No Such Thing As An Eton Oyster

0:00Merry Christmas everyone! Ho ho ho! Yep Thanks Ben Well as you can see we are all in the Christmas spirit And why would we not be because we have a very special guest for you here today That's right It is the man known as the chief gnome of the QI operation He is the person who brought us four including Anna together To make no such thing as a fish It is John Lloyd Yes the Christ figure to our three wise men Oh my god Okay okay no I'm rowing back He's the producer of QI He's the producer of every great comedy series you've watched Blackadder, Spitting Image, Not the 9 o 'clock News So much And he's the author of a book called The Meaning of Left Co-written with Douglas Adams 42 years ago And it's just been reissued It's a fantastic book Yeah, this book is basically a dictionary of things That there should be words for But they don't exist And so, what they've done is There are signs of place names all around the UK That don't have any meaning attached to them and they've attached these observations to those to create new words.

1:04Like bath? No. Bath already has a meaning, badly. Sandwich, for example. No, you guys are screwing this up. Des Moines? The two little lines coming down from your nose to your mouth are the Des Moines. Ah, nice. I like Ely. That's always been my favourite. The first tiniest inkling that something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong. Okay, so that's the meaning of Lyft. It's available in all shops now. It's a brilliant Christmas present, stocking filler. Main present, I would say. Absolutely. But what if you're listening to this and it's too late to do the shopping and you need to get the fish lover in your life a gift?

1:40What to do is get the fish listener in your life. Membership of Club Fish, a wonderful, super secret, top secret, but also crucially accessible to everyone on the planet, Members Club. Absolutely. There's loads of things on there. There's loads of bonus content. there is going to be a super special quiz coming up in the new year that we're going to announce there are extra long versions of our normal episode there is video episodes of drop us a line which is our audience feedback show go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish and you can get your membership there but in the meantime please enjoy this episode of no such thing as a fish with john lloyd cbe christ of the british empire on with the show

2:38hello and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and John Lloyd. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy. My fact is, the Chicago River used to be sparkling, but only because of all the animal carcasses floating in it. Yum, yum, yum. Yum, yum, yum, yum. How do dead carcasses make something fizzy?

3:17Well, they give off methane. They give off gas. Basically, there's a bit of the Chicago River which was called Bubbly Creek. And this is actually a good news story from this year because finally they've cleaned it up. But 100 years ago, it was really foul. It was amazing. So there's this bit of the Chicago River which has been full of junk for a century. and the reason that it was so bad in that particular bit was because it's next to the abattoir district, the slaughterhouses, all of that. Oh, yeah. And it was so foul that bits of it were just solid at the surface. The river was just caked with lumps of matter.

3:58Oh, wow. So you don't need a bridge. No bridge required. No, no, no, exactly. Really good. Chickens could walk on it, could they? Completely unharmed. They'd just wander out over the sky. Chickens can swim, so that doesn't really help them that much, can't they? Can they? Can they? Or am I thinking of ducks? You think of ducks? But that's because the reason there were so many carcasses in it is because from 1865 to the 1920s, more meat was processed in Chicago than anywhere else in the world. No. Really? Wow. And it's a big foodie place. I was interested in other kinds of food in Chicago. Did you know shredded wheat was invented in Chicago?

4:34Was it? It premiered at the World Spare in Chicago in 1893 and invented by Henry Perky. Yeah. Okay. The nice guy. And also 31 % of children admitted to the University of Chicago Burn Centre over a 10-year period were scolded by instant noodles. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. I've been there. To that centre? No, to the world of scolded pot noodle situations. Yeah, you've got to let those noodles stand. I've got to get to them. I've got to get straight into them. You say sparkling. It didn't look nice, did it, right? The bubbles were purely the sparkly elements. Yeah, it's feted, I'd say, rather than sparkling.

5:13Because I've got some sparkling water here in front of me, and it's beautiful and clear. Oh, that's lovely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I put a dead mouse in here before we started just to help it bubble. Well, you say in the bubbly water, though, a litre of bottled water contains an average of 240 ,000 detectable plastic fragments. Oh, dear. So don't drink that. Don't drink that. Here's another one, James. Reusable water bottles can have 40 ,000 times more bacteria than a toilet seat. Oh, well, this is one that I'm going to chuck away into the street afterwards. I'm going to chuck it into the Thames and see what bubbles up.

5:47Can I tell you a thing about bubbles? Yes. Bubbly water. Oh, yeah. So London has the ability to spritz its own water. The Thames? The Thames. It has two boats, the bubble boats, which can inject gas into the river. Is it just for fun? It's not. It's really important. it's only occasionally needed right so when there is really hot weather and when there are sometimes sewage overspills which mostly won't happen anymore because of the new big thames tideway tunnel which we've talked about blah blah blah but basically there are times where you just need to inject oxygen into the water so fish can breathe i see so there's a sewage overflow that means there's not enough oxygen in there so you need to get some in exactly and there are two boats they're called bubbler and vitality it's an absolute last resort you know it's not if you're using the oxygenate the water boat it's a really bad sign but they can each inject 30 tons of oxygen into the river every day that's really cool this is necessary because in 1957 the thames was declared biologically dead and by 1970 it was so polluted it had started to dissolve the hulls of boats wow what is that toxic gosh yeah it's a lot i think it's really it's really interesting because the word um thames means river in celtic same as the word tyne means river from old english word tinan which means to dissolve okay weird nice it's amazing that we can tell how much oxygen is in the thames like that's pretty extraordinary that you would take a sample of one spot and that would tell you the story of the entire tense.

7:27That seems quite wild. I had this thing quite recently where they put a little thing on your finger and they tell you how much oxygen is in your blood. How the fuck does that work? Is it because all your blood goes through your finger at some point or another? No, it can't. Can it? Can it? No, it can't. That's not how it works. No, because some of the blood goes out to your leg and then back to the heart. Some goes out to your finger and then back to the heart. I don't know how it works. And I don't want to know, actually. I prefer to think it's magic. the magic um okay here's some stuff on uh corpses and carcasses do you know there's a theory that anthrax can lure you in oh yeah so the idea is that anthrax gets into an animal okay the animal dies and then the animal sort of fertilizes the ground and so it gets more lush and then that That's more animals to go to it.

8:19And then those animals catch the anthrax and then they die. And there's an idea that that's how it's evolved. That's its life cycle. Isn't that cool? Yes. That's very cool. It's so weird that that stuff goes. Well, I guess I make that sound as if it's like the anthrax is going, psst, hey, shi. Like, you know, I've turned it into a human in my mind. You know, we have to anthropomorphize a lot of these facts to make them interesting. Yeah. yeah like and the other thing that i found is i went to a place called padarack in france it's a big sort of cave and they said that in the 20th century in some parts of france there was a law that if your animal got diseased and died you have to go and throw it into the nearest chasm that's what they called it like to be further one in padarack is like a big chasm they thought the devil lived down there and stuff it was like one of those you know it's like a sinkhole kind of But the problem is that the rivers go underneath these chasms and they're attached to the water supply.

9:17So you throw in your anthrax cow or sheep and then it gets into the water and people get sick that way. So it was a misguided law. So many of them are. Question. What's the difference between a chasm and a gorge? Oh, well. I would say that a chasm is caused by a collapse of land to make a hole, whereas a gorge is caused by a river. So it's like a huge River is like Almost like a V-shaped valley Caused by a fast Flowing river Yeah A gorge sorry Right And a canyon Same Same but bigger Big river Canyon is an American gorge Maybe Do you know what A current bum is A current bum A current bum Is a rock under The surface of a river Which gives that Sort of hump thing Oh yeah Well it's covered in water Yeah Yeah the water Goes over a boulder Is this meaning of Lift or is that Just No, it's not for me It's a book called Landscape by Robert McFarlane Which I highly recommend About dialect words all over the country Very cool The river is now clean, Andy You said the Chicago River Yes Except once a year it looks like toxic goo Oh And that's because of St.

10:27Patrick's Day They dye the river, the entire river, green Lovely Yeah, lovely? Well, I celebrate Irish heritage, James I don't know why you don't It's weird because I am part Irish But I refuse I just straight up refuse. Well, I don't know what... Well, I think the question is, is it okay? Like, are they putting in toxic goo or are they putting in food colouring? Food colouring. They started with toxic goo and that quickly got bad feedback. I think they did because it started by accident in 1961 when some people were putting dye into the water to see where like a leak had come out or to see where the water flowed.

11:06And then it was around St. Patrick's Day. So everyone thought, oh, they did that on purpose. And they went, oh, we didn't, but let's do it on purpose in future. But that dye was toxic. Ah, there you go. That's very funny. The Chicago River is a friend of the podcast. Yeah. Oh, so it is. Because in 2004, the Dave Matthews Band drove over it in their bus and dumped an estimated 800 pounds of human feces onto a passenger sightseeing boat. Oh, yes. Why did they have 800 pounds of feces on their bus? They've been saving it up. the tour bus that's a that's a hell of a tour was it through a grating in the middle of the bridge yeah can you imagine being on that boat celebrity feces all over you wouldn't know it was celebrity though if you knew it's celebrity that might take the edge off do you think if you saw dave matthews waving out the window you'd go how lucky are we i don't think dave matthews is of a level of celebrity enough no no i know his face i'd want it to be a-list you want taylor The Swiss bus travelling.

12:07Source of, yeah. Right. That's going to be mixed with Travis Kelsey's. Oh, gosh. Too much, too much. In the meaning of live, Chicago is defined as the foul-smelling wind that precedes an underground train. Oh, wow. But it might, of course, be one of Dave Matthews' farts. But it was known as the stinking river, wasn't it? The Chicago River. That's what locals called it all the way through the 20th century. It sounds like it was so bad. And a lot of the contemporary descriptions of how awful it was come from this brilliant book, The Jungle, by a writer called Upton Sinclair, who wrote, it was a journalistic expose, really, of the slaughterhouses and their practices, and just how, you know, appalling the quality was there.

12:48So I'll just read you a couple of sentences of it. The material brought to the surface was as black as ink. A considerable amount of gas was given off, which was so evil-smelling that it could be detected even above the prevailing odour from the stockyard pens. Oh my god. I know. And sometimes the river would catch fire because it was so crud. And sometimes people would wander out. And presumably you're chasing a chicken and you're trying to get it back. And then they just disappear below the surface. Could they get out a bit into it? You mean they could walk over some glub and then disappear?

13:20That's insane. Upton Sinclair. Oh, yeah. He was known as like a muckraker. He wrote fiction that exposed what was going on in society. And quite a few laws were changed off the back of different books that he wrote over the course of his life. So he's really important. But I also have a book of his at my house, which is called Mental Radio. And it's a book he wrote all about his experiments with telepathy because his wife, Mary, believed that she had telepathic ability. So weird how these really awesome people get a bit woo-woo towards the end. If you look at all the people who invented quantum mechanics, for example, all became really mystical towards the end of their life.

13:58Really? Because, you know, Schrodinger... I guess it is kind of like, it's almost like magic, isn't it? Quantum. Yeah, quantum. I think so. I think you go, once you've done a lifetime of science, you think, actually, but why? Why is there something and not nothing? Because I've got a friend who was a Nobel Prize winner called Brian Josephson, who invented the Josephson Junction. Oh, yeah. So a superconductor guy. Yeah, yeah. Who is basically slightly sent to Coventry in Cambridge because he's become a Buddhist and become very spiritual. And he's the most wonderful person. I think in the University of Cambridge They don't say sent to Coventry They say sent to the University of Warwick That's very funny Albert Einstein wrote a forward to the German edition of Mental Radio So even he was interested in it So Upton Sinclair was a very interesting character It's a good name for a radio station Welcome to Mental Radio It's no music, it's just pranks That's it, it's just Steve Penk Wall to wall Steve Penk But the thing about telepathy I'm slightly telepathic Oh, here we go.

15:00I can do, there's an online site where you can get scores way, way, way above chance. Right. You have to guess where a thing is under a hidden map. That's called Minesweeper, isn't it? I'm actually getting telepathic messages right now from Andy and James saying, Dan, what the fuck have you done to our podcast by introducing this subject? Can you hear it? I can hear it.

15:27Okay, it is time for fact number two And that is my fact My fact this week is that in Hawaii A tightly guarded secret That used to be passed down from generation to generation Was how people used to tune their guitars Surely everyone knows that Those little knobs, aren't there, on the end? I don't know how to tune a guitar Honestly, if we left you in a room with a guitar you'd work it out really fast if you turn those knobs the sound changes well i know you tend i don't you turn the knobs but i don't know i don't i just i'm very impressed when i see anyone do it well you and also you really shouldn't be you wouldn't know what you were tuning it to right oh that's it that's the thing so a guitar if you play a classical guitar like i would tune a guitar maybe james would tune a guitar your tuning is e-a-d-g-b-e that's sort of the classic and you can make classic e-notes g-notes all that it's basic stuff if you don't understand that at all do we Andy?

16:21If you tune it that way that means wherever you put your fingers on the guitar it will always sound the same so you just know where to put them because you know how each one is tuned Every good child deserves fun Oh that's the staves of a musical score isn't it? Every good boy deserves favour? That's it, yes But this is very interesting because this is slack key guitar in Hawaii It's a Hawaiian guitar tradition that has been part of their world for hundreds of years And the idea is that they all tune it differently to an open set of notes. When you then play it as an open chord, so you don't use your other hand, it plays a lovely chord.

17:01And every family seemed to have designed its own different set of notes unique to them. And that's what would be passed down from family to family. Now, the reason that this happened is almost to do with what you're saying, Andy. so when captain cook first came to hawaii there was a guy on board called captain vancouver who was he was the captain of the next vote that came to hawaii and he brought a bunch of cattle and the cattle arrived and it was roaming around and the king of hawaii didn't know what to do with them this is the origin story of the guitar in hawaii it's really interesting now in those days in hawaii we always tied an onion to our balance cattle's roaming free in hawaii they don't know what to do so they decide to bring in some mexican and spanish cowboys to teach them how to farm yes exactly they brought the guitars they played the guitars and then when they left they left them the guitars after a while a bunch of them went how do we even tune these things and they weren't quite sure the classical tunings so they had to create their own tunings and family by family this is what they did and all these beautiful songs started emerging uh dan you sent around a link like we always do with these facts yeah just so we can check that they're true uh and this we all do it i mean this idea came about because of dan's facts but we all do it yeah yeah and this was about a guy called raymond canne but he has a middle name that i wonder if i wonder if you read his middle name oh yes i did yeah well you're so good at pronouncing things dan i wonder if you'd like to just remind us what his middle name is oh my god Where is it?

18:36It's just there. Oh, okay. Well, this is going to be embarrassing for you because as it turns out, this is my middle name as well. It's Kali-o-aloha-poina-aleo-hele-manu. No, hele-manu. You got so close. I was doing the Australian pronunciation. Do you know, Alan Davis and I went to see the Swedish version of QI years ago. Oh, yeah. And Anders, the producer, very sweetly said, John, it's such an honor to have you here as the divisor of the whole thing. That means, you know, would you kindly introduce the guests? And he gave me the list of Swedish guests and I read them all out and their audience were in hysterics because I didn't get one syllable right.

19:18They were screaming. Who was Raymond Canning? He was, good question. He was a slack key guitarist. Okay. And I think the thing you sent round was an obituary of him maybe. It was, yeah, that's right. I don't play the guitar at all, but I do play a bit of piano. and obviously one thing I know about piano is where middle C is but I didn't know and this is the most interesting thing I think I've found in the whole month is there are three middle C's on the guitar did you work that out yourself when you were tuning it? if you're tuning on your own you'll use your lowest E string as a guide to the next string because you can play all the chords I do it the other way from the highest E string onto the next one so what you do is you find a but do you know where middle C is?

20:00yeah okay, name it Okay First fret of the second string Fifth fret of the third string And tenth fret of the fourth string I don't know what any of those things mean Okay This is also why the quiz failed You give the answers before the person gets the guess Oh yeah yeah yeah But then I'm allowed to say I'm allowed to say Yeah I knew all that I get the point Trade secrets in music Oh yeah As this is a bit of a trade secret You know how these Hawaiian families kept their guitars There is proof legally that an album can be a trade secret. What does that mean? Okay. Have you heard of the Wu-Tang Clan?

20:38Oh, yes. I've seen them. I saw them in Aspen, Colorado. Amazing. Lloyd used to be in the Wu-Tang Clan. The lizard. Yeah. This is one of the most amazing things. Imagine you're at a Wu-Tang gig. You turn around and John Lloyd and Rowan Atkinson, Mr. Bean is standing at a Wu-Tang Clan gig. That's where you went to, right? Yeah. Yeah. So is this about the time when they released one record or something? They recorded a secret album in 2007, and they made one hard copy of it. So it doesn't exist outside this hard copy, right? And a wealthy American guy called Martin Shrekley. Super controversial. Yeah, very controversial character.

21:19Bought it for$2 million. And there were very strict restrictions on how it could be played or reproduced or all of that for the next 90 odd years. eventually, in unrelated reasons, he was sent to prison for fraud. No, no, no. I think they might be slightly related to the fact that he had two million quid to spend on one record. That's very true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think. Just for the lawyers listening. So as part of that deal, as part of him going to prison for fraud, the album had to be sold off, right? And it got sold off to a crypto firm called Pleaser Dow. And then when Shrekly got out, nonetheless, despite the album having been sold off he started playing it for loads of people online and a crypto firm sued him and all of this led to a judge decreeing that an album can be technically a trade secret.

22:08I've got two secrets from the meaning of Lyft two secrety words. Oh cool. Mary Tavey which you probably know is a place in Devon. Mary Tavey is a person to whom under dire injunctions of silence you tell a secret you wish to be far more widely known. Lovely. Useful one. And Tukituki which is a place in New Zealand Tukituki is a sexual liaison which is meant to be secret but which is in fact common knowledge Chartreuse Oh yeah Drink? Yes, green Yeah, the recipe is only known by two monks No Apparently so Really? Yeah There are all these recipes, aren't there? Like the Coca-Cola one famously Yeah Here's a bit secret You know they use Chartreuse to dye the Chicago River Of course, that's all Yeah that's where the fish are so cheerful all the time yeah the um coca-cola one's really interesting so they have like a secret formula right which they say oh no one can work out what this is and all that and actually you can kind of pretty easily work out what it is but obviously pepsi has the same thing because they make arguably the same drink i know they're slightly taste different but they're pretty much the same thing but why do they not have secret ingredients like they don't say oh we have a secret thing called 7x that nobody knows about yeah is it Because no one really likes Pepsi.

23:28Is that it? No, because I think you'll find that the advertising campaign in the 90s showed that everyone loved Pepsi. And today we're sponsored. No, basically they just use normal law and just make people sign non-disclosure agreements and if they give the secrets away, they sue them and stuff. Rather than saying that they have some sort of secret ingredient that no one can know. Because it does seem mad that you can keep... Like, with so much, like, sort of... Regulation. Regulation, and all the warnings on the back of a packet. You can just have a secret sauce in there? You have to sort of...

24:02I think you have to register it somewhere, but it's accepted legally as a trade secret. That's the thing. Got it. So it is a special legal framework. It's got an injunction on it, basically. Kind of. But there is a thing... Anyway, it's orange, vanilla, cinnamon, and a few other things. Don't say the final one! And dead animals. Well, we had an email from listener Esther Nelkin. who says, you may have covered this previously, we haven't covered this previously, but in order for Coca-Cola to be recognised as kosher, a rabbi had to be told the secret formula. In 1935, Rabbi Tobias Geffen signed an NDA and was allowed to investigate the ingredients.

24:39Wow. And she adds, I couldn't find who the rabbi is today who holds the information. That's amazing. That's a Dan Brown novel waiting to be written, isn't it? You're so right. You're so right. I've got some specifically Hawaiian secrets here. Oh, cool. that physicists at the University of Hawaii have recently solved the problem, the secret of how washing machines get clothes clean. It's never been known until now. So there are now two physicists who know the secret of how that works. And the other one is that 2018 was a bad year for Hawaii. They had a massive volcanic explosion. And the authorities warned people not to toast marshmallows over it, which is very good advice.

25:20but they also had in 2018 38 minutes of panic after a wrongly pressed button set off an alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile attack. And the way it's connected to a secret is the governor of Hawaii couldn't correct the false missile alert for 17 minutes because he didn't know how to log on to his own Twitter and Facebook accounts. They were kept from him. There's only one rabbi in Hawaii who knew what the password was. That was mad, wasn't it, when that happened? I think a lot of people just started going around telling, you know, telling people about their secret liaisons and stuff like that.

25:57Dookie dookie. Dookie dookie was everywhere. It's the end of the world. We did it in the book. We were writing the books of the year at the time. And there was definitely an article about that. Yes. And I think it was the second time that the person who accidentally sent the alert out had made this mistake. And it was something stupid. Like there were two buttons next to each other. I think it was a drop down menu. That's right. And it was a drop-down menu, and it was send nuclear alert brackets test. Or send out-of-office reply. Yeah.

26:30Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 1874, the world's largest pearl got lost down the back of a sofa. And was this a kind of princess-on-the-pee style situation? Expand. Well, yeah, easy, okay They kept putting Cushions on top of the sofa Yeah, and it was only found when I can't remember the original fairy tale now Is it the true princess can identify The world's largest pearl down the back of a sofa Is it James? It's not that It's not that complete misremembrance Of a fairy story Anyone else? No, this is something I read in BBC History magazine It was in an article by Kate Williams and it's about the La Peregrina pearl and the sofa in Windsor Castle and how the two things interacted in 1874.

27:27And it was a woman called the Duchess of Abercorn who was at a party with her husband James Hamilton and she momentarily lost the pearl down the back of the sofa but it was enough that it was recorded and we now know about it. Is it such a massive pearl that it would seriously damage the sofa? No, it's not. How big is it? Would you feel a lump if you sat down on it? That's what I'm trying to say. Like the princess and the pea. Oh, I was thinking more of the current bums. Current bums, yeah, true. If you sat directly onto it with no sofa involved, you would feel it on your bum. Yes. In the sofa, I don't think so.

28:04Because it is about 11.2 grams in weight, which is about the same weight as the world's smallest monkey. if you sat on the world's smallest monkey would would you feel that you'd feel it was it squashy it's like a cushion you'd feel it for sure but not necessarily if it was inside the sofa and can you give us a size rather than the weight um no i'm afraid i can give you more versions of the weight so it was 55.95 carats four ounces or 223.8 grains how long was this this very large or small item with a certain weight. How long was it lost for? It was lost momentarily. This is a fascinating fact.

28:47Wait, I've lost my glasses. No, there they are on my head. It was interesting enough that Kate Williams wrote about it in BBC History Magazine. I think the most interesting thing is how small monkeys get these days. I'm staggered. An adult monkey that weighs 11 grams. There's like these monkeys that you can put them on your finger and they just hold on like a beanie baby. I've not seen that. That's a toy. No, they do exist. I've seen pictures of them. It is incredible. I think why it's notable is that this is not just any ordinary pearl. It's not just that it was the world largest at the time.

29:19This is La Peregrina. Yeah, I said that. This is the wanderer. This is a pearl that has been part of so much history. You can see it in the portraits of Mary Tudor. She was wearing this pearl. It made it all the way into the modern day to Elizabeth Taylor, who wore it in two movies. and it's just had this amazing history. So the idea that you could lose this at all. I know. And just to say on Elizabeth Taylor, she got given it by Richard Burton, her husband, a couple of times. And she lost it in a dog's mouth. Again, momentarily. And the pearl was the same size on both occasions. But yeah, she lost it and she was really worried because this was a very iconic piece of jewelry.

30:04And she looked in her dog's mouth And there it was Extraordinary So pearls Oh yeah Famous pearls This one's called La Peregrina Right? Yeah There is also Another incredibly famous pearl Called La Pelegrina Oh my gosh No It's so weird And this one is also One of the most storied pearls This one's been through France Maybe Louis XVI It was involved in the October Revolution in Russia Not in a key role What does Pelegrina mean? Because Pelegrina means A female pilgrim Presumably doesn't it? Peregrina is the wandering one isn't it? I haven't actually written down the meaning of it, I don't know Isn't it a bottled water isn't it?

30:47It's a female bottled water That's it So you know how mollusks of all sorts make pearls? A lot of all sorts, a few specific sorts So what is it like, they get a bit of grit in them and they put something around it or something. Yeah, the main idea is that pearls form around a grain of sand or a bit of grit. In fact, it's almost always a parasitic worm that gets inside the muscle or the oyster or whatever. I know. And they just coat it in the sticky stuff and then they keep on coating and that's how a pearl develops. But this is the amazing thing about how mollusks make them. They can moderate the thickness of the layers that they produce.