs in other zoos. Orangs, you're familiar. They don't like that Andy. They've come up with the idea of showing orangutans in other zoos pictures of orangs they might like to have sex with, they might like to mate with

so that they can do breeding programs rather than go to the hassle of transporting an orangutan across the country and then to find out they actually they don't fancy each other but can they fancy each other through a screen I wonder? Yeah basically. It's like Tinder. I don't know, yeah isn't that weird. Another similarity with us is that it's the younger ones take to the iPads much better than the older ones, the older ones are much more set in their ways.

Same thing. An orangutan was the villain in the first ever detective story. Or what's supposed to be the first ever detective? The murders in the remorgue. Spoiler alert, the murderer is an orangutan. You can't say spoiler alert afterwards can you? And by the way it was Hamlet's stepdad, spoiler alert. Ash told me that, oh god, apparently Dolphids.

When they when they start communicating the words that they'll use to communicate the first word will be their name and then the second word will be the action they're doing. So I'd be like Dan drinking and they all they can pick their name as well. That does sound more familiar to me. I think I have heard that that dolphins use their names. That's how you know when someone's about to speak on the university challenge. So dolphins would be good on that. Yeah, Thompson Edinburgh, yeah.

Flipper, UCL. Quite useful for people who forget people's names though. Wouldn't that be a great social habit if everyone had to say their own name before they started speaking? Oh my life would be a lot easier. So much better, yeah. Under European regulations pigs have to be mentally stimulated because I think pigs are quite intelligent so they get easily bored.

So they've developed Pig Chase, the pig video game. Have you guys seen this? And you can play a video game with a pig as a person and they have this huge screen in their style and there's like a glowing light on it and you control the light and the pig snuffles up and follows the light and the aim is to get your finger on the iPad to make contact with the pig snout on the light and then you guide it towards a goal

and then you score and there's a big display of fireworks. They're very good at it apparently. That was great. I'd love to play a pig in a computer game. I'd say the higher chance of winning, yeah. You used to be able to play chickens at knots and crosses in America. They had these machines, there was definitely one in Coney Island, I'm not sure where the others were but there were a few,

and it was impossible to beat them because it's impossible to lose at knots and crosses if you play the right move. They were trained to always go in the right place and so you would play these chickens at knots and crosses and you could never beat them. Wow. So if you can't beat a chicken at knots and crosses, Andy, I don't fancy your chances playing a pig at call of duty. Okay, now it's time for a final fact of the show

and that is Andy Hunter Murray. Okay, my fact is that the 1888 Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Wales reads Sea England. Does it mean a place where you can see England? That's right. I think it's, so I just thought this would be time to rectify this, you know, historical imbalance and poor treatment by Britannica. But James, actually you found something that makes this more complicated

although it's not just an example of England being totally, you know, anti-well sure. No, I've seen the assertion on a few websites and I found the text of the actual Britannica and it seems like the thing which is entitled England is actually about England and Wales, it's about South Britain. In the article for England, it says, legal phraseology is not quite consistent on this head but the more accurate description of South Britain

is England and Wales rather than England only. And in the article, they mention England and Wales as the whole thing rather than just England. I see, that's good in a way, you know. Yeah, so I thought Wales, time for Wales. I like Wales. They've got the world's largest underground trampoline. Oh yeah, I really want to go there.

It's about to launch, yeah. Yeah, I think it's open now, I think. Yeah, about two weeks ago. No, sorry, what? Oh my god. It's larger than St Paul's Cathedral and it's a place that's already famous because it has the world's longest zip buyer.

Oh wow, we'll put photos of the underground trampoline up here because this is unbelievable. James, you've got a mug here which has a Welsh word on it. Yeah, the Welsh train place which is the longest single word train place in the UK on Anglesey. Yeah, can you say the word? I can try.

Go for it. Might not be spot on but it's something like Now, if you've spotted any mistakes in that write in to James' personal mobile phone number which I'll read out now. But the thing about that is that that was a manufactured name. Yeah, it's called Llanfair PG, Llanfair Paul Gwyneth

and they added all the extra bits I think as a publicity stunt. They wanted a record. Oh really? Yeah, it was a very early publicity stunt where they tried to turn themselves into a notable town and it worked. There are loads of places which have done that. There's a place called...

Oh god, what's it called? Hamilton, Ohio which has an exclamation mark after Hamilton. Yeah, but they changed it. They just voted on it in the 70s to put the exclamation mark in. Yeah. They hadn't just turned themselves into a musical. No, it sounds like a musical, doesn't it?

Yeah. But they wanted more tourists and they wanted more revenue from tourists so they did that and I think it worked. But also... That's the best they could come up with, put an exclamation mark in their name. Well, I mean it's cost effective, isn't it?

Yeah. I went to Llanfair... We'll definitely get letters for that one. Say the short one. Llanfair PG. I went there because I was in North Wales and it was about a 50 mile drive from where I was but I just wanted to go to that place

and I bought a mug. So... There we go. Now if everyone did that, they'd sell 60 million mugs a year. There was a town in America as well that claimed to be the center of the universe. Danny Wallace did this as a book

because no one else knew where the center of the universe was. The mayor said something like, I've spoken to a lot of physicists and astrophysicists and they said that the universe doesn't really have a center. So if no one else is claiming to have it, then I think we'll have it. And he claimed there was like a bench or a manhole cover or something in the middle of the town.

He said, right, this is the center of the universe and they put a little plaque up. Amazing. Good gimmick. I think that was quite fun. Yeah, so... Okay, that was pretty bold of Britannica to do that. But you're saying that's a bit of a disputed...

No, it's not disputed. They definitely did do that and Wales obviously deserves its own section in that we have a 1911 Britannica in this office and that has a very large section on Wales. So they soon amended it. Yeah, I was wondering if when you said, when you told us this fact,

whether maybe if you turned to England, it would have an entry that was like Sea Wales, which did used to happen. So there's this guy's written this really good book called Reading the OED. It's by Amon Shea and he read the whole OED recently. It was before it was re-edited in 2007, I think. So you read the OED from before that

and found a bunch of hilarious stuff, one of which was the word un-poetic for which the entry just said C-F below and the word below was un-poetical and it said C-F above. So that was quite a good one. Oh, lovely. There are other excellent ones. So there's one that's created for the word dis-gib-el-in,

which is D-I-S-G-H-I-B-E-L-L-I-N-E. And the definition is to distinguish as a guelph from a gib-el-in. Someone was really proud of himself for coming up with that as well. It sounds like Leah, doesn't it? Sounds like a milf, guelph. A grey whale, I'd like. Friend.

In the first edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, which is even more basic and rude than the 1888 one, rude is in simple, not as in rude. But the entry for woman just says the female of man, C-Homo. And the entry on tobacco says that excessive use is capable of quotes drying up the brain to a little black lump consisting of mere membranes.

They should put that on cigarette packets, shouldn't they? Yeah. There was a book. You know in the OED how you have sources for each of the things. So it'll have, what was that word you just said? Dis-gib-el-in. It would have dis-gib-el-in and then it would have the source for where they found it, which book they found it in.

There are 51 words in the OED which have the source meanderings of memory by someone called Nightlark. And no one knows what that book is. Did they know who Nightlark is? Nope. That's great. Just very quickly on this idea of the mysterious book, yeah. I read this story when I was looking into stuff about posting

yourself across the country. In 1976, so starting in 1976 residents in a small town called Circleville in Ohio, population 13,000, they all started receiving these letters accusing them of various misdeeds and the letters were just anonymous. No one knew but everyone in the town was getting them. Wow. And they had theories as to who was sending them.

There was a theory that it was a writer called Ron Giuseppe who was writing them but then he mysteriously died. But the letters continued coming to them until the 1990s and then they just stopped. It's a bit like I know what you did last summer and I know what you did last summer and I know what you did last summer. I don't know what they did last summer. I've never seen it.

Oh, they killed someone with a car. Spoiler alert. So bringing it back to Wales, it does at least get the chance to laugh in our faces when we cock up, which we often do where Wales is concerned. So street signs are quite a famous example, aren't they? There was that sign that went up in Wales a couple of years ago. So there was the English above which said something like take the next left if you want to get to X place

and then the translation in Welsh below actually translated as I am not in the office at the moment, send any work to be translated. There's a sign between Cardiff and Penarth that tells cyclists that they've got a problem with an inflamed bladder. That's what the translation is. And there's a sign for pedestrians in Cardiff that reads look right in English. And the Welsh translation below is look left.

Okay, that's it. That's the end of our show. Those are all of our facts. Thanks everyone for listening. If you want to get in contact and talk more about the stuff that we've been mentioning on this podcast, you can get Andy on at Andrew Hunter M James at egg shaped Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com.

And if you want to get through to me to save me from being fired for all of my missed facts, I want to help me out on the idea that maybe camels do vomit up stuff that we can then re eat that bubbles are taken out of sparkling water and reintroduced into the bottle on the other side of the journey. I can be gone at Shriverland. You can also go to qi.com slash podcast where we're going to have all of the facts that we've been talking about

as well as links to further research to extra videos and pictures of that giant trampoline and so on. And we've also got all the other episodes that we've done. And you can explore those pages as well. We're going to be back again next week. Goodbye. Just to add a post podcast addendum to that, Dan and Andy are currently absent from the QI offices,

both performing shows in Edinburgh. They've got two shows each. So Andy's got ostentatious and fully addu. So obviously go to both of those multiple times if you're listening and Dan will be performing his stand up cock blocked from outer space. And he's also going to be in the Museum of Curiosity, which is doing live shows at Edinburgh. So anyone who's anywhere near there should definitely go to see them apparently there.

Apparently they're quite funny. And if you'd like to buy any ham, please go to Mr Fella's ham shop in Oxford. Do. Best ham in the country and the oldest.