No Such Thing As A Fish - 53: No Such Thing As A 3000km Tall Statue Of Liberty

Episode Date: March 20, 2015

Live at the Soho Theatre, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss X-ray sellotape, the world's oldest chewing gum, and why you should never put Skittles up your nose.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the Soho Theatre in central London. My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting with the three regular elves. It's James Harkin, Andy Murray, and Anna Chazinski, and once again we've got around the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order here we go. Starting with you, Andy. My fact this week is that Finnish budget meatballs have so little meat in them that

they have had to be renamed balls. And Finnish pjorikuita, probably pronouncing it wrong, which translates as balls. But the thing is, this is not entirely fair, it's due to European labelling requirements. Basically all the meat has already been cut off the animal, and the stuff they use to make the cheap meatballs is, you know, mechanically reclaimed meat. But they are 50% animal, they're just not 50% stuff which you can genuinely call meat. Like a chop. So they have had to rename them.

I didn't realize meat stops being actual meat. I thought as soon as it's come from an animal, that's it, you're meat for life. I know. So Finland has the world's oldest piece of chewing gum as well, doesn't it? Or it had. That was where it was found. It's a 5,000 year old piece of chewing gum. It's made from tar made of birch bark, and it was found by a 23 year old archaeology

student. It's had teeth marks in it. Wow. Wait, did they say where it was found? In Finland. I was hoping it would be on the bottom of the world's oldest chew or something like that. Did you guys know that in weird ingredients in food, sand is in a lot of what you eat. Sandwiches.

I never thought of that. Not them. Soup. If you have a soup sandwich, sure. Are they in soup? If anything, so it's down a silicon dioxide, which I guess we kind of all know is sand, but you never really think about it. So it's put on the ingredients list.

I checked my soup and my cupboard as anti-caking agent, brackets, silicon dioxide, and it's just sand. And they put it in, like, a lot of the soups. Yeah, be like in grated cheese so it doesn't stick together. Yeah, exactly. And there was a guy, an artist from Chile called Marco Everisti, and he mixed fat removed from his body by liposuction with ground meat to make meatballs. Did he?

What? I bet trading standards got involved, didn't they? Did he eat them or did he serve them to someone else? I believe he definitely displayed them in a gallery because he's an artist. I was feeling he might have fed them to his friends. Oh, wow. Did he tell his friends? Yeah, I think they knew.

Otherwise, that would be a bit of a bad trick, couldn't it? Yeah. Why have we had no Christmas card this year from the Jacksons? We haven't seen them since May when I fed them my own body ground up with meat that I found. I found a few things on, when you said this fact, I just, I love whenever someone is forced into having to rename themselves something new because the thing they were saying was not true or it was just they were stuck in a thing.

There's a great one. It's actually in one of the QI books of the fact books, which is that there's a place in Australia called Shark Bay, but it was renamed Safety Beach to attract more tourists to it. First, they changed the name from Shark Bay to Shark Beach and they still weren't getting many people in. Guys, maybe it wasn't the Bay Beach thing that was putting people up. Well, what else could it be, Frank?

I was reading an interview with a Greek brewer, a Greek beer brewer, who was complaining about the fact that his beer that he's trying to brew keeps up being pushed out of the market by Heineken, which basically dominates the Greek beer market. And his beer only has 5.5% of the market in Greece at the moment, and it's called Vagina Beer. And I just keep thinking, is this interview going to mention at any point the fact that perhaps a bit of rebranding might work? Another one that's a favorite of mine, there's a sushi bar in Montreal that got four years

to change its name by a judge, a high court judge, because so the name that they gave it was F-K-O-Sushi, F-U-K-Y-O-Sushi, and it looked like there was a moment where they were going to try and defend it because it's a genuine Japanese word, and it means good fortune in Japanese. It's also in a karate stance, apparently. It's also the main complaint that people give at the restaurant when they have it like a food. But their downfall was the fact that they have a Facebook page, and they started saying

we have other ideas for bits on the menu that we want to put up, and this really was their downfall because the other bits on the menu were a F-K-U-2 roll, a F-K-ME roll, a F-K-U-ALL roll, and my favorite, the F-K-YONG-MOM-A roll, they've changed their name. I like that, so we're embracing it, trying to embrace it. I think it was a joke from the beginning. Yeah. Okay, back to bowls. Sorry.

In the early 20s, there was a law case between Uncle Luke's mint bowls, these guys who make these little confectionery things, and Uncle Jack's mint bowls, and Uncle Luke was saying Uncle Jack shouldn't be making mint bowls, et cetera, et cetera, and the judge decided that the term uncle could not be copyrighted as there are millions of uncles around the world, and he said, Uncle Jack is just as entitled to offer his bowls to the public as Uncle Luke. Wow. My parents are in tonight.

So, some facts about Finland. Oh, why not? Sure. Finland is a brilliant place. That's not the fact. That's my fact. Damn, and I had that one too. They like strange competitions in Finland, so they have the mobile phone-throwing world

championships, the world air guitar championships, the wife-carrying world championships, swamp soccer, and the finals of that are called the SS World Championships, and I think it's too late for that one. Actually, there was, just speaking of SS, do you remember South End on Sea, their traffic wardens, I think, had a uniform which had SS on, had to change it because they had too many complaints. Yeah, they could have had SOS very easily, so I'd pay attention to the odd. Finland's also got an ant nest sitting competition that you do.

What? It's basically, the idea behind it is there's a bunch of ant nests and you take your trousers down, you sit on it, and then you wait, and the last person to leave is the winner. Wow. Wow. There's one of the champions of the mobile phone-throwing competition is also a hammer-thrower, which I quite like, as if you're hammer-throwering, you don't know what to do in your off-season. You just go to the mobile phone-throwing championships, but also in the wife-carrying

championships, then there are very different positions in which you can carry your wife and people debate over which one is the most efficient, and there's one which is Estonian style, which is if you have the wife's legs over your shoulders and hanging down, which makes you wonder what kind of weird racism was happening, Ari Estonia's sexual practices, whatever that was named. I think it was because the first people to do it were Estonian, but it is the most popular style, and it's the one that the winners always use these days. It's the best one.

It's like a Fosbury flop of wife-carrying. Yeah. It must be every year, someone comes in with a rogue new position, they've got their wife in, and everyone gets nervous going, what does he know that we don't? And then they fail every single year, and Estonia's going, oh yes, that was a good Estonian impression, by the way. There's a boot-throwing world championships also held in Finland, and for an interview, they asked the two-time organizer, not the two-time winner, the two-time organizer of

the championships, and they have their own official throwing boot, so you can't use another boot. You can't use a non-regulation boot, and they have anti-doping regulations, and people are being kicked out of a boot-throwing competition for drugs infractions. Booted out? Yeah. Booted out. They also have a mosquito killing championships.

That is how many mosquitoes you can kill in five minutes using only your hand. Wow. Are you allowed to use your other hand, or is it just, I think you have to go and find them, because it's like, there's a lot of mosquitoes in the art to come, though. Yeah, do you have a tiny, tiny gun dog to go and retrieve the corpses when you've killed them? No, you're being silly, I think. They must have so many potential gold medalists in Finland who are like, have the Olympics

brought up the wife ca-, no, damn it! Finland would wipe the Olympics clean if these were allowed in, and if they didn't just have normal spots in the Olympics. Well, in the news reports of whoever's won the mobile phone carrying or the wife carrying or whatever, it's always, it was won by a Finnish man this year, as if anyone else is really going there. Also, you can't call your friends to tell them you've won, which is a bit of a nightmare. Oh, we met, James and I met a guy, just speaking of throwing things.

We met a guy two days ago, who, he's a scientist who, part of his major study, and he published a paper on this, and he's really proud of it, is that he throws snails for a living. So he chucks them over his garden fence, and then he waits two years to see if they come back. And he knows if they've come back, because he puts Tipex dots all over them, and then he chucks them. He puts one Tipex on, if one-, whenever he gets one in his garden, he throws it over into, there's like a railway that goes next to him, so he throws them over onto the rail.

It's onto the tracks! But then every time they come back, he puts another dot and another dot, and I think there was like one with 17 dots on it in the end, because he just kept coming back and coming back. And he doesn't use slugs, because the Tipex doesn't hold on there, so he has no way of doing it. Sorry, we're going to have to move on, but yeah, do you want to- Another cool thing they have in Finland is fines, all of their fines are dependent on

your salary or your income, and so there was a Nokia executive in 2002, for instance, who was fined 116,000 euros for going at about 40 miles an hour and a 30 mile an hour speed limit or something. It feels like the mobile phone throwing was invented by Nokia, don't you think, because he's like throwing it away, oh, you're going to have to buy another phone now, are you? Do you know what Nokia used to make? They used to make gas masks. Really?

Yeah. The Finnish army used Nokia gas masks until 1995. That's cool. That is good. Can you imagine? You've got your gas mask on. We need to move on. I've just got one last thing, which is that the movie, just going back to meatballs, the

movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in Israel, was retitled, It's Raining for Luffle. That'd be good. In Finland, they've renamed it Cloudy with a Chance of Bolts. OK, time for fact number two, and that is Czazinski. Yeah, my fact is that Queen Victoria's acquaintance once had to apologise to her after her pet Jaguar killed three of the Queen's pet deer, which I just think would have been a really awkward moment. It's bad planning, though, isn't it?

Where can I leave the Jaguar? You're not going to believe what happened. It's an amazing sentence. That is the closest sentence to the kind of otherworldliness of royalty, when you're having to apologise that you're Jaguar. But this woman wasn't, she wasn't a royal, was she? No, she was, by a weird coincidence, she was Bosie's aunt. Do you guys know Bosie, like Oscar Wilde's aunt?

And she was an amazing character, she's called Lady Florence Dixie. She was an explorer, she was a raging 19th century feminist. She picked up the Jaguar in Patagonia when she was chased up a tree by a Jaguar mother, and she was in this tree and she had to shoot the Jaguar mother dead, and then she felt bad for the baby Jaguar, and so she brought it home. And she recounted all this in a letter to Charles Darwin, in fact. They were correspondents. She did correct Darwin.

That's such a name drop of a story. I was at Queen Victoria's because my son is dating Oscar Wilde, and anyway, Darwin. The thing is, is that is, could you put any more... She was well connected. Yeah, wow. What I love about her is the guy who she married, you know this guy? He was called Sir Alexander Beaumont Churchill Dixie, and his nickname was Sir ABCD. Good guy, isn't it?

I know another one of his nicknames, actually. So they were known in court circles, apparently, as Sir Sometimes and Lady Always Drunk. I think she enjoyed a good time. I actually don't think Queen Victoria would have liked her very much, because A, her Jaguar killed Queen Victoria's beloved pet deer, and was then sent to a zoo. But also, you know, John Brown, Queen Victoria's lover of her later years. Lady Florence Dixie claimed that she'd been attacked by Irish transvestites in the grounds of Windsor Palace, and demanded that that be investigated, and so John Brown was sent out into the wet cold.

And he died about six months later of a cold he caught out doing that. Oh no, really? Six months later of a cold he caught? Wow, that is a big cold. Not a good immune system. Mega man flu. I've never looked into Queen Victoria before. She was such a badass. She was so good. Yeah, she wore crotchless underwear.

She did. She wore crotch. I think you might be googling the wrong person. Are you googling Victoria's secret? No, she... How is that badass? There's only badass if you're horse-riding or something. It's not like hardcore. I'm playing it fast and loose with the word.

I was building up to the more badass things I have. I saw that Fiona Bruce on Antiques Roadshow. They were showing that they were selling them, and they were like, this is a crotchless bit of underwear. Actually what happened was when she died, her underwear was auctioned off to people, I think. And she had enormous bloomers. She was very big by the end of her life.

In fact, the circumference of Queen Victoria's waist by the time she died was larger than her height. Wow. Which is quite impressive. So she was technically the wrong way up for the last years of her life. Very sad. Very sad. Do you know the first thing she did after her

exhausting five-hour coronation ceremony? She ran upstairs to wash her spaniel. Which was a spaniel. She had a spaniel called Dash, or Dashie, and she loved it so much. She loved all her animals, a huge amount, actually. When one of her dogs died, she had to be sedated. She was so upset.

And she had a parent called Coco, which could sing God Save the Queen, which was a fun trick. That is the most arrogant thing I've ever heard of anyone doing with their pets. I think her family taught it to sing God Save the Queen, and then they revealed it to her, and she was delighted. She and Albert had huge arguments as well.

They had painted us having had a very, very rosy marriage, but actually she was very angry with him. She was having children all the time. She at one point had nine children under 15 years old, which is a lot. And she was just constantly busy having children. And so Albert had a lot of the responsibilities of state farmed out to him, so he did a lot of dealing with parliament

in his life, but she was very angry about that. He had to go and put notes under the door, apologizing when he'd wielded too much power. She has the reputation of the famous quote of, we are not amused. And so it's attributed to her, but there is no direct evidence that she ever said it. And the thing that we have from her staff and family,

they are on record as saying that she didn't say it, and that she was in fact immensely amused. That's such a lovely PR push. Actually, she was immensely amused. No further questions. Okay, some things on pets, maybe? Okay, so Rudolph II, the Hapsburg Emperor and King of Hungary, he had a pet lion, and he had his horoscope read by Taiko Brahi,

a friend of the show, who told him that the king and the lion had the same star sign. And so when the lion died, Rudolph shut himself in his room, was convinced he was going to die as well, and he died three days later. Oh, really? Because Taiko Brahi, we've talked about him before,

but he was a serious scientist who understood that astrology was all complete bollocks, but it was how he made all his money, wasn't it? So he kept on poor guys, his whole life, having to feed these guys lies. He should have got a pet tortoise or something. But you can't throw someone to the tortoise, can you? During the Civil War, another friend of the show,

Prince Rupert of the Rhine, were very popular with den people. No, he had a poodle called Boy, who he trained to cock his leg and urinate on cue whenever the name of his enemy, Commander Pym, was spoken. So whenever he said his enemy, the dog would urinate. And the people thought that he was Satan in disguise this dog. The enemy thought that.

And they thought he was immune to bullets and could catch bullets fired at Rupert in his mouth. That's Rupert's had some, he's had some good PR. Really good PR, isn't it? People didn't believe amazing nonsense, didn't they? Back in the day. Yeah, it wasn't true. It wasn't true.

Dali used to have a pet ocelot, who he took everywhere with him. And if the ocelot urinated on one of his paintings, when he was painting it, he would charge the biamore for it. He would charge the biamore? Charge the biamore? Oh, right. When he saw the painting, he'd be like, my ocelot, my ocelot weed on this.

So that's 10% increase on the price. Joint work. Wow. The first budgies cost as much as a house. Budgie or house, budgie. Darling, I really think we need to go for the house. Come on, we've got to get on the budgie ladder. They don't need ladders.

So in the 19th century, in 1845, say, they cost about 50 quid, which for a working man was an annual salary. And there was a budgie boom as well, where the value shot up because demand outstripped supply so much, because they had to be brought over from Australia. Do you know where I found out the budgie costing as much as a house thing? Jeff Capes, former Britain's strongest man competitor.

Jeff Capes now keeps budgies, and he's the president of the Budgie Society. Oh, wow. Yeah. I was looking into royals with pets because I just, I just think it's so bizarre because they do get given a lot of presence, which end up being exotic animals and stuff. And Henry the third of France,

he had this thing where he used to carry, so he had pets, he had three dogs, and he used to carry them in a basket around his neck, like a big bit of bling, and they used to bark at people they didn't trust, and he'd be like, get away from me. If they didn't like the person, the dogs would bark them away. But I was, so I looked into the Tower of London

because I've met through stand-up a guy who is the Raven Master of the Tower of London, who does stand-up as well. It's crazy. He looks after the Ravens. He lives there. That's his job. He does stand-up.

He has dick jokes. It's amazing, right? But basically, the Tower of London has extraordinary animals, or at least did, back in the day. They had a polar bear. Apparently, it was a white bear. No one knows for sure. I can't see anyone.

Yeah. And it used to swim in the Thames, right? Yeah. Yeah, it was kept on a long, that was Henry the third of England. Yeah, it was kept on a deliberately long lead, so it could go for a swim. But I went to the Tower...

There were many visitors to the Tower in those days. Well, it's very confusing, because it sounds like the animals had a lot of liberties. I went to the Tower of London's website, and they have a whole page on the animals that used to live there. And they included, they had monkeys, which the monkeys were actually,

they lived in a furnished room. So you could go and visit these monkeys, and it says, be amused by their antics and human-like behavior. But they were removed eventually, because one of them tore a boy's leg off in a dangerous manner. Which makes it sound like the first time they did it,

it was kind of quite funny. You did it safely this time, so we're gonna keep the boys coming into the room. But you are in a warning now. We're gonna have to boob on any last minute. I just have a pet fact. In 2004, a man called Jake Perry owned the Guinness World Record Holder

for the world's oldest cat. In 2005, that record was broken by another one of Jake Perry's cats. This man has owned the two oldest cats by chance. Oh, he's lying about how old they are. Or he painted the first one a different color. The other one, it died. The other one died.

They counted the number of rings, they were old. It's terribly sad, they have to chop the cats down to find out how old they were. That's not the first one died in the second one. And yeah, he feeds his cats bacon, eggs, asparagus, broccoli, and a cup of coffee every morning. And they smoke 40 a day. They're long-lived.

Just fill of spirit. We're gonna have to move on to fact number three. And that's my fact. My fact this week is that the Statue of Liberty originally wore a headscarf. So the Statue of Liberty was originally designed for Egypt. And it was originally meant to be at the mouth of the Suez Canal.

It was gonna be standing there with a torch on the hand. It was gonna be a peasant lady. It was all designed, it was all ready. And then Egypt had a financial situation where they couldn't afford it anymore. And the guy who was called Bartholdi, he was an architect, he was so distressed that he had this colossal thing that was gonna be built

that was no longer built. He went back to France, he was French. And he said, why don't we make a new similar, very similar looking thing for America? And that became the Statue of Liberty. So originally it was meant to be a peasant woman standing at the Suez Canal. You said torch and hand, actually the head of Egypt,

when he agreed to it, wanted the torch on the head rather than the hand, which would have looked a bit weird, wouldn't it? It's interesting because it was, it represents so much for America. And this guy, obviously when he was trying to get it made in America as well, he had to deny so much about the fact that it was originally meant to be for Egypt. And everyone was like, but it feels like you were definitely

pitching this in Egypt. Totally different. Yeah, and so they kept bringing up stuff like, well, okay, how about the fact that when you've now repitched it to us, you still want the Statue of Liberty, not on what we now know as the classic stand that the Statue of Liberty is on. He wanted it on a pyramid.

They just did a really bad job of losing the Egypt connection. And then they said, they said, but it's literally the same design. You've got a torch being held up. And he was like, oh, okay, sure. So how the hell am I meant to design a lighthouse effectively without a torch being up there for the light? For getting to point out that in both of the designs,

the lighthouse element of it was in the head. So again, he just kept shooting himself in the foot. You talked about the kind of plinth that it's on. That was paid for by America, right? So France paid for the statue and America paid for the plinth. But America couldn't get any money for the plinth. And so they had a big sort of campaign to try and get it. And there was a company called Castoria who made laxatives

who offered to give all the money if the name of the laxative would be displayed on the top of the statue. Wow. That's a very different kind of liberty, isn't it? Free and easy movements. So the original sort of garment, the peasant garment, she was designed to be a slave. But the slave was called, the word for it is a fella, right?

F-E-L-L-L-A-H. And one of the main conspiracy theories about the Statue of Liberty, I'm straying into your territory here, Dan, is that the model for it was a man. And we don't really know. A lot of people say that the model was either Bartaldi's mother or the face was modeled on his mother, but we don't know. And what you're saying is that they heard that it was a fella

and they thought... Yes, that's where I think it's come from. Oh, that's cool. There was a really good book written last year, I think, about the Statue of Liberty, and I can't remember what it's called, but the woman who wrote that did hypothesize that he based the face on his brother who committed suicide, I think, whom he really loved.

And it does look like a very masculine face if you look at it. It's a man. I wouldn't say that. It's a man in a dress. The only evidence, actually, as far as I could find, that it was based on his mother is the fact that someone later on after it had been built went to the opera or went to a big sort of arts event with him and his mother. And when his mother came in, this guy was like,

and I turned around and I was like, whoa, it's the Statue of Liberty. And then he said that to people and they're like, oh, that must be it. So I don't know how credible he is. The idea of the Statue of Liberty was actually by a guy called Laboulay, who was a friend of Bartaldi. And he said in a dinner, and this was in a newspaper article of someone who was at that dinner, that it should be a statue that can be seen from the shores of America to the coast of France.

That's big. That is a big, big statue. So some of the guys at qi.com slash talk, Positel and Zed Ziggy, worked out how high it would have to be in order that you'd be able to see it from France. And it would have to be more than 3,000 kilometers high. How high? I'm an idiot. So the International Space Station, for instance.

It's quite high. Yeah, the ISS goes around like 300 or 400 kilometers high. So it's like another 10 times that much. That's massive. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Thomas Edison of electricity fame

He suggested putting a massive disc inside the statue so it could deliver speeches from inside it all across New York. Yeah. It's like it's talking to you. Yeah, exactly. And no one took him up on it, thankfully. It's weird to think of her as it as originally brown or kind of golden yellowish brown for the first 25 years,

obviously being made of copper. It was supposed to be this shining golden statue because we saw obviously picture green. And Bartoldi wanted her to be gilded in solid gold. I think at first he tried to petition the American people to raise loads of money to do that. And I think they said, we've already raised quite a lot of money.

Thanks very much. He had real trouble funding it. He tried to get her image copyrighted so that every single image of her that appeared, he'd get money for it, which was quite in the 1880s, was quite a modern thing to try and do when he failed. Do you know, you used to be able to, they had fundraising dinners as well

where they would desperately try and raise money because all they need, they had the statue. All they needed was the pedestal. And you could buy a meter tall version made of ice cream at these dinners. Fun. He sold his signature. Bartoldi sold it 3,000 times to raise money for it.

And the only way they eventually got the money was by crowdfunding, basically. They printed in, Joseph Pulitzer printed in his paper the name of everyone who gave, even if you gave a penny to it, they would print your name in the paper. So A, it raised a huge amount of money. And B, people bought the paper

because they wanted to see their name in it. So circulation rocketed as well. So it's quite clever. This guy sounds amazing. It sounds like he started copyright laws, Kickstarter. This is really advanced thinking. So I went on to TripAdvisor to see what people thought of the Statue of Liberty.

And there was one guy called H. Jammer. And he didn't like it very much, actually. He said, it was bad because I don't like the sight. It's just a statue, nothing else. The tall was bad and I ordered food at the cart and the person sneezed on my burger. I really don't get it. This was the worst trip ever, one star.

We're going to have to move on to our final fact. Do you guys got anything more that you want to add to that? No, let's speed it up. Okay, time for a final fact of the evening. And that is James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that a polo mint takes 42.5 minutes to dissolve if you stick it up your nose.

And first-hand QI research is the best kind of own research. I actually, when I read that, I stopped on the way to get polo mints. So for the rest of the show, I might have one. We've only got 15 minutes left, so just have half. While he's doing that, I'll explain the point of this fact. It was a fact given to me by my mum, actually, which is quite nice. And she found this study. It was by a guy called Dan Leppard.

And he's an ENT specialist at the University Hospital of Wales. And he wanted to see how long it took. For people at home, Dan is inserting candy into his nose. I'm being put off here. No, he studied five different popular sweets favoured by children and saw how long it took to dissolve in the nose. And the idea is, he put them up his own nose. And the idea is that when children get things stuck up their noses,

it's kind of hard to get it out and it's quite, you know, not a very nice thing. But he thought, if they dissolve quickly, then maybe you don't have to go through that whole thing. You just let nature do its thing. So actually, it's quite an important study, even though it's a bit dumb. I like that. How's that going over there? Everything smells great.

Actually, it's actually quite, like, I know that's not the point of it, but actually, it's making my nose feel like I'm getting more air. OK, so other sweets. Skittles take 37.5 minutes to dissolve in your nose, Smarties 32.5, and Tic Tacs 27.5. So I'm now extremely skeptical about this study because one of my friends is here who stuck a sour skittle up her nose once. On a date?

Not for a day, actually, just for fun, I think. And apparently, it was extremely painful. So I was exploding in her nose. She tried to, like, push it out and it ended up in her eye socket. All the weird sour acid was streaming out of her nose and, like, bits of her eye socket were falling out of her face and stuff. And she managed to get to A&E, I think, which implies that it does take longer than that.

Maybe sour skittles have a different disorder. You might be right. I don't think this is really important to say at this point, but don't try this at home. Although, quick update, it feels smaller. Actually, I can feel it tight. It's smaller. So about polos. Did you know that if you snap a polo in open in the dark,

then it glows? I didn't know this, and I couldn't try it at home because it was daytime when I read this. And nobody knows why. So it's this thing called tribo luminescence, that if you turn all the lights out, snap a polo, they think it's about electrons suddenly rushing to a certain point of the polo. And it happens with polos.

It also happens with cellotape. If you whip cellotape off its roll really fast in the dark, then it will glow at the point where it's being whipped off. And it also emits X-rays. And they did an experiment last year, where they managed to get an X-ray of a researcher's finger by just the X-rays emitted by cellotape. He just whipped off cellotape,

and he managed to get an X-ray through that off his own finger. How cool is that? That is cool. It's very cool. So when you get a hospital in future, they'll just have a massive roll of cellotape. Just stand in front of the cellotape, please. Polo.

I have something about smelling things. So when people who are asthmatics smell something that they think is going to cause them an allergic reaction, they will have an allergic reaction, even if the thing they're smelling doesn't cause an allergic reaction. Oh, wow. Yeah, and it's because when you smell something, it goes to your brain before it goes to your lungs,

whether the signals of what you've smelled. And they tested 17 asthmatics, exposing them to a rose-smelling chemical for a quarter of an hour. And nine of them were told it would irritate their asthma, and the rest were told that it would calm them down, and that's exactly what happened, even though it was the same stuff. Really?

How cool is that? Yeah, that's amazing. Are these all in the mind? No. Well... These people should stop making this too fun? No. No.

With their epic end. Oh, it's the opposite of that. It's the opposite of that. It is in the mind, but the mind is also a real thing, basically. In some people, yeah. Another one of my friends is a pediatric nurse, and she recently changed hospitals,

and as part of the showing her around the new ward, she worked in A&E, part of showing her around the new ward, they were like, and this is where we keep the metal detector, and they have now, in a lot of pediatric A&E wards, metal detectors,

because it's a much easier way, a less expensive way than an X-ray, if a kid comes in and says, I've eaten like 17 marbles, not marbles, things made of metal. That's for the marble detector, yeah. You just go down their body.

That's clever, because in this paper of the polo thing, they did say that if a child states they have inserted a sweet into their nose and it cannot be visualised, one must believe that there is indeed a sweet and not an inorganic or corrosive object. In other words,

you have to trust the kid otherwise. If he says it's a sweet and actually it's something bad. But I also want to know what these mystery sweets are that no one can visualise. Well, when they're in your nose. I've heard of this kind of sweet before.

Can you describe it? No. So, I read a report that there was, originally we thought that the nose had about 10,000 ways of smelling. We could smell 10,000 different things.

And that recently, they looked into it again and like, oh, we got the number a bit wrong. It's actually a trillion. Bit of a discrepancy. Well, to be honest, we got board counting all the way through. At the moment, obviously.

All of us except Mike. Who kept going. How can we know that? It seems like such a high number. I have no idea. Okay. I have no idea. Dan can only smell mint at the moment.

Second update? Definitely getting smaller. Wondering if it might just fall out on its own accord. Stay tuned. So, I got me thinking about how, because I've always thought like, you know, they test people for

how good their hearing is, and eyesight you can see quite well. And I thought smell, we must have humans who have amazing smell. And there's a guy, actually, who, his job, and it's one of the most important jobs

in the world, I think, this is his job title. He's NASA's sniffer. NASA has a sniffer who smells everything before it goes into space. This is how powerful his nostrils are. If he doesn't like the smell, it doesn't go. Literally, his nostrils are the gateway

to all planet activity. Because if you put something up into the International Space Station, and it starts to smell after a few months, then that can be... You can't open a window. You can't open a window. You can't get it out.

So, his nose has the ability to smell the tiniest of smell, so he can see if that smell exists. And if it's there, it can then eventually turn into something bigger. But so, his job, he's tested every four months

to see with a bunch of tiny little test tubes, and some of them have no smell, and some have the tiniest of smell. And if he fails, he loses his job, and he still has a job. He's got the best nostrils on Earth. Do you think he can smell

all trillion things in the world? Yeah, I just don't know how you... I mean, maybe they can try very, very similar things, and you can smell the difference between them. I have some things about things that get stuck up the rectum. Oh, God.

Which, Dan, you're lucky this wasn't by actual facts. Otherwise... That would have been a very different experiment. In the 1995 Ig Nobel Prize in Literature was given to two surgeons who made a study called

rectal foreign bodies, case reports, and a comprehensive review of the world's literature. And here are some of the things that they found that people had put up their bottoms. I might...

I'll stop halfway through this, I think, when it gets too much. But seven light bulbs, a knife sharpener, two flashlights, a wire spring, a snuff box... Sorry, was the second flashlight

to try and find the first? We've just got dozens up there now. This is not the same rectum. Yeah. He's a different rectum. So 11 different forms of fruits, vegetables, and other food stuff,

a jeweler's saw, a frozen pig's tail, and then one patient's remarkable ensemble collection, including spectacles, a suitcase key, a tobacco pouch, and a magazine.

A magazine! If you forget your handbag, I mean, what a magazine. It does sound like he was going on a journey. He's got everything he needs. Mike, where's your bag? I don't need a bag.

Why does he need a suitcase key if his rectum is acting as his suitcase? That must be the key inside the case again. Wouldn't that be the best day of your life if you were one of those immigration officers

who puts the glove on and heads in to fight some drugs? It's like, oh, what is this? Mary Poppins? That's no version of Mary Poppins I've seen.

Goodness me. We're going to have to wrap up very, very quickly. James, give us more. What have you got? OK. One way that you could get out of being in the army

was to pretend that you had polyps of the nose, and this is like a little tumour in style, your nose, and if you had it, you wouldn't get in the army. So people pretended,

and here's a quote, attempts have been made to simulate this affection of the nose by introducing the testes of a cock, or the kidneys of a rabbit into the nostril

and retaining them there by means of a small piece of sponge, which is sometimes impregnated with fetted juices. But if it's not a war, you know?

I'll fight in the war. Frontline Murray. I'm not a violent man, but I'll take the war, please. And another thing, we talked about the ignoble prizes before, and we're currently

doing a bit of a tour with Mark, aren't we? Mark Abraham, so he's in charge of those. So I asked him about this, and he sent me a paper from the Journal of Medical Hypotheses

called ejaculation as a potential treatment of nasal congestion in mature males. Where are you ejaculating? Well, apparently... Quite.

According to the abstract, its emission phase provides vasoconstriction and nasal decongestion, which I must say I've never noticed myself. Your nose clears up when you're having sex.

And that's what this is saying, yeah. You do have a rectile tissue in your nose, so maybe it's that. Speak for yourself. I have a normal nose. Maybe this is for

adolescents listening. That's good excuse for when the mum walks in. I think I've just had a blocked up nose. We've already established that Andy's mum is here tonight, so...

It's like... I have a blocked up nose. Oh, that's why all the tissues are far. OK, we're going to have to wrap up. Shall we quickly find out how my polo is doing

in my nose? All right, so... Oh, gosh. Talk amongst yourselves. Oh, no. It's still here. It's still massive. Oh.

OK. OK, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thanks so much for listening, everyone. If you want to find out more about the things that we've said over the course

of this podcast, you can go us all on our Twitter handles. I'm on at Shriverland. James. It's egg shapes. Sorry. Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M. And Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com. We're going to be back again next week with another episode in the Soho Theatre.

Thank you so much for coming to our show tonight. We'll be back again next week. See you then. Have a good night. Goodbye.