No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Dragon Walk

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Dan, James, Anna and Alex Bell discuss Goya, wire, dead bacteria and fax hysteria. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hi, everybody. Just before we start the show, we want to say a big hi to new listeners coming to us from BBC Sounds, where the podcast now exists. Welcome to the fold. We are no such things a fish. I'm Anna. I'm here with Dan. Hi, Dan. Hello. What do we do? Yeah, yeah. So there's four of us. We are QI elves. We are the people who are involved in the TV series QI. And if you enjoy that, if you enjoy all the weird facts, this is a real kind of constant. distilled version of it where we just sit around and share the best, most wonderful, most odd things that we've discovered over the last seven days. Yes. And also if you enjoy the occasional incredibly immature sense of humor on QI, then you'll get that by the bucket load here. And with a little bit of a warning that there's the occasional bit of adult content. So there is swearing. There's the odd adult theme. A little bit of animal sex sometimes makes it in. Sometimes a little bit of human sex facts make it in. But it's all for the purpose of learning. We're interesting, amazing facts. And you'll notice we've got 10 episodes up there right now on BBC

Sounds and from now on every episode will be published there. That's right. Now we also just want to quickly address the members, the existing listeners of our show and particularly the members of Clubfish. We know that many of you might have joined Clubfish because you get an ad-free version of our show. Well, if you head over to BBC Sounds, you are going to get the ad-free version of the show. But I wouldn't leave Clubfish. You know what's there. The amazing Discord. The behind-the-scenes bonus content like the compilations and drop us a line, you want to miss out on Andy saying, bye, at random moments?

No, you don't. Absolutely not. So, if you do want to go in just for the ad-free stuff, absolutely head over to BBC Sounds. Otherwise, stay with us in Club Fish and enjoy all the background content. So, huge, huge welcome to the BBC Sounds listeners. Thanks for joining us.

This is a weekly show, and we're going to keep going for the next 400 years. So, enjoy, and on with the show. On with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hovurn. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tashinsky, and Alex Bell. 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 fact number one, that is James. Okay, my fact this week is the artist Goya, who was famously a deaf man, lived in a house called the House. house of the death man. It was actually named after a different deaf man who lived in that house. So first of all, what is Goya's full name? Because I think you were practicing. Oh, I thought you were calling back to something that had happened before the... I was, yeah. His full name was Francisco Jose de Goya and Luciente. Lovely. Nice. That is a lot less Spanish than I went in the pre-show. And he is a very famous artist. He was around in the early 19th century, and he's kind of the link between the old masters like

Rembrandt and whoever and the modern artists, because he was doing lots of satires and lots of incredible stuff. He is an absolutely incredible artist. He's probably my favorite artist. Is he? Yeah, I think so. I can actually see why. I can connect those two things. Oh, yeah. Go on. Yeah. Well, we'll get into it. Some of his like dark disturbed. Latter paintings. But can you please tell us about this? Okay, I want to know, did this deaf man name the house after himself, the deaf man? No, it was named by locals as that because this deaf man had lived there and then later Goyer moved in there. And did he move in there because he was only looking for houses called House for a Deaf Man? He actually googled House for a Deaf Man

and this is what came up. But there was nothing special about the house that made it like accessible for dead people. No, it was a really nice house. He was a former court artist so he had money and had a pension from the monarchy and stuff like that. It was also sort of away from the politics. He sort of wanted a place to retreat and sort of get away, because he's heavily involved. His art would often, you know, either do satire or make political statements. Yeah, exactly. He thought if he hangs around where the Spanish Inquisition are, then there's a decent chance he might get, you know, so he wanted to get away. But one interesting thing about this building is his most famous work for people at home, perhaps, is called Saturn

devouring his son. You might know it. It's like a real devilish face. and he seems to be biting the head off what could be a chicken or could be his son or something like that. It's a really sort of dark painting. It's harrowing. It's like really quite scary. Yeah. If you Google it, you'll probably recognize it from memes and stuff. But that was...

It's what he would have wanted. But it was on his wall in this house. And actually, he painted a load of these kind of satirical paintings on the wall of his house. And actually, they ended up being chipped off because he didn't intend to sell them or anything. They were just murals in his house. They're known as the black paintings now. Precisely, yeah. Because he had a whole, his whole first period of his life was much more involved in politics.

Like you say, a painting on commission for royal courts. And there was an awful lot more, like, of a positive vibe to his painting. And then he got really sick and he went deaf as a result of one of his illnesses. And then he became very, like, depressed and obsessed with illness and obsessed with, like, death and kind of neurotic. And these paintings, we think, reflect this dark state that he was in. Yeah. But they're all really weird and mysterious as well. We don't actually know that the painting is called Southwark.

and devouring himself. We don't know anything about these paintings. We know nothing about them. Yeah. We don't know. Because like you say, they were all painted on the walls, and then the wallpaper had to kind of be chipped away from the wall and then put onto canvas. But like a lot of art historians think that like they had to be very significantly altered when that happened. Yeah. There's definitely restoration. Yeah. You can spot little bits of it that really they think, again, it's almost theory. Is that damage or is that what he intended? There's one called the dog. It's basically a landscape where you see a dog's head

sticking up at the bottom of the painting. And, you know, is he coming over? over a sort of horizon? Is he coming over a bump in a hill? Is he drowning in quicksand? A lot of people say he's drowning. I looked at it and thought, oh, it's like, it's like kind of begging. Like you get a dog at a table begging, but a lot of people have interpreted he's drowning.

Yeah, but it's huge. We have no idea, because he never intended anyone to see these. These were private kind of things that he did on his wall at home. You know if a kid draws on the wall, they get in trouble, don't they? And yeah, what kind of example is that setting? You've got to own your own house in order to then make those decisions, right? That's, God, imagine if he was renting how pissed off it. You're not getting your deposit back.

Yeah, so he gave it He gave the house to his grandson And then his grandson sold it to I don't know a baron And then that's the guy who went Let's let's take this off Put this on canvas Donate it to the museums

The dog in particular In the museum where it is The curator of that museum says That there's not a single contemporary painter In the world who does not pray In front of the dog It's that important to I've got to say the dog

Doesn't impress me as the girl Like I think some of the others Are better Really? A bit kind of Pop or anything else It's like, it's a massive portrait shape, vertical painting, and the dog's right in the bottom, and most of it's just brown.

I love it. Like, 95% of it is just brown. Wait till you learn about Malievich, by the way, who's painting is just black. It's like literally just a black square. Right. If you don't like something that's 90% brown, you're not going to like that. I think the only reason people like the dog is because you've filed through these,

like, witches and decapitated, bloody people, tearing each other to shreds, and then you've got, oh, a little black dog. People love an animal. Yeah, people love animals. He knew the TikTok generation was coming up. He knew memes were on the way. He's so clever. It's actually doge, isn't it?

So there's so much written about his art and the interpretations of it, but what do we know about Goya the man? Here's a few things. Are you presenting a documentary? I thought you were on the South Bank shelf for a second. It really felt like I was Melbourne Bragg all of a sudden. The smell of orange. Love the smell of orange.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. The smell of a girl's armpit. Loved it. As long as it had an orange in. You get this from like a dating profile. Yeah. This is weird.

of tobacco, the aftertaste of wine, and the twanging rhythms of a street dance. This is all according to a biography that was written about him. Is it according to him himself? Because it feels like, okay, so he wrote this down somewhere. It wasn't someone going, he seems like the kind of guy who loves sniffing girls' armpits. Let's put that in. Yeah. I love the smell of an orange.

Like, who doesn't? Like, orange is generally pleasant. Why would you, like, note that down? Well, maybe he chucked the orange thing in there to make up for the weirdness of the girl's armpits. So that there was just... Yeah, I'm not totally crazy. I like normal things too. He was the first major artist to paint a woman entirely nude in a profane style.

As in the, this was the one that he got summoned by the Inquisition for, right? So profane means not religious. And this was the naked maha. Yes. It was deemed, I think, indecent and prejudicial to the common good. So, yeah, I didn't know what a macha was, but machos and machas were, according to the New Yorker, this is how New Yorker described them, flamboyantly cheeky lower-class dandies.

Oh, I didn't know. That's what I've got on my dating profile. Lower class, please, if you know, the way you talk, Alex. But yeah, got someone by the Inquisition, and I just find his tangles with the Inquisition quite bizarre. Yeah, so weird. Well, who knew the Inquisition was still bloody happening at the start of the 19th century?

They lasted for ages, didn't they? It lasted ridiculously long. It's practically going since late medieval times. And still, they're struggling on, clinging on. I think they were quite toothless by then. That python sketch was topical. But he did. He got away with it with the naked painting,

I believe by saying, well, if you think this was gross, then you're condemning your former king because he said he was emulating a Velazquez painting that Philip the 4th of Spain had loved. So he was going, well, your king loved this, basically. Your dead king. So what are you going to do?

Well, the interesting thing I think about the naked maha is that he gave it or sold it, I should say, to Godoy, who was the Prime Minister of Spain at the time. And the story goes that we know that Goya made two versions, the naked maha and the not naked maha, the clothed maha, you might call it. And the prime minister supposedly kept the clothed one on display.

And whenever his friends would come round after a few whiskeys, he would say, look at this. And he would pull like a secret lever and the wall would spin round. Oh, wow. That's like one of those pens where you turn it outside down. It's actually so tacky. Well, that's the story and that's supposedly what happened. But for sure, the reason that he got brought in front of the Inquisition, Goya, is because

Godoy was actually really controversial because he was the Prime Minister. And this was one of the really controversial things that he did having this terrible painting. Wow. And it was Goya kind of got pulled into the Inquisition because they were going after Gaudai. Really? That's amazing. It's a painting that has caused controversy for not just his period, but well long. after his death.

155 years, well long. Well long, man. Bear long. He used to say, people used to go to Godoy's house and go, that is a bare good painting. He goes, do you think this is bare good? He, um, so many, many years later, it's issued in Spain as a stamp. And this is suddenly the first stamp where there's a naked woman on a stamp. And in American, this is 1959, they banned it.

So any letters that came into a, um, America, they said, we will not forward them on. There are a few cases where at the post office, they would actually just, you know, they'd scrap, yeah, scroll it over and stuff like that, and then send it on. But it was a huge, huge problem. That's amazing. Yeah, have the letters returned. Yeah. Because of, yeah. It's a Time magazine wrote, an indecent picture is bad enough, but a postage stamp whose backside must be licked. Millions, millions of innocent children collect stamps. And so, yeah, and there were, there were certain places that kind of allowed it, but eventually they did ban it entirely. But it didn't have a picture of her.

button on the back that you could lick, didn't it? So we don't know who the woman is in that painting, but there's a pretty good chance that it's at least partly based on the Duchess of Alba, who was supposedly Guy as mistress. They were definitely very good friends. We're not sure if they were, but they were definitely good mates. That sounded like a sleazy buildwistle. They looked after a small bird together.

That sounded like an actual censor on our show that you said a swear word. now been whistled over. I thought now that we're possibly going on BBC sounds that I should not be saying fucking. Yeah, true. Anyway, Duchess of Alba's full name actually was Donia Maria Del Pila Teresa, Cayetana de Silva, Alvarez de Toledo, and Silva Bazan, Decimotera du Cueza de Alba de Tomas, Decima prima du Cueza de Chaucca, Sexta de Quesa de Montero, Octavia Candesa duquesa de alvarez Decimémerer Marquisa del Capio Deciméééééééé de Coria

I won't do them all It's 754 letters in total Her full name was So either we have to say this fact Or we have to say all the other facts So yeah And her descendant who died in 2014 Who was actually a quite famous Duchess of Alba

The one who was in the painting Was the 13th and the one who died in 2014 was in the Guinness World Records as the aristocrat with most titles. She was a bit of an eccentric, yeah. And the Duchess of Alba, who's in the painting, there's an interesting thing about her is she was one of the most powerful people

because she was also supposedly the mistress of Godoy, the Prime Minister. But she had a bit of a beef with Maria Louisa, who was the Queen Consort, who was married to Charles IV. These were the two most powerful women, and they really, really hated each other. And one day the Queen Consort was going to go to a party, and the Duchess of Alba found out what she was going to wear and got all of her maids to wear exactly the same clothes as the countess

and go to the party. So suddenly there were like 20 women all wearing exactly the same clothes. That could be seen as flattery. It wasn't. It was seen as... Famously women hate that. It was seen as a massive, massive slam. Do they? Women, you say?

They don't like that. It was seen as a massive. massive, massive slam so much so that we think that the Queen Consort had the Duchess of Alba murdered. Oh, wow. Wow. For wearing the... Wow. For getting her mace to wear the same clothes. That is a practical joke gone wrong. Yeah. So this... I'm now terrified because sometimes me and Anne come into the office wearing the same jumper with a cuddly animal featured on the front. Do you think she's plotting my demise? I feel like she might be. Actually, they exhumed her body in

1945 and they think she probably died. Yeah, and she probably died of meningitis, we think. after being murdered. But that was the story for hundreds of years that's what happened. That's amazing. The number of paintings by Goya is going down and down by the day.

Right? It's a real... I'd be more surprised if it was going up. That's such a good fight. I suppose sometimes you find painting, no. No, that's true. You do discover the last painting. That's true.

He might have had another like a shed or something that he painted all over that we haven't discovered yet. Absolutely. He might have had a second home that he rented out as an Airbnb, but then it turns out that it had paintings on it. Yeah.

But none of these things are true. It's what we're saying. Well, I think what we're saying is we don't know. We just don't know. If you're staying in an Airbnb with disturbing paintings on the wall, get in touch. That's every Airbnb in my theory. Have you ever stayed in like a tastefully decorated Airbnb? You need to up your budget very slightly.

I do, I do. It's a lower class daddy. So this is because basically lots of paintings that we thought were by him, turn out not to be by him. Oh, really? And when, you know, modern analysis is done, it looks very, closely at brushstrokes and the type of materials that were used and they make certain deductions. I'm always skeptical, you know, so there's actually one of his most famous paintings, Colossus,

they now think was not painted by him. And there's one expert called Manuel Mena. And she says that the brush strokes are inferior to what he would have done. You can tell that the confidence with which they were made is not an expert. And you think he could just be having a bad day. Can I just say, if people in like 200 years, they listen to episode 1983 of the podcast. They weren't very funny in that one, so I don't think it was them. That's that AI thing. Don't we get over their voices. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that before governments experienced cyber attacks, they had to deal with fax attacks. What a great name. Ultimately, the name for this podcast. Fax attack. That's true, yeah. So this is a thing that's called a black fax, and people would do this as pranks, but they would do it to, companies that they hated, they would do it to governments, where they would basically send over black paper from their side, and often they would do it, they

would loop it round, so their fax machine was just sort of eternally sending a fully black page. Like a conveyor belt. Like a conveyor belt, exactly. And so the people receiving it, if they were not near their fax machine, suddenly they would be using all the ink up, or they might even heat the machine up so much, because so much of it was processing these whole pages. It would overload it and it would sort of just I suppose also means you can't use the fax while that's happening. Exactly. We should say because people will write in probably not ink so much as thermal paper.

Yes, sorry, yes. But I love already the people who would have written in to complain about that. I'm sorry we corrected ourselves because I want to know you better. Send your faxes to podcast.cui.com. So yeah, it's a method that was done. And it was done, you know, before cybercrime. If we're being sort of talking about it loosely, because there are always examples. of like the 1700s, a version of cyber-eacking.

Yeah, they say the first one was like 18, 1834. It was the first cyber crime. What was that then? Well, it was in France, and it was obviously before the internet was invented, and it was a way of... Sorry. Kiss these days, they might not know.

And in those days, financial market data was, like, trading was happening, but it was sort of done via, like, letter. So if you were in a different town, like, the information would travel quite slowly. And people were always trying to find a way beat that information and people tried like carrier pigeons and all sorts of stuff like this. But one way it wasn't communicated was the telegraph system, which was used for other

things. But these two brothers, the Blanc brothers, they set up a ruse with some of the telegraph operators where they smuggled little information indicators in other messages. But the way the hack worked was that the information would be like single character, like I suppose you for up or D for down or something like that to indicate something to do with the stock market. But then if you followed that with a backspace character, it meant that it wouldn't get written down because it would be regardless of.

as a mistake, but the telegraph operator would see it all. So if they were in on it, they could write down and be like, oh, yeah, just sent over as a mistake, and we're not writing it down, but this is the information. And the idea being that you know if the price of gold has gone down, so you could sell it for anyone else. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

That's clever. Do you think, obviously, who was the modern artist we mentioned earlier? Was it Roscoe who did all the black paintings? Oh, Malieovich. There's Malievich. Awkul when he tries to fax the photos of his new artworks. I keep trying to send it to you. What is?

Stop praying. That's why it's worth so much. It's just the ink. No, it's not black. It's the Duchess of Alba's name in very small font. Do you know who, as of 2017, so I don't know if it's changed, but the last report that I saw, 2017, was the biggest purchasers of fax machines in the UK. It's the NHS? Yeah. It's the NHS. Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. They've really phased it out since then, I think, haven't they?

There was a big scandal a couple of years ago. where they were like, we've got to stop. Yeah. And pages as well, wasn't it? Yeah. I think they decided they wanted to get rid of the mold. Also, the NHS still have a big dictaphone tradition where a lot of the older doctors still, instead of...

Why don't they just use their fingers? It's one of my favorite jokes. It's a brilliant joke. It's a great joke. Sorry, as you were saying. No, just that loads of doctors still will be able to log in to the usual NHS account and when you go to the doctor, they'll make your medical notes and just put them into the system.

A lot of old doctors. a doctor still prefer to use dictophones, i.e. manual dictophones with actual cassette tapes inside, dictate the notes, and then they're sent away to a third-party transcription service, and then the notes then the doctors then check them, like the written notes,

and then they're input to the system by someone else, and it's an insanely inefficient system. You've got to feel bad about that, surely. Doctors. I know, it's ridiculous. Miley Cyrus uses fax machines. Okay. Is this... What for?

For communicating. Everything, really? No, only with one person. She uses them to communicate with her godmother, Dolly Parton, because Dolly Parton actually does use them for everything. She refuses to use text messaging and instead uses a fax machine for everything. Really?

You really buried the lead there, but you're trying to get the kids in by saying, Miley Cyrus uses a fags machine for Dolly Potton. That's amazing. Yeah, Dolly said, I don't want to talk to everyone that wants to talk to me. I don't text because I don't want to have to answer. So she thinks if people text her, she'd have to reply all the time, but with a fax machine,

she can just like get the messages and then. Yeah, it's very indirect. You can't do the three dots thing or you don't get seen on a fax. Yeah, no. But then it's still indirect this way because Miley Cyrus says that she doesn't really fax. She has a phone.

What happens is Dolly Parton sends a fax, then somebody at the other end scans the facts to see what it says and then writes it in a text message that gets sent to Miley Cyrus. Actually, the real lead of this fact is that somebody's job is sort of communications between Miley Cyrus and Dolly Cyrus. Barton exclusively. Are you telling me you don't want that job?

Of course I want that job. It must happen a lot. I mentioned years ago on the podcast that that's how Brian Blessed would do his tweets. So yeah, it's the exact same thing. You would, he would be sent the tweets to reply to his agent, fax it to him. He would faxed back. Like, there was a whole fact system. Didn't he write out the replies by hand, which were then facted back and then they would be type.

I can't remember now, yeah. It went through like eight different modes of communication. It was a lot, but maybe that's more, it can't just be Dolly and Blasset. Didn't Brian Blessed one. tweet Miley Cyrus saying, can you tell Dolly Parton to answer her phone? I think it wanted to go to the NHS in the end. It doesn't make it work. Have you heard of the fax number of the beast?

Okay, 666 something? It's 667. Oh. And it's quite just a little nice nugget for phone numbers of faxes. Oh, because of course your fax number used to be your phone number, but with one digit at the end gone one up. Yeah. Remember that?

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So 667 is the fax number of the beast. Oh, I see. According to people who... I think it's a joke, right? It's a joke. It's a joke.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a joke. Yeah, no, nice. I like... Sorry, I get it. I like jokes. I'm a big joke guy. Before we had cyber, let's say, urban legends being sent through email and Facebook and stuff like that. They were all done on fax machines.

And in 1993, there was a big scare in Memphis, Tennessee, because there was a lot of faxes going around about gang. would drive around with the lights off in their cars and if anyone flashed them to tell them their lights were off then they would chase them, stop them and kill them. Oh my God, was this not true? Because I heard this rumor quite recently. It's just got to Anna's fax. I mean, that still goes around that rumour, right?

But no, it is, it is fake. But it was called fax law, the culture of sending faxes around. And it was the old meme culture, I think. Yeah, exactly. And when emails came along, it just went from facts to email directly from there to there. So fax law was the name. for the rumors, the lies that were started. Yeah, like folklore.

Oh, wow. I thank you. Again, I now get that that's a joke, faxed law. It's a play on words. She likes jokes. She loves jokes. Ladies and gentlemen.

I'm joke, I. The last time I came on this podcast. Do you know who else? You used to fax each other in the 80s? Well, load to people. Give us a good. I frame that question badly. I've got a better way of framing it.

Yeah. What was the, and pretend that I didn't ask that previous question. otherwise it'll give it away. What was the hotline between the White House and the Kremlin? Was it a fax machine? Dunn, I know you cheated there. Using previous information. I always thought it was a red telephone.

It wasn't a phone. That's Batman you're thinking of. I think that was part of where the rumor came from that the hotline was a phone because I think it was in one of the Batman films who speaks to the White House on the phone. Anyway, the hotline between the White House and the Kremlin famously started by Kennedy and Khrushchev in the 60s

was never a telephone between them, but it was in the 80s of Facts Machine. So it started with type, so it was teletyped. So it was basically like an old version of text where you'd type a message if you're in the White House or in fact in the Pentagon where it was. You'd type a message, it would be encrypted by people, sent to the Kremlin,

and then translated by someone at the other end into Russian. And it was quite sweet. The start of the Cold War, they swapped machines for this teletyping. So the Kremlin posted to the US four of their teletype machines that could print stuff out in Cyrillic and the US posted back to the Kremlin four of their machines. And they upgraded to fax machines in the 80s.

So in the 1980s, if there was an emergency between Reagan and Gorbachev, then they faxed each other. There's many ways that people have to protect themselves against cyber attacks these days. What do you reckon? This is now turning just into a quiz. The answer is not fax machine. What do you reckon?

So like for the Navy, how they get by, if they get cyber attacked for, let's say their GPS system is hit with malware from an unknown enemy. So you need to know which way to go. Yeah. But your GPS is broken because you've been hit by cyber. Yeah. Do you hop up and look at the stars in your periscope? That's what it is. Oh shit.

Sorry. Celestial navigation. They're all taught celestial navigation, yeah. I'd make such a great submarine captain. That was my first thought. I mean, I wouldn't know how to do it. Someone needs to celestially navigate. Thanks, Alex.

That's why the captain's there. I'm in charge. I'm not actually doing anything. I'm just telling me what to do, right, Anna? But, like, think about how, like, quickly I made that decision and his right one. Go on. No, no.

It wasn't funny. Oh. And she knows funny. So, um, we mentioned the number of the beast earlier on. Yes. I've got a little quiz for you. Oh, great. Are the following things,

names of cyber attacks or the names of bands who have opened for Iron Maiden. Let's go for Shady Rat. Shady rats are banned, surely. Cyber attack. I'm going to go cyber attack. It's a cyber attack. In fact, it was a series of cyber attacks in the late 2000s, originated from China. Night Dragon.

Cyber attack. Banned. Cyber attack. Oh, Dan, you suck at this so badly. Around the same time as Shady Rat, these were attacks on energy companies. companies, uh, Nitro Zeus. Cyber attack. I'm gonna go banned this time.

Baird. Cyber attack. I don't know how my brain works. Everyone knows Iron Maiden have a policy of never having a supporting act. These were attacks on Iran by the US that were planned if nuclear talks failed. Let's go for Vinnie Vincent invasion. Okay, that I'm gonna say as a ban, surely is a ban. Yeah?

Dad. band. I am going to say cyber attack. Oh, I don't you've lost it. I actually run out of cyber attacks now. I did them all at the top. I was looking at other, like, kind of non-digital ways of hacking things. And did you, have you heard of token suckers?

So this was, for many years, the New York subway ran on tokens. It was, you would buy tokens, which would go into the slots to let you through the barriers. And it was because I think the denominations of coins never always matched up with the fairs. And there were people called. token suckers who would steal tokens by jamming up the slot in the machine with a bit of paper so that when people put their token in, they'd lose it, but it wouldn't go all the way in. And then they would come back and they would crouch down and suck the token out. With their mouth.

Really? Yeah. There's a hell of a vacuum you got on your mouth if you can suck a coin out of a slot. Yeah, I think if it's just inside, you can kind of... Never tried. You could maybe use your tongue to just sort of wiggle it. Yeah. You could take a Hoover, take a vacuum cleaner to the station.

Like a Dyson. I think that attacks attention. But they used to, some of the subway, station attendants would put chili powder in the slots as a deterrent which is bad. Yeah, that's nice. You could get half a tennis bowl and stick it on and then wham it and that creates a vacuum

and then when you pull it off it would suck it. Really? That's good. Or any plunger, I guess. Plunger would do the same job. That's the purpose made device. Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is Anna. My fact this week is that for 200 years

humans made wire by soaking steel in urine before realizing that water works just as well. We're so stupid. I love it. How recent was this? It's like last year we worked at a second. Someone squatting down to urinate on the steel again, saying, we'd definitely not just put it under the towel. What was the thought behind it?

Well, I read this in a great book actually called How to Invent Everything. And the thought, I think, was that urine was used for various, things historically, wasn't it? The tanning industry springs to mind, but going through the podcast archive, it was used for millions of other things. And so this was in Altena, in Germany, and it was in 1650. And at that

point, to make wire out of steel, you had to pull a steel rod, so like a thicker rod of steel, through a funnel of decreasing diameter. So you know, like when you did filtration in science, you had those funnels. And so you'd put steel in the wide end, and you'd drag it through, until it gets thinner and thinner, and then you get a thin wire coming out the other end.

And to stop there being too much friction, because you're putting it through really hard, you use grease or oil. And then, in this place called Altaynett, in Germany, someone, according to reports from the time, accidentally sort of urinated all over it, and then tried it, and found that it works just as well as the grease and oil. And so I thought, oh, it must be something special about the wee. I believe, I found something from quite near the time that said that this guy who's called, Han Geddes, so Gerdes, he had been so annoyed that he couldn't draw it well enough that he'd

thrown his material. Volyerdeman Sienvasa Abschlaj, which is where everyone casts their water. So he didn't urinate on it. He got annoyed and threw it in the corner into the toilet and that's way. Yeah, exactly. So he tossed it into the loo and then he thought, I know, that was, I threw a strap there. That was silly, wasn't I? I'll go and get it back.

And so then he went and sort of got elbow deep. Missy metal back. Yeah, exactly. Climmed down into the vat of we, got it back out, and then found that it works better. And when you say work better, is it just that it's softer and more malleable? Yeah, so what it seemed to do, what it did do is make a soft coating around the metal, which reduces the friction when you pull it through. Now, we now do know that water also does that.

But for 200 years, people who worked in this factory would provide urine to it. And actually, their wives and children would also donate their urine to this factory. I like the fact that they, in between the we and the water, they worked out that beer worked. So they did it with the wee for ages. And then after about 100 years, someone tried beer. They went, oh, this works just as well. We don't need to piss on it anymore. Why didn't they stop trying?

Why didn't they like, try like a hundred different things? Maybe they did. I kind of wonder what else would work that we haven't thought of yet. Yeah. Better than water. I think once you've got to water, it's like, okay, good. This is the simplest trick. I'd so love to have been there on the day that the person who came into town and said,

You know you can just use water To that said that Can you? Or like dicks in hands Broly What? Standing in a dick in a You'd be so embarrassed

How long have you've been doing this? 200 years It's not important, doesn't matter Yeah Wow I think it's also interesting That you make Why I like you make spaghetti

You just squeeze it in a I mean I piss on my spaghetti I mean squeezing it through Squeezing it through a thing If you cook it in water, it seems like that. Yeah, I didn't know that smell that iron and steel has, like, door knobs and stuff? You know that in the Thai smell? Yeah, yeah.

The metal smell. So you actually don't because it turns out that it doesn't smell. And you know what it actually is, is the oils and chemicals excreted by you reacting with the surface of the metal. Very similarly, and every kitchen should have this. I don't have this. But you can get stainless steel soap. And I'd never heard of that before. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, stainless steel is like antibacteria, right? Which is why a lot of doorknobs are made out of it, and especially when you go to public toilets and stuff, everything's metal. Yeah. Because bacteria can't last very long on it. So you don't need to wash your hands when you're leaving the loot.

You just turn the metal door knob. As long as you do it with both hands. You're not made of metal, Anna. No, this is specifically for, if you're cutting up onions or you're cutting up garlic and the smell gets stuck to your fingers and you're like, oh, got a smell of this. Rubbing your hands against stainless steel creates a reaction that knocks out the smell from it.

I've tried this. I don't think it's scientifically proven at all, but they do sell, as it were, bars of stainless steel. I actually think it is scientifically proven. What? But it doesn't really work. That's exactly it. It's not actually practical.

But it's like, no, I've definitely rubbed my garlicky fingers up and down, stainless steel stuff to no avail. And does real soap not work at all for garlic? No. I don't think anything works for it except using garlic in a jar, which I've resorted to now in order to sustain my marriage. I think just being... happy with smells of garlic.

All that. James, I wish life with that simple. What a weird cryptic sentence about your marriage that just slipped in there. Anna's husband is a vampire. Can I give you a QI question, but you've got to pretend you're in ancient Rome, and then it works. Sure, do we have to do it in Latin? Yes, so that's okay. I'm sure the listeners at home are fluent. Salway. Oh, no, Alex actually can do.

I study Latin. You only need to know one word and that's that the Latin word for steel and astonishingly they had a version of steel as far back as then, invented in India about 400 BC but it wasn't able to be mass produced until the 19th century.

But they did have it, made it to ancient Rome. The Latin word for steel is chalebe and it was named after that Chalibbe's people who lived on the Black Sea. Okay, so you're in Latin QI. Yeah. What did the Chalibes people invent? The Chalibi people

They made metal I mean the Latin for steel is chaleebate I'm just going to say that Oh okay Is it the word Is it the word caliber Ex caliber? Yescaliber swords

Dan can I feel like you're the one Who gives the more obvious stupid answer Can you do that now? I'm still busy trying to picture myself What character I am What do I know? What do I not know Chalibay

And there's supposed to be an obvious answer to this They invented steel Oh they invented steel Did they invent steel? And then you get a Claxton. What? I don't understand what's going on. Thank God Anna didn't pitch QI to the BBC initially.

Scripts editor. I don't understand how she's made such a mess of this. I've written all the scripts in Latin. This is so awkward. I'm saying to a Latin audience, what did the Chaliba's people invent? You know, speaking Latin, that Chaleebe is Latin for steel.

So we'll say, steel. So steel, woo, woo, woo, coxon, okay, okay. Yeah, I see. And they didn't. They just invented another kind of hybrid iron. They hadn't got to write steel. Do you want to hear about the barbed wire was? Yes.

Yeah. Okay, so barbed wire invented in 1873 in America by Joseph Glidden and used by farmers to protect their farms. Who was not happy about it? The blunt wire manufacturers. Yeah, fence, fence makers. Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's true.

Ramblers. Ramblers. Lots of bramblers. Golfers. Yeah, these are all great answers. But all wrong. I actually feel like ramblers, because I think I may know the answer, but ramblers might be a vaguely correct-ish.

People who wanted to ramble, right? I think it's true. I mean, not many people like Barb Dwyer, I'd say. The answer is cowboys, because if you had a farm and you didn't have fences, your cows and sheep could run anywhere, but you kept them in the right place by employing cowboys. But as soon as you had Barb Waya, you didn't need to employ cowboys anymore. Who rambled freely. which is why I've given Alex half the points.

Rumble, they're on horses. Yeah, I think if rambling is just sort of roaming free, but you think it has to be on foot? I think what we're doing now is rambling. But the other thing, the other people didn't like it were small ranchers, because if you had a big ranch and you could afford loads of barbed wire, you could put loads of barbed wire around your farm.

But actually, in those days, people weren't really sure where one farm stopped and another farm started. So if you were a small rancher, you would often find that you would turn up your ranch and there's a load of barbed wine you couldn't get to your stuff anymore. And so there was a huge amount of violence and tension between these kind of small ranches and the big ranchers.

And there were wire cutting groups that would go out and cut all the wires. And actually, Grover Cleveland, the president, had to send in the army to remove any unlawful barbed wire fences. Didn't they? They formed sort of gangs, didn't they? With really fun names. They were called like the blue devils, the owls. They supported Iron Maiden, didn't they?

Sorry, you're right. Native Americans as well didn't like it because it stopped Buffalo's rambling free. I'm going to make ramble happen. And they depended so much on their livelihood for buffaloes. It's one of the reasons that buffaloes basically went extinct by the end of the century

is that they couldn't roam free anymore. They were fenced in. Right. And it was all kind of Lincoln's full, wasn't it? Because he signed this act which said everyone can have a bunch of free land in the wild west if you agree to farm it so all these farmers move there and then we're like how do we stop these buffalo from trampling all over our crops yeah let me think electric wire right after the barbed wire yeah I'm just trying to think

I wonder how many people died in that small town who were having a nostalgic piss on a bit of wire that they saw it is actually I think that's a myth isn't if you piss on electric fence you get electric so don't try it at home. Don't try to know who's got electric fence. Get out of my run, Mom. I did warn you. I think the myth that I remember, and again, I'm not sure that this is true,

so people shouldn't try it at someone else's home. But your urine stream isn't usually a complete stream. It's usually got gaps in it enough that the electricity can't travel up in. Did anyone come across this Guardian notes and query section? So you know the Guardian does notes queries and someone asked a question, lots of, often people who have inside knowledge, answer underneath. And there's one that's when was wire invented. Does any of you see this? No. It's just very

confusing. So there's, when was wire invented and then various people underneath give their answers. And one of the answers is fierce controversy surrounded the invention of wire. And it goes on to explain that Thomas Malum said he invented wire in 1830 at his foundry in Sheffield. But a Frenchman, Jean-Francois Martin also said he'd invented wire at the same time. There was this legal action contesting the right to the patent. It was never resolved because Thomas Malam died of an inflamed liver. And then it said it's extraordinary facts. Thomas Malam's memorial is an Abney Park Cemetery,

very near where I used to live, which has lots of amazing gravestones on it. And it's now rusted away, but it used to be constructed entirely of wire in the shape of an anvil topped with a falcon. And the source was a book called Wire. it's history and application by Dr. A. Stone. Sorry. It's different material. Well, it is a different material.

But there's nothing obviously in this to give away that it's completely made up. It's completely made up. Oh, it's completely made up. Oh, okay, fine. This person gives this extraordinary story of the history of the founding of wire. And I was like, brilliant, something fascinated.

God, there's Abney Park. I can't believe I never saw that. Completely false. So this is the story of you reading a comment section, finding the information not to be true. It's not a comment section. It's guardian notes and queries, okay? You get highbrow experts

replying to people about... But the jokers can slip in. That's the problem. It's not very good joke, though, is it? I don't know. A-stone. A-stone. Pretty good.

I did laugh. I did laugh really hard. That's not a joke. I know jokes, guys. Just on other things you can use urine for. Virgin boy eggs. Do you remember this? Virgin boy eggs.

Like, so they are a traditional, dish from China, from Dongyang. And basically, it's exactly what it sounds like. They boil eggs in the urine of young boys. So, like, 10 or younger. That's not what virgin boy eggs sounds like it's going to be. It translates with boy eggs. Fine, like, again, urine boy eggs.

You're absolutely right, yeah. Urine boy eggs, got it. You're trying, no, sorry. They are, it translates as virgin boy eggs. Virgin boy being like small boy eggs. And, yeah, they all through the town, their kids are encouraged to, when they go to the Lewin schools,

they either can go to the normal toilet, or they can go and pee in like a collection bucket in the corridor. And then all of this urine gets taken. And then eggs are boiled in them. And it's a whole process where, like, they're double-boiled in this urine. Right. And people eat them. And it's like a delicacy.

And yeah, urine's been used like that for a lot, hasn't it? Yeah, it's just interesting. There is definitely, like, a legit ick factor there where I'm like, it's somebody else's urine that this has been cooked in. Yeah. This is very interesting. I had 100 years eggs. 100 years eggs.

Yeah. They're like supposed to be 100 years old. not really 100 years old, but they are quite old. Yeah. And they just taste really sulfurous. But they haven't been bathed in urine, have they? No, they're just standard. They're a different kind of weird egg.

It's the urine thing I don't like, yeah. I can talk about weird eggs that I've eaten. I had that ballout, you know, that has the baby chickens, the embryo of the chickens. Oh, yeah. All right. Same if your spin-off weird eggs I've eaten podcast, which will run forever and ever.

They've actually poached me. Poach me. Hey! The rest is weird eggs. you gold bag a good podcast. It's me and Dealia Smith just talking about weird eggs.

Weird eggs. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show and that is Alex. My fact this week is that dragonfly wings are equipped with tiny knives that physically rip bacteria apart. What? It's amazing.

Oh my God. It's just a property they have that keeps their wings clean. So clever. Can I ask a question, Alex, straight off the bat. I've currently got a chest infection and I'm on antibiotics. Could I instead chug some dragonfly wings?

That's such a great question. I don't want to answer that in case you die. I thought you were going to say, should I strap a series of knives to my arms and flap them around? Also an option. I think probably not. I think dragonflies are amazing and humans used them as inspiration for scientific innovation so much. But one of the things that we are doing is trying to emmy. this, what's called, they're called nanopillars, these tiny, tiny, sort of blunt pillars that

are so, so, so small. They're 100,000th of the width of a human hair, I mean, so, so tiny. So bacteria literally lands on them, gets caught between two and gets ripped apart. I mean, it's absolutely astonishing, how small is. There's more than 10 billion of them per wing, basically, on each one. Yeah. And they're really, really good at destroying almost all bacteria that lands on them. So there's a university in Melbourne, Australia, who have successfully made a sort of plastic version. So that could be the new stainless steel. You know, next time you go into your public bathroom, there'll be a plastic handle. So scientists have managed to make stuff that small?

Yeah. Well done. Well, you can do novels on rice now. You know that that's quite different to having something that there's 10 billion of them on the way. I don't think they'd be manually sharpening each one with a tiny, tiny sets of carving knives or anything. I once pushed an electron with a scanning, tunneling microscope. Wow. and it took me about an hour and a half.

Really? Where did you push it too? No, just like to slightly other place to where it already was. Like I just moved it. Can you just blown it? No, because it's an electron. It's so small. So you have this little sort of, it's like a needle,

but it's some kind of quantum effect. I don't know. I did study it, but I don't really understand it. But I had the machine, and then it was like a computer game thing and you would kind of push this one electron. And the idea is they used to. Yeah, they asked to.

It wasn't like OCD. You didn't just, it's just. like walking in and seeing a painting slightly askew you're like, oh, I'm really comfortable with that. That really is Princess in the Pee. This place is such a mess. But, yeah, dragonflies are actually astonishing.

They are amazing. Every fact I learn about them is that you are the most metal, insane. They are the most efficient killers in nature. They are the most efficient predators. They kill over 95% of the prey that they chase. Which is, like, that's unbelievable. We're so lucky they're so small and they don't eat us. I love you called them the most metal.

They've opened for Iron Maiden. When they're lava, so like little wormy things, they kind of live underwater. And then they shed their larval skin and starts to become a dragonfly. And they create these wings. But the wings are like made of jelly. They're not like the wings that they have when they're older. So they need to dry them out. And so they produce sodium bicarbonate in their rectum.

and they farted out and it reacts with the water and it creates CO2 and it dries out their wings. Wow. Which means that they become proper wings. They are their own hair dryer. Their asses of their hair dryer, yeah. But also when they're lava, they eat through their anus as well. And they also spend most of their lives as larva. So they can, some species live up to five years, but they spend nearly all of it as a larva.

And then they become a dragonfly for just a couple of months and flying around. I always think it's weird with, it's not weird at all, but it's unfair to these animals that we think of them as dragonflies. when actually for almost all their life they're not dragonflies at all. I think they want to be thought of as dragonflies rather than these weird underwater insects. It was creepy, yeah, yeah. It must be, I watched a great, I watched a couple of great documentaries actually about them. One of them was talking about the extraordinary moment when they're climbing up a blade of grass, which they would do when they're emerging from nymph phase into dragonfly phase,

climb a blade of grass out of the water. And that first time that you feel the weight of gravity on you, they've been floating in water all of their lives. And suddenly they slow down. massively because it's suddenly having to wrench their body weight up. And then if you watch videos of them emerging from the exoskeleton, it's very cool. So their abdomen as a dragonfly is concertinid just like a telescope inside of their larval self. So when they burst out, suddenly it's like pulling a telescope out to its full extension. And when they climb up, they can retreat at any

point, so they're not dragonfly yet until their massive goggly eyes, you know, they've got this big eyes, until their eyes turn cloudy and white and then once the eyes have gone milky there's no going back Oh my god, that's incredible That's awesome That's how you can tell Wow

Did you know they can't walk They've got six legs And they can climb with them But they can't walk on them But they mostly use them To like grab their prey in midair And like stab it And like they're not called dragon walks

Alex That's true I saw it's weird having As in most flies and insects Land can also walk on there They use it to like stand and walk, whereas dragonflies specifically use it to grab and hunt. They're more like pincers.

They're so awesome that the US decided to create a spying dragonfly drone, which was based on all these amazing things that dragonflies could do. So it had tiny beads that could reflect light and could check for oscillations. So you could work out what someone was saying from a massive distance away. It could flap its wings 1,800 times per minute using lithium nitrate crystals, controlled by lasers. It costs about 2,000. million dollars for each ones, but they only ever tested it in lab conditions, and then when they took it out, they realised it couldn't cope with wind.

I found a documentary by David Attenborough, which was called Dragons and Damsels. He made it in 2019. It was a TV special, and I really wanted to watch it, and so I was Googling Dragons and Damsels to see where you could get it. Sadly, the closest I could get was a documentary of similar length, about 45 minutes, called Dragons and Damsels, released on YouTube by Buxton Civic Association during the pandemic and hosted by a chap called Richard Nisley Marple which was really good as well

and so I'm going to tell you some things I've learned from it was about drags and dambles the production quality is slightly lower there were interruptions like can you see my cursor as I'm moving it out there and sort of can everyone see me on the screen or can you see the thing I'm showing you but um

never get at some of been doing that flying out of the article you're like why can't I see there but I would love to see Atterbury doing a new narration over this documentary Here we see the human attempt the cursor The thumbnails have confused the Jesus half of him Was it good though? It was really good so he said

Sweetly he said the Southern Hawker Dragonfly They're the only dragonflies that will fly up to you And look you straight in the eyes That's scary He said it's quite frightening Yeah Sounds like a US drone doesn't it really Maybe that's what they are

they always have been. He said the way to tell the difference between damsel flies and dragonflies where there are many ways but one of them is, and you have to look quite closely, but during mating, they both grab the female from behind,

but dragonflies grab the female on the back of the head whereas damsels grab the female on the back of the neck. So you do have to be quite close. Also, I really enjoyed a metaphor he used, which actually referenced a fact that we mentioned before,

which is that ancient dragonflies millions of years ago were up to a metre wide. And as he said, you can imagine what sort of a mess that would make if it hit your windscreen. I actually laughed. I laughed out loud at that. And I've never laughed out loud at David Attenborough.

Or any of our jokes on this podcast yet. She knows jokes. She knows. Anyone knows jokes. But the female dragonflies also, they fake their deaths to avoid having sex sometimes. Yes. They do do that, don't they?

And the other thing I know about dragonfly sex is that the males have spoon-shaped penises so that they can scoop out sperm of the previous guy if he finds any inside. Ah, that is clever. Bit gross. Well, no, but necessary, right? Well, yeah, I suppose so.

Arguably, humans have that as well. What? The idea is that the bell-end shape at the top of a penis could possibly be used to scrape out other people's semen. Yeah, or just get a half-cut tennis ball and you can plunge that out. I'm actually starting to question your fact now, Alex, having just looked at my notes, because Anna previously gave us a fake fact from A. Stone. And your fact about an insect comes from someone called A Wolf.

Really? It's Dr. Annalina Wolf. She does make this, there's this amazing point that's made inside this article, which you touched on earlier, which is basically all the things that we're looking for for modern invention, evolution has worked out somewhere on our planet. We just need to look around for four billion years' worth of evolution. and you eventually find something that can be then taken into the lab to try and mimic,

which is pretty awesome. It's the mimicking that's art, I think, sometimes. We actually don't have four billion years to make it. We've got about a week before the funding dries up. But they've been around 300 million years. Dinosaurs were walking the planet. I mean, that's always, because in my head, the romanticism of the dinosaurs being just because of how old they weren't alive, and we forget all these animals.

Dragonflies were there. It's a different version. In fairness to people who make castors, cartoons and dinosaur movies. They do often have dragonflies flying around. They do. They do. That's true.

That's true. That is true. One of the incredible thing about them you wouldn't expect is how far they can fly. And that's another thing that scientists are looking into. Can we replicate it? Because the globe skimmer dragonfly has the record for the longest insect migration. And it does a round trip of 18,000 kilometers. That is insane.

It's always one of these things where I think, does it count if it's multi-generational? national. Absolutely not. It is one of these things where the dragonfly, this particular dragonfly, lays its eggs and lives and mates in shallow pools, because the pools are warmer,

if they're shallow, and so it can grow faster. So it follows the rain, so it can follow shallow pools. So it flies from India to Africa, and then the next generation flies back. If I went on a gap here, and then, like, I came back,

and it was my son, like, you wouldn't be like, how was Africa? Like, what is your dad? Alex is so well-traveled. Alex and Alex Jr. Together. 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 at various places on the internet. I'm on Instagram on at Shreiberland, James. My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

Alex? I don't have any socials at the moment. Yeah. Ooh, look at me. Copy can. Live it in my life. And Anna, how can they get in touch with all of us? And you can get in touch with all of us by emailing podcast at QI.com or by tweeting at no such thing.

That's right. Or you can go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com. All of the previous episodes are up there. Do check them out. Also check out Club Fish, which is our behind the scenes special fun place where we have lots of bonus material, little fun extra shows like Drop Us Alines, lots of great stuff there. But otherwise, just come back next week for another episode and we'll see you then. a goodbye.