No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As The Worm Revolution

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the Royal Anagrammist, the man from M.O.U.L.D, and Darwin's publisher's not-so-helpful notes.

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 and I am sitting here with Anna Chazitsky, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with you, James. Okay, my fact this week is that there is a special. language in Papua New Guinea that is only used when gathering nuts. It's very weird. Yeah.

So can you only use it when gathering nuts? Literally picking the nut or when you're on your way to pick the nut? In the general nut picking area. Okay. So you can, if you try and use it outside the area where the trees are, then there's a worry that mountain spirits might come down and investigate and then cause problems with the nuts. Okay. And basically, this is a taboo language.

this is relatively common around the world. And you change your language whenever you're doing anything as a superstition. And eventually it becomes an actual language or an actual vocabulary of more than a thousand words in this case. And what's the idea that the spirits will steal the knots from you? What's the fear here? So some normal words that you might use, like say, I don't know, I'm making these up, but like whither or dry or dead or whatever, they might be bad for the plants. They might be unhealthy for the plants.

and so you have to use alternative words that wouldn't be generally unhealthy to the plants. And is this if you were going to be part of the nut gathering unit, would you have to study this language or does everyone know this language? That's a really good point. I don't know, but I imagine they teach it to you. It's probably not the first thing you learn. It's probably more like a second language, I think. So it's really weird.

There seem to be two different kinds of belief. One is that there's a spirit called Kita Meadow who can rip people apart. But that's only one group of people. That's only one social group because there are loads of different groups all over New Guinea and lots of them gather the nuts and they travel in from the coast to the mountains

to get to the nut area. And the other is that, as you say, that if you talk about wet things, then all the nuts you find will be really wet. And if you use words like empty or bitter, same deal. But it's two completely separate beliefs about why you have to use this language.

So then you have a euphemism for empty or bitter or wet, but then that starts to mean that. So then surely that becomes bad luck. Right. And then you've got to make a new one, right? So this is a thing called perjuration, and it happens in English as well. So, for example, the word for the toilet, in the 15th century, it was privy. And then that was replaced by a euphemism, but then that, which was, it was replaced by Bog House, which I didn't know.

That was the polite way you'd say it instead of privy, because privy was rude. And then toilet, but then toilet becomes rude, so then lavatory. And now, in America, it's restroom. But as soon as people really associate restroom, as soon as that becomes the rude word, they'll have to think of another. even more remote. So what is it in Britain then? I think bathroom. People say bathroom to be polite, don't they?

Yeah. But it will move on. Should we make a new one quickly now? Can we not go back to Bog House? Yeah. The privy. Oh, sorry. The Bog House.

Only when you're around the Queen. In a similar vein, our word for bear in the Middle Ages was taboo. Because, so it probably came from Ursus. So, you know, obviously you have Ersa Major and stuff, and that's the Latin for bear.

But because bears were big, big scary things. It was thought to bring bear rage upon you if you said their name. So people would refer to them as the brown one or the shaggy one. And so the word for bear comes from the word for brown. It's like brough. And in China, you can't say the word tiger in some places. So if you're speaking about a man-eating tiger, you'll use a different word, often referred to as big insect. There's a massive insect down the road. I think you'd be more terrified if someone said there's a large insect behind you and you turned around and it was a tiger. I would say just give them the warning straight out. So it's to prevent it from coming into the village. So you don't,

if there's a tiger behind you, you probably say, tiger. But it's if you say big insect, then it won't hear its name and it won't come down. Oh. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So it won't know it's been summoned. So you'll get summoned instead loads of big insects. Yes. At least there's no tigers. But at least it's big insects, yeah. In Papua New Guinea, so this language, even though this is language purely for picking up nuts. The diversity of language in Papua New Guinea is extraordinary. I think it's the highest diversity in the world. So they have over 800 languages, 850 languages. And they have so much, this is what's crazy, population versus the amount of languages that they have. There's this thing called the Greenberg's Diversity Index, which charts how much diversity language is in per country.

It says Papua New Guinea holds the top spot. It is so diverse there that the probability of two random people selected in the country, any two random people, if they were brought to each other to talk to each other, there's a 98.8% chance that they won't speak the same language. Wow. Isn't that crazy? That's a bad speed dating day. Yeah. So how do you have courts and things like that? How do you have schools? They must have a national language of, let's say, English or something. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. They've got, they've actually got four official languages in Papua New Guinea. The fourth being sign language as the official language. As the official language, but that's exactly what it is.

Everyone speaks a main language, and then these are all other languages that are slowly going extinct with one or two speakers left. Yeah, because they've got English that's very widely spoken there, and then they've got Tocopacin,

haven't they, which is pigeon talk. So just pigeon English, which is great. And I just love all kinds of pigeon English or kind of Creole when you read them because it's such a funny warping of what we say. So the word for broken in Tocopin is

Baggerapim, which is Buggar Up from Buggar Up. That's what you now say, broken. Empty tin is a person who talks nonsense, you know, like an empty person. Like an empty vessel. An empty vessel, exactly. Soosok man is a sophisticated person.

Susock man. Why? James might know this. Oh, James, you always wear sox socks. Is that it? You always say there's a phrase that you used to say when you're growing up to say that someone's a bit well to do. Oh, look at you with the matching shoes.

Exactly. Same thing. Soosong man means person with shoes and socks. Oh, look at you. Look at you. You're matching shoes. There you go. You'd fit right in.

I didn't know that Papua New Guinea is the second largest island in the world. I didn't know that either. It's massive. It depends what you count as an island, of course. Very true, yeah. If you count Eurasia as an island, about down to three immediately. It doesn't include Australia. After, I think it's after Greenland.

Yeah. The country is called Papua New Guinea. The whole island is called New Guinea. but the western half of it, which is part of Indonesia, is Papua and West Papua. And then you also have Guinea and Guinea Bissau and Guyana. Yeah. It's absolutely nightmare. Germany.

I often get that mixed up. I looked up a couple more taboos. So this is an interesting one. There's an Ethiopian language called Cambata, and it's got marital linguistic taboos. That's quite common, isn't it? Yeah. So a woman can't use... some married women follow the system which is called balisha

and it means that they are not allowed to use words that begin with the same syllable as your father-in-law's name or your mother-in-law's name. So my mother-in-law is called Natalia. So you wouldn't be able to say... Talk about Natajak Toads. You wouldn't be able to talk about Natajak Toads at all. You'd have nothing to say.

And you'd have to coin a completely different word for them. I'd just call them Toads, probably. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not such a problem for James. which is great. What syllable would you not be allowed to use? Leal.

Leo, so you won't be able to talk about the northern French city. Right. Where is this Eurostar going to? You'll see when we get there. Shouldn't have become a train announcer. Yeah, that's really cool. Well, there's another kind of gender-based specific language I was looking at.

in Nigeria actually. So I guess the thing you're talking about as a language specific to one thing. And this is a language in the Ubang community in Nigeria and they have different languages for men and women. And they say they think they're the only tribe in the world who has this. That would be even worse for speed dating, wouldn't it? I don't know how it works.

And it's also bizarre because when people are born, then you get raised by your mother and your sisters and generally women. So everyone speaks the women's language. But then apparently there was an interview with one of the tribal leaders who said that as boys start reaching adolescents, they just start speaking the male language. Wow. And it is completely different.

I mean, the words are utterly different. And he's like, if boys don't start speaking the male language, then we consider them a bit abnormal. So what a rough adolescence is that? You're like, shit, I've got to sort of memorize secretly this language I'm supposed to miraculously start speaking. We talk about toxic masculinity in this country, don't we? But that is pretty bad.

You know, sometimes when you're at a restaurant and you see a couple who just don't speak to each other the whole meal. Yeah. I presume every restaurant is like that. Relationships are constantly awkward. That's so weird. So the mills can still speak to the... Yeah, they can understand each other.

They're just not allowed to speak each other's language anymore. Oh, yeah. I was reading about a secret language that was used in wartime in Canada, and it was very cleverly done because it was a secret language in that not many people spoke it. So they were in the Canadian army, they enlisted these native North Americans. And they were, they spoke Cree. And Cree was a language that barely anyone speaks. It's only these people.

And so what they used to do is in between battalions, they would have Cree speakers and any messages that they needed to send across. It was those people who took it. So if they were caught, there was no way of getting the information out of them because the language barrier was so great. So. It's clever. Yeah. But the problem was is that Cree didn't have words for the things. that they needed to get across.

So things like they had, you know, tanks and machine guns and bombers. So a machine gun, they had to translate into their language, which is little gun that shoots fast. Or a fighter bomber would be the Cree word for mosquito because that was the best way of explaining it. So, yeah, they had to invent new words and new phrases in order to do this. That's so cool. That's interesting because there were planes called mosquitoes, weren't there?

That's right. My granddad flew one of those. Were they the ones that were slightly made? made of wood? Yes, they were. I'm pretty sure that was a mosquito. Or partly wooden frame.

That's very cool. I have some stuff on gathering nuts. Oh, great. So don't go gathering hazel nuts on September the 21st in Birmingham. Why? Because that is devil's nutting day. Apparently, according to an old folklore,

Satan comes out at that time and he collects his nuts on September the 21st. so you leave it for him to do. And where's this Birmingham? It's in the West Midlands, basically. And there's an old saying of something being dirty. In Birmingham, you would say it's the color of the devil's nutting bag. Oh.

If you're ever in Birmingham, a bit of local slang for you to use. Yeah, that's going to go down like an absolute charm. You're the coolest kid at the party. Just on not gathering, it's quite dangerous sometimes, isn't it? So if you're gathering big nuts, then they can fall on you. And you laugh. That is a genuine danger. Like coconuts.

Yeah. So if you're having coconuts, then they always wear hard hats. I picture nuts on the ground as opposed to in the tree. No, sorry, yeah, from the tree. Okay, coconuts, obviously. It's not like you're just crawling on the ground. You keep bumping into nuts. Yeah, yeah.

But I like the, so gathering Brazil nuts, then foragers wear hats and they don't collect them on windy days and stuff like that. but I didn't realize that they, when they fall out of trees, they fall from so high that they'll bury themselves 30 centimetres into the ground. So when you're not gathering for Brazil nuts, then you're digging up the ground to get the nuts out. Isn't that weird? Wow. Because they're quite spiky, are they Brazil nuts?

Like in their actual shell. So do you reckon they're made like that so that they... Because it's quite clever if you're a nut, isn't it? To kind of go directly into the ground and not have to get trampled in because that's where you want to be in the end. Absolutely. But if you're a worm, that must be terrifying. If you're a worm

Going through the soil He suddenly Slams Daggers are coming down That would be amazing He's slicing your friend in half And now you've got two friends Actually it's quite nice

The only species Where watching your friend be cut in half It's quite nice God the worm French Revolution would have been really weird Wouldn't it With double the aristocrats Or the worm

James Bond When the laser comes down It just cuts him into two James Bond No messers bond Okay, there's time for fact number two And that is Anna My fact this week is that the man who worked out How to Stop Soft Cheese Going Moldy

Came from a place called Mold. So Anna, just before this We started recording, we ascertain that it's pronounced Molda Yeah, mold. Is that what you just said? Yeah, I think I said, mold. So it's a place called mold. It's in Norway and you sort of say it molder, but it's still got the word mold in it. I mean, it is still quite amazing. This is a great fact written down.

It looks pretty good. As long as you spell mold the American way. So if you're reading this podcast, then great. In America. So this was a Norwegian cheese maker. He was called Olaf Kavli. and yeah he grew up in this municipality in Norway and he was actually really old when he invented primula which is that are you laughing because I pronounced it old not older he ended up inventing primula which is you know that cheese that you see that comes in a squeezy tube

that's interesting I always pronounce that primula same I think it probably is pronounced primula and in fact it's named after primroses because he thought the beautiful yellow color reminded him of the beautiful yellow of a yellow primrose So Primula makes a lot more sense. Anyway, yeah, he discovered this and then he got really rich.

And I quite like this because it gives us all hope for our future, later years of being finally successful rather than hanging out with you dorks because he was in his 60s when he came up with this. He just ran this delicatessen.

It's not good for your next 30 years, no matter, is it? 30 years of hanging around with those dogs until you managed to invent some cheese. you're right I'm not going to last that long he actually lived to 100 lived in 1958 and also a good thing to know about

Primula and I'm actually going to start buying it is that all now that you can pronounce it but all the profits go to charity go to good causes because he was a massive philanthropist and then his son was and didn't have any offspring and so set up the company

which is the I think it's called the Cavley Trust and it's legally required to donate all its profits to scientific, humanitarian, charitable causes. But yeah, cheese and stopping cheese going moldy. It's been a problem for centuries. Just on the place called Molder or Mold, its name comes from the word Mold, without any on the end. It's a plural form of that place. And the word Mold in Norwegian means either fertile soil, skull or mold.

Wow. It might actually be mothed. That's very cool. So I was looking up mouldy cheeses or soft cheeses. So there's a cheese called Cougar Gold, which is made in Washington State University. And this is really weird. So it's canned soft cheese, but it's canned when it's still in the curd form. So it develops as it ages.

As in it's not, once it's gone into the can, it doesn't stay the same. Yeah. So the lactic acid bacteria inside, they don't need oxygen. So the flavour keeps developing. And there are fans who age their cans for years and. years before opening them. And it's just curds. I think it goes in as curd. No way. Nobody? Yeah. No. Yeah. It was too good. I just had to sit back in them and just stare in awe. I can now, looking back when he said,

30 more years out of 30 more years. I said, I'm done. Yeah, that's really cool. So there's no used by date on it, presumably? Maybe there is for safety as then maybe after a certain number of years it does go off, but I'm not sure. So when processed cheese came about, which this is an example of, then it was very controversial because it threatened the normal cheese market. And there were actually a lot of cheesemakers in America who said it should be called embalmed cheese, which it was almost named. But I hadn't quite realized that it's just a blend of lots of other cheeses, which I think

most people will, but like off-cuts of the cheese making process. So, for instance, I think American cheese, you know, your classic American process cheese is a combination of bits of cheddar, Colby, provoloni, things like that. That's incredible. And then they add sodium phosphate, which kind of makes it all go go goofy. And that's quite easy to slice. And that was invented American cheese by a Canadian, of course, who was James Lewis Craft of Kraft fame.

Kraft cheese. Yeah. He was a Canadian and he kind of came up with this idea of kind of shredding it and then adding this stuff which makes it kind of cuttable. Yeah. So it's kind of a Franken cheese. Yeah. And they pasteurize it so it doesn't ripen.

So it's really not proper cheese as the French might know it by the time it's been process. So for instance, Belvita has to be called pasteurized prepared cheese product. It does. Did you know that's only since the early 90s, which is when they find. finally worked out a way to make the base not real cheese at Kraft. So it was a really exciting moment because instead of like using just this mixture of cheese and then adding this sodium phosphate and stuff, they worked out a way of cracking milk,

which I didn't know was a thing. But basically this is you add little bits of plastic membrane into milk and it causes all the milk particles to separate and it separates out into its milk protein lumps and it makes this kind of concentrated protein and that can be the base for their cheese. and it was at that moment when some inspectors went around their factories and they went, guys, you're not using cheese anymore. I'm afraid you have to call it cheese products. How do they come up with this shit?

So weird. I was thinking, though, the other day I found out, this is completely off topic, but early cars had white tires. Right. And the only reason that we have tires that are black is because you add something called, I think it's called black carbon, which is just this tiny bit of weird carbon that they managed to get from the industrial process. and they just thought, let's just try it with rubber.

And it turned out to make rubber 10,000 times more solid than normal. Wow. But even on that, I was like, how do you even think of that? Are they just trying everything or what? I can't believe early cars had white tires. That's so cool. But an absolute nightmare to keep clean. Exactly.

You would just naturally have a black tire after a week. Yeah. It would be as dirty as the devil's nuts. Sorry, I just checked, nutting bag. I'll take back. You'll embarrass himself in Birmingham by getting that wrong. I'm just thinking the difference between your brain and mind, James, is that you're fascinated by the fact that all these processes go on and I'm still busy here going, wow, there was

an actual guy called Kraft. That was a real person. Can't believe that. So I looked off a bit about food preservation. I don't think we've spoken before about Nicholas Aper, or Apert. So he was the man who started preserving foods by heating it a lot and then putting in an airtight container. So this was in the Napoleonic Wars, and there was a massive prize on offer from the French army

to anyone who could work out how to safely preserve food and keep it for long periods of time because it couldn't be done. And he invented it, and it was called Apertization. And he put all his food in glass jars, in fact, not in tins. So he won the prize, and it was decades before microbe theory. So he had invented safe food storage, but he didn't know how it works. So good one that happens. Yeah.

And then later on, there was a British innovator called Peter Durand, and he invented giant tins. So you know how you have a normal tin of beans or something. It's a normal size. He was keen to scale up for the Royal Navy and he stored up to 13 and a half kilos of meat in a single can. I'm already going to go on the limb and say that's not an invention. Making a much, much bigger version of something that's already.

I couldn't invent the giant book. Yeah, exactly. Well, not with that attitude young lady. Yeah, no, we're talking about a Guinness World Record attempt, aren't we? Think of it. It's a quarter of a person's size. Oh my God. And he's showing us how big it is with his hands.

He's right. It's an invention. Okay, innovator. He innovated it. He innovated. It's very impressive, though. Wasn't he the same guy who, um, wasn't this the one where it was like 30 years until they invented something to a specific tin opener, didn't they?

Yeah. So in the Napoleonic Wars, they all used their, um, what those instruments called? Bar Nets. Yeah. Did they? Another name thing I came across. I was looking at some cheese studies and there was a

cheese study in the Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition that was published in 2003. It was called cheeses, colon, processed cheese and the author was called a gouda. Isn't that weird? Wow.

Yeah. Quite unusual surname. That's amazing. If you were surprised that there was a person called Kraft. I know. But I think you'd be biased. if you were called Gouda, a proper cheese,

I'm not sure I would trust you to write a balanced article about processed cheese. Oh, yeah, you're right. You know? It's like being called Baby Bell and writing about the cheddar industry. That is named after a guy called Bell, isn't it? Is it? So I think the Laughing Cow Company was founded by the Bell Brothers, or maybe it was a father and son.

And their surname was B-E-L. So I think Baby Bell is named after a guy as well. That is also. At one point, would have been a baby. Yeah. So was the father, actually. Yeah. The thing about Laughing Cow, by the way, which I did see, is I went on the website,

and they have one top secret technology there that they've never given away to anyone else. Okay. Do you know what that is? Oh, how to cut the triangles. Is it folding the foil? Kind of, yeah. Is it the red thing, how you get the red thing to peel off so perfectly? No way!

It's the easy open foil wrapping technology, which according to the website, remains top secret to this day. Wow. It's not a technology that we're crying out. Oh, guys. What? That would be so useful. That would be so useful for so many things.

Yeah, imagine if you had it for your clothes. And whenever you needed to get undressed at the night, you start to pull one red string and you stop completely undressed. You've got that. It's a zip. Strip shows would be a lot shorter, wouldn't there? If there was one baby bells, I'll peel off thing. I found a weird.

thing about cheese. Come on. Humans invented cheese before they could digest milk. Okay. What? Yeah. Okay. So all mammals, you know, they're lactose tolerant when they're very young because

they're drinking their mother's milk. And then all mammals are lactose intolerant, or almost all are. And then humans only got the genetic mutation to allow them to drink milk as adults a few thousand years ago. But so we couldn't digest lactose. But cheese has much lower lactose than milk. So if you make cheese, you can store all the calories of the animal's milk in cheese form. And that means you can keep the calories for longer.

So you'll survive longer. So you'll be better fed. So that gives you a reason to keep animals for longer rather than immediately killing them or hunting them. So that means that you domesticate sheep and cows and all of this. And you make cheese, but you don't drink the milk. But the thing is, like, to make the cheese, is this not right that what you do is you get the milk and then you get the stomach of a dead animal? and you put the milk inside the stomach because it's got acid which you need

and then you leave it for weeks and weeks and weeks and then you eat it. I mean Anna was talking about things not being inventions that is an invention of half isn't it? It is one of those things that required them to be incredibly bored and wouldn't be able to be invented now because we've all got better things to do than experiment with these bizarre things.

And the ancient Greeks used to grate goat's cheese into their beer and wine. One of the earliest wines actually, the kind of peasant wine mentioned by is actually wine and goat cheese. Nice. We could try and bring back. I mean, I like wine and cheese.

Yeah. Wine and cheese together, but not one inside the other. At a party, you know, at a party, you've got to hold a plate and you've got to hold a glass and it's really difficult if you ever need to use it your head. Gesture. Gesture, yeah. If you just put the cheese in the wine. Yeah.

I'm going to try that this Christmas. Who are these, the Greeks or the Romans? The ancient Greeks. Do you think if they came here, they would think we were really pretentious, you know if you go to some really posh restaurants and they have deconstructed X, Y, Z like you have a deconstructed crumble where the crumbles on one side

and do you know what I mean? Well, yeah, they'd come and say you'd fucking deconstructed wine cheese drink. Wine on one side, you'd cheese on the other if you think you are. Okay, it's time for fact number three and that is Andy. My fact is that when Charles Darwin submitted

on the origin of species to his publisher, the publisher suggested he should rewrite it exclusively about pigeons. So... Ouch. I know. So there's this article in the London Review of Books, which is reviewing a book all about the publisher John Murray

and the correspondence between authors and the publishers over centuries. So it's got all these famous authors like Jane Austen and Lord Byron and David Livingstone and all these people. And the firm sent on the origin of species out to two readers when it came in. but one of them was a lawyer called George Pollock who said that it was beyond the apprehension of any living scientist and the other was this guy called

Whitwell Elwyn who was a clergyman and he wrote back saying, look, I like Darwin but it's a wild and foolish piece of imagination and that it would really be a good book if he just wrote it about pigeons because he said everybody is interested in pigeons so did

when Elwyn then Elrin, sorry, spoke to Murray right. Did Murray then go back to Darwin and say, write it about pigeons. That's what I couldn't work out. Or was it just an internal email kind of thing? Oh, I don't know. I don't know whether it got passed on to Darwin.

But that wouldn't involve ripping the whole thing to pieces because there's quite a lot of pigeon in there. It's just a shorter buck. Yeah. It's a very slight edit, I think. He was really into pigeons, though. I hadn't quite realised how much of a pigeon fancier he was. So he might have been flattered that his pigeon work was so inspiring.

He was a member of two London pigeon clubs. Two. One's not enough. I swear your wife would be a bit annoyed, wouldn't she? You're spending your time at one pigeon club and he decided to join another. The thing is with the pigeons, it was a bit like breeding dogs, wasn't it?

Like, the pigeons were really weird looking. Like, they bred them to look not like pigeons. Yeah. So they didn't look like the pigeons you'd see on for the family square. Yeah. So, like, breeds that he worked on included the pygmy powder pigeon, the Polish helmet pigeon the English long-faced muffin tumbler

Classic If you look at these pictures If you Google them They don't look like pigeons at all There's one, the English carrier pigeon Which you don't see any more It looks almost identical to Jacob Rees-Mogg Does it?

It really, really does Like honestly if you Google it It just looks like Jacob Re-Smog Oh, you should put up a picture on Twitter I will, I will Because they're extinct aren't they So maybe he's actually the one surviving Linger of the species

We need to start breeding him. He's breeding glass, it's fine. Because there were these ones called powders, which are really weird, because they bred them to grow this. They're bizarre birds, because it looks like they're swallowed a bowling ball, basically. They've got this huge, they've got this huge lump under their, under their chins, as it were, in their neck. It's really strange.

Well, I find it weird that we're so used to our just very standard pigeons. When there is this huge variety, so if you go to pigeon contests and pigeon beauty pageants, which you can. They're quite a big deal in the Middle East, in fact. Then they look almost nothing like pigeons. A lot of them have that kind of gross, turkey-like red bulbous stuff around their eyes. But yeah, it's a very popular thing. I think they've been big in the Middle East since 1150

when the first pigeon post service was set up in Baghdad and it took messages from Baghdad to Syria. And by the 1160s, then it was constantly taking messages back and forth to the extent that in the Crusades, the Christians brought loads of falcons over with them to try and intercept the pigeon post in the Middle East. So they were the first hackers who would grab their messages. They also used to do a lot of homing pigeon races, which still go on to this day, but that's been going since the 1800s.

And I was reading about one in China that happened very recently. And it's a huge prize for this. It's a big deal in China. So 160,000 American dollars would be the prize for the winning homing pigeon. So they get sent 100 miles away, and they have to fly back to the... this spot. And the fastest speed that a homing pigeon has ever done is, they go about 100 miles an hour. What? Yeah. But no way. This is the clock speeds faster than 100 miles an hour. But the ones that won would have had to have gone 200 miles an hour, the first four places, and they couldn't work out

how that was possible. And it turns out what it was is the owners of the pigeons had them fly off, but immediately come back, hopped on a bullet train, which can go 200 miles an hour, get to the other side and release them and they won, but they have been caught and sentenced to prison. I think that's such a silly cheat because you will be caught because pigeons don't fly at 200 miles. Sorry, did you say they got a sense of prison? Not the pigeons, the humans. Still. Well, it's a huge prize, isn't it?

It's $160,000. So that's, yeah. Yeah, they go for a lot. I think a Chinese guy recently bought one for half a million dollars, American dollars. They go for a huge amount of money. I should say they were sentenced to three years, but it was a suspended sentence. So if another crime occurs, then they go to prison. Don't do it again.

Have you guys heard of the Spanish sport, which is called thieving? It's a pigeon thieving competition. No. This is amazing. So it's basically pigeon love island. You get, you're a pigeon fancier, and you have a male. So half a dozen men each bring a male pigeon, and they paint them in bright colors to mark which one is there.

and then there's a marked female and the male pigeons all compete to seduce the female and the aim is to get them to come home with them because this is a very unusual pigeon. It's called the Horseman Thief Powder and it unusually it mates by bringing its mate back to its place for sex and so... How do you know that they'll all fancy her though?

I think whole pigeons just all fancy all other pigeons. They are actually quite randy aren't they? These ones are not choosy, yeah. And so the owner wins if his male is the one who wins the seduction competition with the female. Yeah. That's amazing. They all strut around and they, you know, they dance and they do little. That was some excellent pigeon strutting.

And this happens in Scotland too. It's called do, basically. The pigeons are called doos, D-O. And if you see a pigeon flying up and you know that one of your rival doomen has released their pigeon, you release your pigeon of the opposite sex and then there's this battle in the skies over who goes back to whose place and if the pigeon comes back to your place

you get to keep both pigeons it must be confusing because they're completely painted right so that's almost the equivalent human-wise of going to a Halloween party and fancying someone who's just come as a skeleton but you get on well and then the next morning and you're like oh you put them white

pigeons were the first drones in a way, weren't they? Or some of the first drones. In that, there was, in 1907, this guy called Dr. Julius Nerbronna, which I will have pronounced incorrectly, sorry, but he was a German apothecary

and he invented the pigeon camera. And this was a very exciting adventure at the time. It was thought to be quite revolutionary because a couple of cameras had been sent up on balloons and stuff. But this was really acting like a proper drone. So he'd strap it like a backpack onto the pigeon's chest, like a chest

pack and send them off to fly through the air and they took amazing aerial photographs it's so worth looking at them they are like beautiful pictures and i hadn't really considered that for most people seeing those was bizarre because they've never seen pictures taken from above oh yeah there's a whole school of first world war artists which or post first world war art which is derived from aerial photography and aerial landscapes it just wasn't a i guess you saw maps but you could see it from the top of a hill or something. But apart from that, you'd never, you'd never be able to see a city from above. Yeah, exactly.

He also actually invented a horse-drawn dove-cutt, you know, a home for the pigeons and doves that he was trapping the cameras to. And darkroom, which is quite cool, to go with the pigeon cameras. So when you thought, oh, I suddenly want to photograph this city, you'd take your whole horse-drawn dove-cut and dark room inside to where it was, and then you could send them off. Just one last quick thing on Darwin Maybe you guys all knew this But I didn't realize that

In the origin of the species In the sixth edition He added a new chapter Which was responding to all the criticisms From previous editions of his book Oh cool I think that's such a good idea Yeah that's a great idea

Nice That's great We should do that with the book of the year Yeah I think you'll find the Wasps article is funny How many people wrote in saying Not Enough Pigeons Did he have a nose of responses?

I just have one last thing. It's not great, but I'll mention it anyway. Oh, yeah. Buckle up. This is just a fact on publishers getting it wrong. So in this fact, it's the pigeon suggestion. This has just happened. In Australia, there's a businesswoman and socialite called Roxy Gisenko,

and she's just released a book. Now, she's very famous as a PR specialist, and she was on Celebrity Apprentice in Australia, so she's a big name there. And so the book is described as a no bullshit guide to PR, social media, and building your brand. And it had all these glowing reviews on it being street smart and hardheaded. She's totally tenacious PR expert. But they've had to pulp every single one of the copies of the book because it also included, as a result of the publisher's mistake, a quote that was a misquote that said on the front that the book never fails to disappoint. So Medea never fails to deliver.

But yeah, total PR disaster. That's really funny. Time for our final fact of the show, and that's my fact. My fact this week is that King Louis Xirteenth of France had a royal anagramist. Wow. Yeah. This was like, you know, you'd have a court jester, and then you would also have your royal anagramist who would just be there ready to make anagrams for the amusement of the king.

That really was the role. He did a number of things with anagrams. It wasn't just amusing name remixes. He used to do prophecies as well using anagrams. And yeah, so it had a lot of mystical purposes as well as... I wonder if he could make an anagram of Louis the 13th because there's an X and three eyes in there. That's pretty tough one.

If he can do that, he deserves a job. You're right. You get six. I've got the word six there from Louis and then the X. And then you've got L-O-U and there's three eyes. You've got we in French. Yeah. We six.

L-I-I. I'm really bad at doing anagrams because I always end up with spare letters. I mean or in Russian. The Romans supposedly, there's a thing called Ars Magna, the Great Art. And supposedly the Romans called anagramming Ars Magna, which is an anagram of the word anagrams. But I don't think they used, I don't think they knew the word anagrams because they didn't have a plural form like, which just adds an S to the main noun. Normally, there are a few weird ones where it does. But anyway, I don't think that is true.

It does come from the Greek, anagramma design, from Anna, which means backwards, and grammar which means letter. So it's putting the letters backwards. Anna with one end, though, guys. Not the two ends, which means excellent. Anna meaning back foot, considering that Anna is a palindrome, is quite weird, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, that is weird.

Anyway. So what about this guy? Who is he? Oh, so yeah, so we're talking the 1600s here. This is when King Lou the 13th reigned. And this person, I don't actually know if he had a number of them, but the one person you can find who definitely was one of his royal anagrammas was Thomas Billon. So he lived from 1617 to 1647, and he served as the royal anagrammas twice. So there's a suggestion that there might have been another person fulfilling the role in between.

Actually, there was a royal Sudoku guy in between. So he did it from 1624 to 1631, and then from 1640. till his death, I guess, in 1647. Maybe he was fired in 31 because he had a leftover letter or something. But he also predicted people's characters. So he would rearrange the letters of your name. And if it came out as being, you know, an evil phrase, then people would think badly of you.

Do you think as a parent, if you were having a new child, you would deliberately come up with a good word, like an anagram of, you call your child like anagram of awesome. Yes. Yeah, you would try and trick it. Amossoi. Moesoi, yes. This is something that I think we might have mentioned on QI,

and one of our researchers found the other day again, but that during the whole Enlightenment, anagrams were something that fascinated people. They were thought to portend certain things, like you say, if your name could spell something bad. But also they were used by lots of scientists as a way of concealing their discoveries whilst also kind of stamping them as their own.

So people like Galileo and a Robert Hook would record their initial results as an anagram and send it off, when they hadn't actually confirmed their results because that meant once they confirmed the results they could say, look, I did it first. Look, here's the anagram that proves it. It's like blockchain, I imagine, even though I don't really know what blockchain is.

Me neither, but I imagine it is too. But the anagrams were exceptionally poor, weren't they? Were they? Yeah, so Christian Huygens, he discovered the rings around Saturn and he wanted an anagram. So he wanted to anagram Anuto, Singitor, Tenui, Plano, Nusquam,

coherente at ecliptam inclinato which means it is surrounded by a thin flat ring nowhere touching inclined to the elliptic so he wanted to make that his anagram was A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-D E-E-E-E-G-H he basically put all the letters in alphabetical order He's not even trying

It's not even trying No, that's really funny That's not an anagram, is it? That's like the, well we said a few weeks ago the crosswords answers didn't have to be actual words. The an agam has to be an actual word, Christian. God, that was an easy job then if that's all you had to do. Random things.

Well, there are kind of different types of anagram. This is according to a book I was reading for about 100 years ago, I think, which was saying you get a synogram, which is kind of like that. But a synogram is an anagram where the anagram means the same sort of thing. So vile is a synogram of evil or angered of enraged. 11 plus 2 and 12 plus 1 is a famous one. That blows my mind. Every time.

It's always, yeah. Always a winner. But imagine if you thought that there were hidden things in anagrams, you would use those as examples of like, look at how connected the universe is when we reshuffle this stuff. I would have bought into that immediately. There's a website called anagrammy.com, which has a monthly award. So the Archbishop of Canterbury is another church's type of rabbi.

Nice. The amateur Thespians is an anagram of inapt hams used theatre. I really like. And do they release something they want an anagram made of or are you just submitting? I think you submit your own. Right, okay. And they pick a really good one each month. So they're synograms.

They're synograms. And then you get anti-grams, which are the ones that mean the opposite. So like diplomacy is mad policy. That's good. There's a Guinness World Record for the longest anagram that you can get in the English language. And this is for a non-scientific English word. Because in the scientific ones, they're pretty bizarre. So in a non-scientific word.

I have known that in the past, but I can't remember it now. Okay, so I'll give you the original word and see if you can make the anagram. So conversationalists. Oh, yeah. What is the anagram of that? Conservationalists? Yeah. Oh, that's a cheat.

I think you should have to rearrange at least four letters. Yeah, that's true. It's making up rules on the fly. Yeah, I'm allowed. Yeah. It is a bit. A bit measly, isn't it? What about scone and cones?

Yeah, so that's currently the record. No? Why is that not good enough? I think they should have to begin with a different letter. Skon and cones? Yeah, okay, I'll accept scone and cones, but I'm not... I just came up with that right off the bat, like, just... Did you?

Yeah. You invented it. Have you heard of Corey Calhoun? No. He's an anagramer. I don't think he's a pro, but he's about as close as the modern age gets to a pro pro anagramer. So he rearranged at the first line of Hamlet's,

soliloquy to come up with a summary of Hamlet. As in just to be or not to be? No. That is the question. Let's see if it passes the Anna test for crazy anagram. So to be or not to be, that is the question, whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and hours of outrageous fortune, okay? That he rearranged to make, in one of the barn's best thought of tragedies, our insistent

hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten. That's very good. That's really nice. Nice. There's another thing that gets done where these kind of big challenges where people try to take complete texts and create an anagram that works so that it just works as a whole separate work, if that makes sense. So the biggest one that's ever been completed is a guy called Mike Keith has anagrammed the complete text of Moby Dick. So that's, yeah, 935,763 letters. And he used a computer to do this.

So that's seen as a cheat. So the computer did it. Yeah. But there was a person who did it all by. himself which was Richard Brody and he made an anagram of Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift and that's 42,000 letters, 477 letters. But how much of a different anagram does it be? Could you have the exact same book but it just is call me mailish? The rest of it's exactly the same. So the ancient Greeks had, this is kind of related so it's about palindromes, not anagrams,

but Greek fountains had a big palindrome written on them which said, Nisbon an nomin martyr Me Mon and Opsin So that's exactly the same backwards as it is forwards And it means Wash the Sin as well as the face That's a good one Is that cool for a fountain?

Yeah, very good I do know what the longest palindrome In the English language is It's redivider Redivider Oh cool Just a fact That's good a fact

Did you guys know The Dutch National Anthem Is an acrostic As in the first letter Of each word Spell something out The first letter of each line spells something else. So the first letter of, sorry, the first letter of

each of the 15 verses spells out William van Nassau as in William of Orange's name. Um, because it's, and it's sung from his perspective. So it's all in the first person, bizarrely when you're Dutch, you all sing as if you're William of Orange when he sing the anthem. Isn't there a line where he kind of says, and I, um, give everything to the king of Spain in that national anthem? I think there is. Yeah. That's awkward. Oh, how weird. And they were trying to change it, I think. But now. you can't really, otherwise the acrostic won't work. Doesn't work, yeah.

Scuffered. There was a guy called Andre Pujon, and this was back in the day when everyone thought that anagrams were really important and they had some kind of spiritual thing behind them. He worked out that his name was an anagram of Pondue de Rion, which means hanged in Rion. And so he decided to fulfill his destiny

by traveling to the town of Rion and committing criminal offence, which meant that he was hanged. Wow. So he actually, you know, made sure that the omen happened. Right. Oh, poor guy.

Oh, no, silly, silly man. There could have been another ionogram he might have found where it said, had a relaxing holiday somewhere else. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it probably is just a story, isn't it? But it is a story that exists. And that's the bar we've decided to have that.

So there's an anagram thing in our book as well. In the book of the year, there's a thing about Banksy. Because he submitted an artwork to the Royal Academy under the name Brian S. Gackman, which is an anagram of the words Banksy Anagram. Yeah, nice. And they did not spot it. They rejected it.

And then they asked him, can he submit a work? They just got in touch to the Banksy and said, can you submit a work of art? And he sent them the thing that they had already rejected, and they accepted it. Would they have been expected to spot an anagram? Do people naturally have an anagram pass over everything that's submitted? This is an anagram of Moby Dick.

Nice try, buddy. Supposedly, if you are asked to solve anagrams against a green background and then against a red background, you'll do worse on the red background. Really? This has been tried, and the people who were exposed to the red background anagrams did substantially worse. Is that because the text was in red on both times? black text sorry so is that

sorry I misunderstood so it's there's a piece of paper that is red yes right and it's got anagrams in black that need to be solved as black as the devil's nutset it's not it's the devil's nutting bag the language is evolved at this point

it's the nut sack there was another paper that suggests that it's easier to solve anagrams while you're laying down rather than standing up. Right. No way. I don't think that's true.

Is it because there's more blood flow in your head? Because the red green thing is crazy. It suggests that if you do worse than the red, that you're sensitive to the queue of danger. You think these anagrams are dangerous, you know. It must be just that you can't see black on red as well as you can see black on green. No, I tried it. And actually, I did better on the ones with the red background than the green ones.

So I would have been an anomaly. You're so brave. Does that mean you should lead us all into war? I'm now a general in the army. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd 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 at Shreiberland, James. At James Harkin. Andy. Andrew Hote. And Chisinski.

You can email podcast at QI.com. Or you can go to our website. No Such Thing is a Fish.com. We have everything up there from links to our upcoming tour, all of our previous episodes, as well as links to buying our book, Book of the Year 2018. Do please buy it. Okay, we'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.