Little Fish: Poor Benighted Mountain Beaver

0:11Hello and welcome to Little Fish. This is the weekly bonus episode where we, James, Andy, and Dan, step away from the facts that we've been discovering the facts. and instead read out your facts that you've been sending in to us via podcast at qi.com. We've had so many awesome ones this week, so let's get straight into it. Who wants to begin? Well, I'll start with one. Let's do it. All right. Rosie Watson writes, Found out yesterday that Jeff Bezos' biological dad is one of the two notable unicycle hockey players, according to Wikipedia. Unicycle hockey. It's amazing. It's a sport? It's an amazing sport.

0:54Wow. Picture a hockey game. Put everyone on a unicycle. Yeah. And they don't slip around on the ice. This is not ice hockey. Oh, right. Because when you said picture a hockey game. Sorry. Okay. Picture a hockey game. Yeah. Melt all the ice. Okay. Put them in a car park or whatever. Cool. Street hockey. Field hockey. Field hockey. Wow. I don't know. It's not on grass either. It's on tarmac, I suppose. God, sorry. Anyway, there was this guy called Theodore John Jorgensen. Is he the other notable one? No, this is him. This is Jeff Bezos' biological father. So he and Bezos' mum, they split up when Jeff Bezos was a very young baby, and he didn't really stay in contact.

1:33And so Bezos considers his dad to be his new father, his mum's new partner. But they were in a relationship. They were. The wheels fell off. Oh, dear. Well, the wheel. Just one. But he was the president of the Albuquerque Unicycle Hockey Club. Wow. Wow. World's first such club. and how many members you jest there were loads there were loads and it turns out that unicycle hockey is a big thing in various countries so germany at the latest count has 89 teams which is genuinely about 85 more than i thought there would be yeah that's quite big the real skill is the goalie there's only 92 or 93 teams in the english football league exactly why isn't this should be the as big as the english football league in my opinion it should be the global sport the goalie just has to go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth in front of the goal that feels cheating to me i feel like you know when a bicycle um stops at a traffic light and they just have to shimmy ever so slightly is doing that oh the slight back and forth is doing a little bit of oh right oh you know and they're still having to defend the goal with a hockey stick i mean it's crazy i love it when someone comes up to a traffic light and does that and they can't keep it up for long enough and they have to put their foot down.

2:46Yeah. Because they feel like it's such a failure on their part. Oh, it's hard. Yeah, well you should do it. I don't do it. Just put your feet down like a normal person. I fully dismount. Really? Yeah. I fully dismount and I just wait patiently. Just sit on a card's bonnet, having a singie. To me it's like anyone over the age of 12 cycling with no hands. It just really makes me laugh whenever I see it. I just imagine them. in their head, they're thinking, ooh, look at me, I'm doing it with no hands, like you did when you were 12. I'm still impressed by no hands, I've got to say. I saw a kid in Edinburgh this year who was riding a bicycle on the road, and everyone was looking at him, and as he passed me, I was on the pedestrian side of the main Princess Street.

3:33Oh, he grabbed your phone. Oh, I'm sorry, mate. It's happened to the best of us. It's even better. As he went by, he went, welcome to Scotland! Really loud, disappeared, and then behind him on the road wearing a giant Deliveroo box backpack was the guy whose bike he'd just stolen, who was a Deliveroo rider. Oh, no. Chasing after him down the road. It was so Hollywood. It was incredible. It was so holy. Holy rude. Yeah. That's good. I'm so annoyed that I flubbed that joke. It was such a solid one. You went to the edit. Shall I do one? Yeah. This is from paleontologist Thomas Halliday, who I briefly met at a party.

4:10Oh, sorry. That was my briefing notes. You didn't meet him at a party famous I thought I didn't recognise the name But hang on, we've had a letter from Thomas Halliday In one of our duels One of our Drop Us A Line episodes But he included such good stuff Are you just getting your mates to write in Andy? I say this in the nicest possible way, he's not my mate But we met once and he was a really nice guy And he sent a great email Other lands he wrote, it was like a Waterstones Book of the Year I've never met him, I love his stuff Okay well Tommy H says you are genetically descended from only about half of your ancestors that were alive 250 years ago oh piss off thomas what a twat whoa i'm joking i was playing against the whole liking him that's funny because i gotta cut out all the first bit and this is gonna sound like that's very cool what do you mean what does thomas mean well actually we've come across this on qi James Ross and our good friend and colleague found this as well.

5:10And I've literally just written it up for the X series of QI, which will be on your TVs in about 18 months. So set your calendars. Yeah. But basically what it is, is your 50 % DNA from each parent, right? But the DNA comes in chunks. So if you get 50 % from your mum, what if all of that 50 % was what she got from her mum. In that case, you got nothing from her dad. Okay. And that's possible. Wow. So the way I like to look at it is imagine like playing cards, right? So your mum might have hearts and diamonds and your dad might have spades and clubs. Yeah. But you might get all of the hearts from your mum and all of the clubs from your dad, in which case the parent who gave them the spades and the diamonds wouldn't give you anything.

6:00And what you're saying is That's obviously possible, but unlikely two generations up. That is absolutely completely impossible, really. Like it wouldn't happen because of the statistics. But when you go far enough back, actually, it's not just possible. It's certain, I would say. And according to Thomas, he reckons that the tipping point of 50 % is 10 generations. Now, for QI, I did the maths for this as well. and I reckon after 15 generations, you're extremely likely to have at least one ancestor who's completely genetically distinct from you. So Thomas is doing like the 50 % chance. I'm saying after 15 generations, one of your ancestors will not be related to you genetically.

6:46Doesn't that mean problems with genealogy and tests? I don't think when it's that far back, someone's going to be hearing the words, I'm sorry, but you're not the great, great, great, great, great grandfather. It's Jeremy Kyle meets Who Do You Think You Are? Who Do You Think You Aren't? She's not your aunt. Oh, superb. What a fact. Yeah, it's brilliant. It's really interesting. And it really blows your mind when you start trying to do the maths and stuff. But yeah, it's a great, great factoid. So cool. Shall I jump in with one? Yeah. This is from Felicia Winterhawk. And it's sort of similar to a fact that we got sent in from the last episode about relocating an entire thing.

7:29We were talking about how a full village was moved away. The village in Oxford, yeah. So same thing happened this year in north of Sweden in a town called Karuna, where they took literally the entire church, the Karuna church, and they rolled it to a new destination three kilometers to the east. And they've done that because Karuna is like a mining town. And so the stabilization underneath them, because they'd taken up so much from underneath the ground, was getting a bit unsettling. So it's like subsidence and stuff. I think so, yeah. And so they decided, okay, that they're going to move it. I wonder if that Taurus sort of went off a cliff when coronavirus came out in 2020.

8:17You know what, Andy? When you put your head in your hands like that, it really discourages me from doing this. Well, that's why I'm doing it, Chad.

8:28Hey, I've got one. Yeah, go for it. From Louise Drake. Pleasingly, Louise Drake from Louise. Actually, this is about a place I've been to, very excitingly. A place called Basildon Park, which is a National Trust place. And it's a lovely old house. Gorgeous grounds and all of that. And it was where the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, which is the one with Keira Knightley in, was filmed in part, right? Lovely. So when they were filming it, They filmed a ball scene there I just find it so funny The scale of the ball scene was so large That they put some of the National Trust Are you laughing at the phrase ball scene?

9:02In my head Because I don't live in that Jane Austen world like you do And to me, ball scene I was thinking like a ball pool Like kids No, that's it It's a very modern adaptation of the story But it's all Oh no, Mr. Darcy's weed in the corner He dives into the ball pit And then he comes out without his shirt on It's very sexy That's incredible. I had no idea. So all Jane Austen is set in soft play. That's right. Wow. No, so they filmed this ballroom scene. The scale of the ball scene was so large, writes Louise, that they put some of the National Trust conservation staff in costume as supporting artists so they could keep a closer eye on things without looking out of place on camera.

9:40So I presume that's just so they don't break any of the priceless artefacts around the edge of the room. I just find that so funny. So if you watch that scene, there'll be some people there who are just National Trust staffs that are like, please look after this vase. don't touch that yeah that's really funny and then i looked into this place basildon park right mid 18th century yeah like it's they do a fair bit of film in there yes they film lots of stuff yeah i think i know the one yeah and basically this is a bit of gossip from the 18th and 19th centuries okay which is pretty hot gossip for us yeah um it was bought by this guy called francis Sykes, right?

10:18And I looked him up and he sounds like an absolute rotter. Astonishingly, someone who built a really, really big house then had not made all of their money entirely pleasantly. He was an East India Company guy and lots of bribes and insider trading and private embezzlement. I mean, just all sorts of dreadful practice went on, basically. And he made a huge amount of money he had to spend on this house. But the really spicy gossip is about the third Baronet Sykes, so I imagine his grandson, who inherited the estate at age five, right? So, you know, he's grown up. Turned into a giant bullpen. And he married this woman called Henrietta Villabois, who was very wealthy.

10:56He was marrying for wealth, you know, sort of like dynastic marriage, whatever. They both had lots of affairs. She had an affair with Benjamin Disraeli. Oh, wow. I know. What a cameo. What a cameo. Who then, he wrote a book called Henrietta Temple, which was all about having a secret affair with a married woman, which I would say is not a very good way of hiding. If you're putting her first name in the title of the book, Okay fine whatever But she had this other affair with a painter called Daniel Maclees Who was friends with Charles Dickens And when the husband Sykes The rotter found out about this He put a notice in the newspaper Saying whereas Henrietta Sykes The wife of me Sir Francis Sykes Baronet hath committed adultery With Daniel Maclees This is in the newspaper he's putting this advert With whom she was found in bed at my house And then he gives his address On the 4th of July 1837 This is to give notice that hereafter I shall not be answerable For any debts she may contract Or any goods which may be supplied to her What a scoundrel This is like the 19th century, it was Rebecca Vardy It's exactly that And, you remember who I said MacLyves was friends with?

12:02Charles Dickens What's the surname of this baronet? Sykes, Bill Sykes But also, Bill Sykes Bill Sykes is from Francis Sykes It's a direct take off And so everyone knows, this guy Francis Sykes is a worm Yeah, that's amazing

12:22Kate Moore writes Mountain beavers are the most primitive rodent And also host to the world's largest flea They also neither live in the mountains Nor are they a beaver Mountain beavers? What are they? They're a type of rodent Oh, the world's most primitive rodent, I hear Oh yes, yeah they are Wow, that is a real Because rodent is not a word with good associations, but to be the world's most primitive rodent, that's a double whammy. That's bad. The flea can get around 10 millimeters, so about a centimeter. Wow, that's, yeah. But beavers have smaller faces than you, like mountain beavers especially.

13:02They have quite thin faces. And so if you had a flea that was comparatively the same size, it would cover your whole eye. Oh, yuck. One flea covering your own eye. two fleas, both eyes yeah, poor benighted mountain beaver, you know actually it's only the females who get that big, the males are about half that size, and actually you get much smaller ones, this is like a big hefty flea I wouldn't like that at all I wouldn't like at all to have a flea covering my whole eye that's crazy out there thought can I do one? yeah, please Jesse Quick writes, it seems almost too ordinary to be true, because we've all tried this once but did you know the world record for most melons chopped in half on somebody's stomach with a samurai sword while they lay on a bed of nails okay was set by a man named johnny strange he's famous isn't he johnny strange he is he's got multiple guinness he's quite the man is his real name do you reckon no he's he's actually called luke well strange isn't a surname right yeah i've heard people with that surname but then also conceivably you would make it up yeah I think johnnystrangesideshow.co.uk I think it might be a stage name It's an incredible website So he sliced 10 watermelons in 30 seconds On his glamorous partner's tummy And she's on a bed of nails And watermelon to bare skin There's no board There's no board There's no board She's the board And then this watermelon record is I think she deserves the credit for that Well I know what you mean Most badass woman He's broken a lot of records and she's involved in some of them.

14:43So he's broken the record for most apples held in one's own mouth and chainsawed out of it in one minute. That sounds like you've got a load of apples in your mouth. Let's say you have somehow got five apples in your mouth and the only way to get them out is to chainsaw your face so that they fall out. He's biting an apple, which is mostly sticking out of his mouth, and he's getting rid of it by chainsawing across it. He chainsaws across the apple. Okay, so you need someone with a small nose. You do. That's a really good point. I've got a small nose. I'm out. He did eight apples out of his own mouth, but when his glamorous partner was holding the apples in her mouth, he did 12 in 60 seconds.

15:20That's hardly surprising that it's easier to do it out of someone else's mouth than your own mouth. Yeah. You reckon? Yeah. Okay, fair enough. All right. He's done heaviest weight pulled by pierced ears. He's pulled a small plane. Was it his ears or his partner's ears? It's not a glamorous one. No, it's his ears. And I love this. He's done sword swallowing inside the globe of death. You know that cape where they ride a motorbike around the inside? That is cool. I saw one of those quite recently. I saw one of those. I went to Zippo Circus recently. Did you? Yeah, yeah. Oh, you were the guy with his trousers falling down on the ladder, weren't you?

15:51Yeah, yeah. You were the glamorous assistant. But it's so exciting when they bring out that globe of death and they cycle a motorbike around the inside of it. He was standing in the middle of it, swallowing a sword while someone was riding a motorbike around his head. Right. Really cool. Yeah. I mean, very dangerous. Interestingly, I got one, if we can jump into another here, from Shona Mack, which is also a Guinness World Record, which is the world's oldest continuously operating post office, is in the small town of Sankar in southwest Scotland. The post office has been operating on that site since it was established as a staging post in 1712.

16:27Pretty good going. Really good. That's cool. That's very good. I would have had the post office starting a bit later than that. When did you say that? When was Roland Hill? I thought he was like... 19th century, the Penny Post. But maybe they just had a very quiet 100 years before. That was a long queue. Here is one from Richard Galt. When bored at work last week, I came across a pamphlet from about 1970, preparing the company for metrication. So when we're going to go to the metric, the pounds and the pence and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, it contained a fact. And that is that the SI units that we use today are based on the kilogram, the meter, and the second.

17:10And that's a bit messy because kilogram is already a thousand of something. So kilometer, you've got the basic thing, which is the meter, and then you add the kilo on. But the kilogram is already a kilo. Really, it should be the gram, or we should change the name of the kilogram. And indeed, in 1970, the standardization committee, the ISO, was planning to change a kilogram and give it a different name. And one option was to rename it the Einstein. And if they'd have ended up doing that, it would have meant that Einstein himself weighed about 79 Einsteins. Which is a good fact. Apart from the fact that Richard, I think, means mass, not weight.

17:52Because mass is in kilograms, or would have been Einsteins. whereas we measure weight in newtons and newtons is kilograms multiplied by the gravitational pull of the earth and isaac newton's weight would have been according to my calculation around 686 newtons lovely and um the your basic metabolic rate so the the amount that you create energy means that James Watt created about 100 watts of power. Humans have no charge, but we do have a lot of electrons. And the electrons in the body of Charles Augustin de Coulomb would have been minus 9 billion coulombs. And if he was wearing high heels, Blaise Pascal would have asserted 5 million pascals of pressure on the floor.

18:41And do we know whether Blaise Pascal ever did? Maybe he was going out to the Rocky Horror Show. Andy, have you got one more? I've got one more, yeah. Ari Toon Samonsen writes from Norway. I really like this fact. In 2020, the number of near-complete Viking helmets doubled. From? From one.

19:10But Ari knows how to sell a fact, doesn't he? I mean, that's really good. So until 2020 Only the, I'm sorry for my pronunciation here Gyamundbu helmet Was known The Yarm helmet was Found in the 1950s admittedly But it wasn't authenticated until 2020 So there you go That is the doubling of the Viking helmets And Ari adds an additional three fragments are known Largely eyebrow pieces But none of them has horns So yeah Very cool Yeah, you do get horned helmets, but they're pre-Viking. So yeah, you get like from Scandinavia, you definitely get horned helmets. But by the time the Vikings came in, they didn't have horns anymore.

19:54And our thought of the horned helmets comes from Wagner, basically. I had no idea. I thought there were never any horned helmets. No, they do exist for sure, yeah. I think one day we'll find some Viking ones. I genuinely do. But what year will that be? On current evidence, it'll be ages away. Well, no, if it doubled this year, and next year there'll be four the year after there'll be eight okay well that's it for all of your facts before we wrap up though we have something very important to do which is to announce the latest custodians from the fish archive each person who joins the friend of the podcast here in club fish gets to become the champion the effective owner of a fact from our 600 episodes and so today we are going to be handing some out andy why don't we begin with you.

20:40Yeah, alright. Here's a fact that is now under the stewardship of Hollis. It's this. Some rats were once the size of hippos and weighed two tons. I would say a vintage fish fact. It is. It's about animals being an amusing size. Yeah. I remember we talked about whether they made a weird noise as they got bigger and smaller going Do you remember that? Which is the same as the weird noise that a hippo makes when it retracts its testicles into its body. yeah yeah it's all flooding back it's all flooding back yeah that's very good um great fact yep uh this is this is a fact then that goes to matt this was one of my facts which was during his 27 year rule pope john paul ii took over a hundred skiing and mountain climbing holidays a funny image yeah seeing the pope mobile on those slopes well yeah yeah not quite but yeah What he used to do though Was sneak out of the Vatican I seem to remember We spoke about it In a sort of like Almost the beginning of Like a Beatles movie Where they have to wear False mustaches And hide behind newspapers Would cut out holes For their eyes to look through Like he was smuggled Out of the Vatican So that he could get privacy And that he could go On these skiing holidays Surely it's incredibly easy If you're the Pope To be smuggled out of the Vatican You just take off The papal regalia Which is what most people Are looking at Did we say this at the time?

22:02Like just go out As an old Italian man Yes like no one will bat an eyelid it's absolutely true do you not reckon if if there were 10 elderly italian men in this room is he italian the new one i think the new one's american yeah so 10 elderly italian american men in this room standing in a line do you reckon you'd be able to pick out the pope no shoot me now i just couldn't do it do you not think he has some kind of glow like a halo Oh, I forgot about the glow Do you not think he emanates holiness? Yes, you're right So you'd have to have a heavy, heavy coat To cover his papal aura Yeah No, I just, honestly I would not recognise the Pope In a non-papal setting Very interesting Yeah, I could be standing next to one of the urinal And just not know that it was the Pope But do you not think his penis has like an ethereal glow?

22:52I think, James, you've been excommunicated once What are you doing? Okay this is the next fact this one will be forever loved petted and fed by Rebecca Lovett and her fact is that in 1900 a quarter of the residents of New York City would move house every May the 1st at 9am brilliant fact another vintage one I'd say that was one of yours James it was one of mine yeah I can't remember the details what was the reasoning for it it's a long fact that all the details are in the fact but why why were they It was just that everyone's rent would run out on that date. And that's just, to be honest, the answer was really that it was just so.

23:34That was the way they did it. And they didn't really know any different. And it was mayhem, wasn't it? You couldn't get a moving removal firm for love or money because they're all booked. It's really low. It must have been tough to be a removal firm because the rest of the year, you're just twiddling your thumbs. Yeah, absolutely. But maybe that's where you make all your money and then you just hang out for the rest of the year. That's nice. Like Santa. Yeah, exactly. Like Santa.

24:00Andy, let's go on from you Okay, this fact is Now going to be Stuffed, mounted and put on the wall of Stefan Lokamp It's one of my facts actually, is that nobody knows Why we kiss Is that still true? 11 years later? I think people do it because it's nice But I think no one knows that for sure scientifically I can say because The X series of QI will be filmed in the spring and we'll go out in about 18 months but i'm writing it right now and we have a question on kisses because of xoxo kind of thing and according to my research we still don't definitively know where kissing came from yeah as a cultural practice like it's is it from sort of mothers chewing up food in their mouth and feeding it to their babies which is one main theory isn't And so you evolved to feel that smashing your lips against someone else's lips is nice.

24:56Yeah. No one likes thinking about that as the origin of kissing because it's a bit weird. Yeah. Thinking that that's what causes this very... The first human who ever kissed another human was kissing their own mum on the lips. Yeah, absolutely. So we don't like that theory. No. Yeah, but I think it's true. Yeah. I mean, Dan, your mum's sexy. Right. as a callback to Dan saying his own mum was so free. Not a great kisser though, weirdly. Oh my god. Oh no. I mean, it's fine, it's fine, but like, come on. Am I the only one with a tongue? Like, what's going on? James! Honestly, I thought I'd gone too far with the Pope at the urinal, but Okay, here's a fact.

25:47Some years ago, a Belgian man had surgery to make himself look more like Michael Jackson. Okay. Wow. Okay. Interesting. I wonder what Michael Jackson's status was when we did that fact. 20, I think it's still pretty bad. Yeah. What, that was his latest album?

26:08That fact is now under the custodianship of Nick with no C, N-I-K. Nick, you will have to look after that fact as if it was a member of your own family. that was from Mark Abrams by the way oh yeah the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize you and I saw very recently we did indeed he came into this very room yeah he was in town and this is interesting because this is an episode where once again there were only two members of fish on it which is something we really rarely do but in the early days we did I was away and so was Anna so in our place was mark abrams and then also in our place was molly oldfield one of the original qi elves and her fact was the longest viking longship ever found was discovered during renovations of longship museum so that basically found the viking ship underneath the viking ship museum as they were just getting ready to uh expand it that that fact is gonna now belong to simon Mattelian.

27:10Congratulations. Yeah. Be proud. It's a great fact. Where do you put that, though? You've got to build another museum now. Nightmare. Yeah, exactly. Then you just keep discovering more and more theological treasures. Where do you stop? Don't know. Alright, why don't we get another fact? Let's go to you, Andy. I'll do one. This fact is for Michael Boulter, and it's that the tobacco hornworm uses very bad halitosis to stop predators eating it. Wow, so you just got really dreadful breath And predators smell that That's interesting so previous Episode of Little Fish at the end your Fact that you gave out was to do Also with A small insect that was being Eaten the spiders the grass spiders yeah I think amusing animals that was your That was your thing in the early days stock in trade Yeah yeah we used to say It wasn't a proper episode of fish without an animal Fact yeah yeah And that I think we've outgrown it And we did all the animals There are only about 400 animals We've done 600 episodes, do the maths There'll be about 400 animals I love that But honestly with a gun to your head How many could you name?

28:16I think 400 is toppy You know, that's very ambitious Attenborough's really stretched that career out, hasn't he? Once you do, oh giraffes Again, but once you do the big mammals And then the small mammals I mean how many insects can we name? Cricket, locust, grasshopper, ant Crickets and locust are the same animal 399 okay uh let's do one more before we wrap up so this fact is you could have fallen asleep up to five times during this podcast and not known it uh this was about the fact that everyone does little micro sleeps during the day uh and that fact now belongs to matthew renner so matthew i really hope you enjoy that fact being part of your life sweet dreams and we've ascertained like since 11 years ago now it turns out almost half our audience are using us as a sleep aid imagine if Matthew accidentally took his micro nap as you read out his facts and his name and he's going to be listening for all these episodes going forward going oh god surely I'll be on this week's episode come on yeah where's my fact oh well um hey listen we do need to wrap up uh if you want to be a custodian of one of our facts from the archive all you need to do is join club fish at our top tier level which is friend of the podcast uh we're going to be reading out more and more of these as the weeks go on with this new Little Fish show.

29:33We hope you're enjoying it. Come back again next week. Stay tuned for our Friday episode. And of course, if you are a Clubfish member, you're going to get Duel. Drop us a line. We're going to be reading out more and more emails. So send some in there. Podcast at qi.com. We'll see you next week. Goodbye.