No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Boa Constructor
Episode Date: March 4, 2016Live from City Varieties in Leeds, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss glass delusion, useful sphincters, and six foot tall otters. ...
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Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Leeds.
My name is Dan Shriver, and please welcome to the stage.
It's Anna Chisinski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray.
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 fact number one, and that is my fact.
My fact this week is that Chikovsky used to hold his head when conducting.
because he was afraid it would fall off.
So this is apparently he was,
he used to get so nervous when he was going on stage
and there was so much going on in his head
that he genuinely thought,
no, this is definitely going to fly off halfway through the game.
So he would sit there or stand there rather
and have his hand just resting.
Yeah, I thought that it wasn't true
and I went on the internet.
A few people said that they thought it wasn't true,
but then I found one of his best friends
actually said that he did do this.
Although, lest you trust down too far,
when you first told this to me last week,
and he told me where you'd read it.
It was in a book of fiction, wasn't it?
It was in a movie called Still Crazy,
which stars Bill Nijee and Billy Conley.
And he said that.
But yeah, so it turns out
a lot of people do say that it might not be true.
And they only say it because Chikovsky is one of those guys
where people love to build myths around him for some reason
and create stories about him.
And that was one possibly.
But as James says, we found a source.
Well, he was a massive star, wasn't he?
He was one of those classical musicians in the 19th century
that was the equivalent of...
What's the famous band?
One Direction?
Was he the Justin Bieber of his day?
The Justin Bieber of his day?
Yeah, when he went to America
to do a few performances in New York,
people used to cut out pictures of his face
in newspapers and send them to him
and say, please sign this.
Which is really creepy, but whatever.
God, for a guy who thinks his head's going to fall off as well to get him.
Yeah, you're right, that was harsh.
It was harsh.
He was a troubled person,
but I think the clues were there.
So when he was first,
going to America, he was writing this diary of questions he had to ask when he got there to make
sure that, you know, he didn't screw up or die. And there were three questions. And it was,
is it safe to drink the water? Fair question. Where can I do my laundry? Fair question. What sort
of hats do people wear? Wow. Wow. That's interesting because his death is to do with a glass of
water, isn't it? Yeah. Supposedly, yeah. He supposedly died of cholera, didn't he? Yeah.
That's what they think, although maybe he committed suicide. Yeah. Yeah.
not sure.
Or it might be that he, so I think, because he was really paranoid about drinking,
about clean water as evidence by his to do list when he got to America,
really paranoid about clean and support his whole life.
And then he suddenly drunk a glass of tap water in the middle of a cholera outbreak.
So people think maybe he did that on purpose.
There was one of the time when he supposedly tried to commit suicide by walking into the
Moscow River and trying to catch pneumonia that way.
Yeah.
It's unusual, isn't it?
Evelyn War tried to kill himself by swimming out to sea, but then he got stung by
jellyfish.
He didn't like that, one bit.
So I think he thought,
dying's probably even worse than this.
So he swam back.
That was before he wrote anything as well.
We wouldn't have any evil and war that.
I started reading something about Chikovsky,
which is that he always had this
kind of slightly uneasy relationship
with the sound of the violin
because, as a child, he had had this nightmare
that he was being rubbed against a block of,
you know, Rosen, the stuff that the...
Oh, really?
And then I realised this was a humour piece
from the New York.
Okay.
This is not true.
But all the other stuff about Tchaikoski is so crazy that you would think...
It does kind of sound like it could be true, doesn't it?
He did.
He once went to Berlin Zoo and saw a boa constructor being fed a large rat.
A boa constructor.
Those boas don't make themselves.
A boa constrictor, yes.
A boa constrictor being fed a large rat.
And he screamed, ran away, started shaking all over.
And he had to be in bed for a wild.
week.
Yeah.
Pathetic.
So this thing about his head falling off is kind of an example of what they call
glass delusion, isn't it?
Yeah.
It's a really popular delusion for about 300 years.
Glass had become like this massive material that everyone was using.
And it was just the, it was almost a standard mental issue of the day that people had,
that they thought they were made of glass and they were going to shatter if they fell over or
whatever.
And then it got replaced by cement delusion a bit later.
Really?
Yeah, it did.
Cement delusion.
was a real thing. But when was cement invented?
Well, the Romans made cement.
They did. They made a kind of cement that we don't really know exactly what it was anymore.
But the real kind of proper, like, time that cement was really popular was the 19th century,
and that's when cement delusion came in. And actually, it always seems to be that people get
deluded by whatever is the main kind of technology of the day. So people think that the
internet's out to get them or whatever. And there's one that last year was the first ever
known case of climate change delusion. And it was where a guy wouldn't drink any water.
because he felt guilty about taking it from the earth.
Oh.
Wow.
Well, maybe if we all had that attitude,
we would be in the pickle, we're in...
King Charles the 6th of France.
Charles the Mad, wasn't he?
Well, he was known either as Charles the Mad or Charles the well-beloved,
which suggests the PR people found out about the first thing.
But he thought he was made of glass,
and he would keep pieces of iron in his pockets
because he thought that would protect him
if anything bumped into him
or if he accidentally bumped into a doorway
when he was going through it
so he would be defended against it.
Yeah.
So I think it was real.
There is a thing where your limbs
can randomly fall off though.
What?
What?
It's auto-amputation,
which is when a limb decides to amputate itself.
And the most...
When a limb decides to amputate itself.
That's a very darned sentence
and it sounds weird coming from anatomy.
The most common form makes it.
sound less dramatic. The most common form is Dactylosis
spontaneous, which is when your toes spontaneously
fall off. And they don't know why this happens,
but it's like a ring of tough
tissue forms around the base of your little toe.
And weirdly when it happens, it usually happens
on both little toes at once, and it starts
squeezing and squeezing your little toe.
And eventually your little toe falls off, and they
don't know the cause of it, and so eventually it's hanging by
something called a pedicle, and then
it just drops off. And we don't know why
it happens. It's more common in the tropics, but that's
the only clue we have.
Oh, my God. Does anyone else have that thing where you read
about a disease and then you automatically get it.
I am so sure my little toes are going to fall off now.
I found out a thing about sort of worry and fear.
So the Pintupi people of Australia,
who are an Aboriginal people in Australia,
supposedly they have 15 different words for fear.
And this drops up a lot.
And they're all specific kinds of fears.
So I'm going to pronounce this, don't write in,
but...
Niny wararingu.
Even I'm writing in.
You try saying it.
Ninyu, I think,
is a sudden fear that leads one to stand up
to see what caused it.
What?
That's cool.
Yeah, that's really cool.
Is that?
Is that it?
I thought you're going to read the other kind of 45
or whatever the way.
That's the only one I've found concrete proof of.
That's the only one you could pronounce.
We should move on to our next fact soon.
Anyone got anything before we do?
I've one last thing.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Which is, it's not really related.
It's about classical music,
but I found it through looking for things about Chikovsky,
which is that shockwaves from the front of trombones
move faster than the speed of sound.
Whoa.
Really?
I'm going to be the one to say it.
Bullshit.
No!
Well, I refer you to BBC.co.com.
They've measured the, they've measured,
it sort of builds up in the tube of the trombone,
and it leaves the front of the trombone
at about 1% faster.
and the speed of sound, these pressure waves.
And so if you're sitting in front of the trombones,
if you're in an orchestra, it can be a nightmare.
And sometimes people have protective screens.
I don't think anyone's that close to a trombone.
That's going to be a worry at a gig.
If you're in an orchestra.
Oh, sorry, the person with...
Sitting in front of the trombones.
I thought you meant the audience.
It's like, oh, these are great seats.
Wait, so people in the orchestra
wear protective clothes to stop themselves
getting battered by the shock waves.
Some musicians who are sitting directly in front of the trombonists
have protected.
of screens between them and the trombonists.
Now, it feels so passive-aggressive, that emotion.
If I were the trombonist and I sat down,
I realized someone's put a big screen up in front of me.
All right, let's move on.
Okay, it is time for fact number two,
and that is James Harkin.
Okay, my fact this week is that asthmatic otters
can be taught to use inhalers.
So there is an asthmatic otter in Seattle Aquarium.
He seemed to have contracted asthma
after the wild fires got near to him when they had bad fires in Washington State.
He was called Mishka, this otter, and they used food to train Mishka to kind of go up to this
little inhaler thing, and he would press it with his nose and then get a little bit of asthma
medicine.
It is the most adorable fact of all the time.
It really is.
I quite like the whole thing of offering food to get them to heal themselves through a bit of
medication. There is another otter that I read about called Eddie, Eddie the otter. And Eddie had problems
with his, he basically was developing arthritis in his elbows. And so they needed to get him to
sort of exercise all the joints constantly. And so what they did was they set up a basketball ring.
And they had, they rewarded him in fish every time he got a shot in. So they'd give him a basketball.
And I swear to God, this is what this says, Eddie was slam dunking into the ring.
He was loving it
And he's now got a contract
Doesn't he with the NBA?
Speaking of otters
that could be six foot tall
That are giant otters
In Brazil in the Amazon
There are otters that are up to six feet long
And they're called giant otters
So there are only 5,000 left
And in captivity they have killed people
People who fall into their cages
They're killed by an otter
Yeah, but a huge otter
They're really powerful looking things
They're also really, they can be really vicious though
Well, outside of killing people, they can also...
That is the tip of the iceberg.
The Otter family, they're part of the weasel family,
and I was watching a David Atomacl clip the other day,
and there was a weasel that was about three inches long,
and it killed...
Now, it doesn't sound that impressive, it was a rabbit,
but it was ten times its size.
It was the biggest rabbit I've ever seen,
ten times the size of it,
and they wrap themselves around the necks of their prey,
and then they just squeeze them,
and then they bite them in the back of the neck,
and they're done, and they can take prey ten times a size of them.
Wow.
Yeah, so they're not so cute.
Um, so I read a book called Otter by Daniel Allen, and if you want Otter facts, it is such a good book.
Um, so otters used to be sacred to the Zoroastrian people who lived in Persia, so modern
bay Iran. There were 18 possible penalties for killing an otter in ancient Persia with the
Zoroastrians, which included, you would have to then go and kill 10,000 frogs, 10,000 snakes,
10,000 worms, 10,000 corpse flies, whatever they are. And whoever did it, he would all
also have to carry 10,000 loads of cleansed wood to a sacred fire, and he would lose all his wealth,
his property, his land, and he would have to give up his daughter to godly men.
Wow.
In Japanese folklore, Otters can shape shift. And so the stories that they kind of live in moats
around castles and they could turn into a beautiful woman, invite a man over and then eat and kill him.
Okay. I thought you were going to say people are waking up and being caught next to an honor.
I swear to God, she's a beautiful woman last night.
And also they can shape-shift and fool people into engaging in sumo against a rock or a tree stump.
When St. Cuthbert, he was a 7th century saint, and when he walked into the sea one night to pray,
and when he walked out, two otters approached him and warmed his feet ceremonially by rubbing themselves on him and breathing on his feet.
Hot air.
They were probably just trying to dry off, I imagine, and his feet happened to.
be there. I'm sure he's interpreted it as an affectionate move. But when they come out of the water,
they have to rub themselves on a lot of stuff. And this must be the most annoying thing.
Coastal otters who live in the sea, every time they are in the sea and then they come out of the sea,
they have to then go and have a shower in fresh water somewhere because if they keep the salt
on their fur for any amount of time, then it ruins the waterproofing of their fur. So they live in the
sea, but every time they get out of the sea, they have to find some fresh water immediately and
wash the salt out. How annoying is that? Yeah. Do you guys know the surface area
of an otter.
I mean, roughly, yeah.
So what would you say?
About one square meter?
No, no, including the hairs.
Yeah.
Wait, do the surface area?
Well, yeah, if you take total surface area, including the hairs.
And I know that they have 70,000 hairs per centimetre squared, so a quick bit of calculation.
Let's say they're about 10 tennis courts.
A million car parks per letter.
Half the size of whales.
About the size of a hockey rink.
That doesn't have...
That's great.
I want you to say like the size of a shoe or something.
I don't know.
So they've got more hairs on them
than any animal in the animal kingdom.
So if you had to go total surface area,
the size of a hockey rink,
which is...
That's really amazing.
Yeah, I read that the sea otters
have the densest because they spend the whole lives
basically in the sea.
They mate and they eat and they sleep and they feed.
They spend almost all the time floating on the backs.
And they have up to...
165,000 hairs per square centimeter. That's the densest you get. But I think that's more
than a human has hairs on their head. One thing that's interesting about sea otters is they use
tools. So they can get stones and they can crack open shells to get the food inside. But there
are people whose job it is to be an otter archaeologist. And they want to go and find the tools
that the otters use so they can see kind of how they've evolved. So a normal archaeologist would
go and find old human tools, but there are people looking for old otter tools.
That's cool, isn't it?
That's really cool.
But the problem is that a stone, like, after they've broken the thing,
they just kind of drop it to the bottom of the ocean,
and it just looks like a stone then.
Yeah, it's not like now they have spanners and seed drills and stuff,
and we need to look at where they start it.
We all have to start somewhere.
So how does a single archaeologist able to come back?
So what they do now is because they can't really work out
which stones are used by otters and which aren't,
they get like...
They just get some stones and say, probably these.
No, what they do is they get like old ancient otter skeletons
and they look at the teeth and they see whether they've used,
like if they had to use their teeth to open the shells,
then they'll be cracked.
And if they didn't have to use their teeth,
then they won't be cracked.
And so you can tell when they started using tools.
Wow.
That's amazing.
They also have, they smell, and we think they smell in quite an incredible way
because they can't technically smell underwater.
The water stops the smell.
smell particles from being able to get to their nose.
So what is thought that they do,
what we've seen them doing,
is they blow a snot bubble out of their nose
while they're underwater,
and then they blow it out towards what they think of some prey,
and then they immediately suck it back in again.
So they get the scent of the prey into the air in the snot bubble,
and they suck it back in and they can smell it.
No way. That's incredible.
That's apparently what they're doing,
and that's how they smell if it's prey they want to eat,
or if it's just a bit of rock.
That's so cool.
We should move on to our next fact very soon.
Anyone got anything before we do?
Some stuff about asthma very quick.
Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
So Thomas Penny, who is an English entomologist,
thought that if you took crushed wood lice, that would cure asthma.
Something that actually can cure asthma is roller coasters,
or he can't cure it, but it can relieve the symptoms.
It can make you forget about it for three minutes.
Yeah, this is, it's an Ig Nobel study, actually,
and they check people's kind of breeding ability, breathing, not breeding.
Not on a roller coaster, James.
The bars are down.
Three minutes, that's about right.
So they checked their breathing ability
Before and after
And just before they
Because of the stress of going on the roller coaster
It got a bit worse
But then afterwards somehow the pleasurable stress
Seems to have kind of relieved the symptoms of asthma quite a lot
Really?
It's quite good
Good tip
Yeah
Just on difficulty breathing
Otter mothers
Teach their kids to swim
By doing what all of our parents did
When we learnt to swim
Which is just like
Forcibly ducking them
underwater in order to make that.
So baby otters are born not being able to swim.
And you can watch videos of mother's training otters
and they drag them from the rocks into the water
and then they pull them along behind them
and they let go of them like when you're riding a bike
for the first time and they sort of start sinking a bit
and so their mother has to go up and get them.
And then to get them used to being underwater
for long periods of time they just like duck these baby otters
underwater and hold them there.
You've had some very difficult experiences growing up.
My dad was an otter.
Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Chisinski.
Yeah, my fact this week is that your appendix can be turned into a sphincter, if you like.
No one's forcing you.
I think you're going to have to explain.
Yeah, so I just think this is incredibly cool, I guess, what medicine and surgery can do.
So appendixes can be really useful now.
It can be repurposed for other reasons inside your body.
So, for instance, if you need bladder replacement surgery, then the surgeons go in and they take a part of your intestine to make a little bladder out of it.
And then they take your appendix and they reform it into tissue that builds a sphincter muscle that can contract and means that you're not going to be incontinent, which I think is incredible.
You take your appendix that's sitting there relatively uselessly, controversial claim, and you turn it into something really useful that stops you wetting yourself all the time.
I think that's amazing.
And it happens a lot in surgery.
you can use appendices for various things.
You can turn them into other things.
You can also turn them into the ureta.
If you've got a problem with your ureta,
you can replace that by reshaping an appendix.
If you are hosting a child's birthday party,
but you've run out of balloons,
an appendix will make a poor,
but acceptable subsidies.
Weird you should say that,
because the Aztecs used the bowels of animals
to make balloons.
Or they blew into them.
I mean...
And then they kind of tied them,
and I don't think they did shapes out of them,
but they...
But that is true, actually.
I think that is true.
And I read in one place
that apparently, when they ran out of kind of cats or dogs,
what did they use?
They used humans,
because they had loads of human sacrifices
and loads of dead humans,
and they would use the insides of humans
to make balloons.
I have read that.
But happy birthday, son.
Here's your grandparents' organs.
Oh, my God.
So you, Dan, have millions of sphincters.
And so does everybody else.
Millions are strong.
Yes, I should point out to the sphincter I'm talking about
is not the sphincter that you're imagining.
Go on.
Because we do have a lot of sphincters.
Yes, so we've all got an A-list sphincter, as it were.
But there are millions of them throughout your body.
So you have sphincters all the way through your digestive system.
Sphinctor is just a ring of muscle,
which can expand or contract to allow anything through it.
So you also have them in your blood.
vessels. All your veins and capillaries have tiny, tiny, tiny sphincters, which widen or constrict
depending on where it needs blood in the body. Is it millions? I thought it was like 60. Well, I looked into
it a lot. I haven't got enough. They've counted a load of ones. So they've counted the one that goes
from your esophagus to the stomach or from the stomach to the small intestine. But they haven't
counted the ones in the blood vessels. And obviously some of them are so tiny. So I'm not sure that
there can be a proper audit.
Wow.
Yeah.
But you've done your best.
Yeah.
So I say million.
Maybe it's thousands.
I don't know.
So the word sphincter comes from an old word sphingine, which means to squeeze.
And another word that comes from that is sphinx, as in the big kind of animal in Egypt.
Egypt.
Yeah.
That's the country.
So the official plural of the word sphinx is sphinges.
Oh.
Yeah.
So that's one for you all to use.
Sphinxas are
A blowholes, Wales blowhole sphincters
Yeah, any kind of muscle that kind of contracts
Your eyes
Your eyes
In your pupils
The muscles which can allow your pupils
To expand or contract their sphincters
And you have two in your an anus
You have an internal one
Which is involuntary
And an external one which is voluntary
In most cases
Wow
Also koalas
koala pouches are like kangaroo pouches
but they're upside down which feels like a design floor
so when they're raising their young
they're in this upside down pouch
which if they didn't have the sphincter which acts kind of like
an elastic band or like a drawstring
to keep the baby in there the baby would just drop
out of their pouch so they clench their
sphincter and then the baby
stays in there so
the appendix should we talk about that?
Yeah why not yeah so lots of theories
we didn't know about it until
1522 because in the ancient
world the Dr. Galen
who was just the the doctor,
and his stuff was the only really
anatomical stuff we knew about until the 16th century,
he only dissected monkeys,
and monkeys don't have an appendix or appendices.
Do they not?
Yeah, so that's why we didn't know it existed.
Wow.
Yeah, although what happened when it burst,
presumably people would have got appendicitis.
Yeah, people got it.
And they just didn't know what it was.
No, exactly.
That's really cool.
Dissection was really a big no-no,
as long as you went to an Aztec, I suppose.
There's a thing I read today about
when Australian explorers
go to the Arctic, they have to have their
appendix taken out. So
it turns out that that's not necessarily
true, they do encourage it, but there
is, Werner Herzog made a documentary
about the people who live out there and the
the ones who choose to stay out when it goes into
the real inaccessible months. And they
have to make the decision if they're going to stay
out there. The appendix needs to be taken out,
as do wisdom teeth. That's the thing
that's not any way that they can stay out there.
There was a guy, wasn't there, who had appendicitis
when he was in Antarctica.
I was going to say he was Russian, yeah.
Yeah.
So this is 961 and it was a Russian trip to the South Pole
and this guy, Leonard Rogozov, got appendicitis.
He happened to be a surgeon, which was useful.
And he said, look, I think I'm going to have to take out my own appendix.
And he wrote, what I find incredible is he's in total agony.
And the night before he did the operation,
he was writing his diary and he wrote,
it hurts like the devil, I have to think through the only possible way out to operate on myself.
Anyway, he took his appendix out and he had three assistants,
one to hold the lamp, one to hold the mirror
so that he could see inside himself
and then a third person in case one of those two fainted
I want to be that guy
he said though
so the mirror wasn't actually that helpful it turned out
so he ended up doing it by feeling around
oh that's right because it was all back to front
wasn't he had the mirror there but he kept going one way
but like shaving the wrong side of your face or something
which I think was harder than he imagined
so he thought it's probably easy if I just feel
And then he ended up tearing a bit of his gut at one point
and he had to sew that up mid-operation.
And what he said afterwards, when he was talking,
when he was interviewed about it, he said,
I felt so sorry for my surgical assistants.
They stood there in their surgical whites,
whiter than the white themselves.
Poor then.
The Daz doorstep challenge was actually founded that day.
Oh, do you know what, um,
so this is sort of this fact was sort of about repurposing body parts
for different things.
And if you have a tummy tuck,
they use the fat for breast implants.
So they reuse the...
Even if you don't ask for it on the floor.
Waste not what not.
Okay, time for our final fact of the show.
And that is Andrew Hunter Murray.
My fact is that the founder of Crofts
designed special train carriages for celebrity dogs.
So in the 19th century,
Crofts was founded in
the, I think 1891.
But before, there were loads of dog shows before crafts.
And before these train carriages were invented,
what they would just do, they would put the dogs
that were going to the dog show in special boxes,
which were then strapped to the underside of the carriage.
Yeah.
So they would arrive, not in good Nick,
not really ready for a dog show.
So he designed these special deluxe train carriages for dogs.
And they had a row of kennels inside,
and they had zinc flooring,
and they had water troughs
and they had drainage
and they had two seats for attendance
like cabin crew.
Is zinc flooring the height of luxury?
I dream.
I don't know, maybe for dogs or maybe it's seen as cleaner
or maybe it was then.
The guy from Crofts, Charles Croft,
he was actually, was he kind of a showman
or a dog biscuit manufacturer or something?
He was a dog biscuit manufacturer.
In London there was a very famous building
I think it was the first ever dog biscuit factory ever
and it was called Sprats.
And that's where Charles Croft worked.
He started there and he was working on the biscuits.
And he was so good.
He had ideas about marketing and he turned it into the first sort of major brand of biscuits.
They put logos on it and so on.
So people knew about it.
There's a rumor that Charles Croft never owned a dog in his life.
Yeah, I read it.
And he sort of put it about during his life that he never owned a dog.
And his wife's, yeah, because we couldn't show favoritism for one breed or another.
And then in his posthumous memoirs, it turned out he had a St. Bernard.
Yeah, he had a massive St. Bernard, didn't he?
Yeah.
That sounds very rude.
Quite hard to hide that, the dog.
I'm surprised he kept a secret so long.
That's very true, yeah.
So, Croft was a genius at making money, basically,
and putting on these big shows
and putting on even bigger shows
and just really exploiting his audience in his market.
So I read that this was what he did
in the early days of Crofts.
I'm quoting here,
he introduced a system where competitors would pay
to enter their dogs
and make additional payments
if they wish to take the dogs away
each night of the competition
and then pay again
if they wanted to take them away early
on the final day.
So basically, it's not free to enter or leave.
God, did many people run out of money
and just have to leave their dog there forever?
Is there a huge lost property
of a dead dogs that are 75 years old?
I just think that's an inspired system.
It also applies here tonight, guys.
Charles Kraft, the guy who founded it,
also founded a cat show.
Did you know that?
But quoting from, I think,
his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry,
it failed to live up to commercial expectations.
It doesn't feel like cats would like to be shown, is it?
Oh, I read a thing about cat shows,
and there was a lady who was giving advice for,
there is a cat show called the Supreme Cat Show,
which is such a good name.
And she enters cats for it all the time.
And she said the main grooming things
are brushing the coat through with the comb,
making sure the underarms and the bikini area are combed through.
What?
Oh, my God.
And washing the cat's face.
It's pretty weird, yeah.
So the prizes in Kraft are really small as well.
Do you know the maximum price, cash prize that you get?
No.
It's 100 pounds.
So it's really...
It's a token thing.
Yeah, right.
You also get a big silver cup, but you're not allowed to melt it or anything.
A lot of royalty have won.
A lot of royalties.
Do they come in disguise?
Queen Victoria entered as a Shih Tzu.
And one many years running, because everyone was too afraid to say, that's the queen.
Yeah, and so you can make money from endorsements and from, you know, pimping the dog out for stud or whatever.
I don't know what it's called, but they have sex with other dogs and then you get
better dogs. But do you know what the prize was in the first modern dog show, which was in 1859 in
Newcastle? The prizes were all guns. It was a really rural farming-based competition. There was a cattle show
and they said, why don't we add a dog element to this cattle show and so the prizes were all guns?
Do you know if you get a train in the UK that you don't have to pay for your first two dogs to come on,
But your third one you do.
Yeah, so you get two dogs free, and then your third one, you've got to start paying.
Really?
Yeah, and every additional dog you bring on.
But I read also that if any other customer objects to its presence on the train,
you are obliged to move it to another area, according to Bylaw 16 of the...
Oh, yeah.
Try saying that when the pit bull's got its teeth in your leg.
I object to this, according to Bylaw 16.
I just have a cool train, if you want to hear that.
I have a cool train.
What are you, six?
So the Shinen Zeppelin in 1931 was a German train,
and they wanted to make a super fast train,
and what they wanted to do was put a huge propeller on the back of the train,
and it would go super, super, super fast down the tracks.
It's a brilliant idea,
but it never went past the prototype stage
because they found out that the propellers would kill people
who stood too close to the tracks at train stations.
Oh, my God.
I've read there's a new...
idea of most complaints that come about the way that trains function. One complaint is the fact that
too much time is lost when they're trying to stop, when they stop at a station and people are getting
on and off. The other one is about internet access. So one of the plans for a new train that they've been
designing is to design a train that never stops but still picks up passengers. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's
incredible. So it just goes high speed. It's just high speeding along. And then what they do is everyone
boards another train and the other train chases the train.
That's going to the place, docks onto it.
Everyone casually walks over, docks off it, and goes back to the station.
That's one proposed idea for a new train.
It sounds about as sensible as James' massive, spicy fan.
Okay, that's it.
That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for being here.
If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast,
you can find us on our Twitter account.
I'm on at Shreiberland, James, at Egg Shapes, Andy.
Andrew Hunter M. and Chisinski.
You can email a podcast at QI.com.
Or you can go to our group account, which is at QI podcast,
and also go to our website.
We've got no such thing as a fish.com.
That's where you go.
And we have all of our previous episodes up there.
Thank you so much for listening at home.
Thank you all for being here at Leeds.
That was awesome.
Thank you so much.
We'll see you again next time.
Goodbye!
