No Such Thing As A Fish - 388: No Such Thing As A Danquito

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss melodious bridges, murderous dragonflies, made-up politicians and magnificent wigs.    Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everybody, Andy here. Just before we start this week's show, we have an announcement to make. It's a bit of a serious one. It's that for a while we are not going to be able to record our podcast from our spiritual home, our Covent Garden office anymore. And there's a simple reason for that. And the reason is that we are going on tour! Bebe! That's right! I tricked you all! It wasn't bad news, it's good news. You thought someone had died, quite the reverse. We're going to be on tour live and amplified across the entirety of the UK and Ireland. We're going to be going all over the shop. Are we going to Barnstable? You bet your bum we're going to Barnstable. Are we going to pool? As a rule, we're going

to pool. And 25 other places across the UK and of course not to forget Dublin. I know what you're thinking. What's the show going to involve? Well I'll tell you, it's going to be a live, new, fresh podcast right for your ears in the second half every single night. All the bits are actually too funny to put out in the edited version of the show. And the first half is going to be an extraordinary cavalcade of different things. So much different stuff is going to happen in the first half. Elephants, dancing girls, dancing boys, fireworks, Dan's famous avocado trick and a number of other things that I really probably shouldn't actually be promising to you. But Andy, Andy, Andy, how do we get our tickets? It's very

simple everybody. All you have to do is go to knowsuchthingasafish.com, find the nearest one and click book. That's it. No such thing as a fish.com. That's it. It's going to be so much fun. We cannot wait to see you there. If you're not there, we'll talk about you behind your back. Alright, that's it. On with the show. 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 am sitting at a ginormous distance from Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and Anna Tyshinski. 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 fact number one, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that Nate Mercerow, who produced the most recent album of Grammy-winning R&B star Leon Bridges, has now started collaborating with actual Bridges. When you're on to a winner, right? Just stick with it. How many elements of your fact had you heard of before discovering this, James? Be honest. I'd heard of Bridges. That's what I was expecting. You must have heard of the Grammys. I was reading an article in The Guardian about the Golden Gate Bridge, which started making this weird sort of humming noise. But a local musician made some singles where he does a duet with the bridge. And

when I say local musician, I mean extremely famous record producer, Nate Mercerow. But I'd never heard of him. So I Googled him and it turned out that he's worked with people like Jay-Z and with Lizzo, who I have heard of, and also a guy called Leon Bridges, who I hadn't heard of, but he has got the word Bridges in his name. And he's won a bunch of awards. So he's obviously very famous. And I think that's my problem, not his. Did they call it Bridges Over Troubled Water, this new collaboration with the bridge? They don't call it that. No, I think he went for more that artistic than the punny. I think Simon and Garfunkel are quite, I imagine they're quite litigious. I wouldn't

want to get up in their face with that. And Simon and Garfunkel's still alive. Yeah, both. Both. Yeah. Not both of them, surely. Both still alive. If you've seen them before on stage, you wouldn't know, but. Wow. Ouch.

You know what? I'm thinking of Paul Newman, not Paul Simon, who's also alive. Very similar. Well, yeah, Newman and Garfunkel is a very interesting couple. So this Golden Gate Bridge collaboration, I listen to it, is really good. So you see the bridge in the background, and it's just making this weird noise. And then Nate Mercerow kind of shambles on after a minute, where the bridge is, frankly, holding the stage very well. But he starts adding some guitar sound over the top of it to kind of match it and move around it. And it sounds really eerie and great.

Yeah. It is spooky. He likened it to Tibetan singing bowls, didn't he? Oh, yes. Which those things that. I just got one of those. Did you? I've seen it. Yes. Nice. Why did you buy one of those? I mean, I have one, but I went to Tibet.

Well, the guy in the shop who sold it to me said it's either from Tibet or it's from Wales. And he wouldn't confirm either way where it was from. Dan sent me to a witchcraft shop to buy it. It was great. Jesus. I bought mine in Tibet, in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, from a guy called Alan Jones. Interesting, because they don't actually have anything to do with Tibet. So that Tibetans just ripping you off. Why did they get the Tibet name then?

I think it's just one of those Western, let's make it sound cool and spiritual. And it's from somewhere over there. But yeah, India or Nepal. But apparently I was reading about the dangers of singing bowls. And I wonder if the bridge has the same dangers. You can get a headache from them. So Andy, be careful. Oh, you are. Yeah. And if you're pregnant, which I don't know if you are, then they don't know if it will affect it, but they advise not to risk it. But who?

This was just a website listing the risks of Tibetans singing bowls. Pregnant women can't listen to Tibetans singing bowls. Just don't risk it. We don't know that it would do any damage. But that's, could we virtually say we don't know anything that will risk pregnancy if we haven't tested it? Like presumably no doctor's gone. Do you know what I'm going to focus on this week? Seeing how this affects pregnancy, Tibetans singing bowls. Yeah, that's correct. So I think this website is leaning heavily on the safe side. And yeah, don't risk moving, listening to anything. But look, that's my advice.

Very strange. So this, it was quite hard to get the recording of the Golden Gate Bridge because basically the reason it's humming is that the wind is going through it. They put some new slats on the bridge's railings, which is supposed to stop it from getting in trouble in high winds. And but all it's done is means that when the wind goes through it and makes this kind of eerie sound. But also it means that when you try and record it, necessarily it's going to be a windy day. And so it's really hard to get the sound of the bridge as well as this and kind of get rid of the sound of the wind. But good on Nate Mercer, I managed it. Yeah, he found the Cove, didn't he? He had to go down this

Cove, which was partially blocked by the wind. And then in order to get all the equipment working, they had to bring a car battery down to power it all. And so yeah, it was a proper process. The wind supposedly plays in the note of A. So if you want to go and collaborate with it, that's your note to go with. Which is what? Yeah. I thought it had a range. Does it not? Well, it emits a 440 Hertz hum. And so yeah, it probably oscillates, but it will around a bit within. Yeah. So one person said you could tune your oboe to it because that's what your oboe is. What a difficult and pointless way of tuning an oboe. If you live in San Francisco, though, and you're an oboe, it's an opening window. It's tuning. It's nice

because Strauss, who is the guy who built the bridge, who engineered the bridge, said not Richard Strauss, not Richard Strauss. No, Joseph Strauss. He's trying to build a massive oboe. He described it as saying as harps for the winds of heaven, my web like cables are spun. So he imagined his bridge as a harp that could be played by the heavens. That's really romantic for a bridge maker, isn't it? That's very poetic. Yeah. It's an amazing bridge. I'd never really read about it before or learned anything about it because I've not been to San Francisco, but it's 1.7 miles long. And it's across the Golden Gate Strait. Obviously, it's not a golden bridge. It is red. No, it's orange. Sorry. International orange. International

orange has its own paint color. Yeah. But it could so nearly have been a no such thing as a fish themed bridge. Yes. You guys find this? Yeah. The US Navy wanted to paint it in black and yellow stripes. In honor of no such thing as a fish. Yeah. 80 years, I've won a lecture. But yeah, it could be so cool. And it arrived in it in the color that it is now close to the orange. And when they saw that, they went, actually, that aesthetically would work for incoming ships as well. And it looks much better than this weird giant warning sign across the bay. Although I'm skeptical about that. So yeah, they said, I think the Navy wanted that and the Army Air Corps wanted a red and white color scheme so it's visible from the air. And yeah, everyone says, oh, we saw the

base layer, which was this orange color. And we thought that's perfect. But I think what they thought was we've got a fucking massive bridge here. Do we really want to bother painting the whole thing again? Yeah, in two colors. Yeah, two colors. Yeah. Nightmare. There's a great story. So it had two openings, didn't it, the bridge? It had a pedestrian opening. So yeah, there's four openings in total in and out. And then when they actually opened it, they did one day for pedestrians, and then they did another day for the actual automobiles going across. And on the day that it opened to pedestrians, 18,000 people crossed it. And many of the 18,000 wanted to set a record of being the first to do something on it. So the first person to get across it was a sprinter called

Donald Bryant. So he was the first man to run across it. There were Esther and Anne Bullard, who were the first recorded twins. Carmen and Minnie Perez were the first skaters. Florentine Caligari was the first on stilts. There was a Scotty, which was the first dog. Police rushed to aid one woman who was staggering along with her tongue out, and it turns out she was just trying to become the first woman to cross it with her tongue out. Why was she staggering? Did she have a very heavy tongue or something? It's a long walk, as you said. It's a long bridge. Has anyone gone across it while doing a podcast? Oh, great shout. Not in 1937, anyway. The first rope to be taken across, which was taken across

by Boy Scout Troot number five of San El Salmo by their club master. And it's slim picking at that stage. Do you think it's someone who's got to the end with their tongue out? Someone's gone, no, someone's already done this, and they've looked in their pockets. They're like, well, I've got a bit of rope here. Has anyone taken a rope over? There's a brilliant book called Building the Golden Gate Bridge, a workers' oral history by Schwartz Harvey, where he spoke to all the different people who worked on it. I think we said before that when they built it, they put a massive net underneath the bridge so that if anyone fell down, they fell into that giant net. But people who actually fell in there and survived joined a supposed club called

the Halfway to Hell Club. There was someone there who worked on it who said it was the coldest place they ever worked. You had to put on all the clothes you owned, and you had to carry on working, otherwise you would just freeze while you were doing it. And there was no women working on the bridge. But there was a woman called Dewey's Bowen who was working as a nurse for all the men who were working on the bridge. And she said that what would happen is that their wives would come and visit them, and they would always bring them like some bread or salami or some wine. And then the men would always give it to the nurses. And so they would always say to the nurse, make sure you wear a cape tomorrow. And what they would do is they would take their cape and they would hide all the

goodies under the cape and then like have a midnight snack. But it was really, really dangerous. But the people who worked on it really needed the work. And so there were out of work men who would routinely line the site of the Golden Gate Bridge, and they were waiting for someone to either quit or fall off the bridge. But it was actually safer than other construction projects because Joseph Strauss, a bit ahead of his time in health and safety terms, was really into things like hard hats. It was the first time hard hats were compulsory. He put this big net under it. It had a lower death rate than most construction projects, although some people still died, obviously. But it still does sound terrifying. I think I was reading in the same book an account by a guy who

was describing how he was employed to work on it. And you took an elevator up through one of the towers right up to the top. So at 710 feet, you go up in this elevator. And he remembers going up for the first time with two painters who were employed to paint it. And the elevator opened at the top. And it opened onto a two foot wide wooden plank, which you had to walk across to get onto the scaffolding. And the two painters said to the elevator operator, well, what are we supposed to do now? And the operator said, well, you walk across that. So they immediately quit and asked to be taken back down again. And then this guy went for it. So stressful, especially if you've got a row of people shouting at you in the hope that you will fall off standing on the site.

Oh, you missed a bit, mate. Just go a bit further, a bit further out on the plank. I think still, like if you're a maintenance worker on there, you have to do this thing. On the second day, they make you walk on a cable, which is 36 inches in diameter, but with only a 12 inch strip down the middle that you have to stay on because the rest of it's really slippery and that bit isn't slippy. So that's your test to get the pretty much. Yeah, there's a guy called Greg Montareno, and he said, if you can't walk the cable, there's no day three. God, so how is that interview process when you go in? How are you not falling off bridges? This hum, by the way, is as a result of them trying to make the bridge safer as well. So they spent ages trying to work out what was

causing this hum because it came out of nowhere. And they worked out that it was these new thinner slats that were put on the bridge that were meant to help it withstand wind because the wind is so great in that area. And the bridge at the moment can stand something in the vicinity of 69.34 miles per hour. That's sort of what it's built. Something in the vicinity of 69 miles per hour. So can it do 69.35 miles an hour? Something in that vicinity. But not that. That's too high. 5.01. It's around 69 miles per hour, and it has gone beyond that. It's gone up to 75 miles per hour, and it's managed to stay up. But they are worried that if it went higher than that, the whole bridge could collapse. So these new slats are designed to allow it to withstand 100

mile per hour winds. But that's what caused the hums in the end. And they're going to try and fix it now. So this might be the only collaboration that the bridge does, unfortunately. Well, bridges do tend to make noises anyway. I was reading about a musician called Jody Rose, who is really obsessed with the sound of bridges. And she's released albums of bridge noises called, I think there's one called Singing Bridges. I was listening to one. It's kind of nice. Don't listen if you're pregnant to a Singing Bridge. If it's Tibetan, you can't listen to it. Actually, it's a myth that Singing Bridges are originally Tibetan. Yeah, it's great. She's recorded bridges like the Millennium Bridge, the Batman Bridge in Tasmania, in Finland, Rotterdam, Vietnam. She's traveled

all over the world on the profits that she makes from selling her bridge-based sound albums. What's she listening to? Is it people on the bridge, or is it these bridges? Can I just say, I've walked across the Millennium Bridge on many, many occasions and never noticed the sound. She puts a microphone on the actual cables, so you catch the creaking. And I guess when you walk across it, maybe your ears are pinned to the cables themselves. Well, it is, because I'm trying to be the first person to cross it with my ear pinned to the ground. So, there are mysterious hums around the world, around the universe, in fact. Voyager 1 spacecraft has just managed to detect the background hum of interstellar space for the first time. Apparently,

the universe hums. That's so good that the universities are going, hmm. Yeah. Do you think it's skeptical? Yeah, not sure. I think disapproving. Yeah, not sure. Yeah. There is a constant hum of interstellar plasma, apparently, and it's caused when a star, such as a sun, sends out a coronal mass ejection, which is something we discussed the other day with Robinance, then it will fire into this plasma and kind of make the electrons sort of vibrate a little bit. Wow. And you can measure that. It's going to be a whole Grammy category for this one day, isn't it? Fun collaborations. You know, horses' ears sometimes hum, don't they? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I can't believe you guys didn't know that. You said that like, yeah, to convince yourself.

I am looking at my nose and thinking, can this be true? But yeah, in 1995, vets at Newmarket were doing some surgery on a horse's lip, and they noticed that his ear was emitting a sound, a bit like the sound you hear when you've got a bit of tinnitus, like a beeping sound. And they didn't know why, but I went on horse and hound forum, and other people have had this problem. I think humans have it sometimes. Yes, humans do get it. Objective tinnitus. Extremely rare. Much, much more rare than subjective tinnitus. It's making a ringing note. Your ear makes a ringing note. Exactly. Wow. So, you know, if you have tinnitus, go to the ENT surgeon just in case they have a listen and go, yeah, you're right. No, it's not, it's not in your head. Well, it is in your

head. But it's going to be annoying if Nate Mercero follows you around with his guitar, just try to make songs. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that dragon flies used to be the same size as modern-day pigeons. Wow. Terrifying. Yeah. Yeah. Frightening facts. So bad. No, because dragon flies are beautiful and cool. That's true, and pigeons are not. You're right. I don't know, they're scary. All right, James, if you could replace every pigeon in the world with a dragonfly of equivalent size, would you? 100%. And I think everyone would, wouldn't they? Actually, I would too. What? Yeah. We found the real fault line in the fish after seven years. Oh, but dragon flies. Well, dragon flies, prior to reading this, I would have been fine with it.

Having now read what they're like, I think they're terrifying creatures. What would they like? They weren't that bad. Okay, so they were larger than your average dragonfly, and they were, in fact, the largest insect ever, probably. This was about 300 million years ago in the Paleozoic era, and they're called mega-neura. Sometimes they're referred to as griffin flies, and they had a 70-centimeter wingspan, about 40 centimeters long, and yeah, they're the grandparents of the modern dragonfly. They would be able to hunt larger things than they can hunt today, I guess. But yeah, they were the biggest flying things, basically, until reptiles started flying. They were the biggest things you'd ever seen in the sky. Amazing. Wow.

And so cool. They're really interesting things, and they were allowed to get this big because the oxygen levels in the air were so high at the time. There were 40% oxygen in the air, as opposed to 21 now, so they just had a lot more potential power in the air around them. How big would we have been, though, if we were around then? Huge. I always say this. I think this is ridiculous. You always find these fossils of giant dragonflies, giant millipedes, like giant reptiles. Where are the giant humans? Where are they? You've blown this shit wide open. Darwin is turning in his grave. The answer is we would not necessarily have been that much bigger, because they were large,

because they breathe in a different way to us. So they don't have any lungs, insects. They essentially breathe through little holes, spiracles, exactly in their skin. And actually, scientists don't really know how they get enough oxygen to themselves at all, because I learned this fact, which I found amazing while researching this. Each oxygen molecule, if it was moving through empty air, it could move at about half a kilometer per second. But because it crashes into other molecules, so often it goes one centimeter a second. So every second, it has 10 billion collisions. So that's basically like, imagine you're an insect, and you've just got these holes, which are waiting for an oxygen molecule to drift in,

and there's an oxygen molecule 10 centimeters away. It's making billions and billions and billions of collisions. It's never going to get to you. So this is why, in the olden days, when oxygen was more concentrated, they could get more oxygen inside their bigger bodies, but now they can only really get them on the surface of their bodies. So as soon as they get too fat, they can't breathe anymore. If they've got too much meat in their body, the oxygen molecules can't go in. Whereas we suck oxygen in, we use our diaphragm. Right. Question, because they eat a lot, and they eat a lot quite quickly. So if, let's say, imagine we were the thing they were eating, how much oxygen is inside us at this moment inside me? Are we talking about the big dragonflies from the past

at the moment? Well, shrink me down, no, to a modern day dragonfly. You've been shrunk down in some kind of weird, honey, I shrunk the kids movie to the size of a dragonfly. No, I'm the size of a dragonfly is prey, prey, exactly. Like a mosquito. Like a mosquito, right? So does the danquito right now, do I have oxygen inside my body? Yes. So here's the question. If it's that big an eater, and it's eating all these things, can you eat oxygen? Are you eating, is the dragonfly eating my oxygen as well as the food that brings in the oxygen? I think that you would utilize your oxygen relatively quickly, I think. And also, there wouldn't be much oxygen in you compared to the amount of your body. I mean, you're not like a balloon. I'm not a balloon. You're completely

full of oxygen. Yeah, you've got many danquito lungs, which have got a bit of oxygen in them. But that's not a look, that's not a terrible question, I have to say, because they don't have part of it was quite terrible. I thought that I think it's quite a good question. They don't have lungs, so they can't breathe it in. So what are you going to do? You're going to eat it in eat the oxygen. What do you eat? You eat other things that breathe, and yeah, they don't have much oxygen in them, but it's a bit, isn't it? Yeah. Also, the question is whether your stomach can dissolve the oxygen as well as your lungs or spiracles can. Yeah, yeah. I don't really understand the premise of Dan's question, but I've just got Dan as a mosquito in my head now.

Quite irritating, aren't they mosquitoes? Dragonflies, yeah, are not, they're misnamed, I would say, they're not dragons or flies. Exactly, and they don't spend most of their life flying. They spend years of their life as larvae living in water, moving around, eating away, breathing through their bottoms, that's the majority of their life. Breathing through their bottoms, you say? Yeah, they do. If they were to shove something up their bum, which had oxygen in it, would they be able to? Like Dan in mosquito form. Put me up the bum. I don't think this reboot of Honey I Shrunk the Kids is going to work, guys. Yeah, I find that amazing that so many animals live in eternal youth, and then there's a very brief adulthood. How cool is that? Lucky buggers.

Yeah. You shouldn't just be a teenager forever, and then at the very end, you've got this crappy adulthood there. No, you don't want the teenager. You want to be a child forever. Yeah, okay, you're right. Yeah. They have terrifying childhoods as well, or terrifying for everything around them, because they're amazing hunters as adults, but also in the water. So they have this extendable jaw called a labium, and it looks like the thing in Alien, the alien. It's sort of, it's folded up. It's got this arm on a spring under its jaw, and when it sees prey passing by, that jaw shoots out and grabs it. Some species have pincers, some don't, but it's all terrifying, and they're amazing hunters. And it can, the way that the arm comes out of the mouth

is it's hydraulic, isn't it? And they suck in water through their anus, and they use that water hydraulically to fire out the arm from the mouth. Oh, cool. It's incredible. That's amazing. It genuinely is. Do we have any system like that on us? No, Dan. Do you think that you could have got this far in life, and then suddenly someone tells you, oh, Dan, by the way, no one's told you this so far, but if you suck water through your bum, I'll have to come down. I'm just, I'm just like, my ears can hub. That is new information to me. Next time you're in the bath, Dan, just give it a go. Try and grab the soap from across the bathtub. But purposefully don't use my arms. Just suck through my anus. Suck through your anus and see if your jaw shoots out. But it's really weird,

because they, yeah, as James says, they blast it out, and they can use that. It sort of creates this massive pressure wave inside them, this water that they've sucked in, and then it generates a pound of pressure, which is quite a lot for a tiny dragonfly nymph. But they can also use it another way. They can use it as an escape mechanism, because they can unclench, blast the water out, and then jet themselves away through the water. So don't do that in the bath. They've also got an amazing, this is when they're adults, their ability to hunt food is pretty spectacular. So they've been put in laboratories and scientists have watched the sort of rate catch against the prey that they're going for. And it's a 95% of the time they can catch

what they're aiming to catch. They're just absolute mega predators. This is one of those experiments, the way they looked at how they do this, is one of those experiments where I think, how did scientists manage it? So they made a backpack for them, and they strap it on. But then they, in order to look at what's happening in their neurons when they're hunting to find out how their brain is doing this, they connect wires to the equivalent of their spinal cord. And you read the articles and it's just like they say this casually. Yeah. How's someone doing that? Yeah. Well, they've got Dan in the lab in mosquito form. Dan, geto to the rescue. Anyway, they discovered that they don't just react really

quickly, they can predict where insects go. So they watch their neurons like firing, and they watch an insect trajectory, and they can see which direction. It's really clever. Although like this morning, I opened a cupboard in my house, and some sugar fell out. And without even thinking, I caught it. So. Wow. You're the dragonfly of this podcast, basically. Rather than the mosquito. I mean, if anything, this means I get to hang out with Timothy C Weingard, author of the mosquito, a human history of our deadliest. Wait till he hears about the Dan Keto. Do you guys know what doesn't get enough airtime in all this chat about dragonflies? Oh, tell us. No. Damsel flies.

Damsel flies. Is that a guess? Andy, we are on the same page here. I'm so glad you agree. They're basically dragonflies, but a bit smaller, and people don't know as much about them. So the way you can tell the difference between a damsel and a dragon is that damsel flies hold their wings back against their body, whereas dragonflies can't do that. And also, dragonflies have their two eyes kind of like merged together at the front of their face, whereas damsel flies have them on either side. But damsel flies can climb underwater, even when they're adults, which dragonflies can't. So dragonflies lay their eggs. How do you climb on your water?

Well, good question. They climb backwards down a plant. It's like getting into a swimming pool with the ladder. It's exactly like that. Yeah, certain damsel flies, they have to lay their eggs underwater. It's usually inside plant matter. And they like, you climb down a ladder of a pool, climb backwards down the stem of a plant, and they can be underwater for about half an hour, and they turn their wings into- It's half an hour. Yeah.

So what's their oxygen intake? Oh, god. Here we go again, Dankito to the rescue. You can't do it, Dan. I'm just going to tell you now. They turn their wings into a kind of snorkel. Dan, are you all right? I'm just trying to be a damsel fly. If you can work out how to trap an air bubble between your wings, and then use that to breathe half an hour, you can do that.

God, that's so cool. Yeah. That's a human thing that I think we should nail. Trapping an air bubble. Well, we have scuba equipment. We do. Okay, that's solved. Forget my hand bubble I wanted to invent. This massive, massive dragonfly, the first one was discovered by a guy called Frank Carpenter,

who's in America. And he got into fossilized insects at the age of 14. And he was really, really into them, like, you know, wasn't into girls and football and stuff. He was just, all I want to do is look at fossilized insects. But he was like in a little town in Oklahoma, and what's he going to do? Well, luckily, the local neighborhood postman called Waldo Dodge was also an amateur entomologist. And he'd noticed that this young kid was getting loads of books about fossilized insects sent to his house. And he said, mate, I can help you. And he got him invited to the Cambridge Entomological Club nearby. And then eventually he became a Harvard professor of entomology. And in 1992,

just after his 90th birthday, he published his classification of fossil insects. Isn't it starting at 14 and knowing what you want to do with your life all the way till 90. To have job satisfaction like that, dream of it. When he got the big dragonfly in the first place, it was part of a hunting trip where he and a colleague in 10 weeks managed to collect more than 5,000 fossil insects in Oklahoma. Wow. Nice. Wow. What's that 500 a week? So that's about how many a day? Let's say 80. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty good. That's pretty damn good.

For waking hours, 16 hours, that's five an hour. They're going to have breaks. Yeah, you're right. It's more like 20 an hour if you have a lunch break and maybe a little evening break to talk about all the fossilized insects. Where is this gold mine? They're looking for all their fossilized insects in. That's incredible. I guess no one's looking for them. There must have been a big pile somewhere and then they took the rest of the week off or something. I love that postman's name, Waldo Dodge.

I know. So good. It was so much harder to find Waldo when he's got Dodge capacities. I have a little sideline where I collect the names of people which double his short sentences. And Waldo Dodge is going on the list. Very cool. Who else is on the list? Nancy Drew, who I know is a fictional character, but Wesley Snipes. Cheryl Strayed is an author. Are you counting Waldo Dodge as like an imperative sentence? That is a B-list I have created within my main list.

If you put a comma after Waldo and an exclamation mark after Dodge, it works as an imperative. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. The imperatives are a lower category. I agree. That's how punctuation is allowed. They're not a proper sentence.

No, there's no main verb. Oh my God, Randy's literally brought the list up on his phone here. Rosa Parks, Jeremy Irons, Eric Pickles. You know, they're just Sean Combs. No, he cooms. I pick Combs, yeah. Oh, is it? Sean Combs is who?

But then it could be an imperative. Puff, Daddy. Oh, he goes back on the list. Or Pee, did he? Okay, it is time for fact number three. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that Germany's parliament has 709 real politicians and one fictional one.

So cool. How do they tell the different way? Satire. Is that a satire? It's as close as I get. What are we saying? They're all, it's like they're all fake. No, it's Angela Merkel that she made up.

It's not Angela Merkel. So this is the story of Jakob Maria Mierscheid. He is a father of four. He's a widower. He trained as a tailor. He's an expert on columbopalumbus, which is a species of pigeon. He's someone who tried to make it so that the official transcripts of every final sentence from members' speech were banned from the record

since they always ended in the exact same thing. And thus I conclude. And most notably of all, he is not real. He's completely made up and he has been recognized by all the members of their parliament over 40 years now. And he is a person that was on the official website. He had his own profile. He has his own Twitter account, but he doesn't exist.

What's going on? So he was a fictional composite member to replace a guy who was called Carlo Schmidt, who was a founding father of Germany's constitution. And the name came from one former member of parliament and the date of birth from another. And they just created him as this character to be a part of this little town. Just a joke, right? Just a typical German gag.

No particular reason. 00:31:43,560 --> 00:31:44,920 He liked Carlo Schmidt. Everyone seemed to just like him as a character. And so he gets mentioned occasionally in the actual parliament. But does he ever swing a vote? No. The Bundestag's website has a description of Mierscheid.

And it says, I am neither an invention nor a patent. I am a solution. So he's denying it. He says, like constitutional lawyer Friedrich Nagelman and professional diplomat Edmund F. Draker, my colleagues in the judiciary and the executive with whom I enjoy working, I belong to the pillars of our state.

These two people, Friedrich Nagelman and Edmund F. Draker, are also fictional. It's very weird. And there seems to be a German thing, these kind of in-jokes. Like there's that town in Germany called Bielefeld, which is sort of the opposite. It's got a population of 350,000 people, all real. But there's a running joke that it doesn't exist. And so all Germans know of it as not existing.

It's the 18th largest city in Germany. But even Angela Merkel last time she went there, made a speech there. And then the next day she went somewhere else and said, you know, I've just been to Bielefeld. Or have I? Is it even real? That was really cool.

Who knows? And then if you say, well, I've actually been to Bielefeld. So I know it's there. They go, oh, you're part of the conspiracy are you? Exactly. Yeah. The aliens are in your brain. That's so funny.

I did find out a place that is in Germany. And it's not fictional, but it existed as a weird quasi real entity just after the end of the Second World War. This is really bizarre. It's a town called Schwarzenberg. It's near the border with what was Czechoslovakia. And during the end of the war, both the Soviets and the American forces stopped outside,

which is really strange because they had possibly miscommunicated about where everyone was going to stop their advance. So it seems to have been the last independent bit of German territory that wasn't occupied by the Allied powers. And they sort of denazified. The mayor had been an enthusiastic member of the party. They issued new stamps, new train schedules,

and they imagined they were going to be a kind of Hong Kong territory. Like independent from the rest of Germany. From the mainland, if you like, from mainland Germany. And then after seven weeks, the Soviets heard there were uranium deposits there and invaded. But it was a brief dream. You've got to hide those.

Why had they stopped on either side? Is that like they couldn't agree who was going to come to meet who? Like you meet a friend. It's like you come to me. No, you come to me. It is really weird. I think they both agreed they were going to stop

at a certain river. And I think the river has a weird shape. Something, or maybe the river has two bits. Maybe the river bisects. I don't know the exact geography of Schwarzenberg. I'm sorry. I haven't done one. But there was some miscommunication.

Damn, that uranium. I found some other fake people, not necessarily German. Walter Plinge. Is that another one of your furby names? What is the verb to plinge? Is that like a small plunge? What a damselfly does into the water.

Yeah, Walter Plinge is basically, we know the term Alan Smithy for movies, where you would put that name down if you didn't want to be credited because something had gone wrong. Walter Plinge is kind of similar territory in that he can be used as that for British theatre in that case. But also, it's when a part hasn't been cast, it will be said to be played by Walter Plinge.

Or if an actor is playing two roles in the theatre, one will be Benedict Cumberbatch, the other Walter Plinge. I don't know if he's done that. Well, he has done that because he did Frankenstein. Except there was someone playing the other role, which was Johnny Lee Miller. Yes. But they spot roles each night.

So there was never a chance for Plinge to get in there, I see. If Johnny Lee Miller had been ill, and Benedict Cumberbatch had to play both Frankenstein and the monster, that would have been a good chance to have Plinge. Plinge would have been right in there, yeah. There was a member of the J-pop band, AKB48, called Aguchi Aimi.

But she was completely fictitious. She was computer generated, so they took bits from all of the members of AKB48 because there's 48, or there used to be 48 members of them. They took all different bits and put them all together to make this new member. And it turned out that she was a publicity stump for Glyco Ice No Me, which are grape-flavoured ice balls.

Grape-flavoured ice balls. They need all the publicity they can get, don't they? They sound good. They sound good to me, grape-flavoured ice balls. Yeah, lovely. Because if any glass of water can become a glass of wine, if you just add some of this and let it melt. No?

No? It's not wine ice balls. Grapes made. But it's grapes made out of grapes. Yeah, but they haven't fermented it, have they? There's a process. If you give me grape juice and say it's basically the same as wine,

I am going to be pissed off by that. Imagine if you ordered an AK-47 and you accidentally got AKB-48 turning up. You'd be so disappointed. That's a real mix-up in the Amazon warehouse. I can't eat grapes because they're too cold for my teeth anyway. Really? So this would be a nightmare.

Well, you have to cut them open and then to lick them to warm them up. Anna, you're a pretty hard person in lots of ways. That is the most pathetic thing I've ever heard. Of course, that's Titha cake. Wow, we found Anna's weakness after all these years. That's it. It's my cryptonite. Grape tonight.

Gosh. Has anyone heard of Avril Lavigne? Oh, this feels like a trick question because I have a completely fake person. It doesn't exist. No, I'm joking. Of course. I may not know who Leon Bridges is, but I do know who Avril Lavigne is.

But what's this? She recorded a song called Dolphins. If you go on these websites which give you lyrics to music, they give you the lyrics to this song, Dolphins. The lyrics go, Dolphins live in the ocean. Dolphins live in the sea. Dolphins live in nice, clear, blue sea. They are accompanied by lots of sea animals.

We love them. You love them. I love them. Who doesn't like them? So this is the amazing lyrics to Avril Lavigne's Dolphins. Turns out it doesn't exist. It's a completely made up song that someone put into one of these lyrics websites and all the other lyrics websites kind of took them on as well.

This was in an article for Fusion online magazine. It's really, really good. I highly recommend you read it. Yeah, and there are two cover versions online of this song that doesn't exist. There's no music for it, so people have had to guess what the melody is. So is it to expose these lyric websites for their copycatery? I genuinely think someone just did it for a laugh.

I don't think there's anything behind it. Maybe to expose Avril Lavigne for her quite basic lyrics. Excuse me. I would say complicated. Well, okay. You can't just name your song complicated and claim. What can we do about the massive simplicity of these lyrics? I don't know.

Call it complex? And wait, so do people think that she'd actually released it? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Lots of people thought. Because if you go on the lyrics website, you search all of Avril Lavigne's songs, you see it. Unless you've got every single record that Avril Lavigne's ever released like I do, you're not going to think, well, this is one I've never heard of.

Yeah. Bragging there about your Lavigne discography. I don't normally go on lyrics websites and search for an artist and then look through what they've got. What I normally do is I type in big blue shoe lyric misheard and then that'll take me straight there. But it's annoying when the lyric websites copy each other. I do grab you that.

It's really annoying. I like it when a lyric website is handcrafted by one person listening to a song, having a pun to the lyrics. Is that a thing? Maybe I've just been believing them and singing the wrong lyrics to, you know, Done Bummy Love, which... Done Bummy Love. Done Bummy Love is what I thought that was for a long time.

Done Bummy Love. Don't bum it out. That's a very different song, isn't it? Wow. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. That is Andy. My fact is that before it was somewhere to go to powder your nose, a powder room was a room where you stuck your head through the wall

to get your wig powdered. Okay, so is there a hole for you to put your head in? Do you have to smash your head through the wall? That's what I'm currently thinking. In classy establishments, the hole is pre-provided for you and you just pop your head through. So there aren't many of these places around, obviously, because no one wears the big grey wigs anymore,

except lawyers, I guess, if you barrister still wear them. But there are a few places left in historical buildings where they survive. Southside House is a manor house in Wimbledon, in South West London, and it's got a lot of beautiful historical features. And one of them is this weird, cupboard-y room which has a hole in the wall and you would stick your head through the wall

and a servant in there would powder the wig for you. Right. And a wily way. I couldn't work out. Is the servant, which I think was a young boy usually, do they live there the whole time? I couldn't work that out. I don't.

They must be there, right? It depends. Maybe if there's a regular wig powdering time, or if you're having a party. Must be parties, right? Yeah. Party. If you want to quickly get your wig repaired.

Yeah. And why does it have to be a separate room? Are the wig wearers pretending it's like magic? No. You just put your head in. I mean, why do they need to be locking themselves in this cupboard? Have you read the process about how much powder goes into, like, the collateral powder of powdering?

It's a messy situation. Extraordinary. I mean, the opposite version of that is they used to have rooms. They found this in one case where you would sit inside in a barber's chair, basically, and through the hole in the wall would be your powderer, effectively your hairdresser, in a different room, applying the powder just through the hole

and just smashing your face with it. And in order to not get it all over your clothes or all over your face, you would wear gowns, like you would in a salon, and you would wear a weird cone over your face to stop the powder from. Yeah, powder cone. Yeah, exactly.

Which makes you look like a really terrifying medieval doctor, doesn't it? The plague mask, yeah. That's very strange. But presumably the poor servant in the cupboard is absolutely covered. He's choking on powder by the end of the day. Yeah, you'd guess so, yeah.

The Peruk powder page, which is what they were called. Really? Oh, the Peruk old name for a wig. Kind of interesting, actually. Like, the word Peruk meant a wig by the 1560s, but in the 1540s, it meant a natural head of hair. So in 20 years that changed. And that word came from the Italian word

paruka, which means wig. Yeah. But the wigs were made of real heads of hair, because there were people selling their hair, but also it was standard in much of society, not just high society, in lots of society, for men to be wearing these big wigs. So...

Not just the big wigs, were they? No, exactly. Medium-sized wig, men, wore big wigs. But yeah, human hair being sold for wigs was big business throughout this time, and I was reading an account in 1840, written by a British writer, and this was when wig-wearing had really

gone out of fashion in most places, but there were parts of France where it was still quite fashionable. So this British writer went to Brittany, and it was like the most extraordinary thing about being in France is the peasant hair auctions. And what would happen is, you'd have a marketplace in the middle of a town or a village,

and there'd be a whole queue of girls wanting to sell their hair, and the young girls would mount in turn, mount this platform in the middle, and people would shout out bids. And after the highest bidder, the girl is shorn on the spot, apparently. Like a sheep.

Like a sheep. Like a sheep. How much would the hair go for? As in, would it be more affordable for you to shave your head, sell your hair, and then use that money to buy a wig? With the selling of the hair. Someone's taking money there.

There's a middleman, which is what you don't want in business. But if the amount that your hair sells for, greatly outnumbers the amount you buy a wig for. I mean, if that's possible, the Nobel Prize in Economics is going to you. It's a way of making money from nowhere. Well, look at these auctions. I mean, you know, they could go up and down.

It doesn't work economically, unless you had much better quality hair than the wig you wanted to buy. Exactly. You could sell your good hair and buy some shitty hair, and you would make money that way. But what you're proposing is the wig equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.

It was partly expensive, because it was hard to harvest. So it's not like a crop, which grows really fast, and you can cut it down every year, for a hair to grow to the ideal length. You sort of need two to four years growth, depending on how much you want. And so people would offer women advanced payments,

because you've got to make sure you get that head of hair in four years' time when it's lush. So you'd pay in advance and say, in four years, I'll be back to chop that off. But you'd have to keep an eye on your investment the whole time, right, to make sure that there's not anything... I would sell my hair to multiple different people,

take all the down payments, and then scarpa. And that would be my fraud. Yeah, and the good thing is, if you shaved your head, no one would recognize you. The Romans used to get hair from peasants, didn't they? There was a vogue for blonde hair in Roman times, and they went to the conquered sort of Germanic tribes, and people even further north than that,

and they would take the blonde hair from there, and then expensive wigs would be made from them, yeah. And in the 16th century in Italy, blonde hair was really popular, but it was very hard to get hold of blonde wigs. And so what women would do is, they would sit on the top of buildings in huge hats. They were called Salanas.

So there was a massive brim, but there was no top of the hat. So the sun could bleach their hair. Isn't that interesting? Why did they have the massive hat? To stop you from getting tan skin. But also, you can lay out... If you've got long hair, you'd lay it out across the brim,

can't you? So you're bleaching all your hair at the same time? Yeah, the sun tan thing as well might have been probably true. For a sun tan, you don't need a massive hat. You just need a hat that's got a brim. But massive. I'm picturing sort of an umbrella-sized. I like Andy's theory. They used to be made of metal in the... Metal wigs.

The wig era. Yeah, weird, right? Sort of long strands of tin or steel, I think. Not many, but it wasn't a big fashion. But there are accounts out there of iron wigs. Yes, iron wigs, yeah. Edward Waterley Montague was an author and traveler. He had an iron wig. And there was an advertiser who said it could withstand rain,

wind and hail, and all without causing discomfort to the wearer, which feels like a bit of a stretch. The practical wig, though. But then they went out of fashion, didn't they? For various reasons. One, there was a wig tax. Wig powder tax even. Sorry, that's what I mean.

It was pit the younger, wasn't it? Yeah, and there was a licensing system, like a TV license. I tell you what, if Pit was a bit older, he wouldn't bother about wigs so much. It's all right for those young people to say no one should have wigs. But it was roughly the cost of a modern TV license, I think. Right. It was one guinea year, which I have read.

That much TV licenses? Well, about 150 quid in modern money. And so, I mean, there are obviously different ways of calculating it, but yeah, that's roughly it. Well, the hope was that they were gonna sort of use that money to fight Napoleon. Yeah. It was crazy.

It worked. Did it, did it, did it? Yeah, it made a lot of money. Because I thought people just stopped doing it as a result. In the first year, it raised £200,000, which was a lot. But then, by 1869, it was only raising £1,000 a year, as wigs had gone out. And you were exempt if you were royal,

or if you were a clergyman on less than £100 a year. There were various exemptions and... Yeah, the royals need the help, don't they, poor guys? And also, it allowed them to create a funny nickname, guinea pigs, because pigtails were all the rage. Men used to wear them, and it cost a guinea for the wig tax. I mean, it's perfect. So, was that the origin of guinea pigs in terms of...

The animal? No, not the animal. Just in terms of that phrase, was that a completely separate phase? No. Wait, what do you mean in terms of that phrase? It's the phrase to describe someone being like a lab rat. That came from the fact that people experimented on guinea pigs. Okay, but were people already experimenting on guinea pigs? Guys, where do you think that meaning of guinea pig

would have come from the people who paid a wig tax? Because they were the first people with the guinea pigs. They were testing the tax on them. It was human guinea pig. No, no, it's from people testing drugs on guinea pigs. Dan, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm with you. I'm not saying I'm with me. I was just asking whether or not there's a connection.

The worst place to be is with Dan, but he's not on board. I'm not with myself. There's about a dozen early Nobel Prizes that were won by experiments on guinea pigs specifically. Right, okay. But this phrase is from the... Yeah, but that's not what it meant, though. Right, sorry, yeah.

Here's the question. Where does pigs come in into your phrase of guinea pigs? Pig tails. People call them pig tails. Great. Are you back on board with yourself, Dan? No, I'm just learning. Great.

What we're not 100% sure of, and maybe we should go back and check the sources, is that in all those early 20th century medical sources when they referred to testing on guinea pigs, maybe they actually were testing on these overprivileged wig-wearing toffs. I haven't checked. All I'm saying is, was it a phrase that evolved and evolved

to a new meaning? Kind of like the wig, but turns out it's not. So, Andy, you're wrong. Wow. This is a sick bird. You're alone on the ship that Dan's built, then jumps. No. But they went out of fashion.

We know that by about the 1820s, but these weird little holdouts happened, didn't they, across society. So, coachmen kept going until the 1820s. Bishops stopped in 1832 by royal permission. They said, we don't want to wear these anymore. Cool people who live in the Hackney today, for instance, like myself.

We're always wearing periwigs. Right. Well, it's you guys and barristers, James, because... Barristers and barristers. Very, very strong. Nice. But from the mid-1840s onwards, it sort of had a resurgence in court,

and you would, in court, you were technically invisible unless you were wearing a wig. You would not... I mean, technically invisible. You would be, in quotes, not seen or heard. The judge would not recognize you. Wow. So, it's a way of being invisible, basically.

Oh, I don't know. Where is Lord Plinge? I can't see him anywhere. Basically that. Amazing. He's going, objection, objection, but he's not going his way on. Some barristers still wear wigs today,

and I read a great piece in the legal magazine called Council, which is a great magazine, and I recommend you all order, order it. This is brilliant. But I just... I'm remembering the thing about the Sellafield magazine a few weeks ago, and I think this could be Addy's magazine corner.

100%. Sellafield magazine suddenly sounds like an agricultural kind of auction mag, doesn't it? Oh, God, another huge AK-47. AKB-48 thing. Oh, I'm just trying to sell a field, you've delivered uranium to me. Now the Soviets are coming.

Put it with the unwanted gun in your pantry. Look, anyway, Council magazine wrote all about how wigs were nearly got rid of in court, right? So, in 1940s, Parliament debated this clause, which was going to ban wigs and gowns in court. It said, this is ridiculous. So, they went out 100 years ago in the rest of society, and it prompted this huge backlash,

and lots of MPs, who are obviously very traditionalist as well, objected. One MP asked whether the clause would also deprive admirals of their three-cornered hats, or deprive generals of their epaulettes, or clergymen of their distinctive attire. He said nothing about nurses,

the person who had proposed this clause. He said nothing about nurses, although I think we all agree that they look very pretty in their distinctive attire. Oh, my God. I know, that has a common stuff. Jesus Christ. Wow.

But there was a fear that judges would not look majestic if they took their wigs off, and that if a judge was seen in his wig, he was embodying the law and very powerful. But if seen with that one, he might look like a wizened-up gargoyle. So, problem. That's really rough on judges.

Wigs, a big role in the civil rights movement in America. That is because during desegregation in the 60s, there were a lot of jobs where they kind of banned African American her styles, and they kind of said you had to comply with a certain hairstyle. And so a lot of people had to wear wigs to kind of cover that up.

But then there were activists such as Marcus Garvey who said, look, this is ridiculous. We can't be doing this. One, we need to stop people discriminating against hairstyles. But two, we need to kind of reclaim our hairstyle and kind of be proud of it. And he said, don't remove the kinks from your hair.

Remove them from your brain. And then in the 1970s, there was kind of a resurgence of people reclaiming the African American hairstyle. And then all the way to the present day in 2019, New York became the second state to ban discrimination on the hairstyles. So in California and New York right now,

you're not allowed to discriminate on anyone due to their hairstyle. And that is going back to the civil rights movement and all that stuff. Far out, yeah. Oh, I didn't know we were allowed to do that before. You would think so, wouldn't you? Oh, I've been taking the piss out of people

with pigtails left, right, and centre. Do you guys know about the wig club? No. No. It was founded in 1775 in Edinburgh and there was a really cool investigation into it by an author called David Stevenson and it was a gentleman's sex club.

And... I mean, no, I haven't heard of it, no. Yeah, it was a good test and well done, you all passed. It was named after a wig that they had as their kind of relic, their club relic, that was made from the pubic hair of Charles II's mistresses that had apparently been worn by Charles II.

And when you joined the wig club as part of your initiation, you had to provide lots of pubic hair suitably harvested to be added to the wig as proof of having triumphed sexually. So you had to after triumphing sexually, I guess, say to the woman, sorry, do you mind if I snip off a curl of your pubic hair

because I'm hoping to join a sex club. Definitely do that afterwards, I would say. And yeah, they just met and talked about how much sex they were having and drank a lot. These guys sound great. Yeah. So no actual sex happened at the wig club. It was just a bunch of virgins getting together,

bringing cut locks from their dogs. Exactly. Shagged hood last night, man. Is that what it was? Yeah, yeah, it's a really cool club to be a member of. Yeah. Look, I would have applied. I'm not going to lie.

Some wigs were made of duck's tail feathers. Wigs specifically for Parsons and Vickers. Okay. Had because it was to fight off the wet because obviously water off a duck's back. Oh, clever. They literally had a duck's ass at the front of their head, looking so stupid.

It is quite clever though, isn't it? Yeah. What animals hair would you have as a wig if you could have any? Peacock. And just let it go. Yeah. Full, full peacock. That's a good idea.

Well, is it a peacock's tail that you've got? No, I've missed that bit. Oh, you just want the ordinary cleavage. Okay, okay. That's cool. Would that be whenever you clench your teeth? It fans out. Whenever you tense your head.

I would have thought like you'd come in from the cold, take your hat off, and it kind of comes out. Jack in a box. Yeah. I'd probably get an orangutan. Oh, yeah. Because they've got lovely orange hair. They do, don't they?

Always wanted to be a ginger. Don't know. Very wiry orangutan hair. It looks wiry. How do you know? It looks wiry from a distance. It's got a pubic quality about it. Ooh.

Well, you could bring it to your wig party, Andy. I was just thinking yak, just because it's so long and luscious. Ah, lovely. And wise. What? This is just the yaks. Wise like a yak. Not saying?

It is, no? 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 over the course of this, 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.qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website. No such thing as a fish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there, so do check them out. Also, go to the link that gives you the tour dates for our upcoming 2021 tour. It starts in October. See if we're coming to a town or city near you. And hopefully we'll see some of you there. Okay, that's it.

We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.