You know Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin. Anna Tashinsky, and Andrew Hunton-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 is Andy.
My fact is that the road network in Cornwall was probably not created by elephants. Really? Because that's slightly at odds to what you said a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, it is slightly, isn't it? And quite long as well. It was quite long.
Was this line exposed because of what I said, that the roads are far too narrow to allow an elephant to pass through it? It's not, no. So this is just a little bit of inside baseball, which is about that fact that I said that the roads in Gormor were created by elephants and which turns out to... have been published on April the 1st and it's not true and I fell for it and the slightly complicated factor is that the episode that it went out in
went out on April the 1st. Can't we just pretend it was an April Fool's on our part? I seriously considered it, but I wasn't allowed to. Is that your actual fact this week? It's not my actual fact. Shall we get to that one? Yeah. Okay, good. Is this one right? Paul, let's find out in two weeks. My fact this week is that in 1954, Derbyshire Cricket Club tried drying out its pitch with a jet engine.
That won't sound right. I didn't sound it. What's interesting is a few years later, a Yorkshire cricket club used an elephant to suck up the water from the pitch. Oh my God. No, this is amazing, isn't it? It's fun. It's a cricket club.
cricket pitch drying innovation which hasn't stood the test of time it's not you don't get a jet engine to hover over laws these days but um this is from a brilliant piece that was published in the guardian by simon burnton about the history of cricket pitch drying which obviously see that Click straight on that. And it was about all these gadgets that have been tried out over the years. And one of them was...
The jet engine was quite new at the time. It's like using, I don't know, nuclear fusion now. It was a relatively recent innovation. I don't think, have we even cracked nuclear fusion? I think if that's the first thing we use it for, that would be quite an odd decision. of the world's going to be looking at england going jesus they didn't bring a full jet though did they they brought an engine yeah exactly so they they rigged up an engine over
They strapped it to a lorry, and it was a Rolls-Royce engine which they'd used in a plane called the Gloucester Meteor, which was one of the first British jet engines. Christ, that lorry, though, must have been pacing it down the motorway to get there. Yeah. Did it work? It worked. It dried it out for eight minutes. When Rolls-Royce were contacted by...
It was actually someone from Lancashire Cricket Club who contacted Rolls-Royce saying, hey, why don't we do this? They said, well, it's going to use 400 gallons of fuel an hour and it'll probably bake the turf of the cricket pitch. It's not going to be very good. So they tried it out at Derbyshire because it was the nearest club to the Rolls-Royce.
factory whatever so they tried it dried it out for eight minutes worked like a charm and as far as I can tell I don't think it was done again right because of all the fuel But they saved all that fuel by picking the nearest club to the Royal Forest factory. Well, this guy was called Geoff Howard, wasn't he? He was the Secretary of Lancashire. And he said that if you can get play restarted using the Jets, then it'll be fine because...
It won't matter if the cost is £100, which in modern days is thousands of thousands, because if people come to see cricket, then it's worth it. And Geoffrey Howard, he was really interesting. His grandfather was the guy who invented garden cities.
So, you know, like Letchworth and all that kind of stuff. Wellin. Wellin, yeah, all that kind of stuff. So he was the grandson of that guy. And he was the uncle of Una Stubbs, the actor. And the great uncle of the man who... wrote the theme tune for two pints of lager and a packet of crisps whose girl Christian Henson what a dynasty what a batshit family gallery they must have in the ancestral home like that's the cricket guy that's the city
guy that's the two pints of love in the bag of the crisps guy that's you to stop amazing isn't it wow can i just when you say they use jet engines which bit is it the sucky bit or the blowy bit in what way did they use a jet engine oh my god I don't know which way up it was it must have been the blowy bit they were firing it down rather than
got it yeah definitely because they do they do both don't they impressively so you never know and actually i read somewhere that um in in half a second the power of the suction in a jet engine could hoover an entire four bed in half a second. So why is my cleaner taking three hours? Back to more problems with my cleaner. It's been our show. I really shouldn't wash my dirty laundry. Yeah, but if she did it, I wouldn't have to.
surely implies there's kind of a market for a hoover which is shaped like the front door of your home and just drives around plugging into your front door well of course that's what used to happen didn't they hoovers used to be we might have said this but hoovers used to be um on the back of horse and cart yeah They used to wait outside and you'd put it through the window, wouldn't you? Like the big hose and you'd sort of hoover that way. Kind of like an elephant's trunk.
Exactly like it. I wouldn't risk that, Andy. I think if you did do the front door option that you've suggested, you would suck all of your furniture and inhabitants of the home into it as well. There's obviously a net in front of it, Anna. It's sucking out dust. I see. Pick your belongings out.
the net and spend two to three days tidying your house if you have any belongings that are the size of a speck of dust you're screwed right your pollen collection's gone um this this article that you found andy it's amazing because
it is a genuinely really good article and it just seems that there have been so many different innovations trying to work out how to dry cricket grounds and they've come up with great ideas but they all just seem to have just one major flaw that ruins it for them so there was this one idea
which was using a new patented drying roller. And it was really good. It got 75% of wetness from the top of the turf off. It was really useful. Only issue, it left the entire pitch jet black every time it did it. Which was not useful for a cricket ground. That's alright, isn't it? If you've changed to a white ball. Possibly. Wow.
That's really funny. They also tried giant washing up sponges, didn't they? I think in the 30s they just designed these massive washing up sponges where two men would stand on them and it would absorb. And the interesting thing is you kind of get those today. I was reading about puddle pillows. Yeah.
they're cool aren't they you can buy um you can buy a pack of about 12 for about 120 quid if you're interested and um they're really fun they use them mostly for baseball pictures and it's what you'd imagine a big pillow and you plop it down on a big puddle and then you lift it up again and the puddle
has vanished wow where's it gone Anna where's it gone it's magic that's really cool I think they just mostly when I watch cricket they tend to get a big rope and just drag it around the pitch I don't know how that works but yeah that's how they do Is that maybe whipping off the dew? I don't really know. I've never understood why they do it, but they all do it, so it must work.
That's so interesting. For the water? For the water, like the outfield, they tend to just drag a rope along, I guess. Wow, interesting. Maybe it's the standing water that they're getting rid of. Because they try certain things. There was in T20, in 2020, T20 International, in fact.
india and tri lanka t60 basically yes yeah that's what i meant um they used a hair dryer and a steam iron there was footage of the ground using a hair a physical hair dryer to dry wet patches of the ground that's so funny it's like when you get a wet patch on your trousers exactly before you're about to go out and you're like how am I going to get rid of this wet patch and you just have to try everything it's either going to be the hairdryer or the iron depending on which bit of the trouser
One patch, not your trousers, but why is one patch of the grounds wet? Is it one tiny cloud? Yeah, it's like in the Truman Show where it just picks one little spot. You know, sports pictures are all tilted. Have you never seen sports on TV where the whole...
thing is about a 20 degree angle why are they playing on a hill that's why they call it 2020 it's the 20 degree angle of the game well lords is famously tilted isn't lords is very tilted and in fact i think lords don't they say that if you're standing on one end of lords
then your head is lower than the field at the other end. I'm pretty sure. Is that true? Yeah. But that's just a cock up from they built it in the wrong place. I used to play football. When I was at school, I played football for the school team.
And we played against this prep school. And they had a football pitch that was on, I would say, in my memory, it was about a 45 degree angle. Perhaps it was a bit less than that. But it just meant, because we were kids, we didn't really know how to play football properly. Everyone just used to chase after the ball. The ball would then always up at the bottom of the hill just with 22 kids just kind of mauling after it like they're...
play rugby I suppose. Was it like that? It was like the house fucking where the parents would have to come and scoop their kids out of the big net at the end. Anyway, sorry. Sports pitches are meant to be slightly tilted for drainage to stop them getting wet. So they're either crowned, which is...
when they've got a tilt, the high point is in the middle. Brilliant. Or they're just tilted on a side slope so that it all drains to one side. So like in a football pitch, for instance, the crown runs from one goal to the other, like a ledge. And they're supposed to be... So you're always shooting downhill.
Or uphill. No. you're it's downhill to the sides oh okay so it's like a road it's like the camera on the road yeah it's like the camera on a road exactly between one goal and the other and then the sides of the pitch are between 12 and 18 inches lower than the middle of the pitch oh wow isn't that cool that is cool and that's why
when you look at the edges of the pitch and like around where the suspensions are it's often a lot muddier and harder to drain because that's where all the water collects wow that's really cool I didn't know that
football pitchers have underfloor heating. Do they? Throughout the pitch. Undergrass heating. Yeah. All Premier League ones do for sure. Wow. Right. I mean, if you know about football, you definitely know that. But if you don't know about football like me, it's mind-blowing. It's mostly electric wire. Yeah, because you know how they play football in winter.
Yeah. Yeah, so that they don't get called off due to the snow. It's not to warm their feet. I thought it was to help the grass grow as opposed to help melt the snow. That can help as well, although they'll have big lights above the grass to help that grow as well. But it's mostly, I believe, to... stop it from getting cold off in winter. That's insane.
Wow, people really like football, don't they? This will surprise you. It's a multi-million pound international sport. It can't be multi-million. It can't be. I think what we're saying is the heating is paying for itself. I like that. So Lords is obviously the most famous cricket ground, certainly to anyone who's a non-cricketer. That's the one that I know most.
This is the third Lourdes. It was in two other venues beforehand, right? So the original Lourdes, which was opened up by a guy called Henry Lord, was in Marlebone in London. Ah, because they're called the Marlebone Cricket Club, aren't they? Yes, exactly. That's the official.
They own the rules of cricket, don't they? Like if you want to change a rule, you can't. They own it. I've never heard of that before. You have to ask these dicks in stupid outfits whether you're allowed to. But so this guy, he set up... it in uh in marylebone and then it was moved to st john's wood um when he had to change it and then that got moved again to where it currently is and
When he moved each time, he wasn't impressed with the grass there, so they lifted up the turf from the very first lords, moved it to the second one, and then when the current lords that it's in now, I think they've changed the turf entirely, but certainly when it was set up...
that was the turf that was then carried over from the second one to there as well. Really? That's incredible. Yeah. That's really interesting. What did they do with the grass that was already there? Did they swap? I think they, yeah, they might have swapped and got rid of it. Yeah, I actually don't know how they disposed the last one. But in 2002, they actually...
the Lords did a whole new revamp on it and they got rid of the turf. So they sold off chunks of turf to people. So people all over the UK now have little bits of Lords grass in their garden, which they're growing. One guy spent over a thousand pounds.
buying a huge but so his whole garden is lords ground that's cool and um the group that you mentioned the mcc they made sure that they kept one very specific patch of grass that they gave to the location of the original lords from 188 years ago so sitting back there now the grass has returned it's like a cutting that they can propagate and they can grow a new lords for the
if the if the current world is destroyed or whatever yes it's like a seed bank yeah yeah yeah you see andy people really like cricket it's amazing isn't it yeah people do people just love sport anyway so wet fields is a problem in all sports do you know how people dry baseball fields
Well, with the sponges, you said? The puddle sponges? They do it with the puddle sponges. I think that's a good way to do it. That's a recommended way. A non-recommended way, which there's been a space of lately, is people setting fire to them. So it's been really weird. Every couple of visits reported in America. So in 2019 in Connecticut, there were 25 gallons of petrol dumped on a baseball infield and lit. And it was just lit by 20 parents whose kids were playing.
Strike the match to get it going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Baseball term, strike. I like it. Would have also worked if it had been a bowling alley. Hang on. Sorry. Is this on the grassy bit or the muddy bit? The muddy bit. Oh, so there's no grass to destroy. That's good. That's true, although it still does quite a lot of damage. It did $50,000 worth of damage, police estimated, and they advise people not to do it. What, to the dirt?
How valuable is this dirt? I'm sorry, sir. But the dirt's gone. However, will we replace the mud? Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that there's currently a court case going on in Ireland about whether stained glass windows are actually windows. What?
It's a big deal. Can I ask Ella, right, so you've read about this story. Do you land on the opinion that stained glass windows are windows or that they're not? Well... Don't want to get into any subjudice here, but... Oh, yeah. Always a case happening in Ireland, isn't it? Yeah. If you're listening in Ireland, turn the show off now. Especially if you're on the jury for this piece.
Yeah, without wanting to sway any listeners at home, I wouldn't like to make a call because I've instinctively sided with the victim, which doesn't necessarily mean I've sided with the truth. Oh, okay. Yes, this will make sense when you tell the story. Yeah, I should tell the story. The very fact that you've decided... Which side is the victim?
I think it shows that you are biased. Yeah, you're right. You're right. Thank God I'm not on this jury. Anyway, this is all about a place called Bewley's Cafe, which you might know if you live in Dublin. It's in central Dublin. It's this famous old period building. Beautiful building. The pièce de résistance in this building are six stained glass windows. And they were designed in 1927 by Ireland's most famous stained glass window maker, who I'm sure you know as Harry Clark. Oh, yeah.
There's a bit of a problem because Bewley's, Bewley's Cafe, are just tenants. And the people who own the building are called Ronan Group Real Estate. And Bewley's are in massive rent arrears. Not their fault, some would say. The rent has gone up massively over the last few years.
It's very difficult to pay. Working out who the victim is. So they're in rent areas of 700,000 euros. Okay. And the windows are worth about a million euros. And what Beauty's arguing is that the windows are not... windows which means that the company that owns the building doesn't own the windows yeah because they're not windows you own windows because they're part of a building yeah
But these windows are works of art. They're chattels. They're things that are held within the building. So their argument is, I'm afraid this big billionaire landlord group doesn't own the movable chattels. It's arguing they are. Moveable. Yeah, and that might be where the court case falls down. It is quite difficult to move them, obviously. Anyway, so Bewley have made this offer. They've said to the guys who are the landlords, look, we won't pay the rent because we can't, but what we will...
Steal the windows. We'll sell them. That's basically what they said. Well, we'll see what side you're on, the big billionaire business side. Hannah and I are both conforming to type. We will. sell the windows on to a company which will then donate them back to the cafe and you are allowed to keep them. Yeah. So they're actually selling them to the state and then the state will donate them to the cafe and say, okay, you're allowed to keep them in the cafe.
The landlords are like, screw you. We own the windows. You can't sell us something that we already own. Yeah. Feels a bit like they're right. As in, when Buleys arrived, did they knock out the existing windows and put in their own stained glass windows? I don't think so, right? Well, Dan, you raise a very interesting question because the people who owned it originally...
were Beaulies. And then they sold it on. They owned the stained glass windows and then they sold it and became tenants in the 80s. Right. So that does confuse matters so much. So they've kind of sold the windows once. And now they're suggesting they might be able to... Depends what's in the contract, doesn't it? Yeah, it does, absolutely. Maybe they haven't thought of checking the contract. I mean...
Philly's, yeah, like you say, really, you know, part of the furniture in Dublin, you know, one of the most famous places, mentioned in a great work of art. See if you can guess which it is. I'll give you the quote. Monica had gone home long ago.
It was quarter to nine. Little Chandler had come home late for tea. Any ideas? Okay, well, yeah. Well, friends, but what is... What? There's some sort of spin-off. I don't know what you're talking about. They're just two characters in The Dubliners by James Joyce. But isn't it true, James, that...
The TV series Friends is part of the extended Dubliners universe. I got the entire text of the Dubliners and searched for all the other characters. No Gunter, you wouldn't believe it, would you? Anyway, it says a little chance. had come home late for tea and moreover he had forgotten to bring Annie home the parcel of coffee from Bewley's.
So yeah, James Joyce used to go there and he mentioned it. That's really cool. And isn't there an episode of Friends called the one where they sell the windows on dubious grounds in order to get out of 700 grand in front? Central Perk's big problem was solved with that. That's great. It was founded by the Buley family, but the Buley family, the first people who were involved in hot drinks, was a guy called Samuel Buley, and he brought in a load of tea from China.
when the East India Company had a monopoly and the monopoly finished and so people could suddenly buy tea in London and he said well why should we buy tea in London we can just ship it straight over to Dublin so he did that and the reason he could do it is he had all these ships because he used to be a merchant of silkworm guts.
Cool. Isn't that cool? Do you think he said, I'm a silkworm gut merchant? I'm a silkworm gut merchant. That's what I do. Do you know what they might use? I'd never heard of silkworm guts. I mean, I assume they had them. Are we talking about the actual parts of the silkworm? Yeah, the place that they digest stuff. Is it like, yeah, is there equivalent to sausages?
for them like tiny little sausages or the extra bits that's a great thought you could make a sort of silk making robot and then when you implant the silkworm guts into it it is the crucial missing bit it is almost gettable but Probably not. Other kind of gut, other animal guts. Cat gut.
Cat guts are used for violins. How tiny is this orchestra? Whenever someone says they're playing the tiniest violin in the world. Actually, silkworm guts. They were used for making fishing tackle, like fishing line. and also to sew up cuts by surgeons. They used to use silkworm guts because it was really good thread. That's so cool. Isn't that amazing? That's awesome.
Wow. People are so clever. I stayed in a B&B in Broadstairs once with my wife. And the guys who owned it, who ran it, they make their own stained glass. And it's really beautiful. And they were telling us about the process. And I mentioned to my wife, Fenella, that...
we were going to be talking about this and she said do you remember that thing they told us they said that back in the medieval days when people made stained glass they used to use the urine of red-headed boys as part of the formula for making it
And I found a couple of sources online that suggest that that's true. Apparently redheaded or ginger urine used to have magical properties and they thought... Sorry, it was used to be thought that it had magical properties. It didn't used to have magical properties. When did the Redheads lose this amazing power? Some say they've never lost it. Is that how Ron Weasley got into Hogwarts?
It does make sense because the red-headed bit doesn't, but to make the paint in stained glass, it actually used to be made out of crushed glass and something like urine. So it was either urine or wine they tended to mix it with.
make the paint to stain it. I did believe it when you said it, Dan, as well, but I believe it even more now that Anna said it. I didn't believe it. I do now. Guys, what colour can glass be stained? Stained glass be stained. Give me some colours. Any colour. Oh, blue. Red.
Green. Yellow. Green. You're all wrong. You're all completely wrong. What? The only staining you see on stained glass is brown or black or grey paint. What? No. It's a big old misnomer. What? So stained glass, this is if you're... I feel like that doesn't... tally with my experience. You know when you go to the church and all the windows are brown and black? It just looks like the birds are poodled out. It's an absolute symphony of browns.
God's light makes you hallucinate all the colours. No, the way you make the colours, the proper colours in stained glass is you mix up your glass mixture with certain metals that make certain colours. So like cobalt I think makes blue and...
What other different ones are there? Gold chloride makes red colour. So that's not staining. You're mixing it with a metal at the start. So that's you're making the glass rather than having existing clear glass and then painting that because that's one of the other techniques as well, isn't it? So then you do that and that was the only way they made stained glass.
until I think about 13th century. So stained glass wasn't actually stained. And then they came up with this idea of kind of painting it with this paint they made. And all that does is add the shading, which I didn't realise stained glass involved is the black lines that you see that create the kind of... of textures and all the shading which makes it look more realistic and that's all just in brown and brown and gray
Huh, I did not know that. Just for those glass nerds out there. The Palace of Westminster, they have stained glass there. And basically, this is a story about the British Harry Clark, what I think is the British Harry Clark, and that's a woman called Mary Lowndes.
She was a stained glass artist and she was like one of the... main people of the arts and crafts in the uk okay now she also established the artist suffrage league and they did all of the posters and placards and christmas cards for suffrage events uh one of them that she did in particular was the mud march in 1907
this was the largest ever march for women's suffrage they brought people in from all the different towns of the uk and they all had banners and so if you were from bolton you would have like a banner with something to do with bolton in it like a pasty or something i don't know but it would be like for me place it would be something to do them and she designed all of these stained glass artists
And in the Palace of Westminster, window number four has a stained glass of the mud march, which is what she did all of the banners for. So it kind of comes around in a nice circle. That's cool, isn't it? That's great.
is there an individual little bit of stained glass of all of the banners? No, it's just like a general kind of picture of the mudmatch because it was really muddy that day and they went through, I don't know, like St. James's and stuff, but it was really, really muddy and all the... pictures in the newspapers were of all these muddy, angry suffrages. Tragically, they didn't have jet engine technology to dry them out. Western Mr Abbey obviously has a lot of stained glass windows as well.
Talking central London. And it has a recent one that has been added a few years back by, can anyone guess? An artist. An artist. Tracey Emin. No, but like a good guess. That's as good a guess as any. I know what those stains would have been made of. It was all brown, wasn't it? Damien Hirst. No, so David... Gunter von Hagens. Oh, that would have been good. I know someone flayed, you know, someone with lots of pinks and reds. What about, who was the guy who did The Angel of the North? Oh, yeah.
What's he called? Anthony Gormley. Anthony Gormley. Anthony Gormley. But it's his face because he's in everything that he does, right? Is he? So it's a big picture of his face in Westminster Abbey. Oh, great idea. But no, yeah, but great idea. Was it Gormley? I just said no. Okay, great. More artists. Who's that guy who did all the cartoony stuff? Rolf Harris. With all the colours. Rolf Harris. They brought him back into the game.
Who did cartoons? Oh, and who did the cans? Oh, Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol. No, this is just a couple of years ago. So he's... Just a couple of years ago. A couple of years ago. An artist. We can get this, Andy. Oh, Neil Buchanan from Art Attack. Yeah. Oh, it's a great idea to know. Banksy. Oh, who some people think is Neil Buchanan. Exactly, that's why I thought of it, yeah. Right. A modern artist is not Banksy or Neil Buchanan.
Is there someone who says they're an artist, like Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones, who does paint in his spare time technically? Oh, he does great art, yeah. Oh, Vic Reeves. Oh, that would be very cool as well. Or Grayson Perry. Who? Grayson Perry? No, I've already just sent it. Oh, is it Harry Clark, the greatest... There we go! No, it's not.
Dan, I actually do need, I do have class tonight. Well, I've been ready to tell it a while ago. Detective Harkin and Murray insist on cracking the case. Okay, guys, 12 more guesses each, okay? And then... And then I have to move us on. I'm begging you. Please, Dan. Put these guys out of feminist room. I can't even think who it might be. Just because we've gone this far, I'm going to give you the initials. Great. DH. David Hurst.
No. David Hockney. Yes. David Hockney. David Hockney. Oh, my God. That's so predictable. Did he do it on his iPad? Because that's what he does these days. Yes, he did. Did he? Yeah, so it's called The Queen's Window. It's 28 feet by 12 feet. And it looks... When I saw it, I was like, my God, it looks...
like someone's done that on their phone and it kind of turns out he has and he designed it certainly phoned it in that's what i'm wearing i've just i actually read about this in my research oh my god you knew this already could have saved an hour of everyone's time oh god yeah so he he and he didn't even really come over to do it he sent over the drawing he was on the toilet have you guys seen like the david hockneys he does on his ipad yeah like
I'm sure they're great works of art. They genuinely look like they've been done by children. And this looks no different. I'd love to see this in person just to see if it's a bit more vibrant. But when you see a photo of it, it looks like a... I'm a big fan of Hot Me, but... Yeah, yeah, but I agree. These iPad drawings are very much...
They look quite Microsoft Word kind of, you know, or like Microsoft Art. Microsoft Paint. Microsoft Paint, not Word. They're quite impressive today to Microsoft Word. Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Hard Rock Cafe is owned globally by a group of Native Americans.
So weird. This is pretty incredible. This is the Seminole tribe. They're in Florida. And back in 2006, I believe it was, they bought for $965 million the entire... group of hard rock cafes so that's all the cafes it's the hotels it's the casinos and they are now the owners not only of hard rock cafe but this group of native americans are also the owners of the greatest
collection of rock and roll memorabilia in the world. So they have been buying up things like casinos and hotels ever since the late 1970s. And this purchase is just part of their catalogue of ever-growing businesses. ventures and the Seminole tribe is worth putting into context who they are. They came into existence properly in the 1950s and what it was was a disparate group of Native Americans. That feels late.
It was very late. I mean, you know, the peoples that make up the group with this name of Seminole. They've been around 12,000 years in America. And they were all little groups of Native American tribes that were sort of being pushed out further away by white people coming into America. And they made a decision to sort of form together and sort of create a body where you were... officially would become the Seminole. Or like a supergroup.
Yes, yeah. Like Cream. Like the Travelling Wilburys. Yeah. And actually, there's a lot of Travelling Wilburys and Cream memorabilia in Hard Rock Cafe as a sort of solidarity. The Seminole people, though, of course, you know, they've been around... for a very very long time. That's not a new name.
The Seminole tribe that was set up in 1957 was a collection of other tribes coming together and banding under that name. And they basically, the claim on the Seminole tribe website is that they are the only people who never surrendered to the white invasion. basically. And that was true of the Seminole people in the 19th century. They had the Seminole Wars which were a massive deal in the US throughout the 19th century. I think there were three big Seminole Wars and it was this thing where
Presidents like Andrew Jackson, very famous for persecuting Native Americans and others, kind of went to war with them and tried to force them west because obviously they suddenly wanted all the eastern land. So forced loads of them west. But a bunch of the Seminole people, rather than being forced out of Florida... But they wanted to be kind of retreated into the Everglade marshes. The Seminole traditions, I read that there are four particular Seminole traditions, which are sewing, patchwork.
Building chickies, which are small wooden houses on stilts, kind of traditional structures. And bidding on big, multi-national businesses. The fourth one is wrestling alligators. Oh, yes. I just wonder if it's like sewing patchwork, building small wooden structures and wrestling alligators. That's the hardest of the badges to get when you're in seven old Boy Scouts, isn't it? I just feel like there might be some kind of sorting hat procedure.
a young seminar like alligators can i put the hat on again please should we talk about hard rock cafe so it was started by peter morton and another guy called isaac tigret I believe that's how you pronounce his name. And Isaac Tigard, clearly a massive rock and roll fan, actually married the first wife of Ringo Starr. Not Maureen. Maureen. He married Maureen. Someone's read this fact.
You just know about Ringo's marriages. You just know Ringo's marital history. I think if I'd known that before, I would have remembered his first wife was called Maureen. That's the kind of, you know, it's an unusual name. It is, isn't it? Yeah, Maureen Starkey. So Maureen, and they...
broke up because she had an affair with George Harrison huge scandal wait Ringo and Maureen or no Ringo and Maureen broke up when when she was found crumbs with George Harrison yeah like so that's that's just a bit goss for you guys there and are you saying because you say he's Memorabilia massive. Breaking news. What a scoop. A lot of the memorabilia is not all hard rock.
As in, I think of hard rock as being even harder than normal rock. Yeah, like Slipknot or something, right? Right. And it's not, they don't have a lot of kind of death metal or doom drone based. Right, and I think people would be less willing to eat in their restaurants. I certainly would if they did. I'm just dead.
Cradle of Filth was playing over the sound system. You're right. But Wings, Paul McCartney's band Wings, debuted at the London branch, the original branch of the Hard Rock Cafe. Probably what can you get as a starter at Hard Rock Cafe? The Paul McCartney.
One waitress says that when they did debut, all the waiting staff put cotton wool in their ears so that they could keep the noise out while they serve people. Well, this waitress who said this is a waitress. And she still works it. So I walked past it on the way to the QI office.
Did you? I just thought, I want to see this. This was open in 1971. This was the landmark spot where it was opened. And when they opened, they had a waitress working there who was called Rita Gilligan. And she has an MBE. She still works there. She's seriously fun, isn't she? Yeah. And has such good goss because I didn't quite realise that every musical celebrity you've ever heard of has eaten in hard rock cafes. Is this in your contract when you join a band? So, you know, she said...
She said, I've served the Beatles, the Stones, Freddie Mercury, Eric Clapton, Pete Townsend. And then she says, take that and the Carnabies, which seems like an incredibly steep decline. I've actually never heard of the Carnabies. No, I hadn't either. And I looked them up and they don't even have a bloody Wikipedia page.
She's probably pushing a band that she's managing. I wonder if that might be a misprint for the Cranberries. I wondered if it was the Cranberries, but then there is a band called the Carnabies that have played in the Hard Rock Cafe. I think it's part of their brand. So she's trying to slip them in.
maybe with these big names. And she supposedly turned down Posh Spice for a job, Rita, when she came in. I love this story. I don't know the full story. Well, there's not much more to it than that, but she, Rita Gilligan, claims that Victoria Beckham applied for a job. at the Hard Rock Cafe as a hostess or whatever, shortly before the Spice Girls took off. But she was rejected for being too quiet. Yeah. And so she went and got a job at Bill Wyman's restaurant, Sticky Fingers, instead.
She was kind of, no. Oh, what? Was named after a Rolling Stones album. Yeah, I just didn't know who he had that. I would have chosen one of the others. I don't know any of the other albums, but I reckon all of them would be a better name than that, wouldn't they? Yeah, they would. In association with that. They've got an album called Beggar's Banquet that's quite a kind of fun.
One cool name for a restaurant, but no, sticky fingers. Yeah, but this is the weird thing. So there's Rita Gilligan, who worked there since 1971, and was still there a couple of years ago. There's also another waitress from the Hard Rock Cafe called Delia Lees, who worked there for 48 years.
And she got a job two weeks after it opened and she's 80 now and she still does two days a week. Wow. So I think there are two of them who have been there for 50 years. This is like bloody QI. There's no turnover of staff. That reminds me, I only half remember this story, but at the Savoy... There was two very famous waiters who worked behind the bar. Two women. And they both worked there for about 60 years or something. And they knew everyone. But they stopped talking after about five years.
years of working together and then we just stopped being friends and then they didn't really see each other because they were on shifts but literally didn't talk for like 30 years that's so funny that's so well we have a similar thing on the podcast don't we because actually if you listen carefully back to all the episodes you'll notice that anna and dan have not said anything to each other on the show for the last five years if you notice that when we were doing that guessing game
Anna wasn't given any names, was she? There was only me and Andy shouting for half an hour. It's long-term beef. Listen up for that. Rita, by the way, she got her job in 1971, and it happened when her husband was reading the Evening Standard. And he shouted to her, they're looking for people like you. And she went, oh, are they? And she went over and the advert read, older women wanted.
Late 30s, 40s and 50s. And she was only 29 when she went there. That is such a horrible thing to say. Did she have to put talking powder in her hair? Actually, when she went there, she said, you know, I'm... looking for a job. And one of the co-founders, Peter Martin, said, no, you know, you're too young for this. And she said, I'm the best you're going to get, so you better take me. And he said, yeah, cool, you're hired. Is it known why they wanted women in their late 30s?
40s, 50s and so on. I suspect that what they were trying to do is they were trying to get American diners in the UK because there wasn't anywhere that you could, there was no McDonald's then, there was nothing like that. They wanted to have a place where you could get burgers and stuff like that. And there's that cliche of
being sold by sort of a 65-year-old widow. Yeah, like a happy days kind of thing. If you go to any diner in America and you have breakfast there, there's always a woman who's, you know, in her middle age coming round with a... with the pot of coffee and tipping you up and topping you up. And I think that was just the cliche, right? Tipping you up and topping you up. She inverts you on your chart. They're very strong.
Isaac Tigrit was a devotee of an Indian guru back when those Indian gurus were a big deal. And this one was Satya Sai Baba. And so, yeah, the chain was founded by him and he obviously brought the spiritual side to hard rock. cafe and then this guy called peter morton who um was the son of a founder of morton's steakhouse who brought the steak side um so the motto of the hard rock cafe is love all serve all Apparently. That sounds like a tennis term, doesn't it?
You never say serve all in tennis. Serve all. It's like what you might say just before the game starts. Anna, have you not seen the serve all bit of a tennis match where everyone gets to serve at the same time? It's chaotic, but the points rack up. That's what actually happens before, right? a warm-up where they both serve at each other yes technically no that's the level serval but yeah of course it was originally a chain of tennis courts that would be such an improvement i mean like
Cricket has had the T20 revolution. I think tennis needs a jeopardy round where everyone can serve as many balls as they can at the same time. And you just have to stand there and if it hits you in the balls, then that's part of the game. Anyway, this guy who inspired Hard Rock Cafe, this Sai Baba, he was quite interesting. I didn't know about him. He was a massive deal in India. 500,000 people went to his funeral.
Ken Doolka cancelled his birthday. Really? The year that he died. Wait, sorry. He cancelled his... birthday. He's now actually one year younger than everyone thinks he is. That just feels like an anti-aging trick by Sachin Tendulkar. I know, sneaky, right? What do you mean he cancelled his birthday party? Well, he cancelled his birthday party. He didn't celebrate his birthday.
He uninvited everyone. He didn't have a cake. He didn't have a party. He didn't have a party. He didn't even celebrate. No one even sung to him because he was so sad about this spiritualist dying. Gosh. And he claimed that he was a... proper god, like omnipotent, omniscient. And he did loads of amazing tricks, apparently. And he... Have you got some...
Some examples for us. There was a terminally ill woman. She needed treatment. It could only be given in Japan. And so she went and visited this guy and said, I need this treatment to save my life. It can only be treated in Japan. And he pointed at a door and said, walk. through that door and she walked through the door. I'm so glad, I'm so glad I set my office up next to this branch of trail finders.
What happened then? And it was Japan. What? She walked through the door and she was in Japan? Yeah. Cool. Wow. Don't say cool like you believe it though, Dan. It's a cool story. It's an incredible story. It's like Narnia for the modern day. Yes. Isn't that amazing? Quite acclaim. And yeah, and then what happened?
Well, that's sort of where his tale ends. You assume, I suppose, she was in Japan. She's in Japan. Well, how's he supposed to know what happened? That's true. He can't go through the door. He can't go through the door. Okay, so he didn't leave the door open. He just sent her and closed the door. Otherwise, everyone leaves India and goes to Japan. Japan. So this woman, who's quite ill, has just ended up in, I presume, a random bit of Japan.
Because the door already led to Japan. It can't have led to the specific clinic she needs. She's now trapped in a foreign country. She's now illiterate because Japan is a different alphabet. It's an incredibly upsetting and busy place. She's very... He doesn't come off brilliantly in this story.
Because you can get rail cards in Japan that help you go around. Foreigners, you can get them especially. She's wanted by the authorities because she's not in the country legally. She hasn't got a visa or whatever you need. How did you get here? Who's going to believe that? So that's why you've got to be very careful what you wish for.
oh it's one of those stories okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Okay, my fact this week is that when female seals have sex, they have a special muscle in their vagina that can clamp around their partner to stop seawater from getting in. That means that in order to create a seal, they first need to create a seal.
Superb. Fabulous. Sex does always create a seal, really, doesn't it? But do these ones clamp particularly hard? These ones clamp on, yeah. These are like proper muscles in the vagina. like a wise saying that the seals have doesn't it yes to create a seal you must first create a seal yes you know that's the birds and the bees chant isn't it yeah the seals and the seals yeah and what would happen if they didn't have the seal would they flood
They sink to the bottom. It's very tragic. You have to get a jet engine to blow all the water out of them.
Let me quickly say where I got this. Honestly, this was a speculative search. I wonder if seals have seals. And I found this paper called Reproductive Biology of Seals by Shannon Atkinson, where they described this. But basically... it's just to stop seawater getting in pebbles getting in and if you think about they basically have a very similar reproductive system to humans so they you know you know vagina cervix uterus blah blah blah and
If you look at a whale, for instance, they have quite a long sort of maze-like structure in between that kind of stops anything from getting in there. But they have basically like the human reproductive system. It's pretty much...
straight up and straight down so they need something to stop stuff from getting in there and there are a few different ways of doing this but the way they do it is with these folds which have special muscles in and the muscles can clamp around the penis so that when the semen gets in no see Gets it. I feel like you're pushing it a bit further this time. The seals are great, and we should talk about seals. We've hardly ever talked about them, so let's talk about them now.
basically don't need eyes or ears. Excuse me? They're whiskers. Phenomenal whiskers that seals have. They do have eyes and ears. They have eyes and ears and they use them. They didn't have them. They could basically operate because their whiskers are so unbelievably sensitive. Oh yeah. So let's...
say we know that cats use their whiskers or rats use their whiskers they've got 200 nerve endings on their on their whiskers captain rats right a seal has about a thousand five hundred basically what it means is that if they were swimming through the ocean and they couldn't see or hear
and they needed to work out where the precise location of the fish is that they wanted to eat. They could just use their whiskers to feel the vibrations, the little movements of the water that were being pushed through the whisker and pinpoint it and get to them.
disappointed yes yes lovely and the other thing is they can tell if a fish has gone past 30 seconds ago they can tell by the vibration in the water where the fish was using their whiskers and they go oh there was a fish here 30 seconds ago and they can follow the trail of where the fish has been and then
their whiskers and go down and the other thing is not just the whiskers like a cat which is where their nose is yeah they can also do this with their eyebrows because they have whiskers on their eyebrows so they can hunt fish with their eyebrows that is pretty amazing why old men are so good at fishing isn't it there was an experiment on the whiskers it was by the university of rostock
And it was about how harbour seals, they find flatfish. So flatfish hide under the sand. So they're not very visible, but there are these tiny movements of their gills because they are breathing in and out very slightly. And the seals use their whiskers to find the flatfish and eat them. For the experiment, the scientists found some seals, they created some fake flatfish under the water to be the bait, and then they blindfolded the seals.
How cool. That is a better way of doing it because the first person probably to do most of this work was a woman called Dean Renov and she did it by snipping off the whiskers of the seals. You wouldn't be able to do that now. But this was in the 70s and she was really into it.
she loved her seals and stuff like you know obviously now to modern modern ears it sounds quite bad but she really loved her seals apparently you could see the seal walking behind her in the university when she was walking to her lectures and stuff I was listening
to a really good podcast which interviews someone called dr alex milne who has such a great job she's a sensory biologist specializing in pinniped whiskers um and she was saying we don't know this but seal whiskers are curly they've got like wavy hair as opposed to sea lions and walruses who are sort of the other pinnipeds and we think that is to sense the undulations of the water though we're not totally sure but anyway she did this she's done lots of experiments with seal you know playing
with seals and seeing how sensitive their whiskers are and playing with them balancing balls on their whiskers and so you get Balls of lots of different sizes. And then you watch what their whiskers do. So if you've got a small ball and then a big ball, which do you think involves, you know, it points its whiskers towards them to balance. And then which would use more whiskers? The big ball. More area. And it's incorrect.
the little ball there you go Dan's got it how did you work that out you've got to use the method of wait for people to answer wrongly and then get in there I tried to do that with the artist but we didn't go for every artist in the world
So it's the same physics, which means it's easier to spin a big ball around on one finger, right, than balance a little ball. Oh, that's clever. And so the smaller the prey, the more whiskers it takes. So if they're chasing prey in the water, the same thing happens.
us more whiskers towards a smaller prey to try and pinpoint where it is. Because I know you're looking a bit sceptical Andy but you see basketball players spinning a ball on the finger you don't see table tennis players doing it do you? No I don't actually. I've never seen that. Thank you James. But balls get heavier.
the bigger they get yeah to a certain extent like once they're so big they crush your fingers then you have to yeah a basketball versus a ping pong ball for example would I would feel require more whiskers purely for the weight of it so we must be talking beach balls they use their nose as well
But I think the whiskers are sort of for balance. But yeah, I think it probably is beach balls. Seals are the ones with the balls on their noses, aren't they? Yeah. They always have a ball on their nose, yeah. And dolphins do as well, often. It's not a vintage dolphin thing, though.
No. When I think of dolphins, I think of dolphins. Jumping through hoops. Yeah. Yeah. Being really clever. Yeah. Playing chess. But they are the only two animals, so it's weird that you say it's not a vintage dolphin thing when... It's so clearly... No, it's such a seal thing though to have a ball on your nose. Yeah, I agree. I do agree. I don't think it's a dolphin thing at all. No, it is a dolphin thing. Well, I think it's on its way out. They gave people TB.
Tuberculosis in South America is believed to come from seals. No way. I know this sounds like... Elephants built the roads in Cornwall. I appreciate it sounds like that. But no, there's a bio-archaeologist, never heard of that job before either, called Jane Bwikstra, I hope I'm pronouncing it right, from the Columbian Institute of Anthropology and History.
TB got to South America with colonists 500 years ago, but there have been bones found much older, which also have TB. And it doesn't look like they came over with the original humans, you know, 10,000 years ago, whenever it was, because it spreads from south to north, not north to south, which...
is not the order you would expect it to go in. Right. Hang on. Sorry, I'm confused. So the colonists brought the TB over, but there are also seals that are older with TB in their bones. But there was pre-existing human TB found in samples in bones. And if it had come with the original...
10 000 years ago it would have gone from north to south but it didn't it went south to north um and so the theory is that it came over with seals which might have been you know eaten hunted and eaten and the bacteria survived there because tb arose in africa
Interesting. Then somehow seals got it, is the theory, took it to South America, gave it to humans. And then they met on the way down, presumably the humans coming down met the TB on the way up, an awkward dinner. Sometimes zookeepers these days get TB from the seals in their care.
Doesn't always happen. They need to not get so close, don't they? Have you guys seen Andre the Seal? No. No. Okay, seriously? Yeah, seriously. Right. No. I kind of thought everyone watched that as a kid. Oh, it's a TV show. It's a film. Oh, no, I've not seen it. I think I saw the play.
Yeah, I was just shot down on animal rights grounds within a couple of days, wasn't it? Did they mention the vagina thing? Yeah, it was about that. It was weird because it was you and it was marketed to children. Well, Andre the Seal, for those who've seen it, it was a very famous film in our childhoods for a brief period of time.
of time we all watched it it wasn't very good and it was the true story of a seal who befriended a tree surgeon which you wouldn't have thought their lives collide cricket match Yeah, that's a hell of a meet-cute you've got to engineer. Yeah, I don't know how. Maybe the forest was flooded. Anyway, Steel befriended a tree surgeon. We're back in the pitch meeting. So this is the story. The seal meets this guy. We've seen that a million times. The guy's a tree surgeon. Keep talking.
true befriended this seal and it's a true story between 1961 and 1986 yeah so this guy was also into diving met this seal it had been abandoned by its mother and so it took it in and sort of raised it for a few weeks thinking it would return to the wild tried to return it to the
wild and the seal loved him so much he just stuck around stuck around for like 25 years but what like in the bath or don't they need lots of water it would come up to his house and hang out in his house in the day and then flop back down to the harbour and then he'd go swimming with it Wow. And it wintered in this aquarium. Anyway, they made this film about it. And do you know what species of seal they used in the film? Seal? No. There's an elephant seal? What's the name of the film?
Dan, what were you going to say? No, because I realised I was saying a sea lion. You're absolutely correct. You're kidding. They used a not seal. And how bullshit is that? As if they couldn't be bothered to find a seal. They do look quite similar. It's all in the ears. But anyway, the filmmakers wanted to coordinate with the aquarium who raised Andre in the winters and the aquarium refused. Bigger, I think, sea lions.
right i think they're both they are bigger yeah although you can get huge seals elephant seals are massive oh yeah yeah yeah the key apparent is that um seals have um ears that are just holes i think yeah seals are kind of more round-headed So SEALs can remember what they have just done and repeat it on command. As long as you ask them within 18 seconds of the original thing. I said a cup of tea.
But this is unusual because not many people can do this, right? I think most people can do this. Well, I won't come to that. So this is a study by Simeon Smeal at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. and basically they asked them to do one thing and then they asked them to do it again after 18 seconds but they could still do the thing they said repeat They didn't say do this thing again. They said repeat. And they managed to do it. And what was quite interesting is...
The guy in charge of it, Smeal, said that this is really, they did a really good job because what you have to understand is that this is a very, very repetitive study. And even the human trainers and assistants had a hard time remembering what they had just asked. You end up with a human and a seal just staring at each other. What was it we supposed to do? I can't remember.
That's it. That's 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. And James. At James Harkin.
You can email podcast.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 and do come back next week because we will be back with another episode to play. to your ears. We'll see you then. Goodbye.