No Such Thing As A Fish - 538: No Such Thing As A Sausage Cat
Episode Date: July 4, 2024Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss pink clothes, orange cats, ballot boxes and Buddhist blast offs. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club... Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon
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Hi everybody just before we start this week's show we have a very exciting announcement to make which is that we are going on tour
Later this year. That's right. No such thing as a fish presents Thunder nerds
We are back on the road and if you want to come see us live you can do that
The first date kicking off the tour is the 14th of August at the Edinburgh Fringe
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We will be in Bristol and then we're going over to Ireland to Dublin then we're gonna be in Glasgow Newcastle Cardiff London Manchester
That is all happening throughout September and October this year
Yes
And if you want to get tickets to a brand new live recording of the show
Which by the way we should say includes lots of actually very funny bits
We don't put into the panel show better in many ways you just need to go to no such thing as a fish.com
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some of them there are some tickets left for, so go go go. Hurry now. Alright,
that's it. On with the show. On with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, a weekly podcast coming
to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James
Harkin, Anna Tushinsky and Andrew Hunter Murray. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones
with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here
we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.
My fact is that British elections couldn't go ahead without a device called the spanker. Oh, because without it we wouldn't have any conservative MPs.
Which, actually we're recording this two weeks before the election and at the moment it looks
like we might not have any conservative MPs.
So we don't know the result, so really it could go either way. I personally think they've
got it in the bag, but whatever. So this is not an election special, so we should say
that shouldn't we?
Yes. It is a quarter of an election special. Don't worry, basically. If you've just tuned in the bag, but whatever. So this is not an election special, so we should say that, shouldn't we? Yes.
It is a quarter of an election special.
Don't worry, basically.
If you've just tuned in the morning after the election
thinking, oh, it's nice,
and just facts about wasps or something,
this is only this bit.
But this is very exciting for you
because you're listening to the only four people
who don't know the results of the election.
Yeah, but they can't believe they didn't know
at that point that Donald Trump
is gonna become the Prime Minister.
How did that even happen?
So I've been reading a lot about the election,
and this was a feature about literally the stuff
that needs to make it happen.
You know, the polling booths and the ballot boxes
and all of that.
And it's about this company called Shaw and Son,
who have been making election equipment since 1750.
Wow.
I mean, that's before even my enfranchisement of the vote.
Wow, that's amazing.
Was it always like boxes and stuff?
I'm not sure what the very earliest stuff was,
but these days they do about 160,000
little stubby pencils per election.
That's brilliant.
I always thought they just got those from Argos.
Well, they're like baby carrots.
It's that you...
You get a normal sized pencil.
You have to shave it down.
It takes ages.
Oh, they're not specially bred.
They're not a different species.
No, no, no.
They're just cut in half.
It takes such a long, that's why this company is coining it in.
Can I ask what a spanker is?
Yes.
It's a very, very dull thing compared with its name.
It's a long ruler with a hole in the end, right?
And what you do is you stick that into the ballot box and you use it to mash down the
votes.
So if your ballot box
is still ready, then you just give the old spanker a bit of a spanko and it just crams
them down in the box.
That's crazy.
Do we know the etymology? Why such a sexy name?
I guess it's patting it down like you might.
Yeah, it's just spanking down those.
Spanking is a force, isn't it? It's like a whack.
That's true.
You know the word spanker originally meant just something great.
Did it?
Yeah, just that's a spanker.
Nice car went past, that's a spanker.
I like that. My brand spanking new whatever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And it was a gold coin between 1663 and 1785 if you said you had a spanker,
it meant you had a gold coin in your pocket.
That's so nice.
Very cool. Is that a spanker in your pocket?
One thing I didn't realize is now obviously this no one saw this election coming
Maybe a couple of people who put that son
We don't know if they've got premonition abilities
We don't know what the mystical side of them is but no no one knew this was coming. And this is a nightmare for all of these companies that are running these elections,
because the UK is basically 650 individual elections.
So everyone has to run around and make sure they have the stubby little pencils,
that they have the ballot boxes, that they have everything ready.
But it's even physical venues.
You know, people are like having their weddings in certain places,
in halls that suddenly are needed on this
day.
So the hecticness of the count is quite a thing in Britain and it's also a thing that
is not true of all countries, right? It's quite weird that we still have human beings
counting through votes. You know, in America, I think almost everyone does some form of
electronic voting in lots of other countries. And we've mentioned before the most exciting
result that you guys listening will know and we don't, which is who won out of Sunderland
and Newcastle in the race to see who declares the first constituency. But did you know there
is a third, you know, a reform equivalent coming up on the inside?
Is there, is it, uh, let's say it must be Hartley pool or Durham or Durham or it's got to be somewhere up there, hasn't it?
It is somewhere up there. Well done, James. Why do you say that?
Well, because the other two are up there.
It's sort of because of that. Yeah, because it seems that it's the brainchild of one single man
who did this. And it's a guy called Bill Crawford. and he was head of elections at Sunderland Council in 1992. He thought let's make Sunderland famous for always declaring first the vote.
So for internationalist, they always take about an hour and a half to count all the
votes and it's very exciting because they win. But anyway, we mentioned that Newcastle
then won in 2017 and 2019, but that was because Bill Crawford had changed councils. So he
went to Newcastle and he masterminded their victory.
That's amazing.
And has Bill gone somewhere else now?
He's gone somewhere else.
Has he?
He has gone to Ashington and Blyth,
which I believe is one of the new constituencies
after all the redrawing.
And it's in Northumberland.
Yeah, they've changed all of the constituencies now,
haven't they?
Yeah, the boundaries have gone nuts.
It's really interesting.
But the reason they've done it is to try and make the number of people in each constituency
more level, I think.
That's the idea.
So they want every constituency to have between 69,000 and 77,000 voters in it.
But one interesting thing about that is in the United States, the Congress has 435 members.
But there was an amendment in the constitution
that was gonna say that every district
had to have a maximum of 50,000 citizens.
Okay, they never put this amendment in.
But if they had, then the current US Congress
would have to have at least 6,600 members.
Can I tell you about a candidate?
I love this, okay.
So you know you get on your ballot
paper, like there are some main parties, then a few others, depending on where in the country
you are, there might be some local ones like the SMP or whatever. And there might be a
couple of independents as well. Yeah. And especially in the sort of senior, like the
prime minister seat, there'll be sort of 12 candidates. Yeah. And they're all like monster
raving loony parties. Exactly. Well, I just love this. Okay. In the 1994, this wasn't a biggie actually, this was European elections.
It was in Devon.
Richard Huggott stood for a party that he called the literal Democrats.
Brilliant.
Right?
As opposed to the liberal Democrats.
Thank you for making the comparison for us.
For international listeners who might not have heard of the Lib Dems.
Maybe they're huge in Chattanooga, I don't know.
Who's not heard of our new Prime Minister's party? Come on Andy.
But the literal Democrats, he got 10,000 votes because people just read, oh yeah, they just misread it.
I think it's illegal to do that.
Well, he was responsible, he's probably the only independent MP who's ever got a law changed
because thanks to him, the law was changed
because the actual Lib Dems lost that seat by 700 votes.
Oh wow.
They would have won it,
were it not for the 10,000 who voted for him.
Wowza.
And so he got the law changed.
So they claim.
So you now cannot do that.
That's crazy.
So someone was saying that if Queen Victoria
sort of time traveled to today
and went to a polling booth, it wouldn't look alien to her. It would look exactly like how
she would have remembered it. Because 80% of all of the principles that were set out
in the Ballot Act in 1872 are the same.
So you think those people outside doing selfies with their dogs, that was the same thing?
So that would be a bit confusing. But once she's inside with a little pencil, she's
like, ah, I'm home. She's going to say, what are all these women
doing here?
So if you go to this website, by the way, Sean and sons, the company that did, oh yeah,
Malaki, you can just buy this stuff. You can buy yourself a spanker if you like for 5.95,
which I think is probably cheaper than a lot of other shops might charge you for a spanker.
Yeah. But I mean, you can get all sort of, you can get a basic kit. You can buy a sign saying you may use your own pen.
What would you, Andy, it's only you and your wife in your house, isn't it? Why might you
want a ballot box in your house? Oh, what's for tea tonight? All sorts of things. I would
love that. In fact, I might buy it. There are two weeks to go till the election. So
I might actually buy some stuff for the house.
Like no abuse, that's another sign you can buy.
I'd love to buy one of those for my house.
Do you remember I absolutely walked into a primary school
during the Brexit referendum?
I don't remember that.
I was going to vote in the referendum.
Well, they were voting age, weren't they?
And they were singing in,. That's the problem. I was looking
for where I needed to go and vote and I knew it was on this road, but I didn't see where.
And there was a sign that said out and then there was another sign that said in a bit
further down and I was like, okay, here we go. So I went inside and they went, what are
you doing here? And I was like, I'm just here to vote. They said, this is a school. And
I said, I'm sorry, the signs outside. They said, that's for cars. That's the, that's
the car park. That's an inside in and outside. So you don't drive in the wrong spot.
Tragically, your vote to shake it all about declared invalid.
It was embarrassing. Sean Kemp, who was the head of press for Lib Dems in 2010, said that for party leaders,
dignity has to be less important than coverage sometimes.
Very true.
His lessons have been taken on by the current Lib Dem leader.
Because for people outside the UK, the main part of this campaign for me is that when you look at the news
It's like labor talk about their latest tax or the conservatives
Say how they're gonna stop migration and then it's Ed Davey the leader of the Lib Dems goes bungee jumping with Mr. Blobby
But this has been their technique for at least 15 years
But this has been their technique for at least 15 years. Really?
Yeah, so Nick Clegg went to Go Ape and did a lip sync with Carly Rae Jepsen's I Really
Like You.
Wow.
Don't remember that.
But the main king of it was the head of the Scottish lip dems called Willie Rennie.
Once he was in a farm and he was talking about some, I don't know, wind farms or something.
And he wasn't really sure why he was there.
And he said, I don't know how, farms or something. And he wasn't really sure why he was there. And he said, I don't know how,
but it certainly does help in some way.
Someone somewhere will work it out
and work out why we're here.
He was said this in an interview,
but while he was saying it,
there were two pigs having sex behind him.
It's the most amazing video you've ever seen.
And it became so notorious
that the Courier Evening Telegraph even reported
when the pigs died a few years later because they became so famous.
And the idea is that they think that the press who kind of go around with all these politics
are always really grumpy and they always think they're in the wrong place because who cares
what the Lib Dems say, they want to be where the action's happening.
And so they have to put on all these things to kind of keep the press happy.
Sounds super fun. where the action's happening. And so they have to put on all these things to kind of keep the press happy.
Sounds super fun.
Yeah.
I mean, his tour bus is like, champagne is given out
and party poppers and then, you know,
they all get to go down water slides naked with,
not naked, but you know, in trunks with him.
For me, Ed Davie has been an advert
for how Great Britain can be.
He's just done all the most fun stuff in Britain.
He's secretly working for the British tourist board.
I went on to, so like you went on to the website to buy all of that paraphernalia.
Spanker.
Yeah, the spanker and so on. I went on to the major political party websites to look
at their stores to see if there's any fun stuff that you can get as well.
Merch.
Yeah, they're merch stores and they do have a few things that they're trying to have a
sense of humor with. So for example, on the conservative site, you can buy a pair of Kirsten flip flops.
So you've got his face on them.
You will flip flops between policies all the time.
Can you also buy a massive bin fire from there?
Well, what's interesting is it's only made me realize that it's a very different culture
here in Britain to it is in the States where you have so much merch that comes out during an election and they print so much with the hope of the expectation
the person is going to get in and continue to sell.
But what happens when they lose?
What happens when they have to drop out?
What do you do with all this merch?
And apparently for years after the 2012 election in Kenya, you could see kids just walking
around with Mitt Romney t-shirts and hats, thousands were sent over there. And so, yeah, so they have to just
redistribute all of these things that, yeah, it's pretty extraordinary.
I was on custom condoms.co.uk. Oh yeah. Sure. That was you. You were also on there. One other user is currently looking at this condom.
We've been bidding against each other for that one condom, haven't we?
I won't go any other 59p.
They're selling condoms with political jokes on them.
Nice.
Not practical jokes, that would be awful.
This one's got a hole in it. jokes on them. Not practical jokes. That would be awful. So they have like Rishi no Rashi.
Oh yeah. To protect you from STDs. Very nice. We are Fakir or Ed Davey makes my legs go
wavy. Oh, okay. That's a, I like that. The third one? Yeah, okay.
Anyway, the really interesting thing about this is they also have a poll on their website
about how many they've sold. And at the time of research, labor are on 34.2%, the Tories
were on 19.4%, reform were on 15.6%, and the Lib Dems are on 10.3%, which is almost exactly as the actual polls are. It's
insane. The only difference is that the Green Party are on 14.1. So if you give 7% of their
vote to Labour, it is pretty much exactly the same as the polls.
Wow.
Isn't that amazing?
A great graphic at the end would be if they actually put the condom onto three people's penises, but are they the right height?
When you're on a wreck, let's see who's won. That's the channel four swing-o-meter this year.
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Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is James
Okay
My fact this week is that the never pink movement refers to hunters in the US who refuse to wear pink clothing
Even though it gives them more chance
of shooting their prey and makes them less likely to be shot themselves.
So by not wearing pink they're less likely to catch anything and they're more likely
to be shot by a fellow hunter.
Exactly, but their mates might take the piss out of them because they're wearing pink and
that's why they refuse to do it.
Oh, actually there's a few reasons that we might get to, but...
Is it a political thing?
Is it like pinkos, the communist thing,
or is it just a girlie colour?
I'm afraid it's more of like a homosexual slash girlie thing.
Although actually, there are a group of women never pinkers,
and reason for a lot of them is they just get annoyed that,
you know, why should we wear pink just because we're women? Because some of these pink things, they try and sell them to women
and they think, well, we should wear the same as everyone.
You might be mistaken also for a flamingo actually. So yes.
It is amazing that as part of the research that they cite why pink is better is that
pink is supposedly less visible to the animals that they're hunting. Yeah, it's deer specifically and it's compared to orange.
So most states in America say that you have to wear some kind of high vis and they'll
say it's either orange or pink or it might be other things.
But basically the choice for these hunters is between orange and pink and they much more
prefer to go for orange.
And this I should, came from an article
in the Wall Street Journal by John Clark,
which I read about this.
Here's a cool thing about pink.
You can tell where a salmon is from
by the hue of its flesh.
Cool.
So we've mentioned before that salmon are pink
because of the things they eat, right?
They eat the krill and the shrimp.
They eat flamingos and...
They eat flamingos and flumps.
But the different species of salmon, they all have different diets which are heavier
or lighter in the krill and the shrimp that give them that hue. So if you're an Alaskan
sockeye salmon, you'll be a very deep red because you live near the Bering Sea which
is full of krill.
That's interesting.
But if you're a king salmon, you eat relatively less of that stuff and you'll be much paler.
I think the problem is though that they just put coloring in salmon these days, don't they?
No, they don't put coloring, but they farm salmon and feed them deliberately pink stuff
to make them more pink than they would naturally be.
It would be a lot more gray and less appetizing looking to us.
Pink's an amazing color.
I've never really thought about pink too much, but as far as science knows at the moment,
it's the oldest color on earth.
Okay. The oldest color on earth. Okay. That's the oldest color.
Yes, it was in black and white at some point.
And then one very flamboyant caveman came.
Yeah. Basically, a few years back, they crushed a 1.1 billion year old rock that they found beneath
the Sahara desert and that produced
pink and that's the oldest color that we now know of.
Okay, I see.
Yeah.
So cool.
But weirdly, the oldest color, but also get ready to be upset chemists, physicists, scientists,
it's not a color.
What?
Well, I, people get annoyed when you say this, but it's not a colour, it's not on the spectrum,
right? You look at the spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, a rainbow,
pink isn't in there. And this does make it really special. So the way our eyes merge
other colours, right, is we see a specific wavelength. So you'll see a specific wavelength
for blue or a specific wavelength for red or for green and then if you're seeing two different colors you'll see the average of those
wavelengths so if you see red and yellow the average of those two wavelengths is
orange so you see that but when we see pink it's actually because we're seeing
the shortest wavelength and the longest wavelength so we're seeing red at one
end of the rainbow and then like a violet blue at the other end.
And if you got the average of them, it would be like green in the middle of the rainbow,
which doesn't really make any sense. So our brain invents a new colour.
So pink isn't on the spectrum.
The way you can tell this, this is an exciting experiment you can do, which I find so cool.
Type in magenta circle or go onto Microsoft Word and draw yourself a magenta circle. Stare
at that circle for a minute. And first of all, what you'll see is it goes green around
the edge, which is super cool. And then if you stare at it for a minute, if you look
at the white space on the page next to it, you'll see a green circle. And that's because
that's like the inverse of pink.
Like the negative.
Exactly.
And if you stare at it for a minute longer it tells you who the
zodiac killer is. But you're wearing a pink watch and you're trying to say basically that color doesn't... is brain
fabricated. Yeah and other things like brown is a little bit but pink is the most obvious and most round the other side of the
spectrum. Yeah brown's not on the spectrum either. No know. And that's another example of an extra spectral color.
It's just not quite as fun as pink.
Maybe the spectrum is not as helpful.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, I'm with you.
Maybe the spectrum is not a good way of thinking about it.
That is just nature though.
The spectrum is just the reality.
I guess I'm defining color as something with a wavelength and pink doesn't have a wavelength.
Okay.
I was reading about just the effect that pink can have on us.
There's this shade of pink called Baker Miller pink.
And it's been given a big claim that it's a pink
that if you stare at or if you're surrounded by,
it calms you down.
So it was based on some old research
which has not been replicated.
However, people kind of don't care.
In jails around the world, like in Switzerland,
they will paint this Baker Miller pink everywhere
because they believe that if you're in its presence, it takes out all your aggression
and it just absolutely winds you down.
And they also use it in sport.
So you have football teams like Norwich City Football Club who will paint the visiting
team's locker room entirely pink so that when they get in their aggression is
taken out and they're not as feisty for the match and even though we don't even
know if it's true it does affect the mentality of people so in America in
American football they do this as well and you'll have the coaches coming in
getting furious about one pink room and he'll like put white paper all over the
walls so that his players don't get influenced by this calming color.
It could definitely have an effect because let's say, well, first of all, the away team
might think, oh no, it's pink. I'm going to be less aggressive. So they might just naturally
think that. But also the home team might think, are we given them the pink dressing room that
will make us better? And it would just make you, you know, psychologically play better.
Yeah.
Psyops. It's all sort of what's it called? Psychosomatic?
Yeah.
If you're the home team, it's good for you to know that.
And then you have to give the away team who are visiting you a pamphlet explaining.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Actually, did you know this?
And as they leave the room, you just quickly whisper to each one of them,
you know, that's not even a color.
And it just psychologically.
You know that song that Chelsea sing, blue is the color.
They used to sing blue is a color.
Unlike pink, of course. A lot of other teams use different things in their dressing rooms instead of this pink colour.
So Burnley FC used to turn the temperature up in the away dressing room to make everyone sweat.
They also made the away dressing room door smaller than normal,
making the players sort of hunch down as they left.
That would have the opposite effect on me,
because I think, gosh, I'm big and tall and mighty.
That's true.
You know, like giving them all a half pint.
They think, wow, I'm huge.
I'm powerful.
In Arsenal, according to legend,
they have a table in the middle of the dressing room,
which is such a height that wherever the managers stood,
some of the people won't be able to see them.
Oh, wow.
What?
That's clever.
How tall is this table?
So you're sat down, like you're sat down on benches.
Yeah.
And it'll be like halfway up the room is this big sort of
like almost like a kitchen counter.
That's great.
In Liverpool, apparently they would polish the floor
really an awful lot in the away dressing room
so that players would have to tip
to around so they didn't slip over. And they put banana peel all over it today. One more of these.
Chelsea FC apparently made the mirrors in the away dressing room, you know like
those halls of mirrors? No. Make you really tall or really small or whatever. They made them making it look
like the away players were smaller than they are
and the home players were bigger than they are.
That's so funny.
I should say this was all according to an article in the Sun about Ollie's.
That's a great collection. Well done, Sun.
Pink ladies? From Greece?
I'm actually thinking of the apples.
Oh, pink lady apple.
But it's actually, I believe several different kinds of apple.
Is it? But they're grouped.
It's like how when you order scampi, you're getting any old stuff.
You know, it's just got batter on it and it's from the sea, basically.
I mean, there is a main one which is called Cripps Pink.
After?
Like how children say crisps.
No.
It's after the gang, the Crip.
No, it's not.
John Cripps, who was a sort of appleographer
from Appleologist.
Yeah, an appleographer is someone who draws apples.
Or writes the biographies of apples.
Well, this guy was in a way doing that because he was breeding the apples. It took him decades
to get the pink lady perfect because they originated in Australia because they need
really high temperatures to grow and to become perfect and
He died in 2022. He was nearly a hundred years old. I think when he died get on him
Oh, those apples. Yeah exactly. Yeah. I like pink lady actually good about you guys. I think it's my favorite apple
It's my favorite apple. Yeah, it's objectively the best apple guys. I think it's just I mean, it's obviously rock hard
It's nice and sour and I like to not like a pink lady.
I actually like a Braben.
Oh.
The lesser appreciated.
Despite having just said the pink lady's the best.
Yeah.
You like the one that is less good.
In the heart of hearts, I know pink lady is the best.
It's also the most expensive and I'm very stingy.
So I'll save that 25p and go for the Braben.
I objectively know that Man City are the best football team, but that doesn't stop me from
supporting Tremere Rovers.
Exactly. Braben is my Tremere.
Do you know we invented pink pigs?
Did we?
Yeah.
Okay.
What were they before?
Brown.
So they weren't... wild pigs aren't pink.
So we went from one non-colour to another non-colour.
Pigs don't exist.
That's why they have no predators in the natural world.
Nothing can see them.
No, we bred them to be pink and we're not really sure why.
It's when humans started breeding animals for farming.
And we assume it's just because we like bright, fun colours.
And they wouldn't survive in the wild as pink because they are quite visible.
And obviously pink is not a very good disguise colour.
And they get sunburnt as well, don't they?
And they do get sunburnt exactly because pink means they've got no melanin.
That's wild.
No, the wild ones.
I was looking at pink slang as well.
Oh yeah.
From Jonathan Green's fantastic dictionary of slang.
Yeah.
We've referred to a few times before, I think,
because it's amazing.
Pink cigar.
It's the penis.
Oh, is it?
Pink oboe. Is this all going to be the penis? No.
Playing the pink oboe does feel like masturbating. That's his penis. Pink panatella, like a panatella
cigar. Oh, is it the Italian version of the pink panther? I'm afraid it's the penis.
Pink torpedo. Yep. Who's the next?
Pink finger.
Next.
It's a skinhead actually.
A pink finger.
Oh yeah, okay, yeah, right.
Unfortunately, it means skinhead, but skinhead means penis.
Um, pink trumpet.
I must be...
I mean, they're all penis.
Pink steel.
Pink steel?
Yeah, penis.
Um, pink palace.
That's a vagina.
It certainly is.
Yes. Pink what? Pinken. The pinken. The pinken.
Pinken. The communist. No, that's the Financial Times newspaper. Oh. Yeah, the pink one. So there
you go. So it's mostly penis. Yeah. Unless it's the Financial Times. It's not the Financial Times, then you're fucking... Oh, dear.
Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.
My fact this week is that monks working at the 2,800-year-old Buddhist temple Daigoji in Japan
maintain a five-story pagoda, a cherry blossom garden,
and a space program.
Space program?
Yeah.
Is that up there with the US and China space programs?
This is, it's a slow start.
They're going to be sending one small satellite up that measures 20 centimeters in length
and 30 centimeters in width.
You won't even fit a very small monk on that.
This is a heritage place in Kyoto and the monks there have become very interested in the idea of,
if you know for example that a temple in space is flying over you can track it and you can pray to
that temple. So it's a sort of even for wandering
monks and so on.
So you know like whenever the ISS goes over, you always get a tiresome person like me going,
oh look that's a star that looks like it's moving. That's the ISS actually.
But instead we'd be like, now we all meditate.
Yeah, exactly. Now it's a meditation thing. So they have teamed up with a satellite developer called TerraSpace Inc, who are also based in Kyoto. And it was meant to go up in 2023.
It hasn't been launched yet, but it's still there. They're doing tons of talks about it and so on.
So it sounds like it's still on the cards, but yeah, that's their plan.
Yeah. And it said that priests will give space services. I mean, is that just like doing something
over Zoom? Does that
mean the priest in the temple on the ground?
What an unromantic way of looking at it. I mean yes it's technically like doing something
over Zoom.
We already have satellites. We can already communicate with Farflun temples and all the
satellites Elon Musk has put up there.
I really like it. I think it's awesome.
It is a bit confusing about how the operation is going to work at the moment largely because
the articles are just translated from a local source. So it's, we haven't got in depth on
it yet, as far as I know. But inside the temple that it's going to be in space, the satellite,
they're going to include a Buddhist statue and a Mandela painting or a few of those.
Mandala, not Mandela.
No, Nelson Mandela is a, yeah, no, a mandala painting.
Yeah, that will be within this tiny little.
Really?
Yeah.
Which we should probably say what Mandela painting is.
It's like one of those geometric circles.
Like a fractal?
Yeah, it's like a fractal, but it's a circle.
But it means something in Buddhism.
It's a sort of holy symbol of eternity, is it?
Yeah.
I have a few of them at home.
Do you?
Yeah, which I have absolutely no idea what they do. I always sell them as a tourist
And that's what they do. They keep the temple going
That's so good. That's very good. Um, the the world of Japanese temples and trines is so interesting. It's amazing
It's so good. There are so many thousands a lot of them are amazingly old and this is I love this the oldest
Continually operating company in the world is a temple building company called Congo Gumi
When it was founded the Prophet Muhammad was eight years old
It really is very old indeed and it was set up by a guy called Shigetsu Congo and the firm kept going independently until
2006 and then it's become a
Subsidiary of another firm, but it is still going
Sell yourself off after what? 1500 years. Big decision.
But they still do it. They still specialize in construction and maintenance of Buddhist temples.
One good thing they have going is that some temples in Japan
knock themselves down every 20 years. Do they?
Is that a good thing? Yeah.
They knock themselves. If you're part of the building company.
Oh yeah. So the idea is, and this is most famously a shrine in Tokyo that I've been to whose name
I can't remember and I haven't written down, but it's like one of the main shrines in Tokyo.
And every 20 years, they knock it down and they build a new one.
And the idea is one to sort of show renewal, which is obviously big in these religions. But also it keeps the
artisan skills alive. Because if you're building, let's say
you're building churches in the UK, you might build a church,
but then you might not need another one for 60 years. Yeah,
yeah, we have even 600 years. Yeah. And so who knows how to
make an apps at that stage.
So it's kind of planned obsolescence, which we're used to hearing about with iPhones,
but this is the Japanese temples. I think I know the name. Is it the Chumbawamba
temple? It gets done again. Yeah, yeah.
It's something for the 90s children. No?
Yeah, I love that. But the entire process takes about 17 years. So you
build it, it's there, you do three years of everything's fine. And then after three years,
you have to start planning for the next one.
Come on, this is unionized bullshit. There's no way that's necessary. There is this interesting
division slash marriage between shrines and temples in Japan, which
I didn't really know.
So there are 80,000 Shinto shrines and about 77,000 Buddhist temples, and you'll be going
to see one or the other.
They often look really similar.
And often they used to be the same.
It's kind of sad because Japanese people believed in Shintoism and then Buddhism came along about the 6th century
and they sort of merged quite happily until the 19th century and you'd have shrine temples and temple shrines and
you'd have like Buddhas inside Shinto shrines and then in the 19th century the Meiji Restoration said no
let's split them up and let's make sure that
Buddhas know that they're secondary to Shintoism
and now they're divided, but you do get some Buddhas hidden in shrines still. Yeah, some sneaky
Buddhas. I have to agree that 40,000 temples in Japan were destroyed during the Meiji Restoration
period because that's imperial rule was restored and that basically the Buddhist religion had been
quite closely associated with the previous dynasty and there were all sorts of rules, like you had to affiliate yourself with the
Buddhist temple under the previous rules.
And that was partly to prove you weren't Christian and you had to do that just to lead a normal
life basically.
It was kind of a condition of citizenship.
So I think a lot of frustration had built up around that, which is why when the major
restoration happened, all of these tens of thousands of temples.
That's like half the temples.
Japan is obviously a very big country,
but it's just the number of temples
that is just staggering.
I went to a moss one.
Did you?
Yeah, I think it was in Kyoto.
I can't really remember, but I think you go over there
and there's like a bucket of water and you have a spoon
and you pour the water over the butter or whatever it is.
And then it helps the moss to grow.
And it's really nice.
I think you like say a wish and it comes true.
My wish has already come true.
I was starting on a shrine.
There's another one that helps you cure your warts.
The idea there is you put a coin in an offering box
and you pick up a handful of salt
and rub it in whichever area has warts in it.
And why didn't it work for you, James?
And there's another one I really like that I've never been to but it's a single word shrine
and what you do is you put your coin in the box, you clap your hands twice
and then your wish has to be a single word so you can't say I wish to win a hundred quid in the
lottery you have to just say one word and if your wish doesn't edit down to one word, you can't have it.
That's quite good.
Stomach.
That's...
And is that so that whatever God it is who's in control
has a bit of leeway so you could say cat.
And if the God wanted,
they could send a tiger to maul you to death.
Oh yeah.
That would be good.
That's good.
Like a monkey's paw.
Exactly.
Yeah.
One of the good things is if something traumatic happens in a Westerner's life, they often
go to try and find themselves.
And there's an example, which is slightly topical, which is Gareth Southgate.
So Gareth Southgate, right after England football manager, so the Euros are currently on.
Sorry.
Yeah, sorry.
So back in the nineties, he famously
botched a penalty kick and it was huge news. And yeah, when it got to the point where even
his mother said to him, I quote, why didn't you blast it, dear? I need to get out of here.
So he went to Bali and he thought I'm just going to get some rest. And so they stayed
in this beautiful place where they were completely isolated and they found a stunning Buddhist temple. There were lakes
and volcanoes nearby. He said it was absolutely magical. And then he said in the distance,
he saw a monk associated with the temple walk over to him and he comes up to him and the
monk says, you're Garrett Southgate. Oh mate, that penalty. Now I'm paraphrasing though, but those are the those are the words he basically said I did not like that
But it would have blasted that
She was advising the space program temple as well
Have you heard of the shrine you go where you want to break up with someone? This is
great. Oh, no, I haven't heard of that. So quite around about where you're in the car
on the way. I know nothing about this. I'll quickly Google it. Wait till we get there.
Basically there's a whole there's a whole sort of subspecies of shrines. I think they're
called angry shrines and the local gods, they give you the strength to cut ties between
you and another
or whatever kind. So it might be a relationship, it might be a work thing, might be anything.
And there's one, for example, Mantokuchi temple in Gunma prefecture, which is where women could
escape their abusive husbands. So it was quite an unusual kind of shrine because there's quite
male environments, but this was a place where women could divorce their husbands. And these days, if you go there, you can get a set of papers.
They're either red or black, and you feel like one is, I want a new relationship to be formed,
and one is, I want to break an old relationship.
You know how I was saying, Andy, about you buying a ballot box for you and your wife?
Oh no! I opened it on the morning this episode is released.
Dozens of Japanese characters I can't read, but all
saying the same sad message. So you fill in these papers, right? You go into the special
prayer area, which contains two Japanese squat toilets, and you put your paper so it floats
on the water for a few seconds. So it's not also used as a squat toilet, right? Do not
use the toilet. And then you flush your prayers and that is the way that it gets
carried away. Yeah, that's a very unusual variety of trine, but it shows you the range
they've got. And they've got a huge problem in Japan, haven't they? Their rivers are just
full of flushed prayers. It's very dangerous to swim in. Do you know, we've never talked
about the oldest temple in the world?
This is Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which is quite recently confirmed to be the oldest
in the world.
And it has a headless torso with an erect penis as part of its decor.
It's these 60 massive pillars, like limestone pillars, that have all these engravings on
them. 60 massive pillars, like limestone pillars, that have all these engravings on them and
they were built 11,000 years ago and then deliberately all buried a couple of thousand
years later. And yeah, they've got these amazing carvings on them and a lot of them are penis
based, obviously, because the earliest temples, they were obviously worshipping penises. And
so they feature, they also feature eyeless ducks in their sculptures, which is quite scary. Also euphemism for penis.
That's the one-eyed duck you're thinking of.
But in the land of the eyeless ducks, the one-eyed duck is king.
Sure. They also have scum carvings of boars, foxes and a headless man with erections which the
German and English text accompanying it mentioned and the Turkish text does not.
Wow. But interestingly they think this temple is why we invented agriculture. So
it's unclear why this was built at a time when we were hunter-gatherers and
moving around a lot. It was built before we'd settled agriculturally and it would have taken an enormous workforce
and they would have stuck around for ages and ages
to build it.
And they think it might be that to build this temple,
they had to be like, we need a permanent food source.
We need to get houses for all these people
so that they can stick around and build it.
And that was what led to the first agriculture.
So it wasn't that we invented temples
once we came up with farming and sat in one place.
We invented farming because of this temple.
That is really cool.
I was told one theory that the reason they buried it is because they knew that an army
was coming to take over.
So they just all buried it.
And then when they arrived, they just went, yeah, no, nothing to see here.
It says there's a big city.
Just go over this big mound
there's a little one-eyed duck sticking up here is that not something
do you know we've never talked about someone who must be one of Dan's favorite characters
um just speaking of weird space programs the Zambian space program oh right yeah no we haven't
um no we haven't and i love this guy. So 1964, obviously America Had A Space Programme,
Russia Had A Space Programme, USSR,
and Zambia had one and it was headed up
by Edward Makuka Nkoloso, who was a science teacher
and he was director of the National Academy
of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, unofficial,
and he decided that they would be the first country
to reach the moon.
And yeah, they actually never made it to the moon in the end.
Yeah, I know, weird, but they got really close.
Yeah, no, they didn't.
He asked for a lot of billions of dollars of funding from various countries,
but his methods were so fun.
So he recruited 12 Afro-nauts and he did this whole training,
he made up that name, and he did this whole training, he made up that name and he invented
this training regimen which included he'd shut them in an oil drum and then he'd spin
them around trees and roll them down hills in it so they could get used to being weightless.
Being bullied, they get used to being bullied which might happen if you're on a long space
journey.
Oh yeah.
Well if I'm on one. You arrive at the moon with no lunch money for days now.
No, no, don't push my head down the toilet.
It's literally a vacuum into space.
Stop the podcast.
Stop the podcast.
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OK. It is time for our final fact of the show and that is Anna.
My fact this week is that cats only come in two colours.
Pink and brown.
Well, close.
It's just not true.
It isn't true.
It's not even, I've seen cats, we've all seen cats.
This is explained best I found by the Cat Fanciers Association, who had a very, an excellent
I would think so.
I'm not surprised there not dogs are us.
They had an excellent paper on this and basically explained that all cats have two colours,
black or red. And all the colours you think you're seeing on cats are just kind of degrees
of black and red.
My cat is blue.
Thank you for raising blue at this early stage, James. So black and red are expressed by the
B gene, which stands for brown in fact, because black is just very dark brown, and the O gene,
which is orange.
We're learning so much about colours in this episode, aren't we?
They're just not what you thought.
I haven't learned anything, weirdly. It's too complicated.
Your blue cat, as you say-
Black is just dark brown, which doesn't exist by the way,
there's no such thing as brown, but if it gets really dark it's black. I'm not saying black itself
as a colour is dark brown, I'm saying the black you see on cats is actually dark brown. Okay.
And actually often if you have a black cat it goes browner. James your blue cat is just a dilute of
black. What does that mean? It means it's got the black slash brown gene, but then on top of that
It's got the dilution gene and that turns black into blue, but it's still black
It's just added some water. My cat is perfect and I don't like you saying her genes are diluted diluted diluted cat
Sorry, mate. What are we doing with white? Is that just the blank canvas you get?
Oh my god, Dan, you've raised the most difficult question right at the top as the cat fanciers admit
White is the biggest problem.
The thing to know about white,
and you're not going to like this guys,
but this is according to cat fanciers,
white is not a color.
Okay. Oh, I buy that.
Yeah. It's a shade.
I would say black and white aren't really colors.
Black is a color though in this instance.
Yeah, that's what's throwing me.
It's dark brown.
But the thing with white is that your white cat is actually either brown or orange.
So your white cat has genes for either being a black cat or an orange cat,
but then it also has a kit gene, quite nicely named, which covers up those.
And often you can see the true color of the cat on its head.
So if you've got a white cat with a tiny bit of orange on its head, it's actually an orange cat.
And if it mates with another cat cat then they'll likely be orange
I think I follow that because I I was reading that orange cats are likely to be male. Yeah
Yeah, okay
That's because the genetic information of the cat's color is found on the X chromosome
Yeah, and females have two X's like in humans and males have an X and a Y like in humans
So if the male's single X chromosome is orange, that's just an orange cat.
Yeah.
And a male can never have both black and orange genes.
That's true exactly. If you have a tortoiseshell cat,
which is like orange and black and white and stuff, it has to be female.
Because it's got two X's and one X can be black and one can be orange.
Except there are very few males that have an extra X chromosome, which is really rare.
They're XXY.
That's really rare.
So they can be tortoiseshell.
Huge if you've got one of those.
But that's a real...
It's really rare.
And the other type you can have male tortoiseshells is if it's a chimera.
So you start off with an egg and a sperm, but then another egg and sperm come in and
then you've got two embryos and they fuse together to make one cat
Chimeras and then like you get some chimeras where you get a cat and half of it is one color and half
It's the other color and it's exactly how are you kidding?
Really? That's a great thing for a murder mystery plotline
Like the cat that coming in was coming into the room. What color was it?
Yeah, people give different answers and that affects who the killer is.
It's also really good for those panto skits where you play the man and the woman.
That Puss in Boots is going to be electric. It's so weird this stuff. It's fascinating.
It is quite fascinating. One can go a bit too deep. I actually found this fact reading
an article about a new cat color that has been discovered.
So there could be a claim that there's a third color
and that is salty licorice.
And this has just been discovered.
It's a white chest and paws,
and then it's got black body with like white speckles on it
and they're missing a chunk of DNA.
So that's genetically totally different
to anything we've seen before.
It sounds black in color.
No, it's not.
What about the salt?
Salty licorice?
It's like someone with black hair that's going sort of patchy gray, right?
That's it.
Interesting.
And their hair starts out black and then it fades to white by the time it gets to the
end of the hair.
So it's kind of that strange.
And I can't believe, having done this podcast for 10 years, you think, oh, everything's
been discovered.
And then they found a new color of cat in the last year.
Do you know the word licorice? It means this food, this delicious food. Yeah.
But it also had two old meanings. It meant lecherous or someone who enjoys liquor.
So if you were liquor ish, it meant you really like drinking alcohol because you like drinking
liquor ish. And then it also meant lecherous because you might lick things.
drinking liquor and then it also meant lecherous because you might lick things. It's not related to the word lecherous.
This is like an old 18th century meaning.
It was like someone that licked a lot of things was lecherous and therefore they were licorice.
Um, cats, yeah, when they are growing in the womb, this is cool about where they get the
color from. So the colour cells
all grow along their back. They're called neural crest cells. These are the colour cells,
okay? And they start building up and then they migrate around the body of the embryo
and they can get all the way round, in which case you'll have a cat that's one colour.
Oh, is that why you have white bellies?
They can get only part of the way round.
Well, different patches of colour, basically.
Or you have white socks.
If they don't make it all the way round.
Or a Hitler moustache.
And yeah, that's it.
And whether your cat is one colour or different colours
is completely dependent on how far those cells
migrate around the body of the cat in embryo form.
That's so interesting!
So cool!
Because that is it so often you see a white belly on a cat and it's just the belly's
too far from the spine to have migrated all the way around.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Cool.
It's bizarre.
And those socks are weird as well.
Your cat doesn't have socks, does it?
No, she's the perfect all-one color.
Okay.
She's your breed, as foe of the podcast, that old Hitler would approve.
So the cats with socks, you know, the white little white socks that you get, they're lovely,
but they are because we domesticated cats because pre-domestication, that would have
been a terrible idea for a cat to have because they're hunting. And if you see a big white
sock clumping towards you, obviously you spot the cat. So, but early humans probably would
have bred for that.
That's a nice feature to have, a breeder cat with socks.
Like them?
Yeah.
That's very cool.
And your cats are all the same, right?
As in not your cat, James, which is what?
Special and perfect, I'm sure.
But you know what I mean?
Like most cats look more like other cats
than dogs look like other dogs.
I see.
So you don't get like little sausage cats
or great big cats.
Or like Bully XL cats.
It just doesn't happen.
And that's really interesting because there's no actual reason why we couldn't have done that.
Right. So, and the reason is how long have we been breeding dogs for different purposes?
Centuries.
Yeah.
Millennia.
Millennia.
Yeah. And you breed a dog to hunt otters or like a dachshund to hunt badgers in their
sets or to whatever, pick up grouse that you've just shot, whatever.
All these different things.
Whereas cats have fulfilled basically the same function all that time, which is vermin
in the home and companionship.
If we'd put our work in 500 years ago as humans, we could now have, like you're lost in the
Alps and then there's a cat with a barrel of brandy around its neck that comes and saves you.
A terrifying cat guard. When you hear the meow walking past a farm you tense up and
freak out.
We could have had every single cat under the sun. Every single dog could have had its mirror
cat.
I think this is actually a kids book ready to be read.
Oh it is.
It absolutely is. Sausage Cat would be, I'd read that. To kids book ready to be read. Oh, it is. Isn't it? It absolutely is.
Sausage Cat would be, I'd read that.
To a child, that's amazing.
Is it happening though?
Are people breeding?
No, why wouldn't it?
Well, no, but like, you know, why not?
Why haven't we started doing it?
People do breed amazing, like James's amazing British Shorthair Cat.
There are breeds, but they're not being bred to turn spits.
They're all basically being bred because we like the look of them really, aren't they?
Yes, yeah.
I think.
Or some of them, like the British shorthairs, were bred for hunting prowess.
Your cat?
Well, my cat is the most useless cat in history.
But like her breed was bred for chasing birds and stuff like that.
It still does seem to me, not that I'm skeptical about this claim, because I'm not,
but there's explanation, but that cats still seem to have less variety than you'd
expect from lots of breeding. In terms of size, for instance, if we have bred some
for hunting, it's very interesting that you can get tiny, tiny chihuahuas and
giants and burnards, and with cats there's not much variety.
If we'd wanted to, could we have taken an ordinary domestic cat and bred it into the size of a lion?
Yes but I think the other thing is that domestic cats are hunters, all of them pretty much, and so if you do breed a massive cat it's not going to be a lap cat, it's going to go after you, isn't it? Well, the owner is behind it saying, he's very friendly.
This is not the cat he is actually.
The hairless cat, that was a kind of, that was a useful thing they were trying to invent.
Well, it's the people who wanted cats who were allergic to cat hair.
That was the big idea.
But you can't, once you've taken the fall, the hair, I would argue it's no longer really
the same kind of experience of cat ownership.
You've always wanted a cat and you were so sad you couldn't have one
Gollum crawls into the room
Well like those sphinx cats
They look like Gollum really
They don't look good
But it's a slightly pointless exercise as well because it's not just the hair that people are allergic to
There's stuff in their saliva which is yeah so at the time it was believed the hair was a simple thing
But now there's just this naked cat that's still I don't have it. They didn't breathe the dry mouth. No
You know, I sphinx cats are from I'll jump on it Egypt
I did read actually but yeah, Toronto Toronto
It was three weird number of hairless kittens were found in Toronto in the 70s
And they bred them and bred them and so now they're all hairless kittens were found in Toronto in the seventies and they bred them and bred them.
And so now they're all hairless.
Nice.
I was on, I think it was Scientific American.
Yeah, I was on Scientific American.
I came across a headline, which was,
what is the difference between hair and fur?
We spoke with mammalogist Nancy Simmons
of the American Museum of Natural History about this.
Here's the transcript.
Is this gettable?
Yes.
Okay.
Fur on animals, hair on humans? No, hair on monkeys, I guess.
No fur on monkeys, I'd say.
Oh yeah.
If you comb it, it's hair. If you brush it, it's fur.
Right.
No, you brush your hair. Sorry.
Is it structured different, in Mark Heretton?
Hair grows only on your head, fur grows on your chest.
Your pubic fur.
Your pubic hair.
My pubic hair.
That's what I call it.
I'm going to put you out of your misery.
Scientific American asks, is there a difference between hair and fur?
Nancy Simmons replies, there isn't.
Hair and fur are the same thing.
I know, disappointing. Okay, here's the craziest thing I found researching this. Okay. You can give dog blood to a cat. To eat or?
To, not to drink, to infuse. If a cat needs a blood transplant, it can take dog blood.
I find that very difficult to believe. Hashtag more in common. But only once.
This is crazy.
Because they die.
You can drink a pint of arsenic, but only once.
They don't die the first time you do it, but they will die the second.
This is insane.
No way.
So there are dog blood banks.
But they do have nine lives.
There are dog blood banks, which is great for dogs, but there are very few for cats
because for a cat to give blood takes a lot of the cat's blood and it's just a very,
it's harder to do, right? But if your cat needs a blood transfusion, it can take some
dog blood, but then it develops antibodies to the dog blood after the first time it gets
some. So the second time you give it a transfusion, it will, it may react very badly and could
die. But basically there will be cats walking around right now, which are half dog. And dogs, if you're listening, please donate today. You know,
you could be saving a cat's life. That's not the way to advertise it to dogs actually, is it?
I love that we have classical sort of dog people and cat people, right? My favourite example of it
is that the fact that that made it into the Webster's dictionary, the original in 1928.
So Webster, he did an initial dictionary which was in 1806 and in it he used the exact same
phrase to describe a dog and a cat which is just a domestic animal. However, when he published his
dictionary in 1828 he defined a dog as a species of quadrupeds belonging to the genus canis and many
varieties as the mastiff, the hound, the spaniel, the shepherd's dog, the terrier, the harrier, which keeps going on. With cats,
he describes the cat as it is a deceitful animal and when enraged, extremely spiteful.
That's it.
I really thought, did you guys think he meant in the dictionary he was going to have cat
person and dog person?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But you were just saying Webster was a dog person.
Yeah, he clearly was.
Yeah.
That's brilliant.
That was amazing.
James, cat person, clearly.
Actually really a neither person, I think, but I've had a cat forced upon me.
Okay.
Oh, okay.
You're a people person.
I wouldn't say that.
No, no.
You're barely a person.
I'm a bacteriophage person. I wouldn't say that. You're barely a person. I'm a bacteriophage person. Yes,
finally. Someone will stick up for those guys.
Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd
like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast,
we can all be found on our various social media accounts.
I'm on Instagram on at Shriverland. James?
My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.
Andy?
I'm on Twitter at Andrew Hunter-Eb.
And Anna?
We're on Instagram at no such thing as a fish or Twitter at no such thing or you can email podcast at qi.com.
Yep, or go to our website, no such thing as a fish or twitter at no such thing or you can email podcast at qi.com. Yep or go to our website
no such thing as a fish.com all of our previous episodes are up there there's a link to our secret
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and also you will find a link to the dates to all of our upcoming tour thunder nerds we are going out
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It's very exciting. If you want to come along and see a live podcast recording, do get tickets
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and we'll see you then. Goodbye.
That was really good guys.
That was great.
I feel like the rest is politics, don't have to worry too much.