No Such Thing As A Fish - 428: No Such Thing As Free Urine In The Uber

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss surprise sedans, sustained smears, squatting ships and seldom-seen sticks. 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 Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and Anna Tyshinski, 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 Anna. My fact this week is that pedestrians used to be expected to give way to sedan chairs. Oh wow.

So they're the e-scooters of their day. They couldn't have been more so from everything I've read about them. A pedestrian is still expected to give way to sedan chairs, but there aren't any sedan chairs, so it doesn't matter. Oh, like legally. It's a really good question. We'll have to, I guess we'll have to set it up with one of us, well, it would require three of us to have a sedan chair, and then one of us to find a policeman to arrest.

Well, no, no, we only need one sedan chair and two people to lift it. We need three people. Yeah, that's what I mean. I mean, three people. I thought you said a sedan chair each. No, no, no. So we'll need three people, one sedan chair, and then one of us to be the pedestrian who doesn't give way.

Oh, well, I'll be the pedestrian, please. Can I be the person's... I'll be in the chair shop on in the chair. Dang. Front, I got the front. Sorry, James. Anyway, this was the other rules of the road, or in fact, the rules of the pavement in the great sedan chair era, which is quite a short era really.

And just in case you're unfamiliar with the sedan concept, it's obviously a chair that one person's sitting on, and then it's attached to sort of pole railings, and those are held by one person at each end, and you're walked around the street in this chair. And normally there's a box around the chair, we should say. Yeah. There are some rough and ready sedan chairs where it's literally just a chair already being carried. Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can see that. Very cheap fare for those. They were military sedan chairs, or for expeditions, and it's literally just a chair with some handles that fold out. Right. And that's it. You wouldn't have thought it's that useful in a sort of military assault, would you?

It's no tank, the sedan chair. It's free. It's before the battle. Okay, right. You're in the chair. Galloping in on the sedan chair. Over the lip of a hill, thousands of sedan chairs. Anyway, yeah, there were quite strict rules about how they could be used.

So it was in 1634, I think, that they really kicked off in the UK. They came over from Europe, and a guy called Saunders Duncombe got a bunch of licenses to hire out some sedan chairs. And the great thing about them was they were allowed to go on the pavements, much like scooters. And there's much like scooters. There's really irritated pedestrians. But the rule was that pedestrians had to get out the way, and the men who would be carrying the sedan chairs, and it was usually men, obviously, would just shout, you know, buy

your leave as they approached, or sometimes rude of things, according to some accounts. I thought that it was very polite. I thought a sedan chair would be making its way leisurely to you, and they would say it, you'd pause. These guys were bolting down the street. Yeah. Yeah, that's the thing. If you didn't move, you weren't sort of in a standoff.

You were just mowed over. That's why I think this was the rule, but it was kind of an unwritten rule, I reckon. Right? Because, and the reason it was unwritten was because if you didn't get out of the way, you would get smashed. Yeah. Yeah. They could be quite violent.

I always thought that sedan chairs were pretty much in the way that you might, if you're in London these days, you know, getting a rickshaw in the middle of the night. Like it was just a thing of convenience, which was really nice. But actually, they were really practical. They were particularly practical for people whose legs, you know, had problems, who couldn't walk and so on. And sedan chairs weren't just for the outside. You had indoor sedan chairs, which I just didn't think of.

So you could get, you could get from your room downstairs and have a wash go out. I think it was, it was usually the same sedan chair, right? What they would do is they would change the poles so they would have shorter poles when you were doing the indoor bits and then they would give you longer ones for the outdoor. So they were really popular in Bath in the city of Bath. They were, like Dan said, because you could use them indoors. You could literally be picked up from your bed in your lodgings. You could be carried to the bathwaters, which were regenerative.

You could be put into the waters and then picked back up again and taken back to your bed and put into your bed. And these guys, the chairman, who would take you, they would also strip you and cover you in blankets. So they would take off your nightclothes, put you in blankets, put you in the sedan chair, take you to the baths, put you in and then put you back as you were. That's a good service, isn't it? It's like being a baby.

Yeah. Basically, I'm being a... I just think Uber should bring this in. I don't want. I think workers' rights might have got to a place where we can't have the sedan chair anymore. Yeah. It's a bit like a hover wheel chair, isn't it? Like you're...

Did you think about it? It's like, you know... Hovering no wheels. Just like, you know, an old, like the concept. It's a hovering chair. If you imagine the men who are carrying you aren't there, then it is, isn't it? Imagine they are the wheels, the men of the wheels. They were...

So they were mostly for the higher society, obviously, because you had to pay fares to ride in them. And so they had great fixtures. Like they tended to have hinged roofs, especially as hairstyles got bigger so that people's hair, big hairstyles would fit out on top or headdresses or top hats. I saw a drawing as well, which again, it's done in that style where you kind of wonder, is this being satirical or is this being real? But you can see the hinge on the top of the roof and this giant wig coming out.

Now, obviously, one of the problems is if... What if it's raining or what if there's a light drizzle? You're obviously going to get your wig wet. So the person on behind, in James's position, they have on their back a sort of huge pole that comes up with an umbrella on the top and that then sits over. I think it's a satirical drawing, sadly. But it's kind of makes sense that you would do that, I would say.

Yeah, yeah. I think from the attitudes of the chairman that I can gather, their vibe would be, your hair can bloody well get wet, madam. Have you... So there was a thing as sedan chair sickness. Oh, yeah. So it was a big... Sedan chairs were huge in China too and in Hong Kong as well.

And sea sickness was known as sedan chair sickness because that was the best example they had. I think more people might have experienced sedan chairs than the ocean. No way. So you went out to sea and you suffer from sedan chair sickness. I don't know if they called it that when they were at sea. Oh, I thought you were saying that was what they called sea sickness. I think if you're a salty old sea dog, you're probably still called it sea sickness.

Yeah, but I think most people would have said, oh, I've got a sedan chair sickness because it feels like I've been in a sedan chair if they had motion sickness. If they'd been on the waltzes or whatever, they would think of it as sedan chair sickness. But cures included drinking the urine of young boys, which does seem to crop up quite a lot in ancient cures. Was that in... Would you get a little vial of that in the sedan chair?

For a nice one. It felt like coming on the air. Like when the Uber driver has a bottle of water in the back of her eyes. The classy one. Sedan lux. Yeah, all bringing some earth from your kitchen floor for protection. Well, that was how they used to treat sea sickness, I think we've said before. Right.

So it must have been the urine of young boys for the sedan chair only. OK. Also, taxi drivers get annoyed if you get their cars dirty. So if you bring earth into a car and say similarly with the sedan chair, they used to they were able to charge passengers for any mess that was made. So I think if you dumped a bunch of earth in the chair. Or if you drank some young boys urine and then vomited it back up. But that's presumably fine because they're the ones who introduced the boys

urine into the yeah, just don't spill it. And I really like it how when it got to nighttime, the sedan chair, the price would then double on top of all these other fees that you had. It would double. It kind of makes sense because you needed one extra member of of the vehicle, as it were, which was the the link boy who would be standing in front of the sedan chair with a torch lighting the way like a big old headlight. Just, you know, so cool.

Yeah. And it was I read a thing about that was very dark and jolting in the sedan because there are these just slight gaps of light where the curtains are or whatever you see the torch. And at the end of the journey, the link boy would thrust their flombo into your trumpet shaped extinguisher. How cool is that? Yeah, that was if you paid extra, though, but and those extinguishers, you still see them in houses sometimes, don't you?

I walked past the building yesterday and I saw this weird iron trumpet on the outside and it was for them to stick the torture and extinguish is it? That's great. You ever need to put out a candle in London and you happen to be in the right place. You can do it. It's quite cheesy buildings. It's not. Yes. This was in, you know, Piccadilly or somewhere.

Yeah. If look, if you live in one of those buildings, you can probably afford a torch, so you won't need to put the candle out. The World Record longest journey in a sedan chair. I'm not sure if it's still the World Record, but this was in 1728. It was Princess Amelia, who's the daughter of King George II. And she was carried from London to Bath. In a sedan chair. So far.

It's a long way. She must have gone through so much young boys urine on the way. They have like service stations where you can get some young boys urine. Some drive-throughs and stuff. They it's 172 kilometres and she did it with eight chairmen working in turn and they had a coach that was going alongside. Brilliant. That they would jump in and out of.

Amazing. They would carry her. Who was it? Who did this? Princess Amelia. So an actual princess. Yeah, daughter of George II. Wow. It wouldn't be your average pleb would it? No, no, of course. But what this reminds me of every so often, there's a new story today,

which is like this drunk person got an Uber 200 miles. Basically that was the first thing I thought I was like. But she was really kind of quite unpopular, Princess Amelia. She famously closed Richmond Park to anyone apart from her friends. Bastard. In London. And so you had to get a ticket to go to Richmond Park and you had to get it from Princess Amelia. You couldn't get it from anywhere else.

And so, for instance, there was a guy called Lord Baruch who asked her for a ticket. And he said, can I have a ticket to Richmond Park? And she said, I denied one to the Lord Chancellor. I'm hardly going to give one to you. And there was like a huge sort of right to Rome thing. And there was a guy called John Lewis who took her to court saying, I should be allowed into Richmond Park. And in the end, this was in 1758, he won John Lewis one.

And so they had to put ladders up over the wall so that people could get into Richmond Park. But Princess Amelia made it so that the steps in the ladder were too far that people couldn't get on. So they had to go back to court to get them put in. How was she getting in? She was, you know, she had her gates that she could go into that would guard and stuff like that.

She didn't have a human trebuchet or something. But yeah, John Lewis, who did this, he became like a local celebrity. And people who lived near Richmond Park would have his painting in their houses because he was so famous for getting people into it. Oh, yeah. Cool as that. Yeah, Princess Amelia. And so could we say that without the sedan chair, we might not be able to access Richmond Park today?

Well, it's another one of my talking about someone quite a long way from the actual fact. I'm only talking about her because she did have the record for the longest sedan chair race. Just very quickly on the trip, you said that these guys were jumping out. So was it one was it like passing a baton as in, did she ever touch the ground? We know, was it just one journey? That's a really good point. I would imagine she's a princess, right? Do you reckon it's uncomfortable to be put down and picked up again?

Because if it is, they probably did a past baton pass to try and make it as good as possible. But it's also uncomfortable to to to to walk 170 miles without a piss. So I imagine she would have stopped the bit along the way. There must have been hardly any of them had toilets in inside the sedan chair today. So for that one, you would build that in, wouldn't you? For that long a journey. That's a rough gig for the guy at the back.

Oh, no, what I think in now is this is just so obvious that this must have happened. You get your free vial of young boys urine, neck it to make you feel better, and then you need a piss. Where are you going to go in that vial? And then the next person who uses the taxi, they're not going to get your boys. Yeah, you're right. And though if they get the motion, so it was badly, they'll think, I bet that wasn't young boys urine after all.

Only four stars. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that a woman called Mary Papa Nicolaou once had a smear test every day for 21 years. I thought he's being a hypochondriac. That is, I mean, it's quite something, isn't it? No, she was the wife of Dr. Georgios Papa Nicolaou, who was the guy who invented the pap smear test.

And that's why it's called the pap test because it's named after him. And he needed to do experiments and it's kind of hard to get people to do experiments, and so he got his wife to do it and she unbregrudgingly or maybe a little bit begrudgingly did this for 21 years. Depends on the day, doesn't it? If it's Christmas day, your birthday. Oh, yeah. And so the other thing is that he was a zoologist really.

And he came up with this idea of doing a smear of the vagina of a guinea pig. And he could find out when they were menstruating. And so he was kind of doing that experiment on humans. And everyone's like, yeah, but we kind of know when humans are menstruating. It's a bit dumb. There is no sign. There's the odd sign here and there. But what happened was Mary invited some of her friends to a party. And I don't know how you bring this up in the party,

but as part of the party, they all had a smear test. And then one of her friends was diagnosed with cervical cancer and Georgios Papa Nicolaou, he had the smear and he managed to see that there was something in that smear that pre-saged the fact that she was going to get cervical cancer. And that was basically why we have smear test today. He's so brilliant. What a hero. Like he should be a household name.

Well, she should be as well. Both of them should be. Yeah, the Papa Nicolaou's should be. She just laid it as the only person among the four of us who's had a smear test is genuinely not that difficult. Twenty one years. It's not very pleasant. I understand. It's not it's not that pleasant.

So it's a sort of little what is it a little sort of sort of taking of a few cells? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's something a little speculative. I imagine I really want to know who made the tiny speculative for this guy's. Well, I can tell you that. So he went to he went to a shop and bought a nasal speculum for humans.

So a speculum is something that kind of opens up a gap a little bit. OK. And so he would take the nasal speculum for humans and used it in the vaginas of the guinea pigs. And so what that tells me is that guinea pigs, vagina is almost exactly the same size as a human nostril. Oh, well, that's it's useful knowledge. Probably some it's going to be useful at some point. One day.

I'll wait for this point. Not a pub quiz. The pub quiz as I go to the pub quiz as I said. Oh, my God, I just can't see the. So I want to desperately try. But we have a lot of listeners. There's like how many people listening to this show one day? Just little I can maybe you're going

buying some nose plugs, right? Yes, you're a swimmer and you go to the nose plug shop and they say you're not allowed to put them in your nose before you buy them. And you're like, luckily, I have a guinea pig. So I can test the size of the guinea pig instead of testing it on myself. And that's the loophole in the chemist rule. We don't have any rule that says you can't put them in a guinea pig vagina.

Oh, I've seen it more as like someone's being held captive by an eccentric billionaire and they're like, I'm about to kill you unless you can answer this impossible question. That's quite good. I'll be. I've got another one. So you're being held captive by this guy and he wants to put some poison in your nose.

And so what you do is, oh, no, I need to put my hockey mask on first and you put your hockey mask on. He begrudgingly says, well, that's I understand. But then when you've got your mask on, you put a guinea pig where he thinks your nose is. And so he puts the poison in the guinea pig's vagina instead of your nose because he thinks it's your nose. Yeah, that's quite good.

Yeah. And anyway, look. God. Papua Nicola. Yeah. Start to Georgia as the husband, he started working on the guinea pigs during the First World War. I think it was about 1916, maybe within a year or two either side,

because that was the length of the war. But it took him so long. He published his landmark work on it during the Second World War. It was 1943 that the work was published. And that was with a brilliantly named fellow scientist called Herbert Trout. Just on very quickly on Trout, Herbert Trout, because I know you want to know this. I read his obituary and he loved fishing.

Brilliant. Lovely. Good on you. Very good. What is truly amazing about this, though, is one article that I read is that in the early 1900s, cervical cancer was the number one cancer killer in women in the USA. And now it's basically the most preventable cancer up there.

I mean, it's extraordinary what this guy's discovery, along with his wife's vagina did. Another good name in the history of Smith's is the sort of simultaneous inventor. In fact, Oral Babes, which is also stop it. Yeah, that's not real. How do you actually pronounce it, Anna? All right, fine. I think you probably say Oral Babes.

It's Oral Babesh. Oral Babesh is the name of the person who was Romanian, I think. And he also was doing experiments around the same time and sort of came up with a slightly different twist on taking a cervical smear test at the same time. Right. And yeah. And in fact, in Romania, it's called the method of Babesh of Papa Nicolaou. So they give him joint credit for it.

He was, by the way, Babesh. He worked with Robert Bunsen of Bunsen burner fame. Stop. He was his pupil. That's I thought about hundreds of years old. I thought they were back over a hundred years old. OK, that is really cool. It's so cool.

Got so many great names being chucked around. I know. In 2009, Papa Nicolaou, Georgios, again, was named the second greatest Greek of all time in a national poll in Greece. I mean, that's of all the countries. That's a biggy Greece, isn't it? It's 100 percent is because they got a lot of pedigree in there. He was beaten by one man only.

Was it that guy who did? Anassas. Not anassas. Who's that guy who did all the politics and the economics and stuff when they had a... It's like Socrates. Yeah, was it him? No.

I think it should be Anas, but I think it's Socrates. It's basically under the grade. Oh. The only Greek voted greater than George Papa Nicolaou. What did the Macedonians think of that vote? I don't know. I really love the speculum. As...

Said no woman ever. As a historical object. I don't like it too near me. But it's got a very interesting history. So it was invented by this chap called James Sims. So it was actually a very unsavory character in pretty much every way. Wow. At the time, people...

Doctors were totally discouraged from looking at women's private parts. Gynecologists would be told not to look at the affected area. And they'd be, you know, it was... They were instructed to sort of blindly fumble around under a lady's skirt and sort of have a little bit of a feel. And I think there was even a textbook that suggested either the doctors stare determinedly out into the middle of space or look the person in the eye consistently as you're doing it.

Which is better. Which is worse. But yeah, he... He didn't like doing it any more than any other of these male doctors at the time. And it was sort of as very unseemly. But he did say one time this poor girl came to him with a fissure, a really bad fissure. And he said, this girl was in such a condition that I was obliged to find out

what was the matter with her. And so we started investigating ways to see into the vagina. And he tried a bent handle of a gravy spoon first. I don't know if it was clean before it was eaten off again. Not clear on the details there. But it was really controversial, even after he came up with a speculum. Lots of people refused to use it in case it corrupted people, in case women got very proud.

In case it was just too damn sexy. It was exactly that. And the thing about Sims is really controversial, is that he did a lot of experiments on African-American enslaved women, right? And there was a question about how much consent he got. And to such an extent that his statue was removed from Central Park in 2018. Was it? Yeah, it was.

So, I mean, I think he's been roundly cancelled now, Mr. Sims. Yeah, yeah, he's not a he's not a good guy. Another person famous in the history of Smirtes is Anna Marion Hilliard. She was a Canadian physician. And the PAP test was invented by this Greek guy. But actually, she invented the way that they do it in modern days, because she made it much more simple and she made it in a way that any gynecologist or family doctor could do it

without having to have loads of extra training. So she's really, really important in this story. As well as being a physician, she was a midwife. She was one of the best women's hockey players in Canada in her day. And there was a brilliant interview with her and they asked her about her life as a gynecologist. And she said that sometimes women would come up to her six years after their wedding day and she would have to inform them.

But the reason that they still haven't had any babies is that they are still virgins. Whoa. Yeah. This was in the 50s. This interview was in 1957. OK. They were like, why have I not had a baby yet? And they're like, well, let me tell you something about life. That's leaving it too late for the birds and the bees chat, isn't it? Yeah, it's also very fitting that she played hockey

because in terms of gynecological lessons, I was taught to apply condoms by putting them on hockey sticks by my English teacher. Yeah, maybe that was a subtle nod of my English teachers to this. Why is your English teacher telling you to do this? It comes up in middle marks, do you remember this? Dorothea has to pop it on a hockey stick. Yeah, on Calzobon, it would be quite difficult because it's very difficult now. I thought, oh, no, I'm thinking of ice hockey sticks.

A hockey stick? Which end is the hockey stick? I mean, isn't the hockey stick 180 degrees curved at the end? Yeah, and the old point being... The gravy spoon. That's what we call it. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that ships can squat to get under bridges. It's really cool.

Pop a squat and get under bridges. But they don't have any legs. They don't have any legs. Obvious response. No, they can't. What are you talking about? So this is a pretty amazing thing. Basically, what they do in order to achieve the squat is they make the ship go faster. And when you move a ship faster, there's obviously a lot more water passing faster.

And when it passes faster, particularly underneath the boat, the pressure decreases. And so the ship sinks further down into it, sort of gets sucked to the bottom. And that's how they achieve it. And they work out the measurements. They work out how much they need to go down. And that's the speed to which they move in order to gain that extra distance from a bridge. And we've seen it happen a few times.

I mean, it's pretty crazy. There's a one of the biggest cruise ships in the world. It's called the Oasis of the Seas. And it needed to do this. It needed to get under a bridge that connects the Danish islands of Zeeland and Sprogo. So it couldn't get under at the height that it was at. And they did a few things like they had to collapse the tall standing funnels. Can you do that? Yeah, yeah.

Some ships are built to do that specifically for bridges. Yeah, I mean, but normally those ships are in bottles that can do that. On this case, this this particular ship could the Oasis of the Seas. But it still wasn't enough. So they needed to approach the bridge at 20 knots. So they did that. And if you get it wrong, then that's it. You're going really fast.

You're going really fast into a bridge. But it managed to do it and it made clearance by a foot. So they must have, I mean, imagine the maths for that. Working out that this is exactly the right speed. That's a lot of pressure, isn't it? Yeah, it'd be funny to be the ship's mathematician just hearing this enormous crunch above deck and looking at your notes and going. Oh, carry the one.

Oh, yeah, that bridge is called the Great Belt Bridge, right? In Denmark. And I checked out whether it has been hit in the past. It's been hit once since it was opened, and that was by Karen Danielson. Funny name for a ship. It's that's the name of the ship. You're joking. No, the every Karen Danielson crashed into it in 2005.

And because you couldn't get any traffic across, this is one of the main bridges from one of the most populous parts of Denmark to the rest of it, basically cut the whole of Denmark into two and no one could get on either side. Karen Danielson, as far as I can tell, must be named after Karen Danielson, who's a psychoanalyst because I can't find any other Karen Danielsons. She might be better known to you as Karen Horney.

I don't know. Karen Horney. Green Bells. No, she's a really, really famous psychoanalyst who is like a feminist Freudian. And Freud has the theory of penis envy, right? That women are neurotic because they want to have penises and stuff like that. She invented something called womb envy in men.

And she says that this is just as common, if not more common in men and men are neurotic because they're envious of women's ability to bear children. And whereas women fulfill their society simply by being here, men have to achieve their manhood by succeeding in life. So that's Karen Horney. That's that's, well, speaking of invention, something I've always wanted to invent the name for, the opposite of nominative determinism. She's Horney, and so she's gone in the opposite direction.

She denies all the horniness that old Freud put forward. Yeah, according to Wikipedia, Horney was bewildered by psychiatrist's tendency to place so much emphasis on the male sexual organ crowns. What a good reversal would be for nominative determinism. You could call it nominative determinism. Yes. So it's putting things off. I watched that to you a while ago.

Just sorry. I watched that idea to you a while ago. You did. And as I said, I thought, yeah, this bell went ding-a-ling of plagiarism alert, plagiarism alert. But I thought ignore the bell because it was quiet enough that I thought. What are the odds? What are the odds that plagiarising someone in this room? I'm really looking forward to your court case eventually,

where when when the accused stands up and explains what you've done, you just immediately go, oh, yeah, no, you're right. I did that by as I was stealing that loaf of bread and the little bell went off. I thought they must have been a boy wizard called Harry. OK, well, can we go back to shipping? Yeah, let's have a ship fact. Oh, OK, so you want to hear a cool sinking ship fact? This is something I probably said three years ago.

But something that someone else said three years ago. There are ships called. I'm so paranoid now. Semi submersible ships. They're called heavy lift ships as well. OK, right. Any bells going off? No. Great. Thank you. What they what they do is they they're designed to carry other ships or they're designed to carry oil rigs or they're designed to, you know,

enormously heavy things, things that weigh tens of thousands of tons. And what they do is they're these weird, mad, huge platforms with with towers at the corners. They they they float along. They then take on huge amounts of water as ballast. Millions and millions and millions of litres and they sink. The ship sinks and then the oil rig or the other ship or whatever floats over the top. Wow. And then there's the submersible ship

just jettisons all the ballast it took on and Bob's back up, bringing the thing with it. Wow. It's nice. It's you know, it's insane. It's absolutely insane. And they some of them have feet to clamp onto the key as they're being loaded. So some ships have legs. They're just nuts.

Did you guys ever read about the Sean O'Casey bridge in Dublin? Sean O'Casey. It was a bridge. Karen Danielson, Sean O'Casey. We just run out of names. I actually didn't look up who Sean was. I should have. It's a bridge that, you know, would open in the middle.

But not long after they opened it, they lost the remote control that opened the bridge and they couldn't find it for four years, four years. It didn't open. Well, they should start in a traffic jam. The backup getting worse and worse. Some pilot needed to get in for dinner. And they found it.

They know they had to just get a new remote. Why didn't they do that after three years? It's a slightly confusing story because from what I read, the cost wasn't even that great. It was only like compared with the cost of a bridge or the shipping life of a nation. Exactly. I sometimes do that.

You know, when you've lost, you know, you've lost your cheap headphones. I will find them. I know they're in my room somewhere. It's all in one small lounge that they've lost this remote control for the bridge. They just need to look in the sofa one more time and it will be there. Yeah.

My God. In 2020, there was a Donald Trump boat parade on Lake Travis, which was in the Colorado River. There were several hundred boats, all, you know, pro-Trump. They had flags and they were just having a great day out doing it. Like we support Donald Trump, whatever. Unfortunately, they generated massive waves and five of them sank to the bottom of this lake.

And it was a completely calm day. That's the thing. And this is due to a really bizarre shipping effect. So basically, there were boats with planing hulls, which as far as I understand it is above a certain speed, the top rises up a bit and the boat is effectively riding its own bow wave. The problem is that these boats, if they all go at the same speed, they kind of act on each other and the waves that they're generating

at 10 miles an hour, which was the speed they had all decided to go at, was the worst possible speed to go at. And so they created this enormous set of waves, which they created their own storm, basically. That's incredible. I know, I know. If they'd gone at five, it would have been fine. If they'd gone at 20, it would have been fine.

Or if like some had gone at five and some had gone at 10 and some had gone at 12. Yeah, exactly, yeah. But because it was this parade, don't you think? It's quite impressive. If it had been intentional, that could be a useful naval military tactic. Yeah. Better than the old sedans, yeah. How are we going to sink our own navy?

What's the tactic here? You need a mole. You need a mole. Yeah. You need to infiltrate and get in your navy, don't you? Yeah. I was actually reading a bit more about the effect that you were talking about at the start. Yeah.

And so there are a few effects that ships can pull off. Another one is the bank effect. This isn't actually a good thing, but it's a very similar mechanism that Dan was talking about. So as you said, the ship goes faster and faster, and the water in front of it is displaced, as we know, so you get that wave. And that creates a decrease in pressure underneath the ship, and that's called Bernoulli's theorem. But also, it can create a decrease in pressure in the water around a ship's side.

So if a ship goes too fast, and then it turns a tiny bit accidentally or something, then the pressure will be decreased, and so the ship will move to fill up that space of, you know, decreased pressure, gets sucked in. And that means as soon as you turn a corner, you can suddenly get sucked up onto a bank. And actually, it's posited that, you know, the ever-given that got stranded in the sewers can out. Oh, yeah. Last year, was it? That that may have been what happened there.

Just very quickly, I was reading an article in Hakka, Hakka magazine? Hakka magazine, my favourite magazine. Your favourite magazine? Yeah, and it's favourite mag. But it was just an article about ships at sea and all the interesting methods that ships use for various different safety reasons, and one of which is if you look at a photo of a ship at sea, next time you see a photo, have a look out for some people standing on deck, sort of on lookout,

and that's two people, sometimes one, sometimes more, they're looking out for pirates, because that's a big problem when you're out at sea. Sure. But the thing is, is that they're not real people. These ships have dummies that look like people, who they just place on the side. Scarecrows. Basically, scarecrows. Just for pirates.

But for pirates, yeah. Very cool. That was, I think it was in that article as well, that it said about, there was a passing comment about the metal disks that you see when big ships are moored, and next time you see a big ship moored, then you'll see that the ropes obviously tied around the mooring pole, and then there's often a really big metal disk. It looks like a giant CD that the ropes woven through. In fact, I think that almost always is with big boats.

And if it's not down by the mooring, it's up against the side of the ship. And do you know what that is for? No. No, so like the big CD that you get in taxis sometimes, is apparently they think that it will stop speed cameras from being able to catch you. It's not that, but I did not know that. Really? I was told that by a taxi driver once.

I don't know. That's right. Okay. Oh, it doesn't work. That one made me quite anxious in that taxi as he was going at 85 miles an hour. 20. So I got the CD. Calm yourself down.

Drink some of that young boys' urine. We'll be there in a minute. Come on. So it's not that. It's not that. It's not that. Some safety thing. It's a rat stopper.

Oh, really? That was a huge problem on ships. Big problem in harbours. Rat can't run up that rope if you've got a big CD in the way. Brilliant. It's amazing. That article just talks about all the things on the side of a ship. And I've never stopped to think about, well, I haven't really looked at the side of ships

too much in my time. But it's basically covered in graffiti for the various things that you need to know. So there'll be signs that will show you how far the ship can dip as a result of the weight that it's carrying. So here are the certain lines that you need to be aware of. And the lines, there are different lines because if you're going to be in salt water versus fresh water versus sort of like tropical water as well. Is that a plimsoil line or something?

That's exactly it. The plimsoil. Samuel plimsoil. And then there's lines to show you that sometimes boats have this little protrusion at the bottom of the ship at the front, which you would never see. So when tugboats are coming out to get it, there's a little symbol. It looks like a five that's missing the top that says, watch out because you might smack into something underwater.

I think that's to stop the waves from, is it to help it aerodynamically or something? Yes, it is. It's to break the waves somehow. And it's pretty amazing that these giant ships are basically guided when they come into shore if they don't have a pilot doing the various very, very careful turning. Basically tugboats, just tiny little boats because they can't turn it. But those little things are able to shift an entire ship. And a maritime pilot, which I always think is quite cool that you have the pilots who

wait in the harbors or at difficult channels like the Suez. And these are the real pros who just know that very specific area of water and they leap on the boat and tell you how to do it. I saw that in action in Sydney at the Sydney Harbour. So I was having a drink outside the Opera House and there was a cruise ship that was going out. And that's a very hard turn that it needs to make by the bridge. So they just have a pilot come on, get it out and then he gets in a dinghy or a helicopter

and just gets off the boat again. That's it. It's amazing. Yeah. Not dissimilar to airline pilots, right? They take off and land, but then when they're cruising. And then they jump off in the middle of the boat. They get a helicopter off the plane at night there.

One more thing about boats and bridges from me and that is about the Kinsey Street Bridge in Chicago. This is a bridge going over a river and the bridge is kind of, it's mesh on the bottom. So it's to kind of make it easier to clean. If anything falls onto the road, it's just going to go straight down. Right. You know what I mean? It's like a mesh.

Because when he said mesh, I was thinking of a sieve and they're the hardest things to clean. But absolutely right. That's probably what's differently in this instance. Yeah. The holes are big enough that things can pass through like a sieve. You're not going to get little bits of rice stuck in the culvert. That's not the main traffic on the road.

It's just loose rice. Anyway. So there's a band called the Dave Matthews Band. Yeah. Yeah. You know, right? And they were gigging and the guy who was driving their bus decided that he was going to dump all of their human waste as he drove over the Kinsey Street Bridge because he felt

well it's a mesh that'll just pass straight through, right? So he did that. He was in 2004. Unfortunately, at the same time as he did this, a tourist boat was going underneath him. Open top? Open top. Oh my God.

And that incident led to more than $300,000 in settlements, donations and fines. Wow. Really? Oh my God. And the Dave Matthews Band always now has agreed to keep a log of whenever it empties its septic tanks. Keep a log, eh? Yeah.

Logs feel like they were the problem in the first place. I mean, that's amazing. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Andy. My fact is that the art of wooden lacrosse stick making is extinct in the UK. Oh no. Is that global warming? I've said it in a cheery way. It was actually a very sad fact, obviously, because you can't get a wooden lacrosse stick

in the UK anymore. Well, you can import one. Well, you can import one. You can buy an old one. You can... We've just done a whole section on massive ships. Do you know what they use massive ships for? It's an importing.

Lacrosse stick. This is a fact about... Basically, I was on the website of the Heritage Crafts Organization, which they're the advocates for traditional crafts and they keep this amazing watch list of traditional crafts which are either fine, you know, sustainable or slightly endangered or critically endangered or extinct. Wooden lacrosse stick making went extinct. In 2014, there's a phone called Hatter's Lease, which is the UK's main lacrosse stick manufacturer.

But their last wooden stick maker retired in 2014. He was called Tom Beckett. Oh, Thomas Beckett. Probably not. Well, no one rid me of this troublesome lacrosse stick maker. Yes, how did his life end, actually? He wasn't murdered on the steps of a... He's still alive.

He's still alive. Tom Beckett. He still goes for a curry every year with the rest of the people at Hatter's Lease. Does he? Yeah. James, you've been in touch with them. I have. What a blindingly good guess.

I have. I was asking them why they have a stick called the Victoria Cross. But Victoria was with a K and it's the best stick that they ever made. And I asked them why they call it the Victoria Cross and why it has a K. And neither Tom nor David Hay, who's the head of sales, knew. Because it's all plastic these days. That's the sad thing. Is it?

The lacrosse sticks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they're lighter and they're more efficient. Well, one reason is because they yield on impact because it's quite a violent spot lacrosse. And so if you hit someone across the head with a lacrosse stick, which is wooden, they're going to do a lot of damage. Yeah. But the carbon fiber ones bounce right off.

Yeah. It's all gone soft these days, hasn't it? You can't even beat people over the head with a stick anymore. Well, did you hear? I mean, that is an important thing. There was a guy in America at Wheaton College. Sorry, Wheaton College. Where were you educated?

Wheaton, Eaton College. Eaton College. Really? Yeah, Wheaton College. It's the equivalent. It's twinned. It's twinned with Eaton. He was 19 at the time called Alex Chu.

It's the French Eaton, isn't it? He was up until this point playing lacrosse his entire school life for the school teams. And then he became a freshman at Wheaton College. And was told he couldn't play anymore because his head was too big for any of the helmets. They just didn't make helmets big enough for this guy's head. I think what he used to do was the reason he was allowed to play before was that he pieced together parts of two different helmets. He created a bigger helmet for his massive head.

Doesn't sound very safe. It's not very safe. You know, if you get two cars and weld them together, that's really unsafe, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. So he didn't get to play. Wait, sorry. Are the helmet makers of Massachusetts also extinct? Because they're not available to make him...

I can't understand what the... No one built him a bigger helmet. He couldn't play. He played, I think, one game that season. And I think that might have been a mistake. You know what? He could have played women's lacrosse because they don't wear helmets in women's lacrosse. Why not?

Because it's almost a completely different game. Yeah, it's so weird. Yeah. They're different sports. Well, so they say, I actually think they're really similar. But if you ask people who play lacrosse of either type, they say they're really different sports, don't they? Yeah. And they don't really do the body contact so much in women's sports.

So the men's lacrosse is incredibly violent. Basically, you can essentially just attack someone with a large stick. As long as it's not deemed to be sort of like unduly, really intentionally aggressive, I think. Whereas in women's, you can stick people. What do they call it? Stick people. Slashing and fucking. Stick check.

In women's, you can stick check. So you can hit their stick with your stick. Oh. You can't really bash them around the face. Could you hit their fingers holding the stick with your stick? I think you can do that. Oh, yeah. And I should say in men's, actually, you can't bash them around the face.

But the torso, free for all. Golly. Really interesting. And it's all down to a woman called Rosabelle Sinclair. And what happened was, so lacrosse is an old Native American sport. They played it in America, but it was in the early 20th century. Girls weren't really allowed to play lacrosse. And so it was an all-boy sport pretty much.

They came over to the UK and had an exhibition in front of Queen Victoria. So this is a bit earlier. And Queen Victoria said it would be a great game for girls to play in public schools. And so they started playing it in public schools. And so you had this one spot in the UK, which was all girls playing in school. And you have this one spot in America, which was all boys playing. And they've kind of evolved quite differently. And then Rosabelle Sinclair took the girls' game over to America,

but she decided she was going to stick to the girls' rules that they had in the UK. And so that's why now in America, it's almost like netball and basketball. Not quite, but they're quite different sports. Right. That makes sense. And I'd love to see a team of traditional women's lacrosse players play the men's, because just FYI, if you're an American listener, lacrosse in the UK is pretty much, I think, reserved for...

Well, this is an anecdote. This is just based on my own life experience. But in my own life experience, lacrosse is basically reserved for very posh school girls. And in America, it seems to be reserved for extremely hardcore, large men. Yeah. I was talking to someone the other day, a friend of mine who played a little bit of lacrosse, and she said it is quite violent still, the women's skill. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's pretty primal. That was pretty fun. So the kind of aggression of it, I think, kind of makes sense for the origins of it. So it was played in the 1500s. Native Americans did it as a way of kind of battling between local tribes, didn't they? They sort of... They would have games that would last for days, and the teams could be anything from five players to over 100 players.

And it was... You set up with your four mates. Oh, no. They've gone for the opposite, actually, in many ways. But yeah, that's kind of the origins of it, isn't it? Yeah, there's one claim on the World Lacrosse Federation website, which says that sometimes games can involve up to 100,000 players. What?

Stop it. It's so clearly bollocks, isn't it? But that's what it claims in there, the authority. That is amazing. It would certainly come and have over 1,000 people. 100,000. And was it war? Or was it...

Were they fighting? Well, we don't... That's still a big war. It is. On one side, you've got lacrosse players coming, sedentary, as are the other. That's the type trouble. It was actually one team of five, and then another team of 99,995. And it was a draw.

It was a draw in the end. Amazing. That's mental. Wow. But it was like it would be over vast distances, so Native Americans would be, you know, running between states practically, and people subbing in and out quite a lot, I think, over many days. It is the only sport that recognizes Native Americans and First Nations people as their own individual nations.

So they will, you know, in international games, you would enter as an individual nation, like the Mohawk Nation. And in fact, that caused a real problem. They travel on their own passports. So I think the Iroquois lacrosse team travels on Iroquois passports. Iroquois and Haudenosaunee, by the way, are sort of synonymous, except they call themselves Haudenosaunee. But, yeah, the passports tend to be recognized.

There was a bit of an issue in 2010 when Britain denied entry to the Iroquois team because they didn't accept their passports. They wanted them to have U.S. passports, and they said, well, we don't, we don't consider ourselves American. They didn't play. Lacrosse might come back, by the way, to the Olympics. It is coming back. Yeah, because it's such a growing sport, isn't it?

So 2018, they were given the status of receiving funds, which meant that they could sort of, like, start showing that it was possible. And now an official, whatever the official sport that you need to be in order to get to the Olympics, they are now that. So they'll be there for the 2028? Yeah, hopefully. Really? Yeah.

To speaking of, this is just something I read today about hockey. So it must be the same with Lacrosse. And that is that if you're a sports person in Canada, you're doing your sport, you're getting really sweaty, all your gear, your mitts, and your shirt and everything, your underwear gets really, really smelly. But you can't put it outside to air, right? Because it's so cold. Okay.

So traditionally, you find that these people have really, really smelly, like clothes and kit and stuff like that. And so they invented this thing. I can't remember what it's called, but it's like a big sort of trunk and you put your kit in and it fires UV light into the trunk. And then that makes ozone and the ozone kills all of the bacteria. And when the bacteria is died, it means it can't make all the smells. And so you, it kind of gets rid of all the smell of your kit.

And this is the amazing thing. What they hope in the future is they might be able to scale this up to the size of a room. And so you would come in after your game of hockey or lacrosse or whatever, you'd hang up your stuff, you'd go out of the room, close the door. And when the last person closed the door, the whole place gets filled with UV light and ozone. And then when you come back in, it's all clean and not salient.

Isn't that amazing? So might we have these instead of bathrooms in the future instead of a shower? Oh my God. You know what I thought, because I read this article and what I thought is it could be useful for putting your underwear in, right? You know, like if you have a linen basket or something, get changed at night, take your underwear off, put it in the basket next morning, take it out again. It's fine.

Brilliant. You don't need clothes anymore, basically. You don't need more than one of everything. Just one set of clothes for the rest of your life and one set of night clothes if you want them. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can also put your clothes on a washing machine and a dryer. Yeah, but that's two things.

It's a combined system. You need loads of water. Can't do it at night because it upsets your neighbors. I do it literally every night. Oh my God. What? Put your washing machine on? Yeah.

Oh my God. It's psycho. It's all right. He lives in a cottage on the top of the mountain. In the moors, yeah. What you can also do is take your clothes to a tanning salon, presumably, and drop them off and ask them to book in a session. Book a bed.

Book a bed and you come and you take all your clothes off and they go, well, if you'd like to get in, you say, no, no, no, here you go. You've got to make the chair naked next to it. I'm going to climb into a washing machine now. You've got to make sure all of the employees know that that's happening because they don't want to open a sunbed just seeing the missing body. Oh my God. It's happened again.

She's melted. Can we talk about some extinct crafts? Sure. So I spent quite a while on the Heritage Crafts website, Patron, Prince Charles, obviously. So I thought I'd do a little quiz for you. Okay. Right. Is this craft endangered?

Currently viable or extinct? Just before we start, you sent us the link of this list. We all have a bit of an advantage. We might still do badly. Absolutely. I've got it literally open in front of you. I'll close it. I'll close it.

I never bothered to read the sources you sent around. Thank you. So I'm coming to this knife. All right. Orary making. Orary. So an orary is like the solar system, right? Exactly.

It's a model of the solar system. Oh, that's fine. That's fine. Because, yeah, it's in every kid's toy shop. You've got to make them for kids. I'm with Dan, then. He has inside a knowledge here. Okay.

But you're saying viable. I'm saying, yeah. Okay. Props. Probably 200 of them. In North London alone. There are 100,000, actually. They all pale across.

No, it's critically endangered as one full-time professional orary maker in the UK. Well, he's doing a damn good job. Once you're seeing toy shops, Dan, I'm not sure I'm made by the real handmade heritage. Mechanical. Mechanical. Mr Fisher, he's the last one. Timothy Staines and his father, Derek, who was the previous full-timer. They make six to ten of these per year.

Timothy Staines, by the way, is a sentence name. Oh, so it is. Welcome to the club, Timothy. Rake making. Is Oral Babes a sentence? No, it isn't. Sorry. What were you saying?

Rake making. Rake making, yeah. I think, yeah, everyone needs a rake, don't they? If you are an implement, not a bit of a slimy, sleazy lab about town, OK. Then there's loads of them. Yeah, loads of them. I reckon there are at least five. It's endangered.

Yeah, there are only about 5,000 made per year. There are specific kinds of rake, not just normal gullible. There's one more. Rocking horse manufacturer. Viable. Extinct. Yeah, viable. It's viable.

There is a guild of rocking horse makers, which has 2,000 members. The only qualification is you have to have made a rocking horse, which is fair enough, to be a member of the guild. You don't have to have made it in the traditional age-old sculpting message. I imagine there are some barriers to entry about what qualifies as a rocking horse. You can't just make any old shit and claim your guild membership. No, you have to. OK.

Yeah, but I don't know exactly what the criteria are. Yeah. Level of rock or whatever. I read this incredible article. Did any of you read it? It's called Raiders of the Lost Crafts. It was in The Independent in 2016. No.

Raiders of the Lost Crafts, and it was written by a woman called Amalia Ildner. She talked about, so, pole-leathed woodturning, which is, you know, when a crockery used to be wooden. Why didn't they add wooden crockery? And most people would, because it was just the most available substance. So back in Tudor Times, for instance. It's probably not... I thought crockery was like the noise it made.

God, that is probably like blockery or something. Blockery, yeah. Yeah. Woodery. I mean, blockery is a joke. Woodery is just... It's not. It's not.

Can't wait to hear Andy make that joke again in three weeks' time. I'll tell you what. When I tell it, you'll laugh. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland. Andy. At Shriverland. James. Bit weird, but James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email our podcast at qi.com.

Yep. Well, you can go to our group account, which is at Andrew Hunter M4. You can go to our website. No such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. There's also a link to the upcoming tour dates that we're doing later this year. Do check them out and see if we're coming to a place near you. Otherwise, you can listen to us again next week on this channel, on this podcast.

We'll see you then. Goodbye. Bye.