No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Sausage Cat

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss pink clothes, orange cats, ballot boxes and Buddhist blast offs. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hi everybody, just before we start this week's show, we have a very exciting announcement to make, which is that we are going on tour later this year. That's right. No Such Thing as a Fish presents Thunder Nerds. We are back on the road, and if you want to come see us live, you can do that. The first date kicking off the tour is the 14th of August at the Edinburgh Fringe. Tickets are available for that now. And then the rest of the UK, if you want to come and see us, we will be in Bristol. And then we're going over to Ireland, to Dublin.

Then we're going to be in Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, London, Manchester. That is all happening throughout September and October this year. Yes, and if you want to get tickets to a brand new live recording of the show, which, by the way, we should say includes lots of actually very funny bits we don't put into the final show. Better in many ways. You just need to go to no such thing as a fish.com slash live. All the tickets are available there. Some of them have sold out already.

Some of them there are some tickets left for. So go, go, go. Hurry now. All right. That's it. On with the show. On with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn.

My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tosinski, and Andrew Hunter Murray. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy. My fact is that British elections couldn't go ahead without a device called the Spanker. Oh, because without it, we wouldn't have any conservative MPs. Which, actually, we're recording this two weeks before the election, and at the moment it looks like we might not have any conservative MPs.

Yes, so we don't know the result, so really it could go either way. I personally think they've got it in the bag, but whatever. So this is not an election special, also, we should say that, shouldn't we? Yes. It's a quarter of an election special. Don't worry, basically. If you just tuned in the morning after the election thinking, oh, it's nice, some just facts about wasps or something.

There's only this bit. But this is very exciting for you because you're listening to the only four people who don't know the results of the election. I can't believe they didn't know at that point that Donald Trump is going to become the prime minister. How did that even happen? So I've been reading a lot about the election and this was a feature about literally the stuff that needs to make it happen. You know, the polling booths and the ballot boxes and all of that. And it's about this company called Shaw and Sun who have been making election equipment since 1750. Wow.

I mean, that's before even in France. enthrisement of the vote. Wow, that's amazing. Was it always like boxes and stuff? I'm not sure what the very earliest stuff was, but these days they do about 160,000 little stuffy pencils per election. That's brilliant. I always thought they just got those from Argos.

Well, they're like baby carrots. It's that you... You get a normal size pencil. You have to shave it down. It takes ages. Oh, they're not specially brett. They're not a different species. No, no, no.

They're just cutting hard. It takes such a long. That's why this company is coining it in. Can I ask what a spanker is? Yes. It's a very, very, very, thing compared with his name. It's a long ruler with a hole in the end, right? And what you do is you stick that into the ballot box and you use it to mash down the votes. So if your ballot

box is full already, then you just give the old spanker a bit of a spanko and it just crams them down in the box. That's crazy. Do we know the etymology? Why such a sexy name? I guess it's patting it down like you might spanking down those. Spanking is a force, isn't it? It's like a whack, it's true. You know the word spanker originally meant just something great. Did it? Yeah, just, that's a spanker. A nice car went past, that's a spanker. I like that. My brand

spanking new, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, and it was a gold coin between 1663 and 1785 if you said you had a spanker. It meant you had a gold coin in your pocket. Very cool. Is that a spanker in your pocket? One thing I didn't realize is now obviously this, no one

saw this election coming, except maybe a couple of people who put bats on. But we don't know if they've got premonition abilities. We don't know what the mystical side of them is. But no one knew this was coming. And this is a nightmare for all of these companies that are running these elections. Because the UK is basically 650 individual elections. So everyone has to run around and make sure they have the stubby little pencils, that they have the ballot boxes, that they have everything ready.

But it's even physical venues. You know, people are like having their weddings in certain places. halls that suddenly are needed on this day, you know. So the hecticness of the count is quite a thing in Britain. And it's also a thing that is not true of all countries, right? It's quite weird that we still have human beings counting through votes. You know, in America, I think almost everyone does some form of electronic voting in lots of other countries.

And we've mentioned before the most exciting result that you guys listening will know and we don't, which is who want out of Sunderland and Newcastle, in the race to see who declares the first constituency. But did you know there is a third, you know, a reform equivalent coming up on the inside? Is there? Is it, let's say, it must be Hartley-Paul or Durham? It's got to be somewhere up there, hasn't it?

It is somewhere up there. Well, done, James. Why do you say that? Well, because the other two are up there. It's sort of because of that, yeah, because it seems that it's the brainchild of one single man who did this. And it's a guy called Bill Crawford.

And he was head of elections at Sunderland Council in 1992. He thought, let's make Sondland famous for always declaring first the vote. So for international listeners, they always take about an hour and a half to count all the votes. And it's very exciting because they win. But anyway, we mentioned that Newcastle then won in 2017 and 2019. But that was because Bill Crawford had changed councils. So he went to Newcastle and he masterminded their victory. That's amazing.

And is Bill gone somewhere else now? He's gone somewhere else. Has he? He has gone to Ashlandland. And Blythe, which I believe is one of the new constituencies after all the redrawing. And it's in Northumberland. Yeah. They are, they've changed all of the constituencies now, haven't they?

Yeah, the boundaries are gone nuts. It's really interesting. But the reason they've done it is to try and make the number of people in each constituency more level, I think. That's the idea. So they want every constituency to have between 69,000 and 77,000 voters in it. But what interesting thing about that is in the United States, the Congress, the Congress, Congress has 435 members, but there was an amendment in the Constitution that was going to say

that every district had to have a maximum of 50,000 citizens. Okay, they never put this amendment in. But if they had, then the current US Congress would have to have at least 6,600 members. Can I tell you about a candidate? I love this. Okay. So, you know, you get on your ballot paper, like there are some main parties, then a few others, depending on where in the country you are, there might be some local ones, like the

SMP or whatever, and there might be a couple of independents as well. Yeah. And especially in the sort of senior, like the prime minister's seat, there'll be sort of 12 candidates. Yeah, and they're all like monster raving, gloomy parties and stuff. Well, I just love this. Okay, in the 1994, this wasn't a biggie, actually. There was European elections. It was in Devon.

Richard Huggett stood for a party that he called the literal Democrats. Brilliant. Right? As opposed to the liberal Democrats. Thank you for making the complete. comparison for us. For international listeners who might not have heard

of the Lib Dems, maybe they're huge in Chattanooga, I don't know, but... Who's not heard of our new Prime Minister's Party? Come on, Andy. But the literal Democrats,

he got 10,000 votes because people just read, oh yeah, a literal Democrat, yeah, that must be, they just misread it. I think it's illegal to do that, isn't it? Well, he was responsible,

he's probably the only independent MP who's ever got a law changed because, thanks to him, the law was changed, because the actual Lib Demet Lossed that seat by 700 votes. Oh, wow.

They would have won it, were it not for the 10,000 who voted for him. Wow. And so he got the law change. So you now cannot do that. That's crazy. So someone was saying that if Queen Victoria sort of time travelled to today and went to a polling booth,

it wouldn't look alien to her. It would look exactly like how she would have remembered it because 80% of all of the principles that were set out in the Ballad Act in 1872 are the same. So you think those people out, side doing selfies with her dogs. That was the same. So that would be a bit confusing, but once she's inside with a little pencil, she's like, ah, I'm home.

She was going to say, what are all these women doing here? So if you go to this website, by the way, Shaw and Sons, the company that did the whole Milwaukee, you can just buy this stuff. You can buy yourself a spanker, if you like, for 595. Really? Which I think is probably cheaper that a lot of other shops might charge you for a spanker. Yeah. But, I mean, you can get all sort of, you can get a basic kit.

You can buy a sign saying you may use your own. and penned. What would you, I'm happy, it's only you and your wife in your house, isn't it? Yeah. Why might you want a ballot box in your house? Oh, what's for tea today? All sorts of things. I would love that. In fact, I might buy it. There are two weeks to go until the election,

so I might actually buy some stuff for the house. Like, no abuse, that's another sign you could buy. I'd love to buy one of those for my house. Do you remember I absolutely walked into a primary school during the Brexit referendum? I was going to vote in the referendum. Wow, they've lowered the voting agent, I'm saying.

And they were singing, in, out, in, out. That's the problem. I was looking for where I needed to go and vote, and I knew it was on this road, but I didn't see where. And there was a sign that said out. And then there was another sign that said in a bit further down. And I was like, okay, here we go. So I went inside, and they went, what are you doing here?

And I was like, I'm just here to vote. And they said, this is a school. And I say, I'm sorry, the sign's outside. They said, that's for cars, that's the car park. That's an in sign and an out sign so you don't drive in the wrong spot. Tragically, your vote to shake it all about was declared invalid. That's so funny. It was embarrassing.

Sean Kemp, who was the head of press for Lid Dems in 2010, said, said that for party leaders, dignity has to be less important than coverage sometimes. Very true. His lessons have been taken on by the current Lib Dem leader. Exactly, because for people outside the UK, the main part of this campaign for me is that when you look at the news, it's like Labor talk about their latest tax or the conservatives say how they're going to stop migration. And then it's Ed Davy, the leader of the Lib Dems, goes bungee jumping with Mr. Blobby. But this has been their technique for at least 15 years. Really?

That's it? Yeah, yeah. So Nick Clegg went to Go 8. and did a lip sync with Carly Ray Jepsen's, I really like you. Wow. Don't remember that. I don't know. But the main king of it was the head of the Scottish Lib Dems called Willie Rennie.

Once he was in a farm and he was talking about some, I don't know, wind farms or something. And he wasn't really sure why he was there. And he said, I don't know how, but it certainly does help in some way. Someone somewhere will work it out and work out why we're here. He was said this in an interview. But while he was saying it, there were two pigs having sex behind him. It's the most amazing video you've ever seen. And it became so notorious that the Courier Evening Telegraph even reported when the pigs died a few years later

Because they became so famous. Wow. And the idea is that they think that the press who kind of go around with all these politics are always really grumpy And they always think they're in the wrong place because who cares what the Lib Dems say. They want to be worthy actions happening. And so they have to put on all these things to kind of keep the press happy. It sounds super fun. Yeah.

I mean, his tour bus is like champagne has given out and party poppers and then, you know, they all get to go down water slides naked with, not naked, but you know, in trunks with him. For me, Ed Davy has been an advert for how great Britain can be. He's just done all the most fun stuff in Britain. He's secretly working for the British tourist board. I went on to, so like you went on to the website to buy all of that paraphernalia. Spanker, yeah, the smaker and so on. I went on to the major political party websites to look at their stores, to see if there's any fun stuff that you can get as well. Oh, so much. Yeah, they're merch stores.

And they do have a few things that they're trying to have a sense of humor with. So, for example, on the conservative site, you can buy a pair of Kirstama flip-flops. So you've got his face on them. He flip-flops between policies. All the time. Can you also buy a massive bin fire from their... Well, what's interesting is, it's something made me realize that it's a very different culture here in Britain to... It is in the States where you have so much merch that comes out.

during an election. And they print so much with the hope of the expectation the person's going to get in and continue to sell. But what happens when they lose? What happens when they have to drop out? What do you do with all this merch? And apparently for years after the 2012 election in Kenya, you could see kids just walking around with Mitt Romney T-shirts and hats because thousands were sent over there. And so, yeah, so they have to just redistribute all of these things. Yeah, it's pretty extraordinary. I was on custom condoms.com. Oh yeah. Sure.

That was you. What do you mean that was you? You were also on there. One other user is currently looking at this condom. We've been bidding against each other for that one condom, haven't we? I won't go a penny above 59P. They're selling condoms with political jokes on them. Nice.

Not practical jokes, that would be awful. This one's going to hold on this. Snakes fly out of the packet. So they have like Rishi no Rashi. Oh yeah. To protect you from STD. SDD. It's very nice.

Weir Fekir or Ed Davy makes my legs go wavy. Oh, okay. That's a... I like that. The third one? Anyway, the really interesting thing about this is they also have a poll on the website about how many they've sold. And at the time of research, laborer on 34.2.

The Tories were on 19.4%. Reform were on 15.6%. And the Lib Dems are on 10.3%. Which is almost exactly as the actual polls are. It's insane. The only difference is that the Green Party are on 14.1. So if you give 7% of their vote to Labour, it is pretty much exactly the same as the polls. Wow.

It's not amazing. A great graphic at the end would be if they actually put the condom onto three people's penises, but they are the right height. When gone erect, let's see who's one. That's the Channel 4 Swingometer this year. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that the never pink movement refers to hunters in the US who refuse to wear pink clothing,

even though it gives them more chance of shooting their prey and makes them less likely to be shot themselves. So by not wearing pink, they're less likely to be shot themselves. to catch anything, and they're more likely to be shot by a fellow hunter. Exactly. But their mates might take the piss out of them because they're wearing pink, and that's why they refuse to do it. Actually, there's a few reasons that we might get to.

Is it a political thing? Is it like pinkos, the communist thing? Or is it just a girly color? I'm afraid. It's more of like a homosexual slash girly thing. Although, actually, there are a group of women never pinkers. And reason for a lot of them is they just get annoyed that, you know, why should we wear pink just because we're women?

Because some of these pink things, they try and sell them to women and they think, well, we should wear the same as everyone. You might be mistaken also for a flamingo, actually. Yes. It is amazing that as part of the research that they cite why pink is better, is that pink is supposedly less visible to the animals that they're hunting. It's deer specifically, and it's compared to orange. So most states in America say that you have to wear some kind of high-vis.

and they'll say it's either orange or pink or it might be other things but basically the choice for these hunters is between orange and pink and they much more prefer to go for orange and this I should say came from an article in the Wall Street Journal by John Clark which I read about this here's a cool thing about pink you can tell where a salmon is from by the hue of its flesh so we've mentioned before that salmon are pinkers of the things they eat right

they eat the krill and they eat flamingos and flumps But the different species of salmon They all have different diets Which are heavier or lighter in the krill and the shrimp That give them that hue So if you're an Alaskan sock-eye salmon You'll be a very deep red Because you live near the Bering Sea

Which is full of krill That's interesting But if you're a king salmon You eat relatively less of that stuff And you'll be much paler I think the problem is though That they just put colouring in salmon these days Don't they?

No they don't put colouring But they farm salmon And feed them deliberately pink stuff To make them more pink than they would naturally... It would be a lot more grey and less appetising looking to us. Yeah.

Pink's an amazing colour. I've never really thought about pink too much, but as far as science knows at the moment, it's the oldest colour on Earth. Okay. That's the oldest colour. Yes, it was in black and white at some point. And then Earth was black and white.

And then one very flamboyant cave bun came. Yeah, basically a few years back, they crushed a 1.1 billion. year old rock that they found beneath the Sahara Desert and that produced pink and that's the oldest colour that we now know of. Okay, I see. So cool. But weirdly, the oldest colour

but also get ready to be upset. Chemist, physicists, scientists, it's not a colour. What? People get annoyed when you say this but it's not a colour. It's not on the spectrum, right? You look at the spectrum. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, a rainbow. pink isn't in there. And this does make it really special.

So the way our eyes merge other colours, right, is we see a specific wavelength. So you'll see a specific wavelength for blue or a specific wavelength for red or for green. And then if you're seeing two different colours, you'll see the average of those wavelengths. So if you see red and yellow, the average of those two wavelengths is orange.

So you see that. But when we see pink, it's actually because we're seeing the shortest wavelength and the longest wavelength. So we're saying red at one end of the rainbow and then like a violet blue at the other end. And if you've got the average of them, it would be like green in the middle of the rainbow,

which doesn't really make any sense. So our brain invents a new colour. So pink isn't on the spectrum. The way you can tell this, this is an exciting experiment you can do, which I find so cool. Type in magenta circle or go on to Microsoft Word and draw yourself a magenta circle.

Stare at that circle for a minute. And first of all, What you'll see is it goes green around the edge, which is super cool. And then if you said it for a minute, if you look at the white space on the page next to it, you'll see a green circle. And that's because that's like the inverse of pink. Like the negative kind of thing. Exactly. And if you stare at it for a minute longer, it tells you who the zodiac kill it.

Really? But you're wearing a pink watch and you're trying to say basically that color doesn't, it's brain fabricated. Yeah. And other things, like brown is a little bit. But pink is the most obvious and most round the other side. the spectrum. Yeah, brown's not on the spectrum either. No, I know.

And that's another example of an extra spectral colour. It's just not quite as fine pink. Maybe the spectrum is not as helpful. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I'm with you. Maybe the spectrum is not a good way of thinking about it. That is just nature, though. The spectrum is just the reality.

I guess I'm defining colour as something with a wavelength and pink doesn't have a wavelength. Okay. I was reading about just the effect that pink can have on us. There's this shade of pink called Baker-Miller pink. and it's been given a big claim that it's a pink that if you stare at or if you're surrounded by, it calms you down. So it was based on some old research which has not been replicated. However, people kind of don't care.

In jails around the world, like in Switzerland, they will paint this Baker-Miller pink everywhere because they believe that if you're in its presence, it takes out all your aggression and it just absolutely winds you down. And they also use it in sport. So you have football teams like Norwich City Football Club who will paint the visiting team's locker room entirely pink so that when they get in, their aggression is taken out and they're not as feisty for the match.

And even though we don't even know if it's true, it does affect the mentality of people. So in America, in American football, they do this as well. And you'll have the coaches coming in getting furious about one pink room and he'll like put white paper all over the walls so that his players don't get influenced by this calming color. It could definitely have an effect

because let's say, well, first of all, the away team might think, oh no, it's pink, I'm going to be less aggressive. So they might just naturally think that. But also the home team might think, are we given them the pink dressing room that will make us better? And it would just make you, you know, psychologically play better. Sciops. It's all sort of, what's it called, psychosomatic? Yeah. If you're the home team, it's good for you to know that.

And then you have to give the away team who are visiting your pamphlet explaining. Yeah, yeah. Actually, did you know. And as they leave the room, you just quickly whisper to each one of them, you know, that's not even a color. And it just psychologically fucked them. You know that song that Chelsea sing, Blue is the colour? They used to sing,

blue is a colour. Unlike pink, of course. A lot of other teams use different things in their dressing rooms instead of this pink colour. So Burnley FC used to turn the temperature up in the away dressing room to make everyone sweat.

They also made the away dressing room door smaller than normal, making the players sort of hunched down as they'd have to. That would have the opposite effect on me because I think, gosh, I'm big and tall and mighty. That's true.

Like giving them all a half pint. They think, wow, I'm huge. They're powerful. In Arsenal, according to legend, they have a table in the middle of the dressing room, which is such a height that wherever the manager stood, some of the people won't be able to see them. Oh, wow.

What? That's clever. How tall is this table? So you're sat down, like, you're sat down on benches. Yeah. And it'll be like halfway up. The room is this big sort of like, almost like a kitchen counter.

That's great. In Liverpool, apparently they would polish the floor really an awful lot in the away dressing room so that players would have to tip to a round so they didn't slip over. And they put banana peel all over it for the game. One more of these. Chelsea FC apparently made the mirrors

in the away dressing room. You know, like those holes of mirrors that make you really tall or really small or whatever. They made them making it look like the away players were smaller than they are and the home players were bigger than they are. That's so funny. I should say this was all according to an article in the sun

about Ollie's... Okay, right? That's a great collection. Well done, sun. Pink ladies? From Greece? I'm actually thinking of the apples. Oh.

Pink Lady Apple, yeah. But it's actually, I believe, several different kinds of apple. Is it? But they're grouped. It's like how when you order Scampi, you're getting any old stuff. You know, it's just got bachelor on it and it's from the sea, basically. Wow.

I mean, there is a main one which is called Crips pink. After? Like how children say crisps? No. It's after the gang, the Cripp. No, it's not. John Crips, who was a sort of apollographer from an apollologist. Yeah, an apollographer for someone who draws apples or writes the biographies of apples.

Well, this guy was, in a way, doing that because he was breeding the apples. It took him decades to get the Pink Lady perfect. Because they originated in Australia, because they need really high temperatures to grow and to become perfect. and he died in 2022. He was nearly 100 years old, I think, when he died. Good on him, all those apples. Apple a day, exactly, yeah. I like a pink lady, actually.

I thought about you guys. I think it's my favourite apple. It's my favourite apple. It's objectively the best apple, guys. And I think it's just, I mean, it's obviously rock hard, it's nice and sour. And I like to not like a pink lady. I actually like a brabun.

Oh. The lesser appreciated. Despite having just said the pink lady's the best, you like the one that is less-goed. In my heart of arts, I know Pink Lady is the best. It's also the most expensive and I'm very stingy, so I'll save that 25P and go for the Braven.

I objectively know that Man City are the best football team, but that doesn't stop me from supporting Tramereau. Exactly, Braven is my Tramirot. Do you know we invented pink pigs? Did we? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

What were they before? Brown. So they won, yeah, wild pigs aren't pink. Yeah, from one non-color to another non-color. Pigs don't. exist. That's why they have no predators in the natural world. Nothing can seem. No, we bred them to be pink and we're not really sure why it's when humans started breeding animals for farming and we assume it's just because we like bright, fun colours and they wouldn't

survive in the wild as pink because they are quite visible and obviously pink is not a very good disguise colour. And they get sunburn as well, don't they? And they do get sunburn exactly because pink means they've got no melanin. That's wild. No, the... The farthest. I was looking up pink slang as well. Oh yeah. From Jonathan Green's fantastic dictionary of slang which we've referred to a few times before I think because it's amazing pink cigar

it's the penis oh is it pink oboe is this all going to be the penis no playing the pink oboe does it does feel like masturbating that's his penis that pink panatella like a panatella cigar oh is it the Italian version of the pink panther

I'm afraid it's the penis pink torpedo yeah Next. Pink finger. Next. It's a skinhead, actually. A pink finger.

Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, right. Unfortunately, it means skinhead, but skinhead means penis. Pink trumpet. I must be. I mean, they're all. Pink steel.

Pink steel. Yeah, penis. Really? Pink Palace. That's a vagina. It certainly is. Yes. Pinkin.

The pinkin. The pinkin. Pinkin. The pink. The communist. No, that's the Financial Times newsfafe. Oh, the pink one. Yeah, the pink one.

So there you go. So it's mostly penis. Yeah. Unless it's the financial times. It's not a financial time. It's not a financial time. It's in your fucking. Oh, dear.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that monks working at the 2,800-year-old Buddhist temple Daigogi in Japan maintain a five-story pagoda, a cherry blossom garden, and a space program. Space program. Is it up there with the US and China space programs? It's a slow start. They're going to be sending one small satellite up that measures 20 centimetres in length

and 30 centimeters in width. You won't even fit a very small monk on that. No. This is a heritage place in Kyoto. And the monks there have become very interested in the idea of, if you know, for example, that a temple in space is flying over. You can track it and you can pray to that temple.

So it's a sort of even for wandering monks and so on. So you know, like whenever the ISS goes over, you always get a tiresome person like me going, oh, look, that's a star that looks like it's moving. That's the ISS, actually. Yeah. But instead we'd be like, now we all meditate. Yeah, exactly.

And now it's a meditation thing. So they have teamed up with a satellite developer called Terespace Inc., who were also based in Kyoto. And it was meant to go up in 2023. It hasn't been launched yet. But it's still, they're doing tons of talks about it and so on. So it sounds like it's still on the cards.

But yeah, that's their... That's very cool. That's their plan. Yeah. And it said that priests will give space services. I mean, is that just like doing something over Zoom? Does that mean the priest in the temple on the ground? What an unromantic way of looking at it?

I mean, yes, it's technically like doing something over Zoom. I mean, we already have satellites. We can already communicate with far-flung temples. All the satellites Elon Musk has put. up there. I really like it. I think it's awesome. It is a bit confusing about how the operation is going to work at the moment, largely because the articles are just translated from a local source. So we haven't got in depth on it yet, as far as I know. But inside the temple, that it's going to be in space, the satellite, they're going to include a Buddhist statue

and a Mandela painting, or a few of those. Not a Mandela. No, no, Nelson Mandela is, yeah, no, a Mandala painting. Yeah, that will be within this tiny little... Really? Yeah. Which we should probably say what Mandala painting is. Yeah, it's like one of those geometric circles. Like a franical?

Yeah, it's like a fractal, but it's a circle. But it means something in Buddhism. It's a sort of holy symbol of eternity, is it? I have a few of them at home. Do you? Have you? Yeah, which I have absolutely no idea what they do. Right.

I would sell them as a tourist. And that's what they do. They keep the temple going. That's so good. That's very good. The world of Japanese temples and trine It's so interesting. It's amazing.

It's so cool. Because there are so many thousands. A lot of them are amazingly old. And this is, I love this. The oldest continually operating company in the world is a temple building company called Congo. When it was founded, the Prophet Muhammad was eight years old. It really is very old indeed. And it was set up by a guy called Shigetsu Congo.

And the firm kept going independently until 2006. And then it's become a subsidiary of another firm. But it is still going. Don't sell yourself off after. what, 1,500 years? Big decision. But they still do it. They still specialize in construction

and maintenance of Buddhist temples. One good thing they have going is that some temples in Japan knock themselves down every 20 years. Do they? Is that a good thing? Yeah. Well, if you're part of the building company.

Oh, yeah. So the idea is, this is most famously a shrine in Tokyo that I've been to whose name, I can't remember, and I haven't written down. But it's like one of the main shrines in Tokyo. and every 20 years they knock it down and they build a new one. And the idea is one to sort of show renewal,

which is obviously big in these religions, but also it keeps the artisan skills alive because if you're building, let's say you're building churches in the UK, you might build a church, but then you might not need another one for 60 years. Or even 600 years. Or even 600 years, yeah. And so who knows how to make an app at that stage?

That's kind of planned obsolescence, which we're used to hearing about with iPhones, but this is the temple. These are the iPhones of Japanese temples. That's the, I think I know the name, is it the Chumbawamba temple? It gets down again. There's something for the 90s children. No? Yeah, I loved it, Andy. It was great.

But the entire process takes about 17 years. So you build it, it's there. You do three years of everything's fine. and then after three years you have to start planning for the next one. Oh, come on, this is unionised bullshit. There's no way that's necessary. There is this interesting division slash marriage between shrines and temples in Japan,

which I didn't really know. So there are 80,000 Shinto shrines and about 77,000 Buddhist temples, and you'll be going to see one or the other. They often look really similar. And often they used to be the same. It's kind of sad because Japanese people believed in Shintoism and then Buddhism came along about the 6th century and they sort of merged quite happily

until the 19th century and you'd have shrine temples and temple shrines and you'd have like Buddhas inside Shinto shrines and then in the 19th century the major restoration said no let's split them up and let's make sure the Buddhas know that they're secondary to Shintoism and now they're divided but you do get some Buddhas hidden in shrines still yeah some sneaky Buddhas I don't believe that 40,000 temples in Japan were destroyed during the Meiji Restoration. Because that imperial rule was restored. And basically, the Buddhist religion had been quite closely associated with the previous dynasty. And there were all sorts of rules.

Like, you had to affiliate yourself with the Buddhist temple under the previous rules. And that was partly to prove you weren't Christian. And you had to do that just to lead a normal life, basically. It was kind of a condition of citizenship. So I think a lot of frustration had built up around that. Which is why when the Meiji Restoration happened, all of these tens of thousands. of temples. Yeah, that's like half the temples.

Japan is obviously a very big country, but it's just the number of temples that is just staggering. I went to a moss one. Did you? Yeah, I think it was in Kyoto. I can't really remember. But I think you go over there and there's like a bucket of water and you have a spoon and you pour the water over the butter or whatever it is. And then it helps the moss to grow. That's really nice.

I think you like say a wish and it comes true. My wish has already come true. That's right. There's another one that helps you cure your warts. The idea there is you put a coin in an offering box and you pick up a handful of salt and rub it in whichever area has warts in it. And why didn't it work for you, James?

And there's another one I really like that I've never been to, but it's a single word shrine. And what you do is you put your coin in the box, you clap your hands twice, and then your wish has to be a single word. So you can't say, I wish to win a hundred quid in the lottery. You have to just say one word

And if your wish doesn't edit down to one word, you can't have it. That's quite good. Stama. And is that so that whatever God it is who's in control has a bit of leeway, so you could say cat, and if the God wanted, they could send a tiger to maul you to death. Oh, yeah. That would be good, isn't it. Like a monkey's par.

Exactly, yeah. One of the good things is if something traumatic happens in a Westerners' life, they often go to try and find themselves. And there's an example, which is slightly topical, which is Garris Southgate. So, Garis Southgate, right after England Football Manager. England Football Manager. So the Euros are currently on. Sorry, yeah, sorry.

So back in the 90s, he famously botched a penalty kick. And it was huge news. Even when it got to the point where even his mother said to him, I quote, why didn't you blast it, dear? He thought, I need to get out of here. So he went to Bali. And he thought, I'm just going to get some rest. And so they stayed in this beautiful place

where they were completely isolated and they found a stunning Buddhist temple. There were lakes and volcanoes nearby. He said it was absolutely magical. And then he said in the distance, he saw a monk associated with the temple walk over to him. And he comes up to him, and the monk says,

you're Garrett Southgate. Oh, mate, that penalty. Now, I'm paraphrasing, though, but those are the words. He basically said. Buddha did not like that. Buddha would have blasted that. That's amazing.

That's so funny. Sounds like she was advising the space program temple as well. She'd just blast it. Have you heard of the shrine you go where you want to break up with someone? This is great. Oh, no, I haven't heard of that. Sounds quite a roundabout way of doing it. You're in the car on the way and I can't know nothing about this.

I'll quickly Google it. No, no, no. Wait till we get there. Basically, there's a whole sort of subspecies of shrines. I think they're called Engiri shrines, and the local gods, they give you the strength to cut ties between you and another, of whatever kinds.

It might be a relationship, it might be a work thing, might be anything. And there's one, for example, Mantokuchi Temple in Gunma Prefecture, which is where women could escape their abusive husbands. So it was quite an unusual kind of shrine because they're quite male environments,

but this was a place where women could divorce their husbands. And these days, if you go there, you can get a set of papers. They're either red or black, and you feel like one is I want a new relationship to be formed and one is I want to break an old relationship. You know how I was saying Andy about you buying a ballot box for you and your life? Oh no.

I open it on the morning this episode is released. Dozens of Japanese characters I can't read. But all saying the same sad message. So you fill in these papers, right? You go into the special prayer area, which contains two Japanese squat toilets. And you put your paper so it floats on the water for a few seconds. So it's not also used as a squat toilet, right?

Do not use the toilet. And then you flush your prayers and that is the way that it gets carried away. Yeah. That's amazing. That's a very unusual variety of trine. But it shows you the range they've got. They've got a huge problem in Japan, haven't they? Their rivers are just full of flushed prayers.

Very dangerous to swim in. Do you know we've never talked about the oldest temple in the world. This is Gaubeckli-Tepa in Turkey, which is quite recently confirmed to be the oldest in the world, and it has a headless torso with an erect penis as part of its daycore. It's these 60 massive pillars, like limestone pillars, that have all these engravings on them, and they were built 11,000 years ago, and then deliberately all buried a couple of thousand years later. And yeah, they've got these amazing carvings on them, and a lot of them are, penis based, obviously, because the earliest

temples, they were obviously worshipping penises. And so they feature, they also feature eyeless ducks in their sculptures, which is quite scary. Also youth miserable penis. That's the one-eyed duck. But in the land of the eyeless ducks, the one-eyed duck is king.

Sure. They also have carvings of boars, foxes, and a headless man with erections, which the German and English text accompanying it mentioned, and the Turkish text does not. Wow. Yeah. But interestingly, they think this temple is why we invented agriculture.

So it's unclear why this was built at a time when we were hunter-gatherers and moving around a lot. It was built before we'd settled agriculturally. And it would have taken an enormous workforce and they would have stuck around for ages and ages to build it. And they think it might be that to build this temple, they had to be like, we need a permanent food source. We need to get houses for all these people so that they can stick around and build it and that was what led to the first agriculture. So it wasn't that we invented temples

once we came up with farming and sat in one place. We invented farming because of this temple. That is really cool. I was told one theory that the reason they buried it is because they knew that an army was coming to take over. So they just all buried it. And then when they arrived, they just went, you know, nothing to see here.

Wasn't there on my map? It says there's a big city here. I think it's that way. Just go over this big mouth. There's a little one-eyed duck sticking up here. Is that not something? Do you know we've never talked about someone who must be one of Dan's favorite characters? Just speaking of weird space programs, the Zambian space program.

Oh, right. Yeah. No, we haven't. No, we haven't. And I love this guy. So, 1964, obviously America had a space program, Russia had a space program, USSR. And Zambia had one. And it was headed up by Edward Makuka. He was a science teacher and he was director of the National Academy of Science, based research and philosophy, unofficial. And he decided that they would be the first country to reach the moon.

And yeah, they actually never made it to the moon in the end. Yeah, I know, weird, but they got really close. Did they? Yeah, no, they didn't. He asked for a lot of billions of dollars of funding for various countries, but his methods were so fun. So he recruited 12 Afronauts and he did this whole... he made up that name

and he invented this training regimen which included he'd shut them in an oil drum and then he'd spin them around trees and roll them down hills in it so they could get used to being weightless being bullied they'd get used to being bullied

which might happen if you're on a long space journey it will if I'm on one you arrive at the moon with no lunch money for days now no no don't flush my head down to toilet It's literally a vacuum into space. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that cats only come in two colours.

Pink and brown. Well, close. It's just not true, this isn't it? It's not even... I've seen cats. We've all seen cats. This is explained best I found by the Cat Fancy's Association, who had a very and excellent... I would think so. I'm not surprised it's not dogs are us, too.

They had an excellent sort of paper on this. And basically explain that all cats have two colours, black or red. And all other colours you think you'll see on cats are just kind of degrees of black and red. My cat is blue. Thank you for raising blue at this early stage, James. So black and red are expressed by the bee gene, which stands for brown, in fact.

because black is just very dark brown, and the O-Gene, which is orange. We're learning so much about colours in this episode, aren't we? They're just not what you thought. I haven't learned anything weirdly. It's true. Complicated. Your blue cat, as you say.

Black is just dark brown, which doesn't exist, by the way. There's no such as it's brown. But if it gets really dark, it's black. I'm not saying black itself as a colour is dark brown. I'm saying the black you see on cats is actually dark brown. Okay. And actually often, if you have a black cat, it goes browner.

James, your blue cat is just a dialing. of black. What does that mean? It means it's got the black slash brown gene, but then on top of that, it's got the dilution gene, and that turns black into blue. But it's still black. It's just added some water. My cat is perfect, and I don't like you saying her genes are diluted. Diluted cat. Sorry, mate. What are we doing with white? Is that just the blank canvas you get? Oh my God. Dan, you've phrased the most difficult question right at the top. As the cat fancy is admit, white is the biggest problem. The thing to know about white, You're not going to like this, guys.

But this is according to the cat fanciers, white is not a colour. Okay. Oh, I buy that. It's a shade. I would say black and white aren't really colours. Black is a colour, though, in this instance. Yeah, that's what's throwing me. It's dark brown.

But the thing with white is that your white cat is actually either brown or orange. So your white cat has jeans for either being a black cat or an orange cat, but then it also has a kit gene, quite nicely named, which covers up those. And often, you can see. the true colour of the cat on its head. So if you've got a white cat with a tiny bit of orange on its head, it's actually an orange cat.

And if it mates with another cat, then they'll likely be orange. I think I followed that. Because I was reading that orange cats are likely to be male. Yeah, almost always. And that's because the genetic information of the cat's color is found on the X chromosome. And females have two Xs, like in humans.

And males have an X and a Y, like in humans. So if the male's single X chromosome is orange, that's just an orange cat. And a male can never have both black and orange jeans. That's true, exactly. If you have a tortoises, which is like orange and black and white and stuff, it has to be female.

Because it's got two X's. And one X can be black and one can be orange. Except there are very few males that have an extra X chromosome, which is really rare. They're X, X, X, Y. That's really rare. So they can be tortoiseshell. Huge if you've got one of those.

But that's a real... It's really rare. And the other type you can have male tortoiseshells is if it's a chimera. So you start off with an egg and a sperm, but then another egg and sperm come in, and then you've got two embryos and they fuse together to make one cat. What? Wow.

You get chimeras. And then, like, you get some chimeras where you get a cat and half of it is one color and half of it is the other color, and it's exactly halfway down the body. Are you kidding? Really? That's a great thing for a murder mystery plot line. Like, the cat that was coming in to the room, what color was it? Two people give different answers and that affects who the killer is somehow. It's also really good for those pantoskits where you play the man and the woman.

Yeah, absolutely. That pussy and boots is going to be electric. It's so weird this stuff. It's fascinating. It is quite fascinating. One can go a bit too deep. I actually found this fact reading an article about a new cat colour that has been discovered. So there could be a claim that there's a third colour.

Oh, yeah. And that is salty licorice. And this has just been discovered. It's a white chest and pores. And then it's got black body with white speckles. on it and they're missing a chunk of DNA. So that's genetically totally different to anything we've seen before. It sounds black in color.

No, it's not. What about the salt? Salty licorish. It's like someone with black hair that's going sort of patchy gray, right? That's it. Interesting. And their hair starts out black and then it fades to white by the time it gets to the end of the hair.

So it's kind of that strange. And I can't believe, having done this podcast for 10 years, you think, oh, everything's been discovered. And then they found a new color of cat in the last year. Do you know the word licorice? Yeah. It means this food, this delicious food. But it also had two old meanings.

It meant lecherous or someone who enjoys liquor. So if you were licorice, it meant you really like drinking alcohol because you like drinking liquorish. And then it also meant lecherous because you might lick things. It's not actually true. It's not related to the word lecherous. This is like an old 18th century meaning. It was like someone that licked a lot of things was lecherous and therefore they were licorish. Cats

When they are growing In the womb This is cool About where they get the colour from So their colour cells All grow along their back They're called neural crest cells These are the colour cells

Okay And they start building up And then they migrate around the body Of the embryo And they can get All the way round In which case you'll have a cat That's one colour

Oh is that why you have white bellies? they can get only part of the way around. Will it have different patches of colour, basically? Or you have like white socks. Yeah. If they don't make it all the way around. Or a Hitler mustache or a hiltosh. Yeah, that's it.

And whether your cat is one color or different colors is completely dependent on how far those cells migrated around. How interesting. That's so interesting. So cool. Because that is it so often you see it a white belly on a cat and it's just the belly is too far from the spine to have migrated all the way around. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's bizarre. Sox are weird as well. Your cat doesn't have socks, is it? No, she's a perfect all one colour. Okay. Your breed, as foe of the podcast, Adolf Hitler would approve. So the cats with socks, you know, the little white socks that you get. They're lovely, but they are because we domesticated cats.

Because pre-domestication, that would have been a terrible idea for a cat to have because they're hunting. And if you see a big white sock clumping towards you, obviously you spot the cat. So, but early humans probably would have brought. for that. That's a nice feature to have a breed of cat with socks. Like them? Yeah. That's very cool.

Cats are all the same, right? As in not your cat James, which is special and perfect and pure. But you know what I mean? Like most cats look more like other cats than dogs look like other dogs. I see. So you don't get like little sausage cats or great name cats. Or like bully XL cats. It just doesn't happen.

And that's really interesting. Because there's no actual reason why we couldn't have done that. Right? So, and the reason is, how long have we been breeding dogs for different purposes? Centuries. Yeah. Millennia. Yeah.

And you breed a dog to hunt otters or like a dachshund to hunt badgers in their sets or to whatever, pick up grouse that you've just shot, whatever. All these different things. Whereas cats have fulfilled basically the same function all that time, which is vermin in the home and companionship. Right. If we'd put our work in 500 years ago as humans, we could now have, like you're lost in the Alps. And then there's a cat with a barrel of brandy around its neck

that comes and saves you. A terrifying cat guard. When you hear the meow walking past a farm, you tense up and freak out. All kinds, we could have had every single cat under the sun. Every single dog could have had his mirror cat. I think this is actually a kid's buck ready to be ready to be. Oh, it is. It absolutely is.

Sausage cat would be, I'd read that. To a child, that's amazing. Is it happening, though, or people breathing? No, no, why would it? Well, no, but like, you know, why not? Why haven't we started doing it? People do breed amazing, like James' amazing, British short-haired cat. There are breeds.

Yeah. But they're not being bred to terms bits. They're all basically being bred because we like the look of them, really, aren't they? Yes, yeah. I think. Or some of them, like the British short-hairs were bred for hunting prowess. Your cat? Well, my cat is the most useless cat in history.

But, like, her breed was bred for chasing birds and stuff like that. Nice. It still does seem to me, Not that I'm skeptical about this claim, because I'm not, this explanation, but that cats still seem to have less variety than you'd expect from lots of breeding. In terms of size, for instance, if we have bred some for hunting, it's very interesting that you can get tiny, tiny chihuahuas and giants and burnards. And with cats, there's not much varieties.

If we'd wanted to, could we have taken an ordinary domestic cat and bred it into the size of a lion? Could we have reinvented time? Yes, but I think the other thing is that domestic cats are hunters, all of them pretty much. much. And so if you do breed a massive cat, it's not going to be a lap cat. It's going to go after you, isn't it? Well, the owner is behind it saying he's very friendly. This is not the cat he is, actually. The hairless cat, that was a kind of, that was a useful thing they were trying to invent. Well, it was for people who wanted cats who were allergic to cat hair. That was the big idea. But you can't, once you've taken off all the hair, I would argue it's no longer really the same

kind of experience of cat ownership. You've always wanted a cat and you were so sad you couldn't have one. Gollum calls into the room. Well like those sphinx cats. The sphinx cats. They look like Gollum, really. They do. They don't look good. But it was a slightly pointless exercise as well because it's not just the hair that people are allergic

to. There's stuff in their saliva. Yeah. So at the time, it was believed the hair was a simple thing. But now there's just this naked cat that's still... And they didn't breed the dry mouth, no hair. Yeah. You know where? Do you know where sphinx cats are from? I'll jump on it.

Egypt. There we go. I did read it actually, but yeah. Toronto. Toronto. Oh, really? It was three weird number of hairless kittens were found in Toronto in the 70s, and they bred them and bred them, and so now they're all hairless.

Nice. I was on, I think it was Scientific American. Yeah, I was on Scientific American. I came across a headline, which was, What is the difference between hair and fur? We spoke with mammologist Nancy Simmons. of the American Museum of Natural History about this, here's the transcript.

Is this getable? Yes. Okay. Fur on animals, hair on humans? No, hair on monkeys, I guess. No, fur or monkeys, I'd say. Oh, yeah. If you comb it, it's hair.

If you brush it, it's fur. Right. No, you brush your hair. Sorry, no, no, no, no. Is it structured different, as in more keratin? Hair grows only on your head. Fur grows on your chest. Your pubic and pubic.

That's what I call it. I'm going to put you out of your misery. Scientific American asks, is there a difference between hair and fur? Nancy Simmons replies, there isn't. Hair and fur are the same thing. I know, disappointing. Okay, here's the craziest thing I found researching this.

You can give dog blood to a cat. To eat or? To not to drink, to infuse. If a cat needs a blood transplant, it can take dog blood. No way. I find that very difficult to believe. Hashtag more in common. But only once.

Because they die afterwards. You can drink a pint of arsenic, but only once. They don't die the first time you do it, but they will die the second. No way. So there are dog blood banks. But they do have nine lives. There are dog blood banks, which is great for dogs, but there are very few for cats. Because for a cat to give blood takes a lot of the cat's blood,

and it's just harder to do, right? But if your cat needs a blood transfusion, it can take some dog blood, but then it develops antibodies to the dog blood after the first time it gets some. So the second time you give it a transfusion, it may react very badly and could die. But basically, there will be cats walking around right now, which are a half dog. And dogs, if you're listening, please donate today. You know, you could be saving a cat's life. That's not the way to advertise it to dogs, actually, is it?

I love that we have classical sort of dog people and cat people, right? My favorite example of it is that the fact that that made it in to the Webster's Dictionary, the original in 1928. So Webster, yeah, Webster, he did an initial dictionary, which was in 1806, and in it he used the exact same phrase to describe a dog and a cat, which is just a domestic animal. However, when he published a dictionary in 1828, he defined a dog as a species of quadrupeds belonging to the genus Canis and many varieties as the mastiff, the hound, the spaniel, the shepherd's dog, the terrier, the harrier, which keeps going on with cats. he describes the cat as it is a deceitful animal and when enraged, extremely spiteful.

That's it. Did you guys think he meant in the dictionary he was going to have cat person and dog person? You were just saying Webster was a dog person. Yeah, he clearly was. That's brilliant. James Cat person, clearly.

Actually really a neither person, I think, but I've had a cat forced upon me. Okay. Oh, okay. You're a people person. I wouldn't say that. I'm a... You're barely a person. I'm a bacterial phage person.

Yes, finally. Someone will stick up for those guys. Quite right. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our various social media accounts.

I'm on Instagram on at Shreiberland James. My Instagram is No Such Thing as James Harkin. Andy. I'm on Twitter at Andrew Hunter, Ebb. And Anna. We're on Instagram at No Such Things of Fish or Twitter at No Such Thing. Or you can email podcast at QI.com. Yep.

Or go to our website. No Such Thing as a Fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. There's a link to our secret club, Club Fish, where you'll find lots of bonus material and ad-free episodes. So check that out. And also you will find a link to the dates to all of our up. upcoming tour, Thunder Nerds. We are going out back into the world. We're going to be over in Australia, we're in New Zealand. We're going to be in the UK. We're going to Ireland. It's

very exciting. If you want to come along and see a live podcast recording, do get tickets now. Otherwise, just come back here next week, where we will be back with another episode and we'll see you then. Goodbye. That was really good, guys. That was great. I feel like the rest is politics. Don't have to worry too much.