No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As An Ugly Pair Of Eyes

Episode Date: September 11, 2015

Live from The Edinburgh Festival, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss trophies for trophies, Napoleon’s favourite food and the original IMDb. ...

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:02 And welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast. This week coming to you from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My name is Dan Schreiber. Joining me as ever, the three QI elves. Please welcome to the stage. It's Andy Murray, Anna Chisinski, and James Harkin. 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 point is 00:00:41 Starting with you, James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that Las Vegas hosts an award ceremony for people who make awards. What do they get? They get a gold obelisk. Yeah. That is good, isn't it? It's the awards and personalization association, and they celebrate things like best trophy. That gets an award.
Starting point is 00:01:05 Best plaque. That gets one. Best plaque. Best plaque. And best sandblast. sting, that's one. What is that? I didn't look it up. Yeah, the US and Canada
Starting point is 00:01:19 industry for awards is $3 billion a year. That's how much people spend on awards. And that, I worked it out, is enough to give every person in the country a three to five inch resin trophy in the sport of their choice. That seems a much better way of doing it. Just do away
Starting point is 00:01:39 with all the games and sports. Just give everyone a trophy. Yeah. It'd be great. That's amazing. That's because, well, they are hugely money, don't they? The Oscars, we might have talked about this before. The Oscars, the party bag that you get, if you're attending the Oscars, is extraordinary. It's worth something like 120 grand per bag.
Starting point is 00:01:54 Last year, before's, came with every female who'd attended got in their party bag, a genital stimulator, I think. No, it was surgery that can be performed on you in order that you have better orgasms. And every woman who attended, the Oscars got a little voucher for one of these. surgeries. So yeah, it's good to do. It's better than the party bags of youth.
Starting point is 00:02:18 Yeah, it's not a balloon and a bit of cake wrapped in the tissue, is it? Mind you, I think you'd be in trouble at a child birthday party. I started looking up some other awards ceremonies that the UK has based on this fact. And you might like to know
Starting point is 00:02:36 that there is a British kebab awards where categories include best newcomer kebab restaurant and outstanding contribution to the kebab industry which this year I'm sure we all know was won by Edmonton Meat How are the acceptance speeches for that? You just have to slowly turn around as you make a speech.
Starting point is 00:03:01 Another award ceremony that they have which I think the prize for this is enormous given the nature of it So the Smelly Foot Contest, the Riecky Foot Competition, for which it's called the Sneaker Contest, the Sneaker Contest. And the winner every year gets $2,500 as well as to Nightstay in New York and a trip to a Broadway show, which just for proving that your feet stick. For having smelly feet? Yeah. How's it judged?
Starting point is 00:03:28 It's the panel of judges. I can tell you how it's judged, because I actually coincidentally Googled this as well. They check the condition of your heel of your shoe. the soul, the tong, the shoelaces, the odor of the shoe, which is tested by a group of people, one of whom is NASA's sniffer. No. The guy who smells everything before it goes up in space.
Starting point is 00:03:51 This guy's incredible. He literally, he has the most sensitive nostrils on our planet. Nothing goes into space unless it goes under his nose, and he goes, yep, that's the only way it goes into space. If he doesn't like the smell, it does not go to space. This is the most powerful set of nostrils on our planet, and he gets test four times every year where they put beakers of different smells
Starting point is 00:04:11 under his nose. Some contain no smells, some contain a tiny trace and if he fails, he loses his job. He has never failed. He's got the best nostrils on the planet. And even if he did fail, he's got a lucrative sneaker judging career to fall back on.
Starting point is 00:04:24 And so the other thing that these guys do in the competition is that the entrant has to give a verbal response to the question, why he-stroke-she feels that he-stroke-she has rotten sneakers and how they got that way. And last year's winner, Kan Young Hiss, answered the question with, I bike and high coffin.
Starting point is 00:04:43 I've worn them through mud and also through chicken, pigeon, goose and dove poop. And I also don't wear socks. So that was her answer. Oh, the sock bit got you. That was the... Yeah.
Starting point is 00:04:59 And you get into the Hall of Fumes, don't you? The Odorita's Hall of Fumes, if you win it. It's a very clever contest. No, but that's actually true. There wasn't just me making a really bad joke. Where you go. Supposedly, the original trophy was an ancient Greek word,
Starting point is 00:05:14 and it's what it was originally, and it was when you hung your dead enemy's armor on a tree after a battle so everyone could see that you had won. Yeah, amazing. Have you guys heard of the Golden Collar Awards? No. Which are a really big deal, apparently. Every year there's an award ceremony that follows the Oscars
Starting point is 00:05:32 for the best dogs in films. Really? Yeah, yeah, and you get the same category, so you get Best Dog in a Theatrical Film, which I think the dog in the artist won it in the year I was reading about. RIP just passed away. Oh, no.
Starting point is 00:05:47 Sorry. It's not breaking news. It happened ages ago, just no one knows because no one cares. It's not like a... Well, after his death, he might have taken part in the UK's Good Funeral Awards, which is a real thing. Categories include Cemetery of the year.
Starting point is 00:06:05 embalmer of the year, major contribution to the understanding of death. Whoa. Wow. And the final cat in my favorite is Grave Digger of the Year. It's real. What is it to dig a good grave? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:06:23 What are the qualifications? Is it like quantity or quality? I don't know if it's sort of strength or speed or depth. Depth? I mean, because there's a famous term that sort of gives it a sort of bottom ceiling, as it were, six deep. I don't like the phrase bottom ceiling at all. Okay, we always lose down at some stage.
Starting point is 00:06:47 It was a bit early today. It's not very early tonight, yeah. So, speaking of bottoms, something you could do with your bottom relating to award ceremonies is be a seat filler at the Oscars, right? And I think we should try and do that. So I think you can only get the job
Starting point is 00:07:02 if you work for PWC, which sponsors the Oscars, or if you know someone involved. But it's because if the country, camera pans out to the audience and like, you know, Liv Tyler or whoever's famous these days goes to the toilet, then it looks like there's an empty seat. And so you've got to wait there in the wings. And as soon as a famous person stands up,
Starting point is 00:07:17 then you've got to run into their seats in Exa George Clooney for a bit. But you're under strict instructions not to interact with any of the actual invitees. This isn't funny, but I had that the National Television Awards. We went on stage, and then people came in our seat. And then afterwards, we had to... I used to do that job, weirdly. That's how I met everyone at QI. I was, you told, because I would have thought
Starting point is 00:07:45 if I'd gone and got an Oscar and gone back and someone had stolen my seat, I'd just be like, what the fuck are you doing in my seat? I was reading an article about the Oscars and they make about, I think it's about 50 every year. Yeah. And you're not allowed to sell them either, are you? I thought you had to offer them back
Starting point is 00:08:00 to the Academy Awards first for a dollar. For one dollar, yeah. And then if the Academy Awards are like, oh, we can't really afford that. Then you can put your Oscar on eBay. We'd love to afford it, but unfortunately we blew all the budget for this year on buying every woman who attends magic vagina surgery. I have a few recursive things. Can I say those? So this is an award ceremony for awards. There's a village called Borten on the water in Gloucestershire, and it has a one-ninth scale exact replica of the village inside the village. But that replica also has a village inside of it. and that replica has a village inside of it.
Starting point is 00:08:39 And the recursion stops after level four, well, five if you include the original village. Yeah. But yeah, it's got five villages inside a village, inside a village, inside a village. Have you guys heard of Alice Brady? No. We won an Oscar in 1938. She won the best actress Oscar in Best Supporting Actress
Starting point is 00:08:54 in a film called In Old Chicago. And she was unable to make it. So I think she was either on holiday or she was sick. Everyone knew she was unable to make it. So someone went and picked up the Oscar in her place at the ceremony. Turns out, no one noticed, that person was, she hadn't sanctioned that at all, and someone just walked up with her Oscar,
Starting point is 00:09:10 no one's ever found out where that is. Wow. Who that guy was. They just need to search for a person with vaginal surgery. Check it against all the records. Quite hard to search for that, James. Oh, you guys are not Googling hard enough.
Starting point is 00:09:25 Should we move on to our next fact? Okay, time for fact number two, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that Napoleon loved roast chicken so much that his household chefs were constantly cooking some in case he decided he wanted any. Which is my personal aim for my life.
Starting point is 00:09:43 I think that's when you know you've made it. But so is this, I mean, is there a lot of, is chicken sort of really, if you read a Napoleon biography? Is it just everywhere? There's just constant mentions of chicken? Barely a page goes by in the seminal 700 page Napoleon biography. He was more chicken than man by the end. No, I don't know.
Starting point is 00:10:05 It's just something that was an article about. about it recently, which I spotted. This was at his palace in Paris, the Tuileries, and just chicken was constantly being cooked on a spit because he was very erratic in the way he ate. He would have meals at odd times of day, and he, you know, was not a breakfast, lunch and dinner sort of man. Once when he went on a journey from Cairo to, where was it, I think Suez, he just took three roast chickens wrapped in paper as his provisions with him. So yeah, he loved it. Found out quite a cool Mussolini had a code word that he used to tell his wife whenever he was doing
Starting point is 00:10:36 something at the table and he didn't want his mother-in-law to know what he was doing. What was he doing at the table? Is it the same as what these people were doing at my awards ceremony? Sorry, yeah, I should clarify. It's once he left the table that he started doing the thing. So he loved dueling with swords.
Starting point is 00:10:54 He was really obsessed with dueling with swords. And so he got into fights all the time with people over just minor little things. And he would say at the breakfast table to his wife, this was the line, today we are making spaghetti. And that was code to say,
Starting point is 00:11:10 today I'm going outside to fight another man with swords. But like what happened if he actually was eating spaghetti one day and then some guy just came at him with a sod because he thought it was the code. Yeah, it's a confusing code, I agree. And also, I bet like at the same time
Starting point is 00:11:23 the mother-in-law, because she was living with them, would probably be going, ooh, spaghetti tonight then. And no matter what was the plans for dinner would suddenly be changed because Mussolini wanted a fight. You've just got a cooked man's hand here.
Starting point is 00:11:34 What happened today? with the spaghetti. How many secrecy did he keep from his mother? Did he have a code for I'm going to enslave a nation and then go to war with various other nations was that, and now I'm going to feed the cat. Just as a side note to this fact, I found a website all about rabbits
Starting point is 00:11:51 during the course of my research called Napoleon Bunny Part. Just so you knew. Was Napoleon once not attacked by rabbits? There is this story, yeah. And it's hard to know what's, um, propaganda. It's been explained as his biggest ever defeat that he was attacked
Starting point is 00:12:08 by bunnies on a battlefield and had to run away or something like that. I thought it was when he was visiting Egypt, possibly. But yeah, he was mobbed by rabbits when he was out hunting or shooting. People always think he's afraid of cats, don't they? Which I don't think is true, but I think they're confusing him with Napoleon III, his nephew
Starting point is 00:12:24 who used to have to jump onto a table if a cat entered the room or like climb up the curtains to avoid it. That's one thing cats can do, climb up curtains. That's weird. Not a smart man. That's why he doesn't have the...
Starting point is 00:12:38 Yeah, the kudos it is, uncle does. Josephine's dog really hated Napoleon. Yes. And apparently during their wedding night, it bit him on the leg while he was asleep. Not during the... So they had a problem with animals, didn't they? I wonder if his actual...
Starting point is 00:12:52 The rest of his life has actually distracted us from the fact that he was the one human on earth who animals all hated unanimously and that we've been blinded to that actual real extraordinary fact about a man. There was another Napoleon. I think one of the very last members of the Napoleon family Jerome Bonaparte
Starting point is 00:13:08 Jerome Bonaparte They moved to New York Or the fact, no they did Guys Stop it They escaped after the After the fall of Napoleon Lots of his family members
Starting point is 00:13:22 With lots and lots of money And one of them died Jerome Bonaparte I think it was died after tripping over two entangled dog leads While out on a walk Oh my God Yeah
Starting point is 00:13:32 Ooh Well, also he had problems with horse rights. I'm loving this theory. I really think you might be right. So some historians speculate that the reason that he lost at Waterloo is because he had incredibly bad haemorrhoids, which was a serious problem for him that repeated throughout his life, and that he couldn't sit on his horse throughout that day,
Starting point is 00:13:52 which is due, so I think we don't have any evidence that he rode his horse. And so he couldn't survey the battlefield properly, and he couldn't ride his forces into battle. He had to stay backstage because he couldn't sit in a saddle. It was too painful. And there we go. That was the end of everything. So he just couldn't get high enough.
Starting point is 00:14:07 I mean, he wasn't that short? This is a sort of myth that he was short, wasn't it? Yeah, he was kind of short. He was, I think he was an inch taller than Sarkozy. Okay. But at the time, he was taller than the average Frenchman. And he was taller than Nelson. I'm sorry to say.
Starting point is 00:14:21 But it is weird how often I was reading a thing of first-hand sources about Napoleon. And it's weird how often people point out his small stature, given that we say that he was above average height. Maybe he just seems, you know, when you see someone who like seems like they're small but actually they're six foot maybe he's just had a very small demeanour i don't know why are people always going on about it can i um can i tell you someone else who likes chicken yeah yeah is it is it i james like chicken uh no it's stacey irving from birmingham of course she eats chicken nuggets it's the only thing she eats chicken nuggets all the time uh she has
Starting point is 00:14:58 20 a day uh that she shares with her boyfriend and doctors have worn that it's very very very very bad for her health just eating chicken nuggets. I mean, if she shares them, she's not having 20 a day. And that's like... I mean, she is kind of like, it is really bad for her health. But the newspaper article said, a less serious consequence of her craving is that she's struggling to store all of the free toys that come with a fast food meal. So she might be dying, but yeah, where's she going to keep those toys?
Starting point is 00:15:27 What is it? The world's largest chicken nugget is twice the size of the world's largest chicken, I think? Whoa, really? Imagine finding that in the box. Someone else actually, you'll probably know this, Gary Watkinson from Huddersfield. Oh, of course, yeah, yeah. He only eats beans on toast.
Starting point is 00:15:50 That's the only thing he ever, ever eats. And it's from ever since he can remember. But he actually said the beans on toast thing is only more recent. Before that, it was just beans and toast separately. And then like a second Einstein, one day, a moment of inspiration. Yeah, Yvonne Wake from the Nutrition Society said, Gary is probably not constipated.
Starting point is 00:16:24 I read a... So just on the subject of leaders and food. So a lot of leaders get given international gifts all the time. I'm thinking in particular of the American presidents, Two pandas were given to Nixon, that kind of thing. I discovered that LBJ, Lyndon B. Johnson, was given by an unnamed source, a Chinese chef called Mr. Wong,
Starting point is 00:16:52 who just rocked up to the White House door, and he used to, there's all these reports. No one really knew what he was doing there. Mr. Wong just lived with them during his term. They were trying to go to the holiday retreat that they go to, and they couldn't find Mr. Wong, because they were bringing him because he decided to play hide-and-seek with the president.
Starting point is 00:17:08 and they eventually found him behind some curtains after like a good long search. He was hiding from a cat, to be fair. But presidents aren't allowed to accept gifts that are worth more than something like $5, so he must have been an extremely cheap man. Yeah, I don't know. Did you know that, fittingly,
Starting point is 00:17:28 someone bought, so Napoleon has two of those hats that survive, the Napoleonic hats, and one of them was bought for $1.5 million last year, and it was bought by a chicken mogul. It was bought by this Korean guy who owns a chain of chicken, fried chicken restaurants, the Harim Group, which I think provides fried chicken to the people of Korea. So on things of Napoleon's being sold,
Starting point is 00:17:51 in 2006, one of Napoleon's teeth was sold for 11,000 pounds. Blimey. In June this year, a couple of months ago, a single one of Napoleon's hairs was sold at auction for 130 pounds. And I think we've said before on this podcast that after he died, Napoleon's penis was. removed and mummified and has passed through several hands and has been auctioned several times.
Starting point is 00:18:12 But I have a theory that someone out there is reassembling Napoleon. I think the hair thing is a small victory for Napoleon against Wellington because, so later on the hair is obviously depreciated in value because in the 90s, a lock of Napoleon's hair sold for £3,680 at auction. And I think in the same year, Wellington's hair only got 598. So that's quite a nice, it's like balances out, the record between those guys. A penguin named Napoleon
Starting point is 00:18:42 Bolterpart has fallen in love with a Wellington boot. Can you imagine if we don't know really what reincarnation is, but everything is conscious and that's them actually just having a... Sorry about that past life, I hope you're well. They never met, did they?
Starting point is 00:19:02 Did they not? Never met. But, so once the English had defeated the French, Wellington had an idea that he presented to the British government that was discussed, that rather than sent him into exile, they build him a house really near Wellington's house somewhere on the British coastline,
Starting point is 00:19:18 and they live near each other, and they just hang out an exchange, like, strategic tips and anecdotes. I mean, what a great idea. Who kiboshed that plan? Because that sounds fantastic. We've said on the show that Wellington was obsessed with Napoleon. He bought all of Napoleon's stuff after Waterloo, and he hired Napoleon's ex-cook.
Starting point is 00:19:36 The mysterious. And everlasting, Mr. Wong. I'm going to have to move us on in a second. Has anyone got anything else? I got one last thing. This is, it's not particularly interesting or anything. Stop the hard sell down, please. Sometimes you read a sentence, you think,
Starting point is 00:19:55 that's the best sentence I read today. So it's just this, Stalin loved bananas and would be furious if you served him a substandard banana. Okay, it's time for fact number three. and that is my fact. My fact this week is that IMDB was originally just a list of actresses with beautiful eyes.
Starting point is 00:20:17 It just started as this little list that the guy created and he just thought, I need to put together a list of all the actresses that I think people need to know have beautiful eyes. And then people started going to it and adding other lists and then IMDB grew out of it. And it was called Those Eyes, to begin with.
Starting point is 00:20:33 That's the original name. Wow. The words reported is Cole Neidman brought together two things to turn them into IMDB. And people often say, IMDB grew out of this list of women with beautiful eyes. And what he brought together was, one of those things was the list of actresses with beautiful eyes.
Starting point is 00:20:47 And then the other thing he brought in, just as a little add-on, was a list that someone else had created, which was a movie ratings report, where participants were asked to rate movies on a 1 to 10 scale. But it was mainly based IMDB on the actresses of beautiful eyes. I mean, it sounds like the actresses with beautiful eyes was kind of a random, irrelevant list that just, you know, happened alongside it.
Starting point is 00:21:07 He sort of put them all together. he records the details of every film that he sees and he has done since he was 13 years old Colneedham and he has seen this was 18 months ago so he's seen more since then but at that count it was 8,505 that's one film for every 48 hours since he was born
Starting point is 00:21:23 Wow! His favourite film is Vertigo Really? And that's why it always tops the charts because he's rigging it isn't he? Because it's a good film but you know I read an article that said that he and his, it was a quote by him. He said that he and his wife
Starting point is 00:21:40 love going to the cinema and they watch a film together every Tuesday lunchtime. But what it sounds like is they do do that, but the rest of the time it's just him watching loads of other movies. So it's more like my wife has begrudgingly agreed to come to the cinema with me once a week, otherwise we would never see each other.
Starting point is 00:21:58 When he was a boy, he rented out the film Alien and he watched it every single day for a fortnight. Wow, that's a waste of his time. He needs to be getting through these films. Yeah. Well, he said that recently there are so many more good films being made these days. It was just that at the time that was one of the best films ever made, and it was so huge. It is a fantastic place.
Starting point is 00:22:15 I actually do a fair bit of QI research by looking at the IMDB, Did You Know, Section. I love reading the user reviews because the honesty of it is just, here's my favorite one. I haven't even read further than the title of this review, but it was for the movie Batman and Robin, and the headline was, I lost faith in humanity. Signed the Joker. Do you know what is the bottom-ranked movie on all of IMDB? No. It's called Jurassic Shark.
Starting point is 00:22:49 It's from 2012. It's got a rating of 1.5%. And here's what it is. It's when an oil company unwittingly unleashes a prehistoric shark from its icy prison, the Jurassic Killer maroons a group of thieves and a beautiful young female college student. on an abandoned piece of land. How did they manage to screw that up, though? Because that sounds like such a winning this film.
Starting point is 00:23:13 I'll give you some others in the bottom, like 20 or something. The Hottie and the Notty from 2008. Oh, there's Parris Hilton movie. Oh, is it? Apparently, apparently. I think we found out why it's not at the absolute bottom. Do you know the... So there's one film on IMDB, which isn't...
Starting point is 00:23:36 marked out of 10, which is spinal tap, and the IMDB page marks that its rating is marked out of 11. So it gets 8 out of 11. Which actually really affects how good a movie it is in the overall rating. That's really annoying because I worry that people haven't noticed and they're giving it an 8, thinking that's out of 10 and that's 80%.
Starting point is 00:23:52 But it's not. It's obviously X% that I'm not going to patronise you by working out here myself right now. But it's a lower percent. It should be higher than 8 out of 11. I read a cracked.com article about the most depressing IMDB pages. Their top one was someone called Leslie Bremer, and she's only had nine roles in her whole career. They include girl in bikini, shower girl, party girl, and girl leaving room.
Starting point is 00:24:25 She's only had one named part in her entire career, and it was she played Sandy in a movie called School Spirit. But on IMDB, it says, in several scenes, actress Leslie can be seen wearing a necklace with the letter L on it, despite the fact that her character's name is Sandy. I'm going to have to move us on in a sec. We're going to power through to the last one. Anyone got anything else?
Starting point is 00:24:50 I looked up IMDB's current poll of actresses of beautiful eyes. And it's just a list. It's really weird. So there are lots of people who submitted their own list, but like their own curator ones. But this one's a poll which takes others users into account. So the top 20 is all people. like Cameron Diaz, Rachel Vice, Natalie Portman, other people like that.
Starting point is 00:25:08 And then Joan Plowright is in there. I don't know if you know who that is, but I mean, she's 85 years old. She is a kind of famous stage actress. She's often in things like Inspector Morse playing a servant woman. But does she have really nice eyes? I looked really hard. And to be honest, I found it hard to see what they're talking about. Everyone's got nice eyes.
Starting point is 00:25:28 I mean, just eyes are nice, aren't they? Yeah. How long? You know, you know, you know, you can say, someone's got nice hair or not very nice hair but eyes are just nice to look at. Everyone likes looking at an eye. I've seen some bad eyes.
Starting point is 00:25:43 Have you? Some of some really bad eyes. I have a couple of facts about eyes if you want them. Yeah. Fact number one, eyes are lovely. Fact number two, the first person known to have had blue eyes was we know who it was. So it was 7,000 years ago, it was a caveman
Starting point is 00:26:02 living in Spain because it's a mutation. So everyone who's got blue eyes can trace the ancestry back to that particular individual. I wonder if everyone just went to that caveman and went, you have beautiful eyes. And then Andy went, everyone has beautiful eyes. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Chazzynski. Yes, my fact is that the word fascinate literally means the embodiment of the divine phallus. certainly the sense in which I use it all the time
Starting point is 00:26:34 so this is the etymology of fascinate it comes from the Latin word Faskinum which was either Faskinus the phallic god which who we know very little about or it was a Fasconum was a phallic object that you carry around for good luck which they did a lot of the time because they like to ward off the evil eye or something like that
Starting point is 00:26:55 Yeah exactly so the verb Fascinari in Latin was to use the power of the phallus to either ward off the evil eye or to hypnotize someone in an evil manner. So if you're fascinating somebody, you are using the power of the phallus in order to cast a spell on them. This is what Dan was doing at that award ceremony.
Starting point is 00:27:13 Yeah. So I spent most of today Googling, penises are fascinating, and... It's a lot out there. All penises are beautiful, I'm there. Well, back in, back May last year, James and I were in the office alone together.
Starting point is 00:27:37 We kind of ran out of conversation, and this is kind of... This is really not the time, no, the place for this. People need to know. So we kind of just ran out of conversation, and James just, in a way to sort of just spark up conversation, just looked up to me and said, hey, do you know that there were over 600 guys in the world with two dicks? like and as if that was like oh good we're back in we have a more conversation going again and i googled it and there were yeah there were 600 men in the world who have two penises and on reddit there's that website reddit they have that thing AMA
Starting point is 00:28:11 and AMA asked me anything one of the most successful things they ever had was someone coming on saying i have two penises ask me anything it is one bit where in an interview who's talking about it says the most upsetting moment for him was a girl he dated uh seriously he got he got he was over one night stands and they dated for three months they were just kissing and cuddling. She finally was ready. I'd put it off for another month after that. But when
Starting point is 00:28:35 it came down to it, I told her that I was built different from other guys. I was sort of slightly built different. She said she didn't care. I revealed them to her and she said she definitely cared. If only she had known that all penises are beautiful.
Starting point is 00:28:53 There was a guy that used to freak shows in the century and there was one guy called um i think he's called like dos Santos or something like that and he was known as the man with two swords and he used to show himself off as a man with two penises and he married a woman called blanche um dumas or something like that she called two scabbards or something no she but she did have two vaginas yeah what there's someone out there for everybody Okay, this was a fact about etymology. Oh, yeah.
Starting point is 00:29:33 Sorry, sorry. Yeah, back to Roman penises at least, because that's more highbrow, I think. They were more highbrow then. So they used to, at the age of nine days, Roman boys would be given an amulet with a phallus inside it, and that was to ward off the evil eye. That was the point of it.
Starting point is 00:29:51 And they'd have to go around wearing this amulet with a phallus inside it until they came of age. Because they weren't really, they weren't as obscene as they are now, or they weren't seen as being obscene, because of this whole good luck thing. Yeah, and also getting rid of this evil eye, it was really thought to be a really serious thing.
Starting point is 00:30:05 There's a Roman mosaic of a phallus ejaculating into a disembodied eye. Wikipedia described it as a relief. So that, have you seen the relief? I've seen it. It's pretty... It's so weird. The phallus has its own penis. which is doing the ejaculating.
Starting point is 00:30:30 So it's a lovely stone carved relief, as James says. And I think it's in Turkey, and it's a phallus with back legs, and then there's a smaller penis coming down from it, and it's shoot ejaculating into an eye with a scorpion on top of it. Amazing. But I like the penis with the little penis. It's like that village in Gloucestershire.
Starting point is 00:30:52 I mean, not exactly like that. Yeah. Roman prostitutes sold things called colifio which were little bread rolls shaped like penises. That did they? Yeah. You don't get that in Greggs, do you? We should clarify that Greg's is not staffed exclusively by prostitutes.
Starting point is 00:31:19 Yes, I would like to clarify that. That's why you keep getting injected from Greg's, James. So there's a theory that the reason we don't know very much about Faskinus is that Christians tried to eradicate from our collective memory all the weird stuff that the Romans were interested in like this because they thought they were a bit prudish
Starting point is 00:31:38 but there's another god called, has a really good name, called Moutunus Tutunus and he... Sorry, I was mid-sip and then that's the best name I've ever heard. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:31:51 What was it, Anna? Moutunus to-tunus. Mootie-to-Tooty, nobody ever called him. And he was of a god of fertility, and so there was a tradition in which there would be sculptures of Mutunus Tutus, and he had a large phallus, because that was what he represented, and it has been written that Roman brides to prepare themselves for marriage would have to straddle the phallus of Mutunas to prepare themselves for the upcoming intercourse. He was a dildo.
Starting point is 00:32:26 Mootie-tootie, the first dildo. If that's not in the goodie bags that next year's Oscars, I... You're going to turn down your award. This person is called Faskinus, and another word that comes from this guy whose name means penis is fascist.
Starting point is 00:32:48 Ah. Because originally it came from Faski Siciliani de levatory, and the word Faski came from meaning a group, and that originally was a bundle, but he'd also have the same kind of connotations as something large and whatever, and that was where the word fascists came up. Fasker's rods of office, literally, that Roman officials carried to show their authority.
Starting point is 00:33:11 So basically, all fascists are dicks. I feel like the rest of you didn't really get into that way. Audience of fascists here tonight. I feel like I'm going to be making a lot of spaghetti this evening. I read, I discovered a new martial art discipline today. It's called 99 power Chi Gong. So it's part of Chi Gong. It's one of the rarer practiced bits of Chi Gong and martial arts.
Starting point is 00:33:45 Its other name is Iron Croach. Men of a certain age suddenly need to start attaching lots of really heavy things to their dick and allow it to just get some exercise. I think that's the kind of thing. There's a guy called Master 2. He goes around the world teaching people how to do this. He's described on his website as a graceful man who moves like a swimming dragon
Starting point is 00:34:04 with sudden bursts of thunderous gestures, but what he's mainly known for is that he can tow trucks with his penis. What's wrong with a tow rope? I ask you. Well, I'm just only mentioning it in case anyone's looking for an interesting Christmas gift to give this someone, because you can buy Iron Crosch the DVD,
Starting point is 00:34:22 which is like those exercise DVDs that you get, and it comes with a rope and a hook and you'll be able to find that on no such thing as a fish.com this Christmas along with your Motunus to Tunis, Dildo. And a free copy of Jurassic Shark. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us
Starting point is 00:34:49 about the things we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on Twitter. I'm on at Shreiberland. Andy, at Andrew Hunter M. James. That egg-shaped. Chazzynskiy. You can email a podcast at QI.com. Yep. Or you can go to no such thing as a fish.com.
Starting point is 00:35:02 We have all of our previous episodes up there. We're also doing a tour around the UK. So if you want to go to the website, you can see all those tour dates there. We will be back again next week with another episode. Thank you so much for being here, guys. Thanks for listening at home. See you again next week. Goodbye.

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