No Such Thing As A Fish - 269: No Such Thing As Singing The Sport

Episode Date: May 17, 2019

Live from Salford, Dan, James, Andrew and Anna discuss canine height restrictions, finch bite quotients, and the Manchester Of The East.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the Lowry in Salford. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. And with fact number one, and that's my fact this week, my fact is that in 17th century Europe people used to sing each other the news, that's how they got the news, it would be sung at their face, like that, that kind of thing.

This is the thing, in the 17th century illiteracy rates were so high that if they did publish newspapers no one was really buying them because they couldn't read them, so what they ended up doing was they were taking classic ballads of the time, but then applying just the news of the day to them, and so people would go on the streets and they would start singing the news, and people would memorize the songs that they were singing, and they would pass it on and pass it on, and that's how the news got around, and so it was for everything from political news to sentimental stories, religious news, royal rumours, medical advice. They do like an and finally at the end with a dog on a surfboard or something.

They did have a paywall, so people plugged the ballads, so there were guys going around selling the ballads, and they would sing them to the audience on the street corner to drum up interest, but they would not sing the last verse, so you didn't know how it ended, so there was a thing where it goes grey on the website, but it's an execution ballad, how often was it? And he pulled his head out just in time. It is a bit like the internet today, isn't it, because so they had these sheets that you could buy the sheet music if you wanted to, and then you could share it on the streets

by singing it, and then it gave you ideas of morality and stuff like that, so it is a little bit like reading the news on the internet and then sharing it and then commenting on it. Except it was just a lot more gruesome, they were kind of disgusting in their taste. I don't know if you've heard any of the news over the last few years. The fact that I'm not on social media makes that an unreliable comment, but there was one, so there was a French song, in fact, which was set to a really fun tune apparently, so they were quite upbeat, and it was about a Huguenot whose execution got interrupted

because the people thought that they weren't being harsh enough by just chopping his head off, or hanging him, sorry, they were hanging him, and so the people dragged him to a dung heap and mutilated him, and this ballad went, the little children all got together yelling and singing joyously, having a great time, pulling out his innards to throw them in the fire, removing his guts and organs, and then a dog swallowed his heart, there you go, there you go. It doesn't even rhyme. I think it rhymed in French, to be there.

They used to as well, not just report the news, but in the execution ballads, this moral thing that James is talking about, they used to then do verses from the perspective of the person who was killed, guillotined or hanged, and that's where the moral would come in, they would suddenly, it was as if the news was reading a quote from someone, but that quote never existed, so they would be saying, oh, I lament what I did, and I wish I had not done it, and oh, what a silly sausage I was, and that was the way of saying that everyone was upset about the crime they committed. This mortal life I will depart, and then a dog will swallow my heart, and then you end,

yes, that was really good, born in the wrong century, mate, and the nice thing was it was tunes that everyone knew, so they used green sleeves for a load of ballads, because you couldn't say, you couldn't get people to sing a news if they didn't know the tune. That's so appropriate, because didn't Henry VIII write that song? No. No, that is a myth. So it's completely... No, no, no, there is a rumor that he did.

It was written around the same time as him. So he wrote it. The thing is, if we think we have fake news now, I mean, this was out of control, so it was mostly kind of overhead gossip and rumors, because so people having to sort of eavesdrop on diplomats and things like that, and talk to people who talked to people who'd been at court, and so there was even a proclamation in 1672, Charles II, in fact, issued a proclamation to restrain the spreading of false news, which is just very prescient, but there was even ballads about how they shouldn't write ballads that were so full of fake news.

There was a whole ballad that was taking the pier saying, all the ballads we hear these days are full of stories, stories, lies and stories, a pox on your newsletters, they lie both and flatters, they are but a trap to weedle men in. Wow, there are some Manchester ones, so I've read quite a few of them, and they include things like, these are all ballads that were real, The Spinner's Lamentation, Victoria Bridge on a Saturday night, and Johnny Green's Trip from Oldham to See the Manchester Railway. I found a 17th century song, not telling the news, but just a ballad that survived the times, and the title of it is Kentish Dick or The Lusty Coachman of Westminster, and

it was a story about a guy who moved to London, and he would go around wooing women, and he would trick them into believing that he was going to be there for all of their life, and he would sleep with them, and they might get pregnant, and they thought they had a whole life with him, and then he would just disappear, and the whole song was teaching a moral, and it has a line in it where the town seeks to sever from him that unruly limb. And then he was just called Kentish after that, wasn't he? Do you know that under the Town Police Clauses Act of 1847, it's still an offence to publicly sing any profane or obscene song or ballad in the street?

Yeah, so you're not allowed to do it. So Andy, sorry. We could have performed Citizen's Arrest on all the people of Newcastle last night. And when I was looking that up, I found this, this isn't on topic at all, but I found out that there is a pub in Whitehall in London called The Silver Cross Pub, which is technically the nation's only legal brothel. Really? Because it was given a licence by Charles I, which has never been revoked. What?

And they have an upstairs room that you can hire. Yeah. Just another fact. That's actually the sponsor for this week's podcast. I was looking at some other ballads and what they were written for. So a lot of them, maybe the most popular type were drinking songs. And they used to be plastered up in pubs. And this was particularly in Britain, in England, especially.

So in England, ballads were written on single sides because they had to be used as wall paper in various pubs. Whereas on the continent, they were double-sided because they were pamphlets. So they had these drinking ballads, and I read one of them, which was at the end of every verse, it would say, ah, we've had this one drink, now bring us another. So every verse was you had to down your drink and get another one. And they had 13 verses. So one song, you had to drink 13 pints.

Whoa. Yeah. There were quite a lot of sort of heartbreak ballads as well. That was another big genre. I am a bachelor, isn't it sad? Was the title of one of them. Each has a lover but me. Daddy, come home.

I don't think that is actually a single one. Jack and his nuts, possibly a relation of Kentish dick. And my favourite is Nancy, I have lost my wig. What a great song. That's awesome. You were saying, Anna, about how they got these ballads and they put them on the wall in the pub. They put it on the door post of the inn and they used to call that posting and that's how we eventually get the phrase posting a message on the internet.

It's from the same. You're kidding. Wow. Wow. So basically you had posting things on the posts outside the pub and then you went to, like newspapers were called the post and then you would have postal services and then you had posting internet things. Wow.

Awesome. And the phrase dick pic comes from Kentish dick. It used to be he would do a woodcut of his penis. Don't say cut. Don't say wood. I mean, I thought very wrong. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Andy. My fact is that pound for pound a 33 gram finch can bite you 320 times harder than a T-rex

could. Yeah, but pound for pound. So there's not many pounds in a finch as a, no, there's a lot in a T-rex. That's true. So this is like, there's, it's good news in various ways because it turns out the finches are small and T-rexes are all dead. So in a way we're fine. It's win-win.

Yeah, win-win. But this is a study that has just been done into bite force and it's, you know, we know roughly what the T-rex could chomp. So if it bit you, it was the equivalent of 13 grand pianos landing on you. Whoa. Yeah. That's a brilliant cartoon. Unlucky.

So they could bite really, really hard. There's no disputing that. But there's, there's this study has measured hundreds of different animals bite strength and this tiny finch, the Galapagos finch has a very powerful bite relative to its body size. So, yeah. Yeah. I read that it's the, if a finch was scaled up to a T-rex's size, its bite would be 320 times stronger than that of a T-rex.

And a T-rex had a bite force of 12,800 pounds. So the finch would have a bite force of 4 million pounds. Whoa. And a rocket has 5 million pounds of thrust. Wow. So I don't think this is realistic. Yeah. I'm just so concerned now that someone involved with Jurassic Park 29 or wherever we are is

listening and is like, I've got the climactic moment to the next film. The giant finch thunders on. Just swallows the T-rex. That's what the author said. This is Reading University and they said the king of the dinosaurs will be no match for a finch in a fight if they were the same size. Oh my God. The idea of a finch size T-rex is very cute, isn't it?

They do know what baby T-rexes look like now. Do they just like small T-rexes? Yeah, pretty much. Right. No, they've done a picture of what it might look like and they're really cute and fluffy and they had normal length arms compared to the T-rexes have small arms, but they have normal arms. So at some stage in their puberty, their arms just became small.

Wow. Or they keep growing, but their arms have stopped. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Or their arms become small. So relative. It's one of them. So relative.

So if a finch bit me on my finger, what would that feel like? Your hand would explode. What did it? It would hardly hurt at all. Not at all, really. And the thing is basically it's the thing with ants being able to carry massive things, isn't it? If things are small, it's much easier for them to do things in impressive ways.

That's true. Sorry. That's my Tinder profile. You don't understand. Pound for pound. This is like having sex with a T-rex. Yeah. Good.

While they're under things that aren't going to work. But they have just looked into T-rex adolescence and discovered some quite interesting stuff about it. So they have adolescence kind of like humans. They have found out how old T-rexes would grow to is about 28. And the adolescence happened between 14 and 18. And that's where they just had their massive growth spurt. And the way they can tell this is because they look at the growth rings on them.

So they study growth rings on ribs. And they have mineral deposits that are laid down every year as they grow. And so then you can count at what point they grew a lot suddenly. So they're like trees. That's the analogy I was going for. Yeah. I was looking and there's a there's a museum, which is the Museum of Astrias. And it's in Spain.

And they have a model of a T-rex. And it's the weirdest thing. And this is a museum that they invite children to and adults. And it's a family day out. And the structure of it is they're showing two T-rexes mid-copulation. They're having sex. So the female T-rex. It's a doggy style, basically, position of these two giant skeletons.

And the weird thing is there's no reason for it because we don't even know how they have sex. There's just no point. They're just speculating that that's what it is. But when you go in there, there's a T-rex taking another T-rex from behind. It's crazy. They have started putting feathers on them in museums, which I appreciate. I went to a natural history museum in Tasmania recently because, you know, they discovered that most dinosaurs had feathers.

And so they've had to go back through all the old bloody museums and pin feathers to all their exhibits. And they're doing it. Do you know that T-rexes got mouth ulcers? No. Really? Yeah, they did. So they looked at microbes in coprolites in T-rex poo.

And they found that they had the same kind of microbes as birds get. And it gives them mouth ulcers. So we think that probably T-rexes have mouth ulcers. That's amazing. So finches. Yeah. So this is a thing also about adolescents, actually, adolescent finches. So teenage finches, they learn how to sing zebra finches.

They learn how to sing from their fathers. And they get taught this incredibly complicated set of tunes. But we have recently discovered. So most animals learn kind of by rote. They just listen and repeat, listen and repeat. What's really rare in the animal kingdom is learning via social cues. So if I was singing my song, and my father sort of gave a sign of approval or disapproval.

And, you know, that's how they do it. But they don't learn from their fathers. They learn from their mothers. And the way they learn is their mothers kind of give the signs of finding them attractive. So they do what's called fluffing up, which is a signal that a female likes a male song. And basically the young finches sing. And if they get the song,

close to their father's song, the mum fluff is fluffed up. And basically she's saying, that's just how your father wooed me. That's kind of nice. That's like a mum sending their son off to the prom, sorting out his hair before he leaves or something. But making it look exactly like his father's hair. And saying, I find this attractive and I want you to look like it. It's a combination of sweet and creepy.

Yeah. It's back to the future, isn't it? It's back to the future. It's back to the future. They also, when they're tiny, the finches, they have a very amazing ability for feeding at night. These are the baby finches and they lose this as they get older. They have these little nodules that glow in the dark.

They're these blue nodules that suddenly glow so that when the mother is looking to feed them, she can specify which ones are where and not lose any food in the process. How cool is that? Very smart. It's amazing. They glow in the dark.

And on their singing, they have another very clever thing they do when they sing, which has started to happen since global warming became a thing. And this is that zebra finches sing to the embryos in their eggs. So the mothers will sing into their eggs and their singing will be a warning about the temperature outside. And this tells the embryo inside the egg how they're going to be able to feed them.

And this tells the embryo inside the egg how much or how little to grow. So if it's getting hot outside, which it often is now, then the zebra finch sings a song to its embryos going, it is pretty warm out here. That's amazing. Don't grow too big. There's been an armed robbery in Chester.

I was just going to say, we've had them sing in the news and now we're having them sing in the weather. We just need someone singing the spot. The vampire finched, you know, guys, they have very sharp beaks and they peck at the skin of boobies and they drink the blood out of these booby birds and it even breaks into the booby eggs and drinks the contents. And sometimes it does it with humans.

Sometimes it will try and peck on a human and try and get at the blood as well. But not the human eggs. No. That's a very difficult thing to do, isn't it? I don't know how it's got there. You've got bigger things to worry about. It's a slow process of trust gaining over many months.

You start with the boobies. This fact is also about biting. I found a couple of things about biting. This is just a bit of a useful thing to know. And it's something that science is looking into at the moment because I think it can be applied in the long term to mosquito sprays. But mosquitoes, if a mosquito is biting you, if you slap your arm or wherever it's biting,

if you slap there, it sends vibrations up through to the mosquito and when they leap off, they associate the smell that you have with what just happened there, the fear that they might be killed. And the reason that mosquitoes land on us is they're attracted to a smell and they remember the smell. So it turns out that if you do that, you're going to put the mosquito off for 24 hours. That same mosquito won't come back and land on you.

It might be a different one, but it will think, I might get killed if I go back to that smell. It remembers the smell of your body. Exactly. So they think that's a threat. I can't go back there. That might kill me. So all mosquito products at the moment are trying to work out how they can get what we manage to do with our pheromones and our body smell into that in order to stop.

But next time you've got mosquitoes around, just slap yourself a lot and it'll be all over your body. Just slap yourself silly. That kind of implies that the next mosquito repellence are just going to be lots of little slappers that we have to pin to our bodies. Like little mouse traps all over us constantly smacking us. I'd rather be bitten.

Oh, okay. Just personally. For everyone else, it lasts for 24 hours. That's really good. Yeah. Do you know what makes our... So humans, we have a certain bite quotient. We have quite a strong bite,

but do you know we probably could bite much harder than we do? But what would you think holds us back? What do you think determines how hard we bite? How good our muscles are in our jaws. So... I say willpower. So, I think... James is wrong, Andy's more wrong.

This is... Do you want to go for the three-time? I just think socially it looks awkward if you're biting harder than... We have a winner. There we go. No, this is an experiment that was done by a guy called Dr. G.E. Black. He was actually in 1933, so it was a long time ago, but he invented what he called a nathodynamometer,

and this was basically... He put some rubber pads on this steel instrument he designed, and he got 1,000 people to bite down on it, and he worked out that the restrictive factor on how hard you can bite is not your jaw strength, it's your teeth. So the people stopped biting when they said, my teeth really hurt. And actually, if you think about it,

when your jaw more power than your teeth are able to withstand. So if you just man up and deal with the tooth pain... Willpower, that's what I said. Yep, you're right. I amend my response. You're correct. Oh, thank you. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the most polluted city in the world is Kanpur. It is nicknamed the Manchester of the East. I've lost them, guys. Unbelievably risky. What are you thinking? So, I mean, this is true. It's the particles in the air. It's especially particles with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers,

which basically means soot, and it's because of the tanning industry. There's a local wind called the Lou of Kanpur, which gives them really bad dust storms, and yeah, it's really, really bad, but the reason that they call it the Manchester of the East is because obviously Manchester used to have extremely bad pollution, and also it's kind of an industrial town,

and Manchester is one of the most famous industrial towns because it's such a great city. Nice. Good storm. Great backtracking. You say Manchester used to have quite bad pollution. Let's face it, it still does. So, I actually thought this would be a thing where we went,

oh, and it's such a misnomer because Manchester's fine now, and if you look at air pollution rates, I always thought London was the worst, but actually topping the list from last year is Port Talbot in Wales because they've got big steelworks, and then second is not in fact Manchester, it is where we are right now, which is Sulford's Skunthorpe and Sulford Joint Second,

and do you know what's third? This is really weird, the third most polluted place in Britain. No. Gibraltar. What? Oh! I'm sure it won't be for long. That is because half of the world's sea trade

goes through the Gibraltar Strait, and so all of those polluting particles coming from the sea. And they have no countryside around there, it's just literally that little rock. Yeah, exactly. Just pools in there. Those pool monkeys. So, the term acid rain was coined in Manchester in 1872.

Friedrich Engels, who lived here for a little while, he described it as a place of filth ruin and uninhabitableness, and he described it as hell on earth. But in fairness at the time, it was when Manchester was really growing and people had come over from Ireland and the cotton mills had just started, and it was not a great place to live,

unlike now. Although, having said that, there was a pub for every 139 residents of Manchester. Nice. Wow. And one in 40 of the city's population was arrested for drunkenness within a single year. Wow!

That's very good. I found a different thing that Engels observed when he was in town. 1845, he was around, he was amazed to discover that there were flourishing piggeries in every back street in the city. Yeah, still, you haven't been around today. Yeah, but it was very useful.

And in fact, that was the case all over the country, it wasn't just Manchester. It was a piggery just where you're farming pigs. It's a pig. It's a pig. It's whatever tiny space you keep a pig in. It's a piggery. It depends on the presence or absence of a pig.

If it hasn't got a pig in it, it's just a small yard. Are you claiming that if you've got one pig, you've got a piggery? Yes. Really? It's not a thriving piggery, is it? I would say it's on its last legs. Yeah, but it's a very good waste disposal unit.

All rubbish goes into the pig and the pig eats everything and then you eat the pig. Yeah, perfect. It's a slightly slower way of eating lots of rubbish, basically. Just on city nicknames. This is about a city nickname and Manchester used to be called Cottonopolis. And you say it wasn't a good place to be,

but it's always very much swings around about through the 19th century. It was also extremely wealthy and kind of an awesome place to be because you could make money. But I was reading an account of someone who was travelling around Manchester for the first time in the mid-19th century and loving it and saying, you know, it's so brilliant and people are all about the cotton mills. And he kept on asking to be shown round a cotton mill,

like given a tourist visitor tour. And they would never let him because they were so paranoid about everyone else stealing their technology because they had the best cotton technology they weren't allowed in. In 1871, 32% of all the cotton in the world was made in Manchester. Wow. All the cotton on the planet, the whole planet. I just think that's incredible.

Yeah. So there were gangs as well because obviously lots of people moving from the country to the city, lots of people in a cramped space, you get gangs. And are people familiar with the scuttlers? Is that a thing still? Not still. OK.

They are not thriving. Just like the Piggory. But they were a gang who really plagued the city in the late 19th century and they had a very distinctive look. They had a fringe which was called a donkey fringe and they had a Necker chiefs which told you which gang they were in, which was quite smart so you could see the stripes or the spots and say, oh, you're with that gang.

But the way they started, the scuttlers, it started with a historical reenactment society that got out of hand. No. This is... Historian called Andrew Davis has written a book about this. This is what it says about the book. Davis has identified the trigger point for scuttling as arising from the reception of the Franco-Prussian war

by the schoolboys of Ancoats. Young boys recreated the battles on the streets of Ancoats using the categories of Catholic French and Protestant Russian to reflect their own legences. The game very quickly evolved into a widespread vogue for street battles. And it just turned into gang warfare. Wow.

The worst place to go was on Deansgate, wasn't it? That was where they all hung out. And the absolute worst place was a hovel on the corner of Harbin Street and Deansgate, which today is a Wagamama's. Oh, wow. It's only gone downhill. I have a sort of modern Manchester fact.

I imagine everyone here will know this, so apologies to the crowd here, because everyone overseas won't know this. But we all know Manchester United and Man City as the football teams. And in 2011, they were awarded the third ever annual Jelly Donut Award. It's done by the accredited language services.

They award the best translation errors each year. And when the Man City stadium was, the Etihad stadium, Etihad in Arabic means United. And... No. Oh, my goodness.

So Man City suddenly were playing in the Etihad. That's such a good fact. I love it. You know Xi Jinping came to Manchester in 2015 and visited Man City, and he visited the stadium, and he was given a copy of the Rules of Football as a gift, because football made something

that was invented in England. And so he was given a copy of the Rules that were drawn up in 1863. Xi Jinping gave us a copy representation of a figure playing Cuju, the football S-Sport invented in China 2,000 years ago. Wow.

Feels like a bit of Islam. Just on world leaders, do you know that Manchester United was literally hours away from being owned by Colonel Gaddafi? Really? Yeah, so not the whole thing, but a huge percentage. 29.9%. It was the guy who did...

who brokered the deal to the Glazer family who did take over. He said it was hours away from not going to them and going to Gaddafi instead. Ah, bad luck, guys. What might have been? OK, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Chazinsky.

My fact is that dogs over 35 centimetres tall are banned from Beijing. There's a high restriction. They all get measured if they're too tall, they've got to go. So China has this bizarre history with dog laws, and this one was passed in 2003, and it was about what breeds of dogs and what kind of dogs are allowed in Beijing,

in the centre of Beijing, really, and then in bits of the rural districts. If you're taller than 35 centimetres and a dog, not allowed. If you are on a list of 41 breeds that they listed, you're not allowed, so like setters, greyhounds, mastiffs, holding the sheepdogs, those really cute, shaggy things,

band, collies. It's all the classics, Dalmatian. All the classics, yeah. Chow chows, which I had a chow chow, and a chow chow is a Chinese dog, so that's weird. I thought chow chows were quite small. No, chow chows, they're like the Chewbacca looking guys. Oh, right.

They used to be warrior dogs for the Chinese armies, and so they're very revered there, so that's bizarre that they're on that list. Could you get your dog to, for example, sit? So it's shorter than 35 centimetres tall? Oh, yeah. You don't change your height when you sit down. But they could do that wiping bum shuffle that they do, and just walk like that.

You could give it a haircut. I bet if you shaved a sheepdog, there's tiny under all that. The whole point is that these breeds are found no matter how tall they are. I reckon you would recognise a sheepdog if it was completely shaved of all its fat. There are some breeds that would be allowed if they're under 35, but not if they're over 35, so you could shave them.

You're right on that cusp. I don't know if they'll give you the benefit of the doubt. There was a crackdown. They cracked down properly on this in 2014, and there were all these owners of pets that were suddenly told they were outlawed, who were having a bit of a disaster. The government said, why don't you just give your pets away to shelters? And obviously people didn't do that, because that's a weird thing to do to your dog of 10 years. But there is a lot of luxury stuff for pets.

So there's this weird division between the Chinese government, which is cracking down on animals, and then there are lots of tiny dogs, and those are treated very luxuriously. It's a really popular thing in China. So there are play centres just for dogs, which have got indoor swimming pools and ball pits and obstacle courses. There's pet acupuncture. That's quite a big thing.

And there are dog hotels which have dog cinemas in. And the film is especially designed for dogs' eyesight. I don't know what that means. So I think they see stuff more frames per second than us, about twice as many. So maybe they have many more per frames per second in the film. This is why dogs don't get very captivated by television when you put it on. There's one reason, isn't it? Other reason is that they're very, very stupid animals.

But it looks to them like a series of photographs one after the other. So I guess this is... Yeah. So if you suddenly fast forward a movie on your TV, are they like, Whoa, what is this? In Dorset, there is a spa hotel for guinea pigs. Mmm. What does that entail? Well, for £16, you can get a pedicure.

16. 16. That's pretty good. Well, you need to pay for the hotel, but this is just an extra on the side thing. Oh, sorry, I thought this was a nice B&B for a guinea pig. Well, they don't eat much bee. And they don't need a very big bee. So for your £16 anyway, you get a pedicure,

you get two washes with lice shampoo, anti-lice shampoo, you get a haircut, a towel dry, a massage while watching a movie, and a snooze. Wow. You have to pay for a snooze. That is a rip-off. But yeah, in China, people are very into their dogs, but they've worked out recently that the city-dwelling millennials

are responsible for 70% of pet spending in China, which is actually quite weird, because millennials, it's basically were born in the 80s and 90s, which is pretty young to be spending a lot on pets. But they think it's because they've been... This is what the Economist said. They've been lured away from their families and friends by jobs in the big cities,

meaning they're incredibly lonely at this point. A lot of people single. The air is very bad outside, as previously discussed, and it's extremely easy to stay inside and just watch stuff on the internet. It's nice to have someone with you when you do that. And by the way, there are 200 million unmarried people in their 20s and 30s in China,

which is, if you think about that as a proportion of world population, it's a lot of single people. 200 million in 20s and 30s? Yeah. Wow. Single. Yeah. It's a lot. They're all sitting there with their dogs inside. This woman said,

I live alone and it's nice to have little Louie waiting all happy to see me when I get home. And she said this as she flipped through photos of cats on her iPhone. I just feel like there's a social problem that we need to address. Wow. Just on dog sizes in Japan, I was being told earlier by Ash Gardner, who wrote our theme tune.

When he was in Japan, there were parks there, and I started googling this after he said it. Yo-yo-gi park. It's in Japan, and what they have is they want to make sure that dogs that go to the park have a great experience. So there is a weight and size category for dogs of which bit of the park they go to.

So they separate the big dogs from the little dogs, and the little dogs and the medium dogs hang out together, and they all play, and the big dogs have to go to another section. So yeah, they're separated, so no fights break out amongst the dogs. I think that sounds a bit sort of like sizest. I think that sounds good.

That's segregation. You pro-segregation? No. I just don't like very big dogs, or these small ones. Look, never mind. Never has anyone backed down from hiking in so quickly. Dogs are much less clever than humans like to think. So there are lots of people who think that their dogs are very, very clever, and the science doesn't really bear it out, unfortunately,

and I can feel the room slipping away as I say this. So dogs, for example, can't recognise themselves in mirrors, which some animals can do, and on lots of measures they're about the same as pigeons. Well, they can't fly either. And they can't even fly, useless. But the doctor who carried out this work, Britta Osthaus, she did work about ten years ago,

which showed that dogs were cleverer than cats, and she got a big backlash then from all the cat owners, saying, my cat's as clever as any dog, and now she's done this research, she's got a backlash from dog owners, and when she published this study, and it was printed in The Times, there was lots of backlash in the comments section. One Times reader wrote, we once had a beagle who could open the refrigerator with his paws.

Case closed. Just on the idea of having small dogs, there is concern to be had when you do hang out with just small dogs. In America recently, there was a warning when there was a big storm that hit Cleveland with 50-mile-an-hour winds there. The Weather Bureau released a statement saying, can everyone please be careful, these winds are huge, and things that can happen are trash cans will go missing,

trees will fall, and dogs will go flying. Yeah, they did a small dog warning, and it's the idea that when the winds pick up so high, they get lobbed off into the air, and if you're not holding onto them by leash, they will disappear. And if you are holding onto them by leash, you've got an amazing kite.

Now, they did do this slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it is based on real incidences that have happened in America, stories that you can read up on. For example, a 72-year-old couple, or a 72-year-old lady called Dorothy Ottley, she lost her chihuahua. Sorry, she's good at talking. And she lost her chihuahua toto in a tornado.

She lived in Kansas. Wow, did you have to notice that? No, it was a six-pound chihuahua called Tinkerbell, and they said... They are mixing their movies in. Yeah, this is cross-genre movie. They were walking around, and a 70-mile-an-hour wind came,

and it picked Tinkerbell up, and it took her off in the wind, and they couldn't find her. And what they actually ended up doing is that they hired a pet psychic called Laurie. Right. Well, they had my sympathy for a good long time there. Laurie said,

you have to stop looking in lowlands. Was Laurie a pet who was also a psychic? No, no, no. She was a psychic of pets, and she was also a third-generation psychic, so she was the granddaughter of original psychic. The powers will be concentrated. There's a lot of capitalism in psychic careers, isn't there?

My father was a fraud. My grandfather was a fraud. And so she said to them, you need to look up, and so the volunteers started looking outside of the swamp and up the hill, and they found Tinkerbell, and so my point is, you will lose a dog in the wind.

Right. OK, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us who have sat over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on Treiberland, Andy.

At AndrewHunterM. James. At James Harkin. And Chasinski. You can email podcast at qi.com. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. You can go to our website as well, nosuchthingasafish.com. We have everything up there from all of our previous episodes,

to upcoming tour dates, to anything that we've released. Thank you so much, Salford. Thank you.