No Such Thing As A Fish - 343: No Such Thing As A Dolphin In An Escape Room

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss bodacious inventions, heinous nuclear errors and most triumphant costume design. 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 four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Shriver, I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Anna Tachinsky and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Anna. My fact this week is that during out of hours periods, hospital CT scanners are sometimes used to scan Egyptian mummies.

Wow, so cool. It's so weird. This is because mummies need scanning sometimes to find out what's inside them so it's much less invasive as you can imagine than actually unwrapping a mummy which can sort of cause the mummies to disintegrate as you do it and you want to know what jewels they've got in them or what state their bones are in, stuff like that and about, well actually almost since the dawn of X-rays they realised this would be really useful for scanning mummies and since the year 2000 apparently it's been a routine use for hospital CT scanners is to

use them on mummies. There are various hospitals in the UK that do it. I think Manchester Children's Hospital does a very strong line in loaning its CT scanners out. I think it was Leeds Hospital, I can't remember exactly but I read one of them saying that they did it in the night or out of hours because they didn't want to scare the patients which I think makes sense, doesn't it? I love the idea of seeing the previous patient coming out and then being desiccated and they're

2000 years old. I'm not going in there. It looks a bit late for that one to be honest, so the scouts necessary. So this one was in Spain, right? The specific story that you sent around to us because I found this very specific one very fascinating. The fact that this was a project that was done between the Spanish National Museum of Archeology and one of the university hospitals and they wanted to scan three of the mummies

that they had trying to identify who they were and really cool thing about it is that they had to map out a specific route from the museum to the hospital so that they went on roads that had no bumps on them so that they didn't damage the mum. You don't want to hit a speed bump, break your mummy in half on the way. That's pretty smart. I once broke a rib and I got a taxi home because I didn't realise I broke my rib and it's the most pain that I've ever been in because the speed bumps everywhere in London, isn't that?

Tax drivers don't seem to care about them and it was just every time you went over one it killed and then I read a bit later that they thought they might use speed bumps as a way of telling if you've got appendicitis so it's a really good way of telling because the speed bumps hurt you so much if you've got something like appendicitis that it's almost as good a way of diagnosing it as almost any other non-invasive way. It's pretty cool. I think these are great though. We should release these as part of GPS, like Egyptologists should release the routes that

have no bumps so that not just people with broken ribs but mummies to be pregnant women, they can't go over bumps as well. We should be using this. Can't they? Well, no. It's not good for you. It's not good for you to go speeding over a bump. But it's so funny because you've got a bump and yet you can't go over a bump.

The bump is within you already. That is funny. You should only have one. One bump should never meet another. That's the rule. The Spanish ones are really cool because there were some Egyptian mummies and there were some guanchi mummies which are ancient people from Tenerife and I didn't know that people from Tenerife got turned into mummies.

They were buried in caves and the naturally dry air desiccated them and dried them out. The Egyptian one they got, when they scanned, they discovered that it was the Pharaoh Imhotep's high priest. What a score. That's like to me, that's like panini stickers. You're like, oh, yes. It's like a shiny. Imhotep's priest.

Yeah, exactly. It's a shiny. How did they tell that from a scan? Is he wearing a badge? He was actually. Weirdly, he was wearing a lot of amulets and there were lots of adornments where they could piece together who he was from what he was wearing. Makes sense.

Because they're often wrapped up with possessions like rubies and jewels and sapphires and things like that, aren't they? The scan actually serves two purposes with the mummy. You can see what they were buried with and so learn a lot about the rituals and then you can see into their bones and see what injuries they had and so what sort of lives they led. And so quite often you can see what it actually is. So it turns out when things are mummified and we find them, we don't always know even

whether it's a human or an animal. They brought one into the Kent Institute of Medicine and Surgery in 2018, which they all thought was a mummified bird and put it through the scanner and it turned out that it was a miscarried baby. But that actually makes it the youngest mummy ever to be discovered. That's amazing. So it tells you a lot. Have you heard about the crocodile shaped mummy that they found?

No. It was brought in and it was very clearly the shape of a crocodile. If it was a Christmas present under the tree, you would think, oh, I'm getting a crocodile basically. But they looked into it, they scanned it right in the CT scanner and they discovered that it was not a crocodile. Can you guess what it was? An alligator.

No. A human sticking their arms out in a crocodile mouth fashion. Oh yeah, like an old school baby shark. Like a baby shark impersonation, yes. It was actually eight crocodiles. It was eight small crocodiles which had been mummified in the shape of a big crocodile. And I think this is where we get the cultural trope of the like three small people in an overcoat.

Yeah, exactly. But they were trying to get into an adult crocodile movie. Crocodiles were hunted to be mummified as well, weren't they, which we didn't realise. We kind of thought that they just mummified dead crocodiles as and when they came upon them. But they realised from CT scanning the mummified crocs, they realised that you must have had sort of crocodile hunters who would have to go out and beat crocodiles to death. And they smashed it.

The CT scan shows that their skulls have been smashed in and then rebuilt. So you kill it by smashing it in its skull, but then you kind of need to make it look like a proper skull again. It's not surprising they went for eight baby crocodiles and they just came back saying, oh yeah, got another crocodile here. I've actually pre-mummified it, so there's no need to examine. So CT scanners, the object themselves, a British invention, at least half so, from a guy called Godfrey N. Hounsfield, who in the 70s was awarded a Nobel Prize for it.

And EMI were the people who developed the CT scanner, and EMI is the very same EMI that is the music company. And when they were developing this, they needed more money to sort of help the company to do this stuff. And it just so happened that in 1957, EMI acquired capital records, which allowed them to distribute British music into America. And it's 1957, the Beatles are about to arrive in 1962, a few years later, and that helped raise the money for CT scanners.

So the Beatles are partially responsible for the reason that we have CT scanners. I've read quite a few places saying that's a myth, and there's a paper which is called, do we really need to thank the Beatles for financing the development of the computer tomography scanner? I don't know if that's the kind of tone that they had in mind when they wrote the title. But they say that EMI only paid about £100,000 into the development of the CT scanner, whereas the government paid in a lot more than that. And so they say, accordingly, British taxpayers and officials of the British DHSS are to be

thanked for the CT scanner. The Beatles' input into the world's culture is valuable, but it does not require decoration by non-existent connection to the development of CT. I don't know. Hear me out, hear me out, hear me out. Who was paying a lot of tax due to very, very high government tax rates in the 1960s and 1970s? The Beatles. Right, the Rolling Stones all, they went to France.

It was the Beatles. I've got to say, I do agree with Dan that I think these guys are being a little bit uppity in it, and I think that the Beatles, you know, it's £100,000, and it was at the start as well. They gave Houndsville the money at the top, and then the government came in and gave them a lot more money later. So I think it's kind of fair that the Beatles had something to say. But sorry, what was the record label investing in CT scanners?

Well, because EMI stands for Electric and Music Industries, and they're originally an electrical and music company, so they made electrics and they made music. And so this was like the electrical side of their brand, and they also did music stuff as well. OK. Sounds legit. Yeah, it sounds almost, it's still loose, I reckon, but yeah, good on them. Thank you, Beatles, for saving so many lives.

Rockets get CT scanned, and that's to check that all their stuff is working. So NASA and the Navy use a system called Actis Systems, which are special rocket CT scanners, and they are specially rigged up to spot floors in like the engine parts and stuff like that. And they doubled up as whale scanners. Very cool. There's this guy called Ted Cranford, who's a whale expert, and he became obsessed with the idea that he really wanted to CT scan a whale, and most whales don't fit into most

conventional CT scanners, and he... You could get six tiny whales and put them in a big whale suit. It doesn't make any sense. You've got to go the other way round, chop a whale into six parts. Oh, yeah. Anyway, so first of all, he needed to get a hold of a whale, so apparently his mates knew that he was looking for a big old whale head to scan, and they found a dead sperm whale on a California beach.

And so these two friends of his borrowed a front-end loader, like one of those trucks, from a construction company nearby, cut the head off this whale, carried it to a massive freezer somewhere in a marine laboratory in California called Ted. It was like, well, look, we've got your whale head. What now? And then Ted was like, okay, cool, we need to find a CT scanner. And he convinced the Navy to loan him their massive rocket scanner, and it's revealed lots of cool stuff.

So the whole point is to find out about whale vocalization, so sperm whale clicks are incredibly loud, so he wants to look at how they make them and then how they hear. And yeah, now he just shoves marine animals through CT scanners all the time. He said that I was reading an interview with him, and he was saying he once was trying to dissect a dolphin head, and he had to do it in a deep freezer, so he has to wear freezer gear and go into the deep freezer to dissect this head. But at the time, the deep freeze was being shared by a giant skewer, a sort of swan-sized bird from Antarctica.

Oh, skewer, I thought, yeah, we're having a giant kebab at the end of the day. No, a skewer, this massive bird from the Antarctic, they just kept attacking him. They've been vomiting on him for four days as he tried to dissect this. Oh, it was alive. Was it alive in the freezer? Well, it's from Antarctic. It's used to live. Exactly.

It wouldn't like it in the oven. But what? It was, okay, the dolphin's dead. I thought the dolphin was alive. The dolphin, no, dolphin's dead, and it's not in water. It's not in water. You've got it the wrong way around. Dolphin's dead in the freezer.

If you put a dolphin in the freezer, it will die if it's not already. Skewer's alive. Yeah. He's been a hero. Was the skewer kind of tied up, do you think? It must have been right. They kind of just been liars. What kind of sick, messed up scientist ties up a skewer in a freezer?

Who is? You know what? Who's waved this through? What I was thinking is, and this won't go in, but do you remember on your stag do when we did the escape room with the zombie who was tied up and was chasing after us? Oh, yeah, I was just thinking that as well, yes. With the chain in it. That was good.

It only gets so far. I can imagine. It would have been even more exciting. If it was a skewer. Yeah. And then if the key is hidden inside the head of a dead dolphin. But you have to get it into a CT scanner to see where it is. Okay, it's time for fact number two.

And that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 1973, British Rail successfully designed and patented a flying saucer. Wow. That sounds awesome. So this was the late 1960s. British Rail commissioned an engineer who was called Charles Osman Frederick and they does they commissioned him to design a lifting platform for use and he took some time to

develop it. And then he came back to them. He lifted things too far. Exactly. In 1973, he came back with what he claimed was a fully functional flying fusion powered spinning flying saucer. It was a very exciting thing. He handed it in and not only did they not send him away and say he was crazy, but they submitted

it to be patented and the government granted it. It was successfully patented and it was given a number and everything. And it should still in theory be patented, but they overran on the license and they didn't renew. So unfortunately. Why would you not renew a patent for a nuclear fusion powered flying saucer? When you say they wanted a lifting platform, what did that mean? I think when you see construction workers outside and they go on that little platform

that looks like a cross ladder that raises up and up. I think it's like one of those. They obviously had a need for it somewhere in what they do. Got it. And he decided a fusion power because it's fusion powered, wasn't it? Which is fascinatingly ambitious given that what humans have been trying to do for all this century is create something that can be powered by fusion based energy. Yeah.

He just thought it. I reckon I'm onto it. To be honest, I mean, it was it was fusion powered, right? It was ignited by laser beams and the lasers were energized by a homopolar generator. And it kind of feels like he's just been reading a load of science fiction books and picked up a few words and got all, you know, that's a kind of thing. Isn't it? Why don't we say that?

I mean, Well, it was incredibly detailed. I think he I think he thought he knew that the science didn't exist. I think he was trying to predict the future of where science would go. And the idea, I think British Rail saw this, this was a time when there was a lot of interest in space and they thought, maybe let's get ahead of the game here and make sure if if we suddenly discover all the things that he's predicted, sorry, not predicted, but needs that are not yet around.

If they suddenly come to this, this might actually work. It feels a bit like patent trolling, doesn't it? Because if I tomorrow managed to come up with a way of making nuclear fusion work. So it can power things. I don't want to have to pay 20% to British Rail because they speculatively said that oh, we invented this thing. That is going to be in the future, James, if you do that, and I am not saying you will, I'm saying in fact that you won't.

But if you did do that, you infuse like a hundred years from now, sorry to cross your dreams. I feel like you should believe in me. Okay, look, as a physics graduate, I'm saying you are the most likely of the four of us to produce nuclear fusion. However, but even if you did do that in a podcast a hundred years from now, they would be able to say, did you know that actually we have British Rail to thank for nuclear fusion? It would be like EMI and the CT scan all over again.

Yes, they're the Beatles. Yeah. Or would we be saying it's thanks to a podcast? Wait a minute, are we the Beatles in this case? I don't think we can say that. I think British Rail is the Beatles and we're sort of Einstein. And people are going, did you know it's not actually James Harkin who we have to thank for fusion. It's British Rail.

Very good. Yeah. And one of the reasons that we didn't know this until quite recently. So it was some like patent fans found it, didn't they? Yeah. But one of the reasons that we didn't find it is because it contained the word nuclear in the patent. And when you put the word nuclear in your patent, it kind of often gets given a secrecy order.

And so you need to go through an extra hoop to look at those patents. Really? Yeah. It looked really cool though. If you look at the drawings on the patent, it does look like a proper flying saucer and there's drawings on the inside. There's not proper descriptions of what the inside, how it would fully function. It was more trying to focus on the engineering side of it, but it looks to some people who've

sort of analyzed what were drawn. It looks like it could carry 60 people inside it. The way that it looked like they would be inside it is that if you picture like when you go to a fairground and there's that gravity tunnel thing where you will stand against the wall and as it spins, you get sucked to the wall. It's sort of like that. The seats are arranged around the edge of the inside of the circular saucer. That's an uncomfortable way to travel.

If you're going by British rail and you have to be stuck up against the side, how are you going to get to the buffet car? Exactly. Also, they don't work on me. Genuinely. It doesn't work on me. Genuinely doesn't work on me. I've been on them twice and I wouldn't go on again because everyone had to hold my hand

as I slid down the wall and everyone else is stuck up there. I just stayed on the floor. It's the floor drops away. This is an even bigger claim than James saying he's going to invent nuclear fusion is that I'm saying just the laws don't apply to him. Just this one law doesn't apply. So the coolest British rail invention that I came across was, did you guys know about the pub cars?

No. I know. So this is in 1949. British rail decided to launch carriages that were pubs and they were properly decked out like, well, they went for mock Tudor design. Lovely. And the outside of the carriage was all fake brick. So it looked like an idyllic village bricked up Tudor pub, but they put pub signs up.

I think there are a few of them made. No way. They had names like the White Horse, the Jolly Tar, the Green Man. Thomas the Tanked engine would be an awesome name for one. Very nice. Very good. Very, very good. But yeah, this happened.

You could go board your train and sit down. That's insane. Yeah. And it was discontinued because everyone thought it was really tacky. Oh, they're wrong. I went to Universal Studios in America, which is like a theme park, isn't it? And they have the Harry Potter world there. And you can get on the, is it called the Hogwarts Express?

And you can pretend that you're going across the Scottish countryside to get to Hogwarts. Okay. But first of all, you have to queue up in an exact replica of King's Cross. And then they have a shop, which is supposed to be exactly the same as a UK Railway shop. They're so accurate. They sold cans of strong bow. No. Isn't that amazing?

They sold, they had loads of like British brands of like, I don't know what British brands are, like candies and stuff like that. But they had cans of strong bow. I've never felt so at home in my life. Drunk eight year olds everywhere. Yeah. Running desperately at platform nine and three quarters. So many concussed children.

Since you mentioned Harry Potter, I just want to say something about King's Cross station. Cause you know, platform nine and three quarters, the thing that really pisses off Harry Potter fans about it. When you go to King's Cross. Where is it? It's between platforms eight and nine. So basically J.K. Rowling got her stations confused. She meant Houston. She said King's Cross.

And so they couldn't actually put platform nine and three quarters between platforms nine and 10. So it's between eight and nine. And a Harry Potter fan goes to King's Cross. It's like, oh my God, this doesn't make any sense. It's not eight and three quarters. Wow. King's Cross could resolve this quite pressing problem. Because they have 13 platforms.

They've got, but they've got, they've got 13 platforms, but their platforms only go up to 11. So one of them is nine and three quarters, which is like a fake one. But the other one, they needed to add an extra platform a few years ago. And they needed to add it to the left hand side, to the opposite side of platform one. And they didn't want to call it platform 12. Cause they thought that'll confuse people because it's at the opposite end to like platform 10, 11, etc. So they called it platform zero. So what King's Cross can do is they rename platform zero, platform one, as you would rename platform one, platform two, etc, etc, etc.

You get to platform eight and nine. And suddenly platform nine and three quarters is in the right place. It's a great idea. I mean, you only have one week probably of people wanting to go to Luton and ended up in Glasgow. Get on the wrong footplay. But then once that's happened a few times, people will get wise to it. To be honest, what's one week more of lost economic activity for the UK at this point? Exactly.

Should we talk about UFOs? Let's do it. They're illegal in Chateau Nerf de Pap. Well, they disturb the grapes, don't they? That is actually exactly why it is. Oh, really? Kind of. Yeah.

So Chateau Nerf de Pap, it's a town in southeast France and they obviously make very good red wine and all the winemakers are quite protective of their brand. And then in the 1950s, there was a load of reports in France of these what they called cigar valance, which means flying cigars. And there were these kind of UFOs going around and people saying that they'd seen Martians and stuff like that. It's just like one of these normal mass hysteria things where everyone thought they saw UFOs. But when that happened, all the wine growers were like, well, we can't have UFOs around here. So they made a law saying that no UFO is allowed to land in Chateau Nerf de Pap. And they're not even allowed to fly over. And if any alien lands, then they will be arrested immediately.

And actually only a few years ago, the mayor of Chateau Nerf de Pap said that they will keep the law on the books. So it definitely does exist. He said that they want to keep it because it kind of gives them a little bit of publicity and stuff. And it gets them in the news every now and again when people realize this is the thing. But yes, if you're an alien and you like your wine, you can't go to Chateau Nerf de Pap. Do you think there are aliens in alien air traffic control somewhere going, oh, we really need to land in the south of France region? But remember, we can't do it in the Pap area because of course it's interplanetary law.

I don't know how much they respect interplanetary law. I think it's a French law, isn't it? Well, the question is, have you ever heard of a UFO landing there, Anna? That is a good question. And I haven't, Dan. Point proven. Point proven. They respect it greatly. Do you guys know that a decline in Christianity is directly responsible for a massive rise in flying sources? In quite an interesting way. So this is because in the 1940s there was a Belgian company called Belgica

and it made communion wafers for church. And a decline in Christianity meant that there was suddenly a lot less demand for communion wafers. And so they were like, well, what do we do? We've got this technology, but people aren't really buying it anymore. And then what they realized was they could take that paper in communion wafers, sandwich some sherbet in between two bits of it, and what you've got there is a flying saucer. The confectionery, love by all.

So flying saucers are made from communion wafers, same stuff. Originate, yeah. That is amazing. And I've got to say, the church is really missing out on a way of getting the youth in, isn't it? Yeah, if those wafers exploded in your mouth in the same way that flying saucers do, I might convert. That is cool. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that in 2017, the US Defense Secretary had a light installed in his bathroom,

which would turn on if North Korea launched a nuclear missile. No. How stressful. Wow. How stressful. Who was it? That was when James Mattis. That's right, it was James Mattis. And this was at the time when North Korea was launching,

it was the big sort of North Korean missile, HUHA, of 2017. And it needed urgent response, obviously, if they launched another missile, although detected doing another nuclear test. And this light was installed in his bathroom. So he could see it from the shower. If he was having a shower, he would be able to immediately jump out of the shower, go downstairs, get in the car, and go and sort of... Did he always have to shower in the dark so that he'd be able to see this light really well?

I don't know. Basically, his whole home was rigged up like this huge Korean missile booby trap. So there was a bell in his kitchen that was one in his bedroom. And I should say, this is all from a new book called Rage by Bob Woodward, who is an incredible veteran US reporter. And these bells went off on more than one occasion. And he had a car which had to be followed by an SUV. And inside the SUV, there was a team plotting the flight path

of any potential incoming nuclear missile. And this was just his life. He had a very, very stressful life. And he slept in his gym clothes, didn't he? He just had to be at the ready at the time. Yeah. Surely he should have showered in his clothes as well. Otherwise, how often did he end up naked in the emergency vehicles?

Just on missiles, generally, it's astonishing when you look into the history of missile and missile alerts in the last 70 years, and you realize how many times we've come to the brink of essentially nuclear war based on what should have been a minor cock up. So there have just been so many false missile alarms. And I think my favorite ones are... Well, one of them was in 1960 when there was...

So mid-Cold War, everyone is very tense, to be fair. There was radar, US radar in Greenland, which suddenly reported that there were dozens of Soviet missiles coming over the horizon exactly where they'd be expected to be coming from. And they were attacking. And so the US Defense Command went into maximum alert. You know, things were getting ready to retaliate. And it turned out to be the moon.

So it was a moon rise over Norway, which it happened that the moon reflected back the radar in the same way that a missile attack might have. And it came back with 99.9% certainty that they were under Soviet attack. That's amazing. That's poor programming, isn't it? Because you would think that the moon sometimes rises over Norway. And you'd think there would be some kind of anti-moon protocol

built into this program. Yeah. There was another one in 1979 where they believed that they were on the brink of death as well. And it was this one guy who was the National Security Advisor to President Carter, so this is in America, where this happened. He woke up with the phone call saying that the Soviets had just launched 250 missiles and it was headed straight for them.

And he had this weird reaction where he was in a house full of his family and he didn't bother to wake his wife up because he assumed that there was no point in troubling her with the fear they were all going to be dead in the next half hour or so. So just leave them. And he sort of casually just accepted that death was coming and then just waited and all the systems again sort of showed that this was a big mistake and they couldn't work out what it was.

Turns out it was a video game that had been put accidentally into the system at NORAD and they were doing a simulation of what it would be like if they were attacked, but the system thought it was real and it was just a complete cock up. Yeah. So this war game was playing out and they all thought this was a real thing and they eventually worked that out and Carter never found out until years or at least months down the line that this had in fact happened.

I can't imagine not waking up one spouse at a time when you think nuclear war is coming. Well, that's just your typical selfish attitude, isn't it? You're suffering, you want her to suffer too. I mean, you want to be screaming with someone. I guess he had a job to do though, right? Like he was the guy who was meant to check in on this. You wouldn't want your whole family screaming around.

You go, what have you done? As you try to remain calm. One of the really scary things is that one of the things he thought to do in that moment was, and this was supposedly the quote, I want to make sure that we'd have company. And the idea was he wanted to press a button of retaliation on the Soviets before they all died so that that was wiped out as well. So like this misfire thing, that could have led to something real as well.

Well, that's why there's a lot of controversy still about the fact that we still have all those Cold War things in place, which mean that they can retaliate within minutes. But I think the terrifying thing about that one, Dan, was that it must have seemed so perfect, right? Because the tape, I think it was a technician accidentally put this tape into one of the machines at NORAD, which is the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

And the whole point of the simulation was to make it seem like the Soviets had launched the worst possible attack. You know, every single nuclear facility was targeted. Every single missile was targeted. So it must have been like, wow, they've really got us this time. Yeah, they do have, it's not just one person presses the button and then the missile goes. They have a few safeguards.

So at any time in America, they have 90, what are called missileeers who are sitting on alert somewhere in the desert. They're all underground, kind of in these silo places. And they work in teams of two and they each sit together in, like on the wall, it says a no loan zone, as in you're not allowed to be alone because if you're on your own, you might accidentally start World War III without someone telling you not to. And you sit two of you in a room and there's an A side and a B side

and you each have a code which you're supposed to put in. And if your codes match, then that sets off the bomb. But also, I think five of the people in the whole thing need to do it at the same time in order for them to go off. And there's 90 of them. And in the US military, it's mostly men who are obviously in the military. But in that particular one, there's a disproportionately high number of women in that role. And the US Air Force did a big press release in March 2016

because they had the first time that it was an all-female alert. So all 90 people who were in charge of whether America sends missiles to its enemies were women. And that was the first time that it happened. All 90? All 90, yeah. Wow. So they have an all together, they have a team of quite a few hundred. And so normally, it would be a mix.

But on this particular occasion, they had the first ever all-female team. Obviously, you wouldn't want nuclear war to happen ever. Yeah, if it happened then. It would be a nice win for equality if... It was the last that started. If it was, yeah. I don't know, but would it not? I mean, some naysayers would say that if the one time when we actually started a nuclear war

was the first time it was all women working on it. That's a very good point. I think it would set back the cause of women working in missile silos across the world. Well, fortunately, there would be no humans around to have that problem. There would be some man. There was some man would pop up saying, ah, if you remember, we did try this. Yes, some male cockroach.

There's that really sweet story, which I think is quite famous. I didn't actually know it, so I feel like I should mention it. But before NORAD was called NORAD, it was called CONAD. And CONAD was the Continental Air Defense Command, and one day the Air Force Colonel Harry Shoup sitting in his office and he gets a phone call, which is on a line, which basically suggests that the Russians are attacking. If this phone rings, the Russians are attacking.

And at the end of the line, which he grabs it up nervously expecting the worst, he hears a tiny little voice which says, is this Santa Claus? And he thinks, what the hell's going on here? And he barks into the phone, back at them, saying, what's going on? And the voice is crying, he's going, is this one of Santa's elves? And what had happened was there was a huge mistake. There was an advert that was placed in Sears catalogue, the Sears advert, which gave out the number to call Santa Claus,

but they put the wrong number in there, and the number they ended up giving was this classified line that was dedicated to a Russian missile attack. It's so funny. It's extraordinary that that happens. What were the chances? It's not just a random person in America. Yeah.

And what's wonderful about it, though, is that they decided to embrace it, and that is a thing now that you can call NORAD and ask them to track where Santa is in the period of Christmas. I thought you were going to say, you can ask them to drop a bomb any way you like for Christmas. That's what you want. Have you been good? Yes. The naughty list consists of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

OK, and it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. My fact this week is that fashion historian Hilary Davidson has invented the Bill and Ted test, which judges the historical accuracy of movie costumes by comparing them against the surprisingly accurate movie Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. I did wonder why everyone in Pride and Prejudice

is wearing backwards caps. Well, this is really interesting because this historian, Hilary Davidson, she was actually writing a book about dress in the age of Jane Austen, and when she was writing it, there's a lot of quite boring bits that you have to do of copy editing and indexing and stuff like that, and when she was doing her copy editing of the index,

as it happens, she was watching movies at the same time because it was just such a boring, tedious job. And so she was watching Bill and Ted, and she got to the bit where they kidnapped Beethoven, and she kind of looked at the extras and thought, wow, they are actually really good. They look just like they're supposed to look. And so she thought, well, that's it.

I'm a fashion historian. I need a benchmark. I need to decide what's good and what's bad, so this is my benchmark. If you're making a proper Regency production and you can't get it as good as Bill and Ted, then there's something wrong. And so now on Twitter, she has at Bill and Ted test, where whenever she sees a new movie,

she rates it against Bill and Ted and sees whether it passes or fails. Are there films which you know have failed the Bill and Ted test? Oh, I didn't write them down. I'm sorry. Star Wars. I can't remember. Star Wars. Star Wars, big fail. But basically, she says there's a few things

you need to look forward, the fab ring, for instance. So if they're wearing something that's obviously polyester or something like that, then it just looks wrong and you can tell. But the other thing is the hair. So if your hair is down and you're an adult woman, then unless you are unmarried and a virgin, or you're a prostitute, or you're mad,

then you would not have your hair down with a woman in that kind of period. That's a big risk in a singles bar, isn't it? I mean, I think she's unmarried and a virgin, but it's possible she's a mad prostitute. Yeah. And she does say in this interview in Slate, she's stressing that she's not saying

everyone has to be completely historically accurate for everything, but sometimes it can. If you're an expert, it can put you off a little bit by seeing someone wearing, like you say, a baseball cap in the middle of Pride and Prejudice. It might be worth saying for the one person who is not totally familiar with Bill and Ted, that the reason that it's a good benchmark

is because they travel in time, right? Yes. Yeah. Lots of different time periods where they're wearing the clothes of that period. Is that right? They're not wearing the clothes of that period. They stay in their own mufti throughout,

but they go and visit people like Beethoven and Socrates and Napoleon. They must really stand out. Yeah, they do. That's kind of where some of the comedy comes in. Yeah. I mean, it is one of the greatest movies ever made, in my opinion, and it's one of the probably

half a dozen films before 2010 that I've actually seen. I think that might be why you think it's one of the greatest movies ever made, if you compare it with the overall number of movies made. It's so good. But they do spend a portion of the movie in the future. Is that why you've allowed that to be part of the movies you can watch, James?

Yes. Exactly. I love that we have to thank for giving us, Bill and Ted, the thriller, post-apocalyptic author, Richard Matheson. So if you don't know Richard Matheson, he is the author of I Am Legend. He is an author who Stephen King said

is the greatest influence that Stephen King has had by another author. That is Richard Matheson. He's the master. Sorry, and if you don't know what I Am Legend is, it's basically 2020 in a book. It's basically a worldwide apocalypse due to disease, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. It's exactly that. And so Richard Matheson happens to be the father of Chris Matheson, who is the co-writer and co-creator, along with his partner, Solomon, of Bill and Ted. And Bill and Ted was meant to be just a throwaway sketch. They had this idea. They were going to play the characters live on stage,

and they happened to just mention it to Richard Matheson, saying, this is the idea that we have for this sketch. And he said, I actually think there's a whole movie in this. And they thought, oh, God, OK, that's interesting. Never thought to do that. And they wrote up the movie. And that's why we have the most excellent in bogus adventures. Wasn't it almost the most excellent in bogus adventures

or the most excellent adventures of Bill, Ted and Bob? Because initially, in their improv group, it was like constant improvise, wasn't it? And there were three of them. But the character who was playing Bob sort of lost interest in the whole concept and disappeared. And so it ended up just being the two of them. But it sounds like they were committed to the Bill and Ted

conceit for years before it materialized into a film. They sort of used to always keep the improv going. They would write letters to each other in the characters of Bill and Ted. I don't know if that's a standard improv behavior, Andy. It's not. I'm not constantly writing regency-themed letters to my buddies in the group.

That's a shame. A lot of the things with Bill and Ted, how it's come into the culture is obviously through its language, right? So, Anna, if you haven't seen it, they speak in this real kind of surfer-ish slang of saying, like, bodacious and triumphant and stuff like that. And I looked in the Oxford English Dictionary

and they referenced about a dozen times in the Oxford English Dictionary. So they're referenced for the phrase, yes, way, as in the opposite of no way. Oh, wow. Yes, way. They're referenced in dude, in the entry for dude, and also in the entry for second base.

And they're not first citations. They're just kind of examples. But they are the first citation of party on. Wow. So we don't know anyone else who said party on before Bill and Ted did. And they're the first citation outside of dictionaries of the word dickweed.

So it was mentioned. Wait, outside dictionaries, did you say? Yes. So did a lexicographer invent the word dickweed? Sneak it in. Hope it would take off. Sometimes the OED takes, like, words from slang dictionaries and puts it into the OED.

But they did have the citation from there. But they do have the citation from Bill and Ted, which is the first one where Bill says, you killed Ted. You medieval dickweed. That is so good. The first example we have of someone using that in real life. So Bill and Ted is back in the cinemas right now

as we speak, face the music, the third. And I thought they'd been this ginormous gap between the last movie and now. That's all the Bill and Ted that we have. But it turns out underneath, there's been so much. There was an animated series, which had Keanu and Alex Winter and George Carlin voicing it. Can I just say, that was one of the best cartoons.

I used to love that as a kid. I used to love that so much, that show. That's the only version of Bill and Ted that I've seen as occasionally watching that too. It had an amazing theme tune as well. You're going to find the theme tune. Did you see the live series then? There was an action series, live action series.

And they cast people who, when you look at the pictures, look exactly like the guys. But they also went into theater. There was Bill and Ted's excellent Halloween adventure and musical adventure. There were board games. There was the excellent board game and riff in time, R-I-F-F, riff in time.

And then there was a whole comic book series that has been run for years, which were written and drawn by a guy called Evan Dorkin. Really? Yeah. And I basically just said all of that so that I could say the word Evan Dorkin. I was thinking, these are standard brand extensions.

I don't know where Dan's going with this. It's always heading to the name Dorkin. I did find one fact about the comic book, which is that, because they use a time-travelling phone booth, which people might think is a bit of a rip-off from Doctor Who. They use the comic book to explain that actually, due to the way time travel works, Doctor Who ripped off Bill and Ted

despite having started in 1960 something. That's a brilliant way to get around the patents problem we had earlier on in the episode. Absolutely, yeah. But Doctor Who is also a time-traveller, and I would say a more a-depth time-traveller than Bill and Ted, though I haven't seen it, but he is very good at it.

So I would imagine he can always have claimed to have gone back. He's been to the beginning of the universe. Yes, it's true. You know one place that Doctor Who's never been, because he's an alien, Chateau Neftepap. Yes. I want to see the episode of Doctor Who

where he lands in Chateau Neftepap and gets immediately arrested. I wrote such an endearing interview with Keanu Reeves, which actually just came out recently, but it was an interview that he did in 1987, which is when they were making Bill and Ted. But I think no one knew who he was then, and then the film got delayed,

so the interview was never released at the time. And it was for the rap. And he admitted that he wasn't a good actor, in fact, in it. So I think the interviewer who was Steve Pond asked him how long have you been acting, and Keanu Reeves said, I don't really know if I'm acting now. I'm pretty bad.

I mean, I hate acting most of the time I do it. It's a god-awful job. Just on old, awesome movies. This isn't to do with Bill and Ted, but our friend... Are you just using the word awesome as a connectively here? Kind of is, but you'll see where I'm going, because they kind of in the same genre-ish.

So our friend Justin Gaynor sent me an article which had missed from The Guardian, which a few people will have seen about Cool Runnings. Then you'll see this article. It's absolutely brilliant. It was an interview with a few people, including John Turtletab, who was the director. And he gave some bits of trivia about Cool Runnings,

which were amazing. So it was translated around the world, and in Norway it was translated as Cold Buttocks. Cool Runnings. And he said that after Cool Runnings, he got sent lots of similar kind of screenplays about sports. And they were all kind of almost identical. And he said it got so bad that at one point

I received a script called Amanda. Without reading a word, I picked up the phone and said to my agent, what kind of animal is it and what's wrong with the kid? There was a long pause before the reply came, it's a horse and a brain tumor. OK, that's it. That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening. If you would 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 M. James. At James Harkin.

And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website. No such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. Links to bits of merchandise. And yeah, that's it.

We'll be back again next week, guys. We hope you're doing well. We'll see you then. Goodbye.