No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Yeti Fact

Episode Date: September 13, 2014

Episode 26 - Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Andy (@andrewhunterm) and special guest Simon Rich discuss chimps with pets, Kama Sutra crosswords, slinkies on escalators and sagging yeti breasts.

We run it on QI a few years ago. Yeah. Which was, there's no such thing as a fish. You know, no such thing as a fish? No, seriously. It's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. He says it right there. First paragraph, No Such Thing is a Fish.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast, coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with three of the regular elves. It's James Harkin, Andy Murray, and on fact. Checking duties today. It's Anna Chazinsky, and we got a special guest joining us today. He's my favorite comedy writer. We're very excited. Simon Rich from New York here on a book tour. Hello. Thanks so much for having me. This is super fun.

Yeah, thanks for coming. So you're here. You're only here until tomorrow, unfortunately. Short trip, yeah. Yeah. But so Spoilt Brats, new book, a collection of short stories, one of which is being adapted into a movie by Seth Rogen. Your previous book, The Last Girlfriend, Nileth, being turned into a sitcom currently coming out next year. uh, you used to work for Pixar, Saturday Night Live, and you're under 30. How the fuck did you do this? Well, the books are really short, the books I write. They're almost more like pamphlets.

I mean, and also, uh, the font is really large. The margins are wide. Uh, sometimes it'll just, like in between chapters, there'll just be a few unnecessarily blank pages, just to kind of pad it out. So that's, that's the biggest trick. Um, cool. Okay. Well, let's, uh, let's kick into our show.

show. So we're going to go fact number one. We're going to start with you, Simon. Cool. So my fact is about Coco, the gorilla who knows sign language. And according to my research, over the course of her lifetime, she has owned and cared for three pet cats. Yeah. So, and how did she get these cats? It's a good question. Well, I know that she actually, because she speaks sign language, knows a thousand words in sign languages and apparently they asked her what would you like for Christmas and she said I would like a pet cat it's a good thing she doesn't know flame thrower or the word for freedom right or a thousand words isn't that many though is it is it not I know more than a thousand words

see I thought I know more than that in just numbers oh yeah oh good point but if you if you take the thousand words you use most often yeah they probably cover almost everything and then it's it's specific ones after that like hammock or thrombosis or whatever and so what Or, you know, whatever, maybe they're in your top thousand, I don't know. Yeah. It would be lovely to see the thousand words you use most often. Yes. It would be really cool.

I have that list in Russian, actually. What that you use? No, I got that, I was trying to learn Russian, and I still am, but not very well. And I thought one way to do it would be to get the thousand most popularly spoken words in Russian, and then try and learn them all. Well, that's how Dr. Seuss wrote Cat in the Hat. Oh, really? Yeah, he got a book. That was a list of, I think, the first 100 words that children learn how to read.

and he, almost as an exercise, decided, or as like a shamelessly cynical marketing poet, he decided, I'll write a book using just those words. He had very big fonts as well, didn't he? Absolutely. The biggest. Did he not do a thing where one of his books was a bet with his publisher that he could write a book with fewer than 50 words or something like that? It might be, that.

It might be can. Yeah. But he, a lot of his stories are, it's hard to tell if they're true. Like, he spread a lot of mythology about himself in his story. time, he said that he used to get all of his ideas from a small town where they made the cuckoo clock. He used to go there and they'd give him ideas. But he was also a mummy hunter, which is interesting. Yeah, he used to go with his wife and go mummy hunting. Was this, wait, is this late 19th century, early 20th?

Early 20th. Dr. Seas, he would have been later, right? Oh, later. Yeah, because I know he was a cartoonist during World War II. So he must have been before or after that. It's amazing that even then you could still go mummy hunting. Well, they used to, they used to dig up mummies and crush them up and sell them as medicine. jars. Where? Just, you know, around. Like Brooklyn?

Yeah, like that valleys. Oh, no, there's a book that says that the kings of England, lots of them were cannibals. Right. Because they consumed human flesh in the form of mummies, ground up mummies and things like that. Yeah. Yeah, they thought it had some sort of curative property. Wow. Yeah.

Anyway, back to Coco, the gorilla. So Coco asked for a pet cat. And also was quite deceit, Coco basically one day, this is a story I read about Coco, the gorilla. it. They came back to where Coco is, and a sink had been ripped out of the wall. This is my favorite Coco's story, too. Oh, we'll tell it then. Tell us. Right, yes. So a gigantic sink had been ripped out of the wall, and a 2,000-pound sink, and the scientist confronted her and said, you know, who ripped out this sink, signed,

who ripped out this sink? And after the long pause, Coco signed Janice. And Janice was one of the lab assistants, who was a 21-year-old 95-pound woman. And Coco tried to pin it on her, and the scientist signed to Coco. I don't believe that Janice ripped out to sink. I think gorilla ripped out to sink. And Coco had to sort of hang her head and admit what she'd done, and she signed Coco, ripped sink, bad gorilla, Coco. Because I read that she blamed the cat as well.

Oh, wow. She was always pinning things on other. Is that why she wanted the cat to just disguise her crime? Yes, exactly. A stooge. But that's actually, I read about another story about Coco, apparently. So she has a name for a human, which is nipple. And she, at least three former keepers have claimed that they were pressured into showing their breasts at the gorilla's request.

That's right. This Coco was kind of like an evil tyrant. It seemed like she got whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. and there were no checks and balances and she was constantly making a scientist disrobe Yeah, Coco knows what's going on Absolutely Maybe the cat she wanted was a white fluffy cat

Which she could stroke She dictated her to mind Yeah She's quite old now She's 30 or 40 years old How long can guerrillas live to? I think that's a reasonably advanced age I think maybe

Longer than that evidently But in captivity in the wild differs Yeah, they live longer in captivity I think The oldest known primate That's non-human I think was Cheetah out of the Tarzan movies. Oh, yeah.

Because it lived in captivity in Hollywood somewhere. Obviously, we don't know how old every single primate is, but this one in particular lived to about 70 or something. Really? Yeah, it was an artist. That's the Hollywood lifestyle there, isn't it? Yeah, Cheetah was an artist, right? It's same with Bubbles, Michael Jackson's monkey.

But Bubbles had a rough end. He ended up in a sanctuary far away from the glitz and glamour. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Michael never, apparently never visited. although I read this thing where they said that he always thought of Bubbles as his first child and added that he hoped the Jackson children

would keep in touch with their stepbrother after he's gone so he did love him but he got too aggressive he got too big apparently when chimpanzees get too big that's pretty strong can you imagine bubbles in that animal sanctuary

with the other chimps trying to explain what his childhood was like how would anyone believe it he'd have been the Michael Jackson of the chimpanzee That's right. That's right.

My grandmother used to own a chimpanzee in Cambodia. Really? Was it your half-brother? It was named after me, actually. Yeah, it was called me chumps. That's my nickname I had as a kid from them. It sounds like you were named after the chimpanzee. Yeah, yeah.

Well, they had a gibbon as well, and they kept in this cage in this restaurant. They had a restaurant in Cambodia where... It's not like a pick-your-on-gibbon thing, is it? No, no. No, they were just, they were their pets. Yeah. It was an amazing restaurant because they used to have a massive menu, but everyone kept ordering the goulash. the goulash. And they discovered

was that one of the chefs kept putting marijuana inside, which is legal there. So they got rid of the whole menu and it was just a goulash marijuana place. That's what my grandmother. But they had to give away the chimpanzee because she got sexually frustrated with the gibbon in the cage and ripped its arm off.

Very sad. Oh, wow. It's arm off. That's what's not a lot of will do for you. Wow. Well, they're freakishly strong and they've evolved. to go for vulnerable parts of another primate's body.

So they will rip off the genitals of male rivals and throw them. Will they? Yeah, hundreds of feet. Throw them. Yeah, oh yeah. Because then you're simultaneously killing your enemy, and also you're expunging his genetic influence on your child. Very much the John Wayne Bobbitts of the animal kingdom.

Exactly. And very efficient form of violence. God, imagine you're just walking through the forest as an explorer, and this gorilla cock smacks you in the face as you're walking. It's a rough day. Aren't gorilla testicles only about an eighth or a 16th the size of human ones? Certainly the penis is very small. But that's because they do all the establishing supremacy with their muscles, isn't it, with their body?

There's no need for sperm competition because they, you know, once you're a male gorilla and you get a harim, then you're away. You don't need to worry about competition from other males in that sense. And you don't need like a cool car. You can just kind of show up. Yeah, I think it's something like a male silverback gorilla's erect penis is a quarter of an inch in length or something like that. I think you might be right. So like a normal size penis, right guys? Like an average male penis.

Okay, should we wrap up on this one? Anna, we should go to you. Do you have anything you want to add? Yeah, a few things. So a long time ago, you guys were talking about the 1,000 most commonly used English words. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yep, so I've got a list of them here.

and I just, I thought I'd read them all out. The, A, and. You're right. The of and and. Yep. How much time have we got? I know the three, I know the three most common nouns are time, person and year. Yes.

Anyway, the first 25, shut up, James. Don't care, it's my role now. This is my moment. The first 25 words in the thousand most frequently used words make up a third of all printed material, just 25 words. Wow. The reason Coco knew what a cat was before she had her pet cat,

Her two favorite books were the three little kittens and put in boots. And so she looked at those pictures and knew the word for cat. I don't know the three little kittens. Neither do I. You should talk to Coco. Anyway, they first of all tried to give her a stuffed toy that looked like a cat to fop her off. And she was really pissed off and made it clear that she needed the real thing. So they got her the real thing.

And she named it all ball. Did we discuss that? No, we did. So she named her first kitten. Obviously she only has a thousand words in her vocabulary, which it turns out wasn't enough. for a good cat name. So she called it all bull. Because apparently, according to her owners,

she likes to rhyme in sign language. Time for fact number two, and that's my fact. My fact this week is, according to Yeti experts. Oh, God. Yeah. It is easier to escape a female Yeti

than a male Yeti because female yeties have such long dangling boobs that before they can chase you, they need to chuck them over their shoulders like a scarf. Otherwise, they may trip on them and bang their head.

James, you're looking skeptical. That's a fact. Yeah, it's a fact about something that doesn't exist. It's a fact about something that no one has ever seen, yes. But it's a fact that comes from Captain John Null. Captain John Null was the guy who first broke into Tibet under a guise, because he weren't allowed as a Westerner into Tibet. And he was the first person to see Mount Everest and think we need to climb that.

He came back to England and he pitched it at the Royal Geographical Society. And that's what led to the Mallory Expedition. And he was on the Mallory Expedition. He was the official photographer. Do you think they said, I'm not really sure that sounds like a good idea? And then he said, oh, no, there's giant monkeys with enormous breasts. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if he believed in the Yeti.

That might have been a, that was a bit of myth that he brought back with him. But it's a fact, it is a fact about something that people who believe in the Yeti believe. If you were talking to someone who believes in a Yeti right here in this room and you said, did you know this, I'd say, yeah, of course. It's a weird one, though, isn't it? Because it's a fact that that is believed amongst people who believe in it. Yeah. It's like a different world of facts. It's like a second subspecies of facts because it is a Yeti fact, but it's not a real world fact. I think it's a person fact. Yeah, it's a fact about what people believe. So do you know about the $10 million Bigfoot Bounty TV show?

No. Okay, it was on a very small American channel. I can't remember which one it is, like a satellite channel or a cable channel. And there was a number of teams, and they every week tried to find evidence of Bigfoot. And whoever found the least evidence each week would get kicked off until there was only two teams there. So how did they classify the least evidence? They had a team of experts who would explain that. And the final two, whoever got the most evidence, if they could find evidence of Bigfoot, then they would win $10 million.

Wow. Did the price go unclaimed? It went unclaimed. At that point, even I know Bigfoot is something of a recluse, but if I were him, I would go ahead and make a deal and say, I'll take five. You take five million. I'll pose for one picture. And, you know.

Hang on, the premise of this show is that if you find most or least evidence, you're either saved or kicked off. But if at the end of the show, the people who found most evidence had found no evidence and therefore the 10 million went unclaimed. Then all the other teams are like, they found even less than no evidence. Yeah. That's the premise. The 10 million was underwritten by Lloyds of London, probably as a joke. Oh, man, I'd love to see the look on their face if they found Bigfoot. Yeah.

Yeah, what a rough shareholders meeting that is. You know, just, we're in the red this quarter. I found Bigfoot. We're sorry. They did, quite recently, there was a study done of creatures claiming to be Bigfoot or the Sasquatch. And they took 57 samples of hair that people had sent into them saying, this is Bigfoot or this is a Sasquatch. One of them was a piece of fiberglass, so that didn't get used.

But they managed to get down to about 30 where they didn't know what it was immediately. And of that 30, they turned out to be cows, horses, raccoons, or sometimes bears. But they think that they might have got two samples from previously unrecognized bear species or hybrids. So they might have discovered new species. Wow. By doing that. There's plenty more to find out there. We live under this weird assumption that we've discovered everything.

Right. And in the ocean, we've barely cracked the surface, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The ocean is, I think we've done something like 6% tops. We've definitely mapped Mars better than the ocean. The thing that I liked most about this Yeti fact, other than it's Yetis, and I love Yetis, is that I just love its advice. It's advice to escape. It's escape advice, and I love escape advice, because I think it's the best kind of weird, handy advice that you probably will never need to use, but it will always stick with you. If you know this fact now about female Yetis, this will not leave you for the rest of your life. I found this thing of, like, the best way to, in Chinese mythology, to escape a vampire, is to make sure you have bags of rice on the ground because they count.

They're obsessive counters, apparently, vampires. Yeah, so they have that. Do you spill rice? You spill rice. As they're chasing you, they have a dilemma where they're like, ah! And then they count the rice. They have that in Eastern European vampire culture as well. Like, you put sand on the doorstep, and they won't come into your house because they'll just stand their counter.

So what we're saying is that all vampires have obsessive-compulsive disorder. Yeah, like that one off Sesame Street, who goes, Vaughn. Is that where it came from, the Count in Sesame Street? No, I think that was just a pun on the word count, probably. Oh, yeah. If you wanted to escape being an Aztec prisoner, Andy, I know you know this fact, you like it. If you were a slave, sorry, in Aztec times, the way to escape was to run away from your master in the middle of the market and step in some human excrement. And if you did that, you were no longer a slave.

Really? Yeah. That's quite a loophole. It implies either that there was a lot of human excrebit around or that it was very rare. No, there was actually. There was quite a lot because their sewers went alongside the town walls kind of things. But the other thing was, if someone tried to stop you from being a slave and someone noticed that, then... Sorry, if you stopped someone trying to escape, then you became a slave.

So no one ever stopped them. Once they started running away, everyone went, nope, nothing's doing me. I think that gives people a fair chance. I respect that. Really great story that I like about sort of a moment. of needing to escape. The guy who set up, MI6, Mansfield Coming. Oh, yeah.

He's great because you assume that he would be the ultimate spy. It was this great story where during World War I, he went into Germany disguised as a German soldier, infiltrating a German camp, but got busted immediately because it turned out he didn't know any German. Immediately at the gate. He could have at least learned. He was like, yeah.

If he'd learned 25 words, he would have been fired. He would have been fired. Yeah. He used to do his thing, he had a wooden leg, but no one really knew at the time that he had a wooden leg. But in meetings, if he got bored with what anyone was saying, and no one knew he had this leg, he used to take a massive knife that he had on the desk and just stab himself in the leg. And everyone would go, whoa! And then he'd just take over. That's what's a great news.

That's what I do with my wooden genitals. You rip them off and throw them 100 yards. You should see people's faces. We should probably wrap up on this one as well. Anna, have you got anything to add? Just a couple of small things. So on Yetis, you were saying that it's, if you're being chased by a female Yeti, you're in luck because they've got these big breasts, they're getting in their way. But apparently, according to Yeti experts, you're also likely to be able to escape a male if you run downhill because it's got long hair that blows in its eyes when running, so it can't see well.

Oh, I have that. And, oh, just the ocean floor, estimates are that we've only discovered 10% of what there is to be discovered in the ocean. although if you're talking about mapped seafloor that's in the public domain, we've only discovered 2 to 3%. But apparently so much of the information about the ocean is completely classified and shrouded in secrecy according to National Geographic. The 7% of what we've discovered about the ocean, no one's allowed to know because it's so highly secret. What, it's genuinely classified?

Yeah, so military classified information. Right, because I guess they have the gadgets that go under there, so that's proprietary information, right? Yeah. Well, so they wouldn't want it, so they don't want to share? That technology. Right, probably, right? It must come down to that.

Yeah. Because nobody's claimed it. Nobody's claimed that chunk of the earth. They have drones, lots of drones, ocean drones now, which is so cool. They have whole generations of little robots. And their only job is to measure or assess one thing. And you just set them off and they can go all over the world. They're always beaming information back.

Yeah. Like Google spiders. Yeah, in a way, yeah. Wow. It sounds amazing. Sounds made up. Yeah. Okay, on to fact number three, James.

Okay, my fact this week is The Karma Sutra suggests 64 arts to practice alongside sex. They include solving word puzzles and teaching birds how to talk. Yeah, that's weird. I just assumed it was just all sex party. No, not that much sex in there at all, really. In that case, I am a lot sexier than I realize. I'm getting pretty good at the Telegraph Criptic Crossword.

That's amazing. Yeah, 64 of them. some of the others, tattooing, the art of making beds, playing on musical glasses filled with water, knowledge of mines and quarries, and the art of cockfighting. Or are these dating ideas before you get to the actual portion of the book about sex? No, it's... Why not visit a mine or quarry? Why not play musical glasses filled with water?

Yeah. But so what was the book then? What is it? Okay, the book is, it was written in the third century by a celibate monk. And he was bringing together all of the different writings from beforehand that were about sex or about the art of mating in humans. So where does teaching a bird to speak? These are things that if you do those, it will improve your general life and also your sex life. Oh. Sort of like a holistic approach.

Yeah. Yeah. There are nine pages on how to look after your wife and 26 pages detailing how to seduce other men's wives. It's harder, to be fair. It's harder. It's harder. Well, here's one way to seduce other men's wives from that. It's called pocket, no pocket.

First take the heart of a mongoose, then the fruits of a fenugreek plant and gourd and some snake eyes. Mix them all together, cook them over the fire, and then put them in your eyes, and it'll make you invisible. And then you can go and find another man's wife. What? That's in the conversation. What? We mistranslated invisible for blind. Yeah.

Times were great back then. If a recipe at the beginning of a thing says take the heart of a mongoose. Yeah, it's a room. Yeah, just the very first ingredient. That's like the equivalent of like preheat the oven at 350 degrees. It's just the most basic construction. Yeah. There's a papyrus, an Egyptian papyrus, which has a load of things that when it says snake's blood,

what it's supposed to be is some kind of fruit juice or something. And when it says crocodile excrement, it's supposed to be some clay, a special kind of clay from Ethiopia. So they use these words even though they didn't really mean that. Oh, it's all coded, yes. James has a theory that because in a lot of contracept, they say that the ancient Egyptians use crocodile dung as a contraceptive. Yeah. And I think it was just actually a piece of clay from Abyssinia or from Ethiopia and they used to make it into, what do you call these, a peseree, and stuff people from being able to impregnate you that way. But you get it in all the lists of facts, it's like they use crocodile dung for contraception.

It seems pretty unlikely. Yeah, all euphemisms. Yeah. It's always eye of newt, right? Yeah, exactly. Poor newts, you know? Can you imagine them trying to piece that together? What is going on?

Where do they want from us? Why are they wants us? So that would be amazing. Someone in that period taking it literally and going and actually getting the heart of a mongoose. What did you do to our fucking mongoose? That means pencil. Get a pencil.

Everyone knows it. That would be very embarrassing to serve that, you know, which is potion up and filled with all the literal ingredients. It would explain a lot of fancy cookbooks today as well if Heston Blumenthal is actually using a series of elaborate metaphors and he just wants us to make spaghetti bolognese. That's true. But he's saying take liquid nitrogen. No, I mean, I mean ice. Yeah, so what else is there in the Karmusitra? So the Karmusitra was discovered by Richard Burton, who did the first British English translation.

Yeah. We should say not Richard Burton, the actor. Richard Burton, the Victorian Explorer. That's right. Yeah, not that Richard Burton. Who is the most extraordinary character? Yeah. Seemingly fictional when you read his life story

because of the amount of things that he did. Spoke like 30 languages. There's probably too many that I've made up there. Yeah, he did speak a lot of languages, but I'm not sure how well he spoke them all because he translated the Kama Sutra from Sanskrit. And whenever he was supposed to translate the word dildo, he put statue instead,

which kind of changes the means. meaning of some of the things in there. Yeah. He also, when, instead of writing about penises and vaginas, because he was writing for Victorian audience, he would call the penis Lingam, which was Sanskrit for Wond of Light. And he was called the Vigina Yoni, which was Sanskrit for Sacred Temple. Wow. So it's placed your wand of light into the Sacred Temple.

So it must read like a Harry Potter book when you read his version of the Kama Sutra. Do we have more sort of ancient love guides outside of the Kama Sutra? I've never really heard of it. It's an Egyptian one. Is there? Yeah, I kind of remember what's called? Oh, there's one called the Turin erotic papyrus. What's that?

Genuinely, there's the Turin Shroud, and then from about 2,000 years before that is the Turin erotic papyrus. And it's a series of blue drawings, basically. Yeah. I don't think it's meant quite as a love guide. I think it's more to titillate and things like that. Okay. There was that great, I can't remember his name, Annie. you might be able to find it.

But in the Natural History Museum, they have effectively what is an erotica book. It was during a Shackleton trip where the guy who was studying penguins witnessed the insane love life of penguins, and he found it so dirty that all of the bits where he had to describe the actual sexual acts he put into, what was it,

so that you had to be a real scholar to actually read. And then I think it was in a code. I think it was a code on top of ancient Greek. Yeah. So they crack the code. Wow. And then even after you've cracked the code, It's still in ancient Greek.

It's still in ancient Greek. If I saw something coded in ancient Greek, I would, man, I would assume the worst and translate that. I'd jump right into that. Yeah, exactly. Podography was a lot harder to access in the old days, wasn't it? You had to crack the code, then translate it from Greek, and then it's about Penguin. And so the Kama Suture again, they have a section on oral sex. Well, it starts off saying oral sex is very, very terrible, and you shouldn't be doing that kind of thing.

And then they have quite a few pages on how to do it. Like how this is what you definitely shouldn't do. Whatever you do, don't do this. And then don't do it this way and don't do it this way. It's a bit like during Prohibition when they used to like sell winemaking kits. And it would be grapes and whatever. And it says, whatever you do, don't put this alcohol in these grapes and don't bash them down or whatever. For a long time, theater in New York City, it was against the law unless it had some kind of higher moral purpose.

Oh, yeah. And so pretty much every show. during the sort of P.T. Barnum days was a show like a sexy melodrama, and then at the end, a stern matronly woman would come out for 30 seconds after two hours of this and say, like, don't do what you've just seen. And that would kind of be it. That's great. And they were referred to as moral lectures.

Wow. People would start to file out, you know, as the woman came on. Yeah, I'd rather have that at the beginning, I think. Would you? Yeah. Does that not spoil the rest of the movie then? No, because then you forget about it once the sexy melodrama starts. Well, during the, before, there's a few decades where film was really closely regulated by the United States government.

And one of the things was you can never portray a criminal in a positive light. And you can never show them getting away with their crime. They always had to be punished. And so there's a lot of films where basically they get the girl, they get the money, they get the fame and the glory, and then they're just inexplicably gunned down. As they're by a stern matronly lady. And the same woman. And she points at the camera and nods.

And she draws her finger across her throat with gestures down there. But it's all these hilarious, like, tacked-on endings. Right. You were just mentioning Petey Barnum before. My favorite Petit Barnum thing is that. that when people used to go to his circuses, you would pay your money, pay $2, go in. And then there would be a big sign saying,

this way to the egress, and everyone would go down there, not really realizing that egress means exit, and they'd go straight out, and they'd have to pay to go back in again. And they probably wouldn't ask for their money back because they were too humiliated to admit that they didn't know the more egress.

Oh, that's great. Well, he... He was brilliant. Oh, he was, yeah. He invented the skylight, I believe. I think he's the first person to... Yeah, the American... American Museum in Manhattan, that should probably be fact-checked. But yeah, the first person

to burn electric lights at night for no pragmatic reason, other than self-promotion. So the original New York City skyline was just the word Barnum. That's fantastic. And I got shapeless void. But the museum burned down, didn't it? Oh, yeah. Yeah, burned down big time. I wonder if yeah. And then later on, he had spent a long time building an optimal palace for his house, and that burned down, I think the day after completion. Yeah, he built a kind of a, uh, sort of like a Zanidu type place, like a gigantic mansion, and it burned down almost immediately. And then weirdly, this is all in Connecticut

where he sort of retired after his long career. And I think Bridgeport, Connecticut, he, I think, became mayor of the town. So he had his whole, like, small town political career towards the end of the time. It used to be a problem where things burned down, didn't it? Like, there was a lot of that.

Yeah, it still is in many ways, you know. We just haven't solved that problem of the building burning down yet. But in theatres it used to be, because they used to light things up with, like, fire all the time. And there was a few that burnt down in Covent Garden quite a while ago, and then they had to put the prices up, and people protested against the prices going up because they had to pay for this damage. And they protest. They rioted?

They rioted for days and days and days, and they were known as their op riots, because people wanted the old prices, and so OP is old price, and people would just stand there. while they were trying to do the play and just go up, up, up, up for like hours on end. Tough crowd. I know. That's a rough night. I always think the worst would be the actors on stage during the Lincoln assassination.

Just like, man, how do you get the audience back after that? Okay, Anna, have you got anything to add? Yep, a couple of things to clarify. So the guy you were talking about who wrote the sexual habits of Adelie Penguins was Dr George Levick, who was the surgeon and medical officer for the British Antarctic expedition, led by Scott, 1910. Yeah, it was suppressed for almost 100 years, 97 years, and was only made public in 2012 because it was considered too crude for society to handle. I think, did we mention that on QI, that The Penguin Think?

I think it might have been on the show, in which case he kept its secret for more than 100 years until 2012, and then the next year we put it on national television. Yeah. Sorry, Victorians. Any stupid sensibilities? In a way, if he'd only published it then, we'd all have forgotten about it by now. Yeah, exactly. Things in the Kama Sutra. So something that Burton, you're right, he did mistranslate a lot of the Kama Sutra.

He downplays women's position. So in the Kama Sutra, women, there's a lot of equality in there, a lot of gender equality, which obviously he didn't approve of being a Victorian man. And so, for instance, there's a bit in the text that advises that the wife of an unfaithful man should scold him with sharp language. and Burton just inserts the word never into that. The wife of him and big man should never scold her husband. That's a clean fix.

So it's just a minor change. It's an editing decision. Okay, time for the final fact of the show. Andy. Hello, my fact this week is that there are more than 15 trillion tons of water above the earth now at any given moment. Isn't that amazing? That's a lot. Yeah.

Is it a lot? 15 trillion tons, I guess it is. I think so. It's hard to imagine such a big number. I know what do you mean. It's a small proportion, a very small proportion of the total amount of water on the planet, obviously. But nonetheless, it is a vast amount. It's too big to compute, really.

But this is the really cool thing about clouds. So the average cloud weighs about 400 tons, it turns out, the average cumulus cloud. So individually, all the drop, because why don't they just fall? Well, they are. They're always falling, but the air inside the cloud is moving upwards faster than they're falling. So it's like a slinky on an escalator. If you can imagine that. Yeah, okay.

And the water droplets are so tiny. They're 0.01 millimeters in diameter. A billion of them would be the same size as a sugar cube. And they're very fast-paced out. When you say a slinky on an escalator, do you mean an escalator going up? Yeah, I do. I've never had that image in my head ever. It's always stares with a slinky just going down.

But presumably the slinky can stay. Yeah, that's what... Wow. Yeah. That's a strong image. I've never had that in my... A perpetual motion machine. Yeah.

We cracked it. Hey guys, we cracked it. There we go. If only we can think of a way of the escalator going up without any input of energy. Oh, I forgot about that. Oh, cynical, cynical. I still say we patent it. The size of the tiny aerosol droplets in a cloud is one micron in width, which is the same width as a human sperm.

Wow. Okay. A normal male penis is just slightly bigger than that. Right? But the sperm is the smallest cell in the body, isn't it? Or just about the smallest cell? It's very close to it. Everyone says it is, but I don't think it is really.

But it's down there. Yeah, it's pretty small, but like blood platelets are pretty small. Yeah. I think it's not the small. It's generally said to be the smallest. But the female leg is definitely the last. Definitely the biggest. Okay.

Yeah. By the biggest egg in old nature will be like a bird's egg, probably like an ostrich egg. Probably like an ostrich egg. Yeah. Those things are big. Yeah. Well, it used to be the elephant bird egg. Remember the one that David Attenborough found the egg of it.

It looks like a giant ostrich, and it's the largest an egg can be. All right. Before it gets too thick that the thing inside can't crack out of it, or that it just couldn't form to begin. But the ovum. The ovum, sorry, I meant the ovum, not the egg. Like a chicken's egg. Because that's vast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just thinking about that egg, the giant bird egg. Do we still have the elephant bird? No, no, it's extinct, but we do have the egg. It's kind of like when you go to Mongolia and you find dinosaur eggs. They just found a new dinosaur. Did you guys see that? Yeah, gigantic one.

Yeah, the biggest I've ever found. They say it's 12 times as big as a T-Rex. What? Yeah. I read that in the Guardian this morning. Yeah, 12 times. It is scary when you see the photos of these giant, like, thigh bones, which are twice the size of a person. But did you know that most of these dinosaurs had feathers?

This is the new theory, right? They looked like, uh, people, yeah, people say they basically looked like giant chickens. It makes them a little less intimidating. Jurassic Park needs a whole. Sure, sure, yeah. Someone will do it. Someone will do it at some point. For the 20th year anniversary, they'll come up with all feathers on every dinosaur.

Velociraptors, I think. And velociraptors were tiny, weren't they? They were the size of, I think, large chickens or small dogs. Mm-hmm. Somewhere in between those two. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Cloud juice.

Do you know what that is? Cloud juice. Cloud juice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, rain. Well, yeah, it is pretty much. You and your fancy words.

This is a Bolton thing. No, it's not very much not. It's bottled water that you can get in Claridge's, and they sell it in a menu like wine, and it's collected on a plastic roof on a tiny wind-swept island off the Australian coast, and it's the most expensive bottle water ever to arrive in the UK. Wow. How is it sold as being better than normal bottled water? Because the trade winds come off the ocean,

and it's supposed to be much purer because there isn't any pollution on the rain. It's weird, isn't it? Because it's just H2O. There are ways of purifying water. You just need to boil it and condense it, and then you've got no impurities at all. Yet, we have this idealized water in our heads. Yeah.

I want some so badly. Don't you guys want to taste that? I bet it's great. Let's all got a cloud. Let's get sushi on the way. Get them to sponsor this thing. Yeah. We'll be swimming in cloud juice.

juice. It sounds hot. It doesn't sound nice though. It's not a nice name. Yeah, why do they call it? Cloud Water. Lovely. Cloud juice. Yeah. It's a bit claggy. Sky muck. But there's also, you could get beer where the water comes from glaciers and that's supposed to be like better and purer. Oh, like ice vine as well, which is wine where the grapes are frozen and so all the sugar is pushed into the remaining bit of the grape, which isn't frozen. And then you crush that grape. So it makes a much sweeter wine. Yeah. Okay, have you heard of cloud nine? Yes. Yeah, of course.

Yeah, yeah. Well, this is really cool. Cloud nine is not the highest, most elegant, floaty cloud there is. Cloud nine is actually at the very bottom of the height scale in the International Cloud Atlas. It's like high fog, essentially. Oh, absolutely. It's cool. It's cumulus.

So cumulus are the fluffy ones, nimbus are rainy, and that's Cloud 9, yeah, yeah. If you want really high, elegant clouds, you want Cloud Zero, which is Cirrus. And that's the stuff which is just ice crystals in the sky. millions of ice crystals floating together. Yeah. Did they like change the numbers or something? Is that why we say cloud nine is... No, they were all...

So the famous system was invented by a scientist called Luke Howard, which is all the latter names, cumulus, nimbus, stratus. Sirius is lovely. It means a curl of hair. It's really... Because it does... It looks beautiful like that. But he came up with the system

and the poet Gertha was so impressed with this incredible classification job that he dedicated four whole poems to him. and he praised him for bestowing form on the formless and a system of ordered change on a boundless world. You know, back in the day when there weren't names for different types of clouds. But this is really cool. The year before Luke Howard came up with his, that was 1802. It was another French scientist called Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. He came up with the system. And he came up with his when he was ill in bed, looking at the clouds floating past his window.

And they had envual, which reads hazy, atrupe, mast, pomley, which means dappled, and groupe, which means grouped. Was that the same Lamarcu came up with evolution at the same time as Darwin? Sounds like it is. Yeah. And so he was off on a couple of things. Yeah. But unfortunately no one paid any attention to his system. And the next year, along comes fancy boy with his Latin and the way you go.

But they believed him about, you know, giraffes stretching their necks out until they were along. Yeah. People bought that for a while, right? Yeah, yeah. There's still some people. Oh, yeah. Like, there's still some people who think that Lamarckism will come back one day. What?

There was some studies, like, in the last few years that mice can pass. their memories onto their grandchildren. And if that was true, if that turns out to be true, that would be Lamarckism. Why is that Lamarckism? Right. Right. Yeah, it's such a mad idea. It's saying you can pass on learned traits.

Like, it was fear, wasn't it? They associated a particular smell with fear, and two generations on, the mice which had had no contact with their grandparents exhibited the same fear. Okay. Which is, if true, unbelievable. So it's not, but it's not like us getting, you know, you and me suddenly talking about the war. No, no, no, but the fear had altered their genes.

Just like that. Those memories came down. No, but the fear had altered their genes. So they were afraid of the smell of, I think it was lavender. My favorite experiment, a lab experiment is they hooked a mouse's, like, they hooked his pleasure sensors in his brain with an electrode to a button, which he could press in order to send a jolt of endorphins into his system. and he kept, you know, predictably he kept pressing the button, and he pressed it so incessantly that he forgot to eat and he forgot to drink. And his limbs eventually atrophied to the point where he had to just press it with his face.

Oh my God. And then he died ultimately of starvation. And no one stepped in? No, they just let him go with it. Oh, my God. It just sounds like one of the saw movies or something. And then I read another one about, they took a bunch of mice and they, uh, played them classical music and they took a bunch of other mice and they played them rock and roll and they mixed them together and the rock mice ate the classical mice

um okay should we should we wrap up on this Anna have you got have you anything you want to add so the largest dinosaur ever found has been discovered it weighed as much they estimate as 14 African elephants it's seven tons heavier than the previous record holder it's found in argentina so it's pretty impressive and it's about 20 meters tall, which reminded me of a thing I read, and I think it was a new scientist blog, if anyone saw the first episode of this series of Doctor Who, where the T-Rex was the same height as Big Ben.

Oh, yeah. The largest known specimen of a T-Rex that we have is four meters, and Big Ben is 96. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thanks everyone for listening. If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things we've been talking about on this podcast.

You can reach most of us on Twitter. I can be gone on at Shriverland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At Egg-shaped. Simon, you're not on Twitter, are you? No, no dice. Sorry.

Oh, my God. How? Why? You know, I just... Too cool. Yeah, it's just... It's just my level of coolness. Right. It's too high.

I just know it would consume my entire life if I was on social media, so I'd just steer clear of all of it. Fair enough. Okay, but if you can't get... him online but you can get him in bookshops that's a good late yeah so spoiled brats is out now but also all of his books uh last girlfriend on earth elliott alagash what in god's name yep um and then there's two in america if you're listening in america there is uh free-range chickens and ant farm good memory that's amazing uh they're all amazing there's no notes in front of them he's just

doing this yes i remember that i really appreciate i've read i've read all the books i'm a a massive fan. I think he's the best comedy writer out there at the moment. So get Simon's books. You can find us all on Twitter. Anna, you're not on Twitter still. Yeah, I like the fact we discuss this a lot and no one's ever suggested that I'm too cool to be on Twitter over the 20 episodes we've had. Not cool enough, mate. Not cool enough. Yeah, double standards. Okay, that's it for this week. We're going to be back again next week with another episode, no such thing as a fish. Go to our website and you can find all previous episodes and we'll be back again in seven days.

See you then. Bye. Thank you.