No Such Thing As A Fish - 478: No Such Thing As An Award-Winning Gecko

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

Dan, James, Andrew and Sally Phillips discuss mythical beasts, hungry caterpillars, false geckos, and Super Furry Animals. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish before we get going. I have some news and that is that we are going to do some live shows. Now this news will not be news to those of you who are members of Club Fish because you have already had your priority booking time but to everyone else the tickets will be available on Friday the 12th of May at 2pm UK time. That is today if you're listening to the show the day it goes out or it's a Friday in the past if you're not. So the tickets are very likely to be available right now and the way you get those is to go to www.NoSuchThingAsAFish.com forward slash soho. The shows will be at the

Soho Theatre in London. They take place from the 17th of July to the 21st of August. It's going to be a whole lot of fun, loads of facts, loads of dorkiness, loads of special special guests and as I said if you want tickets for that you can go to www.NoSuchThingAsAFish.com forward slash soho. If you're thinking it's in London I can't get to there I live all the way in Belgium then fear not because we also will be doing one show in Belgium at the Nerdland Festival. That will be with our old friend Leven Skyra and that will take place Zondag the 28th of May which luckily I mean my I assume that's Flemish it's not that good but luckily my diary tells me it will be on Sunday the 28th of May and tickets for that are available at nerdlandfestival.be

so I hope to see lots of you at some of those gigs but as far as today's podcast is concerned it is a live show and it was one that we did at the British Library with the incredible comedy actor and genius that is Sally Phillips. We did this show for the Fantastic Beasts exhibition at the British Library they wanted us to do a show all about animals and I'll be honest we stretched that a fair bit from time to time but we had so much fun I really hope you enjoy this show I'm sure you will and I guess what else is there to say apart from on with the podcast hello and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the British Library my name is Dan Schreiber I am sitting here with

James Harkin Andrew Hunter Murray and Sally Phillips and once again we yes 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 and that is my fact my fact this week is that the British Library's Fantastic Beasts collection originally included accounts of a nine-foot dragon terrorizing Essex and an army of horses that teleported to rural Wales and it was donated by the founder of the British Museum Sir Hans Sloane wow so he was a nutcase so here's the thing right he's uh Hans Sloane if you don't know who he is he was one of the founders of the British Museum an incredible guy he was a doctor and at the top

of being a doctor he was obsessed with collecting he collected everything and that's what became the basis of the British Museum's collection he was a hoarder he was a hoarder yeah I mean he was a serious hoarder he had he had like a separate apartment to hoard in because it got too much in his own um yeah and how did he die did it all collapse on him yes exactly a museum pillar took him out um no he um he was quite old I think when he died I think he was in his 90s 93 93 is this the bringer of chocolate the man I know is the bringer of the hot chocolate to the United Kingdom controversial yeah he was um and I think I think it's been claimed that uh that was uh something he nicked it was ready in place yeah I think he was in Jamaica maybe early yeah okay and then it was

a practice day sort of a grated cocoa with milk and cinnamon and stuff but I think he probably sorry to shit on him in his own home but um the teleporting horse is better anyway it's way better isn't it yeah so this is what I was about to say was is all the collections that got handed over after he passed away in his will to be the basis of the British Museum's collection eventually became the British Library's collection as well and there was lots of papers there was lots of physical objects and a part of it was a collection of things called strange news he was obsessed with strange news stories that would come out from France and Scotland and Wales of odd things that you know like um well like dragons like dragons yeah appearing horses in the middle of it was the artifact

version of no such thing as a fish yes well he's the yeah he's the old me I guess um you have fewer links to the slave trade we should say Dan just fewer fewer um yeah so this um this big dragon that arrived in Essex um it was in a place called Hennem which is just north of Stanstead it's about two miles north of Stanstead and so what I like to imagine is actually there was like a time travel portal that came in and it was actually an easy jet flight maybe I don't know but there's loads of other things that he he claimed and the thing is he went out to collect things from around the world but the reason he did that is because he thought it would help people to better understand God's design of the world and so when he was finding this strange news a lot of the things he

didn't believe in but there were some things that he did so he found a story from France where fist-sized hailstones came down and kind of batted everything and hurt a lot of people and killed a lot of crops but the only thing that was saved was a Protestant church yeah he thought that this was proof that you know God was saving them yeah this this one's amazing there was a story this is from Scotland there was a guy who died and he was in his home they laid him to in state is it in state what is it when you lay someone sure yeah sure so he's laid in the house he's in a coffin for people to come and see oh like an open coffin like a way yeah yeah at state is pretty fancy it's pretty queenish isn't it yeah that's yeah yeah you just said this guy was this the king

of Scotland was it how long was the queue is what it was just a guy and um it was a town of Dumfries okay yeah so apparently people went to visit him and then it came the time where okay let's bury him now and they tried to lift him and no one could lift him he was really heavy they just they tried everything so they brought cattle in and they tied ropes around him and tried to pull him and he didn't move and then the house burnt down and he remained as the only thing that was still there wow he's like Arthur's sword in the stone he's he's the guy in the house yeah the corpse in the house sorry so he he collected this story if you didn't collect the guy no you can't collect the guy it's the point of the story so he had straight were these kept in diary form or like

what kind of evidence were they these were like weird pamphlets that used to get produced and so people would go and buy them on the street and it would just say strange news from Scotland so he's 1660s yeah yes he was really early oh yeah yeah yeah yeah we we should say that i know we we don't need to say none of the stuff is true that we're described as in we keep we keep saying apparently and then describing things which people thought it was some people thought it was yeah that's true i'm just saying if in like 400 years they're discussing a copy of the daily star and saying apparently there was a there is an infinitely heavy man i think i remember that headline yeah i did i actually weirdly i found a star headline in the course of recent because i

was researching animals which are not proven to exist yes and there was a headline in the daily star in 2008 Loch Ness monster dies aged three million that's a shame i know oh that's completely overwhelming very sad yeah yeah it's interesting the whole thing of fictional fictional creatures and cryptids i did italian dante there were a lot of fictional creatures the phoenixes in in dante at only incense and cardamom pods in heaven cardamom pods what's that it's that bit of a curry that you see and you're like oh they've left it in oh wow no it's the thing in the in the in the jazz version of a cinnamon bun right yeah there were three types of phoenixes three types of yetis yeah you found a yeti that i've never heard of

which is what was it called it was uh yeah there's three types the nyelmo which is black has black fur and is the largest in the fetus which is 15 foot tall the tuti which is eight feet tall and lives 8 000 to 10 000 feet above sea level and the rangshin bombo which is only three to five feet tall and i think must have been just the mistaken it's an orangutan or some kind of a boom yeah the first one sounds like a gorilla rangshin bombo yeah it does it does a bit yeah yeah the first one you're describing is a black fur quite tall yeah it's interesting the abominable snowman i mean they had some fur didn't they that they kept they various times over history they would analyze the dna of yeah and occasionally find it to be a horse or yeah or a or a bear or a they now think

it is a kind of bear hybrid thing don't they how do they i think say that's interesting yeah also um i i've i've studied this a lot actually Sally um and um i'm trying to find the thing you haven't studied a lot that's everything else i can't believe we've had on the one thing i've studied this is the dream come true but um brine blessed who is a very yeti that's what he would say he would go for the yeti looking for the yeti and then the locals that he would meet in the himalayas would say oh it's a yeti and he realized that all the stories are him it's him i read about quite recently in Nepal they had like these um i think they were models or badges or some kind of publicity of the of the yeti and they sent them out and then all the locals were like well the

yeti looks nothing like that what are you doing because he didn't have any fur on and the guy who did it said well no one knows what it looks like anyway so that's one thing and number two fur is actually really difficult to draw so kinkong for example yeah not a cryptid i know a fictional character character yeah a crowbar is what no we're talking about large hairy okay yeah fellas and kinkong is is all of these three things um but kinkong was originally based on a lizard wasn't yeah oh godzilla no i think godzilla's a bit later kinkong was based on the komodo dragon really yeah really there was a so the filmmaker behind kinkong was uh merian merian c cooper and he was friends with an explorer called william burton who had had got permission to

collect some komodo dragons from the dutch east indies as they were then now indonesia and um until 1910 nobody nobody from the west had seen a komodo dragon so they were cryptids they weren't believed in they had not been sighted spotted hunted brought back well no specimens and one was brought back by william burton to the usa and in the course of the expedition his wife was nearly eaten by eaten by a komodo dragon what really and and yeah she she was she finished a sort of setting a uh you know a photography you know like a photo trap up or something for it and was going back and came face to face with one and you know had a lucky escape wow and so that image of this kind of glamorous woman faced with a terrifying beast when william burton brought back the sample that he

got of a komodo dragon merian c cooper saw it and thought what if it was a monkey and and that and that but i mean because gorillas were also new in the usa at the time how old was how old was his wife oh i don't know because there is a thing when you sort of hit menopause your your maternal instinct goes really into overdrive and you start wanting to mother beautiful primates and yeah lots of women get into trouble that way animals and show business as a marriage made in hell we had an animal agent who came on to smack the pony quite a lot jackie she had quite a lot of represented a lot of animals that would come occasionally with need and she had a vietnamese potbellied pig on her business card i went oh he's so cute you know peri menopause starting so cute and do you

still have him she went no he won't bring in any work so we hurt him wow i hope she said that in earshot of all the other animals you better do your job yeah it was terrible apparently the hardest animals to train are owls they just don't get it apparently it's really interesting you think that an owl would be smart yeah no dumb cannot repeat ravens are the dogs of the of the sky penguins are aggressive bit of a nightmare um and they have explosive poo do you know this who right penguins who explodes so very difficult to no no no no as you mean um the poo shoots out it doesn't they don't lay it and then it just explodes imagine if dogs did that yeah every time you've been walking through the park it'll be like walking through world war one wouldn't it

be like the end of blackout don't take your foot off it don't take your foot off it yeah they have lots of animals obviously playing each part the um the kestrel in cares was played do you know this you prudy played by three different kestrels called freeman hardy and willis after after the shoe shop that's amazing yeah i presented the palm dog award for best came i the palm dog palm dog if there is you know in can the can film festival yeah yeah some british journalist 22 years ago now set up the palm dog rather than the palm door for the best canine performance and i was lucky enough to present the award with runny and kona to quentin terentino on behalf of the dog in once upon a time in hollywood played by three three

dogs two male dogs and one crossbeast stills yeah yeah so the dogs don't get to come to the ceremony or well they didn't the dog didn't come to them no they found a similar breed and they brought that dog in dog didn't know what was happening oh god they ate the first dog didn't they quentin urinated on the carpet it was it was fine but yeah yeah so you have you have several and they use different animals so he was saying quent my quentin quent quenty quent tar with my brother tried to license his image to be on lunchboxes i don't know why but anyway well hang on we need to follow but he said they have three different dogs one girl and two boys and on the day he thought the two male dogs were better but then turned out the female dog was actually when

he got into the edit he realized she was a much better actress sorry your brother tried to tried to license quentin terentino's image famously a man who makes 18 certificate films yes for lunch boxes what was he thinking the market i i didn't ask it was only like a long time after he told me that that i realized that that was mad tarantino's up there he's accepting an award it's like a brand you know that image of him like the shea guvara tarantino picture i think they were putting that on stuff oh okay is that a famous picture the shea guvara tarantino do you know the one i mean that because i don't you okay so i feel like there's a very sort of known i don't know if you remember dan knows everything about yeti's it's nothing about anything else do you

know i just just going back to mythological creatures a second the um speaking of penguins exploding um poo out their buns there's a mythological creature called smooth by the way smooth thank you there's a thing called the bonnican you heard of the bonnican bonnican's like a it's it's like this beast which is like a half horse it's got curved horns and the way that it would if it was being hunted by humans the way that it would deter the humans is to fire poisonous shit out of its bum right but it can it can make a distance and this is what's most impressive about this thing that doesn't exist um thank you is it can shoot at three acres that's um a unit of area area not distance yeah yeah yeah so does he cover the entire like

one and a half football pitch i think it does cover three i've also read about the bonnican interestingly brian blessed told me he could do that he could do that when he was on everest four acres yeah he said when he said he had a bout of diarrhea on everest and the poo shot out and it he said his thing he often says is don't camp under the french because the fuckers will shit on you that's that's his like that's like a t-shirt quote from him but again who's buying these obscene t-shirts and lunchboxes yeah i need to meet your brother actually um so anyway the bonnican the bonnican is a um is a terrifying creature with three acre poisonous poo shoots and everyone that's depicted trying to hunt it all faces the other way

basically facing as as ready to run because they want to escape the uh the firing line poisonous poo yeah it's like fighting medusa have you come across i'm sure you have the fictitious creatures of lumberjack culture no it sounds amazing no guys settle in there are a number of books called things like fearsome critters about fictional creatures in lumberjack lore and they're things like um well my favorite one let me take my favorite one there's a splinter cat it's a regular cat but with no logic who's an indiscriminate destroyer of hollow trees which was their explanation for um for for lightning strikes but there is a there was one that was uh the lumberjack hunter that hides behind trees so you can't see it but um can only be

deterred by loads of alcohol so the lumberjacks must be drunk to keep safe that's good that's good logic and we're gonna have to move on we've we've run way over oh no i was reading um some stuff by alien um the roman writer and orator what alien alien alien i'm gonna call him alien alien and he's got loads of amazing creatures he has the buprestis which he believed existed which is a creature which if swallowed by a cow causes the cow to swell and burst um he had a smooth lobster uh where if you saw it on the beach and then you marked where it was and you drove it to anywhere in the world when you got back to where it was it would be back there whoa you sure wasn't teleporting yeah and he said also that um if a snake is eating something that's a

little bit too big for it to swallow and it kind of gets it into the mouth and can't go any further it'll stand straight on its tail and jiggle itself so the food will go down into his stomach amazing have you seen those videos of people hunting anacondas no no they put a leather trouser on oh yeah yeah stick their entire leg into the snake's hole yeah they get swallowed why would you do and then they have a low to catch a snake to i guess you're you're the worm for fishing you're the worm i don't like this yeah and then they put they haul you out and then and then kill the snake and the leather thing is so that the snake doesn't digest so all the juices doesn't digest that maybe the teeth can't go through it or something yeah i think that as well it's just there was a

did you see the guy i think this is right he was attempting to be swallowed by a snake as well um and it was going to be like a world record but what's the what i think i'm right in saying this again this don't even accept you know heaviest cat anymore i think unfortunately don't they no they found an infinitely heavy one in dumfries today but this guy who this was big it was big it was set up it was like with a like a napgeo kind of thing um the snake started swallowing on the wrong end so he went head first and he wasn't ready for it and so they had to pull him out and cancel the did you not have his big leather hat they do it i mean they catch fish like that sometimes in america don't they it's catfish and they'll get the cat to grab hold of their fist and then

when it's bitten they pull it out it's called catfisting is it yeah i'd rather be catfished stop the podcast stop the podcast hey andy hi james hi andy um i'm a bit sick of my old ip address people have been saying it's stale it needs an uplift okay well how am i going to do that well what you could do james is use a vpn or a virtual private network oh what's that well basically it's a way of connecting your pc or your your phone or your tablet whatever it is to another computer somewhere on the internet and it allows you to browse using that computer's internet connection so if that server is in a different country it makes it look as if you are coming from that country so that might help with security it might help with accessing things

you couldn't do normally helps with all sorts of things this sounds amazing but how on earth am i going to get one of these vpns and also how will i be able to get an extra three months for free when i sign up to one all you have to do is go to expressvpn.com forward slash fish that's express expre double s vpn.com forward slash fish and you will be able to get that and get an extra three months for free when you sign up excellent i will straight away go to expressvpn.com slash fish that's expre double s vpn.com slash fish and i've got me extra three months for free and have the best new ip address and be the best new me lovely okay on with the podcast on with the show it is time for fact number two and that is james okay my fact this week is that in real life

the very hungry caterpillar would have gone around headbutting his mates so these days you know all of these children's books are getting rewritten aren't they like charlie of the chocolate factory and whatever and i'm calling for the very hungry caterpillar to be rewritten to be more factually accurate um because according to the people at florida atlantic university whenever caterpillars get really really hungry and they don't have enough food they'll go around looking for other caterpillars and then they'll attack them knock them off where they're eating and then they'll go in and eat their leaf no way yeah and so that's what eric carl really should have been writing about it's a tougher yeah it's a tougher they don't eat ice cream they don't eat lollipops they don't eat

salami they tend to only eat one kind of leaf any caterpillar whatever caterpillar you get this is going to sell big james on monday you got him one fight and he ate one of the same kind of leaf that he's going to eat for the rest of the week they do occasionally they occasionally get a species which will eat fruit so you might get one that would eat an apple but it would only eat apple and it would only eat the same apple and it would live inside the apple it was eating until it was ready i actually would really enjoy that book my partner ian pointed out on the way here that eric carl was conscripted into yeah he fought on the sea freed lion i think it was so yeah he was an american born yeah aged 15 he was conscripted and he had to dig the trenches in my head that's

a bit like a caterpillar to caterpillars dig that's what gave him the idea he was born in germany the family moved to america really soon or he was his early years were in america certainly then the family moved back to germany in 1935 when he was about six years old so at the end of the war he was conscripted to dig trenches and he was fired at he was 15 as well 15 years old yeah and then and then after the war obviously had a horrible time his father was in a prison camp and and had an awful time then the family moved he certainly moved back to america and then he was conscripted a second time to go to to join the us army and to go back to germany again where he was involved in filling in the holes that he dug i actually feel quite bad that i'm shitting on his buck now no no

no no no well i mean is it any wonder that the follow-up book was called the very grumpy lady bird and there's another called polar bear what do you hear i think he wrote he wrote a lot of what do you see what do you hear yeah because yes he's a great artist and yeah yeah also an amazing scheme off the back of this book because there was an eric carl museum that you can go to in america and in the museum everything everything has a hole in it oh sorry well no everything's edible that would be amazing yeah no every so like if you go to the canteen you buy a cookie and the cookie has a massive hole in it like brilliant so this guy is saving so much money in his like there was i remember reading that the new york times when they removed the dot at the end of new york times

that little on the headline they were saving six hundred dollars a year that little bit of ink cost him so much imagine how much that bit of cookie that's missing is what do they do with those little bits of cookie though do they they sell they sell their cookies yeah but imagine how you could ruin that museum by having eric carl's experience of warfare like a room that's yeah that's not the good thing to go in yeah trench digging and trench room yeah so i went onto his website because there is another problem in this book and that is that towards the end the caterpillar goes into a cocoon it becomes a butterfly but butterflies don't go into cocoons butterflies go into chrysalises well caterpillars caterpillars don't go into anything no they come from chrysalises

yeah and so some kids have written into him and said well why have you got a cocoon in your book and he replied saying well there is a rare genus that lives in Siberia North Korea and the northern islands of japan um called panacean which does pupate in a cocoon so he's he was hugely relieved when he found out i said that doesn't what's the difference sorry what's the difference between a chrysalis and a cocoon so a cocoon is made out of silk uh and a chrysalis isn't uh chrysalis is made out of nylon yes but you get quite a lot of moths that make cocoons okay uh another insects but uh butterflies don't uh but he did then say actually you know caterpillars don't eat lollipops either this was just a this was it's a special caterpillar it's allowed to do what it wants yeah all right

it's children's book grow up and then another kid wrote in saying caterpillars don't have noses oh get starved just i mean just you know and he said i know it hasn't nose on its face but this feature grew out of my imagination don't have shoes either caterpillars i read an anecdote about him which i i'm only bringing it up because i didn't understand it so i'm hoping that maybe you guys will um so he said that his he wrote all these books as you were saying where it was sort of like the next kind of so the very busy spider the very quiet cricket and in an interview he says that um he found himself in the changing rooms after swimming and a satirical young fan suggested a book entitled the very slow penis to the author's great amusement and i can't work out what's funny about

that what's a slow penis ask your wife does it also have a hole going through it this book i just can't work out what a slow penis is yeah anyway there's a slow loris well you've you've stopped us all dead thank you you had no such thing on twitter if you want to let us know it got their hairs right anyway butterflies and moths i discovered have nearly 10 billion hairs on them 10 billion because these scientists have spent over a decade studying the surface area of animals i mean that's such a funny thing i think let's say a cat surface area is actually like a ping pong table when you cover your ping pong table in cat the ball doesn't bounce nearly as well see otter has the surface area of a professional hockey rink because they because

they've got is it they have so many hair so many different hairs brilliant and a honeybee has the same number of hairs as a squirrel really wow i know yeah the georgie institute of technology just astonishing that's amazing what do we do with that yeah they were running calculations to find the true surface area of animals and because they were trying to work out ways of keeping things clean so dogs obviously shake or every animal has a different way of keeping clean and sometimes the fur helps them to stay clean sometimes it doesn't it's where you must never shave a dog i'm sure you haven't but don't shave a dog even a really furry one it's not good for it are you still have a challenge they don't get a number one yeah you shouldn't do that that's bad that's

what that's what were you told the chow chow needs to go and have a number one did you go down to the hairdressers and say short as you can mate yeah and watch out for the number twos they will explode on on the idea of james this whole thing that you have about the uh the incorrect facts about children's books here's one thing that i this feels like a very qi thing so i'm sure a lot of people already know this i didn't though a lot of kids books when there's a whale uh let's say a blue whale or any kind of well that's surfacing there's always this beautiful spout of water that's coming out and there's yeah that's yeah they don't do that what i feel like i've seen that in real life is that uh you have oh what go on go on the riddler

uh but his horse was cold thursday yeah yeah now the doctor was his mum that's the if you see if you see any kind of thing where it's a whale with a huge yeah like yeah the water coming out spout of water spout of water that is basically according to experts that's that is what would happen if a whale is drowning oh they don't spout water out of their blowhole that's their nostril that's their breathing they don't put water out through so they so when you see they do breathe when you see that the breathing is moist air that's just collected inside and that's what's coming out so if you ever see a whale where there's spouts of water is coming down it is drowning so what i've seen i've not seen the drowning whale i've seen like uh water vapor

whale yeah exactly you're seeing water vapor and it gives that misty kind of look like a castle like a cattle exactly but if you see a fountain that's you go save that whale wow yeah so basically what it means is every drawing of a whale in a child's book it's dying very upsetting is a dying whale that's very upsetting it is time for fact number three and that is andy my fact is that the false gecko which has the latin name sudo gecko is a gecko there are 10 species of false gecko they're all geckos not one of them is not a gecko and that is just a name it's just a really really bad name yeah i couldn't find why they're called false geckos i think maybe they were found and assumed to be something different

yeah yeah uh yeah but geckos are wonderful um there are geckos that don't have legs that look like snakes i would have thought that would have been the false gecko yeah yeah yeah there are there are six families of geckos with no legs they're all endemic to australia and ugini right brilliant and they've got the vestigial hind limbs apparently they look a tiny bit like flaps yeah the yeah that you can see these little bumps that come out but and that yeah means it's a lizard yeah um no eyelids either no almost every gecko has no there are 1500 species of gecko and all bar 43 have no eyelids yeah and the u blepharidae which literally means good eyelids in ancient greek they have eyelids but even they also lick their eyes like all the other geckos do

to moisten them despite having eyelids right amazing that's cool have you heard of the fuck you lizard no this is this is a lizard which it's it's not its official name that's not the the scientific name but um it was it was a lizard that uh when americans were over in vietnam during the war they kept noticing that they just kept they just kept hearing a little voice going fuck you and they're like who what is going on and they'd be walking up fuck you and and so they all discovered that it's just this lizard that just makes an order come on fuck you and so it became known as yeah the fuck you lizard why do we not all have one of those yeah the noises i was surprised that gecko noises so that they bark well they're the only lizard that makes a noise geckos oh are

they yeah that's because if you think what noises a lizard make you wouldn't it was but that that's sort of it sounds more like a sort of electric buzzer ring doesn't it sally do you think a gecko could ever win the palm dog no no fuck you but we covered a few years ago i think we covered the hero dog of the year and a few years ago it was won by a cat i presented hero dog of the year i don't know if it was last year or the year before not this year but anyway quite recently and this is going to sound a bit mean now but one of the finalist dogs okay this is just my problem it's a finalist dog and it wasn't a chihuahua but it was similar it was very very small and um his owner slash mommy whatever you prefer to call it said that the dog had saved her partner's

life by giving him um CPR that's she's got home and her husband is kissing the dog that's what's happened there the dog was very very small very small i don't know why the dog was trained in CPR but anyway it's all a bit of a problem for me having to just silence the questions in my brain that kept coming well because there's so many stages you've got to lay the head back a bit you've got to you just want to go you're shitting me right yeah was that was that the oh it was one of the finalists didn't win didn't win didn't win well who the fuck are you of that as a dog when it's amazing there were these water dogs that who did open heart surgery yeah yeah it's a dog with SpaceX in mission control hey animals have done some amazing things they have before we move on

from geckos though did you know that in january last year german handscurt cubus was caught at christchurch airport new zealand with 44 geckos concealed in his pants they were doing a small incision and he's just walking through immigration he's there's a massive market in gecko smuggling really and new zealand's gecko because they're diurnal like most geckos are nocturnal right new zealand gecko is is diurnal very very pretty and they can go for about 22 000 dollars so there's a massive diurnal sorry diurnal oh i've got is that the wrong word no no no it is just the wait of the day you you're diurnal i'm diurnal yeah is that the right word yeah yeah yeah don't question yourself sally question yeah i'm sorry you'll get you to this tell me more about yeti's

my ignorance uh questions no dad do you want to know cool so diurnal awake in the day yeah nocturnal awake at night yeah for a puscular dusky yeah i know that dawn and dusk what happened to the diurnal bit of the word why did they lose that i don't know latin in it uh speaking of latin i was reading about alien the roman writer and he said yeah he said that if a dead gecko lands in your wine then it's fine but okay if it lands in your olive oil it will taste terrible and when you eat it it will immediately give you lice wow okay right they've got lots of symbolic there's lots of superstition around geckos and lizards aren't there if you find a lizard tail in your left shoe it is very lucky do not take it out is that real that's what that's a real one that's

just the current day one just the tail yeah because obviously their tails come off and they can regrow them yeah do you know starfish though can regrow if you take its leg off it can regrow a whole starfish from the leg that's nuts like that's crazy that's crazy though what do they have what do they have um they store all the nutrients in the leg until they can grow a mouse does have a brain or intelligence or any kind of thing i don't know probably doesn't know it's a starfish is the truth yeah but they you know they have neurons yeah yeah can i tell you about a guy called ben bar he was looking for a particular gecko called the capola gecko uh which was spotted for the first time in 1968 and then once again in 2007 and that was it yeah no specimen had ever

been observed or collected apart from those two occasions no one knew if it was still uh existing you know or alive or teleporting horse exactly yeah and he led three trips to search for it and basically the process of searching for this capola gecko is just to turn over rocks he spent two years turning over rocks leaving no stone unturned he left no stone unturned he didn't even know for sure what it looked like because not exactly not exactly and uh no scientist had ever held one in the hand and after two years and three expeditions he found one hey he said he was so excited he said it was very similar to having a baby the euphoria and if he bought the movie rights it's just lovely yeah and he found four he found four on the same expedition that's i imagine under the same rock

but still it's just yeah imagine that determination to keep on it's like your um surface area measuring scientists yeah you do admire it yeah i got addicted to watching conservation tv at one point like the presentations of all the scientists because it's all the conservation scientists zoologists i guess they're called um because they there was it was so funny like the argentinian wolf man he had long long hair and it really appeared to be having an affair with the uh british cheetah lady and and there was a there was this really adorable couple i think from chili from chile who had been looking for the onion wildcat oh he spent to it and they said we have not ever seen the onion wildcat they spent five years and they showed all these photos of land

driver in different places where they had looked for the onion wildcat and not seen it and they were so charming and like oh well it's been interesting don't even but we think that is wildcat we think this is a wildcat poop or whatever they say stool and then they went off and then this really arrogant tool american thin american guy came in from the rare wildcat conservation society and he went wildcat wildcat and he just had 50 slides of wildcats oh yeah wait were you presenting him with an award no i just i was just depressed i was in bed watching them on youtube you know i became very interested in the the women who run sloth sanctuaries oh yeah because they seem to have absolutely no zoological training whatsoever

i know nothing about sloth so there's one woman who's going all sloth orphanage in costa rica she's gone on a cruise with her husband and her baby sloth had fallen out of a tree and she'd known right then she needed to abandon her life in the states and started sloth orphanage which she did and the problem she had she has to stop them having sex with each other she didn't have room for any more and people get bringing them so they were kept strictly segregated and that's a slow penis that is a slow penis there we go yes very nice that is a slow penis but one of them got manged and she just shaved that shaved it and she didn't know whether this is right and she shaved them and she she she didn't shave a sloth i'm sure and there's a phd student and i ended up watching

this you know sub documentary series about them and getting absolutely obsessed was a phd student there called becky who is who's do you remember the one i think we've mentioned becky on the podcast but yeah excitedly like you know she hasn't been a weekend get her though but i mean you're like oh jeez it was really it was really i think i feel she was northern i feel she was northern she was quite lethargic herself okay she said i couldn't decide what to do for my phd and i went to see my tutor and i said i can't decide between jaguar and sloths and he said what about sloths so here i am and then the cheetah lady went past went yeah that's really good have you seen the video where a sloth mistaken its own arm for a tree branch and then can't do anything about it

because it's so slow it just falls from the tree they can be quite fast they can't they there's the ones that can swim they swim really fast they swim really fast if you put them in a fast current they're just drunk aren't they there's leaves that they that's just drugs isn't it for them that they only eat one i did think about writing a film about this sloth sanctuary which is why and um obviously you can get the sloths out of Costa Rica their agents will never get back to you that's the problem with the sloth you can't can't transport them i was reading about a woman who runs a hospital for hawaiian monk seals and i read about her this is amazing yeah amazing yeah so she um she runs this this monk seal place and she was out and she was you know getting lunch

or something like that and she gets a missed call and or like she gets a call on her phone she picks it up no one's there what's going on um happens nine times while she's out and she's called she's called like the phone people she's like is there like anything wrong with the line it looks all fine gets back to the hospital and she looks and on the phone is a little gecko just pressing its finger on the call button and it's calling her and that was it she was getting calling loads of other people as well yeah it called it made a the newspaper said a bazillion phone calls that was the official number yeah well yeah just a little gecko feed can i do a quick quiz before we move on yes we do need to know yes um so this was a weirdly named animal pseudo gecko is it a gecko is it not um

i've got some more like this so the coffin fish can the coffin fish cough ah is it a quiz or are you tricking us with pronunciation does it live i'd say it does float in a coffin it does float it's coffin fish like a coffin but can it cough i'll say no it can't i don't think fish well you're wrong oh um fish can expel air through their gills if things get stuck in there and we call that coughing that's a cough um can the swallowtail butterfly swallow its own tail yes no i'm gonna say no no obviously not um but the only fact i know about it is it has an eye on its penis so it can see where it's going crumbs really that is not true it is true the swallowtail the swallowtail butterfly but oh butterfly yeah oh yeah it's fine it's a butterfly i was thinking

it's a swallow you've read the very hungry caterpillar that's the final scene and finally does the bloody nose beetle often have a bloody nose i'll say yes andy i've told you insects don't have noses oh please listen oh i fell right into it no it expels blood from its mouth and that's why it's called that it expels blood from its mouth um we're gonna need to move on to our final fact of the show can't bear it the show or no no right with you i feel yeah i want to talk about the penguin who got a knighthood and i want to talk about the welsh corgi he's got a phd okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is sally the band the super furry animals do you see what i did there wore yeti costumes for a year and they said it really changed their

personalities becoming much hairier changed how they performed what was the surface area so i don't know much i don't know much about the super furry animals well you know to be honest until yesterday but the welsh welsh wrong yes no they're right the centerpiece of the cool kumry uh you know welsh resurgence with gorky's zygotic minky i'm gonna say that wrong is that that's correct isn't it you're a super fan they want you i am a super very fan i love gorky's zygotic monkey as well you're wearing a t-shirt you're wearing a t-shirt right now yeah they are very very cool they did loads of like yeah they did loads of crazy stuff they had lots of like costumes and all that kind of stuff yeah they bought a they bought a tank and drove it into the

national istedford uh wow they bought it for 10 000 pounds from a one-eyed arms dealer with a limp and then they sold it on to don henley from the eagles really extraordinary like a real arms dealing band circuit it wasn't the only um contact they had with arms dealers either they because they sampled lots of sounds and they and they got some real guns but what's with the yeti thing so the yeti thing they um well they'd experimented on the the album before they had some uh snow monsters on stage in glastonbury during the northern lights song they were members of mogwai do you know all of this mogwai yeah no that bit and unfortunately mogwai just dropped an e before putting the very hot suits on and it became quite dangerous so they had to have people running around

giving them um giving them water but they they were really into different kinds of creatures and then they they came across a sculptor called peter gray who made loads of sculptures out of hair and he suggested just making these these yeti costumes for them for a video for the video for golden retriever and they they thought this was brilliant and peter gray said i'll tell you where it needs to be you need to shoot this on a glacier in iceland next to a giant fire which all the yetis are worshiping but they'd recently signed with sony who said that was an uninsurable concept so they did it in a studio in north london it sort of looks like the yetis are playing inside a cardboard box which is being sniffed at and then urinated on by a dog um but it's really really

cool so how did it change the personality it changed the personality so they said they're none of them exhibitionists really they you know they're quite political and love music very creative and you know non-conformist and and the rest of it they they released a welsh entirely welsh language lp and then only told it in america and australia for example yeah it went to top went into the top 20 yeah but um they said that it was like being transformed they said none of them were exhibitionists in reality it's an actual quote but we were able to put these costumes on and become 70s rock monsters and it drove the audience nuts um so they they really it's kind of interesting the impact of hair hairiness or hairlessness no i think it's incredible power

i think it's a costume fit so my my son's fifth birthday was um last year late last year and i dressed up as mr potato head and i honestly felt did you buy that or make it i bought it from yeah i bought it online i saw i saw it it was it was did it inflate itself was it one of those it was like a brown big piece of fabric and then you could stick on the eyes and the ears and stuff like that it's do you know it it was a hit andy despite you uh i'm saying i'm saying it was good we've lent it out to multiple parents ever since have you parties yeah we haven't even got it at the moment but here's the thing the confidence it gave me because it was with the audience of five year olds who would have worshiped you anyway no i honestly like really yeah it really i felt like

a superhero it was amazing that's interesting and i went up because it was school had just started my son was going to a new school we knew no one so i went up to all the parents i would never do that went up to all of them hey what's up so you went to school not the school gates this is a no no this is the party i'm mr potato what i'm just trying to say is i don't think it's the hair necessarily i think yeah you must know this is an actor when you have a different persona that suddenly comes over you there's a weird confidence that makes you a bit unstoppable in a way i was i can go it could go both ways i'm thinking i really very vivid memories of it going the other way okay i mean i mean what i suppose one yes i do i do know what you mean it's weird when you play a bride in a film

people on set treat you as if you're getting married even though they know your acting we all know your actor you get treated people open doors and they smile at you and go oh it's interesting isn't it yeah there is a thing with autistic kids where if you put them in a mask you can not all and you can't generalize but lots of people have found that theater can really help people who are very introverted to speak well that's really interesting just on topic so what they were doing there they were dressing as yetis it's not being a furry but that's a lot of people dress up as furries right i think we should say what a what a furry is for those i mean yeah so a furry is someone who feels more comfortable when they're wearing a costume that has been designed

where it's an animal i think a furry is just someone who's a fan of the culture of you know anthropomorphic animals and some of them do like to work exactly sorry yeah they're very keen they feel they get a bad press and over 60 percent of furries feel that they are bullied and get negative people have negative concepts weird things only around 25 percent of all furries own a suit yeah really yeah so i don't know how you classify yourself as a furry if you well i guess you the you go to the cons and you you like like what you're eating in your home clothes yeah not in a suit i thought it was all about the suit so did i that we're wrong maybe you can't afford it but on the point of autism there was one of these cons that had an autism panel with furries and

there was a lady there who said that um it really helps if you're autistic so she said for three days i am not autistic for three days i am a giant anthropomorphic version of the titanic and she feels it helps break the ice the first furry convention the first furry convention was almost all people in normal clothes uh or in human clothes and you can still see videos of it online it was in uh holiday in in california uh and there's basically only one person who dresses up in a costume it was a guy called robert hill who came dressed as a giant smm deer called hilda the bambioid crikey i know and but it's amazing and they chose that place because it's so close to disneyland

and they thought that everyone who's kind of into anthropomorphic animals would also be into disneyland and they went there and they you know there's if you go online you can see like the history of all these conferences that they've had um called conference uh and the first time they had a problem with the hotel was in 1994 and the problem was the hotel too many too many all all the bathrooms got clogged drains that was the problem that was the only problem yeah yeah yeah and the breakfast buffet was no um apparently it was too big the hotel so they couldn't fill it up with just their people so there was a lot of other people there as well okay and you know they weren't so understanding and there was lots of complaints uh and then a maid found a costume

in a room by a person who had a costume of veteran of the psychotic wars and it was a unicorn who carried a big sort of cartoon cherry bomb so they they would have like this big sort of black bomb shape like you would have it with like the the wick coming out yeah exactly what is going on they found this the the maid found this costume in the room right and they called the bomb squad because there was a bomb in the room but a cartoon bomb a cartoon bomb although what's the best place to hide a bomb i guess so but the um the bomb squad didn't see it the right way and they find the hotel for making a prank call so when the bomb squad came and they saw it was just cherry bomb and there was a unicorn costume next to us they're like you're wasting our time and they find them

and they never were allowed to go back to that hotel again okay i don't think anyone's favourite will be there what what about this guy's just he's just got a costume it's not his fault yeah i guess they i did it did amuse me that quote in the article we'd probably both read where um they said most furries it's not an erotic thing it just gets too hot yeah right the other astonishing fact was that there's 10 000 people in the uk who live as dogs uh uh that's what it said on google living as maybe not living as dogs maybe like dogs have a very broad spectrum of wanting to be referred to you will dress up as dogs or have handlers and that seemed to be a different kind of outfit that seems to be a kind of it's a lot seem to be a kind of white unitard with little

spots right feels like you might have read live on the isle of dogs i go for a walk every day yeah you know am i one of your 10 000 just so people would spectrum of dogs though like well some dogs some dogs live in the house some dogs might live in a kennel some dogs are pampered house dogs there is a bdsm thing of pups being a pup yeah yeah i mean you've got you've got you say yeah yeah yeah i did i did not i did not know that i said yeah yeah to kind of cross over it rather than rather than to fully endorse um but you know dogs divide into hound pooch and mutt don't they those are the three do they yeah yeah yeah yeah those are the three broad categories of dog is the broad category of dog that you can choose to dress up as

but like if you see a dog normally you'll know within a second whether it's a hound a pooch or a mutt unless it's a labrador in which case it's just a dog the lab the labrador is the kind of classic dog does no one else play hound pooch or mutt no strawberry can you get andy an introduction to hero dog of the year i think i could qualify i do i do um just on dressing up as as animals um so a lot of people who have to dress as animals a lot and not just sort of for relaxation for their work are zookeepers there's a brilliant photo from 2004 of some there's a japanese party of school children they're all about i'd say four or five years old and they are being approached by a life-size rhinoceros which is a pantomime rhinoceros with two zookeepers in it front and back which are

basically charging the school children the teachers have to get the children away from the rhino it looks genuinely terrifying but is it what how realistic is the costume it's pretty good is it if i was five i would be very nervous yeah well i i don't think so because i once did a i once did a kid's show i mean a long time ago did a kid's show with sue perkins in fact and called lucy and the dinosaurs and a friend of ours was playing a tyrannosaurus rex and uh ben moore do you know ben moore yeah ben moore was a tyrannosaurus rex he had a big costume and sue perkins very irresponsibly said to the kids hey let's beat up tyrannosaurus rex and the stage was stormed with upwards of 55 year olds we're just kicking the living daylights out of ben moore who looks

you know like a early mr mussel mr mussel's got musly recently have you noticed that but anyway mr mussel used to be in the advert but anyway and ben was just in the recovery position sort of crying shaking you get them off well i've been beaten up in a chicken costume by alan davis on qi you have yeah yeah beaten up by who by alan davis oh yeah actually properly i think he was taken out a lot of frustration from the previous 10 years yeah but yeah i was in a costume and he decided as a joke i think was this during the show are you guys in a hotel room it was for a christmas special of qi and the thing is because the the kind of slot that you look through is quite small and it's a big sort of costume the one that i had and i assume it was the

same it very easily goes in the wrong place and suddenly you can't see anything yeah and it's boiling hot you're sweating and everything and all you can do is go fetal it's like literally the only thing and you did on set that were like while filming it was incredibly people had to talk you down i once got i once got asked if i wanted to be an alien in a film was that the robin orata i've got the look uh no it was a i was playing basically that i would have been playing the beast that sort of landed in a meteorite and then that's crashed and then but the guy my friend who was casting the film said you will just have to lie in a field in a rubber suit for a week and and i said no and i regret it now i bet i wish i'd done it now what was the movie i don't know

so apparently the just going back to furries a second the conventions are a nightmare for exactly the reason that you were saying about everyone's too hot yeah everyone's too hot they can't see anything so anyone who's in a costume is just bumping into each other you're the article says inevitably gonna smack a child in the head because your arms are just you know whapping about you can't see them at the level you got a big tail sorry got a big tail maybe oh yeah i was just trying to help i was trying to contribute to the was it was it going that badly hey by the way we are going to have to wrap up really soon we've gone really far over the whole like um yeah i've only just started can i give you some um furry vocab and see if you can guess

what they mean oh cool yeah yeah um so what do you think is a furry tan furry tan f-u-r-i-t-a-n furry tan oh a puritan but someone who is like a puritan it's someone who only wears the costume it's a furry fan who is not interested in any sexual content that's really good yeah puritan yeah um to scratch do you know what to scratch means oh oh you can't scratch yourself through the fur oh that's good what you do i don't know it's not that but it is to do is scratching it's to scratch someone gently often as a friendly gesture or greeting just do a little don't do that uh can you guess what a fur pile is is that where they all is that like a fun yeah a bundle they all just a carpet is like a carpet you would say it has a shag pile so is it broadly similar

it's pretty much that it's a gathering of fully costume participants who roll around on the floor scratching each other scratching got quite sexy all of a sudden the other thing is that Andy mentioned tails earlier yeah and there could be an idea in the future that maybe we give maybe give all old people tails for balance for balance you're good at this game um yeah the idea is you get like these sort of mechanical tails and you put them on old people and they can tell if an old person with their consentant and support just stop them falling over is it yeah so the tail can tell when they're about to fall over and it can move itself so it'll give them more balance it'll stop people from falling over i think that's brilliant open with a dr octopus yeah it's just

completely terrifying i think we should give them gecko feet instead because you don't want to come ground that what you doing up there that's one of the reasons there's such a trade in geckos apparently is they're being uh studied for the space program did you read that what they're because they're feet because they're so feet can stick to anything except teflon oh you can see gecko feet will stick to absolutely anything at all except dry teflon it's all right if it's wet but isn't teflon what we largely use in space though yeah so it's a problem because the kling ability we've made you exactly as good as a gecko get onto that space station yeah well they did this experiment where they got a load of geckos and they

stuck them on stuff and then they euthanized them all and then they put them back up and they stayed exactly the same stuck dead as alive so wow on that note that's always good to go out on a big laugh that is it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our twitter accounts i'm on at schreiberland andy at andrew hunter m james at james harkin and sally i've just given it up i know yeah but you're on instagram though i am on instagram i think i'm sally smack on instagram sally smack okay smack the pony and uh yeah we are also on um twitter as a group as no such thing or you can email us at podcast at qi.com or go to our website no such

thing as a fish.com all of our previous episodes are up there thank you so much for joining us tonight sally thank you so much for being here so much happening it's been awesome and we'll see everyone but okay all right yeah um thanks. Goodbye!