No Such Thing As A Fish - 40: No Such Thing As Captain Trousers

Episode Date: December 19, 2014

Episode 40 - Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss military make-up, dinosaur erotica, Obama's honey ale and history's greatest farter.

We ran it on QI a few years ago, which was, there's no such thing as a fish. There's no such thing as a fish. No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish. 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'm sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Anne Miller, and Andy Murray. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts

from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Andy. My fact is that in 18th century France, tooth pullers were entertainers who performed in front of cheering crowds. So one of them had the party trick of pulling teeth out of a patient with one hand, while firing a pistol with the other. And all the while, he had his head in a sack. Why was he shooting? I don't get the gun shooting bit. It's just a touch of flamboyance at Strobis.

Yeah, it was entertainment. Yeah, I've got a really painful tooth. Great. Well, I've got a show on at 8 p.m. if you can make it. There was one guy who did that in the late 1800s who was called Edgar Parker. He might be the person you're talking about. Oh, okay. He said, Edgar Parker. And he changed his name by deed pull to Painless Parker. That's really cool.

James IV of Scotland was a keen amateur dentist. A keen amateur sounds a bit like he wasn't good at being even an amateur. He has tried really hard. Don't give up, son. Don't give up. One day. One day you could make amateur. Well, Peter the Great did that as well. He practiced it on his noble's dentistry.

So if you had a toothache and Peter the Great was around, you had to keep it to yourself. Otherwise he'd say, come on, get in the chair. No one is easier. Yeah. Oh, what was that? You've got a sore tooth? No, no.

It's headache. No, no. Yeah. Sinuses, sinuses. Headache. I have something for that. I'll just get my hammer. Just get my brain sore. And he kept all the extracted teeth in a little bag.

He was very proud of it. And it's now in the Kunstkamera at the museum in St. Petersburg. And he said, there's a bunch of fairies planning a heist. Mark Zuckerberg's dad is a dentist. And his website advertises, or used to advertise, we cater for cowards. And he specifically targets people who have dentists. That's a really good idea.

That's great. Because they usually are quite anti-antial. I need sizing if we don't need it. But some people get so freaked out by the dentists. His website should say, we pull teeth out of your Facebook. So I read that the Egyptians used to use toothpaste way before toothbrushes were invented. Yes.

But it doesn't sound very nice. It was things like ox hooves, ashes, burnt egg shells, and pumice. Oh yeah, lovely. And penis. Pumice. That's what we say. Pumice. Pumice.

Pumice. Worst chateau blind ever. Or excuse for infidelity. I lost my toothbrush, darling. The bummer happened to be here. So the Egyptians used gross toothpaste 5,000 years before the toothbrush was invented. Gross toothbrush was maybe the bristles from a pig's neck.

Bristles from a pig's neck. Damn, it's like better than the penis is the age of the Japanese. That's true. It's definitely an improvement. In 2013, a man escaped from prison in Sweden to go to the dentist. He went to the dentist. He had the affected tooth pulled out, and then he reported himself to the police,

and they took him back to prison. Oh. He got a day added to his sentence as punishment. That's fantastic. Yep. Did he book? You've got one phone call. He should have known, really, when he was going,

yeah, on the 27th next month. Yeah, it's fine. 3 p.m. Okay, cool. I might be a bit sweaty and disheveled one hour, right? I just want you to know that. Just work around it, work around it. While I'm here, do you have large sums of cash on the premises?

Just because your fact was about, obviously, funny sorts of entertainment in centuries past and freak shows, there was a guy, Joseph Pujol, or Pujol, who in the 19th century made his living by farting. And his living was, yeah, yeah. What standard was he in? Oh, was he Lapetta Main? Was he what?

Yes, he was Lapetta Main. There's a whole film about him. He was incredible. Yes, there is. The man who could fart. Yeah, he could suck air in through his bottom, and then do tunes. He retired from his farting career

to become a baker after the first one. Oh, no, I wouldn't eat his pies. I do wonder how successful he was in that. So he went from breaking wind to breaking bread. Just a joke for you all. He claimed that the farts also did not smell. He memorably said, my parents ruined themselves sending my rectum.

Who is this man? What does that mean? He was a French cabaret entertainer. Cabaret's really improved. His parents have spent an enormous amount of money making sure that his farts did not smell bad, like a scented candle. Could he have used himself as an air freshener,

do you think? Hired himself out to people's bathrooms. Every 15 minutes he just releases another waft of lavender into the room. OK, time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in the First World War, the Romanian army issued an order that only officers above the rank of major

had the right to wear eye shadow in battle. That is the bad thing I've heard of agents. Very funny. Now, there are so many elements in that. The rank of major, then wearing eye shadow, and then in battle. So presumably outside battle, all bets were off. Yeah, outside battle, you can do what you want.

You all wear socks on your nose. That's the army, isn't it? Outside battle, we don't care what you do. Have a good time. Yeah. Nelvan is still all right? I think Nelvan is just OK. But again, in the US Army new regulations,

there's recently been a ban on men wearing nail polish. Who's doing that? In China and Japan a few thousand years ago, everyone painted the nails. It's just the thing you did. Maybe that's a niche little kind of tribute group to ancient China that exists in the US Army that I'm going to crack down on.

Because the Romans used to paint the nails with blood. It'd go weird brown almost immediately, wouldn't it? They keep reapplying the fresh supply. Yeah. That was the only reason they were so murderous, actually. Well, because they could tell who was murdering, because everyone had blood on their hands. In those days, you've got blood on your hands.

It wasn't a bad thing. It was just a statement of fact about everyone. Look at you, blood on your hands. Yeah. Yeah, been down super drug, two for three pounds. Smudged a little bit, actually. It's also on your knife. But that's where we get cosmetics from, is Roman times.

They had cosmetai, who were slaves, whose job was to apply makeup and perfume to their mistresses and help out with the toilette. So that's where we get the word from, cosmetai. Not cool. Do you know where we got the word makeup from? Adverts for Max Factor, the makeup of makeup artists. He was an actual guy called Max Factor.

Yes. So his name was Maximilian of Factor, he's from Poland. And he coined makeup as a noun for him to make up your face as a verb. And he was the first one to turn it into a noun. He was the first person. Max Factor. And that is why it's extremely hard to research makeup

if you're looking for what people were wearing in the olden times. Adverts. A very new bloody word, and there's no real old equivalent for it. Except blood on your hands. Turns out some of history's biggest murderers were actually just height of fashion. Ancient Romans who were bald would disguise it by painting their heads.

Weirdly, when it rains, it sort of seems to... It grows, it slides like a craze. Yeah. My favourite fact that I've read about the whole thing of like just what you're allowed to wear in war and so on is that hygiene and clothing was quite a big thing. I always wanted the soldiers to have clean clothes. So apparently, any time you saw a battlefield,

there would always be huge clothing lines just behind where they were stationed of people drying their clothes for them and getting them clean. Yeah, so anywhere that an army moved behind them was almost a laundromat. It was the port of staff. Yeah, that came along. That's crazy.

Where were you in the war? Were you on the front line? No, I was really on the washing line. Speaking of effeminate, did you see those pictures of North Korean soldiers, female soldiers who wear stilettos when they're on parade? Yeah, I was trying to look taller, like cats and making themselves look big.

Maybe. Well, that's why we have the bearskins, isn't it? It's to fool incredibly stupid enemies of the crown. To think that bears are coming. God. British have really long heads. They've got massive skulls. So I find the bearskins quite weird that they still exist.

Do you know how many bears it takes to make one of those hats? Or how many hats per bear? You could probably get 10 hats from a bear. You think 10 hats from a bear? It's one hat. The hats are quite big. One hat from a bear. One hat from a bear.

Does the hat include the head of the bear, or is it just the skin? Yeah, that's what they've got underneath the hat, is this roaring head. That's the last line of defence. Yeah. Is the bear. Take off the hat.

You unleash the bear at the right moment. So one bear, one hat per bear. Yep. And so every year we need 100 new ones, and so 100 bears were killing a year in order to... That's terrible. Can you imagine the guy just cut a tiny square out of this bear skin? Throw the rest away.

Are you sure we can make nine or ten more hats out of this single bear skin? No, no, no, no. We want only the finest back hair from the bear. One bear, one hat. Just the small of the back. That's it. Do you remember because I went bear trekking

in Greece a few months ago? Yeah. Did you see any bears? Of course not. They're all in bucking and pallets. They're all in the hat. That's where you want to go. Just go watch the changing the guards.

Just go on bear trekking there, yeah. We saw lots of tracks, but we didn't see any in a while. I have one other really cool make-up fact. Did you know that Dave Myers and the Harry Bikers started his career as a make-up artist? Did he? Yeah, specialized in prosthetics. He works at BBC.

That's where he met Sly King, the other Harry Biker. He was a locations manager and first AD on films, including Harry Potter. And they met on the induction of a Catherine Cookson drama. Can you guess what Samuel Peeps bought his wife to improve her looks? Was it his cheese? No. Did you like his cheese?

What was your guess? It's... It's not nice. I'll tell you that much. Oh, a snake. No. It was puppy urine. Why did he get her a puppy?

He'll get plenty of urine. He wrote. That's true. Upon... Up with some little discontent with my wife upon her, saying that she had got and used some puppy dog water. Being put upon it by a great desire of my Aunt White who hath a mind to get some for her ugly face.

Oh, well, she's a charm, right? It's your anniversary, darling. Look what I've got you. So ugly, puppy urine will improve your face right now. I'm not going near you until you've covered yourself in dogweed. Quite possibly the worst anniversary gift. So looking into military dress. Drab is a colour.

So drab comes from in the 19th century when the British army and others stopped being colourful and we started wearing camouflage. We started wearing a dull brown colour. It was drab and everyone dressed up in drab. That is fantastic. I can legitimately say to my girlfriend, you're looking very drab tonight, dear.

And she can't be offended by that. Would you say to her you're looking very red tonight or very blue tonight? You say your outfit is very drab tonight. Sorry, that's what I mean. There you go, I think. Okay, time to move on to fact number three and that is Anne. My fact is that the most borrowed children's author

from British libraries doesn't exist. How does she not exist? She's not a real person. Okay. What? What's her name? Daisy Meadows. But she's sort of, she's a front for this group.

So it's a series of books called Rainbow Magic. They're crazy popular. There are over 150 of them. They sold over 20 million copies and it's a company called Working Partners who created the book. They make it by committee. Nobody owns any of the ideas, any of the characters.

They have a bunch of writers who write the books. They're basically loads of, they're basically a mini series. You get the pets series or the school fairies. There was one I read about called the pop star fairies and they all have names that kids will recognize. There's Jesse, there's Jesse J, Adele, the singing fairy, Miley, the stylist fairy. But there are seven in the series

and four of them are, I don't know if you guys know this band. So if you think of a band that have a Vanessa, a Frankie, a Rochelle and an Oona. There's Saturdays. Right, there are five people in the Saturdays. Molly's the other one. Molly's the other one.

So she's not in the pop series. Let's just take a moment shall we? And see what just happened there. I just know there's a Molly in the Saturdays. There is a Molly in the Saturdays. Because you read that phrase, don't you? Molly from the Saturdays. Yes.

But it's very pop culture. Do they, are they directly doing that? Yes. As in do the characters look very similar? I don't know what they look like because I haven't actually read the full series myself. But I did notice they... Do your research then.

I'm really sorry, I didn't read all 200 books. But so they have things like they brought Elizabeth, the Jubilee fairy. Okay. They have Kate, the royal wedding fairy. More cynically, they brought out Alexandra, the royal baby fairy in May 2013. Prince George was born in July 2013.

And I'm pretty sure Alexander was the running favourite if it had been a girl. So it's like an alternative timeline now. Maybe fairies have different pregnancy gestation periods. Yeah, maybe they only go for six months. I don't think it's ever been documented. So these have become quite popular, collaborative writing. It's a thing now.

There's another one called Erin Hunter. And the reason she's called Erin Hunter is because so the series is pictured at the same kind of people who like the Brian Jack Redwall series. And the reason she's called that is because Hunter would be close to Jack in libraries so that people who were browsing Redwall. But this happens again.

I think Lee Child, who does very well with his books, he picked his pen name and he picked it because Child is between Christie and Chandler. So he thought people would be browsing that section and they would be like, hey, who's this new guy? We should check out his book. Oh, okay, right. There's a new app called Inkvite.

Have you guys heard of this? No. No, my friend doesn't do apps, but it's where you can do collaborative fiction yourself. So it's kind of like a more pretentious game of consequences, I think, where you can invite up to four people and you're allowed to write, I think, 280 words of your novel

and then you pass it on to the next person and they write and then you pass it around. I think you mean more fun rather than more pretentious. Yeah, no, it does sound actually quite fun. A set of collaborative books that I really like. I've been obsessed with them since I've arrived in this country. Have you read them yet? Was it Sweet Valley High?

No, but Sweet Valley High also obviously fits into this category. So no, this is not one single author, but Mills and Boone books. You love Mills and Boone. I love the concept of them. I just love the turnaround. No, I really, I'd love to write one one day. I'd love to write a science fiction one and I know that they don't have

or I thought they didn't have their own science fiction arm. But they do. There's a science fiction paranormal arm and there's amazing titles. They do this thing, by the way, where they, if someone in a paranormal one visits a dinosaur and has an erotic moment with a dinosaur, they don't consider it bestiality

because all the animals and crypto animals in it are intelligent. So they're all in mind and consenting. Yeah, yeah. So taken by T-Rex. Hang on, it's still on. Oh. Hang on, I remember seeing these book covers.

They did the rounds a while ago, like Dinosaur Erotica. Was that Mills and Boone all along? That was Dan emailing them. You put them all around the office. That's my novel. I've got a birthday coming up, hint, hint. Go on, taken by a T-Rex. The rest are too rude.

Frankenstein's a bitch. It's not rude. That's lazy. That's lazy, lazy writing. Milked by aliens. Oh, that's not even a sexy thing. That's just farming. This one's the oddest.

Come for Bigfoot. But here's the thing. So Mills and Boone, why I'm fascinated by it is that no same book stays on the shelf for longer than three months. They pulp it straight after. Wow. So they have a huge turnaround.

And in 2008, they were saying every 6.6 seconds, someone bought a Mills and Boone book. The same guy? It was Dan. Well, here's the thing now. Standing at the till with a bigger and bigger pile next to him. You know I've got to have another one. I've picked this one already.

You can read them very quickly to be fair, yeah. And they equate for three quarters of all romance novels that are bought into this country. I like how we're calling these romance. Taken by a T-Rex. I've headed back to romance, are we? That's quite an ex-Disney movie. Did you read that brilliant thing

about what they do with pulped Mills and Boone's? Yeah, that's the QI question. Yeah, it was there. Was it the M6 or the M8 tall road? It's made up of pulp Mills and Boone. So when you drive down, you're driving over all those Taken by a T-Rex. They use the foundations in the foundations to stabilise it.

That's why it's always a bit of a turn on when you're driving down the M6. Only for Dan. Yeah, turn left and turn on. Very good. So I was looking at libraries and the Tarzan books were banned from some libraries in America in the 1950s because Tarzan and Jane were living in sin.

Wow. Yeah. What's the great fact you told me about Tarzan, Anna? It's that... Oh, yeah, the guy who wrote Tarzan is the great grandfather of Wes Anderson. Oh, yeah, true. Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Yes. So I was just looking at other... Oh, I stumbled upon other stuff that's been banned for amusing reasons. And do you guys remember a couple of years ago when dictionaries were removed from classrooms in California? No. Oh, no.

It was a parent complained that a child stumbled across in the Merriam-Webster dictionary the phrase oral sex. So the district spokeswoman Betty Cadmus told a newspaper that the books were immediately pulled off the shelves and temporarily housed off location to make sure that children didn't get their hands on it. And I really like, and it wasn't me that spotted this stunning irony, it was a blogger whose...

Dennis Barron, who's a professor of linguistics, pointed out that her name was Betty Cadmus who was issuing the statements. Cadmus was the Phoenician who brought writing to the ancient Greeks. Wow. And she's taking it away. And she's taking it away.

Great. It's nice, isn't it? So good. In the 1960s, in public libraries, you used to have things which were called block books, which were wooden blocks on the shelves. And that was in place of any books that the librarians thought were risqué or obscene or...

Oh, like top shelf. Well, what you had to do, basically, you had to take the block to the counter and then they would get the book out from under the desk and give it to you. Was it a shame, people, because you feel really dodgy when someone had to go beneath the counter to get something for you.

I mentioned arriving at the front desk was just an armful of wooden blocks. So I'd like all these, please. Granny behind you giving you a really disapproving stare. It's Tarzan. Come on. Do you guys know what the most banned book in 2013 was? I think this was in America.

Positronic Band to Kill a Mockingbird again. I don't know. That was banned, though. I was famously banned. Was it atheism for sexy people? Was it Billy Goats... This is just another excuse to slip in effect, but Billy Goats Gruff was banned in Oregon

because it was deemed too violent for children to be in a children's library. Oh. Mmm. But I take it it wasn't that. It was Captain Underpants by Dan Pilkey. That's an outrage. It's one of the great works of literature

of the 20th century. Fantastic kids' books. God, I've never heard of them. Oh, you know, they're very popular. They're about a headmaster who gets hypnotized into thinking that he's Captain Underpants and any time a certain key word goes off, he suddenly becomes Captain Underpants

and runs around with a cape and is underpants and does adventures and it's all in his head. That's very funny. I really thought you were going to say any time a certain key word goes on, he whips his underpants off. He was saying he's a headteacher. I can sort of see why these books were banned.

If he's Captain Underpants, does he wear his trousers over his underpants, like the opposite of Superman, who famously wears his underpants over his trousers? But Superman's not called Captain Trousers. That's where my clever analogy breaks down, unfortunately. Also, another banned book. I was very surprised by this.

Whereas Wally got banned for quite a long time. Wally was banned. So frustrating. Because it's too hard. Yeah, so it's called Where's Waldo, but someone noticed, so in America it's Where's Waldo, someone noticed that in one of the drawings that on a beach there was a topless lady

laying on the beach. A draw on top of that wall. Yeah, and you could, I mean, she was laying on her stomach, lifting up, so it was kind of more side boob. Well, it's obscene and I'm disgusted. Well, I reckon the person that found her is probably a genius at finding Wally.

You can find boobs on the page. Yeah, I'm sure he's fantastic at finding oral sex in the dictionary as well. Some people are just desperate to be offended. I really like this. In the Second World War, some authorities, some local authorities established, they put collections of books in air raid shelters.

So there was a tube station at Bethnal Green and it had 4,000 books in it and 6,000 people would turn up every night in the shelters and they'd have a library available to them. And they were really, really sort of intellectual books as well, like Bertram Russell and Schopenhauer and, you know, all kinds of... Oh, I see that the people with low brown taste

don't deserve to be entertained in an air raid. No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying it's, you know, very impressive thinking of people sheltering from air raids and also reading some of the great works. Bertram, I'd be so pissed off. You're terrified. You just need something easy to distract you

and all you've got is great works of philosophy. Exactly. I would have preferred books with the titles like How to Survive an Air Raid and How to Survive Being Trapped in a Small Tunnel with a group of other very, very scared humans. So very escapist, though, is it? No, I'm making more fans.

It's more sort of in the brutal realism tradition. Okay, well, when we're fighting over the last rat in the tunnel and you're quoting deep philosophy to me... And Dan's munching away when he's rodent. Who's having the better time? Because I read 101 ways to cook a rodent. The first of a mobile library was Horse Drawn. That's really nice.

I think it's so cool. And they still have in bits of, I think, North Africa, they have a camel mobile library. They travel around from town to town and they have school books and they have all kinds of educational things. I just think that's incredible. Wow.

And then when they stay for a few days and then they go off across the desert again. Seeking out the next air raid shelter. That would have been cool if you'd gone to an air raid shelter and there were just loads of camels there waiting for you. But Dan would be trying to eat them. There are some places where it might be in the UK where you can get books in the National Health Service

if you're depressed. Oh, I thought you meant books about the National Health Service. You actually mean you can get them prescribed? Yeah, you can get prescribed books. Well, I kind of like Bertrand Russell. I'm not sure what kind of life I'm in up in life. Wound cauterizing for dummies. That kind of thing.

OK, time for the final fact of this show. And that's my fact. My fact this week is that it would cost $850 quadrillion to build the Death Star. And you're probably wondering how I know this. I discovered this fact. There's a website that you can go on online called We The People, which is set up by the White House,

specifically for people who want to ask a question to Barack Obama. And the idea is that you put it up as a petition and if enough people sign it, the White House has to officially reply. And one of the questions was a response to secure resources and funding and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016. And the response, it was a fantastic response. They said, we can't do this. We agree that we share your desire for job creation,

a strong national defense, but it's just not on the horizon. One being that it would cost $850 quadrillion. Two, the administration does not support blowing up planets. Wait, wait, wait, so the White House administration calculated how much it would cost them to build a Death Star? Actually, no. It was someone else that they provided a link. If you just find out, if it's under 100, we can do it.

Yeah, these guys have a point. Is this feasible? Oh, I mean, NASA. Damn it. It's not. No, and also it would take years and years to gather all the material that you would need. I think it said it would take 833,315 years to make.

Well, I'll be dead by then. To get enough steel. To get enough steel to actually make it. On petitions, you know this recent innovation in the British government, it's just that the government has an e-petitions website, and anything that gets 100,000 signatures is passed to a business committee in the House of Commons for possible debate.

This has generated quite a lot of amazing petitions, like ban bald football players from Liverpool Football Club, royal baby to be given Lion King welcome. Isn't that good? Yeah. What is that held up on the edge of the cliff? That's held up over, yeah. It was also animals bow.

Yeah. By Rafiki. Do you know what's really cool is this We The People site? It's actually, in terms of research, really a fantastic place to find stuff out. So one of the petitions was asking the White House if they could release the recipe for the honey ale homebrewed at the White House.

I'll just quickly, just very quickly tell you about it, which is, so President Obama bought a homebrewing kit for his kitchen in the White House, and then they had the chefs and they had all the people who work there, who do brew their own beer, come and sort of create this ultimate kind of recipe that they could then use. And now they stick to this one recipe,

and it's the White House's official honey ale brewing beer that they all, it's a drink, they all drink there. It's the first as well, I've learned from this article. It's the first evidence that there's been beer brewed in the White House. So they have in the past, have known that George Washington used to do whiskey, but that wasn't in the White House. That Jefferson used to make wine,

but again, that was, maybe that was in the White House, but this is definitely the first beer in the White House. So President Obama's given the White House a beer. I at least he brought them something here. Yeah, it's nice, isn't it? I don't mean that I quite like him. And lastly, what's really nice is the ingredients for the beer is all unique, but the honey particularly,

because they use honey that they tap from the first ever beehive that the White House has had, which is on the South Lawn. Their own honey, their own beer. So it's their own beehive to create the honey for their own home brewed honey ale. A bunch of kind of rural hippies, really, aren't they? Yeah, and if it takes off,

they might leave this old government nonsense. They might just go into beer brewing. Well, that is what the Republicans want them to do. Yeah, we want smaller government, and we want more home brewed honey ale. Obama, don't get us wrong, we like your beer. Do you remember my favourite Star Wars fact? Go on. Oh, yeah.

It's that in sync, the band, just in Timberlake's band, made a cameo in Star Wars Episode 2, Attack of the Clones, but they were cut out at the final version. Yeah, thank God. Another thing I love about Star Wars is Dave Prouse, who was Darth Vader's body. Dave Prouse is also the Green Cross cool man. He gave an interview a few days ago,

where he said that that was his best role of his life, was not being Vader, being the goodie, and saving lives. You just ruined Darth Vader for a lot of captivated and terrified children. I'm worried he filmed. Now I think he's a little goody two-shoes car safety boy. Darth Vader never crossed the road between two cars. You'll notice that in all the films.

No matter what he might do, he did cross the road, say? Never does it once. David Prouse has the best title of an autobiography. For me, I think it's called Straight from the Force's Mouth. That is very good. Kind of. He doesn't talk in Star Wars. Well, I think he thought he was going to have the voice of Darth Vader. He did think he was going to have the voice.

He was convinced that he was going to have it, and then they revealed that actually, we don't really want a West Country accent for this Master of the Year. Just scary. But there is a video kicking about him doing the voice. I've seen it. It's brilliant. I actually came up with what I thought was a better title for his book. Oh, that's what I mean.

Which is The Empire Strikes Hardback. That is very good. Nice. So you have to change it for paperback. Star Trek invented the touchscreen. Did it? Did it? That's what I was saying. So Star Trek had, yeah, yes. Captain Kirk used to ride with his little touchscreen pen thing on a touchscreen.

I mean, it's not like on set, they had this new touchscreen thing that they invented going. Guys, should we patent this now, or should we continue with the series? That is true. It is substantially harder to invent an iPad than it is to say, I've got a magic device that lets me do anything, talk to anyone. Like J.K. Rowling invented the invisibility cloak.

I think we should invent something right now. Invisibility cloak does exist now, doesn't it? It does kind of. It's reflective stuff. It's like that. You can see it, it's the only issue. I thought you couldn't. It doesn't, you can put it over your hand or your head,

they've tried it, and it doesn't tamper with anything around it. And you can't, you can see the background behind it. Anyway, that's been invented. A hopper board's been invented, which is apparently a thing from Back to the Future, which is another thing I haven't seen. I saw a footage of it the other day. It looks amazing.

It does look fun. It does look really cool. I mean, it looks very beta. It looks very, you know, early stages, but it is working. That's fantastic. There's a great blog about Star Trek inventions. Years ago it came out, so I'm sure most people, if they know Star Trek, know this,

but someone did a list of all the things that Star Trek didn't invent, including cup holders on the ship. They always throw the cup in the head. Seat belts. You think a seat belt. They're always flying around the Starship when they're attacked. Yeah. On Star Trek inventing touch screens.

The first touch screen in real life was invented in 1888, and it was invented by this person called Alicia Gray, and it was like a kind of fax machine, so it used this electric pen to transmit an electric signal across wires, and it meant you could draw a picture, and then someone at the other end in 1888 could see the picture that you'd drawn, and this was used for things that needed signatures.

So it was used quite commonly in hospitals and banks and stuff. You'd be like, oh, you need me to sign that? I'm sorry I'm not here, but I'll just sign that over the phone. That's amazing. That is amazing. Yeah. But we still can't do that. Well, we don't anymore.

Do we lose it? We obviously... So we've lost technology. I mean, I don't know. I've never been able to sign over the telephone. Me neither. But you can't key in your payment. We can't do that in 1800.

We've forgotten that. It's faxing, isn't it? No, no, no, no. It's like live faxing. It's lying. It's like draw something, but... I don't believe that. Me either.

That's amazing. It's a real thing. Wow. I suppose it sends an electric signal of a device moving over paper, doesn't it? Yeah. But we just... We don't have that.

Don't we? Using a... Like, sure I've gone somewhere. Google Docs. Look at the ethic. Check your draw. Alex has probably gone on the station recovered. He's been telling us to use it for years.

Yeah. Can I tell you my favorite Star Trek fact? This will be my last Star Trek fact. It's that Spock was originally going to be Martian. He was going to be from Mars. Wow. Yeah. But he didn't end up being Martian because the other writers kind of

laughed the idea out of the room because they said by the time the series was nearing the end of its first series or a few series, we would be on Mars. No. And no one would mean it would just not be believable. That's so funny. Yeah. That's great. So they made him from...

I like it. That's the bit they thought wouldn't be believable with the whole of Star Trek. Yeah. And everything else. Something about space that I learned recently. I'm reading Commander Chris Hadfield's book at the moment, former captain of the International Space Station. He, when he was out on his first ever spacewalk and he was trying to

fix something on the International Space Station, had a huge pain in his eye, which forced tears out of his eye. And he was saying that it ended up sending him blind because tears don't function like normal tears in space. They don't fall. They instead build up as a huge blob over your eye. So he was suddenly blind completely in one of his eyes because this huge body of water was sitting in front of it.

And it got so big that it eventually passed over the bridge of his nose to his other eye. So suddenly he's out in space and he's trying to fix the International Space Station. And he completely blind. Just couldn't see anything. Literally blinded by his tears. But he has made a double bubble, right? Which is something you're always trying to do when you're blowing bubbles.

The part of his face. The part of his face is very inconvenient. Bad news, NASA. And some good news. Good news for eight-year-old me. But apparently what would happen is naturally the tears would get so big that it couldn't hold it anymore. And it would...

Flood space. It would flood. All of space would be flooded. But you'd still have to be seeing through a kind of... As if you were looking through goggles, I guess. So I was looking at other things that people have valued. Fictional things. They've valued Mr. Burns' manner, which is worth $127 million.

And that has to include things like a bottomless pit, which he has. So a Simpsons fan... Let's see how many references a Simpsons fan listening can get. Bottomless pit, a room containing a thousand monkeys banging on a thousand typewriters and a robotic Richard Simmons. Wayne Manning would be $105 million. But also... Is that it?

Yeah, no, it's affordable. Should we all club together? Without effects and... But they made a real Simpsons house in 1997. They ran a competition for someone to win the Simpsons house. And the winner had a choice of either taking home $75,000, or getting to live in the Simpsons house, which had been totally recreated to look exactly like it inside and out.

But if they chose the house option, they would contractually oblige as soon as they took their prize to repaint it so it looked like a normal house again. So the person who won it took the $75,000 instead. I thought you were going to say the contract was every day when they got home. They had to recreate the intro title sequence, which would eventually get very annoying. They had to paint themselves yellow.

And cut off one of their fingers as well. Yes. Yeah. Do they do that? Oh, yeah, of course. Sorry. It's that famous opening sequence of the Simpsons. They all cut off their last finger. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts.

Thanks so much for listening. If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this episode, you can get us all on Twitter at either atqipodcast or on our individual Twitter accounts. I'm on Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And?

At Miller underscore M. And Jozinski. You can email podcast at qi.com. And you can also head to knowsuchthingasafish.com for all of our previous episodes. And we will be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.