No Such Thing As A Fish - 60: No Such Thing As An Unenjoyable Bowel Movement

Episode Date: May 8, 2015

Dan, James, Anna, Andy and QI creator John Lloyd discuss Iceland's last McDonalds burger, the science of ignorance, and sea battles at Sadler's Wells.

Hi everybody, welcome to episode 60 of No Such Thing as a Fish. Just a quick announcement before we begin. My microphone didn't work this week and as a result it has infected the entire other four working microphones. So the show does sound good but as soon as I start talking it's terrible. No change that happened. 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 here with James Harkin, Anna Czenski, Andy Murray and we have a special guest today. It's the founder, creator of QI, it's commander

John Lloyd and once again we have gathered around our microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with you, James Harkin. Okay my fact this week is that the final McDonald's burger ever sold in Iceland can currently be watched decomposing on a webcam. Who's that? In accordance with a statement that might have been made last week. I don't know what you're talking about. Yes last week I may well have said that Iceland has the most expensive McDonald's burgers and but there has been no McDonald's in Iceland since 2009 a fact that everyone has been very

willing to point out. That doesn't explain why they're so expensive because of scarcity value. So no more McDonald's in Iceland and the last one they kept put it in a museum and now it's in a hostel under a webcam. How's it looking? It's looking fine because burgers tend to not decompose very much. I yeah so I read that because there's some father who's got really outraged didn't he? He put one of his kids McDonald's burgers in a jar or something and filmed it over the course of weeks and weeks and months and months and said isn't this that outrageous this hasn't rotted at all and McDonald's I think ended up I assume

having to be the first franchise ever to protest our food does rot honestly. Please believe us but yeah they don't rot and it's like if it doesn't have access to the fluids that allow the bacteria to thrive then they just go on for years. If you keep it dry and you keep no animals near it or bacteria near it or whatever then it'll be fine. I like the fact that it's on a webcam as well 24 hours a day. Yeah that's good. Do you know there are webcams where you can actually watch paint dry? Have you seen that? Paint Peel. There's one a paint peeling website and there's a grass-growing website and there's one

weekend or you could see a cheddar cheese mature and it was on for a year which how long this cheese takes to mature and it the cheese was known as Wedgenald apparently and it got used to get Valentine's cards from America and assigned rugby ball from the British rugby team. The cheese. The cheese yeah it had a million fans. Did they possibly read mature and think it was some other kind of online thing? Adult cheese. Ex-rated. Cheddar. I had breakfast by yesterday's where the guy used to work on the McDonald's advertising account. Oh really? And he said that when they launched their I'm Lovin' It which is

a terrible slogan. I'm Lovin' It campaign. They had 30,000 parties all over the world simultaneously. It's a world record for a number of simultaneously held parties because they got 34,000 restaurants as they call them in the world. It's his wrong restaurants doesn't it? Yeah what would you call them? Joints? Food holes. I looked up some of these 34,000 outlets and here they are. Number one. The McDonald's in Roswell, New Mexico is the only one in the world shaped like a UFO. Really? Actually just thinking about UFOs look a bit like burgers anyway. Yeah they do. Perhaps it's an accident. And there's a ski

through McDonald's in Sweden, in Linvallam in Sweden. Is there 100 yards between the order microphone and the bit where you pick it up? Did you also see about the the world's most expensive burger which I think came out this month? It's called the Glam Burger and it's available at Honky Tonk restaurant Chelsea. It's not an ad and it uses in the burger is Canadian lobster, New Zealand venison, Kobe beef, black truffle brie, champagne, Iranian saffron, Himalayan salt, bluger caviar and hickory smoked duck egg covered in edible gold leaf. The bun is also covered in gold leaf and it costs £1,100. Is that with fries? No

fries are extra. It's £1,102.99 for the meal. Okay so you were saying about expensive burgers. I read an article saying that burgers couldn't have existed a hundred years ago. Oh I love this theory. Yeah you saw this. And so it's apparently they didn't really exist back then but the thing is you if you have tomatoes they have to be made at a certain time of year in a certain place on the planet. The same with beef has to be you know in the olden days you would kill the cow at a certain time and the bread would have to be farmed at a certain time the wheat would have to be and so it would be impossible until we

had modern farming techniques to actually have a burger. Wait you could have had some burgers right you just couldn't have mass produced them or you couldn't have made a burger. You'd have to take the cow to the wheat field. Yeah kill it there. You're not saying that you couldn't get beef on bread at the same time of year. But for instance tomatoes would only come through in the summer and so you'd have to pick those in the summer if you wanted to have tomatoes on your burger. Gherkins hadn't been invented yet. Does a burger include the bun? I've never really understood that. Yes. It does include the bun.

Have you been to McDonald's? I get some buns with my bun. I'll pay extra I don't mind. I'll pay extra. It does not necessarily include tomatoes because McDonald's don't have tomatoes by and large. That's true. A cheese burger doesn't. You know where you learn all this stuff? Had no idea this place existed. Hamburger University. McDonald's has hamburger university. Is it in Hamburg? No it's in Harvard. Sorry it's not in Harvard it's considered to be the Harvard of it. It's in Elk Grove Village Illinois and everyone says it's the Harvard of the fast food universities. And how many other properties? They have 5,000 students.

They have 12 interactive educational teams. They have in-house professors. Ray Crock taught there the original McDonald's genius. Does Harvard University ever call itself the Elk Grove Illinois hamburger of the academic world? Do you know what is the Harvard of the lock making world? No. Is it Yale? So this is quite fun. Before 2012 2012 Pizza Hut was the USA's biggest buyer of kale. They did not serve any of it. They used it as a decoration in their salad bars. Now NPR check this out and they said they never heard back from Pizza Hut so they did try to fact-check it but they haven't got it cast iron. That's amazing. And that was before kale came. It's taken off now, isn't it?

You know the Queen technically owns a McDonald's? She works in it doesn't she on Alternate Tuesdays. She studied at that university. She basically the Crown Estate bought up a big shopping centre effectively and she's the landlord of it now and McDonald's is in there as a drive-through McDonald's. So she's the landlord of that. You know what shopping centre it is? It's visible from Windsor Castle. Slough maybe? Yeah it's in Slough. Do you know the Great Wall of China is visible from Windsor Castle? No, I think that's been debunked, isn't it? Yeah so she also owns a B&K Superstore, some branches of Comet, JJB Sports and Mother Care. Is she like one of those hands-on owners, a micromanager do we know? She's just always in there

inspecting the staff. She turns up and demands the rent with a sledgehammer every month. Okay time for fact number two and that is John Lloyd. My fact that I offer you elves is that in 1851 Prince Albert commissioned a ballroom for Belmoral Castle made entirely of corrugated iron. Now you think of corrugated iron as being like a really cheesy cheap material it's you know garden sheds and you know tin shacks in Australia but from the time that it was invented in 1829 it was an absolutely amazing wonder material. It's cheap, it's light, it's fireproof, corrosion proof, biodegradable and earthquake resistant and it can survive monsoons, heavy snow loads, immense heat and can be erected by unskilled labour. It really is amazing. I actually went

and bought a book on corrugated iron. It's massive, it's about the size of a corrugated iron sheet because I got so fascinated by it. Wow. These days most corrugated iron is not iron. That's true. Is it corrugated? It's aluminium, zinc and steel. Yeah really. Since the 1890s it has been that and language just has not caught up. So it's been not iron for a lot longer than it was iron? Yeah by now, yeah. Do you know where the word comes from? The word corrugated. It's ruga, Latin for a wrinkle. Yeah that's why you say testicles are rugos don't you? Do you? Well I did. I read that there's a theory and it's not it's very very hard to prove but there's a theory that more people have been sheltered by corrugated iron in the 20th century than by any other material

in the world. Wow. Isn't that incredible? I think that's probably true. Because something like 60% of Nairobi's population live in corrugated iron houses to this day so isn't that amazing? Yeah it's a lot. Yeah and it's amazing but as I guess it's Jon's pointing out I just didn't know the first thing about corrugated iron. Yeah this is what I found about corrugated iron is I'd never thought about it in my whole life before but then suddenly you think this is a really really important thing because in for example the First World War the Nissen hut invented by Captain Peter Nissen who was a Canadian mining engineer serving with Royal Engineers in Britain he invented this thing again you just need this because as I said it bends in one direction perfectly and it's

perfectly rigid in the other so they built a hundred thousand Nissen huts in the First World War which housed two and a half million men in the around the trenches. In the Second World War in New Zealand they came up with a thing called a Bob Semple tank which was it wasn't invented by Bob Semple but it was his idea I think he was a politician or something and the idea is they would take a tractor and put corrugated iron around it and turn it into a tank. But unfortunately due to functional failures tractor gear problems public ridicule and impracticality the tanks were rejected so they didn't work and everyone thought they were stupid. So the reason that corrugated is so strong is if you it's a bit like if you have a pizza slice and you just hold the end of the pizza

and it kind of flops over but if you bend it into like a U shape then it kind of stays stiff and that's the maps behind that and it was first discovered by Carl Friedrich Gauss and he named it the Theorema egregium which was Latin for the excellent theorem. He thought it was one of the best things I mean he was one of the great mathematicians but he thought this was one of the best things that he ever came up with. He's his own hype man there isn't he? Yeah you like the excellent theorem wait till we hear the outstanding theorem. If you know that the Milky Way is supposedly corrugated it's like a disc of matter and stars but it has ridges in it. Whoa that's great. Corrugated universe. Yeah. Is that for strength? Well it might be like because obviously in nature

it just if you think about the hexagons in a in a bee's nest then they they come because they're so strong or so simple maybe it is maybe it's so. Wait but so is there anything else that's natural outside of the Milky Way that's corrugated? Yes I know something um so woodpeckers they have this cartilage in between their beak and the rest of their skull because obviously they head a tree at 50 miles an hour every time and their this cartilage is corrugated and it absorbs the shock of the impact and it stops them from killing themselves every time they hit a tree. That's clever. That corrugation someone is using it at the moment to develop a safer bike helmet by using a layer of corrugation inside to absorb impacts. That's cool. That's really cool. Yeah.

Just going back to Balmoral for a minute um the actual ballroom in Balmoral now is the largest room in the castle it's the only one that's open to the public and um Prince Albert because Prince Albert bought Balmoral with his own money unlike all the other royal residences it's actually private properties actually owned by the royal family whereas all the other ones are owned by the crown which is the the legal personage which you know manages the thing so they can do with it as they wish. Put a McDonald's in it. They also in the Balmoral ballroom the castle ballroom as it's called every year they hold a ghillies ball because there's 50 000 acres of Balmoral so they've probably got quite a few ghillies I think it's 150 staff full-time part-time and holding a ghillies ball

this is my father's favorite joke he used to say he used to repeat this joke a lot which is um he said when he was in America they have these people called the mooses the moose in the order of the moose yeah in Canada which is a kind of mate they like the masons and this guy my father used to say um he's trying to get to sleep in this hotel there's a terrible racket from downstairs and he rings up the manager and he says uh would you please keep the noise down uh and the manager says but sir they're holding a moose's ball and the guy says well for god's sake tell him to let it go you're never tired of that. I was reading over Christmas um a book by uh it was a biography on Robin Williams and Robin Williams his mother used to read so Laurie Williams used to read him this

book which she said was her favorite book which was supposedly written by 19th century English society hostess uh and it was called balls I have held. That's very good. There was a guide to ballroom etiquette written in 1880 I think which I it has like various good advice for attending a ball so like if a gentleman without proper introduction asks a lady who he's not acquainted with to dance she should positively refuse um things like that but I like the fact that um during a ball in a ballroom no lady should be left unattended which I just quite like because they may be removed and destroyed without warning. Okay time for fact number three and that is Chesvinsky. My fact is that during the 19th century

Sadler's Wells Theatre in London was routinely flooded to stage fake naval battles. This is amazing. I think it's really cool so if people aren't familiar with Sadler's Wells like these days it's more of a ballet dancing theatre um but it's had about five or six iterations I think over the past few hundred years and yeah at the turn of the so between about 1800 and 1820s uh this guy decided that in celebration of Britain's naval prowess that he would fill it with gallons and gallons of water and use it to stage fake naval battles and they weren't a huge amount of trouble for it um so they employed it was in 1804 that uh this um this was begun and it was the brainchild of someone called Charles Dibbiden Jr and he employed all these shipwrights and rigors to

exactly replicate the ships that have been used in the British Navy. The scale was one inch per foot so they weren't the actual size of ships otherwise that wouldn't have fitted in a theatre um and yeah it was filled with 8 000 cubic feet of as it was announced in the newspaper in capital letters real water not just fake water and 117 model ships and they employed little children so they they put out adverts asking for children who were able to swim so that during performances they could have when they were staging all these fake naval battles they could have kids who could swim in the water that had to be rescued by the actors and it was commonplace at the end of performances for the audience to jump into the water at the end to all flood forward as it were

and jump in and start swimming in it sounds great that sounds amazing the reason do you know why the reason for these battles but but between the licensing act of 1737 and the theatres act of 1843 for a hundred years only two theatres in the country were allowed to do theatre with dialogue the two theatres were one in Covent Garden one in Drury Lane everyone else could do music but they couldn't have speech as well wow so what happened was that they basically became dependent on stuff that didn't involve any sort of proper acting so they had to have spectacles of various kinds and and sea battles were just one of the main things but in 1784 to 5 the the top of the bill at Sadler's Wells were a play by Scaglione's troupe of thespian dogs

starring Moustache the canine matinee idol of his day apparently two horses dancing a minuet a singing duck and a pig that could tell the time like the children's game what's the time mr pig so there was this intense clowning and so you could have dancing and some but you couldn't have proper theatre for over a hundred years yeah I was reading Grimaldi the the great original clown uh he used to perform there a lot and indeed he made his first appearance there did he age three as a dancer in an Easter entertainment and his last in 1828 so to do his whole life he was a he was a big fan of Sadler's Wells and I just want to mention this thing that one of the highlights of Grimaldi's career was in an 1807 he was at Sadler's Wells and he caused so much hilarity

that a deaf and dumb man in the audience recovered his lost powers of speech and cried out what a damned funny fellow I do want to sound like a swirlsword Darren Brown but I think that guy was a plant it's even more impressive if he if he was a plant can he tell the time as well um so I read that this this genre there was an actual genre of as you say these spectacles which specifically involved naval scenes and it was called aqua drama all the pages refer to it as aqua drama and one of the one of the shows at Sadler's Wells was called was called Philip and

his dog or where's the child and the climax of that show was a dog actor jumping into the water and saving a child from drowning yeah they had yeah these huge dog celebrities well trained dog I know did they have actors on the boats do they stand on the ships yes they're big enough to do that yes they did and there's one quite funny article which points out that everyone's so involved in the show and it's so captivating that no one notices the problem with perspective whereby the boats are about a tenth the size of the but the people obviously are just people sized I was going to say because if you had I think they had 117 mini ships on the stage and yeah I don't well they all on stage at once they can't have been I don't know why would you not have

them all on stage at once so these are called now Machia sea battles and they date right back to classical times but the largest one we had in that era was in 1814 and I came across this by accident it was all any newspapers reporting on that day in 1814 and it was in Hyde Park on the Serpentine Lake and it was to follow it was to celebrate the peace in the Napoleonic Wars so the peace treaty with Napoleon and the end of that fighting and to celebrate that apparently they stage a huge naval battle but newspaper said the whole metropolis seemed depopulated everyone was centered in the parks and the whole of London flocked to Hyde Park and watched this huge naval battle on the on the Serpentine. We have to move on I've just got one last thing to mention before

we do which is it's a bit of a it's a it's a bit of a famous rock myth which I think is really interesting you know that great rock myth about the idea of Van Halen saying that if they had brown M&Ms inside there so they would have there this was in the rider you mean this was in the rider the idea was that they said this is what we want in the green room but we don't want any brown M&Ms I thought that that was true but they did that it is true that they did that but so the idea is that they they would come back and one time David Lee Roth found brown M&Ms and he got furious and he trashed the whole room and that's what became very famous rock myth and I say myth the myth bit is the facts about why he got angry he wasn't angry because there were brown M&Ms because

he hates them he was angry because they were a tiny thing in a very big contract that he sent over because the Van Halen show was such a spectacle it was such a massive event that most venues in America couldn't accommodate the kind of show that they were going to do and so he would put in precise detail this has to be like this otherwise people may die stages could have collapsed or that sort of stuff and if he found brown M&Ms inside that bowl he knew that they hadn't read the contract properly that's really interesting yeah of course that's one reading that the contract hasn't been read properly or the other reading is that the person who's in charge of setting up the stage so it doesn't collapse and kill people isn't also on M&M scouting duty that's true

that's true that's one of the great rock sort of stories and it's it's interesting that there was actually a guy concerned with health and safety behind putting yeah he's been unfairly maligned if that's the case yeah exactly Douglas Adams told me this great story about pythons the pythons when they were their first live tour and they went to america i think and they were having a storm out live tour and they went to this hotel and the manager said gentlemen as soon as you want to trash the hotel room then go right ahead because they loved it you know because having the hotel room trash got massive publicity and of course it's all insured anyway but you've got the papers and so the pythons being very polite and pretty so no that's quite necessary we don't need

to trash i think we're very happy no please sir please trash the room so look let me try with that you know like start with this chair and all that stuff so eventually after not wanting to do this michael palin kindly went into the bathroom and broke a toothbrush okay time for a final fact and that is andrew hunter murray my fact is that the practice of dog owners pretending that they haven't seen their dog having a crap is technically known as strategic non-knowledge and it's conducted by somebody's genuinely called dr gross uh it's all gross wasn't matthew gross he's a german sociology professor and he spent 10 years following dog owners around at all different times of day

observing them and seeing how they and so and so he he just he decided that this is a new sort of aspect to what we do we kind of yeah it's that there's a specific way of not knowing about something or deciding that you're not going to know about something happening because you think it's disgusting so and he found out a lot of other things so often before people actually do pick up their dog's poo they will look over their shoulder and they will try and make sure that other people can see them doing the right thing basically um or um or sometimes if they if there's no one around or if they they really don't want to they'll start to put their hand in their pocket for a plastic bag or something and then they'll take it out again they just they'll decide at the

last minute not to wow andy what is the thing about people doing the pooper scuba putting it in the bag and then hanging it on a tree what's that for well he has a theory about this which is that it's a form of passive resistance um that people are saying i don't people are saying i know it's the right thing to pick this up but i resent having to do it therefore i'm going to leave it anonymously because he said he followed people for years and he never saw anyone leave it on a tree therefore people must be leaving it when there's no one else around but making sure that no one sees them doing it is there a form of decoration maybe maybe it's making a double mark for their dog so the dog pisses on the tree below he sticks the poo up it's just the total that's my dog's tree

and no matter how high your dog is they do they do this thing that because obviously it's a big problem everyone hates the idea of seeing poo in the street uh dna dog testing is a new thing now where they sample the poo and they can identify now whose dog it is so you can no longer they're doing this in london london is where it kind of started feels like it would really give you the dna of whatever the dog's eaten rather than the dog itself isn't it yeah that's true a cow took a poo a tin of pedigree charm has been defying the streets again that's true but no so they so they now have 18 000 dogs when this article was published um in the borough of barking and dagon them uh and they've registered their dna so if you find poo on the street now you can take

it in and they can go again that's that's mic's dog i think i might just still leave it rather than take it in well you get big time also the fatal flaw in this is that because i think it's all voluntary uh whether you submit your dog's dna into this dna database so it relies on the people who decided to go and submit their dog's dna then also being the kind of people who aren't going to pick up poo there's a serious selection bias kind of problem that is tricky why don't uh policemen have to get off their police horses and you know with a shovel get a sack giant bin liner next to an enormous tree um the guy who did this Matthew Gross he wanted you asked about leaving things by a tree he wanted to ask owners about the practice and um very bravely he approached them

and started asking them about it and um apparently in his own words some of the friendlier comments included mind your own business and don't you have anything else to do that reminds me of the study of the guy who um cycled around a town on a unicycle and made a list of all the different comments that he got and something like two thirds of them were something to the effect of words you're on the wheel so i'm pretending not to know things um yeah this is from a book called why everyone else is a hypocrite which deals with some of these questions like Anna was saying of self-deception um so i just wanted to quote a bit of it um so there are lots of situations where if you don't know something you can avoid a situation right which is a lose lose

situation just by pretending not to know or not to understand something um so this is the line if you see a building on fire and a small boy comes to tell you that a cat is caught in the window your options are either to risk yourself to save the cat or take the reputational hit of neglecting a socially perceived duty to rescue the cat and then there's a footnote in the book where it says you could kill the boy but then you've got other problems that's something to consider though yeah um so so whereas if you simply pretend that you don't understand the language the boy is speaking then you don't have to rescue the cat you don't have to risk your life or kill the boy or kill the boy according to a survey commissioned by samaritans quite recently three

times more men than women would pretend not to notice if a friend broke down in tears in front of them bloody hell that takes a lot of not noticing doesn't it broke down in tears not even just a little dribble a proper hysterical crying fit three times more yeah i mean i can't say whether that's positive or negative though because is it thoughtfulness for the person i might well do that because you don't want to make the person feel uncomfortable it's true you could go up to them and say there there or you could walk off or you could kill them all of those would stop the crying but i have noticed with british people generally this is one observation i picked up from being here is that uh if people are talking in a room and someone farts loudly just people just continue

talking they just walk over it like this is um own research isn't it you may have been noticing you've been conducting my study in the office for the last few years we've edited we've edited those all out of the podcast yeah no pretending not to know stuff is is is huge especially in britain so interestingly because there are a lot of scientists don't understand why we do lie though and i don't think it's as simple as we think so there's what they say so there's this um thing called smork which is the simple model of rational crime which says that we lie for rational reasons so we lie when it's going to benefit us so if i've stolen something and then someone asked me if i've stolen something i'll lie so i don't get in trouble but actually

and i've oh basically we started the podcast just as i was in the middle of reading this so i didn't see examples but it's this guy called dan ariele who tested the smork principle and it's not true we don't lie instinctively in a way that benefits us at all we lie in a way that says we want to present ourselves as a certain as something or something that's to do with our own self-image it's not to save ourselves from something so we don't i don't think we really know where we lie yeah i think my favorite thing about lying is that very small children under the age of about four never lie because they think you can read their minds is that why because they think that that voice we all have in our head that we've got used to small children just hear this as a kind of constant

thing they think well everybody i can hear it everyone else must be able to hear it i can sort can't you remember i can sort of remember thinking that i can remember being convinced that i just say which voice and if you're a manipulative parent you could really use that to your advantage and show that the child never stole a biscuit again or you could kill the boy but then you so chimpanzees can do this thing sometimes if chimpanzee is foraging for food he'll see something really tasty and then just kind of walk past it pretending he didn't see it just so that no other chimpanzee can see him kind of get in an eye and then fight over it apparently sometimes a competitor chimp will kind of notice what he's doing and then walk past the pretending chimp hide behind a tree

and then peep out to see if the pretending chimp really does have some food after all that genius is yeah i love it and then another animal apart from us has evolved nonchalance yes we should wrap up very very quickly because we should we should wrap it up indeed i think that's a message of this podcast who should be wrapped up and disposed of responsibly i think we really need to wrap up and hide his podcast around the tree um actually have you guys ever um enjoyed your bowel movements love them go just yes or no do you enjoy your bowel movements yeah yes on occasion okay so this was a study done actually to test whether liars were more

successful and it found that they are and the way they did the study with these two scientists stayed up really late had a few drinks um this is in the 90s i think had a few drinks and said okay we need to ask people questions that we definitely know the answers yes but i bet people will lie about it and so one of their questions was do you enjoy your bowel movements and it was just they were like well obviously everyone does so if they say no they're liars and other questions in this study included have you ever doubted your sexual adequacy apparently anyone who said no to that they're going well obviously a liar and have you ever thought about committing suicide to get back at somebody anyone who just knows that they've got to be a liar that's how you tell

then you do the study so apparently the scientists concluded we've all wanted to do this they're called Ruben Gehr and Harold Sakine wow wow i'm gonna kill myself to get back at him i'll just have a nice poo first okay that's it that's all of our facts thank you so much for listening high five to Anna for asking her boss if he enjoys his bowel movements see me afterwards just in time we could all be reached on our twitter handles i'm on at Shriverland Andy at Andrew Hunter M James at egg shaped john i have someone do that for me Shazimski over to you sure you can email podcast at qi.com which someone else will be monitoring after this podcast i suspect i'll be on jobseekers.com you can also get to us on at qi podcast and you

can go to the qi.com slash podcast where we have all of our previous episodes all 59 up there and we'll be back again next week with another episode thanks so much good bye