No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Cannibal Squirrel

Episode Date: November 10, 2017

Live from Bath, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Calvin Coolidge's robotic horse, the inventor of email, and the language it's easiest to speak while drunk.

Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the Comedia in Bath. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with Anna Chisinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with you, James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that it's easier to speak Dutch if you're drunk. As in if you're a non-native speaker. Yeah, if you're Dutch, you tend not to have too many problems in general if you're Dutch.

And you can't be absolutely hammered. You have to be very slightly one pint kind of drunk. And this is a study that's been done recently. They got 50 native German speakers to talk to a Dutch person in Dutch. And then they recorded it and they asked some Dutch people afterwards, how did they do?

and the drunk people did a little bit better. But unfortunately, I did read on Reddit, someone posted on Reddit, that Dutch is basically like a German got drunk and can't speak properly anymore. There's a lot of slurred sounds in the Fleur-Sler-Lis-Flur. I didn't know you speak,

and you're not even drinking. Does anyone here speak Dutch? Wow. Have another drink and then see. Because I wonder if it's slightly by accident that when you're drunk, you're just a bit more confident and you're saying... Because they've had words that are actually quite similar

to English. So the word for Apple is... The word for pear is... Peir. Wait, someone does speak it down there. Who's saying it, as I said... Or you've gotten what I'm doing now. He just owns a greengrocers in Antwerp.

I think that person has just understood that admittedly complex joke, that you're doing right now. But yeah, it wasn't so much remembering the words as much as they had better fluency and better pronunciation. That's what people said. And weirdly the people themselves

didn't think that they were doing any better. You would think if you're drunk, you have a bit more bravado, but they didn't really have that. The people themselves thought, oh, I'm doing okay. But actually the Dutch people, and that's amazing. But Dutch people are so English proficient. About 90% of people in the Netherlands

speak really good English. it's quite hard to get conversations with people in Dutch. I went there earlier this year and as soon as you open your mouth and try to say hello or something or you know, Apple. You spotted a mile off and they immediately say oh hello, how are you doing? What would you like? You want an apple?

Do you want a pink lady or a russet? And it's very hard to But actually this study was it was German speaking Dutch but actually there was a 1972 study which showed that Americans could speak tie a bit better if they were a bit drunk.

Really? Yeah. I speak Mandarin much better when I'm drunk. Do you? And I do speak Mandarin. I grew up in Hong Kong. And yeah, I do notice that when I'm drunk, I'm just, I'm awesome at it. There's no anecdote with that.

I just want to sort of big up my language-speaking abilities. Has anyone else ever noticed that about you? Or is it just that you think that you know? No, I just tell it to people who don't speak Mandarin. I'm like, whoa, I am kicking ass right now in my Mandarin. But I could know, because I was really bad as a kid. I was the only kid in my year that when I went back to school had forgotten his name in Chinese.

Isn't your name in Chinese Dandab? Oh, yeah, no, that was my nickname at school. This is so bad. I was called, so my name's Dan. Obviously, I was called Dan Dan at school. And I thought that was a really cool nickname because everyone knew my nickname. And I was like, wow, that's so cool.

And they'd be like older kids, hey, Dan, Dan. And I only found out, it was about six years ago. I was living in England. I was in my late 20s. And someone on, I put on Facebook saying, Dan Dan just won a game against an old Hong Kong friend and someone wrote, Ha, Dan, you know that means testicles in Chinese, right?

And I had no idea. No one told me. I wrote to my friends at school, my old school friends. I was like, did you know what was called Balls this whole time? And they were like, yeah, did you not know? It's the whole childhood I thought I was cool. It was just a boy called Bulls. And a boy called Bowls who forgot his name every holiday.

Yeah. And genuinely, I would sit in class. and I would be sweating because they'd be doing the roll call and I'm just saying going, I have no idea what my name is, and when it gets to it. And then there was one time that I thought my name was Seerbor,

but I thought it was Lorbo, which is radish. So then I just got called Radish Bowls or something, I guess. So it's hard, so I'm very proud when I get drunk and remember my Mandarin. I think you can see remember your name. I'm always impressed by that. But getting drunk can improve your skills

in various ways, can't it? So they're a snooker player, Bill Verbenyuk. How do you say that? Werbenik. Werbenik, Verbenyuk, like, who's counting? He used to get to... The referee. He used to get really drunk.

So he used to have six to eight points before a match, and then he would have one during each frame during the match, and that made him play better. And everyone does always think that they play a bit better after a few points. After a few, maybe, but not after. How many did you say? Six to eight, before a game and then during the game. How many frames are there?

I presume there must be only about three. Well, in the World Championship final, which he never reached, I don't think. I think there's like 34 or something, 37. I can see why he never reached that stage. But also, the World Anti-Doping Agency bans alcohol from just five sports. So, bans you've been drinking from five sports. A motor racing. Motor racing is one of them, yes

So motor racing, powerboating, air sports Auto racing Motorcycle racing So you can see why it bands drinking in those It's a bit dangerous and archery And actually, the reason it bans archery Is that there was a study done in 1985 That found that drinking a little bit

Makes you slightly better at archery And it's considered cheating Oh Yeah, yeah That's why that strong bow guy is so good, isn't it? So in 2008, the Dutch voted the word of the year. Now, all countries do this. All lot countries do this every year.

But in 2008, the word of the year in Dutch was swaffelin. Okay. And according to Wikipedia, swafflin means to hit one's penis, often repeatedly, against an object. Didn't they start doing that? There was a trend for swaffolin in the Netherlands, I think. There was, in April, it started in April 2008, when a Dutch student committed the act on the Taj Mahal.

That was it, yeah. Now that... I mean, that's not cool, is it? I don't know, but I don't think it is. I've never known what's cool, but... Given a list, that'll be low down it. They've got... The words in Dutch are so amazing.

Similar to German, which has a lot of these compound words, you know, we just strap words together like a glove is a hand shoe, which I think is cool. So Porcini mushrooms, and I'm going to mispronounce this, are Ikhurnesbrood, which literally means little squirrel's bread. Yeah, that's very sweet. Peanut butter is pindakas or peanut cheese. Slightly less appealing.

And, oh, if you can guess this, a mule pier, a mouth pair. Do you mean pair as in two of something? No, I mean pair as in Dan's pier. here, it's a slap in the face. Slap in the face. Yeah, as it was for you guys just now when you realise what it meant. You know the

little squirrel bread thing though? So I think that's pronounced acorn, and it's good that we don't have any Dutch speaks in the audience, so you can't correct me. But, which is very confusing apparently, because it's pronounced the same as acorn. So the word for squirrel in Dutch,

it's pronounced the same as the word for acorn in English. Yeah. That must be hard for cannibal squirrels. Well, they don't get caught, I suppose, because they just say, I'm going out to eat an acal. And their mates go, yeah, fair enough. And then they eat their brother. I found a word, it's finished,

but this is just a great description of a word that means a lot, and it's a Finnish word about being drunk. Kalsa you're chunit, that is the feeling when you're going to get drunk home alone in your underwear with no intention of going out. Wow. So you just go, I'm just going. I'm just going to have a culture Leonite tonight, guys.

Yeah. It does make it sound like a choice, which is nice. True. Did you know, I mean, this is so off topic, but I read a study this week that said that, if you refer to yourself in the third person, it is a great way to de-stress. So if you're stressed out,

instead of going, oh, my God, I'm really, really scared about this show I've got to do tonight in Bath, where I haven't done any prep for it, then all you need to do... For instance. Like, random example. All you need to do is you step back and you go,

Anna's really worried about a show she has to do tonight. Sorry, James is really worried about a show he has to do tonight in Bath. And if you talk to yourself on the third person, it de-stresses you. And it genuinely works. I do that quite a lot. You do that. You always go, oh, James! Yeah, he does that.

But you sound very stressed when you're doing it. You always say, oh, James, you idiot! That's what I do, yeah. James is going to lock you in the cupboard. I'll be honest. pretty messed up. I'm not stressed though. You're not.

James isn't stressed, that's what you say. I'll say what I want. Daniel is scared. So here's a thing about the Dutch language. There was a guy called Johannes Gropius Bikarnas and he thought that Dutch was the original language in the whole world. Okay? And his logic behind this was that the word Adam sounds a bit like the Dutch words,

heart dam, which means dam and hate. Okay? And Eve sounds a bit like Yu Vat, meaning the eternal barrel. Okay? And he thought that these two names were originally Dutch, and therefore Dutch was the language of the Garden of Eden, and therefore Dutch is the original word, and then everyone just kind of stole words from them.

Wow, that is a desperate man. He has too much time on his hands. He also thought that Antwerp was founded by Noah's kids after the big flood. They decided to go to this place which is basically below sea level. Wow. But on Noah's ark, there would have been some ants.

So maybe they said, oh, we'll name the city after whatever gets off first. And then the ants got off first? Sure. I mean, I sound... I'm reaching here as well. I read a great fact about Adam and Eve the other day. which is that they weren't really humans, because they were prototype humans, so they were actually garden vegetables, both of them.

So if you look at old... If you look at old drawings of them, they're like groove in Guardians of the Galaxy, like tree-like characters. Dan, can I just take you back to the beginning of this bit of yours where you said, I read a great fact. but no no it's because it's like it's a fact that someone and and myself believe that that is and so check this out as well because they were because they were root vegetables and they were like

they didn't they didn't have sex with each other but they had to procreate and secret societies are looking for what is known as a lost word because it's a lost word and they're searching it for it because it's said to be so powerful that if said to the face of a woman it would instantly impregnate her. That was the worst minute of my life. My God. So, I was reading some real facts about language learning. No, the economist did this thing

where they went in search for the hardest language to learn. And it's really interesting. It tells you loads of cool stuff about various languages. But they concluded that the hardest language to learn is this language called Tuyuka, which is spoken in the Eastern Amazon, I think. And the hard thing about that, which I think would be a particular problem for us and for you,

is that the verb endings on statements require you to show how you know something. So if you state a fact, in the verb ending, you have to say how you've known it. So like the way... Is there an ending for, according to secret societies? I think they'll add that when Dan... So there's no to yuccaful citation needed.

doesn't, they don't need it. That's so cool. Yeah. So like the phrase for the boy played soccer, I know because I saw him play soccer, is the played would be a different word to the boy played soccer. I know because I read about it in a book

or on Wikipedia or from a mad person on the street. All right, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. Oh, God. Yeah. And the word fact is brought to you very loose. today. So my fact is that American president, Calvin Coolidge, used to ride a robot horse inside the White

House three times every day. Isn't that extraordinary? And how did you learn this? I was talking to a root vegetable who... So Calvin Coolidge, 30th president of the United States of America, rode horses. There's a surprising amount of presidents who ride horses, but Calvin Coolidge was allergic to horses. So he was built this mechanical horse that sat inside the White House,

and he thought it was a joke that it was being given to him, but he tried it out, and he really loved it. And it had two different options of it. One was Gallup, and one was Cantor. And he used to dress up as a cowboy every time he got onto it, sometimes just the hat and totally naked. No. Yeah, yeah.

He liked being naked a lot, Calvin Coolidge. and get this, check this out, chew on this, Murray. The horse was invented by John Kellogg who invented Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Yeah, he was outside of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. He invented a lot of things, the mechanical horse. He invented this really cool thing for if you're getting too hot in bed.

It was a tent just for your head that led to a sort of tent pipe that went outside your window. So it's just... And you can see pictures of it online. Yeah, you know how like there's... Sometimes windows just have a fan that sends out that little...

Yeah, it was exactly like that. And so you see pictures of people laying in bed with just a tent, door open, so they haven't zipped up, and just getting cooled. I like that idea. He invented the mechanical horse, as you say. He also invented a mechanical camel, which was pretty much the same, actually.

It was... Just had a hump. He invented a kneading machine. in which you would lie on it, and mallets would pummel your bladder and intestines. Wow. And a colonic machine for enemers, and they would fire gallons of water up your rectum.

Gallons! Yeah, gallons. You'd lift off. No, no. Follow by eight ounces of yogurt. That's quite a lot of yogurt as well. Sure, it's not gallons. No, no, no.

And I've seen a picture of it, and they have multiple kind of bits coming out, so it was for more than one person at once. No. Yeah. So you know how you don't like to sit even with us on a train, Andy? Yes. Yeah.

Imagine if we had to hang out while we were all having eight-gallon enemas. My imagination was shut down. But horse machines were quite a big deal, because horse riding, everyone did it before the motor car. So there were lots of horse riding exercise machines. And then when bikes came along in the 19th century, then cycling machines became a big thing. And I found an article on Timeline, which is a really great website, by the way. And it's from a magazine called The Rambl. in 1897.

And it's this description of something that had been invented, which was a stationary bike. So it was a bicycle that has all the delights of outdoor cycling enjoyed at home. And it was invented by a painter. And what he'd done is he'd painted an enormous role of outdoor scenery. And he'd rigged it up to his cycling machine. And he's attached the canvas to rollers. And as he cycled, the scenery rushes past him.

That's amazing. He's like cycling outside. Because you can buy cycling machines. now where you can see on a video like the Tour de France or whatever you're going. So this is basically that. This is that. That's very cool. I found a really similar thing.

Okay, so I think the treadmill, one of its first uses was for horses. As in they were four horses to exercise before they were for people to exercise. Really? Yeah. So case in point, the queen last year bought a treadmill for all the queen's horses, but not all the queen's men. she's got a treadmill that 18 horses can walk or run on at the same time and I think the big question is could they put Humpty together again but there were theatrical shows in London

where they would have live horses on stage in theatres in Drury Lane so they would have a massive stage obviously and then they did a huge spectacular show in 1902 which was I think it was Ben Herr it was a biblical epic and they had a massive treadmill and they had about a dozen horses on stage running, galloping on a treadmill. Wow. Yeah, while they wound a massive panorama beside like a chariot race. Wow.

Very cool. Yeah, that's insane. That is really good. The exercise horse, since we're in Bath, I should say that the exercise horse is mentioned in Jane Austen. Yeah. Is it? Yeah, it sure is.

It's in Sanderton, the novel that she didn't finish. But, yeah, she mentions an exercise horse, and basically in her day what it was was a chair. which had a lot of the springs on it. And so you bounced up and down on it, like a trampoline. It was a trampoline chair. I found out a couple of facts about Calvin Coolidge.

Oh, yeah. So he was famously a very quiet man, and he became even quieter. And I have one anecdote about him here. So this is during the presidential campaign in 1924. He was found out by a reporter who said to him, Mr. President, what do you think of prohibition? Coolidge said, no comment.

Will you say something about unemployment? No. the reporter pressed on, he said, will you tell us your views about the world's situation? No. About your message to Congress? No. And the reporter just started to leave.

And then Coolidge said, wait. And the man turned around and Coorley says, don't quote me. That's good. Apparently, he would always, he wouldn't let his children eat dinner unless they were in full tuxedo. What?

Yeah, apparently. And one night his son came home a little bit late. he'd been out playing and he was a little bit late for dinner and he said oh what do I really need to dress up can I not just go and eat dinner and this and they said young man tonight you are having dinner with the president we've mentioned him haven't we a few times on the podcast he he used to like to play little prank so he used to do a thing where when he was in the Oval Office he used to press an emergency buzzer that meant the secret service would rush in because

there was an emergency but he would press it and quickly hide underneath the desk and they'd come in looking for the president and be like, oh, Jesus, he's gone! And, yeah. Well, he loved to sleep, so maybe he was just taking a nap. One other famous thing about him was that he slept 11 hours a night,

and then he took frequent naps and long naps during the day. And this is the thing people knew about him. So he said nothing, and also he was unconscious most of the time. And one of my favorite people ever, Dorothy Parker, the, you know, excellent, witty, literary figure of his time,

said when she heard about his death, when someone told her he had died, she just said, how could they tell? That's what he was famous for. When he was awake, he was a bastard, I have to say this. When he went fishing, he went fishing a lot when he was awake, and he insisted that his Secret Service men bait his hook for him, okay? Fine, I mean, it's a bit hoity-to-oity, but whatever.

But then, as the Secret Service guys were baiting the hook, he would jerk the fishing rod and try and spear them in the finger with the hook. And he really enjoyed it. He told people how much fun it is to do. That does sound like fun. Do you think, like, when, how long ago was Coolidge, 100 years or something? 20s, yeah. Just that, yeah.

So, like, now we kind of hear all the fun stories of the things that he did. Do you think we'll hear fun stories in 100 years' time about the current president? We're hearing them now. It's quite sweet his relationship with his wife, who was famously a really outgoing, gregarious person, just called Grace. and so he was the absolute opposite of her and the way they met was when she was reading law and she saw him shaving

in his house so he was in his bathroom having his shave and his window was facing out onto the street and he was wearing just his underwear with his suspenders around his waist you know like braces not female suspenders suspenders around his waist and he was wearing a bowler hat

and so she saw him and laughed as you would and he looked round out of his window saw her tipped his hat and went back to shaving. And that was a start of a relationship. Too bad. Yeah. I was looking at other historical ways of exercising and losing weight. Yeah. And I found one online called the Hallelujah Diet. And apparently for the Hallelujah diet, you have to ask yourself, what would Jesus eat? Okay. And so the idea behind this is that Jesus, if he was around now, would probably be a vegetarian, probably wouldn't drink. You know, he'd have quite a good diet. And they stress on the website, it's not

not about saying what people actually at in the time of Jesus, because according to them, they obviously didn't have a great diet, as Jesus was constantly healing the sick. You know that Jesus has a house waiting for him, if he does come back, in Bedford? So there's the Garden of Eden is said to be in Bedford. I'm not Eden again, Dan.

This is by a thing called the Panacea Society, and they believed that the Garden. of Eden was in Bedford. And so they set up the society to make sure, because if Jesus came back for some reason, he would go back to Bedford, and they bought a house for him, which was a sort of semi-detached, I think.

Not even a detached house. Maybe it was a detached house. No, it's a semi-detached. Humble son of a carpenter wouldn't live in a detached house, would he? I've seen this place, and it's an N-teris, in fairness, but it's a terrace. Right, okay, yeah. I would say that's semi-detached and N-teress.

Oh, yeah, okay. But I also think that's why he's not coming back. He keeps on going. of property have you got lined up for me. It's still the old terrace house in Bedford. I'll stay up here for a little while. But yeah, I think they rented out to families, but if he does come back, I think there's a

policy that he... I don't know if they know that, I assume. Imagine the family receiving the phone call. Hello, yeah, Mr. Sanderson, you are not going to believe this, but... It's hard to believe that Jesus would turf out a family from their house. Well, he turned out the Pharisees from the temple.

He was a turnaround. Anyway, we need to move on, guys. It is time for fact number three, and that is Chisinski. My fact this week is that a member of Iceland's pirate party just injured her eye and had to appear on TV wearing an eye patch. This is the nicest of all pirate-related stories, because it would be harrowing to hear she'd lost her lower leg and had to have a peg leg. That's true.

It would have been awkward if you guys had laughed at that. But fortunately, it's just a kind of innocuous injury. Her one-year-old child scratched her in the eye. So she had an injured eye. She wore an eye patch in this debate. And she clarified that it was not an Old Sea injury. Because the Icelandic Pirate Party are not about Old Sea pirates. They're about more modern stuff.

Yeah, they're quite popular, aren't they? Yeah, they are popular. There was a time a couple of years ago where they were the most popular party in Iceland, I think. And now they're the third biggest? I think in the last elections, they might have got about 14%. Yeah, yeah.

Wow. But, yeah, Icelandic elections, they're really into them. So the last election was last year. The government keeps collapsing. It's like saying that we're really into referendums. It's not that they have a lot. It's just that they like them when they happen. So in 2016, the turnout was 76%,

which is the lowest turnout ever at an Icelandic election. Wow. Which is quite impressive. And that was despite 10% of the country in Iceland was away watching the Euros in the last election, I think, when it happened. Yes, so I was reading an AMA on Reddit by the Pirate Party, and they were asked about piracy,

and basically their idea is they think that everyone should be allowed to do whatever they want on the internet, like just copy whatever they want and all that kind of thing, and they don't think that should be copyright rules, and they were asked on this Reddit AMA, whether they think they'd be actually able to do anything because other countries like the US or the UK, have their copyright rules,

and surely Iceland wouldn't be able to do anything about that. And they admitted, yeah, okay, maybe we won't be able to do anything about it. They said no country is an island in a globalized world, not even Iceland, which really is an island. I was confused about this fact when I read it because I thought, oh, that's so ironic when I read it. And then, so a member of Iceland's pirate party, yeah.

And then I thought, hang on, is it ironic? and I couldn't work it out and I was too embarrassed to ask anyone. So I googled if it was ironic and I found a website which if anyone else suffers from not knowing if things are ironic you can now go to

is it ironic dot com and it's just Anna going no no and then Dan and Alanis Morissette constantly submitting requests yeah Alanis is resubmitting saying isn't it

Yeah, so you just, it's just lists of things where people are going, is this or is this not ironic? Just a couple, and I put your fact up as well to see and it's got 50-50 at the fireman. So the people vote on it. Yeah, people vote on it. So Katniss from the Hunger Games

is injured by getting burnt after becoming dubbed The Girl on Fire. Is it ironic? No. 75% say it is not ironic. Yes. Torch Tower in Dubai caught fire. I think all of these things are ironic.

There are different meanings of ironic. Guns won't be allowed. Come on, there's situational irony, there's dramatic irony, there's all sorts. All sorts. Go on, give us another one. Guns won't be allowed a Trump's NRA speech. That is ironic.

Yes, 63% agree with you. The people are with me, guys. That's not ironic. That's a sensible precaution. Just on Iceland, quickly. Iceland has so many, as you say, scandals, political scandals. So the last Prime Minister had to resign because he was caught up in the Panama Papers,

which meant he'd basically been hiding an enormous amount of money offshore, which you'd think the Pirate Party would be fond of, but... They weren't happy. But basically, when that came out, when that story broke, the number of people who protested

was nearly 10% of the entire population as in 10% of the entire country in basically one square. Wow. Was it the same 10% who went to the Euros? I think it must have been, yeah. They just love to travel. Yeah.

It's big pirate news this week, I think, or certainly in the last two weeks. The Pirate Party just came third in the Czech elections and they got their most votes that any pirate party has ever got in any election. So it's big news that. They've been a party for less than 10 years, so they're doing really well.

And as part of their campaign, they kick-started a solar-powered pirate boat to do all their campaigning, despite the fact that the Czech Republic is landlocked. Is that ironic, Anna? It's funny. I'll take it. In Taiwan, the Pirate Party wasn't allowed, I think. So in 2012, there was an application to name a political party. the pirate party. And it was rejected by the Ministry of Interior

due to bad connotations because pirates aren't known as good people. Well, there's a lot of pirates in the straits around Indonesia and Singapore and stuff. So the Ministry of Interior said that we think there might be confusion and people might think that you are

real pirates. So they were told not to do it. But do you guys know, so you know the pirate accent? Ar. YAR. Yes. Thanks. I don't know what's up to these guys. Do you know where that comes from?

The... Somerset. Everyone went from Somerset and Devon and ran away to see... That's exactly what it is. It's not what it is. It was popularised in the 1950s by a guy called Robert Guy Newton, who was a Hollywood actor at the time, and he was the person who was in Pirates of Penzance, I think,

and he played Pirates in a few films. And he was from Devon, and he just decided, I'll just really up my Devon accent. And so he did that being a pirate. and then people decided that that was what pirate sounded like. So that's where it comes from. That'd be a damned lie. But actually pirates, they came from all over the place, didn't they?

And apparently I read an article that says the most number came from London. So really the more correct pirate accent would be kind of a cockney-ish accent with a load of vows and these. Isn't that what Johnny Depp has in... What does he have? It's a Keith Richards accent.

Is that cockney? I guess. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, that's good. No. It's an extremely accurate movie. I met the lady who does the costumes for Pirates of the Caribbean last year, and she says they always bring some wire wool to make all of the costumes old,

because you can't buy old clothes. Well, you can. You can buy old clothes. Wow, James, that is a very elitist thing to think. Wow. I mean, have you seen what I'm wearing? I obviously don't believe it. Yeah, no, but as in 17th century kind of well-won...

Those have mostly run out in the shops now. I'll grant you that. To be there, most charity shops do not have a long 17th century line. Yeah, someone's grandpa's, grandpa's, grandpa's, grandpa's grandpa died, and this is in their attic. So, can you think of a pirate who went to Eton? Not a trade question? Oh, gosh.

Shall I tell you? Captain Hook. Did he? Captain Hook, he's an old Etonian. No, is he really? Yeah, in the first ever play of Peter Pan is made very clear that he went to Eton.

So that's what Jay and Barry says. Yeah, that's what Jay and Barry says. In the original play, in the actual play of Peter Pan, Captain Hook's final words are Floriat Itona, which is the school motto. So there was a letter to the Times in the 1930s, and it said, sir, I see that the term pirate is being applied to the class of person who owns a wireless set without paying for a license.

Is this not a misnomer of a too flattering nature? Unlawful, though it might be, piracy has at least the merit of some romance, and has in the past called forth qualities of courage and even courtesy. The person, especially in these hard times, who listens without paying for a license, displays none of the daredevil virtues of it. a pirate. He is a sneak. And the term wireless sneak would be more appropriate. Signed, James Hook,

Eaton College. Last year, the largest salmon caught in Iceland was caught by Eric Clapton. Sorry, I knew we were way off the Iceland thing. I know, but I just had to mention that. Hang on, the Eric Clapton. The Eric Clapton.

I'm sorry to say, but I actually called the lake that that happened at, and it turns out that it was the biggest salmon at the specific lake, but not for all of ice lot. Who'd have thought that Dan would be the arbiter of what was true in place? How do you phone a lake? They've got one of those novelty shell phones. That is great fact-checking. That's pretty emmptive.

fact check. That's the most fact checky I've ever had by life. All right, we need to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that the man who invented email later changed career to become a sheep seaman importer. Which one of those two things is taken off? Yeah, who is this? He was called Ray Tomlinson, and he's the man who invented email. I mean, he later became a miniature sheep breeder, but that involved the importation of a lot of He wasn't just randomly importing it

just for... Sorry, when you say a manager sheep breeder, was he very small? No, he was massive. He was massive. He was just, he was a human. He was a normal man. But he was a great man

because he invented email and he is the guy who picked the at sign for the email address and it was very, very clever because it basically meant you could send an email to any computer and it was outside a network, basically.

We know what email is, mate. But this is before the World Wide Web, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. So you've got, yeah, you don't have a way of doing it. And it's very weird because until he invented email, basically, the previous means of doing it was you had to leave a message on the same computer and then someone else had to log in to see what the message was.

And that was email before him. Yeah. Which is not a convenient thing, obviously. So you would write the email on your computer, mail your computer to the person Dear Amazon I would like to buy a pair of your socks

Yes you'd have to send a computer Yeah they would yeah okay Do you know how Brian Blessed tweets Very loudly In capitals He has his tweets Facts to him

So and then he receives his tweets By fax he reads through them He calls his agent He answers it over the phone And his agent takes a note of it and then types out all the tweets at the end of the day to send back out. So the app symbol seems to be the thing that Ray Tomlinson gets asked about the most, right? And I think it's weird that we don't have a name for the at symbol.

And it's really, we call it the amphora. But no one, we all call it the a ass symbol. Yeah. Show of hands, who calls it the amphora? I've never seen fewer hands go off in a room. But you can get me on podcast, amphoraq.I.com. I would say. But no, all of the countries call it something interesting. So I think in, is it in Spain or Italy, it's the Tchaquiollo, which is a little snail. In Russia, it's the word

for dog. In Norway, it's called the sign of the meow, which may be to do with the tail. It looks like a cat curled up with its tail. It looks like a cat curled up. So at the moment, the movement of semen, the import and export in the UK, is sorted out by the EU, by the Belai Directive. Imagine sorting that out. No, no, I mean, I just mean the rules. Yeah, the rules. For listeners at home, Daniel's doing some really gross miming.

But I don't think anyone's talking about how this is going to affect it after Brexit, are they? I'm not. I'm not. But this is really important because you need to import semen from different countries, otherwise all of your livestock is in bread. Yeah. Yeah. Because, like, for instance, in America, they're importing a lot of bee semen at the most.

moment because they've got, sorry, bee, bee, bee, semen, yeah. So their bees are really struggling, they're all dying, and they need a new bit of genetic material. And so they get the bee semen in from other countries, and then they inseminate them into the bees. But it's quite difficult if you get it through customs, because they don't often see bee semen coming through. You're looking at me like I'm making this up. I don't know bees had semen. They do. So each male produces one micro-examines. to put that into some kind of perspective, a single drop of water is 100 microlitres.

So you need 100 bees to produce enough semen to be like the one drop of water. What's the purpose of that? That fact. No, what's the purpose of getting the 100 bees together? Ah, yeah. Imagine being invited to that party. As a bee.

I want to know how they collect it because the ways of collecting semen as a farmer are, they're quite interesting. There's one guy, basically. One man. One man. With tiny fingers. Is it Donald Trump?

No. It's Michael Waite 53 from Scotland. Okay. He's one of the few beekeepers who is inseminating queen bees by milking the bees. I've seen a footage of it. You just have to squeeze the abdomen very gently.

Ah. Oh, wow. It comes out. Because in, so in farming of larger animals, then they have dummies, don't they? So they have dummies of use. So, for instance, bull semen, it fertilizes 75% of the cows in this country, I think, because it's just much easier. It's more convenient.

You mean imported. Imported semen. What fertilizes the other 25% of cows? So there's a special word that you say. Sorry, imported bull semen. imported bull semen that comes in vials, fertilizes dairy cows, but you need to be able to collect it.

And so you sell dummies, and you can look up, you know, dummies online, and you can buy dummy sows, for instance, that you can get pigs to mount, because you need pig semen to be imported as well. And it's really hard to collect, because you have to get literally in there, so you've got the dummy sow,

but you have to swoop in there at the last minute with your cup to collect it. And that's why it's much more convenient to use a dummy, because with an actual sow, it moves around the pen quite a lot, and so you have to chase it around, whereas with a dummy, it stays still, at least. But this is how a lot of farm animals are inseminated.

Yeah. There is another method, which is that some males then mount other males, and the other males are called teasers, okay, and then they're interrupted at the last minute by a man with a rubber tube. Oh my God, who volunteers for that job? I don't think, I think it's paid.

Guys, we need to wrap up in a sec. Have you got anything before we do? I have something on sheep breeding. Alexander Graham Bell was into sheep breeding. He noticed that some sheep have more nipples and others. And he tried to systematically breed sheep with each other to get more nippled sheep. And he wrote a paper in science in 1904

called the multi-nippled sheep of Ben Bray. okay and he managed to eventually they don't talk about this when they're talking about the phone do they he eventually yielded five and six nippled sheep and he thought that if they have more nipples they'd be more fertile but he was wrong about that they just had more of nipples everyone

everyone knows the first phone conversation don't they you know Dr Watson come here I want you but no one recorded what came next which is I want you to read this paper I've done about nipples on sheep All right, should we wrap up, guys? Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us

about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy. Amphora, Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Shazinski. You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yeah, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. or you can go to our website. No Such Thing as a Fish.com. We have all of our previous episodes up there. We also have a link to our new book, the book of the year, which is being released November 2nd.

It's out, in fact, by the time you're listening to this. And we're about to give one away to one of the members of the audience because we asked them to send in a fact at the beginning of this show. And Andy, you've picked a winning fact. Yes, this fact comes from Karris Rubinzer.

I hope I've pronounced your name right, and it's that. The inventor of the bra had a pet whip it named Clitoris. So. And just one last thing before we wrap up. This is such a cool venue. We're so proud to have come up here to play it. We've heard so much about it from our friends who have been here as well,

and it has lived up to what they said. And you'll notice that on your seats, you would have been given this thing, which is save bath from being boring. Comedia is looking for crowdfunding to make sure that it can be secured as a community-led place. So please, if you can, go to this crowd funder page, help it out because

it's my first time to bath, but I do know from doing comedy that venues like this do get shut down and they're really important and they're so good and that's how comedy in this country and it's the best country in the world for comedy still exists. So please go to this

and help them out. We will be back again next week with another episode. Guys, thank you so much for being here tonight. We'll be out of the back, signing books and so on. We'll see you then. Goodbye.