No Such Thing As A Fish - 409: No Such Thing As Reverend Christian Book

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

Live from Poole, Dan, Andy, Anna and Andrew discuss tardigrades, tigers, testicle theft and trendy priests.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Poole. My name is Dan Shriver, I'm sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round 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. My fact this week is that tardigrades can survive being shot out of a gun, but they're a bit groggy afterwards, tardigrades, tardigrades yes, tiny little things not quite microscopic

you can see them if you look really really carefully but very very small little things living in all over the world probably some in your garden probably some on this stage no they're not on this stage they live in like moss and in bits of grass and stuff like that they're really really strong powerful things you can't kill them virtually nothing will kill them. They're not powerful like they can't put a lorry they're not going to give you a piggyback. If you get enough of them Anna I reckon what do you reckon? I think it's enough of anything you can put a lorry.

We don't need them to put a lorry we just need them to drive a lorry. Apparently scientists I read can't work out a scenario in which they would go extinct prior to the actual explosion of the sun basically like the well the explosion of the sun might not kill them either so basically they can survive in space they can survive really really hot temperatures really really cold temperatures they can survive loads of radiation if they get in trouble they just kind of shut their bodies down and then kind of get rid of all the water and you put a bit of water back on them and they come back alive again and what has happened is some of these tardigrades have been sent up into space onto the moon

and they've crashed into the moon and people are wondering maybe they're alive and maybe they're actually living there on the moon and so these people this was a woman called Alejandra Trespass from Queen Mary University in London she did this experiment to see if they might still be alive and so what she did is she put them in a gun shot them at a wall and saw how they were basically. They could survive impacts of up to a kilometer per second that's two thousand miles an hour they could survive and shot pressures of up to one point one four giga Pascal's which I know out of context doesn't really mean anything but it's a lot promise me promise

you it's a lot. So there's life in the universe now outside of Earth in theory we haven't yet confirmed it. Can I just check can I just ask how the grugginess exhibited itself I think we need to address this. Oh yeah yeah. Okay yeah so tardigrades are the smallest animal that have legs they have these little legs that they crawl around with and they kind of have like a very specific gait and

as they go quicker they change the gaits but these ones they kind of sort of staggered around a little bit when they kind of put them back. But the problem with what you were saying Dan is the shock pressure that they've worked out that there would have been on the moon would have been greater than this one point one four giga Pascal's so we think that the ones on the moon probably are not alive. Very disappointingly yeah. So when scientists say we can't work out how to kill them shoot them as the bullet of the gun.

There are lots of ways you can kill them. Yeah you can just stamp on them. Can you? Yeah they're actually really easy to kill. Okay I'm here to give you the disappointing truth about tardigrades because they've ruled the internet for too long. A. There are plenty of ways to kill them. B. The whole they can withstand massive temperatures they actually just did an experiment where

they realised they can't withstand temperatures for very long at all. And scientists now reckon that climate change is going to kill them before it kills us. No. The thing is they can survive being boiled but only if it happens quite quickly and then they get back to a nice normal temperature again. But they didn't experiment recently where. It feels harsh that you're criticising them for not being able to withstand indefinite boiling.

I think I think it's impressive if I boiled an egg and then a few minutes later it came out of the pan and it was still in its egg raw egg state I'd be impressed. When I turned it to a chicken. Exactly. I'm not demanding indefinite I just think a couple of hours would be good and they can't even survive for instance above 37 degrees for 24 hours half of tardigrades die straight like within that amount of time so you know any longer than that and then they all die. If you put them at 63 degrees half of them are gone as within like much shorter than

that and I think if you're in the 80s then they don't last an hour. Yeah. Oh I see sorry. Not the 1980s. Yeah. Amazing they made it through that decade. It was a horrible decade for them. Oh music.

They were crushed by a Rubik's cube. I don't think they are shit. I'm just gonna stand up for tardigrades and they do this thing tardigrades do this thing it's seeding the world on its own so it can get picked up by the wind it can get carried in the wind land wherever and then wherever it lands it can just reproduce asexually it doesn't need a partner you could send it to the moon just one and it will be like that's cool I'll set up a colony like it's a phenomenal little creature and the confusing thing about that because there are obviously lots of organisms that can reproduce asexually but it's quite

confusing that they've managed to evolve successfully right because asexual reproduction is supposed to be a bit of a disadvantage because you're only getting your own genes over and over again you can't improve. And so how have they managed to do this? They have sex too. Oh yeah. They do also have sex under normal circumstances if they can find another of the opposite sex and it's a very romantic process actually tardigrade mating is very fascinating so here we go.

Step one. You've already killed any sets of robots. Why don't you do it in like a Craig David style what would you do on a Monday? On a Monday the female would shed her outer skin and lay her eggs inside it. Keep talking to me. Yes. I'll go out on a Tuesday. A Tuesday the male would then arrive and get into position and then fertilize the eggs

which are- Wait, wait, wait, that's making love on Thursday and Friday and Saturday. Well Tuesday then Tuesday and Wednesday is waiting and then when the male arrives. So the male basically fertilizes the female's eggs which are outside her body but they're still inside the shed exoskeleton that she has cast off. But the thing about what she does with the skeleton is she doesn't get out of it. It's a bit like she takes- But she's still inside.

Yeah so she sheds it but it's like taking your arms out of a coat but keeping it around you. It's like a much more disgusting version of doing that. Yes. And then the male has sex with the coat is what we're saying. Yes. Exactly. Wow.

The male has sex in between the coat and you. And then you just chill on Sunday. The good thing is they do it to the face but it ends up around the back and this scientists don't understand how this works yet. I don't understand what you're saying. So if you picture their sexual position the male curls himself around the female's face. Okay. So his crotch is in her face.

Her face is buried in his crotch. And then she does these weird sucking motions with her throat which kind of stimulates. Oh my God. This genuinely happens and it is quite romantic. Mr David I think we're going to need to rewrite us some of these lyrics. She doesn't see sucking motions. It's a full hour of foreplay. Wow.

Unbelievable for these tiny creatures. And then he ejaculates multiple times. Impressive guys. Take note. But then he ejaculates under the skin. But then her eggs come out the back. Her cloaca. So we don't really know how the sperm is climbing all the way around to get to the eggs.

What happens to the coats though? I don't know. Yeah. Oh I think they grew up in the coat don't they? I think the eggs are fertilised but they stay inside the coat. I was thinking that poor dry cleaner when you hand that in. I agree Dan. They're not shit.

They're not completely shit. They're about one-third shit. And that is because they can poo one-third the size of their body in a single go. Oh. With a sloth. Sloths do that don't they? Sloths do that do they? Yeah.

One-third. I think baby sloths. Baby sloths could be. Well it's the equivalent of me pooing out a large pair of speakers. A ten-year-old child or an adult Dalmatian. A ten-year-old child. Is this a game of would you rather? I'm not sure about this 101 Dalmatians remake actually.

I think I'd rather. Wow. That's a lot of poo. It's amazing. The video is good isn't it? Yeah. You should really watch the video of Tardigrades taking a poo. A Tardigrade taking a poo.

You can feel it really trying to squeeze it out and get away from it. It's enormous. I think it looks much bigger than a third of its body. Yeah. There are two of them. It's by weight it's a third. There are two videos of them pooing. One of them it's like really really trying.

The other one it's finding it a lot easier but the researcher who was doing that reckons it's because it was squashed between two pieces of glass and maybe the squashingness helped it to send the poo away. Oh my gosh. It's like a fetish video then that you guys watched. It's like when you massage your stomach a bit to help out with constipation. Yeah. Just like that.

Just like that. The Tommy Cooper cat race. Can we talk about them the way they suspend and then reanimate? Okay sure. Because it is really really cool. So they, as James said, if their environment dries out, so live in moss, they also get called moss piglets which is adorable and if their bit of moss dries out then they dry out with it as it were and they enter a thing called cryptobiosis.

So they roll into a ball, they shrivel up, they're normally 85% water. That goes down to 3% water so they're almost completely desiccated. But then if you put water on them, whoop, back they come. And scientists have been testing for decades how long they can go for and the problem is you need a tardigrade that was dried out decades ago to experiment. The latest experiment on this was in 1983 a group of Japanese scientists in Antarctica they found and they froze a group of tardigrades and 31 years later in 2014 they popped some water on them and they woke up.

Wow. Took them about two weeks but they were called SB1 and SB2 for Sleeping Beauty 1 and Sleeping Beauty 2. That's nice. And one of them, they both came around, one egg they had frozen also hatched into a healthy tardigrade which then laid its own eggs eight days later. It's incredible the way they come back. But did they have lots of very dated cultural references?

There was a story of one that was found in a museum, wasn't there, that was 100 years old, supposedly came back to life as well but that's not in a paper, that's kind of anecdotal. It's a bit, yeah. It's an Italian scientist who said it moved its leg and it's kind of unclear whether it moved its leg or whether he nudged it a bit. Oh look, there it is. We're going to have to move on to our next fact in a sec guys. Can I just because I'm the anti-tardigrade on the panel, I'd like to put forward my rival

to tardigrades and that is the Deloid Rotifer and this is another tiny creature about the same size, maybe a tiny bit smaller, maybe it's just on the cusp of being seeable and they can do all the same stuff, survive unbelievable extremes like massive amounts of radiation, huge heat being in permafrost for ages, much more radiation than tardigrades can survive by the way and they were thought to be able to last a decade frozen and completely dried out and then be able to reanimate themselves and scientists just found some trapped in Siberian permafrost and realised they have to reassess that and it's not a decade they can stay frozen and then come back to life, it's 24,000 years.

What? No. Put up some water on, sprung straight back into action. Those are pretty dated references aren't they? It's like, oh what about those bully mums today? They sound shit. Wow. Alright.

Not nice is it? Not nice. Yeah. Thank you. They also, they're called deloids and they begin with guys, what do they begin with? What letter? D. A B, a silent B.

You're kidding. How brave is that? Like is it a leech is a deloid, isn't it? Is it? I think so. Interesting. No one knows that so that might be wrong. Anyway we need to move on to our second fact, time for fact number two and that is Andy.

My fact is that in the 1920s Chicago was hit by a miniature crime wave of testicle theft which was nicknamed, which was nicknamed gland larceny. Really impressive. Do you think if you'd had your testicles removed and you read that newspaper article you'd be like, ah good one. Do you think they're making light of what is probably quite a horrific experience? Sounds terrible. It sounds terrible, but it is presented as a kind of funny thing that happened once

and it has been a hundred years so let's get into it. Next year actually is the centenary so I know a lot of people will probably be wanting to mark it somehow. I think it's going to be a public holiday, isn't it? I think I might have a big ball. Well one person who didn't have a big ball, James, once this crime wave happened to him, the first victim in Chicago was an electrician. It's called Henry Johnson.

It's called Johnson, huh? And he was found unconscious in the street and he'd been out for a drink. He got into a street car and he remembered nothing else after that but he was quite late. He'd been out and his testicles had gone and he may have been chloroformed or something like this. It's kind of hazy. He didn't report it to the police apparently. He just went home and then went back to work.

Wow. Really? Yeah. It was a different time. People were stoic back then, weren't they? Oh, well, these things happen. It happened. It did happen.

It happened. It's such a hard thing to call in sick to your boss for, isn't it? I've lost my testicles. Pull the other one. I can't. The earliest report I could find on newspapers.com, which is like all the old American newspapers that we go on sometimes. It was a Sioux City Journal on the 14th of October, 1922.

Actually, it was the same report. It was in lots of them but this was the first one that came up. But the next story in the newspaper was about the son of Leo Tolstoy who had lost his family jewels. No. That's really good. That's got to be some deliberate editorial decision making there. I love that. Do you think this actually happened or do you think it was a medi-uppy thing?

It definitely became a panic. The stories were a bit, so you were talking about Henry Johnson and he came to explain that he was missing his testicles off the back of a different person first revealing it. So it's like he didn't tell anyone press-wise but there was a guy called Joseph Wozniak who told and then other people came out and said, Me too, my balls were taken and Johnson was one of them. But the report that I read, the article that you sent round to us, it said he discovered that one or both of his testicles were missing

and that's a curious thing to say. Was that Wozniak? Yeah. There were different standards of self-care back in the day. Right. I was equally confused by his story. In the article that I read about him it said that all that happened was he woke in the streets not remembering how he got there, horrible taste in his mouth, chloroform,

pain in his groin, got through the day and then went to hospital where the doctor discovered his testicles had been removed, which I would have thought you would have realised. But it'd be swollen, you'd be uncomfortable maybe, you might not be analysing yourself properly. You'd be bandaged as well, right, presumably. Well, you bandaged. No, I think this is before he's gone to the hospital.

No, there's been other cases I think where the people who were removing the testicles were bandaged up because they weren't trying to kill people, they just wanted their testicles. Sorry, do you think you'd be so uncurious that if you woke up on the street and you had a big old bandage around your crotch, you'd just go, you know what, I'm not going to touch it, I'm not going to touch it. It's none of my business. It kind of gets to the heart of it.

It's so hard to tell. I think it may have happened to one or two people, but not to all of them. For example, there was a guy who, a young man called John Powell, this was in 1923, there were a couple more cases of it, or certainly alleged cases in 1923, a young man called John Powell who was allegedly assaulted by three men wearing white lab coats who were shouting, we need a gland.

And I don't know if that is true, but it was true that the authorities took it seriously. They promised to charge gland banditry, genuinely the phrase that was used to refer to it, they made it a special crime, that was the crime of mayhem. They sort of included gland banditry in the charge of mayhem, so you could get 14 years in prison if you were found guilty of it. So the world's responses, yeah.

The evidence that I could find, so a few things is, first of all, it's really hard to use chloroform to knock someone out. There's technically really a difficult thing to do. So in movies when we see that, that takes a couple of minutes. You would need to hold it over for like five or ten minutes. Often they would use other drugs as well. Sometimes, you know, there are ways of doing it. You'd have to know what you're doing to get the right dose.

You'd have to hold their head up so they don't swallow their tongue. So that's a bit dodgy. OK. The other thing is, all the articles warn about the dangers of liquor, and this was in the time of prohibition. So they're always saying, like, oh, well, maybe sobriety and early hours would prevent much anguish for this person who lost his testicles, stuff like that.

So there's that. They're saying they were drunk. They're saying that basically, there's prohibition happening, you shouldn't be drinking, but if you do drink, you might lose your bowls. So there's a bit of that there, but then one of the articles referenced a surgeon called Anthony Sigmund Sampolinsky, and I checked him and he definitely did exist. So, you know, there was definitely some stuff there that was definitely real.

So it's kind of weird. I don't know. It's a really curious one. The theory that was launched was that it was to... This is the exact phrasing from the newspaper. It was possibly done to rejuvenate some wealthy ancient, i.e. an elderly millionaire wanted some pep. But wait a minute.

But that was happening, though, wasn't it? But that's the weird thing. That definitely was happening at the time, which lends credence to this, and maybe it was a panic off the back of the fact that people were going around inserting testicles into themselves. Yeah, shove in younger man's testicles on yourself, and you will become his younger self, is what they thought. And then in Chicago, there was a famous doctor, Dr. Lespinass,

and he did, I think, one of the first successful, successful, testicle transplant ops in 1911. And this was actually for a man who'd lost both his testicles, weirdly, in two separate incidents. Stop. Just don't go back to that place. Just resign your job at the archery range. Two separate incidents.

Yeah, one was an accident, and then one was a botch-turnier operation. Oh, that's terrible. I know. That's very sad. Sorry we made jokes about that. But he had this surgery, and so this is where the origin of the testicle transplant, giving you this amazing virility, came from.

He had this surgery, and he said, after the surgery, he had a strong erection accompanied by marked sexual desire, so intense, he insisted on checking out of the hospital right away so he could satisfy it. And so his doctor was like, wow, I found this amazing new thing for you guys. And that was the guy in Chicago, right?

Yeah, yeah. And these things were in Chicago as well, right? Yeah, exactly. These testicle thefts. And in the same year as these thefts happened, there was a very, very famous example of the richest man in Chicago who's called Harold McCormick, and he underwent some kind of surgery,

and they never said what it was, but all the press was certain that he was getting bowls put into his bowls. Everyone was so sure he was going to do it, and it was less than us again who was doing it. And the thing was, he had just married this woman called Gana Valska, who was an opera singer who was much, much younger than him.

She was very, very famous. His four husbands had been worth a total of $125 million. First four? Yeah, he was her fifth. That's going it? That's going some, right? But then he married her, and the idea was that he thought he'd never be able

to keep up with her if he didn't have this operation. She was amazing, by the way. After she divorced McCormick, she married a guy called Harry Matthews who claimed to have created a death ray. Cool. This is the most amazing woman I've never heard of. He was British, this guy.

It was in 1924. He told everyone that he'd invented this death ray, and the government said, oh, can we have a look at it? And he went, well, give me some money first. And they went, well, we're not going to do that. He went, well, I'm going to France then. And he said he was going to go away,

and there was a law made to stop him from going and selling his death ray, which obviously didn't exist to the French or the other people. Wow. Yeah. So what was her type? It's hard, like, just weirdos? She was a rich man to start off with,

then men with testicles put into their testicles, then death ray guys, and then she ended up with a yoga teacher. The obvious end point. Anna, I don't think the 1911 guy was actually the very first, because I think there was a previous doctor called Charles Edward Brown Sequoird. So in the 1880s,

he was convinced that you could reverse your aging. He was a brilliant doctor, by the way. He genuinely was a great doctor. He worked on the spinal cord and revolutionized our understanding of it. But he also... Okay. He started injecting himself

not only with human seed, but he started with dog and guinea pig seed. Mm, guinea pig seed mixed up with blood just to really, you know, make it weirder. And he claimed... He was in his early 70s at the time, and he said, this has done me a power of good.

All I do all day is run around in a wheel. He claimed his eyes had improved. He could see better. He could run up and down stairs again, which he hadn't done for years. He claimed he could lift 15 pounds more than previously. And he claimed the average length of his jet of urine had increased by 25%.

Okay. All thanks to guinea pig. That's what you want. You stood next to him at a urinal, and he's three feet behind you. And the operation go. The urinal punches through the wall. That's amazing.

And that set off, because I think we've mentioned him before, guinea pig testicle transplants became a big thing. But that set off a big wave of kind of transplanting, experimenting with other animal testicle transplants. And so there was a surgeon called Serge Voronoff, and his wife, Mrs. Voronoff, doctor and Mrs. Voronoff,

who became very famous for implanting monkey testicles into men. And what they would do is, they'd remove the monkey testicle, cut it into segments, and then they'd make an incision in the scrotum of the human, and then they would slot one of the segments into that.

Like squeezing an extra slice into a cake sort of thing. Or a chocolate orange kind of thing. Oh, wow. Yes. Yeah. And how many times would you... I'm trying to picture a millionaire walking around with 16 testicles worth of testicles in there,

like just adding to it, just really indulging. Isn't it a good job they don't do it anymore, isn't it? Can you imagine like, I don't know, Mark Zuckerberg walking around with like 200,000 testicles tracking behind him. But the names we're mentioning are quite obscure names from history,

but there is one name that sticks out who supposedly had monkey testicle injections into his own nut bag, and that is W.B. Yates, the poet. Oh. Supposedly he had this done. Wow. And yeah, I mean,

and he was very sex-crazy into his later life. He supposedly was going to Harley Street in London and he was having these things. It was all rumours. We weren't... I don't think it's been fully confirmed, but he had multiple affairs in the final, the twilight years of his life.

And he was a weirdo, yeah, essentially. He was into some freaky shit, so I believe it. The occultist stuff, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Apparently, if you have... Let's say a testicle falls out of you. Let's just say... Let's just say scenario,

you're going home tonight here in Poole, and whoop, my testicle's fallen out. You have between four to six hours of getting it back inside. That's ages. You must have to keep it on ice in the meantime, I should think. Yeah, exactly. So we did Richard Herring's podcast not too long ago. Oh, yeah.

And Richard Herring, sadly, very... He's absolutely fine, but he had testicular cancer and he had a testicle removed. He asked us to find some facts about it. And one of the things that I found out was that a testicle transplant had happened in recent years between two identical twins, one of whom was born with the testicles, just two,

but the other was missing them entirely, and they were able to transplant a testicle to the brother, and they were in their thirties, and it was a doctor called Dr. Dickon Co. And... Sleepive. And Dr. Dickon was able to successfully transplant it, and it was great because you were transplanting it

basically to the same body. Because it's genetically... Yeah, genetically. Yeah, exactly. But four to six hours is roughly... Do you mean four to six hours during which the testicle will still be viable? Yes.

Okay, so when you said if your testicle falls out, you know, you do have to sort of sew up the wound and stuff, and you just mean the testicle, you'll still be able to reattach it, and it will still function. And it will still function as a transplanted object of the body. If it's happening now, you can stay till the end of the show, and you still have bags of time. Yeah.

I'll say bags. We need to move on to our next fact. It is time for fact number three, and that is Anna. Yes. My fact this week is that until 2016, the Indian government earned $10 million a year from a single tiger. Pretty impressive tiger.

Wow. How do you make so much money from a tiger? It just worked really hard. No, it was... This was a tiger called Machli, very famous tiger, big celebrity in India, and a Bengal Tigress, in fact. And she just became famous for being impressive

and hardcore, lasting a long time. She was constantly defeating the odds, so she would fight lots of much bigger male tigers for territory. She had one very famous altercation with a 14-foot crocodile that weighed twice as much of her, which, again, she had a real eye for PR, because she always did this in front of tourists. So whenever a safari load of people came around,

then suddenly she'd do something incredible, like kill a crocodile. She was a great pose, a very photogenic. And so, yeah, raked in money for the government, the state government, for years. Just people visiting to see her. Exactly, yeah. Estimated the number of people who just booked their holiday for her. I read that she won a Lifetime Achievement Award for being a tiger.

That's not that difficult, is it? Like, she is a tiger, so surely every tiger has a lifetime of being a tiger. I don't know. I don't think they do. Who was the award from? It wasn't BAFTA, I don't know exactly. Sorry, I didn't know who it was.

It was Travel Operators for Tigers. Oh, yeah, you really won that one, don't you? It's not the fucking Oscars. I know, but... Probably the Oscars for Tigers. It may very well be dangerous to have that award at the Oscars. That's a health and safety nightmare. Like, what dressing room do they use?

It wouldn't work. The cup, it would be read by the end of the Oscars. That's true. But, yeah, she was super cool, and she was so valuable to the government that in the end her life was extended. So she died when she was 19, which was very old for a wild tiger.

They'd usually die when they're 15. But one of the reasons that she died so old is because she lost a few of her teeth. She lost her canines, and actually she lost one eye, because, you know, she was always in these fights. And it was thought then that she was so valuable to the state and people would be so devastated if she sort of starved to death, she lost her teeth,

that the state started leaving meat for her, sort of tethered goats out in the wild. And they were alive when the goats... Yes, yeah. So they didn't take her into captivity. They just left her in the wild, but with a nice tethered goat. She must have thought that, I don't know, Christmas would come every single day.

She must have thought that goats had got a bit stupid. Yeah. Was the money purely from people visiting the place that she resided, or was she... Okay, so she wasn't doing, like, Pepsi ads, or, like, she wasn't on T-shirts and merch. No, she's very principled. She didn't believe in selling out and things like that.

She just wanted to be herself. I'm sure definitely merch. There must have been merch. Actually, there's shed loads of merch. Her images, she was on a stamp. Her painting is everywhere if you go to train stations in India. And this is up in Rajasthan. Oh, didn't know she painted. Okay. Yeah, it's impressive. It's mostly paw prints,

but it's impressive nonetheless. And she was the most photographed tiger in the world as well. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? Yeah. She had an amazing funeral because she was so kind of worshipped. So, in fact, all... I didn't realise this. All leopards and tigers are cremated in India when they die,

or in international parks like this. And that is so that their skins can't be taken and sold on the black market, because obviously that encourages that. But, so, she was cremated. But first, it's very cool, and there's a video of this. She was given a traditional Hindu funeral, so she was wrapped up in white linen.

And you can just see her little head, quite big head, poking out above it, and then covered in lovely red flowers. Wow. And then carried on a kind of a funeral beer by lots of the park guards to this pire. That's amazing. So cool. Yeah, it's quite a beautiful ceremony. Yeah.

Can I tell you, there's just a random tiger fact that I found quite cool. So, the MGM, the movies, right at the beginning, you've got the big lion that's through the thing, big roar. So, in the 80s, there was a sound designer called Mike Mangini, who was working on ambient sounds for the movie Poltergeist. And while he was doing it, he collected a lot of different sounds, including tiger sounds, and he sent that to the people at MGM,

saying, have a listen to these roars, because they're really quite more striking than you have for your current lion that is doing the MGM roar. So, when you hear that roar at the beginning of a movie, the lion is lip-syncing. It's a tiger's roar. It's not a lion's roar. Lions apparently don't have quite that boomy, amazing roar

that a tiger has. Wow. So, yeah, so it's dope. Interesting. Another Hollywood tiger would be Mike Tyson as tigers. Oh, yeah. He used to have tigers. Is it in the hangover?

He has some tigers, but that's actually in real life, he used to have tigers. He doesn't have them anymore. Any ideas why he doesn't have them anymore? Did they escape? They did not escape. No. Did he beat them up? It's illegal to have tigers, and he shouldn't have put them

in the movie, because that told everyone he had them. Sadly, quite legal to have tigers in some parts of America. Oh, is it? Okay. And he didn't beat them up, Anna, no. It's because they smell so much and fart so much. Really? Apparently, he got married, and his wife didn't want them in the house, because when they fart, they smell like hell.

Right. Oh, wow. And now the tigers are gone. She's like, why is that smell still here, Mike? What? There's a tiger that we're talking about at the start, not much, Lee, right? Yeah.

So she was blind in one eye, and I thought I'd look at kind of tiger opticians, and I found one. There is a person who is a tiger optician, a veterinarian, really, Tammy Miller, and she says there is one big problem with doing optician stuff on big cats. Can you think of what that might be? They're massive tigers, and they'll eat your face. A bit of that, but there's something else.

Ooh, they can't administer medicines to themselves. They can't put contact lenses in, you scratch your eyes. These are all great answers. According to her, the big problem is that they really hold a grudge, and so... How are we going to work that out? Oh, wow. How did you not get that, Anna?

The thing was, is basically when you do the work on them, it's obviously not very pleasant for them, but then later on, you need to go and do a bit more work on them, and they are not happy. They remember what you did, and they will not let you near them. What I thought is, do you know that there's like a kid's story about the lion who gets a thorn in the paw, and then you help them, and then they're always your friend

forever? Not realistic. No, okay. Yeah, why aren't they grateful? They can see again. When you said, and then the next time you see them, I thought you meant the grudge extended to them, sort of like sitting in cafes with coats on,

trying to get back at you, you know, like they're tracking you down, but no, it's... No, it's just the next time they see you. And this was, it was a time when they did some work on a big cat called Indira, and basically they anesthetized them and did this work. But when you anesthetize one of these cats, then you obviously have to do quite a lot of work on them

at the same time. You might as well, because it's quite dangerous to anesthetize these animals. You might as well do as much as possible. I just say that because I really liked it, because they did an MRI, an ultrasound, and a CAT scan. Nice. Listen, we need to move on to our final fact.

It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that St. Michael's Church in Bournemouth has been renamed St. Mike's to make it seem younger and cooler. So this is a genuine thing. We're playing live in pool tonight. Bournemouth is just down the road, and it's a 148-year-old church.

The Reverend Sarah Yetman believes that by changing the name, it's going to be, you know, a nice, hipper place to have groovy kids come in, listen to their record players. Is it working? Do we think? I mean, Mike isn't that cool a name, anyway. Apologies to any mikes in the audience. It doesn't feel like it's one of the top ten names these days.

No, I mean, but I guess it is just shorter than Michael. It's not like, you know, St. Dave's. I think it's a bit hard to just change saints altogether. I wonder if this is going to stick, because there has been backlash with people saying, come on, we can't start, you know, St. David's can't be St. Dave's. We can't suddenly just change the names of saints of our churches.

And it's a slippery slope. You'll have St. Twat's wagon that people go to worship in. It's a Twat's wagon. Oh, God, it's, where does it end? He's in the Apocrypha. He's not one of the main twelve, but he is there, yeah. St. Jude, I guess, for St. Judas. Probably, actually, there isn't a St. Judas there.

There isn't, there isn't. But two Judases, weren't there? Yeah, yeah. Great. Like, you do get St. Jude's. Oh, St. Jude's? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But not St. Twat's, I think we could all agree.

Yeah. I don't mind it changing its name, I have to say. It's had a refurbishment. They've opened up a coffee bar as part of that to offer a school drop-off and so, you know, get the kids in and so on. I don't know. It's funny, though. It is, yeah.

Yeah, it's really cool. I think it's great when churches do this. And there's a big push, although there always has been, from the church to try and rejuvenate itself. And I think there was a building, a church building review group in 2016, which is looking at all these big stone, like, beautiful edifices we have, but which are empty just all the time these days.

And it was looking at how to repurpose them. And so now you get cool stuff, like St. Paul's Church in Bristol is now a circus school. And if you look at pictures of it, it's got like trapeze-wise and high-wise hung from the ceiling and people swinging all around it. Wow. It's great.

There's about a dozen churches that are chomping sites. What thing? Champing. Church camping. Oh, my God. I've camped in a church. Have you? Yeah.

Have you? Yeah. Really? Yeah. For a fortnight when I was 17. Two weeks in a church. Yeah. Your parents really didn't get along with you today.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. What, for any reason? No. We were doing some sort of volunteering thing, and you had to go and live in the church and then take out the kids of the parish during the week. I did once sleep in a church in Northumberland.

I must say, yeah. We'd gone, we went on a walk, because I went to a Catholic school, we went on a walk, and then we went to this little village in Northumberland, and we decided to play football against these kids. And they were so much rougher than us. Oh.

And basically, it turned into a massive fight. And when I say fight, it was them trying to beat us up. And we legged it into the local church. It went, sanctuary, sanctuary. Did they tell you to piss off and fight the kids? We stayed in there overnight. Oh, that's nice. Oh, my God.

That's cool. Anyone else slept in a church, or no? No, not slept in a church. I probably nodded off in a few church services. Yeah. That counts. Have you heard of Stony Fort Community Church in South Carolina? I don't believe so.

It would be staggering if you had. These, I love these guys so much. They have also changed their name. They're a church. And until 2020, they were called Outbreak Church. And then they found themselves think, and it was set up in 2013. The vicar called Scott Carroll,

articulated his mission as follows. He said, I want to be around people who are so infected with Jesus that every time they turn around, they sneeze Jesus. And sneezes. Yes, sneezes Christ. Every time they talked about the church, they talked about contagion and infection and epidemic.

They made bracelets and shirts with the phrase, are you contagious? And people would read them and say, contagious with what? And they'd say, Jesus. And he says, this was really fun until, for some reason, early 2020, stop being funny. I was having a look at the Reverend Richard Coles' autobiography. And he was saying, it was just a throwaway line

that I then looked into. He was saying that a lot of vickers have funny names. And he was saying he knew someone who insisted on everyone, even bishops, calling them the Reverend Gazz. And so then I thought, I wonder what funny names there have been in the church over the years. There's this blog, the blog of St. Chrysostom's church in Manchester. And it's really good.

You know, when people put proper effort into, like, quite an obscure thing. And there's a piece on funny names of church leaders throughout history. And there are some such good ones. So I like this anecdote, which is Henry Joy Fiennes Clinton, who was a rector in the early 20th century, who went to see the Bishop of London and the bishop said, take a chair, Clinton, to which he replied,

it's fine, Clinton. And the bishop said, in that case, take two. And so I think that was funny from a bishop. Come on. It's Wallowa. It's Bishop Humor. It's Bishop Humor. Yeah.

OK, we won't get him on the podcast. Just his audition tape. And I thought... Oh, no, come on. Give us more zingers. All right. Wow. OK.

OK, what about this? The very Reverend Gonville-Obey French Baytag, but French is spelled with a small f and two of them. Is that important for the anecdote? There's no anecdote. That's it. That's it. That's just the thing.

It's just the word French spelled slightly differently. No, Anna, we want you to tell us every single one you've heard. Yeah. This is literally all I've got now. This is not very amusing names. OK, Father John Brabazan, Brabazan Loutha. Come on. It's two Brabazans.

Brabazan, Brabazan. Oh, my God. I'm just picturing Jimmy Carr at the Habersmith Apollo. Your next act is a fucking killer act. She's got some amazing anecdotes. Anna Tashinsky, everybody. Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh. Woo!

We've got Father Page Turner. We've got Father Pickles. Page Turner. Open with Page Turner. That's great. Father Pickles is funny as well. I'll reorder the set. Father Careful.

Father Christmas. OK. So that's the one I should stick with. Father Christmas. Yeah, I don't think stick with any of it. OK. Have you guys heard of St Andrew Undershaft? I can't believe.

You just said it. They're way funnier than Anna's 20 years. Just upstage the full day of work. I'm so sorry. I've been delving into church. I'm so sorry. This is right under your nose the whole time. St Andrew Undershaft is a church in London.

And it was literally under a massive shaft. That's the reason it was named like that. There was a massive maypole. A huge maypole. This is the 16th century. Gigantic maypole. Can't stress how big this maypole was. And it was there every year around May Day

until an event in 1517 called the Evil May Day Riots, which I had never heard of before. And they were these huge riots. They were huge anti-foreigner riots. So they weren't very funny. I'll put them in my set. The maypole was toppled. The maypole had to fall.

And it was then preserved in a house on nearby Shaft Alley. But the maypole itself was then destroyed in 1549 as a pagan idol. OK. But the church St Andrew Undershaft, 500 years later nearly, still has its name. Yeah, cool. I'm so sorry that I need to do this. But it's bugging me.

So why was the double F thing funny? Tell us the name again. Right. The very reverend Gonville-Obey French Baytag, but French is spelled with a small F. Yeah. And two of them. I'm now finding it funny.

I think I've gone through the unfunniness. I think it's funny again. I find it so funny that there's two Fs in the word funny. And they're both lowercase. I got told the thing by a very good friend of ours, Jason Haseley, who is a friend of the podcast. He's been on it a couple of times. And we mentioned a fact quite a long time ago,

which is, and it was about 50-odd episodes ago, which is that flying saucer suites are made by this Belgium company, Belgica. And they are the same people who make the communion wafers. Yeah. And when Christianity was declining a bit, it meant that they had a lot of spare wafers. And so it's the flying saucers that are made out of Jesus.

Jesus' body is the flight. Christianity. I thought you said Christianity. I thought you were trying for another funny name. Anna, please, no. Please, not Reverend Christianity. Christianity. Too boring.

If it was Christianity, that would be pretty good. I just missed her again. I don't want to raise it because he's a really famous guy and I know who hasn't heard of it. Sorry, Christianity was declining. Yeah. So flying saucer suites are basically communion wafers. That's the thing.

So Jason was listening to our podcast, absolutely blown away by it. And he messaged his friend, who is a vicar, and he told her this story. And he said it blew her mind as well. And then he said, she went, oh my God, hang on. She said that when she was in training as a vicar, because communion wafers or hosts, as they're probably known,

are the literal body of Christ, trainees don't use genuine communion wafers. They use flying saucers. And so by accident, they're accidentally using this. And I know, James, I think you said that this doesn't feel right. So I think it's like particular to her story. Yeah. Well, like we always do when people send us stuff like this,

we go into a massive amount of detail. And I emailed all the reverends and vickers and priests that I knew. Yeah. And they reckon that until transubstantiation for them, it isn't the body of Christ. So they wouldn't do that. But that's not to say this person didn't. Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. Can you do it? Because they're flying saucers. Can you do it from a distance? Because I think I would start going to church if someone threw a flying saucer into my mouth. That's true. And then you'd just be jumping up like a dog to try and catch it.

Yeah, yeah. That would be cool. I think it's like how they do the bouquet at a wedding. Who's going to get body of Christ this week? Who's going to heaven? It's one of you. We're going to have to wrap up in a sec, guys. Oh, is there no time for some more names?

Oh, okay. I'm so glad you've asked. Ryan McVicar. I can't believe you've got more. Ryan McVicar is great. Yeah, that is good. I thought you were pissing around with the French guy. When you had Ryan McVicar tucked all the way up your sleeve.

I still think French is the best. Can I just, on churches reinventing themselves, there is a church that shaped like a high-heeled shoe in Taiwan, which has the Guinness record for the largest high-heeled shoe shape structure. And it was built in 2016. It's actually a wedding venue, so it's not ordained by God. It's like a wedding church. But it was built to attract women.

And the Taiwanese government said there will be 100 female-oriented features inside, like maple leaves, chairs for lovers with biscuits and cakes. Women. So, that's, and it's so weird. It's inspired by this story of a girl in the 1960s who got Blackfoot disease, had both of her legs amputated, and her groom cancelled her wedding.

So, it's in honor of her, which I actually think is quite offensive. They made the church shape like a shoe. Yes. Right. Not sure that's okay. Wow, those female things. I didn't know that women like maple leaves so much. Oh, my God, it's what we talk about.

It's great. Actually, every time I get home from a tour gig, the house is full of maple leaves. It's a nightmare. Well, you mean the ice hockey team? Oh, yeah. Well, they do your house when you've been away on tar. I don't know. I could have asked some questions when I get back this time.

In 2019, have you guys heard of the company called the Christian Book Depository? No. Yes, I think so. Oh, yeah. So, the Christian Book Depository, they complained in 2019 because they kept getting phone calls like this. A person would call up and say,

hey, I'm looking for my order. And they're like, what did you order? He says, I ordered gummies. And they went, ah, right, you're not in the right place. And it turns out that their website, cbd.com, was attracting the wrong kind of people. And so, they've changed their name to Christian Book. That's great.

Christian Book, that'll be a great name for a vicar. Look, we need to wrap up, guys. OK, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland. Andy. Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. And if you're a vicar with a funny name, please.

Yes. Right in. Get in. Yes. Yep. Or you can go to our website. No such thing as a fish.com. That's fish with one F.

And we thank you so much, Paul. We've had so much fun here tonight. And everyone listening at home will be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye. Thank you.