No Such Thing As A Fish - 26: No Such Thing As A Yeti Fact

Episode Date: September 13, 2014

Episode 26 - Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Andy (@andrewhunterm) and special guest Simon Rich discuss chimps with pets, Kama Sutra crosswords, slinkies on escalators and sagging yeti breasts.

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 podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with three of the regular elves. It's James Harkin, Andy Murray, and on Back Checking Juties today, it's Anna and we got a special guest joining us today. He's my favorite comedy writer. We're very excited.

Simon Rich from New York, here on a book tour. Hello. Thanks so much for having me. This is super fun. Yeah, thanks for coming. So you're here, you've only here until tomorrow, unfortunately. Sure trip, yeah. Yeah, but so Spoilt Bratz, new book, collection of short stories, one of which is being adapted into a movie by Seth Rogen. Your previous book, The Last Girl from North, being turned into a sitcom currently coming out next year, used to work for Pixar, Saturday Night Live, and you're under 30. How the fuck did you do this?

Well, the books are really short. The books I write, they're almost more like pamphlets. And also, the font is really large. The margins are wide. Sometimes it'll just, like in between chapters, it'll just be a few unnecessarily blank pages just to kind of pad it out. So that's the biggest trick. Cool. Okay. Well, let's let's kick into our show. So I'm going to go fact number one, we're going to start with you, Simon. Cool. So my fact is about Coco, the gorilla who knows sign language. And according to my research, over the course of her lifetime, she has owned and cared for three pet cats. Yeah. So and how did she get these cats? It's a good question. Well, I know that she actually, because she speaks sign language,

knows a thousand words in sign languages, and apparently they asked her, what would you like for Christmas? And she said, I would like a pet cat. It's a good thing she doesn't know flamethrower. All the word for freedom. Right. A thousand words isn't that many though, is it? Is it not? I know more than a thousand words. See, I thought I know more than that in just numbers. Oh, yeah. Oh, good point. But if you take the thousand words you use most often, they probably cover almost everything. And then it's specific ones after that, like hammock or thrombosis or whatever. So, you know, maybe they're in your top thousand, I don't know. Yeah. It'd be lovely to see the thousand words you use most often.

Yes. It'd be really cool. I have that list in Russian, actually. What, that you use? No, I got that. I was trying to learn Russian and I still am, but not very well. And I thought one way to do it would be to get the thousand most popular spoken words in Russian and then try and learn them all. Well, that's how Dr. Seuss wrote Cat in the Hat. Oh, really? Yeah. He got a book that was a list of, I think the first 100 words that children learn how to read. And he almost as an exercise decided, or as like a shamelessly cynical marketing poll, he'd say, I'll write a book using just those words. He had very big fonts as well, didn't he? Yeah, absolutely. The biggest.

Did he not do a thing where one of his books was a bet with his publisher that he could write a book with fewer than 50 words or something like that? I think that's Cat in the Hat. Was that Cat in the Hat? Yeah. But he, a lot of his stories are, it's hard to tell if they're true. Like, he spread a lot of mythology about himself in his time. He said that he used to get all of his ideas from a small town where they made the cuckoo clock. He used to go there and they'd give him ideas. But he was also a mummy hunter, which is interesting. Yeah, he used to go with his wife and go mummy hunting. Was this, wait, is this late 19th century, early 20th?

Dr. Seuss, he would have been later, right? Yeah, because I know he was a cartoonist during World War II, so he must have been before or after that. That's amazing that even then you could still go mummy hunting. Well, they used to dig up mummies and crush them up and sell them as medicine in jars. Where? Just, you know, around. Like Brooklyn? Yeah, like the alleys. Oh, no, there's a book that says that the kings of England, lots of them were cannibals. Right. Because they consumed human flesh in the form of mummies, ground up mummies and things like

Yeah, they thought it had some sort of curative property. Wow. Anyway, back to Coco the Gorilla. So Coco asked for a pet cat and also was quite deceitful. Coco basically one day, this is a story I read about Coco the Gorilla. They came back to where Coco is and a sink had been ripped out of the wall. This is my favorite Coco story. Oh, well, tell us then. Tell us. Right, yes. So a gigantic sink had been ripped out of the wall and, you know, a 2,000 pound sink and the scientist confronted her and said, you know,

who ripped out the sink? Signed who ripped out the sink? And after the long pause, Coco signed Janice. And Janice was one of the lab assistants, who is a 21 year old, 95 pound woman. And Coco tried to pin it on her. And the scientist signed to Coco. I don't believe that Janice ripped out the sink. I think Gorilla ripped out sink and Coco had to sort of hang her head and admit what she'd done. And she signed Coco ripped sink, bad Gorilla Coco. Because I read that she blamed the cat as well. Oh, wow. She was always pinning things on other.

Is that why she wanted the cat to just disguise her crime? Yes, exactly. You needed a stooge. That's actually, I read about another story about Coco apparently. So she has a name for a human, which is Nipple. And she, at least three former keepers have claimed that they were pressured into showing their breasts at the Gorilla's request. That's right. This Coco was kind of like an evil tyrant. And it seems like she got whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. And there were no checks and balances. And she was constantly making the scientists disrobe. Yeah, Coco knows what's going on. Absolutely. Maybe the cat she wanted was a white fluffy cat, which she could

stroke. She dictated her demand. She's quite old now. She's 30 or 40 years old. How long can Gorillas live till? I think that's a reasonably advanced stage. I think maybe longer than that, evidently, but in captivity in the wild difference. Yeah, they live longer in captivity, I think. The oldest known primate that's non-human, I think, was Cheetah out of the Tarzan movies. Because it lived in captivity in Hollywood somewhere. Obviously, we don't know how old every single primate is, but this one in particular lived to about 70 or something. Really? Hollywood lifestyle there, isn't it? Yeah, Cheetah was an artist, right? It's the same with Bubbles, Michael Jackson's monkey. But Bubbles had a

rough end. He ended up in a sanctuary far away from the glitz and glamour. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Michael apparently never visited. Although, I've read this thing where they said that he always thought of Bubbles as his first child and added that he hoped the Jackson children would keep in touch with their step-brother after he's gone. So, he did love him. But he got too aggressive. He got too big, apparently. That's right. Apparently when chimpanzees get too big. That's pretty strong. Can you imagine Bubbles in that animal sanctuary with the other chimps trying to explain what his childhood was like? How would anyone believe it? He would have been the Michael Jackson of the chimpanzee world. That's right. Yeah. My grandmother used to own a chimpanzee

in Cambodia. Really? Was it your half-brother? It was named after me, actually. Was it? Yeah, it was called, they call me Chumps. That's my nickname I had. It was a kid from them and they named... Sounds like you were named after the chimpanzee. Yeah, yeah. Well, they had a gibbon as well and they kept it in this cage in this restaurant. They had a restaurant in Cambodia where... It's not like a pick-your-own-gibbon thing, is it? No, no, no, no. They were just, they were their pets. Okay, okay, sure. It was an amazing restaurant because they used to have a massive menu, but everyone kept ordering the goulash and they discovered was that one of the chefs kept putting marijuana inside, which is legal there, so they got rid of the whole menu

and it was just a goulash marijuana place. That's what my grandmother... But they had to give away the chimpanzee because she got sexually frustrated with the gibbon in the cage and ripped its arm off. Very sad. Oh, wow. Rip Christ. It's arm off. Like, that's what... That's what marijuana will do for you. Wow. Well, they're freakishly strong and they've evolved to go for vulnerable parts of, you know, another primate's body, so they will rip off the genitals of male rivals and throw them, yeah, hundreds of feet. Throw them. Yeah, yeah, because then you're simultaneously killing your enemy and also you're expunging his genetic influence on your life. Oh, gosh. Very much the John Wayne Bobbitts of the animal kingdom. Exactly and very efficient form of violence. God, imagine you just

walking through the forest as an explorer and this gorilla cock smacks you in the face as you're walking along. That's a rough day. That's a rough day. Oh, gorilla testicles, only about an eighth or a sixteenth the size of human ones. Certainly the penis is a very small gorilla penis. But that's because they do all the establishing supremacy with their muscles, isn't it, with their body. There's no need for sperm competition because they, you know, once you're a male gorilla and you get a harem, then you're away. You don't need to worry about competition from other males in that sense. And you don't need like a cool car. Yeah, you can just kind of show up. Yeah, I think it's something like a male silverback gorilla's erect penis is a quarter of an inch in length or something

like that. You might be right. Yeah, so like a normal sized penis, right guys? Like an average, average male penis. Okay, should we wrap up on this one? Anna, we should go to you. Do you have anything you want to add? Yeah, a few things. So long time ago, you guys were talking about the 1000 most commonly used English words. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yep. So I've got a list of them here. And I just, I thought I'd read them all out. V and you're right. The oven and yep. How much time have we got? I know the three. I know the three most common nouns are time, person and year. Yes. Anyway, the first 25 shut up James. Don't care it's my role now. This is my moment. The first 25 words in 1000 most frequently used words make up a third of all printed material,

just 25 words. The reason Coco knew what a cat was before she had her pet cat, her two favorite books were the three little kittens and puss in boots. And so she looked at those pictures and knew the word for cat. I don't know the three little kittens. Neither do I. Anyway, they first of all tried to give her a stuffed toy that looked like a cat to fold her off. And she was really pissed off and made it clear that she needed the real thing. So they got, they got her the real thing and she named it all ball. Did we discuss that? No, we didn't. So she, she named her first kitten. Obviously she only has 1000 words in her vocabulary, which it turns out wasn't enough for a good cat name. So she called it all ball because apparently according to owners,

she likes to rhyme in sign language. Time for fact number two. And that's my fact. My fact this week is according to Yeti experts. Oh God. Yeah. It is easier to escape a female Yeti than a male Yeti because female Yetis have such long dangling boobs that before they can chase you, they need to chuck them over their shoulders like a scarf. Otherwise they may trip on them and bang their head. James, you're looking skeptical. That's a fact. Yeah, it's a fact about something that doesn't exist. It's a fact about something that no one has ever seen. Yes. But it's a fact that comes from Captain John Knoll. Captain John Knoll was the guy who first broke into Tibet under a guise because he weren't allowed as a Westerner into Tibet. And he was the first person to see

Mount Everest and think we need to climb that. He came back to England and he pitched it at the Royal Geographical Society. And that's what led to the Mallory expedition. And he was on the Mallory expedition. He was the official photographer. Do you think they said, I'm not really sure that sounds like a good idea. And then he said, Oh no, there's giant monkeys with enormous breasts. Exactly. I don't know if he believed in the Yeti. That might have been a that that was a bit of myth that he brought back with him. But it's a fact. It is a fact about something that people who believe in the Yeti believe. If you were talking to someone who believes in a Yeti right here in this room, and you said, did you know this? I'd say, yeah, of course. It's a weird one,

though, isn't it? Because it's a fact that that is believed amongst people who believe in it. Yeah, it's like a different world of facts. It's like a second subspecies of facts, because it is a Yeti fact. But it's not a real world fact. I think it's a person fact. Yeah, it's a fact about what people believe. So do you know about the $10 million Bigfoot Bounty TV show? No. Okay, it was on a very small American channel. I can't remember which one it is, like a satellite channel or a cable channel. And there was a number of teams. And they every week tried to find evidence of Bigfoot. And whoever found the least evidence each week would get kicked off until there was only two teams there. So how did they classify the least evidence? They had a team of experts who would

explain that. And the final two, whoever got the most evidence, if they could find evidence of Bigfoot, then they would win $10 million. Wow. Did the prize go unclaimed? It went unclaimed. At that point, even I know Bigfoot is something of a recluse, but if I were him, I would go around and make a deal and say, I'll take five. You take five million, I'll pose for one picture. And you know. Hang on. The premise of this show is that if you find most or least evidence, you're either saved or kicked off. But if at the end of the show, the people who found most evidence had found no evidence and therefore the $10 million went unclaimed, then all the other teams are like, they found even less than no evidence. That's the premise. The $10 million was underwritten by

Lloyds of London, probably as a joke. Oh man, I'd love to see the look on their face if they found Bigfoot. What a rough shareholder's meeting that is. We're in the red this quarter. I found Bigfoot. We're sorry. They did. Quite recently, there was a study done of creatures claiming to be Bigfoot or the Sasquatch. And they took 57 samples of hair that people had sent into them saying, this is Bigfoot or this is a Sasquatch. One of them was a piece of fiberglass, so that didn't get used. But they managed to get down to about 30 where they didn't know what it was immediately. And of that 30, they turned out to be cows, horses, raccoons, or sometimes bears. But they think that they might have got two samples from previously unrecognized bear

species or hybrids. So they might have discovered new species by doing that. There's plenty more to find out there. We live under this weird assumption that we've discovered everything. And in the ocean, we've barely cracked the surface. The ocean is, I think we've done something like 6% tops. We've definitely mapped Mars better than the ocean. The thing that I liked most about this Yeti fact, other than its Yetis, and I love Yetis, is that I just love its advice to escape. It's escape advice. And I love escape advice because I think it's the best kind of weird, handy advice that you probably will never need to use, but it will always stick with you. If you know this fact now about female Yetis, this will not leave you for the rest of your life.

I found this thing of like the best way to, in Chinese mythology, to escape a vampire is to make sure you have bags of rice on the ground because they count. They're obsessive counters, apparently, vampires. Do you spill rice? You spill rice. As they're chasing you, they have a dilemma where they're like, ah, and then they count the rice. They have that Eastern European vampire culture as well, like you put sand on the doorstep and they won't come into your house because they'll just stand there counting. What we're saying is that all vampires have obsessive compulsive disorder. Yeah, like that one off Sesame Street who goes, ah, ah, ah. Is that where it came from? The Count in Sesame Street? No, I think that was just,

I think that was just a pun on the word count, probably. Oh yeah. If you wanted to escape being an Aztec prisoner, Andy, I know you like, you know this fact, you like it. If you were a slave, sorry, in Aztec times, the way to escape was to run away from your master in the middle of the market and step in some human excrement. And if you did that, you were no longer a slave. Really? Yeah. That's quite a loophole. It implies either that there was a lot of human excrement around or that it was very rare. There was actually, there was quite a lot because the sewers went alongside the town walls kind of things. But the other thing was, if someone tried to stop you from being a slave and someone noticed that, then, sorry,

if you stopped someone trying to escape, then you became a slave. So no one ever stopped them. Once they started running away, everyone went, oh, nothing's doing me. I think that's because people are fair chance. Yeah. I respect that. Really great story that I like about sort of a moment of needing to escape. The guy who set up MI6, Mansfield Coming. Oh yeah. Yeah. He's great because you assume that he would be the ultimate spy. Yeah. It was this great story where during World War One, he went into Germany disguised as a German soldier, infiltrating a German camp, but got busted immediately because it turned out he didn't know any German. Immediately at the gate, he was like, yeah. If he'd learned 25 words, he would have been

fine. He would have been fine. Yeah. Yeah. He used to do this thing. He had a wooden leg, but no one really knew at the time that he had a wooden leg. But in meetings, if he got bored with what anyone was saying, and no one knew he had this leg, he used to take a massive knife that he had on the desk and just stab himself in the leg. And everyone would go, whoa. And then he'd just take over. That's what I wanted to say. That's what I'd do with my wooden genitals. You rip them off and throw them on. You should see people's faces. We should probably wrap up on this one as well. Anna, have you got anything to add? Just a couple of small things. So on Yeti's, you were saying that if you're being chased by a female Yeti, you're in luck because

they've got these big breasts that get in their way. But apparently, according to Yeti experts, you're also likely to be able to escape a male if you run downhill, because it's got long hair that blows in its eyes when running, so it can't see well. Oh, I have that. And just the ocean floor, the estimates are that we've only discovered 10% of what there is to be discovered in the ocean, although if you're talking about map to sea floor that's in the public domain, we've only discovered 2% to 3%, but apparently, so much of the information about the ocean is completely classified and shrouded in secrecy, according to National Geographic. The 7% of what we've discovered about the ocean, no one's allowed to know because it's so highly secret. What,

it's genuinely classified? Yeah, so military classified information. Right, because I guess they have the gadgets that go under there, so that's proprietary information, right? So they wouldn't want it, so they don't want to share that technology? Right, probably, right? It must come down to that. Because nobody's claimed it, nobody's claimed that chunk of the earth. They have drones, lots of drones, ocean drones now, which is so cool. They have whole generations of little robots, and their only job is to measure or assess one thing, and you just set them off, and they can go all over the world. They're always beaming information back. Yeah. Well, like Google spiders. Yeah, in a way, yeah. Wow. It sounds amazing. Sounds made up.

Okay, on to back number three, James. Okay, my fact this week is the Karma Sutra suggests 64 arts to practice alongside sex. They include solving word puzzles and teaching birds how to talk. Yeah, that's weird. I just assumed it was just all sex party. No, not that much sex in there in that case, I'm a lot sexier than I realized. I'm getting pretty good at the telegraph cryptic crossword. Yeah, 64 of them, some of the others tattooing the art of making beds, playing on musical glasses filled with water, knowledge of minds and queries and the art of cock fighting. Or are these dating ideas before you get to the actual portion of the book about sex? No, it's why not visit a minor query? Why not play musical glasses filled with water? Yeah.

But so what was the book then? What is it? Okay, the book is, it was written in the third century by a celibate monk. And he was bringing together all of the different writings from beforehand that were about sex or about the art of mating in humans. So where does teaching bird to speak? These are things that if you do those, it will improve your, prove your general life and also your sex life. Sort of like a holistic approach. There are nine pages on how to look after your wife and 26 pages detailing how to seduce other men's wives. It's harder to be fair. It needs more. Well, here's one way to seduce other men's wives from that. It's called pocket no pocket. First take the heart of a mongoose, then the fruits of a fenugreek plant and gourd and some

snake eyes, mix them all together, cook them over the fire, and then put them in your eyes, and it will make you invisible. And then you can go and find another man's wife. What? That's in the conversation. We've mistranslated invisible for blind. Times were great back then. If a recipe at the beginning of a thing says take the heart of a mongoose. Yeah, just lead with that. Yeah, just the very first ingredient. That's like the equivalent of like preheat the oven at 350 degrees. It's just the most basic construction. Yeah, there's a papyrus, an Egyptian papyrus, which has a load of things that when it says snake's blood, what it's supposed to be is some kind of fruit juice or something. And when it says

crocodile excrement, it's supposed to be some special kind of clay from Ethiopia. So they use these words even though they didn't really mean that. Oh, it's all coded. Yes. James has a theory because they say that the ancient Egyptians used crocodile dung as a contraceptive. Yeah. And I think it was just actually a piece of clay from Abyssinia or from Ethiopia, and they used to make it into what do you call these, a pessary, and stop people from being able to impregnate you that way. But you get it in all the lists of facts. It's like they use crocodile dung for contraception. It seems pretty unlikely, doesn't it? Yeah, our euphemisms. It's always eye of a newt, right? Exactly. It's poor newts, you know. Can you imagine them trying to piece

that together? What is going on? Where do they want from us? Why do they want us? So that'd be amazing. Someone in that period taking it literally and going and actually getting the heart of a mongoose. What did you do to a fucking mongoose? That means pencil, get a pencil. That would be very embarrassing to serve that, which is potion up and filled with all the literal ingredients. It would explain a lot of fancy cookbooks today as well, if Heston Blumenthal is actually using a series of elaborate metaphors and he just wants us to make spaghetti bolognese. Take liquid nitrogen. No, I mean, I mean ice. Yeah, so what else is there in that? So the Kama Sutra was discovered by Richard Burton,

who did the first British English translation. Yeah, we should say not Richard Burton, the actor. Yes. Richard Burton, the Victorian explorer. That's right. Yeah, not that Richard Burton. Who is the most extraordinary character? Yeah, seemingly fictional when you read his life story because of the amount of things that he did. Spoke like 30 languages. There's probably too many that I've made up there. But yeah, he did speak a lot of languages, but I'm not sure how well he spoke them all because he translated the Kama Sutra from Sanskrit. And whenever he was supposed to translate the word dildo, he put statue instead, which kind of changes the meaning of some of the things in there. Yeah. He also when instead of writing about penises and vaginas

because he was writing for Victorian audience, he would call the penis Lingam, which was Sanskrit for wand of light. And he was called the vagina Yoni, which was Sanskrit for sacred temple. Wow. So it's place your wand of light into the sacred temple. So it must read like a Harry Potter book when you read his version of the Kama Sutra. Do we do we have more sort of ancient love guides outside of the Kama Sutra? I've never really heard of Egyptian one. Yeah, I can't remember. Oh, there's one called the Turin erotic papyrus. What's genuinely there's the Turin shroud. And then from about 2000 years before that is the Turin erotic papyrus. And it's a series of blue drawings, basically. Yeah, I don't think it's meant quite as a love guide. I think it's more

to titillate and things like that. Okay. There was that great I can't remember his name. Anna, you might be able to find it. But in the Natural History Museum, they have effectively what is an erotica book. It was during a Shackleton trip, where the guy who was studying penguins witnessed the insane love life of penguins. And he found it so dirty that all of the bits where he had to describe the actual like sexual acts, he put into what was it green to ensure so that you had to be a real scholar. I think it was a code on top of ancient Greek. Yeah, so they cracked the code. And then even after you've cracked the code, it's still an ancient Greek. If I saw something coded in ancient Greek, I would, man, I would assume the worst and translate that jump right into

that. It was a lot harder to access in the old days. You had to crack the code and then translate from Greek. And then it's about penguins. And so the Kamasutra again, they have a section on oral sex. Well, it starts off saying oral sex is very, very terrible. And you shouldn't be doing that kind of thing. And then they have quite a few pages on how to do it. Like how this is what you definitely shouldn't do whatever you do. Don't do this. And then don't do it this way. And don't do it this way. It's a bit like during prohibition when they used to like sell wine making kits and it would be grapes and whatever. And it says whatever you do, don't put this alcohol in these grapes and don't bash them down or whatever.

For a long time, theater in New York City, it was against the law unless it had some kind of higher moral purpose. And so pretty much every show during the sort of PT Barnum days was a show like a a sexy melodrama. And then at the end, a stern matronly woman would come out for 30 seconds after two hours of this and say, like, don't do what you've just seen. And that would kind of be it. And they were they were referred to as moral lectures. People would start to file out, you know, as the woman came on. Yeah, I'd rather have that at the beginning, I think. Would you? Yeah. Does that not spoil the rest of the movie then? No, because then you forget about it once the sexy melodrama starts. Well, during the before, there's a there's a there's a few decades where

film was really closely regulated by the United States government. And one of the things was you can never portray a criminal in a positive light. And you can never show them getting away with their crime. They always had to be punished. Yeah. And so there's a lot of films where basically they get the girl, they get the money, they get the the fame and the glory, and then they're just inexplicably gunned down. By a stern matronly lady. The same woman actually, you know, points at the camera and nods. And she draws a finger across her throat and gestures down there. But it's all these hilarious like tacked on endings. Right. Yeah. You were just mentioning P.T. Barnum before. My favorite P.T. Barnum thing is that when people

used to go to his circuses, you would pay your money, pay two dollars, go in, and then there would be a big sign saying this way to the egress. And everyone would go down there, not really realizing that egress means exit. And they'd go straight out and they'd have to pay to go back in again. And they probably wouldn't ask for their money back because they were too humiliated to admit that they didn't know the word. I thought it was a female eagle or something like that. He was brilliant. Oh, he was. Yeah. He invented the skylight, I believe. I think he's the first person to, yeah, the American Museum in Manhattan. That should probably be fact checked. But yeah, the first person to burn electric lights at night for no pragmatic reason, other than

self-promotion. So the original New York City skyline was just the word Barnum. That's fantastic. And like a shapeless void. But the museum burned down, didn't it? Oh, yeah. And then later on, he had spent a long time building an ophthalm palace for his house and that burned down. I think the day after completion. Yeah, he built a kind of sort of like a Xanadu type place, like a gigantic mansion, and it burned down almost immediately. And then weirdly, this is all in Connecticut where he sort of retired after his long career. And I think Bridgeport, Connecticut, he, I think, became mayor of the town. So he had his whole small town political career towards the end of his life. It used to be a problem where things burned down,

didn't it? Like there was a lot of that. Yeah, it still is in many ways, you know. We just haven't solved that problem of building burning down yet. But in theaters, it used to be because they used to light things up with with like fire all the time. And there was a few that burnt down in Covent Garden quite a while ago. And then they had to put the prices up. And people protested against the prices going up because they had to pay for this damage. And they protested. Didn't they riot? They rioted for days and days and days. And they were known as the op riots, because people wanted the old prices. And so op is old price and people would just stand there while they were trying to do the play and just go up, up, up, up for like hours on end.

Tough crowd. I know. That's a rough night. I always think the worst would be the actors on stage during the Lincoln assassination. Just like, man, how do you how do you get the audience back after that? Okay, Anna, have you got anything to add? Yeah, a couple of things to clarify. So the guy you were talking about who wrote the sexual habits of a Delhi penguins was Dr. George Levick, who was the surgeon and medical officer for the British Antarctic expedition led by Scott 1910. Yeah, it was suppressed for almost 100 years, 97 years, and was only made public in 2012, because it was considered to crude for society

to handle. I think did we mention that on QI that the penguin thing? I think it might have been on the show in which case he kept it secret for more than 100 years until 2012. And then the next year we put it on national television. Yeah. Sorry, Victorians. Any stupid sensibilities? In a way, he should have, if he'd only published it then, we'd have all forgotten about it by now. Yeah, exactly. Things in the karma sutra. So something that Burton, you're right, he did mistranslate a lot for karma sutra. He downplays women's positions. So in the karma sutra, women, it's, there's a lot of equality in there, a lot of gender equality, which obviously he didn't approve of being a Victorian man. And so for instance, there's a bit in the text that advises that the wife of

an unfaithful man should scold him with sharp language. And Burton just inserts the word never into that. Why would a big man should never scold a husband? That's a good fix. So it's just a minor change in editing decision. Okay, time for the final fact of the show. Andy. Hello. My fact this week is that there are more than 15 trillion tons of water above the earth now at any given moment. Isn't that amazing? That's a lot. Yeah. Is it a lot? 15 trillion tons? I guess it is. I think so. It's hard to imagine such a big number. It's, I know what you mean. It's a small proportion, a very small proportion of the total amount of water on the planet, obviously. But nonetheless, it is a vast amount.

It's too big to compute really. But this is the really, the really cool thing about clouds. So the average cloud weighs about 400 tons. It turns out the average cumulus cloud. So individually all the droplets, because why don't they just fall? Well, they are, they're always falling, but the air inside the cloud is moving upwards faster than they're falling. So it's like a slinky on an escalator. If you can imagine that. Yeah, okay. Yeah. So, but, and the water droplets are so tiny, they're 0.01 millimeters in diameter. A billion of them would be the same size as a sugar cube. And they're very fast based out. When you say a slinky on an escalator, do you mean an escalator going up? Yeah, I do. I've never had that image in my head ever. It's always stairs

with a slinky just going down. But presumably the slinky can stay. Yeah, that's what. Wow. Yeah. That's a strong image. I've never had that in my life. A perpetual motion machine. Yeah, we cracked it. Hey guys, cracked it. There we go. If only we could think of a way of the escalator going up without any impot of energy. I forgot about that. Oh, cynical, cynical. I still say we patterned them. The size of the tiny aerosol droplets in the cloud is one micron in width, which is the same width as a human sperm. Wow. Okay. Normal male penis is just slightly bigger than that. Right? But the sperm is the smallest cell in the body, isn't it? Or just about the smallest cell.

It's very close to it. Everyone says it is, but I don't think it is really. But it's down there. It's pretty small, but like blood platelets are pretty small. I think it's not the smallest. It's generally said to be the smallest. But the female leg is definitely the largest. Definitely the biggest. Okay. Yeah. If I had the biggest egg in all nature, it would be like a bird's egg, probably like an ostrich egg. Those things are big. We used to be the elephant bird egg. Remember the one that David Attenborough found? The egg of it. It looks like a giant ostrich. It's the largest an egg can be before it gets too thick that the thing inside can't crack out of it, or that it just couldn't

form to begin with. The ovum. Sorry, I meant the ovum, not the egg, like a chicken's egg. Because that's vast. Yeah. I'm just thinking about that egg, the giant bird egg. Do we still have the elephant bird? No, no, it's extinct, but we do have the egg. It's kind of like when you go to Mongolia and you find dinosaur eggs. I just found any dinosaur. Did you guys see that? Gigantic one. Yeah, the biggest egg I've ever found. They say it's 12 times as big as a T-Rex. What? Yeah, I heard that in the Guardian this morning. Yeah, 12 times. It is scary when you see the photos of these giant thigh bones, which are twice the size of a person. But did you know that most of these dinosaurs had feathers? This is the new theory, right?

They looked like, yeah, people say they basically looked like giant chickens. It makes them a little less intimidating. Jurassic Park needs a whole CGI. Someone will do it at some point. For the 20th anniversary, they'll come up with all feathers on every dinosaur. Velociraptors, I think. Velociraptors were tiny, weren't they? They were the size of, I think, large chickens or small dogs. Somewhere in between those two. Yeah. Cloud juice. Do you know what that is? Cloud juice. Yeah, rain. Well, yeah, it is pretty much. You and your fancy words. This is a Bolton thing. No, it's not very much not. It's bottled water that you can get in Claridge's. And they sell it in a menu like wine. And it's collected on a plastic roof on a tiny

windswept island off the Australian coast. And it's the most expensive bottled water ever to arrive in the UK. Wow. How's it sold as being better? Because the trade winds come off the ocean and it's supposed to be much purer because there isn't any pollution on the rain. It's weird, isn't it? Because it's just H2O. There are ways of purifying water. You just need to boil it and condense it and then you've got no impurities at all. And yet, we have this idealized water in our heads. Yeah, that you could buy on some so badly. Don't you guys want to taste that? I bet it's great. Let's all go to Claridge's. Let's get sushi on the way. Get them to sponsor this thing. We'll be swimming in cloud juice. It doesn't sound nice though. It's not a nice name.

Yeah, why do they call it cloud juice? Cloud water? Lovely. Cloud juice. Yeah. Sky muck. But there's also, you could get beer where the water comes from glaciers and that's supposed to be like better and purer. Oh, like ice wine as well, which is wine where the grapes are frozen and so all the sugar is pushed into the remaining bit of the grape, which isn't frozen, and then you crush that grape. So it makes a much sweeter wine. Yeah. Okay. Have you heard of cloud nine? Yes. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is really cool. Cloud nine is not the highest most elegant floaty cloud there is. Cloud nine is actually at the very bottom of the height scale in the international cloud atlas. It's like high

fog essentially. Oh, it's cool. It's cumulonimbus. So cumulus are the fluffy ones, nimbus are rainy, and that's cloud nine. Yeah, yeah. If you want really high elegant clouds, you want cloud zero, which is cirrus, and that's the stuff which is just ice crystals in the sky. It's just millions of ice crystals floating together. Yeah. Did they like change the numbers or something? Is that why we say cloud nine is so great? No, they were all, so the famous system was invented by a scientist called Luke Howard, which is all the lesser names, cumulus, nimbus, stratus. Cirrus is lovely. It means a curl of hair. That's really, because it looks beautiful like that. But he came up with the system, and the poet Goethe was so impressed with this incredible classification job that he

dedicated four whole poems to him, and he praised him for bestowing form on the formless and a system of order change on a boundless world. You know, back in the day when there weren't names for different types of clouds. But this is really cool. The year before Luke Howard came up with his, that was 1802. There was another French scientist called Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and he came up with the system. And he came up with his when he was ill in bed, looking at the clouds floating past his window. And they had Envoil, which means hazy, atrupe, mast, pomle, which means dappled, and groupe, which means grouped. Was that the same Lamarck who came up with the evolution at the same time as Darwin? Sounds like it is. He was off on a couple of things. Yeah, but unfortunately

no one paid any attention to his system. And the next year along comes Fancy Boy with his Latin, and away you go. But they believed him about, you know, giraffes stretching their necks out until they were long. People bought that for a while, right? Yeah, there's still some people who think that Lamarckism will come back one day. There was some studies like in the last few years that mice can pass their memories onto their grandchildren. And if that was true, if that turns out to be true, that would be Lamarckism. Why is that Lamarckism? It's such a mad idea. You can pass on learned traits. It was fear, wasn't it? They associated a particular smell with fear, and two generations on, the mice which had no contact with their grandparents exhibited the same fear. Okay,

which is if true, unbelievable. So it's not but it's not like us getting, you know, you and me suddenly talking about the war. No, no, no, but the fear had altered their just like those memories came down. No, but the fear had altered their genes. So they would they would they were afraid of the smell of I think it was lavender experiment live experiment is they they they hooked a a mouse's elect they hooked his pleasure sensors in his brain with an electrode to a button which he could press in order to send a jolt of endorphins, you know, into his system. And he he kept, you know, predictably he kept pressing the button. And he pressed it so incessantly that he forgot to eat and he forgot to drink. And his limbs eventually atrophied

to the point where he had to just press it with his face. Oh, my God, died ultimately of starvation. And no one stepped in. No, they just let him go with it. It just sounds like like one of the saw movies or something. And then I read another one about they took a bunch of mice and they played them classical music and they took a bunch of other mice and they played them rock and roll and they mixed them together and the rock mice ate the classical mice. Okay, should we should we wrap up on this? Anna, have you got anything you want to add? So the largest dinosaur ever found has been discovered. It weighed as much they estimate as 14 African elephants. It's seven tons heavier than the previous record holder was found in

Argentina. So it's pretty impressive. And it's about 20 meters tall, which reminded me of a thing I read and I think it was a new scientist blog. If anyone saw the first episode of this series of Doctor Who where the T-Rex was the same height as Big Ben, the largest known specimen of a T-Rex that we have was four meters and Big Ben is 96. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thanks everyone for listening. If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things we've been talking about on this podcast, you can reach most of us on Twitter. I can be gone at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. Art's Egg Shaped. Simon, you're not on Twitter, are you? No, no dice. I'm sorry. Oh my god. How? Why? You know, I just... Too cool.

Yeah, it's just my level of coolness. It's just too high. I just know it would consume my entire life if I was on social media. So I just steer clear of all of it. Fair enough. Okay, but if you can't get him online, but you can get him in bookshops, that's a good link. Yeah, so Spoilt Bratz is out now, but also all of his books, Last Girlfriend on Earth, Elliot Allagash, What in God's Name, yep. And then there's Two in America. If you're listening in America, there is Free Range Chickens and Ant Farm. Good memory. That's amazing. They're all amazing. There's no notes in front of him. He's just doing this. Yes, I remember that. I really appreciate that. I've read all the books. This is not a lie. I'm a massive fan. I think he's the best comedy

writer out there at the moment. So get Simon's books. You can find us all on Twitter. Anna, you're not on Twitter still. Yeah, I like the fact we discuss this a lot, and no one's ever suggested that I'm too cool to be on Twitter over the 20 episodes we've had where he lost. Not cool enough, mate. Not cool enough. Yeah, double standards. Okay, that's it for this week. We're going to be back again next week with another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. Go to our website and you can find all previous episodes, and we'll be back again in seven days. See you then. Bye.