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

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

Anna gets exasperated about Tin Tin, Dan is vindicated in a fact about camels, Andy tells the best joke you'll ever hear about the Umayyad conquest of Hispania, and James finally learns what a giraffe looks like.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, James here. Now, as you will have noticed the last few weeks, it is holiday season for us, mostly because we have a brand new, massive stonking UK and Ireland tour just about to happen, and we need to get as much rest as we can that before that happens. By the way, you can get tickets for that by going to QI.com slash fish events. But anyway, what do we have for you this week? Well, we have another compilation. The last one went down so well. You all sent loads of really nice messages about how much you enjoyed it. So it's another hour of us being so silly. These are the times when everything got derailed a little bit too much, so we couldn't fit it into the actual show.

But I always gather them together because they're always so much fun, and I put them in a nice little package for you guys. We will be back again next week with a normal episode. It was recorded while I was away, actually. It's another super special guest, one that I particularly am quite upset that I wasn't there for because it's a really good friend of ours, someone who's incredibly interesting and funny.

I'm actually really, really looking forward to listening to that one myself because I haven't heard it yet. But anyway, for the meantime, please do enjoy this compilation. And we'll see you as a Fawcum on the road or on this podcast feed very, very soon. Okay, on with the podcast. Do you guys know, um, soldier boy? Soldier boy tell him. You guys know he's a, uh, he's a, he's a, he's a.

on guys. No. He's a rapper. He's a rapper. Okay. He's got a song called Kiss Me Through the Phone, which gives a phone number halfway through it. And a load of people decided to call it, and it turns out to be a house in Oldham, who,

according to the Guardian, we're getting a load of crank calls. But I don't need to tell you, guys, that that's a terrible missed opportunity, because one of his main songs is called Crank Bat. so they So they should have called it crank calls Crank that's Coles Yeah probably Okay

I really I misjudged my audience with this one Who were you aiming at that It feels like Dan might have had a prayer Anna hasn't heard anything since Cole Porter Britain's leading female table tennis player Is this woman This girl called Tintin Ho

and do you guys, can you guess why she's called that? She got a quiff, Tintin. That's why I was, I was doing Tintin. No, I got a small dog called Snowy. Confusingly, it's not related to the character of Tintin. Wait, she hangs out with an old fisherman called Captain Haddock. Again, it's not like I say. She has a pair of twins that she hangs out with called the Thompson twins.

You can't just stop us making Tintin jokes, Anna, immediately. You've got to live... Her father is called Herjé. Right. as I have made quite clear it's not related to Tintin and there must be other avenues you can pursue She's Belgian, no

I'm just going to tell you, okay? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I feel like we're close. She's made of TIN. Yeah. Hey, he's found something different but incorrect. No, it's because her dad is obsessed

with table tennis and it actually sounds kind of weird. Sorry, hang on. It's coming, it's coming. I was so sure you're going to say her dad is obsessed with Tintin. Yeah. I wish I hadn't brought this up

He's obsessed with table tennis And the initials of table tennis Are TT So we called her Tintin And in fact her brother is called Ping And she said there was It was between her being called Tintin And her being called Pong

When she was born And so she says that she is delighted That she didn't get bombed You can't have two kids That's cool And Pong The social services will get involved You would think.

Here's a stolen dog. In 1860, during the second opium war, the Anglo-French looted and burned the summer palace and found five Pekingese dogs guarding a corpse of a lady. And so they stole the dogs. And one of them was given to Queen Victoria, who renamed her lootie. After all the looting that the British were doing in China at the time. Loll. Isn't that amazing? That is quite open.

I would have thought she would name it something like completely legal taking of stuff. Wow, PGG Woodhouse, he collected Pekingese dogs, or he bred them or he had dozens of them. Did he steal them from... He stole all of them from China. That's why his books have very low sales figures there. It's really interesting that Pekingese, like,

they're quite small, aren't they? But they almost look a bit like a lion. because they got like a main kind of around their face. And there were a few myths about where they came from. According to one myth, a lion fell in love with a marmoset. And he begged the gods to shrink him in size so that he could have sex with a marmoset. And they did.

And that's where the be gingies came from. You think you'd go the other way around. You'd pray for a massive marmoset. Yeah. Expand the marmoset, oh, God. Actually, so that I may shagget it. No, I'd rather a tiny lion I'd take it back

There's another theory This isn't a myth There's another theory That Buddhist monks Like in Buddhism A lion is a symbol of strength It's a symbol of wisdom And they wanted to have dogs

That looks like a lion So they bred peaking east To look like lions Which is true We might never know There was a guy Who was a stunt flyer Back in the very early days of flight

Called Al Wilson And he hit golf balls off planes which is not as impressive as scoring a put on Concord except that he was standing on top of the plane at the time. So he would climb up onto the top of a biplane and just do amazing drives off it. There are photos of him doing that. How is the air friction there not knocking the golf ball off the tea?

I don't think. Is he? Maybe he'd nail the tea into the top of the biplane before clambering up. You'd have to nail the ball also onto the tea, which you've nailed on the plane. Maybe he did that too. and then how did he hit it? Maybe. Okay.

You have I looked into this, have you? Maybe it was one of those Velcro balls. You know that you throw it paddles? Maybe he just velcrowed it. That's real. You have not about this, haven't you? Except, hang on, he was in the 1920s and Velcro hadn't been invented at the time? Oh, damn.

Yeah. So maybe he is the unrecognized inventor of Velcro and we are giving him his moment of glory. Excellent. Well, I will soon. Congratulations. Gibraltarated named after Jebel Al-Taric, who was the general who brought the Islamic army from North Africa into Spain, when Spain became an Islamic country in whenever that was, the 8th century or whatever it was. But he was in charge of the whole army. They came over. They landed in Gibraltar.

They took over most of the Iberian Peninsula. there was him who was Jebel Al-Tarique and there was another guy called Musa who were in charge these two generals and then for some reason in 714 they were both accused of misappropriation of funds sent back to Damascus

and they both died in complete obscurity so they were the ones who brought the Islamic invasion into Spain and for the reason now that you know there's a lot of Islamic cultures still there, a lot of buildings and stuff. But yeah, they just got kicked out for Knicking a lot of money.

Right. Wow. Yeah. Fittingly, it's known as a little bit of a tax haven now. So I suppose doing him proud the money knicker. Yeah. Yeah. Wow, that's the thing about money.

It's very moorish. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I bet that one. Probably one of the most famous fictional minerals in the world is kryptonites. I would argue.

Cryptonite was invented as an idea for being a thing of vulnerability for Superman that would make him really sick because when the first radio series happened in America, the actor who played Superman, who obviously had to be there all the time, was desperate to have holidays, and they couldn't have holidays because he's the main character. So if in a previous episode Kryptonite was introduced like he was hidden behind a door where Kryptonite was holding it closed, the actor, Bud Collier could go on holiday and not have to be in the episodes. And the rest of the cast would be going, poor Superman, where's he disappeared to?

But we all know he's behind the door. He's been gagged. He can't say anything. Yeah. How boring were the episodes where Superman wasn't in them? What happens in those? Is everyone going, I wonder where he is. Is he better?

Have he seen him? Did you give him Lemsip? Do you think Lemsip works against Criftonite? Oh, yeah. It's the only thing. It's against everything, yeah. It's so weird how long we went without dissecting human bodies. So we, we, I will clear.

same responsibility. I've gone at least three weeks. So the first known dissections in the West, at least, were Herophilus and erasistratus, and this was a third century BC. And so this is quite revolutionary. They thought if we start cutting into human bodies, we can figure out how they work, what the anatomy is. And they died.

And it immediately went out of fashion. People said, we don't actually need that. It's totally unnecessary. It's kind of gross. It's ungodly. Then the Christians came along and they totally banned it. and we don't really think anyone dissected a human body for science for another 1,600 years until about 1231, the Holy Roman Emperor said, actually we should start doing this and made a decree that medical students had to.

And so there was this rush on bodies. And there was such a rush that there was a big old shortage. The demand and supply didn't work out. And so there became a situation where by the 15th century in Italy, medical students had to pay for the funerals of corpses. and that would be their way of saying, look, I'm going to pay you, but you have to give me that corpse afterwards. So basically you can get your funeral expenses paid by a doctor

as long as they then cut you open. Yeah, but at the end of the funeral, they plop you over their shoulder and walk off with you. It doesn't feel. I don't think they would do it. I think they'd wait for the curtains to go across before they did that. I don't think someone's walking in going, are you done with that?

I paid good money for that. Have you guys heard, of Jacqueline Oriol. No. No. So she was the daughter-in-law of the president of France in the 1940s after the war. And she helped to decorate some of the rooms of the Alisei Palace after the war. And she was known as one of the most elegant women in all of Paris. And then in 1948, she thought, fuck this.

The Alise Palace, it's fine. It doesn't need any more work. So she decided to become an aerobatic pilot. and she got into a massive crash and crashed into the CEN and she had to have 22 operations to rebuild her face. Wow. That was how bad the crash was. But then in 1953 she became one of the first ever test pilots to fly Concord

and she was the first woman to fly Concord. Really? Yeah, imagine that for a CV to go from like interior design in the palace in Paris and then to that. Yeah, that is incredible. Yeah. But no one would believe you were the same person because you've got the rebuilt face. Oh my God, I'm just, that's so right.

It's not the same person, is it? No. You've fallen for a really obvious prank. Is it Conair where they change the face of Nicholas Cage and stuff? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Is it? Or is that face off. Face off, yes.

Face off is the same plot as Conair, isn't it? Apart from the face-up coming off. Yeah. I think face-off and Conair, the merging of the two, is your story. story lands right in the middle. I just have one more recent dog napping that I liked. This was a journalist in Boston called Juliana Matzer. Did you see her?

She was reporting on a dog that had been stolen in the local area, kind of slow news day. She's speaking on camera about a missing German short head pointer and she spots a man who matches the photos that have been put out, the CCTV photos of the dog been stolen, with the dog that looks like the dog. So she goes up to him and she said, hey, can I just pet your dog? checks its collar. It is lo and behold

the stolen dog. So on camera, you can watch it. It's very awkward interview. She says, is this your dog? And he's like, um, no, it's not. It's been missing for a day for 24 hours. And she says, why do you have it? And he says, I walk past a car and it was

barking. And I thought it was the dog that I was supposed to be walking because I'm a dog walker. So obviously, I got into a car. Yeah. Maybe he was tired of walking. So I broke into the car and I took it. And she said, why didn't you call the number of the person on the dog collar? And he said, I was sort of tribut that my phone broke and then I lost my phone.

Simple mistake. This guy's had a horrible day. Well, that's an incredible story, Anna. But also, what the hell kind of TV station is doing news video packages about a lost dog within 24 hours? It's like I say, slow news day in Boston. I should also say The verdict has not been returned on his guilt I don't think so jury is out

Okay Well good luck to him Can we get done for subjudiciousness? I don't think so Do you know where the American fear of sharks Throughout the general pop place Comes from where it originated No

It was so it wasn't Jaws It was before that jaws for sure. Ooh, okay. Is it originating the fact that sharks eat people in the water? But they don't tend to eat you if you live in Montana or, you know. No, okay. It basically comes, we think, probably from World War II.

There were lots of stories, especially in the newspapers. This did happen that planes would kind of crash in the water and then the sharks would get the people. But it didn't happen that often, but the newspapers used to report that it was happening all the time. But nevertheless, the US military needed to come up with a way to stop sharks attacking, not just people who've crashed, but also munitions. So if you're in a submarine, you need to stop them from coming towards the munitions. So the Office of Strategic Services, which was that kind of office which kind of came up with lots of wacky, kind of dick dastardly plans, they hired someone called Julia Child as part of their team to try and work out the chef. The chef, yes. What?

So before she became a chef, she was a person who worked in the war to try and come up with ways to stop sharks from attacking people and munitions. And she tried things like clove oil, horse urine, nicotine, rotten shark, asparagus. She tried all these things to try and stop sharks from coming near them. And in the end, none of them really worked that well. And so they came up with this thing called shark chaser, which was a little pill. and you would put it in the water, and it would release like a dye into the water so the shark wouldn't be able to see you. So it wouldn't repel it, but it would stop it from being able to find you.

That is crazy. God, it's awful if you confuse a Julia Child recipe with one of her shark repellents, isn't it? Well, she's for anyone who doesn't know her, she was the one who basically brought French cuisine to Americans. So she was hugely famous. She was massively famous. She had her own cooking show, didn't she, one of the first people to do that? She was huge.

What, look, another good CV. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing CV. And you're sure it wasn't someone with the face transplant, James? Was it Nicholas Cage? Yeah. There is a, there was a thing in 2012 where Boeing, the plane company, fixed their Wi-Fi on their planes using 9,000 kilos of potatoes.

Okay. So did they just happen to have so much potatoes on board the flight at the time? I think they specially got them in and they got them in to pretend to be humans because they needed to test the Wi-Fi on their planes and where you get hot spots and then cold areas and you wanted to fix it all the way through and it turns out that potatoes block internet signals

in much the same way that human bodies do and so they got 9,000 kilos of potatoes and just sat them in the seats of the plane and pretended that they were people and tested it that way and they didn't need paying and they didn't need feeding. What? That's great.

This is so weird. They have the same water content as humans, like that kind of thing, right? Yeah, I guess so. And they're maybe about as dense as humans. It reminds me of the time when I was on a plane and they, Wi-Fi stopped working and I asked them to turn it off and turn it back on again. And they said, we think this is the button, but we've never pressed this button on the plane before. And I said, let me come and have a look at it.

And I looked, I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the router button. Wow. Sorry, they took your advice. Yeah. Random dude all the plane. Cool. Great. That's amazing.

Well, I had my, it was the NFL draft for my fantasy football team and I really needed to get on the internet. Wow. What, James, that's real confidence in your abilities

that identifying a Ruther. What else is it going to be? What a weird place to put the ejector seat. Or the spontaneous combustion button. You never know. All planes have one.

They always put it right next to the router. Hennel. Table tennis was a big thing in Britain. In the early 20th century, I think it was kind of invented in the 1880s, went under, came back in the 1920s and was popularised by this guy, Iva Montague. Did you read about him? No. He's, that's disappointing because this is going to be a long section.

Have you not noticed we've been doing this for eight years now? And we always say no. Whenever someone says, have you heard of this person? We always say no. Because otherwise, it would be a pretty... Yeah, yeah, we've all done the research. I genuinely haven't, though. I have no idea about this seminal figure in table tennis.

I thought I covered the basis. I haven't, clearly. Well, Iva surprise for you, Andy, because Ivor Montague is the, thank you, grandfather of table tennis in Britain. But he was also a spy. So he's such an amazing character. He founded the English Table Tennis Federation,

and then he founded the International Table Tennis Federation in 1926. Clever, more spying opportunities internationally. Nice. Well, you joke, but British intelligence was incredibly suspicious of him all the way through the war, World War II, because of his ping pong habit. Yeah, because he kept standing in airports with two ping pong bats in his hands, didn't he? Yeah, just redirecting planes into the English Channel. Because they thought it was so weird. So there's a letter from an MI6 agent who writes to the agent in Bulgaria, basically about all these letters that are being exchanged between Ivor Montague and these two guys in Bulgaria.

And they're sort of discussing intricate details of the game. They discuss bat weight. They discuss the spin on different balls. And MI6 was convinced this was code. And so he wrote to this agent in Bulgaria and said, look, you've got to investigate these two Bulgarians. He said, the reason for our interest will appear to you rather quaint. but the thing is they write interminably to Ivan Montague

about table tennis and trying out of table tennis balls. So the agent in Bulgaria investigated these guys and replied saying it seems as though these guys are just perfectly solid individuals who spend their time testing table tennis balls. And that was that. Wow. Seemed that way. It did.

But the big reveal in the 60s was that he was in fact a Soviet spy. Really? Oh. Yeah. So wait, wait, wait, wait. But were they right? writing about table tennis balls as well. Do we know that element of the story? It's not clear. We know he loved table tennis. It doesn't seem to have been declassified

whether or not this was code. So I don't know. He was really into the game and a spy. What do you think? What do you think is the world record for slicing the most watermelons in half on your stomach with a sword in 60 seconds? Oh, no, no, no. I know the queen has this record. I just It was a record beaten by friend of the show Ashrita Furman who his life's work is just to get as many random Guinness Book of Record things as possible. 60 seconds on your belly with a sword slicing... And he's slicing them himself. He's slicing them himself.

You're not allowed to wear any protection. So you're slicing down on a sword onto your stomach basically. Yep. 14. Oh, I see you're lying on your back. and you're Oh wow Is someone placing the watermelons

Or do you have to reach Someone would place them on to him each time Okay 14 sounds like a very sensible bet for a manner That's quite ambitious Because you'd get to 13 and you think Oh my God I don't want to do the unlucky one I'm holding a bloody sword

I bet it's slice really really fast and hard This 14th one Yeah I'm gonna say 23 Oh come on Yeah that's what I said This guy's a record holder Yeah well that is really close

It's 26 It's 12 Wow And there was an interview with Mr. Furman who said, my first reaction is I'm relieved, I didn't kill myself. Do you know what you used to do in the 14th century in the Sahara if you got bitten by a snake? Come on, guys, we've all done the research.

We all must have this. We know this, yeah. It's so hard faking, not knowing any of this stuff. What you would do is you would cut the throat of your camel and you would put your hand into the camel's stomach and leave it there for the whole night. And in theory, that would suck out the poison and you would be fine. I learned this from, there was an account of a traveller,

a Moroccan traveller called Ibn Batuta. He travelled more than Marco Polo, who went 15,000 miles. He went 72,000 miles all the way around the world. It was an amazing traveller. And when they went through the Sahara, this was the trick that they used. Unfortunately, it didn't really work, and the guy had to have his fingers cut off. anyway. But it was worse for the camel, let's face it. It was worse for the camel, definitely.

No one comes out of this well, I must say. Apart from possibly Dan, because when I was reading this account, I read that when they ran out of water, they would kill an antelope and they would drink water from the entrails of the antelope, which many, many, many years ago, Dan, I think, said on this podcast, and we all poo-poohed it. But this, in the 14th century, this is what this traveller used to do. Vindicated. This is genuinely like five years later. We were just doing that thing that we pretended not to know the fact, you know. We all knew it's true. One landlord was sacked for selling hay out of the back of the pub. So there was strict rules. This was Dora, right? This was Dora who did this. The old cow, miserable old cow dora. The defence of the Realm Act, which had loads of

other fun rules as well, as well as all this pub stuff. So you weren't allowed to light bomb fires or fireworks or fly a kite, I think in case it was mistaken for a bomb. A zeppelin? A zeppelin, yeah. You weren't allowed to whistle for a taxi in case that was mistaken for an air raid siren. What? How loud is your whistle?

People whistled louder back then, famously. If you can mistake whistles for air raid sirens, then when the actual air raid sirens went off were a load of taxi drivers driving around looking for these rides a whole time. It was absolutely tragic. Yeah, orange lights going on across London. Yeah. All killed. The Doctor Who theme tune was written by an Australian composer called Ron Greiner, the melody. But actually, the importance of it is the crazy effects, right?

Yes. It's this amazing piece of electronic music. And really, when it was invented, there wasn't really a such thing as electronic music or the kind of was, but it definitely wasn't popular. It wasn't done much. And the mix was made by a music. position called Delia Derbyshire, and she basically took each note of the melody and individually made it by taking a version of it, played on some strings, and then kind of speeding it up, slowing it down, splicing it with something else. Every single note was put together to come up

with this amazing, iconic theme tune. And Delia Derbyshire was brought up in Coventry in 1940, and she said she was inspired to get into music by the sound of the air raid sirens as the Germans were bombing Coventry. And it was those kind of noises that got her interested in sounds and that eventually got her interested in music. So... What a glass half-full. Yeah.

That's true. That's so funny. I have actually been to a place which has an annual tooth festival. Oh. Yeah. I think I know. Really? Well, actually.

Is it like one of Buddha's teeth? It's the Temple of the Tooth in Candy in Sri Lanka. and the town is called Candy and it is one of the, it's a tooth of the Buddha dating to about 300 AD you can't really see it when you go there when you're in the temple because it's in a casket which contains five progressively smaller caskets

and in the smallest casket is the Buddha's tooth and it's an incredible brouhaha every year I wasn't there at the time of the festival annoyingly but there's drumming music, there's dancing, there's cannon fire, massive great elephants many with their own biographies on Wikipedia now The elephants. Really?

Yeah. Four of the main elephants, they're called tuskers. You know, they have these great big tusks. They parade through the streets with the tooth container. I mean, it's an amazing temple site. It's really... I've been to another one. I've been to one in Singapore, which is the same.

Were you at the incisor or the canine or the mola? It was the wisdom. It was the wisdom of the other. Very nice. My feeling is that that one, and this is so far going off, memory there might be completely wrong but I think the tooth like really doesn't comes out very very very very rarely as in you know do you mean the candy one no the one in in Singapore okay yeah yeah this one's candy ones all over isn't it but it must be so confusing for the elephants who are employed to carry this

tooth all about town this tiny tooth and looking at each other going if they've seen our teeth look at them I mean they're not a meter long but they are they're celebrated for their massive tasks they are they are that's why that's why they've recruited for the job in elephant The Elephant Academy. And the crazy thing is that this is all in a place called Candy, which is normally very bad for your teeth. Exactly. I thought that's why they were having the festival. So many teeth were falling out.

They thought, we've got to do something with these. Also, they always invite Rob Beckett over to do an opening set, don't they? Because he's got such big teeth. He actually carries it through the streets if the elephant's not available. Yeah, and Esther Ransom for any older listeners. Just, are we now doing a sort of choose-your-own podcast? Yeah, what about the TikTok generation? Who's got big teeth?

on TikTok, write in. Nobody. They've all got perfect teeth. The idea that formaldehyde can preserve

people was discovered by a guy called Ferdinand Bloom, B-L-U-M, and he was using formaldehyde as hoping

to use it as an antiseptic, and he was kind of putting it on things, and then he noticed that he put it on his fingers,

and his fingers got really, really hard when he put the formaldehyde on his fingers. So he found it kind of by

accident, as I know that you love that kind of story Andy? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Did he stop at his fingers once you noticed that they went really, really hard? Did he proceed anywhere else?

I mean, you would, wouldn't you? If you noticed that putting formaldehyde on your fingers made you go really, really hard, the cock is the obvious next step. It's a short step. Wow, what a world we could have had. Yeah. Where that was standard. You just pop and get some formaldehyde.

Yeah. Yeah. No? Okay. Cool. I don't know if it would have flown off. shelves. It wouldn't look

great if medical students were getting boners because they were dissecting a body in Peru if you go and eat potatoes and you go into the top of the Andes and you go to a potato shop or a little stall they might give you a little bag of clay to eat

with the potato and you might put some water in the clay and make it into a little bit of a dip and then dip your potato in it and then eat it because that's like one traditional way to eat potatoes in the Andes. And the reason is that potatoes used to be poisonous. They come from the same family as like deadly nightshade and stuff, don't they?

And in the early days, when they were first domesticated, they were still a bit poisonous. But if you eat a little bit of clay while you're eating your potato, then the clay will attach to these molecules called glycoalkaloids and it will stop your body from processing them, which means that they won't become poisonous anymore. And so still, today, it's a traditional way, even though they're not poisonous anymore, you might still put your potatoes in a bit of clay. That's so cool.

It is really clever. And what's clever about it is how do you learn that, right? How do you decide, I'm going to put my potatoes in clay? And what they think is that humans saw parrots doing it or saw llamas doing it and copied the parrots or the llamas. But hang on, that just raises a second question. That is so amazing. Exactly.

Oh yeah, we just learned it from the llamas. Well, how did the llamas learn how to do it? And how did the parrots learn? Yeah. Animals learn different things to us. That's, you know. But where did the learning start? If we're saying that our learning must have come from watching another animal do it,

their learning must have come from watching another animal. And I don't believe the parrot originated it. If anyone's a copier rather than originator, parrism story. You're right. I did look up if there was a jaw to the fifth potato, and I don't think there is, because the king is. King Edward is named after Edward the 7th specifically, but there are other things named after King Edward. So there is Poulard, Edward the 7th, because he was a big eater, basically, and he was a famous

Gormon, so he had lots of dishes named after him by Crawley chefs. Is that chefs from Crawley? It is, yeah, yeah. He always flew from Gatwick, and he made sure to go via Crawley on the way. Poolead, Edward the 7th is chicken stuffed with. foie gras, which feels like the most decadent thing I can possibly imagine eating. Have you guys heard of Christina Zanato? Crustina?

Or Christina? No, Christina. Why would you assume crustina? How many people have you used to be Christina? Because we're talking about the ocean and we were talking about, I thought it might be a crustacea. Normal person's name, Christina. Christina Zanato. I have not.

She is sometimes called the Shark Whisperer. She works in the Bahamas. And whenever any shark in the Bahamas gets a hook in its mouth, they go and see Christina. Wow. Isn't that amazing? How's the word got out with sharks? I don't know. She put flies up?

I don't know. I don't know how they know. But ages and ages ago, there was a shark came up to her and she realized it had a hook in its mouth. And so she took it out. And now it does seem that whenever any shark, one that she's never met before, gets a hook in its mouth, they somehow know to go to her. and get it fixed.

They trust them. Wow. Not when she's, not when she's in land. No, not when she's in a restaurant or something. Excuse me. Sorry.

Sorry. Are you crustacean sonata? She scuttles away sideways to finish her meal. You never know because there are nine species of shark that can walk. So you never know. They could enter that restaurant. Could be. That is so cool.

But isn't it weird? So she spends loads of time in the water, I guess. And they just swim up to her. She's a diver and a researcher and stuff. She's a researcher and stuff. spends a lot of time looking at sharks and looking with sharks, but she just seems to have, according to the article I read, she seems to have this reputation among sharks as being a person they can trust if they get a hook in their mouth.

That's incredible. Just insane. I once went to a restaurant in, I can't remember where it was now, Maricious maybe, I think, and it was a floating restaurant and the sharks would swim around where your tables were And the waiters would throw bits of meat into the water to kind of get them to come up and bite and stuff. I would not order the fish there. What do sharks dislike?

Toffee. Yeah. I don't know of Toffee. Actually, speaking of this, there is a story that Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley of Halley's Comet fame. Am I saying that, right? Holly, I think.

Oh, no, you're kidding. It is Holly, I thought it was Haley, like Bill Haley in the Comets. There we go. There's a story that Newton and Hallie Hawley once dissected, God, this is a nightmare to read out, a dolphin in a coffee shop. It's actually a dolperhin. There's a story that they dissected a dolphin in a coffee shop called the Grecian Coffee House.

And I've traced it back and maddeningly I think it's not true. So I'm just here to bust this myth wide open. Was it a poppus? There's a diary of a member of the Royal Society called Thorsby from June 1712 And it says in and he says in his diary attending the Royal Society where I found Dr. Douglas dissecting a dolphin lately caught in the Thames where were present the president sir Isaac Newton both the secretaries the two professors from Oxford dr hallie and keel with others whose company we afterwards enjoyed at the grecian coffee house okay so that to me implies they dissected the dolphin then they were went for a coffee rather than dissecting the dolphin at the coffee house, which makes so much more sense. Yeah, that's the way to, yeah, do it. They're not going to let you into Starbucks with a dead dolphin, are they? They're not going to give you a stamp on your card. I think it still is a

remarkable story that those two characters were dissecting a dolphin in London. I mean, that's pretty cool. That's the sort of three things I didn't expect to be near each other. So that's quite good. Actually, Virginia Woolf is another one who has a famous plaque situation going on. right? Because she lived in the same house as George Bernard Shaw. So I think it's one of the only places with two blue plaques on it. And I realised that Wolf and Shaw, their lives collided much later. So there's a letter from Virginia Woolf to George Bernard Shaw in 1940. They'd only sort of met a couple of times.

They'd stayed in the same country house in 1915. And it's so flirty. He was in his 80s at the time. She was about to commit suicide. I hear romantic music. painting the romantic picture. He was in his 80s. She was on the brink of suicide.

Well, she sounded in a good mood in the letter. She said to him, You have acted a lover's part in my life for the past 30 years. Wow. Yeah. But presumably his work more than him. And he'd already confessed his love to her

from another letter saying, I fell in love with you the moment. I saw you all ever. Criky. And she said, if you ever drop your handkerchief near my house, you'd be welcome to come and I'll pick it up and we can hang out. sexy

but they it was very joking by the way they didn't actually fancy each other she also sort of disliked him oh wow what

okay this is a rollercoaster that you sent us on Anna so many mixed signals it was pride and prejudice they started off not liking each other

she thought he was probably a fusty sexist old man she said he had the mind of a disgustingly precocious child of two and then they gradually worn to each other over the course of their

40 year romance and what was the thing about if he drops his handkerchief is that so she can look at his bum Is that... Oh. So she's going to look at his bomb?

Well, if you drop your handkerchief, he has to bend over to pick it up. I didn't get that, but now you said that I think it is. Yes. It's normally the lady dropping the handkerchief. That's what I thought. Was she saying, if you, you old man, drop your handkerchief? I think from I remember that was the wording.

She did like to invert gender norm sometimes Virginia Woolf. He's in his 80s as well. That's a hell of a bend. Maybe that's what she's offering to pick it up for. Oh, dear. Do you know what the standard? dissection kit in America in the 19th century consisted of? Knife.

Yep. You've got the knife? Oh, forceps. I'll give you that. Fork, forsox sounds similar. I'll tell you. A saw. I bet it did.

Yeah, yeah. There were scissors. Scissors because it's very useful for, you know, cutting through bits of stuff. There were some hooks. There were some scalples. And there was a blowpipe. Oh, dear. Yeah.

A blowpipe is just a pipe, isn't it really? Blowing. Was it? No, it's not, it's not just a pipe. It's, it's pipe specifically designed to be blown into. I got it. You wouldn't just blow into any old pipe. Can I guess a theory?

Yeah, go on. Was it a pipe that was, um, used for people's bum-bums to make sure they weren't dead? You know the thing where you blow into it in order to, so it was just to make sure that your patient was actually dead. Can I make a guess? Yes. That might be right what Dan said. But I was just thinking maybe, we already know that a large proportion of, you know, of bodies that were dissected were dolphins.

So did they put it in the blow hole, the blow pipe? Very clever, yes. I retract my suggestion, and I put all my money on James's. I'll take down suggestion. I'll claim you. Anna, it's just as well you did. It was for the colon. It wasn't to test whether or not people were dead.

By the time they were on the slab, they generally were dead. But it was to make the colon easier to see during a detection. To inflate it. Yeah, exactly. Interesting. Yeah. So it was for the bottom. Make sure you blow dot suck.

I'm sure it had a very strict instruction on the pipe written. I probably also this side for blowing, this side floor placing into the anus. Ultrasound with animals can be quite difficult. I saw there was in London Zoo. They tried to do ultrasound on a carpi and they had a real problem with that. Can you guess what the problem was with the ocarpi ultrasound? Can you describe a carpe again? I can't quite.

like a deer. Oh, okay. So that means it might have antlers. Ocarpies, I don't think have antlers. It's a bit bigger. It's like a mixture between a deer and a zebra, I would say, in Ocarpy. Has it got a lot of confusing orifices on its body and they didn't know where to shove the... You tend not to shove.

Well, I might get to shoving things in a minute, but with ultrasound, the whole point of it is on the outside. You're absolutely right. I was thinking of an endoscopy, and I don't know why because it's my fact and it's about not to sound. So forget that. I'll tell you. It's so well camouflaged that you can't see where it is to do the ultrasound because they're prey animals. No, it's not that.

It's when you have an ultrasound, you have to put this gel on, which kind of helps the sound waves to come through. And Alcarpies really love licking it off. So they really like the taste of it if you put it on there. If you're a rhino and you want to look at the reproductive tracts of a rhino, they're so full of fat that ultrasound doesn't really work. but you can do it by going up the bum. So that is kind of where you were coming from, Andy, I think. That's what you were thinking of. That certainly is where I was coming from.

Also, that's a massive machine. Are you going into one of those machines? Because you can't build one of those for a rhino. Well, an ultrasound. An ultrasound is just like you're firing some sound waves into the body. You're right. It's not like an MRI machine. You're not like an MRI.

You don't want to put a rhino in an MRI. You're right. What we've as attained is, very few of us know, the difference between an ultrasound and MRI and endoscopy. Thank God we're not doctors. Thank God we're doing a relatively harmless job. They are amazing trunks because there's no bone in them. There's a hell of a lot of muscles.

They've got way more muscles in their trunk than we have as humans in our entire body. And it's just so weird because it doesn't show up on fossil records as a result. I just wonder how many animals in history that we have the fossil records of An amazing appendage. A big floppy trunk somewhere. Every single dinosaur could have a trunk. Yeah. T-Rex might have had a massive snozer right at the end.

Actually, and other like mussely appendages all over their bodies, right? Yes. Everything looked like a huge octopus in the olden days. We've just got no record of the tentacles. They did one experiment where participants were asked to take part on an ice cream tasting test, which, I mean, what a great study to take part in. and they were asked to take part with someone else. And that someone else would either be someone without a visible social stigma or someone with one.

And the social stigma that they would have is they were either obese or they had a scar on their face, a disfiguring scar on their face. And the person who was asked to do the study with them, the ice cream tasting test, if the person without the social stigma ate shed loads of ice cream or hardly any, then they'd copy them. But if it was the obese person or the person with the scar doing it, then they wouldn't copy them. So they overcame that because I guess the idea is that you don't want to mimic someone

who has negative associations. I can see that with their ice cream. Like if you see and if the person saw an obese person eating an ice cream and had this kind of idea that obesity was wrong, then wouldn't want to be like that. But the scar is really interesting. I would have thought that you wouldn't copy them if they were running with scissors, for instance. If a scar often denotes perhaps being a problem,

pirate or maybe a gangster. And if a gangster was eating lots of ice cream and looking threatening at me, I would eat lots of ice cream too. Would you? I wouldn't risk it in case he wanted mine as well. He obviously liked ice cream. But also interesting that what mimics people a lot, parrots, where the parrots live, on the shoulders of pirates, what the pirates have, scars.

This is falling apart this theory, another. I don't know what you're talking about. This has gone pretty loose. You guys may remember the EU's Wine Lake and Butter Mountain, but I don't know if all are listeners will. Do you guys remember this? Not really, no. So this is the idea that the EU creates too much of a certain product, and they kind of store it so that the price doesn't go too low. Exactly, yeah.

So there was a period where the EU countries, in total, were collectively producing 1.7 billion extra bottles of wine each year, which feels like an enormous overshoot to me. and they paid farmers to turn it into ethanol so you would go through the whole process of turning grapes into wine and then they would just convert it back into undrinkable pure alcohol but they were incentivised to do so and the Butter Mountain was similar yeah what did they use the alcohol for like industrial stuff I guess yeah it can be used as a fuel can't it ethanol and

and the butter thing they just made a massive sort of slip slide all the way down the Iger Yeah There was a beef mountain too Which is the unknown third element of the EU food surplus pyramid I would say Welcome to Beef Mountain Andy's theme park

I'm not queued up for that There's a big sausage swing boat That's one of the rides I was listening to a really great podcast About this whole history of the Shang Dynasty It was called Chinese History Podcast and it was really interesting. There was a bit where the host of it put into context

when this period was in time, this supposed mythological dynasty. And it's 1,600 BC to 1046 BC was the rough period. So in that time, Tutankhamun and Nefertiti were over in Egypt. They were living. The Trojan war was happening. Moses. It's not funny.

Is it because I said it's not funny? It's funny. I'm not laughing. I accidentally said titty, did I? You did, yeah, Dan. And we didn't hear anything else after that. I was reading about Mary Beard, the academic. Who died in 1956, I think, or 58.

Not our Mary Beard. No, no, no. This is Mary Ritter. Yeah, I know. My heart stopped. And then I thought, what? She'd been a ghost all this time. She got so many great documentaries, mate, because she was there.

That's why she knows so much about history. Well, Mary Ritter married Charles Austin Beard in 1900, and they were a really amazing couple of intellectuals, and Mary Ritterbeard wrote a load of articles, one of which was a study of the Encyclopedia Britannica to see how many women were in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and basically the answer was not many. She said, she questioned in the article why there was no article on Quarctica. Queen, even though there was an article on Kings in the Encyclopedia Britannica. She said that there were no women included in the article on health and medicine.

She said, according to the article on songs, no women sang in Europe, basically in history. And the contributions of nuns, choir compositions in singing from women is not recognized at all. And so she had a right go at the Encyclopedia Britannica. and I thought I'd check if she was in Britannica today and her husband is and she is not as far as I can see she's mentioned in the article on women's history this is the online one I'm not in the office so I can't check the actual you've got them behind your head at the moment and so we could check them but yeah as far as I can see she's not in Britannica at the moment wow so let's get her in yes Mary Beard that's great I mean that's not great that she's not in but that's great that's the story you told The story you told is great. Wow.

Shall I just see if she's in, quickly? Yeah, so Charles Austin Beard, I think, is in. He's in the online version for sure. They'll both be under B. If she died in 56, they're not going to be, what year is that, actually? You've got three editions behind you. This is the new Encyclopedia Britannica.

It's not the old one. Founded 1768. Yeah, 1991. Fine. Right, Beard, I'm more bittersweet. Bible, beryllium, Berlin Wall This is a great podcast This is such good content And he reads the Encyclopedia Britannica

But only the titles My word, Beard, Charles Austin Yes Then next article is on Beard Lichen. She's not there. Oh, it's disgrace. Not Lichen Mary.

I read an article about the origins of golf This was in ESPN magazine but they spoke to like proper historians from Scotland because that's where people think it began. And the idea is there's a bit of land in between the sea and the bit you can farm, which is called the links because it links the two bits together. And you would kind of keep sheep there

or you keep rabbits there or stuff like that, keep animals, but there's quite a boring job and so people would start hitting bowls around. And what this article said, and I haven't checked it yet, but it was well sourced, is that the bunkers, you know there's like the sand traps that you get on a golf course, they were formed by sheep who would hide behind little hillocks

because the wind was so bad in that part of Scotland and they would kind of lie down and over years and years and years, they would make deeper and deeper holes which would get filled with sand. No. And he said that the first greens, so the greens where you're putting are really flat and they're easy to just hit the ball along the ground, reckons they could have been rabbit warrens,

because a rabbit warren would be the, The rabbit would put a hole in the ground for it to go into, and then it would flatten around the area around the Warren with its feet to make it flat. And they reckons that that's how those might have started. Sheep and rabbits gave us golf. That's amazing. And who designed the golf clubs? Was that the badgers? That would have been the beavers, right, who were making the dams and they just had spare bits of wood.

There we go. That's some, I mean, that's, do you hold to that, James? I don't believe it at all, but it was really well sourced. And sometimes when things are unbelievable, but they're said by people who have authority, you kind of have to believe them a little bit. Absolutely. Plus, that's making a really good Disney film.

Yes. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's quite a boring Disney film if the length of time that James is describing has to take place. You know, a montage will be enough. It's just sheep laying down for a very long time. I don't know.

If you watch that for, like, okay, you have to watch that for 100 years, but at the end of the movie, you get a game of golf. That's exciting, isn't it? No, you're right, that will really perk things up, yeah. One thing more boring than watching a sheep lie down for 100 years. Oh, shit, there's a game of golf at the end of this. Do you know the fastest eating mammal?

Is it? I thought it was the star-nosed mole. It is. We did it. Anna, we did this last week. Can it observe and swallow a piece of prey. in something like 120 milliseconds. Yeah, something like that.

And that's even quicker than a human can react to a red light out. Oh yes, that's about 670 milliseconds. Of the top of the head, top of the head. If you will insist on recording episodes when I'm not there, then it's going to happen. Isn't the organ on the front of a star does mole's face 12 times more...

Sensitive? Sensitive than the clitor is. I believe so, and it's easier to find. Yeah, yeah. And I tell you what, Since we recorded last week, I've tested that out, and it's true. Yeah, we did that last week, sorry. Well, I'm going back on holiday then. Don't worry about it.

A giraffe would be a good thing to hang in a tree, because you can sort of flop the neck over on one side. And it's quite convenient. It's like its own coat hanger. Yeah, that's true. That's nice, yeah. You could eat it from either side. So, you know that lady in the tramp spaghetti scene? Imagine two of them gnawing their way up to a kiss. The leopards and the giraffe.

I don't want to be the one that ends up with just that scrawny neck and the other one gets the four legs in a body. I guess maybe it's a race to the body. It's a closer race on the leg side, isn't it? There's not much meat on those legs, is there? Although I think the legs are longer than the neck, actually, and you've got to get through. Oh.

In a giraffe. Really? Come on. Yeah, I reckon. Legs are longer than the neck. I can't imagine things very well, but surely a giraffe. It's famous for having a long neck. But it's right, there's four legs. So if you stack the legs up on top of each other, they probably exceed the leg.

No, I don't mean the legs stacked. You mean a single leg is longer than a giraffe neck? Okay. I never ever Google in this podcast, but I'm going to do it now what a giraffe looks like. The only reason they're famous for the neck thing is because other animals don't have the long neck, guys. Other animals have the long legs so we don't go on about it. Sorry, who here is voting that the neck is longer? Me, me.

Me? Me. I'm saying front legs longer. It's pretty close actually Is it? Yeah, I mean I'm not willing I'm looking at Google Images And I'm not willing to make a call on it

Oh my God, no, yeah Okay, interesting I'm looking at an illustration, sure And then there's a bouncy castle one next to it Which has much shorter legs Guys, they're the same length The average legs are six feet long The average neck is six feet long

Sorry, I went to actual facts rather than inches I know that's not how we're supposed to do things What a coincidence though, isn't it? That your legs are the same... Imagine, would you rather have a neck that was the same length as your legs or legs that were the same length as your neck. Easy answer for a giraffe

is what we're saying, right? They've got it just right. Wow. Oh, that's nice. So nobody wins and nobody loses. What a happy ending. What about the tail? Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with me, you can go onto Twitter and you can message me at James Harkin. If you'd like to speak to Andrew, you can go to his Twitter, which is at Andrew Hunter M. Dan Schreiber is also on Twitter. His Twitter handle is at Shriverland and Anna Tashinsky is still not on Twitter, but you can get in touch with her by going to your email server and putting in the address podcast at QI.com. If you have something more general to say, you can go to the group, Twitter, account which is at No Such Thing and if you would like to learn anything else about us you can go to

no such thing as a fish.com and that is also the place where you can get tickets to come and see us live on our massive tour it's going to be really really exciting it's going to be a first half which we have not yet written so god knows what it'll be but it'll be definitely a load of fun with loads of facts and loads of silliness in the last tour i sang baby shark for anyone who wasn't there. I definitely won't be doing that this time. But the second half will be a normal podcast, but it'll be the full unedited version. So you'll get all of these kind of silly bits that you heard in today's compilation. You will hear them live and for real. And probably a lot of things that will never, ever, ever, ever make it to air. So if you want tickets to that, then go to

no such things to fish.com or you can actually go to QI.com slash fish events. It'll take you to the very same place. We will be back. Well, rather, they will be back with a very special guest next week. And we as a group will continue making these podcasts every single week as we have done for the last 380 weeks and as we will continue to do so until they don't let us do it anymore. We'll see you soon. Goodbye.