No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As The iSausage

Episode Date: June 22, 2020

Extra Bits Special: Dan, James, Anna & Andy discuss Sausages, Eels and Unusual Swords in a bonus episode to raise money for the Care Workers Charity. Donate here: qi.com/donate. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's bonus compilation episode of no such thing as a fish, some of the best bits that I couldn't quite fit in the edit of all the shows that we've done over the last three or four months. Yes, this is an extra special treat for all of you because you've listened so loyally for so long, you're getting this episode and you're getting it with no adverts. We're not going to ask you to order home delivered meals or delicious international beer or clothes perfectly sculpted to your finger. Hannah, this is now an advert sticker. Oh God, I've done it to an advert, I can't help it. Well, there is one thing we are actually going to ask people to do because this bonus episode comes with one little tiny string

attached to it and that's that it is for charity. This is raising money this episode for a charity called the care workers charity. We'll be telling you a bit more about them in a bit but it's a fantastic and very worthy cause and so you're listening is being co-opted in the name of that cause. That's right. This episode is absolutely free. It is completely free. You don't have to donate if you don't want to but if you do have a few quid to spare, we would really really appreciate it. Just to stress how really important it is that we're all giving money to charity at the moment, it's obviously a time when a lot of charities need huge amounts of money because of COVID and it's coinciding with a time where people are not giving money to charity. So the charity

sector has lost billions and billions of pounds over the last few months because of COVID because people are just really struggling and so there's no more vital time to be able to donate any money that you can spare. All you have to do is go to qi.com slash donate or justgiving.com slash nst aaf and either one will take you to the place you need. Okay, on with the podcast. Sorry, just on ancient sausages. I was looking at who invented the hot dog which is quite hard to find but I found where the first sausages were supposedly invented and this is an article from BBC History and they said that the emperor Nero had a cock called Gaius and in Roman times you would starve your pigs for one week before you slaughter them but Gaius was watching over his kitchen and

realised that one of his pigs had not been properly cleaned. So he stuck a knife into the belly of the pig to see if the roast was edible and out popped an intestine. Okay and because the pig had been starved it had puffed up because of the heat and Gaius explained I have discovered something of great importance and it was the sausage. Wow. Cool. It's a great story. Don't believe that story. Well no, it's history. BBC History. BBC History mate. Well no, it's an account. Well who made up the account? I think it's, I don't know who wrote it, who wrote about Nero de Ocasio, someone like that. Oh yeah, maybe. Probably. Wow. So that's because they had, they did have sausages, didn't they? They did have sausages in Romans. Yeah. Who's to think it hasn't come from this great discovery

of great importance. And when you do discover something like that, you're going to write about it. It seems weird to us these days. Why would you write about the first sausage? Back then, that's like the iPod coming out. Nero's on stage at the forum. Turtle neck. The eye sausage. One group who are interested in earthworms is the ERG. The ERG. European research group, the Brexitee. Jacob Rees Moggy group. Yeah. No, it's the earthworm research group. Who work in Britain. They're one of the main groups of earthworm researchers in the country. And ironically, considering they have a same name as the ERG Brexites, they mostly deal with overseas projects with people like Finland, France, Ireland, Italy,

Poland and Spain. Wow. So for them, Brexite is really bad. This ERG. Yeah. Wow. So it's like an ERG versus ERG debate right now. I want to see that fight between Jacob Rees Moggy and this head of the earthworm research group. I'd back anyone who's on the other end against Jacob Rees Moggy, although he does have that cane a lot of the time. Because he's a pimp. Pimps have canes. I don't think he carries a cane, does he? He's not a Victorian headmaster. I think I'm accidentally thinking of a caricature of a Victorian gentleman because that's how people portray him, aren't I? Yeah. Or you're thinking of Wes Wally, who he does have a similar look to barring the clothes. Does he have a cane? Yeah, he has a cane. He walks around with a cane.

Yeah, he does. It's a walking stick, but yeah. That's a cane. Why does Wes Wally have a cane? He's walking a lot. Yeah, because he has to get to all the different parts of the page. Yeah. It's a walking stick like someone up a mountain, not someone who has to not take a cane. It came from an old person, for example. No, no. Okay. Because he's middle-aged. Where's Wally? Young to middle-aged. I think young. I mean, I am quite old. It's a young man's game. There was a place I read about which was called Loudoun County. I think I'm pronouncing that right. It's in America. And supposedly, so it's in Virginia, supposedly 70% of the world's online traffic passes through this one county. Yeah. So they have all the storage units there and so on.

Yeah. This was an article that I was reading. So it's the largest concentration, this article says, of computing power. And according to Greenpeace in 2017, 1% of the electricity company that runs all of the electricity in this one place, only 1% of it is renewable sources. So it's incredibly unhealthy. So if we're talking about online carbon footprint. If I go to this town, can I find everyone's emails? Is that what you're saying to me? But they're wishing through so fast. You need a net. Oh, you need a net. Yeah. Is that what the net is? That's what the net is. Have you heard of eel houses? No. It's cool. There are two of these things in the UK, two only. And it's where you build a house over a river and you have sluice gates which are designed to trap

eels. So they're built in the middle ages. And you can, and you just, you know, trap all the eels as they head down the river once they feel the call. They're quite good at getting past obstacles, aren't they? So, you know, you've got to build a good gate. So they're really good at slithering along the ground and they can climb up dams and climb over them and stuff like that. And I think people when, when eels get obstructed by slightly too big dams, if you've got like a Hoover situation, then people have built little eel ladders so you can knit together reeds and stuff and they can climb up dams. That's very like snakes and ladders, isn't it? Eels and ladders. The snakes are climbing the ladders. Oh my god. The game has changed.

I was watching the cartoon cars the other day, you know, the Pixar. So they're NASCAR cars in cars. And one of the things is that he goes into the wild and he gets lost at night because he doesn't have headlights. And I thought, oh, okay, that's interesting. And I was reading into this. So NASCARs don't have headlights for their cars. But when you look at them, they do, right? They're stickers. The headlights that you see on a NASCAR are stickers that are just put on there to look like they have real headlights. How do they light up? I don't think they, well, there's new technology where they do actually just have little beams that come out, but they don't need, I mean, that's a headlight. No, but still the sticker. So it's, yeah, it's not a functioning

headlight. Why, why do they, because presumably the races are daytime or they're floodlit if they're later on in the day. So they don't need headlights to function in the race. Exactly. Yeah. So why do they do it? It's all to do with the manufacturers in getting it past, they need the shape of the body to have the headlight spot. So apparently it's to do with stock, but then they're not functional. So they just put stickers over the top because otherwise it wouldn't be identified as a car or something. Exactly. Yeah. Can I just check in the film cars, when the car goes into the wild, presumably he goes into the wild to the extent that there are well tarmac surfaces in the wild. Yes. Okay, fine. So he just stays on roads, does he? He stays on roads. He goes into the wild west

of America. He goes off track. He goes, yeah. But not literally off track. He goes literally off track in the sense of he goes on races in the sort of the dirty outback. Okay. But there's always a track there. No? Yeah, sometimes when he goes off the track, the dirty outback is a horrible phrase. He doesn't log that. Which probably is of you referring to. The world record for cycling backwards is 333 kilometers in a day. And this is done by an Australian guy called Helinga. And he sits on top of his handlebars and faces backwards and then cycles forward. He cycles. The bike is going forward, but he's facing backwards. Yes. And he's sitting on his handlebars. Whoa. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, cool. He said, I first started riding backwards

when I was a teenager to impress the girls. He's still single. Yeah. Ladies. He's married. He's married. Oh, great. That's so impressive. I mean, where was he doing this? Was it on roads? It was on roads, yeah. Was it on the island of roads? It was in Australia on roads. Okay. Because they got a lot of, I guess, quite quiet roads. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of long roads. Yeah. Dirty back passages. Do you know you can make pie out of hot dogs? And do you want to know the recipe? Do you just, do you make the pastry and then put the whole hot dog in? Do you put the bread in the pastry? No, this is, I'm going to tell you the recipe and tell me when you know what joke I'm making. So the recipe is you drop frozen hot dogs onto a grid where the lines are

further apart in length than the length of the hot dog. So that, you know, none of the lines are closer together than the length of the hot dog. I've got it. He's got it. It's James Harkin for the win. What are we doing? You're working out the mathematical number pie. It's the mathematical number pie. If you don't want to do it the normal way, which is remembering that it's 3.14, like we all know, you can, you do this. So it's really cool. So you basically toss a bunch of hot dogs, let's say a hundred hot dogs onto this grid, and then you multiply the dog length by the number of dogs tossed. And then you times that by two. So that's on the top of the equation. Right. And then you divide that by the distance between the lines and the number of dogs that have crossed

over the lines. And then you will get the answer to what pie is. That's how it was originally worked out as well, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was Erisosthenes, wasn't it? He had a lot of hot dogs. Yeah. Yeah, he did. He had cholesterol issues, but he was a great mathematician. And people do know why I don't, because I had limited time, but I still think that's really cool. I found something out this weekend that was spooky. You know, Andy Murray, the tennis player, the objectively much more famous Andy Murray. So I found out that he and I, as children, both owned hamsters called Whiskey. Really? Yeah. Really? That's amazing fact. That is weird, isn't it? That's incredibly weird. Were you playing tennis before you knew he played tennis?

Um, well, yeah, at school. Yeah. But not like, not as a weekend kind of, you had training and stuff. No, no, no. Okay. I'm just, that would have been a connection as well. You can't discount the tennis. I do play tennis. You play tennis. The fact that you won, God, that's a slam. The fact that you won 6-1 does not mean I do not play tennis. It just means... I just think it's playing pretty fast and loose with the word play. Do you think there was just a hamster salesman going around? Not very good imagination for names. Well, you don't, you name your own hamster. You don't have the pet shop owner name your hamster for you when they sell it. We don't know that though. We don't know that he wasn't very subtly

brilliant. You didn't name Whiskey hamster. I went to Big Larry's Hamster and pour him in Glasgow and... In Dublin. You were told here's Whiskey the hamster and his siblings Whiskey Whiskey Whiskey Whiskey. Why did you call it Whiskey? Because at that age, you probably weren't drinking Whiskey. Well, funny thing. No, it was because of the colour. Yeah, it was Whiskey coloured. And it's not my password for anything online, guys, so nice try. The word alcatraz means gannet in Spanish, but when the island was named in 1775, it actually meant pelicans. But the Spanish word for pelicans, alcatraz, actually came from the

Arabic word for sea eagle. Oh my God, I'm so confused. But basically the bird man of alcatraz is correct. Not really, because there weren't any birds there. He was the bird man of another prison. They just gave him that name. They kept the first bit of his name when he got there. I thought he kept birds in alcatraz. No, he kept birds in the previous prison. They didn't have birds for him on alcatraz. You would have thought it sounds like there are a lot of birds on alcatraz. So sorry, I'm coming back to this. The Spanish changed the meaning of their word for pelican to mean gannet. Yeah. When was this law passed? It wasn't a law. But it was sometime between, I'm saying it's not a law.

Wow. I know it was a law, but it was sometime between 1775 and the modern day. I don't know. Imagine if we wake up tomorrow and someone was like, you know, eagle, that now refers to a magpie. There are seaweed bladders. So there are three bits of a seaweed plant. There's the holdfast, which is basically the root, and then there's the stipe, which is the stem, and then there are the blades. So it's very all analogous to a land plant, but some of them have these air-filled bladders. And the purpose is to hold them upright so they get more sunlight, which I didn't know. But the really big ones, they can get up to six inches wide, these bladders, which I looked it up

is as wide as a human bladder. Is it? Yeah. And are they looking into potential transplants? That's a human bladder of full stretch. Your bladder doesn't get much bigger than that. Bladders don't get bigger than this. When they had the first cars, they were all hand-painted, and the paint wasn't very good. And so after every year, all the paint will flake off your car. And so you had to take it back and get it repainted every single year. And it would take about 40 days to complete painting the whole car. 40 days? No, that is a garage ripping you off. It was because you had to paint it by hand, but then you had to let it dry and do another

coat. And it took ages for the cars to dry. Wow. That's so funny. Isn't that amazing? Because they had electricity at this point, you could get a hair dryer or something, couldn't you? Yeah, I suppose you could. Yeah, no, you probably could. Well, you know, when you go through a car wash, they dry it at the end, don't they? Yeah. But you'd wash off the paint in the process of getting it to the dryer. Oh, God, that would be awful. You'd have to do it all over again. That's why it took 40 days. On the 39th, they're like, hang on, hang on. I mean, you don't get a lot of flummary these days.

Flummary? I don't even notice that. Yeah, you know, flummary, the old school jelly. So again, in the olden days, there was just a great variety of jelly. They were like apples. It was before, you know, we went mass market. I always thought it was like blamange flummary. Is it? It is. Bubble and mongers. Blamange is jelly, really, isn't it? And so, flummary was extremely popular, 17th and 19th century. So it's made by apparently steeping oatmeal in water overnight, and then boiling the strain thing you've got in the morning, and you add sugar, and it eventually turns into a kind of wobbly thing. And if you're wealthy, you had to have a huge array of flummary molds, because they'd present flummary in different

shapes on their tables. And so, and it was really popular to have flummary disguised as proper food. So flummary eggs and bacon was quite a common thing. So there are lots of, you know, molds where you'd look like you were about to eat eggs and bacon, and then you'd bite into it. And it's flummary. It's flummary. It's the best word I've heard in a long time. It's a great word, isn't it? And I wonder if that's where flummary comes from. You know, when you say something like flummary, it's sort of false flattery. I think so, it must be. But I wonder if that comes from the fact that it's false, because flummary often disguised itself as these different delicious foods. Have you guys heard of frozen dead guy days?

No. It doesn't sound like a thing. It's a real thing. This is an annual celebration that's held in the town of Netherlands, Colorado. And it's basically in, in 1989, this is where the story begins. A man passed away. He was Norwegian and his grandson brought him over to America to have him frozen. And so they had him on ice and brought him over. And after a few years, they moved to Netherlands and they built, along with his mother, this big in their house, basically a shed that could just keep him going and keep him frozen. And then the son got deported, the grandson got deported, so the mum had to look after it. And the authorities saw what was going on in the house.

And she didn't have a few things like electricity and so on. And it was a bit illegal and they discovered... How was she keeping a full cryomics chamber going? She had one bit of electricity for that bit, but not for the rest of the house. Anyway, her house... I'm just going to turn the TV on. No! Okay, you can turn the TV on for a bit, but once his ankles are thawed out, but basically the house was in violation of local laws of what you need a house to be. So she was going to be kicked out. And then they discovered that she was keeping her father frozen in the back and they said, hang on, this is very illegal. So they wanted to get him out. And as a result, it had a lot of hoo-ha from the community saying, no, we can't have him thawed out. He'll die. This

is... They want to keep him going. So it worked out in their favor. And this man is still there. He's been moved to a different bit of the town. But as a result, they celebrate every year Frozen Dead Guy Day. And it's a thing... The last one was in 2019 that they had it. They have lookalike contests. They have... They're getting less and less flattering presumably. They have coffin races. And this is a thing where they build a fake coffin. There's an obstacle course and they carry... It's teams of seven. And one of the seven is in the coffin and they have to race around. They have frozen t-shirt competitions. There's a very cold area this place. They have ice cream that's made specifically for it, which has crushed Oreos and sour gummy worms

inside. It's a bit yummy. Yeah. And it's been going on for all these years. So the last one was held March 8th to 10th, 2019. And it looks as if they're going to keep going. It must be soon. When you're listening to this podcast, you might have just missed it. Yeah, exactly. Wow. I mean, do you think there's any moment where she's going to think, is this slightly tasteless what I've done? If. And obviously it's the biggest if ever. If he wakes up at some point, he will be a local hero. Yeah. Imagine that day. That's the film. That's going to be so exciting. Yeah. But he's going to wake up having passed away in Norway. Oh, yeah. He's going to wake up in Colorado with a language he probably doesn't speak,

with all these guys serving him ice creams. It's going to be weird. Um, do you want to know some Orkney language? Okay, I'll teach you some boys. Oh, boys means unbelievable boys. Oh, boys. Oh, boys. It's B E U Y S. So I think it's boys. Okay. Um, to dildar means to walk around aimlessly and slowly. Oh, yeah. I think is a nice word that we can all take. Yeah, just dildaring around. And my favorite one is beer. The word beer means to complain or moan, which means it also means to wine. So the word beer means wine. Extremely confusing in the pleasure of pubs. I'm sure they have. So Grizzly bears can do one thing that I can't do. And that is use a comb.

And they have been found using the comb, using a comb, the only other species other than humans to do so. Cool. Who's making their combs? Well, they have bear peddlers going round their dens. This was in the Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska. And they, there was someone called Volker Decker from the University of St. Andrews. And Volker found this Grizzly bear picking up a rock from the water, looking at it, sort of turning it over, putting it back, picking another one up, looking at that one. And then with that, sort of combing his fur with it around his muzzle. And then he would put it down and he would pick it up and do it again. And then Volker went to have a look at these rocks and found that they have barnacles on them and worked out that what

the bear was doing was looking for the right one. And the fact that he picked up the first one and then threw it away again means that he can discriminate between what's a good comb and what's a bad comb, which basically shows that he understands the fact that it's a tool. Amazing. That's so cool. Isn't that amazing? I don't think of any rocks as being a good comb. Do they have, do they have sort of prongs on them? These rocks? Well, they have barnacles on them. Yeah. Okay. No, that, that does. Yeah. It'll do the job. You're a bear. You don't care. Well, you've got a meeting to be smart or something. It is legal to eat a dog. Yeah. Yes. Not in all countries. True. But in this country, in the UK and in the USA,

in 44 states of the USA and here. You probably can't sell dog meat, can you? You can't sell it. But if it's your dog and you kill it humanely, you can do it. Yeah. People often associate South Korea, don't they, with eating dogs? And it is, there are no legal consequences for selling dog meat in South Korea, although it's officially classified as detestable. A lot of my behavior is not illegal, but it is clearly detestable. There was a survey of worldwide sperm banks to see how common various different traits are. And so statistically, if you get sperm from a sperm bank, your donor is most likely to be a Christian accountant with brown hair, brown eyes and white skin. And it's least likely to be a dark

skinned ginger buddhist. Not likely to be a 19 foot tall dwarf. It's least likely to be a dark skinned ginger buddhist with black eyes. Far and wide for that. They're very easy to sex, alms, yeah, because they have translucent skin. So you can see the genitals through their skin. Oh, that's great. What like just aerial view you can see right through to the, yeah, that's so great. Amazing. But they do and the skin, this is so weird. So they're blind, which is or they're nearly blind, which makes sense because they live in very, very dark caves most of the time. But for the first four months, they do have eyes. And for the first four months of their life, their eyes are out on the outside. And then gradually skin grows over their eyes,

meaning that they find it quite difficult to see. But thankfully, they can detect light with their skin. So it's kind of a happy story. Yeah, yeah, it's weird, though, isn't it to have functioning eyes that just get better than overgrown. Yeah, overgrown by the thing that can also see. Yeah, it's weird. It's not. What's the point? Yeah, hard to say. There is no point, James. Let's not look at this from the religious perspective. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everyone. We'd like to let you know that we are not sponsored by anyone, but we are asking you to donate to the Care Workers Charity. Yes. So the Care Workers Charity is a charity that exists to support care workers who are having a hell of a time right now, as you can imagine. So either very

low paid anyway, over 43% of care workers are paid below the real living wage. And at the moment, with COVID, a lot of them are having to take a lot of time off work and losing even that wage. And so the Care Workers Charity is setting up a fund where they're giving grants to people who are really suffering. Yes, lots of care workers have lost their income as a result of the crisis. There are so many care workers in the UK, two million of them, and many of those guys are on a low income. So anything that can be done to alleviate that pressure on them at this time is greatly appreciated. That's right. The care workers, they're at the absolute front of the coronavirus crisis at the moment. They're looking after the most vulnerable and the most susceptible

people in society. And if there's anything you could do to help, we would really, really appreciate it. And the thing that you can do specifically to help is you can go to qi.com slash donate or justgiving.com slash nstaaf and you'll find the page where you can give money to this fantastic charity in exchange for listening to our weirdo facts. That's the deal. Is that a fair deal? Okay, on with the weirdo facts. And another thing that you could get door to door was HP Sauce. That was originally only sold door to door. No. If you wanted HP Sauce in 1905, the only way you could get it was from a door to door salesman. It was invented by Edwin Sanson Moore, who had a door to door vinegar

and pickle company. So you just had to wait? You just had to wait. If the door to door guy came around yesterday and you suddenly needed it, it's like he won't be back for another three months. If you make a bag with sandwich, you better make it at the right time. Did he, I just, that sounds terrifying, the HP Sauce man coming down the street with his, did he have like a backpack full of HP Sauce? You just squirt it into your home. What do you mean, like a milkman does today? Why is that where your brain went with that? I don't understand. I'm just picturing him in a costume, which is the bottle of HP Sauce. And then he sort of leans his head forward and squeezes his sides.

Disgusting. No, he didn't do that. No, you found your peddling license revoked. You know how you're saying that a lemon can mean like a bad car? You know the lemon rally? Yes. Have you heard of the lemon? No. So this is a real thing. It's in America. And the rules are that you have to drive a car that is valued at less than $500. So you have to drive a really terrible car. And they, before you turn up, they look at all the cars and they put you into three categories, either shit car, really shit car, or probably not going to finish the race car. And the prices are better for the worst cars. So you get more dollars if you're driving a really, really shit car. And the way

that they work it out that you can't cheat is because at the end of the race, according to the rules, they're allowed to purchase any vehicle for $500. So if you turn up with a Bugatti or something, right, then they by law have to be able to buy it off you for $500 twice in their history. They've looked at it and gone, you know what, that's worth more than $500. I want to buy it off you. That's so funny. Isn't that cool? That's great. Is that in America, did you say? In America, yeah. And there's a load of, I mean, it's a bit silly, but there's a load of rules. So if you kind of break some laws, you might have to get out of your car and run around the track singing, I'm a little teapot. It's a bit of a silly thing, but it's kind of cool. Do you have to do the gestures

as well? I think you do. You would have to, wouldn't you? That's part of the song, yeah. Yeah, you're right. Does anyone have any more on the Manchineal specifically? Well, what I can say is, so the Manchineal belongs to a genus called Euphorbia. And there's a more famous plant that comes from that genus, and that is the poinsettia. So it's basically the Christmas thing. And the Christmas thing, there's like red Christmas plants. And they're also a little bit kind of poisonous. There's a myth that they kill dogs, isn't there? And stuff like that. I think they're not quite that poisonous, but they are quite poisonous. And the reason I find this really interesting, the reason we have poinsettias at Christmas is because there was a family called the Eek family, E-C-K-E. I don't know

if that's how you pronounce it. And they found a way to make the poinsettia bloom in the winter, because it's actually a summer plant. And when they did that, they wanted to sell it, but they didn't know how to do this. And so they sent it to loads of TV studios around Christmas time in the hope that the TV studios who just wanted to put something in the background will put this poinsettia in the background. And it just so happened that this was just when colour television had started. And so all the producers were like, wow, look at this red plant. This is going to show up really well on the new colour TV. And so all of the TV shows around that time started putting poinsettias in their Christmas shows. And then that's why today you'll might have these in your house at

Christmas. That's really cool. Did mistletoe a bit poisonous as well? Yeah. So we're just surrounding ourselves in poisons during the Christmas period. Yeah. It's exciting. Just don't eat it. Don't eat mistletoe. Yeah. Don't eat holly as well. That's going to sting on the way down. On the way out. Don't eat the plants. I get it. I get it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I won't do it again. See the food. I actually did this once. So sorry. Which which thing? The miniaturisation thing. I'll explain better. At the end of university, sometimes they take a photo of all of you, you know, and your graduation on your graduation day and your gowns and things. Yeah. And they to get you to buy the photo of your whole year at university, they send you a tiny like a two

inch by three inch photo of your whole year at university. And you can't really see yourself. You can't see who anyone is. No, but it's just to encourage you to splash out on the main thing. I just kept the miniature one and framed that. Amazing. I've got a tiny photo of my whole year at university. I can't tell where I am. Wow. Do you have a memory of where you were on the day? No, I don't not anymore. No, it's been too long. So I'm in there. I'm in there though. That's the main thing. Are you sure? Are you is what actually happened? You didn't graduate and you said to your parents, oh, look, I'm in this picture. That's me. The little blob in the car. Don't wear the same clothes. You really can't tell. That's kind of like a caricature of some sort of

Dickensian, parsimonious, you know, stingy bastard. Well, if you see that on the wall, I've saved about 25 pounds by doing that. Thank you very much. And 10 years later, when I can't see myself in my own graduation, it's worth it. I can't ring up now and say, have you got that photo? I've decided I'm willing to buy it. I've made a decision. Do you know that before they had bumper stickers? So bumper stickers were invented by this guy called Forest Gill. And it was in the 50s, I think late 50s. But before that, drivers would have handmade placards that they tie to their cards with pieces of twine. So if you wanted to say who you're going to vote for in the election, you would just get a placard and tie it to your car.

Isn't that cool? You just tie a bit of card to your car. Really cool. I'm trying to figure out where you'd tie it, maybe onto those roof rack bars, if you've got those. I think where your bumper is, maybe. Yeah, you would just have a small placard, wouldn't you, the size of a sticker almost? What do you tie it around? The bumper. I'm going to have to see it. I forgot my car. I saw this amazing tweet by this guy called Frank Paul, who's like a quiz in the UK. And he found this Wikipedia article about a movie called OK Connery. Have you heard about this? So this was like a spoof of James Bond made in Italy. And the way it started is Neil Connery, who is Sean Connery's brother, was working as a plasterer in Scotland, and he was sacked for

losing his tools. And then this got into the tab like newspapers. This is all real. I thought you meant they'd made all this up. No, no, no. So this Neil Connery is real. He was working as a plasterer. He lost his tools and he got fired. And so it was in all the newspapers that Sean Connery's brother's just been fired for losing his tools. And when this guy, he was making a movie. I must have been at Snow News Day. And then these people in Italy kind of heard about this, and they saw him in interviews on the local news, and he sounded just like Sean Connery. And so they thought, why don't we make a movie with Neil Connery, where he's pretending to be James Bond. And they made this movie called OK Connery, which is apparently terrible.

Which is, yeah. Why does it sound incredible? And apparently also, it was filmed without any live sound. Neil Connery had appendicitis when they were filming it. And he was really sick, and he couldn't really speak properly. So they got Sean in to dub it. But they added all the voices in later in the film. So everyone's licks thinking, and they added all the voices later on. And apparently it's one of the worst films ever made. That sounds, that does sound amazing. That's incredible. I was looking on Reddit, and there is a bit on Reddit called TIFU, which means today I fucked up. And someone posted, TIFU, today I fucked up by putting I voted stickers on my nipples for the sake of getting in my

husband's pants. It was painful to remove. Do not do this, no matter how sexy. And this goes into a load of details about how they got stuck on her nipples, and she couldn't remove them, no matter what she did. But it's so sexy. No, no matter how sexy it is, Anna, you mustn't do it. You've got to do it. She said, when I, when I pulled on it, my nipples stretched sideways, almost bringing me to tears. Oh gosh. I said, weirdly, the thing I remember from a while ago, Reddit, they've never done really any advertising properly, except for one thing, which is they spent $500, and I think this is in the whole history of Reddit, they spent $500 on promotional stickers. Okay. It's the only advertising they've

ever done. Why did they? And put them sort of around the world, just on people's nipples. And they're still there to this day. So it's very well spent advertising money, actually. If you want to get sperm from a bee, it's really difficult, right? Because they're quite small. They don't make much sperm. And presumably, if you are trying to force them out with bee, it will try to sting you. Probably will. Yeah. So what you do is you pick up your little drone bee, and then you squeeze its abdominal muscles to mimic a natural mating event. Okay. And then the pressure exposes the bee's penis. And the little speck of semen comes out. And you have to do it loads of times, because obviously, you need lots of semen, right? If you're going to use

it, you don't just want one little speck, you need lots of specks. But the problem is that just like in real life, if a drone has sex, it immediately dies. And this is what happens to these bees as well. They basically go to the sperm donor's bank and never come back. That's a very, that's an even worse environment than the normal human donation places. If you have to go into a room full of corpses of previous donors. I'm sorry. So is this not what you're into? So I read a whole thing about toy logistics these days. And it's a nightmare for toy shop owners who, as soon as a craze comes in, they have to basically buy quick and sell quick. And then

they don't know what the next thing is going to be. So you can't stock up. You can't really pre-plan it. So it's a real painful. Yeah, they have like a toy fair every year, don't they? Or they have a few of them where everyone says, this is going to be the next big thing. This is going to be the next big thing. But who knows what it's going to be? It's quite exciting, really. Yeah. But it's the opposite of what the beanie baby people did. Oh, yeah. Well, do you remember they deliberately restricted supply? Did they? Yeah. Because that was our fidget spinner, really, wasn't it? The beanie baby. That was our crazy I was too old for that. Oh, no, you were the spinning top, obviously.

I was the wheel and a stick. I used to run down the streets in Lancashire, rolling my wheel. So they basically had loads of beanie babies, but they said, we're only going to sell this many of them so that they work more on. This toy shop owner, she said that normally toy sales reps come into your store and they try and sell you as they say, please buy as many units as you can. The beanie baby's reps will come in and you'd say, please, I need a beanie baby elephant to sell to my clients. And they'd say, no. And it was really, it was their way of, it was basically like the diamond cartel. They were just driving up demand as much as they couldn't. It really worked. That's, that's ballsy, isn't it? Yeah.

So clever. It was the early days of kind of using technology to spy on these shopkeepers, basically, because the beanie baby makers would keep exact records of precisely what beanie babies they'd been selling and how well they'd been doing it. And they would confiscate various beanie babies from them if they weren't doing it very well. And they wouldn't let big shops like Toys R Us or Walmart stock them because they didn't want to invalidate the brand. And it sounded bizarre. And the only way that you could get them was to call a sales rep and then have a conversation with the sales rep and sort of reveal secrets about what the kids in your shop were saying about what beanie babies they liked and stuff so that they could get the

inside scoop. Wow. It was no wonder you millennials are self-fucked up. There was a 1904 carousel up for auction, very beautiful. There was a park in Cleathorps selling at Pleasure Island, it was called. And there were no bids. And the reserve price was £180,000 because obviously it's a huge, complicated, beautiful bit of machinery. And then just before bidding closed, there was one bid for £180,000. And it was sold and the owners must have thought, oh thank goodness we've managed to sell this carousel. And it turns out it was from a Lincolnshire man who had been trying to close the window and accidentally pressed bid. And he had legally bought it. No.

He was in the hole with fees for £245,000. Oh no. Is there no safety net for that kind of specific fingers? As they pointed out, the bid button is in the middle of the screen, not the top corner where they hadn't put bid next to the X or anything like that. Eventually they let him off the hook and they did not force him to spend his entire life savings on a carousel. I think that's fair enough. Given that I get, if I'm on the most irrelevant website and trying to leave it, it'll say, are you sure you want to leave this site? I think at the very least they should have that box pop up. Yeah. Are you sure you want to spend a quarter of a million pounds on an old carousel?

Actually no. So funny. I was trying to find out how you fit that many clowns in a car. It turns out it's very simple. You just get a car and you remove everything, literally everything from it, seats and what else is in a car? Ashtray. The steering wheel? Ashtray. I think you keep the steering wheel. You keep one or two things. But then the record, and you have to fortify the springs as well, because it's normally a reasonably small car for comedy purposes. And the record for the number of clowns in a car is 31 in a Citroen 2CV, which is quite a small car. That is not socially distancing. Were they children or were they... No, they were, I believe, human adult clowns.

It feels like that's too many. If I had to guess how many clowns you could get in a Citroen, I would have gone way under. Way, way, way under. Well, I think that's why it's a world record. I think... No, I do see that, but I would have thought that the world record would be just a little bit more than I could possibly imagine, but this is a lot more than I could possibly imagine. Everything clowns. Have you guys heard of the Great Corncob Fire of 1958? Oh, the 1950s. Oh, yeah, of course. Okay, this was in Memphis, Tennessee. And the Quakers, Quaker Oats, the firm, they used corn cobs at the time to get a particular chemical. And they had a stockpile at their plant of 70,000 tons of corn cobs. Okay. Imagine the size of

that. It was six stories high. And people noticed in 1958, oh, the pile of corn cobs is really smouldering a lot. And it burst into flames. It spontaneously combusted because the heat had been generated inside it. And even... So this huge, massive corn cob fire, and even worse, as it burned, it formed a kind of shell over its surface, which it kind of crusted over with this chemical, which could not... Which reflected the water back onto the firefighters, basically. They had to use bulldozers to crash into this massive pile of... What? Just to inject the water through this weird surface that it forms. Surringe it through. Basically, yeah. I know. I want to see the TV, you know, the TV show Chernobyl, very good show. I want to see the sequel, which is about this,

because it seems like it's almost as exciting, right? Corn nobble. Corn cobble. Corn cobble. Corn cobble. There you go. It's good that you showed us you're working for that joke. Yeah, perfect. I have a historical use of luffas, which may have changed the course of the Second World War. So a luffa was used in the Second World War to convince Churchill of a point, okay? So he was in a boat in 1943. He was sailing to America to discuss war strategy with President Roosevelt, right? And this was in the planning of D-Day. And there was one thing they used in D-Day, which were called these mulberry harbours. And they basically were large floating platforms that were slightly out at sea. And if you had those out at sea, then it

closer to shore, the waters would become. So that was incredibly useful for landing troops, because it means you don't have to have choppy waters while you're trying to get troops on shore. So Churchill was in the bath on this ship in the Atlantic. And his scientific advisor, Professor John Bernal, was trying to teach him about these mulberry harbours. And he used a luffa as an example. He put some paper boats in Churchill's bath with Churchill in it. And then he stirred the water around and he used a luffa to say, look, this is if we had a giant luffa, this is how we protect our ships. And that was how the luffa helped to win the war, basically. Wow. And that's why at D-Day, they also had those massive rubber ducks on either side of it as well.

But I would hope as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, you could have a bath in peace, without people coming in and meeting you. No, Churchill was famous for it, wasn't he? Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting, because now I think it would be, like now it's a charming eccentricity to look back on Churchill having a bath and having a scientific advisor in the bath. But if we heard that Boris Johnson or Donald Trump were having meetings in the bath, we would be completely unsurprised. You know, drafts. Yes. Yeah, drafts, it turns out, has been solved. Okay. There is now no point in playing drafts, because there is a correct way to play it. And this was worked out by a computer games expert called Jonathan Schaeffer at the University

of Alberta. He set a number of computers playing it. At the peak of his work, there were 200 desktop computers, which he had playing drafts full-time to work out the combinations of how to play. Wow. Wow. Imagine how annoying that would be, if you were trying to get a computer at the University of Alberta. And all of Jonathan's 200 machines were playing drafts. And it's not like you save your lives, is it? You know, when he explains to me why you can't use it. You're trying to solve drafts. But it turns out that there are 10 to the 20, sorry, there are 10 to the power of 20 different positions for the game. And even if there are

fewer than 10 pieces on the board at the end, there are still 39 trillion end game positions, which are possible. So there's quite a lot of numbers to crumple. Yeah, exactly. So you say that it's solved, Andy, but unless you and I are playing and we both have 50 computers telling us what to do each time, and we're willing to wait for about six hours between each move, then presumably. That's how I play all my games. It's a game of attrition. It would still have this really unfortunate, not predator, parasite, really, that I was reading about. And I found this out because there's a guy called Ryan Herbison who's a researcher who collected 1,300 earwigs to investigate it, which I think it must be so weird. He was just wandering

along a beach collecting earwigs, and he's looking out for these things called myrmythids. And they're just one of those parasites that takes over your brain. We've talked about this kind of thing before, but I always find them incredible. So he collected all these earwigs, opened up their brains, and found myrmythids inside lots of them. And what they do is they make them hydro-taxic, as in they make them want to go to water. They want to go to get wet, or they make them act really erratically, so they hop around until they see a pond and then jump in it, and they can't swim, so they immediately drown. And then that's perfect because the parasites, little babies, are aquatic, and so then they can swim. But they turn them into water lovers.

I find it amazing that these things exist that control the minds of so many animals. Yeah. Yeah, that's wicked. They also do this really cool thing where they can stop predators from getting a taste for them and their family by, once they're, when they're being eaten, let's say, by a lizard, they vomit inside them as they're being eaten. So they vomit inside the lizard, into the lizard's mouth, and they release a smell which is like rotting flesh, which the lizard hates, because I usually, when I think of animals, I just think they don't, they don't care about the taste of things, right? They just, it's about food. It's all yucky, like they don't have taste buds, but apparently they do. The whole series of weird revelations there

about your preconceptions, but sure. I just think a lizard will just eat whatever, right? But this will actively, once they release this vile smelling toxic into the mouth of the lizard, the lizard will not only spit them out, but it will spend time afterwards going and trying to wipe away this thing from their mouth. And the idea is that I'm not sure if the earwig will survive the one that's been chewed, or if that's, I think it's more about passing on the distaste to never want to eat an earwig again for the future lizards, or that one lizard. So sacrificing yourself for the sake of the clan, like Bruce Willis and Armageddon sort of thing. Yes, exactly. Yeah, it's a lot. Oh, Anna, stop spoiling films for James.

I'm sorry. Don't listen, James. I wasn't, I wasn't. That's, wow, that is amazing. Do you, you know, Dan, you live with a dog at the moment. No, I'm not anymore. Oh, really? Because I was going to say, when you give it dog food, do you just think, fuck it, it will eat any old shit? It doesn't have any taste buds. I was thinking more like lizards rather than, I don't think like when I feed my son, I think he's young, fuck it, he hasn't got taste buds yet. He's got more. Dan, he's got three times as many as you. Well, I'll stop feeding him dog food now.

Hey, just while we're talking about Spain, Spain obviously has that big Christmas lottery, which is El Gordo, the fat one, and it's the big, big prize. Did you guys read that in 2011, it was one, and it's, you know, people win it, but this one town in Spain called Sodeto, every single resident there, the 70 households, won this lottery. And the thing is, is that the way they do it is sometimes these towns club together and they buy this big, they buy the one lottery ticket and then they go around to each house and they say, do you want to be a participant in this? So you get a participation ticket. So this entire town did it of 70 households, which was over 200 people. They all won the lottery except one guy

because they forgot to knock on his door. Surely they shared it with him. They didn't. No, they didn't. And he had moved to the town because he was in love with this girl. It didn't work out. So he decided to stay. So he was renovating in this new place and the people who went around selling the tickets just didn't think to go and sell him a ticket. So he remembers waking up on the day and he's a cinematographer. He does a lot of filming and everyone was on the streets running around. I have no idea why they were in their socks running out of cafes because they'd all just heard the news and he filmed it all. He filmed the joy. But behind that camera is the one man who didn't get any of the benefits from that. And they want a huge

amount. Like if you if you paid in lower amounts, the least that was earned by someone who got some money was around 100,000 American dollars. That was like the lowest on it. So as a result, once the news came out, all of these business people descended on the town trying to sell them B&W cars. Business managers came in and the whole town now there's people on the way home having to hide as they leave the cafe because they can see that really persistent bank manager sitting in his car looking for more residents to sign up. So it's kind of turned into a hell hole for a lot of them. So really the one guy who didn't win is laughing in everyone else's faces because he can just say to those hasslers, mate, I'm the one that didn't win it. I've got nothing

for you. Yeah. Um, just one more thing on hangovers. I found a survey by I think it was a rehab website about it was a survey of 1000 drinkers about what they would do to avoid a hangover, like what sacrifices they would make to never have a hangover again. Okay, so I just want to run these past you and see if you'd agree. So a third of people said they would pay more for their drinks if it meant they would never have a hangover. Okay, yeah, okay, depends on much more. But yeah, if you can afford it. About a third said they would give up watching sports forever. Oh, gosh, no. I'm finding the last few weeks quite hard. So probably wouldn't do that. Okay. It was, it was way more women than men said they would give up watching sports forever.

They so 2% of women said they would give up sex for the rest of their lives. Um, 0% of men said they would give up sex forever to avoid a hangover. Some of them get a bit dark. So sacrificing a stranger's life. 9% of men said yes. Giving up a fingertip, 6% of men, 3% of women, allegedly 6% of men and 1% of women would kill their pets to avoid hangovers. If you've got pet crickets or something, then that actually is. Yeah, I wouldn't give up crickets, but I would give up crickets. Do you guys know the first reference to hair of the dog? I was really surprised by this. The Bible? It's actually from even pre Bible. It's 400 BC. And it's in a recommendation by a guy

called Antiphanes, who was recommending basically homeopathic treatments, which is sort of what hair of the dog is. It's sort of like a little bit of the thing that makes you ill. And he says, take the hair. So this is translated from the Greek and made nice and poetic, but take the hair. It is well written of the dog by which you're bitten, work off one wine with his brother, work off one labor with another. It works to an extent, actually, hair of the dog. First of all, it obviously makes you feel better because you're getting a bit drunk again. So we all know that kind of works. But they think now it works because of something we've discussed before. Dan, do you remember that fact you had where they cured that guy of alcohol poisoning by

feeding him beer? Yes, that's right. And it's because of the methanol. So all alcoholic drinks contain tiny amounts of methanol. And they think that might be a large part of what's making you feel bad with a hangover. And if you drink more alcohol, then the ethanol in that actually is digested before the methanol. So the methanol stops making you feel bad. So keep it up. Is that what we're saying? Is that our official advice? Yeah, please don't sue me when you get liver failure. I was looking up some other museums in Croatia. We've spoken before, I think, about the Museum of Broken Relationships. That's quite a famous one. But I've never seen this one.

It's called Froggyland, and it's in split. And this is a collection of 507 stuffed frogs that were made by a very, very skilled taxidermist from Croatia called Ference Mere. And he used a very clever system where he goes through the animal's mouth rather than cutting it open so you don't end up with any scars on the taxidermied animal. And then he got the frogs and he put them in sort of like settings. So there's one in a blacksmith's shop, there's one in a carpenter's shop, there's one in a school, there's some in the circus, like lots of different modes of life just recreated with stuffed frogs. So cool. Wow. It's funny because it feels like he might also be a candidate for the Museum of

Broken Relationships. But yeah, Froggyland, it gets 4.5 stars on TripAdvisor. Lots of reviews, lots of good reviews. I only read the bad ones, of course. The frogs were very small and not very appealing. Another person, this place is an abomination for frog lovers. Don't go here. If you love frogs like me, I love frogs. You should have seen that coming. Surely, if you're a frog lover, going to a place full of dead frogs is what you're going to like. And another person said, okay, okay, this guy gave a lot of time and effort to make these frogs. But still, it is weird and creepy. But then the people who made the Museum replied with Anna's exact point. We don't understand why someone who has that kind of opinion would even decide

to come in here. It's like you're doing it deliberately so you can complain, guys. We don't like dead frogs. Don't go to the Dead Frogs Museum. Anyway, it's in split. Do you think someone tested the temperature of Cleopatra's milk bath by dipping their elbow into it? Now, that is a joke about how you test the temperature of a baby's milk, isn't it? It's how you test a baby's bath water, sorry. How do you test the milk, though? It's hard to get your elbow into the bottle, isn't it? Do you have it yourself? I think you drip little bits from the bottle on the back of your hand, don't you? I think you just, presumably, you just trust that the milk you're producing from your breast

is not by the boiling hot or freezing cold. That's, yeah. I mean, some mothers are like Yellowstone National Parkers firing up 120-degree milk. It can't be very damaging. They had sacred blades, which, and this is a slight content warning here, sacred obsidian blades, which the kings would use to cut their penises with. Oh, yeah. Okay. Is that so they could bleed them? Yeah. What were they doing? They're not cutting the whole thing off, are they? Not, they weren't cutting the whole thing off, great news, but they were cutting, I mean, it's all sensitive. Well, they did a bit on their full skins,

yeah, but a bit on other parts as well. You know the Victorians had special mini swords that they used to cut corn off corn on the cubs? I don't know what made me think of that. And I think it was pleading, wasn't it, as in they used to sacrifice their blood, so this is the ritual thing that they had to do is they would have to cut their tongues and ears and genitals and stuff, and then pour lots of blood out of them to give to the gods. I think I got that, yeah. But then you would leave the blade somewhere, and so researchers have found a load of these obsidian blades, and it's very hard to tell which of the blades there were sacrificial, because as they put it, the degree of wear imposed on a blade

used only on one occasion to slice open a penis is very little indeed. The knife is much less damaged, so the researchers again had to have a go at this, and they studied multiple blades. Well, no, the scientists didn't cut their own cocks. They tried it on some chicken instead, they tried other people's cocks, and they studied multiple blades, and they think that is giving them a sign of which blades were used. That is really interesting, because exactly what you're saying, the way you work out how a blade was used is by looking at the dents in it, don't you? There was a recent study about some Bronze Age swords, about whether they were purely decorative or whether they used

in fighting, and they can tell by how they hit each other and how they dent, but if you're only using it for one off the slicing of a penis, then you're not going to get that information. Yeah, the wear and tear on the penis is definitely more, isn't it? Yes. Than a knife. Just to go back to their gods, some other fun gods, they were quite interflagellant and smelling. Well, sorry, Anna, just this is a terrible joke that I'm just about to make, and see if we can put it in. But you say that the damage on the penis is worse, but then, of course, the penis mightier than the sword. Oh, wow. Jesus. Oh, wow.

I'm so glad that you taught me that. I'm glad you got that out. Definitely worth it. It's going in, isn't it? It's going in. I can't wait to hear it. We've got our end of section now, so sorry to not hear what you've got to say, Anna. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. What does Dan usually say here? Oh, it doesn't matter, because it's not a normal show. All we want to do is remind you that to give some money to the Care Workers Charity, they would really, really appreciate it if you could spare anything, and so would we. And to donate, go to qi.com slash donate, or justgiving.com slash n-s-t-a-a-f. Off with the show. I've always wanted to say that I've never

had a chance before. It feels like I can now dance away. Wow. If that doesn't make you want to donate to this charity, I don't know what will.