No Such Thing As A Fish - 475: No Such Thing As The Three Little Pigs of Wall Street

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

Dan, James, Andrew and John Lloyd discuss misnamed insects, mislabelled body parts, misbehaving pigs, and Mister Bob Hope. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at nosuchthingasafish.com/apple or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you for the first time from the new QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and here to cut the red ribbon and officially open the new Fish podcasting headquarters is the founder of QI himself, John Lloyd, and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is, Andy.

My fact is that there was a job in medieval times called the municipal swine herd who was effectively a professional pig walker for city dwellers who didn't want to walk their own pigs. Right. Yeah. So it's just a job that you used to be able to get. Were they on leashes? No, I don't think they were.

That's a more difficult job then I reckon, because you're corraling the pigs as well as walking them. It's difficult in that way, but it's also very hard I imagine to keep a pig on a leash if it doesn't want to be. Is it? Really? Pigs are very strong. But they're also very intelligent and can be trained, you know, you can teach a pig

to dance. No, you're right. Yeah, I don't think they were. This was in the middle ages. Sorry, John. Can I just pick you up on you can teach a pig to dance? Yeah, well, they're very intelligent. They're right at the top of the animal league, smarter than dogs, sheep and horses.

They can be house trained, taught to fetch, come to heal. They can pull carts. They can sniff out landmines. But can I bring you back to the dancing quite? Pigs can dance. Apparently they can, yes. Wow. Were they sort of like vaudeville lacks or?

It's mainly flamenco dance, they'd click their little heels together like castanets, you know. Brilliant. They like watching television. They have their own favourite programmes, pet pigs. Peppa Pig? I don't know if Peppa Pig can watch television. No, I was wondering if Peppa Pig was one of their favourite TV shows.

I'm sorry to be late to this, but the Fox Trotter would be an example of a dance a pig could do. And South Park would be a TV show they might like. There we go. There we go. There we go. Should we stragg us away from these? Oh yeah, sorry.

We're back into the middle ages we go, hooray. So these are the first professional pig husbands, I guess you would call them in Europe. They were these village swine herds and it was in a time when everyone had their own pig. A pig was an amazingly useful thing to have. It was a waste disposal unit, but it was a waste disposal unit made of pork. What a delicious... Go into that a bit more.

You feed it leftovers and scraps from the household and then when winter comes you eat the pig. It's like if you can eat your wheely bin. Yeah, yeah. If you can eat the swine stones that's what the trash is a dinosaur that eats the trash sitting in a drawer. So it's kind of like that. It's probably based on these academic studies of medieval municipal swine herds, yeah.

And there was a pig daycare thing though because you didn't want to look after your own pig all day, being a busy middle class peasant in the middle ages and you would have a village swine herd who was rewarded with a sucking pig each year and the entrails of any animal which had been slaughtered. What did the sucking pig actually do or is that a vulgar question? You said they could be trained to do anything, John, is that? But they are party animals pigs. Some pig farmers keep lights on in the sky at night and when the farmers go home at the

end of the day the pigs don't settle down, they start eating, drinking and having fun at the small hours. Oh wow. That's actually their favourite show, The Sky At Night. I read one cool thing about lights in pigsties and that is to get rid of the smell in pigsties you can paint it with titanium oxide paint and then fire UV light at the paint and that will somehow break down the chemicals which will stop it from smelling and it's even better if you put a disco ball in the middle of the pigstie it will fire the UV light out in all

different directions and it will make it smell better more quickly. And you know why the disco ball is there because of the dancing. Medieval pigs don't look like our modern day pig and this is something that has led to a lot of annoyance in the world of academia because a lot of medieval scholars are constantly finding themselves, I say constantly, it's one guy as far as I can find, being pissed off by their representation within video games these days so there's a lot of video games like Assassin's Creed Valhalla, there's Medieval Dynasty Foundation where they represent pigs as a modern day pig, it's pink and it's hairless, it looks nothing like the pig is today.

Minecraft? Maybe in Minecraft. There are pigs in Minecraft. So Minecraft, yeah. And so actually of the time if we want to picture an old pig it's a long legged, they're quite small, long snouts, very lean figure, they had arch-crested backs and they had long curved tusks as well according to this academic. I suppose if you made them look like that in the video game people might not realise

they were pigs. Yeah, and what you've described as a stork basically, as far as I can tell. Wow, okay. But you mentioned Leeds, did you know the thing about Gérard de Neval, the 19th century French poet who had a pet lobster called Thibault, which used to walk around Paris on a blue silk ribbon, so he did have a lead for the lobster. So you could walk on a lead. He was asked why he had a lobster as a pet and he said, they are peaceful, serious creatures.

They know the secrets of the sea and they don't bark. And it was a very... You know the secrets of the sea. It was a very sedate job because I checked this out. In lab tests the maximum recorded walking speed of a lobster is 2.5 metres per minute or 144 metres an hour. That's a good easy job, a professional lobster walker. It feels like at some stage you would end up dragging the lobster more than walking

it, doesn't it? Maybe you've got to get back for lobster dragging. I did the other day in a big railway station, I saw someone who had a ferret on a lead. Did you? Yeah, which you do see occasionally. Yeah. Because they do need to be... So you can pull it out of your trousers as well.

I got sent a picture from my friend Emmy in Hong Kong of someone walking a lizard on a lead. Oh, really? Like one of those big, big lizards. What, like a commuter dragon? Yeah, exactly. No. But not a commuter dragon.

No, no, no. Or a shape-shifting lizard. It was, yeah, it was one of the members of the royal family, you know, visiting Hong Kong. Monitor, I guess. Yeah, it could be. Yeah. I went into my local...

Sorry, no, we're just bragging about animals we've seen lately. But I went into an aquarium shop the other day. Oh, yeah. I was trying to buy some... Fish. Springtails, actually. You know, springtails? There's tiny insects.

Yes. Why do you buy those? I needed to fertilise some soil because I did a terrarium... Workshop. And I made a terrarium. Anyway, I went in there to get my springtails, which was very cheap, three quid for a big box of springtails. Anyway, they had an axolotl in there.

Oh, yeah. I was staggered. Because I thought, you know... They're very rare. Did you not buy it? No. I didn't have anywhere to put it. And the guy who ran the aquarium shop was quite annoyed because he said when he doesn't

have an axolotl in, people only ever say, well, do you not have any axolotls? And then when he does, they just come in and look at the axolotl and then don't buy it. They treat like a zoo. But it does feel like one person is going in there every week as a joke and asking for axolotls. Is an axolotl an amphibian? Yeah. I think it is.

Yeah. Because they're extinct in the wild, apparently. Yes, they are only in two canals in Mexico City now, apart from zoos. And because I ask amphibians because another great medieval job was a frog stoner. They used to hire people to throw pebbles into ponds to shut the frogs up at night. Partying as well. That's so great. The animal king was all parties.

But I did think it's a bit of a boring job for a pig walker in the Middle Ages, a municipal swine herd. And I thought we should come up with a better name. So there's some great walking words, pluch, to flap the feet while walking like a seabird from Shetland, prole, a short enjoyable walk that's from Kent, proper stroll, I should think it stands for, sholve, to saunter with extreme laziness from East Anglia, to spandle, to leave wet footprints on the floor, another Kentish sterling. So do you think swine spandler?

I think it's only a hog plutcher. Hog plutcher. You know? And there was this thing later on after the medieval pig thing, urban pigs were a big deal. And in Manchester, everyone had their own pig, and we know this partly because of Friedrich Engels, who was writing about the conditions of the working class in England in the 1840s, 1845, and he wrote that that was the case.

And another writer was describing North Kensington, and in the mid 19th century in North Kensington pigs outnumbered people three to one. Really? Quite a lot. There's more pigs in Spain now than humans. Really? Yeah. Pigs in Spain.

In the 1820s, there were more pigs in Manhattan than there are cars in New York today. Wow. Well, you know the movie, The Wolf of Wall Street? No, it was previously going to be called The Three Little Pigs of Wall Street. It should have been called that as a prequel. The prequel would have been that, exactly that, because the wall of Wall Street initially was a wall, right? This is when the Dutch were there.

And they built, yeah, they built this wall, and this was during the 1600s, so 1653 to 1999, as they were building the wall, there was a picket fence that was there before. A picket fence. A picket fence, yeah, and it kept getting knocked down by pigs. So it was a huge problem, and they brought in municipal swine herds to try and curb it, and that didn't happen. So then they had to decree that you had to keep your pigs at home until the construction of Wall Street was built.

Wow. So the Dutch thing, New Amsterdam, I happen to know that there's a Dutch word, Udvijn, which means to take a bracing walk in the wind. Isn't that a lovely thing to have a word for? Yeah. And then the Dutch for pig is big. Is it really big? Yeah, big, yeah.

That's great. You're learning Dutch at the moment, right? I am, yes. Yeah. What was the phrase you gave us just before the show started? Who wedden we of de deeren in de deeren to een gluchig zijn? Which translates as? How do we know if the animals in the zoo are happy?

Great. They're philosophical people. You know truffle pigs. You've heard of truffle pigs, right? Yeah. Yeah. That hunt for truffles. And in the Middle Ages, they didn't, they did hunt for truffles, but they ate them because

nobody in the Middle Ages ate truffles. They thought that was weird. I agree. That's weird. Foxes, badges, wolves, wild boar, pigs and rats ate truffles, and they only came back into favor in the Renaissance. So I got interested in truffles, and Rossini, the composer, called the truffle the Mozart of Fungi, which is rather nice, isn't it?

And he claimed to have only cried three times in his life, Rossini. Once when his first opera was booed, once when he had Paganini play the violin, and once when he was picnic on a boat and the truffle turkey fell overboard. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everybody. Just wanted to let you know we are sponsored this week by Canva. Canva.

Absolutely. Canva is a place to go if you want to create visual content. Yes. Now, we've been creating audio content for many hundreds of hours now. I sure have. But this is if we wanted to take it a step further and create something you can see in the real world. Oh, that's what visual means.

Yes, it is. Canva is amazing. It can help you make presentations. It can help you make websites. I know you've been having to go out the website tools. I have. I had a little crack at it, and it's very intuitive. It's very easy.

If I make a website, I will absolutely make it with Canva. There are so many templates. There are so many good fonts. There are graphics, photos, videos you can use. And you can also, if you have more than one person who's making a website, you can use Canva for Teams, which is a really good way of collaborating. That's absolutely right. You can create really stunning stuff.

There are all sorts of magic features as well, magic design, where you upload an image and they curate specific templates for you to get the best out of your images or customize them. There's all sorts of stuff. Absolutely. And you can get a free 45-day extended trial by going to canva.me slash fish. And if you do that, you'll get, like I say, that 45-day extended trial. Absolutely right.

Just go to canva.mv.me slash fish and you will get a free 45-day extended trial. Start making your visual content today. Okay. On with the podcast. It is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the comedian Bob Hope was so reliant on his writers to come up with jokes for him, he even had them provide bespoke one-liners for his social life. So we all know Bob Hope.

A lot of people don't these days, just in case, just in case. It fell on Stony Grande and let's move on to the third fact. So Bob Hope. So you said comedian. Yeah. Bob Hope was possibly the biggest comedian in the world. He was huge. He was huge.

He lived to 100 years old. He hosted the Oscars 19 times. He was a box office hit during the 40s. Number one movie at one point in the 40s was a Bob Hope movie. He received its estimated 38,000 fan letters per week during the 1940s. This is how loved he was, but he's the person who effectively created the idea of the modern stand-up monologue where he incorporated himself, the audience, the situation around him, the topical news of the day, and he used to hire so many writers.

He was the first person to acknowledge he had writers as well, properly. He would mention, hold the cue cards up higher during his act, be quicker on that. You wouldn't say that if my writers were here, those kind of lines. And yeah, and so, so much was he reliant on it that, as I say, even if he was going on like a golf game and he knew that he had some powerful CEOs there that he wanted to impress, they would write these jokes for him and he would memorize them and bust them out as if they were ad libs. Great idea.

Yeah. I'd love that. He'd gotten a lot of stick from other comedians, the Lenny Bruce's and the growing world of comedians who were auteur and wrote their own material because they saw him as an actor as opposed to a comedian, but I'm a big fan of the way that he led his life, I think, and his comedy life particularly, I think that he innovated so many things. So if he was going to play in a town, he would send his writers ahead, days ahead, and they would scope around the whole town.

They would look at the local shops, they would meet the local people and they would base the material they wrote for him on that. It would have been weird though, if he's doing a joke about the local hardware shop. No, I think that's... Well, do you remember like when we went on tour, we would do facts about the local town? Oh, yeah, but that was good. That was great. That was, you know...

Yeah. That was a completely different... John, did you ever meet Bob Hope? No, but I spoke to him. Really? Yeah. One Christmas Eve, I used to produce a live radio two show called Late Night Extra when I was very, very young, sort of 24 or something like that, 23 even, and I was producing one

on Christmas Eve, and I had the best address book in the world, probably, it was amazing. Everybody's singing. For some reason, I had Bob Hope's phone number. I phoned him up in California on Christmas Eve and said, hey, Bob, how's it going? He goes, who is this? Who is this? I said, it's the BBC in London, Mr. Hope. He goes, oh, hi there.

Hi, guy. How are you? He was great. Have you still got the number? Let's call it now. No. He picks up. But he was interesting that his attitude to write, he paid them very well.

He didn't acknowledge them, but he didn't think the writing was the big deal. He said, creating the character was the thing, and the lines were just something that the character said. Yeah. Weirdly, a lot of people in recent biographies say that he was terrible at paying his writers. That was sort of an idea that he was really good. Jack Benny would pay two writers the same amount, Jack Benny being another giant comedian of the day, the same amount that Bob would pay 20 writers, and what he'd do is he'd find

the young writers. Didn't you say that Jack Benny hated him because he had writers? Not Jack Benny. No. Oh, I thought you said people like Jack Benny. Lenny Bruce. Lenny Bruce. Yeah, yeah.

Jack Benny and Lenny Bruce are both double first neighbors, like Craig David or David Cameron. Anyway. Do you know who Bob Hope's most famous writer was, at least the one I'd heard of? No. Larry Gelbart. Oh, yeah. Who was that?

When he was very young. He was the guy who wrote MASH. Oh, wow. Okay. And Bob Hope, one of the things he used to do was tour. He was basically, not only as you say it down, he sort of invents stand-up comedy, but the touring American forces in the 40s and 50s was also a thing that was really nobody'd ever thought of doing that before.

And he did a lot. And he did. And Larry Gelbart worked for him as a very young man, and he was inspired by a tour of the Far East to write MASH. Yeah. Bob Hope famously used to do a Christmas show that he would do from the front lines of wherever a war might be going, and after a war, while people were still stationed out there.

So most comedians and acts would go out while it was wartime, and he kind of continued on. So he died age 100. He did 48 Christmases out on the road, so 48 of his Christmases were spent in a different country performing to troops. And one of them speaking to John Lloyd. And one of them speaking to Lloyd. Yeah. But this is...

In a way, like being in a war zone, you know? But you're... Sorry. Hope You Christmas. Should have been the name of the show. Hope You Christmas. Doesn't get ever was. God, he had 48 goes to get that.

Yep. Never got that. Never got that. Exactly. Hope is a first name, by the way. Is it? Yeah. It's a woman's name.

Bob Hope joins the ranks of... But I was reading that about the wartime thing. Sorry. Jerry Lewis. Two first names. Jerry Lewis. Dean Martin. Two first names.

Yep. Did they all have first names? That's extraordinary. Frank Sinatra. No. But he's not a comedian. Great point. All right.

On we go. The thing about his war shows... Andy Murray. Oh, that's good. Yeah, yeah. So it's not always comedians. John Lloyd. Fair enough, John Lloyd.

Andy Murray are in those weird categories like Lloyd and Murray are kind of first names and kind of so. They can be both. Yeah. It's not the pure simplicity of it. Craig David. Agreed. Okay.

Did you have something? Come on. I did. I did. Well, no, I was just going to say what was particularly touching about the war shows is that for a lot of parents, brothers and sisters, whatever, friends at home, this was the only time that they were able to see possibly one of their family members who was off at war on camera during Christmas time.

So a lot of the 38,000 letters that came to Bob Hope was from people saying, I got to see my boy sitting there in the crowd laughing at your jokes and he didn't make it. He lost his life to the war. Thank you for giving me that moment where I could connect with him. So they were really important shows to America at the time. His last military gig was in 1990 when he went to the Gulf at the age of 87. Yeah, and lots of the troops in the crowd for his final gig, they had fathers who had seen him in Vietnam and some of them had grandfathers who had seen Bob Hope in the Second

World War performing. It's mad the idea that you go to a gig and your grandfather saw the same comedian. Yeah, I mean, lucky that you managed to get two generations that they didn't die in the past. Yeah, true. Yeah, true. Yeah. While reading about this, I found my favorite new human.

Yeah, just like it's an exciting character. So this is to do with the writers and so on. It's a guy called Barney McNulty. Bob Hope used to bring him everywhere with him. What do you think he did? He was part of that team. So not a writer. He's not a writer.

Was he a boxer? Because Bob Hope was a boxer before he was a comedian. He was, but no, he wasn't a boxer. Did he point out whenever he met anyone who had two first names? No, this is... I could do with one of those guys, James. Yeah. I'd love that.

I feel like you could be one of those guys, Andy. Oh, I dream. You know. Um, what's, uh, somewhat like a, just a personal, you know, assistant, like Batman or... So what Barney McNulty was, was the cue card guy. And everything was written on cue cards and Barney McNulty is acknowledged with having invented cue cards, basically. No one ever delivered monologues on TV before with cue cards and Barney McNulty was the

guy to do this. He said doing it was like, it was like a, like handling snakes. You had to work with the rhythm of the comedian. You had to have the font big enough and you're writing and so on. Like a snake. Yeah. Because he said the comedians are wriggling around there. They're improvising.

They're changing. You don't know where they're going to go. It's kind of like an auto cue person. Yeah. Like a modern day auto cue person. Because sometimes the auto cue can be done too fast or too slow and it gets in a tangle and then yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Auto cues are boring then. It should be called a McNulty. Yeah. So McNulty was so important to him. Steve Allen, who's another comedian at the time, said that he was once at a barbecue. Steve Allen. Yeah.

Steve Allen. Oh. This is, you've uncovered a scene. One of the problems is once you start seeing them, you can't stop. Yeah. Yeah. I've been this way for years. Yeah.

So he was at a, he was at a party, a barbecue with Bob Hope and Bob came out and suddenly just did an improvised speech to all the people. It's nighttime. He's, yeah. Thank you for coming and he's doing all these jokes and Steve said, he's, he's hearing these jokes and he's thinking, this is a pretty worked out monologue, but it's pretty topical. He turns around, he says, he notices sitting in the bushes with a flashlight and some cue

cards is McNulty hiding away, giving him the cue cards to do it. So I haven't really said very much in this part because I don't really know anything about comedy, but I do know a lot about golf and Bob Hope used to love golf and that's really kind of all I knew about him is that he was a golfer. I read that, you know, Alan Shepard, the, the astronaut, yeah, he hit a golf ball on the moon and according to Bob Hope, it was his idea. No. Yeah.

He said that he was once speaking to Alan Shepard and he used to kind of always carry his golf clubs around him kind of just to, that was his thing. He would. Yeah. And he reckoned that Alan Shepard got the inspiration by swinging his golf club. He was on the Mike Douglas show when Tiger Woods first appeared on television when he was two years old. So Tiger Woods was a little dot and he was kind of hitting golf balls and everyone was

like, look how amazing this little kid is at playing golf and Bob Hope was on the show when that happened. Wow. So he's there for the start of Tiger Woods and apparently on his first date, he was so nervous he would just sit and draw golf holes on the tablecloth and he did it so much that they made him pay for the tablecloth because he'd draw all these golf holes on it. Oh, that's so great.

I certainly claim they were golf holes later on. These, oh, they're an Alan Shepard with, of course, a job in the Middle Ages. I thought that was your job on QI, John. Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is James. Okay. My fact this week is that the unarmed stick insect has an infinite number of arms. Okay. So what?

I'm not saying anything else. That's it. Does it play golf? Infinite is a big word. Yeah, that's a big word. I was going to say that. It's a long word. Yeah.

It's a full eight letters. So you mean that? No, the thing is, I would say sticking sets can regrow their limbs. Yeah. Theoretically. Possibly forever, you know, if you, if you keep chopping them off, they'll keep growing there. Yeah.

The main body doesn't live forever. Does it? Or does it? No, no, no. I think probably we would reach a time limit. The other thing like about a week, well, because they would die, but the other problem is they can only do it when they're young, but they could keep doing it and doing it and doing it.

If you kept chopping off all the limbs, hell of a shock to your juvenile stick insect. The first time it chops an arm off and it doesn't grow back. It thinks, oh no, now I'm officially no longer a juvenile. Yeah, it must be. Because you must get used to operating with complete impunity. It's a real coming of age moment, isn't it? So they can keep regrowing their arms. Another question is, do they have arms or are they legs?

It's called unarmed. Is there a reason why it's called unarmed? Yeah. Because it doesn't have defences. Yes. It's unarmed. That's in weapons. Yeah.

To be honest, it's just a silly thing because I noticed it was called unarmed and I remembered that they could keep regrowing their arms. Yeah, that's so good. But I just thought, let's talk about stick insects because stick insects are awesome. Yeah. These ones, these unarmed stick insects are the most common stick insects found in Britain. Are they? Oh, okay.

Yes, they are. Because we have no native stick insects in this country, but one of them accidentally got brought in some timber from New Zealand in the 20s. Right. So they don't produce pathogenically, so they don't need more than one of them to create more and more and more of them. It's really pleasing that it came over in some timber disguised as a smaller stick in a load of larger sticks.

That's brilliant. There was probably a guy at the park just counting all of these sticks and go, we've got one too many. So these were discovered, they were discovered in New Zealand in 1955 by a man who also, like this misnamed animal, is called John Salmon, not a fish. That's amazing. But he is responsible for discovering, so there's a Wikipedia list of stick insects of New Zealand, of which there are 23.

John Salmon discovered nine of the stick insects of New Zealand. You do find the same people come up again and again. When you look at all the different species of stick insects, it tends to be the same people. It's almost if no one else is looking for stick insects, right? Yeah, exactly. Or maybe they're specialized because they're quite hard to see. They're so hard.

So I was reading about leaf insects, which are similar, you know, they look, and they are unbelievably realistic leaf insects as in they attach to a tree where they look exactly like that leaf. And they have little bitten out edges, so it looks like an insect. So amazing. But lots of experts on leaf and stick insects have never seen them in the wild. It's quite tragic really. So there's a guy called Royce Cumming, who's a world expert on leaf insects.

He's never seen one in the wild. That's amazing. I mean, because you can't just check every leaf, that's the problem. That's exactly it. Yeah, it's a nightmare. If you want to get any help. Stupid, they should have gone for like elephants. Stick insects feature in Maori myth, quite a few times.

Just something I just happened to know about Maori, the language, which is the Maori for nuclear warfare is umu pongi pongi. Right. You didn't think they would have a word for it, but they do. Your duolingo is very bold, far ranger, this is not duolingo. Other language apps are available, Memrise etc. When stick insects feel under threat, they will play dead or be more like a stick than usual basically.

And I found an insect owning website which had a problem page and the problem was, is my stick insect playing dead or has it died? Or is it in fact a twig? We used to have stick insects when I was a kid, pet and stick insects. Did you? Yeah, yeah, and it is. I mean, they did die, I'm sorry to say quite regularly. They didn't live very long.

I hope that wasn't due to our bad husbandry, but. Or did they die very frequently? Yeah. Maybe they were just trying to get themselves thrown out. We usually check. I don't know what your FAQs will say, but for us it was usually when there weren't many poos for a few days. That was good.

That's good. What's a poo look like from a stick insect? It's just like a black dot. Right, nice. Yeah. Well this, this is basically, if they're threatened, they fold their legs up and they paralyze themselves and they often fall off the branch to the foliage, but that happens if they get surprised, if they face any surprise until they're played dead.

So you either wait to see if the colour has changed because that is a sign that they can't do that by themselves. Can the leaf insects change colour in the autumn? I don't think so. Okay. And the other thing you can do, this is just a bit of advice, is to stimulate the insect's mouth palps, which are these small organs near the mouth, which are incredibly sensitive. And if you stimulate those, it will, it will make a sudden movement because it hates that.

And if not, it has died. I'm slightly moved by all these, you know, pets and things dying because I was, my dad was in the Navy, we never had pets. So when the kids were small, we won a goldfish at a fair in Chippie Norton, who was called Chippie the fish. I love this little fish and it got something wrong with it, swim bladder. And I was really heartbroken and I was very sort of, you know, anxious about it. And so I used to take it to the local vet in a bucket in Hammersmith.

And so I was sitting there in a bucket, you know, this little goldfish, you know, tiny little thing, fair goldfish. Was it on a lead? No. And all these people would be there with Salookies and parakeets and, you know, horses and things like that. And the vets assistant would come out and say, Mrs. Campbell Rouse and Montmorency, the third.

And suddenly he would get up with an antelope or something, and he came to me and she'd go, Mr. Lloyd and fish and after about four visits. And what he used to do the vet was inject this goldfish or something along with the swim bladder with the tiniest little hypodermics that you've ever seen, about two inches long. And after the fourth time, he said, Mr. Lloyd, I'm afraid there's nothing more I can do for fish. He's going to take his chances. Oh, because that is a problem with goldfish, isn't it?

They get these swim bladder problems and they'll kind of float to the surface and sometimes go upside down and people think that they're dead. But actually they're not dead. They can be, you know, they can have their swim bladder pricked and come back. And so people flush the fish down the toilet, but they're not actually dead. They probably don't flush very well either because they are quite buoyant that stage. Oh, no. Yeah.

It's public service. Yeah. I was just thinking Mr. Lloyd and fish is basically this episode, isn't it? Very good. Did you know that some children, human children can regenerate fingertips? Did you? I was astounded when I first... Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I had heard that. I didn't know that so that they just grow back their fingertips if you cut them off. Yeah. Up to a certain... It's kind of much like the stick insect. You don't want to... There's a cut off point, isn't there? It's under a certain amount of the finger, I think.

It's not at the base, but it's the top joint. Yeah. Well, the fingernail, if there's only a tiny bit of the fingernail left, the whole rest of it can grow back. Well, so human children have infinite fingers? Yes. And it's another, don't try this at home, isn't it? Speaking of children, have you guys heard of John George children?

No. He was a famous entomologist of the early 19th century, and there's a stick insect called children's stick insect, which is named after him. No. Yeah. He was a... As well as an entomologist, he was a biologist, and one amazing thing he did, in 1815 he traveled to the battlefield of Waterloo just after the battle, and he purchased a tree under

which the Duke of Wellington had made his headquarters. Yeah, so basically what had happened was the battle had happened and everyone had gone away and loads of souvenir hunters were going in and sort of chopping bits off this tree, but he actually went and bought the entire tree and had it made into furniture by Chippendale, Thomas Chippendale. Wow. Wow. Isn't that amazing?

Was it called a Waterloo tree? Was that the tree? It was called the Waterloo Elm. Waterloo Elm. Yeah. That is... Wow. And I thought I'd see if John George children had any children, and he did.

He had a daughter called Anna Atkins, and she was the first person, we think, possibly to publish a book illustrated with photographic images. She was a friend of Fox Talbot, who made one of the first cameras, and she made a book in 1843 which had photos in it. Can you guess what the book was about? First ever book with photos in it. Insects. The Battle of Waterloo.

It's going to be third design. Something slow-moving tortoises. Twigs. Twigs. Children. Children. Children? No.

It was something very slow-moving. Rivers. Tortoises. Rivers. Rivers. It was very leisurely rivers. Meandering rivers. Yeah.

Something slow-moving. Slugs. Smaller. The big book of slow photos. Smaller than a slug. Lobsters. No, no. Smaller than a slug.

Smaller than a slug. Yeah. There are things... Is that smaller? That's about the same size. I mean, much smaller than a slug. Oh, where? Where?

Tiny worms. Smaller. Smaller than a worm. Parasitic wasps. They're tiny, tiny, tiny. I think a bit bigger than that. I'll tell you. Well, there's water bears.

There's like... Tartigrades. Tartigrades. The big book of Tartigrade photos. That was the first ever photograph. Yeah. Was of a Tartigrade. No, it was of Algae.

Ah. It was... Her book was called Photographs of British Algae, Cyanotype Impressions. It came out in October 1843 and that was the first ever book illustrated with photographic images. It's very nice. I'm still recovering. I was about to say...

I was about to say, you look great. How these quizzes really get you feeling like you're doing exercise. Absolutely. They pump me up. These things are always so... When you do these dives into things like regeneration, for example, it's so miraculous, isn't it? And all the creatures that can, axolotls and salamanders and sharks, regenerate teeth all the time.

And cockroaches can grow new legs. Did you know that? No. And cockroaches have got a bigger genome than people and they taste the inside, the innards of a cockroach. It tastes like blue cheese. Really? Amazing.

And axolotls, they've got 30 billion base pairs in their genome that's 10 times as much as we have. That's amazing. Do you think that guy who was selling axolotls in your shop only had one of them and he kept selling it but keeping a leg so that it would regenerate to a new one? What a brilliant business model. That's what I'm thinking. They're also, the axolotl gets its name from the name of Quetzalcoatl's dog.

Does it? Yeah, Quetzalcoatl had a dog called Axolotl. Did you think when he went to the vet it was Quetzalcoatl and Axolotl? Unarmed stick insects, obviously a badly named insect. I just wanted to mention one I found the other day which is the so-called whispering bat. The so-called whispering bat's call is as loud as a chainsaw or a leaf blower. Wow. But the reason it's called the whispering bat is because it's too high-pitched for us

to hear. Oh, thank God. That makes sense. Other bats find it deafening. Yeah, right. That's funny. There's so many classic animals that are completely misnamed. So like a few that I found electric eel.

Yes. Not an eel. No. It's a knife fish. The horny toad. Yep. Lizard. It's a lizard.

Doesn't have much sex. Doesn't have much sex. Very sad. King Cobra's. Not Royals. Not Cobra's. No, really? Wow.

Yeah. Skip Jack's tuner. Not a tuner. Really? Is it really? That's the one that's always on all the tins, isn't it? It's not a tuner. It's a completely different genus.

Really? Huh. Mountain goat? Not a mountain. No, not a goat. Really? No. The list goes on.

Yeah, it does, actually. Mantis shrimp, neither a shrimp nor a mantis. American buffalo is not a buffalo with a bison. Do you know the difference between a buffalo and a bison? No, I don't, Mr. Hope. What is that? You can't wash your hands in a buffalo. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is loedy.

So I still have to decide which fact to give to you, and I just want to give you some that I didn't choose in the end, because I don't want to waste them. To keep warm in the 16th and 17th centuries, boys at British public schools burned the furniture. It was horrible, a bit like my school. John Denver's wife, Annie, claimed to have fallen in love with him despite his songs, not because of them. It was very sad. Toad Suck, Arkansas, recently won a survey to find America's most unfortunate place name,

beating Belcher Town, Massachusetts, Climax, Georgia, Hooker, Oklahoma, and Rochetown, Illinois. Well, I'm glad that you didn't do that lowbrow one, John. What is your actual fact this week? My fact is, 45% of Britons do not know where their rectum is. Now, this was according to a poll of 2000 British adults commissioned by Palmow Medical Private Health Care in January 2023. Only 55% of men and women in Britain can confidently state where their rectum is, and only 50% know where their reproductive organs are.

No. That is impossible. Now, I can sort of understand why this might be, because they don't know what the words mean, rectum and reproductive organs. But according to the survey also, an astonishing 37% of Brits cannot say where either their heart or their brain is. Well, my brain isn't my reproductive system. Because there's that saying, isn't there? He couldn't find his ass with both hands.

Yes. And what we're saying is that 45% of British people call into that. I don't think we're saying that, because to find your rectum with your hands is quite an invasive thing. Well, I did look it up, because I thought, OK, well, how ridiculous that is. But I didn't know until yesterday which part of the rectum is, but you know, you've all looked that up. So it's not actually what you think. It's not the anus. There's the anal canal with the anus on one end, and the other end is the rectum,

which is basically the poo park, where the stuff that comes down the colon is being digested all the way, and then it goes into the rectum, which is exactly the storage thing. Right. The medical term, the poo park. Yeah, same with vagina, I think, as well. Like, people think it's the opening, but it's the... Yes. It's the tube.

So that's interesting. I thought the rectum was connected from sort of the bottom of the intestine right to the opening. No. I thought that whole thing... OK, cut this. We've covered them. Count me as one of the 55. The interesting thing about this survey was it wasn't testing, can you find this?

It was saying, are you confident that you could locate where organ X is? That's interesting. And so an 8% of people said they could confidently identify none of them. None of them. They just said, no, I couldn't identify any. But surely the brain. The brain. Everybody must know it.

You would think so, yeah. That's just people with no confidence. Exactly. Yeah, there's confidence. Although we have said before that there is this thing in, is it called Lizardman's constant, or something like that, where in any survey you will get a percent who will just give a ridiculous answer. Well, I did wonder whether people... Because it was an online survey.

It wasn't a person asking my eye to eye. So you wonder if people had a bit too much to drink. They think, oh, I'll just put it. Yeah. But there was another thing at the other end of the spectrum on this survey. Because, you know, people not identifying where their brain is sounds mad. I also would like to call a slight doubt over the 24% of people, quite high, who claimed they could confidently identify where their pancreas was. And I think, come on.

Like, I know it's in the middle section. Yeah. But where? But where? Well, like the spleen. That was the one 20% claimed to know where their spleen was. I wouldn't have any idea. It would give me a break.

Yeah. 20% are not spleen doctors. What's the term? I don't know. Splenologists? What's a speleologist? That's a screwdriver. Oh no, that's been a terrible mistake.

Don't worry, he's going to carry out the operation anyway. He says it'll be just like a cave, probably. He's never been in an anal canal before. I tend to do a lot of these things now when I'm trying to get access to a news article online. They often, well, a lot of websites will have like, just fill this quick survey in quickly and see where your rectum is. Yeah. What kind of websites are you trying to get onto then? Please turn on your webcam.

Show us your rectum. I find it interesting that don't knows in surveys as well. So YouGov always include their don't knows and there was an article about this in Wired a few years ago by a writer called Amit Katwala. And it's a great point because YouGov did a survey about surfing, right? Have you ever been surfing or not? In which 3% of people said, I don't know. And it's a big thing to not know if you tried surfing. 2% don't know if they've lived in London.

They could be on the outskirts. Possible. Yeah, I guess. They were born in London but left straight away. Oh, I don't know if we lived there for a couple of months. Okay, here's one from 2023. Do you and your romantic partner each have your own side of the bed that you sleep on? Okay.

And if you don't currently have a partner, please think about the last partner you have. 77% we each have our own side. 4% chaotic. We sleep on whichever side. Absolutely insane. But 6% don't know. Yeah. How do you not know?

I would say it would be different depending on which bed you're sleeping in. Like in our home bed, we sleep on the same size. But if you go to a hotel. Then it's anything goes. Completely. Exactly. Well, it's not. It's whatever my wife wants to do.

In 2017, a survey found that half of British gardeners cannot name a single shrub. And the next year, in 2018, a poll found that 80% of Britons couldn't pick out their own neighbours in a police line-up. I thought that was quite strong. That is interesting. And how did they test that? Did they do some line-ups? I'd like to know that, yes.

That'd be great. It was in the Daily Mail, I suppose. You know, a shrub? Because I think shrub is like a specific type of plant is a shrub, yes. I agree. I mean, I garden. And you know. I have something that looks like a shrub, which is nasalia.

Is that a shrub? I don't know. Is it a little Leylandi bush? A shrub? A bush is a part of the body, isn't it? I think that. Most people don't know where that is. I don't know where the bush is.

Let's think of a shrub. It must be a shrub. Is it a laurel? Or is that a tree? I think that's a shrub. Is it? I think it's a size thing, isn't it? Over a certain size, a shrub becomes a tree.

I think we've shown that this is a very difficult thing to know. We always, always jump when you're on the show, we get into the deep questions. Can I do one more survey? Just this is a silly survey. It's not really that much on topic, but there was a poll quite recently about what Britain's aged 18 to 29, so this is young people according to the survey. What is the least cool hand gesture a person can make? That's great.

Yeah, okay, cool. Okay, can I have a punch? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the peace sign is not cool. Oh, do you know? I do that all the time. I do it all the time, but I just don't. I don't think it's cool.

Oh, okay. I think possibly the horns, the rock horns. Oh, that's like a cookhold in Southern Europe. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Careful at Southern European Metallica gigs, which I know you love to go to. The thumbs up. The thumbs up.

That was in the poll. It wasn't the worst, but a lot of people thought it was quite cringe. A-okay. That was cringe, but not the worst. The phone, call me. In fact, the double A-okay is one of the most cringe-worthy signs. Oh, air quotes. Are they the most naff?

I actually think if anyone had thought of that, they would have gone for it. Jon, do you want to have a guess? Wankings. Oh, yeah. Sorry, Philippa Perry. She basically answered Wank for every question we asked her. It is, and this is 38% of people said this. It's playing an air guitar.

Oh. Like Wild Stallions or Bill and Ted thing. That is pretty embarrassing. Oh, come on. It's cool. Okay. How old are you, Dan? The right age to know that's cool.

Rectum. Okay. Let's talk rectums. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission every year do a list of things that have been found in people's orifices. Really? Yeah. The 2022 list include a monopoly piece, a reusable ice pack, a fishing pole.

No. It can't have been the entire pole. Well, they're collapsible, aren't they? Oh, did they? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, it could have been that.

There's a golf ball in the vagina, an expensive coin from a coin collection in someone's throat and a USB card in someone's penis. Oh, a USB. Yeah. It's brilliant. You've got to make sure you put it in the right way round. Yeah, exactly. Wow.

That's brilliant. Yeah, there was a guy, also a 68-year-old man with hemorrhoids in Hubei province in China who had to have a 10-inch chopstick pulled out of his anus, which he put up there. He said, out of curiosity. I haven't listened to the Museum of Curiosity this series. John, is there? I'd like to donate this chopstick. And just while I was talking about emergency visits in 2022, I found a list of quite a

few. Here are some. This is in the US. Pain after rubbing penis too hard with a loofah. Playing with pocket knife accidentally stabbed penis, closed penis in fridge door, and watched football got excited when team scored and accidentally punched self in penis. Here are all ER visits in the US last year. That's amazing.

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 accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, James. At James Harkin. Andy.

At Andrew Hunter. And John. Oh, John Lloyd QI at Instagram. Oh, yeah. Of course. I don't know. I didn't have a Twitter account. Yeah, yeah.

Or at Quikipedia, I guess. But like the total hub. But yeah. Find Lloydie on Instagram. We do Instagrams. Yeah. Yeah, I've done that before. That's a good point.

I'm on no such thing as James Harkin. Mine is private. You'll never find it. And mine is at John Lloyd QI. All right. And we don't have a fish Instagram, but we do have a fish Twitter account, which is at no such thing. Or you can go to our website, which is no such thing as a fish.com.

Do check it out. All the previous episodes are up there. And that's it for now. We'll be back again next week with another episode. Thank you, John, for officially opening the new QI offices and podcasting. Daniel. And yeah, we'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then.

Goodbye.