No Such Thing As A Fish - 306: No Such Thing As Heavy Snuggle-Pupping

Episode Date: January 31, 2020

Dan, James, Anna and John Lloyd discuss correct gambling attire, the inventor of Vaseline, and Athens' sixteen thousand secret swimming pools. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of Fish. We have a very exciting guest on this week. Yes, is it Andy? It's not Andy. Yeah, no. Andy is still a guest. We consider him a guest on the show. But no, he was busy this week. I suppose what I'm saying is Andy isn't here. Yeah, that's effectively. But I still feel the guest thing. No, very excitingly, we have the founder of QI, John Lloyd himself. He's been on a few times. This is the guy who gave us not the nine o'clock news, Blackadder, spitting image.

He helped create Mr. Bean. He co-wrote to the original radio episodes of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yes, he exact produced a short-lived television show, No Such Thing as the News. Which he says is the highlight of his career. I don't know if he means the ending of it or the experience itself, but he's now turned himself into a music manager. The band that he looks after is called Waiting for Smith. And if you hang out, listen to it, to the end of this episode, we're actually going to play a track from Waiting for Smith. They're latest singles. You don't have to listen to it all. You can fast forward the whole episode.

It just gets straight to the song. No, no, experience the show without our guest Andy and see how it feels and give us feedback on what you think. Anyway, he was a fantastic guest. It's always amazing to get Lloydy on the show and have a listen at the end and enjoy the show. 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 James Harkin, Anna Chazinski and Chief Gnome John Lloyd. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, John. Right. Well, my fact is that when the Greek government put attacks on swimming pools in 2008, only 324 Athenians admitted to having one. A search by Google Earth however revealed the actual number, 16,974. It's incredible. It's bare face, isn't it? According to the IMF, more than half of all Greek households pay no income tax at all. Wow. And Greece has got the largest black market in the whole euro zone, accounting for 21.5% of its GDP. There's a reason for this, I believe. I was when I was in Greece last year, somebody explained why this is, why the Greeks are so poor at paying their taxes. Because for a thousand years, they were part of the Ottoman Empire, which they absolutely

hated. And it was considered a patriotic national duty not to pay your taxes. Well, and they just haven't caught up with the history that the Ottoman Empire fell apart 100 years ago. I think there are some traditions that you really want to bring back immediately, and maybe paying taxes is not one of them. Maybe that's a bit lower down on the list. You're right. I love these pools, because it feels as if they were prepared for this Google Earth search, because they all hide them with camouflage. How do you hide a pool? Okay. So they have floating tiles that they put on the top of their pool. That's very clever.

Yep. They have army nets, so they camouflage it all together. And some even paint the interior of their pools to mimic grass. Oh, it's brilliant. It's extraordinary. So the first Google Earth search said no swimming pools, but an extraordinary number of army nets in people's gardens of no apparent reason. The Greeks have a really good history of paying tax though, because in ancient Greek, they had a really good system of paying tax. And that is that the assembly in Athens would pick

the richest people to pay tax, the top 300 in some cases. And they would just say, you have to pay for this parade and this battleship and this whatever. Really? And they all agreed. They even competed to spend as much money as possible, because it was a real kind of thing where you would get respect from people and gratitude. And if you were one of the people who pay tax, it really increased your standing in the community and people really liked you for it. So everyone wanted to pay tax.

00:04:09,440 --> 00:04:11,520 Everyone wanted to be in that 300. I wonder if you got your name stamped on the event as well, like the Livius Parade. You did. Yeah. The more you paid, the more likely you were to get your name on something. So this is kind of like those philanthropists who I don't know if you mentioned after Notre Dame burned down, the philanthropists who really wanted to donate millions. And then it turned out they kind of only wanted to do it if the bell was renamed, you know, the ex-person will remain nameless bell. Trump bell or the Ikea wing of Notre Dame.

They're not the worst tax payers in the world, the Greeks, though. The Chinese, only 2% of Chinese pay any income tax. And in Pakistan, it's 1%. I mean, you wonder how these countries operate. Especially China, which operates entirely as government. Yeah. I suppose it's just hard to get into those hard to reach spots, isn't it? We've all had that itch on our back. I was kind of nervous researching this topic because my Google searches were like amazing tax dodgers and we're coming up to the end of the tax year. But I find tax dodgers quite fun,

the way that people got. Again, researching them, right? Researching them. It's my accountant there, Jimmy. Yeah, no, early England taxes, like the 1700s. So there were so many great ways that people tried to get around all the taxes that were being thrown at them. So there was tax on bricks, for example, in houses. So one of the dodgers that they used to do was people just used to use bigger bricks. So you use less brick per house. Oh, really? That's a great idea. You could just use four bricks, one for each wall.

Exactly. And then they caught on to that. So they eventually taxed big bricks as well. Did it by weight? That's actually a bit like with cheese. You know, the origin of big cheese wheels is based on the fact that cheese used to be taxed by a number of cheeses in Switzerland rather than by weight. And so people would just make bigger and bigger giant cheeses. And that's why we have them. And now the average emmental is three feet diameter and weighs 220 pounds and uses one and a half tons of milk because it just gets the same amount of tax as a mini one. That's a mini baby bell. And baby bell, yeah.

I was just looking at the quite famous case, the Jaffa cake case on tax. So, you know, there's always this debate over whether the cakes or biscuits debate. And that originates in 1991, I think it was. And it's because cakes are traditionally in a lot of countries actually are not subject to VAT sales tax, whereas biscuits with chocolate on arc as cakes were seen as a necessity because it used to be, you know, your working household would make a cake. But yeah, in 1991, McVitie's insisted Jaffa cake was a cake. And so they agreed it had biscuit tendencies, but then had to argue overall that it had more cake elements. And as part of the, like in court, as part of the evidence for the fact that it was a cake,

McVitie's baked a one foot diameter Jaffa cake to show this is actually a cake. And the courts concurred. And it's been a cake ever since. Oh, cool. Do you know the difference in cakes and biscuits? How you tell? How do you tell? Because when they go stale, biscuits go soft and cakes go hard. Yeah. But they didn't have the time to sit in the court for sort of three weeks watching a Jaffa cake go stale. This is also actually the case with gingerbread men. So a gingerbread man counts as a cake and counts as a biscuit that's exempt from tax because it's got no chocolate on

it until it has a certain amount of chocolate. So if you've got a gingerbread man just with eyes, but naked, no tax on it. But then it'll cost 20% more if it's got one button. One button on its shirt. Who in their right mind is adding that one button? I don't know. These people are missing a trick. It's odd that the people who are best at paying taxes are Americans, strangely enough. That's slightly surprising me. 81 to 84% of Americans don't cheat on their taxes compared to 68% of Germans and 62% of Italians.

Are these self-reported figures? But it is really shocking, actually, how much tax avoidance goes on. Not just Apple and Amazon. Amazon has not paid any federal taxes in America, even though it makes profits of billions. And there's $8.7 trillion worth of world's wealth hidden away in tax havens by the rich. There's a lot of money. Isn't it something like the fifth biggest country in the world if it was a country, isn't it? Something like that. In terms of income, the tax haven country, whatever we're calling that. Where is that? Sounds great. We know where it is.

This is very wealthy. It's wherever you want it to be, Dan. But the UK is king of tax havens. I mean, we've got more than anyone else in the world. Yeah, exactly. We talk about Greece and whoever, but British, the Cayman Islands belongs to Britain, the Virgin Islands belongs to Britain. Bermuda. Yeah, Isle of Man. Yeah, Channel Islands. Channel Islands, Bolton.

Bolton. Didn't realize you were tax exempt there. Well, we're a bit like those villages in China who's very difficult for the tax one to get down to Bolton. Tough itch to scratch, Bolton. So one of those honest Americans is Warren Buffett, who's been paying income tax since he was 14. He had a paper round and in 1944 he paid tax of $7 on an income of $592, which would be equivalent to about £8,000 today, to a pretty enterprising 14-year-old.

That's a lot of newspapers, isn't it? Yeah, another guy who paid £7 tax was the longest serving Prime Minister of Pakistan, who's a guy called Nawaz Sharif, who was in office for nine years on three separate occasions. At one point he had a personal fortune of £2 billion, but over a period of several years paid only just £7 in tax. Wow, the same amount. I mean, why would he bother to pay any? It's like, yeah, this is it. I'm fessing up here.

Here's your full £7 back. Shall we say some stuff on swimming pools? Yeah, sure. Yeah, let's do that. So do you know, name something that you're not allowed to do in a swimming pool? Year and a half. Year and a half. Have a poo.

Oh my goodness. Are there any signs on the walls to say you can't do that? No, that's true, which is why I always challenge them when they attempt to get me out. They've something that's explicitly told you're not allowed to do on the wall. Oh, petting. Petting, that's fine. Petting, yeah. Not allowed.

I mean, who uses that word anymore? Right, so why do they call it heavy petting in these swimming pools? Because surely it's just snogging or kissing or whatever, right? Well, the reason is in the 1920s in America, they had some things called petting parties and high school students would go to swimming pools and they would kind of kiss and cuddle and whatever. They would never have sex in there, but they would be getting very, you know, close and people disapproved. And so they would have signs saying no petting on the swimming pools.

And that has kind of kept over for, you know, almost 100 years now and you still get heavy petting signs, even though you don't have these parties anymore. But you might have them if they took the signs away. I'm not saying, yeah. So is that what a petting zoo is? It is. I had a traumatic childhood actually, repeatedly taken to those places to a heavy petting zoo. They were also these petting parties. They were also known as necking parties, mushing parties, fussing parties and snuggle

popping parties. Smuggle. I really think it should say on the swimming pool, no snuggle popping, snuggle popping. Which they won't be because everyone will feel too sick to pet anyone at the phrase snuggle popping. Because there are no signs actually saying no urinating, public swimming pools contain up to 20 gallons of urine, enough to fill a dustbin. And the proportion in hotel jacuzzi is up to three times worse. Whoa, why are people doing it more in a jacuzzi?

I think it's the bubbles mate you want to go, don't they? Do you think? Well, I think someone knows. That study where they found out there was, did you say 20 gallons? Yes. Of urine. It was really clever how they did it because it's quite difficult to work out how much urine there is in a swimming pool because often the chlorine would change it into other compounds or whatever.

But they found a compound in urine that doesn't react with any other chemicals. And that is called acesulfame potassium. And it's a sweetener that you get in lots of like diet drinks and stuff like that. And if you put, if you urinate that into a swimming pool, nothing can get rid of it. So it'll stay there. And so they could take an amount of water and see how much of that was in, and then work out there were 20 gallons of urine from that. Hang on, are we all urinating this sweetener?

I think they took an average of how much people would. It's in a lot of foods. It's not just in soft drinks. It's in loads of stuff. And that 20 gallons as well as being a dustbin, it's approximately 120 wine bottles worth of urine in each swimming pool. In each swimming pool. And they sell it in Aldi, don't they? That's a terrible slam.

Aldi has a really good wine selection. They do. They're one of the best. I'm sorry. They win all the awards. Did you know this thing that another thing they could use, and I think they do in some places, silver has got the curious property of sterilizing water? So they could use silver instead of chlorine.

That's a bit more expensive though, wouldn't it? But you know, in a tiny amount, you need only 10 parts per billion. Wow. And it's completely safe. That's great. So in the Olympics, whoever comes second could jump in the pool after the race, and then clean the pool for the next race. You know, when you smell that really strong smell of chlorine in a pool?

Yeah, I like it actually. And you think, okay, and you get high off it maybe, or you think there's too much chlorine in this pool. Do you know what the problem actually is? My nose? Is it too sensitive? No, it's that there's not enough chlorine. So I actually learned this from Dr. Carl wrote this in one of his books,

but if it smells too strongly of chlorine, it means they haven't put enough in, because the smell that you're smelling, it's actually when the chlorine reacts with the nitrogen from things like urine and sweat and dead insects and bacteria and stuff. It combines with it, and it makes these chemicals called chloramines, and the smell comes from this particular chemical called trichloramine. So that's very volatile, so you start smelling it.

If you add more chlorine, then it keeps reacting, and it moves on through the chemical process, and the trichloramine goes away. That's incredible. Isn't that amazing? The smell that I really like is actually dead insects and urine. That's correct, yes. That seems true to form, knowing you.

Did you know that Clint Eastwood used to dig swimming pools for a living? I did not. Did he? Or was he a very enthusiastic grave digger? He was quite successful, quite young, and he was sacked by Universal Studios, because his Adam's apple was too big. What? What are you talking about?

What do you mean? You're testing us now, aren't you? That can't be true. Well, it is true. It was on IMDb and on www.clinteastwood.net, where I also found the fact his name is an anagram of Old West Action. That's quite good, isn't it? That's really good.

Wow. I actually am now thinking of Clint Eastwood, and he has big Adam's apple. You can picture it in the film. You're not big enough to stop him from digging holes. No, he wasn't sacked from the grave digging. No, no, he was sacked from the movies. Oh, right. And then he had to get another job.

You're going to scare the mourners. It was swimming pools, it was a grave. When did the Adam's apple thing come in? I'm sorry, I've lost him. In the 50s. He was fired by Universal. And that was at the start of his career or the end of his career? Yeah, he'd been in a couple of sort of B movies,

and then the Adam's apple, they suddenly noticed, hey, that guy there. Oh, my God. It was horrible. It was when they started having 3D movies, didn't it? And people thought it was a popular guy. Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Czazinski. My fact this week is that some terrasors had heads

that were more than four times the length of their bodies. No. How big was that Adam's apple? They were such stupid looking creatures. So the terrasors were pterodactyl, as often used as kind of a word for the pterosaur. Pterodactyl actually not a thing. The pterodactylus was a type of pterosaur.

But yeah, they were the first flying species, and they started off about 250 million years ago with heads nearly as long as their bodies. And they just extended and extended until you got some pterosaurs like the Ketzelkoatlus, where the heads and the necks were at least triple the length of the torso. So it took up over 75% of their bodies.

It feels like if you're a flying animal, having a massive head that's three times bigger than everything else is probably going to be a problem. You just tip plum out the sky all the time. You think so, right? It's been this real mystery about how they figured it out, Ari Center of Gravity, and generally their massive size. And one of the ways that they did it was by having a very

light head. So they had these openings in front of their eyes in their skulls called the antorbital fenestra, which is just the window in front of their eyes. And we don't really know what was in it, maybe a gland or muscle. It might have just been a big air cavity. And this sometimes, this huge hole in their skull

was so big that it could, in some of them, it could fit their entire torso through it. Isn't they didn't put their torso through it? If they stopped too fast, would it shoot out through it? Yes, exactly. They literally turn inside out. Like a jumpy, you have to put back the right way around. Yeah, it's amazing.

And also one reason that we know they had very light heads is because the bones were very light, right? Yes. So the bones were quite thick in places, but there was a big gap of air in the middle. And then the actual edges of the bone were like one millimeter thick. And that means it's really hard for us to find

pterosaur fossils because they just kind of wash away or they crumble up. There's hardly any of them in existence. I read one article. I don't know if this is true of all pterosaurs, but one person said you could put all the fossil material of pterosaurs that we've ever found in one handbag if you were to crush it all up.

And that's because it's so thin and so weak. Oh, that's amazing. It's not that many of them as well. It could be that they were talking about a specific species I couldn't quite tell from the... You could believe that though. If you powder it all, put it in a blender. I've seen some big handbags.

That's why they check your handbags at the Natural History Museum when you're... That's why. In case there's a pterosaur in it. Excuse me, Sarah, is this all of the fossils of pterosaurs we've ever found in history in your handbag? Ah, busted. Pterosaurs?

Not dinosaurs. I'm sure everyone around this table knew that, but I didn't. So it's worth saying for the people at home. Yeah, not dinosaurs. And also birds didn't descend from them, which again, I think everyone says birds descended from dinosaurs and you think, well, it must be the flying type, but yeah, not a total birds descended from things that

could not fly when the dinosaurs were around. It's really amazing that, isn't it? And I read as well that the largest thing which survived that attack from a meteorite, not an attack, it wasn't a meteorite's fault. It wasn't malicious. You make it sound deliberate. It was just flying through the universe and the earth

got in the way. It's not the meteorite's fault. But the largest thing that would have survived was around 44 pounds. And that today would be about the size of an American beaver. So anything bigger than a beaver would die. Anything smaller than a beaver, some would die, but some would survive. And the things that turned into birds were not just the

small dinosaurs. Weirdly, it was some of the medium ones that were eating seeds. Because when there's like a nuclear winter, because the meteor hits and nothing can grow, the seeds can still live underground. And so these little dinosaurs could go and still eat the seeds until everything got better. And they were the ones that survived.

And I wonder if that's, I think that's why today, like birds, which are the things that survive from there are the things that eat seeds. Okay, yeah, that's really cool. One thing that's descended from those guys are woodpeckers. And I just found out what they do with their heads. They bang their heads into trees at speeds of about 15 miles an hour, up to 12,000 times a day. Whoa.

I mean, what must that be like? Why don't they get headaches? It's just... We found this out for QI once. And it's... I know they've got a weird tongue, haven't they? Yeah. It wraps around their brain, doesn't it?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think they've got, they've got thick skulls or some kind of padding or something like that. They've got some kind of special brain casing. Yeah. It's sort of wobbles around in jelly.

It is amazing though, isn't it? Another headbanger is deathwatch beetles, which repeatedly bang their heads on the floor to attract mates. I've tried that. It doesn't... It doesn't work? It doesn't work. Oh, no.

Deathwatch... That's a metal band. Deathwatch beetles to metal tribute beetles band. I've got some, I decided to run a search for four times, what things are four times as much as... Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, there's some quite good ones in here.

So, spider's milk, but you didn't know there was any. No. Some spiders produce milk, and spider's milk contains four times as much protein as cow's milk. Oh, wow. It's chimpanzee. They're hard to milk, though, aren't they? I reckon, like, you get more from a cow's other

than you do from a spider's other. Just going to milk the spiders? I'll be back in two months. I've got enough. So, and chimpanzees expend four times as much energy walking on either four or two legs than humans do. Wow. It's really hard for them walking, yeah.

I wonder why that is? Disourcing. I don't know. They've got a huge up of bodies, haven't they? That must be tiring. Yeah. The T genome is four times longer than the coffee genome. So, that's discovered by Chinese geneticists,

and this one is astonishing. Almost four times as many people are murdered as are killed in wars. Wow. Isn't that a shock? Yeah, wow. Yeah. I mean, some of us would say that being killed in a war is murder.

All right, Jeremy Corbyn. Okay. I'll get out. Well, we've had a lot of guests today, Jimmy Carr, Jeremy Corbyn. Actually, on pterodactyls, they were also a bit hairy, some of them. They had what is called pterofuzz. I found in an email thread that I sort of found archived

between paleontologists. But yeah, they found hair fibers on some of them, and they also think this might be what helped them be able to fly to do with insulation, but they were sort of fuzzy or fluffy. That's really cool. That's quite cute. But not on the wings.

I think just on the bod. Fuzzy bod, bat wings. They were also the babies. You know what they call a baby pterodactyl or pterosaur? No. Flaplings. Flaplings. Nice little word.

And they were, so they were first identified by a guy called Georges Curvier. Georges Curvier. Georges Curvier. Georges Curvier. But what stage read in that census did you realise you were in trouble? Did he live in Corningham?

So. Sorry, who was Georges Curvier then? Georges, Georges Curvier was a, he was a scientist, and he was the person who discovered or firstly identified the flying pterosaur in 1809. And he said that in 1812 he said that they were unlikely, we as humans were ever unlikely, to find any animal as large as that.

Then 10 years after he died, we discovered dinosaurs. Oh, what a shame. They, he was the first person to say that they flew. But the first person to describe them in any way scientifically was Cosimo Collini. And he was most famous for being Voltaire's secretary. Yeah, so weird. That's about cool, isn't it?

Such a weird two worlds colliding. Yeah. His little hobby. I wonder where he was secretary because Voltaire, just down the road from us in Cormac Garden, he used to live there. Oh, Voltaire, I think probably in front. That's why he lived most of his life.

Okay, cool. I think, you said 1809, I think it was 1801, wasn't it? Yeah, and it's Curvier. He was also, I mean, not only did he see the baby, he was also the person who was the foundation of all Darwin's theories. He was the person who just realized that animals could become extinct.

I have one last thing before we move on, which is, did you know that there are pterosaurs in the movie Citizen Kane? What? So this is really worth checking out. So obviously Citizen Kane held up as one of the greatest movies ever made, Orton Welles. He had an incredible script.

He had an incredible cast. What he didn't have was an incredible budget. So for a lot of the movie, they had to reuse certain things from other movies. And there's a scene in the movie, and I've watched it, where they're at some sort of party that's on a beach. And in the background, to show a sort of jungly background, they had to borrow footage

from King Kong, or son of King Kong, because they couldn't afford to do it themselves. Yeah. So in the background, you see these giant pterosaurs flying. No way. No way. Yeah.

It's a spoiler alert. That's what Rosebud is. Yeah. The name of his pet pterosaur. Okay, it's time for fact number three. And that is James. Okay. My fact this week is that the world's first casino

had a rule that you could only gamble if you were wearing a tricon hat. So this was in Venice. It was in 1638, and it was called Illridotto, which means the private room. And ridotto was actually a word which was used for like illegal gambling clubs at the time, but they closed them all down,

and everyone was very upset about it. But they said, no, don't worry. We're going to make an official one that you can all go to. So by the rules, everyone's allowed to go there. You're all allowed to gamble here. Don't worry. You'll all be able to still gamble. But if you do want to gamble,

you're going to have to wear a tricon hat and a mask. And tricon hats and masks are extremely expensive. And so actually the poor people couldn't do it anymore. So these were the kind of masquerade masks that you would get, weren't they? Yes, exactly. Really sorts out your poker face problem, doesn't it, when you're gambling to have a mask on?

That's a really good point. How could they have called anything? I guess usually they don't cover the lips, do they? They're sort of... So if your tell is a big pout... Smoke, you could still see the smoke. Because they normally do say, but your tell is in your eyes.

Not like... Do they? Yeah, not pulling faces with your arm. But the masks, you can see out of the mask, you can still see people's eyes. Yeah, you can see it. Well, yeah, I didn't know the eyes were the tell. I've been looking the wrong bit.

I love people looking at the nose. Yeah. His nose hasn't moved. It's still there. 00:26:25,680 --> 00:26:29,440 Talking about the casinos in Italy, in 1963, Sean Connery, I just couldn't believe this fact, but it's there.

He successfully backed the number 17 three times running at the St. Vincent Casino in Italy. Yeah. You've heard that story? I have heard the story. I know that to be true in a way, but it did happen to be that there was a lot of press there. It was basically a publicity stunt by...

No, you think it was a publicity stunt, but I like to believe it. Yeah. Although he did... He put it on 17 twice beforehand, and it didn't work, didn't he? It does seem like he was like, oh, something's going wrong.

Oh, no. But yeah, basically, most people these days think it was a publicity stunt because it happened to be the week before his movie came out, and he was with all the press and everything like that. So I saw a bit of footage the other day, totally unrelated to it, but to this fact, I just happened to be watching it.

I'm convinced it must be a publicity stunt, but I can't see anyone that says it was. Muhammad Ali, when he was up against Sonny Liston, he taunted to get the fight and to really get at him. He kept showing up at his house in a bus and yelling through a megaphone at three o'clock in the morning, getting him out of the house, just infuriating him. And there's footage of Sonny Liston

at a table in a casino, rolling dice, and Muhammad Ali beside him just yelling at him, I'm going to take you down doing all this Ali stuff. And just out of nowhere, Sonny Liston pulls a gun out of his pocket and he fires it at Muhammad Ali. And you see footage of Ali running out and everyone freaking out, and then it turns out that the gun only has blanks in it,

and he fires a couple of shots into his jacket, and then just goes back to rolling dice, and everyone's fine with it, and it moves on. He must have crapped himself. Found this great line from Stephen Wright about gambling. In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number.

Do you know that all, you know this, you all know the fact that all the numbers on a roulette wheel added up together? They add up to 666, do you know that? Yeah, it's a bad sign. People should know not to enter casinos. But I actually did some research on roulette for this series, the R series,

and I was reading into the number zero, quite heavily. And did you know that zero was banned on roulette tables in this country in the, I think it was the late 60s? Yeah, so... It sways the odds too much in favor of the casino? Well, it sways the odds in favor of the casino at all, basically. Like you'll know, if you go to a casino today, they all have a zero and they absolutely have to,

otherwise a casino wouldn't be able to come off making money because there are 36 numbers and you're given odds of one in 36. But there's this zero on, sometimes there's a double zero or triple zero if you're really being ripped off. But yeah, in the 60s, in 1967, the law lords, like the equivalent of the Supreme Court, decided that they didn't approve of this. They thought it was unfair that the casino

would have any advantage and they banned zeros from roulette tables. And Scotland Yard Policeman would go around casinos and like check for zeros on tables and then close them down if they had them. And how long did that last for? It lasted a year and then they realized that all casinos were saying, well, we're not going to do business anymore. And people like casinos and so they changed that law.

Amazing. I was reading a thing that apparently something that's experienced by quite a few casino goers is if they sit down as a slot machine, they'll sometimes sit on quite a damp chair. And that's because very, very dedicated gamblers who've been playing on a single slot machine for ages and know that if they leave,

it might be the next one that wins, don't go to the toilet, they just go in their trousers. It's a big thing, sort of urinated, urine-covered seats is a big problem in casinos. Is it really? Yeah, yeah. It's, well, certainly... A big problem?

I've never noticed it when I've been to casinos, I must say. But I can believe that. I think that they were like adult diapers and stuff. Yeah, there's new products that have been made specifically for casino goers. It's called players advantage. Yeah, and the idea is it's a diaper that gets you an additional 10 to 12 hours of continuous play.

So you can put, you know... Wow, you've got to take a long, hard look at your life, haven't you, when you're buying gamblers advantage or whatever. Yeah. The roulette wheel, we don't really know who properly invented the modern one, but a lot of people think it was Blaise Pascal who's the mathematician,

who's like the father of probability, really. And the idea that a lot of places say, I don't know if this is true, that he was trying to make a perpetual motion machine, which would make it a really bad game of roulette, wouldn't it? Very dull. The ball just goes round and round, ever and ever and ever. Well, the diaper would come in handy in that case.

Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is to promote his new product, the inventor of Vaseline would demonstrate his invention by dipping his hands in acid, and then healing the burn wounds with the balm. Dedicated to his product. I'd buy it after that.

Yeah. How quickly does Vaseline work? So this is... Okay, so we've mentioned this guy very briefly, ages ago on the podcast. His name is Robert Chesa Bru, which does... I call him Cheeseborough. I really want to call him Cheeseborough,

and I googled how to pronounce his name a bunch of times, and it came up with Chesa Bru. Okay, let's call him Cheeseborough. Cheeseborough is way better. So yeah, Robert Cheeseborough, he patented the balm, Vaseline, in 1872. So he had this new invention. He'd spent 10 years experimenting on himself to see that it would work,

but for the time it was hard to convince people that it had any practical use. So he became one of those traveling salesmen, and he went to department stores all over New York, where he would arrive at the location and do a demonstration. The demonstration consisted of him dipping his hand in acid, or sometimes holding his hand over an open flame, burning himself, and then putting the balm on,

and then showing his other hand that he had done a demonstration on the day before, and how it had healed it up. Yeah, so it was one hand at a time. Oh, wow, so it was the blue peter of his day, that is one I made earlier. Exactly. There's a lot of trust in that demonstration, though, isn't there?

Yes, yeah. Because I mean, you're trusting that he had done that the day before, and he's not just every single day putting his one withered hand on some acid. I bet it was his left hand always that he put it acid, wasn't it? Yeah, that's true. Yeah, but so he did that and used to travel all over. It was real front-line salesmanship from old cheese borough. He had a horse and cart, didn't he,

and he would give away samples, and apparently this is the first time people gave away samples of any product. Wow, that's a very good fact. I don't know if that's... It doesn't sound true, does it? It sounds like someone else must have thought of it, but this is the first example that we've found. So he used to... Chesapeara or cheese borough, whatever his name is,

he used to have a distilled sperm whale oil business, and that started becoming redundant because the oil industry became huge, and he was basically going bust, and he used his very last few dollars to go to Pennsylvania, and he was going to get a job in the oil industry, and he noticed all these oil workers were always complaining about the stuff called rod wax, which is a black gunk that gooed up the drill heads

and then kept having to clean it off, and he got curious about this, and he took a bucket of it home, and he thought, because if they got wounds and burns and cuts and things, they smeared on and it seemed to get better. I don't think it's got healing qualities, actually, but what it does, it keeps the dirt out of it. That's one reason it's good for you.

Yeah, and keeps moisture in, doesn't it? He was fascinating about this. He took this home, and as Dan said, he went years and years experimenting to turn it from this black goo into this very clear, almost translucent balm, and did you know he was a Brit? No, I thought he was American. No, he worked in America, but he was actually a Brit,

and Queen Victoria used Vaseline. We don't know why. She was a big fan, and she actually knighted him in 1883. But unfortunately, the sword slipped off his shell. Because he did used to cover himself in it. That's the one thing that we mentioned, didn't we? He thought that it was just this amazing thing that would cure everything,

and he thought there was some special stuff in it that would make him better, and he got pleurisy, and he covered his whole body in it, and he didn't actually get better, but probably not because of that. Well, he had a... Yeah, I mean, he used to... He lived to 96, and he got sick in his late 50s,

and he hired a private nurse who was instructed to rub him down, whole body rub down, in Vaseline, every day. Can't imagine that job. And he ate a spoonful of it, literally every day, and he attributed his longevity to exactly that. Yeah. I mean, you would, if it's your big business, right? You would say that.

Yeah, he was secretly taking a lot of morphine and paracetamol, but... But I dug out some other uses of Vaseline, apart from the obvious. So it has been smeared on fish hooks to lure trout, treat nappy rash and toenail fungus. It's used for staunching nosebleeds, removing ring marks from furniture.

It's dabbed on cheeks by actresses to simulate tears. Removing makeup, predicting gun barrels, shining patent leather shoes, lubricating slide rules. That's a... That's a niche view, personally, isn't it? That's a euphemism for anal sex, actually. And then moustache wax, sunscreen, anti-fouling for boats. It's used by ear, nose and throat surgeons

to combat nasal crusting. You don't want to get nasal crusting when you're under the knife, do you? No. I like the one I really like is it's supposedly used in boxing before a fight, so that a punch doesn't quite land on your face and sort of slips off as you're used.

See them put it on the cheekbones, don't you? Yeah, and they're not allowed to do it mid-fight. And some people are caught doing it so the coaches will come over and subtly Vaseline their face up. In American football, if you're trying to stop someone from getting to your quarterback, you're not allowed to hold them. That's a big thing.

You're allowed to block them but not hold them. And so people would put Vaseline on their whole bodies so that when you're putting your hands out onto their chest to block them, they just slip away from you. Wow. But the defensive people, they kind of go against it by putting like drawing pins in their gloves

and like thumbtacks in their gloves so they can grip on even better. Is that allowed? I don't think it is allowed. It doesn't sound allowed. But I think people still do it. Wow. There was, John, you're a director.

You've done a lot of advert directing, right? So do you know about the fact that it's used as a technique to make a sort of soft focus effect? Yeah. So they smear Vaseline on the lens of a camera. They say literally that put some Vaseline on the lens. Yeah, it's extraordinary. It's used in a lot of soft core porn.

You know, you get that sort of thing where it's like a dreamy look around the face of the actress or whatever. I can imagine. And I didn't know you had such a strong career in the porn industry before you employed us. Yes, absolutely. He was lubricating slide drills before you were...

So they use it in Star Trek, for example, any time that Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, would see a girl that was going to be the girl of the week, as it were, they would use this soft focus on that girl. So he goes misty-eyed. But it looks as if he's gone misty-eyed. I think I sort of remember that in Star Trek. And Doris Day, the actress, used to have in her contract

that close-ups, when she got older, all had to be done in soft focus because she was too worried about the lines on her face and so on in any close-up. Yeah, so there's movies with her in Rock Hudson where Rock Hudson is in clear shot as a close-up cut to Doris Day. She's in the street and it looks really odd.

That is so weird. They also... I just found one use on smearing over glass. One use for it related to that, if you're a burglar, was uncovered in 2012 when someone went around burgling apartments and people realized that he was doing the same thing every apartment he burgled,

which was smearing Vaseline over the opposite apartment's peephole. So when they looked out of their peephole, they couldn't see him. And I don't know why he thought they couldn't open their own doors. They thought, who's that dreamy guy? Burgling that house. Harrison Ford would never rob a home.

Oddly, you should mention me and commercials and Captain Kirk in the same paragraph down here. Just two of the outside shots were actually with William Shatner. Oh, really? Yeah, in LA for Kellogg's, yeah. Really? He was great. He was such a good guy.

I got on really well with him. Very, very funny. Did he demand the Vaseline for every shot? Oh, just one interesting thing about Vaseline, something else that it was very important in the invention of was mascara. So modern mascara was invented when a woman called Mabel Williams, this was in 1915,

she sort of singed her eyebrows and eyelashes in a kitchen fire and she wanted to make her eyelashes look longer again. And so she came up with this homemade technique of mixing ash and coal with Vaseline and then she'd applied her eyelashes and, you know, did the trick. Her brother Tom, weirdly, watching her, watching her, spying on her,

and decided to try and recreate this and commercialize it. So he used a friend's chemistry set, mixed it all together, made modern mascara and named it after her, named it Maybelline. No, that's Maybelline. That's your own Maybelline. That's really good. Yeah.

That's great. That's cool, isn't it? Very cool. So speaking of burns, there is one thing that's used for treating burns and that is poo shakes. Hmm. And that is like a milkshake, but it's made with poo. And this is in New South Wales

and it's the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital. Obviously, they had a lot of fires in Australia recently and a lot of the koalas got burned. And they found that by feeding them these poo milkshakes, the koalas are getting better a lot quicker. And it's basically your old gut bacteria thing. So when you're a baby koala, you eat pap, which is a mixture of half-digested food and bacteria

that's created in the mother's gut and comes out through the cecum and the joey eats it. And so what they're doing is they're trying to come up with a way of imitating this by making these poo milkshakes and they give them to the koalas and it just helps them to put on weight. It just helps them to get generally better and that makes the burns heal more quickly.

Okay, because it sort of builds up their immune system against the burns. Yeah, that's treating burns from the inside, which is such a cool... Inside out, yeah. My favorite burns related story is in the 1940s and scientists wanted to come up with a pain scale. They wanted to create the pain unit, the door law, and they decided the way they were going to do this,

the way they were going to measure pain and work out the scale was by taking women in labor and then burning them repeatedly and then asking them to compare the sensation of being burned to being in labor. And the women were keen to do that, they were interested, they tended to be the wives of the doctors and the nurses,

they were like, yeah, fine, I'm going to be in pain anyway. And so they'd have these women who were in labor going through contractions and then they just burn their finger with a lighter and say, how bad is that compared to your contraction? And the women would be like, yeah, about the same. And then it got worse and worse and they found, they said that the problem was that as contractions progressed,

the women became less good at coherently describing their feelings. So the researchers had to make inferences about their pain based on their behaviors. Oh, I think when she told me to go fuck myself. I'll put that down as a 10. But that's amazing. It's the idea of a bit like how, you know, if you have a splinter

and then you break your ankle, you forget about the splinter, is it that kind of thing? It's not that idea. The idea was that they thought that going, the peak of labor was maximum pain, so that would be max on the scale. And then they wanted the women to sort of quantify, be like, oh, that burn is about a tenth as bad

as the labor pain I've just felt. But women got less and less good at perfectly rationalizing that pain. Do you know before QI was a thing, I used to have a little email group of six of us, they were in the group. And we said this thing called the quite boring challenge. Do you know this story? No.

And the idea was one of us would nominate every week a subject about which nothing interesting was or could be known. Okay. And I started and I nominated Chumsford because I grew up from near Chumsford. And I spent a week researching Chumsford. There's no fascinating facts I came up with. And one of them was this,

is that largest burns unit in Europe is in Chumsford, in Essex. And for 30 years, the conservative MP for Chumsford was Simon Burns. In a way. Okay. Yeah. He was knighted in 2015. He's the second cousin of David Bowie, bizarrely. But because he was educated, it was to College Oxford,

where he got a third. He's known by his friends as third degree burns. No. Brilliant. It's amazing when those QI facts come together. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, James. At James Harkin. Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep.

And John, you're not on it either. You're like Anna. I don't do social media at all. Yeah, you too. Topic out. You can go to our group account at no such thing, or you can go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com. We have everything up there from all of our previous episodes.

We have links to our behind the scenes documentary. And actually, before we go, we're going to play out with a nice little song because John, you're now the manager of a band waiting for Smith. Yeah. And we've got their single here. Yes, I am the manager. My name is Brian Ego, Lovely Boys Rotality.

And their latest single is called So Much Love. OK, well, we'll see you all again next week. And to play us out now, it's Waiting for Smith with So Much Love. I felt the blood from the offering. And I'm ready for death when it comes to me. So can't you see? So much love, so much love. Feeling in my arms and legs and toes for you.

This is so much love, so much love. So why won't you let me through? Come on, come on. Come on and let me. I promise you, I will try to keep you feeling light. I promise you, I will try to keep your wings afloat. I promise you, I will always, always go speak the truth. I promise you that our lives will always feel well used.

So let the walls tumble down and let the love break in. And in our last happiness, and from there we can begin. Then let me break down your fears and let the love pour through. In our last happiness for me and you. So come on and let me through. So much love, so much love. Feeling in my arms and legs and toes for you. So much love, so much love.

So why won't you let me through? So much love, so much love. Feeling in my arms and legs and toes for you. This is so much love, so much love. So why won't you let me through? Come on, come on. Come on and let me through. Come on, come on.

Come on and let me through. Come on, come on. Come on and let me through.