No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Free Urine In The Uber

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss surprise sedans, sustained smears, squatting ships and seldom-seen sticks. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Tashinsky, and once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that pedestrians used to be expected to give way to sedan chairs. Wow. So they're their e-scoaters of their day. They couldn't have been more so from everything I've read about. A pedestrian is still expected to give way to sedan chairs, but there aren't any sedans chairs, so it doesn't matter.

Oh, like legally. It's really good question. I guess we have to set it up with one of us, well, it would require three of us to have a sedan chair and then one of us to find a policeman to arrest. Well, no, no, we only need one sedan chair and two people to lift it. We need three people. That's what I mean. I thought you said a sedan chair each. No, no, no.

So we'll need three people, one sedent chair, and then one of us to be the pedestrian who doesn't give way. Oh, well, I'll be the pedestrian, please. Can I be in the person's... In the chair, shot on in the chair. Dang. Front, I got the front. What a joke. Sorry, James.

Anyway, this was, yeah, the rules of the road, or in fact the rules of the pavement in the great sedan chair era, which is quite a short era, really. And just in case you're unfamiliar with the... sedan concept. It's obviously a chair that one person's sitting on and then it's attached to sort of pole railings and those are held by one person at each end and you're walked around the street in this

chair. And normally there's a box around the chair we should say. Yeah. Yeah. There are some rough and ready sedan chairs where it's literally just a chair and you're being carried. Those quite cute. Really? Yeah, yeah. I didn't see that. Very cheap fairs for those. There were military sedan chairs or for expeditions and it's literally just a chair

with some handles that fold out. Right. And that's it. You wouldn't have thought it's that useful in a sort of a military assault, would you? It's no tank for the sedan chair. It's before the battle. Okay, right. Galloping in on the sedan chair. Over the lip of a hill, thousands of sedan chairs.

Anyway, yeah, there were quite strict rules about how they could be used. So it was in 1634, I think, that they really kicked off in the UK. They came over from Europe and a guy called Sir Saunders Duncombe. got a bunch of licenses to hire out some sedan chairs. And the great thing about them was they were allowed to go on the pavements, much like scooters. And it's much like scooters. It's really irritated pedestrians.

But the rule was that pedestrians had to get out the way. And the men who would be carrying the sedan chairs, and it was usually men, obviously, would just shout, you know, buy your leave as they approached or sometimes rude of things, according to some accounts. I thought that it was very polite. I thought a sedan chair would be making its way leisurely to you and they would say it, you'd pause.

these guys were bolting down the street yeah yeah that's the thing if you didn't move you weren't sort of in a standoff you were just mowed over that's why i think it's like this was the rule but it was kind of an unwritten rule i reckon right because and the reason it was unwritten was because if you didn't get out of the way you would get smashed yeah yeah they could be quite uh quite violent i always thought that sedan chairs were pretty much in the way that you might if you were in london these days you know getting a rickshaw in the middle of the night like it was just a a thing of convenience which was really nice but actually they were really They were particularly practical for people whose legs, you know, had problems, who couldn't walk and so on.

And sedan chairs weren't just for the outside. You had indoor sedan chairs, which I just didn't think of. So you could get from your room downstairs and have a wash, go out and be brought by again. It was usually the same sedan chair, right? What they would do is they would change the poles. So they would have shorter poles when you were doing the indoor bits. And then they would give you longer ones for the outdoors. So they were really popular in Bath, in the city of Bath.

They were, like Dan said, because you could use them indoors. You could literally be picked up from your bed in your lodgings. You could be carried to the bath waters, which were regenerative. You could be put into the waters and then pick back up again and take them back to your bed and put into your bed. And these guys, the chairman, who would take you, they would also strip you and cover you in blankets. So they would take off your night clothes, put you in blankets, put you in the sedan chair, take you to the bath, put you in, and then put you back as you were. It's like being a baby. Yeah.

I just think Cuba should bring this in. I don't, well... I think workers' rights might have got to a place where we're not going to have the stancher anymore. Yeah? It's a bit like a hover wheelchair, isn't it? Like, you're... If you think about it, it's like, you know...

Not hovering, no wheels. Just like, you know, an old... Like the concept, it's a hovering chair. If you imagine the men who are carrying you aren't there, then it is, isn't it? Imagine they are the wheels, the men are the wheels. They were... So they were mostly for the higher society, obviously,

because you had to pay fares. to ride in them. And so they had great fixtures like they tended to have hinged roofs, especially as hairstyles got bigger, so that people's hair, big hairstyles will fit out on the top or headdresses or top hats. I saw a drawing as well, which, again, it's done in that style where you kind of wonder,

is this being satirical or is this being real? But you can see the hinge on the top of the roof and this giant wig coming out. Now, obviously, one of the problems is, what if it's raining, or what if there's a light drizzle, you're obviously going to get your wig when. So the person on behind, in James's position, they have on their back a sort of huge pole that comes up with an umbrella on the top

that then sits over. I think it's a satirical drawing. But it's kind of makes sense that you would do that, I would say. Yeah, yeah. I think from the attitudes of the chairman that I can gather, their vibe would be your hair can bloody well get wet, madam. Have you, so there was a thing as Sedan chair sickness. Oh, yeah.

Because it was a big thing. Sedan chairs were huge in China too. and in Hong Kong as well and sea sickness was known as Sedancher sickness because that was the best example they had I think more people might have experienced Sedan chairs than the ocean No way

So you went out to sea and you suffered from Sedanshare sickness Oh possible I don't know if they called it that when they were at sea Oh I thought you were saying that was what they called sea sickness I think if you're a salty old sea dog You're probably still called it sea sickness Yeah But I think most people I think most people would have said

Oh I've got a sedan chair sickness Because I feel like I've been in a sedans chair if they had motion sickness. If they'd been on the waltzes or whatever. I see. They would think of it as sedanscher sickness. But cures, cures included drinking the urine of young boys.

Oh, God. Which does seem to crop up quite a lot in ancient cures. Would you get a little vial of that in the sedan chair? For a nice one. Like when the Uber driver has a bottle of water in the back in the house. Sedan Lux. Yeah. All bringing some earth from your kitchen floor.

for protection. Well, that was how they used to treat seasickness, I think we've said before, right? Ah, so it must have been the urine of young boys for the sedan chair only, okay. Also, taxi drivers get annoyed if you get their cars dirty. So if you bring earth into a car, and similarly with the sedan chair, they used to, they were able to charge passengers for any mess that was made. So I think if you dumped a bunch of earth in the chair, or if you drank some young boys urine and then vomiting it back up.

But that's presumably fine, because they're the ones who introduced the boys' urine into the... Yeah, just don't spill it. I really like it how when it got to nighttime, the sedan chair, the price would then double on top of all these other fees that you had. It would double. It kind of makes sense because you needed one extra member

of the vehicle, as it were. Which was the Link Boy, who would be standing in front of the sedan chair with a torch lighting the way, like a big old headlight. Just, you know... So cool. Yeah.

And it was... I read a thing about that. It was very dark and jolting in the sedan because there were these just slight gap of light where the curtains are or whatever you see the torch and at the end of the journey the link boy would thrust their flombo into your trumpet-shaped extinguisher

how cool is that? Yeah that was if you paid extra though wasn't it? And those extinguishers you still see them in houses sometimes don't you? I walked past the building yesterday and I saw this weird iron trumpet on the outside and it was for them to stick the torture and it extinguishes it That's great. How cool is that? If you ever need to put out a candle in London and you happen to be in the right place

You can do it. It's quite shishi buildings it's not This was in, you know, piccadilly or somewhere. Yeah. If you live in one of those buildings, you can probably afford a torch, so you won't need to put the candle arm in there. The world record, longest journey in a sedan chair. I'm not sure if it's still the world record, but this was in 1728.

It was Princess Amelia, who's the daughter of King George II, and she was carried from London to Bath in a sedan chair. That's so far. It's a long way. She must have got through so much young boys. urine on the way. They have like service stations where you can get some young boys urine, some drive-thrus and stuff. It's 172 kilometres and she did it with eight chairman working in turn and they had a coach

that was going alongside them that they would jump in and out of and then they would carry her. Who was it? Who did this? Princess Amelia. So an actual princess? Yeah, daughter of George the second. Wow. It wouldn't be your average.

pleb would it? No, no, of course. But what this reminds me of, every so often there's a news story today, which is like, this drunk person got an Uber 200 miles. And it's basically that. That was the first thing I thought of was like. But she was really kind of quite unpopular, Princess Amelia. She famously closed Richmond Park to anyone apart from her friends in London. And so you had to get a ticket to go to Richmond Park and you had to get it from Princess Amelia. You couldn't get it from anywhere else. And so, for instance, There was a guy called Lord Brooke who asked her for a ticket. And he said, can I have a ticket to Richmond Park?

And she said, I denied one to the Lord Chancellor. I'm hardly going to give one to you. And there was like a huge sort of right to Rome thing. And there was a guy called John Lewis who took her to court saying, I should be allowed into Richmond Park. And in the end, this was in 1758. He won, John Lewis won. And so they had to put ladders up over the walls

so that people could get into Richmond Park. But Princess Amelia made it so that the steps in the ladder were too far that people couldn't get off. And so they had to go back to court to get them put in. How was she getting in? She had her gates that she could go into that were guarded and stuff like that. She didn't have a human trebouchet or something. But yeah, John Lewis, who did this, he became like a local celebrity. And people who lived near Richmond Park would have his painting in their houses because he was so,

famous for getting people into Richmond Park. What cool is that? Yeah, Princess Amelia. Hang on. So could we say that without the sedan chair, we might not be able to access Richmond Park today? Well, it's another one of my talking about someone quite a long way from the actual factor. I'm only talking about her because she did have the record for the longest sedan chair race.

And just very quickly on the trip, you said that these guys were jumping out. So was it like passing a baton as in did she ever touch the ground, do we know? Or was it just one journey? That's a really good point. would imagine she's a princess right do you reckon it's uncomfortable to be put down and picked up again because if it is they probably did a past bat on pass to try and make it as good as possible but it's also uncomfortable to to to walk 170 miles uh without a piss so i imagine she would have stopped a bit long away yeah they must have been hardly any of them had toilets inside the sedan jane today so

for that one you would build that in wouldn't you for that long a journey that's a rough gig for the guy at the back oh no i well i think thinking now is this is just so obvious that this must have happened. You get your free vial of young boys urine. Neck it to make you feel better. And then you need a piss where are you going to go in that vial? And then the next person who uses the taxi, they're not going to get young boys urine. Yeah, you're right.

And if they get the motion sickness badly, they'll think, I bet that wasn't young boys urine after all. Only four stars. Okay. It is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that a woman called Mary Papa Nicolao once had a smear test every day for 21 years. That is being a hypochondriac. That is, I mean, it's quite something, isn't it? No, she was the wife of Dr. Georgios, Papa Nicolao, who was the guy who invented the pap smear test.

And that's why it's called the PAP test, because it's named after him. And he needed to do experiments. And it's kind of hard to get people to do experiments. And so he got his wife to do it. And she, unbredgingly, or maybe a little bit begrudgingly, did this for 21 years. Depends on the day, doesn't it? If it's Christmas Day, your birthday. Oh, yeah.

So, and the other thing is that he was a zoologist, really, and he came up with this idea of doing a smear of the vagina of a guinea pig, and he could find out when they were menstruating. And so he was kind of doing that experiment on humans. And everyone's like, yeah, but we kind of know when humans are menstruating. It's a bit dumb. There is an obvious sign. There's the odd sign here and there.

But what happened was Mary invited some of her friends to a party. And I don't know how you bring this up in the party, but as part of the party, they all had a smear test. And then one of her friends, friends was diagnosed with cervical cancer and Georgeos, Papa Nicolao, he had the smear and he managed to see that there was something in that smear that presaged the fact that she was going to get cervical cancer and that was basically why we have smear test today. So brilliant. What a hero. Like he should be a household name really. Well, she should be as well. Both of them should be. Yeah, the Papa Nicolaos

should be household. She just laid there as the only person among the four of us has had a smear test is genuinely not that difficult. Twenty-one years in a row. It's not very pleasant, I understand. not it's not that pleasant. So it's a sort of little, what is it a little sort of, sort of taking of a few cells. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's something at a little speculum. I imagine, I really want to know who made the tiny speculum for this guy's guinea pigs. Well, I can tell you that. So he went to, he went to a shop and bought a nasal speculum for humans. So speculum is something that kind of opens up a gap a little bit. Okay. And so he would take the nasal speculum for humans and used it in the vaginas of the guinea pigs. And so what that tells me is that guinea pig's vagina is almost.

exactly the same size as a human nostril. Oh, well, that's, it's useful. Knowledge probably somehow. It's going to be useful at some point. One day. I can't wait. One day. Not a pub quiz.

The pub quizzes I go to. The pub quizzes I set. Oh my gosh. I just can't see the suck. I want to. I've desperately tried. But we have a lot of listeners. Like, how many people listening to this show?

One day, just let's all just. I reckon maybe you're going buying some nose plugs, right? Yeah. Because you're a swimmer. And you go to the nose plug. shop and they say you're not allowed to put them in your nose before you buy them and you're like luckily I have a guinea pig so I can test the size of the guinea pig instead of testing it on myself and that's the loophole in the chemist rule but we don't have any rule that says you can't put them in a

guinea oh I'm seeing it more as like someone's being held captive by an eccentric billionaire and they're like I'm about to kill you unless you can answer this impossible question that's quite good I'll be I've got another one so you're being held captive by this guy. Yeah. And he wants to put some poison in your nose. And so what you do is, oh no, I need to put my hockey mask on first. And you put your hockey mask on.

He begrudgingly says, well, that's, I understand. But then when you've got your mask on, you put a guinea pig where he thinks your nose is. And so he puts the poison in the guinea viz vagina instead of your nose because he thinks it's your nose. Yeah, that's quite good. Anyway, look. God. Papua, yeah. So Georgios, the husband, he started working on the guinea pigs during the first world war.

I think it was about 1916, maybe within a year or two either side, because that was the length of the war. But it took him so long. He published his landmark work on it during the second World War. It was 1943 that the work was published. And that was with a brilliantly named fellow scientist called Herbert Trout. Just very quickly on Trout, Herbert Trout, because I know you want to know this. I read his obituary and he loved fishing. Brilliant.

Lovely. Good on your man. Very good to know. What is truly amazing about this, though, is one article that I read is that in the early 1900s cervical cancer was the number one cancer killer in women in the USA. And now it's basically the most preventable cancer up there. I mean, it's extraordinary what this guy's discovery, along with his wife, vagina. Did.

Another good name in the history of smithes is. the sort of simultaneous inventor, in fact, oral babes, which is also... Stop it, yeah, stop it. That's not real. How do you actually pronounce it, Anna? All right, fine. I think you'd probably say it, oral babes. It's aral babesh.

Aral babesh is the name of the person who was Romanian, I think, and he also was doing experiments around the same time and sort of came up with a slightly different twist on taking a cervical test at the same time. Right. Right. And, yeah. And in, in Romania, it's called the Methoda Babesch of Papua Nicalau.

So they give them joint credit for it. Cool. He was, by the way, Babesh. He worked with Robert Bunsen of Bunsen burner fame. Stop. Wow. He was his pupil. That's, I thought Bunsen-Ber were kind of hundreds of years old.

I thought they went back to the same. Over a hundred years old. Okay. That is really cool. It's so cool. God, so many great names being chucked around. I know. In 2009, Papa Nicolao at Georgios, again,

was named the second greatest Greek of all time in a national poll in Greece. I mean, of all the countries, that's a biggie Greece, isn't it? 100% is because they got a lot of pedigree in there. He was beaten by one man only. Was it that guy who did? Anassus. Not Anasus. Oh.

Who's that guy who did all the politics and the economics and stuff when they had a... He said, Socrates. Yeah. Was it him? No. I think it should be honest, but I think it's Socrates. It's Alexander the grade. Oh.

The only Greek voted greater than George Papua Nicola. What did the Macedonians think of that vote? I don't know. I really love the speculum. Said no woman ever. As a historical object. And I like it too near me. But it's got a very interesting history.

So it was invented by this chap called James Sims. So it was actually a very unsavory character in pretty much every way. At the time, doctors were totally discouraged from looking at women's private parts. Gynaecologists would be told not to look at the affected area. And they'd be, you know, they were instructed to sort of blindly fumble around under a lady's skirt and sort of have a little bit of a feel. And I think there was even a textbook that suggested either the doctor stared determinedly out into the middle of space or look the person in the eye consistently as you're doing it.

Which is better. Which is worse. But yeah, he didn't like doing it any more than any other of these male doctors at the time, and it was sort of as very unseemly. But he did say one time this poor girl came to him with a fist chiro, a really bad fisture, and he said this girl was in such a condition that I was obliged to find out what was the matter with her. And so we started investigating ways to see into the vagina, and he tried a bent handle of a gravy spoon at first.

I don't know if it was clean before it was eaten off again, not clear on the details there. But it was really controversial. Even after he came up with the speculum, lots of people refused to use it in case it corrupted people. In case women got very proud, quiet. In case it was just too damn sexy. It was exactly that.

And the thing about Sims is really controversial is that he did a lot of experiments on African-American enslaved women, right? And there is a question about how much consent he got. And to such an extent that his statue was removed from Central Park in 2018. Was it? Yeah, it was.

So, I mean, I think he's been round, cancelled now. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. He's not a good guy. Another person famous in the history of smear tests is Anna Marion Hilliard. She was a Canadian physician. And the Pab test was invented by this Greek guy, but actually she invented the way that they do it in modern days, because she made it much more simple and she made it in a way that any gynaecologist or family doctor could do it without having to have loads of extra training. So she's really, really important in this story. As well as being a physician, she was a midwife. She was one of the best women's hockey players in Canada in her day.

And there was a brilliant interview with her and they asked her about her life as a gynecologist. And she said that sometimes women would come up to her six years after their wedding day. And she would have to inform them that the reason that they still haven't had any babies is that they are still virgins. What was this? This was in the 50s. This interview was in 1957. Okay. They were like, why have I not had a baby yet?

They're like, well, let me tell you something about life. That's leaving it too late for the birds and the bees chat, isn't it? Yeah. It's also very fitting that she played hockey because, in terms of gynecological lessons, I was taught to apply condoms by putting them on hockey sticks. Were you? Yeah. Maybe that was a subtle nod of my English teachers to this one.

Why's your English teacher telling you to do this? It comes up in middlemarch, do you remember? Dorothea has to pop, yeah, yeah, pop it on a hockey stick. Yeah, on cows a bonnet. difficult because I thought hockey oh no I'm thinking of ice hockey sticks

which end is the hockey stick isn't the hockey stick like 180 degrees curved and your pipe big the gravy spoon okay it is time for fact number three and that is my fact

my fact this week is that ships can squat to get under bridges that's really cool pop a squat and get under bridges but they don't have any legs. They don't have any legs. Obvious response? No, they can't. What are you talking about?

So this is a pretty amazing thing. Basically, what they do in order to achieve the squat is they make the ship go faster. And when you move a ship faster, there's obviously a lot more water passing faster. And when it passes faster, particularly underneath the boat, the pressure decreases. And so the ship sinks further down into it. It sort of gets sucked to the bottom. And that's how they achieve it. And they work out the measurements. They work out how much they need to go down. And that's the speed to which they move in order to gain that extra distance from a bridge. And we've seen it happen a few times. I mean, it's pretty crazy.

There's one of the biggest cruise ships in the world is called the Oasis of the Seas. And it needed to do this. It needed to get under a bridge that connects the Danish Islands of Zealand and Sprogo. So it couldn't get under at the height that it was at. And they did a few things like they had to collapse the tall standing funnels. Can you do that? Yeah, yeah. Some ships are built to do that specifically for bridges.

Yeah, but normally those ships are in bottles that can do that. Well, in this case, this particular ship could, the Oasis of the seas, but it still wasn't enough. So they needed to approach the bridge at 20 knots. Oh my gosh. So they did that. And if you get it wrong, then that's it. You're going really fast into a bridge. But it managed to do it and it made clearance by a foot.

So they must have, I mean, imagine the maths for that, working out that this is exactly the right speed. That's a lot of pressure, isn't it? It'd be funny to be the ship's mathematician, just hearing this enormous crunch from above deck and looking at all your notes and going, oh, yeah. Carry the one. Oh, no.

Yeah, that bridge is called the Great Belt Bridge, right, in Denmark. And I checked out whether it has been hit in the past. It's been hit once since it was opened. And that was by Karen Danielson. Funny name for a ship? That's the name of the ship.

You're joking. No, the envy Karen Danielson. It crashed into it in 2005. And because you couldn't get any traffic across, this is one of the main bridges from one of the most populous parts of Denmark to the rest of it. It basically cut the whole of Denmark into two and no one could get from either side. Karen Danielson, as far as I can tell, must be named after Karen Danielson, who's a psychoanalyst, because I can't find any other Karen Danielsons.

She might be better known to you as Karen Horny. No. who are norni No, she's a really, really famous psychoanalyst who is like a feminist Freudian And Freud has the theory of penis envy, right? Women are neurotic because they want to have penises and stuff like that.

She invented something called womb envy in men and she says that this is just as common, if not more common in men. And men are neurotic because they're envious of women's ability to bear children. And whereas women fulfill their society simply by being here, Men have to achieve their manhood by succeeding in life.

So that's Karen Horny. That's, well, speaking of invention, something I've always wanted to invent a name for. The opposite of nominative determinism. She's horny, and so she's gone in the opposite direction. She denies all the horniness that old Freud put forward. Yeah, according to Wikipedia, horny was bewildered by psychiatrist's tendency to place so much emphasis on the male sexual organ.

Crumbs. What a good reversal would be for nominative determinism. you could call it nominative determinism. Yes. So it's putting things off. I watched that to you a while ago. Sorry? I WhatsApp that idea to you a while ago.

Yeah, you did. And as I said it, I thought, yeah. This bell went dinglinging of plagiarism, alert, plagiarism, alert. But I thought, ignore the bell. Ignore it. Because it was quiet enough that I thought, what are the odds of,

what are the odds of plagiarizing someone in this room? I mean, what? I'm really looking forward. to your court case eventually when the accused stands up and explains what you've done you just immediately go oh yeah no you're right I did

demander as I was stealing that loaf of bread and little bell went off I thought there must have been a boy wizard called Harry okay well can we go back to shipping yeah

let's have a ship fact oh okay so you want to hear a cool sinking ship fact this is lowering us This is something I probably said three years ago, but... Something that someone else said three years. There are ships called... I'm so paranoid now.

Semi-submersible ships. They're called heavy lift ships as well. Okay. Right. Any bells going off? No. Great. Thank you.

What they do is they're designed to carry other ships or they're designed to carry oil rigs or they're designed to carry enormously heavy things, things that weigh tens of thousands of tons. And what they do is they're these weird, mad, huge platforms with towers at the corners, they float along, they then take on huge amounts of water as ballast, millions and millions and millions of liters,

and they sink. The ship sinks, and then the oil rig, or the other ship or whatever, floats over the top. Wow. And then the submersible ship just jettisons all the ballast it took on, and Bob's back up bringing the thing with it. Wow.

Nice. It's insane. It's absolutely insane. And they, yeah, some of them have feet to clamp onto the key as they're being loaded. Some ships have legs. They're just nuts. Did you guys ever read about the Sean O'Casey bridge in Dublin?

Shona Casey. It was a bridge. Again, you see Karen Danielson, Sean O'Casey. We just run out of names. I actually didn't look up who Sean was. I should have. It's a bridge that, you know, would open in the middle. But not long after they opened it, they lost the remote control that opened the bridge.

And they couldn't find it for four years. Four years it didn't open. Well, their ships stuck in a traffic jam. the backup getting worse and worse Some pilot and you need to get in for dinner And they found it They know they had to just get a new remote

Why didn't they do that after three years? It's a slightly confusing story Because from what I read the cost wasn't even that great It was only like Compared with the cost of a bridge Or the shipping life of a nation Exactly I sometimes do that

You know when you've lost You know you've lost your cheap headphones I will find them I know they're in my room somewhere It's all in one small lounge That they've lost this road control For the bridge They just need to look at

the sofa one more time and it will be there. My God. In 2020 there was a Donald Trump boat parade on Lake Travis which was in the Colorado River. There were several hundred boats all, you know, pro-Trump they had flags and they were just having a great day out doing it like, we support Donald Trump, whatever.

Unfortunately, they generated massive waves and five of them sank to the bottom of this lake and it was a completely calm day. That's the thing. And this is due to a really bizarre shipping effect. So basically, they were boats with planing hulls, which as far as I understand it is, above a certain speed, the top rises up a bit. Oh, yeah. And the boat is effectively riding its own bow wave. The problem is that these boats, if they all go at the same speed, they kind of act on each other. Oh, yeah. And the waves that they're generating at 10 miles an hour, which was the speed they had all

decided to go at, was the worst possible speed to go at. And so they created this enormous set of waves which they created their own storm basically. That's incredible. I know, I know. If they got at five, it would have been fine. They got at 20, it wouldn't be fine. Or if, like, some had gone at 5 and some had gone at 10 and someone got at 12. Exactly.

Yeah, because it was this parade. It's quite impressive. If it had been intentional, that could be a useful naval military tactic, couldn't it? Better than the old Saddam. How are we going to sink our own Navy? What's the tactic here? You need a mole. You need a mole.

Yeah. You need to infiltrate the enemy navy, don't you? I was actually reading a bit more. about the effect that you were talking about at the start. Yeah. And so there are a few effects that ships can pull off. Another one is the bank effect. This isn't actually a good thing,

but it's a very similar mechanism that Dan was talking about. So as you said, the ship goes faster and faster and the water in front of it is displaced, as we know, so you get that wave. And that creates a decrease in pressure underneath the ship, and that's called Bernouille's theorem.

But also, it can create a decrease in pressure in the water around a ship's side. So if a ship goes too fast, and then it turns a tiny bit accidentally or something, then the pressure will be decreased, and so the ship will move to fill up that space of, you know, decrease pressure. It'll get sucked in kind of.

And that means as soon as you turn a corner, you can suddenly get sucked up onto a bank. And actually, it's posited that, you know, the ever given that got stranded in the sewers canal last year, was it? That that may have been what happened there. Just very quickly, I was reading an article in Haka, Haukeye magazine. magazine. My favorite mag.

Yeah. Anna's favorite mag. But it was just an article about ships at sea and all the interesting methods that ships use for various different safety reasons. And one of which is if you look at a photo of a ship at sea, next time you see a photo, have a look out for some people standing on deck, sort of on lookout. And that's two people, sometimes one, sometimes more. They're looking out for pirates because that's a big problem when you're out at sea.

Sure. But the thing is, is that they're not real people. These ships have dummies that look like. people who they just place on the side. Scarecrows. Basically scarecrows. For pirates. For pirates.

Yeah. That was, I think it was in that article as well that it said about, there was a passing comment about the metal discs that you see when big ships are moored. And next time you see it, a big ship moored, then you'll see that the ropes obviously tied around the mooring pole. And then there's often a really big metal disc. It looks like a giant CD that the ropes woven through. In fact, I think that almost always is with big boats.

And if it's not down by the mooring, it's up against the side of the ship. And do you know what that is for? No. No. So like the big CD that you get in taxis sometimes is apparently they think that it will stop speed cameras from being able to catch you. It's not that. Is it that? Is it that?

I did not know that. Really? I was told that by a taxi driver once. I don't know. Right. Okay. Oh, it doesn't work. That would have made me quite anxious in that taxi.

was going at 85 miles an hour in a 20. It's all right. Codem yourself down. Drink some of that young boys' euro. We'll be there in a minute. Come on. So it's not that. It's not that.

Something, some safety thing. It's a, it's a rat stopper. Oh, really? A big problem in harbors. Rat can't run up that rope if you've got a big CD in the way. Brilliant. Yeah. It's amazing.

That article just talks about all the things on the side of a ship. And I've never stopped to think about, well, I haven't really looked at the side of ships too much in my time. But it's basically covered in graffiti for the various things that you need to know. So there'll be signs that will show you how far the ship can dip as a result of the weight that it's carrying. So here are the certain lines that you need to be aware of. And the lines, there are different lines, because if you're going to be in saltwater versus freshwater versus sort of like tropical water as well. Is that Plimsell line or something? That's exactly. Samuel Plimsal.

And then there's lines to show you that sometimes boats have this little protrusion at the bottom of the ship at the front, which you would never see. So when tugboats are coming out to get it, there's a, there's a little symbol. It looks like a five that's missing the top that says, watch out because you might smack into something underwater. I think that's to stop the waves from, is it to help it aerodynamically or something? Yes.

Yeah, yeah. To break the waves somehow. And it's pretty amazing that these giant ships are basically guided when they come into shore if they don't have a pilot doing the various, like very, very careful turning. Basically tugboats, just tiny little boats. Yeah, yeah. Because they can't turn it,

but those little things are able to ship. an entire ship. And a maritime pilot, which I think always think is quite cool, that you have the pilots who wait in the harbors or at difficult channels like the Suez. And these are the real pros

who just know that very specific area of water and they leap on the boat and tell you how to do it. I saw that in action in Sydney at the Sydney Harbour. So I was having a drink outside the opera house and there was a cruise ship that was going out. That's a very hard turn that it needs to make by the bridge.

So they just have a pilot. Come on. Get it out. And then he gets in a dingy. or a helicopter and just gets off the boat again. That's it. It's amazing. Not dissimilar to airline pilots, right? They take off and land, but then when they're cruising.

And then they jump off in the middle. They get a helicopter off the plate, a nightmare. One more thing about boats and bridges from me. That is about the Kinsey Street Bridge in Chicago. Cool. This is a bridge going over a river, and the bridge is kind of, it's mesh on the bottom, right? So it's to kind of make it easier to clean, if anything, falls onto the road, it's just going to go straight down.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Sort of. Because when you said, Mertan, I was thinking of a sieve and they're the hardest things to clean. But I probably work differently in this instance. Yeah, the holes are big enough that things can pass through like a sim. You're not going to get little bits of rice stuck in the collar.

That's not the main traffic on the road is, just loose rice. Anyway, so there's a band called the Dave Matthews band. Yeah. Yeah, you know, right? And they were gigging, and the guy who was driving their bus decided that he, he was going to dump all of their human waste as he drove over the Kinsey Street Bridge because he thought, well, it's a mesh that just passed straight through, right? Yeah.

So he did that. This is in 2004. Unfortunately, at the same time as he did this, a tourist boat was going underneath the open top. Open top. Oh, my God. And that incident led to more than $300,000 in settlements, donations and fines. Wow.

Really? Oh my God. And the Dave Matthews band Always Now has agreed to keep a log of whenever it empties its septic tanks. Keep a log, hey? Logs feel like they were the problem in the first place. I mean...

That's amazing. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that the art of wooden lacrosse stick making is extinct in the UK. God, is that global warming? I said it in a cheery way. It's actually a very sad fact.

Obviously, because you can't go to wooden lacrosstic in the UK anymore. You can import a wooden lacrosse. You can import one. You can buy an old one. We've just done a whole section on massive ships. You know what they use massive ships for? It's importing. This is a fact about, basically, I was on the website of the heritage crafts organization,

which they're the advocates for traditional crafts. And they keep this amazing watch list of traditional crafts, which are either fine, you know, sustainable or slightly endangered or critically endangered. or extinct. And lacrosse stick making went extinct. In 2014, there's a phone called Hatterslees, which is the UK's main lacrosse stick manufacturer.

But their last wooden stick maker retired in 2014. He was called Tom Beckett. Thomas Beckett. Probably, uh, well, no one rid me of this troublesome lacrosse stick maker. Yes, how did he, how did his life end, actually? He wasn't murdered on the steps of a...

He's still alive. He's still alive. Tom Beckett. There we go. Thank God. Still goes for a curry every year with the rest of the people at Hatterlies. Does he? James, you've been in touch with them?

I have. What a blindingly good guess. I have. I was asking them why they have a stick called the Victoria Cross, but Victoria was with a K, and it's the best stick that they ever made, and I asked them why they call the Victoria Cross and why it has a K, and neither Tom nor David Hay, who's the head of sales, new. Because it's all plastic these days.

That's the sad thing. Is it? The lacrosseys, yeah, yeah, yeah. Carlin fiber. And they're lighter and they're more efficient and all. Well, one reason is because they yield on impact, because it's quite a violent sport, lacrosse. And so if you hit someone across the head with a lacrosse, which is wooden, they're going to do a lot of damage. But the carbon fiber ones bounce right off.

Yeah. It's all gone soft these days, isn't it? You can't even beat people over the head with a stick anymore. Well, did you hear? I mean, that is an important thing. There was a guy in America at Wheaton College. he's a, sorry, Wheaton College. Where were you educated?

Wheaton, Eton College. Nearly? Yeah, Wheaton College. It's the equivalent. It's twinned with Eton. He was 19 at the time called Alex Chew. It's the French Eton, isn't it? My Witton.

He was up until this point, playing lacrosse his entire school life for the school teams. And then he became a freshman at Wheaton College and was told he couldn't play anymore. because his head was too big for any of the helmets. They just didn't make helmets big enough for this guy's head. I think what he used to do was the reason he was allowed to play before was that he pieced together parts of two different helmets. He created a bigger helmet for his massive head. It doesn't sound very safe.

It's like if you get two cars and weld them together. That's really unsafe, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. So he didn't get to play. Wait, sorry. Are the helmet makers of Massachusetts also extinct? Was there no one available to make him... No one built him a bigger helmet.

He couldn't play. He played, I think, one game that season, and I think that might have been a mistake. You know what? He could have played women's lacrosse, because they don't wear helmets in women's lacrosse. No, not. Because it's almost a completely different game.

Yeah, it's so weird. Yeah. They're different sports. Well, so they say, I actually think they're really similar. But if you ask people who play lacrosse of either type, they say they're really different sports, don't they? Yeah. And they don't really do the body contact so much in women's sports.

So the men's sports. the men's cross is incredibly violent. Basically, you can essentially just attack someone with a large stick. As long as it's not deemed to be sort of like unduly, really intentionally aggressive, I think. Whereas in women's, you can stick people. What do they call it? Stick people? Slashing and talking.

In women's, you can stick check so you can hit their stick with your stick. You can't really bash them around the face. Could you hit their fingers holding the stick with your stick? I think you can do that. And I should say in men's actually, you can't bash. them around the face, but the torso, free for all. Golly. Really interesting.

And it's all down to a woman called Rosabelle Sinclair. And what happened was, so lacrosse is an old Native American sport. They played it in America, but it was in the early 20th century. Girls weren't really allowed to play lacrosse. And so it was an all-boys sport pretty much. They came over to the UK and had an exhibition in front of Queen Victoria. So there's a bit earlier. And Queen Victoria said it would be a great game for girls to play in,

public schools. And so they started playing it in public schools. And so you had this one spot in the UK, which was all girls playing in school. And you have this one spot in America, which was all boys playing. And they've kind of evolved quite differently. And then Rosabille Sinclair took the girls game over to America, but she decided she was going to stick to the girls' rules that they had in the UK. And so that's why now in America, it's almost like netball and basketball, not quite, but they're quite different sports. Right. That makes sense. And I'd love to see a team of traditional women's lacrosse players play the men's. Because just, FYI, if you're an American listener,

lacrosse in the UK, is pretty much, I think, reserved for, well, this is an anecdote, this is just based on my own life experience. But in my own life experience, lacrosse is basically reserved for very posh schoolgirls. And in America, it seems to be reserved for extremely hardcore large men. So, I was talking to someone the other day, a friend of mine who played a little bit of lacrosse. So she said it is quite violent still. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty primal.

That's very fun. So the kind of aggression of it, I think, kind of makes sense for the origins of it. So it was played in the 1500s. Native Americans did it as a way of kind of battling between local tribes, didn't they? They would have games that would last for days. And the teams could be anything from five players to over 100 players. And it was... You turned up with your four, mate.

Oh no, they've gone for the opposite actually But yeah, that's kind of the origins of it, isn't it? Yeah, there's one claim on the World Lacrosse Federation website Which says that sometimes games could involve up to 100,000 players Stop it! It's unlikely! It's so clearly bonoids, isn't it? But that's what it claims, and they're the authority.

That is amazing. It was certainly common to have over a thousand people. And I was it... Was it war? Or was it... No. Were they fighting? Well, we don't...

That's still a big war. Yeah. It is. Yeah. On one side you got lacrosse players covering Sedanchos or the other. That's the time travel. It was actually one team of five and then another team of 99,9,95. And it was a draw.

It was a draw in the end. Amazing. That's mental. Wow. Yeah. But it was like it would be over vast distances so Native Americans would be, you know, run. between states practically and people subbing in and out quite a lot, I think, over many days. It is the only sport that recognizes Native Americans and First Nations people as their own individual nations.

So they will, you know, in international games, you would enter as an individual nation, like the Mohawk Nation. And in fact, that caused a real problem. They travel on their own passport. So I think the Iroquois lacrosse team travels on Iroquois passports. Iroquois and Haudenoshone, by the way, are sort of synonymous, except they call them. themselves Hauden Ashoni. But yeah, the passports tend to be recognized. There was a bit of an issue in 2010 when Britain denied entry to the Iroquois team because they didn't accept their passports. They wanted them to have US passports and they said, well, we don't, we don't consider

ourselves American. Right. And they didn't play. La Crosse might come back by the way to the Olympics. It is coming back. Yeah, because it's such a growing sport, isn't it? So 2018, they were given the status of receiving funds, which meant that they could sort of like start showing that it was possible. Now an official, whatever the official sport that you need to be in order to get to the Olympics. They are now that. Yeah. So they'll be there for the 2028. Yeah, hopefully. Really? Yeah. To speaking of, this is just something I read today about hockey. So it must be the same with lacrosse. And that is that if you're a sports person in Canada, you're doing your sport, you're getting

really sweaty, all your gear, your mitts and your, you know, your shirt and everything, your underwear gets really, really smelly. But you can't put it outside to air, right? Because it's so cold. Okay. And so traditionally, you find that these people have really, really smelly, like clothes and stuff like that. And so they invented this thing. I can't remember what it's cold, but it's like a big sort of trunk.

And you put your kit in and it fires UV light into the trunk. And then that makes ozone. And the ozone kills all of the bacteria. And when the bacteria died, it means it can't make all the smells. And so it kind of gets rid of all the smell of your kit. And this is the amazing thing. hope in the future is they might be able to scale this up to the size of a room. And so you would come in after your game of hockey all across or whatever. You'd hang up your stuff. You'd go out of the room,

close the door. And when the last person closed the door, the whole place gets filled with UV light and ozone. And then when you come back in, it's all clean and not so. That's really, isn't that amazing? So might we have these instead of bathrooms in the future, instead of a shower? Oh, you know what I thought? Because I read this article and what I thought is it could be useful for putting your underwear in, right? You know, like if you have a linen basket or something, get changed at night, take your underwear off, put it in the basket, next morning, take it out again.

It's fine. Yeah, it's perfect. You don't need clothes anymore, basically. You don't need more than one of everything. Just one set of clothes for the rest of your life. Yeah. And one set of night clothes. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, you can also put your clothes in a washing machine and a dryer. Yeah, but that's two things. It's a combined system. You use loads of water. Can't do it at night because it upsets your neighbours. I do it literally every night. Put your washing machine on? Yeah.

Oh my God. You're psycho. It's all right. He lives in a cottage on the top of the mountains. In the moors, yeah. What you can also do is take your clothes to a tanning salon, presumably. Yeah. And drop them off and ask them to book in a session.

Book a bed. Book a bed and you come and you take all your clothes off. And they go, well, if you'd like to get in, he'd say, no, no, no. You're just sat in a chair naked next to it. I'm going to climb into a washing machine now. You've got to make sure all of the employees know that that. happening because I don't want to open a sunbed just see the missing body.

Oh my God. It's happened again. She's melted. Can we talk about some extinct crafts? Sure. So I was on the, I spent quite a while on the Heritage Crafts website, patron, Prince Charles, obviously.

So I thought I'd do a little quiz for you. Okay. Right. Is this craft endangered? Critically endangered. Currently viable or extinct. Just before we start, you sent a, us the link of this list.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah. We all have a bit of an advantage. We might still do badly. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I've got it literally open in front of a shower. Shit, okay. I'll close it.

I'll close it. I never bother to read the sources you send around. Thank you. I'm coming to this naive. All right. Ornery making. Horary. Oroery is like the solar system.

Exactly. It's a model of the solar system. Oh, that's fine. That's fine. Because, oh, yeah, it's in every kid's toy shop. You've got to make them for kids. I'm with Dan. Then he has inside an old.

here. Okay. So you're saying viable? I'm saying yeah. Okay. Probably 200 of them in North London alone. There are 100,000 actually. They all play lacrosse.

No, it's critically indebted as one full-time professional orrary maker in the UK. Well, he's doing a damn good job. I'm not just sitting in toy shops, Dan. I'm not sure. Made by the real handmade heritage. Mechanical. The craft. Fisher Price plastic ones.

Mr. Fisher, he's the last one. Timothy Staines and his father, Derek, who was the previous, full-timer. They make six to ten of these per year. Timothy Staines, by the way, is a sentence name. Oh, so it is. Welcome to the club, Timothy. Rake-making. Is oral babes a sentence? No, it isn't. Sorry. What were you saying rake-making? I think, yeah, everyone needs a rake, don't they?

The garden implement, not a bit of a slimy, sleazy, lab about town. Okay. Then there's loads of them. Yeah, lots of them. The least five. It's endangered. There are only about 5,000 made per year There's specific kinds of rake Not just normal gunwomeness. One more. Rocking horse manufacturer.

Viable. Extinct. Yeah, viable. It's viable. There is a guild of rocking horse makers which has 2,000 members. The only qualification is you have to have made a rocking horse which is fair enough to be a member of the guild.

You don't have to have made it in the traditional age or sculpting. I imagine there are some barriers to entry about what qualifies as a rocking horse. You can't just make any. shit and say to what it was and then claim your guild's membership. No, you have to, I'm sure, yeah, but I don't know exactly what the criteria are. Yeah, level of rock or whatever. I read this incredible article. Did any of you read it? It's called Raiders of the Lost Crafts. It was in the Independent in 2016. Raiders of the Lost Crafts and it was written by a woman called Amalia Ilgner and she talked about, so pole-leath woodturning, which is, you know,

when a crockery used to be wooden. I don't have wooden crockery. And most people would because it was just the most available substance. So back in Tudor Simon's For instance. It's probably not, I thought crockery was like the noise it made got that.

It's probably like blockery or something. Blockery, yeah. Woodery. I mean, blockery is a joke. Woodery is just it's not. I'll wait to hear Andy make that joke again

in three weeks. I'll tell you what. When I tell it, you'll laugh. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact

with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shreiberland, Andy. At Shreiberland. James. A bit weird, James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast. At QI.com. Yep, well, you can go to our group account, which is at Andrew Hunter M, or you can go to our website. No Such Thing as a Fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. There's also a link to the upcoming tour dates that we're doing later this year. Do check them out and see if we're coming to a place near you. Otherwise, you can listen to us again next week on

channel on this podcast. We'll see you then. Goodbye.