No Such Thing As A Fish - 444: No Such Thing As Duck Bill Hickok

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

Live from Edinburgh, Dan, James, Anna, and Andrew discuss stopping scoundrels, squeaky sounds and a seriously suspect citation. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.  Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at nosuchthingasafish.com/apple or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Edinburgh! 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 favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go! Starting with fact number one and that is James. Okay my fact this week is that when Dick Loss... Please.

When Dick Loss, the president of the Montana Cowboy Association, drove a car for the first time, he crashed it into a fence because instead of using the brake pedal, he pulled back on the steering wheel and yelled, whoa! Incredible. Lot to unpack. Who was Dick Loss? He was the president of the Montana Cowboy Association. A cowboy?

Here's a cowboy and I found this because he's just been inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Montana. He was a male carrier. Do you keep tabs on the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Montana? Every new person who's inducted, you know about it. He's got one of his phone, he's got one of those notifications. Do you want some other people who are in the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Montana? Bob Fudge. Bob Fudge? Bob Fudge.

Oh no, the Fudge Gang are in town. It's just a funny cowboy name. Bob Fudge, Fanny Steel. Fanny Steel, yeah. Johnny Flowers, Carl Moss, Spud Creamer, Spud Creamer, Chief Sitting Bull and the 1904 Fort Shore Indian School Girls basketball team. Did you say Spud Creamer? Spud Creamer.

He's like incredible. It's a great name, isn't it? He was incredibly dull, I have to say. I read all of the, because they have the biographies of all these people and that's how I read this about Dick Loss. Basically, I found this Hall of Fame and they had all the names. I don't know what drew me to Dick Loss, first of all, but I read his biography and it had this amazing thing. He was a male carrier. He was a cowboy. He lived in a place called Square Butt.

And it's pronounced Square Butte and every time we say the word butt, it's spelled B-U-T-E. We get loads of people writing in from Montana or Wyoming saying, it's pronounced Butte. And I'm like, well, don't spell it like butt then. Yeah, yeah. I was looking up the meaning of whoa. Whoa. So there's some, I wouldn't go so far as to call it controversy. But a little bit of debate.

I was reading horsejournals.com, which is a great site if you're into horses. And Jack Ballew, who is, she's a horse trainer of many years experience. She wrote a piece about the meaning of whoa. And her contention is that by and large, it means nothing. It means nothing at all. It's something for humans to say while they try and sort out the horse situation. Horse doesn't care. But it does have a meaning, doesn't it?

Has a meaning, yeah, yeah. If you're running towards me and I say, whoa, you know what I mean. Yeah, but I'm not a horse and neither are you. She says, the word whoa is used with zero purpose, this is in general, other than to fill silent air and give our busy human minds something to work over and repeat incessantly. No, what is this person talking about? We all know that whoa means slow down or stop. This is person illiterate.

She's a very experienced professional horse trainer. I said in some occasions it can really work if you say it just right. Well, then it fucking works. What is that? But in general, I can't believe I'm having to, in general, it means nothing. Ghost don't exist except that one time when there was a genuine ghost. Jeez, most of the time when horse people say, whoa, they're just saying it for something to say, right? Let's not talk about this now.

We'll take this backstage. Okay, anyway, anyway, that's a distraction. I did a bit of looking into cowboys and some of the cowboys that I love most are movie cowboys, the sort of John Wayne and the Clint Eastwoods and so on. And some of the cowboys were genuine cowboys that then became movie stars. So as in they just found their way into Hollywood in the early days. So there's a guy called Louis Burton Lindley Jr. And he was a cowboy who got conscripted into the war.

And the only reason he really got into the world of Hollywood was when he enlisted into the war, they said, what is your occupation? He said, rodeo. And the person went, radio. Okay. And then they put him down and he did radio throughout the war. And he was like, this is pretty good. After doing rodeo, rodeo is a very easy to sit on.

So after the war, he was like, I really enjoyed that radio stuff. And then he went into movies like Blazing Saddles and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And then there was another guy who was, he wasn't a real cowboy in real life, but James Arnes and he was a famous actor in a TV show called Gunsmoke. And Gunsmoke was really big. During the war, his thing was, he was a really tall guy. And so as a result, as the tallest man in the outfit of his platoon,

he was always sent down the ramp of a boat first to see how deep the water was. He was the measuring stick. The human measuring stick. You mentioned John Wayne. Middle name Marion, if you didn't know anyone out there and didn't like it. Didn't like the fact his middle name was Marion because he liked to get a bit of a macho image. And he said he actually got bullied loads for it at school. His full name was Marion Robert Morris, John Marion Robert Morrison, I think.

Sorry, his real first name was Marion, even worse. This is a Johnny Cash song, basically. This is a boy named Sue. The boy named Marion. Yeah. Is that where Johnny Cash got it from? No. But he changed his name and he's actually credited in some films as Duke.

And he's often called Duke as a nickname. And that was after his family dog. And it was because he had this giant dog, this Airdale, who used to walk him to school every day when he was a boy and they'd stop at the local fire station and the fireman called him Little Duke and his dog Big Duke. And so he had the name stuck. That's very cool.

Can I give you some Montanan cow people? Definitely. Hilda Redwing is recently in the Hall of Fame in Montana. She took part in a rodeo at the age of 90. And during the rodeo, one of her friends who was running it, his horse ran into her and broke her leg. And she carried on doing the rodeo with a broken leg at the age of 90. Isn't that amazing?

Was she riding a bull or anything? No, it was like a relatively calm horse. Okay, okay. Still amazing. And I mentioned the 1904 Fort Shore Indian School Girls basketball team. They went to the St. Louis World's Fair. And they spent five months there as part of the anthropological exhibit that they did at that same time,

where they brought lots of Native Americans in to do stuff. And during that, they started playing basketball against all comers and they beat anyone who came. And so they were named champions of the world. Wow. And why does that get you into the Cowboy Hall of Fame? I think really they were short of people. Tough year.

They weren't in a shoot up, were they? They didn't win a duel. Have you guys heard in Alaska, there are cowboys who ride helicopters instead of horses? That's cool. When you say ride... Well, they don't. Obviously...

They're not spinning around on the... Definitely looking at some tick loss there, aren't you? No, they round their cows up with helicopters. But I didn't even know they were Alaskan cowboys. And Hawaiian cowboys as well, which is a very famous thing in America. Yeah, they're bloody everywhere, aren't they? Yeah.

And in fact, American US cowboys really nicked all of their gear, all of their cliches, all of their hats, their coats, everything, from Mexico. So they're based on Mexican vaqueros. And in fact, the word buckaroo, I didn't know, comes from vaquero. Oh, really? Yeah. And we get so many words all come from those Mexican cowboys.

So lasso, bronco, chaps. As in, you know, you're wearing chaps, not high chaps. Yeah. And gauchos as well, the Argentinian version, which I always think of the coolest. The thing I like about gauchos, so Argentinian and Uruguayan cowboys, is that they, again, they're just like really cool cattle herders. It seems like if you're in the Americas and you're herding cattle,

you become really cool. And they were really fussy about the color of their horses. And if you're a proper gaucho, all of your horses have to be perfectly color matched. And so you get pibled horses, like white with black splodges. But you want the black splodges as perfectly matched as possible to each other. Really? Yeah, it's cool.

Apparently it was so that if your herds got mixed up, you could tell which ones were yours. Wazers. Yeah. That's very cool. I think like a quarter of the cowboys, what we would call them now, were not whites, right? Yeah.

In the time of the cowboy, basically, in the post-Civil War time. And actually the word cowboy would be mostly used for African-American cowhands. Like the white people would be called cowhands, and it was kind of a bit of a slur to say boy. It was kind of diminutive. Yeah, exactly. Wow.

Interesting. I didn't realize how short the Wild West was. After the Civil War, before about 1900. That was it. Yeah. It was a really brief period. Right. Here's a mind-blowing thing.

Cowboys basically invented dust in America. The reason that America is dusty is because of cowboys. Really? Yeah. So there's been this guy, Jason Neff. He's a geochemist. I don't know that. He studied the sediments laid down in various mountains in Colorado.

And he looked at the sediments that had been laid down in the lakes and things like that. And he found there was basically no dust in America for 5,000 years. And the soil had this, it was vegetation. It had this crust, this nice thick crust on it, right? Yeah. No dust blowing around. 1860, the race suddenly shoot up of dust in the atmosphere.

And it's because the cows had arrived, they stripped the grass. And then their feet, their big clumping hooves broke through this gorgeous crust. And as a result... It must have been nice where you first go through that crust. Yeah. Like breaking into a creme brulee. That's the least cowboy thing you've ever said.

Bloody hell. But we have dust, like I get dust in my house, right? That's nothing to do with the cowboys, you're right. That's pre-existing dust. That's, yeah, yeah. I just mean that the reason America is... So basically apart from that one example, this is true. Yeah.

Exactly. Just on names, Dick Loss, a friend of mine, who's actually in the crowd tonight, Shona, sent this ridiculous fact. I can't believe that it's true. Wild Bill Hickok. Any fact that comes from a friend of yours, no offense, Shona.

But there's some skepticism in the room. So Wild Bill Hickok, right? So the name Wild Bill, this really kick-ass name, scared people, he was just like this beautiful, amazing cowboy. Supposedly the reason he got it is not because he was this incredible cowboy who could do dangerous things, is because his face, his nose and mouth

looked slightly like a duck. No. And Wild Bill is the bill of a duck. But, and so he was sort of bullied. I love it. This is Shona's fact. He was sort of bullied by his buddies, and then he changed it to be like,

no, I'm really cool and wild. His brother was called Tame Bill Hickok, wasn't he? Yes. And he had a face that looked like a normal duck's beak. I will bet a decent number of doubloons that that is not true. Okay, using a pirate currency, apparently, now? Pirate's Cowboys.

Sorry, what's a difficult cowboy currency? Like gold nuggets. Gold nuggets. There you go. That's what I'll bet. I'm sorry. You'd wager your parrot on it, wouldn't you, Adam? I would.

I'm going to have to move us on in a sec, guys. We've got to move on. The Cowboys all went on strike in 1883, which I think is a very funny... Wow. Okay? This. There was a cowboy strike in 1883.

Well, they had very good unions at the Cowboys. Right. And, guys... Peter, how about let Jeremy carbon in? Yeah. If you're equating the striking bin men with these Cowboys, that's very fluttering to them. But we're all about the Cowboys here,

and their unions... And pirates. Don't forget the pirates. Man pirates. Also very strong unions. They were called the Turtles. They were the original Turtles. Cowboy unions.

The original Turtles. Yeah. How do they call Turtles? Do we know? They were called Turtles. It was the Rodeo's Union, and so it was in response to bad pay and stuff, and they were called Turtles because the idea is

they're... I don't know why they're proud of this, but they're slow to organise, but once they do, they're unafraid to stick their neck out. That's good. I don't know if that's what you want. It's kind of good.

I thought that when Turtles were afraid, they didn't stick their neck out. I think that might be true as well. I don't know how much they knew about naturalism for the Cowboys. It is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that until the 19th century,

if someone shouted, stop thief, you had no choice but to try and stop the thief. You were legally obliged on pain of being arrested and facing a penalty to chase the thief. But would the crowd who were trying to stop the thief,

if you didn't join in, does some of the crowd then start chasing you? Oh, yeah. Yeah, good point. Stop non-thief stopper. Yeah, exactly. Well, there was a time in, this was in 1760, there was a Jewish second hand clothes dealer,

and he followed this, what was known as hue and cry, and he was faster than everyone else, so he got at the front of the group, and then they thought that he was the one who was... Oh, no. And so they grabbed him and arrested him. Oh, God. That's like a scene out of Life of Brian.

Yeah, it is. But that's a really good point. What was the policing of that situation? Because you've suddenly got potentially one criminal and then 30 criminals. Yes. So I do think the crime of not stopping the thief wasn't as large as the crime of being the thief.

So your priority is still to chase the thief, but I think after you'd given chase and you'd caught the thief, you can mention to the constable, by the way, old Angela, who lives next door, didn't even give chase, so... Well, one reason was if you didn't chase them and they got away, you became liable for the robberies, so you might have to pay money for the person who got you.

Really? If I just don't chase, because I'm halfway through doing something, I'm liable for the robberies. Like a Sudoku or something. Yeah, half of them are Sudoku. And then I don't join the hue and cry. I'm then on the hook for the theft. You wouldn't go to prison for the theft,

but you might have to pay some recompense. Well, I refuse to pay. That's outrageous. Well, then you are going to prison. Then I'll maybe have a bit of peace and bloody quiet to do my Sudoku. Everyone's won. Wow. Going shopping must have been so stressful back in the day.

Yeah. Well, this is why, if it makes you guys feel better, Dan and Andy, because I can see you're having trouble with this, there were also penalties for raising a false hue and cry for exactly this reason, because it was acknowledged that people would be busy working in the farms or doing Sudoku. And so it could interrupt the village economy

every time you shouted stop thief. So you did get in trouble for doing it falsely. As some people did, I think there was one person who raised a hue and cry on his dog, I believe. I think this is in the 15th century. And it was found his dog was chasing some sheep. And so he did the stop thief or, you know, the stop, done my dogs chasing sheep, hue and cry.

Right. And he was fined for that. You know the descendants of Sigmund Freud, Lucian Freud, Clement Freud, a big broadcaster and an artist. When they were younger, they were going through a park and they decided to challenge each other who could run faster to the destination they were getting to.

They both convinced that they were going to be the person that could do it. So they started running. And as they were going, Clement took over, was going much faster. And so Lucian went, stop thief! He's taken my money. And he was grabbed by Pastor Beyes,

who stopped him. And Clement was so pissed off with him that the two of them barely spoke for the rest of their life. That was the incident. I knew they hated each other. Lucian didn't even go to his funeral. Like they hated each other. No way.

Because of that, what? That was the biggie. That's what everyone says. Well, it all comes back down to the stop thief moment when he did that. You should have made his tombstone, boy. You've stopped now, haven't you? That would be good.

You didn't always have to shout stop thief. There are a few other things you could just shout. In Scotland, sometimes you would shout, oh, yay! In Wales, you might shout, hubbub. And in Gloucestershire, you might shout, you testes. Isn't it like you pair of bollocks you've nicked my purse? It's U-T-E-S-T-E-S.

You testes. You testes. Sounds like a Greek philosopher, doesn't it? You testes. You just stout it out a lot of bollocks all the time, yeah. It's really interesting. So there was this thing. There was a magazine.

The magazine is putting it a bit strong. It was kind of a one-sheet thing. In the 1770s, that was run by the Bow Street Magistrate in London. And it was full of unsolved crimes and details of criminals. And it was called General Hew and Cry. And it was distributed across the country. And it was a way of catching criminals. It was basically like an extremely long distance Hew and Cry.

You'd say, this person has stolen this and they look like this. So if you see them, please pick them up. And it worked. Even in the 1770s, people were being picked up hundreds of miles away for crimes they committed. It feels like being a civilian was a full-time job in those days. You had to constantly... Because, again, it wasn't just that you had to give chase when people cried.

You had to if you read it in the magazine. And also, by the 17th century... Sorry, what do you mean if you read it in the magazine? No, you didn't have to chase when you read it in the magazine. People desperately tried not to look at magazines, because then they're legally obliged. It made it very hard to do the Sudoku, didn't it? But warrants would be passed from parish to parish.

So, let's say you're looking for a thief, then you go to the next parish and you give them a picture, a drawing of the criminal and a description of them, and you say, can you spread this around your parish? And then everyone in that parish is obliged to keep an eye out for them. So, I mean, I don't know how anyone held down a job. They had delayed Hew and Cry in the Scottish borders as well. The reason being that you would have a lot of people from England

coming over and trying to steal people's sheep and belongings and stuff like that. And often what you would do is, because they were armed, these people, it's a bit the Wild West, really, and so you might kind of hide in your hedge or kind of just try and get all of your really expensive belongings and go there. In the hedge? In the hedge, yeah.

Anywhere, really. All your sheep in the hedge, entire block of sheep, one hedge. And then someone comes out with a hedge trimmer. No, you would hide often because they were armed. And so there's a special border law where you're allowed to do a counter raid. As long as it was within six days, you still had to shout Hew and Cry as you went,

and you had to carry a lighted torch so that everyone knew you were on a legitimate return mission. That's amazing. And then they had to join you on that? No, that was just you getting your own back from the Cumbrians. Got it, fair enough. And these days, if you shout stop thief, you can get in trouble. There's quite a few people who have sued, like, shop security

because they've shouted stop thief, and they're like, well, I'm not a thief, and everyone's heard that and everyone's going to think that now. There was a guy in Dublin, he was 28 years old, and he claimed that he'd been wrongly accused of shoplifting a toy duck from a toy store. He basically said he was deeply embarrassed and ashamed when a security guard approached me and said,

where is the duck? I know you have it. And the best part about it was they went to court and they brought out the duck as evidence, and it was a talking duck, and they couldn't turn it off. I just... All the way through the court case, this duck was just talking all the way through. Are you sure it was a talking duck and not Wild Bill Hickok

who's hitting in the court? Heard they were identical. Do you guys know the bloody code? No, that's... It was like a penal code, and you could be effectively executed for lots and lots and lots of crimes. It's pretty much, yeah, dropping your handkerchief.

Yeah, yeah. This is in England, so Scotland tended to have a bit of a more... We might say better, we might say more lenient legal system in sort of later medieval time where you didn't get the death penalty for everything, but in England there was the bloody code, which was the English legal system from the 17th to the early 19th century,

and I hadn't realised how many crimes you could be killed for, so there were over 200 crimes that were added to this code. Crimes you could be executed for included damaging orchards or gardens, cutting down trees on an avenue, destroying a turnpike road, wrecking a fish pond. I've got to say, Anna,

I'm agreeing with all of this at the moment. If I owned a fish pond, I would... You're very so proprietary about your garden, aren't you? But there was this thing where if you were done for a crime and the jury thought, oh, we don't really want this person to be literally hanged to death, they would return at what was called a partial verdict, and then say he's guilty,

but not as guilty as the judge is trying to make out. So there was this thing called grand larceny. If you stole something worth more than a shilling, that was the death penalty for you. So a shilling is not a huge amount of money even then. But what juries would sometimes do is they would return a verdict of not grand larceny, but petty larceny.

So in 1751, for example, there was a crime where the accused had stolen a pound and seven shillings and sixpence, definitely way above the barrier for being hanged. But the jury said, we think those coins were actually only worth seven pence. So as a result, you get off. So that meant fewer executions.

So what you say, Anna, about them being a bit more lenient in Scotland, is mostly true. But then after the Reformation, the law was sort of done by the Kirk, by the church. And they started bringing in laws for quite a lot of things that we would be surprised about today. So there was the Statutes of 1661 in Scotland that said that if a child beat or cursed

either their father or mother, they should be put to death without mercy. Yeah. If you were found guilty of the advice of, this is the exact words, filthy fornication, you would get a fine of 40 pounds, 40 Scottish pounds, which in those days was absolutely enormous. And in 1697, as late as then,

there was a guy in Edinburgh called Thomas Aikenhead. He was hanged for declaring that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense. He was hanged for that. Yeah, look, it wasn't, you know, the Norwegian today legal system, but it was slightly more lenient. I was reading about, there's a classic book

that was written by a guy called Havlock Ellis. And it's all about the study of what a criminal, the makeup of a criminal, and this was during Victorian times. Like the face was supposed to look different if you were a criminal, right? Yeah, exactly. So there was a guy called Salsotto,

who was someone who paid particular attention to different bits of the body to see if that. And he found, he believed that you're more likely a criminal as a woman if you have a hairy anus. All right, so from a show of hands, ladies. She said hands. That is a terrible episode of Cry Watch, isn't it? We've done a recreation of the cry.

Is that part of the search? Like, who's the criminal? Yeah. Has everyone shaved their anus before we commit this crime? We don't want anyone caught. So he found it basically in seven out of 40 women that he studied. Seven out of 40.

Who were criminals. Right. Had a hairy anus. That's not a huge proportion. It's enough that it made him write it down. Did he study 40 non-criminals as well? Was there any control group in this experiment? Yeah.

Do we know the proportion of women that have, under normal circumstances, according to him, hairy anuses? That's what I'm saying. And, you know, do we know what counts as a hairy anus? Yeah. Where's the anus-ometer of, you know... How rigorous was this study? Was it peer-reviewed?

It sounds like he wasn't a proper scientist at all. This is in Victorian London. Oh, Victorian London. Fine. Okay. There was no science. I kept reading it because it's a lot about hair. Like, does hair mean you're a criminal?

I'm a really hairy guy. You can probably see from the audience. We can't see all of you. But I am a really hairy guy. And so I was reading on and it said, it's worthwhile pointing out that there are frequent anomalies in the development of hair among idiots. It's the hair.

That's what it is. But yeah, so any hairy anus women out there? What? We're watching it. My God. Good grief. It is time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that in 2016, scientists found a pocket of helium so big that it could make everyone on the planet sound squeaky for 20 minutes. I mean, what great use of that helium. Incredible. We'd have had such a good time. And then actually later on,

they upgraded the estimate they thought, and it would have been 40 minutes. We could all have been squeaky for 40 minutes, everyone. I'm sure that would have had quite serious health consequences for everybody breathing non oxygen for 40 minutes. But nonetheless, this massive, massive amount, and this is the thing of helium. We're always running out of it,

and then suddenly always discovering more. And it's just this constant sea salt. Where is this pocket that can make salt? This was in Tanzania. Okay, underground, presumably. It's in an area called Rukwa in Tanzania. And Rukwa is also the place which has the largest number of crocodiles

in the whole of Tanzania. And the interesting thing about that is if you give a crocodile helium, its voice doesn't go higher, it goes lower. Yeah. I remember we did it on QI and it's weird because the same thing is happening to, I think, is it the timbre of your voice

that helium changes rather than the pitch? Exactly. I think it is. So you'd think that a crocodile sounded like us, like it's going higher, but when the timbre of a crocodile's voice gets higher, it sounds to us deeper. So they sound more sexy.

I don't think I've ever heard... Even more sexy. I feel that. Even more. Hard to believe. A crocodile hunter was a very sexy show, wasn't it? Steve Irwin was... Is that what he was doing to those crocodiles?

It was. I've never heard a crocodile make any kind of noise. They kind of growl. They grunt. Well, that... Okay. Okay. That was hot.

Okay, so they growl. Okay, cool. And the other interesting thing I suppose is that on this whole thing is that we were running out of helium. And it was a big problem because we use it for MRI machines. We use it for all sorts of important stuff, not just balloons.

And we were running out of it and the price was getting higher and higher and higher. And this was the first time we'd ever really looked for it. And they started looking and they found shitloads of it. And so they think that maybe if we keep looking, we might find a lot more. And in fact, in 2017, some scientists at the University of Edinburgh

found a huge amount of helium in the middle of Scotland as well. Really? Yeah. Oh, thank God. The parties are saved. No, it isn't. The parties are saved. It's really...

It's weird. It's the second most abundant element in the entire universe, but it's incredibly hard to keep here. That sounds crazy. And when you find deposits of it, they're mostly deposits of rock that are capped with some impermeable rock. So it's basically in a cave that you're looking for it.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you know the biggest amount of helium you can currently buy? This is quite exciting. And this is new this week. Okay. This is really thrilling. Well, you would say they would come in those kind of canisters, right?

Yeah. A big one of those might be. Beautiful of those. It's even bigger than that. Oh. By weight? Because... Well, it's...

I'm going to tell you by volume and by length. So... Okay. So we can work out the width of the depth from there. This is GCSE maths. And you've just got a GCSE maths. Yeah. No, the USA have just announced...

This is really thrilling stuff. They are just announcing... They are selling off the entire federal helium system. Because they nationalised it really early on, like in the 1920 or so. Yeah. Because they needed airships. So they said we have to... The government has to control the global supply.

But we can now get in on it. That's great news. So why have they decided that we don't really need airships anymore? So we might as well... I don't know. I don't know. That was... The Hindenburg wasn't able to use helium because of that global monopoly.

Exactly. Yeah. Exactly that. Did you... Sorry, Andy, do you tell us the size of this? Actually, I didn't. So... I could just tell that everyone in the room was like...

But Andy, what is the length and the volume? It includes... Thank you, James. 700 kilometres of helium pipelines, which are spread across Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, but I'm sure they can move them for an extra fee. There's the Bush Dome Helium Storage Reservoir, a 4,000 hectare rock formation,

capped, you'll be glad to know, by two layers of non-porous calcium and hydrite, and it is likely to contain 65 million cubic metres of federally-owned crude helium. And are they going to deliver this in convenient packages, or do they just say it's there and get it yourself? Because you can't come... And you know, like, if you go to a supermarket and they say,

you do want a bag and you're like, well, I think I can fit it in these pockets. You can't do that with that much helium, can you? No, no, no. I'm not sure who's going to buy it or what for. Well, we might for helium airships, because, bizarrely, the UK has just decided to start investing in them again.

Really? Yeah, after a bit of a hiatus. And it's air nostrum. It's a sister airline of BA, and it's just put in a massive order for some helium airships. And, in fact, this venture is backed by Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson. Isn't he?

Yeah. Who I think he's pretty into flying, isn't he? He's a pilot, yeah. There you go. That's why he's into flying. So he's into this idea. And the idea is that it slashes a lot of carbon use, because we could use them instead of aeroplanes.

It'll slash carbon use by 90%. I liked the fact that Kwazi Kwad saying, the business secretary said, this is proof of how the UK's businesses are embracing new technology. Anyway, a prototype crash landed in 2016 on its second test. But it is going to be great, we're told. Wow, that's so good.

Who would win, this is an open question, in a conflict between an airship and a submarine? Well, it depends where the conflict takes place. Fair play. Let's say, let's make it a neutral territory, let's make it above water. Or, you know, you've got all the environments there apart from land, it's not on land.

Because this has happened. Oh, has it? Yeah. Specifically, though, like, as in, they were pitted against each other. No, it was during the Second World War, there wasn't time to set up, like, fun... It wasn't like Robot was.

It was in pay-per-view, airship versus submarine. Okay, so... So, there were loads of US ships near the coast, which were sunk by German submarines during the war, and there were ships which went in convoys that were protected by airships. You've got a ship on the sea, then an airship above it protecting,

because they can see when a submarine is approaching, they can detect it, and then drop depth charges. You ordinarily wouldn't hit one, but it would just force the submarine to go lower than its torpedoes. And of the 90,000 ships that were in convoys escorted by airships, only one of them was ever sunk. But in 1943, a submarine fought a U-boat,

and the submarine won. Really? Yeah. And what did it do? Sorry, a submarine fought a U-boat, do you say? Yep, I got that wrong. That would have been a completely ordinary thing to happen in 1943.

It's not the best fact you've ever had. Did a submarine fight against an airship? Yes. How did they shoot it? Like, torpedoes wouldn't go in the air, right? The account is quite vague on the method used. I'm sure it wasn't a torpedo, but I think I might have been firing from the surface,

because I think I might have had surface guns. Coffley, you don't know the answer. I know, I'm sorry, I do know who won. I just don't have a fucking match report. You know, I'm sorry not to know. If you take some helium and freeze it down to pretty much absolute zero, just above it,

and you put it in a teacup and you start stirring it, and you go away, and you come back a million years later, it will still be stirring. What? That's so spooky. I know.

It has no friction, doesn't it? Exactly. It's like this amazing capacity, but only when it's right and they're absolute zero. It's because it doesn't go, like most things, as they get colder, if you remember from your GCSE chemistry, they kind of, they turn into solids.

Helium doesn't turn into a solid, no matter how cold it gets, unless you put it under loads and loads of pressure. And so it just has these amazing properties like a superconductor would. It also, if you leave it in a glass and you bring it right down, A, it'll fall through the glass.

So, like, because, because it doesn't undergo friction at all, every tiny molecule-sized hole in your glass, like I'm holding a glass now, there are molecule-sized holes in it, most liquids stay in that because friction is holding them in. Helium, when it's liquid, will just slip through,

and it will climb up the sides of the glass because gravity doesn't work the same way on. Gravity's not strong enough to hold it down. Yeah, that's magic. Can I quickly tell you my favourite helium story I've ever read? Oh, yeah, okay. 1999, the headline was, Helium blew women up like a balloon.

She was fine, by the way. I just heard the sound of this. She wasn't fine, she had a bad day. She was called... I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. She was called Samantha Munn.

She owned a toy shop. She was standing on a stepladder in her toy shop. She slipped off, and she was speared by the metal spike, which was in a helium tank. Word of it, spear her. In her left thigh. Thank God for that. And she looked down,

and she saw her left thigh and her stomach inflate like a balloon. They managed to get her to a hospital where they extracted her from the helium tank. Did she just kind of go... ...around the room? We don't have any beds for this patient. We'll just rubber against your head and stick it to the wall.

It wouldn't be great as well, because this was in a toy shop where they sell balloons just some random kid went, Can I get this, Mum? For an hour, she just walked around the shopping mall. This is just the kind of joke she dreaded happening after this story. She's fine now, right?

She's fine. They said a doctor x-rayed her left thigh, which showed that it was about twice the size of her right, which I would argue you could tell without an x-ray. LAUGHTER Time for our final fact for the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is,

if you look up humour on Wikipedia, the first thing you'll see is a picture of my face. And this... APPLAUSE Amazing. This is something that, as of the 21st of August, 2022, someone changed the photo on the article for humour, and very randomly, they don't know who I am,

they've made that very clear in their comment, going, I have no idea who this person is. If anyone's got a better picture, please replace it. But it hasn't been replaced, and I now find myself the global face of humour. And in the photo... In the photo, it's not just me, there's someone else. So the wording, the caption underneath,

is a viewer brackets Jimmy Wales left, laughing at a comedian, Dan Schreiber right, performing stand-up comedian. If you don't know who Jimmy Wales is, Jimmy Wales is the creator of Wikipedia, which is basically like making God laugh, right? So... So this is a very exciting development.

I imagine God's laughing a lot when he's looking over at you. Now, that is really cool. I don't know, if you ever needed evidence that Wikipedia is an unreliable source, I think you're looking at it. I think I was... wasn't I there on this day, Dan? You were, so... So why are you not in the picture, Andy?

I don't know, but I did look up the Wikipedia for wanker recently, and very upsettingly... No, no, no, but this was a thing called Wikimania, where they sort of have an annual conference all about Wikipedia and Wikipedians, and you know, they have seminars and they have fun quizzes, and yeah, this was... you did the... Andy and I were actually at the Edinburgh Fringe when it was on.

It was down in London, and I had this idea called Wikipedia of the Missing Bits, and the idea was to do a stand-up show where a comedian would come up and present a set on a missing page on Wikipedia and their pitch for what should be involved in it, and Jimmy Wales came up, and actually Jimmy came on stage with you, Andy,

and did a quiz... Yeah, yeah, no one apparently took a fucking photo. Didn't you try to edit Wikipedia on the way down to say something about yourself? No, there was a comedian who was on the show that day called Steve Cross, who was complaining that he doesn't have a Wikipedia page, so I created a page where I could put his name on,

which was People Who Don't Have Wikipedia Pages, and he was the first on the list, but it got taken down immediately. It was within a minute or something. Yeah. It was amazingly fast editing by the people at Wikipedia. But all the four of us have Wikipedia pages, right? And I had a quick look at the editing online,

because there's been a few times where comments that have been made on this show... Shit. ...have made their way onto my Wikipedia, and I've had to go in, and I've complained about it, and no one changes it, so I've had to physically edit my change into it, and I'm now banned from Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, yeah. Before editing my own page for factual accuracy. So, one of the things was, someone changed my name on it to Daniel Indiana, Craig Schreiber, because I once said that I almost changed my name to Daniel Indiana, to Indiana is my middle name. So, for a while on Wikipedia, it was Daniel Indiana, Craig Schreiber,

Bracket, Dix is... Which is what James said on the podcast, this was what made it on. Then, a few years later, I had to change that, a few years later, Andy makes a joke, and it's a joke that I have an interest in, sort of, we were talking about Nazism,

and stuff like that. You're an avid collector. Oh, my God. Daniel Indiana, Craig Schreiber, aka Dix, is a radio producer, living in the United Kingdom. Others have claimed him to have an extreme fascination and an expertise in Nazism,

and Nazi-sacred myths. I hate to think what it's going to say about herianuses after tonight's show. And then some other Dix put this on. I found this because this was in an edit, it said, removed incorrect statement, Schreiber is not particularly noted for this catchphrase, and then what originally was put into my account was,

Schreiber is famous for his hilarious catchphrase, yep, which he uses after Twitter handles are announced on no such thing as a fish. It's such a good catchphrase, though, because you've called it like, that's a biggie. That's a huge word. Oh, my God.

That's so good. On Wikipedia pages, often it says, like, so if you had Bolton, for instance, it might be notable people from Bolton. I thought I'd check where we are, if any of those things. So this is all that I could find. I am mentioned in notable people with aphantasia. Really?

Yeah, I don't have like a mind's eye, so I'm in that. So James can't picture your face if you leave. He can't remember your face. Uranus, on the other hand. Photographic, absolutely. Dan is mentioned as a notable Australian in the United Kingdom. And Anna is a notable person

in the Poles in the United Kingdom, as in people from Poland. And? Andy Murray is a notable tennis player who... I'm not joking, I genuinely searched, and I didn't find that phrase. Thank you for looking. There was a thing.

So the editing can be used for good and for ill, as we've clearly seen, from Dan's extensive list of grievances that he just read out. But a couple of years ago, there was a bloke in Australia who was a really big fan of a band called Peaking Duck. He was a bloke called David Spargo, and he was going to see them at a gig, and he really wanted to get backstage to see them.

And so he changed the Wikipedia page of the band Peaking Duck, creating an entry for family and listing himself... Brilliant. ...as a family member. And then when he got to the backstage bit of the gig, he said to the guys, no, no, no, I'm their step-brother or cousin or whatever. Show that to the security guys who let him in. Genius.

And the band just gave him a beer and said, fair play, that's a very funny thing you've done. They said, I love this so much, they said he wasn't creepy at all, and was actually much more relaxed and cool than we would have expected from someone who went to those lengths. So good. The band hasn't been seen since then, has it?

You know in Wikipedia how there are multiple language Wikipedia's, and so there may be a translation of no such thing as a fish into, I don't know, Mandarin, for example, or whatever languages there are. So there's a list of the articles where people and things have been the most translated, so it's the leaderboard of that. So in terms of humans that are on that leaderboard, the top people are, the most translations is for Jesus. Second is for Michael Jackson.

Third is for Barack Obama. Fourth is for Donald Trump. Fifth is for Adolf Hitler. Sixth is for Albert Einstein. Who do you think is seventh? Is that Andy? Please. I need this, Dan.

I would have liked someone like Harry Potter, perhaps. He's got to be a real person. Mr Bean? Oh, Rowan Atkinson. Is it another world leader? No, it's a guy called Corbin Blue, BLEU, who was initially at the time a supporting actor from the movie High School Musical, who, one enthusiastic fan, translated his account

into every single language that he could, as using Google Translate and stuff like that, giving him over 200 different languages of translation. And so he's just behind Albert Einstein, Julius Caesar's behind him. But it's, yeah, and it's the theory that it's one person who's been doing that. That's amazing. We just think, because it sounds like that person is in tonight, if we do want to ask.

God, people have a lot of time. So on languages on Wikipedia, actually, there is a Scots language Wikipedia section. It's got 41,000 articles. As in Scots, the language Robbie Burns, some people will say it's a dialect of English, some people say it's its own language, but you know the one.

Anyway, people started to notice that some of the Scots language articles were not entirely correct in terms of not really being written in the Scots language. They were really written in a parody version of it, or what someone who didn't actually speak the language might guess that it sounded like. And it turned out it's because almost half of the articles had been written by a teenager in North Carolina who did not speak a word of Scots.

It's the most odd story. And he started off doing it. He was 12, I think, when he started doing it. What a strange kid. And they started at the top, all with the warning, the Scots that was oozed in this article was written be a body that's mother tongue is not Scots. Please improve this article.

Guinea can, which I think is translated as this is all bollocks, please improve it. But then he took that away. And it was only a couple of years ago, it was revealed that it was just this boy in North Carolina. Poor kid. I know. He felt bad about it.

He felt so bad about it. He hasn't been named, I think, which is good. It's a Wikipedia name, which is Amaryllis Gardiner, but I don't know if you can track him down with that. And very sweetly, because a lot of people said we should scrap the whole Scots language page, the Michael Dempster, who's director of the Scots Language Center said, look, this kid's put in an incredible amount of work.

It's a great resource, but it does need people who are literate in Scots to edit it now. So get on it. The editing of Wikipedia is such a hotly contested area to the behind the scenes of it is just constant fights going on. One of the famous ones, which probably a lot of people here know about, is there is a page for a guy who's called Guy Standing. And in the photo, Guy Standing is sitting.

So the caption reads Guy Standing, sitting. Beautiful. That's great. Except it's cause, it's a very contentious photo, which has now been edited away, brought back, because people are saying you're making fun. This is an obvious joke, and we're not about jokes here. We're about information.

So if you want jokes, head over to Dan Shriver on the humor page. I just have one or two things about stock photos. This is a stock photo, this is a public use photo, but the stock photo libraries that exist, they lead to all sorts of weird quirks and tangents. So for example, in 2019, the New Zealand budget featured stock photos, a stock photo model on the front of it, and it turned out to be a woman called Vicky Freeman,

who just had the picture taken and just sold the rights to it. Anyway, she had moved to Australia because she could no longer afford to live in New Zealand, and was on the front page of the New Zealand budget document all about making life affordable. And you don't really have many options, normally. You can sometimes say, I don't want to be used to advertise an extreme political view or whatever,

but you often just have no rights at all. So in 2014, a woman called Samantha Ovens had years before done a photo shoot for colds and illnesses. You know, those sort of cold remedy photos where you just have to pinch your brow and look a bit pained, or look a bit like you're having a slightly, oh, I've got a bit of a cold or a headache or whatever. Anyway, that then got used as the lead on a Guardian article,

a confessional article headlined, the fantasies about group sex with old obese men. And she just found people started contacting her, saying, you're right, Samantha. A lot of old men getting in touch. Honestly, Sam, do you dance, mate? I'm going to have to wrap this up very shortly, guys. I know, we're nearing the end.

Can I tell you one funny thing? I saw, which is that following one of the Football World Cups, Sepp Blatter, who was the FIFA president, he was awarded this beautiful award, the Order of Companions of OR Tambo for his contribution to the World Cup, and to announce it, the South African government put it on their webpage.

But unfortunately, they took his name and details from his Wikipedia page, which had just been vandalized. And so what they announced on their website was an award for Joseph Sepp Belend Blatter. That is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said about this podcast,

you can get us on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, where you can go to our group account, which is at 90. Check it out very quickly. Thank you so much, Edinburgh. That was awesome. It's always so much fun being here. We love being here. We will be back again.

And we'll also be back again next week for another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye. Thank you.