No Such Thing As A Fish - 278: No Such Thing As A Herring-Okapi Hybrid

Episode Date: July 19, 2019

Dan, James, Anna, Andy and special guest Richard Herring discuss Hitler's feet, greeting hyenas and George III in a house on fire.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, an exciting special guest, it is the Podfather himself, Richard Herring, who is joining us. We're very excited to have him here, doubly excited because we got the chance to go on his show, Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre podcast, which will be going out next week, the 24th of July, if you're listening to it as this show goes out this Friday, it's a week from now, if not, find the 24th of July for Richard Herring,

and so much more, I mean, you're going to be doing the podcast in Edinburgh. Yeah, I'm at the Edinburgh Fringe at the Newtown Theatre, 1.30 pretty much every day throughout the Fringe, and I'm off on tour around the country in the autumn and probably onwards beyond into 2020, I think, so yeah, go to richhane.com.com slash gigs, and you can find out where I'm coming. Amazing, and most importantly of all, you've got a fact, so we're going to start with fact number one, and that is Richard Herring. Here's my fact, Adolf Hitler had size 13 feet, which I discovered this week on my own podcast, because I'm obsessed with the film The Cobbler, starring Adam Sandler, yeah,

in which Adam Sandler inherits a magical cobbling machine. If you're interested in this, just listen to any of Richard's podcasts. It's mentioned literally every week. In which if he puts on the feet of someone whose shoes have been cobbled on that machine, he turns into that person, which is fine, so I asked people who they would turn into, but you've got to have the same size feet, so it's quite a hard question to answer unless you know. Especially for Adolf Hitler. Yeah, well my guest said, you know, who knows how big Adolf Hitler's feet, for example, and we didn't know, but then someone googled it, and it was size 13, which just seems massive.

What I thought was a very short man, but he's 5'8", 5'9", 165 centimetres, but size 13 is like gigantic. Yeah, Stephen Frey has size 13 feet. Does he? And he's what, 6'6"? Something like that. Usain Bolt, he has size 13 feet. Is he tall? Usain Bolt? Yeah. Famously, yeah.

Is he? It's hard to tell, because they're quite far away. He's just so fast, you can't see him. Well, Meg Ryan, who is, I believe, the same height as Hitler, 5'8", I don't think that's the brush we can tar her with. It's on her CV, it's the top line. I believe I'm right, saying she's 5'8", and she has big feet. She's got 11, she's got the West size 11 shoes. Oh, wow.

That's huge. Is that a US 11? Yeah, it will be. Oh, hang on, that's completely different. I take back a lot of my surprise. Is the US 11, well, I don't know if the adult of Hitler 13 is US or English. Isn't there somewhere, is it the USA or Europe, where they're in the 40s? That's Europe. Yeah, that's Europe.

Hang on. I think the American size is about one different. They're 0.5 or one different. Okay, but what a Hitler size feet is in the European measurement, and actually they were like pins. That's a really good point. Yeah, actually, Rich, what is your source for this fact? Well, Google, but then Google just says one size around his feet, it says 13.

One says 13.5, and then I found a 56-page medical report from the CIA that was based on the doctor who had seen Hitler over from 1936 to his death. And it had a lot of facts on it. Did it say how many balls he had? I was interested to look into that, and it says there's nothing wrong with his genitalia, which is... He had a farting problem from that medical report, as far as I could tell. Yeah, he was very flatulent.

Was he? Gastral problems in his tummy. Catharine inflammation he had as well, so he had a very blocked nose. Oh, what a shame. No? No, I don't think we're making that noise. Not yet. Not about Hitler.

Poor old Hitler. He was... I did his BMI in 1936. He came out at 22.5, which is a pretty good BMI. I think that's... I think that's my BMI. Is it? Yeah, you got the same as Hitler.

It's not the top line of your CV, though. I'm afraid it is. But it's kind of weird, because I start looking up the historical figures, and you can't find anyone's foot size. It's something that's not really recorded very... Really? Yeah, you're right. You can find celebrities sometimes, if they've got big or small feet, but that's...

You tried to look up a lot of celebrity foot sizes, and you just found a load of fetish sites. There are lots of people who have these websites where they're interested in celebrities' feet, and I wish... It's weird how your voice slightly broke when you said that. Well, I'm not... Oh, embarrassed. I was reading about celebrity shoes, and there's a little theory. So, I don't know if we can class Hitler in the celebrity bracket.

Yeah, we can put him in there, right? So, celebrities, when they go... He's not going on celebrity, you know... Get me out of here. Yeah. Yeah, that's the point. All those... That kind of level of politician, that's the way they become successful.

He would be all over this. Do you think he's like the hurry red now? I think he's like Ann Whitticombe of his day. Yeah, so a thing that I've read that certain celebrities do when they're going on the red carpet is they often wear much larger shoes than their foot size. That's a common thing in Hollywood because... Why? Well, often when you're going out, you're wearing new shoes, aren't you?

And you haven't broken them in. So, if you're wearing a shoe that fits your foot perfectly, you're going to get blisters. You're going to mess up your feet. So, when you're on the red carpet, there's often photos of celebrities who've got huge gaps at the back of their heels if it's a woman wearing heels. What? No. Yeah.

They will just fall off constantly on the red carpet. It's all an episode of Cinderella every time someone walks down there. It's just... It's a J.Lo desert. Yeah, it's a thing. No. It's a thing. Wow.

Okay, apparently, you know our feet... The more you say it, the more likely it will be to be true. If there are any celebrities out there, please write in and let us know. There are no celebrities listening to this show. Absolutely right. And quite right from them. Our feet are getting bigger, apparently, which I find really weird, but there was a survey done in 1951, I think, and it looked into people's shoe sizes as well as other stuff.

And apparently, the average shoe size for a woman then was size three, which is insane because I don't know any women with size three feet. Kylie Minogue. Kylie Minogue. I don't know her then. She's probably listening, though. So is it true that we're evolving that way because maybe only big-footed women are having sex and having children?

Yeah, big-footed women became incredibly sexy in the late 50s, and yeah, we bred out the small-footed ones. It was a great triumph. The theory is, the explanation I read, is that we're getting fatter and so pushing ourselves down on our feet and we're flattening our arms. No, it's true. It is to do with body size increasing, they think. I actually think those studies must have also been flawed because I don't believe

shoe sizes have gone up three sizes, so now the average for a girl is size six. But it's not like we've all got tiny skeleton feet and massive flabby fat on them. It's not about the fatness, it's about the arch being pressed down and squashing. It sort of spreads out a bit. So you do get wider feet as well, for example, and also the other reason is better nutrition. If you're a child and you have better nutrition, you will just be bigger, and that means your feet will be bigger as well. Dan, you were like this, one retailer called it Bigfoot Britain.

Nice. That is very cool. I did do some, I got sidetracked doing Bigfoot research while I was doing this. Well, the links came up, I had to read it, you know, the investigation continues. Wait, does Bigfoot actually have big feet? Yeah, hence his name. Well, I've never actually pictured his feet. Does he have a big feet for a Bigfoot?

That's the question. In the 50s, Bigfoot was just called foot. Do you know who had the biggest feet of all time? No. It's the tallest man of all time who was called Robert Wadlow. He had size 37 or 36 UK size feet. He had real problems finding shoes, obviously, because he was the only person in the world with this size shoes.

He's just imagining him walking past a Clark's sale and thinking, maybe this time. Well, when he was at high school, he wanted to play basketball because he thought he could stand next to the hoop and just put his hand over the hoop. He stopped anyone from scoring, but he couldn't get training shoes made quickly enough so he could never play. His feet kept growing. When he's only standing by the thing, he must have just been up to a better word. Got some socks.

Is there a rule that says you have to wear shoes that must be worth it? It must be worth it. Building, making those shoes in order to have that guy blocking the whole thing. We can win every game. There could be some six-year-olds. At worst, it's going to be nil-nil. Yeah, you'd squeeze your feet in. He should have done an ugly sister.

You can bend them over. And not apparently most people do. Service always say that something like 40% of women say they wear smaller shoes than they should. Which again, I'm very skeptical about because I don't really know anyone who doesn't wear their shoe size. But do they just claim that their shoes are smaller than they are to seem more dainty? No, because they're saying I've got big feet, but I'm wearing small shoes and it's really painful. You can't go to a shop and say I'm size three and they're just shoving it on. Are you shut?

No, no, definitely three. Well, they do that as the idea because people are embarrassed. So apparently you reach a ceiling at nine as a woman. I don't know what it is as a man. And however large your feet are above that, you just go for a size nine because it's too embarrassing. I think men just like to have bigger feet, don't they? They pretend that they're bigger because it's more masculine to have bigger feet. Because of that fictional correlation thing.

Yes, it's really interesting because I vaguely assumed that there was something in the foot size to penis size thing. And lots of studies have just found nothing. No correlation, rather. There's nothing there. It's all based on studies where, so for example, a study of 104 men by University College London, they measured penises when both soft and gently stretched and they found no correlation. I actually measure my penis on one of those shoe size machines. What are you fitting it for?

You've been kicked out of so many blocks of branches. Okay, who around this table would go back in time to kill Hitler if you could? Anyone? I wouldn't because I understand the butterfly effect. If you killed Hitler, none of us would exist. Yeah, I read a Ben Elton novel. None of the novels don't get me into alternate histories. None of them work.

If you change one thing in history, certainly that long ago, of that magnitude especially, then nobody is the same. Nobody is alive now would be alive. Different people would have hooked up. Different people would be alive and dead. There'd be different children. None of us would be. Because my parents both met up over the love of Hitler.

They were both buying Nazi memorabilia, weren't they? How many people went to war in the Second World War with one partner who then ended up having children with someone else? Because they were dead. That's the first thing. But even if you meet someone a day after or have sex two minutes later, that's a different person coming out. I just don't think that this podcast is about discussing these huge philosophical questions you've posed, James.

Well, can I tell you my fact? I'm already getting weirded out. So the fact is that men are more likely than women to say that they'll go back to kill Hitler. And the reason, according to psychologists, is men prefer utilitarian ideas and women prefer deontological arguments. So men are more likely to do things that help everyone and women are more likely to think, well, actually there are moral reasons why I shouldn't do this particular thing.

Never minding what the outcome is. But also it's always baby Hitler. You go back and kill Hitler as a baby and women are going to go, no, I'm not going to do that, because I think a few men would like to kill him. Can I clarify, I'm not in that category. I would go back and honorably challenge Hitler when he was at his absolute physical peak. What's that going to do us?

How old did you let Hitler get to before you kill him? I'd say after his first World War service. Then that's probably too late, because then the Nazi push through. I think you should aim for probably when you could just about beat him at your current. So maybe when he's about 14. I reckon you could beat 14 year old Hitler. He was pretty weak. He's nasally, he couldn't breathe properly.

With those feet though, he just crushed you. Sorry, just to clarify, I would actually like to go back to Weimar Germany and improve the social and economic conditions to the point at which Hitler had no grievance to exploit in the German side. Such a shame I'm going to cut this out. Hitler was very unfashionable, apparently. So I was looking to his clothes, starting with shoes and working my way up.

He was in 1946, I was going to say. He was very unfashionable in 1946. Probably more than he was quite the fashion. I'd argue he's still out of fashion a little bit. His reputation has never come back, has it? Even in his day, he didn't wear very fashionable clothes. So he had a sort of personal valet, or valet, who despaired of him apparently.

There's this really weird account from the valet of trying to dress Hitler and saying that he'd lay out new clothes for him every day that would suit him and then Hitler always refused to wear them. But then weirdly, Nazi chic, as in wearing Nazi clothes, is a thing that's not outrageous in some parts of the world. So I didn't realise this in parts of Asia, so in Thailand. Sometimes it gets to the news here that someone's got in trouble in Thailand because a class of school children will be wearing SS uniforms.

And it does happen, and it doesn't have the same association as there as it does here. And there was an interview with someone in Thailand, I think, saying, it's not really taught as an ideology, it's taught as an objective piece of history. And so Nazi outfits have become fancy dress. So it's fancy dress, yeah. Whereas they wouldn't wear like a Mao Zedong hat, that would be very upsetting. I used to wear that in Sydney. What, Hitler clothes?

No, not Hitler clothes. We were only in Sydney last year. Who do you think you are, Prince Harry? When I did a trip back to China when I was 18, I bought in Tiananmen Square one of those Mao Communist hats. Jesus Christ, Anne, that is a whole combination of bad things that you shouldn't have done. I know. And I, well, this is what's worse, I went canvassing for the Labour Party

just before I left the country to move here. And it was a really hot day, and they only had one hat. So I wore that hat while I was handing out the leaflets. And yeah, they asked me to stop. They haven't been in power since then. I can't picture the Mao Zedong hat. It's a green little army hat with the red star on it. Okay, I do know the one you mean, yeah, yeah.

No, no, it's not like I love Mao Zedong kind of cap. Yeah, the SS uniforms don't say I heart Hitler. That wasn't the uniform. I had a Hitler moustache for a year, or a toothbrush moustache for a year. You did? That was the first time I ever saw you. Was it? It was the first time I ever got news for you, just sort of looking like Hitler.

Why was that again? Well, I was trying to reclaim the moustache for comedy because Charlie Chapman had it before Hitler. And I was just interested in why that symbol has taken the brunt of Hitler's, you know, disapproval because there was lots of things he did for having a BMI of 22. You're not in trouble for that. And that moustache was very popular before Hitler, and Hitler obviously popularized it as well, but a lot of comedians had it first.

So I was sort of just interested in the symbolism of it, but then I also then had it for a year, which was disconcerting. Did you get very bad reactions from some people? Not really. The worst thing that happened, I mean, most people laughed at you just the second you passed. A few people looked a bit shocked and upset. But the worst thing that happened was I was on Chepards Bush Green at about midnight one night, walking along, and a man was coming out of a white van.

He saw me and went, well done, mate. You're a man after my own heart. Which was just chilling. Like, you know, he was sort of going, if only I was as brave as you, I would display my Nazism on my face. What made you as a Charlie Champlin fan? It could have been. So, you know, that's it. It was all about not making assumptions.

But this show was about the importance of voting and an attempt to stop the rise of right-wing politics. So, you know, I'm glad comedy works so well. Yeah. It's just reminded everyone of what they were missing. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chisinski. My fact this week is that in the indigenous Mexican language of Chalcatonga Mixtec, it is impossible to ask anyone a question.

How did the translation of your emergency questions book go down there? I was going to say, I didn't sell any copies out there. And now it's explained. That's what it is. OK, explain. This is the... Sorry, was that a... That was a question.

Sorry, that... It explains, innit? It wasn't meant to be so aggressive. So, Anna, why don't you tell us what you mean? Yeah, it was an order. So, these are researchers at a place or a company called Idibon, which is a language processing company, and they sort of coded, applied code to 239 languages to look at how they worked.

So, to look at things like how you order subjects and objects and verbs and how a language makes clear things like an order or a negative or a positive or a question. And Chalcatonga Mixtec is spoken by about 6,000 people in Mexico, and it was determined to be the most unusual language in the world. So, it shares fewer things with any other languages than any other languages. And there was no mechanism for showing you're asking a question. So, there's no way of saying, are you all right?

As opposed to, you're all right? But there's also... There's no difference between saying, are you all right and you are all right. Yeah, you're a bit of all right. They're not actually cracking onto each other constantly. I was just trying to sex it up. But there's no way. There's no way of saying to someone,

do you fancy a drink? Would you like to get married? And then, would you like to have some children? Which is presumably why only 6,000 people in the world speak it. Yeah, you have to just kind of... Do you, Andrew Hunter Murray, take this one? Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. It's very demanding, because it's always,

would all be you fancy a drink, you want to marry me. So, the only people who are getting married are very aggressive men and very pious women. OK, I agree. Why can't they just go up at the end of the statement to make a question? I know they do tones, but that's... I mean, the problem in the UK is that people do that with non-questions now, don't they? Yeah.

Just everything goes up at the end of the sentence. But that would be the solution for these people to be able to ask questions. But I guess it's not a problem. I guess they could. But they don't mind. They don't want to ask questions. They want to know. They're very uncurious. There must be one question in the need, which is, are you asking or are you telling? That's the question.

That's made for them. All you need, you're right. But that's one of the things which makes English so weird, is that we flip order to make a question. Yes. It is true. Is it true? Yeah. And then Japanese has, for example, the word, you just add a particle

and that is a magical transforming particle. So, ka is that in Japanese. So, sodes ka means is that so. And that's much more common, isn't it? So, I think only 2% of languages do the word switching. Dutch is another one, very unusual. So, we are quite special in that way. Yeah.

Do you know what the second least weird language is? Least weird. Yeah. So, the most normal after Hindi. Hindi is the most normal. I'll say Welsh. There's a language called Purirpecha, which is another Mexican language.

And the third least weird language, so the third most normal language. I'll say Welsh. Yeah, you're going to keep firing, are you? Mexico, Mexico, Mexico for a while and then Wales eventually. I'm afraid it's Ainu, which we've talked about before, but it's spoken by about 10 people.

That's Japanese. In Japanese, in Hokkaido, in Japan. So, that's one of the most normal languages spoken by about 10 people. And Hindi is the most normal language, and that's spoken by, what, nearly a billion people. Hindi has one unusual feature that they found, and that is something called predictive possessions. So, you can say,

Anna has a glass of wine, or you can say the glass of wine is Anna's, but you can't say Anna's glass of wine in Hindi. You can't have the possessive thing. So, that's the only thing that's weird in Hindi. Have you guys heard of the Indonesian Riau dialect? No. This is a great one.

So, this is claimed by the linguist John McWater to be the most economical language in the world. So, there's a phrase, I am makam, and that just means chicken eat. Okay, but it can also mean, variously, the chicken is eating, chickens are eating, a chicken is eating,

the chicken is eating, the chicken will be eating, the chicken eats, the chicken has eaten, someone is eating the chicken, someone is eating with the chicken, the chicken that is eating, and when the chicken is eating,

and a few others. Who's eating with the chicken? Are they eating the same stuff as the chicken, or are they just singing? They're cracking up trees. They're ordering at a restaurant as well. Oh, of the chicken. Oh, well.

Sorry, you've just been eaten by a chicken. It's the language of sitcoms, isn't it? It is, yeah, yeah. I mean, to eat with the chicken, if you killed it. So, it's economical, but no one has any idea what anyone else means. I think so, yeah.

Great. That's incredible. The really cool language I like is the Yipno language in Papua, which is where everything is conceived, everything directionally, when we'd say, go over there, or whatever, is conceived

in terms of uphill and downhill. So, for instance, if you're talking about where the door is, you'll say, oh, it's just uphill, or if I was saying, oh, whereabouts is, James, now, oh, he's just downhill, and everything is uphill and downhill. So, if I'm downhill from you,

how do I know whether I'm uphill or downhill? So, there, they have, because it's quite a small place, they have a certain geography where everyone kind of knows where the highest point in the island is, and the area is. Everyone knows where the lowest point.

If you're talking about time, then the, oh, the fireplace is always downhill, apparently. So, if you're in a room, you have to check where the fireplace is. So, I guess behind me at the moment is the Thames. So, all of the land kind of goes

towards the Thames, so you could argue that I'm downhill of you, even if I'm not quite done. Yeah, and less is a fireplace on the opposite side of the room, and then that trumps the Thames, and then you're uphill or something. Fireplace is always the trumping card.

I think the fireplace is the trump card, yes. Unless you're talking about time, in which case the past is always downhill and the future is uphill. The future is uphill and it passes down. Okay, yeah. It used to be a fireplace salesman. On the Thames.

In Aboriginal language, which I was reading about, that I didn't write down, but they judge everything by northeast, south and west. That's the direction of everything. Yeah. I think, yeah,

that's a lot of Australian Aboriginal language, isn't it? Is that easy to know, though? Like, would you know which way? Well, you have to know where you are. You have to know where you are all the time, at all times. You can't do any other directions than northeast, south and west.

Wow. But there was a study where they, or they did an investigation where they looked at an Aboriginal person who had then gone to a different country and they realized that instinctively, that person still knew always what was northeast, south and west.

No way. So they are instinctively orienting themselves. That iPhone. Not sure. That's great. Another language, another cool language.

Yeah. Okay, so this language is called Kishae and it was spoken by the Mayans in Guatemala. And what I love about this is if you're speaking to children, normally humans would kind of, talk a little bit higher,

like a bit higher like that. And if you're speaking to someone, if you're speaking to someone who's a higher status than you, you speak lower. But in their language, it's completely the opposite. So when you're speaking to someone

of a higher status, you put your voice in a higher pitch. Wow. I think that's amazing. That's cool. I want to do that. When you meet the Queen, it's all very nice to meet you.

And then it's, are you lost little girl? It's very creepy. Creepy to the place to be. I like there's a language called Tamayek, called Tamajek, spoken by the Touareg.

And they, so, 1984, there was the Prince song, Purple Rain. There was also the movie Purple Rain. They did a remake of that movie 30 years later.

So the exact movie, it was just a remake in their language. Unfortunately, in their language, they don't have a word for purple. So the movie was released as Rain the Color of Blue with a little red in it.

Well, the Pirahá, Brazil language, well, someone claimed has no numbers or colours in it, so my 20 month old son could go there and rule the place. Pretty much all he can do.

You can't play snooker, can you? No. And also, which I don't understand, someone says, but this is controversial. It's the only language with no recursive,

no recursion in it, which is the ability to insert phrases into phrases, but I didn't quite grasp what that means. What you can't, you can't put a phrase in a phrase. You can't say Daniel fucking Shriver.

Is that what it is? There's something along those lines. I think that's something we should adopt in the English language. These guys, the Pirahá, are really cool. So their language

is one of the most tonal languages in the world, so it's different kind of tones as you're speaking. And so, a word which is ha-pa-pa-yi, you can pronounce that

ka-pa-pa-yi, or ha-ha-ai-yi, or kaka-ai-yi. It doesn't matter what the consonants are, it's just the tones. And so it means that you could kind of

talk with your mouth full, or you can whistle words and stuff like that, because it's just about the tones. It's not about the consonants. Because it's like, it's like you've got blank scrabble tiles

that you can just put into the words as you wish. Yeah. As long as you get the bits in between, right? Sure. Yeah.

It is a bit like that. It's like, so when I was saying ha-pa-pa-yi, it's the same as saying a-ai-yi, or m-m-m-m, or whatever.

So no matter what kind of tone you make, that's something. Yeah. That's very cool. That's cool, that, isn't it? I like the scrabble analogy, though. I think that really worked well.

Oh, thanks. I understood that. Cheers. Sorry, Andy. No, no. I simply didn't understand. James, it simply didn't make sense.

So it did. This is about linguistics, right? And so, it's about language. We're talking about language, how it's evolved. Just get to your very linked link.

Yeah. Well, it's only because I was reading some Noam Chomsky stuff, who is obviously very related to, like, how language evolves, and I hate him.

Wow. I think he's so miserable. Too much wine for Anna, I think. Anna, we can't get in another celebrity feud, not with Noam Chomsky. It's always after two glasses of wine,

she starts slugging Noam Chomsky. It's every time. Fucking Noam. He feels the same about me. It's fine. But so Noam Chomsky is obviously, like,

linguistics. It's amazing, like, Einstein figure in the linguistics world. So I was on this linguistics forum. I was just looking at how language has evolved.

And this forum put a big Chomsky quote at the top, and it was about the first article he'd ever written. So he wrote his first article

when he was 10 years old, and it was about the, he was like, the fascist forces of conquered Barcelona, essentially the end of the Spanish Civil War, and it was all about

the spread of Nazi power and stuff. This guy was 10. So it's the top of this forum, like, thoughts, guys. And the comment immediately below it was,

that sounds incredibly boring. And then the comment below that was, when I was 10, I wrote about an evil jack-o'-lantern that terrorized kids

on Halloween. But he had a heart of gold and was just misunderstood. And then the entire rest of the thread is them analysing the jack-o'-lanterns. It does sound a lot better,

doesn't it? It does, doesn't it? It sounds amazing. You'd rather read that. Definitely. Yeah. Good on them. OK, it is time for fact number

three, and that is Andy. My fact is, that King George III once went to a safety demonstration, which involved putting the king in a house

and setting it on fire. Wow. Yeah. That doesn't sound very safe. Well, that was, I guess that's the, that's the trick, isn't it,

with the safety demonstration? You'd try and be something that looks unsafe. And you say, I tricked you. And he survived, right? The king survived it.

He's the longest reigning king. Is he the longest reigning king? The longest reigning king. Yeah, only Victoria and Elizabeth are both queens. Oh. He was 59 years.

He was 59 years, 60 days or something, he was looking for. Wow. Wow. Although, he wasn't regular, was he?

Well, he lost America. He's been reassessed, I think, a little bit over the year. I mean, I think he got a bad rap at the time.

I mean, speaking of bad raps, he's meant to be the best thing in Hamilton, in George III. Oh, he's so good in it. But... It's not him.

He is dead now. He is dead. He is dead now. So, yeah, the extreme safety of the demonstration and his long reign. It couldn't keep him alive past the age of about 80,

which he made it to. A lot of stuff went on in his... I was surprised, actually, I don't know very much about that period of history, even though I studied history. And I was surprised

how much happened in his reign. And yeah, he lost a lot of stuff. As well as the plot, being the main thing. Yeah. Which was actually very sad, wasn't it?

So, he did go very mad. Yeah. His illness was diagnosed as flying gout. Wow. Can I just say, I think Andy is desperate

to tell us the story of this house on fire. No, no, we don't. We can go into the broader sociological implications of his reign. It's such an exciting story about the flaming house.

Andy, please. Back to the burning building. Yeah, yeah. Good. How does that happen? So, I should tell you where this comes from. There's a book called

1776, all about only stuff happening in 1776. A very busy year. Lots of innovations. Lots of stuff going on. The American colonies on the brink of being lost

and all this stuff. And there was a scientist called David Hartley, who had this amazing new way of making a house fireproof. And it basically just involved putting iron plates in it all the way through.

Like a magician in a box. Yeah. So, the king stood upstairs and the flaming pitch destroyed the lower half of the house. And he was absolutely fine.

And this happened on the very day that the news reached London of the American Declaration of Independence. So, it was like it was a big day for daughter third.

Yeah. Wow. Slightly spoilt the day. You just have this great day upstairs in a burning house and I'm fine. What's been happening while I've gone?

The guy who's just talking about, David Hartley, he has a sort of long lasting legacy around the world. And, you know, we're here in the West End. He is the person

who invented the fire curtain that goes down. Did he? In front of strangers. Yeah. He hated fire, didn't he? What's his problem with fire? Let the fire...

Have a few fires. He was thought of as an eccentric because he didn't powder his hair when everyone else did. Who? George III or David Hartley?

David Hartley. David Hartley? George III was thought as quite eccentric as well. Yeah. For other reasons. He also wore stockings with a feet cut out

because he thought it was healthier. And that made you eccentric in those days. Wow. Really? That is interesting. You didn't need to do much,

did you? To be called an eccentric now, you need to work pretty damn hard. I've been trying for years. Yeah. And the house became popular

and was used throughout England. The plates method spread across the country. But then other methods took over which were more efficient and didn't involve putting

huge iron plates all the way through the house. And then the house, the original house, the test house, very sadly caught fire. No. Yeah.

It had been extended beyond the safe bit. You know, there was an extension. Yeah. So that extension caught fire and then collapsed on to the fireproof section and then that caught fire.

Oh. You needed some iron plates on the top to stop that. Yeah. Wow. How do you talk a king into standing in a flaming house?

I don't know. If he's mad, it's easy. Oh, that's true. They got the right king. You're right. Yeah. And I think he was going a bit mad around that time.

He had a few bouts of madness through his life. One of them was just for the French Revolution. So that must have been sort of a round but otherwise there's a bit later than that.

Yeah. When he did start to lose his mind, one stage in 1819, he spoke nonsense, nonstop for 58 hours. It was at Christmas time as well, that one.

Christmas, yeah. Which, you know, that happens at my house with my dad, so. It also says it was a bit racist. Going on about Brexit. That's not my dad.

Yeah. It sounds like he really, really suffered. And obviously it wasn't understood nearly as much at the time. So, you know, he has this reputation.

But he did, obviously, a huge amount of stuff. He was a very interesting guy. He was a hobbyist. He wrote architectural journal articles under a pen name secretly. Did he?

He was interested in all sorts of stuff. Yeah. He had a huge capacity for wanting to know what was going on in his kingdom, I think. Yeah.

Okay. He had a weird marriage to a woman called Charlotte. Charlotte of Mepplenburg who was from this random German duchy. And she was very parsimonious,

known for being parsimonious. The only remnant we have of her is a dish called apple Charlotte, apparently. And that's apple Charlotte is a pudding

that uses up stale bread because she didn't want to waste anything. And she used to stamp butter with the royal signet so that the servants

couldn't eat it to say, this is our butter. Don't touch. She was famously ugly and there was a quote about her. This is suddenly

tipped over into personal abuse. Sometimes I feel like women haven't taken enough flak in history. We've got a sense of abuse their way.

So she was famously hideous. And one of the nobility said that as she got older, this is a famous quote, as she got older, the bloom has at any rate gone off the queen's ugliness.

Since she fell off this carriage and broke her nose, she's actually quite handsome. Wow. Yeah. He married at the day he met her, didn't he?

They married on this day. And he was baptized on the day he was born, George III, because he was two months premature, which at the time was like, you know, definitely you're going to die.

Yeah, yeah. But he survived. But they had a very happy marriage. He was faithful to her, which, you know, what's the point of being king? If you're going to be faithful to your wife,

there's no point. And they had 15 children. Was he? Okay. So I'm just almost making this up, I think. But I thought that in his

madnesses, he actually did have affairs off the back of he was just in a hyper state. He wasn't really aware. He was quite old, though, when I think he was, when he properly was mad,

he was like in his 70s and 80s. So I don't think he would have been much of a threat. And he was blind. So I don't, I think he might have had a go. Well, he had a lot of affairs with walls.

And he shook hands with the tree, didn't he? Yes. Oh, that's true. He did. So, you know, he might have been having affairs with Flora and Fauna.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. He definitely did get off with her a lot. Yeah. 15 children. Well, nine boys. It's like, it's like,

he stayed faithful to one woman, had 15 children. It's a real fuck you to King Henry VIII, isn't it? It's like, just sit with one, just keep plowing away. And only one,

I think 13 of his children survived into adulthood. Yeah. I think. 13. Yeah. But he later refused his daughters the ability to marry.

He was, he was really happy with his wife, but I think he was so worried about them making unsusable marriages that only three of his daughters managed to marry in the end, just because he was

such a tyrant about it. And he passed a law saying that if you were a royal aged under 25, you could not marry without the express permission of the ruling sovereign.

And that law stayed in place until 2013. Really? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I think he was skeptical

about marriage because his sister's marriage had gone very badly. So his sister was Caroline Matilde. And she'd married a guy called King Christian, the seventh of Denmark

when she was 15. And he was also quite mad. And he hung her, he didn't like her at all, his 15-year-old sister. So he hung her portrait in his lavatory

as a show of how he didn't like his wife. So his wife, his wife's portrait. He hung his wife's portrait in the toilet. And he was an obsessive masturbator.

He was very, he was famous. Did he do it in the toilet? Is that why the portrait was there? I think the toilet was the only when we didn't do it. Really?

Yeah. He went to see doctors about this and doctors were always trying to stop him doing it. But he once entered a feast round his ankles. And he had servants

manacle him and then beat him with rolls of paper. And he visited England once. And he visited all the brothels in London and then completely trashed

St. James's Palace. And so that was the man that his sister married. Oh, OK. I think George III thought, well, marriage hasn't gone well

for her. Let's protect women from further excessive masturbation. So he saw a doc. I'd love to hear the doctor transcript. Read that.

So the way to stop doing this is, OK, you're masturbating. You're masturbating. Yeah. Just put it back away. OK. So yeah.

So we have lots of medicines. We have, OK, you're masturbating again. We're just going to have to put that away again. OK. You're doing very good. It's difficult

to stop. You know, you've got to be some happiness doctor. You don't need to tell me. So, Queen Charlotte, we were talking about.

Yeah. She had a pet zebra who was presented to her by the governor of the Cape in South Africa. And it was known colloquially as the Queen's Ass. And there was a massive scandal

when the Queen's Guard were caught charging people to expose the Queen's Ass to public view. In 1764, and you guys are really holding this in very nicely, the newspapers printed a story

that the guard were charging people to see this. And then Queen Charlotte later bred this zebra by getting a male donkey and painting the back of it white and black stripes so that it thought that it was a zebra's

Ass. Ass, yeah. Exactly. And it worked. Wow. I'm going to try that with my own bottom. I'm going to take my own bottom

black and white and see if I can get a zebra to fuck me. It's what I'm going to do. I've always been quite obsessed with having sex with an acarpi, which is like a sort of an armory

zebra or a kind of thing. But from behind, it's got a very nice, it looks like a sort of you've always been obsessed. And they've got, I was obsessed with an acarpi before.

And I've seen an acarpi quite a few times in London Zoo. From behind, it's got a very like leopard skin, trouser. Right. So it looks like a lady's

hindquarters. So that's nice. And then I've realized as well, an acarpi's got a very long tongue. So you could be there and then they can't. If I had to have sex

with an animal. That's your number one. I don't think this sounds like an if I had to situation. I think there's too much thought has gone into this. If I had to have sex with

me, I would paint my bottom black and white. It's just the one I wouldn't mind. Yes. We've all got one. Do they let you in London Zoo anymore?

They do. I'm a member of London Zoo. I can go any time I like. It's a new meaning to the word member of London Zoo. Wow. Good. What is going on?

As long as you donate enough, they let you masturbate. What are you donating? They're hoping that I'm going to create a new hybrid creature that they can put in. Imagine if it was successful.

Oh God. The herring. The herring. The herring. The herring. The herring. The herring. The herring.

The herring. The herring. The herring. The herring's Emperor. The herring of Kapi. So I have taken my tone, now taken the tone down. Let's bring the

tone back up. It is time for a final fact to the show and that is James. Okay, my part this week is that female hyenas say hello by licking each other's clitorises. Crikey.

An uncompromisingly direct greeting, I would say. I just now feel like we're giving Richard ideas for his next clip to the zoo. I'm just saying great deal, very nicely. Is that why the male hyenas are always laughing just out of sort of

awkwardness and excitement? Okay, so this fact was sent to me by text. But not honestly. Not honestly. By Mr. R. Herring. When we're on tar, there was no name attached but phone number ends with 067,

so you know who you are. Yeah, that's nearly my number. I confirmed it in a book called Wild Sex, The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom by Karen Bondar. And yeah, it seems that it does happen. When females arrive and see each other, they stand in a parallel position

facing in opposite directions, lift their hind legs, display their fully erect clitorises to each other, and then they smell and lick them. And this is because female hyenas have extremely large clitorises. Do they ever smell them and not lick them?

They smell them. No. Sorry. That's not as very awkward in the hyena world. It's like, you know, when you give someone a high five and they don't give you a high five,

that's exactly like that. Wow. Yeah. And this happens between females at different ranks and depending on who licks first, depends on who is their most highest ranking. And they're like seven inches long, aren't they?

About seven inches long clitorises. They are. They're essentially a penis in appearance and they get erections. So when they're copulating, they get erections. And they also have a labia that's fused to look like testes.

Actually, testing them a bit like zoologists have got the genders the wrong way around. Except that they give birth through them. And then they give birth through them and so that clarifies things. Yes. And it's a horrific birth. Yeah.

Yeah. I think it's the only animal birth that's worse than humans, because humans are not very well adapted to give birth because we've got our tits are too narrow and our heads are too big, essentially. And so our birth is much, much more traumatic

than almost any other animal. But hyenas, it is worse because you are giving birth through a penis. Yes. There's two types of erections, which is very useful to know. There's a social erection and a sexual erection.

What I've got here, this is a social erection. And now I've got, now I know about that, that's a good thing to know. Unless anyone fancies having sex, in which case it can just turn very quickly into a sexual erection.

Where does it, where's the term? If you're interested in, if you're interested, it suddenly is a sexual erection. In my case, I don't know if that's the case. Where does it, it turns just as you walk past

the large ungimlet section of the zoo. It's very difficult for the males, the true males, to mate as well. So they have to practice a lot because being able to get your genuine penis into this long clitoris is a tough gig. It's like darts.

And so it takes about two months practice for male hyenas. Really? Before you are able to penetrate properly. Yeah. And they're like, probably like crouching behind them and trying to point the penis

the right way. Two months of, yeah. You say that, but George III's brother-in-law was practicing for a lot longer than that. But 60% of hyena cubs suffocate on the way out. No.

Yeah, it's so sad. What? Yeah. More than half because you're in this long tube. Holy moly. It's crazy. There's all sorts of hyena mythology

because of the fact that they're so weird. And just beliefs about them. So plenty of the elder friend of the show, he said that, keep writing it. He said that hyenas are capable of calling people by name because they're quite weird.

They sound slightly human in the way they are. Calling people by name and then killing you when you go outside. So they will lure you out to see if you think someone's calling you. Pliny. Yeah. Pliny.

Pliny the elder. Pliny the elder. Get that hyena out of here. There's also in mythology, have you heard of so werewolves? There's a were hyenas. Yeah. Which is very exciting.

But they have a different thing. So your classic werewolf will obviously be your wolf. Sorry, a human that turns into a wolf. With the were hyena, it's often a hyena that turns into a human. So at night time on a full moon, you might be talking to a human.

And they will not be socialized at all. No. Because they spend five, six, third time as hyenas. Yeah. And their penis might be a clitoris. That's true. Yeah.

They're greetings. You can tell you've met one. Immediately. As soon as they walk into a party, you know it's them. They must be disappointed how hard it's to find the human clitoris though. What's going on?

It's not even here. Oh, I guess a lot of sympathy from fellow men at the party at that point. I know, right? Walter Rally thought that hyenas were so disgusting that Noah refused to let them on the ark. And the species was only resurrected after a natural copulation

between a dog and a cat. Okay. It's not as terrifying as the Richard Herring London Zoo, a cafe creature. I've got some clitoris facts. Yes, please. The clitoris is the only part of the human body that never ages a 20-year-old clitoris

and an 80-year-old clitoris are identical. So you can't count the rings. They get slightly bigger sometimes throughout life, but then they don't look. They don't wrinkle, I guess. That is really good. That's extraordinary. And also I was surprised clitoris,

the word clitoris only dates for that, only dates back to the 17th century is something I read. And then the word clit only came up in America in the 1950s. So it took 200 years, 300 years for some of the shortened clitoris. I've been saying clitoris for a long time,

for some thought this is a mouthful. Let's shorten that to clit. Do we know if it had a meaning before? I think it is a Latin word. And I did look that up. I think it means hood in Latin. Oh, yeah, it does. I would have had a different meaning.

Just a monk would, I guess, go around with a... With a clitoris, I'd say. I don't know what the Romans called a clitoris if they didn't call it a clitoris. One would have thought it was related to the fact that they weren't thought to be... They weren't thought to have any organs that would experience...

They weren't thought to have organs, weren't they? They weren't thought to have organs. They couldn't experience sexual pleasure or anything. But actually, that's often a myth. They often did. I think in ancient Greek, women often talked about the pleasure you get from sex. So they must have been a concept of a clitoris.

What was it called? Any Greeks listening? Plenty, if you could ask your name. Was it called a whipple tickle or something? I'd always get that fact said. That was supposedly what the G-spot was going to be called. Because it was Dr. Something... Was it Beverly Whipple who came up with it? No, it was a doctor.

His name started with G. The reason the G-spot's called the G-spot is because it's named after a doctor and it's something like Geisner that starts with G. Gavin. I thought, should we call him a Gavin? No, why? If I discovered I wanted to have my whole name,

I wouldn't be called the R-spot. The Gavin. It would stop serving its purpose immediately if you called it the Gavin. Okay, that is it. That is all our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast,

we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, James. At James Harkin, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M, Rich. In 1967. You can email podcast.qi.com. Yeah, that's right. Or you can go to our group account at No Such Thing

or our website, NoSuchThingAsAfish.com. We have lots of blah, blah, blah. That's not the website to go to. Go to RichardHerring.com. That is where you will find all the upcoming dates for Richard Herring's podcast. He's going to be in Edinburgh, so all through August, he's going to be there. He's got all of his tour dates.

And it's also got a link to the episode that we went on of his podcast. On July 24th of July. If you're listening after then, just go to his site. You can find that episode. We had an amazing time chatting to him about us generally. He made us say weird things. Check it out.

Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. We'll see you again next week. Goodbye.