No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Trousers For Spiders

Episode Date: September 21, 2018

Dan, James, Anna and Alex discuss how to make spiders less scary, the oldest message in a bottle, and unusual features of the Mastermind chair.

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 Chazinski, James Harkin, and Alex Bell, and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with my fact this week, my fact is that a message in a bottle that was three, thrown off the Titanic as it was sinking, was found one year later washed up on a shore in Ireland only a few miles from the home of the man who threw it. That's, it's pretty extraordinary. So this is... It could be that he just dropped it on his way to the Titanic.

That's true. So this is a, this was a 19 year old. He was called Jeremiah Burke. He was from Glenmire County Cork in Ireland. And the, the way that they were able to verify the bottle, because there's been a lot of forgery bottles that were claimed to be, so people trying to make money. This bottle was a bottle of holy water that his mother had given to him a sort of good luck thing, and he used one of his own shoelaces to tie it up as he threw the letter and the bottle overboard. Saying this didn't fucking work, Mum.

Maybe send me a better good luck charm next time. Yeah, so the message has a date on it. It's slightly unclear. So it could be the 10th, 12th, 13th. We know that it's sunk on the morning of the 15th. but so I don't know why you would have Yeah, that doesn't make sense. It's very odd.

I think at the best of times I don't necessarily know what data is straight away. I think as you're going down with the Titanic, maybe you're going, what date is it guys? What date is it? Asking the person next to you is clinging off dear life. Sorry, do you know what date is it? Is it Monday?

But yeah, so this bottle washed up and I've looked at it on Google Maps. It is literally just a couple of miles separate where the area of where they lived right to this shore. And it was found by a coachman who found it. And I didn't get to the bottom of this bit of the story, but presumably knew the area, knew the people in the area, and thought,

ah, this guy, you know, he's said Burke of Gladmere Cork. I know this family. I know the, uh, the burks. I'm going to see if this is him. And so delivered it to the mother who a year later received this bottle. You could argue that it was a hoax. Uh, at the same time, it's only been reported in the last few years properly again since it because they've been lending it to a museum.

So they didn't sell it, didn't go through auctions. It's been a family heirloom since. Yeah, I suppose the natural current. would take it there anyway, wouldn't it? I suppose so, yeah. That's kind of the obvious place for it to end up. So where did the Titanic launch from Liverpool, was it? It went from Southampton.

Then I think it went to France and then it went to Ireland and its last stop off was in Ireland, I think. Was it? Okay, I didn't know that. All right. But yeah, that is such a weird coincidence. But it's so weird how many messages in bottles, or maybe it's not weird, how many messages in bottles do get tossed overboard and found

and there are so many great stories. So another really good message in bottle coincidence that I liked is that in April 2012, UK fishermen called Andrew Leeper was fishing near Shetland, and he found a message in a bottle, and it was a note that had been dropped at sea in 1890. And it was one of those that wanted to investigate ocean currents. So oceanographers were always doing this to investigate where the messages ended up to see what the ocean currents were like.

Anyway, Andrew Leeper found this message in a bottle in 2012, and so it was, and it was really nice because that meant it was the 315th to be put in that log started in 1890. So 315 of those messages had been retrieved. And it's still going. The log is still a thing. They're still keeping the log going. Some incredibly bored researcher still sitting there handing this town. Yeah, desperately waiting every 40 years.

But what I liked about this guy was that he then broke the record for that's the longest wait anyone's ever had to read a message in a bottle. And the previous record holder had been his mate, Mark Anderson. who'd broken it in 2006 in the same boat. So how weird is that? So he's friends with him and he did, like Leeper did an interview with the papers when he then broke his friend's record and he said,

my friend Anderson is very unhappy that I've topped his record as Anderson never stopped bloody talking about it. I mean, if anything screams hoax. I'm more suspicious of that one. I am with that one. In 1954, I was just, so I was just looking up other bottles

that have been chucked in, actually been chucked in rather than found. Guinness decided to do an advertising promotion and they threw 50,000 bottles into the ocean with messages in to Guinness bottles, which I find unbelievable. So it's known as being Guinness's longest advertising campaign yet because they're still turning up. But I can't believe that would never be allowed today. No. Dumping 50,000 bottles in the ocean. It's illegal in a lot of places.

Yeah, well, it definitely is. So you'll get fined in Canada for $5,000 if you throw a bottle into the water. We found this out because there was a story this year of a guy. called Harold Hackett from Prince Edward Island, and he's thrown an estimated 10,000 messages into the ocean since he started, and he said he has to retire because he doesn't want to get arrested. Well, no, arrested, but fine.

Good. Yeah. I don't know. If that's all his life meant to him, throwing messages in bottles into the ocean. I have limited sympathy with someone like, it was my life dreamed to pollute the ocean. I can't believe that the government is more...

In the 16th century, it was also illegal to open. open a bottle if you found it. Yeah, I never found evidence of that. Is that true? Is that true? Is this the whole Queen Victoria having a... Sorry, Queen Elizabeth having an uncorker of messages? I think that's a minute. She did have that because it's mentioned in a Victor Hugo novel. I think that was the first mention and that was like two, a hundred years later. Now I does, she can't have had an uncorker. But it's not, that's not at least a modern invention, is it? No, I think fake news still exists, even if Victor Hugo is penning it. That's true. In his novel. Yeah.

Victitious novel. I don't know how many Victor Hugo novels you've read, but there is a lot of extremely boring, technical, true stuff. I really. Literally, you'll get like three chapters on the sewage systems of Paris and stuff like that. Oh, no, James' resentment comes out about the fact

he's been reading the same Victor Hugo novel for a year now, which is genuinely true, right? How's it going? If anyone here remembers was talking about Victor Hugo, it was probably about six months ago. Yeah, that was on our 2018 tour at, like... Yeah, and I'm still reading Les Miserables. Yeah.

With the latest sort of modern instance that I read of this uncorker comes down to a 1978 book called The $12 million note by Robert Crask. In it, there are true stories and then there were also hoax stories. And the thought is that this was in the book as a hoax story, but it got mixed up in all the reviews and so on when people were talking about this is a true story and then this is a hoax and that's why it's spread. So the idea, just to explain, that she had an official uncorker of bottles because Queen Elizabeth I didn't want anyone else uncorking bottles that contained secret information.

So a bottle was found, wasn't it, that was thrown from a Navy ship, supposedly, that had military details that were very classified. As in if anyone was throwing bottles over, they would often be people who were in the Navy or doing official work for the government, right? Checking out currents and stuff like that. So they didn't want just anyone to be able to read them. And I don't know. I know what you mean.

And I think you're right to be skeptical, and it's probably not true. But I don't think it's necessarily true that we're saying that one person had this as his only job or anything. It could be someone who was part of the royal household who also had this job. It's green of the stool on the side. He's official uncorker of various royal things. Yeah, so this idea of doing scientific experiments for the sake of finding out ocean currents and stuff by dropping messages in bottles in actually serves a purpose, which seems so weird to me. So there was this guy, George Parker Bidder,

who threw a thousand bottles into the North Sea in 1906, and he promised a shilling reward for anyone who found the bottle and then sent it back to him saying exactly where they'd found it. And in fact, one woman found the last one in 2015, and she posted it back to the address. And the company in Plymouth that was still monitoring it had to then track down a shilling, an old shilling, looking on eBay and old antique coin collectors to send her.

That's so funny. Actually, the first ever message in a bottle possibly might have been, for that reason, which was supposedly Greek philosopher Theo Frustus who wanted to prove that the Mediterranean was fed by the Atlantic and so he put bottles in the Atlantic and saw them go round the corner into the med and he could prove that again this is slightly not sure if this is true or not and did he leave a message saying whoever finds us can you tell me the location

pretty much yeah that's the idea that's cool and he saw them go round the corner did you say I think again this is possibly not true but he would have put them in the water and then there would have been like Dan says a message saying contact Theo Frustus on, you know, 0,700. One Athens Square. There was a thing on, like, the US government nautical site,

which said that a lot of the nautical maps we have now are based on those messages. So in the 1950s, I think loads of messages in bottles were put in the Gulf of Maine, and all the maps we have of, like, all the different ocean currents there, basically based on where everyone picked all those messages up. And where, and, you know, then they sent back saying, I'm here, I've just found this. And that's where a lot of ocean maps come from.

And now we've got like satellite technology and stuff. Also, I think quite recently, I'm sure we must have mentioned this, but there was all those rubber ducks that fell off a tanker, didn't they? And they floated around everywhere. And we got loads of data from that. Yeah, really? So that's still happening. I think they still wash up every now and then.

Yeah, they do, yeah. So I read an article. There was a great mental floss article all about messages and bottles. And then the article veers away because this isn't technically a message in a bottle. but it's a pretty extraordinary story, so I'm just going to read it anyway. This happened in 2001. There was a girl called Laura Buxton, and she was coming up to 10 years old. She released a red balloon into the air.

She lived in Stoke-on-Trent in England, and on the balloon, she wrote, please return to Laura Buxton, and on the other side of the balloon, she put her home address. So they released it into the air. It disappeared. A few weeks later, 140 miles away, the balloon hit a hedge when it came down, and the person who picked it up saw the name and saw the address and immediately went, what the hell was going on and went to his neighbor

because his neighbor had a daughter who was 10 years old who also had the name Laura Buxton. So it landed exactly with the same age, same name of the person. They got in contact and they were saying, what amazing coincidence, let's meet up. So on the day of the meeting, the two girls, independently without having decided what they were going to do, both came in the same outfit.

They both had a pink sweater and were wearing jeans. jeans. Oh my goodness. What are the odds? This is just collecting all the coincidence that happened in the moment. They were both roughly the same height, which was on two girls the same age, were roughly the same height. So they were tall 10-year-olds. So they were very surprised.

Oh, you're a tall 10-year-old. Tiny little coincidence, yes. You like pizza? I like pizza. They both had brown hair. They wore it in the same style. They both had three-year-old black Labrador retrievers. They both had a gray pet rabbit.

Not on them. They left them a bow. They both brought, they did bring their own guinea pigs, which were the same color and had the same orange barkings on their high quarters. This is mental floss. So I know it sounds like I'm reading an April Fool's thing, but this is. But also like, if that was in a local news story, I'm a journalist in a local news story in Stokel on Trent. I would go and go, come on, give me some more. What if you got?

Did they have a dog? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What is on local as well. Yeah, exactly. What color hair does she have? Brilliant.

Nice one. Yeah. Can I just say this is, I don't know why these two are being like this. They must have woken up on the wrong side of their bed. Because that does happen sometimes. Sure. I mean, I suppose you could say the law of large numbers means that there's enough things that happen in the world,

which aren't coincidental, that some coincidental things do happen sometimes. Yeah, thousands of law of boxers pick up found balloons every day. It just happen not to be wearing the same clothes. I do think we should still get excited by coincidences. I know it's like, oh, there's could happen. It's still amazing. Yeah, I think maybe we did get out of bed on the wrong side. But on the other hand, did you not, when you're a kid,

release loads of balloons with notes on them and never get a single fucking reply from anyone. Yeah, that's what you're resenting now. I've never done that. It was a very common thing for people to do when I was a kid. We don't do it now anymore because it's like bad for the environment, but they used to be really in vote to do that. Didn't know that.

You'd write a note on your thing. We used to go to Tiggies for our birthday every year, which is an Italian restaurant in Bolton, and then we'd write a note on it. Yeah, yeah, same. Every birthday party. Some bastard in Bolton was shooting them down. He's got a shared with thousands of labels

of dead balloons of James Harkins' name on. There was one person, one girl who did it and it landed in the Baguongham Palace and the Queen sent it park. Did she? Did she? She was called Elizabeth Windsor, wasn't she? And she was a 90-year-old girl from Buxton.

And they were both turned out wearing crowns. You've got a beeper to do? Oh my God. Okay, it is time for fact number two. And that is Alex. My fact this week is that the original mastermind chair was specially modified to have detachable arms, quote, in case a contender is too large to fit between them, unquote. Oh, okay, so we're going to explain what mastermind is for non-British people.

Yes, so it's a long-running quiz show. It's been running since 1972. It's a very like paired back quiz show. So it's a dark studio. You have a person asking questions and you have four contestants and they each come up to a chair one at a time and the chair is the kind of the famous symbol of the show and each contestant to ask a specialist objects so you prepare a specialist subjects so if you know for example uh titanic facts and everything about it you would get quizzed in a very quick space of time everything about the titanic and the more point to get you in it's like an expert quiz yeah exactly and it was based on um a guy who was in the war in second war he was naref gunner and he was captured in germany and

questioned by the Germans, and it's kind of supposed to be almost the same way that he felt at the time, which is you've got a big light on you. They're asking you questions again and again and again to kind of put you under as much pressure as possible. Yeah, yeah, his name was Bill Wright, and yeah, exactly that. He was a prisoner of war, and he thought, oh, this will make a great game show when he was being interrogated by the Nazis. And interestingly, he says that in Germany, so you were asked three questions, which is name, rank, and number. And that's still the thing that in Mastermind, it's name, occupation, and specialist subject. He took the rule of three that they, and he directly associates it with that.

And when they started it, Magnus Magnuson, who is the original host of the show, and his name is, he's Icelandic. So that's an Icelandic name, so that's an Icelandic name was. No, I don't. What his dad's first name was. Yeah, it was not Magnus. No, so. Because he changed it. Yeah, in Iceland, it's supposed to be your surname is son of your father.

So my dad's called Michael, so I should be James Michelson. Right. But his father was called Anna. Sigurstein, wasn't he? Seagestine. So he should have been Seeger Steinsen. Yeah. But actually, his father was called Seagestine Magnuson.

And in Scotland, of course, you have the same surname as your father, so he had to keep the same surname as his father. Oh, that's very interesting. So, yeah, so Magnus, usually you'd be a quiz host or, you know, you'd have a title like that. his title when he was doing the show was the interrogator. So that's what he was introduced at. So it was completely tied into his experience. And he was actually a Nazi as well, wasn't he Magnus Magnuson? He was, yeah.

Was he? No. Oh, geez. No, he was at a national treasure. I thought I missed that paragraph when I was reading into this. Do you want to know what's weird though is that another little link in that I know from our friend who was on Mastermind? So Ian Dunn, who's a big fan of QI

and who we know, he went on Mastermind, and he said when you fill in the forms when you're saying what your specialised subject should be. It's called the Mastermind SS form. They have a top. You're kidding. That's very funny. I read on Wikipedia, they have a list of a few subjects that have actually been rejected.

A few of the ones that have been rejected include routes to anywhere in mainland Britain by road from Letchworth. The banana industry, not allowed to pick the banana industry as you're... Not allowed to pick it. Nice. Orthopedic bone cement in total hip replacement. is another and the last order of the wiki is perfect squares up to 99 squared

yeah what is a perfect square down um it's 9,801 but um that's one point but in recent years I read in an article that subjects like faulty towers black adder roll doll

Harry Potter um so they've been they've been ruled out because so many people have picked it that they've run out of questions basically they don't know what else to ask about Blackadder that's not been done before. The thing with Harry Potter is that last year, 262 people wanted to do it as a specialist subject

on Mastermind. That's according to producer Mark Helsby. The first three winners were women, which was quite bizarre because far fewer women than men have ended up winning the titles. Not because women are less clever because of centuries and centuries of systemic oppression, blah, blah, blah. But the first...

I sound like you're not totally brought into that. I would say that your specialist subjects is not feminism. Look, I believe it. It's just a long explanation to go into. But yeah, the first three people who won were women. And then in 35 years, it's been eight women and 21 men who won it. But after the first three years, everyone was speculating, is a man ever going to win mastermind?

Can we talk about the chair very quickly? Yes. The chair was voted in a survey for House Beautiful magazine as the second greatest chair, basically, of pop culture. Can we guess the first? Yeah, have a go, yeah. Okay. Just one extra bit of context.

It was voted as the second most iconic chair of the 20th century. I was going to say the woolsack in the House of Lords or wherever it is. Is it the sofa from Friends? No, it's not. Okay, so it's... Is it in pop culture, right? Is it chair, the singer? No, it's in...

Okay, so I'm going to say it's the 1960s. It is a chair that made the... the newspapers because it was a scandalous... Nixon. It was a scandalous chair, basically. Scandalous chair. Elvis? Did he have a chair?

Didn't he? So have you just said Elvis with it? He died on the toilet, didn't he? They often call it the throne. Yeah, that's true. Well, no. Is it the chair that Liza Minnelli sat on in that film? Is that 1960s?

No, it's not, but it's interesting. Have a think in your head about what she does with that chair, and you might get to it somehow. Chicago, you're thinking. She sits backwards. Does someone sit backwards? on it in an iconic photo. We are so close. Is it Marilyn Monroe or something?

No, that's it. Christine Keeler. Yeah, we go. Profumo. Perfumo. Yes. One of the most. Yeah.

So that got voted. The Christine Keeler sitting backwards on a chair as the most iconic. Very much that was more about Keeler than the chair. Except in its time, most comedians would parody that shot

and still do of being naked on a chair that way round in reference to that. So I think for that reason, that chair is the concept of the chair. Yeah, exactly. I think I can picture the picture you're talking about, which I think means it counts. We'll allow it. So the last chair at all mastermind was given to Magnus Magnuson when he retired.

And they've got a new one now, which like Alex says, has these detachable arms. It is an Eames soft pad. It was designed in 1969. And it was designed by Charles and Ray Eames, who are basically the best chair designers in the history of the world. He's very trumpish of you. I have these chairs. They make great chairs. They are the famous.

They're the big names in chairs. They were a husband and wife couple, and they made loads of mass-produced chairs. And the first thing they ever mass-produced was a moulded plywood leg splint for World War II, which they gave to all the soldiers, and it was moulded on Charles' own leg. And they sold 150,000 of them.

So there were soldiers all around the world walking on an exact replica of his own leg. Wow. That's amazing. That's good, that, isn't it? That's incredible. My favourite TV chair is, the chair that was in the audition room when Robin Williams went to audition for the role of

Mork, Mork from Ork on Happy Days. So I think that span off into Malk and Mindy, didn't it? But the producer was a guy called Gary Marshall and Robin Williams came into the room and he was unknown at the time, walked in and Gary Marshall's told him to take a seat. And immediately Robin Williams went to the chair and stood on his head on it and Marshall immediately hired him saying he was the only alien who applied for the job. Wow. It's cool. I think those stories are quite dangerous because it encourages literally everyone

to go into an audition and really break the mould and can you imagine saying it for hours after every single person comes in and does something really annoying with the chair. You're the only one who's sat on the chair. That was the test. Do what I tell you? We're not looking for actual aliens.

We need an actor. We need somebody who's going to be easy to work with to do the same performance time after time in multiple takes. Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is Chazinski. My fact this week is that one competition at the Highland Games used to be pulling the legs off a cow in order to win a sheep. They're really hard in Scotland, aren't they?

Because when I was at school, you used to pull legs off a daddy long legs, but in Scotland they pull legs off a cow. It sounds like a metaphor for like ruining something because a cow is more valuable than a sheep. So why don't you just keep the cow and leave the legs on? So the cow is dead at this point, I should say. So it's not as awful. Still quite awful. Yeah, it's pretty horrible. It's not ideal.

It's a strength test, and it would be impressive if someone could twist the legs off a cow with his own bare hands. It's an emotional strength test as well to witness what you've just done to this poor cow. If you ever see Anna in the countryside and you want to impress her, tug the legs off the nearest quadruped.

This was actually invented in 1820, and I don't think it was that long lasting, but the idea of the contest was invented by a guy called Alastair MacDonald, who was a clan chief, and apparently he was just this really cool, eccentric, vibrant clan chieftain character. In fact, he was who the character of Fergus MacIverer in the Waverly, Walter Scott's Waverley novel was based on.

And yeah, he said, let's do this, that'll be fun. And the first prize is a fat sheep. Okay. And the reason it didn't last probably is because it was extremely difficult. Yes. I read one, I don't, I think it might have happened maybe once or twice in one or two different ones, but the one that I read was in Inver Garry. And there was only one man who succeeded after struggling.

for about an hour. As a reward, he received his sheep and the eulogistic speech from the chief. Nice. Has anyone been to the Highland Games? No. I have you. Yeah, it's really awesome. It's really good.

It's almost like a fate. The one that I went to is like a village fate. But then you've also got these incredible things happening with people throwing these massive weights, like really, really high. Like really high. Is this the big logs? The big...

I saw that. The caper tossing, yeah. The caber tossing. The main one I saw, they were like, they had these kind of, you know, like kettle bells that you would use in a gym. We're throwing this over a big, big, big, high height. Wow. I was really impressed. Is it kind of like high jump? Is there a bar?

Yeah, so it would get higher and higher and higher and higher every time. And the caber toss is not about how far you can toss it. It's about you have to toss it so that it lands at 12 o'clock, so it lands upright. So it's got to stay up in the air for like an hour and a half. Are you jumping in the morning? Depending on time you throw it. Don't throw it at 9 a.m. It's not, yeah.

As in it lands, like, facing away from you, as it were. So it needs to do a full rotation 180 and then land exactly facing away from you. Exactly perpendicular to the earth. Yes. Ah, so it would be extremely hard to pull the leg off a cow, right? I think they twisted. People tend to say twist quite a lot. And is that how you pull a, is that?

I think that is how you would do it, yeah. I think so. Let's say you want to pull a chicken leg off a chicken. Yeah. You tend to give it a twist while you're pulling, don't you? I can see what you're saying, actually. I can picture that now. Do you know the ideal shape for a cow in the 19th century?

It's got full legs for a starces? Well, unless it's at the high end. Is it kind of square? Because I can't really picture cows because I can't picture anything. But if I ever had to draw one, I'd draw it particularly square for an animal. Yeah. And that's if you picture drawings in the 19th century, then cows would be vast and very square.

And there was a lot of competition between members of the nobility and landowners about getting the right shape. your animals. So yeah, if you look at cows, they don't look like real cows. And the actual, the size of a cow between 1710 and 1795 increased by a third. So people were really building up their cows. Sorry, what were the dates? Between 1710 and 1795. So that was when they started getting bigger. So it's only a couple of generations. Yeah, absolutely. But cows were supposed to be rectangular, exactly rectangular. Sheep were supposed to tend towards being oblong and pigs, the ideal shape for a pig was a football shape. Well, what kind of football? As in, it

In those days was... FAA regulation standard black and white hexagon. I think round, so if you get pictures of pigs, very often, there'll be the picture with their stomachs literally on the floor. Oh, like a pot-belly pig. Because eventually they've been to turn them into footballs, didn't they? Yeah, exactly. Pigsbladders, footballs.

So why were the cows square? Because usually when you make things square it so you can stack them, but I don't think they did that with cows. A bit more in the loisies. This was just getting them bigger, and that was the shapes they tended towards. I read, just going back to the history, of the Scotland Highland Games.

I read that the very first one, so they don't know exactly where the first one occurred, but it is believed that one of the first early venues was at Feterresso, and technically it's a few miles south of the Scottish Highlands. So the first one may not... It's in the lowlands. So it's actually the lowland games.

That's a really good fact if it's true. If it's true, yeah. Unfortunately, as the article says, if it did happen there, it predates recorded history. We'll never know. Because really the first one, which is kind of a modern style, was in Brehmer in the early 1800s. And it came at a time when the Scottish were kind of finding themselves. And that's when all that kind of tartan. It did exist, but it was when it was properly being formalized.

It's quite an informal type thing. There aren't the Highland Games, or there weren't the Highland Games, where it happened at the same time. Yeah, it's more just like a festival. type thing, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, various times over the summer, every place will have one. And it's weird, it's not just these, like, any time I've thought of it, I've thought of throwing these giant logs and, as you say, the kettlebell style weights,

but they do stuff like, um, biggest bowl of porridge, you know, as a competition. And there was one that was made in 2010 that set the record, which is, um, it was 690 liters of porridge. So it could feed 2,000 people. It was judged by Goldilocks who said, this porridge is too small.

It is all tourists as well, isn't it? No Scottish people have ever been to the Highland Games. And you know who used to go to it, Billy Conley all the time. And as a result, he used to bring his best mates along, who happened to be famous comedians as well, one of which who went was Robin Williams. Really? Just to bring old alien chairman back into the conversation.

Yeah. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. My fact this week is that you can cure your arachnophobia by drawing pictures of smiling spiders. So good. I'm actually going to try this. Are you a ratophobic? Yeah. Yeah, me too.

Do you need to draw like a nude life model kind of thing? Do you need the spider there? Well, they are always usually nude. Spiders. They can't get trousers with eight legs. So if you do like a sexy photo of a spider, would that make it less scary? Like a perfumos sitting on a chair. Four legs over your side.

So this is a clinical hypnotherapist called Adam Cox. He is British or he practices in Britain. And he encourages his clients to draw brightly colored smiling spiders with big eyes. And he says that it reduces their feelings of anxiety towards the arachnids. But so does it cure you in a, you're presumably it's not like, okay, I'm going to be encountering a spider in the next five minutes. I'm going to quickly draw a picture of a smiling one to. No. It's a long-term therapy.

Right. People are going week after week and drawing more and more spiders, and eventually it makes them feel less anxious. It maybe sounds like the early stages of a very severe phobia treatment. So as in you can't even, because you know there are some phobias where you can't even say the word of the thing you're scared of. Yeah. And the idea of drawing a spider is probably really scary and horrible. And thinking about the details of it is probably part of it.

Well, I am an arachnaphob a little bit, not as much as I used to be as a kid, but I would always find it really hard to see a picture of them in a book. And even now on the internet, I find it quite hard. have to scroll past it quickly. Me too. Yeah, just get it out of shot and just read the text. It's pretty hard to research this. So what's interesting as well is there was a study that was done in Queensland, in Australia, and along with a UK University in Sussex, and they were saying that if you have a fear of spiders, if you have arachnophobia, you are more likely to see a spider, as in you're hardwired, as I say, to notice the threats. So if you were out in Queensland and

you were walking through the bush, if I'm walking with you and I'm less scared, I might not see a spider that's obviously there, but you are on edge waiting to see one. Yeah, actually, that's almost logical. I do have a problem with movement in general. So if I see any movement out of the corner of my eye, it really freaks me out. And the reason they, their movement is particularly weird because I think we mentioned recently actually how they moved by hydraulic pressure. But I hadn't realized it was all spiders move in that way. So when they stretch their legs out, they're not doing it with their muscles are tall, they're pumping blood out through their legs, which is why they move in that weird jerky way. And that's why when they die, they always shrivel up because the pressure

disappears. So they shrivel up. So basically, when they run, they have to have an erection in every one of their legs. That's exactly it, yeah. It's very quickly getting harder than not getting hard, over and over and over again. Yeah. Their genitals are hydraulic as well, by the way. Oh, they? Yeah, they operate with some hydraulic pressure. And also, they obviously have this really cool thing, spider penises, where they can keep on having sex without the spider. So there are quite a few spiders like the orb web spider which will start having sex with a lady spider and then detaches its penis to get away because I'll watch the football. I have to take a call. I'm so sorry, I'll be back in a minute. You have this. Exactly. And it's actually

more effective without its spider attachment. As soon as a spider leaves, the penises tend to eject about 70% of their sperm after that. So they keep pumping sperm out even when the spider's gone. Wow. Wow. Wow. I was looking in to general phobias, because obviously there are so many phobias out there, and I found this long list just to see which ones are actual phobias, because there must be a phobia for everything, but there's a limitation, obviously, on ones that have been given names. So the ones that I found that I thought were quite interesting that have actual names assigned to them. There's a phobia for the fear of opinions. That's very interesting. I'm not really sure what I think about that.

There is the fear of flutes. When you say there is, as in a guy on the internet decided to attribute names to random peers. This is a big list that a guy wrote on phobia. Not Wikipedia is called something like phobia, weirdphobias.com, or something like that. I think that's a really difficult thing, isn't it? Because there's a list of millions of them. There's like someone wrote one about a fear of a duck secretly looking at you or something like that. Which is obviously not true.

Then on the other hand, there are such weird ones that are true. It's really hard to tell which one. are an aunt. So like fernphobia is definitely a thing. Is it? Being scared of ferns. I think quite a few famous people have got that. Fern cotton, which is very difficult for her. Yeah, because she's scared of cotton as well.

Yeah, and fear of like holes and stuff like that is really common. Yes, I've heard of that one. Fear of chins. Do you reckon that's a real one? It's hard to imagine why. That's what I mean, it's hard to say what it is on whether it isn't. Yeah. You know, a guy had his arachnophobia accidentally removed quite recently. so you can get rid of it accidentally

but it does involve really invasive surgery this was a guy who'd always been terrified of spiders and then also he got an illness where he started having seizures and so he went in for an operation to get rid of his seizures and they had to remove a bit of his amygdala and the surgery went really well but he woke up and he found

just two slight changes to his character he had this stomach lurching aversion to a very specific kind of music so when he heard it was a music on a particular advert but he was terrified, just hated it, and he was no longer remotely afraid of spiders. That's really useful. I have a fear of invasive brain surgery, though,

so it's a bit worse than my fear of spiders. There's an organisation, a charity organisation in the UK, called Triumph Overphobia, Top UK. One of the managers is called Trilby Breckman, and Trilby Breckman runs self-help groups. He sounds like a really cool guy, and he said we once had a guy who came to us for six weeks and never said a word. He just sat there.

Then, eventually, he managed to say, I've got a social phobia and then ran out of the room. So good. I mean, we shouldn't be laughing. What if he's listening? And this just makes a tendency to us. Who the hell recommending group therapy to a guy who is a fear of social environment? It's okay to laugh because he came back the following week. And within a year, he was running groups by himself as well.

And now he's got a fear of being alone. He's in the group all the time. I was looking up what, because I was like, what a spider's scared of because, you know, everyone's scared of spiders. Most spiders are terrified of ants, because ants contain formic acid, which is really bad for spiders.

And a lot of them will run for their lives if they see an ant, as it were. That's like a quote. Like a researcher said it sort of run away. But in the University of Cajbury found that they even run away from some spiders will even run away from another species of spider called a jumping spider, the gregarious jumping spider,

which pretends to be an ant. That's its defence mechanism. And it scares away other spiders. So it hides its legs. I think we said that they hide two of their legs, don't they? So some species of spiders do that and pretend to be ants, and that scares other species spiders who are scared of ants.

So as someone who's scared of spiders myself a little bit, if I was to dress as a massive ant, do you think they'd all kind of just leave me alone? Possibly. So the spiders in the TV series, I'm a celebrity get me out of here. Must be feeling good this year because they're going to be missing a big ant on set this year.

Sorry. Why do you think you should never pick up a tarantula? Because I hate them. Because I might shit myself. And if I shit myself, no one's going to hang out with me anymore. You're right. That makes your social phobia even worse. Because you'll scare them too much and they'll die. It's similar.

So it's for their sake. So their abdomen's incredibly thin. And one little touch on the abdomen, and with your fingernail could split it open and they'll spill their guts all over the place. So you can't just like tickle it on its tummy or anything. They hate a tummy tingle. Stop doing that. And if you drop a tarantula, it'll almost certainly die.

Really? Yeah, this is the advice of the British Tarantula Society, which is a bit of a QI favourite, I think, because it was founded in the 1980s, but the woman who founded it was called Anne Webb, which... Wow. That's going to make watching Home Alone again a more harrowing experience,

knowing that that tarantula that gets loose and gets dropped and stuff. I mean, they must have had a stunt spider dressed as a tarantula, if that's the case, because he would have burst open in some of the scenes. I think you're assuming too much knowledge of home alone from some of us. I can't immediately remember the tarantula scene. Oh, he jumps on his face. The only thing I remember is Kevin with his hands to his face screaming because he's been left home alone. Yeah, that's, you've memorized the poster.

Sorry, I'm going to have to correct you again. He's not screaming because he was left home alone. You're screaming because he put aftershave on his face. Was he? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was pretending because he saw his dad screaming like that. I don't think so.

And then it's, and then you suggestively in the poster to make it look like he's screaming at the two robbers who are either side of him in the famous poster. But in the context of the film, he's never screaming.

I have an extremely clear, extremely fake memory. His mom screams, his mom sits up on the plane and goes, Kevin! That's, that's his name. No, he doesn't say, no, he doesn't say his own name.

It doesn't make any sense. I still think you're right, though. What about in Home Alone too? Does he do it there? No, because he's lost in New York. Although she says Kevin again in a scream. You know in Edvard Monks the scream, does he do it? No, that's actually he's just put aftershade lies.

Yeah. Okay, that is 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.

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which shows how we act on tour. It's a lot of ironing. And everything else of all our previous episodes and so on is up there. So check it out. No Such Thing is a Fish.com. We're going to be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then. Goodbye.