No Such Thing As A Fish - 75: No Such Thing As Diarrhoea Drive

Episode Date: August 21, 2015

Live from The Aces and Eights Bar in Tufnell Park, Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss facts suggested from the audience, including blue margarine, superstrong beetles and car-driving monkey butlers. ...

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Starting point is 00:00:00 The following show you're about to listen to is slightly different to the ones we normally do. This show was a live one, recorded at the Aces and Akes Bar in Toughnell Park a couple of months ago, and rather than being our four favorite facts, it was the favorite facts of the audience. So we did no prep for this at all, it was the first time we'd heard a lot of these facts, so it's a bit ropey around the edges, but stick with it because we think it's a really funny one and I hope you will enjoy it. We're putting it out this week in preparation for our Edinburgh Festival shows, which begin next week. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the Aces and Akes Bar in Toughnell Park. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, James Harkin and Andy Murray, and once again we've gathered around the microphone,
Starting point is 00:01:07 but this time it's not with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, it's your favorite facts and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with, okay you were told to put your name, this person's not putting their name, it's an absolute disaster. Why don't we, I reckon people are going to remember what their facts were. That's true, Max Walker. Wicked, okay Max. So my fact is about the Scrooge effect, which is if you make somebody think about death, they then increase how charitable they are and also when they do donations, they then get more satisfaction from it as well. Wow, that's good, okay. Do we assume because they're thinking I really hope someone gives money to charity when I die so that it's not as bad? I think that's what people suspect, it also makes people spend more material goods in general.
Starting point is 00:02:01 What is this famous effect called where you buy something green, so you're doing something really good for the environment and then because you've done that, then you do something really not very nice afterwards. It's called moral licensing, it's where you let yourself do something bad, so this sounds a bit like the opposite of that I suppose, you're reminded of something bad that's going to happen to you so you then do something good. What's moral licensing? What's a good example? If you don't have a shower to save water, later on you'll leave the hob on longer. Yeah, or you'll fill up the kettle slightly less than normal so it uses less energy and then you'll go out and brutally murder three people. Yeah, moral licensing. Weirdly, today I read a story about a show that has been named the worst show of all time. Is it which show? In which the prizes were all charity prizes and the idea was that it was for celebrities and it was a show hosted by a comedian back in the day called Jackie Gleason.
Starting point is 00:02:59 And the idea was that if the celebrity got the question right, a bunch of care packages would go to their choice of charity. If they got it wrong, it would go in Jackie Gleason's name, so it would look like he was this amazing, it was just like, wow, this Jackie Gleason guy is incredible, he cares so much. So here's the thing, the show was terrible, it was absolutely terrible and it got cancelled after two shows. But the second show, and as far as I know, it's the only time in history this has happened, the second show was Jackie Gleason sitting on a stripped down set and it was half an hour of him apologizing to the audience at home. The entire second show was him going, we totally messed up, that was horrible, we can't believe we did that to you, we can't believe we spent so much money on it and then they cancelled the show, but it's known as the worst show of all time. Yeah, that sounds tedious. It is really interesting the stuff that has a psychological effect on you that you're not realizing and they're always doing studies, sometimes quite dubious about it, but there's that study that says that if there's pop music playing in a shop, I think I'm more likely to spend more money. And also the fact that they start playing classical music in places that are high crime, haven't they, because then it stops people, it deters people from coming to crime. Yeah, on two stations, they do that, don't they?
Starting point is 00:04:07 Two stations, yeah, and dodgy parts of town, play classical music at people. Okay, should we go on to the next fact? Yeah, yeah, go for it. Cool, so I think it's from someone called Coraly or Coraly. Ah yes, so if you could pass that over, I'll also read a tweet at the same time. Yeah, go for it. So we have a tweet by someone called at Olly Granger and they said, my fact is that if you like grilled cheese, you'll have 32% more sex. Olly's in tonight.
Starting point is 00:04:34 Oh, hi Olly. Oh, hi Olly. Was this an experiment you did yourself for? It was on BBC News. Oh, was it? Amazing. And is that going to turn into a sexy food now when you're sort of like bringing a date home and going grilled cheese? Champagne, oysters, rare bit. Okay, let's move on to Coraly.
Starting point is 00:04:58 Is it Coraly or Coraly? Coraly. Coraly, what was your fact? In 1567, the man with the longest beard died when he tripped over it running away from a fire. Okay, when you trip, it's quite easy to get back up straight away, right? It depends where you trip. There's a fire next to the Grand Canyon. I think this guy with the beard, I think I've heard about him.
Starting point is 00:05:30 I think he used to tuck his beard in a pocket, didn't he? In a little pocket. He used to tuck it in there so that he didn't trip over. And presumably this time the fire was on and he sort of put his hands in the air and knocked his beard out of his pocket and then tripped up. Wow. I'm speculating. And I accepted that as true. Sometimes James tells me something.
Starting point is 00:05:51 I'm like, wow, okay, that's cool. That's knowledge now. Abraham Lincoln had a beard, famously. Yeah. Not for most of his life, though, did he? The reason he grew a beard, I don't know if people know about this, is because a young girl wrote him a letter saying that if he grew a beard, then some of her brothers would vote for him. Because he'd made a speech or he'd made a statement in some way saying, I think it's so reminiscent of kind of shawditch trendy people today. He said a thing saying, do you think people might think I'm a bit pretentious if I grow this beard now, this whole whiskery thing?
Starting point is 00:06:23 And this girl wrote in saying, look, I've got this brother. He's saying he won't vote for you unless you have facial hair. And so he did it. And then he met her a few years later, a station, didn't he, and said, this beard's for you. Wow. It was a different time, wasn't it? It was a more innocent time, the 1860s. I just to move on quickly, there's a really good tweet here that I got from at Finneyland, which is that in 2009, two French mayors declared the same street one way, but in different directions.
Starting point is 00:07:01 That is such a fantastic moment in history. I remember that happening, actually. Do you? Yeah, it's like near Paris. Yeah, it's in Paris, yeah. And it was like a big argument between these two mers and they just decided, right, we're going to do it. My uncle used to be a mayor in Bolton. Did he?
Starting point is 00:07:19 Okay, yeah. What did he declare in defiance of his counterpart? He declared that this was actually when he was a councillor out in the mayor, but they wanted to build some houses in Bolton. And no one wanted them to build these houses. And they tried to stop them, but they couldn't stop them because they had the law on their side. And my uncle thought, well, we can't stop them. But what we can do is we can rename the streets things that they don't want to put houses on. And so they came up with the idea of making a diarrhea drive and Hitler Grove.
Starting point is 00:07:56 And they were genuinely, they actually had plans that they were going to make these streets. But then in the end, I think someone backed out. Just on the subject of things being named Hitler. There used to be a guy who lived in Ohio in, he was living around World War II. His name was Adolf Hitler, right? And he was living in America in Ohio, refused to change his name. And when the guy asked him, why have you not changed your name? He said, I'm not going to let one guy ruin the good name of Adolf Hitler.
Starting point is 00:08:29 And so he kept the name. And I always, for years, I've known this as a kind of QI-ish kind of thing. And I've never kind of thought to think of whatever happened to his dream. Did it work? I looked into it. Ohio in America is the only place now that has Hitler named landmarks. They've got a Hitler lake. They've got a Hitler church.
Starting point is 00:08:46 They have a Hitler park. It worked. It worked. Hitler brought the name background. Wow. Because what was he? Was he like, give me two months. I'll bring this back.
Starting point is 00:08:54 This will be a fine name again. Hitler did have nephews in Liverpool, didn't he? Yeah. And one of them, one of his nephews wrote an article in 1939 with the headline, Why I Hate My Uncle. He gives really bad presents at Christmas. Shall we move on? Yeah, let's move on.
Starting point is 00:09:18 Sorry, next fact. Okay. Our next fact is from Otti. No. Sorry. No. Diane. They are similar, to be fair.
Starting point is 00:09:29 Yeah. Diane Dupont. Is that a name that? Yeah. That's you. Can you pass the microphone over? Okay. So while you pass that on, I'll read one of these facts that we have from at Appatu.
Starting point is 00:09:42 They said that Canadian one dollar coins are called loonies and two dollar coins are called toonies. That's really cool. That's really cool. I'll tell you something about Canada. My dream was illegal in Canada from around 1880 to around 1930, something like that. What was the reason? It was a very powerful lobbying from the dairy manufacturers.
Starting point is 00:10:08 They wanted it to be banned because they thought that they would take away the butter business and they banned it. And then they brought it back for a little time during First World War because they needed something to put on the bread. But yeah, for a long time. And actually in some parts of America as well, in Maine it was, I think there were seven states where my dream was illegal at the start of the 20th century. Yeah, Wisconsin.
Starting point is 00:10:25 Yeah, and people would smuggle it over the border. They had to dye it blue. They had to dye it blue. Wow. They had to dye it blue. Yeah. Blue and pink. Why did they...
Starting point is 00:10:36 They gave him a comb bag with a little dye packet so as not to be confused with butter. Wow. So once again, this is just an example of the type of audience that we have when we do a comedy guest. Most other gigs, it's just people going, you suck. Get off. We have corrections in a told off sort of manner. I wrote a tweet earlier and I got corrected on it in four different ways.
Starting point is 00:10:57 Within 10 minutes. Two mathematical, one simple counting thing which I hadn't done and one scriptural. Pretty good. That's great. Does this lady, Diane, stroke, Otto, stroke, whatever your name is. Have you got a mic yet? I do. Cool.
Starting point is 00:11:14 What was your fact? The Danish word for 58 is actually short for eight and a half, three twenties. Wow. 58 is... Eight? Eight and a half, three twenties. It follows like a Roman numeral logic. That's quite...
Starting point is 00:11:27 It's semi-similar but much more complicated to a French, isn't it? Which does, you know... Catrava. Catrava. Whatever. This is much better. I need brackets to understand that. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:11:38 I'm going to put it out there. I literally don't understand what that means. I'm not even going to attempt to try and comprehend it. Did anyone try that maths quiz that was all over the news yesterday, that logic quiz? It was good, wasn't it? It was... Was it in Sweden? No.
Starting point is 00:11:53 Singapore. S-Countries. Confusing. We could do this whole thing in call and response, like a queen gig. So what was it? It was a logic puzzle. It was a logic puzzle. It was where a girl and her two friends were...
Starting point is 00:12:07 She was trying to make them guess when her birthday was and she told one friend a date of her birthday and the other friend the month of her birthday and then there's a conversation where... I mean, you look at that and I'm not going to give it to you. You have to guess with us. Yeah. It's a logic joke. No?
Starting point is 00:12:21 Tough. It goes, it's not mine. Three logicians walk into a bar and the barman says, do you all want to drink? And the first guy says, I don't know. And the second guy says, I don't know. And the third guy goes, yes. I don't think it's that type of crowd, James. I'm going to go for that kind of stuff tonight.
Starting point is 00:12:44 Yeah. The logic material didn't quite work tonight. It's a good one. Okay. I have another fact here and it doesn't have a name. Oh, it has a name on the back from Josephine. Josephine. All right.
Starting point is 00:12:59 So while that's making it over, here's another fact we got from Twitter from at itim pilgrim. Jelly babies were originally marketed under the name unwanted babies. Oh, no. That's a good fact. Okay. Josephine, have you got a microphone? Yes. What would you like to tell us?
Starting point is 00:13:21 A rhinoceros beetle. It's towing capacity is the same as a man lifting nine male elephants over his head, apparently. Wow. Yeah. Are they doing it to show off or is it like a... Because I've not even lifted one elephant. I could. I've just never felt the need.
Starting point is 00:13:44 That's, yeah. The idea with this with insects is actually it's because if you're a lot smaller, it's a lot easier to do stronger things. And that's because your muscle strength depends on the cross-section of your muscle, which is a two-dimensional thing. And your size is a three-dimensional thing. And so it goes up quicker because you're multiplying it three times rather than two times. I know I explained that very well.
Starting point is 00:14:07 No, no, that's good. I've always felt inferior to ants because of this kind of thing. It's not because of that kind of thing. They work in a team. I mean, out. There is one thing which is, and it's, I think, the strongest organism in nature. And it's even smaller than the rhinoceros beetle, but it's gonorrhea. Gonorrhea can tow something like 100,000 times its own weight, which is probably why it's
Starting point is 00:14:42 so successful. Not from our perspective, but it has these filaments all around it called pilli, which sort of crawls along things with them. And it has this huge, huge pulling capacity. It's very cool. Wouldn't Andy make the most fantastic STI doctor? Just as you're getting the news that you got gonorrhea. Interesting fact actually about that.
Starting point is 00:15:04 Do you know, Dan, which is your strongest muscle in your body? What would you say? My tongue? Is that your muscle? It's a reasonable guess, but it's wrong. And so the strongest absolutely will be your arse, your gluteus maximus, and that's pretty much because it's the biggest. It's got the biggest cross-sectional area.
Starting point is 00:15:26 But the biggest by actual, not by size, but the biggest by square centimeter is not in your body, but it is in Anna's body. It's the uterus. Really? It's the strongest. Your uterus is actually very weak. Sounds like a challenge. Let's get your uterus out, let's do this.
Starting point is 00:15:47 Every live show, every live show he does this. And a uterus has the strength equivalent of a crossbow. Now I don't understand what that means. I mean medieval castles, when besieged, did not go to the uterus cabinet. So is that saying if we rigged up an arrow somehow to our uterus, then we could propel it further than a crossbow? Not really, a crossbow is much bigger, so it's like per square area. That is a good fact.
Starting point is 00:16:22 Just while we're talking about the body quickly, I've developed a new thing on... Oh dear. Dan, I have to tell you from the diseases perspective, it's doing great. It's an odd new thing. In the last six months, every time I wake up, I'm woken up by the sound of my own body from my face going... Every time I wake up now, I swear to God, every morning I've woken up going... What's happening to me?
Starting point is 00:16:55 That's my question. I don't know what's happening to you, but have you considered donating to charity? I'm swearing. There's a man in America, I don't know what made me think of this, who was... I think he was executed, and what happened was they thought that he'd had sex with a pig. And the reason that they thought he'd had sex with a pig is because a pig had given birth to a piglet that looked a bit like him. Even though he knows it's not true, that's the most insulting thing.
Starting point is 00:17:31 There's no win in that whatsoever. That really reminds me of a story that I remember Richard Maidley of Richard and Judy telling years ago. He went up to a woman in a bus stop and he went, Bill, hi! And this woman turned around and went, what are you talking about? And he said, Bill, right? We knew each other at school and she was like, no, I'm Jane. And he said, oh, sorry, you just look so much like Bill, I assumed you'd had a sex change. And it was you.
Starting point is 00:17:58 Bizarre thing to do. Say what you like about Richard Maidley, he's confident. Shall we move on to our next fact? This fact is from Chris R. It was at Naxfish. Do we have it? Do we have Chris R.? Hello! In the meantime, shall I share my favorite fact that I got via email? Because I assume it's from someone who wasn't on Twitter.
Starting point is 00:18:18 Lauren Gilbert. In 1958, Khrushchev went to Beijing to meet with Mao. Mao proceeded to suggest a meeting while swimming, knowing full well that Khrushchev couldn't swim. AIDS instantly appeared with water wings for Khrushchev and the meeting took place with Mao swimming up and down and Khrushchev flailing around in his armbands. That's amazing.
Starting point is 00:18:40 Okay, who has the microphone? Oh, hello. Go for it. The police department in Cambridge, Massachusetts requested that when the Harvard Bridge between Cambridge and Boston was refurbished in the 1980s, that the graffiti on it was maintained by the people who created it because it became useful in identifying where accidents were on the bridge.
Starting point is 00:19:04 So they would say by the penis. It was quite nerdy graffiti, to be honest. Oh, yeah. It was in MIT, Frank. Got it, okay. My favorite fact about graffiti is... Well, which is it, James? Which is it? This is about graffiti, and it is that there was a Christian group,
Starting point is 00:19:25 I think it was in the south of France, I think, and they were cleaning up graffiti and they were doing it because they were very nice people and they started cleaning and cleaning and cleaning and then only afterwards did they found out they'd actually cleaned off a load of prehistoric cave paintings. Oh, my God. I mean, surely there's a difference that you can tell between...
Starting point is 00:19:50 That is true, although I think that a lot of prehistoric cave paintings were done by teenage boys, actually. And a lot of French graffiti is of buffaloes being killed. Can I read out? Yeah, go on, go on. So we got an email when we said we need facts for tonight and we got an email from a lady called Lauren Gilbert who we just had this fact from Anna about Khrushchev,
Starting point is 00:20:10 which is that... So she gave us ten and this was my favorite one. I'm going to read it out exactly word for word what she's written. F. Scottvich Gerald, bitched to Hemingway, that is, Dick was too small, then went to the bathroom and Hemingway looked at it and pronounced it fine. He had a terrible injury, didn't he?
Starting point is 00:20:30 I'm going off memory here. Hemingway had a very bad shrapnel wound, possibly, in the First World War, which dealt severe damage to that region, the top of his thighs and his parts and private parts. And there is a theory that that's why he was so... about the big game hunting and fishing and all that. So when Fitzgerald showed him, it was sort of like half-hanging off and bleeding a bit in Hemingway.
Starting point is 00:20:54 It looks absolutely normal to me. You're doing fine, mate. Look at that. Oh, dear. OK, let's move on. Steve Ackroyd, where are you? OK, can someone give the microphone to Steve? There we are. Steve, what is your fact?
Starting point is 00:21:13 So, the name Garrett is now, as of 2013, less popular in the UK, that's by people born within that year, than both the name Thor and Loki. Wow. What? That is incredible. Wow. But Gary actually isn't like an... isn't an old name, is it? The first Gary was a country singer, wasn't he? Someone's going to shout out who it was.
Starting point is 00:21:35 Gary Cooper. Gary Cooper. Yeah, that's it. Gary Cooper. He was the first person, pretty much, I think, called Gary, and I think he might have been named after a place called Gary in America. In India. In India. You see? The world expert on Gary's is in the audience. Sorry. What other name knowledge do you have then?
Starting point is 00:21:53 It's kind of limited to basically that, and I definitely learned it from a different podcast. I apologize. You brought someone else's fact from another podcast? Good. Do that more. I thought I needed to raise the bar, you know. How many people in North Korea do you think are called Kim Jong-un? Do you know the answer to this?
Starting point is 00:22:14 In French? It's correct. Really? One person called Kim Jong-un because he made it the law. Who was it? No, he made it the law that everyone else who had that name had to change their name to something else, to Gary. To be fair, I don't reckon there are many
Starting point is 00:22:30 Queen Elizabeth IIs in Britain. Yeah. I guess it would be Elizabeth Windsor, all the Elizabeth Windsors would have to change their name. Does anyone here know anyone called Elizabeth Windsor? There we are. See, nobody knows anyone called Elizabeth Windsor. And that is a scientific experiment
Starting point is 00:22:46 that just happened right in front of your eyes. I got sent a fact by someone for tonight and it was a fantastic fact. It was really good, but I got so distracted by his name that I forgot to write his fact down, so I don't have his fact now, but I do have his name. And his name is Andrew, his surname,
Starting point is 00:23:02 Go To Bed. As one word. He's called Andrew Go To Bed, and he goes by Andy, and he has a middle name which is William, but he goes by Will, so Andy will go to bed. It's his full name. Isn't that great? I found something about names the other day.
Starting point is 00:23:18 This is just completely random now, but the first English... The first teacher of the English language in Japan was called Ronald McDonald. Oh, wow. Why did he move to Japan? That's such a good thing.
Starting point is 00:23:34 That's great. OK, another one. Let's keep going. Yeah, let's pick another fact sent to us by Twitter. This is from at83underscorebis when the tooth of a mastodon was found in North America. It was identified as the tooth of a giant. Wow.
Starting point is 00:23:50 Now, that's very exciting to me, because if you've listened to this podcast, I talk a lot about Yetis and so on. I've worked out that's the period I should have been born in when someone's finding a big thing and going, well, it's obviously the tooth of a giant. That's right there. That's when I should have been born.
Starting point is 00:24:06 I would have been the man who went, it was clearly a giant, Mr. Shriver, you are. Well, there was the other thing, the first dinosaur bone, which they thought was a scrotum of a giant, and they called it scrotum humanum. And it turned out to be a megalosaur, I think.
Starting point is 00:24:22 But by the strict rules of nomenclature, they should still call it scrotum humanum, because you're supposed to call it the first thing that you called it. Are you? Wow. So megalosaur, I still call it a scrotum humanum, actually. But you, as we've ascertained, call it Grafito.
Starting point is 00:24:38 We know what you're like. That is true. Sharks teeth, when they were fossilized, sharks teeth, sharks obviously go many, many millions of years back. And often their teeth are the only bit of them which survives, because they are all cartilage. They don't have any bones.
Starting point is 00:24:54 So we only really know about fossil sharks or ancient sharks from their teeth. But they were thought to be dragon's teeth, unsurprisingly, and they were crushed into powder and sold as a medicine. People still take bits of shark as medicine to this day, but they shouldn't. Please don't do it,
Starting point is 00:25:10 because it doesn't work. You've just got a dead shark, then. And you're not any better. OK, another one. Esther Clarke. I really like the fact that people say alcohol is not a solution, but according to chemistry, alcohol is a solution.
Starting point is 00:25:30 That's very good. All right, so you like the chemistry jokes but you don't like the logic jokes. What's going on? I hope you don't work in an AA centre. All right, alcohol is not the solution, except of course that it is the solution. OK, OK.
Starting point is 00:25:46 Something's dissolved in something to make it alcohol. Yeah, you could have pure alcohol, but it's really hard to get out of. Most alcohol is in water. So alcoholic drinks are the solution. Yeah. Pure alcohol is not. Pure alcohol is poisonous.
Starting point is 00:26:02 So you're not advocating pure alcohol. No. I think that's OK. So I think if you put water and alcohol together, like 40% is about the best kind of solution for alcohol and water. And the person who found that out was Mendeleev, who did the periodic table.
Starting point is 00:26:18 And I think he did it for his dissertation or something like that and he worked that out. So he was the first person to do it. How did Mendeleev work out that 40% was the best? He was a chemist and he tried lots out. Did he? There's notebooks increasingly spidery and slurred.
Starting point is 00:26:34 It's all the 55 to 45. That's the age. If the giant age is the age you should have been in, I should have lived in the age where you could just drink loads of alcohol and claim you're a chemist. LAUGHTER And this also reminds me of another brilliant fact that was sent in by email by Lauren,
Starting point is 00:26:50 I think, which was that the first ICBMs, the ballistic missiles, placed by the USSR outside of the USSR, which are placed in East Germany, could never have been used because the soldiers in charge of them drank the rocket fuel because it was made of alcohol.
Starting point is 00:27:06 Oh, no. That's like when it was... They sent up a bit of bark from the tree that Newton was apparently sitting under when he had the apple and he realised the idea of gravity. They sent that up into space with an apple
Starting point is 00:27:22 and the idea was that they were going to drop the apple and they were going to drop the bit of bark together so that they could experience a lack of gravity. So it was a very exciting moment but they forgot to tell some of the astronauts why the apple was up there and so they ate it and then they were like, okay, time to do the experiment
Starting point is 00:27:38 and they were going, what, experiment? So they ended up doing the experiment with a bit of bark and a pear that they had. No one likes pears on the International Space Station. Shall we move on to another fact? Yes, I have. Hi Adam.
Starting point is 00:27:56 I got a tweet from someone called Olivia Annie at Olivia Annie and she sent me this fact that Bucharest and Budapest are the fifth most mixed up places in the world and she didn't say what the first four were.
Starting point is 00:28:12 So surely Slovenia and Slovakia Yeah, you would have been a few I don't know what the others are but so I googled it and I found there was a site called BucharestNotBudapest.com which collects all the different times when people have mixed it up
Starting point is 00:28:28 and Iron Maiden Mochiba, Metallica and Lenny Kravitz have all mistaken Bucharest for Budapest on stage. Cool. Okay, where's the microphone? The wages in Chelsea and Fulham are so high
Starting point is 00:28:44 that it's the only constituency in the UK where the average wage is higher than the wage of their MP. Wow. So their MP is like the working man. I know something about I think it's the constituency of Kensington
Starting point is 00:29:00 which is nearby, it's not a million miles away and it has the highest proportion of minors as in M-I-N-E-R-S in any constituency in the country and it's... No, it does.
Starting point is 00:29:16 Because it's a lot of people who own mines basically. They say occupation mining. So... Okay, let's move on. Let's try to get some more in before we finish. Chris, where is Chris? Okay, so Apollo 13
Starting point is 00:29:32 nearly ended in disaster before it even got to space because of a malfunction that happened but a second malfunction occurred that saved the ship from being destroyed. What? Did it fix the first malfunction? Yeah, pretty much. That's very rare.
Starting point is 00:29:52 Good thing we have an astrophysicist on the panel today. That's when I should have been born. The age of space. That's incredible. That's amazing. So, okay. Apollo 13, my favourite movie of all time. It genuinely is. Was it a real thing that happened as well as the movie?
Starting point is 00:30:12 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not your favourite event of all time, is it? It kind of is, actually. No, because to me, Apollo 13 is the greatest story ever told. You have a tin heading out into deep space. An explosion happens. They're told they have something like an hour
Starting point is 00:30:28 left of oxygen and they're going to die and everyone on the earth and three men in a tin can have to solve it. And the only way that they can get back home is to go that way towards the moon. It's insane. And they made it home at spoiler alert. Alive. And that is incredible.
Starting point is 00:30:44 And then, obviously, there's a big line in the movie where, as they're going up, there is a malfunction and they say there was a glitch. What was the line? It was something like... Yeah, so they say we just had our glitch for this mission. We just had our glitch for this mission, not knowing that there was going to be this explosion. Obviously, why would they have known?
Starting point is 00:31:00 But so... But this is an interesting fact as well about glitches and things going wrong when you go into space. There was a book called Moondust and in it, on a good, successful space flight 99.99% of things work.
Starting point is 00:31:16 Which means a typical ship has 6 million parts. That means on a good flight they expect 6,000 things to break as they're going up. Did you just do that in your head right then? No. I was trying to style that out and my mouth didn't let me.
Starting point is 00:31:32 6,000? Yeah, that's incredible. 6,000 things. Can you imagine any other job on the first time you use something? 6,000 things break. If I was running it, I would take 6,000 very tiny, very breakable glass plates and I'd smash all of them as we set off and then presumably
Starting point is 00:31:48 everything else would work. Don't think you understand probability at all. I... Just another fact about things going wrong in space. My wife told me this today, in fact, and that is that the two biggest
Starting point is 00:32:04 disasters in rockets in Russian history both happened on the 24th of October on different years, but they happened on the same day and so to this day in all the rocket fields and stuff in Russia they always turn all the electricity off and close everything down on that day
Starting point is 00:32:20 just so it doesn't happen again. Really? Wow. There are lots of Russian cosmonauts and astronaut superstitions so lots of things have built up over the years of the Russian space program so I think on the final drive to the
Starting point is 00:32:36 what is it, the lift off point? To the rocket ship? To the rocket ship, thank you. On the final drive the astronauts will get out, they'll stop the car, they'll get out and they'll have a wee against the right back wheel I think it is of the
Starting point is 00:32:52 truck or of the car. And that's because Gagarin did that the first time. What if you get performance anxiety and you can't go? It's like, yo, we need a launch, I'm trying, I'm trying! F-scot bitch Gerald's going what the fuck is that? I mean, were you lied to me?
Starting point is 00:33:14 OK, should we keep going? Yeah, let's keep going. This one is from Sophie S. Where are you Sophie S? Oh, right in the corner so let's find another fact while we're doing that. OK, so here is a fact from at the underscore ImageSmith
Starting point is 00:33:30 and that is, if you wanted to recreate the entire Lego movie with actual Lego, you would need 15,080,330 Lego pieces. How? Yeah, but why would you want to do that? We've got the Lego movie and it's the best thing
Starting point is 00:33:48 that's ever been done. Yeah, exactly. Have we got the microphone? So my fact is, when a dog enters a room, it knows what's happened two hours before. What are you talking about? Did you learn this
Starting point is 00:34:06 fact from me because I don't think... So he knows what food was on the floor and who was in the room before and... Is it through smell or through... Oh, it's through smell. But it can't tell anyone. That's so nuts! The mic was here!
Starting point is 00:34:24 What are you saying, buddy? Mic was here! I think he's hungry. Oh, no. What a curse! The idea is that once we got dogs, our brain shrunk, isn't it? Oh, yeah. And that is because when we were hunting
Starting point is 00:34:40 we needed to be really good at picking up scents and really good at hearing things, etc. And so then we got dogs and domesticated them and then we didn't need to smell those things anymore, so that smell bit of our brain shrunk and then we didn't need to hear things and so the hearing bit of our brain shrunk and it's been shown that humans
Starting point is 00:34:56 that were around before dogs were domesticated didn't have bigger brains. Wow. That was fast. Just a fact. There is a thing about ant eaters which is that when ant eaters eat ants they don't digest the ants that they eat.
Starting point is 00:35:12 The ants digest themselves because the ant eaters they don't have the proper acid in their stomach but ants obviously have lots of formic acid inside them so they just digest themselves. Wait, so they do that as a kind of like
Starting point is 00:35:28 Harry-Carrie kind of thing? When they die because they've been eating they start to produce this formic acid and that then mulches the whole load of ants down. So ant eaters have now again got rid of that unnecessary bit of their digestive system which they don't need anymore. That is actually a bit like, and actually
Starting point is 00:35:44 I think someone also wrote this fact down today that baby pandas can't digest eucalyptus can they? But it's koalas, sorry. Baby pandas. Whose fact was that? Come up here quickly and say it. Was it baby koalas can't digest eucalyptus when they're first born so they have to get the bacteria
Starting point is 00:36:00 from their mother's kind of poo to be able to digest eucalyptus? I don't reckon humans would be able to digest stuff without the bacteria in their stomachs and you get the bacteria from your mother through their breast milk. So like a baby probably wouldn't be able to digest you know
Starting point is 00:36:16 Ben and Jerry's ice cream or... Dammit. It's not weird that that's the most indigestible thing I could think of. What's the thing that's least like baby food in the world? Colder milk. You could have said steak
Starting point is 00:36:32 or salmon on croot. We actually put out on Twitter we said you could win two tickets tonight if you come up with a fact which is who was that? Was that you? Can you just yell out your fact because it's about Ben and Jerry's isn't it? Ben and Jerry's milk comes from
Starting point is 00:36:48 massaged cows. So and I read into it basically Ben and Jerry's they have a big farm and they really look after their cows including before they milk them they're just like how are you today sir? Mam I guess. That's not milk.
Starting point is 00:37:08 That's why I was kicked out of the bullwret. Who's got the microphone? We had another fact coming out didn't we? Oh no we don't. Okay Anna. I think it's another Anna. There's another Anna at the front. Let's find another fact from our
Starting point is 00:37:24 Twitter list. I got one here. At Timothee underscore Johnson the motto of the Salvation Army is Blood and Fire. They were very funny. They were very funny. They were very unpopular
Starting point is 00:37:40 for a while. People really didn't like the Salvation Army. Maybe that was the branding issue. No they were I mean they're a Christian organization and I think it was William Booth who set up the Salvation Army and he was known as the general.
Starting point is 00:37:56 He was an incredibly organized and strict man and there was another army which was set up in opposition to the Salvation Army called I think the Skeleton Army and they made it their business to shut up the Salvation Army in all their good works and they were bastards.
Starting point is 00:38:12 They were really unpleasant people and they threw rocks at them and they threw burning stuff at the Salvation Army. Whenever they turned up trying to help. Not funny but you know. With their motto flowers and candy. Anna what was your fact? Actually, are Tom's is better?
Starting point is 00:38:30 Well how one you tell us both and we'll decide which is the better fact. So since 1945 all British tanks must come equipped with team-making supplies? That's fantastic! That's how I imagine you exist in life Andy.
Starting point is 00:38:46 You're in a tank and there's tea in there. That's bad, weak, milky tea by the way if it's Andy. But anyway that's an office issue. This is office stuff. This is why I say you can't work in a team. You're constantly throwing shade on my tea.
Starting point is 00:39:02 The worst thing is the milk came from Dan. Let's hear the second fact. Also I've read that all is it JCBs are so popular as digging machines because they all have cattles inside them. That was the main feature. It wasn't that they dug better. It wasn't that they could carry more stuff.
Starting point is 00:39:26 They just have a cattle on board. So you can make a cup of tea. What was the rival facts? I didn't know it was a rival facts. It is now. So Joseph Stalin had some Russian scientists
Starting point is 00:39:42 attempt to create an ape human hybrid because he thought it would be useful in Russian industry and we'll be able to better withstand pain. And how are you getting on Dan? I call a foul! How far down the process did he get? I don't know.
Starting point is 00:40:02 They enjoyed the dinner but the bedroom was a complete disaster. It was ultimately a failure. He had the scientist who was leading the project exiled to Kazakhstan for failing. That's tough. Because he probably didn't want that project in the first place.
Starting point is 00:40:24 There was a prediction. You know these cool old predictions they have of how life is going to be in the 21st century from 100 years ago and they're always either spookily right or ridiculous. And one of them said that we won't have to drive our cars anymore. This is from I think the 20s
Starting point is 00:40:40 when I'm going off memory. We won't have to drive our cars anymore because we will have a race of hyper-intelligent monkey butler creatures which will do the driving for us. That's the only thing we'll have taught them to do. We're going to do a bit of a review with a Twitter fact that we got sent by a guy
Starting point is 00:40:56 called Ewan Taylor in 1953 NASCAR driver Tim Flock raced for eight races with a Reese's monkey named Jocko Flocko as his co-driver. So maybe he was trying to start
Starting point is 00:41:12 the revolution there or the evolution. Let's do one more and we should wrap up. Why don't you choose Anna? That's the whole fact choosing thing. OK. It's from Steve. Particle accelerators.
Starting point is 00:41:28 This is the kind of crowd in which we could have two Steve's who both brought a fact about particle accelerators. Very true. OK, let's read something out. I've got one. This is from at TBUK2 Dubuk2 It's a Twitter name.
Starting point is 00:41:44 You may have already done this one. A consultant urologist at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton Somerset is named Nicholas Burns Cox. He's my friend's dad. No. Really? Hello.
Starting point is 00:42:00 Did you send us that fact? No. Oh, my God. Cool. Very cool. I'm from Taunton. He's really nice. Wow. My mum's from the Taunton Vale. Yeah, it's my space. Can I just say we're focusing on the wrong bit of the facts here?
Starting point is 00:42:16 Exactly. Taunton's nice, isn't it? Yeah. It's lovely in the summer. Bridgewater said more or that. No. A urologist's granddaughter owns Napoleon's penis now, doesn't she?
Starting point is 00:42:36 What? I think Napoleon's penis has been bought and re-bought over the years and disappeared and then it was left with a urologist who died in his daughter. Yeah, there's a lot. So there's a lot of famous historical male penises that have been passed down
Starting point is 00:42:52 through families sold in auction. Just male penises. Yeah, just the male ones. Any male uteruses there? Napoleon's was described at auction as a mummified tendon, which is quite a delicate way of putting it. But it was an inch long.
Starting point is 00:43:08 But it was described by Scott Fitzgerald. There's a very, very good size. OK, the last fact, final fact is from Steve. So, the only man to ever stick his head in the path of a particle accelerator not only lived to complete his PhD, but also seems to have not aged
Starting point is 00:43:24 since the accident. What? Whoa! Wait, what was the accident this week? It was in 1978. What?! So, Anatoly Bakursky was a researcher at something that I can't remember
Starting point is 00:43:40 the name of because I'm in a basement and my notes vanished up there with the Wi-Fi. Yeah, I think how we feel. Basically, he was a researcher at an institute trying to complete his PhD and it was time to fix the particle accelerator.
Starting point is 00:43:56 He stuck his head in it. Yeah, and the safety was apparently not working as well as it should have. And all of a sudden, the particle accelerator fired and a beam passed through his head and he, according to his own words, he didn't feel any pain
Starting point is 00:44:12 but he did see a light brighter than a thousand suns. Wow. And the left side of his face is pretty much no wrinkles. Is he begging to shove the other side of his head into there? He's actually been interested
Starting point is 00:44:28 for, like, western scientists to come over and hang out with him and say, what's going on in my brain? He can't afford it. Yeah, this is crying out for a kickstart. We'll go! Spacey dinoman
Starting point is 00:44:44 and the logician. All right, well, let's wrap up the show and visit him. Thank you so much, guys, for coming to this experiment tonight. We know it was going to be chaotic but actually, I'm just putting this out there as someone who edits stuff,
Starting point is 00:45:02 that's going to edit down really awesomely. Yeah, yeah. But thank you so much for coming. I'm going to do the ending of the show. That's it, that's all of your facts. If you want to reach any of the people who said their facts during the show, you're all probably on Twitter, on Facebook,
Starting point is 00:45:20 hunt them down and question their sources. We can be gone on our regular Twitter handles. I'm on our tribal land, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At Ed Shapes and Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Thank you so much. Have a good evening. Goodbye.

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