No Such Thing As A Fish - 68: No Such Thing As A Friendly Face Fondle

Episode Date: July 3, 2015

Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss the famous last words, the secrets of flirting, and drinking porridge through a straw.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covern Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andy Murray, and Anna Chazinski, 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 you, Chazinski. My fact is that only 28% of people know when they're being flirted with.

I never know. Ever. Do you think you think people are flirting, or they aren't with you? Aren't. They aren't. Yeah, so this is the interesting thing. People never assume. So they've done this study recently, which looked at 52 heterosexual women, 52 heterosexual

men, and they put them in pairs together and made them have a conversation, and then afterwards they asked them if they'd flirted with the other person, and then they asked them if they thought the other person had been flirting with them. And lots of people flirted, and only 28% of people realized they were doing it. And in women, it was 18%. Wow. Was that who knew that they were flirting with someone else, or that someone else was flirting with them?

When people flirted with other people, they were aware of it. Well, sometimes they're not, I think. Sometimes you accidentally flirt. Yes, sometimes people are just so flirtatious. I get accused of that, of flirting when I'm not. Yeah. I do say that to you a lot, and by the way, get your hand off my leg. Oh, this is an interesting thing about flirting.

So men are perceived as being better at flirting when these are some of the behaviors that they engage in when women think, oh, he's flirting and he's good at it. So for a start, actually looking at the person that you want to flirt with, that is a solid gold winner. That's really good. Also positioning your body that it takes up more space, and doing what's called non-reciprocated touching to surrounding men. So this includes playfully shoving, touching, or elbowing the ribs of other men around you.

Supposedly helps you flirt with a woman that you're interested in on the other side of a bar or something. Really? Yeah. You probably should know the person when you're shoving them, right? Yeah. What happens is there's a massive bar fight going on at the other side of the bar, and they're going, wow, stop flirting with me, guys.

Where's the last thing? This study identified as supposedly a really good sign is the men who are good at it changed their location in the bar more frequently. Oh, where's he gone? So is that just literally playing hard to get? I suppose so. You're trying to walk over to him and he's suddenly in a different place. Playing hard to find is technically known as, yeah.

You know how you'd think you're not flirting and you are, Dan? Yeah. Some people think that they're flirting when they're not. What's right? This is called signal amplification bias, and it's where you think that your gestures are making it really clear that you're doing some pretty heavy duty flirting, but obviously you're, the other person has no idea. So it's like when I'm in a bar and I'm running around into lots of different positions.

The other person just hasn't noticed you. Punching random men in the face. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's why the study has ended up showing that people don't know if they're being flirted with because people don't flirt properly because the whole, it's kind of self-defeating flirting because the whole point of it really is to be subtle, isn't it? The whole point of flirting is to kind of conceal and protect, conceal what you're trying to do and protect yourself because you don't just walk up to someone and go, I fancy you.

Do you want to have sex? So evolutionarily, the idea I think is that it could be socially costly to kind of just go up to someone and say, you want to have sex with them because if they say no, then you could get excluded from the group or whatever, and it seems to be like a uniquely human thing. Other animals don't seem to do it, but I read one article about the idea that other animals don't really flirt and it said, if other animals were to flirt, would we even be able to detect it? Yeah, we can't detect when we're doing it.

We must not get ahead of ourselves. Oh, is this mouse flirting? I mean, focus on that woman over there. It's running around all over the floor, so it looks like it's flirting. But there was a natural history museum exhibition that went on where their whole premise was that animals do flirt and obviously they must have just been putting a nice little spin on it, but there are examples of sort of romantic gestures, it seems. The idea with flirting is it's something which you wouldn't really be able to tell unless

you can just about kind of pick up on it. I disagree. I think flirting can be absolutely outright. No, it is. It's a defence mechanism rather than saying, because animals just go up to each other and say, let's sleep together, that's what all of their flirting is. Look, the Amazonian River Dolphin, it brings a bouquet of waterweeds. Yeah, that's not subtle.

It's not flirting. Someone brought you a bouquet of waterweeds. You know what they wanted. Okay. How about there's a haddock that hums. Again, that's not really flirting. Well, if you're going over and going, yeah, I think that could be. If she says, well, you just, no, I was just humming.

I was just humming. It's just a subtle, that's a subtle signal. Yeah. I'm with you, Dan. Flirting's quite a good way of trying to suss out whether someone's going to be worthwhile without like, actually inviting them to jump into bed with you. Right. Because you might decide halfway through the flirting encounter that actually, no, this

guy's not right. I'm not sure how this fits with your stats, but men over perceive flirting and women under perceive flirting. The reason is because men, if they over perceive and they don't get it right, then they just move on to the next woman. It doesn't really matter. Whereas if women over perceive, then they might have sex with an undesirable man and end up with weedy children.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's very plausible. And that's definitely what the study showed. 16% of women recognize when people were flirting, but way more men did. So the, because it is quite costly for humans if you sleep with the wrong person who turns out to be a bit of a weed and doesn't give you good offspring because that's like a nine

month gestation period. And then you've got to raise this kid who's weedy and shit like the dad. So they still under underestimated it, but right. The word flirting, the word flirting used to actually mean hitting somebody. Did it? Yeah. It also meant to turn up one's nose or sneer at. That's the verb anyway.

It's really changed. Yeah. Yeah. But since the fifth, I think in the 1560s, Samuel Johnson described the noun flirt as it's always a female and it's a pert young hussy. I also liked their alternatives to flirting, which were when it came to mean being, it meant being nimble often. And I think that came to be nimble conversationally.

And you could also say someone was a flirty gig or a flirt Gillian, which I quite like to mean an unconstrained woman. Wow. They have a flirty gig. This is weird. Scientists found that men find happiness very attractive in a woman, but women find it one of the less attractive things in a man. Yeah.

Apparently. And shame, sort of doing what's called shameful displays or displays of shame was more attractive to women than happiness. What's a shameful display? Oh, I'm so embarrassed. Oh, I can't do this. Okay. Which explains Hugh Grant, in a way.

It's not dropping your trousers and going. That's happiness. Wait. I like this. There was, I think this is in Scientific American saying, research a split types of touching into three categories. So there's merely friendly, there's plausible deniability, which is what we were talking about.

Like if someone's like, are you flirting with me? You can go. No, obviously not. And then there's going nuclear and plausible deniability includes an arm touch or a shoulder or a waist touch. What's a going nuclear kind of flirt? Face touch, which would be a bit weird, wouldn't it? If you were just in a pub with someone and they leaned over and touched you on the face.

Yeah. Mid chat though, it's not weird. If you ever do that to me, you're going to be in serious trouble. If you had like a thing on your head, I'd be like, oh, you got a thing on your head. You can't just touch people's faces mid conversation. I'm constantly touching faces. You can't do that. I don't even ask.

I go right in. I don't. Why? Because it's a very personal bit of the body. I've got a thing on their face. What was this thing you keep going on about? I don't know. Yeah.

If they've got a thing on their face, I think that's okay. I'm not leaving this until we've ascertained what the thing is. Why? It might be like sometimes people get glitter on their face or a bit of fluff. Why do I get the feeling that you go around with a bit of glitter in your pocket to put on people's faces? I don't think it's weird to touch a face. I'm just putting that there.

I'd touch a bus driver's face. I would touch. That's why they've had to put the screens in these days. Okay, time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay. My fact this week is that ancient Sumerian beer was as thick as porridge and was drunk through a straw. That's so good.

It's good. Although it was as thick as porridge, what kind of a heavy-duty straw? Is it like a McDonald's milkshake? Yeah, that's a bit right. The oldest straw that they've ever found was Sumerian. It was found in a tomb dated 3000 BCE, and it was a gold tube inlaid with lapis lazuli. Gold. Wow.

Wow. The thing is, this beer was kind of fermented bread, so it's a bit like Kvass that they have in Russia. It was really, really thick, but you wanted to drink mostly the liquid bit, so you had the straw to stop the bread from going into your mouth, so you just got the liquid bit. They reckon that that's why the straw was invented in general, probably for drinking beer. That's cool.

That's very cool. I think it wasn't that first one. It was two men sharing a drink, wasn't it, in the Sumerian tomb, which is nice. What was it? You can't share a straw, though. I think they had a straw each. Okay, cool. Well, it wasn't because they found the oldest depiction of a straw, and they also found

the oldest straw, didn't they? The depiction had a picture of two men sharing a beer. Yeah, so this is probably not the first beer in the world that we know of, because that was probably ancient Chinese. That was called kui, but this is in the, let's say, near West. It was Sumerian, and they had a few different words for beer. It was sikaru, dida, or a beer. No way!

What? E-B-I-R was one of their names for beer. No. Do you fancy a beer? Cool. That's pretty cool, isn't it? That also meant beer mug, and they thought that beer was a gift from the gods to promote human happiness and well-being.

And the first brewers were, they were priestesses. So the ancient Egyptians used to say to each other, to greet each other day to day, they'd say, bread and beer, and that basically meant everything is good in life. How cool is that? Yeah, we should start doing that again. Bread and beer. Isn't there quite a long-running debate? I mean, I think there is quite a long-running debate about whether bread came first or beer

came first, and a lot of archaeologists think that we have evidence to suggest that beer was brewed before bread was made, and one followed on from the other. Actually, the oldest breadmaker was actually found in a tomb which contained the oldest depiction of a breadmaker. There are loads of guys who try and recreate very ancient beers, and they find the right sort of chemicals in tombs and things like that, and they speculate that this might have been beer or that it contained the sort of flavourings that were added to beer that they know around the area, so they try and remake all these things.

They even do things like killing goats to make fresh wine skins at the time. Wow, that's so cool. Well, not for the goat. Not for the goat, no. But they add things like, genuinely, beer used to have things like olive oil or cheese or carrot or hemp, all kinds of stuff will be added to it. I don't want to go to a party that these guys are throwing, actually. If I'm going to get a cheesy, olive-oil-y beer.

There is one guy in Oregon who's a brewer, and he made beer with yeast harvested from his own beard. Cool. Yeah. How did that taste? It's just yeast, you know. Most yeast in the rest of the world is found on animals and insects and rotting fruit, so it's not necessarily any grosser, even though it seems like it is.

Yeah, it does. There was some 170-year-old beer found in a shipwreck just off the coast of Finland, either this year or last year, it wasn't there, and the divers who went down and they uncovered it. I think there were six bottles of beer and they decided to taste it, and it was pretty disgusting, I think. It's always disgusting whenever they do this. They never learn.

We found some 5,000-year-old honey, should we give it a go? Oh, it's disgusting. You say that, but it could have been disgusting in the first place. Indeed, and it probably was. They did when they analyzed it. They said that it would have had hints of soured milk and burnt rubber with some rose-like notes and a goatee taste. A goatee?

Like, as in a beard goatee? I'm one of those people that I love a novelty beer. I love the variety of new beers that we have. If I go to an off-license and I see that Iron Maiden has a beer, or ACDC, I'm going to buy that one. Did you know that Hansen the band released a beer? No. Was it called M-Hops?

Yes. Yes, it was. How good was that? Yeah. I was going to say they should have done a soft drink called M-Pop. Oh, yeah. They could see they've missed. There's a whole range of drinks that they could have done, or a range of cleaning items

called M-Hops. It's been going for a while. Also, one that I'd love to get my hands on, because it's a bit of a historical, or historically it'll be a bit of a famous beer, do you know that David Cameron gave the Coalition Cabinet a beer? Really? He bought them around. No, no.

They produced. Just one beer between them. That's austerity. No. After the final session of the Coalition Cabinet, they got Goody bags as they left, and inside one of the Goody bags was a Coalition beer, which was called Co-Ale-Ishin beer. Oh, God. And it had on it, on the back, it said, an unconventional pairing.

This experimental beer has astonished doubters and exceeded expectations. Time for some creative thinking with this carefully crafted beer. Hints of oak and zesty lemon deliver a truly distinctive, refreshing flavor that lasts the distance. Makes you feel sick after a very short time. I was trying to look for which country drinks most beer, I was just having a few little looks. People say it's Czech Republic.

Yep. That's true. So, as I was looking into this, I also found out what country drinks most wine. The Vatican. Oh, yeah. Of course. Vatican, yeah. But they are really the biggest consumers of Jesus' blood.

Oh, that's, they are also that, yeah, that's true, I forgot about that. But they also, the Vatican have their own Vatican beer. They have a brewery that's not too far away from them. And they have, they bring in cases and they love beer. Apparently, and it's only slightly a rumor, but when the, when they were deciding on the last pope, there was enough bottles for each of the people who were deciding. What would you call them? Are they cardinals?

Who do it? The electors? Yeah, the electors basically. There was enough beer for one of them each. The A-electors. Oh. Oh my goodness. I just wanted to kill that because I felt really bad for Dan there, and this is why puns ruin

all conversations. Yeah. Because just for anyone listening, James and Andy were looking into the sky, not listening to a word that Dan was saying, desperately grappling for some pathetic pun relating to popes and beer. And I think it's really inconsiderate to the speaker. Andy's still doing it. Huh?

Okay, time for fact number three, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that baby turtles coordinate when they're going to hatch from within their egg shells. Wow. That is incredible. It's so amazing. Wow. They talk to each other.

Yeah. Scientists listen to the eggs to see if they made any noise from within the shells, and they do. And they actually found more than 300 different noises coming from them. And I don't know if all of those mean anything or have particular meanings, but there was one sound which came only from nests, which had only eggs in. So there were some which had only eggs, and there was some which had a mixture of eggs and already hatched babies.

And they believed that the babies were communicating so that they could coordinate when they all hatched together, because when they hatched, there's a great advantage to having strengthened numbers, because the journey from the point where they hatched to the sea is so dangerous. And there are so many predators who just hang around waiting. As the article I read put it, while some babies will be picked off by predators, a bird can only eat so many sea turtles at a time. How do they coordinate the hatching? Is there a leader?

Is there one leading turtle? All right, guys, come on. We can do this. Leonardo. I saw a really good, I can't remember where this was, but four really good pie charts, which was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, proportion that they're famous for being artists compared to proportion that they're famous for being turtles. This is quite cool.

Donatello, obviously, a tiny sliver of famous artists, a very huge pie. So communicating with things before they hatch, this is so-called birds do the same thing. And some birds called superb fairy wrens, which we must have mentioned before. The mothers sing to the eggs to teach them a password which they have to use when they hatch if they want food. And it's because loads of cuckoos lay their eggs in superb fairy wren nests. What's the password, cuckoo? And it's normally a single unique note that the chicks know.

And what it means is that the cuckoos are laid later on and they hatch earlier as well, so they only get about two days to learn the password, which is normally not enough for them to actually process it and learn it. And wren embryos have about five days. So if the cuckoo hatches and pushes out the other eggs, the parents can test it with the password. The cuckoo doesn't know the password and the parents can just abandon it and fly off and make a new nest and a new life.

Just one more quite cool thing about eggs that I like. So sand goby fish, which you'd recognise, you see them in Europe, it's the responsibility of the male goby fish to guard the eggs when they've been laid by the female. But he gets really impatient because he wants to have sex with as many females as he can and spread his seed as often as he can. So the female goby fish is like, I've laid the eggs now, can you guard these until they hatch? And he knows that the bigger the egg is, the longer it takes to hatch, so he just eats

all the bigger ones. Oh! It's probably better to wait for them. It's bad, isn't it? And usually, the bigger ones are going to be the stronger, healthier offspring, but he mongers them right up. That makes sense to me. There's an octopus who's recently been discovered just stating its egg or protecting its egg

for four and a half years. Yeah, and supposedly, they get so hungry that they nearly starve and they have to eat their own arms to survive while they're protecting their offspring from predators. Wow. Yeah, and often, they're so knackered at the end of this that when their offspring have eventually gone, swam away independently, they're just, they're pretty easy prey. Yeah, I think they waste away, so they don't then die. Isn't that amazing?

Yeah, this is really off topic, but I read the other day that there is some jellyfish, and if they lose an arm, then it's like some animals can grow arms back, but they can't do that. But what they can do is shuffle around all the other arms so that they're now symmetrical again so that they can go up, like, swim properly. What, and not look stupid? That is amazing. I know.

So, can I just say quickly my favorite discovery about turtles this week? Scientists haven't yet properly decided on whether or not turtles have a penis or a phallus. What? It's the same thing. No, apparently it's not, because penis should be restricted to mammals, yet they want to call it a penis. I read this in an article called Terrifying Sex Organs of Male Turtles, and I think I've seen the film of that.

I do, to be honest, I asked Anna to read this article because I couldn't understand all the big words, and so I don't know the answer to that. No, it's not a, it's very, it's full of like really zoological words. Yeah. That's a trick though, because the title sounds really kind of accessible, doesn't it? It's an incredibly deceptive title. Yeah, it's in Scientific American. This is an article from, so if anyone wants to read it and explain it to me.

It's fine. It's just very dense about how, like, their organs work. There are a couple of good things in that article, though. So I like the fact that they're referred to as the Intramittant Organ. When they're having this debate as to whether it's the phallus or the penis, it's called the Intramittant Organ, as in the organ that sends something in, in Latin, which is quite cool. The other thing that, I think there was a spin-off article from this that it uncovered

is, if you Google a cross-section of a turtle penis, it looks exactly like a teenage mutant in a turtle head. What? Doing it now, doing it now. With the bandana and everything. It's got the bandana. Oh my God, Donatello. It does.

Oh, it does. Oh, it does. Oh my God. With the bandana. We'll have to put this up on the Twitter feed. Definitely. Goat. I'm not putting it up on mine.

It'll be on our QI podcast, I guess. Yep. QI podcast. So, we were saying before about how turtles kind of hatch and all go down to the sea at the same time. Well, one problem that they have in Florida is people are accidentally drowning baby tortoises because gopher tortoises nest in sand dunes near to the sea and people keep finding these little tortoises and think they're turtles and so put them back in the

sea. Oh my God. And they just drown because they can't swim. Oh my God. That's so frustrating. That's horrible. In the town of Hilton Head Island, I'm not quite sure what this is. I think it's in America somewhere, there was a man who was proposing to his future wife

and lit a load of candles on the edge of the beach and she said yes and they retired to the room and they killed 60 baby sea turtles. Oh my God. Why? Because they were attracted to the light. They were disorientated by the light and some tracks repeatedly encircled the lanterns where the hatchlings eventually succumbed to ghost crabs. Oh my God.

What are they moths? What's this light thing? I've never heard this before of any other animal getting attracted to light. Well, the thing is, there was one species of sea turtle who hatched during the day and that's really problematic obviously because you know. They just go straight up to the sun. Yeah. Is that a bad omen?

Like do you think you'd cancel the wedding the next day when you emerge from your tent and see just dozens of tortoise carcasses? I know. I don't normally believe in omens or anything like that but that is a bad sign. Sorry darling. I know we have been dating for 10 years and finally you've said yes but there's a couple of dead turtles. I wouldn't be willing to take the risk.

Just saying. Another quite funny turtle story is... How many died in this one? They're already really endangered. All seven species of sea turtle. And here we are casually making light of the deaths of more. Well, include me out. Go on.

Okay, we've included Andy out but for everyone else. So there's in somewhere in China, I can't remember where, there was a drunk guy known only as Wang, the article says. So I don't think he wanted to identify himself in full. He got really drunk, ran into the seafood section of a restaurant, dunked his head in the fish tank and tried to kiss a turtle, at which point the turtle clamped onto his mouth with Lego. He had to go to hospital I think.

Oh no, he had to be freed by having the turtle decapitated. What? Oh for fuck's sake. That was going so well. Okay, time to move on to our final fact of the show and that's my fact. My fact this week is that the playwright Henrik Ibsen's last words were to his nurse. She said to him that she thought he seemed to be looking better and he replied, on the contrary, and died.

It turns out that that's not as exciting as I want it to be in that he actually died the next day but those were the last words he said so I think he must have lapsed into a coma. He thought they were pretty good words. I'm going to sit on those. I think I should collect a series of last words just so that I've got 20 or 30 things to say on my deathbed and if I say one I can just cross it off the list and then I'll go on with the next one.

If everything you ever say is extremely piffy and witty then it doesn't matter when you die. Okay, but we're dealing with the real world here and I have to make allowances. His last words were a terrible story about dead turtles. His last words were a long pause where he was trying to come up with a pun relating the pope to fear in some way. I think if you constantly pepper your conversations with desperate attempts at last words your death might come sooner than you expect. So the thing about last words as you when you suddenly put a sort of researcher's eye

onto it you realise that no one ever said any of the things that everyone thinks they said on their deathbed. Oscar Wilde, either this wallpaper goes or I do. And the actual thing he said was this wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do. Not the last thing he said. Not even close. I mean that was I think in the days preceding his death.

Dylan Thomas was said to have said I've had 18 straight whiskeys. I believe that's the record. Those were his last words. It's such a good last line. It's an amazing last line. It's I think wasn't that there's some controversy now because Dylan Thomas was often assumed to have died of alcohol poisoning and his family and other people say quite strongly that he didn't.

He just died of pneumonia and his agent spread about this kind of falsehood because his agent was actually a bit lax in looking after Dylan Thomas in the days preceding his death. So wanted to make it seem like he was a hopeless drunkard. His agent should have made it. What a magnificent agent I've got. I've always thought that. And now that he's freed up to work with other people, you should all apply. I think probably my favorite last words.

And again, who knows if these were genuinely said, but it was by a French poet slash diplomat died in 1955 called Paul Claudel. And his last words were doctor, do you think it was the sausage? I looked up Paul Claudel just to see who he was. Here's the opening line from his obituary. Paul Claudel was a misogynist and antisemite and it is lava foam. That's the opening sentence. Opening sentence of what?

Of his obituary. It wasn't written by his agent, was it? No, exactly. It was his agent going, could you put and a poet in there? One time when we do know people's last words and when it's going to be something quite pithy is when people know they're going to die. So people on death row. Yes.

So there's a few famous ones of that. There was a murderer called James French when he was on the electric chair. He shouted, hey fellas, how about this for a headline for tomorrow's paper? French fries. It's a cracking one. And another one who did pretty much the same joke was called George Apple. And when he was being executed, he said, well gentlemen, you are about to see a baked apple. That is sort of copying James French.

I don't know who came first actually. He was in the line behind them. Oh, that's pretty good. This is what happened if Andy heard some last lines that he was up next. Well, my name isn't at all food related. So I'd be third in line going, oh my God, what am I going to do? Murray Mintz. Murray Mintz does work.

If you were being sliced to pieces. This is going to sound odd, but can I request the guillotine? It's just for a pun thing. I just have one more last words thing, which actually is just, I just wanted to mention Nero's last words only because I read something else about Nero this week, which I loved and didn't know. So Nero quite famously was supposed to have said, I can't remember who claimed it, but someone who was with him when he died said that Nero's last words were,

what an artist the world is losing in me. But something else, Cassius Dio, who was with him when he died. But another thing I learned about Nero this week was he was kind of like, some people say he was the world's first known SNM propagator. And he liked to have himself dressed up in animal skins like exotic animal furs. And he'd have people lock him in an enclosure in a cage. And then he'd like get himself all worked up. And then he liked to be released from this enclosure.

And he'd gallop around like a wild beast. And there'd be a bunch of men hung up in stocks around him. And he'd attack their genitals and bite them off for fun. Wow. Still not as weird as someone touching your face. 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 we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on Twitter. I'm on at Shriverland James at egg shaped Andy at Andrew Hunter M Chasinski. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. And you can also get us on at qi podcast. You can also go to know such thing as a fish.com where we've got all of our previous episodes. We've also got a link to all the live shows that we're going to be doing.

So go there, check it out. We'll be back again next week with another episode. See you then. Goodbye. Bye.