No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Randy Rat In Polyester Pants

Episode Date: September 5, 2014

Episode 25 - Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Andy (@andrewhunterm), Anna (@nosuchthing), discuss rats wearing pants, pizzas on Venus, pillow fighting in the trenches and how to avoid incest ...in Iceland.

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. No, seriously. It's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. He says it right there. First paragraph, No Such Thing is a Fish. 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.
Starting point is 00:00:26 My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with three other elves, Andy Murray, Anna Chazinsky, and James Harkin. And once again, we've gathered around the table with our favorite facts from the last seven days. So here we go, in no particular order, our favorite things from the last week. My fact is that rats wearing polyester pants can't get erections. How did they find this out? So this guy, it was in 1993, and it was Dr. Ahmed Shafic, and he dressed up 75 rats. We just established why he did this first.
Starting point is 00:00:59 Yeah, he wanted to see if polyester decreases fertility. It's science, Dan. Okay. So, yeah, he split them into five groups, dressed one group up in cotton trousers or pants, dressed another group up in polyester pants, another group up in wool pants, and another group up in 50-50, which I think is what most people wear, right? It's like 50% cotton, 50% polyester. And yeah, they had to wear these pants continuously for six months, and then he shoved them in with a load of women. Wait, you do, female rats. No, maybe that was where he went wrong.
Starting point is 00:01:30 And none of the women got pregnant. Sorry, yeah, he shoved them in with a load of female rats. And he found that the ones wearing polyester pants try to mount the females and their ability to penetrate them was significantly reduced. And the idea is synthetic fabrics are bad for you, is that it? Yeah, actually that's cool. So he said that, but I think that's controversial. A lot of studies say wearing polyester boxes might reduce your sperm count.
Starting point is 00:01:55 How weird? Yeah. But then I read quite a good quote from a doctor saying, how come during the 70s and 80s when everyone was wearing tight polyester clothes, suddenly the human population didn't decrease rapidly. Yeah. There were a lot of advances in other areas as well. It's only working in a world where the only variable was what kind of fancy trousers everyone was wearing.
Starting point is 00:02:14 Yeah, so anyway, he thinks the reason that this happens and the reason that it maybe happens in humans, but the reason that it happens definitely in rats is that it creates kind of a static electricity around if you're wearing polyester type polyester. So you've got electric genitals? You've got electric genitals. Sounds like a great band name. And the sperm hate that. And I found this out in a book called Bonk by Mary Roach, who we love because she writes excellent books. So Bonk is a scientific approach to sex, but it's really well written.
Starting point is 00:02:43 It's a really entertaining read. When I heard the fact, I read into this guy just very quickly because I wanted to see what kind of character he was. And there was a great little thing that Mary Roach had found out that he was Nobel Prize nominated. But the thing is, she checked up to see if he was Nobel nominated. and the rules of Nobel are that they don't reveal who the nominations were until 50 years after the nomination itself
Starting point is 00:03:05 so you can go around she's saying put that on your resume you can go around saying you're a Nobel Prize nominated person and no one will ever know but he also performed the world's first bladder transplant
Starting point is 00:03:15 he also did the same experiment on dogs which I find so I think he might have just really liked putting pants on animals he was quite clear in the study that he washed them every time they were soiled
Starting point is 00:03:26 rats do soil themselves a lot they urinate all my most all the time. Oh, well, that's a lot of washing then. Yeah. Unless it was just number two's that he was cleaning up. But, um, so rats urinate all the time everywhere to attract women, female rats. Um, they also wee on food to marketers edible. Standard practice. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, females will we on a male that they particularly like. Male rats will do the same to females. Young rats will we on older rats and no one knows why they do that. And dominant males regularly we on their
Starting point is 00:03:56 subordinates. Non-standard practice. No. Well, that's a lot of weeing to be cleaning up after, isn't it? Do they have to constantly drink? Sessently in the pub, just downing pints. Got a weird guy. So we don't know why they piss on each other. I think the idea is maybe that it contains pheromones or something like that. But it seems like such a blunt instrument to us
Starting point is 00:04:18 because we don't know about whatever pheromones may be in it. So they probably look at us going, oh, these humans, they make noises with their mouths when they're happy, when they're sad, to please people, to make people angry. It's grotesque. Why are they marking that urinal as edible? Going back to Mary Roach, the book Bonk, which is where you got the fact about rats in pants from,
Starting point is 00:04:40 I read it a few years ago for, I think it was in the J series, and because you have to tenuously tie everything to the letter of the alphabet of your study, mine was under J for jiggy, brackets, jiggy. Other incredible facts from this book, Bonk, I love this one. In 1851, a gynecologist called James Platt White was expelled from the American Medical Association.
Starting point is 00:04:58 for inviting medical students to observe a consenting woman giving birth because his colleagues were so outraged by the idea of a male doctor looking at female genitals. I was given birth to in front of a bunch of students. Really? Yeah. It was pretty awesome. Can you remember much about it?
Starting point is 00:05:12 Of course I can. Yeah. A lot of talk about how beautiful I was. Oh, and the other two-fiths of the human penis is hidden beneath the skin. Two-fifths? Two-fiths. It's like an iceberg. Oh, and I think the other thing, which I've mentioned on this podcast before,
Starting point is 00:05:26 is about the postage stamp penis test. Well, say it anyway. Say it. In the 20th century, if someone couldn't get an erection, it was either going to be psychological or it was going to be physiological. So to test whether or not it was a purely bodily problem or whether it was all in the mind, they would attach a strip of perforator postage stamps
Starting point is 00:05:43 around the base of the penis and then leave you overnight. If it was a purely psychological problem, you would have an erection as you slept and the perforations would tear. Whereas if it was a physiological problem, you wouldn't, and you'd wake up still. Worst thing was when you woke up on your penis, sense of basketball.
Starting point is 00:06:03 Okay, time for fact number two, Andrew Hunter Murray. Okay, my fact is that during the First World War, entertainments for the troops included organized pillow fights, wheelbarrow races, and wrestling on the backs of mules. Sounds like fun. It does sound like fun, doesn't it? Wrestling on top of a mule? Like two men on a top of a mule?
Starting point is 00:06:22 What I think it is is two men on two different mules trying to push the other one off, like low-key josting. But I haven't confirmed that, so you may be right. It may be two men on one mule. But that's a lot to put on one mule. Yeah. I do know you're not allowed legally to ride a llama. What do you mean?
Starting point is 00:06:39 Nobody's allowed to ride a llama? Just in this country? Well, again, you test the limits of my knowledge. Should we have lamas in Britain? We do have lamas in Britain. They're farmed quite a lot. But it's really bad for them to ride them. So they have quite weak backs.
Starting point is 00:06:53 And you can load them up with a bit of weight, but really not very much. And when you look at them, they've got these lovely vertical high necks and then quite a dip in their backs. But you can easily see that riding them would be quite bad for them, actually. Their audience rode them everywhere. They didn't care. Anyway, yes. So these were just the various things that were done to keep morale up among British troops,
Starting point is 00:07:12 because obviously there's a lot of time going on between battles. So where did these fights take place? Are they in the front line, do we think? Just front trench? I suspect a little bit further back. Yeah, they probably didn't do wheelbarrow races in No Man's Land, did they? Just going over the top with your pillows. So, sorry, just so, yeah, just this.
Starting point is 00:07:28 this pillow fight that we only know about it because these are first World Diaries which the National Archive have been digitizing and you can go and see them at Q and you can go and look through them they have hundreds of thousands of documents they have a copy of the Doomsday Book there a replica of it but nonetheless it's very cool um wow
Starting point is 00:07:43 yeah very good hey so uh pillows used to be made of stone did they yeah you wouldn't like a fight with those would you no when was this in the 70s these are thousands of years old so the very earliest pillows are Mesopotamian there are about 9000 years old. And they're made of stone and they're carved in a half moon shape so they can support your neck.
Starting point is 00:08:03 Some people think that it was just to stop insects crawling into your nose and mouth as you slept. Okay. On the day he died, Martin Luther King had a pillow fight. A few hours before he died. It's recorded in Andrew Young's biography. Andrew Young was a really good friend of his and the three of them were in the Memphis Lorraine Hotel. And yep, apparently Martin Luther King and another friend set upon this other guy with pillows and beat him about. That's a pillow assault. Yeah, it was a pillow assault. Yeah, it was pillow abuse. Japan actually has issued an official pillow for pillow fighting. Oh, they're really into it in Japan, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, there's an annual pillow fight day in Japan.
Starting point is 00:08:36 And, you know, if a pillow has a zip, if a pillow has feathers that you can choke on, made out of stone. Made out of stone. You know, there's a lot of pain that can be brought on by a pillow. And the safest pillow you can use for pillow fighting day. Well, because that's no zip. Yeah, you've seen them coming, haven't they? Yeah, but what feathers?
Starting point is 00:08:55 We're not allowed with feathers anymore in a pillow fight. If feathers come out and you're trying to use. choke on a feather, you can die. That's part of the joy of pillifying is the feathers everywhere. Peter the Great of Russia used a young male orderly stomach as a pillow when he was traveling. He would fall asleep
Starting point is 00:09:10 and he would wake up an hour or two later, completely refreshed. Because he sometimes had convulsions which might have been epileptic convulsions, we're not sure. But when it became a proper convulsion, the only cure was to put him in the company of someone he found relaxing. And so when he married his second wife, it was always her or another young woman. He would just
Starting point is 00:09:26 put his head in her lap. She was choking. I just like the idea of like him going to bed with his wife. It's like night honey, laying back on a man. The top of the bed. She has to sleep on the legs as well. Hang on. The pillow's too hot. I need to turn it over.
Starting point is 00:09:48 If we go back to entertainment in the First World War, because I know this is one of your boss's favorite things, Andy. The Wipers Times, have you guys ever read The Wipers Times? Who's so good. Ian Heslop, the other boss. He's not John Lloyd. Andy does is moonlighting at Private Eye. But I think he did a documentary on the Wipers Times, didn't they?
Starting point is 00:10:05 But I just find it amazing. So in 1916 in the trenches, the Wipers Times was the trench newspaper, and it was a satirical newspaper, really funny, like Private Eye or the Daily Mash. And it happened just because it was when they were in EPR, and they just stumbled across a printing press that was lying around. And then they started distributing this newspaper.
Starting point is 00:10:23 It would do things like published articles apologising for when the British shelled their own people and it was it's pretty subversive when you read it you think how on earth did they get away with printing and distributing this to normal soldiers because it's almost seditious given that they'd had their letters checked and they had to be read all the way through to check they weren't saying anything negative about the war but they were allowed to publish this newspaper which is extremely negative about their experiences in the trenches it's kind of weird it's amazing I have one more really one of my favorite facts about the first world war okay they dug a section of trench to help people train for life in the trenches
Starting point is 00:10:56 in Blackpool, but they also took visitors around. You could pay a penny and visit them. They were called the Luz trenches and be shown around by a soldier who was recuperating who'd been actually at the front in France or Belgium. Imagine spending all that time on the front line in World War I and then being sent to Blackpool. I'm allowed to say that because I'm from Lancashire.
Starting point is 00:11:15 The record for the largest pillow fight ever engaged in was set in Chicago in 2013 and involved 3,813 people, but four and a half thousand pillows, which I think is cheating. So somebody would have led too? Yeah, I guess so. Wow. Didn't know it's allowed. Go to check the old Japanese pillow fighting rules.
Starting point is 00:11:35 Just, this is pretty non-sequitur, but about world records. I just really like that thing about the world record custard pie fight. The record was 253 custard pies thrown in the fight. It would have been 255, but two of the pies were mysteriously eaten. Not that mysterious. Now, that's quite small for a custom pie fight. We could beat that. We could beat that in the QI audience, couldn't we?
Starting point is 00:12:04 Yeah. I don't know how the studio managers are going to feel about that. Okay, time to move on to fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact is that the atmosphere on Venus is so hot that if you took a pizza out of a freezer there, it would cook in three seconds. Wow. And would it cook all the way through or would it burn on the surface and not cook in the middle? Great question. Yeah. I imagine, yeah, there would be a certain rare quality of the inside. Yeah, and singed on the outside. And this comes from a talk by Neil deGrasse Tyson. And it was about his book, which was Death by Black Hole and other cosmic quandaries.
Starting point is 00:12:48 And he says in his book, I think, that it would take either seven or nine seconds. but in this article about his talk, someone corrected him and said it would be three seconds. I'm not sure what the correction was. I think it might have been to do with the pressure or something. I like when scientists come up with these sort of weird analogies. Yeah, analogy. It is good because someone might say to you,
Starting point is 00:13:09 okay, it's 800 degrees Fahrenheit on Venus, but what does that mean to anyone? Yes. It's just a number, isn't it? Yeah. But also, if it's 800 degrees Fahrenheit on Venus, why are you having pizza? You should have a nice ice cream.
Starting point is 00:13:23 be a cool lemonade. Yeah. And if you're in a refrigerator as well. Stay in the fridge. It's boiling outside. How are you powering this fridge? Okay, there are certain administrative problems here. But nonetheless, that's what would happen.
Starting point is 00:13:37 In fact, fridges, in the Arctic, the Chukchi, I think, do this. And probably in Canada, they do it as well. They use refrigerators to keep things warm. Because if you have food outside, it will freeze. But if you put it in the refrigerator where it's like three degrees, I'll keep it. Do they call the fridge the oven? No.
Starting point is 00:13:57 Speaking of weather on planet, do you guys know about planet HG-D-189733B? Of course. Yeah. So this is a planet that is 63 light years away from us, and it rains glass sideways in 7,000 kilometres per hour wind on this planet. I won't like to play golf in that. Do you know, I actually tweeted this a few days ago,
Starting point is 00:14:18 and I think someone responded with that exact answer. Yeah, it sounds like a cool play. So it's got this deep blue hue, which they've worked out as a result of, um, it's molten glass, so it's silicate in the atmosphere, which is shooting down sideways. Wow. Have you guys heard about the mysterious light on Venus? No, Daniel, we haven't heard about your mysterious light. The ashen light, it's called.
Starting point is 00:14:42 It's a light that happens on the planet that scientists have been studying. They have no idea what it is. There's a lot of theories. No one's decided what it is yet. Herschel saw it. Patrick Moore. It was a guy called Franz von Gruthyson. I can't pronounce his name properly,
Starting point is 00:14:55 but he believed that it was fires from a celebration of a New Venusian emperor being announced. All these scientists have been looking at it over the years, and we still don't know what it is, so it's a mystery, and it could be lightning. It's just a patch of light that just comes up, and they have no idea what it is. For a long time, they did think that could be life on Venus.
Starting point is 00:15:11 Because it's so covered in clouds, it was really difficult to see, with telescopes what was going on under there. So it was only when they sent probes down that they realized actually there was no way anything could possibly live down here. When the Soviet Venera program sent probes down there, the longest any of the probes lasted was 127 minutes before it was crushed and melted.
Starting point is 00:15:33 Really? The surface of Venus is hot enough to melt an aluminium pan. So I don't know what you're serving this pizza on. Hey, you want to hear some stuff about pizza? Yeah, go on. Okay. This was in a publicity stunt by Pizza Hut in the early 2000s. They claimed that they were the first company in the world.
Starting point is 00:15:51 to deliver a pizza to outer space because the company sent one on a Russian rocket to the International Space Station and then Yuri Usachev, one of the Russian cosmonauts living there, ate it and Pizza Hut paid about 700,000 quid for that,
Starting point is 00:16:07 so I think we can all agree, money well spent. It is now that they've got this kind of promotion from the QI podcast before they were wondering if anything had happened to it. Yeah, but they paid all this money and in return they got to do that. Then they got footage of Mr. Usachov flashing a thumb.
Starting point is 00:16:21 up after eating the pizza and then for pasting the chain's logo on a rocket last year. Do you guys know about Pizza Hut's proposal package? No. So this cost... Sounds romantic. It is romantic. Cost $10,010. It was a limited edition offer in 2012 and it came with a red ruby ring, a limousine which
Starting point is 00:16:42 took you to your location of choice, flowers, fireworks, a photographer and the cherry on the icing, a $10 dinner box. What's a $10? It's like a box with a pizza. run it some cheese sticks. Another thing the Pizza Hut has is its own perfume called Ode to Pizza Hut. It smells apparently like a freshly open box of pizza, although a professional smellologist, whatever we're calling them, actually said it smells like cinnamon, baby powder and most
Starting point is 00:17:08 overwhelmingly feat. They're not my favourite toppings. Actually, speaking of Will You Marry Me, this is something I looked into for the last fact we were discussing for the Iceland fact. But the first woman who ever placed a personal ad in a new. newspaper was immediately committed to an asylum. Oh. What did it say?
Starting point is 00:17:26 Did it say, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to kill everyone. Marry me. No, she was just committed to an asylum by the mayor. She placed a personal ad in the Manchester Weekly Journal in 1727. She was called Helen Morrison. And the first person to respond was the mayor who had her locked up in an asylum for a month for doing something so completely insane.
Starting point is 00:17:45 I don't believe that. When was the last time you were in Manchester? They're a mean bunch. A few things about weather on planet. The great dark spot on Neptune has winds of 1,500 miles per hour. If there winds anywhere on Earth, for instance, are more than about 120 miles an hour, it's no longer possible to stay upright,
Starting point is 00:18:08 and it's 1,500 miles an hour there, so 10 times more. So you're telling us if you open an umbrella, you would fly. You would fly. Well, you would certainly be thrown along the floor, if not fly. Awesome. Also, on Mars, the atmosphere is so thin on Mars that if you stood at the equator at noon, it would feel like summer at your feet and winter at your head. Wow. Amazing.
Starting point is 00:18:33 Crouch to eat your pizza, stand up to eat your ice cream dessert. There'll be little clouds floating around your midriff. Yeah, but it's very thin, so you wouldn't really see much of them. Would it be like being a giant on Earth? Yeah. Maybe. I'm just trying to get a clear sense of what it would be like to be there. I was looking at weird ways to cook stuff.
Starting point is 00:18:52 Okay. Because, you know, pizza on Venus, a weird way to cook stuff. Tips for other weird ways to cook stuff. If your oven's broken, poaching salmon in the dishwasher, apparently. I've done that. Does it work? Yeah. It's great.
Starting point is 00:19:03 Wrap it in tinfoil. Yeah. Cook on top of your car engine. You've got to drive for about an hour in your car for something to cook properly like an egg. But the other good way to cook something when your oven's broken is to put it in the middle of a compost heap. And so there's a guy who likes to do this. I was reading his blog.
Starting point is 00:19:18 And it gets really hot. in the middle of compost heaps. So in fact, once our compost heap in our garden set on fire, it was mental. And our garden came to know. Hot but also composty. Yeah. So maybe, you know, wrap it in foil again.
Starting point is 00:19:30 But this guy says, I quote, now whenever I hanker for a real breakfast treat, I drop a few eggs in the compost heap in the evening and look forward to a morning feast. Are you sure when he says drop a few eggs? That's what we mean. Okay, time for the final fact of the show. That is my fact.
Starting point is 00:19:51 And my fact this week is that in Iceland, there is a phone app that tells you if you're related to the person that you're hitting on. Okay. I don't usually go to frozen food supermarkets to hit some people, but maybe you do. Okay. The country, Iceland. They've got a really small population over there. Something like 320,000 people. So many people were accidentally finding out, you know, in the bedroom chat in the morning.
Starting point is 00:20:13 So like, oh, so what do you about today? Oh, I go to my mom's, my mom's barbecue. Oh, I'm going to a barbecue today. Oh, my God, Cousins, too. That's how it works. It's my grandmother's birthday today. Oh, me too. Me too.
Starting point is 00:20:26 Yeah, so. Where do you live? Just in the next bedroom, actually. Weird, right? Yeah, so this is a really important app because they want to stop the gene pool from becoming incestuous. And it's basically in a bar. You both have the app on your phones. You bump the phones.
Starting point is 00:20:41 Their motto is bump phones before you bump in the bed. And the idea is that then tells you whether or not you're related. It's very clever. That's great. Isn't the feature, the specific feature in this app is called, I'm going to mispronounce this, Sifias Belspillir, which is called the Incest Spoiler. Yeah, it's got negative connotations. It implies you're ruining something that could have been otherwise a beautiful experience.
Starting point is 00:21:03 Yeah, it sounds like you wanted incest. Incest, spoiler alert. Incest. It's what you would receive on your phone. Incest, spoiler alert, yeah. That's so good. But yeah, I just think that's what I really love most about it, other than, like, it's a very, interesting app is the fact that apps are getting to the point now where we've just got so many
Starting point is 00:21:24 options of lifestyle choices via reading a little app that, you know, my friend knew that she was giving birth because her pregnancy contraction app told her, I mean, you figured she keep her phone. You figured you know that anyway. Yeah, I don't know how that works. Also in Japan at the moment, there's a new app which, okay, basically, this sounds really weird, but there's a bra now in Japan that doesn't come off unless you truly love the person that you're talking to or that you're having like a chastity bra. Kind of like a chastity bra. And the way that it knows that you do like the person is something in the bra that monitors
Starting point is 00:22:01 your pulsating heart. Your heart then sends a message to your iPhone where there is an app that releases the bra and then it can come off. What about when you go to sleep at the end of the day and you want to take your bra off? You have to fain being in love. And also, faster heart rate. What if you're being mugged and then your bra comes on? Those photographs on roller coasters would be really interesting.
Starting point is 00:22:24 Everyone's bras falling off. So he wasn't scared. That's not what your breast is saying. There was an app in Azerbaijan in 2013 that would tell you the results of the election as soon as the results came in. Unfortunately, anyone who downloaded it got a message the day before the polls opened saying that there was a massive landslide for the current president. That's great. That's great.
Starting point is 00:22:51 Wow. Whoops. There's a really good one I read about the other day called RunPee, and it's an app. And the idea behind it is, so you know when you're in the cinema and you're watching a movie and you really need the toilet, but it's a great movie and you're going, I have no idea when I need to go. So the app is you open it up and you type in the name of the movie that you're watching. And people have watched the movie before have put this into the app.
Starting point is 00:23:13 So if you're watching Guardians of the Galaxy, it will say one hour, 28 minutes in, you going to get to a scene that says that's like this, perfect time to go. It's a boring scene. It's not needed to know the rest of the plot. So it tells you exactly in every movie where you need to go for a peek. That's good. Isn't that great up? Yeah. Wow. Okay. Incest. Should we talk about incest for a while? So in Hawaii, they used to revere incest. And they had a system called Nia Upo-O, whose aim was to keep the royal lineage as clear as possible. And the very top of the society was a capu and that was a product of a royal brother and sister and if you were the son or daughter of a royal brother or sister you were considered a god partly because you had seven
Starting point is 00:23:58 legs and we're blue yeah wow weird yeah yeah so in russia china ivory coast spain portugal and quite a few other places it's not illegal to um commit incest um but in korea it's really illegal and actually you're not allowed to marry anyone who's related more closely than eighth cousin. Oh my God. Although obviously it's difficult to check that. You're not allowed to knowingly do that, but by law I think you have to check that they're not second cousins. In South Korea, it was decreed in 308 that if you had the same surname as someone else, you couldn't marry them because of this incestabue. However, a fifth of people in South Korea have the surname Kim.
Starting point is 00:24:40 So there are all these people who might love each other very much and be very distantly, not related at all, essentially, but legally they weren't allowed to marry. Well, I think they've changed it now, have they a little bit? Yeah, they have. In 1997, it was repealed. But before that, every so often they would just have an amnesty and say, okay, a few 10,000 of you can get married to each other. Interesting, isn't it? Yeah, that's very interesting.
Starting point is 00:24:59 Yeah, it is. I was going to talk about Iceland. Oh, yeah. Does anyone, does anyone interesting, Iceland? I love Iceland. Have you been to Iceland? Go back long... Yes, I have. I always think high Iceland is like a geography teacher. best ever thing because it's got everything like waterfalls and earthquakes and you know tectonic plates and everything the geezers yeah they also believe in elves which uh is very
Starting point is 00:25:20 exciting oh yeah 54 percent i think did 54 percent 98 well yeah i remember because i only know this because john lloyd told me this uh years ago he said that 54 percent believe in it uh but if you get them drunk uh something like 90 percent admit that they actually believe in it which i really like that's great there was quite a good comment an Icelandic academic who was saying, you say that it's geographically fascinating, who was saying you can completely believe if you've lived there and grown up there,
Starting point is 00:25:47 the earth is so volatile and moving all the time and whips of smoke shooting up out of the ground and stuff, it's kind of not surprising that people think there are spirits everywhere. And there's a really sweet story of a politician, an Icelandic politician a couple of years ago, his car spun off the road,
Starting point is 00:26:02 and he said that he was saved from any injury by elves. And then a short while later, they were going to build over the elf home and the elves lived in a nearby boulder. And so the politician said, no, you can't do that. And said, we'll have to move the boulder that the elves live in. So they got someone who speaks to elves to talk to the elves who are invisible to most people. And they said, okay, you can move our boulder, but we really need to have a view of the sea.
Starting point is 00:26:24 And it's got to be on grass because we like to keep sheep, also invisible sheep. South facing garden. Yeah. And they did. Invisible tiny elf size sheep. You know elves are human sizes, Icelandic elves. Are they? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:35 They look like people, but they're invisible. Wait, they look like people, but they're invisible. That is the only difference. I didn't know they were men's size, as it were. Should we move on? I was just going to say, quickly, because I think, it must be one of James' favourite museums, which everyone of you loves weird museums.
Starting point is 00:26:51 Iceland has the phallological museum, and that has as well, which is the penis museum. Penis Museum, say the real... Sorry, sorry, I wasn't. We mentioned penises too much, I felt like we should use a different word. Two thirds of it's underground. Well, you say that, but parts of it are invisible, because it claims to have penises,
Starting point is 00:27:09 as well as penises of lots of animals, it claims to have elf penises. Oh, and do elf penises look like human penises? Yeah, but they're invisible. So it's just a huge empty cabinet. I've brought in my collection of elf penises. I'm very disappointed that none of you mentioned it yet. I'm actually...
Starting point is 00:27:23 I'm actually wearing my elf dick coat right now. It's just a coat of penises, but you can't... I wish you could see it. Andy, why have you had your mouth open this whole podcast? Get it together. Okay, that's it. That's all our facts. Thanks so much everyone for listening. If you want to get in contact about any of the things that we've been talking about on this week's podcast, you can get us on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter. James. At Egg shaped. And Anna. You can get me if you email podcast at QI.com. Also, if you head to our SoundCloud page and you go specifically to the episode timeline that you're listening to, we often put extra notes up on the timeline. So if you want to look into any more stuff, probably most likely there'll be stuff up there. So do you. that and we will be back again next week with another episode and no such thing as a fish. We'll see you then. Goodbye.

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