Little Fish: Steam Exploded Donkey Bone Powder

0:13Hey everyone, welcome to the very first episode of Little Fish. This is the show where instead of talking about our four favorite facts from the last seven days, we have gone through the podcast at QI.com inbox and selected your best facts. We're going to be doing this every Monday. So if you want to join and be part of this extra special Monday bonus episode, just send in your best facts and we'll be reading them out each week. So let's get into it. I'm sat here with James Harkin and Andrew Hunter-Murray. Hello. And in no particular order, here we go. This is from Dav Lee. It's about an executive leaving a job at McDonald's UK after 18 months in post.

0:50Okay. And the reason it's a great fact is because her name is Zoe Hamburger.

0:58In fact, she was promoted within the McDonald's truck. She's gone off to run McDonald's Netherlands. She said, Hamburger has been my name my entire life. So as you can imagine, it has always made people do a bit of a double take. I've never heard of anyone else with that surname. There's a comedian called Neil Hamburger. Is it his real name? That feels like it's not It's not his real name at all It's not called Neil I found a report on this from the Metro I just want to read a line from it Despite her name being the beefy snack item That is the best thing about journalism isn't it? There's a name for it I think Second mentions Second mentions Where it's like A duck crossed the road The waddling Waterfowl Despite her name being the beefy snack item She said her favourite menu McDonald's item Is the double cheeseburger Believe it or not I do believe it I absolutely believe it Anyway That's really good So I guess her relatives Or her ancestors came from Hamburg Exactly that's what it is And we don't really have names like that do we We don't have sort of like Tony Scouser Do we?

2:08Oh we do yeah No we absolutely do Like Michael Bolton Oh yeah But that's not Because his real name is Bollaton He changed his name Michael Bolton's real name is Michael Bollaton Is it? There's been a news Bollaton Is that it? Yeah he changed it But there are many people whose surnames Is the name of a town Jack London Sydney Sweeney Sweeney's not a place But Sydney is Her relatives were in that 1970s cop show

2:45I'm struggling to think of many UK place names Jack London you're absolutely right The Earl of Bristol Of course I'm just actually struggling to think of Place names at the moment But 100 % there are some Surnames where it's Where you came from Like someone English Harris English the golfer for instance Sarah Brighton She's a person Ah, okay Isn't she? Sarah Brightman Okay Okay, okay, Dan Keep going Start the episode And maybe we'll get one Brooklyn Beckham Oh, God Oh, God Anyway Just a little extra report on this From BM Magazine Which actually stands for Business Matters And not, as I thought Bowel Movement You get that You get that on charts Hospital charts and things Will say BM 3PM Or whatever It's a very regular publication That one, isn't it?

3:41Really worrying if you haven't had an issue For two or three days of BM magazine And you need to buy prunes prunes prunes Quarterly

3:50But just they found a lovely extra detail Which is just hamburger has been succeeded As UK chief restaurant officer By Patrick Gerber Who takes over responsibility For restaurant operations across the country It is good that Gerber has no Responsibility for the operations in France As his surname in French means to vomit or to puke in a slang context. How good is that? That's BM Magazine delivering the goods there. That's really good. Here's another thing about Gerber, I think. I might have to cut this because I might be wrong, but I think it's a baby food company, Gerber, or an old one. They might not be around anymore.

4:24Right. And there was a famous thing where they issued some baby food in a country where everyone in that country, if you ever saw a picture on a packet of food, you would think that's what's inside the food. And the baby food had a picture of a baby on it. And everyone in the country thought that this baby food was actually food made of babies. That's very good. I think. That's very... Years ago, I bought a bike for my son for Christmas. And it had a picture of a baby riding the bike on the front. And on the box, it did say baby not included. No. Yeah. That's funny. Shall we move on to our next one?

5:01James, you got something? Okay, this one is from Wayne Hoyt. H-O-I-T, it looks like. Although it looks like a misspelling of Holt. No, it's Hoyt. I've seen it in the inbox. Some like it Hoyt. Wayne says, spiral staircases are not spirals. Okay. Oh, okay. Point of information. Yeah. Surely they are. Well, he says that although they are called spiral, they are actually helical. They are helixes. A real spiral twists with an increasing or decreasing radius. For example, a spiral on, or he doesn't say this, but for instance, on a snail shell, you know, kind of goes out like that. But a staircase always has the same radius.

5:42Like it's not getting wider as you go up. No. Is it? It's always going to be about the same width at the bottom as it is at the top. Right, yes. And a helix is basically a line which you draw around a cylinder. Right. And he says, I guess they're called spiral because unfortunately most people have no idea what a helix is. But I think people know what, like double helix. Famous. Yeah. From DNA fame. So are there any actually spiral staircases where the building gets wider and wider and wider? Well, here's the interesting or probably not very interesting point. Some people say that a helix is a type of spiral.

6:23Other people say, no, they're completely different things. And there doesn't seem to be an international body that decides on what a spiral in a helix is. Wow. I think we have run this on QI actually many, maybe in the H series. I think we might have done it under helixes. um but yeah we we have discussed it before and almost come to blows in the qi office james you're the mathematician i think out of the three of us you get to make the call i actually you know at qi we have a much better mathematician than i am who's will bowen and i think he landed on the side of a helix and spiral being different so i think that's why we ran with it nice but the other thing that we found when we were researching that was a place called chateau du chambord in france and they have a double helix staircase okay so it's two helixes two separate separate staircases and what that means is you can go up one staircase while someone else is coming down the other staircase so you don't use up any more space because it's still on the same cylinder but actually two people can go and according to the people who run that house that um stately home it was designed by leonardo da vinci although we're not quite sure if it was.

7:35Wouldn't it be great if you met the love of your life while you were going down and she was coming up? You don't meet her. Oh, you would never... That's the point about this. That's the whole point of the staircase, isn't it? There's one helix going up and another one coming down. You'd never meet. You'd never meet. You wake up. It was all a dream. Your whole life, Dan. Your lovely wife and your family. Oh my god. They're not tunnels, though. You can see each other going down the steps and going up. No, you can't. You can't. Okay. There was actually one... Do you remember there was some Duke or something who had a load of tunnels made in his house so that he never saw his staff.

8:07Yes. Yes. I think he was nicknamed the Tunneling Duke, which is a good and a bad nickname, isn't it? I've always wanted to go to Cambridge. There's a very specific pub that serves a double helix beer or ale. Oh, is it the Spread Eagle? Yeah, it must be. Because it's where the two of them came in. Watson and Crick announced that they'd found the secret to life. Imagine walking into a pub. Imagine I walk into the Beaumont Arms in Bolton, and I just walk in and I go, I've discovered the secret of life. Yeah. People would, I mean, they give me short shrift anyway in that pub, but... Also, it's pronounced Bolton, by the way.

8:45Should we move on to another fact? All right. This comes from Charlie Wakefield. Can I just say Wakefield in Yorkshire? Well, there we go. Great. There we go. Oh, Dan, that was right there for you. And James snuck in there and got it. I am a fellow TV person who has been working in development for over a decade, so I've discovered hundreds of fish-worthy facts, but there's one that has always stayed with me. Astronauts in space still get morning wood. Sadly, I found this years and years ago in a paper by NASA, I think, but clearly I was a much better researcher back in the day because I've been unable to find it again.

9:19We all have that problem as we go.

9:24That's NASA suppressing the truth, isn't it? Well, no, I mean, there is stuff that you can see out there. This is an interesting thing that they actually have to work on because we're planning voyages to Mars and so on. And what does it do to you? Hang on, don't astronauts go through 17 mornings a day because you're spinning around the world really fast? Isn't that... That's a good point. Yeah, you have to quickly hide. Yeah, so basically there's lots of things that they're looking into. For example, cosmic rays, what happens to your body in microgravity. so when you're in the iss um from what i've been reading it says that the blood will often travel sort of to where your chest area is so you don't have much blood down in that area to begin with so would you be getting a sort of random morning wood uh is the question and because we don't know if anyone's had sex up there we don't know if anyone has had a little fiddle up there we don't know what's been going on up there there's a there is a rumor that a couple went up there isn't there yeah exactly but the thing is like you don't get an erection when your penis is the lowest part of your body it's not like the blood rushes down there with no vasculatory system to push it around yeah you know it's like gravity shouldn't make that much of a difference i see i don't think they think it's um a massive influence but they think it has some influence right yeah is that why your penis is so far down do you think as we evolve our penis is going to get lower and lower and lower just to just yeah yeah use the gravity to get the blood down there absolutely yeah we end up being one of our toes um so so i was trying to find if there was any evidence of an astronaut having mentioned this and i did manage to find one astronaut mike mullain in 2014 in an interview with men's health said a couple of times i would wake up from sleep periods and i had a boner that could have drilled through kryptonite wow that's a plot of superman far isn't it very confident astronauts aren't they that's stunning yeah so that's the one that's the one maybe that's what you read charlie wakefield it's like basically superman is in a cage yeah which is made of kryptonite yeah i think that even happens in the latest one oh really that came out this year but what you need is this guy to drill through kryptonite cage to free him yeah mike mullane the human boar which is better than the human boar nickname that i have

11:58i promise you this is a coincidence but my next one is by lindy hardstaff and lindy says my fact is you can hear a rafflesia flower bloom before you can smell it so you know the rafflesia is the big corpse flower that you get in southeast asia and it kind of flowers once every few years maybe but apparently the petals are so big and thick and leathery that each one makes an audible thwack noise as they crack open and lindy hardstaff discovered this when doing an overnight shift monitoring a blooming event at the bog bogor not bognor i assume bogor botanic gardens in 2012 i've never heard of bogor that's so cool i was nearly i nearly got to see one of those flowers blooming when we were on tour in melbourne oh there was a thing there was a museum and it was about a two hour drive out of melbourne i think and it had one on display one of these amazing corpse flowers that opens up once every 10 years or whatever it is and it was just flowering that day how long did you miss it by oh i could have got to it oh so you okay i comfortably could have got to it i chose not to oh wow i was busy i was in melbourne with my friend that reminds me of the um world laziness championships that i was supposed to go to this year and decided that the weather wasn't very good so i'd go the next day and when i got there it had finished everyone was stood up by the time you got there yeah are you being serious i can't tell if that really happened that really happened it's who could lay down the longest is this month it's montenegro it's called the world lazy citizen competition and i missed the end of it because i couldn't be bothered leaving but the weather was bad.

13:39In a weird way, I feel like you should have won the competition. I feel like I'm going to write to the organisers and ask for a special award. Yeah. Someone travelled all the way over from the UK only to miss it out of laziness. Well, I'm quite annoyed because I did email them saying, can I come along? And they said yes. And I told them what day I'd come and they didn't email me to say it had finished. What were you expecting, James? What were you expecting from the world laziness people? It was a four hour drive. Into the mountains. you couldn't be bothered to reply that's all didn't you also go to a church once that you drove out of your way forced polina to come with you too i went there are two rugby union themed churches in france and i'd been to one of them and the other one was only a three and a half an hour drive away and when we got there it was closed yeah unbelievable question a rugby union themed church what's that it's a small chapel where people who are rugby union fans can go and they put like some of their shirts there and pray for their team to do well oh okay and also actually one of the stained glass windows is themed on rugby union as well and the priest throws the communion wafer backwards into your mouth very good yep and when you go and get the wafer everyone puts their head in between the person in front slags and you haven't been back presumably no i can't imagine i ever will it's such a shame i had that same experience i went down to yeovil junction train station to go see a haunted buffet um supposedly the sausages levitates and and so on and i did and i went on a sunday it was my only chance and i had to explain to fenella and the kids like daddy's got to go off i've got to do this thing it's a long journey i was in london got there london to yeovil yeah did you know where yeovil was at the time oh i did have a brief look at it yeah yeah it's a distance it's a distance Anyway, cafe was shut Couldn't get in Looked through the windows Couldn't see anything Imagine if you'd look through the windows Only to see a levitating sausage And you couldn't get any further towards it Yeah, maybe that would have been worse Yeah, no Sausages weren't even out Too levitating Okay, Andy Okay, here's one From David Morgan from Sydney This is about Sir Henry Parks Premier of New South Wales in the 19th century Australia's father of federation Who got the ball rolling on the six British colonies in Australia, joining together to form a country.

16:00So he campaigned for this. Right. Anyway, that's sort of personal. That's the business end of his life. But David Morgan is writing to tell us that he was also in the Australian parlance, a mad keen rooter. Oh, no. He was married three times, fathering 12 children with the first lady Parks. And after a 22 year gap, five more with the second lady Parks. Wow. 17 children. 17? The first three were born out of wedlock while the first Lady Parks was still alive. She had been his housemaid. At dinner in the 1890s when Parks was nearly 80, the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald innocently remarked, These oysters are good.

16:39Parks replied, I don't need these adventitious aids. Lady Parks and I, until quite recently, have been in the habit of having connections 17 or 18 times every night, and we now have connections 10 or 11 times. Parks and Recreation. Superb. um kernal was very quiet the editor for the rest of the dinner parks later uh made a splendid speech full of elevated thought and moving language there you go i i've got to say all cultures around the world i completely appreciate and i think people should be able to do whatever they want wherever they're from and i would never take the piss out of anyone or say that anyone around the world is wrong in any way for what they do but the word root to mean have sex does not sit well with me oh really interesting well maybe you'd like what parks did as his first job because i did a little bit of extra digging on him he was born in warwickshire actually in england and his first job was as a bone turner which is uh kind of someone who i think chisels and chips and shapes bone and ivory oh i think it's that right did you use root in uk to mean sex no that would not mean that it would not mean it here okay good so a router is something you use to connect to the internet yes yeah or joe roots the english cricketer right okay okay so who has never scored a century in australia at time of recording he's busy isn't he probably so many misunderstandings whenever he says his name anywhere yeah uh james when we go to you uh james yes that's the name of the person who wrote in uh they didn't put their surname just james uh and they wrote long time listener first time caller hopefully you haven't heard this fact before the last piece of nazi architecture in berlin is a 12 650 ton concrete cylinder nice okay so this is the schwerblastungskurper meaning heavy load exerting body and it was used to test whether the ground would be strong enough for all the amazing projects that they wanted to build in berlin so they wanted to do like a big arch like to celebrate their glorious victory in world war ii and they thought we can only do this arch if we have strong enough ground so they built this big cylinder that was really really heavy to see if it would uh the ground was strong enough to hold it and it turns out that berlin is a massive swamp and really you couldn't put a big arch there but then they also couldn't move it because it was too big so it's still there it's still there so they i mean that's bad planning in two ways firstly you should know that you're on a swamp and secondly you should not put anything in without having a plan to take it out again i think nobody accuses the nazis of being a hundred percent in their plans they've had one or two flubs in their time yeah true yeah attacking russia but yeah and the thing is that they've never been able to get rid of it because it's so big but it's also next to a load of train tracks and apartment buildings so they can't blow it up oh wow so it's kind of just stuck there as a memory 12 000 ton cylinder 12 650 tons concrete cylinder feels big i think i think it's empty on the inside because i think you can go and visit it and have a look inside we should do a podcast there that do you think the acoustics will be that's gonna be echoey i think yes that's the reason why we shouldn't go and do a podcast in the last piece of Nazi architecture.

20:12Obviously reasons of taste. Obviously reasons of taste. Do you remember the last time we played, well, the only time we played Berlin was in that big hall and it was used as a rock and roll hall and they hadn't had anyone do a speaking gig in there. So like all the chairs were set up and I was talking to the guy and saying, so you don't do what this, like we're a new concept here as a speaking thing, as opposed to a gig? And he went, yeah. And I said, so when's the last time you had someone do a talk here? And he went, Gerbils. I remember that. We followed Gerbils. Yeah, I love that. Why is it so silent?

20:51I don't love that. Sorry. I love that. Gosh. I've got one last one. Okay, cool. Yeah. This is from Josh Smith, who, I don't know why I picked this as my last fact to read out because it's quite abstruse. It's about steam exploded donkey bone powder Oh This is just a mad thing that you can make Donkeys into Basically donkey bone is about a tenth of the donkey But most people don't use it for anything, right? Okay A tenth of a donkey is bone Really? Yeah That's a pretty amazing fact It's about 15 % if they're in space and it's not How much of us are bone? Oh, probably about 10 % Really? Well, I don't know Amazing I don't know, you're right Yeah, yeah, yeah but i mean maybe they got thick thick bones i feel like mine's less than 10 no do you own i do think that yeah maybe a bit maybe a bit i think like let's round up my weight to 100 kilos i don't weigh 100 kilos but let's round it up if i take all my bones out are they gonna be too heavy to take as hard luggage on ryanair oh that is a very let's test it out i think we have to yeah don't write in i don't know what the level of ryanair welcome to mythbusters where we are going we haven't checked the stuff but james has taken out almost all his bones and now with that gatwick james's will reading is gonna be amazing and my bones i leave too along with two tickets to lanzarote to visit the other rugby union based chapel in france so ends the will of the human boar so basically anyway yeah 10 of donkey is bone and it's good stuff there's a lot of good stuff in there nutritious but it's very hard to get to because it's very dense very strong there's a donkey around all sorts of reasons this is why you were fired as a taskmaster challenge rider debone this donkey and you've got 30 minutes to do it but basically to use it you know if you are going to kill an animal you may as well use absolutely everything in it.

22:58Oh, yeah. You know, it's an important thing to do. You need to crush it to a powder. And one thing you can do is do steam explosion, where you basically use high-pressure steam to kind of reduce it to a powder. You sort of blast it. This is a Chinese study because China gets through a lot of donkeys, as I think we did in a podcast a few months ago, didn't we? Yeah, they're running out. Right, they're running out. In fact, they're using up everyone else's donkeys and they're running out of them. This is a problem. Wow. Not helped by the use of steam-exploded doggy bone powder. But it turns out that when you bake cookies using steam exploded donkey bone powder instead of flour um they're rated very highly by participants like people tasting these cookies which are one-third donkey bone powder instead of flour say that's delicious really yeah and does it maybe contain like bone marrow stuff so it might be okay for you it might it might i mean it sounds like in terms of flavor odor and overall acceptability this was a chinese study so it might be culturally specific but uh turns out that might be what you're missing in your next bake is a little bit of the old steam exploded donkey bone powder give that a miss i think thanks though yeah okay before we wrap up this first episode of little fish we are now going to do something that is going to be appearing at the end of every single episode which is if you were part of the friend of the podcast here on club fish as part of your membership you are going to become the custodian of one of the facts, one of the headline facts from the 600 plus episodes of No Such Thing as a Fish.

24:29And we will give you a shout out to let you know what your fact is. And we'll also be sending you a digital certificate to acknowledge it in writing forever on. You can put it on the wall. You can do whatever you want. And this is an honor that cannot be stripped away, right? This isn't like a... I don't know. I think if you do something really bad, like really, really bad, if you're a knight of the realm yeah and you do something really awful they can take it off you okay this digital certificate is now your moral compass if you need to behave like a person with a digital certificate would i get which is a good person a good human i don't want the police like knocking down someone's door because they've done some terrible deed and the first thing the police see on the wall is a custodian of episode 453 of no six fingers of fish that's the last thing we need we don't Then they'll ask us questions, and they'll see how does this go all the way to the top of no such thing as a fish.

25:25I think we should say as well, a little bit of the theory behind it, which is that these facts, they're endangered. Some of them. They need support. Many of them are true. Some of them. All of Dan's, James's, and Anna's are true. And mine are occasionally like the largest kettle in Hamburg. It's called Caroline, which turns out not to be a kettle. Imagine if the police are trying to arrest a murderer. They bang down the door. They open the door. They look on the wall. They go, oh, did you know that the largest funicular railway in Swaziland is called Derek? And then while they're doing that, someone's run away.

26:02Okay, so use us as a decoy. Do what you want with it. It's a lovely certificate. And so, yeah, why don't we, because we haven't actually launched the tiers yet, why not give ourselves an honorary fact each that we will be the custodians of. And we should say, please join Clubfish at the Friend of the Podcast tier, because if nobody has joined Friend of the Podcast, we're going to have to do that again. And we're going to look really stupid. Okay, so the way we're going to do it is we're going to be allocating members in sequence, in a very particular order. So the first fact is now going to be allocated to Mr.

26:39James Harkin. Thank you. James, please read us your facts. Sorry, first I'd like to say a few words. I have an alibi for that night of the third. Okay, so I am a custodian of fact number one in episode number one of No Such Thing as a Fish, which was that the Large Hadron Collider had to be turned off because a bird dropped a bit of baguette into it. Stunning. And what did I eat just before we came on air today? Baguette. A bird. Large Hadron. so yeah i'm really honored to to be the custodian of that i i promise to look after it well how does it feel it feels good because it's a fact that can't be proven wrong because it's a historical fact it's happened unless someone goes back in time of course but you would need some sort of enormous physical laboratory to go back in time it's impossible um okay so that's James, congratulations, James.

27:39Thank you. That's a very exciting fact. And your digital certificate is on its way. All right. So Anna's not with us today, but obviously Anna is getting her own fact. And the second fact of the show was her fact. So for Anna, we will be allocating what is almost the classic fact of No Such Thing as a Fish. Weird that it's the second one that we think is a classic. Almost like the first one was a bit rubbish. It's like a Star Wars films in that respect. Yeah. Carry on. Yeah, we wouldn't want to be custodian of that first fact. So this was Anna's fact. For the last month of his life, US President James Garfield ate everything through his anus.

28:19What a fact. Congratulations, Anna. What a fact. Your digital certificate will be on its way. Dan, what about you? Are you going to get a fact from this? I am going to get a fact. But if we're going to go sequential, we should assign each of our own facts, I think, for this first episode to each other. So, Andy, you're next. And your fact comes from James Harkin. Yeah. Didn't manage to get a fact into the episode one of No Such Thing as a Fish. Try my best. You're welcome.

28:52James just had two good facts. I think it's because it was a Franken show, right? It wasn't deliberate. It wasn't deliberate, right? Hard to say. So, yeah, it's a good point. Like we made a few shows and then in the edit, we edited, again, it was a pilot. Like that episode was never meant to go out. I'll happily take one of James' facts. All right. So what is it? It's that in 2013, six people in the USA named their child Mushroom. Very nice. Good fact. I wouldn't want to be associated with that fact anymore. Exactly. Actually. Yeah. Did you hate mushrooms as much then as you did, as you do now?

29:24It's been a whole life thing. Right. Wow. From as young as I remember being, I did not like mushrooms. Maybe if you'd been named Mushroom, you wouldn't now have that phobia I probably would hate it more Because I can imagine the bullying I would have had The number of people saying, you're a fun guy Which you are Yeah, but I feel like I would have become less and less fun over the years As people made that joke to me That's true Yeah, that's understandable Yeah, okay Well, those six people in the USA who were named Mushroom will now be 12 Oh yeah Yes Years old I mean, they won't have doubled in size

29:59they may reproduce with sports we don't know that's actually the age that a lot of people who come to our shows who are like kids that's when they start listening usually around 12 isn't it yeah well if you're in the usa and you are named mushroom and you were born in 2013 do write in to podcast.qi.com i wonder if i wonder if it's gone up you know over the years whether it'll be oh yeah it'll be a popular name by now you think so yeah yeah it's a nice popular the name in the states yeah soon okay well uh well there you go andy thank you very much you official custodian i love it of the mushroom probably in a few years there will be lots of people named mushroom after the cloud oh god um all right should we uh assign mine so my fact this was the the fourth fact of the very first episode is that philippa langley who found richard iii's bones with an amateur but nonetheless saw him at a car park beneath a huge r and the bones were beneath there could have done with an edit yeah apologies for anyone who is custodian of dance facts because we won't be able to fit them on the certificate i think at the time when i was typing up these episodes i hadn't yet found my scrupulous methodology of writing the headline facts up in a really concise way i don't think i would have said it like that yeah i think you might have said it like that well okay well that's that's that's how it goes we're gonna be doing this every week so join friend of the podcast you will become the official custodian of one of our facts and as of next week we'll be going from episode two onwards yes so if you want to find out how to do that and how to claim your fact uh then just go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish and even if you don't join at the friend of the podcast there are two other tiers available all of them contain all sorts of goodies whether that's ad free stuff or merch or extra content every fortnight or little videos of us doing very very stupid stuff it's all so much fun and we're very excited to be making it just go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish and check it out and of course if you want to get your fact on little fish our new show here thank you so much for listening podcast at qi.com and he goes through all the emails he's going to be cherry picking the best of them and we're going to bring more of them next monday until then goodbye Thank you.