No Such Thing As A Fish - 433: No Such Thing As A Golden Chicken

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Francis Fitzgerald's fame, full-to-bursting fish, and a frankly phenomenal fruit.  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. Hope you're all very well. I have a little bit of news here and it is of particular interest to people in the UK and a particular interest to people who love our mothership of a TV show, QI. Now you all know QI, it's facts, it's funny, it's just like fish but it's been going for a full 20 years and the big news is that all 20 series of QI are now available on BBC iPlayer. So as you probably know, each series of QI is represented by a letter of the alphabet and so you can go back and watch facts about astronomy, about bees, about campanology, about dog, well you get the idea. It's 20 series of QI, so many facts, so many amazing moments

from over the years and it is all as I said available on BBC iPlayer. And of course it wouldn't be a top of the show announcement if I didn't remind you all that we are going back on the road in autumn, if you live in Scotland or in Wales or indeed I think we have one show coming up also in London, then do go to qi.com slash fish events and get your tickets fast because I know for a fact that some of those dates are just on the verge of selling out. Anyway, before you go to iPlayer to binge on all the episodes of QI, we've got to get on with this week's show, so on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tyshinski and Andrew Hunter Murray and once again we have gathered around 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, that is Andy. My fact is that in 1944 the book The Great Gatsby sold 120 copies. In 1945 the number of copies printed was 155,000. I didn't realise how I was going to deliver it until I got towards the end and I thought, I've just said 120, why not say 155 and then wrap it up. Anyway, great behind the scenes inside, lovely. Got to show how the sausage is made. So The Great Gatsby

by F. Gotvitz Gerald was a book that was quite popular at first and then it really tailed off and then by 1944 pretty much no one was buying it and it was practically out of print. So then in the Second World War though there was this mad scheme that was run by a load of American publishing titans. They clubbed together and they formed this thing called the Council on Books in War Time and they decided that they wanted to print and sell millions of books to the army. So the army bought the books and then those books were distributed free to the soldiers and they were made incredibly cheap and 122 million books were given away to soldiers. And it basically created the paperback book market

in America. They weren't really popular. And they were to fit in the pocket, weren't they? Which is why Gatsby is good because it's unbelievably short. It is. But if you were shot and it like plowed straight through your copy of The Great Gatsby. You'd rather have Alarice Sherch the Tom Perdue though. One volume on each breast. Two on your back. Go on, where are the other three going? One over the genitals and one on either side of the head. Two over the genitals.

So he died in 1940. Fitzgerald. Yeah, Fitzgerald died in 1940. The book was originally published in 1925. He didn't achieve any success in his life much to the point of like we all know that book in his name now. Was this the moment that made him a global man? Yeah, pretty much. Well, he was very famous as a literary figure in the early 20s for his first couple of books or it was beautiful in the damned, wasn't it, that he wrote, which did very well. And he

was a famous figure on the literary scene. He made a good amount of money. But it was just that Gatsby when it came out in the early 20s was quite well received by some people and not by others. It was just like when a book comes out and some reviews are good. He thought it was brilliant, didn't he? He thought it was like the great American novel. But then it was only after the war that it became accepted that it was the great American novel. Yeah, exactly. So from these days, it sells about half a million copies every year. Compare that with 120 copies just, you know, a few years after his death. I mean, it was, it

was nowhere. So this year it sold about 500,000. Exactly, cool. I didn't see where you were going with that. Yeah. Like I said, these books came to fit in your pocket, right? Yeah. These sizes want to fit in your shirt pocket, want to fit in your pants. They were quite flimsy. They cost six cents each to make.

Yeah. You can still get hold of them today. And Andy, seeing as today is your publication day for your novel. Oh. I brought you a gift. OMG. And that is one of these books. Oh my God.

Rumble, rumble, rumble. Which one is it? Well, I couldn't get hold of the great Gatsby, unfortunately. But this is the selected plays for Neil. Oh my God. But it is genuinely one of the ones that was given to the Armed Services. Oh, that is so cool. Wow.

Thank you. So take it out. Let's see the flimsiness of it. This is so cool. They were kind of printed in landscape. Yeah. And they would have two columns. I'm seeing that right now and it's shocking to see. Sorry, go on. Way broader than his tool.

But they would have two columns on each page. So you get more in than, you know, a normal book in quite a small amount. That's so cool. Oh, thank you, James. You're welcome. And it says overseas edition for the Armed Forces, distributed by blah, blah, blah, published by Editions for the Armed Services. So another place that owns these books is the University of Texas, which has about 1400.

And because they were printed on magazine presses, so they were very, they really worked. And they sort of printed them like a magazine and then they just sliced it in half. So the University of Texas ones, they're really brittle and brown these days because, you know, the paper was not designed to last for 80 years. They're kept in, I think, called tuxedo cases. That's cool, which is described as an acid-free enclosure to keep them pristine. I have looked, it just looks like they're in a box. Do most boxes have lots of acid in them?

I don't have my boxes specified there, acid-free. Does that mean they're full of acid? Unfortunately, librarians kept putting them in with the acid. Those big acid bats they have, yeah, libraries. So comic books were quite popular. Terry and the Pirates was one of the ones that was quite popular by a cartoon. It's called Milton Caniff. And the ones that he did for the military contained, and this is a quote,

damsels as breasty and near nude as Caniff dead draw them. Wow. So he took his quite like normal comic strip and thought, well, this is for the soldiers. So I'm going to add boobs. Nice. Speaking of comic books and associated culture, the video game Legend of Zelda. Yes. We probably remember playing as children.

Or adults, maybe? I bought one recently, actually. Absolutely fine and no judgement here. It was named after Zelda Fitzgerald, Scott's wife. I don't know that. Yeah. Although who else might it be named after? It's not a very common name, is it, Zelda?

She was named after two random other people from books, wasn't she? She was named after someone from a book, wasn't she? Yeah, I think her mum found two references to Zelda. Oh, it wasn't like someone called Zelina and someone called Da. No. Fitzgerald, just as his career, I didn't realise that he had a bit of a moment in Hollywood. You know, potentially he was going to be one of the biggest Hollywood script writers, but he just didn't quite get the break that he needed.

And he was part of this group that were called the legions of jerks. And that was a name given to them by Jack Warner. And it was quite an amazing pack of writers that were working for Hollywood in that time. In that sort of underneath that name. So you had Aldous Huxley, you had Anthony Powell, you had Dorothy Parker. It's basically the Algonquin group, really, sounds like. Yeah, it's so interesting. Yeah, but they were all there trying to pump out scripts.

And like Fitzgerald was brought on, I don't think they used any of his work for it, but he did a week on Gone With The Wind. Did he? Yeah, like it's a bit... Didn't he go there because Zelda had got sick and he needed to make some money or something? Yes, so he was really... He was going through a bad patch.

There's a lot of rumours that he was an alcoholic in this period. And he was, he had a lot of alcoholic problems, but I think in this specific moment with Hollywood, he was actually quite productive and he was off the alcohol. He was drinking cases of Coca-Cola apparently to sort of, you know, replace one addiction with another and just distract himself. And he produced a lot of work and there's something like 2,000 pages in an archive sitting somewhere of screenplays, of doctored scripts that he did,

but virtually none of them except I think one credit he has properly for a movie. It wasn't very... Like he only wrote a few novels, a few batches of short stories and I don't know, the whole thing seems to have gone off a bit half-cocked his life. You know, it just wasn't very... He'd joined the army hoping to die. I didn't know this in the First World War. So he'd been rejected by a woman called Ginevra.

And again, weird. Wow. Weird name, Ginevra to Zelda. Anyway, he'd been rejected by her. She'd said, no, absolutely not. I think she was extremely wealthy and he was extremely not wealthy. Sounds about right. And so he joined the army hoping to die.

Trained under Dwight Eisenhower. Oh, wow. And then he quickly wrote 120,000-word novel in the hope that it would sell before he died. And then anyway, the war ended so he was fine. So... Because the period where you were American and then being trained and then definitely getting to the war was quite a narrow window because of how late America joined the First World War.

Quite impressive to quickly write 120,000-word novel. You've just written a novel, Andy. Do you think you could have spaffed that out in terms between army service? Spaffed out is a funny way of putting a heart and soul into something. Well, there was an interesting thing about that wasn't there because later on it took him a bit longer to write the novels. He couldn't just spaff them out. But when Zelda got sick because she had mental problems, right?

Mental issues. And he was kind of looking after her and going to Hollywood and doing all this stuff. And so it took even longer for him to write his novel. And at the same time, Zelda decided to write a novel called Save Me the Waltz which he thought used all of his material. And what had actually done, it was about their life, right? So who it belongs to, it belongs to whoever writes it first. But he was really annoyed because it had taken him ages to do it

but she managed to write her novel in three months. Wow. Ouch. That is good. It got a bit spicy between them during the tender of the night Save Me the Waltz rivalry. Doesn't sound good. Well, they obviously, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald were the Richard Burton

and Elizabeth Taylor of that day. And yes, that is the most modern analogy I can come up with. Which was basically the same day. They weren't too far off. You're right. It was about 10 years later. Anyway, yeah, when Zelda said she was going to write Save Me the Waltz Scott was so annoyed that he wrote to the person who was going to publish her book

saying, don't you dare publish it. He's got diary entries where he basically plots how to make sure that she doesn't write it. So he says, attack on all grounds. Play Brackets to Press. As in if she's writing a play, suppress it. Novel Brackets to Lay. Pictures Brackets to Press.

As in she did a lot of art. Child, as in the child they had Brackets to Touch. It sounds really bad. It does sound awful. There was one slight situation was that apparently her doctor said it was bad for her to write novels apparently. So that might have been one of the reasons why he tried to stop her. Got it.

But they did have a chat about who was going to publish what, where he accused her of being a third rate writer, a useless society woman with an Amazonian and lesbian personality. Which, look, she didn't love it, but all relationships have problems. Well, the thing is when he said you're a third rate writer, she said it seems to me you're making a rather violent attack if I'm third rate. I mean, he was quite attacked for his writing, wasn't he? He wasn't the best writer himself. As in the editing process.

Huge claim. I'm not claiming it. I'm simply reading. So there was Edmund Wilson, who was a critic. One of the greatest writers of all time. You could just say he wasn't the best writer himself. I'm saying there was a lot of criticism towards his writing at the time. So this side of paradise, one of the critics wrote one of the most illiterate books of

any merit actually published. Supposedly in the Great Gatsby editing process, punctuation marks just had to be removed because there were like hundreds of them. He just kept chucking them in and they're like, let's get that back out. That's what copy editors are for. Exactly. Exactly. But the best character definitely in the Great Gatsby has got to be Jordan Baker

because she's a golfer. She is a friend of Daisy and she is based on a real life person called Edith Cummings, who was a friend of the Fitzgeralds. And in the book, Jordan Baker has got a bad reputation that she kind of cheats in golf. But at the time, people saw that it was based on this Edith Cummings and said that actually Edith Cummings was as honest as she was bewitching. Because she was famous for being a very, very attractive golfer. She was known as the fairway flapper.

And she was the first golfer of any gender to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Oh, cool. I can believe you found the golf angle in... I know. Fitzgerald. Like there's always a way, isn't there? You see a very distant fairway. You think I can get there.

Fitzgerald, he called Zelda something flapper as well. A flapper was just a flapper. A fashionable woman. Oh, I'd never... Sure. No, no. But Zelda was good at golf, by the way, just to get us back to golf. Sorry to try and move it over there.

So Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald used to spend the summers at White Bear Lake where there was a golf course and apparently she was much better at golf than he was. Oh, he went up like that. So him and Zelda had quite an interesting start to their marriage. I don't know how well she comes across. So she was a very high society, very wealthy. I think her father was a Supreme Court judge or something. And he was, you know, fine.

But as you can see, if you read The Great Gatsby, he's kind of obsessed with this posh people versus not posh people. And so Zelda felt that he was beneath her. And so they had a relationship and then she kind of dumped him for being too poor. And then he wrote... I think it was he wrote this side of Paradise. It sold out in three days. He suddenly made lots of money. And within a week, she'd gone, all right, come on, let's get married.

So F. Scott Fitzgerald's secretary, Francis Kroll, the last secretary in his life. Okay, F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940. Okay, age 44. When do you think his last secretary died? Yesterday. Let's say she was 20 when she was his secretary in 1944. And she died when she was 100. The maths is going very badly for me.

I like what people work it out. She's still alive. Yeah, all right. Okay, guys, you've really taken the sting out of this one. She's dead. She died in 2015, aged 99. So one year of change. But I just think that's amazing that, you know, she would have remembered being F. Scott Fitzgerald's secretary,

but she also saw what's an event like the alternative vote referendum or... Do you think those will be her two main memories on the deathbeds? Life ladder before my eyes, the AV referendum. The Scottish independence vote, you know. Cannot believe that's the only place you could go from there. Okay. The 2012 Olympics. The fall of the burning wall.

When was it, 2015? 2015. When she died. Yeah, yeah. So she didn't see Lester winning the Premiership. No, sadly. But she might have heard the few episodes and no such thing as a fish. Oh my God!

Maybe that's what killed her then. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that to protect the city of Syracuse, Archimedes invented a giant claw that could lift enemy ships clean out of the water. It was so successful that Roman soldiers began to be scared of any piece of rope hanging from the city walls. This is, I just to quickly say, fucking insane. It's amazing, isn't it? It's incredible.

So why were they scared of rope if it was the giant claw that... Because that's what presages the giant claw, isn't it? Is it? You have a little bit of rope and you're like, oh shit, what's that rope attached to? And it's attached to the claw? Could be. So does a rope lead out ahead of the claw? Well, you need the rope, because the thing is with Archimedes,

he was good at levers and pulleys and stuff like that, so they all have ropes involved. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've seen drawings of this. I mean, it's like a real life size. You know, when you go to the arcades and you've got the claw that you're trying to pick at the time? It's like this giant claw. I don't think the contemporary drawings, the ones that you've seen,

they might be imaginations. Yeah, exactly. But like to show what size claw you'd need to pick up a ship, it's pretty big. So this is around two on two BC. We're talking the Second Punic War. Rome has taken over all of Italy, but they need somewhere else to take over. So they go down to Sicily, which is where Archimedes lived. And it was currently owned by Carthage, which is modern-day Tunisia.

But then the Romans managed to take over it. But then the people in Syracuse, the main city, decided they're going to rise up. So they start to rise up against the Romans. The Romans siege the city. And then Archimedes, the great mathematician, lives there. And he's like, well, I'm going to come up with all these great contraptions that are going to stop the Romans from taking our city. And this was one of these.

The biggest we have for this particular claw thing is by someone called Polybius, who was writing only about 50 years after Archimedes died. So it's the reasonable chance that it was true. Do you know what's amazing about this fact is that one of the great Archimedes stories is that he created a sort of death ray for incoming ships. So they would point mirrors and they would use and harness the sun. And that would give this great beam that would burn holes into the ships and so on. Turns out that's not true.

Now, that's such a shame because that's such a wonderful thing. It's very rare that you then get given this gift of an even more batshit idea. It turns out to be true. We don't know. So this is all stuff that's reported about him after. So that's Galen said that three centuries later or something about the death ray. And we think it's probably not true because it seems completely impossible that you do it. Mostly because to focus a death ray.

So the idea was you'd have huge mirrors, I suppose, that would be concave, I guess, and they'd focus a ray directly at a point on a ship. But you need to focus it at one point for quite a long time. The ship is moving. The ship is moving around. You need a perfectly still day. That's a good point because they've tied up the ship. Actually, Anna, it has been tried, the death ray, with the mirrors and the thing.

So some students at MIT, I think it was in about 2007 or 2008, they got 127 mirrored tiles and an oak replica of a Roman ship. And they proved it was possible. Did they? They did it. Nice. Did they put it on the water? I don't know if they did it or if they had to hold the ship in exactly the same place for six days

or whatever. So it might be untrue, but it still might be possible. One reason it might be untrue is, like Anna says, it was quite a while after it happened that people wrote about it. Lucy, and I think it was the very first person in 160 AD. But the same story is told of another person, Proclus of Athens. And usually when the same story is told about two or three different famous people, usually it means it's probably a madey-upy thingy.

Do you think the grappling hook happened with the ships? Well, I just can't. I just can't believe it, even though it's obviously people said it happened. But the descriptions are so extraordinary. So I think in Plutarch's description, he said, a ship was frequently lifted up to a great height in the air, a dreadful thing to behold, no shit, and was rolled to and fro and kept swinging until all the sailors were thrown out.

I mean, it sounds like one of those rides at a theme park, actually. Yeah. You know, the pirate ship ones. Yeah. What theme park are you going to? That all of the people inside the rocket have been shut down. But before they invented the safety bar. Yeah, Plutarch was writing around 1080, so that was quite a few hundred years later.

And I think whether it happened or not, certainly as you get further away from the supposed time, the stories get less and less realistic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Archimedes, there's so many stories about him, though. That's the thing, isn't it? Like maybe the thing everyone gets taught is that he shouted Eureka and he jumped out of his bath because he discovered the Archimedes principle

about displacing water. He was trying to work out how much gold was in the king's crown. Right. Yeah, he put it in the bath and the amount of water that tipped out told him how dense it was. Exactly, yeah. But he was an incredible mathematician. You know, he did brilliant work on the surface area of volume of spheres

or centres of gravity and floating objects. And so they're really complicated ideas. And it seems unlikely he would have got so excited that he would have jumped out of his bath. Also, he didn't like baths. We know that he didn't like to go in the bath. Again, according to Plutarch, they're writing quite long down the line. But he was writing, yeah, 200 years later,

saying this guy was a stinky old guy who never took a bath. But he said that his servants used to take him against his will to the bath. And when he was in there, they would put oil on him. And instead of washing himself, he would draw like mathematical symbols on his body so he could do the maths on his own body. It's like when you draw like in the shower when you kind of write your name on the glass of the shower.

Exactly like that. I was thinking of it as a kind of clever way of getting a child to eat his peas. That's really clever. Cover them with oil so they can write their equations on their chest. No, I just sort of mean it's a way of tricking Archimedes into washing himself, basically. Yeah, exactly. That gets a sort of crafty...

I tried to find out more recent sources about Archimedes. So you know the sites where you type in any celebrity's name, basically, and it gives you all the auto-google results. Oh, yeah, okay, no. So I've been on whozdatedwho.com. Who is he dating right now? Apparently Archimedes is possibly single, according to whozdatedwho.com.

I went on celebwiki.net. Measurements, not available. Bodybuild average. Are these sites... What are these? What are you talking about? You know these automatically generated sites that just asset a strip from all over the internet, and they just come up with dubious figures

and celebrity net worth or whatever. I just thought I'd try it for Archimedes, and it turns out he's on all these sites and they know it. They don't know anything about him. They don't know anything about him. They've got it right, mostly, haven't they? Which just goes to show, like, if Plutarch found it hard, like, now celebwiki.net is finding it even harder to try.

Do you think in a thousand years time there'll be a podcast going, did you know Archimedes was of average build? That was probably single. I think so. According to the sources that were written only 2,000 years after he died. Something Syracuse, he was in Syracuse, right? That's where he's from. Syracuse had one very in particular thing in common with the UK today.

Can you guess what it is? It was a services economy. Rather than goods-based. You say the UK? The UK, yeah. You said the UK, right? I mean, you're never going to get this in a billion years. Was it about gold?

It was, that they only had one or a remaker. Oh, my God. So, do you remember a couple of weeks ago, we found out there was only one or a remaker in the UK? Well, there was only one or a remaker in Syracuse, and it was Archimedes. Because he invented it. But it feels like we've got them on the way up.

And it wasn't in decline then, was it? And a thousand years ago, in between those two points, like one in ten people made all of these full-time. I can't believe we didn't get that chance. It was so stupid. It was looking you right in the face alongside. Damn it. He's such a model for the kind of mad scientist trope, isn't he?

And it must be true. I guess all these things must spring from a truth that he was so obsessed with his bloody mouth, couldn't even get him in a bath. There must have been something to that. He was incredible at golf, because he could just calculate. He could count the number of shots he played. Exactly.

Amazing. He just had one big lever. His golf club was one huge lever. Every shot was a putt for him. Do you know you can buy golf clubs where you hold it next to a ball, and then it has a little mechanism inside the club head, and it just fires out and shoots out and hits the ball exactly the right distance that you want it to go.

So you don't have to swing there or anything. Just hold it still and it just shoots off. Kind of like the alien's drawers in Alien, you know, where it just open up. And what's the point in that? Because that doesn't seem to take away some of the play. You still got to walk. You still got to walk to where the ball is. Imagine you're a disabled person who can't swing a golf club, but you still want to play, so you still want to hit the ball,

and you want to aim it and stuff like that, but you can't swing it. Okay, so you have to point it right, I guess, don't you? You've got to point it. He calculated the total number of grains of sand in the universe as could possibly be in the universe. He worked out that it was 10 to the power of 63. And he worked that out by working out that the entire universe was about two light years in diameter, and he was no one there.

I mean, he wasn't even in the same ballpark. You can't see picturing alien planets that have sand on it. So people had been saying that there was an infinite amount of sand, and he wanted to prove that actually there wasn't an infinite amount of sand. There was a finite amount. And I can prove that by looking at how big the universe is, looking at how big a grain of sand is, and working out that there's a maximum that you could have.

And he said that that maximum was 10 to the power of 63. But fortunately, he didn't realize that he knew that there were five planets, but he didn't know that there were an infinite number of universes and planets and stuff. The old, all I have to do is look at how big the universe is, and that feels like you're going to trip up at the level of how big the universe is. It's still very impressive. It was impressive because he had to basically invent new bits of maths to do it, because they didn't really have big numbers in those days.

You could talk about, you know, 10,000, which is myriad. So that was basically the biggest number you could say. I think that is really cool. And then he came up with like a myriad to the power of a myriad, which is 10,000 to the power of 10,000, and then sort of extrapolated from there. So weird the idea of inventing big numbers. Inventing big things. The biggest thing they could think of was 10 meters high.

It's very impressive. You can see all the academics getting together and then someone going up to the board and revealing a new zero. The entire audience goes nuts. Has anyone considered 10,001? Okay, it is time for fact number three. That is Anna. My fact this week is that most black swallower fish specimens died

because they ate too much and their stomachs exploded. Wow. Weird life trajectory they have. There's a lot weird going on in that sense. Yeah. So the black swallower fish is a type of fish. When I say specimens, I mean like ones that we've found. A specimen is something that, you know, a scientist looks at in researches.

So it's not clear that this is how most of them die. It's just all the ones we've found have floated up to the top of the water because this has happened. And the reason this has happened is because they're amazing at swallowing. Sometimes too good. So they're about 20 centimeters long. They can swallow prey that is over twice as long as them. I mean, one of them was found with prey four times as long as it in its body

and 10 times the mass. So if you look up pictures of them, they're just the best. It looks like they're carrying a huge bit of carry-on luggage under their stomach, which is where they store this food. It's amazing. They look absolutely ridiculous. But sometimes their eyes are too big for their stomachs and they'll eat something so huge that they can't digest it quickly enough

before it starts decomposing. And when it starts decomposing, it releases all these gases in their stomachs and they inflate and they sort of float to the top like a helium balloon and they explode and then that's where we find them. Pick them up and go look at this. It's kind of not surprising these are the only ones we've found because they live quite deep down, don't they? They live in the twilight zone.

I know, I love it. Well, they live in the lower twilight and the upper midnight zone. There are two different zones. Do you think lots of really weird stuff happens down there that they can't explain? Yeah. Well, these things are really freaky. One thing we don't know is how they prey or we're not sure. It's basically where they prey forwards or backwards.

So they've got these teeth which retract. You know like a staged dagger which kind of retracts and then pops back out. So they've got those basically, but they're pointing backwards, I think. So the prey can push it, it can push prey into its mouth and the prey then finds it incredibly hard to get out again. But it can go further in and so we think it either... That's a horrible option, isn't it? It's like you can't get out darling, but don't worry, you can go further in.

That's it, they either bite from the tail end of the prey and just work their way up to the head or they bite the head and then work their way down. Yeah, like a really sharp teeth, don't they? Yeah, but maybe they bite something too big and then they just have to keep going. Yeah, because not only can the prey not escape, but we think that they can't spit anything out. They're just locked in to this thing, so they have to judge quite carefully how big what they're eating is. It's like if you go to the buffet and you can only go once, you have to really nail it.

You get the biggest piece of turkey. But then you have to finish it otherwise they won't let you leave. And you're like, you've still got five sausage rolls there and you're like, oh no, I knew it. The Black Swallowfish was discovered in 1864 by someone called James Yates Johnson and he is possibly more notable or as notable for discovering a lot of other fish and spiders, but also for donating the moss collection to the Natural History Museum of Madeira. So just a little of moss. Can I, James? Thank you.

It's probably more moss facts at this point in our show from you. Andy teed it up back in the day, but it's great. I'm going to have to hand over the moss trousers at some point. Jesus Christ. Please wash them first. One cool thing we should say is that their bellies are stretched so thin that they are transparent. So you do get a good view. It's like having a window into there.

It's interesting. You get quite a few of these animals that can eat whole prey. Not just this one, but most of them. I'm not most of them. Maybe about a quarter of them have got black guts. Inside of their guts has got like a black layer so that if you eat something which glows, when you eat it, you don't want it to be glowing inside your tummy. Otherwise, all of your enemies are going to be able to come and eat you.

And so they have this black line stomach which stops the glow from coming out. That's so cool. But the black swallow doesn't have that, I don't think. That would be really weird if you, yeah. You could see what Tom was eating. Yeah. Do you think it would help us eat more healthily if we walked around and everyone could look in your stomach and go, oh yeah, three pizzas last night.

I think it would. So we're not allowed clothes in this scenario. They have to be transparent. Just one little transparent window in the middle of your t-shirt. Oh, like Rihanna's pregnancy outfit where she showed off her tummy. Yeah, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on guys, keep up.

Did you call her Rihanna? Yeah, I really leaned into the H, I think, yeah. For all I know, that's how she pronounces it, but I don't think so. Mate, I think she does, but only in private. She doesn't tell me. Yeah, yeah. It sounds like you said in an e-mail to someone about Hannah. Rihanna.

Rihanna. What do we think of her clothing choice today? Not appropriate for the office, I say. You know dolphins? Yeah. How do they breathe? Through their blow holes. Exactly.

Exciting news. Scientists in New Zealand have found a dolphin that breathed through its mouth. It's called Hector's Dolphin, the species or the sub-breed of dolphin. And specifically, it's not actually the whole species. It's literally one guy, one dolphin who breathed through his mouth. Sorry, is he congested in his blow hole? I've noticed some weird thing about the way the trachea links up to the blow hole and how actually he might have been injured or something.

But anyway, he's found a way around whatever this past injury was or event in his life. And now it just goes around like a dork breathing through his mouth. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. I wonder if he looks at humans and thinks, I belong there like a little mermaid. So other fish that have interesting ways of eating food, one of them is the lancet fish. And mostly this is good because it's sort of vaguely similar to the black swallower in

that its contents of its stomach are often in completely pristine condition because it again eats these huge meals. So we think it's often fish that live very deep and don't get meals very often. So when you do, you've got to really eat shed loads. It's about seven foot long. Whoa. It's very big. Yeah.

Yeah. It's huge. But it will gorge on all these meals and then they just sit in its stomach for ages. But it means that lots of the new species that we discover of fish and squids and octopus are based on opening up the contents of the stomach and then you just get a bunch of new species fall out. The other interesting thing about lancet fish is that they don't see each other very often because they live quite deep down.

And so when they see another lancet fish, they're going to want to mate with it. And they don't want to have problems with genders and stuff like that. So if two lancet fish come together, they're hermaphrodites and they can change when they meet a new one. Do they argue about that? Well, I thought it, but you know, like when you're walking down a pavement and you're not sure to turn left or to turn right because someone's walking towards you. I imagine there's a lot of that going on.

So what there are some times where they accidentally both change together. Oh, sorry. Sorry. They both change to female. Oh, sorry. Sorry. They have a little laugh about it and then move on. That's cool.

The whole thing off. So do you end up just having sex with that person, James? If you're in a remote enough place, it's actually wisest to have sex with that person because you might not see someone for days. Right. If you're going on a country walk. I guess it's our responsibility to repopulate the earth. What?

We're in Henley. I found a pretty weird fish that I want to mention. Yeah. This is called the Calogono and it's in Lake Malawi in East Africa and it's what's known as kind of like a sleeper fish. Right. So this thing where it pretends not to be a fish for most of its life and then it just comes to life as a fish.

Exactly. It's sort of, you know, hanging out with some crabs. Sort of pretending to be part of the family, getting all the info, waiting for the moment to arrest. No, this is a fish that plays dead basically in order to eat food and it lays down and it just plays dead and smaller fish will come to sort of either check it out or maybe get a nibble on it. And as they come, it's something goes, whoa.

Oh my God. Well, not jumps, but like, you know, whatever fish do swims up and eats everyone eats all the spectators. It's like going to a buffet and you get eaten by the sausage hole. Exactly. Exactly. I'm going to slightly, slightly off piece thing about guts because this was about the black swallower and how it eats.

So I was finding out about uses of cow guts, right? Oh yeah. Did you know that like top flight tennis rackets all used to be made of cow intestines? Hey, it was used on the strings, wasn't it? It was the strings. But until about 10 years ago, I was in like really recently, um, there was this Norfolk film called Bo Brand, right? And I read a few news articles about them and they made tennis racket strings and harp

strings out of cow guts. So, well, imagine if you accidentally got those mixed up, that'd be a very melodious game of tennis. Turn off with the harp, I'm cool. Um, but yeah, and I gave them a ring because I thought, I can't believe this is true. And they said, oh yeah, we don't do it anymore. But until about 10 years ago, we did. And it took four cows to make one tennis racket.

No. That's too many cows for each, because they use like five tennis rackets per game. I know. And that's why you'll often see around the edge of the court, like 20 cows just waiting to be actually just look on their faces. I think you can play on with that racket actually, Roger. At least they didn't use silkworm guts. I just remember we talked about that.

Yeah. Not a silkworm. Was that just the top end players? Or is that every racket? No, this is top play. And they used to have, no, top end. And they used to have a, like they used to send a team to Wimbledon. They would have like a little place where they would restring your rackets for you for the

top players. And they would, you know, stable where they do that, wasn't it? Around the back. Yeah. And that's where they come out bloodstains when they go back onto the courts. So they all made, but they're all like plastic now. They are. Yeah.

And they worked with a really nice lady at Bo Brand. So thank you to her for talking to me for quite a long time actually about this stuff. And she said that demand really slackened off about 10 years ago. But fortunately it coincided with a huge increase in demand for harps. No idea why. But basically they just pivoted in the business. Did you ask her like, what happened 10 years ago with that harp? And then suddenly it played in the background as she thought about what happened.

The Sloan's Viperfish can eat very big things. And it does it by opening its jaw up to over 90 degrees. So it massively opens its mouth and is doing it net right now. I think I can go over 90 actually. Actually how big do you think your mouth gap is there Anna? Would you say? At a conference or? Let's say, no, no, top to bottom in centimetres.

You'd have to ask Archimedes, uh, uh, essentially it's like 4.5. 4.5. The largest mouth gap of any woman in the world is 6.52 centimetres. So you're getting there. Samantha Ramsdell. She can bite through four single stacked cheeseburgers in one go and fit an entire large-sized French fries from McDonald's in her mouth. Oh wow, standing up.

So she eats fries vertically. Is that what you're saying? Oh no. I think like you bundle them like straws. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I thought you meant the full thing. No, no, no.

Cheese fries. That's a real, like cheese fries vertically. It's some kind of sick burn. She can be seen on TikTok sometimes, um, with a guy called Isaac Johnson who has the male record gape and his is 9.52 centimetres. Oh my God, that's big. And they, they are coupled because I want to see them snog. Yes.

Oh no one wants to see that tonight. Oh my God. They can snog when they can hold a billiard ball in between their tongues as they're doing it. Um, Isaac can fit objects such as a baseball, a soda cam, or a large apple in his mouth. Oh, that's really put it in context to me. Yeah. I once saw a really big apple at the offices of We Buy Any Card dot com in, um, Haringay.

I reckon he could fit that in because it was a fucking massive apple. Good pump for We Buy Any Card dot com. I'd like to drill down into this a bit. Like, um, was it on display? Was it, you know, you think our cars are good? You should have, honestly, this apple was so massive. It was, Dan Scott, like a large coffee cup here. I reckon it was as tall as that.

Oh, that's right. And all I could do when he was talking to me was look at this apple because it was so massive. Were you trying to sell them a car at the time? I gave them, yeah, I sold them a car, yeah. I'll take one apple. Oh my God, it's Jack and the Beanstalk all over again. When you go home, your aged mother is saying, did you manage to sell the car to let us live?

No, but I got this big old apple. They just say, in Jack and the Beanstalk, right, the moral of that story is that you should sell your cow for beans because he gets the beans and he gets a massive Beanstalk and then he gets a golden chicken or something, doesn't he? And how much of that? A golden chicken? You've misread that story. Does he not get a golden head or something?

A golden goose? Yeah. Does he get a golden goose at the time? He chimes down the Beanstalk after it, but then he has to cut the Beanstalk down. He does all that. Like, basically, he's taken a risk at the very start of that story, you know, selling his car or whatever it was for some beans. And then he's had to go through a few troubles, but at the end, he gets a golden goose that

lays golden eggs. So the moral of the story is, do something stupid. At the end, it'll work out fine. Are you trying to justify giving away your cow for an apple because it feels like you're... How much? It's a big apple. It's not any old apple. My wife didn't buy this, and you guys aren't buying it either.

OK, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that there is a cathedral in Norway currently restoring its rooftop with large amounts of urine from a retired field horse called Norik. Norik likes to pee into a bucket at specific times every single day. Wow. So? A lot to unpack here with this story. I should just quickly say I got sent this story by a friend of mine, Riggs, who lives

in Norway. She spotted it, and it was a calling out for horse urine. So the story is basically that there is a very old cathedral there. It's called Niderås Cathedral. It's in Trondheim, and the idea is that they're doing the roof at the moment, but the problem is that in order to get the roof back to the state that they want to get it to, they need to oxidize the copper. And in order to do that, it's been discovered that you can use horse urine or cow urine.

So to oxidize the copper, you mean like it goes from the shiny color to like a green color? Exactly. So if you know a green color on a cathedral roof, that is the state that it needs to be in, but it takes a long time to do that, and it can take decades in fact. But by using horse urine, they are able to speed up the process. The issue is where do you get that much horse urine on? From a horse.

From a horse, right? But you know, who's going to give you that urine? You need to do a calling out to the world, or specifically to that very tiny bit of Norway. And so that's what they did. The people said, do you have horse urine? We need it. And this was spotted by someone who has a very old horse called Norik, who has this very curious thing, which is that Norik likes to pee at certain times indoors every day.

And so what they do is they bring Norik in. He comes for his daily pee at a certain time, and he's been supplying sort of most of the pee. Amazing. Okay. They sent it on Facebook, didn't they? Yeah. This happens in Binneset, which I think is a town near Trondheim.

And they said, hello. A somewhat special request, but we would love to get our hands on about four to five litres of horse urine. If you have an opportunity to help with this, feel free to contact Henning Grott, stone cutter at the cathedral. I'm interested that they collect it in a bucket, because that does imply that someone's waiting there all the time, because you don't know when a horse is going to weep, you just go into the stadium and they've done it all over the hay.

But this is the point, though. So it chooses, and does it over the bucket? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's actually a video that you can see online. So Norik is about to take a pee. It's basically just a shot of his penis in camera, and then the urine starts coming out. A bucket comes underneath it and starts collecting.

So actually there's a stable hand who has to sit in the stable all day, every day, until he starts peeing and then shove the bucket underneath his woolly. This is how you got a urine sample from a horse. I was looking up how you do it, and I was on the website horsesidevetguide.com. And it said, what you do is you get a disposable coffee cup. So Dan's got a disposable coffee cup here, and you attach that to a broom handle, and then you wait for the horse to start peeing, and then you just move it slowly into position, and then you catch the midstream urine, which is the good stuff if your testing horse is

healthy. If you want to at home picture how big my cup is, by the way, it's roughly the same size as a big apple. Well, like a huge apple. That's just for the listener. Like an apple that I would say would be worth a car in. There's a few different ways that they could have done this, instead of putting horse urine on the roof.

They could have covered it in hard-boiled eggs, and that would have done the job. They could have used Miracle Grow Plant Fertiliser. I've got some of that. Well, you can use that to oxidise your copper. Oh, great. And is that what, is that because of nitrogen? It's the ammonia we think in the urine, isn't it? Yeah, so in the urine, it's ammonia.

Now urine doesn't have any ammonia in it, but it does contain things that bacteria like egg, and you have bacteria in the air, so that bacteria goes into the urine, and then the bacteria creates ammonia, so you couldn't use just fresh out of the horse urine. You need to leave it to stand for a bit. But sulfur also works, and that's what you get with your hard-boiled eggs. That's so clever. It would stink, though. You've smeared egg sulfur all over your church roof.

Well, more than horse piss? Yeah, actually, that causes a lot of differences. Another one you could do would be salt and vinegar crisps, apparently. That is apparently an age-old, can't be that old, but it's a way of doing this that you see on there. That's how they did Westminster Abbey originally. Just back to this idea about Norric going in at certain times and peeing into the bucket. I was reading a blog the other day, and it actually has this really interesting thing,

which is that horses can be taught to pee on command. They can be toilet-trained. They can be toilet-trained. Really? But what about that old saying, you can take a horse to the toilet, but you can't make it piss. Well, in the article that I was reading, it did sort of say that what it's useful really is horse shows.

If a horse is going out into the ring and it's about to do an act, you don't want your horse shitting and pissing everywhere, do you? So if you can get your horse to go beforehand by teaching it when to go, you're fine. What you need to do is when you see a horse pissing, quickly go up beside it and just start whistling. And whistle to the exact length of their pee. Now, obviously, you might not have that much breath, so catch your breath back into the whistle.

Yeah, no, I know what whistle sounds like. Great. So you've done that. Go away. You're seeing the horse pee again later. Go back quickly to its side as it's peeing. Do this for weeks and weeks and weeks, and then after weeks, you'll find that when you go near a horse that probably needs a pee and you go, it goes the other way around.

The horse starts peeing to your whistle. Amazing. It's suddenly you're enabling the piss via your whistle. It's not much of a superpower, is it? It's not making any horse piss on demand. You can do therapy horses, though, don't you, or guide horses. Some blind people who are allergic to dogs have to have guide ponies, remember? Just a small pony.

Shetland. A little Shetland pony. Shai horse. Yeah. I mean, I haven't been on the London Underground when a horse comes on the carriage. No, but that is a thing. I guess they have to have some kind of training system. Yeah.

Well, you can pee. I mean. Well, there are nappies as well. You can get a horse nappies. You said that as if it's a really standard piece of information. That's what it was. Who wears the nappies? The guide horses?

Yeah, or horses that are, you know, doing, I guess, presentations. That's worse. In dressage, you'd rather your horse is weed than you've got some huge nappy. Rodin used urine on his sculptures. Not all's urine, but he used to instruct his assistants to go out into the, um, his, like, outdoor studio and urinate all over the bronze statues in the yard. Oh, bronzes. I was thinking stone.

I just thought, well, that won't have a reaction. But, okay. Bronzes. He didn't piss on the kiss. Sadly not. Well, actually he just got his helpers to pee on it. He didn't collect them or anything. He just said, go and piss on that.

It's a studio, isn't it? It's like Damien Hurst. Damien Hurst often won't piss on his own stuff. Will he not? No. Don't piss on your own stuff. Save that for the critics. Well, Vincent van Gogh also used cow urine.

There's this color called Indian yellow, which was this huge secret. And it came in these balls. And it was really popular in the 19th century because it's an unbelievably vivid dye. And no one knows how it was made. And it was this huge secret. And it turns out that this village in India called Mirazapur was taking its cows. And it was restricting their diet, basically only to mango leaves. Oh, yeah.

And there are some claims and counterclaims about it. But there's pretty good evidence that it did happen. And they would take the cow's piss and they would heat it. And they'd bake it down to a syrup, basically. They'd dry the syrup so it's ultra pure. And the Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. Cow piss. You're seeing cow piss when you see those stars, yeah?

No way. You should go and stand. What gallery is it in? I don't want someone to go and stand there and just tell everyone who comes and starts admiring it. Cow piss, you know? Cow piss. You can use horse urine to grow pineapples. Really?

Which they do at the Lost Gardens of Heligan, which is in Cornwall. And they still make pineapples in that old way that they used to. So do you remember how we said that you used to be able to buy a pineapple for the same price as a car? Now I know what you're going to say. You got confused. You thought it was a pineapple. When you saw these really big apple dogs, was it spiky and didn't have like green spines? It was an open brackets pine, closed brackets apple.

No, so like pineapples used to be really expensive because they were so expensive to grow in the UK because we don't have the climate. And so the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall still make them in the old fashioned way. And the way that they do that is they get a greenhouse, but they heat up the greenhouse by putting horse manure and horse urine and piles of straw in the corner. And they kind of like a compost heap will get hotter and hotter and that heats up the building. But it does mean every pineapple costs £1,200 to grow. That's a lot. So it's a lot of money for one pineapple, isn't it? Yeah.

I reckon that the pineapple that they're growing at the moment or might have just grown is going to be worth around £10,000 in total because of not just how much it costs to make, but also its rarity and stuff like that. But even though it's worth that much, they're not going to sell it. They're going to cut it up and feed it to their staff. Nice. Wow. It's quite nice, isn't it? I did read that when they started doing this, they gave the second one they'd grown to the queen. That's great.

I did make sure that they tasted the first one to ensure that they did not taste of horse urine and horse manure. Good idea. That is a risk. On urine collection, the first ever people doing IVF. Very early patients. This was, when was it? 70s, I think? Well, Louise Brown was 77, I think.

Okay. Yeah. So the two doctors who are pioneering it really will call Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe. And it was really old Steptoe. And it's quite controversial. You know, they were refused various grants because it was kind of creating life artificially. But early patients had to live in the center basically for two or three weeks as inpatients while this was going on.

And they had to collect all of their urine during treatment because they needed to monitor their hormone levels. So they just had to carry these huge plastic containers every time they went offsite. They did have an amazing pineapple garden round the back. Yeah. It was really basic stuff. And the other thing I had to do was after your embryos were inserted back into you, the women had to spend an hour or two crouching down with their bottoms in the air just in

case, in case gravity helped. They weren't sure whether it helped or not. Wasn't it the case, by the way? I actually don't have any information on this, but I remember reading that in the early days of penicillin, we didn't have enough penicillin itself to go around for every patient. So what they would do is they would give a patient some of the penicillin and then wait at the other end of them for it to come out through their pee. And they would extract the remaining penicillin that was in there and then give that to another

patient. So you would have thought that you have metabolized the useful bits of the penicillin. So surely it's diluting and diluting and diluting. Well, I guess you've maybe got enough left over in it that it's worth extracting from the pee. That's really gross. I was reading an article which said that action must be taken over the surprisingly widespread problem of stable staff urinating into race horses bedding.

I saw that. Did you? Yeah. And what's the problem? It's horrible for the horses because they've got a bed covered in groom piss. Well, that's not a problem. The problem is the testing. No, it's bad for the horses.

It's bad for the horses. You don't want to lie them down on sort of wet, damp hay or straw. Horses sleep on their urine a lot. They should be mucked out. They should be, you know. But when you muck out the horses, hey, you're going to muck out the human urine with the horse urine, aren't you? I also think, though, if I, you know, got for a bit ever wet the bed, I don't want other

people coming pissing on my bed going, well, you've already done it, so I might as well as well. Do you think it's, it probably is worse, like your own fart smell okay, but someone else is already horrible? It feels like it would be less, I don't really want to sleep on my own wet bed, but I would rather do that if it was a choice between that and the bed that Andy's pissed in. Thank you. Sure.

Yeah. Great. Exactly. Yeah. No, I thought they were saying it was for the horses benefit, but you're saying it's also for the problem of doping. The reason it came up. Because the grooms are all coaxed off their heads.

The reason it came up is because the grooms are all coaxed off their heads. The reason it came up. But they don't test the straw? Yeah, they do. They test the straw? Yeah. Often you'll get, you'll do the testing by testing the horses straw because that's where you get the horse urine for.

So the bedding will get tested as a sample and there's a trainer whose horse was found to have been sort of doping, but I think with something that you wouldn't dope with like marijuana or something. I can't remember actually what it was, but it turned out to be caused by the stable staff urinating in the box while he was mucking it out. This horse has been asking a lot of big questions about the universe. Listen to a lot of jazz. OK, that's it.

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

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website. No such thing as a fish.com. Check it out. It's awesome. It's got all of our previous episodes up there. It's got a link to the tickets for our final leg of our nerd immunity tour. We're going to be doing that in September of this year. Come check it out.

It's an awesome night. We would love, love, love to see you guys there. But if you can't make it, don't worry, because we'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.