No Such Thing As A Fish - 350: No Such Thing As Tickling Baseball Players

Episode Date: December 4, 2020

Dan, Anna, James and Alan Davies discuss people lending, perilous landing, rigid fishes and frigid dishes.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of fish before we begin We just want to let you know we have a very special guest on it is the QI main man himself James Harkin Who is it? It's James Harkin the QI main man himself That's right. And the second banana has joined us this week as well No, it is his name is his name is Alan Davis and he is the main big banana He is the biggest banana of all the bunch of people who work at QI He's our absolute best mate and he's come along to tell us a load of facts that we didn't already know That's right. Yeah, and we also want to just quickly mention that he has a new book out. It's an extraordinary book

It's called just ignore him and it is a memoir of which Stephen Fry former co-host on QI second banana Second banana to Alan said it's funny sad frightening sweet savage and tender Just ignore him will never leave you and that's what all the critics are saying about it as well It has had universal praise and we highly highly recommend it. Yeah, it's an absolutely brilliant book It's just I mean you probably know Alan There's just this funny happy-go-lucky guy, but it really really gets down to what made him who he is and I can't recommend it Enough. It's just such a great great book. It's available presumably in all good book shops I guess even the shit ones even the shit ones

So definitely go out and get that but in the meantime you can hear him doing what he does best Which is being unbelievably funny and this week's show. Okay on with the podcast on with the show top banana 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 Schreiber I am sitting here with James Harkin Anna Tashinsky and special guest It's Alan Davis and once again We have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here We go starting with you Alan

Well, I've found for you from the Lizmore library in Australia an unusual approach you can borrow a person The human library it's called The human library was started to create a space and this is from the founder Ronnie abhijal You could walk in borrow a human being and talk to them about a very challenging topic Ideally we wanted people to talk about issues they would normally would not talk about or don't like to talk about and so You get you get a human book and that's a volunteer from a diverse background where they have experiences They're willing to share and they have titles the human books have titles like black activists or chronic depression or

survivor of trafficking I mean, they're not very funny It seems to me It feels like you might have like had a really really bad Edinburgh experience That would be a good one I would quite like football hood again Shotlifter pervert They're the really interesting ones

Covid denier That's what you could point about Edinburgh though imagine getting that in your review. Have you thought of being a human book instead? There is a photo here and it's just you just sit at a table for someone You sit at a table with a human book and then and you borrow them from her for an amount of time Hmm. I mean, I don't know it makes me that Monty Python sketch, you know when you get an argument Oh Someone goes in and says I've come here for an argument and they go no you haven't But I think it must be really like imagine if you're one of these books and like you're there for a few days

And no one takes you out that must be pretty depressing. Yeah, that's yeah bad stick they have a thing where so they all sit in a sort of waiting room which they call the bookshelf and They have a matchmaker so someone says I want to get a human book out and the librarian match makes you with a type of book I give they give you the list, but but here's an interesting thing while they're waiting to be chosen It can obviously get a bit boring there so they can borrow each other out while they're waiting It's like Sorry, I didn't realize I've borrowed this one before I

Wanted do they have barcodes on them? I mean if you try to smuggle out a book under your It was Spoiler alert for the ending It's a cool idea. Yeah, it's not just this Lismore library in Australia So this was launched back in 2000 in Copenhagen by who Alan mentioned earlier Ronnie and a few others and It sort of went around to festivals and they had people Where you could rent them out at Ross Kilda festival and so on and then it's sort of the idea latched on and it's spread out So it's an over 70 countries now that you can go to certain libraries and they don't always have them waiting in the back room

They're not just permanently sitting there. It's sort of like on a Friday between the hours of nine and three or something like that We have slots since COVID they they have started doing it virtually So you can you can borrow one, you know It's all about diversity and you know understanding people from other backgrounds or races or cultures. It's very good Yeah, it's a good plan. It's it's challenging your preconceptions. I guess isn't it? Making you people making some friends, you know, if you're really lonely. Well, that's it I mean, we're now recording recording this in the second lockdown and everyone's sick to the back teeth of all the people they normally zoom With the quiz markets falling off and cliff

It's like you get sick of the people you live with and then sick of the people you zoom Yeah, and then I'm sick of my Amazon delivery guy now Well, it's time to go to the human library Libraries are really trying to branch out in the modern day, right? You know because people often don't use them anymore So they say they're trying to get to grips with the digital age and now they just hire out loads of random stuff so there's this woman Barbara stripling who's the president of the American Library Association and She says that local libraries are constantly getting calls from people like plumbers or electronic specialists saying

Do you want to put me in your books catalog and you can rent me out? You can hire me out to people who you know need a plumber or need to learn about how to wire a plug and So actually you can hire people for practical purposes as well I think it'd be a weird thing to do to go to your library as a first port of cool if your toilets blocks, but It's worth a try currently I really I have a lot of faith in YouTube for all of those things. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I had to sew up My five-year-olds One of his poor patrol toys that have split down. It's back. Oh, yeah, it was Marshall for those of you interested in the

The best Great guy. I love him. That's the prone. That's why he's funny. Yeah, and Ironically, it's he's the one who got split down Typical Marshall And I got a needle and thread for the first time since I don't know when this century and stuff And then thought how do you finish? Oh, I must have been taught this at primary school I'm sure but I don't remember and I found a YouTube video that told me how to Wow, and how do you finish you do like a little knot at the end or something?

You don't put it all the way through you leave a loop and go in that Do another one of those and then you're done. I've left Proudly left Marshall on the table Wait for my five-year-old to come over and probably just rip him up When we started talking about Paw Patrol that was so much in his comfort zone I've ever seen him on this podcast. He was like Just on Anna you were just talking about things that you could take out from libraries like curious things so outside of people you can also get really Sort of practical things for your house like like the Philadelphia library allows you to get cake pans for if you're baking

That's part so you can get a book in a cake pan Yeah, you can at the Ann Arbor Library of Michigan as well You can rent out lots of weird tools and it says we only stocked the unusual tools that you might not have in your own house Which is a kind of a good idea right because with a cake pan, you know I'm only gonna make one cake every three years or whatever so I don't want to buy a whole pan for it Much better to just hire it out in my time. I've lived with several unusual tools Guys this is on books and Fagely this fact and we just never mentioned on the show and I think we should talk about the fact that Boris Johnson wrote a novel in

2004 has any of you read it? No, I've seen it It's called something virgins very well done. It's a certain number of virgins 72 It's littered with racial stereotypes isn't that right I think I read about it in the Guardian The racial stereotype detectives column Well, you won't be surprised to know the telegraph called it effortlessly brilliant This is genius, this is exactly what I think It does sound I mean it's extraordinary first of all

It's about a sort of bumbling gaffe prone bike riding MP who's vaguely in trouble for a sexual indiscretion and It's a Marina Hyde's read it so we don't have to and tweeted a few of the quotes from it One quote is Boris Johnson wrote these words She was looking this may sound crude But it's no less than the truth like a lingerie model only cleverer and if anything with bigger breasts Just writing those words in a book although it is meant to be a farce so to be fair. Well, that's what his Premiership is turning into I read about that I read an article that suggests that people who are storytellers like Boris Johnson as you say

Have more children than non storytellers This was a couple of anthropologists who are looking at the Agata people who live in the Philippines And they're a hunter-gatherer group and they don't really Then one of these groups that aren't really affected by the Western world very much And they looked at the people who tell the stories in the group and they found that they are more desirable social partners They ask people of all these ones this guy does lots of Finding food and this guy tells lots of stories and this guy does a lot of fixing things Who would you most like to have sex with most of the people said they wanted to have sex with the storytellers?

Really? Yeah, is that because they don't have poor patrol to put on for five hours there So they know when they have kids they need someone who's gonna sit up doing the bedtime story thing They didn't they didn't come up with any idea why it might be the case. They just said it was the case Interesting. Yeah. Well, it does figure doesn't it good old Boris Maybe the only way to shut the story teller up is to have sex with them I was reading about in terms of Old storytelling traditions in China. They have pingshu which is a version of the Any sort of group that has that one person who knows all of the stories and all the traditions of the people and what led them to this

current point that's their version of it and for a very long time these people were so revered that radio channels would just play them and Farmers would have the radio out there listening to these long stories and those classic Chinese stories that date back from ages and ages Go that they're simply telling over and over but as far as I can tell pingshu is a bit different to other storytellers in that While they're telling the story they break off to give commentary about it and the commentary is their own personal opinion Which they could go on for 20 minutes or so and it's a tradition that is kind of still going on So the old stories aren't engaging the kids anymore. So they have to use news stories so there's a guy who's been going since 2012 telling in pingshu the entire Harry Potter book series and He's gonna finish it

Some he's on the order of the Phoenix right now in 2020. So that's book five I believe and so these little diversions in in the second book You've got the three-headed dog in Chamber of Secrets He'll then go into Greek mythology for 20 minutes to talk about the three-headed dog away from this It's the worst to me kind of storytelling. Oh, yeah You want to hear the story and then you're suddenly getting 20 minutes about You know, yeah, it's like someone leaning over your shoulder when you're reading going. I love this bit of this bit Oh, this guy's awful, isn't he? You don't you don't want that? I think it sounds doesn't that sound more like footnotes or something

That's true. Actually, that's true How quickly I've buckled I'm really into it Sounds awesome James do all your favorite works of fiction and footnotes. Well, I think the problem is that I don't really read fiction very much I read a lot of nonfiction and what Dan's describing sounds more like a nonfiction thing, doesn't it? It sounds more like okay, now we're gonna tell you some facts about Kerber or so on ever And to me, that's I guess I just need to read more fiction. Well, sometimes you can get Like if you're reading a Dickens book, for example, yeah, it's books are so full of references of the day

Yeah, they're written in many, you know Publishes they were a magazine form is full of jokes about characters of the time and so the footnotes in those books Or they usually notes at the back of the volume pages and pages in here He refers to and here this is about and this is a popular song of the time This is the right of the time and this is someone think it's hated Yeah, that's what you can you can go to those or Not yeah, I lost actually it's kind of the best bit sometimes, you know, it's full of weird facts I think James, I think you found something recently about how if

People didn't have somewhere to sleep for the night, but they couldn't afford a bed in a home. Oh, yeah You could sit up on Can I just say we shouldn't be saying this to Alan because it will be on QI next year If it wasn't for the fact that I 100% know that he will have forgotten it by the time it goes out We shouldn't be saying it but yeah, sorry, what did you say? So in Victorian times if you didn't have anywhere to live but you're working in the city But you needed somewhere to sleep you could pay one pence and you'd be able to sit on a bench for the night Or you could pay two pence and you'd be able to hang over the top of a rope, right?

The rope would go underneath your arm and some then you would kind of sleep there and that is it dickens, isn't it? Is it I read about that in a footnote in one of the dickens is yeah Yeah, one of the dickens is So they're good there may be good fiction for you to start with James Fuller footnotes or David Foster Wallace if you want more footnotes than actual fiction, okay, any footnotes in the Boris Johnson, but a lot of very arcane references that yeah You need tons of footnotes for those. It did sell more than the last book we wrote. Just want to make that clear Wow You can get Eddie his arms written an autobiography, which is a great find especially like Eddie

But he's got lots of footnotes in it both so in the audio book I listen to he reads the footnotes But of course Eddie's always Digresses in his in his comedy. It's big part of what it does is digression digression digression But instead of just digressing he reads it as a book so you'll talk for a bit Then you go footnote, and then he'll tell you something and then he will say End of footnote, and then he will carry on talking and then you go Footnote

Stop saying footnote Just read it out Digress Single greatest digress And now you're going I love it. I love Eddie dearly, but I could not listen to that Yeah, edit those out. Maybe he'll hear this and go back and edit the footnote Straight back to Hilary Mantell

Chapter 907 Oh god, don't get me started Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Anna My fact this week is that it's illegal in the uk to tickle a trout Trout tickling Yeah, they don't like it. No, they do like it. That's the problem. So I guess anyone have you guys ever Have you guys heard of trout tickling? Are you familiar with the concept? If you ever tickle trout yourselves? Yeah, we have it on the doff Can I just check that trout's not a euphemism here?

I don't want to be kind of uncool and know that you're all talking about the penis It's a great point If it isn't euphemism, then I've misunderstood all of the articles I've read about it It's it's an angling thing that goes back many hundreds of years and p fishman will talk about it And it's what you do is you dip your hand if you're trying to catch a trout without a rod Then you dip your hands in the water. I was actually speaking to someone. I know who's says he's done it yesterday Dip your hands in the water and you sort of want to chase a trout under a rock They'll guide from you under a rock

Then you go underneath the trout and you pull your hands up gradually until you're touching it And then you want to touch it at the tail end and then just sort of tickle its little belly Creeping your fingers up in a weird and pervy way until you've tickled it right up to the head and it makes them go completely Emotionless they seem to love it or it at least makes them catatonic I heard of it. They go into a sort of a trance Exactly, but that's illegal It's illegal because It's illegal because it's um

Well, so there's a lot of angry people online who say it's a hangover from Classism of the olden days essentially because it's thought of as poaching because You if you don't have a rod then you can easily pretend that you weren't trying to poach fish from a river So it's a way of getting away with stealing fish from someone's river without permission And so it's illegal. You've got a fish with a rod in line or a net You're allowed to do it if you're if you're on your own property and you have your own river going through your own property And I think you are allowed to do it, right? It's on the public

Lands. Yeah, I can't remember years ago. I was on holiday with bill Bailey and in uh, Indonesia and we were on this river Doing some sort of canoeing or rafting or something. Anyway It was idyllic mountains and trees and tropical foliage everywhere And floating down the river and I thought this is perfect. What a paradise. I understand my bill comes here all the time It's just really takes you away from everything. He'd always say never got asthma while he was there. There's no pollution Etc etc Then we go around and bend in the river and there's a local gentleman With a car battery slung over his shoulder

connected to a metal pole wading in the river electrocute in fish Oh my god I mean It's suddenly completely removed from the ecstasy of commuting with with nature The brutal reality It's kind of the only time we've ever seen seen a car battery used like that was in a film about the craze when they were torturing someone

I mean, it's it's very resourceful You're going to get more fish that way really really effective. Yeah Oh, wow, I think they they do try to uh people who actually are permissioned to try to kill trout like that In fact, so I think they're invasive trout in Yellowstone Lake Which are eating up all the trout that are supposed to be there and they've tried to electrify the whole lake By so electrocuting all the eggs, but the water didn't conduct it well enough apparently weird because we're a good conductor So you've got to make sure you got the voltage for it. Yeah And actually what they did and this is really creepy is they so this is Yellowstone Lake and the native trout are the cutthroat trout

Which is confusing because they're the good guys who are meant to be there And the invasive trout have come in they're eating them all up And so the way eventually researchers have managed to get rid of the invasive trout one of the ways is they Suffocate the invasive ones by dumping loads of dead fish in the water And then that removes the oxygen from get stops the oxygen from getting in and the eggs don't survive So you see them like tipping all these fish back into the water So suffocated by their own parents, but it's it's all in honor of saving the cutthroat trout So it's actually sort of a good thing depending on which side of that fence you're falling on

Sound of the cutthroat trout. Yeah. How do they survive all the lack of oxygen though? They hang out in slightly different parts of the lake and so you just got to pick your spot. Got it Um chart tickling is mentioned in Shakespeare, isn't it? I reckon if you looked in the um In the footnotes it would be there It's in twelfth night when malvolio walks in and malvolio's a bit stupid Maria says here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling Don't know if that that might be one of um shakes being weird sexy jokes that no one gets but Yeah, oh, can you imagine the riotous laughter at the globe?

I actually love I saw Stephen Fry big enough malvolio and it was genuinely riotous laughter He's quite a talented man. So that's Stephen Fry. Yeah, I don't remember that specific line This um, I was I was reading as well about these methods of unconventional fishing so Electrifying and using car batteries in the water to get fish and one of the ways that a lot of people do it Is using dynamite so dynamite fishing you pop a bunch of dynamite and blows up all the fish raised to the surface and you collect them and That's a big problem for a lot of places where there's coral reefs because they're absolutely decimating all of these coral reefs

And in the Philippines, it's a big problem in particular So in 2010 a group called the sea knights decided to do something about it Philippines is very very religious and so what they did was where the coral reef was they dumped at the bottom of the ocean A 14 foot tall statue of the virgin mary so that if anyone came by they would see the virgin mary in the ocean and want to pray to her as opposed to Decimate her uh with dynamite. So yeah Yeah, so they've gone back uh in 2018 eight years later and it seems to have worked She's covered in coral. It's growing on her now and all the coral in the area seems to be vibrant again

Because no one's blowing it up and it's bringing a lot of tourists in so if you want to stop Yeah, any illegal poaching just pop a virgin mary into your area and you should be fine Popping a virgin mary into your area again does sound like a euphemism, but that is ingenious It's better than popping a virgin mary out of your area Or is it? In scotland it looks it looks like it's known as guddling It is that's what my friend called it yesterday. He does it in the highlands Guddling guddler trout in scotland. It's like talking about guddling. It's a bit like cuddling, isn't it tickling and guddling and

Touching into a trance. It's a wonderful skill Yeah I read one person who does it who says you need to be very gentle and with a delicate touch Much as though you are caressing your lover Wow, you then of course fry on the barbecue After you've gutted them Technically gobbling if you ever want to know the term Specifically for trout if you're gutting a trout or chopping up a trout it's called gobbling

According to a book of carving from 1508, so I don't know if it's in common use anymore A few watch that program it's on bbc2 I think about it's called scotland from the sky No, yeah, I think I have seen it. It's really good And it's a kind of history history of scotland from the sky so aerial photography But in getting to the sky and use there's all kinds of lost history that's rediscovered and And one of the things they were talking about in the last I'll watch it with my daughter. She loves it And the last one was the lost herring industry scotland used to have this huge herring industry

And they used to export herring by the hundreds of tons to particularly to russia and germany and those markets disappeared with the second world war But they would have herring girls and herring girls could gut herring They had footage black and white footage of herring girls with buckets full of herring gutting them at a terrific rate Cutting up 40 fish in a minute It's absolutely extraordinary kind of lost art and lost industry I wonder why it was the girls who did it just didn't the boys were on the boats and the girls were doing the gutting And that's how that's how it worked

I remember reading about those herring girls and they used to you know They were really cliquey and they would like do all the gutting in the daytime And then they'd all go to the bars in the evening and they would never go home in between So they'd go to the bars and they'd be covered in herring guts and you know blood and whatever Yeah, really messy business The smell must be unbelievable That's a human library book you wouldn't want to see in the back room I can have a herring girl, please

Oh my god Yeah, Scotland from the sky it's worth a watch There's another thing in there about creating this so they kind of can't create fish traps by building a kind of L shape out of rock Into a tidal river and as tide goes out fish get caught up here in the L and then The catch it was incredibly efficient way of catching fish so much so that They had too many and then they ended up dead fish were poisoning the locks

It became it was made illegal sometime in the 19th century, but yeah Yeah genius ways of trapping fish The Scots are all over it Feels like cheating to me Yeah, um, you know we had a conversation a few weeks ago about how did all the fish get in the lakes? And this weird mystery and Alan any guesses You know when you got late Stick with basic evolution

Basic evolution They just used to be a me but okay, thanks for that answer cut to 10 million years Um, even Darwin doesn't agree with you there. So Darwin thought that The way that the fish had got into the lakes was the eggs and little fish eggs that attach to bird feathers And then in the sea and then birds had flown and sort of dropped them over lakes Which is generally how people thought these fish got in lakes, but there's actually no Christians Christians just laugh at it, you know Yeah, whatever the eggs were on the wings of the birds, that's right

I mean it sounds ridiculous They've got a point But they've got a point the thing is Alan who made the amoeba You know, we can all say that it went from amoeba to fish in the lake But you know, you need the perfect conditions to create life Liquid and you've got to be in the Goldilocks own James. Okay, got it. It's not it's not Lancashire Wow, life on earth did not start in Lancashire. I know you credit a lot of things with length Life on earth did not begin there, but that is where it reached its absolute peak

In the Harkin household We've topped out, we've topped out Humans are officially going downhill now All right, Anna are you going to tell us where these fish came from? Yeah, so they don't we think there's no evidence that this happens Although it tends to be what everyone still thinks is the cause of fish hanging up in lakes But then the latest theory which a few people sent us after the show because it was on a podcast that same week When you mentioned it and I think it was Jim Alcalini was saying that a Jim Alcalini podcast inside science

That birds eat and this is going to sound even more ridiculous to the creationist But birds eat fish eggs But fish eggs actually survive going through their digestive tracts with some fish And then they poo them out when they're flying over a lake and the eggs end up in the lake I'll go with that You know, this is just going to annoy the Christians even more The reason you've got fish in lakes is acts of God, you know Huge storms where sea creatures get swept up into the air and then reigned on land

And all these there's always an act of God, right? That's God's throwing fish down He must be annoyed or happy or he's got too many fish or He's having a clear out and they land in the lake Yeah Some stuff on trout maybe. Yeah Female trout's fake orgasms. I'm sure you guys saw this Um, so when a female is ready to spawn she kind of quivers a little bit And that kind of turns the male on and then he gives her his um sperm

But sometimes she will do that when she's not going to release any eggs Because it makes all the other trout in the area horny And it's either that then she gets a really good mix of DNA from all the different trout Or that all the males then start fighting each other and so she ends up with the best possible male Ah clever. Yeah. Yeah They so this was a study that was done by the swedish national board of fisheries a guy called Eric Peterson And they checked out 117 different spawnings and they found that 69 were false. They were false orgasms And I just like it's a very sexy number to land it on

Sexy number All this just makes me think of Mike trout the Baseball player. Are you familiar with Mike trout? I am. He's like the best baseball player ever, isn't he? It's one of the all-time greats. He signed a contract in 2019 with the uh, the LA angels Uh for $426 million It was the singer at the time of signing it was the single biggest contract in the history of sport ever He's an extraordinary baseball player and I've actually seen him play Although I love baseball and I was in toronto working and I went to see the blue jays play

And there it was and a guy went I went with a guy a canadian guy I was working with and he just filled me in and that's trout that is trout that you're you're you are in the presence of greatness Well, that is The main thing that I know about him um Is that they sold a baseball card of his for like five million quid or something last year or this year? Maybe and it was the most anyone's ever spent on a baseball card um Wow, and I think like what I always thought about that was

He is only and I think he's in his late 20s, isn't he? So there's so many chances that he gets cancelled in the next five or six years and that card just becomes complete It's not like buying so I buy the Babe Ruth one where you know, you know, this is kind of done You can't not be a fan of anyone except people whose careers are over just in case they Cancel I think they're not bought by fans They're more bought by collectors, aren't they like the most money ever spent on a card before that I don't know the name of the guy But they only ever made one or two of these cards because he hated smoking

And he refused to let cigarette companies sell his card And so they made one or two of them and he wasn't even a great baseball player I don't think but they you know it became really rare and then people paid millions of dollars for it Wow Mike Trout, you want to tickle Mike Trout? That's the most expensive Trout you possibly can Tickle Mike Trout into a trance Yeah, you're winning Is this one of these people he'd probably be good at any sport and I mean he could do anything

Field any position Hit do anything better than anybody if you had nine of him you'd win every game So what you need is the keeper the keeper behind him just slowly tickling his bum as he's going to hit I don't know much about baseball rules, but I can't think that's allowed is it? Very rarely. Do you it's not really a contact sport in that sense? You're not going to get many opportunities to really tickle into a coma, but if you get one take it Yeah Just one more thing on trout that I really liked is coral trout, which are these beautiful red

Sposy fish in the west west of the Pacific Ocean and they are doing this really clever thing Which it was previously thought was only possible for great apes and for ravens You know ravens are always super clever and essentially they recruit other animals to help them hunt And so they'll chase prey smaller fish into crevices, but they are too big and fat to squeeze into the crevices So they recruit eels and octopuses because octopuses have tentacles to get them out for them And they do that by going up to them and performing this series of signals Which essentially says hey, can you come on a hunt with me? And so they do kind of headstands

They'll flip over onto their head and wiggle around and they'll do specific like head shakes And then they'll lead an eel or an octopus to where they've chased this bit of prey And they'll point at where they've got to go to get it out And it's they're the only animals aside from apes and ravens who are known to do Referential gestures as in you know when you're pointing at something and they'll point and they'll say can you go in there and get some of those fish out And in return the eel or the octopus which like puts its arm in there Gets a little bit of the fish catch as well. So they get to share it That's amazing like I'm even quite impressed by the eel in this situation because like if I pointed something

To my cat the cat has no idea what I'm pointing at. She just looks at my finger, right? Yeah, so the fact that the eel even knows that that's what he's pointing at. I just Yeah Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is james Okay, my fact this week is that all of the cheese eaten on Antarctica is past its expiration date Yummy Yum, yum, yum. Why are we just sending them our rejected food? Well, this is well first of all

I saw this on a video on the pbs youtube page and it was an interview with tom senty Who's the culinary manager in the myrtle galley? And he was talking about how they get all the food in and he says basically all the food comes by boat And it takes so long to get to Antarctica and most of this cheese has got an expiration date of maybe one month Two months three months by the time it gets there. It's always out of date, but they are in Antarctica So luckily it's very cold. They can just freeze it and it's all fine But technically if they were in a shock they wouldn't be able to sell it And you can always just scrape them all off. I suppose once it gets there, but yeah, exactly

Cheese, yeah, that's forever, doesn't it? Yeah, it gets better Exactly. Can't they drop food out of a plane? They can. So every now and then I think like once every three or four months And only in the summer they do have a plane that comes with food But they can only fit so much in there And so they always go for the really fresh stuff like salad and vegetables and fruits and stuff like that Because they can get away with the cheese. They don't bring cheese in there So this is the last place that Deliveroo haven't got food

I think it says go on and ask for a wagon mummers. Oh, yeah Your rider has left the restaurant. He'll be with you in nine months And then you look again and it's ten months He's nearby please go to resuscitate him He has hypothermia. It's a really amazing video this video You get to see it's a sort of journalist going around and showing you all of the canteens that you meet all the chefs And basically as james says it's not just the cheese that it's expired Basically, most of the food has expired and it's all frozen and they have a phraser

Which is that expiration dates or a suggestion as opposed to as a thing that you meant to take for real But the way that they have to plan for these big ship contaminants of food to come in Mean that they're making a million meals and they have to plan that 18 months in advance for every time those shipments come So it's a huge operation It's mad level of meal planning me as someone who decides half an hour in advance what i'm having for dinner It must be helping the chefs and they get proper good chefs, don't they so I think I was reading an interview with the British chef who says it's it's a quite a fun job because it's such a challenge But he'll make Thai curry and Moroccan tajin and meatballs and burritos

And this is all with ingredients that arrived sort of eight months earlier And you do so he has to put in an order. It's like the most high pressure tesco order ever You put in an order once a year for all the food ingredients So you're going to need to last an entire year if you forget coriander That's it you're done for But it says on the on the youtube channel that if you don't get a delivery There's a lot of fish obviously in that article if you can catch it But other than that all the really is to eat is seal placenta

Which the penguins laugh badly Oh my god, what's wrong with the rest of the seal? It must be the best bit But you couldn't get a seal I suppose Well, you don't have to catch the placenta They did used to bludgeon seals back in the day sort of when scott was there and they would take the Blubbery bits and they would mix that into a porridge that they would make to sort of use that Which is disgusting

But they're not allowed to do that anymore because there's this whole Antarctic treaty which got set up which sort of yeah, the old Antarctic boring treaty that they set up Which means you can't yeah, you can't do that anymore. You can't sort of Political correctness gone mad. I think we all agree It does sound like they ate better back in the day like scott's expedition obviously famously He didn't eat very well towards the end But when he was an Antarctic before he went to find the South Pole he lived at Cape Evans in a hut Which sounded like they were living the life of Riley

So he wrote in his diary all the meals they had and they'd have things like sort of several courses They'd have turtle soup. They had stewed penguin breast in red currant jelly They were having crystallized ginger and champagne They cooked they used penguin blubber as oil to cook it and although apparently didn't taste very nice So they were really I mean before he ended up accidentally going on an expedition where he only brought half the calories he needed Then he was living the high life My most interesting thing about scott though is that he is the spitting image the doppelganger of john loyd the

The reason that we all know one another the creator of Creator of qi and I know this because I went to I was touring in new zealand and I went to a museum in christ church and because a lot of the Antarctic expeditions set off from new zealand and they had a replica of the Of a hut that they were going to take with them and erect when they got there and it's say Well, you think of a hut you think of a shed, but this was really enormous several rooms and planks of wooden tables

And then a picture of there's the biggest double take I've ever done in my life On the wall dressed in some 100 year old explorer outfits standing in a hut in a sepia Was john loyd It's extraordinary It's a little known fact that the reason captain oats left the tent is because scott was just telling me all these tedious facts Another quite interesting thing about penguins that I go for a walk I may be some time No, it's quite interesting

Um eating penguins can be quite good for you or it was back in the day because it contains vitamin c which would help you Get scurvy They should have taken more penguins on that expedition 200 000 penguins they have all lived The um the belgica uh when that got stopped in Antarctica in 1897 They decided they were going to eat penguins to stop them from getting scurvy And so but they needed to catch some penguins right so they came up with a rule where Every time that someone caught a penguin they would give them some money And just to try and encourage people to go and catch penguins

Uh, but then they realized that all you had to do was play a tune on your trumpet And the penguins would just come and stand right next to you because they loved the music so much And that became the way that they caught them all and so First of all, they would play the cornet or the trumpet and then there was one guy who pulled out his banjo and started playing a long way To Tipperary and apparently the penguins loved that and they would come right up to him and hang out with him And then one scottish member of the expedition started to play the bagpipes And apparently the penguins fled in terror and plunged back into the sea I went to the end of the festival once and stayed in the hotel on princess street and uh, it's pretty busy princess street

As you know, but it's very very very quiet in the morning apart from 10 a.m Outside wavy station a bagpiper starts up that i've never in my life wanted an air rife or more than that I think we can all empathize about to borrow that from my library Yeah, um the Antarctic was known as the womanless continent for a long time Uh, because there weren't any women there Basically, um, good name. Yeah, there was um the first women to uh go and stay further evidence That women are a bit a little bit less stupid than men Some men just kept sailing to this place

Getting out and dying and then other ones would think those men were idiots. I won't die if I go there and then they go there and die as well Well, I want to take credit but actually women were desperate to go weren't they they were The first women to actually go and spend like a year on the continent were Two women called Jackie Ronnie and Jenny Darlington and they were actually the wives of two explorers And all the other men on the expedition signed the petition trying to stop it from happening And when the two women arrived on the Antarctic base One person who was already there fled in fright thinking that he'd gone mad because he saw two women in Antarctic Okay

Um, but women were explicitly banned from Antarctica until the 60s and 70s in America and the uk so as in British and americans banned them And it wasn't because we were too smart because thousands of women were applying right from the start of Antarctic exploration And they were bound on partly on the grounds that they'd tried to seduce everyone's husbands So I think the first woman who eventually went out with the British Antarctic survey Janet Thompson She had to go around and properly meet and talk to all the wives of the teammates that she'd be going with to convince them That she was an actual scientist and not just going out to seduce all of their husbands Which we huge effort to go to there was another quote from the British Antarctic survey a few years later

I think which when a bunch of women applied to go to Antarctica and were turned down They were turned down on the grounds that there are no facilities for women in the Antarctic no shops No hairdressers And even like These days there are more men there, but the you know, it's getting more and more level I think the u.s. Antarctic program is about 60 to 65 percent men But in the 1980s they had there was so many men there and so few women that they had something called the cysteine ceiling In weddle hut in Antarctica, which was basically the ceiling of this whole hut was covered in naked pornographic pictures of women

And in the 1980s there was an attempt by some Australians to turn that ceiling into an Australian national heritage site of high significance Right, so what do you mean they kept it as it is? They wanted to put it back as it was and um, you know have it as some special site it was protected a bit of a mystery that there's so important to have a visual stimulus That you have to have the image in front of you. Yeah You can't just can't just picture somebody naked in your head. Some people. I just can't think of anyone I'm going to have to look at the actual photograph. Oh, there's one. Yes Some people can't picture things in their head. I can't picture things in my head

Yeah, and that's why your ceiling is covered in porn, isn't it? As you say the pinnacle of human evolution I keep pointing them out to my cat. She's not interested. No No, there's a load of wheels lying on their backs on the floor Yeah Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact My fact this week is that in 1990 a british airways flight landed with one pilot in the cockpit and the other Hanging by his legs outside the front window

It's an extraordinary story. So this was a british flight 5 3 9 0 it left birmingham and it was heading for malaga in spain and um They were just under 15 minutes into their flight. They were cruising at 17,300 feet over oxfordshire When suddenly there was this huge loud bang in the cockpit the window on the pilot side on the left hand side Suddenly flung away from the plane and exposed the plane to all the air on the outside and the decompression was so great That the door that blocks off the pilots from the rest of the plane Got ripped off its hinges Straight into the control panel as well as the pilot who got ripped out of the window of the plane

And only didn't disappear because his legs got caught on the control panel So he was just being whacked back and forth on the plane on the outside and um The story goes that there was a first officer who came in to see if they needed refreshments, which I don't quite believe I think When the door is ripped off and the plane is sent into a descent He comes in anyway. He sees the pilot outside the front window and quickly runs and grabs his legs and has to hold him

And the story ends with them having to make an emergency landing They spend 22 minutes from the moment that it happens to landing and they successfully land and um, he's alive It's an extraordinary survival story But that's the other brilliant bit about this story that I liked was two things one was that the the flight attendants were taking in turns to hang on to Because it was really exhausting and freezing cold and it wasn't the air was thin They were and they but also that they thought he was dead. They thought they were hanging on They thought they were hanging on to a dead person

And the reason that they kept hanging on Was because they were worried that if they let go He might get sucked into the engine Oh my god, take the whole plane down potentially. Oh my days. So they were he was unconscious, right? He lost consciousness So it's only when that they landed and they kind of I don't know how delicately they dragged him back into the witness But believing as they did that he was dead Often if they put that point they then just dropped him out the window and he'd landed on the runway That might have killed him but to their amazement

He was alive and rushed to hospital. Wow. And that's good. I hope they never told him I hope you woke up and said god. Thank you so much for saving my life and they didn't say no We were just trying to stop you fucking up the engine It is extraordinary Pretty incredible when the guy the one of the flight attendants got frostbite in his eye Wow and suffered per PTSD But they there's such a suction that they they think that these the equivalent weight of 500 pounds they were hanging on to So really terrific

Feet of endurance and strength to save this guy or really it's bizarre story What is that? That's about the weight of sort of four people, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Wow Well or two large blocks It's fake it's like two greg davis And seeing it all I mean it's kind of amazing that the passengers got to see everything Yeah, I think that's that's a real perk for the anecdote purposes once you're back on earth The door blew off or would you rather not know what was happening? Maybe Certainly at the time you'd rather think everything was fine and handy, but

Yeah, then you get two weeks in Southampton What I find amazing is that in 2018 this happened again So there was a there was a Sichuan Airlines plane going to Tibet and there was again the windscreen went and the pilot got sucked out And the co-pilot said I looked over to my side and half of my co-pilot's body was hanging out of the window Fortunately, he was wearing a seatbelt So They only got halfway out and they managed to pull him back in

But that apparently it's a thing that happens That is an advert for seatbelts if you really don't I don't ever take your seatbelt off in a plane Really because it's like something does go wrong. It's not by chance. So I'll probably be all right anyway No, you'll definitely go out of a window Stop it gonna say We should say so the reason that this happened was because the windscreen itself had been refitted to the plane the night before And the wrong bolts had been used to secure it. So they were half a millimeter too small

And so it just couldn't handle the intense air pressure once it was up there and that's why it blew out So since then they've changed it so that they've stopped bolting them out a from the outside They now do it from the inside which um, it just apparently is a bit more helpful And uh, they make sure to use the proper bolts. This is just for anyone who's currently on the plane listening to us It's not going to happen again. Don't worry Okay, good to know they're making sure to use the proper bolts. How I mean, it's amazing the stuff that can go wrong. There was this 1983 Canada flight

Where the pilots have to check that so you check the fuel levels before you take off So, you know how much fuel to put in the tank for your journey And they were a bit understaffed so the pilots had to do the checking themselves and they did it The electronic system was broken. So they had to use a dipstick So they just dip the dipstick into the fuel tank pulled it out You've got to figure out the volume from that and then from that They have to do the calculations to figure out the mass of fuel so they know how much to add and to add an extra complication They just switched to the metric system

Which confused them so they used the wrong calculation They used a calculation as if they were converting to pounds rather than kilos Which given that 2.2 pounds is one kilogram meant they ended up with just under half the amount of fuel they needed And because their systems are broken, they didn't get a warning until the plane engine just completely cut off And they started plummeting out the sky And fortunately the captain was an experienced glider pilot which always comes in handy And so he glid them down Just about to safety although he did break the nose off the plane

But it's quite confusing. Was that pilot hero or was he a moron? I mean He did cock up the calculations Yeah It's interesting, isn't it that planes they can glide down can't they really in theory a An aeroplane is designed so that even if both of the engines go it can glide for quite a long time And actually the chance of surviving depends on how high you are because Obviously the higher you are the further you can get and the easier is to get to an actual airport

And apparently I was talking to my wife about this who is a helicopter pilot as you guys know and I was asking her like If we were flying in a helicopter and she collapsed Would I be able to land the helicopter and she reckons that there's about a 50 50 chance that I would be able to do it No way and survive that's what she reckons I reckon yeah, it seems a lot Into this whole thing about your family being the peak of the She thinks you're an actual genius. She thinks I could jump out and just fly down but no James when you say she collapses and she's still telling you what to do or you just taking control

She said that the main problem first of all would be throwing her body out of the helicopter And getting the controls before it went out of control, but if I managed to do that She why do you need to throw the body out? What if that is that pilot situation again? And she's just falling unconscious. It's quite a small helicopter. And you know, I just want to look we want to I want to stretch my arms I got to say the the 50% side of you surviving kind of makes you a dick if you do survive There's a lot of unfortunate things you need to do to survive there Apparently I wouldn't be able to hover by be able to probably make quite a hard landing

And That's a crash right It's a crash, but the survival would be the survival would be approximately 50% but I don't know That's what she says. Um, I had a quite my favorite plane based story from the year Is one that I read about a couple of months ago, but it's that a there's a french businessman 64 years old and his colleagues got him a present and they got him like an experience present And what they got him was a flight on a fighter jet And this was in spite of the fact as he said afterwards

He'd never expressed any interest at all in planes or fighter jets or desired to go in one So they got him this flight in his amazing fighter jet and he it took off and he felt really unstable He said he sort of flew off his seat as it took off because you know g-force and everything And he grabbed at the nearest lever to try and stabilize himself And what that lever was was the ejection mechanism And so he he accidentally ejected himself from the plane So the roof flies up the plane He flies out of the plane and had to surprise parachute land into a field and be taken

Immediately to hospital where he was absolutely fine, but resentful of his colleagues So funny, I think the ejection mechanism shouldn't be that accessible Well, you do need it if you're kind of Imagine if it wasn't accessible and you did actually want to leave the plane Yeah, and then you have to you have to solve a Rubik's cube just to get out of the plane or something Yeah, my first is in lemon but not Okay, that's it that is all of our facts Thank you so much for listening

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said in the course of this podcast We can be found on our twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland James at James Harkin Alan at Alan Davis one Don't go to Alan Davis because that bloke's had enough shit to last a lifetime And Anna you can email podcast at qo.com Yep, or you can go to our group count, which is at no such thing or our website No such thing as a fish.com all of our previous episodes were up there So go check them out. Also do go online to any book buying place and get yourself Alan's autobiography

Just ignore him, which is out now and uh, it's it's available amazon and that new book repository thing Which is really good should have looked that up, but I didn't just type it in and buy it At least you can say books repository Yes, please buy my book from your local bookseller. That's what you meant, Dan That's what I meant do what Alan says and we'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye