Oh! Hello and welcome to No Such Thing As A Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoban. My name is Andrew Hunter-Murray, I'm joined by James Harkin, Dan Schreiber and Anna Tudzinski and this is... An upside-down, Christmassy, end-of-year-y episode, Lord of Misrule style. I'm in charge. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Exactly that, and instead of...
Us telling you our facts, you are going to be telling us your facts. No, we will be telling you your facts. That's it. We will be telling each other your facts, but you are allowed to listen. that's yeah you're welcome basically we have this email address podcast.qr.com people write in with all sorts of stuff and if you're a member of clubfish you'll hear every month the kind of things people write in with on one of our bonus episodes
But also you send in a huge number of brilliant extra facts. So we have just gathered around here. We have a massive pile of different facts from all of you. Some of the absolute best ones that have been sent in over the last year or two. You know, because we can all dip into the inbox. We might have seen a couple of... them a lot of them we'll have never seen before yeah so would someone like to begin all right i got back to you yeah go on all right this is from hayley dargan It says,
In doing this, they broke two world records, longest underwater drive and the deepest underwater drive. Wow. Pretty cool. Sorry, it's a... What kind of car? It's called the mud crab. And it's, I guess, amphibious and... Drive sideways. Yep. That's cool that it can drive underwater. Very much don't try this with your own car. warning, right? Yeah, this is, I bet there's a few alterations they've made to their regular car. There's an old, I think it's a Mitch Hedberg joke, or something like that.
which I will absolutely butcher. But it's something like, I went on a date with a girl. It didn't go very well. She was annoyed that I didn't open the doors for her. And rather, I swam straight to the service. That's very good. that story reminds me of that story we had in one of our books of the year our books we did about the news of the year if you want to catch up on the news of 2018 why don't you go to amazon and buy it um One of the stories was about...
those two Australian women, I think this is right, who were following their sat-nav and just, it was somewhere in Australia and they just followed their sat-nav into the ocean. The sat-nav had messed up and they just went, must be right, must be right. It's amazing.
And their car got stranded in the sea. Do you remember we mentioned on the podcast there was a president who had an amphibious car and he used to take... So it wasn't at the White House. Lyndon B. Johnson. It was Johnson, that's right. And he would take his friends out in the car and they would go a bit down a hill where there was a lake at the...
bottom and then he would fake losing control oh god oh god what is that and then they would go in the lake but they obviously drive on brilliant very very cool if there's ever a weird wacky thing a president did fact it's always lbj isn't it yeah it's amazing you had time to
lose the war in Vietnam yeah is where I was going it's amazing in the last you know decade or so we've had such straight down the line presidents haven't we buttoned up you know in the Addo National Park in South Africa, if you're driving along there, dung beetles have the right of way.
So if you're driving along and a dung beetle crosses the road, you have to just sit there and wait for it. How good is everyone's eyesight in this area? Sorry, that's incredible. They are small, but they do push large bowls of dung. That's a good point. Yeah, fair enough. And there must be a lot of traffic jams.
a lot of cars stopping going is that can you get out the car and check no just a normal beetle okay get back in or a normal poo yeah it's just a poo in the middle i'm sure i can't see the beetle but it must be there pretty sure it's not moving
breakups with it. You would hear breakups there. It was like, why'd they leave you? Why'd your boyfriend leave you? He waited five hours. Five hours because there was a random piece of poo sitting on the road. If you do go driving in any of these places like I drove in...
Yellowstone, I think, and a few other places like that, you do have a lot of traffic jams because as soon as there's an animal there, everyone stops and you just kind of sat there at the back. Oh, that's so annoying. And the first two or three people can all see the animal. But of course, then it...
wanders off and they drive off and everyone else who's in the traffic jam never gets to see it. And the elves of Iceland we've spoken about before. A lot of people in Iceland believe there are elves and they believe they live in rocks and so if a rock finds its way into the middle of the road and
it's a believed home of an elf, you can't move the rock. You have to drive around, literally maybe going off-road in order to get around it until it's removed safely by the proper authorities. Anyway, look, guys, I'm sorry, we'll move on to the next fact.
Oh, this is actually a bit of an audience feedback one. It's from Dave Clemmer. We mentioned the Treaty of Versailles and the rights to champagne or naming champagne were part of the Treaty of Versailles. So Dave said, I didn't know about that, but it was not shocking given the presence of two other... I knew about with extreme military significance in the Treaty of Versailles. One of them was the patent on aspirin.
which Bayer, a German pharmaceutical firm, was required to give up. The second is the concert pitch for orchestras being standardised such that the A above middle C is 435 hertz. That was in the Treaty of Versailles. think this is on qi this year isn't it yeah it's amazing that's incredible might be on your tv in about 18 months time but yeah the british used to tune their instruments to a different
Actually, everyone came to the British way, did they? I can't remember. Because they won the First World War. I can't remember. It was something like that. That was what really upset the Germans. This is actually the platform on which Hitler built his rise to power was that frequency thing. 30 years of Hertz was the slogan you wrote, wasn't it? Thank you. Just a quick fact.
about that so if you play i can play the trumpet for instance and when you tune to the orchestra you play a b flat because everyone plays whatever their you know, their note is tuned to and then it all comes together and you can hear if you're slightly flat or slightly sharp. But B flat is also the way you tune a Vuvuzela.
How many orchestras? I think there is one VVC concerto that someone wrote once. That's incredible. But no. That's so good. That's the sad thing, isn't it? So few professional VVC lists. Yeah. You know. I wonder when the last time officially an instrument's been allowed into, like, the main orchestra posse. You know. It's interesting, that. Yes, good point. One of the sort of later, weirder brass instruments, you know. Like, weirder than a French horn. You'll see a, um...
There are men, often. But that's not part of a classical orchestra. Yeah, it's quite neat. That's a great point. I remember seeing, I watched a piece once, I can't remember who it was by, shame on me, but there was a... Parts for cutlery. Lovely. So the percussionist had a load of cutlery there and they would either rattle it or they would drop it or whatever. Was it a tuning fork? Brilliant. There we go. Good grief. You're on fire today. Let's have another one. Come on.
all right here we go this is from tom whitfield the world record for highest jump into water is held by rick charles at 172 feet can i ask was that how high the water was He was before he got in the water. How could highest jump into water? I just thought it might be someone, like, for instance, I've been to Lake Titicaca, which is the highest navigationable lake in the world. Right. If I jumped...
into Lake Titicaca as I did. You've broken this record. I see what you're saying. Sorry. It's just a fun bit of whimsy from James though. No, I love a fun bit of whimsy. You know me. I get comedy. I just sometimes like it to be expanded on a little bit.
So, sorry, that's 20 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty. An air had to be pumped into the pool to break the surface tension. Otherwise, he would have gone splat. That's amazing. I think it's in the 70s or so because there's footage of it. So I follow the YouTube link that Tom put in the...
in the email it's unbelievable because he's basically on a ladder which is taller than the Statue of Liberty he's so far up that's hard to get up the ladder I was impressed that he got up the ladder at all I mean it's stunning we're on the second floor of this building and I struggle mostly what's interesting is someone very very recently
And I've heard the term the highest jump into a body of water ever broke the record just a few days ago. So maybe this is an old email and possibly it was right at the time. And he doesn't have water. It's incredible. You see the footage. He's standing on the edge of a cliff and he...
throws something i don't know what it was it looks like a giant fish but i don't think it is into the water and as soon as it hits and breaks the tension he jumps and goes in and it's the new world record oh really um okay well it must be my turn to read a fact i'll take the one closest to me This is from Sam And Sam says,
to find a relatable reference scale and came up with a nearby city that had similar population. So I thought you might not have a sense of what the population of Olympia, Washington is. Correct. Is there a reference for that? I think that's the capital. of washington isn't it olympia i don't even know whether that's true or not i simply have i had not heard of olympia washington before now it's not the biggest it's not seattle um so i looked up a uk comparison at the
estimated most populous, there were as many Neanderthals as modern humans living in Torquay. 52,000. That would be an excellent episode of Fawlty Towers, wouldn't it? That's great. Wait, how many was it? 52,000. 52,000. and yeah that is unbelievable yeah that's wow actually that would be a cool premise for something
Like the Neanderthals are here. They all live in Torquay. And it's about the... Modern day Torquay. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just like the amusing cultural clashes that you get. Do they... remove all of the current population of Torquay so the population stays at 52,000 or does the population balloon to 104,000? I think everyone in Torquay is sort of bought out of their homes and it's like, we need to house exactly this number of people.
Where can we put them up? You all go to Exeter. It's exactly that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah. So, yeah, there were also a thousand more Neanderthals in the world at their peak than there are currently inhabitants of the county of Rutland.
Very nice. So, I mean, I reckon that I have more knowledge about the city of Olympia in Washington than I do about the county of Rutland. Apart from I know it's the smallest county. I live very near it and I can tell you the difference between the people there and Neanderthals. Rutland is a it used to be a proper county and I believe it's now a unitary authority so much like the Neanderthal it's actually sort of faded into the past really? I thought
Because it was still a county. Actually, interesting, the people of Rutland do bury their dead with flowers and trinkets. And they're rumoured to have mastered fire. Wow. And actually, if you get yourself tested, you are... You're between 1% and 3% Rutland. I've got another one here from David Saunders. The British Basketball League is having to change its name as no one can Google it because the acronym is shared with a surgical...
procedure that's become very popular in recent years. The Brazilian butt lift. That's brilliant. The league's new logo looks more like it's advertising the surgery than the basketball. It's true. I've seen the new logo and it's a big... It's a big bulbous bee. I'll put it that way. It looks a bit like a bum that's been lifted. That's cool. Do you think having a big...
Brazilian butt would help you in the basketball? Oh, unquestionably. I don't know. Of course. You're space-hoppering your way along the court on that thing. Yeah. You don't even bounce on your ass in basketball. I think that's a travel violation, yeah. But do you think, like, if Kobe Bryant was jumping and doing a basket, he might say to someone, can you smell my ass? that was a thing right that was a yeah yeah tell me how my ass tastes sorry grandad christ
Because you're up your bums in the other guy's face, right? That's basically, yeah. What was the story? It was like Shaquille O'Neal and Kirby Bryant. That's like, I just had such a flashback to when I was a kid. You know when you used to get so embarrassed, your mum singing along the really wrong...
words to modern songs and i just felt that shiver hearing you say that you know what it was in the same episode that we mentioned that as the darts players where one of them farted and put the other one off so that's why i'm conflating I think that's a good, I think that's, don't listen to these guys, James. I think that's a really good, like, punk line for you in whatever sport you are. Can you smell my ass? When I'm playing Scrabble over Christmas.
I can't say it to my head, Lars. You smell my ass. Oh, my God. Brilliant. Here's one. Ludwig Umeyer. uh in cuban and other cigar factories it used to be common to have a person to read aloud to the cigar rollers while they worked oh yes and the monte cristo cigar brand got its name because the count of monte cristo was an extremely popular choice for the workers to listen to
That's incredible. That's interesting. I heard the story one, I think, yeah. I think we told that on the show at one point. Oh, did we? Sorry, okay. Yeah, but that's a great extra detail. Yeah, that's the bit that I think is amazing, really, the Monte Cristo bit. It's such a long book. It is long, yeah. You could watch so many cigars while listening to that. It's long but quite exciting, and also it's not very...
I would say you don't really need to remember what happened at the start so you could swoop in and swoop out a bit because it's just him and his adventures, isn't it? It almost feels like the second half is a bit like a comic book. There's like a 300-page digression in Paris in the middle bit. Yeah, I know, but you don't need to know what's happened before. It's just like there's a...
It's rich dude having a bloody whale of a time. On Cuba, Fidel Castro once ate 18 bowls of ice cream in a single sitting.
Okay. Yeah, he just liked ice cream. As like, oh, that wasn't a challenge. It wasn't a challenge. He really liked ice cream. There was a big thing in Cuba, which we might have mentioned before about milk and stuff like that and being able to... feed the country with amazing cows and stuff like that so it was partly a an advertising thing about how great our milk is but it was also partly he just loved ice cream right his sister passed away yeah really yeah she was she was a double
agent basically she to begin with loved castro and and then when he took over And then he continued to sort of go in a direction that was bad. She went, hang on a second. I thought you were going to be good when you got into power. And he wasn't. And so she left Cuba. I can't remember where she went. And, yeah, became a spy. And was really a big part in his downfall. Sorry, he didn't have a downfall.
She famously outlasted 10 US presidents. She was the worst spy ever. I guess that's where the double agent bit comes in. She's actually doing a fork Uber. I'll make sure I bring him down. Next week, honestly, he's coming down. One of the first facts I remember discovering for QI was in a cigar magazine about Kennedy when he placed the embargo on Cuba. His last move before that was to order a couple of suitcases.
of Cuban cigars wasn't it sent over to him and then the gates came down I love though that they would discover that fact in Cuba While someone's reading out a biography of JFK as part of the Roley system. Yes! He did what? The factory workers. Shall I take another fact from the middle? Okay, again, this is the closest to me. So Rebecca from Ottawa.
I think not the band, probably the province. Read on, but we'll find out, I guess. What did Ottawa sing? No, not Final Countdown. Something really famous, they say. Sorry, I don't know. Final Countdown, wasn't it called Europe? Yeah. ottawa ottawa not ottawa they did disco The ICO. But unfortunately, slightly different name, so it renders that whole bit. So Rebecca, who is a person who lives in Ottawa, an Ottawa, you might say, writes in.
Do you think there's a shop in Ottawa called Ottomans? Like a furniture shop? Yeah. There should be, shouldn't there? There should be, yeah. Ottowan, Rebecca, writes... Thought you might enjoy this news story from Canada about a sad goat. She goes on to put the headline, which is Mysterious Screams on BC Island, British Columbia, I imagine, turn out to be from a sad goat. Royal Canadian Mounted Police say. And yeah, there was basically a lot of sounds.
in the bottom of a ravine in British Columbia in Quadra Island. And the Mounties say it didn't come from a person in distress, but rather a sad goat. It sounded apparently a bit like, help, help. Oh, that was great. Do we know why the goat was so sad? Yes, the mama goat's babies had been removed and she was calling for them.
Been removed? That is sad. That has taken a sad turn. Yeah. I'm now siding with her. Could have been just removed temporarily to go to nursery. Yes. Do you think that's what it was? It's hard to sell. Thankfully, officers confirmed all was well and nobody besides the mama goats was in any kind of distress. Poor old, poor old mama goat. Don't know how much we did enjoy that, actually, looking around at everyone's faces, Rebecca. It is de-distressing. It was I.
Okay, never mind. It was a nice idea for a joke. I've got one here, which is from Ivor Cardis, and it's from Chapter 5 of A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley. And so this is an extract, I think, word for word. During the First World War, trainee soldiers were frequently set the initiative test of hiding and spending the night in Madame Tussauds' Chamber of Horrors. This caused such inconvenience that Madame Tussauds was forced officially to ask the War Office...
to stop the practice. How many... soldiers would fit in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors before it became unmanageably... Yeah. Before it was just a military training ground at that point. What is the Chamber of Horrors? Is it one room? Is it a whole building? No, it's a sort of labyrinthine basement full of, you know, spooky people.
It's relatively small, though. It's tight, isn't it? The corridors. A couple of corridors. People jump out at you. People grab you. Yeah, I actually really don't like those when actors are jumping out at you. I get why people do, but I just find them really tedious. But you love horror films. Yeah. But it's like a live horror film, isn't it? It's not really. It's just people trying to scare you.
That actually, now you say it, that is quite like a horror film. I don't like it because I find both of them equally scary. I don't like Ghost Rides, all things like that, because I have such high hopes and they're always disappointed because they're never scary enough. Except the Ghost Rides.
Ghost Rider Alton Towers. I'm absolutely terrified in all of them. I'm shouting to the people behind me in the ghost train. Can you smell my ass? You know, I'm really... Oh, dear. In the... After World War I... Okay, in World War II. In World War II, would Kitchener have been... No, not Kitchener. Who was it? Who's an American... General? General-ish. I can't remember who it was. Might have begun with K. Anyway, an American goes back to France and he sees that there's a war grave.
that the locals have been looking after for years and years and years. And what he doesn't have the guts to tell them is actually they'd mistaken it. It wasn't a war grave. It was a toilet. And they'd had this kind of... like latrine which all the soldiers had used and they put something on there to kind of say this is the latrine and the locals when they came back saw it and thought it was a grave and for 25 years they were putting flowers down Yeah.
Did they put a headstone down to mark the latrine? Because that would be a weird thing to do, for one thing. It wasn't that. It was more like, you know, you put a stick with... Oh, yeah. So the people would know that it was a latrine. Oh, no. Oh, no. And it was in... Whoever it was, it was in his memoirs.
that he went back there 25 years later and this is what they were doing. Why did he go back to the toilet? I want to have one final poo to remind me of the good old days. Back to the area where he was stationed. What's awful is that if you squatted and took a poo there, you'd probably be arrested for desecration of such a holy... And yet you're the only one doing the right thing. Yes. We'd shout as they dragged you away in chains. Yeah. That's a great story. And there you go.
Here's one from Matilda H. In 2018, IKEA released an advert designed to be urinated on. I think we might have said this. Yes, I remember this. We did do this. It was a pregnancy test. It was. Yes. And it got you a discount on... Your... A baby? I gave you a free baby. You've got a crib discount on the crib. Yes, it's baby furniture, but I mean, not how much furniture a baby needs to be on the crib, does it? They don't need a writing desk or a... A baby stays long. She's short, yeah.
Yeah, it said a positive pregnancy reading would get you a discount of 50%. And according to the agency, getting the technological aspect of the ad took some work. However, they quote in this email, the pregnancy test strip was used as a starting point.
make sense which relies on antibodies that bind to the pregnancy hormone htg resulting in the color change did you have to take along the now quite urany magazine or whatever it was yeah i don't know were they waterproof posters that they put up I guess it's not a poster you can't you can't have people going around peeing on the posters just says release an advert doesn't say could have been on the TV
People trying to get a pissy telly. So many people were electrocuted by this campaign that they had to end it. Oh, that's great. That's a great fact. Here's a good one. I like this. This is from Hayley Inslee. Mass-produced tomatoes in cans. We're all familiar with those. Yeah. Owe their existence to Galapagos tortoises.
Is it a riddle me this? Yeah, that is a riddle me this, isn't it? What is it? Would you like to have a riddle? Is there any chance we can get it? No. Oh, so, famously on the beagle... all the giant tortoises that were brought back were eaten as food right uh so you've got a giant turtle that's been eaten but
You've not got the turtle, but you've got the shell. Is it possible that any of the fruit and veg that was on the boat was then stored inside the empty shells and it kind of kept them... fresh enough that they thought we should be storing that is really that's really good that's very plausible can i have another guess assuming that that's not right yeah um tomatoes you get in a tin are a very special uh species they're not the normal tomatoes you get because they work better in tins and
These species of tomatoes were... the seeds went through a turtle and in the turtle's poo and grew out of turtle poo. Very good. Do you know, James is actually closest here. Oh, wow. I'm going to give James the point. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, I'll tell you what it is. It's sort of a bit like a... Okay, when you pick a...
and you should all have been saying tortoises throughout. Sorry. When you pick a tomato, that short section of stem that comes with it, you know, that little spidery bit, is the calyx, and there's a tiny bit of stem breaking off from... joint which is called the pedicel right so for many years these sharp stubs meant you couldn't put them into automatic harvesting bins because you'd end up with sharp stubs in the can right but an american botanist called charles rick two first names
discovered a tomato plant with jointless pedicels, but he couldn't get them to germinate. The only solution he found as a last ditch was to feed the seeds to some tortoises. The seeds then germinated quickly. He bred from them. Within a couple of years, all mass-produced tin tomatoes could be machine harvested. Wow! James, that's amazing. But also, Charles, Rick, what amazing lateral thinking going, the only way I can do this is done.
feed it through an animal. He must have tried various different things. Even different animals before then, I would think. Yeah, that's incredible. No, you're right. I got one here from Jeff Houghton. Check out a guy by the name of Francis Wharton. A backwoodsman, I think. British Columbia, who in the... Backwards rather than backwards, right? From the backwards knot is a little bit... British Columbia, who in the 1960s shot a deer...
Used its teeth to make his own dentures, then used them to eat the deer with its own teeth. Whoa. Blimey. That's incredible, if true. I've got a question. Yeah. Do deer have canine teeth? You wouldn't have thought so, would you? I would have thought they're mostly molar-based for all the plants they eat. They tend to want to eat sort of live prey. But you can sharpen, right?
presumably that's what he was doing he probably shaved them to size yeah which animal's teeth would you most like to have in your mouth great question but what about the um Sheepshead fish that we mentioned the other day, which has the teeth of human teeth. I wouldn't want those. I would want... I mean, shark's teeth, where they grow on a conveyor belt. Sorry, just on Anna's point. I guess the question is...
Are you doing it to improve yourself? Or has some evil demon come to you saying, you must have another animal's teeth? In which case, Anna's idea is quite clever because you're like, well, basically, I'm just getting human teeth. You're tricking the demon, though. I think the demon will say, and it can't be the sheep's head fish. Nice try. That wasn't in the contract.
You know how blue whales have that sort of... Baleen? Yeah. No, no. There's huge plates of... Baleen. Baleen, yeah. The system whereby you can only get krill through? Yeah, because of the baleen. It's called baleen. There we go. I'd go Baleen. Oh, what's that? It's what blue whales have. That's a nice idea. Yeah, so then every meal, every dinner party I go to is, oh, the guy who can only eat krill's coming. We've got to cater hundreds of thousands of krill for him.
one vegan and the krill guys and there's nothing that'll please all of them guys Dan I've just realised I don't think you have any canines oh really holy moly So normally you've got two in the middle, two on the sides, then two canines, right? Where are your third teeth out? They're completely flat. Dan, whoa. You're the newly evolved human. Because we don't need our canines anymore. Because we have cut three.
So, well done. I find it really hard to bite things these days. Yeah, you can see Anna's canines right there. No, honestly, this is incredible. So, you know, when you go to the pub and you buy a pack of crisps and often you want to open it up so that everyone can eat it, you might bite into it. For years I could do that and then suddenly...
five years ago. I can't bite. I can't get through. Someone's come and shaved your teeth in the night. Holy moly. Well, there you go. We've learned an interesting fact today. And here's another one from Jeff Partica. who opens with an omission. He says, I may have a fact-sharing problem. Thanks for letting us know. But I'd be remiss if I didn't share at least one. I myself do not hunt, with this fact being one good reason. In any given year, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota...
Pennsylvania combined to issue over 2.5 million deer hunting licenses which if an organized group would be the largest standing army in the world knowing some hunters though generally speaking organized would not be the word I'd use for them. Isn't that the idea of Americans being able to bear arms? Certainly is. In case the government goes rogue, there is automatically a standing army there. Right. I think that's...
One of the arguments. Or in case the deer finally get their act together and rebel en masse. Claim back their teeth. I haven't done one for a while. Can I read this? This is from Noah de Koenig from the Netherlands. out that the timer on your washing machine doesn't just feel wrong it often is the timer on your washing machine is an estimation based on the weight of your laundry or inverted commas load sense and it adjusts itself as it goes. That's incredible. Oh my God. Is it Noah?
Noah, you've saved the world for the second time today because that is... My mind is blown. I've wandered this for years, haven't we all? Because how often have we looked at the last minutes of the washing machine, especially when you're desperate...
it's just before you go to bed and you're desperate to take it out and apparently because I did see this one I looked into it the last minutes are specifically the ones where the timing messes up quite a lot is it because there's less water so they're less heavy maybe it's because the
The cycle, what's happening in the cycle in the last minute is they're spinning it around. So it's to do with water. It's trying to shed the excess water. So depending on the density of your wash, the water can be much greater than the washing machine is estimated at the end.
So yes, it'll spin for longer and longer, and that's why there's that agonising slowdown. When you go in, it's eight minutes, you go in eight minutes later, it's seven minutes, whatever. It's really annoying. That's a great fact. Thank you, Dan. Incredible. Dan has lined up loads of facts before him, like he's sort of doing Monopoly money.
collection over here. No, they just happen to be facing me. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I mean... arguably see all those bits of paper in front of you we can all throw stones can I read out a fact what that was just about to I've got 20 lined up to me you've done loads you've done loads like here's one here's one from Dominic Brown he's a pretty intense host this guy yeah
It's about time someone started cracking the whip. No, I love this. This is from Dominic Brown. The US Navy has an army which has an air force. That's great. I was looking this up to try and find out a bit more about it. It turns out that the US Army also has its own navy. They've got, I can't remember, it's called Army Watercraft Systems and they have got 130 boats or ships or vessels. or whatever it is. Right. It must be quite confusing. I've got one here, Chelsea Pyle.
Sounds like a very expensive house, doesn't it? My husband told me this interesting fact, and I found an article to explain it. When Mount St Helens erupted in 1980, the sound of the explosion could be heard as far away as Canada. So we kind of all know that, right? Like it sort of went... Where's Madison Helen? Quite near Canada, I thought. I mean, it is, isn't it? It's in the northwest of America. Oh, the USA? Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay.
It's in Washington. Okay, but still... Oh, up next door. There's still a distance though, right? The point of the next sentence... Several hundred miles away that you can hear this eruption. Yeah, there you go. The sound of the explosion could be heard as far away as Canada. But to those closest to the epicentre, it made no sound at all.
Oh, I see. What? That's pretty amazing. Is this like a trick because they were underwater or something? How is that possible? They were in a mud crab vehicle setting a world record. Is that... How? Is it like being in the eye of a storm? Yes. I guess so, right? Yeah. Oh. No, no, sorry. I was just saying yes. Is it like that? I wasn't saying yes, it is. Because, yeah, because it's weird because sound...
I don't feel like sound acts like the eye of a storm, I guess, which is where it's whirling around you. It's not like James talks and if I'm standing right in front of him, I can't hear it. But if I step to the side and now James is miming at me for the listeners at home. That's a really good visual cake. Yeah. That was great.
If sound gets too loud, it creates a shockwave rather than a soundwave. Oh, is that it? Do you not have the reason? No, I mean, I'm clicking the link here with my finger on this bit of paper. It's not opening. Sorry, that's my flub. I should have... Oh, dear. Someone else read it. This is from Hannah Killen or Kylan? Kylan, I think. Kylan, okay. This is from Hannah Kylan. During the world wars spies, mainly women, were discovered because...
What would have given them away? So they trained in language, they trained in culture and manner. What would have given them away? Specifically, something specifically female. You know what I thought it was going to be at first? There was a woman who was...
because they had some weird writing on their buttocks. And what had happened was they'd sat on a train and they were worried about the dirty seats. So I'd put some newspaper underneath their bum and then the print had gone onto their bum cheeks. like backwards writing so they didn't really know what it said so they assumed that she'd been dispatched into the country with a secret message for the resistance exactly written on her bum and it just said can you smell my ass wasn't they all
You ordered pints instead. And in Germany, you don't order pints. No, I guess like famous examples are a spy once was outed when she was giving birth and she started swearing in her actual language, that kind of stuff. No, we talked about the spies, the German spies. caught in the UK because...
Didn't they have a load of sausages in their bag? And there were French spies who were given away because they smelled of garlic or something. Do you remember that? No, it's too crude. There was an Australian spy who was throwing a boomerang.
Mexican spy with a big sombrero. There was one amazing story where a guy was, they thought he was a spy and they just couldn't get him. They kept trying, they're interrogating, doing all the tricks to get him to do it. And he was just flawless. And then supposedly one day when crossing a road,
one of the people who's trying to out him was behind him and went watch out a car and he looked the wrong way brilliant and but like you need a lot of witnesses like how does that hold up in court everything else is anyway the answer here is that
knitted wrong. So this is from a book by Debbie Stoller called Stitch and Bitch and the idea is that Americans knit in a very cumbersome time-consuming way these are Hannah's words where they let go of the yarn and then loop it around the needle whereas Europeans never let go of the yarn and can make the stitches much faster so they would be out of
for their knitting style. Wow, so this is American spies in France, presumably, or in Germany or whatever. Wow. Great fact. Because in this thing, people used to knit codes in various wars, didn't they? Like Morse code into knitting. specific lumps in your knitwear i don't know how much it was done and how much there was a lot of fear mongering around oh my god is that um person wearing a jumper actually transmitting morse code to their friend
But you could definitely knit code into stuff. Remember that also where they used to shave people's heads and tattoo them? This is back in the ancient Roman times. And the hair would grow back. Exactly. There's a problem with that and with the pregnancy one.
is you have to wait quite a long time between setting it up and getting the payoff. The message will be out of date by the time... You would think so. You would think so. Wait, what was pregnancy one? Well, like, for instance, the idea that Dan mentioned, which was when a woman gives birth... she'll swear in her own language. If you weren't sure someone was an agent and you had to wait for them to get pregnant and then wait nine months. And how are you going to impregnate them as well?
Probably the normal way. She got pregnant in a peculiarly British way. All right. This is from Jeremy Coracken. And he says, my hometown, Rochester, New York, forgot it had a nuclear reactor. And it found out when they're about to tear it down. Don't know if the wrecking ball has just swung back. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I've just thought of something. And there's more detail on this, and it's amazing, actually. I'll just read it to you. So...
Kodak may be a sinking ship. Kodak the company. A humorously written piece here. But apparently it's a nuclear sinking ship. For more than 30 years, the company kept a small reactor running in its basement in Rochester. And it was used for... research and powered by 3.5 pounds of uranium kodak the the i think the camera the camera people had their own nuclear
Believe so. That's amazing. And it's the kind they make bombs from. Apparently. Wow. They took precautions. The reactor was locked away in a concrete bunker. It never leaks. And I'm just going to skip through and try to find out why Codec would keep getting used. nuclear reactor. Was that originally what photobombing was? It was much more dangerous, yeah. So good.
So starting decades ago, Kodak had an interest in neutrons, subatomic particles that can be used to determine the makeup of a given material or create an image of it without damaging it. Okay, so you can fire neutrons at something and get an image. of it and to do that you need to create a nuclear reactor in order to generate a bunch of neutrons I guess how else are you going to do it? Can I do one? Elizabeth Royce writes
There's a bridge in West Virginia which was only fixed after the Soviet Union intervened. This is great. So I sort of looked up what was going on here and basically it was an article about it on the Blue Ridge Country website. It's called Vulcan, this place, this tiny town. Very few people living there. They had no safe way to drive out of town because there was a bridge that collapsed in 1974.
The only way you could get in and out was to drive up the Kentucky side of the tug, which I guess is the river, and walk across a narrow swinging bridge. Children had to crawl under parked railroad cars at the railroad's bridge to get to school. One child lost a leg doing that. So just, like, horrible...
situation and you know just a nightmare they can't get in and out of town And this guy called John Robinette, who was the self-appointed mayor, apparently, wrote to the Soviet embassy in 1977 in Washington, D.C., describing Vulcan's plight and requesting foreign aid for a bridge. And the Soviets dispatched a journalist who reported back saying, yes, of course we'll fund your bridge. If America can't do this, we will pay for it. Nice.
Because of the PR coup. Within hours of that journalist visiting, word came down from the governor saying, yeah, we'll build a bridge, we'll build a bridge. And there we go, they kept the promise and eventually the bridge was delivered. According to news reports, Volcom residents celebrated with illegally... imported Russian vodka. Nice. The American flag hung high. That's a good story. Mia Tappin says, a loan word is a word borrowed from another language.
A calc is a direct translation of one word into another language. See? Subtle difference. Remember that. The word calc, and bear in mind we're spelling this C-A-L-Q-U-E, the word calc... is an example of a loan word, because it comes from the French word calc, and the word loan word... is an example of a calc, because it's directly translated from German's lane word, meaning loan word. That's super. So good. I love that. Yeah, that's amazing. Here's a fun one. This is from Dan Maynard.
Hey, I have a fun fact about Ozzy Osbourne. I tried sending it to James on Instagram, but not sure if he'll see it. Sorry, that's not the fact. I don't really know how Instagram works, I'll be honest. I am on it. No such thing as James Harkin. He is, I can prove that because I watch him post stuff from Abschreiberland.
Jesus Christ, the self-plugging is off the charts. Anna, anything you want to... I've got nothing, thanks. Well, Dan writes, if you don't already know the story, in 1972, Black Sabbath were recording volume four in a mansion in Bel Air. Ozzy went and adjusted the thermostat and continued on with the day. Next thing, the cops turn up, sirens blaring. And here, everyone thinks it's a drug raid in the house and proceeded to flush away and snort as many drugs as possible. It turns out...
Ozzy had not adjusted the thermostat. He had, in fact, hit the emergency call button and alerted the local police. And they were just there to check if everything was OK. We're fine, we're fine, we're fine. Oh, wow. I suppose there's no crime... There's no criminal offence...
of having taken drugs even like five minutes ago. That's really interesting and I think no one's ever properly tried that in court because I think that is in theory that is true but it's difficult to say that something's never been in your possession if you've taken it. Especially as it's in your body. But if you've taken every bit of it and it's just fizzing around your nervous system, is that still possession? Possession is illegal. And if it's in your stomach, arguably you're possessing it.
And it's very difficult to say it's in my stomach, but at no stage did I ever possess it. This is quite a fun one. Chuck Norris once helped deliver a baby on a helicopter. No, he didn't. This is from James Wetter. It happened in 2013. There was a woman in, you know, the Isles of Scilly? Yes. When you're pregnant and you're about to give birth, you go to the mainland. Yeah. But she went into labour...
And then gave birth in mid-air on the helicopter. Okay. And Chuck Norris happened to be on that helicopter flight? On board the helicopter was Lieutenant Commander Chuck Norris, who was the observer on board the helicopter. Come on! And... Yeah, the baby was born mid-air. And they took off with seven passengers on board and landed with eight. It's so cool. And then in 2022, it happened again.
Chuck Norris again? No, don't think so. Here's one for you, Andy. If you're in a certain town in Switzerland... whose name escapes me once a year you can get a helicopter ride for six euros 50. Riddle me this. Normally, of course, it would cost you a lot of money to go in a helicopter. And where is it again? It's in Switzerland somewhere. And is this for me because I'm cheap? No, no, it's because you like infrastructure.
and you know vehicles and stuff like that so are you hitching a lift I've given too much away are you hitching a lift because it's flying under a what do I like to a funicular railway it's made of moss and everyone's refusing to get in Think funiculars. That's a link here. Okay, so rather than a funicular helicopter whereby it's attached to a tower and the rotors...
provide the power to lift it. Brilliant. But you're going by helicopter. I've got it. I think I've got it. It's like a rail replacement bus service, except it's a funicular replacement helicopter. Exactly. Isn't that amazing? And they're not allowed to charge more than the funicular. Precisely. So once a year, they have to...
put their funicular into maintenance but they still need to get to their village and so the government puts on a rail replacement helicopter and of course they can only charge you the amount that you would charge if it was a train. That is so good. I would just wait at the bottom.
Thank you. I don't need to get home. I'll just wait for the funicular to be back in service. There's a fact I said ages ago. And when I say fact, it's something I said out loud that I'd love to confirm. And I still haven't confirmed it. And I promise. of it looking, which is that there was a story that Chuck Norris, the actual Chuck Norris actor, as opposed to the helicopter pilot, all his movies are arguably, I think, a bit B-movie-ish, not very good. You'd watch it for the fighting, right?
He's got kids. He doesn't want his kids to watch his movies because it has fighting. So the story is that Chuck Norris... Edits out the fighting scenes from his movies and then lets his kids just watch the shitty extra videos. That's a whole movie. That's so funny. Chuck Norris. But I read it in an interview with him once and I can't find it anywhere. So I'm still looking. I'm still on the hunt. Wow. That's a great fact. This is a good one from Dylan Difford.
In May 2005, the British Department of Trade and Industry was briefly renamed the Department of Productivity, Energy and Industry. But the name was reverted after one week when it was suggested that this made Minister Alan Johnson, if you remember him. the productivity, energy, and industry secretary, or penis.
I can't imagine Mr Johnson had any problem. No, indeed. Very good. I think this is the shortest one we've got. Oh, great. From Stuart Marsh. The company that makes square fire extinguishers is called Oval. What? I've never seen a square fire extinguisher. I think I looked it up when that fact came into the inbox and it's... What an odd thing to have. They're real. They're real. That's amazing. Do we know why? Okay, here's an idea. You put them on a ship.
And then they won't roll away. Brilliant. Very good. They fall over. Yeah. That is the only reason I can possibly think of. Easier to stack in the warehouse. Yeah. If I was shopping for a square fire extinguisher and I was a ship captain, I wouldn't open up the website that was ovalextinguishers.com. This is from Amy Apple and apparently was also sent in by John Turbo. Yeah. And...
Turbo was my nickname when I was younger. It was. And John's your brother's name, so is there some sort of... The fact is that a few years ago, Nicholas Faisal, a biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland... and his colleagues developed a fascination with the penises of serotin bats, which is a species found in woodlands and the attics of old buildings. Serotin bats sport abnormally long penises with wide heart-shaped heads.
When erect, the members are around seven times longer than the female's vagina, and their bulbous heads are seven times wider than the vaginal opening. God, it's a lot of detail, isn't it? Anyway, Faisal wondered, as you would, how does this work? How can they use that? copulation long and short of it as it was the long and wide
Basically, they hang upside down. The male climbs onto the female's back and gets her neck, as bats do. But then he uses his erect penis to push the female's tail membrane to the side, locates her vulva, and then he just... puts his penis on her vagina and copulates there. So it's more of a... It's more like a cloacal kiss. It's a cloacal kiss, yes, is a nice way of putting it. God, they do have massive penises, Bats. Do you remember I got...
Do you not remember? I showed you a photo that I got sent. No! I got sent a picture by Colonel John Blastridge Snell when he was out on his expedition. He said, look at this big bat. And I opened it. It was a bat that strung up with this giant flopping penis. It was huge. It was huge. Wow. It's still burnt in my memory as a terrifying image. Holy dick pic, Batman.
Okay, that's it. That's all of your facts. Thank you very much for listening and thank you for sending them in. If you would like to get in contact with us about the things that you have said over the course of this podcast via Ask Your Mouthpieces, you can get in contact with us online. I'm at Andrew Hunter M. James? I'm on threads at no such thing as James Harkin, but I haven't done any threading. Okay. Exciting. Dan? I'm on Instagram on at Schreiberland. And Anna, if people want to contact...
Us, yes. You can contact the podcast by going to at nosuchthing on Twitter or by emailing podcast at qi.com. That's right. Or you can go to nosuchthing as a fish.com where we have lots of stuff. We have merch. We have various...
a few other endeavours that we're up to. We also have a portal there to Clubfish, the exclusive Members Lounge, which is a really fun place to be. Isn't that right, guys? It sure is! If you liked what you just heard... last 40 minutes or so every month or so we do a drop as a line which is of a similar bend yeah yeah there's bonus stuff there are ad-free episodes there's there's a thriving
fan community called Discord. It's on a thing called Discord. I know what Discord is. Don't write in. It's the place where you would probably find out first about new gigs that we're doing. there's some tempting schmutter on display at Club Fish. So go to no such thing as a fish.com. Thanks very much. We'll see you next time. Goodbye.