No Such Thing As A Fish - 58: No Such Thing As Van Gogh The Elephant

Episode Date: April 24, 2015

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss copyrighted bum-slaps, pickpockets with chopsticks, and Louis Armstrong's passion for laxatives.

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'm sitting here with Anna Chazinski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray, and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Chazinski. My fact is that Kaiser Wilhelm once lost a valuable arms contract for Germany because he slapped the King of Bulgaria on the bottom. This was a thing he did, he liked to slap people on the arse, so the King of Bulgaria was furtunned at the time, and he visited,

and apparently he was wearing his Colonel's uniform, which had been made when he was a bit slimmer, so he'd put on some extra weight, and he was leaning out of the palace window in Germany, and Kaiser Wilhelm noticed that his unmentionables were tight, and so he slapped him on the arse. So his unmentionables are another word for trousers, aren't they? Well I think it was, so the historian says, he noticed that his unmentionables were tight, so when he leaned out of the window he presented a mark so tempting that the Emperor of Minnesota resounding spank on the sacred seat of the King. Anyway, he was very, very angry, and

he then awarded an arms contract to someone else that had been going to go to Germany as a result, so Prank kind of backfired. Yeah, but he did, so he was a big bottom slapper, wasn't he? He loved to slap bottoms. Yeah, I read that he had a secret society, the White Stag dining club, so the idea behind that is that when you were trying to gain admission you'd have to tell a vulgar joke and then present your butt to the Kaiser, who would then slap it, and then you were allowed in.

I already smacked you on the bum with the flat of his sword, which is a bit important to get the flat. Yeah, absolutely. Another death tonight of the White Stag dining club, when the King cut yet another man into, was it Ferdinand? Was that with his hand? That was with his hand, so the flat of the sword was the White Stag dining club, but just casually with acquaintances it was the flat of the hand.

So just explain Anna who Kaiser Wilhelm was. So yeah, Kaiser Wilhelm, as you correctly pronounce it, Kaiser Wilhelm the second was Kaiser of Germany, was King of Germany until 1918, when there was a revolution that eventually led to the rise of the Nazis, etc. Yeah. Kaiser Wilhelm the second was also the Colonel in Chief of the Royal Dragoons at the start of the First World War, and didn't turn up, obviously, for duty because he was the Kaiser of Germany.

So there were lots of things like that, because the Royal Families was so mixed up. So he was the cousin of George V, the King. Wasn't either cousin of this guy who he slapped on the arse as well, or they were related to each other? Yeah. Ferdinand? Yeah. He was the cousin of Nicholas the second, the Tsar of Russia.

It was this incredible time when everyone was related to each other in this circle. Well that's always been Royal Families and Neurie Cousin, they love the old incest. He was a... He kept some weird company, and he was into some quite camp activities, there was quite a famous incident when he was being entertained, so he had like 400 different military uniforms that he liked to dress up, and he changed outfits four or five times a day. He redesigned the German military uniform, something like 37 times in 17 years. He was just obsessed with it.

Love dressing up. I love that idea that, you know, you get armies who don't really know if they're all on the same side. Yeah. Because they've had a redesign. Yeah. Wait, are we supposed to be killing you? Yeah.

Are you wearing March's collection for now in June? Yeah, he... Whenever he had plum pudding, he always wore the uniform of a British admiral. He was insane. He was totally insane. He hit other people as well in public. So he hit the Grand Duke Vladimir, who was a Russian Grand Duke, on the back with a Field Marshal's baton in 1904.

Wow. I mean, he was quite wild, and he didn't really respect anything. On Bumslapping, so for Chinese Lunar New Year, then Taoists visit this temple where they go to get richly slapped or whipped. So men are slapped, and women are whipped by the temple staff, and that means good luck all year round. And thousands of people go to this temple to get slapped every year. On the bum.

On the bottom. According to the church, it is an okay thing to slap your child's butt. Is it? Bop. As long as you call it a bop. Give us your bop. Bop, bop. Wait, is this...

This was the Pope. Yes, always the Pope. But the Pope has also said, if you make fun of my mum, I'll punch you in the face. What? What? Yeah, he did. Didn't you see that? No.

He said this was after the Charlie Hebdo thing. He said, if you make fun of my mum, you can expect a punch. And then he sort of joshed with a cardinal standing next to him, sort of miming, hitting him on the face. Oh, okay. Was it a metaphor for if you make fun of religion, then people will attack you? Yeah. So, asda's buttock slap has been copyrighted, no, trademarked.

So you know the adverts where they go, they have a little jingle and then someone slaps it. Like that, yeah. So for the purposes of advertising meat, fish, poultry game, coffee, tea, bread, agricultural, horticultural and forestry products and other items, you can't use a buttock slap unless you're asda. Did you say forestry? Forestry products.

You can't sell a tree with that. We all know that's the best way to sell a tree. Please buy a tree. You fit it right in your back pocket. Is the slap suggesting you're hitting your wallet? Yeah, it's like I've got, I've spent not that much money, so I still have some money left in my back pocket and now I'm going to slap it. But also, I don't keep my money safely in a purse or wallet, I keep it in loose change

in my pocket. Yes. That's the other implication. So implies you're a bit fun as well. I didn't see, I never read into that second meaning. I have to say, I thought Dan asking about the first meaning was quite obvious. I thought we said like a dad's. Everyone at asda has a fun ass thing.

I don't know. I just thought it was everyone needs a thing. You can't explain it sometimes, you know, you ask a band why they called their band name that. They don't know. I thought maybe asda were like, we don't know why we're hitting, but it's working. Get complete rights on that. Those dickheads trying to sell trees.

Get them away. This is ours. Gotta stop buying woodland from asda. Yeah. Okay. Here's the thing about the Kaiser. So he had like an intimate circle of friends and confidants and apparently one count. They were quite sycophantic.

And so one count allowed himself to be led before the Kaiser, imitating a poodle with a marked rectal opening. I don't know what that means. What does that mean? I don't really know. And actually, I don't really want to know. Is that that he's imitating the marked rectal opening of a poodle or is it the rectal opening separate to the poodle imitation?

There are some dogs where that you can see their bums. Yes. Is that what it is? I think so. The ones with their tails up. Yes. But I wouldn't build that into a fancy dress costume. It just in case someone else comes as a poodle with a marked rectal opening.

Also, there wasn't really a mention of a costume, was there? It just says he was imitating. That's a very broad spectrum of behaviour. He also liked to sit on his horse behind his desk because it made him feel like a warrior when he was doing his homework or his tax return or whatever he was doing. How could you do that? Yeah, did he have a high desk? Or did he have a tiny horse?

A shell and pony. Or did he just have a long pen? Those are the only options I can think of. He led military exercises, which is just training exercises for the whole army. But obviously, whenever he did that, he was so hyper-masculine and so in charge that the commander on the other side had to basically throw the military exercise and say, oh, you've won again, Kaiser Wilhelm. Well done.

Yeah. You know that really awesome character from history, Annie Oakley. Do you know the story about Annie Oakley? So she was part of the Buffalo Bill touring group and she had the amazing shot. And she was asked to shoot off the ash of a cigarette that was being held. In the hands of Kaiser Wilhelm and she did it. So from a distance, she took a shot and she managed to knock the cigarettes in half in his hands.

And people say that had she killed him, that may have prevented World War One. And she actually wrote to him much later, requesting a second shot when she found that out. But he didn't respond. When did this guy die? 1941, I think. Yeah, it's kind of amazing that he got away. He managed to live through the rise of fascism and he lived in what country did he live in?

He lived in the Netherlands in exile for a while. And he kept writing to Hitler. At first he started writing to Hitler, congratulating him on winning various battles with my armies in a sort of, look, we're on the same team, you're using my military and Hitler was kind of like, what are you talking about? You've been missing for 20 years. I overthrew you. And eventually he got quite angry.

So it's a bit like I loosened the top of this jam jar lid and all you had to do was just... Exactly. It was a lot of that. But he ended up hating Hitler in the Nazis. He did. There was a thing about his funeral in which he wanted no swastikas at his funeral, but apparently his funeral was just completely surrounded. I think I might ask for that at my funeral.

I was just going to say... Is that a box you can tick when you're... But surely that's a surefire way of ensuring your funeral is stuffed with swastikas. So you wouldn't ask for no swastikas unless you wanted them to change. Yeah, that's true. That's like, guys, no birthday this year. I don't want a birthday. So no birthday presents, please.

Okay? And especially no swastika wrapping paper. Okay, time for fact number two, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that beware of pickpocket signs attract pickpockets. They shouldn't make them so pretty. They shouldn't festoon them with wallets and verses. So why would that happen? This is because they have them in public places.

You've probably seen them wherever you live is that they have big signs saying beware thieves operate in this area or beware there are pickpockets nearby. And pickpockets like to hang out near those signs because as soon as someone sees that sign they will immediately pat their pocket or their trousers or wherever they're keeping their purse or their money. Is that because they're just filming asda adverts nearby? Don't steal my stuff. And so then the thief knows exactly where your stuff is and he can follow you.

And so if you see one of those signs, the thing to do is not go, hey, let me just check my wallet. It's still where it was. Yeah. So pickpockets, one of the things they do is this has been studied by a neuroscientist who says basically what they do is totally overload you with information. It's not just about where the hands are. They're up close to you and they're distracting you.

They're talking loudly to you. They're arguing with you. They're touching bits of your body, you know, which are not. They're totally slapping your bum. They just completely overload you. This is particularly with stage pickpockets, but the same principle applies. And it's basically because our brains can't do more than one thing at once. So they, yeah.

So if they're like touching your bum, you're like, why does he touch my bum? And when you turn around, they've taken your hat off. Yeah. He's already in your jacket pocket or something. Yeah. Yeah. In 2009, a Russian bank employee gave over $80,000 of cash to a woman who had hypnotized her in the bank.

Wow. I think that I am not sure about that. It feels like she might be the accomplice. Do you think? No, I just think that I was hypnotized is often a very easy excuse for mistakes that one has made. I was in the pub at the time. Yeah.

I left the whole bank unattended. She hypnotized me to go to the pub and stay there all day. No, I don't know how she did it either. I read a great robbery story that was in the news, I think a couple of days ago, which was a guy, he, uh, he robbed a local grocery outlet and managed to get away. They kind of knew who he was though straight away. So they, they were chasing him. But when he was caught, the kind of defensive going, it wasn't me, was totally knocked out

by the fact that he was carrying the money that he stole in a canvas bag that he'd drawn a massive dollar bill sign. It's the huge classic, like, what are you, the Riddler from the 1960s Batman who carries bags like that? It's like a double bluff. This is the last place the police will think to look. I hope in Britain that they gave him a special outfit with arrows all over it. Um, there's apparently a school of the seven bells.

Have you guys heard of this? No. For which there's, um, no actual verification because people don't admit to attending it, but it's rumored to exist in Columbia and the final, it's called the school of the seven bells because the final exam tests the ability to noiselessly remove items from the pockets of a jacket rigged with bells to make sure that you can do it without distracting anyone's attention. How, how do they know when it's time for another lesson at the school of seven bells?

Can I tell you briefly about this guy called Apollo Robbins? Yeah, go on. Okay. So he was the subject of this New Yorker piece and, um, I'll put it up on my Twitter, which is Andrew Hunter M, which is, it's, and he is a stage pickpocket and he can steal anything basically. So he met Penn of Penn and Teller and Penn said, okay, go on, steal something from me. And he wasn't wearing, at the time, Penn was wearing a sort of sleeveless outfit and some

shorts. So that's quite hard. Obviously there's less to less clothing to steal from there were fewer pockets. So he asked Penn, okay, tell, take off your wedding ring, put it on a bit of paper and trace the outline with it, right? So Penn takes off his ring, he puts it on the paper, he gets his pen out of his pocket and it won't write anything. The reason being Apollo Robbins is holding the cartridge from inside the pen.

Wow. Yeah. Okay. I have an even better pickpocket than that guy. Go on. Are you ready? So this guy is called Wang Hongbo and he's from Zhengzhou and he has been caught. Well, he's been caught.

So I'm not that good. But he's been caught using chopsticks to pickpocket people, okay? And he was photographed lifting the phone from a woman's pocket with chopsticks while she was cycling through Zhengzhou. No. That is skillful. Wow. Do you know cool pickpocket slang?

So they have a whole range of terms and exciting ways to describe it. And some of that's mentioned in this New York piece actually. So kissing the dog is making a mistake, not in a Kaiser Wilhelm poodle way. That's a mistake where you're letting the victim see your face. It's always a mistake in the Kaiser Wilhelm way. And the skinning the poke, which is taking all the cash out of a wallet you've nicked and then you get rid of the fingerprints and you throw it away. And there's, the teams are called whiz mobs, a team of pickpockets, it's called a whiz

mob. Whiz mob. It doesn't have Sonic the Hedgehog or something. It doesn't sound like a serious criminal organisation. Yeah. It's all quite Victorian though, isn't it? Yes. There was some old Victorian or maybe Edwardian names for criminals.

Sure. One of those. Swaddlers was one, which was people who were Methodist preachers whose accomplices pickpocketed the congregation. They were known as Swaddlers. What? A few others. Bully Huffs would hang around brothels, surprising and threatening the customers by claiming

that the woman they were in bed with was their wife. That's very clever. And then extract money from them that way. Tatmungas were card sharps and body baskets were women posing as sellers of pornographic books to disguise their real game, which was stealing linen off washing lines. Well, it's an obvious disguise, isn't it? You come into the door, would you like to buy some erotic literature? No?

Okay. Do you want to see your garden behind? In the 15th century, Ambrose Pare, who was a famous doctor in the 15th century, saw a beggar in Paris who was begging him for money and who did so by, I don't actually know if we can put this out, it's so gross, who did so by, she begged by lifting her skirts to reveal a prolapsed rectum. It was a horrid sight, he says. It was over half a foot long, leaking pus like fluid over her legs and garments.

But his companion then attacked the woman and said, you're a big faker, you don't look sick enough to have a prolapsed rectum. You have to be pretty confident that you're right in that situation. I know prolapsed rectums and that, madame. He beat this woman to the ground and eventually she was forced to reveal that it was actually the prolapsed rectum of an ox that she put inside her own bosom. It was actually a prolapsed rectum. It was, it was a prolapsed rectum.

He felt pretty silly then, didn't he? That's not a human prolapsed rectum. It was the prolapsed rectum of an ox. Yeah, she'd put up her own bum though. I think you've gone to the trouble of doing that. I really think you've earned your 50 cents or whatever. Definitely. But the lifting of her skirts as well, she could just have a sign saying, prolapsed

rectum, please help. Wait, so if you saw someone with a sign and said, that's probably how she started. And she's like, no one is buying this at all. Except Andy. I could show it to you, no need. Absolutely believe you. The thing is though, I would pay, I would pay 50p not to see a prolapsed rectum. She should have done that.

We should move on. I've just got a couple of police things. Policemen in Grenada are now wearing their Twitter handles on their uniforms now. That's not very good protection, if that's... Weirdly, it's a kind of way of saying to the community that you are not going to allow us to get away with anything as much as we're not going to allow you to get away with stuff. Yeah, so it's like a policeman having their own name or their number on a badge or something like that. So you can tweet them and you can tweet because everyone in the town now, the police cars now

have their Twitter handles. They're starting to do this in America now, police cars with Twitter handles, so that people can make direct contacts and just let it be. Do you think they're all on Twitter though? Like maybe there's like, again, Constable Harris on Twitter. That's true. And you can add them in so you can say, I'm currently being beaten up by Constable Harris. Yeah.

Is there like a really old school cop called Nigel or something who has his fax number on his arm? A full postal address. One other thing is that Scotland's police force have had to ban a lot of words from their Facebook page, so this is where social media has gone against them slightly. So they have over 139 words that, you know, they don't appear now on their page. They swear words mostly. A lot of swear words, but then they include pigs. So if you have an issue with a pig that actually won't make it onto the page.

Someone stole my bacon. If your name is Fanny, you can't write to them. What? Yeah, because Fanny is now a banned word. Tea bag. Banned word. Is this in Scotland? Yeah, lots of people are called Fanny in Scotland.

I know, it's a big issue. So basically the way to be a criminal in Scotland is to steal pigs off people called Fanny. There's nothing they can do. ACAB is also banned. Sorry? Which is all cops are bastards. And so is Baconfucker. God, they're so sensitive, aren't they?

What about Mr John Baconfucker, though? What about his wife, Fanny Baconfucker? And their son, Tea Bag. Okay, time for fact number three, and that's my fact. My fact this week is that no one is quite sure how to say the name Louis Armstrong or Louis Armstrong. No one knows. Oh, right. So it's either Louis or Louis.

Yeah. We're sure in Armstrong, though, right? We're sure in Armstrong. Yeah, but I mean, it's an insane thing that we don't know. I only found this out because I was on Louis slash Louis Armstrong's house.org. It's like a major website for him. And someone asked how do you pronounce the name Louis or Louis? And they go into this whole reasoning where they say that he in songs used to say Louis.

In interviews, they would say Louis. His friends would claim that he was called Louis. But then his wife used to call him Louis. And then things got really confused because you then got called Satchmo and Pops. No one knows. There's no agreed opinion. Despite the fact that we have so much footage of this guy. We have so many audio recordings.

No one knows. But he never says it. He never breaks off from a solo, does he? By the way, it's Louis. Exactly. But there's a famous song called Hello Dolly and he sings the line, this is Louis. So everyone was like, oh, so it's Louis. That makes sense.

But then later in the song, a waiter says, this is Louis. So suddenly everyone's Louis in the song. So that was the one bit that suddenly... Well, in America, you would normally pronounce it Louis, wouldn't you? Like St. Louis town and stuff like that. So it feels like it should be Louis to me. Oh, yeah. I don't know.

I think one of his biographers said that he told him that only white people call him Louis. Right. And that... Well, his wife, his wife called him Louis. Was she white? Don't think so, no. Oh, well, was this the wife he married a prostitute, didn't he? He did, yes.

Well, because his... He had a couple of wives, I think. Oh, yeah, four. Oh, right. Yeah, but he had a couple of wives twice. There's another thing just with his name not being decided on. They also later found out that he wasn't born when he thought he was born. So he thought he was born on...

Wait a minute, wait a minute. He thought he'd been born. He'd just come out of the womb. Yeah, and he was like... And they were like, no, you've not been born yet. Because he thought he was born on the 4th of July, 1900. But it turns out he was born August 4th, 1901. Oh, wow.

But now all of his kind of big fan groups celebrate both birthdays. So he's a bit like the Queen now. He's got more than one birthday per year. Are they just two different people? One of them is Louis, one of them is Louis. One is August. They were both fantastic jazz players. Yeah.

So he did only get married a couple of times. It's just the other guy who got married a couple of times as well. He was obsessed with a particular laxative, Louis Armstrong. It's called Swiss Chris. And it got sold by this American dietician called Gaylord Hauser. And Louis Armstrong would give whole interviews about his diet and about how fantastic this laxative was. And he said the first time I tried it, it sounded like applause.

He said I had to crawl back to bed. He would know what applause sounds like as well. And he would post fans' cards. He had his diet advice printed on cards to post back to any fans who wrote to him asking about it. And then he had specially printed cards which had him on a toilet on the front of it, a picture of him on the toilet. Holding the bottle of Swiss Chris in his hand.

He would send it back with a free sample of Swiss Chris. This is how devoted he was. I think there was a slogan on the cards, wasn't there? And he had this slogan printed saying, Satch says, leave it all behind you. Yeah, that's right. And he never accepted a penny from endorsing them ever. Really?

He was never paid. He just loved it. He loved it so much. He did it every day. The love of diarrhea. Yeah, every day. He took it every day. Okay, so the Voyager probes, which they sent up with a record on,

which contains sounds and images about Earth. That includes Louis Armstrong music. Does it? Yeah, it also has some Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky. And it has a Peruvian wedding song. Sounds good. An address by UN Secretary General Kurt Waldhelm. And a recording of the Azerbaijani bagpipe orchestra.

Wow. I hope they start with the Bach and the Beethoven. Hey, you haven't heard the Azerbaijani thing, have you? I've heard bagpipes. It was meant to, as well, have a Beatles song. And all the Beatles said yes to it going on. But the record label said no. And the rumor is they said no because they thought if suddenly there is life out there,

we don't have rights to these planets that will then be using the song. Which is nuts. Yeah, I've signed contracts that say, like, in all universities, and we're so right. Do you think maybe when the aliens come down to invade, the first thing they're going to do is go, yeah, can you take us to your bagpipe orchestra, please? We are massive fans. So on mispronunciation of names.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, great poet, obviously. He said the following of his name. I can't tell whether he was taking the mickey or not. I'm not sure. But he said, I think that the word Coleridge, and he brackets Amphimachron, long on both sides, has a noble verbal physiognomy. It is one of the vilest Beals above cries of detraction to pronounce it Coleridge, or Coleridge, or even Coleridge.

And in his own poems, he rhymes it with Polaridge, Scholaridge, and the whole ridge. So the whole ridge. That's a great nickname. It sounds like his wrestling name, doesn't it? Yeah. So he's saying anything. Yeah. He rhymes it with everything.

He rhymes it with anything, but he wants to say long on both sides, which is Coleridge. No, but that's the third way he said don't pronounce it. Coleridge. I have no idea how he wanted to pronounce it. Can I just say as well, why is he putting his own name in his own poems? Oh, you know, for fun. Yeah, he's like a rap artist. That's what you'll do there.

So you know the word ask, or you might say ask. And then some people in London say ox. Why is that? Did you ask me? Apparently people have been making that mispronunciation for more than a thousand years. What? It's not a modern thing at all. That's fantastic.

A thousand years? What was there to ask people about back then? What was there to ask? Can I borrow your ox? No, his ox. Can I mention something about trumpets very quickly? Please do. Okay, so obviously Louis Armstrong, just to wrap it back around, played trumpet very famously.

They found a trumpet in Tutankhamun's grave. So not only just his socks. Is that where he got the word toot? It is there. But yeah, they found a trumpet in Tutankhamun's grave. I really like that. Was it from that age, or was it just something that was left there by the original excavators? No charter when he broke in.

Oh, we got to go back. I left my trumpet. Why'd you bring a trumpet? I was actually just coming to do a gig. I went to the wrong venue. Now he goes on a pyramid stage at Glastonbury. You know who else was a jazz star? Romano Mussolini, which I think we might have mentioned on the show.

Mussolini's son, that is, right? Yeah, he was a jazz pianist, and he started under an assumed name, as you would, because it's such a drag, that you'd ask the square fascistic data. But then in the 1960s, his ensemble got a claim, and he reverted to his real name. Probably because the Mussolini name had been rehabilitated by it. That's a terrible time to thrust that on your band members as well. You'll notice on the banner I've brought, a little tweaking I've done. The article I read about him, I mean, he played with Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington,

and the article I read said, although he shied away from his heritage, he wrote a memoir in 2004 called Il Duce, My Father. He says that Mussolini was a caring father. Oh, really? Not that that makes a difference, I'd like to stress. I don't know, it's changed my opinion about him. OK, time for a final fact of the show, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is, the man who holds the Guinness World Record for the lowest voice

can hit notes that are so low, only elephants can hear them. How do we know that? Well, computers can hear them, as well as elephants. But yeah, actually other large animals would be able to hear them as well. But yeah, below human hearing range, he can hit a note which is eight octaves below the lowest G on a piano. Oh my God! Did he say that he can't really hear them?

He can't hear them at all, can he? No, he can't, but he can kind of feel a vibration through his body when he doesn't. That's amazing. How can he sing so low? He has vocal cords which are about twice as long as a normal person. As a normal person? Yeah, they're like 12 feet long. Dangling behind him or something, like throw up straight.

No, sorry, those are my vocal cords, no way. Andy takes his money back. Yeah, so yeah, he can feel it coming through his body. You will get that with astronauts in space. We can pick up sounds from people on the moon, but it's usually the vibrations going through the body of the astronaut because there's not enough atmosphere for the waves to propagate. Oh, so the vibration of the helmet brings the sound through.

Wow, so they talk by touching helmets if they couldn't talk to each other via? I don't know if they do that, but I guess they could do that, yeah. No, I don't think they have done that, but I think they could. The other thing is why you hear your voice differently from a recording to what you hear in real life, because you hear it through your body. You're not hearing it as other people hear it, which is you're hearing it through your face. So does it sound deeper to you?

It does sound a bit deeper to you. Because it's the vibration. Yeah, because we do fancy, like we're attracted to people with deeper voices, aren't we? Well, women are attracted to men with deeper voices, apparently because it signifies a larger body size, apparently a study has shown men are attracted to women with higher voices, but I'm very skeptical about that. Well, there are a lot of women with very husky voices.

Yeah, and people love that. Well, there was a study that found that men with lower pitched voices had higher numbers of sexual partners, but people with more attractive voices actually also have lower sperm quality. Is that because they're putting all their effort into their voice? Inside the body there's a guy going, yeah, don't worry about the sperm. Let's turn all our attention to the voice.

Did you just do a slight Italian accent for the thing inside your body? It controls you. It's an Italian guy. It feels like he has an Italian inside breaking out. I like the stress it's not a Mussolini. So elephants can tell the difference between different human languages. So they could tell which language this guy was singing in at his incredibly low thing. How do we know they can tell?

They've tested two different African ethnic groups on elephants, and those are the Canva, they're basically farmers, they don't really hunt elephants, and the Masai, who often hunt elephants, I'm now afraid of them. Yeah, they're afraid of, and they were recorded saying the same phrase, look over there, a group of elephants is coming, and then that was played to elephants. And when the Masai said it in their language, the elephants got spooked, but only Masai men who are the guys who do the hunting,

because women and children of either group, it could be the way that they're saying it though, right? Because if you're a hunter of elephants, you're going to say, look over there, there's some elephants, we can hunt them. Whereas if you're a farmer, you're like, oh my god, look, there's some elephants, they're going to trample our crops. Look, there's some elephants coming! I hadn't thought of that.

I think it's evidence though. It sounds like a pretty good study, but that is a good point. But I also suggest that they understand the words that are being said as opposed to the tone, right? What, they heard the word elephants ago? Oh, that's us. Sorry guys. My ears are burning. They can also, elephants they've recently discovered can point, can't they?

And they're the first animal that's not an ape. They can recognise pointing of humans. So if a human points to a bucket that has food in it, then they'll go to that one rather than the other one. And they're the only animal who aren't apes, who can do it and lots of apes can't. But they think elephants might point with their trunks. So they thought that they're moving their trunks around is just, you know, for gags, shits and giggles. But actually it's thought that they might be pointing at each other with their trunks. That's cool.

Elephants can also recognise themselves in the mirror, can't they? And in fact, I think, sorry, this is what we don't think anything else can do that's not from the ape family. So I retract the last ape thing. They can recognise themselves in a mirror and if you put a dot on their forehead, then they will, and they see themselves in the mirror, their reflection, they will like try and get the dot of their own forehead rather than like an idiot, like all other animals, trying to get the dot of the forehead of the reflection in the mirror. Oh, okay. It's a well done them.

Yeah, that's quite cool. Also, do you remember that? Because they paint, don't they? And that was an incredible study. Van Gogh, I think, was an elephant. Is that right? No, that's why he sold so few paintings that was owned in his lifetime. It was very messy when he cut off his ear.

Send in that huge package. There was this amazing footage that came out years ago of an elephant using a paintbrush painting an elephant. And basically, everyone was going, what the hell is this? And it turns out that they were being trained in very cruel ways to be able to do it, but they can do it and they can memorise every single movement that they need to do in order to paint this thing. Everyone thought this was a hoax and I think it was Richard Dawkins who went out to find out about it because he thought this is impossible and it's absolutely true. They've trained these elephants to hold a paintbrush and paint canvas drawings

and you can buy elephant paintings online now that they do. They're extraordinary. Don't buy them. Sounds like you've become doing something. It's cruelty. Yeah, it's massive cruelty, but the video footage is extraordinary to watch an elephant doing something which is such precision as well. Amazing.

I've got something about voices. So you know that the biggest hearing range of any creature, can you guess? A bat. It's not a bat. It's a bat's prey creature though. A moth. It's a moth. Is it the greater wax moth?

It is the greater wax moth. How on earth did you know that? I just know stuff like that. Yeah, it's like it can hear something really weird. A noise that bats can't make or something. That's it. In the course of evolution, it has evolved a greater hearing range than the noises bats make. So most of bats' prey creatures can't hear them because they just get eaten out of the air

and they have no defence against it. But the moth has evolved such a massive hearing range that it not only can it hear everything the bat does, it can talk to other wax moths in higher than bats range. It's very cool. That's so good. That also feels like quite a good insult for some reason, saying, I can hear noises you can't even make. It's true in humans that your hearing of high noises decreases as you get older,

which is why they had those mosquito sounds outside shops, which were to disperse teenagers. Very, very high-pitched sounds. But people of my age wouldn't be able to hear them because my little sill-eye in my ears have died out. It's also useful if you want to talk about sex in front of your grandparents. You could just do it like this. I don't know what you'd like to do for a quick shake right now. It's already gone here. Koala voices are really low, aren't they?

They're 20 times lower than you'd expect from their body size. They're about as low as an elephant's voice. And that's because their organs that make the sound is an organ that no other animals have. It's got, I think they've got two vocal pouches instead of one, which most creatures have. Two vocal folds. They're weird, aren't they, koalas? They're just, yeah, they're really strange. They have the longest cecum of any animal.

Which is the small intestine, I think, or the large intestine. And like the brain is really tiny. Well, the brain is not incredibly small, but it is very unfolded. So it doesn't have much intricacy in it. And as a result, it's got a very, very low surface area. They are so stupid. It feels like they were made by a kind of trainee. Yeah, because I think it sounds like the brain and the vocal cords got confused,

because the vocal cords are very folded, and the brain is very unfolded. So we obviously thought, is the brain in its neck? The little Italian inside the koalas was drunk when he made them. There is a black hole, which does the deepest noise of anything in nature. And it does a B-flat, which is 57 octaves below middle C. So this guy that we were talking about before was eight octaves, and the black hole is 57 octaves. And if you wanted to play that on a keyboard,

you'd need a keyboard more than 15 meters long. And it's only for that one note as well. Can elephants even hear that? Who are you playing that for? Elephants cannot hear that. Wow. Yeah, who is the black hole playing to? Yeah. And you would need something to reach it with like Kaiser Wilhelm's pencil.

Oh, an elephant's trunk. Maybe that's why they have such long trunks, so they can play the wider pianos when they're necessary. Do you guys know about, or do any of you do, this vocal fry? Do you engage in vocal fry? No, I've never heard of it. Not knowingly. Well, you might do.

So vocal fry is the lowest human register. So the guy with the highest pitch voice on earth, for instance, is singing in his whistle register, which is the highest register, which actually the person who has the highest pitch of singing in the world goes much higher than the highest whistle in the world. And anyway, the vocal fry register is your lowest register, but it's become really fashionable,

and people have started doing vocal fry, and it's that thing, 66% of college women do it, for instance. And it's this thing where people talk like this, you know, like American girls. The Paris Hilton. Yeah, exactly. Paris Hilton does it, I think, and Keisha with a dollar sign in her name.

And apparently it's really bad for your vocal cords. It sounds like it's strained. Yeah, it's bad for your vocal cords, and also it's bad for you in job interviews, something like 85%. No kidding. I just thought you had some kind of horrible disease or something. I want the job.

I don't understand, wait, so it's not a low, because it doesn't sound, is it lower? It is lower, yeah. And apparently this is, everyone's doing now in America. Yeah, interviewers are saying, we don't like this. Stop, stop it. Mid interview. I do not like this.

But that's how I just stop. Mr. Spielberg, just stop. Okay, we're coming to the end of the interview now. Is there anything you'd like to ask me? Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to get in contact with any of us

about the things that we have said, you can get us on our Twitter handles. I'm on at Shriverland, James. At Eggshapes. Andy. At AndrewHunterM. And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com. And we will be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.