No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Queen Of Clean, The Sausage Machine

Episode Date: October 14, 2016

Dan, Anna, Andy and Alex discuss animal babysitters, supermarket laser tag, and the best party in the history of the world.

And welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Alex Bell, Andy Murray, and Anna Chisinski. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Andy. My fact is that scientists have developed barcodes for Z-Barrows. Zebras. Not zebras.

They've also developed a separate and identical system for zebras. We'll get on to how to say the name of the thing in a bit. But this is a team of scientists at Princeton, and what they've done is this is a particular species of zebra called the Grevis zebra, and it's the rarest of the species of zebra. And they've persuaded volunteers to take 40,000 photos of different animals, and the scientists have then... use this software on them because they've all got completely unique strike patterns and it combines barcode technology and facial recognition software and so you can now identify an individual animal from it. Levin Skyra who's been on as a guest he has a show in Belgium and one of the games because when you go to a supermarket in Belgium they give you a scanning gun to take around now so you

can just scan as you go along the items and then you hand the scan gun in at the end and then they tally up what you have to hand in your badge as well. So he convinced the supermarket in allowing him to have him and his friends have barcodes printed up on t-shirts. And they ran around the supermarket like LaserQuest and we're trying to scan each other's shirts and they had to collect all the kills as it were. Yeah, very cool game. At the end they were like, well, I got three zebras. It's really, I had no idea this is how it works. But each gap and space combo is a number.

And so each digit is a combination of seven black and white bars. So to say one in a barcode, it's white, white, black, black, white, white, black. You put those all together, so it's slightly thicker, white and black bits, and that is number one. It's kind of like Morse code. Did you read about the guy who invented it and how he came up with it? Well, it was several people who kind of developed it, but one of the people in charge of kind of developing the idea was a guy called Norman Joseph Woodland, and he was thinking about it when he was at the beach, and he drew a sort of Morse code pattern in the sand,

sort of by doing dots and dashes, poking them in the sand, and then pulled down those dots and dashes into bars and came up with a barcode. But then the developers turned it into the shape of a bullseys. So the first barcodes were actually bullsize. Oh, yeah. And they turned out they took up loads of space, didn't it? So it's actually much more efficient to just go with the long line. Yeah.

You know that guy, Joe Woodland, who you just mentioned, one of the pioneers. Supposedly, he came up with the idea indirectly because of the Atlantic City Mafia. Go on. Okay, so he got the idea when he was at Drexel, University in Philadelphia and he was doing a master's degree there and he hadn't originally wanted to do a master's he wanted to start a business where he made a music system for lifts but and he wanted to sell up this whole phone and his father said no the mob control the music at

lifts you in Atlantic City or on the east coast of the USA you're not allowed to go into that because they'll they'll get you so instead he went off and did a master's and came up with the barcode instead I don't weird industry to decide to control if you're the mafia I think they had a whole range It wasn't just lift music that they controlled. That feels like it was really like the mobster's baby brother. They needed to give him something. Have you seen that in Venezuelan supermarket since last year, you've had to scan in your fingerprints to get...

Wow. Why? Because, so you know, Venezuela's going through a very horrible time at the moment and there's a lot of food shortages, and so the government's had to ration stuff and people have been panic buying things. Like they'll just buy in loads of grain or loads of cigarettes or whatever it is that they think the country is going to run out of. And so in order to stop them doing that, supermarkets have installed fingerprint

scanners and when you buy something, you have to provide ID, you have to give your name, your address, your date of birth, and you have to scan in your fingerprint so they can make sure that you haven't been overbuying. Whoa. If you just want a loaf of bread. I was looking into other animals with codes on. So in 2010, farmers in summer be painted QR codes onto their cows, so to try and raise awareness of their website, this is dairy farming.com. Well, it's work. Oh my God, best website ever. I spent all afternoon on it. It's really good.

There's videos of new dairy farm technology. There's a farmer's dairy diary, I quite like. Did you read it? Yeah, I did. Yeah, there's a cow of the month as well, little profile on the cow of the month. And there's also like what it's like to live as a cow and like you can follow the journey of milk.

It's a really good site. Genuinely, he'd recommend it. So the cows are writing the diary? No, the cows make the videos. They put cameras on the cows, and then the cows go around and make videos. Wow. What do you say make videos?

They don't like edit. They don't like edit and direct. They just gave a Cal Video camera. They did that recently. Did you see there's a small island. I can't remember where it is, but they Google Street View has not got to them yet. And they're quite furious because they've learned that Google Street View is a fantastic way about getting tourism. Because a lot of people just go, wow, this place looks amazing.

We should go. So they've attached cameras, their own cameras, to the heads of sheep and goats. And they just have them walk through and they've been taking photos. So there's whole islands being mapped by sheep now. But all sheep do is eat grass. So presumably all you're saying is this place is full of grass. That's true. And also sheep follow each other.

So you're just going to get a lot of the same pictures. Just a lot of sheep's bottoms of grass. Tourism has plummeted. And also on naturally low down as well. Yeah. It's not practical. Yeah. Also on barcoes, embryos are going to get them.

They're developing these at the moment. And this is to stop baby swap disasters. Because, you know, there are always a few news. stories every year where people end up with the wrong baby. The barcode doesn't go on the embryo. It goes on the egg. It goes on the egg or on the sperm. On the actual, wow.

On the spine. Oh, Buckco to sperm. Well, they're on it. It would be a nine-meter scan, apart from anything else. It kind of goes off 500 million times. Not only one at one. Here's a thing about buck codes. When they were introduced in the 70s,

I think the first item bought with the UPC, which stands for universal product code system was a bit of chewing gum. But it was really hard to introduce because obviously you need hundreds of products to have bar codes in order for it to be worth anyone's while. And also they didn't use to come on the packaging. So you used to get the food into the shop and then you would have to stick on the bar codes. The shopkeepers had to glue them onto the boxes and then you could scan them. I mean that doesn't, that's not really that weird because a lot of reduced foods in supermarkets come with a fresh barcode.

But the reduced price. So yeah. But people were frightened of them initially. In the 70s, people thought that they'd be blinded because there are lasers involved. Oh, yeah. Blinded by the scanners.

By the scanners. Yeah, I think if you're just kind of a barcode, that's a bit. Yeah, but it's quite alien, isn't it? If you're used to someone just ringing up goods at the till or, you know, a label which says 50p, this weird. I don't know.

I'm not frightened of them. I'd like to make that very clear. It was the 70s. We had, we'd landed on the moon. I don't have petrope. I don't think witchcraft. People running out of significant. screaming.

No, we landed on the moon before we had the barcode. Yeah. That's weird. That is odd. Yeah. Yeah. It feels like the moon is the landing is the last thing that we should do. Yes.

I'm not sure we should have landed there yet, even. Funny that you mentioned the devil because the universal product code is part of a big devil conspiracy. Oh, yeah, yeah. It begins and ends with some sort of easy identifying lines. So that the lasers kind of. know where the code begins and ends. And that resembles a six-six-six on either side. No, there is. There's a six and a six. There are three sixes throughout the barcode. They're not quite sixes. There are sixes as well in the barcode, but at the beginning,

they're just markers that look like sixes. They're not quite sixes. And there's a, the guy who developed the product code, George Joseph Lara, has got a section on his website where he addresses this constant accusation. He says, there's nothing sinister about this. They resemble sixes. It's simply a coincidence, like the fact that my first middle and last name we'll have six letters. If you'd like to ask me anything more about this, sacrifice the lamb on your lawn at midnight. He does say,

I will not be answering any questions of this as of October 2000 or something. There's a section on his website. Like the video that, do you remember Ringo Star? Oh yeah, peace and love. Peace and love. Peace and love.

Peace and love. I'm not answering any more fan mail as of this date. Peace and love, peace and love. The thing is, I genuinely believe that Ringo Starr gets quite a lot of fan mail, whereas I really struggle to believe

that this man is just in on Or if he is, it's the same two mad people and he can just block their addresses. I was trying to look into how zookeepers identify different species of animals. Say they have a bunch in a cage and what do they do to do that. Sometimes they have training to teach them the difference between, say, a rabbit and a giraffe. Exactly. It's true. The better resource zoos, though.

And I didn't find anything. But this is the only reason I wanted to mention is that there's a great hashtag that you can find. on Twitter, which is hashtag Zookeeper's Problems. And it's just really fun because Zookeepers around the world just put up their problems. So a few I have here. From Yummy Tees at Yomitis. I have way too much lemur pee in my hair right now. From Gillian Erzar, at Gillian Erzar.

Punched in the vaj by a tortoise. Hashtag Zookeeper Problems. How slow is Gillian? Zebras caused the most injuries to U.S. zookeepers more than any other animal. Are those injuries caused when the zookeepers mispronounce their name so egregiously just like Andy did earlier? Yeah, exactly.

What did I say? Hey, zebra. That's going to be the only kind of feedback we'll get about this episode is people saying, why on earth does Andy say zebra? Yeah. Is it a problem? It's going to be. Believe you, me. Potato, potato, zebra, zebra. Yeah. Zebra. No. No, it doesn't sound right. So why are they injuring? Because they're wild animals, but people

think they're like horses. So I think that it's just you're more likely to be injured. So have we not domesticated the zebra? It's impossible to domesticate a zebra. They're really in fact there's only one person I found who managed to even slightly domesticate them and that was Walter Rothschild. Have you heard of

him? Yes. He is an amazing man. He was late 19th century, early 20th century. He was a zoologist naturalist. He had the most amazing collections of animals. He collected tens of thousands of butterflies. He was a child from the banking dynasty the Ross Child, so he was seriously wealthy. He didn't care about

any of the banking stuff. All he wanted was to collect animals. And he had a carriage harnessed with four zebras and he rode it along Piccadilly and into the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. Oh, I think I've seen a photo of that. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of these sort of historical photos that you get trotted out a lot. I'm surprised that we still haven't, it seems to be one of those evolution questions that we haven't. yet of why they have the black and white. My favourite theory, I just can't believe this, is that it cools the zebra down, because air might move more quickly over the black bits of skin, which absorb light,

and then more slowly over the white stripes, which reflect it, which might make little convection currents around the zebra to cool down. I cannot believe that's true. Well, I mean, first of all, I think that God slash Darwin is looking down on the zebra debate and going, you guys are overthinking this. So I just thought it would be fun. I love to the theory that God slash Darwin is looking down right now. Only one of them will be looking down right now if they're right.

In fact, it's either both of them or neither are looking down right. Sorry, so you are right. Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Alex. My fact this week is that Agatha Christie was once turned away from a party held in her honor. Nice. I think we've all had that. Yeah. Was she too drunk? No, she was too shy, actually. That was the problem. So this is in April in 1958. The Mousetrap, which is the play in London that is based on the book that she wrote, became the longest running production in the history of British theatre.

So most performances ever, 2,239 performances. And there was a big party in the Savoy Hotel. And so she turned up, all dressed up, and went to the party room. And the guy at the door didn't recognise her. And she was so shy that she just got very embarrassed and went and sat in the lounge and had a drink by herself for most of the evening. She'd been asked to turn up early, hadn't she, by Peter Saunders, who was the producer of Mousetrapp, who said, avoid the press by turning up early and you can sneak in early.

And I think when she did that, she couldn't get in until the party actually started. Oh, so she did make it into the party? She did get into the party, yeah. Because I read an account in the British newspaper archive from the stage newspaper in 1958, and it was an account of the speech that she made. and Richard Attenborough actually gave this interview about what she'd said and she just stood up. It was one of the shortest speeches in theatre history.

She said, well, darlings, I think we'll get a few months out of it. So, yeah, which is weird because at that point she'd already got 10 years out of it. In 1972, to exacerbate her shyness, there was another party held in her honour because there seemed to be constant parties held in honour of someone who was very shy. It's like a form of torture. But in 1972, she turned up to the party and she forgot her false teeth because she was in her 80s at that point. And so none of the guests were allowed to speak to her

except her very closest friends because she didn't want to open her mouth. And did that cure her shyness? Does it cure her shyness if nobody speaks to you? I suppose it might do, because then you have to go and speak to other people. Can you imagine you're a shy type? You've plucked up the courage to go to your party.

You know everyone's going to want to talk to you and you haven't brought your fucking team. Oh man. Yeah, it's a tough moment. It's a tough moment. So I was reading this Mousetrap play when she died. The Wrights went over to her grandson, Matthew Pritchard. And there's been this big thing where he's been in a bit of a fight with Wikipedia.

Because Wikipedia, often, whenever they put a novel or anything, they'll often do a really detailed plot analysis of what goes on. And Mousetrap famously has a plot twist right at the end. And it's up there. And so he's been trying to get them to take it down. And it's very funny because even on the Wikipedia, they now acknowledge that he's trying to do it. But so he hasn't won.

Wikipedia says this is just information. It stays up there. But it's interesting this plot twist because it's, hang away. Are you about to? I'm not going to say it. But the plot twist has become famous for being a plot twist. And so I for one know what the plot twist is because of people saying,

oh, there's this famous plot twist where this happens. I've never actually experienced the actual twist. And I reckon the majority of people know what the twist is without ever having actually had the twist happen to them. Which is a shame. I don't know what the twist is, so I'm not going to go on the Wikipedia page. I kind of feel like it would be sporting of them to take it down. Well, there is surprisingly, or rather unsurprisingly, on Wikipedia,

there's a page you can go to with huge discussions from all the wikipedians about the attitude they're taking towards spoilers. That sounds like a really fun reading. It's surprisingly was. It's surprisingly on the role of an encyclopedia, doesn't it? Is the role of an encyclopedia to tell you everything about, you know, the ending of all plots. Or is the role of an exactly to be able to peak your interest so you want to

know more? I think it's the first one. To find out what zebras really are, you'll have to come and see the stage show. Do you know how she described herself? She said she was a sausage machine. Sausage machine.

Why? Not a sausage party. Vital difference. No, this was at a time of her life when she was writing two books a year. She said, I'm a sausage machine, a perfect sausage machine. There was one year where I think she wrote seven

books, plays, collections of short stories. Right. Yeah. insane. So if anything, she's a mystery novel machine rather than a sausage machine. I think, but I think it was a metaphor rather than her actually just describing what she was. And that was all made her so brilliant as an author is she never, you know, she sometimes would not

literally describe the thing she was. What I love for her novel is all those sausage similes. Yeah. Is that the plot twist in the mouth? Yeah. The lead characters are sausage all along. It was in the drawing room a sausage. I like the idea of her at the press conference where she's giving the interview saying, the thing about me is I'm just a sausage machine, a perfect sausage machine and every single

journalist trying to suppress that snigger as they wrote it down. Is it the case? Especially saying it without any teeth in as well. Do you know where she did a load of her writing? On paper? On paper. And in Iraq. I don't know this.

Oh. Her second husband was an office. archaeologist and a really eminent archaeologist and um she uh she went out and did a load of digs with him so there are loads of stories happen in you know exotic archaeology dig sites and that kind of thing yeah there are a fair few at least which do and that's why she was a very keen archaeologist wasn't she in the second part like she herself got into it as well as her husband yeah she said to her she said to a husband there's a sort of famous anecdote where she says oh i just wish i knew a bit more about this kind of pottery stuff and he says do you realize you know more about this ancient

pottery than any other woman alive in the world today because it wasn't really studied by women at the time. Right. It was quite a closed shop. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. She, if you go to the British Museum, you can see a bunch of artifacts that he uncovered. I think he made a particularly important find in Nimrod, which is an ancient Iraqi city. I found a bunch of sort of 3,000-year-old artifacts, and they're in the British Museum, and because she cleaned all his artifacts, so you can go and see stuff that's been cleaned by Agatha Christie. That is so cool. So the British Museum says the reason these are probably been preserved so well over the last hundred years is because they were perfectly cleaned by Christy. They called her the Queen of Clean. They called her the sausage machine.

Queen of Clean and sausage machine. I was looking into other people who've been turned away or kicked out from their parties. Nirvana kicked out of their own never mind release party. Wow. What did they say as they walked away. But yeah, they, it's really odd though, because you read what they did when they got there. Basically, they started tossing around a watermelon and they effectively started a food fight and they were told to leave the release of their album. That's a pretty hardcore food fight to start throwing an entire watermel. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, I can understand if it was lobbed at someone's face that that might be. Start with mashed potato or something. I got a fact about parties. Yeah. There are schools. in Japan for how to have a party. Oh no. Yeah. Oh, cool. Because it's not really the done thing because most people live in very small homes.

So you don't really have parties where you have loads of people around very much. So there is this group which has been set up called the Home Party Association, which teaches you how. And there are three levels of certification. First one, you just have to send them about $22. And pictures of a party that you have thrown. Second one, level two, you have to attend five hours of lectures in how to throw a party. and you have to write an essay, and that costs about 200 quid.

The third one costs about 450 quid for all the training, and you have to successfully host a party attended by the examiners of the school. Oh, my God. Get this, get this, the failure rate is 90%. Whoa. No shit, any party attended by examiners, it's going to be crap.

By definition, inviting your teachers to a party, ruins it. Oh, my God. What they should have taken tips from is the party of the century in the 20th century and I'd never heard of this but it's this party that apparently

is the party of the century it was in 1951 it was thrown by someone who was known as Charlie who was heir to some great Mexican silver fortune and it sounds incredible and it's been remembered

in great party history great party law as the greatest party ever thrown and so you said a bunch of stuff there that doesn't exist great party law the big book of famous

parties mentioned at every party. It's a great encyclopedia of party legend. I never throw a party without reminding all my guests of the greatest party of the century in 1951. If you guys had attended these Japanese lectures, you'd be highly familiar. What happened at this great time? So this is what happened. It took place in the Palazzo Labia in Venice.

Oh no. Okay, it sounded good. You weren't wrong. It was called the Bal Orientale, or the Bal Oriental. Tau, depending on which pronunciation is correct. So sorry, an oriental ball inside a labia. Yeah, that's correct. The host wore 16-inch platform shoes, so he was 6'10, so he towered above all of his

guests. He changed his costume 16 times throughout the evening. And the roof of the place had a garden designed by Dali. And Dali actually did attend. Dali attended and Christian Dior attended, and they came dressed up as each other. That's a fun little trick. It was a costume ball, but all... Orson Wells' costume didn't arrive on time.

So he had to wear just a normal suit, which is very and embarrassing for Orson. He came as himself. That's quite a good costume for a party. Yeah. He should have just claimed he wasn't Orson Wells. Daisy Fellows was there, who was a very famous, I think, journalist or socialite at the time. And she was the first time anyone had ever worn leopard print. So she started the trend for wearing leopard print in the West.

It was the first time, you know, a Western person had worn leopard print. This party is. sounding better and better. Isn't it? So many people threatened to be clear patcher that it had to be up to the host

to settle who was going to come as clear patcher. It's an anonymous phone calls. Going to be clear patro in your party. Americans who hadn't been invited because it was so famous it was happening,

they sailed over and arrived in the Lido nearby in their yachts just in the desperate hope of getting an invitation. So there were all these wealthy people's yachts parks in nearby coastline and Lido's

just in the hope that they get it Doesn't it sound incredible? I've never heard of it. But who's Charlie? Just a super rich guy. No one really knows anything more about him. That's amazing. That's very cool.

It sounds kind of Great Gatsby-esque, doesn't it? So great Gatsby. Was the period of, was that correct? It's slightly later than that. 20s, really. Truman Capote through a party as well, which was to tie in with the publication of In Cold Blood. And that apparently in America was the big party of 1966.

Yeah, so it was dubbed the Nighter, Capote made 500 friends and 15,000 enemies because the invitations were so coveted. The idea that he was saying no to people to come to this party, created more enemies than the people who ended up coming, liking him. And everyone wore masks. So it was, you know, no one who knew who anyone was there. Frank Sinatra was there, apparently. Lauren Bacall, apparently no one knows.

I had a mask on. The only person without a mask was Andy Warhol, who just decided not to wear a mask. It's so arty. And yeah. That's like when Brian Cranston went to Comic-Con and he wore a plastic mask with his own face on and no one recognised him. That's really good.

It's funny. Are we sure Jim and Capote didn't just invite a few thousand randomers off the street, put masks on them, take photos and then point at the various photos going, that's Frank Sinarcho there? Skepticism from the woman who told us this cock and bull story about the greatest party in 1951 ever told. I just don't like being faced with this Capote competition.

Salvador Dali once said, I am never alone. I'm used to being with Salvador Dali always and that for me is a permanent party. Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is Chuzinski. My fact this week is that different species of dolphins babysit each other's children.

So this is some research that was done a while back and reported in the Marine Mammal Science Journal and it's about bottlenose dolphins and spotted dolphins and how they work together and they do loads of stuff together. And one of the things they do together is leave their children with each other.

So when dolphins dive deep to hunt squid, for instance, their kids, young dolphins can't dive that deep, so they leave them with someone to care for them. And these two species, it's the first instance of species properly cooperating in this way. It would be great if you could get an animal or babysitter just for your kids.

What kind of animal would you pick to babysit your children? Presumably, not dolphin. Not as ever either. Yeah. Well, dolphins are very well qualified. If you give the kids armbands and drop them in the sea, then get a spotted dolphin to look at them?

They're a bit sexy towards any human they come into contact with, aren't they? Dan speaks from personal experience. I don't know. Anytime I've read about people with dolphins, there always is a sort of weird humping going on. Because I feel like you want to tell a sexy dolphin's screen. No, no, no, no. I just, anytime I've read about dolphins.

Oh, okay. But then maybe I shouldn't be Googling those particular keywords. Yeah, I think hanging out the wrong section of the library. Do you know that dolphin nipples are secret? in that even they don't know about it. They're hidden. They have these abdominal slits

and the nipples are kind of inside the slits, the mammary slits they're called. And also the penis of the male dolphin is the same. It's in a slit and it sort of, it can poke out, but it can retract within the slit as well.

So it's not external. I read an article title that was called Dolphins have scary hand-like penises. Did you read that as well? well? Well, I did, but I've read a debunking of it. But you say, what have you? No, I just, they have a retractable penis.

And the idea was that they use it to find things. If they're near, if they're near a sort of a surface area, they'll use it like humans in the dark use hands to find their way around things. I'm afraid that's not quite true. I've read a thing by a science writer called Justin Gregg, who's a bit of an expert on these masses. And there's a myth that dolphins have prehensile penises. and that doesn't really make any sense because prehensile, like prehensile tails,

which can be used to grip and grab things and wrap around things. Yeah. They can extend it and they can retract it and they can bend it in different directions to help with mating. But they probably can't pick up keys,

for example. Yeah. That's enough if you give someone directions with that kind of... Yeah. You could give someone directions with it if you really tried hard. Yeah.

Oh, so that's not too far off. It's not too far off. Yeah, yeah. So this is an interesting thing. They have such control because dolphins like whales, they have pelvices because they evolved from land animals, which got bored of being on land, went back into the sea, right?

So all the muscles which attached to their penis and give them this controls, left, right, in, out, that kind of thing, they are directly attached to the pelvic bone. And one scientist said, it's like operating a trick kite where you pull two strings and pulling left and right makes it go in a loop-de-loop. But I don't think... Wow. That's quite a specialised.

I don't think dolphin penises can do a loop-de-loop. You're talking about the secret nipples. It's really interesting how the baby... drink the mother's milk. So they have a tongue that they can turn into like a little straw. You know when you kind of like loop your tongue over and some people will do that. Yeah. Oh yeah. They do that. And their tongue has little

fingery things on the end that kind of go into the nipple and act a bit like a zip like they kind of latch on to make it a little bit of a seal. Because it is difficult because they're drinking milk underwater, so it's liquid and liquid. Oh yeah. Well, otherwise it would seep out. Yeah, exactly. And it's got the consistency of milkshake apparently the milk. And yeah, it lasts

about five, ten seconds. But it smells a fish. a milkshakes that smells of fish I imagine everything smells a fish in the ocean But can't they only taste salt Ooh Yeah I think you're right Yeah I think that is true

They lost their other taste plus They lost and they lost the sense of smell They used to have it when they were on Land And then obviously in water You don't need to smell the air And then their nostrils moved above their head To become the blowhole

I just want to know about the middle of that process Where the nostrils were moving north The ortholes The Orpid adolescent stage Where they had their nostrils And therefore At least the unicorn look. Yeah.

It's bizarre, isn't it? It's so bizarre. You know, dolphins' grandmothers sometimes feed them. And they employ wet nurses, I think. It's underwater. They're all wet nurses. There's a theory that

male dolphins can tell when female dolphins are pregnant because we know they take a special interest in females when they're pregnant. And there's a theory that's because they have capability to use ultrasound so that they can do

without having to make an appointment at antonogram. So do they see them and go, oh, it's a boy? Don't tell me. I'm trying not to look. I feel like we quite, in dolphin eska, that would be quite rude, actually, to look at someone else's.

Don't look inside my wife's stomach. It's like having x-ray specs all the time. Yeah. Imagine taking your wife to the ultrasound and it's just a dolphin. He'd be like, oh, great, we're in good hands. I don't know what he's doing. Except they're not.

Because we have this impression that dolphins are really nice. But some dolphins, some male bottom-nosed dolphins, kill newborn calves, which is not nice. Why do they do that? They do it. It's really grim, actually. They do it because it frees up the females for mating. Because if a female has a newborn calf, she will be looking after the calf for some years. She won't be interested in having any more offspring.

Whereas if the males have killed off the calf, and within a few months, she might be ready to make. mate again. Do they have to, I don't know if we would know this, but do they have to do it sort of behind, while the mother's away on a trip? No, on a trip. On a holiday. Well, babysitting's going on. Presumably. They just kind of mob the mother. And so the mother will try and protect her cuff and often will succeed in protecting her cuff from the males and get away with them. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then the mother's fine just to mate with that dolphin again. They get over it, don't they? Pretty fast in the animal world. They've got to procreate. It's not a healthy family situation. It's not.

I think actually I think bottlenose dolphins might be the bastards of the dolphin world because actually this initial fact was about bottle nose and spotted dolphins looking after each other's children

but the only instance they found is of spotted dolphins looking after bottlenose dolphins' children not the other way around and actually there's quite a lot of instances as well as them cooperating with each other species-wise bottle-nose dolphins will just force their way

into a group of spotted dolphins and start shagging the women in them and there's nothing that the spotted's can do because they're half the size yes yeah they just go take their women So actually they're kind of bullies Bottle-nows bullies

There's evidence in marine research centres that kind of manage large areas of water with lots of species in that when dolphins get bored of all the human toys and things that they use baby sharks as volleyball which is definitely bullying Well that's how dolphins kill baby dolphin calves

They toss them out of the water or they will hold them under the water because dolphins need to come up for it Have you guys heard of a wolfen it's a whale dolphin half whale half dolphin it's amazing how big is it a massive dolphin it was in between the size of the two

because it was the false killer whale there I think they're slightly smaller than killer whales it must be so bad for it though it's so awkward like who do you hang out with you're way too small for the whales and you're way too big of the dolphin sell it to Pixar sell it to Pixar Alex

okay time for our final fact of the show and that's my fact my fact this week is that Sylvester Stallone's mum is a bum reader. That's a no way to speak of her. This is something she is very proud about, according to her website, which she has taken down, and we had to search very hard to verify.

This is the kind of fact you get when James Harkin is away for a week for the podcast. It's what slipped through the net. I know. This is my only chance. This is called Rumpology. Why didn't they call it astrology? Oh, nice. Yeah.

Okay, so for anyone who hasn't heard of Rumpology, or astrology, the newly coined. If indeed those people exist, surely everyone's familiar with the art. What they do is rompologists

look at people's bums and they make predictions off the back of the creases, off the back of any interesting... How many creases are there? There's one. Do you have to spread? Like, how much detail is this?

Well, it depends how much, how far into the future you want to see, Alex. The future is very dark. But yeah, so I was reading about this. I actually found out about this because I was emailing an author called David Bramwell, who wrote an incredible book called Number Nine Bus to Utopia. And he's also the maker of a podcast and a live show called The Auditorium. And so he puts on these nights and he had a rumpologist

speak at one of his events. And I thought, what the hell's a rumpologist? Googled it. Found out that Jackie Stallone, Sylvester Stallone's mom, has done it. And she's done it to the point where, even on her website, again, this is quite hard to verify because it's been taken down. but suggestions sort of little echoes of a past website through reading on Reddit and so on suggests us that she used to charge $600 and you would send a printed copy of your bum to her and she would read your bum digitally as it were I love that a printed copy of your bum how does one print one's bum

now with 3D printing you probably can print your bum he probably can oh I think that's was the perfect excuse for all the office parties whenever someone was caught sitting on the copy machine I don't know. I want to know about my business prospect for the next year. But according to Wikipedia, Jackie Stallone has claimed to predict the outcome of presidential elections and the Oscar winners by reading the bottoms of her two pet Doberman pincers. So it doesn't, he works on animals as well. Yeah, she's reading, she's reading animal bums. And it doesn't seem, it doesn't, so it's one thing to send your picture of your own bum and get your own future.

But for some reason, these two dogs have the future presidential elections in them instead. How does that work? true. Sometimes it's just born lucky. What are the odds of her having those dogs as well? Yeah. Amazing. Dan, you briefly read out from the Wikipedia on Rumpology just there.

Which is surprisingly restrained actually in what it says about this ancient art. But I did want to read out one paragraph from it. The American astrologer Jackie Stallone claims that Rumpology is known to have been practiced in ancient times by the Babylonians, the Indians and the ancient Greeks and Romans. although she provides no evidence for this claim, Stallone has been largely responsible for the supposed quote marks revival of Rumpology in modern time. It's the most skeptical paragraph I've ever read about anything. The idea that's going in and out of vogue as well.

Yeah. You're wondering that the ancient Romans would have spent their time on it. Just to clarify how you print a bum, because I just feel like people are going to have been wondering. Yeah. And she does tell you, did you see what she said you can do? No. You can henar your bum,

and then you sit on a piece of papyrus. she says because I guess she's trying to enhance the ancient origins of extractors. So you sit your hen a newly wet henna d' arse on a bit of papyrus and then you blow it dry or whatever and send that off to her and she can read the imprints. She doesn't even need the physical book. That is fantastic. It's like potato prints but with your ass.

It's very skilled of her not to need the original bum. It's amazing. Isn't it incredible? Yeah. I guess that's what you pay your $600 for, don't you? Where do you get papyrus these days? Is that a real? Is that in Riemens? Is that readily available?

Yeah, you're right. It's hard. It's next to the 80 GSM. It's on papyrus. Parm is really good, though. I mean, it lasts a lot longer than our paper. That means all the paper from our time of this current bit of history is going to go, except for these bits of papyrus

that just have ass prints on that. Little is known of the civilization of the early 21st century, but they accurately predicted every single thing that has come to pass. So here's the thing. The ancient Babylonians also believed that you could predict the future.

And they believed it was by the liver. That was the part of the body they thought was really significant. But how do you know which bit of the liver means what? And they had a model liver. So you would kill a sheep, get out, get a special priest, get the liver out, and he had a special wooden liver. Or there were even some special bronze livers. And it says, look, if this bit is discoloured this way, then...

You're an alcoholic. Yeah, it's hepatology. No, sorry, not hepatology. I'm sorry, that is the medical study of the liver. It's not hepatology. I think that's going to be the thing that gets most feedback, I know, not my Zia. I'm not getting liver surgery in the next 10 years.

I'm going to correct it right now. It's hepatoscopy, and it's a branch of haruspy, which was the, yeah, Babylonian and Etruscan study of various organs, which spelt out your future in some way. But yeah, it was really popular, wasn't it? A common way of telling the future. And in fact, an example, very famous example of Haruspice,

was in Caesar, Julia Caesar. So do you know the way the Ides of March was predicted was... Not by his body, I'm assuming. Because of this practice. The Beware the Ides of March, famously that Julia Caesar was told to do. And he was told this by Harusbiscist,

who is someone who looks at the entrails of animals to tell the future. So I think it was the entrails of a sheep which informed the herespusist to tell Caesar to beware the eyes of March. And that was recorded by, I think, Sueton. So here's the things. Isaac Newton himself did a lot of future predicting. And he was very interested in learning about the nature of God.

It's so contrary to the modern image of him. He devised a chronology of all the great events before his life. And then he did a chronology of the future as well. So he predicted a thing called the Tribulation of the Jews. and he predicted a thousand years of peace are going to begin in 2370. And part of it was based on the life cycle of the locust. I mean, it was seriously out there stuff.

That's also quite scientific in a way. The idea of taking a load of data and trying to find trends based on kind of things that happen. No, that's the kind of thing that conspiracy theorists do. It's not scientific. It's taking a load of data

and making it find the trends that you want it to find, I think, or find... There is a scientific edge to making future predictions on, say, you know, what's going to happen with climate change, a global warming based on

past data. That is science also. There's good ways and bad ways to do it, but it's two sides of the same coin. Yeah. I was reading about one of Thailand's leading fortune tellers. Oh yeah. Whose name is Luck Rakanithes, and he says that the fact that his name is luck, which means luck in English's complete coincidence.

There was an interview with him recently where he runs this system now, which is not like a cool center where people just literally ring in and they get their horoscopes or they get told what lottery numbers to choose or whatever. He's a multi, multi-millionaire. So hundreds of thousands of people call him every month. And the way he did it was, he just memorized a bunch of astrology books when he was a child and then regurgitates it.

But he spoke to Channel 4, I think, in the last couple of years. And Channel 4 asked him how he finds it, just reading people's futures and telling them what's going to happen to them. And he said, I want to change my life. I'm not kidding. I'm so bored of going places with people shouting, teacher, look at my palm, tell me my fortune.

He's basically completely, well, I don't think he ever believed it, but he's now gone, these people are all idiots who are asking me what's going to happen to them. And he acknowledges, there's no point in asking me if you're going to get rich, you need to get rich using your own brains. I can't tell you what's going to happen to you. You actually have to just go out there

and make it happen for yourself. He should sell that device over the phone to people. Perhaps he is, yeah. I don't think he'd make much money. Press 1 for an angry rant. Press 2. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening. if you would 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 Schreiberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter, M, Alex, at Alex Bell underscore, and Chazinski. You can email a podcast at qI.com. Yep, or you can go to at QI podcast, that's our group account, or you can go to no such thing as a fish.com where we have all of our previous episodes. We'll see you again next week. Goodbye.