No Such Thing As A Fish - 316: No Such Thing As a Leg Made from Milk

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Meaty Biscuits, Leather Baths and Other Strange Tails.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everybody, before we start this week's podcast, just a quick reminder to remain indoors and also to say we have an announcement to make. A few weeks ago, as some of you may know, we put up back online the second complete year of Fish. We put up 52 episodes. We are now doing the same thing with the first complete year of Fish. Those episodes are all going back up online and they are a kind of insight into how the podcast started in the first place. There's lots of crazy, brilliant stuff on there and if you listen in reverse chronological order, you could notice the sound quality audibly diminished like week on week as we get back to the first episode where we had a single microphone and we recorded it in a cupboard.

So if you'd like to check that out, please do so. There is another amazing thing you can get when we first put out the first year of Fish on sale. It had a special accompanying vinyl LP which was brilliant and that came with a bonus episode that we recorded. That vinyl is going on a special flash sale this weekend. It's going to be just 12 quid and you can check it out at nosuchthingasafish.com. Also, of course, the cassette tape USB that we did with the complete second year of Fish is up there too if you want to check it out. They're both great fun and we love working with the companies who made them and made them a reality. So do check them out and enjoy the episodes and enjoy this episode all with the show.

Hello and welcome to another Working from Home episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Czenski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again, we have gathered around our microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Andy. My fact is that the inventor of condensed milk, Gail Borden, had previously tried inventing a biscuit made of meat. Sounds delicious. So I don't like condensed milk but I've read about this meat biscuit and it sounds amazing. It sounds, I guess it kind of sounds a bit like dog food, I think, but for people. Okay. That doesn't sound amazing but I guess we have different tastes. Well,

so he was alive in the mid-19th century and you know, there were all these problems about preserving food at the time and feeding, you know, large numbers of people at a distance or at a distance of time, so especially feeding your armies, things like this. This was a couple of decades before the Civil War so he would have known there was a civil war coming needed to feed people for that. He had amazing powers of foresight, didn't he, this inventor? Yeah, I know. Yeah, I mean, incredible, actually. Sort of weird, he didn't make his money out of that. But he invented so much stuff and one of the things he invented was a beef broth which he then evaporated into this kind of syrup and you could either fry or bake that syrup into a biscuit and it was a universally

derided, actually not universally derided. What? The Scientific Americans said it was one of the best discoveries of modern times. Okay, that was a good review. It also won a gold medal at the Great Exhibition in 1851 but the army tried it and they declared it was not only unpalatable but failed to appease the craving of hunger, producing headache, nausea and great muscular depression. Picky, picky, picky. But can we talk about some of the other stuff that Borden invented? Because he was incredible. So lots of his relatives, very sadly, died of yellow fever. His mother, his wife and his son had all passed away because of yellow fever. So it was a summer disease predominantly and one thing he decided to invent was a giant refrigerator to keep people

in until they got better. That didn't work. Did you read about the amphibious machine he invented? The Terequius. Yeah. It was basically one of those things that you get on the Thames in London, wasn't it? Like a duck ribbiter. It was built for prairies. It was like a wagon that could ride you along the prairies but then it transformed into a boat at the click of a button or the erection of a sail, I guess, once it hit the water. It was horse drawn, wasn't it, as well? Yes. So I guess the horse stayed on shore, presumably. No, you'd then attach seahorses to it once it got in the water. Yeah, the poor horse didn't get to ride the boat but it was pretty unsuccessful. I think on its first outing all its occupants ended up in the water, right? Oh no. Yeah, they did. So he went out

a couple times to the ocean. One time, as you say, it tipped over the people into the ocean. Other times they were just too afraid to let him take the boat in and I was reading an account of that which gives you an idea of other food inventions that he had because he hosted a dinner before he took everyone out on this boat and there's a quote which is, from which he talked about the food that he'd concocted that evening out of material, from which if you knew what they were you would turn to loathing and horror. I have transmuted even the dirt itself into delicacies. That was dinner before the horror show boat experience. That's brilliant. Interestingly, you know when he invented this biscuit. I just want to go back to the biscuit which I do think is pretty cool.

So he invented this biscuit and then he went to the Great Exhibition in 1851 and everyone said it was amazing. Like I said, the Scientific American said it was amazing. Everyone thought this was going to be the next big thing and so he opened up a big office in New York where he could sell these biscuits from and it was opened on Maiden Lane in New York and it was and I can't quite tell from Google Maps. It was either the same building or its next door to the building where the Hamilton song, the room where it happens, that room is in a building on the same street and it's either the same one or it's next door to it. So are you implying that the song The Room Where It Happened is about the room where the meat biscuit

almost took off? The original probably was right. It probably was about the meat biscuit and then they thought oh you know what it's not doing as well as we thought let's change this musical from what used to be about the meat biscuit business and now let's turn it into something about Hamilton. Oh if only. I didn't know what The Room Where It Happens is. I assumed it was a metaphor of some kind but you're saying there's an actual room. I think and Anna knows the story better than me but I think is it not where they all got together and decided that the country would be a federal system or something like that? It was the bargaining moment I think between Hamilton and Jefferson and Jefferson and his second in command who was Madison and Burr was not

allowed into the meeting and that's the meeting he wanted to be in because that said that's where power was and meat biscuits. Madison actually came out of that with his own set of demands which is that he wanted to have some square gardens named after them in New York so everyone got what they wanted a little bit. Back to Gail Borden for a second. Did you find that quite a few of the biogs of him say he was bit of an eccentric and he used to ride around Galveston on a pet bull apparently and he was quite an important guy so he lived in this place called Galveston in Texas but he actually also helped design it apparently so it was in 1829 he moved there and then he helped set up all the streets of this place and the way they measured streets was it was

by the number of longhorn cattle that could move a breast down the street so I suppose you're just shows in Texas at the time what was most important the most important thing to transport so a hundred foot wide street could fit 14 head of longhorn cattle wow and then Borden basically then went on to make his condensed milk didn't he Andy yes and that's what we know him best for today that's what we know and love him for today but then Borden's milk is like I think in America still perhaps one of the big brands is it yeah it is but it wasn't called Borden's until after he died I believe he was actually inspired to make the condensed milk on the way back from collecting his prize for the meat biscuit right he was obviously on a roll yeah yeah it was it was on the boat

on the way back from London and there was cows there were cows on board to help feed the young kids on board and they were too distressed to produce their milk selfishly because of all the waves and so a lot of the kids on board died and he thought we've got to have a way of getting milk that doesn't require sucking out the orders of a cow directly well the reason that he became so popular is that his milk was way better than everyone else's because he had what was called the Dairy Man's Ten Commandments and if anyone was going to sell him milk to condense it had to fit in with certain things that he said had to happen so for instance they had to wash the cows orders before milking and they had to sweep their barns clean and they had to dry their

strainers every morning and night and stuff like that but he came up with these specific rules that you had to adhere to if you wanted to give him milk well he was working on his milk round about the time where milk was incredibly controversial wasn't he because this is the 1850s and I didn't know about this thing the great milk swill crisis uh but I'm sure everyone else knows about it uh which is basically uh this thing happened where until until industrialization people really did have a farmer bring a cow around to their door and they'd order milk from it so you met the cow and you got to okay it but with like urbanization stuff then you just had to buy milk without having met the cow first hand and so people used to start tampering with it and a major problem was distilleries

always a bit roguish used to basically set up side alleys in dairy farming and they just fill and then they just feed cows all the leftover kind of corn, rye, swilly mash and it was really badly infected and they'd sort of the milk would come out and it would be a gross watery blue color and then they'd fill it up with things like chalk and plaster to make it look white and like real milk and people were just dying by the bucket load uh because these incompetent whiskey makers were trying to give them milk and so uh there was this huge huge crisis and huge controversy and once they cleared that up I think death rates went down about five times in New York wow that's so interesting about sorry to pick up on a very minor thing you said in that really

it's quite intense thing about life saving um but meeting the cow that gave you milk and um sort of knowing its name that's why I guess they must have um the spokes cow that they have for Gordon's milk which is Elsie yes because you would feel like okay Elsie's in charge here she's she's looking after so they've had over 50 Elsie's over the year um do you think everyone in America thinks that they're all getting the milk from this one exhausted cow she puts on such a brave front but my god she's knackered yeah we've mentioned Elsie before have we like incredibly briefly we mentioned her when we were talking about I think she was censored because she had udders and Elsie has undergone a bit of a transformation from the first time she appeared

she used to be a complete cow I said she used to be actually a cow and then she's kind of started she was put on her hind legs and she was dressed in pinafores and things and so she was in the kind of uncanny valley between human and cow and I think Hollywood censored her because she was a bit too sexy that for a cat that sexier than a cow should be basically you don't want to be turned on while you're trying to eat your breakfast cereal no way okay I do actually just if we're on milk I have one more thing about condensed milk because I think I might have found an earlier example of condensed milk which is St. Cuthbert St. Cuthbert was alive in the 7th century AD and he according to legend he chopped his own leg off after speaking angrily to his parents

and it was then replaced with a cast that was made of milk and so I think that is a possible example of earlier milk condensation what are you talking about so you know miracles happen and you if you've cut your own leg off because you're you've been speaking angrily to your parents and you're remorseful sometimes god will grant you a new leg and his new one happened to be made of milk anyway there's one weird connection which is that there is a St. Cuthbert's Cooperative Society which was a shop it's now called Scott Midd so it's one of the big Scottish grocery shops and they hired in 1944 Sean Connery as a milkman did they no way yeah okay so so what's the link again well the supermarket is called St. Cuthbert's Cooperative and Sean Connery what's Sean Connery

got to do with it has he got a leg made of milk yeah it's the man with the milky leg things equal to the man with the gulking gun it was one of Q's less popular gadget suggestions okay it is time for fact number two and that is my fact my fact this week is that in 2014 four non-related economists with the surname Goodman published a paper about the economics of surname sharing the paper was titled a few good men very clever you've got to wonder what came first that title or any of the rest of it there actually none of them was called Goodman when they first started the paper they all had name changes well they were very strict about that actually because they claimed that this is the first paper co-authored by four non-related

surname sharing economists and there was a thought that this could be challenged because there was a paper published by Scarbeck Scarbeck Scarbeck and Scarbeck back in 2012 but they disqualified it from beating them to it because they said it was written by two brothers and their two wives so they argued that first the fact that the two wives had their maiden names before they started the paper and then took on the name Scarbeck disqualifies them so they did it during the research and also one of the brothers and his wife are not economists they're attorneys and so that also knocked them out they were very thorough so in this paper they looked at how likely it is for other groups of economists with the same name to share papers didn't they they had a data set

with loads of names of economists and they found that 45% of them share a surname with at least one other economist so I think that it might be helpful but the main reason that they think this whole thing might help is that if you have loads of people with the same name then you don't have that problem where the paper is by Dan Shriver et al and we don't see who the other people who wrote the paper are why do they do they just pluralize this surname basically by four Goodmans they just say by Goodman et al but they don't refer to exactly which Goodman is the first Goodman so actually everyone is getting equal billing it's like if we all changed our name to Toshinsky and then we went to do a gig and then in big lights on the theatre it said Toshinsky Toshinsky

Toshinsky and Toshinsky we wouldn't know who was the top of the bell of course it would be me but we wouldn't know who it was yeah exactly I'm not fully for that I'm not rocking up to a fish gig with Harkin and et al nice try buddy I've I've got to think about surnames and actually this is a Beatles fact so Dan I'm probably going to defer to you on this one but is it the case that Paul McCartney wrote yesterday yes this quiz is easy all right next okay no but I read that John Lennon became furious when he was in hotels because quite a lot of the time the person playing the piano in the hotel would play yesterday as a tribute to him and he hadn't written any of that song at all it wasn't a Lennon and McCartney song it was just a McCartney song and so that that made him furious

yeah that's true yeah two points you have that confirmed so if you're if you ever see Andy in a hotel and you want to pay tribute to him don't play him the episode of no such things a fish where Alex Bell was here instead of him because that'll just annoy him exactly I'll be so angry I'll be amazed at your piano skills if you can play that episode go imagine those poor penis getting requests for do you know episode 313 no such thing as a banana with wi-fi it's the same tune everyone's the same um on surnames in academia and problems that this poses so the same surname problem is a serious issue and it's especially an issue in China because in China there are 200,000 people per unique surname right so they've got far fewer surnames in China and uh I

read a piece written by a Wang a J Wang who was saying there are more than 1200 J Wangs J Wangs in nanoscience alone so I mean this is hell so if you want to find an individual academic you can't find them because you have you know 200,000 Wangs to deal with so now in academia you get something called your orchids which is standardized now across most journals so rather than being one of a billion you know Smiths Wangs you have to have a 16 digit number um but there is an issue because dead scientists probably won't sign up to this orchid system because they can't and so this the worry is that now if you're a deceased scientist your academic work is going to become harder and harder to source so have you guys heard of Dick Astman uh no I've never heard of him

he was a gas station employee from Canada and his name if you look him up on Wikipedia it says his name propelled him to celebrity status across North America for four months in 1995 wow that is like the um who is it the Andy Warhol isn't it it's there everyone has their four months of fame yeah exactly I think it's because David Letterman found out that there was someone called Dick Astman and he found this so funny that he um you know kept on referring to him this became known as Asmania and um eventually eventually his dad by the way was called Adolf Astman which is amazing I mean what an amazing yeah wow if you're only allowed to change one of those names it's so hard to know what it should use

rough um yeah and so he became super famous and then he faded into obscurity and then but there was another astman recently who got in trouble over a vanity license plate another Canadian I believe who had an astman on his license plate and the authority said no you can't have that anyway that's that name I have a very random surname fact while we're just lobbing in some good old surnames um I just read this late last night Silla Black the singer and um tv show host I found out what her real surname is do you guys know what her real surname is no Silla White and uh she only got the name change as a result of a misprint in a Mersey Beat newspaper when she was starting out that called her Silla Black and she just went oh that's a bit of a misprint

isn't it yeah it's a massive it's a massive typo yeah it's not a typo at all is it it's like literally the difference between black and white yeah good cool but I can't believe she styled it out and just went oh yeah yeah that's me like like when a boss when the boss says your name wrong in a meeting you just go okay I guess I'm Mike for this meeting yeah she did it for her whole career okay it's time for fact number three and that is Anna my fact this week is that if you wanted to have a bath in Paris in the 1820s you could have one delivered to your door this is the bath delivery service did you have to take the bath outside of the door or could you bring it into your house or what it was it was brought into your house sorry so it was delivered to your door and then

up your stairs and into whatever room you chose to bathe in so this was called the Bain à domicile and it was so popular in Paris in the 1820s and yeah someone would come along a guy called a thermo four would deliver a bath to your doorway and then they'd also bring these metal rails so they could wheel it up the stairs on these rails plonk it down they also came with a dressing gown and a towel and you could you'd order your flavor of bath so if you wanted a hot bath you would say if you wanted a refreshing cold bath that like may have been less money i don't know but that was also an option Anna when you say flavors i don't usually associate hot and cold as flavors so was there any of anything else that you could choose like pistachio i think there was one

other choice uh mineral yeah it's not again not a flavor mineral not a flavor um i think it spices up bath time a bit if you do refer to them as flavors turn on the hot flavor cold flavor sure try it next time i love the fact that they brought along a towel that feels like the least important bit of the entire enterprise what so was this a porcelain bath they were bringing or was it made of something like whoa what what do you do do you just drip dry whenever you get out of the bath of course i do of course i do just stand in the street letting nature do its work it's very important to bath time to have a towel obviously do you jump out do you jump out like a dog and shake all of the water off you i just i just shake it off once and then i'm i'm

normal again sorry you were saying was it a porcelain Anna was it porcelain they were made of various different materials apparently some were made of leather um and some were foldable pleabla apparently they said in one article so you know i guess i thought if it was leather and you had like a hot flavored bath then it might what i don't maybe they had better technology that we've now forgotten like secret leather yeah yeah a leather bath some you're playing some weird sex games if you're that must have been a no questions art service anyway what a great service it is it seemed to sort of disappear as i guess trends do so they think i think there were a thousand of these baths for rent in paris by the mid 1820s

and then they receded again bathing was a bit controversial i think some people thought it was a bit lascivious there was a famous prostitute a courtesan french courtesan who had two baths and that was a bit frowned upon like oh that's the kind of thing courtesans do and she actually had in one of her baths that was made of that was that was made of silver she had three taps one of which delivered water and another delivered milk and the other champagne just on the flavor thing though uh because james was saying stuff about what did you say like almond and stuff like that i said pistachio but it was just the first flavor that came into my head yeah but that was a thing like there was the sort of prototype back then of the bath bomb that gives

the color and and aroma that you get with them in the form of things like clouded powdered almond paste and then milk was another big one and largely i think that was a modesty thing for women the idea was that you would have the bath not necessarily in a bathroom but possibly in an open room and so just created a layer of camouflage to stop your bits from being seen i do see that but i think let's say you have some nice redox in your bath or something and it smells of lavender then you come out of your bath and you smell like lavender i probably don't want to smell like milk after you get out of the bath do you know what i mean i i i like milk i wouldn't mind smelling like fresh is the milk fresh that's the big question to begin with it will be that's a

really good show if you're using if you're using the patent Murray drip dry method then over time that milk will kernel also i don't know how clean you can claim you are if you're stepping out of the bath and you're sort of covered in bits of pine nut and almond seed and whatever else it was that they had well there was another thing where you used to have and this was more for the aristocracy you would have two baths so you would have the bath that had the bath bomb in it like the milk and the almond you'd go in and wash down then you'd get out and go into your next bath and that would be just the clear water and you could just wash in the purity of that and then get out according to the Smithsonian i read this on the website sometimes you wouldn't actually get into your

actual bath you would wrap yourself in blankets and then you would lie or sit on sticks of wood which were balanced across the tub of water i can't believe this is true like you're being steamed yeah basically yeah i i mean i really can't believe this is true and is that is that to make you more healthy to consume and to give you a more satisfying crunch i mean that's why you do it to broccoli isn't it um it's weird that we're talking about baths in this one and someone we've talked about earlier in this podcast has quite a strong connection to bathing adult fast man no adult fast man i dread to think of the bath that he'd come up with girl boredom of meat biscuit fame also invented a wagon which women could wheel down down the

beach into the shore and then they could descend from there into the water without anyone saying them which we had in the victorian era but he invented that in americas for ladies to use so a bathing entrepreneur as well do you guys know who invented the heart shaped bathtub no i can't believe they're not famous for it though have you guys heard of the heart shaped bath no no okay so this is a thing in america i think uh which is where you have a bathtub which is shaped in the classic heart you know so i guess the two of you sit it is for it's for couples the inventor of this thing was a guy called morris benjamin wilkins and i just i like him so much this guy because he he served in the u.s navy he was in submarines um and then he came out of the

navy came out of the submarine and decided to invent a new kind of bathtub i guess to preserve a bit of the submarine experience um and again if that's the opposite that's the opposite experience in a submarine you're out of the water you're right if you wanted to do that he would just be in the sheath inside the bath yeah he would be in like a metal sheath yeah okay or laying on the twigs above the bath like your other invention did he get fired from being a submarine because he kept trying to fill up the submarine okay i badly misspoke he hated submarines so much that he vowed to create the opposite of a submarine which was a bath um but he he um if you look him up again on wikipedia if it says that he is credited with making the pocono mountains in northeast

pennsylvania the honeymoon capital of the world now i have never heard of these mountains before now so i don't know if they really are but he invented this bathtub and then he was so emboldened by it wilkins that he went on to create the champagne glass bathtub this is unbelievable it's seven it's a it's an actual champagne glass and you know one of the shallow ones not a very high flute yeah that'd be a disaster the one that's based on marianne's winet's breasts exactly yes and it's it's it's that shallow shape a coop and uh you can both sit in there but you are seven feet off the ground and supported by this incredibly narrow looking wow yeah it's really cool yeah how do you get in there uh i think you need a ladder to get in there no you're in um you're in a much

higher champagne flute and you kind of over the edge okay it's time for our final fact of the show and that is james okay my fact this week is that dogs can suffer from a sprained tail if they get too happy sweet so nice yeah it's sweet isn't it so this um i read about this in a news article about rollo who was a seven-year-old dachshund who managed to strain his tail by wagging it so hard his family are at home a lot more at the moment and so he's always happy because his humans are around and so he kept wagging his tail and he strained the ligaments uh and it turns out that strained tails is a thing with dogs that you need to worry about i've never had a dog so i didn't know about this but apparently it's a problem oh how problematic is it because their tails aren't

offering that much are they a bit of balance but if you sprain it it's not like an ankle i guess it's just more painful than um awkward for their lives um it's a thing called limber tail it's also called dead tail swimmers tail cold tail frozen tail sprained tail limber tail sprung tail and broken tail um lots of synonyms for it did you say swimmers tail swimmers tail because that's one of the main times you get a sore tail if you're a dog if you've been swimming in water that's too cold or too hot so either of the flavors then it narrows the space where your spinal cord goes through and that can cause basically your the bones to kind of rub against the ligaments and stuff and that can cause problems and cause you to to have injured

ligaments ouch so always request the mineral option for your dog bath exactly yeah is this is quite common james is this something that a lot of people who have dogs are often at the vet for i don't think it's the most common thing in the world but it is definitely a thing that happens if you look on the internet and google engine tail like i say i don't have a dog uh and i do have a cat and she seems fine yeah it's not as it's not as common as worms is it no it's less common than worms but more common than being hit by a meteorite yeah i've grown up with dogs and we never had to take them to the vet for a sprained tail but then we made sure they were never happy because i just didn't want the hassle it's not just happy that they wag their tails when they are

right it's um they they do it when they're angry they do it when they're about to attack there's different kinds of wags um and i was reading there was a guy called dr roger mugford who invented a wagameter and the wagameter so dr mugford probably best known for retraining prince and bolt area dotty after a bit two boys that's how i know him best known unbelievable so he created the wagameter which can indicate whether or not the dog is happy or angry or about to attack and it's a sensor that's attached to its tail what it's used for though is when they do dog shows um they want to sometimes tell who's the happiest dog so the wagameter is put on the dogs and it monitors the wag that's going on to then officially scientifically using mugford's

wagameter determine who the happiest is i think we're all mugfords here they do definitely have different wags though that you can kind of tell so if it's um apparently they've if they do it like a really slow quite stiff wag then that's when they're saying go away i might attack you i'm anxious okay but left and right is a difference too so if they i had no idea about this before looking this up that a tail wagging to the left is negative emotions and wagging to the right is happy and i thought that dogs just wag their tails left and right yeah the wag was a wag i would have thought a wag would be left then right then left then right exactly yeah oh no they lean they um they tend to one side unless our dog's a bit lopsided but they definitely

left or is it the dog's left or is it my left it's the dog's left yeah that's important to know it's from the perspective of the dog because it's about brain hemispheres right the same as in humans so amazingly they've got similar brain hemisphere responsibilities as we do and so when they're wagging to the right and they're happy that's because the left side of their brain is kind of active when they're feeling relaxed and chill and then the right side of their brain is active when it's an emergency and so that's why they then wag to the left that's weird because whenever i do the hokey-cokey whenever i put the right leg in it i always feel really relaxed but then as soon as i put the left leg in i feel really anxious you're misaligned um there are researchers at keo university

they have invented a tail for humans that's great so um a full size tail for humans and the idea is that it will help you to walk around bend over and anything that you might find a little bit tough to do because your body has okay things that it can't do the tail will just help balance you really when you say your full size tail do you mean are we talking kangaroo length are we talking dog length uh more kangaroo-y than dog because it has to balance your entire upper body so let's say you're running a bath and you have to bend over i've got a shower kind of um screen next to my bath so it's kind of hard to bend around and turn my bath on without getting in the bath but if i had a tail i could do it easily because that would just balance me out and i could kind

of bend my body in any direction and it might be useful especially for elderly people who have like limited mobility it might help them to bend over and reach things that they can't normally reach so it might be that when you get to a certain age you get a tail attached wouldn't that be cool that would be amazing something to look forward to it's not surgically attached is it they just sort of strap it on you at the moment it's strap on okay well that'll that'll bring a bit of spice to the 70th birthday party won't it grandad we bought you a strap on it's a hell of an intimidating strap on to walk in the room on kangaroo length whoa you've got it on the wrong side grandad it's supposed to be sticking out the back

oh Jesus oh dear some sheep uh when they're nursing they're young they get so carried away grooming newborn lambs that they lick off their entire tails what wow wow they sort of chew them there's a chewing the latter chew out some of the debris in their fur but they really love them you know sometimes apparently if you really love your baby you've got a baby down you kind of want to sort of bite it um what they're in they'd like that and they accidentally chew off their tails dan's child's leg is made of condensed milk so it's a bit easier for him that is remarkable though like wow you'd resent your parent do you know why rabbits have white tails no seems a bit stupid doesn't it yeah it does seem stupid because whenever you see a rabbit running around

in the countryside they're really easy to spot because they have this white fluffy tail that jumps around yeah and you can see them from anywhere so you would think that a fox would have the same yeah skill right well it turns out that while you do notice them immediately they're really good for kind of tricking you as to which direction rabbits go because if you do see a rabbit running away they kind of dart from left to right from left to right and so when they're directly in front of you you see the tail but as soon as they dodge to the left or the right you can't see the tail anymore you can only see the dark bit you can't see the light bit so for a second you can't tell whether they've gone left or right so basically confuses any

predators it's not clever so really good tail decoys and animals are so fascinating like how you know how lizards can just drop their tail off um i was reading about geckos and the fact that the way that their tails are made up they're kind of like toilet paper they're kind of serrated already they're pre serrated so that they help the process of the tail to be bitten off by clenching muscles they're actually actively part of it um which is why if a gecko is already dead it's much harder to bite off its tail because it's not helping the animal eating it uh to do it yeah and there was this really cool thing which is it's very fatty their tails and so if the predator then pursues the gecko and the gecko still gets away the gecko will then go back and eat the tail

because it's so fatty it's got so much nutrients in it yeah so it's effectively also an emergency meal for them do we know if they sort of cry as they're doing it because i think if you had to eat your own limb to survive you would yeah crocodile tears even so um the actually the longest tail in nature is a lizard isn't it which can be deposited at will it's the asian grass lizard which looks so funny it looks like a child got carried away when drawing the tail so its tail its tail is 25 centimeters which is over three times the length of its body it's so sweet and i also quite like um the term the terminology when they're talking about the length of lizards compared to their tails they talk about snout to vent snout to vent the length is six centimeters

is the vent the bottom the vent is the bottom yes from from which you vent air and other things i just like that phrase how tall is he snout to vent yeah that's true actually because people who have long legs it's like having a long tail it's not as important is it yeah the most important bit is from your nose to your anus yep and really what happens below that is just incidental agree all these basketball is bragging snout to vent they're barely different to us okay that's it that's 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 schreiberland james at james harkin andy at andrew

hunter m and chasinski you can email podcast at qi.com yep where you could go to our group account at no such thing or our website no such thing as a fish.com we've got everything up there from all of our previous episodes and when we say all we mean all every single one that disappeared from the internet a couple years ago is back up there so there's over now a hundred episodes for you to re-listen to from the first and second years of fish and also if you'd like to buy the cassette or the vinyl they're there too and we will be back again next week with another working from home episode guys we really hope you're doing okay stay home stay safe love to your family we'll see you again next week goodbye let's say for instance oh i hear birds yeah i can too yeah me too oh yeah

ana can you hear birds in the foreground is that a problem that's a problem isn't it i'm recording outside this maybe next time don't keep fishing chips next to your computer anna is this your pitch to be on tessan island discs