No Such Thing As A Fish - 75: No Such Thing As Diarrhoea Drive
Episode Date: August 21, 2015Live 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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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,
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry, next fact.
Okay.
Our next fact is from Otti.
No.
Sorry.
No.
Diane.
They are similar, to be fair.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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...
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,
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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
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
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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?
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
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
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
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!
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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,
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,
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.