No Such Thing As A Fish - 52: No Such Thing As A Worthless Bucket Of Urine

Episode Date: March 14, 2015

Episode 52: Live at the Soho Theatre, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss Tutankhamun's fashion choices, how to get ahead in a marathon, a city full of socks, and the most boring day ever.

hi everyone James here I just wanted to start with an apology unfortunately the audio is very bad in this episode and some of our microphones failed so we only had one mic and you'll be hearing it from that so it's going to be a bit tinny a little bit like we recorded in a toilet but that's kind of back to our roots because that's what most of our early ones were like but enjoy the show anyway we think is a good one get through the audio next week will be much better welcome to another episode and no such thing as a fair show weekly podcast this

week coming to you from the Soho Theatre in central London my name is Dan Schreiber I'm sitting here with Anna Chazinski, James Harkin and Andy Murray this is our one-year special it's our birthday we've once again sat around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with you Andrew Hunter Murray hello my fact is that the route for the Hong Kong ultramarathon is to run up and down the same stretch of road 25 times this has been on the news a bit recently it's because it's just happened the

first ever ultramarathon they've had on this route for one of a better word and it's 31 miles long because apparently anything longer than the standard 26.2 is an ultramarathon which I think is cheating because I think it should be at least double and I say that as someone who's never run more than 200 meters and that was at sports day and I came fourth out of four so yeah that's it

well how far do you say it was? 31 miles yeah because normally ultramarathans are more like 100 miles or 100 miles 200 miles whatever but if they had done that here they probably would have been suicided borderline actually sorry I read that if you run 200 miles it's less tiring than if you run 100 miles right

that can't be true yeah apparently what happens is when you know it's going to be much longer your intensity is much lower so you take take your time a lot more they found the people who do the longer ones feel better at the end so you'll just say you do it much more slowly you're saying it takes you you conserve your energy better you walk it you take job when you get the tube

so the thing about this marathon is that everyone's been describing it particularly the people doing it as the most boring marathon possible because of the repetitions and I was looking into boring marathons and there is an annual boring marathon what yeah there's an annual boring marathon there's an ultra boring marathon and it's actually apparently quite exciting it's just it happens to take place in a town or city called boring Oregon city yeah which is an actual place and their motto is the most exciting place to live

they all add their twins with a town called Dull in Scotland yes yeah yeah they have an annual dull and boring day which is I think it was august 9th someone worked out recently the most boring day in modern history and it was equal to 11th 1954 oh yeah that's a bad one a bad time it was a scientist about the computer program to work out the day where the least interesting stuff happened

it included a general election in Belgium so sorry sorry Belgians the front page of the New York Post was two cops attending a conference on juvenile delinquency front page news so they put that into a machine right and it's generous so it was like three million bits of information 300 million

three was it 300 million was wow so they said find us the most boring day they came up with this date we're April 11th 1954 as I read this as well side note to it which actually caught my eye more than the fact itself is that the guy who was a Cambridge scientist

he was a computer programmer his name uh his name is William Tunstall Pito he'd change his surname wouldn't he I was trying to research the fact I got so sidelined so you're keeping that you got Charles Dickens came up with Fordham as in he invented the word yeah I've read his books yeah

oh word um yeah it's in the Bleak House he says someone is bored to death by marriage so so maybe he's not incomplete people just assumed that's what it meant maybe it meant thrilled what do you mean thrilled

is that what people say to me when I'm talking to them in the pub and they're saying I'm so bad yeah they're actually saying they're thrilled is that why you keep going on and on there's um there's a tribe in Papua New Guinea called the Baining and they value work as the highest ideal the best thing you do is work

and they have been called unstudiable because of their failure to do anything interesting yet so harsh isn't it there was an anthropologist called Gregory Bateson who said who spent 14 months attempting to study them in the 1920s before giving up entirely they don't even like sex is that right they don't like it very much

no they don't like it but they do have kids but often a lot of adoption because they don't really want to have kids wait when are they about to be thrown it's been neighboring tribes or something yeah I don't know but they also don't like play because it's a natural state of children

and they don't like children and they're sometimes they will punish their children who are playing by putting their hands in the fire that's not boring that's an exciting thing to do as a kid I think the most boring sports ever the most boring sporting event ever

was the cycling event of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic where it involved people watching two people who were cycling head to head sitting still on bicycles for more than an hour what were they exercise bikes you know it's the sprint cycle when it goes head to head and you know they often like hover at the start of it because I think is it a slipstream thing

so because they want the other person to start cycling first so they can get in their slipstream and these two guys just have this standoff they're still on the bikes, bouncing on the bikes but over an hour and an hour and sitting on the bike so that's pretty hard yeah I know impressive that sounds exciting to me

because if you're wondering it'll always go the commentator had to leave it's something else to get on with the excitement was too much can't handle this do you know that the way they induce boredom scientists want to test boredom obviously there are definite ways of doing it

so to do pain they put your hand in a bucket of icy water and to do boredom they make you copy out the phone book that's the official way of doing it but if they want to really test you they just make you read the phone book and see how to focus on it and really concentrate

and but it improves your creativity what are you doing the phone doctors what being bored as in induced by this and the experiment they did so they tested they had people who could just copy numbers out of the phone book or not do that and at the end of that

everyone who'd been in it was asked to this is the test think of it as many uses as they could for a pair of plastic cups which is apparently a test of divergent thinking and how crazy and creative you are and people who've been reading the phone book or copying it out are much more creative

you're like throw them at the person who told me to read the phone book and there's a scientific test at the boredom proneness scale that's come up with by two psychologists and it's 28 statements which you have to agree or disagree with and it consists of statements including I have projects in mind all the time

things to do or much of the time I just sit around doing nothing if you could do that successfully I don't think you're easily bored no I sometimes read my own phone book and test myself on people I've forgotten who they are who is Rose?

who is that? does anyone else do that? one yes one yes thank you I did a terrible thing the other day I got a message on my phone from someone saying hey how's it going and you know that terrible moment when you haven't got their number

and you're like oh my god the message is so familiar I definitely know who this is they're gonna hate so I have to do the old classic sorry it's a new phone haven't got your number who is it

and the person wrote back going it's Sheila and so I did the lamest thing that I've done at you is I wrote back saying sorry I'm Australian there's a lot of Sheila's which one do you do?

she didn't write back I found this the most boring this is very unfortunate there's a resort in Switzerland and I was a bit confused because it's described as a village and a resort so I feel like the village is like a ski resort

yeah and it's been described as the most boring resort in Switzerland and you know when it's like oh I had a nice time they're all of their things it's just this is so dull this is my dull face and the tourist board there

released a statement they said that they think they got this title because their quiet village has nothing does nothing and offers nothing and then they added

we think that's a positive but so they've combatted it now by going they had a meeting and they're like how do we sort out the boredom levels of our of our town

how do we make it exciting and vibrant and they started a stone skipping competition which they're now trying to make a worldwide thing but then they found out that another similarly dull town

also decided the way to combat boredom was to set up a Skimming Stones competition so they had to call them and say could we do the qualifying round before they get to you can't even go and see

the finals yeah yeah okay some stuff on ultramarathans yeah okay so ultramarathans athletes sometimes

have all their toenails removed before or after before not during but like between races so but you're often there so you'll end up

you'll run and you'll have real problems with your toenails and they'll get worse and worse and then they get better and then once they've been a problem once they get worse and worse

all the time and so yeah quite often they'll have them taken off just weekly what it reminds me of the how

how yeah how how do they take them off do you want me to show you the how they would surge that surgeon would do it yeah

that's not what I wanted I wanted a method I think it's a yank and the other thing that happens in ultramarathan people is their body gets in such trouble because they're really

really pushing it that they are insatiable and want to have lots and lots of sex apparently this is according to one of the athletes

who I met in a pub yes he was boring but I couldn't help myself he says that when is when a person is in various traits like that sex becomes a priority because naturally

we want to perpetuate the species we want to procreate so it's like we're in such trouble we're about to die we need to have kids quickly that's what he said

wow okay marathans were considered so dangerous that they weren't supposed to happen again weren't they in 1902 the 1902 olympics

or the 1904 olympics it was decided because it was so badly done that one guy so the doctors drove in front of them along this dust track and like

one of them did one of them collapsed had like a pulmonary failure or something collapsed very nearly died because he'd inhaled so much dust another one

the guy who won in the end collapsed and had to be picked up and was given strychnine which is that pesticide that we now use

on crocs to try and stimulate him and then some brandy it was a at that time it was a useful stimulant that didn't do anything except slowly killing you

and then there was a guy who won initially who was called someone's laws who decided he couldn't hack it after about nine kilometers and jumped in a car passed by waved all the other athletes

jumped out at the other end sprinted to the finish line the 50 yards and won 50 yards and then there was no one nearby presumably

because I would stop a mile back you know I was just thinking well what he claimed was when he was taking his trophy and someone did say by the way

I did see you dry most of the way he did say he'd always been meaning to give it back it was just a joke but that is the kind of thing you think are cleaners

and if no one says anything that I've won and if they do I'll just say I was kidding anyway yeah it was how strong was going to do that wasn't it?

that was just a joke guys have you heard of Rosa Ruiz? no no she won the 1980 Boston Marathon she's 23 year old New Yorker and she was very very fast

she was the third fastest time ever recorded for a female runner and she was completely swept free and composed when she crossed the finishing line car obviously no one saw her during the race

none of the checkpoints none of the other runners photographs of the race she was nowhere she was so fast they couldn't get her in the photo she not car, subway

just got the subway straight across and does it count though if you're still running while you take all these shortcuts if you ran to the subway it just had to that should count right?

just on the spot on the train I was running I just got created with it but again she just jumped back in half a mile before the end which seems very cocky

yeah why don't you often in subways you have to run up a lot upstairs I reckon that's more tiring we've got to move on very soon to the next fact can I just quickly give a few Hong Kong things

so because I'm born and raised in Hong Kong and there's a can I bet money on a Hong Kong fact that you will say in the next 20 seconds oh okay yeah I'm just wondering if there's a

Hong Kong fact about Bruce Lee to follow no there's not oh my god although there is a good Bruce Lee fact you've made it through why did I do it? he was the 1958 char char champion in Hong Kong

there you go how many people have it? as you are yeah so one thing I discovered was that after the handover happened there were a lot of things that the Chinese admitted to doing

that they were sort of tripping the British colonialists about when they first arrived and one thing was the names of places in Hong Kong and I've been to a lot of these places and I had no idea that their

translations meant what they are so for example there's a place called He See One so when the British were like oh what's this called? they went up

He See One that translates as vagina discharge day vaginal discharge day there's Niu Shi Wu which is cow shit lake and Dao Tao which is penis head rock

the needs have been on signs in Hong Kong for ages and they've started changing some so foreign level sex organ has now changed has become pyramid rock and all sex corner is now some main dragon cake

oh that's really cool I had no idea when I was there did you guys have any more that we yep okay time for fact number two and that is yep my fact is that

the meter is wrong typical honor everyone everything's wrong because I hate it what what does that mean so the meter it was determined that the meter

so in a guy called Pierre Mecha was a French astronomer in the 1790s he determined that he would create a they decided to go to a decimal system and the meter would be the unit of the system and it would be exactly

one 10 millionth of the distance between the equator and the north pole so he went on this big tour to measure out arcs of the earth and stuff and do calculations to work out what the meter was

and there was a slight error in his calculations a slight problem with one of his bits of equipment and he was 0.16 of a millimeter out for every meter the meter we use now he realized that he'd gone wrong

so we tried to draw people's attention to it but at that point they were like we've made all these like meter long sticks we can't just go and un-make them and so it just stayed that way so he's

I mean but that's so unscientific for how science usually works well we've made them it's just gonna have to be it sorry I heard that he went back to where he had made the original mistake later in his life

and he wanted to correct it he was on this campaign to get it corrected and he got to where he made the mistake where he caught malaria and died I'm just going to show you never check you're working

he kept getting arrested didn't he when he was doing all this stuff because it was during the revolution people thought that his what do you call these things instruments were weapons didn't they

yeah so it just kept on him at prison all the time yeah and it was that but that was actually a good thing well was it good or was it bad because it was when he was in prison

that he realized he'd got it wrong he thought I've got nothing else except recheck my calculations and when he did that he realized it was wrong but then it didn't do much good so in fact there was in 1875 there was the

treaty de la Métro or the treaty of the meter in France 00:18:14,720 --> 00:18:15,040 thank you it saved me 10 valuable minutes though I'm just going to leave it and I remember you were here

and that decided to consecrate his wrong meter into like being the actual meter so to say actually Michelin's meter is the proper meter the meter is now going to be one meter and not 0.616 millimeter long and so they created the standard meter

at this conference so they had to create an exact replica of the wrong meter but this time say this is now the right meter but they couldn't just take his wrong one and say this is the standard meter because that had been wrong

does that make sense it didn't but yeah I'm still on treaty de la Métro and so before this happened in 18th century France there were more than 250,000 different types of measurement

in France what? I know how many people were there? was it just just different weights and measurements and 250,000 yeah

it's a lot about that yeah it's a lot yeah they were totally really arrogant weren't they when they wanted to go to the decimal system and there were a lot of people saying I can't believe you think you can just like make the whole world abide by your ridiculous system

but obviously they did Japan went metric in 1924 and no one noticed or did anything about it and they had to do it again 40 years later oh my god well I think the US has tried to a few times

in the 1960s they were saying let's do it and they've just never got around to it and now because there are three countries that are metric aren't there so Burma, Liberia and the US but Burma's about to go imperial now so it's about to just be

you're about to go metric yeah about to go metric sorry so it's just be Liberia and I'm better at it yeah wasn't that great I don't know the full fact

I hope you guys do which is that I thought that was complete the fact Mount Everest when that was originally measured what was it 29,000 feet yeah so

the first to say it yeah yeah so they worked out exactly how tall it was it was 29,000 feet but they thought that if they put that as the actual number people won't believe them they would think they just rounded them up

and so they put an extra two feet on top so they called it 29,002 feet yeah can you imagine you've just done this incredible thing you've measured the greatest mountain the highest tallest mountain in the world and it's a perfect number

and you can't tell them that it's bad because no one will believe you poor guy you must be like can't fucking believe my life what's in that I really I really like mistakes I think history definitely

some of the things that we find is an everyday thing like the meter is as a result of a mistake one of the things that almost seems to have come out of being mistakes is phosphorus matches the head of matches the only reason I mean we may have got to it eventually but the actual reason that we did end up getting to it

is because a guy in 1675 called Hennig Brand got obsessed with the idea that he could make gold by converting buckets of urine into gold so he in his basement fit the buckets of urine going on to a winner here and it went all soupy

and it went all waxy and it just didn't at all go goldy if he had a cleaner he must have had to have a load of every single bucket please leave but so the weird byproduct of him doing this is that it actually led to this substance tubs of urine

yeah well no the tubs of urine did this waxy substance that he ended up having sort of lit up when light was making contact with it and they were going what is this and they realized this was a way of making fire and so actually each bucket became way more worth than gold so he actually exceeded the amount of money

that he would have made from turning that into gold if I shine a light no no it's like setting light to it oh right okay yeah yeah do you know the first matches were a yard long seriously the first sold matches and the guy who invented them sold 168 in something like three years and they were a toy for the for rich people

and they were also incredibly dangerous because once you'd lit it it was more like a home science kit almost it wasn't a practical thing but once you'd lit it the globular flaming stuff had this amazing tendency to just fall to the ground and set fire to whatever you were standing on at the time

I guess because they weren't very practice-advising matches so once you'd lit it well not on their yard long as well helps taking two people yes yeah good for bonding maybe that's why they did it maybe and before the 19th century

there was a unit of measurement which was called a lot but how many was that it was about not very much not very much it wasn't it was the 30th of a pound so it wasn't an awful lot that's great

the word acre used to mean an open field of no particular measurement and yard comes from Saxons used to wear like a gird it comes from the same origin as gird doesn't it because remember belt that people used to wear and then they take it off to measure something when they needed to

no speculating as to what and I'm nice some people understood how big is this conch so there are some other good units of measurement the Garn you'll know the Garn

the Garn is a unit of measurement that measures space sickness and it's named after he was the first US politician to go into space actually it was named after Senator Jake Garn who was so sick during a space mission that now it's meant one Garn is considered very space sick that's great

that's like the uh the mini Helen the mini Helen is the amount of beauty you need to launch one ship it's weird lots of units of measurement that we have are quite similar so there's a Japanese measurement called I'll mispronounce this but Kanejaku

it's an obscure one as in it's not used anymore but it's about the same as an English foot and both of those things are about the same length as the average man's foot so it's a sort of you know common origin for lots of these things which is quite cool

like the qubit is the distance from it what is it your elbow to to the beginning of your hand so you would send out someone with a big arm to buy cloth in ancient Egypt that because

they would be able to get more cloth for their money because they had bigger arms it's just one guy with a really massive arm yeah yeah just one all that one huge arm it's amazing that we took so long to get to grip to the fact that all humans are different sizes

and we can't face a measurement system there's one called a piédrois which is a Charlemagne introduced and it was supposedly you know the size of his foot it wasn't it was it was

he was just trying to understand those things but so it was bigger than his foot our smaller than his foot I don't know but I don't know what size his foot was but I also don't know what size the thing was so it could be actually

yeah you know what they said I've been with indeterminate size feet can I just say very quickly just as a side note every time that we've said oh what's that called someone from the crowd

his gun is called that you don't get this at any other comedy gigs the audience are treating it like a pub quiz are you hearing that yeah can you not hear it every time every time listen out

you'll be there just quickly the carrot I just just kind of interesting the carrot measurement for diamonds is from carob seeds because they thought people used to think they're all carob seeds

were exactly the same amount so they're kind of the same word they don't they don't the same amount yeah like um

who was it was it Barth who weighed out 60 coffee beans for each cup of coffee he drank oh yeah oh he gets all of your weight mate he counted them out yeah it was one of them it was Barth

it was whoever wrote the coffee canta after which I think was Barth he wrote a whole thing of praise of coffee who was it how did the coffee beans Barth wrote the coffee canta after I can told you um guys we're gonna have to

then we have to go on next time this is hard and the next fact comes from that lady in the audience okay so I'm for fact number three and that is James okay my fact this week is that St Andrews Aquarium has three meerkats called Churchill, Admiral and Sheela's Wheels

I love that Sheela's Wheels meerkat they also had a Viva and Direct Line but they both died unfortunately who's that doing the credit punch um but yeah meerkats and funny names one question first of all do does an aquarium have meerkats

because they've realized there's no such thing as a fish they had this little bit it's a brilliant aquarium by the way but they had this little bit of rock where they didn't have anything to put there and they got offered some meerkats from a different studio and they said yeah great meerkats why not

everyone loves meerkats so you um just you you actually I was there this weekend yeah you went that's how you found this out yeah did you see the meerkats I did meet the meerkats and fed the uh what do you call these things penguins

and saw all the different fish yeah it was great really really good definitely recommend it so why are they why are they named there um oh so they were named uh by someone on facebook and they thought there's such great names that will name them that

they have wait I know they're existing names so they no they were allowed to name them when they they were born there and they were allowed to name them my head Admiral has a tiny jacket with epaulets

and the main two are called Kate and Will's the others are named after members of the um of the royal family as well and they have a penguin who is called Angby Murray do they do

yeah they do and it's a female okay all the other penguins are named after the Murray family not your family the tennis player yeah

um interestingly that the meerkats are named after Kate and Will's because meerkats too are threatened by inbreeding inbreeding so um meerkats as when they're fighting they line up in a line

and they just charge at each other really yeah like a horizontal line like a key like a horizontal line and so it's like one against the other one and they just charge into each other

and that is how naval warships are in the other so presumably Admiral that's what you're talking about very good um uh and one way they stop from fighting each other is because they get a lot of

their thing from scent they rub vicks vapor rub on the meerkats because then they can't smell each other and they don't get angry with each other but they also can't smell who's related to them no but that's that's a good thing

they because they recently had one meerkat who was completely segregated they just like we don't want you and they named the meerkat Oliver Twist because he was orphaned and one of the guys there

had to look after Oliver Twist and that was the sentence he said we're gonna we're gonna completely cover them in vicks what's it called vapor rub vapor rub and um

we're gonna cover him as well and that will allow him back into the group because they won't know that he wasn't smelling the same as us so I just reminded me of a brilliant thing that I read this week you you have already I'm sure a new scientist

which is that when you shake someone's hand you smell your hand afterwards because you're trying to get the scent of the person who you shook hands with and all humans have been doing this forever and no one's ever noticed not me I can assure you I don't do that I am

they videoed a lot of the people in the room shaking hands and counted how often they were touching their faces around their nose and mouth and it was a certain number and when they shook hands it always went up

it's amazing that's incredible it's such a good face I've been watching my boyfriend a weekend we've found various instances of we've played on a board game

shake hands after them and then I watched him and he holds his nose after he shakes hands with me yeah which I've not taken a good sign on meerkats they're the only animal we've observed

the cyber mass who we've seen like employing proper teaching methods to teach their young how to hunt so because they hunt individually you can't the young can't just follow their parents around to see how they hunt

so the parents bring back dead animals and then explain to their kids how to dismember them another thing meerkat mothers do is they kill the children of other meerkat mothers so that those mothers will breastfeed their own children

so that they can go out and have fun nice guys so they turn that mother into a babysitter because she's lactating anyway so she'll be like okay you can look after my kids

and I've killed yours I'm gonna go out in the past they aren't they're horrible they're not good pets apparently according to some websites because they can be very cruel to each other aggressive to the people

they don't know they smell quite ferrity likely to be an animal I was reading about aquariums and I read about London's very first aquarium which was the Royal Aquarium you guys heard about the Royal Aquarium

it was basically it was 1903 sorry just before 1903 because it was pulled down in 1903 it had huge tanks it was ginormous central London and the reason it was pulled down

and didn't do so well is that all these giant tanks contained no fish they were completely empty because they marketed it as having sea life so they needed salt water and they realized

how extensive that was and they couldn't afford to actually put the right amount of water in there with the relevant fish so people used to come and just look at tanks of water I mean the promise at one day that there would be fish in them

I don't think that was the first one because the first one I think was at London Zoo which would have been when did you say yours was 1903 it was taken down London Zoo is opened in the mid 19th century

and it was called the Aquarium but it used to be called Aquavivarium which is a cool name and then Aquarium was originally a watering place for cattle so you see sometimes troughs where people used to let their horses and cows drink

and it has Aquarium written on it and it looks like the worst Aquarium in the world but it's not so did they call it Aquavivarium so as not to be confused and have cattle turn up hoping for a drink and then they had this thing

called Aquarium Mania have you heard of this no this is so cool sounds great so there was a guy called Philip Henry Goss or Gosser we can edit that as appropriate

and he was one of the pioneers of basically allowing fish to survive basically everyone went around killing old fish and he was like no this is wrong we should let them survive he came up with a system

whereby you could keep fish in a tank and they would get enough oxygen and you need plants in there but suddenly everyone started getting Aquariums so people got them set into their windows some people or put into chandeliers

just hanging from the ceiling some people built a bird cage into an Aquarium so there would be a bird living in there surrounded by fish which it could never eat torture yeah

they've made a Nike trainer into an Aquarium Nike designers now it's they've transformed into I don't know how functional it is as a trainer anymore but it looks really cool if you look it up

there's sort of a fake turn into the Aquarium in the base of the shoe do you mean the whole shoe is an Aquarium so it's round the edges of the shoe they filled it with water and put some fish in what that's incredible

that's a little bit wow that's weird also there's the world's smallest Aquarium isn't there that's uh all of them is that not it

yeah that's not even a full shoe that's a heel I think this one is 24 millimeters high so right it's for zebrafish it's this guy

Anatoly Komenko who just designed like he's a designer his job is designing tiny things and so he's created the world's smallest book that's he's put at the work of the human hair is it

is it advice on how to keep your new zebrafish just a few things oh I forgot I was just going to say did anyone see the giant male octopus this week that was trying to escape from its aquarium

oh yeah yeah did anyone read what the Aquarium it was an Aquarium in Seattle the Aquarium owner said um so there was so this octopus it's crawled up the sides of its aquarium and it's clutched at the outside

and it's got some of its tentacles on the outside and it's trying to get over and aquarium officials say the octopus named Inc. was not attempting a jailbreak but simply learning to embrace his new home with all eight arms

it was not an escape attempt they said well putting the lid back on so good all right so some things about name changes and product placement and stuff like that oh yeah

so um Aussie rules footballer Gary Hawking changed his name by DePaul to Whiskers one year because he was paid a lot of money by then so Tongvin Ruppistar Epitione who changed his name to Paddy Power and you can

you can change your name of your your stadium and stuff but it doesn't always work out the MLS side Colorado Rapids has changed their stadium to Dick's Sporting Goods Park but everyone calls it the Dick yeah

and like changing your name by DePaul as well I like all that kind of stuff so there was a guy called Gary Brett from Potter's Bar Potter's Bar had changed his name to Potter's Bar he changed his name to Mr Hong Kong Fui okay and he said I've loved Hong Kong Fui

since I was a boy and always wanted to be named after him I'm quite serious I speak to a sad child I'm quite serious about being known as Mr Fui my wife was a bit upset but she should be honored to be married to a number one super guy

who's quicker than the human eye but then there was a guy called Nigel Beil who changed his name to Mr Toasted Teacake and he said some people can't believe it especially because I don't even like teacakes that much just thought it was a nice name it must be it must be so horrible that if you love stupid names

that you've got to go to the to the what's the name change DePaul and you must be in the queue going okay this time it's just going to be Brian Smith and you're saying hi to the guy in front of you oh what are you changing your name to oh Rainbow Sunshine Moonga

oh god damn it and then you get home to your wife she's like is it Brian Smith it's ass like a dang dang I couldn't help myself it must be so hard if you love a name at least you're now married to a number one super guy there's a guy called Sean Hennessey

who changed his name to Nigel Bottomface to win a bet with his friends and he said my mum was furious but at least I got a night out in Chelmsford you're the sad life there we're gonna have to move on but do you want to get one last name oh that's some five funny stuff on advertising

okay so the Churchill dog as the one in the Fisher School Churchill at the start of this back the Churchill dog was initially a real bulldog called Lucas who had to be sacked after one advert because he refused to hold a phone in his mouth he refused

he was like oh no oh we are gonna have to move on so we move on to our final fact of the evening and that is my fact my fact this week is that the only ancient Egyptian socks that we know of all belonged to Tutankhamun is that awesome

when they when he was when Howard Carter went into the tomb he found a lot of stuff a lot of gold a lot of walking sticks and he found three pairs of socks and what's amazing is that up until finding these socks

there had been no depiction of socks in ancient Egypt whatsoever and I can't believe that that wasn't the headline they wore socks also because he wore sandals it means that he was a socks and sandal shirt which is very exciting

do you normally have painted on the bottom of his sandals this is cool he had the faces of his enemies painted on the bottom so that wherever he walked he would be crushing them into the dust yes but except there was a lot of sand so that would just be great branding

because you'd see the guy everywhere that's like the ultimate marketing try you Tutankhamun's enemy um yeah they have that um so there were some socks that I think those weren't found intact were they they were reconstructed from the evidence that they had

but they're all the socks found intact no no no they sorry in in his tomb they found three that were completely intact and then they found three that weren't but they think that they must have been socks they were the other pairs yeah so he actually had six pairs

but three didn't make the 3000 year period of time as since past there's a fact they also found the bottom of perfume speaking of the 3000 year period of time which still when they took the lid off it still smelled I think it smelled like something rotten

oh no it smelled nice it smelled like something like chamomile or vanilla or something oh that's 3000 years um he was also buried with his own baby clothes which I think is quite sweet yeah yeah I wonder why there was actually a few toys

weirdly there was a boomerang yeah yeah well they used them to hunt and they used lassoes as well did they yeah yeah cool isn't it is he from Australia

yes it's not a thing we did with America where we thought it was India it does sound like the outpack from yeah wow and he was buried with 413 what were called shabty figures and these were little slaves

that he would take into the next life because often people think that if you were the slave of a pharaoh and your pharaoh died then you'd have to kill yourself and be buried with him or be buried alive with him which is even worse

but that never happened it was actually a little muddle so I'll give you that you would do it so he was also buried with James was telling me an erection that was his confidence yeah he um

he had a 90 degree erection 90 degree and he's the only um known pharaoh as far as I know who was buried that way and no one really knows that and James has studied the field extensively

there was a guy called George Glidden who was going to unwrap a mummy in front of a lot of people he was a bit of a charlatan but he did have a mummy and he was going to unwrap them and he said it was a princess a princess mummy

and he claimed that he knew that he knew her identity who was she was a daughter an Egyptian priest he knew that because he had deciphered the hieroglyphics on her sarcophagus

and then he unwrapped her unwrapped her unwrapped her in front of a load of people and then they they realized actually that it was a man and the princess had a rather large penis that's where we get the photo

from the princess and the penis and he they it was in boston this and he explained that his error was due to the poor handwriting of the sarcophagus a bad egyptologist

always blames the hieroglyphics that's funny um have you heard of mummy pettigrew mummy pettigrew was a guy called thomas pettigrew and he uh he was

he just unrolled loads of mummies all the time he was an egyptologist and he unrolled 14 of them and he would do a six-part lecture series and he would always save the unrolling for the very last lecture

in the series to build up to it throughout it and i just found one sentence about it which i wanted to share which is that pettigrew's dramatic erotically-tinged unrollings became so popular that at one gathering

that the archbishop of canterbury himself got squeezed out of the room that is a waste of study and then later on he was asked to turn a victorian duke into a mummy

there was a the duke of howlton was obsessed with mummies and he said will you mummify me after i die oh after he died yeah yeah

um and he did it but unfortunately he didn't fit in the sarcophagus he'd had built so they had to take off his feet yeah when they were excavating

toon coming's clothes no actually this was later on when they decided to recreate all his clothes then the person who was recreating them decided to tell her students for the only way that they could work out exactly how he'd worn them

was by trying them all on himself themselves so the students of this archaeologist got to just try and all toon coming's clothes and they worked out that something they thought was a headdress was actually apparently

these things to be worn the arms to form the wings of a falcon um that's what he went around with but i don't know how you work that out and it sounds a bit like they were just pissing him out

and like put a headdress on their arm and went he probably did he was a very strange shape they think he had sorry too sorry too

sorry too can come here all right um they think he had a congenital disease or something because his his hit measurements were extremely loved

it was sort of out of proportion with the rest of his body and we don't know why well much like hate and wills it was inbreeding i'm talking about the beer cuts

beer cuts kato wills yeah no his um his parents were brother and sister they yeah

i really like the so when you were saying the thing of unwrapping the mummies that was a massive craze that the victorians went through

where they suddenly were just digging up lots of mummies and using them for virtually everything railroads used to use them

as fuel they were just that's not i promise that's not for you oh is that in america they oh okay mark

mark trains said that they did and um we think he was taking the mickey oh okay he is a wait so how about the time traveler guy when taking arcus court

that's not a oh man i've got some terrible news being about philip trans bogus journey all right how about mummy brown is that true that's true

i think mummy brown is true mummy brown is amazing mummy brown was if you haven't heard of it is a um it was a it was a paint that

that artist would use it was ground up mummy that would lead to a brown and they would use them on uh on their paintings and a lot of people didn't they just thought

it was a cute name and then someone explained no it's an actual mummy and a lot of famous artists actually got quite disturbed by that and and buried

the rest of the paint giving it an honorable burial because they just thought well they did there's a lot of stuff about curses going on back then and they didn't want that

but yeah you get paint i can't believe that it's extraordinary yeah and they used it as like a panacea as well that they they would um use this mummy and then they would take it

as a medicine for any illness yeah i think they used it uh people in beads used it until the 20th century to heal bruises really which is amazingly

capitalier considering it's just a bruise yeah why do you need to you don't need to heal a bruise you could get imitation mummy as well if you didn't have the real thing

and so you would here's the ingredients take the carcass of a young man some say red-haired not dying of a disease let it lie for 24 hours in clean water cut the flesh into pieces

and add maire a little aloe and then bite for 24 hours in the spirit of wine and turpentine it doesn't sound artificial to me it smells real yeah it's real but not old okay yeah

i was looking at very interesting burial sites and burial rituals but so the vikings um they were buried on ships obviously but not at sea

and i read a really interesting theory that because they were often buried with decapitated animals so the um osberg osberg Viking ship which is one of the most famous

Viking ships that's been on earth it was this woman she was buried with 10 decapitated horses and i think a couple of decapitated dogs and they think this is because they because they have the ships on land but to get to the underworld you had to sail

it was in order to create a river a convenient river of blood from your decapitated horses on which you could sail to the underworld wow yeah grotesque um and also

so the first evidence of a ritual burial is from 28 000 years ago of like a burial where people were sort of buried with items and it seemed like they believed in an afterlife and it was two young boys and they were buried with mammoth tasks

over two years long but they'd been straightened and we don't know how they straightened them so they were we think they boiled them and then straightened the mammoth tasks into

they were four feet long and just straight tasks i changed my will as soon as i go that's what i want and i'll tend to decapitated horses and straightened the mammoth tasks i read a thing that i want as well for death

which was that um i was reading about that's weird when you read like someone's death you're like oh i want that they sounded really cool

um utzi who was the um the oldest ice man that we found he was made of ice he was he was

i don't know what period he was from but um he was complete and they found everything on him they found a bag which had magic mushrooms in it they found he had shoes

he had socks he had socks but what's amazing is is that they found him complete and what they don't point out is that they have found other people who are complete but utzi's a rare case

because he was just a whole pink sorry utzi utzi not the q and a but thank you though again

these are the kind of heckles at jongler's it's like you're shit our crowds utzi dickhead did i say it right utzi

uh so utzi was found as a full a full body but then i read about these other deaths where they found other people and basically because of the way that

um that tectonics and just the way that things shift they found full bodies but people have been splattered and cartoonified you know at the end of roger rabbit where he splats

and he goes into long form they found people that are like just fully like huge humans in a huge world like a book of pressed flowers yeah like some kind of pressed human bit and that's how i want to go

which looks great look at me um we're we're gonna have to wrap up we've got uh only a couple more minutes is there anything else you guys want to add

one third of the world's socks are made in a single city in china the way yeah way that's how it's called but they get one third they come in pairs

handy what is one third of six oh we are gonna have to wrap up so i'm just gonna end over that thank you so much everyone those are all of our folks if you want to hear more from our show

we've got plenty online if you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said our pronunciations you can get me on that Shrigerland on twitter james egg shaped andy

andrew hunter m and anna you can email podcast at qi.com okay so uh so that's it we'll be back again next week with another episode from soho theater

thank you so much for listening thank you so much guys for being here we'll see you again next week have a good night one last week we're gonna go upstairs and get very drunk

if you'd like to join us that would be awesome yeah hang around for a bit