No Such Thing As A Fish - 35: No Such Thing As A Good Sloth Onesie

Episode Date: November 15, 2014

Episode 35 - In a special live episode for the Chortle Comedy Book Festival, Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Andy (@andrewhunterm) and Anna (#getannaontwitter) discuss the invention of sarcasm, the Antarctic Fire Department, dogs disguised as lions, and a Ming dynasty astronaut.

We ran it on QI a few years ago, which was, there's no such thing as a fish. There's no such thing as a fish. No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish. Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this time coming to you from the Turtle Comedy Book Festival in Camden, London. My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Andy Murray, Anna Czazinski, and James Harkin. And this week, all of our facts are coming from the new QI book, 1411 QI Facts to Knock You Sideways. So here are the four facts that we entered into that book, and in no particular order, here they are. Fact number one, James. So my fact this week is, Viking names included Desiris of Beer, Squat Wiggle,

Lust Hostage, Short Penis, Able to Fill a Bay with Fish by Magic, The Man Who Mixes His Drinks, and The Man Without Trousers. But so, okay, when you say that these are Viking names, were they like, were there more than two sometimes in a ship? Was it like, did you have to be like, do we have a surname here?

Because we've got two short penises on the moment. I don't know about that. There's a great long list of them. These come from names of people actually from the Sargas, from the Icelandic Sargas and the Norwegian Sargas. And these are the kind of nicknames rather than actual first names, I think. Did you find out anything about the specific, like, a Squat Wiggle?

Do we know what that is? What it is? Is it some kind of...? What it is? Well, I don't know. I assume the person who was called it did it. Squat at Wiggle. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Is that the thing you do on the dance floor where you, like, go down to the floor and then up again? That I do on the dance floor. Yeah, or in the office sometimes, we all find it a bit weird. I think it's like when a dog wipes its bum on the ground, on the carpet. You know, it does that little Squat Wiggle. So you know how Native Americans name their children

after the first thing they see after they give birth? Do they? I think Squat Wiggles' parents saw this dog doing the thing on the floor. Wait, what? Really? Yeah, that's the idea. I've always thought that was a myth as well. Yeah, they can't be wrong.

So someone gave birth next to a sitting bull and that's how they got their name. Oh, jumping badger. Is that literally what it was? Well, that's the idea. I don't know if it's really true. I think it depends what kind of Native American you were, what tribe you were from. Some of them named their children, I think, the Miwok tribe,

named their kids after how the nearest stream looked when they gave birth. Oh, really? Yeah. Surely a limited number of, yeah. Yeah, you've got to be very imaginative with your adjectives. Yeah, wet, wet, wet. Is that where the band got the name from? They were all in the Miwok tribe.

I hope the short penis and the man without trousers were friends with each other. I hope one named the other. I found out a few more of them. They're all from the Landnamabok, which is medieval work about when the Norse went to Iceland and settled it. And so there's a load of, it's a bit like a doomsday book.

There are loads of records of people and where they live and all of this. And a few more of them, the same names, same source. Harmfart, arson victim, that was the name. Arson victim, a person in trouble or in disgrace, but I think that's inaccurately transcribed, and able to remain warm in winter. That sounds like a euphemism of fat, doesn't it?

Able to remain warm in winter. One of my favorite ones is King Ragnar, Harry Bridges. We might have mentioned him on QI, actually. A few people know him. He got his name because his wife made him hairy trousers from animal skins, and they were supposed to protect him in battle. They were magic trousers.

What, really? Yeah, magic trousers. Did they work? Did they work? Well, he's dead. We should have used it. I like that, you know that situation when you're in a room and someone comes up to you who you blatantly know and you've forgotten their name.

I'd love to see that scene in Viking times. That'd be amazing. Short penis? No, sorry. Ugly, gross face. Dick head? Is it dick head? You look like a dick head. I'm sorry, it's just, you're right.

Maybe they were more catchy in Norse. Did you think they were quite long-winded, aren't they? Yeah, they used it. That's actually a name of a person. Long-winded. I thought I'm stuck on a dinner table with a long-winded. The word gun is Norse. How weird is that?

Gun, yeah. And it's because there's an inventory of weapons from the Tower of London, which was in 1330, and there was a bellister, a big projectile device, which was called Lady Gunilda. So again, Gunilda meant war or battle, so that's where... So even though they weren't really around at the time, were they? Guns?

No, no, no, Vikings. I had a moment of crisis of confidence about when they... When did you say? Thirteenth century. Yeah, you're fine. You're safe ground. Something else invented by the Vikings or from that area, this is one for you, Anna, sarcasm. Well, thanks, James.

Yeah, great. The words or the concepts? No, the concepts. According to Clans Gruber, the Danish ambassador, whose name also sounds made up, he says that the Danish and the British have a similar sense of humour with our sarcasm and the way that we make jokes, and so he reasons that it must have come over with the Vikings.

Okay. Do you say Clans Gruber? No. Clouse Gruber. Oh, Clouse Gruber, sorry. I thought it sounded like Hans Gruber, the baddie in Die Hard. One for the Die Hard fans. Does his name have a good meaning in English, do we know? Like, make some questionable theories? We get quite a lot of a surprising number of words

from the Vikings, don't we? And they're all quite negative, which might be how, like, pillage and so forth. Like pillage and hell, I think, and weak, skulls, slaughter, anger, dirt. It might be that I've gone through them and chosen the most negative ones. That's the purpose of my point.

Muggy? Muggy? Is that negative? I guess so. It's never a good thing, is it? Berserk. You've got to come outside, it's so muggy. Feeling too dry. So what about Berserk? That's something to do with Bers, is it? So Berserk, the Berserkers were the Viking warriors

who were just insane, weren't they? And they think that either they worked themselves up into some kind of meditative trance, because they were so, like, forced themselves to be so angry that they became vicious warriors or they were just on drugs. Anyway, they were called Berserkers, which is where we get the word Berserk.

There's one theory that actually Vikings weren't worse than anyone else, but the only reason that we have only bad stories about them is because they attacked monks who were much more literate than them. And so the monks were the people who were writing things down and they wouldn't write anything down. That's a proper theory, yeah.

The modern equivalent is like writing something really about Mark Zuckerberg a few hundred years from now. Your name will be mud. That's very cool. So, I mean, what I love about this obviously is we're talking about silly names. And I had a fact, just to tell you guys, I had a fact that I tried to use on a previous podcast,

which got rejected in the office, which was that 40% of all penises are in America. And it's the surname... It's the surname Penises. You can go on our website and it tells you where they all are. 40% in America, Fiverr and Britain. And the most popular name? Shot.

There must be someone who's named Shorty Penis. Well, there was one guy called Penis, Penis, Penis. And actually, that was a popular name because it was involved. No, it wasn't a popular name. That's a confusing error. No one. Was it hyphenated? No, it was just pure Penis.

Penis is married to each other. Penis, Penis was also a very popular name. Next to Penis, Penis, Penis. It's a double-barrel surname obviously. So this surely must be people filling in online forms with rude words. I don't know, the most popular is Bob Penis. So I don't know.

It's an actual name. They didn't let me do it on the show. I'm not going to get in this wiki, though. Did you guys get speaking of stupid names and kind of vikings? There's a Swedish couple who are being fined because they failed to register a legally-approved name for their child. And they've presently called their child...

I don't know how to pronounce this. It's... 11116. Apparently... Apparently it's pronounced Albin, but it's a series of consonants. So they were told they weren't allowed to register that as a name for their child.

And so they said they were willing to change the child's name to A, the letter A, which also wasn't accepted. And so they've been fined. But yeah, the explanation was that the naming of their child, as such, was a pregnant expressionistic development that we see as an artistic creation. That's not really going to cut it when he's been bullied in school.

Did you see today? There was an article on the paper today, and I can't, so maybe someone here will remember it. The number one hacker, internet hacker in the world, they managed to crack his code and get into all the places he's been hacking because his personal password

was his cat's name with one, two, three at the end. It was just in the news. The worst thing was his cat was called Password. Wayne Rooney had his computer hacked and his password was Stella Artois. You're not helping yourself when you're him with the stereotypes, are you?

Other beers are available. Interesting naming traditions. So the Amazonian Amondawa tribe, when you say you get your name at birth and then when your younger sibling is born, you have to give your name to that sibling and take on another name. And you have to constantly change your name

throughout your life. And that's the tribe that doesn't have a concept of time, so they're really interesting because they don't have any words for day, week, month. And so the only way they distinguish time is by the stage of life that you're at. So you get a new name for whatever stage of life you're at. So if you graduate, you're called a history degree.

I don't know how many history degrees they're getting, but... Wait, do you have to change your name until your parents have their last child? Do I understand that right? Yes, you do. As soon as one of the family changes the name, the rest of the family also has to change the name. So even if you were 30 and your parents had another child,

all right, that's not likely. Wait. But you can change your name to 10, 20 years later. I guess sharp penis must have been really hoping that his parents had a good child. Come on, guys. We're not going to do it, son. You inherited your father's traits.

I'm not going there again. My favourite pop star name change. I've done a few in the podcast, so I can't say that loud now. But what I discovered recently, Michael Bolton. That's not his real name. Michael Bolton's what? Real name is not Michael Bolton. What is it?

It is Michael Bolton. He lost an O from it. A single O, and he lost it. And there's another singer called Michael Bolton, who's a country singer in America, who they keep asking him, like, obviously you're trying to make a career in music and you're called Michael Bolton.

Why have you not changed your name? And his answer was, why should I change it? He's the one who sucks. Very strong principles. It's not going to work in the sales. Yeah, yeah. I found a thing about Viking mice. What?

I'm just... Right. Well, bear with me. There is such a thing as Viking mice. So all the mice in Scotland and Ireland and bits of Wales are Viking ones because they're directly descended from Norwegian house mice,

and they came over with the Vikings, and they were much more effective than the weedy Anglo-Saxon mice. And that's how they think they know that the Vikings lived in Scotland and Ireland first in enough density to support house mice, because house mice only live somewhere where you get quite a dense concentration of people.

So that's how they know that the Vikings were hardy enough to live there, is because their mice went there with them, and they lived there in enough numbers to support them. Wow. Vikings are quite cool, so they have a god of skiing, don't they like?

Really cool. In fact, they have a god and a goddess of skiing. They have the god of skiing who is Ulur, U-double-L-R, always pictured with skis and a bow and arrow, and then the... A proper skiing equipment, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, are you going out on the slopes?

Don't forget your bow and arrow. Yeah, goddess Skade. They weren't in a relationship or anything, but yeah, she was the same, always on skis, always bow and arrow, and she married another god called Njord, and they split up because they had a bitter fight about the fact that he loved the coast

and she loved the mountains and skiing. So that's in Norse mythology, and Skade is where the word Scandinavia comes from. Goddess of skiing. That's cool. So the Vikings had quite a cool way of making fire, fire that could last a long time, where they collected fungus called touchwood from trees,

and then they would like bash it down, and then they lit it, oh no, they boiled it in water for a few days, and then they lit it, and instead of catching fire properly, it just kind of, what's it called, kind of smoldered, and then it would last a few days, and it would be, you know, a useful fire

that they could take on ships and stuff. I was reading today that fire is a problem on Antarctica, apparently, because you wouldn't think it, would you? Because it's cold. Is that what's melting at all? No, because it's so dry and like a lot of wind which can blow the fire somewhere,

so if you, yeah, it's one of the things I'm most worried about on Antarctica is fire. They have a fire department. How does it sound? There's a fire brigade on there. Really? Yeah, yeah, an Antarctic fire department. Because they're a bit,

because the driest place in the world is in Antarctica, isn't it? It is. There are these valleys. Yeah, valleys, yeah. I haven't had any rain for two million years. And even then, it wasn't much. They're muggy. Yeah, it's all.

We need to move on, guys. Really? Any last things you want to get in? I just have one more thing about a different type of Vikings. It's a bit sad. The Minnesota Vikings, I'm an American football fan, and there was a Minnesota Vikings fan who vowed to let his beard grow

until his team won the Super Bowl, and he died in 2013 with a 38-year-old beard. Aw. So sad. We salute him. Yeah, what a dude. That's amazing. I found one last fact that I want to add,

which is from the book festival. It's from our new QI book. This is the fact, and it's to do just with names. Johnny Cash is a state once refused permission for his hit Ring of Fire to be used in a commercial for hemorrhoid cream. Just wonderful. Good decision.

Should we move on to facts? Yeah, let's go. Okay, time for fact number two. That's my fact, and as we said at the top, all of our facts come from this new book that we've done. There's 1,411 facts in this book. I, after much, much work, only managed to get one fact into this book.

I wait till you hear it. This is my fact. And it concerns the model Jordan. Otherwise, that was Katie Price. Why did you only get one in? They were all about Jordan. All 900 dance emitters were about Jordan. So my fact this week is you only live once

is Katie Price's fourth autobiography. And that's on page 334. It should be on page three, shouldn't it, really? Oh, yeah. Is there any sign in it that she's aware of the irony of it? Like, is it a humorous, ironic comment on modern-day celebrity autobiographies that she's making? Of course there is.

It's Katie Price. Have you read it? No, but neither has she. No, in fact, I've never read it. I've never read it. I've never read it. I've never read it. I've never read it.

No, in fact, I'm pretty sure she hasn't because she was promoting her new autobiography, her fifth autobiography. And they asked her, where does it pick up from? And she said, it picks up from the amazing ending of my last book, which I think was about when I broke up. No, I stopped reading it there. I was like, you cannot say where I think

about your own life in a book. Like, that's unacceptable. But that's, yeah, I just love it. You didn't get Hillary Mantel going. I think was Cromwell, was he dead yet? I'm not sure what happened to Winston Smith. Anyway, ask me about the books. Katie Price has written more books

than Shakespeare wrote plays. Well, Shakespeare didn't write any plays, really. And I don't know if you're right. Katie Price hasn't written any books. They should meet. They should meet. They would get along like a house on fire. No, but she's admitted it.

She has admitted it. She had a quote when she was talking about her book. She said, I'm not going to lie. I don't sit there with a typewriter and write it. So this is someone who still thinks I'm going to play a book with a typewriter. I don't want to knock her, by the way. Like, we don't do that on this show.

I don't want to knock her. But apparently it's full of good facts. They did. They did. Yeah, everyone's laughing because you said knock her. So this is another thing that she... So Katie Price, I mean, there was an interesting thing. It actually has gone on the latest QI book.

Sorry, no, it's on the latest QI episode about Katie Price, which is actually outsold all of the booker list, didn't she, at one point? Yeah. I mean, so she sells massive, which is insane. But all of them are ghost-ridden. She's admitted that they're ghost-ridden, and ghost-riding is just ginormous.

Now, ghost-riding is so big at the moment. This is insane. They've started outsourcing it to other countries. So they go to the Philippines for ghost-riding now. Celebrity order biographies get sent to the Philippines and they have people doing that. Are they good at writing ghost-riding in the Philippines? Yeah, why not?

Quite a lot of people do admit to not reading their autobiographies, don't they? Ronald Reagan as well. Ronald Reagan as well. Ronald Reagan. What did he say? Oh, he had a great article. I was like...

He said, I know that many of you are looking forward to reading this book, and so am I. So am I. Cool. Oh, I hear it's very good. I can't wait to read it. Yeah. Naomi Campbell.

Models obviously don't like to read they're in autobiographies. No. Barry Manilow didn't write the song, I write the songs. Oh, yeah. That's true. That's an actual fact.

The first ever autobiography was Ghost-Ridden. Well, the first ever autobiography was... The Bible. The first... I don't know. Jesus is autobiography. Jesus is autobiography. I don't think you meant to call God a ghost.

It was Holy Ghost-Ridden. Holy Ghost-Ridden. That's what the Holy Ghost was for. What purpose do you think it's for? Nobody knows. The other two are so obvious in their roles. He's from the Philippines. No one knows it.

Holy Ghost. No, the first autobiography in English was written by someone called Marjorie Kemp and it was written in the 1400s and she was an illiterate woman who wrote the whole thing in the third person and so she said... I read it. Have you? Have you? Yeah.

What? I did an English degree and they make you read a lot of... What? Yeah. It's not very good. Oh. It's really not. There's no...

I'm not here to knock Marjorie Kemp, we don't do that on this podcast. She spends maybe 300 or 400 pages crying and weeping and crying and it's just... How do you cry? All the words are smudged from the name. Can't read this. Yeah, it's very hard going. It's really weird though because she imagines herself married to Jesus and lying in bed there with him and it's a very strange text in lots of different ways, yeah.

That's not funny, it's just true. She was from Lancashire, wasn't she, I think? Or was she? She was from my neck of the woods, yeah. Was she like a wise woman or something? Yeah, she was like a prophetess. Yeah. Who had a religious awakening.

It's very interesting but at the same time it's also quite boring. A surprising amount of people used to do ghost writing, so Mozart used to do ghost writing. Really? Yeah, yeah, he'd write, he would be commissioned by other people, they'd put their names to it, Mozart would then provide the music for it, yeah. Charles Dickens' very first book, it was a book that he ghost wrote for a clown called Grimaldi. Yeah, just going back to Mozart, when he first played in Europe, he was very young, like

nine years old or something, and everyone thought he was a dwarf in disguise. That's true. What? Yeah, it was written that they thought he was. Because that was most likely. What you're going to say is, if you're going to disguise a dwarf, you don't make him the same height. You're making him taller.

Yeah, that is a good point, but that's true, that is true. How do you make him taller? You can't stretch a person as part of a disguise. Stilts. Put him far away on a hill so no one can tell. With a small piano, right? Gary Brown started as a stiltwalker. Gary Brown started as a dwarf.

He just stretched him on the rack for 20 years. Someone who does stretch his body is Superman. Remember that? Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah. So as part of Superman's disguise, he puts on his glasses, but he can also make his spine two inches smaller, so he kind of goes smaller. No, when he becomes Clark Kent.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, shorter as Clark Kent, so people for extra realism don't tell. I mean, he's not real. That was going to be my fact next week. Damn it. I have a few good, so titles of autobiographies, which I just really like. Colonel Sanders wrote one called Life As I Know It Has Been Finger Licking Good. Leonard Nimoy wrote one called I Am Not Spock, and then a follow-up called I Am Spock.

I've read them both. Love you. Really good. Highly recommend them. Book festival for you, then. Don and I sit next to each other reading I Am Spock and Marjorie Kemp. And Judge Judy. Anyone know Judge Judy?

American too. That's a weary ascent. Judge Judy wrote one called Don't Peel My Leg and Tell Me It's Raining, which is apparently an American idiom. It's sort of, don't lie to me. Have you? Don't piss up my back and tell me it's raining. Yeah.

Might be a Bolton thing. In Bolton, it's necessary to say that. In 2010, a man was caught masturbating to Alan Sugar's autobiography in Crawley Library. The man was cautioned and banned from returning to the library. Was the book cleaned afterwards? No more information. In 1979, Gerald Ford released his autobiography and Betty Ford, his wife, was releasing hers at the same time.

And his was called A Time to Heal, the autobiography of Gerald Ford. And hers was called The Times of My Life, which obviously sounds much more fun. So that year, for Gerald Ford's 64th birthday, Betty gave him a T-shirt that read I bet my book will outsell yours, which is quite sweet. And it did. Yeah, by a long way, yeah. Wow. Yeah, so good prediction.

Yeah. And then next year, the T-shirt said, told you. Yeah. And then they divorced. No, they didn't. Alec Baldwin wrote one which sold 12 copies in its first month, which is amazing. And it has an amazingly bad title.

It's called A Promise to Ourselves, Colon, A Journey Through Fatherhood. Yeah, that's the noise I'm making. Is it true that the Bronte sisters, their first book of poetry, there were three of them wrote it and they only sold two copies? Yes. So they didn't even buy one each? In the first year, it took a year to sell two copies. Unbelievable.

Yeah. Well, they live together. You can share. Yeah, you're right. I like the fact that autobiographies used to be called Apologia, didn't they? So when you look back to antiquity, then it was always Apologia, which was sort of apologizing for what you've done wrong, and it seems like much more people should do rather than, you know...

It was kind of false modesty. Yeah, it was. It was usually a justification of what all their critics had aimed at them and explaining that it was, yeah. But Augustine as well, who a lot of people say is the first autobiography of kind of a non-classical age. His was just called Confessions, and that was his explaining all the stuff he'd done wrong

and not even stuff that he remembered. So chapter one of Augustine's autobiography was him saying, when I was a child, I don't really remember it very well, but I know I will have committed loads of sins, and for that I'm really sorry I feel terrible about it. Don't know what they were, but I'm sure I did. Really, really bad. Sorry, guys.

Wow. Yeah, no. John Henry Newman, who was an eminent Victorian, wrote one in 1864, which was called Apologia Prosuavita, or Apology for His Life, which sounds very sarcastic. Like, sorry about my life, guys. Adolescent. We should move on.

Yeah, we're going way over here. Anything else, Andy? No. I got a couple of interesting things, which I didn't know, which is, so there's a number of things that are happening. You have ghost writing, which is obviously just ghost writing, someone's autobiography. There's a term in the music world, which is called a Hummer,

and Hummer is someone who takes claim of having written a tune on a movie. So like, back when Charlie Chaplin used to make his movies, he's always said written, directed, music by, he would go around, so he'd walk up to a musician who he'd hired and go, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Good luck. And then he would take claim for having written that song.

What? And that's called a Hummer. A Hummer is someone who takes claim for a song off a hum that they'd done to say, Hang on, because they hummed near somebody who wrote something. Yeah, exactly. No, no, they would hum an initial tune and say, build on it, and then they would do it.

Oh, right. So it's ghost writing. It's fake. And also, I was really surprised by this. There's script doctoring, which is done as well for Hollywood movies. And obviously, that is done a lot of the time, but I didn't know these famous people were involved with it. So Tom Stoppard, we all know Tom Stoppard.

Tom Stoppard was a ghost writer in the movie sense. So script doctor for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. What? For the Born Ultimatum. And for Star Wars III, Revenge of the Sith. Isn't that amazing? It's amazing in the way that I don't believe it. No, it's true.

Is it true? Yeah, it's absolutely true. Speaking of Tom Stoppard and Star Wars, Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia of Star Wars. Actually, Ghost wrote most of Tom Stoppard's plays. They just don't swap. She did script doctoring for Sister Act, Lethal Weapon III, Last Action Hero, The Wedding Singer,

and she wrote all of Tinkerbell's dialogue in hook. Well, Carrie Fisher's on the Christmas episode of QI this year, isn't she? Yeah. Well, I've had to have known that and I got to write the script instead of spending all that time. That's true. Okay, we should move on. Okay, it's time for fact number three and that is Czazinski.

Yeah, my fact from the book is that William Morton, father of Anesthesia, first experimented on himself but kept falling asleep before he could describe the results. That's amazing. Day nine. Very optimistic about it. That's amazing. Yeah, he loved experimenting on himself and various things.

So this was in the late 1830s, 1840s, and he was experimenting with Aether and he also experimented on his wife's chicken. He cut off its crest to see if it would be in pain, which she said that it wasn't. Psychopath. What do you even know this one? I was just cutting beds off and seeing if it was painful.

How does he know as well? It's like, yeah, did that hurt? No, okay. I'll keep going. He spoke chicken. That's one of his gifts. Wow, that's mad. Yeah, he experimented on a goldfish, on the pet dog,

on various pets, on his students. We're not still cutting things off, are we? Yeah, just decapitated. No. And yeah, because people tended not to want to volunteer themselves but eventually he had to get a volunteer because he did keep falling asleep. So once his wife walked into the room

and found him unconscious on the floor and had to rouse him and he'd been asleep for about 12 minutes and he said he thought he probably would have died had she not interrupted. So his wife went through a lot. So his wife said, he was obviously quite a strange character, loved these kind of grotesque experiments on himself and things around him.

His wife said, never shall I forget my sensation as a young bride sleeping in a room where a tall, gaunt skeleton stood in a big box near the head of the bed, which I just like as the image of coming home on your wedding night and going, what's that? Is that gonna stay?

Just this human skeleton that he kept by his bed. Amazing. Yeah, deal breaker, I would say, but whatever. Well, once you're already married, it's too late. Yeah, I know that you can do. Picky, picky, picky. But yeah, so it says in the book Father of Anesthesia and he's quite controversial.

So if there are any Horace Wells lovers out there, I understand that Horace Wells was the guy who experimented with nitrous oxide, which turned out to be more effective in a lot of ways as an anaesthetic, but he was unfortunate because it seemed to be working, so he decided to do a public demonstration of how effective an anaesthetic this was in 1845

and he slightly misjudged the amounts he had to give and the length of time he had to give it for and this public demonstration ended in, like, the screaming, hysterical, agonized fit of the person in question. So everyone went home and said, well, this is rubbish, isn't it? Let's not try this.

I know that. There was a lot of surgeons didn't really like anaesthetic at the start. I'm not sure if I've said this before, but there was a Russian surgeon called Nikolai Prigov and he didn't like using laughing gas because he was accustomed to the screams and reactions to pain of his patients

and found it much more difficult to operate on an unresponsive body. Yeah, but apparently he wasn't alone. Like, a lot of surgeons like to know that if you prod this bit, someone screams, they say, no, it's not the right thing to do. They said it guided the scalpel and a lot of people went, oh, don't go there, okay.

Yeah, there was a French surgeon called Magendi who thought it was ridiculous all this experimenting with anaesthetics because he said the pain was essentially irrelevant and it was barely worth noting the pain of actual surgery and I've looked into him and he was never operated on. So I didn't know. And then a lot of religious, a lot of Christians

thought that it was what God intended for us and that it was kind of anti-Christian. Suffering and bearing children. Exactly, yeah. Very controversial. Before they had, before Morton got involved and kind of before Wells got involved as well, they just had laughing gas shows

which just travelled the country across America. Supposed professors would travel from town to town giving lectures and then just put people under laughing gas and then people would laugh and then stagger about and then fall over and talk rubbish and yeah, and they just happened on the pavement and it was at one of these that Horace Wells noticed

that someone had a painful accident and didn't flinch and so he thought, oh well I'm going to go and try this, try this out on people and the next day he had one of his own wisdom teeth taken out under the influence of nitrous oxide and that's what set him off on the whole. It took a long time, didn't it?

Because when was, what's he called nitrous oxide, Humphrey Davy, that was the 1790s wasn't it when he was dealing with laughing gas and it wasn't until the 1840s though. So for ages they'd just laughed for 50 years just going there must be a use to this at the moment.

I ran it really good so James has got a subscription to the British newspaper archive which if anyone wants to I would highly recommend because it's so fun so I looked up Are you going to offer everyone your login details? James Harkin, yeah, no. It's his cat's name, 123.

So there was a letter written to the Liverpool Mercury in 1824 and this was in the era when a lot of people were going to shows and having nitrous oxide tried on them and it was by someone who'd been to one of these shows and he tried nitrous oxide and he wrote a letter to the paper describing it saying

the sensation somewhat resembled those I've experienced when coming in for a share of super fine wine. Which wine it most resembles, I cannot determine, but if you or any of your friends are anxious to have the point settled, you have only to send me a few specimens of superior champagne or burgundy and not like

that. What a guy. I'm really obsessed with people who do self-experimentation because it feels like it was a long gone era where they were doing it and now you look at the news almost virtually every

day and it just seems to be going on more and more people just going into their own world not asking for permission. The guy Barry Marshall won the Nobel Prize. One of your countrymen. Yeah, an Australian fellow Australian won the Nobel Prize for trying to explain

that you all know this better, so why don't you just say this? Yeah, a lot of people know it. So he won the Nobel Prize because he proved that stomach ulcers were caused by a bacteria called Heliobacter pylori I think it's called, and he found that out by testing himself

by giving himself this bacteria and then he turned out that he did get these stomach ulcers and then he took some antibiotics and it got rid of them. It's not all stomach ulcers, but it's a lot of them. Yeah, but he effectively, he should have died off the back of what the medical community thought would happen to him, so he just went,

screw it, I'm going to drink a petri dish for a bacteria myself and I'm going to do it to myself. I really admire that, but it has been going forever and my favorite ever self-experiment story is back from 2000 BC, it's from the Ming Dynasty and it's a guy called Wan Hu from China who decided

to become the first ever astronaut. It's going to be the first ever astronaut? When was that? When was it? It was Ming Dynasty. Good grief. Yeah, so he decided he was going to be the first ever astronaut. They didn't have rockets then, did they? What they did have was

fireworks. So, so he sat on a chair and attached to the chair 47 rockets. He had 47 attendants candle ignite

the 47 rockets. There was a massive explosion and neither one or the chair were ever seen again. So they might be in space. It could have worked. It could have worked. I

thought they did do that in the movie Up. That would have been pretty funny. The press announcement from Pixar. Sorry, we really cocked up this time. Try to send a character into space. He's dead, the chair is gone as well. No, it's no one really agrees that this definitely

happened. It's definitely apocryphal. But at the same time, there is a crater on the moon named one who... I thought you were going to say created by his impact. There's a crater and yeah, spoken to my friends. Wow. Okay, some more self-experimenters. Herbert Woolard

and Edwin Carmichael did some experiments in 1933 and they wanted to know how it felt to put certain pressures on the human testes. And so they placed weights on the testes and they explained

how it felt. So I'll give you some of the things they said. 300 grams slight discomfort in the right groin area. 550 grams definite discomfort in testicular region followed by a dull ache

in the right lumbar region dorsally. Should we stop now? No, let's keep going. I don't know, I'd like to stop though, we're going on. And then when they got up to 850 grams there's a quote of what he said and he exclaims at once that is quite different from the

left side. Good understatement. So speaking of crushing testicles do you guys do you guys know August Beer who so he's someone who pioneered

the cocaineization of the spinal cord in like 1898 which is where you inject cocaine into your spinal fluids and it has a numbing effect and it was quite successful. So he and his assistant August Hildebrand decided to try it out. First of all his assistant was supposed to try it

out on him and used the wrong size syringe for the needle which meant that he injected August's spinal cord and his spinal fluid just spouted out all over the room because it didn't fit there well this is useless and then he was drained of all this spinal fluid so they couldn't try that again. So they switched places

and the assistant agreed to have him inject his spinal cord. I would not switch places with someone who's spinal fluid I just wasted. I would feel very bad about that. So they did it and it was quite successful it was very successful he lost all the feeling in his legs and so

to check that it worked August kicked, stabbed bludgeoned and burned his shins plucked out his pubic hairs stubbed out cigars on his leg and then crushed and tugged his testicles. That's what happens this is for my spinal fluid

But they said so he felt nothing so they thought this has been great and they celebrated by getting really pissed and smoking loads of cigars and they woke up the next day and apparently it was awful and they felt like hell for five days apparently that's a common side effect

of loss of cerebrous spinal fluid I guess combined with quite a bad hangover. We shouldn't have had that seventh line of cocaine into our spines wasn't we? I think it was the seventh that did it Wow

We need to move on Another self experimenter this guy is unbelievable in 1804 he was an American student called Stubbins Firth what a name and he wanted to show that yellow fever was not contagious and so he did so by

ok brace yourselves inhaling the vapour of sufferers simmering black vomit he then injected the vomit into his own veins and into cuts on his arms despite the fact that a dog he had injected had died within minutes and then he smeared his body

with patients blood, sweat and urine and drank patients saliva, blood and vomit he didn't catch it because the samples came from late-stage patients who were no longer contagious alright ok let's move on to our final fact time for a final fact and that is Andrew Hunter Murray

ok my fact is that Chessington World of Adventures banned animal onesies to stop the animals there getting confused so did they genuinely get confused we're all confused by animal onesies aren't we

so they weren't confused that it was another animal that was similar to it that's a poor fashion choice I don't know why you've gone for that it was a temporary one to stop the, they had a new giraffe and a new rhino and they hired

new scientists and if you went in an animal onesie apparently you were going to be given a grey boiler suit to put over it which would make you look more like a rhino and a big pointy hat why we don't know

I don't know there's an article in New Scientist about this they asked an animal expert and she said some colorations do give warning signs to other animals so big cats get interested if someone limps past their enclosure because they look weak and then she said

possibly the worst thing you could do is limp past the lion enclosure in a zebra print outfit what about climbing into it also bad second worst thing limp past since 2012 the company Kigu who make onesies have sold twice as many panda onesies

as there are pandas sad fact isn't it it's easier to make a panda onesie to be fair I'm just saying you don't have to put two panda onesies together and then leave them for five years or however long it takes a panda onesie is more keen to shag each other

is that what you're saying than pandas much easier have we talked about the zoo in China that tried to disguise really crap animals as really great animals in the Henan province I feel like we might have so

dressed up a Tibetan mastiff as an African lion rats posed as snakes dogs dressed up as leopards and in an effort to save face the zoo's animal department chief claimed the real lion had been temporarily sent to a breeding facility

although they didn't explain why there was a mastiff dressed up as a lion in the lion's enclosure they also said by the way we've got Mozart playing tonight you should come and see him they do when you start to google zoos and

people dressing up as animals most of the articles that come down are from the idea that it's the zoo people who are dressing up so there were pandas talking about pandas they had a small baby panda that was born and they wanted to put it into the wild so all of the zookeepers

dressed up as pandas so they didn't think that there was human contact going on so maybe it does actually confuse the animal we're not giving them much credit animals are very good at recognizing each other aren't they? a lot of animals are I think we talked about wasps last week

that they can recognize each other's faces so if you put wasps in a maze and you show them a photograph of one wasps face that leaves something bad and one wasps face that leaves something good then they learn the wasps face and learn to go that direction rather than the bad wasps face

which I don't know what happens when they meet those wasps in real life and have me down a bad way but yeah sheep are really good at recognizing each other which is weird because they all famously look the same now you're being sheep racist I am

I'm a sheepist yeah if you show sheep so I think they experimented on 50 sheep and if you show them a picture of one sheep like a couple of sheep faces then they can always identify the one that's associated with something good or 85% of the time I think they identify the one

that's associated with something good so yeah I don't think animals are being confused by humans dressed in furry suits well then in a different case at a zoo in Tenerife they have a thing they do this in zoos now where they dress up

certain members of the team as an animal and get them to try and escape the zoo and the costume bit the costume bit is just to add effect it's to test if a gorilla escaped from an enclosure

and it started running out how they could have an emergency situation they have an emergency routine if something escapes and they have to make sure they know what they're doing but a guy in a gorilla suit can't rip someone's arm off so they add extra realism by ripping someone's arm

well what happened in this case is one of the zookeepers wasn't told this was happening saw the gorilla escaping and shot a tranquilizer dart into the person genuinely this was this was this year they had to bring them to hospital and bring them back too

so evidently animals are better at noticing humans dressed up as animals than humans are in 2008 if you rang up Dublin Zoo you would get an answerful message saying if you are calling to speak to Mr Rory Lyon C Lyon

G Raph or anyone similar please be aware that you are victim of a hoax message or or perpetrating one that's exactly what I would do if I had thought of it so I really like history of zoos as well so when London Zoo was

first opened it was obviously much more wild westy than modern zoos so they thought they would use zebras to pull people around in passenger carts and carriages and things you could play with the bears sometimes just let you play with the bears

and they didn't have proper vets you know they just and also sorry play with the bears that's never going to end well and they died in their hundreds a female seal disappeared two weeks before the grand opening

and they only found it two days before the public first arrived how does a seal escape? sketchy on detail here it just was in the zoo but not but in the lion enclosure the very first animal at London Zoo was a griffin vulture called Dr. Brooks

who was named after the anatomy teacher who had donated him and his job used to be to eat the corpses when they were finished with but then he had retired so he didn't have a fresh supply of food the corpses of the children who had been sent to play with the bears no sorry

Dr. Brooks anatomy school the bodies and then afterwards the vulture could have the rest but after he retired no more bodies so he said we'll have to find a home for the vulture wow one in eight British adults owns a onesie don't they

that's in one of our back books from us Dan owns half of one yeah is that true? show of hands that's about one in eight that's about ten 30% that wasn't ten

wasn't that one? any animal ones? which animal wait someone in the front row is wobbling his hand because he's not sure of it is Godzilla a good question yeah

he's not a vegetable or a minimum is he? this is interesting this is onesie hour you know when you find yourself looking up there's really hopeful stuff for qi research so today I found myself looking up at one point animals dressed in human onesies

in the test room test room oh please tell me that you found something I didn't find anything my god if someone finds one that would be good there's a sloth onesie you get if sloths get mange then you have to shave them from head to toe but they need to remain warm

and so they've designed sloth onesies there you go yeah that's cool that would be the worst human onesie but also the worst if you're trying to show a sloth escaping a zoo because you could literally go home come back the next day

and they've moved a meter like that's not the animal escaping sloths have lots of beetles living in their fur so the onesies would have to be thick enough for all these beetles to live in and moths and all sorts you must be the worst onesie buyer you're returning it to the store

here in the description where are the beetles what the hell's going on here it's a fucking joke I made several attempts to lure beetles into my sloth onesie we found that few of them found it enticing prospect Churchill had a onesie

Winston Churchill yes he called it his siren suit because air raid sirens he spent a lot of the war second war war working underground in the cabinet war rooms and he had it especially designed people have dressed this up so they say he invented the onesie

which he did not that's not fair because it's like an adapted boiler suit but it was auctioned recently for thousands and thousands of pounds really? yeah it wasn't an animal can you imagine Churchill had a dog onesie when Churchill talks about his black dog

and beats the team's depression my black dog's back again I'm imagining in the dog onesie going oh yes okay Chessington Chessington World of Adventures they imply a lady who looks very nice

called Lisa Britton and her job is a birds and the bees consultant because I have questions for her well that's she's there to help children or immature adults to tell them what's happening when they're walking past and animals are

having sex is she all over she walks around does she know when the animals are having sex and rushing I see her with a bank of CCTV screen wait the sea lions are at it I must go she says she's most in demand

around three species the monkeys who have no shame and wave their monkey hood around as part of their courtship the lions because it's a noisy affair and the tortoises because it's a very slow process and they are not discreet at all

that's amazing I printed out the page for the history of Chessington Zoo because they have a little timeline on their website and I just want to share three entries with you from three different years it was a civil war place 1991

following the development in 1990 there weren't any new attractions for 1991 1992 1992 was another year of little investment 1993 fifth dimension closed at the end of 1993

1993 I've never been is it fun, is that a fun place 1991 and 1993 it is fun there's a theme park I discovered Dolly Land, have you guys heard of Dolly Land is it Dolly Parsons?

Dolly Parton has a theme park quick guess sorry Dollywood of course Dolly Land is a very different place Dolly Land and I am not allowed back there Dollywood, I'm so sorry that's so awesome that you knew that

Dollywood anyone want to have a guess of the opening hours of it's 10 till 7 it genuinely is, missed opportunity I don't know what they were thinking hey listen, we need to wrap up really soon

do we have any more final facts we want to throw into this I quite like, if we're talking about theme parks I didn't know what the first ever roller coaster was or the original roller coaster are you thinking Russia? I was thinking Blackpool no Russia

1700s 1700s they had Russian ice slides and it was this fad in Russia that went through 1900s Catherine the great loved them she had loads of them installed on her own property and what they were were, they were the structures that were up to 100 feet tall

so they were, you climb up a ladder 100 feet and there's an ice slide and you just slide all the way down it and people would have them installed in the halls of their stately home so you'd go into a stately home, there's a huge ice slide in the middle and then the French during the Napoleonic wars saw these and thought that's really

and tried them and said that's super fun and then they yeah, that was the predominant emotion in Moscow in 1812 who's happening well, they're going to city and we're starving but these ice slides

so the French brought them back and then built the world's first roller coaster and called it Russian mountain in homage, homage, good fact good fact, alright that's it that's our facts, thanks so much for listening to that we went on way too long

but for those listening to this and not in the room, if anyone in the room wants to ask us anything afterwards, we're going to be selling books downstairs, we're going to be hanging out downstairs so join us, that'll be awesome if anyone listening wants to ask us any questions about the things we've talked about, we're on Twitter

my hashtag, no not my hashtag I do have a hashtag though, I don't that'd be the labest thing, hey my hashtag is, that would be terrible hashtag Dolly Land yes yes oh yeah, it is a land, yeah

my twitter name is at Shriverland, James, at egg shaped Andy, at Andrew Hunter Anna podcast at qi.com yes, or you can get us all together at atqipodcast that's our twitter handle for the whole of us

we're going to be back again next week with another batch of facts, thanks for listening and we'll see you again, good night good night