No Such Thing As A Fish - 395: No Such Thing As A Kryptonite Drill

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

Live from Nottingham, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss the lunar hammock, Titanic panic, Aussie officials and how to cook pizzles. 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 this week coming to you live from Nottingham! My name is Dan Shriver, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in 2015 paramedics in Australia stopped asking patients to name the Prime Minister as a test of mental capacity because the answer changes so often it's no

longer considered a reliable indicator. That's amazing. It's absolutely true isn't it? Australia is constantly trading its PM, in fact there's a Twitter account which is called atwhoispm where it gives basically half hourly updates going it's still Scott Morrison. So what you're saying is if you're in some kind of problem the paramedics come along you have to go I just need to go on Twitter really quick. They did say I think the reason, the particular paramedic who was interviewed and asked why

I read this, the reason that he said he stopped doing it was because he'd actually had a patient whom he'd asked who's the Prime Minister and they just said I don't know I haven't watched the news today. So very nice. That's a strong answer isn't it? I didn't really know how crazy Australia, I don't know anything about Australian politics before this and so just to clarify it there's this big thing of ousting your predecessor. So in 2010 Julia Gillard ousted Kevin Rudd and that was really exciting after only three

years but then in 2013 Julia Gillard was ousted, guess who, by Kevin Rudd then in 2015 Malcolm Turnbull ousted Tony Abbott then Turnbull stayed on and basically there are so many politicians there are so many PMs specifically in that short period. Yeah it was five PMs in five years if you count Rudd twice which you could because many people say he's sort of got two different personalities. What's amazing is none of us in this room really know anything about him but we all booed anyway. It could have been worse, it could be worse.

If you're in Nepal for instance and you get caught in an accident they, since they became a democracy in 1951 they've had 53 changes of government. Wow. That's a lot. Yeah, that stuff. Although if Australia kept up its won a year which it hasn't actually since 2015 but you know it would be beating Nepal. Who is the current Prime Minister?

So that's Scott Morrison now, it was Malcolm Turnbull so they've had six and seven years which is quite good, five and five years. So Scott Morrison is he the one who shit himself in McDonald's? Sorry? What? Not familiar with this? I'm not sure. Is he?

I think that's what he's most famous for isn't he? I don't know if that's what he's most famous for in Australia, the country where he's Prime Minister. I don't know, literally every time he goes on television he says, oh I'm going to be on ABC tonight and someone replies, tell us about the time you shit yourself in McDonald's. He's the Australian Paula Radcliffe, is that what I was saying? Well he is running a lot for, come on guys, top crowd tonight. Wow.

Aussie politics, it's just a bit more earthy and rude isn't it? Genuinely it is, it's quite, the stuff they say in parliament is also really rude so I looked up unparliamentary language from the Australian Parliament and there is a lot, there is a lot, especially if you include all the regional assemblies and things like that, a list of things, they call each other nitwit, knucklehead, muppet, these are a bit mild. My question is to the village idiot, that was one. And they all answered.

Well there's more, in 1994 one member of the Victoria House said to another one, what is the difference between you and a bucket of shit? And the speaker rightly said, that's unparliamentary language, and he said, I withdraw bucket. Wow. It's had a long history of it. Every Australian PM has an offensive nickname, the first Australian Prime Minister was called Toby Tosspot. Really nice.

They named that pretty much straight away, yeah. He was Edmund Barton and it was turn of the 20th century and Tosspot then was a term for someone who drank too much, and Toby was just what people called it, you toss a pot back. He could toss a pot back. Toss a pot. Well, QI, when I first joined QI, and I'm an Aussie, I should say, technically, and I went to... I wonder what village is missing there, idiot.

I am Aussie, my dad's Aussie and my grandmother's Aussie and I lived there for my whole high school years. And when I moved to England, I moved to Oxford where, I didn't go to university, but QI was set up there and there's a pub called the Turf Tavern and in the Turf Tavern on the wall, one of our Prime Ministers has an award, a Guinness World Record, Bob Hawke, for downing the quickest yard of ale that anyone has ever done. It was in 1954, it was two and a half pints he did in 11 seconds. It's since been beaten, but for the rest of his life, Bob Hawke, whenever he went to like

cricket matches, people would give him a big pint to be like, oh, this is like a 70 year old man. He's fucking down it. Such a champ. I think my favourite Australian Prime Minister, sorry, but was Tony Abbott, who was in opposition when I lived there and he's an entertaining man. So he's very right wing Tony Abbott. He's done some wacky shit, so every Australian knows this, but it is worth watching if you

haven't seen it. He went to visit an onion farm in Tasmania, an onion seller, a big onion selling company, and the cameras were on, and he was like, God, I won't do the accent, God, your produce is so great, ground an onion, skin on, and just bit straight into it. Just chowed right down, was asked afterwards what he was doing, he said, people eat raw onion all the time, it's fine, salads, whatever. The skin wasn't on, the skin was on, it's very clearly on. Wow.

And then he did it again. A couple of months later, someone sent him a promotional pack of onions. He bit down on one again. When footage was on earth of him eating a raw spring onion, the man's got a problem. All spring onions are eaten raw in salads, aren't they? Just on its own from the floppy end. I remember reading once that if you hold your nose and you bite an onion, then you won't be able to, it'll taste like an apple, and I tried that and it is not true.

Maybe that's what he was testing out. The first woman to be elected in Australia was someone called Edith Cowan and she won a seat in West Perth in 1921, but she had to go home whenever she needed the toilet because there was no female toilets. Wow. Orton McDonald's and shit herself, I suppose it's possible. Did she live nearby? Yeah, she lived around the corner.

But even so. I'm not so... She lived nearby, fine. There was one really cool thing in 2013, there was an election in Australia, as there were most years around then apparently, or Al Sting's anyway. The voting booths came with magnifying glasses because there were 50 parties on the ballot paper. Wow, wow.

There were so many parties that you had to be able to zoom in, so it was for, yeah. Wow. I know. Was that the election where... I think it was the lead up to that election where they postponed the prime ministerial debate so much like us in Australia. They have the incumbent or the two candidates who are going to be prime minister before an election go up in debates, various television debates.

And the last one is a massive deal and it's the first time ever they moved it an hour forward, I think, because MasterChef was on. Wow. Oh, it's big in Australia, yeah. It's good. Australia MasterChef is good. Yeah. That's pretty good.

And they are better than the British MasterChef people. Supposedly the worst prime minister that has ever been in Australia is Billy McMahon. He had a bald pointy head with big ears and one opponent said he looked like a Volkswagen with both doors open. He wasn't liked by even the people in his own cabinet. There was one guy who he worked with called Paul Hasluck who referred to him as that treacherous bastard. And the guy who was writing his potential autobiography said that he is a third-rate

politician and that he could become PM. It is a damning indictment on the country, hearth-truths, lies, cheaper tracks. What an unpleasant little turd. Another actually prime minister who's considered writing a book but apparently didn't get around to it is Malcolm Turnbull, who's the last prime minister but one, and he considered finishing off his mother's raunchy novel. Malcolm Turnbull had kind of a sad childhood. He was very close to his dad who tragically died in a plane crash when he was quite young

but his mother was this academic who'd run away with another man. And she went to America and while in America, so she was called something landsbury and she was a cousin of Angela Landsbury and while she was in America Angela Landsbury said to her, mate, you've got to stop writing this dry boring academic stuff and start writing some fun shit. Wait, so Angela, she's, she murdered she wrote? Do you know Angela Landsbury, right? Yeah, murdered she wrote and anyway, yeah, she wrote a few raunchy novels which sold

quite well and then she died halfway through writing a novel called Opium, exclamation mark. Sounds like a musical. It does, it does. Quite a sleepy musical. Well, I think our son might still be working on it so now he's out of office, maybe we'll get Opium finally. Opium Turnbull's podcast My Mum Wrote a Porno is going to be a stone cold hit, I think.

On the test that you can get from people, from paramedics or another one is like if you've been in a crash and they want to check if you've been drinking, right? There was a thing with Tiger Woods a few months ago, do you remember he was in a car crash and they wanted to check if he'd been drinking and so they said to him, okay, Tiger, what you need to do is you need to say the alphabet forwards, not backwards, you need to say the alphabet forwards and you're not allowed to sing it. So Tiger, do you know what you have to do? And he said, yes, I have to not sing the national anthem backwards.

Queen gracious, save, oh God. You know he's American. Yep, cool. All right, we need to move on. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is my fact. My fact this week is that three people were recently hospitalized after being hit by an iceberg at a Titanic Museum. So this is the Titanic Museum attraction which is in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee and they have

this giant ice wall inside of the attraction and it's 15 foot by 28 foot and it's sort of, it is actual real ice so visitors can actually touch it and it's grown using a sort of water filtration system and the whole thing just cracked and smashed down and it hurt people and they were hospitalized but I think they survived. They survived. And then you're saying the hearts will go on. But yeah, I think it's time we don't put any ice near things called Titanic, it feels like because you know, it happens a lot doesn't it?

It's not just, it's happened more than twice, famously the first time it happened, we've all heard of that one, 2008, Carnegie Science Center, there was a Titanic exhibit that was in Pittsburgh, they had to temporarily close due to flooding, so that stopped them. There was a Titanic musical which was in Southampton, which had to be stopped after the replica Titanic hit the iceberg and plastic fell off the wall, that was the actual iceberg, yeah. And everyone, all the audience thought, wow, that's an amazing effect but then the crew ran out going, stop the show!

I read and like, I haven't actually confirmed this but there was another Titanic musical incident where a burst pipe just exploded across the first three rows of the audience and everyone left angrily and one person went, wow, we truly experienced the sinking of the Titanic. You need to confirm that one. Nice one, you can really empathize with those figures from history. Well there was even in 1898 a Titan ship that hit an iceberg and sank, which was a fictional ship but a novel was written in 1898 by a guy called Morgan Robertson, it was called

Futility, starring a ship called Titan and it had been built in Britain, it was sailing to America, it was going too fast, hits an iceberg, not enough lifeboats, half the crew die. Yeah, gosh. 1898, although there are a few details that are slightly different, it also involves in the plot, the boat cuts another boat in half while plowing through to the iceberg and yeah, just cuts one in half, it's about this massive boat that's so huge it leaves other boats in its midst, sort of like a monster boat and then when it crashes the hero almost goes

down with the ship but thankfully he survives, I believe, ends up on the iceberg and manages to rescue the young child of the woman he fancies from a polar bear who's trying to eat him. Oh, okay. So some of it is also, yeah, that's close. So apparently the V&A Museum, they did a Titanic exhibit and apparently this book, Titan, was on the Titanic as part of the reading library, apparently. Just quickly on Titanic, so it was called the RMS Titanic, do you know what RMS stands

for? Royal Mail, no. Royal Mail steamer, okay, because it was a postal ship as well, there were 3,000 bags of post on board but the postal workers, when they found out that the ship was flooding, they tried moving 200 sacks of registered mail to the upper decks of the ship. They forced several stewards to help them saying, look, this is the registered stuff, this is important, they were told not to bother but they kept going. I always get confused about when a disaster is happening, if there's staff members working

at place, they're like dedicated to their job to the point of like, we've got to play the music till the ship goes down, we've got to bring the mail up, guys, if there's a fire here tonight, I'm fucking off straight away, right? I am not being like, get the audience out, no. You guys know about Clive Palmer's giant Titanic replica, right? Clive Palmer is an Australian billionaire, he's an Australian billionaire, he's an eccentric, he wants to make Titanic too and he's been promising it for ages and it will be a cruise ship by his company, the Blue Star Line and it will take the same route as Titanic, I

don't know why he thinks people would go on this, but it's completely recreated inside and he's been promising it for a long time and the project keeps having various issues. Anyway, it's been moved to Europe, the project was going to be based in Britain because of Brexit, I'm afraid, it's now based in France and yeah, well, if you want Titanic too, don't leave the EU. If only that was on the side of a bus. Unfortunately, it was painted on the side of an enormous ship which then sank. But the project director in Europe is the director of this whole Titanic project is

his nephew, who's called Clive Menzink. Wow, really? Yes, it's doomed. Some other stuff on other weird things that have happened in museums. This was in Denmark, I was reading about an artist called Jens Haarning and what they did was they commissioned him to do this work. They were going to give him 534,000 kroner and what he was going to do, he was going to put it in a huge sort of art installation and it would be a picture of something, they

didn't know what it was going to be and that was the average amount of money that a Danish person earns in a year. Anyway, so he went away and then he came back with a complete empty canvas and it was an artwork that he called Take the Money and Run. So good. Did they take that in the good human spirit which he hoped they would? The guy who runs a museum said he stirred up my curatorial staff and he also stirred me up a bit but I also had a laugh because it was really humoristic but then he did say

that he needs to pay the money back. I really like incidents of museums, you're just making flubs and blunders and accidentally ruining exhibits and things like that. The National History Museum, they released a list of their incidents in 2009. One of them, slightly shortly before that, was there were these things called conodonts which are their extinct eel-like creatures, okay? They had 22 of them and they were accidentally knocked over and then hoovered up. Did they retrieve them from the back?

No, I don't think so. Why? I think they were ruined in the process of being hoovered up. They're just a bit fluffy. There was an art gallery that had an exhibition, I can't remember what it was, but it was an exhibition that showed lots of remnants from a party, kind of cigarette butts and empty beer bottles and stuff strewn around and the cleaner cleaned it all up in the morning. Yes, that happens a bunch.

Yeah, like Damien Hirst had one where the garbage was carried. There was one where there was a garbage bag and they took it away and they apologized and he was like, that's fine, he just gave another garbage bag. Yeah, I'm sure I must have said it on here before, but the time I went to an art gallery in Barcelona and there was someone collapsed in the corner and I ran to the front and said, oh, does someone collapse in the corner of that room? And they went, no sir, that is part of the exhibit. And it was just a doll and I said, oh, that must happen all the time.

And he went, nope. It happens so much, but it does happen with specific works of art, like either someone collapsed or just something that is designed to look like rubbish. So there was a, in 2011 there was an artwork which featured a bathtub with a sort of thick scummy line around the inside and that was scrubbed by an overzealous member of cleaning staff. Did she not wonder why there was a bath in the middle of the gallery? Exactly, I think that's a fair cop actually. But there's an article called Joseph Buys, B-E-U-Y-S, Buys, who had not Buys.

What a fun... Oh, I mean, never stop saying that name. It's all about the Buys. He had an artwork which was a grease stain and that was unsurprisingly scrubbed. And it wasn't the first time it had happened to him. He also had a baby bathtub in 1973 on display which was wrapped in gauze and bandages. So baby bathtub wrapped up. Anyway, two cleaners just took it to wash the dishes in because they thought this cannot

possibly be a work of art. Oh, really? Yeah. I feel like all the stories involved cleaners fucking stuff up and we need to maybe... A lot of blame on the cleaners, a lot of blame on the cleaners. Yeah, we need to have a conversation with the cleaners of museums saying, you see all the random fucking shit here? It's meant to be here.

It's easier if you're at the National Portrait Gallery, isn't it? It's much, much easier to tell what's art and what isn't at the National Portrait Gallery. That's true. Because it's a portrait. It's not like you're not going to see a picture of someone's face and go, I'm just going to rub that off. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Just got to get rid of Rembrandt's mole. Hang on. Macron, the president of France, he did a report in 2018 and he found that 90 to 95% of sub-Saharan Africa's cultural heritage was held in museums outside of Africa. Okay, so pretty much all of it's been taken out of Africa. And so there's a guy called Mwazulu Diabanza who is an artist and he's decided he's just going to go to museums and steal it back. Cool.

And so he basically goes around... So he goes around all these museums in France and he'll just kind of walk in and see, oh, there's an ivory spear there that was from Congo and he'll just go in and walk out and walk straight out with it. Occasionally, he did want to steal a sculpture that was actually from Indonesia. Okay. It was a bit of a mistake. But obviously he's been arrested from time to time.

But this lawyer said, I don't know of any thief who turns up to a museum and says, film me. And then having been filmed stealing the article puts it back. So he doesn't put it back afterwards. I thought he was like a reverse Indiana Jones, you know? That doesn't belong in a museum. That's the line from the third film. Doesn't matter. And then what?

Was he chasing after a massive ball? He... That's right. He actually... He puts his hat into a room just as there's a wall about to crush it. Yeah. It's very exciting. Just on injuries in museums, which this is about,

there's a man who's suing Melbourne Science Works, Science Museum in Melbourne, for an exhibit they have where they have a virtual sprinter, Kathy Freeman, an Olympic medal-winning sprinter, and they encourage you to race against her on a 10-metre track. Okay. And what they have done is they've put the 10-metre track immediately in front of a wall, a quite solid wall. And he's suing them because he's broken two vertebra,

another bone and a rib, and lost the feeling in his arms and hand because he ran headlong into a wall. Oh, my God. There's a French museum that was going to hold an exhibition about Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, but they were told by the Chinese government that they could only have the stuff if they didn't mention the words empire, Mongol, Genghis, or Khan. All right, we need to move on to our next fact of the show,

and that is fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that there are nine hammocks on the moon. Who's using them? Also, like, no trees. Yes. Yes. What a good point. There are nine tragically unopened hammocks on the moon.

This is from a book called An Answer for Everything. One of the pages is about everything there is on the moon. One of the things is loads and loads of hammocks because Apollo 11, the first man landing on the moon, they slept really badly, they slept appallingly, and they just got a terrible night's sleep when they were there. So, yeah, they were in the lander and they didn't really think of that, and it's so crowded, so Buzz Aldrin, I think, was basically laying on the floor

as if he was just, you know, like you would if you were drunk and you got home and couldn't find the bed. That was him, and they thought we need to sort that. Yeah, absolutely. So, when Apollo 12 to 17 flew with more man missions to the moon, they had these specially designed lunar hammocks that would go in the lander, and when you come back, you can't bring all your stuff with you, so they just left the hammocks behind.

And so, yeah, and it's amazing to think about it because they would land on the moon and then they would set their hammocks up in a sort of X shape, so one lower and one above, and they would just lay in it and just... And this is not on the moon, we should say, this is inside the lander, right? Inside the lander on the moon, though. That is how they slept, like they were on some sort of desert island, but the problem was, and the problem with for a lot of these missions,

was the adrenaline is so great, you're on the fucking moon, you're not going to sleep, right? And when Armstrong and Aldrin landed, they were scheduled to have a nap. Yeah. And the mission control said, right, you're on the moon, off to bed you go, and they said, absolutely not, we would like to go on to the moon now, please. You know how, like, at night time, the moon comes out? If you're on the moon, does it always kind of feel like night time or...?

Good question. Do you think you'd just be really sleepy the whole time? I think I would, yeah, just naturally. Apollo 14, unfortunately, where they landed with Apollo 14, was on a seven degree slant, so the lander was just slightly tipping, which freaked the shit out of the astronauts inside, so they couldn't get to sleep, because any time they heard a noise, they thought we're about to tip over,

and you can read their actual transcripts of what they were chatting about, so one transcript goes, and this is while they were trying to sleep, I think, they go, Ed, did you hear that? He goes, hell yes, I heard that. What the hell was that? I don't know. Ed? What?

Why the hell are we whispering? But they couldn't go to sleep, they were so worried about, so that didn't happen, and then slowly Apollo 15 and 16 got better and better. I think, mainly, they had to make it better for Apollo 15, because that was the first time they'd stayed on the moon any length of time that required sleep. They were there for three nights, and they had to do proper stuff on the moon, like collect loads of samples, and drive. You can't drive when you're sleep deprived.

It was the first time they had a car on the moon, and so they got proper hammocks, and I think they solved it by basically letting them take their space suits off, right? It was the first time that they'd allowed them to go back into the lunar lander and actually strip down so that you can adopt a comfortable position. And I suppose the reason that the hammocks are on the moon is because you need to get rid of all your stuff when you're going to take off again, because it needs to be as light as possible, right? So I was speaking to this morning to someone called Beth O'Leary,

who pretty much invented something called space archaeology. She's a scientist, and she said that basically when Apollo 11 came down at least, for about eight minutes, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong stood on the corner of their lunar module and just threw anything out that they didn't need. They just threw it all out. We don't need this. We don't need that. We don't need the other. That's a steering wheel, Buzz. I'll get it. I'm sorry. In archaeology, apparently, that is called a toss zone. It's because they fill the thing with rocks, right?

Yes. It's so weird going, dumping all the useful stuff and just filling it up with rocks for the way back. They did leave some things which now NASA would like to look at, but NASA would only like to look at them because they left them there, if you see what I mean. So bags of poo, basically. Bags of poo, urine and vomit. There are 96 bags of all of this stuff on the surface of the moon still today, and NASA is fascinated to know what's happened biologically with them and what has lasted and what hasn't and what they could tell from it.

So if they go back to the moon, if there's another crewed mission to the moon coming up soon, it is possible that one of their jobs will be finding bags of poo, just doing a poop-a-scoop on the moon. The truth is that it's not just that. It's everything that they left there. They want it to be like kept as it is, right? Because let's say Elon Musk goes up there for a party or something. What they don't want is him kind of knocking over all the flags and all the poo and all the hammocks and stuff. They want it all to be as it is.

And so this year, actually, the 31st of December last year, the US enacted the One Small Step to Protect Human Heritage and Space Act, which made it illegal to touch anything on the moon that the humans have left there. And it was really, really controversial because by law, no one owns the moon, no one owns any of the land on there, but America owns the objects that are on the land. And so it was really dodgy. The Soviets, sorry, the Russians, really didn't want. I think you've made your allegiances very clear there, James. But they didn't really want the Americans to have this kind of law saying no one can touch this area,

because they're like, well, it doesn't belong to you. Who are you to say who touched it and who doesn't touch it? And even more than that, if you look at the footprints of Neil Armstrong, for instance, theoretically, America owns the footprints, but they don't own any of the dust which creates the footprint. They're at the space directly above that dust. Yeah, they own the concept of the footprint, but not what makes it. The cleaners are going to have an absolute nightmare when they turn up to the moon. Which bit of this is the party and which bit is debris preserved? It's amazing that, I hadn't thought of that, that in theory, Neil Armstrong's one small step for man,

that one small step is still there, right? Possibly, yeah. Possibly, because it was right at the bottom of the ladder, so Buzz might have landed and just smudged it out immediately, pissed off. Very likely Buzz was here, right next to it. But like the last thing that was left by an astronaut on the moon wasn't a physical object, but it was the last astronaut who was there who wrote, like you would in the sand at a beach, wrote the letters T-D-C, and that was the initials of his daughter, and that was Eugene Cernan, the last person to stand on the moon.

And in theory, unless that bit of the moon is hit by space rocks and so on, that's going to be there for at least 50,000 years. Well, because there's not the same kind of atmosphere on the moon to mess it up. So in theory, Neil's footprint, if Buzz managed to sort of like do a wide berth with his landing, is still there, which is amazing. There is 100 metric tons of human material on the moon, man-made, which if you can imagine there being a massive mirror in front of a theatre somewhere in the, you know, midlands of England, it would be approximately 10 times the weight of that thing. That's going to mean a lot to all the listeners at home.

It's also going to be confusing when James boosts that laugh in the edit. Here's one thing you can get if you go to the moon. The secret to David Copperfield's magic tricks. No! Yes, they are on the moon now. There was this private mission, there was a crash on the moon in 2019, which I can't believe we didn't, more wasn't made of it, there was a private spacecraft called Beresheet, and it had a disk on it.

It had a sort of human library which had Wikipedia, had thousands of books, and one of the other things on it was the technical illustrations and diagrams for David Copperfield's magic tricks. It's not certain that it survived, but it wasn't just a DVD, it was a 25-layer sandwich of metal and resin. It was really well protected, and so it is possible it is surviving there. And Copperfield said he was so inspired by the idea of the mission that he wanted to give away secrets. I mean, when aliens get there and find that, they're not going to have the saw or the box to put the women in. Or even the woman to put in the box. Another thing on the moon, a bunch of flags, as we know, very controversial at the time,

whether to erect an American flag on the moon. So when Apollo 11 first went there, there was this big debate in the US because it was that post-colonial era when everyone was saying, that was really bad, where we stamped our flags in countries that weren't ours and claimed that they were. Let's not do that again. And so they said, okay, we probably shouldn't put an American flag there because it's like we're claiming it. And then there was a suggestion, which they seriously considered and almost did, to instead bring up a miniature flag for every country on Earth for them to put into the soil at once.

A little village. It's so sad they didn't have 160 tiny flags. I think it was a relief because it sounded like a real oursake hammering the one flag in. What do you do when, for instance, South Sudan? The South Sudan problem. You've got to go back. Every time there's a new country, you have to go back. Please don't divide into two countries.

It's going to be so expensive for NASA. There already is. Not a model village, but a model something on the moon. There's a model. It's a miniature art gallery, which is very exciting. Oh, yeah. It's called the Moon Museum and an artist called Forrest Myers commissioned artworks from six different artists to draw tiny, tiny drawings.

And the engineer at NASA, he gave it to, says that he stuck it onto the leg of the lunar module. So it's there. There's no confirmation it's there, but it's got Andy Warhol's signature. So why do you think he might be lying? No one has properly confirmed it. Yes, we saw that. And obviously the lunar module is still there. So we don't know if there's a tiny... Wasn't Andy Warhol's signature just a cock and balls?

It looks a lot like a cock and balls, yes. But there's also a sketch of Mickey Mouse on that tile. Mickey Mouse looked like a cock and balls. Flip Andy Warhol's signature upside down and you've got Mickey. I think that says more about you, James, than it does... It says a lot about my childhood, doesn't it? Yeah, so there's no final confirmation that there is a tiny art gallery on the moon, but wouldn't it be nice? Actually, speaking of cocks and balls in space, there was a lot of worry when astronauts first went up.

Well, not a worry, but they were interested whether you could have sex up there or not. Because people thought that, you know, if you have an erection, the gravity might be needed to get the blood down there. But luckily there was a guy called Michael Malaine who was interviewed by Men's Health magazine in 2014. And he said that sometimes he had a boner that I could have drilled through kryptonite. So that's... Oh, wow! That's put that to bed. What an image!

There's some kryptonite, none of our drills are working. Can we get that guy with his rock hard boner and drill him? Imagine that guy's day every day. How was work, honey? Yep, managed to break through the unbreakable rocks with my dick. It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that deer penises are often sold with the pelvis attached, so the buyer knows they're not being ripped off with a seal's penis. If I had a quid for every seal penis I've sent back to the shop, outraged.

Well, the problem was you broke the seal, didn't you? I don't think it was me who broke the seal, if I'm receiving his penis through the post. So this was an article on the online magazine Stuff.NZ, and it was about New Zealand's Pizzle Market. New Zealand sells deer penises mostly to China and to Hong Kong because they're used in traditional Chinese medicine as a sexual vigor enhancer. And this was basically just telling us how well they're doing. In the last year or so, they've sold a $5.2 million worth of pizzle.

That's 1,700 tons of deer pizzles. So if you can imagine a large sort of metal mirror that might be outside of theatre in the Midlands, it's about 170 of those, that's how much it was. I think that since 1994, like it's the total. But it's a lot, it's a lot of pizzle. I didn't know anything about pizzle before. I didn't know that was a word. I only knew it because I studied English and there's a line in Shakespeare where someone says,

you bull's pizzle, that's a great insult. I only knew it because of Snoop Dogg going shizzle-dizzle, man. I think if Snoop Dogg asked you to snizzle his pizzle, you might want to get out of that party. I regret that evening. A lot closer then, yeah. But cattle pizzle is sort of a dog treat. I didn't know this.

I think that's the only reason I knew it. We've all got different origin stories for pizzle. Yeah, you get bull's pizzle for dogs. Right. They love it. Well, clearly they do, but it's very distressing. I agree with Andy. I've seen those, but does it say on the packet, genuine penis?

No, I don't think. I don't think it says. That's what I mean. I think in the ingredients somewhere, it makes clear that it is the pizzle of a bull. I don't know if it has some genuine penis down to the front, like a warning sign. I think that should be said on things I'm buying. We'll all club together then and we'll get you a t-shirt that says it. Do you know?

Took a while for me to get there. But the prep is really, it's upsetting, isn't it? If you're the deer. If you're the deer or the whatever. So you take it, you clean it, you wash it, you hang it, you stretch it, then you cook it for several days. This is the worst Daft Punk song I've ever heard. Stretch it, hang it, clean it, cut it.

It's really upsetting. It is, and actually the farmers tend to not get paid for it. If you're a deer farmer, you don't get extra money for your pizzle. The money goes to the people who kind of cut it up, the butchers and stuff like that and then they get it as an extra bit of money. And there was a guy who was in charge of Deer Industry New Zealand and he said that it can't be justified that you can pay them extra for it until farmers have a way of producing animals with attributes like larger tails or pizzles.

So until you can find the way of making a deer with an absolutely enormous penis, you're not going to get paid extra for it. Okay, because the butchers have to do a lot of work basically. Because there is a big difference in value with size, isn't there? So they're sold in different sizes. You've got the under 10 inch, lame, 10 to 12 inch. 10 to 12 inches, okay, 12 to 14 and then over 14 inches is where it's really at if you want to have all your virility problems solved according to Chinese medicine.

And somewhere up to 20 inches long, which I think you're pretty much immortal once you've eaten that. Some are 36. That's even longer than 20. Well, that's after they've been stretched. That's after the stretching process is over. We should say, maybe you did say that the reason the deer is so... Well, the reason it's upsetting when you get a seal instead of a deer is because the deer is so valuable, right?

A seal penis is nothing compared to a deer. And in fact, there are often others being substituted for deer penises. Like I think there's a big problem with sheep's penis and testicles, Pizzle, so Pizzle is sort of the two together. Sheep's Pizzle being sold, counterfeiting, pretending to be deer Pizzle. And it's because sheep have much bigger testicles and so they get a lot more bang for their bark. Yeah, you can bulk it out. It's not a bark, guys.

Oh, very nice. I can't, in my head right now, I can't picture a seal's penis. No, no, you're right. So, like, I can picture a bull and a sheep, but a seal, if we're talking, do they have testicles as well? I guess they are inside. They're inside. I think so, yeah.

Weird thing that just happened, I just pictured seal's penis, and that's the singer, and... You're in public, Dan. You don't need to say everything that comes into your head. I couldn't see seals, but then I thought, oh, seal, he must have one, and... My God, he does. I think they have, like, a genital slit, which then opens up and the penis comes out. Seal, seal.

The singer, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you guys heard of Fuchsia Dunlop? She is an English writer and cook, and she was the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute in Chengdu. And she has written one of the greatest articles I have ever read online about cooking Pizzles. She used some traditional Chinese recipes to do this. She made it into kind of a stew.

She said the raw testicle penises in particular were a shocking sight, because they were too big to fit in the fridge. So she kept them outside on the side. The silent presence, huge, furry, and outrageous, cast a strange atmosphere over the apartment that night. And she goes on and goes on about how she kind of cooked these things. And she said that, at one stage, she says, the next step was the bleaching at which the Pizzles are abruptly stiffened.

One of them lunged out of the saucepan when we weren't looking. Lunged. I could go on and on, but it is the greatest article. I'll put it on my Twitter, it's unbelievably good. She's amazing if you've done that. I've got her cookbook. She's the woman who brought Chinese cooking to the West, really. Really?

With the Chinese cooking and cooking recipes, yes. You guys may have found this in the course of your research, but another use-for-pizzle if you're not feeding it to a dog, or whatever it may be, or using it in traditional Chinese medicine, is that it makes a good walking stick. For a very small person. A three-foot walking stick? That's a reasonable height.

It's after it's been stretched. That's a decent size, I promise. And basically, you can get these on... I can't believe I'm having to defend a 36-inch walking stick. Anyway, you can get them on eBay. There are some on eBay, which are antique, and there is also a website, fashionablecanes.com, which has a lengthy section of prose about...

The legendary bull penis cane is the most unique of all walking canes, and it's sort of... There's a rod down the middle, and then it's stretched over this, this genuine pizzle being used, and it goes on and on and on about, you know, using one of these canes will shock anyone when you tell them what it is, and it's sure to create an interesting conversation. It lists lots of people who've used canes in the past,

Johnny Depp, Madonna, Brad Pitt. None of them had penis canes, though. And this website is amazing. It says, even if a cow penis cane is not your style, it can make the perfect gift for that hard-to-buy person on your list. It makes the perfect over-the-hill or retirement gift. If I retire and you guys give me a stretched bull's penis walking stick, I won't take it well.

Come on, you'll be absolutely delightsed. You'd love it. It's not very useful on a cold day when you go for a walk. This was a traditional, sort of, is a traditional cure for impotence, I suppose, right? That's largely what you'll grind up, some bull's pizzle, or some deer pizzle. You'll drink it. You'll go on for years.

And I was just looking at some other... The cryptonite won't know what hit it. The planet of Krypton was split in two. So if the pizzle didn't work, quite an important part of the Protestant Reformation, according to my reading, which was biased towards the word pizzle, fine, was this other ritual that you would do to solve impotence. So this is around 15th century, 16th century.

It was to urinate through your wife's wedding ring and... From what distance? I think she's wearing it at the time. But this was cited as one of the reasons that Calvin wanted to do away with the exchange of wedding rings, because he was, you know, Calvin's great Protestant leader. He was worried that this superstition was kind of taking over the wedding ring superstition. Men were just sort of pissing through women's wedding rings all the time. And it said, if that didn't work and you still couldn't get it up,

then you had to go and urinate through the keyhole of the church that you got married in. Wow. That's why that TV show, Through the Keyhole, used to be about... Who pissed in a house like this? Was that done, do you think? I believe it was done. Well, the wedding ring thing was done enough for Calvin to want to ban it, so I reckon the keyhole thing was done enough for priests to be pissed off,

and those cleaners to be very confused. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Wow. Another thing for the cleaners in the churches, is this meant to be here this year? Viagra. Does anyone need any? Because I have a bunch on me. No, Viagra was invented and patented by Pfizer.

Pfizer, who have just stepped up to help try and save the world with the vaccine. I've been injected with Pfizer myself. You sound so surprised. It's not like they were a little like Blackberry selling startup. They were just one of the world's biggest medication manufacturers for the last four years. It was never that you think you were going to get a COVID vaccine and you accidentally get a Viagra vaccine. Imagine that.

We're all walking out with our arm in the air. Like some Nazi rally. Sorry, there's been a mix-up with our famous vaccine. There's a thing called low-intensity shockwave therapy, which this is a proven thing that helps you if you have impotence problems. The physician will wave a wand over your penis, and the wand makes these tiny shockwaves. What it sounds like is little clicks.

And what that will do, apparently... Apparently it sounds a bit like a Newton's cradle. You know, there's that tie. And it stimulates the blood vessels, and it helps you to be unimpetent. Free willy. Thank you. Okay, that is 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 all 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. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. Or you can go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there, as well as the link to all the upcoming tour dates as part of our Nerd Immunity 2021 tour. Thank you so much, Nottingham. We had an amazing time. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You're welcome.