No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Death By Aardvark

Episode Date: March 14, 2014

Episode 2 - The second episode of the new podcast from the writers of QI, who discuss the best facts they've found that week. This episode features Dan Schreiber (@schreiberland), James Harkin (@eggshaped), Anna Ptaszynski (@nosuchthing) & Andrew Hunter Murray (@andrewhunterm). For more check out www.qi.com/podcast

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

Welcome to the second episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. This is a QI elf podcast coming to you from our offices in Covent Garden. We want to say, first of all, thanks to everyone who listened to the first episode that we put out last week. got huge numbers. We weren't expecting it and really great feedback. There's a lot of technical hiccups that we are sorting out. We're going to get on with this second podcast now. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with three other QILs, James Harkin and it Chesinski and Andy Murray. And once again, we're huddled around our microphone and these are the best facts that we found out from the last seven days. So in no particular order, here we go.

Okay, first fact. And let's go with you, Anna. Yeah, I found out this week that the first ever sandwich that we know about contained wine. Yeah, but it was a wine sandwich. What? It was so bread with wine? It had other stuff in it, but wine was one of the ingredients, yeah. So the first recorded sandwich was actually more of a rap. It was called a Corech, and it was invented by Hillel, who's a Jewish religious leader from like 100 BC.

So the Jews have been, like, at this festival eating wine and figs and spices and stuff all mixed up together for about a thousand years. and he decided to just shove it between some flatbread. And part of the concoction was wine. So this isn't the Earl of Sandwich's invention. I'm doing the inverted commons sign there when I say that. So this is way before that. This is way before that. The Earl of Sandwich claims credit where it's not due.

Really? Yeah, I never heard that. And that's actually probably, I don't think we've done that, Jenig on QI, who invented the sandwich, have we? No. But what did the Earl of Sandwich do, if anything? I think he was the first person to,

I mean he probably wasn't but he was known for shoving meat between bread in the West people say it's because he was a like a gracious gambler yeah there's no way that he invented the sandwich anyway is that because like obviously for like you say forever people have been putting things in between

two slices of bread yeah it's so obvious I think I like this idea of people just putting their name to something which has been invented for so long like in 1999 in Japan someone patented curry Wow. Yeah.

What happened was the very next year 80 people tried to patent pizza after this happened. Really? Well, there was a guy in Australia who successfully patented in the wheel, right? Oh yeah, what was that? Successfully? Yeah, successfully.

But that was actually the first wheel in Australia. It was just 20 years ago. Yeah, he did. He successfully did it, and it made it past, and he did it as a kind of parody protest to show how, things were getting through the net when it came to patents.

Because I think, too, a lot of people were getting stuff stolen in Australia as an invention. And so, yeah, he successfully did it. I remember the guy in the 70s who patented the comb over. Oh, yeah. Like, obviously that's been happening forever. This is from the Wikipedia about the sandwich, full disclosure. But what it says is, before being known as sandwiches, this food combination seems to simply have been known as bread and meat. Or, or bread and cheese.

Hang on, I just thought that would work for all fillings. You just bread and... Yeah. Bread and chute and nail. Can you imagine? I'm just going to go and have a cheese and ham bread and cheese and ham. I was thinking about, because the idea of wine going into a sandwich, it's a nice thing about what else goes into a sandwich that you would not expect.

But then I started thinking, I bet there's a lot of... stuff that goes into wine that we don't expect. But there's a nettle wine. So nettle being those stinging... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so you can get nestle. That's a... There's cannabis wine which is available,

which has become really popular in the US. This is my favourite one. It's a Chilean wine, and it's been created using meteorite formed during the birth of the solar system. What? Yeah, so it's a... It's been developed by a guy called Ian Hutchin.

He's an English guy working in Chile. It's a meteorite that's believed to have crashed in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, about 6,000 years ago, and it's submerged in the wine during the fermentation process. Yeah, so it's a meteorite wine. I mean, that's extremely cool. Yeah, I really want to taste that. In China, you can get something called three penis wine. Can you guess what's in that? Two penises. No, three penises. It does contain three different penises. Of what? Okay, so deer.

Which is one of them. And it's supposed to be like a general pick-me-up kind of. of bird? Maybe a bird? One of the birds with a penis? Yeah, most birds don't have penises today. 97% of bird species have no penises. But the other three, some of them have very... They are covered in them.

They are... The Argentinian lake duck. 45 centimetres and curled and blue. And that's just a blute it. Yeah. If you're listening to this at home, Google Argentinian Lake Duck penis and you'll see exactly what Andy's talking about.

It is epic. Wow. Well, what's the third penis? I can't remember. History penis. Lucky dip penis. Pinesus. Pinesse du jour. There is one other wine. It's a Japanese wine, which is called Japanese feces wine. It's known as Tong Sol, and it's primarily made using human or animal feces.

So what's the third kind of feces that they can use? Okay, I'm going to give you one. I'm going to give you one. I'm going to trump that even for a disgusting wine. In 1495, it was reported that the Spanish were mixing the blood of lepers with their wine and feeding it to the French as an early kind of biological warfare. That's pretty right, isn't it? Were they at war at the time?

Yeah. It wasn't a preemptive. Okay. So, leper, sorry, leper what? Leper's blood. But it probably wouldn't have done any harm. No. Because 90% of people, 95, are immune.

That's Hansen's disease. Hanson's disease or leprosy anyway. And a lot of people will probably misidentifying leprosy even then as other skin conditions. I'd really like to quickly say a word about the Earl of Sandwich because I love him. It's actually the current Earl of Sandwich I wanted to mention the Eleventh Earl of Sandwich, who's direct descendant of the Earl of Sandwich because he, so he's obviously thought, I'm the Earl of Sandwich. And I've got this son called Orlando.

So he's got Orlando, who's going to be the Earl of Sandwich. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and set up a sandwich shop and go into business with this guy called Robert Earl and it's going to be in Orlando and so that's what he did so the current Earl of Sandwich owns a sandwich shop in Disneyland Orlando called Orlando Blooms

It should be It's called the Earl of Sandwich The good thing about the Disneyland in Tokyo You'll know this better than me Andy But didn't the not one of the North Korean Kim Jong You know this guy? One of Kim Jong Il's three sons

was disinherited for going to one of the Disneyland's. Really? Isn't that great? He had three sons and the first two botched it and I can't remember how the other one did

but Kim Jong Nam is the eldest son of Kim Jong Il and he was detained in Japan with a fraudulent passport in 2001. He was trying to pass himself off as a Dominican named Pang Shion

which translates as Fat Bear in Chinese and so they deported him but he was trying to visit Tokyo Disneyland with his family I got told the other day that Who was it? Someone I know went to South Korea And they stood at the border Of South Korea and North Korea

And apparently what you see when you're at the South Looking at the North Is a huge cardboard cutout of a city That North Korea has put up To give the impression that they're a huge metropolis From South Korea Yeah absolutely They're called them Potemkin towns, don't they?

Yeah, yeah But it's just it's like literally like Imagine the Hollywood sign But done as a ginormous looking city So that's what you see when you look and North Korea. What's made of, I'm sure they laminated it for some way. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, actually.

What's proof out? There is an industrial area at the border where they both work. That was where there were a lot of recent tension, and they shut down, it's called the Kaishong industrial area. Oh, yeah. And actually, workers from both countries go into it every day, thousands of them work together. So there's this one weird point of contact between the two countries.

My favorite fact about that part of the world is it's called the demilitarized zone, isn't it? Yes. But it's the world's most military. I'm not a lot of it. Yeah. That's an That's a lot of

Derek. Why isn't that in Alanis Morissette? God's sake. She missed out so many opportunities. Didn't scan. We should have rewritten

QI version of ironic for Alanis Morrison. Okay, let's move on to fact two. James, this is your fact. Yeah, I like this one. It's in 2003, three people in Mexico died of acne.

So, I love that. I'm pretty sure you can't die of acne, can you? I don't know how they died. This just came from a list of the ways that people died. So it's on Nationmaster.com and it gives all of the mortality stats for all the different countries.

And so if you looked for people dying of acne, there were seven deaths worldwide, three of which occurred in Mexico. And what I think it is, it's just the way that they do their stats and other countries might have people dying of the same thing, but they don't say it's of acne. So they just died with acne.

Yeah. Let's just say to that. Because I can see that. Otherwise, they have to cut him open. It looks to me like he died of being a 5'6 male. Or maybe they're just, they have to tick a box of what they died with them. And acne is right to the very top. And they're just like, oh, it's the first.

That's the worst. It's an ailment right at the top. Is it an ardvark a disease? No. So, yeah, it's going to be acne. You can be killed by an ard vark. Yeah. Death.

They do have a list of people who were killed by animals. 27 worldwide in 2003 people killed by contact with millipedes Which is pretty cool Poisonous melipedes or? Yeah, venomous ones and I think five of those were in El Salvador I seem to remember you telling me ages ago that in Australia no one's died Ever No one's ever died in Australia's really interesting

But we don't have acne in Australia So that no one bitten by a spider or a snake has died in the last 50 years It's certainly been a long time since a spider bite killed anyone because they have very good anti-venom now in Australia. I think it was the 1980s and I just remember looking this up because I got paranoid that I'd been bitten by a black spider in Tasmania. Pretty sure that I was going to be the next case. Wow.

What we do a lot on QI is find like people with funny deaths. And I don't think that's bad because death is just a part of life. And, you know, we all die. And if it can be quite a funny thing, then that's good. So you could have been in one of those lists of... You could have been a stat. You would have liked it. It would have been announced in the QI office

and you would have been like, that's awesome. What a great fact. That's going on, series. I almost had a death which I thought if it happened, it would have made a nice list for you. Well, when I was living in Hampstead, we got evacuated from our apartment one day because police were outside.

They didn't even tell us, but we went outside and then they didn't let us back in. And I was like, what's going on? And they said, we found in the basement of your flat an unexploded World War II bomb. And so they had people inside detonating the bomb. But it struck me that had that had gone off, the person calling my parents, the police officer,

would have had to have said, your son's met with a tragic accident. And so how'd he die? Well, he was blown up. Who did this? We believe it to be the work of the Nazis. I would have become a victim of World War II. I think that's Hitler would have killed.

I have an even worse one than that because there was a Russian psychic in the 80s who wanted to prove that he was psychic. And so he stood in front of a moving train and tried to stop it with his mind and was killed by the train. Oh, my God. I have one death, which I'd like to share.

Please. Wow. This is the man who introduced the camel to Australia. His name is John Ainsworth Horrocks, and he died in 1846. And he brought the first camels there because they were used to build the railways, and the result is now that there are a million feral camels in Australia.

But anyway, the man who... introduced him, John Ainsworth Horrocks, was killed by his own camel. What? He... What? Trample to death? No, he was riding it, and he was reloading his gun. It sort of lurched a bit as he did so, and the gun went off,

blasted him in the arm and in the body. He lived four days during which he ordered the camel to be shot. What a bit of him. I looked at him, so acne, just because I was so skeptical about the idea of acne killing you. So, and then got really caught up in theories about acne from the 19th century, what caused it. So for like 150 years, they were referred to as chastity postules, because it was thought that the reason you had acne was because you weren't having sex.

And so, like, doctors wrote, so I've got this quote from a doctor in about the 1830s. It is a fact that this affection disappears in young girls immediately after marriage, and that it is especially seen in young men who observe rigorous chastity. And so they thought, well, so first of all, doctors recommend that you marry a marriage. as soon as possible to get rid of them. And then they thought another way of like alleviating it was to give people laxatives. Because that I guess like, I don't know, it expels, perges you in a similar way. But weirdly, they do actually work to cure acne. So they try laxatives and laxatives do work.

Okay. Acne comes, can I tell you my acne thing? It comes from the Greek word cnaon, meaning I gnaw or I scrape. Oh, really? Yeah. I have another cool death here. This was a guy called Morton Norbury. and in 1910 all I know about him is he was killed after an argument over who possessed the most handsome mustache

That's such a good death That's wonderful What's his name? Morton Norby Morton Narby is a great name He sounds so like a guy with a huge mustache I'm on his side Time for fact number three

That is my fact this week I bought a copy of There's a new book out called This Is Improbable 2 by Mark Abrams Mark Abrams is the founder of the Ig Nobel Prizes He's also a good kind of QI family friend. We love him. He's been on Museum of Curiosity. We often do talks at his Ig Nobel tour. One's going to be happening this year.

Yeah, if you go on to, if you check out Mark Abraham. He's at Mark Abraham's or check out mine at Egg Shake. We'll post up when we're going to be appearing in that. So this book is basically a collection. He runs as well as the Nobel Prizes, a magazine which is called the Annals of Improbable Research. And it's a kind of a collection of all the greatest research projects that have been undertaken by scientists around the world. He collects them, rewrites them. And so I'm reading the book at the moment. And there was one story which, it's not so much a fact, but I really like the idea of it.

It's all the other notable Einstein's out there. His point being that it's very hard to have the surname Einstein if you work in science, because there's quite a famous one who worked in science, and he often overshadows the rest of them. So the most notable ones that are out there is Emmy Einstein, who has set an equation that predicts the composition of a pork carcass. There's also a lady called Rosemary Einstein who, she and two other colleagues at the University of Leeds, investigated

the use of cannabis and alcohol and tobacco by 300 young persons at the university. So these are two people who've published reports that have been quite successful in the scientific community. But it did get me thinking about other namesakes, other people with incredible shadows to jump over.

Yeah, it must be hard. Maybe it opens some doors, or maybe it just puts a lot of pressure on you. I think you're right. I think it does open doors. So are there any other Obama's out there at the moment? At the moment, not really. I mean, there's a prime minister in, I can't remember what country,

but he's Obama and he's currently in power. Really? Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, I don't think he's related, but I'll see if I can find his name. It's not actually Obama, just secretly running a thing on the side. I have one found an Obama, which I think is better than the Barack. The Barack Obama.

Yes, Obama. No way. Yep. It's the city of Obama in Japan. Oh, yeah. Don't say, come on. Okay, I'll give you a chance. It's got a population of 32,000, so already that's pretty good. Yeah.

I imagine they'll be quite productive, and they make 80% of Japan's total lacquered chopsticks. Oh, that is great. That is great. Yeah. So when can the president say he's done that, made 80% of Japan's lacquered chopsticks? He can't. I don't know. He's working two jobs as it is, poor way. But, yeah, I mean, it is one of those things. We all have namesake. So you James Harkin, how did James Harkin?

Yeah, there's another James Harkin who writes for the Guardian, I think, or some other newspapers. And Molly from QI met him at a party once. And apparently he doesn't correct people when they think he works for QI. And he said that if I ever want to claim any of his articles, which I'm sure are very good, that I can do that as well. It's nice. It's like going into a cooperative with someone else. Yeah. I should do that with the other Andy Murray.

With the other Andy Murray. Yeah. And we just do a straight split of everything, you know, the money. Start a company. Oh, whatever. Andy, if you're listening to this now, just please, please get in touch. Well, he needs to listen because people are coming up going, hey, great, work on the podcast. Yeah, thanks, cheers.

My thing about the etymology of acne is really, yeah. This week I've been trying to come up with some new facts for our book. So we did 1339 QI. fact, over Christmas, and we're selling it to America. And we need to come up with some facts that work for an American audience to replace the ones that were for a British audience. And one that I really liked was that the first ever player drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers NFL team was called William Shakespeare. Isn't that great? That's such a great fact. Yeah. I really love that. And it's great. And it's great as well because you can imagine that any of the journalists who really

struggle with, they're running out of cliches, basically. That's just a gift. Like you suddenly got Shakespeare is a baseball player. Yeah. Like, if he... He was a football player, NFL player. Uh, not so good. Don't have a string of baseball shirt. That's...

What a waste. I tried to actually test out the theory of someone who is great, like do my own kind of collection of Einstein's, as it were. So I try to think of the most impressive person alive. So I picked who I think is sometimes pitted as the greatest living mind at the moment. So the, uh, actor James Franco. James Franco is consistently, if you read a paper on him,

treated as some sort of great god of the intellectual. For example, this is a quote, this is someone from an interview. He has an unusually high metabolism for productivity, a superhuman ability to focus. So anytime people write about him, they write about with these huge kind of descriptions of it. So check, but okay, okay, I'll justify why people think he's so impressed. He's not only an actor. He's an author. He's a director. He's a poet. He's a painter. despite having an acting career, which he's constantly doing, he's doing postgraduate courses and got permission to take as many as 62 course credits per quarter

compared to the normal limit of 19 while continuing to act. He has an IQ of 140, which is considered to be genius level, although when I was looking into that, I know it's a bit, it's very dubious because the graph I saw it had Mozart, Beethoven, James Frank. Stephen Hawking. No, uh, Shakira. So it's a bit dubious But so I kind of

I started thinking Okay that's the best Franco we have I want to see what about General Franco General Franco I mean is he better than James Franco Well Did he do more? He did more

Maybe fewer movies But was in charge of more countries Yeah I think that's fair I did find one other guy Who is his name He might be a better Franco He's called Jesus Franco He's a Spanish director

He was born in 1930 Actually, he died late last year, rather sadly. He made over 180 movies. So he made a cult movie in 1961 called The Awful Doctor Orlaf. But then his career kind of took a side-weary turn. So he made a movie called The Two Female Spies with Floured Panties, A Penis for Three. Not a Three Piedist, Why?

Night of the Open Viginas Add Lulu's Talking Bunghole. And he also, he was named. by the Catholic Church as the most dangerous director out there. So he was called Jesus as well. Jesus, yeah, Jesus Franco. Oh.

And then Franco is the first name of the first Italian in space. So we have an astronaut. The Jesus guy, he was originally called Terrence, but as they saw his film, they kept saying, Jesus, Franco. For God's sake. I think it's interesting. That's suddenly, you know, take one name, Franco.

Lucy's talking bunghole. Lulu's, sorry. Night of the open virgin. I don't even know what I mean Is it like Night of the Living Dead? Yeah, I don't know. It's a zombie vagina. Walk the earth at night.

Yeah. Whoa, did you know that? It used to be the theory about vaginas. They moved around the body. They would disappear into the middle of the night to go get food. What are you talking about? I read a book called...

It should be here. It should be here. It's called The Story of V. And it was all about vaginas, the history of vaginas. The history of vaginas. The first notable vagina. Was it meant to by the other.

Who got hungry when he was playing cards. The best thing I saw about people's names is I went on to Facebook and NPR had done this post on Facebook saying, do you have a name which is similar to someone famous? If so, how has it affected your life? And there are 1,100 comments on there. I read through them all. But there was a girl called Sharon Stone who said,

if I had a book for every time someone said, are you wearing panties, I'd be as rich as the actress. Oh, a buck. I think you said a book. If I had a book for every time, I'd be able to have a very successful secondhand bookshop.

There was a guy called Dave Apps who had to get special permission from Facebook to have an account because his name was Apps. No. Yeah, which is pretty good. And there's also a guy called Nicholas Dragon. And he said,

I don't think there's anyone famous with my name. but anytime I meet someone new, they say, wow, that's a cool name. And a cool story, Nicholas. He's not wrong. Did you guys know that Samuel Johnson? I know we've got, so we found one and found the other Samuel Johnson, but actually there was a third Samuel Johnson.

So can you give a repeat of what that is? Yeah, of course. So one of the other QI researchers found that there was another Samuel Johnson alive at the same time as Samuel Johnson, you know, the guy who wrote the dictionary, who was a sort of a dramatic. and an entertainer performer who was also known as Lord Flame

A great name that is. Yeah. But there was a third Samuel Johnson who, so Samuel Johnson, the one we know about the dictionary man, was asked to do a translation of this great work by Frau Paulo. I can't remember what it's called, but anyway, it was this great historical work.

It was Big Cheese at the time. It was like the Harry Potter of its day. And so Samuel Johnson was like, yeah, I'll do that, started translating it. Then found out that they'd also asked another guy also called Samuel Johnson to do it. And so he kind of was He was like not only has someone else been asked to do it, but it's someone else called Samuel Johnson. And then there's this series of exchanges in newspapers where Samuel Johnson 1 is getting really angry with Samuel Johnson 2.

And eventually 9 of them translated the work. They just got into this big skirmish and they both went, oh, sod it then. Fine, I'm not doing it. And then Lord Flame came along. Hi! What did we do at Somersault? Oh, dance, you are translation. Let's move on to our final fact. So Andy, we're coming to you, yes. Okay. The fact is,

The first contact lenses cost as much as a car. Wow, what year was this? Well, they were invented in Germany in the late 1880s originally, and Britain was a bit late to it. That was in the 1930s. But even in the 20s and 30s in Britain, so even if they'd been invented for 50 years, they were still that expensive.

Wow. Yeah. So they weren't presumably things that you would change every day. No, no, no. These were hard contact lenses, proper sort of shell-like ones, and they were very thick as well. So they could only be one for two hours max at a time.

Wow. And then the irritation in your eye was so great that you had to take them out. And initially you had to have a mould taken of your eye.

There are great videos if you look up on British Pathet News. There are photos of people's islands being pulled apart, this big mould being stuck in their eye.

And there's sort of the promotional videos and the lady's saying, look, I, you look at how nice my eyes look now I don't have to wear spectacles.

And she's in her eyes are watering. She's clearly in great, and veins everywhere. She's clearly in great pain. Of the mulches of the gun I've never known such clever and ease

It's really funny You should look them up if you're listening It's amazing Maybe you can post it on your Yeah I will I'll put it on my Twitter which is At Andrew Hunter M And you'll be able to see

So yeah that was the first contact lenses So you actually found this out Because you went to a museum didn't you? I went to the museum of the British Optical Association Or British Ophthalmological Association I didn't remember the name of it But I did go to it

It's in Charing Cross It's great Just on the same street, five doors apart, there's Benjamin Franklin's house from when he lived here, and this amazing museum. But you can only go around it by appointment. So you have to email the curator and say, I'd like to see what are your cool stuff. And there's so much amazing stuff. So not only that, the first ever soft contact lenses, i.e. much thinner and more comfortable, you had to, they came in a glass tube. And to get access to the lenses, you had to break open the glass tube.

So there are now shards of glass. Near your contact lenses. And the person promoting them with just crying blood. They were invented. They were invented not to help you see. They were invented to shield people's eyes because there's a medical condition called kerakotones. Kerikotanus.

But very close. It's called kerakotinus. And it means you have a very, very sensitive, it's the cornea, is it, at the front of the eye? And it also becomes pointed. And so they were invented to help people just have their lives. Intense pain and irritation Yeah

They were initially a medical thing in that sense Rather than an is-eyed thing Yeah Did you guys know that Abraham Lincoln's contact lenses Were made of wood That's not true is it No it's not I'm sorry I haven't spoken for a while

I read about Supposedly Renee Descartes made some Contact lenses that were made out of What they were fluid in that would magnify things. But they stuck so far out of your eye that you couldn't blink when you had them in. Wow.

That's great. I'll tell you what, though. The early snow goggles were made out of Caribou Ansela, weren't they? Really? Yeah. And they weren't see-through. They just had a very small slit that you would be able to see through

and it would protect your eyes when you were skiing. That's great. I guess that would work. I was surprised to read that 64% of people supposedly it's an estimate wear glasses. Have you got contacts? Yeah, yeah, I've got them in now. Oh, you wear contacts.

Of course you. They're made of... I mean, well, I'll take about an hour and a half, though. You'll pay that loan off. Okay, that's it for this week's episode. That's all of our facts. Thanks so much, everyone, for listening. I hope you enjoyed it.

We're going to be back again next week with a special edition of No Such Thing as a Fish. We've got two special guests, Greg Jenner, who's the historical. consultant for The Horrible History Show, and we've got an American comedian called Alex Edelman. Until then, if you want to talk to us individually about some of the stuff that we said on the show, you can get me on at Shriverland, James can be gotten on at Egg Shaped, and he can be gotten on at Andrew Hunter M. Anna is still not on Twitter, but if you want to get hold of her, at

Quicopedia, she answers all of those from there. Or you could head straight away to our new podcast page, which is on QI.com slash podcast. We're going to put up videos, we're going to put up pictures from this episode, extra facts, links to show you where we got some of the information on. There's a lot to play with. So again, send us your feedback. Hopefully you enjoyed it and we'll see you again next week. Goodbye.