No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Useless Condom

Episode Date: August 7, 2015

Dan, James, Anna and Anne discuss the preparations for D-Day, secret library porn, and cannibalistic cane toads.

Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with Anna Chisinski, Anne Miller, and James Harkin, and once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Chazinski. My fact this week is that as part of the preparation for the D-Day landings, the Allies used condoms to collect soil and sand from the Normandy beaches. Why? Because they just felt like it. So this was called Operation Postage Abel, which was the operation that preceded the D-Day landings to check that they were going to work. And it involved sending Allied forces out under the cover of night in mini submarines and then getting them to swim to the beach with a bunch of condoms and scoop up.

lots of sand in them because I guess condoms are just used for receptacle. I think they ran out of bucket. I think they started off with, you know, some sort of tupperware and ran out and ended up using condoms. And it was to check that the sand wasn't going to be difficult to walk on. It was the wrong kind of sand. Yeah. I think they suspected that it was kind of sinking sand. Oh, okay, right. So they ran out of bucket so they use condoms. Obviously. Yeah. That doesn't work so much if you're building sandcastles. It does. It does not. It also doesn't work the other way around.

You can't supplant a bucket for a condom. Exactly. So, why condoms? I mean, like, there must have been other things we could have used. I honestly think they are just a useful receptacle. I don't really know why we don't use them for more stuff. Yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, they squish up so small and then they expand so huge.

So a lot of survival advisors say you should use them to as a water receptacle and you should put it inside a sock because it's not that strong so it can get quite easily pricked. I'm not going shopping with you if you think that condoms can be used for any kind of receptacle. The weekly shop. Would you like a bag? No, I brought my own. They have been making counterfeit condoms in China and it's so weird because how do you counterfeit condom? But I think they're not regulation.

They just buckets. They're just buckets. And they've put vegetable oil in them to make it seem like they've got spermicide in them to give that same slippery quality. Oh, God. You heard about the spray on condom. No. I heard of the spray on t-shirt.

It was like a picker aerosol, but it made a fabric so you sprayed it on and it made the fabric as it sprayed. You could still make a spray on anything. I mean. No, but this was, it was in 2006, the Institute for Condom Consultancy, who created it. And it was inspired by the mechanics of a drive-through car wash. So the idea is that a gentleman's member would be inserted into a chamber. To a car wash. It's kind of like a little chamber.

It's like a mini car wash. And nozzles would apply a coat of fast-drying liquid. No, that's horrible. And that would go all around. I think I comes out to clean the windscreens. Yeah. So the prototype meant that you could change sizes and everything, which, so they thought it would appeal to men who find difficulty finding the right size.

It would appeal to men mostly. But they had several problems with it. One was that it had a two to three minute drying process, which they thought kind of killed the mood. The other mood killer was the loud hitting noise of latex being burnt And also having to buy tokens in the garage before you start Exactly What's the point?

So is that a sort of a green and recycling friendly thing? I think it was just an innovation for how you could sort of have You can make your own condoms, DIY condoms I think it shows not all innovation is helpful other uses for condoms in other wartime uses for condoms they were used in Second World Water to protect rifles from water

so you cover the barrel of your rifle with a condom, pretty useful they're often used by engineers apparently I must ask my engineer friend about this to keep soil dry and they're commonly used apparently in the film industry if you're doing underwater filming to keep microphones dry yes I've heard of this really yeah yeah yeah only two

25% of condoms in India are used for their correct use. Really? Yeah. Are the rest of collectsand? No. Other uses include giving a smooth finish and shine to silk saries. Ah. And also cutting and spreading them on roads,

mixing them with tar concrete to make more waterproof tar. Wow. You need a lot of condoms to cover a road. Well, that's why 25% are only used for the proper way because that so many are used for roads. And also in other construction they use it. Wow. Wow.

and pensioners in South Africa have started to rub condoms on their knees to ease arthritic pain. Oh my God. If I ever go on Desert Island Discs, that will be my luxury item now. Condoms. This seems like the most practical thing

you could bring anywhere. That's quite funny, because you're left alone on the desert island. It's going to sound like real wishful thinking. It would be the weirdest moment if a woman did wash up after 10 years. I'd be going, I'm sorry. I don't have any left.

I've been using them for soil samples. and my arthritic knees. Carrying my water. Like I'm going to waste water and having sex with you. You're talking about. Do you guys know there's a restaurant called cabbages and condoms that hands out condoms instead of after-dinner mints? Wow.

Which is quite an interesting approach. And also I had read about options of people who are too embarrassed to buy condoms. And there's a company, I just like its name. It's called Johnny's in a jiffy. And they sell condoms over the internet. Their tagline is, we come before you do. Oh, that's very good. It's just those little nice little taglines that they like to constantly use.

Celebrity condoms is a thing, which is very surprising. There was a Daff Punk celebrity condom. No, JLS had them, didn't they? JLS had them. Darth Punk's was called Get Lucky condoms. Oh, yeah. Makes a lot of sense. JLS, they had each member on a separate box of condoms.

Dad, when you say member. So you could decide which favorite JLS person you'd want to use. Right. Do you think we should do our own? No such thing as a fish conference. No such thing as an unwanted pregnancy. What's a serious? Is Darth Punk's condom? Is that opaque so that you can't identify the penis it belongs to?

Yes, it's a big helmet. Sorry. It's back to buckets again. So a few years ago, 5,000 happy meals from McDonald's were accidentally sent out with colored condoms instead of a plastic toy from the movie, the last airbender. And basically there was just a huge misunderstanding.

So 5,000 children were opening up their happy meals. Was there a kind of confusion? Imagine you're in the bedroom. Your condom is the last airbender toy. Let's just play with this. It's much more fun. This is the best contraceptive ever. But having any sex, though.

So we've got evidence of condoms that goes back to 13,000 B. see in a cave painting, which is quite cool. I think it's made as a cave painting in France in the Grot de Combarrel, and it shows a man who looks like he's standing there with a condom over himself, probably made of animal skin. Over himself. Over his whole body. They hadn't quite mastered. Wow, really?

Yeah. Is it, and it's definitely what we think it is? Well, I mean, all we have is that picture that looks like he's got a covering over his willy, but why else would you do that? It could be a last air bender type. We're not quite sure. Some stuff about D-Day. Sure.

Did you know that in 1943, so we started planning the D-Day invasions very early on, which obviously were in June, 1994, in 1943, an early copy of the plans for them blew out of the window of Norfolk House in London and was found on the street by a short-sighted old man who went and handed it in and said, I don't know what these are, I can't really read them,

because my eyesight's not very good. Oh, yeah. I said my eyes are just good enough. so I can see the bits of paper, but not quite good enough that I can tell anything that's on there. Yeah, I can see the address on the top of the paper that tells me it's this building. I always think it must have been so exciting.

You know, so code words were transmitted over the radio as signals to your various allies in the war that you were going to launch an attack, for instance. So on Radio London, I think a code word was transmitted to make the resistance fighters aware that D-Day was about to happen in the next 24 hours. And I just think that must have been the coolest thing. So I think the code for that was a poem.

The first answer of Paul Verlans' poem, Chanson d'Ateum, that's in the song of autumn. And that was the signal that the DJ landings were going to happen within the next 24 hours. But that must have been the coolest thing. If you're listening to the radio and you'll go, oh my God, it's happening. Should we talk about soil and mud and stuff? Sure. Because according to Britain's leading Earth Sciences organization, the Geological Society, 2015 is the Year of Mud. Is it?

Yeah. Didn't know that. What are we supposed to do? I think it's to celebrate what an important and ubiquitous substance mud is. Is mud important? Yeah. It makes you happy. Did you know that?

Mud? Yeah. Playing in the mud is a microscopic bacteria called microbeacterium vase and they increase serotonin, which makes you relaxed and calm. Oh, really? That explains a lot of Glastonbury photos I've seen over the years. All the mud, but they don't mind. That's what it is.

He thought it with the drugs. It turns out. It's just the mud. Just the mud. Just the mud. One tablespoon of soil contains more organisms than there are people on earth, which is extraordinary, right? More living things in that than there are human beings.

And 15 tonnes of soil passes through an earthworm each year. They eat and poo out? Yeah. Oh, okay. Wow. That's cool. I once read, and I'm not sure if it's even true, that if you get a field full of cows, then the weight of earthworms underneath the ground will be heavier than the way.

of cows above the ground no matter how many cows you have. Really? Because you couldn't fit enough cows next to each other. I don't know if it's true. Well, 1.4 million earthworms is the average number of earthworms. You get an acre of land. Okay. And what's the average weight of earthworm?

Let's all work this out, guys. I think this is going to be fun. While you're working yet, you know, acres from an old English word that meant an open field of no particular measurements. So you could just be like, yeah, I've got acres of land around my house. Scientists have invented transparent soil. Oh yeah, I saw that. It's really cool.

It's so that you can plant a plant in there and you can see the roots grow. That's the coolest. It's a good idea, that's incredible. It's a thing called Nafion, which is a synthetic polymer also used for batteries. Right, so it's not really soil. It's plant brewerer. Potato potato, potato. Both of which are grown in soil.

A potato is the transparent one. Yes, okay, there we go. Should we move on? I have one last thing that I just want to. quickly mention before we move on. Just a movie recommendation. I haven't seen it yet, but it sounds fantastic. A movie called Killer Condom.

The tagline, The Rubber That Rubs You Out. Set in the seedy parts of New York City, Killer Condom follows gay detective Luigi Macaroni, who has been hired to investigate a series of bizarre attacks at the Hotel Quickey, in which male guests have all had their penises mysteriously bitten off. I'm just going out on a limb here, but is Luigi Macaroni an Italian character? I think he's an Italian. Detect him.

So we don't know if they catch the condom. You have to watch the final. Spoiler alert. I haven't seen this movie yet, guys. I'm not going to give that away. Okay, time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that every second a star in the universe explodes. Every second.

Every second. Oh, my goodness. So by the time you told this fact, how many? Yep. Right now. Nope. There. Somewhere in the universe has exploded.

I read a different article as well. that suggested that up to 30 stars in the universe explode every second, but I think it's safer to say at least one. Yeah. This kind of, so actually just researching this whole fact I found really unpleasant because it just terrifies the life out of me. You know, whenever you read any of the facts related to this kind of stuff, the massiveness of it all is horrifying.

The reason I like this fact so much, just as a thought experiment, is we can fit a million of our Earths into our sun, size-wise. that's the equivalent. Our sun is quite a small sun in comparison to the majority of suns out there. And so just the idea of one of these things exploding, there's a lot of damage when a star explodes. The idea that that's happening every second of every day.

I mean, that's over 46,000 stars a day exploding. But they're really rare. I mean, comparatively rare, even though there's one a second. The last one in our galaxy was 1604, but it was almost as bright as Jupiter. I think that's the last one we could see. The last one we observed. Wow.

So they think that in every galaxy you get one or two a century, don't they? Yeah. But I find this extraordinary as well that the last one that we saw was, yeah, 1604 and Kepler saw that. And the last one that was seen in our galaxy before that was Tycho Brahe, who, you know, was Kepler's tutor.

Yep. And no one's seen one in our galaxy since. Wow. I find that bizarre. If you didn't know better, you'd say they were making it up, wouldn't you? They could be, but we've investigated their claims and we have evidence that they weren't.

And we're still using the remnants of Kepler's supernova that he witnessed in 1604. So he wrote it down very clearly what he was seeing over a period of time. And we can still use his observations to study it now because we can still see the remnants of that supernova now. And we know exactly what kind of supernova it was. And we can actually use that, his observations, to work out how fast the universe is expanding.

It's like a time marker in the universe that tells us how fast the universe is expanding. Did he actually see the supernova explode? Well, a new star appears, doesn't know? They saw the brightness. It was a supernova antennae six. it was so bright people could read their manuscripts at midnight. No. Wow.

Isn't that cool? That sounds like a me fact. I read that there's certain patches of the ocean that are so at the surface filled with little algae and animals that are bioluminescent that you could actually read a newspaper on your boat. It's so bright, the surrounding shine. Supposedly during World War II when they have blackouts in Japan, they would take bioluminescent creatures out of the sea and put them in like jam jars and use them as like, lights and read things from love. That's very clever. Which is so romantic.

Or condoms when the jam jaws ran out. Not romantic. Wow, that's amazing. Is that true? That's definitely true. A supernova allowed us to read in the middle of the night. Yeah, they burn really bright. So one day we might be in the middle of the night and it will just light up.

Yeah. And that's a supernova from it. There is 16 candidates I read that for future supernovas in our galaxy, Beast of Jesus is the nearest would be apparently spectacular if that one goes. And, excitingly, it's definitely going to expect. explode sometime within the next 100 million years. Oh. Yay.

So that's what... I think if you say Beetlejuice three times, it explodes. No more times, guys. Yeah, because you can see Beetlejuice anyway, like just with your naked eye. So imagine how light it would be when it explodes. Oh, my goodness. You'll be reading all night. They can be far away and you can not notice.

So there was a brilliant thing in January 2011, a 10-year-old Canadian girl discovered a supernova. She was looking at pictures on her computer. computer and spotted one. Did she say that's a supernova? Or did she say, what's that? Yeah. Well, there's a guy in Australia. So Bill Bryson's book, Short History, nearly everything, and they call him the Supernova spotter because Bill Bryson basically says that throw a bunch of sand onto a table, have him stare at it and stare at it and stare at, take him away, remove a single grain, let him turn back, and he'll tell you that that grain is gone. Like he can have a just, and he spot supernova by just looking at the night sky with a telescope. He would have gone nuts

in 10 of 6th. James doesn't believe this. I mean, so that's a down fact. The difference. I can imagine it walking onto the D-Day beaches. Wait a minute. There's a condoms worth of sand missing here. That grain, that grain, that grain, that grain.

Yeah, maybe I've sexed that story up a bit. I mean, maybe it's true. I don't know. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure he claims it. Sounds like the kind of thing, a wacky guy in Australia might claim, right? So do you know how far away?

You know how people say you can see like millions and millions of stars? Yeah. I think you never, I think it's like roughly 4,000 stars is pretty much the maximum number of stars you'll ever see in the sky. Right. But do you know how far away we're seeing when we look up to the sky? No.

We are seeing 19, I think that is quadrillion miles away. Okay, well then why am I wearing glasses to see. I know at two meters away? TV screen when I'm on a couch and I can see a star 19 quadrillion miles away. No, I don't remember. understand it. You should ask that next time you go to the opticians, you should say, I can't read that,

but would you mind placing that 19 quadrillion miles from me? I appear to be extremely, extremely, extremely long-sighted. That is amazing, though, isn't it? It's extraordinary, isn't it? Our tiny little eyes are taking in light from that far away. Yeah. So a good thing about supernovas is that is the only place where sort of more complicated elements than hydrogen and helium can be born.

And so the human body is mostly made of like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, a few other things. And they will all have been made in supernovas. So basically your whole body was created in a supernova. Yeah, so this is something that was freaking me out on the bus to work this morning when I'd have been reading this. And I was looking at a Boris bike stop. And I was staring at this metal of this Boris bike stuff and was like, you came from a star. That doesn't make any sense. It terrifies me.

Everything you're looking at was born inside a star. Yeah. Mental. explosions in space, different kind of stars, sometimes really absolutely stunned scientists. They have no idea what to make of it. So, for example, in 1979, they found an explosion that was 50 times more intense than anything previously recorded. It was 180,000 light years away, and no one knew what it was.

And the people at NASA and other leading scientists said that the odd thing about it was that its source was an area of only 187 miles in diameter with a whole lot of energy erupting in fairly small sector, it resembled a high-energy bomb blast. And they basically said it was unlike anything we've seen in space. They thought it was Star Wars. Exactly. They thought that what they were saying basically, like, we know it won't be this, but what it looked like was we were witnessing an intergalactic battle between giant ships. And this has led to Star Wars theory, which has been going since the late 70s. I mean, it turns out we know what it was now. It's a new kind of star that they hadn't yet previously detected. But since 1979, there's a great conspiracy

theory that has been running. You can still see it online. Star Wars theory that we witnessed an intergalactic battle and the government's been covering it up ever since. It's very exciting. This is like, I think that's on the same level as, which is fictional in Harry Potter when they have a, they're following a fight in the sky and there's a line about, oh, they think of the muggles down below thinking of fireworks. So we see fireworks. Yeah. See? What do you mean, see? See? And's proved my point. I forgot for a second. She was talking fiction.

Okay, time for fact number three, and that is James. My fact this week is that the Tlatel Camila cannibals of ancient Mexico at their human flesh with chili sauce. Yum. Yeah. How do we know that? So, we found some bones of humans, and the bones have kind of been chipped with tools and nod on a little bit,

so we know that, well, we think that they were eaten by humans. and they're also stained with chili sauce. They have the stains of the spices on the bones. Wow. So they assume that they were marinated before eaten. Well, you would, wouldn't you? Yeah, it makes sense. This is a study from two universities,

one in Madrid and one in Mexico, and these cannibals were living about 2,500 years ago. Wow. Yeah. It's good that. Yeah, I like that, yeah. Because you never think about condiments or anything when it comes to eating humans.

No. Yeah, and I think it's prejudice of us against cannibals to think that they don't have, you know, the sensitivity of taste. Yeah, exactly. Like, there's no gourmet version, like they're just gorging on stuff. No, they want to have a nice meal. Like, some people don't even think cannibalism properly exists. Like, they think, okay, well, people do each other after war, after battle or something. Or they might do a real, real hardship, but they don't think that humans would do it just naturally because they're hungry.

Yeah. But then I think there are a few examples. of cultures that did. So I think that does happen, yeah. Yeah. I was reading about survival cannibalism, which is seen as slightly more acceptable. You know, if you're in a disaster

and you have no choice for you or you're going to die. In the 18th and 19th century, it was seen as something that basically as an occupational hazard of life at sea, and it was just something that happened from time to time. And the customer of the sea involved throwing straws. If you drew the second shortest straw, you had to do the killing. You drew the shortest straw, you got eaten. Wow.

John Lloyd told us a story once, which John Lloyd of head of QI. He was at C. Yeah, he was at C. It's an occupational hazard when he work at QI. He'll accept it. Do you remember that story told us about how there used to be a guy that went around towns, and I don't know which country this is,

but his act was buy tickets and he will eat a person on stage. And so, yeah, he would go around to all these towns. People would pay all the money. He would sell out all these places, and he'd get on stage, and they're all going. going what are we going to expect? What's going to happen here? And then the man said, I will now eat a person.

Who would like to be eaten? And of course, everyone would go, oh. Not me. God, no. And so he would go, well, I can't do my show unless anyone is ready to be eaten. Yeah. And then so no one could return their money because he couldn't do his act because no one was providing themselves. Could venues not specify before he came?

Like, you know, you need to bring your own person, mate. That's true. I think it was his responsibility to provide the person. It puts me in mind of there was a movie in America, and they did as a publicity stunt that they were going to give away a baby. And there was a massive, massive uproar. And they sold tickets to this baby giveaway, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then in the end, they gave away a baby pig.

Oh, yeah. And so it was all fine. I mean, it's not fine for the baby pig's mother, is it, James? No. That her child ripped from her teat. Sorry, Anna. Yeah. Was Captain Cook, he was eaten by cannibals, right?

I don't think so. Oh, you don't? No, it's often said that he was But I think generally speaking now That we think that he wasn't They think that the people who et him Believed in the power of human bones Yeah

And not to eat, but they just thought they were powerful objects And so they boiled down his body To get the bones And that's people saw that happening And assumed that he was being eaten But actually Ah, okay Do you know that we got the word cannibal

From Columbus Do we? So he took it from a Spanish word It was to describe the indigenous people On the Caribbean Islands Even though he didn't actually believe The rumours that they ate people So as you say, James, I don't think I've read in the course of this research,

like people eating people for sustenance anyway, it was always a ritual thing. So I think in ancient Mexico, you don't eat your enemy, wouldn't you? If you slaughtered your enemy, you'd eat it. Or if funeral rights and people would do it. Funeral rights, yeah. It wouldn't be to live off. It's always what the neighbours do, isn't it? It's always what the guys down the road are the guys who eat people.

It's not us. Yeah. But we also ate them here as medicine. So people would consume bits of Egyptian mummies to try and heal. Oh, yeah. expanded to being pieces from local cadavers. So we were eating bodies. Is it bad to eat human?

Just curious. It's generally frowned upon. I know it's frowned upon it, but is it bad? Probably the same as red meat, right? Yeah. Well, there are bad things. Supposedly, it's more likely to give you something like variant CJD or some kind of spongy form brain illness.

Okay. In Papua New Guinea, I think they were suffered from a disease called Kuru, which is a bit like CJD. and that was thought to be because they were eating human human brains mostly actually yeah um um dan if you'd like to know more it might be interested in the annual cannibal conference for academics

where papers include guess who's coming to dinner inside the mind of the cannibal serial killer and bon appetit a concise defense of cannibalism wow where's that take place the one was in Manchester that I read about but I don't know if it's there every year okay I wonder what the catering's like yeah when you're queuing up in the canteen and all they have is a load of straws

said you know you're in trouble. I was reading about animal cannibalism because it happens a lot in animals and there's an interesting thing with salamanders. So salamander larvae have this amazing thing where they get very crowded and so they've developed what's called the cannibal morph. They have wider mouths,

broader heads, lower jutting jaws and their teeth can be three times as longer and they eat the other ones that don't have the cannibal morph. So you know how we get paranoid during puberty you know, if someone doesn't develop their breasts early enough or whatever. These guys must be terrified when they're going through adolescence and they're not one of the ones who's developing the special cannibalistic draw. Yeah.

And your best mate is. And you're looking at him going, oh, this guy's going to eat me. They did a study of cane toads. I really like the title of this study. It's called Deceptive Digits, the functional significance of toe-waving by cannibalistic cantoes. And anyway, it's about the fact that so cane toads, they practice cannibalism a lot. So there was one study that found that 64% of the cane toad diet is made up of other cane toads. Really?

Yeah. 64%. Yeah. Wow. And they found that the bigger ones who have decided to cannibalize lure the smaller ones to them by wiggling their middle toe and make it look like a little bit of prey, I think. Or something about that seems to attract smaller cane toads to them of their own species who come and approach them to say, hey, man, nice wiggle. And then they eat them. Wow.

Yeah. And hippos. Hipos practice cannibalism. Do they? which is weird because they're vegetarians. Well, I'm a vegetarian except for... I did just eat my best mate. I read an article from the Lancashire Evening Post in 1921.

And it was, you know how old newspapers used to just have, rather than have big long articles, they just have quick report. So they just have a quick paragraph of update. This is just somewhere in the middle of the newspaper, Lancashire evening post 1921. Brigadier General Barnett in a report on conditions in Haiti declares that the natives ate the bodies of several US Marines,

including Lieutenant Lawrence Muth. End of article. Right. It just seemed like such a throwaway tiny little, oh, by the way, some soldiers have been eaten in Haiti. Yeah. And the weather. Can I say a thing about chilies?

Yes. There was a study that found that women like to eat chili for the spicy feeling, whereas men do it for social reward. Linked to this, Nando's tweeted, that they often get men on dates ordering plain chicken but asking for extra hot flags on their food. Wow. Does that what they do?

No, no, they put flags on your food. To show how hot it is. That's very funny. I really hope if waitresses bring it to the table, they say, and we've got one plain chicken with extra hot flags here? The mild, mild with extra hot flags. Anyone?

Oh, you, sir. There were some hot sauces, names just for fun. Pain is Good sauce, is a good one. Ring of Fire, hot sauce. It's another one you get in America. And the winner of the Hot Sauce Awards, 2015, Crazy Bastard Sauce. Oh, nice. Nice. Yeah.

Could have a beneficial effect, though, eating hot sauce because this guy called Randy Schmitz took part in a hot sauce chili eating competition. He was rushed to hospital because he collapsed immediately after dabbing just a drop of this chili called flashbang onto his tongue. Went to Russell, had an MRI scan, had a lot. a tumour turned out, which they removed and he's fine. Great. In January 2013, Dr. Ian Rothwell at the world's hottest curry. It took him over an hour to finish the dish,

which included a 10-minute walk down the high street weeping. No, just pure chili coming out of his eyes. Oh, my God. The Indian Army supposedly are testing out chili grenades as a form of non-lethal weapon. These are on elephants. Do they? But then they got cancelled because they were pruned to fungal rot.

Oh no. Don't use it on hippos because they'll go, oh wow, even more delicious. Okay, time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anne. My fact is that dogs aren't allowed at Selwyn College in Cambridge, so the master's basset hound has been reclassified as a very large cat. That's really good. So basically, this guy, so they've just got this law, no dogs. There's a sort of precedent that you can have a cat.

They were quite knowing about it. Apparently, it was a joking minute. But nevertheless, the minute hit the internet. And the minute says, College Animal, noting precedent under the master's of Professor Chadwick, counsel approved the master's request who dropped a very large cat in the Masters Lodge. And then everyone's sort of taken it to heart. And people thought it was just a quirky Cambridge customer.

He'd go out and tell and everyone would yell, hey, I love your cat, after his basset hound. But the story went viral. It was on the official Chinese news agency on websites in South America. and he had to do an interview in America about what Yo-Yo the dog thought of the situation and Yo-Yo's owner says... He was up and down about it.

But his owner said he played long gamely and resisted the urge to shout, she has no idea, she's a sodding dog. But there have been seen to quite a lot of dogs passing off with other things. There was a new story a few months ago

about a guy who had two puppies, had them for two years, turned out they were black bears. He only found out when someone put out through his house about people trading in illegal animals and was like, hang on a minute. But his poppies weighed 50 kilos each.

He only found out. He only found out when it clawed off his face. I think he only found out when he discovered that you can be punished for only the wrong time. Some other loopholes, maybe. The 1862 Homestead Act in America allowed people to go through America and grab a bit of land. So any US citizen could go along, find some land.

but in order to claim it, they had to build a 12 by 14 dwelling on it. But the law didn't say what units the 12 by 14 was in. And apparently some people built 12 by 14 inches houses so that they could claim the land. They couldn't live in the house, though. Yeah. There was in 2007, smoking was banned in bars in Minnesota. And there was a bar called Barnacles Bar,

which found out it was losing a lot of custom on account of that. and it found a loophole in the law which said that smoking is banned in indoor places unless you are an actor in a play who's playing a character that smokes. And so the Minnesota Bar said that they were staging a continuous life performance and that everyone in the bar was an actor. Very good. This is not a loophole, but I just like in the idea of bands that have happened. In 2013, Florida accidentally banned computers.

What? Yeah. It was a very badly worded bill. They were cracking down on online gambling in internet cafes, particularly in Florida. And it banned, I guess, slot machines and so on. And it said any machine or device or system or network of devices, which meant that that's exactly what a computer is. And so...

And in 2011, they actually made it illegal for anyone to have sex as well. So this is two times. It's a great time to live in. Yeah. It was basically they were banning beastiality. They outlawed, and this is the quotes here, knowing sexual conduct or sexual contact with an animal, forgetting that that's what we are. There was a loophole in Christchurch in New Zealand where if you wanted to register your diesel car,

you needed to pay $260. But if you wanted to register a hearse, you could register it for $58. And so a lady registered her diesel car as a non-commercial hearse. by arguing that whenever she went to the supermarket, she was bringing back dead chickens. How much did she save by doing that? She saved $200. $200. Amazing.

Can I bring us back to Cambridge very quickly? Because I used this opportunity of looking into something that I've always wondered about, and I read about it in a Stephen Frye novel years ago. So there's always been a rumor that the library of Cambridge for the university contained a secret stash of Victorian porno. And Stephen Fry talks about it in his novel The Liar. So obviously it's a novel, but it's a real rumor that's existed,

and everyone seems to talk about it. Recently, they had to put all of their books online because they've upgraded into the new world, and it has been revealed that there is no pornostash. And what they do have are a couple of Victorian books, and the only titles, really, that get close to it, are The Lover's Guide to Courtship, Floating made easy.

What? I mean. Yeah. But if you had a secret collection, you wouldn't put it on the website. Well, this is true. But so... Or you'd rename it Floating Made Easy, so no one knew what it was. Did you hear floating then?

Floating. Floating. I wanted to what James gave you such a weird... I'll tell you what, that's why I'd be going wrong all these years. Oh, James was floating in bars. It's so good of levitating, though. I'm impressed with it. But yeah, they had this article.

Vanessa Lacey, who's the manager of the Cambridge University, the library tower project, said that unfortunately it's not true. However, she did say, good news, there are plenty of pornography from the modern world. Good news, the internet. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But so they do have a lot of modern porn in there, but no, so far, unless you're right, unless they're still hiding the secret stash. Yeah. They did have something very recently, and it's a shame that it's been busted so quickly. there was a book in a Cambridge library where when you opened it, it was hollowed out on the inside and it had chocolate bars. You're not allowed to eat inside the library. And so the idea was that you would eat these chocolate bars if you were starving and stuck in the library researching.

And then there's a message underneath the chocolate bars which said your job is to now return the book with more chocolate inside for the next person who finds it. But unfortunately it's been busted, so now that's no longer a thing. Although at the end of the day you are bringing chocolate into the library and you are eating chocolate. It's an odd system, isn't it? Because you might as well just eat your own chocolate. Yeah, exactly. Very odd. They're only doing for the sake of the fun system. Maybe it's if you're working late, you think I'm really hungry.

There's no psych machine in here. I'll check the book. I'll check every buck. Oh, that's all of it. I'll read all of it. Porn, porn. Nuzbers. Winning.

Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to get in contact with any. of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast. You can find us on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, James, at Egg-shaped, and at Miller underscore M, Chazinski. You can email a podcast at QI.com. Yep. You can also get us on our group account, which is at QI podcast, and you can also go to no such thing as a fish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes.

Go there as well if you want to book some of our live shows. We will be back again next week. Thank you so much. See you then. Goodbye.