No Such Thing As A Fish - 382: No Such Thing As A Waiter Made Of Potatoes

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss delicious dissections, tempting tatties, provocative publications and rearing rocks. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that Cheryl Tweedy is the only member of Girls Allowed who doesn't share her name with a type of potato.

And is that deliberate? Is that a snub from the potato community? I think perhaps not. I think it's just a coincidence in the world. In fact it's not even a coincidence because one of them doesn't share their name with a potato. If they all share names with potatoes that would be an incredible coincidence but as it happens, one of them doesn't.

I've not seen this come up anywhere on the internet James, this is not from Oh My God Facts right? No. What is this? This is from my weird brain. So I was reading an article about potatoes and I noticed there was a banana potato and an almond potato and I thought that was kind of weird. I wonder if there's lots of other foodstuffs that are actually potatoes.

And so I found a list on Wikipedia of potatoes that started working my way down it and I found one called Nadine and I remembered that there was someone called Nadine in Girls Allowed so I thought I wonder if there's other potatoes named after people from Girls Allowed. So I found a website with all the world's potatoes on it and searched all the names and there's a Kimberley and a Nicola and there is Maria Sarah, so Sarah is in that name which I think counts because especially because Sarah, well Sarah Harding's mother is called Marie so that's like a... We're not going for the mums of the members of Girls Allowed.

Well it's an even more of a slam that Cheryl doesn't get one. They're heading into mum territory and not giving Cheryl. Yeah that's true. Sarah's got hers and her mums, yeah. There is a Cherie potato so that's quite close but yeah I'm not really trying to say anything important about the world here, just there's a lot of types of potato and there's a few members of Girls Allowed and they kind of, some of the names overlap. But I think it's maybe because there's lots of potatoes that are named after women so

there's like Annabelle, Anya, Augusta, Barbara, Cara, Charlotte, Desiree, Juliette, Linda. I mean that's just me listing names of potatoes now so. Yeah. There's an Anna potato. Is there? But there isn't, Dan, James or Anandie. So Anna is the Cheryl Tweedy of No Such Thing as a Fish. She's a reverse Tweedy.

Yeah. Reverse Tweedy, yeah. You're the Cheryl. No, no, no. She's the Cheryl in that her position in relation to potato naming is unique among the members of No Such Thing as a Fish. Yeah. James, I'm just curious.

Was this the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, ahdb.org.uk website that you got your potato names on? No, it wasn't actually. Is that where you got your potato names from? Certainly is. And they've, I mean, I don't know if this is a comprehensive list. I suspect it's not because there are thousands of potato varieties. But there are romantic ones.

So there's Excalibur, Lionheart, Mayan Twilight, Mulan Rouge is the kind of potato. So these are all the kind of sexy ones. There is also- In what way outside of their name are they sexy, Andy? Just in their name, literally just in their name, but they don't, they don't have shapes that are sort of, oh, that's a hot potato. The Amorosa potato is not shaped like something especially sexual, no. But I do hope that on the back of this podcast, you've changed the meaning of the phrase hot potato to just literally mean a hot potato.

There is another Girls Allowed and Potato link, which is the only one I've found and this is solely because of Googling off the back of James's fact. But Nadine from Girls Allowed, is she Nadine Coral? Yes. She loves or loved when they were doing their gigs to eat a potato before going on stage. And in one of the interviews she did with the magazine, she listed the top five ways she liked to eat a potato. Okay, now I'm just going to run these past you because this is important.

The top five ways Nadine Coral likes to eat a potato are, see if you can spot the floor mashed, chips, roast, jacket, and new. Now, new is not a way of eating a potato, it's just a kind of potato. She means boiled potato. I call them new. Then she should have said boiled. If you go to a restaurant and you order new potatoes with your steak, you know what you're going to get.

You're not going to get chips, so they go, oh, actually, you know, you ordered new potatoes, these are chipped new potatoes. I think Andy's right. Nadine's clearly a potato connoisseur. She's going to be devastated when she hears this episode. Our interviewer is just asking her questions about potatoes because she's Irish. That's why I'm here. I think she must have brought it up first, but she would have a potato before every show

for a decade. Wow. Whether in any of her five favorite methods or her four favorite methods and one favorite kind of potato. The restaurant central in Lima, in Peru, has 50 different ways to prepare potatoes. Wow. Are you going to give us, have you read the list? No, but I have been there.

Okay. What kind of potato did you go for, inside out potato or something? They kind of just give you what you get. It's like a menu, but there was one dish that was just potatoes in lots of different ways. So like one of them was quite salty and one of them was bread made out of potato and one of them was something else. Cool. Chris, did you visit the International Potato Center while you were there in Peru?

You know what? I didn't. I was on holiday and even I will draw the line dragging my wife to the International Potato Center. Absolutely. You don't draw the line. How's this? That's well within your line.

You're just sitting there regretting it now. Okay. Fine. I didn't know it was that. Exactly. The truth comes out. Yeah, there's an International Potato Center. I managed to find a slideshow of interesting potatoes that they have online and it was

quite a journey going through the slides. They have a potato that they like to show which is called the Jana Pina Potato and that's nicknamed the Weeping Bride. The idea is that the potato needs to be peeled properly by a to-be wife so that the mother-in-law can see that they've got the skills to peel the potatoes as such. It's a very lumpy potato if they can get past all of the bumps and the crevices. It shows that they can navigate a potato. That's interesting.

Peru takes its potatoes very seriously. Yeah. They have got the International Potato Center. Yeah. Then they have occasional turf wars, don't they, with chili. A lot of international potatoes, the really big hitters of the potato world, come from an island, I think it's Chiloé, which is off the coast of Chile and potatoes are so popular there that some people carry a potato in their pocket to ward off the spells of

spiteful neighbors. There was a guy called André Contreras Mendes. He died in 2014, but his kind of lifetime's ambition was to go around Chiloé just trying to find unusual potatoes because in Chiloé you had a lot of people who kind of lived on their little homestead and you would have lots of elderly women who would look after the potatoes and then they would pass down the seeds of their potatoes to the next generation, to the next generation. So if you didn't have someone going around kind of collecting the seeds and saving these

types of potato, then when the generations died with the last old lady, then the potatoes would too die. Okay. Very cool. What kind of a name is Chiloé if it's part of Chile? I mean, they've literally just dropped a potato shaped thing into the middle of the world. Seriously, unimaginative day for these guys.

It's amazing. Mr. Potato Head has rebranded. Big news this year. Okay. He's just Potato Head now, or in fact they are just Potato Head to be more inclusive of the brand because the Potato Head family is a whole family. I don't think I realized that. Yeah.

Have you not seen Toy Story? Oh my God. There's a Mrs. Potato right there in Toy Story, isn't there? He just steals the attention so much. I think it was that the overall brand was called Mr. Potato Head and now the overall brand is Potato Head and they made a big thing about saying, look, you can still buy a Mr. Potato Head within the family of Potato Head. It was a really…

It was one of the… It was a crazed media panic of the most predictable type. Every headline saying, Mr. Potato Head's gone gender neutral and even though the press release it's gone out is on every Mr. Potato Head packet, it says Mr. Potato Head to make it clear that's who you're buying. They're just saying, look, we can't call a whole brand Mr. Potato Head. Just like my whole family just being named after my dad. Actually, I suppose that's what surnames are.

But like you can really imagine that press release going through the entire company and everyone just going, this will be fine, won't it? No one's going to take offense to this. You know, the biggest Mr. Potato Head in history, I guess you could say, is a guy who we've mentioned once before, who's Antoine Augustin Parmentier, but he's the guy who rehabilitated potatoes in France. They were seen as being incredibly dangerous, even though people were eating them in Germany at that time.

And he made them popular by this long PR campaign to get French people into potatoes. But it was partly because France was already looking for an excuse to eat potatoes, if you like, because they had had failed grain harvests and things and there were big worries about this. And there were prizes to identify alternative sources of nourishment. Such a cool era when the government would just say, there's a prize if you can think of anything we can eat. And he wrote an essay on potatoes and it won.

And then he hung out with a friend of the podcast, Benjamin Franklin, and was telling him all about these great things called potatoes. And then he ended up hosting a dinner, Parmentier, where everything was made of potatoes. What like the chairs, the table, the door, the house? God save. Kind of like this restaurant James went to, everything on the plates was made of potatoes. So they served fish that was actually made of potatoes. And then they drank vodka, which was distilled from potatoes.

That sounds like a very bland meal. I don't know if salt was allowed or not. I think that's a big part of the... Every bite is disappointing. I agree with Annette. Plot twist on every moment. The fork is made of potatoes. What?

My plate is made of potatoes. The waiter is made of potatoes. A potato waiter. And then you look down at your own body and it's, I'm a potato. Potatoes outside of Mr. Potato Head, as Anna was mentioning, being in the news. It has had quite a lot of press since the pandemic started. I was looking just in, you know, news items to see where it's popped up. Quite a few headlines.

Woman accidentally turned herself into a potato for video meeting and couldn't figure out how to fix it. Do you remember that? She was, yeah, Lizette Ocampo was her name, political director at People for the American Way and there was a filter on her Microsoft Teams app which turned her into a potato. She couldn't change it, had to do the entire meeting as a potato, a speaking potato. Microsoft have developed a filter that knocks out potato chip noises from your conversation. This is another headline when you're talking on Microsoft Teams.

What noise is potato chips making? So if you're, sorry, what I meant is, if you're crisps, exactly, so if you've got your hand in a bag of crisps and you're talking, it will knock out that noise because the AI has recognized that noise. Yeah. So it kind of filters it out. So you can, you know, as everyone does, eat potato crisps during meetings. Stop calling them potato crisps or potato chips.

What do you mean? What are you doing? But they are crisps, right? Oh, Anna's about to strike a national this time. She's just like crisps, I think is what she's about to say. Just crisps. Just call them what we've always called them. Okay.

I was just really trying to drill home the potato connection, even though obviously they're still connected without the word involved. Oh, I like that. You're helping the kids out. Yeah. I just want to make sure. And then in 2020, last one that I found was the inaugural potato photographer of the year prize.

Oh, yeah. That must be a hard job because they're quite hard to catch in the wild. They're always hiding behind a bush. Exactly. Nature's moles. Yeah. Yeah. It's an annual award that's happening every year now going forward a thousand pounds

to the winner and you send in, yeah, you send in your picture of a potato that you've taken. It's a very creative thing. So the 2020 winner went down to a potato getting a lockdown haircut. So it's obviously quite stylistic and artistic. A lot of these photos. All the potatoes are actually potatoes in the wild or people planting potatoes or going through fields.

I would have gone for it instead of a haircut, Dan, I would have gone for a Shakespeare King Lear, but with potatoes. And you've got a potato Duke of Gloucester having its eyes removed because that's what happens in the play. Spoiler alert. Oh, because you call those things eyes on potatoes. Yeah. Exactly.

And in King Lear, the Duke of Gloucester is blinded. Okay. Well, 2022 potato photography year competition, here we come. Have you guys heard of the ketchup and chips plant? No. No. Is this an actual plant? This is an actual plant you can buy from a company called Tom Tato and on the top above

ground, it's a tomato plant and below ground, it's a potato plant. So you can get from one plant, your chips and your ketchup. Amazing. That's so good. Can I say chips, James? Sorry. Can I just clarify what you mean? Potato chips.

Sorry. I'm sorry. Not potato crisps. No. Can you, speaking of chips though, can you guys guess what the egg and chips plant is that you can buy from the same company? Egg and chips. It's a, oh, oh, it's a chicken which lays a potato.

Oh, beautiful. It's GM food gone mad. That's, that would be great, but this is a plant. Oh, okay. But before we get to Andy quickly, that definitely, if we get a photo of that, it's potato photographer of the year 2022. No question. Yeah.

An egg and chips plant. So it's got to be, it's got to be a potato below ground. Yeah. You've got that halfway there. But are you, chickens don't grow on trees as a single, is it an, is it an aubergine? It's an egg plant. He's got it. Yeah.

Aubergine above ground, potatoes below ground. So good. It sounds, that sounds like one of those sayings, aubergine's above ground, potatoes below ground. It sounds like I'm this in the streets, but I'm this in the sheets, you know? I'm an aubergine above ground, but I'm a potato below. That's actually horrible. It's disgusting. I'm not sure you want the potatoes to be this.

Okay, it's time for fact number two. And that's my fact. My fact this week is that dissecting cadavers doesn't put you off your food. In fact, it actually makes you hungrier. Do you mean dissecting? Say it normally. Sorry. Dissecting.

Dissecting. Yeah. It sounds pronounced, guys. So fun fact for listeners, we had a chat before this episode recording started about how to say the word dissecting. And it turns out that dissecting is when you're only dividing something into two. Yes. But dissecting is only what pedants say.

So in James Bond movies, when that laser is heading towards him to cut him right in half, the villains should be saying, no, Mr Bond, I expect you to be dissected. No, dissected. What? Are you kidding? Because that's in two and he would be cut in two pieces. No, Mr Bond, I expect you to dissect. Yeah.

Yeah. He doesn't want James to dissect something. Dyssecting is an active verb. So, Dan, what about these cadavers that I hear so much about? Yeah, sorry, that is disgusting. Let's go back to your fact. People get hungry with dead bodies. Is it because it's meat?

Like they're like literally cutting up meat? No, it's not quite that, although it's a possibility that that's involved as well. But what it is, is that in order for students, medical students to practice dissection on bodies, the bodies have to be preserved and they're preserved in formaldehyde. So that's a chemical that helps for them to stay fresh and they can go through and they can practice all sorts of things. Now there's a phenomenon which has been reported by so many doctors online and I was told this by a doctor friend and I happen to have two doctor friends.

So I asked another one, have you ever heard of or experienced when you were dissecting a body, a thing called formaldehyde hunger and he went, oh my god, I didn't even know that was a thing. Yes, I've had that that entire time and everyone online talks about it. So the idea is formaldehyde does something to you where it makes you extremely hungry and if you look online at medical students talking about it, they talk about it's not just a hunger, they get starving to the point where as they're wrapping up, they all start talking about what they're going to eat, they exchange menu ideas.

And one of them's like, wait a minute, this guy had nine fingers when he came in. It seems to be pretty widely acknowledged. I could believe that all my doctor friends hadn't told me about it before when I asked them, they were all like, oh yeah, of course, yeah, you're starving. Absolutely. All you want to do is bite the head off that dead body. It's like, well, why haven't you mentioned this before? Very weird.

There was a study in rats, wasn't there? Like there always has been. And they injected rats with formaldehyde, which is where you get formaldehyde and you put it in water and when they gave these rats formaldehyde, it increased how much sodium they took in. So they really craved salt. So that is a tiny bit of science, which suggests that it might be true. But obviously for obvious reasons, one of which being that formaldehyde is toxic and

carcinogenic, they haven't done the experiments on humans yet. Yes, they do think that formaldehyde might cause sick building syndrome, which I've never heard of, but which is what it sounds like. The building gets sick. Oh, OK, apparently it's not what it sounds like. To be fair, that is exactly what you made it sound like. Sorry, yeah, I've just seen how you could hear that. It's where people get sick in a building.

Sick person in a building syndrome is the full name. And it's because formaldehyde has loads of uses I didn't know about, but one of them is as glue on wooden furniture. And if you're in a building which has lots of that, you can get headache or you can get nauseous and they found in a study in Japan in about the year 2000 that you can scatter lots of teabags about the place. And if you do that, it'll soak it up and you will get less ill. Soaks up about 60 to 90 percent of the formaldehyde in the air.

Really? You just scattered them around the building? That seems to be what they did. Yeah, it feels risky to me as a tea lover. I would I would think, oh, great, someone's left out some teabags for me. Yeah, I'll just brew these up. If you just see teabags on the floor, you just pick them up and think, well, I might as well use them. Do you? It depends.

It is context dependent, but it's mostly dependent on how recently I've had a cup of tea and if it's been more than half an hour, I'll probably pick it up. I was looking into the history of dissection and how medical students have been doing over the years. And I was reading a fantastic book called The Butchering Art, which is by Lindsay Fitzharris. And in the intro of her book, it just paints this amazing picture of what it was like in the 19th century in London when the sections were done publicly. So you would go into a theater and the rafters above where people

could observe medical students would be packed not only with medical students, but random people off the street who were just fascinated with what was going on. They had to have people come in and make way and push people back so that the surgeon had enough space to actually do the operation. Like that's how tight it was. And there would be heckles as they were doing it if people were in the way. So someone's doing surgery and people are going, heads, heads, saying, get your head out of the way so I get a better view of it.

All right, not this is what we want you to cut off. Elbows next. Shoulders, knees, toes. And it was, you know, this is a thing that used to be public entertainment. It went back all the way to the Renaissance, where it was actually sort of billed as public entertainment to the point that when they were doing it, they would often have someone playing the flute to a dissect, to a dissection that was going on in the theater. I thought you'd seen a ghost just then.

I did. And I thought you'd seen it in one of our zooms. And I thought it was like behind my back or something. As I was scared, we've got your mispronouncing thing. I feel terrible like this is an abusive relationship. It does sound amazing, the shows that we're on. And they were mostly in the winter in the European theatres, because it was just too hot in the summer and they needed to make a dissection, take a couple of weeks, a full dissection would take weeks.

But I really like the rules that you had of who was doing the cutting up. So in Padua, there was a lector, a sector and an ostenzel. Those were the three jobs that you would have. And a lector was a lecturer who was lecturing while it was going on. The sector, as you might guess, is the barber who's doing the cutting up, the barber surgeon who's doing the operation. And the ostenzel is just pointing to the bit of the body being dissected at the moment, which feels like being the kind of sheet music turner rather than one of the two main roles.

You might be the most important one, because otherwise people don't know which bit is the arm and which bit is the leg and stuff. You're right, you're right. I guess I'd just focus on which bit the surgeon was clearly cutting. It's an unnecessary second pointer to have when you've got the knife as the first pointer. Have you guys heard of Susan Potter? No. So Susan Potter, in the year 2000, she was 72 years old and she donated her body to medicine.

And she has died now, unfortunately. But they cut her body into 27,000 slivers, each one thinner than a human hair and then photographed each side of it, each side of each slice. And now she is like a virtual cadaver, which medical students can use whenever they need to do any studying. That's unbelievable. So is that is it so that you can be scanned sort of at any? You can just see what's going on at every single level.

And I suppose that's. Yeah, it's like a 3D tour of the body, right? Yeah, exactly that. So you can like see the inside of your liver or you can see the edge of your liver or you can see any any part of the body. And the really interesting thing about it is when she donated her body, she'd just been in a major car accident and she was in a wheelchair and people thought that she only had a year to live.

And she continued to live for another 14 years after that. And kind of became quite friendly with the doctor who was going to do all the work. And they interviewed her quite a lot during that 14 years. And now the plan, I don't think this is available yet. But in the future, the plan might be that if you're a student looking at Mrs. Potter's kidneys, you might like Siri ask her about her kidneys. And she could say, oh, I've had these kidneys for 72 years and blah, blah, blah. And you would even be able to hear the voice of the person whose body you're looking at.

That's incredible. They should make it that she just does constant small chat with the while they're trying to do it. You seem a very clever boy. Your parents must be very proud of you. Wow. Makes you hungry, doesn't it, this? Do you guys know? So public dissections obviously stopped hundreds and hundreds of years ago or hundreds of years ago, rather.

But there was one performed publicly in London in 2009. Oh, yeah, I think I remember this. And oh, yeah. And it was that's right. Yeah, Gunther von Hagens, and it was filmed for Channel Four and it went out. And so Gunther von Hagens, he's the guy who in Piccadilly Circus in London, there used to be a giant Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum. And it's now this thing called Body World Exhibitions.

And he's worked on this method, which is called plastination. And plastination is the idea of taking certain body fats and tissues out and replacing them with silicon so that the body doesn't deteriorate or smell. And so you can go inside and you can see all these dissected different things. And so it's pretty gross. And in 2009, he did this big show for Channel Four where he had a body that was donated, dissected on TV, handing out to the crowd who was sitting there in their hundreds. Bits of the body to look at closer on little plates as it was going around.

Yeah, and he was told that this was illegal and that he was going to be arrested. In fact, police were there in the room to make an arrest if they thought that it went into a territory which was dubious, but he didn't get arrested. Oh, sorry, police are not trained for that kind of decision. They sent them inside the Ripley's Believe It or Not shot. We're like, OK, watch this weird creepy shit happen. If you think it's a bit dodgy, arrest them. What are they looking out for?

What are they looking at? Like, if he kills someone else and starts dissecting them, then you definitely slap the cuffs on him. It's got to just be that. His thing is he's now quite ill. In 2011, he got diagnosed with Parkinson's. And so his plan now is that he is going to be turned into one of his bits of art and is going to be in this Piccadilly Circus body world as an exhibition

just as part of the display. And it's his wife who's going to do it to him and she doesn't want to do it. So he's granted her a year of not doing it. But then she has to. That's not a year. That's not a grunt of anything. That's a year of worrying about this thing you have to do, apparently. Also, she doesn't really have to do it. I don't think you can make that statement in your will,

saying I want someone to cut me up and plasterate me after my death. She said that he said to me, Angelina, you were entitled to freeze me down to minus 25 degrees for one year. But after that time, you really need to put your hands on me because otherwise I will get freeze burn. So when he gets down to minus 25, he'll be gone to von Haagen-Daz. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Please release that as an ice cream hug and dust, please.

OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that on the day that the border between Spain and Gibraltar opened, the key to the gate didn't work, and they had to call a locksmith to let people through. I love this. It just sounds like such an awkward moment. And I kind of love the fact, like, borders just being physical gates. So the border between Spain and Gibraltar was closed by Franco in 1969,

and no one could really cross until 1982, December 1982, when it was reopened. And I was listening to an interview with a guy called Tito Belejo-Smith, who is a Gibraltarian, and he was there at the time, and he said it came to midnight when they were going to open the gate, and he first said there was this argument between all the top officials over which one of them was going to open the gate. Eventually, the head of customs sees the key, said I'll do it, but the key didn't work, and they couldn't find the right key,

and eventually they had to call a locksmith. So he claims... So funny. It's weird that the border was closed. Was it a power political move by General Franco? Yes, it basically was. He was quite famous for that, wasn't he, Franco? He loved a power move. He did. He was pissed off with Gibraltar.

Spain has a history of being, and there was a referendum, I think, in the late 60s about whether Gibraltarians wanted to be British or wanted to have Spanish sovereignty, and it's the most astonishing result ever, because no vote rigging, no corruption, but 96% turnout and 99.6% of people voted to stick with British sovereignty. Quite similar to the vote in Crimea as well, isn't it? Which was... No vote rigging, no corruption.

Just a massive, massive win for one of the sides. The huge majority, both equally valid. But yeah, only 44 people voted to have Spanish sovereignty against 12,138 who voted to be British, so Franco was kind of pissed off, and he got more and more hard line in terms of who could cross the border and when and trade between the border, between Gibraltar and Spain, and then he just shut it down, a bit of a big fence,

and literally, it's amazing, when you hear about it, I hadn't realised that Gibraltarians just couldn't get across. You could get a boat to Morocco and then sail all the way around, but there was an interview with a guy who just said, you know, it was 15 when they opened the border, and it was the first time I'd ever seen a cow, because I went across and they had farms on the other side. Wow!

Oh, my God. Because it's tiny, imagine being stuck there, it's like 2.5 square miles. Yeah, it is tiny, isn't it? But a lot of it's rock. It is a lot rock, but when you see... I watched a video earlier, because I thought, I wonder what it looks like. All the descriptions just talk about rocks and tunnels and caves and so on.

I thought, OK, it must be quite barren. And actually, the high street looks very much like a high street you'd get in the UK. There's McDonald's, there's shops everywhere, it's bustling. The issue is, it's so tiny and there is so little flat surface on Gibraltar that, you know, when you're sometimes going, driving on the road and a train's coming and you have to stop because of the train and sex of the road? The airport runway intersects with their busiest main road, Winston Churchill Avenue. So they have to stop all the traffic to let an easy jet plane land

and then they can start again. Well, when they opened that bit of road, which was actually later, the Winston Churchill Avenue bit, that was in 1985. Because even 1982, it was only the pedestrian border that was opened. They wouldn't let cars drive across and there were loads of limitations on it. The 1985, they opened the road border. And I think they learned from the 1982 mistake because they did a practice run. So early on in the day, they did a practice run.

And it was a good thing because since they'd shot it, the Spanish had laid two coats of tarmac on their side. And so the gate was completely jammed shut on their side. That's amazing. They had to get a pneumatic drill and a workman to remove it. It's a really strange place. And I think it occupies a big space in the sort of the British imagination, because it was this big outpost of empire.

It changed hands so many times, didn't it, between various different nations who were all claiming it. It's the site of the longest ever siege in British or English history. The Great Siege of Gibraltar went from 1779 to 1783. There were huge French and Spanish naval and land forces attacking about 30,000 troops on that side, only about seven and a half thousand British troops. And they tried starving the British troops out, launched these huge assaults.

There were tourists watching the final Franco-Spanish assault, who just assumed it was going to be a complete walkover. Everyone applauded as the French and Spanish took their places to start the bombardment. And yet it withstood that. So it occupied this big space in the imperial imagination, I guess. Yeah. So as we said, this place, Gibraltar, has just constantly been under siege.

There's always been attempts to take it over. And shift the ownership around. And one of those times was in World War Two. And this was a point where Winston Churchill had his eye on Gibraltar and wanted to make sure that we as the Brits kept hold of it. And one of the things that happened is that there's an old superstition in Gibraltar for the British that if the Barbary apes that live there left, kind of like how the ravens left the Tower of London,

Britain's rain over it would fall. So Winston Churchill made a specific request to make sure there were always twenty four of these Barbary apes on the island, even shipping some over to make sure that they had this. So I read this on Winston Churchill dot org. And he sent a directive to the Colonial Secretary saying the establishment of the apes on Gibraltar should be 24 and every effort should be made to reach this number as soon as possible

and maintain it thereafter. And as a result of this directive, the army appointed a noncommissioned officer who is the officer in charge of the apes and they had to just make sure that the apes were looked after. They were maintained. It was a role that was held by a guy called Sergeant Alfred Holmes for 38 years. No way. He must have just thought this is a relatively easy army post. No one is shooting at me.

I just have to make sure none of the apes die. Yeah. Kept on pretending. Oh, no, it's actually very difficult to get them to breed. I'm really struggling here. Do you think he was in charge of making them breed? It sounds like he was in charge of bringing up their numbers. Mostly bringing them in from another country rather than making them shag each other. I think. Yeah.

Look, it's not. I don't know why he did for those 38 years. But you've got to say, I don't know. There was a lot of resources being stretched in a lot of ways during World War Two and was shipping 20 monkeys from Africa to Gibraltar. Really the best use of our time and effort. There was a big plan to invade, wasn't there? It's called Operation Felix, the German plan to invade. But there was big turf war between Hitler and Franco.

Franco said, no, I only want Spain to invade. And, you know, Spain was technically neutral, although it was the most Nazi neutral country you could possibly imagine. It was literally a fascist country. And so Franco decided to stay neutral. But everyone thought it would be incredibly easy. An aide to the governor thought it was impregnable as a poached egg. And the Spanish thought it would take literally 20 minutes to invade

if they ever actually bothered. How overcooked is this guy's poached eggs? I think the point is that it's not impregnable, right? Thank you. So like a poached egg, it will just fall apart as soon as you pierce it. Exactly. James has understood the metaphor there. I was saying, there's no way we can get in. That makes a lot of sense, because it does feel like the Nazi's Mr. Trick.

It's a piece of piss to get to. It's really small. It's the entrance to the Mediterranean. I don't know if we've said for any sort of confused American listeners. It's not just a random place. Or any other country. You might not know where Gibraltar is. Just because America is quite far away.

Yeah, actually, and our America is a continent, not a country. I think you mean just to correct you on your geography there. Look, I was just trying to help and I know I've got in trouble now. So, yeah, it's really important. Why didn't you go for it? Because wasn't there a plan because like an egg has lots of holes, tiny, tiny holes in it so that the chick can breathe on the inside. The Rock of Gibraltar has lots of little holes and caves.

And wasn't there a thing where we put some soldiers inside one of those holes? Yes, there was. There was a cave which was set up so that if the island was overrun, a crew of six soldiers only could stay behind, spy on the enemy movements and then report back. So they had a year's food and water. I mean, I don't know what happens after the year is up. They had exercise bikes, which I love.

And that was going to power the generator they used, I guess, to run the radio and stay in contact with Britain. But what a situation that would have been for those six left behind. The only troops not discovered. It's amazing, isn't it? That is awesome. And the idea was that if one of them died, they couldn't take them out because that would tell everyone where they were. So they were going to bury them underneath the floor in one of these caves.

And that was the official plan. Oh, my God. Really? Well, you can't put the formaldehyde on because then you'll use up your food supplies quicker than you want. Wow, that is that feels like it must have been the seven worst people in the British army, the guy who's guarding the apes and the six people they shove in the caves on Gibraltar. They're like, I'm going to do something with these guys.

Just to go back quickly to the blockade of Gibraltar by Spain. It's quite interesting because before that happened, before the Second World War, basically, Gibraltar was sort of Spanish in character, even though it was British territory. Everyone spoke Spanish. It was Spanish culture, Spanish families. You know, you'd have one half of your family on one side of the border, the other half on the other.

It was almost indistinguishable. And what one of these guys who I was listening to an interview with was saying was that the blockade hardened Gibraltarian's attitudes. So it did complete the opposite of what Franco wanted because he shut the border and suddenly everyone in Gibraltar went, well, screw you then. And they did really well. And obviously they've got this access to the Mediterranean

and they had all this food imported. And so before the war, I think a third of marriages were intermarriages between Spanish and Gibraltarians. Everyone spoke Spanish, like I say. Now most people in Gibraltar don't even speak Spanish. So you don't grow up speaking Spanish and there's no intermarriage. They have completely turned against Spain. So shot myself in the face.

And the keys have been quite a historical thing, haven't they, in Gibraltar? Because over history, especially in like the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, they only had a certain number of doors that you could get into the country with. And they had special keys that they would lock it up every night. And they would have the ceremony of the keys like they do in the Tower of London. Did they? Right. Yeah. And during the Great Siege, which Andy was talking about,

the governor, who's called General Sir George Augustus Elliott, apparently he would have the one set of keys and he would carry them everywhere he went. No matter where he went, he always had this set of keys on him. And it was rumoured, according to the website I read, it was rumoured that he slept with them under his pillow at night. They're massive keys. That must be a rumour because it would be an incredibly uncomfortable night's sleep to you.

To put, I could just about put my house keys under my pillow because I don't live in a medieval fortress. Do you put your keys under your pillow when you go to bed? I'm just saying I could. I'm not telling you where I keep my keys. I try, James. I was just thinking you might get robbed by the Tooth Fairy. Freaky weird tooth this guy has. Every morning I wake up with a quid, which then goes straight to Timbson's cutting another set.

OK, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that Aristotle's masterpiece was written more than 2,000 years after Aristotle died. Wow. Yeah, a late bloomer. How much formaldehyde did he apply to his body to stay quite that active? This is a 17th century book, Aristotle's masterpiece. It's a sex manual in a way. It's also a pregnancy manual, childbirth manual,

all sorts of facts about human reproduction and generation and all of this. And it's got nothing to do with Aristotle. It's completely bogus as a title. But it was popular to put Aristotle in the title of your book because it was a pseudonym that got used often for sex books because it was kind of known that he'd written a bit about reproduction. And so if you put Aristotle in the title of a book, that made it quite sexy. And was it like people actually thought it was by Aristotle, right?

It wasn't like it was just the title. It was kind of claiming to be by him. I don't think it did claim, but I don't think anyone seriously thought it was by him. Apart from anything, it kept getting updated every year. And most people knew that he'd been dead for quite a long time. So I don't think they really thought it was by him. But yeah, like you say, Aristotle was like a reference for sex, basically. There are a lot of plays where people use the word Aristotle to mean sexy times.

But of how's your father? Yeah, it's pretty amazing because it was published in 1684 and it was immediately a massive success. It was pirated immediately as well, despite the fact that they tried to copyright it and say an official publisher was was releasing the book. But it was reprinted all the way up until the 1930s. And in the middle of the 18th century, there were more additions of this in circulation, this book, than all of the other works that were on reproduction combined.

It's insane. What does that mean? I saw that written down, but I couldn't work out what it meant. It'd be the equivalent of what to expect when you're expecting outselling all the other books on the subject, combined together. They still had more in circulation. And it was Aristotle had this real rep for being sexy. So the book Aristotle's Problems was published in 1595,

which sounds like a fun agony uncle book. It was mostly, you know, lots of Q&As about sex and reproduction. So questions including what is carnal copulation and how are hermaphrodites begotten, another really important stuff that you needed to know. It was exactly the format of the book that we've released this year. Funny, you should ask exactly the format, but quite a different different content, wasn't it? No, I was reading it. Sexy, you should ask.

I was reading it and looking at the number of questions that are the same in that as funny, you should ask. And there are quite a few. It's probably like it made me think how great that humans have been curious about the same shit for so long. We didn't have we didn't have how our hermaphrodites begotten. OK, I did try to get that one in and not acceptable. We there are a few sort of areas that we we didn't cover.

But like, why do we sneeze? Why do you have only one mouth but two eyes? Why is spit white? Why do we like sweet taste so much more than others? Why do men and women get ticklish when you tickle their armpits but nothing else? I really thought this is this guy's whoever wrote this, not Aristotle, is a man after her own words. Pseudo Aristotle.

Yeah, that was that. This is a whole field of study is books that claim to be by Aristotle, but a manifestly not. And the author, the collective author of those is known as Pseudo Aristotle, which I love. Basically, everyone had a copy of this Aristotle's masterpiece, didn't they? They were really, really popular. I was chatting to Ross McFarlane, who works at the Welcome Library,

and they have quite a few copies of this book there. And the ones that they have are quite small. They're printed on very cheap paper. You can tell that they're things that were mass produced and that people would just own. One thing that would happen is sometimes as they get towards the end of a page, the font would get smaller and smaller and smaller so that they didn't have to have another page at the end of it. And you would see often people would write things in them.

So there's one where they recorded all the births of their children, for instance, in there and stuff like that. So, yeah, it was they were very quotidian. That's such a good idea. This I can see successfully with Brian doing this. Yeah, one didn't work, tried it 12 times because there are these rules all the way through, which are obviously loads of them are complete Horlicks, you know,

that male children sit on the right hand side of the womb and girls sit on the left. Not true. If you want to test whether your child's a boy or a girl, drop a drop of milk into a basin of water. And if the milk sinks to the bottom intact, it's a girl. If it spreads out and disperses, it's a boy. That's not true. You'll be amazed to hear. Like it's I can't believe this book survived until 1930s

because a lot of it is just pure baloney. Yeah, but it's entertaining baloney. If it's entertaining, you'll read it, right? That's true. And it's sexy baloney. Sexy baloney. Yeah. But with what James is saying about writing down the the children and their birth dates, there's been a few cases where the book has been useful to prove things for people who've lost documentation.

So this book made it over to America. And in 1832 in Tennessee, there was a guy called Edward Wheat who was trying to get a pension in connection to his military service in the Revolutionary War, but he had lost his discharge papers. And so he needed to prove his age, but he had no way of proving his age. And what the court records as his submission of proof was that this book, Aristotle's masterpiece was brought in by him and it had in it his birthday as recorded by his parents in it.

And they that persuaded the court that he was born when he said he was born so he could get the pension. Sorry, why were people recording his birthday in the book? Well, that was a thing parents used to write stuff all in the book. So you would you would record your children's birth dates in it because it just was a it was a place to put it was the reproduction book. Why not mark it down there? You could say that, you know, he didn't have his discharge papers,

but that he had his parents discharge papers. Oh, dear. And that's a joke about his conception, because obviously it's. Do you have discharge papers, Andy? Is that what? What is it like? What are you like in the bedroom? There's a lot of paperwork. It almost feels like some of that stuff is a lot better than

actual Aristotle was writing, right? Because Aristotle, well, he was a genius for his time. I think it's fair to say he got quite a lot of things wrong, but he did get a lot of things wrong about women in his writings. He thought that blonde women were better at getting orgasms than non-blonde women and that the orgasm was very important for conception. So he thought that blonde women would be able to conceive better than non-blonde women. He thought that women's discharge was very important for procreation.

And so he spent a lot of time, according to the article I read, trying to separate out female fluids. And he thought that if women ate pungent foods like garlic or peppers, they would be able to conceive better. I found it's definitely a hindrance rather than a hill. He thought that women had fewer teeth than men. Look, that is just a fact, James. You can't argue with nature like that.

And he thought that women are more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive, more compassionate, more easily moved to tears, more jealous, more crerulous, more raptor scald and strike, more prone to despondency, less hopeful, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, more attentive of memory, more wakeful, more shrinking, and more difficult to rouse to action than men. OK, more shrinking. I mean, there was a lot of wrong stuff in there.

And it's quite strange that it's weird because there are there are a few things in there that you're like, oh, yeah, yeah. And it's got to it's a whole melange of compliments and insults. It would be hard to know how to take that list. Would I think probably best not to say that women are like X and men are like Y in general, perhaps, even if some of them are compliments. Let's just not say that. I'll take the compliments.

Fuck it, you take what you can get. But is it possible? I mean, this guy was slightly clever, wasn't he? It was kind of a big deal. Is it possible that back in the day, women just did have less teeth? I read a really good article of there was a guy called H.L. Levy, who was trying to rescue Aristotle's reputation for misogynism because everyone thinks that he's misogynistic.

And he basically said, well, maybe it's not that he was misogynistic. Maybe he just got all these things wrong about women because he got quite a lot wrong about everything. Yeah, right. Because he did quite get quite a lot wrong. He must have got stuff wrong about men as well, right? Presumably. Yeah, like I think he said that men with bigger penises

would be less good at fertilizing women because that gives the sperm more time to get cold on their way over. And that does sound like something he said on a one night stand, doesn't he? I think that makes sense because I've successfully had two children and it's not about the size, guys. Go into that. I feel like we should say that also Aristotle, unlike some of the more fun but more wild ancients that we talk about,

is is still discussed today extensively in philosophy. He's one of the great philosophical pillars and his idea that everything is in balance. So the idea of a virtue is the exact equidistant between two extremes of vice. Things like that are still discussed a lot. So let's give the guy some credit. He was a bit sexist. He believed some crazy stuff, but he was a great philosopher. Thought that the RX, which is the thing which turned into cows,

thought that they project our pood 1.8 meters away from their bums at the poos bird-like fire to get rid of predators. It's not completely implausible. He thought that an earthquake, he thought that the tremor of an earthquake was either the Earth farting or, you know, that shiver when you pee sometimes. He thought it was the Earth's equivalent of that kind of shivering pee. Sorry, what's the what's the shiver when you pee?

I don't... It's not a thing that everyone gets, but it's a relatively common thing that some people like get a shiver down the back of their neck when they urinate. Do they? Wow. OK. Sounds like someone else is urinating onto them. I'm sure you haven't been reading the wrong texts. Like that saying, don't piss up my back and tell me it's raining, right?

Yes. Yeah. And he thought eels spontaneously generated from mud. But as we've said before, eels is a tough one. Yeah. Eels is a really tough one. Yes, yes. Another one in this constant wrangle with me trying to defend this obviously very ancient sexist, but who was a genius,

is the eels thing is evidence that he was an empiricist. And that was amazing at the time where his tutor Plato and everyone else would just like come up with theories and then we'll say they're true because they make sense. And Aristotle said, shall we actually look at what some stuff that's happening and start describing it instead? So, yeah. And then he went to eels and said, well, they don't have any genitals, which to be fair,

we thought for another 2000 years, you say. Yeah. But that didn't stop Dan from having two children. So Dan's paperwork was all in order, though. It's mostly about paperwork I find in the bedroom. And there were things which, and again, this is the counterweight to all the absolutely true stuff James has just said. So, for example, he observed that hairs can become doubly pregnant,

which wasn't believed to be true for centuries after him. You know, hairs can become pregnant while already pregnant, as it were. They can do that again. He did think that elephants couldn't bend their knees and that they always had to sleep upright because they couldn't bend down. Look, this is a grudge match between James on one side and Anandi on the other, saying Aristotle was an idiot or a genius.

This is the thing I'm not sure about, though, Anna, because I thought that he didn't do actual experiments as in... No, he didn't do experiments. He was an empiricist, but he didn't do the scientific method to that extent, but he gathered a huge amount of data and then kind of extrapolated and inferred based on that, which is still obviously a massive step forward from just saying any old stuff.

And it was an attempt to categorise and sort things, which also, obviously, is a massive cognitive leap forward. So he divided animals into 11 grades from highest to lowest, highest unsurprisingly humans. And he said, you know, the best and the highest animals in nature are the ones that give live birth to hot and wet creatures and that the worst animals, the lowest grade of nature, lay eggs, they don't give birth to the live young,

and those are cold, dry eggs, and that those are the worst. So I imagine chickens. No, chickens are warm, aren't they? Chickens, eggs are warm. I suppose like lizards. Yeah, I think it must be something. Lizard is something reptilian. I really love just thinking about how he was, you know, co-opted by all these people over the years,

how he still is co-opted today. And if you look up Aristotle and look up articles that have been written about him, they'll just apply his philosophy to everything. So how Aristotle is the perfect happiness guru, guardian article. Should we cancel Aristotle, New York Times article? Sure. It is useful, that thing that you said, Anna, about every virtue being a tightrope between two alternating vices.

That is quite a clever idea. So the idea is, for example, that bravery is a tightrope between cowardice on the one hand and being completely foolhardy on the other side between those two is the golden virtue, the golden mean of being brave when necessary. Part of that theory was that basically everything that is extant kind of fits in its own niche, right? And that there wasn't a beginning to the universe and there isn't going to be an end to the universe.

It's just everything just existed. And, you know, the worms are where they should be and Aristotle's where he should be and everything's, you know. Yeah, it was also an attempt to justify the social structure of Greek city-states vis-a-vis slavery. And yeah, it was a justifying, it's just the way things are, guys, was kind of how you could simplify his possession too. Look, I don't want a worm revolution any more than he does.

The Aristotle's problems that you were talking about before, which Anna said is basically the same as Funny You Should Ask. Each chapter begins with a poem. And I wonder if we should bring that for the next Funny You Should Ask book. We should start each chapter with a poem. Which space? Yeah. So, for instance, this is one of the chapters. Thus man's most noble parts described we see for such.

The parts of generation B are they that carefully surveyed will find each part is fitted for the use designed. The purest blood we find, if well we heed, is in the testicles turned into seed. Do you think that might work for our next QI poem? That's obviously beautiful. I think not. That's static. Testicles does stick out a bit there in the poem, doesn't it? It's difficult, isn't it?

Because the poem is about testicles. Yeah. So you do need testicles. It's like Wordsworth's Daffodils poem. The word Daffodil really sticks out in that poem, I have to say. But it's about Daffodils. Memorable. Yeah. Memorable. I didn't see the testicles coming. That felt like a twist to me.

Oh, don't twist the testicles. Well, if you do, you won't see them coming. OK, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy at Andrew Hunter M. James at James Harkin and Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or go to our website. No such thing as a fish dot com. We do have everything up there from previous episodes to links to our upcoming tour. Check out where we're playing in the UK and Ireland and do come along because it's going to be awesome. All right, guys, we'll be back again next week with another episode. We will see you then. Goodbye.