No Such Thing As A Fish - 429: No Such Thing As Newsbite

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss magnificent moustaches, mating moles and Miniscule Maltese Mothercare.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of no such thing as a fish. It is the super long bank holiday for the Queen's Jubilee and so We have decided that we are going to take a weekend off and instead of this week You're gonna get another one of my Compilations from all the best bits from the last year or so of fish Which didn't make it into the final show because they were too silly because they've got the facts wrong or just basically because there wasn't enough space Since it's the Queen's Jubilee I can guarantee that for once this compilation doesn't contain anything libelous to the British royal family

But I can't guarantee it won't for the next one So you better make the most of this your royal highness if you're listening anyway Just one more quick thing before we start this week's show and that is that we have a couple of live dates coming up They will be in Inverness Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Cardiff They are postponed gigs from earlier in the year that will be happening towards the end of August and the start of September We would love to see you there if you live in any of those places Then get your tickets fast if you don't live in any of those places But you can get to those places then get the tickets as well because it's gonna be a whole lot of fun in loads of facts

Loads of silliness and the best way to get your tickets is to go to qi.com fish events Anyway, hope you enjoyed this week's show and what else is there to say but on with the podcast Mike Tess from Dennis. Hello. Hello Mike Tess from Harkin. Hello. Hello. Hello Mike Tess from Andy. Hello. Hello. Hello. What an awesome chat we're having. Hello. Hello. Hello Yeah, he's been trying to think of puns based on tv shows and dogs heal or no heal the bark first Oh, yeah. Oh bark first. Bark first is a good. Yeah. Yeah I'm trying to do something with one of the big news like news. Nice. All right. You just right. Come on news bite very nice

All right, we're good. Are we recording ready? We're recording Hello And welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish a weekly podcast coming to you from the qi offices in Covern Garden My name is dan shriver. I am sitting here with andrew hunter murray james harkin and anna tashinsky And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days And In a particular order here we go starting with fact number one that is barken One thing I found on allen withy's page

Is a thing that he thinks might be the first ever beard and mustache show And this was in 1873 Yeah, members of the public came to watch bearded men stand on a stage and have their beards judged um Yeah, so this was set up by a guy called william holland and it happened in london It had quite a bit of um momentum behind it journalists who couldn't make it to the day because they were busy Were writing in trying to influence the judges saying a beard has to be like this and it you know Giving opinion pieces about who a winner should be

So they thought it was going to be massive and it really really wasn't it was um barely attended They thought they were going to have 30 entrants to it including mr. Charles chaplain who sent in fragments of his beard because he couldn't physically be there Um, it's definitely not what chris. Did charlie chaplain have a beard? Exactly he says in brackets in his article But unlikely to be that charles chaplain and I agree because this happened 16 years before chaplain was born Um, okay, so you couldn't even enter the beautiful baby competition Should we go on to some more steady ground and start talking about poos?

as it feels like That's more kind of our direction usually All right brings on to solid ground. Can I just say it's ground. Yeah, can I can I say that um the Some time today, uh, I got a text from dan being like just heads up These are all the facts on copper lights. We've already covered Why is this bloody podcast? Well, it's literally they've got a massive excel list of all the copper light facts That wasn't on any of the other facts not on the you know, media air heart

Quite impressive. It was so right. Yeah, that was pretty outrageous that we've never mentioned immediate air heart before But we have mentioned copper lights 50 different times. Yeah I think they they come out of the tunnels to mate. Don't they moles? I think that's one weird thing about them Um, so they because you can't really have sex inside a tiny little tunnel So you have to come outside. So you could say they're mounting out of the molehill Couldn't you? Yes. Yes Why wouldn't why have they not built a big sex dungeon in the mole burrows? I think I've got the birth room

I think you missed my pun just there. They're mount mounting out of the molehill. Did you that's why they haven't built it? Yes, so that we can make Very big on comedy fans Um, Torval and Dean were um Famous are Who are they and I know their name? I know they skate but in what context do they skate? Were they professionals or are they an entertainment thing? Yeah, the gold medal at the Sarajevo Olympics, whatever that was Jane Jane Torval and Christopher D And for Britain or for Britain? Yeah, that's basically why they're really really big deal here

Probably international listeners are thinking who the hella Torval and Dean but guys, they're a huge deal here Uh, because yeah, they everyone loved them. They won the winter olympics in the 80s and I always thought they were a husband and wife and No, um, um, um, uh cousin's father and daughter Brothers You've got it. Uh, no, I think the detective and villain It's none of the above it's nothing it's owner and pet. No, it's nothing It's they were just friends and they've snogged once at the back of a bus when they were 14 before they were even partners

And then that was the end and they were just really great friends But they had to spend so much of their lives together So they both say their spouses took it took a lot to persuade them that this was okay And they I think just it was only shortly before they won gold that they gave up their jobs I think he was a policeman and she was a worked in insurance. So he was a detective He said when they got it they I think when they won when they won I think it was one of the most watched tv programs ever in britain. It was massive And dean said afterwards or said in an interview since that the moment that he won it

And and they won it and breaking all of these records So they got perfect scores throughout that which no one had ever got before And he said nothing had ever affected him so much in his life And then he specifically said sure having children is a life-changing event But this was the crowning moment and I wonder why his partner thinks And do you know who the first europeans I should say to climb Kilimanjaro were No So they were called mea and perchella and they climbed it in 1889

But to celebrate the 100 year celebration they decided Who this is the organizing committee. It just says in my notes. I don't know who that is but they decided to Award posthumous certificates to the african porters who helped them to get to the top So obviously they didn't go by themselves So they went to this village called morangu, which is near the bottom of the mountain And they asked the locals, you know, do you know who did this and they went? Oh, this guy did it And there's a guy called yohani kenyala lau Who apparently had taken these guys to the top 100 years earlier when he was 18 years old

Oh no So he was given the certificate despite the fact that if he was that person he would be the oldest man who ever lived And he continued to live for another seven years Which means that if this was the guy he died at the age of 125 Which would make him at the oldest person male or female to have ever lived by three years. Wow. I believe it It's possible. Yeah I mean gosh that clean mountain air really is good for you The other option is he was nine years old when he went up and was just under the oldest person ever

But no, right. We're probably a misrememberance It sounds like a lie There was a baby born at an irish petrol station this year. It was in kildare and um, it was awarded free petrol for a year The baby was well I guess That's great. Yeah, so it wasn't like, you know, sometimes people get christening presents of a case of champagne And you know, they can't enjoy it for 18 years. It's not one of those It's been kept in the cellar for when the baby turned 17

You have to do maximum driving these parents have to be driving as much as they possibly can in the area of the service station Right, I'm going to tell you a sort of similar fact Which none of you are going to care about or have any interest in whatsoever But I guarantee you there's a slither of audience that might care There was a massive show that came out on netflix Last year called selling sunset huge show on netflix and it has a big following and it's all about real estate agents in america And they're all sort of very beautiful Hollywood characters in it, right? They all have really odd names like one's called a manza

I just haven't heard a manza before not Amanda a manza And then there's a lady called cruchel, right? Again, very weird name Turns out the reason cruchel is called that is because her mum went into labor at a shell petrol station And she was delivered there by a member of staff called chris So she became cruchel now means nothing to you three here I'm telling you it's just blown the minds of about six people Had a really embarrassing thing when I was staying in Sussex last year where um, there was a post Box, which I thought was a post box that it looked like a red post box

So I thought it was somewhere where you post letters and it was like Outside the house. So I thought oh my god. This is so cool The royal mail have installed a post box but like in the property of this tiny little cottage And so I posted a few letters into it and then the owner of the property I was renting off came and delivered them back to me about three days later I was like, so you seem to have got these letters in my postbox Which is Well, it's the letter it's the letter box for the house. It's the letter box my house

Yeah Because what I thought you're gonna say is every couple of years you see it in the tab lights of some old man Who like for 25 years has been posting his letters in a dog poop bed like literally It's such a common story They did smell pretty bad if you gave me back come to think of it So one of the people who was trapped in Wuhan in China when it got shut down because of coronavirus was A mr. Bean impersonator

Happened to be there. He was he was at a lab wasn't he and he left a fridge open He's a British comic called Nigel Dixon and his job for a living is that he impersonates mr. Bean So he's extraordinarily popular in China right now since the pandemic happened on weibo He's got hundreds of millions of views for each of the videos that he puts up He basically did all these videos about how to treat lockdown, you know, how to stay healthy and lockdown And so all done with the mr. Bean suit on, you know, the tie It was it was him being mr. Bean on this thing But one of the things that he then did sort of as himself without mr. Bean as he released a video

Which reportedly was him delivering propaganda about the fact that that china was doing fantastic in the pandemic And this was in early 2020 So he said things like once people were waiting for hospital beds now Beds are waiting for people and it sickened me to hear of other countries blaming china But for what we're now hearing of cases where people around the world have contracted their virus with no obvious connections to china And this was a part of a state's propaganda channel An official channel with china So basically because mr. Bean as a tv show and I say this is someone who grew up in hong kong

Handau xian shen he is ginormous in china This guy they suddenly had their own mr. Bean who could be used as propaganda And well wait a minute doesn't mr. Bean doesn't talk does he I thought that was the whole part of mr. Bean Oh Wow that is very depressing Yeah, well, he's massive there and it was lucky for them because he was trapped literally at the heartbeat of coronavirus in wuhan And he defended them And we don't know if that was just him defending them on his own

Or whether or not it was because he was making it specifically for xian hua a news agency Which is an official chinese state run media agency who knows we don't know Oh, that's us legally covered dead Um, here's a thing here's a puzzle for you all Um, it's a word you have to guess five letters. It's g r a blank blank G r is this your is james are you trying to do an audio version of work? Once a week this is going to be the next big thing. Okay. This is going to be great at the tube. Okay. Okay. I'll say I'll say grass Straight in there anyone. Do you want us to say grave great?

I wanted you to say whatever you wanted to say, but now you've said grave ana Um, that signifies a high mortality salience in you Not in damon andy And apparently this is a test that psychologists use to see how much you're thinking about your own mortality And what you can find is that people who think more about their own mortality tend to be more conservative So um, the idea is that the the more you think about death the more you kind of try and conserve your own world view

And the more kind of entrenched you are in in the current You know system not saying that this is you ana, but this is the idea of the researchers And they said that people who did this test and went for grave as opposed to grass or grape If they were asked to set bail like pretend to be a judge and set bail for a supposed prostitute Then they would give an average bail of 455 dollars Compared to 50 dollars who would set of the people who would have said grass or grape So you're a much more conservative person in according to these researchers to be fair james When I said the word grass just there what I actually was thinking of was a patch of grass on the plot

Of land where my mortal remains will be buried. So yeah, yeah Dan was thinking that like in the way that people crush grapes with their feet to make wine So death is crushing above us and pushing us down and down deeper into the earth before we meet our maker Now I was thinking about like I love green grapes On uh, actually silly mountaineering clothes. Do you remember in 2016 on international women's day? What a group of chinese mountaineers did no A group of chinese male mountaineers to celebrate climbed up Climbed up a mountain wearing dresses and heels in order to experience the struggles and strife of being a woman

But yeah, they wore like hot pants and many Hot pants. Yeah, so I don't think it was quite the same outfits as people in the 1700s Suspenders This is what all the women that I've seen on the internet wear Exactly. They were all wearing very high stilettos and stuff All going god it really is hard being a woman climbing a mountain, isn't it? This branch of string fell is at the top. It better be worth it What as james you were saying extraordinary character, peter o' tool his his stories are very wild. He was a very

particularly in his younger years a tour de force of of partying and and booze and Letharioism he was he was just a big old character. He accidentally in a boating accident Cut the top of his finger off And so he put the tip of his finger into some brandy and then he pushed it back into place and wrapped it with a bandage And then weeks later he removed it and found that he'd put it back on the wrong way round And that's where the story ends and I don't know I've looked at photos. I don't see a backward finger on peter o' tool Was it sort of nail in or upside down? See the story just doesn't give us anymore. Yeah, it's hard to no

I think it must be backwards. So let's imagine the nail would be yeah Facing front. It doesn't say how much of the finger it was either Right, it could have been just the very very very tip like I've got the very tip of my finger, right exactly It might not be the whole nail Exactly, but you would assume if it was very very tip. You wouldn't tell it was the wrong way Exactly, you kind of need a distinguishing feature. Don't you like a nail? That's true Yeah, if you if you if you heard him drumming his fingers on the table Would you get three taps and then a squelch as the soft hit at the front? Yeah

Loved loved. I don't know if he loved a fight, but he certainly was in them enough to Have some opinion that was probably You know in favor of Otherwise, you might avoid it, but it just seems like he was just He's gonna sue dad. I mean he's been dead since 2000 or something. He's It was a hell of a sentence. I loved it. I didn't give up as well. I kept Going but I think his kids are gonna get in touch going. He did not love a fight. He quite liked a fight But I read so I found he was very good friends with brine blessed another great actor

And very good friends and I read an article where brian was talking about his relationship with peter atul And basically and it's a very long article every single encounter ended up with brian beating the shit out of him That was the the thread of it and it even starts with him beating someone else up when he first meets peter atul So he says um that they first met at a party in the mid fifties These are his words where I'd memorably just punched harold pinter's lights out Um He got one right on the side of the jaw and peter atul comes over and says wow, that's really good And then peter atul because he's this drunken man

Anytime he was on set with brian blessed on on various movies brian would just beat him up And those cases of him dragging him around the house as he was crying and throwing his arms around and And but peter atul supposedly loved him. He said he was the only person who was you know properly Honest and loved him and they were very that actually sounds like Are you sure that peter atul loved to fight? What you've described there is the fact that brian blessed was a very violent man So if you if you'd actually given my very interestingly long sentence a chance earlier, what I was trying to say was He was always in fights which makes it suggest that he likes a fight Even though he was not necessarily the one instigating it otherwise

Or at least at least he had an opinion on it One last thing on middle finger is if you do asl american sign language Then you can Kind of make what you're saying profane by doing it with your middle finger So for instance if you do the sign for mother But instead of using instead of pointing with the fingers you're supposed to point with you point with your middle finger It means motherfucker For instance

And there's a few other things like for instance the sign for A hearing person is kind of you do a little gesture around your mouth And if you do it with your middle finger, then it's like say fucking hearing people Should I mean it's a way of saying like the what you want to say is actually quite profane And they think this might be quite a new thing because there is a very old asl symbol which is having your um Your forearm facing upwards and then doing the middle finger And that is the sign for the sears tower or the cn tower in north america those two big buildings

Basically, you have to do the middle finger and that is the sign for the for those buildings for the cn So the cn so the cn tower in seattle or the sears tower which is in i think chicago But i can't remember if you want to do a sign for that you basically just do Do you think that's because the cn tower is cnt It really is not that it's because it's calm. It's got a spiky bit at the top Yeah, yeah, whatever. I'm going to see if it's calling someone the c word. That's that's rude Um, my favorite river that i've recently read about is um the congo river only because it's so unfathomably deep I kind of mean unfathomably literally there

So it's the deepest river in the world. It's 220 meters deep at the bottom There's no light can penetrate that low and I realized that if you put all of london Into the deepest bit of the congo river only six buildings poke out of the top of it So building you see the tip of is the cheese grater That's 225 meters and then the rest of us are all submerged Is the shard is the shards No, no shards are shards taller shards the highest I think tallest Wow

But yeah, so we do if that does happen we all have to flee to the top of the shard I guess I think that's going to be the least of our problems if all of the buildings in london get taken to the congo river I don't know how it's how we've woken up with this situation being because it is but He's got to deal with it. That's really cool. That's good. Yeah, I don't think of others being Anyway near that deep and I guess the point is that most of them are not but this one is yeah Okay And there was advice literature About beards that you could get back in the day

um in the in the time of the beard mania And one of the best ones according again to dr. Whitty was um don't a manual of mistakes and improprieties More or less prevalent in conduct and speech and this was like a little pamphlet on every page It told you stuff you weren't allowed to do at no stage did it tell you what you could do instead It only told you what you couldn't do and on one page it says that if men have beards or whiskers You should be careful um to wash them after smoking and should not get in the habit of pulling your whiskers Adjusting your hair or otherwise fingering yourself Sensible advice then sensible advice now

Yeah Some things don't age, but what am I supposed to do with these fingers? The funny thing about omelettes is that I've had maybe 20 30 maybe even 40 different kinds of omelette They all tasted the same I've never had an omelette that I can differentiate. This is a taste bud thing. Isn't it Athena? I mean that sounds like you need to get your taste buds looked at specifically a cheese omelette mushy monet spinach omelette It's a small egg to me. Do you feel that way? I think

You can taste the mushroom within it, right? But at the same time it just I think what the egg does is it overpowers everything So it doesn't matter what you put in it. It's just an omelette. It is powerful. You should try eggless omelette. That's what you need Oh, that's the cheese sandwich On the challenger expedition, which I had never read about they collected 4,800 new species And they found the Marianas trench on the expedition That's incredible Yeah, did they just have seven miles of cable or whatever it was? Um, I actually don't know how so now I think maybe yeah in the 1880. Yeah, so it was weird. Maybe I'm not sure

That's incredible. It's yeah. Yeah, it was I can't remember anything about it, but it does sound like an amazing expedition Yeah, yeah, maybe it was I once dropped a can of coke into the ocean Very shallow and it hit the bottom and came back up. So maybe that's what they did Maybe they had sort of what are you even talking about? Well, maybe they got over the Marianas trench drop Was it was it Diet Coke? It was I can't remember actually because Diet Coke floats and normal Coke sinks. Ah, so it must have been sealed Yeah, sealed. Yeah, hang on it went to the bottom and it came back up again Yeah, and you're suggesting that maybe they timed how long it took to come back I'm just trying to spitball how this happened and I just know that I've had practical experience with uh, did that

What practical experience have you had Andy? well Yeah, people in glass houses I've never dropped it compared to the rest of us. That is an expert With this one experiment. So hang on it went all the way to the bottom. Who knows? No, no, no, you know because this is your experiment It went all the way to the bottom and it came all the way back up to the top Well, what I did was I did it in a swimming pool and then in shallow water and then when we're out on a boat

We put a coke can in it disappeared for something like five minutes and then it bobbed back up That's really interesting could be a change in pressure. I guess could be an octopus holding it Read the back hate Diet Coke toss it back up Why has diet coke never come down? What's going on? Wow That's proper science. I would say um

Yeah, you you would have been on this expedition. I'm not suggesting this is a real thing Do you know where the largest mum made waterfall in the world is? Do you know who owns man made who owns the largest mum made waterfall in the world? So we're more likely to get who owns it rather than where it is is what you're saying Is it a squillionaire who we've heard of? Uh, yes, okay. Have they recently been to space? They have not Mosque Elon Musk. No

Bill Gates. No, think of someone who has got no taste whatsoever. Trump Trump Trump. You kidding? How did you all get that straight away? Amazing I feel like that clue was too easy to go And this is at the trump national westchester golf course And basically every one of his courses has a fake waterfall and each one is more tacky than the previous And they're so huge if you're playing anywhere near them You can't hear anyone speak because there's so much water going over the top of them um, and this um, this one at westchester is the world's biggest

There is one at changy airport, which looks really big to me and possibly could be bigger But according to guinness book of records, this is the biggest. Wow. And what do you know how tall it is? Did you say? I don't I think it's 5 000 gallons go over every minute or second because I'm going off memory But there's a lot of working out from that. Yeah But another fake waterfall um can be found in australia and can be seen on our tv from time to time Can you guess where that might be credits of neighbors? No, the whole blessing is adverse It's on tv on tv in australia. So when do we see australia?

So maybe air is rock. Is there like a weird bit of water that comes down water comes down there occasionally But as rock, I don't know if you know orulu is not a fake rock So hang on it's a fake rock that we see on our tv sometimes fake a fake waterfall fake waterfall But there's australia that's on british tv sometimes very famous waterfall famous famous but it's fake It's fake. It's is it known that it's fake or is this a secret you're busting open? Um, I'm not busting it wide open, but I think some people know It's a sydney opera house It's it's not a waterfall

We've been there. Yeah, I didn't see a waterfall. Um, I just I'm naming things in australia now. Yeah, give us a tiny bit more There's often a um attractive young tv personality underneath it neighbors No, it's that what what no, but you can't just say neighbors. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I'm a celebrity I know you are andy, but do you know the name of this show? Okay, so i'm a celebrity get me out of here Yes, so they have that kind of place where they all go for a shower underneath a waterfall And it turned out recently they found out that this is a completely fake waterfall And they can turn the taps on and off whenever they

Kidding whenever anyone goes for a waterfall shower. They just turn the taps on and they get watch that is brilliant Do they that was like my lean class literally turning a hot water? No, it's the producers. What a shame. What a shower that would be So which poor producer has to stand there watching the dry waterfall 24 hours a day in case someone stands under it It's I guess it's not that bad a job. Is it it's it's one for an intern. I think It's really sad though because president mckinley used to genuinely really love handshakes He used to it said that he it was the it was his favorite thing to do was shake people's hands And this guy basically used it as a as a tactic as a you know

Yeah, because it was it was him that was killed this way, right mckinley. Yeah, and he was killed It was it was at a fun fair, wasn't it? He was he was at the buffalo. It was like the buffalo world fair Sorry, that was a really big difference between fun fairs and the buffalo world They were fun. I think is you know It was fun space fair down was just using it as a descriptor. It was a fun fair not for willy and mckinley But for someone else the fun fair down at frinsbury park as opposed to you know This massive world fair where they were showing off, you know, american industry and like bell My poor kids

Dad Speaking of concrete and there was a woman that called sarah guppy And in 1811 she invented a new way of making piling for bridges So when you make a bridge you need to kind of fire some stuff into the ground So that'll hold it solid and put some concrete in there to make the foundations And so she came up with a new way of doing this and she was a friend of ismbar kingdom brunel And so brunel basically used all of her Piling tactics for all of his bridges

But she didn't patent it Because she said it is unpleasant to speak of oneself. It may seem boastful particularly in a woman Hmm So she decided not to patent it and this kind of technique was used in a load of bridges Come on guppy She did come up with a few things that she did patent So she um came up with a method of keeping ships free of barnacles Which made her 40 grand from the government because it was so important. Wow

And she was I mean that's so important that as well exactly not a lot of money for how important that is She must have identified there was a guppy in the market A guppy in the market Yeah, no, no. We did guppy Feels like it's not the right guppy pun when we're talking about ships and water Here's another quite French French politician Gaston d'affaires And he was a participant in the last duel that ever took place in France. This was in 1967

And the fair had insulted a rené ribière in the french parliament He'd said um Which means apparently shut up stupid And so they decided they were going to have a duel And defer that vowed that he wouldn't kill ribière because it was the night before his wedding that they'd organised this duel But he said I will only wound you and spoil your wedding night very considerably Otherwise it wouldn't be defer Just stunning

And james, what was the upshot of the duel? So the fair won but it was a couple of he there were a couple of nicks that he put on ribière He wasn't like he didn't chop his penis off or anything It was just like a few cuts and then the guy who was officiating the duel who was France's secretary of state for foreign affairs Decided this is enough enough enough. We're going to call it a win for for defer I've actually been up a lookout tree. Um, cool. Yeah. So in Australia, um, sort of south of Perth There is um, three trees the dave evans bison tenial tree There's the gloss ester tree and the diamond tree

I don't know which one I was up because I went as a kid. It's like 10 or so So basically the way you get up these trees is that they slammed in these metal bars and they would go circular around it And you would climb to the top and then you'd have that hut there and um, it was petrifying But I had sort of kid confidence to get up to the top and you climb and so you climb on these metal bars Is that climbing on all fours? Yeah, you're climbing on all fours and there's nothing underneath you Like there's no there's no matching by the forestry commission. They open it up to the public So it's no longer a used tree and uh for those purposes And so tourists can just rock up and go and they say don't go up if you're afraid of heights

Or if you might have a heart attack or if you're if you're a kid I don't know why I was allowed up and I do remember we went to the top my sister and I and there was a couple sitting Shivering petrified in the corner of the the hut at the top And we went down to go back down too scared to go back to it was petrifying Like it was you if you look down I mean it's but is it when you go back down presumably you have to climb back you're descending a ladder Yeah, right exactly much more of an angle. I guess. Yeah, and here's the thing There was no system whereby you would go up one way and come down the other

Oh, sure you would bump into people coming up on the way. Yeah. Yeah So you have to go all the way back up like if you're only 40 percent of the way down there 60 percent of the way up Is it like you have to climb all the way back up the top? I remember shimmying past someone who leaned into the tree Yeah, yeah, it does sound Horrific this. I mean, I would absolutely love to do it. But also why did you call it the gloss ester tree? Is that what they call it in Australia? No, I'd probably just pronounce that weirdly. Hey Well, I thought maybe all Australians do because they can't pronounce, you know In this place names gloss. Yeah, it would have been the gloss. I certainly have called it the gloss to tree

I was once skiing with my in-laws And um, I was at the top and I didn't I don't like other people seeing me skiing because I'm so bad at it And I get really embarrassed because I keep falling over and stuff And my father-in-law went down the first bit and then he stopped I'm like, oh fuck sake. He's waiting for me because he's trying to be polite and he wants to wait So anyway, I was like, I'm not going I'm not going so I waited at the top and I waited at the top for about 40 minutes And then eventually he went down and then I kind of followed him down And then I spoke to him afterwards and he said he was too scared to go back down

And he was just trying to get up the courage to go down And I thought that he was you know, just yeah spying to see if I was gonna fall over So funny. That's very That's such a weird situation Just all the women in the family the bottom going, why? What are those two doing? That is a moment where you go to Polina. You've married your father There was there was a mountainer who made kit out of balloon material So george finch

Uh was an Aussie mountain climber and he went on the Mallory expedition in 1922 And invented the Ididown coat the puffer jacket essentially from hot air balloon material when everyone else on the trip was wearing tweed So it's a really radical thing to imagine and all the other mountaineers laughed at him. It's really you know He was wearing a basket on his feet But imagine being laughed at by a lot of people wearing tweed. I know Sounds like my school days He and he was really looked down on by the other mountaineers. So he was observed repairing his own boots

Very, you know very unclassy behavior and the deputy leader of the expedition who was called colonel edward strut said I always knew the fellow was a shit He's a mentally new jacket and he's clean What a way with words this guy had Yeah, but he had the last laugh because obviously no wind got through his amazing jacket and he was he was feeling a lot warmer Yeah, so today there's still something like 500 lookouts in america and they reckon it's a 50 50 split of men and women And they reckon it kind of was that in not the very earliest period But but as soon as the sort of ceiling was broke and the first woman started doing it

Which was this lady who was called hallie morse daggett and she became the first female to serve in the forest service And it's an amazing recommendation that she got in order. Did you read that letter? It's incredible this guy who was the ranger He wrote a letter to his boss saying that he thought that daggett would be the best person for the job But obviously there were three people applying and two of them were men It should have gone to one of them and What he wrote in the letter was the novelty of the proposition Which has been unloaded upon me and which i'm now endeavoring to pass up to you may perhaps take your breath away

Like just like even that thought alone like the fair the end where he said She is absolutely devoid of the timidity, which is ordinarily associated with her sex. Yeah Okay, uh, but she's not afraid of anything that walks creeps or flies. She is a perfect lady in every respect Wow That's a perfect lady Um general motors they make artificial stalactites out of their car byproducts Pretty cool and pretty weird for where for the bats. Yeah, cool for bats to cling on to So they've they've installed a couple of hundred of these across the usa

They put them in caves because it gives the bats more surface area to spread out And hang from and that means when the bats have more space They don't all cluster together because when they cluster together they spread this disease amongst themselves called white nose syndrome Which is kind of fungus that's very bad for the bats and as we know if we've learned anything It's that you should try and keep the bats healthy Um, and so general motors have started installing these right what are they? I've thought you're going to say there was some sort of amazing benefit for general motors as a company to do Just pr the intangible benefits of pr a huge dent because listen listen. I'm talking about them now. Yeah

The bats tell their other bat friends and they tell their other bat friends and before you know it There we go. Yeah. Is the car market big in the bat world? Do they particularly like batmobile? Yeah Good point. Yeah, it's just the one model, isn't it? You'll get letters there are loads of models Maybe I'm sorry. No, thank you for saving me because I saw you think about letting me drop myself in there There's another lifestyle that you tell if something is a fossil By licking it. Oh, yeah, is it supposed to like have air holes and it's like stickier to your tongue or something I've got to tell you I've been on so many archaeological sites and once in a while like some of the undergrads will be like

Like nobody knows what on earth it means they've just got stone to their tongues. It's I don't think it's very interesting But what's the idea what as in what are you meant to get from it that people it's supposed to be different I think it's supposed to stick more if it's actually a fossil. It's supposed to be like, um It's not oh, what is it now? It's like supposed to have little tiny holes in it that when you put your tongue into it It kind of sticks to your tongue and I worry very much that your undergrads might have heard this on qi I think oh my god, I think you're right. We might have a retraction to make if that's not true Yeah

Yeah, we've punked your undergrads accidentally and I'm sorry No, it just it's not very the best method is actually just to see if it will break apart Which is kind of similar with the crop because if it's if it's bone it will just snap But obviously you don't really want to be snapping fossils For obvious reasons. Yeah, but I've definitely been on I feel like I've got two fossils then if you do that You're not coming with me What we found 16 finds I swear he started with eight

um But no, is it yeah I was on an expedition and uh, and they were like and we have this massive argument about if something was a was a fossil or a stone And um, I might have accidentally dropped it and it made such a loud noise. We were like, that's a stone But then another time a professor was massively arguing with the and I was like, I swear it's a fossil as you can tell I think everything is a fossil Even when it's stone and he was like, no, it's not it's a stone. It's a stone and then he went Look, you can't break it and then he broke it and he was like, oh, let's just pretend that never

So much history destroyed by the professor that was the best But yeah, the other marine worms do that kind of dissolving thing. Don't they there's a worm called the zombie worm which feeds off skeletons of mostly whales by other dead ocean animals at the bottom of the sea And that sends acid out onto the bone which kind of melts it. Well And then they just live inside whale bones forever and ever and they're really cool The thing I like about them is that the males just live inside the females forever So there'll be one female and then they'll have about a hundred males living inside And they just live there and they feed off her yoke of her eggs

And then eventually they inseminate her because they thought they did they were looking for the males, right? Because they knew they found the sperm inside the females. So they were like, well, where are the males? And it turned out the sperm was the males It's like they're the little guys who live inside the female That's incredible. Do the males ever leave the female and find their own a new female. Do they ever break up? I don't think I think you haven't got a choice. It's very much an arranged marriage to the situation But what about when the what about the when the female gives birth or when she lays eggs that then hatch? Yeah, they must have to have to swim around to find another female

How do they yeah, do they get that when they hatch when a female hatches? As in when a female one of these fish hatches, do they how do they get new males? I guess, yeah, you're right They just swim around and they find each other. Oh, yeah, I don't actually know They probably just look for some tasty bones where everyone else is hanging around. That's where the term boning comes from What what am I talking about? The interesting thing is that um, they do they live on a um, a whale bones But also they've been found living on like the food the bones of the food that people throw Yeah, and that is where the phrase throw me a bone comes from There was lots of reasons that people climb Mont Blanc

This was from a book called Killing Dragons the conquest of the Alps by Fergus Fleming Um in 1818 there was a russian count called Matsefsky Who did it because he wanted to improve his poetry skills Hmm Yeah, do you think no, I don't know. What's he practicing there? Is it the writing of is it the speaking of home? I think he's thinking seeing all that beauty Yeah, I kind of think of that being inspired by amazing stuff because there is a a Shelly poem called Mont Blanc, which is one of the worst Shelly poems in existence. What does he rhyme with Blanc?

Blanc Mont There was someone I knew had a tutor who you know an english literature tutor who said Poetry is better than sex apart from Shelly's Mont Blanc. Sex is better than Mont Blanc There was a guy called John Oljo and he climbed because he wanted to see a better reflection of the mountain in the lake So he thought he couldn't see it properly from the ground So he had to go to the top so they were to see it You know the lake was there if it was halfway up the mountain

Strange isn't it and also can you really see the mountain reflection from a lake that's below you? Maybe you can't there was a guy called Comte Henri de Tilly Who climbed because he wanted to cheer himself up after a failed affair? And there was a guy called Edward Boutal Wild Bram who climbed Mont Blanc because he had been told not to Cool. Wow. That's literally all I know Was he an eight year old in a strop? Isn't that amazing proper reverse psychology? Yeah, don't climb that mountain Is bigger do you think the tallest curtains ever made?

Are taller than the widest curtains ever made are wide. Okay. Well, do you know I would think width is easier to make than height I'm gonna go height Okay, well the the the obvious answer is I'm afraid the correct one here I wish I could have some kind of exclusive minority report for you But no the tallest curtains are only half High as the widest curtains are wide That's actually still surprisingly large proportion of the widest curtains. That's quite tall. Also They're 65 meters tall. I mean, that's incredible. Also. All you need to do is just flip it the other way up

And then you've got the tallest curtain Yeah, that's a really good point Just turn your landscape curtains into portrait curtains and they're much taller There has been a new kind of paper invented made from biomaterials So you take like Parts of people's body and you kind of squish it down and do a load of chemical stuff to it And you can get get this new kind of paper

And the idea is that they can use it by kind of folding it into certain ways and it will help to heal wounds Or it'll help the body to regenerate organ tissue stuff like that So it's a way of using origami inside the human body And it's really interesting the way they discovered this there's a guy called adam jacos And it's one of those discoveries where it was an accidental discovery Because he He'd actually created an ink made from an ovary that he was going to use for a 3d printer And he spilled the ink

And it kind of hardened and turned into this paper and he realized that he could use that and I know there are more questions to be asked Yeah You saw questions appear on our faces one after the other What ovary? Well, that's the way that they make these biomaterials is they take Body parts from people Is it a human ovary? Humano, um, actually, I think it was a pig ovary this one, but the hope is in the future

They'll be able to use human body parts as well or maybe stem cells to create them So it's the idea that you would sacrifice, let's say a finger But you would get a cool new power. No, no, no, it's almost like you haven't understood anything I've said It's more like you would get stem cells to create some kind of Biomaterials and then that would turn into a paper kind of material and you'd be able to fold it and help to Like cover wounds or or swallow it and it springs into a fake heart inside you or something That is closer to what might happen than what Andy said. Yeah If you james said you can make it from a body part

So if in extremis you cut off your own finger Yeah, but you'd only be using the finger to make some paper bandage to put over that. Yeah, you're the missing finger I see it's a problem that's solving its own creation. It's a false economy. Really. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, pretty cool though. Yeah Until the 70s and 80s a lot of geographers assume that elephants couldn't swim And so when you found elephant bones on an island there must have been a land bridge because otherwise There's no way they could have got across there's a debate about how elephants got to Sri Lanka, isn't there? And lots of other places used to have elephants like Malta and Crete and Cyprus. Yes, none of which I think I think have elephants now I've been to Malta and it's it's quite a small island. You you would struggle to hide a wild elephant population on it

They also they have British home stars there, don't they which is um, it's an extinct shop in the uk But it still goes on in Malta. Do you reckon there was a land bridge once from the uk to Malta where British? British home stars Frantically taking their reasonably priced outer rain garments God, you're right. Malta is one of those funny places though because they've got they've got a bhs They've still got a mother care. Yeah, I don't think there's a mother care on the British mainland anymore And it's just like that thing where You know a species goes extinct on the mainland, but it survives on the island

Yeah, but the thing is because it's an island they get either very very big or very very small So the mother care is really tiny whereas the British home stars is massive That's so funny. Do you know when I got there when I got to Malta? I shared a cab from the airport with to the main town because some guy just approached me and said Do you want to share a cab and and then he turned out he said he didn't have any money. It was all a bit dodgy um, but he you've you've been duped my friend well He was a really peculiar guy because he said he was there for some kind of

Corporate espionage purposes. Oh, yeah Right and he said that's what he does and he goes around to make sure that for example the multi's mother care aren't selling He's probably from chinese home stars It was so unclear what he was doing and then he found out I had some kind of job in the media And he clearly didn't say a word for the rest of the journey Except to clarify perhaps that he didn't have any money to pay for the cab at the end of it Sounds like he really didn't want you to mention him publicly. So it's a good thing that this will be going out to a few hundred thousand people Um, I have I have one last thing which is I think I have found the only copper light street in the world

Okay, what do you mean like it's paved with poo? No, no, it's called it's called copper light street Oh As far as I can tell I've gone on google maps and I've put copper light in and there's only one Place in the world that has it on its sign. Is it in light reaches or no? It's an ip switch Oh Yeah, which is in suffolk for anyone overseas listening and um, yeah, it's um copper light street It was named that because there was a guy called edward packer Who started basically a fossil feces factory burning it up and using the energy

Um, he was known as the golden muck man of it switch Yeah, the copper light king Great name. Where are they finding enough fossils to I guess back in the day in the 1800s. They're everywhere, right? Someone near ip switch, I guess Norwich now This is I can't believe the way you researched dan is you just type in all the keywords that we're researching that week into google maps to see I mean, do you think this is genius or are you just disappointed with your teammate? I wish I thought of it first It's seven years. It's finally paid off copper lights. Yeah

Only one in the world Looking at that list that massive list of copper light facts. I just imagined I'm being like, yeah, we're running out of facts She's gonna not google it. I'm gonna literally google earth it Think outside of the box here Okay, that's that's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening If you would like to speak to me you can go to twitter and you can look for at james harkin And I will be there if you would like to speak to andrew hunter murray You can go to at andrew hunter m on that very same website

And dan is there as well at schreiberland if you would like to speak to anna You could email her or indeed any of us on the address podcast at qi.com And if you'd like to learn more about the podcast, you can go to know such thing as a fish.com And that is also the place where you can get tickets to the shows which I mentioned at the top of this show The easier place to go for those as well is qi.com slash fish events We will be back again next week with another episode of no such thing as a fish another normal episode But in the meantime, hope you enjoy your bank holiday weekend if you're in the uk and wherever you are in the world Hope you're having a great time. We will see you again next week. Good. Bye