No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Kiss

Episode Date: April 4, 2014

Episode 5: This week in the QI Office Dan Schreiber (@schreiberland), James Harkin (@eggshaped), Anna Ptaszynski (@nosuchthing) and Andrew Hunter Murray (@andrewhunterm) discuss rats, popes, kissing a...nd moving house.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 We run it on QI a few years ago. Yeah. Which was, there's no such thing as a fish. You know, no such thing as a fish? No, seriously. It's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. He says it right there. First paragraph, No Such Thing is a Fish.
Starting point is 00:00:19 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a new weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with Three Elves, James, Andy, and Anna. And once again, we just got around the microphone, and we're going to share our favorite facts from the last seven days. So, in no particular order, here they are. All right, so let's begin with you, Anna.
Starting point is 00:00:47 What's your fact? So this week, I discovered that rats were once the size of hippos. That is humongous. Yeah, it's pretty big. Well, basically, it's not all rats. It was discovered in 2008. It's called the Josefo Artegasium-1-A-C. We'll put that on the website, so you can look it up.
Starting point is 00:01:03 And they think they could have grown up to 2.5 tons. Wow. So that's like the average hippo, I think, is about 1.5 times. The largest known snake in history. This was called Titanaboa Carogenesis. It was about the length of about three or four cars. What length would that be? So that is 50 feet long.
Starting point is 00:01:25 Yeah, what kind of cars? Like a Lamborghini or one of those little ones that you can park sideways? Or is an Essex Hindu yelling out the side of it. But no, there is a longer snake that was discovered. It's just never fully been authenticated, which was Percy Fawcett, the great explorer. He was a snake? No. He claimed to have shot a 62-foot anaconda.
Starting point is 00:01:47 And he was very reputable as an explorer, so he wouldn't have bragged. In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt offered a reward to the first person who presented a snake that was 30 feet long. And I don't think anyone ever claimed it. Well, is that quite clever? Because is that a catch-22 or something? similar because you've offered this reward but once you've shot a 30 foot plus snake how are you transporting it back um to show it off and also even if if you do see a snake that's longer than 30 feet my first thought would be to run away not to capture it for a reward that's you don't have the
Starting point is 00:02:20 hunter's mentality i mean if all people thought like that the stately homes of england would be much emptier in nicer places so what else do we know about this rat um okay so it was actually found in 1987 in uh uruguay it was apparently was just put in a box in the Natural History Museum. It makes you wonder what else is in boxes at the moment, which people put aside five or ten years ago, I thought, I'll deal with that later. Do you remember that new species they found in a market in Cambodia or something? Oh, yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:49 It was a rat. It was thought it was extinct. It was a rat. And yeah, they thought it was extinct. They found it on a kebab, didn't know. Well, no, in Laos well. I remember Bill Bailey, his neighbor went to Laos and had a picture of what he thought was a new species of, I think it was porcupine.
Starting point is 00:03:06 and he showed Bill and Bill took it to someone who studies porcupines and they said, yeah, this is a new species and it was just there sitting in the marketplace. And the guy said as well that on this table, because it was a bunch of animals being sold for food, he was like, there's at least like three or four new species that we don't know about in science yet sitting on this table. That reminds me of another one.
Starting point is 00:03:24 There was a guy who bought a sea urchin, I think it was, on eBay, and that turned out to be a new species. Right, first of all, why was he buying a sea urchin on eBay? Remember in the 19th century you would have like old explorers would get a load of They would go in an exploration They'd buy a load of weird stuff and keep it in their house
Starting point is 00:03:45 Like Sir John Soren's Museum up the road And I like to think that when I have a bigger house I'll have a cabinet of curiosities And it'll be just stuff I bought off eBay And it's just a new way of exploring And finding new things Yeah Someone recently found some of the first
Starting point is 00:04:01 Charlie Chaplin bits of film Considered to be lost and that was an eBay purchase. Amazing. Yeah. There's constant finds going on, not just with the natural world. We just need a really big spreadsheet as humanity,
Starting point is 00:04:12 and then if we just put everything on there that we don't have, you can just check in according to what you know about. Like a stock take? Yeah. Like the internet. Well, you can call it whatever you like. If you want to make up a name for it, that's fine. So going back to massive animals,
Starting point is 00:04:26 I was reading about the largest kangaroos, and apparently they were extinct now, but there were kangaroos that were up to 9 feet 10 tall. in Australia. And imagine how big that is. What kind of bounce could they get? Well, exactly. And I read that they were hunted to extinction.
Starting point is 00:04:44 And that's pretty hardcore hunting, isn't it? They're not like you, James. They didn't. They would just run away and go back to eBay. But hunting a 10-foot kangaroo. With what as well? Yeah. It's not like they were shooting them down with rifles.
Starting point is 00:04:56 I really like imagining what it would have been like if you were like dropped on earth any long period of time ago, like three million years ago, it just would have been completely mental. at the same time that rats were like sporting this enormous size, there were elephants in Cyprus that weighed only 200 kilograms. Oh. Yeah, really sweet.
Starting point is 00:05:13 How big? I don't know how big that is. Do you know what? I genuinely, when I went, oh, for some reason I thought that was the size of my fist. Yeah. That's 200 kilograms. I don't know why it sounded so tiny. I wasn't thinking about it.
Starting point is 00:05:27 You have a very inflated sense of your own strength as well. I'm a hefty punch. There's a cool thing. So animals shrink. 10 times as fast as they grow. So, in 24 million generations, an animal the size of a mouse, can grow until it's the size of an elephant.
Starting point is 00:05:43 But it takes a much shorter time for them to shrink back down again, about 2 million generations. It must be weird if you fast-forward the footage of Earth, let's say, somehow there was someone filming the whole thing, just to watch these animals, just one suddenly go,
Starting point is 00:05:57 boo, another one go, and the power play between them. It would have been a time where elephants would be like, stay away from the massive, 20 times the size of us things over there. And now a rat would be petrified of a... Or not. Aren't elephants scared of mice?
Starting point is 00:06:12 Is that a hangover? Or is that something either in a cartoon? Definitely in a cartoon. Is that not a real thing? I don't think. No. They are scared of bees, I think, but not. I was surprised to learn that Queen Victoria had a rat. Did she?
Starting point is 00:06:23 She had an official rat catcher. He doubled as his job. He was a rat catcher and a mole destroyer. And his name was Jack Black. He supposedly... also gave a pet rat to Beatrix Potter. Wow. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:06:38 And so her book, Samuel Whisker's, is dedicated to the rat of the same name. And he was, those job titles were by appointment of Queen Victoria. Hang on, you're saying that she had a rat and also a rat catcher. Did he catch it? Yes. So would she release it? No, for him to catch ceremonially. And now the 4th of August, the catching of the rat begins.
Starting point is 00:07:10 Okay, let's move on to fact number two. reading this month's 14 Times magazine. It was an article on the poke, and that's where I found this fact, which is, during his 27 year run as poke, John Paul the 2nd took over 100 ski vacations. Very extravagant.
Starting point is 00:07:27 And he did it, he did it... Three a year? Yeah. He wouldn't have taken as many when he was old. No, no, he did it for about a 15 year period. Whoa! Yeah. Well, so he took like seven a year or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He used to sneak out. He used to get very bored with the
Starting point is 00:07:40 Vatican, and so they would, genuinely, they would get into a car and they would drive to the mountains and he stayed in a resort with a mate of his who he would go skiing with and he was a ski instructor and this guy used... I'd like to think he would be in full garb as well. Yeah. But his friends said that he skied like a
Starting point is 00:07:57 swallow. Is that good? I don't know. I don't know what that means. Because Swallow's almost famous for not skiing. That's the first thing you think when you say the word swallow is not skis. But he was a very sporty guy.
Starting point is 00:08:12 He was. He was. He was. He was a goalkeeper, wasn't he, when he was a... Yeah, he was. He played for his school and his university, and he might have carried on, but World War II haven't broken out. Well, the pitch that he used to play on in his hometown is a sacred site that pilgrims often go. There's a list of places to go.
Starting point is 00:08:30 That's one of the places, one of his old fields, yeah. Do they take away turf or things like that? The article that I read was an article to do with the fact that a bit of clothing with a stain of his blood was stolen recently, and I know that that would be... seen as quite sacrilegious to steal something like that. But it seems that everything that was to do with his is being left. So I doubt anyone would take
Starting point is 00:08:49 any turf out of respect. Because they see them as kind of holy... I don't know. He's going to be probably a saint if he's not already. This year. This April 27th he's being on there. He's been a fast track, isn't he? So people just love relics. And I remember reading, I don't know if this is true, but then they
Starting point is 00:09:04 gave away relics for free on the internet after he died. So that people wouldn't then start trying to steal and sell relics because they would flood the market it with these other ones. There was someone in the 14th or 13th century who bit off the finger from the hand of a relic in a church.
Starting point is 00:09:24 Do you remember this, James? I remember that story, but I remember... You sort of bend down to, oh, please, I'll kiss the finger, the holy finger of the holy hand of the saint, and then just bite off a joint and keep it in your mouth until you've left. Guys, I got it! Start the car! Dan, did you know that he was a member of the Harlem Globe Chotters?
Starting point is 00:09:42 I did actually. But you're about to say that. Yeah, no, because he was a total sports enthusiast. So on top of being a, on top of skiing, he also spent a lot of time with Muhammad Ali whenever he got the chance to. So he was a huge boxing enthusiast, as is the Dalai Lama loves boxing. I don't know what it is about religious heads. I should say, though, my source for this is Brian Blessed.
Starting point is 00:10:05 Who claims he sparred with the Dalai Lama when he was up? The Dalai Lama does not look like he'd throw a weighty punch. Like, not on your, you know, 23 stone fist level at all. But like he really looks pretty weak. No, I think. Yeah, I suppose. Anyway, so yeah, I got this fact from the 14 Times magazine, which is a magazine about
Starting point is 00:10:25 the World of Strange Phenomena. I highly recommend anyone. It's a brilliant magazine. It's fantastic. One of the QILs writes for it, Matt Coward, he writes a myth conception column for it. Yeah. Which is like a general ignorance thing and it's great. It shocked me when I read in this article that he went skiing because you kind of imagine
Starting point is 00:10:41 that Pope's grew up. up as religious people straight from the get-go didn't have a life before. The latest Pope that we had, Pope Francis, one of his early jobs was he was a nightclub bouncer. Actually, when you think about it, isn't his role effectively as like the greatest bouncer now? No. Well, he could let you...
Starting point is 00:10:58 If you did something bad, he could let you into heaven. Who's God in this? Is God the manager of the club? Yeah, God's the owner. That sounds right. God's the owner of the club. I thought God was a DJ, according to that popular hit song. God is a DJ, life is a danceful. The Pope is the bouncer. How about Ministry of Sound? Also, the new book, Pope Francis, he loves The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
Starting point is 00:11:22 And often in his talks, he cites. He'll use examples where he'll say, it's like Frodo and Bilbo. Like, he'll use them as actually... That's really funny. Yeah, yeah. He has a degree in chemistry. I wouldn't have expected that. And he has one lung.
Starting point is 00:11:35 He has one lung. What? What do with the other one? I just, you know... He gave it to the poor. He did do that Here's a thing He can't have donated it to the poor
Starting point is 00:11:46 Because the Pope is not allowed to donate his organs I read this in a house A lot ago, yeah There was a guy who was a member of the Vatican Health Council And they asked him about it And he said he couldn't do it Because the body of the Pope Effectively belonged to the entire Catholic church
Starting point is 00:12:00 You had a thing about the Pope's The Pope's dying Or the death of the Pope Yeah, yeah It's basically when a Pope dies I haven't done this for the last two popes but every Pope before they have done, to confirm that he's dead,
Starting point is 00:12:13 they gently tap him on the head with a silver hammer and call his name out three times. Hey, Pope! They say his birth name just to make sure he's really dead. It's a tradition. It's a small silver hammer. I remember reading an article about when the Pope died, and there was a brilliant line in it.
Starting point is 00:12:29 I always remember it's, when a Pope dies, his seals are defaced, and his ring is split in two. Which is going to be particularly poignant when the latest one goes because of his Lord of the Rings and Hobbit. that has to be taken to Mount Etta. You know what? I also I was suddenly thinking I don't know much about how they choose a Pope.
Starting point is 00:12:51 How do they actually find the next Pope? You know, I could technically be a Pope, as in they could choose me if they wanted to. I think you should be. Because the rule is, I'm pretty sure this is right. The rule is that as long as you're a baptised and confirmed Roman Catholic, you could technically be chosen as a Pope. I mean, they usually choose a cardinal, but theoretically, they could just knock on my door and say,
Starting point is 00:13:11 you're in. The only thing that might stop me is I think I might have been excommunicated already. You think you might have been excommunicated? That's a very hazy night out, isn't it? I was in this nightclub. Don't worry, I know the banter. Well, what it is, is there's certain things
Starting point is 00:13:34 that if you do them, you can be excommunicated even without any priest or post. say so, they're just so bad that you are excommunicated. And I have done one of these things. And that is mentioning Jesus' foreskin. Oh.
Starting point is 00:13:49 And because I was part... He's done it again. He's done it again. James, your chances of being Pope are narrowing all the time. Well, we mentioned it on QI and so, as part of as a team who wrote that script, that means as a Roman
Starting point is 00:14:05 Catholic, I think I'm out. Everyone who works on the production has Thanks a lot. It's now out of the running. Especially you, I know, you would have made a brilliant Pope. Thank you, I know. I think it only on the council if you're a Roman Catholic. The rest of you are going to hell anywhere.
Starting point is 00:14:20 Looking forward to it. So, okay, if you were going to be made Pope, they've put a new rule in quite recently, which is you have to be under 80 to vote. Why do you have to be under 80? That seems unfair. Anyone who can successfully complete a black run on speeds can vote. So do you know how they, so they,
Starting point is 00:14:38 they obviously select the Pope, but they have to ask the Pope, first off. It's an official sentence that needs to be said. And they all go, no. No, me, I come on. No, so the question that they get asked is, do you freely accept your election as supreme pontiff? And the one word answer that they give is, Accepto! Is that wonderful?
Starting point is 00:15:04 That's more Harry Potter than Lord of the Rings, isn't it? And then they walk through the door of tears And then they get fitted with the fisherman's ring Which is the ring that you were talking about earlier That we now need to throw into the fires of Mordor I just want to say this is pretty non-sequitur But it's my favourite fact about any popes in history In the 15th century, Pope 6thus the 4th
Starting point is 00:15:25 granted a formal dispensation to the Cardinal of St. Lucia To cool himself by sodomy During the three hot months of June, July and August Amazing That's very thoughtful. I'm just so warm. I really think that if I was allowed to commit sodomy, I feel much cooler.
Starting point is 00:15:45 And you considered maybe a cold bar. That is an amazing, amazing thing. Okay, let's move on to fact number three, which is you, James. A hundred years ago, a quarter of the residents of New York would move house every single May the 1st at exactly 9 a.m. That's extraordinary. Why? I read this the other day.
Starting point is 00:16:13 I can't remember where I came across it, but I was just astonished that I haven't heard it before. It just seems like the kind of thing that I would have come across. And what would happen is people who were renting their houses would have a one-year lease, and all the leases would end on the same day. And the landlords would up the rent so much that they needed to find a better deal.
Starting point is 00:16:31 And everyone would do this, and everyone would move. And it was absolute pandemonium, absolute chaos. Unsurprising. Yeah. It sounds. What a terrible. system. Bad idea. When did that go up to? That was until the 1940s, I think, but I mean, it was more common in the late 19th
Starting point is 00:16:49 century and early 20th century. That is such a bad idea. I know, because moving is the most stressful thing you can do. What if you were doing it at the same time as a quarter of all residence of your city? Oh my goodness. Maybe there's something moral supporty about it and you know, you come out to the street and it's like, oh yeah, it's it's same for you, hey? A bit like the blitz spirit kind of thing, right? Exactly. It's and something that I read about it was that the big kind of important people suddenly of that of the city were the cartman, the people who suddenly were treated with respect that they'd never seen people who would be bowing to them, calling them Mr. Cartman. And Tristan Cartman.
Starting point is 00:17:31 Mr. Whatever your name is. Screw you guys. You're not going to the home. There was Anthony Trollope's mother wrote about it, and I just want to quickly read out this little passage. She said, on the 1st of May, the city of New York has the appearance of sending off a population flying from the plague, or of a town which has surrendered on condition of carrying away all their goods and chattels. Everyone I spoke to on the subject complained of this custom, as most annoying, but all assured me it was unavoidable.
Starting point is 00:18:05 And what I love about this is it's. something which is completely obviously impractical, but people still did it and just thought, well, this is obviously the only way we're just going to have to put up with it. And I think that's happened quite a few times in history. I think it's quite cool. In India at the moment, they're trying to change the time by shifting this certain area of India by 30 minutes forward.
Starting point is 00:18:25 They would save 2.7 billion units of electricity every year. And that's the reason they want to do it, but everyone's petrified of it because they're saying it's going to cause chaos. And it just made me think that, you know, daylight savings is a thing that we all just very, we just do it. We just say, okay, the time has changed, that's fine. I mean, maybe in the future
Starting point is 00:18:44 that will be a thing. They'll just look at it and go, these guys were idiots. Remember when they wanted to work out where the zero longitude it was? Yeah. And it goes through Greenwich now. So we call it GMT. But at the same time, the French wanted to put it through
Starting point is 00:19:00 Paris, which means if we'd have done that, it would have been called PMT. You were telling me. a fact about this whole thing of chaotic movement and it was to do with the swapping of... So yeah, this was in Sweden. I can't remember what year it was, but they always
Starting point is 00:19:16 drove on the left-hand side and they decided to drive on the right-hand side and they decided to do it all at one time. So everyone would drive on the left and then all of a sudden they would all decide to drive on the right at a certain time. That's amazing. Do you want to phase it gradually? No, no.
Starting point is 00:19:32 Depend. So what happened was everyone would drive on the left until 4.50 and then come to a complete stop. No one was allowed to drive for 10 minutes and then everyone would carefully move to the right hand side of the road and start driving again,
Starting point is 00:19:47 and you weren't allowed to start again until 5. Can you imagine if you're the only person in the country who hadn't got the memo? What's going on? That would be brilliant. It was called... Did it work? Well, weirdly it did.
Starting point is 00:20:02 And there's lots of pictures that it looks a bit like chaotic, but it was called, I'm going to get this wrong, I'm sure, but it's something like Herga Traficom-Lagmingen, or they call it Dagen H, which means the H-day. And on that day, there were only 125 reported traffic accidents, but on a normal Monday, there would be between 130 and 198. And there were no fatalities.
Starting point is 00:20:24 So actually, it was a safer day than normal. So we should have switched signs of the road every single day to keep fatalities down. I think we've got a moral duty to do that. Absolutely. What's brilliant. I do it. But you would be more careful. It's like the idea of some innovator has come up with the spike in the middle of the steering wheel,
Starting point is 00:20:43 which is pointing directly at your heart, which would make us all drive very carefully. The spike of Damocles. Yeah. I think that's a brilliant idea. Don't get an airbag. Get a spike. If you really want to be safe.
Starting point is 00:20:57 There would be a lot of fewer people hit by cars, but a lot more people driving cars would die of spike related in juice. Another spike, I'm afraid. Well, I think we can make this a quick autopsy, can we? The husband's been tragically impaled by his new fayondon. Tragically impaled because he couldn't get the right clutch. And yet another seat adjustment accident. And there's another even more complicated theory
Starting point is 00:21:26 that actually it wouldn't affect the number of statistics we have because people always drive at the very edge of safety. There was a study done on this. I can't remember all the details, but there was a study done. and it was a level crossing, and they measured how quickly people were driving, and it was just about the safest they could do and slam on and still not hit a train.
Starting point is 00:21:47 And then they put a hedge in front of the level crossing, so you wouldn't be able to see it until a bit later, and they found that people slowed down, but only to the extent that they would have to slam on and just about miss the train. Wow. Risk takers. So going back to the obviously impractical,
Starting point is 00:22:02 in Micronesia, they had these maps, and the maps were they were made of sticks and made of rope and the maps would be related to the waves because waves change when they go past islands and so you would look at your map and look at the waves and you'd be able to tell which way to go. Now the waves are not very easy to see so you have to somehow detect the waves
Starting point is 00:22:25 and the best way that they found to do it was to put the most sensitive part of your body into the sea which was your testicles. So they would dip their testicles into the ocean and measure the waves and then they would look at their map and decide which way to go to get to the next island. The thing is, I just like the fact that
Starting point is 00:22:41 I mean, dipping your testicles in the water and looking at our map is a completely impractical way. But they just thought, well, you know, that's the best way we have, we're just going to do it. It's just as well that you'd have to do it today, isn't it? Excuse me, sorry, do you know the way to the swimming? Yeah, hang on a second. Get my beaker.
Starting point is 00:23:06 Okay, let's move on to our final fact of the show. Andy, this is your one. Okay, this is that nobody knows why we kiss. Is that you and I? Especially not your wife or my girlfriend. There are a couple of theories as to why humans kiss each other as opposed to just for pleasure because it feels good. But it's not clear with the answer one way or the other.
Starting point is 00:23:37 Basically, it's between whether we, in terms of one way or the other. Basically, it's between whether we... instinctively do it or whether it's a learned behavior? Well, I remember reading that actually it's not historically that all cultures kiss, is it? So that would imply that it's not instinctive to Hermesapians. I think the theory is to it being instinctual is that mothers would mash up food in their mouth. They would chew the food themselves and they'd transfer it into their infant's mouth. And so all we're really trying to do when we kiss each other is recreate the nice feeling of one's mother,
Starting point is 00:24:09 regurgitating food into your mouth. We all love that. Certainly why I do it. I read that it was the kind of the global spread of kissing as a common thing was done by the Romans. Oh really? Yeah, they were a vibrant kissing culture, apparently.
Starting point is 00:24:24 And they maybe brought it in from India. Have you read that bit? No, but the weird sentence I read is that they did it via military conquest. So it was actually through war that kissing became a thing. Kiss each other now.
Starting point is 00:24:37 I read about one culture that doesn't kiss. These are the people of Mangaya, which is an island in the Cook Islands. And it's written about them that they don't kiss at all. But the way they make up for it is they are one of the most sexually active groups of people in the world. And I'm going to quote this. At 28 years of age, they average two orgasms per night five to six times a week. The expectation is that the male will strive to have his partner have two. or three orgasms to his one.
Starting point is 00:25:09 So basically they're the most orgasmic people, but they don't kiss. Or they're the most compulsive liars in the world. That's the... That's the society of amazing braggers. Yeah. We had like eight orgasms last night. I didn't know how about you.
Starting point is 00:25:23 My girlfriend had three times as many. Nonsense. There is a thought that in... I think Cato the elder said this. Yeah, because the Romans did like to kiss, but there's a theory that Romans kiss their wives to check out whether or not they've been drinking. And Cato wrote that a husband was considered to be acting within his legal right
Starting point is 00:25:40 if he killed his wife after catching her drinking or with alcohol on her breath. It's true. Did you guys read that? It's only this year, the 2014 edition of the French Dictionary, that French kissing is now a word in France. This is the word. Galoschet. La Galoche is an ice skating boot.
Starting point is 00:25:59 And so the new term is the idea of tongues slipping on ice. Slipping on ice. Yeah, like an ice skating boot. They're not as romantic as we have. given them credit for. Hey, he did a lot of slipping on ice last night. Yeah. I use the official word, uh, catagwatism.
Starting point is 00:26:14 Yeah. That's why you do so well. There's a book called The Science of Kissing by Cheryl Kishenbaum, which I've really enjoyed. I've read not all of it, but some of it. The author says that 90% of people can remember their first kiss better than the first time they had sex. Is that to do with, um, drunkenness or? I don't know.
Starting point is 00:26:34 You're showing you a good point. Yeah. I bet it is. Do you guys know the first video footage of a kiss? It was actually one of the first films ever shown to the public. And it was a couple kissing, and it was from a scene which was in a play called The Widow Jones. And you can see the video online.
Starting point is 00:26:52 It was filmed by the Edison Company. The quote they gave around it was, they get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time. That was the description, yeah. And so we'll put that on QI.com slash podcast. you can see the very first recorded video kiss. I thought you're going to mention the first film to win Best Picture.
Starting point is 00:27:12 This was called Wings, I think. Going off memory, but Andy's nodding, so I think it might be right. But there is a man-on-man kiss. Yes, there is. It's two soldiers or aviators in the first. Yeah, yeah. But you were saying about the Widow Jones, the first cinematic kiss, I just wanted to quickly mention the review that it was given
Starting point is 00:27:31 by a painter called John Sloane. This is also possibly the first. film review ever. This is in 1896. He said, The Kiss is absolutely disgusting. Neither participant is physically attractive, and the spectacle of their prolonged pasturing
Starting point is 00:27:46 on each other's lips was hard to bear. When only life-sized, it was pronounced beastly, magnified to gargantuan proportions. It is absolutely disgusting. Such things call for police interference. That's amazing. Allegedly the first ever film review. Police interference.
Starting point is 00:28:03 Call the police. Shut it down. He just got out of a difficult relationship. But if you watch the video as well, it's hilarious because they basically spend half the clip with their mouth to each other, but they're just chatting to each other. They're snuggled up really close.
Starting point is 00:28:16 They're literally their mouth and mouth just going, oh yeah, how you go. They're talking into each other's mouths almost, yeah. Obviously, a lot of cultures have a different way of greeting, kissing, you know, the French will kiss on both cheeks. It's always a confusion you don't know how many times you're kissing. For politicians, it's a big problem, particularly when they're meeting heads of states
Starting point is 00:28:34 who particularly they shouldn't be seen as having an intimate moment with. And I learned that Bill Clinton, when he was introduced to Yasser Arafat, because Yasser Arafat's a big hugger. And there was a period where he just couldn't get a hug from Yasser Arafat, so he had to avoid it. And the way that he avoided it was that his aides taught him Jiu-Jitsu, so he could call specific moods on Arafat whenever he went in for a hug. What, threw him over his shoulder?
Starting point is 00:29:00 If you watch some of the footage, you'll notice that Arafat suddenly get flipped to the ground. No, but so Clinton was actively taught jujitsu In order to avoid the Arafat hug Arafat finally got a hug on him though At one point there's a photo that you can see in her Yeah Bill Clinton tries to avoid physical contact What a hell like
Starting point is 00:29:18 Monica Lewinsky said that he initially kissed her or the first time he kissed her it was to shut her up about something because she was rabbiting on her words I think she's a thing that she's putting a more charitable interpretation on it than it might deserve Maybe she accidentally walked into the Oval Office and she said sorry I got lost I was looking for the staff room
Starting point is 00:29:39 do you know where it is I do have a method Okay that's all the time we have for this week That's all of our facts Thank you so much everyone for listening That's been another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish If you want to get in contact with any of us About the facts that we've been talking about
Starting point is 00:29:55 You can find us all on Twitter Andy, you're on At Andrew Hunter M James, you're on At Eggshaped Anna, we are almost convincing to get onto Twitter But in the meantime, at Quicopedia
Starting point is 00:30:06 And I'm at Shriverland Also special thanks to Emperor Yes For the theme tune that they've given us Which is Wasps There's a full version of that song on iTunes That you can download Or check out their SoundCloud or follow them on Twitter
Starting point is 00:30:20 at Emperor underscore yes. And if you want to head over to www. com slash podcast, we're going to have a full page again of all the information, extra links, the first kiss, all that sort of stuff. You can check it out.
Starting point is 00:30:32 And we'll see you again next time. Next week. Bye.

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