No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As An Elephant In The Airport

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss elephantine super-sniffing, Thomas Jefferson's version of the Bible, and André the Giant's all-night bender. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with Anna Chazinsky, James Harkin, and Andrew Hunter Murray. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, James. Okay, my fact this week is that elephants can tell how much of something. thing is in a closed bucket by smell alone. It's so cool.

It's so amazing. So let's say, let me take one of you, for instance, Dan, because I'm looking at you. Hello. If you have two plates of food and one of them has got three steaks on and the other one's got one steak, you'd know which one had the most stakes. Damn right. But if you had two boxes of corn flakes that were both closed, you wouldn't be able to tell which one was full of corn flakes and which one isn't full of corn flakes and elephants can do this.

So that's insane. Are they, am I allowed to shake the cornflake boxes and are they allowed to shake the buckets with their noses? You're allowed to do whatever you want. No one's going to stop you unless you do it too much in Sainsbury's. But the elephants know they didn't do any touch at all. It was all completely by smell. And it was, in their particular case, it was two buckets containing 11 different ratios of sunflower seeds. And they managed to choose the bucket with the most sunflower seeds, 59% to 82% of the time, which is more than you would expect by chance.

and actually even dogs, they've tried this on dogs and dogs can't do it. So basically if you've got, say, two kilograms of cocaine up your bum or four kilograms of cocaine up your bum, the dogs wouldn't know which one it was. Right. I think if you had four kilograms of cocaine on your bum,

it wouldn't take a snub of dog to identify you. Do you think there'd be a marked difference, do you, between the four and the two? I think in your gate, yes. You think the gates would be different? No. No. No, mate.

It's like a big pocket up there. Four kilos of cocaine. Two kilos is still uncomfortable, Andy. It's not like you're swaggering and uncomfortable. It doesn't have to be one big bag as well. You could do ten small bags. Oh, great. That's going to make a big difference.

Well, on the entry point, I think it would. I want to know how you close a bucket. I'm glad you said bucket at the end of the same. It's buckets with a lid on. The buckets, I wish my buckets came with a lid. How many buckets do you have? But I have loads. Yeah, like a bucket you would make a fire in, you would need a lid for, wouldn't you?

Why are you making fires and buckets? Well, I'm trying to get rid of all this cocaine I've got out of my bum. It's really interesting, right? It's not even like these amounts are huge differences. I think I read in the study that, let's say, what were we saying? Seeds? Sunflower seeds. It would be the difference between, say, 150 sunflower seeds and 130. Not all of them could get it.

It's obviously easier for them with bigger differences. but even at that point they could still do it. So the other cool thing was they double-blinded it because the experimenter's thought we might accidentally give away if we, because we know which buckets have the most sunflower seeds in and we might get really excited when they're going towards the bigger ones. So they definitely made sure that the elephants didn't know

and the researchers didn't know where the sunflower seeds were. Yeah, okay. That's useful. So if you're getting raisins in a supermarket, for instance, and you need to choose the packet that's got the most in them, you could bring an elephant and then you've got your money's worth, right? because they frequently label on the packet how many raisins are in the bag. Well, they put the weight.

They put the weight on. They don't say this contains 4,000 raisins. 4,000 raisins. You're not having a good day with your amounts today, I buy in bulk, all right? That must be how many are in a big packet of raisins. I just buy those little sun-made boxes the size of finger. Oh, you can't fit more than 30 raisins in there. Imagine that you've got 10 raisins in your hand.

That's a nice handful slash mouthful. Right. You're 4,000. It's 400 handfuls of raisins each bucks. Look, it took a lot of work smuggling these into the country. I never saw them down. I knew you were walking funny. Just on testing elephants,

so there was another test of elephant smell by the University of KwaZulu Natal, and they did something really cool. They built an elephant-sized lab mouse maze. So you know the stereotype of scientists putting mice in a maze? It's almost always just a Y-shaped maze. So they put the mice in. at the tail of the Y as it were and they'd see which of the two branches it goes into

and they build an elephant size one of that and they put a bucket of food they liked at one branch of the Y and they put a bucket of food they didn't like at the other branch of the Y and they could identify it they knew instantly which branch to go for just through smell just through smell again yeah so do they have they have the best smell of any mammal that we know of I reckon that was extraordinary yeah they've got the highest number of olfactory receptors definitely haven't they and I feel like other animals can claim it in a different sense but yeah their ability to distinguish between amounts seems to be unique. And it's so sensitive

that for instance there was another experiment where they show that they can distinguish between different people. So in Kenya there are different tribes and some of them kill elephants and some of them don't. So the Maasai kill elephants as a ritual thing whereas the Canber people don't.

And if you hold up a Maasai tribes person's clothes, then the elephant freaks out and starts bashing its trunk at the ground. That is amazing, isn't it? It's absolutely incredible. But they could it by sight, which you've just described, and also by smell? Yes, they can do it by sight and smell, yeah. So they identify the colour of the clothes, but also if they're blinded in their face,

they can still smell it in the nose. Blindfolded, we should say, blindfolded in the face. Blindfolded, yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, either of those works. Yeah. Well, it just sounds a lot more cruel than being, having the right to blind a hundred elephants. You're not going to get approval. Isn't it great to know that it does have the best sense of smell, given how big its nose is? You would hope that that big nose had some sort of great advantage, and it does. Do you know one other thing they can smell? TNT, and they're very good at it. And in fact, in one sense, at least, they're better than dogs at it.

What's that sense? Sense of smell. I think it's the proportion they can identify it, or the sensitivity score. They score 99.7%, and dogs get about 94%. So there was an article all about this saying, so does this mean that elephants should take over TNT sniffing dogs duties? No, absolutely not. Their sheer size and weight makes them completely unsuited to being infield TNT detectors,

which I think is fair at airports. You'd have to go past the sniff at elephants. Although you're not sniffing for TNT in airports. This is in the minefields of Angola, isn't it? It's not like they're expecting people to smuggle huge suitcase of TNT and security. Oh, well. Another amazing thing is that, so they're incredibly,

elephants are incredibly smart and they've only really started properly experimenting on their intelligence over the last 20 years or so. But we used to think they were idiots because for instance there was this experiment where scientists dangled really, really nice smelling fruit and food and stuff at various heights that were too difficult

for them to reach and then they left sticks all over the floor and thinking the elephants will pick up the stick hopefully and then they'll prod the fruit. Like a pinata. Like a pinata. Exactly and they didn't. So scientists thought well they can't be that smart. They can't figure it out. Should have hung an actual donkey, because that's what an elephant, really.

They wouldn't use one of the basic rubbish pignatas, would they? You'd hollow out an actual donkey. Yeah. You would. I don't know if they have pignatas in their culture, though, elephants. Also, you've been to some traumatic children's parties that they've hollowed out a donkey. That's tough to get through. You need a really big stick for a long time.

Mine and James's parties, I'm blinding elephants in one corner. James is scooping the inn and to have a donkey in the other. Anyway, the point was that they weren't being stupid not being able to get it with a stick. They'd pick up the sticks, and then they wouldn't prod at the fruit because people didn't understand the elephant sense of smell is so good.

So as soon as they pick up a stick, they can't smell anymore because they've wrapped their trunk around it, and so they couldn't smell where the fruit was. And the scientists, because we're so human, we just think, oh, you just see the fruit because we assume that a sight is the most important thing. But for then they have to smell where it was.

So it's like putting a clothes peg on your nose, but they wrapped their nose around a stick. Exactly, yeah, yeah, exactly. I read a thing saying, It's basically like having a nose on the palm of your hand. Every time you touch something, you're smelling it, much more than you are touching it. Butterflies can smell through their feet, can't they?

Yes. They have olfactory stuff on their feet. So imagine if you had feet like a butterfly and hands like a... This is the worst by having our leave. I found, just on the subject of amazing senses of smell, there is a woman who can smell Parkinson's disease. This is really weird.

So there are people with incredible sense of smell, the super-smellers. called and this lady was a retired nurse called Joy Milne and obviously she'd worked with a lot of of patients with Parkinson's and she'd been to a talk about it by a doctor and at the end of it there was any questions at call and she put up a hand and said why aren't you doing something about the fact that people with Parkinson's smell and they didn't really they thought oh that's a slightly weird question to ask and she and eventually they worked out that she meant no I literally can smell it and they tested it on her and you can she can tell before physical

symptoms appear. So they presented her with a load of t-shirts that have been worn either by patients with Parkinson's or people who did not have Parkinson's. And she got them all right, apart from one false positive where she flagged someone up as having Parkinson's who didn't. And then later on, that person got in touch to say, oh, by the way, I've just been diagnosed with Parkinson's. So she had identified it before. Yeah. Anyone knew. Yeah. That is amazing. That is amazing. We need to move on in a sec. One more thing about elephant smell. They smell each other's urine and get a lot of information about the pack, about the herd from that. And if you, if they're walking in a line, let's say, do it a conger or whatever, and then the one at the front smells some

urine from the one at the back because some scientists have taken it and then run to the front of the queue and then put some urine there, they get really confused because they know whose urine is whose. And if it's at a place where they're not expecting it, they get really confused and looking around and they can't work out what's going on. Wow. Let's say, you came into the bathroom next week when I'm on holiday in Japan and you smell the urine and you went, bloody hell, that's James's urine. I thought he was in Japan. It's like that.

Cool. And remembering, because that's the other thing. The two things we assume that elephants are good at, smelling to the trunks, remembering, because in the jungle book they say an elephant never forget. And they don't. So they remember all the smells of urine, of all the different mates they have. And also there's this amazing moment in 1999 at an elephant sanctuary where there was this elephant called Jenny.

There's still going on about this. There was this Asian elephant called Jenny. And she was suddenly introduced to a new elephant into the sanctuary. And they had this amazing reaction to each other. They got really freaked out and agitated and then ran up to each other. And it seemed like this exhibition of euphoria for both the elephants. And the carer of Jenny was like, what on earth is going on? This is so weird.

So as you look back into their history. And for a few months, 23 years earlier, they'd worked in the circus together. Wow. Just remember each other? 23 years ago. That's incredible. I'm like, Jenny, it's you.

I don't remember anyone I worked with 23 years ago. You look at us blankly every morning. I was nearly in a Congo the other day. Yeah. It was at a wedding. It was a very long Congo, and everyone was going pie in the Congo, and they kept saying, hey, join the Congo.

And I kept saying, oh, I'm going to join on the end. I got about five people say, hey, get in here. Made room for me. No, I'll just join on the end. Did you join the end? I tricked them all, no. Oh, then.

No one's going to know, are they? No one knows. No one looks behind them in the Congo. Exactly. But I had already urinated at the very end of their route, so I was there to freak them out. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chisinski. My fact this week is that Thomas Jefferson cut his Bible to pieces and glued it back together in the order he thought it should be written. And...

Wow. Yeah. great. He had a better idea for the Bible. It was in the wrong order. And he was right. Really. So this was the New Testament specifically. And he was a Christian, obviously Jefferson. And he had a Bible. And he wanted to put it all kind of in chronological order. So he got all the Gospels. He ripped them apart. He actually had six different volumes. So he could do lots of experimenting. And he had a Greek one, a Latin one, English and French ones. And he cut up all the Gospels page by page, rearranged all the pages in chronological order. So, you know, if John said Jesus had a sandwich when he was 17, then Matthew said, and then he went on a slide when he was 20, he'd sort of put Matthew after the John bit, even though in the actual Bible, Matthew would come before the John. Yeah, yeah, that's a really good idea. Because Matthew, Matt, Luke and John, they're all telling the same story. They're telling the same story, different bits of it. Is there any good bits that he left out, do we know?

I actually don't know what the examples are that he left out, but I know he left out some of the dodgier miracles. So he was a bit skeptical that some of the stuff might not have happened. A miracle of the sandwich and the slide. Exactly. It was tuna at the top and then it was BLT at the bottom. It's literally a step down, I would say. And he glued it back together and he liked it so much his new upgraded version that he glued all the pages together and he sent them to be bound properly.

And in fact, I believe it still exists somewhere in America. It's at the Smithsonian. Is it the Smithsonian? Of course it is. They've got a lot of Jefferson's stuff. They've got his Bible. So you can visit it. I'm not sure you can flick through it, but I believe you can see it.

You definitely won't be able to flick through it. Yeah, but it's... Very unusual. But there's six volumes it might be opened at certain pages. His desk that he wrote the Declaration of Independence on, they have that. And a polygraph, which I've always thought to be a lie detector. But it's... Yeah, I would have thought that too.

Well, it is, right? But originally what it was was a way of whenever he wrote letters, because he wrote thousands and thousands of letters. and he always wanted a copy of each letter because if they made it into the papers he could show the original so it was a machine that was designed that would have a double pencil

with a double ink well and it would mimic his writing so he wrote two letters at a time but the same letter. Yeah, amazing. And makes actually more sense because polygraph it means lots of writing

so it's actually a better term for that machine. His Bible, he didn't mean it to be published because it was just a private sort of passion project of his and he shared it to a few friends but then after he died It became very popular and lots of copies were made of it.

It was printed and it was called The Life Immorals of Jesus of Nazareth. That was his title for him. Yeah, he retitled it as well. I thought the Bible wasn't good enough. He was a kind of a Jesus fan as opposed to a religion fan in some ways. And then 9,000 copies were printed. And until the 1950s, when they ran out, each newly elected senator got a version of it when they were elected. Did they go to office?

Yeah. Do you know how it ends the book? Spoiler a lot. His book? I don't know. It ends, I believe. Now in the place where he was crucified, there was a garden. And in the garden, a new sepulchre. Wherein was never man yet laid. There they laid Jesus and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulca and departed. That's it. No resurrection. No resurrection. Oh. He just dies. Poor Jesus. Isn't that amazing? That's like the main bit. That's what I was told at school. That's like the main bit.

That's like the somber art house reinterpretation. realism bullshit. Yeah, he was an amazing guy though, Jefferson. He's quite confusing person, isn't he? Because he has this bizarre legacy where he came up with the idea that all man is created equal and then he had 600 slaves and

everything. And actually, even the Monticello, which is the place that he built his home, very famous home, even the Monticello website now acknowledges that Sally Hawkins mothered about six of his children at least. Who was an enslaved person?

Yeah. Who bizarrely was the daughter of a woman who mothered children of his father-in-law. So they kept it in the family. So his wife's dad had lots of affairs with Sally Hawkins' mum. Sorry, it's not Sally Hawkins. That's a famous actress. Sally Simmons. Sally Hemings.

Sally Hawkins is, of course, in Paddington, the shape of water. She's great. She was also the mother of a lot of Jefferson's children. Wow. God, she's versatile. I know. So he was third president, right, after Washington and then, who was it, John Adams? Yep. And he, you know, he did a lot of, he had a lot of remarkable achievements in office.

As we said, drafted the Declaration of Independence. He's also responsible for a phrase that was a massive hit in the 19th century in America. Carwights hear this. Yeah. So he bumped into a man near his home. This is the story. And no one knows if it's true or not. But this guy started complaining.

They were riding their horses next to each other, some neighbor of his. And the guy was complaining about everything in Washington and all these idiots. as they had running things. And he talked for a couple of hours, talked Jefferson's ear off about all this. And then eventually they got to Jefferson's house and Jefferson said, well, this is me. Is that the phrase?

No. That would have been a great phrase to come up with. This is me. This is me. Jefferson, so the guy eventually asked pretty much the first question he'd asked this whole time and he said, what's your name by the way? And he said, well, my name is Thomas Jefferson.

A-oh, massive social clang of this guy's made. He was deeply embarrassed. And so he couldn't think of anything. thing to say and he just said my name is haynes and then he galloped away on his horse so this became a phrase my name is haines which is whenever you had to leave suddenly or whenever you were massively embarrassed about something it was basically the 19th century boy was my face red that's right is it like i'll get my coat kind of thing yes it is like that yeah wow and what is it my name is my name is my name is haynes my name is haynes start doing it um just very quickly on typos in the bible oh yeah

There are some absolute doozies. So there's one in the 1682. There's a 1682 edition which gets called the Cannibal's Bible. Because there's a typo. It should be if the latter husband hate her. And they mistyped it. So it's if the latter husband ate her. I'm talking about his wife.

And there's a great one, the 1944 King James, which has a line which should be, submit yourselves to your own husbands. It's advice for wives, basically. But it accidentally reads, submit yourselves to your owl husbands. It's good advice Okay, it is time for fact number three

And that is Andy My fact is that in 19th century America Caviar was a free bar snack Yeah Actually I hate caviar Do you? Yeah Oh, well

I don't like things that are savoury That have the kind of texture That I think sweet things should have That's understandable Well I know where and when you should not go on holiday 19th century America because you couldn't move for it It was so readily available Because there was huge sturgeon fish

That's where the fish that caviar comes from Or classic caviar anyway And they were just so thick in the rivers That people put it in bars Basically like peanuts to make people thirsty Oh yeah That's a way of getting people Because it's very salty stuff

So it was a way of getting people thirsty Oh yeah because it used to be used like salt as well Didn't it? You'd sprinkle it on a meal Just to add a little bit of salty flavour How did they used to eat it? Because from what I've read the best place and the sort of most encouraged place to eat it from is the little bit of skin between your index finger and your thumb. So you place it on that. Oh, that's the, what's that called? The snuff box. It's called the natural snuff box or something. They say it's

because you don't taint the taste by doing that. So if you use a metal spoon, for example, that has a metaly taste that can affect the caviar. That sounds just like the kind of thing that High society makes up the weird ways to eat their high society food, isn't it? But I think if it's a bar snack, there's surely to be on a cocktail stick. And you could get one little egg on a little egg on a stick. I would think it would just be in a bowl like peanuts with like 12 different types of urine. I think it's like that. Yeah, exactly.

People don't wash their hands coming back from the toilet. It's very squidgy to get on your fingers, though. You think you just do it straight with the fingers? Yeah, probably not. You need to have a finger bowl next to it. Yes. Let's say in Russia, you have it on Blini. So maybe they had little bits of bread.

That's perfect. That's like a little micro plate for each bit of caviar. That's a very nice way of eating, I think. But this is the thing. So U.S. caviar was so common, but Russian caviar was thought to be a lot better. So quite often, U.S. caviar was exported to Europe, and then it was repackaged and re-labeled as Russian caviar.

Then it was exported back to the States and sold as Russian caviar as better stuff, even that was exactly the same. Am I his same? Yeah. And basically what happened was the caviar in America was extremely numerous, like you say, because the sturgeon were numerous. But then they overfished them. And then that meant there was no caviar left in America anymore,

which meant you had to get it from Russia, which made it much more expensive. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because in Russia, before then, before the Western demand increased, in Russia, it was of peasant food as well, wasn't it?

It was considered much more peasant foodie than sauerkraut, for instance, which is more of a delicacy. And they use it just as a flavouring. And it was only one, there's apparently a Greek guy called Johannes Varvarkas, who discovered Russian caviar on his travels. So this is delicious. I'm going to introduce it to high society in Europe.

And then that was what shot its prices up. He made it fashionable. Kind of just shows that food, how much you value it, is just about how fashionable someone says it is. Apparently, if you were to take, let's say, a 45 kilogram barrel of caviar. I'm not putting us up my boss in Jane. No, not after last time.

But if you would take this massive barrel of caviar, which is kind of how they transport it, It would take a farm labourer two weeks to earn it back in the olden days in Russia, and now it would take a decade for them to earn it. Wow. That's amazing. Big difference. I guess so much of it is because it's sturgeon. I mean, you get salmon cavio and you get lumpfish cavio, and there are all sorts of other much, much cheaper meals, which are just fish eggs, basically, of different kinds. But sturgeon has this kind of, you know, supposed hallmark of quality about it. You know, it's pretty similar. So, okay, here's a question. Is caviar vegetarian? Because it is eggs. Not vegan, for sure.

It's not vegan. I'd say no, because you have to kill the sturgeon in order to get it. Fair play. However, there is some, I think, vegetarian caviar out there where they don't kill the sturgeon. Oh, yeah. They make a tiny incision, and then they massage the sturgeon to get it out of them. Oh, that's nice. It's quite a rough massage.

It's so I've really shook of the pill there. This is a company in Leeds, and then you just squeeze the sturgeon like a toothpaste tube, basically, and all the caviard comes out of it. And then you put it back in the water? Yeah, it survives. You keep them. Yeah, I was reading about this actually. Yeah, they, they, um, you can repeat the process every 15 months. Yeah.

Um, yeah, this was, I read that there was a scientist called Angela Coller. Um, she spent nine years trying to work out how you didn't, you wouldn't have to kill the sturgeon in order to extract the eggs. And I believe it was her who pioneered it. Could be wrong. Maybe multiple people around the world had the same idea. But the process isn't just doing what you said with the incision. They give the sturgeons an ultrasound, um, to see if they're ready.

And then they have a protein. administered, which you're talking about, which releases the eggs. And then they massage them out like a toothpaste tube. Yeah. That's really funny, an ultrasound for a fish. Yeah. You're going to have 100,000 babies. Congratulations.

I think they have to give them ultrasounds anyway, because there's no way of telling if they're male or female. So you need to make sure that you've got female fish. I think so from the outside. So you have to check their innards anyway. Check you got the right gonad. That's incredible. One way that you might get some eggs without killing the, um,

sturgeon is sometimes producers will take some of the eggs out to check if they're ready or not because you don't want to kill your sturgeon, get all the eggs out and it's not at the right stage. And so some fisheries will take a female sturgeon, put a incision in her, put a straw in her, and then suck out some of the eggs to taste them to see if they taste right. And then if they're right, then they'll kill the sturgeon and get the eggs. And if they're wrong, then they'll just let her go for a while. That must be something someone's doing in a Porsche Russian restaurant. It's just serving up live sturgeon jamming a straw into it. Yes, but we only have paper straws in our reference, so it's good for the environment.

And then do you, what, if it's not ready yet, do you just sew it back up? Yeah, yeah. And then that is insane. They have a bit of a rough old ride sturgeon because it's not just caviar. We also use them for beer, don't we? Traditionally, they were the original icing glass providers. So that's the swim bladder. And that's what they used to kind of purify beer.

It was used in things like Guinness until a couple of years ago. I think they got rid of it. It's to clarify alcoholic drinks. Sorry, I don't fully understand it. So you get the swimblad and it's just, it's used in the wine making or the beer making process to get rid of a lot of the sediment. I think it's kind of used like a sieve. Yeah. And so that's why a lot of beers aren't vegetarian or a lot of vegetarians.

A lot of vegans can't have wine, can they? Yeah. Because of that reason. Yeah. They can weigh up to 1,500 kilos. Okay. That's a lot. I only work in stone.

There's a lot of stone. It is. No, they are massive. They are massive. And they grew up to 28 feet long, which I find, I mean, that's, yeah, 28 feet long. Right. What? Thank you.

That's weird. I mean, the very, very biggest ever found that had been 20, around that. Okay. That's Beluga sturgeon. So it's, I think Baluga sturgeon is the second biggest kind of bony fish. And yeah, it's this length of four men. That is extraordinary. Yeah.

I see. And they don't. a long time to this one of the reasons why caviar is so valuable is that they take so long to reach maturity right so the biggest one sometimes there is not until about 20 that they're producing enough caviar you have to wait forever so as well as eating fish eggs you can eat fish sperm there's something called shirako uh that's probably not how you pronounce it in japan it translates as white children and it's the war is the raw or cut sperm of the codfish and in russia they eat the sperm of herrings because they like herrings in Russia and they not on they preserve it but not only

do they eat it on their own sometimes they will eat it with the row of herrings as well so they the eggs of the herring and the sperm of the herring in the same meal yeah I think that's a little unkind isn't it why to whom to the sperm and the eggs because they should they belong together they should be well you're marrying them you then you eat one of each and then a herring grows in your stomach It's like if you eat an apple seed Then an apple tree will grow out of your mouse Oh man we've got a lot of stuff to fill you out tonight I do feel like if I ate the sperm and the eggs of a herring

I would genuinely worry about that Right yeah You did worry A little bit The sperm is called Maloka Which I thought was Russian for milk And your Russian lessons are not going well And you came back with a pint the other day

Didn't you? Hope you enjoyed your tea You get ant caviar too, that's the thing. What's that? It is ant pupae and larvae, you know, so it's not eggs really, but it's from a particular Mexican ant, which is known locally as La Homiga pedora. You say that as if there's only one ant.

It's incredibly expensive stuff. He cooks it as well as producing it, so it's a real treat if you're in town. No, La Hormiga pedora is the farty ant because their nests smell like farts. But the eggs are a delicacy or the larvae, you know. You do get snail caviar, don't you? Which is quite like fish caviar, apart from it tastes a bit more like snails. I've never, have you tried it?

Yeah. Well, how? You get cowboy caviar? Is that made of the eggs of cowboys? No, it's slang. It's bull's testicles that are fried. So they're also known as Rocky Mountain Oysters. Have you?

But they also. they would have those as bar snacks, wouldn't they, in the olden days? Yeah. You would have testicles as bar snacks. What? They eat them a lot somewhere. I think it might be in Mexico. It's still a common eating.

Yeah, South of America. Yeah. It was a Montana testicle festival that I read about them in. So maybe Montana as well. It makes sense. If you're going to eat them anywhere, it's going to be there. Confusingly, it's also, from what I can tell online, Cowboy Caviar is a salad, which is just a lot of salad bits thrown together.

So there's no sense to it. It's just, yeah. So be careful when. ordering. If you're a vegetarian in Montana. Yeah. What else happens at a testicle festival? I think it's a lot of eating of testicles competitively. Testicle festival is a very nice

phrase to say. It is. It's very nice. Yeah. It trips off the time. Waxing of testicles probably. I'd have there, like waxing competitions. There's the big bowl contest that I've got here, which is men in wet underwear. No. No. That's what it says here. I wonder if you could call it the festicle. Yes,

you could. Or the testival. No, neither is as good as testicle festival. Anyway. They branded it right. They branded it right. Well done, guys. There's another caveat. There's a caviar sort of replacement you can have,

which is very much like the real Russian thing. And this is a replacement for a Russian sevruga caviar. And this is a kind of caviar that you can get from paddlefish. And basically, where most paddlefish are is a place called Warsaw in Missouri. And so apparently it's so good this stuff. And all the Russians in Missouri think that this is just like their sevruig. caviar back home. And so there's this huge black market caviar fishing problem there. And there was a really good, this was on longweed.com, I think, a really good long read about it. And it was about police descending

on this place. And its population doubles in the paddlefish fishing season, which is just a couple of weeks long, because people flock there to try and get these fish and get the caviar out of it. And they thought, we know there are all these Russian people who are coming and they're illegally poaching these fish. And then they're going, obviously selling them. They're getting so many. And gradually, as you're reading this article, you realize the police have this massive problem because even though they know these fish are disappearing, they know they're illegally taking

them, they can't track down any kind of black market, they can't trace any money. And it turns out when actually they start arresting people and when they go undercover, then no one's selling it at all. It's just all these Russians are just eating it. They're just eating it. They've just got these big Russian families. So they'll get

like tens of thousands of pounds worth of caviar or some of them will have about £1,000 worth of just the fish themselves. And they're like, no, we're not going to, why would I sell this? I'm not going to sell this. They just take it back to their big families and they eat it all. And so there's nothing really that they can do.

And they just get taken to the police station and told, please don't take that fish again. And then sent home. Yeah. They're just like it. They like it in Russia. I can say that much. I think it's delicious. I was reading about a sniffer cat called Russick.

Sniffer cat. Snipper cat. And they just praces this entire long read. this amazing industry in America. Fucking sniff a cat, which looks like a bit of research left over from the elephant research from an hour ago.

This was in Russia. This was a lot of smuggling, or was a lot of smuggling, or was a lot of smuggling, in the Caspian Sea. So they would come to a checkpoint and people would try and get it through on their cars, and they found that that was a big problem, but they had this cat that they had adopted

that was, I believe, a stray, who loved eating chunks of sturgeon and caviar and so on that was being confiscated from the criminals as a result developed in a really strong nose for sniffing out whenever there was sturgeon in the area so what they stopped what they started doing was every time a car came up the cat would be sent to go and you know maybe they walked it on a leash I didn't actually get that detail and Russick would have a smell

and smell out all of these bits of sturgeon and caviar and so good was he at doing it that they actually retired the sniffered dog that they had That is got to hurt. If you're a sniffer dog and you lose your job to a cat. Yeah. First I lost my job to the elephant in that airport and now do this. But yeah, so unfortunately he died in 2013 when a vehicle that he was searching suddenly jerked forward.

Oh, how convenient. That's a hit job. I can't believe they didn't do that sooner. I can't believe no smuggler thought of doing that straight away. Also, so they've got the cats smelling the cars. Are they stationing it on the pavement and cars whizz past? and the cats then like, mew-and then you know to stop that car.

It's not like a speed gun. This is surely at a checkpoint. You have to stop at checkpoints. So imagine holding on to the cat and pointing at cars as they go past. You pull its tail when you want it to sniff something. Surely once you stopped a car and you've opened the doors, isn't it as easy for you? We've just covered our big sturgeoner. I would say I could find sturgeon as easily and quickly as a cat.

You're right. They're massive. Do you think they were sat in the sort of passenger seat with a hat and a fake mustache? This is my friend Bob. What do you say, kitty? That's a sturgeon. Thank God for Rosset or whatever he's called. Otherwise, I would have believed in Bob.

And it stinks. I mean, if there's a car full of fish, I'm going to smell it. I don't need a magic cat. But maybe his gift was in telling people about it. Oh, yeah. Like most cats, if they smell, They're not going to tell you. They're not going to grasp someone up.

I'm not ridden down the most interesting bit of the story. It was a talking cat. I'm so sorry. Missed out the best detail. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that wrestling star Andre the Giant was so massive that once when he drunkenly passed out in a hotel lobby, staff couldn't move him and had to corner him off with velvet ropes until he woke up.

So, this is... Yeah, this is from a, this is an anecdote that comes from a book called As You Wish, Inconceivable Tales from the Making of the Princess Bride by Carrie Elwes, who was the lead actor in it. He was also in Robin Hood, Men in Tights. And the whole book is just anecdotes about the time that they were making the movie. And that's what came out. The fact that he just used to have all these drunken escapades, one of which meant he, yeah, passed out. And Andre the Giant was in that movie as well, right? He played Fezic, the Giant. Yeah. You're really typecast, wasn't he?

I wasn't going to play Pezick, the dwarf, was he? And he was a wrestler, Andre the Giant. He was a wrestler before he was a film star. Absolutely. I mean, that's his big career thing, really. Well, before that, he was a rugby player, and before that, he was in a furniture removal business. And before that, he was a child.

Before that, he was a tiny egg. Professional egg. But he's to the WWF, now the WWE, he is one of the great wrestling stars of all time. He was in the period of Hulk Hogan and Macho Man and Ultimate Warrior that sort of very classic era when they started. I just don't

get wrestling. It doesn't make any sense to me. We've covered it before on this podcast and I find it impossible to research because everything you read about it you're like, is this real? Did this really happen? The confusion of real sport and fake acting is

bewildering. Like there's this fight between him and Hulk Hogan which was this really famous fight and apparently it was super controversial. It was 1988 and there was a referee, a famous referee called Dave Hebner, who was refereed wrestling matches. And he happened to have an identical twin. Oh yes. Who they tracked down for this match.

The referee? Yeah, the referee had an identical twin. He didn't really, I think. No, he did. He did really. I've seen the actual pictures. Either he did or there's some amazing photoshopping going on. But he had this identical twin.

And so, right, Andre the Giant's agent got... Dave, who was supposed to referee the match, locked him in a cupboard, and then bribed Earl, his identical twin, to referee the game instead. And he did. And then he made Andre the Giant won. And then Dave broke out of his closet.

And then him and his identical twin brother had a big fight afterwards in front of the crowds. This is the weirdest conversation. I really want to hear Anna do the commentary of WWF. I don't understand any of this. Is that real? Oh, my God. But there's storylines.

There's storylines. You go to the theatre all the time. Are you standing up going, what the fuck is going on here? No, no, no, because in the write-ups of the theatre, it doesn't say, and there was an incredibly controversial moment when Hamlet's mother remarried Hamlet's uncle and the audience can be. You're like, okay, this is a story. Or was it in the Wikipedia page?

It's true. It's not clear. Was it controversial or was it all made up? It's all made up. It's all made up. Then why is it controversial? It's controversial in the world of wrestling. Which is a fake world.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now you're getting it. No, it is weird how it's presented as true. You know, normally it was plays. There is a synopsis. Normally when you go out of the play, the thing doesn't keep happening out.

Yes. No, but. I just think it's amazing that we found the edge of Anna's comfort zone. Yeah. I never thought we'd get there. Who would know it was pro wrestling is fake? It just makes you have a panic attack when I read about it. But it's a drama.

EastEnders. It goes on and on. Of course its characters don't smash out into the news at 10 and suddenly they're brawling. What about the guy from Holyoaks was fighting the guy from Emmerdale last week. I missed that. Yeah, one of them got fired in real life, I think. Yeah. Although this is all making you wonder about everything. Wait, hang on. So there was a real life fight between a character. Someone in Emmerdale and someone in Holy Oaks. Was it Holly Oaks? Yes, it was Holly Oaks. Yeah. They got in a big fight. Wow. Physical fight. Yeah. I thought you meant that someone from Holly Oaks. jokes turned up in Emmerdale, like a character sort of made his way through the membrane

and he ended up, because I definitely watched that as well. Like a weird portal opens between the world. It's like the Truman Show or something. One of the pint glasses from the old Vick suddenly slashes through into Coronation Street. Look, can we get back to Andre the John?

Of course, of course. Oh, was he a giant? He was actually three children in a massive overcoat. So, when he was drinking, according to Carrie Elwas, when he was drinking in New York once, the NYPD had to send an undercover cop to follow him around the bars because if he got too drunk, there was once time where he fell over and crushed a human underneath and they didn't want that to happen again. Not to death. No, no, just, yeah, but I think he was stuck.

You know, that's seven foot two of massive, massive body on you. He got so tall because he had acromegaly, you know, that was the cause of his giant size, that his parents did not recognize him. So he left home at 14 He came back at 19 and they said Who are you? And they'd even seen him wrestling on TV without recognising who he was. But yeah, they didn't realise until quite late, right? So he wasn't sort of amazingly huge.

He was normal until he was 15, normalised until he was 15. And we keep saying he gets drunk but to give him credit, I don't think he really did get drunk very often. He basically held his drink incredibly well and he'd drunk extraordinary amounts like he'd drink over 100 beers in a night and be fine. Or I think someone was.

once asked how much can he drink before he's drunk and someone said he starts he starts to feel it after the first bottle of vodka or something so he used to order a drink which was a concoction that consisted of 40 ounces of just random liquids which he called the American he just he had it poured into a pitcher so glad he didn't have a cocktail bar because that is the most disgusting sounding thing. He also seen random liquids on a menu well that's Carrie Lwebs again this is from him and he says it I've never tasted airplane fuel but I imagine it's very It's like a top shelf you would have, like, let's say it was your 21st birthday and your friends wanted you to get drunk.

They buy you a top shelf, which is basically one of every shot in a glass. Oh. Your friends would have done the same thing, I'm sure. Well, yeah, we would have done, but we didn't finish our croquet in time, so we all had to go home. When Andre the Giant was in Paris one day, he realized that the cars there were quite small and he could just move them around if he wanted to because he was so strong. And so he would get his friends, because in America, they're much bigger, right? So he would get his friend's cars and then move them into tiny little spaces where they couldn't get there. God, it would make parking easier.

If you could just get out of the car and lift it into the space. That's such a good idea. He could hardly get into cars. He was so huge. There's photos of him getting in and out of a car. And he basically had to go in on all fours and be the entire backseat was him. You know? Yeah, he once got into a taxi and they couldn't close the door.

Whoa. Who was it that? I think we've done it on the podcast before, but when he was a kid. he couldn't get the bus, the normal bus. He used to be driven to school by Samuel Beckett. Samuel Beckett. But that's not true. Is that not true? That was actually another thing that Elle was claimed,

but wasn't quite true. So he grew up in the same French town, weirdly, as Samuel Beckett moved to in Moliere. And apparently Beckett was kind of a friendly guy and used to drive the kids to school. And in a way that was okay back then. And sometimes he would hit to ride with him, but he could fit on the bus,

because how small would a bus have to be if, you know? No, he had a pickup truck. and the kids would sit on the back of the truck. So it is true that he used to get a lift. Yes, he did. It just wasn't because he couldn't fit on the bus. Right, yeah, yeah, got it. He was a really nice guy, though, wasn't he?

Everyone said he was very much a gentle giant, everyone called him, and someone said he didn't like hurting people, which now I understand that wrestling isn't really about really hurting people, does make sense. But he was friends with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Arnold Schwarzenegger in this PBS documentary that you should watch, if you were really interested in Andre the Giant.

But Arnold Schwarzenegger said that he was, was at a restaurant with him once and Andre used to always insist on paying for anyone's dinner or anyone's drinks when he went out with them. And so Arnold knew this and he tried to sort of sneakily pay and Andre lifted him up off his chair and put him on top of a cupboard. That's brilliant. Well, it's bizarrely, and it's weird saying Arnold Schwarzenegger say this word. It's an armwa. So he says, and Andre just lifted me up and he put me onto the armour. Wow.

I never thought I'd see Arnold Schwarzenegger used the word armwomen. He was meant to play Phezzik. He was meant to play the role in Princess Brides. Yeah. He was the original casting choice. He couldn't do it. That would have been such a different film. Yeah. And he didn't because it took so long to make, didn't it?

It took about a decade to make. And by then, Arnie was too famous. It took a decade to get into production, I think. And by then Arnold Schwarzenegger had a real career. Gosh. Wow. I've got some facts about alcohol tolerance, but I don't know if you got more on Andre the Giant.

I just said he kept a small farm and he would walk around and play with the animals because they didn't stare at him for his size. I think that's bullshit as well. but worth I say. No, I think he definitely likes not being stared at. It's kind of a tragic life he had because he was obviously lovely and knew that his career depended on being huge. But at the same time, he said the Princess Bride was the happiest he'd ever been filming that

because for the first time ever, people didn't stare at him. Because I guess he was just an actor on set and then knew what to expect. He loved it. And in fact, there was a really nice interview with one of his friends called Lanny who said that after he'd filmed the Princess Bride, And Andre invited him around to his house and gave him a bunch of alcohol and said, hey, do you want to come into my drawing room?

I'll show you something. And made him watch the film. And then he kept inviting him around and kept making him watch it. And he did it with all his friends because he loved, he was so proud of it. And he said, you know, did you think I was good in it? Do you think I was right in the Princess Pride?

And they'd all be like, yeah, you were really great in that. Don't worry. Have you guys all seen this movie? Yeah. I actually don't even know what it's about. Oh, okay. Is it a fair retail? Yeah.

But a very funny one. Yeah. It is an amazing film. if anyone listening hasn't. Yeah, it's a classic, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, it's very good. I also did a bit of reading about just other people who drank a lot.

Okay. So Oliver Reed, one of the great hellraisers of the 20th century. I didn't know this. He would frequently expose his penis when drunk. Standard practice, I guess. But he got a tattoo of an eagle's claw on his penis. I know. Painful.

It was just a tattoo of one. It wasn't an actual claw. Yeah, but do you think people got confused and thought, an eagle had landed on his dog? Well, he'd be. then later got an eagle's head tattooed on his shoulder and he would show fellow drinkers his shoulder tattoo and then he'd say would you like to see where it's perched and then get his cock out?

Wow. I know. That's quite a labour-intensive practical joke, isn't it? Yeah, really. So he died on the set of Gladiator, you know, and he had to sort of reconstitute his role for the final film. But when he died, he'd had 12 double rums, lots of whiskey and an arm wrestle. Which of those killed him?

I think it was the previous 60 odd years that killed him Yeah, yeah Wow Just another film giant Is Richard Kiel And he's the guy who played Jaws In Jaws In Jaws

He was amazing I really believed it That was actually a sturgeon So famous fish Richard Kiel No he played Jaws in the Bond films But he had lots of jobs Before he became an actor So he was

First of all he was a cemetery plot salesman. I just like the idea. So he was seven foot two, whatever, seven foot three. Imagine someone selling you a cemetery plot who's a giant. And then he was a door-to-door vacuum

cleaner salesman. You know how if you're, if you bury someone, they're six feet under, he could stand at the bottom of that plot and still talk to you and he'd be able to see his face. Wow.

And what else was he? A vacuum cleaner salesman. Vacuum cleaner salesman. And then he married a woman called Diane, who was five foot one. And she did an interview and they said, also, He's got lovely needs.

Interestingly, the opposite. They said, why did you marry him? And she said, we just see eye to eye on most things. Sweet. That's very sweet. Any more for any more? I'm done, I'm out. I mean, I'll just tell you.

Go on, tell us. Well, it's just another hellraiser factor. It's not really relevant. But Peter O'Toole, big old drinker. When he was filming Lawrence of Arabia, he found and bought a precious pair of Greek earrings, but he had to get them through customs, so he smuggled them through in his foreskin.

Wow. Wow. No. I didn't expect that. I told you it wasn't relevant. Are you sure, Jumbo? Are you sure it's there? We better get the cat as well.

My second opinion. She's an elephant. He's a cat. Together, they fight crime. Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us

about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, James, at James Harkin, and Shazinski. You can email a podcast at QI.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account at no such thing, or you can go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com.

We have everything up there from upcoming tour dates to links to all of our previous episodes. We even have a behind-the-scenes documentary called Behind the Gills. Check that at as well. It's us on tour. It's really fun. Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts.

again next week. Goodbye.