No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Pee-Bay

Episode Date: September 4, 2015

Live from The Edinburgh Festival, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss the history of buttons, White House squirrel problems and sewer-powered street lamps.

Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast. This week coming to you from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm joined by three other QI elves. Please welcome to the stage. It's Andy Murray, Anna Chesinsky, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that dog pee makes streetlights collapse. You always hurt the ones you love. How does it do that? Well, it's urea that you get in dog pee and it's corrosive. And all over the world, streetlights are falling down due to dog pee. There was a report that came out in San Francisco. They were just keeling over these lamp posts.

The pee was really ruining them. And this is a quote from them, we encourage people and dogs alike to do their business in other places like a proper restroom or on one of our fire hydrants. The idea of the fire hydrants is they're made out of cast iron

so they won't corrode. Okay. But I didn't know that people pissing on lampposts was a thing. Where have you been doing it? I don't know. I've been clearly wasting my time. Yeah, because dogs like to urinate on things

in order to market as their territory, don't they? Whereas humans don't really have that, so we could just wee anywhere. That's a really good point. They did some tests on dogs as well. They tested how they do it in terms of status. So they took 48 Labradoros through a course, which was full of the urine of other dogs.

You know, because that's what scientists do. And they found out that animals with higher tail bases and tail positions, so if the tail was higher up, they did more urine marking. So they think that that is the sign of status. You do more urine marking, and you are higher status if your tail is higher. Wow, that's the equivalent of a mansion in the dog world.

And there are some very submissive low-status animals. They just fake it, they lift a leg, and then they don't spray anything. I'm doing it, but I'm not. I'm shy, I'm shy. Or maybe they just really like streetlights and they don't want to wreck them. Well, that would be a nice thought. They're like environmentally friendly dogs. So have we, other than just encouraging people not to piss lampposts to death, are we doing something about physically making the land?

Yes, we are. There's a dog urinal in the Spanish town of El Vandrelle. So they have a pole and the pole has a grid underneath it and the idea is that the dogs will pee on this pole. So is it law there in... Where was it? El Vandrelle. Is it law there that you have to train your dog

to recognise a dog urinal and only urinate into that? It isn't, but there is a law in Piaceenza in Italy which says that someone can be fined 500 euros for not cleaning up after your dog urinates. Wow. Wow. People have to walk around with a bottle of water and kind of wash it away. Or some kitchen towel and you just snap on it and let it absorb.

Wow, good. It's also happening to a museum in Dorset. They're very worried about it. It's the Bridgeport Museum and it has a really extensive archive of the town's 800-year-old rope and netting industry. And this museum is now being eroded by Doggier in and they've had to release statements saying. The whole museum? The entire museum.

So they just attack the wall right around. Yeah. And then... I mean, this is a great way of taking over somewhere, eventually with war... Just weeing on it. Just wee on it enough and it'll collapse. It's a long-term strategy, isn't it?

It's not a blitzkrieg. Almost not worth having the place once you've weed it to death. Oh, that's true. But do you know why the dogs are so attracted to this rope and netting museum? Or is it a mystery? They're very interested in, yeah, early fishing industries.

Anyway... Anyway, we're going off topic here. Dog urine. Innovative types are using dog feces as a solution to some problems. What possible problem could you have? I sort of presented that quite cryptically. So if you put your dog waste in a bin, then it goes to a site, and then it gets burnt up, and it releases lots of bad stuff into the atmosphere.

But in Massachusetts, they've created a methane digester so that you put your dog feces into this methane digester, and it powers electricity. only powers one lamp, I think. Which has collapsed. But they are working on it. Okay, there is a feces-powered lamp in London, a streetlight. A human feces powered.

Really? Yeah, and it's really near the QI offices in Covent Garden. It's by the Savoy Hotel. I can't many people notice me doing that. embarrassing. And they used to have them. They used to be streetlights which burned off. the gas from the sewers.

So the gases would come up these pipes and just be burned off at the top. And there's only one still working. But it's called the, what's it called? The carting lane, patent sewer ventilating lamp.

That's what it's called. Catchy. Wow. So lamps in London, speaking of which, there are 1,500 gas lamps in London that is still powered by gas. And there's a team of five people who work for British gas, apparently.

And they are employed to go around London every night and wind up these gas lamps. So they don't actually light the fire. They wind up a clock thing, which ignites the gas lamp on the inside. And they climb ladders and go up there and do that. Every single night, you'll see them. I have never seen them.

You aren't looking up, James. You've got to start looking up. Isn't that cool? They call themselves the guardians of the lamps. Nice. British gas employees. Yeah. Nice.

It's pretty cool. I've discovered a really great place to buy urine online. So just a quick shout-out And if anyone here or listening needs some, they're called P-MART, P-W-MART. It should have been called P-BAY. Oh, P-B-B-B-Oh, my God, that would have been great. And it's basically, this is their sort of opening blurb.

Welcome to P-Mart, your best discount online source for 100% real undiluted predator pee and animal urine. So what they do is they sell to people who need urine in order to make a mark of smell so that they can fend off other predators coming towards them. Yeah, you can get gift cards. You can buy someone a gift card

for sort of like $100 worth a pee. My birthday's coming up, that. Yeah, exactly. They invented this thing called, I don't know if they invented it, but they sell it. It's called pea gel. And they say, this is an amazing product.

And I agree. It's designed for indoor use, so you can have that great pee smell inside your house. And no spilling, no mess, no fuss. and it's just basically a gel rather than a liquid that you can just smear some urine smell

of a coyote it stops I guess other coyotes maybe coming into your house using your sofa yeah yeah my sofa at home is full of coyotes all the time we've got a new sponsor by the way for this week's podcast guys

it's pee gel it's P-mart but also so you can also go down the list of all the things that they sell and there's lots of animals it's really cool and they bottle them in those kind of you know when you go past those health shops

where they have up your mass, you know, all those big, huge bottles. Up your, what? Like protein shakes? Yeah, protein shake. Let's say there's lots of different animals. My favorite one that I saw is that you can buy one gallon of pure black bear urine.

A gallon. A gallon. That's what I thought. How long must it take a bear to produce a gallon of urine? I know. And straight into the thing as well. It must be a nightmare. That could take down a building.

Yes. Yeah. Have you heard of white-footed sportive lemurs? I haven't. No, neither had I until I found this out. So they're a kind of lemur and they're really antisocial. In fact, they actively avoid each other and they go to great lengths to not see their mates

or their family members or anyone else. And they only communicate using their communal toilets. That's what they do. So they leave a cent mark. Is it like writing little comments on the toilet wall? Yeah, basically, yeah, yeah. And they just go and they say, oh, good, you know, mum was here or whatever. That's what I've seen, your mum was here.

It's been nearly 80 episodes before we had our first Your Mum joke on air. We stood out very well. Yeah. Other uses, good uses for urine, which is backfired in this case, actually, but a family in Bristol who tried to lure back a lost dog by leaving a trail of their own urine on the streets near their home. have been criticized by the local council. Criticised is such a nice word.

What did they? They insisted it's the best way they went on forums online and said like, well, dog is lost. And the people on the forum said, well, you should pee all over your town. And it'll come back and find you. Apparently it's quite a normal way of doing it, said the owner. Because I would just put up a sign, silly me.

There was a vet who was interviewed about it, who said he would be pleasantly. surprised if it works, but probably it would be better if they could place jumpers and items of owner's clothing, because they really recognise things that their owner's smell of. So he said, the only way that the urine thing would work was if the owner had an incontinence

problem. And we're going to have to move on to the next fact in a few minutes. Okay, there was a book called Pharmacopia Beatiana from 1706 by George Bate and he had a gargle for mouth ulcers which included a white dog turd. Wow.

Yeah. How do you gargle a solid thing? I think you then dilute it in some water. I would say wine, actually. Yeah, why not take the edge of it? Some other uses for dogs, according to old medical dictionaries. Here's one from Robert James in 1743. He said, keeping a warm puppy next to one's upset belly

will give a kindly and cherishing heat. That's nice, isn't it? Yeah. And not quite as nice. Dog dung, being hot and acrid, might treat toothache. Might as well give it a try. Anything else? So there was an experiment in 1955, which I really like,

where the urine of schizophrenics was fed to spiders to find out if they made webs any differently compared to when they drunk the urine of non-skitophonics. It really sounds like they're just getting words out of that. and going schizophrenic, spiders, urine. What are we going to do? Inject! Okay. You can imagine that they thought,

I bet they make really wacky webs with some crazy... They didn't. There was no marked difference in the webs of the spiders who drank the schizophrenics urine. The only thing they could conclude from it, the scientist said, was that urine must taste extremely unpleasant. After taking just a sip, the spiders exhibited marked abhorrence.

If I was a spider, I would have made a web, which has said, screw you. in the middle of it. Okay, let's move on to our next fact. Time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that after the button was invented, it took more than 1,000 years for someone to invent the button hole. What do we do with these?

What do we do? Where do they go? Who keeps making them? And they were doing things like, well, I guess we'll just latch a bit of string around it. That might be the way it just no one thought to have created the buttonhole and eventually, and I love that that must have been the biggest innovation of its day, just a little slit

in the bit of clothing. It's kind of, I mean, because the loops do work, so I think the buttonhole came about in the, it was a mid-13th century in Europe when the buttonhole came to being, but you can understand, so if you have a loop, that works perfectly well, I don't really see why we bother to invent the buttonhole, to be honest.

True, and they have to be reinforced as well because you can't just cut a hole in your clothing, because then that'll widen and eventually it'll be no good for a button. So they do have to be reinforced guys. And that public service announcement was brought to you. Yeah, and they were used for decoration as well,

weren't they? Because they were really ornate and whatever. There was apparently really expensive as well. According to Franco Giacasi, who is the world's biggest button collector. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Does he have the world's largest collection of buttons or is he the world's biggest button collector?

He has three buttons, but he's eight foot six. He said that there was a little bit of the world. time when the buttons were so expensive you could pay off a debt by plucking a precious button from your suit and giving it to someone. Wow! That's great, isn't it? That's really cool. Yeah. There's a really, really good article

about buttons on slate.com if you want to go there afterwards for more button stuff. Go on. The quote is, A button packs an extraordinary amount of information about a given time and place, its provenance onto a crowded little canvas. Children learn to button and unbutton early in life, and they keep doing it

until they're dead. Here's a great little thing. Anyone in the audience here, anyone listening at home, all of us on this stage, most likely the one thing that unites us is that all, if you have a button on you, are wearing a button that comes from the same town in China. There is Button City in China.

It's called Chowto. And Chowto produces 15 billion buttons a year. And it started because three, I think it was three, brothers. They just found a few buttons on the ground, and they started collecting buttons, and then it turned into an industry, and it became this massive thing. But now they

make them rather than find them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, that's the amazing thing. They find 15 billion buttons a year. And nobody knows where they come from. Yeah, but it's not every single button in the world. I think it's something like three out of five people, if they're wearing buttons, wear buttons from Button City. And Button City

apparently is amazing, and it's situated very near Toothbrush City, which produces a lot of the toothbrushes. You should be next to buttonhole city. Something else about buttons. Lots of Birmingham is built on buttons. So, stay with me. So shell buttons used to be extremely popular buttons

made from Mother of Pearl or Shell. And in the 18th century, the button town of the 18th century was Birmingham. But they made a huge amount of the world's shell buttons and the best ones apparently required 80 different processes in order to just make a button. And there was so much waste shell, which they produced, that they dug enormous pits to bury it all.

And lots of buildings in Birmingham today, especially in the jewellery quarter, have their foundations on Mother of Purp. So they're all on sort of buttons and buttoned upcast. How cool is that? I did not know that. That's really interesting. Did you know that cloth buttons were illegal

in 17th century France? No. Cloth buttons. Cloth buttons were illegal in 17th century France. Yeah, they sound totally useless. I would ban them. Like buttons made of cloth. That wasn't the reason they banned them.

And basically it was due to big button. Oh. Yeah. It was the handicraft industry who said that basically by making these cloth buttons, it was going to make out other buttons made out of pearl or whatever. They were going to make them obsolete. And it was so bad that people, that officials would go to houses and search them looking for buttons.

And you could be arrested for enjoying a button in the privacy of your own home. According to this article I read. Wow. When we say enjoying a button, I mean, if you're enjoying a button, I think you might have to be arrested. There was, so a button alternative, since we didn't really figure out the button-button hole thing, in ancient Greece, in ancient Rome, was the fibula,

which was a for one of the safety pin. Essentially, we had exactly like a safety pin, and they had these in ancient Greece in Rome, and that's an example of one of these things, which I love, which is an invention that vanished for about 2,000 years, and the safety pin resurfaced in... So they had safety pins in ancient Greece. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what they did, up their tunics.

The guy who invented the modern safety pin was called Walter Hunt, I think, and he sold his patent for $400 because he had like a gambling debt or something. So he sold his patent so that he could pay off his debt. Because he thought, oh, it's a safety pin, it's nothing. It's not really important. That is how I feel about safety pins, to be honest. But actually, as a commercial enterprise. And also, he invented, I think, like a sewing machine, like similar to Elias Howe invented the actual sewing machine,

but he did a precursor to it. And he didn't patent that because he thought, it would put a lot of seamstresses out of work. Oh, no. It did the opposite of that. Created a massive global industry. Oh, my friend. One thing that button,

so when the buttonhole did come into Bing, one thing that they were useful in fashion between 13th and 15th centuries was detachable sleeves. So that was a really fashionable thing, is that you would have, you know, you could swap between outfits. It would look like you were wearing a different outfit every time.

You had lots, you had a sleeve. draw, which was just sleeves. And you probably, they did. I don't know, they had lots of different sleeves. Where else are you going to keep the sleeves? That's really cool. That is really cool.

That's amazing. But then one day you might accidentally leave the house with odd sleeves on. Oh, disaster. And then some people say, he's just doing it on purpose to be pretentious. So basically, before the buttonhole was invented, buttons did become very popular.

Everyone was wearing them ornamentally. And one of the hangovers of that time which we rarely think about, I was reading this in Bill Bryson's book at home, if you think about a suit coat and the buttons by the cuff, they're not practical buttons. They're just ornamental, three ornamental on each side. Yeah, that is weird. Yeah, so that's a hangover from back in the day pre-button hole. Well, so another hangover which we are wearing every day, every female in the audience,

symbols of sexism of the olden days, is the fact that buttons on women's clothes are on the opposite side to buttons on men's clothes. So there are loads of theories about why that is. The main theory I've heard is that women were dressed by maids. Yes. And so the maids who were mostly right-handed would kind of be, it would be easier for them because it was on the left-hand side, whereas men dress themselves.

I thought it was because all women are left-handed. I've heard so, yeah, I think that is the main theory. Although, like any women you're talking about my one are. The gender theory is the main theory, mine isn't. No, no, the all-left-handed thing we are. Yeah, it's true. But another theory is that, so men have them on the right-hand side because they would have their weapons in their right hand

when they were carrying their weapons. So when you're trying to get undressed and kill someone at the same time. Exactly. It's much easier, one-handed. I will deal to the death, but... Duh, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-ha. Gillian Lincoln's can't stand to be in the same room as friends and family who word buttons.

Who? What? She's called Gillian Lincoln's, and she has something called Coompoon. phobia, which is the fear of buttons. She's had it since she was age seven, and her boyfriend, Nate Dorington, can only wear clothes with zips.

Wow. But her name is Lincoln's, which is nicely ironic. Oh, yeah. Considering the function of a button. Do you know who else had that? Yeah, yeah. We must have read the same thing. Yeah, let's say it together.

Okay, ready? One, two, three. Steve Jobs. Yeah. Steve Jobs was scared of buttons, and partially there's a theory that that's why it led to the buttonless iPhone, because he was so...

Yeah, so Steve Jobs, he actually had a fear of buttons. Yeah, he did say that in 2007, I think. Another person who had a fear of buttons was Napoleon's, I think, great-granddaughter, Marie Bonaparte. Oh, really? Really? Yep. Wow.

That's true. Is she the one who had a clitoris moved? Moved? I don't want to... We can't get into it. Just to a holiday house? She had a little bit. Very, very quickly, she did some studies

where she looked at the distance between the clitoris and the vagina of lots of women and found out that those where it was closer had more orgasms and she wanted to have more orgasms so moved her clitoris surgically closer to her vagina. She had to move twice and it didn't work. It's very sad. It's extremely sad, yeah, yeah.

How the mighty families have fallen. Napoleon's Army actually had a situation with buttons, which was that their buttons were made out of tin. And I've read, I don't know if this is actually a solid theory, but apparently when they were marching into Russia was so cold that the tin crumbled. And so their uniforms opened wide up,

and suddenly they were exposed to the cold, and that's what led to a lot of deaths. So as they were invading, it was kind of like watching the full Monty coming towards. I've read that theory. I've read different things about it, though. I've read people contradicting it, and people saying, yes, no, it's definitely it.

So, yeah, I'm not sure. I'm going to have to move us on. No worries. Anyone else? Got something? Just that the button replacement is the zip in the modern era and you've got to beware of the zip because it is by far and away the most common cause of penis injury.

So between 2002 and 2010, there were almost 18,000 people in the US alone who were hospitalized because of penile injury. Can you imagine if they all arrived on the same day? Imagine the coincidence. It was after a big charity, pull your flies up. And also, possibly not interestingly for men, but it is almost only ever the penis and not the testicles are good news of the testicles,

very hard to get them caught in the zip. It's more like no news for the testicles and very, very bad news for the penis. When they invented the zip, it was marketed as a better way to do up your trousers as you were less likely to forget to do up a zipper as you were to forget to do up buttons. Oh.

But also less likely to chop your cock off with buttons. Okay. Time for you. Fact number three, and that is Andy Murray. Oh, good. Okay. My fact is that as a baby, St. Nicholas refused to drink his mother's breast milk on fast days. So on Wednesdays and Fridays, St. Nicholas would refuse to suckle because he was so holy, so young, except in the evening when it was allowed because the day was over. So there are other saints where this happened. So there's a biography of the 5th century

St. Candid, which says, that as a baby, he completely refused to suckle at his mother's right breast, but if she had eaten a delicious meal, he also refused to suckle at her left breast. Wow. What? So he wasn't allowed to enjoy it too much.

So if she didn't a delicious meal, then breast milk is more delicious. Exactly. It was like an abstinence thing. Babies are so much more advanced than we give them credit for it. Yeah, absolutely. Do you know who the patron saint of breastfeeding is? It's not Sir Nicholas.

No, it's St. Giles. And before he became a saint, he withdrew deep into the forest near Neme, where he lived on his own and his sole companion was a deer who sustained him with her milk. A weird person to nominate as a patron saint of breastfeeding

because it is not a conventional way to breastfeed. Yeah. But he is also the patron saint of Edinburgh, St. Giles. Is he? And the patron saint of people who are afraid of the dark. Wow. Good knowledge. That's very good knowledge.

The patron saint of Glasgow is St. Mungo, and St. Mungo died of shock after getting into a very hot bath. Guys, I think I can handle a bath. It is really hot, sun munger. Please, why are you calling me saint? So, just one more saint. St. Gwen the White was the mother of two young sons,

and then she gave birth to a third son. And in order to help her nursing her third infant, God miraculously gave her a third breast. And she became known as Gwen of the three paps. Anyway. St. Nicholas about this fact is. So one of his miracles, which is particularly impressive, I think. So there was someone who was selling pickled ham in a street market,

and St. Nicholas realized that he was not selling pickled ham, as the sign suggested. He was selling the pickled, chopped up bodies of three small children, and he pieced them together. But it's not sad because he pieced them together, and he brought the children back to life again. So that is impressive. The Gokin triplets.

My God. Yeah, we should clarify that stories about what saints do, we're not necessarily presenting us. I know. I didn't know what to write down as interesting because it sounds like wherever he walked, he would be in a situation and he would pray it away. So he'd be like, oh, we're in the ocean, and sailors are vomiting and there's a whirlpool.

I'll just do a quick prayer. What is true about him, actually, is that he slapped somebody once. He slapped a fellow bishop. Yes, because it's the great Aryan controversy, which is the controversy about whether Jesus is actually fully divine or whether he's sort of half divine because he was also a human. And basically, Sir Nicholas strongly believed that Jesus is God. And someone suggested that Jesus wasn't quite either divine or human.

And he got up, it was at some synod in the year 3, 25 AD. And Sir Nicholas got up, crossed the room and gave him a big slap around the face. Wow. And that is where we get the phrase bashing the bishop. So, yeah, I'm not sure, like you're saying, that saints didn't do these things. Is that sacrilegious in any way? For instance, there are a few saints who were decapitated

and carried their own heads. You're saying that that didn't happen as well? No, I definitely am not saying that. St. Jean of Lajara, who carried his own severed head and threw it into the rhone. Or Paul of Tarsus, who had his head chopped off and then said, Jesus Christ, 50 times after it,

have been chopped off. Wow. You might not have said it in that way. But 50 times. 50 times is amazing. Well, the first time it would be amazing. And then the 10th time it would be, yeah, okay, we get it here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm like 50th time. Okay, can you just shut up now? There's actually a real problem with saints who are beheaded and then carry their heads around where to put the halo. So I think there's some controversy as to whether you put it over their severed neck when you're painting them or whether you put it above the head here and there's mixed views. You'll see both. You'll see both.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So everyone can have their own view on that. Wow. Can I bring it back to breast milk very quickly? Yeah. Okay. Is this another website? So I found a great place to buy breast milk online.

So only thebreast.com. And it's genuinely... Simply the breast. I know. It should have been, right? What? Think out there, guys. And this is a genuine place

where people trade breast milk online, and you have all sorts of categories, subcategories of types of breast milk that you can buy and have shipped to your house. You can have zero to two months. There was fresh breast milk on demand, special diet, brackets, vegan, etc. And then the final one is willing to sell to men.

Yeah, pretty disgusting, right? I've heard, I don't know if this is true, that bodybuilders like to have breast milk, because their theory, and apparently this is complete rubbish, but their theory is a baby goes from really small to quite big in a really small amount of time so surely the same will happen to Mike Mussels.

Do you want to combine it, marrying the two together, saints and breast milk? Oh yeah. Have you heard of the miracle of the lactation of St. Bernard? This is where St. Bernard was praying and the Virgin Mary, one who was praying, sprinkled some milk on his lips, as in her own breast milk.

And there are other depictions. of it, which are quite impressive. So I'm quoting directly from the Wikipedia article about the lactation of St Bernard. In art, he usually kneels before a Madonna lactans, breastfeeding Madonna, and as Jesus takes a break from feeding, the Virgin squeezes her breast, and he is hit with a squirt of milk, often shown travelling an impressive distance.

It's true, it is across a room that it's depicted. It's medieval artworks that you get this in. Yeah. Yeah. Well, men can lactate, can't they? Because you can, I think we've discussed it before, if you massage your nipples enough as a man, then you can bring it on.

Did you ever do that experiment, Andy? Oh, was it Dan who was going to do it? I did have a go, yes. And was it successful? Not a dribble, nothing. Furious to spend weeks. It looks so weird on the train. Research.

Just doing some research. Yeah, no. No, not a drop yet. Well, keep trying. I'm not giving up. Do you want to hear about St. Philip Neri, who's known as the humorous saint? Is this like, oh, I've got a really funny mate.

Yeah, you've got to meet him. Funny Mike. It really is like that. It's so sad. Basically, all he did that was funny is he once shaved off half his beard as a way of poking fun at himself. And he also liked to wear a cushion on his head.

How come? And he's doing his debut solo hour at sea venues So he was sainted for that He must have done some other stuff I don't know It was very much easier back then wasn't it We're going to have to move on very soon

Can I just tell you very quickly about the infancy Gospels of Jesus Because as another young More than a saint He was a Jesus, wasn't he? So But There are lots of

There are some second century sources which describe what Jesus did as a very, very small boy when he was about five years old. And they're really amazing because they're very different to the Gospels. So when he was five years old, he gathered together separate rivers, which had all been disparate pools of water, and he gathered him into a single pond, and he cleaned it up, and then a boy ruined them by sort of sweeping them apart with a broom. So Jesus made, immediately just made the boy withered. And then there was another time when a boy bumped into him, and Jesus immediately kills him.

Oh, wow. Oh, my God. The pair of him. of the boy who Jesus has killed, go to Joseph saying, your son's killed our son. So Jesus simply struck blind all of his accusers. And then Joseph sort of boxes his ear and tells him off. Wow.

Infancy Gospels, look him up. They're really good. Okay, it's time for our final fact, and that is Jozinski. Yeah, my fact is that when Ronald Reagan left office, he left a note on the White House law for the squirrels warning them to beware of George Bush's dogs. Yeah, it's quite sweet, isn't it?

Yeah, but also, he's assuming that squirrels can read. Is he? Yeah, I mean, he wasn't the sharpest door in the shed, but he was very fond of the squirrels. And sadly, George Bush recounted later that it did absolutely no good because their dog Millie beat the heck out of those squirrels whenever he could, she could. Oh, wow.

Yeah, he should have left also a sign for the dog saying, don't get the squirrels. Why didn't he do that? Yeah. They currently have, and this is like hot off the press, the White House is having squirrel issues at the moment. Are they? With Michelle Obama's garden.

Oh, well, because they always dig up. My friend spent an entire weekend planting lots of bulbs in her garden and went to what I came back and like 100 bulbs have been dug up. So it's probably that. There's a silly little legal issue that the gardeners are not allowed to touch the bit of garden that she's created. But she's away so much that she's actually not able to maintain it. They can't mow it.

They can't weed it. they can't do anything to it but water it and it's just... So they're not allowed to go near the First Lady's Garden. Yeah, I cannot really. So she's saying to them, please do go near it and they're like, we want to, but there's this clause somewhere in our legislation that says we're not allowed to touch your bit of garden. I genuinely didn't read the article.

I have no idea. But they are. So squirrels are prolific on the White House lawn and Reagan was really fond of them and it's kind of touching. So every time he went to Camp David, he'd bring lots of acorns back from there to feed the squirrels. I was reading a trans... What?

Yeah, he'd love to feed the squirrels. I was reading a transcript of an interview that he was having. I think it was with the New York Times, where basically he... There was in the transcript, there's a pause at one point, and he says, oh, sorry, if I look out the window and look distracted, I'm just seeing if the squirrels are still eating the acorns that I brought in this morning.

Oh, my God. Well, it's a good thing there wasn't anything going on at the time, like the Cold War. Wow. Come on, it's cute. I read a thing about Reagan, because he was an actor in B movies. He was starting films with amazing titles.

Accidents will happen. Girls on probation. The Angels wash their faces. Brother Rat and a baby. But his IMDB page begins with this quotation. Ronald Reagan is arguably the most successful actor in history. And they base that on the fact that he became President of America.

But it's not, that's not a success as an actor. I really like the pedantic nature of that comment because he is the most successful person who has also been an actor. You can't fault it. That's true, that's true. Did you guys know that it is because of him that we have blue jelly beans?

No, no. Why? You don't even know we have blue jelly beans actually. You can always feel the skepticism emanating. I know, the whole room goes, it's not true, is it? It's true. It was for his inauguration.

So basically he was a massive jelly bean lover. The reason he was a massive jelly bean lover is because he had a huge pipe smoking habit and he hated it and he didn't want to smoke anymore. The only thing that would stop him from having any nicotine would be to have a jar of jelly beans. And often, if you look at photos of Ronald Reagan, in all the meetings that he's in,

there's a big jar of jelly beans next to him. And so he loved licorice. That was his favorite type of jelly bean before the inauguration, being caught onto it. They thought we're going to create one. We don't have a blue one for the red, white and blue. And so they created it.

And so, yeah, Ronald Reagan. Wow, that is really interesting. Thank you. One thing he didn't like was Brussels sprouts. He once did a trip to England, and he was fed so many Brussels sprouts during his trip that he swore off them for the rest of his life. But they told him they were green jelly beans

which they created in his honor. You know, when he was an actor, as I was reading, he actually wrote two autobiographies, but his later one after he was president, he talked about when he was an actor, and the fact that there was a lot of talk backstage about how small his head was, and so he was there with this casting director

who was saying, what are we going to do about Ronald's head? You could stand the actors slightly further away from him, and then it would match the size of their heads from back there. But then his body looks weirdly large. So it was decided to be a successful actor, he had to have very wide collars to minimize his shoulder width and have collars that were sort of open up a little bit lower,

so it looked like his head was a bit bigger, I guess, to increase the amount of skin exposure in the head area. That's amazing. Yeah, poor guy. Imagine. Yeah, but he is the most successful actor of all times. That is true. Who can forget watching Brother Rat and a Baby every Christmas? You know, he wrote his first autobiography

16 years before he became president. Wow. In 1965, it was saying, and it was called Where's the Rest of Me? Don't he talk about his head? Was his next autobiography called, Here it is. Very forward thinking.

He was once threatened by a guy who was going to attack him and the way he was known as the cat man and the reason was because he would send threatening letters but also pictures of cats to the president. That is the precursor to the internet I think

Lots of purposeless abuse and then pictures of cats. And the other thing that Reagan started was the idea that whenever a president leaves, he always leaves a note for the next president. And he wrote a note saying, don't let the turkeys get you down to George Bush. Sorry, what is the relevance of the turkeys?

The turkeys is in the press, the other countries. Don't let the turkeys get you down. It's not about turkey, is it? Because that's a very specifically racist thing to say. When you're taking over the most powerful nation. So this was discovered by Brad Meltzer, not the fact that that note was left for Bush, but that Bush then said, I left a note for Clinton.

And Brad Meltzer, he's a crime writer, political thrillers. He then said, this is, apparently, he thinks this is true, wherever Ronald Reagan went, he had a briefcase with him, and always carried a handheld gun on him. Okay. What's the opposite of a handheld gun? A foot propelled bow and arrow. He was, I just always think this is amazing.

His chief of staff, did people know what his chief of staff was called? Ronald Reagan's? Yeah. No. He was called Donald Reagan. And I don't understand why this isn't the most well-known fact on the face of the earth. And the chief of staff who preceded him was called Baker. So the chief of staff who preceded Donald Reagan was called.

called Howard Baker, and the guy who came after him was called James Baker. So people say Ronald Reagan was a bit confused in the 80s, but I definitely see where he's coming from. Annoyingly, we're running out of time. In fact, we're on the time runout moment, so any last facts? Very quick one about squirrels? Yeah, go on. It used to be illegal not to report a grey squirrel in your garden.

Really? I think that grey squirrels were brought to the UK by Benjamin Franklin. He brought squirrels over to the UK. according to News for Squirrels dot com the blog How many hits does it get? It's had a lot this week for me

Male Cape ground squirrels have very big genitalia The penises can be 40% The length of their body And they can and do autophilate Yeah And according to researcher Jane Waterman They do it to clean their genitals

Sorry what's unusual about any of this I'm sorry, only 40% Got it, no, no, no, no, no, it doesn't even wrong. Okay, that's it, that's all of our facts. Thank you so much for being here, guys. We really appreciate it. Thank you at home for listening to the show. If you want to get in contact with any of us

about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, please get us on our Twitter account. I'm on at Triberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter, M, James. At Egg-shaped. Anna. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep, or you could, yep.

It's a fantastic email address, to be fair. And you can also find all of our previous episodes on No Such Thing as a Fish.com and we will be back again with another episode next week. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you then. Goodbye.