No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Unicorn Stew

Episode Date: July 25, 2014

Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Andy (@andrewhunterm) and Anna (@nosuchthing) discuss the estate agent army, bankers in sacks, medieval snail fights, tricky recipe ingredients and 'legs or tails'.

We run it on QI a few years ago. Yeah. Which was, there's no such thing as a fish. You're in the No Such Thing as a Fish? No, seriously. It's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. He says it right there. First paragraph, No Such Thing is a Fish.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with the three regular elves, Anna Chisinski, James Hart. and Andy Murray. And once again, we've gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last week. And here they are in no particular order. Okay, starting fact number one, James. Okay. My fact this week is about kangaroos, as you all know. Yep. It comes in the form of a question. And that question is, how many legs does a kangaroo have? I think I can feel this one with

confidence, uh, two. James is holding up a tiny claxon button. Where did you get that? That's from the QI travel game. Which is available in shops. Oh my God, that must be the most annoying toy. Can you imagine on an aeroplane, the little kid sat next to me? Yeah. Just any time you get something wrong. Can I eat ice cream?

No. No, I'm afraid the answer is I can eat ice cream. Okay, I'm going to put that to one side now because that probably is very annoying. Yeah, they don't have two legs. Wait, so if they don't have two, they must have, what, four? The front hands are legs. I'm going to have to get my buzzer out again. Why?

Yeah, that is annoying. No, they have three or five, depending on how you look at it. The tail counts as a leg. And that's according to a new study, which was in new scientists a couple of weeks ago. And what they did is they put a kangaroo on a treadmill, which had pressure points and could see when they were putting pressure on the floor. And they found that in the normal walk, not their bouncing walk, but the other one they do, it's kind of a shuffling walk.

They used the tail in the way that any other animal would use a leg. Is it a weight-bearing thing, though? Yeah. It's weight-bearing and propulsion. Yeah. Wow. Okay, so I've got two questions. Go on.

First question is, can they walk backwards? Because that's one of the great Australian either myths or truths. Because the idea is that the country's coat of arms has a kangaroo and an emu on either side looking at each other. And the idea being that they were chosen because not only the national animals, but they can't walk backwards. Either an emu or a kangaroo. Well, because doesn't it say on the coat of arms, always forwards or something? Keep going forward. Terrible.

Terrible piece of advice for a lot of people. Yeah, crossing a road. People standing near cliffs. That's true. I think they can jump backwards. Yeah, you can see it on YouTube. There's footage of Woody Allen boxing a kangaroo in a very, very weird bout. Very odd, isn't it?

It's on YouTube, yeah. The kangaroo, I think moves backwards a bit in that. Yeah. Yeah. You said you had a second question. I do. Yeah, second question that I had was, are they the only animals with a tail for a leg?

As far as I know, you do have prehensile tails that animals use to swing around trees and stuff and grab things, but not to my knowledge, do they use them to walk? Do gongs use their tail as like a supportive thing? Isn't there anything where they, do gongs? What are they? You know, those things, they're manatees. Oh, yeah. A type of manatee.

Sea cows. They're the things that sailors apparently thought were mermaids back in the olden days. They actually do have quite human faces. I think they have adorable faces. I'll put a picture on the website. Last time I was back in Sydney, the aquarium, they had like an arrival of dugongs and it was all over the posters in the city and, you know, doongongs are here and it was the most unexciting attraction to an aquarium.

Since they had the Lego exhibition at Sydney Aquarium. There are lots of bits of Lego washing up on British beaches. Do you know about this? There was a crash. There was a container crash in the late 90s and something like a billion pieces of Lego went into the water and they're still washing up in. in North and South Cornwall. Wasn't it weird because a lot of the Lego happened to be sea-related stuff? Like there are octopuses

which are very, very special and little bits of sea grass. Or maybe they are like little Lego plankton and that's what you were watching in Sydney Zoo. Remember there was that a guy who wrote a book all about another container strip that had the rubber ducks. The rubber ducks. And the plastic

frogs, wasn't it? The rubber ducks were obviously the big draw. And beavers? Beavours. Real beavers? Plastic ones. Yeah, plastic ones. We're in the same container. Didn't know that. They don't get the same publicity as the ducks do.

It's because the rubber duck is a timeless style icon. When have you ever bought someone a rubber beaver? I didn't even know that was a thing. Let's leave that. Maybe that was like a new thing that they were bringing over. This is our big chance. We're shipping over all the plastic bevers. It's going to be a massive hit.

Now we'll never have them. Other animals which have odd numbers of legs. Are there any? Do you know any, Andy? There's a crab. there? Yes, there is. There's a spider crab called Macroquiera Camp Fairy. It's like that massive Japanese spider crab that you see every now and then on the internet. It's absolutely humongous. And there's a study done and they found that three quarters of the crabs are missing

at least one limb. And most crabs have got ten legs. In fact, all crabs have got ten legs. So most of these particular crabs have got nine legs, although they have lost them. Wow. It's a bit, yeah, it's a bit of a cheat, isn't it? They should just evolve with one leg fewer. Well, they might do. They can survive with up to three legs missing. It's more than I can do. There's a thing called a seven-arm octopus. Is that born with seven-arms?

No, it has eight arms. But one of them is very small and curled up and you can't see it very well. So people thought they had seven arms. People who didn't look very closely. Yeah. And also there's starfish, of course. Yeah, so all of those creatures like starfish, sea urchin, sea cucumbers always have multiples of five, don't they? But they're not legs, really.

They're limbs. limbs, yeah. And the tripod fish? Do you guys know about the tripod fish? Which is an extremely deep water fish and it has three long protrusions that come off its fins. So it's, I think it's never any more than 30 centimetres long, but its little thin protrusions can be up to a metre and it walks along on them like a tripod. And it's really good because it means it's at the right level for the currents to sweep loads of prawns into its face and it can detect vibrations in the seabed if predators are coming. So I reckon that might be the closest other animal there is to having three. natural odd-legged. Yeah. When kangaroos are born, when Joey's are born, you know, and they crawl up into the pouch, they don't have their back legs even. They do have their front legs, but that's the only thing. They're basically a tiny worm with these two minuscule front legs

which they use to basically crawl up their mother's fur into the pouch. That's good. And then they get the back legs later. They are tiny, aren't they? They're the size of a grain of rice, kangaroos when they're born. People thought that kangaroos had two heads when they first. saw them when Europeans first saw them because of their Joey on the chest. Oh yeah, that makes sense.

So when the first descriptions came back to the West, that's what they thought. Wow. They have, there's the QI fact, which might have been one of the first ever QI facts about kangaroos having three vaginas, which they do just in case there's one listener out there who doesn't know it. It's the first fact I learned when I was having my interview for the job. You had an interview for QI? Was a chat?

A lunch. was it testing your response to that what did you do yeah you recoiled in disgust you would have immediately been rejected I didn't recall and disgust I said oh I like the sound of that that's the incorrect response I've got two favorite kangaroo QI facts have been in the books and the TV shows but I absolutely love them the first one is that the mother kangaroo mammary glands so female mammary glands produce both full cream and fat-free milk simultaneously that's one The child's just the ruse got an option. They're like the waitros of macropodians.

Yeah, exactly. And the other one is that kangaroos swim doggy paddle when they go swimming. That's their style, doggy paddle. And also, they kick their legs independently when they swim, which they never do on land. On land, they move both legs simultaneously. So you see them move forwards, either hopping or using the tail to project themselves. But in swimming, dum, dum, either side. Did you know that Elvis had a pet kangaroos?

Did he? I've always been curious if anyone had a pet kangaroo. And Elvis had one? He had a couple, I think. He was given them, I'm going off memory here, but I think he was given them by a zoo in Australia. And then he gave them back because they weren't as much fun

as he thought they were going to be. One quite cool thing when I read about kangaroos is kangaroo mother care. Kangaroo mother care is what's being recommended for premature births in developing countries. So 10% of premature births in developing countries, the child dies within the first year. and 90% in developed countries.

So it's a massive problem in developing countries. And they're suggesting kangaroo mother care, which is basically where you have constant skin-to-skin contact between baby and mother, and the mother straps the baby to her for up to like the first eight or nine months. And it reduces infant mortality by 50%. So it could have saved,

would save like 1.1 million deaths a year. And it's just about the warmth of the skin contact and constant breastfeeding and probably bonding between mother and child and anticipating its needs more. A pretty simple way of seriously reducing infant mortality. Yeah. I've got one last thing that I want to throw in before we move on,

which is that there's been a study that's shown that male kangaroos can attract the opposite sex by impressing her with his biceps. Oh yeah. With his forearms. They're apparently really important at the kangaroo world to the point where they frequently adopt poses, showing their muscles like bodybuilders, going, hey, ladies. Two tickets to the gun show? Just for people listening, Dan is doing the bodybuilder poses as we're doing it.

If you've ever seen Johnny Bravo, it's a lot like that. Cool, yeah, exactly, yeah. And in a fight, that's often apparently what the female kangaroos are looking at, at the males in a fight. They're going, look at biceps on that guy. Yeah, because what they do is they grab the other guy with the arm bits, and then they kick them with the leg bits. So the arms are quite important in fighting.

Yeah. But the legs are more impressive if you want to attract someone. Why aren't they going, look at my huge feet. How awesome are my huge feet, guys? You know what they say about kangaroos with big feet? Yeah. Exactly. Okay, time to move on to fact number two, and that is Anna. Yep, my fact is that during the financial crisis of 1720,

Parliament called upon stockbrokers to be sewn into sacks filled with poisonous snakes and thrown into the Thames. Was that a serious thing? I mean, that's surely... I think it was just to... I don't think they were intending it actually to happen. and it was to express their vehement dislike. But it was during the South Sea bubble,

which was one of the earliest financial crises. A guy who made the speech, which suggested this, was Lord Molesworth, and he was drawing on Roman tradition, which had people who committed parricide, which had them thrown into the tiber. So he said... It was a suicide.

It's killing your father. Anyway. With animals as well, there were animals in the sack. There was a rooster, a monkey and a dog in the sack with you when you went into the river. Oh, was there? That is horrible, isn't it?

According to another Roman thing, if there wasn't any water nearby, if there wasn't a convenient river or sea nearby, you would be put in a sack with a rooster and a viper and a dog and a monkey and then thrown to wild animals to be torn apart. Oh my God. Yeah. They used to put more effort into punishment, I think. They go to lengths to find these poisonous and tropical exotic creatures.

Well, I think this was, because in this particular case, before the debate, because everyone was extremely angry about the South Sea bubble bursting because people were ruined by it, including, in fact, Isaac Newton, invested a lot of money in the South Sea Company, and he was totally bankrupt after it. And Alexander Pope was not, because he was one of the crafty ones who exited early. But so did Isaac Newton.

Isaac Newton got out in time and then went back in. He could see it was going to fall. Very good. But, yeah, people were angry, and so in Parliament was getting very vehement. And so before the debate, the King made a speech urging people to retain prudence and temperate, and temper to ensure that the right punishments were distributed.

And their response to that was say, throw them in the Thames in a sack that's sewn up with poisonous snakes. Well, the king got out in time. Did he was one of the people who got out in time. He and Robert Walpole, who I think was Prime Minister at the time, both got out in time. But that's only because their financial advisors had disobeyed them. Really?

Interesting, yeah. Ah, that is interesting. Actually, this is not going to be good for you. I'm not going to put the money in. So isn't that interesting? Any financial advisors were that thoughtful for everyone all the time. Luckily, we learned our lesson and there was no financial crisis ever again. Absolutely.

It's not the earliest, is it? Is tulip mania the first? Was that before the South Seat bubble? Yes, it was. Yeah, it was 16th. 17th century. Yeah. So you should explain what that is?

So Julietania was in the Netherlands, wasn't it? And it was when people were suddenly starting going mad for tulips, and the price of tulips massively inflated. And I think the price of one tulip bulb was the same. as a 10-year salary for the average craftsman. Wow. And then it burst. There's a really cool story about Tudat Mania, which is in the 1630s that Sala was

imprisoned in a Dutch prison for eating what he thought was an onion. It was actually a tulip bulb and that could have fed the entire crew of his ship for 12 months. That's insane. Who eats an onion just on its own? A sailor who's not had vegetables for a long time, I suppose. That's pretty desperate. Not only are you eating an onion, you've just eaten the world's most expensive on you. He's like, you know what, as well?

It didn't taste that onion-y. I was reading about Parliament, because I don't actually know much about Parliament. There's that thing of that if the Queen goes to Parliament, then Buckingham Palace needs to take an MP prisoner for the time that she's there, just in case they suddenly decide. Hostage. Yeah, which is a movie that I've not seen made yet. Why not?

It's never a really important MP. Is it not? Do they get like the rubbishest? I think they get a... The new guy. Yeah. Sorry, no offence if you're listening and you've been the hostage.

But it's normally not George Osborne. It's normally not a really senior member of parliament. It's dispensable just in case. Exactly. In chess terms, it's like trading the queen for a pawn. Except you've got 600 pawns and this is the least good of them. It's the replaced one because you lost all the other. Yeah.

You lost the proper one. It's a thimble, yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about MPs doing. cooky stuff in Parliament. I read somewhere that William Pitt the younger, he was a drunk, and he once during a speech, vomited behind the speaker's chair and then returned to his seat and continued doing his speech until the end. There were contemporary reports that say that. But you don't, they might come from, they might be propaganda from the other side, but he was a drunk.

So I have one more thing on parliamentary misdeeds. In 2010, a Tory MP had to apologize for being too drunk to cast his vote on the budget. He got drunk in the parliament bar. And, and he forgot to rock up and vote. And Hazel Blizz, who we all probably know, Labor MP, said she had been out on the terrace with him, but had retired the library when it got a bit too lively. But this man's name is Mark Reckless. Oh, good, isn't it? That's great.

You mentioned the bar. So Parliament has their own bar, don't they? They've got a few bars. They have a library. The stranger's bar. The all kinds of things. They've also got a hairdressers. Yeah.

And this is really odd. They have a rifle shooting range. Oh, the lords have one in the basement, yeah. Yeah, isn't that really odd? Yeah, yeah. They just go, you go and shoot a rifle. I think it's very rarely used. They used to have rifle shooting in pubs.

Yes. It was like a pub spot that people would go around the different pubs and play against each other. And they banned it. And you know why they banned it? Because people were gambling on it. That's excellent. It wasn't some of it across corridors and things like, it's incredibly dangerous. There's some brilliant photos of people taking shots.

in a pub and there's like old boys drinking the stout underneath the barrel of the gun it's absolutely really what should we do in this place where people come and get really drunk and disorderly should we introduce guns um anything else um can we just quickly go back to punishments because i have one more thing oh yeah yeah in the olden days they used to um saw people in half as a as a mode of execution wow what good way of going about it when well not a good way but a way it's a it's a It's a thorough way. Simon the zealot was sawn in this way, supposedly. Simon the zealot?

Simon the zealot. Yeah, you know him. Really enthusiastic guy. Hey guys, do you want to play rounders later? But the way that they sawed him, I don't know if this is what they did with everyone, but they hung him upside down, and they started with his groin and went lengthways.

Oh, God, the goldfinger method. Yeah, but with a saw. Sorry, when you said in half, I thought you meant as in a magician's trick. Me too. But so they did it. Oh, my God. Starting with a groin.

That is the worst. But Simon the zealot didn't mind. Guys, I'm not feeling as zealous about this as I normally am about other things. Okay, time to move on to fact number three, and that is you, Andy Murray. My fact is that there are three times as many estate agents in the UK as there are members of the armed forces. Yeah, that is weird. Well, yeah, there's been a massive boom in estate agents recently, and also all the soldiers have been sacked. So in some ways it's...

Oh, really? There are being huge cuts, and people said that the army is going down to the size it was at the Boer War. But it's not true. It's actually going to be substantially smaller than it was during the Boer War. Yeah, because in wartime, then, armies increase massively. It's amazing. There are graphs of the armed forces population from about 1870 to today, and obviously there are two vast spikes there.

And it's been a gradual tail off since the end of the Second World War. Are they becoming estate agents? Is that what's that? Is it straight swap? Is this why I got the same round of house by a guy in camouflage? Now this house has a beautiful bunker, which you might want to use.

It's facing north and it's very defensible. Very defensible. I don't know. I don't think a lot of them are becoming estate agents. How many real estate agents do we have? Real estate agents or fake estate agents. There are, I think, it's something like $560,000 from memory.

In 2008. an estate agent was showing people around a potential property. I think it was in somewhere in the south of England. It was worth 350 grand. He opened up the walking closet to show it off and he found the owner hanging dead in there. A spokesman for the company said it was quite a shock, which you would expect.

It would have been good if it had been sold by a guy called Roy Brooks. Do you guys know who he is? No. No. Okay, Roy Brooks was an estate agent from the early 20th century and he was known as the honest estate agent. agent. He would give somewhat too honest descriptions of his houses that he was trying to sell. So I'm going to read one. This was from the early 20th century by Roy Brooks. Brothel in Pimlico. Wanted. Someone with taste means and a stomach strong enough to buy this erstwhile house of ill repute in Pimlico. It is untouched by the 20th century as far as convenience for even the basic human decencies is concerned. Although it reeks of damp, Or worse, the plaster is coming off the walls and daylight peeps through a hole in the roof. It is still habitable judging by the bed of rags, fag-ends and empty bottles in one corner.

Plenty of scope for the socially aspiring to express their decorative taste and nothing to stop them putting Westminster on their note paper. That's fantastic. Ten rather unpleasant rooms with a smelly backyard, 15,000 pounds. Wow. With a smelly backyard. Why did he do that? Well, he became famous for it and then got a lot of people looking at his properties because he'd become famous. There is definitely room for someone to do that today.

I went on a viewing with someone who was looking to buy a place recently, and it was basically a condemned place. And the estate agent, to her credit, said, this is awful, isn't it? And she was really, really honest. Well, the kitchen was all covered in brown rust and condemned tape, where it says, do not use. This is condemned equipment. And she says, it just looks like really bad food. then someone can get to the toilet in time. That was the first viewing I'd ever been on.

That was quite... That was £450,000 in Zone 9. The foremost adulterous professions in the US are physicians, physicians, police officers, lawyers and then real estate agents. No way, isn't it? I do like real estate agents. I feel like in Australia, that's what we call them. Real estate agents.

I think it is. And in America as well, possibly, or realtors or things. But here, we just say estate agents. So here in real estate agents, is wonderful. Doctors, that's not great, doctors. I know. I know.

How did they find that out? Was it self-reported? No, it was from a website where you go if you want to, if you're married and you want to hook up with people. Like those illicit encounters. I mean, not that I know, I just, I'd like it. And you have to put your profession in there and that's what they found. Right.

Well, they might have been lying about that. I mean, they've been lying to the people in their lives as well. So it's entirely possible a lot of would-be doctors were just saying, yeah, I'm basically a doctor. There's a website. you can look up in the US, which tells you if there's anyone's died in your house. Oh, okay. And how they did it. How they did it.

Sounds like John Bonderson's book, isn't it? James wrote an endorsement for this book that John Bonderson, he's a... He's a friend of ours. He does all sorts of odd travels around the UK to discover this book in particular. It's called The Murder Houses of London. Basically, he's got this book, which is all about all the houses in London where there have been murders. And he goes into detail about the different murders that have been there. really, really interesting book.

I got drunk with him once in central London, and when we got drunk, he went, do you want to see some of the houses? And we walked around London, and he was like, here there was a murder. And he was so excited by these murders. Just with the people being murdered in houses, though, sometimes the idea of ghosts is actually a desirable thing that real estate agents, real ones, use in order to sell a house. I mean, people actually used to put wanted ads out when they were for a house with little requests for ghosts in the house. Wow. The word mortgage.

Does everyone know what that means? It means a massive kick in the balls delivered to the wallet. No, it means death, mort. It means death pledge, basically. I think you'd be paying us off until you die? Sort of. Well, the reason, so the earliest explanation we have for that is from someone, I think, in the 16th century who said the reason mortgage is death pledge, literally, is because

it is doubtful. the borrower will pay at the appointed day such some or not as is due and so the land is taken from him, i.e. dead to him. So it's called a death pledge or a dead pledge literally because it's so unlikely you'll be able to pay it back that you're going to have the land taken away from you that you wanted.

But it comes from the same route, which I find really interesting. It comes, the word mortgage comes from the same route as the word wedding. So Gage is a pledge and wed was pledge and they both come from the Germanic word wadjo. Why don't we still use?

Yeah, look, it's a stupid word. Why is that word? Why is wadjo so funny? It's a really beautiful wadjo, actually. The bride looks wonderful. I think we've just realized why we don't still use that word. Four wadjos in the funeral. Okay, time for the final fact of the podcast, and that is my fact.

And that is that I recently discovered that medieval manuscripts are littered with drawings of warfare between snails and knights. They're just constantly in battle. and the amazing thing is no one knows why. It's a total mystery. Isn't it wonderful? It's just so on the margins, on the side of all these manuscripts, there will just be drawings of snails versus... And at the same side, it's not a real-sized knight and a tiny snail.

It fluctuates. It fluctuates sometimes. Sometimes it is tiny by their foot. Sometimes they're way larger than the knight. And people are looking into it to try and work out why. There was a great paper called the snail in Gothic marginal warfare. and they have theories that it's a representation of the resurrection of Jesus, that the snail represents a sort of a highly armored chivalric foe.

They don't know. They just have no idea. You know what I think it might be? You know, when you just sat there doodling, one of the things you doodle is like a spiral. And sometimes if you just draw a spiral, you might then turn it into a snail. And then when you've drawn a snail, what are you obviously going to do? Make it fight a night. It does go down a bit there.

there's a lot of paintings of the Virgin Mary where she has snails in the picture that's a symbolism of the Virgin Mary because their shells mean that their modesty is protected and it was thought that they reproduced without sex Oh really? And they don't do that do they? Snails?

Yeah, they don't reproduce without sex. No, they don't know. So they're randy little beasts. Yeah, they're hermaphrodites and they fire love darts at each other. They certainly do. So love darts, they're like little arrows which are attached to the to the snail,

but they don't, they don't fire them through the air. They basically get into close combat and then stab each other. And sometimes they can stab each other very fiercely, so the harpoon will go through the other snail's head and out the other side, and then they mate. Yeah, that's not really what the painters of the Virgin Mary were going for.

No, no. There's a lovely 15th century manuscript that's covered in cat paw prints that I think went on Twitter last year, I went a bit viral. Oh, we should put that on our podcast page. We'll put it on the podcast page. Humanizes it, really, because suddenly you think,

oh my God, a cat just walked across this guy's page. That was the one where the cat peed on it, is it? Did it? Yeah, the cat peed on it. And the guy wrote, Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on it during a certain night. Cursed be the pesky cat that urinated over this book

during the night in Deventer, and because of it, many others too. And beware well not to leave open books at night where cats can come. As in arrive, I assume. Right. Got it. Fordn't to clarify that. It sounds like in the margins of these manuscripts are where whoever was scribbling all the stuff and the monks, let's say, it was like their own little place in the book where they could say what they really felt and the drawings that they could doodle in. No one would know to stop them.

And people have translated some of like the extra commentary written by some of these monks who are frustrated from writing out these long manuscripts and they're amazing. So some of them include new parchment, bad ink. I say nothing more. Another one is, oh, my hand. And this one, now I've written the whole thing. For Christ's sake, give me a drink. That's in a manuscript. Oh, God, it's fantastic.

It's quite exciting because I didn't realize at the time when I saw this snail versus night thing that there's a lot of mysteries in medieval manuscripts and they're constantly digging them up. And there's great blogs on the British Library website, on the Smithsonian's website, where they go into the backrooms, they dig through all for these manuscripts and they managed to find things that have just been lost in their archives and they contain mysteries once they find them they found this great one recently which was a it was a long lost

cookbook that they were dying to find that they knew the existence of and it was written by a guy called geoffrey fuel and he worked in the kitchens for the queen of england in 1328 to 1369 so that was philippa of haynalt at the time and um he was basically known as the heston bloomenthal of his day and he just wouldn't have known who Heston Blumenthal was. That's the mystery, really. Yeah, exactly. The only evidence we have the time travel. He made tiny night porridge.

This is what's weird about it. It's got a bunch of recipes in it, and it has a recipe for hedgehogs, blackbirds, and then a recipe for unicorns. And one of the recipes starts with the sentence, Takeeth one unicorn. That is so good. Yeah. That's the kind of cookbook. You know when you get a cookbook that's really complicated and you open it and you think,

oh, I don't have any of this. Straight away, you're closing that and going, fuck it, Delia. He was the Heston Blumenthal of this. You remember Mrs. Beaton? She published recipes for kangaroo going back to them. Did she? Yeah. Curried kangaroo tales.

Oh, that's funny because the Western grey kangaroo smells of curry. Does it? Yeah. Apparently. Oh. Speaking of kangaroos, there is a manuscript, which is. is a Portuguese manuscript, which has in one of the, you know how they always have a big letter to start of? Yeah. And there's always a drawing inside. Once upon a time with a big

O. Yeah, exactly. And then a drawing in the O. In this Portuguese manuscript, they have a picture of a kangaroo. And it predates when supposedly anyone had visited Australia by 400 years. Now, here's the thing. They obviously don't know whether or not it was a kangaroo in the drawing, because people have pointed out it looks quite similar to an ardvark. And an ardvark apparently can go on its hind legs when it's trying to eat something off a tree. But when you look at this picture and we'll put it on the website, it's a kangaroo. Like, no question about it. It's definitely a kangaroo.

There is a painting from 1496 that has a sulphur-crested cockatoo in it, which is a parrot native to Australia. Yeah. And they reckon that that is evidence that there was trading going on throughout the world at that time. Okay, we might not have, Westerners might not have sailed down to Australia. but the Australians would have traded with the Chinese who would have traded with the Indians who would have traded with Europeans. Okay. Wow.

Yeah. That's amazing, isn't it? Because Australia was definitely traded with China and things like sea cucumbers. So there's no reason to think that we wouldn't have traded, that the trade route wouldn't have come all the way through the Silk Path, etc. Yeah, yeah. They spread rumors, didn't they? They said these islands that we've got are guarded by giant sea serpents and giant birds. They made the spice islands sound as intimidating as they possibly could,

just so that no one else would sail there. And also it was so that the price would be so high. So cinnamon sticks, they said that they were part of a nest of a giant bird. And in order to get this bird, you had to kill oxen and hide them so that the bird would go down and get the oxen. And then you could sneak up and grab bits of its nest, and they were cinnamon sticks. Of course, it's all made up.

But it meant that when you came home, you could charge a massive price because all five of my men were killed. Wow. I just have one cool thing about knights. So how do you dub a knight? Sword on both shoulders, right? Yeah. Wasn't always the case.

So by the time Willie and the Conqueror come to England, to knight someone, you punch them in the face. Yeah, it was a blow with a fist, a bare fist to the face or neck. And this is how Willie and the Conqueror, for instance, knighted his son, Henry. Just to be punching the neck. When did that stop? Not sure. Still going.

Still going. Can you imagine if the queen did that? To Sir Cliff Richard. Yeah. Praise yourself, Cliff. But she doesn't say arise Sir Cliff. No. It's a myth.

Because he's unconscious. Because he's unconscious on the park. Okay, that's it for this week's podcast. That is all of our facts. Thanks so much everyone for listening. If you want to get in contact with us about any of the things that we've said, you can get us all on our Twitter handles. I'm on at Schreiberland.

James. At Eggshaped. Andy. At Andrew Hunter. Anna? Yeah, you can get me if you email podcast at QI.com. Also, you can head to QI.com slash podcast, which is the page where we like to add extra links, videos and so on, of all the things that we've been talking about during the course of this podcast.

It's also got every single one of our previous episodes that you can check out, and they've all got a special page with links and so on. So go there, check it out, QI.com slash podcast. Also, just very quickly, if you happen to be in Edinburgh for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, There's quite a lot of no such thing as a fish-related comedy shows going up there. Andy, you're going to be doing two shows. You're doing ostentatious. Yeah, that's at the Pleasance Dome at 140pm every day.

It's Jane Austen-themed, improvised comedy. I'm also doing a two-person improv show called Folly Adder, which is at 6pm every day at Pleasant's Courtyard. Yep, I'm going to be doing my debut hour, which is called Cock Blocked from Outer Space, and it's an hour stand-up show from 540 at the Underbelly Daisy Room, and also we're going to be doing Museum of Curiosity Live, which is the live version of our BBC 4 radio show.

John Lloyd's going to be up there. We have amazing guests from Jimmy Carr, Phil Jupiter, Mark Watson, David O'Doccurty, to the academics that we love getting on the show, like Henry Marsh, the UK leading brain surgeon, and Irving Finkel, who is an ancient Babylonian cuneiform expert from the British Museum. Okay, and if you're not going to Edinburgh,

just come to London and have a drink with me because I'm going to be on my own. Okay, thanks so much for listening. We'll see you again next week. Goodbye.