No Such Thing As A Fish - 96: No Such Thing As A Touch Of Worms

Episode Date: January 15, 2016

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the Chill Pill, Socrates' imaginary friend, and levitating fridges.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Andy Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Chazinski. And once again, we've gathered around the microphones this time with our four favorite winter facts for our winter special as it's really cold, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Anna Chazinski. My fact this week is that Socrates had a spirit who spoke to him through the medium of sneezing.

And this is one of the great thinkers of Western civilization, just to be clear. He was guided by sneezes. No. Aristotle wrote about sneezing as well. Did he? So he said that sneezing was of divine origin, or he said that that was believed at the time. So coughing wasn't, and if your nose was running, that didn't mean anything. But he said, why is it that we think sneezing is divine? Is it because it arises from the most divine part of us, the head, from where reasoning comes?

But there's one other thing we know about Aristotle as well, which is that he was one of the people who when they look at a bright light, they sneeze. Oh, did he? Yeah. Authentic. And it only affects between one in three and one in ten people, but we know that he was one of them because he said, why does this happen? How have we not managed to pin that down to a more precise statistic? How hard is it to

interview a hundred people and find out if it's one in three or one in ten? I'll tell you why it's weird, because people like me who don't have this, until they meet someone who has it, think that it's completely made up. You think, how is that even possible? Yeah. And then people who have it think that everyone has it. Wow. That's what I've found in the past.

I'm sure that's not... I thought everyone had it because I have it. Yeah. I don't believe any. I don't believe it's possible. I need to pee when I am around books. Is that a thing as well? It's why you're banned from foils.

No, that is a thing. Is that a thing? Is it not a Japanese thing about there's a word, which means the impulsion that you want to defecate in a life? It's a Mariko Aoki phenomenon. That's right. It's what it's called. And it's named after the only ever sufferer of the week.

Until now. But the rumour in has loads of books in it down. This must be a nightmare for you. I'm just constantly on edge. Cleaners of this office have a rough time at the weekend. There's a wiki page of what to say if people sneeze around the world. In Albanian, you say the Albanian word for health. It's quite similar.

Around the world, quite a lot of people say for health or God bless you. In Amharic, they say, may God forgive you. In Azari, they say, be healthy. And in the Rithangu language of Australia, they say, class bin kuruan, which means you have released nose water. I found that page as well. And the Filipino response to it. Almost all of them are, you know, God bless you, may God forgive you, God have mercy on

you, or whatever. The Filipino response is to say, Naligo Akoa, which means, hey, I took a birth. What? Is that to say I took a bath in your mucus? I took a bath. Yes, I took a bath and now you've sneezed on me. I think. I have to take another one.

And the response from the sneezer is, who didn't take a bath? Or maybe it's, who didn't take a bath? I'm not sure. I think that sounds like, you know, when someone sneezes on you, we used to say as kids, I asked for the news, not the weather. That sounds similar to that. Just on sneezing. Dog sneeze.

And what's interesting is they do it when they encounter another dog, but they actively sneeze. So they sort of fake sneeze in order to show that they're not aggressive. To say that they just want to hang. Really? Yeah. So it's a, it's a sort of showing that they're friends. I found this on canineuniversity.com.

Did you? Oh, the only university run by dogs for dogs. Sponges sneeze. What? How does that work? They, some of them have like little chimneys, which they can expel stuff out of and if they get something stuck in their bodies, then they can fire it out with a bit of a kind of puff of air.

Is that what like a blowhole is for a whale? They're just sneezing out their back. No. A blowhole is like them breathing. But whales do, they must sneeze because they do have mucus. Yeah. Sometimes I thought they actually expel, like, and for example, isn't that how they now find out whether a whale is ill?

They'll have a sort of a drone helicopter go over to catch snot. So they must be rocketing mucus out of their blowholes. Yeah. But in the same way that you're rocketing mucus out of your mouth all the time. Yeah. In your breath. Whoa. Whoa.

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Hey. Whoa. Whoa.

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Oh no. Whoa. Whoa. That sounds like a horrible euphemism.

That sounds like you've gone to the hospital with a Hoover attached to your genitals. Just swam in there. I was asleep. So this fish has been dead for three days. Sneezing. Socrates is amazing. Sneezing. Yeah.

I should say that it's very hard to know what's true and what's not about Socrates. Socrates is an account by Plutarch, which is a couple of centuries later. So all these people followed Socrates around writing down everything he said because Socrates refused to write anything down himself. So Plato is his main disciple who wrote loads of stuff about him. And then Xenophon wrote loads of stuff. And they sort of refused to ever acknowledge each other's presence except they would have slide digs at each other's work when they wrote about Socrates. So, you know, it's thought they had a bit of a rivalry going. Socrates have a really junior disciple who would just have to write down shopping lists and stuff like that.

Possibly. Yeah. Actually, he did have one called Simon the Shoemaker who sounds kind of junior. What did he do? Like, intern level. He actually made Socrates socks. Did he? Yeah, weird.

Oddly. Do they have shoes back then or sandals? What have been sandals? They did have shoes in ancient Greece. I mean, they had democracy down. One of the other things about Socrates is sneezing was supposedly the sneeze demon would notify him with a sneeze or someone else sneezing when his wife was about to have what's been translated as a scolding fit so that he could run away. Because apparently she's life is unthippy. Wasn't she?

Yeah. She's famously like a scold or, you know, She's like Marys in Frasier. Yeah, exactly. Supposedly she got so angry that sometimes she would turn over the supper table, even if there were guests. Oh my God. So I think she was like the Hulk. I wonder if she went to that.

The angry table flip. I've never done that and it's my dream to one day do it properly. They really got there with everything before us. Those are the little inventions we don't talk about. Zanthipe was supposedly the only person who ever beat Socrates in an argument. It was said. Really? Yeah.

By basically shouting over him rather than he could speak. And after one argument, she poured a, what do you call it, a chamber pot over his head. And it led him to remark, after the thunder comes the rain. And that's supposed to be a clever thing that he said. Even invented. I asked for the news, not the weather. Okay, time for fact number two. And that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that people used to hang their fridges from the ceiling. What people? And why? Because. To create more room on the floor. No. To stop vermin from getting at your food. You suspend it from the ceiling like a bird feeder, but it's a person feeder.

And this was, I think in the 17th and 18th centuries. And even into the 19th century, I think people were still. So basically just before they got fridges. Pretty much, yeah. It was called a meat safe. So it didn't actually involve artificial refrigeration, but it was the precursor to the fridge basically. Some are like a lardo kind of thing. Exactly.

And so you would just get a box made of wood or metal with perforated sides. And you would hang it from the ceiling. Some people mounted theirs on the wall. And some people just put them on the floor with long legs. So meat safes had doors. Yeah. Yet they still had to keep them off the ground because of vermin. Yeah.

They can chew through. I think they could be chewed through if they were wood or things like that. But basically the original safe was for keeping meat in. Yes. Oh really? So that's before they had safes and honey and stuff. People were quite against refrigeration when it sort of came in. So in the early 1900s, when we started being able to transport ice in big batches and we'd start creating refrigerator compartments to transport food.

People were against it for two reasons. I think this was mainly in America. It was quite interesting. They thought that first of all, it meant that sellers of produce could manipulate the market because now you could preserve food. You could create like an artificial scarcity and then cause the prices to go up and then sell it for more. And it also meant fewer end of the day bargains because you didn't have to sell your food at the end of the day. So people were often banned from refrigerating their foods overnight and preserving them until the next day to sell them because it meant you couldn't do those things. And in fact, also they thought that it meant food wouldn't be as fresh.

And so in 1880, I think one of France's most successful fruit wholesalers was this guy called Dessougui or Décougui. He used to transport his fruit all over France in trains and sell it everywhere and he started refrigerating it in the trains in a cold chamber full of ice. When people found out he was refrigerating it, they were so outraged that because it meant that his fruit wasn't fresh anymore because he put it in a cold chamber that he had to invite people to a public ceremony in a public square where he burned the fridge and agreed never to refrigerate food again and everyone got food poisoning in France. Yeah, it was when they used to get ice from lakes, didn't they? One of them was Lake Wenham which was the most famous lake in the world in the 19th century because they got ice there and they took it all the way around the world. Was that the one in Massachusetts? Yeah, it's near Boston and now it's just like a reservoir, it's fenced off, you're not allowed to go there, it's just like a little rubbish reservoir but it used to be the most famous lake in the world. That's where all the ice came from?

Yeah, it was really, really clear, really seemed clean. Somewhere in Mayfair I think they used to keep some in a shop window with a newspaper behind it so you could read the newspaper to show how clear it was. The first time they brought any over to the UK, they didn't know what to do it, what's tax it because it was ice, they didn't know whether it was water or it was a solid or whatever and they kind of spent about two months trying to work out and it all melted. And then there was in Sweden they had a lake as well which had really good ice and they renamed the lake, I think it was called Oppersgard or something, they renamed the lake Lake Wenham so that they could say they had Lake Wenham ice as well. Smart move, Swedes. Yeah, I think that was, it was a guy called Frederick Tudor who became known as Frederick the Ice King of the World Tudor who first decided, who first realised that he could make a sports night of getting all this ice off Lake Wenham and then he paired up with another guy who invented the ice plow which I think is really cool so you had horse drawn ice plows in the 1830s I think it was which would go up and down the lake and it would cut the ice into big blocks so you didn't have to cut it by hand anymore. This is really interesting, refrigerators, this is the line I read online, refrigerators have been used successfully to artificially hibernate many animals, snakes, lizards and even bats have been hibernated in domestic refrigerators so and this gives you a whole protocol of how you can hibernate artificially an animal of yours if you have a turtle or if you have a lizard. Certainly why I bought my fridge. Yeah but I just didn't know that was possible, you can actually, but they say that what the fridge will not do definitely is if it drops below what you're meant to have it as, as the hibernation coolness, it will kill the animal so you've got to be really careful.

I'm not sure we're advising people to do it though are we? Certainly store them on a different shelf to the yoghurt. There are two really dangerous things about fridges, really dangerous. The fact that the London Fire Brigade says that fridge freezers are the most dangerous household appliance when it comes to starting fires. They cause the most deaths, it's because they have a lot of plastic and flammable insulation. And a lot of ice. You would have thought but not enough. But the firemen when they turn up, you don't use ice James. Yeah but ice when heated turns to water.

Oh yeah. And they do use water. It would be cool if there was a fire brigade who used ice, you could ring 9999 or something. This is a really serious fire guys. They turn up with the horse ice cloud. It's so many blockages in your hose pipe. So anyway that's one dangerous thing about fridges, they're going to explode, set fire to your house. The other one is, so four in every five US fridges has fridge magnets on it.

And I don't have the stats for the UK but I would guess similar. And a lot of fridge magnets are so strong that if you have a pacemaker, can have deadly consequences. Oh yeah. You walk past pacemakers and it disrupts the, or it can completely disrupt it. That's pretty strong fridge magnets though right? Apparently you have to put warnings on a lot of fridge magnets now because fridge magnets do tend to be stronger than your standard magnet. Wow, wow, there's not enough space on a fridge magnet for a warning. As in that way if you had a, oh on the packet.

It would ruin the witty phrase. That's what I'm saying. Walk a mile in someone else's shoes, then you'll be a mile away and be wearing their shoes. Brackets do get a lot of fridges. Touch the internet these days, don't you? Oh yes. Yeah, those kind of things. I don't really know what it does.

What it does is you can do a number of things like it has a scanner. So anything that you put in, you scan the food that goes in. Oh that's smart. Yeah, and then you run out of milk and it knows you've run out of milk. Yeah, exactly. Well it's part of the Internet of Things. And there was, in 2014, there was the first hacking scandal where people were hacked through fridges, weren't they? Yeah.

They sent 750,000 phishing emails were sent from fridges to people's email accounts. Oh wow. I thought when you sort of said hacking into fridges that you'd just steal a banana or something. Because that would be kind of hacking I'd be interested in. We have 500 kilograms of beef in the Nigerian accounts that we would like to send over to you. But yeah, I think that's really cool that we might be able to be hacked through all of our household gadgets. Fantastic. Can't wait.

I can't wait for my own bedside lamp to turn against me. Okay, time for fact number three and that is my fact. My fact this week is that TV star David Frost used to host live shows eight nights a week. Fantasy is David Frost. Yeah, so this is... Is that a time zone thing? It is, it's surprisingly true. David Frost used to host a lot of night shows and afternoon shows.

And what he used to do was do four shows in England and then he would take Concord over to New York. And Concord famously bragged that you would often arrive before you left. And that allowed him to then do a show that night as well. And so he managed to do eight shows per week. Very impressive. So he used to just go back and forth on Concord doing night shows. You couldn't do it these days, could you? Because it takes like eight hours to get to New York.

Exactly, since Concord has gone, this has become impossible. I don't think I appreciated enough at the time because I guess I was too young. Concord was extraordinary. He used to go over my house when I was very young. Yeah, I remember this amazing sound of it. It went faster than a rifle bullet, I think. Wow, so if you fired a bullet at the retreating Concord... Concord would accelerate away.

Wow. Faster than the rotation of the earth? Yeah, 1,350 miles an hour is the top speed. I mean, it was twice the speed of sound, wasn't it? It wasn't like they just broke the speed of sound and thought, well, let's linger around one or two miles an hour above it. They doubled it. Yeah, they went twice, you're right.

It's amazing. And they used to fly at a sort of altitude of 50 to 55,000 feet. People used to say that you could see the curvature of the earth when you're at that height. Which is astonishing. One of the most amazing things about it was that it had, I'm quoting here from an article about it, computer-controlled engine air intakes, right? Now, that doesn't sound very cool,

but it is because what it means is that the air going into the engine had to be slowed down by 1,000 miles an hour over a distance of 15 feet. Wow. Air comes in at the 1,300 miles an hour or whatever it might be and has to be slowed down only over four meters. That's whiplash. That air has serious whiplash. And without it, the engines just would have blown up immediately.

But that was the cool thing about it. It's the kind of fact you do not want to be told if you're me or Dan and it's about to take off. If we didn't do this, the engines would explode immediately. Fortunately, everything is going to go okay. Andy Warhol used to steal all of the items on the plane, sort of like little plates and silverware and so on, because he knew that it would be collectible.

For some reason, he just thought it would be collectible. And so he encouraged people. No excuse for stealing. I know a lot of stuff in the British Museum is collectible. I went abseiled in there in the middle of the night to get it. Let's go to David Frost, shall we? Yeah. He was offered a contract to play for Nottingham Forest,

but he turned it down because the maximum wage for a football player at the time was £15 a week. And he predicted Concorde and his desire to travel on it eight times a week. Thought that was not going to sustain me. Yeah. But obviously in those days, before Jimmy Hill, there was a maximum wage for footballers.

And so it wasn't a very good profession to go into. We should just very quickly, for younger listeners and people who may just have never heard of David Frost explain who he was. So he died not too long ago. He was a TV host. He used to do interviews. Very famously interviewed Richard Nixon.

And there's a movie, Frost Nixon, which won a lot of awards. And he was just one of those guys that seemed to know everybody and be around for every major event on TV. Some of his TV shows that he did. Yeah. Can I read a few out? Yeah, go for it. A Degree of Frost, The Frost Report, Frost Over England,

Frost Over America, Frost's Weekly, The Frost Interview, Breakfast With Frost, Talking With David Frost, Headliners With David Frost, The David Frost Show, Frost On Friday, Frost On Saturday, Frost On Sunday, The Frost Program, Frost On Sketch Shows, Frost On Interviews, Frost On Satire, Frost Tonight, and Frost. But not a touch of Frost.

Wow, he really made the most of that name. Yeah. Was he paranoid people were going to forget it or something? It's a bit strange. It's a good name for an interviewer and a host or something because it's a noun which is good, but it's not a bad noun like worms. Worms on Sunday. First with worms.

Touch of worms. We actually, so James and I, this show that we do, Museum of Curiosity, we actually had Frost on the show and weirdly it was the last program he ever did. Yeah, so Museum of Curiosity, his appearance on that is his final appearance. It was quite amazing. Because he was on the airways for more than 50 years,

wasn't he? And constantly as well. I don't think you could escape him in the 70s, 70s, 80s. Do you know what the longest career of any presenter in history was, according to the Guinness Book of Records? No. Is he someone in Japan? No.

Someone in Cuba. Oh, of course. She's called Ines Sanchez de Revuelta and she was on TV for 52 years. She hosted the program TeleClub since 1963 and has never been off TV for more than 3.5 months in all that time. That's something, isn't it?

Yeah, that's amazing. I really hope you were going to say more than 3.5 minutes. Yeah, me too. Just for bathroom breaks and naps. While I was reading up on Nixon, just came across this fact, Nixon used to love fireplaces. He used to love a roaring fire. So he used to at the White House make sure that there was always

a fire roaring in the Lincoln Room. The thing is though is that he was never interested in the heat. He just loved the fire. So he used to have all the air cons turned on to high in any room that he had a fire on. Wow. Yeah, because he just didn't... He just liked the sound and the look of it.

He liked the look. Yeah, he just wanted a roaring fire. Just get a picture. You'd think. Yeah, much more environmentally friendly. If there's a fire going, it's easier to conceal the noise of the tapes being changed in the machine. You're recording people.

Topical as ever. He also, more weird behavior from Nixon, after his dog, Checkers, died. Secret Service agents saw him eating the dog biscuits. No, they really know. But the crunching of the dog biscuits helps disguise the sound of the changing of the tapes. Frost said when he came on this, on Museum of Curiosity,

that when he did the interviews with Nixon, Nixon was the worst person for small talk. He had no small talk whatsoever. So it was so weird that he used to insist before any interview, five minutes of small talk. Nixon insisted. Nixon would insist that he had five minutes of small talk with the person before an interview, but he just didn't know...

In theory, that sounds like a good idea, because you get to, you know, relax and, you know... Yes, but so Frost remembers those bits of small talk and he said they were truly awkward, because he just didn't know what to say. One thing he said when he came up to him was, get any fornicating done on the weekend. That was his opening line.

Actually, speaking of fornicating, he once had delivered to him a naked woman in a trunk. In a suitcase. What? Yes. And this was from... He had a couple of kind of hard-partying friends, who apparently were the only kind of people

he properly relaxed in front of. He was notoriously uptight, usually. And there's this guy called Robozo, who thought... I can't believe that's his name. I've just read that and realised how ridiculous that is. So there's a guy called Robozo and his friend, Amplanalp.

These guys would never have had the same career as Frost had. Breakfast with Robozo. So, yeah, they got a prostitute, I think, and got her into a suitcase and brought her to the White House and bumped into the Secret Service agents and were like, we've got a delivery for Nixon and unfortunately the Secret Service agent said, what is it?

It sounds like there's a naked woman inside there and turned them away at the door. So he never got his gift. Well, well done for doing their job from Robozo and Alpenelp. Get one of their capers away. Let's look for a series of books about Robozo and Alpenelp's crazy adventures.

There's always just another naked prostitute in some other kind. We're just here to give this wedding cake. We're just here to install this new chimney. OK, time for our final fact of the show and that is James. My fact this week is that the original chill pill was a pill that you took when you had a chill.

Nice. That's very good. So, yeah, this is from, let's say, 19th century. It was like a homemade pill that you would make. The ingredients would be sulfur quinine, arsenic acid, striccanine, Prussian blue, and capsicum,

and you would shove it all together into a pill form and take it if you had a cold. And was it called? It was called chill pill. It was called a chill pill, yeah. So, yeah, that was the original chill pill and the use of the word chill as in to relax only dates back to 1979. It dates back to a song called Rapper's Delight,

which is apparently by Travis Sick Tricks Isaac. Well, Rapper's Delight, you will know. It's probably the most famous rap song of all time. It's like one of the first ever rap songs, isn't it? Yeah, it's a hip-hop. It's mentioned 14 times in the OED, that song. Wow. In the Oxford English Dictionary.

It's the first time that anyone used the word rhyme as in a set of lyrics, as in listen to my rhyme. The first time anyone used the word rapper to refer to someone who's rapping, previously it would either mean a massive lie, or it would mean someone who like wraps a table or something. Wow. And it was the first place to use emcee,

as in master of ceremonies. Wow. So, were people just listening to this song at the time, going, what is this guy talking about? No, as usual, these things were used, but this is the first citation that they have. And also, the first use of the word ill, meaning bad. Meaning good?

Meaning good, it was seven years later. So, it took seven years for ill to mean bad, as in, ah, this is really ill, man. To meaning good, which is, ah, this is really ill, man. I'd just like to point out that you can't pull off either of those phrases. Did you say the date of the original chill pill? 1879, by any time over the next 20 years,

they still were making it. You know, because obviously a lot of wacky medicines were pedalled in the 19th century, not all effective, and in pill form. And one of the most successful peddlers of these medicines was someone who made Brandrith's vegetable pills, which could fight off basically everything you'd ever have. So, fever, sickness, headache, pimples, ulcers, yellow fever.

And essentially, they were just laxatives. And so, the whole thing was that, the point was that they got all impurities out of you. So, I think one of the taglines was, Brandrith's pills put all your pains and impurities out of the system through the bowels. But it was Giles Brandrith's great-grandfather. Really? Wow.

Who got really rich off them, yeah. He gets, there's a street named after him in New York now, because he became so rich and famous because of these pills, and he gets a mention in Moby Dick, apparently. Really? Wow. Giles Brandrith's great-grandfather, isn't that cool? It's so weird when you hear about celebrities with a great-great-great-great-great-grandfather

who was notable. You just think, wow, that's just, I was reading Bear Grylls' autobiography on holiday, and his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, don't know how many greats, wrote the very first self-help book. And it was called Self-Help. Really? Yeah.

And it was so big in its day that it outsold on the origin of species, which is when it came out roughly at the same time. That's Samuel's name. I can't remember his name. That's it. I didn't know that he was related to Bear Grylls. Yes, yeah, directly related. Wow. With a name like Samuel Smiles,

it's the ideal profession, isn't it? Bear Grylls, if you want to be, you know, someone who lives in the wild. He'd be better if he was called Grylls' Bear. Yes. Why isn't he called that? He is when he fills in forms. Another weird relation I found out about speaking of that, actually,

the other day, is that, is it Stephen Dubna, the guy from Freakonomics, who we love and think is great, his grandfather, or great-grandfather, wrote Rudolf the Nose Reindeer? Did he? Yeah. Wow. There are some slang terms of things

that are older than you'd think they are. So, for example, the word text as a verb goes back to 1564, does it? Yeah. Obviously, it doesn't mean to write a text on a mobile phone. It means to quote texts. And dude goes back to 1876,

which was originally to make fun of a woman, the way a woman was dressed. You'd say, oh, she's a dude. And there was even a feminine version of it. It was after dude became a male word. And you'd say, there's a thing, Joe Wendee used to marry

the young dudeine out there. Wow. I can't believe men hogged that. One of the few, you know, quite cool fun nouns that's been applied to us. And you guys had to get in there, clutch it away. Now, we'll start with do-debt or do-deen. One slang term that I was

reading about, cowabunga. Oh, yeah. So, what do you associate cowabunga with? I thought it was a Japanese word, is it not? Oh. Yeah, I haven't done the total origin on this. It's just that I watched a documentary on the Ninja Turtles and they said

the writers took cowabunga from Snoopy. So cowabunga first appears in Snoopy. Yeah, I think on a cover where Snoopy's on a surfboard as well. Wow. That's very cool. I looked up a timeline of

slang terms by Jonathan Green, who is an amazing slang lexicographer. We have his complete slang dictionary. It's so good. So he's done these really cool online slang terms for all sorts of different things. So just idly, I was looking at slang terms for vagina over the centuries.

These all date from the 19th and early 20th century. Coffee grinder, front parlor, bum shop, carnal mantrap, central office, bit on a fork, and my favourite,

that thing. It kind of makes it sound like we used to repurpose vaginas for a lot of other things in the 19th century. Well, I sell my wares out of it in the daytime. I sell my coffee grinder out of the front parlor. I use it as a central office. Off to the bum shop.

A really interesting thing on pills is that, so the colour of the pill you're swallowing can have an effect on, can affect how well it works. If you take the blue pill, you wake up and you're bad and everything's the same. If you take the red pill...

That's from a movie called The Matrix. Yeah, thanks. I get some of the references. This is a placebo effect thing, so red pills are more effective for treating pain it's been found. And blue pills are more effective for pills to calm you down

to have calming effects. And there's an exception to this. Blue pills are more effective tranquilisers except for Italian men. It's been suggested that this could be because blue is associated with their football team. And so... Italian football team, yeah.

So Italian men see a blue pill and just get really over excited because it reminds them of their football team. That's genuinely what the research has concluded. That is bizarre. They're the only people who don't get calming when they swallow a blue pill.

Very weird. John Wesley, who found in Methodism he had a lot of ideas of curing the cold. One of them was to make pills out of cobwebs. Oh, wow. That would work, presumably it didn't. He also thought you could

take a very thin rind of an orange, roll it inside out and thrust it into each nostril. So not effective? No, not effective. When SARS came out when was that? When I had the big launch party.

They shouldn't have invited so many people to the launch party. But it was thought in some parts of China that vinegar would solve SARS. And what they would do is they put vinegar in the corner of the room and that would supposedly help to cure it. And it was like a folk remedy.

But it was really good news for vinegar salesmen. Because it meant that they could sell tons of their wheres, of course. But that was bad news because it meant that the vinegar salesmen were then travelling between village and village and they were spreading the cold. Oh, wow.

That's kind of like a... I mean, that could be a zombie film, couldn't it? Based on vinegar salesmen spreading the common cold. Yeah, that's a really good idea. Yeah, not a very exciting film. Or it sounds like another one of the brilliant schemes of Robozo and Alpenel. OK, that's it.

That's all of our winter facts. Thanks for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with us about any of the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M.

James. At Egg Shapes. And Chazinski. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, or you can go to knowsuchthingasafish.com where we have all of our previous episodes. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.