No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As a Leg Made from Milk

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Meaty Biscuits, Leather Baths and Other Strange Tails.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everybody. Before we start this week's podcast, just a quick reminder to remain indoors and also to say we have an announcement to make. A few weeks ago, as some of you may know, we put up back online the second complete year of fish. We put up 52 episodes. We are now doing the same thing with the first complete year of fish. Those episodes are all going back up online and they are a kind of insight into how the point, podcast started in the first place. There's lots of crazy, brilliant stuff on there. And if you listen to reverse chronological order, you could notice the sound quality audibly diminish, like week on week, as we get back to the first episode where we had a single microphone

and we recorded it in a cupboard. So if you'd like to check that out, please do so. There is another amazing thing you can get. When we first put out the first year of fish on sale, it had a special accompanying vinyl LP, which was brilliant. And that came with a bonus. episode that we recorded. That vinyl is going on a special flash sale this weekend. It's going to be

just 12 quid and you can check it out at no such thing as a fish.com. Also, of course, the cassette tape USB that we did with the complete second year of fish is up there too if you want to check it out. They're both great fun and we love working with the companies who made them and made them a reality. So do check them out and enjoy the episodes and enjoy this episode. On with the show. Hello and welcome to another working from home episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Chisinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered round our microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that the inventor of condensed milk, Gail Borden, had previously tried inventing a biscuit made of meat. Mmm. Sounds delicious. So I don't like condensed milk, but I've read about this meat biscuit and it sounds amazing. It sounds, I guess, it kind of sounds a bit like dog food, I think, but for people. Okay. That doesn't sound amazing, but I guess we have different tastes. Well, so he was alive in the mid-19th century and, you know, there were all these problems about preserving food at the time and feeding, you know, large numbers of people at a distance or at a distance of time.

so especially feeding your armies, things like this. This was a couple of decades before the Civil War, so he would have known there was a Civil War coming, needed to feed people for that. He had amazing powers of foresight, didn't he, this inventor? Yeah, I know. Yeah, I mean, incredible, actually. Sort of weird, he didn't make his money out of that.

But he invented so much stuff. And one of the things he invented was a beef broth, which he then evaporated into this kind of syrup, and you could either fry or bake that syrup into a biscuit. And it was a universally derided... Actually, not universally derided. What? The scientific Americans said it was one of the best discoveries of modern times. Okay, that was a good review.

It also won a gold medal at the Great Exhibition in 1851. But the army tried it, and they declared it was not only unpalatable, but failed to appease the craving of hunger, producing headache, nausea, and great muscular depression. Picky, picky, picky. But can we talk about some of the other stuff that Borden invented? Because he was incredible. So lots of his relatives, very sadly, died of yellow fever.

His mother, his wife and his son had all passed away because of yellow fever. So it was a summer disease predominantly. And one thing he decided to invent was a giant refrigerator to keep people in until they got better. That didn't work. He tried him. Did you read about the, what's it, when something? Amphibious. The amphibious machine he invented.

The Terequius. Yeah. It was basically one of those things that you get on the Thames in London, wasn't it? What like a duck riveter? It was a duck river tour. Yeah. So it was built for prairies. It was like a wagon that could ride you along the prairies.

But then it transformed into a boat at the click of a button or the erection of a sail, I guess, once it hit the water. It was horse drawn, wasn't it, as well? Yes. So I guess the horse stayed on shore. No, you then attached sea horses to it once it got in the water. water. Yeah, the poor horse didn't get to ride the boat, but it was pretty unsuccessful. I think on its first outing, all its occupants ended up in the water, right? Oh, no. Yeah, they did. So he went out a couple times to the ocean. One time, as you say, it tipped over the people into the ocean. Other

times, they were just too afraid to let him take the boat in. And I was reading an account of that, which gives you an idea of other food inventions that he had, because he hosted a dinner before he took everyone out on this boat. And there's a quote which is, from which he talked about the food that he'd concocted that evening out of material from which, if you knew what they were, you would turn to loathing and horror. I have transmuted even the dirt itself into delicacies. That was dinner before the horror show, boat experience. That's brilliant. Interestingly, you know when he invented this biscuit? I just want to go back to the biscuit, which I do think is pretty cool. So he invented this biscuit, and then he went to the great exhibition

in 1851, and everyone said it was amazing. Like I said, the scientific Americans said it was amazing. Everyone thought this was going to be the next big thing. And so he opened up a big office in New York, where he could sell these biscuits from. And it was opened on Maiden Lane in New York. And it was, and I can't quite tell from Google Maps, it was either the same building or its next door to the building where the Hamilton song, the room where it happens, that room is in a building on the same street and it's either the same one or its next door to it. And it's either the same one or its next door it. So are you implying that the song The Room Where It Happened is about the room where the Meat Biscuit almost took off? The original probably was, right? It probably was about the meat biscuit,

and then they thought, oh, you know what, it's not doing as well as we thought, let's change this musical from what used to be about the meat biscuit business. Now let's turn it into something about Hamilton. Oh, if only. I didn't know what the room where it happens is. I assumed it was a metaphor of some kind, but you're saying there's an actual room. And Anna knows the story better than me, but I think is it not where they all got together and decided that the country would be a federal system or something like that? It was the bargaining moment, I think, between Hamilton and Jefferson and his second in command, who was Madison, and Burr was not allowed into the meeting, and that's the meeting he wanted to be in because that said that's where power was and meat biscuits. Madison actually came out of that with his own set of demands, which is that he wanted to have some square gardens.

named after him in New York. So everyone got what they wanted a little bit. Back to Gail Borden for a second. Did you find, quite a few of the biogs of him, say he was a bit of an eccentric, and he used to ride around Galveston on a pet bull, apparently. And he was quite an important guy, so he lived in this place called Galveston in Texas,

but he actually also helped design it, apparently. So this was in 1829, he moved there, and then he helped set up all the streets of this place. and the way they measured streets was it was by the number of longhorn cattle that could move a breast down the street which I suppose just shows in Texas at the time what was the most important thing to transport

so a hundred foot wide street could fit 14 head of longhorn cattle Wow and then Borden basically then went on to make his condensed milk didn't he Andy? Yes and that's what we know him best for today That's what we know and love him for today But then Borden's milk is like

I think in America still perhaps one of the big brands is it Yeah, it is, but it wasn't called Borden's until after he died, I believe. He was actually inspired to make the condensed milk on the way back from collecting his prize for the meat biscuit, right? He was obviously on a roll. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was on the boat on the way back from London, and there were cows on board to help feed the young kids on board, and they were too distressed to produce their milk selfishly because of all the waves.

And so a lot of the kids on board died, and he thought we've got to have a way of getting milk that doesn't require sucking out of the udders of a cow directly. Well, the reason that he became so popular is that his milk was way better than everyone else's because he had what was called the Dairy Man's Ten Commandments. And if anyone was going to sell him milk to condense, it had to fit in with certain things that he said had to happen. So, for instance, they had to wash the cows udders before milking. And they had to sweep their barns clean and they had to dry their strainers every morning

and night and stuff like that. But he came up with these specific rules that you had to adhere to if you wanted to give him milk? Well, he was working on his milk roundabout the time where milk was incredibly controversial, wasn't he? Because this is the 1850s. And I didn't know about this thing, the great milk swill crisis, but I'm sure everyone else knows about it, which is basically this thing happened where until industrialisation, people really did have a farmer, bring a cow round to their door, and they'd order milk from it. So you met the cow, and you got to okay it. But with like urbanisation and stuff, then you just had to buy milk without having met the

cow firsthand and so people used to start tampering with it and a major problem was distilleries always bit roguish used to basically set up side alleys in dairy farming and they just fill and then they just feed cows all the leftover kind of corn rye swilly mash and it was really badly infected and they'd sort of the milk would come out and it would be a gross watery blue color and then they'd fill it up with things like chalk and plaster to make it look white and like real milk and people were just dying by the bucket load because these incompetent whiskey makers were trying to give them milk. And so there was this huge, huge crisis and huge controversy. And once they cleared that up, I think death rates went down about five times in New York.

Wow. That's so interesting about, sorry to pick up on a very minor thing you said in that really, it's quite intense thing about life saving. But meeting the cow that gave you milk and sort of knowing its name, that's why I guess they must have the spokes cow that they have. for Borden's milk, which is Elsie. Because you would feel like, okay, Elsie's in charge here. She's looking after it.

So they've had over 50 Elsies over the year. Do you think everyone in America thinks that they're all getting the milk from this one exhausted cow? She puts on such a brave front, but my God, she's knackered. Yeah. We've mentioned Elsie before. Have we? Like, incredibly briefly. We mentioned her when we were talking about, I think she was censored because she had others.

and Elsie has undergone a bit of a transformation from the first time she appeared. She used to be a complete cow, as in she used to be actually a cow. And then she's kind of started, she was put on her hind legs, and she was dressed in pinnifles and things. And so she was in the kind of uncanny valley between human and cow. And I think Hollywood censored her because she was a bit too sexy, that for a cat, that sexier than a cow should be, basically. You don't want to be turned on while you're trying to eat your breakfast cereal.

No way. The thick house. Okay. I do actually, just if we're on milk, I have one more thing about condensed milk. Because I think I might have found an earlier example of condensed milk, which is St. Cuthbert. St. Cuthbert was alive in the 7th century AD. And he, according to legend, he chopped his own leg off after speaking angrily to his parents. And it was then replaced with a cast that was made of milk.

And so I think that is a possible example of earlier milk. condensation. What are you talking about? So you know, miracles happen and you if you've cut your own leg off because you've been speaking angrily to your parents and you're remorseful, sometimes God will grant you a new leg and his new one happened to be made of milk. Anyway, there's one weird connection which is that there is a St. Cuthbert's Cooperative Society which was a shop. It's now called Scott Mid so it's one of the big Scottish grocery shops and they hired in 1944 Sean Conchartner. Connery as a milkman.

Did they? No way? Yeah. So... Sorry, what's the link again? Well, the supermarket is called St Cuthbert's Cooperative. And what's Sean Connery got to do with it? Has he got a leg made of milk?

Yeah, it's the man with the milky leg, the sequel to the man with a golden gun. It was one of Q's less popular gadget. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 2014, four non-related economists with the surname Goodman published a paper about the economics of surname sharing. The paper was titled A Few Good Men. Very clever. You've got to wonder what came first, that title or any of the rest of it.

Actually, none of them was called Goodman when they first started the paper. they all name changes. Well, they were very strict about that actually because they claim that this is the first paper co-authored by four non-related surname-sharing economists, and there was a thought that this could be challenged because there was a paper published by Scarbeck, Scarbeck, Scarbeck, and Scarbeck back in 2012.

But they disqualified it from beating them to it because they said it was written by two brothers and their two wives. So they argued that first, the fact that the two wives had their members, made in names before they started the paper and then took on the name Scarback disqualifies them. So they did it during the research. And also, one of the brothers and his wife are not economists. They're attorneys.

And so that also knocked them out. They were very thorough. So in this paper, they looked at how likely it is for other groups of economists with the same name to share papers, didn't they? They had a data set with loads of names of economists, and they found that 45% of them share a surname with the same. at least one other economist. So they think that it might be helpful.

But the main reason that they think this whole thing might help is that if you have loads of people with the same name, then you don't have that problem where the paper is by Dan Schreiber et al. And we don't see who the other people who wrote the paper are. Why? Do they just pluralize this surname, basically, by four Goodmans? They just say by Goodman et al, but they don't refer to exactly which Goodman is the first goodman.

so actually everyone is getting equal billing it's like if we all changed our name to Tashinsky and then we went to do a gig and then in big lights on the theatre it said Tashinsky to Shinsky to Shinsky to Shinsky and Tyshinsky we wouldn't know who was the top of the bill of course it would be me but we wouldn't know who it was yeah exactly I'm not falling for that I'm not rocking up to a fish gig with Harkin at all

nice try buddy I've read a thing about surnames and actually this is a Beatles fact so Dan, I'm probably going to defer to you on this one. But is it the case that Paul McCartney wrote yesterday? Yes. This quiz is easy. All right. Next.

Okay. No, but I read that John Lennon became furious when he was in hotels because quite a lot of the time the person playing the piano in the hotel would play yesterday as a tribute to him. And he hadn't written any of that song at all. It wasn't a Lennon and McCartney song. It was just a McCartney song. And so that made him furious. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah. Two point to me. Good. I'm glad to have that confirmed. So if you ever see Andy in a hotel and you want to pay tribute to him, don't play him the episode of No Such Things of Fish where Alex Bell was here instead of him, because that'll just annoy him. Exactly. I'll be so angry. I'll be amazed at your piano skills if you can play that episode.

Go, imagine that poor penis getting requests for, do you know, episode 313? No such thing. Banana with Wi-Fi? It's the same tune. Everyone's the same. On surnames in academia, problems that this poses. So the same surname problem is a serious issue,

and it's especially an issue in China, because in China there are 200,000 people per unique surname. So they've got far fewer surnames in China, and I read a piece written by a Wang, a J. Wang, who was saying there are more than 1,200 J-Wangs, J-Wangs in nanoscience alone. So, I mean, this is hell. So if you want to find an individual academic, you can't find them because you have, you know, 200,000 wangs to deal with.

So now in academia you get something called your orchid, which is standardised now across most journals. So rather than being one of a billion, you know, Smith's, wangs, you have to have a 16-digit number. But there is an issue because dead scientists probably won't sign up to this orchid system because they can't. And so the worry is that now, if you're a deceased scientist, your academic work is going to become harder and harder to source. So have you guys heard of Dick Asp Man? No, I've never heard of it. He was a gas station employee from Canada and his name, if you look him up on Wikipedia, it says his name propelled him to celebrity status across North America for four months in 1995. Wow, that is like the, who is it?

The Andy Warhol, isn't it? It's there. Everyone has their four months of fame. Yeah, exactly. I think it's because David Letterman found out that there was someone called Dick Asman. He found this so funny that he, you know, kept on referring to him. This became known as Asmania. And eventually, his dad, by the way, was called Adolf Asman, which is amazing.

I mean, what an amazing. Yeah. Wow. If you were only allowed to change one of those names, so hard to know which to choose. rough yeah and so he became super famous and then he faded into obscurity

but there was another assman recently who got in trouble over a vanity license plate another Canadian I believe who had an ass man on his license plate and the authority said no you can't have that anyway that's that name

I have a very random surname fact while we're just lobbing in some good old surnames I just read this late last night Silla Black the singer and TV show host I found out what her real surname is. Do you guys know where her real surname is? No. Silla White and she only got

the name change as a result of a misprint in a Mersie Beat newspaper when she was starting out that called her Silla Black and she just went, oh, that's a bit of a misprints, isn't it? Yeah, it's a massive, it's a massive typo. Yeah, it's not a typo at all, is it? It's like literally the difference between black and white. Yeah, good, cool. But I can't believe she styled it out. and just went, oh yeah, yeah, that's me. Like when a boss says your name wrong in a meeting, you just go, okay, I guess I'm Mike for this meeting.

Yeah, she did it for her whole career. Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that if you wanted to have a bath in Paris in the 1820s, you could have one delivered to your door. Wow. This is the bath delivery service. Did you have to take the bath outside of the door, or could you bring it into your house?

house or what? It was brought into your house, sorry, so it was delivered to your door and then up your stairs and into whatever room you chose to bathe in. So this was called the Ban and Domicil and it was so popular in Paris in the 1820s. And yeah, someone would come along. A guy called a thermophore would deliver a bath to your doorway. And then they'd also bring these metal rails so they could wheel it up the stairs on these rails, plonk it down.

They also came with a dressing gown and a towel and... You could, you'd order your flavour of bath. So if you wanted a hot bath, you would say. If you wanted a refreshing cold bath, that may have been less money. I don't know, but that was also an option. Anna, when you say flavors, I don't usually associate hot and cold as flavors. So was there anything else that you could choose like pistachio? I think there was one other choice.

Mineral. It's not, again, not a flavor. Mineral is not a flavor. I think it spices up. time a bit if you do refer to them as flavors. Turn on the hot flavor, cold flavor. Sure.

Try it next time. I love the fact that they brought along a towel. That feels like the least important bit of the entire enterprise. What? So was this a porcelain bath they were bringing? Or was it made of something like... What do you do? Do you just drip dry whenever you get out of the bath?

Of course I do. Of course I do. Just stand in the street, letting nature do its work. It's very important. wasn't to bath time to have a towel, obviously. Do you jump out like a dog and shake all of the water off you? I just shake it off once and then I'm normal again. Sorry, you were saying, was it a porcelain?

Anna, was it porcelain? They were made of various different materials. Apparently some were made of leather. And some were foldable, pliable, apparently. They said in one article. But I would have thought if it was leather and you had like a hot-flavored bath, then it might what? I don't,

maybe they had better technology that we've now forgotten. Like secret leather, yeah. Yeah. A leather bath, you're playing some weird sex games if you're ordering a lot of great. That must have been a no-question's-ask service.

Anyway, what a great service. It is, it seemed to sort of disappear, as I guess trends do. So I think there were a thousand of these baths for rent in Paris by the mid-18,

20s and then they receded again. Barring was a bit controversial. I think some people thought it was a bit lascivious. There was a famous prostitute, a French cortisan who had two baths and that was a bit frowned upon like, oh, that's the kind of thing called theans do. And she actually had in one of her bars that was made of silver, she had three taps, one of which delivered water and another delivered milk and the other champagne. Just on the flavor thing though, because James was saying stuff about, what did you say like almonds and stuff like that? I had pistachio, but it was just the first flavor that came into my head. Yeah, but that was a thing.

There was the sort of prototype back then of the bath bomb that gives the color and aroma that you get with them in the form of things like clouded, powdered, almond paste, and then milk was another big one. And largely, I think that was a modesty thing for women. The idea was that you would have the bath, not necessarily in a bathroom, but possibly in an open room. And so it just created a layer of camouflage to stop your bits, being seen.

I do see that, but I think, let's say you have some nice redox in your bath or something and it smells of lavender, then you come out of your bath and you smell like lavender, I probably don't want to smell like milk after you get out of the bath. Do you know what I mean? Like milk? I wouldn't mind smelling like, is the milk fresh? That's the big question. To begin with it will be.

That's a really good show. If you're using the Patent Murray drip dry method, then over time that milk will curdle. Also, I don't know how clean you can claim you are if you're stepping out of the bath and you're sort of covered in bits of pine nut and almond seed and whatever else it was that they had. Well, there was another thing where you used to have, and this was more for the aristocracy, you would have two baths. So you would have the bath that had the bath bomb in it, like the milk and the almond. You'd go in and wash down.

Then you'd get out and go into your next bath, and that would be just the clear water. And you could just wash in the purity of that and then get out. According to the Smithsonian, I read this on the website, Sometimes you wouldn't actually get into your actual bath. You would wrap yourself in blankets and then you would lie or sit on sticks of wood which were balanced across the tub of water. I can't believe this is true. Like you're being steamed.

Yeah. Basically, yeah. I mean, I really can't believe this is true. And is that to make you more healthy to consume and to give you a more satisfying crunch? I mean, that's why you do it to broccoli, isn't it? Yeah. It's weird that we're talking about baths in this one. and someone we've talked about earlier in this podcast

has quite a strong connection to bathing. Adolf Asman. No, Adolf Asman, I dread to think of the bath that he'd come up with. Gail Borden of Meat Biscuit fame also invented a wagon which women could wheel down the beach into the shore and then they could descend from there into the water without anyone saying them, which we had in the Victorian era,

but he invented that in America for ladies to use. so a bathing entrepreneur as well Do you guys know who invented the heart-shaped bathtub? No, I can't believe they're not famous for it though Have you guys heard of the heart-shaped bathtub? No. Okay, so this is a thing in America, I think,

which is where you have a bathtub which is shaped in the classic heart, you know, so I guess the two of you sit. It's for couples. The invention of this thing was a guy called Morris Benjamin Wilkins and I just, I like him so much this guy because he served in the US Navy,

he was in submarines, and then he came out of the Navy, came out of the submarine, and decided to invent a new kind of bathtub, I guess to preserve a bit of the submarine experience. And again, if you look at... That's the opposite experience. In a submarine, you're out of the water.

You're right. If you wanted to do that, he would just be in the sheath, inside the bath. Yeah. He would be in like a metal sheath. Yeah. Okay.

Or laying on the twigs above the bath like your other invention. Did he get fired from being a submariner? Because he kept trying to fill up the submarine. Okay. I badly misspoke. He hated submarines so much that he vowed to create the opposite of a submarine, which was a bath. But he, if you look him up, again on Wikipedia, it says that he is credited with making the Pocono Mountains in northeast Pennsylvania,

the honeymoon capital of the world. Now, I had never heard of these mountains before now. So I don't know if they really are. But he invented this bathtub, and then he was so emboldened by it, Wilkins, that he went on to create the champagne glass bathtub. This is unbelievable. It's seven, it's an actual champagne glass.

And, you know, one of the shallow ones, not a very high flute. Yeah, yeah. The one that's based on Murray Antoinette's breast. Exactly, yes. And it's that shallow shape. coop and you can both sit in there but you are seven feet off the ground and supported by this incredibly narrow looking.

Wow. Yeah, that's really cool. How do you get in there? I think you need a ladder to get in there. No, you're in a much higher champagne flute and you kind of flow over the edge into that. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that dogs can suffer from a sprained tail. if they get too happy.

Sweet. So nice. Yeah, it's sweet, isn't it? So this, I read about this in a news article about Rolo, who was a seven-year-old Dax hunt, who managed to strain his tail by wagging it so hard. His family are at home a lot more at the moment, and so he's always happy because his humans are around. And so he kept wagging his tail, and he strained the ligaments.

And it turns out that strained the ligaments. strain tails is a thing with dogs that you need to worry about. I've never had a dog, so I didn't know about this, but apparently it's a problem. How problematic is it? Because their tails aren't offering that much, are they? A bit of balance, but if you sprain it, it's not like an ankle. I guess it's just more painful than awkward for their lives. It's a thing called limber tail. It's also called dead tail, swimmer's tail, cold tail, frozen tail, sprained tail, limp tail, sprung tail, and broken tail. Lots of synonyms for it. Did you say swimmer's tail?

Swimmers tail, because that's one of the main times you get a sore tail if you're a dog. If you've been swimming in water that's too cold or too hot, so either of the flavors, then it narrows the space where your spinal cord goes through, and that can cause basically the bones to kind of rub against the ligaments and stuff, and that can cause you to have injured ligaments. Ouch, so always request the mineral option. for your dog bath. Exactly, yeah.

Is this quite common, James? Is this something that a lot of people who have dogs are often at the vet for? I don't think it's the most common thing in the world, but it is definitely a thing that happens if you look on the internet and Google, engine tail. Like I say, I don't have a dog,

and I do have a cat and she seems fine. Yeah, it's not as common as worms, is it? No, it's less common than worms, but more common than being hit by a meteorite. Yeah. I've grown up with dogs and we never had to take them to the vet for a sprain tail, but then we made sure they were never happy because... Just didn't want the hassle.

It's not just happy that they wag their tails when they are, right? Right. They do it when they're angry. They do it when they're about to attack. There's different kinds of wags. And I was reading, there was a guy called Dr. Roger Mugford who invented a wagometer. And the wago meter, so Dr. Mugger, Dr. Mugger, Dr. Mugford, probably best known for retraining Prince and Bull Terrier Dottie after a bit two boys.

That's how I know him. Best known. Unbelievable. So he created the Wagometer, which can indicate whether or not the dog is happy or angry or about to attack, and it's a sensor that's attached to its tail. What it's used for, though, is when they do dog shows, they want to sometimes tell who's the happiest dog. So the Wagometer is put on the dogs, and it monitors the waggoner that's.

going on to then officially scientifically using Mugford's waggon meter determine who the happiest is. I think we're all of Mugford's here. They do definitely have different wags though. You can kind of tell. So if it's apparently if they do like a really slow quite stiff wag then that's when they're saying go away I might attack you. I'm anxious. But left and right is a difference too. So if they I had no idea about this before looking this up that a tail wagging to the left is negative. emotions and wagging to the right is happy. And I thought that dogs just wagged their tails left and right. Yeah.

A wag was a wag. I would have thought a wag would be left, then right, then left then right. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, no, they lean. They tend to one side, unless our dogs are bit lopsided. But they definitely... Is it stage left or...

Is it the dog's left or is it my left? It's the dog's. Because that's important to know. It's from the perspective of the dog. Because it's about brain hemispheres, right? The same as in humans. So amazingly, they've got similar brain hemispheres. fear responsibilities as we do.

And so when they're wagging to the right and they're happy, that's because the left side of their brain is kind of active when they're feeling relaxed and chill. And then the right side of their brain is active when it's an emergency. And so that's why they then wag to the left. That's weird because whenever I do the hokey-cokey, whenever I put the right leg in, I always feel really relaxed. But then as soon as I put the left leg in, I feel really anxious. You're misaligned.

There are researchers at Keio University They have invented a tail for humans That's great So a full-sized tail for humans And the idea is that it will help you To walk around, bend over And anything that you might find a little bit tough to do Because your body has things that it can't do

The tail will just help balance you Really? When you say a full-sized tail Do you mean Are we talking kangaroo? length, are we talking dog length? More kangaroo than dog because it has to balance your entire upper body. So let's say you're running a bath and you have to bend over.

I've got a shower kind of screen next to my bath. So it's kind of hard to bend around and turn my bath on without getting in the bath. But if I had a tail, I could do it easily because that would just balance me out and I could kind of bend my body in any direction. And it might be useful especially for elderly people who have limited mobility. It might help them to bend over and reach things that they can't normally reach. So it might be that when you get to a certain age, you get a tail attached. Wouldn't that be cool?

That would be amazing. Something to look forward to. It's not surgically attached, is it? They just sort of strap it on you. At the moment, it's strap-on. Okay. Well, that'll bring a bit of spice to the 70th birthday party, weren't it? Granddad, we bought you a strap-on.

It's a hell of an intimidating strap-on to walk in a row. kangaroo length Whoa You've got it on the rug side Granddad It's supposed to be sticking it out the back Oh Jesus Oh dear

Some sheep When they're nursing They're young They get so carried away grooming newborn lambs That they lick off their entire tails What? Wow

They sort of chew them They're sort of chewing the lad To chew out Some of the daibre in their fur But they really love them You know sometimes apparently If you really love your baby You've got a baby, Dan.

You kind of want to sort of bite it. Yeah. But they're in, they'd like that, and they accidentally chew off their tails. Dan's child's leg is made of condensed milk, so it's a bit easier for him. That is remarkable, though. Like, wow. You'd resent your parent. Do you know why rabbits have white tails?

No. Seems a bit stupid, doesn't it? Yeah, it does seem stupid. Because whenever you see a rabbit running around in the countryside, they're really easy to spot because they have this white fluffy tail that jumps around. Yeah. And you can see them from anywhere. So you would think that a fox would have the same skill, right?

Well, it turns out that while you do notice them immediately, they're really good for kind of tricking you as to which direction rabbits go. Because if you do see a rabbit running away, they kind of dart from left to right, from left to right. And so when they're directly in front of you, you see the tail. But as soon as they dodge to the left or the right, you can't see the tail anymore. You can only see the dark bit.

You can't see the light bit. So for a second, you can't tell whether they've gone left or right. So basically confuses any predators. Isn't that clever? That's so cool. That's really good. Tail decoys in animals are so fascinating. Like how lizards can just drop their tail off.

I was reading about geckos and the fact that the way that their tails are made up, they're kind of like toilet paper. They're kind of serrated already. They're pre-serrated so that they help the process of the tail to be bitten off by clenching muscles. they're actually actively part of it, which is why if a gecko's already dead, it's much harder to bite off its tail because it's not helping the animal eating it to do it.

Wow. And there was this really cool thing, which is it's very fatty their tails. And so if the predator then pursues the gecko and the gecko still gets away, the gecko will then go back and eat the tail because it's so fatty. It's got so much nutrients in it.

Whoa. Yeah, so it's effectively also an emergency meal for them. Do we know if they sort of cry as they're doing it? Because I think if you had to eat your own limb to survive, you would. Crocodile tears, but even so. Actually, the longest tail in nature is a lizard, isn't it? Which can be deposited at will. It's the Asian grass lizard, which looks so funny.

It looks like a child got carried away when drawing the tail. So its tail is 25 centimetres, which is over three times the length of its body. It's so sweet. And I also quite like the term, the terminology, when they're talking about the length of lizards. compared to their tails, they talk about snout to vent. Snout to vent the length is six centimeters. Is the vent the bottom? The vent is the bottom, yes, from which you vent air and other things.

I just like that phrase, how tall is he, snout to vent? Yeah, that's true, actually, because people who have long legs, it's like having a long tail, it's not as important, is it? Yeah. The most important bit is from your nose to your anus. Yep. And really, what happens below that is just a long leg's. incidental. I agree. All these basketballers bragging. It's an out of vent. They're barely different

to us. Okay, that's it. That's 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've 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. And Shazinski. You can email a podcast at QI.com. Yep, or you could go or a group account at No Such Thing or our website. No Such Thing as a fish.com. We've got everything up there from all of our previous episodes. And when we say all, we mean all.

Every single one that disappeared from the internet a couple years ago is back up there. So there's over now 100 episodes for you to relisten to from the first and second years of fish. And also, if you'd like to buy the cassette or the vinyl, they're there too. And we will be back again next week with another working from home episode. Guys, we really hope you're doing okay. Stay home, stay safe. Love to your family. we'll see you again next week goodbye

let's say for instance oh I can hear birds in the background yeah I can too yeah Anna can you hear birds in the foreground Is that a problem

that's a problem isn't it I'm recording outside Maybe next time don't keep fish and chips next to your computer Anna is this your pitch to be on Desert Island discs Ha ha ha ha