No Such Thing As A Fish - 57: No Such Thing As A Hoverhorse

Episode Date: April 17, 2015

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss supersmog, horses on treadmills and impossible colours.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting with Anna Chazinski, James Harkin, and Andy 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, that's my fact. My fact this week is that monorails were originally horse drawn. That's really great.

It's like they're ultra-modern, with they're not very modern at all. Yeah, exactly. It's the future, but there's a horse attack. It's like... It's everything. I always wonder. Spaceships have the same thing, I think, don't they? Yeah, exactly.

I've always wanted to know if like back in that period there were books that were just called like, when will I get my hover horse? Like, they hadn't yet known about the next bit of technology. Yeah, the thing I really love about it is all the main new inventions coming out at that time, even household stuff that was run on QI that vacuum cleaners used to be horse drawn as well. Yeah. Just everything was horse-drawn.

We should say why, because that sounds insane, but they were really, really, really big is the idea. And they had the vacuum cleaner would pull up outside your house and they would send in tubes who were inside the house and it would suck all the dust. And the tubes were see-through so you could see all of the crap coming out of the house, which is quite cool, because then you just like see what your neighbor's all the crap that's in the house. Yeah, you don't want to drop embarrassing stuff on your floor.

So you might end up doing that thing of making sure all the stuff that's vacuumed looks really expensive and nice, you know, just for a nosy neighbor. My ming-a's is in the house. God, a few more doesn't matter. I don't know if you've seen it, but the Jacksons have some very expensive looking dust. So when are we talking? What era? This was in 1820 and it was a guy called Ivan Elmenov and this was in Russia.

But the 1800s, like when you think about all of these horse-powered things, it just feels like it was such a productive time for horses. They had a lot of jobs that they seem to have gone through like a job recession recently because they were doing monorails, they were doing, obviously, fire engines, they were doing trains, they were, I mean, they were everywhere and there was this amazing, actually before I mentioned this bit, they were used in plays. The first Ben Hurd play that they did on Broadway was done using real horses on treadmills on the stage.

Yeah, on these treadmills and they were attached to these poles so that the horses couldn't get loose and go into the crowd, but they wanted to make it a spectacle when the audience was watching the chariot races. That's quite a spectacle, isn't it? Yeah, it was incredible. So all these horses were lying, bolting like crazy on a movable floor so they weren't making any ground and it toured the world. It was a huge, huge play.

So they were in plays as well. Do you think the Grand National will ever just be on treadmills? Wow, it's not a bad idea. Yeah. Well, it's not a great idea, is it? What's wrong with it? One disadvantage, for instance, is you only have a very small amount of place where people couldn't watch.

But on the other hand, everyone there gets a really good view of the whole race. You don't see the horses go by a flap and then you have to wait another five minutes to come around again. You watch the whole race, yeah. You see the whole race. No jumps. That's a problem. Not with my revolutionary moving hedge treadmills system.

It'd be like an okay, go video, wouldn't it? Monorails are very old-fashioned in a way. So the official Monorail, I don't know how official it is, but the Monorail's website I looked at. What was the website? It's monorails.org, I think, or monorails.com. It's one of the two. But there are lots of theories that the guys who run that website have about why monorails

are not more popular, why we're not all on a monorail all the time. And there is one theory that they espouse that people actually make a lot more money out of railways or that more groups of people stand to make a profit out of railways. So that's why they've been keeping monorails down. It's the same reason we don't have those everlasting light bulbs. Right. Light bulb manufacturers will go out of business, or the idea that Gillette supposedly have come up with a blade that never dullens, but they won't sell it because then people

stop buying blades. Yeah. I don't buy it myself. But they also say that another problem is that people think of monorails as being a bit eccentric or quaint. So the Disney problem is what you've got, you know, that they go around Disney World or Chessington World of Adventures and, you know, they're not serious. They aren't that serious, though, are they?

I like them, though. But it's like someone who rides a unicycle, just going, I don't know why everyone's not riding unicycles. It's because they make money out of that extra wheel. It's also because it's much easier to ride a bicycle, mate, and it's much easier to make a train. And monorails are really unbalanced, like unicycles, like, well, they're very hard to balance.

They're not because they have saddlebags kind of below the level of the track. And you have to admit that it's more complicated and difficult than just having to see the trains people have got to you. Winston Churchill once drove a monorail. Did he? Yeah. For a job or for fun? Oh, no.

In 1910, before he was prime minister, it was at a Japan-British exhibition, and the daily mail wrote it up and said it was as interesting to him as a new toy would be to a child. And he liked it so much that he then persuaded the prime minister and the chancellor to come and have a go. And he put loads of money into developing it. And he was hugely enthused, and the money ran out eventually. That was a nice simile, as interesting as a toy to a child. And I have some other similes here.

As useful as a coalman on a maglev monorail means like as useful as a chocolate teapot or something like that. A coalman on a maglev monorail. Because you don't need to put coal into a monorail because they run on so and so. There's a list of some other as useful as a which I found online. So these all are things that are useless, as useful as a warm bucket of spit. Not like one of those really handy cold buckets of spit.

And another one, this is my favorite, as useful as a hat full of busted ass holes. So that's a little hat full of busted ass. A little phrase that you could use. Wow. Wow. Have you guys heard of tumor monorails? There's a medical innovation they've come up with. So it's still in the very early days, but they're very tiny nano fibers, which scientists want to use to put into the body to persuade cancer cells to move along them because it mimics the paths that cancers use

to get around inside the body. So they latch on the cancerous cells. They get them to other bits of the body, which is either where scientists can cut them out more safely, as well as less dangerous to operate. Or they can even they've tried experiments actually moving them out of the body. And this is just on rats. They've tried an into a toxic gel. Isn't that incredible?

Do you have a little rail comics coming out of your face and you just watch the little train doodle out? How do they persuade the cancer cells to get on board? Do they have very cheap fare? It just looks like it looks to the cancer cells, I think, like the way that they get around. So they just assume, oh, this is the route that we're going to go on. Isn't that unbelievable?

That's so cool. And you thought monorails were bad. I take it back. That's awesome. All right. Anyone got anything else? San Diego Wilde Animal Park opened in 1972 with a monorail around the park, like a lot of things do. The railway was called the Wagassa Busch Line. Everyone thought Wagassa was like an African name or whatever.

But it actually stood for who gives a shit anyway. As they couldn't think of a name. Oh, wow. That feels like the end of a long meeting. OK, time for fact number two, Andy Murray. My fact is that the great smog of 1952 was so bad that blind people led sighted people home from the train station. The sighted people just could not see where they were going. It was completely impossible.

That's brilliant. That's amazing. So the great smog is the most extraordinary. I think it was a five day stretch in London specifically, but it later spread across the whole of the UK. So what was it like people burning things in their houses or factories or? Yeah, a bit of a mix. So people were using coal, but they were using very dirty coal, which had lots of sulfur in it.

And factories were also belching out lots of sulfur dioxide, which then turned into sulfuric acid in the air. So and all the dirty coal, normally the colfumes would have just gone into the atmosphere and spread out. But there was this layer of cold air above London, which sort of formed this bubble, if you like, of warmer air inside. And everything just turned back towards the ground and mixed with moisture. So would it have been hazardous to your health to breathe in?

Yes. Very much so. Right. I think they think now that 12,000 people died and 100,000 became ill. Wow. Yeah. Oh my God. There were 19 people. I'm not sure if this was the same great smog. It might have been 19 people were drowned after unwittingly walking into the Thames. Yeah, because they couldn't see where they were going. Yeah. So you couldn't see your feet, could you, by the end of it?

And bus conductors had to get out of buses and have flames in front of buses to guide them down the street. Because it was something, I mean, it was about three feet of visibility. And librarians, I find this a really funny image, library, so it got inside buildings and library workers reported walking through stacks of libraries and turning a corner along the library corridor and suddenly bumping into a huge waft of smog that was just sitting in their library. Yeah. Just hanging in as a column.

It's just hanging out. It sounds like something out of the horror film. Trying to check out a book. Yeah. Yeah. Because like I read the Sadler's Wells, they had to stop a play midway through because so much smog entered. But I love that idea of that suddenly being like, whoa, the production levels on this play is phenomenal. Look at this. And they had to abandon dog racing because the dogs couldn't see the hair.

So they just had to talk about it. And presumably the people couldn't see which dog won, right? Everyone demanded money. They couldn't see anything. And they had to cancel football matches because nobody could see the ball. You just kick the ball and you that's it. Everyone's looking for the ball for then, you know, for half an hour. I've been to football matches where they had to be cancelled for fog.

Really? Yeah. And it's interesting when you're like a fan, because often you're behind a goal and you just can't see anything on the other side of the pitch. And you just hear a massive cheer from the other side. You've got no idea whether it's a goal or a save or whatever. I like this as well. So obviously very dangerous on the railway lines, because, you know, there are workers on the railway lines and if you can't see a train.

So train engineers, what they would do, they put little explosives on the line itself, which would go off as the train went over them like a cap gun, basically. I like those things that kids throw on the floor to make a little bang. And then that would make a noise so that they would notify the workers that there was a train coming slowly along the tracks and they could get out of the way. Oh, wow. But that must have been because a smog like that, when this,

this must have been a really productive time of people going, OK, blind people are now offering their services to walk people home at tube stations. The train people are going, OK, we're going to lay down. Like it's very home alone, isn't it? Like everyone's like trying to reinvent how you can get by in a city where you can't see everything's like a 1980s movie to you. Well, just think about it like no one would have been prepared for an entire city to be totally just actually there were.

It was kind of semi-common, wasn't it? That they would have these kind of things. This was the worst by miles. Yeah. Peace Supers were kind of common at the time. Yeah. Peace Super being Peace Super, just being the nickname for the for the fog, because it was as thick as peace soup. And it was greenish, apparently, the greenish yellowish. It had lumps of ham in it.

Yeah. Looking the air. Yeah. No, you're right. It would have been a time of ingenuity, but also like the roads were covered in abandoned cars because people just could not see to drive. So speaking of ingenuity, they have quite bad smog in China at the moment, especially in Beijing and the Chinese state media came up with a number of benefits of smog in China. Has anyone seen these? Yeah, really good.

So one, it unifies the Chinese people. Which is kind of what you were saying, Dan, about, you know, everyone gets together and has to it's like against a common enemy. Yeah. If you excuse the 12,000 or so deaths, it's kind of a party. Think about it. My big, massive smoke machine. It's like the beginning of Matthew Kelly's stars in their eyes. That's what it is.

Tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be falling in the Thames. Another one was it makes people more knowledgeable. Brackets of things like fog. Sure. And also apparently it makes people funnier. Oh, it's because of the dark humor that comes with it. But obviously, if you do come up with any jokes, don't put them online because the party will find you. Even in the smog.

Yeah. Actually, there was a fire in Beijing in 2013 at a Furnish factory. And no one noticed it was on fire because the smog in the city was so bad. That's terrible. I know. Well, the thing in China as well, in Beijing, particularly, is that the Gobi is kind of really encroaching on China at the moment. So not only so smog and fog must be a massive one, but they get huge sandstorms now. Like they have sandstorm warnings on the weather now.

And they started this plan. Do you know about the great green wall of China? I do not. Yeah. They've been building this huge wall of effectively a forest wall. Yeah. Where they're going to try and stop the desert from encroaching and capture all the sand as it comes in. So it's like sand versus smog at the moment,

like an alien versus predator for 21st century China. They're taking each other on. Yeah, you compare everything to bad two thousand and teen films. Yeah, like Shark to Puss versus. Yeah. In China, in 2013 alone, Chinese consumers spent the equivalent of one hundred and forty million dollars on anti smog devices, which is not great because I think. What are they anti smog devices?

Oh, they're sorry. They're just those smog masks that you see a lot of people in China where only about a fifth of them work, so which is kind of a shame. But it's been adopted into their fashions because a couple of years ago on the catwalk, the people on the catwalk had to wear smog masks just because and a designer decided to make smog masks suddenly fashionable. So he's called Yin Peng and his two thousand and fifty

in collection includes fashionable smog masks. And they look so cool. One of them looks like the shredder. Is it the shredder? Who has from Teenage Mutant Ninja? Yeah, one of them looks like Darth Vader. Yeah, are they all films from the seventies and eighties? Yeah, that's the theme he's going for. Yeah. This is the thing.

Hong Kong and China are very good at doing that kind of thing where they try and convince the public that it's now fashionable. And when SARS came out, a very similar. When SARS, remember when SARS came out? That was first released in the nineties film. So everyone was wearing the masks to stop themselves from having the coughs. And there were like huge rappers singing about SARS and stuff. They try to make it a pop culture thing so that people felt comfortable

and cool, wearing sars in your eyes. It's better than dancing with the SARS. Um, on, can I say anything about sight? Yes, yes, please. Vision. Do you guys know about forbidden colors? No, I can't believe I didn't know this. So we can't see all the colors that are available for us to see. For instance, reddish green.

You can't see reddish green with your eyes, but that does exist. And you also can't see yellowish blue. So that means that you can't see a color which is in equal parts getting more red and more green at the same time. We see these things because our cones, which are our receptors, which see these colors will, if they're exposing themselves to, let's say, the red part of reddish green, then they will shut down the green bits of the receptor to allow you to properly see the red and vice versa.

But we could have eyes that could allow us to see both. And some people think there was an experiment done in 1983 which tried to make people see both. And that is a test you can do. And some people claim that they can see these never before seen, never before described colors. If you just, if you look up forbidden colors or impossible colors test, you'll see it online and it's a yellow square next to a blue square.

And there are two white crosses in the middle of each one. And if you stare at that for long enough, apparently you'll see a color that has never before been seen before you. I read a great thing about tiger beetles, which apparently is that they can run so fast that they go blind. Is that one? Yeah. Is that like exceeding the speed of light?

They know they exceed the speed of information, I guess, to their brain. That's really funny. They don't gather enough photons to make a picture of their prey. So they end up having to stop to let their brain catch up so that like in pursuit running and then they'd have to just pause so their brain can suddenly bring the visuals back. Yeah.

And they have to like sometimes all stop three to four times before they actually catch their prey. They're like the opposite of pigeons, because pigeons could see a huge number of as it were, frames per second. Yeah. So we did that thing ages ago on QI, that a film in a cinema to them would look like a slideshow. They would find it incredibly boring.

Yeah. And this has been used by some people to explain why pigeons don't get out of the way as fast as we think they should have. We're driving towards them or cycling towards them. It's because they're seeing stuff more frames per second so they can wait for longer because we slightly they're in the matrix. Yeah. But that's not true.

I crash into them all the time. So whatever this amazing sense is, which means they can escape quicker. It's not working. I cycle into pigeons. OK, time for fact number three. And that is James. OK, my fact this week is that on the 24th of March, 2015, the temperature in Antarctica was higher than in Malta, Madrid and Marrakesh.

So book your flight now. That is extraordinary. This was it. It was the record temperature in Antarctica so far, and it was 17.5 degrees Celsius. And in all those three places, it was around 16 degrees. Wow. Yeah. So does that mean you could go out in a t-shirt?

Yeah, you could. This was on the corner. It's not like in the absolute South Pole. It was on Antarctica, but not right down in the center where it probably was pretty cold, pretty nippy. You can always go out in a t-shirt. That's true, yeah. No one's stopping you, but yeah.

It's true. They have that thing called the 300 Club, don't they? Do you know that? You sit in a sauna at 200 degrees Fahrenheit for as long as you can stand. And then you go out and run around the pole naked. And the idea is that the difference in temperature is 300 degrees Fahrenheit. And also that you pass through all 24 time zones in your imminent.

Do you need to do passport checks at all of those different borders? No, obviously not. You don't get passport checks at time zones. No, but the parts of Antarctica are claimed by different countries. So theoretically, they could pull up areas. We've got no one respects that, though. Like no country. They'll be like, this is ours and everyone's going, it's not.

It's but that's true. It's like Britain saying, oh, this bit's ours. And then everyone else is going, no, it's not. But this is ours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, this bit's ours. Yeah, no, not really. But this is ours.

There is a I thought there was a treaty of the Antarctic which said no one owns it, but only about 50 countries have signed it. And it's probably countries which don't have large claim stakes. Yeah, equatorial Guinea. That's cool. We'll sign it. We'll record that. We'll be the bigger person here. In order to bolster their claim to the Antarctic,

Argentina sent a seven month pregnant woman to Antarctica to give birth. So the first baby born in Antarctica was an Argentinian baby called Emil Marco Palma, and that was in 78 or possibly 79. Yeah, I remember it was 78, I think, because it was the same year I was born. I mean, I don't remember it from when I was born. Even then, James was finding facts. I remember reading it and thinking that could have been me because the first test tube baby was in the same year, Louise Brown.

It was a big year for celebrity babies. Yes. Oh, you could have been so special, James. I know. Well, some people say I am. Your mum. She's a good woman. So it's that this idea that it's hotter in Antarctica

isn't to say that it's always hotter in Antarctica. They logged the record cold temperature last year as well. So it's not to say that everything's warming up exactly by that amount. It's a lot more complicated than that. But of course, this is all probably down to climate change. Right. Big year for Antarctica, breaking its own records constantly.

There's a guy online. He's called Maximiliano Herrera, and he's a climatologist. And he has a list of all the extreme temperature records for every nation on Earth. It's a brilliant website. You know, if you like data, go there. And he's found that in 2015 so far, five nations or territories have set or tied all-time records for the hottest temperature.

Wow. And they are Antarctica, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Wallis and Fortuna Territory and Samoa. Have you seen the hottest temperature ever recorded was in America, I think. It was somewhere called Furnace Creek Ranch. But on the Wikipedia, it's not just a coincidence, that name. Well, on the Wikipedia, it says in brackets after it, formerly Greenland Ranch.

I assume that they changed it after that. I think I might have been there. Is that not in Death Valley? Yeah. Yeah, I've been there. Yeah. Yeah. It was hot. That was a sign saying you must not go out of your cars after 10 a.m. or something, because it was so hot. Everyone was ignoring it, of course. And the people were like frying eggs on the floor and stuff like that.

What? Not hygienic. That's something people never talk about when you talk about frying eggs on a car bonnet. It may work, but it's not hygienic at all. No, I don't think they generally eat them straight afterwards. Oh, do they not? What do they do with the eggs? Throw them away, maybe. What's the point of that?

I know. Someone had to do. I mean, you could eat something in a wrapper, like a microwave meal, for example, on the bonnet of your car. And then at least it would be hygienic. That's dealing with Anna's problem. Dan, please tell us the microwave fact that you told me yesterday. Oh, yeah, I saw this online on National Geographic.

There's been a pulse that's been detected, a microwave. From space, supposedly, it could be a pulsar or aliens even. Since the 90s, they've been thinking, what the hell is this thing? It's been a big mystery, and it would come by every so often. They'd log it and no one would know what it was. And they've dealt with this kind of thing with space before. Mysterious signals that they eventually find out. So they've continued the search to find out what it was,

and they've had a breakthrough. They now know what it is. The microwave signals were coming from a microwave, basically on premise. Any time someone used it, it would send out microwave signals. It would register it, and that was mystery solved. They would always send the same pulses that were two minutes long and then a 30-second garp, and then another two minutes.

Mysterious. Every time. Is that, did you say, since the 90s? Yeah, and I think it's I think it's neighbouring microwaves as well from houses around. It was at Parks Observatory. That's where it was. Such a good fact.

Yeah, I love that. So there has been some really weird weather this year in America, especially. So they've had down the West Coast, for instance, San Francisco was recorded its first ever January without rain, I think. And then on the East Coast, it's been ridiculously snowy. There's everlasting snow in places like Boston. And they've realised, and they've realised it's because of the blob, which is this warm mass of water.

It's a thousand miles long and it's sitting off the West Coast of America in the Pacific Ocean. It's 300 feet deep and it's not cooling off. And it's been there for about a year and a half, and it's just sitting there like hot, not hot. It's about seven degrees Fahrenheit above the water around it and not cooling like it usually would. And so this is causing these crazy weather phenomena all across America

because of the blob. That's amazing. I've never heard that. That's amazing. Yeah, that's cool. So it is a weather thing for you. Go on. What killed a third of Napoleon's army on his way to Moscow in 1812? Yes, it was the cold snap. No, it wasn't. It was heat stroke. What? Yes. No.

Yeah, that's not what I learned in school. It was just as much of a problem. Don't get me wrong. Cold was also a big problem later on. But no, there was an enormous heatwave, which killed a lot of the soldiers who died. Was this going for an Antarctic style? Let's break two records in one year.

How do you know what to wear in the morning? Yeah, quite. It's a nightmare. You go invading Russia in layers always. That's what they're saying. So you can take them off if you have to. I've got a fleece, but there's a crop top underneath here. Don't worry, I'll be fine.

There's an incredible image of the journey to and from Moscow. And he starts out with 400,000 men, a very, very thick line. And it shows where he goes geographically, what the temperature is along the way. By the time he gets there, he's got 100,000 men. By the time he gets back, he has 10,000 men. Yeah, that's incredible. It's one of the best infographics they would call them these days.

But it's a very, very classic chart. I'll try and put it up on my Twitter. Yeah. Because it looks unbelievably cool. Wow. Sorry, go on. No. I was just going to say, I do love how weather in places that you...

Antarctica is the one place that on this podcast is constantly mentioned. That blows me away in terms of the facts. Like the fact that fires... Fires are a problem there. Yes, it's a huge problem. So they have a fire service there. And as soon as they blows me away,

it's got a serious wind problem at the moment because of global issues as well. Oh, does it? I read that it suffers from horizontal avalanches. But I think that's a kind of a description that people who are out there, it's not as dangerous or as crazy as it sounds. But they describe the idea of a horizontal avalanche.

I'm guessing it must be wind, smashing... That's weird. So this is another thing that's happened in America. I think that's called an ice shove. And that's... Or it's also known as an ice tsunami. And it is where wind will...

For instance, in a frozen lake, wind or weird water movements cause the ice to just move like a very slow tsunami onto the land. But it happened last year in Minnesota. And it's so weird. People just woke up and this huge wall of ice was just creeping into their houses and creeping up.

If you watch it, it moves at about a centimetre every couple of seconds. That is still scarier than smog, though, isn't it? Yeah. Imagine walking through a library and there's a big load of ice in front of you. Yeah. Have you heard of spontaneous snowballs?

No. This is a very similar thing. Right. Basically, it's when snow rolls up and forms a snowball on the ground spontaneously because of the wind. And they have a hollow centre and they can be huge.

They can be up to a foot in diameter. And it's when you have a crust of old snow which is covered by a thin layer of new snow on top. And if the conditions are right, a small bit of snow gets rolled along by the wind and it gathers more as it goes. And they have a hollow centre. Yeah.

That's amazing. They're very cool. I was looking at places in Antarctica. There are some quite good place names. Oh, I was literally just about to say this. Go for it. No, no, you go for it. Take it in turns, do one each.

Okay. Let's see who runs out first. Okay, okay. All right, yeah, yeah, let's go. So, couple of my favourites now. Nipple Peak. That's going to be hard to peak. Yep.

Knobhead. Wait a minute, are we doing names or just insults here? Knobhead's good. I will raise you dick peaks. Similar theme. Asses ears. Nice. The office girls.

No one knows why. Shag nasty island. Football mountain. Shapeless mountain, which is really interesting because it was named that. It was named that because of the inability of the discovering team to agree on what its actual shape was.

So much so that shapeless mountain was a confusing thing that when they went to climb shapeless mountain, they climbed the wrong mountain because they assumed it was shapeless mountain and they ended up naming that mountain that they mistakenly climbed, Mistake Peak. Yeah. I think I've only got Mount Cox left and then I'm out.

Guys, these names are about as much used as a hat full of busted assholes. OK, time for our final fact of the show and that is Chazinsky. My fact is that Tonga's official finance minister was also its official court jester. This is this guy, Jesse Bogdanov, who was employed as their financial advisor in 1994,

financial advisor to the government of Tonga and he was, I guess, he got a promotion. Actually, he decided he should be a court jester. It was at his own suggestion, as financial advisor said, why don't you make me your court jester because my birthday is April the 1st. So it seems like the obvious thing to do. It's not much of a CV that is it.

Why should you get this job? Well, my birthday is on April the 1st. It would have been better if it turned out his birthday wasn't on April the 1st. And then it was a trick. Maybe it was. He wasn't a very trustworthy character, slanderous. I hope he's not listening.

He did lose the country about $25 million as their financial advisor. But yeah, there was the Tonga trust fund, which he was given to manage and he invested it all in... Squirty flowers. Massive shoes. And the Big Shoe Index fell off a cliff a few months later.

But all those little cars pulled a bit. It was basically that. He invested it in questionable places and it disappeared. Lost all their money and he had to flee the country. So he left the country. He left the country and he can't return now because he says he fears for his life. I think some Tongans who put their money into this fund

were pretty angry when he lost it all. As court jester, he was quite fun. He used to play saxophone at royal events and he wrote a poem about the king. And yeah, he was generally an entertaining chap in that part of his. That doesn't sound like a lot. He played the saxophone, for heaven's sake.

The funniest of all instruments. So where is this guy now? He's in America. He's changed his name to Jesse Dean. He's the founder and sole practitioner of a company called the Open Window Institute of Emotional Freedom in California. And he does offer hypnosis as part of it.

So he can't go back because he's terrified for his life, but is he a wanted man there or is he? I did not openly. I thought he was forced to pay back a million dollars. He was forced to pay back a lot of money and he still has to pay part of his income to Tonga, but he never admitted any liability. Right.

It's supposed to be a very nice room to pay it back then, isn't it? He's just down the goodness of my heart. Ah, jolly good. So we should tell you Tonga, because a lot of people won't know much about Tonga. Tonga is 171 different islands, right? And they're spread over 700,000 square kilometers of ocean.

It's hugely spread out, but only 36 of the islands have actually got permanent inhabitants on them. Right, okay. Yeah, so lots and lots of them are empty. They used to be called the friendly islands, didn't they? They were originally called that

because James Cook was given such a friendly welcome when he arrived there in 1773, but legend tells that unbeknownst to him, when they were having a big feast, the only reason he departed unscathed was because the chiefs could not agree a plan on how to kill him. So I've been to parties like that.

They must have been kicking themselves after he left. They must have been so close. Okay, so we're five to four in favor of decapitation. Please, can we? Yeah, it's amazing that there isn't just a, okay, if we don't decide on anything, here's our fallback. Like, how do you not have a plan B of basic death?

Between 1918 and 2006, Tonga had only two monarchs. Very long reigns. We know who the current one is. No, nobody knows. But he would have been looking into it. The current one is George Tupo, the sixth. What do we know about George Tupo, the sixth? Almost nothing.

But I believe we know some interesting stuff about George Tupo, the fifth, who was quite a fun character. He used to own the island's only power company, brewery and mobile phone company. He got rid of them eventually. That sounds like he was having a fun time. Sounds like an entrepreneur.

I like him. Was he just making drunken phone calls all the time? Is that his life? He also, I think it was him, wasn't it? Who insisted on being driven around in a London black cab everywhere. And the reason that he gave it this was because a London taxi has the right proportions

to make it easy for you to get in and out whilst wearing spurs and a sword. Wow. Which I think is why we all ride around in them sometimes. That's why I never use Uber. Can't get my sword out of there. I've got a couple of things on gestures. I don't know if anyone does.

So one thing that surprised me is that I just probably very stupidly assumed that all gestures were male back in, you know, the 1500s, the old times. But gestress was an occupation as well. Oh, that's cool. Can I just say that is definitely not the stupidest thing you've ever assumed, Dan.

So. Okay, good. Keep going. So, La Jardinière served as Mary Stewart's gestress in 1543. And she was there for a very long time and she got paid very well. She even got paid four pounds of snow every summer.

I think paid very well. I reckon you believe the PR that she believed. I think that was cocaine, was it? Because if it's cocaine, then four pounds is a lot, I believe. I think that was bonus money. Four pounds of snow, three pounds of scag. It was seen as a refrigeration thing. I can see that that's useful, especially in the spring,

like having a bit of, you know, a bit of snow in your underhouses to keep things cold. I suppose so, yeah. Tycho Brahe, we've mentioned him before, he had his own jester who was a little person, dwarf. And it was his own personal jester who Brahe thought possessed psychic powers and he used to make him sit under the dinner table

while he ate dinner. And in the source I read, I think it was an IO9, which I do like as a source, but it said, he's just had to sit under the table while he ate dinner, probably best not to speculate why he had him do this. Oh. I don't think that was a necessary comment.

Yeah. Didn't Tycho Brahe die because he refused to leave the table? Did he? Yeah. Oh my God. When he needed to pee and he never left. So maybe the jester had enough of him

and then kind of held onto him and stopped him from leaving and made him die. Oh, that's what you're thinking. I'm not circulating a little here, but. My other, my favorite jester that I've learned about recently, Perkyo of Heidelberg. Have you heard of him? No.

Perkyo of Heidelberg, 18th century in Germany. His name actually was a shortening of an Italian for why not? So Perkyo. So he was a dwarf and he was famous for his ability to drink. And anytime he was offered a drink, he would say, Perkyo, which was his name, why not? And he would keep drinking.

That was basically his main entertainment. He would just be drunk the whole time. And he supposedly lived into his 80s. So it didn't, it didn't kill him. But yeah, that was his, that was his one main thing. There must have been times where his name was, and where his catchphrase was quite annoying to him. Hey, do you want to put this snake on your leg?

Perkyo. Do you want to punch in the face? Perkyo, because St. Chrysostom defined a fool as he who gets slapped. Really? Yeah. It's a good definition, isn't it? That is a good definition.

It's also kind of misleading because the role of fools in let's say Tudor courts and late medieval courts was to be the person who could insult the monarch, but get away with it, wasn't it? I like the trick that King James the Sixth of Scotland's jester George Buchanan played on him. So James the Sixth was really lazy about signing official documents.

And he just signed them without reading them. And you know, George kept nagging him, like some annoying wife to actually read the documents. And he wouldn't learn. So George the Jester eventually went to James and made him sign this document, which had tricked him into abdicating the throne and giving it up to his jester.

And then he took the document away, he walked back into the room, said to the king, oh, could you just get up or feel thrown for a second? And then he, the jester, sat down on it and said, I'm King now, by the way, showed him the document. And apparently King James the Sixth always read his official documents after that. But the jester was brutally competent.

Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thanks so much for listening. If you wanna get in contact with any of us about the things we've said in the course of this podcast, you can get us on our Twitter handles. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. I'm at Andrew Hunter M.

James. At Egg Shaped, Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. And we are gonna be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.