No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Criminal In A Fabulous Hat

Episode Date: April 27, 2018

Dan, James, Andy and special guest Original Elf Molly Oldfield discuss blue whale birthing, ceramic pillows and how to cast for a police line-up.

Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and it's the original QI elf and author of the new children's books, Wonders of the World's Museums, Molly Oldfield. 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, Molly. My fact is, blue whales are born backwards, tail first, so they don't drown during birth. Yeah, that's extraordinary.

What I think we can tell is that you are the original QI elf because that's typical QI fodder, isn't it, blue whales? Oh, we've got to love a bit of a blue whale. Yeah. It's actually really weird. I googled it to see what they look like. So obviously, the tail's coming out first. And then I thought, okay, what's it coming out of?

I know it sounds ridiculous. their mammals right. So am I allowed to say vagina? Oh yeah. And I was like, do whales have them? What? Obviously they do, right? Yeah, yeah. So, but we spent like so long at QI. I think I spent about 12 years looking up. In fact, James and I were thinking of writing a book, the QI book of genital ignorance. Do you remember that? I don't remember that. That's a great title. It sounds like a great idea. Yeah. Backing off from this project period. But anyway, yeah, so I googled this and There is an expert of whale vaginas, and the scientific American have written an article about her.

She's called Dr. Sarah Messick, and it's really hard to study them, obviously. So what she does is she looks at Victorian drawings. She's got a freezer full of them. She asks people if they ever find one. I'm sorry. A freezer full of Wales vaginas. Yeah, exactly.

Not drawings, the real things. And she also... That must be a big fridge. Well, right, a blue whales want to stay big. You could walk inside it. And the strange thing with every single whale... But how do you fit that in your freezer? You need a walk-in freezer.

You could make the freezer out of the vagina, couldn't we? Also, the other thing she does is she gets people who are like, well-experts but love diving to like swim down and try and like put little cameras on the whale so that she can CT scan them. And she said that is a total gauntlet in there. Our very first whale vagina, when we open it up, there were so many structures in there

that we couldn't figure out how a sperm would possibly be able to swim from one end to the other. So basically, well, inside, they've got like flaps, folds, blind alleys and funnels and a dizzying maze for sperm. So the reason for this possibly is, is that because they're in water, they don't want the way, they don't want water going up there. So, you know, that's a way to keep them out. Keep the water out, have lots of little sort of blind alleys and funnels and mazes. Oh, okay, right. But they don't really know why?

But how about with the birth then? Why is it? Because if they came out at tail first. Yeah. Well, it's so that as they're being born, they can still breathe. because if they came out head first then they would just drown. But surely whales breathe there, right? They come up to the surface to breathe.

Yeah. So if they're being born underwater, they won't be able to start breathing whichever end comes out first. So what happens is often with whales, they'll have a load of mates of the mother. Midwives. Yeah, they're known as midwives, right? And they'll kind of take the baby up

so it can have its first breath to make sure that it doesn't just drown there. And also their umbilical cord is like perforated. And so it kind of comes apart really quickly at these. Cool. That's amazing. Have you heard about whale placenta? No? It just floats off looking like a big plastic bag in the water. It was very exciting recently.

One floated past Hawaii, and everyone in Hawaii gathered at the water's edge to watch it go. Other animals are not fish it? I would imagine. I think it probably becomes food for other animals, yeah. Yeah. She said to me, can blue whales talk to killer whales? What do you think? No.

No. I'd say... Different language. I'd say yes. I'd say you could sort of shout in blue whale and put on a killer whale accent. Yeah. Or you could get the gist. You'd be like, I think they want to eat me.

Doss, squids, pour favor. That kind of thing. Yeah. But a killer whale isn't a whale. Yeah, right. It's a dolphin. So it makes more like clicking, whirring noises. And blue whale obviously makes deep.

singing and noises but I don't know because the killer whale they're called killer whales because they killed whales right they were originally called

whale killers and then they got flipped around Ah nice But humans humans can talk to other animals And other animals Can kind of communicate with each other We can talk to dogs kind of

We can talk so whoever we want Yeah Whether they understand us or not So a baby blue whale For its first year Gains 200 pounds every day Which is about my weight Wow

So it's like after day one, it's like I then go into the whale and then day two, another one of me and day three another one of me for a whole year until they're absolutely humongous. And that's all, is that all krill or do they get some sort of other food source from the mums? They mumps the milk? The milk have to make 200 litres of milk a day. Wow. That's a shitload. It's a very weird mental image, James. Can I just say a whale made up of 365 ewes all kind of tied together.

Imagine I'm Jonah. Yeah. Only baby whales like to eat me. Yeah. But they're doing it again and again. And I'm cloning myself, obviously, in this metaphor. How many years would it take to make up one blue whale? A lot.

So, for instance, an adult blue whale eats about four tons of krill a day. Okay. And by weight, that's the equivalent of eating 26,000 Greg steak bakes a day, which is one every three seconds. Oh, wow. What is a steak bake? I don't know. It's a glorious thing. It's like a sausage roll, but it's got a steak in it instead.

It's like a pasty. Right, got you. It's very nice. Yeah, but you wouldn't want to eat one every three seconds for the rest of your life. Would you go on with life if you had to do that? Yeah. So you don't get full because you've got a much bigger stomach. Yeah.

Like if your vagina's the size of a fridge, then your stomach's probably the size of, you know, maybe a whole warehouse full of fridges. Yeah. So you're not going to get full all the time with these steak bakes. And you've got a big mouth. You can eat more than one in time. You don't need to do the three second separation. I guess so. Yeah, it's funny as to imagine you, Daniel,

having to eat one every three seconds. Especially they feed in this, like, it's called the Blue Whales feed in the lunging position, which is actually the position of... Not the lunching position. The eternal lunching position. Yeah, that's the... You know, they've hung the Blue Well

and Natural History Museum from the ceiling. It's in the feed lunging position. So what they do is they like dive down and open their mouths and all the krill goes in and then they close their mouths and the baline like filters out the water and the krill stays inside like little peas. Right. I don't know if we've mentioned this on the podcast before,

but the blue whale in the Natural History Museum, the one that's made of the massive sort of like paper mashay. Do you remember that giant whale that they have? Oh, the model one, yeah. Yeah, the model one. So there's a trap door at the bottom of it. And builders, when they were making all the surrounding rooms and the whale itself, used to go in there for breaks.

And it's a bit of a time capsule now because inside there are still old, magazines. They're said to be a mattress because supposedly after late night parties, there were sneaky shag sessions going on inside the blue whale. We were told us by curators from there. Did you have to go in through the freezer size vagina? But yeah, inside the blue well, supposedly is a time capsule of newspapers and there might be a mattress in there and so on. But having sex inside a blue whale definitely happened in Gothenburg. And they also have a trapdoor and public was allowed to go inside, but they stopped it because they found a couple in the doing that.

Wow. Everything else I've got is very tame compared with this stuff. They had a cafe in the mouth of this one in Gothenburg. They used to have religious people would go there and tell the story of Jonah and the whale while having their coffee in their...

I'm in a whale of a time. You couldn't get it... You couldn't be swallowed and end up in the stomach of whale, could you? Because you'd be... No, because they can only eat krill, right? Yeah. They've got tiny throats.

Yeah, the size of a grapefruit we've said on QI, isn't it? But you could squeeze through size of a grapefruit. It's not going to be really solid, is it? It's going to be like mussely, but I reckon you could squeeze through. No? Imagine trying to eat a meal, though, that was trying to get through, that was too big. Imagine a lump of gristle that was trying to get into your stomach. It was too big.

I think you'd choke. Yeah, but it's better to have them helping you swallow it. The gristle, if you had food that helped you swallow it, that would make life a lot easier. If the Greg's steak bake wants to be eaten. It's crawling slowly down your throat. Like, get out! I don't like you. Come on, there's another of my buddy is two and a half seconds behind me.

Let's go, let's go, go, go. Okay, it's time to move on to fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that during the Qing Dynasty in China, when the weather got hot in the summer, people would swap their pillows for ceramic ones. Ceramic pillows. What an uncomfortable day it must have been the first day of using a ceramic pillow after having a lovely soft pillow. Do you think? I guess your pillow would be nice and cool, which is good.

which is the advantage of doing it. Well, we're in the hottest day of the year today, aren't we? This is going to go out in a few weeks when it's probably pissing it down again. But this is the hottest day of the year. This morning, when you're in bed, would you not have killed for a ceramic pillow. I would love the ceramic pillow right then. Actually, that would be awful. Imagine a pillow fight with a ceramic pillow fight.

You wouldn't want that. There was a pillow fight in 2015 between a load of army cadets in America. And they decided. for some reason, instead of having a normal harmless pillow fight that they put helmets in the pillows. And as a result, at least 30 cadets were injured, 24 suffered concussions. There were three broken arms, one broken neck and many missing teeth. One broken neck. That is bad.

I read about that. It's at West Point Military Academy. And it was this great tradition. It happened every year since 1897. And after 2015, they said, well, maybe no more of this. Isn't that crazy? That is. Pillow fights used to be used a lot for early cinema. There's a lot of examples of some of the early movies that were made.

Those black and white ones that are called, like the first example in 1897 was just called A Pillow Fight. And it's just people having a pillow fight. And then it was remade. Well, there was a follow-up called New Pillow Fight. What happened then? Yeah, it was just more, yeah, I guess, you know, the second installment. They didn't put helmets inside the pillow. No.

But what they, what they, what they, I read is the reason it was. very good for cinema is because you could see the fight starting small and feathers would come out and as the fight escalated and they got harder more feathers would come out so the audience were able to properly see the intensity of a fight as it got heavier and heavier it was just great for early cinema to have that as an effect of visual so yeah a lot of pillow fights in early cinema have you guys heard of a pillow fort uh that's a phrase yeah yeah where you build yourself you feel a fought out of pillows okay there is a park in america which is called fort pillow. That's his name. And it's named after a US and Confederacy General whose name was

Gideon Johnson Pillow. It's got enough... He's very comfy man. I can just imagine like putting my head down sleeping on his like fat tummy. Was he really fat? I don't know if he was fat or not. He was not a nice man. You wouldn't have wanted a couple. Yeah, no, he was a bad dude. But I don't think it's got anything to do with pillow forts and it's called Fort Pillow. What are the odds? I've been trying to find out The first use of the phrase pillow fort. To see if Fort Pillow predates it. I can't find it. Pillow, what a terrible name for a general.

General pillow. Was he general? Captain Pillow? He was a general. General. He was a Brigadier General. He was very senior in the army. I reckon it's his name that made him such an angry man. So I got this fact from the Christie's website, the auctioneers. There was an article about 100 things we learned from Christie's. I'll give you a few more of those before we go on to be the last.

Okay, cool, yeah. Napoleon was allergic to leather. In France, first edition comic books sell for much less than the original plates that we used to make them. That's a good fact, isn't it? And Andy Warhol once wrote in his diaries that Danny DeVito was so cute, we should all marry him. Wow. That is two pop culture names I did not expect to come together. DeVito and Warhol.

Davido? Is that how you just look at people who are slightly everywhere? Pillowy. That means like Tommy you'd sleep on. Tommy you'd sleep on, right. There was someone who, who was it, who slept on the stomach of? I know who it was. Was it Genghis Khan or someone? No, it was, I think it was Peter the Great.

That's right. Peter the Great used to use a young male secretary's stomach as a pillow. He preferred his wife, but if he was away traveling and his wife wasn't available, he had his bring in general pillow at once but you couldn't turn him over could you? Because if you turn over that person

you've got a bony back You've got a bum You could use the bum You just have to slid out of it No it's not ideal No but you would want The man's tummy It's different

It's different isn't it There's less going on in the stomach Rumbling if it's hungry Yeah that's true You don't be well fed Sorry where we talk What are we talking about? I mean, pillows a long time ago.

Yes, so Chinese people, they used to use ceramic pillows. Well, actually, James, they still do. I've got someone staying with me and she's from Singapore. And she said her aunt still uses a ceramic pillow. Cool. Is that right? Very cool. Just in the summer.

She stopped talking to her aunt recently, but... Following a pillow fight wear. But because they lived in small living spaces, they would be decorative as well. and they would be given as wedding gifts and they'd be kind of a sign of, you know, wishes for many happy years of marriage or offspring or whatever. Some of them were shaped. So there were lion-shaped ones which would scare off evil spirits, which is useful. There was some shape like frogs. And there was a fashion for some shape like sleeping children.

Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I think they thought that like pillows could commune between the spirit world and human world. So they'd put like children playing on them to like bring children into the family or specific. There's one in the Met in New York that's got a drawing of two boys playing in Pianese, which is apparently to ensure like baby boys and airs would come along. And there's one in the British Museum that is in the shapeful woman lying down with her head on a pillow. And yeah, on the concave bit of the woman around her hip where you'd put your head,

there's a lovely poem which says, The Wind rustles flowers under a snow-white moon. I read this, and I can't quite believe it, which is that in medieval times, pillows were really for people who were a bit weedy. they were only for the elderly or pregnant women. They still are actually. I sleep on a piece of two by four with nails stuck in it. You can take the man out of Bolton.

I do have a reason why you should throw your pillows away, James, and go back to that piece of two before with nails in it. Why is that, Andy? There was a study by the University of Manchester which took pillows which had been used for various length of time and they found several thousand spores of fungus per gram. of pillow. They found 47 different species of fungus, so that might be what you're sleeping on. Yeah, I read that a third of the weight of any pillow, if you've been using it for ages, is

dead skin. I think that's... Some people think that might be true, and some people think that might have been a rumour put about by pillow manufacturers. By big pillow. No, you would think, wouldn't you? And it's not just dead skin, it's also housemite corpses and housemite excrement and living housemites and everything. But if it was one third, third of an entire pillow. That's a lot of a pillow. You would think you could tell if just one end was just your skin. Yeah.

That's true. Mind you, but you sleep with pillowcases, right? So it doesn't all the gross stuff go on there and then you change it. And then you wash it. Wow. Who washes a pillowcase? If you put a pillowcase around a turd, it's still a turd, isn't it? It's still bad, yeah. That is true.

Hitler's pillowcase. I'm afraid we've reached the Hitler bit of the podcast. His pillowcase was not only monogram with his initials. It had an eagle. and a swastika on it. Yeah, it was auctioned in 2011, and a pillowcase on a sheet was offered £2,000. That's not much.

It's not, well... Come on, for Hitler's pillowcase. I didn't realize we had a collector in the room. I did a lot more for that. Okay. Do you want a random swastika fact? I got two, actually. One, the oldest bit of human writing ever found

that's got a swastika in it. And two, the word swastika is Sanskrit, and it means kind of lucky or fortunate. Yeah, it's Hindu symbol. The oldest writing, so that's the ancient Hindu, Indo-European... Sanskrit? Yeah. No, it's pre-Sanscript.

Yeah, it's proto-Sanscript, proto-European. You know, if you get to a hotel and you don't like your pillow, you can order a pillow menu? Not in all hotels. Not all hotels, but we've just finished a tour, and I don't think a single one of the hotels that we stayed in had a pillow menu. Yeah, sorry, I should have said certain hotels.

Provide a pillow menu. I've worked in hotels that had pillow. Really? Yeah, yeah. And it would be like, let's say you had an anti-alrogen pillow. You might have that. Or hard or soft or general pillow's tummy or whatever. I'd like one with an eagle and a swastika right, please.

Do you have one of those? Okay, it is time for fact number three. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that Oscar Wilde ate his books as he read them. This was, there was a book that was written by Thomas Wright called Built of Books, how reading defined the life of Oscar Wilde. In it, he reveals that as Oscar Wildwood's reading books, he would tear off the top corner of each page once he'd read it and eat it and then keep moving on.

It was just a habit of his that he did. Instead of having like a bookmark, right? I guess so, yes. You just go to wherever the chomp has been taken out of the corner. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, very clever. Why don't we all do that? Well, have you ever eaten paper?

Yeah. Do you like it? I don't mind it. It's not my favourite. It's no Greg steak bake. I think it's not that nice eating paper. I think in a small amount it's fine. I've been reading a lot on Oscar Wilde recently. That's one of the fun facts that I discovered. Eat the books. Is he read them? No, I didn't. It was the internet. He was reading it. Oh, if you're reading online, you have to take a bite. Oh, good. Very nice.

So there was an exhibition not too long ago, 2016 in Reading Prison where they showed all of the books that Oscar Wilde had while he was in prison. Eat him. And they did it. Yes. It's an empty exhibition. But basically when he was in jail, you weren't really allowed to have access to books,

but because he was such a prominent figure. He was the only one who was allowed. Basically, they have special dispensation for him, right? Yeah, he was allowed to keep his light on at night, longer than everyone else to keep reading. So what I like about it is that Reading Jail was the only reading jail. Wow. Oh, very nice.

Yes. I read that I'm a bit hazy on the details. I think he was allowed, it was technically a long letter that the governor of the prison allowed him to write because you were allowed to write a letter, but he was writing a huge long... Oh, so this is the writing part rather than the... Deep profundis, exactly, yeah.

So that was when he was in prison being allowed to write. Yes, and we see it interestingly as a letter because it starts dear Bozy to his lover who he ended up going to prison as a result of the relationship with. And Bozzi never read it until. after Oscar Wilde had died. It was never written to be a private letter to him done in long form. It was meant to be published,

and it was written and sent to a publisher as opposed to Boise himself. So, yeah, it was a good cheat that he pulled off. Oh, it's a huge sort of philosophic. It's his deepest work, I think, that Oscar Wilde did, just life and why he was in there and what people thought about sex and gender and all that sort of stuff. I think. And he's pretty rude about Bozzy in it, because Bozzi encouraged him to sue for libel

when Bozzi's father had been extremely rude about Wilde and public and said that the cost would be covered in all of this and as it was, the libel jar collapsed. Oscar Wilde was sued for what the time was gross indecency, being gay basically, and as a result went to prison. So he's quite annoyed with Boce in bits of it. You know that he, supposedly his last words were,

my wallpaper and I are fighting a jewel to the death. One or either of us has to go. So I tried to find out what his wallpaper was like. because it must have been pretty horrible, right? And did you find out? I didn't. But I found out that his wallpaper in his own house, back in London, because he died in Paris in a hotel, right?

He, in his own house, he had a drawing room with dragons painted all over a blue ceiling. And his wallpaper had peacock feathers. It was like peacock feathers all set into the plaster of the walls. And then I don't know whether the hotel in Paris where he died knows this because they've redecorated the Oscar World room where he died with the fresco of kissing peacocks and the other thing that's on show in there is the bill from his hotel stay

when he died and he never paid it and apparently he said I am dying above my means but I don't think that they were his final words were they the wallpaper thing so he had an operation just before he died and while he was recuperating he said that

last words and he said a few other last words as well saying I can't even afford to die and things like that But when he actually died, I don't think he was in any fit state to be making witticisms. James, you just ruined the whole lovely ending. It was definitely nearly his last. Yes. So I read a thing.

Andy and I were talking about this downstairs because there's a sense that it's been debunked this fact that I'm about to say. But I read it in a Christopher Hitchens article where he talks about the hidden sort of innuendos that was all the way through the importance of being earnest, the play. So Christopher Hitchin says that the word earnest used to be Victorian slang for if you were homosexual. So the idea was Oscar Wild loved the idea on the marquee. It was effectively saying the importance of being gay was his big sort of hidden message that was underneath it. And that seems to have been slightly been debunked. But it's interesting because Hitchens brings up a bunch of different examples where he ceded sort of hidden meanings within the play.

So for example, there's a character, minor character called Bloxham. Bloxham was famous at the time as an editor of a magazine, a gay magazine called The Chameleon, and he was a very controversial character. Cessaly was one of the characters' names of one of the high society girls. That, according to Hitchens, was vernacular for transvestite rent boys back in the day. And just lots of little bits of hidden hints towards the two main male characters having alternative lives that they're trying to hide was a suggestion that they were both themselves gay and if there was a missing handbag in...

A handbag. Very nice. Where and supposedly sort of meet-up places where guys would go to meet up, sort of illegally, would be places like lost property places and so on. So another thing that you were telling me, Dan, is about the Marquess of Queensbury. Yes, yeah. Well, my original fact for this was that to protest at the opening of the important of being earnest about the relationship of Oscar Wilde and Bosi, the marquis of the marquis of

Queensbury try to interrupt the premiere with a bouquet of phallic-shaped vegetables. Did he like throw them on stage or what did he do? That was his plan. He was going to go inside and he went with a posse. He went with like a crew, kind of how Connor McGregor recently threw stuff at a bus. That was kind of the marquee of Queensbury. Well, Conno McGregor didn't throw phallic vegetables, did he? No, they were phallic chairs. So do you have to like carve a phallic vegetable? No, I don't think so.

But I, so I think he definitely did take along vegetables. He took along a basket of vegetables to throw at the stage and throw at Wilden and protest. But I think they weren't especially phallic. I think they were just carrots and turnips. But then carrots are quite phallic, aren't they? All of them really. Yeah, yeah. Cucumber.

Yeah, okay. Orbanes. What we're saying is that many vegetables are kind of a little bit phallic in nature. Yeah. And so to say that these were phallic vegetables seems plausible. Yeah, but what I don't think is true, that the Marquis of Queensfrey went around selecting. I think that would be a weird thing to protest against homosexuality by going around looking for penises wherever you could find. And we'd say more about the Marquis's own state of mind than about wilds.

So he wasn't allowed in, he didn't get led into the play. And then he left a card, I think, at his club. Sorry, can I just say, did they not let him in because he was carrying the vegetables? Like, did they, you know, when you go to a gig and they have to check. your handbag. Your handbag. But yeah, so was that the reason why? Or was it because they recognised him?

I think probably he turned up angry with thugs and holding vegetables and they thought, oh, that's the opening night. Let's not take the chance. Yeah. And also he was famous for going to premieres of theatre shows to protest them. That was his thing. So he went to one play that he was protesting that they were giving atheists a bad name, I believe. It was by Tennyson.

He was an avowed atheist. That's right. And then he brought Veachery. shape like Jesus. Yeah, exactly. Well, a lot of vegetables actually look like cheese. Think about it, yeah. Which one?

Dicely. Jerusalem Artajoke. Yeah, play actually failed. In Bolton's being honest, failed as a result of this trial happening. It closed after 83 performances, in spite of getting crazily good reviews. But it survived longer than it should have. What they just did was take his name off the bill. So they just erased Oscar Wilde from the production because he was up there on the marquee.

Oscar Wilde play and they just said all right let's get rid of that and let's keep it going so it should have come off 30 or 40 performances before then really but when he didn't when he didn't manage to get into the play the Marquis I think he went to Wiles club and he left a card saying to Oscar Wilde posing as a somdermite he meant to write Sodomite and he misspelled it I think to a writer that's got to be more of an insult almost than spelling it right it's annoying and that's what That's what made Boise say, no, you have to sue my father for libel, and that's when Wilde did sue for libel. What, one card spelled wrong?

Yeah. He shouldn't have done that. With the benefit of hindsight, Molly, no, he shouldn't have done that. I should have sent it back. You spelled it wrong. Leave me alone. Did you know that Oscar Wilde's on the front cover of the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band album? No, is he?

No. He's like looking over the shoulder of John Lennon. The other thing I found out is that is about his tomb. So he's buried in Per Lachaise's Cemetery in France, Paris, where lots of famous people are. And his tomb, it's got a big sphinx flying across it. Have you seen it? And yeah, so it was described as a demonic flying angel, and it had a huge set of genitalia,

which apparently the keeper of the cemetery said... That was actually a cucumber. Or a carrot. Wasn't it? Yeah, the keeper said that this is totally indecent. So they just covered it up with a tarpaulin for a little while. Anyway, so then they said, right, we're going to have to sort this out. Top all in is just not going to work.

So they made a bronze butterfly-shaped codpiece and put that over the top. And then Alistair Crowley apparently stole it. Yeah, he was known as a wickedest man on earth, wasn't he Crowley? Yeah. He was like, what was he? He was like a dark magician who... Oh, like David Blaine. The newspapers called him evil because he was like,

he had very poor morals and was kind of corrupting the young they said Oh yeah, like Jeremy Corbyn. Okay, so he's a cross between David Blade and Jeremy Corbyn. I think I understand who this is out of Charlie Guy is. Apparently when he was on holiday in Egypt with his wife Ruse, he had a vision of someone dictating like a book of laws to him and he founded a whole new religion. Crowley. No, Corbyn.

There's a bookshop not too far from here, which is called Watkins, and it's an esoteric bookshop. It's a cult and all that sort of stuff. It's amazing. And they have a story which is that Alistair Crowley used to shop there. And he came in one time and the owner said, I don't believe that you have all these magic tricks.

And then he said, well, watch this. In an instant, he made all of the books disappear in the shop. And then a second later, they all came back. That's because he went in with Oscar Wilde

who ate the world. Anyway, so Alistair Crowley, he took the butterfly off. He nicked it, basically. And then when he went to London, he got all dressed up, put the butterfly on his jacket. And he went to,

Cafe Royal and like hung out with all of his friends and was like, I've got Oscar World's butterfly copies and now everyone can see his massive genitalia on the Sphinx, right? And then they're now not there. And the rumor is that two angry ladies who are walking in the cemetery just got some rocks and bashed it off because they didn't like it. And yeah, and apparently the balls are now used at paperweights in the pear lachers conservation office. Is that right? That's what I'd like to happen to my balls after I die. believe the penis shaft is used as a draft excluder under the door in that office as very good use okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is andy my fact is that

the new york police have a casting director for their lineups which he's now he's not a proper policeman right he's not even a rogue policeman he's just a guy um and there was a profile of him in the new York Times a few years ago, he's called Robert Weston. And whenever the police in the Bronx need to do a line up, they say we need five, you know, light-skinned Hispanic men, he'll say, okay, I know just the people are ring. They all get $10. He gets $10 for organizing the thing. And he's been doing this for years. And he can find various different categories of people. So, yeah, it's a very weird casting job that he does, but he's been doing it for ages. So these days, we have something called Viper in the UK, which is the video identification

parade electronic recording and it's basically a database of loads of different faces and so you go into your database and you say this person has this color eyes this color of hair and whatever and then it just finds people who look like them basically instead of getting a tenor for every lineup you do you get paid a tenor once and then your face is in their system ah right what it means is that they can go to the house of the person who's been a victim of the crime so if you've been mugged the police will come around to your place and they'll show you on a computer a line up and say can you identify any of these people. So with the Viper thing, if you're accused,

then you can ask your lawyer to get the police to Photoshop any distinctive mark you might have on your face. So, for instance, I have a scar on my face, don't I, under my eye. What's that from? From when I was... Pilliphyte. I was in the West Point military when I was younger. No, I just fell when I was a child.

And it's basically, I can make it so everyone else has this exact scar on so that... Oh, cool. Nice. So you wouldn't erase it off. You just put it on everyone else. Yeah. Surely. Yeah.

It is because if people are looking for, if they remember a birth marker or scar or something, they'll fixate on that. And they might misidentify if they're just looking for that thing. But surely it's an incentive to criminals to do all their crimes in like a fabulous hat or something. Because then you can just make everyone in the ID parade wear a fabulous hat. That's what I'd do. I was a criminal. With phallic vegetables on it. Yeah.

Do you know that in 2000, 15 there was an ID parade of dogs in the UK. Was there? Yeah. Because a dog did a crime. A dog did a crime. What did it do? It had bitten a girl in Wales and the police ran an ID parade of dogs which were all from the street.

The biting had taken place. And the girl picked the right one. But then dogs are very different looking at it. Well, I don't know if they tried to get five border collies. We just had a rochwiler and a load of chihuahuas and poodles and stuff. I think they might have put the other dogs in border collie costumes. You've got two chihuahuas one in the front one in the bag. Actually, you could have a lineup where the dogs are the ones who are picking the criminal.

Oh, okay. Because in some states of America, Alaska, Florida, New York, and Texas, they have scent lineups. Wow. Where dogs smell a number of people to pick out the suspect. The FBI report from 2004 says it should not be used as primary evidence. Okay. Because it's not exactly amazingly. kind of accurate but see.

Just smell like food. We're going to bark at that one, aren't there? They rub sausages on all the criminals before they. If you smell like sausages, normally, you're allowed to ask your lawyer to make everyone else smell like sausages. But this is not, the dogs are not the victims of the crime, right? It's not which of these men called you a bad dog. No, they're just matching the scent with a scent from the crime.

Okay. Do you want to hear one thing about this, so this is, so this is, about people who look like each other in lineups. I didn't find one thing about lookalikes. Yeah, go on. It's this guy who's a Daniel Craig lookalike, and he was writing up his experiences. And he just sounds like he has a really tricky time. He was recounting some of his adventures. He's called Steve Wright. And he has these awful times. So he says he was flown out to Santrape by a millionaire to reenact the scene where James Bond comes out of the water in his swimming trunks. And he said, I was told to wait a few yards out of the water until my cue came, the theme team from Casino Royale.

But when it did, it sounded very faint, he says. I suddenly realized that somehow I had drifted 100 yards out of sea. Oh dear. But I had to lurch back with seawater slapping in my face. By the time I reached the sand, I was totally out of breath and staggered out of the water. So you think that's bad? Then he did another party where he said it's more typical for him to be schmoozing ladies at a corporate event, dressed as James Bond and looking like Daniel Craig.

He did a function, a black tieball. And he said, unfortunately, it was a black tieball. So I didn't stand out easily. When I waltzed into the room of 250 people and attempted to charm the female contingent, I found myself being treated like a repellent sex pest. I tried taking a woman's arm and saying, so you must be pussy galore. Would you like to be my escort for the night?

But I had failed to introduce myself with James Bond first. She pulled her arm back very quickly and called her husband over. Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. 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, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I am on at Shriverland, James. At James Harkin. Andy, at Andrew Hunter M. And Moll. At Molly Oldfield. Yep. And Moll, mention the name of your book again. It's called Wonders of the World's Museum.

Yeah, and it's available now on Amazon and in all bookshops. All bookshops. It's a guide to all the best things in museums around the world for children. Yeah, I've got it for my kid. It's awesome. So do go out and get that. You can also go to our website, No Such Thing as a Fish.com. We have all of our previous episodes up there.

We have links to our tour dates. and we have links to our book and other goodies. So go there and check it out. We'll be back again next week with another episode. See you then. Goodbye.