No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Bloober Reel

Episode Date: January 9, 2015

Episode 42 - Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss Kickstarter non-starters, gluey geckos, blue-breasted women and green-faced writers.

Oh, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as Official Weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting with the three regular elves. It's Andy Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Chisinski. 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, Chazinski. My fact this week is that Franz Kafka once convinced his entire family that Einstein's theory of relativity was going to cure his tuberculosis. How was that going to work?

It's a good question. I can't exactly tell you, but I can tell you how it was claimed it was going to work. I'm not sure I understand it, but essentially the plan was that you would take a cruise, according to this spoof article that he sent to his family, you'd take a cruise heading east in the direction of the Earth's rotation. And this would enlarge your body And that would close the cavities in your lungs That were causing these problems

And by enlarging your body and gaining weight By taking this easterly cruise, then you'd be cured And he actually said that there was a company in Prague That was fitting out hospital ships Specifically for this purpose Unfortunately, I think the holes would get bigger as well That is one of the many flaws in the claim Is it in Superman where he flies around the world

And slows down the rotation? No, he turns it backwards. He spins the world backwards, which reverses time, which stops his, from Lois Lane, from dying in a car crash. I don't think that would work either, actually. But wouldn't it also turn back the thing he had just saved? Because he saves the world first, and then he has to turn the earth backwards to save the girl. But it would also undo his own saving of the world in the first one.

So he'd be in exactly the... What we're saying is, it's not science. I've wondered if when you sail back westward, is that going to... I mean, is your TV going to return? Do you then have to stay in China? Does everyone with TB have to end up in China? I think if you keep travelling east, you're all right. Okay, you have to keep going forever and ever. Do we know their reaction, the family's reaction, when he revealed them to joke?

They were really devastated, yeah. That's not usually how good jokes end, eh? It's how good jokes always end. Someone being very upset, joke fail. But Kafka was amazing, wasn't it? Kafka is the most hilarious character. He wrote letters obsessively all the time, which is great. So we've got this, and I think as most people know,

he hardly had anything published in his life. I think he published 450 pages of work in his life. And on his deathbed... Metamophysis was, wasn't it? Yeah, Metamphys was. A few stories. The trial wasn't. And then on his death, he said to his publisher, wrote him that famous letter saying, make sure you burn everything I've written. And obviously, instead of doing that, it was all published. Yeah. So his publisher was called Max Broad. Yeah. And Max Broad kept all of his papers and then was in a really weird sort of menager-to-wa relationship. with a woman called Esther Hover and her husband Otto. And when he died, he gave all of Kafka's papers to Esther Hoffer,

who then gave them to her daughter. And her daughter now lives in an apartment full of cats with all of Kafka's papers in the corner. And basically they think they're all going to just get demolished by Cat P. Wow. And we'll never be able to read them. So everyone wants to get these Kafka papers so that we can read these amazing stories.

and she's like, no, they're mine, and my cats are going to pee on them. Is that why? I think the British Library, or maybe the Brodian, keeps claiming that they actually have the right to them, and there's some ambiguity in what Kafka said. Everyone keeps trying to get them. And everyone also keeps trying to get rid of cats. And so they keep going in the council and saying,

no, we're going to take these cats. And every time they take, like, 20 cats away, another 20 arrive. They just keep coming. It's like an ultimate cat lady. Maybe they just love Kafka. Kafka. That's a cat-esque.

Never mind. So, so. So the whole burning all of your work post your death. Why? I think because, so it's actually estimated that he burned 90% of what he wrote during his life, Kafka. So we only have 10% of what he wrote. But he was a real perfectionist and he hated himself. He was really self-loathing.

So I think he thought that nothing that he ever wrote was good enough. And, I mean, I guess maybe some of it's quite revealing. Like he wrote this letter to his father. He went on holiday for two weeks intending to write. And he ended up spending the entire two weeks writing a letter to his father, this incredibly long letter about everything his father. had done wrong and it was all his father sounds like a terrible person so um it was accusing him of say of doing stuff like his father would say no one's allowed to speak at the table the table is for eating

but his father would incessantly speak at the table no one's allowed to swear but his father had the foulest mouth of anyone he knew he was terrified of his father and he wrote him they spent two weeks writing this letter that he never sent him um another letter that he wrote that i quite like is he wrote a 16 page letter asking for a promotion when he worked at the workers accident and insurance company. The thing about his father in the dinner table, Kafka liked to have the diet called Fletcherism, you know that one? So that's where you just keep chewing and chewing and chewing.

You chew every mouthful a hundred times. Yeah, until it goes. Yeah. Until basically there's nothing left in your mouth and it all turns into mush and you can swallow it. What's the point of doing that? By having larger things in your body, it makes you put on more weight. Whereas if you chew it all, it makes it go through your body. Yeah, because it'll be more broken down, won't it, by your saliva?

Yeah. So they used to, for instance, they used to have. dinner parties like Fletcher's and dinner parties where they would have a timer so everyone would have a mouthful and they would have like a one minute timer and everyone would chew, chew, two, two, and then they'd be like, ding, okay, next mouthful and then you do that. Wow. Come to parties, 7pm on the 4th. Carriages, 9pm on the 12th.

Fletcher was really cool actually. He thought that by doing his particular style of diet that you would only defecate once every two weeks and he said that it would smell like warm biscuits and also apparently he carried

around a sample of his own feces around to illustrate the wonder. Wow. Biscuits, anybody? That's true. Hopefully he didn't carry

it in a biscuit tin. He also got really into Muller's, he was into fads because he was really self-conscious about his weight. He was afraid of his own reflection because he thought he hated

the fact that he was so ugly which he actually wasn't. But he got really into Mueller's exercise fad, which was, I think, think probably the first real big exercise fad, this guy called Muller telling you the exercise you should do every day.

Is that like naked exercise? That was the naked exercising. So he always appeared in a loin cloth and said people should just wear the tittle. And he would go skiing in St. Moritz and a loincloth and stuff. And people were a bit skeptical about how beneficial this was to anyone's health. But he got ready. He was devoted to that. That's fantastic.

I was looking into sort of just famous authors and their quirky ways of writing. So Kafka obviously just going for massively long. It's really enjoyable to find out that everyone doesn't find writing as easy as you assume that they did, some of the biggest authors. So Victor Hugo, he was so bad at writing and concentrating and needing to be in the... You know, you always have that, oh, I need to get out of the room and do something more important. He used to lock away all of his clothes to avoid temptation of going outside. Oh, wow. Yeah, yes.

He often had a chauffeur who he'd give the clothes to and say, on no account, give me these clothes until I've done my work. and he did eventually start wearing a shawl. I think people would walk in and be like, oh. Was there a Greek writer who shaved half of his head, and the idea was that he would be too embarrassed to go out in public, and so he would stay in and write. I can't remember who that was. Wow.

These are all universally bad ideas. That's the interesting thing for these great writing. Yeah, because if you can't resist his temptation, you end up wandering the streets stark naked with half a head of hair, and you're in an asylum. But the half the head of hair is okay, because if you were desperate enough, you could just make sure that you were facing one direction wherever you went.

As long as you kept that spot, no one would know. Just on writing practices. I didn't know this about T.S. Eliot, who similarly to Kafka, he didn't want his life written by anyone. He left instructions. There should be no official biography of him. And I think Peter Ackroyd's just written one, but he basically wasn't allowed access to any of T.S. Eliot's private letters or any of his life,

so it's quite difficult. Just made it up. Yeah, I think he just made it all up. So maybe this is made up. But no, T.S. Eliot used to put very pale green makeup on his face, and nobody knows why. He wore very pale green makeup. People have speculated it was to look like a corpse, although I don't know why he'd want to do that. Maybe it's just a fashion thing. T.S. Eliot, who's he? The green face guy. Maybe. Oh, yeah, yeah. It was just always insanely jealous.

Maybe it was like. Oh, yeah, just constantly. What are his poems like? I haven't read it. Are they just like, she's with him again? Yeah. Do you see the green cat in Bulgaria? week who's in the news. No. Yeah. There's a green cat in Bulgaria. It's like bright green and everyone's like, well, how on earth could it be a bright green cat? Is it like some kind of science experiment gone wrong or something? But apparently it likes sleeping in a tub of green paint. Right. How long did it take them to work that out? Not so long. Yeah, okay. Victor Hugo, I think this is right, kept a detail, an extremely detailed diary of all the women he slept with. Did he? Yeah. But it was, I mean, it was extremely detailed. It was like a

spreadsheet with lots of different columns and lots of different that's kind of a woman's worst nightmare that's like the um the curator at the natural history museum he does that doesn't he have we spoke no did we speak did we talk about this on the podcast he used to collect um after every sexual conquest

a single hair of pubic hair yeah after he after you died we should specify this is not the current curator at the never history museum no no you just said the curator dad I just want to avoid any potential legal as in the one that we've spoken about before he was a curator. I can't remember his name. He used to collect just one sprig. I seem to remember a sprig of pubic hair being the word used. And he would file them in color, a date, and he did

a proper curator's job on it. So they were going through all his files after he died, and they came across this kind of collection of pubic hair. Can you visit that at the Natural History Museum? It's not on display at the moment, though. It should be, though, yeah. It should. That's very distressing. Other writers in their weird writing habits There was a writer who was huge American novelist That sort of early 1900s Thomas Clayton Wolfe Who always used to write on a refrigerator

Because he was so tall Which just seems like he's rubbing in people's faces What was little magnet letters Yeah I would take a novel out there Imagine sending it to the publishers as well There are 300 fridges outside Yeah

Kids rearranging it This novel just seems to say bum, bum, bum, we. Just going back to Kafka, if we can. So there was a biography of Kafka written a couple of years ago by a guy called James Hors, and he caused controversy because he wanted to talk about the pornography that Kafka had. And apparently he was saying that Kafka was into hardcore porn, including images of hedgehog-style creatures performing fallacious. Hedgehog style creatures.

Yeah, so like creatures that look a bit like a hedgehog, but like porcupines, maybe. Oh, okay. Well, just say porcupines. I think they're like half human, half hedgehog things. So he was a furry? Isn't that what a furry is? Yeah. Kind of.

I'm not sure he dressed up as them. Okay. But then the German scholars then said, well, this is obviously rubbish. This author in Britain is just a prude, and these hedgehog kind of things are just not pornography at all. they're just high art. Wow. And he said that comparing those illustrations to hardcore porn is like comparing a poem by Henrik Heiner

with an advertising slogan for McDonald's. So basically, this isn't hardcore. You should see our hardcore. Yeah. Come into the back room. I'll show you something. Since we're on the subject, I was reading a book about the history of London and it's sort of London and vice, basically.

And it had titles for 19th century pornography, which were quite something. So the spreeish spouter or Flash Cove's Slap Up Reciter. I mean, that is a good title. That is very interesting. The Jolly Companion and The Story of a Dildo. It sounds like it could almost be a girl's name. You'd see it on the shelf. We think, ah, the maiden a Dildo.

Well, it might have been the story of A Dildo, as in the story of Alan Dildo. We don't know that ever. Yeah, exactly. So I spoke about on a previous podcast just on this subject about Monster Erotica. You guys remember. So it's an amazing... I spent the weekend looking more into it. I've downloaded a number.

But the interesting thing was, they're all on Kindle, you could get them. There's this whole world of Monster Erotica, and you would figure that, who the hell's reading this? No one's reading this. Kaka's reading it. That's who he was reading.

It turns out some of the authors are making up to $30,000 a month. If this is an advert in a cyber saying how I earn $30,000 a month working from home, that's it's a con okay clearly the whole 30,000

is coming out of Dan's bank account um Kafka used to laugh uncontrollably at his own jokes which is weird indeed another thing which I think he would have found funny because he had a really morbid sense of humour

hence the a spoof letter to his family convincing them he wasn't going to die which I don't know if I mentioned this but he did die of TB quite young shortly after sending them that spoof article was that While he was writing the hunger artist, which was a story about starvation, he was writing that as he was dying of TB, and during the writing of that about someone who can't eat, his throat closed up and he stopped being able to eat anything.

So it's sort of like his body was trying to give him the visceral experience of what he was writing about. Well, my first job was interviewing women with acid reflux for a market research company. And after four days of doing that, my boss and I, both doing the same interviews, we both got the symptoms of acid reflux on the same night. Coincidence? No. One more thing about letters. Gordon Brown apparently liked to write letters to people in the X Factor. What? And he wrote basically for a few years.

I think it was while he was Prime Minister, he would write to people and say, I thought you were very good, or I thought, you know. I remember this? Yeah, good. He wrote to one guy, Daniel Evans, a 38-year-old swimming pool cleaner, and said, on a personal note, can I say that the next time Simon says you are only supported by the oversea 60s, you can tell him, I disagree. He was 57 when he wrote that. Wow. That's gone really helping my case. Yeah. Was he really big, like a massive fan? Apparently. No, it sounds like some kind of sad political stunt that his stupid PR advisor told him to do along with

smiling like a maniac in order to ingratiate himself with people, doesn't it? Poor Gordon. I'd like to think it was real. Oh, I've got one more thing about the writing process. Yeah. Okay, so there's an inventor who James, it turns out, has met. called Dr. Yoshiro Nakumatsu. Yeah, I met him. Yep, so you've met him. He, okay, so he's responsible for 3,300 inventions, according to him, James. He claims to be the most prolific inventor of all time.

Yeah, he patented the floppy disk. He had many of his greatest ideas when he was close to drowning. And when you say many, it means that obviously this is a guy who shouldn't be in a pool. And so basically, he, uh, He also invented scuba apparatus, arm bands. So he realized that in order to have good ideas, or at least what works for him, is that he needs to be at the bottom of a pool, simulating the idea that he's about to drown.

And he had developed one of his inventions, an underwater notebook pad. So he'd start jotting ideas down as he was on the brink of death and then swim back to the surface and come out and go, flop me disc, of course. Okay. Time for fact number two, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact this week is that dead geckos still stick to walls. It's just pleasing, isn't it? Just a nice fact.

And this was tested by a team of scientists who stuck a gecko. They didn't stick a gecko on a wall. They just let it climb up one. And then kill them? But then killed it. Did they really? That's how they did it? It was induced death rather than waiting for the gecko to die of natural causes,

which would, to be fair, have slowed the experiment down a great deal. So it's really interesting. How come you don't see loads of dead geckos on the walls all the time And they're not filling up all the walls? You do every lizard wallpaper you see That's actually real Lizard wallpapers that you get Yeah, yeah, yeah, very fashionable

Well, it lasts not forever It lasts until a while after they die At least half an hour after they die They can still be there Quick question, you know how we've been Because Andre Geim Who is a professor He came up with

the Nobel Prize winner. Yeah, Nobel Prize winner for graphene. Going to change the world. He does these Friday night experiments. One of the things that he's invented in which he's trying to make better is a glove which acts like a gecko. It's called Gecko tape, I believe. You can climb up a wall.

The only issue that they have with it is that unlike a gecko, it kind of the little hairs, which is what they are using. So spider hairs and gecko hairs, that's the kind of technology that they're trying to harness. It clogs up, and so you start slipping and you start. going down. My question is, get a big enough gecko. Why can't you create a glove where a live gecko is on the actual end of the glove and you climb a wall with four geckos? With four geckos attached to your hands and your feet. There's no reason. There's no reason at all. Has anyone tried? Yeah, there are ethical reasons, definitely. Oh, hang on. They're baking them,

climb walls and killing them while they're there. We're already in dubious territory. That's for scientific purposes, not Spider-Man purposes. This would help. This would be for military All right, we should say how they can do it in the first place. So it's very, very clever. Every square millimeter of a gecko's foot contains 14,000 little hair-like structures. And as they climb up the wall, they basically push these into contact with the wall. And they use something called the Van der Wiles Force, which is so cool. It basically disrupts the balance of electrons and protons in atoms.

So the hair, as it's pushed towards the wall, it pushes all the electrons of the first atom of the wall to one end. right so it pushes them to the other end so that atom is next to the one next to it and it repels all the electrons to the other one because like forces repel that means that you've got an atom with all electrons at one end and an atom with all protons at one end and they then are attracted to each other and stick together that in microcosm is how the gecko climbs up walls and they can support 20 times their own weight i think they inspire they've inspired a kind of superglute the way it works they've designed super glue based on that there's another

there is a type of super glue that's based on that and the thing that muscles use so muscles will attach to rocks using a kind of like cement and they've mixed that kind of cement technology with the van der Val's technology of the geckos and they've gone new adhesive called it's called geckle or something like that

which is like supposed to be a super duper amazing but also works underwater so it could be used for you know like elastoplastoplasts that won't go fall off in the bath and stuff like that that would be very handy that would be really useful i can't believe they haven't got on that yet but i don't think the elastoplastoplast industry would allow it no they make their money from people constantly losing them in the bath if you put a new one on so it's like a conspiracy theory yeah you're going up against big plaster there i wonder if there's a technology that we've not yet harnessed in the you know when you

lick uh icicle yeah yeah i mean that's a very good sticky little thing that we haven't really harnessed. Do you think it's like 20 times your own weight? Do you think you could hang off? Have you seen Dumb and Dumber when they're trying to... I have, yeah, but I don't know if that. They did a lot of scientific research. There's about five people trying to pull Jeff Daniel's tongue off that.

Okay. That look, it's really cold outside today. Yeah. That wall is very cold. Put your tongue in it. We'll kill you and we'll stay if you still. Good work. On geckos, there was, did you guys remember that woman earlier on this year who claimed that she'd birth to a gecko. Oh yes.

In Indonesia and her and a midwife both reported it. She thought she was going to give birth to a child. And when it came out, it was a lizard coated in mucus and blood, apparently, slithered out of the birth canal. And I don't know why the midwife had to help with that. It seems to make it quite easy. Oh, yeah, of course. Those damned adhesive feet.

But then they became the target of this witch hunt in Indonesia because she was accused of witchcraft. Really a witch one. So why would you make that hoax? Why would you pretend you'd give them birth to a lizard? It must be like the Kafka joke. She thought, this is going to go down a treat and then got revealed. Actually, that kind of backfired.

Wow. Geckos lick their own eyes to keep them. They can't blink. So they just go around licking their own eyes. Oh, yeah. Isn't it that they don't have eyelids? They've got a sort of clear film over their eyes, but they don't have movable eyelids, I believe. Is that right?

You have three eyelids, Dan. I've always thought it looks a bit weird. What do you mean? Three eyelids on each eye. Do I? So the one that goes down, the one goes up, and you have another little one. There's a little kind of flap of pink in the corner of your eye, and that is what used to be your third eyelid, and now it's only a little tiny flap.

That's very coincidental, because geckos have three eyes. Do they? They have a third eye, which is a little light sensing. Oh, Pineal one. Yeah, Pineal eye. I'm trying to think of how to describe it, really. What does Pineal mean? Okay, so basically it is, they're...

are cells which will, they will sense light. And their outgrowth of the pineal gland, which is in the top of your head. And I think the idea is that they can then sense the change in light above them. So if any kind of predators come from above, then they'll be able to sense them. I think that's right. Yeah. And they've done tests on people where, and I don't think this is a pinnial thing, but where completely blind people can tell whether a light is on or not.

Do they hear someone click the switch? There's a type of gecko called the Moorish gecko, and they change... They are delicious. They change colour if you put them on a surface, but unlike a chameleon, they change colour to be the same colour as a surface. Oh, they genuinely camouflage themselves. Yeah, exactly. And these geckos, say you put them on a yellow surface, they'll turn yellow, but if you

blindfold them, they'll still turn yellow because it's not their eyes that are getting their senses. it's some kind of light sensors in their skin that are doing it. Oh, really? So if you put the blindfold around their kind of stomachs, then they won't be able to see it and they won't be able to change. That's not a blindfold, though, is it? It's a...

Stomachfold. Can they do patterns? I... Can you put them on a picture of Marilyn Monroe and have, like, that appear on a gecko? Very sexy gecko, yeah. You're fulfilling a long-standing fantasy of Dan's here, which has a gecko... Gecko-cour-lossed like Marilyn Monroe.

Yeah. It's a monster errone. very much the Kafka of the office. There was a gecko discovered in 1877, a British lieutenant colonel called R.H. Bedham found it in India, and then it disappeared, and we just rediscovered it 135 years later.

We stumbled back upon it. Same one. The J-Poor Ground gecko, very old, very bored. That's not any company for a long time. I miss the colonel. Okay, can I tell you something about adhesion? Yeah, I think you will like. Okay, this is in 2008, a campaigner against a third runway at Heathrow attempted to glue himself to Gordon Brown at a Downing Street reception.

He's called Danglass. That'd be terrible because you'd have to spend all Saturday night watching X-Factor. So he was about to receive an award from the Prime Minister for his campaigning work, and then he stuck out his super glued hand and touched the Prime Minister's sleeve. And Downing Street later said there was no stickiness of any significance. But the amazing thing is he'd smuggled this in in his pants And he said afterwards I just glued myself to him

And after 20 seconds he tore my hand off It really hurt He tore his hand off He's a tough man Wow He had to give a couple of tugs before it came away He was just grinning about it He didn't seem to take me seriously

And then later on He was allowed to stay at number 10 for 40 minutes after this happened. Wow. And when he left the building, I'm quoting from the BBC article about it here, he tried to glue himself to the gates of Downing Street, but was prevented from doing so by a police officer.

I didn't have much glue left by that point, he said. Okay, time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that the active ingredient in the first ever homeopathy treatment was the blood of Thomas Beckett. Wow. So this, basically, when Thomas Beckett, Beckett died, he was basically a saint straight away as soon as he died and everyone thought he

was great and they had his blood as a relic but they only had a small amount of his blood so the way that they could give it to lots of different people was to put a tiny drop in an enormous vat of water and then take bits of that water and give it to people and it supposedly would be able to cure everything

which as far as I'm concerned is pretty much homeopathy. I agree and it's supposedly just a few years after he died from the time that they started doing it to a few years after. It's something like 703 miracles, supposedly. Yes, but that was over the whole, I think it was over a 10-year period.

And in just one year, a couple of years later, 100,000 people visited the... Oh, so it's quite a low-hit rate. It's quite a low hit rate. But I found another report saying it was that, you know, you would drink the water, this homeopathic water that James has mentioned. And also, there were cases were reported in which it was used for the magical detection of thieves and even for extinguishing fires, which is the same as use. Yeah, exactly.

It's a miracle. The holy water put out this fire. I was thirsty before and now I am not thirsty. I was dirty before. I was too hot before this magical substance. Can I tell you about these, just really quickly, about those monks? Yeah, please. So one of them was called William of Canterbury, of the two monks who was writing down these things.

This was in Canterbury. That's where he died, right? That's where he was buried anyway. Because he was the Archbishop and he was killed. And that's part of Canterbury Tales as well. He is the journey. Oh, to visit. The end point is Thomas A. Beckett.

Right. Or Thomas Beckett, not A. Beckett, right? That is a myth. Thomas A. Beckett is a later edition. He never really had the a. It was the same with A, Dildo. It's just called Dildo. If he was on Twitter these days, he would be at Thomas Beckett.

Yep. I always feel sorry for Henry the second in the Thomas Beckett incident because he said, didn't he, famously, well, people claim that he said, will no one rid me of this turbulent priest or some other phrase like that? And that is the kind of thing you say when you're slightly pissed off with somebody and what you're not asking your friends to do is actually go and brutally murder them. I wonder if they came back. Well, we did it.

He's like, you did what? Did what? Yeah. Oh, my God, guys. Simon Sharma reckons that that's not the right phrase. No, I know. That's a really neat phrase. And the biographer at the time Edward Grimm wrote in Latin.

And the translation is, What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a lone-born cleric? Which is not catchy. But actually, there's no way of, he's not saying they're going to kill him, is he? No. Although he is. No, it's even more ambiguous.

But he is actively saying that the people who work for him have to have a responsibility to go and seek vengeance, isn't he, in that quote? He's saying your crap because you're letting a lyric walk all over me. And I bet they got told off for doing it. It's one of those bosses, just never happy. One of them had to go and fight another crusades for 14 years to say sorry. Really? Just to say sorry. Yeah.

Oh, wow. Well, Henry was, I think, whipped by 80 monks. Yeah, like he asked for that, didn't he? S&M, really. As he requested it, not other than he was asking for it. Yeah, he was like he wanted to be penitent, so he asked to be whipped by these monks. Wow. And they just said, sure, that's not weird.

we'll do it. It was more common at the time to be request for monks to whip you. You're making it sound weird now. One thing, I read a really peculiar thing about him, peculiar to me, but then clearly I find things like being whipped by 80 monks peculiar, so

maybe this is just a very normal thing. I read that on his death, the monks at Canterbury discovered that he wore a hair shirt and it was infested with lice. These were under his vestments. What's a hair shirt? That is a special shirt made of very coarse animal hair that you put on under your normal clothes,

and it scourges and irritates you. To keep your suffering. Oh, so it wasn't like a nice comfort thing. No. Do you not wear those? What do you wear when you go to be whipped by 80? Thomas Beckett was voted the second worst Britain of the last thousand years. What?

In a poll by BBC History magazine. Who came first? Jack the Ripper. Wow, so that's quite harsh, considering that he wasn't really a murderer. Considering that everyone loved him as well. Yeah, he wasn't a murderer. No.

There are lots of other murderers. I'm surprised by Jack the Ripper. What? He's surprised by Jack the Ripper who voted the worst person. The worst of all time? Of all time. Who would you go for? I don't know, but like Jeremy Clarkson.

There's a theory he got his name, Beckett, from Beck, which means beak, because he had quite a prominent nose, and that was maybe a family trait. And that's where his family had got the surname from. It's just a theory. theory, but... Ah, really? It humanises him a bit, Thomas Beaky. When he was killed, he'd just got back from a six-year...

I was going to say six-year holiday. He'd actually been exiled in fearing his life, but still... That's how he was marketing it to his friends. So he was away for six years because he was in fear of his life? Yeah, he was right. When he literally arrived back, he was killed. He came back under an amnesty because he had a huge power struggle with the king, and then he got back under an agreement, and it was all going to be fine.

and then he started excommunicating a load of people who he'd specifically agreed he wouldn't or the king had asked him not to. Okay. So that was the reason that he was killed. Back on your word. On homeopathy, the guy who came up with it, so and called it homeopathy,

came with the original theory for it, who was Harnaman. He thought that coffee was the thing that caused, well, he went through a phase of thing, that coffee caused huge numbers of diseases, and he said the thing that was wrong with coffee, and the reason you know it's bad is because coffee drinking makes everything pleasurable,

and you know that in life you're supposed to suffer as well as experience pleasure and you sort of get drunk on coffee and you enjoy everything too much and that's not how it's supposed to be. So he says even in the corporal functions, which in a natural state of health are accompanied by rude and almost painful sensations, now operate with an astonishing facility and even with a species of pleasure. What is he referring to when he talks about corporal? It sounds a lot like he's referring to the fact that you've suddenly got chronic diarrhea

as soon as you have a coffee and it sounds to me like he was just a constipated man. Sounds like he's got IBS. Yeah, it does, doesn't it? Accompanied by rude and painful sensations. Yeah, it's IBS. Yeah, good diagnosis. So George Sikv received homeopathic treatment when he was trying to get his speech right. So in the King's speech, he had that, but it wasn't in the movie.

So what did he have? What did they give him a ground-up word diluted heavily? How do they... Just a very short word. With lots of silence. It was a medicine called Hypericum, and he was so... appreciative of it that he named a racehorse after it. So quite appreciative.

He didn't name a child after it. King Hypericum. Probably best. I saw it, I was looking on a forum about just, I guess, these kind of miracle relics that are out there. And someone was asking an interesting question, which is they used to, these relics used to sort of perform or, you know, give miracles. quite a sort of large volume in the early days.

And the question was, as time passes, do relics perform less miracles just because, like, the gecko on the wall after half an hour, it will fall off? Has it got a period of... Like a battery running gallery? Exactly. Does it have the ability to do it for so long? And everyone obviously said no on the forum. But yeah, I just like that as a question.

Do they run out of steam? Do they run out of steam? Yeah. Well, because you just, I love... This is my favorite thing about this part of history. with these kind of relics, like, it does sound like everyone was a superhero back then, and we've lost the ability to be superheroes. I found a thing that James posted on QI, the forums, years ago.

I found it this week, but this is really funny. So this is someone's superpower from back in the day. The Times reported that Sonora Anna Morano, the luminous woman of Pirano, she suffered from asthma, and as a result of the asthma, emitted a blue glow from her breasts as she slept. Many doctors came to witness the phenomenon. Of course they did, yeah. But apparently, I'm not sure if there's ever an answer to why she had...

Is that a superpower? Are we counting that as a superhero? Well, I mean, you know, it would... What purpose is that, sir? Luminous breastwoman. What if you're lost in the... She palled up with T.S. Eliot and his green face that he'd go on. Join his circus.

If that's the times, I guess that's not as old as I thought it was. No, it's quite... I remember. that I don't remember it happening. I wasn't posing as a doctor or anything. No, but I remember reading about it. I think I read it in 14 times, actually. So it must have been only in the last 10 years.

Yeah. I'm not sure how real it was. Blue boobs. Just say. Blobs, for short. The bloober reel is after they finish filming a film. They just superimposed blue breasts onto everyone. Okay, time for our final fact to the show.

And that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 2013, a group of people attempted to crowd fund London's first ever UFO museum. They needed a million dollars, but unfortunately, after 30 days of pushing and trying to raise money, they only managed to get $370. I mean, a million in 30 days is very ambitious, but also that is what, that's $10 a day they managed to raise. It's almost like the kind of people who are putting this together have unrealistic ideas, not based in reality. Yeah. They only got four pledges, really, from people. And it felt like one of them was their mom.

It was like, you know, like when you set up this thing, and it's like, oh, please support my thing. Always your parents come in first. Yeah. So, but I mean, it looked really interesting. What was going to be in the UFO museum? Well, I think it was going to be UK-based UFO stuff, of which there is tons.

The biggest ever siding of UFO, like a big UFO incident, was in the UK. Yeah, but we didn't get the actual saucer, did we? We don't have the UFOs. Is it just a lot of mad people telling anecdotes, sort of stuck in rooms in the museum, saying, I saw this really scary thing in the sky. Yeah. What would be really great is that you go in and you don't see anything

and you come in and you go, we saw nothing in there. And then they say, yeah, it was the men in black at the end who wipe your memory. That's a really cheap way of making a... That's a brilliant idea. So there is a... There's not a UFO museum that I can find in existence, but you know, I assume about...

Are the UFO museums? Roswell. This one in Roswell. The most famous. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. What's in there? It's all, I guess I'll put like a dummy of an alien and that will become as famous as what could be the real alien because enough people have seen it.

Yeah. That's what they do. So there's a cryptozoology museum in Maine and it seems like they do the same thing. They just keep making models of made up animals and then saying, isn't this amazing? This is what a Yeti would look like if it was a thing. Yes. But it does sound quite cool, the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland. They've got thousands of exhibits and like bits that are claiming to be bits of Barnum's Fiji mermaid.

I kind of want to test you on whether you know what all these made up words are. Okay, so the mermaid. Yeah, the mermaid. You can see a few of them at the British Museum. So these are the... One at the Harnaman, I think. Yeah, so these are the ones that it's a half monkey, half fish sewn together. Yeah.

They are, they're just inside on the right-hand side of the British Museum. Yeah. I think we've talked about them before. Yeah, I think we have. We talked about them in relation to P.T. Barnum, who had a load of them. one of his other tricks was he said I have a cherry-colored cat in this bag

and it was just sleeping in some cherry paint no it was just a black cat and he said some cherries are black that's quite good one yeah I kissed a girl by the mermaid in the British Museum sorry?

Just remember it's the worst Katie Perry song I've ever heard I kissed the girl by the mermaid it sounds rude you know that half monkey fish thing Where did you kiss her? Just next to the mermaid. First date.

I don't know. So, Dan, do you know what this is? So this museum contains loads of hair samples of like the abominable snowman and orang, pendek and yowie. It's not a single pew from each one. I think it is. And there's also a letter from the actor Jimmy Stewart,

who's one of my favorite actors. So this disappoints me, if it's true. A letter from the actor Jimmy Stewart. it is on display is his link to the Pang Bok Yeti hand mystery. The hand. Yeah. How was Jimmy Stewart linked to that? There was a hand which supposedly belonged to a Yeti.

But yeah, he was very obsessed with Yetis and he managed to get his hands on this hand. Yeah. There was a review of this museum and the guy said, quite frankly, we have more creepy things in my living room than they have in this museum. And then he gave it five stars. Another museum in America, the Cockroach Hall of Fame. Museum, which is in Plano, Texas. This was a guy called Michael Bowden, who was an exterminator, and he has dead cockroaches dressed as celebrities.

Have you got any examples? Yes. Ross Perroach and David Letteroach. I think he's also got a Liberochi, hasn't he? Oh, yeah. And it's in a little gold cape sitting at a tiny piano. Yeah. So this guy's experience with the bizarre, I'm reading here, began in the 1980s when he held a contest to find the biggest cockroach in Dallas.

He later travelled the country judging cockroach fashion contests as a promotional stunt for an insecticide company. Well, you wouldn't do it as anything else, would you? It would it as a serious investigation? I like the way that he's had that job and he's turned it into something awesome like a museum. I bet the insecticide company is annoyed. He sort of went a bit off-piced. That's very funny Daniel, I have a question for you

What shape was the first ever Flying Saucer There's a clue in the word saucer So it was round like a saucer No It tricked you What they're trying No, the word saucer

Why it was called Flying Saucer Is because it skipped across the sky Like a saucer Like if you were skimming a saucer That's why it got called that It was actually Crescent shaped Like a boomerang

Oh really? Yeah Is that why we can't keep them because they always go back to where they came from. Oh, yeah. Why they're aren't any UFOs in the museum. So do we know anything about the people who started this? Are they, they're genuine believers in alien UFOs?

Yeah, well, I'll give you the basic blurb that they wrote. Our team includes people of Soundmind who wanted to go to a UFO museum one day close to home in Paris, London and Berlin and realize that they had to travel thousands of miles to visit such a place. When you have to start off something by saying, we're of Sound Mind. Honestly, it's like... And I think they think sound mind means they hear voices in their head. We already have access to material from a former UFO museum, but to open a new place today that would look modern, one would need much more material, and to purchase new equipment.

We've even found a few perfect locations to rent in London, but there are many other issues to solve first. We need your support to do more research, produce more information boards, mannequins, videos, pictures, computers, etc. We truly believe this is a unique exciting project that would attract a lot of people and we need your help and support to make this become a reality. That was their basic blurb. I see. No mention of what would be in there.

Have you heard of kick-ended? No. It's a side project to Kickstarter, which a man has set up, which is all the projects on Kickstarter, which have made nothing. Okay. And they include the book, So Long Constipation. It's a toilet book. Anyone who doesn't have two or more easily passable bowel movements a day will benefit from reading so long constipation. Have you seen those adverts for anti-constipation medicine which say instant overnight relief?

No. It really doesn't sound like one. You might want to clean your teeth in the morning. Total immediate relief. Wherever you are. Uncontrollable relief everywhere. Sorry. So long constipation didn't get a single?

No, nothing. Do you know what else didn't get a single pledge? Is someone called Henrietta needed to raise $6,000 to fund her comedy show called Please Love Me. Oh, my God. Nothing? Nobody zero.

If you're out of the Henrietta, we love it. Another quite good idea that I might have donated to was The Little Eats. Did you read that? Which was a guy who has invented a food that is dog food and human food. Which, if you have a dog, you can't you?

Yeah, and dogs can eat human food? I don't know. Can you eat dog food without really hating it? Yeah. No, probably not. It's probably not tasty, but I think you can eat it. Yeah, I remember... Didn't you work a thing about a supermarket? Yeah, there was a fact that I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but it's something like there is enough food in a supermarket for a single person to stay alive for 56 years, and it's something like 67 years if you're willing to eat dog food. Oh, yeah. I'd eat the dog food early on, because you don't want your last year. to be the worst year. You'd save the Haribows. Yeah, that's a really good idea, yeah.

But then if you get saved after like five years. Why did you eat the dog food first? They'd be psychologically a lot of questions going on. Can I just take it back to museums for a second? Because I just did a search on the sort of weird museums of the world. And there's so many great ones. I don't know why they exist, but I'm so glad that they do. The Giant Shoe Museum.

I don't know if you count it as a museum. It's a single exhibit wall. Is it a shoe? No, it says here, to see the museum's collections, visitors must drop quarters into a coin box and then look through stereoscope viewing slots that reveal views of a variety of giant shoes, including size 37.

That's American size, though. Yeah, but that was worn by the world's tallest man and the world's largest collection of giant shoes. The world's tallest ever man, William Wadlow. Yeah. Was he called? No, Robert Wadlow.

He was a shoe salesman. That was his job. Wow, was he? Because he had to get really, really big shoes because they didn't make them that size. He went to the company and they said, yeah, sure, you can have them for free if you go around and sell them. And he did. But why would anyone else want to buy size 37 shoes? It was an example of what great workmanship you have because you can make such a big one, then surely you can make little ones as well.

Right. That's very cool. So Minnesota's Science Museum has the content of a former museum inside it, which is a very museum insider which was called the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices including the prostate gland warmer the vibratory chair and the recto rotor you just picked three at random there France has four museums devoted to foie gras wow I mean they didn't want more than the first one actually but the people behind the museum just kept stuffing them down their throats that's good thank you very labored

Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've spoken about over the course of this podcast, you can get us on our Twitter handles. You can get us either on at QI podcast or on our individual ones. I am on at Shriverland. James. At Egg shaped. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And Janski. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep. Or you can also head over to no such thing as a fish.com. And you can find all of our previous episodes on. there. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Good bye.