No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Pancakes For Perverts

Episode Date: March 18, 2016

Live from Newport, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss tweeting chickens, litigious hyenas and peer-reviewed romantic comedies.

Welcome to another episode, a no such thing as a fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Newport. My name is Dan Schreiber, and please welcome to the stage. It's Anna Chazinski, James Harkin, and Andy 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, James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that grumpy from the seven dwarfs is not nearly grumpy enough. Sounds like an opinion.

It is an opinion, I'd say. It's the opinion of some researchers from Duke University in North Carolina. And what they did is they looked at a load of movies that are aimed at children, so they would be rated you in the UK. They split all the characters up in class. So you have your upper class,

your middle class, and your lower class. And they decided that the depiction of working class was unrealistic and that the seven dwarfs would not be singing cheerfully as they walked down to the mind. So James, who were the scientists? Yeah, they were just people at Duke University in North Carolina.

To be honest, they are, you know, they're cartoons, aren't they? You don't really expect them to be all that kind of realistic. But scientists don't like it when you get things wrong. In the Lion King, their hyenas in the Lion King are the bad guys. And some of the artists for the film spent two days observing hyenas in the hills above the campus of where they were. and the scientists who were with them said, look, hyenas are good guys. Don't depict them as idiots as evil people,

and they did, and then one of them sued. One of the hyenas. No, one of the hyenas, no. I mean, that is litigious, and I think they are evil as a result of that. No, that wouldn't be very realistic either, would it? No, it was one of the scientists sued you. I would watch that film, though.

One of the hyenas from the original film, sues the main... You know, there's a Lion King three, which is like, so the Lion King sort of based on Hamlet, and then the Lion King 3 begins with Timon and Pumba, the comedy characters, and they're based on Guildenstern and Rosencranz

in the original thing, but then the Lion King 3 is based on Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are dead that Tom Stoppard play, but no, it begins with Timon and Pumba watching the Lion King 1 in a cinema, this is how the Lion King 3 begins, and they say that's not how it happened, we're going to tell the story of how

it actually happened, and it's all the other bits. So it's Guildenstern and Rosenstern the Guildenstein of dead. But from the perspective of a war, War, Hawke of America. Amazing. Yeah. So on the seven dwarves. So originally they have no names.

In the Grim Brothers story, they have no names. Okay. And then when Disney did the famous film in 1937, they had about 50 potential names for the dors which were slowly whittled down. And the rejected names included jumpy, deafy, hicky, baldy, puffy, stuffy, and all.

Awful. I actually made a list of my dream seven dwarves. Okay, go on the Disney potentials list as well. There's slutty, hotsy and chesty, which I think are obviously a bit of a threesome. And then awful, goopy, snorful and big-o-ego ego. I think that would be a better seven dwarves. Chesty.

Chesty. It could be someone with a cuff. Gov-cuff, yes. I actually read the... that when they pick dopy is one of the characters that people working at Disney said to Walt Disney that that's not a good name to use because this is meant to be an old tale and dopey is a relatively recent hip name. And so people will think that that's not a good name. Oh yeah, because like dope just meant good, didn't it? Yeah, exactly. And so Disney said, well, it's not a new name. It was used in a Shakespeare

play. So they went, oh, okay, of course, sorry. He made that up. It was never... It's like, yeah, it's right here. Dopee or not dopey? I actually once lost a school quiz off the back of a question of name all the seven dwarves. We got six of them, and we were stuck on the seventh, and my friend, my best friend, Dan, suddenly went, oh my God, I know it, because it's my dad's name.

What's his dad's name? Sneezy. His dad was a rock star in Australia, a really big rock star called Doc Neeson, and he goes, I know it. Now, Doc is not his dad's real name. So what he ended up putting on the paper as the seventh dwarf was Bernard. Are you looking at, he's sure?

He's definitely. I've grown up, everyone's like, oh, I like the dwarf. So there's some controversy about this fact, because obviously as a study, some would say it is fatuous, the word has been used, by others around this table, studying this kind of thing and drawing these conclusions. So I was looking at other potentially fatuous studies. And so there were two studies, one in 2008 and one in 2013, looking at how films can affect people psychologically.

And so whether we should be worried about the effect of Hollywood films, for instance, on society and ourselves. 2008, there was an Edinburgh University, recruited 100 volunteers, and the study deduced that fans of romantic comedies have a stronger belief in predestined love, and they have more unrealistic expectations for relationships. So romantic comedies, bad,

give us unrealistic expectations of relationships. In 2013, there was another study looking into exactly the same thing, found that there is no correlation between people who are interested in watching romantic comedies and people who have unrealistic ideas about love. So really, you can make a study say whatever it is, you want to prove. It'd be good if the leads of those two papers got together and then had a beautiful relationship. That's the thing. I know that sometimes they do seem like they shouldn't have been done, but I love the studies that make no sense. Here's a great one I really like. This is from 2005.

This is what the study was about. Far-way objects are tougher to see. And they confirm that to be true. Swallowing more than one magnet is dangerous. There is, I think it is a problem with kids because magnets are sold down as office stress relievers, I think. And, yeah, apparently, sure. But if you swallow one, it is bad.

But there are like hundreds of people who have met a, ERs in America every year kids who have swallowed two of them and obviously that really screws up your intestines because as soon as you swallow the second one they try to find each other in your insides and disrupt everything else in the meantime so that is quite bad. That is amazing

we need to move on to our next fact. Does anyone have anything before we do? I can give you one more study that's kind of a bit fatuous but also about Disney stuff so they did this thing where they had men watching movies and they had some which were sad movies and some which were happy movies and the happy movie was

the jungle book, which would make everyone happy. Yeah. So they made them watch this jungle book, and then they took swabs from their armpits, and then they gave the swabs to women and asked them to smell them, and smelled all the different armpits of people who've watched all the different movies, and they found that people who'd watched happier movies, when you smell their armpits, it makes you smile more. What? I mean, you can't be smiling much, because you're smelling an armpit. Yeah, it could be more of a grimace. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andrew Hunter-Murie.

My fact this week is that the ancient Romans had party bags. So in ancient Rome, if you went to a dinner party, at the end of it, you would be given a thing called an apophoreta, which literally means a take-away. So they invented takeaways as well. And we know about them because there was a poet called Marshall, and he wrote a whole book about them. It's 221 pairs of lines. and it's everything the things that were given away.

So they included toothpaste, whips, seashells, bladder footballs, or I think I translated this right, a pastry penis. Don't get that in Greg, Steve. That's true. And he said, even if you consume every part of it, you will not be the less pure. That's good.

So you had this huge range of things you could be given at the end of a night. It was very exciting. Wow. You could also take your food away at the end of a night after Roman parties, couldn't you? They had a doggie bag. They had doggy bags. They were the inventors of the doggy bag, which is unbelievably cool.

I think it was called a map. You had to bring your own doggy bag sometimes, I think, so it was called a Mapi, or a mapper, I guess, in the singular. And it was a piece of cloth, and you'd bring it. And if you had leftovers, you wrap them up, and you take them away with you. Wow, that's really interesting. There was, I remember reading once that there was, so there were a lot of houses in Rome, which were above shops. and if you lived in one of these flats, they were quite low-roofed,

and they didn't want people, like their shops to catch on fire, so you weren't allowed to cook in them. And so if you wanted to eat anything, you had to get everything takeaway. Really? Yeah. Wait, it's just a fact.

That's amazing. Yeah, it's good that, isn't it? So you'd want to go to these parties all the time to bring your doggy bag home. So what were the parties like back then? Were they wild? Were they rocus? I think they varied like parties today, then.

The more I looked into it, they had hot tub parties. I found out, which I didn't know about. Did they have toga parties? They didn't wear togas most of the time, did they? Did they not? I think they wore tunics. Yeah, I think they hated them, didn't they? They had to wear them every now and then,

but they were really awkward to wear. Was it not, Roosevelt had a toga party because people took the Mickey out of him and said that he was acting like a Caesar, and so his wife kind of threw a party as if to say, like as if to cock a snook to the man. I believe that happens. He was the man.

What are you talking about? You're right. Yeah. To the little men. Yeah, Roman parties, it's a good question. One of the things that I've always thought would be, have been awkward at Roman parties, is the fact that everyone had to lie down.

And so at dinner parties, everyone lay down, as we know, and you'd have a couch arrangement where there would be a couch or a bed on three walls of the room, and you'd have the hosts on the middle couch, and then the top guests, there were seating plans. So I think they also came up with seating plans, and the most favoured guests would get the couch where you had the better view of the host,

and you had a really nice view out of it. the building and then the less favoured guest just got a view of the wall. And you had to lie down and you lay on like your left arm and ate your food with your right arm and it just sounds really uncomfortable. So another thing the Romans invented was the concept of deal or no deal. In that, this is invented by the Emperor Augustus. He asked his guests to bid sums of money for pictures when they were faced to the wall. So you had to bid a sum of money on a picture, which was...

You couldn't see the value of it. And I gather that that is what happens. That is exactly the same. So that is, and then they turn the painting round to reveal it at the end. Cool. That is amazing. That is deal or no deal? That is deal or no deal.

Wow. And he was amazing because he did this thing where he said, you also, when you went to a dinner party with Augustus, you would pay for a token and it was inscribed with what you might get. But they varied hugely. So you couldn't really see what was on the token before you bought it. So again, it was like a blind. auction. That's like a lucky dip.

Like a lucky dip. And so you could either get some gold or you could get a sponge. So it was really varied. And then later emperor, Ella Gabulus, he gave out things called Lucky Chances, which were these special spoons and it was inscribed with what you'd won. And it might say

10 on it and you'd redeem it and they'd say oh, you've won 10 pounds of gold. Or it might be that you won 10 flies or something. So it really varied. And they started giving them out at the Coliseum. And when they had a lottery at the games and the to see him, you just won a token and you'd redeem it and see what you'd want. You might have won 10 bears. How terrifying to have the 10, yeah. You'd wonder, 10 times I have sex with your

wife. It could be anything. You shouldn't ever run the lottery. We need to move on to our next fact. Anyone who got anything else? I can quickly tell you that there is 808 million pound spent on party bags for children's parties in the UK every year. Wow. 8808 million. Apparently the average bag is worth £7.50 which I think means there's

107 million party bags which means every child it's 30 each so it goes to 30 parties every year. Yeah. I did not know 30 people when I was seven certainly not 30 would have had me to a party.

And apparently 2% of a thousand parents surveyed in one survey said that their child had received an iPod in a party bag. Wow. What? No. Who were they serving? People in Chelsea Mansions. I read a news article, an American news article, a mother called Sherry Jameson, who was left speechless when she had a birthday party for her son,

her six-year-old son, and a guest took back the birthday gifts they'd given him when they found out they were going to be no party bags. The article reported about a party goer who asked to remain anonymous saying, a lot of us feel cheated. The kids had fun, but it was a really bare bones event. It's not like she had a bouncy

castle. And she's since received emails and texts from guests who felt it would be in poor taste to take their gift back at the party, but who are now getting in touch to demand to be refunded the full price, including tax of their present. Including tax. Let the tax go.

Let's move on to our next fact so we don't run out of time. So it's time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Ernest Hemingway once stole a urinal from a bar, saying that he pissed away so much of his money into it that he owned it. I can tell you from experience, that very rarely works on landlords. do you piss on all your furniture? Yeah, so this was a bar that he used to go to all the time, and it was moving, it was closing down,

and so he just went in, and he just took the urinal off, and he brought it back to his house. And James, I know you've been to Ernest Hemingway's house. I have been there, and the urinal is still there. Really? Yep, it's still there, you can see it, and when you go to Ernest Hemingway's house in Key West, they make you go on a tour around there,

and that's one of the things they tell you that this is a, This is a story. His urinal is now in the garden, I think. Yeah, that's right. It's in the back garden. And it's been turned into like a fountain or it's a nice centerpiece. I think it's quite a nice urinal, actually. If my memory serves, it's quite big and kind of made of big stone and it's kind of

got flowers on it and stuff. I think it's quite nice. Wow. Hopefully. How did he get it out of the bar? Because I wouldn't know where to begin taking urinal off a wall. He was a big, manly man, manly. And, you know, you're enjoying your wife.

over there. You've made yourself very plain. He was a big guy though, you're right. He was obsessed with boxing. He used to take on people half his age, saying, and probably, you know, same size as him, but they assume being younger, they could take him out, and he would win.

He had his own boxing ring in the back garden. It was next to where the urinal now is. And he went off to the Spanish Civil War to act as a correspondent. And while he was there, he had an affair with another woman, and his wife wasn't very happy about that. So she sold his boxing ring and bought a swimming pool.

And that swimming pool cost $20,000 in those days, which now is hundreds and hundreds of thousands. And when he came back, he had one penny in his pocket and he said, you've taken everything I've got, have this last penny. And he threw it down and it's still there under a bit of glass. And you can see it if you visit.

We've preserved the remnants of his childish spoiled brat tantrums forever. Just on his manliness, I love this. image. He wrote standing up, always. He would write in a pencil. He wouldn't be wearing a shirt, so he had his shirt off,

wore baggy shorts, and they were held up by a leather belt that he'd taken off the body of a dead German soldier that was inscribed with the German the Third Reich kind of insignia. Wow. That's cool, isn't it? A half-naked man with a

third Reich belt standing up and writing some novels. Well, I think we know your type. Just on the pub fights thing. I read that he went out drinking with James Joyce and that James Joyce would get into fights and then say, Hemingway, deal with this. Because he was too drunk, Joyce was too drunk to stand.

This is according to Hemingway. I have a fact about Ernest Hemingway, which is that Hemingway was part kangaroo. Have you got Dund's notes there? No, he was. He was part kangaroo. He broke his arm in a car accident, and the surgeon tending him

bound his bone together inside his body with kangaroo tendon. Wow. Yeah. And this was a... I mean, that wasn't an innovation just for Hemingway. It was, that was a...

At some point, a standard medical procedure to put a bit of kangaroo inside you. That's so cool. It feels like the tendons would be kind of stretchier, doesn't it? Yeah. I wonder if they were. Maybe why they used it.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know. But anyway, he was. It's not like all bits of a kangaroo a bouncy, James. I enjoy it. They're not made of rubber. Do you know when he was a young boy, Ernest Hemingway, when he was a young boy,

his mother used to dress him up as a girl because she didn't want a boy, she wanted a girl. And so she used to dress him up as a girl and call him Ernestine. That backfired very badly, didn't it? It really did. But it was up until like he was six years old. He was going around. She grew his hair long.

And he had to pretend to be the twin sister of his older sister. Wow. Yeah. They're a pretty weird family. I read he didn't like his name. He didn't like being called Ernest because it was like the hero of an importance of being Ernest by Oscar Wilde. Oh, really?

And he was upset about that. And that was why he objected because he thought Oscar Wilde wasn't a feminine. And therefore that he shouldn't be called Ernest. He had huge problems about wanting to be incredibly masculine and sort of hyper masculine. Yeah, he did. He was a really seriously odd guy. He was also, honestly, go home and spend two hours researching Ernest Hemingway because you think, as I was saying to James yesterday, as you're reading about him, you think,

I have not lived. This man has lived. And in so many ways, one of the ways was that he was incredibly accident prone, it seems. So he had this old kangaroo malarkey in his arm. He had a plane crash in 1954. So he was on safari with his wife. He was in Uganda. And his plane crash had to crash land,

and they had to choose whether to crash land on an elephant trail or in a big crocodile pit. Those are the only options. There's not even a tiny strip of land in between the elephant trail and the crocodile pit. What are we on? What did they pick? No, they picked the elephant trail. Of course. So they landed in the elephant trail, then.

He, his wife, and the pilot of the plane had to sleep there overnight because they were surrounded by elephants blocked in by these elephants. So they were both quite badly injured. And the next day, they were rescued by another plane. So they boarded this other plane, which caught fire.

And also crashed the following day. Where did that crash into? Do you want to go to the snake pit or the Wildebeest? Sanctuary. So if it was from the Wildebeest, I would pick the Wildebeest Sanctuary. They'll be calm. They're being looked after.

Maybe we could adopt one. What word comes after Wildebeest for that joke to make sense? What about the hyena lair? Actually, hyena's are quite nice guys. I actually read a thing about Wilderbees the other day, and I was going to try and use for a main fact. The scientists were saying that they were looking at ancient, Wilder Beasts, and apparently ancient

Wilder Beasts, they evolved a trunk, like a longish trunk, so that they could gossip with each other. Yeah, because they needed to tell each other like, you see Jeff over there? Like, they needed to do tiny little bits of gossip, and they couldn't do it with

their normal Wilderbeast face. What? I feel like you're paraphrasing and studying. That's what it said. It's so gossiping. Do you know where Hemingway's biggest scar came from? So he had this big scar on his forehead. It was the most prominent thing you'd notice about him in his later life.

And it didn't come from the car crash or from the two plane crashes or from the motorbike accident he had when he was in Germany. Or the wars that he was kind of in? Any of the wars he covered. It came from a time he was in a bathroom and he pulled a chain thinking it was the toilet flush and it accidentally brought the whole skylight down on his

head. And that's what gave him this massive scar. And whenever anyone asked him about it, he was really reluctant to say it's from a toilet skylight. So the two plane crashes there was an interesting thing that actually happened in the time between the first plane crash and the second plane crash, which was he and his wife were reported dead, and it got spread around the world, and obituaries were printed the next day, and so he had the rare thing of being able to genuinely see the obituaries to his life.

And then the next day he got on a plane, and then that crashed again. And that led to severe trauma, which his best friends think is what led to the end of his life for him killing himself from that second plane crash. I think it just ruined the rest of his life. But again, you know, you were saying just what an insane character, what a big life. He, during World War II, was hunting Nazis, despite not being enlisted into World War II. And he did it from his boat, and his boat was set up. It was a fishing boat. It had direction-finding equipment.

It had a machine gun. It had grenades. And he went out hunting Nazi U-boats. He used to practice with his son trying to take down U-boats with grenades by throwing them at turtles. I think that was very unfair on the turtles. A, you've been playing their Nazis, and B, a U-boat is a lot tougher than a turtle. But that's what he did.

Okay, we need to move on to the final fact very shortly. Anything before we do? Just quickly, he had 52 cats, and he taught one of them, so this is his exact words, I have taught Uncle Wolfer, Dillinger, and Will, to make a pyramid like lions. and...

Sorry, what? Well, I think he taught his cats to make a human pyramid, I'm not sure. But lions do you? Yeah. And then he said, and have taught friendless, that was the name of another of his cats,

have taught friendless to drink with me, brackets, whiskey and milk, but even that doesn't take the place of a wife and family. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the night, and that is Chisansky. Yeah, my fact is that.

The official medical diagnosis code for being struck by a chicken is different to the official medical diagnosis code for being pecked by a chicken. And this is the international classification of diseases, the ICD, and everything that could go wrong with you has an ICD code. So it's now enormous,

and every possible injury that's ever been reported has this code. So, yeah, there are codes for being pecked by a chicken and struck by a chicken. completely different codes. There was one new one added in the 70s which was bitten by an orca. There's contact with non-venomous frogs,

that's one, sucked into a jet engine. And injuries caused while knitting and crocheting. So all of those things, if you go to a doctor or at ER, then they'll write down, you'll say, oh, my knitting needle just jammed into my thigh,

and then a non-venomous frog landed on it. And they'd say, oh, there are two codes for that, hold on and write them down, and then they've, you know, they've reported it. What is the code for was pulling on what I thought was toilet chain? Turned out to be skylight. There would definitely be one for that. There is one for fall off toilet. That's W18.1.

Just to let you know that. A few others, just because it's a 1,593 page PDF, and I read through the whole thing. Um, fall from a non-moving, non-motorized scooter is W-05. Fall into bucket of water. Not trip over bucket of water, but fall into a bucket of water. That's W1622. And S30.862 is insect bite on penis. Ah!

That's amazing. Long list reading. This is my favorite one. V91.07. Burn due to water skis on fire. Don't smoke on water skis. I was reading an interview with someone. So there's a brilliant article in the New Yorker about this.

And they interviewed someone who's involved in deciding the new classifications because they quite recently upgraded it and expanded them. And it sounds quite frustrating. She said, you're in this meeting room and you're debating all the things. things that could possibly happen as well and asking if you should also have codes for them. And so she was saying, a question was raised on what codes would apply if a mother was given the wrong baby to breastfeed. It was stated that that would be outside the scope of ICD coding. So they do have some limits.

I read a thing about breastfeeding just this morning, which is that in the 19th century in America, if you had what's called agalactica, which means you can't produce milk for your baby, the way that they would treat it is to put a pancake on your breasts. As a milk substitute? He's got milk in it, isn't it? It's true. I don't know what they thought it would do, but you would put a warm pancake on the breast,

and then when it got cold, you'd put another warm one on and keep doing that for a couple of hours. What would they do with all the cooled breast pancakes? Just make some new pancakes, I think. That's very wasteful. Yeah. You could give them to... perverts

just three pounds we'll buy four pancakes for a pervert I was reading about the fact that not only do they have these codes that they can write for proper medical use but they actually, there's a lot of medical slang that gets used which patients

because doctors are telling people at home they're putting it on the internet people are wising up to the fact that they use this kind of slang so like for example one PFO Pist fell over. That's what they'll put on the paper as a thing. They'll put brothel sprouts, which is genital warts. I really like that. Nice. Nice. Brothal sprouts. Very clever. Yeah. But yeah, I was reading about the fact that some doctor board now needs to tell doctors

not to do this anymore. So they sent out a mass email and different hospitals are doing this. It's really funny the fact that when they say it, this is a quote from it, although acknowledging that slang is likely to continue to be used, should be kept to a minimum. So they're like, well, we know you're going to do it anyway. So, yeah, but it's, yeah, there's a whole Prat-Fo, patient, reassured and told to fuck off. I have read articles like that, and some doctors go on there and comments and say, no, we don't do this at all. But then others go, yeah, we do, really.

I've got two close friends with doctors and both of them say they do it all the time. To they. Wow. I was reading a thing about bills of mortality, which were these, they were these lists that got published in the, 16th and 17th centuries and it was a record of how people died basically in your parish for example and every week the parish clerks would record who had died in the parish and how they died but they weren't medically trained obviously because they were clerks so a lot of the causes of death are really quite vague so they include things like um this is for how they died um griping in the guts

we don't know uh stopping of the stomach again and um Suddenly. This is my favourite from the bills of mortality that I managed to read was cancer and wolf. Sometimes you can't know what got them first. Another one just said,

Planet. Killed by a planet. Guys, we need to wrap up fairly soonish, so if you've got any more. I've got a thing very quickly on chickens. Okay. So this fact was about the medical code for chicken, and it just reminded me that I was reading about a, there's an Australian fast food chain called Chicken Treat,

who currently have a chicken doing all of their tweets. So it basically, it's in its cage. They put a computer in there, and they've put the food onto the keyboard. And so the chicken pecks the keyboard for the food, and it starts typing stuff out. And Guinness World Records have said that if it manages to type a five-letter word and it's a successfully, it reads as a word,

then it's going to go into the Guinness World Records as the first non-human to tweet. So far, it's only managed three letters. What was the word that it tweeted? Bum. Anything more before we wrap up? How can you ask us to follow a chicken tweeting the word bum?

Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts then. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shreiberland, James, at Egg-shaped. Andy?

At chicken bum. And Shazinski. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep, or you can go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com, where all of our previous episodes are, and you can also go to our Twitter account, which is at QI Podcasts,

and send us all a message. Thank you so much for listening at home. Thank you so much, you guys, in Newport. Thank you so much. It's been awesome. We'll see you again next week. Goodbye.