No Such Thing As A Fish - 391: No Such Thing As A Sausage Swingboat

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

Anna gets exasperated about Tin Tin, Dan is vindicated in a fact about camels, Andy tells the best joke you'll ever hear about the Umayyad conquest of Hispania, and James finally learns what a giraffe looks like.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, James here now as you will have noticed the last few weeks It is holiday season for us mostly because we have a brand new massive stonking UK and Ireland tour just about to happen And we need to get as much rest as we can that before that happens By the way, you can get tickets for that by going to qi.com slash fish events But anyway, what do we have for you this week? Well, we have another compilation the last one went down so well You all sent loads of really nice messages about how much you enjoyed it So it's another hour of us being so silly These are the times when everything got derailed a little bit too much

So we couldn't fit it into the actual show But I always gather them together because they're always so much fun and I put them in a nice little package for you guys We will be back again next week with a normal episode. It was recorded while I was away actually It's another super special guest one that I particularly am quite upset that I wasn't there for Because it's a really good friend of ours someone who's incredibly interesting and funny I'm actually really really looking forward to listening to that one myself because I haven't heard it yet But anyway for the meantime, please do enjoy this compilation And we'll see you as a force them on the road or on this podcast feed very very soon

Okay on with the podcast You guys though soldier boy soldier boy tell him you guys know he's a Come on guys. No, he's a rapper. No, he's a rapper. Okay. He's got a song called kiss me through the phone Which gives a phone number? Halfway through it and a load of people decided to call it and it turns out to be a house in Oldham Who according to the Guardian we're getting a load of crank calls But I don't need to tell you guys that that's a terrible missed opportunity because one of his main songs is called crank that So they so they should have called it crank calls crank that's calls. Yeah, probably

Okay, I really misjudged my audience with this one Like Dan might have had a prayer Britain's leading female table tennis player is this woman this girl called tin tin ho and Do you guys can you guess why she's called that she's got a quiff tin tin? That's why I was a small dog called snowy Confusing is not related to the character of tin tin wait. She hangs out with an old fisherman called captain haddock But she has a pair of twins that she hangs out with called the top You can't just stop us making tin tin jokes and immediately you gotta live with her her father is called her jay

Right as I have made quite clear. It's not related to tin tin and there must be other avenues you can pursue She's Belgium in I'm just gonna tell you okay. No, no, no, no. No, I feel like we're close. She's made of 10. Yeah Yeah, he's found something different But incorrect. No, it's because her dad is obsessed with table tennis and Sorry I was so sure you're gonna say her dad is obsessed with He's obsessed with table tennis and the initials of table tennis are TT

So we called her Tintin and in fact her brother is called Ping and she said there was it was between her being called Tintin and her being called Pong when she was born. So she says that she is delighted that She didn't get bombed. You can't have two kids who call them Ping and Pong The social services will get involved Here's a stolen dog in 1860 During the second opium war the Anglo-French looted and burned the summer palace and found five Pekingese dogs Guarding a corpse of a lady and so they stole the dogs and one of them was given to Queen Victoria who renamed her Lootie

After all the all the looting that the British were doing Wow China at the time lol Isn't that amazing that is quite open. I would have thought she would name it something like completely legal taking of stuff Wow P.G Woodhouse he collected Pekingese dogs or he bred them or he you know he had dozens of them Did he steal them from he stole all of them from China? Yeah, that's why his books have very low sales figures there. It's really interesting that Pekingese Like they're quite small aren't they but they almost look a bit like a lion because they got like a mane kind of around their face And there are a few myths about where they came from according to one myth a lion fell in love with a marmoset

And he begged the gods to shrink him in size so that he could have sex with a marmoset and They did and that's where the Pekingese came from You'd pray for a massive marmoset. Yeah Expand the marmoset No, I'd rather a tiny lion There's another theory. This isn't a myth. There's another theory that Buddhist monks Like in Buddhism a lion is a symbol of strength is a symbol of wisdom and they want to have dogs that looks like a lion So they bred Pekingese to look like lions

Which is true we might never know there was a guy who was a stunt flyer back in the very early days of flight called Al Wilson and he hit golf balls off planes Which is not as impressive as scoring a putt on Concorde except that he was standing on top of the plane at the time So he would climb up onto the top of a biplane and just do amazing drives off it No photos of him doing that. That's how is the air friction there not knocking the golf ball off the tee? I don't Maybe he nailed the tee into the top of the biplane before Clambering up you'd have to nail the ball also onto the tee Yes, maybe he did that too and then well then how did he hit it?

maybe Maybe it was one of those velcro balls, you know that you throw it paddles. Maybe he just Except hang on he was in the 1920s and Velcro had been invented at the time so maybe he is the unrecognized inventor of Velcro and We are giving him his moment of glory excellent. Well our Wilson. Congratulations Gibraltar named after Jabel Al Tariq Who was the general who brought the Islamic army from North Africa into Spain? When Spain became an Islamic country in

Whenever that was the 8th century or whenever it was But he was in charge of the whole army. They came over they landed in Gibraltar They took over most of the Iberian Peninsula There was him who was Jabel Al Tariq and there was another guy called Musa who were in charge these two generals and then for some reason in 714 they were both accused of misappropriation of funds sent back to Damascus and they both died in complete obscurity. So they were the ones who brought the Islamic invasion into Spain and for the reason now that you know, there's a lot of Islamic culture still there a lot of buildings and stuff

But yeah, they just got kicked out for nicking a load of money. Right. Wow. Yeah Fittingly it's known as a little bit of a tax haven now. So I suppose doing it doing him proud The money knicker. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's the thing about money. It's very Moorish Yeah Probably one of the most famous fictional minerals in the world is kryptonite, I would argue Kryptonite was invented as an idea for being a thing of vulnerability for Superman that would make him really sick Because when the first radio series happened in America the actor who played Superman who obviously had to be there all the time was

Desperate to have holidays and they couldn't have holidays because he's the main character So if in a previous episode kryptonite was introduced like he was hidden behind a door where kryptonite was holding it closed The actor bud Collier could go on holiday and not have to be in the episodes and the rest of the cast would be going Poor Superman. Where's he disappeared to but we all know he's behind the door He can't say anything. Yeah, how boring were the episodes where Superman wasn't in them? What happens in those well, everyone going wonder where he is. Is he better? Have you seen him? Did you give him Do you think Lemsip works against kryptonite? Oh, yeah, that's everything. Yeah It's so weird how long we went without dissecting human bodies. So we just we I will claim

So the first known dissections in the West at least were Herophilus and erasistratus and this was a third century BC and so this is quite revolutionary They thought if we start cutting into human bodies, we can figure out how they work what the anatomy is and They died and it immediately went out of fashion people said we don't actually need that. It's totally unnecessary It's kind of gross. It's ungodly then the Christians came along and they totally banned it And we don't really think anyone dissected a human body for science for another 1600 years Until about so about 1231 the Holy Roman Emperor said actually we should start doing this and made a decree that medical students had to and so there was this rush on bodies and

There was such a rush that there was a big old shortage the demand and supply didn't work out and so there became a situation where by the 15th century in Italy medical students had to pay for the funerals of Corpses and that's that would be their way of saying look I'm gonna pay you but you have to give me that corpse afterwards So basically you get your funeral expenses paid by a doctor Yeah, as long as they then cut you open. Yeah, but at the end of the funeral thing Plop you over their shoulder and walk off with you. It doesn't feel I don't think they would do I think they'd wait for the curtains to go across before they did that

I don't think someone's walking a gun. Are you done with that? I Paid good money for that Have you guys heard of Jacqueline Oriole? Oh So she was the daughter-in-law of the president of France in the 1940s after the war and she helped to decorate some of the rooms of the Elysees Palace After the war and she was known as one of the most elegant women in all of Paris And then in 1948 she thought fuck this the Elysees Palace. It's fine. It doesn't need any more work so she decided to become an aerobatic pilot and

She got into a massive crash and crashed into the Sen and she had to have 22 operations to rebuild her face That was how bad the the crash was but then in 1953 She became one of the first ever test pilots to fly Concorde and she was the first woman to fly Concorde Yeah, imagine that for a CV to go from like interior design in the palace in in Paris and then to that Incredible, yeah, but no one would believe you were the same person because you've got the rebuilt face My god, I'm just that's so right. It's not the same person. Is it no you've fallen for a really obvious Is it Conair where they changed the face of Nicholas Cage and stuff? Yeah, I think so. Yeah Is it face-off face-off face-off? Yes, it's a face-off is the same plot as Conair, isn't it apart from the face of coming off

Yeah, I think face-off and Conair the merging of the two is your story I just have one more recent dog napping that I liked this was a journalist in Boston called Juliana Matze Did you see her? She was Reporting on a dog that have been stolen in the local area kind of slow news day she's speaking on camera about a missing German short head pointer and She spots a man who matches the photos that have been put out the CCTV photos of the dog been stolen With the dog that looks like the dog. So she goes up to him and she said hey, can I just pet your dog? Checks its collar. It is low and behold the stolen dog. So on camera that you can watch it. It's very awkward interview

She says is this your dog and he's like, um, no It's not it's been missing for a day for 24 hours And she says why do you have it and he says I walked past a car and it was barking And I thought it was the dog that I was supposed to be walking because I'm a dog walker One has got into a car Maybe he was tired of walking So I broke into the car and I took it and she said why didn't you call the number of the person on the dog collar? And he said I was sort of tribe at my phone broke and then I lost my phone

Simple mistake. This guy's had a horrible day. Well, that's an incredible story Anna But also what the hell kind of tv station is doing news video packages about a lost dog within 24 hours It's like I say slow news day in Boston I should also say the verdict has not been returned on his guilt. I don't think so jury is out Okay, jury's out Well, good luck to him

Can we get done for subjudicious? Definitely. I don't think so. Do you know where the american fear of sharks? Throughout the general pop place comes from where it originated No, it was so it wasn't jaws it was before that jaws for sure Okay, um, so originating the fact that sharks eat people in the water But they don't tend to eat you if you live in Montana or you know No, it basically comes we think probably from world war two There were lots of stories, especially in the newspapers. Um, this did happen

That planes would kind of crash in the water and then the sharks would get the get the people But it didn't happen that often but the newspapers used to report that it was happening all the time Um, but nevertheless the u.s. Military needed to come up with a way to stop Sharks attacking not just people who've crashed but also munitions. So if you're in a submarine You need to stop them from coming towards the munitions. So the office of strategic services, which was that kind of Office which kind of came up with lots of wacky kind of dick dastardly plans Um, they hired someone called julia child As part of their team to try and work out the chef the chef. Yes. What?

So before she became a chef She was a person who worked in the war to try and come up with ways to stop sharks from attacking people and munitions And she tried things like clove oil horse urine nicotine rotten shark Asparagus she tried all these things to try and stop Sharks from coming near them and in the end none of them really worked that well And so they came up with this thing called shark chaser Which was a little pill and you put it in the water and it would release like a dye into the water

So the shark wouldn't be able to see you so it wouldn't repel it But it would stop it from being able to find you that is crazy God it's awful if you confuse a julia child recipe with one of her shark repellents, isn't it? Well, she's for anyone who doesn't know her she was the one who basically brought french cuisine to americans Um, so um, she was huge. She was massively famous. She had her own cooking show Didn't she one of the first people to do that? She was huge. Another good cv. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah amazing cv And you're sure it wasn't someone with the face trans plant james Nicholas cage

Yeah um There is a uh, there was a thing in 2012 Where bowing the plane company fixed their wi-fi on their planes using 9 000 kilos of potatoes Okay So did they just happen to have so much potatoes on board the flight at the time or? I think they especially got them in and they got them in to pretend to be humans because They needed to test

The wi-fi on their planes and where you get, you know hot spots and then cold areas and you wanted to fix it all the way through Um, and it turns out that potatoes block internet signals in much the same way that human bodies do And so they got 9 000 kilos of potatoes and just sat them in the seats of the plane and pretended that they were people and um and tested it that way and they didn't need paying and they didn't need feeding what? That's great. This is so weird. They have the same water content as humans like that kind of thing, right? Yeah, I guess so and they're maybe about as dense as humans It reminds me of the time when I was on a plane and the wi-fi stopped working And I asked them to turn it off and turn it back on again and they said we think this is the button

But we've never pressed this button I said let me come and have a look at it and I looked I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the router button Wow, sorry. They they took your advice Yeah, oh my god. Random dude on a plane. Cool Right That's amazing Well, I had my um, it was the nfl draft for my fantasy football team and I really needed to go on the internet Wow, right. What would jose that's real confidence in your abilities to identifying a rooster

What else is it gonna be? What a weird place to put the ejector seat? All the spontaneous combustion button, you never know. All planes have one Right next to the router And no more Table tennis was a big thing in britain in the sort of early 20th century I think it was kind of invented in the 1880s went under Came back in the 1920s and was popularized by this guy. Iva Montague. Did you read about him? No He's that's disappointing because this is gonna be a long section

Uh Have you not noticed we've been doing this for eight years now? And we always say no whenever someone says have you heard of this person? We always say no Because otherwise it'd be a pretty yeah. Yeah, we've all done the research. I genuinely haven't though I've no idea about this seminal figure in table tennis. I thought I covered the basis. I haven't clearly Well, Iva surprised for you and because Iva Montague is the thank you grandfather of table tennis in britain But he was also a spy so he's such an amazing character he

Founded the english table tennis federation and then he founded the international table tennis federation in 1926 More spying opportunities internationally. Nice. Well, you joke But british intelligence was incredibly suspicious of him all the way through the war world war two because of his ping pong habit Yeah, because he kept standing in airports with two ping pong bats in his hands, didn't he? Yeah, just redirecting planes into the english channel Because they thought it was so weird So there's a letter from an mi6 agent who writes to the agent in bulgaria basically about all these letters that are being exchanged between iva montague and these two guys in bulgaria and

They're sort of discussing like intricate details of the game. They discuss bat weight They discuss the spin on different balls and mi6 was convinced this was code And so he wrote to this agent in bulgaria and said look you've got to investigate these two bulgarians He said the reason for our interest will appear to you rather quaint But the thing is they write interminably to iva montague about table tennis and trying out of table tennis balls so The agent in bulgaria investigated these guys and replied saying it seems as though these guys are just perfectly solid individuals Who spend their time testing table tennis balls?

And and that was that wow seemed that way It did but the big reveal in the 60s was that he was in fact a soviet spy Really? Yeah, so wait wait wait, but were they writing about table tennis balls as well. Do we know that element of the story? It's not clear. We know he loved table tennis. It doesn't seem to have been declassified whether or not this was code So I don't know. He was really into the game and a spy. What do you think? What do you think is the world record for slicing the most watermelons in half on your stomach with a sword in 60 seconds

Oh, no, no, no, I know I know the queen has this record It was a record beaten by friend of the show ashrita firman Who um, his life's work is just to get as many random Guinness book of record things as possible 60 seconds on your belly with a sword slicing slicing them himself. He's slicing them himself. You're not allowed to wear any protection So you're slicing down on a sword onto your stomach basically. Yep 14. Oh, I see you're lying on your back And you oh, wow Um, it's someone placing the watermelons or do you have to um, someone would place them onto him each time

Okay, 14 sounds like a very sensible bet from out. That's quite ambitious because you get to 13 and you think oh my god I don't want to do the unlucky one. I'm holding a bloody sword I'd better slice really really fast apart this 40s one. Yeah I'm gonna say 23 Oh, come on. Yeah. That's what I said. This guy's a record holder. Yeah. Well, that is really close. It's 26 It's And there was an interview with mr. Furman who said my first reaction is I relieved I didn't kill myself Um, do you know what you used to do in the 14th century in the sahara if you got bitten by a snake?

Come on guys. We've all done the research. We all must know this We know this. Yeah, it's so hard faking not knowing any of this What you would do is you would cut the throat of your camel And you would put your hand into the camel's stomach and leave it there for the whole night And in theory that would suck out the poison and you would be fine Um, I learned this from there was an account of a traveler a Moroccan traveler called ibn batuta. He traveled more than Marco polo who went 15 Thousand miles. He went 72 000 miles all the way around the world. It was an amazing traveler

And when they went through the sahara, this was the trick that they used Uh, unfortunately, it didn't really work and the guy had to have his fingers cut off anyway But it was worse for the camel. Let's face it. It was worse for the camel. Definitely. No one comes out of this well I must say Apart from possibly done because when I was reading this account I read that when they ran out of water They would kill an antelope and they would drink water from the entrails of the antelope Which many many many years ago done. I think said on this podcast and we all

Poo pooed it but this in the 40th century. This is what this traveler used to do Vindicated this is genuinely like five years later. We were just doing that thing where we pretended not to know the facts, you know We all knew it's true One landlord was sacked for selling hay out of the back of the pub. So there were strict rules This was dora, right? This is dora who did this the old cow mythical old cow dora the defense of the realm acts which Had loads of other fun rules as well as well as all this pub stuff

So you weren't allowed to light bonfires or fireworks or fly a kite. I think in case it was taken for A bomb a zeppelin Yeah, you weren't allowed to whistle for a taxi in case that was mistaken for an air raid siren. What? How loud is your whistle? People whistled louder back then Famously right if um, you can mistake whistles for air raid sirens Then when the actual air raid siren went off were a load of taxi drivers driving around looking for these Rides the whole time. It was absolutely tragic. Yeah, orange lights going on across london. Yeah

all killed The um doctor who theme tune was written by an australian composer called ron grainer the melody But actually the importance of it is the crazy effects, right? Yes, this amazing piece of electronic music And really when it was invented there wasn't really a such thing as electronic music or the kind of was but it definitely wasn't popular It wasn't done much and the mix was made by a musician called delia darbyshire And she basically took each note of the melody And individually made it by taking a version of it played on some strings and then kind of speeding it up Slowing it down splicing it with something else

Every single note was put together to come up with this amazing iconic theme tune And delia darbyshire was brought up in coventry in 1940 and she said she was inspired to get into music By the sound of the air raid sirens as the Germans were bombing coventry And it was those kind of noises that got her interested in sounds and that eventually got her interested in music So What a glass half full That's so funny I have actually been to a place which has a an annual tooth festival Oh

Really well actually is it like one of buddhist teeth? It's the temple of the tooth in candy in shrillanka And the town is called candy and it is one of it's a tooth of the buddha dating to about 300 ad You can't really see it when you go there when you're in the temple because it's in a casket Which contains five progressively smaller caskets and in the smallest casket is the buddha's tooth and It's an incredible brouhaha every year. I wasn't there at the time of the festival annoyingly But there's drumming music as dancing as cannon fire Massive great elephants many with their own biographies on wikipedia now the elephant parade through the elephant

Yeah, four of the main elephants. They're called tuskers. You know, they have these great big tusks They parade through the streets with the uh tooth container. I mean, it's a it's an amazing temple site It's really I've been to another one. I've been to one in singapore, which is the same Were you at the incisor or the canine or the molar? It was the wisdom. It was the wisdom of the buddha Very nice My feeling is that that one and this is so far going off memory that it might be completely wrong But I think the tooth like really doesn't comes out very very very rarely as in

You know, do you mean the candy one? No the one in in singapore? Yeah, this one's the candy ones all over, isn't it? But it must be so confusing for the elephants who are employed to carry this tooth all about town This tiny tooth looking at each other going if they've seen our teeth look at But they are they're celebrated for their massive tusks they are That's why that's why they're recruited for the job in elephant academy And the the crazy thing is that this is all in a place called candy, which is normally very bad for your teeth

Exactly. I thought that's why they were having the festival. So many teeth were falling out. They thought we've got to do something with these Also, they always invite rob becker over to do an opening set Because he's got such big teeth He actually carries it through the streets if the elephants not available Esther ransom for any older listeners Just like are we now doing a sort of choose your own podcast? Yeah, what about the tiktok generation? Who's got big teeth on tiktok? Right in nobody they've all got perfect teeth

The idea that formaldehyde can preserve people was discovered by a guy called third nand bloom uh blum and he was using formaldehyde as hoping to use it as an antiseptic And he was kind of putting it on things and then he noticed that he put it on his fingers And his fingers got really really hard when he put the formaldehyde on his fingers So he found it kind of by accident as I know that you love that kind of story and oh, yeah Yeah, yeah, of course. Did he stop at his fingers once you noticed that they went really really hard Did he proceed anywhere else? I mean you would wouldn't you

If you noticed that putting formaldehyde on your fingers made you go really really hard The cock is the obvious next exactly. It's a short step. Wow. What a what a world we could have had Yeah, where that was standard. You just pop and get some formaldehyde Yeah, yeah, no, okay. I don't know if it would have flown off the shelves It wouldn't look great if medical students were getting boners because they were dissecting a body In Peru if you go and eat potatoes and you go into the top of the andes and you go to a potato shop or a little stall They might give you a little bag of clay

To eat with the potato And you might put some water in the clay and make it into a little bit of a dip And then dip your potato in it and then eat it because that's like one traditional way to eat potatoes in the andes And the reason is that potatoes used to be poisonous. They come from the same The same family as like deadly nightshade and stuff, don't they? And in the early days when they were first domesticated, they were still a bit poisonous But if you eat a little bit of clay while you're eating your potato Then the clay will attach to these molecules called glyco alkaloids

And it will stop your body from processing them Which means that they won't become poisonous anymore And so there's still today It's a traditional way even though they're not poisonous anymore. You might still put your potatoes in a bit of clay That's so cool. It is really clever. And what's clever about it is how do you learn that right? How do you decide I'm gonna put my potatoes in clay? And what they think is That humans saw parrots doing it or saw llamas doing it and copied the parrots or the llamas

But hang on that just raises a second question. That is so annoying. Exactly. Oh, yeah, we just learned it from the llamas Well, how did the llamas learn how to do it? And how did the parrots learn? Yeah, animals learn different things to us. That's you know But where did the learning start if we're if we're saying that our learning must have come from watching another animal do it Their learning must have come from watching another animal and I don't believe the para originated it If anyone's a copier rather than originator I did look up if there was a George the fifth potato and I don't think there is because the king Edward is named after Edward the seventh specifically

But there are other things named after king Edward so There is poulard Edward the seventh because he was a big eater basically and he was a famous gormand So he had lots of dishes named after him by crawly chefs Is that chefs from crawly? It is. Yeah. Yeah. He he always he always flew from gatwick. He made sure to go by crawly on the way. Um Um

Poulard Edward the seventh is chicken stuffed with foie gras which feels like the most decadent thing I can possibly imagine eating have you guys heard of christina zanato Crustina or christina No, crus christina Like the why would you assume crostina? Because we're because we're talking about the ocean and we were talking about I thought it might be a crustacea Person's name christina christina zanato

And she is sometimes called the shark whisperer Uh, she works in the Bahamas and whenever any shark in the Bahamas gets a hook in its mouth They go and see christina Wow, isn't that amazing? How's the word got out with shark? I don't know she put flies up. I don't know how they know but Ages and ages ago there was a shark came up to her and she realized it had a hook in its mouth And so she took it out and now it does seem that whenever any shark one that she's never met before Gets a hook in its mouth. They somehow know to go to her and get it fixed

They trust but not not when she's not when she's in land. No, not when she's in a restaurant Excuse me. Sorry. Sorry. Um, are you crustacean zanata? She scuttles away sideways to fill his own meal Um, so you never know because there are nine species of shark that can walk So you never know they could enter that restaurant could be that is so cool But isn't it weird? So she she spends loads of time in the water. I guess and they just yeah She's a diver and a researcher and stuff She spends a lot of time looking at sharks and looking with sharks, but she just seems to have according to the article

I read she seems to have this reputation among sharks as being a person they can trust if they get a hook in their mouth That's incredible. Just insane I once went to a restaurant in I can't remember where it was now um Mauritius, maybe I think And um, it was a floating restaurant and the sharks would swim around where your tables were And the waiters would throw bits of meat into the water to kind of get them to come up and bite and stuff and yeah I would not order the fish there. What are sharks dislike? Yeah, toffee. Yeah

Actually speaking of this there is a story that Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley of Halley's Comet fame. Am I saying that right? I think but yeah, we say you're kidding I thought it was Hailey like Bill Hailey and the Comets. There we go. Um, there's a story that newton and Halley Hawley once dissected. This is a nightmare to read out a dolphin in a coffee shop. It's actually a dolphin There's a story that they dissected a dissected a dolphin in a coffee shop called the grecian coffee house And uh, I've traced it back and maddeningly. I think it's not true. So I'm just here to bust this myth wide open Was it a poppus? It's uh, there's a diary of a member of the royal society called thorsby from june 1712 and it says

In and he says in his diary attending the royal society where I found dr. Douglas dissecting a dolphin Lately caught in the Thames where were present the president sir Isaac Newton both the secretaries the two professors from oxford Dr. Halley and keel with others whose company we afterwards enjoyed at the grecian coffee house Okay, so that to me implies. Yeah, they dissected the dolphin Then they went for a coffee rather than dissecting the dolphin at the coffee house, which makes so much more sense Yeah, that's the way to yeah They're not going to let you into starbucks with a dead dolphin. Are they they're not going to give you a stamp on your card I think it's still is a remarkable story that those two characters were dissecting a dolphin

In London, I mean that's that's pretty cool. That's a sort of three things. I didn't expect to be near each other So yeah, that's quite good Virginia wolf is another one who has a famous plaque situation going on right because she lived in the same house as george bernard shore So they it's I think it's one of the only places with two blue plaques on it And I realized that wolf and shore their lives collided much later So there's a letter from virginia wolf to george bernard shore in 1940 They'd only sort of met a couple of times. They'd stayed in the same country house in 1915

And it's so flirty. He was in his 80s at the time. She was about to commit suicide and I hear I hear romantic Painted the romantic picture He was in his 80s. She was on the brink of suicide Well, she sounded um, she sounded in a good mood in the letter. She said to him You have acted a lover's part in my life for the past 30 years Wow Yeah, but presumably his work more than him

But and he'd already confessed his love to her from another letter saying I fell in love with you the moment I saw you ever Likey and she said if you ever drop your handkerchief near my house, you'd be welcome to come on I'll pick it up and we can hang out Sexy Yeah, but they it was very jokey by the way. They didn't actually fancy each other Okay, I sort of disliked him. Oh, wow What? Okay. This is the roller coaster that you've said this on

It was pride and prejudice. They started off not like each other She thought he was a probably a fusty sexist old man She said he had the mind of a disgustingly precocious child of two And then they gradually warmed to each other over the course of their 40 year romance And what was the thing about if he drops his handkerchief? Is that so she can look at his bum or what is that? So she can look at his bum Well, if you drop your handkerchief, he has to bend over to pick it up Mate, I didn't get that, but now you've said that I think it is. Yes

It's normally the lady dropping the handkerchief. That's what I thought Was she saying if you, you old man, drop your handkerchief I think from what I remember that was the wording. She did like to invert gender norms sometimes for Jenny Wolf He's in his 80s as well. That's a hell of a bend Maybe that's why she's offering to pick it up Oh Do you know what the standard dissection kit in America in the 19th century consisted of knife? Yep knife

Um, you've got the knife Oh four seps. I'll give you that fork four seps sound similar. I'll tell you I saw Starbuck set kind of thing. I bet it did. Yeah. Yeah. Um, there were scissors scissors because they're very useful for You know cutting through bits of stuff. Um, there were some hooks There were some scalpels and that was a blowpipe Oh Yeah, a blowpipe isn't just a pipe, isn't it really like a pipe blowing Was it? Oh, no, it's not it's not just a pipe. It's as pipe specifically designed to be blown into you wouldn't just blow into any old pipe

Can I guess a theory? Yeah, go was it a pipe that was um Used for people's bum bums to make sure they weren't dead You know the thing where you blow into it in order to so it was just to make sure that your patient was actually dead Can I make a guess? Yes, that might be right what dan said, but I was just thinking maybe We already know that a large portion of um bodies that were dissected were dolphins So did they put it in the blow hole the blowpipe? Very clever. Yes

I retract my suggestion and I put all my money on james's I'll take down suggestion Anna, it's just as well. You did it was for the colon It wasn't to test whether or not people were dead by the time they were on the slab They generally were dead, but it was to make the colon easier to see What like in doing a dissection to inflate it. Yeah, exactly Yeah, so it was for it was for the bottom. Don't suck I'm sure it had a very strict instruction on the pipe Britain. I probably also this site was lowing this

placing good to the anus Ultra sound with animals can be quite difficult I saw um, there was in london zoo. They tried to do ultrasound on an acarpi And they had a real problem with that. Can you can you guess what the problem was with the acarpi? ultrasound Can you describe an acarpi again? I can't quite it's like a deer Uh, oh, so that means it might have antlers Uh, acarpis. I don't really have antlers

It's a bit bigger that it's like a mixture between a deer and a zebra I would say an acarpi Has it got a lot of confusing orifices on its body and they didn't know where to shove the You tend not to shove well, I might get to shoving things in a minute But with ultrasound the whole point of it is it's on the outside. You're absolutely right I was thinking of an endoscopy and I don't know why because it's my fact and it's about not Don't forget that. Um, I'll tell you It's so well camouflaged that you can't see where it is to do the ultrasound because they're prey animals

It's no it's not that it's when you have an ultrasound you have to put this gel on Which kind of helps the sound waves to come through and alcarpies really love licking it off So they really like the taste of it if you put it down there There if you're a rhino and you want to look at the reproductive tracts of a rhino They're so full of fat that um ultrasound doesn't really work But you can do it by going up the bum So that is kind of where you were coming from Andy. I think that's what you were thinking of That certainly is where I was coming from

Yeah Also, that's a massive machine. Are you going into one of those machines? Because you can't build one of those for a rhino What an ultrasound an ultrasound is is just like you're firing some Sound waves into the body. You're right. It's not like an MRI Yeah, you don't want to put a rhino in an MRI. You're right What we've ascertained is very few of us know the difference between an ultrasound an MRI and endoscopy Thank god we're not doctors. Thank god we're doing a relatively harmless job They are amazing trunks because there's no bone in them. There's a hell of a lot of muscles

They've got way more muscles in their trunk than we have as humans in our entire body and it's It's just so weird because it doesn't show up on fossil records as a result I just wonder how many animals in history that we have the fossil records of Actually amazing appendage a big floppy trunk somewhere every single dinosaur could have a trunk Yeah, t-rex might have had a massive schnozzer right at the end actually and other like muscly appendages all over their bodies, right? Yes Everything looked like a huge octopus in the olden days, but we've just got no record of the tentacles

They did one experiment where um participants were asked to take part in ice cream tasting test, which I mean, what a great great study to take part in And they were asked to take part with someone else and that someone else would either be someone without a visible social Stigma or someone with one and the social stigma that they would have is they were either obese Or they had a scar on their face a disfiguring scar on their face And the person who was asked to do the study with them the ice cream tasting test If the person without the social stigma ate shed loads of ice cream or hardly any then they'd copy them But if it was the obese person or the person with the scar doing it then they wouldn't copy them

So they overcame that because I guess the idea is that you don't want to mimic someone who is has negative associations I can see that with the ice cream Like if you see and if the person saw an obese person eating an ice cream and had this kind of idea that Obesity was wrong then wouldn't want to be like that But the scar is really interesting. I would have thought that you wouldn't copy them if they were running with scissors for instance If it's a scar often denotes Perhaps being a pirate or Or maybe a gangster and if a gangster was eating lots of ice cream and looking threatening at me

I would eat lots of ice cream too Would you I wouldn't risk it in case he wanted mine as well. He obviously liked ice cream But also interesting that what mimics people a lot Parrots where the parrots live on the shoulders of pirates what the pirates have scars This is falling apart this theory. I don't know what you're talking about This has gone pretty loose You guys may remember the e use wine lake and butter mountain, but I don't know if all are listened as well Do you guys remember this?

So this is the idea that the e u creates too much of a certain product and they kind of Star it so that the price doesn't go too low Exactly. Yeah, so there was a period where the e u countries in total were collectively producing 1.7 billion extra bottles of wine each year, which feels like an enormous overshoot to me And they paid farmers to turn it into ethanol So you would go through the whole process of turning grapes into wine And then they would just convert it back into undrinkable pure alcohol, but they were incentivized to do so And the butter mountain was similar. Yeah, what did they use the alcohol for like industrial stuff? I guess

Yeah, I it can be used as a fuel can't it ethanol and um, and the butter think they just made a massive sort of slip slide All the way down the Iger Yeah There was a beef mountain too, which is the unknown third element of the e u food surplus pyramid Sounds disgusting. Welcome to beef mountain Andy's theme park I'm not queuing up for that There's a big sausage swing boat

That's one of the rides Um, I was listening to a really great podcast about this whole history of the shang dynasty it was called chinese history podcast and It was really interesting. There was a bit where the host of it Put into context when this period was in time this supposed mythological Um dynasty and it's 1600 bc to 1046 bc was the rough period So in that time toot and car moon and nephra titty were over in egypt. They were living the trojan war was happening moses

It's not funny It's funny. I'm not laughing. That is right. I actually said titty. Did I you did? Yeah, dan And we didn't hear anything else after that I was reading about mary beard the academic. Um who died in 1956 I think or 58 No, no, no, this is My heart stopped and then I thought what she'd been a ghost all this time She's got so many great documentaries made because she was there

That's why she knows so much about history Well, mary ritter married charles austin beard in 1900 And they were a really amazing couple of intellectuals And mary ritter beard wrote a load of articles One of which was a study of the encyclopedia britannica to see how many women were in the encyclopedia britannica And basically the answer was not many She said she questioned in the article why there was no article on queen even though there was an article on kings In the encyclopedia britannica

She said that there were no women included in the article on health and medicine She said according to the article on songs no women sang in europe um, basically in history And the contributions of nuns choir compositions and singing from women is not recognized at all And so she had a right go at the encyclopedia britannica And I thought I'd check if she was in britannica today and her husband is and she is not as far as I can see She's mentioned in the article on women's history. This is the online one I'm not in the office. So I can't check the actual you've got them behind your head at the moment

And so we could check them but yeah as far as I can see she's not in britannica at the moment. Wow So let's get her in. Yes, mary beard That's great. I mean, that's not great that she's not in but that's great. That's um, The story you told the story you told is great Um, wow Shall I just see if she's in quickly? Yeah, so she charles austin beard. I think he's in uh, he's in the online version for sure But she died in 56. If she died in 56, they're not gonna be what what year is that?

Yeah, you've got 300 way later than 1956. This is the newest like the pd of britannica Not the old ones the founded 1768 Yeah, 1991 fine, right beard. I'm a bittersweet Bible beryllium Berlin wall. This is a great podcast. This is such good content And he reads the encyclopedia britannica but only these oh my word beard charles austin Yes, then next article is on beard lichen. She's not there. Oh It's disgrace not lichen mary

I read an article about the origins of golf. This was in the espm magazine, but they spoke to um, like Proper historians from scotland Because that's where people think it began and the idea is there's a bit of land in between the sea and the bit you can farm Which is called the links because it links the two bits together And you would kind of keep sheep there or you keep rabbits there or stuff like that keep animals But there's quite a boring job and so people would start hitting balls around And what this article said and I haven't checked it yet, but it was well sourced is that the bunkers You know, there's like the sand traps that you get on a golf course

They were formed by sheep who would hide behind little hillocks because the wind was so bad in that part of scotland And they would kind of lie down and over years and years and years They would make deeper and deeper holes which would get filled with sand And he said that the first greens so the greens where you're putting are really flat And they're easy to just hit the ball along the ground Reckons they could have been rabbit warrens Because a rabbit warren would be the rabbit would put a hole in the ground for it to go into And then it would flatten around the area around the warren with its feet to make it flat

And he reckons that that's how those might have started Wow, rabbits gave us golf. That's amazing. And who designed the golf clubs? Was that the badgers? That would have been the beavers, right who were making the dams and they just had spare bits of wood. There we go That's um, I mean that's do you Do you hold to that James? I don't believe it at all But it was really well sourced and sometimes when things are unbelievable But they're said by people who have authority you kind of have to believe them a little bit. Absolutely plus that's making a really good disney film I mean, it's quite a boring disney film if the length of time that james is describing has to take place, you know

It's just sheep laying down for a very long time I don't know if you watch that for like, okay, you have to watch that for a hundred years But at the end of the movie you get a game of golf. That's exciting, isn't it? That is really perk things up. Yeah The one thing more boring than watching a sheep lie down for a hundred years Oh, shit Um, do you know the fastest eating mammal? Uh, is it I thought it was the star dosed mole

We did it. So Anna we did this last week Can't it observe and um swallow a piece of prey in something like 120 milliseconds? Yeah, something like that and that's even quicker than a human can react to a red light out. Oh, yes 670 milliseconds off the top of my head. Yeah, it's so top of the head top of the head If you will insist on recording episodes when I'm not there then it's going to happen Isn't the organ on the front of a star dosed mole's face um 12 times more Um, what was it sensitive sensitive than a clitoris? I believe so and it's easier to find. Yeah. Yeah And I'll tell you what since we recorded last week. I've tested that out and it's true

Yeah, we did that last week sorry. Well, I'm going back on holiday then don't worry about it A giraffe would be a good thing to hang in a tree because you can sort of flop the neck over on one side And it's quite convenient. It's like it's own coat hanger. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's nice Yeah, you could eat it from either side. So you know that lady in the tramps were getty scene Imagine two of them gnawing their way up to a kiss the leopards and the giraffe I don't want to be the one that ends up with just that scrawny neck and the other one gets the four legs and a body I guess maybe it's a race to the body It's a closer race on the leg side, isn't it?

There's not much meat on those legs is there Although I don't I think the legs are longer than the neck actually and you've got to get through Oh in the giraffe really come on. Yeah, I reckon legs are longer than the neck I can't imagine things very well, but I'm surely a giraffe. It's famous for having the long neck But it's bad. It's like there's four legs. So if you stack the legs up on top of each other They probably I don't mean the legs stacked. You mean a single leg is longer than a giraffe neck Okay, I never never ever google in this podcast, but I'm going to do it now. What a giraffe looks like The only reason they're famous for the neck thing is because other animals don't have the long neck guys

Other animals have the long legs. So we don't go on about it. Sorry. Who here is voting that the neck is longer because I am I'm saying front front legs longer. It's pretty close actually. Was it? Yeah, I mean, I'm not willing. I'm looking at google images and I'm not willing to make a call on it Oh my god. No. Yeah Okay, interesting. I'm looking at an illustration sure and then there's a bouncy castle one next to it Which has much shorter legs guys are the same length the average legs are six feet long the average neck is six feet long Sorry, I went to actual facts rather than pictures. I know I was supposed to do things What a coincidence that your legs are the same imagine

Would you rather have a neck that was the same length as your legs or legs that were the same length as your neck? Easy answer for a giraffe is what we're saying, right? They've got it just right. Wow. Oh, that's nice. So nobody wins and nobody loses What a happy ending. What about the tail? Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts Thank you so much for listening If you would like to get in contact with me You can go onto twitter and you can message me at james harkin

If you'd like to speak to andrew you can go to his twitter, which is at andrew hunter m Dan schreiber is also on twitter. His twitter handle is at schreiberland and anna tushinsky is still not on twitter But you can get in touch with her by going to your email server I'm putting in the address podcast at qi.com If you have something more general to say you can go to the group twitter account, which is at no such thing And if you would like to learn anything else about us, you can go to no such thing as a fish dot com And that is also the place where you can get tickets to come and see us live on our massive tour It's going to be really really exciting

It's going to be a first half which we have not yet written So god knows what it'll be But it'll be definitely a load of fun with loads of facts and loads of silliness in the last tour I sang baby shark for anyone who wasn't there I definitely won't be doing that this time But the second half will be a normal podcast But it'll be the full unedited version So you'll get all of these kind of silly bits that you heard in today's compilation

You will hear them live and for real and probably a lot of things that will never ever ever ever make it to air So if you want tickets to that then go to no such thing as a fish dot com Or you can actually go to qi.com slash fish events. It'll take you to the very same place We will be back. Well rather they will be back with a very special guest next week And we as a group will continue making these podcasts every single week as we have done for the last 380 weeks and as we will continue to do so until they don't let us do it anymore We'll see you soon. Goodbye