No Such Thing As A Fish - 74: No Such Thing As A Computer In The Oval Office

Episode Date: August 14, 2015

Dan, James, Andy and Alex discuss the early days of MI6, donkeys with WiFi, and the world's only handwritten newspaper.

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, Andy Murray, and Alex Bell, 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. Starting with my facts, and my fact this week is that according to the diary of the first chief of MI6, this is how the first day went. Went to the office, saw no one, nor was there anything to do there.

And that was the first day of proper spying in Britain. Yeah, when is that because the spies were so good, he couldn't fight them. Yeah, and we're in, and there were seven lampstands, and I had a stand. Hello, who was this? Mansfield coming. He's the founding chief of MI6. This was in the year 1909, I believe, and he's someone we've mentioned very briefly, ages ago on this podcast.

He's the guy who used to, when he was recruiting people in MI6, would stab a knife into his leg in order to see what the reaction of the person he was interviewing would be. You've missed out a very important bit of that. Exactly, which is that he had a wooden leg. Yeah. Very good point. It's a trick you really have to get right, isn't it? You can't make a mistake.

He had a wooden leg because he lost his first leg having stabbed himself so many times. Yeah, he said to have gone because it was quite hard to walk around with a wooden leg, and he wasn't born with it. It was later in life, but he used to go around on his scooter. Oh, wait, wait. Sorry. Tragically, Pinocchio was born with a wooden everything. But he's an amazing character, Mansfield coming.

He's everything that you would hope for in the founder of, it's so British eccentricity. He's like Inspector Cluso, all the stories you read. Famous British eccentric inspector. Oh my God, so eccentric, he didn't even have British nationality. Before he joined, he was in Boom Defence, which is a defence of the sea, the coastline, sort of putting huge piles into the sea, concrete nets and all sorts of traps and spotting devices and things like that. And the man who was setting up the secret service called A.E. Bethel wrote to him saying,

my dear Mansfield coming, boom, defence must be getting a bit stale with you. You may therefore perhaps like a new billet. If so, I have something good I can offer you. What a cool way of saying, do you want to be, you know, by master. He was really reluctant. He was living on a narrow boat at the time. He was coming up to retirement age anyway and he kept sort of going, I really like making these boom nets and he just keeps asking, he's like, could I do the boom netting thing

at the same time? Is that a possibility? Do you think that he would spend all his days in an MI6 daydreaming of being not a spy, whereas what everyone else would daydream about being a spy? Oh right. You're dreaming of getting a tap on the shoulder and saying, would you like to not be a spy? What's really weird is that he lived on a narrow boat, before then he was in the navy and he had to leave because he got really seasick, but then he went to live on a boat.

Right. Wow. Not many waves and tides on a canal though, is there? Even fewer on the land though, that's true. An interesting thing about spies, in the first correspondence where they're talking about the spies, they're not referred to by the word spies, they're referred to by the word scallywags because they used to recruit people, it was different to the romantic notion we have of this James Bond character, it was all about any kind of common criminal that

you might be able to find overseas who would be up for doing some spying for you. The word scallywags was used in the war to refer to people who would kind of do very, very small things to put off any invaders, so like turning signs round or that kind of thing. I know something about that and I think we did this on the show actually, is that Private Godfrey from Dad's Army was in a group called the Scallywags in the Second World War, which was devoted to sabotage of any potential German invasion and they were given arms, they were given the ingredients to make bombs, they were given instructions for how to set up

razor wire traps across roads, it really was pretty unpleasant the stuff that they were prepared to do in the event of an invasion, yeah of course. So do you guys know about all the other MIs? Because there are 19 of them, yeah it's amazing, so there was for example MI1 was codes and ciphers and that's now GCHQ, so some of them still exist but they're under different names, they've been subsumed, you know, things like that. My favourite ones are MI4 which was the geographical section, so maps, they just dealt with maps, MI7 which was press and propaganda, which is quite interesting, and MI16 which is scientific

intelligence, that was formed in 1945, during the Scottish independence debate it was revealed that there's still money going into MI16, so it still exists, how cool is that? But then it is just scientists, I reckon you go to a party and go yeah actually I work for MI16. There's no MI13 though, no, not because it's paddling. Well I don't know, there are a couple that never existed, so for some reason I mean MI18 was only used in fiction apparently, but then why would you not just use all the numbers, it's really odd that they missed out a couple.

So the correct name for MI6 is the SIS which is a secret intelligence service, it was originally known as the Secret Service Bureau, and that was known as either the SS Bureau or sometimes just the SS. It's got a new fashion now, do you want to know something else that's really cool about Mansfield coming? I think that he invented the method of spies driving up to someone and saying get in. So before that people would just stand there, when the car got there and go well what do you want me to do?

So basically he would drive to meet people right, but he thought that they would have associates who would be waiting to photograph you or that they would be waiting to you know, cost you or whatever, so he said, drive past the rendezvous on the opposite side and once you've spotted the target, and I'm quoting here, drive up close to him, open the door and invite him in. I lean back the moment I've caught his eye and from then onwards I do not show myself at all. This is another bit from his diary, surely we cannot be expected to sit in the office

month by month doing absolutely nothing, there was just nothing to do. And then on the 14th and 15th of October his diary then again reads, office all day, no one appeared. I heard it was just an office rented in the name of a private detective called Mr. Drew, the Victoria Street. And then the next office as well, or one of the later offices was under another pseudonym. There was one that was 54 Broadway, they had that between 1926 and 1964, but the sign outside said it was the Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company, that was actually MI6, and when they eventually

sold that property to buy a new one, they realised that people were coming round to view it and one of the people who came to view was a Russian trade delegation, so they quickly go round taking all the maps off the walls. That's amazing. There's also another exciting character who was recruited by Mansfield Cumming, which was a man called Thomas Merton, he was the original Q, he was the gadget man, he worked out how they could create an invisible ink for writing, because up until then they'd been experimenting with using semen, which I think is quite well known, right?

Yeah, Mansfield Cumming said that he thought the best invisible ink was semen. The advantage of using bodily fluids is that if you were found in possession of them, they weren't incriminating. If they're in a bottle, I think it's more incriminating. No, the idea is that spies had been convicted and sentenced to death because they'd been found with lemon juice and stuff like that, because they're saying, why would you have lemon juice on you? I think why do you have semen on you, it's still a good question for us, it's not one.

Is this anything to do with Cumming? The agent who discovered that you can use semen as invisible ink apparently had to transfer to another department after he was teased so much by other staff members. That's so bad, isn't it? And apparently there was one officer in Copenhagen who took the discovery so seriously that he stocked a whole load of invisible ink in his office, and it began to smell so badly that other agents said to him, you should use fresh every time you want to write a letter and save in it.

You have to really take someone aside to acquire a corner of the room to tell them that, don't you? I'm surprised that in all the stuff that I read of Mansfield Cumming, I've only read this in one spot properly, but Rasputin's death was off the back of Mansfield Cumming. Supposedly. I think the word British spies involved somehow in his death, definitely. They poisoned him and he sort of ate all the poison and then he laughed and he had his having a great time and then they beat him up, you know, and then they shot him a couple of times and he still didn't die.

The thing I read was they smashed his testicles flat. Terrible. You won't be writing any more invisible ink letters after this, will you? OK, time for fact number two and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that there is a distillery in Kentucky that claims that playing Bruce Springsteen to the whiskey improves the aging process. Is that because of Bruce Springsteen going through the aging process himself and he knows what it's like, therefore he could teach the whiskey?

It'd be nice to be that, but no, sadly not. It is the vibrations, they think. But specifically of Bruce Springsteen. No, it's just any old music, but I think being in Kentucky, it's just the kind of rock they like. Plus it being dad rock, it just naturally ages anything that listens to it. So this will be bourbon because it's in Kentucky. But when you make any kind of whiskey like this, the way that it ages is they put it in barrels and then the liquor inside the barrel will go in and out of the pores of the wood and

that will give it its kind of woody taste and it will age it in that way. And they think that by bracing it, it'll slosh the liquid around a bit more, which will make age quicker. It seems like it probably does work to a certain extent. It's really cool the way that whiskey distilleries make drinks that might not actually hit the market until after the founders are either retired or dead. So there are still, you know, there are 70 year old whiskies which go on sale. And, you know, this is something that they made 70 years ago. What was that 70 years ago from now?

That's 1945. I don't know how much whiskey they were making in 1945. Other things on the mind. But yeah, it's just incredible. It's really interesting as well the relationship between the whiskey and the barrel because obviously the, like you say, the kind of the essence of the barrel goes into the whiskey, but it happens the other way around as well. So the barrels in which Jack Daniels Tennessee whiskey is aged are reused afterwards to age Tabasco sauce.

I think they also sell the barrels over to Scotch companies as well in Scotland. Yes, I've been to the Jack Daniels distillery. How are you? It's in Tennessee and a fact about it is that it's a dry county. You're not allowed to buy alcohol there. Wow. It's a special sort of dispensation. So you can, I think you can buy a souvenir bottle,

but you're not allowed to actually drink it until you're over the border out of that particular county. It's amazing the relationship of music and alcohol. So there was a report done, a research report by a guy called Professor North, who found that people were five times more likely to buy French wine than German wine if accordion music was playing in the background. What? Yeah. What about if there was Oompa music? No way.

An Oompa band was played, the German product outsold the French by two to one. Wow. I can't believe that the effect is that substantial. People are so impressionable. There was a study done quite recently about the best environment to drink whiskey. They had people drinking it in a... Oh, it's on your own, isn't it? It's on your own.

You just stare at the wall. Yeah, in your underpants. Sorry. They had a grassy room with a turf floor and the barings of sheep and the smell of freshly cut grass. Just do it outside. Oh, that's the best environment. Unfortunately, there's no other room in existence that anyone can drink that in. That's one.

That's one. The other one is a sweet room which was filled with a sweet fragrance, rounded red objects, and a high-pitched tinkling sound. The last one was a woody room with wood panelling and floorboards, the sounds of leaves crunching and log fires and the smell of cedar wood. The wooden one was by far what people enjoyed it the most in the wooden room. Wow. The woody room.

The woody room, yeah. Cool. This report I was just talking about different tastes of wine matched to music. They actually released a playlist of the types of music you should listen to, to the different wines. So, when you're drinking Merlot... By myself. Just I'll repeat 500 times. If you're drinking a Merlot, Sitting on the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding.

Easy by Lionel Richie. Over the Rainbow by Eva Cassaby. None of those are French songs. No, these are... The French and German wine tasting was about what you buy in a supermarket. Oh, I see. This is about how it actually tastes better. But how does it affect the taste?

Okay, so what he says is that they did a study with over 250 university students. They played them various different bits of music and they all reported back that a certain type of music absolutely tasted way better than if they heard it with more Merlot music. I can imagine if you have kind of a more smooth tasting wine, then you want more smooth kind of music. Yeah. That kind of makes sense. I can imagine students just trying to find some correlation to play on so that they just get given more free wine. I think I'm going to need to hear another one.

Let's try it again. I think I'm splitting a pattern. I think we should continue, guys. Chardonnay had what's love got to do with it, Tina Turner, spinning around by Kylie Minow and Rock DJ by Robbie Williams. That's what Chardonnay tastes best with. This research, by the way, was carried out by a wine maker from Chile who himself plays monastic chance to his maturing wines. Does he? Yeah. So that's his choice. No spring steam.

Okay. So there was a whiskey, a Bourbon whiskey in America where the warehouse where it was held was hit by a tornado. And basically the whole of the house was almost ripped to smithereens. But the barrels were kind of left more or less where they were. Apparently when they tried the whiskey, it was absolutely amazing. And it's called tornado surviving whiskey. And it's superior to the usual product, they say. I would say that too if I had an enormous bill of damage to repair.

This whiskey is suddenly quadrupled in volume. Wow. Oh God. Well, I mean, that's something, I suppose. Yeah. And there's another company called Ocean Aged Bourbon who take their whiskey and then put it on a boat and send it out to sea for four years. And when it comes back, apparently it tastes a lot better. I think this is all months ago. I know it sounds like it sounds like it's not true, but there is a little bit of science behind it. The more that it kind of sloshes against the woods, the more it will react to it. They really do believe it, like the whiskey makers really believe it.

If you go on the internet, you can find a nice advert for whiskey toothpaste. Wow. Don't even know if it's real, but the advert seems to be there. It's 6% proof scotch bourbon whiskey. And the advert says, why fight oral hygiene? Enjoy it. Here's real he-man toothpaste. Best argument yet for brushing three times a day.

It's also a fantastic excuse for turning up at work smelling of whiskey. No, no, no, that's my toothpaste. OK, time for fact number three, and that is Alex Bell. OK, my fact is that there is a statue of Nikola Tesla in Silicon Valley that radiates free Wi-Fi. Cool. It's cool, isn't it? That is what he would have wanted. It is, yeah.

It's him holding a sort of giant wireless light bulb, and the light bulb sort of goes off Wi-Fi. It's a Kickstarter project. I've seen the drawings of it. I have to say, in the drawings, they don't quite get the light bulb right in his hand. It looks like a big ping-pong bat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does look a bit weird. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's quite an odd thing for him to be holding as well.

We should tell you who Tesla was. Yeah, yeah. He was known as the man who invented the 20th century. Yeah. As in before Tesla. It was the 19th century. He was born on the 1st of January, 1900. Yeah, he was born 1856.

OK. He was born into a lightning storm, a fierce lightning storm. According to this is his family legend. And midway through the birth, the midwife said that the lightning was a bad omen. And she said that he'll be a child of darkness. And the mother said, no, he will be a child of light. That definitely sounds like writing there. And so Tesla was this fantastic scientist and very, very eccentric man.

We talked about him a bit on the podcast and QI. He was, he invented, among other things. You talked about the death rate that he invented on the podcast. The main thing he invented was the AC polyphase system, which does not sound sexy, but it was unbelievable. So before Tesla, you could transport electricity one mile before Tesla. And even then you could only use it for lighting up light bulbs and things. Thanks to his system, you can transmit it hundreds of miles

and use it for industrial machinery. I mean, it made electricity into a viable technology which could span the world. Ironic that he's now a wife, I think, that probably goes about two meters. Yeah. Yeah. He was a big whiskey aficionado, actually. Was he? Yeah, he drank it every day and he thought that he would live to 150 by drinking it.

Worth a try. Prohibition came along and he was not a fan of prohibition at all because of this, but he went along with it anyway and decided that he was now only going to live to 130 because he was no longer drinking whiskey. He lived till 86, I think, yeah. That's pretty good. Yeah, but he's a long way off his prediction, isn't he? Yeah, that's true.

Well, prohibition, he probably couldn't factor in how many years it actually would take off. Mathematician. I think it was Cardano, but it might not have been him, but it was one of the people around at the same time as him around the Renaissance that predicted exactly the day he was going to die and told everyone this was the day he was going to die and he was exactly right. But a lot of people think he probably killed himself to prove himself right. Ah, yeah.

I was thinking some other statues as well. Oh, yeah. The statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square. There's a myth that it's electrified so that pigeons don't want to land on it, but I looked it up and I found a new scientist article that says that they thought about it, but they didn't do it. Yeah, they also thought about inserting pins that would stand out at the top of his head intending to stop the birds as well.

So that's a stand-away of stopping pigeons. Yeah, but they just thought that would look really weird, like he had a punk hairdo. And also the pins are really subtle, then there's a risk you'll just end up with a dead pigeon cabal on top of Winston Churchill's head. The location of where the statue stands is located in a spot that in the 50s used to be referred to by Churchill as where my statue will go. Really? Yeah, so he would constantly say that if ever they passed.

He would say that's where my statue will go and that's where it did. He was successful in his life, but that's quite a presumption to make for anyone. I don't know. Just walk through the park loudly proclaiming that's where my statue will be. Well, as long as you don't say it everywhere you go and you help to win the Second World War, I'd be inclined to give him a statue. Well, towards the end, he got voted out and people weren't particularly happy with him. I know where he got voted out immediately afterwards.

Then he got voted back in at the age of 80. He was elected Prime Minister. Yeah. That was amazing. There's a mysterious statue in Budapest of Colombo. The detective. Of Peter Falk, yeah. Not the guy who discovered the clitoris.

No, no. That's a callback. That's a callback to an episode between 1555 if anyone wants to have a listen. Yeah, there's a slightly mysterious Peter Falk statue sitting in a street in Budapest. No one's quite sure why it's there. It was built about three years after his death. It just suddenly was there. They think it was a Hungarian politician.

Do you think maybe he went there on holiday once and went, that's where my statue is going to go? Yes, exactly. So he's known to have had Hungarian roots through his grandparents' side. But yeah, there's no actual link. No one's quite sure why it's there. There's the world's smallest sculpture by a guy called Johnty Hurwitz. It was unveiled earlier this year and it was almost,

it was less than one millimeter tall and was almost immediately destroyed when the photographer accidentally crushed it with his finger. No. Really? Yeah. It was being photographed standing inside the eye of a needle. There was a museum in Bath called the Impossible Micro World, which was the most fantastic museum and it closed down.

But there's this amazing guy called Willard Wigan who makes these things. And he's done, so as a sculpture of a horse dancing on the head of an actual ant. Wow. And all the exhibits in the museum, you had to go through. I went when I was a little boy. It was a museum normal size. Museum was normal size. It wasn't closed down when someone accidentally stood on it or something.

Every exhibit you had to look at through a magnifier basically. Wow. And he, this guy, he has to slow down his heartbeat in order to make the cuts necessary on the thing he's sculpting. So he slows it right down, look through the binoculars or the magnifier, the microscope, whatever he's using, waits for a heartbeat, makes the cut on the thing, then the next heartbeat happens. It's just incredible that his hands were so unshaky

that his heartbeat could have affected how shaky they were. I mean, if I try to do something quite small, my hands are way shaky than what is being affected by my heartbeat. Yes, but you drink very heavily. It's a whiskey. Do you want to hear some facts about Wi-Fi? Yes, please, Andy. Okay.

So, this is cool. There's an Israeli theme park called Kfar Kedem, right? And it's a traditional theme park for people who want to experience life as it was in Galilee 2,000 years ago, right? If people get bored, I presume, or want to check their phones, they have donkeys walking around with Wi-Fi hotspots on them. Oh, wow. But the thing is they have 30 donkeys,

and only five of the donkeys are actually carrying Wi-Fi hotspots. So there's only a one in six chance that you're donkey. Do you want to spend ages trying to connect to that one? So you run over to a donkey and then you say, no, not this one. It's hard to imagine anyone getting bored at a theme park which recreates 2,000 years old Israel. It's just really difficult.

When you were talking about running around finding donkeys, this just reminded me of something that Alex told us just before we walked in about the, it's like a children's playground following you around. Oh, yeah. I just saw this video on BBC News. You know these random science products that get made for seemingly no reason? A guy has created a climbing frame that wanders around parks looking for children to play on it.

It just sounds like the most ridiculous and also predatory thing. What they've done is they've spliced the genes of a climbing frame in a pedophile. It's absolutely horrendous. The idea isn't to get children used to the idea of robotics in real life. Does it move if you're climbing on it or does it stop? I don't know. I mean, it sounds incredibly dangerous as well. It doesn't matter.

It's an academic question because no child will ever climb on this thing. I don't think they have any choice. I mean, it's very slow. It doesn't like gallop around or anything like that. Can I talk about the sort of invention of Wi-Fi for a second? Because I want to talk around for ages and I've never had a chance. Oh, it's God. You can't sit at home, but there are slides coming out.

Haley Lamar, which is very glamorous films done in America, 30s and 40s. She was one time dubbed the world's most beautiful woman, but she was also this fantastic scientist as well. She worked out, she applied to the National Inventors Guild, but was rejected, mainly because she was a woman and people didn't take her seriously, and she was encouraged to use her celebrity and beauty to sell war bombs, which she did a little bit, but she got started inventing things herself.

She got together with her neighbour, who was a composer called George Antile, and they built a machine called a frequency hopping spread spectrum. Basically, the problem with torpedoes at that time was that they were remote controlled, so they were kept on course using a radio signal transmitted from the ship, but that signal could be easily blocked. And Lamar and Antile developed this improved system that allowed the radio signal to jump up and down frequencies randomly so that it couldn't be jammed, but what's really brilliant is how they did it.

You guys know what player pianos are, right? They're pianos that play themselves. They have this big role of paper music, which has lots of holes in, and they correspond to which notes should play and when. The frequency hopping spread spectrum used the mechanism from the player piano, but instead of playing 88 keys of the piano, it switched the torpedo signal between 88 radio frequencies. The principle of modern wireless technology is based on that.

Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, everything like that. Wow, isn't that amazing? That's so cool. So Sri Lanka, the island of Sri Lanka, is about to provide Wi-Fi to the entire island using a network of floating balloons, which are going to be 12 miles up in the sky. They're all solar powered, and the solar power that the balloons get is going to be used to transmit internet signals to the spot of land beneath it.

How insane is that? 25,000 square miles. That's amazing. The area of the country. There's a place that I'm still trying to find this out for certain, and I can't properly find anywhere online yet that would tell me the right answer, but certainly up until 2012, you can't get Wi-Fi in the White House. Wow. Yeah, the White House has no Wi-Fi,

and for example, the Oval Office doesn't have a computer in it, and if you want to use a computer in it, you have to bring in a laptop and plug in. Clinton famously apparently only sent two emails during his time as president. One was as a test, and then the second one was delete everything. Was the second one too spaced? Yes.

Yeah, it was to John Glenn. So I don't know if he was in the... Yeah, was he in the ISS on the second trip? John, you'll be hearing a lot of crazy stuff about me when you get back to work. I just want to let you know that none of it's true. Mr. Clinton, we've gone through your entire five million emails, and we think there's two of them we can save. Yes, good news about the invisible ink you were asking about.

OK, time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that a third of people in Britain have written almost nothing by hand in the last six months. This makes so much sense when you think about it, but it sounds crazy when you feel... It sounds terrifying, yeah. This was a survey admittedly by a printing and mailing company called Doc Mail,

but what they said was that one in three people had not written anything by hand for six months, and on average, people hadn't written something for 41 days. And I think when they say written anything by hand, they mean anything that's not a shopping list, a post-it note. Or a signature. And when you think about it, what is there that you need to write at length? Letters to people.

Most people don't write many letters these days, if any, you know. I presume at school still, you would be writing all the time. Well, one thing about that is apparently if you write things down, it helps you remember them. That makes kind of intuitive sense. I do definitely believe that, yeah. But actually, there's like a neurological reason for it, like there are certain neural circuits that are activated

whenever you write things down. And so children who write tend to learn more quickly. And so if you have schools where children aren't really writing things down, then it can hamper their improvement. Wow. The other downside that we're sort of going to have in years to come is that all these great works of literature and everything else, we're not going to have the original handwritten notes of people doing drafts

because so much of it now is on computers. So the American Museum of Natural History on their website, our Twitter link, they've got all of Darwin's papers and all his works. And it's amazing because you can see all of his handwriting, which is really bad. And he's got little doodles of drawings. His kids drew pictures on the back. There's an amazing one of a fish walking on the land holding an umbrella, which I really like.

So they obviously subscribed to his theory. The opposite of calligraphy is cacography, bad handwriting. Bad handwriting. That's great. Cacography. They reckon that in like a hundred years time, the, in fact, even neatly written handwriting will be completely illegible to people because it's like if you look at very, very old calligraphy now, you can't understand any of it.

And then in a hundred years time, it might be only that you can recognize the times, new Roman or... Looking at, say, Jane Austen's letters or something, quite actually quite difficult to decipher. Yeah. Some of the words. The guy who was credited with pretty much single-handedly reviving modern calligraphy and penmanship is Edward Johnston, who also is very, very big in fonts.

Not like font size. I mean, he created Johnston and New Johnston is now the London Underground font. And he mentored the sculptor Eric Gill. He came up with Gill Sands, which is the BBC's official font. Here's another incredibly creepy company. Just off the back of the playgrounds, which follow children. There's a company which has made a robot to write handwritten letters. So basically you write a lot of handwriting samples,

and then a robot reads your handwriting samples and can perfectly replicate your handwriting. And they basically say that they want to retain the delight of giving and receiving notes without the hassle of heading to the stationery store, writing out a letter, finding stamps and locating a mailbox, which is the whole point of writing a letter to someone, is that it's a nice thing to do because it is a bit of trouble.

Have you guys heard of the Musselman? No. It's an Urdu language newspaper. It's probably the world's only remaining newspaper that's completely handwritten. Wow! It's daily newspaper. It's only about, like, four pages.

It's four pages long. It takes three hours. One copy. Circulation remains a difficult matter for them. Circulation, 22,000 subscribers in 2008. But yeah, it's four pages long, but they leave a blank space on the front page in case there's any breaking news.

That's great. So there's an editor in America called Horace Greeley, and he once sent a note to the Iowa Press Association. At the start of it went, I have waited till longer waiting would be discourteous, only to find that I cannot attend your press meeting next June as I would like to do. But his handwriting was so bad that they thought it said,

I have wondered all along whether any squirt had denied the scandal about the president meeting Jane in the woods on Saturday. Wow! That's pretty bad handwriting, isn't it? That's amazing. At the end of this letter went, I feel obliged to decline any invitation

that takes me away a day's journey from home. But they thought it said, any insinuation that brick ovens are dangerous to hams gives me the horrors. Yeah, so that's why it's important to have very good handwriting. Yeah, this is like when I'm in Asia, I speak Mandarin from school, but obviously in Asia,

every word has four different tones. And if you get the tones wrong, you might be saying, what's the way to the shops down the road? As the cow eats the grass in the way a meringue looks like a banana. Something completely different. Does that mean that you have

a completely different system of puns, though? Yeah, totally. Chinese puns are extraordinary. There was a story that they'd been banned, wasn't there? The Chinese government sort of cracked down on puns? Yeah. Can you do that? I don't know.

I don't know. Cows had been banned from eating meringues. Fountain pens. I was thinking that, they're quite interesting. You're not supposed to share fountain pens with people. They're just like giant needles. Because you... You're using them wrong.

Is it because of the bodily fluids you've been writing in? Exactly. It's because every person writes in a unique way, as you'd imagine, a bit like a fingerprint, a specific angle that you write at, and the amount of force you use, means that the nib gets shaved down in a very specific way. And so if you're properly using a fountain pen

and you want to be writing into the nicest way possible, don't lend your pen to someone else, because then they'll shave it down in their way, and you'll just end up with a horrible nib. Actually, that's true. I have lent fountain pens to people in the past, and I approached them right here, and I thought, oh my God.

He's absolutely murdering it. I really have thought that. I can imagine you have, hasn't he? Yeah. And I haven't said anything at the time, obviously. Shall we wrap up? Just a cool thing. Yeah.

So in medieval times, you would write in a scriptorium, as in monks were copying out books. And some texts, we only know their history because of mistakes that got in somewhere along the chain of being repeated. You know, you make a text, you copy from that. And that is similar to the way the enigma codes were broken, because when people made mistakes in text,

that allowed the guys at Bletchley some way in. Yeah. Yeah, when there was some difference. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. The difference between medieval and, you know, MI, whatever it was in the war. Just on mistakes, actually.

And therefore, Torah is a special type of copy of the Torah, which is handwritten with a quill. You're not allowed to make mistakes in any of them. If you make a mistake on most words, then if you're able to scratch it out and carry on, that's okay. But if you misspell God's name, or make a mistake in writing God's name, you have to cut out the entire page and bury it,

and then sew in a new page and start again. It's pretty hard to misspell God. It's not in English, obviously. And then dogs set off, for fuck's sake. Okay, that's it. All of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to get in contact with any of us

about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we could be found on Twitter. I'm on at Shriverland, James. At X-shaped, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And Alex. At Alexbell underscore.

Yep. Also, you can go to AQI podcast on Twitter. That's our group account. You can message us there. Or go to knowsuchthingasofish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes. We've also got a listing of our live shows. We're doing this UK tour.

Check them out. See if any of them are near you. And please come. Okay, we'll be back again next week with another episode. See you then. Goodbye.