No Such Thing As A Fish - 389: No Such Thing As A Semen Chest

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the high-pitched president, inflatable shoes and likin' lichen.    Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Afternoon all, you must know by now if you've been paying attention over the last couple of months that I have for some reason committed to traveling the country with these three upcoming idiots. We are going to all sorts of exotic places like Ipswich, Barnstaple, Pool, Reading, Peterborough, Chesterfield, but popping over to Dublin, we're going up to Scotland, few locations there. Obviously, sitting on a tour bus for months on end with Dan, James and Andy is not how any sane person would choose to spend their time. The only thing that's going to make it bearable is if you guys come along too, please know such things at fish.com, has all the details, get tickets, come and watch us. There'll be an exclusive first half which will never be available

anywhere else and then we'll be doing a different podcast every night for the second half. See you there. 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 humongous 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's my fact, my fact this week is that it would take people around 10 minutes to adjust to the way Abraham Lincoln sounded before they could enjoy his speeches. Wow. So are the first 10 minutes of his speeches always really shit because he

knows it has to be filler and then at the 10 minute mark he launches into the real stuff. He does the what do you do, what's your job, you know, emceeing moments. Hang on Dan, Abraham Lincoln's most famous speech was the Gettysburg Address where I believe he spoke for two minutes. And also his most famous line is the first line of that address isn't it? Oh no, yeah you're right. It's true. Oh I would say it was the last line so it's the last line, wasn't it, shout out Parrish from the earth? Line. Yes, it was the first line, four score. I really would have gone the four score as the big line. Would you? And I would go buy the people too, the people for the people with the people. You didn't understand the first minute and a half though,

did you? That's true because I was so distracted by his weird voice. What's his weird voice? Did he have an accent? He did have an accent but he also had a much higher voice than you would think. So I guess all of us probably had an introduction to Abraham Lincoln's supposed voice through the movies and so on. For me it was Bill and Ted's excellent adventure and incredibly low. I watched that this weekend. Did you? Well you would have seen it then. My niece had never seen it, she's only nine and so yeah. Right. Introduced her to it, it's brilliant. It's a fantastic movie. So he comes out at the end and he does the four score and it's a very baritone war score and that's what we know is Lincoln but all of the contemporary accounts of his

speeches say that he had a tenor's voice, a much higher voice and as a result there's a historian called Harold Holzer who's written over 40 books on both Lincoln and the Civil War and he found that there were all these accounts of journalists saying that for the first 10 minutes people just really had to adjust to both the accent and the sound matched with this tall human who was quite gangly and just putting all the things together. It took 10 minutes before they could settle in and go oh okay he's actually saying amazing stuff. It sounds like a really weird voice. Oh because obviously no recording. You're good at voices at me, can you do us a little? He had a thin tenor or rather falsetto voice almost as high pitched as a boson's whistle.

Yeah it's Matt. The New York and all the reviews are so negative of him. The New York Herald said he had a frequent tendency to dwindle into a shrill and unpleasant sound. It just sounds yeah. Some people think it was useful though because like there were some famous debates he did with a guy called Stephen A. Douglas and he had quite a baritone voice Stephen A. Douglas but they think that maybe in a big crowd the baritone might sometimes get lost there and the people at the back will be able to hear the high pitch sounds better. Yes how interesting. Is that like when your neighbors are having a party and you can hear the bass much more indistinctly but the high stuff is what really annoys you. Yeah. For me it's

the bass. Is that a joke? No. The bass is the annoying bit right? The bass is the bit that keeps you. Yes you're right. Okay so it's like this. It's like the opposite of my life with my neighbors. It's another brilliant analogy from Andy Murray. The whole thing of it being the voice being low. The first time I think I've then heard the higher voices when Daniel Day Lewis played him in the Spielberg movie. It's a fantastic movie. I mean it's still Bill and Ted. It's no Bill and Ted. Yeah I read an article in the Library of Congress and they said that his voice is closer to that Daniel Day Lewis voice than any other impression that anyone's ever done. Oh really? They even said it was more close than the one Andy is going to do on the podcast

in a few weeks time on that article. It's amazing. Oh no. So when Daniel Day Lewis was cast for the movie which was after Liam Neeson had to drop out he spent a year prepping. Was Liam Neeson going to play Lincoln? Liam Neeson was going to play Lincoln. I don't know if I take a role that I was second to Liam Neeson. Well I think Daniel Day Lewis was the original choice. He said no to it and then Liam Neeson got involved and then Liam Neeson had. Incredible. I know yeah. Surely then Daniel Day Lewis said oh god fine I will do it my lord. I'm going to find whoever stole my hat and I'm going to rip their heads from the body. Yeah so he took on the role and he spent a year possibly more prepping for it. Read over a hundred books and that's when he was trying to find the

voice the voice of Lincoln and when he eventually found it. Probably reading the wrong books wasn't it? I read the audio but yeah. When he eventually decided on what the voice was he recorded it with a neighbour and he posted it to Steven Spielberg in a package where he drew a skull and crossbones on it and put a black mark on it because he wanted no one but Steven Spielberg to read to hear it first. It's much more interesting and exciting to be tampered with. If it was just a blank envelope I'd be like yeah fine I'm not interested in that all of a sudden. It didn't treasure that. Exactly I don't know what he was thinking. It sounds very odd filming with him because he is your classic method actor I guess Daniel Day Lewis and he insisted on being

Lincoln on set so he talked in that voice the entire time on and off set for months and months when they were filming. He never didn't talk in the voice. He wouldn't allow any accents other than American accent around him in case that put him off his flow. He made everyone refer to him as Mr President throughout filming. I think Spielberg insisted on that as well. Did he? They're both presidents. Yeah it was very confusing battle of the presidents. No no he said let's buy into this you know. Oh so he said that everyone had to call Day Lewis president. I believe so because he started coming in inappropriate clothing as well as the director to sort of make it. Yeah Spielberg did that and Daniel Day Lewis was not on the call sheet Abraham Lincoln was on the

call sheet instead. How do you dress inappropriate as a film director if you're dressing for the 1860s? Surely yeah but he just walked in they went sorry we can't make a film because film hasn't been invented yet. Everyone go home. There's one journalist who described Lincoln as a slang wanging stump speaker. That is a great phrase isn't it? It's a really good phrase. He was known for being humble which some people cast as maybe not sophisticated enough in his language slang wanging. He's wanging the slang around. His accent we were saying before was kind of different as well right. So whenever he was supposed to say chairman he would say cheerman. Cheerman. Cheerman. And so cheerman. What about this if he ever said winder. Winder. That's window. Winder right.

Learned would be larned and he would always say reccom instead of assume. That sounds really different. But equally strangely he also had a lot of misspellings in his written work as well and he would often spell the word inaugural wrong. Oh yeah. But that's we think that perhaps that gives a clue as to how he spoke as well. If he if he spelled it slightly differently maybe he spoke it that way as well. Right. Was it was it radically different? Did it start with a cue? No it would be inaugural. Okay. Instead of inaugural. Right. And he stood so still. This was another report of the way he spoke. So his law partner was a man called William Herndon and Herndon recorded that I don't know why he said this but he said you could leave a silver dollar between his feet at the start of

a speech and it would still be there at the end. I have a theory for why he did this. So I was reading accounts of young Lincoln. I don't think he actually did that. I'm just what do you mean? He didn't actually leave a dollar between his feet at the start. No no no but he stood in credit. The point was to make the point. I thought you were saying that he had done that. I have a theory that the coin was magic. He used to be a busker and he always put a few coins there to just get people. Yeah yeah yeah. No my theory which probably is an established reason as opposed to a theory is when he was young he used to sit up late at night and he used to listen to his dad tell stories to all of his friends. Really funny stories. Lincoln was obsessed with them. So in the morning

he would go and he would find his friends and he would tell all the stories that his dad had told the night before and he would stand on a tree stump and that is where he would deliver all of his speeches. So he didn't have much of a stage. He had the space of a tree stump and that would have informed the lack of leg movement which then took him to presidency. When he was doing his inaugural speech he was thinking oh exactly. The Gettysburg address was not him. What? Yes it was. Wow okay this is a crazier theory than my tree stump theory. This is he stood so still because it was actually a robot. No the Gettysburg address was someone else delivered it. So really at the event where he delivered the Gettysburg address he was supposed to be giving a very

short closing dedication which is why it was only two minutes long. It was just a very quick thanks for coming guys. Thank god these blokes gave their lives for the civil war etc. If there's a carriage in the park with the license plate it's blocking the way you need to move your carriage. Exactly the person who was supposed to give what they were calling the Gettysburg address at the time was this great orator and politician pastor who was called Edward Everett and his was two hours long. So that could be the one we all knew of by heart. Wow really. So did he actually do that two hour speech first? He did a two hour speech which means it's incredible people had the energy to listen to Lincoln after that. He did the two hours and then. I wonder they loved it so much.

I think he was sick at the time as well Lincoln when he then gave the speech afterwards and it kind of bombed I guess after a two hour speech. It did bomb. It got terrible reviews everywhere so the Times said that the inauguration of the cemetery at Gettysburg was an imposing ceremony only rendered ludicrous by some of the luckless sallies of that poor President Lincoln. He got a ru... Ouch. Yeah and in fact there was an apology issued in 2013 by a newspaper called The Patriot News who gave him a really bad review at the time. They said it was silly remarks and that maybe he was drunk and that it deserved the veil of oblivion and then in 2013 they recanted. I don't know America. Of all the things you should be apologizing for that it does feel quite far down the list.

When did Lincoln become president? How do you all know? 1860? Yeah so when do you think the first town was named after him? Oh I would have guessed a few years after the Civil War or maybe soon after it. Okay I'm going to go the opposite direction and say he was an influential lawyer and maybe that led to something so two years before he was president. Wow who are you and what have you done with Dan Shriver? That is absolutely correct. It was 1853 because he was a lawyer. Some people who were setting up a new town brought him in to kind of sign the deeds and they said would you mind if we named this town after you? God that's flattering. And so that's Lincoln Illinois which is still there today and at noon that day he purchased two watermelons, carried them to the

public square and squeezed the watermelon juice out onto the ground. Did he use his thighs? Call back. Then he said to the people nothing bearing the name Lincoln ever amounted to much so he said that they shouldn't really have called it after him. That's very cool. One thing from the time that Lincoln was president was that the White House was an open house at the time which is so bizarre to think of now obviously because there are two miles of security around it but people were just walking in all the time. You just walk into the White House and people were free to climb in through the windows. They camped outside his office door. If it's open why they go through the windows? But they were demanding jobs from him. The whole thing was carnage.

He's the president of the country. He must have had one room where it was like do not enter. Well he had an office but they had to cut it down to two five-hour sessions a week where you could just knock on the door and go and see him and chat to him and ask for a job. 10 hours a week of his working time was spent just being harangued by people and he called them his public opinion baths and people would just leave inventions that they thought he might like to look at. It's insane and he couldn't walk from the office to his own private living quarters without being bothered along the way by people asking for jobs and the White House maintenance people had to build a partition to say no he actually just needs a corridor that he can walk along without

being bothered all the time. Corridor of power. Yes he's mad. I suppose it's kind of like an mp surgery isn't it today but you know for 10 hours a week. For the quarter of your working time. For the president of the United States. I think he did more than 40 hours a week I'm going to say. Maybe at the height of the war yeah you're right. And now he bothers presidents because isn't he constantly reported not constantly but by a few the ghost of Lincoln are seen in the White House. The people of you know presidents have said yeah yeah I saw the ghost of Lincoln. Wow yeah. That's him. Okay it is time for fact number two and that is Anna. My fact this week is that 5,000 years ago

Scots built houses by dropping huge piles of stones to the bottom of locks and building their home on top of them. That's so amazing. Such a weird way of doing it and we don't know why they did it. These are things called crannogs. I mean if you live in Scotland it's very likely you know about them. I actually didn't know about them at all. Yeah never heard of them. But there are about 600 of them known about so far. They're artificial islands that were built in locks and they would be connected to the shore by like a little causeway and until quite recently it was thought they'd dated back to about 800 BC and then they just did some radiocarbon dating of pottery that's been sunken around them and they found out it actually dates back to 3,600 BC.

Before Stonehenge, before the pyramids, the Scots were just piling up stones in locks and building a house on top for no apparent reason. It's not just piling stones right like there's so much engineering that goes around it. So impressive. So the word crannog is Gaelic for Son of Tree or Young Tree and the idea is because they would cut these huge long timber piles and they ram them into the beds of the lock and then they would pile the stones in around them so they had a solid wooden foundation. Yeah you've got like a scaffold that you can stuff full. Yeah I think there are different types as well aren't there. There are some that are just timber so they're just kind of wooden platforms and then there are some that are stones. Yeah

exactly and we've tried to remake them in modern times and it's taken about three years to construct one to be in a similar using the technology and so on. How did they drive the piles into the bed of the lock? Exactly. They have to get meters into the bed of the lock and you know that's obviously incredibly hard to do from a floating surface. Yeah well I think what happens is you put some stones near the shore and then you put some a little bit further away and a little bit further away and you put like a path to the middle of the lock or not the middle maybe a few meters away from the edge and then you build it from there so you kind of make a causeway first and if you look from above you can kind of see the little causeway underneath the water. Yeah. And then how do you

get the pile to go so deep into the bed? Oh yeah I mean it's it's all crazy and how do you do it. I think we'll know. You pile up on top like a circus trick. You just have people standing on top of each other. It's the ghost of Lincoln I think is coming out again in flyers stuff. If it's the Loch Ness monster. It's aliens of course it's aliens. No we have no idea do we? It's absolutely amazing. I've lived there until the 17th century apparently the last people were living on crannogs so pretty relatively recent compared with when they were built. I think the ones where we found the pottery we're not sure if people actually lived there right? Yeah. So the reason that we think they might not have lived on these particular ones is because there isn't any domestic

waste around there. You do have these pots there's no human remains so we don't think it's a funeral thing so we think it might be some kind of feast maybe some kind of rite of passage that kind of thing. So what has happened is people have brought some pots to this island this fake island done something thrown the pots in the water and then left. It's a bar. I mean that's obviously just a bar. You're pissed you toss your pot away you can't be asked to carry at home. It's a Scottish pub. It sounds so exciting being the person who discovered that they were really old so they are 3,000 years older than we thought they were and it was a retired navy diver called Chris Murray who first kind of discovered this and it was 10 years ago and he was just going for a

dive and he saw some pots and then he sent them off to be analysed and turned out they were 5,500 years old but he was saying that in 2020 he was going for a dive and he found a 5,500 year old drinking vessel he just saw a little fragment sticking out of the mud so he took it and then he took a sip of water from it and you can think the last time someone did this was over 5 millennia ago. Isn't that so cool? Maybe people will be doing that with our old horrible ribena cartons and plastic festival cups in 5,000 years. What a lovely thought. The plastic will still be there won't it? Artificial islands? So lots of artificial islands in the world. I didn't know about the ones in Bolivia and Peru on Lake Titicaca. They're amazing. I've stayed on them.

Wow the floating ones. The floating ones, the reed islands. So yeah these are islands made of weeds woven together and they're made by indigenous people and it seems like they were just made by the Uro people and basically they got to the shores of Lake Titicaca hoping to set up camp and take residence there a thousand years ago and they realised there were people there. There was the Quechua people, the Aymara people there so they were like well we can't live here, what should we do? So they built some platforms and then just sailed out into the middle of a lake and they still hang out there. Yeah it's really cool. When I was there they said that they went there because there was taxes they wanted to get away with so it was like a literal offshore account that they

come and tax them but some people think it was because there was a war and they went there so that people couldn't attack them but yeah they taught me how to make the reeds and stuff like that and yeah. So you have to constantly sort of it's like repainting a bridge right like you're constantly fixing the reeds. So near to where the islands are there's like loads of massive reeds and you go over there and you cut them down and then you kind of turn them into like little not like bricks but like little groups of reeds and I went on a boat to the school because they have a floating school and a floating basketball cart and stuff and I was staying with family of Uros and it was really cool. Wow. I highly recommend that. So amazing. Have you heard of

Mistress Reef? It's another created island and it's a new island that's being created by China and it's in the, is it the South China Sea? I think it is. Probably it's why they do most of their island creations. They're creating a lot of islands at the moment and it's causing a lot of mischief. Yeah. Oh they genuinely are. I tried to work out was this called Mistress Reef before China started creating military runways and hangars and you know missile bases. It's quite an innocuous term. It's Naughty Boy Island. It's Mistress Reef. Yeah. Silly Billy. Mistress Reef is one of the biggest and you can see photos of it from you know 15 years ago photos now and it looks like a different place. It is a different place that's because it's been imported and installed and

concreted and all over but there's this bizarre war of attrition going on kind of Cold War style between the China who are building these islands which are contested by the way the ownership is contested and the US Navy. So the US Navy keeps on sailing close to them to make the point. They do a thing called a phonop which is a freedom of navigation operation and if you have a land I think the barrier is 12 miles like that's how far your border stretches into the ocean if the island is definitely yours. I know there are different sort of definitions but the USA pointedly sails within 12 miles of Mistress Reef to make the point these are international waters according to the international community so we're going to keep on doing it and it hasn't broken into or

conflict yet. A little bit isn't it because like I think Philippines want it, Japan wants it, Indonesia wants it, Russia wants it, it's like yeah it's dodgy but do you remember I was telling you guys about in Bhutan on the border between Bhutan and China. China has just started building villages and no one noticed and like in Bhutan they started. Yeah like the Bhutanese noticed and they were like well shall we tell the Chinese not to do this anymore or shall we just kind of leave it and they just kind of left it because there are other things that they want to have a good deal with China about but then the international community are like well last time we looked here there weren't three villages and an airport and you know oh man yeah I thought it was called

Mistress Reef Islands because of a ship oh really called the Mistress Reef. Yeah I think it's in dedication to a ship that used to pass and that I could be wrong about that but it's a party cruise ship wasn't it? It's a swinger's cruise. Here's an island that I'd never heard of, Dejima. This was created in Nagasaki Bay in the 17th century in Japan and during the Edo period Japan wanted to be a closed country so it didn't want anyone else to come in. The only people that were allowed to go anywhere near Japan were Chinese, Korean and Dutch and they were allowed to do that for trading reasons. Dutch is a bit of a wild card. It feels like a Dutch got a weird free pass okay whatever not offended. But basically if you were a member of the Dutch East India Company

and you were trading and you were like taking some silk there or some spices or whatever you would go to this created island called Dejima and you would kind of live on there but you weren't allowed onto the main island and there was like a bridge there with guards which would stop you from going over. It's really really cool. There's an amazing book David Mitchell book set on Dejima because it was very famous. Japan's policy was they didn't want any Western culture coming in and invading them so which is why they really tried to block them out and then you know wars happened and we got involved and forced them out of it but yeah it's so brilliant. What was the book? The Thousand Autums of Jacob Dezoet

and yeah so it's about this Dutch guy who goes over and stays there but yeah completely fake. Yeah and while you're on there like the local kids would kind of oh look there's a Dutch person isn't that strange kind of thing and also you were required to tell the Japanese about anything that had happened in the world while you were away. So really you're a human newspaper for the news of three years ago when you last left the Western world. I find that really cool because at one point Dejima was the only independent bit of the Netherlands so at one point the Netherlands was an artificial island so this is when the Netherlands was annexed by Napoleon I think in the Napoleonic wars and like lots of Dutch territory was taken elsewhere and so that was

where they lived and I think they succeeded there because they're so used to living on basically artificial reclaimed land right. The Netherlands is sort of mostly an artificial island in itself about 60% of the land in the Netherlands is just there because they've drained away the water and they've built it up. It's incredible most of the population lives on land that shouldn't naturally be there. There's an entire province called Flevepolde which is the 12th province of the Netherlands and it's new. It's just a new land yeah. Oh because polder is what they're called polder it's a polder the reclaimed land isn't it? It would make you nervous I think. That is incredible. I found a really cool new artificial island which I'm so annoyed I have not looked up the

pronunciations but I imagine you guys will know it's a bridge which connects Copenhagen to Malmo and it's the Oresond bridge. Oresond yeah. Oresond. So have you been there? Yeah okay apparently you've been to every artificial island in the Netherlands. So the Oresond bridge if you're passing it you go in the bridge and then what the TV show The Bridge is based on. Exactly yes yeah and it goes down underneath doesn't it as opposed to being a bridge that connects Copenhagen to Malmo it goes bridge-like and then suddenly it becomes a tunnel and you go underneath and that tunnel bit has become an artificial island which is called Pepa Holm and Pepa Holm is called that because there is an actual island next to it called Salt Holm and yeah so that's the um

they don't mention that in the bridge. It's a really great TV show it's so exciting to start and end Lanskij Malmo it's really like cool and sexy and scandy and they don't ever say that. If they just had one character who just gave bits of trivia about the area that would be a successful show exactly but so yeah so it's become this artificial island and um sorry how does the tunnel become an island? There's a stretch of water between the two between Malmo and where is it? So you have a bridge over some of it then there's an island at the end of the bridge and that island then contains the portal to a tunnel yes the tunnel runs under the rest of the water right so the boats can still go past but you can have a bridge

I see I see very clever and so what's happened is this small very concrete look in island has become a place where new species have migrated to and set up shop and so you're only really allowed it's like a penguin going well they fish anyone any fish? So supposedly I mean this is I don't know if this is definitely still the case in 2021 but for the last few years it's been the case that you can only go there once a year and it's only biologists who are allowed to go there and what they found on it is amazing there's 12 species of bird that are living there there were 20 species of spider one really rare one which they think might have migrated there via a train so it sort of popped off while it was on the train there's a couple of rabbits

there that they think some people in a car must have just let out and let them be on their own there's 345 species of beetle there's 421 species of butterfly which vehicle did these all leave out of the breeze the beetles came in a yellow submarine okay it is time for fact number three and that is James okay my fact this week is that the only known species of marine lichen was discovered by a person named Ivan Lamb their work often acknowledged the help of a miss Elkie Mackenzie but that turned out to be one in the same person as lamb later transitioned and took that name it's very cool so Ivan lamb was basically thanking her future self exactly Elkie Mackenzie yeah or teasing it's a trailer trailer for yeah yeah

so i read a no-bit tree of Elkie Mackenzie written by Vernon Akmagian but it actually first come across Elkie Mackenzie in a blog by JSTOR the website by Sabrina Imbla and in that blog there was an amazing thing that said that Mackenzie had spent her whole life preparing this monograph of a particular type of lichen only for her never to be able to quite make it because sometimes her specimens got blown away once she fell down an elevator shaft did she fall down an elevator shaft or did the light fall down it's really hard to tell but that was like what really piqued my interest about this person it's like what an amazing life but yeah a really cool person who kind of dedicated her life to lichen she worked in the natural history museum in London as an

assistant to Annie Lorraine Smith in the 1930s and it's just so interesting that at the time Annie Lorraine Smith was a huge character in the lichen world and she'd written a book which became the sort of seminal textbook for the time about lichen yet she was not officially hired by the natural history museum because they didn't hire women at the time so she had to have as her pay packet was outsourced to somewhere else that could fund it because that was the only way that they could do it because they didn't have women on the payroll wow it's weird the reading about the history of lichenologists because there do seem to be a lot of women in there even like in the 19th century a lot of the people I was coming across were women which is kind of exciting it was

like a secret area that women knew that they were going to be led into almost but not quite and I did get excited that Carol Dodge who was Elkie McKenzie's main rival was also a woman but it's not a woman but um it's kind of sad Carol Dodge the Carol Dodge story because Elkie didn't like Dodge so what Elkie found that was really revolutionary in the lichen world was endemic Antarctic species right and she never got the chance to publish her Antarctic discoveries for various reasons and she didn't like Dodge because she thought Dodge's taxonomy was kind of reckless and Dodge was just identifying things all over the shop you know you pick up a bit of lichen you go yeah yeah I bet that's a new one come and write it down and now Dodge's record

of Antarctic lichen is the kind of authority because Kenzie for various reasons one of which was that she said in I can't remember what year she transitioned was it the I think it was the late 70s maybe but she said I am a woman so I'm gonna have the surgery and she basically was made to take early retirement yeah yeah that's the implication isn't it they sort of tried to rewrite the history in the moment didn't they by saying oh it's just for reasons but there was it was quite obvious that that's why yeah post McKenzie's retirement she got into woodwork post obviously felt like a bit of a wind down and I think she had some mental health problems that she admitted to she'd been quite depressed and so she quit the whole lichen game and decided to get really into

making Siemens chests so you know where else are you going to keep your Siemens? James Siemens chests are a completely different thing to Siemens chests oh no wait then what am I keeping mine in oh my god that's why they didn't invite you back on the boat oh no there's a treasure map out there we're wondering when it's found it's gonna be hugely disappointing just a pool of Siemens X marks the sponk more like wow that was too far was it too far yeah she didn't make receptacles for Siemens just to make that very clear she was made receptacles for Siemens gear you know it's like that it's like a suitcase the only notable thing really about them is that they're like a chest but they have sides that tilt inwards because if you're on a

rocky boat you don't want them to tip over very clever very clever and they have very intricate knots in the handles called beckets and this is what Elkie got particularly into is making these knots just on lichen lichen are incredible i didn't really know what they were god me neither no why have we never talked about them before and what they are is they're two things they're two species living in the same house it's mad or they're rather there's it's one species living in a house built by another one so it's a fungus and normally an algae teaming up sometimes it's an algae sometimes it's a cyanobacteria sometimes there are two algae it gets a bit complicated but basically basically the basic thing is it's a fungus which builds a structure and the algae

lives in it and photosynthesizes sunlight which produces sugar which the fungus then eats so the fungus is providing the home and the algae is bringing in the food and so what's the lichen it's the it's the collective thing for the lichen yeah exactly these two things that are working together as you say in symbiosis the word symbiosis was coined by a guy called Heinrich Anton de barry and he was talking about lichens when he coined that term although Vernon Matian who wrote the obituary of Elkie he doesn't think they're in symbiosis he thinks that actually the fungus is a controlling parasite of the algae or cyanobacteria it's very interesting what's the stealing food of it he's basically he's saying that yeah exactly that the algae has no choice in the matter and it

could perfectly happily live without a roof over its head there's no evidence that they need this building that the fungi makes for them and the fungi is getting a free ride but it's very controversial it's a big old debate and it's like everyone knows couples like that where you think should they be together isn't one of them fine without the other one is it controlling parasitism you can only judge these things from the inside unless you are an algae or a fungi you cannot comment so does the fungi absolutely need the algae then yeah because it gets energy from the algae so the fungi can't do what most fungi do which is eat decomposed matter which is how fungi normally survive but they've now evolved to just eat the food that's made for them by photosynthesis

so they would starve and the argument is that the algae is getting some protection in return but a lot of people think that actually it doesn't need that protection right yeah it's controversial well I've got actually something even more controversial to blow this even wider open which is that they now think it's not a lichen is not two organisms it's three three yeah so that and this is a massive discovery in the world of lichen so this is that there have been a bunch of mysteries about it so one was that there were different lichen which at a DNA level are exactly the same when they studied them but that have different effects like some will kill you when you eat them and some are perfectly edible they're like how is this possible they look like they're

the same thing and they also had this problem where scientists can't recreate lichen in a lab which you should be able to because you should be able to get the fungus and the bacteria or the algae shove them together create it doesn't work and now they found a way of looking at them closer and they've realized they all have inside them a different fungus which is more like a yeast so right deep within their cells single cells of this other fungus so is this every known lichen we're talking about it seems like it might be the definition of lichen is this third thing it's a new order of fungus so it's an extra fungus which is carried within the fungus that then takes to the exactly it's very hard to blow this shit wide open because a lot of it is just learning about

the original shit in the first place but i just blow some more shit right away please so you know the um there's a lot of species of lichen that they thought were just a single species there's one in particular which is called dic tionema glabratum and they thought it was just one species and it turns out that it's at least 126 different species of like this one lichen that you'd never heard of i know it's actually 126 lichens that you'd never heard of it's amazing that's incredible which lazy intern did the first count of that well the problem is that when you take lichen from the natural setting if you see that in the in the countryside it might be lots of different colors it might be lots of different shapes and stuff like that as soon as you take it into the

lab it loses all of its color it becomes like a boring gray brown sludge and they kind of all look the same at that point and so loads of people were finding the stuff and bringing it back and they couldn't tell the difference and it's only when they look at the genes that they can now tell the difference between the different species i'll tell you what if anyone's thinking of becoming a lichenologist and i imagine after this chat you're gonna be applying yeah best place to do it new zealand in my mind really 10 of the world's lichen is found in new zealand and as of 2019 they had fewer than five lichenologists did you would have an absolute playground there if you wanted to go and do that and wasn't that the place that they had the sexy pavement lichen it was exactly

so we in one of our books we mentioned it in book of the year 2019 it was that new zealanders i believe were told by the government to stop licking lichen on the ground because it was acting like viagra but who was who was licking lichen off the ground i don't think i think they were taking it off the ground and they were ingesting it in a different way maybe in a tea or something so mixed messages because the word lichen comes from the greek to lick so yeah there you go lichen this they were getting an erection when they had this lichen right yeah exactly so why were they not allowed to do it i think it was i can't actually remember do you remember i think it was going around stopping people having perfectly healthy erections based on snuffing pavements great things

maybe if you get the wrong lichen then maybe you deck falls off or something you know because they are hard to tell apart so that's probably that's true i do remember how it was what was it it was that basically you would get lots of heavy metals leaching into it on the on the pavements and stuff you might get a dog poo in it you might get dog weed it's hard to it's hard to regulate right truly it's hard to regulate there was high levels of lead they found they were found cadmium in it they found mercury they found arsenic and the us food and drugs administration bought one lot online and found that it was actually 20 grass clippings and 80 ground up viagra okay no way i would say be a lichenologist in britain because the british lichen society as far

as i could tell a super on it they have an amazing website and they just have a fabulous time they've got about 650 members and a lot of competition there though isn't there like that we're saying only five lichen experts in new zealand fewer than fewer than the number yeah that's what the article said surely you could just say three if that's what it was actually in britain it's useful to become a lichenologist because i was going through the list of the presidents of this society um specifically the women and every single woman that i could find that had a wikipedia article attached to their name they've all got ob's so i don't know what's going on in the lichen world that the government is recognizing their work towards the country but they're all they've

all got titles wow yeah so that's a quick way to an ob become a lichenologist wow maybe they're there's some secret they're not telling us doesn't feel like a quick way to become an ob sorry i think years and years of craft it's not like become an ob with this one weird trick i actually am not sure it does take that long stop denigrating the work of the british lichen society they're serious science dude again please don't write in it's the ob committee that we're talking about oh what they just see like and they just waggle it through yeah yeah yeah oh no i'm saying it doesn't take long to become a lichenologist takes a week okay yeah this is what anna is saying that's my point this is because i was reading about kerry knudson or kerry knudson um who's

california's only professional lichenologist he's a really fun guy and he's probably fewer than two i believe californian lichenologist he's published over 200 papers on them and he pretty much took up being a lichenologist after he retired and now he's he maybe knows more about lichen than anyone else in the world claims the atlantic he was a construction worker for most of his life he so he ran away from home at 16 to join an anarchist commune wait a minute wait a minute he was a construction worker sorry so before he was a construction worker built a lot of very wonky buildings along anarchic lines yeah no he ran away at 16 before being a construction worker took lots of acid wrote lots of poetry got into quite magic was a big fan of friend of the podcast

alistair crowley and then he went off poetry because he didn't like the modernism direction it was going in so worked in construction got some blood clots in his legs had to retire prematurely in his fifties and he said to his daughter i'm going to go back behind the house and i'm going to study whatever i find there and he found lichen there and so now he's the world leading lichenologist and wow he named one after obama that's his contribution to the lichen world i've read about that one yeah that was a big deal 2009 huge deal you can age structures based on how fast lichen moves across it that's that's a fun thing to do like anometry they're incredibly slow growing some of them and i really like this the oldest

lichens in the world have found in the arctic and they're a species called rhizocarpum geographicum and they've been aged at 8600 years some of them and they're still alive yeah which i think would make them the oldest living organism on the planet what they also use them for detecting pollution levels don't they so if you're in a very polluted area if a certain type of lichen is introduced um and it doesn't grow that means that the pollution levels are too high and if you can bring them down and then the lichen starts growing there that shows you that you're at the right level so it's a really interesting bar for that's why because there's always some dickhead on a country walk that you're going on when trees are covered in lichen there's always someone who goes

that's a good sign actually that's because that means it's really clean air but isn't that true yes it is well it's just annoying like they keep reminding me about it i get it okay the tree looks a bit dirty though wouldn't like to be in your club this isn't a stressful country walking club hey can i please get listeners to solve a crisis that i had this weekend which is sort of like and related maybe um i was in the children's i was staying in this like little bit of bit of woodland and we found a tree that was covered in ivy and then the ivy looked like basically a dump truck a dump a load of mud on it like every single ivy leaf was covered in red soily mud and we realized we traced it looking closely at the tree back to these sort of large dinner plate size what

looked like fungi bright white kind of beautiful fungi growing straight out of the tree and in their dinner plate which was like a bowl there were mountains of this red soil stuff and i'm going to put i am going to get a picture on the podcast twitter feed some engagement good and someone needs to tell me what it is um some names of lycan and you can tell me why they're called this okay um so dog lycan why is it called dog lycan looks like a dog looks like it's gonna look like a dog it grows in the shape of scooby-doo um it catches balls in its mouth no not that if dogs pee on it it eats it up and makes it stronger than the dogs it grows towards the dog star serious it's all amazing oh it's it's it's hairy like a dog like if you

were walking in the forest would be like that's a dog but that's the same as it looks like a dog that's just see first answer uh yeah okay i see mix it with half a pint of warm milk and it can cure a dog rabies rabies correct named by Linnaeus in 1753 dog lycan wow just in case anyone's listening who does happen to have bitten by a rabid dog we should probably say it definitely doesn't cure rabies no go go and get out is the half pint of milk that does all the work i'm genuinely glad you guys added that because in my head that was how you cure it uh british soldier lycan okay for wounds on british soldiers you would you would put it that's good nope i'm gonna stick with my previous one looks like a british soldier

does no one want to shag it you know how it was like the americans came over and stole all the ladies maybe because no one wants to shag the british uh andy was right it looks like a british soldier thank you very much it has a red cap which looks a bit like the red hats worn by british soldiers during the american revolutionary war uh and rock tripe lycan oh tripe the tripe is um innards and things isn't it so oh is it one that lives inside a rock because there are there are like um what are they called they're like endolithic or something like and they live literally inside rock okay which is incredible it is outside a rock but underneath a rock in a cave yeah neither correct great answers yeah that's really good grows in a kind of string it looks like tripe looks like

two out of three it also was uh gathered by george washington's troops supposedly and boiled into soup at valley forge uh during the winter of 1777 so that's they ate it like tripe but also it looks a bit like tripe that's a pretty bad winter as well when you have to persuade yourself that what you're eating is tripe that's even worse than tripe there isn't like a called rock gnome lycan as well oh yeah and this is endangered and no one's allowed to know where it is because the us fish and wildlife service said they had an option to label its location as critical habitat this is just it's only found in like georgia and the carolinas and tennessee in the mountains and if you label something as critical habitat that means people

know where it is you publish it and then you get these lycan collectors who are over enthusiastic who go and nick it so they kept it super secret and sweetly the person who was in charge of guarding its location was a national park service botanist called janet rock oh that's cool and where is it in georgia and george i'm not giving you any further details james i'm just thinking i could do with an obi quite soon okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is andy my fact is that ebay employs staff whose job includes sniffing trainers wow yeah they're the shoe perverts of ebay for legal reasons not oh no yeah they're absolutely not perverts this is part of their job i don't want to need to make it any clearer these people are not perverts they're not getting a

kick out of it i also got a sick thrill this is because ebay sells a lot of shoes which i i didn't know because i'm not a sneak ahead it's what they get called people who collect and trade and you know buy and sell and sometimes make a living selling shoes to each other and collecting them sounds like they're just people who wear them on the wrong bit of their body but uh could be the same yeah and so there are so many fake shoes on the market now which uh are obviously not worth nearly as much as the real deal you mean fake brands the shoes you could get your shoe onto your foot right it's not like you put your foot in there like oh that's an algae it's not made of blanche and it turns out every damn time no they're real shoes but they're not really made by nikey or whoever

so ebay has got experts in trainer provenance whose job is to put shoes through their paces nice thank you to assess whether they're real or fake and any shoes that are worth over 150 quid that are bought in ebay because they have to have some kind of lower floor in it they can't check all of them yeah any shoes worth over 150 quid go through this center sneak authentication center and the seller doesn't get the money until the shoes have been authenticated and then they get forwarded to the buyers and the the smelling is part of that because there are so many different ways you can tell whether a trainer is authentic or not there's the stitching there's the glue and the glue has a smell and all these other methods it's something like 52 elements they've identified

it's crazy yeah so it's as you say it's the glue it's the quality of ink on the inside of the tongue there's the variations of color there's the smell check as well well ebay going on the road with this it's very exciting they're doing nationwide what you mean like torning i wouldn't watch that show yeah come to our show come to the antiques road show it's basically that okay well i mean basically they have an ice cream van i've slightly hyped up the nationwide taura limit of it but the ice cream van is touring the country and if you bring your sneakers along worth over 100 quid then they will authenticate them or not they will bust this shit wide open on your foot will they fill one of my sneakers up with mr wippy and put a flake in it no they won't they're only doing a

few dates as well on this tour i think because ice cream vans can't go on the motorway and i presume they're going to have to take b roads all the way around there was an amazing article on this is money dot co dot uk written by grace godson and she actually smelled the shoes and said that she could definitely tell the difference the journalist hey yeah she said that the ones that are fake just kind of smell really chemically a bit like nail varnish but the real ones smell more like tennis balls according to her and but she also said that if you want to work in these warehouses then you have to pass an entrance test which involves a blind test whether can you tell a sneaker is real or fake just by smelling it so you have to pass that test to get the job so weird

imagine them i think so they are blindfolded yeah it's pretty weird isn't it that's cool it is cool it's amazing it must be so hard though because a lot of these sneakers most of them are manufactured in china and chinese factories and the real ones the real ones but also the fake ones and the fake ones in the article i read say that they're often attached literally to the real factory so you've got the sort of fake factory that's using 90% of the materials anyway so 90% of it is as close to the thing that you would have it's just the actual manufacturing and and stitching together process where yeah so mad they're also employing trainers to test watches within the next couple of months human trainers human trainers humans sniff the trainers the trainers test the watches

i think the watches were first actually oh were they oh i think maybe they're upgrading i read that they were looking for a new tranche of watch trainers in august this year i didn't realize the ebay gets almost all of its profits now from three items what are the three trainers luxury watches trading cards oh really apparently this is the third um the third category that has authentication from june 2021 is handbags is it maybe they're trying to branch out into a fourth direction wow as in you can get everything else on ebay it's just that their shares are mostly going down people aren't buying other stuff on them anymore on anymore but those three things and the thing is with the authentication is you as a buyer don't pay for it and the seller doesn't pay for it either

ebay pays for it and you think well what's the point of that but actually the sales of luxury items like watches and sneakers and probably soon handbags has gone up massively since people have known that they're going to get the real deal that's interesting the growth in sneakers is gone up by triple digits year on year for the last couple of years so yeah apparently they sell a pair every nine seconds yeah when companies make trainers and sneakers especially especially in the last 10 15 years they often make them mostly in sizes eight nine and 10 because they're the most popular sizes for men and men are the people who bought most of these trainers but these days more women are wanting these trainers and so the smaller sizes are rarer and so if you're a counterfeiter

you're more likely to go for the smaller sizes because actually you know there's less on the market for them so you're more likely to find that women's trainers are fake than the men's trainers but does it matter to sneakerheads a lot of these shoes are never worn that's the thing i find so weird and bizarre i think you still buy them in your size usually when you say never worn are there many are there really many people who are buying loads of sneakers that they don't intend to wear collectors have hundreds of pairs it's mad and a lot of them they can't afford to wear themselves because they don't want to wear out a ten thousand dollar pair of sneakers they keep them because they have that value if they wore them they'd become really grubby and they'd lose their

value but they can't be that many people that do that that's what's funding ebay and it's i'm serious it's a billion dollar industry in the future dan in 200 years people will say did you know people used to wear these decorations on their feet but yeah it is that is true yeah and the other advantage of doing the women's shoes for instance is because you need less materials to make them of course so the markup is bigger i always buy shoes three sizes too big so i can circumvent the possibility that they're fake they do get there are sometimes seizures of counterfeit sneakers at customs and ports and things like that so in 2019 there was a chinese guy called ching fu zeng who was arrested for allegedly importing 22 shipping containers of fake trainers

into the usa disguised as napkins not disguised labeled as napkins which would have been worth 472 million dollars it's just an insane amount of money that you can make and he had this complicated system set up to get them in and then get them distributed that's why they make you take your shoes off as security right to test they're real yeah you just look back the security people are huffing away at them yeah giving you a good sniff and i was talking about buying shoes that were too big and then putting loads of socks in there so that they fit i didn't i haven't actually come up with that workaround i just buy shoes that are too big but thank god you solved the blister problem well the reason that i made that solution in my head is because i was reading about a guy called

jim tharp who was the first native american to win a gold medal at the olympics and he was in the decaf one so after the first day he was miles ahead but then someone stole his shoes okay so he didn't know what to do for the second exit there were his only pair of shoes so he looked around and he found like in the garbage like a couple of odd shoes and he wore them but one of them was massively too big so he had to wear loads of pairs of socks and that thought so there are pictures of him in odd shoes with one foot with loads of socks on and in the second day he won pretty much all the events and won the gold in the decaf one in the 1912 olympics and on the same day he also won i think it was the long jump or the high jump and the 110 meters hurdles and the

1500 meters wearing odd shoes wow isn't everyone do that now it's clearly an advantage but also it sounds like he could have tried a bit harder just to get a pair of shoes right like if the jamaicans were able to borrow a bobsled surely because i only found out recently that shoes you used to be able to inflate them yourself sorry because now i have to go to a shop to inflate them what are you talking about all your shoes blow up shoes um okay i'm glad you don't remember this james because this was during the sneaker wars of the 1990s you all remember uh the nike versus rebark and this yeah yeah and the pumps yeah i know sorry it's not with you on this wasn't erjordan's but they had the air pump as well didn't they did erjordan's yeah erjordan's look i was not

allowed to wear any cool shoes during the 90s so can someone explain this to me so they used to be on the time so if actually the pair of brogues thank you you you inflated them from the tongue and this was an innovation by rebark their time that have you seen the movie uh men in tights robin hood men in tights i have not i was about to watch that okay but this apparently clenched it for rebark for a while nike's always been the big guy rebark's always been the underdog and they had these self-inflate shoes so uh they no one bought them because they thought that's really weird and then there was just one slam dunk championship basketball seems to be more about the shoes than it is about the basketball you rarely get a team in barefoot winning the nbms

not since the 1912 olympics so this guy d brown did this move before he did his amazing slam dunk and won the competition where he just bent down and he pumped up his shoes with the tongue and then he slam dunked it and then after that the crowd went insane and then it became his thing every time he went to take a shot he would pump up his shoes and then deflate them afterwards not in a match he wouldn't dribble the ball not mid-match bend down pump yeah when you're doing like a dunk from a standing position you know the lingo dan you know what i'm trying to say well and i don't know we should just say for andy i i don't know the pump actually did anything as in your shoe functioned it wasn't like a deflated shoe that you pumped air into it just

was this sort of but this basketball who pumped the tongue did that that did have an effect did it i mean i don't know they always refuse to say it suggested it had ankle support and they always asked does it give you a bit more bounce to make it pumpy and they always said we're refusing to say if that gave you more bounce i never noticed it you didn't know you just had a big time with time it was just a cool thing to do it wasn't like having a pogo stick something attached to it yeah they weren't moon shoes there was a story this year about a lady who has made 2 500 pounds by selling old crisp packets from the 1980s oh yeah but they had released figures on how many of these ostensibly not very glamorous items have been sold over a

three month period this year 350 crisp packets 206 wine corks 225 empty jam jars 37 toilet roll tubes but it's hard to make a million from them because they on average go for two p each that's a cheap telescope though if you want to make that's true that's true i think people must be buying crisp packets to do the um blow it up and bang it thing oh yeah which i love doing but i don't eat enough crisps to do that as often as i'd want to i would have thought it was set dressing for a tv show in the 1980s it's weird where our brains go because i was thinking you would buy it and hopefully there's a few little crumbs of crisps left in the car and you can lick your finger and get them out we've all got good reasons but i mean that's true you won't be able to taste the 80s again

will you no that's a slogan for your firm you can taste the 2010s by buying the pre sugar tax drinks that are available on ebay i genuinely thought about buying one of these for my brother who i've never seen him so furious as when lucas aid halved the sugar content in their drink it hasn't been the same it doesn't taste the same so in 2018 the sugar in iron brew halved there was lots of rules over the last few years saying you know you've got to reduce your sugar and you can buy a lucas aid pre 2011 for 145 pounds okay imagine how good that's gonna taste now after all these years i'm with your brother actually i think modern pop is disgusting really can you taste the difference oh yeah really i don't really you listen to a lot of modern pop which i find disgusting

okay 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 schreiberland andy at andrew hunter m james at james harken and anna you can email podcast at qi.com yep where you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or you can go to our website no such thing as a fish.com all of our previous episodes are up there also do check out the upcoming tour dates we are back on the road as of october the fifth going around the uk and ireland come along it's going to be an awesome night and uh we want to geek out with you all okay we'll see you again next week with

another episode goodbye