No Such Thing As A Fish - 81: No Such Thing As Jellyfish Jelly

Episode Date: October 2, 2015

Anna, James, Alex and Anne discuss glow-in-the-dark animals, Dr Seuss’s secret war films and what happens when you Google something.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Anna Toshinsky and I'm sitting here with Anne Miller, James Harkin and Alex Bell and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with Anne's fact. My fact is that Ruby, a sheep who had been genetically engineered to glow in the dark, was accidentally sold to an abattoir. So you would have thought if you genetically engineered a sheep you're keeping pretty close tabs on it. Apparently not. How did that happen? Well actually it may have been an insider job that you may have been

someone with a grudge against the company. What, one of the other sheep? Yep. Very close and dagger stuff. So this is the National Institute for Agricultural Research in Paris and actually it was Ruby's mother, Emerald, was given this jellyfish gene which makes her glow in the dark and then Emerald had a lamb Ruby who had the same gene but I'm not sure if it was active or she actually was glowing but it was revealed this year that last year Ruby made it into the food chain and they've been very close to reassuring people that they won't rescue you ate Ruby you're all right but somebody did buy her someone didn't eat her. We are constantly making animals glow in the dark these days and it's always for apparently scientific purposes

but I'm so suspicious and also it's always bloody jellyfish isn't it? I think sometimes anemones but usually we just seize a jellyfish from the sea take its genes out inject them into something they must be so fed up with it. It's because jellyfish have this particular protein called GFP which stands for? Green fluorescent protein. Yep and they this particular protein when you put it into other animals it doesn't really have any other effect on the animal or hardly anything anyway and so it's quite safe. There are other animals which have these kind of proteins but they're not quite as useful really. They have been used as a marker so they can see what happens to the cells they use it in stem cell research and they're monitoring.

Well in 2011 scientists created kittens which glow in the dark in order to help fight AIDS because apparently FIV which is the feline immunodeficiency virus it's very similar to HIV and so it was apparently legitimate to make kittens glow in the dark. I think it's legitimate anyway just to do that. When we say glow in the dark it does annoy me because it's not like you turn the lights off and they glow is it? You have to put UV light on them which is so different. Scorpions glow in the dark under UV light? Naturally. Yeah so they'd be pretty cool to take to a night club. If you want more personal space in the dance floor. Gin and Tonic also glows in the dark under UV light and I know which I'd rather have. So on sheep they recognise each other's

faces don't they? But not when they get sheared. Yeah so this really confuses me. When they're sheared they have to re-establish a different hierarchy and fight again to be leaders because they don't recognise each other but I would have thought if you're recognising faces. I was just just relatedly I guess I was reading this week that in chickens or in roosters the first chicken to go cockadoodle do in the morning is always the most dominant one and if you get rid of the most dominant one then it will be the second most dominant who does the cockadoodle doing. And sheep so they're much clever well I guess we say there's about all animals that we think are idiots and we revise it but sheep are cleverer than people give them credit for.

That is much cleverer than you give them credit for. It will never happen with Dan Shriver he's the exception that proves the rule. So they are one of only two animals I think who can recognise shapes and remember shapes really quickly so they're better at monkeys than doing this so if you give them like food in different shape buckets and you put food in one bucket but not in another then they'll remember the right shape bucket that it's been in and then come back to the next day. Are the other animals humans? The other animals that most humans can do that again with Dan I would question it. Majority of humans. The movie Predator came out in 1987 and the blood of the predator is kind of glow in the dark and the way they made it was mixing KY jelly with green

glow stick fluid. Really? Fun trips to the shops for that intern. You would definitely use the self scanner wouldn't you? The fluid is called Biz245 trichlorofenol 6-carbo pentoxyphenol oxalate. Catchy, snappy. Sialoom for short. Do you know there's an ice cream company called lick me I'm delicious who make a glow in the dark ice cream? Really? This is the same jellyfish protein which it gives off a glow when it touches your tongue but it'll cost you about 140 quid of scoop so maybe we could share one rather than one each. Yeah yeah yeah. How do they make it glow do you say? They use the jellyfish. Oh they should have eaten jelly rather than ice cream shouldn't

they? Maybe that's what jelly is it's just jellyfish with their legs pulled off. That's why it always stings your mouth a bit. Nobody else. That's why you have to urinate on your mouth whenever you've eaten jelly. Get wondering why people were always doing that to me. Okay time for fact number two and that is Alex. My fact this week is that during the launch of BBC2 in 1964 a live kangaroo got stuck in a lift at television centre. And I assume it's tiny arms couldn't reach the buttons? No well there was a massive power cut just before they went on air there was a fire at Bassie power station half of London lost power and the whole night was just a massive disaster. Wait well what happened to the kangaroo? It was the mascot of BBC2 basically

so there was a big run-up to this launch and the publicity campaign centred around a kangaroo with a joey coming out of its pouch because it was the second channel so the BBC decided to get a live kangaroo in as part of the opening night. It'll probably be W1A I mean it does sound like a W1A plot doesn't it? It does yeah I think a bit crazier. I mean this is all according to the biography of Gerald Priestland who was a BBC newsreader. The first time he delivers his news bullets in they get through like two and a half minutes and then they realise there's no sound going out so he has to start again. And then there's lots of awkward pause there is a phone is sitting on his desk and it rings and he picks it up and there's no one there. Is it true that the first

words that were spoken were a news story about a bus conductor who had been sacked for insulting Pakistani passengers and that it included the words that she used to insult said passengers. The next news story was about that last news story also including the words they'd used. A second newsreader has been fired for again saying... Didn't they had to scupper all their big sort of launch events they were going to have like Kiss Me Kate songs from the musical they were going to have the top comedian from the Soviet Union. I think all the plans went away and they had to end up the first thing they showed properly was PlaySchool the next day. The whole evening was just test cards on the screen and people apologising from the BBC. I think it's a great

BBC programme. I think more of the BBC should do more of that. I read this thing about there was thing on the BBC in the earlys called the toddler truce where there was so Kate's TV was on from five till six and then they would have nothing from six till seven so I think to say to the kids oh look the TV's off you got to go to bed now and so they didn't have anything on for this hour and it ended in February 1957 when they brought in a teen show. When everyone went to bed. When they brought out a new show for teenagers called The Six Fives Special and I just love this opening bit because it just sounds so fifties where I open with this line welcome aboard The Six Fives Special we've got a hundred cats jumping here some real cool characters to give

us the gas so just get on with it and have a ball. Great. Even then they're out of touch. These days it would you would think there were actual cats though wouldn't you? Jumping. Yeah it sounds like a precursor to the internet that programme if you're taking it literally. And now our troop of dancing feline. Speaking of which there was a channel on cable in America called The Puppy Channel which was a 24-7 network showing nothing but puppies. This was I think in the 90s or maybe 2000s and of course it just went out as soon as the internet came and you could get as many puppies as you want whenever you want. Oh no the sad fate of all the porn magazines. Doing another QI fact about the most watched channel in most countries

is the weather forecast. I have I've read that in the government meteorology site and I haven't up to find anywhere else but I decided I trust the government. It's the meteorology department. They do say it does say in most countries the weather forecast is the most watched programme but it's hard to find like what the definition of the most watched programme would be or Speaking of most watched I reckon the most repeated television programme ever is on BBC2. QI. No no no it's not no. Contrary to what the Guinness Book of World Records says and what we said on QI as well so we said in series G that it was a short film called Dinniful One which is massive in Germany they watch it every holiday. In that's approaching I think 300 repeats in total

but I was reading about this thing called trade test transmissions which were these films broadcast in the early days of BBC2 and they were designed to fill the channel with nice vibrant varied colours which TV manufacturers and retailers could use to test their televisions but it was they were very popular among normal viewers as well and the most repeated one is apparently a documentary about downbuilding called The Captive River. This is according to the test card circle which is a group of enthusiasts in early UK television. They're really cool I remember don't laugh. QI. Yeah I was going to ask if you're the president. QI. It's the same way that I don't believe the meteorologists that the show is the most popular

I don't believe you that these guys are really cool you have ulterior motives Alex. QI. Okay it was this this film according to them was repeated almost 550 times over 12 years partly due to the fact that in 1963 a huge fan of the film's director locked himself in the ops room at the BBC and Block played The Captive River until he was rugby tackled to the ground and eventually deported. Would you like to hear some early alternatives to the word television from the 1920s which died out? Telechroscopy, visual listening, hearseeing, radio movies. QI. I like visual listening as if they didn't have the word watching. QI. Yeah in the 20s. QI. What you do with your ears but with your eyes.

QI. There was a big discussion as to what they were going to call people who watch television as well wasn't it like viewers or watchers or yeah there were loads of different. QI. In October 1983 when the email was just starting to be a thing there was a two hour program on the BBC which was to demonstrate little known technology and it demonstrated the first email ever shown on the BBC. Yeah I know it's so weird isn't it so weird but before they were transmitting the program one of the tech guides shouted the password to the email account over to someone else this was overheard by two sort of coder computer guys and so they hacked into the email and so live on TV in 1983 the first BBC email said to the presenters.

QI. Do you want a bigger cut? QI. No what was it? QI. What did it say? QI. They wrote they were called Oz and Yug and they left them a song saying try his first wife's maiden name this is more than just a game it's real fun. Questionable but just the same it's hacking, hacking, hacking. QI. What a waste of a hack. QI. The first HD channel in the Philippines was called Bowls just a fact. QI. Do you know why it was? QI. Yeah because it was a sports channel. London Live the TV channel in its first month on eight separate occasions its morning TV show was broadcast for a full hour to no measurable audience and in 2010 S4C the Welsh TV channel they got zero viewers for 196 of the 890 programs. QI. Oh my god. QI. It's not so depressing just

think all the F at the studio being set up everyone doing makeup and everything. QI. But were the actual programs were there your test cards on repeat? QI. Yeah we've seen this one I'm not watching it again. QI. Well yet again we seem to have a viewership of one. A man in London. QI. Who are you? QI. Two hundred members guys. QI. Speaking of these kind of clubs it just reminds me there was a there was a club called I think they're called the White Dot Club. I remember this from when I used to work for a pub company and they used to go around trying to turn off TVs in pubs because they thought it was anti-social people people watching football or whatever and they should be talking to each other and they would have these like universal remote

controls and then turn off the football when people were watching it just to stop people from watching TV. QI. My friend had one of those in school and he would turn on TVs. QI. He would turn on TVs in the classroom and no one was watching. QI. He was the opposite of this group. QI. I like the Alex's idea of having like a gang like you know like rivals with the tap. We're going back and putting them on with their universal remote controls. Just coming back again. QI. Oh you're watching like the World Cup semifinal on a massive screen and then suddenly someone puts on this BBC 2 documentary. Guys the test cars back on. QI. All right moving on to fact number three and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Dr Seuss once wrote a Warner Brothers film that was banned

because it accidentally predicted the Manhattan Project. So between 1943 and 1945 the British government enlisted Warner Brothers to produce these propaganda cartoons which show the adventures of this guy called Private Snafu as in snafu which... QI. Situation normal all f'd up. QI. All f'd up indeed and he was just this completely cack-handed military man Captain Snafu who kept on letting all the military secrets spill and messing everything up and yeah there was this one film which they wrote and it was called Going Home so Snafu takes a date to the local cinema and this film shows a news flash which says US secret weapon blasts Japs because you said that in those days and then Private Snafu leans over to his girlfriend and spills all these all these secrets about how

they were making the bomb to her and it was incredibly close it sort of completely paralleled what the you know Americans were working on at the time. QI. Do you think what they were worried about is that the Japanese would see this cartoon and think oh my god that's what they're gonna do? Well I don't know it's a good point because they did prevent them from making it but yeah what did they fear? Were the Japanese really gonna think? I bet if the US was gonna attack us they'd broadcast it in a film a year earlier. QI. But making a cartoon of it as well which is traditionally kind of really stupid escapades that would never happen in real life. QI. Could be a double bluff. QI. But it must have been confusing for the makers who obviously had absolutely no idea why

the way they were told their film couldn't get made. I mean the coincidence is bizarre when you look at the plot line of the film but it was quite interesting this project and it involved all the big shots of Hollywood so the voice of Snafu was Mel Blanc who obviously is Bugs Bunny and loads of other Warner Brothers characters and yeah Dr. Seuss wrote most of the film shorts so it's thought that he almost certainly wrote that one. QI. So Anne one of the last times you're on the podcast you took exception to Dr. Seuss didn't you? Anne. Yes Dr. Seuss. I've done further research into this actually and while it is originally Dr. Seuss because that's how he would have financed it once it started getting bigger in America he apparently like sort of

let took on the riding with Goose. Seuss to run with Goose because it was easier for kids. QI. Yeah and also he kind of liked the association with Mother Goose because he was a children's writer. Anne. Oh really? QI. He wasn't even a real doctor maybe that's a bit obvious but he didn't have a doctorate. Anne. Amazingly neither is Dr. Dre, Dr. Fox. QI. I wasn't absolutely sure I thought maybe he is a doctor maybe he's he did a physics degree or something like that. Anne. No it's because I always picture you like as a GP when you said it. QI. What's wrong with me? I cannot tell you but let me tell you a rhyme. It'll fix it most of the time. QI. Right he and a friend invented a thing which sounds really terrifying called the

Enfantograph that they wanted to build for their world friend they never actually built it but it was a thing to you would go with your boyfriend and they would show you what your child might look like. Anne. Ooh. QI. I think that sounds creepy. Anne. Yeah I swear the internet can probably do that kind of thing these days. QI. You see it on Facebook don't you? Anne. Yeah well maybe they maybe my friends have actually had children. QI. James keeps leaving messages to his married friends going oh don't do that it'll turn out dreadfully. Anne. Like you tested it out first. QI. So age 14 Dr Soisius he worked for the Boy Scouts and the Boy Scouts at that time were made to or were asked to sell war bonds to help the war effort and he was one of the top 10 sellers in

his Boy Scout battalion or whatever they come in and this meant that he got to meet the president so Teddy Roosevelt gave out 10 medals to the top 10 sellers of war bonds but what happened it's so sad Teddy Roosevelt up on stage is calling all these boys up and Dr Soisius was the 10th guy there waiting Theodore had only been given nine medals so he got to medal number 10 Theodore went up on stage in front of his parents and all these like hundreds and hundreds of people applause and Teddy Roosevelt just went what on earth is this boy doing here and then the Boy Scout leader jumped on the stage and dragged him off stage to save embarrassment and he said from that point onwards he always had a crippling fear of public appearances. QI. I find it a bit weird

that the president's reaction on seeing there were nine medals and 10 people dressed as Boy Scouts they would assume the 10th person is an imposter and they'd say are you sure we haven't got the right number of medals? Yeah that's a really good point. I read this recently Anna you might know this I don't know if it's true or not that there are two Roosevelt's but one of them was actually pronounced the name Roosevelt. Oh really? Yeah one of I can't remember which is which but one of them is let's say Franklin D Roosevelt and the other one is Theodore Roosevelt or the other way around I can't remember. Why because they're obviously you know they're obviously related so why would they have changed it? I believe it's like different branches of the family and this branch of the

family called themselves Roosevelt and this branch called themselves Roosevelt. I've not looked at if I just heard it. The War of the Ruses. So this um this movie this movie that you're talking about is it true that we're not a hundred percent sure that it definitely was Dr Seuss who wrote it as in there was no credits or anything like that. Yeah no credits they didn't ever credit them top secret. But there's a whole range of them that most of which were in by Dr Seuss. Most of them apparently were written by him but the reason we think this particularly is because of the meter of the lines because it sounds like a lot of his kind of stuff. It's called um anapestic tetrameter and it's it goes bababam bababam bababam bababam bababam bababam and it's green accent and it rhymes but apparently

this is that kind of meter and he always wrote in that kind of meter. Other people apparently according to Wikipedia who have this meter include um Byron's uh Don Dewan apparently that has it and also Eminem in um The Way I Am. The Way I Am rhymes also with green accent. That's a nice link isn't it like carving a path from Byron to Dr Seuss 100 years later to Eminem 100 years later. Yeah I mean like that. Um Dr Seuss in 1931 uh illustrated a book called The Pocket Book of Boners. Was it a pop-up? No. What sort of boners? Uh boners in those days meant like a mistake like a blooper kind of thing. Yeah it still does doesn't it sort of. I mean no. I wouldn't google it. Okay time for our final fact and that is from James. My fact is that the phrase

why is my poop green is googled most commonly between five and six in the morning. God I thought I raised my history. At what time? Uh between five and six a.m. So this comes from an article in the New York Times by a guy called Seth Stevens Davidovich uh and it's just a brilliant article with loads of times when it's most likely that people google things. What I don't mean by that is this is when it's most often. It's more common for people to google it at that time than it is for them to google it at any other time. So the percentage of people searching google for the word lonely peaks at three twenty four a.m. Well they're all doing it at the same time so we need to bring them together. Yeah so you're actually the least if you're feeling lonely that's when

you're actually least lonely because everyone is feeling it too. They should have an I'm feeling lonely button next to the I'm feeling lucky button it should pay you up with a random person. That's called chat roulette. And that's lots of bonus. And the phrase how to put on a condom peaks at ten twenty eight p.m. Yeah I love that because that's really sweet that people are doing that because before we had to have like really awkward lessons in year nine with our English teachers who told us I think it's better than you get to ask do google. You should have been the sex ed teachers really. They always doubled up they were very similar. Actually we had our guidance teachers I think. Yeah and bring hockey sticks in to hockey sticks. No expectations are very high.

And bent at the end. Yeah actually this is a slightly off topic but speaking of you know girl boy differences I was at a pub quiz this week and there was a picture quiz and one of the pictures was what brand is this. Joe brand or Russell brand. All right yeah good one yeah so you would have given the funny answer and not got a point. The brand was a picture of a tampax packet with everything on it except the word tampax and I was on a team with three boys and they were all looking at it going I've never seen that before. Actually I really think one said that the reason why some men will go to the fridge and say I can't find the cheese and you have to go and say it's right there is because a man's brain is more likely to look for if you're looking

for cheese looking for C H E E S E and so the cheeses upside down are on the side. If you want to hide from a man stand on your head. If you shave men they can't recognize each other and then they have to fight to see who's the best. That is that is quite something. Also I must say of all the cheese that I buy usually is not labeled with the massive word cheese. Again we're not in a cartoon. The first Google computer, the first database, they built a computer housing for it with fans and a cooling system out of Lego and you can see a picture of it so they've got they've still got it in like an hour glass display case and it's all multi-coloured so it kind of looks like the

Google logo. The word Google is not a gram for go Lego. It coincides. Oh my god. I had a look at other sort of clever internet things you can track so there's this guy called Steve Worswick who has built a trap bot called the Mitsuki. So Mitsuki works by you ask her a question and then she has every time someone talks to her she learns appropriate responses and she can search things and tries to think of a good thing to say back to you. So I asked if she knew any fact so it might be a good shortcut to do my work. Now we're all out of a job. She told me that butterflies taste with their feet. Oh yeah that's good in one of our books and it's maybe she's read them. And the cats can hear ultrasound so that was quite good. So I tried to teach her a new fact,

the bananas are slightly radioactive. She said what makes you say that? I said oh never mind. We tried a little longer but what I like is that obviously I was using it to try and do my work with people probably using it as an online girlfriend let's be honest. So I said shall we try again me teaching you the fact. And she said once more do you mean you and me. It may record alteration in my personality. I said no no I meant the fact about bananas. It is very fun. I recommend you all try out Mitsuki. A couple of facts about what happens when you google something. So if you google something now that's one of 3.5 billion things that people google every day. 20% of those things have never been googled before. That is interesting Alex but why is my poop green?

It would be 40% but you keep asking that. Then your query takes 0.2 seconds to go 1.5 thousand miles and go through a thousand confuses to get your results. I just find that completely mind blowing. That we have access to those incredible resources. These are so easy but they are amusing. You know the old google autofill when people send in the google autofills for them. Just a couple of my favourite ones. So someone typed in is it n letter n and the suggestion is is it normal for my left nipple to be bigger than my other two? Someone typed in to google if I and the letter a and the suggestion the first suggestion was if I ate myself would I be twice as big or completely disappear? Wow that's good. It's really good isn't it? Yeah nobody knows.

Someone typed in my and then the letter b and the suggestion google first suggestion from google is my balls are stuck in my xbox. And my x is not happy. Okay that's all of our facts. We'll be back again next week with another episode of Know Such Thing as a Fish and in the meantime you can get these guys on their twitter handles which are and at Miller underscore and James at eggshaped alex at alexbole underscore and you can email me at podcast at qi.com. All right until next week then goodbye.