No Such Thing As A Fish - 246: No Such Thing As The Worm Revolution

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the Royal Anagrammist, the man from M.O.U.L.D, and Darwin's publisher's not-so-helpful notes.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Anna Chazitzky, Andrew Hunter Murray, 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 is a special language in Papua New Guinea that is only used when gathering nuts.

It's very weird. So can you only use it when gathering nuts? Usually picking the nut, or when you're on your way to pick the nut? In the general nut-picking area. So if you try and use it outside the area where the trees are, then there's a worry that mountain spirits might come down and investigate and then cause problems with the nuts. Okay.

Basically, this is a taboo language. This is relatively common around the world, and you change your language whenever you're doing anything as a superstition, and eventually it becomes an actual language or an actual vocabulary of more than a thousand words in this case. And what's the idea that the spirits will steal the nuts from you? What's the fear here? So some normal words that you might use like say, I don't know, I'm making these up, but like wither or dry or dead or whatever, they might be bad for the plants, they might be

unhealthy for the plants, and so you have to use alternative words that wouldn't be generally unhealthy to the plants. And is this, if you were going to be part of the nut gathering unit, would you have to study this language or does everyone know this language? That's a really good point. I don't know, but I imagine they teach it to you. It's probably not the first thing you learn. It's probably more like a second language, I think.

So it's really weird. There seem to be two different kinds of belief. One is that there's a spirit called Keto Meida who can rip people apart, but that's only one group of people, that's only one social group, because there are loads of different groups all over New Guinea, and lots of them gather the nuts, and they travel in from the coast to the mountains to get to the nut area. And the other is that, as you say, that if you talk about wet things, then all the nuts you find will be really wet, and if you use words like empty or bitter, same deal.

But it's two completely separate beliefs about why you have to use this language as well. So then you have a euphemism for empty or bitter or wet, but then that starts to mean that. So then surely that becomes bad luck, and then you've got to make a new one, right? So this is a thing called perjuration, and it happens in English as well. So for example, the word for the toilet, in the 15th century it was privy, and then that was replaced by a euphemism, but then that, which was, it was replaced by bog house, which I didn't know.

That was the polite way you'd say it instead of privy, because privy was rude. And then toilet, but then toilet becomes rude, so then lavatory, and now in America it's restroom, but as soon as people really associate restroom, as soon as that becomes the rude word, they'll have to think of another even more remote word for it. So what is it in Britain then? I think bathroom, people say bathroom to be polite, don't they? But it will move on. Shall we make a new one quickly now?

Can we not go back to bog house? The privy, oh sorry, the bog house. Only when you're around the Queen. In a similar vein, our word for bear in the Middle Ages was taboo, because so it probably came from ursus. So you know, obviously you have ursa major and stuff, and that's the Latin for bear. But because bears were big scary things, it was thought to bring bear rage upon you if you said their name, so people would refer to them as the brown one, or the shaggy one.

And so the word for bear comes from the word for brown, it's like bruh. And in China, you can't say the word tiger in some places, so if you're speaking about a man-eating tiger, you'll use a different word, often referred to as big insect. There's a massive insect down the road. I think you'd be more terrified if someone said there's a large insect behind you and you turned around and it was a tiger. I would say just give them the warning straight out. So it's to prevent it from coming into the village.

So you don't, if there's a tiger behind you, you probably say tiger, but if you say big insect, then it won't hear its name and it won't come down. So I won't know, it's been summoned. So you'll get summoned instead. Loads of big insects. Yes, at least there's no insects. Yeah. In Papua New Guinea, so this language, even though this is language purely for picking

up nuts, the diversity of language in Papua New Guinea is extraordinary. I think it's the highest diversity in the world. So they have over 800 languages, 850 languages, and they have so much. This is what's crazy, population versus the amount of languages that they have. There's this thing called the Greenbergs Diversity Index, which charts how much diversity language is in per country. It says Papua New Guinea holds the top spot. It is so diverse there that the probability of two random people selected

in the country, any two random people, if they were brought to each other to talk to each other, there's a 98.8% chance that they won't speak the same language. Isn't that crazy? That's a bad speed dating. Yeah. So how do you have courts and things like that? How do you have schools? They must have a national language of, let's say, English or something.

Exactly. They've got, they've actually got four official languages in Papua New Guinea. The fourth being sign language as the official language. But that's exactly what it is. Everyone speaks a main language, and then these are all other languages that are slowly going extinct and one or two speakers left. Yeah, because they've got English that's very widely spoken there. And then they've got Toko Pusin, haven't they, which is pigeon talk.

So just pigeon English, which is great. And I just love all kinds of pigeon English or kind of Creole when you read them because it's such a funny warping of what we say. So the word for broken in Toko Pusin is bagarapim, which is bugger up from bugger up. That's what you now say, broken, empty tin is a person who talks nonsense, you know, like an empty person, like an empty vessel, an empty vessel. Exactly.

Su-soc man is a sophisticated person. Su-soc man. Why? James might know this. Oh, James, you always wear sock socks. Is that it? You always say there's a phrase that you used to say when you were growing up to say that someone's a bit well to do. Oh, look at you, we'd be matching shoes.

Exactly. Same thing. Su-soc man means person with shoes and socks. Oh, look at you. Look at you, you're matching shoes. There you go. You'd fit right in. I didn't know that Papua New Guinea is the second-largest island in the world. I didn't know that either. It's massive.

It depends what you count as an island, of course. Very true, yeah. If you count Eurasia as an island, I'm down to three immediately. It doesn't include Australia. It doesn't include Australia. After, I think it's after Greenland, yeah, it's... The country is called Papua New Guinea.

The whole island is called New Guinea, but the western half of it, which is part of Indonesia, is Papua and West Papua. And then you also have Guinea and Guinea-Bissau and Guyana. Yeah. It's absolutely nightmare-affusing. Germany, I often get that mixed up. I looked up a couple more taboos.

So this is an interesting one. There's an Ethiopian language called Kanbata, and it's got marital linguistic taboos. That's quite common, isn't it? Yeah, so a woman can't use some married women to follow this system, which is called balisha, and it means that they are not allowed to use words that begin with the same syllable

as your father-in-law's name or your mother-in-law's name. So... So my mother-in-law is called Natalia. So you wouldn't be able to say... Talk about Natajaktoads. You wouldn't be able to talk about Natajaktoads at all. You'd have nothing to say. And you'd have to coin a completely different word for them.

I just call them Toads, always. Yeah. So it's not such a problem for James, which is great. What syllable would you not be allowed to use? Leel. Leel, so you won't be able to talk about the northern French city. Right. Where is this Yorostar going to?

You'll see when we get there. Shouldn't have become a train announcer. Yeah, that's really cool. Well, there's another kind of gender-based specific language I was looking at in Nigeria, actually. So I guess the thing you're talking about is a language specific to one thing. And this is a language in the Uban community in Nigeria,

and they have different languages for men and women. And they say they think they're the only tribe in the world who has this. It would be even worse for speak-dating, wouldn't it? I don't know how it works. And it's also bizarre, because when people are born, then you get raised by your mother and your sisters and generally women.

So everyone speaks the women's language. But then, apparently, there was an interview with one of the tribal leaders who said that, as boys start reaching adolescence, they just start speaking the male language. And it's completely different. I mean, the words are utterly different. And he's like, if boys don't start speaking the male language,

then we consider them a bit abnormal. What a rough adolescence is that. You're like, shit, I've got to sort of memorise secretly this language. I'm supposed to miraculously start speaking. We talk about toxic masculinity in this country, don't we? But that is pretty bad. You know, sometimes when you're at a restaurant

and you see a couple who just don't speak to each other the whole meal. I presume every restaurant is like that. Relationships are constantly awkward. That's so weird. So the males can still speak the... Yeah, they can understand each other. They're just not allowed to speak each other's language anymore.

I know. I was reading about a secret language that was used in wartime in Canada. And it was very cleverly done because it was... It's a secret language in that not many people spoke it. So they were in the Canadian army, they enlisted these native North Americans. And they spoke Cree.

And Cree was a language that barely anyone speaks. It's only these people. And so what they used to do is in between battalions, they would have Cree speakers and any messages that they needed to send across. It was those people who took it. So if they were caught, there was no way of getting the information out of them

because the language barrier was so great. So yeah, but the problem was is that Cree didn't have words for the things that they needed to get across. So things like they had tanks and machine guns and bombers. So a machine gun, they had to translate into their language, which is little gun that shoots fast. Or a fighter bomber would be the Cree word for mosquito because that was the best way of explaining it.

So yeah, they had to invent new words and new phrases in order to do this. That's so cool. That's interesting because there were planes called mosquitoes, weren't there? That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember I'd flew one of those. Were they the ones that were slightly made of wood?

Yes, they were. I'm pretty sure that was mosquitoes. I think, yeah. Or partly wooden frame. That's very cool. I have some stuff on gathering nuts. Oh, great. So don't go gathering hazelnuts on September the 21st

in Birmingham. Why? Because that is Devil's Nutting Day. Apparently, according to an old folklore, Satan comes out at that time and he collects his nuts on September the 21st. So you leave it for him to do. And where is this? Birmingham?

It's in the West Midlands, basically. And there's an old saying of something being dirty. In Birmingham, you would say it's the color of the Devil's Nutting Bag. Oh. You're ever in Birmingham? A bit of local slag for you to use. Yeah, that's going to go down like an absolute charm.

You're the coolest kid at the party. Just on not gathering, it's quite dangerous sometimes, isn't it? So if you're gathering big nuts, then they can fall on you. And what? I mean, you love. That is a genuine danger. Like coconuts.

So if you're going to have coconuts, then they always go hard nuts. I picture nuts on the ground as opposed to in the tree. No, sorry. Yeah, from the tree. OK, coconuts, obviously. It's not like you're just crawling on the ground and you keep bumping into nuts and then.

But I like the, so gathering Brazil nuts, then foragers wear hats and they don't collect them on windy days and stuff like that. But I didn't realize that when they fall out of trees, they fall from so high that they'll bury themselves 30 centimetres into the ground. So when you're not gathering for Brazil nuts, then you're digging up the ground to get the nuts out.

Isn't that weird? Because they're quite spiky, are they, Brazil nuts? They are on the outside, yes. So do you reckon they're made like that so that they, because it's quite clever if you're a nut, isn't it, to kind of go directly into the ground and not have to get trampled in, because that's where you want to be in the end.

Absolutely. But if you're a worm, that must be terrifying. If you're a worm. Going through the soil. He suddenly slaps. Daggers are coming down. That'd be amazing. He's slicing your friend in half and now you've got two friends.

That's quite nice. The only species where watching your friend be cut in half is quite nice. The worm French Revolution would have been really weird, wouldn't it? We've doubled the aristocrats. The worm James Bond, where the laser comes down, it just cuts him into two James Bonds.

No Messers Bond. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that the man who worked out how to stop soft cheese going moldy came from a place called Mold. So, Anna, just before this, we started recording, we asked it saying that it's pronounced mold. Yeah, mold.

Mold. Mold. Mold. Mold. Mold. Mold. Yeah, mold. Is that what you just said?

Yeah, I think I said mold. So, it's a place called mold. It's in Norway, and you sort of say it molder, but it's still got the word mold in it. I mean, it is still quite amazing. That was very cool. This is a great fact written down. Yeah.

It looks pretty good. As long as you spell mold the American way. So, if you're reading this podcast, then great. In America. So, this was a Norwegian cheese maker. He was called Olaf Kavli. And, yeah, he grew up in this municipality in Norway, and he was actually really old when he invented Primula,

which is that, do you laugh because I pronounce it old, not older. He ended up inventing Primula, which is, you know, that cheese that you see that comes in a squeezy tube. That's interesting. I always pronounce that Primula. Same.

I think it probably is pronounced Primula, and in fact, it's named after Primroses because he thought the beautiful yellow color was reminded him of the beautiful yellow of the yellow Primros. So, Primula makes a lot more sense. Anyway, yeah, he discovered this and then he got really rich. And he, I quite like this because it gives us all hope

for our future later years of being finally successful rather than hanging out with you, Dorks, because he was in his 60s when he came up with this. He just ran this delicatessen. It's not good for your next 30 years, no matter what it is. 30 years of hanging around with us, Dorks, until you managed to invent some cheese. You're right, I'm not going to last that long.

He actually lived to 100, lived in 1958. Cool. And also, a good thing to know about Primula, and I'm actually going to start buying it, is that all... Well, now that you can pronounce it, it's like easier. But all the prophets go to charity, go to good causes because he was a massive philanthropist

and then his son was and didn't have any offspring. And so set up the company, which is the, I think it's called the Cavalry Trust, and it's legally required to donate all its profits to scientific humanitarian charitable causes. But yeah, cheese, and stopping cheese going moldy, it's been a problem for centuries. That just on the place called Molder, or Mold,

its name comes from the word Mold, without any on the end. It's a plural form of that place. And the word Mold in Norwegian means either fertile soil, skull, or mold. Wow. It might actually mean... It might actually be Mold, that's very cool. So I was looking up moldy cheeses, or soft cheeses.

So there's a cheese called Cougar Gold, which is made in Washington State University. And this is really weird. So it's canned soft cheese, but it's canned when it's still in the curd form. So it develops as it ages. As in it's not, once it's gone into the can, it doesn't stay the same.

Yeah. So the lactic acid bacteria inside, they don't need oxygen. So the flavor keeps developing. And there are fans who aged their cans for years and years before opening them. And it's just curds. I think it goes in as curd.

No way. Nobody? No? No, yeah. It was too good. I just had to sit back in them and just stare in awe. I can now, looking back when you said... 30 bar years out of 30 bar years.

That's it, I'm done. Yeah, that's really cool. So there's no use by date on it, presumably? Maybe there is for safety as in maybe after a certain number of years it does go off, but I'm not sure. So when processed cheese came about, which this is an example of, then it was very controversial

because it threatened the normal cheese market. And there were actually a lot of cheese makers in America who said it should be called embalmed cheese, which it was almost named. That's so good. But I hadn't quite realized that it's just a blend of lots of other cheeses, which I think most people will,

but like offcuts of the cheese making process. So for instance, I think American cheese, you know your classic American processed cheese is a combination of bits of cheddar, Colby, provolone, things like that. That's incredible. And then they add sodium phosphate, which kind of makes it all go goopy.

And that but quite easy to slice and stuff like that. And that was invented, American cheese by a Canadian, of course, who was James Lewis Kraft of Kraft fame. Of Kraft cheese. Yeah, he was a Canadian and he kind of came up with this idea of kind of shredding it and then adding this stuff, which makes it kind of cuttable.

Weird, yeah. So it's kind of a Franken cheese. Yeah. And they pasteurize it so it doesn't ripen. So it's really not proper cheese as the French might know it by the time it's been processed. So for instance, Belvita has to be called pasteurized prepared cheese product.

It does. Did you know that's only since the early 90s, which is when they finally worked out a way to make the base not real cheese at Kraft. So it was a really exciting moment because instead of like using just this mixture of cheese and then adding this sodium phosphate and stuff, they worked out a way of cracking milk,

which I didn't know was a thing. But basically this is you add little bits of plastic membrane into milk and it causes all the milk particles to separate and it separates out into its milk protein lumps and it makes this kind of concentrated protein and that can be the base for their cheese. And it was at that moment

when some inspectors went around their factories and they went, guys, you're not using cheese anymore. I'm afraid you have to call it cheese products. How did they come up with this shit? Yeah. So weird. I always think the other day I found out this is completely off topic, but early cars had white tires.

Right. And the only reason that we have tires that are black is because you add something called, I think it's called black carbon, which is just this tiny bit of weird carbon that they managed to get from the industrial process. And they just thought, let's just try it with rubber. And it turned out to make rubber 10,000 times more solid

than normal. Wow. But even on that, I was like, how do you even think of that? Are they just trying everything or what? I can't believe early cars had white tires. That's so cool. But an absolute nightmare to keep clean. Exactly.

You would just naturally have a black tire after a week. Yeah. It'd be as dirty as the devil's nut sack. Sorry, I just checked. Nutting bag. Nutting bag, that's it. I'm going to embarrass myself in Birmingham by getting that wrong.

I'm just thinking the difference between your brain and mine, James, is that you're fascinated by the fact that all these processes go on. And I'm still busy here going, wow, there was an actual guy called Kraft. That was a real person. I can't believe that.

So I looked off a bit about food preservation. I don't think we've spoken before about Nicholas Apert or Apert. So he was the man who started preserving foods by heating it a lot and then putting it in an airtight container. So this was in the Napoleonic Wars and there was a massive prize on offer

from the French army to anyone who could work out how to safely preserve food and keep it for long periods of time because it couldn't be done. And he invented it and it was called Apertization and he put all his food in glass jars, in fact, not in tins.

So he won the prize and it was decades before microbe theory. So he had invented safe food storage but he didn't know how it worked. It's so good when that happens now. And then later on, there was a British innovator called Peter Durand and he invented giant tins.

So you know how you have a normal tin of beans or something, it's a normal size. He was keen to scale up for the Royal Navy and he stored up to 13 and a half kilos of meat in a single can. I'm already gonna go on the limb and say that's not an invention. Making a much, much bigger version of something

that's already, I couldn't invent the giant book. Yeah, exactly. Well, not with that attitude, young lady. Yeah, we're talking about a Guinness World Record attempt, think of it, it's a quarter of a person's size. Oh my God, Andy's showing us how big it is with his hands and he's right, it's an invention. Okay, innovator, he innovated it.

He innovated, it's very impressive though. Wasn't he the same guy who was in this, the one where it was like 30 years until they invented something to a specific tin opener, didn't they? So in the Napoleonic Wars, they all used their, what those instruments called, bayonets, yeah.

Another name thing I came across, I was looking up some cheese studies and there was a cheese study in the Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition that was published in 2003. It was called Cheeses, colon, Process Cheese and the author was called a Gouda. Isn't that weird?

No. Yeah, quite an unusual surname. If you're surprised that there was a person called Kraft. I know. But I think you'd be biased if you were called Gouda, a proper cheese. I'm not sure I would trust you to write a balanced article about Process Cheese.

Yeah, you're right. It's like being called Baby Bell and writing about the cheddar industry. That is named after a guy called Bell, isn't it? Is it? So I think the Lafincale Company was founded by the Bell brothers or maybe it was a father and son

and their surname was B-E-L. So I think Baby Bell is named after a guy as well. That's awesome. And also at one point would have been a baby. Yeah, so was the father, actually, yeah. The thing about Lafincale, by the way, which I did see is I went on the website and they have one top secret technology there

that they've never given away to anyone else. OK. Do you know what that is? Oh, how to cut your triangles. Is it folding the foil? Kind of, yeah. Is it the red thing? How you get the red thing to peel off so perfectly?

Yeah, that's right. It's the easy open foil wrapping technology, which according to the website, it remains top secret to this day. Wow. It's not a technology that we're crying out, oh, guys. What?

That would be so useful. That would be inventor destroyer. That would be so useful for so many things. Yeah, imagine if you had it for your clothes. And whenever you needed to get undressed at the night, you start to pull one red string and you start completely undressed. You've got that.

It's a zip. Stripshoes would be a lot shorter, wouldn't they? If there was one Baby Bell style peel-off thing. I found a weird thing about cheese. Go on. Humans invented cheese before they could digest milk. Okay. What?

Yeah. Okay, so all mammals, you know, they're lactose tolerant when they're very young because they're drinking their mother's milk. And then all mammals are lactose intolerant, or almost all though. And then humans only got the genetic mutation to allow them to drink milk as adults

a few thousand years ago. But, so we couldn't digest lactose. But cheese has much lower lactose than milk. So if you make cheese, you can store all the calories of the animal's milk in cheese form, and that means you can keep the calories for longer, so you'll survive longer,

you'll be better fed. So that gives you a reason to keep animals for longer rather than immediately killing them or hunting them. So that means that you domesticate sheep and cows and all of this, and you make cheese, but you don't drink the milk. But the thing is, like, to make the cheese,

is this not right that what you do is you get the milk and then you get the stomach of a dead animal and you put the milk inside the stomach because it's got acid, which you need, and then you leave it for weeks and weeks and weeks and then you eat it. Yeah. I mean, Anna was talking about things not being invented

because that is an invention that's half, isn't it? It is one of those things that required them to be incredibly bored and wouldn't be able to be invented now because we've all got better things to do than experiment with these bizarre things. And the ancient Greeks used to grate goat's cheese into their beer and wine.

One of the earliest wines, actually, the kind of peasant wine mentioned by Homer is actually wine and goat cheese. Nice. We could try and bring back. I mean, I like wine and cheese. Yeah. Wine and cheese together, but not one inside the other.

At a party, you know, at a party, you've got to hold a plate and you've got to hold a glass and it's really difficult if you ever need to use it. Gesture. Gesture, yeah. If you just put the cheese in the wine. Yeah. I'm going to try that this Christmas.

Are these the Greeks or the Romans? The ancient Greeks. Oh, OK. Do you think as they came here, they would think we were really pretentious? Because you know if you go to some really posh restaurants and they have deconstructed X, Y, Z, like you have a deconstructed crumble,

where the crumble's on one side and do you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, yeah, they'd come and say, you fucking deconstructed wine and cheese drink. Wine on one side and cheese on the other. Anything you want. OK. It's time for fact number three and that is Andy.

My fact is that when Charles Darwin submitted on the origin of species to his publisher, the publisher suggested he should rewrite it exclusively about pigeons. So... Ouch. I know. So there's this article in the London Review of Books

which is reviewing a book all about the publisher John Murray and the correspondence between authors and the publishers over centuries. So it's got all these famous authors like Jane Austen and Lord Byron and David Livingstone and all these people. And the firm sent, on the origin of species out, to two readers when it came in. One of them was a lawyer called George Pollock

who said that it was beyond the apprehension of any living scientist. And the other was this guy called Witwell Elwin, who was a clergyman. And he wrote back saying, look, I like Darwin, but it's a wild and foolish piece of imagination and that it would really be a good book if he just wrote it about pigeons.

That's really good. Because he said, everybody is interested in pigeons. So did, when Elwin then Elrin, sorry, spoke to Murray, did Murray then go back to Darwin and say write it about pigeons? That's what I couldn't work out. Or was it just an internal email kind of thing? Ooh, I don't know.

I don't know whether it got passed on to Darwin. But that wouldn't involve ripping the whole thing to pieces because there's quite a lot of pigeon in there. It's just a shorter book. Yeah. It's a very slight edit, I think. He was really into pigeons, though. I hadn't quite realised how much of a pigeon fancier he was.

So he might have been flattered that his pigeon work was so inspiring. He was a member of two London pigeon clubs. Two? Two? One's not enough. I swear, your wife would be a bit annoyed, wouldn't she? You're spending your time at one pigeon club

and decided to join another. The thing is with the pigeons, it was a bit like breeding dogs, wasn't it? Like, the pigeons were really weird-looking. They bred them to look not like pigeons. Yeah. So they didn't look like the pigeons you'd see on Farmers Play. Really?

Yeah. So breeds that he worked on included the pygmy-powder pigeon, the Polish helmet pigeon, the English long-faced muffin tumbler. Classic. If you look at these pictures, if you google them, they don't look like pigeons at all. There's one.

The English carrier pigeon, which you don't see anymore, it looks almost identical to Jacob Rees-Mogg. Does it? It really, really does. Like, honestly, if you google it, it just looks like Jacob Rees-Mogg. You should put up a picture on Twitter. I will, I will.

Because they're extinct, aren't they? So maybe he's actually the one surviving member of the species. We need to start breeding him. He is breeding last, it's fine. Because there were these ones called powders, which are really weird, because they bred them to grow this- they're bizarre birds,

because it looks like they swallowed a bowling ball, basically. Oh, yeah. They've got this huge- they've got this huge lump under their- under their chins, as it were, in their neck. It's really strange. Well, I find it weird that we're so used to

are just very standard pigeons, when there are- there is this huge variety. So if you go to pigeon contests and pigeon beauty pageants, which you can, they're quite a big deal in the Middle East, in fact, then they look almost nothing like pigeons. A lot of them have that kind of gross,

turkey-like red bulbous stuff around their eyes. But yeah, it's a very popular thing. They've been big in the Middle East since 1150, when the first pigeon post service was set up in Baghdad, and it took messages from Baghdad to Syria. And by the 1160s, then it was, you know, it was constantly taking messages back and forth

to the extent that in the Crusades, the Christians brought loads of falcons over with them to try and intercept the pigeon post in the Middle East. So they were the first hackers who would grab their messages. They all used to do a lot of homing pigeon races, which still go on to this day, but that's been going since the 1800s.

And I was reading about one in China that happened very recently, and it's a huge prize for this. It's a big deal in China. So 160,000 American dollars would be the prize for the winning homing pigeon. So they get sent 100 miles away, and they have to fly back to this spot.

And the fastest speed that a homing pigeon has ever done is they go about 100 miles an hour. What? Yeah. But... No way. 100 miles an hour? They've clocked speeds faster than 100 miles an hour.

But the ones that won would have had to have gone 200 miles an hour, the first four places, and they couldn't work out how that was possible. And it turns out what it was is the owners of the pigeons had them fly off but immediately come back, hopped on a bullet train,

which can go 200 miles an hour, get to the other side and release them, and they won, but they have been caught and sentenced to prison. I think that's such a silly cheat, because you will be caught, because pigeons don't fly at 200 miles an hour. Sorry, did you say they got sent to prison?

Not the pigeons, the humans. Still. Well, it's a huge prize, isn't it? It's $160,000, so that's, yeah. Yeah, they go for a lot. I think a Chinese guy recently bought one for half a million dollars, American dollars. They go for a huge amount of money.

I should say they were sentenced to three years, but it was a suspended sentence. So if another crime occurs, then they go to prison. Don't do it again. Have you guys heard of the Spanish sport, which is called, it's thieving. It's a pigeon-thieving competition. No.

This is amazing. So it's basically pigeon love island. You get, you're a pigeon fancier, and you have a male, so half a dozen men each bring a male pigeon, and they paint them in bright colours to mark which one is theirs. And then there's a marked female,

and the male pigeons all compete to seduce the female, and the aim is to get them to come home with them, because this is a very unusual pigeon. It's called the horseman-thief powder, and it, unusually, it makes by bringing its mate back to its place for sex, and so... How do you know that they're all fancy her, though?

I think all pigeons just all fancy all other pigeons. Yeah, they are actually quite randy, aren't they? These ones are not choosy, yeah. And so the owner wins if his male is the one who wins the seduction competition with the female. Yeah! A little strut around, and they, you know, they dance, and they do little...

That was some excellent pigeon strutting there. And this happens in Scotland, too. It's called do, basically. The pigeon's called do's, D-E-O-O. And if you see a pigeon flying up, and you know that one of your rival do-men has released their pigeon, you release your pigeon of the opposite sex,

and then there's this battle in the skies over who goes back to whose place. And if the pigeon comes back to your place, you get to keep both pigeons. It must be confusing, because they're completely painted, right? So that's almost the equivalent human-wise of going to a Halloween party and fancying someone who's just come as a skeleton.

But you get on well, and then the next morning... And you're like, oh, you putt-and-white? Pigeons were the first drones in a way, weren't they? Or some of the first drones. In that, there was... In 1907, this guy called Dr. Julius Neurbronner, which I will have pronounced incorrectly, sorry, but he was a German apothecary,

and he invented the pigeon camera. And this was a very exciting invention at the time. It was thought to be quite revolutionary, because a couple of cameras have been sent up on balloons and stuff, but this was really acting like a proper drone, so he'd strap it like a backpack onto the pigeon's chest, like a chest pack, and send them off to fly through the air.

And they took amazing aerial photographs. It's so worth looking at them. They are like beautiful pictures. And I hadn't really considered that for most people, seeing those was bizarre, because they'd never seen pictures taken from above. Oh, yeah. There's a whole school of First World War artists,

or post-First World War art, which is derived from aerial photography and aerial landscapes, because it just wasn't... I guess you saw maps, but you could see it from the top of a hill or something, but not from that. You'd never be able to see a city from above, which would be impossible.

He also actually invented a horse-drawn dove cut, a home for the pigeons and doves, that he was strapping the cameras to, and darkroom, which is quite cool, to go with the pigeon cameras, so that when you thought, oh, I suddenly want to photograph this city, you'd take your whole horse-drawn dove cut

and darkroom inside to where it was, and then you could send them off. Just one last quick thing on Darwin. Maybe you guys all knew this, but I didn't realise that in the origin of the species, in the sixth edition, he added a new chapter, which was responding to all the criticisms from previous editions of his book.

Really? I think that's such a good idea. Yeah, that's a great idea. That's great. We should do that with the Book of the Year. I think you'll find the Wasps article is funny. How many people wrote in saying not enough pigeons? Did you have loads of responses? I just have one last thing.

It's not great, but I'll mention it anyway. Oh, yeah. Bugle up. This is just a fact on publishers getting it wrong. So, in this fact, it's the pigeon suggestion. This has just happened. In Australia, there's a businesswoman in socialite called Roxy Jacenko, and she's just released a book.

Now, she's very famous as a PR specialist, and she was on Celebrity Apprentice in Australia, so she's a big name there. So, the book is described as a no-bullshit guide to PR, social media, and building your brand, and it had all these glowing reviews on it, being Street Smart and Hard-Headed. She's a totally tenacious PR expert,

but they've had to pulp every single one of the copies of the book because it also included, as a result of the publisher's mistake, a quote that was a misquote that said on the front that the book never fails to disappoint. So, it might say never fails to deliver, but, yeah, total PR disaster. Time for our final fact of the show, and that's my fact.

My fact this week is that King Louis XIII of France had a royal anagramist. Wow. Yeah. This was like, you know, you'd have a court jester, and you would also have your royal anagramist who would just be there, ready to make anagrams for the amusement of the king.

That really was the role. He did a number of things with anagrams. It wasn't just amusing name remixes. It was... He used to do prophecies as well, using anagrams, and, yeah, so it had a lot of mystical purposes as well as... I wonder if he could make an anagram of Louis XIII, because there's an X and three I's in there.

That's pretty so funny. If he can do that, he deserves a job. You can get six. I've got the word six there from Louis and then the X, and then you've got L-O-U and then three I's. You've got we in French. Yeah. We, six, L-I-I. I'm really bad at doing anagrams,

because I always end up with spare letters. Ili means awe in Russian. The Romans supposedly... There's a thing called Ars Magna, the great art, and supposedly the Romans called anagraming Ars Magna, which is an anagram of the word anagrams, but I don't think they used... I don't think they knew the word anagrams,

because they didn't have a plural form, which just adds an S to the main noun. Normally, there are a few weird ones where it does, but anyway, I don't think that is true, but it does come from the Greek, anagrama design, from ana, which means backwards, and grammar, which means letter. So it's putting the letters backwards.

This is not the two ends, which means excellent. Ana meaning backwards. Considering that Ana is a palindrome, it's quite weird, isn't it? Yeah, that is weird. Anyway. So what about this guy? Who was he?

So yeah, so we're talking the 1600s here. This is when King Louis XIII reigned, and this person... I don't actually know if he had a number of them, but the one person you can find who definitely was one of his royal anagrams was Thomas Billon. So he lived from 1617 to 1647,

and he served as the royal anagramist twice. So there's a suggestion that there might have been another person fulfilling the role in between. Actually, there was a royal Sudoku guy in between. So he did it from 1624 to 1631, and then from 1640 till his death, I guess, in 1647. Maybe he was fired in 31 because he had a leftover letter or something.

But he also predicted people's characters. So he would re-arrange the letters of your name, and if it came out as being, you know, an evil phrase, then people would think badly of you. Do you think as a parent, if you were having a new child, you would deliberately come up with a good word, like an anagram of... You call your child like an anagram of awesome.

Yes. Yeah, you would try and trick it. Amasawi. Moisawi, yes. This is something that I think we might have mentioned on QI, and one of our researchers found the other day, again, that during the whole enlightenment, anagrams were something that fascinated people.

They were thought to portend certain things, like you say, if your name could spell something bad. But also, they were used by lots of scientists as a way of concealing their discoveries whilst also kind of stamping them as their own. So people like Galileo and Robert Hook would record their initial results as an anagram and send it off when they hadn't actually confirmed their results yet,

because that meant once they confirmed their results, they could say, look, I did it first. Look, here's the anagram that proved it. So good. It's like blockchain, I imagine, even though I don't really know what blockchain is. Me neither, but I imagine it is too. But the anagrams were exceptionally poor, weren't they?

Were they? Yeah, so Christian Huygens, he discovered the rings around Saturn, and he wanted an anagram, so he wanted to anagram, Anuto, Singitor, Tenuai, Plano, Nusquam, Coherente, and Ecliptam, Inclinato,

which means it is surrounded by a thin flat ring, nowhere touching inclined to the elliptic, so he wanted to make that. His anagram was A, A, A, A, A, A, C, C, C, C, C, D, E, E, E, E, E, G, H, but he basically put all the letters in alphabetical order. It's not even trying. It's not even trying.

That's really funny. That's funny. Yeah, that's not an anagram, is it? That's like what we said a few weeks ago, the crossword answers didn't have to be actual words. Oh, yeah. The anagram has to be an actual word, Christian. God, that was an easy job then,

if that's all you had to do. Just random things. There are kind of different types of anagram. This is according to a book I was reading for about 100 years ago, I think, which was saying you get a synagram, which is kind of like that, but a synagram is an anagram

where the anagram means the same sort of thing, so vile is a synagram of evil, more angered than raged. 11 plus 2 and 12 plus 1 is a famous one. That blows my mind so far. Every time. As always, yeah. Always a winner.

But imagine if you thought that there were hidden things in anagrams, you would use those as examples of like, look how connected the universe is when we reshuffle this stuff. I would have bought into that immediately. That's great. There's a website called anagrami.com,

which has a monthly award, so the Archbishop of Canterbury is another church's type of rabbi. That's very good. The Amateur Thespians is an anagram of inept hams use theatre. I really like. And do they release something

they want an anagram made of, or are you just submitting? I think you submit your own. Right, okay. And they pick a really good one each month. So they're synagrams. They're synagrams, and then you get antigrams,

which are the ones that mean the opposite. So like, diplomacy is mad policy. That's good. There's a Guinness World Record for the longest anagram that you can get in the English language. And this is for a non-scientific English word, because in the scientific ones,

they live pretty bizarre. So in a non-scientific word... I have known that in the past, but I can't remember it now. Okay, so I'll give you the original word and see if you can make the anagram. So conversationalists. What is the anagram of that?

Conservationists? Yeah. Oh, that's a cheat. I think you should have to rearrange at least four letters. Yeah, that's true. You're just making up rules on the fly. Yeah, I'm allowed.

Yeah, it is a bit. Bit measly, isn't it? What about scones and cones? Yeah, so that's currently the record. No? Why is that not good enough? I think they should have to begin with a different letter.

Scones and cones. Yeah, okay, I'll accept scones and cones, but I'm not... I just came up with that right off the bat, like just a... Did you? Yeah, I didn't even have to think about that. Have you heard of Corey Calhoun?

Nope. He's an anagrammer. I don't think he's a pro, but he's about as close as the modern age gets to a pro anagrammer. So he rearranged the first line of Hamlet's soliloquy to come up with a summary of Hamlet.

Oh, cool. That's just to be or not to be. No. That is the question. Let's see if it passes the Anna test for crazy anagram. So to be or not to be, that is the question,

whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, okay? That he rearranged to make, in one of the band's best thought of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.

That's very good. That's really nice. So good. There's another thing that gets done where these kind of big challenges, where people try to take complete texts and create an anagram, that works so that it just works

as a whole separate work, if that makes sense. So the biggest one that's ever been completed is a guy called Mike Keith, has anagrammed the complete text of Moby Dick. So that's, yeah,

935,763 letters. And he used a computer to do this. So that's seen as a cheat. So the computer did it. Yeah, but there was a person who did do it all by himself, which was Richard Brody, and he made an anagram

of Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift. And that's 42,177 letters. But how much of a different anagram does it be? Could you have the exact same book, but it just is call me mail-ish? The rest of it's exactly the same. So the ancient Greeks had,

this is kind of related, so it's about palindromes, not anagrams, but Greek fountains had a big palindrome written on them, which said, nispon annomin murder me monan opsin. So that's exactly the same

backwards as it is forwards. And it means, wash the sin as well as the face. That's a good one. Isn't that cool for a fountain? Yeah, very good. I do know what the longest palindrome in the English language is.

Oh, go on then. It's redevider. Re-devider. Oh, cool. Just a fact. That's a good fact. Did you guys know the Dutch national anthem

is an acrostic? As in the first letter of each word, spell something out. The first letter of each line spells something else. Oh, cool. So the first letter of,

sorry, the first letter of each of the 15 verses spells out William van Nassau as in William of Orange's name. And it's sung from his perspective. So it's all in the first person. Bizarrely when you're Dutch, you all sing as if you're

William of Orange when you sing the anthem. Isn't there a line where he kind of says, and I give everything to the king of Spain in that national anthem? I think there is, yeah. That's awkward. How weird.

And they were trying to change it, I think. But now you can't really, otherwise the acrostic won't work. It doesn't work. Yeah. It's covered. There was a guy called André Poujon. And this was back in the day

when everyone thought that anagrams were really important and they had some kind of spiritual thing behind them. He worked out that his name was an anagram of Pondu de Rion, which means hanged in Rion. And so he decided to fulfill his destiny

by travelling to the town of Rion and committing criminal offence which meant that he was hanged. Wow. So he actually, you know, made sure that the omen happened. Right. That's a whole poor guy.

Oh no, silly, silly man. There could have been another anagram he might have found where it said, had a relaxing holiday somewhere else. Yeah. I mean, it probably is just a story, isn't it? But it is a story that exists. And that's the bar we've decided to set up.

So there's an anagram thing in our book as well. In the book of the year, there's a thing about Banksy because he submitted an artwork to the Royal Academy under the name Brian S. Gackman which is an anagram of the words Banksy anagram. Yeah, nice. And they did not spot it.

They rejected it and then they asked him, could he submit a work? They just got in touch with Banksy and said, can you submit a work of art? And he sent them the thing that they had already rejected and they accepted it.

Would they have been expected to spot an anagram? Do people naturally have an anagram pass over everything that's submitted? This is an anagram of Moby Dick. Nice try, buddy. Supposedly, if you are asked to solve anagrams against a green background

and then against a red background, you'll do worse on the red background. Really? This has been tried and the people who were exposed to the red background anagrams did substantially worse. Is that because the text was in red

on both times? That was black text. Sorry, so is that... Sorry, I misunderstood. So it's... There's a piece of paper that is red. Yes. And it's got anagrams in black

that need to be solved. As black as the devil's nutsack. It's not. It's not. It's the devil's nutting bag. Nutting bag. No, the language has evolved at this point. It's the nutsack.

There was another paper that suggests that it's easier to solve anagrams while you're laying down rather than standing up. Right. No way. I don't think that's true.

Is it because there's more blood flow in your head? Because the red-green thing is crazy. It suggests that if you do worse on the red, that you're sensitive to the queue of danger. You think these anagrams are dangerous, you know? It must be just that you can't see black on red as well as you can see black on green.

No, it's not. I tried it and actually I did better on the ones with the red background than the green ones. So I would have been an anomaly. You're so brave. Does that mean that you should lead us all into war? I'm now a general in the army.

Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd 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, James.

That's James Harkin. Andy. At Andrew Hooper M. And Czazinski. You can email podcast at qi.com. Or you can go to our website. No such thing as a fish.com. We have everything up there from links

to our upcoming tour, all of our previous episodes, as well as links to buying our book, Book of the Year 2018. Do please buy it. Okay, we'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.

Bye.