No Such Thing As A Fish - 392: No Such Thing As An Ancient Persian Badger

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

Dan, Anna, Andy and special guest Craig Glenday of Guinness World Records discuss triple-decker tattoos, hidden codes, pre-Biblical air-con and extremely elderly balloons.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish. Before we begin, we just want to let you know that we have a very exciting guest joining us today. It is the editor-in-chief of the Guinness World Records, Craig Glenday. He's an amazing guy. He came to the office. We sat at a nice distance and chat facts with him, and he has a new book out. You may have heard of it. It's called Guinness World Records 2022. It is a collection of all the greatest records that have been set. You know what Guinness World Records is, like explaining the Bible. You don't need that. Anyway, it is out now. It's another fact-packed book, and Craig himself is an incredible person of such a pleasure having him on. So do get the book, and we hope you enjoy him. That's right. And in fact,

we have one other announcement to make, which is that our tour of the UK and Ireland is starting very, very soon. It's starting next week. In fact, the tour is going to be so much fun. We're going to be doing live podcasts all over the country, and there are shows coming up this next week as you're listening to this. So there are two shows in London. They're kind of work-in-progress shows. You'll be able to come and see our first half as we shape and mold it into the perfect form. And then after that, the first week of tour proper is the first week of October. We're going to Tumbridge Wells. We're going to Nottingham. We're going to Richmond, and we're going to Reading. So do come and get a ticket by going to knowsuchthingasoffish.com. All of our dates are up there.

Also, 27th of September. Our work-in-progress at the Soho Theatre. If you're in London, come and see that. And then on the 30th, go to the Canal Cafe. We'll be doing a second run of it there. It's going to be really exciting, but most importantly of all, get Guinness World Records 2022 and enjoy Craig Glenday on No Such Thing as a Fish. Here we go. Yay! 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 here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Tyshinski, and our special guest, it is the editor-in-chief of the Guinness World Records, Craig Glenday. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite

facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Craig. Right. Well, my fact this week is that the world's most tattooed person finally proved that they had the Guinness World Records title by gouging out strips of their scalp and posting it to the Guinness World Records headquarters. Right. In a matchbox. In a matchbox. It's so, Craig, it's so grim. It's a slightly odd thing to do. Did you ask them to do it? No, he was driven to do it. This is the very nice, I have to stress, it's the very, very nice lucky diamond rich. And he has a full body suit of tattoos, as you'd expect. And he was convinced that he had the record, despite the current record holder, Tom Leppard,

who he was a British military vet, lived on the Isle of Skye. It's very recognizable because he was covered head to toe in this bright saffron yellow and black spotted full body tattoo and wore gold thong. That's all he wore. Like a leopard does in the wild. I thought by getting you on, we've been very similar worlds, but I think you live a very different life to us. No one else is going to go, you know Tom Leppard, right? Yeah, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, this is our bread and butter, I guess. So Tom had the record at 99.9% because it was almost you couldn't really determine. I mean, there would have been tiny bits between the fingers or up the nostrils in the ears or whatever. So when Lucky Rich came around, everyone just said, well, he's the same. He's going to be

99.9%. And Lucky Rich is like, no, I am more than 100%. And what he'd done is he had a full bodysuit of exotic, interesting tattoos he'd collected from around the world. And then at some point decided to black them all in entirely using just a black pink gun and then didn't stop there. So then started tattooing white pieces over the black and then colored pieces over the white. So it's multi layer. I think that makes sense. I think that is more than 100%. So I mean, the one of the key rules for Guinness World Records is that if it's not breakable, then it can't be a record. Right. So it's kind of like the thing with the we mentioned before on the show, a pepper army is actually 108% pork. Because to get 100 grams of pepper army use 108

grams of pork and you kind of desiccate it down, right? So is Diamond Lucky Rich like that? I mean, I never tasted the bits that you sent in, but I don't know. Yes, I guess. I mean, you can just indefinitely carry on tattooing and layering and tattooing. Right. Rightly, probably angry about this. And angry about Mr. Leppard. About Mr. Leppard and not beating him, that he turned up at the office one day and we didn't know he was coming. So I got this weird phone call. And that's why I got it because I was taking calls maybe foolishly from reception and in a panic scene, there's a blue man, there's a blue man in reception with white hair and metal teeth. It's like, what are you on about the blue man group? I was thinking

about something. I said, can you just take a note or something? And he left a package, which ended up being like a wedding album, but not of wedding photos, but of very detailed anatomical shots of his own body and all the body parts and like really detailed, like proper, you know, cheeks apart type. Too much. Would you say too much? Oh, the other stuff I'm going to definitely have to cut. In my head, the package he sent you was the size of the matchbox. So I'm just picturing very tiny writing as the address on it. And just a very confused postman picking up this little mouse package that he delivers to you guys. So was it so that you could test the tattooed skin that it had multiple layers on it? I think that was possibly his intention. We

had, I think, did a new story because we'd taken a core sample of the world's largest paintball. So you know, the guy who paints a softball every day, how many his wife give a coat of paint this thing, and now it's, you know, a meter and a half wide. They actually did us a core sample so you can count the number of layers in an engine, you know, extrapolate from that. And I think maybe inspired by that, he sent us a piece of his head. And in the end, I think he just almost overruled the body editor and I said, we have to accept this as a record because he's going to this great length. He's so passionate and he is clearly more than 100% covered in ink. So eventually he got the record. Wow. People and their heads and you are something I feel

are like really connected. I read a story that you were walking down the street one day and a man recognized you, stopped you and just started kicking himself in the head in order to show you that he was able to do a bunch of it in the space of a minute and he made it into the book in the end, right? Yes, because that was also and that started off as a joke. How many times could you could we get a thousand applications a week to deal with and a thousand from all around the world? It's a lot to process and you end up rejecting 95% of what you get and in one included would be most times to kick yourself in the head. Well, I think that he said most kicks to the head. So he did clarify, did you mean like your head or someone else's? No, it's his own head.

Did you improvise on the spot? But this is one of Jane Torkin's favorite facts that he did on the past podcast. The world record for most kicks to one's own head is 127 in a minute. It's bloody hard. I mean, the physical effort involved. So it happens all the time in people. I mean, that's why we tend not to let people into the office. Hence why Lucky Rich was turned away. He looks like a smurf, but he looks like the angriest smurf in the village. Because yeah, he's completely blue. I wasn't expecting that. Yeah, I think because everything fades to blue eventually, isn't that right? It sounds like it's a philosophical statement.

He's got his ear canals done, apparently. And I want to know how deep we're talking here. Wow. So his gums, which is very weird. Has he shown you his gums presumably? Gums, yeah, gums eyelid. I mean, we've seen tongues tattooed. We don't do tattooed eyeballs. So we refuse to accept that because it's just too far. And it's very, very bad for you. So medically, we can't. Does he have that? Does Lucky have? No. Okay. The thing I was going to say, the one that you may want to not use when it's so weird, but the strangest application we've had is for someone who could who tattoos their own rectum. And what is bizarre is that they actually prolapse the rectum in order to tattoo it and then stick it back in. So I suspect, I don't know.

Do they tattoo their own because no one else will do it for them? Yes, for a very steady hand. A very cool head. And of course, we did reject that. We don't want to be encouraging such activity. Oh, I don't know. Cover shot for next year's book. Hey kids, have a go. Oh my God. The Guinness line's pretty far out, but you do have a line. I found out a favorite tattoo artist who I think is still practicing with mine. So this is a guy called Blaine Dickinson. And he got in the news in 2007. I can't believe he got in the news for this, but he tattooed a full English breakfast on top of a man's head. And that was that was it.

But the man requested it or was it unwanted? I don't think he hadn't requested it. But Blaine Dickinson had said, I want to do this and I need a volunteer, right? So then he found a volunteer some 19 year old who said, Yeah, I'll do that. It's funny. Anyway, the next thing Blaine Dickinson did, he got Anne Robinson's face tattooed onto his bottom next to the words, you are the weakest link goodbye, because he had been on the weakest link, but he got kicked out in the first round. He was on the show for about 45 seconds in total. We have an ultra fan who has the owner of Guinness World Records picture tattooed on himself. And I think also restraining order so you can't come near the office as well. But this is what tattooed on him. Well,

probably should be. More women than men have tattoos. Really? Really surprising. Yeah. I thought that's surprising. Yeah, in almost every country. So it's in the UK, it's 40% to 36%. 40% of women have tattoos quite high. Yeah. In I'm sorry, that's the average is 40% to 36%. And in the UK, it's 47% to 33%. And they're also more popular among people with higher levels of education. Oh, they're interesting. Yeah. Because they can afford it as well, I wonder. Oh, maybe. It's quite expensive, aren't there? When you or you can get some cheap backstreet ones. Definitely have a couple of friends and boys for 17, get some 20 quid jobs. I found one tattoo, which is worth millions. You'd obviously have to remove it from the person in order to sell it

at auction. Oh, is it a line of code that is the code for Google or their algorithm? And why would that be worth that much? Because it runs Google. Oh, you mean it's actually used. Someone's plugged in via their back. Google is keeping one person prisoner in a cellar and all of its codes. I'm not saying that necessarily, but I'm just saying that that might be a way of keeping the secret, wouldn't it? Yeah. Well, he's got it in one. Yeah, that's it. No, it is. In fact, Kate Moss has two birds, two sort of flock of birds on her lower back. Wait, two or a flock? Well, I thought it was two because I've seen the picture. Yeah. Okay. But then she said we decided to do a flock of birds in the quote that I'm looking at right now. It's in the picture that I saw. It's two little

birds on the back. And it was tattooed by Lucian Freud, the famous artist. And these are original drawings. And he used to tattoo when he was in the Navy. So he would tattoo sailors and she heard about that when they were chasing one day. And she said, I'd love to have a tattoo by you. So she thinks that probably everyone in the Navy from his period is probably passed away by now. So she's probably the only living person with a Lucian Freud original tattoo. So she said if you cut that off her body, I'm not saying anyone should, if you're listening. She's already sent it to Craig in a matchbox. But you know, that skin is worth a lot. It's original art by Lucian Freud. There's another very expensive tattoo or a very tattoo that's worth a huge

amount. And that belongs to a guy called Tim Steiner. Do you know about this guy? So he has a tattoo on his back that was designed by this Belgian artist called Wim Del Voi. And it's very cool if you look it up. It covers his whole back and there's like fish being ridden by children and stuff like that. And it was sold to a German art collector called Rick Reinking. And the idea is that when he dies, when Tim Steiner dies, he's agreed that his back can be removed and it'll be given to Rick Reinking and framed on his wall. And it was a good few tens of thousands of pounds he paid for that. So he's already sold it and he's got the money. He's got the money. Again, I like we discussed with selling your hair in advance. That was the thing that people

that they'd sell their hair and they get a small down payment for making the deal. And then they'd go back for the rest of it. When they chop the hair off, I would just run away. I would just run away, take the money and run. Yeah. Yeah. If you're a tattooed back guy. Yeah. Tattooed back guy didn't get the money though. The artist who tattooed it on got the money. What the hell does tattooed back guy get? I don't know. A little bit of a fame on the No Such Things as a Fish podcast. But does he get anything? He must get a percentage. I think he got some payment, yeah, because he had to sign a contract. There is a roll dial short story about a guy who has a beautiful work of art by a famous artist tattooed on his back. And then it ends up in a gallery.

And does he get money before he does? I can't remember the details. I think he might do. Oh, wow, plagiarized by this artist. Right. Okay, here's an ethical dilemma for all of you. Okay. You're a doctor working in an A&E department, right? Yeah. Someone comes in, patient, unconscious. They have the words do not resuscitate tattooed on their chest. Yeah. The word not is underlined. It's quite emphatic. Do not resuscitate. And it's signed as well, also in a tattoo. Yeah. Do you resuscitate the guy? No. Okay. No, that's a thing, right? It's a thing where you can request. I believe you can request it with this paperwork. This is not an official. Oh, no, but yeah, I guess, I guess it's just a reminder because I read about another lady

who had that on her front, but on her back just in case she was on the wrong side, it said PTO. So yeah. Wow. Oh, Dan has really reduced this, I would think, quite complicated ethical dilemma, which actually happened in which the hospital called in specialists for you just said, no, don't resuscitate. Yeah, it's really tough because I think, and I have not researched this, so please don't quote me on this, any actual surgeons. But I think it's like, if the patient has made their wishes clear, you're supposed to follow them. I think there are ways in which you can make wishes clear. So it is sometimes a bit of a gray area and that does seem quite clear once you've underlined it, unless you meant to do a strike through, of course, and you slightly

misaligned it. Yeah. But there was someone else who in 2012 had a DNR tattoo on his chest, but he was conscious when he was in hospital and the doctor said, look, what's this DNR tattoo on your chest? And he said, oh, I got it because I lost a bet playing poker. I actually would love, if ever I'm in the position, I'd love to be resuscitated. And he, the doctors said, you should really get that tattoo removed. And he said, I don't think anyone will take it seriously. Wow. So it does, it can, you know, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, DNR DNR could stop a do now resuscitate. Imagine getting it through now. Okay, it is time for fact number two. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that the judge

who presided over the Da Vinci code plagiarism case hid his own code in the actual text of the judgment. Very unprofessional. Yeah. So there was this big plagiarism case. I don't know if you remember between Dan Brown, the author of the Da Vinci code and the authors of a book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. And Holy Blood and Holy Grail was a nonfiction book where a hypothesis was put out that the Grail was in fact a bloodline lineage of Christ. And there's a lot of similarities in the book to the point where Dan Brown actually amalgamates the author's names, pageant and Lee into a character within the book. So there's definitely a sort of acknowledgement of the book. Anyway, huge case, multimillion dollar case, and the judge finds in favor of Dan Brown

saying it is not plagiarism. And when he handed over the judgment, it went round to all sorts of, you know, different media outlets, including The Guardian, where a journalist who was also a lawyer called Dan Tench was reading it. And he noticed that certain words had just a random letter italicized in it for no reason at all. And he thought, that's a bit odd. What's going on there? And then this is where the story gets a bit hazy for me, because it sounds like the judge, Justice Peter Smith, wrote to Dan Tench to say, have you noticed anything weird about the old judgment there? Yeah, he really, really wanted it to be fair. Yeah. Like a kid with a secret. Yeah, exactly. You know, look at the opening paragraph, see what you see. And you know, and then he was

like, yeah, I noticed the italics, you know, it's a bit odd. So he tried to crack it, wasn't quite sure how to do it. And then old judge got back in contact going, oh, why don't you look at my who's who? I've had some clues in there. Middle of a manslaughter case. He's just typing away. Also, he's British. I don't know why I've given him some like old Wild West gold digger. Well, now if you look at it, so more and more clues were given, and they kept trying to crack it. And eventually, eventually it was cracked. And the answer was so dull. It's so weird. Yeah, I think it's very interesting. Yeah, I think it's not dull. I think it's absolutely bizarre. Yeah, sorry. Go on, Andy. The answer is Jackie Fisher. Who are you? Dreadnought. Okay. And

Jackie Fisher was an admiral in the early 20th century, who's really interesting. He changed the whole Royal Navy. He's incredible. And Justice Peter Smith had a particular interest in Jackie Fisher. So, you know, hid this code completely for his own amusement. Yeah. But Jackie Fisher is amazing. Yeah. He's so cool. First person ever to use the abbreviation OMG, to mean oh my god, when he was in his 70s. So very cool and down with the kids, wasn't he? Wow. When was Jackie Fisher around? Sorry. He was running to Winston Churchill, I think, just after the First World War. It was in 1917 that he used that. But he is incredible. Jackie Fisher, he joined the Navy at the age of 13, which is, you know, mind-blowing. He served in

the Crimean War. And he revolutionized the Navy. He created the first ever all big gun fast battleship, which is a technical term, apparently. Just all the guns are big. It's all I take from that. And he was made First Sea Lord. Then he lost the job. And then he was given it back again, because the guy who replaced him was Prince Louis of Battenburg, who was sort of born in Germany, had a German name, beginning of the First World War, lots of suspicion. So he was replaced, despite the fact that he'd been in the British Navy for 40 years, like unimpeachably totally British, but he was called Prince Louis of Battenburg. So he lost the job and Jackie Fisher got it again.

But it's interesting that he was replaced by Battenburg, which is a cake, because Fisher was responsible for introducing bread onto submarines. I didn't know that. Maybe Battenburg went on to bring cakes on one step further. But Fisher introduced bread onto submarines. How would no one thought of taking bread onto a submarine before? No one made the leap from biscuits to bread. I think it was because you couldn't take fresh bread, because, you know, it goes pretty moldy, slash stale. So he introduced the idea of baking their own bread, taking the ingredients for bread, and then you become

bakers, artisan bakers under the seas. Okay, Jackie Fisher's interesting. I grand you that. But I'm just saying, if the code revealed something like, he's actually guilty, you know, it's something... What does that actually mean? What is the end result of doing all this other than, yeah, you're a smart ass, know what? Exactly. You're right, that's it. But you didn't even get it right, did you? I mean, just do it properly, at least, Smitty. That's true. Yeah, he made a few mistakes.

Well, I think I'm on the defendant's side in this. I'm on the side of Michael, Baygiant, and Richard Lee. I think the judge might have called it wrong. That's my final statement. Oh, M.G.? 00:20:45,600 --> 00:20:46,800 Yeah, again, Fisher. No, solely because he doesn't sound like a trustworthy character. He's busy concocting... Wait, Dan Brown?

Or Peter Smithy? The Peter Smithy. Peter Smith, sorry. Busy concocting his codes. And yeah, the character of Lee Teabing, is that how we're pronouncing it? And the Dan Brown novels is those two men's names, which I find weird because Dan Brown went into the trouble of making an anagram out of Baygiant's name, Teabing, and then couldn't be bothered to find an anagram for Lee.

What's the anagram? Eel? It's LEIGH, to be fair. So you've got some things to play with there. Heigl. Heigl Teabing is even for Dan Brown. I think that's a bit far. Dan Brown, as well as writing the Da Vinci Code, which has sold, what, something incredible? Tens of millions. Tens of millions of copies, yeah.

Almost as much as the Guinness World Records. Not quite. Nice try, Brown. It's even more implausible stuff with Dan Brown. He is rumored to be the author of a 1995 dating guide called 187 Men to Avoid, a Survival Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman. Okay, this is a humor book, and there was a story about it, I think, in the New York Times. Really recently, there's a woman called Chloe Gordon, who is trying to track it down, right? Because she believes this must exist.

It's by Danielle Brown. That's who it's listed as being by. Again, the master of codes conceals his identity. Whenever she tries to buy it, she gets delivered the wrong book. This has happened to her repeatedly, and lots of different wrong books are labelled as being this book. And there's been some error with the bar code. There's been some mistake that means that this missing mystery book by, we think by Dan Brown, because his agents will not confirm that he's written this book. And he's never said anything.

He completely stonewalls about it, but we think it's believed that he wrote it with his, quite confusing, his future ex-wife, Blythe Brown. So she wasn't his wife yet when they wrote it. Then they got married, then they got divorced. What if the bar code is a code? That needs to be cracked. This is all sounding amazing. He puts codes everywhere, this guy. This is what Dan Brown does. I know, but this is such a tedious sequel that you two are attempting to write between you in invitation. I'm saying that Indiana Jones, you know, that huge vault of things, just all of this book, thousands and thousands of copies, because it's just got the wrong bar code.

That fits slightly into his early career as such, the idea that he would have written this book, because he was a musician. He tried to be a musician. He had a CD that was released. There was a song in it called 976 Love. And then he followed it up with another CD called Angels and Demons, which eventually became the first of the Robert Langdon novels for a CD. Wait, was it a song? No, no, it was an album. He has an album called Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, and it's nothing to do with his future career as an author. Okay, so you said the CD became his first Robert Langdon book, which is the book based on the album.

What I meant, sorry, is the title, very sort of, if you know the Da Vinci Code series, is the prequel to the Da Vinci Code, and then the sequel in the actual movie series. Very much like the wife situation, sort of predating and then becoming the Future X, that Angels and Demons is the prequel in the books, but the sequel in the movies. Craig, has he got any records that you know of, Dan Brown? Because he sold so many books that I would think he must. I think at some point, he did have that record. But the problem is, we find it very hard, because we claim to have one of these records as the best-selling. We're not even sure ourselves. So we used to always sell ourselves as the best-selling

copyright book, because in 1974, I think it was, we overtook Dr. Spock's book of childcare, which was at the point. And then we, because we had effectively this same book, we were... Different Dr. Spock, everyone. Different Dr. Spock, thinking of the other Dr. Spock. Show them no emotion whatsoever. Live long and prosper, isn't it? No, not that Dr. Spock. Anyway, so yeah. That's a really famous one. Is it Benjamin Spock who wrote, and it's sort of, it was the manual, like 77 million copies or something. And then at some point in 1974, I think it was, we overtook it. Anything else on Dan Brown? He never reads other books, which is a bit distressing,

because he could explain something else. You definitely read one, didn't he? No, I think that's really clear, yes. Read one book, took all of its ideas, read another. Eagle-teabing, yes. He said in a piece with the New York Times on him, he said, I don't read other fiction because reading other people's work doesn't help me, it just turns me into a consumer rather than an author. Wow. Isn't that extraordinary? That is, like, probably explains a lot. But he reads, well, I thought he reads non-fiction. I think, I thought he just didn't read novels. Well, I think he does, but I think that counts as reading. That's like being a chef and not

eating food. It's weird. I think it's incredibly odd. It's incredibly weird to believe that you can write genuinely good literature, but be so arrogant about your abilities that you think you don't need to read other examples of it to draw from them alone. Not going to be a consumer. A few things on other codes hidden in places. So recently, a very exciting code was cracked for the third time. Diminishing levels of excitement, surely? Well, it's been a while since someone cracked it. This is a book that was called Cain's Jewel Bone, and it was a 100-page long murder mystery puzzle. So it was created in 1935, and the idea was a prize was given out of 15 pounds,

which is about a thousand pounds in today's money. And it was a novel that was printed out of order. And the idea is that you had to reorder it in order to work out who the murderer was. So page by page, the book had to be reordered by the person reading it to work out how the story played out and who the murderer was. And it's a short novel. It's only 100 pages, but the possible combinations of 100 pages are 32 million. So it's an extraordinarily hard thing to get right. Surely it's more than that? Well, yeah, maybe 32 million plus. And they're not numbered, of course. Say, the number of the pages just, yeah. Yes, they're not numbered. That's a challenge. And it doesn't, do they have some pages where there are chapter openings? I haven't

actually seen the book. So yeah, I'm not sure if it's just one long story, but it was set by an observer's crossword compiler called Edward Palsmather. And yeah, so it was bound out of order, and only two people back in the day managed to do it, who I think did it in collaboration. And then it was republished recently, because it's been out of print for a long time, by buddies of ours, John Mitchinson of QI, who has been on the podcast with his company Unbound. And it was cracked by a British comedian, who some of us in this room know as well, John Finnemore. Really? John Finnemore, yeah, who, John Finnemore's souvenir program on Radio 4. He's currently co-writing Good Omens 2 with Neil Gaiman.

Yeah, he managed to crack it. Is it good? Did they, I imagine it's a terrible book. Sounds tedious, doesn't it? No wonder only two people did it, because like, can't be bothered with it. Oh, it's like a print, no surprise. So it was his lockdown hobby, and it took him six months to do it, and he used to go into a room, and he had to research everything to work at, you know, he'd be looking into where certain train stations were, and stuff like that, just constant research to make the connections in the book work, and eventually got there. Are we 100% sure it wasn't a publishing cocker that was post-hoc rationalised? I'm so sorry, we've put your book in the wrong order, why didn't we make this fun?

It's a good wind-up for someone, isn't it? One of the most explosive of codes that probably rock the world, and the kind of sort of same way that the Da Vinci code really got people obsessed with it was the Bible code, wasn't it? Michael Drosnin. Do you remember that? Have you met him? I feel like he said that. Before my life at Guinness World Records, I was the editor of The X Factor, and not the Simon Cowell show, but like a paranormal magazine, and we covered all sorts of paranormal and conspiracy theories, ghosts, aliens, all that sort of stuff, and we spent, we gave a lot of inches to Michael to talk about the Bible code, and is it Ripsy Lee Yahoo Ripsy, I think, who originally came up with

the idea, who discovered this idea, and published the paper, which then Michael Drosnin went into, the idea is that you have a skip code, so that every, I think it was like every fifth letter. So specifically in the Bible, every X letter? Yes, I think it was, maybe it was in the Hebrew version of it, but you would take every fifth letter and it spells Torah, for example, or you take every hundredth letter and it will spell Dana, or you know, you just go through and you come up with these, and it's probably now, I think, nonsense, in that you could take any big subject, any big book, and apply a skip code to it, and you will find secret messages. In the Bible, if you take every two millionth letter, it spells out Jackie Fisher,

who are you? Dreadnought. Yes, I think someone did a bit of research to disprove it by taking, I think, Moby Dick, and found the death of Diana coded into Moby Dick, and if you apply the code, you, I mean, the words is Dana, Dodie, Skid, Hearse, Royal, Lady Diana, mortal in the jaws of death, and Henri Paul, even, is all within the same code. If you rip apart Moby Dick and find the code, so yeah, I think you'll find anything in anything. Yeah, it's quite a convoluted way to have written that message, isn't it? Just try to make a normal sentence if you're going to hide that. He went on to produce this idea that somehow it was aliens that were giving us this code. Did he? Yeah, that was the second book, so we sort of parted ways at that point.

I thought he was an atheist who just didn't believe it, but just found it. Wow, that's so interesting. He thought he was an atheist. No, no. Yeah, good point, yeah. But yeah, he, aliens, gave us DNAs, a code of another kind, he thinks it's all connected, and yeah, so we, yeah, we stopped publishing him. Yeah, I think that's right. You don't encourage that too much. The X Factor. A conspiracy magazine stop publishing him. Just to think about the tattoos, the other one that came to mind was that supposedly the very first use of this steganography, I think, is the word for it when you hide codes, I think it was as the tattooing people's heads and then sending them off as a messenger, and then they arrive and then they shave their heads.

And there's just a full English break. Send the wrong guy. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in ancient Persia, instead of sitting in front of a fireplace to warm you up, you'd sit in front of a wind place to cool you down. It's really cool. These really cool things called barred gears, and that spell like badgers. Yeah, I mean, you've really pronounced them unhumorously correctly that I think, Anna. I'm really disappointed. I was waiting to say badgers, and there we go. I'm so sorry, James would be so upset if he ever hears this,

not doing a wanton mispronunciation, but they are on old Persian houses and old Middle Eastern houses really, and they look like a mini Greek temple really, don't they? But like a really tall Greek temple that's acting as a sort of a chimney, and they've got these columns on them, almost like Doric columns on them. They've been around for sort of 2,500 years, at least we think. We think perhaps they got the idea from ancient Egyptians, but the idea is that as wind blows past them, they funnel cool wind down into the house, and as the hot air in the house rises, as hot air does, the cool air is pulled downwards, and it would cool the house up, and it would often be channeled into the sitting room or the general living area,

and a family could sit around the wind place and have their hair blown out of whack. So would it properly bring it in terms of gales of wind, or would it be just gales of wind? If it's windy, really windy, it's like a Beyonce. So many great music videos filmed in 500 BC, actually. If it was a completely still day, it would be very surprising to have a gale force wind coming down your chimney, but yeah, it would be, you know, it would channel as much as it could. It's amazing. I've got a question, Anna. Could these things double as fireplaces?

Is it just, you know, could you light a fire in there and... It'd get blown out instantly, wouldn't it? Yeah, I just understood. I'm born into the room and I've understood the problem, yeah. I think there's a bit of engineering side which might screw that up for you. There's sort of like various flaps and stuff, they're really cleverly designed, so they'd face a very specific way, they'd face in the direction that the wind would most commonly come in that area and they'd have little flaps that you could open and close and various duts

on them that, depending on where the wind was coming from, you'd open and close to maximize efficiency. Wasn't there also a thing we're like, because obviously, once the air is inside, the air would warm up and rise. They also had sort of like cat flaps to let the warm air out, sort of the building slightly pressurized the warm air out, so you were just bringing in kind of like an air conditioner, right? Modern surgery, they have the same thing, don't they? Because the pressure is different inside, so it blows everything out of the room, not in.

Yeah, in the operating theaters. Oh, really? So that when you open the door, you just, yeah, you don't get germs. Things get pulled out of the room and not into the room. It's amazing. It's amazing. That's interesting. Oh, it's brilliant.

I was saying to Andy earlier, just we're so clever as humans, the history of humans. We are. Just to like, to invent something like that. They've got this far to this point right now. Yeah, like it's just so, all I'm saying is like we've been deserted on an island and all we had were the elements of the earth and the universe to play with. And this is where we've got to. And when you hear stuff like this, I'm just saying magic.

The ancient Egyptians probably came up with this and it's, what a system. How clever. Everyone listening, give yourselves a pat on the back. Yeah, well done. Yeah, we are screwing it up now because having invented air conditioning, we've now sort of forgotten the techniques of using natural ways of cooling houses. And now air conditioning is destroying the environment and seriously contributing to climate change.

Okay, take that pat back. And it's all these fuckers faults, isn't it? These Persians introducing the idea. No, no, they're the ones who have the solution. They invented the electricity free version, which is incredible. They invented the concept. Come on. The concept of being cool.

No, it is. There are a billion air conditioning units on the planet, one for every seven people. And that is, it's too many. It's too many by a long. Obviously, if you live somewhere really, really hot, the natural impulse is to get any kind of device that lets you cope with the summers. But it's really wasteful because a lot of the energy it uses gets tended to heat. So you're cooling yourself and heating the room and therefore the planet.

Although obviously we can talk having just endured a three month long summer. Yeah, when it's hot, sometimes that's all you want, isn't it? Just stick it on. I'll be dead soon. Just stick it on. I love freezing cold rooms. I'm going to say I'm obsessed with air conditioning. There may be a thing you can do to trick yourself in this regard.

This is really interesting. There was a study done by a guy called Frederick Rawls, who is a psychologist and he's a member of the American society of heating, refrigerating and air conditioning engineers. Anyway, his study has shown that if you are shown a false thermometer displaying a high temperature, you will feel warm, even if the room is not especially hot. So maybe if we all just draw a thermometer on the wall saying it's only 10 degrees in here, what a chilly day it is, then you won't need AC.

Have you guys heard of John Gorry? He could have invented air conditioning. Has someone got there first? No, he got there first. In 1851 he patented an ice machine. He was a doctor in Florida. He wanted something to keep rooms cool for patients. And his was a bit different because it created ice, which would then call the room,

rather than him cooling the room with a manual or evaporation principles. But he was run out of business by, can you guess, big ice. Big, giant ice cubes. Pretty much. There were these ice makers from the north of the USA who made their money hacking up ice and transporting it across the country. Don't call them ice makers. That's like saying Dan Brown invented the idea for the Da Vinci Code,

rather than taking it from somewhere else and moving it into his own property. This is the most legally contentious podcast I've done for a while. No, you're absolutely right. The ice sellers then. The ice king, Frederick Tudor, his name, not a medieval monarch despite the name of it. Yeah, he campaigned against him and John Gorry died penniless. A few years later, his invention didn't take off, but it worked and it would have worked. Yeah.

Oh, wow. Nothing. God, that idea of bringing ice in, there's an older example of that, which was a mountain of snow was created in the garden next to a villa, which was imported via donkeys, sort of just carrying it in. Bye. Where are we? We're in old days.

It's a friend of the podcast, Basie Anus, aka Elagabalus. Roman Emperor. Roman Emperor, who featured on the show because he invented the Whoopee Cushion and his original name is Basie Anus. He had, it's pronounced differently, correct? Yeah, it's definitely spelled Basie Anus. But yeah, so he imported, this is the story. He imported a lot of snow into his villa.

So he had this giant snow mountain for the summer just to keep himself warm. Cool. Did you shove a little? Well, he built an igloo out of it. And actually, igloo is very warm if you get inside them. Keep him cold, yeah. I had this idea. I've got many ideas for films as well, which never get made and never get written.

No one's ever done an Inca movie, like the proper Inca movie to end all Inca movies. So I had this great idea. I went to research around Peru. There's an excuse to go on holiday, really. But they have similar things, don't they? The Colcas and where they would keep food to have these grain stores on mountain sides, which are designed in such a way to channel the air. Probably very similar sounding.

You know, the Incas were amazing in terms of architecture, but they have these grain stores, which are placed about one day's march apart as well across the whole country, like a network of them on the Inca highway. And they're designed and have channels to drain the water so that if it gets wet, it doesn't spoil the food. So that's how they were able to grow so big and cover the whole country because of these Colcas. And they're amazing things. Yeah, very smart.

Yeah, I heard of those. Well, that's like actually the Persians also had these things called yakchal, which sound quite similar. They look like big igloos. Is this what these look like? They're sort of like big huts. Well, the Incas changed the shape depending on what was stored in it. So the grain would be round and fruit would be square.

That's like so you can see from a distance what you're having for dinner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's brilliant. Amazing. And they'd also store non-food things, but it was mostly food. Different shapes for different foods. That is incredible. What's it like a pig shape?

I think there was that many shapes, but yeah, there were sundae. Called on the cob shape. Flashing hamburger. Yeah, the Persians had these huge kind of insulated igloos, which were really similar. And yeah, I think a few hundred of them still exist and still function, many hundreds of years old. And you can shove frozen stuff in them.

They can keep things below freezing, even when it's well above freezing. Just pop there, put your ice cream. When air conditioning was new, or not when it was first invented, but when it was newly being adopted across America, especially in America, that's where a lot of AC units are, because they've got cities like Washington DC and New York, which are so hot in the summer.

But I love this fact. This is from Prospect Magazine. They wrote about air conditioning. It was easier to get into buildings, because air conditioning units were quite large at the time, right? And air conditioning in cars was very rare and special in the 1950s, because obviously to miniaturize the technology surface into a car was really expensive.

I'll take the window down. Yeah, exactly. If you're in a car. But in Texas in the 50s, it was so fashionable that some people would drive around with their windows shut tight in 100 degree heat, just to fool their neighbors into thinking that they had AC in the car.

Imagine. God. Is the driver of that car sweating profusely? But he's got a little thermometer drawn on the side, says it's only five degrees. I think at the beginning of mobile phones in cars, the Koreans, I think, everyone who was getting pulled over, about 70% had just black wooden bricks

who were driving around to make it look like they had mobile phones. It's probably as dangerous. Do you think you can get arrested for that? Can the police find you when they stop the unit? It turns out you were just holding a brick. Not on the phone. What? Brilliant.

Get around. Always carry a brick in the car just in case you get stopped. Yeah, yeah. How was that a guess around? And then just swap? Because you can't actually talk on the phone if it's a brick. Oh, I know, but you can be on the phone and then quickly, you know. On a brick cover for your phone, just flip it round.

Oh, yes. I mean, just don't be on the phone when you're driving, obviously. Oh, sorry. Yeah, that's the best thing. Most important thing. But if you have to be, get that brick. All right. Why do you think Aircon was initially taken up widely?

Cool people down. Incorrect. Oh, yes. What? Walking on that. Oh, this is a publishing fact, isn't it? It is not a publishing fact, although I think I maybe know what you're talking about.

It was used in publishing, but then it was widely taken up to actually warm places up. And it was taken up by factories. This is in the early 20th century. And so the idea with Aircon is really the technology behind it, just allows you to manipulate the temperature and the humidity in whichever way you like. And the take-up was by factories and the particularly textile factories, where it wasn't humid enough and cotton threads were breaking. And so they mass bought these new Aircon units to make it warmer and more humid.

So nice. Oh, yeah, the humidity thing. Yeah. I walked right into it. I did. But that's why it's important in printing, because I obviously like to bring it back to the book again. But I do spend a lot of time in printing factories,

printing the Guinness World Records Book. This is just out. Controlling humidity is a huge thing. Yeah, and that's, I was reading very early on that it was introduced because the paper gets kinky. Because the humidity changes and the paper warps, and then you can't print, particularly for color work on it, because you can't get registration.

So then does it change the, how the ink sits? Because the paper scrunches up and stretches out. You want it to register perfectly on top of each other. That's the paper is slightly kinks, then it doesn't line up. So you get these weird hairlos, colored hairlos around. I was hoping when you said it gets kinky, that all the material suddenly just turns a bit sexy. Fishnet.

Yeah. It's like one of those mugs. If it gets too hot, it would be a naked woman. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is Andy. My fact is that the world's oldest balloon has been blown up for nearly 30 years. Has someone's been continuously blowing it up?

That's right, I know. And he's exhausted. I'm wary of saying this in front of the Records Master, but there are a few different claims about the world's oldest balloon. I don't know if any have actually come across your desk and been verified. This was a recent story, a young man called Ryan Harrison. He was interviewed by The Sun newspaper and he was given a foil balloon when he was born in 1992.

And his parents taped it up in a box and he insists that it's still completely blown up. So that's one good claimant. There's one guy called Jordan Lyman who lives in Birmingham. And in 2018, he'd have one for 26 years. So that might be 29 years old by now. So about the same age. It's only the size of a tennis ball,

but he claims it was only the size of a tennis ball when he got it. What a sad birthday that was. Sad balloon. Well, he was small at the time as well. He was born when he was small. So it probably looked like a normal balloon. We put it next to him. I don't know why Dan's accepting that.

You know, get balloons and purported to your own size. The younger the birthday, the bigger the balloon. I really went with that, Anna. And I would have got away with it if it wasn't for you. Always has to be the same size as your head. Yeah, there you go. You don't need any bigger. These are the tin foil balloons.

If you're picturing the balloon right now, it's not your classic rubber balloon. This one was a tin foil one. Mylar, I think, almost. Is it mylar? Mylar, yeah. So not actually tin foil, obviously, because that would make a balloon.

But yeah, mylar. What's mylar? It's like a plastic thing that's been covered in metal. Yeah. Tin foil. Faperized. It's all like tin foil, but not... Yeah.

Yeah. But I just can't believe this. I think they're lying. I'm going to come out and say it. And I know I'm being sued by Dan Brown already, but we've all had those balloons, and they deflate by the end of the day. Practically, they're kind of floppy and flaccid and sad.

It's absolutely incredible. Yeah. I do get... I say, I mean, the company gets probably once every couple of months a claim in from mylar slash foil balloons. Until you mentioned this, it was going to come up. I thought, you know, we reject it as a claim, interestingly, or we have done it, at least.

But they all seem to be roughly the same age. And I'm just wondering if there is a manufacturing period when these mylar balloons were made to a certain spec that was maybe too high, and all the... So it's the balloon on a stick, isn't it? The same one. It's a boy.

It's a girl. The golden age of making these when they accidentally made them indestructible. So I went through, and rather than go to bed last night, I went through... Well, I stopped at 101 claims to plot who at least claiming, we haven't seen the balloons, but I've plotted them all. When I had a few from the UK, I called Craig Wood, he's got an Itzaboy, that's 28 years and 10 months.

Annemarie Ormshaw, she's got an Itzagal, that's 33 years old. Then I emailed them, and two came back, actually. No way! So I've got pictures of these balloons, and it's the same type of balloon. Ten foil classic. And it is the mylar. I don't want to say mylar, because the Guinness World Records books,

traditionally, were those shiny ones. If you remember, there was a picture made on the same material. So again, weirdly, I had to become an expert in tin foil and mylar. You don't have to say tin foil just as a soft attack. I don't know how we get it. But we have a pet foil cover, and we don't know, because we want the book to be recyclable. So we've got rid of that, because the sheets themselves

can't be recycled because it's plastic. This is huge. This is amazing. So I think we need to reactivate this as a record, because it's obviously a thing in our job at Guinness World Records is to reflect what's happening. So if people are storing these balloons, which they do seem to be, I don't know why,

do you keep balloons down, if you keep everything, like toenail clippings? I do. Yeah, yeah, I keep a lot of random things. Oh, you've been to Dan's house, I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But not balloons. But yeah, I do have a cabinet of super old things that I keep.

I'll go through it and see. Super old things. Well. Like toenail clippings. No, it's mainly like the toys that I had as a child and stuff like that. But I'm doing it for my kids. I'm keeping stuff.

Like, I've got the pillow that my wife was sleeping on. Oldest excuse. The oldest pillow in the world. No, nothing special like that, like a balloon. You think your kids are going to appreciate receiving the pillow that your wife was on when she gave them? North conceived.

I've got my, you know, the blue scrubs. I've kept that that my second son I was wearing when he was born to give it to him for a Halloween in when he turns 18. Just get them a proper 18th birthday present. If you save this stuff up, it's worth way more. How can you live in London? You must have a very big property.

I don't understand this. You farmed this. Okay, so you're going to, I mean, it sounds like unless these are legit that, unfortunately, for 29 year old Ryan, he's not got the record. It's very exciting. I think this might be a record for the first time

we've ever had a fact pretty much comprehensively debunked while we're recording it. We normally wait until the recording session's over before discovering it's wrong. Also, these people must be so excited because did you say you were looking this up at two o'clock in the morning and you've, they've replied already, presumably.

Yeah, that's the. They've been waiting. Well, because I think if you, if you have Guinness World Records on your email address, people tend to get quite excited. Yeah. And also the people who've written in, and then we've rejected,

and then I've written back saying, actually, this might be a record. So they're very, very excited about it. Wow. So good. I'm sending pictures of these balloons and the story and, you know. That's amazing that like,

even though it was rejected, she's held onto it going one day. One day, they'll understand. Damn you Guinness World Records. I'm going to keep it anyway. Yeah. Did the reply go, well, well, well. Yes.

So, back to soon. Look who's back. He comes floating back to my balloon. Oh my God. How do people beat it if we tried to set a record? So if we, if we hold a record. Just stop to do better than you. But what, do they, do they record a video?

Or do you have to be present? Yes. So, no, we can't, we get, so we get about a thousand applications through, so we can't go to everything. Yeah. So we do have some guidelines for filming it, getting an independent witness.

You have to get photographs and all the stuff of the space you're doing it in, send all that to us with the video, and one take video as well. Yeah. Because we don't want any cuts. Or even two videos if you can't fit one into the frame, you know. And then, yeah, send it in.

So go to GuinnessWorldRecords.com and register your application. We send you the rules, because every record has a set of rules that you must follow. If you do that, then you can attempt it. Oh, my words. If you set the record, then the next person who applies

gets given your figure to beat. Yes. So they'll know that they have to do better than you. And what qualifies as an independent observer? Does that just mean you can't be holding a gun to their head at the time or? Like, not your mum and, yeah. Not your mum.

We've had that before. We actually got reported to the Queen, because someone, I can't say who it is, but someone who was very famous, there was a famous organist, I'll leave it at that. And... That narrows the few.

Yeah, exactly. There are not that many. Anyway, he did have, I think, his mum as a witness to the longest organ marathon in like 25 hours of playing the organ. But we then rejected it saying, well, you can't have your mum say you did it, because that's nothing.

So he wrote to the Queen and said, this is disgusting because he wasn't British. Now I'll sit down again. Wrote to the Queen to say, this is outrageous. One of your subjects has refused me my recognition. So the Queen has to react to things. If you send her a letter, she has to do something about it.

She never reacts to any of mine. No. So then she sent it to the Department of Training Industry, who then got in touch to say, what happened with the organ? It's like, why, what, what? Oh, my God. And they understood in the end

that there were guidelines and they didn't follow the guidelines. So that is amazing. Extraordinary. Okay, a foreign organist. I can't believe they called the Queen on me. Who's apparently mega famous in the organ world. In the organ world.

Longest organ played means very different thing, obviously, in other record-breaking records. You wouldn't get your mum to witness that. Not again. Weirdly, the Queen has several records. I've been looking her up on Guinness World Records. Does she? She's got a lot of free time.

She's got loads. She has, yeah. But they're all, they're all- Always kicks to the head. Yeah, a minute. They're all really, like, oldest current monarch, longest reigning Queen. Charles, it has to be your own head.

Yeah, she came to the office once, actually. Wow. She was, I imagine, during organ gate. Sought it out herself. Yeah, no, she came because we'd won some awards. Did you let her in because you were saying often you don't have to go to the office any often. No, we did the full, paint the office.

I'd love it if the Queen's sitting in reception next to Lucky Diving Rich. He had Peter Douriswell turned up to the office one day. Peter Douriswell is quite famous in that world of glutton. He has, like, fastest three-course meal. And he has this thing where he swallows hot dogs whole. And that is one of the rules. He can't bite them. So he is from Essex, I think.

And he opened a can of hot dogs at his home and then took it on the train into London. Opened still and full of brine and turned up at the office and said, I'm Peter Douriswell. And I knew who he was because it was just one of the names that I'd just had dealt with over the years. I said, oh yeah, Peter, hello. He said, I want to eat these sausages.

It's like, well, okay. I can't stop you. Yeah. So this is... Have you met the Queen? Yeah. Well, that's why we stop people coming to the office now because he ate eight of these sausages, back to back.

So you put it in your mouth and you push one down with the other. So you have this chain. What a nightmare. How do you stop? Right. No, you can't get any more in, literally, because it's like, you know, it's gone as far as it can go. Oh, wow.

So do you need a ninth sausage to push in the eighth one and then you withdraw? You retract your mic. Oh, you can get your fingers in there. Okay, so I'll go see you. Anyway, he did it. You got the record. Great.

And then he said, I can also drink milk hanging upside down. And it's like, I don't know how we, we haven't got a frame or anything, but we had two very tall boys in the office. So we got the two boys to hold him by his ankles upside down in the reception area, and he drank two pints of milk. But what you have to do with this record, you have to get up very quickly. Otherwise, the milk and gravity, you know,

and he was trying to communicate this after the fact when he had a gullet full of milk and nine sausages. And he couldn't get it out. So he ended up vomiting all the sausages and all the milk, all over our office reception area. Do you then have to take the record away from him? He didn't get the milk one then. He got the sausages.

That's okay. They stayed in long enough. But yeah. So the office manager is just like, that is it. We're not having any more people come to the office. Our office managers. Oh my God. The scenes outside your office will be amazing.

Poe going up on their noses and you know. How many cleaners have quit after one day? That's the main image I'm going to be left with after this week's podcast though, is the guy on the train with the open tin of sausages. Why did he, why did he open the tin? He probably had one tin left. He opened it and he thought, oh no.

Well his wife was saying, I need the tin opener here for dinner. So you're not taking that with you. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said

over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Craig. At Craig Glende and at GWR. And Anna. You can email a podcast at qi.com.

Yep. Or 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. Do check out all of our previous episodes. You'll find them up there. You'll also find a link to our upcoming tour,

which begins this October. And of course, do go to all online bookshops and physical bookshops to get the latest Guinness World Records 2022. It is out now. Craig is the writer and editor of that book, along with your buddies in the office at Guinness World Records.

It's an amazing book. Every year it's amazing. So do get this one. And yeah, we'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you all then. Goodbye.