No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As The Loch Ness Monster

Episode Date: April 18, 2014

Episode 7: This week in the QI Office Dan Schreiber (@schreiberland), James Harkin (@eggshaped), Anna Ptaszynski (@nosuchthing) and Andrew Hunter Murray (@andrewhunterm) discuss parachuting dogs, a misbehaving coconut, the longest game in the world & more...

We run it on QI a few years ago. Yeah. Which was, there's no such thing as a fish. You didn't have no such thing as a fish. No, seriously. It's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. He says it right there. First paragraph, No Such Thing is a Fish.

Hello and welcome to No Such Thing as a Fish. This is a QIEL podcast coming to you from our offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver. I am sitting here with three other QILs, James Harkin, and a Jasinski. and Andy Murray, and once again, we're huddled around our microphone, and these are the best facts that we found out from the last seven days. So in no particular order, here we go. Okay, fact number one, we're going to start with you, James.

Okay, yep, my fact this week is a computer game has been invented that takes more than a lifetime to complete. Is it digitized monopoly? Oh yeah, because remember that thing we found? There was a computer simulation of monopoly, and they found that something like 12% of all games will go on indefinitely. Which is not true because... It's much more than that.

So with monopoly, how would it go on? Everyone would own a certain portion of the border and just keep going. Terry Pratchett has a computer game in his book, which is called Journey to Alpha Centauri, which takes over 3,000 years to play. Oh, wow. You know the screen saver, the very old-fashioned screen saver with just the moving dots for a spaceship?

It's that, with a counter counting down for 3,000 years. and at the end, the dot appears in the middle of the screen and it says, welcome to Alfa Centauri, now go home. And someone has actually made that as a very rough game. We're going to find out about this eternal game. Okay, this came from the design

museum. I went there this weekend. It's the design of the year 2014. It's a competition for all the best design things and this was the thing that I thought was most interesting. But the idea is it's kind of an art installation and they're asking questions like, what happens to digital things after you die. If you die

halfway through that game, can you pass it onto another person to finish off the game? Is that possible? Or maybe this game is designed for mobile phones. What happens when mobile phones are obsolete will the game carry on? So they're asking those kind of questions. Wouldn't it be dispiriting to find out that

your great uncle that have bequeathed you his high score so far in this game and that you just had to keep on playing it for the rest of your lifetime as well? To my first son, I leave all the property, and to my second son, I leave this game. Hey, do you guys know how many hours of games are played per week on Earth by humans

if you tallied up over hours? I'll say 100 million hours. 100 million hours. Yeah, I would say I'm going to go for 2 billion. Okay, I'm going to go for just 24 hours. 24 hours. 24 hours. Yeah, and I think most of humanity is out on a walk.

Okay. The answer is 3 billion hours. Oh, so close. I say I'm close, but actually I'm a billion out. Yeah. Feels close. So gamers are supposed to be good at using drones, aren't they, for war? Yeah.

And also, surgeons... Surgery. Yeah, if they play computer games, it's supposed to help them with keyhole surgery and stuff like this. There's a lot of job opportunities coming up for gamers now, which didn't exist before. When Robert Ballard discovered the record of the Titanic, probably in your head you have an image that he was in a submersible trawling through the ocean.

But he was in a submarine, but they would send down drone submarines, as it were. And obviously, you need someone to operate. them. And this is a quote from him. He said, I would not let an adult drive my robot. They don't have enough gaming experience. Wow. So with this game, did you actually play it? I prodded at the screen a few times, but I couldn't

really work out how to play it. Oh, okay. Maybe that's why it takes lifetimes. The first lifetimes. What the hell is this thing? I've just, some of the other things at this design of the year, they had the first car that's been able to drive 100 kilometres on one litre of petrol. It

looks really cool. It's a bit like James Bonkire, it's very sleek, and in order to help their aerodynamics, they don't have wing mirrors, and instead they have tiny cameras. They had talking lamp posts. Is that useful? They were popular. Stop that. Stop that. Bad dog. They were in Bristol last year or the year before, I think, and the idea is that say you had a rubbish bin and it was full, then you would be able to talk to your rubbish bin and say, you're a bit full, and he got, oh, sorry, I'll make sure I sort that out. And then it was. get emptied, so it's a way of the community

kind of dealing with stuff like that. It's really interesting thing, isn't it? There's this guy, have you guys heard of Dmitri Itzkov? No. So he set up this thing called the 2045 initiative. Basically, he's a Russian mogul who thinks that he wants to remove our minds from our bodies

essentially, so our mind's going to live forever. Well, that's never gone wrong in any films. I think it seems very promising. So by 2045, he really thinks that we'll have our minds to be a couple from our bodies and he's going to live forever, and he's 100% certain this and we'll have holograms and we'll be able to like shop in department stores for the body that we want that most suits our purposes and live for eternity and he met the Dalai Lama

to discuss it who apparently was really supportive according to their website the thing is at the moment the computer capability isn't enough to simulate human brain is it yeah 2045 seems ambitious so I have something about things that run for longer than you'd expect because of the back of the computer game one of Norway's most popular recent TV shows has been a seven-hour train journey in real time across Norway. That might be quite beautiful, actually. Yeah, it was. So they broadcast it in 2009, and over 20% of the population tuned in at some point to the show.

In Britain, that would just be like 45 minutes of sat outside Milton Keynes. I've watched that. I've seen shots of the Norwegian one. It's gorgeous rolling countryside, the snow and the furs, and it's all beautiful. And, yeah, here it would not be so much. And they keep doing this. They've done 18 hours of fishing for salmon, and then they had a 12-hour knitting night. And my favourite is National Firewood Night, which was in February last year,

which was inspired by a Norwegian book, Solid Wood, all about chopping, drying, and stacking wood, which sold as many copies as 50 shades of grey in Norway. Oh, there are different kind of people, aren't they? And the first four hours of National Firewood Night was a discussion of firewood, and then the next eight hours was a live fireplace. being filmed for eight hours and they had 60 complaints. Half were complaining that the buck had been put facing up and the other half had been complaining it was put facing down.

How comes all the people all the time? Just picking up on this idea of things that go on for an extended amount of time, so there's obviously the game where it takes a lifetime, or more than a lifetime to play. There's a lot of musical pieces that do exactly that as well. John Cage famously has a piece. It's called Oregon Squared slash ASLSP. It's a musical piece, which was written in 1987 for an organ.

The piece itself lasts 20 to 70 minutes. But it's going to finish. It's going to go for about 639 years, ending in the year 2,640. And people, you know, the next note is going to be played in a few years' time, and people will go and watch that note be played in this continuing piece. That sounds good. Do they use John Cage to teach, like, beginners' piano? Because a lot of his pieces are very easy, technically speaking.

Like piece number one, don't play anything Especially four minutes 33 That's one of the easiest things to play There's a lot of people who accidentally play a note During that four minute I see what you've gone wrong here A classic mistake Did you guys know this game called ESP

And I don't know if this actually exists anymore I couldn't get the website to open But basically two people simultaneously Like tag a picture with keywords And if you tag it with the same word Then you get a point And that's how they tied a whole bunch of Google images Oh, wow.

Yeah, the use of gaming. I thought what you're going to say is that people around the world are all playing this game and they're going to see if two people say the same thing at the same time and then see if there is actually ESP going on. I don't think it counts as ESP if you're both shown a picture of a table and you both write a table. Call me, Captain Skeptico. Okay, let's move on to fact number two.

This one's my fact. The fact is that 2013 was the first year since 1933. that there hasn't been a sighting of the Loch Ness Monster. So there's huge worries in the Lachness Monster community because they think Nessie's dead. Oh, that she's just learned to be a bit more surreptitious. After hundreds of years of being constantly spotted, if I just stay underwater...

No, I think they're worried. I think, because they think Nessie is a friendly animal, doesn't mind being spotted. Oh, do people like Nessie? Very much so. It's not an aggressive animal. In fact, in 2005, there was a triathlon in Scotland where all of the athletes took a...

one million pound insurance deal out in case of being attacked by the Lopaness Monster when they were swimming across the lock. And the community came out saying that's a ridiculous thing to do. If anything, she would join in. She would, and she would beat them because she's a great swimmer. They're obviously saying that the Lopinnes Monster is friendly because she hasn't killed anyone in the last 70 years. But there is a slight logic flaw there, isn't it? You're saying that maybe she only needs to eat once a century? No, I'm saying she doesn't exist.

Every year, William Hill, the Buckees, they do an actual... competition. It's a photo competition where they award money to the winner who's provided the best photographic evidence of Lochness Monster. And this is the first year where they haven't given, they had to disqualify all three entries. The first one was obviously a duck. The second one was a wave. And the third one on closer inspection, just wasn't even the lock. It was just another body of water. So I have a theory of what's happened to Nessie. Well, it's not my theory. This is the theory by, um, by, um, Britain's high priest of white witches, Kevin Carleon. And he says, I personally believe Nessie is a ghost of a dinosaur, who has been regularly seen in the lock. But the spirit of the creature has been so exploited in recent years,

I decided to carry out an exorcism, hence no sightings of the monster. So he's saying that he has personally killed off Nessie. Yeah, he just thinks that people have been... Yeah, people have been messing around with this spirit of a dinosaur, and he wanted to set it free. I really like the mythical creatures that, um, that we come up with.

There are so many of them in Britain. I don't really know if other countries have them to the same extent. But my favourite, I came across in... I'm reading our mutual friend at the moment, and I've decided to read all of the footnotes. And if you're ever reading, I think Dickens especially, but read all the footnotes. They're so interesting.

One of them made reference to the Dun Cow. This vicious beast that was slain by Guy Earl of Warwick, who was one of these pre-medieval British heroes. And yeah, it was just this cow, and it produced an everlasting supply of milk, and eventually got annoyed that people would be like milking it and milking it, milking it, ran away from its farm in Shropshire.

And eventually Guy Earl of Warwick, who seems like a sort of St. George of the 10th century, went out and had to slay the cow. Yeah, you say St. George, but slaying a cow is not quite as impressed to slaying a dragon, isn't it? Although he did also slay a dragon. Which was, it must have seemed like a step down.

Go on, guys. That's that difficult second monster syndrome. If you go to Warwick Castle, certainly until the 90s, I'm not sure if it's still there, because I haven't seen it, you can see the rib of the Dunn, cow, that the king ordered would, should be, like, put in

Wrecked Castle. Is it big? Bigger than a normal cow rib? Yes, it is bigger. They think that it's actually an elephant tusk. I mean, skeptics think that it might not be the rib of the giant dun cow. It might be an elephant tuss. That's even cooler, though, if this was found in Gloucestershire and a fear. Why is no... Instead of saying, oh, it's a great crazy, crazy magical cow,

why has this elephant been there? Maybe that's what they meant by a giant cow. Because you know that the initial photo taken in 1933 of the Loch Ness Monster, the very famous photo, they think that that's an elephant. Oh. In the lake? Yeah, yeah. Justify you. There was a circus in town

at the time. Elephants, as we've seen in David Axtonborough documentaries do go swimming. And when they do, they use their trunks as snorkels. And if you look at the photo, it looks exactly like an elephant trunk. Do you guys remember that story in 2011, where police in Southampton went on the alert because there was a tiger sighting in one of the fields?

And then there was a gust of wind that blew it over, and it was a cuddly toy. There was a lion's gear in the 70s in Britain, which turned out to be a paper bag. I can't remember the details There was a lion scare only last year that turned out to be a large cat So Annie you were saying

You're not sure if other countries Have similar kind of monsters Yeah go on enlighten me So I have one or two here So the Lake Ocanagan In Canada They have a monster Which is very similar to Nessie

And every year they give a $50 prize To anyone who can shout loud enough To wake the beast up So everyone stands on the side of the lake yells Wake up, wake up! And if anyone can wake them up, they get $50. And they go home with the same $50, don't they?

As yet, no winners, I think. Isn't there a fact... You told me years ago, I seemed to remember, that there was an animal similar to the Loch Ness Monster that had protection policy on it in a different country. Yeah, in Sweden, that was. It was the Storcio monster, I think you pronounce it. And it was classified as an endangered species in the 80s or some time like that.

Yeah, because as a result of that, a direct result of that, the Thatcher government actually put the Loch Ness Monster on the animal protections Oh really? Yeah they were going to do exactly the same They were going to do what Sweden did But they decided that that was one step too far So they would just put in

They were actually there was a document That was put in front of Thatcher Or Thatcher's main people Which was they wanted to bring to blue-nosed dolphins Over from America to search for the Loch Ness Monster Really? Yeah it was It never got passed but it was this was the Tory government What would happen when the dolphins

find, is it like flipper? They'll come back and go, I'd like to. What's that? What's that? What's that? Flipper? Speaking of Hollywood people, what about Charlie Sheen? He went looking for the Lottnest Monster. Did he? You know what? You know you're saying that

there's this guy who exercised the ghost? Charlie Sheen's getting a lot of stick from the Lottnest Monster community. Is he? Is he? The Lottnest Monster doesn't like two and a half men? Maybe they went and then, they went into the Lofness with a fishing hook in a... He attached a leg of lamb to a... fishing rod and tried to catch it on an old wooden boat.

You know what? Call me Captain Skeptical, but I don't think that's any less sensible than trying to exercise its ghost. Or look for it in the first place. Number three, this is your fact, Anna. Yeah. So my fact is that the French government forced Madame Tussaud to make models of her friend's decapitated heads.

Oh. Yeah. Poor old madame. It's kind of like how her career started. Is that during the revolution? Oh, exactly, yeah, it was during the terror. The story goes that she actually had her head shaved and everything, and they were ready to decapitate her as well,

because she was friends with the royal family, and she had various mates in high places, and she'd made wax models of a lot of them. And just before they dropped the guillotine, they were like, actually, you come in handy, because we want to make these death masks of our victims. And so she writes in her memoirs about having to sift through these piles of heads, decapitated heads, pick them up,

have them on her lap, them. Yeah, I read an account of it and I kind of got the impression that it turned into something she really enjoyed. Yeah. I mean, she had no choice, but you know when you kind of just get used to something, you know, it's your job, you're now waxing heads for living. It was like a treasure hunt effectively. She was going, my God, look, this is, this is the bloke who was in the paper last week. Isn't he, Mary Antoinette's like, chef? I'm never coming on an Easter egg hunt with you. Look, if you just get used to it, you'll enjoy it. Was Madame Tussaud was Madame Tussaud the only wax work person at the time?

I don't think so. I think she just made... So I've been going on for hundreds of years. I think she was just very much a self-made woman. Well, my understanding of Madame Tussauds is that she was an apprentice to a doctor, and he would make wax bits of internal organs. Is that right?

Oh, yeah. Was his name Curtius? Yes, Cotius. But there's a theory that he may have been her father. Her biological father, yeah. Scandal. I know. Her mother's husband was killed two months before she was...

Madame Tussaud was born. But there is a theory that he was her natural father. Because I heard about this guy that he made most of his money making erotic wax miniatures. Is that true? I don't know. I didn't see that, really. That cast kind of an odd light on him having this 15-year-old girl

making wax models for him in his little office. Creepy. She was obviously challenged, though. When she was 16, I think she made models of Rousseau and... Voltaire. I love Voltaire because Voltaire had a statistician friend who figured out that this lottery that the French government was proposing as a way of it making money. Actually, if you brought up all the tickets of it, you were guaranteed to win more money than you'd spent buying the tickets. So Voltaire bought up all the tickets offered in this French lottery and became

the equivalent of a millionaire today and never had to work again. I don't know if this is completely true, but with Madame Tussauds these days when they do a waxwork of someone, um, There's no contracts or anything, and technically I think people could request for it to be taken away. They could say, I'm not, I don't want, to be done as a waxwork. But everyone just finds it such an honour that they're fine for it to be done. I think you would, wouldn't you? Some people put a few clauses with it. So Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson have both said, you can do me, and it's fine, and people can take photos,

but no press are allowed to take photos of the waxwork, because then they'll start using that as press shots. And so they're not allowed to... They're good, but they're not that good. Yeah. Tom grew spotted again in Madam Toothal's Waxwork Museum He just loves that thing I found it very interesting who they pick Who the pool of people is

Because now it's almost all celebrities Although every monarch since draw to the third Has had a waxwork made of themselves Every king or queen of England Off the top of my head, Ian Duncan Smith is the only leader of the Conservative Party Not to have had a wax work Oh no, that's just because he's the most likely, isn't it?

Well, it takes a while as well to make the waxwork And he wasn't leader for very long So I mentioned by the time they'd book the appointments he was out Do you know Jenny Ryan, who works on QI a few years ago? Well, she had to ring up Madame Tussar for another reason to find out which was the most groped wax work at Madam Tussar. And she found out that it was Brad Pitt. And the way they found out is they work it out by which is the one that's taken in for maintenance the most of it. Because presumably he would have had to have been taken in for maintenance constantly.

They had Hitler in a glass box, didn't they? Because they were worried that he was going to be repeatedly attacked. And he was. And he was beheaded, in fact. Yeah, someone ripped his head off. Was that before or after? Or when was that? 2008. Oh, 2008?

It's not lunatic to have made one during the war, I suppose. I think he had his maid in the 1930s, the first one. Oh, really? Yeah, I think he was made people. Gradually, they moved it from, you know, honored place with other statesmen to the ground floor, to the Chamber of Horrors. They're eventually in the Lou or something like that. There's also, there was a rumor going around that Gary Barlow, it was melted down into

Britney Spears. So, yeah, but it turned out that wasn't true. He was taken away. He was taken out after Take That had finished.

But he was brought back when Robbie Williams and Take That got back together. But it meant that he's kept in a warehouse in the interim and apparently there's a warehouse with all these fallen wax works. Yeah,

which is kind of, it's like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And I don't know who were in there. That is the stuff of nightmares. I really think. Imagine being locked in that warehouse. It's just going to be old people from the 80s, isn't it?

Yeah. Vanilla Rice is in there. I read as well that some people is so enthusiastic about being turned into a wax work that they just do as much as they can to help out with the authenticity of it. And Boris Johnson, when he was turned into a wax work, he gave on the spot after they measured him the clothes that he was wearing. And he left naked. Oh, really.

That was his excuse for why he was found wandering a piece of London naked. But if you visit Boris Johnson at Madam Two Swords, have a look at the bottom of his tram. because you'll notice that there's a rip and that's a rip from a bike chain from when he was riding over to be measured. Oh wow. Yeah, so there's a little... What a PR stunt, even as I love cycling at. That is the best cockney rhyming slang I've ever heard, PR stunts.

But for his chance, yeah, it's a complete PR stunt. Apparently, in the past five years, 123 pairs of false teeth and one false leg have been left behind in Madame Two Swords. One set in a month. No, two coins. Who leaves their teeth? I don't know. 123 pairs, five years. It's a lot, isn't it?

One last fact about wax works, and wax in general. It's possible to fire lasers and a fly's brain and make it have sex with a ball of wax. Not only possible, it's great fun. For the fly or do you? I suppose the fly, if the fly doesn't know that it's having sex with a ball of wax so that we'll feel stupid afterwards.

Yeah. We've all been there. Okay, final fact of the show, and we come to you, Andy. My fact is that during the Normandy landings, the Allied forces dropped dogs by parachute onto the battlefield. The UK deployed parachute dogs in the Second World War, which were used to identify minefields and to keep watch and to warn of enemies. Yeah, you know when you say identify minefields,

does that basically mean wander over a minefield? They were sniffers, yeah, they could smell them. So, yeah, there were three, initially just three sent over, Brian, Monty and René. And René, I think, was the only female parachutist in the British Army during the war. And they were sent in with the 13th Lancashireas. And one of the articles I read it said they were called Paradox, brackets, short for parachuting dogs. Which I love. But the War Office had made radio appeals in 1941 for people to give up their dogs for the war movement.

And basically, lots of people used it as an opportunity to just get rid of their dogs. So they had thousands sent in and lots of them weren't suitable. So were they trained to pull the parachute at the right time? I think the parachutes opened automatically. Because they were the right shape and size, they were given the same parachutes that the paratrook is used to drop bicycles over the battlefield. Sorry, Andy, are you saying a dog is the same shape as a bicycle?

And size, and if you pedal it right, they're the same effect. That's a very good point. The first training was to jump out of the plane with a bit of meat in your pocket And then I think for someone else to throw the dog out of the plane It's actually slightly crueler than that They used to starve the dogs And so what they would do is they would hold the meat outside the plane

So the dogs would leave from me Yeah, yeah, yeah How else are you going to get a dog out Other than throwing it? Yeah, but they're not cruel I think eventually they got used to it though Didn't they? You did get used to it though

I remember watching a really interesting documentary a while back about, I think it was 12 paratroopers from the Second World War, who they did their first parachute jump and they were obviously terrified as you are when you threw yourself out of a plane for the first time. Really, really nervous. And then obviously they did it for the subsequent five years, got really used to it, not scared at all. Didn't parachute for 50 years.

And this documentary picked up on them when they were in their 70s and 80s and said, do you want to do a parachute jump again, let's see how it is. And after 50 years, not a trace of fear in them. And it's like this thing where the way to get over a phobia permanently is to do it repeatedly and you're cured for life. So 50 years, they didn't parachute. and they all just blaz-e up in the plane. It's brilliant.

When you're looking for illustrious decapitated heads, you get used to it. You get used to it. So I have something else about people dropping stuff by parachute during the war. During Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, they dropped sheep and bulls by parachute. And the reason was they needed food.

They were in the desert. What's the best way of doing it? You can drop meat down, that's fair enough. Or you can drop live animals and then they can butcher them themselves whenever they need the meat. And so that's what they did. They dropped their bulls and the sheep.

They attached them to modified harnesses and parachuted them down to the soldiers. That is amazing. Wow. Yeah. That must be the biggest thing that's ever been parachuted. A bull. I read that in parachutes actually during wartimes people, as well as, you know, you'd look out for it because of enemy. But you would also be looking out for it because parachutes, the material was such a collectible. It was a thing that everyone...

Yeah, yeah. Like, apparently if it was a silk one, that would... be the common little triangles and you would turn them into underwear. Like a fru. Otherwise they had no underwear. Oh, it's like a new meaning to go in Commando. I love, have you guys seen the footage of Franz? Oh yeah.

Racial, yeah. Were you watching that? Poor guy who developed a parachute suit, I think, starting in 1910. And I just love the fact that he, so he made this parachute suit, which he decided was going to be useful, effective and work. And it just didn't work, consistently didn't. And he threw various dummies where. wearing it off from various heights and they all just plummeted to the ground and died a dummy death. And then he tried to throw himself off very like 10 metres high sort of levels fell,

broke his leg. And so he thought, well, this has gone well, I'm going to ask if I can throw myself off the Eiffel Tower wearing it. And so yeah, he did and died and you can watch it. You can watch on YouTube. It's an extraordinary bit of footage. That's amazing. I didn't realize that it had gone so badly before he decided to jump off the Eiffel Tower. Just to give him the benefit of the doubt. Did he jump off the viewing platform at the Eiffel Tower? Yeah, it's a lower platform.

And that's quite low, isn't it? Yep, but it's not high enough. I wouldn't be surprised if maybe if he'd jumped from higher, it might have worked. That was what some people said. Some people claim that his parachute, it looked like his parachute suit suddenly blossomed at the last moment, the last split second, but I actually can't, I've watched it. That sounds like a wily coyote and roadrunner thing, doesn't it? He splats down and then the parachute of watches as he runs.

Yeah, yeah. He had the most amazing mustache though I wondered why the moustache didn't save him with the air resistance It's so good One of my favourite facts about D-Day landings Is that 4% of the sand on the beach today in Normandy Is made up of tiny metal particles Left Over from artillery explosions during the attack

No, 4% That's a lot Isn't it? Yeah Did you guys read that in the year 2000 If someone tried to replicate Leonardo da Vinci's Who was one of the first people to design a parachute Oh yeah it was like a triangular one was it

Yeah, it was, I think it was a bunch of triangles, and anyway, it definitely had wood involved. So in his design, it was like some sort of cloth and wooden things holding it together, wooden planks holding it together. So someone tried to recreate this in the year 2000, but he used modern materials and said it worked, and it was this, like, it was all over the news saying,

you know, Da Vinci's design works, this guy survived, but he used cloth and modern materials. I feel like if he built a parachute out of wood. It would never have worked, would it? I don't think it would work. Never, never, never. The official, I guess, first parachute jump, as far as we know, the first public one. So it was done by Louis Sebastian Lennemond in Montpellier in France.

And his very first jump was off a tree holding two umbrellas. Cool. That was the very first parachute jump. So do we not count the Malmbury monk, Islema of Malmnsbury, who was the 11th century monk who flew 200 metres when he jumped off the top of Malmbury Abbey? He was airborne for 15 seconds they've worked out because they know where he landed. and where he took off from and how high it was and he just made a bunch of wings for himself

on his feet and his pants and he said if he'd remember to make himself a tail then he would have been unharmed and that actually seems to be true because it gives you an equilibrium and means that you're giving me a really skittal I'm always skeptical I think that sounds very true

and people would have thought him a fool when he did that and yet a few hundred years later we are throwing dogs out of planes to help identify minds still doing it 2010, German Shepherds were being flown in and dropped over Taliban regions. Yeah, good.

To spy on the Taliban. It's a spy. Yeah, they had little cameras on them. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, German Shepherds. I like the idea, I like the fact that in the war it was German shepherds that the British were dropping on Germany. I mean, the Nazis must have thought, you traitors. That reminded me that there's always countries that find an animal and then arrest it for spying.

That happens all the time, isn't it? Yes. Was it Saudi Arabia, or I'm making this up, Saudi Arabia that arrested a coconut for spines. Oh, yeah, I remember that. I can't remember my mind. I don't know. I think that's amazing.

I find you guilty of spying. You ought to be broken up and put it in cocktails. There was a bounty on his head. That's all that there is for this week. Those of our facts, thanks so much for listening, everyone. If you want to get in contact with us, you can do so by going to our Twitter handles. I'm on App Shriverland.

At Andrew Hunter M. James. I am at Egg shaped. Anna, still not on Twitter, but do you know what? Let's get you on this week. Otherwise, you can get Anna in the meantime on at Quicopedia. Please do go if you enjoyed this podcast to our QI.com slash podcast page. Anna and Alex have been putting together these amazing pages. They have all the links to the stuff that we're talking about,

videos that go with what we're talking about. It's a great page. It goes to it. And we'll see you again next week. So thanks everyone for listening, and we'll catch you again. Bye.