No Such Thing As A Fish - 188: No Such Thing As A Mouth-Propelled Grenade Launcher

Episode Date: October 27, 2017

Live from Newcastle, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Mo Farah's only Guinness World Record, what's inside a Kit Kat, and how hamsters arrived in the UK.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you this week from the stand in Newcastle! I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, James Harkin and Andrew Hunter Murray and once again we have gathered round the microphones to share our four favourite facts from the last seven days and now it is time for fact number one and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that Mo Farah has only won Guinness World Record and it is in the 100 meter sack race. When? It's not like a school sports day here was it?

I don't know why he did it but he did it. I read an article and it said Mo Farah needs a world record to seal his place among the old time greats and I thought I'll check if he has one and he does. He has one other one which is a two mile indoor run but that's not in the Guinness Book of Records but this in the Guinness Book of Records this is the only one and he's about to lose it. There's a guy called Stephen Wildish from Rotten and Mo Farah got 39.91 seconds for his 100 meters and Stephen Wildish has already got 28 seconds. But unfortunately two weeks after he did it he got a letter from Guinness saying that to get the world record he needed a 50 kilogram sack and his sack was only 30 kilograms.

I thought for a second you meant the sack had to weigh 50 kilograms and I am amazed anyone finishes it. So anyway I got in touch with Stephen Wildish and he's going to repeat his attempt next week and he's really confident that he's definitely going to do it and so that means that by probably the week after this goes out Mo Farah will have no Guinness World Records. So we snuck in. This definitely needs to go out this Friday James. What's the speed that he managed to clock in for the record? So Stephen managed to do it at 28 seconds for the 100 meters so a normal 100 meters for Usain Bolt will be just under 10 seconds. So you know it's not that fast but it's quite fast and I asked him why I asked Stephen why he

was so much better at the sack race than Mo Farah and he says unlike Mo I have little legs but large calf muscles and I asked him if he has any inspirational words for the people of Newcastle and he said inspirational words always check your sack. Very good. So Mo Farah you're saying has the Guinness World Record for the sack race but he also has but he does have a world record. He just has one other world record but it's not a special Guinness one it's just like just the IAAF or something. Yeah but it's a world it's a world record. I don't think like when Usain Bolt gets an Olympic world record they're going yeah that's not a Guinness World Record. Surely that's more. I see what you mean but it is I mean

it's the two mile indoor run. Yeah I mean I'm not putting him down but why is that any different than an outdoor run? It's more impressive really to have a two mile long building frankly. That's true. It's weird though because on the Guinness record page for running records they've they've really bumped him up haven't they like and he's in the top four I think he's fourth one down it's the sack race so like number one is fastest male marathon number two is fastest female number three is first to get three records at the Olympics and number four he sneaks in there with a sack race and I don't want to put down Guinness Book of Records but when they said that Stephen Wildish's sack was too small I kind of think they're a bit upset about Mo Farah losing this record. Yeah

they didn't know but they do have rules about how big your sack is they actually do they have one thing which is if the sack is too big they notice that people as opposed to like 100 meters long but that's that's the main issue really because obviously in a sack race you're hopping everywhere if you have a slightly larger sack people actually run inside the sack in order to get there and that builds up speed and you can kind of run you can put your feet into the little corners and do a little kind of wiggly run but the thing is it used to be in the 19th century in America that each college would have their athletics team so they'd have a javelin thrower and a hundred meters runner but they would all also have a sack race guy and this was quite a big deal and they would train

and they would really try and be awesome at the sack race and some of them would hop and some of them would run with their feet in the corners and the hoppers were usually better and the thing is that they came up with a technique of really hopping as like as far as they could and it was quite ungainly and sometimes they'd fall over okay but they were so good that when they fell over they sort of did a little somersault and could get back on their feet immediately and they virtually lost no time whatsoever oh wow like andy's anal thing that he was talking about earlier so for the people listening to this podcast on friday and i would hope you'd edit this bit right out not a chance there's a new robot no we don't have time for this we don't have time

no no we don't have time no no people can just imagine what you were thinking about okay um do you know there's a hundred meters on all fours world record is there and it's 15.71 seconds it's really they are unbelievably fast the guys who do it it's so good um so it's the same man who's broken the record four times since 2008 he's a japanese guy and to practice he mops flaws on all fours which is fun to say as well as to do how does that help him practice i think he just gets habituated to being on all fours all the time and moving around and you know he's less like but it's misrepresentative of the actual purchase you can get on the ground he that would be more useful if he was ice skating because then you have no because of a it's like

training at altitude isn't it because if you can do it on a slippy floor and then you get on a proper road yeah he's not wrong yeah he's right he's right these stupid sports like sports day sports used to be more difficult stupid sports you know sports that are for the people who aren't sporty at sports day we've all got a list and i had polevolts on mine polevolts are stupid stupid sport i'm thinking more egg and spoon the three-legged all that kind of stuff but i was looking them up in the british newspaper archive to see you know what people used to do in the olden days about them and it turns out that the egg and spoon race for instance used to be done while punting so there was there was a reference uh this is in fact this is the earliest usage in the OED

of egg and spoon is in 1894 and it said the gentleman had a turn in the egg and spoon race in which competitors had to punt with one hand and balance an egg and spoon with another so that was actually much harder you know punting for people who aren't from Oxford or Cambridge is where you are on a boat standing up and you drop a stick in and you have to power your boat along at the same time as carrying an egg and spoon wow yeah i thought you meant punting as in putting a bet on with the horses no no that was strictly forbidden actually and the wheelbarrow race was blindfolded um this is in the 19th century at uh so for instance a queen blindfolded well wheelbarrows don't have eyes exactly it's just more realistic i think you're both blindfolded

so this is for queen victoria's jubilee there was a huge wheelbarrow race and she didn't she didn't participate sorry the wheelbarrow are we talking we're talking where you're carrying someone's legs and they're moving on their hands in front of you not a wheelbarrow wheelbarrow no no where there are two people one of them is pretending to be a wheelbarrow yeah yeah yeah you have to be blindfolded which makes it a lot more difficult both of you that's nuts yeah hey you know that um mofara does the robot oh yeah uh it turns out that he's actually being the m from ymca as in are you saying that's where he came up with it or just no they came so he does that thing he does he does his robot and the inspiration from that was he was on a tv show claire bolding

and james cordon were trying to work out what he should do to celebrate the win and claire bolding was the one who invented it james cordon called it the robot but she said it's the m from ymca if you had um someone who'd just done a vault in the gymnastics stood next to him you only need a c in an a and you've got the whole thing but wait i that's not it stands for the m of his name i think claire bolding was just trying to explain what it looked like to people if they weren't watching the tv right he doesn't do it as a tribute to the ymca i don't think no he's stopped he's plagiarized one of the greatest dance well mr farrah's lawyers are listening to big claim it's not one we all support on this show do you know something mofara did do

which uh is not that cool actually he's there's a he has a fellow runner called chris thompson and their good friends and chris thompson won silver medal in basalona when mo won gold a few years ago i don't know why i'm calling him mo i don't know him when mofara won gold a few years ago but the first time they ran a race together mofara said was encouraging him and said how about we'll run this race we're gonna win it uh we'll both run it we'll hold hands as we run and then we can cross the finish line at the same time and so they did it and they held hands for the full race um and then with 10 meters to go mofara let go of him pushing a sign sprinted ahead so um the 100 meter record for egg and spoon race yeah uh is do you think it's more or less than

steven wildish's um 28 seconds 28 seconds quicker or slower quicker it is quicker yeah and it's 16.59 seconds um but it was set by sally pierce who is a professional 100 meter runner or she's a hurdler but she's quite famous uh and she beat a guy called ash rita firman who you guys might recognize we've mentioned him before he has more than 100 world records mostly in what animite called the stupid spots um triple jump i've got loads i can't think of many non-stupid sports well um he i reckon he must have been pretty annoyed to have lost his 100 meter egg and spoon race uh because the very next month he then broke the 100 meters carrying an egg and spoon in the mouth record wow didn't even know that was a sport i suspect it probably wasn't

do you know that school sport stays a regular feature of them used to be the pillow fight and now that's a sport that's how do you win the pillow fight i don't know it didn't actually say i so i read this article where the winner was just announced we used to play in australia for sports um you would sit on a big wooden pole and you'd each have a pillow and you'd try and whack each other off um sorry i wasn't aware you had such a traditional education then okay it is time for fact number two and that is andy my fact is that the inside of a kick cat is made of more kick cats kick cats are an infinite recursive loop is what i'm trying to say this is so cool i mean it's it

can't be true right because where did the first kick cat insides come from nobody knows yeah this is like a chicken and egg situation isn't it kind of yeah except the eggs are not made of mashed up chickens yeah it's it's kind of it's kind of like that so basically during the production process of kick cats some of them don't meet the very strict criteria for a proper kick cat the wrong shape or they got uh too many fingers i don't know but anyway they're wrong and they are they are rejected and they are ground up and they are the filling layer between the wafer bits in a kick cat is made of those plus a couple of other things as well more sugar um so yeah this hit the headlines earlier

this year which i'd never hit the headlines sure it was a slow news day wasn't it i'd never noticed until you said this fact i looked into it there was a layer between the wafer and a kick cat i just thought it was chocolate around the outside and wafer on the inside sometimes you get one which is all chocolate wow that is i think it's a good day that is there when you get one of those oh yeah has anyone else yeah about half the room okay cool wow okay you really honestly andy waits till it happens to you it's a real life changer but kick cats i only realized looking into this what they mean in japan oh which is a lot everything what do you mean everything so japanese people just love kick cats and they've gone way more nuts than we have so um apparently

kittokatsu is a japanese expression that means surely win so it basically means good luck and so because of this coincidence they're super popular in japan and they've got loads of flavors so they've got more than 300 different kick cat flavors in japan um nestle they've just built a factory there specifically to make the weird ass flavors that they have so they have like wasabi flavored kick cats they have soy sauce flavor they have sushi flavored kick cats what guys you haven't tried it don't knock until you try it they they have in japan made a kick cat which doubles up as a post card and you can just put it in the post to someone because every year about half the children doing their exams get sent a kick cat for good luck because of that surely win thing so kick cat

invented a one that's a postcard and you can just send it to someone you just put a kick cat into the letterbox you did there you'd be arrested we're only one envelope away from that yeah but you know that um kick cats started out as mutton pies this is true it um so there was a club in london called the kick the kick the kick the kick the kit cat club and um and it was it was run by an innkeeper called christopher cat who was called kit cat and every all the literary figures of the time used to go there and he would serve them mutton pies which they called a kit cat and so the idea is that that just became a name of a popular food source and then eventually it turned into kick cat no one has acknowledged that this is

true but no they have they're definitely the kick out club is definitely true it's definitely true and it was a socialist well yeah yeah so the original kick cat definitely was mutton pies but get this the ceilings were so low in the kit cat club that they were beautiful establishments so what they what they did was have paintings all over the club but because the ceilings were so low they needed to get paintings that were longer on the uh well on landscape rather than portrait and there's a theory that the reason that kick cats are shaped like they are is because they're paying tribute to the squatty paintings of the kick cat club in london sorry i didn't realize when he said no one's acknowledges this is true you were talking about the thing you were about to say

you know the kick cat slogan i only have a break have a break i only got that yesterday that's a that's a pun i didn't realize there was a reference to kick cats breaking i thought it was just like you know yeah a break or what i didn't get the other meanings and they only did everyone get some no no no like of course everyone got it it's not as if the slogan ride is going to be at its home going finally how was it to obtuse what was i doing that was wrong sorry can i can i join Anna's club of people who didn't you're not sorry i'm sorry it's in the in the advert they break it as they say have a break i didn't i know i know i know we know all the clues were there james sometimes

and it only came about in the 50s when they toughened up the materials that they made kick cats from and they were very proud of the new snapping sound that it made and so actually the crucial thing about it is the breaking sound look who's suddenly the expert on the etymology and understanding of a slogan i have a fact about chocolate okay okay the average chocolate bar is about 20 to 25 fat 40 to 50 sugar right so it's one gram of fat to two grams of sugar okay now it's very unusual in nature to find those ratios of sugar and fat together so if you have nuts they have lots of fat but not no sugar if you have fruit loads of sugar but no fat there is a theory that the reason we like chocolate is because the place you find that same ratio

one gram fat two grams sugar is breast milk no weren't you yeah four percent fat eight percent sugar so it may be that we are trying to recreate our earliest yeah comfort food that's what's happening why do you think the terry's chocolate orange is so successful i don't know why because you were breastfed by an umpa lumpa and you're trying to get back to that wait done the terry's chocolate orange isn't orange you know you have to take the wrapping off i found a really cool thing i was looking into how they test um chocolate and it led me down a little road that got me to um mcvitties and and all sorts of just how they they for candies and biscuits and chocolate biscuits

and stuff and um there's a dummy that tests crumb uh usage once you're biting into so it's a robot dummy that just bites got plastic teeth it's called a crumb test dummy and the idea is that mcvitties have a laboratory where they put it into its mouth and it just goes up and the the advantage is that it never stops doing that uh because it doesn't need to breathe because andy what is it the robot yes it's a bit like that anal thing you were talking about do we need to move on to the next fact yeah we do actually we do need to move on to the next fact um uh sorry andy to cut you off again or try to get to it before the end of the show and now it is time for fact number three and that is chasinski yeah my fact this week is that

the first hamsters to come to the uk arrived in a coat pocket oh i know so sweet the story of hamsters is really interesting so um basically there was a scientist called so don't be skeptical there was a scientist uh called sol adler back in the 1920s 1930s and he decided that hamsters would be similar were similar enough to humans that they might serve as useful lab animals for obvious reasons that i don't need to go into hamsters humans basically the same um and you know he specifically wanted to try out stuff that might cure parasitic diseases on them and so he brought three hamsters back from syria in 1931 so all the pet hamsters that you have had in your childhoods and that you've ever seen are all descended um from the this tiny batch

of syrian hamsters that these guys found in the 1930s and yeah he smuggled these guys back in his coat pocket and didn't he smuggle them i might be thinking of a different person but didn't he smuggle them back in the coat pocket because they ate their way out of the box that they were in yes it's a really exciting story yeah it is no they got they got a dozen didn't they to start they had 11 and a mother and then the mother started the mother killed one of the babies so then they had 10 less okay fine then half of them escaped and had to be recaptured and then they put them in a wooden box and they chewed through that and then were recaptured it's like the great escape but with hamsters and that was with the the guy was called israel aharoni wasn't

he who he was the guy who was determined that he'd get these hamsters and it sounds like his life depended on it um when when these five escaped he was absolutely devastated he said he was shaken to his depths and imagine yeah when the mother ate her children and then he had three left and then i think uh oh no yeah one one sibling ate another and then he had to make the brother insisted didn't he that were left so they're all products of incest no all your childhood hamsters yeah incest that's actually one that's one of the reasons they're so useful uh because they're similarity to humans is genuinely because they're very susceptible to heart disease hamsters um as susceptible as humans are so that's why they're quite good to study and the reason that's acceptable

is because they're all very inbred really yeah yeah apparently so wow the thing is about um hamsters is it's really weird why they become popular pets really because they only live for a couple of years tick yeah there's a certain comfort james and knowing this is a short term contract well they don't like being handled tick you know and they're nocturnal so during the day they don't do anything are they nocturnal i read that they well in the wild they're definitely nocturnal both of mine as a child were nocturnal they just didn't want to hang out with you i read as well that they're because i kept pointing at them and saying incest you should be ashamed yeah clocks ticking boys you got two months left i've had mobile phone

contracts longer than you i've read that you can uh that they are able to drink alcohol because they hold they hold things what is it they hold stuff in their cheeks yeah for so long and then they hoard them and they don't eat them till much later but then it ferments and it turns into alcohol and so they've had to turn their digestive system into one that can just down booze really quickly and not die which a lot of animals can't do and these are like someone from new castle basically risky their pouches are amazing though they their cheeks stretch back to their hips when they need them to what yeah they basically go run down the whole length of their body and they they switch off their saliva glands to stop themselves accidentally metabolizing

the food that they want to store so they stop making saliva until they feel hungry and then they start making again i read one thing that said that they can put enough stuff in their cheeks that will make their heads triple in size what but i looked at the the size of the hamster's head and did a bit of working out and basically it's the equivalent of me fitting a large tin of paint in my mouth and ladies and gentlemen for our finale tonight i think that's why they were called saddlebags right so when they first went to syria to find them they realized the Arabic word for them translated as mr saddlebags that's what they called hamsters well i'm not sure why but i assume that must be it i think that is it yeah have you heard of america's hamster king no he's cool he's

a great guy he's the guy who popularized the hamster across the whole of the usa he's a guy from mobile alabama and his name was albert f marsh and so i think in the early 50s but i might be wrong might be 40s um he he took one hamster on as a payment of a one dollar gambling debt that was how the debt to him was paid off in a hamster right and he must have got another one from somewhere because he then breathed that them um but within three years he was making the equivalent of 1.8 million dollars a year just from sending hamsters out to people and the way he built this business it was a huge business he he can't have been making that much money how much was he charging he made him i i think he charged about a million nine dollars no it was about nine dollars which

would have been a lot more than um but this is incredible so he did the he built the business up and he made it absolutely massive really quickly and his shipping method was to send a hamster to the address uh you wanted it sent to in a coffee can with a potato and the potato was for it to eat and drink along the way and it would arrive and you would have a hamster and then no potato in a coffee tin that is worse than ryan air food i gotta say one potato come on i was reading that uh so the idea of him bringing this uh ham these bunch of hamsters in his coat pocket um i suddenly thought that's you know the idea of like smuggling things in i think i slightly misread the fact thinking it was smuggling in but um so i looked up smuggling and that's where we're going now um

but i i was a story that happened just this year and i'm so upset that it's not made it into the book uh because it would have been perfect um a woman was arrested uh in venezuela after several guards caught her trying to break her boyfriend out of jail by smuggling him out in the suitcase that she brought in with her so she went in with her daughter and she just had i've just got my suitcase with me and during the visit while the guards were away she opened it up he got inside they zipped him up and then she tried to just walk out again with him and she got quite far but then she started struggling with the suitcase and uh so they laid it down and they opened it up and inside was a squished boyfriend who um yeah that is not the only person in suitcase crime story

that is from this year from this year no yes in the news last week there was a guy i think in india who was arrested because he had been committing crime by getting himself loaded into luggage holds in a bag and then he would get out of the bag rob all the other bags in the luggage hold and then get back into his bag no yes great how how could he fit everything in his bag with him i think he might he might have just left at that point well he might have just stolen small things but imagine on that carousel if you accidentally pick up the wrong bag is this small indian man is this mine no that's not mine all right let's move on to our final fact uh okay it's time for a final fact of the show

and that is my fact my fact this week is that an effective way to treat snoring is to regularly play the didgeridoo this is been done it's been proven by scientists to work um no less annoying for the partner is it when you come home you're like darling i've got fantastic news i found a cure i'm just going to constantly play the didgeridoo for the rest of our relationship instead of sleeping i will be in bed next to you playing the didgeridoo you won't even notice any snoring yeah though they they did this um as a test they had 25 patients who all suffer from chronic snoring um they're 18 years old um onwards so they they usually snoring affects people much older but they wanted to start a younger age um and they had them all practice a didgeridoo for 5.9 days

per week that's how it worked out um for 25.3 minutes per session and they found a remarkable recovery process of the the nasal passage for when you're sleeping that you no longer were snoring either as intensely or at all so if anyone here in the audience is a snorer um get yourself to Australia it's a bit expensive that's that's where they sell them and yeah start playing so i found out about this a few years ago i went on to the qi forums which is where we do the research for the tv show and i look for didgeridoo and it turns out i'd post about this in 2006 which is when the report came out yeah and um i suggested a question for qi which was how does rolf harris sleep at night

we do stuff about it there right oh my god i actually own a didgeridoo no you don't promise i was given it as a present for my 16th birthday can you play it no it's very hard to play yeah only get one note out of it and you need you need a circular breathing the whole way through which i can't do and i read that when the way that they get different sounds it's all to do with the way that you shape your lip once it's inside so in the way that if you were saying words like hello hello hello that that would be like and then if you're like wow wow do you put your lips inside i think your lips go inside the didgeridoo yep i see now because it stretches the mouth unbelievably out of these guys do it

this explains my short-lived trumpet career as well but it is it is a circular breathing right that means it can cure snoring is that the idea i'm i'm guessing i thought it also seems to strengthen your whole respiratory tract you know it just makes everything stronger in the whole yeah yeah and snoring is very problematic apparently a third of people in relationships cite snoring as a problem in their relationship in finland maybe they snore i know i have snoring bad i have bad snoring and talking yeah and i and i talk to my wife about it every morning because i'm like was it bad last night with my snoring and was it bad for you last night and she she's always she's like no i

really like it it's really um it's god you're a lucky man are you or i've married a freak i don't know what it's going but she um she says because it's consistent you know it has a rhythm it's it feels like you know you're out at sea or you know there's a i think i have a very pleasurable snore did you know that she is suffering more than you are probably so when snoring is cured people's partner's quality of life improves more than the snorer's quality of life and apparently the partners of snorers wake up on average 21 times an hour what in the night yeah like a little bit you know like you semi wake up and then you fall back to sleep so that's amazing um well i no it's about didgeridoo's but it but it is about didgeridoo's all right didgeridoo's um this is

just a story that was in the bbc news website it's it's from a few years ago it's from 2004 and the story is a temzlink train driver caused two terror alerts when he mistook a didgeridoo for a grenade launcher he's a train driver in london and he reported that he had seen a man carrying a grenade launcher um other passengers said the man fitting the driver description of the suspect had been there but only had a didgeridoo right that happened in the morning then later the same day the same driver reported seeing the man taking aim at luff bridge junction and the terror police said this time we found the man with the didgeridoo he added the driver was quite right to inform us about what he genuinely thought was a terrorist threat on both

occasions which is you can't really say anything else can you if you're an idiot don't phone in you can't say that he must have been so annoying the second time calling saying i can't believe you guys were irresponsible enough not to catch him the first time round and i'm having to tell you again the traditional mouth launched grenade launch i was trying to work out actually because didgeridoo is obviously very long uh very wide um how they hollow out the inside of a didgeridoo so that you get a whole so i started googling it and couldn't find anything oh it's yeah uh termites do it nobody yeah they train termites to no no they're kind of naturally occurring aren't they so you get a big bit of eucalyptus and the termites live inside and they eat all the inside

bit and then you can cut it off and you've gotten naturally occurring so you have to wait for a didgeridoo to naturally occur before yeah but it's not like a long way it's not like people buy like filled in planks of wood and then they sit there staring at it they're just in the wild no that's but i mean it's like we're just we're taking in wild instruments and bringing them like we're not even making them we're just finding them in the wild taking them from their habitat and then sticking our mouth right around the rim of them hey we're gonna have to wrap up at a sake if you guys got anything more before we do there's a bed you can buy it's like a robotic bed like my um my uradil thing yeah yeah we don't have time Andy

but anyway it this is amazing it has sensors in it and it can tell when you're snoring and then it kind of just moves you very slowly into a better position so you won't snore oh isn't that incredible and it also will warm up your feet so it'll tell if you've got cold feet and it'll go oh no that's incredible how can it tell oh they're clever robots aren't they here mate they're doing somersaults inside you they are that's the robot for listeners it's a colonoscopy robot get the word out we don't have time we don't have time okay that's it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you would like to get in contact with us about anything that we've said over the course of this podcast you can find us on our twitter accounts i'm on

at Shriverland andy at andrew hunter m james at james harkin anna you can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our website which is no such thing as a fish.com we have all of our previous episodes up there we also have a book available it's out on november the second we're about to give one away to the best fact that we've received from the audience of which we have picked james have you got it yes the winner is at Jess Sara X on twitter and her fact is that the northeast has the greatest variety of ginger hair in the world with 47 shades whoa 47 shades of ginger that is a book that i would definitely definitely be down for um okay that's it we'll be back again next week with another episode thank you so much for being here guys that was really fun we'll see you

again goodbye well hi guys it seems i'm the last one left in the office and i think that's because all the others have gone to use their brand new harry's razors that's what they do with a friday night that's just the kind of lives they lead and i just wanted to thank our sponsors harry's once again and say if you do want to support the show and get that trial set delivered to you then you should go to harry's dot com slash fish and you'll get your razor handle and your five blade cartridge and your shaving gel and your travel blade cover and you too can have an excellent friday night harry's dot com slash fish