No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A 3000km Tall Statue Of Liberty

Episode Date: March 20, 2015

Live at the Soho Theatre, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss X-ray sellotape, the world's oldest chewing gum, and why you should never put Skittles up your nose.

To another episode a no such thing as a fish, a weekly podcast. This week coming to you from the Soho Theatre in central London. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting with the three regular elves. It's James Harkin, Andy Murray, and Anna Chazinski. And once again, we've got around the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Andy.

My fact this week is that Finnish budget meatballs have so little meat in them that they have had to be renamed balls. In Finnish, Puri Kouita, probably pronouncing out wrong, which translates as balls.

But the thing is, this is not entirely fair. It's due to European labeling requirements. Basically, all the meat has already been cut off the animal. And the stuff they used to make the cheap meatballs

is, you know, Like reconstituted. Yeah, mechanically reclaimed meat. Hmm. But they are 50% animal. They're just not 50% stuff which you can genuinely call meat. Like a chop.

So they've had to rename them. I didn't realize meat stopped being actual meat. I thought as soon as it's come from an animal, that's it. Your meat for life. I know. So Finland has the world's oldest piece of chewing gum as well, isn't it? Or it had. That was where it was found.

It's a 5,000-year-old piece of chewing gum. It's made from a tar made of birch bark And it was found by a 23 year old archaeology student It's had teeth marks in it Wow Yeah Did they say where it was found In Finland

I was hoping it would be on the bottom of the world's oldest chew Or something like that Did you guys know that in weird ingredients in food Sand is in a lot of what you eat And it's just If you look at them And I'd never thought about it like Not them.

Soup. If you have a soup sandwich, sure. Are they in soup? If anything that... So it's down as silicon dioxide, which I guess we kind of all know is sand, but you never really think about it. So it's put on ingredients list.

I checked my soup in my cupboard as anti-caking agent, bracket, silicon dioxide. And it's just sand. And they put it in like... Yeah, it'd be like in grated cheese so it doesn't stick together. Yeah, exactly. And there was a guy, an artist from Chile called Marco Everisti,

and he mixed fat removed from his body by liposuction with ground meat to make meatballs. Did he? What? I bet trading standards got involved, didn't they? Did he eat them? Or did he serve them to someone else? I believe he definitely displayed them in a gallery because he's an artist. I'm a feeling he might have fed them to his friends.

Oh, wow. Did he tell all his friends? Yeah, I think they knew. Right. Otherwise, that would be a bit of a bad trick, couldn't it? Well, that's an end of friendship, isn't it? Why have we had no Christmas card this year from the Jackson's? We haven't seen them since May when I fed them my own body.

Ground up with meat that I found. I found a few things on, when you said this fact, I just, I love whenever someone is forced into having to rename themselves something new because the thing they were saying was not true, or it was just they were stuck in a thing. There's a great one. It's actually in one of the QI books of the fact books, which is that there's a place in Australia called Shark Bay, but it was renamed Safety Beach

to attract more tourists to it. First, they changed the name from Shark Bay to Shark Beach, and they still weren't getting many people in. Guys, maybe it wasn't the Bay Beach thing that was putting people up. Well, what else could it be, Frank? I was reading an interview with a Greek brewer, a Greek beer brewer, who was complaining about the fact that his beer that he's trying to brew keeps up being pushed out of the market by Heineken,

which basically dominates the Greek beer market. And his beer only has 5.5% of the market in Greece at the moment, and it's called vagina beer. And I just keep thinking, is this interview going to mention at any point the fact that perhaps a bit of rebranding might work? Another one that's a favorite of mine, there was a sushi bar in Montreal. they got forced to change its name by

a judge, a high court judge, because, so the name that they gave it was fuck yo sushi. F-U-K-Y-O-Sushi. And it looked like there was a moment where they were going to try and defend it because it's a genuine Japanese word and, you know,

it means good fortune in Japanese. It's also in a karate stance, apparently. It's also the main complaint that people give at the restaurant when they haven't liked their food. But they, yeah, so their downfall was the fact that they have a Facebook page. and they started saying we have other ideas for bits on the menu that we want to put up. And this really was their downfall because the other bits on the menu were a fuck you two roll.

A fuck me roll. A fuck you all roll. And my favorite, the fuck your mama roll. Wow. They've changed a name. I like that. So they were embracing it, trying to embrace it. I think it was a joke from the beginning.

Yeah. Okay, back to bowls. Sorry. In the early 20s, there was a lot. case between Uncle Luke's mint balls, these guys who make these little confectionery things, and Uncle Jack's mint balls. And Uncle Luke was saying Uncle Jack shouldn't be making mint balls, etc., etc. And the judge decided that the term uncle could not be copyrighted as there are millions of uncles around the world.

And he said, Uncle Jack is just as entitled to offer his bowls to the public as Uncle Luke. Wow. Wow. My parents are in tonight. So some facts about Finland? Oh, why not? Finland is a brilliant place. That's that the fact.

That's my fact. Damn, and I had that one too. They like strange competitions in Finland. So they have the mobile phone throwing world championships, the World Air Guitar Championships, the wife-carrying world championships, swamp soccer, and the finals of that are called the SS World Championship.

and I think it's too late for that one. Actually, just speaking of SS, do you remember South End on C, their traffic wardens, I think, had a uniform which had SS on. They had to change it because of too many complaints. Yeah, they could have had SOS very easily. That's why paying attention to the odd.

That's true. Finland's also got an ant nest sitting competition that you do. What? It's basically the idea behind it is there's a bunch of ant nests and you take your trousers down, sit on it and then you wait and last person to leave

is the winner wow there's one of the champions of the mobile phone throwing competition is also a hammer thrower which I quite like as if your hammer throwing you don't know what to do in your off season you just go to the mobile phone

throwing championships but also in the wife carrying championships then there are various different positions in which you can carry your wife and people debate over which one is the most efficient and there's one which is the most efficient and there's one which Estonian style, which is if you have the wife's legs over your shoulders and hanging down, which makes you wonder what kind of weird

racism was happening. Are Estonia's sexual practices? Whenever that was named. I think it was because of first people to do it were Estonian. But it is the most popular style and it's the one that the winners always use these days. It's the best one. It's like the fosbury flop of wife carrying.

It must be every year if someone comes in with a rogue new position, they've got their wine in and everyone gets nervous going, what does he know that we don't? And then they fail every single year. Estonia's going, oh yes, we did it. That was a good Estonian impression, by the way. There's a boot-throwing world championships also held in Finland.

And for an interview, they asked the two-time organizer, not the two-time winner, the two-time organizer of the championships. And they have their own official throwing boot. So you can't use another boot. You can't use a non-regulation boot. and they have all kinds of, they have anti-doping regulations and people are being kicked out

of a boot-throwing competition for drugs infractions. Booted out. They also have a mosquito-killing championships. That is how many mosquitoes you can kill in five minutes using only your hand. Wow.

Are you allowed to use your other hand? Or is it just, ugh, e-ch, e-ch. I think you'll have to go and find them because it's like, there's a lot of mosquitoes in the art to come there. Yeah, do you have a tiny, tiny gun dog to go and retrieve the corpses when you've killed? No, you're being silly, I'm doing.

They must have so many potential gold meddlists in Finland who are like, have the Olympics brought up the wife? No, damn it. Like, Finland would wipe the Olympics clean if these were allowed in. Yeah, if they didn't just have normal spots in the Olympics. Well, there's always, in the news reports

of, like, whoever's won the mobile phone carrying, or the wife carrying, whatever, it's always, it was won by a finish man this year as if anyone else is really going there. Also, you can't call your friends to tell him you've won, which is a bit of a nightmare. Oh, James and I met a guy, just speaking of

throwing things, we met a guy two days ago who, he's a scientist who, part of his major study, and he published a paper on this, and he's really proud of it, is that he throws snails for a living. So he chucks them over his garden fence, and then

he waits two years to see if they come back. And he knows if they've come back because he puts tipx dots all over them. And then he chocks them. He puts one tipx on whenever he gets one in his garden. He throws it over into there's like a railway that goes next to him. So he throws them over onto the rail. Into the tracks.

But then every time they come back, he puts another dot and another dot. I think there was like one with 17 dots on it in the end because he just kept coming back and coming back. And he doesn't use slugs because the tipx doesn't hold on that. So he has no way of doing it. Sorry, we're going to have to move on, but yeah, do you want to...

Another cool thing they have in Finland is fines, all of their fines are dependent on your salary or your income. And so there was a Nokia executive in 2002, for instance, who was fined $116,000 euros for going at about 40 miles an hour and a 30 mile an hour speed limit or something. It feels like the mobile phone throwing was invented by Nokia, don't you think? Because he's like throwing it, well, you're going to have to buy another phone now? Do you know what Nokia used to make?

They used to make gas masks. Really? Yeah. The Finnish army used Nokia gas masks until 1995. That cool. That is good. Can imagine you've got your gas mask on. We need to move on.

I've just got one last thing, which is that the movie, just going back to meatballs, the movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in Israel was retitled, It's Raining Falafel. It'd be good. In Finland, they've renamed it Cloudy with a chance of balls. Okay, time for fact number two, and that is Jasinski. Yeah, my fact is that Queen Victoria's acquaintance once had to apologize to her after her pet jaguar

killed three of the queen's pet deer. Wow. Which I just think would have been a really awkward moment. It's bad planning, though, isn't it? Where can I leave the Jaguar? Just put him in with the deer. You're not going to believe what happened. It's an amazing sentence.

That is the closest sentence to the kind of otherworldliness of royalty. When you're having to apologize that your jaguar. But this woman wasn't a royal, was she? No, she was, by a weird coincidence, she was Bozzy's aunt. Do you guys know Bozzy, like Oscar Wild's lover's aunt? And she was an amazing character. She's called Lady Florence Dixie. She was an explorer.

She was a raging 19th century feminist. She picked up the Jaguar in Patagonia when she was chased up a tree by a jaguar mother. And she was in this tree and she had to shoot the Jaguar mother dead. And then she felt bad for the baby Jaguar. And so she brought it home. And she recounted all this in a letter to Charles Darwin, in fact. Wow. They were correspondence.

She did correct Darwin. This is such a name drop of a story. I was at Queen Victoria's because my son is dating Oscar Wild. Anyway, Darwin, the thing is, is that it is. Could you put any more... She was well connected. Yeah, wow. What I love about her is the guy who she married.

You know this guy? He was called Sir Alexander Beaumont Churchill Dixie, and his nickname was Sir A, B, C, D. Whoa. Good, that, that's such good name. I know another one of his nicknames, actually. So they were known in court circles, apparently, as Sir Sometimes and Lady Always Drunk.

I think she enjoyed a good time. I actually don't think Queen Victoria would have liked her very much because, A, her Jaguar killed Queen Victoria's beloved pet dear and was then sent to a zoo. But also, you know John Brown, Queen Victoria's lover of her late years, Lady Florence Dixie, claimed that she'd been attacked by Irish transvestites in the grounds of Windsor Palace and demanded that that be investigated

and so John Brown was sent out into the wet cold and he died about six months later of a cold he caught out doing that. Oh no, really? Six months later of a cold he caught, wow, that is a big cold. Not a good of you. That's a mega man flu. I've never looked into Queen Victoria before. She was such a badass.

She was so cool. Yeah, she wore crotchless underwear. She did. She wore crotchless underwear. I think you might be Googling the wrong person. Are you Googling Victoria's secret? No, she... How is that badass?

There's only badass if you're horse riding or something. It's not... It's not like hard... Playing it fast and loose with that word. Yeah. I was building up to the more badass examples. Sorry, go on. I saw that Fiona Bruce on Antiques Roadshow.

They were showing that they were selling them and they were like, this is a crotchless bit of underwear. Actually, what happened was when she died, her underwear was auctioned off to people, I think. And she had enormous bloomers. Like she was very big by the end of her life. In fact, the circumference of Queen Victoria's waist by the time she died was larger than her height.

Wow. Which is quite impressive. Wow. So she was technically the wrong way up for the last years of her life. Very sad. Very sad. Do you know the first thing she did after her exhausting five-hour coronation ceremony? she ran upstairs to wash her spaniel.

Which was a spaniel? She had a spaniel called Dash or Dashy and she loved it so much. She loved all her animals, a huge amount actually. She was, when one of her dogs died, she had to be sedated. She was so upset. And she had a parrot called Coco,

which could sing God Save the Queen, which was a fun trick. That is the most arrogant thing I've ever heard of anyone doing with their pets. I think her family taught it to sing God Save the Queen. And then they, you know, they revealed at her and she was delighted

you know she and she and Albert had huge arguments as well they had not they're painted as having had a very very rosy marriage but actually she was very angry with him she was having children all the time she at one point had nine children under 15 years old which is a lot and she was just

constantly busy having children and so Albert had a lot of the responsibilities of state farmed out to him so he did a lot of dealing with parliament in his life but she was very angry about that he had to go and put notes under the door apologising when he'd wheeled did too much power. She has the reputation

of the famous quote of we are not amused. And so it's attributed to her but there is no direct evidence that she ever said it. And the thing that we have from her staff and family they are on record as saying

that she didn't say it and that she was in fact immensely amused. That's such a lovely PR push. Actually she was immensely amused. No further questions. Okay, some things on pets maybe? Okay.

Okay. So, Rudolf II, the Habsburg Emperor and King of Hungary, he had a pet lion. And he had his horoscope read by Tycho Brahe, a friend of the show, who told him that the king and the lion had the same star sign.

And so when the lion died, Rudolph shut himself in his room, was convinced he was going to die as well, and he died three days later. Oh, really? Because Tyco Brahe, we've talked about him before, but he was a serious, who understood that astrology was all complete bollogs,

but it was how he made all his money, wasn't it? So he kept on poor guy, his whole life having to feed these guys' lies. He should have got a pet tortoise or something. But you can't throw someone to the tortoise, can you? During the Civil War, another friend of the show, Prince Rupert of the Rhine. We're very popular with him. Dead people. No, he had a poodle called Boy,

who he trained to cock his leg and urinate on cue whenever the name of his enemy Commander Pim was spoken. So whenever he said his enemy, the dog would urinate. And the people thought that he was Satan in disguise this dog. The enemy thought that. And they thought he was immune to bullets and could catch bullets fired at Rupert in his mouth.

That's Rupert's had some... He's had some good PR, Don't really good PR, is there? People did believe amazing nonsense, didn't they, back in the day? Yeah, it wasn't true. It wasn't true. No, no. I'm sorry, you go. Dali used to have a pet Ocelot, who he took everywhere with him, and if the Ocelot urinated on one of his paintings,

when he was painting it, he would charge the Byam Moore for it. He would charge the Byamore? Oh, right. When he sold a painting, he'd be like, My Osolot weed on this, so that's 10% increase on the price. Giant work. The first budgies cost as much as a house. Budgey or house, budgie.

Darling, I really think we need to go for the house. Come on, we've got to get on the budgie ladder. They don't need ladders. In the 19th century, in 1845, so they cost about 50 quid, which for a working man was an annual salary. And there was a budgie boom as well, where the value shot up because demand outstripped supply so much because they had to be brought over from Australia.

Do you know where I found out the budgie costing as much as a house thing? Jeff Capes, former Britain's strongest man competitor, Jeff Capes now keeps Budgies. He's the president of the Budgey Society. Oh, wow. Yeah. I was looking into Royals with pets because I just it's so bizarre because they do get given a lot of

presents which end up being exotic animals and stuff. And Henry the 3rd of France, he had this thing where he used to carry, so he had pets, he had three dogs and he used to carry them in a basket around his neck, like a big bit of bling, and they used to bark at people they didn't trust and he'd be like, get away from me.

If they didn't like the person, the dogs would bark them away. But I was, so I looked into the Tower of London because I've met through stand-up a guy who is the raven master of the Tower of London, who does stand up as well. Weirdly. It's crazy. He looks after the Ravens. He lives there.

That's his job. He does stand-up. He has dick jokes. It's amazing, right? But basically, the Tower of London has extraordinary animals, or at least did back in the day. They had a polar bear. It was a white bear. No one knows for sure. I can't see anyone just to swim in the Thames, right?

Yeah, it was kept on a long... That was Henry III of England, wasn't it? It was kept on a deliberately long lead so it could go for a swim. I went to the tower... Not many visitors to the tower in those days, but I... Well, it's very confusing,

because it sounds like the animals had a lot of liberties. I went to the Tower of London's website, and they have a whole page on the animals that used to live there, and they included... They had monkeys, which... The monkeys were actually...

They lived in a furnished room, so you could go and visit these monkeys, and it says, be amused by their antics and human-like behavior. But they were removed eventually because one of them tore a boy's leg off in a dangerous manner. Which makes it sound like the first time they did it. It was kind of quite funny. You did it safely this time.

So we're going to keep the boys coming into the room. But you are in a warning now. We're going to have to move on. Any last minute? I just have a pet fact. In 2004, a man. man called Jake Perry owned the Guinness World Record holder

for the world's oldest cat. In 2005, that record was broken by another one of Jake Perry's cats. This man has owned the two oldest cats, by chance. Oh, he's lying about how old they are. Or he painted the first one a different colour.

The other one, it died. The other one died. They counted the number of rings. They were old. It's terribly sad they have to chop the cats down. to find out how old they were. That's how the first one died in the second one. And yeah, he said he feeds his cats,

bacon, eggs, asparagus, broccoli, and a cup of coffee every morning. And they smoke 40 a day. They're long left. It's just full of spirit. We're going to have to move on to fact number three. And that's my fact. My fact this week is that the Statue of Liberty

originally wore a headscarf. So the Statue of Liberty was originally designed for Egypt. And it was originally meant to be at the mouth of the Suez Canal. It was going to be standing there with a torch on hand. It was going to be a peasant lady. And it was all designed. It was all ready. And then Egypt had a financial situation where they couldn't afford it anymore.

And the guy who was called Bartholdi, he was an architect, he was so distressed that he had this colossal thing that was going to be built that was no longer built. He went back to France. He was French. And he then said, why don't we make a new similar, very similar looking thing? for America and that became the Statue of Liberty. So originally it was meant to be a peasant woman standing at the Suez Canal.

You said torch in hand, actually, the head of Egypt when he agreed to it, wanted the touch on the head rather than the hand, which would have looked a bit weird, wouldn't it? It's interesting because it was, it represents so much for America and this guy, obviously when he was trying to get it made in America as well,

he had to deny so much about the fact that it was originally meant to be for Egypt. And everyone was like, but it feels like you were definitely pitching this in Egypt. time, but definitely not. Totally different. Yeah, and so they kept bringing up stuff like, well, okay, how about the fact that when you've now repitched it to us, you still want the Statue of Liberty, not on what we now

know is the classic Stan that the Statue of Liberty's on. He wanted it on a pyramid. They just did a really bad job of losing the Egypt connection. And then they said, but it's literally the same design. You've got a torch being held up. And he was like, oh, okay, sure. So how the hell am I meant to design? a lighthouse effectively without a torch being up there for the light.

Forgetting to point out that in both of the designs, the lighthouse element of it was in the head. So again, he just kept shooting himself in the foot. You talked about the kind of plinth that it's on. That was paid for by America, right? So France paid for the statue and America paid for the plinth. But America couldn't get any money for the plinth. And so they had a big sort of campaign to try and get it.

And there was a company called Castoria, who made laxatives who offered to give all the money if the name of the laxative would be displayed on the top of the statue. Wow. That's a very different kind of liberty,

isn't it? Free and easy movements. So the original sort of garment, the peasant garment, she was designed to be a slave, but the slave was called, the word for it, is a fella, right? F-E-L-L-A-H.

And one of the main conspiracy theories about the Statue of Liberty. I'm straying into your territory here. is that the model for it was a man. And we don't really know. A lot of people say that the model was either Bartholdi's mother or the face was modeled on his mother, but we don't know. And what you're saying is that they heard that it was a fella and they thought, oh, that's what I think it's come from.

Oh, that's cool. There was a really good book written last year, I think, about the Statue of Liberty and I can't remember what it's called, but the woman who wrote that did hypothesize that he based the face on his brother who committed suicide, I think. whom he really loved. And it does look like a very masculine face. If you look at it, it's a man. I wouldn't say that.

It's a man in a dress. The only evidence, actually, as far as I could find, that it was based on his mother, is the fact that someone later on after it had been built went to the opera or went to a big sort of arts event with him and his mother. And when his mother came and this guy was like, and I turned around and I was like, whoa, it's the Statue of Liberty.

And then he said that to people and they're like, oh, that must be it. So I don't know how credible. The idea of the Statue of Liberty was actually by a guy called Labulai, who was a friend of Bertaldi. And he said in a dinner, and this was in a newspaper article of someone who was at that dinner, that it should be a statue that can be seen from the shores of America to the coast of France. That's big. That is a big, big statue.

So some of the guys at QI.com slash talk, Posital and ZZigi worked out how it would have to be in order that you'd be able to see it from France and it would have to be more than 3,000 kilometres high. How high? So the International Space Station, for instance, yeah, the ISS goes around what, like 3 or 400 kilometres high, so it's like another 10 times that much. It's massive.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Thomas Edison. of electricity fame wanted he suggested putting a massive disc inside the statue so it could deliver speeches

from inside it all across New York Yeah So like it's talking to you Yeah exactly yeah And no one took him up on it thankfully It's weird to think of her as it As originally brown Or kind of golden yellowish brown

For the first 25 years Obviously being made of copper It was supposed to be this shining golden statue because we sew obviously picture her green and Bartolti wanted her to be gilded in solid gold I think at first he tried to petition the American people to raise loads of money to do that

and I think they said we've already raised quite a lot of money thanks very much he had real trouble funding it he tried to get her image copyrighted so that every single image of her that appeared he'd get money for it which was quite in the 1880s was quite a modern thing to try and do and he failed you used to be able to they had fundraising

dinners as well where they would try it desperately try and raise money because all they need, they had the statue, all they needed was the pedestal, and you could buy a meter tall version made of ice cream at these dinners. Fun. He sold his signature, and Bartoldi sold it 3,000 times to raise money for it. And the only way they eventually got the money was by crowdfunding, basically. They printed in Joseph Pulitzer printed in his paper the name of everyone who gave, even if you gave a penny to it, they would print your name in the paper.

So A, it raised a huge amount of money and B, people bought the paper because they wanted to see their name in it. So circulation rockets in as well, so it's quite clever. This guy sounds amazing. It sounds like he started copyright laws, Kickstarter. This is really advanced thinking. So I went on to TripAdvisor to see what people thought of the Statue of Liberty. And there was one guy called H. Jama.

And he didn't like it very much, actually. He said, it was bad because I don't like the site. it's just a statue, nothing else. The tour was bad, and I order food at the court, and the person sneezed on my burger. I really don't get it. This was the worst trip ever, one star.

We're going to have to move on to our final fact. Do you guys got anything more that you want to add to that? No, let's meet. Okay. Time for a final fact of the evening, and that is James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that a polo mint takes 42.5 minutes to dissolve

if you stick it up your nose. And firsthand QI research is the best kind. I actually, when I read that, I stopped on the way to get polo mints. So for the rest of the show, I might have one. We've got 15 minutes left, so just have half. While he's doing that, I'll explain the points of this fact. This was a fact given to me by my mum, actually, which is quite nice. and she found this study.

It was by a guy called Dan Leopard, and he's an E&T specialist at the University Hospital of Wales, and he wanted to see how long it took... For people at home, Dan is inserting candy into his nose. I'm being put off here. No, he studied five different popular suites, favored by children, and saw how long it took to dissolve in the nose. And the idea is, he put them up his own nose,

and the idea is that when children get things stuck up their noses, it's kind of hard to get it out, and it's quite a, you know, not very nice thing. But he thought, if they dissolve quickly, then maybe you don't have to go through that whole thing. You just let nature do its thing. So actually it's quite an important study, even though it's a bit dumb. I like that. That sounds like going over there.

Everything smells great. Actually, it's actually quite, like I know that's not the point of it, but actually it's making my nose feel like I'm getting more air. Okay, so other sweets. Skittles take 37.5 minutes to dissolve in your nose. Smarty's 32. and Ticktacks 27.5. So I'm now extremely skeptical about this study because one of my friends is here who stuck a sour skittles up her nose

once. On a date? In the audience. Not for a day actually, just for fun, I think. And apparently it was extremely painful. So I exploded in her nose. She tried to push it out and it ended up in her eye socket. All the weird sour acid was streaming out of her nose and bits of her eye socket were falling out of her face and stuff. And she managed to get to A&E, I think, which implies that it does take longer than that. Maybe Sauer Skittles have a different dissolving.

You might be right. I don't think this is really important to say at this point, but don't try this at home. Although, quick update, it feels smaller. It actually, I can feel the tight, it's smaller. So about polos, do you know that? If you snap a polo in open in the dark, then it glows.

I didn't know this. And I couldn't try it at home. because it was daytime when I read this. And nobody knows why. So it's this thing called tribo luminescence that if you turn all the lights out, snap a polo, they think it's about electrons suddenly rushing to a certain point of the polo.

And it happens with polos. It also happens with cellar tape. If you whip cellar tape off its roll really fast in the dark, then it will glow at the point where it's being whipped off. And it also emits x-rays. And they did an experiment last year where they managed to get an x-ray of a researcher's finger

by just the x-rays emitted by cellar tape. He just picked off cellar tape and he managed to get an x-ray through that off his own finger. How cool is that? That is awesome. It's very cool. So when you go to hospital in future they'll just have a massive role of cellar tape.

Just stand in front of the cellar tape, please. Or a polo. I have something about smelling things and nose is. So when people who are asthmatics smell something that they think is going to cause them an allergic reaction, they will have an allergic reaction, even if the thing they're smelling

doesn't cause an allergic reaction. Oh, wow. Yeah. And it's because when you smell something, it goes to your brain before it goes to your lungs, as it were, the signals of what you've smelled. And they tested 17 asthmatics,

exposing them to a rose-smelling chemical for a quarter of an hour. And nine of them were told it would irritate their asthma, and the rest were told that it would calm them down. And that's exactly what happened, even though it was the same stuff. Really? How cool is that?

So, Arjues are all in the mind? No. These people should stop, making some of them far? With their epi- No, it's the opposite. It's the opposite of the It is the mind, but the mind is also

a real thing, basically. In some people, yeah. They have, another one of my friends is a pediatric nurse, and she recently changed hospitals, and as part of the showing her around the new war, she works on A&E, part of showing her on the new ward, they were like, and this is where we keep the metal detector and they have now in a lot of pediatric A&E wards metal detectors because it's a much

easier way and less expensive way than an x-ray if a kid comes in and says I've eaten like 17 marbles not marbles things made of metal that's for the marble barbell you just go down in their body oh that's clever because in this paper of the polo thing they did say that if a child states they have inserted a sweet into their nose and it cannot be visualized one must believe that there is indeed a sweet and not an inorganic or corrosive object. In other words, you have to trust a kid otherwise. If he says it's a sweet and actually it's something bad. But I also want to know what these mystery sweets are that no one can visualize. Well, when they're in your nose. We've never heard of this kind of sweet before. Can you describe it? No. So I read a report that there was,

originally we thought that the nose had about 10,000 ways of smelling. We could smell 10,000 different things. And that recently, they looked into it again and like, oh, we got the number a bit wrong. It's actually a trillion. Which

bit of a discrepancy. We got bored counting at the moment. All of us except Mike. Who kept going. How can we know that? It seems like such a high number. I have no idea. I have no idea.

Dan can only smell mint at the moment. Second update? Definitely getting smaller. Wondering if it might just fall out on its own accord. Stay tuned. So, but I was, so it got me thinking about how, because I've always thought, like, you know, they test people for how good their hearing is

and eyesight you can see quite well. And I thought smell. We must have humans who have amazing smell. And there's a guy, actually, who his job, and it's one of the most important jobs in the world, I think. This is his job title. He's NASA's sniffer. NASA has a sniffer who smells everything before it goes into space.

This is how powerful his nostrils are. If he doesn't like the smell, it doesn't go. Literally, his nostrils are the gateway to off-planet activity. Because because if you put something up into the International Space Station and it starts to smell after a few months, then that can be... You can't open a window. You can't open a window. You can't get it out. So his nose has the ability to smell the tiniest of smell.

So he can see if that smell exists. And if it's there, it can then eventually turn into something bigger. So his job, he's tested every four months to see with a bunch of tiny little test tubes. And some of them have no smell and some have the tiniest of smell. And if he fails, he loses his job. And he still has a job. He's got the best nostrils on earth. Do you think he can smell all trillion things in the world?

I have no idea. Yeah. I just don't know how you... I mean, maybe they can try it. very, very similar things, and you can smell the difference between them. I have some things about things that get stuck up the rectum. Oh, God. Which, Dan, you're lucky this wasn't my actual fact.

Otherwise, that would have been a very different experiment. The 1995 Ig Nobel Prize in Literature was given to two surgeons who made a study called rectal foreign bodies, case reports, and a comprehensive review of the world's literature. And here are some of the things that they found that people had put up their bottoms. I might, I'll stop halfway through this, I think, when it gets too much. But seven light bulbs, a knife sharpener, two flashlights, a wire spring, a snuff box. Sorry, was the second flashlight to try and find the first? You've just got dozens up there now.

This is not the same rector. He's a different rector. So 11 different forms of fruits, vegetables and other food stuff. A jewel is saw. a frozen pig's tail and then one patient's remarkable ensemble collection including spectacles a suitcase key, a tobacco pouch

and a magazine. A magazine? If you forget your handbag, I mean, what are you do? It does sound like he was going on a journey. He's got everything he needs. Mike, where's your bag? I don't need a bag.

Why does he need a suitcase key if his rectum is acting as his suitcase? That must be the key inside the case again. Wouldn't that be the best day of your life if you're one of those immigration officers who puts the glove on and heads in to fight some drugs? It's like, what is this really? Mary Poppins? That's no version of Mary Poppins I've seen. Goodness me. We're going to have to wrap up very quickly.

James, give us more. What have you got? Okay. One way that you could get out of being in the army was to pretend that you had polyps of the nests of the nests. nose. And this is like a little tumour instead of your nose. And if you had it, you wouldn't get in the army. And so people pretended, and here's a quote.

Attempts have been made to simulate this affection of the nose by introducing, by introducing the testes of a cock, or the kidneys of a rabbit into the nostril and retaining them there by means of a small piece of sponge, which is sometimes impregnated with fetid juices. But if it's that or war, you know. I'll fight in the war. Frontline Murray. I'm not a violent man, but I'll take the war, please. And another thing, we were talking about the Ig Nobel Prizes before,

and we're currently doing a bit of a tour with Mark, aren't we? Mark Abraham, who's in charge of those. So I asked him about this, and he sent me a paper from the Journal of Medical Hypotheses called Ejaculation as a potential treatment of nasal congestion in mature males. Where are you ejaculating? Well, apparently... Quite.

According to the abstract, its emission phase provides vaso-constriction and nasal decongestion, which I must say I've never noticed myself. Your nose clears up when you're having sex. And that's what this is saying, yeah. You do have erectile tissue in your nose, so maybe it's that.

Speak for yourself. I have a normal nose. Maybe this is for adolescents listening. That's good excuse, for when the mum walks in, I think. I just had a blocked-up nose. We've already established that Andy's mom is here tonight. It's like, I have a blocked-up nose.

Oh, that's what all the tissues are for. Okay, we're going to have to wrap up. Should we quickly find out how my polo is doing in my nose? All right. God. Talk amongst yourselves. It's still huge. It's still huge.

Oh. Okay. Okay. That's it. That's all of our facts. Thanks so much for listening, everyone. If you want to find out more about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, you can get us all on our Twitter handles. I'm on at Shriverland. James. At Egg shapes. Sorry. Andy. At Andrew Hunter. And Chazinski. You can email podcast at QI.com. We're going to be back again next week with another episode in the Soho Theater. Thank you so much for coming to our show tonight. We'll be back again next week. See you there. Have a good night.