No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Garlic Superman

Episode Date: December 16, 2016

Dan, James, Andy and Alex discuss historical ham sandwiches, edible passwords and why Jupiter is shrinking.

And welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covern Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with James Harkin, Alex Bell, and Andrew Hunter Murray. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Andy Murray. My fact is that in 1851, all of the 400,000, all of the 400,000, 136,800 sandwiches sold on the streets of London were ham. Just ham sandwiches.

That's so obviously not true. Well, I think it is. Was it just ham or did they have like ham and pickle or ham and mustard? It had some mustard. Okay. Had other sandwiches been invented at that point and they thought we don't actually like those, we'll stick with ham? I think they have because I think they had cheese sandwiches because we've said before on this podcast they used to be called bread and meat or bread and cheese.

Yeah. So I'll tell you, basically, ham sandwiches. Sandwiching was a thing, as in you didn't have a sandwich shop. You would be a sandwich seller and you have your own ham and you would boil it and then you would sell it from your car. So it's quite hard to have a big range. And we only know about this because there was a guy called Henry Mayhew, who was a social investigator and he wrote this huge work called London Labor and the London poor. And he calculated that that number of sandwiches were sold. And the only ones he came across were ham ones. So he's pretty amazing this guy. I hadn't heard of him. He co-fellate. founded Punch, which was the original British satirical magazine that ran for, God, hundreds of years. So might this have been satire, we're talking about? No. And

B. Wilson, who's a food writer, and her book's very good. She also has written an essay on the subject. She said that all the sandwiches were home. If B. Wilson says it, then I do believe it. But even before he went and did punch, he had the most ridiculous childhood. He ran away from home when he was 12 to

join the East India Company. Wow. And worked on their ships. And then he came back and tried law and then he went into journalism, but 12, he ran away when he was 12. But you know how people used to die younger? Is it like dog years? Is 12 actually like 18 back then? Well, I guess kind of, but also it was he ran away because he didn't want to follow the same career as his father. So it's a pretty early age. What did his father do? He was a sailor. I think he was an accountant. Oh, well, I can understand that. He was a very fertile accountant because Henry Mayhew was one of 17 children. What was he? 17. Wow. He did report on his sandwich investigation.

that one seller told him that sometimes cab drivers would offer to fight them for a sandwich instead of paying for it. That doesn't really feel like it would be a good idea. Well, it doesn't work in Pratt when I try it. Because as a sandwich seller, the best outcome is that you've won a fight. Yeah, and kept a sandwich. But you've had to fight someone not to lose a sandwich. Yeah, exactly. It feels like it would be better for you to do nothing at all than to get involved in this fight.

Yeah, there's a no transaction. This isn't the best ham-based story from 1851. It was a good year, wasn't it? It was a very, very strong year. What did you say what else happened in 1851? Just give it some of the context. The great exhibition happened in London. And it was just ham sandwiches on the way.

Well, didn't they have tin food as one of the attractions? I guess ham might, may have been. And also, Moby Dick was published. I've got to say the best Moby Dick fact ever, which we all know because it was found by one of our colleagues, Edbrook Hitchens, this last week, which is that he got a rejection letter. from one publisher saying, the whale is obviously a nice idea, but maybe you could replace it

by something more popular. Maybe young voluptuous maidens? Why would you want to harpoon young voluptuous maidens? That's true. It would make any sense. I would have been like, Carrie. It would just be the horror. Horridor. Hang on, hang on. Dan, you said you had a better ham anecdote from 1851. Yeah, well, okay, Alex. We all did it in our heads, James, and we were decided not to say it. That's not how podcasts work now. Yeah, so other news, Alex mentions the great exhibition, Moby Dick. Two other things that happened in 1851 is that the New York Times was founded and Reuters News was founded as well. So obviously a lot more outlet to report hand-based stories erupting that year. So Christmas in 1851, have you heard about this? In London, it was a sort of super great giveaway to all the poor of London to feed them on Christmas Day. And it was over 22,000 people who were fed in one single place and that place was called ham yard. And ham yard in London, they had benefactors from all the richest people in London who gave

one guy called Mr. Richard Cooper supplied 200 pounds of beef. And they did a massive Christmas meal for all the less privileged of London. So over 22,000 people fed in one go by a very famous chef. He's often called the first celebrity chef, Alexis Sawyer. And it was his idea and he put it together and he fed all these people. Wow. I've been to ham yard. It's off Regent Street. Yes, still there, right?

Still there, right? Yeah. The best ham sandwich-related story of the mid-19th century. Okay, that's cheating a bit. Well, it is. This comes from around 1840, so it's about 10 years before both of your ham sandwich stories. Oh, this is way better then. If you've got predated.

It's true. So the town of Swindon was invented by a ham sandwich. What? It was founded by a ham sandwich, let's say. The story goes, I don't know if this is true, that Isambardkind and Brunel was on the railway, and he knew that they had to found a town somewhere on the railway because they needed to have a stop there. And he started eating his ham sandwich. And then he thought, well, as soon as I've had enough of this sandwich and I throw it out of the window, wherever it lands, that's where I'm going to start my new town.

And it landed where currently Swindonner's. No way. Hang on. Because you'd have to stop the train immediately. Yeah. And go back and find the sandwich. And go back and find a sandwich. That is true.

unless you remembered. Oh, we were passing through Swindon when I threw my sandwich out of the window. I threw my sandwich out right next to that sign that says, welcome to Swindon. The Swindon was tiny. It was absolutely tiny before the railway arrived, and then it became huge. So there's another town that's sort of further south in Wiltshire called Mulborough,

and it's absolutely tiny, but it could as easily have gone the other way if isn't about Kingdom Runell had been a bit hungry or hadn't had a banana or breakfast, and he wanted a bit more of his sandwich. So ham sandwiches, still extremely popular. Are they?

Yeah. The British Sandwich Association says that ham sandwiches is the most popular sandwich in the UK. Really? Do you think they'll look back in 100 years at 2016 and think it was a great age of ham sandwiches as well? I think finally, back to the great times of 1851. So this is an old survey. I can't imagine, though. It was 2001.

I can't imagine in 15 years it's changed that much. But they said that the favorite filling wasn't ham, though. It was cheese. but a ham sandwich on its own topped. But the favorite filling? Yeah. I always like my ham sandwiches without ham, but with cheese. I think what they mean is what's your favorite filling?

Well, if I'm having a sandwich, I love it if there's cheese in there. And they said, would you be happy with just a cheese sandwich? No, no, I think I'll go for ham. I think that's how the conversation waits. Wait, but the favorite filling, is that because you have it outside the sandwich? No, you have it in the sandwich, but you might have it with ham, so you have a ham and cheese sandwich. So you're saying ham is not a filling because it's the base ingredient of the sandwich. You know, for anything extra as a filling?

No, no, there's two questions. What is, there's bread and an item in it. And you could have one item in it. They've gone for ham sandwich. That works best as a sandwich. Yeah. What's your favorite filling to go in a sandwich? Oh, okay.

Well, if I'm having a ham sandwich, rather than pickle, I'll have cheese. But cheese is the favorite added on. But what's your favorite filling for two slices of bread is ham? Yeah. Of all the things that people have voted on in 2016, this makes me the most denied. Well, this is 2001. People say 2016. Just a shit, yeah.

Imagine you were presented with a lot of different sandwiches that had base meats in them, like, let's say, or no meat, or like a salad or whatever. Base meat. Like the alchemy of the sandwich world. There's base 10, which on them is different, and then base meat, which is what our sandwiches are based on. It turned ham into cheese. Two-thirds of ham and cheese pizzas tested by trading standards officers in Derbyshire failed to contain ham or cheese.

No. How many? Two thirds. Two thirds of the pizza? What it was is when people thought it was ham, it was actually turkey ham, which is made of turkey, not ham. And the cheese was often cheese substitute. I'm not sure what cheese substitute is, but it doesn't sound great. Well, ham, apparently.

So Henry Mayhew did a load of, just to drag us back to Henry, Mayhew. for a bit. He did a load of calculations basically. So he calculated how many sellers there were of each thing on the streets of London. So he calculated, for example, that there were 60 ham sandwich sellers in London, 200 baked potato sellers, 300 people who sell pea soup and hot eel. Six people apparently specialized in plum puddings. Yeah. And he would work it out by estimating the number of miles of street in the city and then multiplying that by the number of traders he found per mile. Yeah. I think it sounds like the most fascinating book. I really want to read it. It's what's it called again? It's called London Labor and the

London poor. Yeah, and he basically documented 1851 in London, down to every bit of clothing that people, it would be like us just going out on the street and just recording what's going on as a time capsule. And it's pretty amazing work. It's probably comprehensive. Really, yeah. And it had a big impact. He pissed off a lot of people with this book, particularly the street traders, and they actually set up a street traders protection association against this kind of journalism. specifically because how they were presented in the book. They were presented, like these sandwich sellers, they're like, well, actually, we do have a bit more than ham.

Yeah, exactly. Really? Yeah. Some of the sandwiches didn't even have ham in. Did they not? No. Just cheese. They had a bit of beef dripping.

And that was it, between two bits of bread. What is beef dripping? It's fat. Yeah. It's a congeal fat. When you've cooked beef, you get all the fat kind of drops down when you roast it. And then you can take. that and you can kind of spread it on bread and it's what people used to eat.

That sounds like cheese substitute. It does, but it doesn't taste anything like cheese. It tastes more like kind of fatty gravy. Oh, so delicious. Also, he collected a load of data with his brother Augustus Mayhew and yet 20 years after the book was published, Augustus Mayhew was had up in court on charges of attacking a female peddler, a woman going on selling things. And his defense in court was that people would knock on his door up to 38 times a day selling things. and he just snapped and he said they were shouting things like crockery or fine young rabbits or roots all are blowing all are growing fine young rabbits sounds like a great band doesn't yeah did you know there's a latitude around the earth that's sometimes referred to as the

ham belt and it's 40 degrees latitude and it's the it's not so much these days but it used to be the climate at which all the best ham came from so uh like kentucky ham virginia ham it's Italian, prosciutto ham, Spanish serrano ham. All of those places are along the same last unit. It's because the climate is sort of ideal for ham curing. And it's not so important nowadays because, you know, you have climate control factories and whatnot. And it was discovered by Alexander von Hanbelt. Okay, it is time for fact number two.

And that is Alex. My fact is that since 2003, the UK has eaten one and a half million pounds in cash. And when you said cash, are we talking two pecoins? notes. So this is, the Bank of England releases stats every year on the, yeah, the graph. Alex's got a massive graph on his research notes. So for people at home, what happens is we kind of do some research and we print it out on a sheet of paper and we've got like little paragraphs that we might read out if something comes up, but Alex just has a massive graph. I'm concerned by the year to year trend. I'm going to explain you can submit bank notes that are damaged in some way

to the Bank of England to get them replaced. And then they keep stats on them. So they release each year how many banknotes have been torn apart or accidentally washed or contaminated or damaged by fire or flood. And the other category is Tudor Eaton. And so each year they've released how many notes of each denomination have been Tudor Eaton and how much they're worth. And in total, since 2003, it's 1.5 million.

Okay. So I reckon when you said that fact, people were thinking that humans were eating these notes, but I reckon it must be mostly like dogs and stuff, right? Maybe, yeah. It could be babies. Yeah, I mean, so babies will put things in the mouth, aren't they? They will, but they don't have teeth. That's true. So they won't be chewing it and damaging it? I mean, some of them have teeth, don't they?

Do you have to have teeth to chew? That's a good point. Can you chew with gums alone? You could, suppose you could ruminate the note in your mouth. You could, like a cow. You could dissolve it. I'd say a baby would be sucking rather than chewing. Yeah. Okay, well. But you have to provide the remnants of the note to prove

that you had it in the first place because otherwise you could just write the back room and say So what? You bring the dog? You bring the leftovers, I guess. So there could be plenty of notes that have been completely eaten, I guess. It's very hard to say my dog ate 2,000 quid in 50 pound notes.

Unfortunately, he ate them so thoroughly. But if you could tell me, no way they do send them I recommend it. It's called the mutilators notes service and you post them in and you write a little explaining letter. And if they think it's legit, then I'll post you some money. I could have used that.

I once got given an envelope of some money. And you've been paid it for asking those questions in the House of Commons, haven't you? That's excellent satire from the early 2000. It's 90s, actually. The rest of you can look that up at home and have a really entertaining afternoon. Cash for questions. Anyway, sorry, go on. Go on.

So rather than opening the envelope the normal way, I opened it up at the top end of the on the side. So I just ripped it open. The short edge of the envelope. Yes, exactly. So I ripped it open there. And then I got to the shop and it was closed. And so I couldn't buy anything.

So I went to my house. Came out in the morning to buy the milk that I was looking to buy. Handed over from the envelope my 10 pound note. And the guy said, I can't accept this. You're missing the last, like, eighth of the note. And what I had done, and there was about 60 quid in this envelope, I had ripped as well as the envelope, all that final eighth of all the note. boats and they had scattered all on the street and had to go around the street collecting the rest of my notes.

He got the bag? Yeah, I found them. The day afterwards. Yeah. Oh my God. Did you get the milk? I did. Yeah.

I think that all of these bank notes were mostly eaten by dogs, not humans or babies. Well, babies are humans, apart from baby dogs. So I think they're mostly eaten by dogs. In Montana, a few years ago, there was a new story about a dog called Sundance, who at five one hundred dollar bills that were stashed in his owner's um little cubby hole um but the five hundred dollar bills were together with a single one dollar bill which it didn't eat that's fantastic wow this is interesting do you know where the first place to feature queen elizabeth on money was oh uh so not britain it was not britain it was it somewhere in the caribbean no

Somewhere in Africa? No. Australia? No. Canada? Yes. Yes. What was that?

They had her when she was a nine-year-old princess. So prior to being the queen, and it was on their $20 notes. And so obviously she wasn't on any money here. She wasn't the queen yet. But they wanted to give her some props over there. I'm not sure completely why, but they used her image. That's cool. Speaking of notes in Canada, a few years ago,

there was a rumor that all Canadian banknotes smelled of maple syrup and people were kind of pulling them out of their pockets and smelling them and believed that they could smell maple syrup and everyone on the internet was saying yeah mine smell of maple syrup as well but mine only smell of it when I take them out my pocket and they've warmed up so they must be putting something in the note and I keep on the pocket I keep on my maple syrup in well I think that must have been it or it was just like a weird hysteria because the bank of Canada said that actually there's nothing in there and we've tested ours and they don't smell a maple syrup. But they have got in trouble in the past as well, the Bank of Canada, because they

did a new series of banknotes and they put a maple leaf on. And it was pointed out that that particular shape of maple leaf is from a tree which does not grow in Canada. That's right. It was a Norwegian maple rather than a Canadian maple leaf. Right. And they said, actually, what we've done is we've blended together a load of maple leaf to avoid being regionally insensitive. To all those Norwegians living in Canada. That's kind of like the Euro though. Yeah. When they designed the Euro notes, they didn't want to favour any particular country, culture. So they got someone to take a load of famous bridges from all the different countries that were taking the euro and sort of blend them into generic bridges.

Yeah. So all the euro money has fake bridges on it. So no one gets offended. But then an artist started building those bridges. It was an art installation rather than an actual bridge, but he started building the fake bridges over rivers in Belgium or something. That's a great idea. Yeah. Yeah. That's fantastic. It's odd, weird, reverse forgery, but not money. Yeah. Oh, this is a cool thing about currency. So in, I think it was November or October. The Japanese financial services industry was considering regulating a new kind of currency, which was, any guesses? It's currency that James spends and the rest of us don't.

Pokemon money? It's Pokecoins. So as far as I understand, you use the currency to breed imaginary monsters on your phone? You use them to not buy monsters, but buy things to help you to find monsters. I see. Okay. So you can't even buy Pokemon with them. You can buy facilities to help you.

You've got to catch Pokemon. Yeah. So it's like you can buy a net with a pokecoin. Kind of. You can buy a lure. That's spending real money on that. You can spend real money or you can find them in the game. Okay.

But we all do it like Temple Run, you know, when you spend money to buy more, you know, speedability and so on. We all do it, Andy. We all do it. Okay. The Japanese Financial Services Authority is not considering regulating Temple Run coins. They are considering regulating. The million. And basically, if they did decide to regulate it, I, I would.

I'm not sure if they'd come to a conclusion yet. Companies would have to declare all the unused currency that gamers have held, and they'd have to secure it with massive deposits of real money. That's really interesting. Speaking of digital money, there's a landfill in Wales, which has an enormous treasure trove, like a buried treasure, and it's getting more and more valuable each year. So in 2013 it was worth £4 million.

And it's because there's a hard drive, which a man called James Howells threw away in 2013. and he realized after you've thrown it away that he had a digital wallet on it which had seven and a half thousand Bitcoin and he got those in 2009 when they were worth nothing but they're now worth

2013 they're worth about four million pounds and they're increasing a lot more since then and so we don't know where it is somewhere under there yeah right yeah so yeah get digging should we move on soon yeah I have one thing that Motorola has invented an edible password

they call it an authentication vitamin and it's a pill that you swallow and if you have your phone near you are all wirelessly unlock it Sorry, I'm a bit confused on how it works. So you swallow a pill. You swallow a pill. It has a tiny microchip in it, which broadcasts a little signal. And that's a signal that will wirelessly unlock your devices if they're set up for it.

So is it activated by the act of swallowing it? No, no, no, you don't have to swallow it every time you're on the phone. You put it in you, and then whenever you're around your phone, it's unlocked. But except for when you pooed out. Yeah, so then you have to swallow another one. But why can't you just have it in your pocket? Because you could lose that or someone else could... Pick pocket you?

Yeah. Whereas you can't... have it stolen from you if you've eaten it. So what you could do is you could put the little chip that's in an oyster card and you could eat that and then every time you're walking towards the gates and a tube station, it'll be like you're on Star Wars or something. And that is why, my lord, I took a dump all the oyster barrier. Okay, it is time to move on to fact number three.

And that is my fact. And my fact this week is that a day on the sun lasts both 25 and 3. 38 Earth days. Okay. You're going to have to explain because it's always going to feel like daytime there, isn't it? Yeah, it's not really going to, yeah, you're going to be confused. So because it's a massive gas body, it spins at different speeds. So the middle of it, the equator, as it were, spins around 25 days. That makes one days. But the poles go a lot slower. So it takes up to 38 days for them to turn around. So I should say that there are fluctuations in these numbers, obviously. So 24.7 is usually the number given for the quickest bit where the equator, where the middle of the sun is

spinning around. 38 is the top end bit. But I asked Alex and I saw an astrophysicist the other night, Dr. Lucy Green, and she said that's absolutely true that they do have these different spins on them. Yeah, really interesting. So did Jupiter and Saturn, actually. They also have differential spin because they're gas. Yeah. I found out this thing the other day, which I told the guys, but I haven't told you yet, so I'll ask you it as a question. So let's assume that there are eight planets. in the solar system. Yeah. How many planets in our solar system orbit the sun?

Of those eight, all of them. Ah, technically, if you go into a super technical reasoning, we orbit the sun because at the center of the gravity that's pulling us, making us orbit the sun, is in the middle of the sun. Jupiter is so large, it's so big that it's pulled the center of gravity out to above the sun's surface. So technically, they are orbiting each other. That's really good.

Yeah, it's quite cool, isn't it? I had no idea Jupiter was that big. It also has a massively fast day, Jupiter. Does it? So yeah, it rotates every 10 hours. So daytime and nighttime each lasts about five Earth hours, which is really short as fast than any other planet. And if it was 80 times larger, which is not that much larger, it could have been a star, Jupiter. Wow. Yeah. What would it done to us? Oh, I think we'd be in big trouble. Yeah, issues, right? Probably. Hey, so I found this fact when I was reading a book called the Jupiter effect, which is written by John Gribbon, who most people know

is a massive popular science writer. He wrote in Search of Schrodinger's Cat. And this book is the one book that he wants people to forget about. So I apologize to John Griffin. Because you've met John Griffin, haven't you? I have, yeah. He'll be delighted that you're bringing this up. I'm really sorry, but it is out there. And it is, it's a really well-written book, except for one thing, which it has a conceit of it, which is that basically there was going to be a ginormous earthquake at the San Andreas Fault on March the 10th of 1982, because they believed that all the planets were going to line and it was just going to set off chaos on earth, which never happened. It was a bestseller, though, but it didn't happen. And so he's kind of buried that book by writing about 200 more

books to separate himself. He writes tons of books. And they're all brilliant. They're all brilliant, yeah. But yeah, do you think that's the reason he writes so many? I think just so it goes to photo down that bibliography list. I'm just going back to the sun very quickly. Yes. What would happen if you replace the sun with a black hole? So there'd be less light. Yeah. For starters. It'd be less energy coming from it, you would think. Yes. So it all freeze to death. And we would get sucked into it.

No, there we are. That's finally the thing. Yeah, no, apparently, so the Oxford University science bog looks into this. And they found that apparently the planet's orbits would stay kind of much the same. Because if it's the same masses of the sun, this black hole, then the gravitational field it produces is about the same as the sun. But it will be cold and dark. The sun is obviously emitting loads of heat, but Jupiter is almost.

Jupiter irradiates so much heat that it loses it faster than it gains energy from the sun which means that it's shrinking at about two centimetres a year. That is huge. Yeah. Two centimeters a year. Yeah. I mean it's massive so that's relatively quite small amount but that's mad. Are the planets out there

that we've seen exoplanet style that would be just enough atmosphere, tall enough that a six foot person could stand in and sort of like run their life but that's where the planet ends. Well that's the only atmosphere. Yeah so if you were to go to I think it's Mars.

Yeah. They have a very, very, very weak atmosphere. And so it would kind of feel like winter at your head, but spring at your feet. Wow. Yeah. So you kind of, your head would be out of the atmosphere, kind of. So you have to, what do you have to, where do you spend Christmas? Do you have to go up a step ladder, basically, for Christmas?

And then for spring. Just lie on the floor. Summer collection, just lie down. I have one more. Do you know what else is fueled by the sun? Superman, according to DC Comics. Really? We know this because once he was bitten by Dracula and Dracula exploded.

What? Science, guys. I don't recall that bit of the Bram Stoker novel. Wait, hang on. Dracula bite Superman and then Superman explodes. No, Dracula explodes because Dracula vampires don't like sunlight. How do we know if Superman isn't made out of garlic? Okay, it's time for a final fact.

to the show and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 1945, police in Halifax, Nova Scotia initiated a campaign to stop people from beeping their car horns in Morse code to signal out vile and filthy language. And what were they saying in the Morse code? Do we know? This is the weird thing, right? So I saw this on a website called Boing Boing, which is one of my favorite places online. They have amazing facts and stuff like that on there. And it was a news cutting and I'm pretty sure the news cutting is real because I found it in other places, but that's the only thing on the whole of the internet that seems to give any idea that this actually happened. Now I see why you were throwing shade at my ham sandwiches fact you were trying

to draw attention from your own sketchy sourcing. Yeah, fair enough. I just, I don't know if it's true. If anyone knows any more, then do let us know. But I think it's a really, it's a nice idea if it's not true, right? Yeah. It's, I don't think it's the most eloquent way to swear. someone through Morsk? It takes a long time. It takes a very long time. B, beep, beep, beep. Oh, you're a dick. Kind of, yeah. Yeah. If you're in traffic, though, you do have time. So you might as well send a message. Yeah. You're relying on

the person who is a dick, knowing Moss Code. Yeah. Yeah. It's quite funny, because it does sound like you're actually just bleeping yourself. Yeah. As you're swearing at someone. So, this is 1945. That's right. What kind of car horns were we at that point? What kind of cars were we at at that point?

Well, we will have had cars that are not a million miles dissimilar to cars that we have now, the combustion engines. So maybe slightly bigger American cars, that kind of thing? Yeah, so the 50s is where I start to sort of clock what a car is. Okay, so imagine five years before that.

Take off the tail fins, yeah. But they've had horned, like a horn sound since the very beginning of things with wheels on the road, haven't they? Yeah, so they predate cars. Yeah, and they were originally outside the cars and people would walk alongside carriages with horns or they'd walk alongside cars with horns. If you were just walking, you had a horn.

Yeah, I've read this as well. Pedestrians carried the first car horns to warn cars. And then eventually they said, why do we combine this with the car? I read that there was an early locomotive act. And the idea was that cars used to travel really slowly. And to warn people that cars were on the way, someone would walk ahead of the car with a red flag. Okay. So Andy knows everything about this.

Yeah. Is it true? Is this true? Not really. It's true that the act existed. The act existed. And the red flag thing was used. And you would have to have three people operating a vehicle, one to steer it, one to stoke the boiler, and one to walk ahead who was called the stalker with the red flag.

However, I think that when the act was introduced, cars were not a thing. Because it was in about the 1870s. And by the time people started having personal cars, the red flag bit was not observed and had been repealed. Okay. From memory, yeah, that's how it went. So, yeah. I was looking online about sometimes in Morse code, you know, how on text messages, you know,

lol for laugh out loud, there's a long list of how they do abbreviations for longer sentences. So one of my favorite ones, and this is Goodbye, so I want to see who gets this. If you were doing a shortened Morse code of Goodbye, it's DSW.

Why would it be DSW? Don't. Darling? No, DSW. Oh, you were doing all the D-S-W. Does it stand for three words? No, it doesn't actually. Oh, then I'm not going to know it.

DSW. I would have gone for CU because that would be shorter. Yes, it would have been, yeah. So what's DSW? DSW, I can't actually pronounce it, but James will be able to because it's his second-landia. Yeah. Isn't that interesting? It's Russian.

Yeah, Russian D-S-Fidna. You see. That's a goodbye. D-S-W, goodbye. And then humor is H-I, humor-intended. H-E is humor-intended or laughter. We should absolutely start using these after some of our jokes on the show.

I can just say, H-I after one of my puns. Here's another thing I hadn't heard of. Hog-Morse. Have you heard of Hog-Morce? Hog-Worce, yeah. Hog-Morce. Is it bad Morse? Is it like Pig Luton? It's auto-correct.

It's basically autocorrect for when you're doing Morse. It's the most commonly made mistakes when you're doing Morse code. What does it mean? Is it like letters which are similar or? Yeah, it's basically called after one example, home, becoming hog. One example given in the literature is, please fill me in, becoming six Naz Fimmy Q. I see.

So M.E is going to be dash, dash, dot or something, but then G is going to be dash, dash, dot without a space. Yes, yeah. And so. And I guess there's the risk of everything going really out of kilter if you mix up something, and then you get out of sync with a person receiving, and they think your letters end and start in different places, and then it turns into gold will you go. Yeah. So this was, this whole fact. about a kind of secret message being set out basically,

a sort of rude secret message. So I found another example of this kind of thing. Another thing from the Second World War. So Chinese engravers who are designing banknotes changed the design of Chinese banknotes to score points off the Japanese who are occupying their country. Did they?

Yeah. So, for example, the one UN note, very, very common note, it has a picture of Confucius on it, and he's making a gesture of prayer, almost, it looks quite Buddhist, almost. And some engravers changed some of the banknotes they made so that Confucius is doing the classic sex mime, or you use one thumb and finger on one hand and the finger on the other. And for people at home, Andy is doing said mime.

Great radio. Classic sex mime, as he put in. Yeah, so they did that. Here's a thing about signaling out vile and filthy language, an article from the Daily Mail from a couple of years ago. mother Lauren Walker had endured a day from hell at the hands of her son Max. The two-year-old had smeared their dog in butter and put jam in the DVD player. Then he decided he didn't want the fish pie she had spent two hours making. So she then spelt out the C word in his alphabet potato shapes in revenge.

I don't know how that becomes news, but it didn't make a laugh. It must be a photo on Instagram that gets picked up or something like that. I was reading about and President Andrew Jackson. He had a parrot that he taught to swear. And apparently he attended his funeral and started swearing really loudly as funeral had to be taken out. Taken out like the secret service. Bit harsh. They just open up the coffee and chuck it in with him.

There is an online service called Eggplantsmail.com where you can send a message to your loved one. And the idea is that in emojis, an obejean is a signal for something sexual. And this company will send a real life obogeen to your loved one, and they'll inscribe a message on it. And it's supposed to be a signal. It's like doing a real-life emoji. That's quite cool. It's quite good, isn't it? They describe themselves as 100% phallic, 100% anonymous, and 100% disturbing.

And 100% add at math? Okay, that's it. That's 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 have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at Eggshade, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, and Alex. At Alex Bell underscore. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at QI podcast, or you can go to no such thing as a fish.com, which has all of our previous episodes and you can also go to No Such Thing as the News

which has all of our previous TV show episodes a topical look at the week which week all the previous weeks all the old weeks If you were really thinking to yourself I'd love to know what happened in November and late October of this year

head to no such thing as the news.com we'll be back again next week with another episode we'll see you then goodbye bye