No Such Thing As A Fish - 48: No Such Thing As A Pokemon-Playing Goldfish

Episode Date: February 21, 2015

Episode 48 - No Such Thing As A Pokemon-Playing Goldfish by The QI Elves

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting with James Harkin, Andy Murray, Ann Miller, and a special guest today is Victoria Corrin Mitchell, who joins us because our three Elves have been on Only Connect, battling it out in the big competition. They've got their quarterfinal match coming up this Monday, the 23rd of February, and so we thought we'd get Victoria in to reveal how little she knows about the Elves possible

exit from the series. I understand. Don't worry. It cuts both ways. You can laugh at what I don't know. Yeah, okay. So, once again, we have gathered round with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go, starting with Victoria.

My fact is that the actor Charles Hortree hoarded bedsteads in his house thinking that one day he would make his fortune from them. That's so good. So, okay, Charles Hortree, massive British comedy actor, carry-on films, that was a big thing for him. Charles Hortree was particularly known for the carry-on films. I don't know if he ever did anything else. He had a very particular acting style.

Let's just say it was good news for him that the carry-on films came along, because even though he was wonderful, an extremely talented, very funny man, I don't know if people clamored to see his Hamlet. He and Clint Eastwood weren't vying. They're the same roles, but if people have seen the carry-on films, yes, he's the sort of slender camp fellow in the glasses. I wonder if he thought they were they really expensive bed poles, do we think, or what? Well, how the collection started, I mean, I like to think maybe he one day accidentally

bought two bedsteads when he used one, I might as well start a collection now, and he's come up with that. I mean, he did like a drink. That is a thing that's known about Charles Hortree. He did, so it's possible that the original bedstead hoarding fortune weas was hatched in a moment of not-entire sobriety. Yes, but you sober up at some point, don't you? Yeah, well, I don't know if he did ever.

No, but probably he sobered up, thought, what am I doing with all these, better have a drink and work out how I'm going to get rid of them, and then he gets drunk, and he thinks, it's fantastic, look at this collection, I need more, maybe that's what it was. Or it's a brilliant idea, so I've got some money, I'll buy a drink, no, I'll buy a bedstead, it's an investment for the future, and I can look at it in my house. Maybe that was a reason, every time I want to have a drink, I won't, I'll buy a bedstead. That was his A.A. meeting plan, yeah. It was a long time ago, I did it.

Step three. He was supposed to be quite miserly, wasn't he, Charles Hortree, I read. Apparently he brought sacks of carrots from Yorkshire to Kent's because they were cheaper to buy in Yorkshire, and then he would bring them all down south. It's not to sell, this was for his own personal use. Just for his own, yeah, to eat, and also he kept his money in the Royal Bank of Scotland because he thought that Scots were more likely to look after his cash carefully. Wow, well had he lived a little longer, he would have been thoroughly disabused of that notion.

It's quite a good, I like to say, miserliness though. Miserliness is quite a good vice. There's something quite sweet and old fashioned and funny about it, of the things that can be wrong with people. I read a sentence about Charles Hortree, which I like so much, so the first half isn't fun, but it picks up a lot. From there, he spiralled into reclusion and paranoid fantasies, buying a cottage on the south coast, and filling it with brass bedsteads and rent-boys, one of whom burnt it down after Hortree wanted to pay by check. You see, now that's where brass bedsteads are a better investment than, for example, first folios of Shakespeare, because if a rent-boy is going to burn your house,

and an act of payment revenge, it's the bedsteads that are going to come out on stage. It's just going to be ashes everywhere and hundreds of bedsteads. He's leaving in the remains, the bedsteads. His checkbook stub must have been amazing, because you have a little stub don't need to write what you've been spending the money on, so you know the end of the month. So he just went, bedstead, bedstead, red-boy, bedstead. He was quite macho though, Charles, there's nothing I've read about him, I don't know very much about him at all. I was just a big fan of him in the films, but he used to get drunken play cards on set. And that does make you think of sort of Oliver Reed or Robert Mitchum or something.

Like a drunken gambling card-playing actor. You don't think of Charles Hortree, you don't think of him sort of sorting out his kind of butterfly collection. But no, so I wonder if his carry-on persona was just completely fabricated. Okay, some stuff on collections and things like that. There's a guy called Chevalier Jackson who collects things that he retrieves from people's throats. See a surgeon. Actually he's dead now, he's an old surgeon. So he has nails and bolts and binoculars and a medallion that says carry me for good luck.

Sorry, binoculars? Like miniature. I thought that could be mini, wouldn't they? Why have you all got old miniature? Oh yes. You're always swallowing. Actually I've never seen a set of binoculars so small that I thought to myself, I could swallow that. I think you get ones that you can fold up as well, can't you? Yes, I don't know.

Just fold up and tuck in your cheek. What was that thing about cheeks and hamsters that you found? Oh, the hamster, they x-rayed a hamster while I was eating, so they stuffed their food into these pouches. Their pouches go all the way back to their hips. So when they shove the food in, they just shove it and shove it in the hamster pouch, goes all the way back to their hips. You know, greedy things. That's extraordinary. Like where their legs are.

Yeah, that's where I assumed they'd be. I think a lot of them have hip bones, I would say. Whales have hip bones, which I'm not sure if we've mentioned on this book. No, I don't think we have. Whales have got hip bones. And also sometimes they'll grow legs like a vestigial leg from the side of the body. Yeah, so we knew they came on land at some point. We didn't like it when back to the sea.

I still can't get my head around that. And then we're like, nah. So this guy's Chevalier Jackson. He says that parents who feed peanuts to children without molars should be hung drawn and quartered. He's very, you know, very serious about not putting things down children's throats, basically. He says people should chew their milk, by which he eats. Yeah, you put it in your mouth and you swish it around so saliva can get around it. And then you could drink it.

Do many people... Well, I suppose he would know. Would people... He wouldn't choke on milk, I don't think. If it's off-milk, you might. He refused to cheer on his football team as he thought it would damage his larynx. And he only ever ate postage stamp-sized sandwiches for lunch. How many did he have?

I don't know. Well, they're huge stamps that he had. Novelty. A tiny slice of bread with a single lettuce leaf in between. There's another guy, a librarian, called Graham Barker. He has the world record for collecting bellybutton fluff. How hotly contested is this record? I don't imagine there are many submissions every year.

Well, it's true. Does he turn up and defend his title against people? Well, he's been doing it for 26 years. So if you want to start now, it'll be a long time before you catch up. Is it all his own? It's all his own, yeah. I reckon you could beat the record pretty quickly with a door-to-door roundup.

Yeah, you could do a Kickstarter for it, couldn't you? So this guy, Graham Barker, who says he is not obsessive, vows to continue until he is no longer capable. You have this one, you're not obsessive. He says he harvests it every night and places it in a clay pot. Harvests. Because normally harvests provide nice things, like grain.

He has an annual harvest festival. People sing celebratory songs. I think probably the new thing to collect is data about yourself. It's a huge trend, isn't it? People have charts. You can wear smart watches and things that measure your blood flow

and your energy and your calories and your expenditure. Your steps. Yeah, your steps, everything can be just laid out so neatly. It's hard to imagine anyone wanting to buy that off you in the future, though. But maybe that'll be instead of the collected letters, it'll be the collected glucose expenditure of PG Woodhouse or whatever

that we'll see in shops. Do you know the last thing Charles Autry did? No. Oh, yeah. He threw a vase at his nurse who asked for an autograph. That was his last act. But if he's dying, you shouldn't really bother a pro man. I mean, she said it was an autograph.

It was an autograph on the bottom of his paper that said, I leave my nurse every day. OK, time for fact number two. That is James. OK, my fact this week is that in 1937 you could visit Romford Dog Track

and watch Cheetahs racing. You don't mean people who've been taking dope? No, and this was a guy an explorer called Kenneth Gandardauer who brought a dozen Cheetahs from Kenya to the UK so that they could watch them race

and bet on the outcome. Surely it's difficult to get a Cheetah to chase an electric rabbit? They did find that was the problem. The thing would be to release... Pray. That was a problem. They weren't really interested in racing

and so it only happened twice and they just gave it up. The amazing thing about this fact, which you told me, was that they realised Greyhounds weren't the fastest animals in the world. But then they brought the Cheetahs in and they just shaved so much time

off their records that they realised that their Cheetahs were fastest. The Cheetahs, they could hit 68 miles an hour sorry, 65 miles an hour and 43 for the Greyhounds. I think they can go up to about 100 kilometres an hour. It was often thought that that was impossible and maybe it was a myth

because it was only one ever study that ever proved that. But then they've started putting tracking devices on collars on Cheetahs in the wild and they found that it is true after all. They were saying as well, and I don't understand this, but they were saying that Cheetahs, when they accelerate, they change gears.

Like a car changing gears as they're running. They go into a different stride. A different gate. I just love that. They change gears mid-run. That's brilliant. It's kind of like a horse walking. Was it walking in a trot than a gallop? So they were saying with Greyhounds

they then change the number of steps that they take as they're running and it makes up the speed. Whereas Greyhounds take exactly the same number of steps. No matter how fast they're going. So the feet just get crazy fast. Like a cartoon. It does sound incredibly glamorous.

And I've been to a few dog tracks. It's not a glamorous night out. Cheetahs though. That name's quite James Bond. Sounds very Vegas. This guy, kind of Gandard Dower, was quite glamorous himself. He once brought a male cheetah

to Queens Club. Whatever Queens Club is, I don't know what that is. Oh yeah, probably is. And it was rubbish. It didn't return a single serve. It was very fast. But when it got to the ball, it killed three ball boys. The other thing is

that they couldn't negotiate tight bends. The cheetahs apparently. Like Greyhounds can. I read that they just cut the corners. Ironically, making them cheetahs in the race. And there's Cats V Dogs. Which is such a great idea.

Are they racing against Greyhounds? Yeah, sometimes. You have five Greyhounds and then one cheetah. And so the Greyhounds I think all chased after the cheetah. And the cheetah did it a couple of times. But then it quickly realised this is a mechanical hair. There's nothing in it.

Were the Greyhounds not freaking out? That there was a cheetah next to them? I'd be petrifying. But what happened, the cheetah would often say, I'm not really bothered. And then something would catch its eye. And then it would speed up. And then go miles faster than the Greyhounds.

So it'd be like a proper underdog victory. Like in a movie. Right. This would be the movie if you were having this. But if you knew that a race was going to be five dogs and a cheetah. The thing to do is in the car on the way to have a friendly bet with the person

who would say, listen, I'm going to take trap seven. I love it. It would be all right. Because obviously if they've got six spots and you've got one, you're in great shape. So you'd have the bet. And then when you got there and they saw it was a cheetah, they'd feel tricked.

And then you'd sell the bet back to them for a huge sum. And then the dogs would all race off. And the cheetah would go, well, I can't be bothered. I mean, that's a win-win. That's what they call going all green. You're betting and laying at the same time. So every outcome is successful for you. You could definitely negotiate a position

with that thing about winning both ways. I read about this guy called Brian Zembeck who bet his friend. He bet his pal $100,000 that he would get breast implants for a year. And he did it. But he still has them. This was about eight years ago. But this was the moronic thing about

this is what I want to say to Brian Zembeck's friend. This is exactly the kind of proposition bet you have to never take. Prop bets, which is on certain sort of outcomes that might be under a person's control. Weight loss bet. Whether or not someone will get

breast implants, he just will get them. He says, I bet me I won't do that. I think this is a ridiculous call. Because I think what happened here basically is they've paid him to do it, haven't they? Because like you say, if you give him enough money, he will do it. And they've just found the price

that he'll do it for you. You have a lot of that. Yes, I want a better guy. But it's not really a bet. James Dempsey, it's a very good poker player. I'm not going to argue with him that he wouldn't turn up to the World Series of Poker wearing an outfit that I'd selected for him from the mall.

And he accepted the better things we both knew. I knew, I can't remember what we bet, $500 maybe, I knew he would wear anything for the money. And he knew that I was happy to pay to see him walk into the room dressed in, you know, I just had a fantastic afternoon going around the hall

buying terrible sort of glittering hats. I didn't go for I went for something that would make him look like a real tosser. So I think it was like a t-shirt with a straight flush on it. That sort of vagus tourist hat.

But he also had to factor in, you know, it's a $10,000 tournament. And he needs to have the sort of peace of mind just sit down dressed like that and have everyone think he's a real idiot and play anyway. But that's a different, because there's the famous one, the ones are always great at the sort of trickster gamblers

like Titanic Thompson and, you know, Amarillo Slim and people who tricked people into bets that weren't really what they sounded like. So the famous, for example, Titanic Thompson once, you know, he bet with a guy, there was a watermelon truck was going past

and he'd bet how many, oh, I reckon there's, you know, 40 watermelons on that truck and the other guy said, you know, 100. But of course Thompson had paid the man to drive past them with the watermelons on the truck. And Amarillo Slim had a lot of them. He had a bet once, you know, he bet

a golfer that he could hit a golf ball further than him and the guy, he'd never met this person. He was like, what kind of idiot is this? And Slim said, you know, I'm choosing the golf course, that's fine. And, you know, but they chose their own course. So the golfer picked his favorite course, he hit the ball and then they went to Slim's choice

and it was a frozen lake. So he hit the ball and it sort of skitted miles, miles, miles, miles. And that kind of thing, that's rather beautiful. You know, someone's just been done. They haven't looked at the small print. Okay, that's enough facts. Let's have an advert.

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Well, I'm with the show, eh? On that bomb show. Okay. Time for fact number three and that is N. In 2010, the US military built a supercomputer out of 1,760 PlayStation 3s. Wow.

How's that even possible? It's not possible anymore. They basically got really lucky. So basically, Sony did an upgrade so you can't mess with PlayStation 3 anymore. They got really lucky. Sorry. They got really lucky. They bought the PlayStation. They're like, I'm just going to do it and we'll see what happens.

There's no method to this. It was a land party that got out of hands. Yeah. So basically, they wanted to build the supercomputer and at the time, PlayStation 3s cost $400, but the equivalent computing power would be $10,000 each and they needed 1,760. It's quite a lot. So they got all these PlayStation's, wired them up together

and they hacked them. So they're all joined together and they're running off Linux, which is rather than running on PlayStation games. And then, yeah, it's using the US military. They're using it to track stuff. I mean, it definitely was either that or someone said to that department, I see you've ordered 1,700 in PlayStation 3s.

Is that a supercomputer? Yeah, that's because we're making a super computer. It had to do it. Which it did. It was the 33rd biggest computer in the world when they completed it. Really? I saw a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world

and the number one is called Tian'e 2. It's in China and that means Milky Way because it can do as many calculations per second as there are stars in the Milky Way. But the interesting thing I thought is it's been number one for four years.

It's a lot faster than one below it as well. Yeah, but you would kind of think that because of Mars Law or whatever that they would get faster and faster but this one's been number one for all that time. The other thing I love about that list is that a lot of supercomputers sound like they belong on gladiators. I went down and said there's Titan,

Vulcan, Lightning, Vulcan, Shadow, Crystal, Macman, Maverick and supercomputer system for a statistical science eye. He was a great gladiator. I would hear a word to it again soon. Also, the 192nd most powerful supercomputer is called Gordon. It's a good solid name.

The famous one's Watson, isn't it, who won Jeopardy a few years ago, if you remember that. He obviously doesn't do that anymore and so he's now making, he's working as a chef coming up with new dishes. So he takes all of the different all of the different dishes

and all of the different ingredients and he mixes them up and supposedly uses his intelligence to make new dishes. I bet they're awful. Terrible. And how does that differ from a seven year old? Well, it differs in that it can't do it very well

and a seven year old probably can. There was an article in New Scientist and they tried to get some of the dishes they had. One of them, a creme fraiche, had been replaced by a glass of milk and another one, the tuna bake, had replaced a tuna with a kilo of goose meat.

Oh! No one ever wants even a small amount of goose meat. I was watching Watson's actually appearance and he makes a gaffe two minutes in because Watson repeats the same answer someone else had already given. We're still being beaten by a machine.

I would like that one slide. Presumably computers can make a limited number of gaffes at the moment. They can't be involved in a race scandal and they can't... That's one more thing we'll have artificial intelligence is when the first computer is forced to resign over an indiscreet late night tweet.

I started looking into PlayStation. So, okay, here's a really odd thing I found out. Grand Theft Auto, I don't know if you guys know that. It's made in Dundee. Is it? Okay, so Grand Theft Auto 5 officially so far, just up until this point now, is the most successful franchise ever.

Think of anything... Harry Potter. Grand Theft Auto 5, when they released it on the opening 24 hours, it sold 500 million copies. What? 500 million pounds worth of copies. 500 million copies.

Everyone in the world. In 24 hours and that makes it officially the biggest franchise. I saw something great yesterday. You know Playmobile, these little plastic ties. The fastest selling Playmobile of all time came out last week

and it was a Martin Luther Playmobile tie. Martin Luther? Oh wait, no, Martin Luther, the extreme Protestant... Yeah, it was released to mark the 500th anniversary of the publication of 95 theses on the power

and capacity of indulgences and they sold 34,000 in 72 hours. I've got six, yeah. I love them. Why is Playmobile doing a celebratory Martin Luther secondary doll?

I mean, do they do a lot of... historical dolls or just someone there absolutely bloody loves them? The new chief is a massive fan of Martin Luther. You're a great nephew. I like the new farmyard range, but... You're going to make a million plastic Tyndall Bible translation.

And it's worked. It's amazing. I know. I saw an amazing... there's a movie shop around the corner in Covent Garden and they have all the kind of, you know, just classic movie merchandise and toys, a lot of action figures and there's an Apollo 13 toy there and Apollo 13 is my favourite movie

and it's a car that appears in the movie. Who the hell is buying the car? Complete Apollo 13. Apollo 13, the one with Tom Hanks goes to space. Yes. Is your favourite film? Yes. Of all the films that were ever made. Don't ask him for his Top 5

because it gets worse. I thought your favourite was Grown Ups 2. Grown Ups 2, Mean Girls. No, Apollo 13 because I love the story. I just think it's the greatest story. But your favourite ever! I remember Apollo once coming out about the greatest albums of all time and number two was The White Album

from The Beatles. Number one was Stars by Simply Red. When people vote in these things you literally have just written down the last album you bought, haven't you? Quick question though, when's the last time you heard Stars by Simply Red? Because that was a fantastic album. My favourite album is just a recording of

Martin Luther. Play it every day. Maybe they've looked at Lego with the Playmobil thing and they've thought, because Lego have diversified so much into robots and stuff. You can buy Lego U.N. building where you can just sort of have meetings in it.

In the 50s there was a Barbie who came with a book which said, don't eat on the cover. Seriously, yeah. I think it was a dieting Barbie or it was a model Barbie. Supercomputers. The world's fastest

supercomputer, who I mentioned earlier, uses 99% of its volume to keep it cool. Correct. I did go to the Museum of Computing. Is that where you found this fact? Yeah, I went to the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley last weekend and it was so, so incredible.

Everyone's free. It's half an hour out of London. It's amazing. They've got Colossus which actually runs. They let it run and we watched it go. Which is all this computer that you could see being programmed as it does its functions. You see all the different bits lighting up and making whirring noises. They've got this amazing computer memory

from the 60s. It's like whole crates of memory worth like 20 bytes. Yeah, so it was amazing. I always think it's a bit sad the way the first great thing invented in some field is so rubbish. I think it's sad. It's like seeing old, very old buildings which were

the absolute, you know, they were the best thing in defence 500 years ago. You go back to your first boyfriend, isn't it? At the time, that seemed so exciting. Someone had sent me a Valentine's card and you go, wow, but then you look at the later upgrades and you're about to die. We had Buzz Aldrin on Museum of Curiosity

and there was this amazing moment where we gave him one of those singing birthday cards and he was, you know, a Wallace and Gromit one. He just opened it and the point that we had for him to hold this and open it was that there was more computing power in that card than there was in the lunar module.

You just want to make him feel bad about himself. Yeah, he was pretty pissed off with that. He threw the card onto the table. He went, can this card land on the moon? Oh, okay, sorry. I mean, it can. You just have to put it through. And it can land on the moon.

Not to make him feel worse, but... My other favourite video game fact is that in 2014 a goldfish played Pokémon. What? I'm totally going to trade up the office goldfish. I don't know what that sentence means. So, Pokémon is a video game where you... Do you remember Pokémon in the 90s?

No, it did. I think it knew what it was doing. They put it in as a tank and it had a webcast. If it swam left, the character went left. If it went right, the character went right. And apparently after the first few hours it was reported the goldfish had chosen

his first Pokémon, Charmander. He'd named it AAABBK and won a fight against the Squirtle. That was a big mistake, Pokémon. Maybe it knew. It was swimming about. But it's not like any hands. It would need some sort of motion detection. That's probably right. Inside it said it was going,

damn my lack of hands, I would have chosen I crave Pokémon. OK, time for our final fact. And that is Andy. My fact is that in 1552 a man in England managed to shoot himself to death with a bow and arrow. Which I think is a Darwin Award before the fact.

How on earth is that even possible? Well, his name was Pert, Henry Pert, and he was a gentleman. He lived in Nottinghamshire. And he was trying to fire an arrow straight up in the air. History doesn't record why, unfortunately. But he drew the bow

to its full extent, and then the arrow lodged. And while he was leaning over to look it managed to un-lodge itself and he died the next day. Unfortunately for him. The next day? An arrow in his head for a couple of hours. But it's quite an achievement

because obviously with handguns, you know, accidents happen. But with a bow and arrow you have to be doing it quite badly wrong to kill yourself that way. So that's the thing. Coroners in the Middle Ages have recorded 56 accidental deaths from people at archery

who were standing too close to the targets or who just went and collected arrows at the wrong time, which had already been fired. I think it's a bit unfair to say that the people were standing too close to the targets. It's more the guy who shot didn't hit the target, really. Yeah, I mean it depends how bad the archer was, you're right.

Do you remember the Olympics? There was an archer who was like a very famous celebrity, at Gina Davis. Gina Davis, from Thelma and Louise? She didn't quite make it into the Olympic team. She placed 24th out of 300 people. I mean, that's, you know, I didn't quite make it onto the Olympic team.

Do you know what I think? If there's a linking theme to this episode, it's the sort of tragedy of the transience of an actor's life. I mean, you've got Charles Haughtry hoarding the bedsteads. Gina Davis desperately trying

to make the Olympic archery team. Even the supercomputers branched out into cookery. Yeah, that's true. You do realise this isn't only Kinect, we're not looking for a link between all of them. You'd never believe and say they're going, what the hell is going on? I have her onto the fourth thing,

so I want to go next. So some mortality things. There was a Greek philosopher called Phylatus of Kos who studied erroneous word usage so intensely that he wasted away lots of death. But we all do know somebody like that.

Yeah, you can't leave until you get the sentence right. Somebody who's such a pedant Why are you looking at me, Andy? Captain Panino. James won't let us say Panini because it's a plural. You'd say one, Panino. If you order a Panini, he will make you eat two of them.

Oh, you would say you order a Panini. A Panino. I would say... I know, I'm sorry, you can't say a Panini. Four years. It doesn't feel so plural to you. What do you say, can I have a Panino? I do.

James does. I would be trapped between not wanting to be grammatically incorrect and not wanting to sound like a wanker so. I think I'd have to find some middle ground. See, this is the kind of argument we have today. James is wasting away at the moment. I found some stats in Australia.

Contact with a hot water tap is more deadly than a venomous spider in Australia. I'm sorry. If you're a man that will go into a sandwich shop and say I want a Panino, I'm going to point out to you that it isn't. More people might die as a result,

but that doesn't make the hot water tap more deadly than the poisonous spider. You must have seen the latest series of I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, where they have to be locked in a cage with a hot water tap. It's the big series back home. Australia's worst taps. This week, he's taken out six men.

Wait, so they would scold them to the point of death? Yeah, basically that. Is that only Australia? Australia is the only place I have figures from. I've not heard this. This isn't like a cultural thing that I was told at school. I think it's more that people think

bugs and things and sharks are really deadly, but actually the amount of people they kill. Very, very few people die of venomous spiders in Australia because they have unskilled. I mean, isn't there a difference between a kill and stupidity? The taps are not trying to kill.

That's a good point, actually. In the Middle Ages, they would have put the tap on trial as a deodorant. As a satanic object. What was the word you said? A deodorant. So it's like they would have trials in the Middle Ages if a bow of a tree had fallen on someone.

They would put the bow of the tree on trial. Wow. I found a brilliant one on the QI talk board. It says that between 1658 and 1663 there were four deaths recorded in the Paris of Lampleau in Cumbria for the cause of death, frightened to death by fairies.

That's an inexperienced coroner who wants to cover his back, basically. Well, they've changed your rules now that you can't die of natural causes in the UK. So they have to put something down on your death certificate. Fairies. This is quite a nice thing.

The first-ever funeral flowers were 13,000 years ago. Which I find fascinating. How do we know that? Well, they found stone age graves. There's a Mediterranean culture called the Natufians. I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing it. 20 Natufians listening.

But they built the first cemeteries. So before that there were only scattered bodies, which had been buried. But they were the first people where we found 100 bodies in the same place. So we think that's a cemetery. And archaeologists have found I think the remains of flower beds

which would have been around and underneath the bodies as well. That's the earliest evidence we have for the use of flowers in a funeral ritual, if you like. Which I think is amazing. I think that's rather nice, actually. And they were the first people who had a feast.

The first-ever feast was the Natufians. And it consisted of 71 turtles. No, sorry, 71 tortoises. When I was a kid, so in Hong Kong they used to tell us that it would be vertical burials of space. Have you guys heard of that?

I have heard of that, yeah. A lot of people live in cemeteries in Cairo. As in they live in cemeteries. Because there's such a housing problem that thousands upon thousands of people and the city has these enormous cemeteries. That always blows like when we found out there's this thing about 30 million

people in China live in caves. They're just housed in caves. And when you hear that, I just always think I thought I just knew where everyone was. Everyone. And then you discover there's just all these people living in these extreme locations. That's a big number for cemetry.

How many people would you expect there to be living in cemetry? Well, just none. The fact itself was already a starting point. It's not 12. He's just roaming. He's about the right number. Actually, there is a fact about,

is it brookwood cemetery just outside London where the bodies came back to life and became zombies. The population would be higher than Southampton. Really? Someone's really gone a long way to come up with that fact. I'm sorry it was me. It's the panino.

Given the unlikelihood of all of the bodies coming to life. Here's my favourite fact about Southampton. Southampton once and I think this was in the 80s or early 90s. Southampton came second in a poll of the most boring towns in Britain. What's brilliant about that is

it wasn't even interesting enough. Whatever one, there's something remarkable about that place. Southampton is so boring. It's not even the most boring. That's brilliant. OK, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thanks so much for listening.

If you want to get in contact with any of us, you can find us on Twitter. I'm on at Shriverland and at Miller underscore and Andy at Andrew Hunter M James at X8 and Victoria at Victoria Corrin which isn't even my name anymore but the new one is too long to change. Can you put just an M at the end?

I put a name in my tweeting name. I mean listen, you all talked about supercomputers and I pretended to know what they are and I don't. You probably can change your fit today. But I don't know how. OK, if you want to hear all of our previous episodes you can head to knowsuchthingasafish.com. They're all there.

There's about 48 of them and we'll be back again next week with another episode. Thanks for listening. See you then. Goodbye. you