No Such Thing As A Fish - 71: No Such Thing As A Somersaulting Long Jumper

Episode Date: July 24, 2015

Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss humans versus horses, where to get new eyelids, and why you should never drink with Alfred Hitchcock.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, this week coming to you from the literary arena in the Latitude Festival, my name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with three other QILs, it's Anna Chazinski, Andy Murray and James Harkin and once again we've gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go. We're going to start with my fact this week, my fact this week is that the world record for horse long jump is shorter than the world record for human long jump. That just can't even be true, that just is so obviously not true it's unbelievable. No it's absolutely true but here's the weird thing, horse long jump,

did anyone know that existed? It was an Olympic sport for one year. I have a question about the horse long jump, did they have to do it with a human on their back? Yes. Well then of course they're gonna, if you put a horse on a human's back. That's not a fair comparison though, you need to put, so it'd be like strapping a child to your back maybe or which wouldn't be allowed I guess. No but listen horses, okay how many people here just by show of hands are surprised that humans can jump further than horses? Yeah pretty much everyone and when you say surprised none of them believe you. Okay so this is absolutely true, you can go online to Wikipedia so this was in the 1900s. You and your niche sources for these. So 1900 at the Olympics they

did the horse jump, the guy riding the horse was called Constant Van Langendonk and his horse was called Extra Dry and he jumped as far as, he jumped about six meters and that's not actually the horse record so that was just their first ever attempt at the Olympics, everyone said let's not do that again, let's move on, let's never speak about this. But the world record as it stands was set in 1975 by a horse, the horse was called Something. Now what was it called? Something, the horse was actually called Something, that was the actual name of the horse, by Mr Andre Ferreira and they jumped 8.4 meters so that's the horse record, the human record is 8.95 meters. Oh yeah and that was set in 1991 by a guy called Mike Powell, it's still holding to this day as the

longest human jump. What about height? Can they jump, can we jump higher than horses or can they jump higher than us? No way. I think the horses can go higher. Can they? Yeah. Well I've looked it up. Oh really? And there is an official high jump record for horses and it's 2.47 meters and the official high jump record for humans is 2.45 meters so they can beat us by 2 centimeters. Wow. But do they know that we're asking them to jump really high? There's the problem. There's a big fence in the way that gives a bit of a clue. Yeah, they just don't have the competitive urge, they don't know that they need to win, assuming that we do. But the thing is with human high jump is there was a massive difference was that when Dick Fosbury came in and did his Fosbury flop which is going

over backwards and until then the record was a certain amount and then it went massively up in a really short amount of time. And what's interesting with him is he was the in the America, he won gold in the Olympics in 1968 but by 1970 he wasn't even in the Olympic team anymore because everyone else had seen his tactic and gone that's amazing and he wasn't even that good a high jumper. Really? It's just the technique. Yeah, just the technique. That was the only thing that did it. He wasn't even that good. So long jump was almost the opposite, right? Because the long jump record until it was broken by Mike Powell in 1991 was held for I think a record length of time in the Olympics so it was broken in 1968 by Robert Beaumont and he just did this incredible

long jump so the record up until then had been 21 feet and three quarters of an inch and then in 1968 he jumped 29 feet and 2.5 inches and he jumped so far that they couldn't record it properly because they didn't have the equipment to stretch that far. They didn't have the equipment to stretch that far. Yeah, I don't know how advanced the equipment has to be in order for you to buy another one meter ruler to measure the distance. How many people is that? So I think he jumped 29 feet. Okay, I think this with long jumps is they reckon, some people reckon, I don't know if it's true, some people reckon you could go further if you do a somersault while you're jumping. That makes sense. But there's a rule that says you're not allowed. The rule is very clear,

it says the jumper's head has to stay in a superior position during the jump so your head has to be always the highest point. But why? Has someone done it and then they've gone further? Well, they said that it was maybe due to it being dangerous but the actual reason that they said they jumped, banned it when they did, is that nobody would jump a puddle in this way. So apparently that's what we're doing with a long jump, it's just a way of jumping a puddle. Good Olympic reasoning. Do you want to hear something else that happened at the 1900 Olympics? Men's underwater swimming. So start underwater and you just keep going until you have to come up and you get a point for every second you're underwater and you get a point for every meter you swim underwater. It was never

held again because of, and I quote, a lack of spectator appeal. Actually, they're kind of bringing that back, you know, because they found that swimming underwater is quicker than swimming freestyle. Yeah, it's called the fish kick. Yeah, and it's the first time they found a new swimming stroke which is faster than freestyle, the first time it's happened in hundreds of years. It's literally moving your hips really, really far and, you know, moving your arms around. You look like a fish when you're doing it. Yeah. There's another, so horse long jump has been abandoned as an Olympic sport. There's a list of other Olympic sports that we no longer do. This is my favorite one. Solo synchronized swimming.

And that was for three Olympics. Just one person in a pool with music, love it. And eventually they thought it just not working for us. That's amazing. That's so cool. Another thing they had at the 1900 Olympics was, so they were really into horse events at that Olympics, I think, and they had the male coach event which was basically who can deliver post the fastest and was, so it was a four in hand male coach event and it was four horses on a male coach and, you know, you've got your letters and it was a race and the guy who won it actually was the guy who then went on to found the Orion Express Company weirdly, so he was the guy behind Orion Express Train. You'll have seen some of my work in the Olympics.

That's very cool. Have you heard of Margaret Abbott? No. She was an art student from America, right? She won in the 1900 Olympics. She won a nine-hole golf tournament, but she didn't know it was an Olympic event. She died 55 years later, still not knowing that she was America's first female Olympic champion. Wow. I know. No one told her at any point. How did she get into the Olympics then? I don't know. There are all these sort of weird half Olympic events, so the male coach I think they've decided now it wasn't a, it was technically an Olympic event and all of this stuff. There's all this sort of shadow Olympics. And the horse high jump I think at that same event was decided it didn't count as an Olympic event, but the horse long jump did,

because horses jumped. I think they jumped just over six foot at that. Oh, did they? Which, yeah. So the modern Olympics, you know, it disappeared for a long time. Obviously someone brought it back and the person who brought it back, one of the main people was a guy called Baron de Coubertin. So Baron de Coubertin decided when he set it up that he was going to award an Olympic gold, so someone won this in the Olympics for literature, right? So there was a whole arts category that happened with the Olympics, which they've since dropped. But so they did it in all different things. They did it in sculpture, architecture, in poetry. But do you know who won the poetry award? No. He did. Did he? He won it. He was no good at sports, but he set up the Olympics and he's like,

well, how am I going to win a gold medal then? And so he sets up poetry and then he did a poem himself and he won. He won a gold medal. Guys, I really, really think we should have a poetry competition in the Olympic. I know it's kind of sporty, but you know, yeah, it was meant to be the whole thing. 1948 was the last, was the last London Olympics before 2012. That was the last time they had architecture and was it sculpting? Yeah, town planning. I've got the, I've got the town planning. There was an Olympic medal for town planning. Yeah, but it was solo town planning. That's very important. So they also had it for painting and graphic art. So I've got the gold, silver and bronze winners of the 1948 painting and graphic art competition. So in it,

bronze was a guy called Alex Diggleman from Switzerland, who won it for his graphic art world championship for ice hockey poster. Silver was Alex Diggleman from Switzerland for world championship for cycling poster. Gold medal to no one. That is brutal. Can you imagine losing to nobody? So the art, the Olympic art had to be art that was about Olympic sports. Yes. Presumably. Everything had to be about the Olympics. Imagine having to tell him that he won silver and he'd be really excited. He said, oh, that's great. I'm so made up to one silver. Who got gold? Yeah, a little thing, Alex. There is an interesting thing. They did a study of faces of people who are doing races, who do running races in the Olympics. And they could tell how happy

people were by how smiley they were on the podium. And anyone who came second was much more miserable than whoever came third. They found that out because the people who came second, presumably, are really upset because they just just missed out on gold. And the people who came third, well, I got something at least. You told us, okay, James told us this great thing the other day about Usain Bolt. What was that quiz question that you said about him breaking the 100 meters? Well, his fastest ever 100 meters is a lot faster than world record. And that's because the second half of his 200 meters, he'd already had a running start. And so I think he beat nine seconds for 100 meters, Usain Bolt. But he was already running. He was already starting. He had a running start.

But when he broke the 100 meters world record, he had one of his shoes untied, one of his shoelaces untied. No way. That's how good he is. That would be so distracting. Well, I'm sure he wasn't looking at it the whole time. Should I deal with this? Did he stop and tie up? Yeah, he still broke the record in spite of stopping to tie it up. That would have to be double knot. When he does 100 meters, his feet are touching the ground for, I think, two seconds in the whole race. Do you want to know something else about the long jump in Ancient Greece? This was so hard that you were allowed to have weights. So you held these weights and you sort of threw them behind yourself as you jumped forward. Also, the ancient Greek long jump was

so tricky that you were allowed to have a flute playing so you could keep time with it as you did your jump. That was that concession. We know this is really hard. So we'll give you a flute player to make it a bit easier. So the flute played a rhythm? Yeah, the flute would play in time so that you could make your jump. I do feel like between flute playing and steroids, you'd probably go for the latter, wouldn't you? We understand this is hard. You can have an orchestra accompanying you. Awesome performance. You're going to be tested for flutes, obviously, for liars, yeah, all kinds of stuff. We're going to have to move on to our second fact. Does anyone have anything else before we do? No? Okay, time for our second fact and that is Chaczynski. Yeah,

my fact is that every time Alfred Hitchcock had a cup of tea, he always smashed the teacup. That was what he did. Always. Well, apparently every morning he'd have his cup of tea before he went off to work and he'd drink the tea, smash the teacup, go to work. He'd drink tea in the studio, throw teacups at the wall and it was just his tea drinking habit. He sounds very difficult, doesn't he? He's a mad man. He was a mad man. Someone wrote a biography recently about him saying he was doing it to remind himself of the frailty of human life. So he throws a teacup against the wall and thinks, oh, that's like me dying. But he just did it. He used to smash, so he used to punch light bulbs out quite a lot himself as well. Yeah, yeah, he did. That's how

he turned off lights. Yeah, he turned the light on and then he just punched it until it stopped giving out light. And actually speaking of horses, he was really good friends with Gerald de Morier, who was Daphne de Morier's dad. And Gerald de Morier was an actor and at one point Alfred Hitchcock, while Gerald de Morier was out on stage performing at play, Alfred Hitchcock somehow, nobody knows how, had a horse delivered to his dressing room. So Gerald came back at the interval or whatever while he was performing, went into his dressing room, and there was a huge horse there. And he didn't know what to do with it. And no one knows how it got there. And I don't know how he removed it. He was a bit of a prankster, wasn't he? He loved practical jokes. Yeah. One of the

things he used to do was he would get into a lift with a friend of his who told amazing stories. And then he would start to tell this incredible, incredible story. And then as soon as the doors opened, he would get just about to the punchline and then walk out. So everyone else in the lift is like, no, what happens? But he also stopped the lift just by jamming his arm into the doors and levering them open and getting out, even if it was between floors. Classic Hitch pranks. So I think the most impressive prank, I don't know if this is impressive or if it makes him a bad person, but there was I know what I think already. Yeah, but you're a bit of a prude. So he was one of his employees on set one night. He said, I bet you a certain amount of money. I think it was

just I bet you a pound that you won't agree to be handcuffed to a part of this set overnight. You don't have the balls. I'm going to turn all the lights off. And so the stage, I was like, oh, a pound. Yeah, maybe it was more than a pound. It was still only the sixties. Yeah, yeah, I can do that. Sure. And so Alfred would like was like, yeah, great, fine. Have a drink to celebrate gave him a brandy spiked his brandy with a lot of laxatives, handcuffed him to the set. They all went home. They came back the next day. There was a man there in tears, covered in shit, having soiled himself all over the set. Now, do you think that makes you think it maybe makes him a bad person? Call me Captain Prudy. I'm on the fence. He did then give him a bonus. Oh, great.

This is a good sort of bar of what his comedy was like. The BBC uncovered some archive interviews that they did with him recently from a while ago when he was alive. And he really all the interviews after he died are so boring. So it turns out that psycho, the great horror, when he made it, he thought he was making a really good comedy. Absolutely true. He thought he was making a comedy. And he thought people he was parodying the genre. But he did it so well. And he took it so into such an obscene territory that it got taken as a prop. He did it so well that it wasn't funny. Is that what stand up comedian could say? Yeah, according to Hitchcock, that's that's what he said. Psycho was intended to be a comedy. You know, when he released when he first released psycho,

he bought up or he got his PA to buy up all the copies of the novel psycho that he could find in America because he didn't want anyone to give away the ending. Yeah, he would do that with all of his films. He bought up the rights so you couldn't see them in the cinema after the cinema run had ended because he only wanted people to see them in the cinema. So he would stop them from being broadcast after that. So for about 30 years, nobody saw psycho in the cinema after, you know, until after he died. Really? Psycho is the first film to feature a actual shot of a toilet flushing. Oh, yeah. 1960 was when it was made and still before then it's so taboo. And it got all these terrible reviews which were partly based on all the murders and partly based on, I can't believe

they showed a toilet flushing. This is outrageous. They had never, it had never been seen on screen before. I like the way you say so taboo. It had never happened before as though obviously if they had been able, so it had been socially appropriate to do a toilet flushing, they would have included it in all the films. There just aren't that many scenes in films where that's an appropriate thing to show. Yeah, you're right. You're right. Something else fun he did. If you went on holiday and you were friends with Alfred, he would murder you hilariously and then give you a bonus. If you went on holiday, he was actually completely harmless. He would just leave some extra large furniture in your house for when you returned. He sounds so awful. Speaking of things that were

only used once, Justin Bieber never wears underpants twice. Does he not? I googled sort of famous people who may not use things twice and I... Oh, where you googling Justin Bieber, no underwear. I discovered that the Queen is not allowed to appear in a public, I guess if she's going to open a library or like, you know, launch a new Starbucks latte, she can't appear in her underwear. But she can't be seen in the same costume that she's worn previously. Otherwise, what happens? Well, I think it's just they don't want it to happen and she has a stylist who has a spreadsheet of every single bit of clothing that she's worn to an appearance and they make sure that nothing matches up and they've given every bit of clothing a code name like Buttercup for a yellow dress. But she's been

going a long time like the Queen, so there must be not many clothes left. She's going to be just turning up in a romper suit. The headline is always if Kate Middleton wears an outfit twice, they say, oh, she's recycling her outfits. Exactly. So you never see that with the Queen because of the great spreadsheet that they've made. And so this guy, Stuart Parvin, he's the guy who for 11 years was the Queen's personal, he dressed her, he picked all the clothing. He said in this interview that she has someone employed specifically to wear her shoes before she wears them. No way. Yeah, so someone just wears the Queen's shoes and breaks them in. So they're comfy. Yeah, so they're comfy for when she has to wear them for the first time that she

goes to her. So the only person who can have that job is someone who has exactly the same size and shape feet as the Queen, I guess. I read the other day, I don't even know if it's true, I read that Prince Charles has his shoelaces ironed every day. I've read that as well. No, I don't know because it might not be true, but I did read it. Only if he buys curly shoelaces, like fun ones, which she can get as a kid. Curly fries, they're slightly more expensive. Curly fries, yeah, yeah. So smashing things. Shall we go on to that? Smashing crockery. The Greeks do that, don't they? Yeah. Well, actually, they don't really do it. It's been, it's kind of discouraged in Greece these days. They prefer people not to do it so much, not just for the austerity reasons.

No, they don't really think it's a good idea. But when they do do it, what they do often is, I believe this is true, they'll buy lots of kind of semi-broken plates, like they've already got little cracks in them, and they'll have like 19 of those, and they're one real plate, and they'll kind of run the real plate along the slightly broken ones to make it look, this is real, this is real, and then they'll smash them all on the floor. So often one of them won't properly smash because that's the real plate, and the other ones aren't really real. Hang on, sorry, what qualifies a plate as real? As in it's got like cracks, it's like a stunt plate. You can still put food on it, presumably. You can only put bad food on it, I'm afraid. Stunt food.

But apparently before they smash plates, they used to throw knives at the feet of dancers. I'm gonna have to move us on to the next fact, but if you have anything more, go for it. Just one thing, like it's quite famous that Turing used to chain his tea cup to a radiator. Alan Turing. Alan Turing, yeah, so the great computer scientist, during, in Bletchley Park, he used to chain his cup to a radiator so that no one would steal it. Not like to mess with his tea cup or anything, like Alfred Hitchcock torturing his tea cups. Okay, cool. But everyone like thinks of this as a kind of a weird sort of way that he's quite eccentric, but a few years ago they went round to Bletchley Park and they were draining the

lake to try and find some enigma machines, and when they drained the lake they found a load of cups in there, and apparently Turing's assistant used to just go around with his cup and then just wander around and throw it in the water, so actually he was quite right to chain it too, because people just used to steal it all the time. Yeah, maybe that's why Hitchcock did it, to prevent theft. Okay, time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is, the Romanian equivalent of comparing apples and oranges is, you're comparing grandmothers and machine guns, because those are much more different than apples and oranges are. Apples and oranges are really similar, and there have been studies done on apples and oranges. Well, to see how similar they are,

to try and tell the difference. There was one study in the British Medical Journal in 2000, and it's kind of a joke study, but still, and he did this whole table of similarities and differences between apples and oranges. Both round? Both round, yes. Both fruit? Yeah, I can keep going. No, no. So in the color table, it says oranges, orange, apples, depends on variety. Can be juiced. Oranges? Yes. Apples? Yes. He goes through this whole list of similarities between them. Yeah, and they are really similar, it turns out. And so why is it grandmothers and grandmothers and machine guns? I don't know, just I think they've picked two very, very different things. Oh, okay. Yeah. They've just done better than we did, slightly more imaginative than we are.

Another thing they say in Romania is it's like comparing cows and long johns. My favorite one, when I was trying to find sort of interesting sayings, there's a Spanish proverb, and this is the Spanish proverb, there are no ugly 15 year olds. I don't know in what context you would ever say, well... In prison, I think? As they say. Well, your honor, I think the court and the jury will agree. Wow. All children are attractive. Do you want to hear some more Romanian phrases and guess what they mean? Oh yeah, sure. Yes, please. You take me out of the watermelons. Is it like something you say to a lady who really kind of blows your mind? Yeah, you give me butterflies. No, it's the opposite. It's you're making me really angry, because obviously, where do we all want to

be among the watermelons? Yeah. You take me out of the watermelons, stop this. That explains the problems I had in that Romanian nightclub. My face has fallen off. Is it literal, that one? No, no. I'm surprised. I'm surprised, yeah. And you've put snot in the beans. Is that something you might say to well for a titchcock? It just means you've made a mistake. Just a fun way of saying you've made a mistake, you put snot in the beans. I have made a whip out of shit. It means I've done a lot with a little. I've made a really good effort considering I've got limited resources. Like making a purse from a Salseer kind of thing. Yeah, I've made a purse from a Salseer

and a whip out of shit. A whip isn't a spaceship. I mean, it's not the most complicated thing you could manufacture. You try making a whip out of shit. I have a friend who lived in South America who powered electrically his entire home out of a huge pile of manure in his back garden, and you're saying making a whip squidging poo into something that could hit someone is like turning something tiny into something fantastic. I would question the logic of that one. They are quite logical. In Germany, they say you have tomatoes on your eyes to mean you're not seeing what everyone else can see, but why tomatoes? It's always fruits and apples especially. So in Spanish, I think they say when you say you're

going to walk around the block, in Spain you'd say let's walk around the apple. Take a walk around the apple. Wow. I don't know why. That's great. It's weird. In Colombia, to confuse two things, it's a bit like what we were saying before, but you would say he confused shit with face cream. That is a mistake. It is a mistake, yeah. Or one of Alfred Hitchcock's hilarious pranks. And if you're in Sweden, if you're talking about someone who hasn't really had to put in much effort to achieve what they've achieved, you say he slid in on a shrimp sandwich and that means he got here really easily, which actually not that easy to slide on a shrimp sandwich. You have such war priorities about what's easy and what's hard. It's easy to slip on a shrimp

sandwich. It's very hard to compress turds together to make a working whip. Indiana Jones's whip wasn't made of poo. We don't know that. I think we have very different skill sets. Also, slipping is very different to sliding. So you can slip on it, but sliding in, that implies that you're skiing into the piece. I will consider skiing on a shrimp sandwich will be hard. Are any of these actually said in these countries? It's a weird one that because we occasionally do this kind of thing on QI. And when we ever say it, we'll say, okay, in Thailand, they say, the hen sees a snake's feet and the snake sees the hen's boobs. And that means two people who know each other's secret. We'll say something like that on QI. And then everyone in Thailand

will email us and say, no, we don't say that at all. Yeah. I think it will be said. And I think it's just people who I haven't heard every phrase that gets used in Britain. Yeah. I think that's right. If there are people from Sweden or Spain or Germany who know that we're wrong, please do heckle. So just like we were talking about grandmothers and machine guns right at the start. So maybe a few things about guns. Yeah. Yeah. You know how old you have to be to get a firearms license in the UK? Is it 12? It's 14. Okay. Do you know how old you have to be to get a shotgun license? No. You have to be two. No way. And the reason you have to be two is because an adult needs to sign for you saying they've known you for at least two years. And I can confirm he is a fit and proper

person to earn a shotgun. What? Really? That's so good, isn't it? Yeah. And there's loads of people like under 10 in the UK who have shotgun licenses, but you can't buy a shotgun until you're a certain age, although an adult could buy you a shotgun. Does anyone here have a shotgun license? Just that child on the front row. How old are you? 19. So you've had it for 17 years. You must be very good. The person who invented the first portable automatic machine gun was a guy called Hiram Maxim. He's kind of a bit famous. And he was arrested at an old age. He also invented the traditional mousetrap that people use. He was arrested at an old age in 1913 for harassing Salvation Army workers with a P-shooter. Better that than the machine gun, I guess. I read a story about him,

which was that when he invented the machine gun, but was testing it out in his neighborhood, he went to all his neighbors saying, sorry to bother at 3pm today or whatever time he said, I'm going to be testing out my new machine gun. If you could open your windows, the noise is so great in this vicinity. It will smash all the glass in your house if the windows are shut. That's really considerate. Yeah, he sounds like a nice guy. I think he showed off the gun. There was an early demonstration of the machine gun. And he was, because it was Queen Victoria who was the Queen at the time. And one of the things he did to demonstrate how cool it was, was he blasted with the machine gun the letters V-R for Victoria Regina into a brick wall. Yeah, that was

the thing. Would you trust a man who said, I'm going to be practicing with my machine gun this morning. Can I ask that you open your windows for me? I mean, it doesn't really make any difference whether you do or not. We're going to have to move on. So time for our final fact. And that is James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that replacement eyelids can be made from foreskins. I told you, I told you they would grown. Wait, has this actually been done? It's been done. Yeah, it has been done. You might lose your eyelid for you might get a disease or you might, it might be burned. Someone might be practicing with a machine gun next door. Exactly. And then the problem is your eyelid is kind of really thin kind of skin. And so it's really hard to find

replacement skin from around the body. And there are a few different places to get it. But the foreskin works particularly well and people have had their eyelids replaced with foreskins. Do they, what? What, what do they get to replace their foreskin? So they get another foreskin from somewhere else? No, it's like a pyramid scheme of foreskins. No, they do without. If your foreskin is on your eyelid, are you circumcised or is that, does a foreskin have to be fully removed or does it just have to be removed from its original position? That's a very good question. I feel like I'm going to let you down. I don't know the correct answer. Well, you should reread the Torah because it must be in there somewhere.

Just quickly, before we get into foreskin valley, if you don't have a, this is really, really cool. If you don't have, if your eyelids don't work, so the eyelid is there and it's intact, but it needs, it doesn't operate. The muscles don't work to move it. One way that doctors can fix it is they take gold thread and because they use gold in the body because it doesn't react with anything, it's inert chemically and it's, the thread they use is a hundred times thinner than a human hair and they thread it through the eyelid, which gives it a bit of stability and it stiffens it and what that means is it's stiff enough to open and close the eye, but you have to do it by hand, so you just do this. You just, they go, yep, I'm awake or whatever it is that you do. Isn't that

incredible? Yeah, so you can wink at someone by just going. I read this thing, this isn't really related, but one of the early buttock augmentation surgeries, the guy who invented buttock augmentation basically took a breast kind of silicon thing from a breast and just put it in someone's butt. That's basically the way he did it, but the problem was it didn't really look like a, looked like a bottom, so it didn't really work. Does he left the nipple on? Is that what he did? And so what they did instead is they managed to get like something that was better sculpted and put it in between the gluteus maximus and I think the gluteus minimus and so it actually looked a bit like a buttock and this was the first proper real buttock augmentation surgery,

but the problem was that it kept slipping and so what you could do is someone would go, oh your buttock slipped and then you could actually lift it up and put it back in place. How far down did it slip? Did it slip out of your trousers or something? Oh sorry. It could go quite far down the thigh I think. Oh my god. Interesting that isn't it? Yeah it's amazing. I wonder if you still say someone had a nice ass if it was just halfway down that calf. I read about the first penis transplant the other day, which they've successfully done. Have they? Yeah and they knew they could do it for a long time and this guy wanted to have it done and the only issue was is that for four to five years it was I guess to the tail end of four years

they couldn't find a donor. That's very reasonable. I heard that they used a middle finger once for a penis transplant. No I've read this and you're all looking and I've got no evidence either. I've forgotten all the sources and I read it five or six years ago. It's already quite bad when someone gives you the finger in the street isn't it? If it was also attached to the groin it would be ten times worse. Let's say some stuff on eyelids to keep it clean shall we? Pioneering French surgeon Ambrose Parais, if you had itching eyelids he suggested washing your eyelids in urine but only if the urine had been kept all night in a barber's basin. Okay it's very specific isn't it? Do you have to have the consent of the barber presumably? You can't just wee in a

barber's basin and then go in the next day. Oh yes sir I've been using Basin 4, hope you don't mind my eyelids are itchy. Do you want to hear another really interesting body part replacement thing? Yes please. This guy is great. Okay there's a Finnish computer programmer, his name is Jerry Gelava and in 2008 he lost a finger, he lost his third finger in a motorbike accident so he replaced it with his penis. Yeah his typing has not improved. No but everyone was saying oh it's so annoying for you because you type for a living don't you because you're a computer programmer you're going to be really it's going to be really annoying for you and he said yes yes it is going to be really annoying and eventually he decided to do something about it and he built himself

a prosthetic finger. Not only that it doubles up as a USB drive so all he has to do he just peels back his prosthetic fingernail and there's a there's a and he can just plug into a computer. No no no one can ever just plug in a USB into a computer. Okay yeah sorry he turns upside down and then yeah yeah yeah and so he he can store two gigabytes of data in his finger and he can even remove the whole finger and give it to someone else if they need to store a file or something. How cool is that? That's amazing yeah. What a great guy. I don't know if I'd accept that if you asked me if they had a spare USB. Oh yeah that's a great idea. Another on eyes and yeah like replacement surgery you know if so in 2009 I think was the first instance of this a woman

who'd been blind for nine years had her eye replaced with her tooth and she could see again. What? So this sometimes people are having surgery to get their cornea replaced with their tooth and they make so they drill a hole in the tooth and they make a little lens in it and then they have to implant it in a different part of your body because the lens needs to properly fuse I think with the tooth first of all so they implanted it in her shoulder for a while. This is her tooth and then they can put it in the eye. If you google image it's very weird but there are people who've had their teeth in their eyes and they can see properly and they just line it up with a retina and it's people who've got corneal problems where it's gone blurry. That's amazing. It's

so bizarre. You can pat someone on the shoulder and on the eye and on the tooth at the same time. That is so incredible. I think that's the main benefit that's what they say they're all pleased about. We're gonna have to wrap up soon so should we James? Okay well just on what you were saying you can get stem cells these days can do all sorts of things and people there was a lady who kind of injected some stem cells into her wrinkles around her eyes because she wanted to get rid of the wrinkles and it was hoped that it would grow back and then suddenly whenever she kind of winked her eyes she heard this bony clicking and it turned out that... Oh no. Yeah it turned out that a bone had grown in her eyelid. I know. I've got some light entertainment stuff about four skins if anyone

wants it. Oh hang on. Eyelids quickly because I've always wanted to know this. You know that thing when your eyelid involuntarily twitches? Yeah. Like you have twitching eyelid so that's called blepharospasm or blepharospasm and so it's usually it's usually fine and harmless. Some people have it so badly that their eyelids get locked shut and a cure that was proposed for that in the late 1700s by a Dr Gerald and he suggested that... He said he doesn't sound like a real doctor. If any doctor only gives you their first name that's a real danger sign like Dr Nick in The Simpsons. So Dr Jez advised that people who had this problem where their eyes were clamp shut because their blepharospasm was so bad don't try and cure the spasm drill a hole in their eyelid so that they can

see through it. I actually don't know if anyone had that done but that's lateral thinking. I hope not. Also blepharospasm are playing on the obelisk stage at 9 p.m. tonight secret gig so check it out they're very good. Four skins? Humorous four skins? Oh no. All right there's a bit bit PG-13 but some cosmetics are tested on four skins but ones that have been removed if someone is circumcised when they're born the hospital normally sells the four skin. There is a man out there who's been circumcised and his cells have been used and grown and grown and grown and grown and grown to make an entire face cream company. But here's the thing it um there was a whole anti because when people found out that four skins were being used for cosmetics there was a huge

anti four skin movement that tried to stop it and it turns out Oprah Winfrey has released four skin products um not for your four skin like four skin face products and they said that's a great product name four skin that's brilliant yes so obvious yeah but so that's the amazing thing about it it's not as if they're carding off lots of four skins to turn into face cream it's one singular four skin that they've been using for 20 years well they can't that there are lots of four skins but yeah you can use them for up to yeah I think 40 years because the cell it's just the cells in there are very unusual there's did you say they're like stem cells in that they can be grown and used in lots of different ways and they're yeah incredible medically yeah that's insane um we're gonna have to wrap up

in a sec so if anyone's got anything a final fact they want to throw in no no we're good uh okay all right that's it that's all of our facts thanks so much for listening if you want to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said on our podcast we can be found on twitter i'm on at tribal and andy and andrew hunter m james x shaped anna you can email podcast at qi.com yeah you go to know such thing as a fish dot com we've got 70 episodes up there thank you so much for being here guys that was that was fun as hell see you later guys