No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Domesticated Furniture

Episode Date: March 27, 2015

Live at the Soho Theatre, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss eccentric dinner parties, the most pointless scientific studies and what happens to tattoos when they die.

To another episode, no such thing as a fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the Soho Theatre in Central London. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andy Murray, and Anna Chisinski. 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, Andy Murray. My fact this week is that when you have a tattoo Lasered off you end up pooing it out That's what happens Does it still have the same design on the poo?

So yeah this happens So when you have a tattoo it goes into the middle layer of the skin Which is called the dermis And when it's lasered off The beams of light They heat up the ink and it breaks down into tiny particles And those go into the bloodstream and then they are excreted via the liver and the digestive system,

and that's how they get out of you. I just think that's amazing, yeah. I mean, that says something about how little you want the tattoo anymore, doesn't it? It's sort of a statement. So do you know what tattoos are made out of, like the ink? Do you know where that comes from? Okay, well, there was a lady on Facebook who got a tattoo, a vegan, on her inner lip, and then her friends pointed out

that actually most black ink of tattoos is made from burnt animal bones. Oh, God. She's going to see that every time she looks in the mirror. Every time she eats anything, she's going to get a little. Oh, that's the worst spot. You can get vegan tattoos, but they're very rare indeed. Right. Yeah.

The oldest tattoo we know of is on a lip, isn't it? Is it? It's a tattoo of a thin pencil mustache. Tattooed onto the upper lip of a 7,000-year-old mummy from Chile. Wow. Mm. What? Like a little...

French kind of... I'm not sure if it has the gap down the middle that a pencil mustache is supposed to have. I didn't... Do they have to have a gap down the middle? Don't they? No.

I've never... All right, yeah. I think of someone who's never been able to grow a moustache. I don't know. Dan? I don't know. Yeah. My grandmother has tattooed eyebrows.

It's hot. Does she, like, permanently look surprised? I don't know. I don't know where her original eyebrows went, though. That's what I don't know. Does she poo them out? I do think you were going to say your grandmother had a thin pencil moustache, which would be kind of a cruel thing to share.

Yeah. So the thing on tattoos being quite, sort of the stereotype of them being for sailors or for criminals or whatever it is, the headline tattoos are not just for sailors anymore, has appeared in print every decade since the mid-19th century. Every decade, there's a rash of articles saying, they've entered the mainstream, here they are. So today, more teachers have them,

members of the armed forces. Really? Yeah, by 14% to 9%. But it used to be like 90% of sailors had tattoos, wasn't it? Something like that in the 19th century, probably. Yeah. And one thing that it was good for was it meant that you could identify

a sailor who had drowned because you'd be able to identify them by the tattoos. And they were actually used in that way. Sorry, you could tell that he had a tattoo that said, I have drowned. He has a lot of tattoos. The first one says, help. The third one says, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And the other thing that they thought the sailors is if you had hold tattooed on your knuckles on one hand and fast on the other hand, then it would help you hold onto ropes better. One way you could stop drowning as a sailor apparently was to have a pig tattooed on your knee and then a cock, as in a rooster, tattooed on your right leg somewhere. And they had a saying that was pig on the knee, safety at sea, a cock on the right, never lose a fight.

Which is weird. Neither those animals can swim. Yeah. Fight very well. Speaking of cocks and tattoos. Oh, God. Sometimes when I want to find out some facts for this show, I'll go back to the old QI talk boards

and see what I wrote in the past. And I touched for tattoos, and I found something that Dan posted in 2005. Really? And this is what he said. He said, I was told today that if a man was to have a tattoo done on his penis, then he was entitled to free tattoos

for the rest of his life from anywhere in the world in any tattoo parlour no questions asked. This is what used to pass for QI research back in the day. So I have a confession. It's not just my grandmother with a tattoo.

Well, I had a look and there are one or two tattoo parlors that will claim that they will do that whether they will or not. I don't know, but it's not everyone in the world all the time. It's a very difficult thing to Google, by the way. It's very easy to Google. it's very difficult to forget.

I shouldn't have gone in Google images really, but I found a story about a 21-year-old from Iran who paid a tattoo artist to put the letter M for his girlfriend's last name and the Persian phrase for good luck with your journeys on his penis. And he felt pain for eight days, and then his penis became permanently semi-erect, so he couldn't get it to go down. He lived with it for three months before getting medical help, and doctors tried shun-stead.

the penis to drain excess blood. Shunting. Shunting? Yeah. It's weird, that, isn't it? And then it didn't work. And so the patient decided he was fine with the condition and declined further treatment. Wow.

Wow. So they were a quite a high society thing, weren't they, in the 19th century? And at the turn of so in about 1900, New York newspaper estimated that 75% of society ladies in New York had tattooed. 75%. But what kind of tattoos? Like practical ones or... Practical tattoos? Yeah, I'm going to...

I'm back away from that. No, no, no, no, you do. Don't back away. Step up. You get medical tattoos. And we think that some of the oldest tattoos ever, which are 5,000 years old, the 3,000 BC, we found bodies,

where there's a body in the Alps which has tattoos over his joints, and they looked at the skeleton, and he had osteoarthritis in those joints. So it's like a kind of... This is the ice man, in fact, isn't it? Uthsey.

Yeah, yeah. That's what I meant by it, actually, because the Mercury astronauts apparently as well. No, no, no, but I looked into whether or not astronauts had any tattoos because I just thought that

they seem like the type of people that would, and majority ofly... I feel like I'm saying a lot of things that's just me agreeing with. Mercury astronauts, they would have them in just, like, sensor locations, basically, for whenever they had to monitor their health.

So they knew where they were. Kind of like putting a bit of tape on the ground as a mark for an actor. There was a guy who was arrested by Canada's Border Services Agency with the letters H-A-T-E on his knuckles, and he claimed that it stood for happiness all through eternity. That's very good. Quick thinker. One woman used an internet translation to translate,

I Love David into Hebrew. She later discovered she inadvertently had the phrase, Babylon is the world's leading dictionary and translation software on her back forever But she doesn't have a free account with Babylon forever So David Beckham has Victoria Beckham's name

Miss Belt tattooed onto his body in Hindi Yeah And Samantha Cameron has a tattoo Does she? Yeah, she's cooler than all of us Hello, Dan's grandmother Sorry Is it a practical tattoo?

It's a dolphin on her ankle Is that practical? That's practical No, that's cool Was that just a holiday That she took once? To a dolphin To a dolphinarium

No, just you go in holiday You get a tattoo No, I don't mean that as like Oh, is anyone got a camera? No Oh, quick tattoo that dolphin So I can live this memory forever Yeah, sorry

There's an American guy who has over a thousand tattoos based on Disney characters, including all 101 of 101 Dalmatian. Which I don't. They must be tiny, though. The Dalmatians. Well, obviously none of them is life-size, but, I mean, how many, divide a single, you know, the area of a body by a thousand. It's not much room you've got.

Yeah, so, I mean, I think it is to scale, but it is scale down. And he has a system, so he has all the bat, all the evil, characters are below his knees and all the undersea characters are below his belly. So I don't know, but then all the evil characters aren't under the sea. So I don't know how he works that out. Wow. Anyway, he gets some copyrighted by Disney. Like Disney's allowed him to do it.

Oh, really? He's the only person. Why is it illegal to do a Disney tattoo? I think when you've got that many of them. What would they do? Make you poo it out? Oh, yeah. We're going to have to move on to our next fact.

So if anyone has anything more that they want to add. On mistakes in tattoos, John Caru, who's a footballer? Yeah, John Caroo. John Caru, he got a tattoo saying, he wanted to say, my life, my rules. So he got my vie, my regla. But he got the accent wrong on regla. He got an acute accent instead of a grave one, which translates as, My life, my menstruation.

Okay, it's time for our second fact of the evening. fact is Chazinski's. Yeah, my fact is that the man who invented the airship used to hold dinner parties with 10 foot high chairs so that his guests could experience the joy of flight. This is an amazing Brazilian guy called

Alberto Santos Dumont. And first of all, he decided to have him hanging from the ceiling, which you could understand was more reminiscent of flight. But one of his first dinner parties, he put all his guests hanging from the ceiling and the ceiling collapsed. So he... So after all of the safe... After all the funerals of the previous guests, weirdly, no one wanted to come to the next party in the ceiling was fine.

Yeah. So the wake will be at mine. I've organised a nice dinner. Wow. Yeah, he was great. He was an inventor. He grew up on a plantation in Brazil, and he invented a toy motor-powered functioning aeroplane, which was quite a long time before the first aeroplanes were invented in the late 19th century.

And then he moved to Paris and became a celebrity because he invented the airship, which attracted attention and you'd to invite celebrities and royalty to his house and have these wacky dinner parties and they'd have to mount their seats on ladders and yeah he was so famous in his time that the time said when the names of all those

who have occupied outstanding positions in the world have been forgotten there will be a name which will remain in our memory that of Santos Dumont what was the name again he does sound like an amazing guy he sounds unbelievable actually as in he had his own airship

in Paris when no one else had any means of flight he was just flying around the streets of Paris he would just stop at a cafe tether it and then go down to the cafe then say well so you're like that and four night off it's in the late 19th century i'm 20th century he just did it where what was he tethering to uh roostps and landposts and things like yeah it wasn't huge when you look at photos of it it's not a massive airship it's not the size of the one-on-one or the hindrance no it's a one-man airship i think a personal It's unbelievable. He would go past ladies' bedrooms and they would throw their underwear out of the window at him.

No, that's how famous he has. Really? Yeah, yeah. He was also super generous. So he was responsible for the first woman ever to take flight because there was a princess. She was a princess of some foreign country who came to visit Paris, took an interest in his airship, said,

I wouldn't mind going up one of those. And he taught her to fly one. And then he had her flying one through the streets of Paris. And he cycled below shouting her instructions as she did so. And this was the first woman to fly. Wow. God, actually, it sounds way worse to think of men throwing their underwear at her. He just got, oh, Jesus, I'm not.

He invented other things as well. I know the 10-foot chair. No one talks about it. No one mentions the 10-foot chair. We've all got one. No, he invented a set of motorized skis to get him back up a mountain. Really? And he invented a slingshot which would throw life belts out from sinking ships

so that everyone could have a life belt. He also invented a racing gear ship, which was similar. to his airship, but he never raced it because he had no one to race against. That is so sad. He could have just made two, couldn't he? Can I bring it to dinner parties very quickly? I just want to talk about my favorite dinner party host from history, which is William Buckland. He's a very exciting character.

He studied fossils and he was a geologist, but he also went on this massive mission to eat every single thing in the animal kingdom. He was just like, I need to have everything his favorite. So if you went to his house for dinner, you would end up having things like elephant's trunk or mice on toast was his favorite thing. And he knew food so, like he knew animal food, everything about them so well that he was once invited to go to this church where they thought a saint's blood was on the ground of this church. And he came over there and he had a look at it. And he was like, because it was just this patch on the ground and they thought, oh, it's the saint's blood. He leaned down, he licked it and he came back up and went, no, it's bat urine.

He just knew. But also the worst guest to have at a dinner party in that respect, because he went to this party, which was Lord Harcourt. He's the Archbishop of York. And at the dinner, Harcour was like, I've got this amazing relic that I want to show you all. He brought out what was the heart of Louis XVIth in a box. And within seconds, Buckland just grab it and he ate it.

But you say worse than a guest ever, very few dinner hosts bring the heart of a dead king to the table. I would say worse dinner host ever. Okay, here's another dinner party thing. There were christening of Louis the 14th grandson. He created a cake. Sorry, there was a great chef called Antoine Carame who created a cake.

And the cake was made out of almond paste, pastry, and clockwork. I love clockwork. I love it so much. And it's so hard to get these days in pastries. Every Gregs I go into. They had clockwork because this cake on top of it had a baby duke entering the world through a marzipan vagina

that is quite a centrepiece isn't it so it was him it was celebrating him the child yeah it was a model of of his mother giving birth to him yes through marzipan with quack

don't get that in Gregs to you no wow I was reading that back in the day when furniture was just suddenly being introduced to the idea of us having it in our homes and stuff Wait, wait, wait. I know, it's a very interesting.

When furniture was being introduced to the idea of having it in our arms. It was quite a shock for furniture. It wasn't domesticated until the 1500s. The beautiful days when, you know, freestanding shazes would just roam the belt. It's on a wild chair these days. You know, there are only 400 Louis Cato's tables left in the wild. Sorry, sorry, Dad. Oh, no, that was my fact.

No, apparently when we started introducing furniture, like, cupboards would just be put in the middle of the room, as opposed to against the wall now, and dinner tables, we didn't used to have legs to dinner tables. You would have people come and sit. If you were having a party, there would be a big board like this that you would bring out, and you would put it on your legs.

So they'd just be sat on your legs, and that's why apparently there were boards, and you would be a boarder, and apparently borders who stay in your house. That's why they're called borders, because they would be part of the legs that would hold the table up. Yeah, you hold the table up with your legs. I read this in Bill Bryson's book, at home, and he used to say that carpets, before we used to walk on them, you'd just have them on your wall, and you'd go, it's my carpet.

And if you had a special guess, then you'd take it down from the wall, and you'd put it for them to walk on. And chairs used to be against the walls. You would have chairs against the walls, because at night, when you didn't have electricity, you would not trip over stuff in the middle of your room. But if you had chairs all over the shops, then you might. hurt yourself. Where are you going? You should be asleep. They would get up halfway through the night, wouldn't they?

Because people used to sleep into two different sections. And then get up and have sex or... You're very confident, aren't you? Oh, we're going to have to move on. Should you move on? Has anyone got anything else? I quite like the inactivity chair, which has recently been invented, which is a chair with only two legs. And it is basically so that you live in fear while you sit on it.

And I have to constantly be doing a balancing act. And I think the idea is that you can exercise while also being seated. But it sounds awful. Anyway, invest in one if you're looking to improve your health. I always think, I'm not afraid enough when I'm sitting down. The podcast. We have an emergency announcement to make, and this is it. Today's installment of no such thing as a fish was produced with the help of Squarespace,

which is that award-winning website builder that has 24-7 to the podcast. support e-commerce, beautiful templates. It just makes it really easy to tell your story, however tedious that story may be, to the world. Give your story a voice by going to Squarespace.com and use the offer code fish to save 10% of your order. Okay, back to the podcast. Okay, time for fact number three. That is my fact. My fact this week is that a new scientific study has concluded that there are too many scientific studies.

It's basically the study was saying that it's doing a thing now where so many studies are coming out in science that it's diminishing the attention that gets given to an actual good study because it's drawing headlines away from them and studies are going so sort of minute into these little, I don't know, like there's great ones that we've read in the past that we've talked about in the office and stuff, a study that showed that the fish herring that they fart to communicate. with each other. That's how they talk and that's a study and that might get in the way of say... Yeah, but that could be a good study because like you might want to know if there's a load... So in, I think it was in Scandinavia somewhere they heard a load of like bubbles underneath the sea and they thought it might have been like a Russian submarine

or something like that but it turned out to be herrings communicating by farting to each other and if you hadn't done the study you wouldn't know that that was a thing. So probably saved World War III. Okay, so that was a bad example. Right. There are lots of studies that seem to be taking attention away. So it's the idea that we forget as well.

Yes. So we might have cracked everything five years ago, but just not noticed at the time. And now we're carrying on and on with more studies. And we do start doing some irrelevance. Not we personally. But the Royal Society of Chemistry last year published 11 steps on how to make the perfect cup of tea, which definitively determined after releasing this paper that you are supposed to put the milk in first to avoid denaturation. of the milk.

We actually have big arguments in the QI office and how to make sense a lot of anger. I know. Oh my God, that was like British League ever.

There was a, there was a palpable it wasn't a hiss but it was, it was an intake of breath isn't it? I think we all felt that. So I am with the breath intake

because I obviously think that was a travesty to address you put the milk in first but that is what they say that's a safer way to do it. It's also explained in this study. Three more tea deaths in Orphan Stone. So the single most downloaded paper in the history of the journal,

is it PLOS, Medicine, PLOS? It's the 2005 paper, Why Most Published Research Findings are False. That's quite good, isn't it? So there's a guy who's written a lot of studies about falsehoods in science, and his name is John Ioannidis, and as a boy, he was already doing research on research, as it were. he was doing meta research. And when he was a child,

he came up with a love numbers system to work out how affectionate he was about his own family. He said, my mother was getting a thousand and twenty four point four two. My grandmother, 173.73.73. That's amazing.

Yeah, he said basically that all the statistics in all these papers are a bit dubious, etc. But then a lot of people who said actually his statistics are a bit dubious as well. So, yeah.

All right. Controversial. Yeah. It is certainly, sorry. Sorry, go. I assume he was talking about like publication bias. So the publication bias is a major problem in scientific studies, isn't it? Because only positive results tend to be published.

And about 90% of studies that are done actually yield negative results, which aren't as headline grabbing. And there are journals now which are like the journal of negative results, which is just people who have done experiments and gone, we found nothing. Nothing has been achieved here. And there's important that's important. Yeah, that's great.

And there's also a guy called Mark Shrine at Harvard who wanted to see how easy it would be to get something published. And so he published an article and he made one up using random text generator.com and the article was called Kuckoo for Cocoopuffs and it was by Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Wells. And he submitted it to 37 journals over two weeks and it was accepted by 17 of them.

Wow. Wow. Pinkerton A. LeBrain. It's nominative determinism, isn't it? Because, you know, you have a name like LeBrain. You're going to be a scientist. There's a journal called Brain, isn't there? Do you remember that?

There's a journal called Brain, and there's a guy who used to be the head of brain, who was called Head. Henry Head, it was. And then he left Brain. And then when he left being the head of brain, head was replaced as the head of brain by a guy called Brain. There's a website called Retraction Watch, which is fun,

because they pay attention to people quietly retracting their research when it turns out to be wrong. That is fun. Yeah, it was set up by these two journalists called Ivan Oranski and Adam Marcus, and they're absolute heroes. And the top one or two retraction holders are both anesthesiologists, for what it's worth. And there is one scientist in Japan who has had to retract 100,000, 183 papers out of

212 12. Oh wow. Stop publishing him. But his name is Captain Orson, so they assume it must be right. So I went on to

Dailymail.com.uk and searched for, according to a recent study, just to see if there were too many, really. And here were the first five things I found. Even sharks can be shy

according to a new study. We have covered on the podcast that sharks can have friends. So let's not... It's not... It's not going to be shy sharks. Study reveals the tactics we use to avoid being heard on the loo. Oh, that's great.

Any... Any... Any... Any... Any... I only read the headlines, sorry. Another one was, bump in the night,

send in the wife. One in five men pretend to be asleep when hearing a possible intruder according to a recent... Fortunately, fortunately, it's almost always furniture. They haven't placed safely by the wall. We're going to have to move on. Okay, one more thing.

I looked at other things that there's too many of. And there was a study done that said, it said three quarters of viewers of television have cited confusion over the proliferation of choice as the reason they miss shows, as in there's so many channels they always make. miss TV shows. They're just flicking desperately between them.

Yeah, and they can't find the right one. So I had a look at all the different channels on my TV system, on Sky. And I found one, which I'd never seen before, it's pavershoeshoes.tv, and it's Sky Channel 669. And their programs include sensational sandals, pretty in pumps, and classic clogs. Sounds like the best channel ever that. Thank you eye on this. That's 669.

But in the UK it's 667. It's a shoe size joke. All right, we're going to have to move on to our final fact. How did the shoe material go out? Time for our final fact of the evening. That is James. Okay, my fact is that you should never pick up a desert tart ice. if you do it can pee itself to death

yeah so what they do is they store urine in their bladder which they can then draw upon because they live in the desert so they need as much water as they can get and if you pick them up they can get so scared that they will evacuate their bladder as in wet themselves and then they can die of dehydration because they keep something like 40% of their body mass is kept as the urine that then translates into a sort of of like rehydrated water, not a rehydrate.

It's really, really diluted, I think. Yeah, yeah. It's not too acidic or, you know, it doesn't damage them. But it's just a way that something can live in the desert, but obviously then they don't expect people to just come and pick them up and then they die. But yeah, desert tortoises, pretty cool. They live around Las Vegas area, around Nevada, around there. They dig basins to catch rainwater, another way they get water.

And they always know where they are. And whenever it looks like it's going to rain, they're always found next to these places that they've dug waiting for the water to come so they can immediately drink it. And weirdly, this is really strange. Humans are not so likely to die when they're in their, you know,

children or teenagers or whatever and you get more likely to die as you get older. But weirdly, desert tortoises, they are less likely to die as a time goes on. The older they get, the less likely they are to die. Yeah, yeah. So that's why they live for so long. And that's the, like, tortoises do live for a long time. Yeah.

And that's true of these days. Well, one was so. old. I read this in and apparently there's a bit of contention about whether or not this is true or not, but one of Darwin... I'm ready. What we'll do is we'll cut that out and put it at the start

of every fact you say about that. Basically, there was a tortoise called Harriet, which belonged to Charles Darwin. So the contentious bit is, did that belong to Charles Darwin? They're not fully sure. But Harriet had a bit of a travelled life after Darwin or whoever got her. Ended up in Australia Zoo

and ended up being looked after by Steve Irwin. So Steve Irwin and Charles Darwin are connected within one lifetime. Wow. Yeah, that is really cool. There was a tortoise called Adwater, who lived to the age of 255, and that meant that this tortoise was born before the USA existed, and their death was announced on CNN. Wow.

So there's some quite good footage of tortoises sniff each other's bombs like dogs, because they secrete pheromones from the cloaca or from that. area and there's quite good footage of a female tortoise crawling over a lettuce and then secreting her scent as she goes and then a male tortoise really enthusiastically trying to have sex with a lettuce because, you see? Oh wow.

It thinks it's sad. Lettuce was used to, they did think it was an aphrodisiac, didn't they? In ancient Egypt they did. Tortoises and people did, yeah. It's because they used to grow quite tall. They used to have wild lettuce, which was really tall and it wasn't like our normal, boring, modern lettuce. It was quite exciting.

And it secreted a white sap. It secreted a white sap, and it tasted peppery, and it was, yeah. And it was a stem, and it secreted... Letters used to be better, as well. Apparently tortoises can use touchscreen technology now. They can touch things. No, so... Because, no, because they found that tortoises are actually a lot more cleverer than they believe them to be originally.

For example, in mazes, they're fantastic in mazes. They can remember multiple destinations in one single route, which often rats can't do. And now they're teaching them to use touchscreen technology to create Spotify lists of great music. Because they've got great taste of music, which Captain Orson published in his recent paper. I haven't seen the retraction list.

I don't know if it was in that. So if they need more food, and they give them grapes and apples and stuff, they press the right button that high. highlights itself. So they go into a car dog. More letters, more letters, more letters. Oh, by the way, apparently...

So I've always been confused between what a tortoise and a turtle is. Oh, yeah. And so I'm just going to say it in case everyone here doesn't know the difference. But a tortoise has feet and a turtle has flippers. Okay. So now we know. That's a very good way of... And so I thought they should have been called Ninja Tortoises because they have feet.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Don, I think you've redeemed yourself without night. What was amazing about that was it took ages for everyone to go, that wasn't as dumb as it definitely sounded. So on ways of staying hydrated in the desert, where there's no water and no rain, there are lots of very cool ways of doing it.

So there are some beetles which, when night is just telling it today, they stand very still and they let fog, condense on their bodies and then they can drink it because it slowly coalesces onto them and then they have enough water to get them through the day. The name for these beetles is fog stand beetles. Someone thought that was the best name on that day that they could come up with. Every time you see animals and their names, it's always like, who gave, there's a tortoise called the big-headed tortoise.

That was a very small creative meeting. Well, he told me he was the best artist. Some other tortoise names while we're here. The pancake tortoise. The geometric tortoise. The impressed tortoise. Who hangs around with a big head tortoise, I guess. And this guy, I really like him.

The wolf volcano giant tortoise. Whoa! It just sounds like the four best things. Yeah. He's got a really good PR manager. Other ways of... So other desert animals that have, like, good ways of storing their water are... So, road runners, urinate out of their eyes. What?

Like, they cry... I have not seen that in the cartoon. It's how they excrete their salt, because you use a lot... You lose a lot of water. You lose a lot of water when you urinate. So they just lose it through their eyes. Also, mountain goats, you've got to be really careful now, apparently, in areas of the mountain goats, like in North America,

because they really like human urine, because they've realized they don't have a natural salt, a natural thing they eat that provides them with their salt but they have worked out that mountaineers wee and that has salt in it and so they will spot human mountaineers and follow them until they go to take away and then they will sometimes mull them

in an attempt to drink their excretion, yeah, you've got to look out where do they mowl, no I don't want to know where they don't turtles pee through their mouth some species? There are some, yeah, some of them do. And there are some, the Fitzroy River It's a turtle breeze through its anus.

Oh, no. It's a really cool turtle. It's Australian, I think, and yeah, it is. It's in the Fitzroy River. And it lives in water, which has a lot of oxygen in it. And its cloical orifice goes two-thirds of the way along it, and it gets 68% of his oxygen through its bottom. Wow.

It does a lot. Did you know how Tartos was once the fastest animal in the world? No, it wasn't. It really was. Are you talking? Can I guess what you're talking? No, is it the space thing? It is the space thing.

Yeah, I'm so smart. Okay, go on, you can tell it. Looks like we got a big head of tortoise in the room. I'm very tough. This was in 1968, and the Soviets sent out a spaceship from Kazakhstan with a tortoise on it, and it was the first animal in deep space, and it traveled round the moon before returning to Earth seven days later, so for that short amount of time, it was the fastest animal in the world.

There were also wine flies, mealworms and a few other things, but that was the main walk. That was the headline grabber, wasn't it? The poor mealworms going, I was there too. But that was, they were the first life forms as well to get around to the moon. Yeah, so your fact was about things wetting themselves in a way. And we don't know why, there's no evolutionary reason why a lot of animals wet themselves when they're afraid. And it's really weird. So gazelles wet themselves when they're being chased by lions, not very useful.

Well, one theory is that it might, like, send the lions off because they have the scent somewhere else, right? I think that's one theory. But don't they, surely they chase the scent until they reach the bottom? Yeah, so you pee, and then the lion will stop and go, oh, there's a smell of gazelle pee there, and then... I mean, that's just one theory. Yeah.

What it is with humans, when you get shocked, I think, is, like, somehow your brain gets overridden by the shock, and normally your brain is, like, you always want to pee, and your brain's saying, no, don't pee, you're on stage. You're shocked so much. that you end up wetting yourself. It's weird. There's a bit of the brain

called the Pontine Micturition Centre, which is constantly saying, let's go, let's do it. Really? Yeah, when your bladder is full, it makes the decision to empty the bladder, and then, but the prefrontal cortex always overrides the desire. But when you get really, really, really stressed,

the limbic system overrides the prefrontal cortex, and so the signals get confused, and then, you know, it's all cold and you're ashamed. But we don't know why. It's want to stand off, We're going to have to wrap up. Okay, one more thing? Yep.

Okay, so there was a guy whose tortoise had a swollen penis, and he didn't have the money to pay for the operation, and so he went on to one of these Kickstarter-style things, and he needed £200, and he reached his target in less than 24 hours, and he went over, he went up to £555,000 in the end. People, like, really clubbed together and paid for it. And when you gave your money, you could put a little, note about what you wanted to say.

One person said, I hope he gets the report done soon. I know what it's like having it enlarged penis. That is not so nice. But at least he gave some money. We hope that total's doing well. And we're going to have to wrap up.

So that's it. That's all of our facts. Thanks so much for being here. If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said, you can get us all on our tour. Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shreiberland, James. At Egg Shapeshapes. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Chazzynski. You can email podcast at QI.com. And we've got about 53 episodes up on

no such thing as a fish.com. You can listen to those previous episodes there. We're going to be back again for our final live show at the Soho Theatre next week. And yeah, we'll see you again next time. Goodbye. Thanks so much.