No Such Thing As A Fish - 423: No Such Thing As A Seminole Sorting Hat

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss seal sex, cricket contraptions, hard rock, and controversial colourful cafes.  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 coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tyshensky and Andrew Hunts and Murray and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is Andy. My fact is that the road network in Cornwall was probably not created by elephants. Really?

Because that's slightly odd to what you said a couple of weeks ago. Yeah it is slightly isn't it? Like quite long as well, it was quite long. Was this line exposed because of what I said that the roads are far too narrow to allow an elephant to pass through it? It's not, no. So this is just a little bit of inside baseball which is about that fact that I said that the roads in Cornwall were created by elephants and which turns out to have been published

on April the 1st and it's not true and I fell for it and the slightly complicated factor is that the episode that it went out in went out on April the 1st. Can't we just pretend it was in April falls on our part? I seriously considered it but I wasn't allowed to. Is that your actual fact this week? It's not my actual fact, should we get to that one? Yeah. Okay good.

Is this one right? Paul let's find out in two weeks. My fact this week is that in 1954 Derbyshire Cricket Club tried drying out its pitch with a jet engine. Doesn't sound right. I don't find it. What's interesting is a few years later Yorkshire Cricket Club used an elephant to suck up the water from the pitch.

No, this is amazing isn't it? It's fun. It's a cricket pitch drying innovation which hasn't stood the test of time. It's not you don't get a jet engine to hover over laws these days but this is from a brilliant piece that was published in The Guardian by Simon Burnton about the history of cricket pitch drying which obviously see that click straight on that and it was about all these gadgets that have been tried out over the years and one of them was the jet engine was quite new at the time.

It's like using, I don't know, nuclear fusion now. It was a relatively recent innovation. I don't think, have we even cracked nuclear fusion? I think if that's the first thing we use it for that wouldn't be quite an odd decision. The rest of the world's going to be looking at England going Jesus. They didn't bring a full jet though did they? They brought an engine. Yeah exactly.

So they rigged up an engine over, they strapped it to a lorry and it was a Rolls Royce engine which they'd used in a plan called the Gloucester Meteor which was one of the first British jet engines. Quite a thought lorry though must have been pacing it down the motorway to get there. Yeah. Did it work? It worked. It dried it out for eight minutes.

When Rolls Royce were contacted by, it was actually someone from Lancashire Cricket Club who contacted Rolls Royce saying, hey why don't we do this? They said, well it's going to use 400 gallons of fuel an hour and it'll probably bake the turf of the cricket pitch, it's not going to be very good. So they tried it out at Derbyshire because it was the nearest club to the Rolls Royce factory, whatever. So they tried it out for eight minutes, worked like a charm and as far as I can tell I don't think it was done again.

Right. Because of all the fuel. But they saved all that fuel by picking the nearest club to the Rolls Royce factory. Well this guy was called Jeff Howard, wasn't he, he was the secretary of Lancashire and he said that if you can get play restarted using the jets then it'll be fine because it won't matter if the cost is £100 which in modern days is thousands of thousands because if people come to see cricket then it's worth it. And Jeff Howard, he was really interesting, his grandfather was the guy who invented garden

cities so you know like Lechworth and all that kind of stuff. So he was the grandson of that guy and he was the uncle of Eunice Stubbs, the actor and the great uncle of the man who wrote the theme tune for two pints of lager in the packet of crystals. It's called Christian Henson. What a dinerster. What a batshit family gallery they must have in the ancestral home, like that's the cricket guy, that's the city guy, that's the two pints of lager in the packet of crystals, that's

Eunice Stubbs. Amazing, isn't it? Wow. Can I just, when you say they use jet engines, which bit is it the sucky bit or the blowy bit? In what way did they use a jet engine? Oh my God, I don't know which way up it was. Blowy bit, they were firing it down rather than sucking it up.

Because they do both, don't they, impressively, so you never know. And actually I read somewhere that in half a second the power of the suction in a jet engine could hoover an entire four bedroom house in half a second. That is, no. Well, so why is my cleaner taking three hours? Back to more problems with my cleaner. The spin-off show. I really should wash my dirty laundry here, but if she did it, I wouldn't have to.

That surely implies there's kind of a market for a hoover, which is shaped like the front door of your home and just drives around plugging into your front door. Well, of course, that's what used to happen to play, hoovers used to be, and we might have said this, but hoovers used to be on the back of horse and cart, didn't they? They used to wait outside and you'd put it through the window, wouldn't you, like a big hose and you'd sort of hoover that way. Exactly like an elephant's trunk. Exactly like an elephant's trunk.

I wouldn't miss that, Andy. I think if you did do the front door option that you've suggested, you would suck all of your furniture and inhabitants of the home into it as well. There's obviously a net in front of it, Anna. It's sucking out dust. I see. You just pick your belongings out of the net and spend two to three days tidying your house.

If you have any belongings that are the size of a speck of dust, you're screwed, right? Your pollen collection's gone. This article that you found, Andy, it's amazing because it is a genuinely really good article and it just seems that there have been so many different innovations trying to work out how to dry cricket grounds and they've come up with great ideas, but they all just seem to have just one major flaw that ruins it for them. So there was this one idea which was using a new patented drying roller and it was really good.

It got 75% of wetness from the top of the turf off. It was really useful. In the issue, it left the entire pitch jet black every time it did this, which was not useful for cricket, right? Isn't it? If you've chased a white ball, possibly, yeah. Wow. That's really funny.

They also tried giant washing up sponges, didn't they? And I think in the 30s, they just designed these massive washing up sponges where two men would stand on them and it would absorb and the interesting thing is you kind of get those today. I was reading about puddle pillows. Yeah. They're cool, aren't they? Amazing.

You could buy a pack of about 12 for about 120 quid if you're interested and they're really fun. They use the most if you're baseball pitchers and it's what you'd imagine, a big pillow and you plop it down on a big puddle and then you lift it up again and the puddle has vanished. Wow. Where's it gone, Anna? Where's it gone? It's magic.

That's really cool. I think they just mostly, when I watch cricket, they tend to get a big rope and just drag it around the pitch. I don't know how that works, but yeah, that's how they do. Is that maybe whipping off the dew? I don't really. I never understood why they do it, but they all do it, so it must work. That's so interesting.

For the water or is it? What? Like the outfield, they tend to just drag a rope along, I guess. Interesting. Maybe it's the standing water that they're getting rid of. Because they try certain things. There was in T20, in 2020, T20 International, in fact, between India and Sri Lanka. T60, basically.

Yes. Yeah. That's what I meant. They used a hairdryer and a steam iron. There was footage of the groundskeepers using a hair, a physical hairdryer to dry. Wet patches of the ground. That's so funny. It's like when you get a wet patch on your trousers just before you're about to go out

and you're like, how am I going to get rid of this wet patch? And you just have to try everything. It's either going to be the hairdryer or the iron, depending on which bit of the trouser. Why is one patch not your trousers, but why is one patch of the grounds wet? Is it one tiny cloud? Yeah, it's like in the Truman Show where it just picks one little spot. You know, sports pitches are all tilted. Have you never seen sports on TV?

Well, the whole thing is about a 20 degree angle. Why are they playing on a hill? That's why they call it 2020. It's the 20 degree angle of the game. Well, lords is famously tilted as well. Lords is very tilted. And in fact, I think lords, don't they say that if you're standing on one end of lords, then your head is lower than the field at the other end?

That sounds about right. That's true. Yeah. But that's just a cock up. They built it in the wrong place. That's insane. I used to play football when I was at school. I played football for the school team and we played against this prep school and they

had a football pitch that was on, I would say, in my memory, it was about a 45 degree angle. Perhaps it was a bit less than that, but it just meant because we were kids, like we didn't really know how to play football properly. So everyone just used to chase after the ball. The ball would then always go up at the bottom of the hill, just with 22 kids, just kind of mauling after it like they were playing rugby, I suppose. Was it like that?

It was like the house fucking where the parents would have to come and scoop their kids out of the big net at the end at the end. Anyway, sorry about what you were saying. Sports pitches are meant to be slightly tilted for drainage, to stop them getting wet. So they're either crowned, which is when they've got a tilt. The high point is in the middle, or they're just tilted on a side slope so they're all drains to one side. So like in a football pitch, for instance, the crown runs from one goal to the other,

like a ledge, and they're supposed to be... So you're always shooting downhill? No, it's downhill to the sides. So it's like a road. It's like the camber on a road. It's like the camber on a road, exactly, between one goal and the other. And then the sides of the pitch are between 12 and 18 inches lower than the middle of the pitch.

Oh, wow. Isn't that cool? That is cool. And that's why when you look at the edges of the pitch, and round where the sub-spenches are, it's often a lot muddier and harder to drain, because that's where all the water collects. Wow. That's really cool.

I didn't know that football pitches have under-floor heating throughout the pitch. Under-grass heating. Yeah. All Premier League ones do, for sure. Wow. Right. You know football. You definitely know that.

But if you don't have that football like me, that's mind-blowing. They've got... It's mostly electric wire, isn't it? Yeah. Because you know how they play football in winter? Yeah. Yeah. So that they don't get cold off due to the snow.

It's not warm on their feet. I thought it was to help the grass grow, as opposed to help melt the snow. That can help as well, although they'll have big lights above the grass to help that grow as well. But it's mostly, I believe, to stop it from getting cold off in winter. That's insane. I just think, wow, people really like football, don't they? This will surprise you.

It's a multi-million-pound international spot. It is. Oh, that's good to hear. It can't be multi-million. It can't be. I think what we're saying is the heating is paying for itself. I like that. So Lorde's is obviously the most famous cricket ground, certainly to anyone who's a non-cricketer.

That's one that I know most. This is the third Lorde's. It was in two other venues beforehand, right? So the original Lorde's, which was opened up by a guy called Henry Lorde, was in Marlborough, in London. Oh, because they're called the Marlborough Cricket Club, aren't they? Yes, exactly. That's the official, they own the rules of cricket, don't they?

Like, if you want to change a rule, you can't. They own it. I've never heard of that before. You have to ask these dicks in stupid outfits, whether you're allowed to. So this guy, he set up it in Marlborough, and then it was moved to St. John's Wood when he had to change it, and then that got moved again to where it currently is. And when he moved each time, he wasn't impressed with the grass there, so they lifted up the turf from the very first Lorde, moved it to the second one, and then when the current

Lorde's that it's in now, I think they've changed the turf entirely, but certainly when it was set up, that was the turf that was then carried over from the second one to there as well. Yeah. That's really interesting. So what did they do with the grass that was already there? Did they swap? I think they, yeah, they might have swapped and got rid of it.

Yeah, I actually don't know how they disposed the last one, but in 2002, they actually, Lords did a whole new revamp on it, and they got rid of the turf, so they sold off chunks of turf to people. So people all over the UK now have little bits of Lorde's grass in their garden, which they're growing. One guy spent over a thousand pounds buying a huge, so his whole garden is Lorde's ground. That's cool. The group that you mentioned, the MCC, they made sure that they kept one very specific

patch of grass that they gave to the location of the original Lords from 188 years ago. So sitting back there now, the grass has returned. It's like a cutting that they can propagate and they can grow new Lords for the, if the current Lorde's is destroyed or whatever. Yes, it's like a seed bank. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You see, Andy, people really like cricket as well. It's amazing, isn't it?

Yeah, people do. People just love sport. Anyway. So wet fields is a problem in all sports. Do you know how people dry baseball fields? Well, with the sponges, you said, the puddle sponges. They do it with the puddle sponges. I think that's a good way to do it.

That's a recommended way. A non-recommended way, which has been a spate of lately, is people setting fire to them. So it's been really weird. Every couple of years it's reported in America. So in 2019 in Connecticut, there were 25 gallons of petrol dumped on a baseball infield and lit, and it was just by lit by 20 parents whose kids would play the weekend. Did they strike the match to get it going? Nice.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very good. I like it. Yeah. We would have also worked if it had been a bowling set. Yeah. It's like a bowling alley.

Hang on. So they, sorry, is this on the grassy bit or the muddy bit? The muddy bit. Oh, so there's no grass to destroy. That's good. That's true. Although it still does quite a lot of damage. It did $50,000 worth of damage police estimated, and they advise people not to do it.

What to the dirt? How valuable is this dirt? I'm sorry, sir. But the dirt's gone. Sorry. However, will we replace the mud? Okay. It is time for fact number two, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that there's currently a court case going on in Ireland about whether stained glass windows are actually windows. What? What? It's a big deal. Can I ask Anna, right? So you've read about this story. Do you land on the opinion that stained glass windows are windows or that they're not?

Well, I don't want to get into any subjudice here, but... Oh, yeah. Always a case happening in Ireland, doesn't it? Yeah. So if you're listening in Ireland, turn the show off now. Especially if you're on the jury for this case. Yeah. Without wanting to sway any listeners at home, I wouldn't like to make a call because I've

instinctively sided with the victim, which doesn't necessarily mean I've sided with the truth. Oh. Okay. Yeah. I mean, so it makes sense when you tell the story. Yeah. I should tell the story.

I should have mentioned it. The very fact that you've decided which side is the victim, I think shows that you are biased. Yeah. You're right. You're right. Thank God I'm not on this jury. Anyway, this is all about a place called Beauty's Cafe, which you might know if you

live in Dublin. It's in central Dublin. It's this famous old period building. Beautiful building. The pièce de résistance in this building are six stained glass windows, and they were designed in 1927 by Ireland's most famous stained glass window maker, who I'm sure you know is Harry Clarke. Oh, yeah.

There's a bit of a problem because Beauty's Cafe are just tenants, and the people who own the building are called Ronan Group Real Estate, and Beauty's are in massive renters. Not their fault, some would say. The rent has gone up massively over the last few years. Very difficult to pay. Okay. We're working out who the victim is. Okay.

The renter is of 700,000 euros, and the windows are worth about a million euros. What Beauty's are arguing is that the windows are not windows, which means that the company that owns the building doesn't own the windows because they're not windows. You own windows because they're part of a building, but these windows are works of art. They're chattels. They're things that are held within the building, so their argument is, I'm afraid this big billionaire landlord group doesn't own the moveable chattels. They're arguing they are.

Moveable. Yeah, and that might be where the court case falls down, because it is quite difficult to move them, obviously. Anyway, so Beauty have made this offer. They've said to the guys who are the landlords, look, we won't pay the rent because we can't, but what we will do is we will sell the windows. Oh, you see what side you're on, the big billionaire business side, don't you? I cannot deny both conforming to type.

We will sell the windows on to a company which will then donate them back to the cafe, and you are allowed to keep them. So they're actually selling them to the state, and then the state will donate them to the cafe and say, okay, you're allowed to keep them in the cafe. The landlords are like, screw you, we own the windows, you can't sell us something that we already own. Yeah. Feels a bit like they're right.

As in, when Beauty's arrived, did they knock out the existing windows and put in their own stained glass windows? I don't think so, right? Well, Dan, you raised a very interesting question because the people who owned it originally were Beauty's. And then they sold it on. They owned the stained glass windows, and then they sold it and became tenants in the 80s.

Right. Interesting. Wow. So that does confuse monsters somewhat. So they've kind of sold the windows once, and now they're suggesting they might be able to... Depends on what's in the contract, doesn't it? Yeah, it does, absolutely.

Shit. Maybe they haven't thought of checking the contract. The Beauty's, yeah, like you say, really part of the furniture in Dublin, one of the most famous places, mentioned in a great work of art. See if you can guess which it is, I'll give you the quote. Yeah. Monica had gone home long ago. It was quarter to nine.

Little Chandler had come home late for tea. Any ideas? Okay. Well, yeah. Well, friends, but... What? No, no. I don't know what you're talking about.

So they're just two characters in the Dubliners by James Joyce. But isn't it true, James, that the TV series Friends is part of the extended Dubliners universe? I've got the entire text of the Dubliners in search for all the other characters. No gunter. You wouldn't believe it, would you? Anyway, it says the Little Chandler had come home late for tea, and moreover he had forgotten to bring Annie home, the parcel of coffee from Beauty's. So yeah, James Joyce, he used to go there and he mentioned it.

That's really cool. And isn't there an episode of Friends called the one where they sell the windows on dubious grounds in order to get out of 700 grand in time? It's basically Central Perk's big problem. It was solved with that. That's great. It was founded by the Bule family, but the Bule family, the first people who were involved in Hot Drinks was a guy called Samuel Bule, and he brought in a load of tea from China.

When the East India Company had a monopoly and the monopoly finished, and so people could suddenly buy tea in London, and he said, well, why should we buy tea in London? We can just ship it straight over to Dublin. So he did that. And the reason he could do it is he had all these ships because he used to be a merchant of silkworm guts. Cool. Isn't that cool?

Do you think he said, I'm a silkworm gut merchant? I'm a silkworm gut merchant. That's what I do. Do you know what they like? I'd never heard of silkworm guts. Are we talking about the actual parts of the silkworm that make the silk? Yeah, the place that they digest stuff. Is it like, yeah, is there equivalent to sausages for them?

Like tiny little sausages. Oh, the extra bits. That's a great thought. You could make a sort of silk-making robot, and then when you implant the silkworm guts into it, it is the crucial missing bit. That's a really good thought. It is almost gettable, but probably not of the kind of guts or the animal guts. Cat guts.

Cat guts are useful. Oh, for instruments. Yeah, so silkworm guts. How tiny is this orchestra? I think someone says they're playing the tiniest violin in the world. Actually, silkworm guts. They were used for making fishing tackle, like fishing lines. And also to sew up cuts by surgeons.

They used to use silkworm guts because it was really good thread. That's so cool. Isn't that amazing? That's awesome. Wow. People are so clever. I stayed in a B&B in Broad Stairs once with my wife. And the guys who owned it, who ran it, they make their own stained glass.

And it's really beautiful, and they were telling us about the process. And I mentioned to my wife and Ella that we were going to be talking about this. And she said, do you remember that thing they told us? They said that back in the medieval days, when people made stained glass, they used to use the urine of red-headed boys as part of the formula for making it. And I found a couple of sources online that suggest that that's apparently red-headed or ginger urine used to have magical properties. And they thought...

Sorry, it was used to be thought that it had magical properties. It didn't used to have magical properties. When did the red-heads lose this amazing power? Some say they've never lost it. Is that how Rod Weasley got into Hogwarts? It does make sense because the red-headed bit doesn't. But to make the paint in stained glass, it actually used to be made out of crushed glass and something like urine.

So it was either urine or wine they tended to mix it with to make the paint to stain it. I did believe it when you said it done as well, but you believe it even more now that I understand it. I didn't believe it, I do know. Guys, what colour can stained glass be stained? Give me some colours. Any colour. Red.

Green. Yellow. You're all completely wrong. The only staining you see on stained glass is brown or black or grey paint. What? No. It's a big old misnomer. What?

So stained glass... I feel like that doesn't tally with my experience. You know when you go to the church and all the windows are brown and black? It just looks like the birds of poodle down here. It's absolute symphony of browns. God's light makes you hallucinate all the colours. No, the way you make the colours, the proper colours in stained glasses, you mix up your glass mixture with certain metals that make certain colours.

So like cobalt I think makes blue and what are the different ones are there? Gold chloride makes red colour. So that's not staining, you're mixing it with a metal at the start. So that's you're making the glass rather than having existing clear glass and then painting that. Exactly. Because that's one of the other techniques as well, isn't it? So then you do that and that was the only way they made stained glass until I think about 13th century. So stained glass wasn't actually stained and then they came up with this idea of kind of painting it with this paint they made

and all that does is add the shading. Which I didn't realise stained glass involved is the black lines that you see that create the kind of textures and all the shading which makes it look more realistic and that's all just in brown and grey. I did not know that. Just for the glass notes out there. The Palace of Westminster, they have stained glass there. And basically this is a story about the British Harry Clark, what I think is the British Harry Clark and that's a woman called Mary Lownes.

She was a stained glass artist and she was like one of the main people of the arts and crafts in the UK. Now she also established the Artist Suffrage League and they did all of the posters and placards and Christmas cards for suffrage events One of them that she did in particular was the Mud March in 1907. This was the largest ever march for women's suffrage. They brought people in from all the different towns of the UK and they all had banners and so if you were from Bolton you would have like a banner with something to do with Bolton in it, like a pasty or something, I don't know. But from each place it would be something to do with them and she designed all of these stained glass artists. And in the Palace of Westminster, window number four has a stained glass of the Mud March, which is what she did all of the banners for.

So it kind of comes round in a nice circle. That's cool, isn't it? And then on the window, is there an individual little bit of stained glass of all of the banners? No, it's just like a general kind of picture of the Mud March because it was really muddy that day. And they went through, I don't know, like St James's and stuff, but it was really, really muddy. And all the pictures in the newspapers were of all these muddy, angry suffragettes. Tragically, they didn't have jet engine technology to drive them out. There's Westminster Abbey obviously has a lot of stained glass windows as well.

There's loads. When we're talking Central London. And it has a recent one that has been added a few years back by, can anyone guess? An artist. An artist. Tracey Ehrman. No. But like a good guess.

That's as good a guess as any. I know what those stains would have been made of. It was all brown, wasn't it? Damien Hirst. No, so David. Gunter von Hagen's. No. That would have been good.

I know someone flayed, you know, so there were lots of pinks and reds. What about who is the guy who did the Angel of the North? Oh yeah. What's he called? Anthony Gormley. Anthony Gormley. Anthony Gormley. His face because he's in everything that he does, right?

Is he? So it's a big picture of his face in Westminster Abbey. Oh, great idea, but no. Yeah, but great idea. Was it Gormley? Well, I just said no. Okay, great, great, great. More artists.

Who's that guy who did all the cartoony stuff? Roll Harris. With all the colours. Roll Harris, they brought him back into the game. Who did cartoons? Oh, and who did the cans? Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol. No, this is just a couple of years ago. A couple of years ago. An artist. An artist. We can get this, Andy. A modern artist. Neil Buchanan from Art Attack.

Yeah. Oh, it's a great idea, though. Banksy. Oh, who some people think is Neil Buchanan. Exactly. That's why I thought of it. Yeah. Right.

But no. No, okay. A modern artist. Not Banksy or Neil Buchanan. Yeah. Is it somebody who says they're an artist, like Rodney Wood from The Rolling Stones, who does paint in his bear time technically? Oh, he does great art.

Yeah. Oh, Vic Reeves. Oh, that would be very cool as well. Or Grace and Perry. Yeah. No. Grace and Perry. No, I've already just sent it.

It wasn't Grace and Perry. Oh, is it Harry Van Laak, the greatest... No, it's not. Dan, I actually do need... I do have class tonight. Well, I was... I've been ready to tell it a while ago. Detective Harkin and Murray insist on cracking the case.

Okay, guys. 12 more guesses each, okay? And then... And then I have to move us on. I'm taking you. Please, Dan. Put these guys out of this room. I don't even think who it might be.

Just because we've gone this far, I'm going to give you the initials. Great. D.H. David Hockney. No, David Hockney. Yes. David Hockney. David Hockney.

Oh, my God. That's so predictable. Did he do it on his iPad? Because that's why he does these things. Yes, he did. Did he? Yeah. So it's called the Queen's Window.

It's 28 feet by 12 feet and it looks... When I saw it, I was like, my God, it looks like someone's done that on their phone. And it kind of turns out he has, and he designed it. Certainly found it in. That's what I'm wondering. I've just... I actually read about this in my research. Oh, my God.

So he's doing this already? He's going to save an hour of everyone's time. Oh, that's good. Yeah. So he... And he didn't even really come over to do it. He sent over the drawing. He just sat over and found for a bit that he was on the toilet.

Have you guys seen, like, that David Hockney's... He does on his iPad. Yeah. Like, I'm sure they're great works of art. They genuinely look like they've been done by children. And this looks no different. Really? I'd love to see this in person just to see if it's a bit more vibrant.

But when you see a photo of it, it looks like a... I'm a big fan of Hockney, but... Yeah, yeah. I know, but I agree. These iPad drawings are very much... They look quite Microsoft Word kind of, you know, or like Microsoft Art kind of stuff. Microsoft Paint. Microsoft Paint.

Not Word. Quite impressive today to Microsoft Word. Okay, it is time for fact number three. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that Hard Rock Cafe is owned globally by a group of Native Americans. So weird. This is pretty incredible. This is the Seminole Tribe.

They're in Florida. And back in 2006, I believe it was, they bought for $965 million, the entire group of Hard Rock Cafe. So that's all the cafes. It's the hotels. It's the casinos. And they are now the owners, not only of Hard Rock Cafe, but this group of Native Americans are also the owners of the greatest collection of rock and roll memorabilia in the world.

Brilliant. So they have been buying up things like casinos and hotels ever since the late 1970s. And this purchase is just part of their catalogue of ever-growing business ventures. And the Seminole Tribe, it's worth putting into context who they are, they came into existence properly in the 1950s. And what it was was a disparate group of Native Americans. That feels late. It was very late.

The peoples that make up the group with this name of Seminole, they've been around 12,000 years in America. And they were all little groups of Native American tribes that were being pushed out further away by white people coming into America. And they made a decision to form together and create a body where you officially would become the Seminole. Like a super group? Yes.

Like cream. Like the traveling Wilburys. Yeah. And actually there's a lot of traveling Wilburys and cream memorabilia in Hard Rock Cafe as a sort of solidarity. The Seminole people though, of course, you know, they've been around for a very, very long time. That's not a new name.

The Seminole tribe that was set up in 1957 was a collection of other tribes coming together and banding under that name. They basically, the claim on the Seminole tribe website is that they are the only people who never surrendered to the white invaders, basically. And that was true of the Seminole people in the 19th century. They had the Seminole wars, which were a massive deal in the US throughout the 19th century. I think there were three big Seminole wars. And it was this thing where presidents like Andrew Jackson, very famous for persecuting

Native Americans and others kind of went to war with them and tried to force them west, because obviously they suddenly wanted all the eastern land. So force loads of them west, but a bunch of the Seminole people rather than being forced to go to Florida, but they wanted to be kind of retreated into the Everglade marshes. Yeah. The Seminole traditions, I read that there are four particular Seminole traditions, which are sowing, patchwork, building chickies, which are small wooden houses on stilts, kind of traditional structures.

And bidding on big, multi-national businesses. The fourth one is wrestling alligators. Oh, yes. I just wonder if it's like sowing patchwork, building small wooden structures and wrestling alligators. That's the hardest of the badges to get when you're in Seminole Boy Scouts, isn't it? I just feel like there might be some kind of sorting hat procedure as a young Seminole. Alligators, can I put the hat on again, please?

Shall we talk about Hard Rock Cafe? So it was started by Peter Morton and another guy called Isaac Tigret. I believe that's how you pronounce his name. And Isaac Tigret, clearly a massive rock and roll fan, actually married the first wife of Ringo Starr. Not Maureen. Maureen. He married Maureen.

Someone's read this fact. I just know about Ringo's marriages. Ringo's marital history. Do I have to be a specialist? I think if I'd known that before, I would have remembered his first wife was called Maureen. That's the kind of, you know, it's an unusual name. Yeah, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. Maureen Starrke. So Maureen, and they broke up because she had an affair with George Harrison. Huge scandal. Wait, Ringo and Maureen? No, Ringo and Maureen broke up when she was found with George Harrison. Yeah, like, so that's just a bit goss for you guys there. And are you saying, because you say he's clearly a massive breaking news?

What a scoop. A lot of the memorabilia is not all hard rock, as in, I think of hard rock as being even harder than normal rock. Yeah, like slipknot or something, right? Right, and it's not, they don't have a lot of kind of death metal or doom drone based memorabilia. Right, and I think people would be less willing to eat in their restaurants. I certainly would if they did.

Just dead rats. Yeah, cradle of filth is playing out of the sound system. Right, you're right. But Wings, Paul McCartney's band Wings, debuted at the London branch, the original branch of the Hard Rock Cafe. Yeah, probably what can you get as a starter at Hard Rock Cafe? The Paul McCartney. One waitress says that when they did debut, they, all the waiting staff put a cotton wool

in their ears so that they could keep an eye out while they serve people. Well, this waitress who said this is a waitress. And she still works it. So I walked past it on the way to the QI office today. Did you? I walked past the Hard Rock. I just thought, I want to see this. This was open in 1971.

This was the landmark spot where it was opened. And when they opened, they had a waitress working there who was called Rita Gilligan, and she has an MBE. She still works there. She's seriously fun, isn't she? Yeah. Anne has such good goss because I didn't quite realize that every musical celebrity you've ever heard of is eating in Hard Rock cafes.

Is this in your contract when you join a band? So, you know, she says, um, she actually said, I've served the Beatles, the Stones, Freddie Mercury, Eric Clapton, Pete Townsend. And then she says, take that and the Carnabes, which seems like an incredibly steep decline. I've absolutely never heard of the Carnabes. No, I haven't either. And I looked them up and they don't even have a bloody Wikipedia page. I think she's probably pushing a band that she's managing.

I wonder if that might be a misprint for the Cranberries. I wonder if it was the Cranberries. But then there is a band called the Carnabes that have played in the Hard Rock Cafe. I think it's part of their brand. So she's trying to slip them in maybe with these big names. And she supposedly turned down posh spice for a job, Rita, when she came in. I love this story. Can you tell it?

I don't know the full story. Well, it's, it's, there's not much more to it than that, but she, Rita Gilligan, claims that Victoria Beckham applied for a job at the Hard Rock Cafe as a hostess or whatever shortly before the Spice Girls took off, but that she was rejected for being too quiet. Yeah. And so she went and got a job at Bill Wyman's restaurant, Sticky Fingers instead. But if she was trying to know.

Oh, what? Well, it's named after a Rolling Stones album. Yeah, I just didn't know. I would have chosen one of the others. I don't know any of the other albums, but I reckon all of them will be a better name. Yeah, they would. In association with it. They've got an album called Beggars Banquet.

That's kind of fun, cool name for a restaurant, but no Sticky Fingers. Yeah. But this is the weird thing. So there's Rita Gilligan who worked there since 1971 and it was still there a couple of years ago. There's also another waitress from the Hard Rock Cafe called Delia Lees who worked there for 48 years and she got a job two weeks after it opened and she's 80 now and she still does two days a week. Wow.

So I think there are two of them who have been there for 50 years. This is like bloody QI. There's no turnover of staff. That reminds me because I only half remember this story, but at the Savoy there was two very famous waiters who work behind the bar and they two women and they both worked there for about 60 years or something and they knew everyone but they stopped talking after about five years of working together and then they just stopped being friends.

And then they didn't really see each other because they were on shifts but literally didn't talk for like 30 years. That's so funny. We have a similar thing on the podcast, don't we? Because actually if you listen carefully back to all the episodes, you'll notice that Anna and Dan have not said anything to each other on the show for the last five years. If you notice that when we were doing that guessing game Anna wasn't giving anything, was she?

There was only me and Andy shouting for half an hour. Rita, by the way, she got her job in 1971 and it happened when her husband was reading the evening standard and he shouted to her, they're looking for people like you. And she went, oh are they? And she went over and the advert read, older women wanted late 30s, 40s and 50s

and she was only 29 when she left. That is such a horrible thing to say. Did she have to put talcum powder in her hair? Well, actually when she left there she said, you know, I'm looking for a job and one of the co-founders, Peter Martin said, no, you know, you're too young for this and she said, I'm the best you're going to get

so you better take me. And he said, yeah, cool, you're hired. Is it known why they wanted women in their late 30s, 40s, 50s and so on? I suspect that what they were trying to do is they were trying to get American diners in the UK because there wasn't anywhere that you could, there was no McDonald's there and there was nothing like that.

They wanted to have a place where you could get burgers and stuff like that. And there's that cliché of being sold by sort of a 65-year-old we're doing. Yeah, literally, happy days kind of thing. You've got 20 diner in America and you have breakfast there. There's always a woman who's, you know, in her, you know,

middle age coming around with a pot of coffee and tipping you up and topping you up. And I think that was just the cliché. Tipping you up and topping you up. She inverts you on your chair. They're very strong. Isaac Tigrit was a devotee of an Indian guru back when those Indian gurus were a big deal

and this one was Satya Sai Baba. And so, yeah, the chain was founded by him and he obviously brought the spiritual side to Hard Rock Cafe and then this guy called Peter Morton who was the son of a founder of Morton's Steakhouse who brought the steak side. So the motto of the Hard Rock Cafe is love all, serve all. Apparently.

That sounds like a tennis term, doesn't it? You never say serve all in tennis. Serve all. Serve all. It's like what you might say just before the game starts. Yeah. Anna, have you not seen the serve all bit of a tennis match where everyone gets to serve at the same time?

It's chaotic, but it's the points rack up. That's not actually how this before, right? They do a warm-up where they both serve at each other. Yeah, right. Of course. It was originally a chain of tennis courts. That would be such an improvement. Cricket has had the T20 Revolution.

I think tennis needs a jeopardy round where everyone can serve as many balls as they can at the same time. And you just have to stand there and if it hits you in the balls then that's part of the game, doesn't it? Yeah, that's 40 love. Anyway, this guy who inspired Hard Rock Cafe, this Sai Baba, he was quite interesting.

I didn't know about him. He was a massive deal in India. 500,000 people went to his funeral. Sachin Tendulkar cancelled his birthday. Really? The year that he died. Wait, sorry. He cancelled his birthday.

He's now actually one year younger than everyone thinks he is. It just feels like an anti-aging crick by Sachin Tendulkar. Oh, no, he's sneaky, right? Well, he cancelled his birthday party. He didn't celebrate his birthday. He uninvited everyone. He didn't have a cake. He didn't have a party?

He didn't have a party. No one even sung to him because he was so sad about this spiritualist dying. Oh, gosh. And he claimed that he was a proper god, like omnipotent, omniscient. And he did loads of amazing tricks, apparently. Have you got some examples for us? There was a terminally ill woman.

She needed treatment. It could only be given in Japan. And so she went and visited this guy and said, I need this treatment to save my life. It can only be treated in Japan. And he pointed at a door and said, walk through that door. And she walked through the door.

I'm so glad. I'm so glad I set my office up next to this branch of trail finders. Well, what happened then? And it was Japan. What? She walked through the door and she was in Japan. Yeah. Cool.

Don't say cool. You believe it though, Dan. It's a cool story. Incredible story. It's like Narnia for the modern day. Yes. Isn't that amazing? And why to claim.

And yeah. And then what happened? Well, that's sort of where his tale ends. You assume, I suppose, she was in Japan. Well, how's he supposed to know what happened? That's true. He can't go through the door. He can't go through the door.

Okay. So he didn't leave the door open. He closed the door. He closed the door. Otherwise, everyone leaves India and goes to Japan. So this woman, who's quite ill, has just ended up in, I presume, a random bit of Japan. Because the door already led to Japan.

It can't have led to the specific clinic she needs. She's now trapped in a foreign country. She's now illiterate because Japan is a different alphabet. Yeah. It's an incredibly upsetting and busy place. She's very, she hasn't come off brilliantly in this story. She doesn't have a rail card because you can get rail cards in Japan that help you go around foreigners.

You can get them especially. Well, she's now, she's wanted by the authorities because she's not in the country legally. She hasn't got a visa or whatever you need. How did you get here? Who's gonna believe Dan? So that's why you've got to be very careful what you wish for. Oh, it's one of those stories.

Okay. It is time for our final fact of the show. And that is James. Okay. My fact this week is that when female seals have sex, they have a special muscle in their vagina that can clamp around their partner to stop seawater from getting in.

That means that in order to create a seal, they first need to create a seal. Wow. Superb. Fabulous. Oh, God. Sex does always create a seal, really, doesn't it? But do these ones clamp particularly hard?

These ones clamp hard, yeah. These are like proper muscles in the vagina. It feels like a wise saying that the seals have, doesn't it? Yes. To create a seal. You must first create a seal. Yes. You know.

That's the birds and the bees chat, isn't it? Yeah. The seals and the seals. And what would happen if they didn't have the seal? Would they flood? They might. God, they sink to the bottom. Sorry, tragic.

You have to get a jet engine to blow all the water out of them. Let me quickly say where I got this. Honestly, this was a speculative search. I wonder if seals have seals. And I found this paper called Reproductive Biology of Seals by Shannon Atkinson, where they described this. But basically, it's just to stop seawater getting in, pebbles getting in.

And if you think about, they basically have a very similar reproductive system to humans. So they, you know, you know, vagina, cervix, uterus, blah, blah, blah, blah. And if you look at a whale, for instance, they have quite a long sort of maze-like structure in between that kind of stops anything from getting in there. Yeah.

But they have like basically like the human reproductive system. It's pretty much straight up and straight down. So they need something to stop stuff from getting in there. And there are a few different ways of doing this. But the way they do it is with these folds, which have special muscles in and the muscles can clamp around the penis so that when the semen gets in, no sea gets in.

I feel like you're pushing it a bit further this time. The seals are great and we should talk about seals. They're amazing. Hardly ever talked about them. So let's talk about them. Yeah. You know, they basically don't need eyes or ears. Excuse me?

They're whiskers. Phenomenal whiskers that seals have. They do have eyes and ears. They have eyes and ears and they use them. They didn't have them. They could basically operate because their whiskers are so unbelievably sensitive. So let's say we know that cats use their whiskers

or rats use their whiskers. They've got 200 nerve endings on their whiskers, cats and rats, right? A seal has about 1,500. Basically, what it means is that if they were swimming through the ocean and they couldn't see or hear, and they needed to work out where the precise location of a fish is that they wanted to eat,

they could just use their whiskers to feel the vibrations, the little movements of the water that are being pushed through the whisker and pinpoint it and get to the nose. Can you pinpoint it? Yes. Lovely. And the other thing is they can tell if a fish has gone past 30 seconds ago.

They can tell by the vibration in the water where the fish was using their whiskers. And they go, oh, there was a fish here 30 seconds ago. And they can follow the trail of where the fish has been and then with their whiskers and go down. And the other thing is not just the whiskers like a cat, which is where their nose is, they can also do this with their eyebrows.

Because they have whiskers on their eyebrows so they can hunt fish with their eyebrows. That is pretty amazing. That's also why old men are so good at fishing, isn't it? Yes. There was an experiment on the whiskers. It was by the University of Rostock. And it was about how harbor seals, they find flatfish.

So flatfish hide under the sand. So they're not very visible, but there are these tiny movements of their gills because they're breathing in and out very slightly. And the seals use their whiskers to find the flatfish and eat them. For the experiment, the scientists found some seals. They created some fake flatfish under the water

to be the bait. And then they blindfolded the seals. Yeah. How cool. That is a better way of doing it because the first person probably to do most of this work was a woman called Dean Reynolds. And she did it by snipping off the whiskers of the seals.

You won't be able to do that now. But this was in the 70s and she was really into it. She loved her seals and stuff like, you know, obviously now to modern years, it sounds quite bad, but she really loved her seals. Apparently you could see the seal walking behind her in the university when she was walking to her lectures and stuff. I was listening to a really good podcast

which interviewed someone called Dr. Alex Milne who has such a great job. She's a sensory biologist specializing in pinniped whiskers. And she was saying, we don't know this, but seal whiskers are curly. They've got like wavy hair as opposed to sea lions and walruses who are sort of the other pinnipeds. And we think that is to sense the undulations of the water.

They were not totally sure. But anyway, she did this. She's done lots of experiments with seal, you know, playing with seals and seeing how sensitive their whiskers are and playing with them balancing balls on their whiskers. And so you get balls of lots of different sizes and then you watch what their whiskers do.

So if you've got a small ball and then a big ball, which you think involves, you know, it points its whiskers towards them to balance. And then which would use more whiskers? The big ball, more area. And that's incorrect. Oh yeah, the little ball. There you go.

Dance, dance, put it. How did you learn that out? You've got to use the method of wait for people to answer wrongly and they get in there. I tried to do that with the artist, but we didn't go through every artist in the world. So it's the same physics, which means it's easier to spin a big ball

around on one finger, right? Oh, that's clever. And so the smaller the prey, the more whiskers it takes. So if they're chasing prey in the water, the same thing happens. They focus more whiskers towards a smaller prey to try and pinpoint where it is. Because I know you're looking a bit skeptical, Andy,

but you see basketball players spinning a ball in the finger. Yeah. You don't see table tennis players doing it, do you? No, I don't actually. No, I've never seen that. Thank you, James. But balls get heavier the bigger they get. Yeah.

To a certain extent, like once they're so big, they crush your fingers, then you have to. Yeah. A basketball versus a ping pong ball, for example, I would feel require more whiskers purely for the weight of it. So we must be talking beach balls. They use their nose as well. I think the whiskers are sort of for balance,

but yeah, I think it probably is beach balls. So those are the ones with the balls on their noses, aren't they? Yeah. They always have a ball on their nose, yeah. And dolphins do as well, often. It's not a vintage dolphin thing, though. When I think of dolphins, I think of dolphins. Jumping through hoops.

Yeah. Being really clever. Playing chess. But they are the only two animals. So it's weird that you say it's not a vintage dolphin thing when it's so clearly... No, it's such a seal thing, though, to have a ball on your nose. Yeah, absolutely.

I agree. I don't think it's a dolphin thing at all. No, it is a dolphin thing. Well, I think it's on its way out. They gave people TB. Tuberculosis in South America is believed to come from seals. No way. I know this sounds like elephants built the roads in Cornwall.

I appreciate it sounds like that. But no, there's a bioarchaeologist. Never heard of that job before either, called Jane Buikstra. I hope I'm pronouncing it right. From the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History. Because TB got to South America with colonists 500 years ago, but there have been bones found much older, which also have TB. And it doesn't look like they came over with the original humans,

you know, 10,000 years ago, whenever it was, because it spreads from south to north, not north to south, which is not the order you would expect it to go in. Hang on. Sorry, I'm confused. So the colonists brought the TB over, but there are also seals that are older with TB in their bones. But there was pre-existing human TB found in samples and bones.

And if it had come with the original arrivers 10,000 years ago, it would have gone from north to south, but it didn't. It went south to north. And so the theory is that it came over with seals, which might have been, you know, eaten, hunted and eaten, and the bacteria survived there. Because TB arose in Africa, and somehow seals got it,

is the theory, took it to South America, gave it to humans. And then they met on the way down, presumably the humans coming down, met the TB on the way up, an awkward dinner. Sometimes zookeepers these days get TB from the seals in their care. Doesn't always happen. They need to not get so close, don't they? Have you guys seen Andre the seal? No.

No. Okay, seriously? Yeah, seriously. Right. No. I kind of thought everyone watched that as a kid. It was a TV show. Well, it was a TV show.

It was a film. Oh. Oh, no, no, I've not seen it. Okay, well this. I think I saw the play. Yeah, I was just shot down on animal rights grounds within a couple of days, wasn't it? Did they mention the vagina thing?

Yeah, it was about that. It was weird. It was you, and it was marketed to children. Well, Andre the seal, for those who've seen it, it was a very famous film in our childhoods for a brief period of time. We all watched it. It wasn't very good. And it was the true story of a seal who befriended a tree surgeon,

which you wouldn't have thought their lives could lie. A better cricket match. Yeah, that's a hell of a meat cute you've got to engineer. Yeah, I don't know how maybe the forest was flooded. Anyway, still befriended a tree surgeon. We're not even in the picture, you see the guy. So this is the story. The seal meets this guy.

We've seen that a million times. Wait, wait, wait. The guy's a tree surgeon. Keep talking. True, befriended this seal. And it's a true story. Between 1961 and 1986. Yeah, so this guy was also into diving, met this seal.

It had been abandoned by its mother. And so it took it in and sort of raised it for a few weeks, thinking it would return to the wild, tried to return it to the wild. And the seal loved him so much. He just stuck around, stuck around for like 25 years. But what, like in the bath? Or don't they need lots of water? He would come up to his house and hang out in his house in the day

and then flop back down to the harbour and then he'd go swimming with it. And it wintered in this aquarium. Anyway, they made this film about it. And do you know what species of seal they used in the film? Seal, no. There's an elephant seal. What's the name of the film?

Dan, what were you going to say? No, because I realised I was saying, well, I was saying a sea lion. You're absolutely correct. You're kidding. They used a knot seal. And how bullshit is that? As if they couldn't be bothered to find a seal.

They do look quite similar. It's all in the ears. But anyway, the filmmakers wanted to coordinate with the aquarium who raised Andre in the winters and the aquarium refused. Bigger, I think sea lions, right? I've seen them both. They are bigger.

Although you can get huge seals. Elephant seals are massive. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The key apparently is that seals have ears that are just holes, I think. Yeah, seals are kind of more round headed. So seals can remember what they have just done and repeat it on command. As long as you ask them within 18 seconds of the image, I think.

Okay. I set a cup of tea. This is unusual because not many people can do this, right? This is a study by... I think most people can do this. Well, I won't come to that. So this is a study by Simeon Smeal at the University of Southern Denmark in Odentz.

And basically, they asked them to do one thing and then they asked them to do it again after 18 seconds, but they could still do the thing. They said, repeat. They didn't say do this thing again. They said repeat and they managed to do it. And what was quite interesting is the guy in charge of it, Smeal, said that they did a really good job

because what you have to understand is that this is a very, very repetitive study and even the human trainers and assistants had a hard time remembering what they had just asked. You end up with a human as if they're staring at each other. What was it we were supposed to do? I can't remember. That's it.

That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shribeland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M.

James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. You can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website. No such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there.

Do check them out and do come back next week because we will be back with another episode to play to your ears. We'll see you then. Goodbye.