No Such Thing As A Fish - 46: No Such Thing As An Apostle Called Scrotum

Episode Date: February 7, 2015

Episode 46 - Dan (@schreiberland), James (@eggshaped), Andy (@andrewhunterm) and Anna (#getannaontwitter) discuss bad Harry Potter translations, how to spot a Lama and ancient practical jokes.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covern Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with Andy Murray, Anna Chasinski, and James Harkin, and once again we've gathered around the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. And with fact number one, Andy Hunter Murray. My fact is that there have been three top 50 songs in the British charts which have been sung exclusively in Latin.

Wow, I bet you own all three of them, don't you? Yeah, I do, yeah. Just the mixtape of three Latin songs. Yeah, one of them actually made it into the Alan Partridge movie last year. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which was Gaudete by Steeleis Spann, which is a religious song. Unfortunately, they're all a bit religious rather than an Abba song, which they just

happened to fancy doing in Latin. I didn't know we got religious songs in our pop chart, in our top 40 top of the pops. They're just choirs. Constantly. Anyway, the other one was from Evita in 1976, which is choral in Latin, and another was a recording of P.A. Yezu from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Requiem. That's a fantastic song. So two of these are, is the other one from Evita, you said?

Yes. So two of them are Andrew Lloyd Webber songs, two of the three Latin songs are Andrew Lloyd Webber, right? Evita Bing and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. Well done.

Well done, Drew. So yeah, it's just interesting, the sort of the things that get into the pop charts over the years. Yeah. Yeah. And it was, it's easier now to get things in the pop charts, because you can just, everyone can download something at the same time, and then it can get in the charts. Whereas in the olden days, you actually had to release a record or a CD or something for

it to get in the charts. Because these days, you could get a very popular person on the radio saying everyone download a Latin song, and it would just get... Yeah, you're right. It doesn't need to be. The Taylor Swift album that came out last year, they accidentally on the iTunes downloads included a track just of white noise. And because it just went viral, everyone bought it and it went to the top of the charts in

Canada. Every other music in Canada must have been so angry. Yeah. I'll add as far as that going, this is ironic. So, you know that the Mel Gibson film, The Passion, was in a mix of Aramaic and Latin. It turns out that the Latin that they used in The Passion of the Christ is church Latin and not classical Latin, which means the entire thing is an anachronism. That's funny.

I'm really, really pleased by that. They pronounce their V's as W's. I don't know. I don't know how much we do know about the pronunciation of classical Latin. I think the journal consensus is that classical Latin, it was pronounced as a W and then church Latin, it's a V. And if they screwed that up, they fell out the first hurdle. Yeah. So, we've got some chat trivia, which Day of the Week has had the most songs written

about it. So, it's in the title. Oh, okay. Monday. Yeah, Monday. That's so obvious. I'm going to go with Friday. Oh, well, you're all wrong.

It's Sunday, 30 songs with the word Sunday. And so, 30 songs with Sunday and 23 with Saturday, 11 with Friday, which is a third. And only one song, this is in the billboard charts, has ever been written with the word Thursday in the title. Only one. Yeah. Sweet Thursday by Johnny Mathis in 1962. Okay.

This is my favorite fact about the charts. Go on. Okay. It is that Paul McCartney has had 200 songs in the charts. So either Beatles songs, Wings songs, Solar songs, songs are these written for other people. If you take the amount of time and accumulate all the time that those 200 songs have spent in the charts, they add up to 32 years. Right.

That's amazing. Oh. He's had songs in the charts that are for a longer period than I've been alive by two years. That's pretty good. That's insane. Yeah. And do you know who I found out that fact from?

Who? President Obama. Wow. Yeah. Well, is President Obama just tweeting factoids about Paul McCartney? Yeah, he runs OMG. They've just signed him up. Yeah, yeah.

Good for him. No, Paul McCartney won the Gershwin Prize at the White House where they do it. And he gave a speech and he said, here's an interesting fact about Paul and then told that. Nice. Do you think that was original research from Theo? Source, own research. I have a thing about Latin which I wanted to tell you because I really, really like it.

When Pope Benedict XVI resigned, one of the journalists who broke the story only got it because she could understand the Latin in which he made the announcement. Right. And as a result, she got the scoop before anybody else. My name was Giovanna Ciori. She must have been very Ciori about that. It was a weird one, wasn't it? Because he was just doing a general talk to about six or seven journalists and they were

just talking about basic stuff. They all understood what he was saying was being translated and then he spoke that bit in Latin, that particular bit. She was the only one who got it and she kind of pre-announced it without confirmation. She was lucky she was right because she was a bit like, I'm not sure if he did, I'm pretty sure he did just say that. Did that word mean resign or olive? No, they just wanted an olive, guys.

It's an interesting thing because Latin in the Vatican, obviously, is still a big thing. They're constantly updating because of all the new words that we have. Have we spoken about that particular thing? Words like dishwasher are now in the new Latin dictionary and so are... World Wide Web, there is. They're quite behind if they've only just updated it with dishwasher. I mean, what about iPhone? Rush Hour, which I don't know when that movie made it to the Vatican, but it's only just

got it in this one that's been released. Speaking of Pope Benedict, have we spoken about the fact that he released a Christmas album, didn't he? A Christmas music album. No. So in 2009, before he resigned, he released a Christmas music album, it was Prayer Set to Classical Music and it was with Snoop Dogg's record label. Wow.

Yeah, Geffen Records. Snoop Dogg collaborates with a lot of people like that. He did a song with Buzz Aldrin. A lot of people like the Pope. So the Dalai Lama. No, Buzz Aldrin. Just like people who are not in music is what I meant. Yeah, old people who...

He wanted to be on Coronation Street, didn't he? The Pope. Snoop Dogg. Snoop Dogg. Yeah, there was a... There was something in the news a while ago that he was going to be on Coronation Street, but I don't think he ever did. I think we would have heard.

Yeah. Yeah. I was reading that J.K. Rowling's, obviously, The Philosopher's Stone was released in Latin. Oh yeah, yeah. They did it. So it's Harrius Potter is what the book was called and it was the Philosopher's Stone one. They also translated it into ancient Greek and apparently it's the longest ancient Greek

text to have been produced since 3 A.D. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. That's what I read. Wow. That's amazing. So this is interesting.

The book, The Order of the Phoenix, when that came out, so just going from the idea that we had three Latin songs in a British chart in France, when the book came out, they did this thing where they didn't pre-give the book to different countries to translate it. They basically had to wait for the English book to be released and then they started translating the Harry Potter book. So it was a big rush to sort of which country could get them quicker for the demand. Yeah.

In France, they couldn't wait for the book to be translated. So Order of the Phoenix is the only non-French book to hit number one in the French bestsellers list in France as a book. That's great. Just on the Order of the Phoenix one as well, there was this thing in Venezuela where they knew the release date was going to be about six months after or five months after the release of Order of the Phoenix. They couldn't be bothered waiting and some guy just translated it on his own and released

it and people bought it. But it, by all accounts, was the worst translation because it's packed with sentences. This is a genuine sentence from it. Here comes something that I am unable to translate. Sorry. And then later on after another sentence, there's a bracket that said, I'm sorry, I don't understand what that means. It's just totally littered with the translator.

It makes it sound actually a bit more terrifying. If you're describing something, it's like this thing is so awesome. I can't even put it into words. It's like another version of Voldemort. He cannot be named. Literally, I can't name it. Sorry, guys. Do you guys know the only New York Times bestseller to be written in Latin, bestselling book to

be written in Latin? Can you give us a clue? Is it Winnie the Pooh? Yes, it is. Because there was a version of Winnie the Pooh in Latin, wasn't there? It's Winnie Ile Pooh. Yeah. Winnie Ile Pooh.

It was on the bestseller list for 20 weeks. That's pretty good. Yeah. It's very, I imagine there's not much vocabulary in it, so it's probably quite good for teaching children who are learning Latin. Yeah. So the Dr. Seuss, three Dr. Seuss books have also been translated into Latin, which I would have thought would be...

Wait, Dr. Seuss or Dr. Seuss? Dr. Seuss. Because that would be for Greek, if anything. I don't think... I don't think Seuss was a doctor. I think he had a bigger fish to fry. It's maybe his medical name. It's pronounced Dr. Seuss as well.

Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss. But if I said Dr. Seuss, people would call me a dickhead, wouldn't they? Yes, they'll say Dr. Seuss then. Dr. Seuss, I always say. I say Dr. Seuss, yeah. Anyway, how the Grinch stole Christmas and two others have been... In fact, okay, I'll tell you the two others and see if you know what they are.

I assume some of you will. Catus Pettisatus. The Cat in the Hat. Correct. And Wierent Owa, exclamation mark. Wieret Perna, two exclamation marks. Oh, Green Eggs Green Ham. Nice.

Green Eggs and Ham. Green Eggs and Ham. Yeah. Very good. Started it till the age of 18, still didn't get the Cat in the Hat one. Catus is a tough one. Yeah, really is. Catus really told you me as well.

The Latin Wikipedia has 94,000 articles. Which is amazing when you think about it. Yeah, I mean, that's much more than many other languages. In fact, I wonder where that features in Wikipedia language. Yeah. And you can get Facebook in Latin as well. Instead of the like button, there's a mihi plaquette button. It is pleasing to me.

It pleases me. Sorry. Do you know the other languages that Latin almost, you know, was, or the Latin tribe was vying with before they became the Romans, you know, when they were just a tiny tribe in southern Italy. They were really cool names. Volskian, Oskian and Falescan. These were just other languages doing the rounds in the area at the time.

Falescan sounds like it comes from Fales, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. It sounds penis language. Okay. Well, I'm sure they got a lot of that at school. They don't need any more of it from you guys, even though they lost to the Romans. Embarrassing.

Germany, I think, is the only country to have had a number one song in Elvish. Wow. Because the... The Lord of the Rings track? Yeah, it was the Enya track. Director, producer, promoter, whatever this is called in the business, decided that her musical ideas were too complex and interesting to get across in any language that existed,

so they wrote a new language for her in which some of her other songs are sung. Which is called amaranthine. That's Enya's language. Got her own language. Hey, you know how we were talking about dishwashers earlier? Yeah. The Latin for dishwasher,

and obviously we all know them terrible with words, but it's something like eschariorium as the first word. Something like that. That's not correct. Lavatory. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Lavatory is a...

Lavatory is to wash. Lavatory was, I think, an ecclesiastical room for washing in a church or in a monastery or that kind of thing. A lavatory was a room where you go and have a wash. Who do you think was the first person who took a poo in there and transformed it from, oh, Father Dave, what have you done? It was time the room branched out.

I think that's what happened with all the words. Someone just like, Father Dave, this used to be a place where we just had a bath. Now the defecatorium's completely ruined Father Dave. Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Chuzzinski. My fact is that the way to recognise the Buddha is to look out for his webbed feet, a tongue that can reach his ears,

and withdrawn genitalia. That's a good excuse on a date. No, no, no, it's not small. I'm just, I'm the Buddha. I'm the reincarnated Buddha. Oh, yeah, then show me your tongue because I could get on board with this. So, yeah, these are some of the 32,

these are three of the 32 Lakshanas, or special bodily features of the Buddha, and they're what proper representation of the Buddha must have that make him the perfect being. So the perfect being has these features, as well as various other things, like 40 teeth rather than 32, and ankle bones that are hardly noticeable,

and an excellent sense of taste. It is an amazing list of characteristics that the Buddha had, I mean, this is Buddha original as well, Buddha classic, if you will, had thighs like a royal stag, a 10-foot aura, and the area below armpits well-filled.

With hair? Or... Yeah. So, wait, are there 32 of these? There's 32, but then there's... I don't know what well-filled with. I think well-filled with flesh, maybe, yeah. There's an additional 80 extra little tiny things,

if you want to look at. Right. What's really weird is they point out that the extra 80 things are just like, you know, you've confirmed it's Buddha, you know, his tongue can wrap around his ears, he's got these web-feet, it's definitely Buddha. Yeah.

But if you just want to make doubly sure that it's him, there's these 80 extra things. And I read through the 80, and they are quite simple, but then one is he can fly. That feels like it should be the first one. That'd be the first thing I'd ask him. Yeah.

They're so mixed as well, like one of them is he has a protruding nose, number 28 of the extra 80, and the one before it is, he has the strength of 1,000 elephants. No, no, no, he doesn't. He has the strength of 1,000 craw elephants, and craw is 10 million,

and so he has the strength of 10 billion elephants. Sorry, that was my mistake. But I mean, that, the Buddha, 10 billion elephants. That's the kind of strength that he's pulling. Wow. To be fair, once you're strong enough that you can pull 10 elephants, the extra just feels like showing off.

Yeah, you're right. Number 75 in this list of 80, so he is either completely bald or has a full crop of hair. No in between, though. Yes, no, yeah. So what I like about this list is that it's not only just what he was,

but if you were looking out for Buddha as a reincarnation, that is, these are all the things that he would have still. And I was looking into reincarnation just generally, because we haven't had a reincarnation of the Buddha, but we obviously have the Dalai Lama. He's a reincarnation of, so he's the 14th, I believe. He's threatening, and I don't know what the latest update on this is,

but he's saying he might not reincarnate anymore. Just to stick it to the Chinese. Yeah, he's going to put it up as a vote. That is petty. He's going to take a vote on it. Well, yeah, this is the last, you know, that you may have changed in, you know. He was speaking about it in September last year,

so it's very recent that he said he might not do it. But it's so interesting the way that they do find the reincarnations. Did they not like give a child some of the old Dalai Lama's possessions and see if he likes them? Yes, so there were a bunch of possessions that were given to him,

and he was picking them up saying, oh, this is mine, this is mine. It tends to be... But if you give children anything, they say this is mine, this is mine. But there's a bunch of things on the ground. There was a kid who was told that he was a reincarnation of a Lama,

and it was down to a few things like he was able to identify the colour of the previous Lama's car. And the mileage. What's in the glove box then? Some tic-tacs and my gun. The next Dalai Lama is the guy who stole my car. We did a deal.

Can I just ask a question about this, right? Yeah. So this guy is supposed to be the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. No, no, sorry. There are lots of Lama's that you can be. Like a Punchin Lama or something. Yeah, yeah.

So, like for example, it's been confirmed that Steven Seagal is the reincarnation of a 17th century Buddhist spirit called Chengdragh Dorje. What do you say is being confirmed by the community of the Dalai Lama people? By evidence, Andy. Right?

Yeah, so he's not obviously the Dalai Lama, but he is a... China tried to make their own Lama, didn't they? I thought it was their own Dalai Lama. They said, right, okay, the guy that you guys have chosen in Tibet isn't the real one. We're going to have a lottery to choose,

which is the real one. Oh, really? They had a lottery. They put a load of names in an urn and pulled one out and it was a child. How did that go for them? Is he being raised now? I think he's still there.

I think he is, isn't he? Could I just mention Yogic Flying? Yes, please. Because I like it. So, you know, there was this big 1950s movement, the Transcendental Meditation Movement, and it was a group of people who took on the idea of the power of the frog,

I think it's called in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, and it's the idea that you could reach a state of meditation where you can fly. And famously, there was the Natural Law Party in the 1980s where they tried to get into politics and they would do this flying thing. Yeah. Yeah, so it's quite funny when I think there's video footage

of the groups that tried to do it, the Beatles were quite interested in it, and Yogic Flying has three stages, and stage one is hopping, and stage two is floating, and stage three is flying. I could do stage one of those. The key breach point is between one and two, though, isn't it?

So, you've got two, your three is probably going to be fine. So, the Transcendental Movement itself admits that no one in the modern era has yet got beyond stage one. Keep at it, guys. Do you guys know, have you guys heard of Druk Pakunli? No. He was a Buddhist master in the 15th century.

He was the guy who brought Buddhism to Bhutan. Okay. And he had pretty wacky methods of, like, enlightening people and pretty wacky Buddhist practices. He mainly tried his methods on women, and so he had the title, The Saint of the 5,000 Women. Among other things, women would seek his blessing

in the form of sex. He's called the Defined Madman. Is that the guy? He's always called the Defined Madman. His penis is called the Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom. Yeah, I've been invited by it. Oh, you have, haven't you? Yeah, what?

What do you mean? I've been to a, what do you call these, like a temple of his, and as you go in, there's a priest with a large wooden phallus, and he sort of puts it on each shoulder, like knighting it, like the queen would, well... The queen would do it. But then it's supposed to be like a fertility thing.

God, Bolton's changed since I was last there. Where is he? This was in Bhutan. Okay, cool. Put an acra there. That's amazing. That's what he does. He's been anointed by the phallus.

What is it called? The Thunderbolt of? It's the Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom. It had the power to turn women into deities, but I guess that was the real thing. I don't think James is a god, I think. But what happens is you walk into this temple, and the priest approaches you with a giant phallus.

I imagine the first time that happened, it was probably Brother Dave again. Exactly. Well, the houses around here, they paint phalluses on their walls as well. Around there? Around this area, right, Bolton? If you go around there,

there's shops that sell local produce, and they all have big pictures of penises on the walls. People draw those on walls around near where I live as well, actually. Do you guys know religious communism? Yeah, apparently. On your front door. Yeah.

What a devout place we are. Maybe that's what the Buddha meant when he says withdrawn genitalia. It's withdrawn genitalia. Oh, my goodness. Cease the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everybody, it's Andy here.

Sorry to cut into the fact again that it's happening. This is just to remind you that today's podcast is sponsored by Squarespace, the website building website company. So if you like websites, and you want to see another one of them in the world, which you have birthed, then they're very good people to do it with.

They offer a lot of support and things like that. And also, if you go to their website and type in the code FISH, they'll give you 10% off your website. All right, carry on with the podcast. Okay, time for fact number three, and that's my fact. And my fact this week is that the Whoopi Cushion

was invented by Roman emperor called Basi Anus. Now, that is just... I've never heard of this emperor. So the Roman emperor, Ella Gabalus, he is the famous, that's his name. His birth name was Basi Anus. Now, I'm sure it might be pronounced... Bassianus?

Sorry about that, but when you read it and you find out he invented the Whoopi Cushion, I just don't know how. You can't let that go. Yeah. Basi Anus. What described the Whoopi Cushion? Well, it was obviously a prototype to what we have now.

It was in development hell for nearly 2,000 years. A prototype. He just used to bring a cushion that had air in it and he would bring it to his dinner parties and he was only 14 or so at the time. He was a very young emperor and it just used to be his little party trick, his little... And it let out a while while he was there.

That's all we know about it really, isn't it? Yeah, didn't it sink them? Yeah, it could be rather that they were at a normal height and then just got lower and lower and lower as it went on. I don't know if it made a farting noise. It might have done. Yeah, I think it's... I mean, any, you know, anything full of air

where you've got something coming out of a sphincter that it's going to make a noise. Yeah, especially because they had to come out slowly, I guess, because they had to sink gradually. It would be one of those squeaky farts. Yeah. That went on forever. Yeah, yeah.

All dinner. Oh, this is still embarrassing. Another thing Ella Gabalus did to dinner guests, apparently, is suffocated a bunch of dinner guests under loads of rose petals. Really? I'm a bastard, but yeah, I think that's quite an imaginative way to go about murdering your dinner guests

if you do want to do that. That's true. Did he mean to, or was that actually... He actually just wanted them to go home. It was kind of his way of hinting that it was late. He was tired. Yeah. He locked them in a room, didn't he,

and they had a fake ceiling, and he dropped out all these rose petals, but there were so many of them that they all suffocated. But he did mean them to. I thought he was trying to kill them. Oh, I don't know. He was a total dick, though, wasn't he? Yeah.

I don't know much about him, but from what I've read... He was a real basey anus. Yeah, he wasn't a nice guy. He had all these... It's one of those ones where the stories are half funny, as well as the bad bits. He kind of just used to go and prostitute himself in bars and dresses of women,

and he purposefully tried to piss off people so that they would beat him up, because he had a bit of a fetish about being beat up, and he's a very odd character. The weirdest thing I read is that he wanted to have his dick chopped off. Right? And so he went to a doctor,

and the doctor said, I don't want to do that. And he said, no, do it. And apparently they really, like, thrashed out the conversation. And the compromise, and this is from what I've read they said,

they compromised on, he was circumcised. That's a hell of a compromise. That's a huge compromise. That is a massive possession, too. That is kind of level one of the three levels of chopping your penis off. Wait, what's the third one?

I think the third one is the full chopping. Absolutely, not his total lob off. The whole second one. I don't want to know, I don't want to know, I don't want to know. Right. Yeah, so interesting character. Yeah. And again, it's another thing where just even if it,

like for me the enjoyable thing of the fact is that he was called Basianus, but actually the initial thing of the whoopee cushion being invented as far back as then is like on a previous podcast when I found out that yo-yos were being used from that period as well. It just, it's so out of place to me to think that a whoopee cushion was that far back in time

as a practical joke as well. Yeah, yeah. You know the whoopee cushion, when it had its first 20th century origin wasn't actually called a whoopee cushion. It was called a musical seat in 1926. And it didn't really make a fart noise either, so it wasn't very good.

Did it make music? Well, in the catalogue it says, sounds like you sat on a cat. It made this weird little scream. It was quite upsetting to hear, apparently. Like a screeching cat or a crying child. And it was invented, and then initially it was called the poo-poo cushion

or the boop-boop-a-doop. These are not good names. But when they hit on the name whoopee cushion, which was only in 1932, that was after the slang term whoopee, and making whoopee is a slang term for having sex. So the whoopee cushion is named after sex. So it was a sex cushion.

So who made that connection? Is that what it's for? Yeah. Well, there was a hit song in 1928 called making whoopee. Yeah. But who called the whoopee cushion a few years later? I think whoopee then became just having fun after that, and then became like a...

That makes more sense. So Sorenson Adams, who was a very famous joke developer, the SS Adams currently, loads of stuff, like the insect in an ice cube, and the flower that squirts stuff out. Yeah, all of these really classic jokes.

A lot of them were invented by him. But he turned down the whoopee cushion initially because he thought it was indelicate. And then he realized his mistake soon after it was, you know, to become a big success. And he made his own one, which was called the raspberry cushion. Okay.

Yeah. But he also invented the droid buzzer. Which is the hand buzzer. Exactly, yeah. Okay, I just want to... You know when you shake hands with someone, and there's a buzzer in there, and it's a little electric shock or something.

It's actually just a vibration, isn't it? It's not electric shock. Yeah. But I just want to read you this. It was modeled after another product, the zapper, which was similar to the droid buzzer, but did not have a very effective buzz, and contained a button that had a blunt point

that would hurt the person whose hand was shaken. So just a mini knife, basically. That's got you really good with that one. Yeah, I'll get the bandages. Funny prank. I just stabbed you in the chest. Now just stand underneath all these rose petals. Yeah.

Hey, smell my flower. It's a gun! So Sirenston Adams, he started off with itching powder. Or was it sneezing powder? Yeah. No, it was sneezing powder. Okay, yeah. And he worked for a company that made this,

whatever product it was, and they had this dust that was left over from the product, and he noticed that people were sneezing from it. And so then he thought, oh, this is a great prank. I can make this and sell it. And he started selling loads and loads of this sneezing powder, and became really big.

It was called Kachou. And his first year, he sold $15,000 worth. But 25 years later, the FDA banned it as a toxic substance. So for all that time, he'd be poisoning people as well as making them sneeze. Oh, wow. It was genuinely toxic.

Oh, that's quite funny. That is health and safety got mad. Another thing they used was itching powder. Wasn't it in World War II? And it came, there was an idea to plant itching powder on Nazis in various ways. And on the instructions

that were given to people who were trying to infiltrate and plant this, it said, the greatest effect is produced by applying the powder to the inside of the underclothing. So I don't know how it was intended. Wow, yeah, exactly. You think when they were pitching that in the meeting,

they said, okay, so let me get this right. You've made it right up to a Nazi. You got your gun on you, yeah? Okay, so now I want you to take out the gun and just use it to apply a bit of the itching powder to his underclothes. Be careful. In World War I,

they had sneezing powder, the Germans, this is. And it didn't do you that much harm. Apart from, it made you sneeze, so it made you take off your gas mask, and then they'd be able to get you with the other stuff. Oh, cheeky. Wow.

Okay. Why did you take off your gas mask when you sneeze? You don't want to get spit all over your face. I think it was like, it would kind of just get in their eyes and in the nose and stuff. They just needed fresh air. Okay, okay.

Wow. The man who invented the fart machine, much later than the whoopee cushion, he tried to record the sounds with his friend. His name was Fred Jarrow, and he and his friend John Blackman, who was developing it, tried to record it by going into a recording studio

after having eaten lots of fart-causing foods, like cabbage and beans and things, and they said it didn't work. It didn't sound right. What did the people around them say? You're never using this recording studio again. What did they use in the end for the sounds? A synthesizer, sadly.

Wow, okay. Oh, yeah. My old Yamaha didn't have a fart button of it, so have I just not understanding how synthesizers work? Yeah, I know. And also, here's the thing, a synthesizer uses recordings of sounds that it collects. Yeah, exactly.

So he must have got it from somewhere else originally. Yeah. All right. I don't know the full details on this one. I'm going to fess up. I think they used existing sounds and slowed them down and sped them up. Oh, okay.

You know, made them sound... Okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah, okay. That makes sense. Yeah. One more prankster was Jim Moran in America, who was born in 1907. He lived until 1999.

He was called America's number one prankster, and he did lots of, you know, fun, crazy pranks. Like, he walked a bull through a China shop once, and he did this kind of thing. He also looked for a needle in a haystack in 1939, and it took him 82 hours before he found it. Yeah, but who's that? A Joe Kahn?

Yeah, himself, isn't it? It was near the bottom and slightly to the left of center. But this, I love so much about it. Pranksters tried to set fire to the haystack five times while he was in it. Out pranking the prankster. The jokes on him. Kinda.

Tried to. How do you fail to light? Well, you know the saying. You know what it was. It's like trying to set fire to a haystack. How did he know the needle was in there? I think he put it in there. Was he just, like, fingers crossed?

Okay, he definitely... So if he put it there... Yeah, that's a very good point. Well, he must have thrown it in, and then it must have fallen through. No, I think he would have got a friend to put it in. Yeah, I agree. I'm amazed he had friends.

Okay, time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that the oldest known purse is decorated with dog's teeth. Okay. So it's very old bling. This is found in a grave

dated to 2500 BC, and it was a leather pouch decorated with dog's teeth in a nice little pattern. But over the years, the leather has disappeared, so the always left was the teeth. Cool.

But they've kind of worked out that it must have been a purse. A purse rather than a dog. It was decorated in the shape of a dog's mouth. And next to it was, like, a bum bag decorated with dogs. Skeleton. Yeah, that's really interesting.

I guess they used what they could find. What were they carrying back then? I don't know, really. You would carry, let's say you'd carry... More dog's teeth. Something valuable or some food or some, you know, a tool or something. So this is according to

Harold Staubel, the senior archaeologist at Germany's Saxon State Archaeology Office. And he thinks that it was very fashionable at the time to decorate these handbags with dog's teeth because he says that not everyone was buried with them. It was only people of high status

who were, so it must have been quite... Quite good. High status people who were catching dogs. Yeah. Maybe that was a sign of just... I mean, what meant high status 3,000 years ago? Yeah, we're... What, like, civilisation are we talking about?

We're talking... Bronze age, stone age. Bronze age, stone age. I do like that we've... Humans have, like, wanted to adorn ourselves since as long as we know they've existed, basically. And we just find...

The elders as well, didn't they? They had, like, little trinkets and stuff they were buried with. Yeah. Like, I think the oldest... I think maybe until 2006 the oldest jewellery we had were snail shells, weren't they,

from about 75... I want to say 75,000 years ago. And we found them in a cave in South Africa. And it was just, like, little holes drilled in snail shells which they think they used to hook them into their... some bit of their body.

In the Bible, Judas is specifically identified as the guy who was carrying the purse. See? Yeah. Well, he was given money in the purse, wasn't he? He was given 30 pieces of silver in the purse. Oh, yes, that's true.

I thought that was... His name... Sorry, go on. Well, he took... If Jesus was given anything, so it says in John's Gospel, Judas had the purse into which was put whatsoever was ministered to Christ.

So it was... He was the banker. As always, when playing Monopoly, as in the Bible, don't trust the banker. He's cheating. Be a good actual version of Monopoly. Yeah. Where you have to betray one of them,

one of the other players who's then crucified. That must be why... So Judas Iscariot, the name Iscariot, comes from the Latin scorteur, which is a purse or a bag used to carry money. Right. Yeah. So maybe that's that.

Do you think that's where the word scrollton comes from? I wonder. I bet it is. So was he Mr. Moneybags? I guess he was Mr. Moneybags. Oh, Mr. Scrollton. And I wonder he was resentful. Guys, it means moneybags.

You'll see. You'll see. Yeah, yeah, Judas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Scrollty. Well, scrolltons have been used as purses. Have they? Well, they use them like...

In Australia, you can buy kangaroo scrollton purses. Oh, yeah. That's right. That's really big at the moment. Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's a W-shaped kangaroo scrollton purse. And that is kind of...

If you can imagine the two bits where the testicles go, rather than being attached like webtoes might be, they're kind of more like a W-shape. Is that so you can keep different things in the different halves? I think it's just because they're rare. They're rare. It's like one in 10,000 kangaroo scrolltons shaped like this. It's like a lucky four-leaf clover.

Yes. Except for the kangaroo. Yeah. That's great. Speaking of designer handbags and stuff like that, women's handbags are much... Oh, women's bags are much more expensive than men's bags, no matter what they look like or anything.

So there was... There's a purse blog run by someone called Amanda Mull, and she looked at all the different things that you could buy. And she found that for two bags which are virtually identical, one for women and one for men, the woman's one cost $2.96 a cubic inch, and the men's one cost $1.54 a cubic inch. And they're pretty much identical.

So the idea is basically they just charge more because it's aimed at a woman. So on designer bags, Louis Vuitton apparently burns all of his bags that he's made that year. Not him personally, he gets someone to burn all the bags he's made that year so that they don't get sold on the cheap the next year because it devalues the items.

Wow, so all the ones that haven't been sold in the shop. So first of all, they have an in-house private Louis Vuitton sale for Louis Vuitton staff, so people can buy a slightly reduced price. But they keep tabs on who's bought them so they can track them. So if one of them appears on eBay, Louis is going to be like,

you put this on eBay, that's now cool. So you can give one as a gift, I think. And then he burns all the rest. Make sure it doesn't devalue the brand. That is insane. He's pretty mental. Yeah. That's why he's never made anything of himself.

Are there any other careers in which he would just set fire to all your stuff at the end of the... Well, it kind of reminds me a bit, not setting fire to it, but a bit like what De Beers did with diamonds in that they deliberately don't sell them to keep the prices high.

Yeah. And grain. I mean, it's the same thing with grain, isn't it? Yeah. To stop grain prices from going nuts. I'm not very good at understanding this. We have huge stocks of grain that go across in every year.

Yeah. I like butter mountains and all that kind of thing. Yeah. There is a New Year's ritual somewhere where you write down... you make little pieces of paper sculpture, basically, on which you have already written things that you didn't really enjoy about last year.

And then you set fire to them a midnight. It's quite fun. I tried that one, yeah? Did you? Yeah. Set fire to the house. There was so much that you were unhappy with. Yeah.

So the year always begins with a big insurance claim. And then that's the first item in the next year's list. That's a thing in China as well, that you write down a confession and you do it on three separate bits of paper and then you light the confession up. And it's a way of almost a priest saying... That must be bad if your lighter runs out

and you've written something really darkly on the piece of paper. Oh, my God. Oh, God. Oh, God. Is there a reason why it's three, De Beers? Yeah. I'm not sure.

I saw it on the Carl Pilkington. Idiot. Why should I? It's because you grew up in China. You know that handbag originally meant a bit of luggage for a man? The original handbags were for men. Yeah. And then it only became women's specific item in 1841,

I think, didn't it? Yeah. It's really recent. And do you know who invented it? The guy who invented the handbag also invented Butterscotch. Samuel Parkinson. Samuel Parkinson. Yeah.

Wow. He invented it, didn't he? It is, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, it is cool. So he came from Doncaster. It's from Doncaster. Well done, Doncaster.

What's that? What's that? It's from Doncaster. Well done, him. And yeah, so he introduced handbags as a women's item, specific women's item, because before women only had those reticules, which are like those tiny drawstring bags

that you could basically fit an earring in. And he said, he wrote to a designer and was like, my wife needs to travel on a train. My wife. No way. From Doncaster. So I looked up a few of the oldest things that we know of in particular different fields.

Okay. So the oldest copy of a gospel was found inside the mask of a mummy. Oh. Wasn't that really recent? That was really recent. Yeah, really recent. Yeah, it was discovered.

And it was basically, they made all these things out of, it was made out of papyrus, which were then basically turned into papier-mache. And all kinds of different things were used, all kinds of texts were used to make mummy's mask. So there were business papers and just personal letters or biblical documents,

like the early gospel. Do you think it was for something for them to read? It was the Google glass of its day. God, that would be awful. I'm getting so tired of this. Yeah, and then you were... In the beginning shit. Will somebody turn the page?

Sorry, go on. And so Greek texts, things like homosodicy, would be used as the contents of a papier-mache papyrus mask. Wow. It's so strange. You never think of that. No, what did they make it out of?

Yeah. Just any old paper, it seems. They just use it. And they can read it now by taking the mask apart. It's like today's headlines are tomorrow's papier-mache mummy masks. Yeah. It's probably a saying in those days. Yeah, and when you go to the fish and chip shop,

they give you a mummy's mask to eat it out. The world's oldest human footprints outside Africa. Anyone, any guesses on where they are? Just on the border leaving Africa. They're on a beach in England. Yeah. They were in Norfolk. Hang on, they're on a beach where the tide just never came in

and washed them away. Basically, they... It's quite tricky. They were indentations in the... Not in the rock, but in the... It's... Sand. Yeah, it's not like the beach, the water's just misted

for millions of years. No, it's really hard. I read an entire article about this, and it's kind of vague, but they were on the beach. They have now been washed away, but they were indentations in the beach somehow which resembled footprints.

I have no idea how they dated them as well, but they are 800,000 years old. That's the amazing thing. I thought it was basically the idea of mud and then the mud dried and kept them, and then a beach... What they discovered was the sand on the beach kind of disappeared and revealed them.

Yes, that's exactly it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 800,000? Yes. That is amazing. But there are places in the UK where you can see footprints of dinosaurs in the same way,

which have been like whether the mud's hardened in the sky. It's amazing. It's so cool. And they only had a very short space of time to get imprints of these before they were washed away by rain and by the effects of the waves. And there was one adult and five children with him, and that's all we know about these footprints,

or this family or whoever it was. Wow. Yeah. How cool is that? It is good. So, dog's teeth were used as currency in Papua New Guinea until as recently as 1960. What?

Yeah. That's good, isn't it? That's amazing. In 1876, we know what you could get for so many teeth. You could get a bride for 100 dog's teeth. That was like the price of a dowry. Wow. Are dogs really...

Like, there's not many there? Or... I don't know, really. I guess. If you're like going out for dinner and you're going, oh, we should probably pick up the bill tonight. How many dog teeth should we bring? Should we bring Rover with us?

Just in case. Like, could you... Was it a special type of teeth? What I think it is, and I might be wrong about this, but teeth have been, and animal bones especially, have been used forever as things to like cut or to, you know, they're useful tools because they're hard and you can do things with them.

Yeah. So, I reckon it's quite often currencies are made out of things that are useful, and then they trade them and then they become a currency, so I bet it's probably something like that. Okay, yeah. That's interesting. Although, when you say 100 dog's teeth,

that is ambiguous. Is it the teeth of 100 dogs? Oh, no. Or is it 100 teeth? Where's the apostrophe in that one? Where's the apostrophe? Yeah, no, it's 100 teeth. 100 teeth.

That come from dogs. So, you don't want to accidentally murder 100 dogs and realize you only need to do three or something. Darling, we're rich. Yeah. That's great. Have we got any more? Shall we wrap up?

And done. The oldest penis in the world, the oldest penis is 100 million years old. What? Is it? He dates the dinosaurs. It belonged to an ostracod, which is an early kind of crustacean,

and it was found on a fossil of that, and some scientists found it and they analyzed it. One of them was Professor David Civeta of the University of Leicester, and it was on a tiny marine creature which was about one millimetre wide. I'm not sure whether that was the penis or the whole animal, but...

The one millimetre penis. Yeah. Oh, my God. It's withdrawn. It's withdrawn. It was the Buddha. But he says that it doesn't have one penis, it has two. So, the earliest ever penis that we've got

is from an animal which had two of them. Wow. It's not bizarre. That's great. That's cool. Yeah. Nice. I like it.

Yeah, me too. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this show, you can find us all on Twitter. I'm on at Shriverland.

Andy. I'm at Andrew Hunter M. James. At Egg Shaped. And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. And we'll be back again next week.

Also, if you go to qi.com slash podcast or no such thing as a fish.com, you can find all of our previous episodes that we've done. Have a listen, and we'll be back again with another episode next week. Goodbye.