No Such Thing As A Fish - 88: No Such Thing As A Moon Sausage Bullet

Episode Date: November 20, 2015

Live from the Lyric Theatre in London, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss William Wordsworth's nickname, lettuce grown in space, and Van Gogh's new ear. ...

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the Lyric Theatre in London's West End. My name is Dan Schreiber, and please welcome to the stage the three regular elves. My name is Andy Murray, Anna Chazinsky, and James Harkin, 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 you, Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact this week is that Lord Byron's nickname for William Wordsworth was William Terdsworth.
Starting point is 00:00:52 He had a way with words, he was a literary genius. They were living in the same time, they were mates. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well they weren't mates, they weren't at all. They didn't. Yeah, Byron thought Wordsworth was very boring, and so he called him that. There's this whole cache of letters they've just found from Lord Byron to a friend of his who was a clergyman. And yeah, he happens to slag off Wordsworth as Terdsworth, and there you go.
Starting point is 00:01:16 I was quite surprised that the word Terd existed so far back. Really? Did you, I thought of it as more of a modern thing. I don't think of it as a word like hyperlink, or... I thought they were exactly the same thing. I had a look on Hansard, which is the House of Parliament kind of transcript, and nobody has ever directly called another MP a Terd in the entire history of Parliament. The closest anyone came was in a hunting debate a few years ago when the MP for Worcester,
Starting point is 00:01:49 Michael Foster, was described as a nasty, snide little Terd, but in that case the MP was quoting Harry Enfield, so he didn't do it directly. I think you're still calling someone something when you are quoting someone else. Yeah. He was saying, isn't it bad that they called him this, basically. Yeah, you're a real dickhead, said Rick Mail in the bottom. Still calling the guy a dickhead. The world record for uttering the word Terd in Parliament.
Starting point is 00:02:16 What? World record? Well, it's not really a world record. Most world records, you have to bring someone to record it officially in, so that must have been a phone call where they said, I've got a big idea I want to do in Parliament today. Are you up for calming? Is it frequency or volume?
Starting point is 00:02:31 It was frequency. Frequency is Tony Banks, the former Minister for Sport, and he said it three times in two years in the late 80s. So it's very beatable. Yeah, he could say it ten times in ten seconds if he wanted to. It's true, all I'm saying to the current MPs is that there is a chance of breaking that record. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:51 There was one time where he said, I read every time MP has ever said Terd, and there was one when Tony Banks said it, and he said, there was an occasion when I walked around the corner and was faced with the terrible dilemma of seeing a one-pound coin embedded in a dog turd, and then he said, I managed to find a small boy who for 50p was prepared to be one. What bill were they debating at the time? It was about dog mess on the streets. George Bush used to call Karl Rove turd blossom, didn't he?
Starting point is 00:03:29 Yeah. Chief of Staff Karl Rove, but it was a compliment. I don't think so. Turd blossom is a flower, apparently, in California or wherever that grows out of shit. And George Bush said, you know, you're so great, Karl Rove, you can turn a bad thing into a good thing. So you're turd blossom. Also, I reckon that was an emergency meeting with the biggest minds of America going, OK,
Starting point is 00:03:49 I just called Karl Rove turd blossom. Someone turned this around on its head. I just got one more thing from Hansard. I was so hoping to talk about Lord Byron, about romantic verse. Yeah, well, tough. The first time that ever anyone said twat in parliament was a guy called Bill Cash, and he described Field Marshal Lord Carver as a boring old twat in 1986. And the second use of the word twat was immediately afterwards with an unnamed MP shouting, he
Starting point is 00:04:24 said twat. Does anyone have anything on Byron? Byron liked to insult his fellow poets a lot, didn't he? And in fact, all romantic poets had all these rivalries between them, but he said about Keats that he wrote piss-a-bed poetry, which I don't know what that means. Like, did it mean you wet the bed when you read it? Well, piss-a-bed was an old name for dandelion, so maybe it was another fancy thing. It just doesn't feel judging by the tone of it, I mean, it goes on to say, no more Keats
Starting point is 00:04:58 iron treat, flay him alive. If some of you don't, I must skin him myself. There is no bearing the driveling idiotism of the mankin. So I don't think he was calling him a flammer. I don't know if I called that, I must say. He also said that his writing was a sort of mental masturbation. Wow. I think he meant it, yeah.
Starting point is 00:05:18 I have quite a good thing on a literary feud, which happened. So A.N. Wilson is a famous author, and he was writing a book about John Beckerman just decades ago. And so was another person called Bevis Hillier, and A.N. Wilson was so rude about Bevis Hillier's book, which came out first in a review. And when he was writing his a little while later, he got this letter from a mysterious French woman, which included this, like, gold dust for interviewers. It was a hitherto unknown copy of a letter from John Beckerman to one of his mistresses.
Starting point is 00:05:51 And Wilson was so excited, and he printed the letter in full in his book, only for Bevis Hillier to reveal that he had sent the letter, and that it was an acrostic, and that the first letter of every sentence spelled out, A.N. Wilson is a shit. And he put it in his own book. I found out something really rude about Lord Byron. When he died, he was buried in a really odd way. They removed his organs, and they put them in jars, and it was in a different country. And when he came back, he was buried, and they weren't quite sure if it was definitely
Starting point is 00:06:27 him. So someone wanted to find out. And they made a discovery that not many people have spoken about. So this was the sentence, basically. Before replacing the lid, the vicar, who was the person who was looking for him, noted that his sexual organ showed quite abnormal development. He began to tap the spot just above Byron's knee, and he said, he was built like a pony. That was in the tomb.
Starting point is 00:06:53 That's... Wow. It's not a horse. You know, if we were being really critical. Picky, picky, picky, picky, picky. So when they got his body out of the tomb, there was seven people present. So there was Thomas Gerard Barber, who was the canon of the church. There was an unnamed doctor, a surveyor called Nathaniel Lane, a local archaeologist, a
Starting point is 00:07:17 photographer called Mr Bullock, and the local MP was there, and I promise you this was his actual name. His name was called Frederick Seymour Cox. No. No. I promise. No. Honestly.
Starting point is 00:07:32 No. That's his name. Honestly. You know what they say, Seymour Cox, by name. Byron didn't wear underwear. Apparently. Sorry? And apparently this is what was fashionable.
Starting point is 00:07:45 Just couldn't find them in his size. Do you have that in pony? No, that was... And the reason was, and it was common, people like Bob Brummel and other fashionable people in Byron's era weren't wearing pants either, it was because tight trousers were in fashion at the time, and it was to avoid VPL. People still say VPL. They used to say it when I was at school.
Starting point is 00:08:07 What's VPL? The visible panty line. They didn't say it was to avoid that. The historian, who's because of being said, the line of the trousers was not to be interrupted by underwear, and so he largely didn't wear any underwear. He bought white linen trousers in batches of 24 at a time. Wow. What was he doing to them?
Starting point is 00:08:25 Going through them. I did not think this fact would be this penicy, and I'd like to put that on the record. We're going to have to move on very soon to our next fact. Oh really? Yeah, yeah. Do anything before we do? I have a fact about nicknames. Okay, yeah.
Starting point is 00:08:42 At least 10 kings of Serbia had the nickname the crowned. That's all they could think of for them. It's imaginative. My favorite nickname of all time, there was a guy called Leo the Second. He was a Roman emperor, and he was known as Leo the Butcher. That's not my favorite one. He was called the Butcher because he killed the patriarch of Alexandra's supporters, and he was called Timothy the Cat, but that's not my favorite either, because Timothy the
Starting point is 00:09:11 Cat had replaced another guy called Timothy Wobble Hat. And nobody knows why he was called Timothy Wobble Hat. There's two main theories. One of them is that he flip-flopped between religious positions, and the other one is he had a wobbly hat. Okay, let's move on to our second fact. It's time for our second fact, and that is James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that if you grow a cos lettuce on a spaceship, it tastes like
Starting point is 00:09:46 rocket. Yeah, so this is the first ever lettuce that's been grown in space. It was a red romaine lettuce, which is also known as a cos lettuce, and astronaut Scott Kelly said it tastes good, kind of like arugula, and in this country we call arugula rocket. It's weird that he didn't manage to make that leap, though, from arugula to the word rocket as someone living on a rocket. They called it, apparently, at the time, a giant leaf for mankind. Also when they ate it, apparently, because they had to freeze half of them, I think,
Starting point is 00:10:24 to return to Earth for studies, see if they picked up any radiation or any microorganisms or anything. But they also ate the other half, and they were really happy with it, and they put extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar on the leaves, but they had already cleaned the leaves with sanitizing wipes. I don't know why they bothered mentioning that, because that's just normal, isn't it? Do you know the thing that astronauts most like to eat in space? You'll know this.
Starting point is 00:10:48 Almost every single astronaut who comes back from space says, so there's a bunch of staple meals that you get given in space, and I think they have their meals repeated every eight days, so you've got eight days' worth of meals, and then you have to go back to the start, and the one that they all love is prawn cocktail, and they all rave about it, so Chris Hadfield, Jim Riley, Jim Lovell, they all say that shrimp cocktails are their favorite. There was one astronaut who said that, because the astronauts choose their menus before they go out into space, so if you're out there for a year, you have to write down what you want as a big commitment, and he said he has a word with the astronauts before they're
Starting point is 00:11:19 about to go out into space, saying make sure you do the prawn cocktail, because I'm not going to be giving you any of mine in space, and you're going to really, really want it. But apparently it is delicious. One thing they do like is really spicy foods or very flavorsome foods, and the reason for that is because the blood goes into your sinuses, because no gravity as such, and you can't really taste things properly. I did a radio show which we had Helen Sharman on earlier this year. Helen Sharman first British astronaut into space?
Starting point is 00:11:48 Yeah. Back to you, James. And she said that when she goes into, when she went into space, she was warned, basically the Russians are going to have loads and loads of garlic, and the Americans are going to have loads and loads of chili, and when you go up there, it is going to smell bad, and apparently you're warned not to say anything, when you go up there, just pretend that you can't smell it, because these people haven't seen a human for, you know, months and months and the last thing they want to do is you come in and go, f***ing hell.
Starting point is 00:12:15 Someone open a window. You know how if you go into places like the Science Museum or anywhere that has astronaut based products, you always buy astronaut ice cream? Astronaut based products. Astronaut based products? And Sainsbury in that section. Can you tell me where the astronaut products are? Well, try aisle 10, nine.
Starting point is 00:12:43 So anyway, so you know, so astronaut ice cream is a massive thing, and everyone buys it and we all eat it, and we go, this tastes horrible, but they eat it in space. It turns out that astronaut ice cream was used for one mission, and it was in 1968. No one liked it. It was too crumbly. It's never been up back again. And so the makers of it went, well, what do we do with this? Let's just pretend it's still a thing.
Starting point is 00:13:05 So every time anyone eats it and goes, this tastes terrible, but doesn't it feel like space? No one's eating it. It didn't work. It's a failed product. Does it? But when you say everyone buys it and eats it out of interest, you come to my family for Christmas dinner, there are plans to farm in space. One of the advantages apparently.
Starting point is 00:13:23 So it's good at the idea of farming in space for various reasons. But one of them is that the veggie project, which is what this is part of, could be used by astronauts in space for recreational gardening during the long duration missions, which I quite like, because they all have their own allotments. They NASA once shipped a specific bit of fruit up into space because they wanted to do an experiment and attribute to Isaac Newton. So they sent up a bit of the tree that Newton had the idea under and they sent it up with an apple because they thought, oh, this would be great to film a video of not only the bit
Starting point is 00:13:57 of the tree that taught us about gravity, but also an apple. So they brought it up and they were all set to film and it was looking like it was going to be an amazing video to put online. And as they were about to film, they forgot to tell one of the astronauts that they were doing that, who suddenly saw this floating apple going, oh, God, there's an apple. She ate the apple. And they went, where's our apple? And she went, hmm.
Starting point is 00:14:20 And then they had to film the video with a pair. You can see on YouTube, there's a pair floating in space, and they don't mention it. They're like, wow. The first ever Swedish astronaut was a guy called Krister Fugelsang, and he tried to take reindeer meat into space because it was around Christmas time and it's a delicacy. But he was told it wasn't very Christmassy. To eat reindeer. Yeah, it's like bringing a piece of Santa Claus up to eat.
Starting point is 00:14:52 So on Lettuce, Lettuce has been an aphrodisiac for 3,000 years, apparently. Right. And the reason is, I didn't realize this, so part of it is because of its upright kind of phallic structure. So it was considered an aphrodisiac in ancient Egypt, and continued to be considered that throughout Rome and Greece. And it's because it's got this upright structure, and also it secretes a latex at the bottom of it, which so it oozes like white liquid when you cut it.
Starting point is 00:15:17 Wait, hang on. Did you say it secretes it at the base? Yes. Well, that's one point of difference right there. If you're listening to this, and that sounds like you, you need to contact a doctor immediately. So of course it's green. But supposedly we've bred it, so it's much more domesticated.
Starting point is 00:15:37 And we sort of tamed the wild lettuce, which did have all these sort of sexy connotations. And we've now got really boring iceberg lettuce and things like that, which are not sexy at all. Yeah, because it was too rude before. Yeah. It was post curfew stuff. I found a couple of foods in space that are not food. OK, explain.
Starting point is 00:15:56 So the process of falling into a black hole is called spaghettification. That's an actual scientific word. And the idea is that when you fall into a black hole, as you may do, you get stretched out longer and longer like spaghetti. Yeah. And so some scientists just said that spaghettification. The tidal forces end up stretching you like spaghetti. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:16:16 Yes. So that's what spaghetti is. Yes. That's what spaghetti is. That's how we get spaghetti. I'm giving up. The other one I found is that in the US Army, there was a program back in the day, a future weapons office for, in case we colonize the moon and they invented a
Starting point is 00:16:33 sausage gun. Wait, what? It didn't shoot sausages, but it did a process whereby you make sausages coming out of the gun. And there was an actual thing that the Pentagon worked out and said that once the war gets way enhanced and we're all on the moon fighting, you're going to need your sausage gun. It's exciting.
Starting point is 00:16:51 So does it have anything to do with sausages? No sausage. It's not made of a gun. The gun's not made of sausages. To be honest, I stopped reading when it said sausage guns. Sounds pretty exciting, though, doesn't it? Sausage guns on the moon. It's time for our third fact of the evening.
Starting point is 00:17:11 And that is my fact. My fact this week is that scientists have grown an ear using Van Gogh's DNA. Yeah. OK, so this is what it was. It was an artist decided that they wanted to do a project where they could regrow an ear. And they found on the back of a stamp some saliva from Van Gogh. And they used it and they contacted one of the nephews, great, great, great
Starting point is 00:17:40 nephews of Van Gogh, and they managed to get some of their cells off them. And they created a kind of scaffolding and they've regrown the ear, the left hand side ear that would have been sliced off when he sliced it off. That's amazing. Are we totally 100% sure that whoever it was that stole Van Gogh's ear in the first place hasn't been bearing this burden of guilt for the last 150 years and thought, I've got to let it out. And they've just put it on the market and said, I grew it.
Starting point is 00:18:07 But no one knows what happened to it, right? Was it not supposed to be given to a prostitute? Well, yeah, so it's thought that he gave it to a prostitute. But there's another theory that Goghan chopped it off. So I think Goghan was living with Van Gogh at the time. And I think Van Gogh liked Goghan more than Goghan liked Van Gogh. And Goghan was also like an ardent fencer. And they used to have a lot of fights.
Starting point is 00:18:27 And so people have pieced together this information and thought, what happened is they had a fight, Goghan chopped Van Gogh's ear off. And then Van Gogh was such a needy, weird housemate and Goghan wanted to move out anyway. And he was like, is that right? I won't tell anyone. I'll just say that I chopped off my own ear and I sent it to a prostitute. Is that what you say if I do that?
Starting point is 00:18:44 And that's a genuine theory. I've had arguments with housemates before. And it sounds plausible. You know, you can get a disappearing Van Gogh mug. When you pour in hot water, his ear disappears and it's replaced by a bandage. It's really cool. That's really cool. I think what I'm saying is wrong.
Starting point is 00:19:05 It should be Van Gogh or something. But yeah, so it's very hard to say his name. The very old thing that happened on this episode was that I once said in a fact, Van Gogh, because that's what I thought his name was. And then I got a tweet when the show went out. And I just want to read you the tweet. Episode 28, at 10 minutes 55 seconds. Why did you incredibly stupidly and ignorantly say Van Gogh instead of Van Gogh?
Starting point is 00:19:39 And then I wrote back to him because I got really angry. But I wrote back to him saying, sorry, and wait till you hear how I say Covert Garden. What I wanted to say was, fuck yourself. So on ears. Yes. A woman recently grew an ear on her arm. And that was because she'd had a kind of skin cancer that meant her ear she didn't have an ear anymore and she wanted to regenerate her ear.
Starting point is 00:20:11 And so it was grown on her arm as does sometimes happen. So there's another guy in China. I think you had a nose grown on his forehead, which if you Google image it is very impressive. And you know, it was used to replace his nose a couple of months later. Anyway, this woman had an ear grown on her arm and it was in order to be transplanted back onto where her ear should be a couple of months later. So the surgeon who did it said she had some fun with it. If the kids got into trouble, she'd roll up her sleeve and say,
Starting point is 00:20:37 tell it to the arm. In 2009, this is a news article. Doctors have saved a woman's severed lobe by stitching it to her bottom. Julia Schwartz's right ear was bitten off by her best friend in a fight over a lover. And they stitched it onto her ass and kept it there until they could put it because she had too much scarring there. They couldn't put it on straight away, so they stitched it onto her ass. But why the why the ass?
Starting point is 00:21:04 It's about availability of blood vessels in it and availability of skin. I guess it's a lot of skin on your ass. All right. There was someone else who there was someone else. I really enjoyed this. I can't remember what paper it was in. But it was someone who someone who like a design, a mechanic or something who cut off the tip of his finger or half his finger and had to have it regrown.
Starting point is 00:21:28 Again, they thought, let's try and regrow this on a part of your body so that it gets fed by the blood vessels and so that the muscle can regrow and the skin can grow around it. And so they sewed his finger onto his stomach. But I think I read this article on maybe the Huffington Post and on the picture of it, they've blacked out like you would if someone was showing their penis or something. They've blacked out the bit where you see the finger grafted onto the stomach. And then you can only see it if you scroll right down to the bottom
Starting point is 00:21:57 and there's a big black box over. And I think it because it does look a bit phallic, but it's not a penis. It's just a finger on somebody's stomach. When you say it looks like a penis, does it have white stuff coming from the base? I was when I was looking into Van Gogh, there's a Van Gogh, there's a theory. There's an actual theory that he used to paint at night with candles on his hat so that he could see in the evening.
Starting point is 00:22:21 And his nickname was Flamie Hat. There are many theories as to why. Can I mention another thing about this ear, which is really exciting? So because it was done by an artist, you can actually visit the ear that's been grown. It's in New York City and they've done it in a way that you can talk to the ear. And I don't fully understand the science of it, but... It can't hear anything, by the way. Well, from what I gather, when you talk to it,
Starting point is 00:22:50 the ear kind of slightly moves in a way that it's going, no, kind of like it responds to what you're saying. And the first person to speak to this ear, when it was initially debuted in Germany, was Noam Chomsky. What? So Noam Chomsky went, and then the ear went, what? And we don't know what he said. But the really cool thing about this work of art is that it's called Sugar Babe.
Starting point is 00:23:12 The idea is that it's about the... There's a philosophical argument called the Ship of Theseus, right? Which is, if you replace every bit of a ship one by one, at what point is it no longer the original ship? And this applies to the band The Sugar Babes. Can I just... I have something so cool on acoustics, which I didn't know, and which sounds only tenancy-related,
Starting point is 00:23:35 but you know hearing trumpets, ear trumpets, that they used to use before hearing aids were invented. The reason they were invented, it was in the 17th century, and it was because Puritan couples in America, when they went out to dine with each other, they wanted to have private conversations, but they had to sit opposite each other, because there was no intimacy allowed. And so they sat opposite each other,
Starting point is 00:23:57 but they wanted to have private conversations, raunchy chats or whatever. And so the ear trumpet was apparently invented in order that you could be sitting there with your boyfriend, and he could be saying, into this end of the trumpet, you know, I really want to have sex with you. What?! I wish that all adult chat lines would start with women with ear trumpets. Can I tell you one cool thing about ears?
Starting point is 00:24:24 Butterflies have ears on their wings. And complete with eardrums, they're proper ears, but they use them to hear bats' ultrasound. And when scientists play ultrasound to butterflies, they start flying in crazy patterns, sort of doing evasion tactics to get away from a predator. And butterflies evolved at the same time that bats developed the ability to use echolocation and develop their big ears.
Starting point is 00:24:47 And the theory is that butterflies started flying in the daytime to avoid bats, or, in other words, bats invented butterflies. Let's move on to our final fact of the show, and that is Anna Chesinsky. Yeah, my fact is that the larger Pacific striped octopus catches its prey by sneaking up behind it and tapping it on the shoulder. Yeah, this has only just been documented this behaviour. Well, it was actually documented once in the 1970s,
Starting point is 00:25:21 and a biologist wrote a report on it. No one believed it, and so it was ignored, and it's only just been rediscovered, the behaviour of the larger Pacific striped octopus. But the way that it hunts is it sneaks up, it's called a slow bounce. So it's like a grandmother's footsteps, and it sits there hiding on the sand.
Starting point is 00:25:39 It's only small, it's only a few inches big, and it's chasing a shrimp, and it will sneak a bit further and further up behind it when the shrimp can't see, and eventually, when it's close enough, it's tentacles, or its arms, or its legs, or whatever you want to call them, and it gets its leg around the front of the shrimp,
Starting point is 00:25:56 and it prods it here, and then the shrimp's like, oh, fuck, there's a predator here, and it rebounds right back into its mouth. And that's how it does it. That's amazing. Look it up, there's a video of it, which is excellent of an octopus sneaking up on a shrimp.
Starting point is 00:26:12 Another thing octopuses do, this is so cool, they fling sand or debris in each other's faces when they're fighting, so you know scenes in films where the villain throws some sand into the hero's eyes, they do that. When in a movie does that happen? Oh my God, Dan, every movie! We've not seen the good, the bad in the octopus.
Starting point is 00:26:32 But they deal with shells and debris, like hard shells and debris as well, so they have a kind of water ejector system, which means they pick up a shell and they propel it with this water ejector system at their enemies, and knock them unconscious. Yeah, this is actually amazing,
Starting point is 00:26:50 you mentioned this ages ago in the office, so they throw a shell, and then they have this water pistol that launches the shell behind it, so it picks up speed like a bullet towards... Like a sausage bullet? Like a moon sausage bullet. They also, by the way,
Starting point is 00:27:06 they carry armor with them, so if they're going into battle or if they predict battle may happen to them, they carry coconut shells often two at a time, and they will travel on the seabed, so their enemies think they're a horse. But they genuinely have coconuts,
Starting point is 00:27:26 and they have the shells, and then as soon as the enemies start attacking, they'll bring the coconut shells up over them, like, I swear to God this is true. It is amazing to watch. Again, videos of that aren't there, and they pull the coconut shells in to create one coconut, but if you try to drink the milk from inside it,
Starting point is 00:27:42 they seem to have personalities, octopuses, and lots of scientists say that if you watch an octopus, it watches you back. One scientist, he had teased the octopus, he'd offered it a fish, and then he'd really quickly taken it away again, right? And then when he got into the office the next day, as soon as he walked through the door,
Starting point is 00:27:58 the octopus had been waiting in its tank and squirted him with this water funnel, with a huge jet of water. However, there were already loads of splashes of water on the wall, which implies the octopus had been doing target practice at the scientist's height and was just waiting for him to come in
Starting point is 00:28:14 in the morning so he could get him with water. Isn't that incredible? That's amazing. Well, the endless conundrum with octopuses is, uh, octopuses it is, that they hate each other, they like to be solitary, except for the larger Pacific striped octopus, by the way, if there's one here, they're really sociable, but that's really weird.
Starting point is 00:28:30 They're the first species that's been seen to be sociable, so actually there was in the experiment that, uh, my fact was about, one of the scientists said, it was really amazing watching them. They're so sociable. I put two in a tank together and they didn't kill each other. But most of them hate each other,
Starting point is 00:28:46 but they have to have sex in a very intimate way, which is quite unusual, um, for animals like that, so the way they have sex is they insert their sort of penis arm, uh, into the woman's... Let's pause you there a second. They have a penis arm. Yep.
Starting point is 00:29:02 Everyone has a penis arm. That's what right or left-handed means. LAUGHTER Um, so the world record for, um, an octopus opening a jar is 54 seconds. And this all kind of started. There was an experiment at Seattle Aquarium
Starting point is 00:29:20 where they gave child-proof bottles to, um, octopuses to see if they could open them. And the first attempt for opening one of these, um, by a Pacific octopus as well, called Billy, it took him 55 minutes to open it, or her, sorry, and within, um, a bit of practice,
Starting point is 00:29:36 she could open these within five minutes. But Roland Anderson, the lead researcher, said, these results do not imply octopuses are smarter than children. LAUGHTER It's easy to open child-proof stuff once you've worked out the trick.
Starting point is 00:29:52 That's, like, as soon as you know to push it before you twist it, then you're gold. I can't believe we did them five minutes after that. There was an American group called Safe Kids who tried out whether children could open these or not. Uh, they gave the containers to the kids and said, we want you to open them three, two, one, go. And then the kids were asked to open them as quickly as they could.
Starting point is 00:30:08 And every single child in the group could open at least one of the bottles that they were given. And Olivia, who opened two within a minute, was interviewed by a researcher. She said, I'm really fast, because I'm a big girl. Oh. That's nice, isn't it?
Starting point is 00:30:24 That's very nice. There's an Indonesian species of octopus where they sometimes build bunkers. They don't build bunkers. They just dig in the sand. The male stays in a little hole in the sand and he's lined with mucus. And he sends his arm
Starting point is 00:30:40 over, across the sea floor and down into the den of the female next door and has sex with her that way. But sometimes the females go out mid-sex, I don't know, on an errand or something. If I had a pound... But we're never sure to groceries in my house. Are they accidentally dragged the male along with them?
Starting point is 00:31:12 Again, if James had a pound. Well, that isn't an accident, because it's a massive danger in octopus sex of the female eating the male, because they love to eat male octopuses. And so the best time, apparently, if you're a male octopus out there and the female is while she's eating,
Starting point is 00:31:30 because then she's distracted or while she's foraging, so maybe he's chosen to go for it that way. But that's why they go for the long-distance sex, isn't it? To try and make sure they don't get eaten. And sometimes she will suddenly leap out and propel herself towards him and swallow him whole. Or strangle him to death sometimes during sex
Starting point is 00:31:46 as in like Xenia Olatop. Does anyone remember her? In the 90s Bond films, yeah? They'll have sex, get their sperm in them and then strangle them to death and eat them. It's like an all-in-one kind of deal. LAUGHTER OK, that's it.
Starting point is 00:32:02 That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening to our episode. CHEERING If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, you can find us on Twitter. I'm on at Shriverland. James at Egg Shapes.
Starting point is 00:32:20 Andy at Andrew Hunter M. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. CHEERING You can also head to knowsuchthingasafish.com where we have all of our previous episodes. Also, as this episode goes out, it's the launch day of our vinyl, so be awesome if you could get that.
Starting point is 00:32:37 We will be back again next week. Thank you so much for being here, guys. We'll see you again next time. Have a good night! CHEERING .

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