No Such Thing As A Fish - 14: No Such Thing As A Dirty Pair Of Jeans
Episode Date: June 7, 2014Episode 14: This week in the QI Office Dan Schreiber (@schreiberland), James Harkin (@eggshaped), Andrew Hunter Murray (@andrewhunterm)Anna Ptaszynski (@nosuchthing) & Freddy Soames (@fsoames) dis...cuss Charlemagne's tablecloth, Charles Lindbergh's fan mail, the original members of the Mile-High club and more...
Transcript
Discussion (0)
We ran it on QI a few years ago, which was, there's no such thing as a fish.
You mean 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.
Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Shriver, I'm sitting here with the regular three QI elves,
Anna Czazinski, Andy Murray, and James Harkin,
and we've got joining us today on fact-checking Judy's Freddy Soames.
And once again, we have gathered around the microphones in our offices
to tell each other our favorite facts from the last seven days.
So, in no particular order, here we go.
First up is James!
My fact this week is that the CEO of Levi's, Chip Berg,
hasn't washed his jeans in more than a year.
So, when you first mentioned this to us, I thought that wasn't that surprising
because I didn't really wash jeans and didn't realize that was a thing.
I was shocked and I wanted to know where his mother was,
and I wash my jeans every day.
But Andy eats crisps off a plate, come on.
That's true.
Can't trust his household habits.
But apparently I'm right, right?
So, a jeans aficionado is on my side.
Well, there are lots of people who think that you shouldn't wash jeans
because it fades the colors and it spoils the fabric.
But that's people who work for jeans companies,
not so much microbiologists who tend to think
that you probably should wash them
because there's going to be lots of bacteria on there.
So, how much bacteria are we talking?
Okay, so there was a student at the University of Alberta
called Josh Lay, or Lee, and he, as an experiment,
wore the same pair of jeans for 15 months without washing them.
And after two weeks, he found that he had around 1,000 to 2,000 bacteria per square centimeter.
That was on the front of the jeans, 1,500 to 2,500 on the back,
and between 8,000 and 10,000 in the crotch area.
Lovely.
I wonder how many more there is than we have on our skin.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
Because you do have bacteria on your skin.
We have 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells in our bodies, is that right?
Yes, most of them are very small cells in the gut,
but 90% of you is not human.
Isn't that where all the smell comes from?
I seem to remember saying this to you guys a long time ago,
but that's why you smell.
It's not you.
It's the little animal, lads.
It's a very poor excuse on a date, though.
It's not me.
It's the 90% of cells which aren't me in my body.
So, if someone ever says to you,
oh, you smell of sweat today, you should say,
no, I smell of bacterial feces, actually, in your face.
Where are you going?
Don't get in that taxi.
I see a promise for us.
So, I don't know.
Do you just not do anything with your jeans, Anna,
or do you put them in the freezer like some people do?
I don't really understand this freezer thing.
What's the freezer thing?
Well, that's what this guy from Levi says,
that instead of washing, you can kill the bacteria
by putting your jeans in the freezer.
Oh.
And, one, it means that it doesn't fade the jeans
and what have you.
But, two, it also will save water.
And, apparently, people are using a lot of water
all the time, uselessly, for washing their jeans.
So, that's a bit like, that's like a cool way of cleaning
in the same way that, remember the person
who used to have an asbestos tablecloth?
Oh, yeah, Charlemagne.
Charlemagne.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Do you know about that, Andy?
No.
Okay, so, like Dan says, exactly that.
He had an asbestos tablecloth.
After each meal, he would take it out,
throw it in the fire, and then let the fire clean it,
and then he would bring it out and use it again.
Did he die young by any chance?
Can I tell you my favorite thing about this Levi's fact?
Yeah, go on.
Is that, I just like that the head of Levi's wears Levi's.
Yeah.
It's just, I love any time you hear a story
where someone uses the thing that they created,
or that they're the head of.
Like, when I was wearing my No Such Thing as a Fish t-shirt
at QI Recordings this week.
Exactly, yeah.
There's no shame in that.
There's no shame in that.
There's no shame in buying online.
In New Zealand.
Not from us.
Not from us.
I like even more so when you see the company getting in trouble
for something to do with their own company.
Like, for example, Jimmy Wales, who created Wikipedia,
got in trouble for editing his own Wikipedia page.
Which is the top line of what you're not meant to do.
And he got busted for it.
And I don't know what he was thinking,
because it comes up as edited by Jimmy Wales.
I think we tweeted this the other day,
and Freddie might have to check which unis they were,
but there's an American uni that are guidelines
on plagiarism, and it was all plagiarised from another American.
Oh yeah, that's a great fact.
That was, yeah, it's a QI tweet if you can find that.
Do we know who invented jeans, by the way?
Well, there's a difference between jeans and blue jeans.
You know, the blue jeans that everyone wears today.
Yeah.
Were invented in the late 19th century in America.
But this is cool.
There have been paintings discovered from the 1650s,
where people are wearing the blue cloth,
sort of fixed in with white,
which is the, you know, the proper gene fabric.
And the artist is unknown, but he's called the master of the blue jeans.
And so in one there's a peasant wearing a blue skirt,
another there's a boy in a ripped dark blue jacket,
and it looks like they're wearing jeans in the 1600s.
Yeah, yeah, and double denim.
It's very, very cool.
That's so good.
Is that a neem?
Because that's where it comes from, denim, doesn't it?
Wood, supposedly.
Denim is from neem, or it's either there,
or it's from Genoa in Italy,
which is where they think we might get the word jeans from.
But that's not blue jeans with the rivets in them.
Those were the ones which took over the whole world.
But Levi's didn't call their product jeans,
did they, for a long time?
I think for the first 107 years,
they called them waste overalls.
We had a fact in one of our books
that half of the world's population
are wearing jeans at any one time.
Can't remember where it came from.
I think it's kind of missed, maybe.
I know where it came from.
Oh, go on.
Well, it was a man called Miller,
who visited lots and lots of countries.
And in every country he visited,
he stopped and counted the first 100 people to walk by,
and in each one he found that almost half of the population
were wearing jeans on any given date,
which is unbelievable.
It's fantastic.
I'm wearing jeans now.
I'm wearing jeans.
Yeah, me too.
Around this table.
I'm not wearing jeans.
Around this table.
I was smelling, and I thought, yeah.
Just going back to not really washing, etc.
There was a very famous dirty celebrity
in the 19th century, I think.
I thought you were going to say the 1970s.
He was called Dirty Dick.
Can you know Dirty Dick's pub?
It's on Liverpool Street,
near Liverpool Street station on Bishop's Gate.
And what happened was on his wedding day,
his fiance died very sadly.
And then after that, he refused to wash or clean
for the rest of his life and lived in this place in London.
And he became really famous for being dirty and never washing.
And if you sent any letters addressed to the dirty warehouse London,
they would always get to him because he was so famous for being dirty.
Well, there wasn't washing.
Queen Victoria thought washing was really bad for you as well.
Lots of people did.
Yeah, in the 19th century, very unfashionable.
Okay, before we move on, Freddie, have you got anything to add?
Yeah, so the tweet that was on Quikipedia the other day
was that a university in Oregon has plagiarized the section on plagiarism
in its student handbook from the section on plagiarism
in Stamford University's handbook.
Wow.
So good.
And we took that tweet from OMG Fats.
Okay, let's move on to fact number two.
And this fact is my one.
It's a long one.
So I was just I found this pretty astonishing.
The first successful transatlantic flight, which happened in 1919,
was made by two guys from Manchester.
But it's one of those trips where it was just a complete disaster,
but they managed to do it.
But my favorite bit about the fact is that at one point
they got completely lost while they were in the air.
They were just covered in cloud and fog.
And when they came out of the cloud and fog,
thinking that they were 13,000 feet in the air,
it turned out they were only 60 feet above the water.
And not only that, but they were flying sideways
on a 90 degree angle to the surface of the ocean.
Wow.
Well, how would they know?
I always know when I'm at 90 degrees because of gravity.
Yeah, were they so tense while they were flying that they just didn't?
Oh, so stiff and up they were.
They were so tense.
Now, I got this from Bill Bryson's book,
One Summer America 1927.
He was saying this is how tense it was for them to do it.
The guy who was in front, who was called Alcock,
was holding onto the wheel.
They didn't have a cover over them.
It was like a convertible plane.
And the other guy's job, who was brown,
had to sit forward and using his two index fingers
as kind of windshield wipers on the goggles of Alcock.
That was his job to basically just be wiping them away.
He also had to jump out onto the wings of the plane six times
in order to knock icing off and get back on.
I say icing.
You mean ice.
They flew through the Great Cake Drift.
So when was this?
What year was this?
1919.
1919.
They did the first transatlantic crossing,
but they went from Canada, didn't they?
They went from Newfoundland to Ireland.
Yeah.
But at one point, they even went the wrong way.
They did a loop and started heading back towards Canada.
It is pretty easy to get disorientated,
I think, when you're flying.
Shame on me.
I can't remember who it was,
but there was an explorer who was in a balloon
and he went up very, very high and sort of passed out
or fell asleep or something like that.
And then when he woke up, he thought he'd landed.
And so decided to get out of the plane
to just walk on the snow, which he saw below.
And only when he was halfway out of the balloon
did he realize that it wasn't snow.
It was actually the clouds.
And he was still 20,000 feet up.
Oh my God.
In 1914, when you look at the military use of airplanes,
there's this fact here that the French Air Corps
had the largest air force in the world,
larger than Germany, Britain, Italy, Russia, Japan,
and Austria all combined.
And they only had three dozen planes.
And that was the largest in the world.
So how many did the rest of us have?
Four.
Each or between us?
Each.
Each in America had two.
And in the space of four years, they went up to Britain
having 55,000, Germany having 48,000, Italy having 20,000.
And France still had 36.
Do you want to hear something cool about Lindbergh?
Yes, please.
Who made the first solo flight from New York to Paris?
He was the 19th person to cross the Atlantic in a plane.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Was he the first solo then or?
He was the first solo New York to Paris.
That was the thing.
And New York is a much further distance,
because obviously it's further down the coast.
So lots of people talk about the amazing length
he went to cut down the weight of the plane,
and he even cut the top and the bottom off his map
so that it would save a couple of ounces.
But he also had this thing.
He said, I had an arm burst cup,
which is a device for condensing the moisture
from human breath into drinking water.
How cool is that?
Why don't we still have these?
He didn't realize how famous he was going to be, did he?
He knew he might be in the papers,
so he subscribed to a cutting service
that would send all the newspaper cuttings
to his mother's house,
thinking it would just be a few here or there.
But of course, it was in every single newspaper
for days and days and days.
And by the end of his first week,
his mother discovered to her horror
that a fleet of trucks was preparing
to deliver several tons of newspaper articles to her house.
Wow.
Reports were at the time,
like if he left something on his plate,
you know, a meal, like corn on the cob,
the waiters would fight over it,
because that would become a really precious item.
Look at Drummers' drumstick after a gig.
Yeah, exactly.
Is that an actual drumstick for corn?
So, the right flyer was the right brother's plane
that they first flew,
and what's the highest altitude that any part of it reached?
20 feet.
30 feet.
I'm thinking it's a QI question,
so I think I know the answer.
Yeah, go on.
Is it the moon?
It's so the moon.
Oh, of course.
Another one of Neil's little trinkets.
Who brought it up, Neil Armstrong?
Neil Armstrong brought it up to brought up a bit of the wing.
We had a few series ago,
Buzz Aldrin on Museum of Curiosity,
sister show to QI,
and no such thing as a fish,
cousin of no such thing as a fish,
and I found this fact that I hadn't read in any of his biographies.
I can't even remember where I found it now,
but I mentioned it to him in person,
because I thought this is going to be amazing to say that Buzz Aldrin.
I discovered that his dad was mates
with one of the Wright brothers.
So within the father's lifetime,
he knew the first person to fly a plane,
and his son became the first,
well, second person to stand on the moon.
And so I said to him,
you might have actually met him,
because you were at the same Air Force base
where your dad and he worked,
and he went, yeah, I guess so.
And he just wasn't interested at all.
I thought I'd delivered the ultimate.
I think it's the way you tell him, Dan.
The Wright brothers' dad told them
that they were never allowed to fly together,
didn't he?
Because he was right that one of them was going to die,
so they only flew together once in their whole lives.
And you know, so after their first flight
in the Wright Flyer in 1903, I think it was,
then so they took turns flying,
and they had go's on it,
and they flew further and further,
and then they had a chat about it,
stood next to the plane, had a chat about it,
and the Wright Flyer never flew again after that day,
because a gust of wind picked it up
and flipped it over a bunch of times and broke it.
Oh, really?
Yeah, just as they were talking,
they're like, oh, shit, there goes that.
Do you guys know who was the first woman
to fly solo in an aeroplane?
Is it not a female lady human?
Is it a female animal?
Is it a female ant?
Is it a tortoise?
It's not even a QI thing, it's just a question.
And it's a question to which none of you know the answer.
Tell us the answer, goddammit.
It was Blanche Stuart Scott.
Of course!
Because the story was quite good,
because she was the first woman to fly solo in an aeroplane,
she reached 40 feet and it was in 1910.
And she was a friend of an aviator called Glenn Curtis,
and he, like was the time in those days,
nobody thought a woman should really be in an aeroplane,
and he allowed her to sort of taxi around the airfield
in the aeroplane, but she wasn't allowed to take off.
And then something happened,
we don't know what happened, on September the 2nd in 1910,
and she managed to take off and ended up
going up to 40 feet in the air,
and no one really knows how she managed to do it,
because what he would do is,
he would insert a block of wood behind the throttle
to stop her from reaching the necessary speed to take off,
and then suddenly...
Do you assume that a woman would not have the intelligence
to remove a block of wood from behind the throttle?
Because my theory is that's probably what she did.
Or it might have come loose itself.
And did she land it?
Yeah, she landed it.
So she didn't die?
No, she didn't die.
Okay, that's good news.
Good old Blanche.
I have a fun fact about the guy who invented the autopilot.
Who was Lawrence Sferry,
who I think you're familiar with, Andy.
But so he also inadvertently invented something else,
which was the Mile High Club.
Sorry, I was going to make that like a tension thing.
I got you to guess, and then I decided to tell you the answer.
So yeah, in 1916, he was going flying lessons
to this socialite called Mrs. Waldo Pierce,
whose husband, to make this story a bit more poignant,
was driving an ambulance in France at the time in the war.
Her husband was friends with Ernest Hemingway by coincidence.
So Lawrence Sferry, autopilot inventor,
Mrs. Waldo Pierce, go up in his plane.
He uses his autopilot to fly the plane for a while
while he has a quick bit of whatever you want to give it.
How's your father with Mrs. Waldo?
And the plane crashed.
Something went wrong with the autopilot.
People think that they kicked it during their relations
and kicked the autopilot, of course,
and the plane crashed into a duck pond
and they were found unclothed by duck hunters.
Fortunately, her husband was driving an ambulance nearby.
Sferry claimed they'd been divested
by the force of the crash when they emerged from the plane,
not wearing any clothes.
Isn't there a fact that the first ever hot air balloon trip,
there was some hanky-panky going on in there as well?
Not the first ever,
because I think that was the Mongolian brothers who were interested in it.
George Biggin and Letitia Sage went up in a balloon
organised by an Italian man called Lunardi,
but he got out just at the last minute
and it went over Piccadilly.
And as it went over Piccadilly,
people could see Sage on all fours,
although she maintained that she was not having sex.
I think she said she was looking for something,
although I can't remember for sure.
And all of her clothes had fallen off
in the excitement of going up.
And so then later on in these big wager books
that they have in London Clubs,
one wager reads,
Lord Chumbly has given two guineas to Lord Derby
to receive 500 guineas
whenever his lordship plays hospitals with a woman
in a balloon a thousand yards from the earth.
Maybe people's clothes were just much more poorly designed
in the olden days.
Maybe they just never washed their jeans
and they just fell off.
Crumbling away.
Okay, time for fact number three,
and that is Anna's.
Yeah, my fact is that in 2007,
a woman called Evan Latimer
inherited Napoleon's penis from her father.
That happened.
So basically at Napoleon's autopsy in 1921,
there were 17 doctors present.
And it's thought that the main,
his physician, his main doctor cut off his penis.
We know that bits of his body were removed.
So his heart was removed
because he wanted it sent to his wife,
his estranged wife, although it never got to her.
And there's a theory that it was eaten by rats.
And anyway, then it was later admitted
by one of the doctors who was there
that other bits of Napoleon's body were also removed.
So it resurfaced at the beginning of the 20th century
from the family of the priest
who was also present at the autopsy
whom the physician had given it to.
And yeah, it was put up,
it was sold to a collector
and it's been sold at various auctions
and it's been on display in New York in 1927.
How much did they sell it for?
Only $3,000 he bought it for.
In 1977, that would have been more money.
A bit more, but not that much.
Also, it was questionable whether it was his penis at all.
But was this woman upset that, you know,
did her elder sister get the Duke of Wellington's penis
in the well or something?
Was it the whole bequest penis?
Maybe, she might have been
because his penis is certainly diminutive.
It measures 1.5 inches now.
And there is a defense that it wasn't very well preserved
so there's been some shriveling.
But it's been likened to various things.
It's been likened over the years
by people who've seen it to shriveled eel,
beef jerky and a bit of leather.
And it's 1.5 inches.
Yeah, it was described as a mummified tendon,
I believe, when he removed it.
Which is a very delicate way of describing a severed penis.
Certainly better than shriveled eel.
I first read this fact in a book called The Antiques Magpie,
which is really good.
And it's written by an antiques roadshow expert.
He thinks that the reason the willy was locked off
was because the physician was annoyed
at being left out of Napoleon's will.
Oh, I read it, it was the chaplain
who wanted it done as an act of revenge
because Napoleon kept calling him impotent.
Well, he did give it to the chaplain.
So maybe they both had a chat in the pub one night
and he was like, I'm really pissed off in Napoleon,
I'm not in his will.
And the chaplain was like, I'm pissed off in Napoleon too,
he's called me impotent.
And they agreed to it.
Maybe they each got half, which explains its size.
That's such a good point.
It's actually three inches, we've been unfair.
The thing is that after Napoleon was captured at Waterloo,
all of his belongings were sent on tour around England,
very much like the X Factor Roadshow today, for example.
So his carriage was sent around the country
and it drew crowds.
It had little objects that he had owned,
like a gold tongue scraper, a flesh brush, and a chocolate pot.
Oops, sorry, what's a flesh brush?
I think, I'm not certain.
It's a brush with hard bristles that you use
to stimulate your skin and stimulate blood flow,
but I am not certain.
Did you guys know that this is a bit of research
that I did in the B series
and no one liked it?
Napoleon had a little genie that he used to talk to.
Is that what he called it?
Little 1.5 inch dried up genie.
Honestly, it's small, but it works magic.
Just rub it, just rub it.
No, he had a, it's apparently someone who before big battles
used to come from the stars called the Red Man.
It's what he called them, the Red Man.
And he first appeared during the Battle of the Pyramids
and supposedly Napoleon said he made a pact,
a 10-year pact with this genie.
Oh, weird.
Resputants penis, that was sold.
And it turned out later to be a dried up piece of sea cucumber.
And not a penis at all.
Just, can you imagine all the women
who were disappointed in the bedroom by that?
And Tutankhamun, another famous person,
was the only mummy who was buried with an erect penis.
Wow.
Someone else's or his own?
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
One of the best sentences set out loud in this office,
I'm convinced, was one night when me and James were sitting here
and putting music to one of the No Such Thing as a Fish podcasts.
And in a moment of silence where James saw,
oh, I've got, you know, I should just start a conversation,
James said to me, hey, did you know over 600 men in the world have two dicks?
Yeah, no, that is true.
600 men have two dicks.
There was a circus performer who had two penises.
Do you remember him?
No.
No, I missed that.
I missed when I was seven that Zippo's circus.
You were concentrating on the clouds and the elephants.
Yeah, I can see the man exposing himself by the door of the tent.
I'm not sure he was part of the circus, I'm just thinking about it.
It might be two men.
So the guy was called Juan Baptista dos Santos,
and he was known as the man with two penises.
And he was born in Faro in Portugal in 1843.
And in 1865, he turned down the sum of 200,000 francs to appear for two years with a French circus.
Impressive guy.
That would be very difficult for his tailor, though.
Which way does he address to the left?
No, actually both.
Both to the left and the right.
Okay, moving on to our final fact of the show, fact number four, Andy.
Yours.
My fact is, to say I don't care about something,
a German person has the option of saying it's sausage to me.
Or in German, das ist mir wurst.
Yeah, so there's a rich heritage of sausage sayings in Germany.
There's another one which suggests that it's very important,
is that sausage is very important,
where you say is get undiversed, which is it's all about the sausage.
Anyway, this is from a blog on Oxford Dictionary's website from the OUP.
They have other ones like, if you're sulking,
you aren't playing the offended liver pate.
That's like, I think that's like referring to the bottom lip sticking out,
isn't it? It's like a bit of a liver.
What is it?
I think so, yeah.
They have a sausage academy, I believe.
You can get a sausage diploma in Germany.
Hang on, is it a diploma that's also a sausage?
It's a real thing.
I also have a sausage diploma.
I got it from Banger University.
And it's right, there's 1,300 students have earned certificates.
At the sausage academy, they learn things like,
what's the right mustard to put with what sausage,
and which is the best log to drink with it.
In America, they have the National Hot Dog Academy,
and they do a similar thing.
They have rules about eating hot dogs.
And so, for instance, one of them is,
don't take more than five bites to finish a hot dog.
For Footlong Wiener, seven bites are acceptable.
And also, don't use ketchup on your hot dog after the age of 18.
Mustard, relish, onions, cheese and chili are acceptable.
The first hot dog eating competition was held in 1916,
which I think was in the States,
so the year before they entered the war,
when they were still larking around.
And the winner ate 13 Frankfurters.
I don't know in what time scale that was,
but recently, the latest record I've found
is from last year, where a man ate 69 hot dogs
in 10 minutes with buns.
I highly recommend to anyone listening,
if they want to find out more about this kind of hot dog eating competition stuff.
I just read an article by John Ronson in his book,
Lost at Sea, called The Hunger Games, and he interviews the top.
The person who set that record that Andy just read out,
it's him into John Ronson interviewing him,
and it's phenomenal, the industry.
The great breakthrough was a very small, slight-looking,
I think Japanese man who came up with the incredible innovation
that you don't have to chew your way through the buns.
You dip them in water, which makes them a lot smaller,
a lot easier to swallow quickly and revolutionize the game.
That was the Fosbury Flop moment in competitive hot dog eating.
But actually, there is controversy
whether you should be allowed to do that or not.
It sounds like cheating to me.
I definitely think you shouldn't, I'm afraid to say.
No. I found there's a Japanese book,
which is published in Edinburgh,
and it's called The Insider's Guide to Scotland,
obviously though with a Japanese title,
that's the translated title.
And in the book, they advise anyone from Japan visiting Scotland
to avoid eating the sausages.
Yeah. Speaking of parts of the UK and sausages,
there is a Welsh product called Dragon Sausages,
and it had to be taken off the shelves
because it didn't contain any dragons.
Really?
Yeah. A Powys County Council spokesman said,
the product was not sufficiently precise
to inform a purchaser of the true nature of the food.
There's a man called David Harding in London
who's become the first official sausage addict,
and he's spent more than two grand on therapy
to try and get over it because he can't live.
He says, I genuinely cannot bear the thought
of living without sausages.
He thinks he's had at least one sausage a day
since he was three.
Why would you need therapy to get over that?
They're not going anywhere. Just buy another sausage.
Oh, yeah. That's your attitude to all drugs, isn't it?
It's a very good sign.
Cane everywhere. Why don't you just carry on?
It's a shortage, isn't it?
Just have some more cocaine if that's the case.
Man up.
Sausages are very elderly.
Old. They are.
They've got a long and noble history, haven't they?
I've found a lot of things online.
Need to properly stack it up,
but I think they're older than Ancient Rome.
Yes. Which is cool.
I'm pretty sure they are.
I think Poma mentions one.
There's an Aristophanes play called The Knights,
as in Knights of the Round Table,
in which a sausage seller beats a demagogue
in conversation over politics
because he knows how to do all the stuff
like mincing up policies and stuff them
and dress them up looking all nice and pretty.
So, yeah.
They say lars are like sausages, don't they?
Was it Bismarck?
00:27:25,760 --> 00:27:26,880
I think it was Bismarck who said it.
Laws are like sausages.
It's best not to watch them being made.
Yeah.
Something like that, isn't it?
So, we're talking about how old sausages are.
They were banned, or blood sausages were banned,
by Leo the Wise.
He ruled in the 10th century,
and he banned the blood sausage,
and the pronouncement was like this.
It said,
We hereby forbid all persons either to use or sell it,
and we give notice that if anyone should,
in contempt of divine law,
have been found to have prepared blood as food,
whether he sells or buys it,
he shall have all his property confiscated.
Wow.
And after being severely scourged
and disgracefully shaved,
he shall be exiled for life.
Disgracefully shaved.
What is that?
That's wonderful.
That's very funny.
The Catholic Church banned them in the 4th century as well,
because they were thought to be a part of a pagan rituals,
which they were often.
Hey, this is really exciting.
There's a bunch of forgotten Grim Fairy tales stories,
and one of them is called
The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage.
A mouse with a bird and a sausage
set up the house together for a while,
and things were going well.
Bird's job was to fly into the forest every day,
bring back wood, mouse carried water,
lit the fire, set the table.
Sausage did the cooking,
making sure their meals were properly flavoured
by rolling round in them.
I think we should wrap up.
Okay, Freddie, do you want to add anything
before we wrap up?
Yeah, I have one thing.
It's kind of mundane,
but pretty impressive, all the same.
So, Asda actually commissioned in 2000
the creation of the world's longest sausage,
and it was made in Sheffield,
and it measured 59.14 kilometres.
Kilometres?
Kilometres, yeah, 36.75 miles.
Wow.
Did they just not turn on the thing
which divides the sausages up?
You know?
So, they just have a continuous production line
of one sausage.
That must be it.
Oh, that's great.
Good fact.
They also won the world's most frightening
penis metaphor with that.
Napoleon looked on with envy.
Okay, that's it for this episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.
That is all of our facts.
If you want to talk to us about any of the things
that we've mentioned in this podcast,
you can get us all on our Twitter handles.
I'm at Shriverland.
Anna is not on Twitter still,
but have you seen the push?
There's a big pushy to get on Twitter now.
From you three.
Trending in this office only, isn't it?
Yeah.
But if you do want to ask any questions about the podcast,
if you go to qi.com slash podcast,
and there's the email address you can write to Neon.
There you go.
You can write to Anna on there.
James.
My Twitter is at Eggshapes.
Andy.
At Andrew Hunter M.
And Freddie.
My Twitter is rfsomes.
You can also head over to qi.com slash podcast,
where we're going to have all sorts of extra information,
videos and links that you can click on to
and explore further into the stories
that we've been talking about.
We'll be back again next week with another episode.
Until then, goodbye.
you