No Such Thing As A Fish - 36: No Such Thing As A Game Of King's Footsie

Episode Date: November 21, 2014

Episode 36 - Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Andy (@andrewhunterm) and Anna (#getannaontwitter) discuss criminal camels, ancient yo-yos, trucking bees, maize mazes and terrible reasons to call 999.

we run it on qi a few years ago yeah um 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 coming to you from the qi offices in covent garden my name is dan schreiber i'm sitting here with andy murray anna chasinski and james harkin and once again we've gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here they are chasinski fact number one my fact is that if you got into an argument in 18th century abyssinia

you could resolve it by blaming everything on the camel the camel on the camel yeah we're all arguments about who had eaten the hay i think it turned out that all crimes but yeah perpetrated by camels he blamed it on the camel too much he's bound to get the hump hey how long we've been planning that uh yeah so this was first recorded in bruce's travels into abyssinia to discover the source of the nile and this book was written between 1768 and 1773 and it was his travels around africa trying to find the source of the nile and he observed this tradition wow so what what what exactly does it evolve so what he said was he came across a town where the townspeople have been fighting for several days when it was agreed upon by the elders

of both parties that nobody had been to blame on either side but the whole wrong was the work of a camel and so they the townspeople rounded up this camel they chose a camel at random i guess you can't round up one camel yeah well it was a very clever camel it was a criminal camel it was seized and everyone in the town gathered around and one by one they speared the camel and he records that they upgraded the camel with all the wrongs done so they told the camel everything it done wrong shouted at it for a while each one of them speared it and then apparently retired fully satisfied as to the wrongs they had received from the camel so yeah there's quite a long history of blaming things on animals isn't there like scapegoating for instance it's a famous

one there was a case in st. kilda i think where a great orc was accused of being responsible for a storm that had ravaged st. kilda um it was captured and put on trial and found guilty in stone to death this is a real animal presumably or it's like a bird right a uk is a bird it's no extinct that was one of the first things i ever researched for qi was the great orc because i joined during the g series they used them for everything on st. kilda didn't they yes they used filmers and gannets and orcs and they ate porridge for breakfast which was you know sprinkled with great orc shavings and they had they had yeah they used to go and kill them in in their thousands and they men would just walk around because they're flightless they would go to the islands where they

flocks and they would just go around clubbing them to death because it saved ammunition so you didn't have to waste bullets killing them and then the last one was seen you know floating out at sea in the mid 19th century and that was it it's never been seen since wow awkward oh my god ancient Egyptians used to when like they felt they've been particularly sinful used to sacrifice an animal and lump all their sins onto this animal and sacrifice it and then they'd sell it to foreigners because they didn't want to eat the sin none classic tease the foreigner joke so is that this was where we get the scapegoat from is that right no the scapegoat is from the Torah from Jewish folklore i think and what they would do is on the day of atonement the Jewish high priest would

lay his hands on a live goat confess all the sins of the children of israel and then send it away into the wilderness it's like a Santa Claus who just gets the naughty list but then has to deal with it um the ancient Greeks used people for this kind of purpose didn't they so they would have a person i think it was often a disabled person who they would again they pile all their sins upon this person and send him into exile and that would be that person taking their sins away and he was called a pharmacos which is where we get pharmacy pharmaceuticals is from because he would remedy the sins of a of a community yeah it's amazing yeah it's quite a cool word origin and kind of sort of unpleasant was there a reward for it beforehand did you live quite well before you

were cast out yes you did you used to be treated as kind of a blessed and cursed so they'd be preserved and they'd be like they'd be hosted around the village and does that not make it worse because like the difference between being sent into the wilderness and just having a normal life is one thing but the difference between that and having a really great life is even worse yeah well tom hanks explores this theme in the film joe versus the volcano i believe um if you remember that one didn't that no i didn't know that was a great philosophical oh yeah three sides of a film and the qi's gain was newsnight reviews last wasn't it camels does anyone have anything about camels i do go on uh google you know google maps i do yeah okay so street view yeah they've had one

camel with a camera on its back walking the liwa desert that's good yeah it's basically a camel has mapped one of the deserts one of the great deserts one camel just one camel that's a lot for a camel to do yeah his name's raffia that's a great name yeah 150 kilometers southwest of abadabi and uh yeah just went is it on its own how does they know how how are they directing it well in the picture that i've seen online as a dude walking it you can train camels to go in certain directions by giving them food if they go in one way and then they'll keep going there because they think that's where they'll find food and that's a way that they transport drugs across the sahara oh yeah they train these camels to walk from western africa all the way up to the mediterranean

they train them and train them and train them and then they put the drugs on the back of the camels and they don't need any human assistance at all so if they get caught if the camels get caught by the police then there's no humans yeah no but again camels getting blamed because they're the camel's going to be the one that takes the rap camel milk is more nutritious than cow milk isn't it is it yeah i don't know why they don't drink it in australia for instance why they've got more camels than anywhere else or they're all feral they started selling in america why wouldn't you yeah they do and i think they're trying to make it into a baby milk as well australia um sells camels to saudi arabia does it yeah saudi arabia also imports sand yeah for use in construction

exactly so the saudi sand isn't good for construction whereas the australian one is and also the saudi camels are for breeding and racing whereas the australian ones are good for meat um i've got i i was looking into just general excuses because i do like that that's the scapegoat but it is also just a fantastic excuse to sort of say let's no longer argue about this stuff and um so can i okay some some of my favorite sporting excuses yeah this one comes from us sprinter la sean merit oh yeah um he was banned because he did a drug called the hea i'm not going to try and pronounce the longer version of that word um but he claims it wasn't to improve his performance he claims this is a quote i was trying to make my penis bigger he didn't realize that they had this kind

of dragon it was to improve his performance but just not yeah it would probably not help his spot in performance at all would it it's still it could be worse it could be a high jumper this is an interesting i don't think you know how high jump works yeah he left that behind yeah here's another one uh so okay there's a cyclist called tyler hamilton who did you know about this one i know him okay so he got busted um because they'd found someone else's red blood cells oh yeah blood which suggested that uh there was all this thing about replacing your blood and stuff um his claim was that it was his unborn twin oh he said that his mother had had a twin who died um weirdly medical authorities have said that that's plausible that could definitely happen yeah it's

called chimera ism isn't it how is it and the idea is that you um had two um babies and then at a very very early stage one of them um was enveloped into the other one it could be even just when it's a few cells right and it means that you can sometimes people who have one eye which is different color that could be cut due to chimera ism but also yeah it's really interesting actually yeah oh okay so blaming people blaming your mistakes on other people is socially contagious in the same way that a yawn is um so they've done studies and they found that when you watch someone else blaming someone then you will blame someone yourself and that's more likely to happen wow so there can be a culture of blame yeah that's amazing also you're just mentioning yawning

has made me yawn now so thank you for that actually i think it was probably a dance fault okay uh time to move on to fact number two and fact number two is my fact uh my fact this week is that in ancient Greece they used to play with yoyos now i know that everyone in this room is not as surprised by that as i am but i just find that's amazing it's great yeah i was amazing oh okay because james and ana seem to know that but i saw this i went to a wikipedia page yeah i thought they just played with xboxes there's a there's actually called them kai boxes exciting very good um there's there's a vase and there's an illustration on this vase of someone from ancient Greece a boy playing with a yoyo and i looked at that and i was like what the

hell is that doing there it's really weird it's so out of place in time for me i'll say to james earlier i feel like that's like if i was looking for evidence of time travel and i didn't you know we didn't know stuff about history which now i know it's not time travel but i didn't know that that was like i think that's the only one there is that jar i think and i don't think we have written evidence of it so and i don't think yoyo's reappeared until quite a lot later so maybe he was a time traveler wow and he made onto a vase it makes you think as well that if you did get put back into ancient Greece as a time traveler then i know i have no uses but i do know how to walk the dog and rock a cradle in yoyo's would instantly be mr popular you'd be on all the vases i'd be on

to be fair though we only have that one vase because almost all the vases in the world have been smashed from that time so yoyo's so maybe it's that maybe every single vase in any case yoyo on it yeah but they do think they do think it appeared in ancient china way before there's three locations that they kind of say it could belong to ancient Greece ancient china and the philippines the philippines is less so of a strong argument except for the fact that they call it the yoyo and that's where america adopted the word yoyo from but in philippines they used it as a weapon we thought on qi certainly that yoyo's were never used as weapons and we got quite close to running it as a general ignorance on the show and i don't think we did in the end but then i read something

by president aquino the third of the philippines and he reckons that they do have evidence that it was used as a weapon after all so according to the president it's true but we still really don't think it he said that their version that they used was large and with sharp edges and studs and attached to thick 20 foot ropes for flinging its enemies or prey i've had a different etymology for yoyo which is the it was known in france in the late 18th century as the juju de normandie which just means a little toy so that's another possible one okay it's a it's one those again you look into the history of it and suddenly it starts appearing everywhere napoleon's army it says online that fought with yoyo's no he just used to play with them in the kind of

downside yeah well in turn i read that napoleon played i mean surely that's a myth there are paintings of yeah the napoleonic army aren't there with yoyo's almost all pictures of people playing with yoyo's in the 18th 17th centuries are adults and it was a really fashionable thing to do like you get parisian ladies in the 18th century playing with yoyo's as they're walking along with their little parasols and their smart clothes i think was quite trendy i just didn't know it was such a big deal the yoyo it was a big deal when i was a kid yeah me too in the 80s late 80s when i was a kid it was massive in school we all had yoyos same in the 90s it was well it was voted the biggest fad toy of the 20th century because every childhood has had a yoyo being a

big part of it yeah there was a massive one in 1988 and they the company that made this particular type of yoyo sold a couple of hundred in 1987 and more than half a million in 1988 how come it just became a massive fad and everyone in every school had to have one the company that made them was called pms international it's already pissed off woman looking for something to buy our kids um you used to be able to become rich and famous for scalex trick in america really yeah it was massively popular in the 1960s um they used to show live tournaments on us tv and there were more slot car facilities and there were bowling alleys in america that's in the 1960s and today there are none no way yeah what's a slot car so it's like so um i had a scalex trick it's the same

it's just like it just slots in on a little sort of plugs into the track um another famous toy car maybe the most famous toy car uh yeah go on um brum brum oh wow he's a cartoon from the brum the the little car who goes on adventures he's not a toy it's high yeah it's a cartoon hot wheels they were quite famous yeah i was going for bigger i was going for the cozy coop you know that you know the one i mean right no it's it's the red and yellow car oh yes you have that as a kid yeah as a kid that you sit inside life size for a kid oh yeah yeah yeah one of those um so that has been the best selling car in the us it was throughout the 90s and the last time uh the last stores i have was from 2008 in the us and the uk it sells more than

any other make of car that's great wouldn't that be great if that was the rescue plan for general motors well we've actually got a new model we are very excited and it's going to reinvigorate the american car industry well it's not a not a long way from smart cars are they they're true yeah but they're closer to flinstone cars as well well that's similar to the fact that lego is supposed to be the largest um tire manufacturer yeah you know you can buy a lego nazi concentration camp that is just been yeah you can yeah it was designed by an artist and i think it was bought by the warsaw jewish memorial museum or something and so it's not meant to be right so it's not a commercial product i don't think so they've said that lego people are getting angrier as the years

go on aren't they yeah expressions can i tell you about twister yes i love twister i love twister so much is it an ancient this is not an ancient greek game no um that'll be great yeah it's on the other side of the bars where they've never lived they have ancient persian rugs with this circles on there that'd be great um so okay the inventor is a guy called rain goi guya uh rain goya i think is his name i don't know how to pronounce it um but he wanted to call it pretzel although one of his initial names for it was kings footsie um but the thing is it tanked when they first sold it because people thought it was risque did they sell it a sex in the box or something well other people complained supposedly that the other manufacturers or possibly the bosses at the other firm which made

it and they were going to give up sears didn't want it for their catalog and the one last ditch attempt they had was to get it on a tv show and the pr firm pushing twister got it onto the tonight show with johnny carson and he played a round of it with um eve gabore who was a sex symbol at the time and the next morning the queue was 50 deep um and they sold three million that year wow and it was just it suddenly took off because that one appearance on tv it's weird when because toys if they take off they really take off yeah like my especially toy helicopters um my little i i went to see my little niece recently it was her birthday and i was shocked that there's a whole new toy that's dominating everything and it's looms looming is the biggest thing is that a giant

weaving looms yes i can use rubber bands and you loom bands to go around your wrist you make necklaces all that it's the biggest go walk by any kid shop at the moment look in the window it's all looms on display um get this in 2008 the national toy hall of fame awarded oldest toy to the stick also the cardboard box is in that hall of fame is it yeah imagine at christmas and your parents go good news we bought you something from the toy hall of fame time for back number three and that is andy my fact this week is that most honeybee hives in the usa live on trucks on flatbed trucks they do not live in fields where you might think or in stationary apires most bees in the usa are driven around and rented out so that they can pollinate

plants they never find a home they just the truck is their home i think some i don't know about how it happens during winter but i think during the summer season there are billions of bees being driven all over america um and they stop and they're released to pollinate a crop and then they go back to the hive in the evening or whatever it is they finish doing all the pollinating and then away they go because of colony collapse is it because it's partly because of that yeah although colony collapse has slowed down they're not sure why but even so a third of all bees in america die each year um they think it's because of these chemicals used called neonicotinoids i thought bees would die within a year they live the lifespan well the lifespan is really variable depending on how hard

they work so i think we're all in our late 80s i think worker bees um in hot weather where i think they have to work harder i have a lifespan of about six weeks and then if it's a cold year then they can last about 10 months they move around slowly don't they're sort of sluggish the other thing i read about old bees is if you give them a job that normally young bees do then their brains stop aging or even reverse age they get younger it's like doing sudoku for them wow yeah apart from i don't think the young people are doing sudoku these days if you started playing with looms then you're okay or if you teach an old bee to play call of duty advanced warfare yeah yeah cool and the brain chemistry can change can't it so if so i think honeybees do lots of jobs so there are certain

like worker bees are just workers um and uh drone bees etc but honeybees do lots of jobs and when they switch from one job to another their actual brain chemistry changes and i think they're one of the only animals that's known to do that in order to adapt them to the other job um but they do so uh we do need them to pollinate our crops to me i think you pollinate a third of the world's crops they're responsible for 20 billion dollars worth of food production in america alone i think don't flies pollinate flowers more than than bees do no there were lots of other things do as well so there are 20 000 species of bee which know and the honeybees the one that gets all the press so the agave plant which tequila's made out of is um pollinated by bats yeah um the coco plants

is pollinated by midges yeah are we about to go through all the plants let's see what they're pollinating this is my this is my smart moment never been invited to party again are you drinking tequila oh i can't help but noticing you're eating an almond and i wonder if i can tell you about the pollination of the almond it's a peanut fuck off there is a bat if you're listening to this stop what you're doing and google the tube-lipped nectar bat because it has the longest tongue proportional to its body look of any animal it's longer i think than the animal itself or it's two-thirds of the animal's length and it has such a long tongue it has to keep a bit of it in its rib cage and they specialize in

pollinating and drinking the nectar from these flowers with incredibly long trumpets so that's what they they have to do they have to have this unbelievable tongue wow um i found a great headline to do with the trucks uh carrying all the bees oh yeah and the headline is this is someone who made a connection why are so many bee carrying trucks crashing apparently in the last few years there's been serious problems with these trucks that are carrying the bees overturning on the road smashing down and releasing millions of bees into the road just millions swarming everywhere presumably that happens mostly not on motorways but on bee roads i enjoyed that so they crash they crash yeah they crash and they release all these bees it

caused us hell for them and there was a really funny thing of there's been like two to three of these major crashes millions of bees throughout and then one time another truck uh came along that crashed but it wasn't carrying bees it was carrying honey and it's filled uh something like 200 gallons of honey which attracted just all thousands of swarms of bees and so they had another bee crisis on their hands and then you can't you have to get them the right ones back onto the truck when you fix the truck and you have to separate them plenty had a theory that if honey bees were caught outdoors at night and they they had to camp out basically and they would sleep on their backs to protect their wings from the dew but in many ways it was rubbish right yes it was

interesting but not true have you heard of the superhero the red bee no he's one of the worst superheroes of all time i just i love him um he's his identity is rick rally he's an assistant district attorney in oregon and his modus operandi is to put on a red and yellow costume and he has trained bees with which he fights nazis and this is from the wikipedia page for the red bee his favorite bee is named michael and lives inside his belt buckle for use in special circumstances okay time for our final fact and that is james okay my fact this week is the sacramento police department get at least one call a week from people stuck in the world's largest corn maze that's really funny wow i could tell by the way you laughed no it was i just like the thought of it

of just the phone ringing in the in the station so how big is this corn maze it's 63 acres in size so what do the police do when they're called often the police will get into the maze and then though they themselves will have to call the bigger police yeah until it's kind of like a conga line that they eventually find yeah i think they just calm them down really because it's mostly that people are like freaking out a little bit because they're stuck okay and then presumably the owners of the maze and can then go in and sort it out there was it must be a nightmare being like okay we shot at six nine o'clock now there's something there we shot it yeah we shot at six but last entry is at 9 30 in the morning that's when you know you're in a serious there was a guy in in england

who had a maze it was quite it wasn't like a big like corn one it was a small one and he was mowing it he was mowing the paths and he got to about halfway through and then he realized he had to go to his daughter's school thing and so he had to leave but he couldn't get out of his own maze and so he just used his lawn mower and just plowed straight through and gave himself an exit i was the world's worst maze now yeah exactly he said i've just found the article he said i'd already had feedback suggesting the maze was tricky to negotiate before i became lost myself next year i think i'll make it a bit easier next year i'll listen to the bloody feedback but yeah mazes in general they're pretty good i love mazes i haven't been a maze for ages i don't

think i've ever been to a maze really let's all go to hampton court in germany mazes are called irregarden or error gardens oh yeah how good is that yeah that's good but they used to be so mazes grew out of labyrinths is that right yeah so a labyrinth is a maze with only one entrance and exit so you can't get lost in it you just go straight and you come straight back out wait lots of mazes surely got only one exit an entrance do you mean one path yeah there are no dead ends yeah so you walk in and you keep walking yeah you get to the middle and then you get back out again and there's no way you can't turn left or right you just have to go in that direction i see because that yeah there's all the stuff about the labyrinth creed with theses and the mind at all but you

wouldn't get lost in that you wouldn't even need a thread so was the labyrinth just effectively a more complicated walk um like what was the purpose behind it so actually that's nice yeah it does look nice but people used it for like religious reasons sometimes or because it's a very particular pattern one way that you could do it is you would you would walk in and on the way into the center of the labyrinth you would be thinking about your problems and then the way out you would think about your solutions that's supposed to be a contemplative thing apparently like also norwegian sailors would would go through these mazes just before they went and it would be good luck so they used it as a charm thing sometimes as well i read other another theory um

either symbolizing the hard life of an early christian or showing the entanglements of sin or my favorite uh you would it would be like doing a mini pilgrimage if you're committed a small sin go to hampton course but like that's cheating because labyrinths are quite fun or mazes are quite fun but i think it's like go and have a long walk and think about what you've done i suppose so yeah that's it go on a long walk but stay within yes stay within sight of me yeah we close at six i think they've they've found a maze in peru that's more than 3000 years old i think so it's in the peruvian andes and it's beneath charvinda huanta which is this ancient site and the whole maze is underground and they think that i acted as a ceremonial like massive

and disorienting acoustic chamber because if you go down into it the way that it's built means that your when your voice bounces off the walls madly and like if someone else in another part of the maze you can never find them and you think they're coming from a different direction and if you're above the maze it sounds absolutely terrifying and they found at this site all these uh kind of trumpet things and if you blow the trumpets it sounds sounds like a torture thing yeah i think so yeah so you get lost in this maze and also sounds are coming from everywhere there's an old scandinavian punishment um called the uh cave of roses and that was you would go into a dark cave and then they would throw a load of poisonous animals at you and you just have to

stay there for a while and then come out and hopefully not be bitten really it's a bit like i'm a celebrity kind of yeah cave of roses is a misleading title they all have misleading names torture equipments because you very rarely get one called the excruciating foot cutter off a thing there's one called the pair of anguish oh yeah which is uh something that piece of metal right and it gets put into your mouth and then i think it's expanded and it hurts your door terribly or it's heated and you know it's all but the pair you know oh pair oh i'll have a pair of anguish not so good yeah the judge has a bit of an eye for the amateur dramatic side of things he's sent i sentenced you to eat a pair of anguish people make mazes into weird things in fact i think i

knew something recently done of um brian blatt's face was turned into a maze slash crop circle that's right yes pretty great yeah um in the november 2004 election america a farmer carved giant faces of john carrey and president bush into his cornfield in pleasant grove in utah which i just think when farmers do that you're ruining your crops right yeah they do have her um to bring in tourists and stuff don't they do i can they make that back i mean let's all go and see john carrey's massive face yeah in a massive draw in a place formerly known as pleasant grove by studying sheep in mazes they found that when left to their own devices sheep tend to turn to the left that's so interesting when left to their own devices when they're not constantly being

bothered would you just leave me alone for a bit so i can think okay i'm gonna go to left you can make an infinite maze in a finite room if you use virtual reality and they've made these particular types of virtual reality it is but it's quite clever they've made these particular types of virtual reality and the illusion is so strong that people keep walking around and they don't realize they're going around in circles so you're walking around in one room but it feels like you've walked miles but actually you haven't that's okay that is really clever isn't that's really cool that's because i i saw a thing online about a japanese janitor who had drawn a maze did you read about this oh yeah i do kind of remember his daughter dug it up in amongst his papers just

found it it was just it was a piece of paper and she put it online and everyone listening if you if you want to see something amazing just go look at it it's the most intricate it's and she sells it now she sells prints of it because it's so beautiful and and when you said infinite and it was in virtual yeah i kind of thought oh no when you look at this this looks like it just goes on you know when people say like the coastlines are it's the idea of fractals so that the closer you look in at something it just gets more and more complicated so it's just infinite in terms of yeah wow but to be fair i bet that the corridors were pretty dirty no one can find anything in the school anymore i found out about ways you can navigate if you are lost just in an urban area

okay one way one great way of doing it satellite dishes almost all point in the same direction in britain they almost all point to the southeast wow yeah also going downhill is normally towards the river or the coast if you're in a coastal place and if you're lost in the morning you can find a station by going against the flow of people because everyone's going to work from the station if you're in the center of town and if you're lost or you might be going towards a huge fire yeah it's not a perfect system let's end with some stupid reasons for calling 9-1-1 or 9-9-9 okay there was a man who received a letter asking him to attend a hospital appointment on tuesday the 6th of february and he called 9-9-9 to tell them that tuesday wasn't the 6th yeah so i think the cornish police force

released a top 10 list of the most ridiculous emergency calls they'd have and i think three of them were bird related and uh so one of them was a woman saying i can see a really rare bird sitting on top of a telegraph pole who shall i ring um i read a thing on it's doing the rounds on the internet at the moment it's not particularly funny um because it was a lady in distress but it was a really interesting thing where she called up 9-9-9 or 9-1-1 and she goes hi i'd like to just put in an order for a pizza ham and cheese she said something pepperoni they go sorry man this is this is the police she goes yep i know i'd love to get a ham and cheese please so please and they go what uh sorry you know this is the police yep so can you can you uh do you need

me to tell you my location or do you know if you got it and they go do you know is there something going on there yes there is yep uh how long will that be um okay man we'll we'll just find your location we'll be there very soon yep quick hurry um well we were very hungry kind of thing like she had it's become a famous phone call that uh that the guy who took the phone call released it was a domestic abuse call and he and they tracked in they worked out that that guy had gotten in trouble before twice for domestic abuse so they were like this is definitely a sincere call right that is really and well done for the operators realizing yes yeah in june of this year a woman in birmingham phoned 9-9-9 because she was unhappy with how many sprinkles she had been

given on her ice cream and they were all on the wrong side as well maybe she phoned 99 okay that's it that's all of our facts thank you very much for listening if you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this show uh you can find us on at qi podcast uh you can also get us individually on our twitter handles i'm on at schreiberland james at eggshaped andy at andrew hunter m and anna uh you can email podcast at qi.com and uh yeah that's it from us we're going to be back again next week with another episode no such thing as a fish we'll catch you then goodbye you