No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Chocolate Train

Episode Date: March 22, 2019

Live from Uffculme, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss chocolate gramophones, licking your own forehead and Icelandic sheep dating.

Hi everyone, before we start this week's show, which was recorded live in Ofcom. We want to let you know how you can come to one of our live events. Yes, we have a website. It has all of the places that we're going to be in the upcoming months. Some of them will be in the UK and Ireland. For the rest of you living in Europe, we are going to Gothenburg, Stockholm, Oslo, Amsterdam, Grenigan, Geneva, Copenhagen and Antwerp. And this is very exciting. We've just announced two more dates. Can you guess where they are, Dan? You know where they are Yes, I know That was me trying to fake not knowing It's Paris and Berlin Paris and Berlin Wow

Yeah, we're so excited Those tickets are going to go on sale This Friday You can go to no such thing as a fish.com We have a link to the British, Irish and then all of these amazing European dates going as well Do go for the Europe ones as quick as you can

By the way if you're living there Because they are going quick We expect Paris and Berlin We'll sell out in minutes Is my prediction Well, let's see if that prediction comes true Daniel, but no matter what, we hope to see you there. Anyway, hope you enjoy this week's show. Again, recorded live in Offcom. Okay, on with the show. On with the podcast.

Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from Upcom. Anne Schreiber and I am sitting here with Anna Chisinski, Andrew Hunts of 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 no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, James. Okay, my fact this week is that there is a man in Nepal who can lick his own forehead.

And the reason I'm laughing to myself is because I know what he looks like. So if you're at home listening to this, then do Google it. And if you're in off-com sat in front of us, then here's what he looks like. We told you at home it was worth Googling. It's so weird.

What's so bizarre about him is that when you hear you can look his own forehead, you immediately think, oh my God, he makes his tongue really long. And little do you know, he makes his face really tiny. Yes. Well, it's a little bit of both, because he does have a really long tongue. You can sometimes see pictures where he sticks it out. It's really, really long. He's basically, he's a 35-year-old bus driver from Erla Bari in Nepal,

and he says that he tries not to do this too often because he scares the children. Well, he says he's not been allowed to do it at work When he's on the bus He says A, the children get scared And then he talks about adults He says even adults can lose consciousness When they watch me in action But can you guys lick your nose with your tongue?

No It's quite rare, isn't it? Oh, wow Wow Again, just Google pictures of people licking the nose with a tongue And you'll see what that is I didn't realize it had a name, so 10% of people can do it, including me. It's called the Galen sign.

Didn't know how to have a medical term. Have you ever tried doing the full forehead? I think I have to work up to that. It's really interesting, though, because it... So this guy is kind of gurning, are we saying? It's, you know, gurning the sport, where you scrunch your face into an amazing shape and you surprise people and win awards. You know, gurning the sport.

Gerning, yeah. The Olympic sport of Gerning, yeah. So at the British and world, obviously, gurning championships, because nowhere else does it, make-up is banned, but manipulation of false teeth, if you have them, is permitted. And it really helps if you don't have many teeth. So this guy in Nepal has only one tooth, I believe. Oh, has he?

Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, okay. And there's a Gurning World Champion called Peter Jackman, not to be confused, of Peter Jackson. who he's won the championships four times and he had all of his teeth removed so that he could improve his technique. Yeah. Really? Yeah.

There's an organiser that said age definitely helps in the competition because your skin is much looser when you age, it allows you to manipulate and crease up in ways. So you have an advantage if you're older. And I should say this world championship or British championship for the whole world, but only British people take part. And in fact, only people from Cumbria take part. Even the people of Devon look down on the... I'm joking, I'm joking. You know, in 2014, the two runners-up were both Swedish. Oh, are they?

I didn't know that. But it takes place in the Egremont Crab Fair. And they say it's been happening since 1267. The fair, it seems, might have been happening since then on and off because we know that King Henry III granted a royal charter for a fair. We think probably the Gurning hasn't taken part for all that type. Although there is a newspaper article in 1852 that says it's an ancient practice. So it has definitely been going on for a long time.

Yeah, I was reading an obituary of a guy called Lenny Wells. This is an obituary in The Guardian. He died in the year 2000. And he was known for Gurning in various TV adverts. He was very good at Gurning. It said, although he was also a keen rugby fan and devoted family man, it is for the unique rubberiness of his lips and cheeks that he will be most fondly remembered.

and there was one then they were interview people who'd taken part in contest with him and one of the guys said this one time Gordon Blacklock another competitor I'm sure you've heard of another Gurner Gordon Blacklock was a head on points

but then Lenny stepped up and pulled a face like a rhinos anus I tell you Is that a technical term? I tell you the audience went berserk Oh that love. Love to hear the commentators. I'm like,

oh, it's coming up the back like a rhinos anus! There was, in fact, the, I think the greatest champion of all time is Anne Woods, who has won the woman's gurning title 28 times. That's 28 years of gurning.

She missed one crab fare when she was expecting a baby. Probably pulling a lot of faces then as well, I guess, right? And in 2010, she collapsed after four minutes of intensive gurning and had to be rushed to hospital. So there are injuries that happen in this sport.

And actually, Anne Woods died quite recently as well. She died in 2015. And I read her obituary. And it said that she always entered the gurning arena to the tune of Your Gorgeous by Baby Bird. Arenas. Like, how many people are going to watch this thing? We've mentioned before Mr. Ugly from Zimbabwe. So there's an annual Mr. Ugly competition in Zimbabwe, which is very similar to the, to the

earning. And in 2015, there was a huge controversy because the guy who won it, the runner up, who was a previous winner and had been thinking he would win it again, the runner up said, it's not fair. His ugliness is based on the fact he's got a lot of teeth missing, whereas my ugliness is natural. And the winner said, you know, yeah, suck it up. You know, he said, they should just accept, I am uglier than there. He can only suck it up if he's no teeth. Get your teeth removed. Have some commitment. Like, you know, aforementioned champion. Get them out. On tongs, because this guy can lick his own forehead,

there's some new research has found that weightlifters have stronger tongues and runners have better tongue endurance than normal people. Wow. This is amazing. Why? I've actually never watched weightlifting. Do they have a little tiny little weight that they lift with their tongue while they're doing the big ones with their arms?

What they thought is perhaps it's because you're working out more, all of your muscles are stronger. But actually having good tongue muscles is really, important because it keeps your airways open. So if your tongue is stronger, then it means it keeps your airways open and maybe it's better for running, better for keeping more oxygen in your body, stuff like that. I think it's a very specific thing, the way you pronounce tongue from your part of the world, and it just takes so long to get over the fact that it's tong and you're just thinking, well, my fire tongs are perfectly strong. I don't know why. Do you genuinely own fire tongs?

Of course, I don't have a fire. I just jab the radiator with them sometimes. Giraffes have good tongues, really good tongues. Their tongues are half a metre long. What? And at least, I think. Half a metre? So that's what? That's longer than my forearm.

Wow. How much do we see? Is that outside or is that... No, no, it's not outside. So quite a lot of it goes back into them, I think. But, you know, there's a decent amount outside. Have you seen a giraffe, you know, lick a leaf off a tree? Can they...

Can they look their ears? Yes, they can't look there is. Yes. And they're also black or purple their tongues. And they think that's because... they spend 12 hours a day with their tongues out and they would be sunburned on them if they didn't have sun protection.

So that's why they have black tongues. Wow. I'm just really self-conscious about saying that word now. Oh no. There was a doctor in the, I think the 19th century. There was a big debate over how you could prove that someone had died and there was a, I think he was French doctor called Laborde.

And he said that you can save people who only appear to be dead. You know, they've fallen into. a swoon or they might be unconscious but they are revivable. And he said the way to do it is to pull their tongue rhythmically for three hours. He could do that for two hours and 59 minutes and then they go he swore that he'd done this. He said he'd saved people doing it. He said he'd saved an unconscious cow and a bulldog that had swooned and he invented a tongue pulling machine which was you know which pull the machine and there was an assistant whose job was to turn the crank and pull the tongue

for three hours. Oh my God. I know so he he resigned because he was bored and he was replaced with an electric tongue pulling machine so. Wow. There's a hockey player called Brad, an ice hockey player called Brad Marchand and he has been ordered to stop licking his opponents. He's done this more than once but the most recent person he licked was opposition player Ryan Callahan. And Marchant has been described in his official. biography as the little ball of hate. Is that the...

Sorry, the liquor or the lickie? That's the liquor who was that. And basically it's his job to kind of start fights and stuff like that happens in hockey. But the guy who he licked said, I don't know what the difference is between spitting in someone's face and licking it, which is quite a good point, I think. And then the person who did the licking said, well, he punched me four times in the face.

It's six and half a dozen, isn't it? Do you know how you stick your tongue out when you concentrate or you may have done as a child? Some people do, yeah. I definitely did. And it's much more common in children. And I was reading an article by a neurologist who said he thinks he knows why we do this.

And it's partly because if you're really concentrating, number one is because it stops the distraction of taste or texture within your mouth. So if you just hang your tongue out, I guess it's not really touching anything. It's not tasting or touching anything. But number two, he said, it's because breastfeeding babies stick their tongue out

to push their mother's nipple away when they're full. And so that's what we're doing. When we're concentrating, we're saying, leave me alone. I've got stuff to be getting along with now. Wow. I'll be honest.

Next time I stick my tongue out, I won't be able to concentrate quite as much as I could be fun. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that in 1903, you could buy a gramophone record made of chocolate,

which you could play a song on and then eat the disc. and somehow we have lost this technology. But I think the technology was never great to start with, was it? You could play a song on a piece of chocolate. That much is true. You could play a couple of times. I mean, they weren't great turntables either

because they were designed for chocolate records. So this was made by a company called the Stolverk Chocolate Company, and there were tiny turntables and small chocolate records. It was for children, basically. It was a children's toy. And you could play the song a couple of times, and then when you got bored, you could just eat the song. And I think, did they put,

put foil on the chocolate, didn't they? And it was the foil that they put the ridges in, which acted like the record. And then you could peel it, because you don't want to be, you know, degrading your chocolate as you play a record. No, quite. And you say that it was a children's toy.

It was advertised in the French magazine La Natured, and it specifically said, this is not a toy. What kind of miserable person do you have to meet to pretend your chocolate gramophone record is not a toy? Did it take off? No. No.

Presumably you don't have any chocolate records. Did you think you were the only one in the world who hadn't picked up on this technology? It's got a massive hot chocolate record collection. I'm from Australia. Maybe it hasn't reached yet. Maybe we're getting it next year. But, you know, sometimes in the annals of history,

you can have 50 years of chocolate records. You know, the Beatles were released on chocolate, and then it goes. I think it might have been sort of a limited edition thing. And they tried lots of other chocolate-based things, this company. So they also produced Stolvark. they produced a chocolate clock and a chocolate train.

Which I think train was a toy. Not a full-on train. People weren't going around in chocolate trains from Edinburgh to London. What a whimsical world we could have lived in. I'm afraid there's more delays. Someone's eaten the mode of transport again. There must be a better way.

All the sleepers are twixes and there are kick-hats over the main rails. and there are little Malteseers puffing out of the train. Oh, nice. Okay. It's nice. We all want to live in this world now, don't we? Yeah, very cool. It's not real.

It's not real. But there were toy trains. I'm not quite sure how they worked. But yeah, a chocolate clock, I don't understand how that works, because that's not very useful clock. That's not going to last a long time. No. So this is why they didn't take off.

Actually, I didn't even look at what the oldest piece of chocolate still existing is. There must be some. They keep finding bits of chocolate from the Antarctic expeditions. The Antarctic expeditions, just back to gramophones, there is a gramophone that still is in Antarctica. It's been there for over 100 years.

Scott of the Antarctic took two gramophones with him. Two gramophiles. Yeah. He was a fucking idiot, wasn't he? I mean, he claimed to feel sorry for him. Wow. I can imagine them in the tent at the end. It's like, we're so cold and hungry.

Can we eat the gruel? Grammar phone? You brought the chocolate one, right? What was he thinking? He brought hundreds of records. That's amazing. Yeah, and so the idea was, because obviously they were in the hut for ages.

So Sherry Gard, who wrote The Worst Journey in the World, he said that after dinner every night, that's when the records would go on. And one was left there, and one made it back. I've seen it. There was an exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London. I went to see it. And they've actually made an album of the best of song,

that went along as a record. But they couldn't play the records when they were out in the middle of nowhere because they had no power. No, because they had Scott's hut. So it was in the hut. So it was before they went probably out to the middle of nowhere.

You could have wind-up gramophones as well, can you? Oh, the wind-in. Okay. The captain notes, I know your hands are very cold, but would you mind taking them out of those gloves to wind up the grammar phone just one last time? And then I promise you can go outside. So this is quite a cool thing.

You know the new five-pound notes, the plastic ones? Yes. You can play a gramophone record with a five-pound note. As the stylist, do you mean? Yeah. So you set the record spinning. There's footage online at someone doing it, and it doesn't produce a brilliant sound,

and you need an amplifier and stuff, but you can do it. You can probably use that five-pound note to buy an actual stylus. Do you know that? I couldn't believe this. There were basically iPods in the 1920s. I don't believe that either.

Well. The word basically did a huge amount of heavy lifting there, isn't it? What did they have? These were things called meiky phones or mickey phones. They were little music players. 180,000 of them were produced in Switzerland. And they were, basically, they were tiny little music players, like gramophones or phonographs,

that you could carry around in your handbag, and they measured two by four inches. And the only tiny thing about them was that they measured two by four inches when they were packed up, but then whenever you got somewhere, it was quite a complex assembly job to build a 10. 10-inch record player, so it couldn't play straight away. But even so, these portable...

That's really cool. Tiny old music players. Very cool. Yeah, very cool. Edison, when he sort of came up with the phonograph, which was the precursor to gramophone records, I guess, he thought that their main use would be, or one of their main uses would be phonographic books,

which will speak to blind people, he said, without any effort on their part. It's basically a podcast. It's an audio book or a podcast, yeah. Wow. The phonograph recorded as well, that as playing. I think that was a point of that. And one of the main things they used it for was to record the last words of the dying.

Wow. That's so much pressure on someone who's dying to nail your last words. And then what if you don't go for another hour? You just got to sit silently going. It would also make you very paranoid, wouldn't it? If you just felt a little bit peaky and then your wife started getting the gramophone rigged up in the corner. Honestly, darling, it's a cold. Okay, we need to move on to our next fact.

It is time for fact number three, and that is Chisinski. My fact this week is that in the early 1700s, the most popular British guide to the history, language, and culture of Taiwan was written by a man who didn't speak the language, had never been there, and knew nothing about it. This was in 1704, and I'd say Taiwan, so it was Formosa then, which was what it was called, and it was called the History of Formosa, and it described in huge detail the practices that these people who would have seemed so foreign to the people of Britain,

the practices that the Formasan people got up to, their language and everything. It was written by a guy called George Salmanetsar, and it was completely fake. He was a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Frenchman who'd never left Europe. And to this day, we don't really know what his background was or what his real name was, because George Salmanatza was a fake name. and he just made this up. He convinced them that his pale skin and his appearance of being like French

and his French accent were because in Formosa, the upper classes live in underground palaces so they never see the sun, which though he'd never got... That's a good excuse though, isn't it? It's really quick thinking, yeah. So he had this big showdown

with the Royal Society of Scientists and they were all questioning him for ages about, right, so okay, if you really are from Formosa, what about this? So Edmund Haley of Comet fame asked him, how long does the sun shine down your chimneys? And that's a really revealing question.

But no, come on. Like, if you went on holiday to Spain and they said to you, yeah, but Andy, are you really from England? How long does the sun shine down your chimney? I'd be stuffed, wouldn't I? Exactly. Yeah.

So how is he supposed to know it? Because that answer would have revealed if he knew where it was on the planet. Did he have an answer to it? He said, we have bent chimney so the sun doesn't shine down them. That's a good answer. Brilliant.

Spirled, wasn't it? Spirled chimneys, yeah. Yeah, he's an amazing character. He said of Formosa that the men walk naked except for a gold or silver plate to cover their privates. He said that they executed murderers by hanging them upside down

and shooting them full of arrows and annually they sacrificed the hearts of 18,000 young boys to gods and priests to eat their bodies. Yeah, which people did say to him if that is true and they sacrifice that. number of people, you're not going to have any people left on this small island. And he didn't have a

good answer to that. But he said, Formosan's always sleep upright. And he actually then saw this through because he had to live the habits of them. So he must have regretted that. He used to, I think he sort of sat. So he said a lot of Formosan sleep standing up. And then he used to leave a candle on in his room so everyone could see that overnight he was still erect in his chair because he was a Formosum, so he couldn't sleep in a normal bed. Bizarly, he said that, you said that, you know, they all eat food raw, things like fish raw. And he was saying that Fomosa was part of Japan, which is a bit weird because it was actually belonged to China then.

But he said it was part of Japan. So that's strange that he kind of predicted sushi 300 years before it happened. So he got basically Famosa was his third go at trying to convince people he was from somewhere else. So he was originally from France. His first bash at it was saying he was Irish. So he would go around saying I'm Irish. But the thing is everyone knew the Irish. So they'd be like, oh, so what do you?

He was like, I have no idea. So he quickly, that stuff up on him. Oh, have you been to the dog and duck in Dublin? Then he said he was Japanese. Right. And then that failed on him as well because Japan was getting too much. People had been traveling there too much. He needed to find somewhere else.

Formosa was the third one that he finally landed on, which was useful to him. And at the time in Formosa, there was a lot of Jesuits, Catholic missionaries, and they knew everything that was happening there. And so when he came along, they were going, no, no, no, really, that doesn't happen. but weirdly because no one trusted Catholics at the time they all trusted this one guy over all the Jesuits who were saying no this is bullshit well at least the reputation of the church has recovered

so that's something but we should emphasise that this was a big deal this book he wasn't just a weirdo with a pamphlet this was a book that was so believed that he lectured who was invited to lecture on Formosan culture and language at Oxford University so he invented the entire language

alphabet and all completely new alphabet, a linguists studied it to see how consistent it was and agreed it was definitely a language to the extent that it remained in lots of language books until the mid-19th century and people were still saying this is... People weren't doing GCSE Formosa, were they? Can I tell you quickly just something amazing about Formosa itself? So Formosa, now Taiwan. If you were in Formosa, Taiwan, and you dug through the ground and you dug all the way through

the earth onto the other side, the antipode as it's called. you would land in a place called Formosa, Argentina. Is that right? No. By total coincidence. Not by a coincidence, surely. By coincidence. Yeah, there's no relation that as far as we can see

between the two places that you would land. Yeah, there's a place in Argentina called Formosa. I mean, let's all definitely Google this after the show. That is incredible. If that remains in the episode, that means it is true. And that is unbelievable. If not, you're welcome, everyone. an exclusive.

It would be around Argentina, so that does make sense. So, we're in Devon at the moment, and it seems like Devon is a bit of a hotbed for absolute fantasists. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so, Andy, you definitely know about Tuesday Lob Sang Rampa, don't you? He was from Devon.

Was he? Yeah, so he was, he did a fraud saying he was a Tibetan monk, and that was still happening in the 1950s, he was saying that. He said that he came from Tibet, he made up a language. When they gave him actual Tibetan and said, why do you not recognize this?

He said that he'd been so badly tortured during the war, he'd blocked out all knowledge of the Tibetan language. And then afterwards, when they realized he wasn't actually Tibetan, he said, oh no, no, no, actually I was possessed by the spirit of a Tibetan monk after I fell out of a tree in London while trying to take a photograph of an owl. Yep.

He was, his name was Cyril Hoskins. and he was an unemployed surgical trust manufacturer from Devon who claimed to be an incredibly ancient and powerful Tibetan monk. He wrote 15 books, he wrote Travels with the Lama and Lama as in Dalai Lama. And then he wrote one living with the Lama, which was dictated to him by his cat, Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers. And then he moved to, he later, he moved to Ireland

and then Canada blatantly for tax reasons. He was great. Yeah, he was great. Yeah, and then back in the 18th century, you had someone called Princess Caribou, who was also from Devon. Okay, and she turned up at someone's house near Bristol, speaking a fake language,

and said she was from somewhere in the east. And again, she was from Devon, and she made the whole thing up. She was from, I looked into it, I spotted that as well today. She was from somewhere that is a 30-minute drive from where we are right now, a little place called Withridge.

Oh, hello. Yeah? Well, even the people of Cumbria looked down on the people of Witherage. But it was a sort of tradition that travel writing merged into fiction from about 1600 to 1900. You couldn't quite tell.

There was basically three categories. There was Gulliver's Travel Style, this is a fictional travel account, and then there were proper travel journals. Then there were loads of people who were just kind of making stuff up but pretending it was true. And there was the travels of Sir John Mandeville.

Actually, so this was much earlier, but he was almost the precursor to all of these. These appeared in about the 1360s, and they were taken as legit travel books for over 300 years. So Christopher Columbus used them as a complete reference book, like all the great travellers of later ages did. And they covered China, India, present-day Indonesia, and they told these amazing stories of, like, Ireland's first-hand account

of people who had the bodies of humans and the heads of dogs or people whose mouths were so small that they had to suck all their food through reeds because they just had a tiny hole for a mouth. And he said, all the Mongols eat their fathers as soon as they die. Okay, great. That was the thing that Salmanazar claimed.

He claimed that he said he was divorced and that he was a reformed cannibal because in Formosa, husbands were allowed to eat their wives if there was adultery that had happened. If their wives were committed adultery, there was always a lot of cannibalism going on in these stories, weren't there?

It was like the idea of weird foreigners would eat humans. Although the guy who you're talking about, John Mandeville, he found one group of people whose only source of nourishment was the smell of apples. And he also found, he said that in Ethiopia, all the people had only one foot, but that foot was so large

that it shadowed them from the sun. Oh, cool. How does that work? Wow. They would lie on their back and hold their massive foot. Oh, wow. It was awful when they wanted to go bowling. That's pretty cool.

We should evolve like that. This is slightly off topic, but P.L. Travers, the writer of Mary Poppins, she was into... She had one massive foot, isn't she? She was into a lot of esoteric stuff, and she went on a trip at one point with a spiritual guru who she looked up to, where they were searching the earth for a giant footprint that was said to be made by an intergalactic. giant who used Earth as a stepping stone as he was hopping through the universe. And she was convinced there was a giant footprint that would be... Where was she writing?

Sorry? When was she writing? What, 30s, 40s, 50s? Yeah. But she was part of a very big spiritual, very lobsam rampa kind of movement. People believed any shit, didn't they? Until almost now. Yeah, you're right.

Everyone's making really fact-based sensible decisions these days. Thank God we've come so far. It's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that ahead of breeding season, Iceland publishes an illustrated catalogue of the country's most eligible sheep. Yeah, so this is called the Ram Registry. It's an annual catalog that they make available. It starts online, then they do a physical publication.

And it profiles in the last year that's gone 44 Rams. They do color photos. They do pedigrees breeding. It's all these stats. it tells you everything you need to know. It's a 52-page catalog. They have an obituary section for Rams that have passed away who were...

I think if Tinder had an obituary section, it would be more interesting. Yeah, it's true, but it has stuff like how many they're expected to sire. It's just the ultimate guide that you need for when it's breeding season you want, I want that, and that's how they spend their money. This thing is 20 years old, this registry.

It's well established. There's a ram in this year is called strumpur. And strumpur, they say, the farmer who owns him, says strumpur, he is aware of his environment and knows exactly what's expected of him. He doesn't call himself a stripper. He calls himself an exotic dancer, actually. But they get graded for leadership as well. So there are these sheep which are called flock leaders,

and they automatically act as leaders to the rest of the flock. and they, that's very important because they go off into the mountains and you need a ram in charge who's sort of, you know, when the weather's going to be bad, they can foretold the weather, so when they think the weather's going to be bad,

they lead the flock to shelter and safety. Wow. And the sheep, which are particularly intelligent subbreed are called Icelandic leadership. Okay. Because they show leadership. I don't think that's why, but it's a very nice coincidence, isn't it?

But the thing is, unlike day snaps, they never get to meet the lady sheep today because basically it's a sperm donor kind of thing so even when they're swipes on they're just like oh no all you're going to get is my sperm oh my god tinder doesn't run like that i've never used tinder but uh is that not how it works i used to but i never just popped my sperm in the post

of the person who i swiped right on me i think that might be a relief for a lot of women on tinder thank god a cup of sperm She's a picture of me with a lot of stamps. I'm ready. First-class male. Wait, is that first-class male both ways around? But they're into sheep, aren't they, in Iceland?

They have three times as many sheep as people, and they have this amazing ceremony every winter. So basically the sheep in Iceland, they have this weird farming system where all different farmers, different herds of sheep, are free to roam with each other up on the mountains. So they all intermingle, which is a massive hassle when it comes to bringing them back down to put them in your pen

because they're all mixed up. And so they just recruit everyone. So if you're a tourist in Iceland at, you know, pen time. And it's got a name, I think it's called Retire Time. And then you go and you help round up sheep. And you have to shimmy them down the mountain. You put them into this big enclosure with a central bit in the middle. And then they've got little marks on their ears that show which farmer they belong to.

And if you see a mark, you grab it by the ear or by the scruff of its neck. you lift it up and you chuck it into the bit of that enclosure. You lift it up and chuck it. You lift up and throw it. Anna's very strong. The sheep are really, like they're really perfect in Iceland, aren't they? They don't have any kind of other genes? They're like, they've been there since the Vikings and they've never had...

All right, Captain Arian over there. No one sullied these jeans. Well, this is what they think. They think that because they've been there for the whole time, they're not sullied by any other blood. In 1878, they imported a single English ram into Iceland, and they had to kill 60% of Icelandic flocks. What? Because they spread disease and parasites to the flocks.

English tourists, best of the world. They love eating the sheep as well, obviously, because, you know, cheap are eaten. But there's a thing called Zwith, which is half a sheep's head. That's a delicacy. and they make sour testicles and brain jam. Well, so I found out the best way to eat the boiled sheep's brain, which is something that is a real delicacy. And this is because there's an MP.

I think he might have been the foreign minister or the home secretary or something. He's a guy called, why didn't I practice this name before I came on stage? He's called Osser Scarfioienton. Osser Scarfioienton. Well, I think he's safely anonymous. That's the main thing.

He's not sat at a home going, why they're talking about me, is he? No, he's not. Wouldn't want to be that guy, who were he is. But he was, in 2013, he was served some sheep's brain at a party, and he said,

this is amongst the best boiled sheep's head I've ever had. They stuck to my gum, as proper heads should. And so that's what they're supposed to do. They stick to the gum. And then he was asked, really, but was it the best?

And he was like, okay, look, it wasn't the very best. The head should have been more fermented because we from the West Fjords prefer our sheep's head so fermented that we can drink the eye out of the eye socket. Oh. So that's what you're going for.

Wow. Goodness. In 2018, two men in Iceland summoned the police and the Coast Guard after they'd seen a polar bear on a peninsula. And that's obviously incredibly dangerous because they really don't come near. He was very often. Eventually, after a lengthy search, the search was called off

and the men admitted it may just have been a large sheep. It's just a lot closer than they thought. It's understandable. I know how to artificially inseminate a cow based on researching for this podcast. Cool. So this is obviously about pairing sheep up with each other so they can mate properly. And dairy cows, you do the same thing. So I think 75% of dairy cows in this country,

when they have to be inseminated, they get inseminated but just by semen rather than the actual bull. And for some reason, I found myself reading this really in-depth farmer's guide to how to do it. And what I didn't realize was, so you get a seaman gun, which you put the semen in. Imagine you bring your semen gun to a gun fight. Oh. You bring your semen gun to the insemination fight,

but what you do is you have to... So there are two entries into a cow. So it's marching with humans. Yeah. You've got the... Front. Oh, sorry. There are three now.

Sorry, there are three. We're in Devon. Something tells me you're not the biggest expert in this room on the number of ways into a cow. I know the people have never known all these secret ways, but there were two entries... There were two entries into the back of a cow, officially. And so, you know, one is the rectum, as we all have.

Stop, Professor, let me write this down. Children, will you be quiet? You've got the rexom, and then you've got the raxon, And then you've got the sex tubes and they're different... All right, the cervix. But what you do is, amazingly, when you're inseminating a cow, you obviously have to stick the gun in the cervix. But the way you navigate the gun into the uterine horns, as they're called,

is you have to put your other arm that's not holding the gun into the rectum. And so you... It's so amazing. And they say you shove your arm into the rectum, insert your arm into the rectum, get someone else to hold the cow's tail aside while you do this. That would be a bald farmer who tried using one foot to pin the cow's tail. This is the worst game of twister I've ever played. It says left hand six tubes.

Anyway, look, this lesson isn't going to end. So you essentially use your rectum arm to navigate your semen gun, which is in the vaginal canal, and you push it through. So you've got your arm in the rectum, and it's pushing against the other canal so that it gets into the uterus, and it's called recto-vaginal insemination. And that's lesson over. Enjoy. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, please don't but if you insist

I'm on at Shriverland Andy at Andrew Hunter Webb James I'm James Harkin and Chazinski The authorities should email Yeah

You can email podcast At QI.com Yep Or you can go to our group account Which is at no such thing Or our website No Such Thing is a fish dot com We have all of our previous episodes up there

We have links to our upcoming tours We have YouTube videos of Anna Showing How to Inseminate Thank you so much. Good night!