No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Herring-Okapi Hybrid

Episode Date: July 19, 2019

Dan, James, Anna, Andy and special guest Richard Herring discuss Hitler's feet, greeting hyenas and George III in a house on fire.

Hello and 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 Anna Chazinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, an exciting special guest. It is the podfather himself, Richard Herring, who is joining us. We're very excited to have him here. Doubly excited because we got the chance to go on his show, Richard Herring's. Lester Square Theatre podcast, which will be going out next week, the 24th of July. If you're listening to it, as this show goes out this Friday, it's a week from now. If not, find the 24th of July from Richard Herring. And so much more.

I mean, you're going to be doing the podcast in Edinburgh. Yeah, I'm at the Edinburgh Fringe at the Newtown Theatre, 130, pretty much every day throughout the fringe, and I'm off on tour around the country in the autumn and probably onwards beyond into 2020, I think. So, yeah, go to richarang.com slash gigs, and you can find out where I'm coming. Amazing. and most importantly of all, you've got a fact. So we're going to start with fact number one, and that is Richard Harry. Here's my fact.

Adolf Hitler had size 13 feet, which I discovered this week on my own podcast, because I'm obsessed with the film The Cobbler, starring Adam Sandler. Yeah. In which Adam Sandler inherits a magical cobbling machine. If you're interested in this, just listen to any of Rich's podcasts. It's mentioned literally every one.

In which if he puts on the feet of the shoes of someone whose shoes have been cobbled on that machine, he turns into that person. Oh, my. Which is fine. So I ask people who they would turn into it. You've got to have the same size feet. So it's quite a hard question to answer unless you know. Especially for Adolf Hitler. Yeah.

Well, my guest said, you know, who knows how big was Adolf Hitler's feet, for example. And we didn't know, but then someone Googled it. And it was size 13, which just seems massive for what I thought was a very short man. But he's five foot eight, five foot nine. something like, 165 centimetres, but size 13 is like gigantic. Stephen Frey has size 13 feet. Does he? And he's what, 6 foot 6?

And something like that. Usain Bolt, he has size 13 feet. Is he tall? Usain Bolt? Yeah. Famously, yeah. Is he? It's hard to tell because they're quite far away.

He's just so fast. You can't see him. Well, Meg Ryan, who is, I believe, the same height as Hitler, 5 foot 8. I don't think that's a brush we can tar her with. It's on her CV. It's the top line. I believe her right saying she's 5 foot 8 and she has big feet she's got 11 she's she's huge is that a US 11 yeah will be oh hang on that's completely different I take back a lot of my surprise is the US 11 well I don't know if the adult Hitler 13 is US or you're English isn't there

isn't there is it USA or Europe whether in the 40s that's yeah that's so that's European I think the American sizes is similar one different would he have 0.5 or 1 different okay but what if Hitler's size feet is in the European measurement and actually they're were like pins. That's a really good point. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, Rich, what is your source for this fact?

Well, Google. Okay. But then it did Google just says, what size are out of his feet? It says 13. One says 13 and a half. Okay. And then I found a 56 page

medical report from the CIA that was based on the doctor who had seen Hitler over from 1936 to his death. And it had a lot of facts on it. Did he say how many balls he had? Well, that was, I was interested to look into that. And it says there's nothing wrong with his janitorial, which is,

he had a farting problem from that medical report, as far as I could tell. Yeah, he was very fletchalant. Was he? Was he? Was he? He was real. Catheral inflammation he had as well. So he had a very blocked nose.

Oh. Oh, what a show? No. No, I don't think. I don't think we're making that noise. No, yeah. Not about Hitler. Poor old Hitler.

He was, I did his BMI in 1936. He came out of 22.5, which is a, a pretty good BMI. I think that's I think that's my BMI. Is it? Yeah, you've got the same as Hitler. It's not the top line of your CV though, isn't I'm afraid it is. But it's kind of weird because I start looking up the historical figures and you can't

find anyone's foot size. It's something that's not really recorded very... Yeah, you're right. You can find celebrities sometimes if they've got big or small feet. Yeah. You try to look up a lot of celebrity foot sizes and you just found a load of fetish sites you were telling us. There are lots of people who have these websites where they're interested in celebrities's feet.

And I wish you... It's weird how your voice slightly broke when you said that. Well, I'm not embarrassed. I was reading about celebrity shoes, and there's a little theory. So I don't know if we can class Hitler in the celebrity bracket. Yeah, we can put him in there, right? So celebrities when they go... He's not going on celebrity, you know.

Get me out of here. Hey, but he would now, that's the point. All those, that kind of level of politician, that's the way they become successfully would be all over this. I think he's like the Harry Rednapp. I think he's like the Anne Whitacom of his day. Yeah, so a thing that I've read that certain celebrities do when they're going on the red carpet is they often wear much larger shoes than their foot size. That's a common thing in Hollywood because, well, often when you're going out, you're wearing new shoes, aren't you?

And you haven't broken them in. So if you're wearing a shoe that fits your foot perfectly, you're going to get blisters, you're going to mess up your feet. So when you're on the red carpet, there's often photos of celebrities who've got huge gaps at the back of their heels. if it's a woman wearing heels. What? No. Then it would just fall off constantly on the red carpet. It's all an episode of Cinderella every time someone walks down. It's just, it's a J-Lo does it.

Yeah, it's a thing. No. It's a thing. Wow. Okay. Apparently, you know our feet... The more you say it, the more likely it will be to be true. If there are any celebrities out there, please write in and let us know.

There are nobody listening to this show. No, that's absolutely right and quite right from them. Our feet are getting bigger, apparently, which I find really weird but there was a survey done in 1951 I think and it looked into people's shoe sizes as well as other stuff and apparently the average shoe size

for a woman then was size 3 which is insane because I don't know any women with size 3 feet Kylie Minogue I don't know her then she's probably listening though so is it true that we're evolving that way because maybe only big footed women

are having sex and having children yeah big footed women became incredibly sexy in the late 50s. And yeah, we bred out the small-footed ones. It was a great triumph. The theory is, the explanation I read, is that we're getting fatter, and so we're pushing ourselves down on our feet,

and we're flattening our arms. No, it's true. It is to do with body size increasing, they think. I actually think those studies must have also been flawed, because I don't believe shoe size has gone up three sizes. So now the average for a girl is size six. But it's not like we've all got tiny skeleton feet and massive flabby fat.

It's not about. the fatness, it's about the arch being pressed down. It's squashing. It sort of spreads out a bit. So you do get wider feet as well, for example. And also the other reason is better nutrition. If you're a child and you have better nutrition, you will just be bigger and that means

your feet will be bigger as well. Dan, you were like this. One retailer called it Bigfoot Britain. Nice. That is very cool. I did do some... I got sidetrack doing Bigfoot research while I was doing this. Well, my links came up. I had to read it.

You know, the investor. The investigation continues. Wait, does Bigfoot actually have big feet? Yeah, hence his name. Well, I've never actually pictured his feet. Does he have a big feat for a Bigfoot? That's the question. In the 50s, Bigfoot was just called foot.

Do you know who had the biggest feet of all time? It's the tallest man of all time who is called Robert Wadlow. He had size 37 or 36 UK-sized feet. He had real problems finding. shoes obviously because he was the only person in the world with this eye shoes. And he... Just imagining him walking past a clerk's sail and thinking, maybe this time.

Well, when he was at high school, he wanted to play sport. He wanted to play basketball because he thought he could stand next to the hoop and just put his hand over the hoop and stop anyone from scarring. But he couldn't get training shoes made quickly enough so he could never play. Because his feet kept growing. Well, he's only standing by the thing. He was just... Got some socks.

Is there a rule that says you had to wear shoes? It must be. It must be. It must be worth of building, making those shoes in order to have that guy blocking the hole. We can win every game. There could be some six-year-old. At worst, it's going to be nil-nill-nill.

Yeah, you'd squeeze your feet in. He should have done an ugly sister. You can bend them over. And apparently most people do. Service always say that something like 40% of women say they wear smaller shoes than they should, which again, I'm very skeptical about, because I don't really know anyone who doesn't wear their shoe size.

But do they just claim that their shoes are smaller than they are to seem more dainty? No, because they're saying I've got big feet, but I'm wearing small shoes, and it's really painful. You can't go to a shop and say, I'm size three, and they're just shoving it on. Are you shot? No, no, definitely three. Well, they do, that's the idea, because people are embarrassed. So apparently, you reach a ceiling at nine as a woman. I don't know what it is as a man.

And however large your feet are above that, you just go for a size nine because it's too embarrassing. So a lot of people are in. I think men just like to have bigger feet, don't they? They pretend that they're bigger because it's more masculine to have bigger feet. Because of that fictional correlation thing. Yes.

It's really interesting because I sort of vaguely assumed that there was something in the foot size to penis size thing. And lots of studies have just found nothing. No correlation, rather. There's nothing there. It's all based on studies where, so for example, a study of 104 men by University College London, they measured penises when both soft and gently stretched. And they found no correlation.

I actually measure my penis on one of those shoe-sized machines. What are you fitting it for? You've been kicked out of so many clerks branches. Okay, who around this table would go back in time to kill Hitler, if you could? anyone? Andy, you would or not? Yes, I would. I wouldn't because I understand the butterfly effect.

If you killed, hit, then none of us would exist. Yeah, I read a Ben Alton novel where this was the... But all of those, none of the novels, don't get me into alternate histories, none of them were. If you changed one thing in history, certainly that long ago, of that magnitude especially, then nobody is the same... Nobody's alive now would be alive. That's true.

Because different people would have hooked up, different people would be alive and dead, there'd be different children, none of us would be here. Because my parents both, met up over the love of Hitler. Yeah, they were both buying Nazi memorabilia, aren't they? Just how many people went to war in the second world war with one partner who then ended up having children with someone else because they were dead. That's the first thing.

But even, you know, but just even if you meet someone a day after or have sex two minutes later, that's a different person coming out. Yes, true. I just don't think that this podcast is about discussing these huge philosophical questions you've posed, James. Okay. Well, can I tell you my fact anyway? Yeah.

So the fact is that men are more. more likely than women to say that they'll go back to kill Hitler. And the reason, according to psychologists, is men prefer utilitarian ideas and women prefer deontological arguments. So men are more likely to do things that help everyone. And women are more likely to think, well, actually, there are moral reasons why I shouldn't do this particular thing. Never minding what the outcome is.

But also, it's always baby Hitler. It's always when you go back and kill Hitler as a baby and women are going to go, no, I'm not going to do that. Whereas I think a few men would like to mind killing babies. Can I clarify, I'm not in that can. I would go back and honourably challenge Hitler when he was at his absolute physical peak. Well, what?

God's not going to do us? You're just going to get to annihilated. How old did you let Hitler get to before you kill him? I'd say, after his first world war service, I would do it. That's probably too late because then the Nazi party. I think you should aim for probably when you could just about beat him at your current. So maybe when he's about 14. Come on.

I reckon you could. could be 14 year old Hitler. It was pretty weak. He's nasal. He couldn't breathe properly. With those feet, though, he just crushed you. Exactly. Sorry, just to clarify, I would actually like to go back to Weimar, Germany,

and improve the social and economic conditions to the point at which Hitler had no grievance to exploit in the German side. Such a shame I'm going to cut this out. Hitler was very unfashionable. Apparently. So I was looking to his clothes, starting with shoes and working my way up. He was in 1946, I was going to say. He was very unfashionable. But before then, he was quite the fashion. I'd argue he's still out of fashion a little bit.

Yeah, his reputation never come back, has it? He, even in his day, didn't wear very fashionable clothes. So he had a sort of personal valet or valet who despaired off him, apparently. There's this really weird account from the valet of trying to dress Hitler. and saying that he'd lay out new clothes for him every day that would suit him and then Hitler always refused to wear them. But then weirdly, Nazi chic, as in wearing Nazi clothes, is a thing that's not outrageous in some parts of the world.

So I didn't realize this in parts of Asia, so in Thailand, sometimes it gets to the news here that someone's got in trouble in Thailand because a class of schoolchildren will be wearing SS uniforms. And it does happen, and it doesn't have the same association as there as it does here. And there was an interview with someone in Thailand, I think, saying it's not really taught as an ideology, it's taught as an objective piece of history. And so Nazi outfits have become fancy dress. So it's fancy dress, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Whereas they wouldn't wear like a Mao Zedong hat. That would be very upsetting. I used to wear that in Sydney. What? Hitler clothes. No, not Hitler clothes.

We were only in Sydney last year. Who do you think you are? Prince Harry. When I did a trip back to China when I was 18, I bought in Tiananmen Square. one of those Mao communist hats. Jesus Christ, Dan, that is a whole combination of bad things that you shouldn't have done. I know. Well, this is what's worse.

I went canvassing for the Labour Party just before I left the country to move here, and it was a really hot day and I only had one hat. So I wore that hat while I was handing out the leaflets and, yeah, they asked me to stop. They haven't been in power since then. I can't picture the Mao Zedong.

It's a green, like, little army hat with the red star on it. Okay, I do know the one you mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, it's not like I love Maltzy Dong kind of cap. The S.S. Uniforms don't say, I heart Hitler. That wasn't the uniform. I had a Hitler moustache for a year or a toothbrush moustache for a year. You did. That was the first time I ever saw you. Was it? Have I got news for you? Just sort of looking like Hitler? Yeah. Why was that again that you did that?

Well, I was trying to reclaim the moustache for comedy because Charlie Chapman had it before Hitler. And I was just interested in why that symbol has taken the brunt of Hitler's, you know, disapproval. Because there was lots of things he did. for having a BMI of 22. Whatever, that wasn't that? That's not, you're not in trouble for that. So why, and that mustache was very popular before Hitler, and Hitler obviously popularized it as well.

But a lot of comedians had it first. I was sort of just interested in the symbolism of it. But then I also then had it for a year, which was a disconcerting. Did you get very bad reactions from some people? Not really. I mean, the worst thing that happened, I mean, most people laughed at you'd just the second you'd passed. A few people looked a bit shocked and upset.

But the worst thing that happened was, I was, on Shepherd's Bush Green at about midnight one night walking along and a man was coming up a white van he saw me and went well done mate you're a man after my own heart which was just chilling like you know he was sort of going if only I was as brave as you I would display my Nazism

on my face well maybe he was a Charlie Shepden fan it could have been so you know that's it was all about not making assumptions but the show was about the importance of voting and an attempt to stop the rise of right wing politics so you know I'm glad comedy works so well Just reminded everyone of what they were missing. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chisinski.

My fact this week is that in the indigenous Mexican language of Chalkotonga Mix-Tech, it is impossible to ask anyone a question. How did the translation of your emergency questions book go down there? I didn't sell any copies out there. Now it's explained. That's what it is. Okay, explain. This is the, sorry, was that a, that was a question.

Sorry, that explains, isn't it? It wasn't meant to be so aggressive. So Anna, why don't you tell us what you mean? Yeah, it was an order. So these are researchers at a place or a company called Idibon, which is a language processing company, and they sort of coded, apply code to 239 languages to look at how they worked. So to look at things like how you order subjects and objects and verbs

and how a language makes clear things like an order or a negative or a positive. or a question. And Chalkinognex tech is spoken by about 6,000 people in Mexico. And it was determined to be the most unusual language in the world. So it shares fewer things with any other languages than any other languages. And there was no mechanism for showing you're asking a question. So there's no way of saying, are you all right? As opposed to you're all right.

But there's also. It's no difference between saying, are you all right and you are all right. Yeah. you're a bit of alright. They're not accidentally cracking onto each other constantly. I was just trying to sex it up. But there's no way.

There's no way of saying to someone, do you fancy a drink, would you like to get married, and then would you like to have some children? Which is presumably why only 6,000 people in the world speak it. Yeah. You have to just kind of...

Do you, Andrew Hunter Murray, take this one? Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. It's very demanding because it's always, it would all be you fancy a drink, you want to marry me. Yeah. So just the only people who are

getting married, a very aggressive man and very pliant women. Okay, I agree. Why can't they just go up at the end of the statement to make a question? That's why can't they do? I know they do tones, but that's with that. I mean, the problem in the UK is that people do that with non-questions now, don't they? Yeah. You're just everything goes up at the end of the sentence.

But that would be the solution for these people to be able to ask questions. But I guess it's not a problem. I guess they could. But they don't mind. They don't want to ask questions. They don't want to know. They're very uncurious. There must be one question.

need, which is are you asking or are you telling? That's the question. That's made for them. All you need, you're right. But that's one of the things which makes English so weird is that we flip order to make a question. Yes. It is true.

Is it true? Yeah. And then Japanese has, for example, the word you just add, you just add a particle and that is a magical transforming particle. So ka is that in Japanese. So does ka. It means, is that so? Yeah.

And that's much more. common, isn't it? So I think only 2% of languages do the word switching. Dutch is another one, very unusual. So we are quite special in that way. Yeah. Do you know what the second least weird language is? Least weird. Yeah, so the most normal

after Hindi. Hindi's the most normal. I'll say Welsh. There's a language called Peripetia, which is another Mexican language. And the third least weird language, so the third most normal language. I'll say Welsh. Yeah, you're going to keep firing, are you? I think it'll be Mexico, Mexico, Mexico for a while

and then Wales eventually. I'm afraid it's Ainu, which we've talked about before, but it's spoken by about 10 people. That's Japanese. In Japanese, in Hokkaido and Japan. So that's one of the most normal languages spoken by about 10 people. Hindi is the most normal language,

and that's spoken by, what, nearly a billion people? Yeah, yeah. Hindi has one unusual feature that they found, and that is something called predictive possessions. So you can say Anna has a glass of wine Or you can say the glass of wine is Anna's But you can't say Anna's glass of wine in Hindi You can't have the possessive thing

So that's the only thing that's weird in Hindi Have you guys heard of the Indonesian Riao dialect? No, this is a great one So this is claimed by the linguist John McWhorter To be the most economical language in the world So there's a phrase, I am macam and that just means chicken eat Okay, but it can also mean

variously the chicken is eating chickens are eating A chicken is eating The chicken will be eating The chicken eats The chicken has eaten Someone is eating the chicken Someone is eating with the chicken

The chicken that is eating And when the chicken is eating And a few others Who's eating with the chicken? Are they eating the same stuff as the chicken Or are they saying Packing up the seeds ordering at a restaurant as well.

I'll have the chicken. Oh, well. Sorry, you've just been eaten by a chicken? It's a language of sitcoms, isn't it? It is, yeah, yeah. I wanted to eat with the chicken and you killed it. So it's economical, but no one has any idea what anyone else means? I think so, yeah.

Great. That's incredible. The really cool language I like is the Yipno language in Papua, which is where everything is conceived. Everything directionally, when we'd say, go over there or whatever. is conceived in terms of uphill and downhill. So, for instance, if you're talking about where the door is, you'll say, oh, it's just uphill. Or if I were saying, oh, whereabouts is James now,

oh, he's just downhill. And everything is uphill and downhill. So if I'm downhill from you, how do I know whether I'm uphill or downhill? So there they have, because it's quite a small place, they have a certain geography where everyone kind of knows where the highest point in the island is, the area is.

Everyone knows where the lowest point. if you're talking about time, then the, oh, the fireplace is always downhill, apparently. So if you're in a room, you have to check where the fireplace is. So I guess behind me, the moment, is the Thames. So all of the land kind of goes towards a Thames. So you could argue that I'm downhill of you, even if I'm not quite down. Yeah, unless there's a fireplace on the opposite side of the room, and then that trumps the Thames.

And then you're uphill. So the fireplace is always the trumping card. I think the fireplace is the trump card, yes. Unless you're talking about time, in which case, the past, is always downhill and the future is uphill. The future is uphill. If you say, I used to be a fireplace salesman. On the terms.

It's an Aboriginal language which I was reading about that I didn't write down but they judge everything by north, east, south and west. That's the direction of everything. Wow. I think, yeah, that's a lot of Australian Aboriginal language, isn't it? Well, you have to know where you are. You have to know where you are all the time at all times. You can't do any other directions than northeast, south and west.

But there was a study where they, or they did an investigation where they looked at an Aboriginal person who had then gone to a different country and they realized that instinctively that person still knew always what was northeast south and west. So they are instinctively orienting them. That iPhone. Not sure. Another language, another cool language.

Okay, so this language is called quiche and it was spoken by the Mayans in Guatemala. What I love about this is, if you're... speaking to children, normally humans would kind, in most languages would kind of talk a little bit higher, like a bit higher like that. And if you're speaking to someone, if you're speaking to someone who's a higher status than you, you speak lower. But in their language, it's completely the opposite. When you're speaking to someone of a higher status, you put your voice in a higher pitch. I think that's amazing. That's cool. I want to do that. When you meet the queen, it's, oh, very nice to meet you. And then it's, are you lost little girl? It's very creepy creepy to the place of it I like there's a language

called Tamayek or Tamajek spoken by the Tureg and they So in 1984 There was the Prince song Purple Rain There was also the movie Purple Rain They did a remake of that movie

30 years later So the exact movie It was just a remake in their language Unfortunately in their language They don't have a word for purple So the movie was released as rain the colour of blue

with a little red in it Well the Piraha Brazil language Well someone claimed has no numbers or colours in it So my 20 month old son could go there And rule the place That's pretty much all he can do You can't play snooker

Can you? No And also which I don't understand Someone says but this is controversial It's the only language with no recursive No recursion in it Which is the ability to insert phrases into phrases, but I didn't quite grasp what that means.

What you can't, you can't put a phrase in a phrase. You can't say Daniel fucking Schreiber. Is that what it is? It's something along those lines. I think that's something we should adopt in the English language. These guys, padahas, are really cool. So their language is one of the most tonal languages in the world. So it's different kind of tones as you're speaking. And so a words which is hapapaie, you can pronounce that capapai or ha ha ha ha or kaka aii. It doesn't matter what the consonants are.

It's just the tones. And so it means that you could kind of talk with your mouth full or you can whistle words and stuff like that because it's just about the tones. It's not about the consonants. Because it's like you've got blank scrabble tiles that you can just put into the words as you wish. As long as you get the bits in between, right?

Sure. Yeah. It is a bit like that. So when I was saying hapapaeee, it's the same as saying I ain'te or whatever so no matter what kind of tone you make that's something

That's very cool that isn't it I like this gravel analogy though I think that really worked well Oh thanks I understood that Cheers Sorry Andy I simply didn't understand

James it simply didn't make sense So it did This is about linguistics right And so it's about language We're talking about language How it's evolved Just get to your very tenuously linked thing Well, it's only because I was reading some Noam Chomsky stuff

Who is obviously very related to how language evolves And I hate him I think he's so miserable Too much wine for Anna I think Anna we can't get in another celebrity feud Not with Noam Tromsky It's always after two glasses of wine

She starts slagin Nolmchonski It's every time Fucking Nome He feels the same about me, it's fine But so Nome Chomsky is obviously like father of linguistics this amazing like Einstein figure in the linguistics world. So I was on this linguistics

forum. I was just looking up how language has evolved. And this forum put a big Chomsky quote at the top and it was about the first article he'd ever written. So he wrote his first article when he was 10 years old and it was about the he was like the fascist forces of conquered Barcelona at essentially the end of the Spanish

Civil War and it was all about the spread of Nazi power and stuff. This guy was 10. So it's the top of this forum, this academic forum. This person posts this quote from him and it's like, thoughts guys? And the comment immediately below it was, that sounds incredibly boring. And then the comment below that was, when I was 10, I wrote about an evil jackalant

and that terrorized kids on Halloween, but he had a heart of gold and was just misunderstood. And then the entire rest of the thread is them analyzing the jackalant's story. It does sound a lot better, doesn't it? Sounds amazing. You'd rather read that. Definitely. Yeah.

Good on them. Okay. It's time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that King George III once went to a safety demonstration, which involved putting the king in a house and setting it on fire. Wow. Yeah. That doesn't sound very safe.

Well, I guess that's the trick, isn't it, with the safety demonstration. You try and do something that looks unsafe, and you say, I've tricked you. And he survived, right? The king survived for another 40 years nearly. He's the longest reigning king. See, the longest reigning king. Yeah, only Victoria and Elizabeth. both queens

he's 59 years he was 59 years 60 days or something he was the king for Wow Although he wasn't very good at it was he Well he lost America He's been reassessed I think A little bit over the year

I mean I think he got a bad rap at the time I mean Speaking of bad rapes Have you seen Hamilton He's meant to be the best thing in Hamilton In Hamilton He's so good in it But it's not him.

He is dead now. Despite the extreme safety of the demonstration. It couldn't keep him alive past the age of about 80, which he made it to. A lot of stuff went on in his... I was surprised, actually. I don't know very much about that period of history, even though I studied history. And I'm surprised how much happened in his reign.

And yeah, he lost a lot of stuff. As well as the plot being the main thing, which was actually very sad, wasn't it? So he did go very mad. His illness was diagnosed as flying... gout. Wow. Can I just say, I think Andy is desperate to tell us a story of this house on fire.

No, no, no, we don't. We can go into the broader sociological implications of his reign. There's such an exciting story about flaming house. Andy, please, back to the burning building. Yeah, yeah. How does that happen? So, I should say where this comes from. This is a book called 1776, a London Chronicle,

which is all about only stuff happening in 1776. Very busy year, lots of innovations, lots of stuff going on, the American colonies on the brink of being lost, all of this stuff. and there was a scientist called David Hartley who had this amazing new way of making a house fireproof and it basically just involved putting iron plates in it all the way through like a magician and a box you know, where they put it in.

So the king stood upstairs and flaming pitch destroyed the lower half of the house and he was absolutely fine. And this happened on the very day that the news reached London of the American Declaration of Independence. So it was a big day for daughter to third. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. Slightly sported the day. That, isn't it? You just haven't had this great day. I stood upstairs in a burning house and I'm fine. What's been happening while I've gone? The guy you're just talking about, David Hartley,

he has a sort of long-lasting legacy around the world, and we're here in the West End. He is the person who invented the fire curtain that goes down in front of stages. He hated fire, didn't he? What's his problem with fire? Let a fire. Have a few fires. He was thought of as an eccentric

because he didn't powder his hair when everyone else did. Who George III or David Hartley? David Hartley. David Hartley? George the third was thought as quite eccentric as well. Yeah, for all the reasons.

He also wore stockings with a feet cut out because he thought it was healthier. And that made you an eccentric in those days. Wow. That is interesting. You didn't need to do much, did you? To be called an eccentric now, you need to work pretty damn hard.

I've been trying for years. Yeah, and the house became popular and was used throughout England. You know, the plates methods spread across the country, but then other methods took over, which were more efficient and didn't involve putting huge iron plates all the way through the house.

And then the house, the original house, the test house, very sadly, caught fire. No. Yeah, it had been extended beyond the safe bit, you know, so there was an extension. Yeah. So that extension caught fire and then collapsed onto the fireproof section.

That poor fire. You needed some iron plates on the top to stop that. Yeah. How do you talk a king into standing in a flaming house? I don't know. If he's mad, it's easy. Oh, that's true. They got the right king.

You're right. Yeah. And I think he was going a bit mad around that time. He had a few bouts of madness through his life. One of them was just before the French Revolution. So that must have been sort of around. Otherwise, there's a bit later than that. Yeah, when he did start to lose his mind,

at one stage in 1819, he spoke nonsense non-stop for 58 hours. It was at Christmas time as well, that one. Which, you know, that happens at my house with my dad. It also says it was a bit racist. Going on about Brexit. That's not my dad. Yeah, it sounds like he really, really suffered. And obviously, it wasn't understood nearly as much at the time.

So, you know, he has this reputation. But he did, obviously, a huge amount of stuff. was a very interesting guy. He was a hobbyist. He wrote architectural journal articles under a pen name secretly. He was interested in all sorts of stuff. Yeah, he had a huge capacity for wanting to know what was going on in his kingdom, I think. Yeah. He had a weird marriage to a woman called Charlotte, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Streltz, who was from this

random German duchy, and she was very parsimonious, known for being parsimonious. The only remnant we have of her, is a dish called Apple Charlotte, apparently. And that's Apple Charlotte is a pudding that uses up stale bread because she didn't want to waste anything. And she used to stamp butter with the royal signet so that the servants couldn't eat it to say, this is our butter. Don't touch.

She was famously ugly, and there was a quote about her. This is suddenly tipped over into personal abuse. Sometimes I feel like women haven't taken enough flack in history. We've got to send some abuse their way. So she was famously hideous. And one of the nobility said that as she got older, this is a famous quote, said as she got older,

the bloom has at any rate gone off the queen's ugliness since she fell off this carriage and broke her nose. She's actually quite handsome. Wow. Yeah. But he married at the day he met her, didn't he? It's not right. And he was baptized on the day he was born,

George III because he was two months premature, which at the time was, like, you know, definitely you're going to die. But he survived. But they had a very happy marriage. He was faithful to her, which, you know, what's the point of being king? If you're going to be faithful to your wife, there's no point. And they had like 15 children.

Was he? Okay. So I'm just almost making this up, I think. But I thought that in his madnesses, he actually did have affairs off the back of he was just in a hyper state. He wasn't really aware. He was quite old, though. I think he was, when he properly was mad, he was like in his 70s and 80s. So I don't think he would have been much of a threat.

and he was blind. So I don't, I think he might have, he had a go. He had a lot of affairs with walls. And he shook hands with a tree, didn't he famously?

Oh, that's true. He did, yeah. So, you know, he might have been having affairs with flora and fauna. Yeah. But, uh, yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. He definitely did get off with her a lot. Yeah. 15 children. Well, like nine boys. It's like, it's like, it's like, he stayed faithful to one woman had 15 children.

It's a real fuck you to King Henry the 8th, isn't it? It's like, just stick with one, just keep plowing away. And only one, I think 13 of his children survived into adulthood. Yeah. But he later refused his daughters the ability to marry.

He was really happy with his wife, but I think he was so worried about them making unsuitable marriages that only three of his daughters managed to marry in the end just because he was such a tyrant about it. And he passed a law saying that if you were a royal aged under 25, you could not marry without the express permission of the ruling sovereign. And that law stayed in place until 2013. Really? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I think he was skeptical about marriage because his sister's marriage had gone very badly. So his sister was Caroline Matild and she'd married a guy called King Christian the 7th of Denmark when she was 15. And he was also quite mad. And he hung her, he didn't like her at all, his 15 year old sister. So he hung her portrait in his lavatory as a show of how he didn't like his wife. So his wife's portrait? He hung his wife's portrait in the toilet. And, he hung his portrait in the toilet. And, he hung his portrait in his lavatory. And, he was an obsessive masturbator. He was famous. Did he do it in the toilet? Is that why the portrait was there? I think the toilet was the only when he didn't do it.

Oh, really? Yeah. So he went to see doctors about this and doctors were always trying to stop him doing it. But he once entered a feast with his trousers around his ankles. And he had servants manacle him and then beat him with rolls of paper. And he visited England once and he visited all the brothels in London and then completely trashed St. James's Palace. and so that was the man that his sister married.

I think George I thought, well, marriage hasn't gone well for her. Let's protect women from further excessive masturbation. So he saw a doctor. I'd love to hear the doctor transcript read that. So the way to stop doing this is okay, you're masturbating. You're masturbating. Yeah, just put it back away. Okay, so yeah, so we have lots of medicines.

We have like, yeah, okay, you're masturbating again. We're just going to have to put that away again. Okay. but you're doing very good. It's difficult to stop, you know. You've got to be sympathetic as a doctor. Hey, you don't need to tell me. So Queen Charlotte we were talking about.

Yeah. She had a pet zebra who was presented to her by the governor of the Cape in South Africa. And it was known colloquially as the Queen's ass. And there was a massive scandal when the Queen's Guard were caught charging people to expose the Queen's ass to public view. in 1764 and you guys are really holding this in very nicely the newspapers printed a story

that the guard were charging people to see this and then Queen Charlotte later bred this zebra by getting a male donkey and painting the back of it white and black stripes so that it thought that it was a zebra's ass, yeah exactly and it worked wow I'm going to try that with my own bottom I'm going to paint my own bottom black and white

and see if I can get a zebra to fuck me that it's what I'm going to do I've always been quite obsessed with having sex to the Nicarpe, which is like a sort of laramory, zebra kind of thing. But from behind, it's got a very nice, it looks like a sort of... You've always been obsessed. I was obsessed with the Nacarpi before.

I've been to see the Karpi quite a few times in London Zoo. From behind, it's got a very like leopard skin trouser. Right. So it looks like a lady's hindquarters, so that's nice. And then I've realised as well, and the carp's got a very long tongue. So you could be there. And then they can't...

If I hadn't have sex to an animal... I don't think this sounds like if I had to situation I think there's too much thought has gone into this to have sex with me I would paint my bottom black and white

it's just the one I wouldn't mind yeah it's fair Andy we've all got one do they let you in London Zoo they do they do I'm a member of London Zoo I'm a member of London Zoo

I'm sure it's I can go anytime it's a new meaning to the word member of London Zoo wow Okay. As long as you donate enough, they let you masturbate quickly. What are you donating?

They're hoping I'm going to create a new hybrid creature that they can put in. Imagine if it was successful. Oh God, the herring, the herring zebra. The herring are a copy. I've taken the tone down. No, no, no. Let's bring the tone back up.

It is time for our final fact of the show. and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that female hyenas say hello by licking each other's clitorises. Crikey. An uncompromisingly direct greeting, I would say. I just now feel like we're giving Richard ideas for his next trip to the zoo.

I'm just segued it very nicely. Is that why the male hyenas are always laughing just out of sort of awkwardness and excitement? Okay, so this fact was sent to me by text. But anonymously. Anonymously. By Mr. R. Herring. When we're on tar, there was no name attached, but the phone number ends with 067, so you know who you are.

Yeah, that's nearly my number. I confirmed it in a book called Wild Sex, The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom by Karen Bondar. And yeah, it seems that it does happen. So when females arrive and see each other, they stand in a parallel position facing opposite directions, lift their hind legs, display their fully erect clitorises to each other, and then they smell and lick them. And this is because female hyenas have extremely large clitorises.

Do they ever smell them and not lick them? No. Sorry. That's thought of as very awkward in the hyena world. It's like, you know, when you're going to do, someone a high five and they don't give you a high five back. It's exactly like that. Wow. Yeah. So and this happens between females of different ranks and depending on who licks first, depends on who is their most highest ranking and they have, they're like seven inches

long, aren't they about seven inches long? Yeah. They are. They're essentially a penis in appearance. And they get erections. So when, when they're copulating, they get erections. And they also have a labia that's fused to look like testes. It actually does seem a bit like because they all just have got the genders the wrong way around. It does. Except that they give birth through them.

And then they give birth through them and so that clarifies things, yes. And it's a horrific birth. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's the only animal birth that's worse than humans because humans are not very well adapted to give birth because we've got

our tits are too narrow and our heads are too big, essentially. And so our birth is much, much more traumatic than almost any other animal. But hyenas, it is worse because you are giving birth through. penis. Yes. There's two types of erections which is very

useful to know. There's a social erection and a sexual erection. What I've got here, this is a social erection. And now I've got, now I know about that, that's a good thing to know. Unless anyone fancies having sex, in which case it can just turn very quickly into a sexual erection. Where does it turn?

If you're interested in, if you're interested, it's suddenly as a sexual erection. In my case, I don't know if that's the case. It turns just as you were past the large ungulate section of it's very difficult for the males, the true males, to mate as well. So they have to practice a lot because being able to get your genuine penis into this long clitoris is a tough gig. It's like darts.

And so it takes back two months practice from male hyenas before you are able to penetrate properly. Yeah, and they're like probably like crouching behind them and trying to point the penis the right way. Two months of, yeah. Yeah. Oh, you say that, but George the third. brother-in-law was practicing for a lot longer than that. But 60% of hyena cubs suffocate on the way out. No.

Yeah, it's so sad. Yeah. More than half because you're in this long tube. Holy moly. It's crazy. There's all sorts of hyena mythology because of the fact they're so weird. So, and just beliefs about them. So Pliny the Elder, friend of the show, he said that, keep writing in,

He said that hyenas are capable of calling people by name Because they're quite weird They sound slightly human in the way they laugh Calling people by name and then killing you when you go outside So they will lure you out So you'll think someone's calling you Pliny! Pliny!

Pliny the elder, Pliny the other. Get that hyena out of here. There's also in mythology, have you heard of So werewolves, there's wear hyenas. Yeah, which is very exciting. But they have a different thing. They have, so your classic werewolf will obviously be a wolf, sorry, a human that turns into a wolf. With the wear hyena, it's often a hyena that turns into a human.

All right. So at nighttime, on a full moon, you might be talking to a human. And they will not be socialized at all. No. Because they spend five, six the time as hyenas. Yeah. And their penis might be a clitoris. That's true.

Yeah, they're greetings. You can tell you've met one immediately. As soon as they walk into a party, you know it's that. They must be disappointed how hard it's to find the human clitoris. What's going on? It's not even here. Oh, I guess a lot of sympathy from fellow men at the party at that point. I know, right?

Walter Raleigh thought that hyenas were so disgusting that Noah refused to let them on the ark. And the species was only resurrected after a... an unnatural copulation between a dog and a cat. Okay. It's not as terrifying as the Richard Herring, London Zooo-Cathing creature. I've got some clitoris facts. Yes, please. The clitoris is the only part of the human body that never ages.

A 20-year-old clitoris and an eight-year-old clitoris are identical. So you can't count the rings. They get slightly bigger sometimes throughout life, but then they don't look. They don't wrinkle. That is a really good idea. That's extraordinary. And also I was surprised the word clitoris only dates for that

only dates back to the 17th century as something I read. And then the word clit was only came up in America in the 1950s. So it took 200 years, 300 years for somebody to shorten clitoris. They were saying clitoris for a long time. For someone thought, this is a mouthful. Do we know if it had a...

Let's shorten that to clit? Do we know if it had a meaning before? I think it's... But I think it is a Latin word. and I did look that up at it here. I think it means hood in Lafrey. Oh, that's right. Yeah, it does. Yes.

So I would have had a different meaning. Just a monk would, I guess, go around with a clitoris that is how it's had. Yeah. I don't know what the Romans called a clitoris if they didn't call it a clitoris. One would have always related to the fact that women weren't thought to be, they weren't thought to have any organs that would experience sex. They weren't thought to have organs, weren't they? They weren't thought to have organs.

They could experience sexual pleasure or anything. But actually, that's often. myth. They often did. I think in ancient Greek, in ancient Greece, women often talked about the pleasure you get from sex. So there must have been a concept of a clitoris. What was it called? Any Greeks listening? Pliny, if you could ask your name.

Was it called a Whipple tickle or something? But you always get that fact sent to us. Oh, that was supposedly what the G spot was going to be called. Because it was Dr. Something, was it Beverly Whipple? Who came out of it? No, it was a doctor. His name started with G. The reason the G spot is called the G spot is because it's named after. doctor and it's something like geisner

Gavin. Yeah. Gavin. I thought, should we call it the Gavin? If I discovered I wanted to have my whole name, wouldn't it be called the R-spot. I want to be the R-Spotie spot. Not the R-SPot. The Gar-Spot.

The Gavin. It would stop serving its purpose immediately if you call it the Gavin. Okay, that is it. That is all 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'm on at Schreiberland, James, at James Harkin, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, Rich, at Herring, 1967, and Chisinski. You can email podcast at qI.com. Yeah, that's right, or you can go to our group account at No Such Thing or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. We have lots of blah, blah, blah. That's not the website to go to. Go to Richardherring.com slash gigs. That is where you will find all the upcoming dates for Richard Herring's podcast. He's going to be in Edinburgh. So all through August, he's going to be there. He's got all of his tour dates. And it's also got a link to the episode that we went on of his podcast. It goes out on the 24th of July. If you're listening after then, just go to his site. You can find that episode.

We had an amazing time chatting to him about us generally. He made us say weird things. Check it out. Okay. That is it. That is all of our facts. We'll see you again next week. Goodbye. You know,