No Such Thing As A Fish - 261: No Such Thing As A Chocolate Train

Episode Date: March 22, 2019

Live from Uffculme, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss chocolate gramophones, licking your own forehead and Icelandic sheep dating.

Hi everyone, before we start this week's show which was recorded live in Ofcom, we want to let you know how you can come to one of our live events. Yes, we have a website. It has all of the places that we're going to be in the upcoming months. Some of them will be in the UK and Ireland. For the rest of you living in Europe, we are going to Gothenburg, Stockholm, Oslo, Amsterdam, Groningen, Geneva, Copenhagen and Antwerp. And this is very exciting. We've just announced two more dates. Can you guess where they are Dan? You know where they are. Yes, I know. That was me trying to fake not knowing. It's Paris and Berlin. Paris and Berlin. Wow.

Yeah, we're so excited. Those tickets are going to go on sale this Friday. You can go to knowsuchthingasafish.com. We have a link to the British, Irish and then all of these amazing European dates going as well. Do go for the Europe ones as quick as you can, by the way, if you're living there because they are going quick. We expect Paris and Berlin will sell out in minutes. That's my prediction. Well, let's see if that prediction comes true, Daniel. But no matter what, we hope to see you there. Anyway, hope you enjoy this week's show. Again, recorded live in Ofcome. Okay. On with the show. On with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming

to you from Ofcome. My name is Jan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Anna Czenski, Andrew Huntsman, Mari and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around 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 man in the poll who can lick his own forehead. And the reason I'm laughing to myself is because I know what he looks like. So if you're at home listening to this, then do Google it. And if you're in Ofcome sitting in front of us, then here's what he looks like. We told you at home it was worth googling. It's so weird. What's so bizarre about him is that when you hear him lick his own forehead,

you immediately think, oh my God, he makes his tongue really long. And little do you know, he makes his face really tiny. It's a little bit of both because he does have a really long tongue. You can sometimes see pictures where he sticks out. It's really, really long. He's basically, he's a 35 year old bus driver from Urla Bari in Nepal. And he says that he tries not to do this too often because he scares the children. Well, he says he's not been allowed to do it at work when he's on the bus. He says, A, the children get scared. And then with he talks about adults, he says, even adults can lose consciousness when they watch me in action. But can you guys lick your nose with your tongue? No, it's quite rare, isn't it? Oh, wow.

Again, just Google pictures of people licking the nose with their tongue and you'll see what that is. I didn't realise I had a name. So 10% of people can do it, including me. It's called the Gaul in sign. Didn't know I had a medical term. Have you ever tried doing the full forehead? I think I have to work up to that. It's really interesting though, because it, so this is, this guy is kind of gurning. Yes. Are we saying it's, you know, gurning the sport where you scratch your face into an amazing shape and you surprise people and win awards? You know, gurning the sport. Gurning, yeah. The Olympic sport of gurning, yeah. So the British and world, obviously, gurning championships, because no one else does it,

make up his band, but manipulation of false teeth, if you have them, is permitted. And it really helps if you don't have many teeth. So this guy in Nepal has only one tooth, I believe. Oh, has he? Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And there's a gurning world champion called Peter Jackman, not to be confused with Peter Jackson, who, he's won the championships four times and he had all of his teeth removed so that he could improve his technique. Wow. Really? Yeah. Really? Yeah. There's an organizer that said age definitely helps in the competition because your skin is much looser when you, when you age, it allows you to manipulate and crease up in ways. So you have an advantage to your older. And I should say this world championship or British championship

for the whole world, but only British people take part. And in fact, only people from Cumbria take part. Even the people of Devon looked down on the back. You know, in 2014, the two runners up were both Swedish. But it takes place in the Egremont crab fair. And they say it's been happening since 1267. The fair, it seems, might have been happening since then on and off because we know that Ken Henry III granted a royal charter for a fair. We think probably the gurning hasn't taken part for all that time, although there is a newspaper article in 1852 that says it's an ancient practice. So it has definitely been going on for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. I was reading an obituary of a guy called Lenny Wells. This is an obituary in the Guardian. He died in the year 2000

and he was known for gurning in various TV adverts. He was very good at gurning. It said, although he was also a keen rugby fan and devoted family man, it is for the unique rubberiness of his lips and cheeks that he will be most fondly remembered. And there was one, there was an interview of people who had taken part in contests with him. And one of the guys said, this one time, Gordon Blacklock, another competitor, I'm sure you've heard of, another gunner. Gordon Blacklock was a head-on point, but then Lenny stepped up and pulled a face like a rhino's anus. I tell you. Is that a technical term? I tell you, the audience went berserk. Love to hear the commentators. I'm like, oh, he's coming up the back like a rhino's anus is.

There was, in fact, the, I think the greatest champion of all time is Anne Woods, who has won the women's gurning title 28 times. That's 28 years of gurning. She missed one crab fur when she was expecting a baby and probably pulling a lot of faces then as well, I guess. And in 2010, she collapsed after four minutes of intensive gurning and had to be rushed to hospital. So there are injuries that happened in the sport. And actually, Anne Woods died quite recently as well. She died in 2015 and I read her obituary and it said that she always entered the gurning arena to the tune of Your Gorgeous by Baby Bird. Arenas? Like how many people are going to watch this thing? We've mentioned before, Mr. Ugly from Zimbabwe. So there's an annual Mr. Ugly competition in Zimbabwe,

which is very similar to the to the gurning. And in 2015, there was a huge controversy because the the guy who won it, the runner up, who was a previous winner and had been thinking he would win it again, the runner up said, it's not fair. His ugliness is based on the fact that he's got a lot of teeth missing, whereas my ugliness is natural. And the winner said, you know, yeah, suck it up. You know, he said, they should just accept I am uglier than them. He can only suck it up if he's no teeth. Get your teeth removed, have some commitment like, you know, aforementioned champion. Get them out. On tongs, because this guy can lick his own forehead. There's some new research

has found that weight lifters have stronger tongs, and runners have better tong endurance than normal people. Wow. This is amazing. I've actually never watched weight lifting. Do they have a little tiny little weight that they lift with their tongue while they're doing the big ones with their arms? What they thought is perhaps it's because you're working out more, your all of your muscles are stronger. But actually having good tong muscles is really important because it keeps your airways open. So if your tongue is stronger, then it means it keeps your airways open. And maybe it's better for running, better for keeping more oxygen in your body, stuff like that. I think it's a very specific thing, the way you pronounce tongue from your part of the world. And it just takes so long

to get over the fact that it's tong. And you're just thinking, well, my fire tongs are perfectly strong. Do you genuinely own fire tongs? Of course, I don't have a fire. I just jabbed the radiator with them sometimes. Drafts have good tongs, really good tongs. They're tongs are half a meter long. And at least I think half a meter. So that's what that's longer than my forearm. Wow. How much do we see? Is that is that outside? No, no, it's not outside. So quite a lot of it goes back into them, I think. But you know, there's a decent amount on the side. Have you seen a giraffe, you know, lick a leaf off a tree? Can they look their ears? Yes, they can make their ears. Yes. And they're also black or purple, their tongues. And they think that's because they

spend 12 hours a day with their tongues out. And they would be sunburned on them if they didn't have sun protection. So that's why they have black tongues. Wow. I'm just really self-conscious about saying that word now. There was a doctor in the, I think the 19th century, there was a big debate over how you could prove that someone had died. And there was a, I think he was French, doctor called Laborde. And he said that you can save people who only appear to be dead. You know, they fall into a swoon or they might be unconscious, but they are revivable. And he said the way to do it is to pull their tongue rhythmically for three hours. Imagine doing that for two hours and 59 minutes and then they go. He swore, he swore that he'd done this. He said he'd save

people doing it. He said he'd saved an unconscious cow and a bulldog that had swooned. And he invented a tongue pulling machine, which was, you know, which pulled the machine. And there was an assistant whose job was to turn the crank and pull the tongue for three hours. So he resigned because he was bored and he was replaced with an electric tongue pulling machine. So there's a hockey player called Brad, an ice hockey player called Brad Marchand. And he has been ordered to stop licking his opponents. He's done this more than once. But the most recent person he licked was opposition player Ryan Callahan. And Marchand has been described in his official biography as the little ball of hate. Wait, is that the liquor or the licky? That's the liquor who was that. And basically it's his job

to kind of start fights and stuff like that happens in hockey. But the guy who he licked said, I don't know what the difference is between spitting in someone's face and licking it, which is quite a good point, I think. And then the person who did the licking said, well, he punched me four times in the face. It's six and a half a dozen, isn't it? Do you know how you stick your tongue out when you concentrate? Or you may have done as a child. Some people do, yeah. I definitely did. And it's much more common in children. And I was reading an article by a neurologist who said, he thinks he knows why we do this. And it's partly because if you're really re-concentrating, number one is

because it stops the distraction of taste or texture within your mouth. So if you just hang your tongue out, I guess it's not really touching anything. It's not tasting or touching anything. But number two, he said, it's because breastfeeding babies stick their tongue out to push their mother's nipple away when they're full. And so that's what we're doing when we're concentrating. We're saying, leave me alone. I've got stuff to be getting along with now. I'll be honest, next time I stick my tongue out, I won't be able to concentrate quite as much as they could before. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that in 1903, you could buy a gramophone record made of chocolate, which you could play a song on,

and then eat the disc. And somehow we have lost this technology. But I think the technology was never great to start with, was it? You could play a song on a piece of chocolate, that much is true. You could play a couple of times. I mean, there weren't great turntables either, because they were designed for chocolate records. But so it was this was made by a company called the Stolver chocolate company. And there were tiny turntables and small chocolate records. It was for children, basically. It was a children's toy. And you could play the song a couple of times. And then when you got bored, you could just eat the song. And I think they put foil on the chocolate, didn't they? And it was the foil that they put the ridges in, which acted like

the record. And then you could peel it because you don't want to be, you know, degrading your chocolate as you play a record. No, quite. And you say that it was a children's toy. It was advertised in the French magazine La Nature. And it specifically said, this is not a toy. What kind of miserable person do you have to be to pretend your chocolate gramophone record is not a toy? Did it take off? No. Presumably, you don't have any chocolate records. Did you think you were the only one in the world who hasn't picked up on this technology? It's got a massive hot chocolate record collection. I'm from Australia. Maybe it hasn't reached yet. Maybe we're getting it next year.

No, but, you know, sometimes in the annals of history, you can have 50 years of chocolate records. You know, the Beatles were released on chocolate and then it goes. I think it might have been sort of a limited edition thing. And they tried lots of other chocolate-based things, this company. So they also produced Stolverk. They produced a chocolate clock and a chocolate train, which I think, not a full-on train. People weren't going around in chocolate trains from Edinburgh to London. What a whimsical world we could have lifted. I'm afraid there's more delays. Someone's eating the mode of transport again. There must be a better way. All the sleepers are twixes and there are

Kit Kats for the main rails. And there are little Maltesers puffing out of the train. It's nice. We all want to live in this world now, don't we? Yeah, very cool. It's not real. But they were toy trains. I'm not quite sure how they worked. But yeah, a chocolate clock, I don't understand how that works, because that's not a very useful clock. That's not going to last a long time. So they didn't take off. Actually, I didn't even look up what the oldest piece of chocolate still existing is. There must be some. They keep finding bits of chocolate from the Antarctic expeditions. The Antarctic expeditions,

just back to gramophones, there is a gramophone that's still as an Antarctica. It's been there for over 100 years. Scott of the Antarctic took two gramophones with him. Two gramophones? Yeah. He was a fucking idiot, wasn't he? I mean, I don't even claim to feel sorry for him. Wow. I can imagine them in the tent at the end. It's like, we're so cold and hungry. Can we eat the gramophone? You brought the chocolate one, right? What was he thinking? He brought hundreds of records. That's amazing. Yeah. And so the idea was, because obviously they were in the hut for ages. So Sherry Godd, who wrote The Worst Journey

in the World, he said that after dinner every night, that's when the records would go on. And one was left there, and one made it back. I've seen it. There was an exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London. I went to see it. And they've actually made an album of the best of songs that went along as a record. But they couldn't play the records when they were out in the middle of nowhere because they had no power. No, because they had Scott's hut. So it was in the hut that they did it. So it was before they went probably out in the middle of nowhere. You could have wind up gramophones as well, couldn't you? Oh, the winding. Okay. The captain notes. I know your hands are very cold, but would you mind taking them out of

those gloves to wind up the gramophone just one last time? And then I promise you can go outside. So this is quite a cool thing. You know the new five pound notes, the plastic ones? Yes. You can play a gramophone record with a five pound note. As the style was stewing. Yeah. So you sell the record spinning. There's footage online that someone doing it. And it doesn't produce a brilliant sound. And you need an amplifier and stuff, but you can do it. You could probably use that five pound note to buy an actual stylus. Do you know that? I couldn't believe this. There were basically iPods in the 1920s. I don't believe that. Well, the word basically did a huge amount of having to do that, isn't it?

What did they have? These were things called mickey phones or mickey phones. There were little music players. 180,000 of them were produced in Switzerland. And they were basically tiny little music players like gramophones or phonographs that you could carry around in your handbag. And they measured two by four inches. And the only tiny thing about them was that they measured two by four inches when they were packed up. But then whenever you got somewhere, it was quite a complex assembly job to build a 10 inch record player. So it couldn't play straight away. But even so, that's really cool. And tiny little music players. Very cool. Edison, when he sort of came up with the phonograph, which was the precursor to gramophone records, I guess, he thought that the

main use would be, or one of their main uses would be phonographic books, which will speak to blind people, he said, without any effort on their part. Basically a podcast. It's an audiobook or a podcast. Yeah. Wow. The phonographic recorded as well, didn't it, as playing? I think that was a point of that. And one of the main things they used it for was to record the last words of the dying. Wow. That's so much pressure on someone who's dying to nail your last words. Yeah. And then what if you don't go for another hour? You just go to sit silently going. It would also make you very paranoid, wouldn't it? If you just felt a little bit peaky, and then your wife started getting the gramophone rigged up in the corner. Honestly, darling, it's a cold. Okay, we need to move on to

our next fact. It is time for fact number three, and that is Chazinsky. My fact this week is that in the early 1700s, the most popular British guide to the history, language, and culture of Taiwan was written by a man who didn't speak the language, had never been there, and knew nothing about it. This was in 1704. I'd say Taiwan, so it was Formosa then, which was what it was called, and it was called the history of Formosa. And it described in huge detail the practices that these people who would have seemed so foreign to the people of Britain, the practices that the Formosa people got up to, their language and everything. It was written by a guy called George Sal Manitzar, and it was completely fake. He was a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Frenchman who'd never

left Europe. And to this day, we don't really know what his background was or what his real name was, because George Sal Manitzar was a fake name. And he just made this up. He convinced them that his pale skin and his appearance of being French and his French accent were because in Formosa, the upper classes live in underground palaces, so they never see the sun, which so he'd never got. That's a good excuse though, isn't it? It was really quick thinking. Yeah. So he had this big showdown with the Royal Society of Scientists, and they were all questioning him for ages about, right, so okay, if you really are from Formosa, what about this? So Edmund Haley of Comet fame asked him, how long does the sun shine down your chimneys? And that's a really revealing question.

Yeah, but no, come on. Like, if you went on holiday to Spain, and they said to you, yeah, but Andy, are you really from England? How long does the sun shine down your chimneys? I'd be stuffed, wouldn't I? Exactly. Yeah. So how's he supposed to know it? Because that answer would have revealed if he knew where it was on the planet. Did he have an answer to it? He said, we have bent chimneys, so the sun doesn't shine down them. That's a good answer. Brilliant. Spiralled, wasn't it? Spiralled chimneys, yeah. Yeah, he's amazing character. He said of Formosa that the men walk naked except for a gold or silver plate to cover their privates. He said that they executed murderers by hanging them upside down and shooting them full of arrows, and annually they sacrifice

the hearts of 18,000 young boys to gods and priests to eat their bodies. Yeah, which people did say to him, if that is true, and they sacrificed that number of people, you're not going to have any people left on this small island. And he didn't have a good answer to that. But he said, Formosans always sleep upright. And he actually then saw this through because he had to live the habits of them. He must have regretted that. I think he sort of sat. So he said a lot of Formosans sleep standing up, and then he used to leave a candle on in his room so everyone could see that overnight he was still erect in his chair because he was Formosan, so he couldn't sleep in a normal bed. Bizarrely, he said that they all eat food raw, things like fish raw. And he was saying that

Formosa was part of Japan, which is a bit weird because it was actually belonged to China then, but he said as part of Japan. So that's strange that he kind of predicted sushi 300 years before it happened. So he got basically Formosa was his third go at trying to convince people he was from somewhere else. So he was originally from France. His first bash at it was saying he was Irish. So he would go around saying, I'm Irish. But the thing is, everyone knew the Irish. So they'd be like, Oh, so what are you? And he was like, I have no idea. So quickly that stuff up on him. Have you been to the dog and duck in Dublin? Then he said he was Japanese. And then that failed on him as well, because Japan was getting too much people been traveling

there too much. He needed to find somewhere else. Formosa was the third one that he finally landed on, which was useful to him. Another time in Formosa, there was a lot of Jesuits, Catholic missionaries, and they knew everything that was happening there. And so when he came along, they were going, No, no, really, that doesn't happen. But weirdly, because no one trusted Catholics at the time, they all trusted this one guy over all the Jesuits who were saying, No, this is bullshit. Well, at least the reputation of the church has recovered. But we should emphasize that this was a big deal, this book. Well, he wasn't just a weirdo with a pamphlet. This was a book that was so believed that he lectured, he was advised to lecture on

Formosan culture and language, Oxford University. So he invented the entire language alphabet and all completely new alphabet. A linguist studied it to see how consistent it was and agreed it was definitely a language to the extent that it remained in lots of language books until the mid 19th century. And people were still saying people want to GCSE Formosa. Can I tell you quickly just something amazing about Formosa itself? So Formosa now Taiwan, if you were in Formosa, Taiwan, and you dug through the ground, and you dug all the way through the earth onto the other side, the Antipode as it's called, you would land in a place called Formosa, Argentina. Is that right? No, by total coincidence, not by coincidence, surely

by coincidence. Yeah, there's no relation that as far as we can see between the two places that you would land. Yeah, there's a place in Argentina called Formosa. I mean, let's all definitely Google this after the show. That is incredible. If that remains in the episode, that means it is true. And that is unbelievable. If not, you're welcome, everyone. An exclusive. It would be around Argentina. So that does make sense. So we're in Devon at the moment. And it seems like Devon is a bit of a hotbed for absolute fantasists. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, Andy, you definitely know about Tuesday lobsang rampa, don't you? He was from Devon. Was he? Yeah, so he was he did a fraud saying he was a Tibetan monk. And that was still happening in the 1950s, he was saying that.

He said that he came from Tibet. He made up a language. When they gave him actual Tibetan and said, why do you not recognize this? He said that he'd been so badly tortured during the war, he'd blocked out all knowledge of the Tibetan language. And then afterwards, when they realized he wasn't actually Tibetan, he said, oh, no, no, no, actually, I was possessed by the spirit of a Tibetan monk. After I fell out of a tree in London while trying to take a photograph of an owl. Yep. He was his name was Cyril Hoskins. And he was an unemployed surgical trust manufacturer from Devon who claimed to be an incredibly ancient and powerful Tibetan monk. He wrote 15 books, he wrote Travels with the Lama and like Lama is in Dalai Lama. And then he wrote one Living with the Lama,

which was dictated to him by his cat, Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers. And then he later he moved to Ireland and then Canada blatantly for tax reasons. Yeah, he was great. Yeah. And then back in the 18th century, you had someone called Princess Karabu, who was also from Devon. Okay. And she turned up at someone's house near Bristol, speaking a fake language and said she was from somewhere in the east. And again, she was from Devon and she made the whole thing up. She was from, I looked into it, I spotted that as well today. She was from somewhere that is a 30 minute drive from where we are right now, a little place called Witheridge. Oh, hello. Yeah, even the people of Cumbria look down on the people of Witheridge. But it was a sort of tradition that travel writing merged into fiction in

from about 1600 to 1900. You couldn't quite tell. There was basically three categories. There was Gulliver's Travel Style. This is a fictional travel account. And then there were proper travel journals. And then there were loads of people who were just kind of making stuff up, but pretending it was true. And there was the Travels Officer John Mandeville. Actually, so this was this was much earlier, but he was almost the precursor to all of these. These appeared in about the 1360s. And they were taken as legit travel books for over 300 years. So Christopher Columbus used them as a complete reference book, like all the great travelers of later ages did. And they covered China, India, present day Indonesia. And they told these amazing stories of like islands, first

hand accounts of people who had the bodies of humans in the heads of dogs, or people who whose mouths were so small that they had to suck all their food through reeds because they just had a tiny hole for a mouth. And he said, all the Mongols eat their fathers as soon as they die. They went, oh, okay, great. That was the thing that Sal Manazar claimed. He claimed that he said he was divorced and that he was a reformed cannibal, because in Formosa, husbands were allowed to eat their wives. If there was adultery that had happened, if their wives had committed adultery, you were allowed to just... There was always a lot of cannibalism going on in these stories, weren't there? It's like the idea of weird foreigners would eat humans. Although the guy who

you're talking about, John Mandeville, he found one group of people whose only source of nourishment was the smell of apples. And he also found, he said that in Ethiopia, all the people had only one foot, but that foot was so large that it shadowed them from the sun. Oh, cool. How does that work? They would lie on their back and hold their massive foot. Oh, wow. It was awful when they wanted to go bowling. That's pretty cool. We should evolve like that. This is a slightly off topic, but P.L. Travers, the writer of Mary Poppins, she was into... She had one massive foot, didn't she? She was into a lot of esoteric stuff, and she went on a trip one point with a spiritual guru who she looked up to, where they were searching the earth for a giant footprint

that was said to be made by an intergalactic giant who used earth as a stepping stone as he was hopping through the universe. And she was convinced there was a giant footprint that would be... Sorry? When was she writing? What, 30s, 40s, 50s? Yeah, but she was part of a very big spiritual, very lobsam, rampa kind of movement. People believed any shit, didn't they, until almost now. Yeah, you're right. Everyone's making really fact-based sensible decisions these days. Thank God we've come so far. It's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that ahead of breeding season, Iceland publishes an illustrated catalog of the country's most eligible sheep. Yeah, so this is called the Ram Registry. It's an annual catalog

that they make available. It starts online, then they do a physical publication, and it profiles in this, in the last year that's gone, 44 rams. They do color photos. They do pedigrees breeding. It's all these stats. It tells you everything you need to know. It's a 52-page catalog. They have an obituary section for rams that have passed away who were... I think if Tinder had an obituary section, it would be more interesting. Yeah, that's true, but it has stuff like how many, how many they're expected to sire. It's just, it's the ultimate guide that you need for when it's breeding season. You want, I want that, and that's how they, that's how they spend their money. This thing is 20 years old, this registry. It's well-established. There's a ram in this year

is called Strumper, and Strumper, they say, the farmer who owns him says, Strumper, he is aware of his environment and knows exactly what's expected of him. He doesn't call himself a stripper. He calls himself an exotic dancer, actually. But they get, they get graded for leadership as well. So there are these, there are these sheep, which are called flock leaders, and they automatically act as leaders to the rest of the flock. And they, that's very important because they go off into the mountains and you need a ram in charge who sort of, you know, when the weather is going to be bad or when they can force hold the weather. So when they think the weather is going to be bad, they lead the flock to shelter and safety. Yeah. And the sheep,

which are particularly intelligent sub breed are called Icelandic leader sheep, because they show leadership. I don't think that's why, but it's a very nice coincidence. And then, but the thing is, unlike day snaps, they never get to meet the lady sheep today because basically it's a sperm donor kind of thing. So even when they're swipes on, they're just like, oh no, all you're going to get is my sperm. Oh my God, thank God Tinder doesn't run like that. I've never used Tinder, but is that not how it works? I used to, but I never just popped my sperm in the post. Swiped right on me. I think that might be a relief for a lot of women on Tinder. Thank God a cup of sperm. Just a picture in me with a lot of stamps. I'm ready for his class mail.

Wait, is that first class mail both ways around? But they're into sheep, aren't they in Iceland? Sure. They have three times as many sheep as people and they have this amazing ceremony every winter. So basically the sheep in Iceland, they have this weird farming system where all different farmers, different herds of sheep are free to roam with each other up on the mountains. So they all intermingle, which is a massive hassle when it comes to bringing them back down to put them in your pen because they're all mixed up. And so they just recruit everyone. So if you're a tourist in Iceland at, you know, pen time and it's got a name, I think it's called Retier time. And then you go and you help round

up sheep and you have to shimmy them down the mountain. You put them into this big enclosure with a central bit in the middle. And then you, they've got little marks on their ears that show which farmer they belong to. And if you see a mark, you grab it by the ear or by the scruff of its neck, you lift it up and you chuck it into the bit of that enclosure. You lift it up and chuck it. You lift up and throw it. That was very strong. The sheep are really, like, they're really perfect in Iceland, aren't they? They don't have any kind of other genes. They're like, they've been there since the Vikings and they've never had something. Or at Captain Arian over there. They want sullied these genes. Well, this is what they think. They think that because they've

been there for the whole time, they're not sullied by any other blood. And in 1878, they imported a single English ram into Iceland and they had to kill 60% of Icelandic flocks. Because they spread disease and parasites to the flocks. English tourists, best of the world. They love eating the sheep as well, obviously, because, you know, sheep are eaten. But there's a thing called swith, which is half a sheep's head. That's a delicacy. And they make sour testicles and brain jam. Well, they, so I found out the best way to eat the boiled sheep's brain, which is something that is a real delicacy. And this is because there's an MP. I think he might have been the foreign minister or the home secretary or something. He's a guy called, why didn't I practice this name

before I came on the stage? He's called Osso Skafjöjntson. Osso Skafjöjntson. Well, I think he's safely anonymous. That's the main thing. He's not sat at home going, why are they talking about me? Is he? No, he's not. Wouldn't want to be that guy who it really is. But he was in 2013, he was served some sheep's brain at a party. And he said, this is amongst the best boiled sheep said I've ever had. They stuck to my gum as proper heads should. And so that's what they're supposed to do. They stick to the gum. And then he was asked really, but was it the best? And he was like, okay, look, it wasn't the very best. The head should have been more fermented. Because we from the West Fjords prefer our sheep's head so fermented that we can drink the eye out of the

eye socket. So that's the, that's what you're going for. Wow. Goodness. In 2018, two men in Iceland summoned the police and the Coast Guard after they'd seen a polar bear on a peninsula. And that's obviously incredibly dangerous because they really don't come near. He was very often eventually after a lengthy search, the search was called off and the men admitted it may just have been a large sheep. It's just a lot closer than they thought. I know how to artificially inseminate a cow based on researching for this podcast. So this is obviously about pairing sheep up with each other so they can make properly. And dairy cows, you do the same thing. So I think 75% of dairy cows in this country, when they have to be inseminated, they get inseminated,

but just by semen rather than the actual bull. And for some reason, I found myself reading this really in depth farmer's guide to how to do it. And what I didn't realize was, so you get a semen gun, which you put the semen in. Imagine you bring your semen gun to a gunfight. Oh, you bring your semen gun to the insemination fight. And but what you do is you have to, so there are two entries into a cow. So it's much of a humans. Yeah, you've got the, oh, sorry. There are three now. Sorry, there are three. We're in Devon. Sorry. Something tells me you're not the biggest expert in this room on the number of ways into a cow. I know the people at Devon know all these secret ways, but there are two entries.

There were two entries into the back of a cow officially. And so, you know, one is the rection as we all have. Stop, Professor. Let me write this down. Children, wouldn't you be quiet? You've got the rexum and then you've got the sex tubes and they're different. All right, the cervix. But what you do is, amazingly, when you're inseminating a cow, you obviously have to stick the gun in the cervix. But the way you navigate the gun into the uterine horns, as they're called, is you have to put your other arm that's not holding the gun into the rexum. So you, it's so amazing. And they say you shove your arm into the rexum, insert your arm into the rexum, get someone else to hold the cow's tail aside while you do this.

That would be a bald farmer who tried using one foot to pin the cow's tail. This is the worst game of twister I've ever played. It says left hand sex tubes. Anyway, look, it just feels like this lesson isn't going to end. So you essentially use your rectum arm to navigate your semen gun, which is in the vaginal canal, and you push it through. So you've got your arm in the rectum and it's pushing against the other canal so that it gets into the uterus and it's called rectovaginal insemination. And that's lesson over. Enjoy. Okay, that is 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, please don't shout. But if you insist, I'm on At Shriverland, Andy. And Andrew Hunter-Ebb. James. At James Harkins. And Chazinski. The authorities should email. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yeah, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thing, as a fish.com. We have all of our previous episodes up there. We have links to our upcoming tours. We have YouTube videos of Anna showing how to inseminate. Thank you so much. Good night.