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My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tashinsky, and Andrew Hunter-Murray. 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 fact number one, and that's my fact this week. My fact is that the world's longest golf putt took 26 seconds for the ball to reach the hole. In that time, it covered a distance of over nine miles.
Wow. So, Dan, I've just done some calculations just before we came on, and I reckon that means they must have hit the ball at about just over 1,200 miles per hour. And is that good, James? I know you play golf. I've just been watching the Open just before we came on as well. And Bryson DeChambeau, who most people think hits it the hardest and fastest of anyone, can hit it at a maximum of 140 miles an hour. So what the fuck's going on?
Okay, so yes, you were correct in your calculation, but incorrect in how this record was set. This was set aboard Concord. Yeah, so... It is a cheat. I was talking to our good buddy, Jason Haisley, and this came up in conversation. He mentioned that a record had been set by someone who had basically used the idea that the distance that you would travel on.
concord matched with a putt that could travel the distance of concord into a hole would set the record so the record that is held currently is by a guy called jose maria olathalbo And he's a golfer who, in 1999, was on the Ryder Cups team Concorde flight to the United States. And during the whole trip, he spent most of the time in the aisle trying to break the record for longest putt ever. Right.
And so the putt that he achieved was 26.17 seconds long. So it covered the 150 feet of the cabin. But as a result of the distance traveled by Concord, that was 9.2 miles. That he travelled. I can only imagine how hard it was for the poor bloody air stewards to serve the drinks around this.
golfer the other thing is when you're playing golf it's always more difficult to play over water but presumably this whole shot was over water yes exactly but also you know i mentioned he tried to break the world record this isn't the first time that someone
has set the record of longest golf putt done on a Concorde airplane. So a couple of years before in 1997, there was a guy called Brad Faxon and he set the record. Now, what's interesting is I've managed to find a blog about the story of how this... happened and i think it's a cheat his record setting because as opposed to this other completely legitimate well as far as i can tell
The current record holder did it by hitting it and getting it into the hole on his own. But in this blog about Brad Faxon, it sounds like he hit the ball and then all of the passengers were putting their hand and feet in the way, navigating the ball. That doesn't count. Exactly. That doesn't count. I have a question, Dan. How did they make a hole in Concord?
In fact, that made it easier to sink the ball because everything was being sucked towards the massive hole in the fuselage of the plate they'd just drilled. Yeah, is that what happened? No, I think it must have been a cup on its side. For such an important record, this... detail such an important record unbelievable world-changing record was set today as far as i could tell the first person to ever hold the record was not a professional golfer but was sugs from the band madness who initially did
What, did you mean the longest putt or do you mean on Concord? On Concord, the longest putt on Concord. No wonder Concord went out of business. The number of golfers just queuing up, taking up valuable spaces for people with their bags. I'm the longest golf. Shot. Ever.
or what was often claimed or speculated to be one of the longest happened on the moon, right? I think we've mentioned before Alan Shepard did a golf shot on the moon. Okay. And it was never a record breaker or anything, but everyone always just said, God, that must have gone miles because obviously...
gravity on the moon is a sixth of what it is now so you should be hitting it six times as far and there's the i think there's the footage and when he hits it this is on apollo 14 1971 he missed it the first one which we've mentioned four hit the second and disappeared out of shot and he was like wow god i reckon that's gone
A long way. He actually said about 200 yards, which still is not as far as professionals will hit it. But they recently analysed the videos of his golf shot and zoomed right in and they worked out where he was standing because they saw his footprints and... where the ball landed and he hit the ball 40 yards which in earth yards I guess that would be
What, like seven? Seven yards he basically hit at the equivalent of on Earth. Wow. VAR has really ruined more things than we realise. Yeah. As someone who once lost a cricket ball throwing competition, aged about... 15 or 16, to a seven-year-old girl. I don't think we should criticise this guy too much. Cricket ball throwing? Yeah, it was a cricket ball throwing competition. It was in Germany.
Why were you representing the UK in the world's cricket ball throwing championships? That's a fair point. I guess they didn't have much interest from elsewhere. Yeah. Oh, God. Amazing. Anyway. Speaking of the sports, what sport do you reckon has the fastest? ball are not being played on concord just generally what about squash squash faster for sure it's not going to be table tennis it's not ping pong the answer is plotter
You know that game that they play in the Catalan region of Spain? Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm so excited about the Pilota World Cup coming up soon. Well, apparently you're representing the UK in that as well, Andy. I don't know if you know. It's basically a game where...
you you have these gloves but they have like a slope on them and so you catch the ball in mid-air it's a bit like squash and then you flick the ball using your hand and with this slope and it really gives it a massive speed but i thought that's about 180 miles an hour, the best tennis serve, about 160. I thought maybe Quidditch, but the Quidditch broomsticks, apparently, according to the internet, I haven't read the books.
at all so i might be wrong about this only 150 miles an hour the fastest brooms go so quite a pedestrian sport really but then if you throw the um i want to say snitch from a broomstick and you're traveling Let's back it up. Come on. Come on. From a broomstick. If you catch the snitch, the game ends. Your team gets 150 points. Right. Sorry. Well, you're throwing some sort of balls, presumably. You might throw a quaffle or a blusher. It's a quaffle. Yeah.
Right, so you quaff the quaffle off the broomstick while going at 150 miles an hour. You give that some extra speed. Yeah, it's like shining a torch out of a car. Exactly. No, hang on. That's still the speed of light. It's exactly unlike shining a torch. In actual fact, you've chosen the one thing light which doesn't act like a ball.
You know a hole-in-one? The phenomenon of a hole-in-one? I did not know this. You can get a hole-in-one insurance if you own a golf course. What do you mean? Basically, lots of golf courses offer prizes. You know, huge prizes if you've got a hole-in-one on this hole. we will give you 50,000 pounds. And that's obviously quite risky for a golf course in case someone just turns up and does it. So there is special insurance and you pick a main hole.
And you can also get optional prize cover for five other holes in the policy I read. I'm sure they vary. But yeah, I just had no idea. That was a special insurer. That's very cool. So you're encouraged to get insurance if you play golf because you're hitting balls quite often in the...
wrong directions in areas where there are people but part of your insurance will often be hole-in-one insurance and that's because when you get a hole-in-one you're kind of supposed to buy everyone else in the club a drink
And so if you do get it and you pay for that, then your insurance will pay for that round of drinks. Really? That's brilliant. That's kind of stingy, isn't it? People are saying, even on that day, when presumably they're winning this massive prize from the golf course anyway, they're not going to buy the $500.
other blokes in the golf bar a drink. The poor people at Aviva who are dealing with two competing claims, one for £50,000 and one for the biggest round of drinks ever. Wow. Well, you say things... golf balls often do get hit in the wrong direction, right? And one particular group of people who is prone to doing this are American politicians. So I think maybe the record for the most disastrous...
misdirected hit is held by Spiro Agnew. So this was 1971, I think. So he was former vice president. Thank you. I was going to say, just for the younger listeners, can you explain who Spiro Agnew is? Sorry. Come on. If you've heard his name once, which you probably have, you never forget that name. So no one needs to contextualise.
It's the Bob Hope Classic tournament in 1971. This is like a lot of celebrities took part in this. A lot of presidents have played in it. And I think he might be the only person to hit three people with two shots. So he... Hit one shot and it hit a husband and wife couple, both. So rebounded off one, smacked into the other. He paused, went up to apologise. How embarrassing for me. I'm a public figure. Went back down, put it back on the tee and thwacked another woman.
Who had to go to hospital? No. God. Did he then continue? Oh yeah, he absolutely nailed it after that. You get your bad shots out of the way. That's amazing. And I think, was he working with Gerald Ford? He was at the time, wasn't he? Who also once hit the same woman twice from the same tee. You're kidding. Did she move in between shots one and two?
That's a really good question. In which case are you saying it's her fault? Because obviously he's not going to hit it to the same place. Sorry, I don't think I'm saying it's her fault. I'm just saying it would be interesting if she moved and that implies that he was drawn towards her somehow. I guess if she didn't. It also could imply that. She could have been wearing like a giant flag on her head. Yeah. He thought she was the whole.
She was. She had an enormous hole in the middle of her diaphragm. Do you guys know who the number one female golfer in the world is at the moment? Time of recording? No. No. No. Come on, guys. But it's not sexist because I don't know the number one. I don't either, yeah. Fair enough. The number one female golfer is a woman called Nellie Corder. The number 13 golfer is her sister, Jessica Corder.
And you might know the name if you follow tennis because their brother is Sebastian Corder, who is currently the 46th best player in the world and was the first player born in the 2000s to reach the fourth round of any Grand Slam event. Wow. Imagine that family. Their father is Petter Corder, who was a former number two tennis player in the world and an Australian Open winner. And their mother is Regina.
Korda, nay, Reichshitova, who was a former tennis top 30 player as well. Wow. Imagine that family at Christmas. Their grandfather was Konkorda, who invented it. Shall we talk about Konkord? Yeah. Yeah, Concord was absolutely amazing. It's kind of sad that it's defunct.
I love the fact that it had a wiggly nose, which I didn't really know. Because you see photos of it looking slightly skew-iff, the nose. They could genuinely, from the cockpit, control where the nose was. And it was simply so they could see the runway. Because when the nose was in its up position, the pilot... coming into land couldn't see the runway nearly as clearly obviously advantaged to see the runway so they just had a
And you could see it tilt down and they could see the runway land. And it made that noise, didn't it? Yes, absolutely. Comedy noise. Oh, I've just lost my sex drive sound effect. Do you guys know the oldest person ever to fly on Concorde? Gosh, I don't... Was it... Who was that? Do you mean old now? Because all of them are fairly old now. Well, that's a good point. Yeah, okay.
I'm gonna say this is a trick question. I reckon your like a mummy was transported from ancient Egypt or something like that. Classic Andy. Oh, it's bound to be that, isn't it? What a great... Lucy, the ancestor of all the Homo erectus. Yeah, some primordial soup was brought on board and served. Would you like the chicken or the fish or the primordial soup? Poor Andy. He now just has to tell us it's a 61 year old woman.
That is very true. Well, there have been a few oldies on there. The Queen Mum celebrated her 85th birthday by going on Concorde and sitting in the cockpit. She's not the oldest person ever. The oldest person ever was a woman called Eva Woodman, okay? She flew on Concorde in 1998, and she was... aged 105, born in 1893. And what I really like is this. When she went on the flight, it was only the second time in her life she had left Bristol.
Isn't that incredible? That's amazing. Good on her. Waiting for the right moment. She would have been 11 years old at the time of the first flight of the Wright brothers. She was born at a time when cars were pretty bloody surprising. That's true. Concord was maybe not used to transport mummies, but Concord was used to transport body parts.
which I didn't realise. So the actual speed of Concord had served a genuine purpose, medical purpose. And apparently BA Concords were quite often used to transport organs that needed to be quickly relayed to somewhere else to be donated. was one incident according to concord magazine where french concord had to ship a really rare anti-venom to someone who'd had a snake bite somewhere in africa oh my god
That's amazing. And because you've got such limited time, it was literally like if they'd just gone aboard a normal BA flight, then wouldn't have made it in time. But the person survived because it whizzed over there so fast. But Concorde doesn't fly to Africa, does it? Well, I suppose it flies to wherever the person gets bitten by the snake if it's...
It probably was a scheduled flight, is what I'm saying. Do you mind if you could get him from Sudan to Amsterdam, then yeah, we'll give him the answer. No, I think it diverted. Paul McCartney once ordered a pizza to be flown from New York. to London by Concord. Yeah, I don't get that. We're trying to find out more about that. Was it a cooked pizza? Was it like a Sainsbury's? It would be cold, wouldn't it? I think it was from his favourite pizza place.
You'd imagine it would be. He wouldn't have got it from Domino's in New York if there's Domino's in London, would he? He might have had vouchers for the one in London that he couldn't trade in in New York. Wow. Was he misled as to how fast Concord was? It is possible. If your delivery arrives after two and a half, three hours, it is still going to be lukewarm at best. I wonder if the pizza got its own seat.
I wonder that. I do wonder that. I would like to think it did. There was a thing where you could save money by being a courier. And so if there were sensitive documents that had to be delivered, you would get a cheaper ticket on Concord. So maybe the pizza had its own special courier. Yeah. That's interesting. I imagine if the pizza just comes out at the other end and there's a guy with a sign which just has a pizza on it.
There were quite a lot of famous people that did travel Concord that have led to stories like this, like Phil Collins famously with Live Aid played in London and was able to fly to America to play for the end of the day. over there and there's a story of Uri Geller being on the plane and he visits he visits the captain in the cockpit get him out of here he's gonna bend everything in sight interestingly the nose was completely straight until he got on Hahaha!
He went into the flight deck and he said, I can spin the compass on your instruments. Thanks, Yuri. Thanks a lot. Fucking don't. Because presumably he's doing it with a hidden magnet or something, right? It's going to be a trick.
so why are you letting him on with that exactly so the captain said i thought at 37 kilometers a minute are we being wise to allow this man to fiddle with the navigation and he did he let him he let him do it um i think though he did it on the standby compass which is still
You need it. It's a standby compass. Sure. And he said, sure enough, it whizzed around. I've never seen anything like it. And when it stopped, I'm pleased to say it went back to show accurately where we were going. What a surprise. Just like what would happen if you put a magnet there. Yeah, exactly. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna.
My fact this week is that some fish use sharks as scratching posts. Wow. Brave fish. And also, like, my cat uses scratching posts to kind of get her nails down. And fish don't have nails. So what's going on? Oh, yeah. What's itching? No, but they do have parasites. And so they like to rub themselves up against rough surfaces to get rid of those or scratch that itch. And the adrenaline junkies among them scratch up against sharks.
This has been documented in lots of places underwater. So I first read about it. There's a photographer who spotted a crowd of jack kind of fish enveloping a massive bull shark and found out later this is what they do. They rub up against them. And it seems to happen.
everywhere so i found a picture of mackerel rubbing up against a great white very bold very bold and even sharks rubbing up against other sharks sometimes there are silky sharks rubbing up against whale sharks to scratch themselves wow
It must be harsh. Like sharks, it's not their fault. They got this rough skin and they've just become kind of everyone's using them, right? And they're so rough, aren't they? I didn't really realise this because I'd never obviously touched a shark. But shark, for example. can destroy human skin with their own skin. So sometimes people who try to rescue sharks which have washed up on land, if they handle them they end up with shark burn.
Where basically their skin is just so rough that they destroy your fingers and your hands. Yeah. Wow. What, like classic grey smooth sharks? Because that just looks like that's such a smooth surface. The amazing thing about them, which is just so cool, is they're basically made of loads of teeth, aren't they? So their skin is loads of these tiny, tiny teeth called dermal denticles. And if you zoom in, they do look like kind of layers of overlapping teeth. They literally are Jaws.
They are. Very nice. They're entirely yours. That's amazing. And they're as hard as granite and as strong as steel, and they're made of material called appetite. Oh, wow. And also, here's the thing. Sharks do lose their appetite sometimes because they get dandruff, which means bits of their skins, their dermal denticles, kind of fall off.
And what's really useful about that is we can go into the bottom of the sea and find these bits of shark dandruff. And it can tell us quite a lot about the number of sharks that lived in an area over many, because it's really hard stuff. It doesn't really degrade very.
much so it's all there from hundreds and hundreds and thousands and millions and years of wow it's really helpful if you're looking after coral reefs for instance you can work out how many sharks were there how acidic the water was all that kind of stuff and people are using this shark dandruff to do that that's so cool that's amazing the shark that was mentioned in this article was a bull shark
And bull sharks, very fascinating sharks. They have this incredible ability to swim in both salt and fresh water. So do I. So do I. Yeah.
Hi, you too. Yeah, sorry, let me rephrase that. They can live underwater in salt or freshwater. I could be neither of those things. And as a result, these sharks can be found in really odd spots. And one place in particular that bull sharks are found... in is a place called carbrook golf course in queensland where following a flood where the golf course was flooded bull sharks swam into the local lake that's in the golf course
and then stayed there once the flooding went down. So they're permanently there, these giant bull sharks. As part of the golf course. Someone's got to break that putting record by putting it onto the back of a shark which swims the entire length of a lake and deposits on the other side. Whale sharks, that's a kind of shark. They're absolutely huge. They have remora on them, the sucking parasitic creatures. But they make a lovely meal, these remoras, for birds. However...
How do you get from the bird to the shark underwater? It's really cool. What they do is, there's only one bit of scientific footage of this happening, I believe. The cormorants will dive bomb into the water. They will swim down once they're underwater. And then once they get to the surface of the whale shark, they will peck away at the remora on the surface, basically trying to chisel it off because it's stuck on, you know, with really strong adhesive.
and pry it away from the surface of the whale. And they do this, you know, losing oxygen all the time, and then swim back up and they've got their meal. The remora are amazing, aren't they? Have you seen photos of them? This little suction pad. I've never heard remora, I must say.
never heard that before so they're quite a big fish and they're they're different in say like pilot fish that pilot fish will swim alongside the shark and they will eat parasites along the way and clean up around them and hence the symbiotic relationship but the remora literally on top of their head have this insane suction pad and they just rock up to the side of a shark and they just go
and suck themselves on with their head the right way up and they just get free transport along the way and they're really important to some of these sharks to the point where the shark will put itself in danger to help the remora suck on but they live off Mark poo, don't they?
I think some of them, they now think, they thought they lived off, like they feed off the parasites on the shark and live off of scraps of food falling out of the shark's mouth, which is a kind of ignominious existence. But now, even worse, they eat shark poo, some of them we think, and that's what they think. Yeah.
So it's no kind of life. Because there are these fecal plumes that sharks produce. And really big sharks produce thousands of litres in this plume. You know, it's 30 feet across. Whale sharks, they produce this huge, great plume. But if the shark is swimming... I don't actually know how the Remora manages to eat that. Maybe it detaches and swims around? No, yeah, they detach. I think they're only attached for great travel.
So they travel and then they pause and I think they disattach and eat, you know, they eat parasites off their faces and so on. That's tough though. That's like being driven to a restaurant. You jump out the car, but the car continues driving on and then you have to catch it up after your meal.
Like a drive-thru? No, not like a drive-thru. No. Unless your parents hated you, didn't they? They drove you to the drive-thru and then just drove away. You can walk for my dog, isn't it? Look, it was a fun... game and it didn't do me any harm I grew up well addressed
Greenland sharks. You know, we've mentioned those guys before. The really slow swimming. Dan's favorite shark. Yeah. They are often partially or completely blind because they have these... copepods which are tiny crustacean like creatures attached to their eyes but the great news for the Greenland shark is that they're swimming in such deep water that the sharks don't care because it's so dark that they don't actually need their eyesight very much
Well, but there's also a theory, which is not yet proved, but that the copepod might be bioluminescent. And because of that, it's attracting prey towards the Greenland shark, which travels... at one mile an hour it's the slowest shark in the world top speed is two miles like we could out swim this shark basically so in the greenland shark version of jaws the music doesn't speed up at all it just stays
forever exactly and so the idea is that the coplopods are attracting prey to eat that and it's basically bringing food to the face of the greenland shark Nice. So it's, again, symbiotic is the theory. Because that makes sense because I read recently that 90% of creatures in the ocean are glow in the dark, are bioluminescent. And they're just sort of discovering this.
I'm realising all these animals, deep sea animals that glow in the dark. Lantern sharks, they glow. I think they're luminescent underneath. And so that if you look at them from underneath, it looks like it's just the bright sky and you don't realise that there's a shark. It says camouflage. Yeah.
That's weird, having a light that is also camouflage. That's clever. Yeah. If you lived in Blackpool with all the illuminations and you wanted to kind of camouflage yourself there, then it would make sense to cover yourself in lots of bright lights, right? Absolutely. It all depends where you live. No, no, no, completely, but what a terrifying version of a serial killer you've just thought of, James, who goes around covered in Christmas lights, but only in Blackpool.
We've never talked about the shark murder case in Sydney, which just feels like if people don't know about that, you need to because it's such a good story. This is basically 1935. There's an aquarium in Sydney. There's a tiger shark. There are loads of people admiring it. And suddenly it vomits up a human arm.
And this, thank you, good sound effects. And this launched this massive murder investigation. So it was an arm which when they studied it, it obviously been cut off by someone as opposed to eaten by the shark. It had a tattoo on it, which was identified as the arm of this kind of boxer-cum-criminal. It actually turned out the shark hadn't eaten the arm. The shark had eaten a smaller shark, and that smaller shark had eaten the arm.
Wow. What a tangled web this is. This is incredible. Oh, wow. It was awesome. It's never been solved to this day, this crime, because this guy got accused, this guy called Reginald Holmes, and he denied it all. He got really, really drunk.
got his boat out into Sydney Harbour, I think. He tried to shoot himself in the head to get away from the accusation, but instead the bullet flattened against his stall, knocked him into the water. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Did he have a skull made of iron or what? Like, how does that work? the hell Anna I don't know what Reginald Holmes is made of but this bullet was flat and his skull was fine he got a mild concussion
What? He climbed back into himself against his skull. A lot of this story was unbelievable, but that bit in particular. So, okay, so he's in the water. He's got a bullet made of jelly. Yeah, and he's got his skull made of iron and he climbs back into his speedboat and there's a police chase around Sydney Harbour which lasts for a few hours and eventually... I'm amazed that it lasts a few hours given that he...
He's been shot in the head by himself shortly before this. He's hardcore. Maybe he's that guy from James Bond with the metal face. Anyway. Jaws. Yeah. Jaws. Yeah. The other jaws. So then he says, OK, fine, I am involved. He says his business associate had killed the victim, this guy called Smith, and had dismembered him, cut him into pieces, and he turned up at Reginald Holmes' door.
because they had beef between them. And he'd waved this severed arm at him and said, look, if you don't do what I need you to do, then you'll end up like whoever this guy was. And he left the severed arm with... reginald holmes so holmes just tossed this arm into the water didn't really know what to do with it and anyway then he was murdered the day before he was supposed to testify and the case was never solved because even though they kind of knew it was the guy who holmes had said
It was determined that no one could prove anyone had been murdered because actually a severed arm does not constitute enough of a body to suggest that anyone's been killed in the first place. The threshold of proving a murder in Australia seems to be remarkably high. It's high. Okay, it is time for fact number three. That is James. Okay, my fact this week is that 46% of Maasai men have become friends with someone who got the wrong number and mistakenly called their phone.
How fat are their fingers? How lonely are the Maasai, more importantly. If I get a wrong number, I never try and befriend the person who's called me. So I think, I don't know anything about the mechanics of how they use their phones, so I can only answer Andy's question, really. But basically, the Maasai, these are traditionally nomadic people, but they're... lifestyle is evolving quite a lot like a lot of places around the world as the expansion of western society kind of
globalizes itself and there was a 2021 study about maasai men who live in kenya and tanzania and it found that because they work in big big areas and they don't see many people from day to day But it's really, really important for them to have these social networks because it means that you can sell your goods better. It's really important to kind of see people and speak to people.
They have found this way of making friends where whenever anyone accidentally calls them and they're speaking the Ma language, which is the language that they speak, they automatically just start going, oh, how's it going? I don't suppose you want to buy any cows.
or some grain or whatever. And they just basically start up a conversation. So bizarre. One of the mechanics for why they miscall sometimes is it's to do with the fact that there's not great access to electricity in many areas. And so... if you were in an area and your phone died but you wanted to call someone you would borrow someone else's phone and in that case you'd have to manually put in a number off memory
And it's during the memory of it, you would misdial. I didn't see that. That's really interesting. I should say this is specifically men that they found this in. There has been a study on Maasai women by a woman called Kelly Summers, who comes from Virginia Tech.
and she found that the men are often using their phones to talk about people outside their social circle to try and make contacts for selling things especially, whereas the women are mostly talking to each other, other people in the family unit in the local.
unit yeah so that's quite a gender line as far as mobile phone uses in the Maasai yeah there's another division that is being created in Maasai society not a serious division but according to a 2017 study People with mobile phones, which are dumb, you know, non-internet enabled as it were, they call smartphone users.
because they have the ability to download weather forecasts. And if you're nomadic or a cattle herder, weather forecasts are very important. So this is basically a new system of being a tribal elder opening up, which is, you know, have you got an iPhone or the equivalent? That's very funny.
wait so they just call they'll call loads of random numbers until someone picks up and they say hey are you on an iphone and then they say great can you tell me no they'll know if one specific person has an iphone they'll call them say can you download the latest weather forecast exactly yeah so that person's on
the phone all day long basically just delivering much it's like being a being a weather man or woman but instead of being on tv you just have to deliver the weather to every individual person yeah that's hard it's it's like being the speaking clock isn't it really yeah Yeah. I remember being so surprised when I was in Kenya. I went around Kenya and Tanzania in 2005.
five? And I was on like a Matatu on those buses and there was a big Masai guy and they're so tall, most of them, sitting directly opposite me. Our knees were touching and I remember feeling kind of awkward. And then he delved into his sort of coat and he whipped out a mobile phone.
And this was kind of when I just got a mobile phone. That was when you finally decided to get one, wasn't it, Anna? It was like, you know what? Yeah, it is time. But he was on a bus with you, right? Yes. Like he's already engaged in... The modern world. Well, he's on a Matatu going into town to sell some meat, I guess. Did he have the meat with him? Yeah, the rest of the passengers on the bus were all cows, actually.
Have you guys heard of the Maasai spitting customs? Again, I don't know if these are now completely out of date. And I suspect COVID might have rendered them a little bit passé now. Yeah, it doesn't sound very COVID friendly, does it? No, there's lots of spitting belief. It's considered a blessing, spitting.
So parents and friends might spit on a newborn baby to wish it luck and health. Ah, that makes sense. Absolutely, yeah. During Maasai weddings, a father might spit on his daughter's forehead and breasts as a... Again, as a blessing. It's so weird to marry into that if you're not aware, isn't it? Yeah. I'd take that as an insult. And they do the classic spit on your hand.
for a handshake as well, which is often done as a sort of blood brothers with spit kind of thing. So you spit on your own hand. Yeah, you spit on your own hand and then shake. But that seems to be a normal sort of handshake. Again, as you say, Andy, it might be out of date now, but yeah.
God, I like the idea, though, that, Andy, you would spit on someone else's hand in a spit shake. I'm going to start suggesting that. You have to project it onto their hand. There was a traditional way of preparing mead. in the maasai and that was that a man and a woman would live in a hut and keep away from the rest of society while they're making the mead
And while you're doing it, you have to abstain from engaging in any sexual intercourse. It lasts about six to seven days. But if you don't follow that rule, then it means that the mead will be undrinkable. and all the bees who produce the honey will leave the village forever. Wow. Imagine if you had broken the rules, just nervously presenting your tainted need to the rest of the tribe and seeing if they guess.
like, hey, where are those bees going? No, they're just popping out. They're popping out. That would be a great Maasai game show, you know. What, the mead makers? Dirty mead. Yeah, it's a panel of Maasai judges who have to...
work out whether the couple of mead makers have had sex during the production process of the mead. It's like anti-Love Island, basically. We're just watching people try not have sex. Oh wait, there is a new Netflix show, I believe, is that. That's the premise. Is there? Yeah.
Yeah, well, you're not allowed to have sex. Right, to protect the mead. It's not, they've actually, they've cut the mead element from the Netflix show, which I think is a huge blunder. Big mistake, big mistake. How's that going to work? I mean, I hope they haven't cast long married couples because that shows me. going for years and not be a challenge for anyone.
The Maasai have now created their own intellectual property trust because they're so sick and tired of big global companies using the name Maasai or using traditional Maasai designs. And so they are creating a body of intellectual property trained elders.
And they hope that they'll be able to negotiate with firms on behalf of the Maasai. Obviously, it's tricky because you've got lots and lots of people who are, you know, very dispersed and it's hard to negotiate on behalf of all the Maasai. But they are trying to... persuade firms to recognize the Maasai trademark over their own name, for example.
Yeah, because isn't there an estimate that over a thousand companies use Maasai designs, basically? It's that sort of red check toga and the beads. You see those beads everywhere, belts. And so like Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein. Yeah, and obviously... It's hard to trademark beads, for example, but particular designs you might be able to. Or there are sometimes voluntary codes of conduct, which some Native American groups have struck so that now...
It's seen as an industry standard that if you're using this, you have to kind of get permission or at least talk to the people involved. And there is somewhere you can go, which has been the first company to start paying them for their trademark called Koi Clothing. So K-O-Y, which I was looking at. And the items for humans are very expensive, but you can get a dog collar for £25. So... Some stuff on wrong numbers? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Elon Musk has an old phone number.
which he doesn't use anymore, but which Lindsay Tucker, 25-year-old skincare consultant, does use. And so she regularly gets phone calls and text messages for Elon Musk. One guy sent her a blueprint for a bionic limb. Another guy in South Africa sent her a text message asking if he can buy 1,000 trucks and the IRS...
called her asking about her tax. Amazing. What did you say her job is? She is a skincare consultant. Oh, so that first one sounds quite useful. What was the first call? Bionic limb. That's the one place you don't need skincare. You just need WD40.
Yeah. Look, if you get someone, you say, I'll try to fix your skin, your cold source on your leg. And then it's like, I've really screwed that up. I'm so sorry. I had to amputate. But on the bright side, got a bionic glim. I can see how that would work. It's unlikely.
God, it must be tempting. Some of the offers she gets, she must be really tempted to pretend to be his representative. I'm sure she'd be caught pretty quickly. According to the article I read, she takes it in her stride. And she says that... If any of you ever call Elon Musk or text him and you don't get a reply, then don't feel hard done to. You probably rang her number and she doesn't get a chance to reply to everyone saying it's that. So it's not Elon's fault. It was NPR and they did.
He did ask Elon Musk about it and he did say that that was his number. He can't believe that it's still in use. It's so old. That's amazing. So you should start selling Musk. Oh, nice. That's such a good idea. Great idea. Capitalise on it. Start selling Elon's mask.
the skin does he have that as a perfume company Elon's Musk he must do right he should he must I mean the exciting thing here Anna is we could literally call this lady up and you picture the idea right let's do it we've got her number no no the number wasn't printed in the story because that would just make matters worse yeah irresponsible journalism yeah this person gets loads and loads of dodgy calls but here's her number anyway just in case you need to know
Do you guys want to hear the greatest wrong number of all time? Yeah. In my opinion. Okay. It happened in 1992. It happened in Dover. There was a man called Jason Pegler. He was walking past a phone box, right? and it rang. He answered the phone and the person ringing that phone box wanted to speak to him. The person making the call was a colleague of his who was ringing, trying to get through to Jason, asking how to work the office fax machine.
They hadn't phoned his phone number though. They had accidentally looked up his sheet at the company and phoned his employee number at the company, which happened to be the same as the number for the phone box. No way. And was he able to help out with the fax situation? I don't know. You bastard. I have no idea. I mean, do you buy this? Because it does sound unbelievable. Well, yeah, you're absolutely right. It does sound unbelievable. It's collected...
by David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University, who has a website where he collects unbelievable coincidences. And this is one of them. So I don't know what verification he does, but I think it might be true, actually. I think it is legit. I think I've heard him be asked about it before, the guy who answered the phone.
I bet he was loitering outside that phone because he spotted that years earlier. I suppose it's like the law of big numbers, isn't it? Exactly. If you have enough billion people in the world and enough things happen that eventually one of them will be an amazing coincidence. It's exactly that.
exactly that i found another just with silicon valley tech billionaires one who's i'm not sure if he's a billionaire but steve wozniak the creator of the apple computer with with steve jobs so he used to have a phone number which was very similar to pan am's reservation number and people in Silicon Valley if they fail to use the right area code.
they would get Steve Wozniak instead, who loved pranks. We've spoken about before on the podcast. And so he would play up to it. And what he used to do is if someone was trying to make a reservation, he would tell them... that they were the millionth passenger on Pan Am. And as a result, they'd won free lifetime travel on Pan Am. And then what he would do is halfway through collecting their personal information, he would hang up.
leave them confused and the obvious thing would be they would spend the next however long calling pan am back going no i swear to god someone was offering me lifetime under a million guys harsh real hard such a dick move In 2015, there was a woman called Betty Barker who got a phone call and she picked up the phone and the person said, hello, is this planet Earth?
And so she thought that's a prank call or this person's drunk. And the phone call ended. I think either the person cut it off or she cut it off. And it only came to light the next day, I think, when Tim Peake tweeted from the International Space Station, I'm so sorry for the wrong number I called yesterday from space. I was trying to get through to my family. That's so good. Isn't that great?
Similar story. Our friend Polly Adams got a call from the International Space Station one day. So she's the daughter of Douglas Adams. And it was the 42nd mission to the International Space Station. So 42 is a big number in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. So the whole mission was themed to that. So Polly was told that she was going to receive a call from the astronauts. But...
Her phone, when it rang, had an area code of Texas, America, which is where it's rooted from. And she thought, well, that's not space. So she let it go to voicemail. It called a couple of times. What did she think the area code of space was going to be? it might have just said space universe um so she ended up having to receive a voicemail going hi polly um it's just the astronauts up in the international space station trying to get through to you if you could give us a call back
Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that halfway through the First World War, the British government bought nearly 400 pubs in an attempt to stop people drinking. How was that helping? Surely that just gives the Members of Parliament way more options. And what, did they just close? The pubs are... They didn't close them. They closed some of them, but actually a large number of them were not only kept open, they were substantially modified.
Basically, they were very worried about people going to the pub and how this might affect the war effort because there were lots of factories making munitions where you had workers turning up either hungover or maybe still drunk. But it was a real problem, especially if you're making...
very delicate bombs and things like that. Bombs aren't delicate, you know what I mean. High explosive devices. There's probably some delicate parts of a bomb, I reckon. There probably are, aren't there? Yeah, the embroidery on top, actually. It's very hard to get that right. Okay. And so they really were concerned about this. And as an experiment in June 1916, the height of the war is really crazy to imagine. But they bought nearly 400 pubs over an area of about 300 square feet.
miles uh quite near the city of carlisle it was called the carlisle experiment this this campaign they bought some more elsewhere but that was the main area and they said we're going to do it for as long as the war lasts and do you mean they sold them back afterwards or
I think we'll get onto that later, but they initially just sort of bought them and said, we have to do this. And they basically took all these actions to stop people drinking, but in a pub environment. So they brought in really strict hours. They encouraged the sales of food.
non-alcoholic drinks. They made it more attractive to women and families. They introduced table service. You know, all of these moves were basically designed to slow down drinking and make pubs nicer. Why is the attractive to women and families? to slow down drinking. I would have thought you're just doubling your clientele there. Very good point. I guess...
It stops mad binging. It stops like people just going in just to drink, isn't it? Like just drink as pubs, right? Exactly. Get on their best behavior. If only women had the same impact now when they walked into a pub, suddenly everyone is a complete gentleman. into your childhood, Anna, that you think children are part of the drinking problem in this scenario. Don't let them in. They're out of control.
But it's basically gastropubs. I think the British government kind of invented the gastropub. Yeah. It was called disinterested management, wasn't it? The idea where you would give your landlords big commissions if they sold soft drinks or if they sold food, but you wouldn't really give them any commission if they sold alcohol. And it started, the idea started with private temperance people started buying a few... pubs to do this and then the government thought oh that's a good idea
Right. Wait, and we should say it did expand out of Carlisle, presumably, or was it just the poor people of Carlisle who couldn't get a drink anywhere? It was mostly Carlisle, I think. I think it was across the country that the laws were passed that limited things like ours, right? So you were...
allowed to drink between 12 and 2 or between 6.30 and 9.30. It's interesting that they wanted to turn it so that more women and children were going in because I did read that women were a big problem for the drinking in 1916. So there was a magistrate that... dealt with a case with a guy called Captain Oversby that said he said
In the opinion of the committee, the great increase in the number of women visiting public houses during the past year has demanded drastic treatment. And they all wanted to put in place things like, this is the quote, partitions, snugs, and other obstacles likely to... facilitate secret drinking be done away with so they
Women were just a big problem for the people of England, apparently, because they kept going getting pissed at the pub. I think it was basically there was like these factions, wasn't there? Like a lot of people, temperance was kind of a thing and people were trying to stop people from...
drinking in general and obviously the war helped that argument but then obviously a lot of other people were thinking not so when um they decided that they would allow or try and get more women into pubs there were 37 000 female signatories in Birmingham of a petition demanding that women not be allowed in pubs until a certain age. That's incredible. Wow. Keep women in the home and out of the pubs. There were lots of changes that were made also to pub designs.
because there were structural things in the building that you could do to slow down drinking, bizarrely. So pubs used to consist of lots of little rooms, and those were all done away with inside. It became one large space inside. could be more easily supervised so snugs that were you know potential for naughtiness uh and and binge drinking and there were snob screens you know these no snob screen you will all have seen one uh because it's this etched pane of glass, right?
In some very old classic Victorian pubs, you will still see them to this day. And it basically is erected between two bits of a pub. You can see through it kind of one way. The middle class drinkers have their own space, which you can kind of see through. You can see through to the working class. drinkers next door but the working class drinkers can't see back at you and so it gets called a snob screen
Yeah, and those were done away with as well in loads and loads of pubs and they survived in some. There's one right by Oxford Circus which still has snob screens. But we don't have snugs anymore, which is so sad. I think you get a few snugs in Ireland still, but they sound so great.
sometimes the snugs could be entered just from the outside but you couldn't get into a snug from inside the pub and these were like like andy says they were for people who didn't want to be seen in the pub so if you're quite a classy chap or women often like dan said like women
and didn't want to be known as drinkers. So you enter a snug from outside, sit in the snug, no one in the pub can see you and then the barman just has to wheel round a tray of drinks and then you pull it in through like a little letterbox in your snug. That sounds really fun. It does sound fun. Can I ask, Andy, these snob screens in...
You said there's a few in London. I've been to, I would say, most of the pubs around Oxford Circus, and I've never seen this. Does that mean that they've put me in the working class bit? Oh, dear. And I've just been unaware of it. I've been breaking the code here.
Forget everything I said, James. I don't think any of them have them anymore. Okay. I think I said before, or maybe I didn't, about how they made the beer weaker, obviously to stop drunkenness. And there was a... song by Weston and Lee in World War I which was very popular because it was about this and some of the lyrics are really good so have you read it seen what's said of it in the mirror and the mail it's a substitute And a pub-stitute. And it's known as the Government Ale.
And it goes on, blah, blah, blah. Oh, they say it's a terrible war, oh, law. And there never was a war like this before. But the worst thing that ever happened in this war is Lloyd George's beer. so for some people the whole thing that was happening with the war it was the weak beer that was the real killer I'm gonna bet that those were two guys who had not been to the front
And beer never fully recovered after the war. What do you mean? It's hardly remembered these days. Yeah. Apparently after the war, it was pretty much remained about 19... percent weaker so it used to be slightly stronger before the war it never quite climbed back up there unless and obviously now we're in london you get all these ponzi craft beers like last night i was drinking a ponzi beer i'd bought and i tasted a bit weird and i realized it was 11 so
We are gradually, gradually recovering the percentages. Jesus Christ. Generally, yeah, suffered. There is a pub that I'd love for all of us to go to when we're back in pub land. Amen. It's the Dolphin Tavern, and it's not far from our offices in Covent Garden. It's up in Holborn. And the initial pub that was built on the site...
was bombed to the ground on the 8th of September 1915, and it was completely destroyed, rubble everywhere, and they decided to rebuild it. So in the process of moving away the rubble, they discovered one of the remaining surviving things was a clock. that had stuck at 10 40 pm the exact moment that the bomb was dropped and crashed down on top of it and ruined everything and so the dolphin pub to this day has that clock sitting
with the exact time that it was bombed in 1915 on the wall for you to see. That's very clever because also it always gives the impression that it's about to be last audience. Dan, does it have a snob screen? If it has a snob screen, I'll go. Well, but then we won't get to hang out. with james no no i'll be by myself in the uh
Have you heard my accent? I'm getting behind that snob screen. You'll be in the snog with the other women, I'm afraid. Actually, like it was until relatively recently, it was quite unusual for women to go to pubs, especially drinkers pubs.
You wouldn't see that that often. And it was only the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 that meant a lot of places would start allowing women in even. There was a pub called the Grill Pub in Aberdeen that... famously had a sign outside that said, no ladies please. and wouldn't let any women in at all. And in 19... In fact, it was in 1975... No, it was in 1973 that a group of women ripped the sign off the door and went into the pub and demanded to be served.
and the police had to come in. And actually, I think the police escorted them out of the premises, but they refused to leave until they finished their drinks. And eventually, obviously, this act came in in 1975, so there was nothing they could do. had to let these women in, but they didn't install a female toilet until 1998.
Well, I bet they regretted that when the cleaner had to do a serious job on the floor every night. Isn't that amazing? There was a pub called Elvino, which was a big journalist's pub. And there's a book by Helen Lewis called... difficult women which is all about history of feminism and the the opening of it is about the fight for women to get served at alvino because you weren't allowed to go
to the bar as a woman. This was after the Sex Discrimination Act. This was in the early 80s. So it's several years later and the courts were just not upholding it because they said, well, this is too... Trivial to uphold or whatever. And if you went in, as a woman, you weren't supposed to wait at a table.
And the guys would go up to the counter. That is true. And it was the early 80s, like you say. And a lot of places you'll see that will say on the internet that it was still legal to not serve women in pubs until 1982. it was this case when eventually it was a solicitor called Tess Gill and a journalist called Anna Coote and they went to court and they won which meant that there was now a precedent there was already the law but now it was a precedent which meant they had to be
served. They said that I think the pub management had justified it by saying well look If you allow women to stand at the bar, they're going to put their bags down and that's going to create absolute chaos. OK, there will be no room at the bar for people because it's going to be full of bags. And what Tess Gill, genuinely, that was their argument, and what Tess Gill and her colleague did.
was they got a couple of male friends to go in, put their briefcases down on the counter, clearly taking up space when the pub was very empty. So clearly that is a breach of the rules that the pub is trying to say only applies to women and the men kind of gathered evidence.
that way and that's one of the ways they're one yeah wow so i actually think the greatest contribution that teskill and anna anna coots made uh obviously women are allowed in all pubs now but also i'm guessing those little hooks under the bar because of them too
Right? Must be. I can't tell you how grateful I often am for those. Hey, Dan, you asked earlier about what happened to the... state management scheme the carlisle experiment you know because it was going to be for the duration of the war plus one year afterwards right so that would have been 1919 they kept the pubs until 1973 that was when the last ones were sold off it was i know
It was a serious success. And I read a website about the state management scheme, the official name of it, which asked why this thing lasts so long. There were two reasons it lasts so long. Number one, it made a profit every year for the government. It was so profitable.
And number two, the economic and political problems facing Britain in the 20s and 30s that ultimately led to the Second World War and the rebuilding problems in the 50s and 60s were far more politically urgent than dealing with state management of pubs in Carlisle.
I don't know if you guys have ever been out for a drink in the Carlisle area, but I am not that surprised that they did all this stuff. But one of the other reasons is because at the start of World War One, there was a bit of a rise of Irish nationalism.
in Ireland and a lot of the workers who came over to the munitions factories in Carlisle were Irish and there was a worry that if the rise in nationalism in Ireland kind of spilled over to Carlisle it might not be just that they struggled to work. because they were hungover, but also that it might cause political discontent in that area. Well, speaking of Ireland, we've made a big deal about British pubs, but really...
we've got nothing on Irish pubs. They're the big global export, aren't they? And I was wondering, when did they get so big? How long have they been around? I reckon they date back to the 6th century, which is quite a lot older than ours. I think I've been to some Irish pubs. Irish pubs with some old boys in there that bid versus the 6th century.
So in the sixth century, there was a law passed that said every single local king, and there are about 140 in Ireland, had to have their own personal brewer. And the brewer had to keep a never dry cauldron, which basically, and it was called like a brew goo.
That's amazing. And the cauldron by law had to serve free food, free alcohol and free entertainment to anyone who passed by just in case it was the king. And there were loads of rules. They had to be on a crossroads. They had to have torchbearers all around. to give passers-by a welcome and invite them in. It was so good. And if you were caught running a brew goo and you couldn't provide free booze, free food, free whatever entertainment, then by law, the sort of state of the...
poet of the region had to write a satire about you, a poetic satire to publicly humiliate you. That's so good. Oh my God. Hey, just modern day London pubs again. Another one I'd love to go to is The Grapes in London. which is, well, for one main reason, they have a pub quiz there, and sometimes it is supposedly run by Gandalf.
Serene McKellen. What? Really? Yeah, he bought the pub. Oh, is this the one that he owns? Yeah, he owns a pub. It's called The Grapes. He bought it in 2012. If you don't know the answer and you want to pass, does he say, you shall not pass? Is that a joke about...
lord of the rings i don't know god that's like seeing someone score a basketball hoop while blindfolded considering you've never seen it yeah it's like the lady from bristol on her first concord flight she doesn't know what she's doing um yeah it's He does the hosting sometimes, apparently. He mentions it on his Twitter occasionally. Who loves pub quizzes? Come to our pub quiz. Let's do it.
But we won't be allowed to because James will be removed immediately for making bad jokes that he doesn't even understand about Lord of the Rings. It's a hard pub quiz. There are a lot of shadow facts.
Shadowfax is the name of Galar's horse and fact sounds a bit like facts. See, that shows true knowledge. Yeah. Weirdly though, Andy wouldn't be allowed in for a very different reason, which is that was just fucking weird. I would say Andy wouldn't be allowed in because at the end, I think you have to throw... ring into a volcano but andy would have to get a seven year old german girl to do it for him
Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would 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 Schreiberland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. at James Harkin and Anna.
You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. Do check them out. Also, we're back on the road, baby. We're going on tour in October. Nerd Immunity is the name of the show, and we're going to be hitting up over 20 venues across the UK and Ireland. So check them out, see if we're coming to a town near you, and please come along. It's going to be great fun.
Otherwise, we'll just be back here next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.