No Such Thing As A Fish - 383: No Such Thing As A Mead-Based Maasai Gameshow

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss shark exfoliators, droopy Concordes and who belongs behind a snob screen Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tyshinski and Andrew Hunter Murray and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that's my fact this week, my fact is that the world's longest golf putt took 26 seconds for the ball to reach the hole. In that time, it covered a distance of over nine miles.

So Dan, I've just done some calculations just before we came on and I reckon that means they must have hit the ball at about just over 1200 miles per hour. And is that good James? Well I've just been watching the open just before we came on as well and Bryson Dechambeau who most people think hits it the hardest and fastest of anyone can hit it at a maximum of 140 miles an hour, so what the fuck's going on? Okay, so yes, you were correct in your calculation but incorrect in how this record was set. This was set aboard Concorde.

Cheat. It is a cheat, I was talking to our good buddy Jason Haisley and this came up in conversation. He mentioned that a record had been set by someone who had basically used the idea that the distance that you would travel on Concorde matched with a putt that could travel the distance of Concorde into a hole would set the record. So the record that is held currently is by a guy called Jose Maria Olathalbo and he's a golfer who in 1999 was on the Ryder Cup's team Concorde flight to the United States and during the whole trip he spent most of the time in the aisle trying to break the record

for longest putt ever. And so the putt that he achieved was 26.17 seconds long so it covered the 150 feet of the cabin but as a result of the distance traveled by Concorde that was 9.2 miles that he traveled. That's good. I can only imagine how hard it was for the poor bloody air stewards to serve the drinks around this golfer. The other thing is when you're playing golf it's always more difficult to play over water

but presumably this whole shot was over water. Yes, exactly. But also, you know, I mentioned he tried to break the world record. This isn't the first time that someone has set the record of longest golf putt done on a Concorde airplane. So a couple years before in 1997 there was a guy called Brad Faxen and he set the record. Now what's interesting is I managed to find a blog about the story of how this happened and I think it's a cheat his record setting because...

As opposed to this other completely legitimate... Right. Well, as far as I can tell the current record holder did it by hitting it and getting it into the hole on his own but in this blog about Brad Faxen it sounds like he hit the ball and then all of the passengers were putting their hand and feet in the way navigating the ball. That doesn't count. Exactly.

That doesn't count. I have a question, Dan. How did they make a hole in Concorde? In fact, that made it easier to sink the ball because everything was being sucked towards the massive hole in the fuselage of the plane that just drilled. Yeah. Is that what happened? No, I think it must have been a cup on its side for such an important record, the scant

detail. Such an important record, unbelievable. World changing record was set today. As far as I can tell the first person to ever hold the record was not a professional golfer but was Suggs from the band Madness who initially did it and... What? Did you mean the longest part or do you mean on Concorde? On Concorde, the longest part on Concorde.

No wonder Concorde went out of business, the number of golfers just queuing up taking up valuable spaces for people with their bags. The longest golf shot ever or what was often claimed or speculated to be one of the longest happened on the moon, right? I think we've mentioned before, Alan Shepard did a golf shot on the moon and it was never a record breaker or anything but everyone always just said, God, that must have gone miles because obviously gravity on the moon is a sixth of what it is now so you should be hitting it six times as far and I think there's the footage and when he hit it, this

is on Apollo 14, 1971, he missed it the first one which we've mentioned before, hit the second and disappeared out of shot and he was like, wow, God, I reckon that's gone a long way. He actually said about 200 yards which still is not as far as professionals will hit it but they recently analysed the videos of his golf shot and zoomed right in and they worked out where he was standing because they saw his footprints and where the ball landed and he hit the ball 40 yards which in earth yards I guess that would be like seven yards he basically hit it the equivalent of on earth.

Wow. VAR has really ruined more things than we realised. Yeah. As someone who once lost a cricket ball throwing competition aged about 15 or 16 to a seven-year-old girl, I don't think we should criticise this guy too much. What? Cricket ball throwing? Yeah, it was a cricket ball throwing competition.

It was in Germany. Why were you representing the UK for the World Cricket Ball Throwing Championships? That's a fair point. I guess they didn't have much interest from elsewhere. Yeah. Oh, God. Amazing. Anyway.

Speaking of sport of the sports, what sport do you reckon has the fastest ball of not being played on Concord just generally? What about squash? Squash faster for sure. It's not going to be table tennis. It's not ping-pong. No. The answer is pelota.

You know that game that they play in the Catalan region of Spain? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm so excited about the pelota World Cup coming up soon. Wow. Well, apparently you're representing the UK and that as well, I don't know if you know. It's basically a game where you have these gloves but they have like a slope on them and so you catch the ball in midair.

It's a bit like squash and then you flick the ball using your hand and with this slope and it really gives it a massive speed. Wow. But I thought that's about 180 miles an hour. The best tennis serve about 160. Wow. I thought maybe Quidditch, but the Quidditch broomsticks apparently, according to the internet, I haven't read the books at all.

So I might be wrong about this. Only 150 miles an hour, the fastest brooms go. So why pedestrian sport, really? But then if you throw the, I want to say, snitch from a broomstick and you're travelling at that. No, no, no. Come on, let's throw the snitch. On a broomstick.

If you catch the snitch, the game ends, your team gets 150 points. Right. Sorry. Well, you're throwing some sort of balls, presumably. You might throw a quaffle or a blusher. It's a quaffle. Yeah. Right.

So you quaff the quaffle off the broomstick while going at 150 miles an hour. You give that some extra speed. Yeah, it's like shining a torch out of a car. Exactly. No, hang on. That's still the speed of light. It's exactly unlike shining a torch. The actual fact you've chosen the one thing light, which doesn't act like a ball.

You know a hole in one, the phenomenon of a hole in one. I did not know this. You can get a hole in one insurance if you earn a golf course. What do you mean? Basically, lots of golf courses offer prizes, huge prizes. If you get a hole in one on this hole, we will give you 50,000 pounds. And that's obviously quite risky for a golf course in case someone just turns up and does it.

There's special insurance and you pick a main hole and you can also get optional prize cover for five other holes. In the policy I read, I'm sure they vary. But yeah, I just had no idea that was a special insurer. That's very cool. Yeah. So you're encouraged to get insurance if you play golf because you're hitting balls quite often in the wrong directions in areas where there are people.

But part of your insurance will often be hole in one insurance and that's because when you get a hole in one, you're kind of supposed to buy everyone else in the club a drink. So if you do get it and you pay for that, then your insurance will pay for that round of drinks. Really? That's kind of stingy, isn't it? People are saying even on that day, when presumably they're winning this massive prize from the golf course anyway, they're not going to buy the five other blokes in the golf bar a drink.

The poor people at Aviva who are dealing with two competing claims, won for 50,000 pounds for one of the biggest round of drinks ever. Wow. That's amazing. Well, you say things golf balls often do get hit in the wrong direction, right? And one particular group of people who was prone to doing this are American politicians. So I think maybe the record for the most disastrous misdirected hit is held by Spiro Agnew. So this was 1971, I think.

So he was former vice president. Thank you. I was going to say, just for the younger listeners, he explained who Spiro Agnew is. Sorry. Come on. If you've heard his name once, which you probably have, you never forget that name. So no one needs to contextualize. It's the Bob Hope classic tournament in 1971.

This is like a lot of celebrities took part in this. A lot of presidents have played in it. And I think he might be the only person to hit three people with two shots. So he hit one shot and it hit a husband and wife couple both. So rebounded off one, smacked into the other. He paused, went up to apologize. How embarrassing for me. I'm a public figure.

He went back down, put it back on the tee and thwacked another woman who had to go to the hospital. No. Did he then continue? Oh, yeah. He absolutely nailed it after that. You get your bad shots out of the way. That's amazing.

And I think was he working with Gerald Ford, he was at the time, wasn't he, who also once hit the same woman twice from the same tee. You're kidding. Did she move? Did she move in between shots one and two? That's a really good question. In which case you're saying it's her fault because obviously he's not going to hit it to the same place.

Sorry. I don't think I'm saying it's her fault. I'm just saying it would be interesting if she moved and that implies that he was drawn towards her somehow. I guess if she didn't, it also could imply that. She could have been wearing like a giant flag on her head. Yeah. He thought she was the whole.

She was. She had an enormous hole in the middle of her diaphragm. Wow. Okay. Oh, that's very wrong. Oh, Nadi. Do you guys know who the number one female golfer in the world is at the moment? Type of recording?

No. No. Come on, guys. It's not sexist because I don't know the number one. I don't know either. Yeah. Fair enough. The number one female golfer is a woman called Nelly Corder.

The number 13 golfer is her sister, Jessica Corder, and you might know the name if you follow tennis because their brother is Sebastian Corder, who is currently the 46th best player in the world and was the first player born in the 2000s to reach the fourth round of any Grand Slam event. Wow. Imagine that family. The father is Pettacorder, who was the former number two tennis player in the world and an Australian Open winner.

And their mother is Regina Corder, Ney Reichstover, who was a former tennis top 30 player as well. Wow. Imagine that family at Christmas. Their grandfather was Concorda, who invented it. Shall we talk about Concord? Yeah. Concord is absolutely amazing. It's kind of sad that it's defunct.

I love the fact that it had a wiggly nose, which I didn't really know because you see photos of it looking slightly skew if the nose. They could genuinely, from the cockpit, control where the nose was and it was simply so they could see the runway because when the nose was in its up position, the pilots coming into land couldn't see the runway nearly as clearly, obviously, advantage to see the runway. So they just had a boo. And you could see it tilt down and they could see the runway at land.

And it made that noise, didn't it? Yes, absolutely. It's probably nice. Yeah. Oh, I've just lost my sex drive sound. Do you guys know the oldest person ever to fly on Concord? Gosh, I don't. Was it, who was that?

Old. Do you mean old now? Because all of them are fairly old now. Well, that's a good point. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to say this is a trick question. I reckon you're like a mummy was transported from ancient Egypt or something like that's

classic Andy. Oh, it's bound to be that, isn't it? Right. Lucy, the ancestor of all the homoerectasis. Yeah. Some primordial soup was brought on board and served. Wow. Would you like the chicken or the fish or the primordial soup?

Poor Andy. He now just has to tell us it's a 61 year old woman. That is very true. Well, there have been a few oldies on that. The Queen Mum celebrated her 85th birthday by going on Concord and sitting in the cockpit. She's not the oldest person ever. The oldest person ever was a woman called Eva Woodman. Okay.

She was born early on Concord in 1998 and she was aged 105, born in 1893. And what I really like is this. When she went on the flight, it was only the second time in her life she had left Bristol. Wow. Isn't that incredible? That's amazing. Good honor. Yeah.

Waiting for the right moment. She would have been 11 years old at the time of the first flight with the Wright brothers. She was born at a time when cars were pretty bloody surprising. That's true. Concord was maybe not used to transport mummies, but Concord was used to transport body parts, which I didn't realize. So the actual speed of Concord had served a genuine purpose, medical purpose. And apparently BA Concords were quite often used to transport organs that needed to be

quickly relayed to somewhere else to be donated. And there was one incident according to Concord magazine where French Concord had to ship a really rare anti-venom to someone who'd had a snake bite somewhere in Africa, I think. Oh my God. That's amazing. Yeah. And because you've got such limited time, it was literally like if they'd just gone aboard a normal BA flight, then wouldn't have made it in time, but the person survived

because it whizzed over there so fast. But Concord doesn't fly to Africa, does it? Well, I suppose it flies to wherever the person gets bitten by the snake if it's... It probably was a scheduled flight, is what I'm saying. Do you mind if you could get him from Sudan to Amsterdam, then yeah, we'll give him the anti-venom. No, I think it diverted. Paul McCartney once ordered a pizza to be flown from New York to London by Concord.

Yeah, I don't get that. I'm trying to find out more about that. Was it a cooked pizza? Was it like a Sainsbury's? It would be cold, wouldn't it? I think it was from his favorite pizza place. You'd imagine it would be, rather than... He wouldn't have got it from Dominoes in New York if there's Dominoes in London, would he?

He might have had vouchers for the one in London that he couldn't trade in in New York. Well... Was he misled as to how fast Concord was? It is possible. If your delivery arrives after two and a half, three hours, it is still going to be lukewarm at best. I wonder if the pizza got its own seat and stuff. I wonder that.

I do wonder that. I would like to think it did. There was a thing where you could save money by being a courier, and so if there were sensitive documents that had to be delivered, you would get a cheaper ticket on Concord. So maybe the pizza had its own special courier. That's interesting. I imagine if the pizza just comes out at the other end and there's a guy with a sign which just has a pizza on it.

There were quite a lot of famous people that did travel Concord that have led to stories like this. Like Phil Collins famously, with Live Aid, played in London and was able to fly to America to play for the end of the day over there. And there's a story of Yuri Geller being on the plane and he visits the captain in the cockpit. Get him out of here. He's going to bend everything in sight.

Interestingly the nose was completely straight until he got on. He went into the flight deck and he said, I can spin the compass on your instruments. Thanks Yuri. Thanks a lot. Fucking don't. Because presumably he's doing it with a hidden magnet or something, right? It's going to be a trick. So why are you letting him on with that?

Exactly. So the captain said, I thought at 37 kilometers a minute, are we being wise to allow this man to fiddle with the navigation? And he did. He let him do it. I think though he did it on the standby compass, which is still, you need it, it's a standby compass. Sure.

And he said, sure enough, it whizzed around. I've never seen anything like it. And when it stopped, I'm pleased to say it went back to show it accurately where we were going. What a surprise. Just like what would happen if you bugged it there. Yeah, exactly. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that some fish use sharks as scratching posts. Wow. Brave fish. Yeah. And also like my cat uses scratching posts to kind of get her nails down and fish don't have nails. So what's going on? Oh yeah.

What's going on? No, but they do have parasites. And so they like to rub themselves up against rough surfaces to get rid of those or scratch that itch. And the adrenaline junkies among them scratch up against sharks. And this has been documented in lots of places underwater. So I first read about it as a photographer who spotted a crowd of jack kind of fish enveloping a massive bull shark and found out later this is what they do.

They rub up against them. And it seems to happen everywhere. So I found a picture of a mackerel rubbing up against a great white. Very bold. Very bold. And even sharks rubbing up against other sharks sometimes there are silky sharks rubbing up against whale sharks to scratch themselves. Wow.

So it must be harsh to like sharks. It's not their fault they got this rough skin and they've just become kind of everyone's using them right. And they're so rough aren't they? I didn't really realize this because I've never obviously touched a shark. But shark for example can destroy human skin with their own skin. So sometimes people who try to rescue sharks which have washed up on land if they handle them they end up with shark burn where basically their skin is just so rough that they destroy

your fingers in your hands. Yeah. Wow. Like classic gray smooth sharks because that just looks like that's such a smooth surface. The amazing thing about them which is just so cool is they're basically made of loads of teeth aren't they? So their skin is loads of these tiny tiny teeth called dermal denticles and if you zoom in they do look like kind of layers of overlapping teeth and they literally are jaws.

They are. Very nice. They're entirely jaws. That's amazing. And they're as hard as granite and as strong as steel and they're made of material called appetite. Oh wow. And also here's the thing sharks do lose their appetite sometimes because they get dandruff

which means bits of their skins the dermal denticles kind of fall off. And what's really useful about that is we can go into the bottom of the sea and find these bits of shark dandruff and it can tell us quite a lot about the number of sharks that lived in an area over many men because it doesn't, it's really hard stuff. It doesn't really degrade very much. So it's all there from hundreds and hundreds and thousands and millions and years ago. Wow. It's really helpful if you're looking after coral reefs for instance you can work out

how many sharks were there, how a stick of water was all that kind of stuff and people are using this shark dandruff to do that. That's so cool. That's amazing. The shark that was mentioned in this article was a bull shark and bull sharks, very fascinating sharks. They have this incredible ability to swim in both salt and freshwater. So do I.

So do I. Yeah. Hi. Yeah, sorry. Let me rephrase that. They can live underwater in salt or freshwater. And as a result these sharks can be found in really odd spots and one place in particular that bull sharks are found in is a place called Carbrook Golf Course in Queensland where following

a flood where the golf course was flooded, bull sharks swam into the local lake that's in the golf course and then stayed there once the flooding went down. So they're permanently there, these giant bull sharks as part of the golf course. Someone's got to break that putting record by putting it onto the back of a shark which swims the entire length of the lake and deposits on the other side. Whale sharks, that's a kind of shark, they're absolutely huge. They have remora on them, the sucking parasitic creatures. But they make a lovely meal, these remoras, for birds.

However, how do you get from the bird to the shark underwater? It's really cool. What they do is there's only one bit of scientific footage of this happening, I believe. The cormorants will dive bomb into the water, they will swim down once they're underwater and then once they get to the surface of the whale shark they will peck away at the remora on the surface, basically try to chisel it off because it's stuck on, you know, with really strong adhesive and pry it away from the surface of the whale and they do this, you know, losing oxygen all the time and then swim back up and they've got their meal.

The remora are amazing, aren't they, have you seen photos of them, this little suction pad? I've never heard remora, I must say, I've never heard that song. They're quite a big fish and they're different in, say, like pilot fish, that pilot fish will swim alongside the shark and they will eat parasites along the way and clean up around them and hence the symbiotic relationship. But the remora, literally on the top of their head, have this insane suction pad and they just rock up to the side of a shark and they just go and suck themselves on with their

head the right way up and they just get free transport along the way and they're really important to some of these sharks, to the point where the shark will put itself in danger to help the remora suck on. But they live off shark poo, don't they? I think some of them, they now think, they thought they lived off, like they feed off the parasites on the shark and live off scraps of food falling out of the shark's mouth, which is a kind of ignominious existence. But now, even worse, they eat shark poo, some of them, we think, and that's what they

eat there. So it's no kind of life. Because there are these fecal plumes that sharks produce, and really big sharks produce thousands of litres in this plume, you know, it's 30 feet across whale sharks, they produce this huge, great plume. But if the shark is swimming, I don't actually know how the remora manages to eat that. Maybe it detaches and swims around. No, yeah, they detach.

I think they're only attached for great travel. So they travel and then they pause and I think they disattach and eat, you know, they parasites off their faces and so on. That's tough though, that's like being driven to a restaurant, you jump out the car, but the car continues driving on, and then you have to catch it up after your meal. Yeah, it's like a drive-thru. No, not like a drive-thru. No, unless your parents hated you, they drove you to the drive-thru and then just drove away.

Look, it was a fun game, and it didn't do me any harm. I grew up well-adjusted. Greenland sharks, you know, we've mentioned those guys before. Favorite shark. Slow swimming, Dan's favorite shark, yeah. They are often partially or completely blind because they have these copepods, which are tiny crustacean-like creatures attached to their eyes, but the great news for the Greenland shark is that they're swimming in such deep water that the sharks don't care because it's

so dark that they don't actually need their eyesight very much. Well, but there's also a theory, which is not yet proved, but that the copepods might be bi-luminescent, and because of that, it's attracting prey towards the Greenland shark, which travels at one mile an hour. It's the slowest shark in the world. Top speed is two miles. Like, we could out swim this shark, basically. So in the Greenland shark version of Jaws, the music doesn't speed up at all.

It just stays... forever. Exactly. And so the idea is that the copepods are attracting prey to eat that, and it's basically bringing food to the face of the Greenland shark. Nice. So it's, again, symbiotic is the theory. Because what that makes sense, because I read recently that 90% of creatures in the ocean are glow-in-the-dark, a bioluminescent, and they're just sort of discovering this and

realizing all these animals, deep sea animals, that are glow-in-the-dark. Lantern sharks, they glow. I think they're luminescent underneath, and so that if you look at them from underneath, it looks like it's just the bright sky, and you don't realize that there's a shark. It's just camouflage. Yeah. That's weird, having a light that is also camouflage. That's clever.

Yeah. If you lived in Blackpool with all the illuminations, and you wanted to kind of camouflage yourself there, then it would make sense to cover yourself in lots of bright lights, right? Absolutely. It all depends where you live. No, no, no, completely. But what a terrifying version of a serial killer you've just thought of, James,

who goes around covered in Christmas lights, but only in Blackpool. We've never talked about the shark murder case in Sydney, which just feels like if people don't know about that, you need to, because it's such a good story. This is basically 1935. There's an aquarium in Sydney. There's a tiger shark. There are loads of people admiring it, and suddenly it vomits up a human arm. And this, thank you, good sound effects.

And this launched this massive murder investigation. So it was an arm which, when they studied it, it obviously had been cut off by someone, as opposed to eating by the shark. It had a tattoo on it, which was identified as the arm of this kind of boxer cum criminal. It actually turned out the shark hadn't eaten the arm. The shark had eaten the smaller shark, and that smaller shark had eaten the arm. What a tangled web this is. This is incredible.

Wow, it was awesome. It's never been solved to this day this crime, because this guy got accused. This guy called Reginald Holmes, and he denied it all. He got really, really drunk and got his boat out into Sydney Harbour, I think. He tried to shoot himself in the head to get away from the accusation, but instead the bullet flattened against his skull, knocked him into the water. Did he have a skull made of iron? No, what?

Like, how does that work? What the hell, Anna? I don't know what Reginald Holmes is made of, but this bullet was flat, and his skull was fine. He got a mild concussion. What? He climbed back into his... The bullet flattened himself against his skull. A lot of this story was unbelievable, but that bit in particular.

So, okay, so he's in the water. He's got a bullet made of jelly. Yep, and he's got his skull made of iron, and he climbs back into his speedboat, and there's a police chase around Sydney Harbour, which lasts for a few hours, and eventually... I'm amazed that it lasts a few hours, given that he's been shot in the head by himself shortly before this. He's hardcore. Maybe he's that guy from James Bond with the metal face.

Anyway. Jaws. Jaws. Yeah, Jaws. Yeah. The other Jaws. So then he says, okay, fine, I am involved. He says his business associate had killed the victim, this guy called Smith,

and had dismembered him, cut him into pieces, and he turned up at Reginald Holmes's door because they had beef between them, and he'd waved this severed arm at him and said, look, if you don't do what I need you to do, then you'll end up like whoever this guy was. And he'd left the severed arm with Reginald Holmes. So Holmes just tossed this arm into the water, didn't really know what to do with it. And anyway, then he was murdered the day before he was supposed to testify, and the case was never solved because even though they kind of knew it was the guy who Holmes had said it probably was, it was determined that no one could prove anyone had been murdered,

because actually a severed arm does not constitute enough of a body to suggest that anyone's been killed in the first place. The threshold of proving a murder in Australia seems to be remarkably high. Okay, it is time for fact number three, that is James. Okay, in my fact this week is that 46% of mass eye men have become friends with someone who got the wrong number and mistakenly called their phone. How fat are their fingers? How lonely are the mass eye more importantly?

If I get a wrong number, I never try and befriend the person who's called me. So I think I don't know anything about the mechanics of how they use their phones, so I can only answer Andy's question really. But basically the mass eye, these are traditionally nomadic people, but their lifestyle is evolving quite a lot, like a lot of places around the world, as the expansion of Western society kind of globalizes itself. And there was a 2021 study about mass eye men who live in Kenya and Tanzania, and it found that because they work in big, big areas,

and they don't see many people from day to day, but it's really, really important for them to have these social networks, because it means that you can sell your goods better. It's really important to kind of see people and speak to people. They have found this way of making friends, where whenever anyone accidentally calls them and they're speaking the ma language, which is the language that they speak, they automatically just start going, oh, how's it going?

I don't suppose you want to buy any cows or some grain or whatever. And they just basically start up a conversation. So bizarre. One of the mechanics for why they miss call sometimes is it's to do with the fact that there's not great access to electricity in many areas. And so if you were in an area and your phone died, but you wanted to call someone, you would borrow someone else's phone, and in that case, you'd have to manually put in a number off memory.

And it's during the memory of it, you would miss the aisle. I didn't see that. That's really interesting. I should say this is specifically men that they found this in. There has been a study on mass eye women by a woman called Kelly Summers, who comes from Virginia Tech. And she found that the men are often using their phones to talk about people outside their social circle,

to try and make contacts for selling things especially, whereas the women are mostly talking to each other, other people in the family unit and this in the local unit. Yeah. So that's quite a gender line as far as mobile phone uses in the mass eye. Yeah. There's another division that is being created in mass eye society, not a serious division, but according to a 2017 study,

people with mobile phones, which are dumb, you know, non internet enabled as it were, they call smartphone users because they have the ability to download weather forecasts. And if you're a nomadic or a cattle herder, weather forecasts are very important. So this is basically a new system of being a tribal elder opening up, which is, you know, have you got an iPhone or the equivalent? That's very funny.

Wait, so they just call, they'll call loads of random numbers until someone picks up and they say, hey, are you on an iPhone? And then they say, great, can you tell me? No, they'll know if one specific person has an iPhone, they'll call them say, can you download the latest weather forecast? Exactly. Yeah. So that person's on the phone all day long, basically, just delivering the weather.

It's like being a weather man or woman. But instead of being on TV, you just have to deliver the weather to every individual person. Yeah, that's honest. It's like being the speaking clock, isn't it? Really? Yeah. I remember being so surprised when I was in Kenya,

I went around Kenya in Tanzania in 2005, and I was on like a Matatu on those buses, and there was a big Masai guy, and it's so tall, most of them, sitting directly opposite me. Our knees were touching and I remember feeling kind of awkward. And then he delved into his sort of coat, and he whipped out a mobile phone. And this was kind of when I'd just got a mobile phone.

That was when you finally decided to get one, wasn't it, Anna? It was like, you know what? Yeah, it is time. But he was on a bus with you, right? Yes. Like he's already engaged in the modern world. Well, he's on a Matatu going into town to sell some meat, I guess. Did he have the meat with him?

Yeah, the rest of the passengers on the bus were all cows, actually. Have you guys heard of the Masai spitting customs? Again, I don't know if these are now completely out of date, and I suspect COVID might have rendered them a little bit passe now. Yeah, it doesn't sound very COVID friendly, does it? No, there's lots of spitting belief. It's considered a blessing, spitting, so parents and friends might spit on a newborn baby

to wish it luck and health. That makes sense. Absolutely, yeah. During Masai weddings, a father might spit on his daughter's forehead and breasts as a blessing. It's so weird to marry into that, if you're not aware, isn't it? I'd take that as an insult. And they do the classic spit on your hand for a handshake as well,

which is often done as a sort of blood brothers with spit kind of thing. So you spit on your own hand. Yeah, you spit on your own hand and then shake. But that seems to be a normal handshake. Again, as you say, Andy, it might be out of date now, but yeah. God, I like the idea, though, that, Andy, you would spit on someone else's hand in a spit shake. I'm going to start suggesting that.

You hand out and you have to project it onto their hand. There was a traditional way of preparing mead in the Masai, and that was that a man and a woman would live in a hut and keep away from the rest of society while they're making the mead. And while you're doing it, you have to abstain from engaging in any sexual intercourse. That's about six to seven days. But if you don't follow that rule, then it means that the mead will be undrinkable

and all the bees who produce the honey will leave the village forever. Imagine if you had broken the rules, just nervously presenting your tainted mead to the rest of the tribe and seeing if they guess. Yeah. Then I'm going, hey, where are those bees going? No, they're just popping out. They're popping out.

That would be a great Masai game show, you know. What, the mead makers? Dirty mead. Yeah, it's a panel of Masai judges who have to work out whether the couple of mead makers have had sex during the production process of the mead. It's like Anti-Love Island, basically. We're just watching people try not have sex. Oh, wait, there is a new Netflix show.

I believe is that that's the premise. Is there? Yeah. Yeah, well, you're not allowed to have sex. Right, to protect the mead. They've cut the mead element from the Netflix show, which I think is a huge blunder. Big mistake, big mistake.

How's that going to work? I mean, I hope they haven't cast long married couples because that shows they're going for years and not be a challenge for anyone. The Masai have now created their own intellectual property trust because they're so second tired of big global companies using the name Masai or using traditional Masai designs. And so they are creating a body of intellectual property trained elders

and they hope that they'll be able to negotiate with firms on behalf of the Masai. Obviously, it's tricky because you've got lots and lots of people who are very dispersed and it's hard to negotiate on behalf of all the Masai. But they are trying to persuade firms to recognize the Masai trademark over their own name, for example. Yeah, because isn't there an estimate that over a thousand companies use Masai designs, basically? It's that sort of red checked huger and the beads.

You see those beads everywhere, belts. And so like Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein. Yeah. And obviously, it's hard to trademark beads, for example, but particular designs you might be able to. Or there are sometimes voluntary codes of conduct, which some Native American groups have struck. So that now it's seen as an industry standard that if you're using this,

you have to kind of get permission or at least talk to the people involved. And there is somewhere you can go, which has been the first company to start paying them for their trademark called Koi Clothing. So K-O-Y, which I was looking at. And the items for humans are very expensive, but you can get a dog collar for 25 pounds. So stuff on wrong numbers?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Elon Musk has an old phone number, which he doesn't use anymore, but which Lindsay Tucker, 25-year-old skincare consultant, does use. Oh, no.

So she regularly gets phone calls and text messages for Elon Musk. One guy sent her a blueprint for a bionic limb. Another guy in South Africa sent her a text message asking if he can buy 1,000 trucks. And the IRS called her asking about her tax. Amazing. What did you say her job is? She is a skincare consultant.

Oh, well, see, that first one sounds quite useful. What was the first call? Bionic limb. That's the one place you don't need skincare. You need something just the WD-40. Yeah. Look, if you get something you say, I'll try to fix your skin, your cold sores on your leg.

And then it's like, I've really screwed that up. I'm so sorry. I had to amputate. But on the bright side, got a bionic limb. I can see how that would look. It's unlikely. Yeah. God, it must be tempting.

Some of the offers she gets, she must be really tempted to pretend to be his representative. I'm sure she'll be caught pretty quickly. But according to the article I read, she takes it in her stride. And she says that if any of you ever call Elon Musk or text him and you don't get a reply, then don't feel hard done. So you probably rang her number

and she doesn't get a chance to reply to everyone saying it's that. So it's not Elon's fault. But it was NPR and they did ask Elon Musk about it. And he did say that that was his number. He can't believe that it's still in use. It's so old. That's amazing. She should start selling Musk.

That's such a good idea. Great idea. You can capitalize on it. Start selling Elon's Musk. The skin. Does he have that as a perfume company, Elon's Musk? He must do, right? He should.

He must. I mean, the exciting thing here, Anna, is we could literally call this lady up and you picture the idea. We've got her number. No, no. The number wasn't printed at the story because that would just make matters worse.

Yeah. It would be irresponsible journalism. Yeah. This person gets loads and loads of dodgy calls. But here's her number anyway. You just get what they should need to know. Do you guys want to hear the greatest wrong number of all time? Yeah.

In my opinion. Okay. It happened in 1992. It happened in Dover. There was a man called Jason Pegler. He was walking past a phone box, right? And it rang. He answered the phone and the person ringing that phone box

wanted to speak to him. The person making the call was a colleague of his who was ringing, trying to get through to Jason, asking how to work the office fax machine. They hadn't phoned his phone number though. They had accidentally looked up his sheet at the company and phoned his employee number at the company, which happened to be the same as the number for the phone box.

And was he able to help out with the fax situation? You bastard. I have no idea. That isn't it. I mean, do you buy this? Because it does sound unbelievable, doesn't it? Well, yeah, you're absolutely right. It does sound unbelievable.

It's collected by David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University who has a website where he collects unbelievable coincidences. And this is one of them. So I don't know what verification he does, but I think it might be true, actually. I think it is legit. I think I've heard him be asked about it before, the guy who answered the phone.

I bet he was loitering outside that phone, but he spotted that years earlier. I suppose it's like the law of big numbers, isn't it? Exactly. If you have enough billion people in the world and enough things happen, then eventually more of them will be an amazing coincidence. Exactly that.

It's exactly that. I found another just with Silicon Valley tech billionaires. One who's, I'm not sure if he's a billionaire, but Steve Wozniak, the creator of the Apple computer with Steve Jobs. So he used to have a phone number, which was very similar to Pan Am's reservation number. And people in Silicon Valley,

if they failed to use the right area code, they would get Steve Wozniak instead, who loved pranks we've spoken about before on the podcast. And so he would play up to it. And what he used to do is, if someone was trying to make a reservation, he would tell them that they, with a millionth passenger on Pan Am,

and as a result, they'd won free lifetime travel on Pan Am. And then what he would do is halfway through collecting their personal information, he would hang up, leave them confused, and the obvious thing would be, they would spend the next however long calling Pan Am back, going,

no, I swear to God, someone was offering me lifetime under a millionth. Guy, real harsh, such a dick move. In 2015, there was a woman called Betty Barker who got a phone call and she picked up the phone and the person said, hello, is this planet Earth? And so she thought that's a prank call,

or this person's drunk. And the phone call ended. I think either the person cut it off or she cut it off. And it only came to light the next day, I think, when Tim Peake tweeted from the International Space Station, I'm so sorry for the wrong number I called yesterday from space. I was trying to get through to my family. That's so good.

Isn't that great? A similar story. Our friend Polly Adams got a call from the International Space Station one day. So she's the daughter of Douglas Adams and it was the 42nd mission to the International Space Station. So 42 is a big number in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. So the whole mission was themed to that.

So Polly was told that she was going to receive a call from the astronauts. But her phone, when it rang, had an area code of Texas, America, which is where it's rooted from. And she thought, well, that's not space. So she let it go to voicemail. It called a couple of times.

What did she think the area code of space was going to be? I don't know. It might have just said space on her phone, universe. So she ended up having to receive a voicemail going, hi, Polly. It's just the astronauts up in the International Space Station. Try to get through to you if you could give us a call back. OK.

It is time for our final fact of the show. And that is Andy. My fact is that halfway through the First World War, the British government bought nearly 400 pubs in an attempt to stop people drinking. How is that helping? Surely that just gives the members of parliament way more options. And what, did they just close?

The pubs are. They didn't close them. They closed some of them. But actually, a large number of them were not only kept open, they were substantially modified. Basically, they were very worried about people going to the pub and how this might affect the war effort, because there were lots of factories making munitions

where you had workers turning up either hungover or maybe still drunk, but it was a real problem, especially if you're making very delicate bombs and things like that. Bombs aren't delicate. You know what I mean? High explosive devices. There's probably some delicate parts of a bomb.

There probably are, aren't there? Yeah, the embroidery on top, actually. It's very hard to get that right. OK. And so they really were concerned about this. And as an experiment in June 1916, the height of the war is really crazy to imagine, but they bought nearly 400 pubs

over an area of about 300 square miles quite near the city of Carlisle. It was called the Carlisle Experiment, this campaign. They bought some more elsewhere, but that was the main area. And they said, we're going to do it for as long as the war lasts. And. Do you mean they sold them back afterwards?

Or. I think we get onto that later, but they initially just sort of bought them and said, we have to do this. And they basically took all these actions to stop people drinking, but in a pub environment. So they brought in really strict hours. They encouraged the sales of food and non-alcoholic drinks.

They made it more attractive to women and families. They introduced table service. All of these moves were basically designed to slow down drinking and make pubs nicer and mightier. Why is the attractive to women and families going to slow down drinking? I would have thought you're just doubling your clean tell there. Very good point.

I guess it stops mad-spinging. It stops like people just going in just to drink, isn't it? Like just drink those pubs, right? Exactly. Get on their best behavior. If only women had the same impact now when they walked into a pub.

Suddenly, everyone is a complete gentleman. Insighting to your childhood, Anna, that you think children are part of the drinking problem in this scenario. Don't let them in. They're out of control. But it's basically gastropubs. I think the British government kind of invented the gastropub. Yeah.

It was called disinterested management, wasn't it? The idea where you would give your landlords big commissions if they sold soft drinks or if they sold food. But you wouldn't really give them any commission if they sold alcohol. And it started, the idea started with private temperance people started buying a few pubs to do this. And then the government thought, oh, that's a good idea.

Right. Wait. And we should say it did expand out of Carlisle, presumably. Or was it just the poor people of Carlisle who couldn't get a drink anywhere? It was mostly Carlisle, I think. I think it was across the country that the laws were passed that limited things like hours, right?

So you were only allowed to drink between 12 and 2 or between 6.30 and 9.30. It's interesting that they wanted to turn it so that more women and children were going in. Because I did read that women were a big problem for the drinking in 1916. So there was a magistrates that dealt with a case with a guy called Captain Oversby that said,

he said, in the opinion of the committee, the great increase in the number of women visiting public houses during the past year has demanded drastic treatment. And they all wanted to put in place things like, this is the quote, partitions, snugs, and other obstacles likely to facilitate secret drinking be done away with.

So women were just a big problem for the people of England, apparently, because they kept going, getting pissed at the pub. I think it was basically there was these factions, wasn't there? Like a lot of people, temperance was kind of a thing. And people were trying to stop people from drinking in general and obviously the war helped that argument. But then obviously a lot of other people were thinking not.

So when they decided that they would allow or try and get more women into pubs, there were 37,000 female signatories in Birmingham of a petition demanding that women not be allowed in pubs until a certain age. That's incredible. Wow. Keep women in the home and out of the pubs.

There were lots of changes that were made also to pub designs because there were structural things in the building that you could do to slow down drinking bizarrely. So pubs used to consist of lots of little rooms. And those were all done away with inside. It became one large space inside, which could be more easily supervised. So snugs that were potential for naughtiness and binge drinking.

And there were snob screens. You know these? No. Snob screen, you will all have seen one because it's this etched pane of glass, right? And in some very old classic Victorian pubs, you will still see them to this day. And it basically is erected between two bits of a pub.

You can see through it kind of one way. The middle class drinkers have their own space, which you can kind of see through. You can see through to the working class drinkers next door. But the working class drinkers can't see back at you. And so it gets called a snob screen. Yeah. And those were done away with as well in loads and loads of pubs.

And they've survived in some. There's one right by Oxford Circus which still has snob screens. But we don't have snugs anymore, which is so sad. I think you get a few snugs in Ireland still. But they sound so great. Sometimes the snugs could be entered just from the outside, but you couldn't get into a snug from inside the pub. And these were like, like Andy says,

they were for people who didn't want to be seen in the pub. So if you're quite a classy chap or women often, like Dan said, like women didn't want to be known as drinkers. So you enter a snug from outside, sit in the snug, no one in the pub can see you. And then the barman just has to wheel around a tray of drinks. And then you pull it in through like a little letter box in your snug. Sounds really fun.

Can I ask, Andy, these snob screens, and you said there's a few in London, I've been to, I would say most of the pubs around Oxford Circus, and I'd never seen this. Does that mean that they've put me in the working class bit? Oh dear. And I just get unaware of it. Sorry.

I've been breaking the code here. Forget everything I said, James. I don't think any of them have them anymore. OK. I think I said before, or maybe I didn't, about how they made the beer weaker, obviously to stop drunkenness. And there was a song by Weston and Lee in World War I,

which was very popular because it was about this. And some of the lyrics are really good. So have you read it, seen what's said of it in the mirror and the mail? It's a substitute and a pub-stitute. And it's known as the government ale. And it goes on, blah, blah, blah. Oh, they say it's a terrible war, oh law. And there never was a war like this before.

But the worst thing that's ever happened in this war is Lloyd George's beer. So for some people, the whole thing that was happening with the war, it was the weak beer that was the real killer. I'm going to bet that those were two guys who had not been to the front. And beer never fully recovered after the war. What do you mean? It's hardly remembered these days. Yeah, apparently after the war,

it was pretty much remained about 19% weaker. So it used to be slightly stronger before the war. It never quite climbed back up there. Unless, and obviously now we're in London, you get all these Ponzi craft beers, like last night I was drinking a Ponzi beer I'd bought, and I tasted a bit weird and I realized it was 11%. So we are gradually recovering the percentages.

Jesus Christ. Generally, yeah, suffered. There is a pub that I'd love for all of us to go to when we're back in Publand. Amen. It's the Dolphin Tavern, and it's not far from our offices in Covent Garden, it's up in Holburn. And the initial pub that was built on the site was bombed to the ground on the 8th of September 1915.

And it was completely destroyed, rubble everywhere, and they decided to rebuild it. So in the process of moving away the rubble, they discovered one of the remaining surviving things was a clock that had stuck at 10.40pm, the exact moment that the bomb was dropped and crashed down on top of it and ruined everything. And so the Dolphin Pub to this day has that clock sitting

with the exact time that it was bombed in 1915 on the wall for you to see. That's very clever because also it always gives the impression that it's about to be last order. Oh, Dan, does it have a snob screen? If it has a snob screen, I'll go. Well, but then we won't get to hang out with James. I'll be by myself in the snob area. Have you heard my accent?

I'm getting behind that snob screen. You'll be in the snug with the other women, I'm afraid. Actually, like it was until relatively recently, it was quite unusual for women to go to pubs, especially drinkers pubs. You wouldn't see that that often. And it was only the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 that meant a lot of places would start allowing women in even.

There was a pub called the Grill Pub in Aberdeen that famously had a sign outside that said, no ladies please and wouldn't let any women in at all. In fact, it was in 1973 that a group of women ripped the sign off the door and went into the pub and demanded to be served. And the police had to come in. And actually, I think the police escorted them out of the premises,

but they refused to leave until they finished their drinks. And eventually, obviously this act came in in 1975, so there was nothing they could do. They had to let these women in, but they didn't install a female toilet until 1998. Well, I bet they regretted that when the cleaner had to do a serious job on the floor every night. Isn't that amazing?

There was a pub called Elvino, which was a big journalist's pub. And there's a book by Helen Lewis called Difficult Women, which is all about history of feminism. And the opening of it is about the fight for women to get served at Elvino because you weren't allowed to go to the bar as a woman. And this was after the Sex Discrimination Act. This was in 1980.

This was in the early 80s. So several years later, and the courts were just not upholding it because they said, well, this is too trivial to uphold or whatever. And if you went in, you weren't as a woman, you weren't supposed to wait at a table and the guys would go up to the counter. That is true.

And it was the early 80s, like you say. And a lot of places you'll see that will say on the internet that it was still legal to not serve women in pubs until 1982. Because it was this case when eventually it was a solicitor called Tess Gill and a journalist called Anna Koot. And they went to court and they won, which meant that there was now a precedent. There was already the law, but now it was a precedent

when they had to be served. They said that I think the pub management had justified it by saying, well, look, if you allow women to stand at the bar, they're going to put their bags down. And that's going to create absolute chaos. Okay, there will be no room at the bar for people because it's going to be full of bags. And what Tess Gill, genuinely, that was their argument.

And what Tess Gill and her colleague did was they got a couple of male friends to go in, put their briefcases down on the counter, clearly taking up space when the pub was very empty. So clearly that is a breach of the rules that the pub is trying to say only applies to women. And the men kind of gathered evidence that way. And that's one of the ways they won.

Yeah. Wow. So I actually think the greatest contribution that Tess Gill and Anna Kootz made, obviously women are allowed in all pubs now, but also I'm guessing those little hooks under the bar because of them too, right? Oh, yeah, must be.

Ah, yes. I can't tell you how grateful I am for those. Hey, Dan, you asked earlier about what happened to the state management scheme, the Carlisle experiment, you know, because it was going to be for the duration of the war plus one year afterwards, right? So that would have been 1919. They kept the pubs until 1973.

That was when the last ones were sold off. It was, I know it was a serious success. And I read a website about the state management scheme, the official name of it, which asked why this thing lasts so long. There were two reasons it lasts so long. Number one, it made a profit every year for the government. It was so profitable. And number two, the economic and political problems

facing Britain in the twenties and thirties that ultimately led to the Second World War and the rebuilding problems in the fifties and sixties were far more politically urgent than dealing with state management of pubs in Carlisle. I don't know if you guys have ever been out for a drink in the Carlisle area, but I'm not that surprised that they did that.

But one of the other reasons is because at the start of World War One, there was a bit of a rise of Irish nationalism in Ireland. And a lot of the workers who came over to the munitions factories in Carlisle were Irish. And there was a worry that if the rise in nationalism in Ireland kind of spilled over to Carlisle, it might not be just that they struggled to work

because they were hungover, but also that it might cause political discontent in that area. Well, speaking of Ireland, we've made a big deal about British pubs, but really, we've got nothing on Irish pubs. They're the big global expert, aren't they? And I was wondering why? When did they get so big?

How long have they been around? I reckon they date back to the 6th century, which is quite a lot older than us. I think I've been to some Irish pubs with some old boys in there that bit versus the 6th century. So, in the 6th century, there was a law pass that said every single local king, and there were about 140 in Ireland,

had to have their own personal brewer, and the brewer had to keep a never dry cauldron, which basically, and it was called like a brugu. That's amazing. The cauldron by law had to serve free food, free alcohol, and free entertainment to anyone who passed by, just in case it was the king. And there were loads of rules.

They had to be on the crossroads. They had to have torch bearers all around to give passers-by a welcome and invite them in. And it was so good. And if you were caught running a brugu, and you couldn't provide free booze, free food, free whatever entertainment, then by law, the sort of state,

the official poet of the region, had to write a satire about you, a poetic satire to publicly humiliate you. That's so good. Oh my God. Hey, just modern day London pubs again. Another one I'd love to go to is The Grapes in London, which is, well, for one main reason, they have a pub quiz there,

and sometimes, it is supposedly run by Gandalf, Serene McKellen. What? Really? Yeah, he bought the pub. Oh, is this the one that he owns? Yeah, he owns a pub. It's called The Grapes. He bought it in 2012.

If you don't know the answer, and you want to pass, does he say, you shall not pass? Is that a joke about Lord of the Rings? I don't know. You get kicked out of the comment. God, that's like seeing someone score a basketball hoop while blindfolded, considering you've never seen it. Yeah, it's like a lady from Bristol

on her first cold-claw flight. She doesn't know what she's doing. Yeah, he does the hosting sometimes, apparently. He mentions it on his Twitter occasionally. Who loves pub quizzes? Come to our pub quiz. That's right. Let's do it. But we won't be allowed to because James will be removed from the game for making bad jokes

that he doesn't even understand about Lord of the Rings. It's a hard pub quiz, so a lot of shadow facts. Shadow facts is the name of the horse, and fact sounds a bit like facts. See, that shows true knowledge. Yeah, weirdly though, Andy wouldn't be allowed in for a very different reason, which is that was just fucking weird. I would say Andy wouldn't be allowed in

because at the end, I think you have to throw a ring into a volcano, but Andy would have to get a seven-year-old German girl to do it for him. 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 any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website.

No such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. Do check them out. Also, we're back on the road, baby. We're going on tour in October. Nerd Immunity is the name of the show, and we're going to be hitting up over 20 venues across the UK and Ireland.

So check them out. See if we're coming to a town near you, and please come along. It's going to be great fun. Otherwise, we'll just be back here next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.