No Such Thing As A Fish - 73: No Such Thing As A Useless Condom

Episode Date: August 7, 2015

Dan, James, Anna and Anne discuss the preparations for D-Day, secret library porn, and cannibalistic cane toads.

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 Shriver, I'm sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Ann Miller, and James Harkin, 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 this week is that as part of the preparation for the D-Day landings, the Allies used condoms to collect soil and sand from the Normandy beaches. Why? Because they just felt like it. So this was called Operation Postage Able, which was the operation that preceded the D-Day landings to check that they were going to

work, and it involved sending Allied forces out under the cover of night in mini submarines, and then getting them to swim to the beach with a bunch of condoms and scoop up lots of sand in them, because I guess condoms are just useful receptacle. I think they started off with some sort of Tupperware and ran out and ended up using condoms, and it was to check that the sand wasn't going to be difficult to walk on. It was to check that it wasn't the wrong kind of sand. I think they suspected that it was a sort of sinking sand. So they ran out of buckets, so they used condoms. That doesn't work so much if you're building sand castles. Just a top tip. It also doesn't work the other way around. You

can't supplant a bucket for a condom. So why condoms? There must have been other things we could have used. I honestly think they are just a useful receptacle. I don't really know why we don't use them for more stuff. They squish up so small, and then they expand so huge. So a lot of survival advisors say you should use them as a water receptacle, and you should put it inside a sock, because it's not that strong. So it can get quite easily pricked. I'm not going shopping with you if you think that condoms can be used for any kind of receptacle. The weekly shop. Would you like a bag? No, I brought my own. They have been making counterfeit condoms in China, and it's so weird, because how do

you counterfeit a condom? But I think they're not regulation. They just bucket. They just bucket. They've put vegetable oil in them to make it seem like they've got spermicide in them to give it that same slippery quality. Oh, God. Have you heard about the spray-on condom? No. I heard of the spray-on t-shirt. It was like a Pekka aerosol, but it made a fabric, so you sprayed it on, and it made the fabric as it sprayed. You can say you can make a spray on anything. I mean. No, but this was in 2006, the Institute for Condom Consultancy, who created it, and it was inspired by the mechanics of a drive-through car wash. So the idea is that a gentleman's member would be inserted into a chamber. Into a car wash?

Yeah, it's kind of like a little chamber. It's like a mini car wash, and nozzles would apply a coat of fast-drying liquid latex, and that would go all around. Like I comes out to clean the windscreen. Yeah. So the prototype meant that you could change sizes and everything, which so they thought it would appeal to men who find difficulty finding the right size. It would appeal to men, mostly, I think. Exactly. But they had several problems with it. One was that it had a two to three-minute drying process, which they thought kind of killed the mood. The other mood killer was the loud, hitting noise of latex being burnt. And also having to buy tokens in the garage

before you start. Exactly. What's the point? Is that sort of a green and recycling-friendly thing? I think it was just an innovation for how you could sort of have, you can make your own condoms, DIY condoms. I think it shows not all innovation is helpful. Other uses for condoms, other wartime uses for condoms, they were used in second-world water to protect rifles from water. So you cover the barrel of your rifle with a condom. They're often used by engineers, apparently. I must ask my engineer friend about this to keep soil dry. And they're commonly used, apparently, in the film industry if you're doing underwater filming to keep microphones dry. Yes, yes, I've heard of this.

Really? Yeah, yeah. Only 25% of condoms in India are used for the correct use. Really? Are the rest a collect sand? No, other uses include giving a smooth finish and shine to silk saris and also cutting and spreading them on roads, mixing them with tar concrete to make more waterproof tar. Wow, you need a lot of condoms to cover a road. Well, that's why 25% are only used for the proper way because so many are used for roads and also in other construction they use it. Wow. Wow. And pensioners in South Africa have started to rub condoms on their knees to ease arthritic pain. Oh my god. If I ever go on Desert Island discs, that will be my luxury item now, condoms. It seems like the most practical thing you could bring anywhere. That's quite funny

because you left a load on the Desert Island. It's going to sound like real wishful thinking. It would be the weirdest moment if a woman did wash up after 10 years. I'm sorry, I don't have any left. I've been using them for soil samples and my arthritic knees. I'm carrying my wallet. Like I'm going to waste water having sex with you. You're talking about... Do you guys know there's a restaurant called Cabbage and Condoms that hands out condoms instead of after-dinner mints. Wow. It's quite an interesting approach. And also I had to read about options of people who are too embarrassed to buy condoms and there's a company, I just like its name, it's called Johnny's in a Jiffy and they sell condoms over the internet. Their tagline is, we come before you do.

That's very good. It's just those little nice little taglines that they like to constantly use. Celebrity condoms is a thing which is very surprising. There was a Daft Punk celebrity condom that came out. No, JLS had them, didn't they? JLS had them. Daft Punk's was called Get Lucky Condoms. Makes a lot of sense. JLS, they had each member on a separate box of condoms. You could decide which favorite JLS person you'd want to use. Do you think we should do our own? No such thing as a fish condom. No such thing as an unwanted pregnancy. What's a serious act? Is Daft Punk's condom is that opaque so that you can't identify the penis it belongs to? Yes, it's a big helmet. It's back to buckets again. So a few years ago, 5,000 happy

meals from McDonald's were accidentally sent out with colored condoms instead of a plastic toy from the movie The Last Airbender. And basically there was just a huge misunderstanding. So 5,000 children were opening their happy meals and... Was there a kind of confusion? Imagine you're in the bedroom and your condom is the last airbender toy. Let's just play with this. It's much more fun. This is the best contraceptive ever. But having any sex there. So we've got evidence of condoms that goes back to 13,000 BC in a cave painting, which is quite cool. Really? I think it's in a cave painting in France in the Grotte des Combarelles. And it shows a man who looks like he's standing there with a condom

over himself, probably made of animal skin. Over himself. Over his whole body. They hadn't quite mastered. Wow, really? Yeah. Is it and it's definitely what we think it is? Well, I mean, all we have is that picture that looks like he's got a covering over his willy. But why else would you do that? Could be a last airbender toy. We're not quite sure. Some stuff about D-Day? Sure. Did you know that in 1943 when... So we started planning the D-Day invasions very, very early on, which obviously were in June 1944. In 1943, an early copy of the plans for them blew out of the window of Norfolk House in London and was found on the street by a short-sighted

old man who went and handed it in and said, I don't know what these are. I can't really read them because my eyesight is not very good. Maybe, yeah. I said my eyes are just good enough so I can see the bits of paper, but not quite good enough that I can tell anything that's on there. Yeah. I can see the address on the top of the paper that tells me it's this building. I always think it must have been so exciting. You know, so code words were transmitted over the radio as signals to your various allies in the war that you were going to launch an attack, for instance. So on Radio London, I think a code word was transmitted to make the resistance fighters aware that D-Day was about to happen in the next 24 hours. And I just think that must

have been the coolest thing. So I think the code for that was a poem, the first stanza of Paul Verland's poem, Chanson d'Automne, as in the song of autumn. And that was the signal that the D-Day landings were going to happen within the next 24 hours. Wow. But that must have been the coolest thing. Yeah. If you're listening to the radio and you'll go, oh my God, it's happening. Shall we talk about soil and mud and stuff? Because according to Britain's leading Earth Sciences organization, the Geological Society, 2015 is the year of mud. Is it? I didn't know that. What are we supposed to do? I think it's to celebrate what an important and ubiquitous substance mud is. Is mud important? Yeah. It makes you happy. Did you know that?

Playing in the mud is a microscopic bacteria called mycobacterium vasae. And they increase serotonin, which makes you relaxed and calm. Really? That explains a lot of Glastonbury photos I've seen over the years. All the mud, but they don't mind. He's thought it with the drugs. Just the mud. One tablespoon of soil contains more organisms than there are people on Earth, which is extraordinary, right? More living things in that than there are human beings. And 15 tons of soil passes through an earthworm each year. They eat and poo out? Yeah. Oh, okay. Wow. That's cool. I once read, and I'm not sure if it's even true, that if you get a field full of cows, then the weight of earthworms underneath the ground

will be heavier than the weight of cows above the ground, no matter how many cows you have. Because you couldn't fit enough cows next to each other. I don't know if it's true, but yeah. Well, 1.4 million earthworms is the average number of earthworms you get in an acre of land. Okay. What's the average weight of a earthworm? Let's all work this out guys. I think this is going to be fun. Well, while you're working it, do you know acres from an old English word that meant an open field of no particular measurement? So you could just be like, yeah, I've got acres of land around my house. Scientists have invented transparent soil. Yeah, I saw that. It's really cool. Yeah. It's so that you can plant a plant in there and you can see the roots grow. That's

the coolest. It's a good idea. That is incredible. It's a thing called a napheon, which they are a poly synthetic polymer also used for batteries. Right. So it's not really soil. It's it's plant brewer, potato, potato, both of which are grown in soil. A potato is the transparent one. Yes. Okay. There we go. Shall we move on? I have one last thing that I just want to quickly mention before we move on. Just a movie recommendation. I haven't seen it yet, but it sounds fantastic. Movie called Killer Condom, the tagline, the rubber that rubs you out. Set in the CV parts of New York City, Killer Condom follows gay detective Luigi Macaroni, who has been hired to investigate

a series of bizarre attacks at the Hotel Quickie, in which male guests have all had their penises mysteriously bitten off. Well, I'm just going out on a limb here, but is Luigi Macaroni an Italian character? I think he's an Italian detective. So we don't know if they catch the condom. You should watch the film. That's a spoiler alert. I haven't seen this movie yet, guys. I'm not going to give that away. Okay. Time for fact number two. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that every second a star in the universe explodes. Every second. Every second. Oh my goodness. So by the time you told this fact, how many? Yep. Right now. There. Star is somewhere in the universe has exploded.

I read a different article as well that suggested that up to 30 stars in the universe explode every second. But I think it's safer to say at least one. Yeah. So actually just researching this whole fact I found really unpleasant because it just terrifies the life out of me. You know, whenever you read any of the facts related to this kind of stuff, the massiveness of it all is horrifying. The reason I like this fact so much just as a thought experiment is we can fit a million of our earths into our sun size wise. That's the equivalent. Our sun is quite a small sun in comparison to the majority of suns out there. And so just the idea of one of these things exploding, there's a lot of damage when a star explodes. The idea that

that's happening every second of every day. Yeah. I mean that's over 46,000 stars a day. Yeah. Exploding. But they're really rare. I mean comparatively rare, even though there's one a second. The last one in our galaxy was 1604. It was almost as bright as Jupiter. I think that's the last one we could see. Yeah. The last one we observed. Wow. So they think that in every galaxy you get one into a century, don't they? Yeah. But I find this extraordinary as well that the last one that we saw was 1604 and Kepler saw that. And the last one that was seen in our galaxy before that was Tycho Brahe, who was Kepler's tutor. And no one seen one in our galaxy since. Wow. I find that bizarre. If you didn't know better, you'd say they were making it up, wouldn't

you? They could be, but we've investigated their claims and we have evidence that they weren't. And we're still using the remnants of Kepler's supernova that he witnessed in 1604. So he wrote it down very clearly what he was seeing over a period of time. And we can still use his observations to study it now because we can still see the remnants of that supernova now. And we know exactly what kind of supernova it was. And we can actually use that his observations to work out how fast the universe is expanding. It's like a time marker in the universe that tells us how fast the universe is expanding. Did he actually see the supernova explode? Well, a new star appears, doesn't it? They saw the brightness. It was a supernova in 1006 that was so bright people could

read their manuscripts at midnight. No. That sounds like a me fact. I read that there's certain patches of the ocean that are so at the surface filled with little algae and animals that are bioluminescent that you could actually read a newspaper on your boat. It's so bright, the surrounding shine. Supposedly during World War II, when they had blackouts in Japan, they would take bioluminescent creatures out of the sea and put them in like jam jars and use them as lights and read things from them. Which is so romantic. Or condoms when the jam jars ran out. Not romantic. Wow, that's amazing. Is that true? That's definitely true. A supernova allowed us to read in the middle of the night. Yeah, they're really bright. So one day we might

be in the middle of the night and it will just light up. Yeah, that's a supernova from it. There are 16 candidates I read that profited supernovas in our galaxy. The best is the nearest would be probably spectacular if that one goes. And excitingly, it's definitely going to explode sometime within the next 100 million years. I think if you say Beetlejuice three times, it explodes. No more times guys. Yeah, because you can see Beetlejuice anyway, like just with your naked eye. So imagine how light it would be when it explodes. Oh my goodness. You'll be reading all night. They can be far away and you cannot notice. So there was a print thing in January 2011, a 10 year old Canadian girl discovered a supernova. She was

looking at pictures on her computer and spotted one. Did she say that's a supernova? Or did she say what's that? Yeah. Well, there's a guy in Australia. So Bill Bryson's book, Short History Nearly Everything, and they call him the supernova spotter because Bill Bryson basically says that throw a bunch of sand onto a table, have him stare at it and stare at it and stare at it, take him away, remove a single grain, let him turn back and he'll tell you that that grain is gone. Like he can have just, and he spots supernova by just looking at the night sky with a telescope. He would have gone nuts in 10 or 6. This is, James doesn't believe this at all. I mean, so that's a down fact. The difference. I can imagine him walking onto the D-Day beaches

and going, wait a minute, there's a condom's worth of sand missing here. That grain, that grain, that grain. Yeah, maybe I've sexed that story up a bit. I mean, maybe it's true. Yeah, I'm sure he claims it. It sounds like the kind of thing a wacky guy in Australia might claim, right? So do you know how far away, you know how people say you can see like millions and millions of stars? I think you never, I think it's like four, roughly 4,000 stars is pretty much the maximum number of stars you'll ever see in the sky. But do you know how far away we're seeing when we look up to the sky? No. We are seeing 19, I think that is quadrillion miles away. Okay. Well, then why am I wearing glasses to see? I know it two meters away.

TV screen when I'm on a couch and I can see a star 19 quadrillion miles away. No, I don't really understand him. You should ask that next time you go to the opticians, you should say, I can't read that, but would you mind placing that 19 quadrillion miles from me? I appear to be extremely, extremely, extremely long-sighted. That is amazing though, isn't it? It's extraordinary, isn't it? Our tiny little eyes are taking in light from that far away. Yeah. So good thing about supernovas is that is the only place where sort of more complicated elements than hydrogen and helium can be born. And so the human body is mostly made of like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, a few other things,

and they will all have been made in supernovas. So basically your whole body was created in a supernova. Yeah. So this is something that was freaking me out on the bus to work this morning when I'd just been reading this and I was looking at a Boris bike stop and I was staring at this metal of this Boris bike stuff and was like, you came from a star. That doesn't make any sense. It terrifies me. Everything you're looking at was born inside a star. Mental. Explosions in space, different kind of stars, sometimes really absolutely stun scientists. They have no idea what to make of it. So for example, in 1979, they found an explosion that was 50 times more intense than anything previously recorded. It was 180,000 light years away.

And no one knew what it was. And the people at NASA and other leading scientists said that the odd thing about it was that its source was an area of only 187 miles in diameter, with a whole lot of energy erupting in fairly small sector. It resembled a high energy bomb blast. And they basically said it was unlike anything we've seen in space. They thought it was Star Wars. Exactly. They thought that what they were saying, basically, like we know it won't be this, but what it looked like was we were witnessing an intergalactic battle between giant ships. And this has led to Star Wars theory, which has been going since the late 70s. I mean, it turns out we know what it was now. It's a new kind of star that they hadn't yet previously

detected. But since 1979, there's a great conspiracy theory that has been running. You can still see it online, Star Wars theory, that we witnessed an intergalactic battle, and the government's been covering it up ever since. It's very exciting. This is like, I think that's on the same level as, which is fictional in Harry Potter, when they have a, they're having a fight in the sky and there's a line about, oh, they think of the muggles down below thinking of fireworks. So we see fireworks. Yeah. See. What do you mean, see? See? Hands prove my point. I forgot for a second she was talking fiction. Okay, time for fact number three. And that is James. My fact this week is that the Tlatel Camila cannibals of ancient Mexico at the human flesh with chili

sauce. Yeah. How do we know that? So we found some bones of humans and the bones have kind of been chipped with tools and a nod on a little bit. So we know that, well, we think that they were eaten by humans. And they're also stained with chili sauce. They have the stains of the spices on the bones. Wow. So they assume that they were marinated before eaten. Well, you would, wouldn't you? Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. This is a study from two universities, one in Madrid and one in Mexico. And these cannibals were living about 2,500 years ago. Wow. Yeah. It's good that. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Because you never think about condiments or anything when it comes to eating humans. No. Yeah. And I think it's prejudice of us against cannibals to think that they don't have,

you know, the sensitivity of taste. Yeah, exactly. Like there's no gourmet version, like they're just gorging on stuff. No, they want to have a nice meal. Like some people don't even think cannibalism properly exists. Like they think, okay, well, people do eat each other after war, after battle, or something. Or they might do a real, real hardship, but they don't think that humans would do it just naturally because they're hungry. Yeah. But then I think there are a few examples of cultures that did. So I think that does happen, yeah. Yeah. I was reading about survival cannibalism, which is seen as sort of slightly more acceptable, you know, if you're in a disaster and you have no choice, Ray, or you're going to die. In the 18th and 19th century, it was seen as something

that basically is an occupational hazard of life at sea. And that's just something that happened from time to time. And the customer of the sea involved throwing straws. If you do the second shortest straw, you had to do the killing. If you do the shortest straw, you got eaten. Wow. Democratic. John Lloyd told us a story once, which John Lloyd, the head of QI, he was at sea. It's an occupational hazard when you work at QI, you'll accept it. No, do you remember that story told us about how there used to be a guy that went around towns, and I don't know which country this is, but his act was buy tickets and he will eat a person on stage. And so, yeah, he would go around to all these towns. People would pay all the money.

He would sell out all these places and he'd get on stage and they're all going, what are we going to expect? What's going to happen here? And then the man said, I will now eat a person who would like to be eaten. And of course, everyone would go, oh, God, no. And so he would go, well, I can't do my show unless anyone is ready to be eaten. Yeah. And then so no one could return their money because he couldn't do his act because no one was providing. Could venues not specify before he came, like, you know, you need to bring your own person, mate. That's true. I think it was his responsibility to provide the person. Yeah. It puts me in mind that there was a, there was a movie in America

and they did as a publicity stunt that they were going to give away a baby. And there was a massive, massive uproar and they, they sold tickets to this baby giveaway, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then in the end, they gave away a baby pig. Oh, yeah. So it was all fine. I mean, it's not fine for the baby pig's mother, is it James? No. Is that her child ripped from her teeth? Sorry, Anna. Yeah. Was Captain Cook, he was eaten by cannibals, right? I don't think so. Oh, you don't? No, it's often said that he was. But I think, generally speaking, now that we think that he wasn't, they think that the people who

et him believed in the power of human bones, not to eat, but they just thought they were powerful objects. And so they boiled down his body to get the bones. And that's, people saw that happening and assumed that he was being eaten, but actually he wasn't. Do you know that we got the word cannibal from Columbus? Do we? To take it from a Spanish word, it was to describe the indigenous people on the Caribbean islands, even though he didn't actually believe the rumors that they ate people. So as you say, James, I don't think I've read in the course of this research, like people eating people for sustenance anyway, it was always a ritual thing.

So I think in ancient Mexico, you don't eat your enemy, wouldn't you? If you slaughtered your enemy, you'd eat it. Or funeral rites and people would do it. Funeral rites, yeah. It wouldn't be to live off. It's always what the neighbors do, isn't it? It's always what the guys down the road and the guys who eat people. It's not us. But we also eat them here as medicines. So people would consume bits of Egyptian mummies, try and heal. That expanded to being pieces from local cadavers. So we were eating bodies. Is it bad to eat human? I'm just curious. It's generally frowned upon.

I know it's frowned upon, but is it bad? Probably the same as red meat, right? Yeah. Well, there are bad things. Supposedly it's more likely to give you something like variant CJD or some kind of spongiform brain illness. In Papua New Guinea, I think they were suffered from a disease called Kuru, which is a bit like CJD. That was thought to be because they were eating human brains mostly, actually. Dan, if you'd like to know more, you might be interested in the annual cannibal conference for academics. Our papers include Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Inside the Mind of the Cannibal Serial Killer, and Bon Appetit, A Concised Offence of Cannibalism.

Wow. Where does that take place? The one was in Manchester that I read about, but I don't know if it was there every year. I wonder what the catering's like. Yeah. When you're queuing up in the canteen and all they have is a load of straws, then you know you're in trouble. I was reading about animal cannibalism because it happens a lot in animals. There's an interesting thing with salamanders. Salamander larvae have this amazing thing where they get very crowded, and so they've developed what's called the cannibal morph. They have wider mouths, broader heads, lower jutting jaws, and their teeth can be three times as longer, and they eat

the other ones that don't have the cannibal morph. So you know how we get paranoid during puberty, you know, if someone doesn't develop their breasts early enough or whatever? These guys must be terrified when they're going through adolescence, and they're not one of the ones who's developing the special cannibalistic draw. Yeah. And your best mate is, and you're looking at him going, oh, this guy's gonna eat me in a year. They did a study of cane toads. I really like the title of this study. It's called Deceptive Digits, the Functional Significance of Toe Waving by Cannibalistic Cane Toads. And anyway, it's

about the fact that so cane toads, they practice cannibalism a lot. So there was one study that found that 64% of the cane toad diet is made up of other cane toads. Really? Yeah. 64%? Yeah. Wow. And they found that the bigger ones who have decided to cannibalize lure the smaller ones to them

by wiggling their middle toe and make it look like a little bit of prey, I think, or something about that seems to attract smaller cane toads to them of their own species who come and approach them to say, hey, man, nice wiggle. And then they eat them. Wow. Yeah. And hippos, hippos practice cannibalism. Do they? Yeah, which is weird because they're vegetarians. Well, I'm a vegetarian except for, I did just eat my best mate.

I read an article from the Lancashire Evening Post in 1921. And it was, you know how old newspapers used to just have, rather than have like big, long articles, they just have quick reports. So they just have a quick paragraph of update. This is just somewhere in the middle of the newspaper. Lancashire Evening Post, 1921. Brigadier General Barnett in a report on conditions in Haiti, declares that the natives ate the bodies of several US Marines, including Lieutenant Lawrence Muth. End of article. Right. I just seem like such a throwaway, tiny little, oh, by the way, some soldiers have been eating

in Haiti. Yeah. And the weather. And I say a thing about chilies. Yes. There was a study that found that women like to eat chili for the spicy feeling, whereas men do it for social reward. Linked this, Nando's tweeted that they often get men on dates ordering plain chicken, but asking for extra hot flags on their food. Wow.

Is that what they do at Nando's? Put flags on your food. To show how hot it is. Yeah, so you don't mix them up. That's very funny. I really hope when the, if waitresses bring it to the table, they say, and we've got one plain chicken with extra hot flags here. The mild, mild with extra hot flags. Anyone? Oh, you, sir. There were some hot sauces names just for fun.

Pain is good sauce. It's a good one. Great. Ring of fire hot sauce. Oh, it's another one you get in America. And the winner of the hot sauce awards 2015, crazy bastard sauce. That's good. Nice. Yeah.

Could have a beneficial effect though, eating hot sauce, because this guy called Randy Schmitz took part in a hot sauce chili eating competition. He was rushed to hospital because he collapsed immediately after dabbing just a drop of this chili called flash bang onto his tongue. Weren't also had an MRI scan had a tumor turned out, which they removed and he's fine. Great. In January, 2013, Dr. Ian Rothwell at the world's hottest curry. It took him over an hour to finish the dish, which included a 10 minute walk down the high street weeping.

That's just pure chili coming out of eyes. Oh my God. The Indian army supposedly are testing out chili grenades as a form of non-lethal weapon. They use it on elephants. Do they? Do they. But then they got cancelled because they were prone to fungal rot. Oh no. Don't use it on hippos because they'll go, wow, even more delicious.

Okay, time for our final fact of the show and that is Ann. My fact is that dogs aren't allowed at Selwyn College in Cambridge, so the master's basset hound has been reclassified as a very large cat. That's really good. So basically this guy, so they've just got this law, no dogs. No dogs, but there's a sort of precedent that you can have a cat. They were quite knowing about it. Apparently it was a jokey minute, but nevertheless the minute hit the internet

and the minute says, college animal. Noting precedent under the master's tip of Professor Chadwick, council approved the master's request to drop the very large cat in the master's lodge. And then everyone sort of taken it to heart and people thought it was just a quirky Cambridge custom and he'd go out and tell everyone would yell, hey, I love your cat after his basset hound. But the story went viral. It was on the official Chinese news agency on websites in South America and he had to do an interview in America about what Yo-Yo the dog thought of the situation.

And Yo-Yo's owner says- He was up and down about it. But his owner said, he played along gamely and resisted the urge to shout, she has no idea, she's a sodding dog. But they've been seeing quite a lot of sort of dogs passing off with other things. There was a news story a few months ago about a guy who had two puppies, had them for two years, turned out they were black bears. And he only found out when someone threw his house about people trading in illegal animals

and was like, hang on a minute. But his puppy weighed 50 kilos each. She only found out when it clawed off his face. I think he only found out when he discovered that you can be punished for only the wrong time. Some other loopholes maybe. The 1862 Homestead Act in America allowed people to go through America and grab a bit of land. So any US citizen could go along, find some land. But in order to claim it, they had to build a 12 by 14 dwelling on it.

But the law didn't say what units the 12 by 14 was in. And apparently some people built 12 by 14 inches houses so that they could claim the land. They couldn't live in the house there. There was, in 2007, smoking was banned in bars in Minnesota. And there was a bar called Barnacles Bar, which found out it was losing a lot of custom on account of that. And it found a loophole in the law which said that smoking is banned in indoor places

unless you are an actor in a play who's playing a character that smokes. And so the Minnesota bar said that they were staging a continuous life performance and that everyone in the bar was an actor. Very good. This is not a loophole, but I just like in the idea of bands that have happened. In 2013, Florida accidentally banned computers. What? Yeah, it was a very badly worded bill.

They were cracking down on online gambling in internet cafes, particularly in Florida. And it banned, I guess, slot machines and so on. And said that any machine or device or system or network of devices, which meant that that's exactly what a computer is. That's fantastic. And in 2011, they actually made it illegal for anyone to have sex as well. So this is two times. It's a great time to live in.

Yeah. It was basically, they were banning bestiality. They outlawed, and this is the quotes here, knowing sexual conduct or sexual contact with an animal, forgetting that that's what we are. There was a loophole in Christchurch in New Zealand where if you wanted to register your diesel car, you needed to pay two hundred and sixty dollars. But if you wanted to register a hearse, you could register it for fifty eight dollars.

And so a lady registered her diesel car as a non-commercial hearse by arguing that whenever she went to the supermarket, she was bringing back dead chickens. So how much did she save by doing that? She saved two hundred dollars. Two hundred dollars. Amazing. Can I bring us back to Cambridge very quickly? Because I used this opportunity of looking into something that I've always wondered about,

and I read about it in a Stephen Fry novel years ago. So there's always been a rumor that the library of Cambridge for the university contained a secret stash of Victorian porno. And Stephen Fry talks about it in his novel, The Liar. So obviously it's a novel, but it's a real rumor that's existed, and everyone seems to talk about it. Recently, they had to put all of their books online because they've upgraded into the New World,

and it has been revealed that there is no porno stash. And what they do have are a couple of Victorian books, and the only titles really that get close to it are The Lovers Guide to Courtship, Floating Made Easy. What? I mean, yeah. But if you had a secret collection, you wouldn't put it on the website. Well, this is true, but so.

Well, you'd rename it Floating Made Easy, so no one knew what it was. Did you hear Floating then? Floating. I wanted to know James gave you such a weird joke. I'll tell you what, that's why I've been going wrong all these years. Oh, James was floating in bars. So good at levitating, though. I'm impressed by it.

But yeah, they had this article. Vanessa Lacey, who's the manager of the Cambridge University Library Tower project, said that, unfortunately, it's not true. However, she did say, good news, there are plenty of pornography from the modern world view to look at. The internet. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

But so they do have a lot of modern porn in there. But no, so far, unless you're right, unless they're still hiding the secret stash. Yeah. They did have something very recently, and it's a shame that it's been busted so quickly. There was a book in the Cambridge Library where, when you opened it, it was hollowed out on the inside, and it had chocolate bars. You're not allowed to eat inside the library. And so the idea was that you would eat these chocolate bars

if you were starving and stuck in the library researching. And then there's a message underneath the chocolate bars, which said your job is to now return the book with more chocolate inside for the next person who finds it. But unfortunately, it's been busted, so now that's no longer a thing. Although, at the end of the day, you are bringing chocolate into the library, and you are eating chocolate. It's an odd system, isn't it?

00:35:32,360 --> 00:35:34,120 Because you might as well just eat your own chocolate. Yeah. Exactly. Very odd. They're only doing it for the sake of the fun system. Maybe as if you're working late, you think I'm really hungry. There's no slack machine in here.

I'll check the book. I'll check every book. Not all of it. I'm going to read all of it. Pond, pond, pond. Those bars! Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts.

Thank you 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, you can find us on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, James. At Eggshaped. And at Miller underscore and Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, you can also get us on our group account, which is at qi podcast. And you can also go to knowsuchthingasafish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes. Go there as well if you want to book some of our live shows. We will be back again next week. Thank you so much. See you then.

Goodbye.