No Such Thing As A Fish - 64: No Such Thing As An Honest Saiga

Episode Date: June 5, 2015

Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss banana bombs, disappearing lakes and a church for zombies.

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 am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Chazinski, and Andy Murray, and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Okay, my fact this week is that bananas emit antimatter. That's nuts, so I've had to get my head round antimatter, which- I just researched bananas.

I should have gone down that road, what am I doing? So, an anti-watter is just like the opposite of matter, so if you have an electron with a negative charge, then the antimatter version of that is a positron, which has a positive charge. I know, I see, what's weird is I just, for me, I still don't understand what that means. It means that when you say you had to get your head round it, if you'd actually had to put your head round antimatter, your head would no longer exist. Wait, antimatter? Antimatter.

That was some kind of Freudian slip. The presence of Andy in a room eliminates everything else in it. So wait, because what I read was the beginning of the universe, big explosion, and what should have happened is the universe created enough matter, which is why we're here, but it also should have created an equal amount of antimatter, which in theory should have wiped out the matter, and we shouldn't be here at all. Because if you get to a matter particle and an antimatter particle and they come together, they just explode into energy.

Put my hand up, I still don't fully understand it. Well, that's why you researched bananas, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a quick question about the bananas. If banana emits antimatter, but it is matter, why doesn't it cancel itself out? It doesn't matter. That's a very good answer. Yeah, it's a very good answer.

It's not a very satisfying answer, though. So what happens is bananas contain potassium, and some of the potassium decays, because it's slightly radioactive. I think you might have already known that. Yes, bananas are radioactive. And what it does is it, when it decays, it emits a positron and turns into argon from potassium. And a positron is an antimatter particle? It is.

And then the positron will then meet an electron and then we'll just turn into a little bit of energy. So there's a tiny reaction happening in a banana? It will be in the outside of a banana, yeah. It's about every 75 minutes, I believe. I read that with humans that we're trying to create antimatter. We've got a tiny amount, but if we created a lot, it would be equivalent of an atomic bomb explosion. Yeah, I mean, it's much bigger. So if we created a giant banana, not only would it explode, but it would have the radioactive fallout as well.

Well, there is someone on Wired who has worked this out, and they said to turn bananas into a power station by utilizing this fact that they create positrons. To get 200 watts, you would need a banana generator with 2.2 times 10 to the 20 bananas. That's cool. And it would be a sphere full of bananas, 200 kilometers in radius. And that would create 200 watts. So we don't think big supermarkets should be on the lookout for someone ordering a suspicious number of bananas? There isn't a button for times 10 on the automatic checkouts, is there?

Do you guys know when bananas reached the UK? Because they think it dates to the mid-15th century. Really? They found a banana peel in a Tudor rubbish tip. And the first... Were they doing like a Charlie Chaplin style comedy sketch? Who knows? We have no idea how it got there.

It's really freaked everyone out, because previously archaeologists and historians thought that they got to England in the 19th century. But there's a theory, this is just a theory, that they were really common in Tudor England, but obviously by the time they got here, they'd all be completely black and unrecognizable as bananas. And therefore that's why we have no depictions of bananas. Just picture Henry VIII eating a banana. It's so weird. That's kind of dirty actually, that image, isn't it? But I don't like it.

I read in the QI archives, a Victorian guy called Lord Egremont. Do you know the facts? No. Okay, so Lord Egremont, he spent £3,000 building a greenhouse where he kept a single banana tree, because he wanted to grow his own bananas. And so he managed to grow them, and the day came where he was having his first taste of it, at which he exclaimed, Oh God, it tastes just like every other damn banana.

And had the tree immediately destroyed. Have you heard the story of Oberon War and the bananas? This is so good. So the banana imports were banned between 1940 and 1945. And soon after that, the first delivery arrived since the ban, which was 10 million bananas. And the new Labour government said, let's have a national banana day where every child should have a banana. Great. Oberon War was a writer.

He was the son of Evelyn War. And as a child, he and his two sisters, they got three bananas, and they had heard all about bananas. They were so excited. And he wrote later on in his memoirs, They were put on my father's plate. And before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable,

and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three. From that moment, I never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very seriously. Isn't that incredible? Have you heard of banana peelers? Oh, I don't think so. These are such interesting people. They were fraudsters in the late 19th century, and they made their living from, it was on railways they were,

they would take an old banana peel out of their pocket, put it on the ground, slip over on it, and sue the railway for compensation. One woman called Banana Anna, she did that 17 times over the course of her career. She got huge compensation for it. Where'd she call this off, Banana Anna, when she could just be called Banana Anna? You would have thought, wouldn't you? You've thought this already, haven't you?

There was this, relatedly, to banana slipping. In 1941 in Texas, first one in the newspaper article where I read this, there was a ship that was described as, the first ocean-going cargo ship built since the World War, this is in 1941, so paroled America, hadn't quite predicted what was happening around them, as in the other World War. Anyway, the newspaper reported that the first ocean-going cargo ship built since the World War,

was launched on a bed of half a ton of bananas, because it was cheaper than Greece, apparently. So the bed slid into the water on half a ton of bananas. In 1923, the song Yes We Have No Bananas was released. It was a massive hit, it sold 25,000 copies a day, but this was in sheet music, because they didn't have the recordings back then. And it was so popular, it spurred a new craze,

Dancing the Charleston on Banana Peel Covered Flaws. That sounds great, doesn't it? Do you know who wrote that? It was Leon Trotsky's nephew. He followed a very different career path to his uncle. Well, here's a slightly weird link. The Bananas and Pajamas, the TV show, Australian big TV show, it was big here, right?

Karl Marx's grandson, I believe, played the banana. So it started off as a song. It was called Bananas and Pajamas, and that's what the whole series was based on. The song was written by Cary Blyton, who was the nephew of Enid Blyton. So two nephews involved in the songs. That's about bananas.

So when I started researching this fact on bananas, I thought I'd hit a jackpot moment, because I discovered on Twitter there was an account called At True Banana Facts. Unfortunately, really disappointing. Let me give you a few examples of the facts. Bananas are actually very bad and not good. Just kidding. Bananas are yellow and healthy.

420 retweets. They have me for a second there, actually. Don't like what someone is saying? Pop a nice banana in their mouth and shut them up. 1628 retweets. What's your problem, Dan? These are true. They are facts, and they are about bananas. Bananas are not good at soccer,

because I don't really have legs. They've sort of got legs. You mentioned the bananas are yellow. Yeah. And I think they're healthy and good for you, aren't they? Not entirely true. They are not yellow, if you see in the UV spectrum. I don't think they'll hold up in court.

So, yeah, they've recently discovered this. Only recently discovered that if you shine a black colour, you'll be able to see it. I don't think they'll hold up in court. So, yeah, they've recently discovered this. Only recently discovered that if you shine a black colour, on a yellow banana, it glows blue, which other plants don't do,

and they don't know why. But they think it might be to help things like fruit bats, which prey on bananas, they do see in the UV spectrum. And so that makes the bananas show up more. Do you say they prey on bananas? Bananas, with those little legs, they can get away faster than anything. Actually, they don't really have legs.

I read a thing psychologically, that if you've shown a black and white photo of a banana, you see yellow. Your brain just projects yellow onto it. Which spectrum are we talking about? The tinges of yellow, your brain just naturally finds little tinges of it.

That is really interesting. So, bananas are slightly radioactive. I read that eating 600 bananas is the equivalent of having a single chest x-ray. I just like how you're presented with that option in hospital. How many bananas was it? 600. How many bananas?

How many bananas was it? 600. Well, we can x-ray the photo, of course, or you could just eat these bananas. I'm going to give you 600 bananas. The nurse and I are going to stand behind this screen. That would kill you, wouldn't it? There's too much potassium or

it's too much of eating food. Generally. It depends on the time span. You probably eat over a lifetime. But that's a long wait for your chest x-ray. There was a guy in a hospital. He'd stolen the necklace

and he ate the necklace and they wanted to get it back off him and so to get it back they needed him to pass stool and in order to do that they fed him bananas. But then it came in the news and some doctors said this is stupid

because bananas do not really work as laxatives and the only thing bananas will do is add bulk to his stool. Maybe that was a way of protecting the necklace though or the man's stomach. Like bubble wrapping the goods. I read that they fed him 60 bananas and the article just finished by saying

meanwhile the owner of the necklace has said she will not wear it again. OK, time for fact number two and that is Czozinski. My fact this week is that Slovenia's largest lake, Lake Cerknica disappears every year. Where does it go?

So it's a lake called Lake Kirknica and when it exists it has a surface area of 30km² so it's not volume, it's surface area that makes it the biggest lake in Slovenia. So there are two terms here, Polje, which is a field above a cast and a cast is basically a landscape

that's got loads of kind of soft rock in it and it means that water is a road of the soft rock in various places and created holes in it like a Swiss cheese filled up in rainy season and then it gets sucked through these swallow holes or these sink holes when it gets dry and the water stops coming through and it vanishes.

So it'll be a lake one day and there's boats on it. Imagine if you were camping in this nice big field and then you just wake up and suddenly you're in the middle of a lake. It would be like Glastonbury. How long does it disappear for? So it generally disappears between I think

June and September. It's amazing that this is the biggest lake in Slovenia. I wonder, it disappears every year but we still haven't heard of it. Isn't that truly bizarre? So you just went, you just got back from Slovenia. I've just come back from Slovenia. Did you go and visit this lake?

I didn't. How bad is that? Maybe you did and it wasn't there. Anyway, did you happen to hear about while you were there the religion, the fifth biggest religion of Slovenia? I love this. So the fifth biggest religion in Slovenia is called the trans-universal zombie church

and it's become the fifth biggest religion in less than a year. What do they do? They ring bells. And eat brains. They have a holy book which says so it's rules written down. It's holy book include the fact that

it's zombies resurrect daily. It's holy drinks of beer and pina coladas and holy pina coladas. Holy pina coladas and it worships cows and it recommends eating the super succulent Japanese Kobe beef. And also I like this, they're sermons

instead of ending with an r-men and with bong which I think is cool. I mean it's actually really good. So it's an anti-corruption party and it was set up as a serious opposition to rampant corruption in Slovenia. And it was cooled by the prime minister

of Slovenia, I think. It was referred to as a bunch of zombies and so they embraced the zombie tag. That is very cool. So the Slovenian drink a salamander brandy. You tried that when you were in Slovenia? Well I'm glad you didn't try it

because it's not a very nice way of making it. They take a salamander, hang it by its back legs and pour brandy over its body and so it drips into a cup and then you drink it. And the idea is you infuse the alcohol with the poison that the salamander makes on its back and the slight bit of poison

and the brandy apparently gives you more of a kick than normal brandy. I was looking up oldest things in Slovenia. Slovenia has the oldest wheel ever found. Oh really? Oldest wheel and it was found in and I can't pronounce it but

Ljubljana. I think Danza's right actually. Ljubljana, marshes. Also they have, you about to say this, they have the oldest vine. It's a grapevine, it still bears grapes. It's over 400 years old, the Guinness World Records book went over there, put it in their book.

And do you know what it's called? It's called Old Vine. So they also like the Linden tree, which is that tree that kind of smells of semen. Wait sorry, we just spoken about this if I've missed this? No, what knows about the Linden tree, it smells like semen.

There's a famous Michelin web sketch. Anyway, the Linden tree smells of semen and they're proud of their Linden trees and there's a 780 year old Linden tree in Slovenia which is the oldest one and every year in the summer the government gathers with it. Does it smell like very, very old semen?

Yes. A long abandoned condom. The government gathers around. Does anyone got anything else? Something Slovenia also has. The Hitler beetle. Oh yeah. Oh yes, yeah.

I'm not sure. In my head I thought you meant the Beatles as in the band and I was like, who is the Hitler beetle? The ringo, ringo. The Hitler beetle. It's a cave beetle. It's blind and it lives in five caves in Slovenia. It's very, very rare

and it was named in 1933 by someone who really liked Hitler. He was a guy called Oscar Scheibel and Hitler wrote him a thank you letter and they're now critically endangered because Hitler fans are still in the market for them. They sell for £1,000 each.

Well that's why I went to Slovenia this year. Just one more thing, just on taxonomy I know this is a complete tangent but there was a fly in 1994 a fossil fly which was named I just the letter I. Until a researcher said he didn't want to have to keep writing

I have small male genitalia. It got changed. It got changed to I, I, I. OK, time for fact number three that is Andy. My fact is that half the world's syghers have died in the last month and nobody knows why. What is a syga?

They look like antelopes that are in Star Wars. They look like a Dr. Seuss character. Yes they do. They have this incredibly strange proboscis on the front of their face and they live in Mongolia and Kazakhstan I believe and it's China

and for some reason we don't know why but in the last month half of all syga have died. Wow. I think the dying has stopped now. You mentioned Mongolia and China I actually think they're extinct there now and I think they were driven to extinction

by the fact that they were being used for medicine so you could buy bits of them for quite a lot of money Is they're horns isn't it? They ground up horns. That's one of the reasons they're so endangered. In the early 90s I think there were millions of them and they were hunted partly because

they were trying to conserve rhinos because rhino horn was being used as a traditional medicine and so sort of encouraged people to revert to syga horns instead as traditional medicine and it's thought to be like an aphrodisiac so for instance in Singapore you can buy cooling water

which looks like a normal bottle of water which says that this can reduce a fever or just really cool you off and if you look at the ingredients it's got syga horn as one of the ingredients It's terrible isn't it? It's like ultimate ungulate.com which has good stuff about them

and it also says only one word can describe the face of the syga bulging If you look at them straight on it looks like their eyes are sticking out on little stalks They have really really odd faces And they're tiny aren't they? They're about two foot tall I think

They're not very big But those noses that they have, they're pretty extraordinary They can heat air in them In the winter they do that They take air in and they'll just do a quick sort of microwave on it and they'll take it into their lungs And...

Do they sometimes suck in like a little jinsters burger at the same time? Quickly! I was looking up other animals with mental noses basically for this I really like the hammerhead bat which looks just like a moose It's just quite a huge nose and its larynx takes up half of its body

and the way they attract female mates is by a big honking ceremony So all the bats line up on hang off various trees and they all perform this honking ceremony through their gigantic larynxes and then the female bats all fly past and listen and if they like the sound of someone's honking

then they pop onto the branch next to him So cool! One more thing that tigers do with their trunks They use them to lure females, male tigers do. They make sounds through their proboscis If they make lower sounds they can make themselves seem larger

than they are. And that's more attractive And this is important for tigers because most matings occur mainly at nights when the real sizes of callers are not visible So all the female tigers are thinking that there's these really beefy kind of male tigers around and then during the day time

they're like, weren't they all gone? There's just this little weedy guy around Is it like that thing where you wake up in the morning after one night stand and go oh that is not what I was expecting You said you were huge! This is probably the most interesting taxonomy thing about antelopes

generally. They are even toad ungulates so that group is called artyodactyla. It's recently been discovered that these share a common ancestor with cotations, i.e. whales and they're all part of the same group as cotations and this is partly why we believe now that whales

evolve from being on land to going back in the water because there's this tiny 2 kilogram mouse deer which really likes being in the water and so we just just wants to be a whale and that's kind of the link between whales now and millions of years ago

when these little deer kind of evolved to creep back into the water and turn into a whale so you have a little deer who wants to be a whale at night time probably telling the ladies he is a whale and it's because we found ankle bones in certain cotations haven't we?

and also they sometimes grow hips and bones and sometimes grow little legs on the side of whales. They don't really have legs not like bananas I was reading this it was like a book of biology from 1800 and apparently to say a woman had eyes like an antelope

was the highest praise you could possibly give her because they have the most beautiful eyes you have eyes like an antelope and nose like a sega legs like a whale also on attractive women compared to antelopes the word for an Arabic love poem

is a gazelle and that is thought to be connected to the word gazelle because often women were compared to gazelles in Arabic love poetry so for instance there's one poem I think from the year about 650 AD where the caliph abd al-Malik

frees a gazelle he's captured because he suddenly realizes it looks like the woman he's in love with so he captures this gazelle and he's like oh my god on the extinctions one more thing the voluntary human extinction movement do you know about these guys so there is the V-H-E-M-T

they call themselves vehement and their idea is that humans should die out because it would save all the other animals on the planet he doesn't think the people who are in charge don't think that everyone should just be killed they think we should just not have children

that's the idea and they think that the need for children is neutral conditioning and actually people don't really want to have children and they could take such desires and channel them into perhaps gardening or adopting a stream adopting a stream

that's one of their suggestions you'd be really sad if you'd adopt a lake in Slovenia weren't you okay time for our final fact of the show and that is my fact my fact this week is that Barbara Streisand had a shopping mall built for her sole use and it's under her house

it's got a cobblestone paved street and then it's a collection of just old last century style shops sounds like Diagon Alley it kind of looks like it when you see it I mean it's got a sweet shop it has an antique doll shop are they all staffed?

no there's no cash registers what she does is she buys it rather than putting stuff in her actual house she's just set up shops underneath her house to put the things that she's bought into so they're like cupboards really yeah what are you saying is she's got a massive cupboard I know it's cupboard

but she's taken it so seriously that when she's on the sets of movies like famously on Meet the Fockers the movie that she was in when they were dismantling the sets she started collecting the doors and bringing them back to when you say collecting do you mean stealing I think she asked I don't think Barbara Streisand could steal

I think she just takes it and you go well I must have given that to her that kind of thought that gets people in trouble yeah so Blanto was just collecting a lot of money yeah so she has an antique shop she has things like benches out the front for men to sit on

I think she sounds tiresome I'm sorry Dan I'm not defending her I'm just saying this is what she's got also she doesn't know what a shop is that's not a mall you have there has to be some kind of exchange of money for goods in a mall does she walk around it yeah she walks around it

and she needs to bring a present she'll go down into her mall and she'll pick up an item does she do all the voices does she run around behind the counter and say oh that'll be $86 Miss Streisand oh well that's very expensive but I'm sure well it looks like it's worth the money

thank you would you like it wrapped oh yes please I'd love it wrapped that's an excellent Barbara Streisand thank you very much so my favorite thing about Barbara Streisand is that her real name is Barbara Streisand originally but she got rid of an A in the name Barbara so it's now B-A-R-B-R-A

I think she said she did that she wanted to be a bit special but like changing her name fully was too showy and that seems to be a part of herself she's left behind that desire not to be too showy do you think she goes to her Starbucks in her mall and then

excuse me what is the name please well it's Barbara okay is that B-A-R-B-A not actually in 2006 she donated $11,750,000 to the Barbara Streisand Foundation

which I'm sure that that buddy goes somewhere but I like that idea because it was the construction of vast underground palaces so the main thing that I know Barbara Streisand for is the Barbara Streisand effect yes okay so this is on the internet you try and stop people from doing it and it just makes them want to do it

even more and it started off when some guy took a photo of her house and she wasn't very happy and she tried to sue him to stop people from being able to see it on the internet and 420,000 people went to the website to look at this house because of the lawsuit

and before they'd done the lawsuit it had only been downloaded six times wow so just by starting off the lawsuit it meant that everyone then saw what she was trying to hide did you also recently do a lawsuit about no one's allowed to release a podcast referring to my ridiculously extravagant basement

and doing a series of amusing but also startlingly accurate impressions of me actually, relatedly I read this most fascinating article in the New Yorker recently and on extravagant houses the second biggest mansion in London after Buckingham Palace

is in Highgate, nobody knows who owns it people have been trying to find out for years and it's called Wittenhurst it also has a ridiculous basement so it has a 70 foot long swimming pool in the basement, a cinema with the mezzanine massage rooms, a sauna, gym

staff quarters it's just a normal house then it's a standard basement, it's more than 40,000 square feet and the family's lawyer the family that owns it said that he would take the secret of Wittenhurst's ownership to the grave the journalist in the New Yorker

who went to talk to the estate agent about it the estate agent made the journalist leave her phone in her bag in a different room while he just discussed the house with her the only thing bigger than it in London is Buckingham Palace that's incredible the idea of

digging downwards now to make house extensions is massive and stuff that they're building is insane, people are putting in two floor rock climbing walls and Ferrari museums that's what the guy who hasn't been able to build it just yet but the Foxton's owner

is trying to get an extension below his garden where he wants to keep his Ferraris as a Ferrari museum as a museum though will the museum be open to the public or will it be one of these bars and shopping mall things oh what a lovely Ferrari enormously wealthy man

have you guys read about this guy who posted on Reddit earlier on this year I think he moved into a studio apartment somewhere in England and he found a trap door and he saw a trap door on the floor that hadn't been mentioned it, opened it turns out it's an old English monastery conversion underground

so he bought a studio apartment he now has 30 rooms that's quite exciting isn't it I'm going to dig up all the floors in my house just in case there's one I would do the same thing but I live on the first floor there's a mirror kingdom underneath mine the White House

has an amazing bunker and they're currently building, in fact they're going to be moving to Obama and the Oval Office this year away to another location in the White House because they now need to add all the extensions because he has a trap door underneath the desk there's a trap door for the president

underneath the desk the existing trap door under the president's desk leading down to the secret service command post will be modified so this is what's currently going on to allow presidential passage directly to the new underground command bunker now what's interesting is this is from the White House's

website in 2010 they started building a new underground command sensor and it was this building that was sitting there that in the Bush administration the building officially didn't exist despite being there they just said what we don't know what you're talking about it did notoriously have a problem with that

administration with whether or not things existed okay that's it that's all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you want to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast we are all on Twitter you can get me on at Shriverland at Andrew Hunter M at Egg Shaped

you can email podcast at qi.com or you can go to atqipodcast we'll answer on that too we'll be back again next week with another episode we'll see you then good bye we're a family together show what we can do