No Such Thing As A Fish - 77: No Such Thing As Pee-Bay

Episode Date: September 4, 2015

Live from The Edinburgh Festival, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss the history of buttons, White House squirrel problems and sewer-powered street lamps.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm joined by three other QI elves. Please welcome to the stage it's Andy Murray, Anna Chasinski and James Harkin. And once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with you, James Harkin. Okay my fact this week is that dog pee makes street lights collapse. You always hurt the ones you love. How does it do that? Well it's urea that you get in dog pee and it's corrosive

and all over the world street lights are falling down due to dog pee. There was a report that came out in San Francisco. They were just keeling over these lampposts. The pee was really ruining them and this is a quote from them. We encourage people and dogs alike to do their business in other places like a proper restroom or on one of our fire hydrants. The idea of the fire hydrants is they're made out of cast iron so they won't corrode. Okay but I didn't know that the people pissing on lampposts was a thing. I've only ever been doing it. I don't know I've been clearly wasting my time. Yeah because dogs like to urinate on things in order to mark it as their territory don't they whereas humans don't really have that so we could just wee anywhere that's a really good

point. They did some tests on dogs as well. They tested how they how they do it in terms of status so they took 48 labradors through a course which was full of the urine of other dogs you know that's because that's what the scientists do and they found out that animals with higher tail bases and tail positions so if the tail was higher up they did more urine marking so they think that that is the sign of status. You do more urine marking and you are higher status if your tail is higher. Wow that's the equivalent of a mansion in the dark world. Yeah basically yeah and there are some very submissive low status animals they just fake it they lift a leg and then they don't spray anything. I'm doing it but I'm not I'm sorry I'm sorry. Oh maybe they just

really like street lights and they don't want to wreck them. Well that would be a nice thought. They're like environmentally friendly dogs. But so have we other than just encouraging people not to piss lampposts to death are we are we doing something about physically yes we are okay cool there's a dog urinal in the Spanish town of El Vandrell. So they have a pole and the pole has a grid underneath it and the idea is that the dogs will pee on this pole. So is it law there in where was it? El Vandrell. Is it a law there that you have to train your dog to recognize a dog urinal and only urinate into that? It isn't but there is a law in Piacenza in Italy which says that someone can be fined 500 euros for not cleaning up after your dog urinates. Wow people have to

walk around with a bottle of water and kind of wash it away. Oh my god awesome kitchen towel and you just sniff on it and let it absorb. Wow good. It's also happening to a museum in Dorset they're very worried about it. It's the Bridgeport Museum and it it has a really extensive archive of the town's 800 year old rope and netting industry and this museum is now being eroded by dog urin and they've had to release statements saying the museum the foot the entire museum. So they just attack the wall right around yeah and then I mean this is a great way of taking over somewhere eventually with war. Just wing on it. Good just wee on it enough and it'll collapse. It's a long term strategy isn't it? It's not a Blitzkrieg. Almost not worth having the place once you've weed it to death.

But do you know why that do you know do we know why the dogs are so attracted to this rope and netting museum or is it a mystery? They're very interested in yeah early fishing industries. Anyway anyway we're going off topic here. Dog urine. Innovative types are using dog feces as a solution to some problems. So what possible problem could you have? I sort of presented that quite cryptically. So if you put your dog waste in a bin then it goes to a site and then it gets burned up and it releases lots of bad stuff into the atmosphere but in Massachusetts they've created a methane digester so that you put your dog feces into this methane digester and it powers electricity. At the moment it only powers one lamp I think but which has collapsed.

But they are working on it. Okay there is a feces powered lamp in London a streetlight a human feces powered. Really? Yeah and it's right but it's really near the QI offices in Covent Garden it's by the Savoy Hotel. How many people notice me doing that embarrassing. And they used to have them they used to be streetlights which burned off the gas from the sewers so the gases would come up these pipes and just be burned off at the top and there's only one still working but it's called the what's it called the carting lane patent sewer ventilating lamp that's what it's called. It still works. So lamps in London speaking of which there are 1500 gas lamps in London that are still powered by gas and there's a team of five people who work

for British gas apparently and they are employed to go around London every night and wind up these gas lamps so they don't actually light the fire they wind up a clock thing which ignites the gas lamp on the inside and they climb ladders and go up there and do that every single night you'll see them. I have never seen them. You aren't looking up James of course are looking up. Isn't that cool. They call themselves the Guardians of the Lamps British gas employees. I've discovered a really great place to buy urine online. So just a quick shout out and if anyone here or listening needs some they're called P Mart PEE Bay. Oh my god that would have been great and it's basically this is the

opening blurb. Welcome to P Mart your best discount online source for 100% real undiluted predator pee and animal urine. So what they do is they sell to people who need urine in order to make a mark of smell so that they can fend off other predators coming towards them. Yeah you can get gift cards you can buy someone a gift card for like $100 worth of pee. My birthday's coming up that. Exactly they invented this thing called I don't know if they invented it but they sell it's called P gel and it's they say this is an amazing product and I agree it's it's designed for indoor use so you can have that great pee smell inside your house and no spilling no mess no fuss and it's and it's just basically a gel rather than a liquid that you can just smear some urine

smell of a coyote. It stops I guess other coyotes maybe coming into your house using your sofa. Yeah yeah my sofa at home is full of coyotes all the time. We've got a new sponsor by the way for this week's podcast guys. It's P gel. It's P Mart and P gel but also so you can also go down the list of all the things that they sell and there's lots of animals it's really it's really cool and they bottle them in those kind of you know when you go past those health shops where they have up your mass you know all those big huge bottles of your protein shake yeah protein shake yeah let's say there's there's lots of different animals my favorite one that I saw is that you can buy one gallon of pure black bear urine a gallon a gallon that's what I thought long must

it take a bear to produce a gallon of urine and straight into the thing as well yeah it must be a nightmare that could take down a building yes yeah um have you heard of white-footed sportive lemurs I haven't no neither had I until until I've found this out um so they're they're a kind of lemur and they're really anti-social in fact they actively avoid each other and they go to great lengths to not see their their mates or their family members or anyone else um and they only communicate using their communal toilets that's what they do what so they do they go they leave a scent mark is it like writing little comments on the toilet wall yeah basically yeah yeah and they just go and they say oh good good um you know mum was here or whatever and then that's

what I've seen your mum was here it must have been nearly 80 episodes before we had our first your mum joke on that we we stood out very well um yeah other uses good uses for urine um which is backfired in this case actually but a family in Bristol who tried to lure back a lost dog by leaving a trail of their own urine on the streets near their home have been criticized by the local council criticizes such a nice way they insist it's the best way they went on forums online and said our dog is lost and the people on the forum said well you should pee all over your town and it'll come back and find you apparently it's quite a normal way of doing it said the owner because I would just put up a sign silly me there was a vet who was interviewed about it who said he

would be pleasantly surprised if it works but um probably uh it would be better if they could like place jumpers and items of owners clothing because they really recognize things that owners smell of so he said the only way the urine thing would work was if the owner had an incontinence problem and we're gonna have to move on to the next fact in a few minutes okay there was a book called Pharmacopia Beatiana from 1706 by George Bate and he had a gargle for mouth ulcers which included a white dog turd wow yeah how do you gargle a solid thing I think you then dilute it in some water oh I want to say wine actually yeah yeah why not take the edge off it some other uses for dogs according to old medical dictionaries um here's one from

Robert James in 1743 he said keeping a warm puppy next to one's upset belly will give a kindly and cherishing heat that's nice isn't it yeah and not quite as nice dog dung being hot and acrid might treat toothache might might as well give it a try um anything else so there was an experiment in 1955 which I really like where the urine of schizophrenics was fed to spiders to find out if they made webs any differently compared to when they drunk the urine it really sounds like they're just getting words out of a hat and going schizophrenics spiders urine what are we gonna do inject okay you can imagine that they thought I bet they make really wacky webs with some crazies they didn't there was no mark difference in the webs of the spiders who drunk the schizophrenics

urine the only thing they could conclude from it the scientist said was that urine must taste extremely unpleasant after taking just a sip the spiders exhibited marked appearance if I was a spider I would have made a web which has said screw you in the middle of it okay let's move on to our next fact time for pack number two and that is my fact my fact this week is that after the button was invented it took more than 1000 years for someone to invent the buttonhole what do we do with these what do we do where do they go who keeps making them and they were doing things like well I guess we'll just we'll just latch a bit of string around it that might be the way just no one thought to have created the buttonhole and eventually

and I love that that must have been the biggest innovation of its day just a little slit in the bit of clothing it's kind of I mean because the loops do work so I think the buttonhole came about in the it was the mid 13th century in Europe when the buttonhole came to being but you can understand so if you have a loop that works perfectly well I don't really see where we're bothered to invent the buttonhole to be honest and they have to be reinforced as well because you can't just cut a hole in your clothing because then that'll that'll widen and eventually there'll be no go for a button so they do have to be reinforced guys and that public service announcement was brought to you yeah and they were used for decoration as well weren't they because they

were really ornate and and whatever um there was apparently really expensive as well according to Franco Giacasi who is the world's biggest button collector wait wait wait wait does he have the world's largest collection of buttons or is he the world's biggest button collector he has three buttons but he's eight foot six and he said that there was a time when the buttons were so expensive you could pay off a debt by plucking a precious button from your suit giving it to someone wow is that that's really cool yeah there's a really really good article about buttons on slate.com if you want to go there afterwards for more button stuff um go on the the quote is a button packs an extraordinary amount of information about a given time and place its provenance onto a crowded

little canvas children learn to button and unbutton early in life and they keep doing it until they're dead um here's a great little thing uh anyone in the audience here anyone listening at home all of us on this stage most likely the one thing that unites us is that we're all if you have a button on you are wearing a button that comes from the same town in china there is button city in china is called chalto and chalto produces 15 billion buttons a year and it started because three i think was three brothers they just found a few buttons on the ground and they started collecting buttons and then it turned into an industry and it became this massive thing but now they make them rather than find them yeah yeah yeah no no that's the amazing thing they find 15 billion buttons a year and nobody

knows where they come from yeah but it's not it's not every single button in the world but i think it's something like three out of five people if they're wearing buttons wear buttons from button city and button city apparently is amazing and it's situated very near toothbrush city which produces a lot of the toothbrushes in the world should be next to button the whole city something about something else about buttons lots of birmingham is built on buttons so stay with me um so uh shell buttons used to be extremely popular buttons made from from mother of pearl or shell and um in the 18th century the the world's button the button town of the 18th century was birmingham but they made a huge amount of the world's shell buttons and the best ones apparently

required 80 different processes in order to just make a button um and there was so much waste shell which they produced that they dug enormous pits to bury it all and um lots of buildings in birmingham today especially in the jewellery quarter have their foundations on mother of pearl so they're all on on sort of buttons and button wow cool is that i did not know that it's really interesting did you know that cloth buttons were illegal in 17th century france no cloth buttons cloth buttons were illegal in 17th century france yeah they sound totally useless i would ban them like buttons made of cloth that wasn't the reason they banned them basically it was due to big button yeah it was the handicraft industry who said that basically by making these cloth buttons it

was going to make out other buttons made out of pearl or whatever they were going to make them obsolete and it was so bad that people that officials would go to houses and search them looking for buttons and you could be arrested for enjoying a button in the privacy of your own home according to this article i read wow when we say enjoying a button i mean you're enjoying a button i think you might have to be arrested there was so a button alternative since we didn't really figure out the button button whole thing in ancient Greece in ancient Rome was the fibula which was a foreign of the safety pin it sends you out exactly like a safety pin and they had these in ancient Greece and Rome and that's an example of one of these things

which i love which is an invention that vanished for about 2000 years and the safety pin resurfaced in so they had safety pins in ancient Greece yeah yeah yeah that's what they did up there tunics the guy who invented the modern safety pin was called Walter Hunt i think and he sold his patent for 400 dollars because he had him he had like a gambling debt or something so he sold his patent so that he could pay off his debt because he thought i say to pin it's nothing it's not really important that is how i feel about safety pins to be honest but actually as a commercial and also he invented i think like a sewing machine like similar to Elias Howe invented the actual sewing machine but he did a precursor to it and he didn't patent that because he thought it would

put a lot of seamstresses out of work oh no it did the opposite of that created a massive global industry oh my friend uh one thing that button so when the button hole did come into being one thing that they were useful in fashion between 13th and 15th centuries was detachable sleeves so that was a really fashionable thing is that you would have you know you could swap between outfits it would look like you were wearing a different outfit every time you had lots you had a sleeve drawer which was just sleeves and you probably they did i don't know they had lots of different sleeves where else are you going to keep this leaves that's really cool that is really cool that's amazing yeah it's nice but then one day you might accidentally leave the house with

odd sleeves on oh disaster and then some people say he's just doing it on purpose to be pretentious so basically before the buttonhole was invented buttons did become very popular everyone was wearing them ornamentally and one of the hangovers of that time which we rarely think about i was reading this in bill brison's book at home if you think about a suit coat and the buttons by the cuff they they're not practical buttons they're just ornamental three ornamental on each side yeah that is weird yeah so that's a hangover from back in the day pre buttonhole well so another hangover which we are wearing every day every female in the audience symbols of sexism of the olden days is the fact that buttons on women's clothes are on the opposite side to buttons on men's clothes

so there are loads of theories about why that is the main theory i've heard is that women were dressed by maids yeah and so the the maids who are mostly right-handed would kind of be it would be easier for them because it was on the left hand side whereas men dress themselves i thought it was because all women are left-handed i've heard so yeah i think that is the main theory although the theory is the main theory mine isn't no no the all left-handed thing we are yeah it's true um but but another theory is that so men have them on the right hand side uh because they would have their weapons in their right hand when they were carrying their weapons so so when you're trying to get undressed and kill someone at the same time exactly it's much easier one-handed i will deal to

the death but jillian linkins can't stand to be in the same room as friends of family who word buttons who she's called jillian linkins and she has something called kumpoon phobia which is the fear of buttons she's had it since she was age seven and her boyfriend nate dorrington can only wear clothes with zips wow but her name is linkins which is nicely ironic oh yeah the function of a button do you know who else had that yeah yeah we must have read the same thing yeah let's let's say it together okay ready one two three steve jobs yeah steve jobs was scared of buttons and and partially there's a theory that that's why it led to the buttonless iphone because he was so yeah so steve jobs he actually was he had a fear of buttons yeah he did say that in yeah

2007 i think another person who had a fear of buttons was uh napoleon's i think great-granddaughter marie bonaparte oh really really yep wow that's true is she the one who had her clitoris moved moved i don't want to go away too just to a holiday house very very quickly she was she did some studies where she looked at the distance between the clitoris and the vagina of lots of women and found out that those where it was closer had more orgasms and she wants to have more orgasms so moved her clitoris surgically closer to her she had to move twice and it didn't work it's very sad it's extremely sad yeah yeah how the mighty families have fallen napoleon's army actually had a situation with buttons which was that their

buttons were made out of tin and i've read i don't know if this is actually a solid theory but apparently when they were marching into russia it was so cold that the tin crumbled and so their uniforms opened wide up and suddenly they were exposed to the cold and that's what led to a lot of deaths so so as they were invading it was kind of like watching the full monti coming to you um i've read that theory i'm i've read different things about it though i've read people contradicting it and people saying yes no it's definitely yet so yeah i'm not sure i'm gonna have to move us on anyone else got something um just that the uh button replacement is the zip in the modern era and you've got to be aware of the zip because it is by far and away the most common cause of penis

injury uh so between 2002 and 2010 there were almost 18 000 people in the u.s alone who were hospitalized because of penal injury imagine if they all arrived on the same day imagine the coincidence it was after a big charity pull your flies up and also possibly not interestingly for men but it is almost only ever the penis and not the testicles are good news of the testicles very hard to get them caught in the zip it's more like it's more like no news for the testicles and very very bad news for the penis when they invented the zip it was marketed as a better way to do up your trousers as you were less likely to forget to do up a zipper as you were to forget to do up buttons but also less likely to chop your cock off with buttons

okay time for fact number three and that is andy murray good um okay my fact is that as a baby st nicolas refused to drink his mother's breast milk on fast days so on wednesdays and fridays st nicolas would refuse to suckle um because he was so holy so young uh except in the evening when it was allowed because the day was over so there and there are other saints where this happened so um there's a biography of the fifth century st candid which says that as a baby he completely refused to suckle at his mother's right breast but if she had eaten a delicious meal he also refused to suckle at her left breast wow what so he wasn't allowed to enjoy it too much so if she didn't eat a delicious meal then it breast milk is more delicious exactly it was like an abstinence

thing babies are so much more advanced than we give them credit for yeah absolutely do you know who the patron saint of breastfeeding is it's not st nicolas no it's st giles and before he became a saint he withdrew deep into the forest near neem where he lived on his own and his sole companion was a deer who sustained him with her milk oh a weird person to nominate as a patron saint of breastfeeding because it is not a conventional way to breastfeed but he is also the patron saint of edinburgh st giles and the patron saint of people who are afraid of the dark wow yeah that's very good knowledge um the patron saint of uh glasgow is st mungo and st mungo died of shock after getting good to a very hot bath yeah guys i think i can handle a bath it is really hot st mungo please

why are you calling me saint um so one just one more saint uh saint gwen the white uh was the mother of two young sons and then she gave birth to a third son and in order to help her nursing her third infant god miraculously gave her a third breast and and she became known as gwen of the three paps um st nicolas um about oh yeah this fact is uh so one of his miracles which is particularly impressive i think so there was someone who was selling pickled ham um in a street market and st nicolas realized that he was not selling pickled ham as the science suggested he was selling the pickled chopped up bodies of three small children and he pieced them together but it's not it's not sad because he pieced them together and he brought the children back to life again so wow that is

impressive isn't it the gherkin triplets yeah my god yeah we should clarify the like stories about what saints do we're not necessarily presenting is i know i didn't know what to write down is interesting because it sounds like wherever he walked he would be in a situation and he would pray it away so be like oh we're at the ocean and we're in the ocean and sailors are vomiting and there's a whirlpool i'll just do a quick prayer what is true about him actually is that he slapped somebody once um he slapped a fellow bishop uh yes because it's the great arian controversy which is the controversy about whether jesus is actually fully divine or whether he's sort of half divine because he was also a human and basically it's a nicolas strongly believe that jesus is is god um

and someone suggested that jesus wasn't quite either divine or human and he got up it was at some synod um in the year three 25 ad and snicklas got up crossed the room and gave him a big slap around the face wow and that is where we get the phrase bashing the bishop so yeah i'm not sure like you're saying that saints didn't do these things is that sacrilegious in any way for instance um there are a few saints who um were decapitated and carried their own heads so you're saying that that didn't happen as well now i i definitely am not saying that saint gene of lejara who carried his own severed head and threw it into the ron or um paul of tarsus um who had his head chopped off and then said jesus christ

50 times after it had been chopped off wow you might not have said it in that way but 50 times 50 times as a mate or the first time it would be amazing and then the 10th time it would be yeah okay we got it exactly like by the 50th time okay can you just shut up there's actually a real problem with uh saints who are beheaded and then carry their heads around where to put the halo so i think there's some controversy as to whether you put it over their severed neck when you're painting them or whether you put it above the head here and there's mixed views and what's see both you'll see both wow yeah okay so everyone can have their own view on that wow um can i bring it back to breast milk very quickly here okay is this another website so

so i found a great place to buy breast milk online so only the breast dot com and it's genuinely simply the best i know we should have been right what think out there guys and this is uh this is a genuine place where people trade breast milk online and you have all sorts of categories subcategories of types of breast milk that you can buy and have shipped to your house you can have zero to two months uh there was fresh breast milk on demand special diet brackets vegan etc and then the final one is willing to sell to men yeah pretty disgusting right i have heard i don't know if this is true that bodybuilders like to have breast milk because their theory and apparently this is complete rubbish but their theory is a baby goes from

really small to quite big in a really small amount of time so surely the same will happen to my muscles do you want to combine it marrying the two together saints and breast milk oh yeah have you heard of the miracle of the lactation of st bernard this is where st bernard was praying and the virgin mary virgin mary one who was praying sort of sprinkled some milk uh on his lips as in her own breast milk and there are other depictions of it which are quite impressive so i'm quoting directly from the the wikipedia article about the lactation of st bernard in art he usually kneels before a madonna lactans breastfeeding madonna and as jesus takes a break from feeding the virgin squeezes her breast and he is hit with a squirt of milk often shown traveling

an impressive distance that's true it is across a room that uh it's depicted it's medieval artworks that you get this in yeah yeah well men can lactate can't they because you can i think we've discussed before if you massage your nipples enough as a man then you can bring it on did you ever do that experiment andy oh is it then who's gonna do it i did have a go yes uh yeah and was it successful not a dribble nothing i'm furious it's been a little weeks looks so weird on the train research just doing some research yeah no i don't know not a drop yet okay well keep trying hey i'm not giving up do you want to hear about st philip neary um who's known as the humorous saint is this like i've got a really funny mate yeah you got to meet him funny mic it really is like

that it's so sad um his basically all he did that was funny is he once shaved off half his beard as a way of poking fun at himself and he also liked to wear a cushion on his head how come and he's doing his debut solo hour at sea venues um so he was sainted for that is that he must have done some other stuff i don't know it was very much easier back then wasn't it we're gonna have to move on very soon can i just tell you very quickly about the infancy gospels of jesus because as another more than a saint he was a jesus wasn't he um so but um there are lots of uh there are some second century sources which describe what jesus did as a very very small boy when he was about five years old and they're really amazing because

they're very different to the gospels um so when he was five years old he gathered together separate rivers uh which had all been disparate pools of water and he gathered them into a single pond and he cleaned it up and then a boy ruined them by um sort of sweeping them apart with a broom so jesus made immediately just made the boy withered and then then there was another time when a boy bumped into him and he jesus immediately kills him wow oh my god the parents of the boy who jesus has killed go to joseph saying um your son's killed our son so jesus simply struck blind all of his accusers and then joseph sort of boxes his ear and tells him off wow infancy gospels look him up they're really good um okay it's time for our final fact and that is jerzinski uh yeah my fact is

that uh when roald reagan left office he left a note on the white house lawn for these squirrels warning them to beware of george bush's dogs yeah it's quite sweet isn't it yeah but also he's assuming that squirrels can read is he yeah i mean he wasn't the sharpest on the shed but uh he was very fond of the squirrels and sadly george bush recounted later that uh it did absolutely no good because their dog milley beat the heck out of those squirrels whenever he could she could oh wow yeah he should have left also a sign for the dog saying don't get the squirrels i didn't do that yeah there's um they currently have and this is like hot off the press uh the white house is having squirrel issues at the moment are they with michelle obama's garden

oh well they because they always dig up my friend spent an entire weekend planting lots of bulbs in her garden and like that came back and like a hundred bulbs have been dug up so it's probably that there's a silly little legal issue that the gardeners are not allowed to touch the bit of garden that she's created but she's away so much that she's actually not able to maintain it they can't mow it they can't weed it they can't do anything to it but water it and it's just so they're allowed to go near the first lady's garden uh yeah i cannot really so that she's saying to them please do go near it and they're like we want to but there's this clause somewhere in our legislation that says we're not allowed to touch your bit of garden i genuinely didn't read the

article i have no idea but they aren't so the squirrels are prolific on the white house lawn and reagan was really fond of them and it's kind of touching so every time he went to camp david he bring lots of acorns back from there to feed the squirrels uh i was reading a trans what yeah he loved to feed the squirrels um i was reading a transcript of an interview uh that he was having i think it was with the new york times where basically he uh there was uh in the transcript there's a pause at one point and he says oh sorry if i look out the window and look distracted i'm just seeing if the squirrels are still eating the acorns that i brought in this morning oh my god well it's a good thing there wasn't anything going on at the time like the cold war

wow come on it's cute um i i read i read a thing about reagan because reagan was obviously he was an actor in b movies um he was starting films with amazing titles um accidents will happen girls on probation the angels wash their faces brother rat and a baby but his um but his imdb page begins with this quotation ronald reagan is arguably the most successful actor in history and they based that on the fact that he became president of america but it's not that's not a success as an actor i really like the pedantic nature of that comment because he is the most successful person who has also been an actor yes he can't fault it that's true that is true that's true did you guys know that uh it is because of him that we have blue jelly beans

no i don't know i didn't know we have blue jelly beans i feel the skepticism emanating i know the whole room goes it's not true is it um it's true uh he uh it was for his inauguration so basically he was a massive jelly bean lover the reason he was a massive jelly bean lover is because he had a huge pipe smoking habit and he hated it and he didn't want to smoke anymore the only thing that would stop him from uh having any nicotine would be to have a jar of jelly beans and often if you look at photos of ronald reagan in all the meetings that he's in there's a big jar of jelly beans next to him wow and so he loved licorice that was his favorite uh type of jelly bean but for the inauguration because jelly bean caught on to it they thought we're going to create

one we don't have a blue one for the red white and blue and so they created it and so yeah ronald reagan wow that is really interesting thank you one thing he didn't like was brussel sprouts uh he once did a trip to england and he was fed so many brussel sprouts during his trip that he swore off them for the rest of his life but they told him they were green jelly beans which they created in his honor you know when he was an actor as i was reading he actually wrote two um autobiographies but his later one after he was president he talked about when he was an actor and the fact that there was a lot of talk backstage about how small his head was um and so he was there with this casting director who was saying what are we going to do about ronald's head you

could stand the actors slightly further away from him and then it would match the size of their heads from back there but then his body looks weirdly large so it was slightly to be a successful actor he had to have very wide collars to minimize his shoulder width and have collars that were sort of open a little bit lower so it looked like his head was a bit bigger i guess to you know increase the amount of skin exposure in the head area so that's amazing yeah poor guy imagine he was the most successful actor of all time so that is true who can forget watching brother rass and a baby every christmas you know he wrote his first autobiography 16 years before he became president wow in 1965 saying and it was called where's the rest of me uh don't you talk about his head

was his next autobiography called here it is very forward thinking he was once threatened by a guy who was gonna attack him and the way he was known as the cat man and the reason was because he would send threatening letters but also pictures of cats to the president yeah that is the precursor to the internet i think lots of purpose was abuse and then pictures of cats and the other thing that reagan started was the idea that whenever president leaves he always leaves a note for the next president and he wrote a note saying don't let the turkeys get you down to george bush sorry what is the relevance of the turkeys the turkeys is in the like the the press the other countries the the don't let the turkeys get you

down it's not about turkey is it because that's a very specifically racist thing to say when you're taking over the most powerful this so this was discovered by brad melzer um not the not the uh the fact that that note was left um for bush but that bush then said i left a note for clinton and brad melzer he's a crime writer political thrillers um he then said this is apparently he thinks this is true wherever ronald reagan went he had a briefcase with him and always carried a handheld gun on him okay ma what's the opposite of a handheld gun a foot propelled bow and arrow he was i i just always think this is amazing his chief of staff do people know what his chief of staff was called ronald reagan's yeah no he was called donald reagan

i don't understand why this isn't the most well-known fact on the basis of the earth and the chief of staff who preceded him was called baker so the chief of staff proceeded preceded donald reagan was called howard baker and the guy who came after him was called james baker so people say ronald reagan was a bit confused in the 80s but i definitely see where he's coming from um annoyingly we've uh we're running out of time in fact we're on the time run out moment so any last facts um very quick one about squirrels yeah go on um it used to be illegal not to report a gray squirrel in your garden really oh i think that gray squirrels were brought to the uk by benjamin franklin uh he brought squirrels over to the uk uh according to news for squirrels um

dot com the blog how many hits does it get it's had a lot this week for me uh male cape ground squirrels have very big genitalia uh the penises can be 40 the length of their body and they can undo auto for late yeah and according to researcher jane waterman they do it to clean their genitals sorry what's unusual about any of this i'm sorry only 40 got it right okay that's it that's all of our facts thank you so much for being here guys really appreciate it thank you at home for listening to the show if you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast please get us on our twitter account so i'm on at triberland andy at andrew hunter m

james eggshade anna you can email podcast at qi.com yep or you could yep it's a fantastic email just to be fair uh and you can also find all of our previous episodes on no such thing as fish dot com and we will be back again with another episode next week thank you so much for listening we'll see you then goodbye