No Such Thing As A Fish - 311: No Such Thing As A Michelangel-ogram

Episode Date: March 7, 2020

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss a bank that was too warm, a bottle that was too full, and a nose that was just right.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden. My name is Dan Shriver, I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, James. Okay my fact this week is that when the world's largest bottle of wine sprung a leak this year, the owner called the local fire department who stopped the spillage with sandbags.

Wow. How big are we talking? We're talking big. It was 9.8 feet tall, 2.6 tonnes in weight and 1,590 litres, which is about the equivalent of 2,000 bottles of wine. If we lived in a truly circular recycling economy then they would have gone, solved the wine problem, retained the wine and used it to put out their next fire. Well they could have done that, apart from the wine is still drinkable, believe it or

not. Not the stuff they squeegee'd off the floor. Well, it depends on your standards, right? That's true. So they took this bottle of wine and they got all the stuff off the floor and then they took the wine from the bottle and put it into barrels and they've checked it, they took it to a winery to test and it's been deemed fit for consumption and they're going to sell it by the glass at an upcoming event.

Cool. That's going to take ages, isn't it? So why did they build it in the first place? Well they build it because people like building large things. It was just like a publicity stunt, I suppose. It was sold to a Chinese restaurant in Austria and they had it on display. It was in a giant climate-controlled glass chamber. Really cool.

So it was like a big fridge and they think that's where the problem came from. They think the electricity went off and so when it was not as heated then wine expands or liquids expand in a bottle when the temperatures have changed and they think that's what led to the leaking. Well so it got cooler, isn't it? No it got warmer so it was in a fridge and it got warmer so it expanded and it pushed the cork up and left a little bit of a gap where the wine could come out. And I guess they brought the fire department in because they were a bit scared about what

was going to happen. They couldn't tell where it was leaking from to begin with. Well it's a big lot of glass and they were worried it might explode. Exactly, so it could have just shattered onto them and that's a lot of deaths in a restaurant. If you order a glass of wine out of this bottle do they have a sort of bodybuilder who has to come and pour it? How does that work? I think that the idea was that the wine in the big bottle was probably never supposed

to be drunk it was just a display thing. But then once it started leaking out they were like oh I'm going to have to drink it now. It's like you know when you have a bottle of wine in your fridge and suddenly the electricity goes off and you're like well I'm going to have to drink all the wine in the fridge now. I think that's a thing James. I don't think so.

I've had a lot of electricity problems in my house recently. So yeah. So you were mentioning another rival bottle of wine. Okay yeah I forgot about that. This has the Guinness World Record for being the largest filled glass wine bottle but when I was doing the research for this fact I found another one in Switzerland that was way bigger. Like way way bigger and so I can only think there's some technicality that it's not made of glass because I couldn't quite tell from the images or maybe it wasn't full of wine

so I couldn't really tell. So these giant bottles of wine they are a thing but I didn't know that most of the wine on earth is transported in giant bottles or a huge amount of it. So I didn't know this and then I told a few people who are a generation older than me and they all knew it so maybe this is a generational thing. But loads of wine when it's shipped it's not shipped in bottles it's shipped in bulk tankers. Did you guys know this? What do you mean like a petrol tanker?

Kind of yeah really. Like in a shipping container but obviously a special container. They don't just pour it into a shipping container and then seal it up. But basically a 45% of the wine imported into the UK arrives not in a bottle. It arrives in these massive containers. The crappier wine right? Because I think if you're getting the really hardcore good Sartre-France stuff then it's bottled in the place.

It's quite a lot though. And they bottle so much here and they have labels which are from you know Overseas wines just here that they put on. So there's a place in south west England called Avonmouth and Avonmouth near the mooth of the river Avon. Avon-mooth. Okay anyway they have a hangar there which is the size of 12 football pitches and it's owned by a firm who are a specialist bottler and they fill up 720,000 bottles of wine there

alone every day. Really? You believe that? Wow. And the wine arrives in these massive plastic bladders basically. They're called flexi tanks right and then they have a special pump and tilt system they call it to get the last 150 litres out of each bladder. Is that when you're sort of shaking to get the drugs out?

Yeah. Basically. And do you have to get it directly into the bottles? That must be quite difficult. Do you submerge the bottles? Over into the bottles. No more. How do you do it?

I don't know. The interviewer. There must be a tap. There must be. There's probably a tap. There's probably a tap system. I don't know. But these bags are then soaked with wine because they're obviously liquid proof on the outside

but on the inside they're completely soaked with wine but those bags are then shredded and turned into traffic cones. No way. And that's why traffic cones are like orangey red in colour. Exactly. Maybe not. Maybe not. But it is maybe why drunk people are drawn to traffic cones because they just know at

some level. Just another hitch. That's amazing. Isn't that cool? That's really cool. Yeah. That's very cool. That's like the kind of inheritor of butlers because butlers are originally bottlers, right?

I didn't know that was where that comes from. I took a bottelier. It was the king's bottler who would bottle up all his wine and I suppose they're your modern day butlers and even moth. You know that from 1636 to 1860 it was illegal to sell wine by the bottle in the UK. You would go to the shop and you'd have your own bottle with your initials on it and then they would fill it up and they'd work out how much you'd bought and by volume and you'd pay by volume.

And the reason was wine bottle making was kind of quite common in the 17th century but not until the 19th century could you make it so they were all the same size and so duplicitous shopkeepers might kind of sell you a bottle which is a lot smaller than the normal bottles so that's why they made it illegal. It's going to be hard to hide your alcohol problem when you rock up with ten bottles. Another big party, Mr. Shriver? Isn't that just the same as leaving the shop a minute later with ten bottles which is what we do today?

Exactly. How do you hide your alcohol problem normally if you're leaving the supermarket with ten bottles of wine every day? I've got a mustache. I send my son in sometimes together. You've got a full facial beard. How is the mustache going to help? I know.

It's so distracting. It's so weird. Let's not question his story. I'm kind of annoyed with wine bottles though. Having done the research for this fact, they're so inefficient. They're so heavy. Yeah. Most of them are made from green glass which is quite hard to recycle and also we import

so much and bottle so much here that actually even if you recycle it it's quite hard to find uses for all of it. Well you can get or you could get paper wine bottles which are an answer to this. I read about those. Yeah. It was kind of sad because it was in 2014, wasn't it, that they sort of went global with them, this company, and they're made from compressed recycled paper and so they're incredibly light and they so they weighed 65 grams which is a seventh of a wine bottle

if a wine bottle is empty and then they had the little sort of bagging inside you get inside boxed wine and really quickly the company folded. Very clever. So that was a real shame. Was that intentional though that when you said folded? It was but I stole it so. Okay. Yeah.

But it did. The company folded. Okay. You could have said crumpled. Like that common phrase, the company crumpled. That's the way the company crumbles as they all say. Do you know who is known as the father of the modern bottle? Ooh.

Is it someone famous who we will have heard of? It's someone not famous who you will have heard of. Oh who we will? Ooh. Is it someone who's around around Guy Fawkes era? Quite close to Guy. One generation away from Guy Fawkes era. Yes.

Everyone dig me. No. But it's someone I was confused with him. Ken Elm. Ken Elm. Ken Elm Digby. Ken Elm Digby. Yes.

Wow. They're back. The Digby's are back. For anyone just listening, this is a four-year callback. I really have to put the hours in to be having a good time now. Okay. So, Everard Digby who was the gunpowder plotter, his son was a Ken Elm Digby and he kind of came up with ways of making really good glass because he was an alchemist and he was like

taking sand. I really felt like you were going to say alcoholic. And he was like adding metals and oxides to his sand and making it really, really hot and making really good glass and he could make darker glass as well which would make the wine not spoil as quickly. Yeah. So that's so cool. High achieving family, the Digby's weren't they?

I found a story about, so this fact is about wine leaking out and losing precious wine. I found a story similar to this. In Canada, there's a company called Mission Hill, they make wine and they had an employee called Brent Crozier and he was a sellerman so he worked inside the factory and for years his job was blending wines and he was transferring them between tanks. He accidentally left a valve open when he wasn't meant to. As a result, 5,680 litres of Sauvignon Blanc spilled to the ground and went down a drain. So it cost them $162,500.

He was fired, obviously, for losing that amount but it's not the first time he did it. So back 18 months earlier, he left a valve open and he flushed 11,000 litres of wine down the drain and they gave him a second chance. But it does sound to me like there's someone in that drain with a massive bladder. You're right, it's a con job, yeah. Did you guys see the story or remember the story last year, that tweet that was put out by Hawksmore Restaurant in Manchester which was to the customer who accidentally got given a bottle of Chateau Le Pound Pomerol 2001 which is £4,500 on our menu last night, hope you

enjoy your evening. To the member of staff who accidentally gave it away, chin up, one of mistakes happened, we love you anyway. Wow, okay. What a good employer. Yeah, that's amazing. Has that happened again since though? He's been fired, it happened repeatedly.

The thing is, a lot of enjoying wine they've shown is if you know it's more expensive, you like it more, right? Yeah. And if you're thinking you're buying the £3.99 bottle of wine on the Hawksmore menu, which I don't know if they go down that low, but if you think you're buying the cheap one and you get the expensive one, you might not enjoy it as much right now. No, they probably would have. I mean, no one can be good enough to surely be, I can't differentiate anything above

about eight or ten quid, basically. Okay. No. But have you ever tasted the £4,500? Do you never know that might be such an explosion? I have one every other week and I can't taste the difference. Line testing. This massive bottle of wine that I talked about at the start, you could, if you had

drank one bottle of wine to yourself every day, since we started this podcast six years ago or so, you'd just be draining the bottom of the bottle now. That's a great count for that. And you would need it after listening to this podcast every week for six years. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Anna. My fact this week is that when Michelangelo sculpted David, the town mayor told him that the nose was too big. So Michelangelo picked up some dust, climbed to the top of the statue, sprinkled the dust

down and claimed they had fixed it. So was he making like sculpting noises while he was doing it? He must have been, right? He went even further, he went even more method. He did take up a hammer and chisel and stuff. So this was in 1504 and it was when David was just being displayed in Florence. It was revealed and Piero Soderini was the town's sort of mayor or chief. Anyway, Soderini said probably displaying his artistic appreciation, you know, I think

the nose is a bit out proportion with the rest of the rest of the thing, isn't it? You want to go up and fix it? And Michelangelo, everyone was surprised at the time because Michelangelo was very touchy and really dislike criticism. And but he said, yeah, absolutely. I'm so sorry. Absolutely right. It's enormous.

And so he picked up a hammer and a chisel and secretly a handful of dust, climbed to the top, pretended to chip away at it and then Soderini went, ah, that's absolutely perfect. Nailed it. Stop there. Came back down again. This is like the wine tasting thing with the prices. Absolutely.

If you're told something is better. You believe it. You believe it. Do we know that this fact is completely true? Well, it comes from this amazing book, which is sort of the foundational book of all art history, which is by Giorgio Vasari, and it's called The Lives of Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. And yeah, so he founded art history and wrote this incredible biographies of all the great

artists up until them, or, you know, not all of them, but many of them, many of the Florentine ones especially. And so there's a lot of facts are very, very true. And then we think he had an eye for drama and liked to embellish. So he was friends with Michelangelo and he was a huge fan. This book, The Lives of the Artist, so the origin story of this book is that he was sitting at a dinner. This is in the 1500s at the Roman Palazzo with the Cardinal at the time.

And the Cardinal was talking about a collection of paintings along with the other people. And he kept noticing there were getting dates wrong and certain, they were attributing certain bits of art to different people. So he said that if someone was going to collect all this information together, they should have someone who knows it really well, and they suggested that he do it. So that was his sort of claim for it. But the reality is that two of the people he claimed that were at the dinner with him had died already.

And they don't think he was even in Rome at the time when that dinner was said to have happened. So he was someone who did have a bit of a sort of like Brian Blessed or... He had a... He's definitely the Brian Blessed of his day maybe, because he also claimed that he rescued David at one point. So he was born... He was very young when David was sculpted, but in 1527 there were these massive riots

in Florence. And one of the rioters, it was anti-Medici riots and one of the rioters threw a bench from a parapet which knocked off David's arm. Threw a bench? Yeah, a parapet. Who was this? Goliath? Yeah, so his arm came off and Vasari says that he was a boy at the time, he was about 16,

and he fought his way through these rioting, marauding crowds to rescue the various pieces of the arm. It can't be true. And take them to safety. Actually, what they didn't say is that this was a miniature bench that a travelling salesman had brought. Wow, we're going mega on callbacks. I love mixed episode callbacks, I love it.

He had a broken nose, Michelangelo. Like David supposedly did. Oh yeah, because he got into an argument with one of his friends or something, is that right? His friend threw a bench at him. He was called Pietro Torrigiano and he was supposedly envious of Michelangelo's skills and then, but he also had a very bad temper and so smashed him in the face. And he said, I gave him such a blow on the nose that I felt bone and cartilage go down

like biscuits beneath my knuckles and this mark of mine, he will carry with him to the grave. Blimey. But it basically screwed its life because everyone loved Michelangelo because Michelangelo was with the Medici's at the time, wasn't he? So like he had the protection of the people who ran everything. And so Torrigiano had to leave Florence. He went all the way to England where possibly he was hired by Henry VIII and then he started

sculpting nobles in England and then wanted to go back to Florence to try and get some help, some like students and stuff. But when he went back, no one would go with him because they remembered what he did to Michelangelo. Wow. Yeah. This is why you should bully and pick on people who are inferior to or smaller or less talented than you are because if you pick on people above you, then you will reap the

consequences, won't you? You're absolutely right. How is your bullies league coming along? It's going pretty well. Thanks Andy. Thanks, by the way. So I was looking for Michelangelo, just what he looked like and he's in Sistine Chapel as a self-portrait, we think, which is, but it's not him as a person.

It's not him looking healthy. It's him as a piece of flayed skin. Oh yeah. Yeah. So there's an image of the last judgment as one of the bits of the Sistine Chapel and the St Bartholomew trying to get into heaven, kind of get God's attention and say, hey, I'm sane. Let me in.

And in one hand, he's holding a knife and in one hand, he's holding his own flayed skin and it says he has got skin as well. So it's not clear when he grew this second skin. Well, you can't see him 360 presumably, so maybe it's off his back or something. No, no, no. You can see it's the face. What he's got, what he's saying is he's got two faces. It's not completely accurate.

I see. Michelangelo didn't paint a completely flayed St Bartholomew because it might have been a bit grim. But the hanging skin that this guy's clutching is Michelangelo and we know because he's got a little broken nose. But then again, if you break your nose, it's the bone that breaks. It's not the skin that breaks. And so how can you tell if you flay someone's skin, how can you tell if they got a broken

nose? That's a good point. That's true. He knew nothing about anatomy, did he? But he used to paint sort of very buff people with an eight pack as opposed to a six pack. Does that exist an eight pack? Yeah, you know that. It does.

It's extremely rare. Oh, okay. But it does exist. I've got one. Yeah. I'm talking about cans of beer now, I mean. Oh, I haven't got one, though. So six pack is your basic muscles of your abdomen, but a very small percentage of people

do have eight muscles down there. And they think this is a clue as to who might have been one of his main people who he based his paintings and his sculptures off. Because if you look at a lot of his sculptures, they all have this particular unusual anatomical thing. In 2015, it helped to verify two pieces that they were tiny bronze statues that someone had claimed was Michelangelo's and they said there's no way proving. They did years and years of research on it and they had eight packs.

They had sort of oddly shaped toes, which was another classic feature of Michelangelo's and they confirmed them as a result. One of his other things, so toes, eight pack, what's another thing that might be classic Michelangelo's? Tiny toger. No, but you're in the right area. Enormous testicles. Anatomically correct pubic hair.

Okay. Supposedly is something that to look out for. To sculpt. And do you say bronze, these are? Yeah, these are in bronze. That's a tough cast in bronze. Yeah. Very fine.

Yeah. I mean, if you're doing pubic hair, I'd be surprised if it wasn't anatomically correct. Where are you going to put it on the belly button? As soon as you're choosing to do pubic hair, you're putting it over the pubic region, aren't you? It's classically in order to have the pubic hair in the years of the people you do. If he wanted to send someone a present, Michelangelo would send them 33 pairs of apples. 33 pairs as a present, one for every year of Christ's life.

Okay. Do you know why he did that? One for every year of Christ's life. Okay. So I now understand the number, but I don't understand why that particular object. No, I don't know. I don't know. He was very stingy.

I know that. I think he had a reputation for that. So maybe they were the cheapest thing around at the time. Really? He was kind of horrible, quite mean, bit of a brat, very difficult to work with, a terrible snob. And when he died, they found absolute fortune in his house because he was so penny-pinching throughout his life.

He had just duckets in jars all over the house. He was very old. He was 88. That's Scrooge. That is Scrooge, isn't it? Wow. Oh, it's Scrooge McDuck, isn't it? Yeah, Scrooge McDuck.

Like kind of swimming in his own duckets. Yes. You're right. Scrooge McDucket. As you say, he was very rich. Do you know what his estimated worth was of all the stuff in this? Gross on that. 1.6 million duckets.

So 50,000 florins. Oh, great. There we go. Yeah. So James was bang on. 50,000 florins. Yeah. So it's about 35 million in today's money.

Jesus. A lot for an artist. That is... Well, he was one of the big ones, I suppose. He was? Yeah. Yeah. And he lived a long, old time.

88 is ancient for someone to get to, so I suppose. And he kept working as well. Yes, he did, didn't he? So he would have been getting royalties, I guess, from earlier works all the way through. Does the royalty system exist with that? Well, it's more kind of dukes, wasn't it, at the time? Yeah. That's a joke about the Medici family.

It's very good if you're an art historian. Cool. I'll do some research and get back to you with my laugh. There are some art historians out there, absolutely cracking up at that. He apparently, despite all his wealth, was not into personal hygiene. He... There's a lot of legends about him, and, you know, Georgio Vasari is one of the people to perpetuate a lot of those.

So, this is not from him, I don't believe, but another legend is that when he died, because he showered so little, or bathed so little, they had to peel his clothes off him because he hadn't changed in so long. It had sort of congealed to his body. He wasn't a very striptease ever. I'm your Michelangelo grab tonight. You'll be having to peel my congealed clothes off my body. Well, just wait for me to die.

Don't be shocked when you see where my pubic hair is. Jesus, I was upset not to go to your stag do last weekend, Andy, but now I'm signing a thing I got off lightly. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that a plane was once built which had nine wings. You would think it would have to be an even number. I know. I think this plane actually had 18 wings.

But that is a controversial theory. OK, explain what it is and we'll decide whether it's nine or 18. This comes from an article on airspacemag.com, which is a great website about air and space. This plane was built in 1921. It was called the Noviplano. You know how you have a normal plane, two wings? Then you've got a biplane which has two layers of wings,

although technically the top one only counts as one wing supposedly. So does a biplane have four wings or two? OK, the Noviplano was another level. It had three sets of wings, front to back, and each one was three layers high. OK. So like a biplane, but turn it into a triplane and then do that three times.

So if you're going by biplane logic, it just had six wings, right? No, no, because it had three decks. No, I know, but didn't have three wings each. I know, but aren't you saying that a biplane has two wings? I thought you were saying that a biplane had three wings because it's got two wings as a normal plane and then it's got one at the top.

I thought he was saying that too, but he wasn't. He then confirmed that you think a biplane officially has two wings because they count as one each. It's very weird. A monoplane has two wings and so does a biplane. That's frustrating. I think then biologic, it doesn't matter how many layers up, it's still just one wing. Okay, this plane has one wing. Stop trying to destroy the fact.

It is amazing. It looks insane. I'm going to put a picture up on Twitter. I think you better have. So why do we not have this same plane taking us to Tenerife? Well, it crashed almost immediately. It's second ever test flight. It crashed.

I'm amazed it didn't crash on its first flight just because it's so hard to land on water because it was a... It was a flying boat, which is slightly different to a seaplane. A floating plane are a flying boat and they're different things. They are different things, yeah, yeah. Is this about how they identify?

Is it like the flying boat sees itself as mostly a boat? So the seaplane is... You know the one where Indiana Jones gets onto. It's got floats under its feet, right? So they land on water. All these things land on water. We don't have time to get into it. Those are the planes which are basically

look like they're wearing massive shoes because they float on those things. Then there's flying boats and they have the buoyancy built into the fuselage. So they land basically on water. The main body of the plane is the thing that's floating on the water. But in the USA, seaplanes are called float planes

and they use the term seaplane to describe both float planes and flying boats. Jesus Christ. So which one was this? This is a flying boat. So the fuselage was basically a boat. Yeah, but it had wings.

Exactly. It smashed up on its second ever flight and it now exists as a model and a few bits of wreckage in a museum. It was in Italy, it was flying like Maggiore. Really? Yeah. And it was meant to be a passenger plane, wasn't it? Yeah, the wings were made of linen, as far as I can tell.

Linen? Well, canvas, you know. It was really early days of flight, obviously. God, if someone's just attached a sheet to the outside of my planes and is hoping it's going to fly, I'm not surprised it crashed. Nine sheets. The phrase nine sheets to the wind means, is that a phrase?

I think it's three sheets to the wind. It depends how you count in them. So there's been lots of really cool planes in history, haven't they? There's loads of, especially during military times they always try and invent new things and, you know, even when they'd started making airplanes

they didn't really know how they worked and stuff like that, so there was lots of different ideas. I really like these parasite fighters that they tried to do for most of the 20th century. And the idea is you have one big plane and then inside it you have lots of little planes and then they fly out and attack like the town.

And so the big plane takes you there and saves all the petrol for the other guys and then they can go on little forays. That's so cool. Has it landed or are you flying out of a plane mid-flight? You're flying out of the plane mid-flight. What? Yeah, and they try to do it loads and loads of times.

Usually the problem is that they just all crash into each other. That happens quite a lot. But they experimented from the 1950s all the way through to the late 1950s. The USSR were the only ones who really made anything that was kind of useful. Everyone else tried it and couldn't. And the reason we don't do it anymore

and I didn't realise this is a thing is these days you can refuel your airplane while it's flying. Isn't that amazing? I've never noticed a plane I'm on stopping at a petrol station. Well, that's when you're in the airport that's what the petrol station is. They come and fill you with petrol, right?

How do you refuel while it's flying? It's really weird. You just get one aeroplane with loads of petrol in it and you fly it next to the other plane with not much petrol in it and then you attach them together. So it's not my planes that I've been on that are getting refueled?

No, you're probably not. But if you've seen the movie Air Force One, they refuel the plane mid-flight. Harrison Ford uses that as the big moment to sort of get to another plane. You must have to have a really long, petrol plane and you have to stretch it all the way round. If you fly on the wrong side of the aeroplane

that's going to be really awkward here. On this mid-air thing because it is insane so there was a flying boat in the 1930s called the Short Empire and the problem was they couldn't get enough fuel into it for it to make it all the way across the Atlantic.

So that's the problem but it could be loaded with more fuel than it could take off with. So it can only get into the air if it has under a certain amount of fuel on it. But once you get it into the air you can load it with extra fuel. So the idea was

this plane took off towards the USA from Britain with not enough fuel to get there and then while it was over Ireland it would be refueled by another plane as it went. It would take off without enough fuel to get to where it was meant to go

and it had to refuel with extra gallons of fuel. That's extraordinary. We do have planes now that can carry other well flying machines. There's a plane called White Knight 2 and this is the

so it's not operational yet but it will be within a few years I think. It looks like a catamaran really or it looks kind of like two planes of Siamese twins and one of their wings is fused. It's an incredible looking thing with two planes stuck together

and then hanging underneath this shared wing will be the Virgin Rocket which will then take tourists into space. So not only do you get to go to space if you pay for this but you get the bonus of things suspended under a weird double Siamese plane catamaran thing. It's extraordinary. Have you ever seen footage of it

when it drops the plane? Oh no I haven't seen that. So that's the thing. Obviously the rocket can't thrust it's or boost it's thrusters other planes so it literally plummets and they have to turn on the engine as they're dropping

and pump the fuel and then it kind of just finds its way. So you're in sort of freefall for a while when you're inside. Is this in the rocket or in the plane? In the rocket? Imagine if people have bought tickets and they're listening to this now having not realised because that sounds terrifying. I think you would have watched a YouTube video

before pressing purchase. You just mentioned two planes being stuck together is what this looks like. There is only one time as far as I'm aware that two planes have stuck together mid-flight. This was in 1940. This was a training flight above Australia.

Two bomber planes crashed together. Okay. Disaster obviously. Except that one of them basically jammed over the other one and they just got stuck together in mid-air. So the one on top had its wings and its controls still intact and the one beneath had the engine working.

The pilot of the plane on top managed to land successfully both planes. That sounds like it's made up by Dan Zittalli and Brian Blessard. I know. Nobody died.

One person jumped out and was hit by a propeller. Even he was fine eventually. He just covered. But it's amazing that it just so happens that the engine works for this one and the steering works. It's like the coffee machine works for this one and it works for the other one.

Do you think they had a chat between the planes going, we're like, Jack Spratt and his wife, aren't we? Just on this thing that you were talking about carrying space shuttles the largest plane that's ever been made which was the Anatov AN-225 Maria which was made in Ukraine

in Soviet times. This has the record for the biggest payload ever taken and they carried shuttles out of Russia to the one part of the Soviet Union to the other. That was the main job of them. And one time they carried a generator

for a gas power plant in Armenia which weighed 247,000 kilograms which is the weight of 80 elephants. That's the largest payload of any airplane ever. That is so cool. That's amazing. And then it went into commercial service

in the early 2000s. There's no way. You don't have extra luggage because it doesn't matter. Emotional support elephant with me. When I say commercial I don't mean you could buy a flight on it. It was used for companies and actually at one stage the American military

took it and took 216,000 ready meals to military personnel in Oman. Wow. We are not out of chicken or fish. It was transported on 375

pallets weighing 187.5 tons of ready meals. Oh man. Do you know why nuclear planes have never been tried? Because they sound dangerous. They do sound dangerous. They are dangerous. So people have kept trying all the way through. Kind of like the

thing you were mentioning James. The parasite ones. The parasite planes, yeah. So I think the USA have tried. I'm sure the Soviet Union tried as well. Basically they could not work out how to deal with radiation and to keep the planes light because obviously to protect against radiation you need a very heavy, thick, armless stuff.

So one thing they considered doing because it was in the 50s in the USA was just hiring pilots who were so elderly that they would certainly die before any effects of radiation got through to them. That was their plan. What a move. That's crazy. JFK

cancelled that plan. Yeah. That makes sense. You sort of, as we were saying earlier, those that military period of plane innovation which is extraordinary decisions they had to make. So when the Navy was out and they needed planes that were on their ships, in the early days

they didn't have landing strips that were long enough so they could launch with some help but they couldn't get back because it was too short. So what they did was they started toying with ideas like building a plane which this was prototype called the Blackburn Blackbird. And the idea was that you could take off but you weren't meant to return.

The idea was that the plane was designed to be ditched in the ocean by the ship. But luckily all the pilots were so old that they were expected to die before they got to there. Yeah, exactly. Wait, sorry. These were single-use planes. No, if you were successful you came back

and you ditched the plane as close to the ship as possible and hopefully the ship got to you before both you and the plane sank. If it did, they would lift the plane back onto the ship and then they would rebuild it and you could reuse it. What? Well, they had no choice because I'm confused. When you say ditched the plane, do you mean fly into the sea? Yeah, fly into the ocean.

So the pilot would be waiting with the plane while it's sinking. Another thing they tried to solve that was something called the flying pancake which the flying pancake either had no wings, one wing or an infinite number of wings depending on how you look at it.

It's all wing. And it's pancake shaped so it's flat and it's kind of tilted and it's got massive propellers on it and so if you were sailing into a headwind then the wind can help you just take off by using the shape of your flying pancake

and if you weren't going into a headwind it had these massive propellers that you could create your own headwind and so it could like blow air over your aerofoil and help you take off that way. That sounds amazing. Yeah. And they look kind of like a flying saucer, right? They do, yeah, yeah. I don't like that I do a flying something called a pancake

because I imagine pancakes flipping 180 degrees in the air. And the reason we don't use them now is basically because jet engines came in so we didn't need them anymore. Once you had jet engines, you could get to a really high speed really quickly. So it worked fine.

Oh god, we've got to talk about the inflator plane quickly. Okay. Just very quickly. This was a sort of foldable collapsible plane that was commissioned by Goodyear of course in the 1950s and it could deflate and be transported in like a three and a half foot container,

and it was actually a brilliant idea. So it was built in just 12 weeks which just on a worryingly short time in which to build an entire plane designed and built. But Goodyear the idea was that a single person would be able to hand pump it and so you could drop it behind enemy lines

so you drop it from your plane behind enemy lines where you know your men were captured and they'd have that little hand pump on the ground I suppose waiting for this moment and they'd pump it up until it got big enough and then they could take off. It could be a little tube in case your pump wasn't working so you could blow it by mouth.

I think it must have, yeah, yeah. Anyway, look, it had a test flight in 1957 and it sort of went into a spiral and one of the wings got floppy and folded on top of it and got chopped off by the propeller and so it never really it really never took off.

I tell you what, with that and your paper company folding it's been a bad day. It's been a bad day for puns worldwide. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact. My fact is that this year a sperm bank lost a court case

to a man named Dick Weiner so this happened in Oregon, in America and the jury who was dealing with the case awarded $400,000 American dollars to two Oregon dog breeders because the International Canine Seamen Bank accidentally

destroyed both of their Labrador sperms. Why did you not tell us the name of the other breeder? Yeah. Because Fanny Vagina is not as interesting to be fair. So this is from Oregon Live which is a big newspaper in Oregon

but in every other report I've seen it's Richard Weiner and only just discovered that before we came upstairs to record this but it's still, you know, parents should have known. His name's Dick Weiner. Exactly. So yeah, this is amazing.

I didn't know there was an International Canine Seamen Bank. Did you not? No, I didn't. Who do you bank with? I just keep all of mine in Barclays, you know. Did you know I'm Bubba's Barclays? Yeah, it's a crazy big industry, isn't it? And it seems to be getting bigger so it used to exist

mainly for professional dog breeders so that if you had, you know, a top dog then you could pass on their genes for generations but now it seems to be just sentimental dog owners who want an exact copy of their beloved pet before, you know, after they've died and they send off their...

It's playing on people who don't know how genetics works, basically. You will get a quarter of the dog you had. Well, it's better than nothing, isn't it, Andy? Okay, yeah. We should say this mistake with the dog semen that Dick Weiner found this happened 20 years ago. This story goes all the way back.

I know. They knew that they stuffed up 20 years ago. Exactly. Dick Weiner only found out a few years ago because of ex-employee told him randomly he was a whistleblower. He deposited the sperm in the 90s, I think. And then in the maybe late 90s, early 90s

it was accidentally thawed out making it worthless. And then nearly 20 years later a disgruntled ex-employee must have told him. Unfortunately, this guy who thawed out the sperm had done the same thing 18 months earlier, hadn't he? 500,000 litres was flushed away.

I looked up their costs at the international semen bank. Canine semen bank, very important. To store your dog's semen for a year is $324 to deposit and store it for a year. But then every year after that you can store it for a year.

Which is, I think, what Amazon Prime used to cost. It's a very different service, isn't it? You've got to weigh it up when you're making your budget choices. But another thing you can do with these banks, and this is not, we should say other dog semen banks are available.

We're not, you know. But another thing you can do, I think, is ship your dog's testicles to them after your dog has been neutered. You absolutely can, yeah. That's what you do. You can get instructions of how to do it yourself, I think.

So most people do it at a vet and say, would you mind sending these balls to the bank? But some banks do... Some banks do give instructions on how to package up your testicles, and you have to send them off ASAP within two or three hours. You must have to send them in a special

cool box or something. You've got to order the packaging. You can't just walk into the Royal Mail with a pair of dog-naggers and buy an envelope, can you? No, and what if you do, you've got to go first class because it really is time for some vets and stuff.

Do you know who did the first ever artificial insemination of a dog? Hmm. Oh, oh, oh, oh! Ever on Digby! No, it was none of a Digby clan. It was an Italian physiologist called Lazaro Spallanzini. And we probably... You guys

will have heard of him, I'm sure. What was his thing? Frogs and pants. Frogs and pants! Exactly. And bananas and pajamas was the sequel, wasn't it? He is most famous among QI researchers at least for putting male frogs in form-fitting rubber pants

to prove that that they couldn't fertilize eggs if they couldn't get what was in the genitals out over the eggs. If you know what I mean. He basically proved how reproduction worked. He also was the first person to note the effect of cooling

on human sperm. So you know how they say that you should wear at least warmish underpants if you want to conceive babies? Is that right, Dan? You've... Not too tight, but you need to keep it. Loose flowing... No, looser is not as good for you.

They need to be kept reasonably warm. Yes. And you don't put your testicles on ice, basically. You shouldn't have hot baths. So it's a very odd sort of warm, not hot. You need to keep it at the right temperature, but he was the first person to notice that and he noted that if you put sperm on snow,

they would stop swimming around. Wow! So he would have he would have had a microscope, technologically, I guess. This was after... What's his name? Living Hook. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That is really very cool. Cool guy, cool guy. They can't ski. They just don't go to public school. And the first person to make puppies from frozen dog semen was a guy called Stephen W.J. Seeger.

He's still alive, actually. He's a veterinarian from Ireland who moved to Oregon. And this was in 1969. And they made some baby Labradors. And they called them Popsicles because they came from frozen semen. Wait, very cool.

Did you say Popsicles? Well, that would have been good, wouldn't it? The article I read says Popsicles, but Popsicles would have been way better. So maybe that's not the correct thing. Guys, have you ever seen fish being artificially inseminated? No. Oh, my gosh, it's incredible.

I can't emphasize enough how much you have to watch this video on YouTube, but basically on a lot of fish farms it's more efficient, or if you really want to control how many fish are being inseminated, then you do it artificially. And the way they do it, I actually learned this in an interview with a guy called Mike Freeze,

which seems kind of almost suitable who is a fish farmer in the U.S. And then I was led to this video of koi fish breeding. So koi carp, very expensive. And they are being bred at Kentucky State University. Look it up, basically.

They get the female out of the water and she's alive and gets laid down in some paper towel for some reason and then just lift it up and massage from top to bottom and you squeeze the eggs out. And what the eggs are is this thick brownie green slime

that just spouts out, it's incredible. It's like sludge coming out. So they put that in a bowl, pop her back in the water, get the lad out, do exactly the same with him and it's a little bit less. But you squeeze it out, it looks like mayonnaise coming out of a mayonnaise thing. And then you just stir it up together like you're making a cake.

And they mix it together for three to five minutes and pop it back in the pot. Sounds like a recipe on this. It's a recipe for fish. It's very important to do this with koi carp because they're very shy, aren't they? I have something about

Crofts because it's about champion dogs. Only one dog has ever pooed live in the middle of a Crofts event. Did he win? Did he win? Instant disqualification. The video is on YouTube.

A lot of YouTube recommendations today. YouTube is going to be getting some real hits after this podcast. It's incredible. It's 2012. This is the only one I've found. We should say for international listeners Crofts is the biggest dog show in the world. I don't think he's as well known outside of this country but it's a massive dog show.

In the UK it's all we talk about. But yeah, Crofts is the biggest dog show in the world. And it was in 2012 and the video is online of the full attempt because they have to do the full course they do the seesaw and then they do the jumping over things. Anyway, the reaction of the crowd is so funny

because it's an amazing run it's going so well and then the dog just absolutely stops dead and squats down and the whole crowd goes oooh it's amazing and the owner gets handed a plastic bag by a Crofts ball boy.

It's very much the polar red cliff of the dog reading world. It's a really funny video. Why do they have such mad names in Crofts? It's bizarre. Your dog name has to be involve the name of the breeder somewhere but I was looking at the best in shows

and the list. So the most recent was called Planet Waves Forever Young Daydream Believers I think last year or the year before it was McVan's to Russia with Love there was also Afterglow, Maverick, Saber Araki, Fabulous, Willy FB

FB 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, Andy at Andrew Hunter Reb, James at James Harkin,

and Chisinski. You can email podcast.qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. Go check them out.

We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye. FB