No Such Thing As A Fish - 469: No Such Thing As A Rubik's Tube

Episode Date: March 10, 2023

Dan, James, Andrew and Lucy Porter discuss cube lube, pajama drama, a leech's home and the Cuckoo's Nest. 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

Hi everyone welcome to this week's episode of no such thing as a fish we have another very special guest for you today and that guest is our very good friend Lucy Porter. You will remember Lucy from previous episodes on fish I know you'll love her she's so smart she's so funny in fact she's got a stand-up show that is touring at this very moment which is called wake up call and really I'll be honest the best way to find out about that is to google Lucy Porter wake up call and you'll find all the dates but she's doing the whole of the UK it's definitely a show that's worth going to see she also has a podcast called fingers on buzzers it's all about quizzing and she does that with my very good old friend

Jenny Ryan it's a brilliant podcast so listen to that and she has a radio for stand-up special called Lucy Porter's lucky dip which is going out at 11.30 on March the 15th it'll probably be on the BBC sounds app after that so again google Lucy Porter's lucky dip and you'll find that and apart from that just enjoy the show so nothing more to say apart from on with the podcast on with the show oh hi Andy I've been here the whole time hello and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden my name is Dan Shriver I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray James Harkin and Lucy Porter and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our

four favorite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go starting with fact number one and that is my fact my fact this week is that it took the creator of the Rubik's Cube a month to solve it the first time he tried that is mad a month of really trying as well it's so crazy you I would have thought after about 20 or 30 days you would just make a new one if you didn't know what this doesn't work so yeah invented 1974 he was a professor and he just had this idea what if I could make something that was static on the inside but fluid on the outside and that's what gave him the idea and he had a bash it it's later been worked out quite a famous number if you know Rubik's Cubes that 43 quintillion is the number of permutations that you can make on the

Rubik's Cube and so luckily he got there within a month yeah it's pretty good well I'll tell you what's weird his prototype wasn't three by three his prototype was two by two so I've got that took him a month that's the thing well I'm curious to know if this is the one that took him a month because this is okay so Dan's showing us an image and it's like four wooden blocks that have got various colors and numbers on it and they're held together almost by bits of wire yeah there's a wire meshing inside and he took a month to do a Rubik's Cube it must have been a three by three it must have been a three by three yeah that one's piss easy yeah exactly you're clever enough to make that you're clever enough to solve it yes yeah you can do a Rubik's Cube James I can and I think

you can Lucy well I yeah my children are obsessed with them we've got hundreds in the house and all those weird what you know there's like weird different shaped ones and mirror ones where there's absolutely no colors on it and stuff so this is a long way of me saying I should be and I have at one point been wait a second because James you know I don't want to do this one because that one's tough because it's got like Dan's mixing up one from the transport museum I'd rather do the one with the colors but the other thing is about the Rubik's Cube is that I find that when you're under pressure it's almost impossible yes because you do it kind of with muscle memory yes and then as soon as you start thinking about it you can't really do it at all yeah I made a terrible decision

when because I did learn to do it when my kids got into it and then I decided we were doing a live podcast recording of fingers on buzzers and I said oh I see what'll be fun I'll solve a Rubik's Cube well we do this round oh yeah and it took about 15 minutes is there an algorithm basically it's like a set pattern of moves that will help you work on the side you're working on so but layers that's the key yeah exactly layers not sides so you can see at the moment that I've done the bottom layer right the top layer right and then you do the middle one then you do the top one I remember when we went on the only connect and they asked you for facts about yourself and my fact was that I could do a Rubik's Cube in less than a minute and the team that we were playing with apparently

one of them said that he could do three Rubik's Cubes in 30 seconds they decided they weren't going to use that fact made you look pretty foolish but it's it's huge the speed cubing because we had to get a timer so that we could record my kids times and also my kids said oh can we have some kube lube and that's the moment that I was like I'm sorry well as a mother you've got to worry could we have some kube lube is there a brand is it a specifically sold lube there is one of the best kube lube we didn't get good kube lube so it's called kube lube yeah yeah yeah we got dodgy kube lube and it's allowed as well it's it's allowed in competition yeah yeah it's like chalk on your hands if you're an athlete yes well there's just over at a piece about the you know there are

so many cubes the world there we go but let's just change it just completed the Rubik's Cube that's why I've been silent for the last three minutes yeah but by the time I've edited this it'll be about 20 seconds um but the and it just listed the the gan 356 i carry the mo you rs3m maglev the gan 11m pro and it's all there's there's kind of fever of cubing yeah the world cube association it's are they corrupt they're hugely corrupt millions and millions of dollars change hands so 1981 the top selling book in america was a book that was called the simple solution to Rubik's cube sold six million copies and it was the number one book of the year it was massive guy called james gene norse he was a professor he did it as a pamphlet for his university and

then someone saw it said can you expand that into a like 64 page book so it wasn't that big it was double the expansion of the pamphlet and uh so he published it and in it he gives uh categories of what you're labeled as as a kuber if you managed to do it within certain times so this is 1981 20 minutes if you did it in that time you were a whiz 10 minutes you were a speed demon five minutes you were an expert and three minutes you were an mc the master of the cube oh that's what i am then yeah you're a master of the cube well in the 80s in the 80s let's not it's actually been updated since 2013 you're now adult uh unfortunately um were you james if you take longer than 60 seconds i do i take probably about a minute and a half okay i'm afraid you don't even

qualify as a whiz at this point whereas a whiz was 20 minutes it's now 60 seconds speed demon has gone from 10 minutes to 40 seconds oh my god an expert has gone from five minutes to 15 to 25 seconds and the master of the cube which is now called world champion from three minutes to three to five seconds that's amazing the difference isn't it i can't even pick it up within three my old arthritic fingers but i because i remember you know i remember the original craze in the 80s i'm old enough for that and it was but it was one of those things that boys would learn to do and this is a terrible sexist generalization but it did tend to be boys would learn to do it thinking it will really impress the girls and all girls just went meh i found that i've never

ever pressed a girl with a rubik's cube i impressed the qi's accountant once oh yeah with a few rubik's cubes tricks but he wasn't my type i did because i brought mine in today so i did sit on the tube doing it and you people don't look at you with admiration oh really it's pity no no honey honey we'll just have to get up at the next stop i need to is she gonna do it the craze just is unbelievable the 80s craze so it was the uk toy of the year in 1980 and then again in 1981 as if they just thought we're gonna give it to the cube again yeah nothing better so dan you were mentioning the books that sold out very well so at one point in 1982 i think it was four or five different books on the new york times bestsellers list for rubik's cube books

there was a boy called patrick bossert who was 13 years old and wrote a book called you can do the cube and sold nearly a million copies of it he was the youngest ever author on the new york times bestseller list and it kind of came from nowhere right like dan says it was invented in 1974 and this was 1980 in 1981 though it was absolutely huge i looked on the newspaper archives and the first mention of it it doesn't even call it the rubik's cube it calls it the hungarian magic cube this was in 1979 this was in the observer and they said that at first most people tried to take the cube apart but that is not the object and it said if you even get one face done of the cube in 20 minutes then you've done well and it says but there are several people brackets well at least three

that are able to solve the cube in less than five minutes right dan you mentioned that there are 43 quintillion different states that you can have the newspaper said and this was in 1979 at one per microsecond a computer would take around 3 000 million years just to count up the number of states wow and in 2022 we got the first ever quintillion per second computer so today a computer could reach it in just under a minute wow i think what's extraordinary the numbers are so bamboozlingly big it's like those i remember reading an interview with erno rubik where he was talking about the fact that he'd invented more kinds of rubik cubes now and there was a snake rubik's cube that he'd invented did you buy that lucy i did have rubik's snake which sounds a bit

dodgy now yes why did they call it the rubik's tube sorry very nice yeah good point but he he said that and this one has potentially even more permutations and the guy writing the article just went yeah once you've hit 43 quintillion i'm not impressed anymore but um what's interesting i so very randomly day before yesterday i bumped into a rubik's cube Guinness world record holder who's a guy called george he holds two records one which he's just done which i'm not allowed to reveal oh i know of course that i got secrets rubik's cube goss i'll tell you guys after the show the other one is that he has the most rubik cubes solved while riding on a skateboard or i think like an hour or something he did like 500 of them just going around a skate park quick

question then yeah did he have on him a bag of 500 rubik's cubes which he then had to get out of the skateboard no he had a big sack of yeah yeah yeah he wasn't yeah it wasn't like santa yeah he was what he was was he had people stationed around the skate park so he'd hand the solved one to the person they would mix it back up and he'd grab a new one as he was traveling around um so they mixed them back up again and so he used the same one yeah it feels kind of pointless it's a like a punishment for the gods actually yeah it's sisyphean isn't it yes yeah that's right so he demonstrated one thing i found amazing which is to do with the bamboozling numbers if i took this right now and i mixed this up to give to him to solve whatever i've just done here is a combination

that he will have never seen yeah in his life every combination is unique because of the 43 quintillion yeah it just can't i think what's extraordinary like when it started getting big there was a big concern that is this thing solvable so there was a world fair that he was taken to and he's not a particular he's quite a philosophical guy he's quite sort of very serious and he wasn't the best ambassador of what this item was but they needed him there to prove it could be solved otherwise it was the americans wasn't it yeah that's right yeah they got sent to an american toy company and they thought this is a good toy but it probably can't actually be done and i think they sent it at an executive to Budapest to meet rubik it's like if you can solve this we'll make

it and we'll manufacture it and we'll distribute it and then they sold 150 million in the next three years but they sold it thanks to the most famous hungarian at the time so rubik obviously couldn't really do all the press and stuff such a great question i'm going zha zha gabor but i can't imagine was it absolutely zha zha gabor and rubik's cube that is not a ben diagram amazing right so this is the earliest mention of the actual phrase rubik's cube i could find this was from 1980 and zha zha gabor had put on a party for the rubik's cube where she invited all of her hollywood friends with a buffet of hungarian delicacies that said but he didn't say what i supposed goulash but i'm not sure what else was there and yeah that was she was hired by the ideal toy corporation to

promote the um to promote the rubik's cube as she said even if you can't solve it the cube feels so good in your hands it may replace worry beads oh nice oh yeah like the original um fidget spinner or like a those new poppers i mean that is true if you do just play with the rubik's cube even if you don't solve it it is fun to play with isn't it yeah yeah well especially if you've got cube lube because then it really oh it flies through your hand i saw an interview with him from quite early and he said that children are better than adults at solving it which would you agree with that lucy my own anecdotal experience would bear that out and who was saying all this was it rubik that was rubik was saying that he had a couple of reasons why he thought that kids would be better uh more

more nimble risks but turning i think purely physical terms uh smaller hands so so you know yeah i'm supposed to feel like i always think with technology my kids will just pick up anything and go blah blah blah blah whereas i am hovering and i think i overthink it but so maybe there's a sort of um yeah i think overthinking is kind of one thing he said so he said it requires a certain innocence that children had um because adults will try out a pattern and it doesn't quite work out and they'll just never do that again whereas kids will keep trying things and the thing is with the rubik's cube is it is all algorithms and it's just repeating things again and again and again and so kids are good at that he also said that kids and i think this is probably quite true is

certain kids anyway will get very absorbed with one thing and won't let anything else distract them they'll just kind of concentrate on it and do it and the other thing he said is that kids have good visual memory and that is true children can have much better visual and until around 10 or 11 or 12 they have almost idyllic memories that they can just remember things really well do you say anything about the wrist? he didn't mention nimble fingers it's weird because i know rubik was hungarian in 1981 the spokesman at the hungarian embassy in london said the cube is our secret weapon to pacify the west wow there was even a cartoon did you guys see the cartoon rubik's cube it's a sentient rubik's

cube that is an alien yeah yeah so great and it was a rubik's cube that was completely useless if it was out of position so and that could happen quite easily if a passing pigeon knocked it it would just sort of go and it would become useless but if it was in its right sold state it was this powerful sentient thing could he change could he solve himself or did he require he required yeah that's nice that's good yeah so it's called rubik the amazing cube and um it has and there's i love it his imdb page has you know goofs uh one of the goofs is even in its sold state the colors of rubik are often in the wrong position white is always across from yellow correct yeah yeah yeah um and so it says in many of its sold states the colors are sitting next to each other that

shouldn't be so yeah what a blue thing um but yeah but it was it was actually it was not a long-lasting series but it was very much praised because the um yeah but it sounds like such a long-lasting format but um it the family that the when trusted with the sentient cube was a um latino family and that was not shown on tv really back then it was so it was a very progressive show it was seen as uh you know it's nice to see a family who aren't white it's the leads in a cartoon bring it back it's what i'm saying they didn't have a film in 2010 which i'm not sure did they ever saw the light of day with loads of them didn't they lots of them they did loads of toys and they made one or two like battleships they made battleships got made but they also announced

ridley scott's monopoly which i don't think happened unless i really missed it but they're about to do tetris as a big series oh yeah a big netflix series about tetris and it's uh i think guess who would be a very good one yeah because you know you're very instantly recognizable character do you think like a mystery thing yeah that'd be good did the suspect wear a hat it's the weirdest follow-up to knives out yeah operation that'd be another good one which would be a great one operation yeah yeah gruelling harrowing medical it's his funny bone get the tweezers stop the podcast stop the podcast hi everybody just wanted to let you know we are sponsored this

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that's right so go to gusto.co.uk and use the code fish and you'll get 60 percent of your first box and 25 percent of all boxes for two months okay i'm with the podcast bell okay it is time for fact number two and that is lucy it is this fact on at least three occasions in the last 16 years the government of shanghai has tried and failed to stop people wearing pyjamas outdoors which seems i mean famously chinese authorities are so laissez-faire i can't believe the fact they've tried and failed is quite interesting it doesn't say much for the all-powerful machinery of the state you can't even stop people wearing pyjamas out i don't think they've sent the army in i think they've okay they've just disapprovingly said you shouldn't do this well

i haven't really tried then i think yeah there's been several attempts because it's it's quite a big thing particularly in shanghai for people to wear pyjamas out and about and it's they think it's partly because in the early 20th century it was a real status symbol to be able to afford imported pyjamas so people would take to the streets in their fire and are going look i can afford these and slippers and they've got little teddy bears on them or whatever and so it was sort of a status symbol and then it's just become a thing and i mean i'm all into it because i wear pyjamas at all times i'm doing a tour at the moment in which i wear pyjamas so i'm very much on the side on stage yes yes yes because i decided during lockdown there's nothing you can't

like if i do a zoom and the other person is wearing something smart i think you absolutely lose it why would you dress up to have a meeting in your own home especially now you think if they're not wearing three layers and a blanket you think oh showing off you can afford heating so what you're doing then is possibly what they're doing in china as well which is you've got daytime pyjamas and then you'll go home and you probably have nighttime pyjamas that you wear right this is what they do in china so these aren't the pyjamas they're waking up in and just going out onto the street they'll get out of their pyjamas to put on some pyjamas to then go out into the street yeah they are the day wear pyjamas i can't say that for everyone but

that's for a lot of people to be honest i would try and get away with going oh no these are my fancy pyjamas why have they got egg stains all day no no no i definitely didn't sleep in these definitely have you ever done a school run or anything in your pyjamas Lucy well do you know i was on five live the other day because the prime minister's wife had gone and done the school run in her slippers except they were like five hundred pounds and five live phone me up and said oh for our breakfast show tomorrow do you want to do a you know phone in about should you be allowed to wear slippers on the school run and of course i'm desperate to promote my tour so i said yes but the great thing was nobody cared and it was one of those it was lovely when you're part of

a sort of supposedly controversial phone in that is not at all controversial did people just phone in and say i don't care yeah they just said well you can wear what you want this is a tantrum do you know the most amazing radio phone in i've ever heard i was in a like a cab on the way somewhere or something it's quite a long journey this is 2020 and it was if we get a new royal yacht right should prince andrew be allowed to go on it okay yeah it's not going to be a new royal yacht that's just not no and people had such strong opinions this must have been in the first two months of 2020 it was it was yeah yeah the event overtook uh that one what how do where do you stand on what should prince andrew be allowed on the royal yacht

um oh god he's actually thinking about it it's a tricky one isn't it because it's a it's a taxpayer funded yacht you know if they're buying their own yacht they can do what they like on it i guess but if we're if i'm playing for this yacht yeah i think i am actually angry about it i think shouldn't be allowed to go on it why if he's not allowed to come above decks what if he's only allowed in the i think he should be allowed to be in steerage that's fine that's more work you can't keep him like hidden in a basement you don't want to get on that yacht and then discover andrew oh god no they used to use sign language on the old royal yacht did they yeah because they wanted to keep it quiet for the royals so they had this complicated system of like waving at each other

so not typical bsl sign language no sorry they had a specific like a royal yacht based hand language like the people on ryan air when they need a new tin of pringles they have a special sign that they make do they yeah yeah the um attendance they have a secret sign language code amazing whatever they've run out of and you'll notice it now next time you've got a flight yeah yeah do they make the shape of a hyperbolic paraboloid for a pringle i don't know i'm not party to the code but i just i know that that's so good like bookmakers bookmakers yes like to attack crew yeah oh nice i can get us back to pajamas go on the other thing they did on the royal yacht was i think they wore soft sole shoes the crew so they weren't stamping around the decks and

presumably infuriating princess margaret or something so they they had a specific you know everything was designed to well speaking of pajamas oh yeah they did used to be outdoor things didn't they hey well they originated in um like persia ottoman empire uh and they were just basically loose fit trousers which you would tie around the waist they were taken by the colonial british and they realized that actually were quite nice to sleep in so that's how they became pajamas but coco chanel thought that we should wear them down the beach and they became really fashionable people wearing pajamas down the beach in the 1920s and 30s really yeah there was a place called uh i don't know how to pronounce it it's in france so it's j u a n so is it juan

juan le pan i think it is juan le pan i think it's juan le pan i've seen it i've not been able to pronounce it but i'm going with gudstein it feels like juan le pan feels like the nice way to say it right um but it was called pajama land in english and pajama palace in french because there was so many people in pajamas on the beach in that town i think it does come and go as a fashion isn't it and there's pockets of it i remember being in cardiff for quite a long time and there was one area of cardiff where everybody went out in their pajamas all the time is that right really take pajamas or or the ones they slept in i think those are the ones they slept in but it's a fine line between leisure wear but the um there's been shall i tell you about the various attempts to shut

down uh pajama wearing in china so in the 1990s there was an education campaign and they put signs up in shanghai saying please don't wear your pajamas 2008 the rixin neighborhood in northeast shanghai had a public campaign saying don't wear your pajamas but then 2020 in suzhan city which is near to shanghai there was a social media post entitled exposing uncivilized behavior increasing the quality of residents and the local government put out various pictures of people who were engaged in antisocial behavior including seven people in pajamas and they used facial recognition technology to find out who they were and put their names up and which what you need there is you need pajamas that have got some sort of balaclava a sleep mask but yeah it does seem

around the shanghai world expo in 2010 as well there was quite a campaign to stop people wearing their pajamas yeah that was a big one wasn't it they the government at that one hired sort of 500 members of the public who volunteered to sort of stand at bus stops and just just if someone in pajamas came along go hey that looks daggy you need a change out of that might do you know what kind of pajamas james bond wears or what he wears to bed surely doesn't wear anything i mean because i don't think pajamas are sexy are they can they be sexy well great point because there are obviously fancy silk pajamas which might be sexy or there are sort of grubby cotton ones which might not be or might be but pajamas aren't sexy

because they cling it's like you get static unless it's proper yeah yeah that's a problem all the balloons in the house so Anthony Horowitz is a thriller writer he writes you know lots and lots and lots of books and he for a while was the um he wrote james bond sequels he was the official sanctioned estates choice for and he wrote a couple of bond books and one of them was called trigger mortis right and he wanted to stuck great name and in the start of the book in pretty much the opening chapter Anthony Horowitz wrote a description of bond jumping out of bed naked and he sent this off to the flaming estate and they got back in touch they said you can't have that because it's official bond cannon in one of the books i can't remember which

one it is i think it's you only live twice or something bond wears a bed jacket which is it's maybe the least sexy item of clothing you could possibly imagine it it's kind of buttons up to the neck and it goes down to the knees and i think it's like a sort of wee willy winky night shirt style so he just rewrote it not saying that bond was naked he just didn't he didn't describe the bed jacket because he thought that would be a way of destroying bond undid the top of his night jacket hung up his nightcap on the side you just imagine a little packet of renny's in the pocket oh there's a hanky in there how long has that been in there for interestingly for a very long time the the classic trouser pajama with the the the jacket button up

kind of thing yeah for a long time worn by men and that changed during world war one this is where women started wearing it this is according to a professor at the university of glasgow called lucy whitmore who talked about the fact that zeppelin raids meant that whenever you heard the alarm and you needed to run out of your house it got to a point where you became quite conscious of what you were wearing you would come out and you're nighty you might look a bit disheveled and also it's not the most practical thing to be running around in the night so to begin with this at the start of it it would be people would leave very nice looking jackets in a very good spot so that as the raid was happening and they would grab it and go out and look fashionable

there was an old lady who suggested leading leaving an emergency to pay by the door as well so you could grab that on the way out and then eventually people started wearing women rather started wearing pajamas and the popular color was dark blue because if you're outside you obviously don't want any the zeppelin come on you don't want to give away i guess if you're being bombed you want to do everything to stop yourself from being seen right is that also why you need the two page to stop the bold yeah yeah light reflecting back up yeah dan widley i found the same zeppelin based first world war fact in it i was i went to the library did a bit of research on this one and i got a there are a couple of books about the history of underclothes and i sat there looking like a

dirty old man sitting in the library or you did have your penis out you should never have a hodler believe on the but almost every page of the book had a a line drawing of some corset or some some girdle or something and i just i was quickly flipping through i'm just here for the pajamas actually i want the least sexy you know what though anyone looking at that would go that is the most adorable thing if that's how you're getting your kicks i'm looking at line drawings of ladies petticoats it's not andrew tate is it let's be honest and what did you find anything extra on the on the underclothes because they were the onesy was sort of invented in that period as well

wasn't it we know Winston Churchill used to love wearing a onesy and that was a world war one he called his lake a bilus siren siren siren suits yeah they had slumber suits i think that was later i've only just realized he meant siren suit because of the air raid sirens i was thinking that he would sit on a rock and sing imagine if he had a lovely singing voice we'd have really heard him sing so i wanted to meet them on the beaches we will seduce them on the beaches um most men claim not to wear anything to bed but you're doubting them okay interesting i am doubting them i think pajamas have a reputation of being a bit cozy and a bit comfy and a bit you know yes i think there is a sense that men want to be thought of as being tough and rugged and like i

don't wear anything to bed even if it's minus four in the house or whatever is there not and now listen i know nothing of the male anatomy i'll put that right out there but is there not do things not get a bit twisted and i would imagine discomfort if you slept completely naked as a man do things not is it not nice all right that's okay is it all right okay good to know good to know thanks for that yeah um never been woken up by that you've never never twisted anything or anything it's got a trap under the bed again honey you're gonna have to fold in the fiber game again oh if you tried to leap out for an air raid and you've got it i feel like that was the one of the weirdest moments ever on our podcast where you had three

guys sitting here picturing ourselves naked in bed the four listeners now of course said the mental images please send in your fan art okay it is time for fact number three and that is andy my fact is the flow of the amazon is so big that even a hundred miles into the atlantic you could drink over the side of your ship and the water would still be fresh amazing that's incredible i love it i should tell where i got this fact first of all it's from a guy called thomas puyo on twitter and um i'd so i thought i couldn't believe it when i first read it and so i did a bit more you know looking and some sources say the water's going to be a bit brackish you know it might not be totally

sparkling evian style fresh but it would definitely be noticeably less salty so you would not be able to see south america if you were a hundred miles out and you would still get water that was so much less salty if you were let's say you were sailing across the ocean before you knew where you were you could keep tasting the water and as it got less and less salty you could almost find your way to the one incredible idea yeah to navigate your way yeah well sailors must have worked that out because they're very wise there'll be some sort of sailor you know sailor rhyme like if the water tastes nice if the water tastes nice brazilian being in a trice if the water tastes salty then your compass is faulty really there you go um it's so every single day the

water that we're talking about that that sort of pushes out into the atlantic it's 17 billion metric tons of water that flows out it's hard to work out what that is what that equates to if you were getting fresh water in new york city that's the daily amount for nine years that would be used nine years worth of fresh water in new york city is what goes out daily holy moly into the atlantic they should move new york yeah i don't know if that's practical but it's weird that it we can't somehow harvest it it's just going into it's just disappearing becoming salty i think it is useful yeah it goes into the water cycle and eventually you know rains down on us yeah but we could use the planet alive no i don't think i think we've done enough mucking around actually maybe we

should just meet the amazon i actually disagree i think a huge pike at the mouth of the amazon that just takes it all the way to new york brilliant not new york but somewhere that needs fresh water there's lots of places where they don't have water yeah somewhere closer yeah exactly yeah like new orleans yeah there you go new orleans i can't see it not working i'm just saying it's a bit of a waste that's 17 billion metric tons really i think it's a waste donald trump listening to this it's going to be diverted to his golf course oh yeah anyway the amazon it's big it's big it blows my mind in fact my mate's got a new brazilian girlfriend and he was saying you know you go to brazil it's just

massive mate it's just massive the thing i always find interesting about the amazon is that you can't build bridges yeah because it's too because the width of it varies so much and it's sort of so soft crumbly at the edges so it would have to be such a massive bridge because it would have to start and so what they just go across on boats and stuff yeah yeah so and there's yeah i think they've built one now there is one but it's right up isn't it it's sort of it's over a tributary right it's the rio negra which is uh which is a tributary of the amazon but it's before it joins the river proper yeah basically so there are no bridges across the amazon amazon and yeah like you say Lucy it's during the wet season the amazon is 190 kilometers wide at its widest

that's why it's really wide imagine from here to stoke yeah maybe stafford somewhere else in the field my electric car wouldn't be able to drive if there was a bridge that went over that there they would have to be a charging point on that bridge otherwise they wouldn't be able to get a drive wow that is insane i like that the amazon river is part of effectively an amazon river sandwich it's the it's the meat of of a sandwich in that go on well this is a tortured metaphor i know what you're talking about and even i'm struggling to figure out this well there's a there's a river below it the hamster and there's a river above it oh is there well there's more there's more water above the amazon river in the clouds above the actual amazon itself

the clouds kind of follow the shape of the river yeah i believe so yeah that's clever it's water vapor stream isn't it yeah it's amazing yeah i think it's 20 billion tons 20 billion metric tons of water yeah and that's more water than is actually in the in the river itself they say yes isn't it something like every tree in a like a big tree in the amazon perspires or transpires or whatever it is a thousand liters of water in a day yeah that's right one tree sweats it out yeah one tree and then underneath you've got the the hamster yes so secret underground river uh it's uh the you you can only get to it if you defeat an Aztec boss on the final level so yeah so under the amazon there is a sort of aquifer that is even wider even bigger even bolder even brash it's amazon 2

the revenge and it's yeah the river hamster named after the um strictly winner this year obviously oh not abu hamster it's got a big hook in it yeah range of hamster yeah and it's very it's quite recently discovered isn't it so hamster was the name of the head of the team that discovered it and um it's very low down 4000 meters below the river itself wow super slow moving yeah to the point where you can't really call it a river like it's it's not flowing it moves at one millimeter an hour yeah that's flowing i relate to this river very slowly very slow low down if you drop something in it you'll be reunited with it quite quickly you won't be swept away suddenly you gave a poo sticks would be quite low stakes didn't it the giant amazon leech which you find in the amazon

river do you think it's longer or shorter than the world's longest cattail now i actually know the length of the leech but i have no idea but that's the difficulty of this quiz question you actually need two quite arcade bits of knowledge to even make a guess i think the longest cat's tail is not that long really well this is domestic cat okay thank you okay very great because i oh right here here we go i think the leech is about a forearm i think it's about 18 inches okay the like the biggest giant leech yeah so is the cats the longest ever cat's tail longer shorter than 18 inches i'd say cats this gives it away a bit it's a fern dale cat fern dale well now you've made it too easy and i don't want to submit an answer anymore is it exactly the same length well andi is spot on

with the 18 inches further for the amazon leech um and the longest cat's tail according to guiness is 17 inches do you think that the giant amazon leech is longer or shorter than the height of the world's tallest donut right so it's good now we know we've got 18 inches put the donut down flat yeah so not the diameter not the realm this is how tall it goes i think the donut's taller i yeah no i think it's still the leech yeah andi knows his stuff tallest donut 16 inches tall it was quite wide in fairness right yeah but actually what's that foot no foot no heart i mean that's a tall this tall donut i could eat that that's not let you know i want the world's biggest donut to be a donut that i was like i couldn't eat that because

yeah you could make novelty donuts that big or like the ring road of a small town exactly oh this is a great quiz that's the end of it well i loved it i had a great time have you heard of the amazon tall tower observatory this is a cool thing okay so this is and it's a really new thing as well actually so it's an observatory it's um but not a space observatory it's to observe is to look down at the amazon and so it's in the middle of the rainforest and uh the trees are what are tall trees are about 80 to 100 meters aren't they like a good tall tree is up to you know that's a really tall tree 100 meters and the tower that's yeah i think the tallest ever tree is about 120 meters like the tallest ever measured you know but this tower is 325 meters

okay it's a it's a tall it's about as tall as the eiffel tower which actually is really tall when you when you look at it you know the eiffel tower yeah well busting some myths today out me i never think of it as tall but actually if you i went there it's big the eiffel tower yeah you can see it from a long way away exactly and this is it's much thinner than the eiffel tower it's just one needle going up okay like it looks it looks mad this thing i was up the eiffel tower once go in a restaurant and um we had a table next to the window it's really nice and it was overlooking the bridge and what you would see is they had these guys playing you know we have three cups and you have to hide the ball and just taking loads of money and then about every 20 minutes

the police would turn up and they would leg it and then you could watch them go all the way down the river over the next bridge back over again and then back on the bridge and then start playing again and then the police would turn up it was like a cat and mouse of i really thought you were going to say that from your perspective on the eiffel tower you can see which cup it was on there i just yelled that middle one that's what i was thinking your wife's down there looking up you've got special cupball sign language you've developed how are they doing it we have never done that restaurant too we didn't get a window seat no well you need for what is the point are their tables with don't have window seats in the eiffel tower just looking at a big piece of iron

god they really saw you coming was it on the ground floor was it everyone was there did you get the basement table she and prince andrew said didn't know pizza express was it france wow oh that's funny i didn't i didn't is the restaurant still going is there a restaurant yeah silver i think it's cold i wasn't even i didn't even get into the restaurant if we needed we'll go together yeah i'd love that um so this tall tree oh yeah this observatory is is 325 meters and it's actually it's one meter taller than the eiffel tower and it's got 1500 steps up to it is it and it takes about an hour to walk up to the top i don't i don't know if there's a lift actually and basically it's just to sniff sniff the breath of

the forest you know they're they're measuring all the chemicals in the air where there are forest fires you know they measure the concentrations and how dangerous that is and deforestation they can you know they can tell things about that and the tree emissions and it's just i just think it's amazing imagine you go up you've forgotten your glasses i can't even see the guy with the cup and the ball okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is james okay my fact this week is that while playing a psychiatric patient in one flew over the cuckoo's nest danie davito ended up becoming a psychiatric patient himself was he was he going method um some people did go method we might get to that but davito's problem

really is quite sweet actually um he had recently um gotten together with rea perlman the actor um the amazing rea perlman and cheers right just to put her head in your in your car look and cheers yeah uh and obviously they were filming or not obviously but they were filming a long way away from where she was uh 3000 miles in fact and so he was really missed her and in order to deal with that separation he invented an imaginary friend to talk to at night and he became a little bit concerned about his mental health perhaps because they were making this film and there was a lot of it in the air and so he decided to see the doctor on set who's called dr brux and asked for his advice and dr brux said yeah don't worry about it as long as you're aware that it's an imaginary friend

imaginary friend's perfectly normal thing to have it's no problem at all but also that doctor the onset doctor was actually in the movie of course was he yeah so dr brux yeah so he but an amazing man because he owned the clinic in which they filmed it so it's no wonder they were all a little bit stir crazy because they're in an actual mental institution filming this very intense uh movie he's someone who sort of checks in jack Nicholson's character McMurphy at the start of the film and interviews him and he I think I don't know if he was going to be in it but he was really insistent that everyone in the institution all the patients got involved with the film he was quite forward thinking you know he took lots of the patients on expeditions he took the white

water rafting and he taught them kind of to rappel down cliffs and things like I mean really because this was in the 70s they were filming it was pretty progressive at the time and I think about 90 inmates ended up involved in the film in some capacity or another I must say I haven't seen the film it's pretty amazing yeah I've heard very good things about it so I will try and watch it and I started reading the book this week and got about a third of the way through but I think the brook's amazing yeah yeah and apparently the film's even better so they're both tell you it was even better was a stage production that was put on about 20 years ago 2004 and I was in a stage production. Who were you? Were you the giant Nates of America? Yes that's me

Chief Brompton that was me. Well no do you know what though so we did this basically so it was Christian Slater from Heather's etc came over and was McMurphy so and it was amazing because it was at that time there weren't that many Western shows with big Hollywood stars. McMurphy being Jack Nicholson's role in the movie. Exactly yes the main guy and I played a nurse who had about two lines and some of my friends came to see it and they said oh we just thought you were being modest because I said oh I'm playing a nurse who mumbled over the cookie's nest and we thought you were just being modest and you were playing Nurse Ratchet but you really were just a nurse who has two lines because Francis Barber was Nurse Ratchet and Mackenzie Crook was in it and

he's a crook. Yeah yeah he played Billy the sort of little shine. Oh yeah that's a good role for him I can say. Shall we super quickly just say what the basic premise is just for anyone who hasn't seen it is a bit confused. Oh god we should shouldn't we? Yeah it's Jack Nicholson is um god I it's been so long. Lucy? Yeah so yeah Jack Nicholson plays McMurphy who is this sort of tear away who is sent to this secure psychiatric facility which Nurse Ratchet is this horrible nurse who sort of rules with the reign of terror over everybody. There is one nice nurse though isn't there who just has a couple of lines. There is the star of the entire production is that nice nurse yeah and then the Indian chief oh spoilers are we worried about that? I think it came out

quite a long time ago. Yeah so anyway Jack Nicholson kind of creates this air of chaos and rebellion in the place and rebels against Nurse Ratchet and then the chief Bromden the Native American chief smothers him with a pillow. We should maybe say that Jack Nicholson's character suffers a lobotomy as in Lucy's not just the chief Bromden wants to restore order in the hospital. Exactly it's a mercy killing basically. Yeah and the whole sort of thing is it's not hey we're not mad society's mad and who you know yeah all of that stuff. And there's a bit of a book where McMurphy finds out that all the patients are allowed to leave if they want to they just don't. He's incredibly freaked out by he says why don't you just go home you're allowed and he says well I'm not ready to and you

it's amazing anyway. It sounds like it was a very tense filming experience in lots of ways as well because you had a lot of big personalities you had Ken Casey who wrote the book and then ended up hating the film never watched it. He once started watching it when it was just on TV and then he realized what filming he was watching and changed channels. I mean I love that. He was channel flipping yeah and he was like oh what's this? This looks great oh no. And then so the director was Milos Forman and Jack Nicholson and Milos Forman had a big disagreement about McMurphy's character and basically it's very ordered and then Jack Nicholson arrives and he turns the place upside down and Milos Forman wanted it to be more like it was already chaotic

and then he arrives and he sort of draws the patients together and they become a team. They had a big falling out over that and they would end up they ended up they were only talking to each other through the cinematographer so it would have to be kind of so can you tell Jack Nicholson this way? I mean it just sounds so tense. Well Danny DeVito as well because he like I mean I'm a huge fan of Danny DeVito and remembered him as Lou in Taxi the sort of doer dispatcher but he um when he was in Matilda they actually played Matilda said that actually although he was playing a horrible dad she but he actually became like a really lovely father figure to her and then you know in Mum Play With The Cookies next you could argue that he actually was playing a sort of

psychiatric patient but he was taking care of his mental health. What I'm saying is he's always the opposite of how he appears and actually in Twins if you put him and Arnold Schwarzenegger together he's taller. What a film. What a movie. He was um inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2010 uh so I thought I'd look at some other people who are in New Jersey Hall of Fame. So you've got um Buzz Aldrin, Frank Sinatra. Oh okay. Do you have to be from New Jersey? Can I just ask? Well uh Thomas Edison is there born in Ohio, Yogi Berra born in Missouri, Harriet Tubman born in Maryland and Albert Einstein not even born in America. So we've all got a shot at the New Jersey Hall of Fame basically. I think you have to have lived there for a while because Einstein worked

in Princeton of course. Oh that's great. On One For Over it was nearly defeated by the Cold War and it didn't get turned into a film because of the Iron Curtain. Oh yeah. You know this? This is cool. So I didn't know. So the book came out in the early 60s and um Michael Douglas, no sorry, Kirk Douglas bought the rights. He was in the play. He was in the first play version and then the film is actually based on the play not on the book which is maybe why Ken Casey hated the film. So Kirk Douglas was the initial McMurphy which is mad. It's so strange to imagine now because it's so Jack Nicholson's role. And then he bought the rights and he wrote to Milos Forman in Chakrasavakia and said, got this great play, got the rights to it, think it should be a film,

I'll send you a copy of the book. Milos Forman said great. The book was then seized by Czech Customs in 1963 and it took more and Forman was really annoyed because Kirk Douglas said I'll send you a book, never sent the book, rude. Kirk Douglas was very annoyed because Milos Forman never said thank you for the book, rude. It took a decade to sort out this misunderstanding between them. The film was made in something like 1975 I think. Yeah, it took a long time and eventually Kirk Douglas gave the rights to his son Michael who then said, should we just try again with this book thing? Do we think that the Czech Customs didn't let the book go initially because they were worried that it was seditious or maybe it's not clear. It's not clear why it was seized. Maybe

they just wanted to read it. I have no idea. I was wondering if it was like the Rubik's Cube but going in the opposite direction. Yeah, I have no idea. I don't know what their reasoning was. Kessie was quite notorious as a LSD proponent. He was quite famous with the counterculture of America at that point. He had a bus that he used to take everyone on and they used to... What a radical free thinker. It was a psychedelic bus. Oh my god, a multi-coloured bus. We have those all the time. London buses are bright red. It's what it represented. They were called the Mary pranksters and Tom Wolf wrote a whole book about this. It was a non-fiction book about these guys who just would go around. They used to do things like they would have people playing

flutes on the top of the bus who would feel buses where people have been playing the flute. Were they on LSD? Yeah, probably. Just a public safety warning. Do not take acid on a London bus. It's not a friendly environment to do that. But it is possible. It was the counterculture thing and his name was very much associated with that. It has a good point. I don't know if it was. It's possible. It's interesting because he was an author already at this point, Kessie, before he wrote one flew over the cuckoo's nest and he was working on a book called Zoo and in order to fund it, he needed a job. So he worked at a psychiatric ward in order to fund it and the book idea came to him when one night he was in there. I think he was cleaning and he was on peyote and he was

tripping and he saw a full-blown chief broomed in there as a sort of vision. Just a psychedelic drug. It's peyote. Yeah, sorry. Sorry. Is it like a cactus or something? Yeah, it's like a cactus, which you, yeah, it's a, it's a drug. I know it is a word and I know it's a drug, but I can't tell you the specifics. Come on, I'd be a big old squass. Sorry, not to hurt. Yeah, yeah. But he said he saw a full-blown Native American, he said Indian, chief broom, the solution, the whole mothering key to the novel and that's how he wrote the novel. Because in the novel, he's the main, like the narrator, right? The narrator, sorry, and in the movie not. He's not and that's why Kessie immediately hated it. It wasn't told from the perspective of him. He is a big character in it, but he's, he's not,

yeah, yeah. Interestingly, the guy who got the role of Chief Brondon got it because Michael Douglas was sitting next to a used car dealer on a plane and the used car dealer's dad was an acting agent who had a load of Native American actors on his books and the thing about Chief Brondon is he's about eight feet tall in the thing and Michael Douglas got a phone call saying, I was just met the tallest Native American guy you've ever seen and it was Will, something I can't remember his name who, yeah, yeah, but anyway, he got the role as Chief Brondon. Will Sampson. Will Sampson. Nice name for someone incredibly tall and he's got long hair. Wow. Oh my god, it's perfect. So this, this movie was made in, in an actual, as we've said, hospital. That was originally, it was called

the Oregon State Mental Hospital. It's since been renamed as now Oregon State Hospital and it's a, it's an interesting place in its own right. It had a really controversial bit, which was they found 5,000 canisters of unclaimed human remains in there. And this was, yeah, this was a lot of the patients who had been cremated, but no one had to collect them. And they put out the list. They found all the names of the people and a lot of relatives, distant relatives came and reclaimed them. Yeah. And there was a, there's a documentary called the Library of Dust that was made about it. It's tragic. Yeah, yeah. It was pretty, it was pretty mad, but also they had a railroad underneath the hospital, specifically built one so that they could deliver items to different

bits of the hospital, but also to transport patients that they didn't want the members of the public to have to come across if they were visiting the hospital because they were worried something might go wrong. Dangerous, dangerous, you know, all that sort of stuff. And some of the tunnels possibly are still there, but you just walk them now or use bicycles. It's just Prince Andrew in there now. Oh my God. Yeah. And then they had a horrible thing. I found just horrible things about it. Unfortunately, 1942, there was a mass poisoning by accident. They were serving scrambled eggs and they accidentally and 47 people died from this. They used instead of powdered milk, they used sodium fluoride, which is a poison you would

use to kill cockroaches. And that was accidentally added to the scrambled eggs and 47 died. Well, I used to work as a, in a kitchen, we had a Christmas party and instead of putting white sauce on the Christmas pudding, they put garlic sauce on, which is a very less problematic version of what you just said. It's good to know you can relate. I mean, just saying it's easily done. Yeah. It's easily done. Gosh. I want to use cube lube instead of... Instead of what? Twisted sideways, didn't it? Should we just quickly mention Louise Fletcher, who was, she played Nurse Ratchet in the film and died last year, sadly, but she was amazing. And she, I think she kept herself separate from the

rest of the cast, didn't she, for a lot of the filming, so that she could be an icy authority figure. And did you do that when you were in the play of her, Louise? I am always an icy authority in every situation. I keep myself... Well, didn't she also take all the clothes off though at one point? Yeah, at the end of filming, wasn't it? Yeah. She'd go, look, hey guys, look at this, all along, I was fine. It was her saying, I'm fine. That's right. Yeah. She got, she, I think she had her underwear on. I don't think she was fully naked, maybe she was fully naked. She wasn't that much fun. I'm fine, but I'm not, like, fine. There must be a better way, like, bring in some cupcakes. To grace yourself with their colleagues. Just wait till the end of this podcast.

But yeah, she, there were two others. There was Anne Bancroft and Angela Lansbury were both offered the role, but turned it down because they didn't want to appear so evil on screen. Wow. This was in a no-bit tree of Louise Fletcher that I read. And also, it's said in this, that she was repeatedly turned down from roles, because she was five foot 10. And in those days, a lot of the leading men were much shorter than that. And she couldn't play roles opposite people who were shorter or about the same height. And actually in the nurses' cap, she'll be more than six foot, you know? And Jack Nielsen is quite, I think he's quite a short guy, but it really works for the authority, for the sort of power struggle happening between them. She's brilliant. Yeah.

She's on Star Trek. That's right. Yeah, she was a character on Star Trek. Oh, yeah, that's right. Wow. And she said that she found her role so disturbing that she also couldn't watch the film. It's Star Trek. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Aliens are scary, man. Did she, as Nurse Hatcher, she found it really hard and she just found it too disturbing to watch as a, as a writer. Actually, the last time I watched it, which was a couple of years ago, the person I was watching it with, sided with Nurse Hatcher, which to make me think, no, hang on, you've taken the wrong message there. And she said, no, no, no, look, the point is she's, someone's got to keep order. She's just doing a job. She's just doing a job from where if he was running the place,

it would be an absolute, we may have. One last thing just about Ken Cassie, the author, because he was a pretty amazing author. His method for a certain period when he was writing was to be completely off his head on drugs, and he would write a crazy amount. Then in the morning, he'd sober up and become his own editor. So he'd sort of say, okay, what, who, let's see what the author's written and chop out all the junk and get down to the good meat of it. Wow, that's clever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Apart from presumably the first draft was absolute bullshit. It just didn't make any sense at all. And then you'd think, but hang on, what if the editor was drunk as well? But a different, I'll take different drugs. Then I'll make the copy editor

will be sober. So that'll be fine. Okay, as long as the printer is sober, it'll be fine. 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 have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter account. So I'm on at Shriverland, Andy at Andrew Hunter and James James Harkin and Lucy at Lucy Portacomic. That's right, where you can go to our group count, which is at no such thing, or you can email us at podcast at qi.com. Also check out our website, no such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there so you can listen to those. But most importantly of all, if you'd like to see Lucy in her pajamas, make sure to get out of your

house and into a comedy club to see Wake Up Call. It's the show that she's touring and she's going to be going around the UK doing that. So go Google it, see where she's going and try and see it. Okay, that's it. We're going to be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.