No Such Thing As A Fish - 455: No Such Thing As A Suspicious Duffel Bag

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss chimps, caterpillars, darts and debris. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at nosuchthingasafish.com/apple or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things as a Fish. I have three things to share with you very, very quickly before we start this week's show and I will give them to you in reverse order of how much you embrace capitalism. So first of all, if you go to NoSuchSthingsAsAfish.com you will find that we have merch. We have a whole new range of merchandise. There is a tour book which was originally only available on tour. It's got loads of stuff about the history of fish made lovingly by Alex Bell. There are pretty much the nerdiest t-shirts you've ever seen and there are pin badges.

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always be free is coming up right after I say those magic words on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of NoSuchSthingAsAfish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covern Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and Anna Tyshinski. And once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the 1986 ocean search to recover debris from the Challenger disaster also turned up 25 kilograms of cocaine. The value of which was enough to cover the 13 million dollar cost of the entire search operation. Wow, what a shame. Well, the fact that they could have gotten that money and it would have paid for the whole thing but obviously you can't just go and sell your cocaine.

Which is weird, isn't it? You should be able to sell your cocaine. There should be, what, like a government buyback program for cocaine because in the end they just burnt it, right? So you could argue that this whole thing cost about 26 billion. So what this was is obviously the very tragic Challenger disaster. NASA sent a spaceship up into space, 73 seconds into its launch it explodes. That was January 1986.

They then start the rescue mission to try and salvage any of the bits of the ship that they could find. The bit where it exploded over was just over Florida. So the ocean patch that it landed in is a very garbage-y patched bit of ocean. So to find it was a very hard process because they were using sonar and when you use the sonar you're picking up on everything literally from garbage all the way through to shipwrecks and so on. So along the way they found the things they trawled up included marine batteries, trash

cans, paint cans, there was half a torpedo, a refrigerator. It's like everything but the kitchen sink, wasn't it? Well it was literally not because they found a kitchen sink as well. Was this just a clever way of getting someone to clear up the oceans without telling them they're clearing out the oceans? Like when you kind of put a pee on a bit of, how do you trick children to eat healthy food? You know, you put a pee on a bit of chocolate or something. You put a pee on a bit of chocolate, that's it.

Don't pee on a bit of chocolate, that's a different thing. They did find a lot of cocaine in that area, not just the Challenger search rescue mission. They found five identical duffel bags, all of which had cocaine in over about a six-month period. A chemical duffel bag? Yeah, so the NASA people, they found the fifth one but there had been four previous duffel bags all full of cocaine that had been found in the area. It's quite a good way to hide cocaine I think in a duffel bag because I don't think people

look in a duffel bag. Do you think? I've never said duffel bag that's many times in a short space of time, but I think of duffel bags as being something quite innocuous, something quite as you take to school, you have a duffel bag. Yeah, but I think if you watch, like, certainly British gangster movies, like the Guy Ritchie kind of movies, you can imagine them opening up a duffel bag. It's always in a duffel bag.

I feel like that's your classic cocaine character. What's a duffel? What is duffel? Isn't it like a shawl? Duffel's a town in Belgium. Is it? Yeah, yeah. I think it's a shoulder bag, yeah.

Oh, a shoulder bag. I associate it with crime, definitely. But what are you thinking of? I think of duffel as a light blue cloth. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well. Oh, OK, OK. Right. Well, yeah.

But also, I would argue that duffel bag doesn't get an exemption from when you walk into, say, a building and they have security checks not to be opened. They normally wave you through it. Excuse me, sir. Is that a duffel bag? What, from the Belgian town? Yeah, come on through. Yeah, that's fine.

With these five identical duffel bags full of cocaine, four of them, they managed to get the cocaine and they managed to destroy it. Can you guess what happened to the fifth amount of cocaine? So there's another duffel bag full of cocaine which they never destroyed. Went into a museum? The cocaine museum, yeah. Very good glass cases on those exhibits. The audio guide.

Yes, you're going through the cocaine museum now. If you look on your left hand side, there's a really good exhibit. It went missing. It was put into a sixth duffel bag and smuggled out that way. No, it was found by a party boat just off the coast of Florida and they found this massive bag of cocaine and thought, they're not going to believe us if we take this back. So they emptied all of the cocaine back into the sea. Very clever.

We thought you were going to say, obviously. They took it all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 25 kilos. That's a pie. What happened to the duffel bags? Do we know? Well, I don't know.

Often what would happen is they would sell them on, wouldn't they? The police or the Coast Guard would. If they find stuff and it's not illegal, they have like auctions and stuff. So there might have been. If you'd have seen a lot of four identical duffel bags. And if you got your head right in one and really sniffed away at the lining, you could definitely get a hit. I'd imagine.

Definitely. Do you think? It's normally wrapped up, isn't it cocaine? I'm not an expert on drugs. I don't think you put it in the bag loose. No, that's fair. That is fair. Can I just quickly ask about the duffel bags?

Do we know if it was part of a shipwrecked or? We don't know where they came from. These duffel bags, presumably some kind of nefarious activity. Yeah. But we're not. No, they were. That's kind of the mystery is where they came from. Right.

What a great ad for duffel bags, though. They're so resilient. This podcast. Yeah. We can just find them floating in the ocean. They might have survived the plane crash or a sunken ship. We don't know what kind of state the cocaine was in. It might have been unsnortable.

It could have been drenched. You know, when you eat some crab meat sometimes, and there's a tiny little bit of crab shell in, do you reckon it's the same with snot and cocaine? You're like, oh, there's a bit of shell in this. Yeah, I think it is. Duffel bags. I was looking up pharmaceutical things found on shipwrecks.

And I think I found maybe the oldest example of this being found. So this was discovered in 1990, not from 1990. These archaeologists found an ancient Greek shipwreck and there were pills on board that they were able to retrieve. Imagine that. Wow. I know. They were in a duffel bag that had been, obviously they weren't.

But then the scientists were able to analyse them and we know what people were taking as medicine because we literally have surviving medicine from ancient Greece. So you have what they are? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lots of different ingredients which were all sort of faintly vegetable or herbal. So celery, carrot, radish, wild onion, oak, cabbage, a few other things. Oh yeah, okay.

And they were kind of, I think we've been able to tie them to recipes or medical manuals from the time that said, oh, this is good for lots of things. And these are kind of cure-all pills basically. Lots of different ailments. That's incredible. Imagine that. Wow. It's basically a vitamin pill, right?

Pretty much. I've given them to Crabtree and Evelyn. Crabtree and Evelyn. Crabtree and Evelyn is that shop that sells quite expensive herbal stuff which I'm sure is very useful for a lot of people. Sure. Do you guys don't know Crabtree and Evelyn? I'm afraid it hasn't hit Bolton, I don't think.

I mean, there's one about 10 yards from our office. Is there? Yeah, literally 10 yards from the office. Oh, is that not Holland and Barrett? That's what I'm thinking of Holland and Barrett. Crabtree and Evelyn. If you know who Crabtree and Evelyn are, then please write in. I think maybe Crabtree and Evelyn is another version of Holland and Barrett.

Like some knock-off black market version of Holland and Barrett. I don't know. I feel like it sounds like two elderly detectives from a Richard Osman novel, doesn't it? I really thought you guys looked like the idiots in that. Wow. Yeah, we weak herbal cures. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So lots of shipwrecks that exist at the moment are being stolen.

There's a thriving market in shipwreck theft, which I had never heard of before reading about this. So it's Matt. 42nd World Warships that were sunk have already been partly or totally just removed from the ocean. And it's because they're incredibly valuable. Can you guess why? Yes. Okay, great.

Let me tell you why. I read the article. So they contain something which we need today. Like Euclid stuff, like uranium. Oh, you're so close. They're made of something that we need today. So they're made of iPhones. iPhones.

Very forward thinking. No, they're made of steel, lots of them, but they're made of steel that was cast before the year 1945 when nuclear testing started. They're made of something called low background steel. And that's incredibly valuable. Scientists use it, don't they? Scientists need loads of it for medical equipment,

Geiger counters, space sensors, and all steel that you make these days because it uses atmospheric air and the production is slightly radioactive. So this stuff is really valuable. And also low radiation lead is used. And a few years ago, they used a 2,000 year old shipwreck. The Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics used it. They cut it up to make a neutrino detector.

And there's a bit of a hoohar about it at the time because it's sort of controversial. But it's worth 20 times as much as normal lead, low background lead. But there is one bit of good news, which is that this steel is all steel today is radioactive. It's getting less radioactive because we're not doing as many nuclear tests anymore.

Well, at least there's no danger of nuclear war in the next year or so. At the moment, time of recording, background radiation is decreasing. I've just thought, if you are a supervillain who just got a load of this iron, it's in your best interest to kind of start another nuclear war, isn't it? Because you want the value to increase. That's a terrible, that's a James Bond plot. It's a classic James Bond very convoluted way of making money as opposed to trading. I love it.

I mean, it's hard getting stuff off ships. It's hard getting ships up like the salvage, the technology of salvage is so cool. I was reading about when they salvaged the Costa Concordia, a member that sunk in the med in 2012. And they have armbands basically to get them back up to the surface. It's too late for armbands. Kind of made of steel, probably stolen from some other sunken ship.

They're called Sponsons. And they are these projections that they attach to the side of the ship. So you've got a ship on the floor of the ocean. It's on its side. First of all, you'll fill one Sponson with water and the other with air. And so that will tip the ship upright as the air one lifts in the water. But the water one is weighed down. And then you'll get rid of the water that's in the heavier one. So they've both got air in them.

And then that just floats it up to the surface like a pair of armbands. It is quite cool. And I think they did that to Costa Concordia, I think. Why did they do it to Costa... Why didn't they just leave it? These things with the really expensive iron, I see why you would do that, or if you had a galley with loads of gold coins. It feels like Costa Concordia would just have a pool table. I think it was on its... Wasn't it poking out of the water?

Yeah, it wasn't quite fully in. I think it wasn't fully submerged. Probably blocking other traffic. And also useful for scrapers, I guess. And also just untidy. But in those cases where you had court cases and so on, I think it's part of the working out, the insurance and all that sort of stuff, isn't it? Did it definitely hit in the way it did?

Let's look and see whether... You have to look into that kind of stuff. I suppose that's what they were doing with Challenger, wasn't it? A lot of it. It was like an investigation as much as trying to salvage anything. Mentioning Challenger again very quickly. Big Bird was meant to be on Challenger. It was a very last-minute thing that... Well, it wasn't super last-minute.

It was... Pause. 3, 2, wait. 3, ah, ah, ah, ah. 2, ah, ah, ah, ah. Yeah, the actor was asked to go in and be part of the mission. I think his name was Carol Spinney. And he was all going to go ahead,

but then they realized that the Big Bird costume was way too big to get in there. There's a very sad account, actually, of them at Sesame Street watching the Challenger go up and Carol Spinney going, oh, I was meant to be on that and then the explosion and the sort of realisation. Wow. Yeah, really, really horrible. Something else that washes up that we've never mentioned on this show is feet. Human feet.

And human feet. Yeah, I was just looking at weird stuff found in the ocean. Oh, yeah. And I found out why. So do you remember this mystery it started about? Do we know why? We can speculate reliably. So they kept finding, like, was it just left feet or something?

No, it wasn't. I think it was basically feet overall. There was a while when a few left ones were found. And there was shod feet, weren't they? Yeah. There was shod feet. Yes. Shod feet.

Wearing a shoe. Usually used to refer to horses, but in Andy's case, apparently, to refer to the people. And where was this? Was this globally? They were rocking up on shorelines? No, this was the old thing. It was specifically in Canada or Vancouver Island

in a place called the Salish Sea. So it's just like near the border with the US. And from 2007, over the course of 12 years, 15 different feet within shoes washed up. And the shoes were all sneakers except one shoe, which was a walking boot. That sounds irrelevant, but it's not. Oh.

And everyone was, there were lots of theories, obviously, about who had been assassinated and had their feet chopped off. So this woman, Gail Anderson, who studies things like this, how things decompose, sank a bunch of dead pigs into the Salish Sea to see how they decompose. Were they shod? They actually were not shod. Unshod, yeah.

Because you can't fit a sneaker on a pig, I think. As the old saying goes. They've got trotters, though, which have a different, I imagine, float profile. Yeah, I think they do. In an ideal world, she would have sunk a human body. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there are issues around that.

I would definitely give my consent for a weird experiment like that. I know me too. If there was a use for an... I would say, orally, you just have. Oh, yeah. Yeah, if there's any mad scientist listening. Whoever gets me first gets her music for a... Is that legally possible?

I'm sure. Wow, okay, great. There should definitely be a thing you can check, donate my body to weird science. You can donate your body to science, but I need it to be... Specifically, yeah. Basically, no such thing as a fish-worthy science. Anyway, this...

Oh, yeah, trotters. Basically, the conclusion was that they get eaten by crustaceans pretty quickly, but in your ankles, you've got basically soft tissue, like tendons, joints, ligaments, stuff like that. So they can eat through all of that. And because there's a trend in this area over the last 20 years for trainers, which have air bubbles in them...

Like Nike heirs and stuff. Nike heirs, they pop up to the surface and bob along to a beach. The feet are remaining, the feet haven't been eaten. No, because there's... I think they're probably skeleton feet inside the suit at this point. I suppose, yeah, it's like you kind of eat the ankle and then you kind of turn around to start eating the foot,

but it's already floating away kind of thing. It's kind of amazing that crabs and lobsters also find it hard to get to the difficult bits of humans. They should have a special human fork. Wow. Oh, I'm not ordering the human. No, I can't, no. I've just got a new shirt.

OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that chimps will help to break you out of prison, but only if they like you. So is it a good idea to befriend some chimps? Before the bank job. Before the bank job. Go straight from the sanctuary to... I would say it depends if the prison you're aimed for

is staffed by chimps, which very few are. Very few, yeah. So I don't know how many practical benefits this is going to have for you, but this, I think I originally read this a while ago in a book called Mental Leaps by Keith Olioke, which is really good, but it's about this specific chimp called Sarah on whom lots of experiments were done in the 80s. We might have mentioned her before.

And they were done by David and Anna Premack, and they were trying to suss out basically the extent to which chimps have empathy and a theory of mind so they can understand that other beings are conscious beings just like them. And so they did this amazing experiment where they showed her videos of actors trapped in a cage and then they showed her pictures, like various grainy black and white pictures of various objects. So it would be like a key that could let her out of the cage,

let the actor out of the cage and then a book and then a crowbar and then a poo or whatever. I think you've made a mistake in describing this, that you've included crowbar, which also can be used to get you out of prison. It should have been the key and then a lot of things that you can't use. And in fact, a book can help you on your journey out of prison through education. Right, that is a more long form, isn't it? You're absolutely right, I've picked the one other object

that would have confused the hell out of poor Sarah. I got confused though, yeah. I'm so sorry. Flingy poo at the guard, he's distracted, you're over the wall. Hey, you should be reading your book. Right, I'm just going to say, they showed her a picture of a key and then three other things that can't get you out of prison. And she'd know to pick the picture of the key.

So that was like, she knows that this actor wants to get out of prison and she's managed to match up this image, grainy image, and figure out that that's what the actor would want. And there were lots of other stuff as well. So they'd show actors trying to reach a banana that's just out of reach beyond the cage or trying to reach up to a banana that was on the ceiling and couldn't get to it.

And they'd show her pictures of a ladder, a box, a jetpack. Not a ladder and then three other things that you can't do. Exactly, a ladder and then a pole to get a banana. Do they then give her the choice to help people? Yes. So well then they did the experiment with two different people, Keith, her favourite trainer. And in the study it says, Bill, Brackett's fictitious name

because I guess didn't want to be identified, someone who she didn't like. And she would choose the good versions for Keith. So she'd get him the banana by giving him the pole or let him out of prison. But for Bill, she chose bad outcomes for him. So there'd be pictures of, for instance, Bill, like, sprawled out having tripped over the box,

isn't on the floor. And she'd pick that one for him because she wasn't a fan. What's Bill worried about? Why does he want no one to know his name? Because chimps don't like it. If a chimp doesn't like him, what's he done to the chimp? Oh, I see. Oh, there's an implication there.

I don't think we're... You think the chimp just doesn't like his music taste? I think Bill's doing some dark stuff. Okay, there's no suggestion in the study that Bill did anything untoward. We should actually, if you're going to say stuff like that, then we should change his name again

so that people don't know who he is. Mark. And actually, I might change my name just so that they don't know it was me. So I'll be Gary. Anyway, it's just so incredible the mental leaps that they can make. Understanding. This is a person, it's a person I like.

I want to help them. I can do it in this way. I'm going to say it. I think they're smart. I think chimpanzees are really clever, yeah. It depends what you compare them to. That's true. If you compare them to Slavoj Zizek,

they're not very smart. But if you compare them to me... If you compare them to Gary over here... But one thing they do is they will... This is kind of, again, their friendship to enemy ratio. They have enemy lists today. Wow. And the article I read said,

this is why chimpanzees are like Richard Nixon, which I think is a bit unfair. So this is scientists from the Max Planck Institute. They observed wild chimpanzees for thousands of hours in a row, right? Yeah. And what did chimpanzees spend lots of their time doing? Grooming each other. Grooming, yeah.

And it's a big thing. And it's a huge part of their social life as well. And basically, they have a very, very sophisticated mental map of who has groomed them recently, who they've groomed. And it's effectively who owes them a pint, you know? It's that kind of social level. They will be able to return the favor for someone who's groomed them. And they will freeze out other chimpanzees who haven't groomed them

or who are selfish and never groom anyone else. And then do they break into their offices at the middle of the night and steal? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Documents. So for example, if Dan groomed James on Monday, then on Thursday, James might groom Dan back. And the system works just fine.

As in, it doesn't need to be the same day for it to be. I've slept three times, but I still remember it. Exactly. And Dan knows not to worry about it because he knows that you've got his back, basically. But, you know, if Dan grooms Anna on a Tuesday and there's nothing for the rest of the week, and the week after that, Dan will remember. And it's not to be trusted with this thing.

I just like he's a hairy man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's his mama work. Yeah, yeah. You're right. We've got a lot on. All gym research is so interesting. And I was listening to actually show the interview Jane Goodall recently.

And it's so interesting listening to her. Obviously it's maybe the most famous gym researcher ever. But when she started researching, she went to Tanzania. She was the first person who saw chimps using tools, I think, using sticks to catch insects. She got PhD at Cambridge based on that. But she got there and she was vilified. And all the other academics said,

you're doing this completely wrong because she wanted to look at chimps' personality and emotion. And at the time, everyone else said that's really unscientific. Doesn't make any sense. You're humanizing these chimps. They're just animals. Whereas she obviously was saying, I've lived with these chimps. They're really similar to us. The only way to understand them is by trying to look at them through these lenses.

Wow. So yeah, she was bitched about. So she would give them names. Yes. And the scientists would like, you can't give them names. That is wild. Well, she was part of a group of three women who were put together by Louis Leakey, who was a paleoanthropologist and amazing character in this world.

And he was the one who thought that they needed studying at different closer contact. And so he wanted three women who he thought weren't necessarily even qualified for doing the job. And he wanted them to be single and he wanted to send them out there. And so he found Jane Goodall. He found Diane Fosse. And then there was a third one, unfortunately, whose name I can't remember. And they were known as the Trimates or Leakey's Angels. And they would go out there.

Leakey's Angels. Yeah. Why did they have to be single? Is that in case they fell in love with the Trim? He was, I think he was a bit of a eccentric character. No, he was very much married, but he just had these eccentric ways. He sent her a letter saying, you've got to have your appendix taken out before you go out there. She did it.

And then he wrote back saying, I was joking about that. Oh my God. That is a good prank. He wanted to test who had the commitment to go out there was the joke of it. And then he said, oh, you actually did it? No, no, it was a joke. He was just a jokey thing. But if he was testing the commitment, it sounds like, you know,

if you hadn't done it, he might have been like, you didn't pass the test. My theory is he was back working on that to be like, oh yeah, no, I was testing your commitment. Jane Goodall, by the way, I have a Barbie of Jane Goodall. Yes. Which is like my equivalent of Dan buying Ben Elton stuff. What does it come with? It comes with a little monkey, a little chimp, which is the David Greybeard chimp, which is the one who she first saw using a stick as a tool.

You know, she properly believes a big foot. Like, properly. And I saw her recently. How did you get this stuff out of these otherwise sane people? It's bizarre. There's this American program, which is called something like Big Foot Uncovered or something. It looks really kind of amateur. And yet Jane Goodall sat down for a major interview with them

and told all her anecdotal evidence that she believes that locals believe that it and so on. Did you not write a letter afterwards saying I was only joking about that, by the way? Yeah. I would just get a scar. I would just get an appendectomy scar if someone asked me to do that. Smart. In most places where you're asked to have it removed. Yeah.

You probably do will have need to have had it removed. Yeah. So do an emergency. Most people aren't doing it for a joke, are they? No. No. How funny that little novelty scar is going to be when you're out in an isolated area. No doctors are there.

Chimpanzees, they have their own theme tunes. I really like this. Really? Yeah. Just like Richard Nixon did. This is bizarre. They have these drum rhythms, male chimpanzees. When they're traveling, they will bash really loudly.

They grab a big old tree root and they bash it against the surface of the tree. And that specific male chimpanzees have their own specific tunes or rhythms that they bash out. And it's to advertise their presence, basically. There's a primatologist called Catherine Hobaita who found this out. And basically they can decide whether they want to hang out with each other or not. Right. It's a bit social media-ish. They're saying, I'm here.

If anyone wants to hang out, I'm here. Sounds more sophisticated than social media, to be honest. But they also can, you know, be on incognito mode if they like. Right. Just not hitting the tree with the thing. Yeah. Or you could steal someone's identity, couldn't you? You know, get your own blue tick now by imitating the...

Your own blue stick. Oh, no. Can I tell you guys about my favorite prison break of all time? Yeah, go on. With the facts about breaking humans out of prison. This is a prisoner in South Korea who broke themselves out. His name was Choi Gapbok and this was in 2012. He was in jail for five days off the back of his arrest.

And he escaped by squeezing his entire body through the food slot. That is unbelievable. So when you're in prison, you see this on prison dramas, right? Yeah. They come in with a tray with your food in it. They open a little slot. They slide it under. It's about the size of a letterbox.

Yeah. It's so tiny. So the slot was 5.9 inches tall, 17.5 inches wide. Come off it. And Choi Gapbok got through it is the story. That's impossible. It sounds impossible, right? It's a middle part of his name, Gap.

It is. Yeah, brilliant. He was known as the Korean Houdini and he's a yoga instructor. And a borrower. It seems too tiny, doesn't it? That's 15 centimeters from the top. That's nothing. I know.

That's a lot more than 5.5 inches what you just did there. I've always taken that. But what are the bits? It's skull and hips, I guess, are the two challenge bits. Shoulders are tough as well. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's your heads through? I think you might be okay.

As long as you can rotate your body in the right way. Have you seen those guys in Covent Garden just in that main square up there who put their entire body through a tennis racket? Captain Frodo is a performer who I've seen do that on stage at a show called, I think it's called Le Cleak. Okay. And he does a 12-inch tennis racket, I think I've mentioned it

before, and then a 10-inch racket. And also you can move a tennis racket around, whereas a food slot in a cell wall stays in place. It's incredible. Does he remove the strings? He does. Yeah, okay. There's a guy called Henry Box Brown.

This was an enslaved American who got himself out of his slavery by asking someone to construct a wooden box and posting himself from Virginia to Pennsylvania. Amazing. Again, so he's one of those middle names where that's been added afterwards, right? It has, yeah. He was just called Henry Brown after he did the box.

In fact, it was a bit later. He, on the box, it said, handle with care this side up. And the article I read about it said several times the box was placed upside down and handled without care. It took him 27 hours and he got to Philadelphia and he posed himself to the Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia. So he's free when he arrived. Awesome.

And he then moved to Britain and he had another career, which is related to this. Can you guess what it was? Postman. Postman. No, not postman. Um, removals. He made labels which said this way up and he

embossed them rigorously. Did he go on Telly? He didn't go on Telly. It was a bit before that. It was the 1860s. Oh, the 1860s. But you're close. There's a lot to do with packaging.

Showbiz. Oh, so... Was he an escape artist? He was an escape artist. Yeah. He became a guy who would escape from boxes. That's great. Tell his story and then do the escape.

Cool. Very nice. Wow. That's so cool. Have you guys heard of Michel Vajour? Yeah. He was someone who was in prison for bank robbery in Paris. And this was in 1986 and he got his wife to spend

months and months learning to fly a helicopter so that she could rescue him. I say he got her. Maybe she volunteered. I don't know how the letters went. James, your wife flies a helicopter. Yeah, she is. What are you planning?

Well, why do you think I made friends with that chimp? You're going to steal some steel, aren't you? You're going to steal some steel. I'm going to go into the chimp prison. My wife's going to fly me out. She's going to lower a duffel bag from a helicopter. I can't believe my entire scheme has been explained on this podcast. That might be the most callbacks to different bits of the show anyone's ever done.

That was lovely. Anyway, his wife, Nadine, spent months learning to fly a helicopter, did fly a helicopter and picked him up from the roof of the prison. And the way he got onto the roof, which is the only thing that he needed to do, was by tricking the guards by painting some nectarines and making them look like grenades, which I don't know how you do. You've got to paint shadows on them. I've painted green and yellow.

Yeah, I think, yeah. That's how far away you are, yeah. I thought you meant he'd painted nectarines onto the roof of the prison and said, oh, can I go and pick those nectarines? Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in Tudor times, the guy in the crow's nest of a warship had to be really good at darts. Right.

Okay, so is the deck of the ship painted like a dartboard? Oh, yeah. And why is he throwing darts down at the people, his colleagues? Yeah, good point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it if you see another massive ship and you think there's no way we can win this, why not challenge them to a game of darts and stuff? Yeah?

To accept, don't they? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. No, it's not that. It's because there are things called fire arrows. And they were also known as darts of wildfire, and they were kept by the guy in the crow's nest, and you would launch them at the other ship and hopefully set fire to it when you're in battle.

Wait, so bigger, these aren't darts that would be permitted in your local pub? They're not. They were a bit bigger than that. Right. They were more spear-sized than dart-sized, but they were called darts of wildfire. And I read this in, I reckon this is the book with the least encouraging title that I got the most facts from ever. It's called Darts in England, 1900 to 1939 by Patrick Chaplin, but it's full of amazing

facts and I read it in there. Well, Chaplin is also straying way outside its brief, as in 1900 to 1939. These were not used in the First World War, right? No, they were. He did give a little bit of exposition before he got to 1900. Cool. So, yeah, a bit unfair for me to call them darts, possibly, although they did call them darts.

Also a bit unfair for me to call them crow's nests, because there was no crow's nest at the time, either, where the term crow's nest didn't exist in the 16th century. So they would have been called mastops. And was it a platform you put at the top of them? Actually, it was a little kind of barrel thing, but they just didn't call it that, and so they used these on the Merry Rose, for instance, and if you go to the Merry Rose Museum, they say that their crow's nest there shouldn't technically be called that, it should be called a mastop.

That's interesting. I assumed it was a really old term. I assumed it comes exactly from that period of the Golden Age of Salem. You'd have thought so, but no. But there's, and I didn't even write his name down, because I thought it was such a pointless or meaningless thing to invent, because there's always credit to the guy who invented the crow's nest. And it is in the 19th century.

And you think, well, crow's nest exists. What did he do? He gave them a name, didn't he? Excuse me, Anna. Are you referring to William's school as a senior? I certainly am. Give him his rightful name. He's not a lime to get pissed off.

Let's talk about William Scorsby's senior. So he was a whaler and an Arctic explorer, and he's credited with developing the crow's nest or creating the thing, which was first properly called a crow's nest. If you were up there, you were a barrel man. That was the thing. And he had a great family. So he had a son, William Scorsby, Jr., who was also an explorer. Scorsby, Jr. was one of the first people to scientifically record what snowflakes looked

like. He once called a polar bear and allegedly brought it to Whitby. I'm not completely sure that's true. They're from Whitby, weren't they, the Scorsby's? Yes, exactly. And the book Northern Lights by Philip Pullman, there is a Texan explorer in that book called Lee Scorsby, who is named after and inspired by Scorsby. That's really cool.

So the name lives on. William Scorsby's wife was called Lady Mary, and Lady was her first name. Mary was her surname, and because she was born on Lady Day, so they called her Lady Mary. Oh, and because they wanted to trick society into embracing them. Maybe. She had married Lord Timothy Dexter. Yes. They could have been Lord and Lady.

What was Lady Day, and does it still exist? Lady Day is a religious day for the Virgin Mary. And also, they did a sculpture of a crow's nest in Whitby in 1994, but local historian Norman Nichols said it looked more like a margarine tub from their crow's nest, and even the bird on top is of an unknown species. Also, there are two men in the tub, whereas a crow's nest would only ever have one person, and one of the people's looking through binoculars and they weren't used on ships until the 20th century.

That's a hell of a fact check on a statue. And the council said that it wasn't supposed to be accurate. That's a cop-out as well. It was the winning entry in a competition, and they just happened to put it in Whitby because it was near the sea. That was Dan's excuse for most podcasts. It's not meant to be inaccurate. So I guess the upgrades that were done to the crow's nest in the 1800s were they had nooks

and racks included, don't they, to accommodate your telescope, the very much the 19th century binoculars, and signal flags, so you could signal down to the people on the deck to say there's a shark coming or whatever, and a speaking trumpet, so you could shout to your crew and you'd have a trumpet up there, and then often on deck the captain would have another trumpet to shout back. That's great. And it actually apparently had big painted arrows too, and I think painted so that they showed up so you could see them on deck, and this was for pointing at a whale if you're

on a wailing expedition. What do you mean, sorry? Where were the arrows painted? I think that they were just painted a bright colour, so you'd make a long way on the ship. In the crow's nest. Oh. You would hold an arrow. Sorry, you're holding an arrow.

It's not a patch of an arrow. Like someone who's trying to show you where there's a gulf sail. Yeah. I just blank those people out. No, but those guys, they all originally had worked on ships because they were better at pointing to things. Yeah, yeah. According to Penn State website, Penn State University, and I don't think this is true

but it was on there, it said that the crow's nest used to actually contain a crow. And the navigators, because crows were used by, I know the Vikings use crows because if you let one go it'll go to land, and so you can follow it to land. That was a thing. I don't think that bit's true. I think they were named because crows generally speaking build their nests quite high up at the top of trees. Looks like a bird nest.

They look massive, don't they? Yeah. Exactly. Although there was a study in British Columbia that found 45% of crow's nests are built on the ground. So I've blown a few myths there. So really all the ships crow's nest should have been just on the... 45% of them should have been there.

That's great. And you wouldn't need the trumpet. No. Yeah. And the Titanic had a crow's nest. Did it? And it was... It was...

Tragically it wasn't properly functional on the night the ship hit the iceberg. Right. So there were two lookouts, official lookouts on the Titanic. They were called Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee. And this actually might be the whole cause of the Titanic sinking to a degree. So the ship's second officer was a guy called David Blair, right? And he was only on board from Belfast where, you know, launched to Southampton. And then it was going Southampton to New York.

Yeah. But he got off at Southampton. Okay. And when he got off the ship, he took with him a small key. Oh, yeah. And the key opened the cabinet in the crow's nest, which contained the binoculars and the telescope. So the lookouts...

Decided, shall we break open this lock now? They just... They were just relying on the naked eye. Yeah. And Frederick Fleet survived the sinking. And he went to... You know, there were hearings afterwards. And at the hearings he said, yeah, it would have been beautiful.

Yeah. It would have been very useful to have the binoculars or the telescope. And we might have been able to get out of the way. And that key has survived, though, because Blair, who had got off the ship, kept it as a souvenir, memento, whatever. Really? Chips now use it to break people on the pages. Yeah.

It was auctioned off in 2007. Oh, I think they got that wrong in Titanic. I've got a real vision in Titanic of the lookout looking through a telescope. So James Cameron, take a look. Maybe go back into an edit. I've got a lot on darts. I'm talking about darts. Darts stuff.

The guy that you got this fact from, James, Patrick Chaplin, has a fantastic website where he goes heavily into the world of darts, learns so much from him. One interesting thing that he pointed out is there's a conception that darts became a big game in this country when a man called Bigfoot was able... Oh, my God. Well, no, but this is real. This is a real Bigfoot. But how do you find Bigfoot?

William Bigfoot Anakin, in 1908, courts in Leeds were saying that darts is gambling because it's simply just throwing it as a gamble on where it lands. It's completely random where it lands. Completely random where it lands. And in order to prove that that wasn't the case, Bigfoot was brought into court and he was asked to throw specific three double twenties, which he managed to do. And in doing so, showed it was a game of skill and that meant, ah, OK, this is a sport, therefore you are allowed to bet on it.

This, in the history of darting, is often presented as it changed it for the whole country in a seminal moment. The truth is it was more localized and it helped in a very specific case. In Leeds. In Leeds, exactly. Yeah, so this story, we're not sure if it's true or not. So William Anakin's grandson says it is true. But all the magistrate records from Leeds from 1908 are missing.

Yeah. Suspicious. Suspicious. They've been spotted halfway up the Himalayas, actually. But it's never been confirmed whether they were really the... There's a blurry documentary. You can't quite make out the words on it. The story is that they just told him what to hit and perhaps it was twenties and stuff

like that. But then everyone else in the court would shout out a number and then he'd have to hit that. So someone goes seven and then he'd hit the seven and someone shout out nine and he hit the nine. That's a great story. I like that. So there was a study done about what you should aim for in darts. It was done, it was published in the Royal Statistical Society Journal and basically it

was saying you should only aim for treble twenty if you're a very skilled player. Because if you are not a skilled player and you aim for treble twenty, you'll average ten point two points per throw. And if you throw totally randomly, you'll average twelve point eight points per throw. So you'll actually do less well than average. Because on either side of triple twenty, there's a five and a one, so you risk getting low scores. And that's a very unambitious way of thinking about darts.

It implies that no one can ever improve from the low base and just like, unless you're a natural savol, you just play for your twelve. It just says, why don't you try and improve on the baby slope down here with, you know, the nineteen, which has less dangerous numbers around it. I was reading about what a sort of man sport it was, you know, women weren't allowed to compete with the men in their competitions as well as there wasn't really a women's body for it for a very long time. And there was a big moment for women's darts.

And it's all down to the Queen Mother, because the Queen Mother went and played with the King at the time, a game of darts, and she beat him. And she was standing a foot closer to the to the dartboard, but she beat him twenty one by nineteen. And afterwards there were headlines around the country. She beat him twenty one by nineteen. They both threw three darts. I see.

And this was in the thirties, we should say. And so the headlines everywhere, women flocked to follow the Queen's lead at darts. And there was this moment where it looked quite cool because it meant that women and men were playing together, different classes were playing together. It sort of transcended everything. And then Bloody World War Two broke out. And that sort of put a stop to things for a while. People stopped playing darts and then they forgot about this, these Halcyon days of when

everyone came together to play darts. I think darts playing tripled after the Queen Mother played it for a while. But then, but you say, you know, women didn't used to be able to compete against men, but I mean, in almost no sports can women compete against men. And actually darts is one of the very few where they can now. It's the most famous female darts player. Has she just won a tournament? A couple of years ago, she played in the World Championships and she beat a couple of men.

And she played in the men, specifically the men's. So she entered as a woman into the men's championship. And she says she gets a lot of shit from the female league because they feel like she's not taking their league seriously. I read an interview with her recently where she said, You can understand that. I think that's a complicated issue. Lisa Ashton as well from Bolton, I should mention her.

Who's the best female darts player? One interesting thing that could happen to the darts player. And this is something that has been observed in the older generations of professional darts players. It's called Dartitis. Yeah, that's really bad. Dartitis is a motor neurone disease without any explanation. Some people have described it as sort of the yips. It's the yips for darts, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. And you basically start throwing, but your brain won't let you let go of the dart. And you just have this kind of mental barrier that stops you from being able to throw a dart. It's terrifying and a darts player is terrified of it, I think. The yips is the same as choking, right? No, the yips is actually the same. So if you're in golf at least, this is the yips. So if you need to hit a very short putt, so the ball into the hole,

your brain just won't let you push the club through the ball. You'll get close to it and you'll just kind of freeze up. And how common is it? Does this happen to people sporadically, or is it if you've got it, you've got it? No, so Eric Bristo, who is seen, I mean James, you know darts more, but he's basically seen as one of the greatest if not the greatest. So six time world champion for darts, and he got it on his fifth world championship. So he had Dartitis and he managed to get himself out of it.

And he went back to number one in the world, but he says he had it. He definitely had it. Amazing. Sid Waddell, who was a very famous brilliant darts commentator, famously said of Eric Bristo, when Alexander the Great was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer. Eric Bristo is only 27.

Oh, what a legend. So great. He was. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is there is a 50% chance that you have a caterpillar in your mouth. What are you talking to? So it's everyone. You're not addressing.

I thought you were looking at me and I thought maybe... No, no, no, it's not a... It's a personal judgment. Absolutely not. It's not a personal hygiene thing. As far as I'm aware. Is that why sometimes the butterfly will eventually fly out of my mouth? That's right.

So these caterpillars, they are bacterial caterpillars. So they are multicellular bacteria, which are all in the line. So they look like caterpillars. That's why they've got their name. Okay. Yeah, and this is from... It's a trick. It's a trick.

It's a brilliant website called Small Things Considered, and Jennifer Fraser wrote an article about it, and I read it recently. It was featured on a website called The Browser, which I read, which I love. And these bacterial caterpillars, they cling onto the inside of your cheek and they eat you, you are the food, and they just live inside your mouth. And about half of people have them. And they're a family of microbes, which are so hard to pronounce. I'm going to have a go at it.

It's niceriaceae. To see you, niceriaceae. Nice. There we go. Yeah, and they've evolved to live in our oral cavity or our mouth, as the common saying has it. The most famous member of the niceriaceae family is niceriaceae gonorrheaae. Oh, not so niceriaceae.

So gonorrhea is part of this family of bacteria, but they named after a guy called Albert Nysa, who is a German physician. And he was the one who the gonorrhea bacteria was named after. What on earth? He did discover it, but yeah, it's not the greatest thing. He also co-discovered the causative agent of leprosy as well. Wow. It's called, the other guy was Hansen, I think.

It's called Hansen's disease now, but he was the other guy who found that. Two really palatable and attractive things. I know. Was there ever a Mr. gonorrhea? Oh, no, gonorrhea means something else. Rea means like shooting out like diarrhea, doesn't it? And I can't remember what gonorr means, but yeah, it means something else. But the other thing about Nysa, again, not a very nicer thing, he did some quite unethical

clinical trials on syphilis, putting it into patients in the 1890s. And because he did that, the universal rule regarding human experiments and the ethical rules that we have now on human experiments came in because of his experiments he did also. So we've got about, according to a study I read, 700 different species of bacteria in our mouth at any given time. A caterpillar, maybe one of them. And some of them stick to their own patch of mouth.

Your mouth roof bacteria will be very different to your cheek bacteria, for example. And yeah, they just live on different continents within your face. It's pretty amazing. And also our mouth microbiome, our oral microbiome, is like our gut microbiome, right? There's lots of talk about the gut microbiome, how everyone has their unique collection of bacteria, colony of bacteria, and that helps you digest food and your immune system, et cetera. But similarly in your mouth, you've got your unique oral microbiome

and it started building up basically from the moment you were born. And it doesn't change that much. So you'd think when you eat kind of food with certain bacteria in it or when you put your fingers in your mouth or you don't wash your hands for ages, you'd think that you're introducing new colonies. But they're just fought out because basically at birth you've started forming this thing.

And in fact, in the womb, I found this really amazing, if your mother had gum disease or was a smoker, you are more likely to be born with pathogens in your mouth that dispose you to cavities and stuff. What's really interesting is that they found that quite recently because they thought that the first bacteria inside a baby would have probably come vaginally as they came out. Basically they thought a baby would be quite sterile,

but as they came out they would pick up all of the bacteria and stuff. But it turns out that the baby's already getting bacteria from the mother's mouth and somehow it's going from the mother's mouth down through placentally into the baby. We're not quite sure how it happens, but we know that the same species from one place and the other, we know that's how it's coming through. And into the baby's mouth because it ends up, because these are bacteria that belong in the mouth,

so they find their way. How do you find it? It is incredible. The thing that you said, Dan, about how different species live in different parts of your mouth, they found that quite recently in a study where they kind of had these fluorescent things, like little tag markers that they put on different types of bacteria.

So if it was a gonorrhea bacteria, it would be blue. It would be red or whatever. And they took them all out and then saw what they were and they gave them different names because they saw patterns. So you would have the caterpillar in your mouth, but you might also have a hedgehog, a corn cob or a cauliflower. These are different types of bacterial colonies. So all four of us here, the bacteria on our tongues

are more similar to each other, aren't they, than the bacteria on our own teeth? Because we make out so much. That's right. That's exactly it. It's how we keep this vibe between us and the rep our teeth. We're pretty show-makers. But if you kiss someone,

your tongues will be chatting to each other, but they are more similar than your own tongue will be with your gums. They're so romantic, Andy. Maybe our tongues could chat to each other. Sounds quite French, doesn't it? Eating sweets. Kids listening. And adults, that's allowed.

So I'll patch kids, Andy. Love them. But as an adult, you can eat whatever sweets you like, whereas as a kid, your parents often say, don't, you'll get holes in your teeth. It doesn't cause cavities. What? Are you sure? Well, there's a...

I have to count this. Wait for the backtrack. So basically, the way the cavities are formed are when bacteria living in our mouth digest things that we eat, and then when they digest them, they excrete acidity, makes them very acidic,

and it's the acidity which rots away at your teeth. And some bacteria do, like, carbohydrates, but they don't prefer a sweet to an apple or some grain. And I don't think there's a connection between eating loads of quality street or whatever. But it is true that children are likelier to snack on sweets than some grain.

As in... I'm sure you were very popular in the playground, Andy. The man is there, the pick and mix. Oh, you know, maybe some buckwheat would be nice. That was a very advanced child. Yeah, look, that's a good point. But I think also the problem is that if you were to eat, like, let's say, peanuts or bread or something,

that's more like to get stuck in your teeth. Wow. Whereas the sugar tends to just disappear away. So it would be quite a good advertising campaign to say, you know, if people are trying to not get cavities in their teeth, bacteria are trying to have a poo in your mouth and don't let them, you know, only let them do it at mealtimes. Yeah, that's nice.

That would be a motivational poster. Maybe a character, you'd have like a bacterial character. Yeah. Goes into schools, you know, a giant bacteria does a poo on the floor. Don't let me do this in your mouth. And then it burns a hole in the floor. Yeah.

I think this could be a good spin-off business for us. I love it. I had half my tooth fell out the other night in bed. And I thought it was dead. And I stopped chewing on the bed posts. Just so you know, Dad, that's the side of the head is very dead. I know. I know. There was a huge contrast between me, a 38-year-old man,

and my son, five years old, in our reaction, because I went, oh, my God, I'm crumbling. This is it. My son, Grabby, went, Dad, you're so lucky. Put that under the pillow and you're going to make tons of money by the morning. But yeah, it just disappeared. And I've been eating a lot of sweets because Halloween, we got a huge hoard off the back of the trick-or-treating that we did.

I think there's a correlation, causation thing here. So half your tooth fell out. Just fell out. Yeah. So you've only got half a tooth now? Yeah, it's still the breast. Are you serious? Yeah, I'm not joking. I feel like you're overly concerned here, Andy. I feel like Dad needs quite urgent attention.

I feel like you're utterly concerned. I have to say, because I've only got half a tooth at the back of my mouth because of some dental work that I never got finished, because it was coming too expensive. And I said to the dentist, it's only the back half of my tooth that I have. The roots are a little bit exposed. And I said, if hypothetically I didn't come back

and pay for you to put the crown on top of this, would it be bad? And the dentist said to me, look, if you were an 85-year-old woman, I'd say it doesn't matter. But for a younger person, you probably want that tooth at some point in your life. So if you do feel like the end is nigh,

it's probably not worth getting it done. So that's something to reassure you. So you're saying I should leave it? You can leave it. I remember when I was younger, I was not having much money. And you say to the cabbie, can you let me off here?

This is great, where you're a mile short of your destination. It takes up the cash you've got. I've got an infected wisdom tooth at the moment. I've taken antibiotics, it's just about getting better. But I'm thinking the way that Andy's looking at all three of us at the moment, I think our make-out sessions might not be happening anymore. OK, that's it.

That's all of our facts. If you're listening, if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said, you can find us on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Gary. I'm not at Shriverland. Andy. At Andrew Hunter. James. At James Harkin. And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. Check out all of our previous episodes up there. Also check out Club Fish, our membership club. Join today and come and hang out with the fellow Thunderdors. Come and make out with us.

On our discord. On our discord. Yeah, check it all out. It's really fun. Otherwise, why not just come back here next week. We're going to be back with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye. Bye.