No Such Thing As A Fish - 275: No Such Thing As A Squashed Microbe

Episode Date: June 28, 2019

Live from Oxford, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss lethal hippopotamus poo, ice cream-making warplanes, and how to avoid upsetting microbes.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Oxford! My name is Dan Schreiber, and 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 favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go! Starting with you, Andy. My fact is that hippos sometimes poo into rivers so much that all the fish downstream die. This is such cool science.

Not if you're a fish. Not if you're a fish. This is a horror story if you're a fish. True. So, quick shout out to the scientists who did this. The team who did this was scientists Chris Dutton and Amanda Szybuluski, and the hippos poo a lot into rivers. Basically, pooing is one of the main things that hippos do, and they do it for all sorts

of purposes, communication, and... Mostly to get it out of their bodies as well. Mostly for pooing purposes. It's technically called organic matter loading. That's what I call it. Surely it's unloading. Depends if you're loading the river, I guess. Oh, yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I don't know. No, you're right. You're right. Well, I'm not sure I am. But, so they eat a lot of grass and they eat it at night because it's cooler when they're out of the river feeding, and in the daytime they wallow in the river to stay cool. So this was on a river called the Mara between Kenya and Tanzania.

There are 4,000 hippos living in this river, and these hippos deposit 8,500 kilos of waste every day into quite a short section of river. And it turns into this huge sludge at the bottom of the river, and then in the dry season the river shrinks and dries up a bit, but then when it rains, this massive tidal wave of hippo poo gets churned up and all of this sludge gets washed down, and it doesn't have much oxygen in it because of all the bacteria which have been consuming the poo. So the oxygen levels in the water plummet, all the fish die. So it's bad news if you're a fish, but it's good news if you're something that eats fish,

and don't mind a little bit of pooey aftertaste. Yeah, yeah. You're definitely sending that back if you're at a restaurant. The fish looks great. It's just the hippo shit all over it. So things like stalks, falches, crocodiles, hyenas, they eat these fish really quickly. Once they die off. And actually, the researcher says, if you weren't there to see it, you wouldn't know

it was happening because it happened so quickly that they'd come and eat all this stuff. Wow. There's a really good way of the nutrition cycle almost happening through the ecosystem. Yeah. The researchers who did this, it was in Kenya, wasn't it? And they couldn't do it themselves. They couldn't go and analyze the poo themselves because hippos are very dangerous. They're the most dangerous of the large mammals in the world, actually, in Africa.

So they kill, estimates seem to vary between 503,000 people in Africa every year. But so the researchers didn't really want to go near that. So they sent in some boats and they got advice from a Maasai guide who said, disguise your boats as crocodiles. And so they disguised their boats as crocodile heads, which went around collecting data on their poo. That's amazing. Because they get along quite well hippos and crocodiles.

They do. But actually, it's a bit of a relationship that seems a bit skewed towards the hippo in that the crocodile just needs to be a bit passive when it comes to a hippo and them interacting. I've seen footage of a baby hippo using the back of a crocodile, basically as a teething ring just to... But they do sometimes eat hippo babies. It's quite bold for it to be chewing on a crocodile as a ring because they do occasionally flip around and swallow a baby, which I imagine doesn't happen with an actual baby's teething

ring. So this is very rarely... You'd have a very strong case. Yeah. A few products on Amazon would one-star reviews going, hey, my fucking kid. It's actually what brought down toys around, isn't it? But yeah, in this case, it's because the children, obviously they could take on. It's when a mother is babysitting near a crocodile and they're watching the biting going on.

So the crocodile has to just put up there. Just take it because they're like, I don't want to start anything here. I think I read that a hippo can bite a crocodile in two, which doesn't sound plausible, but they're very, very powerful jaws. They're very strong jaws, don't they? They're going to easily snap a boat into it if they want to. Yeah. Like, you know, not a cruise ship, but a robot or something.

Just back to the organic matter loading thing. So the thing they do, which is really communicative with other hippos, is that they use their tail as a propeller and they spray it over a very wide area. Spray the poo. They spray the poo over a wide area because their tail is going round and round and round like a propeller. Like shit hits in the fan, isn't it? Exactly that.

That's it. Yeah, they do seem to spray it around willy nilly and they use it for flirting, don't they? They're spraying. So they, both sides, both genders flirt with their feces. So the males will mark their territory with this big spray of poo, which they can spray a couple of meters with their tail. And then the female, if she's impressed, will respond by turning round to face him with

her ass, so to not face him, and to, and then she'll do the whizzing, the poo whizzing. And it's called submissive defecation. Do you know that hippos can't get cholera? And they think that one of the reasons is because they throw their poo around so much. So I surmise if humans start throwing their poos around. Eventually, after thousands of years, millions of deaths, you'll have humans who are covered in poo but can't get cholera. Look, no one's saying that it's going to be great to start off with, it's like Brexit.

No one's saying that it's going to be great to start off with. But eventually. The cholera is, well, because it moves the poo far away from them. Well, because they have a lot of contact to the bacterium or whatever it is. If they could get cholera, they'd be dead. Right, so they've got some sort of immunity. Yeah. Okay.

Because they do eat it as well, don't they? God, really? The babies eat their mother's feces, because they have that unfortunate thing, which some species have, where babies are born without any functioning intestines, they don't have any live bacteria in their insides. The only way they can get that is to eat their mother's poo, so as soon as they're born, they've got to start showering down on that. There was a...

There was a... We briefly mentioned hippo testicles before, but I found out just a little bit more about them, so I thought we should return to that wellspring. So there's a great article in Discover magazine, which is headlined, Why It's Nearly Impossible to Castrate a Hippo. So the... First of all, you've got to get pretty close to it. That's true.

Yeah. Can't do that with a remote-controlled crocodile-shaped boat. Although you would be able to use the chars, doesn't it? Yeah. But there are a problem in some places, obviously, because they are a bit of a pest. They're very prolific breeders as well, so they can produce 25 calves in 40 years. So before you know it, you've got loads of hippos. So the problem with castration, to spread it across loads of hippos in the pest area,

is that their testicles are hidden inside their bodies, and there's a paper in the journal Thereogenology, which names all the difficulties in castrating hippos. Number one, the penis is apparently discreet. I've used that excuse. It's just being polite. And also, the testicles are not in the same place from one hippo to the next, so they can vary by up to 16 inches between different animals. Wow.

So if you cut in trying to remove the hippo's testicles, they're not there. So a game of pin the testicles on the hippo could lead to... Pretty much stick a pin anyway, you're correct. Yeah. And the problem is that they can retract further during surgery, which we've said. They can retract them further into their body. They can flee the surgeon's knife. And also, it's very hard to anesthetize a hippo.

I mean, there are so many problems. Yeah. Just don't do it. Don't do it. Don't castrate them. Although they are a pest, as you say, and they are a particular pest, of course, in Colombia, right? So this hippo's known for really hanging out in Africa, but Pablo Escobar in Colombia

had this zoo. Pablo Escobar, a massive Colombian drug lord, obviously, was shot in 1993, left behind his massive menagerie of weird animals. And they got rid of most of them. But people didn't notice at the time, I don't think, that he had a bunch of hippos living in his lake. How could he not notice? Didn't spot him.

Didn't spot him. They look like rocks. And they've bred. And eventually, everyone's attention was drawn to this in 2007. So he died in 1993. 2007, fishermen started calling the local council or whatever it is and reporting... My fish tastes a bit like hippo shit. Sales have really plummeted.

No, they kept calling up and reporting creatures with tiny ears and huge mouths. And they genuinely didn't know what they were, these people, and they were hippos. And so now there are about 60 of them that are just living in this tiny area in the rivers and lakes. And apparently, you'll be in this nearby town and you'll see a hippo just wandering down the road. Wow. It's very exciting.

It's very scary. We're going to have to move on in a second. I found an interesting thing. The first pharaoh of the United Egypt was killed by a hippo. He was called King Menes. And we only know it from a single line, as far as I can tell, by a historian called Manetho, who just simply wrote, Menes was the first king, he was snatched and killed by a hippopotamus and nothing else.

We don't know the circumstances, we don't know what he was doing at the time. What a legacy. We do know what it's like to be swallowed by a hippo or to half swallowed, because there was a guy a few years ago called Chris Broughton, who was on the Zambezi. And basically, he said, before he knew it, he was inside a hippo. He said, I was aware that my legs were being surrounded by water, but my top half was almost dry. I seem to be trapped in something slimy.

There was a terrible sulfurous smell like rotten eggs and a tremendous pressure against my chest. My arms were trapped, but I managed to free one and felt around my palm past through the wiry bristles of the hippo's snout. It was only then that I realized I was underwater, trapped up to my waist in his mouth. Wow. Isn't that amazing that we know what that's like? He managed to get himself, he wriggled as much as he could, managed to get free, and

there were people there who could drag him away. Wow. So his arm was going up through the hippo's airwaves and out of its nose? Yeah. No, through the mouth. He had to reach further into the hippo and then back out through. No. I thought he was coming up through the nose, out of the nose.

He clambered his way out of the ear in the end. My god, he didn't go through the anus. He would have been propelled. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chazinsky. My fact this week is that there are monks in India who avoid going out in the rain in case they splash through puddles and upset the microbes in them. And these are Jain monks and people who follow Jainism, so you know Jain's the people who basically don't believe in harming any living creature.

And this goes right down to all bacteria which basically live in everything and on everything. And so as soon as the monsoon comes, you're not allowed to leave your house if you're Jain because you might immediately be killing stuff because they believe that these tiny creatures, which they call Nagoda, and they believed in hundreds, thousands of years before we even discovered microorganisms, they believed that these tiny creatures existed sort of everywhere in puddles, in damp environments, and if you touch them, then they're going to get upset, even die. And so they can't go out in the rain.

And if you hurt them in any way, then you go to hell. Is that the idea? You just won't be reincarnated, I don't think, as well as you might have. It's not as bad as hurting a human, which is a higher being, but it's still not ideal. So these guys are the ones who sweep the streets so that they don't stand on any insects and stuff? They don't wear masks so they don't inhale them, and they don't go out at night because you men...

Someone said they don't go out at night because the light's not good enough, and so you can't see what you're eating, and so you might think you're eating a piece of bread, but it could be a bunch of small insects, which... I'm no gourmand, but I think I can tell the difference. It's incredibly hard life being a Jain. So Jain monks, you know, it's an older sister religion of Buddhism. So they're very, very, very keen to avoid the pleasures of the flesh, extremely keen. So Buddhist monks shave their heads, Jain monks pluck out their hairs one by one in a deliberately

painful ceremony, Buddhist monks beg for their food, Jain monks are not allowed to beg, they're not even allowed to beg, there's a hand jester you can make, a bit like they arch their right hand over their shoulder, which I think is like this. It's kind of like the beginning of I'm a little teapot, and that's to show hunger, but they cannot directly ask for food. Oh, really? Yeah. But then if you do that, Jester, then people do sometimes give you something, don't they?

Yeah, people say, oh, he's hungry, yeah. Yeah, because there is the thing, there are basically two main variants of Jainism, and one is called Digambar, and one is Shvetambar, and the Digambars are the sky-clad or naked Jains, and they are not allowed to own any material possessions, and this is if you really strictly adhere. So this is the monks and the nuns. So they have to be naked all the time, if they're those monks, because you're not allowed to own clothes, because they're material possessions, and that causes something to

happen. You can have an iPhone though, can't you? Of course, obviously you can have an iPhone. Where would you keep it? It's not going to that. Could you rent a tuxedo, for example? Because then you don't own it. You don't own it, you just rent it.

Oh, yeah. But how would you pay for it? Your point. No money. I don't know if tuxedo rental existed 3,000 years ago, when they sort of founded it, so maybe they've updated it, but those ones can't even own a bowl, so they have to ask for water by cupping their hands, and then it all slides through their fingers before they can drink it.

I think they're allowed to drink from God, aren't they? Are they? I think so, yeah. I think one sect is. Are the other sects? I believe so. Wow. Because the other sects, which are allowed to wear clothes, are still only allowed to

wear white, aren't they? This thing about how they don't want to hurt any animals, if you look back in the stories of their history, there were 24 Jane Ford makers. They were the prophets who kind of started the whole thing, and one of them was so bothered about not harming anything at all that before he was born, he floated perfectly still in his mother's womb, sending not so much as a ripple throughout the amniotic fluid to avoid harming his mother. Wow.

So thoughtful. They're the epitome of thoughtful. They're what we all should strive to be. Some of them wear a mask to stop inhaling insects, but there's controversy about the masks because some people say that it's a good thing to wear a mask because the breath from your mouth is hot, and if you don't wear a cloth, you might scorch microscopic beings in the air, kind of like Godzilla. Kind of.

He didn't wear clothes either. He didn't wear clothes either. So some people say that if you do wear a cloth, that might be a bad thing because your breath is moist and that might give rise to microorganisms in the cloth, and then there will be more living and dying because of you breathing, so they'll die when you handle it. So problem. It's a tightrope, isn't it, that you've got to walk? And it's slightly tougher for women, although I will say I think they have much more egalitarian

views than a lot of mainstream religions, and generally they're kind of great, but they do have this slight thing where if you believe in the naked Jainism, the sky-clad Jains, then women can't quite attain proper enlightenment, proper nirvana. And that is because women can't be naked because it's inconvenient for them, apparently. I don't understand why it's more inconvenient for women to be naked than for men to be naked. Seems equally inconvenient, but also, so one, women can't be naked because it's inconvenient, and two, women can't be naked because they are intrinsically harmful. And this is actually based in the understandable belief that women's periods kill loads of

creatures as they happen. So as, and I don't know what it is, I think maybe they think it's just sort of bleeding. I've never seen that body form advert. Well, that was the idea. Menstruation was basically the death of thousands and thousands of these tiny organisms. So you couldn't quite achieve nirvana as a woman, but you could come still quite close. I've got a tangential fact about Jainism, and it's actually to do with a lot of Eastern religions.

So we may have mentioned before that swastikas are quite big in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and they're big in Jainism. And I found out in the course of researching this, I didn't know this. In the year 2013, and in fact, a few years since then, there was a day called Learn to Love the Swastika, which was aiming to rehabilitate the swastika because it's an ancient symbol. But it seems to be working. You've seen a lot more of it these days. It's going really well.

But to raise awareness of the symbol and its history as a peaceful symbol, tattoo artists around the world offered people free swastika tattoos. Is this true? This happened. There were lots of articles about it, and there was a report from the Journal Internationale which said this, when a BB journalist questioned one of the tattooists about the probability that neo-Nazis might take advantage of the event, the latter answered that even if that was the case, these people will leave with a symbol of love on their body.

You've just got to let some things go, don't you? I think you've got to leave the swastika behind. There was a guy in America that I read about years ago who went through World War II, and he lived in, I believe it was Ohio in America, whose name was Adolf Hitler, and he refused to change his name. He ended up becoming famous for it, people interviewing him saying, why have you not changed your name from Adolf Hitler? And his response was, I'm not going to let one guy ruin the good name of Adolf Hitler.

Just on microbes. I was looking up lots of stuff about microbes, because of the puddles and microbes in them. Did you know that Oregon has an official state microbe? No, I didn't know that, what is it? It's Baker's Yeast, because it's very important to craft brewers and craft bakers, if they exist. But lots of states have discussed having a state microbe, and I think so far Oregon's the only one which said...

Well, they've got the best one, haven't they? They've got a good one. So, Wisconsin proposed, in its parliament, Lactococcus Lactis, which is very crucial for cheese production, because you get a lot of cheese in Wisconsin, but that didn't get through. Hawaii suggested a bacterium, which was found on a native shrub, but then there was a rival camp who wanted a different state microbe, and there was a huge argument in the Hawaiian parliament about some people said, no, we want this one, which lives in a symbiotic relationship

with a squid. Wow. And all the people who wanted the shrub ones said, yeah, well, the shrub lives in Hawaii, it's a native to Hawaii, and the squid lives everywhere. The squid one is Vibrio fish scary, isn't it? I love that microbe. They should definitely have gone with that microbe. Oh, no, I like the other one, actually.

Oh, here we go again. Hang on. All right, let's take this outside. The one on the bush. The one on the bush. Are they going into such a massive row that they scrap the whole thing? Do we think America hasn't got its priorities straight? It feels like they've got bigger fish to fry.

We're going to have to move on very shortly. Can I just talk about how you can kill a microbe if you really want to? Yes. Because there are pain in the arse, and antibiotics are struggling, and so people have been really looking into how else we can kill microbes, and they're quite hard to squash. So actually, this is something that James probably have got wrong, because they're so small, obviously, they're like a thousandth of a millimeter that you can't, they'll get into crevice before you can probably squash them.

So there's a scientist called Elena Ivanova, and she works in Australia, and she's worked really, really hard to create surfaces so smooth that bacteria will just slide off them without being able to hold on. But some of them can still cling on, so that's failed. And she was really panicking about, well, I don't know how to kill these microbes, but they're still clinging to my slidey surfaces. And so she wrote to another scientist and asked if he had any ideas, and he said, try the cicada wing.

And what on earth, but she got a cicada wing, so you know, cicadas, they took a wing off, and it turns out that if you put a bacterium onto the wing of a cicada, it gets punctured all over, spills all its guts out, little bacteria guts, and it leads to a quick death, and gecko skin is even better. It's really, really, it is hard to kill them, and it's really hard to kill them by stamping. You can do it if you really put a huge amount of pressure on. You can't kill a bacteria. No, you can't.

You can. If you press food, there's a process called pascalisation, and if you press food with 87,000 pounds per square inch, you just make all the bacteria go pop. I'm not coming to your restaurant. We serve extremely flat food at extremely competitive prices. How heavy is that? Sorry? Yeah.

87,000 pounds. Yeah. It's a lot. It's more than all four of us put together. Okay. It's a lot more. Yeah. Buy us a margin.

But it depends how we arrange it, right? So if I was wearing one stiletto shoe, and you all climbed on my shoulders, then I think that might be enough concentration of weight. If we were all hippos, and that, yeah. It's not a good idea to do it. So science ABC, they looked into it, and they said stomping around your house in a bid to sanitise or sterilise your floor is a bad idea. Honestly, you don't want your family to see you and think you've lost your mind.

Okay. We need to move on to our next fact. It is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that during the Second World War, while American pilots were flying over enemy territory, not only were they shooting at that enemy, but they were also often making ice cream at the same time. How were they doing it? Yeah.

They weren't just churning it while they were. No, exactly. So this was a big thing during World War II that I'd never read about before. Ice cream was massive for the troops. It was to help them with calories and sustenance, and it was a food that got banned by most other countries. Britain, for example, banned ice cream during the war as a sustenance thing. It was a rationing thing, basically, because it's sugar, and we don't need to use all

that sugar. Yeah, exactly. They suggested a carrot on a stick as an alternative. That didn't go down. What a stick! The carrot is the stick. What's the point of shoving a stick up a carrot? Just so it looks like an ice cream.

I'm just saying that carrots can be used as a stick, because carrots don't melt in the same way that magnums do. You would have been court-martialed at this point, mate. Just stick with the program. It's a waste of sticks. Probably we need sticks for the war ethic. Do you know weaponry had come on quite a lot further than that? All in the stick battalion, follow me!

So what this was is that they were constantly making ice cream in very creative ways during the war, and one of the things that they discovered is that you could take a sort of drum, put all the ingredients inside of it, and attach it to the back of a plane. As you flew over, you were reaching about 30,000 feet up in the air, very cold up there, so you had the coldness to make it freeze. But also, the vibration of the engine, the machine gun going, were churning all the ice cream products around, so by the time that you'd sort of down some enemy planes and landed back on your aircraft in the ocean, you could go and have a big scoop of ice cream off the

back of your airplanes. That's amazing. That's so cool. There was a guy called Jay Hunter Reinberg, who was one of the first people, maybe the first person to do this, and the first time he put the ice cream too close to his engine so it couldn't get cold enough, so it was a bit like goopy. They still let it, of course, but then the second time, he flew 33,000 feet over Palau, and so he went high, high, high enough so it was really, really cold, and the good advantage

of that is, number one, it meant that the ice cream froze, but number two, it meant that none of the Japanese aircraft could shoot him because he was so high, and so they just kept shooting at him and the bullets couldn't reach him. So he was just like watching it all going on below him. Wow. Wow. Yeah, I kind of didn't realise how easy ice cream is to make. I haven't tried it.

I have just read about it still, so maybe it's not. Yeah, it sounds, at the moment, it sounds like you need a plane, so... I'm not sure if you got your pilot's licence just for that, but you can, I was reading it, like there was a thing in the New Yorker by someone who said, you went to a friend's house and the friend said, for dinner, and the friend said, great, who's for ice cream for pudding? And everyone was like, yeah, great. And so the friend went away and she came back and she had one ziploc bag and then another

much larger ziploc bag, and basically she filled the small ziploc bag with vanilla extract and sugar, and then she closed that, and then inside the larger one she filled that with ice and salt, and salt is the crucial ingredient for making ice cream, isn't it? And then she shook the bag about a bit, got tired, passed it round the table, so it's quite a fun past the parcel kind of dinner party experience, and by the time it got back round to her, that was ice cream. But it's because ice and salt makes an endothermic reaction, so it sucks all the heat out of your ziploc bag with vanilla in it.

This doesn't sound like a great party, I have to say. So just other things that during World War II they used ice cream for. The US Navy, so in order to get ice cream to a lot of people, they had a lot of the Navy ships that were out and about. There was one specific ship which they spent a million dollars converting at the time, which was effectively an ocean ice cream factory, and that's all it did. It created ice cream, it could do 10 gallons every seven minutes, and it would just go to various different Navy ships and deliver them ice cream.

I was just looking at that amount that it could do, it's the equivalent of doing one Ben and Jerry's tub every five seconds. Wow. Did it need to only be an extremely rough seas all the time to churn it up? No, because you've got the engine kind of going round the propellers and stuff like that. Oh, so it was still powered by the engine? Yeah.

And also the enemy could always hear it coming because of the chimes and that. Is a flawed system, yeah. But there's reports, apparently, of these boats or these ships that when they were attacked by the Japanese, if a torpedo hit it, there were a few accounts of sailors before they were abandoning ship and jumping overboard, running to the bit of the ship that had the ice cream, scooping as much as they could into their helmets, eating that, and then jumping off. So just a quick, you know, bowl of ice cream before.

That was in the USS Lexington, which had a lot of ice cream on board, wasn't it? Yes. Yeah. This is, I should just very quickly say, I've gotten a lot of this information from the Atlantic online. What? The ocean. Yeah.

I speak to oceans. Just on, you mentioned the chimes just now, James. So there used to be, I didn't know this, in the UK, I believe, 250,000 ice cream vans. And as I say that, that sounds insane. Today there are fewer than 2,500, and one of the main threats to them is, can you guess? The sun. Yes. Yes.

I kind of, I guess, yeah. Children growing up. Yeah. But more come to replace them. That doesn't make sense. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Is it the health code people?

Yeah. All of these are really good answers, but there's one thing that's, you haven't mentioned yet, double glazing, because you can't hear the chimes. No. Yes. In 2017, the head of the trade body, the Ice Cream Association, by the way, awesome, said that new homes are so energy efficient, they've got double, sometimes even triple glazing, and children might not hear a van right outside their house when it's playing

a chimes. So they launched an app for smartphones called Van Toot, which alerts you on your phone with an electronic jingle if there's an ice cream van nearby. That's really cool. In the 1980s in Glasgow, there was an ice cream war between two gangs who were selling drugs and stolen goods from ice cream vans. Ooh. Yeah.

So it was really a drugs war. No, James said it was done from ice cream vans. Well, it was quite serious, actually, but it was all in the news, and everyone was having to go at the Strathclyde police because they weren't solving all these crimes. And the local newspaper is called The Police, the serious chimes squad. Oh, they should have, they should have called for Magnum P.I. Ah. There he is.

Very strong. The jingle, the jingle used to be before it was playing music, it used to be a man shouting hokey pokey, because it's really cool. That is the Italian for oh chip okay. So it's a bastardization of that. And oh chip okay means oh, how small. I have heard that a few times because they about 10th of Italian immigrants in the 1890s were selling ice cream.

Yeah, I think about 10. Well, about 10% were vendors and they were basically all ice cream vendors. And so that came about. But in the 19th century, so the ice cream wars is not the first time it's been associated with a vice because in the 19th century, ice cream parlors became a very big thing. This is especially in America. And it was because women basically weren't really allowed to go to places on their own unless they were chaperoned.

And this started becoming more and more of a thing as a century progressed. So you turn up to a restaurant and they'd be like, well, that's your chaperone. And then they kick you out. And so they sort of came up with ice cream parlors, which became a place that women were allowed to hang out by themselves. And they were called parlors to kind of mimic the homey, cozy life that we ladies desire. But they, of course, turned into hotbeds of vice immediately. So there was all this disapproval because it was thought that without formal chaperones,

women were just turning up and keeping awful company and like going out with really bad men. And there were rumors about ice cream drugged with passion, exciting vanilla. And lots of there was one journalist who wrote, I think in the New York Times that he went into an ice cream parlour and he saw a man and woman deep in conversation who were evidently man and wife, though not each other's. It's amazing that a vanilla was so, because that's the shittest of all the flavours these days, isn't it?

Very raunchy back then. Yeah. Yeah. I'll have a hornetto, please. Nice. You could say. Yeah. You could.

We're going to have to move on shortly. Before cornets, they used to sell ice cream in penny licks. And these were little, this was in London, and they used to sell them in little glass. They're like glasses, but they're a little bit bigger and they're almost like what you put Sundays in. What they would do is they would give you your penny liquor, put ice cream in it, and then you would return it to them and then they'd give it a quick wipe and then put some more ice cream for the next person to do it.

Sometimes not even a wipe, right? No. And that is why ice cream cones kind of became quite popular, wasn't it? Yeah, because they were banned in 1899 because they were causing the spread of tuberculosis. Right. Ah. Quite right. That's bad.

And then the cone came about and it was a huge deal. So this was the 1904 World's Fair that the ice cream cone was invented. So there were instances of it appearing kind of in a few cookbooks in the 19th century, but it was suddenly made popular at the World's Fair. And it was this huge thing in the 1904 World's Fair. So if any of you have ever seen Meet Me in St. Louis, and I don't know why the song is pronounced like that, but it was about the World's Fair that was in St. Louis. And it was a huge deal.

So they had sort of like bears made of prunes at the World's Fair. Just what everyone's always watching. What's the point of the bear made of prunes? Everyone loves a prune. Yeah, true. A bear's an exotic thing. There you go. I think they did actual snarling.

They had a massive landscape sculptured entirely from butter. They were showing the new refrigeration technology. So they had a milk made milking a cow, but all of it was made of butter. And they had Roosevelt on a horse, Teddy Roosevelt, the president at the time, on a horse. What was he made of? Peaches. It's all butter. It's all butter.

But anyway, sorry, they made the ice cream cone there because there was ice cream on display and no one had thought of eating it like on the hoof. And then they realized people wanted to try it. And so a nearby waffle vendor curled his waffle round into a cone shape and said, try this. And hence the cone was invented. But there's this great historian who's really looked into this and she's found seven different people who claim to have invented it at that one fair. They're like, there was a Syrian guy, a Lebanese guy, a Turkish guy, someone from Ohio all saying

they'd done it. But that's, there was born the ice cream cone. Well, it's a simple history of the ice cream cone. Do you know that it's better to eat ice cream by licking it than with a spoon? This is theory. And the reason is that the flavor in ice cream is released when the fat content comes out of it and that comes when it warms up. And because your tongue is warmer than a spoon and it's got a larger surface area, it's better

to put it on there and then it kind of melts and you get the flavor. Whereas if you do it with a spoon, then it's still cold when it goes in your mouth and you don't get all the flavor because you swallow it before you can. Just a tip. It's a top tip. Yeah. Yeah. Now you can tell the difference between 12% and 11.5% butterfat in ice cream.

I bet he gets invited to a lot of parties. He's an official ice cream taste tester and he was called John Harrison. He was the ice cream taste tester for dryers from 1980 to 2010, so for 30 years. And he had his tongue insured for $1 million. In fact, the company had his tongue insured for $1 million. And they always say this, we've insured your tongue for $1 million. Yeah. Risk.

There isn't a gang of roving tongue thieves. It's a very precious tongue. I'd get it if I could. He would know that. No. And before you can explain what that means, it is time for fact number four. Our final fact of the evening is James. Okay.

My back this week is that in 1997, a town in Saskatchewan held a referendum on whether the end of a toilet paper should hang under or over the roll. And luckily that was the last time anyone ever asked a stupid question by means of a referendum ever again. So this was a local election in Saskatoon, which is in Saskatchewan. And they were trying out new voting machines basically. And so what they wanted to do is have a trial question, which was nothing to do with any kind of politics and wouldn't kind of get people riled up.

And so they said, what do you think should be the official town microbe? The question was, are you in favor of toilet paper in all public washrooms being installed with the loose end coming up and over the front of the roll? And the answer was 80% over. Hmm. Okay. And so they said they didn't want it to be political. Oh, we've got a few overfans in here.

Oh, okay. That was definitely 52%. In Sunderland, they feel completely the other way about it, all right? But yeah, one teenager did a science project about it and did a survey and found that liberals usually go for over, while conservatives usually go for under. What? Really? So actually it was quite political after all.

And was it enacted as in did all public washrooms follow the overwhelming mandate of... I think it became the rule, but I'm sure there isn't a person who goes around checking them all. So it wasn't legally binding. Far be it from me to criticize the people's choice, but I think they got that absolutely wrong. Oh, really? The toilet roll thing.

That's insane. And there's no wonder liberals go for the over the top because over the top waste so much more new roll because it easily gets, you know, tangled. It doesn't waste more? Yeah, it absolutely does. It falls down more easily, especially if you've got a cat. It's not cascading down like that. Like now.

If you've got a cat. Do you have a cat? If you've got a cat or if you get home drunk, it's all over the floor. So what was the moment that No Sitch Fingers of Fish really ended? Wow. I feel tense. Some more referendums that have happened. Since that one worked so well.

No, but it's really interesting. So lots of... America is really big on this. So in the USA, they have extra referendums kind of attached to votes that they're having. So you might have a state or a national election and you'll just append a few extra votes, which are yes, no things normally. So and some of them are quite fun. So in 2006, Arizona voted on whether to give a million dollars to a single resident chosen

by Lottery simply for voting to encourage turnout. Yes. One person would get a million dollars. It was called the Arizona Voter Reward Act and they rejected it. Classic. Yeah. Classic human. They think, what if it's not me?

There was a great one which was in Castlewood, Virginia and this was in 1997 and the question for the vote was, should we exist? And they decided they shouldn't. And they no longer do. What are you talking about? Well, I think it was quite a tiny community that was right next to a bigger community, that came with a lot of extra taxes off the back of existing. So they said, let's not exist anymore.

So they abolished themselves and became part of Russell County. Yes. But they had literally only existed for a couple of years, right? They'd signed this big petition saying, we want to exist. We want autonomy. We want a government. Great. Let's do it.

So they bloody did it. And then straight away they were like, taxes, what are you talking about, fuck off? Literally immediately the second administration they put in power was this mayor called Roy Castle, whose whole platform was to abolish their existence. Wow. Castle. So people are able to change their minds and have another vote a bit later if they feel like it.

Subtle. Very subtle. By the way, this show isn't going out for about three months, so fuck knows if any of that is wrong. Oh, fine, yeah. You'll be able to trade this for food, this episode of the podcast. You'll be all sitting around your carrot sticks at home. It's on a stick.

It's on a stick. It's on a stick. Yeah. I mean, you can make carrot into sticks. That's the weird thing. Just some other good referendums. In 1993, San Francisco had a referendum and it was on whether one specific policeman could patrol with a ventriloquist dummy and they got pretty into this.

So this is this great guy called Bob Geary, who was a community policeman, and he was given the remit to make policing more creative and ingenious, and he did that by spending a lot of money on a big wooden ventriloquist dummy and going about, and he properly learned how to do it. He got all these tapes. He practiced in front of the mirror, and he called it Brendon O. Smarty as sort of like a flip on the idea of a dummy, and he dressed it up in police uniform with a water pistol, he trolled the streets, and then eventually the person in charge of police complained

and said he had to leave it in the car, and so he got enough signatures for a referendum, and it happened. And bizarrely, the result, I find so unfathomable, the result of the referendum was just 51% to 49% in favor. Wow. Who were the 49% voting against a policeman having a dummy? I reckon it's probably the other policeman who, when they call for backup, and Brendon with no smarty rocks up.

With his water pistol. Hello. There's a very, very, very small fire that needs putting out. Can you send Brendon? He cost $1,700, which, in 1993, was not nothing. No. Yeah, but he already owns it, so he doesn't need to buy a new one, does he? I guess not.

No. Still, I'm part of the 49% saying no to Officer O's mother. It was to entertain children, wasn't it, on patrol? Oh, yeah. To entertain people, I think. And he did manage to apprehend criminals with it. No, stop. Apparently, there was more than one suspect that he took down with a dummy in one hand

and the suspect in the other. Are you kidding? No. Did he do good cop, bad cop with the dummy? Look, I'm managing to hold him off you, but I can only restrain him for so long. Blimey Adam, blimey Adam! He's going to shout, let me Adam, let me Adam. I'm drinking a glass of water now.

There was another, just speaking of entertainers, in Sao Paulo, there was a Brazilian clown who was called Tiririca, who won an election, and he was going for a federal deputy, and this was in 2010. He, it was a question as well, which was, does anyone really want to know what happens behind government doors? That was simply it. And everyone went, yes, someone's going to tell us the truth, and it won him the election, but he was a clown.

And did he reveal, did he, I should have read the rest of the article, really, yeah, yeah. Can I talk about House of Lords' votes, because they're quite weird. So first of all, so that, Lords aren't allowed to vote for MPs, which is fair enough. There was actually quite a good article looking at funny voting comments over the years, and apparently in 1948, then someone in America said that he got in touch with the Houses of Commons, because he was interested in the qualifications for voting in England. So he called the reference library in the Houses of Commons, and he received the following pronouncement.

In Great Britain, any adult 21 years or over may register and vote, except peers and lunatics, and we make an exception for the latter if they have a moment of lucidity. And that moment was in 2016. Well, they can't vote for MPs, but they do have their own elections, and they're often quite weird. So in 2016, there was a by-election in the House of Lords. It was to replace a Lib Dem peer called Eric Lubbock, who was actually a very cool guy who wanted to leave his body to Battersea Dogs Home to vary their diet.

But that's besides the point. Anyway, he died, so someone had to replace him. And the only people qualified to vote to replace him are the other Lib Dem hereditary peers, of which there were three, and there were seven candidates. So they had a proper election where three people voted for seven candidates. Wow. Which might be the only election where there are more candidates than voters. That is really good.

There was, in 1862, there was a referendum in Greece, because the people overthrew King Otto and decided to hold a referendum to decide who would take his place. There were 240,000 votes counted, and the winner was a guy who got six of them. And that's because the Greeks voted 95% for Prince Alfred, who was British. But Britain, France and Russia had signed a treaty saying that no person from any of those countries was allowed to take over. Wow. Okay, so the guy who got six votes was William of Denmark, who took over on Julie Raid for

50 years. Did he say how many votes the first guy got, Alfred? He got 95% of 240,000, so I'm sure you can work that out. Yeah. There were 93 people who voted for having a republic rather than any king at all, and there was one vote to bring back King Otto. I wonder who that was from. We're going to have to wrap up in a sec.

Oh, I've got one last fact about presidential elections, which is just, it's not really on referendums, but this was sent in by someone in the audience tonight, someone called Charlie Gennis. Gennis? Hiya. And it's this. It's that in the 1948 U.S. presidential election, the Democrats commissioned a papier-mache donkey which was designed to have smoke belching from its nostrils to make it look impressive

and intimidating. Unfortunately, all the smoke came out of its back end instead. Amazing. That's a good fact. Okay, 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 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, Andy, at Andrew Honderem, James, at James Harkin, and Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. You can go to our group account as well, which is at no such thing or our website. No such thing as a fish.com. We've got everything up there from our previous episodes to upcoming tour dates. Okay.

That is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much. All right. Thanks.