No Such Thing As A Fish - 12: No Such Thing As A 164ft Tall Gorilla-Whale

Episode Date: May 24, 2014

Episode 12: This week in the QI Office Dan Schreiber (@schreiberland), James Harkin (@eggshaped), Andrew Hunter Murray (@andrewhunterm) & Anna Ptaszynski (@nosuchthing) discuss urinating voles, the rules of cricket according to J.M. Barrie, and more...

We run it on QI a few years ago, which was, there's no such thing as a fish. There's no such thing as a fish. No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish. Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly QI podcast coming to you from our offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, and the three other elves joining me today are James Harkin, Anna Czenski, and Andy Murray. Once again, we're gathering around the microphone, and we're going to share with each other our favorite facts from the last seven days. So, in no particular order, here are the best things we found out this week.

James, we're going to start with you, fact number one. Okay, my fact this week is, if the new Godzilla existed, it would produce 12.9 million gallons of urine a day. That's more urine than the Exxon Valdez spilled oil. How many times does Godzilla go a day? That's not one bash, is it? Well, some animals go all the time, like voles, I think, just urinate the whole time. Really? They're just consistently urinating? Well, actually, you're consistently urinating, but your kidneys trickle out a milliliter of urine every minute.

But obviously, you can store it in your bladder, but voles, I'm pretty sure they just always let it go. And birds of prey can sometimes see these tracts of urine, and that's what helps them find the voles. Ah, because they're just constantly leaving a piss trail, basically. What's weird, though, right, is that if Godzilla were, if the new Godzilla were real, he would take the same amount of time to urinate as the rest of us do, right? Because hasn't new research shown that all animals take roughly the same amount of time to we per wee? 21 seconds, I think, on average? It's all mammals over a certain size, I think, so I'm not sure that Godzilla is a mammal.

Did someone find out that most dogs urinate in the same direction that they face north or they face west? Is that true? Well, is it true? That's a good question. I think it was dogs defecating, according to the Earth's magnetic field, if I remember the study correctly. I didn't look into too much detail to see how true it is, but yeah, it was definitely claimed. There is an article online saying that dogs have a butt compass, which is the most unpleasant phrase I've heard for a long time. Yeah, less convenient to carry around than a compass as well. But it would be convenient if you were lost with your dog.

With your dog, absolutely. If you were, for example, going to the North Pole and you lost your compass, they'd say, and it's a featureless environment. You just have to look at the dogs and they keep moving. But Rover has taken a piss in that direction. It's true, and if you had like five or six dogs and they all started peeing, but they were all facing, nuzzle to nuzzle in a big circle, it means you're exactly in the North Pole. Fantastic. So we agree that Godzilla definitely isn't a mammal.

Originally Godzilla, the initial idea for Godzilla that it was half gorilla, half whale. Oh, really? And that's where the word Godzilla comes from. Godjira is a combination. And that's where the name, it's the two words, smashed together, gorilla whale. When they actually made the movie, they did make it into a reptile dinosaur, prehistoric sort of monster. Well, one of the guys wanted it to be a giant octopus called Udako, which is very close to Okado, which would have been good. Okay.

And what was it used in? Was it used in a Godzilla versus? No, it was used to delivered groceries. In the 1954 one. Yeah. Which is the original? Yeah. The sound of Godzilla roaring was made by rubbing a leather glove up and down a double base strings.

Wow. Yeah. That's strange. I really like lo-fi solutions to problems. So in Jurassic Park, the sound was, I think, tortoises mating. Yeah. The new Godzilla is massive, isn't he? Like much bigger than the old Godzilla's.

Okay. I think that's interesting. The scaling up that happens over the years, bigger and bigger. The website where I found how much urine they produce was deepseanews.com. And it was a post by a guy called Dr. M. I don't know what his real name was. And he, as well as working out the urine, he also worked out how much bigger it's gotten in the last 50 years. And the 1954 Godzilla was 50 meters tall, but the new Godzilla is about 150 meters tall. And his idea, his theory is that the reason that it's gotten bigger is because skyscrapers have gotten bigger.

And the Godzilla has to be big enough to crush the skyscrapers. Right. It's quite interesting, isn't it? That's very interesting. Yeah. That's, yeah, it's adapting. It's evolution. It's very fast evolution.

Well, it could be evolution. It could be sexual selection. So the lady Godzillas like male Godzillas who can crush buildings and so they have to get bigger. So that's suggesting that there is a lady Godzilla? Or that this one isn't a lady. I think that in Japanese, they just call it it. They don't say it's male or female. Oh, so we've never known if it was a male or female?

Not to my knowledge. I just think there's a general inflation that goes on. With the next film, you have to have something even bigger and it's just run away in a way. This guy worked it out that it's getting bigger on a logarithmic scale. He said if they do another one in 2050, then the Godzilla will be 288.4 meters tall. Do you guys know what Godzilla breathes out of his mouth? Yeah, doesn't he breathe like nuclear clouds? It's atomic breath.

Atomic breath. That's Godzilla. Yeah, it's not fire. I thought it was fire, certainly. You think everything is fire. You think the sun is fire, Dan? I cannot believe that that is... I'd like to back Dan up.

I also still think the sun is on fire. But yeah, wasn't Godzilla initially a sort of comment on Hiroshima Nagasaki? That was why it had all these nuclear content. It was. It's interesting that the way Godzilla is defeated, certainly in the last film, is with military weapons. Whereas the whole point of Godzilla is it's a metaphor for nuclear bombs, you know, the most devastating weapons we can come up with. So it's kind of missing the point if you just attack him with weapons capable of dealing with it. So we should have beaten him with like a peace treaty?

Yeah, or like in the War of the Worlds, where the aliens catch the common cold. Do you think Godzilla would have been as popular amongst like 10 to 15 year old boys if the second half of the film had been like a Potsdam round the table peace treaty shaft? Or just a load of people tried to sneeze on him. Sorry, can you repeat your last demand? So what I really like about your fact, James, which I know you enjoy doing and I like doing as well, is the fact that when you get like an original fact and you work it out and it reminded me of one I think you found in 1339 facts to make your jaw drop, which is that the Statue of Liberty wears size 879 shoes. Oh yeah.

So I have worked out the shoe size of Godzilla. Have you? Now it's the 50 meter Godzilla. So it's the original. So he wears UK size 1680 shoes, which sounds weird because he's only a little bit taller. The 50 meter is smaller than the Statue of Liberty, but he has bigger feet. So there was a press release at the time which gave the measurements of his feet. Did you say 1680?

1680. So in US size that's 1679. Yep. It's a part to get those sorted out. Yeah, yeah. Because the new Godzilla is quite a lot bigger than the other one, a lot of Japanese superfans are really upset that the Americans have just made him fat. So Godzilla's overweight? Yeah.

That's a problem. I was just saying like it's fat from the neck downwards and massive at the bottom. This is what Godzilla superfan Fumiko Abe told the AFP at a Tokyo exhibition. But then they had the premiere I think a couple of weeks ago and Gareth Edwards who we have met. Gareth Edwards came, so the director of the latest Godzilla movie was on Museum of Curiosity, our radio show. He told us at the time that he was going to be doing Godzilla, but it wasn't announced. Oh, did he? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't remember that. They asked him at the premiere what he thought about these Japanese people saying that Godzilla got very fat. And he said, I just think it's comments like that that give giant monsters an image complex. It's such a great comeback. Yeah. OK, let's move on to fact number two and that one's yours, Anna. Yeah, this is one of my favorite things I've ever found. It's that the real Long John Silver from Treasure Island was father to the real Wendy Darling from Peter Pan.

The real Long John Silver. The guy on whom Long John Silver is based, a guy called William Ernest Henley, who was a poet and he wrote the poem in Victus by far the most famous thing he did. Was that Nelson Mandela's favorite one? Yes. Yes, and Barack Obama quoted it, didn't he? The last verse of it in his funeral. Mandela supposedly read it in prison to everyone and that got them all kind of, you know, staying positive. It's a fantastic poem. So that's his most famous poem, this guy.

Yes, which just, I don't know if this will ever go in, but I do really like the last verse, which is, it matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments, the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. It is a great poem. So that was the poem written by the man who Long John Silver was based on. Yeah, that's right. So he was this, like, full of life guy, had only one leg and Robert Louis Stevenson just thought he was this great guy, wrote him a letter after writing Treasure Island saying, I've got to be honest with you, I based Long John Silver on you because I find you, you know, such an incredible chap. Has anyone read Treasure Island? Yes, I have. It's extraordinary that we've read it at all because for a long time no one read his books.

Robert Louis Stevenson was seen as just a terrible author to the point that when in 1973 they published a 2000 page Oxford anthology of English literature, he wasn't mentioned in it at all. And now he's one of the 26 most translated authors in the world, above Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde, but for a long time no one read him. Bizarre. I don't know much about him. I know he died on Samoa. Yes, he's on their postage stamps. And he drank a lot of Guinness. It's the only other thing I know about Robert Louis Stevenson.

Right. He had it shipped out to him. Wow, that's a long way to ship out Guinness. Yeah. I remember I tried to find the furthest Irish pub from Dublin and I reckon it's Waxio Shays in New Zealand. So even from there it's a long way to Samoa. It must be strange having somebody based on you. Years ago I researched a guy called Lord Burners who was an early 20th century aristocrat and eccentric.

He built one of the last follies in Britain. You know those towers that go nowhere and are completely pointless. He built one of those and then he put it at the bottom of the sign saying, members of the public committing suicide off this tower do so at their own risk. He was a very, very funny guy. But he wrote a novel in which he based all of the characters on his friends, but he also cast it as a lesbian schoolgirl story. And one of the characters in it, Sitwell, was so angry that he tried to buy every copy of this book in circulation to destroy it.

That's a really good way to get good sales, isn't it? Yeah, pretty much. Isn't that what Alfred Hitchcock did when he released, I think it was Psycho. He bought up as many copies of the novel Psycho as he possibly could, because he didn't want the ending to be given away. Was it Psycho? Yeah, it was Psycho. Do you know who Psycho is based on?

Yes, it's based on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy. It's based on the same guy as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's Silence of the Lambs and Psycho. They're all based on the same guy called Ed Geen. He was a big famous serial killer in America. So a real gift to screenplay writers at least. Thank you, Ed. If you look at it one way, it means there are fewer Psychos out there than you think,

if they're all based on the same one guy. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Or he just had such a variety of fictional type quirks. There must be other Psychopaths going, why does he get all the gigs? I'm doing some great killings there. And yeah, does he want a single Oscar? No. Academy, getting it?

Well, Silence of the Lambs won Best Picture. But my point is, was he invited to the ceremony? What are you wearing today, Ed? I'm wearing my mother. The nipples of all my victims in a belt. You know, on a lighter note. Yeah, just to take us away from nipple wearing. When I was looking into Long John Silver,

I found a porn star who has a similar name. When you were looking into Long John Silver. So his name's Long Don Silver. And Long Don Silver, he's a retired porn star now. But he was famed, obviously, for the apparent size of his penis, which turned out that he was using a fake penis during the shoots, which no one really knew about. He persuaded a makeup artist who did the makeup for the film The Elephant Man

to create a prosthetic. I wonder if they thought, well, you know, we've got a trunk here. Actually, The Elephant Man didn't have a trunk. That would have been the makeup artist going, I've done the trunk, and they go, no, he's not physically an elephant, man. What am I going to do with this trunk? Do you think I should quickly explain the Wendy connection as well? So we don't...

William Allen and Henry was the father to Margaret Henley, who was one of the girls who, J.M. Barrie, so he loved playing with children. He was always, he loved spending time with children. And he used to hang out in Kensington Gardens and entertain the kids and tell them stories. Henry was one of the girls who used to hang out there with him, and she was the person who called him Fwendi, wasn't she?

Fwendi Wendy. Fwendi Wendy, which is where we think he got the name Wendy for Peter Pan. Is it right that Wendy was not a name before he came up with this? It was a very popular name at all, but there are some examples before him. The original title of the novel, which Peter Pan first appeared in, was going to be The Boy Who Hated Mothers. It's pretty dark. It is.

And J.M. Barrie was nicknamed The Furry Beast by his friends. Yeah. Yeah. He was very, very short and very hasute. He also loved to play cricket, right? Yeah. And this is extraordinary, his cricket team. Have you seen his cricket team?

The Allah Haq Bariz. Yeah. There are people on it. This was his team. H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Woodhouse, Jerome K. Jerome, G.K. Chesterton, A.A. Milne, and others. That was his cricket team and others. Yeah.

And there's plenty more very famous names on that list. There is so many. But the thing is they were a terrible team. And he printed a book of advice for them, which had little tips. It was in 1893. Like, don't practice on an opponent's ground before the match begins. This can only give them confidence. Or, should you hit the ball, run at once.

Do not stop to cheer. Okay. Time to move on to fact number three. And that is, I believe, my fact. My fact this week is that the tinfoil hats that conspiracy theorists wear in order to stop the government from sending messages into their brain actually does the opposite. It amplifies the signal.

Almost to the point that if there were a thousand people in a crowd and they were the one with the tinfoil hat, that's the only brain that would actually get the brain messages. It's like a huge antenna that they're wearing. How do we even know that? Well, it was a study by a bunch of students in America who just wanted to look into the myth, I guess, because people were doing it and no one had actually checked it out before.

And obviously we don't know how to send messages into people's brains or take them out. As far as I know, James is shaking your head as if we do. We don't, yeah, but they're working on it. There's been studies done in the last couple of years where people have thought about a word and people have been able to work out what word they were thinking about by measuring their brainwaves.

But they would work if they were made properly, right? So they are meant to be a Faraday cage which stops electricity passing through it. If it fully covered the head and properly tightly fitted it, then electromagnetic radiation could not get in. But as it is, if it's worn loosely or designed as sort of, you know, just a skull cap, then it gets in. But I love the idea that you would make one that was so good that the government couldn't get in,

but also then you would immediately asphyxiate. Yes. Did you guys know that the Vatican used a Faraday cage in 2013 to shield the Sistine Chapel from eavesdropping? So no one could hear who they were electing as Pope, because there was, I think in 2003, was it a Pope before that was elected? There was a leak in Germany. And so they put a Faraday cage in the Vatican.

A massive tinfoil cardinals. Cardinals hat. That's great. Have you guys heard of stealth wear? This is a company who make clothes that make the wearers invisible to infrared surveillance cameras, particularly those on drones. So the idea is that you wear these clothes and drones can't see you and it's supposed to make you safe.

Say you are being infiltrated by the American government who are looking at you with drones, they won't be able to see you anymore. They make hoodies, they make full length burkas in this kind of material. The burka goes for $2,300. The hoodie is $481. But unfortunately due to the high cost and limited availability, so far they've only sold one item a scarf. I know where we should put all the secrets.

In my neck. Swallow them, but not completely. Speaking of hats, useful hats, the following quote is from radiologist Richard Gerstle's 1950 book, How to Survive an Atomic Bomb. He said, if you are caught outdoors in a sudden attack, a hat will give you at least some protection from the heat flash. When I say some...

That's true, you probably could mathematically calculate how much it gives you. It's just that it won't... It will by no means save your life under any circumstances. This is amazing. No army at the start of the First World War gave their soldiers metal helmets. It took until 1915 and thousands and thousands of deaths before they said, the German army had leather, little leather caps called Pickle Halben. Until 1915 did people start making these helmets.

We have the image of the helmet from the First World War, the kind of shallow, again, innovated for the First World War. Francis Galton, who was, I believe, a relative of Charles Darwin, he invented a hat, didn't he? It was a hat that had an air conditioning device in it, or a little flap that opened the top because it was the idea that if you've thought too much about stuff, your head overheated. It does explain why my hair is always sin.

Weird hats, you mentioned. When was it dangerous to wear a hat? Why am I phrasing this like a Q&A question? Because I reckon that you'll get it, James. When was it dangerous? In Stockport, you used to be attacked if you weren't wearing a hat because they had the hat industry was quite big there and they thought it was unpatriotic to the town if you weren't wearing a hat.

You were attacked, not just verbally or in print. Well, people throw things at you. But not as mean as the straw hat riots. So in the early 20th century, in New York, past September the 15th, it was socially unacceptable to wear a straw hat. It was a summer item. And if you wore a straw hat, past September the 15th, then it was traditional for youths to come along

and knock your hat if your head and trample on it. And in 1922, it got out of hand. So the straw hat rioters decided to start knocking people's hats off their head a bit early and I think they approached a bunch of dock workers who were wearing straw hats on September the 13th, knocked the hats off, trampled them, started a fight, huge fight, riot. Lasted three days, a bunch of people ended up in hospital. Disaster.

And in 1924, a guy was murdered for wearing a straw hat after September the 15th. So it was a dangerous business, actually. Three days of fighting. Three days of riots, the straw hat riots. One last thing on conspiracy theories. I like the randomness of them because they're often so connected, but often they also have very strange outputs. So I found a list of conspiracy theories online

and this was 16 conspiracy theories that have been proved to be true. Someday scientists will use millions of genetically modified animals in experiments. Scientists all over the world are creating bizarre human-animal hybrids. Obama is making government employees spy on one another. And pro-wrestling is fake. It's number seven on this list. Shall we move on? Sorry, sorry, sorry. We were all brothers and sisters before.

Literally brothers and sisters and family connections. The guy who came up with the first ever tin hat was Julian Huxley, who was the brother of Aldous Huxley. It was in a short story called The Tissue Culture King about a scientist who is lost in a jungle kingdom and he offers to culture the king's flesh so the subjects can worship him in their home. And then this allows the king to exert telepathic power over the entire kingdom. And in that story he says we used caps of metal foil which reduced the effect on ourselves.

But it started as a fiction in a short story. Oh wow. That is great. Okay, moving on to our final fact of the show and that is Andy. My fact is that geese sometimes fly upside down to lose height quickly when they're coming into land. Rather than doing a long slow descent, it's like a short cut for them, like a life hack. But the best thing is they flip their body upside down but their head and neck stay the right way up. So they do a twist so that it just looks weird.

It looks really bizarre. You see the neck and the head are perfect. And then they've got this weird upside down body flapping away beneath them. And this is called whiffling. So great. I know geese the only animal to do that. I think there are a few others which do it. The description I read is that it looks like they're a falling leaf.

There's good footage which we can put up online on the podcast page. And there are amazing photos of it being captured mid-flight. It looks brilliant. So I started looking up things about flying upside down. And planes which are flown upside down. There was that movie wasn't there? Flight. Denzel Washington.

The Robert Zerm Heckersmith. I got distracted. This fact should be a lot better research but I got distracted watching a 10 minute clip from flight. The bit at the start where he crashes, he flies upside down. Yeah, it was that bit. Did you see that Boeing issued a statement after the film came out and they said, The MD-80 cannot sustain inverted flight. The MD-80, as with all commercial airliners, was designed to fly upright.

So that was a bit, you know. Do you remember that plane that flew under Tower Bridge? Oh yeah, when was that? Remember that? No. Yeah, you must remember it. I remember the Arc de Triomphe one. Go on.

Well, in 1919, someone flew a biplane through the Arc de Triomphe. And the Arc de Triomphe is big, but it's not that big. And it was the wingspan of the plane, plus a media meter on either side. Wow. It's such cool footage and we can put that up online as well. Yeah, let's put that up. Yeah, it's amazing. The guy who flew under Tower Bridge, I was talking about, this guy was called Hawker Hunter.

And he flew under Tower Bridge on the 5th of April 1968. He flew across the Thames as a demonstration against Harold Wilson's government. And he was struck off from the RAF for it, I think. And weirdly, there was a quote from him when they asked him about it. And he said he was flying down the Thames. And he said, until this very instant, I had absolutely no idea that, of course, Tower Bridge would be there. Where did he think it was going to be? Just going back to animals in the air very quickly, so geese flying upside down.

This is something that I found out weeks ago and I've mentioned it to you guys a bunch before, but we haven't said it on the podcast. It's about ladybirds. I mean, this really surprised me. The recent research has shown that ladybirds who were thought to have only flown at a height of, say, our shoulders, an average human's shoulder height, actually have been found flying at the height of 3,600 feet. And they travel as fast as 37 miles per hour. And they can go as far as 74 miles in one journey.

Do you know how they find them? What do you mean? Well, they originally found this out because obviously you've got to be at that height to find one. So they sent up planes with sticky panes and saw what they got. That was very early experience. That was by planes. When you try to swat a fly, you know how you try to swat it and you're definitely going to get it. It looks barely conscious. And then it gets away and you don't understand how.

And apparently this is because the moment they see you coming, they do a somersault rather than just falling and that speeds up their descent. So they just drop into a somersault. You can sort of imagine it and I wouldn't be able to explain the physics. Maybe you would. And then they pick up the air with their wings and fly away. That's so cool. A little somersault.

Tennis racket. That's what you need. Because they can avoid most of the strings, but they can't avoid all of them. Sorry to bring them down. Unlike tennis balls in my experience. Every time I hit it, I do a little cheer and then forget to run. And this might seem unrelated, but on geese. Can we go on geese? I would almost say that's completely related.

Goose grabbing was very popular as a sport in 17th century New Amsterdam, which obviously became New York. And the way it worked was you smear the neck of a goose with soap or something slippery and you hang the goose upside down and a bunch of competitors ride towards it on horses and the aim is to try and rip its head off. Sorry. Do you remember we did what uses a goose on QI? Yeah. Do you remember that?

We came up with loads of different things that you can use geese for. Oh yeah. Because they were used as garb dogs in ancient Rome and various different things. They were used to turn spits in the kitchen. Just grab the handle and turn it around slowly in the kitchen. That's great. Yeah. So we heard of the goose crusade.

It was during the crusades. There was a group of crusaders, slightly mad. They somehow managed to believe that a goose was filled with the Holy Spirit. And so they worshipped him and used him as a guide to find their way to Jerusalem. Like the compass direction every time he did a little goose poo. That should be east. Wow. I'm still stunned by that cruelty of that goose.

Yeah. Well, when James mentioned the goose rebellion, I thought, what was it called? The goose crusade. What did they call it? The goose crusade. Because that is some kind of disgusting drink. They knew it. Oh God.

For our gross movie. If life gives you geese, make goose age. Okay, that's it for another podcast. That is all of our facts. Thanks so much everyone for listening. If you want to get in touch with us about any of the things that we've said during the course of this show, you can get us on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland.

Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At Egg Shaped. Anna. Still fighting against the avalanche of requests coming through to us on Twitter and Facebook to get her on there. Hashtag get Anna on Twitter.

Hashtag bugger off all of you. So in the meantime, you can get her on at Quickipedia or you can go to the page that she creates for each and every single one of these episodes, which is qi.com slash podcast. And we're going to have pictures and videos and links to all the stuff that we've been talking about in this episode. We're going to be back again next week with another set of facts. So we'll talk to you then. Catch you later.