No Such Thing As A Fish - 466: No Such Thing As Political Moss

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss snail roads, convent gardens, political moss, and political goss. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club F...ish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at nosuchthingasafish.com/apple or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi everybody, just before we start this week's show, we've got an exciting announcement to make, and that is that our half-sister show, our sort of semi-sibling show, The Museum of Curiosity, is coming back. Absolutely, it's a show on BBC Radio 4. It takes place on Mondays starting from the 20th of February at 6.30 in the evening, and even more excitingly, our half-podcast sister, Anna Tyshinski, is starring in this year's series. Yes, that's exactly right. The show is hosted by John Lloyd, the father of QI. It's a sort of fictional museum, an imaginary museum, and every week they have brilliant guests submitting strange and wonderful imaginary objects to the museum.
Starting point is 00:00:47 John is the director of the museum, and Anna, this series, is going to be the curator, so that's really exciting. Absolutely, if you love No Six Things A Fish, and if you love QI, you will absolutely love Museum of Curiosity, and just to remind you, it's on Monday the 20th of February at 6.30 and for the subsequent six weeks. OK, on with the podcast. On with the show. 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 around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days,
Starting point is 00:01:43 and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy. My fact is that there's a type of moss called political moss. Jesus, is there? Yeah, well, that's a great question, Dan. No, there isn't. What? Thank you for bringing it to the show. No, wait a minute, your fact is that there isn't a type of moss called political moss.
Starting point is 00:02:07 So, what this fact is, that phrase, there's a type of moss called political moss, is something that a listener got in touch with, okay, a listener called Beau Stuckey, and he had been in touch with chat GPT, which is a newish kind of artificial intelligence conversation bot, basically, that's one of the most powerful ever created, but in fact, I think might be the most powerful ever created. A timer for recording. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you're listening to this after the revolution, it's the second most powerful ever created. And if you're scurrying through rat holes and eating old packaged food and fleeing the robots, then, yeah. Anyway, but chat GPT is currently best in the show, and he asked chat GPT to come up with an episode of Fish
Starting point is 00:02:48 about that fact of political moss, and it came up with, I would say, a pretty good transcript. Okay. Yeah, do you think? Yeah, well, can we read the transcript and just see how it sounds? You pass them around to all of us, so it feels like we've got no choice. Okay. Okay. So everyone has a name here except me. I'm a host, I guess. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:03:07 Okay. Welcome back to the show, which we never say. No. Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Dan. With me today, we have James, Anna, and Andy. So Andy, what do you have for us today? Well, I've got a real doozy. Did you know there's a type of moss called political moss? Political moss? That sounds like something out of a dystopian novel. No, no, no. It's a real thing. Apparently it was discovered in the 1800s by a botanist named William Jackson Hooker.
Starting point is 00:03:35 And get this, it's called political moss because it prefers to grow in areas with high levels of pollution. Hey, funny. Funny chat GPT. Sorry, I've gone off script. I'm so sorry. Right, back in the game. Wow, that's really interesting. So it's like a canary in a coal mine for environmental pollution. Yeah, I can see how that would make sense. And I bet it would be a good indicator for scientists studying the effects of pollution on plants. Exactly. That's incredible.
Starting point is 00:04:08 I never would have thought that something as small as moss could have such a big impact on our understanding of the environment. I think we need more political moss in the world, children. Indeed. I think we all do. And that's it for today's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. Join us next week for more fascinating facts and interesting tidbits. Or tidbits, not tidbits. Tidbits is fine, it's a word. This is not in the chat, by the way.
Starting point is 00:04:39 We should do a podcast called Show Us Your Tidbits and it's just interesting facts. That's great. Written on people's breasts. So anyway, that was painful. Did we think it was realistic? No, it wasn't because we're not that worthy. There was no mention of the word penis in there. There was no pun. I didn't see a pun anywhere. No mention of golf. Could we call it a pun that it's high levels of pollution and it's talking about metaphorical pollution in the world of politics?
Starting point is 00:05:07 It doesn't really make sense. So is political moss real or not? No. It just might be. The details are all here, right? I think Bo Stuckey came up with the idea of political moss and then he saw what chat GPD could come up with. I did check if there was a political moss and there isn't one. There's some politicians called moss and there is a political word, a mossback. In America, that's an extreme conservative. It's a mossback.
Starting point is 00:05:33 And the idea is that it came from when people tried to dodge the draft in the Civil War. People from the Carolinas who tried to hide from the draft would call mossbacks because it was as if they were putting moss on their backs and hoping that were people go past. And then it later became to mean reactionaries and then it later became to mean conservatives. I'm not quite sure where the link came. Oh, I like that because it's a bit like the Rolling Stone gathers no moss. And then you've stayed in one place for so long with all your opinions taking the same that now you've got moss on your back. It could be that, yeah.
Starting point is 00:06:04 Yeah, it would make sense for a conservative without that context, is that what you're saying? Yeah. That's their policy. So chat GPD, it's really good at certain things. As in I asked it for ideas for a birthday party and came up with some great suggestions. Go on. That was fine. Oh, no, well, it was just, it wasn't, I didn't write them down, but I just thought, oh, those are great ideas.
Starting point is 00:06:23 But you can't remember any of it. Was it sort of top of the Eiffel Tower or just tea and cake with your mum? It was more like principles behind a birthday party like invite people and, you know, and we like sitting together. I actually, I think that is one of the big problems with chat. What's it called? Chat GPD, right? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:06:42 And that is that it's really good at making things that are theoretically correct. It's good at grammar. It's good at making words that fit after each other. But it doesn't necessarily think like a human thinks. So if you say to someone, give me a good idea for a party, they might say pirates vodka. Let's go to the top of the Eiffel Tower. But the computer thinks you mean invite people. I was quite grateful for that.
Starting point is 00:07:06 In fact, it showed me where I've been going wrong a few years in a row now with my partners. Pirates and vodka. When is your daughter's first birthday party again? There's one great thing about chat GPD, which is it has, it warns you it may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content. So it, no, and it's because it's broad. It literally has hoovered up trillions of words from all over the internet. That's quite good, isn't it? Because I know a lot of humans who don't realize that they're doing that.
Starting point is 00:07:32 Exactly. So it's aware of itself. And also the other great thing about it is it has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021. And I did try it. I asked it, who is Liz Truss? And it says she's the secretary of state for international trade. It's just a simpler time. How many of you guys have a smart speaker? Like an Alexa thing. You've got one.
Starting point is 00:07:52 And I think you've got a Google thing. Yeah. Anna, I bet you don't. I am a smart speaker, Andy. Brilliant. But no, I don't have one. Okay. Okay.
Starting point is 00:08:03 That's roughly where I thought the three of you would be. Yeah. Yeah. Do you, how do you address them? Do you say please? No. You say, hey, fucker. Play me some music now.
Starting point is 00:08:14 It better be something I like. Okay. And come the revolution, James. Goodbye. Okay. Well, that again is broadly in line with what you'd expect because men are much less polite to their smart speakers than women. Okay.
Starting point is 00:08:31 Men say please 45% of the time. It still feels quite high. And women 62%. Yeah, I don't say please. I'm sorry to say. I've never said please. Well, there's a school of thought which says you shouldn't say please. In fact, you shouldn't teach your children to say please because you're teaching them
Starting point is 00:08:44 to respect the machines. Okay. And there's another school of thought which says maybe we should teach them to respect the machines. And Google recently added a function called pretty please, right, which I find a bit sinister. Where if a user says please or thank you, they will get a delightful response from the speaker, which starts with, it'll say back to you something like thanks for asking so nicely.
Starting point is 00:09:05 And then it'll say your answer. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But I think you're very lonely on you if you need that from your Alexa. Yeah. Well, also you don't, I don't say please or thank you in the hope that someone will say thanks for asking so nicely. I think that should be a slightly nicer tone of voice it uses for you.
Starting point is 00:09:20 And you should get a slightly ruder tone of voice back if you don't say please or thank you. Yeah. Or maybe it does things slightly worse. Exactly. The less you say please or thank you, the more you ask for it to play Bell and Sebastian and it plays slipknot. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:09:35 It plays Bell and Sebastian, but it also just spits in the middle of the song. Just a good bit. It puts you off. Is this what your one person parties are like, Andy? You're just being a load of speakers. They're all talking to each other. It's a social nightmare. They're all playing each other Bell and Sebastian.
Starting point is 00:09:54 I'm just wandering around the room with my drink. Looking for someone to talk to. Busted. Play busted. Can't solve it. Play busted. Do you know there's a big split in the AI world at the moment between the, I guess, the deep machine learning proponents, which is most of what we usually talk about now.
Starting point is 00:10:13 So obviously you just feed it, shed loads of data and it figures stuff out. And then the other group called themselves Go-Fi, which I just like. And the Go-Fi is that stands for good old fashioned AI. Oh, okay. And what's that? So they're the ones who think that there needs to be more of an element of programming and structure and human input. And their argument is that you can only get so far with the machine learning because what
Starting point is 00:10:40 AI tends to be quite bad at if you do it that way is kind of categories and hierarchies. So it can get incredibly good at knowing what a cat is if you show a billion pictures of cats. You can spot a cat just by a little hair on its tail. But it's not very good at knowing, okay, a cat's an animal and a dog's an animal. So it'll see a dog and be like, that's the same as a cat or an elephant and be like, that's similar to a cat in the sense that it's an animal. Whereas it'd be more likely to see something which is not like a cat but has pointy ears
Starting point is 00:11:06 and think, well, that's the same as a cat because it looks like a cat. Exactly, yeah. It's kind of like the difference between going to a foreign country and living there to learn language and kind of being taught the grammar, I suppose. Facebook. Yeah. I actually do think that things like Babel are quite good programs for learning. I think they're brilliant.
Starting point is 00:11:23 You're off the clock now. No, I think they're amazing. Does it feel, Elon Musk says, we've got to be careful, AI is going to take over. Is it dangerous? A. And what's I? That'll be like proclamation number one for the robots, wasn't it? Not A, B anymore.
Starting point is 00:11:42 It goes A, I, B, C. I forgot my follow-up question now. Is AI dangerous? Is AI dangerous? Yeah. And will it make us forget things? Google, what was I trying to say, please? What was my second question?
Starting point is 00:11:59 Actually, there's obviously a lot of debate as to whether Elon Musk's AI is dangerous and kind of specifically in driverless cars. And I read this amazing thing from a few weeks ago, which I hadn't really seen covered until I went to research this. But there was a famous demo video of a driverless car in 2016, which I think I remember is the one I'm thinking of. And it was really well publicized, launched loads and loads of funding for driverless cars and lots of excitement, like here's what they can do.
Starting point is 00:12:27 And it's basically a video of a car driving driverlessly on its own autonomously and navigating traffic lights and stuff. But there's a person sitting in the driver's seat. And I remember we talked about this at the time, I think. Yeah. And it says under the video, the person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.
Starting point is 00:12:46 Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. Engineer at Tesla's just come out and said he was driving the car. Oh, wow. That's weird. Isn't that mad? Because I thought that in 2016, Tesla's did drive themselves for a shot. You could go on to water.
Starting point is 00:13:00 They could, but it was doing stuff that they couldn't do at that time. So for instance, it was stopping at a red light. There was an AI that was programmed to play a video game, a survival video game. OK. And they just wanted to see what would happen. And it got the highest score that anyone had ever got. But it got that by having lots of children and then eating them all. OK.
Starting point is 00:13:21 Oh, my God. And it's just a classic way of the AI just finds a way out that no human would ever think of doing that, right? Was that a thing you could do in the game? Well, they worked it out that it was a thing you could do. You had to eat, right? And you had a way of making children. And every time you ate something, you got more points.
Starting point is 00:13:40 And so it was like, well, let's just keep making children. I've got a fact about it. It seems like it's about AI, but it's actually about cows. OK. Yeah. OK. You still spoiled the ending there, wasn't it? There's an AI that can eat grass and make milk.
Starting point is 00:13:52 It's brilliant. So there are these smart dairy farms now, right? The point of them is that you can assess the health of your cows the whole time by filming them, right? And it's actually more useful than having a person there watching them, even if you could have a person there working all the time. And it's because you're scanning them as they walk. And you can see if they've gone a bit lame, right?
Starting point is 00:14:15 Mm-hmm. Now, the amazing fact is from a person who designed the system or co-designed it. It's called Melvin Smith, who says that cows hide their limping when they think they're being watched. Wow. They're prey animals. And if they've got a bad foot, they think, oh, I better conceal this. And they walk, no, I'm fine.
Starting point is 00:14:31 I'm fine. I'm just walking. That's really interesting. You know some humans, like there are some humans that if you twist your ankle, you'll just kind of carry on walking and you don't want anyone to know. And there's some humans who will make a right song and dance about it. Thank you. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:14:45 Those ones who make a song and dance about it are the predators. And the ones who hide it are the prey. Natural prey. I didn't think I was a predator before, but I make such a fuss whenever I've slightly turned an ankle or something. Yeah. Show us how powerful you are. Wow.
Starting point is 00:14:59 This is actually a power move. I'd like some peas now. That's really interesting. I was chatting to someone on email for something else about an AI which has learned how to tell whether sheep are sad or sick or something like that. And because if you look at a sheep and you look at another sheep, it's really hard to tell anything about them because they just look like sheep, right? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:15:24 But there are very, very sort of micro expressions that they have when they have saw rudders or they have, you know, saw feet or whatever. But the AI can scan them and can tell with 80% accuracy which ones are sick and which ones aren't sick. It's like a gambling thing, isn't it? Like if you were playing poker against a sheep, you could use that. Yeah. It's like a gambler's tell.
Starting point is 00:15:43 But I presume you could use that in poker. I presume that if you had that kind of technology and you programmed it for people, you could easily tell who had what. I suppose it's possible that humans have micro expressions. There must be a tiny, tiny, fuck. And then, you know... Yeah, that happens. Back to there.
Starting point is 00:15:57 Woo-hoo! That's so short that we can't see it. Certainly poker players think that there are certain tells that people have like maybe your pupils slightly dilate if you've got good cards or bad cards or stuff. I don't know how true they are. No. I think most people are good at poker who basically hide any semblance of that. And I don't think...
Starting point is 00:16:17 I think AI is better... You're better off making an AI that has X-ray vision to see through the cards. With the farm stuff, though, with pigs, if you get sent a photo as a farmer of your pig if it's feeling unhappy, it'll be like pig number eight is feeling down just by... What, by the machines? Yeah. By looking... Wow.
Starting point is 00:16:33 It's incredible. Do you think the machines are trying to get the animals on their side before they're apocalypse? Oh. Oh, McDonald had a farm. AI. AI. Oh. Stop the podcast.
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Starting point is 00:18:21 OK, on with the podcast. On with the show. OK, it is time for fact number two and that is Anna. My fact this week is that snails use trails like we use roads. Do they get their mucus from a shell station by any chance? Wow. See, it's because we have in real life where we get petrol from is called shell as well. You are doing so well with that.
Starting point is 00:18:51 Look, anyway, snails leave this slime trail, which obviously we've all seen and know about. And if another snail gets into that first snail's slime trail and follows it, it takes way, way less energy for it to move. And when snails are moving, a huge amount of the energy that they're using goes into making this slime on which they kind of move. So I think the mucus production, the slime production cost of moving outweighs the metabolic cost by 35 times. Right.
Starting point is 00:19:21 What does that mean? So that means like, you know, if you're aspiring and trying to move the way we move, that's metabolic cost. But then on top of that, they're using 35 times more energy on just making slime to move. Basically, this is why snails have never made anything of themselves. It's quite tragic really. What? Some snails, I read this, spend 60% of their energy making mucus.
Starting point is 00:19:41 Right. And it's just, there's no time. There's no time left in the day. You spend so much of your life making podcasts and I don't think snails think much of that. That's why I've never made anything of myself. Well, that's what they do, they're snails, they make mucus. I know, but if they didn't have to make all these mucus, I just wonder what kind of stuff they'd have going on.
Starting point is 00:19:57 But they can, as a result of the mucus, yes, it's a terrible amount of wasted energy when they're just trying to walk on, say, a flat surface, but they can climb walls, they can go upside down. That's the purpose of it. They're Spider-Man. We're just podcasters. They're also making roads for other snails. So they're, you know, utilitarianistically, it's actually quite a good thing for them to
Starting point is 00:20:17 make. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, but I bet there are some snails who just get done with all the mucus making and there are some real coasters aren't there. Yeah. It's just, like, fucking Barry again in my mucus trail. And he's literally never seen him make his own mucus. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:20:30 But he is, you know, he's doing very well for himself. His podcast is going brilliantly. Oh my gosh. You rarely see a sort of, you know, gridlock of snails sort of traveling. I always see snails sort of quite isolated and alone. I think they've got very long stopping distances on the roads. Much longer than us. Yeah, you're right.
Starting point is 00:20:52 I know. I do agree with that. Because, like, if you see trails in your garden or whatever, it's not like you see a trail and then you see another snail following it. You don't tend to very much. True. And I don't know why because obviously they're more effective at reducing the amount of energy it takes to move on them the newer they are.
Starting point is 00:21:08 So if you're on a newly laid trail, you know, your heart, you're reducing your energy levels cost by about 50%. Yeah. And that's within a day you've got to get on that trail. Right. That's interesting. Wow. You could effectively lay a trail.
Starting point is 00:21:22 So I could, if I had my family to go out on a walk, I could go like, I'll go out an hour early. Let me just walk ahead. And then convenient. And then they all get on. Let's go on a nice walk. Well, I'll go at different times. But they could catch up with me because it'd be like walking on a travelator.
Starting point is 00:21:38 I'll get back to the house just as you finish your three hour walk. Lovely. Oh, thanks, darling. That was really great. Great work. How are the kids? Where are the kids? I really like the fact that snails leave dotted trails.
Starting point is 00:21:52 This is cool. Sometimes they do. And basically, there are lots of different theories I've read about why. One is that there's a kind of snail called the Rosie Wolf Snail, which is a predator snail. And it hunts other snails by their trails. Oh. Obviously, if you get on the trail, you just follow it and then you eat the snail.
Starting point is 00:22:11 So that might be the reason. Or there's another guest that they're going over very rough terrain and it would actually cost so much slime to properly slime all the ground under them that they make a little economy there. And they just proceed without making slime for every bit of the ground. I like the idea that they're leaving gaps so that people can't follow them. That's a cool idea, isn't it? That's a nice idea.
Starting point is 00:22:29 Because there was a thing, wasn't there last year in the news where they found some, someone was smuggling snails in an airport or something. Yes. And they found one snail. Yes. And then they just followed his snail trail back and they found like a hundred more or something like that. Wow.
Starting point is 00:22:45 They're giant African land snails. They're absolutely mega and people import them to eat them. They're really vilified, the African land snails. And in fact, they have a close relationship with the rosy wolf snails, who I think are the most vicious snails on the planet. They're so, they're known as cannibal snails and honestly, look up a video of them eating other snails. It's so frightful.
Starting point is 00:23:06 Time lapse, it must be. Yeah, yeah. I'll put it on at least two times speed. So they'll catch up with the snail by following in its trail, the rosy wolf snail. They'll climb over its shell and then the snail obviously retreats back into its shell trying to get away and the rosy wolf just sticks its head. Imagine how frightening that is, this huge head coming into your shell and sucks it all out.
Starting point is 00:23:27 It's grotesque. This is actually a question that's been, I saw it online, it's a meme question the other day. So the question is, you can have $10 million. Yeah. $10 million quid. I don't want this bloody Malcolm Gladwell question again. You can have $10 million quid, but if you accept it, there is a snail always chasing
Starting point is 00:23:43 you somewhere around the world. It doesn't ever stop moving. It always knows where you are and it doesn't ever die. But what do you accept the money? It's a killer snail. Sorry. If it touches you, you die. Oh, okay.
Starting point is 00:23:56 I missed out the only important bit of information. And crunch. Proper. It follows the movie, isn't it? It follows, but with the snail. I don't think I take the money. You're doing that. No, because I like peace of mind.
Starting point is 00:24:13 Can you just live half the year in Australia and the other half the year in the UK? So just as he's kind of getting over the Tasman Sea, you get on a plane. Is he or she a clever snail in that respect? If I boarded a flight to Australia. Oh, could it board the next one? Could it board the next one? Was that what these guys would do to the airport? Yeah, exactly.
Starting point is 00:24:35 Yeah, it could. Yeah, yeah, it's a clever snail. Oh, okay. Well, that's a bit different because I think the whole point of it being a snail is it's going to take forever to get to you. Oh, sorry. And it's got legs and it rubs. And a knife.
Starting point is 00:24:47 And it's six foot. So yeah, snails are frightening, I think is what we've learned here. Yeah. But actually, sorry, I did mention a connection between the African land snail, which is a big bad guy because it's this big snail and it destroys invasive species, and the rosy wool snail. And that's because so in Hawaii, there's loads of kind of endangered species of snail, lots of types of tree snail.
Starting point is 00:25:07 And the African land snail rocked up and started threatening them. And so in 1955, we did the classic and we thought what we'll do is we'll introduce a bigger snail. Brilliant. To eat the African land snail. And now, I went to Hawaii a few years ago, if you go there's just one massive snail. That's the island, isn't it? So they introduced another bigger snail.
Starting point is 00:25:26 Yeah. And it decided, the rosy wool snail decided it preferred the taste of all the leisure street snails that were really endangered to the African land snail and it's now responsible for the extinction of at least eight native species. Oh man. We've got to stop doing that. We've got to stop it. So some winkles, kind of snail, that you can read the slime trails of other snails and
Starting point is 00:25:46 then get all sorts of data from the slime, the sex, the species, the direction it was going, and how attractive it is as a mate. From its slime? Yeah. And if you're a lady snail and you're free of parasites, which is to a male, there's basically the Benny Hill Show happens where you've got a load of male snails chasing you. And this happens so much that there are some, they're called rough periwinkles. The females, they can change the composition of their slime and basically turn on a cloaking
Starting point is 00:26:14 mode where... To hide their parasites. Well, to hide the sex. Oh, to hide the sex? They leave a sex neutral trail because they've got so many bloody male rough periwinkles chasing after them. Oh really? I'm sick of this.
Starting point is 00:26:27 I'm not interested. And so they change the slime. How cool is that? Clever. Like a phone box. Like a sticker in a phone box. Like a phone box. Your snail is a snail trail.
Starting point is 00:26:36 What? I don't know, I was just trying to think what the human equivalent is of leaving a trail behind you, advertising how sexy you are. Oh, those things in the phone boxes. Yeah. I mean, there's a dated reference. I don't think the way they work is you go to one phone box and they say, right, now to the next phone box and you keep going down the phone boxes until you eventually reach
Starting point is 00:26:54 the prostitute. I think that's how it works. That's how it works. Is it? Yeah. All right. I have one more number added to the phone number. She's been here.
Starting point is 00:27:03 She doesn't then conceal her trail by leaving a gender neutral card in a phone box. No. No, she doesn't. Not that kind of trickery. What an average time. We should move on in a sec. I just have some things on slime. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:27:18 I quite like. Do you know that to most of the inhabitants of the ocean, the ocean is slime. It's thick and viscous. Slimey. Viscous. Yeah. Slimey. To fish on things.
Starting point is 00:27:31 Plankton and microbes. I don't think we know how it actually feels to them, but basically, this was an article. There's a new scientist in the year 2000. Maybe it's been completely disproven, but basically they found out that there are way more sugar molecules in the seawater than we thought there were. It's like this whole mesh of sort of saccharide molecules and they trap water in their mesh and that creates this kind of gel and it's cobwebby, it described it as. If you're a small animal going through that, because you're so tiny, that feels like really
Starting point is 00:28:03 thick and viscous and we think it must feel like that to them, because if you look at how microorganisms are distributed in the sea or plankton or tiny things, they're not evenly distributed or randomly distributed, they're sort of in clusters because I guess some bits are thicker than others in this weird cobweb and so they can't plow through them. So you're just a little kind of bit of plankton going down the sea. You can't really swim because you're plankton, that's the whole point of plankton, but then occasionally you just get to a bit and you're like, great, this is all slimy now.
Starting point is 00:28:34 Yeah, you mean great sarcastically. Yeah, yeah. Can you climb through the water? If you're plankton, you can't do it at all, you're just, whatever the current do. Whatever happens? Yeah, whatever happens happens. No wonder they've evolved sarcasm as a threat. What's plankton's most powerful weapon?
Starting point is 00:28:57 Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that Italy's defence minister was once hospitalised for smoking 150 cigarettes in a day. What? Was it a challenge? What was it? Was it a competition? I think he was very stressed.
Starting point is 00:29:17 It was during an election in 2013. There's a guy called Guido Cressetto and anyone who follows Italian politics will know that quite recently the Brothers of Italy have won an election or become the biggest party and they formed a government and they're kind of like the UKIPI nationalist party of Italy and Guido, who I think was the leader of Brothers of Italy at the time in 2013, he was electioneering and apparently had one cigarette every six minutes from 8am to 11pm and started feeling not very well and had to go to hospital. But then after a few days he was fine.
Starting point is 00:30:00 What does that do to you, that level of intensity? What did they diagnose him with? Well he felt that it was stress related as well, I think. Oh yeah, that's what it taught the doctors was it? So do you drink, oh I just have a sherry at Christmas, do you smoke well, you know, just 150 a day. Just every six minutes. Yeah, definitely the stress thing though and I live quite near a main road.
Starting point is 00:30:25 Can I unpack the six minute thing though because is that including, is that post finishing a cigarette with a six minute break? No. So every six minutes he would have had to have started and ended smoking. How long does it take to smoke a cigarette, a few minutes? You have to go quite quickly to get through one in three or four minutes. He might not have got to the filter in all of them. Right, right, yeah because you're busy, it's stressful, you're campaigning here.
Starting point is 00:30:49 I tried to find any evidence anyone would ever smoke more than this in a day. Oh yeah. And I don't know if you guys found Stefan Sigmund. Oh yeah. Right. But he's called Sigmund. Oh yeah? Cool.
Starting point is 00:30:59 Oh yeah. Wow. Stefan Sigmund, Sigmund Sigmund. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's close enough. Anyway, in 1996 what he did, he was trying to get a Guinness World Record apparently. And it's, there are some people who say it didn't happen but there is a photo of him doing it.
Starting point is 00:31:12 It happened. Okay. So he took a wheel, rigged them all up to a pipe and smoked 800 cigarettes in six minutes. Yeah. And it was a rotating wheel. And the idea was that he'd be able to get a little bit of all the cigarettes. The people who said, I think it definitely happened. I think most people who say that it didn't happen are more saying that he couldn't have
Starting point is 00:31:33 got much from the ones on the outside of the wheel. Oh right, yeah, yeah. That surely wasn't accepted as a Guinness. Well Guinness said it was not environmentally friendly. Yeah. Which is one good reason why it's not. But no, it's there. I read a newspaper article about him because at the same time as doing this, he also ate
Starting point is 00:31:50 29 hard boiled eggs in four minutes and he leaped into a lake from 135 foot cliff all in order to get into the Guinness Book of Records. But Carol Jones, a Guinness spokesperson said, we do discourage this sort of thing and suggested that he tried the record for collecting cigarettes instead of smoking them. Okay. So yeah. I wonder if he holds any for any of those events because it sounds they're all too dangerous. It was almost like an advert because it was in quite a lot of newspapers during the day
Starting point is 00:32:20 and it was almost like it was an advert for Guinness saying, don't do these stupid things because you won't get in the Guinness Book of Records because it like listed a few things you couldn't get records for. That's mad. I was just looking at tips for quitting if you're the 150 a day kind of person and I just came across an article that I really enjoyed in The Guardian because it asks for other people's ways that they'd found quit smoking when the normal stuff didn't work. And so if the patches in the gum haven't worked for you, here's what some people recommend.
Starting point is 00:32:49 There was Pete who got all. I thought you were going to say you smoked Pete instead. Just bury yourself in it. Yeah. You can't. And on top of that, you won't be drafted into the war. It's a win-win situation. Sorry Anna.
Starting point is 00:33:03 Pete. Peter. Yes. He had all of his teeth removed. He smoked for about 40 years and he went to the dentist and said, Stop you from being able to smoke. Because not that on its own, but he had them take out all of his smoking yellow teeth and then he had them all replaced with fake teeth, which looked really good.
Starting point is 00:33:20 And then he was like, well, I don't want to do anything to damage these fake teeth. That's a good idea. Yeah. Incentivising. Great way to quit. Pull out all your teeth and replace them. Well, okay. Here's a different method then because they do a lot of the warnings on the packet and
Starting point is 00:33:36 then I think some countries have considered warnings on each individual cigarette in the case you haven't got the message on the pictures on the packet, which is pretty... Sing your mouth. You can't read it. Unless you could create a cigarette that gives smoke signals, but say, stop smoking. That's good. Like Gandalf kind of breathing out that shit, but he'd breathe out a picture of a diseased lung.
Starting point is 00:34:00 The director's cut. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In 2013, there were some researchers at Sterling who kind of did this. They made a packet of cigarettes, which shouted at you. When you opened the packet, it played an audio clip warning about the dangers of smoking. I think that's quite good.
Starting point is 00:34:19 Yeah. Because I have a musical biscuit tin. Do you? Yeah. Yeah. And does it say stop eating biscuits, Fatso? It was a Christmas present and I'm still working my way through it because it's got loads of biscuits in it, but every time you open it, it's very hard not to play a bit
Starting point is 00:34:34 of the tune because you move it and it's quite delicate. And it's more made me stealthy about opening the tin because I don't want to give away the fact that I'm... Eating biscuits. Eating biscuits. That's quite clever. I don't want my neighbours to hear and come over and say, can I have a biscuit? So you think you're going to be like an ice cream man.
Starting point is 00:34:54 Your neighbours are going to hear a song of biscuits very close to my neighbours with great friends, but you've got to keep something private. You've got to have some boundaries, yeah. I think that's one of them. Just one guessing game for just one other way to quit smoking. One woman said, convert from, when you're drinking tea, convert from mugs to a cup and saucer. She said, this is what made her quit.
Starting point is 00:35:17 So she would have had a ciggy with a mug of tea. Very good. Yeah, but it's good to put your cigarette in the saucer because you've got something to rest on. It's like a mini ashtray. Yeah. A mug. A mug.
Starting point is 00:35:27 A mug. What's the difference? Does the mug have, like, because they can have writing on them, does it say, my lovely fag? Yeah. She only had pro smoking mugs, you know, they used to do big business in them. I actually think she might be using a cup and saucer differently to how we might use one for this to work.
Starting point is 00:35:45 Oh, she holds them in both hands and you've got those third hand free. That's clever. That's the object of a cup and saucer. She got rid of all the tables in her house. So she had to hold them. She moved to a mountainous region with no flat surfaces at all. Just one cup, one saucer. It was a huge sacrifice, actually.
Starting point is 00:36:04 She only smoked one a week. Right. That's amazing. So there's a big movement these days, obviously, for trying to stop people from smoking almost altogether. So a lot of people on top of that are trying to erase their relationship with cigarettes, particularly for big companies. So the example I have, Walt Disney.
Starting point is 00:36:23 Walt Disney supposedly used to smoke about three packs of cigs a day. And if you used to go around Walt Disney World, you would see pictures of him holding cigarettes. And so many shots. He's just got a cig in his hand. And what they've done is they've photoshopped out every single cigarette that's ever found in a photo of Walt Disney at Disneyland. So wherever you go, the photo is still the same photo, but the cigarette is now missing.
Starting point is 00:36:46 Did they put something else in his hand? No, they don't. So that's the thing. You've got this weird little point thing. Make it a pencil. So easy. What they've done instead is every member of staff is trained to do the Walt Disney point with their two fingers.
Starting point is 00:36:58 No way. So that normalizes it. Yeah. And this is even used in the movie where Tom Hanks plays Walt Disney with the Mary Poppins movie that was done. Yeah. It looks a bit like he's doing gun fingers. It does.
Starting point is 00:37:10 Gun fingers. Doesn't it? Or like you're swearing at someone if you leave a gun with a cigarette. Exactly. If you have a tiny gap. But so members of staff are specifically trained to do the Walt Disney point, which he never did because he had a ciggy in it. When do you do it?
Starting point is 00:37:22 Do you want to do it? Or is it just every five minutes you have to do it three times? I think probably if you're pointing somewhere, maybe it's just over there. Maybe if you're a bit stressed after sex with a cup of tea. So cigarettes don't smell very nice to a lot of people. Agreed. Yeah. They smell pretty horrible to a lot of people.
Starting point is 00:37:40 To a lot. I suppose it depends if you're a smoker. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But have you heard of nice cigarettes? These were launched in 1989. They were called the, that wasn't the official brand name.
Starting point is 00:37:52 I can't remember the official brand name, but it was basically the first cigarette to smell good was the idea. And it was, they burned with a vanilla smell and they were advertised under the slogan, you shouldn't have to leave the room. You shouldn't have to apologize. Oh yeah. Well, that's just going to smell like a vape, which I must say I'm not a big fan of either. Well, it's sold terribly.
Starting point is 00:38:10 And they, like there have been a few attempts, but they were all the kind of proto vape things. So premier smokeless cigarettes was another kind. They were tested in 1989. And smokers didn't like them. Well, customers who tried it complained that it smelled bad, lack flavor, and it was too hot to touch. And industry experts noted that it could also be used to smoke crack. So it didn't make it off the testing line really.
Starting point is 00:38:35 Right. Yeah. But apart from that, that's the thing. Smokers like the smell and taste of cigarettes and have never liked stuff that doesn't really taste like it really. Except the occasional eccentric smoker who used to smoke some menthol cigarettes. Just lest we think that smoking is on its way out ASAP, it's going up worldwide in terms of number of smokers.
Starting point is 00:38:58 And that is related to the population going out. But still, it's the biggest cause of preventable deaths in the world. And by quite a long way, because I actually didn't look up the second biggest, but I always sort of like things like car crashes are really big and other things are around. I wonder if they can measure alcohol, yeah. You can't. You've got nails that are following you around for your 10 million quid. That's actually ironically hot on the heels of smoking.
Starting point is 00:39:28 The whole point of that is it's not preventable. That's like literally you just can't stop it. Leading inevitable cause of death. Obviously smoking has been banned in various places over the years and in New York it was banned in 1908 smoking, but only for women. Really? Yeah. Unlady like?
Starting point is 00:39:51 Pretty much. Yeah. Pretty much that. They haven't invented that Audrey Hepburn long cigarette. Absolutely. That came down later. Yeah. It was a very short lived ban.
Starting point is 00:40:01 Basically in 1907, there was a cafe, a very trendy cafe in New York that allowed women to smoke because usually people, women didn't really smoke in, in public very much because it was seen as unlady like, but this bar decided actually we don't care about that, anyone can smoke if they want. And then it was really, really popular. And so a load of other bars started to let women smoke in there and the politicians didn't like it. There was a politician called Timothy Little Tim Sullivan and he decided that he was going
Starting point is 00:40:31 to ban smoking even though he had personally never seen a woman smoke. Right. He still decided he was going to ban it and they did ban it. And there was only one woman, Katie Mulcahy, who was the only person who was cited for violating the crime because a few weeks later, the mayor of New York vetoed it said, actually this is ridiculous. We're going to stop this. Really?
Starting point is 00:40:55 But for two weeks and for one woman in New York, it was illegal. That's cool. That's cool for Katie. I bet that got her a good reputation. I reckon. Did you guys see, we were just mentioning Audrey Hepburn had, you know, those beautiful cigarette holders? What were they called?
Starting point is 00:41:09 The cigarette holders. Yeah. Did you see the inventions of Robert Stone, who this was in the 1950s, he just tried to come up with new and innovative ways to make smoking a more pleasurable experience. So he invented these holders, there was one brilliant one where it was for if it was raining and you wanted to have a ciggy, it had just a little umbrella that hangs over the cigarette itself off the back of its holder. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:41:31 It looked really, really clever. So that was the Periscope Ciggy, which would go upwards. No specific purpose as far as I can see for the Periscope Ciggy. If you're in a submarine and you want to fag, what do you do? Because you can't go outside. Yes. But if you had a massive pipe going up there. Well, we didn't see the approaching warship because Perkins was using the Periscope.
Starting point is 00:41:55 Have a quick gasper. Ironically, they found us through the lit tip of the cigarette. Actually, weirdly, until 2010, you could smoke in a submarine as well. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There was a room. There was a smokers room in submarines and you could smoke down there. Spaces at a premium on submarines.
Starting point is 00:42:14 Yes. It's amazing how geared everything was towards smokers needed spaces because so many people smoke. Interesting thing is the Beatles had a white submarine, but it just got stained by old nipples. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everyone.
Starting point is 00:42:33 We'd like to let you know that this week we are sponsored by Squarespace. Yes. You will have heard of Squarespace already, but just in case you haven't, it is an all-in-one platform for building a website, building your brand, growing your business online. It's a multifunctional tool. Absolutely. If you have a product you want to sell, if you want people to read your stuff, if you just are giving your time, or not giving your time, selling your time, providing your time,
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Starting point is 00:44:02 Okay. I'm with the show. I'm with the podcast. Okay. It's time for our final fact of the show and that's my fact. My fact this week is that actually we've all been pronouncing Covenant Garden wrong. Okay. Come on, Dan.
Starting point is 00:44:21 All right. What do you want about everyone? All of us? Or have you been doing it right all along? I've been doing it wrong as well. A different kind of wrong. Different kind of wrong. Still wrong.
Starting point is 00:44:30 So I was looking into Covenant Garden. I love where we work. I love this area. It's full of incredible historical significance. And while looking into it, I discovered that the word is actually a bastardization of the word convent. It should be Convent Garden. That's how this started.
Starting point is 00:44:46 The very first mention that was ever made of Convent Garden was in the 1200s. And it was in reference to the fact that this area was a lot of it was garden. And for Westminster Abbey, they had lots of vegetables and so on here. So this is prior to the big market and the reason it became a market. That's almost a ... But wait. You've explained why the garden bit's pronounced garden, but the Convent bit is it the Garden of a Convent, right?
Starting point is 00:45:10 Yeah. It was Garden of a Convent. And so on. And they were running it. And so it was known as Convent Garden. This was basically a big old monastery around here that was kind of attached to Westminster Abbey, which is not that close to here, which makes you think, wonder how that works. But actually a load of monks lived here.
Starting point is 00:45:27 And it was the dissolution of the monasteries famously under Henry VIII that sold it all off and then it became what it is today. Yeah. Is it? I think I read this too long ago to be absolutely sure of it now. So basically this was quite underpopulated a bit of London because there were two main bits of London, which were Westminster, the seat of power, and then there was the city, which is over further east.
Starting point is 00:45:48 And actually the bit in between was not really populated at all. Not really. It was this sort of two-bit system. I think so. Yeah. I think it definitely went down population-wise. It was a thing about the eighth, ninth century, then it went down and then came up again. But I think technically, Dan, you could argue you've been pronouncing it more right than
Starting point is 00:46:06 us. Well, you're pronouncing it with an extra R. Yeah. And what is R except half of an N in Covent Garden? Well, he puts the R towards the end of the word Covent, don't you? Yeah. Yeah. Is there any other Covent?
Starting point is 00:46:21 Do you get Covent anywhere else? Coventry? Yeah. Should that have been Coventry? Oh my God. God, yeah. Or was it a place where witches lived? Oh, Coventry.
Starting point is 00:46:30 The Coventry. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why Hitler went for it. Yeah. The witches. Yeah. Famously.
Starting point is 00:46:39 Fair enough. Not fair enough. What? My grandma lived in Coventry. We won't be torrid in Coventry anytime soon, then. Yeah. Yeah. Covent Garden Market is the main thing that Covent Garden was famous for, wasn't it?
Starting point is 00:46:54 Yeah. For centuries. Oh, man. It was so interesting. Such a cool time. What period are we talking? Oh, centuries. Which particular centuries?
Starting point is 00:47:04 I think it started being officially a market in 1670, didn't it? But it had been used in the market before that. Okay. And in fact, still is today. If you wander out into the market from the office, you'll find... It's not your big fruit and veg. It's not the biggest fruit and veg market in the country anymore. Like it was from whatever year on I said it was.
Starting point is 00:47:20 But they sell knock-off football jerseys. Yeah. That's true. And those are sort of the vegetables of today, aren't they? In a way. Yeah. But the market porters were a huge thing. And there's amazing footage as footage from the 20s and 30s of them carrying stacks of
Starting point is 00:47:35 the baskets on their heads. That was how everything was transported in the market. And they were slightly domed in the base. So they fit on your head very neatly and they stacked really well. And have you heard of basket gym? Basket gym. Is that a person? It's a person.
Starting point is 00:47:48 He was called Jim Sainsbury. I don't know if any relation. But he worked at the common garden market in the 1920s and 30s. And there's footage of him doing 25 baskets in a stack on his head. Wow. Unbelievable. What? I don't know if they're full or not.
Starting point is 00:48:01 I think maybe for the show, for display purposes, they might have been empty. Yeah, yeah. That's still a lot, though, isn't it? It's the balance, is the main thing. Yeah. It must be a different family. Otherwise, surely Sainsbury's baskets would have that head shape. If you walk around Sainsbury's now, I think you have to put it on your head.
Starting point is 00:48:18 Do you know the first Sainsbury's was in Covent Garden? Really? Interesting enough. It was on the Drury Lane, just down the road from here. There we go. And they sold like, what was it called? Railway milk. That was their big seller.
Starting point is 00:48:31 That wasn't disgusting. Railway milk. You have to get up so early in the morning to see the trains being milked. But it's a beautiful sign. The idea was that it came from like Devon and Cornwall. But it came on the railway, so it's still fresh. Okay, right. The square was built for the fourth Earl of Bedford by Inigo Jones, the famous architect.
Starting point is 00:48:50 For international listeners, Inigo Jones, I always feel sorry for, because he's gone down in history as not Christopher Wren, essentially, in England, wouldn't you say? He's basically the other architect that's not Christopher Wren. Okay, right. He was a very famous architect. Yeah, but he's just the second most famous architect. Sure. I'm sorry, Inigo, I just wanted to say.
Starting point is 00:49:08 Oh, fair enough. Christopher Wren who designed St Paul's Cathedral, we should also say for international listeners. I don't think Christopher Wren is that famous outside the UK either. No. Or in the UK, to be honest. And Inigo Jones is less famous than him, but still very cool and has a cool name as well. Well, he actually has a less fun name than one of the people he worked with. So he was, he worked under James I and Charles I, alongside the official royal stone master,
Starting point is 00:49:36 who was called Nicholas Stone. Cool. Nice. Amazing. That's really good. Stone master. Yeah, the stone master. What would the stone master do?
Starting point is 00:49:45 Well, he would have worked with stone. He would have worked with, he was nicking stone as well. He was a sculptor for sure. So nicking it. Yeah. Nicholas Stone. Nick Stone. Very good.
Starting point is 00:49:56 Yeah. And Inigo Jones was more famous, no less famous, but quite famous for being the first person to do a survey of Stonehenge. Speaking of Stonehenge. Oh, really? That's cool. Yeah. But he did say that it was a Roman temple.
Starting point is 00:50:09 Which it wasn't. Right. And that's why he's only the second most famous. Because Christopher Wren would have got that straight away. He loved Roman stuff. Yeah. Actually, the sad thing, another sad thing about Inigo Jones is that the main thing he had to do really in this square, he was asked to build a square fit for gentlemen with ability
Starting point is 00:50:26 by the Earl of Bedford. The ability of being able to carry baskets on your head. Yeah. Just for the basket carriers. Yeah. And the living statues. No, it's basically for really posh rich people. And so the only thing they wanted, they wanted a completely bare square.
Starting point is 00:50:41 So it was the first time London had had this, a huge expanse with nothing in the middle. So, you know, you could prom not about it. And then with a church in it. And it was St. Paul's. And the church still is St. Paul's. So, Christopher Wren designed St. Paul's Cathedral. Big F off, beautiful cathedral down the road. And then he designed little St. Paul's church on Covent Garden.
Starting point is 00:51:01 That's still there today. But St. Paul's Covent Garden is better in some ways. In some ways. Because it's a reverse church. It's a reverse church. It's where God comes to worship me. Yeah. That's right.
Starting point is 00:51:17 Yeah. Church authorities aren't very happy about it, actually. It's like religious. No, it's a wrong way church, isn't it? It's a wrong way around church. What do you mean? Well, basically churches have their doors at the west end. And then the east end is the bit that faces towards Jerusalem.
Starting point is 00:51:31 That's how churches are laid out. Right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's just how churches are. But he, because he wanted the doors to open onto the piazza. It was the first ever piazza that we were going to have in the UK.
Starting point is 00:51:42 Very exciting. He wanted these huge, great double doors. So he built them like that. And then the church said, absolutely not. You're going to have the altar at the east end. And you're going to have the door at the west end, like normal. And so the doors are kind of false doors. Oh, really?
Starting point is 00:51:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes so much sense. Because the back looks so much like a front kind of thing with that church. It's a bit confusing. It's a wrong way around. Yeah. It's a reverse-episode church. So do all churches face Jerusalem?
Starting point is 00:52:03 Not all of them. But the idea is that they face east. Yeah. Because that's where you're looking and that's where, you know, when you're praying, you're sitting in church facing the front, you're facing towards Jerusalem. If you're ever lost. Yeah. In a town.
Starting point is 00:52:14 Go to the church, whichever way it faces. Just walk in that direction. If I'm on my way to Jerusalem. You'll get to Jerusalem, actually. Yeah. The Squeezy Jif Lemon. No. The O to Covent Garden.
Starting point is 00:52:26 Squeezy Jif Lemon. Sorry. There's a lemon juice product called Jif. And it comes in a bottle that looks like a lemon. It was invented by a man called Edward Hack in 1957. Not his, not an original idea, but no, no, no, it was. That's just a joke. And supposedly he, he looked at the whole, every lemon there was in Harrods and Selfridges
Starting point is 00:52:44 of Fortnum and Mason's. And then he looked at 900 individual lemons at Covent Garden to find the perfect lemon to base his lemon on. Oh, I see. Because it's in the shape of a lemon. Because it's in the shape of a lemon. Okay. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:52:56 I thought you were going to say he looked at them all and made an average of all of those shapes. No, I think he just found one unbelievably nice lemon. The flawless lemon. I must admit, I don't actually find any one lemon more attractive than any other lemon. That's just me. Yeah. James, you've got no heart.
Starting point is 00:53:11 Yeah. There was a place called the Rose Tavern, which I think was the best place to hang out in the 1700s. And it was where criminals, highwaymen, prostitutes. Sounds great. But then actors, poets, artists, Samuel Peep spent a lot of time there. He said he really liked food. Are you going to the brothel against Samuel?
Starting point is 00:53:34 No, no, no, I'm going for the sausage rolls. Fish and chips is honestly done. I just like that simple pub grub and the topless woman who serves it to me. There's Rose Street up there. Is it there? I think it might be. So I think it is still there. Rose Street.
Starting point is 00:53:51 And then just off of this floral passage or something. Yeah, yeah. Floral lane or something. Probably. And the people who sort of performed there had amazing tricks. So there were topless women would wrestle there as a thing and you could put bets on it. I've played lots of posture moles, which I've never heard of, but posture moles.
Starting point is 00:54:11 I don't think you're going to guess what this is. Well, it's obvious, isn't it? You dig down a hole into someone's garden and then when you come out, you sit straight. It's like this, like the conductor, Ethel Smythe, tying yourself to a tree to improve the posture. Okay. I don't think it would have got as much custom in the pub if it was your version, but it would have been closer to...
Starting point is 00:54:30 Mole is a prostitute of some kind. Oh, mole. I see. Oh, because I heard that posture women was a nickname for the women plying their trade around. It probably is the same. Maybe it's posture moles, posture women, but these people used to emphasize that they were not prostitutes.
Starting point is 00:54:44 But what they did was they would be paid by the clientele. Samuel Peeps is either to be flogged or to flog them, one of those in public in front of people in the pub. In public? Yeah. Ooh. Yeah. I know.
Starting point is 00:54:57 Sexy. That is saucy. Well, I guess a strip club these days, it's all in the open, isn't it, as well? They don't have a cast of nine tails. Dan always asks for the whipping. It's been 300 years, Dan. Oh, 300. Okay, sorry.
Starting point is 00:55:10 But the way they advertised who they were to say, you know, I'll whip you if you want, was they would lie naked on a table and a waiter would bring a lit candle on a tray over to them, and they would simulate kind of having sex with it, with the climax being that they would snuff the candle out. So, wait a minute. Until that had happened, you just think it's a knob of naked women. A knob of naked women lying on your table. And then as soon as she blows out the candle, having pretended to have sex with it, you're
Starting point is 00:55:37 like, oh, you're a prostitute. Exactly. You weren't just passing and felt like a lie down. It's a bit like when you go to TGI Fridays and you tell them it's your birthday. They do that in some branches. No one's, oh, they've told them it's my birthday. They're going to do the thing that are so embarrassing. He's only six.
Starting point is 00:56:03 That was not what chat GPT suggested is a good idea for a party. Are you saying they snuffed out the candle with their... Yeah, with their nether regions. Apparently they... In fact, the quote was, snuff out the candle in a highly obscene and hazardous manner to rows of approval from her audience. It's quite, you know, like if you have a candle and you manage to put it out with your fingers because you lick your fingers.
Starting point is 00:56:26 It's a bit like that. Like that. I always feel really hard when I do that, like Danny Dyer or Russell Crowell. Imagine doing that with your funny. Maybe it's sort of like a downstairs sneeze. Possible. Gosh. Okay, 20 minutes.
Starting point is 00:56:42 All my other Covent Garden stuff is so tame. I found a record that was broken at Covent Garden. But it was... Most candles snuffed out with the vagina. Yeah. It was how you'd end the night there. All the lights, honey. Pick up a naked woman to slowly dip her over every single.
Starting point is 00:57:04 Sorry, which record? Most medium hamburgers, even in one minute. Medium-sized? I don't know if they were medium-sized. I don't know if they were medium-sized or medium-cooked. Oh, had they come from the, you know, from the dead world? They were medium-sized ghost hamburgers that had been cooked somewhere between rare and well done, right?
Starting point is 00:57:24 Okay. Do you want to know? How many was it? Four. It was four. Which in one minute? In one minute? That's impressive in one minute.
Starting point is 00:57:32 It was by a bloke called Furious Pete from Canada. Furious Pete. Very nice. Oh, dear. TGI Fridays was mentioned a second ago. There's a road called Maiden Lane. Right at the bottom of Maiden Lane on one end, opposite on the corner of Bedford Street, there is a building there.
Starting point is 00:57:49 And if you look up on the building, you'll see a plaque, and that plaque reads that Charles Dickens used to live here in the workhouse when he was a young boy. And I was looking into it, and that building was, it was a sort of a working house, and he used to work downstairs putting black polish into tins, and you know, you would sell that. And I'm pretty sure it's where there used to be a TGI Fridays on the bottom. There was. There was, yeah. That would have been the spot where Charles Dickens as a young man was put in the front
Starting point is 00:58:16 window of the building because what they used to like to show was how boot polish was going in fresh, so it looked like you're getting the best sort of stuff. Oh, really? And he would sit in the window with his best friend at the time, and they would both do it together. And his best friend was called Fagan. So Fagan and Dickens used to sit in the window doing the sing-right. And that became a TGI Fridays.
Starting point is 00:58:35 And that became a TGI Fridays. It's what he would have wanted. It was the best of foods. It was the worst of foods. Predominantly the latter. It was the best of foods. It was, what? Happy birthday.
Starting point is 00:58:54 Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we'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.
Starting point is 00:59:07 James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can either podcast at qi.com. Yep, you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or go to our website nosuchthingasafish.com. All of the previous episodes are up there, so do check them out. And also check out Club Fish, our private members club.
Starting point is 00:59:22 There's lots of fun behind the scenes, extra shows, and all sorts of little bits up there to check out. So do that. Or just come back here next week. We'll be back again with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.

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