No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Worthless Bucket Of Urine

Episode Date: March 13, 2015

Episode 52: Live at the Soho Theatre, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss Tutankhamun's fashion choices, how to get ahead in a marathon, a city full of socks, and the most boring day ever.

Hi everyone, James here. I just wanted to start with an apology. Unfortunately, the audio is very bad in this episode. Some of our microphones failed. So we only had one mic and you'll be hearing it from that. So it's going to be a bit tinny, a little bit like we recorded in a toilet. But that's kind of back to our roots because that's what most of our early ones were like. But enjoy the show anyway. We think it's a good one. Get through the audio next week will be much better. Another episode and no such thing is a fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the Soho Theatre in central London. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Anna Chisinski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray. This is our one year special. It's our birthday. We've once again sat around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Andrew Hunter Murray. Hello. My fact is that the route for the Hong Kong Ultramarathon is to run up and down the same stretch of road. 25 times. This has been in the news a bit recently, because it's just happened, the first ever ultramarathon they've had on this route, for one of a better word.

And it's 31 miles long, because apparently anything longer than the standard 26.2 is an ultramarathon, which I think is cheating, because I think it should be at least double. And I say that as someone who's never run more than 200 meters. And that was at Sports Day. and I came fourth.

Out of four. Out of four. So, yeah, that's it. What are how far do you say it was? 31 miles. Oh, yeah, because normally ultramariffins are more like 100 miles, 200 miles, whatever. But if they had done that here,

there probably would have been to a size of border. I read that, actually, sorry, I read that if you run 200 miles, it's less tiring than if you run 100 miles. Right. Have you told you when he's actually trying it? That can't be true. Apparently what happens is when you know it's going to be much longer, your intensity is much lower,

so you take your time a lot more. They found the people who do the longer ones feel better at the end. So you're just saying you do it much more slowly. You're saying it takes... You conserve your energy better. You walk it. You walk it. You make joke when you get the tube.

So the thing about this marathon is that everyone's been describing it, particularly people doing it, as the most boring marathon possible, because the repetition and I was looking into boring marathons, and there is an annual boring marathon. What? Yeah, there's an annual boring marathon, there's an ultra-boring marathon. And it's actually, apparently quite exciting. It's just it happens to take place in a town, or so you called Boring Oregon City, yeah,

which is an actual place, and their motto is, the most exciting place to live. They're twins with a town called Dull in Scotland. Yes, yeah. Yeah, yeah, they have an annual dull and boring day, which is, I think, it was August 9th. Someone worked out recently the most boring day in modern history. And it was April the 11th, 1954.

Oh, yeah, that was a bad time. It was a scientist about the computer programme to work out the day where the least interesting stuff happened. It included a general election in Belgium. So, sorry, Belgian. The front page of the New York Post was two cops attending a conference on juvenile delinquency. Front page news.

So they put that into a machine. right and it's generous so it was like three million bits of information 300 million. Was it 300 million? Was. Wow. So they said Find us the most boring day. They came up with this date, April 11th, 1954. I read this

as well. Side note to it, which actually caught my eye more than the fact itself, is that the guy who was a Cambridge scientist, he was a computer programmer, his name, his name is William Tunstall Pido. He changed his own name. I was trying to research the fact. I got so sidelines.

But you're keeping that? You know Charles Dickens came up with boredom, as in he invented the word. Yeah, I've read his books, yeah? Yeah. Oh! What? It's my head Charles Dickens. Um, yeah, it's in Bleak House.

He says someone is bored to death by marriage. So, yeah. So maybe it means something complete, people just assumed that's what it meant. Maybe it meant thrilled. What do boredom means thrilled? Is that what people say to me when I'm talking to death? to me when I'm talking to them in the pub and they're saying, I'm so bored. They're actually saying they're thrilled.

Is that why you keep going on and on? There's a tribe in Papua New Guinea called the Beining, and they value work as the highest ideal, the best thing you do is work. And they have been called unstudiable because of their failure to do anything interesting. It's so harsh, isn't it? There was an anthropologist called Gregory Bateson. Gregory Bateson who spent 14 months attempting to study

them in the 1920s before giving up entirely. They don't even like sex, is that right? They don't like it very much? No, they don't like it, but they do have kids. But often, a lot of adoption, because they don't really want to have kids. Wait, where have they adopted them from?

It's been neighbouring tribes or something. I don't know. But they also don't like play, because it's a natural state of children and they don't like children. and sometimes they will punish their children who are playing by putting their hands in the fire. That's not boring. That's an exciting thing to do as kids. I think the most boring sport ever,

the most boring sporting event ever was the cycling event of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics where it involved people watching two people who are cycling head to head sitting still on bicycles for more than an hour. exercise bikes. No, it's that you know, it's the sprint cycle when it goes head to

head and you know, they often like hover at the start a bit. Because I think is it a slip stream thing? So because they want the other person to start cycling first so they can get in their sit stream and they do what I just had this standoff. Just still on the bikes, balancing on the bikes for

over an hour. An hour and sitting on the bike so, that's pretty hard. Yeah, I know impressive. That sounds exciting to me. Because you constantly be wondering, oh, he's got a nice, no, no, yeah. The commentator had to leave. It had something else to get on with. The excitement was too much.

Can't handle this. Do you know that the way they induce boredom, scientists want to test boredom, obviously there are definite ways of doing it. So to do pain, they put your hand in a bucket of icy water. And to do boredom, they make you copy out the phone book. That's the official way of doing it. But if they want to really test you,

they just make you read the phone book. see how to focus on it and really concentrate. But it improves your creativity. What? Are you in the phone doctors? Well, being bored, as in induced by this in the experiment they did. So they tested, they had people who could just copy numbers out of a phone book or not do that. And at the end of that, everyone who'd been in it was asked to, this is the test, think of as many uses as they could for a pair of plastic cups.

which is apparently a test of divergent thinking and how crazy and creative you are and people who've been reading the phone book or copying it out are much more creative they're like throw them at the person who told me to read the phone book and there's a scientific test at the bored and proneness scale has come up with by two psychologists

and it's 28 statements which you have to agree or disagree with and it consists of statements including I have projects in mind all the time things to do, or much of the time, I just sit around doing nothing. If you can do that successfully, I don't think you're easily bought. I sometimes read my own phone book and test myself on people I've forgotten who they are. Who is Rose? Who is that?

Does anyone else do that? One yes, one yes, thank you. I did a terrible thing the other day. I got a message on my phone from someone saying, Hey, how's it going? And you know that terrible moment when you haven't got their number and you're like, oh my God,

the message is so familiar, I definitely know who this is, they're going to hate. So I have to do the old classic, sorry, it's a new phone, I haven't got your number. Who is it? And the person wrote back going,

it's Sheila. So I did the lamest thing that I've done to you is I wrote back, okay, sorry, I'm Australian. There's a lot of Sheila. Which one in you?

I found the most boring... It's very unfortunate as a resort in Switzerland and I was a bit confused because it's described as a village and a resort. So I've come to feel like a village resort. Yeah. And it's been described as the most boring resort in Switzerland. And you know when it's like, oh, I've had a nice time. They're all of their things.

It's just this is so dull. This is my dull place. And the tourist board there released a statement. They said that they think they got this title because their quiet village has nothing, does nothing, and offers nothing.

And then they added, we think that's a positive. But so they've combated it now by going, they had a meeting, and they're like, how do we sort out the boredom levels of our town? How do we make it exciting and vibrant? And they started a stone skipping competition

which they're now trying to make a worldwide thing. But then they've been, found out that another similarly dull town also decided the way to combat boredom was to set up a Skimming Stones competition so they have to call them and say, could we do the qualifying round before they get to

you? You can't even go and see the finals. Yeah, I'll see. Yeah. Okay, some stuff on ultramarathans. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Okay, so ultramarathon athletes sometimes have all their toenails removed. Before or after? Before. I'm not during, but like, between races.

Put you off, wouldn't it? Yeah. So you'll end up, you'll run and you'll have real problems with your toenails and they'll get worse and worse and worse and then they get better. And then once they've been a problem once, they get worse and worse all the time. And so, yeah, quite often they'll have them taken off completely. What? It reminds me. How?

Yeah, how? How do they take them off? Do you want me to show you? They, with surgeon, would do it. I wanted a method. I think it's a yank. And the other thing that happens in ultra-American people is their body gets in such trouble because they're really, really pushing it that they are insatiable and want to have lots and lots of sex,

apparently. It's according to one of the athletes. Who I met in a pub. Yes, he was boring, but I couldn't help myself. No, he said... He says... He says that when... When a person is in diastrichts like that, sex becomes a priority because naturally we want to perpetuate the species.

What? We want to procreate. So it's like we're in such trouble, we're about to die and we need to have kids quickly. That's what he said. Wow. Okay. Marathans were considered so dangerous that they weren't supposed to happen again, weren't they? In the 1902 Olympics or was it in 2004?

The 1904 Olympics. It was decided because it was so. badly done that one guy, so the doctors drove in front of them along this dust track and like, who got on his face? One of them did, one of them collapsed, had like a pulmonary failure or something, collapsed very nearly died because he'd inhaled so much dust. Another one, the guy who won in the end collapsed and had to be picked up and was given striccneed, which is that pesticide that we now use on crops to try and stimulate him and then some brandy. At that time, it was a useful stimulant that didn't do anything except to slightly kill you.

And then there was a guy who won initially, who was called someone Laws, who decided he couldn't hack it after about nine kilometres, and jumped in a car, passed by, waved to all the other athletes, jumped out at the other end, sprint to the finish line, the 50 yards. 50 yards? There was no one nearby, presumably, because I would stop a mile back. What he claimed was, when he was taking his trophy and someone did say, by the way, I did see you drive most of the way.

He did say he'd always been meaning to give it back. It was just a joke. But that is the kind of thing you'd think I'll claim this. And if no one says anything, I've won. And if they do, I'll just say, oh, I was kidding. Anyway, yeah. I think that sounds strong was going to do that, wasn't he? That was just a joke, guys.

Have you heard of Rosa Ruiz? No. She won the 1980 Boston Marathon. She's a 23-year-old New Yorker, and she was very, very fast. She was the third fastest time ever recorded for a female runner. And she was completely sweat-free and composed when she crossed the finishing line. Car, obviously.

No one saw her during the race. None of the checkpoints, none of the other runners. Photographs of the race, she was nowhere. She was so fast they couldn't get her in the photo. She was not car, subway. She just got the subway straight across. Does it count though if you're still running While you take all these jobcast

You ran to the subway Just on the spot I was running I just got creative with it But again she just jumped back in half a mile before the end Which seems very cocky Yeah Why often in subways you have to run up a lot of stairs

I reckon that's more tiring We've got to move on very soon to the next back Can I just quickly give a few Hong Kong things Yeah So, because I'm born and raised in Hong Kong, and there's a... Can I bet money on a Hong Kong fact that you will say in the next 20 seconds? Oh, okay, yeah. I'm just wondering if there's a Hong Kong fact about Bruce Lee to follow.

No, there's not. Oh, my God. Although, there is a good Bruce Lee fact, because... See, I think you've made it true. Why do I do it? No, he was the 1958 Char-Chi champion in Hong Kong. There you go. How many people matter?

As you were. Thank you. Yeah. So one thing I discovered was that after the handover happened, there were a lot of things that the Chinese admitted to doing that they were sort of tripping the British colonialists about when they first arrive. And one thing was the names of places in Hong Kong. And I've been to a lot of these places,

and I had no idea that their translations meant what they are. So, for example, there's a place called Kyi-Si-1. So when the British were like, oh, what's this called? They went, oh, he-see-one. That translates as vagina discharge day. Viginal discharge there. There's Nushi Wu, which is Kowshit Lake. And Daltow, which is penis head rock.

And needs have been on signs in Hong Kong for ages, and they started changing some. So foreign devil's sex organ is now changed. It's become Pyramid Rock, and Oral Sex Corner is now swimming dragon cake. Oh, that's really cool. I had no idea when I was there. Did you guys have any more that we...

No, that's what we... Yep. Okay. Time for fact number two, and that is Chuzzynski. Yeah, my fact is that the meter is wrong. Typical, Anna. Everything's wrong, we're calling it. Yeah, I hate it.

What on earth could that mean? So, the meter, it was determined that the meter, so in a guy called Pierre Mecha, was a French astronomer. In the 1790s, he determined that he would create a, they decided to go to a decimal system, and the meter would be the unit of the system. and it would be exactly one 10 millionth of the distance between the equator and the North Pole. So he went on this big tour to measure out arcs of the earth and stuff and do calculations to work out what a metre was.

And there was a slight error in his calculations, a slight problem with one of his bits of equipment. And he was 0.16 of a millimeter out for every metre. The metre we use now, he realised that he's gone wrong. And so he tried to draw people's attention to it. But at that point, they were like, we've made all these, like, meter-long sticks. We can't just go and unmake them. And so it just stayed that way. So he...

I mean, but that's so unscientific for how science usually works. Well, we've made them now. It's just going to have to be it. Sorry. I heard that he went back to where he had made the original mistake later in his life. And he wanted to correct it. He was on this campaign to get it corrected. And he got to where he'd made the mistake, where he caught malaria and died.

It just goes to show. Never check. You're working. He kept getting arrested, didn't he, when he was doing all this stuff? Because it was during the revolution. And people thought that his, what do you call these things? Instruments were weapons, didn't they? Yeah.

So it just kept in prison all the time. Yeah. But that was actually a good thing. Well, was it good or was it back? Because it was when he was in prison that he realised he'd got it wrong. He thought, I've got nothing else there to do except re-checked my calculations. And when he did that, he realised it was wrong. But then it didn't do much good.

So in fact, there was, in 1875, there was the Treaty de la Metro or the Treaty of the Meter in France. Thank you. Save me 10 valuable minutes, but I was going to leave it, and I remember you were here.

And that decided to consecrate his wrong meter into like being the actual meter. So to say actually, Meshans meter is the proper meter. The meter is now going to be one meter and not 0.6, 1mm.0.6 millimeter long. And so they created a standard meter at this conference,

so they had to create an exact replica of the wrong meter, but this time say, this is now the right meter. But they couldn't just take his wrong one and say, this is the standard meter, because that had been wrong. Does that make sense? It didn't. But yeah. I'm still on Trouty de la Metro.

So before this happened in 18th century of France, there were more than 250,000 different types of measurement in France. What? I know. How many people were there? Was it just... Just different weights and measurements. 250,000.

Yeah. It's a lot, that look. Yes, that's a lot. They were told they were really arrogant, weren't they, when they wanted to go to the decimal system, and there were a lot of people saying, I can't believe you think you can just, like, make the whole world abide by your ridiculous system.

But obviously, they did. Japan went metric in 1924, and no one noticed or did anything about it and they had to do it again 40 years ago. The US has tried to a few times. In the 1960s they were saying, let's do it and they just never got around to it. And now, because there are three countries that are metric aren't there, so Burma, Liberia and the US, but Burma's about to go imperial now. So it's about to just be US and Liberia.

About to go metric, sorry. So it would just be Liberian and America left. Yeah. Wasn't there that great, I don't know the full fact, I hope you guys do, which is that... I thought of them to complete the fact. Mount Everest, when that was originally measured, what was it, 29,000 feet? Yeah. So, the... The Lord was to say it?

Yeah, yeah, go for it. So they worked out exactly how tall it was. It was 29,000 feet. But they thought that if they put that as the actual number, people won't believe them and think they would think they just rounded them up. And so they put an extra two feet on top So they called it 29,0002 feet Yeah Can you imagine you've just done this incredible thing You've measured the greatest mountain

The highest tallest mountain in the world And it's a perfect number And you can't tell them that attack Because no one will believe you Poor guy, you must be like Can't fucking believe my life That's nuts I really like mistakes

I think history definitely Some of the things that we find is in everyday thing, like the meter is as a result of a mistake. One of the things that almost seems to have come out of being mistakes is phosphorus, the head of matches. The only reason, I mean, we may have got to it eventually, but the actual reason that we did end up getting to it is because a guy in 1675 called Henne Brand got obsessed with the idea that he could make gold by converting buckets of urine into gold. So in his basement, you have 50 buckets of urine going on to a winner here. And if he was...

It went all soupy and it went all waxy and it just didn't at all go goldy. If he had a cleaner, he must have had to have a load on every single bucket. Please leave. But so, the weird byproduct of him doing this is that it actually led to this. Aside from the tubs of urine. Yeah, well, no, the tubs of urine did this waxy substance that he ended up having sort of lit up when light was making contact with it and they were going, what is this? and they realized this was a way of making fire.

And so actually, each bucket became way more worth than gold. So he actually exceeded the amount of money that he would have made from turning that into gold. If I shine a light... No, no, it's like setting light to it. Oh, right, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you know the first matches were a yard long?

Seriously, the first sold matches. And the guy who invented them sold 168 in something like three years. and they were a toy for rich people and they were also incredibly dangerous because once you'd lit it it was more like a home science kit almost it wasn't a practical thing but once you lit it the globule of flaming stuff

had this amazing tendency to just fall to the ground and set fire to whatever you were standing on at the time I guess because they were very practice at lighting matches so once you litignt in a yard long as well helps have taken two people yes yeah good for bonding maybe that's why they did it Maybe.

Before the 19th century, there was a unit of measurement which was called a lot. How many was that? Not very much? It was not. It wasn't. It was the 30th of a pound. So it was an awful lot.

That's great. The word acre used to mean an open field of no particular measurement. And yard comes from Saxons used to wear like a girl that comes from the same origin as gurd, doesn't it? Because it's from a belt that people used to wear, and then they take it off to measure something when they needed to. No, it's speculating as to what. What? I don't know. Some people understood. How big is this caused?

So there are some other good units of measurement. The Garn. You all know the Garn. No. The Garn is a unit of measurement. measures space sickness and it's named after he was the first US politician to go into space actually it was named after Senator Jake Garn who was so sick during a space mission but now it's meant one Garn is considered very space sick that's great that's like the the mini Helen the mini Helen is the amount of beauty

you need to launch one ship it's weird lots of units of measurement that we have are quite similar so there's a Japanese measurement called I'll mispronounce this, but Kanegaku, it's an obscure one, as in it's not used anymore, but it's about the same as an English foot, and both of those things are about the same length as the average man's foot. So it's a sort of, you know, common origin for lots of these things, which is quite cool. Like the cubit is the distance from it, what is it, your elbow to, to the beginning of your hand, so you would send out someone with a big arm to buy cloth in Egypt because they would be able to get more cloth for their money

because they had bigger arms. Just one guy with a really massive arm. Yeah, yeah. Just one more, that one huge arm. It's amazing that we took so long to get to grip to the fact that all humans are different sizes and we can't face a measurement system before the victim of a human body.

There's one called a Piet de Rois, which is Charlemagne introduced, and it was supposedly the size of his foot. It wasn't. It was, he was trying to stand with those things. So it was bigger than his spots or small than his spot. I don't know. I don't know what size his foot was, but I also don't know what size of thing was.

So it could be actually, yeah. I think it was. You know what they say about men with indeterminate size feet? Can I just say very quickly, just as a side note, every time that we've said, oh, what's that called someone from the crowd, his gun, it's called that. You don't get this at any other comedy gigs, the audience are treating it like a pub quick. is.

Are you hearing that? Yeah, can you not hear it? Every time. Listen out. It'll be there. Just quickly, the carrot, I just is kind of interesting, the carrot measurement for diamonds

is from carob seeds because they thought, people used to think that all carob seeds weighed exactly the same amount, so they don't. They don't. They don't.

Yeah. Like, um, who was it, was it, was it bar who weighed out of 60 coffee beans for each cup of coffee he drank? Oh yeah. Oh, sorry,

didn't weigh like, counted them up. Yeah, it was one of them. It was bar. It was, it was, it was, Whoever wrote the coffee cantata, which I think was bad. He wrote a whole thing in praise of coffee. Who was it?

Fucking told you. We're going to have to move out to our next time. This is hard. And the next fact comes from that lady in the audience. Okay, sign for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that St Andrew's Aquarium has three meerkats called Churchill, Admiral and Sheila's Wheels I love that

Sheila's wheels Miratat they also had Aviva and Direcline but they both died in front of them is that doing the credit punch but yeah

meerkats and funny names alright questions first of all does an aquarium have mere cats because they've realised there's no such thing as a fish yeah wow

They had this little bit... It's a brilliant aquarium, by the way, but they had this little bit of rock where they didn't have anything to put there, and they got offered some meerkats from a little to do, and they said, yeah, great. Mir cats. Why not? Everyone loves meir cats.

So you actually... I was there this weekend, that's right? Yeah, that's how you found this out. Yeah. Did you meet the meerkats? I did meet the mere cats, and fed the... What do you call these things? Penguins.

And saw all the different fish. Yeah, it was great. really good. Definitely recommend it. So why have they named their... Oh, so they were named by someone on Facebook and they thought they were such great names that will name them that. Wait, they know they're existing names, don't they? They were allowed to name them when they...

They were born there and they were allowed to name it. My head admiral has a tiny jacket with epaulettes. And the main two are called Kate and Wills and the others are named after, members of the Royal Family as well. And they have a penguin who is called Andy Murray. Do that? Yeah, they do. And it's a female.

Okay. All the other penguins are named after the Murray family. Not your family. The tennis player. Interestingly, that the meerkats are named after Kate and Wales, because meerkats, too, are threatened by inbreeding. So, mere cats, when they're fighting, they line up in a line and then just charge at each other.

Really? Yeah, like a horizontal line, like a key. Like horizontal line. like horizons the line. And so it's like one against the other one and they just charge into each other. And that is how naval warships fought in the old days.

So presumably emerald country of arms. Very good. And one way they stop from fighting each other is because they get a lot of their thing from scent. They rub Vicks vapor rub

on the mere cats because then they can't smell each other and they don't get angry with each other. But they also can't smell who's related to them. No, but that's a good thing. Because they recently had one meerkat who was completely segregated. They just say, we don't want you.

And they named the meerkat Oliver Twist because he was orphaned. And one of the guys there had to look after Oliver Twist. And that was the sentence. He said, we're going to completely cover them and fix, what's the called? Becker up. And we're going to cover him as well. And that will allow him back into the group. Because they won't know that he wasn't smelling the same as us.

I just reminded me of a brilliant thing that I read this week. You'll have all read out of shore, a new scientist. which is that when you shake someone's hand, you smell your hand afterwards because you're trying to get the scent of the person who you shook hands with. And all humans have been doing this forever, and no one's ever noticed.

Not me, I can assure you I don't do that. And they videoed a load of people in a room shaking hands and counted how often they were touching their faces around their nose and mouth, and it was a certain number, and when they shook hands, it always went up. It's amazing. It's incredible.

It's such a face. I've been watching... We went to go and do it over the weekend. We found various instances that we'd like play a little board game, shake hands after them. And then I watched him, and he holds his nose after he shakes hands

with me, yeah, which I've not taken this good sign. On mere cats, they're the only animal we've observed as I've seen, like, employing proper teaching methods to teach their young how to hunt. So because they hunt individually,

the young can't just follow their parents around to see how they hunt. So the parents bring back dead animals, and then explain to their kids how to dismember them. Another thing meerkat mothers do is they kill the children of other mere cat mothers so that those mothers will breastfeed their own children so that they can go out and have fun. Nice guys. So they turn that mother into a babysitter because she's lactating anyway.

So she'll be like, okay, you can look after my kids and I've killed yours. I'm going to go out on the house. They are. They're horrible. They're not good pets, apparently, according to some websites. because they can be very cruel to each other, aggressive to the people they don't know, and they smell quite ferrety. Like you to be in Hannah?

I was reading about aquariums, and I read about London's very first aquarium, which was the Royal Aquarium. You've heard about the Royal Aquarium. It was basically, it was 1903, sorry, just before 1903, because it was pulled down in 1903. It had huge tanks.

It was ginormous. Central Iron and the reason it was pulled down and didn't do so well is that all these giant tanks contained no fish They were completely empty because they because they marketed it as having Sea life so they needed salt water and they realized how expensive that was and they couldn't afford to actually put the right amount of water in there with the relevant fish So people used to come and just look at tanks of water I made the promise that one day that there would be fish in them I don't think that was the first one because the first one I think was at London Zoo

which would have been... When did you say yours was? 1903. It was taken down. London Zoo's opened at the mid-19th century and it was called the aquarium but it used to be called an aquavirium which is a cool name. And an aquarium was originally a watering place for cattle.

So you see sometimes troughs where people used to let their horses and cows drink and it has aquarium written on it and it looks like the worst aquarium in the world but it's not. So did they call it aqua-verium so it's not to be confused and have cattle turn up and hoping for a drink.

And then they had this thing called Aquarium Mania. Have you heard of this? This is so cool. Sounds great. So there was a guy called Philip Henry Goss or Gosser. We can edit that as appropriate. And he was one of the pioneers of basically allowing fish to survive.

Before that, basically everyone went around killing old fish. And he was like, no, this is wrong. We should let them survive. He came up with a system whereby you could keep fish in a tank and they would get enough oxygen and you need plants in there. But suddenly everyone started getting aquariums. So people got them set into their windows, some people,

or put into chandeliers just hanging from the ceiling. Some people built a bird cage into an aquarium. so there would be a bird living in there surrounded by fish which it could never eat torture they've made a Nike trainer into an aquarium

Nike designers now it's they've transformed it I don't know how functional it is as a trainer anymore but it looks really cool if you look it up they turn into the aquarium in the base of the shoe do you mean

the whole shoe is an aquarium so it's around the edges of the shoe they filled it with water and put some fish in what's incredible that's quite some of it wow that's weird also there's the world's smallest

Aquarium, isn't there? That's... Smaller than the shoe? Yeah. It's not even a full shoe. A heel. I think this one is 24mm high, so... It's for zebrafish. It's this guy, Anatoly Konenko, who just designed, like he's a designer. His job is designing tiny things.

And so he's created the world's smallest book. That's he's the width of the human hair. Is it advice on how to keep your new zebrafish? Just if you think... I was just going to say, did anyone see the giant male octopus this week that was trying to escape from its aquarium? Oh yeah, yeah.

Did anyone read what the aquarium... It was an aquarium in Seattle, the aquarium owner said. So there was this octopus that's crawled up the sides of its aquarium and it's clutched at the outside and it's got some of its tentacles on the outside and it's trying to get over. And aquarium officials say the octopus named Inc

was not attempting a jail break, but simply learning to embrace his new home with all eight arms. It was not an escape return, and they said, whilst putting the lid back onto the car in time. So good. So some things about name changes

and product placements and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. So, Aussie rules footballer Gary Hocking changed his name by Deep Pole to whiskers one year, because he was paid a lot of money by them. It was a Tonglin rugby star Epitione, who changed his name to Paddy Power. And you can change your name

your stadium and stuff but it doesn't always work out. The MLS side Colorado Rapids has changed their stadium to Dick's Sporting Goods Park but everyone calls it the Dick. And like changing your name by Beapole as well, I like all that kind of stuff.

So there was a guy called Gary Brett from Potter's Bar. Potter's Bra had changed his name to Potter's Bar he changed his name to Mr Hong Kong Fooey Okay, and he said, I've loved Hong Kong Fouy since I was a boy and always wanted to be named after him. I'm quite serious. I'm quite serious about being known as Mr. Fooey.

My wife was a bit upset, but she should be honoured to be married to a number one super guy who's quicker than the human life. And then there's a guy called Nigel Dyle, who changed his name to Mr. Toasted Tea Cake. Okay? And he said, some people can't believe it, especially because I don't even like T-Ks that much. I thought I was a nice name. It must be so hard if you love stupid names that you've got to go to the, what's the name change? Dean pole. And you must be in the queue going, okay, this time it's just going to be Brian Smith.

And you're saying hi to the guy in front of you, oh, what are you changing your name to? Oh, rainbow sunshine, moon dust. Oh, God damn it. And then you get home to your wife, she's like, is it Brian Smith? it's arsmak a dang dang my dad I couldn't help myself it must be so hard

if you love a name at least you're now married to a number one super guy there's a guy called Sean Hennessey who changed his name to Nigel Bottom Face to win a bet with his friends

and he said my mum was furious but at least I got a night out in Chelmsford another sound life there we're gonna have to move on but do you want to get I've got some quite funny stuff on advertising. Okay, so the Churchill dog,

as the one of the fish is called Churchill, to start this fact, the Churchill dog was initially a real bulldog called Lucas, who had to be sacked after one advert because he refused to hold a phone in his mouth. He refused. He was, oh no.

We are going to have to be fun. I'm going to have to move it on. So, we move on to our final fact of the evening, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the only ancient Egyptian soft, that we know of all belonged to Tutankhamun. Is that awesome?

When he was, when Howard Carter went into the tomb, he found a lot of stuff, a lot of gold, a lot of walking sticks, and he found three pairs of socks. And what's amazing is that up until finding these socks, there had been no depiction of socks in ancient Egypt whatsoever, and I can't believe that that wasn't the headline. They wore socks! Also, because he wore sandals, it means that he was a soft-sing sandals

which is very exciting. Do you normally have painted on the bottom of his sandals? This is cool. He had the faces of his enemies painted on the bottom so that wherever he walked he would be crushing them into the dust. Yeah, except there was a lot of sand, so that would just be great branding because you'd see the Harley everywhere. That's like the ultimate marketing device.

You, Tunka, Moon's enemy. Yeah, they have a lot of. But there were some socks that, I think those weren't found intact, were they? They were reconstructed from the evidence that they had. But the older socks found intact. No, no, no. Sorry, in his tomb, they found three that were completely intact. And then they found three that weren't, but they think that they must have been socks.

They were the other pairs. Yeah. So he actually had six pairs, but three didn't make the 3,000-year period of time since passed. They also found a bottle of perfume, speaking of the 3,000-year period of time, which still, when they took the lid off, it still smelled. I think it smelled like... Something rotten. Oh, no, it smelled like something like chamomile or vanilla or something.

After 3,000 years. He was also buried with his own baby clothes, which I think is quite sweet. Oh, really? Yeah, I wonder why. There was actually a few toys. Weirdly, it was a boomerang. Yeah. Well, they used them to hunt.

And they used lassoos as well. Did they? Yeah. Good, isn't it? Is he a true? Yes. It was the thing we did with America where we thought it was India.

It does sound like the outpack from... Yeah. Wow. And he was buried with 413 what were called Shapti figures and these were little slaves that he would take

into the next life because often people think that if you were the slave of a pharaoh and your pharaoh died then you'd have to kill yourself and be buried with him or be buried in life with him

which is even worse but that never happened it was actually little models of you that you would... Ah. He was also buried with James was telling me erection.

That was a confident. Yeah, he had a 90 degree erection. 90 degree. And he's the only known Pharaoh, as far as I know, who was buried that way. And no one really knows that. And James has studied the field extensively. There was a guy called George Glidden, who was going to unwrap a mummy in front of a lot of people. He was a bit of a charlatan, but he did have a mummy.

and he was going to unwrap them and he said it was a princess, a princess mummy and he claimed that he knew that he knew her identity, she was the daughter of an Egyptian priest, he knew that because he deciphered the hieroglyphics on her sarcophagus and then he unwrapped her and raptor and rapture in front of a load of people and then they realised actually

that it was a man and the princess had a rather large penis that's where we get the fairy dog from the princess and the penis and he was in Boston this and he explained that his error was due to the poor handwriting

of the Starconference A bad Egyptologist always blamed the hierarchy That's funny Have you heard of mummy pettigrew No Mummy Pettigrew was a guy called Thomas Pettigrew And he

He just unrolled loads of mummies All the time He was an Egyptologist And he unrolled 14 of them and you would do a six-part lecture series and you would always save the unrolling for the very last lecture in the series to build up to it throughout it

and I just found one sentence about it which I wanted to share which is that Petagrew's dramatic, erotically tinged unrollings became so popular that at one gathering the Archbishop of Canterbury himself got squeezed out of the room that is almost disturbed and then later on

he was asked to turn a victory duke into a mummy. The Duke of Hamilton was obsessed with mummies and he said, will you mummify me after I die? And he did. And he did it. But unfortunately he didn't fit in the sarcophagus he'd have built, so they had to take off his feet. Yeah.

When they were excavating Tutankhamun's clothes. No, actually this was later on when they decided to recreate all his clothes. Then the person who was recreating them decided to tell her students, but the only way they could work out exactly how he'd worn them was by trying them all on himself themselves. So the students of this Archaeologist got to just try and all two-and-combe-in-close and they worked out that something they thought was a headdress

was actually a pair of these things to be worn on the arms to form the wings of a falcon. That's what he went around with. But I don't know how you worked that out and it sounds a bit like they were just pissing him out and put a headdress on their arm and went, he probably did. He was a very strange shape. I think he had a two. Sorry, Duke and come in. They think he had a congenital disease or something. because his hit measurements were extremely loved. It was sort of out of proportion with the rest of his body.

And we don't know why. Well, much like Kate and Wills, it was inbreeding. Talking about the mere cats. Meerkats, Kate and Wills. Yeah, no, his parents were brother and sister at that. I really like the... So, when you were saying the thing of unwrapping the mummies, that was a massive craze that the Victorians went through,

where they suddenly were just digging up lots of mummies and using them for virtually everything. Railroads used to use them as fuel. No, that's not. I'm not sure. I promise that it's not true. Oh, is that they in America? Oh, okay. Mark Twain said that they did, and we think he was taking the Mickey.

Oh, okay. Yeah. He is a wonderful effect. Wait, so how about the time traveler guy who went to King Arthur's Court? That's not at all. Oh, man. I've got some terrible news about Bill and Ted's Bogus' journey. How about Mummy Brown? Is that true?

That's true. Mummy Brown is amazing. Mummy Brown was, if you haven't heard of it, is a, it was a paint that artists would use. artists would use. It was ground-up mummy that would lead to a brown, and they would use them on their paintings. And a lot of people didn't, they just thought it was a cute name, and then someone explained, no, it's an actual

mummy. And a lot of famous artists actually got quite disturbed by that and buried the rest of the paint, giving it an honorable burial. They just thought, well, there's a lot of stuff about curses going on back then, and they didn't want that. But yeah, you get paint. I can't believe that. It's extraordinary.

And they used it as like a panacea as well, that they would use this mummy, and then they would take it as a medicine for any illness. I think they used it, people in Thebes used it until the 20th century to heal bruises. Really? It's amazingly cavalier, considering. It's just a bruise.

Yeah, you don't need to heal a bruise. You could get imitation, mummy, as well, if you didn't have the real thing. And so you would pierce the ingredients. Take the carcass of a young man. Some say red-haired, not dying of a disease.

Let it lie for 24 hours in clean water, cut the flesh into pieces, and add mare a little aloe, and imbib for 24 hours in the spirit of wine and turpentine. It doesn't sound artificial to me. It sounds real. Yeah, it's real, but not old. Okay. I was looking at burial, interesting burial sites and burial rituals. So the Vikings, they were buried on ships, obviously, but not at sea.

And I read a really interesting theory, because they were often buried with decampetated animals. So the Osberg, Osberg Viking ship, which is one of the most famous Viking ships that's been on Earth. It was this woman, she was buried with ten decapitated horses, and I think a couple of decapitated dogs. And they think this is because they have the ships on land, but to get to the underworld, you have to sail. It was in order to create a river, a convenient river of blood from your decapitated horses on which you could sail to the underworld. Wow. Yeah. Grotesque. And also, so the first evidence of a ritual very varied. is from 28,000 years ago of like a burial where people were sort of buried with items

and it seemed like they believed in an afterlife. And it was two young boys and they were buried with mammoth tusks over two yards long, but they've been straightened and we don't know how they straightened them. So we think they boiled them and then straightened the mammoth tusks into, they were four feet long into straight tasks. I have to change my will as soon as I get. That's what I want. I'll tend to catatinated horses.

and straightened the mammothed dust. I read a thing that I want as well for death, which was that... I was reading about... It's weird when you read like someone's death, and you're like, oh, I want that. It sounded really cool. Utsi, who was the oldest ice man

that we found... He wasn't made of ice. He was... I don't know what period he was from, but he was complete, and they found everything on them. They found the bag, which had magic mushrooms in it. They found he had shoes.

He had socks. He had socks. But what's amazing is, is that they found him complete. and what they don't point out is that they have found other people who are complete, but UTSY is a rare case because he was just a whole... Sorry? Etzi.

Utsi. Not a Q&A. But thank you, though. Again, these are the kind of heckles. At jonglers, it's like, you're shit. Our crowds. Ertsi, dickhead. Did I say it right?

Utsi. So Ertsy. was found as a full body. But then I read about these other deaths where they found other people and basically because of the way that tectonics and just the way that things shift, they found full bodies

but people have been splatted and cartoonified. You know at the end of Roger Rabbit where he splats and he goes into long form? They found people that are like just fully like huge humans in a huge role... Like a book of crest flowers. Yeah. Like some of the crest human book. And that's how I want to go.

It just looked great. It looks like on me. We're gonna have to wrap up. We've got only a couple more minutes. Is there anything else you guys want to add? One third of the world's socks are made in a single city in China. The way. Yeah, way.

That's how old. But they get one third, they come in pairs. What is one third of six? Two. All right, we are going to have to wrap up. Thank you. Thank you so much, everyone. Those are all of our friends.

with any of us about the things that we said are pronunciations. You can get me on at Shriverland on Twitter, James. At Eggshaped. Andy. Andrew Hunter M. And Anna. You can email podcast atuI.com. Okay. So that's it.

We'll be back again next week with another episode from Soho Theater. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much, guys, for being here. We'll see you again next week. Have a good night. You guys and get very drunk. If you'd like to join us, that would be awesome. So, yeah, hang around for a beer.