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Hi everybody, Andy here. Just before we start this week's show, we have an announcement to make. It's a bit of a serious one. It's that for a while we are not going to be able to... record our podcast from our spiritual home, our Covent Garden office anymore. And there's a simple reason for that.
And the reason is that we are going on tour, baby! That's right, I tricked you all. It wasn't bad news, it's good news. You thought someone had died. Quite the reverse. We're going to be on tour live and amplified across the... entirety of the UK and Ireland. We're going to be going all over the shop. Are we going to Barnstable? You bet your bum we're going to Barnstable. Are we going to Poole? As a rule we're going to Poole and 25 other places across the UK and of course not to forget Dublin.
I know what you're thinking. What's the show going to involve? Well, I'll tell you. It's going to be a live, new, fresh podcast right for your ears in the second half every single night. All the bits that are actually too funny to put out in the edited version of the show. And the first half is going to be an extraordinary cavalcade of different things.
So much different stuff is gonna happen in the first half. Elephants, dancing girls, dancing boys, fireworks, Dan's famous avocado trick and a number of other things that I really probably shouldn't actually be promising to you. But Andy, Andy, Andy, how do we get our tickets? It's very simple, everybody. All you have to do is go to nosuchthingasafish.com, find the nearest one, and click book. That's it.
That's it. It's going to be so much fun. We cannot wait to see you there. If you're not there, we'll talk about you behind your back. Alright, that's it. On with the show.
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 am sitting at a ginormous distance from Andrew Hunter-Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Tash... 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 is
James. Okay, my fact this week is that Nate Mercero, who produced the most recent album of Grammy-winning R&B star Leon Bridges, has now started collaborating with actual Bridges. When you're onto a winner. right? Just stick with it. How many elements of your facts had you heard of before discovering this, James? Be honest. I'd heard of bridges.
That's what I suspected. The Grammys. You must have heard of the Grammys. Heard of the Grammys, yeah. R&B stars. I was reading an article in The Guardian about the Golden Gate Bridge, which started making this weird sort of humming noise. But a local musician made some...
singles where he does a duet with the bridge and when I say local musician I mean extremely famous record producer Nate Mercero but I'd never heard of him so I googled him and it turned out that he's worked with people like Jay-Z with Lizzo who I have heard of and also a guy called Leon Bridges who I hadn't heard of but he has got the word Bridges in his name and he's won a bunch of awards so he's obviously very famous and I think that's my problem not his Do they call it...
Bridges over troubled water. This new collaboration with the bridge. They don't call it that. No, I think he went for more that artistic than the punny. I think Simon and Garfunkel are quite, I imagine they're quite litigious. I wouldn't want to get up in their face with that. Simon and Garfunkel. still alive yeah both both yeah both of them both still alive if you've seen them perform on stage you wouldn't know but wow ouch you know what i'm thinking of paul newman
Not Paul Simon, who's not still alive. Well, yeah, Newman and Garfunkel is a very interesting girl. So this Golden Gate Bridge collaboration, I listen to it, it's really good. So you see the bridge in the background and it's just making this weird noise. And then Nate Mercero kind of shambles on after a minute where the bridge is frankly holding the stage very well. But he starts adding some guitar sound over the top of it to kind of match it and...
move around it and it sounds really eerie and great yeah it is spooky he likened it to tibetan singing bowls didn't he which yes those things that just got one of those did you i've seen it yes yeah why did you buy one of those I mean, I have one, but I went to Tibet. Well, the guy in the shop who sold it to me said it's either from Tibet or it's from Wales. And he wouldn't confirm either way where it was from. Dan sent me to a witchcraft shop to buy it. It was great. I bought mine in Tibet.
In Lhasa, the capital of Tibet from a guy called Alan Jones. Interesting, because they don't actually have anything to do with Tibet. So that Tibetan is just ripping you off. Why did they get the Tibet name then? I think it's just one of those Western, let's make it.
make it sound cool and spiritual and it's from summer over there but yeah India or Nepal but apparently I was reading about the dangers of singing bowls and I wonder if the bridge has the same dangers you can get a headache from them So Andy, be careful. Can you? Yeah. And if you're pregnant, which I don't know if you are, then they don't know if it will affect it, but they advise not to risk it.
Who? This was just a website listing the risks of Tibetan singing bowls. Pregnant women can't listen to Tibetan singing bowls. Just don't risk it. We don't know that it would do any damage. But that's, could we virtually say we don't know? anything that will risk pregnancy if we haven't tested it like presumably no doctor's gone
Do you know what I'm going to focus on this week? Seeing how this affects pregnancy, Tibetan singing bowls. Yeah, that's correct. So I think this website is leaning heavily on the safe side. And yeah, don't risk moving, listening to anything. But look, that's my advice. Very strange.
hard to get the recording of the golden gate bridge because basically the reason it's humming is that the wind is going through it they put some new slats on the bridge's railings which is supposed to stop it from getting in trouble in high winds
But all it's done means that when the wind goes through it, it makes this kind of eerie sound. But also it means that when you try and record it, necessarily it's going to be a windy day. And so it's really hard to get the sound of the bridge as well as this and kind of get rid of the sound of the wind.
wind but good on nate mercero managed it yeah he found the cove didn't he he had to go down this cove which was partially blocked by the wind and then in order to get all the equipment uh working they had to bring a car battery down to power it all and so yeah proper process the wind supposedly plays in the note of a so if you want to go and collaborate with it that's your note to go with um which is what yeah i thought it had a range does it not well it emits a 440 hertz hum and so
Yeah, it probably oscillates. It wibbles around a bit. Yeah. So one person said you could tune your oboe to it because that's what your oboe is. Difficult and pointless way of tuning an oboe. If you live in San Francisco, though. And you're an oboist. Yeah, open your window, get tuning. It's nice because Strauss, who is the guy who built the bridge, who engineered the bridge, said... Not Richard Strauss. Not Richard Strauss, no, Joseph Strauss. He was trying to build a massive oboe.
He described it as saying, as harps for the winds of heaven, my web-like cables are spun. So he imagined his bridge as a harp that could be played by the heavens. That's really romantic for a bridge maker, isn't it? That's very poetic, yeah. It's an amazing bridge. I'd never really read about it before or learned anything about it because I've not been to San Francisco. But it's 1.7 miles long and it's across the Golden Gate Strait. Obviously, it's not a golden bridge. It is red.
No, it's orange. Sorry. International orange. International orange. It has its own paint color. Yeah. But it could so nearly have been a no such thing as a fish themed bridge. Yes. Did you guys find this? Yeah. The US Navy wanted to paint it in black and yellow stripes.
In honour of no such thing as a fish. Yeah. 80 years of all Electra. But yeah, yeah. It could have been so cool. And it arrived in the colour that it is now, close to the orange. And when they saw that, they went, actually, that aesthetically would work for...
incoming ships as well and it looks much better than this weird giant warning sign across the bay although i'm skeptical about that so yeah they said i think the navy wanted that and the um army air corps wanted a red and white color scheme so it's visible from the air
And yeah, everyone says, oh, we saw the base layer, which was this orange colour. And we thought that's perfect. But I think what they thought was we've got a fucking massive bridge here. Do we really want to bother painting the whole thing again? Yeah. In two colours. Yeah. In two colours. Nightmare.
There's a great story. So it had two openings, didn't it? The bridge. It had a pedestrian opening. So yeah, there's four openings in total in and out. And then when they actually opened it, they did one day for pedestrians and then they did. Another day for the actual automobiles going across. And on the day that it opened to pedestrians, 18,000 people crossed it.
Many of the 18,000 wanted to set a record of being the first to do something on it. So the first person to get across it was a sprinter called Donald Bryant. So he was the first man to run across it. There were Esther and Anne Bullard, who were the first recorded twins.
Carmen and Minnie Perez were the first skaters. Florentine Caligari was the first on stilts. There was a Scotty, which was the first dog. Police rushed to aid one woman who was staggering along with her tongue out, and it turns out... She was just trying to become the first woman to cross it with her tongue out. Why was she staggering? Did she have a very heavy tongue or something? It's a long walk, as you said. It's a long bridge. Has anyone gone across it while doing a podcast? Ooh.
Great shout. Not in 1937, anyway. The first rope to be taken across, which was taken across by Boy Scout troop number five of San El Salmo by the clubmaster. I had a slim pickings at that stage. Do you think it's someone who's got to the end with their tongue out? Someone's gone, no, someone's already done this. And they've looked in their pockets. They're like, well, I've got a bit of rope here. Has anyone taken a rope over?
There's a brilliant book called Building the Golden Gate Bridge, a worker's oral history by Schwartz Harvey, where he spoke to all the different people who worked on it. I think we said before that when they built it, they put a massive net underneath the bridge so that if anyone fell down...
they fell into that giant net. But people who actually fell in there and survived joined a supposed club called the Halfway to Hell Club. There was someone there who worked on it who said it was the coldest place they ever worked. You had to put on...
all the clothes you owned, and you had to carry on working, otherwise you would just freeze while you were doing it. And there was no women working on the bridge, but there was a woman called Deweese Bowen, who was working as a nurse for all the men who were working on the bridge.
the bridge and she said that what would happen is that their wives would come and visit them and they would always bring them like some bread or salami or some wine and then the men would always give it to the nurses and so they would always say to the nurse make sure you wear a cape tomorrow
And what they would do is they would take their cape and they would hide all the goodies under the cape and then have a midnight snack. Nice. Which is kind of cool, isn't it? But it was really, really dangerous. But the people who worked on it really needed the work. And so there were out-of-work men who would routinely...
line the site of the Golden Gate Bridge and they were waiting for someone to either quit or fall off the bridge. But it was actually safer than other construction projects because Joseph Strauss, a bit ahead of his time in health and safety terms, was...
I was really into things like hard hats. It was the first time hard hats were compulsory. He put this big net under it. It had a lower death rate than most construction projects, although some people still died, obviously. But it still does sound terrifying. I think I was reading in the same book.
an account by a guy who was describing how he was employed to work on it and you took an elevator up through one of the towers right up to the top so at 710 feet you go up in this elevator and he remembers going out for the first time with two painters who were employed. to paint it.
The elevator opened at the top and it opened onto a two foot wide wooden plank, which you had to walk across to get onto the scaffolding. And the two painters said to the elevator operator, well, what are we supposed to do now? And the operator said, well, you walk across that. So they immediately quit.
and asked to be taken back down again. But this guy went for it. So stressful, especially if you've got a row of people shouting at you in the hope that you will fall off standing on the sides. Oh, you missed a bit, mate. Just go a bit further. A bit further out on the plank. I think still...
Like if you're a maintenance worker on there, you have to do this thing on the second day. They make you walk on a cable, which is 36 inches in diameter, but with only a 12 inch strip down the middle that you have to stay on because the rest of it's really slippy and that bit isn't slippy.
So that's your test to get the job. Pretty much, yeah. There's a guy called Greg Monterreno, and he said, if you can't walk the cable, there's no day three. God, how is that interview process when you go in? How are you not falling off bridges? This hum, by the way.
is as a result of them trying to make the bridge safer as well. So they spent ages trying to work out what was causing this hum because it came out of nowhere. And they worked out that it was these new thinner slats that were put on the bridge that were meant to help it withstand.
And... wind because the wind is so great in that area and the bridge at the moment can stand something in the vicinity of 69.34 miles per hour that's sort of what it's built something in the vicinity of 69.34 so can it do 69.3 five miles an hour something in that vicinity yeah but not that that's too high by point
oh one um it's around 69 miles per hour and it has gone beyond that it's gone up to 75 miles per hour and it's managed to stay up but they are worried that if it went higher than that the whole bridge could collapse so these new slats are designed to allow it to withstand 100 mile per hour but that's what caused the hums in the end and they're going to try and fix it now so this might be the only collaboration that the bridge does unfortunately
Well, bridges do tend to make noises anyway. I was reading about a musician called Jodie Rose, who is really obsessed with the sound of bridges. And she's released albums of bridge noises called, I think there's one called Singing Bridges. I was listening to...
one it's kind of nice um don't listen if you're pregnant to a singing bridge if it's tibetan you can't listen to it yeah actually it's a myth that singing bridges are originally tibetan uh yeah it's great she's she's recorded bridges uh like the millennial
The Millennium Bridge, the Batman Bridge in Tasmania, in Finland, Rotterdam, Vietnam. She's travelled all over the world on the profits that she makes from selling her bridge-based sound albums. What is she listening to? Is it people on the bridge or is it these bridges that... Can I just say, I've walked across the Millennium Bridge on many, many...
occasions and never noticed the sound she puts a microphone on the actual cables so you catch the creaking and i guess when you walk across it maybe your ear is pinned to the cables themselves well it is because i'm trying to be the first person to cross it with my ear pinned to the ground I love you.
So there are mysterious hums around the world, around the universe in fact. Voyager 1 spacecraft has just managed to detect the background hum of interstellar space for the first time. Apparently the universe hums.
That's so good that the universities are going, hmm. Hmm. Yeah. Do you think it's skeptical? Yeah, not sure. I think disapproving. Yeah, not sure. Yeah. There is a constant hum of interstellar plasma, apparently, and it's caused when a star... such as the sun sends out a coronal mass ejection, which is something we discussed the other day with Robin Ince, then it will fire into this plasma and kind of make the electrons sort of...
vibrate a little bit and you can and you can measure that it's going to be a whole grammy category for this one day collaborations you know horses ears sometimes hum yeah yeah that's right Um, this was... You said that like you had to convince yourself. I am looking at my nose and thinking, can this be true? But yeah, in 1995, vets at Newmarket were doing some surgery on a horse's lip. And they noticed that his ear was emitting a sound a bit like...
The sound you hear when you've got a bit of tinnitus, like a beeping sound. And they didn't know why, but I went on horse and hound forum and other people have had this problem. I think humans have it sometimes. Yes, humans do get it. Objective tinnitus. Extremely rare. Much more rare than subjective tinnitus. It's making a ringing knot. Your ear makes a ringing knot. Exactly. Whoa.
So, you know, if you have tinnitus, go to the ENT surgeon just in case they have a listen and go, yeah, you're right. No, it's not. It's not in your head. Well, it is in your head. It's going to be annoying if Nate Mercero follows you around with his guitar just trying to make songs.
Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everyone. We'd like to let you know that this week we're sponsored by TV licensing. That's right. I have a TV license. James has a TV license. As a result, we have access to over 400...
TV channels and everything on BBC iPlayer because that is the magic that it brings you. James, you've been watching anything recently? Yes, QI. I'm contractually obliged to say I watch that all the time. The new series of that is just coming to an end now. I'll tell you what.
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driven but it's his amazing look at all the different things that are happening in this world and why maybe the world's not quite as bad as everyone thinks it is it's so so good what about you Dan what you've been watching uh so well you know I've got three young sons and uh we watch a lot of tv together So collectively, we have been binging on Bluey.
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consume all of these amazing shows on any device. If you want to find out more information of how to get one, head to tvl.co.uk slash pod. That's right. So go to tvl.co.uk forward slash pod to learn more. On with the podcast. On with the dog cast. Ah, woof. Got a side hustle? Like making money from a hobby? Selling stuff online? Or doing a bit of dog walking outside your day job?
You might need to tell HMRC so you don't get any tax surprises. To take the hassle out of your side hustle, search HMRC Help for Hustles. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Anna. My fact this week is that dragonflies used to be the same size as modern day pigeons. Wow. Terrifying. Yeah.
Yeah. Frightening fact. So bad. No, because dragonflies are beautiful and cool. That's true. Pigeons are not. You're right. I don't know. They're scary. All right. James, if you could replace every pigeon in the world with a dragonfly of equivalent size, would you? A hundred percent. Really? Everyone would, wouldn't they? Actually, I would too. What?
We found the real fault line in fish after seven years. Oh, but dragonflies. Well, dragonflies, prior to reading this, I would have been fine with it. Having now read what they're like, I think they're terrifying creatures. What were they like? They weren't that bad. Okay, so they were larger than your average dragonfly.
And they were, in fact, the largest insect ever, probably. This was about 300 million years ago in the Paleozoic era. And they're called meganeura. Sometimes they're referred to as griffin flies. And they had a 70 centimeter wingspan, about 40.
centimeters long and yeah the grandparents of the modern dragonfly they would be able to hunt larger things than they can hunt today i guess but yeah they were the biggest flying things basically until reptiles started flying they were the biggest things you'd ever see in the sky amazing wow
So cool. They're really interesting things. And they were allowed to get this big because the oxygen levels in the air were so high at the time. They were 40% oxygen in the air as opposed to 21 now. So they just had a lot more potential power in the air around them.
How big would we have been, though, if we were around then? Huge. I always say this. I think this is ridiculous. You always find these fossils of, like, giant dragonflies, giant millipedes, like, giant reptiles. Where are the giant humans? Where are they?
the ship wide open and Darwin is turning in his grave. The answer is we would not necessarily have been that much bigger because they were large because they breathe in a different way to us. So they don't have any lungs, insects. They essentially breathe through little holes.
particles exactly in their skin and actually scientists don't really know how they get enough oxygen to themselves at all because and i learned this fact which i found amazing while researching this each oxygen molecule if it was moving through empty air it could move
at about half a kilometer per second. But because it crashes into other molecules, so often it goes one centimeter a second. So every second it has 10 billion collisions. So that's basically like, imagine you're an insect and you've just...
got these holes which are waiting for an oxygen molecule to drift in and there's an oxygen molecule you know 10 centimeters away it's making billions and billions and billions of collisions it's never going to get to you okay so this is why in the olden days when oxygen was more concentrated they could get more oxygen inside their bigger bodies but now they can only really get them on the surface of their bodies so as soon as they get too fat
They can't breathe anymore. If they've got too much, you know, meat in their body, the oxygen molecules can't go in. Whereas we suck oxygen in, we, you know, use our diaphragm. Question, because they eat a lot and they eat a lot quite quickly. So... If, let's say, imagine we were the thing they were eating, how much oxygen is inside us at this moment? Are we talking about the...
big dragonflies from the past at the moment. Well, shrink me down, no, to a modern day dragonfly. You've been shrunk down in some kind of weird Honey, I Shrunk the Kids movie to the size of a dragonfly. No, I'm the... To the size of a dragonfly. Prey. Prey, exactly. Like a mosquito. Like a mosquito. Dankito, right? Yeah. So does the Dankito, right now, do I have oxygen inside my body?
Yes. So here's the question. If it's that big an eater and it's eating all these things, can you eat oxygen? Is the dragonfly eating my oxygen as well as the food that brings in the oxygen? I think that you would utilize your oxygen. relatively quickly, I think. And also there wouldn't be much oxygen in you compared to the amount of your body. Do you know what I mean? You're not like a balloon where you're completely full of oxygen. You've got many...
Dankito lungs which have got a bit of oxygen in them. But that's not a terrible question, I have to say. Part of it was quite terrible. I think it's quite a good question. They don't have lungs, so they can't breathe it in. So what are you going to do? You're going to eat it in. What do you eat? You eat other things that breathe.
then yeah they don't have much oxygen in them but it's a bit isn't it also the question is whether your stomach can dissolve the oxygen as well as your lungs or spiracles can Yeah, yeah. I don't really understand the premise of Dan's questions. I've just got Dan as a mosquito in my head now. Quite irritated, aren't they, mosquitoes?
Dragonflies? Yeah. They're misnamed, I would say. They're not... Dragons or flies. Exactly. And they don't spend most of their life flying. They spend years of their life... As larvae, living in water, moving around, eating away, breathing through their bottoms, that's the majority of their life. Breathing through their bottoms, you say? Yeah.
They do. If they were to shove something up their bum which had oxygen in it, would they be able to... Like Dan in mosquito form. Put me up the bum. I don't think this reboot of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is going to work, guys.
Yeah, I find that amazing that so many animals live in eternal youth and then just a very brief adulthood. How cool is that? Lucky buggers. Imagine just being a teenager forever. And then at the very end, you've got this crappy adulthood bit. No, you don't want the teenager. You want to be a teenager.
child forever yeah okay you're right yeah they have terrifying childhoods as well or terrifying for everything around them because they're amazing hunters as adults but also in the water so they have this extendable jaw called a labium and it looks like the thing in alien
The alien. It's sort of folded up. It's got this... arm on a spring under its jaw and when it sees prey passing by that jaw shoots out and grabs it some species have pincers some don't but it's all terrifying and they're amazing hunters yeah and it can the way that the
arm comes out of their mouth is it's hydraulic isn't it and they suck in water through their anus and they use that water hydraulically to fire out the arm from their mouth oh cool it's incredible that's amazing it genuinely is do we have any system like that on us do you think that you could have got this far in life and then suddenly someone tells you oh damn by the way
No one's told you this so far, but if you soak water through your bum, a hand comes out of your mouth. I've just learned my ears can hum. That is new information to me. Next time you're in the bathtub, just give it a go. Try and grab the soap from across the bathtub. But purposefully don't use my arms. Just suck through my anus. Suck through your anus and see if your jaw shoots out. But it's really weird because they, yeah, as James says, they blast it out and they can use that...
It sort of creates this massive pressure wave inside them, this water that they've sucked in, and then it generates a pound of pressure, which is quite a lot for a tiny... dragonfly nymph but they can also use it another way they can use it as an escape mechanism because they can unclench blast the water out and then jet themselves away through the water so don't do that in the back I'm going through the window into my neighbours back here
Bye. Bye. they've also got an amazing this is when they're adults their ability to hunt food is pretty spectacular so they've been put in laboratories and and scientists have watched the sort of rate of catch against the prey that they're going for and it's a 95 percent of the time they can catch what they're aiming to catch they're just absolute mega predators this is one of those experiments the way they looked at how they do this is one of those experiments where i think
How did scientists manage it? So they made a backpack for them and they strap it on. But then they, in order to look at what's happening in their neurons when they're hunting to find out how their brain is doing this, they connect. wires to the equivalent of their spinal cord and you read the articles and it's just like they say this casually yeah how's someone doing that yeah well they've got dan in the lab in mosquito form dan keto to the rescue
they discovered that they don't just react really quickly they can predict where insects go so they watch their neurons like firing and they watch an insect's trajectory and they can see which direction it's really clever although like this morning I opened a cupboard in my house and some sugar
fell out and without even thinking i caught it so wow you're the dragonfly of this podcast basically i'd rather that than the mosquito i'm not i mean if anything this means i get to hang out with timothy c weingard author of the mosquito a human Do you guys know what doesn't get enough airtime in all this chat about dragonflies? Ooh, tell us. No. Damselflies. Damselflies. What a guess. Andy, we're on the same page here.
I'm so glad you agree. They're basically dragonflies, but a bit smaller and people don't know as much about them. So the way you can tell the difference between a damsel and a dragon is that damselflies hold their wings back against their body, whereas dragonflies can't do that. And also... So dragonflies have their two eyes kind of like merged together at the front of their face, whereas damselflies have them...
on either side. But damselflies can climb underwater even when they're adults, which dragonflies can't. So dragonflies lay their eggs. How do you climb underwater? Well, good question. They climb backwards down a plant. Like getting into a swimming pool with a ladder.
It's exactly like that, yeah. Certain damselflies, they have to lay their eggs underwater. It's usually inside plant matter. And they, like you climb down a ladder of a pool, climb backwards down the stem of a plant, and they can be underwater for about half an hour. And they turn their wings into... Half an hour? Yeah. So what's their oxygen intake? Here we go again. Dan Keto to the rescue.
You can't do it, Dan. I'm just going to tell you now. They turn their wings into a kind of snorkel. Dan, are you all right? I'm just trying to be a damsel fly. If you can work out how to trap an air bubble between your wings and then use that to breathe for half an hour. Oh, wow. That's very good. God, that's so cool. That's a human thing that I think we should nail, trapping near a bubble. Well, we have scuba equipment. We do. Okay, that's solved. Forget my hand bubble I wanted to invent.
This massive, massive dragonfly, the first one was discovered by a guy called Frank Carpenter, who's in America. And he got into fossilized insects at the age of 14. And he was really, really into them. Like, you know, wasn't into girls. football and stuff he was just all i want to do is look at fossilized insects nice but
He was like in a little town in Oklahoma. And what's he going to do? Well, luckily, the local neighborhood postman called Waldo Dodge was also an amateur entomologist. And he noticed that this young kid was getting loads.
of books about fossilized insects sent to his house and he said mate i can help you and he got him invited to the cambridge entomological club nearby and then eventually he became a harvard professor of entomology and in 1992 just after his 90th birthday he published his classification of fossil insects
Wow. That's a happy story. Isn't it? Starting at 14 and knowing what you want to do with your life all the way to 90. That's really nice. To have job satisfaction like that. Dream of it. When he got the... big dragonfly in the first place it was part of a um a hunting trip where he and a colleague um in 10 weeks managed to collect more than 5 000 fossil insects wow nice wow what's that 500 a week So that was about how many a day?
Let's say 80. Yeah. Pretty good. That's pretty damn good. For waking hours, 16 hours, that's five an hour every hour. They're going to have breaks. Yeah, you're right. It's more like 20 an hour if you have a lunch break and maybe a little evening break to talk about all the fossilized insects you find. Where is this goldmine?
They're looking for all their fossilised insects in. That's incredible. I guess no one's looking for them, right? There must have been a big pile somewhere and then they took the rest of the week off or something. I love that postman's name, Waldo Dodge. I know. So good. It was so much harder to find Waldo when he's got dodged.
capacities i have a little sideline where i collect the names of people which double as short sentences and waldo dodge is going on the list very cool who else is on the list uh nancy drew who i know is a fictional character but wesley snipes um
Cheryl Strayed is an author. Are you counting Waldo Dodge as like an imperative sentence? That is a B-list I have created within my main list. If you put a comma after Waldo and an exclamation mark after Dodge, it works as an imperative, doesn't it? Yeah, exactly. Absolutely, yeah. But imperatives are...
lower category. I agree. So punctuation is allowed. They're not a proper sentence. I mean, you know, there's no main verb. Oh my God. Andy's literally brought the list up on his phone here. Rosa Parks. Jeremy Irons. Eric Pickles. You know, they're just Sean Combs. No, he coombs, doesn't he? I think coombs, yeah. Oh, is it? John coombs his hurr. But then it could be an imperative. Puff, daddy. There we go. He's back on the list. Or Pete. Diddy?
Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Germany's parliament has 709 real politicians and one fictional one. How do they tell the difference? Satire. It's not a satire. It's as close as I get. What are we saying? It's like they're all fake. No, it's Angela Merkel that she made up. It's not Angela Merkel.
Angela Merkel. So this is the story of Jakob Maria Meerscheid. He is a father of four. He's a widower. He trained as a tailor. He's an expert on Columba palumbus, which is a species of... pigeon he's someone who tried to make it so that the official transcripts of every final sentence from members speech were banned from the record since they always ended in the exact same thing and thus i conclude and most notably of all he is not real
He's completely made up and he has been recognized by all the members of their parliament over 40 years now. And he is a person that was on the official website. He had his own profile. He has his own Twitter account, but he doesn't exist.
What's going on? So he was a fictional composite member to replace a guy who was called Carlo Schmidt, who was a founding father of Germany's constitution. And the name came from one former member of parliament and the date of birth from another. And they just created him. as this character to be a part of this little town.
Just a joke, right? Just a typical German gag. No particular reason. They like Carlos Schmidt. But everyone seemed to just like him as a character. And so he gets mentioned occasionally in the actual parliament. But does he have a swing of vote? No. The Bundestag's website has a description of Meerscheid, and it says, I am neither an invention nor a patent. I am a solution.
So he's denying it. He says, like constitutional lawyer Friedrich Nagelmann and professional diplomat Edmund F. Dracker, my colleagues in the judiciary and the executive with whom I enjoy working, I belong to the pillars of our state.
These two people, Friedrich Nagelmann and Edmund F. Drucker, are also fictional. It's very weird. And there seems to be a German thing, these kind of in-jokes. Like there's that town in Germany called Bielefeld, which is sort of the opposite. It's got a population of 350,000.
people all real but there's a running joke that it doesn't exist and so all germans know of it as not existing it's the 18th largest city in germany but even angela merkel last time she went there made a speech there and then the next day she went somewhere else and said you know
I've just been to Bielefeld, or have I? Is it even real? Who knows? And then if you say, well, I've actually been to Bielefeld, so I know it's there, they go, oh, you're part of the conspiracy, are you? Exactly, yeah. The aliens are in your brain. That's so funny. I did find out a place that is in Germany, and it's not fictional, but it existed as a weird...
quasi-real entity just after the end of the Second World War. This is really bizarre. It's a town called Schwarzenberg. It's near the border with what was Czechoslovakia. And during the end of the war... both the Soviets and the American forces stopped outside.
Which is really strange, because they had possibly miscommunicated about where everyone was going to stop their advance. So it seems to have been the last independent bit of German territory that wasn't occupied by the Allied powers. And they... sort of de-Nazified. The mayor had been an enthusiastic member of the party. They issued new stamps, new train schedules, and they imagined they were going to be a kind of Hong Kong territory.
Like independent from the rest of Germany. From the mainland, if you like, from mainland Germany. And then after seven weeks, the Soviets heard there were uranium deposits there and invaded. But it was a brief dream.
You've got to hide those. Why are they stopped on either side? Is that like they couldn't agree who was going to come to meet who? Like you meet a friend. It's like you come to me. No, you come to me. It is really weird. I think they both agreed they were going to stop at a certain river. And I think the river has a weird shape.
Or maybe the river has two bits. Maybe the river bisects. I don't know the exact geography of Schwarzenberg. I'm sorry. I haven't done one. But there was some miscommunication. Damn that uranium. I found some other fake people, not necessarily German. Walter Plinge. Is that another one of your burby names? What is the verb to plinge? A small plunge? That's what a damselfly does into the water.
Yeah, Walter Plinge, he is basically, we know the term Alan Smithy for movies, where you would put that name down if you didn't want to be credited because something had gone wrong. Walter Plinge, kind of similar territory in that he can be used as that. british theater in that case but also it's when a part hasn't been cast it will be said to be played by walter plinch or if an actor is playing two roles in the theater one will be benedict cumberbatch
the other Walter Plinge. I don't know if he's done that. Well, he has done that because he did Frankenstein. Except there was someone playing the other role, which was... Johnny Lee Miller. Yes.
But they swapped roles each night. Yeah. So there was never a chance for Plinge to get in there, I see. Yeah, poor Plinge. If Johnny Lee Miller had been ill and Benedict Cumberbatch had to play both Frankenstein and the monster, that would have been a good chance to have Plinge. Plinge would have been right in there, yeah. There was a member of the...
J-pop band AKB48 called Aguchi Aimi but she was completely fictitious she was computer generated so they took bits from all of the members of AKB48 because there's 48 or there used to be 48 members of them They took all different bits and put them all together to make this new member. And it turned out that she was a publicity stump for Glyco Ice Know Me, which are grape-flavoured ice balls. Grape-flavoured ice balls? They need all the publicity they can get, don't they?
They sound good to me, grape-flavoured ice balls. Lovely, because any glass of water can become a glass of wine if you just add some of this and let them melt. No? It's not wine, ice balls. Grapes made. White's made out of grapes. Yeah, but they haven't fermented it, have they? There's a process. If you give me grape juice and say it's basically the same as wine, I am going to be pissed off by that. Imagine if you ordered an AK-47 and you accidentally got AKB-48.
turning up. You'd be so disappointed. That's a real mix-up in the others and warehouses. I can't eat grapes because they're too cold for my teeth anyway. Really? So this would be a nightmare. Well, you have to cut them open and then sort of lick them to warm them up. Anna, you're a pretty hard person in lots of ways. That is the most pathetic thing I've ever heard. I've got sensitive teeth again.
Wow, we found out his weakness after all these years. That's it. It's my kryptonite. Grape tonight. Gosh. Has anyone heard of Avril Lavigne? Oh, this feels like a trick question. Yeah, this is a trick question. Completely fake person. Doesn't exist. No. No, I'm joking. Of course. I may not know who Leon Bridges is, but I do know who Abigail Levine is. But what's this? She recorded a song called Dolphin.
that if you go on these websites which give you lyrics to music they give you the lyrics to this song dolphins the lyrics go dolphins live in the ocean dolphins live in the sea dolphins live in nice clear blue sea they are accompanied by lots of animals we love them you love them i love them who doesn't like them so this is the amazing lyrics to avril lavine's dolphins turns out doesn't exist
It's a completely made up song that someone put into one of these lyrics websites and all the other lyrics websites kind of took them on as well. Right. This was in an article for Fusion online magazine. It's really, really good. Highly recommend you read it. Yeah, and there are two cover versions online of this song that doesn't exist. There's no music for it, so people have had to guess what the...
melody is. So is it to expose these lyric websites for their copycattery? I genuinely think someone just did it for a laugh. I don't think there's anything behind it, really. Maybe to expose Avril Lavigne for her quite basic lyrics. Uh, excuse me, I would say complicated. Well, okay, you can't just name your song complicated and claim. What can we do about the massive simplicity of these lyrics? I don't know, call it complex? Wait, so do people think that she'd actually released it? Yeah, yeah.
Definitely. Lots of people thought, because if you go on the lyrics website, you search all of Avril Lavigne's songs, you see it. Unless you've got every single record that Avril Lavigne's ever... release like i do you're not going to think well this is one i've never heard of yeah bragging there about your levine discography i don't normally go on lyrics websites and search for an artist and then look through what they've got what i normally do is i type in
Big blue shoe lyric misheard. And then that'll take me straight there. But it's annoying when the lyric websites copy each other. I do grant you that. It's really annoying. I like it when a lyric website is handcrafted by one person listening to a song. poem to the lyrics is that a thing yeah maybe i've just been believing them and singing the wrong lyrics to you know done bummy love which done bummy love done bummy love that's what i thought that was That's a very different song, isn't it? Wow.
Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everyone. We'd like to let you know that this week we're sponsored by TV licensing. That's right. I have a TV license. James has a TV license. As a result, we have access to over 400. TV channels and everything on BBC iPlayer because that is the magic that it brings you. James, you've been watching anything recently? Yes, QI. I'm contractually obliged to say I watch that all the time. The new series of that is just coming to an end now. I'll tell you what.
else i watched um someone you and i both know dave gorman's new show oh modern life is good it is an amazing show it's dave gorman who you might know very fair to say nerdy comedian absolutely powerpoint driven it's all powerpoint
driven but it's his amazing look at all the different things that are happening in this world and why maybe the world's not quite as bad as everyone thinks it is it's so so good what about you Dan what you've been watching uh so well you know I've got three young sons and uh we watch a lot of tv together So collectively, we have been binging on Bluey.
recently an equally nerdy show it's about dog and her dog family and uh yeah it's a good aussie accents and they can talk um talking dogs talking dogs yeah anything else yeah Hey, Dougie. Hey, Dougie. Another dog-based show. Talking dog. You know, even more than shows about talking dogs and talking Dave Garman's, there is so much more to be had if you get yourself a TV license. That's right. And once you have this TV license, you can...
consume all of these amazing shows on any device. If you want to find out more information of how to get one, head to tvl.co.uk slash pod. That's right. So go to tvl.co.uk forward slash pod to learn more. On with the podcast. On with the dog cast. Aw, woof. okay it is time for our final fact of the show that is andy my fact is that before it was somewhere to go to powder your nose a powder room was a room where you stuck your head through the wall to get your wig powdered okay So...
Is there a hole for you to put your head in, or do you have to smash your head through the walls? That's what I'm currently thinking. In classy establishments, the hole is pre-provided for you, and you just pop your head through. So there aren't many of these places around, obviously, because no one wears...
the big grey wigs anymore except lawyers I guess a few barristers still wear them but there are a few places left historical buildings where they survive Southside House is a manor house in Wimbledon in southwest London and it's got a lot of beautiful historical features
one of them is this weird cupboardy room which has a hole in the wall and you would stick your head through the wall and a servant in there would powder the wig for you right i couldn't work out is the servant which i think was a young boy usually do they live there the whole time i couldn't work that out i don't i'm sure it depends maybe if there's a regular wig powdering time or if you have parties right quickly get your wig repowder yeah and why does it have to be a
separate room are the wig wearers pretending it's like magic you just put your head in i mean why do they need to be locking themselves in this have you read the process about how much powder goes into like the collateral powder of powder. It's a messy situation. Extraordinary. I mean, the opposite version of that is they used to have rooms. They found this in one case where you would sit inside in a barber's chair, basically, and through the hole.
in the wall would be your powderer effectively your hairdresser in a different room applying the powder just through the hole and just smashing your face with it and in order to not get it all over your clothes or all over your face you would wear gowns
like you would in a salon and you would wear a weird cone over your face to stop the powder from... Yeah, a powder cone. Yeah, exactly. Which makes you look like a really terrifying medieval doctor, doesn't it? Yes, the plague mask. The plague mask, yeah.
They're very strange. But presumably the poor servant in the cupboard is absolutely covered. He's choking on powder by the end of the day. You'd guess so, yeah. The Peruk powder page, which is what they were called. Really? Peruk, old name for a wig. Kind of interesting, actually, like the word Peruk meant a wig by the 1560s, but in the 1540s, it meant a natural head of hair.
So in 20 years that changed. And that word came from the Italian word peruca, which means wig. Yeah. But the wigs were made of real heads of hair because there were people selling their hair. But also it was standard in much of society, not just high society, in lots of society, for men to be wearing these big wigs. Not just the big wigs, rather. No, exactly. Medium-sized wig.
men wore big wigs um but yeah human hair being sold for wigs was big business throughout this time and i was reading an account in 1840 written by a british writer and this was when wig wearing had really gone out of fashion
most places, but there were parts of France where it was still quite fashionable. So this British writer went to Brittany and was like, the most extraordinary thing about being in France is the peasant hair auctions. And what would happen is you'd have a marketplace in the middle of
of a town or a village, and there'd be a whole queue of girls wanting to sell their hair, and the young girls would mount in turn, mount this platform in the middle, and people would shout out bids. Wow. And after the highest bidder, the girl is shorn on... On the spot, apparently. Like a sheep. Like a sheep. How much would the hair go for? As in, would it be more affordable for you to shave your head, sell your hair?
and then use that money to buy a wig with the selling of their hair. Someone's taking money there. There's a middleman. Yeah. Which is what you don't want in business. But if the amount that your hair sells for it... greatly outnumbers the amount you buy a wig for. I mean, if that's possible, the Nobel Prize in economics is going to you. It's a way of making money from nowhere. Well, look at these auctions. I mean, you know, it doesn't work economically unless you had much better quality hair.
than the wig you wanted to buy exactly you can sell your good hair and buy some shitty hair and you would make money that way but what you're proposing is the wig equivalent of a perpetual motion machine it was
partly expensive because it was hard to harvest. So it's not like a crop which grows really fast and you can cut it down every year. For hair to grow to the ideal length, you sort of need two to four years growth depending on how much you want. And so people would offer women advance payment.
because you've got to make sure you get that head of hair in four years time when it's lush. So you'd pay in advance and say in four years, I'll be back to chop that off. But you'd have to keep an eye on your investment the whole time, right? To make sure that there's not... anything I would sell my hair to multiple different people take all the down payments and then scarf her and that would be my fraud yeah and the good thing is if you shaved your head no one would recognize you
The Romans used to get hair from peasants, didn't they? There was a vogue for blonde hair in Roman times and they went to the conquered sort of Germanic tribes and people even further north than that and they would take the blonde hair from there and then...
The, um... then expensive wigs would be made from them yeah and in the 16th century in italy blonde hair was really popular but it was very hard to get hold of blonde wigs and so what women would do is they would sit on the top of buildings in huge hats they were called solanas So there was a massive brim, but there was no top of the hat. So the sun could bleach their hair.
Oh. Isn't that interesting? Why did they have the massive hat? To stop you from getting tanned skin. But also, you can lay out, if you've got long hair, you lay it out across the brim, can't you? Yes, I bet it was that. So you're bleaching all your hair at the same time. Yeah, the sun tan thing as well, mate.
Well, for a sometime, you don't need a massive hat. You just need a hat that's got a brim. But massive, I'm picturing sort of an umbrella-sized. I like Andy's theory. They used to be made of metal. In the... Metal wigs. The wig era. Yeah, weird, right? Sort of long strands of tin or steel, I think. Not many. But it wasn't a big fashion. But there are accounts, aren't there, of iron wigs? Yes, iron wigs, yeah. Edward Wortley Montague was an author and traveler. He had an iron wig.
And there was an advertiser who said it could withstand rain, wind and hail and all without causing discomfort to the wearer, which feels like a bit of a stretch. The practical wig, though. And then they went out of fashion, didn't they? For various reasons. One, there was a wig tax. Wig powder? attacks even. Sorry, that's what I mean. Yeah. It was Pittly Younger, wasn't it?
Yeah, and there was a licensing system, like a TV license. I'll tell you what, if Pitt was a bit older, he wouldn't bother about wigs so much. It's all right for those young people to say no one should have wigs.
But it was roughly the cost of a modern TV license, I think. Right. It was one guinea a year, which I have read... How much TV licenses? Well, about 150 quid in modern money. And so, I mean, there are obviously different ways of calculating it, but yeah, that's roughly it. Well, the hope was that...
they were going to sort of use that money to fight Napoleon. Yeah. It was crazy. It worked. Did it? Did it? Yeah, it made a lot of money. Because I thought people just stopped doing it as a result. In the first year, it raised £200,000, which was a lot. But then...
By 1869, it was only raising £1,000 a year as Wiggy's had gone out. And you were exempt if you were royal or if you were a clergyman on less than £100 a year. There were various exemptions. Yeah, the royals need the help, don't they? Poor guys. And also it allowed... them to create a funny nickname guinea pigs because pigtails were all the rage men used to wear them and it cost a guinea for the wig tax i mean it's perfect so was that the origin of guinea pigs in terms of the animal
No, not the animal. Just in terms of that phrase, or is that a completely separate phrase? No. Wait, what do you mean in terms of that phrase? It's the phrase to describe someone being like a lab rat. That came from the fact that people experimented on guinea pigs.
Okay. But were people already experimenting on guinea pigs? Guys, where do you think that meaning of guinea pig would have come from the people who paid a wig tax and also wore the hair in big tails? Because they were the first people being taxed. They were testing the tax on them. It was human guinea pigs.
No, it's from people testing drugs on guinea pigs. Dan, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm with you on this. I'm not saying I'm with me. I was just asking whether or not there's a connection. The worst place to be is with Dan, but he's not on board. I'm not with myself. There's about a dozen early Nobel Prize...
that were won by experiments on guinea pigs specifically. Right, okay. But this phrase is from the... Yeah, but that's not what it meant, though. Right, sorry, yeah. Here's the question. Where does pigs come in into your phrase of guinea pigs? Pigtails. People call them pigtails. Okay, great. Are you back on board with yourself?
No, I'm just learning. What we're not 100% sure of, and maybe we should go back and check the sources, is that in all those early 20th century medical sources, when they referred to testing on guinea pigs, maybe they actually were testing on these overprivileged wig-wearing tops.
I haven't checked. All I'm saying is, was it a phrase that evolved and evolved to a new meaning? Kind of like the wig, but it turns out it's not. So Andy, you're wrong. Wow, this is a sick bird. You're alone on the ship that Dan's built then jumps. No! But they went out of fashion. We know that by about the 1820s. But these weird little holdouts happened, didn't they, across society. So Coachman...
Kept going until the 1820s. Bishops stopped in 1832 by royal permission. They said, we don't want to wear these anymore. Cool people who live in the Hackney today, for instance, like myself, were always wearing periwigs. Right. Well, it's you guys embarrassing. James because baristas and barristers very very strong nice but from the mid 1840s onwards it sort of had a resurgence in court and you were in court you were technically invisible unless you were wearing a wig you
What do you mean technically invisible? You would be, in quotes, not seen or heard. The judge would not recognise you. Wow. So it's a way of being invisible, basically. Oh, I don't know. Where is Lord Plinge? I can't see him anywhere. Like that. Basically that, yeah, yeah. Amazing.
He's going, objection, objection. But he's not got his wig on. Some barristers still wear wigs today. And I read a great piece in the legal magazine called Council, which is a great magazine. And I recommend you all order, order. Can I just... this is brilliant but i just i'm remembering the thing about the cellarfield magazine a few weeks ago and i think this could be andy's magazine corner 100 cellarfield magazine suddenly sounds like an agricultural kind of
auction mag, isn't it? Oh God, another huge AK-47, AKB-48 thing. Oh, I'm just trying to sell a field and you've delivered uranium to me. Now the Soviets are coming.
Put it with the unwanted gun in your pantry. Look, anyway, Council Magazine wrote all about how... wigs were nearly got rid of in court right so in 1940s parliament debated this clause which was going to ban wigs and gowns in court said this is ridiculous so they went out 100 years ago in the rest of society and um it prompted this huge backlash and lots of
MPs, who are obviously very traditionalist as well, objected. One MP asked whether the clause would also deprive admirals of their three-cornered hats or deprive generals of their epaulettes or clergymen of their distinctive attire. He said nothing about nurses. person who had proposed this clause he said nothing about nurses although i think we all agree that they look very pretty in their distinctive attire oh my god i know that has a common stuff jesus christ wow
But there was a fear that judges would not look majestic if they took their wigs off. And that if a judge was seen in his wig, he was embodying the law and very powerful. But if seen without one, he might look like a wizened up gargoyle.
That's really rough on judges. Whig's a big role in the civil rights movement in America. That is because during desegregation in the 60s, there are a lot of jobs where they kind of... banned African-American hairstyles and they kind of said you had to comply with a certain hairstyle and so a lot of people had to wear wigs to kind of cover that up but then there were activists such as Marcus Garvey who said look this is ridiculous we can't be doing this
One, we need to stop people discriminating against. hairstyles but two we need to kind of reclaim our hairstyle and and kind of be proud of it and he said don't remove the kinks from your hair remove them from your brain and then in the 1970s there was kind of a resurgence of people reclaiming the the african American hairstyle and then all the way to the present day in 2019 New York became the second state to ban discrimination on hairstyles
So in California and New York right now, you're not allowed to discriminate on anyone due to their hairstyle, and that is going back to the civil rights movement and all that stuff. I didn't know we were allowed to do that before. You would think not, wouldn't you? I've been taking the piss out of people with pigtails left, right and centre. Do you guys know about the wig club?
No. It was founded in 1775 in Edinburgh and there was a really cool investigation into it by an author called David Stevenson and it was a gentleman's sex club. I mean, no, I haven't heard of it, no. Yeah, it was a good test, and well done, you all passed.
It was named after a wig that they had as their kind of relic, their club relic, that was made from the pubic hair of Charles II's mistresses that had apparently been worn by Charles II. And when you joined the wig club as part of your initiation...
You had to provide lots of... pubic hair suitably harvested to be added to the wig as proof of having triumphed sexually so you had to after triumphing sexually i guess say to the woman sorry do you mind if i snip off a curl of your pubic hair because i'm hoping to join a sex club and Definitely do that afterwards. And yeah, they just met and talked about how much sex they were having and drank a lot. These guys sound great. Yeah. So no actual sex happened. the wig club it was just
A bunch of virgins getting together. Bringing cut locks from their dogs. Exactly. Yeah. Shagged hood last night, man. Is that what it was? Yeah, yeah. It's a really cool club to be a member of. Yeah. I would have applied. I'm not going to lie. Some wigs were made of duck's tail feathers.
Oh, yeah. Weeks specifically for Parsons and Vickers. Okay. Because it was to fight off the wet because obviously water off a duck's back. Oh, clever. But they literally had a duck's arse at the front of their head looking so stupid. Amazing, yeah. It is quite clever though, isn't it? yeah what animal's hair would you have as a wig if you could have any peacock and just let it go yeah full peacock that's a good idea is it a peacock's tail
That you've got. No, I've missed that bit. Oh, you just want the ordinary clue which... Okay, okay. That's cool. Would that be whenever you clench your teeth? It fans out. Whenever you tense your head. I would have thought like you'd come in from the cold, take your hat off and it kind of comes out. Jack in a box. I'd probably get an orangutan. Oh yeah. They've got lovely orange.
Orange hair. They do, don't they? Always wanted to be a ginger. Don't know, very wiry orangutan hair. How do you know? It looks wiry from a distance. It's got a pubic quality about it. Well, you can bring it to your wig party, Andy. I was just thinking... I'm thinking yak just because it's so long and luscious. Ah, lovely. And wise. Wise. Wise like a yak. Not saying? It is now.
Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland.
Andy at Andrew Hunter M. James at James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you could 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. So do check them out. Also go to.
the link that gives you the tour dates for our upcoming 2021 tour. It starts in October. See if we're coming to a town or city near you and hopefully we'll see some of you there. Okay, that's it. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.