No Such Thing As A Fish - 250: No Such Thing As The Mysterious Chamber

Episode Date: January 4, 2019

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss demolishing the Great Pyramid of Giza, with the WWF logo is a panda, and psychopathic teenage angst.

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, I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and Anna Chazinski and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Andy. My fact is that in 1833 the Pyramid at Giza was almost dismantled by the Pasha of Egypt so that he could use the stones to build a dam.

Wow. That's brilliant. That's amazing. And why did he not do it in the end? He was talked out of it. I'm not so sure you want to destroy the most ancient site in the world. So this was in 1833 and it was when Egypt was Ottoman ruled so it wasn't a local Egyptian ruler exactly and he was called Muhammad Ali Pasha and he did a sort of cost benefit analysis

or he commissioned one from a civil servant to see how much it would cost and the civil servant was a Frenchman and he thought maybe it wasn't a good idea for the pyramid to be destroyed. His name was Linol, Louis-Maurice Adolf Linol and he was really young, it was one of his first jobs but I think the story goes that he thought maybe this isn't a great idea. So he came up with this cost benefit analysis which said, look, this is going to be quite expensive and some of the stone isn't quite right and I know it's precut and I know that's really convenient obviously but maybe don't do it.

They did actually take some blocks, didn't they, from one of the pyramids? Yeah, it was one of the great pyramids, wasn't it? You can see that big gash down the side of it. So it was the pyramid of Menkaure and it was a guy called Sultan al-Aziz Uthman and he was in the 12th century and he decided to demolish the pyramids because he thought that they were not according to his religion, let's put it that way. And they took a few stones every day and after eight months they came up just like that says just this tiny little gash on the side of the pyramid because they just realised that

these things are absolutely massive. So I was looking up people visiting the pyramids and because this is about them in the 19th century. So it turns out that people have been scribbling on the pyramids for many, many years. And Flowbear, Gustav Flowbear, a great French writer visited Egypt in 1850 and he was so annoyed by all the graffiti everywhere. He wrote to his uncle, he said there was a huge number of imbeciles names written everywhere and then he went to Alexandria, he was really excited about Alexandria and then he wrote

back saying, a certain Thompson of Sunderland has inscribed his name in letters six feet high on Pompeii's column. It can be read a quarter of a mile off. There is no way of seeing the column without seeing the name of Thompson. This imbecile has become part of the monument and is perpetuated with it. Yeah, I saw that and then I also thought, well, let me see if I can find out who Thompson from Sunderland is. So I was googling for, I spent quite a lot this morning doing this, but I tried to find

people called Thompson from Sunderland around that time and what I reckon is there was a ship builder called Thompson and he started his company about 15 years before this happened. And eventually became quite a big ship builder in Sunderland and my guess is that's the kind of person who would leave Sunderland and go to Alexandria where this was and maybe that was an advert for Thompson of Sunderland rather than him writing his name because it's in such big writing, it's six feet high, that would make quite a lot of sense I think. And also if he's a ship builder, he's got the tools to do it probably. Yes.

Yeah, the Victorians when they were touristing all over it, they got much more access than we did. So they would be able to climb up all the time and that was actually what they did and they had picnics on top. So there are lots of pictures of Victorians with the picnic tables and drinking champagne on top of pyramids. Way more fun. Well, during World War II, it's one of the only stories I know of my grandfather during World War II.

He was very young, but he got into it by lying about his age and he was a post deliveryman and he used to go past the pyramids every day on his run. So he stationed in Egypt and on days when there was not much post, he used to go and just sit on the pyramids and have his lunch and just watch out. Yeah. So even then, World War II, I guess, you know, see what we'll do. Yeah. Because they did the same thing in World War I, the Anzacs, they were there and they used to have races up the pyramids.

Oh, really? Yeah. Which are quite hard to climb. It looks like little steps, but obviously when you're there, they're really big blocks. The first European visitors, they were offered sharp objects to make their own marks by Arab guides, as in, you know, to write your little graffiti and stuff like that. Cool. You don't get that anymore. Yeah. That's like a Stonehenge they used to do that. Yes, they did.

Yeah, we used to mention you got given a pickaxe and a, yeah. What a chisel. Oh, yeah, not a pickaxe. I'll change some. I went to Stonehenge at one of these times where they let you go before all the tourists get there. And if you even look like you're slightly touching one of these stones, they are not happy at all. They're really, really.

And even if you try and imagine someone was to do this, try and hide behind one of the stones so that the people in charge can't see you. They quickly run around to make sure that you're not touching anything. And those druids are pretty nifty, aren't they? Don't want to end up in druid prison. What is it? They chop your hands off? Well, I never touched it, Anna, so I wouldn't know. Of course not.

Of course not. A lot of inscriptions on the pyramids are from the Greek Roman period. There is one which says, I visited and I did not like anything except the sarcophagus. And then another one says, I cannot read the hieroglyphs. I know. Exactly. In the article that I read, which was admittedly from the Daily Mail, they said that it was quite similar to Trip Advisor at this day.

What I find the most amazing thing, actually, about the pyramids is that we don't know what's inside them still. So we've gone to outside of the solar system. And yet still in the main pyramid in Giza, we don't even know what's inside it. There was that discovery last year that there's a massive chamber inside it. There's a cavity that's 30 metres long and it's above what's called the grand gallery. So there's like two rooms, chambers where they thought the king and the queen were probably kept, although they were all stolen.

So we're not totally sure. And then they've just done this technique where they use the sensors at Sensee's Particles called muons and see what directions they're bouncing off the pyramid in. And there's this massive chamber we don't know about. And I actually think, which is what one Egyptologist said, that that's where the bodies are. Because they said that they think because they put lots of kind of fake things in there anyway, because they really wanted to deter robbers. So they said, oh, yeah, this is the king's chamber here.

But actually, I bet that's where the aliens are. Exactly. And the aliens will hang out with king and queen. Yeah, yeah, of course. This new chamber that they found, isn't it the case that it's so mysterious that they can't even call it a chamber? They've got they call it the void or something like that. Well, I think they're doing that to pique your curiosity rather than it's so mysterious.

They just know it's a big hole. They're not allowed to call it a chamber. It's not a chamber. It doesn't it doesn't fit the word. When I read when I was going to read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, I'm like, well, where's the secrets of Chamber of Secrets? It should be called the void of secrets. I was going, no, no, no, please.

Do you know what mummy wheat is? Mummy wheat. Yeah. No. So we've covered, I think, before the mummy craze, where in the Victorian times, people had mummy unwrapping ceremonies and they had brass bands accompanying it. And it was all very exciting and amazing people like Mummy Brown and Mummy, whoever. Well, Mummy Pettigrew. So Mummy wheat was wheat that was grown from seeds,

which had allegedly been found in mummy's bandages. And this was a craze. People got really excited about wheat that was allegedly from 3,000 years ago growing into proper plants. And there were all these articles published about, for example, ancient cobs of corn, because, you know, we've got ancient Egyptian sweet corn growing. And obviously it was almost certainly not true. You don't want your food ancient most of the time, do you? I can see it's kind of exciting.

They'd also, when they're mummifying people, I think, you know, you learn in school that they put a hook up your nose and they take your brains out and stuff. And they also took your eyeballs out and they often replace them with various things. So they replace your eyeballs with shells or with linen, apparently, or with painted onions. So various of the most famous fairies were found with just painted onions instead of eyes. Cool. It's quite weird. That is cool.

They're quite fun, like kind of a snowman or something. What vegetable is most like an eye? They didn't have carrots for noses, though, did they? No, we don't know. I was quickly looking into, because this is a famous monument that was almost destroyed, if this guy's plan had went forward. And I was looking at other monuments that have almost been destroyed. So the Colosseum, that got hit by lightning in the year 217, which caused huge destruction.

And as a result, they just started pillaging the actual Colosseum. So two thirds of it went and then something was put in place to say, stop, this is now, we're keeping this as is. So we got to keep that. The Washington Monument was almost destroyed even before it was fully made, when all the materials were being donated. The Pope donated a beautiful rock to go to it. But there was a group in America.

He's got so much stuff. Such a generous man. I mean, he's a humble though, humble. I'm sorry, I'm so humble. I can only give you this nice rock. Yeah, it was Pope Pius the Ninth, and he gave a rock. I'm so pious. I'm so pious.

And it was a party that were known as the Know Nothings, and the Know Nothings tried to prevent it. So they, yeah, so what they did was they stole the rock that the Pope gave, and they dumped it into the Potomac River. And then eventually further down the line, the Know Nothings became the actual company that were building it and bankrupt them, so that they weren't able to do it. And eventually it got, they, you know, they weren't able to stop it.

Can I just ask, is this amazing rock that the Pope gave still in the river? I think they got it out. I think they eventually found it. Yeah, because you're not going to leave a Pope's rock in a river, are you? Yeah, I think they think some people within it admitted to where it was, and where they'd thrown it. How did they know after all that time in the river? There's all these normal rocks around them.

One's so beautiful. It's wearing the hat, I think. Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that psychologist, Herman Rorschach thought his test wouldn't work on teenagers as they were the same as psychopaths. Yeah, so this is the man who invented the Rorschach ink blot. If you can think of any time you've been shown some weird ink blots, that's the man who created them.

As we all have at some stage in our lives, right? When we've had our psychological testing, we've all done that, right? Yeah, and he, yeah, it was a thing that he wasn't sure how it worked. He wasn't sure if it worked, but he definitely thought it couldn't work with teenagers because it just was, they were two, particularly 14 year olds, they were just too unpredictable and it was just too similar in characteristics to a psychopath. What are the characteristics then in a 14 year old that he thought made them similar to a psychopath? I think it's emotional turbulence and it's a crazy mixed up time and there's all sorts of stuff going on.

Things are changing, you know? Things are changing, growing. You guys need to have some more psychological testing. Yes, so I think he did think it worked, but like you say, he didn't know why it worked. But a lot of the people in Germany at the time did not think it worked. And they called his blobs crude. Can we go to the blobs? This is taking me right back to my own teenagers, having your blobs called crude.

He very sadly died at the age of 37, which is over 37 year old, is absolutely heartbreaking. And but then it was the year after he died that they kind of got a bit of recognition in the community. And still today, I suppose we don't know if they work or not. Probably they don't really. But he didn't think they worked for detecting personality types really in the way that they are kind of sometimes used today. So we should say the Rorschach test. It's when you get shown an ink blot and it's sort of a mirror image

because it's when paper's been folded over with wet ink. And then you're asked what you see in it. Do you see a cow? Do you see someone being brutally murdered? Do you just see a blob? And I see a beautiful, beautiful stone at the bottom of a river. All right, Pope. Get out.

We've got more patience to see if that was one of the results. This person is the Pope. Two options. Imagine whenever you had to get a new Pope. That's what they did. They got this Rorschach test and just waited for someone to say that. Christ, Christ, pointy hat, wafer. He's the Pope.

But yeah, he didn't think that it determined whether you were the Pope or whether you were a smart person or a horrible person or whatever. He just thought it could diagnose schizophrenia. So he was a psychiatrist and he just noticed he'd been really into these things as a kid and he noticed that schizophrenics had different responses to them than normal people. So he just thought, you know, you could spot schizophrenic. Yeah, he was so into them, by the way, that as a child, when he was at school, his nickname was Inkblot.

Not that actually as a word. It was Kleck. But that was, yeah. So it was a children's game originally. It was called Klexography and he got nicknamed Kleck. And you just, you did exactly the same thing. You poured ink on a bit of paper. You folded it and then you saw what images you could make.

It's like looking at clouds or something like this. I didn't really get this. So it's not about whether you see, as Anna says, a murderer or a flower in the image. He was really interested in what kind of things people saw. He said there were three categories which were form, movement and color. So form is whether you see a donkey or a bear or a knife or whatever. And then movement is whether you see, you know, a donkey offering a man a sandwich or something. Whatever.

A dancing woman. Yeah, a dancing woman is better than a donkey offering a man a sandwich. But his main interest in all of this was whether the answer was good or poor. So he basically, he thought, right, I think these look like particular things. And if you see something which is broadly moth-like and you say a moth or one of another, you know, reasonably appropriate answer, then you're probably fine. And if not, then that's maybe problematic. That's a problematic indicator for your personality.

Yeah. And we should also say that it's not a case of putting ink on a bit of paper and then folding it over. The blots are actually quite specific, aren't they? Yeah. So they have to look blottish because if they look deliberately crafted, then people might think, well, there's a specific answer that I need to go for. But also he didn't want brush strokes, so it looked like someone had painted it.

So they're quite specific. Yeah. And what's amazing, this was 1921 that he created them. So they really kicked off in 37, but they're still used to this day. And it's the exact same 10 ink blots that he created in 1921. So even though maybe people are thinking, oh, we can advance this as an idea, they still have not gone any further than the 10 he created. Yeah.

So if anyone shows you them, don't say, for instance, television, because there was no televisions then. Don't say iPhones, because there were no iPhones. You'd have to think, I need to go for something that was around in the 1920s. So like the end of the war. You see the Wall Street crash. You might just say, prohibition. If you see an iPhone or a television, they'll say, this man is insane.

Or prophetic. Yeah. Have you guys done it? I've done the first few. You didn't have the patience to do the full 10. Well, actually, I wanted to save myself in case I need to be tested in future with a Rorschach test, because they got really funny about people. So they were published in a book in the 70s.

And a lot of doctors who believed in them and used them said, this is going to completely screw up our results, because it came with answers of what to say and what not to say. Yeah, I did it today. Did anyone else do it today? We did it of a Christmas dinner last year. Did you? Yeah.

So what did you, did it give you a percentage? And I got taken away by it. I can't remember, actually. But it's just like, these days, a lot of people use it as a parlor game, don't they? Yeah. I don't know. Maybe up in your household. We just get pissed on Christmas Day and eat pudding.

But I'll do the Rorschach test this Christmas. Maybe it's more fun. Well, I did it today and it gives you a sickness percentage at the end of how sick it thinks you are. You did the Buzzfeed version. You won't believe blob number seven. But no, I got 66%, which it says is a little worrisome. Well, do you know how many out of the 10 were worrisome?

Because there's a very specific way that you're supposed to do it. So the proper test is there are 10 things. And if you get more than four images classified as worrisome, then it is, you might be verging on schizophrenic. And then less than four is fine. And the average is two. So if you look at the graph, so it might be that if you got 66%, you saw three images that were worrisome,

but that puts you right in normal. Right. So you don't know how many you got out of 10? No, it wasn't Buzzfeed. It was something that was classy as that. It didn't really have any kind of... But you have a lot of viruses on your head. They tried it on computers, on robots, didn't they?

Quite recently. They gave a load of inputs to robots. Robot one saw one and said it was a mask. Robot two saw one and said it was a pin. Robot three said it meant isolated. And robot four said this is the Rorschach test. Oh, wait a minute. Imagine if you went into the psychologist's office and said,

what do you see here? I see the Rorschach test. I just say that for every single answer. Poor old robot three. No one's worrying about him, though. Sounds like he needs some help. Good point. So I looked at some other psychological tests from the 20th century.

Okay. And some of them are pretty weird. So there's the Rosenzweig picture frustration study from 1978. And this is really fun. So it gives you lots of cartoon images. And it's people who are in frustrating situations. All men, by the way, people in frustrating situations, all men. And one bubble from the other person who is the frustrating

in all of these cartoon scenarios is already filled in. And you have to fill in your response as the man who is being frustrated. So can I, it would it be like someone whose car is being given a ticket by a traffic warden or something like that? Exactly. Yeah. So there's an example of someone on a train and someone, a woman is saying to him,

here's the newspaper I borrowed. I'm sorry, the baby tore it. So these are, I think, relatively minor frustrations in life. If you punch the baby, then you're fine. You have to fill in the cartoon bubble. So I'm about to punch that baby. Is that what you said? Yeah, that would that would be a mark of concern.

I mean, what page of the newspaper was it cut? As long as it wasn't the crossword, that would be Trinidad. Okay. So you would write, was it the crossword page he tore? If it is, I'm going to punch the baby. Yeah. Or the Sparks pages. Or actually the TV review, I want you to read that.

Yeah. So there was that one, which sounds pretty good. There was the 1942 make a picture story test. This is really fun. So it gives you 67 little people on paper who are cut out. And there are all sorts of different people and there are humans and there are ghosts. There's a superhero. There's a one-legged man.

There's a cocker spaniel. There's a policeman. There's Santa Claus. There are women, some women clothed, some women naked. And you have to make a scene with them. And then you make up a story about the scene. And the psychologist analyzes the scene you made up. The first thing that came into my head was, you know,

do you remember the Benny Hill show? So the naked woman is running and then Santa Claus and the one-legged man, the cocker spaniel are all running after him. Sorry. So what does that mean? I think that means that you fell into a coma in the 70s and you haven't been able to update your memory ever since. Personality tests did get really popular around that time though.

It was sort of the 40s when the Rorschach test and other stuff became a thing and the idea of a character making you good at your job. And so in the 50s, people would often get tested on their personalities when they're applying for jobs. But they were looking for different stuff in the 50s. It was that era where everyone was quite gray and the traits that people wanted as employers were things like being really hard working and diligent and very loyal, very conformist.

And in fact, in the early 50s, the Navy put out a handbook with the proper way to deal with a dissenting colleague if you're in an office or a conference or whatever. And this is what it said. So if a colleague dissents or disagrees, fail to hear his objections. Or if you must hear them, misunderstand them. The aim is to make him feel like he belongs. It just seems a bizarre way to achieve that.

And then it says, if he persists, ask him to clarify his position and then ask him to clarify his clarification, et cetera, et cetera, until our lad is so hot and bothered that he's worked himself into the role of conference comedian. So basically, ignore, ignore, ignore, humiliate. Is that the British Navy? Yeah, it was the Navy. This is the best way to deal with colleagues.

Actually, ignore, ignore, ignore, humiliate does seem like your role on this podcast to the rest of us. The only book I've ever read is this handbook. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that Robert Falcon Scott's dying wish was for his son to get into nature. Peter Scott went on to found the World Wildlife Fund and designed its panda logo.

Very, very cool. How nice is that? So this was when Scott was in the South Pole. He was stuck in his tent. He was 100% sure he was about to die. So he thought he'd write a few letters, as you do. And his last letter was to his wife. So it's 1912.

He's cold in a tent. He's managing somehow to get his hand around a pen. And he says to his wife, make sure when you're raising our son, make the boy interested in nature. And that boy was Peter Scott. And yeah, he founded the WWF. Very exciting this fact, isn't it?

Because two sort of seminal things, polar exploration and conserving animals, are connected. And I had no idea through one generation, well, two generations. So Robert Falcon Scott, we should say, he made it, didn't he, to the South Pole with his team. But they weren't the first there.

They were beaten by the Norwegians. And then on the way back, they were close to a depot. But they were only about 10 miles away. And then he died. And he wrote all these letters in the tent, just as they were dying. Yes. And the letter says,

make the boy interested in natural history. If you can, it is better than games. Although he was quite good at games in the end, because he won a bronze medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics in the old jolly dinghy class of sailing. So he was a dinghy sailor. That was one of the big hitters, wasn't it, of the Olympics?

Well, he's the reigning bronze medalist, isn't he, because they never did it again. It was the one and only time the old dinghy got an outing at the Olympics. So that's a cool record. He's an amazing character, Peter Scott. Never properly heard of him before. But someone who's, at one point, I think,

in the UK was a household name. A lot of older listeners might actually go, yeah, of course we know who he is. He was on a lot of natural history TV for the BBC. Fact, back in the day, he was on the very first color TV program from the Natural History Department. And that was in 1968. It was called The Private Life of the Kingfisher,

and he narrated it. Oh, I see. Because Kingfisher's are quite colorful, because you wouldn't go for The Private Life of the Zebra or something like that would you? They've deliberately chosen an animal which is quite colorful. Yes.

Well, just on that point, it is said, I got told this by my friend Simon Watt, mentioned it years and years ago on this podcast, but supposedly one of the reasons for picking the panda as the logo for WWF was the fact that it was black and white. So printing costs, when they were printing out with headers, would be cheaper.

That's clever. They could have just picked something really, really small, like a microbe, and then it would just be a printing, just one dot. That would be cheaper, right? Yeah, that's true. It would. It's a bit less evocative, isn't it?

Yeah. Save the dot. It's important, though. One other thing he did, he gave the Loch Ness Monster a name, a proper scientific name. He called it Nessiteras rhombopterics, allegedly so it could be registered as endangered, which I guess it is.

Now, if I'd said he'd given him a proper scientific name, you would have jumped down my throat there and said, it's not real. I know what you mean. I think it was a joke. Was it or not? I don't know if he was joking or not. Well, you know there was that whole thing about the name

that he did give it. So it was an ancient Greek name for the monster of the Ness with the diamond-shaped fin, and that came out as... Nessiteras rhombopterics. Yes. And supposedly, when someone looked into it, they found that there was an anagram of monster hoax by Sir Peter S. Oh, well, in that case, it probably was a joke.

Well, no. I mean, at anagrams, James always is saying this, you can make anagrams out of anything if you want to. Well, we did say this in a recent podcast, didn't we? We did a load of anagrams, and people can be very clever in anagrams and find meaning that isn't necessarily there. Why would he say it's got diamond-shaped fins? Ness, that made it much easier for him to put monster hoax

by Sir Peter S. Yeah, I don't know. I think he believed it. He did send a proposal to Buckingham Palace asking if he could name Loch Ness Monster after the Queen, Queen Elizabeth II. So it was going to be called Elizabeth Nessie or something along those lines, but first named Elizabeth for the Loch Ness Monster.

And supposedly, the Queen did consider it, but the people of Buckingham Palace said, no, no, no. No, thank you. So I should say where I got this fact, by the way. It's from a new book that's just come out called What a Hazard a Letter Is. And it's sort of about all the letters in history that either were never sent or that were never properly received,

or we only found years later. It looks like a really, really interesting book. I've only read a bit of it, and I got this from a review. But there's another piece in it, actually, which is about the composer Eric Sati, which I really liked. It's kind of tragic, but amusing at the same time. This is, so Eric Sati had this six-month relationship

with an artist called Susan Valadon. And then she broke up with him. And that was the end of it, as far as anyone knew. And then when he died 30 years later, they went into his house, and they found just thousands and thousands of letters that he'd written every single day to her, but never sent love letters. So he died, and he literally spent 30 years writing love letters.

And then he... So they got in touch with Susan, still alive. Like, hey, Eric had a thing for you, and gave her all these letters, and she immediately burned them. As you would. How stupid. I was probably very delighted that that relationship ended when it did.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, got out of that one in the nick of time. One last thing. Peter Scott, just to mention again how incredible his career was. One of the other things he did was during the war, he designed camouflage ideas for painting on the side of ships so that you could camouflage a ship in the ocean.

And they worked so well that two ships that were painted with the same camouflage crashed into each other. Yeah, and one of them was called HMS Broke. So yeah, not the best name to name a ship. But yeah, it did break. You know how soldiers used to all dress in very bright colors? And then there was a camouflage.

Well, you know the British armies, the bright red uniforms in the 19th century. And then that was because most battlefields were so covered in smoke from guns and chaos that you couldn't... It wasn't dangerous to troops to dress them in bright colors. I didn't know. So if you had an arm, a duke leading a regiment, he got to kid it out

and he would pick whatever color he liked basically. It's like football kits, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you wanted something flashy. And then as the smoke started to clear from battlegrounds, it suddenly became obvious that having everyone dressed in bright red is probably not a good tactic.

I just wonder if there was a period where all ships were extremely bright colors. And then suddenly thought, maybe this isn't a great idea. Yeah, I guess so. About football kits, there was once a football game, which I don't know if you'll remember, you probably won't. But it was the first time Man United had won their new gray kit.

And then halfway through the match, they realized that they couldn't see each other because they were camouflaged against the crowd. So they just kept passing to the crowd because they couldn't see each other. Oh, my God, that's so funny. And then at halftime, they had to swap all their shirts back. Is it an advantage, though, if the other team can't see you?

Well, in American football, they have rules that the pitch has to be a particular shade of green. And that's because there was once a team who had a blue jersey and they painted the entire grass blue, so the other team couldn't see them. I love the idea that if in war you have a home and away kit and you know you're losing against the invading army when they suddenly change their kit to home.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that a traditional hangover cure in Mongolia is the Mongolian Mary, which consists of tomato juice with a pickled sheep's eyeball floating inside it. Is it either bit meant to be more helpful or does it have to be combined?

So I think the traditional helpful bit is a pickled eyeball because that goes back supposedly to Genghis Khan times. The tomato juice obviously doesn't because they didn't have tomatoes in those days. But actually tomato juice, I think, would probably help your hangover. So that probably today is the active ingredient, although the traditional thing is the eyeball.

But if a load of you have a hangover, obviously it's very labor-intensive in sheep. Then you have to kill a lot of sheep. You don't have to kill them, you can just put an onion in the place of the eyeball. And I learned this from Malmo's Disgusting Food Museum, which I went to a couple of weeks ago and tried lots of disgusting things.

Did you have the hangover? I did have a hangover, but I didn't have any of this. Actually, I did have a hangover on that day, which was very bad because I had to eat things like bull's testicles and shark meat marinated in urine and rotten fish and all that kind of stuff and three penis wine, which that did help the hangover a little bit.

Yeah, because it's got alcohol in it and it's like hair of the dog. It's like penis of the dog and of the seal and of the deer. Here's the thing though, you went to this museum and traditionally museums, you don't touch the exhibits, but you went around eating them. And so is this more a restaurant than a museum? No, so these days a lot of museums, they are hands-on, aren't they?

As in you can kind of do little bits and pieces with the exhibits. And in this place, they have a particular tasting table at the end where you can taste all the things, or not all the things, but just a few of the things that are on display. And lucky me, they put a lot of extra stuff on for me, which not everyone gets to have. So not everyone gets to have the bull testicles,

not everyone gets to have the rotten egg with a fetus in it, you know, that I managed to have. But yeah, it's a really good museum. It's in Malmo, they've just announced that there's a new one about to be opened in LA. And they're hoping to go around the whole world, hopefully one day soon. So wherever you are in the world,

you might be able to try some of this delicious stuff. It's quite exciting because the museum was founded by Samuel West, who also founded the Museum of Failure, which how often do people found more than one museum? So it had things like failed Donald Trump games and so on, but with such a success that he's had to keep it going. And this is his second museum. It's very exciting.

The only person I can think of is the person who founded both the Natural History Museum and the British Museum, I think. Yes, I think you're right. Sloane? Yes, Han Sloane. So he's in quite high, you know, there's just that guy and the guy who did the Disgusting Food Museum. Yeah, it's pretty good.

It's very funny because he talks about, I've read an interview with him about setting up this Disgusting Food Museum and he has to sample a lot of the stuff that they get in. And he's just in his story, just constantly vomiting. It's just like, he doesn't like it. It's not as if it's like a weird fetish. He really doesn't like it.

You can't like this stuff. It's just not very... The only thing that was quite nice was the bull testicles. That was all right. I had durian fruit, which smells disgusting, but it actually tastes kind of okay. But everything else is just objectively quite disgusting. So he makes a point that a large part of taste

is to do with your psychological take on it. So if you think something's going to be disgusting, your mind sets itself ready to vomiting. So he uses the example of Vegemite, which is the first time he had Vegemite. He hated it and thought it was horrible. Then he went to Australia and at a party, it was served on two bits of toast,

two slices to him, and he saw children eating. And he thought, oh, this must be how you neutralize the taste. And he started eating it. Now he loves Vegemite. And Vegemite is in this museum. And the guy who showed me around, who's this guy's co-owner, Andreas, he said that it caused almost like a diplomatic spat

with Australia because as soon as the Australians found out that Vegemite was in this disgusting food museum, they were absolutely really upset. Yeah, I really like the idea of Sweden and Australia going to war with each other. Because it's mostly a commuter's war, isn't it? You've shown us videos of you at this museum, James. And you look like you're having a really, really bad time.

And it's sort of your disgusting. Can I just say, I had a really, really great time. 00:34:00,360 --> 00:34:01,960 But the thing is, I just, you know, I'm not going to say no to anything. I'll just do whatever, you know. And also, he was very much peer-pressuring me into trying absolutely everything.

He was like, well, if I try it, then you have to try it. And of course, he works here and has this stuff all the time. It's not really fair. But yeah, I opened some sirstrumming, which is like a fermented rotten fish, which we once had on QI, but we weren't allowed to open in the studio. And actually, according to their lease,

this museum, they're explicitly not allowed to open any of the cans inside the museum. So we had to go outside. We had a crowd of people watching me open this sirstrumming. Yeah. And then you did have to recoil from it, didn't you? Was that the one where you hit the coil? Yeah, it's unbelievably disgusting here.

It just smells of everything rotten that you can think of, like, you know, bin juice and rotten fish and, you know, vomit. And everything you can think of, it just smells and tastes a bit like that. Great. And all the tickets to the museum are printed on a sick bag. And in the first three weeks of opening, they had 11 cases of visitors vomiting after trying the exhibits.

Only 11, which is not that bad. That's an achievement, isn't it? They must be looking for vomit. They are. And they said, if it's just like a wretch, it doesn't count. Or if it's spitting out, it doesn't count. It has to be an actual vomit from the stomach, it for them to count it.

And to get the tally up. So they have one of those boards, like, blah days since last time. Penis is quite common, though, as a hangover cure, isn't it? When you sort of read about the traditional hangover cures. So it's often dried, dried and shriveled. I think a Sicilian traditional hangover cure is bull's penis, actually.

So you also have to be a dried bull's penis. But in Bolivia, it's also a famous thing. Bull penis soup, bullpizzle soup, is a thing that people say they have with hangovers quite a lot. They actually had a bull penis at this museum, but I couldn't taste it. But it was like a hands-on exhibit, so you're allowed to touch the bull's penis.

Were you impressed? Did you congratulate the bull? The bull sadly never made it. Well, I've been looking up other hangover, disgusting hangover cures. Oh, yeah. So Pliny, the elder, our old buddy, he recommends various things.

So he mostly recommends things to stop you from getting drunk in the first place. For example, roasted wild boar lungs will do. Or if you don't have a wild boar, if you have the ashes of a swallow's beak and mix it with myrrh and put that in your wine, that stops you getting drunk in the first place. Okay, but does ruin the wine, doesn't it?

A little bit, yeah. The gladiators used to eat ash for energy. On ITV? No, it was like they used to take it out of the hearth, and then they would mix it with presumably wine, I guess. And then that would supposedly help them after a hard day's gladiatoring. That's cool.

Get home after a hard day's gladiatoring. Darling, what have you cooked me for supper? I'm exhausted. Here's some ash. With some wine, Anna. Oh, no, that's absolutely fine. So, John of Gadsden in the 14th century had advice for if you drunk too much.

He said that if you're a man, then you should wash your testicles with salt and vinegar. And if you're a woman, you should wash your breasts with salt and vinegar. Was he a salt and vinegar salesman? He worked in the local chippy. He'd overordered. And he said you can also eat the leaf or stalk

of a cabbage with some sugar, which does sound like the better option. He should have put it first. So, these days, I guess you could just put your testicles in a bag of salt and vinegar crisps and that'll have the same effect. Absolutely. But don't do it in Tesco's.

Duck embryo is another thing that's eaten. So, this is balut. Yeah, so I had that balut. Did you? Is balut, is how you say it? Yeah, yeah, whole balut. Yeah, I had that in the museum. To be honest, I kind of chickened out a little bit. Ducked out, you mean?

Ducked out? I did duck out, yeah. And when they weren't looking, I only took a bit of the egg part of the balut and didn't have any of the embryo part because I thought that was a bit beyond the pale. You cheater. Oh, you found your line though. Well, to be honest, if anyone was watching,

I probably would have done it because I am extremely bad with peer pressure. But yeah, I did taste it. It just tasted like... I've had a 100-year egg before and it tastes a bit like that. So, slightly rotten eggs, it tastes like, yeah. Okay, slightly rotten.

You would have thought after 100 years that rotten had really penetrated. Yeah, it tastes like sulfurous eggs, like, you know... Yeah, sulfur, fat. Fat, yeah. Egg-y eggs. What were you saying? Was there anything else about balut or...?

No, that that was a hang of a cure that apparently works. So, it's stuck embryo, isn't it? Yeah. It's border life and then you eat it in the shell. You eat it in the shell. But it's not shelly, presumably, at embryo stage. And with the beak, can you tell the beaks there? You can tell it's there, but it's not crunchy, I don't think.

And there was a Filipino lady who works at this place and she absolutely loves it. She's like, my whole family says this is not weird. I don't understand why people think this is weird. The Philippines are declaring war on Sweden. Well, they do have, for instance, haggis. Do they? Yeah, they have.

Weirdly, they have like haribos. Not haribos, but like other gelatin sweets. Because they're like, well, you know, this is made from gelatin from bones of animals. This is kind of, if you think about it, it's kind of weird. It's all just, it is just perspective, isn't it? I mean, the things that we find weird are the people. We eat equally weird stuff.

I would say so, apart from, you know, like urine-soaked shark is objectively strange, I think. What's the urine adding to that taste? Well, it adds a uriny taste to it. If you were to have that and any other food in the whole history of time, you would know which one had been soaked in urine. Yes, okay.

So their rules are, just to quickly go, they have three rules. It has to be considered disgusting by some people around the world. So not necessarily people eating it. It has to be genuinely eaten by people as a choice, not through necessity. So it's not things that you can only have because you have no other food. And it must be not our food stuff invented just for tourists. Right, because that does happen sometimes, of course.

On the fact that it's kind of all about perspective, this sort of thing, there was an FT journalist who went to China in 2011 and went to Xiaojing and was investigating what Chinese people thought of cheese brought over from Europe. Because obviously not very much cheese is eaten in the East, very many of them are lactose intolerant. A lot drink milk now a bit, but cheese is not really a thing. So it brought over a whole bunch of cheeses.

And they find that disgusting. All these people who worked in a restaurant found it kind of gross, the idea. And then ate the cheeses. And it was a lot of blue cheeses, very strong blue, which interestingly, they thought was fine. So they thought that's okay. And they said it was quite similar to a sort of rotting bean curd dish

that they served up. I've had that as well, rotting bean curd. And it does taste quite cheesy. It does it. Yeah, they said it was a similar taste. So weirdly, the only one that they all said that's absolutely disgusting is an animal stench that haunts your nose.

Baby Belle. Is it Primula? What a cool bag. Wow. Yeah, the multi-podcast cool bag. That's one of the best. It's not, it's Brie, which is very interesting to us. It obviously is quite mild Brie,

but then it's just something they're not used to. They find it disgusting. I remember reading somewhere, and I don't know where it was, so I think this is true. But the idea was when Europeans first went to Japan especially, that was the one overarching thing about it, was that we smelled of milk and cheese and stuff like that. Is that right?

Yeah. They say that in China as well. Like all the time they'd be like, oh, Milky Boy's here. It's a smell that emanates off a white person. So I'm trying to have a Milky Bar kid. It's not a good thing. No, it's fine. It's just you can smell it.

It's just a smell they all identify. Do you guys know there's an iron brew sausage? I almost, I just choked on my drink because I'm so excited. An iron brew sausage. So basically this was invented a few years ago by a guy who said, what a great hangover cure this would be. By a genius. Invented.

Hang on, we have had a debate in the past. No, no, Andy. Whether combining two existing things counts as inventing a new one. I will accept a lot of things in this podcast, but for you to say that an iron brew sausage, it's not an invention that we're all calling out for. Okay, sure. It's pretty simple actually.

But still an invention, you replace all the water in the sausage making process with iron brew. And he says it's a brilliant hangover cure. One guy said he felt like he'd gone to heaven after tasting it according to the inventor of the iron brew sausage. And I really want to try one. I do as well. If you are a people who make iron brew sausages,

do get in touch. We'll advertise, free. Hang on. Is it all the water involved in the process? As in, has it grown the crops that feed the cow? Has the cow been drinking iron brew from a trough? It has to have rained iron brew. Has the farmer had all the water in his body replaced with iron brew?

Yeah, he's Scottish. 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.

At James Harkin. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And Anna. You can email a podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account at No Such Thing or our website, NoSuchThingAsAfish.com.

There's a very exciting new banner on there showing you the link to our 2019 tour. There's lots of tickets going. We'd love to see you guys there. You can also buy our new book, Book of the Year 2018. And you can also find all of our previous episodes. Okay, that's it. We'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then. Good bye.