No Such Thing As A Fish - 28: No Such Thing As A Man-Eating Clam

Episode Date: September 26, 2014

Episode 28 - Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Anna (@nosuchthing), and Andy (@andrewhunterm) discuss washing with wine, dogs eating homework, counting with your loins, and all things clammy...

We ran it on QI a few years ago, which was, there's no such thing as a fish. There's no such thing as a fish. No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish. 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'm sitting here with three of the regular L's. It's Andy Murray, Anna Czazinski, and James Harkin.

And once again, we've gathered around with our favorite four facts from the last week, and here they are in no particular order. Andy Murray, my fact is that over 100 people used to watch King Louis XIV get up and get dressed every day. Did he know they were there? Yes, he did. So was it like a window display? No, people would come into his bedroom and watch him... Hundreds!

It's a ceremony called the Leve as in the French verb for getting up, and it was kind of to ease the king into the day. That would be quite good if you got up in the morning and brush your teeth and you got a big round of applause. Yeah, really? That would really help your day start. Yeah, and people came to see him while he was having his breakfast. So a few people would come in when he was still in bed at eight o'clock,

and he would be woken up, and his nurse would kiss him, his childhood nurse, and his chamber portal would be removed. And then the ceremony started, which took an hour and a half, and he would have his hands washed in wine. He picked a wig. He was given his slippers and dressing gown. His hand washed in wine? Yeah, yeah, he washed his hands in wine.

Why would he do that? No idea. Stinky hands the whole day. Spartans used to wash newborn babies in wine. It was one of the first things that happened to them as they got a bucket of wine on washing them. Yeah. Wow.

So sometimes he would just go to the corner and have a wee in the chamber pot with no embarrassment or inhibition. Well, we've done all this podcast, haven't we? How he liked to defecate in public. Was that him? Was that him? Yes, that was him. The thing like to is an exaggeration.

No, he liked to. Architects at first, I suggested that toilet cubicles are becoming, you know... No, no. Alamogos. No, I liked to put them in public. The really amazing thing is the bit where they dress him. So two officials took the sleeves of his night shirt and started to pull it off him,

while another courtier brought a fresh and pre-warmed shirt to the king. And then two other people, this is four and five, had to hold up the king's dressing gown as a curtain so people didn't get a glimpse of, you know... So quick question. Back then, how do you pre-warm something? Do you hold it over an oven? I mean like near a fire?

Or maybe you can warm up irons, can't you? And then you can press the oven. I might have been warned by someone for a little while. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Because if it was a fire, then you're going to get the wood smell. This guy must have been the smelliest man. What that sounds like is he wakes up and he gets dressed as a walk of shame. Smelling of booze and fire.

I read something about microbiomes. This is off-topic. But what it is, is if you go into your house, you leave microbes everywhere and they're specific to you. So my house will have a certain microbiome and then you'll have one that's completely different. But the interesting thing is, if we went to stay in a hotel, you would only have to be in that hotel for 24 hours

before the microbiome of that hotel room is indistinguishable from your house. Wow. That's how much they all go from one place to another. If only like dogs, we could use them to mark our territory. Then we'd claim ownership of everywhere. Then we might have a bit more of this planet than we already do. I'm getting sick of the swans taking bits of my land by right. Going back to Louie, I really like the fact that

so it's part of the Levet ceremony. And is it the Couché ceremony when he goes to bed? Yeah. Does that not mean? Yeah, Couché just means go to bed. There was a Couché ceremony. Yeah, that he obviously had his private chamber where he actually slept and then he had his bed chamber where all of the people used to do all this stuff.

So he would be woken up in his private chamber at, let's say, 7.30 a.m. and then escorted to the public chamber, which also has a bed in it, and have to sit in bed and sort of fake that he was being woken up out of bed. And then to go back to bed, he'd have to have this whole Couché ceremony around him. They take his clothes off, they put his nightgown, he climbs into bed, they kiss him good night, they tell him a little rhyme, but he does a fake snore. And then he has to get out of the display bed

and walk down the corridor to his private bed chamber to actually go to sleep. And Louis the 15th really didn't like these ceremonies. And so he would get up in the morning and go hunting for a couple of hours first and then sneak back in and pretend to get a sleep. That's amazing. Sounds like a real hassle. What if you just want to get downstairs? Yeah, it sounds like a complete pain.

Did anyone else get it? Was it just specifically him? No, his descendants did. It lasted for centuries. Though what I mean is, oh, anyone outside of the king. Well, what I read is that some of his courtiers who came to that ceremony had their own levée ceremonies in their own house earlier in the day. Oh my god. I'm the dresser of the dresser of the dresser of the dresser of the dresser of the king.

And it caught on, so it became fashionable with Charles II in England, I think. So the French really went for it and then we picked up on it. And you used to be able to watch King's eating as well. You used to have public galleries you could walk through. I can't remember which historian it is, but someone calculated that Louis XIV would have eaten between getting up and going to bed 30 different dishes in the course of the day, just constantly being fed.

His life sounds like, it sounds like Salvador Dali has designed his life. It's a surrealist nightmare. Do you know about the Washer Woman's Rebellion in the time of Louis XIV? This was the introduction of chocolate in the cart of Louis. And it was a new thing, people were drinking chocolate. When the Washer Ladies first saw the brown stains on the fine white damask table napkins, they refused to touch them. I mean, going on what Anna said about Louis XIV's

behavior in the corridors of Versailles, probably reasonable assumption, yeah. And the other interesting thing about Louis XIV that I always like is this guy called Eustache D'Ager. So this is a prisoner of Louis. He was transferred from prison to prison all over France for 34 years. He had to wear a mask the whole time, a black velvet mask. He was told that if he said anything other than food or water, he was to be killed on the spot.

And no one knows who he was or anything like that. And there's loads of conspiracy theories in French history about whether he was Louis's twin brother or he was the son of the King of England or whatever. And hence the Man in the Iron Mask, the brilliant Leonardo DiCaprio film. Is that who he is? He's the man in the Iron Mask? Well, that's the idea that Dumas had came from that. He popularized Champagne, didn't he?

Louis, him and Dom Perignon got together, decided they loved wine from the Champagne region, even though it wasn't ever fizzy in his lifetime. So that was a real guy? Yeah. Dom Perignon, he was a monk, yeah. Dommie? Love that. That's like nachos being invented by Mr. Nacho.

Not by a guy called Ignacio. Oh, it was Nacho for sure. That's good. King Louis XIV probably only liked Champagne because he thought it got the germs off his hands better. Yeah. This is great wine, Dom Perignon. I love it.

He took it as a cure for his gout, which obviously didn't work. But the bane of Dom Perignon's life was the fact you couldn't get these bloody bubbles out of Champagne well enough. So, you know, they would try to make it as flat as possible. And it was only after Louis died that people decided to start drinking it sparkling. I have a cool fact about Champagne, which is that in the days before Tough and Glass, bottles used to explode at the slightest provocation. And you had to wear an Iron Mask to go into the wine cellar.

And Champagne makers would lose sometimes up to a third of their bottles, because obviously it can be a chain reaction. If one goes, then all the others around it might go as well. So, yeah, you see these incredible outfits that they had to put on big, heavy gloves. Oh, no, someone's ordered Champagne again. Put the radiation suit on. Louis XIV ruled for so long that his successor was his great-grandson. He outlived his oldest son and his oldest grandson.

Ruled for 72 years. I like Louis. What else has he done? He wasn't a nice guy, particularly. And he was extraordinarily lavish. I mean, he robbed his own people and all defunded his spending habits. And in fact, that's where we get another piece of etymology, the word silhouette. So that comes from Louis XIV's reign, because Etienne de Silhouette was the finance minister.

And so he was the guy who organized attacks of people a lot, and especially the rich, so that Louis could have expensive habits. And you're wondering how the hell we got a silhouette from here. That meant that rich people who used to get their portraits painted couldn't afford to do that anymore. And the replacement for that was just having silhouettes of themselves drawn. And it was called Silhouettes because it became a byword for on the cheap because we can't afford this anymore.

So he, as well as there being a man called Don Perignon, there was a man called Silhouette. Etienne de Silhouette and Don Perignon were hanging out with Louis together. There's another book that needs to be written. Like Burns, Side Burns, and named after a guy called Burnside. Really? Yeah. Burnside.

He was the first head of the NRA, Burnside, wasn't he? Don't forget Hank Krispygreme. I thought it was Krispygreme. I would have been a lot better. Anyway, yeah. Sorry to derail it with that. Just there's a man called Silhouette. Yeah, I like that.

That's great. And the only image we have of him is a silhouette. Is that right? No. It's like you heard me say his name and you stopped listening. I'm pretty sure everything I said. That is exactly what I did. Okay, time for fact number two.

And that is James. Okay, my fact is that there is an original Picasso that no one will ever see because it was eaten by the dog. By the dog? Who's the dog? That was Picasso's jazz friend, the dog. There was a dog called Lump who was named after the German word for rascal. The dog lived with Picasso for six years

and one day he drew a picture of a rabbit, which if it was still around now would be worth tens of thousands of pounds. But the dog carried it into the garden and ate it. Because he thought it was an actual rabbit because we've all seen Picasso's paintings and they're not as realistic as that would imply. That's true. That's true.

Yeah. Didn't Picasso, maybe he was a bit of a dodgy character who was lying about the whole dog thing because What's a bit dodgy? He was purported to have stolen the Mona Lisa at one point, wasn't he? It wasn't either prime suspects. He was definitely interrogated about it. And now I think he's the artist with the most works of art stolen of any artist.

I think there was something like 1,100 works of Picasso, original Picasso's around the world. All stolen by dogs. He did burn a lot of his work when he was younger because he was too cold and too poor to afford proper heating. And he had all these sheets of paper with drawings on and he just burnt them. Do you remember hearing that thing about Picasso? That he had two mistresses and they came to his house

and they said, oh, you have to choose between us. And he said, no, you need to fight it out. And then he just sat there and let them fight. Brilliant. The only man who could get away with that. Yeah. Wow. And you can hang your clothes up over there.

Corner of the room. Sotheby's once won a $20 million contract to sell a collection of Picasso's and Van Gogh after they won a game of scissors, paper, rock. Hold on. Sorry. Sotheby's won the game of scissors. I don't understand how it was them versus Christie's. And they'd both gotten like the contracts at the same time.

They didn't know who was going to get it. And so they just did a game of rock, paper, scissors. All of them, all the staff lining up opposite each other. Mr. Sotheby against Mr. Christie. Mr. Christie and Mr. Sotheby won. Steinbeck's dog at his first draft of Mice and Men. Really? Really.

Yeah, that's happened. Oh, wow. Do you know where the rumor of the dog eating once homework first came from? No. Apparently it's from, I think it was 1901 and it was in a Welsh village and there was a stand-in vicar. And he was reading out his sermons at the end and then he felt like his sermons had been too short

and he hadn't prepared enough. So he went back into the vestry to talk to one of the clerics afterwards and apologized and said he dropped some of it on the way and the dog ate half of his sermon. If you are interested in dogs, the Wikipedia list of individual dogs is unbelievably good. It is divided into actors, athletes, faithful dogs, working dogs, other heroic dogs, dogs of unusual size, which is divided,

I kid you not, into small dogs, heavy dogs and tall dogs. Also, space dogs is one of them. Oh, okay, yeah, Leica and so on. Intelligent dogs, notorious dogs, ugly dogs, unique dogs. What's a unique dog? Every dog is unique, Dan. Famed by proxy to a famous dog. That's a big list, yeah.

You mean dogs. Did you see that in the news this week about the Russian biggest lender in Russia? If you get a mortgage with them, you get a free cat. Or they lend it to you so that you can be photographed with it in your new home because it's looking. Well, there's supposed to be a thing about good luck in Russia, if it's quite true,

but the first to go into a house should be a cat. Did you know that builders used to wall up cats inside buildings that they were working on? No, I didn't know that. They've been found when you do renovations. You often find a mummified cat in the walls of a property. Well, they also put shoes in, didn't they, in the walls. And there's a guy who collects all the times

when they've been mentioned and has a big long list online of all the secret shoes that are in. Is that just for fun? Is that some sort of inbuilder's joy? Good luck, superstition. The first cat mentioned in an English witch trail wasn't black, it was white and spotty. Was it?

And was that bad at the time? Are they sure it wasn't a Dalmatian? Well, the reason... How good were they at identifying? Well, the reason they knew it was a witch's cat is because it would talk to her and it was called Satan. I said, two obvious clues. Apparently white cats with blue eyes are deaf.

Yeah, most of them are, I think. And also almost all torture shells are female. What? Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Just back to the paintings very quickly. There's also a painting that we do have,

but we're never going to see the proper original of. It's the three Bronte sisters sitting in this painting and it was painted by Bramwell, their brother. And it's the only drawing that we have of the Bronte sisters. The interesting thing about it is that Bramwell used to be in it. He painted himself into the drawing, but he lost confidence in himself. So he painted over himself by putting a pillar,

just this huge pillar randomly in the painting. And it was only when they looked closer at it that you could see, you know... He's peeking out behind it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crying mad behind the pillar. That's a bit like, I think, it's Bruegel's painting Massacre of the Innocence.

It was commissioned by a king, but he wanted to make a political point about how inhumane this massacre had been. So the painting looks like a beautiful snow scene. And there's just piles of snow everywhere and snow just falling down everywhere and children playing. And then if you look, they've done X-rays of the paint. And if you look behind all the snow,

there's countless dead bodies everywhere. Oh, wow. There was the painting that they just found recently. They did a restoration on this painting, which was of a beach scene. And there was a crowd of people, static-graded area. They didn't know why.

And then when they restored it, it revealed a beached whale. Like a ginormous whale. Just laying there, which has obviously come onto the shore. What, and someone had painted over that? It was seen as being a bit unfashionable and a bit weird to have this big whale in the painting.

On whales, there was a news story recently, and apparently this happens quite a lot, of when you get a big beached whale, it can fill up with gas, and it gets really, really inflated and really tense. And then if you slightly prick it, I mean, you've got to kind of prick the whale in order to dispose it.

It completely explodes. And so there's footage of whales that explode their innards all over. There's some videos on YouTube, isn't there, I think. Some really good, really entertaining videos, yeah. I have the best thing about beached whales. It's about, well, I've been reading this book, Whales Bones of the British Isles,

by a guy who has spent 30 years traveling around, finding whales' jaw bones in arches and things like that, and as gate posts and as umbrella stands and all of these things. In 1897, a whale was stranded near Bournemouth, and it began to make this terrible smell. And according to the newspapers, one Somerset farm laborer

climbed up on top of the body and declared, I've come 40 miles to see this here whale, and I'm going to walk from his head to his tail. He started on his walk, but the carcass said for some days had been undergoing a softening process. And the surface giving way like rotten ice, the adventurous laborer sank into the blubber

and was subsequently extricated from his unpleasant surroundings. A sadder, if not a wiser man. Okay, time for fact number three. That's my fact. My fact this week. During World War II, the U.S. Navy diving manual contained detailed instructions for what to do if eaten by a giant clam.

What do you mean, that's good? Yeah, dive with dignity. You're supposed to basically, you're supposed to have very heavy-duty scissors and cut its muscles from inside the mouth. I like, because it was you who originally found this fact. And when I said it to you yesterday, I was like, oh, where did you get this fact from?

You were, oh, it was a book. What was it called again? It took you a few seconds, a few beats. And you were, oh, yeah, it's called Eat and Buy a Giant Clam. Didn't even open the book. Joseph Cummins, if anyone wants to read it. Great adventure, it's natural science. But actually the way to get away from a giant clam

is just to pull your hand out, because they don't close fully, do they? Yeah, so you can't be eaten by a giant clam. There is a crustacean they found recently. I can't remember what it's called, which its teeth are the hardest known to eat. Its teeth are the hardest known substance that nature produces.

It's got these black jotting out teeth. Wow. I'll see your teeth and I'll raise you Ray Winstone. We should say we are a far bigger threat to giant clams than they are to us. We've overfished them horribly. And so now they're critically endangered in lots of places. It's amazing how long they take to grow as well.

It takes them 11 months to get to just a couple of inches across. And then to get one up to the weight of five pounds, it takes seven years. So really big ones that you see on the ocean floor could be 50 years old or 70 or 80. They've seen it all. They've seen it all. Well, they've seen a very, very tiny bit of it all.

The largest giant clams in history can be found under London. Wow. Really? Yeah, they're fossils. Well, they're not still alive. I know Ceramus, they're called, and they can be found in the Cretaceous gulch clay

underneath London, and they were as big as two meters in size. Wow. So the height of a door. I think the largest one ever found was in Japan and it weighed 730 pounds, which is about as much as four adult men. Which is, it's big enough that you can understand

why people slightly thought it was threatening, but it's quite fun to Google. If you do a Google book search for giant clams and then you refine it to the 19th century, that is quite entertaining because there are a lot of books of popular science which warn of the dangers of being eaten by a giant clam. Journal of Popular Science from 1896,

which talks about how if you're diving a slack line or pipe may fall into the jaws of a giant clam which close over it and hold the diver prisoner to his death alone in the dim ocean depths. The biggest pearl ever found was inside a giant clam, the pearl of Lao Tzu, and it was found by William Cobb, and he claimed that when they found that,

it was a guy who was killed by a giant clam when they were trying to find the pearl. Oh yeah, I read that account. Yeah, apparently what happened was this guy, he was a dyac diver, and he went down, grabbed a hold of the pearl, it closed, and then he wouldn't let go of the pearl, and he stayed there and drowned.

Do you know about the oldest clam ever? Unsurprisingly, we only know because we killed it, because that's what we do. A group of researchers in Iceland, they fished a load of clams up, and it turns out that he was 507 years old when they took him up. He was born in 1499. Isn't that amazing?

What would have been happening in 1499? Well, they called it Ming, because that was Ming Dynasty China. She started the Tudor Dynasty. Yeah, Henry VII had been king for a little while. The Battle of Bosworth was a recent memory. 1485, was that? Yeah.

I mean, you probably didn't have the recent memory of the Battle of Bosworth. We've got no evidence he actually fought there. That's the thing, true. It'd be the one sort of longevity diary that if you got hold of, it'd just be boring and so dull. Oh mate, you went through a lot, and we've just got our filtered, filtered some more water and...

Year 396, grew another ring. Year 397. Females in one... Oh, sorry. Females is wrong, obviously, because they're hermaphrodites, aren't they? So they are male and female, but they can't fertilize themselves.

So they just spurt out their eggs and sperm into the water, and they let them find each other. But they can eject in one egg ejection, 500 million eggs, which is quite impressive. Whoa! So there's a lot of... Well, also, 98% of them do start as men as well, and then they just transfer into whatever sex they want to a bit later.

Leeches do that as well. Speaking of sea life, actually, I would urge people to look up blue lobsters. So I didn't realize that one in two million lobsters is born bright blue, and so this is really exciting for lobster catchers when they come across them, and they are, like, properly bright blue,

and then one in 30 million is bright yellow, which I think is... Go on a hunt. Well, what gives us a genetic... Just a random mutation. Okay, right. If you search on the Wikipedia for unique lobsters, you'll find them.

Yes. Again, massive list, but... Tall lobsters. Heavy lobsters. Space lobsters. Space lobsters. That's a movie I want to watch. Yeah.

The smallest species of giant clam is called the Boring Clam. Because it bores into the coral. Oh, this is also cool. They found the fossil of... Not shellfish from a long time ago, but a shark from a long time ago, which they think ate shellfish,

because it had these massive tooth plates, which it probably used to crush things like giant clams. It was a 10-meter-long shark. They found it in Kansas, the fossil of it. Isn't that amazing? Just back very quickly to the fact that the Royal Navy did put How to Escape a Giant Clam into their booklet.

I do love when you just read stories of silliness. That seems silly to us, but maybe made sense at the time to the people. And I've got this story here, which is an old QI fact, but it's that in 1993, an Army Bomb Disposal Unit was called to investigate a suspicious-looking package

outside the TA Unit in Bristol. They blew it up with a controlled explosion, but only to discover that it was a parcel of leaflets explaining how to deal with suspicious packages. That's excellent. Yeah. Whoops. Yeah.

Yeah, I like funny labels and unnecessary labels on products like, I think we talked before about, they do not eat the iPod Shuffle, but there are the good ones. There's a packet of screwdrivers, which is sold in America, where there's the warning at the top,

says not to be inserted into penis, which is quite useful. I don't believe it. I don't believe it. Well, why don't you believe it? You think you should. Yeah, it clearly belongs there. And he runs to the bathroom.

By that logic, almost everything in the world would have that label on it. Except possibly medical swabs. And even they shouldn't be labelled only sometimes in certain penis. We've covered before the Alfred Kinsey, the sexual search for kids. Yes, we have.

Okay, all right, all right. 00:22:32,040 --> 00:22:33,800 Maybe it didn't say on his toothbrush, she likes it. Or maybe as where he gripped it, it wore away the do not over time. Hang on, what's this label? Okay, time for the final fact of the show,

and it is Erzscherzynski. My fact. Is that 100 used to be 120? What do you mean? Ah, well, that's a great question, Dan. I mean that. Well, I mean a couple of things. So the word 100 derives from an old Norse word,

hundrath, which literally meant 120. And when people referred to 100 throughout the Middle Ages, and up until the 17th century in loft cases, they actually meant 120 because we worked, especially before the 14th century, on a duodecimal system or a base 12 system rather than a decimal system as we do now. So everything was divisible by 12.

Is it true that they said a small hundred when they meant 100? Yeah. And they said 100 or a long 100 or a great 100? For 120. Yeah. It's so weird. So when you saw like the Roman numeral C

throughout medieval times, that would usually refer to 120, not 100. But it wasn't actually that regular. And so 100 can mean various different things depending on what you're referring to. So if you were counting drinking glasses or gunpowder weight, then if you said 100, then that would be 100.

But if you were counting eggs or pins or fish, if you said 100, that would be 120. But then there were some commodities for which it was neither. So apparently in Roxburgshire and Selkirkshire, 100 sheep or lambs was actually 106. You're making me stop. And it was 100 for dried fish in some places,

was actually 160. And if you were talking about onions and garlic and you said 100, it was 225. So God knows how the hell anyone knew how much they'd ordered of anything. Interestingly, 1000 comes from exactly the same etymological root as 100. So 1000 literally means a strong 100.

And again, in medieval times, 1000 was 1200 usually, because it was a strong 100. It was 10 times 100, which was 120. So to be clear, it wasn't a could be 12 times. Yeah, so it's not. So I was going to say to be clear, it wasn't a completely geodecimal system.

It was sort of a half and half. So it wasn't all divided by 12. I think we've established this was not a system of any kind at all. Didn't have a lot of binding logical rules to it though. This is why no one got anything done until about 1800. And then we all sorted out the numbers and we found coal. And then we got on with the industrial revolution.

There is a tribe in the Amazon. It's the Manduruku, Manduruku tribe. And they only count up to six. And as soon as they get up to six, the next number just becomes many. So if you're having like a dinner party and it's like how many people are coming, it's as many. It's like, cool, I appreciate that,

but I need to set out some chairs. James, what's the thing about Chinese use as a counting system in China and they use all the bones? Each knuckle is worth three things because I think you have like three lines on your knuckles or something. And they can count up to about a million with that. The venerable bead had a good way of counting.

He could count to a million by moving his hands up and down his body. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We've heard this all before. Excuse every 16 year old boy. Just counting. Thank you.

You're counting. His number for 90,000, for instance, was represented by grasping your lines with your left hand with your thumb towards the genitals. There's a great one called the yupno in Papua New Guinea. It's an Aboriginal tribe. And they have a counting system that goes up to 33,

but they use their body like the way that we use our fingers to count to 10. They go further, but there's a logical kind of step for each one. So they count to 10 on their fingers and then their toes take them up to 20. Then their ears, eyes, nose and nostrils take them to 27. And then their left nipple is 28.

Right nipple 29. Belly button 30. I don't like where this is going. It heads into man territory. Left testicle 31. Right testicle 32. Penis 33. So women just can't count as high.

They get up to 27, unfortunately. They're stuck. Well they've got nipples. I know, to 30. To 30. That'll be fantastic in bingo calling. Right testicle 32. I've just found the fact of the Chinese

and counting using their finger joints. So it's not a million that they can get to. It is one less than 10 billion. They're cool. I think the last few things that we've just said come from a book called Alex's Adventures in Numberland. It's by Alex Bellos. And his book is extraordinary.

I haven't read his new one, but the first one is amazing. To drag it back to hundreds for a minute. 100 weight was 112 pounds. Still is. Still is, yeah. Yeah, but only after the 15th century. And before that it was 108 pounds. Oh.

The whole thing is a nightmare. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. So when we get up to 10, when we're counting up to 10, we think we use the decimal system of counting. But if we properly did it, 11 should be 1 teen and 12 should be 2 teen. But we say 11 and 12 because we used to work on a semi-duro decimal system. Also, the number 100 is the sum of the first 9 prime numbers.

Yeah, that's weird. Between 2 and 23. And all the 7 in between. Add them up, you got 100. Cool. The other thing is that if you add up all the numbers on a roulette wheel they add to 666, which is a nice little fact as well. So you were saying that the word 100 came from old Norse and that's it meant 120.

We still spoke Norse in the UK until the 18th century. Did we? Parts of the UK speaking Norse. That's amazing. In the 1701, I think it was a census or there was certainly a report in 1701. And they said there were still a few monoglot Norse speakers who couldn't speak any other language apart from Norse. That is so cool.

Well, the thing is like Shetland was belonging to the Norse people for a long time and they pawned it to Scotland in the 15th century or something like that. So theoretically they could buy it back if they wanted to. Wow. In the Roman army, you know being decimated is where 1 in 10 men is killed. What I didn't know before is that it was a punishment for mutiny. You thought it was a treat reward? Good news boys.

I thought it happened in war that you lose one man in 10 and say, oh god the legion was decimated yesterday, terrible result. But no, it's a punishment. But there was a minor punishment which is called being centimated. Which is why one person in 100 is put to death and they choose it by lot. And the reason it's a punishment for everyone, isn't it because one in 10, if you're decimating as a general, is killed by the other nine in 10.

So it's a punishment for everyone I think. So nine people had to stone one of their people to death. Oh dear. You know a word that doesn't exist but does exist? Zillion. It exists but there's no numerical... No, it's just a random like when you want to come up with something unfeasibly big. Yeah.

There used to be a children's magazine called Zillions and the Wikipedia entry for it just says it existed for several years until 2000 when it was folded into its parent magazine, Consumer Reports. Not amazing. Happy 18th birthday, here's Consumer Reports. Okay, that's it. That's all our facts. Thanks so much everyone for listening to another episode of our show.

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we said over the course of this episode, you can find us all on Twitter. Andy, you can be got on... At Andrew Hunter M. James at Eggshaked. I'm on at Shriverland and Anna. I'm on podcast at ui.com. It's an email address not on Twitter handles.

Hashtag get Anna on Twitter. Okay, so thanks for listening. We're going to be back again next week with another episode and no such thing as a fish and we'll see you then. Goodbye.