No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As An Apostle Called Scrotum

Episode Date: February 7, 2015

Episode 46 - Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Andy (@andrewhunterm) and Anna (#getannaontwitter) discuss bad Harry Potter translations, how to spot a Lama and ancient practical jokes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast, coming to you from the QI offices in Covern Garden. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with Andy Murray, Anna Chisinski, and James Harkin. Once again, we've gathered around the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, Andy Hunter Murray. My fact is that there have been three top 50 songs in the British charts, which have been sung exclusively. exclusively in Latin. Wow. I bet you all three of them,

don't know? Just a mix tape of three Latin songs. Yeah, one of them actually made it into the Alan Partridge movie last year. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which was Gaudetti by Steel Ice Band, which is a religious. Unfortunately, they're all a bit religious rather than an Abba song, which they just happen to fancy doing in Latin. I didn't know we got religious songs in our chart,

in our top 40s. Yeah. They're just choirs. Constantly. Anyway, the other ones, one was from Evita in 1976, which is choral in Latin, another was a recording of P.A. Yezu from Andrew Lloyd Weber's Requiem. That's fantastic song. So two of these are, and is the other one from Evita, you said?

Yes. So two of them are Andrew Lloyd Weber songs. Two of the three Latin songs are Andrew Lloyd Weber, right? Ibita Bing and Androo O'Dreiber. Yeah. So there you go. Well done. Well done, Drew.

So yeah, it's just interesting. The things that get into the pop charts over the years. Yeah. And it was, it's easier now to get things in the pop charts because you can just, everyone can download something at the same time and then it can get in the charts. Whereas in the olden days you actually had to release a record or a CD or something for it to get in the charts. Because these days you could get a very popular person on the radio saying everyone download a Latin song and it would just get. Yeah, you're right. It doesn't need to be, um, the Taylor Swift album that came out last year, they accidentally on the iTunes downloads included a track just of white noise. And because, it just went viral. Everyone bought it and it went to the top of the charts in Canada. Every other music in Canada must have been so angry. Alainis Morissette going, this is ironic. So you know that the Mel Gibson film, The Passion, was in a mix of Aramaic and Latin.

Yeah. It turns out that the Latin that they used in the Passion of the Christ is church Latin and not classical Latin, which means the entire thing is an anachronism. That's funny. I'm really, really pleased by that. Do they pronounce their V's as doubles? I don't know. I don't know how much we do know about the pronunciation of...

I think the general consensus is that classical Latin, it was pronounced as a W, and then church Latin, it's a V. And if they screwed that up, they fell at the first hurdle. Yeah. Some chat trivia. Yep. Which day of the week has had the most songs written about it? So it's in the title. Oh, okay.

What do you reckon? Monday. Yeah, Monday. That's the obvious. I'm going to go with Friday. Oh, well, you're all wrong. It's Sunday, 30 songs with the word Sunday. So, 30 songs with Sunday and 23 with Saturday, 11 with Friday, which is a third,

and only one song, this is in the Billboard charts, has ever been written with the word Thursday in the title. You won! Yeah, sweet Thursday by Johnny Mathis in 1962. Okay, this is my favorite fact about the charts. Go on. It is that Paul McCartney has, had 200 songs in the charts. So either Beatle songs, wing songs, solo songs, songs are these

written for other people. If you take the amount of time and accumulate all the time that those 200 songs have spent in the charts, they add up to 32 years. Right. That's amazing. He's had, he's had songs in the charts that are for a longer period than I've been alive by two years. That's pretty good. That's insane. Yeah. And do you know who I found out that fact from? Who? President Obama. Wow. Yeah.

Well, is President Obama just tweeting factoid? Yeah, he runs OMG. They've just signed him up now. Yeah, yeah. Good for him. No, he, Paul McCartney won the Gershwin Prize at the White House where they do it. And he gave a speech and he said, here's an interesting fact about Paul and then told that. I see.

Do you think that was original research from Fio? His own research. I have a thing about Lassin, which I wanted to tell you, because I really, really like it. When Pope Benedict the 16th resigned, one of the journalists who broke the story only got it because she could understand the Latin in which he made the announcement. And as a result, she got the scoop before anybody else.

Her name was Giovanna Chiri. Oh, she must have been very cheery about that. It was a weird one, wasn't it? Because he was just doing a general talk to about six or seven journalists, and they were just talking about basic stuff. They all understood what he was saying as being translated. then he spoke that bit in Latin, that particular bit.

She was the only one who got it. And she kind of pre-announced it without confirmation. She was lucky she was right. Yeah. She was a bit like, I'm not sure if he did. I'm pretty sure he did just say that. Did that word mean resign or olive? Yeah.

I just wanted an olive, guys. But it's an interesting thing. Because Latin in the Vatican obviously is still a big thing. They're constantly updating because of all the new words that we have. That's so good. Have we spoken about that particular? thing. Like words like dishwasher are now in the new Latin dictionary and so are. World Wide Web there is. Are they quite behind if they've only just updated it with dishwashers? I mean, about iPhone.

And Rush Hour, which I don't know when that movie made it to the Vatican, but that's only just got it in this one that's been released. Speaking of Pope Benedict, have we spoken about the fact that he released a top, he released a Christmas album, didn't he? A Christmas music album. No. So in 2009, before we resigned, he released a Christmas music album. It was prayers set to classical music and it was with Snoop Dog's record label. Wow. Yeah, Geffen Records. Snoop Dog collaborates

with a lot of people like that. He did a, he did a song with Buzz Aldrin. A lot of people like the Pope. So, the Dalai Lava. No, um, Buzz Aldrin. Just like people who are not in music is what I meant. Yeah, old people who... He wanted to be on Coronation Street,

didn't he? The Pope. Snoop. Did he? There was some news a lot. ago that he was going to be on Coronation Street, but I don't think he ever did. I think we would have heard. Yeah. I was reading that J.K. Rowlings, obviously, the Philosopher's Stone, was released in Latin. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And so it's Harrius Potter is what the book was called, and it was the Philosopher's Stone one. They also translated it into ancient Greek. And apparently, it's the longest ancient Greek text to have been produced since 3 AD. Wow. Oh, yeah. That's amazing. That's what I read. Wow. That's fantastic. And also, this is interesting. The Book, The Order of the Phoenix, when that came out, so just going from the idea that we had three Latin songs in a British chart, in France, when the book came out, they did this thing where they didn't pre-give the book to different countries to translate it. They basically had to wait for the English book to be released, and then they started translating the Harry Potter book. So it was a big rush to sort of which country could get them quicker for the demand. In France, they couldn't wait for the book to be translated. So Order of the Phoenix is the only non-English, sorry, non-French book to hit number one in the French bestsellers list in France as a book. That's great. Just on the Order of the Phoenix one as well, there was this thing in Venezuela where they knew the release date was going to be about six months after or five months after the release of War of the Phoenix.

They couldn't be bothered waiting. And some guy just translated it on his own and released it and people bought it. But it, by all accounts, was the worst translation because it's packed with sentences. this is a genuine sentence from it. Here comes something that I am unable to translate. Sorry. And then later on, after another sentence, there's a bracket that said, I'm sorry, I don't understand what that means. It's just totally littered with the translator.

It makes it sound actually a bit more terrifying. If you're describing something, it's like this thing is so awesome. I can't even put it into words. It's like another version of Voldemort. He cannot be named. But literally I can't name it. Sorry, guys. Do you guys know that only New York Times bestseller to be written in Latin, bestselling book to be written in Latin?

Oh, no. Can you give us a clue? Is it Winnie the Pooh? It's, well, yes, it is. Because there was a version of Winnie the Pooh in Latin, wasn't there? It's Winnie Ileapoo. Yeah. Winnie Alley Pooh.

It was on the bestseller list for 20 weeks. That's pretty good. Yeah. It's a very, I imagine, there's not much vocabulary in it, so it's probably quite good for teaching children who are learning Latin. Yeah. Although the Grinch. So the Dr. Zeus, three Dr. Zeus books have also been translated into Latin, which I would have thought... Wait, Dr. Zeus or Dr. Seuss?

Because that would be for Greek, if anything, surely. I don't think Zeus was a doctor. I think he had bigger fish to fry. It's a pronounced Dr. Seiss as well. Dr. Seuss. But if I said Dr. Soiss, people would call me a dickhead, isn't they? Dr. Seuss, then. Dr. Seuss, I always say. I say Dr. Seuss, yeah. Anyway, how the Grinch stole Christmas and two other.

others have been in fact okay I'll tell you the two others and see if you know what they are I assume some of you will catus petersatus the cat in the hats corrects and weerent oha exclamation mark we're at perna oh green eggs green ham nice green eggs and ham yeah very good studied it till the age of 18 still didn't get the cat in the hat one yeah hatos is a tough one yeah It really is. Atos really through me as well. The Latin Wikipedia has 94,000 articles, which is amazing when you think about it. Yeah, I mean, that's much more than many other languages.

In fact, I wonder where that features in Wikipedia language. Yeah. And you can get Facebook in Latin as well. Instead of the like button, there's a mehi placket button. It is pleasing to me. It pleases me. That's very good. Do you know the other languages that Latin,

almost, you know, the Latin tribe was vying with before they became the Romans, you know, when they were just a tiny tribe in southern Italy. They were really cool names that Volskian, Oskan and Phaliskan. These were just other languages doing the rounds in the area. Valiscan sounds like it comes from Phallus, doesn't it? Yeah, it sounds like penis language. Okay, well, I'm sure they got a lot of that at school. They don't need any more of it from you guys, especially it's given that they lost to the Romans.

Embarrassing. Germany, I think, is the only country to have had a number one song in Elvish. Wow. It's a Lord of the Rings track. Yeah, it was the Enya track. Director, producer, promoter, whatever this is called in the business, decided that her musical ideas were too complex and interesting to get across in any language that existed. So they wrote a new language for her in which some of her other songs are sung. Ah.

Which is called Amarantine. That's Enya's language. Got her own language. Hey, you know how we were talking about dishwashers earlier? The Latin for dishwasher, and obviously we all know I'm terrible with words, but it's something like Escar aiorium as the first word. Something like that, it's not correct. Lavatory.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Lavatory is a... That's because larvae is to wash. It's to wash, yeah. A lavatory was, I think, an ecclesiastical room for washing in a church or in a monastery or that kind of thing. A lavatory was a room where you go and have a wash. Who do you think was the first person who took a poo in there

and transformed it from, Father Dave, what have you done? It was time the room branched out. Do you think that's what happened with all the words? Someone just... Like, Dave, Father Dave, this used to be a place where we just had a bath. Now the defecatorium's completely ruined Father Dave. Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Chazzynski.

My fact is that the way to recognize the Buddha is to look out for his webbed feet, a tongue that can reach his ears, and withdrawn genitalia. That's a good excuse on a date. No, no, no, it's not small. I'm just, I'm the Buddha. I'm the reincarnated Buddha.

Oh, yeah, then show me your tongue because I could get on board with this. So, yeah, these are some of the 30. These are three of the 32 Lakshanas, or special bodily features of the Buddha, and they're what proper representation of the Buddha must have, that make him the perfect being. So the perfect being has these features, as well as various other things, like 40 teeth rather than 32, ankle bones that are hardly noticeable,

and an excellent sense of taste. It is an amazing list of characteristics that the Buddha had. I mean, this is Buddha original as well, Buddha classic, if you will, had thighs like a royal stag a 10 foot aura and the area below armpits well filled with her or

yeah so wait are there 32 of these there's 32 but then there's a well filled with I think well filled with flesh maybe there's an additional 80 extra little tiny things if you want to look out and what's really weird is they point out that the extra 80 things are just like

you know you've confirmed it's Buddha you know his tongue can wrap around his ears He's got these web feet. It's definitely Buddha. But if you just want to make doubly sure that it's him, there's these 80 extra things. And I read through the 80, and they are quite simple, but then one is he can fly. That feels like it should be the first one. That'd be the first thing I'd ask him.

Yeah. They're so mixed as well. Like, one of them is he has a protruding nose, number 28, of the extra 80. And the one before it is, he has the strength of a thousand elephants. No, no, he doesn't. He has the strength of a thousand crawl. elephants and a craw is 10 million. And so he has a strength of 10 billion elephants. Sorry, that was my mistake. But I mean that the Buddha, 10 billion elephants, that's the kind of strength that he's pulling.

To be fair, once you're strong enough that you can pull 10 elephants, the extra just feels like showing off. Yeah, you're right. Number 75 in this list of 80. So he is either completely bald or has a full crop of hair. That's fantastic. No in between, though. No coma. Yeah. So what I like about this list is that it's not only just what he was, but if you were looking out for Buddha as a reincarnation, these are all the things that he would have still. And I was looking into reincarnation just generally because we haven't had a reincarnation of the Buddha, but we obviously have the Dalai Lama. He's a reincarnation of, so he's the 14th, I believe. He's threatening, and I don't know what the latest update on this is what he's saying he might not reincarnate anymore. just to stick it to the Chinese

Yeah, he's going to put it up He's going to put it up as a vote He's going to take a vote on it Well, yeah, this is the last You know, that he may have changed And you know He was speaking about it in September last year So it's very recent

Yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah He said he might not do it But it's so interesting The way that they do find The reincarnations Do they not like Give the, give a child

Some of the old Dalai Lama's possessions And see if he likes them Yes, so there were a bunch of possessions That were given to him And he was picking them up saying, oh, this is mine, this is mine. It tends to be... But that's, if you give children anything, they say, this is mine, this is mine. But they, but there's a bunch of things on the, uh, on the ground. There was a, there was a

kid, um, who was told that he was a reincarnation of a llama. And it was down to a few things like he was able to identify the color of the previous llama's car. Uh, that, that... And the mileage. Yeah. What's in the glove box then? Some tic-tacks and my gun. The next Dalai Lama is the guy who stole my car. We did a deal. Can I just ask a question about this, right? Yeah.

So this guy is supposed to be the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. No, no, sorry. Of another, there are lots of lamas that you can be. Like a pension llama or something. Yeah, yeah. So, like, for example, it's been confirmed that Stephen Segal is the reincarnation of a 17th century Buddhist spirit called Chungdrag Dordche.

When you say it is being confirmed by the community of like the Dalai Lama people. By evidence, Andy. Sorry. Right. Yeah. So he's not obviously the Dalai Lama, but he is a... The China tried to make their own Lama, didn't they? I thought it was their own Dalai Lama.

They said, right, okay, the guy that you guys have chosen in Tibet isn't the real one. We're going to have a lottery to choose, which is the real one. Oh, really? And they had a lottery. Like, they put a load of names in an urn and pull... one out and it was a child. How did that go for them? Is he being ready now? I think he's still there. Can I just mention yogic flying? Yes, please. Because I like it. Yes. So, you know, there was this big 1950s movement, the transcendental meditation movement and it was a group of people who took on the

idea of the power of the frog, I think it's called in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, and it's the idea that you could reach a state of meditation where you can fly. And famously, there was the natural law party in the 80s where they tried to get into politics and they would do this. And they would do this flying thing. Yeah. Yeah, so it's quite funny when I think there's video footage of the groups that tried to do it. The Beatles were quite interested in it. And yogic flying has three stages. And stage one is hopping.

And stage two is floating and stage three is flying. I can do stage one of those. It's very much... The key breach point is between one and two, though, isn't it? If you've got two, your three is probably going to be fine. So the transcendental movement itself admits that no one in the modern era has yet got beyond stage. each one. Keep at it, guys.

Do you guys know, have you guys heard of Drukh Pakunli? No. He was a Buddhist master in the 15th century. He was the guy who brought Buddhism to Bhutan. Okay. And he had pretty wacky methods of like enlightening people and pretty wacky Buddhist practices. He mainly tried his methods on women. And so he had the title, the saint of the 5,000 women.

Among other things, women would seek his blessing in the form of sex. Um, he's... He's called the divine madman, is that the guy? He's sometimes called the divine madman. His penis is called the thunderbolt of flaming wisdom. Yeah, I've been anointed by it. Oh, you have, haven't you? Yeah.

What do you mean? What? When I've been to a, um, a, what do you call these? Like a temple of his. And as you go in, there's a priest with a large wooden phallus and he sort of puts it on your, each shoulder like knighting you, like the queen would, well. The queen would. Yeah.

But then it's supposed to be like a fertility thing. God, Bolton's changed since I was last there. This was in Bhutan. Okay, cool. That's amazing. That's what he does. You've been anointed by the phallus of... What is it called the thunderbolt of...

It's the thunderbolt of flaming wisdom. It had the power to turn women into deities. But I guess that was the real thing. I don't think James is a god. But what happens is you walk into this temple and the priest approaches you with a giant phallus. I imagine the first time that happened. And it was probably Brother Dave again.

Well, the houses around here, they paint fallacies on their walls as well. Around there? Around this area, not in Bolton. Yeah, if you go around there, there's like shops like that sell like local produce. And they all have big pictures of penises on the walls. People draw those on walls around near where I live as well, actually. Yeah. I didn't know.

Do you guys want a religious community? Yeah, apparently. On your front door. Yeah. What a devout place we are. Maybe that's what the butter meant when it says withdrawn genitalia. It's with drawn genitalia. Oh, my goodness.

Cease the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everybody. It's Andy here. Sorry to cut into the fact again that's happening. This is just to remind you that today's podcast is sponsored by Squarespace, the website building website company. So if you like websites and you want to see another one of them in the world,

which you have birthed, then they're very good people to do it with. They offer a lot of support and things like that. And also, if you go to their website and type in the code fish, they'll give you 10% off your website. All right, carry on with the podcast. Okay, time for fact number three. And that's my fact. And my fact this week is that the whoopee cushion was invented by Roman emperor called Basie Anus. Now, that is just, I've never heard of this emperor.

So the Roman emperor, Ella Gabulus, he is the famous. His birth name was Basianus. Now, I'm sure it might be pronounced Bassianus. Something like that. But when you read it and you find out he invented the whoopie cushion, I just don't know how. You can't let that go. Yeah. Bacy anus.

What, describe the whoope cushion? Well, it was obviously a prototype to what we have now. He was in development hell for nearly 2,000 years. Prototype. He just used to bring a cushion that had actually. air in it and he would bring it to his dinner parties. And he was only 14 or so at the time. He was a very young emperor.

And it just used to be his little party trick, his little... And it let out air while he was there. That's all we know about it, really, isn't it? Yeah, didn't it sink them? Yeah, it could be rather... It could be rather that they were at a normal height and then just got lower and lower and lower as it went on. I don't know if it made a farting noise.

It might have done. Yeah, I think it's... I mean, any, you know, anything full of air where you've got something coming out of a sphincter, that it's going to make a noise. Yeah, especially because they had to come out slowly, I guess, because they had to sink gradually. It would be one of those squeaky farts.

Yeah. That went on forever. Yeah. All dinner. Oh, this is still embarrassing. Another thing Ella Gabblis did to dinner guests, apparently, is suffocated a bunch of dinner guests under loads of rose petals. Really?

He was a bit of bastard, but yeah, I think that's quite an imaginative way to go about murdering a dinner guess if you do want to do that. That's true. Did he mean to? or was that actually... He actually just wanted them to go home. It was kind of his way of hinting

that it was late. He was tired. He locked them in a room, didn't he? They had a fake ceiling and he dropped out all these rose petals, but there were so many of them that they all suffocated. But he didn't mean them to.

I thought he was trying to kill them. I don't know. He was a total dick, though, wasn't he? Yeah. I don't know much about him, but from what I've read... He was a real basey anus. Yeah, he wasn't a nice guy.

He had all these... I mean, but it's one of those ones where the stories are like half funny as well as like the bad bits. Like he kind of just used to go and prostitute himself in bars and dresses as a woman. And he purposely tried to piss off people so that they would beat him up because he had a bit of a fetish about being beat up. And it's a very odd character. The weirdest thing I read is that he wanted to have his dick chopped off. Right. And so he went to a doctor and the doctor said, I don't want to do that.

And he said, no, do it. And apparently they really, like, thrashed out the conversation. And the compromise, and this from what I read, they said, they compromised on, he was circumcised. That's a hell of a compromise. That's a huge compromise. That is kind of level one of the three levels of chopping your penis off. Wait, what's the third one? I think the third one is the full chopping.

Absolutely. Total lob off. There was the second one. I don't want to know. I don't want to know. Right. Yeah. So, interesting character.

Yeah. And again, it's another thing where just even if it, like for me, the enjoyable thing of the fact is that he was called Bacy Anus. But actually, the initial thing of the whoopee cushion being invented as far back as then is like on a previous podcast when I found out that yo-yo's were being used from that period as well. It just, it's so out of place to me to think that a whoopie cushion was that far back in time as a practical joke as well. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the wippy cushion when it had its first 20th century. origin wasn't actually called a whoopee cushion. It was called a musical seat in 1926. And it didn't

really make a fart noise either, so it wasn't very good. Did it make music? Well, in the catalogue, it says, sounds like you sat on a cat. It made this weird little scream. It was quite upsetting to hear, apparently, like a screeching cat or a crying child. And it was invented, and then initially it was called the poo-poo-pooh-o cushion, or the boop-boop-a-doop. These are not good names. But when hit on the name Whoopi cushion, which was only in 1932, that was after the slang term Whoopi, Making Whoopi is a slang term for having sex. So the Whoopi cushion is named after sex. So it was a sex cushion? What? So who made that connection? Is that what it's for? Yeah. Well, there was a hit song in 1928 called Making Whoopi. Yeah. And I think it was called the Whoopi Cushion a few years later.

I think Whoopi then became just having fun. Yeah. And then became like a... That makes more sense. So, Soren Soren Sorens and Adams, who was a very famous joke developer, the SS Adams code, loads of stuff like the insect in an ice cube and the the flower that squirts stuff out. Yeah, all of these really classic jokes. A lot of them were invented by him.

But he turned down the woodby cushion initially because he thought it was indelicate. And then he realized his mistake soon after it was, you know, to become a big success. And he made his own one, which was called the Raspberry cushion. Okay. Yeah. But he also invented the Joy buzzer.

Which is the hand buzzer. Exactly. Yeah. Okay, I just want to... You know when you shake hands with someone and there's a buzzer in it and it's a little electric shock or something? It's actually just a vibration, isn't it? It's not electric shock.

But I just want to read you this. It was modelled after another product, the Zappa, which was similar to the Joy buzzer, but did not have a very effective buzz and contained a button that had a blunt point that would hurt the person whose hand was shaken. Just a mini knife, basically. That's got you really good with that one.

Yeah, I'll get the bandages. Yeah. Brank, I just stabbed you in the chest. Now, just stand underneath all these rose petals. Hey, smell my flower. It's a gun! So Sorensen Adams, he started off with itching powder. No, it was a sneezing powder.

No, sneezing powder it was. And he worked for a company that made this whatever product it was. And they had this dustless left over from the product. And he noticed that people were sneezing from it. And so then he thought, oh, this is a great prank. and make this and sell it. And he started selling loads and loads of the sneezing powder and became really big. It was called Kuchoo.

And his first year, he sold $15,000 worth. But 25 years later, the FDA banned it as a toxic substance. So for all that time, he'd be poisoning people as well as making them sneeze. Oh, wow. It was genuinely toxic. Oh, that's quite funny. That is health and safety got mad. Another thing they used was itching powder, wasn't it in World War II?

And it came, there was an idea to plant itching powder on Nazis in various ways. And on the, on the, like, instructions that were given to people who were trying to infiltrate and plant this, it said, the greatest effect is produced by applying the powder to the inside of the underclothing. So I don't know how it was intended. Wow. Yeah, exactly. Do you think when they were pitching that in the meeting, they said, okay, so let me get this right. You've made it right up to a Nazi. You got your gun on here.

Okay, so now I want you to take out the gun and just use it to apply a bit of the itching powder to his underclothes. Be careful. In World War I, they had sneezing powder, the Germans, this is. And it didn't do you that much harm. Apart from, it made you sneeze, so it made you take off your gas mask, and then they'd be

able to get you with the other stuff. Oh, cheeky. Wow. Okay. Why do you take up your gas mask when you sneeze? You don't want to get spit all over your face? I think it was like it would kind of just get in their eyes and in the nose and stuff. They just needed fresh air.

Okay. Okay. Wow. The man who invented the fart machine Much later than the whoopie cushion He tried to record the sounds with his friend His name was Fred Jaro And he and his friend John Blackman Who was developing it

They tried to record it by going into a recording studio After having eaten lots of fart causing food Like cabbage and beans and things And they said it didn't work It didn't sound right What did the people around them say You're never using us recording studio again What did they use in the end for the sounds

A synthesizer Oh wow okay Oh yeah. Like my old Yamaha didn't have a fart button of it. So like, is that, I'm like, is that, I'm just not understanding how synthesizers work. I know. I know. Here's the thing. A synthesizer uses recordings of sounds. Yeah, exactly. So he must have got it from somewhere else originally. Yeah. All right. I don't know the full details on this one. I'm going to fess up. I think that they used, I think they used existing sounds and slowed them down and sped them out. You know, made them. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. One more prankster was Jim Moran in America, who was born in 1907. He lived until 1999. He was called America's number one prankster. And he did lots of, you know, fun, crazy pranks.

Like he walked a bull through a China shot once and he did this kind of thing. He also looked for a needle in a haystack in 1939. And it took him 82 hours before he found it. Yeah, but who's that a joke on? No, yeah, himself, isn't it? It was near the bottom and slightly to the left of center. But this I love so much about it. pranksters tried to set fire to the haystack five times while he was in it.

Out pranking the prankster. There's jokes on him. Kind of. Did he? How do you fail to light? Well, you know the saying. It's like trying to set fire to a haystack. How did he know the needle was in there?

I think he put it in there. Was he just like fingers crossed? Okay, he definitely. So if he put it there. Yeah. That's a very good point. Well, he must have thrown it in and then. it must have fallen.

No, I think he would have got a friend to put it in. Yeah. I agree. I'm amazed he had friends. Okay. Time for our final fact of the show. And that is James. Okay.

My fact this week is that the oldest known purse is decorated with dog's teeth. Ugh. Okay. So it's very old bling. This is found in a grave. dated to 2,500 BC and it was a leather pouch decorated with dogs teeth

in a nice little pattern but over the years the leather has disappeared so that all was left was the teeth cool but they've kind of worked out that it must have been a purse rather than a dog it was decorated in the shape of a dog's mouth and next to it was like a bum bag with decorating with dogs

skeleton. Yeah, that's really interesting. I guess they use what they could find. Yeah. What were they carrying back then? I don't know, really. You would carry, let's say you'd carry... More dogs' teeth.

Something valuable or some food or some, you know, a tool or something. Yeah. So this is, according to Harold Stalbel, the senior archaeologist at Germany's Saxon State Archaeology Office. and he thinks that it was very fashionable at a time to decorate these handbags with dogs teeth because he says that not everyone was buried with them it was only people of high status who were

so it must have been quite good high status people who are catching dogs yeah maybe that was a sign of your I mean what meant high status 3,000 years ago yeah where what like civilization are we talking about uh what's bronze age stone age I do like that we've humans have like wanted to adorn us

since as long as we know they've existed basically and we've just fine the under cells as well didn't they they had like little trinkets and stuff they were buried with yeah like I think the oldest I think maybe until 2006 the oldest jewelry we had was snail shells weren't they from about 75 I want to say 75,000 years ago and we found them in a cave in South Africa and it was just like little holes drilled in snail shells which they think they used to hook them into their some bit of their body In the Bible, Judas is specifically identified as the guy who was carrying the purse. See?

Yeah. Well, he was given money in the purse, wasn't he? He was given 30 pieces of silver in that's true. I thought that was, wasn't it? His name. Sorry, go on. Well, he took, if Jesus was given anything. So it says in John's Gospel, Judas had the purse into which was put whatsoever was ministered to Christ.

So he was the banker. As always, when playing Monopoly, as in the Bible, don't trust the banker. He's cheating. That'd be a good actual version of Monopoly. Where you have to betray one of the other players who's then crucified. That must be why, so Judas Iscariot, the name Iscariot, comes from the Latin Scortia, which is a purse or a bag used to carry money. So maybe that's that's.

Do you think that's where the word Scrotum comes from? I wonder. I bet it is. So was he Mr. Moneybags? I guess he was Mr. Moneybags. Oh, Mr. Scrotum. No wonder he was resentful. Guys, it means money banks.

You'll see. You'll see. Yeah, yeah, Judas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Scroton. Well, scrotens have been used as purses. Have they? They use them, like, in Australia, you can buy, like, kangaroo scrotum purse. Oh, yeah. That's right. That's really big at the moment. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Apparently, the best one is a W-shaped kangaroo scrotum purse. And that is kind of, if you can imagine the two bits where the testicles go. rather than being attached, like web toes might be, they're kind of more like a W shape.

Is that so you can keep different things in the different halves? I think it's just because they're rare. It's like one in 10,000 kangaroo scroters in shape like this. It's like a lucky four-leave clover, except for the kangaroo. Speaking of designer handbags and stuff like that, women's handbags are much, or women's bags are much more expensive than men's bags, no matter what they look like or anything. So there was a purse blog run by someone called Amanda Mull, and she looked at all the different things that you could,

the things that you could buy, and she found that for two bags, which are virtually identical, one for women and one for men, the woman's one cost $2.96 a cubic inch, and the men's one cost $1.54 a cubic inch. And they're pretty much identical. So the idea is basically they're just charged more

because it's aimed at a woman. So on designer bags, Louis Vuitton apparently burns all of his bags that he's made that year, not him personally. He gets someone to burn all the bags he's made that year so they don't get sold on the cheap the next year because it devalues the items. Wow, so all the ones that haven't been sold in the shops.

So first of all, they have an in-house private Louis Vuitton sale for Louis Vuitton staff so people can buy a slightly reduced price. But they keep tabs on who's bought them so they can track them. So if one of them appears on eBay, Louis is going to be like, you put this on eBay, that's not cool. So you can give one as a gift, I think. And then he burns all the rest, make sure, doesn't devalue the brand. is insane.

It's pretty mental. Yeah. That's why he's never made anything of himself. Are there any other careers in which he would just set fire to all your stuff at the end of the... Well, it kind of reminds me a bit not setting fire to it, but a bit like what De Beers did with diamonds in that they deliberately don't sell them to keep the prices high. Yeah. When they used to do that, I don't know if they do any more. And grain, I mean, it's the same thing with grain, isn't it?

To stop grain prices from going nuts, I'm not very good at understanding this. We have huge stocks of grain that go rotten every year. I like butter mountains and all that kind of thing. Yeah. There is a New Year's ritual somewhere where you write down, you make little pieces of paper sculpture, basically, on which you have already written things that you didn't really enjoy about last year. And then you set fire to them a midnight. It's quite fun. I tried that one, yeah.

Did you? Did you? Yeah. Set fire to the house. There was so much that you were unhappy with. Yeah. So the year always begins with a big insurance claim. And then that's the first item in the next year's list.

That's a thing in China as well, that you write down a confession and you, you, you know, you. you do on three separate bits of paper and then you light the confession up and it's it's a way of almost a priest saying that you must be bad if your lighter runs out and you've written something really darkly on the piece of paper oh my god oh god oh god is there a reason why it's three do you know uh i'm not sure i saw it on the carl pilkington idiot abroad document i thought it's because you grew up in china you know the handbag originally meant a bit of luggage for a man the original handbags were for men yeah And then it only became women's specific item in 1841, I think, didn't it?

Yeah, it's really recent. And do you know who invented it? The guy who invented the handbag also invented butterscotch. Samuel Parkinson. Yeah. Wow, that's two cool things to invent, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, it is cool.

So he came from Doncaster. Well done Doncaster. Is it? What's Samuel Parkinson's from Doncaster? Yeah. Well done. And yeah, so he introduced handbags as a specific women's item. Because before women only had those reticules,

which are like those tiny drawstring bags that you could basically fit an earring in. And he said he wrote to a design and was like, my wife needs to travel on a train. My wife. From Doncaster. So I looked up a few of the oldest things that we know of in particular different fields. So the oldest copy of a gospel was found inside the mask of a mummy. Wasn't that really recent?

That was really recent, right? Yeah, really recently they discovered. And it was basically they made all these things out, it was made out of papyrus, which were then basically turned into papier mashing. and all kinds of different things were used, all kinds of texts we used to make Mummy's Mask. So there were business papers and just personal letters

or biblical documents like the early gospel. Do you think it was for something for them to read? It was the Google Glass of its day. God, that would be awful. I'm getting so tired of this in the beginning, shit. Will somebody turn the page? Sorry, go on. And so Greek text, things like Homer's Odyssey, would be used as the contents of a papier-mache papyrus mask.

Wow. So strange. You never think of that. What do they make it out of? Yeah. Yeah, that's really cool. Just any old paper, it seems, they just use it. And they can read it now by taking the mask apart.

It's like today's headlines are tomorrow's papier-mache mummy flas. It's probably a saying in those days. Yeah. And when you go to the fish and chip shot, they give you a mummy's mask to eat it out. The world's oldest human footprints outside Africa Any guesses on where they are? Just on the border leaving Africa They're on a beach in England

Yeah, they're in Norfolk Hang on, they're on a beach So what, the tie just never came in and washed them away Basically, they are, it's quite tricky They were indentations in the, not in the rock But in the... It's... Sand.

Yeah, it's not like the beach. The water is just misting. For eight... Millions of you. No, it's really hard. I read an entire article about this, and it's kind of vague, but they were on the beach. They have now been washed away, but they were indentations in the beach somehow, which resembled footprints.

I have no idea how they dated them as well. But they are 800,000 years old. That's the amazing thing. I thought it was basically the idea of mud, and then the mud dried. And it kept them. And then a beach... what they discovered was the sand on the beach kind of disappeared and revealed them.

Yes, that is something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 800,000? Yes. That is amazing. But there are places in the UK where you can see footprints of dinosaurs

in the same way, which have been like weather the muds hardened. It's amazing. It's so cool. And they only had a very short space of time to get to get imprints of these

before they were washed away by rain and by the effects of the waves. And it was one adult and five children with him. And that's all we, that's all we know about these footprints, this family or whoever it was. Wow.

Yeah. How cool is that? It's good. So, um, dogs' teeth were used as currency in Papua New Guinea until as recently as 1960. What? Yeah.

That's amazing. Uh, in 1876, um, we know how, what you could get for so many teeth. Uh, you could get a bride for a hundred dogs teeth.

That was like the, the price of a dowry. Wow. Uh, Are dogs really, like, there's not many there, or? Um, don't know, really. I guess. Because, like, if you're, like, going out for dinner and you're going, oh, we should probably

pick up the bill tonight, how much, how many dog teeth, should we bring, should we bring Rover with us just in case? Like, could you, is, was it special type of teeth? What I think it is, and I might be wrong about this, but teeth have been, and animal bones, especially, been used forever as things to, like, cut or to, you know, they, they're, you useful tools because they're hard and you can do things. Yeah. So I reckon it's quite often currencies are made out of things that are useful and then they trade them and

then they become a currency. So I bet it's probably something like that. Okay. That's interesting. Although when you say 100 dogs teeth, yeah. That is ambiguous. Is it the teeth of 100 dogs? Oh, no.

Or is 100 teeth? Where's the apostrophe in that? Where's the orthography? Yeah, no, it's a hundred teeth. A hundred teeth. That come from dogs. So you don't want to accidentally murder 100 dogs and realize you only needed to do three or something.

Darling, we're rich. That's great. Have we got any more? Should we wrap up? I'm done. The oldest penis in the world. The oldest penis is 100 million years old. What?

It predates the dinosaurs. It belonged to an ostracod, which is an early kind of crustacean, and it was found on a fossil of that. And some scientists found it, and they analyzed it. One of them was Professor David Civitor of the University of Lester and it was on a tiny marine creature which was about one millimeter wide. I'm not sure whether that was the penis or the whole animal. But the one millimeter penis.

Yeah. Oh my God. It's withdrawn. It was the Buddha. But he says that it doesn't have one penis. It has two. So the earliest ever penis that we've got is from an animal which had two of them. Wow.

That's great. That's cool. Yeah. Nice. I like it. Yeah, me too. Sure you wrap up. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this show, you can find us all on Twitter. I'm on at Shriverland. Andy? I'm at Andrew Hunter, M. James. At Egg shaped. And Anna. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep. And we'll be back again next week. Also, if you go to QI.com slash podcast or no such thing as a fish.com, you can find all of our previous episodes that we've done. Have a listen. And we'll be back again with another episode.

next week. Goodbye.