No Such Thing As A Fish - 407: No Such Thing As An Echidna With An After Eight Mint

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

Happy New Year! It's the Fish Live Compilation Special! Dan, James, Anna and Andrew show why they're absolute pro podcasters, with a new bunch of outtakes and near disasters from our live shows.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. 

Hi everyone, it is New Year's Eve if you're hearing this on the day that this episode drops. Wow, 2021, what a year eh? Phew, dear goodness. Well, we got through it, we got through it and 2022 I'm sure will hold lots and lots of exciting things for all of you people and all of us as well. So what do we have for you this week? Well, we have a compilation of outtakes from our latest tour. We like to think that we are the pros. We've been doing this for 400 episodes, we've been doing it for almost 8 years. Surely everything is so slick that nothing ever goes wrong. Well, if you've actually been to one of our shows, you know that things quite often do go wrong. Sometimes we say things that we can't possibly put out on the

podcast unless I very heavily censor them. Sometimes it's a really good fact and it just doesn't quite fit in the final edit. Sometimes the set just falls to pieces all around us. And so what I've done is I've collected all those things together and put them into a compilation of all the craziest bits from the last few months of touring fish. Really help you enjoy it. We'll be back with a normal episode for the first show of 2022. For the time being, hope you enjoy the show on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin. And once again, we have

gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is James. What, wait, did you not bring your microphone? Do you know I'm so relieved about that because I forgot to bring my drinks on. All right, you two go, I'll cover it. Should we start again? So it turns out, unbelievable, listeners at home, James forgot to bring his microphone, Anna forgot to bring her drink. I can't work out which is worse. I'm here, Dan. Thank you, Andy. Dan, I don't think anyone's noticed. I think if we go straight to me, Dan, though. Really, it's hilarious you didn't bring your microphone. I think what's funny is it was only

when I was speaking. I started speaking and my voice is a lot quieter than normal. And you started looking at your empty hands and you were like, amazing. Absolute pros, eight years we've been doing this. Okay, it's time for fact number one, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week. It's gonna make no sense in the edit when this show goes out. His real name is not Caravaggio. Yeah, he's actually called Michelangelo, but that name was taken. So he had to resort to where he was born. So Leonardo da Vinci, that's not his surname, it's of Vinci. That's where he's born. Same thing with Caravaggio. Michelangelo,

Mericy da Caravaggio, of Caravaggio. So that just became his nickname. And do you know why he was called Michelangelo? No. It's because he was born, we think probably, on the 29th of December, which was the feast of the Archangel Michael, which is also my birthday. Wait, your birthday's not 29th of December? September. Oh, did you say September? You said December, yeah. But by the time the edit goes out, I won't have done. Is there a reason why clownfish are so good to experiment on? Do we know? I'm actually not sure. We've probably mentioned it at some point in our 300 podcast, so you should go back and check. It's kind of funny. Yeah. Good looking. Yeah, photogenic. You can fit a load of

clownfish in the same car, which is useful for research purposes. That's something. And do you know why he was called Michelangelo? No. It's because he was born, we think probably, on the 29th of September, which was the feast of the Archangel Michael, which is also my birthday. I was looking into, I was just looking into names of dentists. There's always that thing that if you're called Dennis, you're going to be a dentist. There's the idea, and there's been lots of studies to show that Dennis or Denise, you'll be a dentist. And so I found a few names where it does feel like you're being pulled into it. So Rachel B. Pullin was one. And then in Rubland, there is a dentistry that are called Dennis and dentists dental practice. You said that again. Dentists and dentists.

Dentists and dentists. Yeah, D-E-N-T-I-T-H and dentists. But when they get their braces off, they're going to have to change the name, aren't they? Exactly. So good. In the 1960s, some women were taught how to breastfeed using sock puppets. Okay. Sock puppets. I run. So they would, I mean, we're just doing the sock puppet symbol. Yeah. Well, they were knitted breasts as well. So they were knitted sock puppets and then knitted breasts to kind of demonstrate how the baby latch is on. So the sock puppet would suck on the knitted breast as opposed to the real breast? Yes, that's right. Why not use a real breast? It's a very weird punch from Judy show. In fact, I told one of our colleagues this in the office the other day and immediately he said punch from

booby. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was also an advent Christmas clock, wasn't there, which had 24 hands on it. And so you would move the hand. 24 hands. Yeah. 24 spots for the hand to move on. And so you would move it each day. That was a primitive version of the icon. Your clock would be so weird. Just look at the relevant hand to know what the time is. Remember the time when we, they asked if they could put our podcast on British Airways flights? Yes. Oh, yeah. And they said, well, can you go back through your first 100 episodes and remove, we don't want anyone's where you mentioned plane crashes. And it turned out we mentioned it in every single episode. It was bizarre. It was so weird. Yeah. It was weird. We've already done it

in this one. Yeah. Do you know, can I just say a non orgasm thing to do with llamas, which is that llamas, there was a photo that was taken in the 20s, which led to an international incident where Tibetan monks were or monks from, I think they were Tibet were flown over and there was a photo taken of them with llamas. And yeah. And this calls. So a llama with a llama was the idea the British did when they brought them over. And it led to big problems because so this was part of publicity for a 1924 film, which was filmed by a guy called Captain John Knoll, who provided, for me, the greatest fact that I think I've ever brought to this show, which is he said that it's easier to escape a female Yeti than it is a male Yeti, because female Yetis have such long dangling

boobs that before they can chase you, they need to chuck them over the shoulders and tie them like a scarf. Otherwise, they might trip on them as they're chasing you. And then the time it takes them to do all that, you can escape. So that's Captain John Knoll who said that. And he was responsible for bringing the lamb. Yeah. So he was the official filmmaker on the Mallory expedition. He's the one who filmed the whole thing. He made it into a big movie. And it was a, you know, Hollywood nominated movie. And it's still to the say, it's a classic. But the publicity that he did is what actually banned any more attempts from happening on Mount Everest because the authorities were so furious about the way that the religion was parodyed by having llamas

next to llama. We weren't allowed to go back to Mount Everest for ages. That's interesting. That happened when I tried to put some bananas in some pajamas. It's also happened to me. Who are you? Who's the parodying? The bananas or the pajamas? I don't know. I haven't got that far. I'm working on the joke. Here's one really weird thing. I don't know if we can do this in the UK. I unfortunately found this way too late in the day to research this a bit more. But in other countries, this definitely happens. So imagine you're at home, right? Everyone and the bins have just gone out. And suddenly you realize that you accidentally threw away or must have lost something really precious in the trash. Yeah. Right. So what you can do and the story that I was reading about,

that's in a bunch of places, but in Montgomery County in Maryland, you can call up your local trash place. And if the truck is still doing its rounds, they will separate the truck into a different area when it gets the dump, dump the entire contents out, and you can come in to go through all the trash to find your lost thing. So it's a 10 ton pile of trash, basically. They let you go in it. What would it have to be? Do you think a wedding ring or a passport? If you were leaving the country, like things, a child can throw away a thing, right? Yeah, a child's teddy. If I lost one of my teddies in the bin when I was four, my parents would have both been in that rubbish dump for hours looking for it. Yeah. And on the FAQs, when you read their site for

doing it, it says time available to work. And it says, we must clear out all trash that comes into the transfer station before our day is over. Therefore, we can give you a limited time of 30 minutes for your search. I mean, we've had a few kind of TV formats that we've been pitching in the past. This is a TV show waiting to be made, isn't it? 30 minutes. You're going to find your teddy in a whole bunch of shit. Yeah. And they sort of go, you might just notice your own personal black bag that you threw away amongst the 10 tons of black bags. Yeah, if you label them, yeah, of course. I mean, don't you label yours? You so labels in, don't you, those guys? I didn't want to. We've got to move on in a second. I've just got one more thing. Is this is more, I was looking

into the telescopes and I was looking into numbers behind them. So this is a bit of a tangent. There's a number called Graham's number, which is so big that if you could imagine it properly, it would cause a black hole to form inside your head. What? No. Yes. That's just not what I understand about black holes. That's bullshit. No, it's not bullshit. It's real. Black holes form, right? When there's an enormously heavy mass, huge mass in a very small space, right? Yeah. This number is so big, there are so many digits in it, that if you, if the smallest measurable space, a plank volume was a digit, and you had the entire observable universe to write with, you couldn't write it. Therefore, if in your head, you could conceptualize every single one of those

digits, a black hole would form in your head and destroy you. I've received an unexpectedly small amount of pushback on that fact. I'm thrilled. I'm not surprised you didn't get that job on countdown. I'm sure you guys know there's a plant that lives entirely off Bat Poo. No. And we only realized this recently. It's a pitcher plant. So you know, there's plants that are like carnivorous and they're like champagne glasses, champagne flutes, and then insects fall into them and they eat them. But it was really confusing, researchers, because they weren't trapping any insects. They didn't have enough of liquid in them. They were kind of too big. But what researchers kept finding was that whole families of bats were nesting inside them. And turns out they've adapted,

they've evolved to just become the home for hardwicks, woolly bats. This is in Borneo, and they eat their guano. So they attract them by basically they're shaped like this parabolic dish. And so bats give out their sonar. And then these pitcher plants are the only ones that are shaped perfectly to reflect that sonar straight back to the bat. That's amazing. So then they're like, okay, cool. That's the core of my home. And they go to this plant, they go and live inside it, pool all over it. Plant eats it up. Bob's your uncle. That's amazing. Because there's another one that's in Borneo, I think, because I remember seeing it is like for is it shrews as well? They do kind of a similar thing. They sit on the edge. And then they kind of lick the pollen, but it's

it's a laxative. So it makes them shit everywhere. And then the plant just goes, oh, yum. That's so amazing. So it feels like the plant is a bit sentient there, right? I know you're going to say no. But okay, let's move on. So there is a tunnel under Mont Blanc now. Oh, yeah. Yes. Like a rail tunnel or a rail tunnel? It's a, look, it's a tunnel. It's a road tunnel. It's a road, it's a road tunnel, isn't it? Thanks guys. Oh, okay. Okay, literally everyone in our audience knew that. Yeah, yeah. But okay, it's a road tunnel. And it was started by one man who just decided to make a tunnel under Mont Blanc, freelance off his own bat. He was a count called Dino Lora Tatina. He was Italian. And when he was growing up, getting between France and

Italy around Mont Blanc is a massive pain. And it took about 18 hours to make the journey. And he called it an accursed mountain. He grew up in the shadow of it. And he became a wealthy businessman. He owned a wool factory. And he said, I'm going to do something about Mont Blanc. And he just started digging with no permission from anyone. He got 250 meters into the granite on the Italian side. And the authorities eventually said, what are you doing? And they stopped him. And then fine, he was stopped. But by that point, the plans were in progress. And France and Italy eventually agreed. They were really nervous about it as well, because it was only 15 years after the Second World War ended. And they thought, well, this feels like giving the other country a

route just to pass military vehicles straight into our country. But they did agree on it. And eventually it was completed in about 1962. Wow. And so now, you know, the 18 hour journey takes 10 minutes. That's so cool. Yeah, I have been through that tunnel actually, because we got a speeding ticket on the French side, on the way in, and then on the way out on the Italian side. That's what an example of learning nothing from crashes. I went to the dentist for the first time in two years the other day. And I went because I had a bit of a problem. And when I got there, the dentist misheard me when I said my name and put me down as Samuel Schreiber. And I didn't correct her. And so for the whole thing, while she was setting it up,

I was called Samuel Schreiber, which I thought was quite cool. That's a nice cool name. Anyway, it turns out when she found out my name wasn't Samuel, she gave me a lot of crap saying you can't do this. It's all in all the systems now. It's all the records. And she spent half an hour undoing it and then ran out of time. And she wasn't able to look at my teeth. So I have to go back in six weeks with the pain. I thought you were going to say when she realized it wasn't you, the tooth that she pulled out, she shoved back in. But it is important to identify people by their dental records sometimes. Yes, you know, so if they say, well, we found Anastasia Jadsky, James Harkin, Andrew Antimaria, and someone called Samuel Schreiber. It's gonna be confusing. It is confusing.

Yeah. And I've got a painful tooth because my dick headness. So yeah. Seagulls use humans as taste testers. This is so weird. This happens at the seaside. There's a scientist called Madeleine Goumas, and she approached 38 gulls with a bucket, right? Each bucket had a flapjack in. Sounds like a riddle, doesn't it? A wonderful riddle. She would unwrap both flapjacks, right? And then she would pretend to eat one of the flapjacks for about 20 seconds. She's sort of mime nibbling away at it, right? So then she would put down the flapjacks. When seagulls approached and got involved with the food that she'd just left, 19 out of 24 times, they approached the one that she had been pretending to eat. Okay. Seagulls are way more

interested. It could just be that they're dicks, right? And it's like, oh, she was really enjoying that one, so I'm gonna steal that one from her. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, her thesis is that they know that a handled food is probably good for you and not gonna kill you. But your theory also cuts a lot of ice, frankly. But also maybe the other thing is that it's discarded food. She ate it, she no longer wants it. So I'll take that, and we're gonna have a cool symbiotic relationship. It's like, cool, I'm not gonna touch your good stuff. How many seagulls have you met, Dan? Because symbiosis is not on their to-do list. When they steal a chip out of his mouth, he's like, oh, it's okay, I wasn't gonna eat that anyway. That's nature. Good on you. More on the weirdness of a

kidney bodies just a bit, because they, you know, we've mentioned a few things, but they have so little stuff that we take for granted. So they have no stomachs. They have no teeth. They just have to crush their food up against the roof of their mouth with their tongue. They have no nipples. So when the baby hatches and is in a little pouch, there are these glands which just leak directly out of their skin. They're very, they're very basic, basically. And they have to pop when just for the baby itself, they have to kind of like curl up and pop it out of their bum. So that yeah, because they're an animal that is called like mono-hole. I don't know the word. That's it. It's sort of fact number one about a kidney that's on the Wikipedia page. They are a monotreme.

Mono-hole. I missed that episode of the Simpsons. Mono-hole. Mono-hole. Mono-hole. They are one-hole. It's their bum and they're everything. It's everything. It's a mono-hole. Okay, so they bring it up and then the baby sort of pops out and obviously there's an egg which is cracked and it pops out and then they have a pouch much like a kangaroo does and the baby crawls along and it goes inside and that's where the milk is secreted into. Wait, are you talking about goodness? Yeah. That's not what happens. Oh, shit. How is the baby crawling along? It's an egg. It's what? The baby, the baby's in an egg, right? So the way the mother... No, it's like a kangaroo, isn't it? A joey who climbs up. I'm afraid that's the difference between your monotremes and your

marsupials. Your Dolby dreams. Yeah. Right. Okay, so... But it is very fun the way they give birth. The mother, it's much harder than as a kangaroo because you can just give birth and the thing sorts itself out, clutches at your hair and crawls up. Right. As an echidna, you lie on your back and you give birth, the egg comes out in egg form, no legs, and they have to sort of shimmy it up their stomach. A bit like, oh, you know that game where you have to get an after eight down your forehead? And pop it in your pouch and then it sits in your pouch for a few more days. It's a different game when the after eight comes out of your vagina, isn't it? Right. Well, it kind of gets late some parties, you know. Oh my God. I was thinking, yeah, that ping pong ball talent thing.

They were the originators. Talent. It's a talent. It is a talent. I haven't seen it. It is a talent. I haven't. I thought they'd laid what was inside the ping pong ball and that's what shot out. I didn't realise that it was... Anyway, let's move on. So in fact, we actually do need to move on to our next fan. That was a terrible insight into Dan's internal monologue though. I felt really alone there. I think you were alone. It was incredible. I also felt like everyone, 900 people were going, shh, just... Let's see where it goes. Let's see where it goes. Quite similarly, she was the oldest person ever in a rap song. And again, someone just recorded her saying, je m'appelle, je m'appelle moi. What's happening, Dan? Have you broken the table?

My table's falling down. I'm literally holding it up. I just... You were telling such a good story and they wouldn't want to do anything. I actually think it might all be one of Dan's terrible dreams. Can't fucking believe this. He's going to be naked and have to do an exam in a minute. Okay, don't lean on this table. Okay, Dan. Holy shit. Don't touch it. I was literally always like... Like Atlas. You're like Atlas there, holding up the world. I like this. I was reading about this group of people that like to get to the top of a mountain or somewhere a bit hard to get to and set up a jacuzzi. And then they all hop in the jacuzzi and they managed to do this on the top of Mont Blanc, which even though a lot of people assume

it's quite an easy mountain to climb, it's responsible for a huge number of deaths. It is a very hard mountain to get to. So they packed up all their stuff and they managed to get this jacuzzi on top of there. And you can see photos of about 30 people who've gone through all the night, treaching up there. Yeah, yeah. And setting it up. And using... It's heated by the snow with the system that they have. So... Heated by the snow? Yeah. So they have a system and... Oh, shit. Okay. So... Get out of this one. And blah, blah, blah. And they put the snow onto these kind of really cool things that then heat up the water that somehow they've brought up with them. Had they brought water up? No, you wouldn't bring water to the top of Mont Blanc. Why would you do that? That's

an unnecessary... Why would you do that? So it was really hot because it was powered by snow and... Okay, so they get to the top. Here's the fascinating thing. They're on the top of Mount Mont Blanc and suddenly this Italian group that climbs up and they see them and obviously it's a shock for anyone that suddenly sees a jacuzzi full of people in their swimwear on the top. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it just so happens this Italian group had already met these people in a jacuzzi on a previous mountain that they'd been on before, completely by coincidence, got up there and they're like, you again? And they now just think there's someone in a jacuzzi at the top of every mountain, don't they? Yeah, it's amazing. That's so funny. It is funny and so it doesn't matter about how you can

make a jacuzzi with snow. This has not been a good one for me, guys. I'll admit that right now. It's been a shitter. We need to move on to our next fact, guys. Oh, can I just talk about an origin of life thing that I really like? So there are lots of theories about where life started and most of my sensible scientists, but one was by an American homeopath at the start of the 20th century called Charles Wentworth Littlefield and he was reported as a scientist and it was in all the news that he's found out where life comes from and the way he found it was, he took some salt out of one of his patient's wounds and he looked at it under a microscope while thinking about chicken and he saw it turn into a chicken. Sorry, what?

Some stuff from a patient's wound. Some salt. Something like bodily salts, basically. Sift them out, looked under a microscope. It's all about chicken. It turned into the shape of a chicken, not a live chicken. That would be stupid. But he realized that by concentrating on any grain of salt, he could make it transform into the thing he was thinking about and it was always inanimate until he thought about octopuses, tiny, tiny octopuses and then he created live octopuses from these grains of salt and he concluded that this must be how life initially formed. Who was doing the thinking? That's the question. I suppose that's where God comes into it. What was the octopus bit though? He thought of octopuses and they didn't turn into octopuses,

but they were alive. So it was life. Sorry, given that all this is complete bullshit, what is the outcome? Hang on, don't judge it just yet. Because there is a theory as well that octopuses are actually aliens that came to earth and so that wouldn't be the original life, right? So this guy was probably just going through every single animal and then suddenly hit on the one that actually, if you stare at it long enough, does turn into a living octopus. I should just say that theory is also bullshit. I think it's demeaning us, James, to say it's bullshit. So what was he just crazy, this person? He was just taken vaguely seriously in the news at the turn of the century. I like the idea and who's tried it? Who's tried looking at salt

and thinking of an octopus. So don't knock it. Well, listen, okay, this half of the table thinks there's something to it. That half of the table doesn't it? I'm not signing up to this. Instead of the first car on the moon, we almost had the first pogo stick. There was debate. So as I said earlier, Apollo 15 was the first mission where there was actually a vehicle that was driven around. They drove it around and they were there for three days. They drove it around for like at least six hours a day, which actually is just quite a long time to be driving. And they had to wear seatbelts. The seatbelts really didn't fit and they took ages trying to get the seatbelts on, which seems so weird to me. How many obstacles are there? How

many cars coming at you? There's a lot of rocks around them. There are a lot of craters and dips and okay, I reckon I could hack it. I don't know. That's the main question at the national astronaut selection actually. Do you reckon you could hack it? Yeah. Come on in. Anyway, there were lots of ideas for what kind of vehicle to design for the moon. NASA was very interested in a motorcycle at first. I thought that might work. And then there was the idea for a giant pogo stick, which would be manned by two people. I think sort of one on each. The things that you do to get yourself along the railway tracks, you know, those things. That's not what a pogo stick is. No, but it's manned by two people, you know.

So is a pedalo. It's not. Yeah, a seesaw. Don't think the audience needed a simile for manned by two people. I just, I thought maybe they'd each be standing at one end of the pogo stick and then one would go up and one would go down. At the same time, that is a seesaw. That's not a pogo stick. Yeah. Okay. Look, we've drilled down and we've acetate that. I don't know what a pogo stick is. You are failing that NASA interview. If they're testing laboratories, dog food is often used to put down them because it has a sort of, to simulate the stuff. It's got the same consistency as my poo, for example. Okay. Do you get it in jelly or in gravy? Is that? Okay. My poo? Okay.

Sure. You know, there's quite a different, there's quite a range of textures, isn't there? But I suppose that's to have poo on dog food. James, I want to split off and start around. Just on this table. There used to be a takeaway place near me that would cut off the top of a loaf of bread and they'd hollow it out and then they'd just pour in a stew and they'd give you the bread back. That sounds great. It was nice. It was a South African thing, I think. Okay. Say again. Bunny chow. Bunny chow. I don't think it was a bunny in it. I think it was a better option, but it's very nice. Well, in Christmas, very quickly, the aviator, he claimed to be the third person to fly in America, but we think he probably didn't because his planes

were all terrible. He kept inventing these really awful planes, so there was one called the Christmas Bullet. The wings were supposed to flap as you flew, but unfortunately, they crashed on his maiden flight and then they made another one and that one crashed as well. He made another design where it was a plane which had a huge hole in the top. His idea was, right, if you get a parachute, a lot of parachutes have a hole in the top and that's because you don't want all the air to properly just get properly into the parachute, otherwise it might get a bit wobbly, so he thought, why don't I do that for a plane? Interesting. I hope they tell you when you do a parachute jump about the whole thing, because I can't imagine how fucking terrified I'd be

if my parachute, because I looked up, there was a huge hole in the top. Could be worse. I was, James, when you said they have to have a hole in the top, I just thought, I thought you were going to say, because obviously, if the air all goes up in there, it just gets stuck in there and you just stay where you are at the sky. That's how that works, yeah. Do you know that, you may have seen it, actually, this is like extremely cutting-edge soup news right now. The Heinz have just released a Christmas soup, which is very exciting. They've just announced it as a kind of PR thing. They've only made 500 tins, but it's got, you know, everything. It's got turkey, sprouts, stuffing, roast potatoes, pigs in blankets, gravy, cranberry

sauce. Well, I mean, that sounds all right, because at least it's one course. Have they just mushed it all up? No, you get chunks of turkey and things like that. Oh, right. Yeah, there are chunks. Oh, James, don't worry. There are chunks. But it could be worse, because in 2013, game, the video game people, they launched a thing called a Christmas dinner, which was for people too addictive to video games to cook anything on Christmas day. And the top layer was scrambled egg and bacon. Then there was a layer of mincemeat. Then there was some turkey and trimmings. And then there was a Christmas pudding in the bottom of the tin. Where are all the quality street? Wow. Yeah. Are you allowed to eat a painting?

What do you mean? Are you allowed to eat a painting? Legally, if you own a painting, this is, yeah, you can do whatever you want. If you own it, you can do what you want. Well, you're absolutely right. Okay, it's time for fact number three. Any more? Any more for that, no? Not really. Is that myth, myth busted? It's just, you know, would you be allowed to eat the Mona Lisa if you owned it, probably? Yeah, yeah. Well, you're right. Has someone put this in the statue books? Yes, they have. Thank you. Good question. It's the 1990. Oh, no, hang on. No, it is all right, actually. There are laws about works that might still be in copyright. So if it's within 75 years of the artist's death, or works that are protected under the 1990

Visual Artist Rights Act, you're not allowed to eat some of those protective ones. But the good news is, anything from Caravaggio's time is on the menu. So, wow. That's interesting that we really have to pull it out of you, but 75 days after 75 days? 75 days? Okay, cool. 75 years. That's Christmas lunch sources in the Hunter Murray household. Oh boy. I think the very first ever study of it, the Long Beaked Echidna, it's called, was published in 2009. And even then the study author, who was a guy called Musee Opiang, spent 500 hours studying them before even seeing one. Was he studying them then, really, for that first 500 hours?

He was warming up. He was doing stretches. They are quite hard to find, though, aren't they? There was a guy, the first scientist to study the testicles of echidnas. He did that by employing Aboriginal people to find these echidnas for him. And he always paid more for the females, because it was more hard to find the females. And actually, we now think that, of all you... Presumably, it is much harder to find the females' testicles. Is that what he said? He did lots of studying, but he happens to be the first person to have studied the testicles. This guy actually committed suicide. He was a German scientist. He committed suicide in 1918, while wrapped in a German flag, because he was so upset with the way the war was going.

But yeah, he was most famous, I think, for studying the testicles of the echidnas, and his name was Dick Seaman. Richard W. Seaman. Oh my God, that's incredible. A, change your name. B, don't study testicles if your name is Dick Seaman. Well, the guy was obviously a troubled man. Let's not kick him while he's down. Seriously, weird thing. So random. On soup, Ted Cruz, you remember Ted Cruz, came second to Trump in the primaries. 2016, during those primaries, his wife revealed that after they got back from their honeymoon, the first thing he did was, he went out to the shop, said he was going shopping, he came home, and all he had was 100 cans of Campbell's soup.

And so she said, she said, we had to have a tough conversation. I explained to him, you don't come back with 100 of anything, low-loan Campbell's soup. He said, you know you're not going to cook love, so this is what I'll be eating for the rest of our marriage. And she was, look, he didn't say put it in those terms, don't worry. But basically, that's what he said. She snuck out and returned them all the next morning before he woke up. And then she talked to her mom on the phone, and her mom said, are you going to cook for him, though? And she went, no, I'm a terrible cook, can't cook at all. Her mom was like, go and get the soup back. She went and got the soup back. No. Yeah. Well, that's a beautiful marriage, right there.

There's one cashier at the soup shop who has no idea about this whole story, just knows a weird thing, where some guy turned up, bought 100 tins, the lady came and took him away. Then returned, demanded them back. What's going on? Am I on a reality TV show? Can I tell you one more trick? Yeah, we're going to have to wrap up in a sec. Okay, this is a trick by one of the greatest magicians of all time, Robert Houdin, who Houdini got his name from. This is the trick. He would take a handkerchief from an audience member. He would turn that into a file of liquid. He would pour that liquid on a dry twig. That would sprout and grow into a bush. The bush would then grow oranges on it. Robert Houdin would pick the oranges off the bush. He would throw them into the audience

one by one. The final one, he would split open. Out of that final orange, two butterflies would fly, living butterflies, holding the handkerchief between them and return it to the audience member. Return it. The butterflies would return it. And we're going to be, we're going to do that tonight, ladies and gentlemen. But unfortunately, no one has a handkerchief anymore. Sorry. Can I just tell you one more thing about Postcards? In 2017, Europol, so kind of like Interpol, but for Europe, they started trying to catch criminals through the mechanism of postcards. They developed these postcards, each one featuring one of Europe's highest-profile fugitives, and they said things like, you know, Dear Arta, Belgium fries are the best, and we know you miss

them. Come back to enjoy them. We'll have a nice surprise in store for you. That was for a famous drug dealer. So did they send them to him? Did they send the postcards to him? They just published them and made people aware that these people were on the ground. Because they were going to say if he knew where he lived to send them a postcard. That's true. So true. Hi David, we've been trying to get hold of you because there is still so much to discuss. Please get in touch soon, the police. That was for someone accused of multiple, quite serious sexual offences. And they won an award for it. And three criminals were actually... For the sexual offences. They didn't win a... Sorry. It's hard. It's very hard to transplant testicles, obviously, onto a different part of the body.

Oh, sorry. Why? So actually, I got that. What a shame. I got that. Which part of the body was it? It's actually a lot easier to transplant testicles onto a different part of the body than into a scrotum. And this has been tested on rats. So a few years ago, a team put a load of testicles of rats. They did some transplants and they moved the testicles either into other rat scroti or onto the necks of the other rats. And it had a much higher success rate, the transplant, if the testicles were just put on the necks of the rats. Really? Yeah. But you'd be pissed off with your surgeon when you woke up. They said, well, transplant wasn't successful. Of course, it was easier to do it onto your forehead. And so that's why we've done it. So you don't mind.

It's so strange that you have a tiger with canine teeth, because they're felines, but they've got canines. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's weird, that, isn't it? Makes you think. It really does. What does it make you think about? It doesn't really make me think about anything. It just makes me think in a kind of abstract way. Bill Gates is intending to block out the sun. What do you mean? He wants to use some of his money to help scientists at Harvard University who are proposing an experiment that can hopefully stop global warming by sending a balloon up there, sending a load of particles into the atmosphere where the sun's rays will come down, bounce off into space, and it will be less hot on Earth. I can't see that going wrong. No. Why not? Let's do

it. Let's do it. I'm up for it. It's going to look like a worldwide children's birthday party. That's quite cool. That would be cool. That would be cool. He's one of the few people in the world who has a McDonald's gold card, and I don't know if it's connected to this. What's that? McDonald's gold card is where you can go to any McDonald's, you hand it in, and no matter what you've ordered, they give it to you for free. Oh, thank God, because otherwise, how would he be able to afford a Big Mac? Yeah. So we don't have it in the UK. What we have is the Nando's Black Card, which is quite a famous card, which I've experienced a couple of times. It's like, I have. Yeah. A couple of friends of mine have had it. So Tom Davis, who is a King Gary, he once had it. The other guy had to stop

using it because he was... Good luck with the Nando's lawsuit, Dan. I am not saying... Good point. Let's edit that out. We're not saying that Nando's... We're not. Put it from your mind. There was an amazing thing that happened in the Netherlands at the start of this year. Actually, it was the end of last year, and that was that there was an Armenian family who'd been living in the Netherlands for nine years, and the country had decided they wanted to deport them. And they were like, well, we can't go back to Armenia because if we go back, we'll be in terrible trouble. And they said to the church, what are we going to do? And apparently there's

an old and obscure Dutch law that police aren't allowed to arrest someone in the middle of a church service. And so the local church started a mass that went on for 24 hours a day for 97 days. While this family were living in the church, they started off doing it for a few days, eventually more than 650 clergy members were signing up to be the next person to do it. They kind of tag-teamed all the priests, and eventually the government just thought, fuck this. And they went, fine, you can stay, you can stay, you can stay. Oh, really? I would have thought they'd go, fuck this, we're going to walk in and arrest you anyway. But... It's the law. You can't break the law if you're a government, can you?

What? Well... Caravaggio died maybe of sunstroke, we think. Really? Really? Yeah, this is what people have claimed, but I couldn't define what their evidence was, except that. So researchers, there's this big mystery of how he died, all shrouded in mystery, like was he murdered? Was he poisoned? Did he have syphilis? And they thought in 2010 that they found some of his bones, fragments of his bones. They studied his bones, these researchers, and they showed signs of lead poisoning and syphilis, but they think what eventually killed him

was sunstroke. And then the only evidence I could find that they had was that 1610 was an extremely hot year. That makes sense, yeah. It's been quite cold this winter. In future, every single person who died this year, people will look at them and go, I reckon that was the cold that killed this one. I'm not sure they were. I think they might be. It was a very heavy cold. A bit too much Nando's, I reckon. No, we can't keep that in. It has to stay. Who's full of titches? Gates or Nando's? We'll find out when this episode goes out. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Very much hope you enjoyed that show. If you would

like to get in touch with me, you can find me on Twitter and I can be found at at James Harkin. Andrew Hunter Murray can be found on at Andrew Hunter M. Daniel Shriver can be found on at Shriver Land. And if you would like to get in touch with Anna, you can email her on podcast at qi.com. We also have our group Twitter account, which is at no such thing. And if you are the lawyers of Bill Gates or Nando's or indeed anyone that we have libeled on this week's podcast, then it's Christmas, guys. Give us a break. We're only joking. Okay, listen, we'll be back next week at the start of 2022, can you believe it, with a whole new episode. So we will see you then. Goodbye.