No Such Thing As A Fish - 435: No Such Thing As An Arm-Wrestling Chihuahua

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss huge heads, bloated batsmen, lopsided lighthouses and 'armful arm-wrestlers.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covern Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the author George Elliott had a massive head. That's very similar to another fact that we've had a few years ago.

This is sort of a sequel fact, this is so for fans of the show you might have remembered in episode 265, we delivered the jaw breaking news that George Elliott had a secret jaw slapping news jaw dropping news breaking my facts are really aggressive femur snapping news coming to you. So what was it? What was the news? We delivered them. So the jaw dropping news, no breakage is that 50 years after she died for 50 years was

the fact that she had a massive hand, but that was a secret and the family denied her having it. Anyway, so this was written in a book which was back in the 1840s. So there was a biography that was put together of George Elliott by a writer called Matilda Blind or Mathilda Blind. I can't get the exact pronounces. Could be blend as well. Could be what?

Could be blend. It's probably Matilde Blind. Matilde Blind and so Matilde Blind wrote a biography of her and she went round. South African. Matilde Blind. She's a kiwi. Sorry, she wrote an autobiography. A biography and during the research period she went to the farm where George Elliott

used to live and there was a couple there called the Braes and it was Mrs. Cara Brae who told everyone that she had this big hand. However, when I was reading the book recently, I also discovered that her husband became obsessed with George Elliott because he noticed that she also had a ginormous head. Was she just huge? Was she a giant? No, she wasn't that big, but I mean, I think that's why they were astounded by the size of her head.

She was taller than average, I think. Yeah, but you're not just dragging out for when you don't have a fact next time because George Elliott had a massive elbow. It's quite possible we will be back at 100 episodes time with another feature. So Mrs. Brae wrote of her, she said her head was massive, her feature is powerful and rugged, her mouth large but shapely, the jaw singularly square for a woman, unbreakable at the sound of a powerful fact, I imagine. And so Mr. Brae said, I need to get your head turned into a cast.

I need to take you to London and so we can go and we can do phrenology on it and see how it's going to be. So phrenology is where you look at the shape of someone's head and you can tell their personality. Exactly. That's right. It was very popular back in those days when people started trying to work out how the brain functioned and maybe certain bits of our brain. They couldn't do palm reading on her because it would be like going through Ella and Sherf

to Tom Perdue. It sounds amazing, the report. So her head was, it was measured by a doctor called James Deville and then it was analysed by George Coombe who was one of the leaders of the phrenological movement in the whole country. So, you know, she would have needed a very big Coombe. And when he first saw the cast of her head, Coombe, because he was doing the analysis, he was in the lab.

I don't think I had a lab. But anyway, he took the cast for a man's head. That's how huge it was, you know, 22 and a quarter inches. That's how much bigger are men's heads than women's heads. Statistically speaking. I know that my head is five centimetres bigger than George Elliot's. But that's good. So this, this is just a bit bigger than George Elliot's head.

Yeah, yeah. So if anyone sees me in the pub and you're like, oh, that's James from the podcast, imagine my head but five centimetres smaller and that'll be George Elliot's head. That's like she's there. So this is actually, now your fact has become kind of an insult to James because what you're saying is James Harkin has a really massive head compared to, but then men don't have larger heads in general than women, I think. That's true, except for Andy, apparently.

I'm just looking at Andy's head. Which Anna was saying at the top of the show. Yeah. It's got a small head. I'm not very comfortable with this line of inquiry. Have you ever, if just listening at home, have you ever seen a matchstick? Imagine the head was a bit smaller. It actually goes in from the match shaft.

Australians, you might know them as dickheads, those matches. That's right. Yeah, and funnily, at school, a lot of the kids were Australian matchmen. No, but so she was, she was analysed by this phrenologist and you know, so it said that her temperament was nervous lymphatic, which means active without endurance. And lo and behold, it turned out that she worked from 9am until 1pm. So she was active, but didn't have endurance and you know, intellectual and all of this. And she visited this guy over the years, Coombe.

She didn't just have her head sent to him via the casting, she actually was in his presence a few times. Well, that's what happened. You would make the cast of the head and you would send it to phrenologists who were keen to sort of measure the bumps and so on. You just need to be very careful that you do specify cast before someone saws off their own head and turns it into a package. Okay, here's the thing I don't get.

What about your hair? So if you've got huge hair, that will surely obscure the lumps and bumps on your head. But you feel the bumps. You're not looking for the bumps. But this is one of the things that opponents of phrenology said, you know, this is why it's nonsense. So Oliver Wendell Holmes. Oh yeah.

Wait, who was he again? I think he was a writer and a doctor, I think. He was a celeb. He was a celeb. I just double checked because in my head I went, oh, Sherlock's brother. And then I realised not a real person. Definitely not. No, no, no.

But he wrote this. Could you tell how much money there is in a safe by kneading its knobs with your fingers? When a man fumbles about my forehead and talks about the organs of individuality, size, etc. I trust him as much as I should if he felt the outside of my strongbox and told me there was a five dollar or a ten dollar bill under this or that particular rivet. Okay. Which is fair. Well, yeah.

So even at the time people did speak. It was a long way of saying this is bullshit. Yeah. Isn't it? Yeah. Why is it keeping such small value bills in a safe box? Jesus Christ. Maybe he's on holiday.

Even back then. It's just the 1700s. Yeah. Yeah. That's worth a lot. See, is it 1800s, isn't it? I think so. Yeah, yeah.

That was the manner. But the idea was that, you know, you could have your eyeballs almost pushed out even. And this in fact was the first, you know, the first instance of it. So phrenology was coined, the idea of it was coined by Franz Joseph Gaul. And he said that he came up with the idea or he realised it was the truth when he noticed that classmates in his class could memorise these massive long bits of text and the ones that could memorise it had quite bulging eyes. He said they had big salient eyes.

And he said, this must mean that the organ of verbal memory is sitting right behind your eyes. And if you're really going to remember himself, it's pushing them out. So I don't know if your eyes just drop out of your face entirely if you've got a really good memory. But then, yeah, he's the father of it really, wasn't he? Yeah. The thing I liked about it though is he wasn't this Gaul character.

He wasn't onto the wrong idea, really, because all he could do was... No, that's all right. I agree. I think it was... I mean, it was definitely all bullshit. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. But, you know, modern day brain understanding is that certain bits of the brain are compartmentalised

to certain things, music and so on, and emotions and right thinking, left thinking and all that. He didn't come up with that idea. So someone else had come up with that idea and he thought, ah, well, what if I took that idea and then made the bump thing a thing? Right. I could just say that if I was around at that time, I definitely would have believed it. It just sounds so... Yeah, well, obviously.

Yeah. I think he would have as well. Yeah, he would. I think I wouldn't. It's very hard to put yourself in there. My organ of credulousness is tiny, actually. Yeah. Phrenology is basically astrology, isn't it?

Or it was sort of a version of astrology in that it seemed to tell people things that were vague enough that they could go, yeah, that sounds exactly like me. Like Barnum's statements. It mostly wasn't. The reports you got from a phrenologist were very rarely. You're a wanker. It was always, oh, you've got a nice organ over there, it's an organ there, and I don't think I don't think they've often said you've got the organ of the killer.

No. But they told everyone else after they left with Asia. It was used to suggest that other races were lower. It was used in a very racist sense. Yeah, yeah. And people believed it. Yeah, you're a genesis. To be honest, it was mostly used to whatever your belief was.

Yeah. It was used to kind of strengthen that. So for instance, there was a woman called Mrs. Hamilton. She was known as, she was from Ayrshire, and she would go around talking about phrenology. But she said that because the bumps on a woman's head were generally the same as the bumps on a man's head, this proved that women had exactly the same intellectual capacity as men's. And she went around saying, yeah, well, you know, this proves feminism.

See, I knew it was bullshit, but that is the nail in the coffin of phrenology there, isn't it? What the hell's the odd about? Alderman got phrenologised. John James Alderman, the big bird man, did all the bird sketches and stuff. And actually he was huge. He wasn't a bird man. He was a man who studied birds.

He studied birds. Easily, yeah. The naturalist who was sort of the leading authority on birds that time and his books for the beautiful drawings. And he wrote in his diary, I was astounded when I had my reading because they said that I must be a strong and constant lover and affectionate father. I would have made a great general and that I was extraordinarily generous. I know all these to be facts, so I'm amazed that they discovered them.

I'm amazed at the person who you're paying to do your phrenology said, oh, it apparently says you're very generous. You guys remember Aaron Burr, of Burr and Hamilton, of musical fame. Vice President of America. Well, Aaron Burr was cast, his head was cast, but after his death and they found that he had lots of secretiveness and destructiveness. Did he die in the duel? No, he survived the duel and then ran away, I think.

Yeah, he died on his deathbed many, many years ago. He should never have gone there. He didn't die on the field. When you're in John Lewis, don't pick the deathbed. Hi, I'm looking for a deathbed? Yeah. Are you sure? Some celebrity fans, just quickly?

Modern day ones. No. Oh, I see celebrities. No, Kim Kardashian or... No, Arthur Conan Doyle. Yeah, of course. I mean, Arthur Conan Doyle. Absolutely everything.

I wish I'd been friends with him, the pranking you could have got down Arthur Conan Doyle That was an epic. Queen Victoria as well and Prince Albert. They had studies done by George Coon. Can I just say, Andy, when you say some celebrities, I thank God you're not booking Celebrity Love Island. Well, I've got as Queen Victoria and Francis Goll. You'd want to see it.

Dead. Was there a deathbed in there? Shit. Love the deathbed. Anyway, they appointed them. Barack Obama. I'll find someone living for me. End that sentence, James.

Sorry, he didn't... No, no. You don't let me finish my sentence. Sorry. Okay. Barack Obama is a subject of an incredibly weird book called The Phrenology of Barack Obama. It's a self-published book by a guy called Bensa Magos and apparently he looked at a

mysterious headscar on Obama's head that the mass media refuses to discuss and according to him, this is evidence that Obama once had a horn and leads ultimately to the Satanic Endgame revealed by the demon horn of Molloch. Oh, okay. I can't believe the Guardian isn't reporting on this. That's outrageous. It feels like he's missed the boat because he just served two terms and then left office in an orderly fashion.

What's Molloch's Endgame here? Maybe it took a while to find a publisher. Wow. I'm definitely buying it. That sounds awesome. Yeah, this guy, Coom, just going back to the casting of True Celebrities, he did very famous people. He did Prince Albert's head.

So George Eliot was having her head done by the guy that did Prince Albert. He did William Blake as well. Or rather, he studied, it was someone else who Coom didn't do it. It was the... There was a different person, wasn't it? Yeah, James DeVille. But where are these casts? Where's George Eliot's head?

This room, actually, is the inside of the cast. They used it to the Statue of Liberty. It's actually such a good ending for the movie. What a movie for the phrenology movie, it's like, and they never knew where it was. With Pan out to New York. And it just winks. Yes! Mount Rushmore for their heads.

Gives a little thumbs up with his massive hand. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that the chef who cooked for Lord's Cricketers on match days for 35 years was once asked to limit their meals to five courses, and she refused. So this was a woman called Nancy Doyle, and she, yeah, she was the tea lady at Lord's for 35 years until 1996. I think she retired, and she liked to make them large, large meals. So obviously in cricket, you've got meals codified, and you have to take your lunch break.

It's in the rules. It's so amazing that they're actually in the rules of cricket, it says, unless the umpires and captains together agree to alter it, lunch shall be taken at the agreed time. It's actually in the rules, you have to have lunch. And the captains of each team decide on what time lunch is happening, how long fall. What other sport has a conversation like that when you're about to flick the coin for who bats first or whatever? By the way, when are we having lunch?

What are we having? We're having roast today. How are we, you guys? So Mrs. Doyle. Mrs. Doyle, her typical menu seemed to be for lunch you'd have soup, then a starter, then a roast. You've got to moisten your palate, I suppose. Then a starter, then roast meat and potatoes.

And she also served chips and vegetables. It's quite hard to know. This was just on an example list that I think Mike Brealy gave of what she'd serve up. Chips and vegetables, then a dessert, then a cheese board. Then you get back on to plate. But of course in cricket, every two hours, because although they decide when you have meals, it's pretty much every two hours is the general rules roughly for when you eat. So two hours later, you get back in and she's made you a huge cake.

And there you go. So there was this moment where Mike Brealy said in the 70s, Mike Brealy was the England captain at the time. He said to her, do you know what? I don't know if it's good for the game. The guys can't stand up after lunch. And she replied. He was like, could we possibly make the meals a bit lighter?

And she said, but in an Irish accent, tell you what, Michael, I won't tell you how to feckin' bat and you don't tell me how to feckin' cook. Okay? And that was it. It was terrifying. Someone called her a small yet volcanic. So I think he didn't ask again. She also couldn't cook.

No snob on her whatsoever. But she said she'd never read a cookbook. She didn't use weighing scales and she didn't follow recipes. But that shows having a natural affinity to cooking. Her organ of cooking was absolutely massive. Huge. She was taught by nuns, wasn't she? Like she did get taught.

She just didn't. I think being able to cook without a recipe is... No, that is the mark of quality. I found a bit of a scandal researching this fact. Oh, yeah. Okay. I thought tea in cricket was the most English thing. Right.

It's not English. It's Australian. No. It was introduced by Australia. It was imported. Australia started doing this in about the 1880s. And then a captain called Joe Darling brought it over... Tea Darling?

Tea Darling in 1899. But even then, it was brought onto the field. So like they would bring you a cup of tea where you stood. And there are photos of England players just standing around with waitresses. You know, just bringing them a tea trolley basically. And it wasn't standard until about 1905 that players went off and had their tea. So it was an Aussie thing. Very cool.

I know that. You were saying about how Nancy can't cook, Andy. She can't cook curries. That is one thing. She can't cook anything anymore because she is dead. Yes. Sorry. It was a...

What kind of death? It was a deathbed thing. Yeah. Another cause of death. Deathbed. No, she couldn't cook curries. I should have said. Because during tests, when England's playing people like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, they

want to have food which they had at home. And so they want to have curries. And she couldn't cook them. And so she brought her daughter Jeanette in. And Jeanette, who was a nurse, was apparently a brilliant curry maker. So she would come in and make the curries. I love that. Just get professional cooks, guys.

Get a nurse who might have left some really ill people to die. I'm just going to leave these deathbeds. They'll be fine. Curries have been a problem in the past for English cricketers. So when they do big tours of India and Pakistan and in the 70s and 80s when curry was less common here and people weren't used to eating it, a lot of the players found it quite difficult. Alex Stewart, in fact, who was a player in the 80s, said that he basically, before they were doing a tour of India, him and Jack Russell, who I hadn't heard of Jack Russell, but they

couldn't hack the Indian food. And so before they fly out to Pakistan, they said they'd do a trip to Tesco and they'd just buy, Alec would buy 43 chicken breasts, 43 days worth of mashed potatoes and 43 days worth of broccoli. And every day he'd just make himself chicken breast broccoli. Oh my God. Mashed potatoes. Did he say going to India?

Yeah. Quite a hot country. Are these chicken breasts refrigerated or are they just loose in his case? That is horrible. Just like into the separating chicken case. Look, I think they probably have some kind of refrigeration technology. I don't know if we ever mentioned this on the podcast that when the Beatles went to India to see the Maharaja, not the Maharaja, the Guru, wasn't it?

They went to see their Guru who was going to teach them transcendental meditation and how to free their minds and all of this. Yeah. I took a suitcase of baked beans. Yeah. Did we say that? Yeah. That's because he had digestion problems from childhood when he was hospitalised and nearly

died in hospital. Wow. Just getting the facts in. Whereas Alec Stuart was just being a bit of a bore, which in fact, Atherton wrote in his autobiography, and I feel like this might cause some tension with your teammate. So Atherton was in captain work, played with Stuart, said, Alec Stuart has a narrow focus on sport and life. I do wonder, and he said this of his meal choices in India.

I do wonder whether he'll look back with regret at some of the missed opportunities that touring life offers. Wow. But you could say the same about me when we go on tour. That's true. And I'm sure you all three do. I don't hear you, though, because it's after 9pm and I'm in bed. You do have a lot of courses on your breakfast, everyone.

Oh, my God. Yes, you do. That's true, but I have brought them all from home. When I started in a suitcase, I just brought 350 waffles. I went to a cricket match once, and it was sponsored by Sauri Maltloaf. Oh, lovely. Yeah. Delicious.

And he was handing out free bits of Maltloaf to everyone, but no one really likes Maltloaf and everyone likes beer in watching like a shirt cricket, so everyone just started throwing Maltloaf at him. Oh, my God. And he refused to give any more Maltloaf to anyone, and everyone got really upset because they wouldn't give him any Maltloaf at him. But why not? They only wanted it to throw at the guy, so hanging it up, if he removes himself, the

loop closes. Well, he did exactly the right thing as far as I'm concerned, but the 20,000 people in Old Trafford did not see it the same way. I love Maltloaf. I'd have been groving around thinking about it with my big net standing near him. What is it? I don't think I've had it. It's absolutely delicious.

We're not sponsored this week by Maltloaf, but I did really... Something we should be. Sorry if you're listening. It's a kind of fruity bread, basically. It's very delicious. I think any beer drinker worth his salt, if he loves beer that much, can turn a Maltloaf into a beer. It's got malt in it.

Yeah. Surely. You blend that. It's been five days. Eventually, it's going to ferment. Exactly. Just on a sort of eating and drinking in cricket, and drinking specifically, there's a cricket called Gary Sobers.

I want you to remember that. Yes. I see why we're going here. I was trying to work out which road you were going to go down there. Almost a sentence person. Gary Sobers. Gary Sobers. Yeah.

If he married in Double Barrel with Helen Up. Yeah. Anyway, Gary Sobers, he batted his last century while drunk. And not even just a bit tipsy. This sounds like a mad experience. So he was playing at Lord's. He played for the West Indies, and he'd been out clubbing until nine in the morning, and he was batting that day, and he was going straight into bat.

So he got in at nine. He's completely hammered. He's been drinking, solidly drinking for, you know, 12 hours straight. He batted amazingly well. He hit 132, extraordinary, but then begged to be taken off, because he said suddenly he sort of started to sober up. What? They come down.

And they're sobering up, and they're hangover. So he was taken off with a stomach complaint after batting 132. And then he was brought off, but felt quite bad about it. And so ended up being, apparently, according to him, revived with a couple of large port and brandies. Oh, my God. I didn't know. Port and brandy.

I've not heard of that as a drink. No. It's not like a very old fashioned Jagerbomb, basically. I think that was what it was. Yeah. Can you come back on to Cricket? I thought once you've got off the... That's sick.

Yeah. Oh, okay. So he returned. He returned, hit 150, not out, and then the England retired. Wow. I wonder if the drinking still goes up. W.G. Grace, for example, so he was around in the late 1800s.

His choice of drink during matches was, if he was coming off, he would drink champagne during the match all the way through, and at lunch he would have whiskey as his choice of drink. So he was bladdered the whole time that he was playing, or comfortably married as a poster drunk. Yeah. I wonder if that still happens. Of course it doesn't.

And I think this is one of the great tragedies of all sports, because of course it doesn't, because they've all changed in the last 30 years so dramatically. Like anything you watch, tennis, football, Cricket. None of them are pissed. It's ridiculous. They're all so cold sober and they're eating these crazy diets, and I think there should be a rule that says no professional sports people are allowed to eat anything outside of what they would normally eat or drink.

And then you just have to play like that, which is basically how they did it until the 70s or 80s, isn't it? Yeah. Agassi won quite a seminal match in his career with a giant hangover from the night before, and he played so well with the hangover that he did think, am I going to have to do this for every match? Wow. This is so good.

And it's kind of like, what's the chops, he's saying, Bolt, who at the Beijing Olympics I think, 2008, he pretty much only had chicken nuggets. Yeah, because I didn't think he trusted the local cuisine to think that was a thing. He brought them all. He bought 43 days work, and they were pretty off by the end. And there are two cricketers for India called Rishabh Pant and Ishan Kisham, and when they get together, they just eat any old crap. And apparently their favorite thing is they get a bun, they put some chocolate ice cream

on the bread, and then they put Nando sauce on top of that, and then they put a piece of chicken on top of that, and they eat it, and they reckon if you eat that, it guarantees you're going to score runs the next day. Right. Wow. They put it to a scientific testing, rigorous testing process. These are great cricketers, you know? OK.

Yeah. It's two of the best in the world. Yeah. They're doing what you want, Anna. They're just combining all the unhealthy foods into one meal. Like, I'm very hard to please. Yeah. Yeah.

Good on them. But Sri Lankan cricketers have been banned from eating biscuits. This was a few years ago, actually. But they were losing games, and the government decided to get involved, and the Sri Lankan government gave them an ultimatum and said, start winning matches, or we're going to get rid of your biscuits, and they didn't win matches, and they lost their biscuits. No. And Lassith Malinga, who's a really famous bowler, he talked about the comments of the

Sports Minister and said, what does a monkey know about a parrot's nesting hollow? What an amazing burn. That's a sick bit of sledging. I just love the idea of one of them going into a shop, trying to buy some biscuits, and the shopkeeper looking under the counter, where the entire squad's photos are up. To be honest, if Lassith Malinga is very clear what he looks like, he's very distinctive looking. Very distinctive.

OK. There's no way he got a biscuit in the whole country. Oh, man. Loaturing outside a shop, asking for one of 10-year-olds, I mean, can you give me some garibaldies, could you please? OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that Northern Ireland contains the world's only upside-down lighthouse. How soon was that an architectural cock-up?

Or maybe to scare moles away from the... Exactly. They've got a massive mole problem, aquatic moles, and no, it is so weird, because genuinely, it's not just a low... it's got a tower, but the tower is above the light. But it's just for anyone who's picturing in their head a lighthouse that's been flipped upside down. It's unfortunately not at all like that. It is exactly that.

No way that. I'm sorry. It is exactly that. Andy, explain exactly what it is. Thank you. We'll see if it's exactly what Dan thinks it is. It's on an island called Rathland, which is off the coast of Northern Ireland, and the lighthouse was built into the cliff face at the island's edge.

And they wanted a lighthouse, because they wanted to warn shipping about, you know, the island, and its presence. But the problem is, the island is often covered in fog. It's covered in fog. So if you were to have the lighthouse installed on the cliffs, at the bottom of the cliffs, and the light up at the top of the cliffs, the light would be lost in the fog. So they built the tower, which is where all the supplies are kept, and the stalls, and the spare lenses for the light bulb, and all of this stuff.

But the actual light itself is at the bottom of the cliffs, and that's the thing that means it can be seen more. So it's like they've sliced the top off a lighthouse, and then put it down in front of the rest of the lighthouse. Or have they put it all in reverse order? You have to climb down the stairs, upside down, together. Yeah. Yeah, so it's sort of a little, it's sitting in front of the tower.

It's not directly underneath. And so it's a lighthouse, and the bulb is at the bottom, not at the top, it's an upside down lighthouse. So it's not like in the daytime, it makes a dark area. That's an inside out lighthouse. And it's just a very cool thing. And it was built in about 1912, I think, so it's 110 years old now. And also, I read this about Rathlin Island, I don't know if it's true, that it's the island

where Robert the Bruce went after a battle, and it's where he saw the useless spider. That is true. Well, the fact that, whether that happened or not, it's definitely said to have happened on Rathlin. It's said to have happened in a cave underneath the lighthouse, but not that lighthouse. The other one is. There's an east lighthouse and a west lighthouse, and the Robert the Bruce one is the other one.

So the story is, isn't it, that he was in a Scottish guy, he's gone away from where the battles are, he sat down, he's worried, there's a spider there, the spider keeps trying to make a web, keeps trying to jump over, keeps failing, and eventually he makes it, and he thinks, if at first he don't succeed, try, try again, and he goes back and gets dashed on the rocks because of this useless lighthouse. They also have fog bells sometimes, lighthouses, because it is a problem, a lot, that you can't see a lighthouse if it's obscured by fog. And it sounds like they haven't really cracked it.

So they have bells, which A is a lighthouse keeper, I suppose, or you had to in the olden days before everything was automated, you had to just ring them kind of constantly. So I think you'd ring them about two rings every 15 seconds in fog to let ships know that you were there, and it only travelled about 100 metres. So I think the light from whitehouses can travel many, many kilometres, can't it, more than that kilometres. But it couldn't travel that far, and you could wind them up the bells, so you'd wind them up really, really far, and then it could, as it unwound, like a clock, it could do 10,000

strikes. Wow, cool. Yeah, the Rathen Island fog signal can be heard 20 miles away. So they've got an audio signal as well. Yeah, yeah, they have a fog signal too. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty cool. They're very cool places, lighthouses.

You know the beautiful lighthouse lens that you see, which looks almost like a chandelier. It's got loads of cut faces and sides and edges, and it's incredibly complicated. It looks, you know, it's not just a big lamp. That is the creation of a guy called Augustin Jean Fresnel, who was, by the way, the one who realised that light is a transverse wave. Big deal guy. Or is it, though? Oh.

Just a whole set of fakes. I don't think we've got time to get into that. Yeah, you're right. But basically, the lenses would have been incredibly heavy if you just made a single lens. So he created this clever lens, which can be much thinner, but it has dozens of prisms and they all focus the light. So you do get a beam using much less glass. But the really cool thing about those heavy, great lenses at the top is they were created

to float. Mercury. And they float in this mercury bath. And it's so cool. Mercury is so dense, it's 14 times denser than water. And if you drop a lump of solid steel into mercury, it will float and float really high up in it. Right.

And so the whole lighthouse top was just floating on this gruel. Seems quite dangerous. So dangerous. Yeah. Don't call it a bath. If you're in that house with kids, they'll try and bath in that as well. What do you think the US Coast Guard's only lighthouse keeper has in common with the English female cricketer who has the highest ever score in the test match?

Long arms. Yeah. So she could change the light bulb. Change the bulb? How many lighthouse keepers does it take without going upstairs? And obviously as a cricketer, it's good to have long arms. You need longer arms, don't you? Yeah.

It's not that, no. What are they having? What are they having? Can't wait. The US only lighthouse keeper. Yeah. The US Coast Guard's only lighthouse keeper. If it's the answer I think, I reckon you're not going to guess it.

Because you know we're on both of them. So this could be one of those long games, like the other day, what was it the other day we had? Oh my goodness. Which artist? Bloody stained glass. This game again. This is going to last us way longer than that.

Red or white? She doesn't live in a lighthouse. She does live in a lighthouse. Red or white? She lives in a lighthouse. We don't know that too. Do you know where she lives? Hang on.

Hang on. I do know this. Okay. Cricketers wear white, don't they? Oh yeah. And the ball is red. They're the typical colours of a lighthouse. They're red and white.

Okay. So take that knowledge. Yeah. And forget about it. I try to think of something else. Okay. The Coast Guard surname is lighthouse and her surname is Coast Guard. You're so close.

They have very similar surnames. Okay. Think of something that's white. Something else that's white. You know the answer? Yeah. Cocaine. The both are cocaine.

Jessica Cocaine. Yeah. Coast Guard's only lighthouse keeper is called Sally Snowman. And the highest score ever by an English female cricketer in a test match was by Betty Snowball. Oh my God. So it's not even something they've got in common. Is this something quite similar? We've got the word snow.

Oh my God. I'm in. I'd count that. That's a real fair question. That's the million dollar question. Who would know that? James. What can my phone a friend be, James?

I'm there going option B please. Red and white is something that links them. She's not allowed to retire Sally Snowman. She. Yeah. Last year I think. Which one she? The lighthouse keeper.

Right. No more walking in the air for her. Because when you're at the top of the lighthouse it must feel like you're floating in the moonlit sky. Yeah that's good. I wonder if she blasted that out in times of fog. You could hear walking in the air. And the abducted boys at night.

Yes. And now all that's left in that lighthouse is a solitary carrot. Did you know that I am a member of the Association of Lighthouse Keepers? Are you? Yeah. Did you join it just for this episode? I joined it yesterday. Yep.

Really? I gotta say. ALK. ALK. Are you an alcoholic? I am. And it's fun. Have you got a posting yet?

Do we have to do a podcast from Lighthouses? Right. But you don't have to be a lighthouse keeper to join. That's the wonderful thing. Evidently. Unless you've also got a job as a lighthouse keeper just to join. Lots of news guys. No but it's really good.

Just a quick shout out to them. It's a very reasonable price for a year's membership and I think you might get a sticker for your car. Anything else you get for it? You get their quarterly journal, Lamp, and I've read a bit of it, I've read a sample online. It's really good. Is it?

Yeah. What are they, is it largely just the latest in Lighthouse News? Shining a light on Lighthouse News. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They don't do exposés or anything like that. It's just lots of news from the Lighthouse community and you know. You've been quite cagey about how much it was but what is a reasonable price to pay

to be in there? Also can I ask what is the sticker? Is it like my other car is a lifeline? My other headlamp is a Fresnel lens. How much was it? I don't want to say in flash but it was £18 for a year. £18? Yeah.

For one joke and we might cut out. They almost certainly will get that, I know. I'm worried that this is going to take over your life gradually and when you quit the podcast in five years, this is the moment we should have known. Wow, you think I'm going to last five more years on the show? I'm incredibly flattered. Just have one weird Lighthouse, one of my favourite Lighthouses is, I think basically an unnecessary Lighthouse.

It's the Lighthouse in Machias Seal Island. So this is… Machias Seal. Machias, M-A-C-H-I-A-S. What's that? So it's a tiny little island just between the US and Canada and it's positioning as crucial because… It's a land border most of that, isn't it?

Yeah. The US and Canada? Famously. But it's on like, if you continue the border basically, it's in the Atlantic Ocean, a sort of between Maine and New Brunswick and so it's disputed because both countries want ownership of this tiny uninhabited island, I think because you can claim fishing rights around a certain circumference of it if you do claim it. So it's been argued over since 1832 and Canada, to stake its own claim for the last 25 years,

has just kept a Lighthouse keeper in a Lighthouse on there to stamp its identity on the island and it's this guy called Ralph Eldridge. Same guy? It's been the same guy for 25 years. Yeah. It's actually two guys and they alternate one month on one month off. Okay. But they're fun guys.

Guys, I read an interview with Ralph a couple of years ago where the interviewer said, because it's just him, the interviewer said, you're a lonely person, Ralph. And he said, lonely is the wrong word, independent is better. Let's say I like me best of all. And then the interviewer just goes, divorced, Ralph? Yes. Oh! There's a bit of Lighthouse news this year, so you might be seeing it in Lamp later on

in your quarter. Great. In your quarter. At least six months time. That's right. And that was, there was a film festival which took place in a Lighthouse this year. It was a Swedish film festival, the Gotterberg Film Festival. And 60 movies were played in total at this festival and they were played entirely to

one human. Did they use the light from the Lighthouse as a projector? Did you have to keep walking around and stop and see it? There were 19 shipwrecks next to one another. The sailors were so entranced watching Back to the Future 3. That was so cool. Was it a particular kind of film? Was there a genre?

No, no. Was that film recently with Robert Pattinson? Yes. And they played two Lighthouse keepers who were going mad, yeah, yeah. No, no, it's a collection of independent film making, yeah, so every kind of genre. It sounds like a horror film festival, you know, we're going to trap you in the Lighthouse and show you 60 films. Well, no, it was a COVID thing that happened and so they couldn't put the festival on as

they wanted to. And actually, sorry, I slightly got it wrong, so it might have already been in an issue of Lamp. This was 2021, so you might have missed out on the story just. I'm sure that you can get back issues. Yeah. So, yeah, the idea was they were going to have to go online and just stream it online for the entire...

Well, that's literally the opposite of playing it to one person that was playing it to everyone with Internet access in the world. Yeah, but for one thing they wanted to do was make it special and so they did a competition. 12,000 people applied for it and this one person, Lisa Enthroth, won it. And so she got sent by boat to this island. They took away all of her electronics. She had just a little iPad. It was a Salica horror film.

It was a Salica horror film. There was one person on the island who was checking on her once a day just to make sure that she was okay. The murderer, as he's always known, yes, and she was there for a week watching these 60 films. So she had to watch about nine films a day, which was presumably about 18 hours. She's under sleep. She hasn't had anything better to do.

Yeah, it's true. She has to watch the creepy caretaker of the island. We'll do a little film quiz after every single one. And who played the battler? What does the cricketer, Betty Snowball, have in common? OK, it's time for our final fact of the show and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that in 2007, a Japanese arm wrestling arcade machine was recalled when it broke three players' arms.

See, I am amazed it wasn't recalled after breaking one player's arm. Yeah. No, they thought, let's let it break a few more people's arms first. No, I think they happened, all the breaks happened in a short enough time that they couldn't recall it before. It was an afternoon at the arcade that must have been, you know, ringing the third ambulance. Yeah. Yeah, amazingly.

Actually, we are going to contact the manufacturers now, yes. Three kids who are holding it at the same time, trying to be the big boss. That's a good idea. Well, they were all in the same trench coat standing on each other's shoulders. I'm afraid you've lost the arm, but we have replaced it with one of these claw grabbers. With which you won't be able to grab anything at all. Just try and have your breakfast every morning. You just grab the spoon and then just drop it before it gets to your mouth.

No, so this is a company called Atlas and the game is called Arm Spirit. And what they said, this was an article from the BBC, is that probably the players got a bit overexcited and maybe they twisted their arms in a slightly weird way because the game was, it was like a fake arm and then you would grab hold of the fake arm and you would play an arm wrestling game against it. Yeah. And they were like 10 levels and it went from the easiest level, which was a French made. Okay.

Famously weak. There's a lot of lugging to do when you're a French made. Some of those dusters are extremely heavy with all the feathers. Look at George Eliot. That's where she got her hand from. Milk and all them cows. I don't, French made is not the same as like a cow made. Milk made.

Oh, is it not? French milk maids don't wear the little lacy outfits. They're quite different. If you go to Ed Summers and ask for a milk made outfit, do you mean French made? No, no. That makes sense. Or something like a milk and cow. After the French made, you might fight against a drunken martial arts master, a Chihuahua

dog. And the final is against a professional arm wrestler and it gets harder and harder each time. So in the end, that's not the order I would put that in. You're saying a Chihuahua dog is better at arm wrestling than a drunken martial arts master. Does it seem that way? Does it?

How drunken? Yeah. Yeah. If he's unconscious, then possibly. I can see, though, how an arm breakage might happen based on a video that I watched on YouTube. There's lots of videos where you can see people playing, not this game, not Arm Spirit, but there's another game called Over the Top.

And very similar. I think it's exactly the same game, basically. I think that's also, sorry, just for legal reasons, probably not exactly the same. Yes, probably. There's no Chihuahua, for example, over the top. And so you've got the big bulky hand there and I watched a video of a super strong guy take on the final boss and he was holding it and my God, he was like really going for it.

Someone leans over next to him and says, ah, when I tried to beat the big box, I totally cheated. I lent in. I got my arms underneath it. I went. So I can imagine, by manipulation of your body in weird ways, trying to beat it, a snap might occur when you buckle. No, no.

I can see that. Yeah, yeah. Isn't Over the Top as a move, isn't it? In arm wrestling? It's where you kind of twist your wrist a little bit. Oh, I thought it was where you put your fingers over the top of their hand, but they're probably meant to be anyway. Yeah.

If they're holding your whole hand in their hand, you're not going to do very well. Okay. Yeah. There are moves. There are proper moves. Yeah. In arm wrestling. There are sort of, I think a couple of dozen different techniques as in, you know, if you're

watching with an expert of the game that's like, ah, he's trying the French defense now or whatever. He's wearing a French made outfit. What were you going to say, Anna? I was just going to establish it was the kid's fault. That seems to be where we're landing on this. The company said they were playing it in a weird way. How do we think he's likely at a zoo?

I think it's the question we need to answer. I think there was no, as far as I could see, I couldn't see any later news stories that explained whether anyone had sued anyone. I feel like some parents got some real large quantities of cash behind the scenes for that. I don't know if that happened on that, but I wouldn't like to comment. But I'm on breakage does happen in arm wrestling. Yeah. Yeah.

Not typically regularly. Apparently this is according to John Jenk, who is the Guinness World Records greatest arm wrestler of all time. He says that the people who break their arms tend to be beginners because you get incredibly strong when you're starting out arm wrestling, but you haven't actually built up kind of the bone and tendon resilience. So you don't know your own strength. You break your own arm.

You literally you push so, so, so hard that your bone just snaps and it's really horrible. There was a match in Cumbria in 2018. It was like a farmer's event and there were various kind of fun things like a little fair round ride or a little, you know, shoot the tail of the donkey or whatever. They do those things and is that what they do? Yeah. Is that really? Welcome to Anna's Fair.

Okay. Look, this was nothing like my fantasy fair. This was just a normal fair. There was an arm wrestling contest. A 20 year old girl broke her arm incredibly badly. It sounds like she was resting another girl. It was in a huge amount of pain. Her opponent fainted, which I can really imagine doing if you're arm wrestling someone.

You know when you see one of those snappages that were at suddenly a right angle to the arm. So her opponent fainted and then they interviewed. I think this is on the BBC. They interviewed the paramedic, Andrew Dickinson, who said, this is what happened, the opponent fainted, but he also added the rest of the day was absolutely fantastic. It ended in a dance where 600 people attended and we were on site until 1.30 in the morning. Is that good paramedicking?

I guess if you're the onsite paramedic, if you were summoned to take her to hospital, it's very bad paramedic. Yeah. It's not clear. They're starting the dance now. Would you mind if we just kept the engine running a little bit longer? So I always wonder, because I'm not actually a professional arm wrestler myself. No.

I'm a member of the Society of Ancient Armwrestling. Forget the magazine. Yeah, slam. It's impossible to pick it up. But I thought that the rule was that you couldn't hold the table. Right. Actually, in the professional game, they install pegs in the table for you to hang on to. So it's all about the rest of your body as well.

Do you think? I can believe it. Yeah, I thought it was just about your arm. Am I right? I've got an old memory of you, James, of you and me hanging out and you saying to me, I have an unbeatable technique and then we did it and you almost broke my arm, basically, in my attempt to... So you know how to not do your thing.

I do, but I have to really trick you into position, basically. So if I was upside down. Okay. There's a way, basically, if I was to arm wrestle you and we kept the table on my right hand side and your left hand side and we arm wrestled on that table, then I would be pulling with my arm and you'd be pushing with your arm and the pulling muscle is way stronger than the pushing muscle. So you could beat anyone.

Then it's like a pub trick where you can win a pint of something, that kind of thing. Yes. But if you've got any brains on you, you insist, surely you do it over a table, right? Yeah, but if you're in a bar, there might be a bar, right? You know, that's why it works in a pub. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, I have injuries now, that means I can't do arm wrestling. I have something called tenosinivitis of the first compartment of the wrist. It's a very common thing that arm wrestlers get. And yeah, it's like arm wrestlers thumb, it's called. Did you get it from arm wrestling? No, I got the version which is also known as mum's thumb. I got it from carrying my baby too much. Wow.

But you can get the same injury from carrying a baby in the wrong way, as you can get from arm wrestling in the wrong way. It's better than getting the one they call Wankers' Colleges' name. So you mentioned John Brzenk there, Anna, the great arm wrestling champion. So he is the guy who the main bit of culture about arm wrestling ever to exist in the world is based on. Oh, what's that? It's the movie over the top, which is a Sylvester Stallone film, which we have briefly mentioned

fleetingly in passing in the past. Basically, he plays a character called Lincoln Hawke, whose character's name changes about twice as the film continues, like it's not a level of attention to detail. And you know, he has to arm wrestle his way to winning a big prize and to a relationship with his son. But it's based on John Brzenk. And this is the really nice thing. John Brzenk worked for decades as a mechanic at Delta Airlines so that he could arm wrestle

because he wanted to travel. His main expenditure was plane tickets to arm wrestling competitions, whereas if he worked as a mechanic at Delta Airlines, free transport. Does that also mean that if you're in, let's say, the world championships in Reykjavik or something and you want to go home but there's a problem with the plane and he's in the middle of an arm wrestling championship, you have to wait. Everyone has to wait. That's true.

If he sees a competitor heading towards the championship, he can mess up a piece on the plane. Oh, that's great. What? He's just saying through a crash, just so it doesn't take off. Just throw something small into the end. Anyway, but God, you wouldn't want to share an arm rest with him, would you? No.

My man. Depends on the size. Depends on the size. But he... I think his both arms are probably strong. I was hoping, I was looking at pictures of all arm wrestlers, desperately hoping to find like one puny flaccid little stringy arm and one huge arm. There is a difference though.

There is a difference in size and it's roughly the difference between George Eliot's head and Jane Tarkin's head. That's the... Yeah, five centimeters. Yeah, it's a great match. That's interesting. Because you get some of them are experts with just the right hand and some of them are experts with just the left hand and I think the women's champion last year won both right

hand and left hand. You're kidding. Wow. I've forgotten her name. So are there people who just never play each other? Yeah, of course. Because if you're right handed and there's a champion who's the left handed, how are you ever going to meet them?

Yeah. You can't both sit on the same side of the table. Wow. What if you're good though at backhand arm wrestling as such? What do you mean? So if I went that way... Well, like I told you, it's really hard to pull things in that direction compared to pushing with your other muscles.

Hang on, you also... It makes sense of Andys. We're sitting next to each other and I'm pushing this way and you're pushing this way. I don't think we've invented a new sport. No, hang on. I think we might have arm pulling. Isn't that... You have exactly the same position as arm wrestling, but you have to pull.

You have to sit next to each other. Or you just have to pull. Yeah. You have to pull. So you slam your own arm down. I mean, I think we've invented a sport that's even less exciting to watch than arm wrestling. But are you saying they have the right handed champion trips and they say, and now we're going to have the left handed champion...

Yeah, yeah. It's different categories. It's like different weights and boxing, but you've just got different arms. Is there any other sport that does that with right-handed? Yeah, boxing. You can only punch with your right hand. And then some people are really going to only punch him with their left hand. I don't believe you.

No, that's because I'm not telling the truth. Can I just quickly mention, with Over the Top, this movie, and with John Bridgenk, basically, when Over the Top was going into production, they did a thing for part of the promotion where they actually set up this massive arm wrestling championship that was called Over the Top once the movie was green lit, so they went, let's actually do this. And so they did it as this, both it was a sort of national thing in America, but then they had international qualifying rounds that would happen in places like Japan, and they had a final in Las Vegas.

And the final, when all of these competitors from all around the country came together, that was the footage that makes it into the final of the film. And so, yeah. And so you see real arm wrestlers who were part of this big tournament. Well, you would have to have real arm wrestlers, otherwise you have normal actors who would be like fake arms. The problem was that they wanted to use real arm wrestlers to fight or to do the arm wrestle with Stallone in the final movie.

But they were all too big. It was unrealistic. No, I thought they weren't big enough because it's more about technique. They've got more normal arm looking than the huge weightlifting muscles. Some of them are massive arms. I don't know. Dave Dean, who was the main arm wrestler at the time, was Jai Norris, and he was, and they said this is so impractical that you would win this.

Like, for instance, Gath, all arms, Carlson. Well, he does sound like he's got big arms, or tiny the rest of him. Such a weird name, isn't it? This doesn't imply he's got nine arms. Yeah. Terry Big Man Barton is another one. They're all big men. I've seen videos.

They're very WD-40 nicknames, aren't they? They're not. No one's called the smokescreen or the diplomat. The next one I could find was Verne, the one-armed bandit, Martell. And I don't know why you're laughing because he lost his arm in a motorcycle accident. Did he? Yeah, one of them. Oh, I said he was actually one-armed?

Oh, my goodness. One-armed bandit actually did have one arm. Oh, my God. Yeah, he started going back into tournaments again after his accident. Right. Which did he lose his good arm? No, he lost his less good arm. That's incredible, though, because you can't hold onto the peg, is it, so he couldn't use

the zoom? Yeah. So he became the best in the world in the non-ablebody class, but he also came fourth in the regular able-bodied class once, which is pretty amazing. Some arcade game stuff. You know those penny pushers where you put, like, two P in and there's, like, some shit shell. I've spent more money than I'm comfortable with on those if I love them.

Well, they're invented by a company called Comptons in 1964, and they were so sure that it was just going to be a one-year thing that they didn't even put a patent on it. They thought this will just be fun for one year, everyone will forget about it, so we're not going to do that. And then that's why you get them in all the arcades now because they weren't patented. But why do they steal my money so effectively? Well, it's really interesting that. So there's a hole where all the money goes down.

So it seems that when you put two P in, it's bound to come out, right? Eventually it'll come out. So every two P that goes in. Should equal one two P out, yeah. Now the way to make money is for some of those two P's to fall into the machine. But surely you'd notice. You used to be able to notice. There used to be a big hole in the middle, and you see the two P's go down, and that

would be where, you know, obviously they made the money, but now they hide the holes. So there are holes on the side that the two P's go into. And so not all of the two P's that go in come out and that's how they make the money. What? That's a swizz. It's an absolute swizz. That genuinely has something that's been blown wide open. I can't believe that.

So do they have to muffle the noise of the two P's sliding down the holes? No, they must do, I guess. Because that's a noisy thing when you put your two P at the top. I sometimes, you know, resort to just banging in a fiver. I'll put the fiver into the slot. I have to pipe it down with a long pipe cleaner thing. I think that'll get me a few two P's. 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've 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 either podcast at qi.com. Yeah, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or a website.

No such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there, so do check them out and also go and check out the links to the upcoming tour dates that we're going to be playing in September. It's the final leg of nerd immunity. It's an awesome night. We're going to do a live podcast in the second half and a whole show that you've never seen before in the first half. It's stand up.

It's facts. It's everything you want. Come and see it. If I sell it, I hope so. All right, we'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.