No Such Thing As An Unlucky Fountain

15:36Anna Ptaszynski:going to be a funny thing like he just goes flying into the air but actually that's a very serious medical thing he went through you can that's why if you're not a cartoon character a lot of things

15:43Dan Schreiber:It's more dangerous. But why to meet his son? That's what I'm really...

15:48Anna Ptaszynski:But if you've got time to kill before an appointment and you think, oh, I'll just give myself a quick enema, you know. Okay. Look, I sympathise. Okay.

15:54Dan Schreiber:Did it on a whim. Oh.

15:56Anna Ptaszynski:Really good. Really good. Really good. Let's end on that.

16:05Okay, it is time for fact number two,

16:07Anna Ptaszynski:and that is Andy. My fact is, in 19th century Egypt, one of the sexiest dances imaginable involved pretending you had a bee inside your clothes. Go on, let's see. Well, I was reading a book about Cleopatra's needles and how they came to be. There are a few of them, and two of them are in London and New York, respectively. And it's not as bad a story as you might think from the century they came over in. Anyway, it just contained this side detail, this book, all about the dancers of Egypt. And this dance, the dance of the bee, sometimes Dance of the Wasp, is basically, this was catnip to kind of white middle-aged blokes from Europe who were enticed to the Egypt by the sound of this unbelievably alluring dance.

16:55It was the Bangkok of its time.

16:56Anna Ptaszynski:It was the Bangkok of its time. It basically was. And, you know, the dancer will pretend there's a bee in her clothes and takes them off one by one. And you can see where that goes.

17:04Dan Schreiber:But does she take them off at frantic, mad speed? Because that's what you would do, isn't it? I imagine she's doing it sort of seductively rather than just...

17:11Anna Ptaszynski:I think she probably finds a way of spinning it out and making it a bit more fun than, you know, the sort of, everyone has a friend who doesn't like bees at all and, you know, will go a bit tonto when there's a bee anywhere near them. So I think she doesn't do that. Are there connoisseurs that can tell the difference between Dance of the Bee and Dance of the Wasp? I'm sure there are. I'm sure there are. I'm sure this led to a lot of connoisseurs making the journey down to Cairo or whatever. But there was this whole group of women called the Gawazi who lived apart, spoke a different language. They were street performers and they were, you know, quite controversial in Egypt.

17:39Anna Ptaszynski:They were seen as immodest. They were described by one writer, Edward Lane, as the most abandoned courtesans of Egypt. And in fact, they were so attractive, they were expelled from Cairo en masse, you know, as a social grouping. And they were exiled to Upper Egypt, which on a map is just below Northern Egypt, below Lower Egypt.

18:00Dan Schreiber:Because that's where the Nile flows. Because that's the way the Nile flows.

18:02Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, the Gawazi, and they had this dance of the bee. And was there any, sort of a pun, was there the Queen Bee of the dancers that was sort of leading the rage? Hannah, you don't have to look so upset when you hear it.

18:16Dan Schreiber:No, I really enjoyed being pre-warned about the pun. Yeah, it was very rare, wasn't it?

18:20Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah, yeah.

18:22Dan Schreiber:I wish James would do that, then we can all steal ourselves.

18:26Anna Ptaszynski:Sorry, go on. I don't think there was. I don't think it was a Queen Bee. Well, you may have found differently, though. No, no, I mean, there were a few people. But it was, you know, this is what has been bracketed as well as belly dancing. And that used to be seen as vulgar. You wouldn't think that now, but you would say son of a belly dancer if you were insulting someone. Yeah, that's a huge insult. I think maybe still to this day in lots of North Africa.

18:47Dan Schreiber:Yeah, it's very, very controversial belly dancing. It seems to hold this incredibly odd position in Egypt where it is the quintessential Egyptian dance. And it's huge in Egypt and makes lots of money. But Egyptian women basically kind of don't do it now. I think it's Egypt's got increasingly conservative. Obviously, it goes in waves. And now if you're an Egyptian woman, you are really called all manner of things if you belly dance. So all the belly dancers in Egypt come from mostly Eastern Europe, I think, and Russia, Ukraine, America, Britain, almost all of them.

19:17Anna Ptaszynski:It's like if Morris dancing was unbelievably sexy. Do you not find it? Sorry. And obviously, I do find it unbelievably sexy.

19:25Dan Schreiber:There is one belly dancer in Egypt called Johara, who's one of the queens of belly dancing, apparently. and she was descended on, her nightclub was descended on in 2018 by police to check that she was wearing the appropriate shorts. So I think you have to wear shorts underneath your belly dancing gear and there was a rumour that she was wearing nothing and she insists that she was and the police said she wasn't. It does feel like it's not hard to check but I'm not, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, guys. But she was delighted that she was arrested and put in jail because... Publicity. For such good publicity, yeah.

19:55Dan Schreiber:She was invited by the policeman who arrested her and put her in jail. She's now done belly dancing at loads of his weddings He's a Lothario Weddings of his friends and family Andy, when you were talking about them being kicked out That was in 1834 But more recently, in the 1960s The government put an actual clause into their rules Oriental dance is not permitted to show the following Lying on the back, lying on the ground in a vulgar fashion or making rapid movements in such a way as to cause excitement. The thighs are not to be fully open while on the ground. There are to be no wobbling up and down movements.

20:39And it goes on. You don't always have control

20:42Anna Ptaszynski:over whether there are wobbling up and down movements, I find, increasingly.

20:45Dan Schreiber:Sumo wrestlers were also banned under these rules, aren't they?

20:49Anna Ptaszynski:Wow. Yeah, the ruler who banned them in 1834 was Muhammad Ali. What? He was just called Muhammad Ali. Sting like a bee. Sting like a bee. Sexy dancing, pole dancing. I don't know if any of you are... I'm grade three. I've got my blue belt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep practicing because people are now lobbying for it to become an Olympic sport. Because it's just a bit like the parallel bars. It's just like a pole. It's like a vertical bar. They've got the poles left over from the pole vault. Exactly. They're not being used 98 % of the time. Yeah, just use them. Yeah. Because it is very technical. I mean, it's sexy, obviously, you know.

21:23But it's just very technical, isn't it? you know strength it's a sport yes wow yeah but if you say to a lot of people john i come for a

21:30Dan Schreiber:night seeing the parallel bars with me then you don't get as much interest in my experience and

21:36Anna Ptaszynski:it's very very hard stuffing a tenner into a pole vaulter's jockstrap right from the top

21:44you mock guys but when it is an olympic sport you're all gonna go do you think it will be i think it will like a lot of people now do it just as a recreational sport right yeah yes men women It's not just a woman thing It's F1 user Because it's very good for your Kundalini

21:57Dan Schreiber:You went towards your crotch now But is it good for your crotch? I thought it was Kundalini Excuse me

22:01Anna Ptaszynski:It is good for your crotch Oh sorry It is This is a thing about Belly dance in particular Right Which is that it's So different Back to that Back to that So sorry That is good At preventing urinary incontinence In the cohorts of dancers Who've tried it But not if they're in a swimming pool I don't think if you're in a swimming pool Then you are just Pitting yourself Yeah It improves your pelvic

22:23Dan Schreiber:strength a lot basically that makes a huge amount of sense if you do the belly dancing motion which i'm trying to on my seat now it does feel like you're doing a pelvic floor exercise isn't it oh yes it does there you go there was a rumor that's repeated to this day almost everywhere that it was also used in north africa in the 19th century and 20th century to help women in labor and everyone repeats this thing where um its origin was sort of women would flood to the woman who was giving birth and belly dance around her as a way of saying, you know, do these motions to ease labour, which having, I think, the only person who's been through labour around this table, I don't imagine that doing a belly dance would have made it that much easier.

23:04Dan Schreiber:And I don't think there's that much evidence for it. There's a couple of mid 20th century accounts. But I do like academics who really dig into this. So there's an academic who wrote a whole massive thesis on is belly dance a birth dance, sort of debunking it and saying, this just wouldn't help. Very annoying, really. Just to say no. But she did describe something else. She was like, it's possible that, you know, this one account we have in the 20th century was leftover of something that was really common in the 19th century, much like other dances that seemed to have disappeared. And then she described another example of this.

23:37Dan Schreiber:And I just love this. She said, Arabic scholar John Lewis Burkhard described a marriage custom in which a man wrapped head to toe in white, wearing a massive male organ made out of cotton, cavorted in the wedding procession of a bride. And this interesting custom seems to have faded out as well.

23:52Anna Ptaszynski:That's a shame.

23:52Dan Schreiber:It is a shame, isn't it? And she doesn't say where he's wearing the organ. And bizarrely, I imagined on his head, but having read that out again, he's just wearing it on his crotch.

24:02Anna Ptaszynski:I don't think it's clear. I think it's definitive. Not clear. There is a thing which persists, I think even to this day, where the Goazi women were seen as immodest and they were taboo and they were banned, all sorts. There were kawals who were men who did the women's dance. They dressed as women. They, I think, acted and walked and spoke as women. And I think even today, Morocco has a few kawals. I suppose it's sort of analogous to drag in a way, but it's centuries old, it's tolerated. And it was a way of, I think, maybe getting around the exclusion of gay men and allowing self-expression in that sense.

24:37Anna Ptaszynski:Because belly dancing and singing in public were both seen as so immodest and so almost akin to prostitution that actually we should just let the fellas get on with this. and that's you know they're trusted to do it in a non totally immodest way that's fascinating i think that is you know when we started our podcast in 2014 it was still the case that you would need a permit if you wanted to do any of this kind of dancing out on the streets of egypt and they have a sort of morality police that goes around and so show me your papers you know if you're doing it out on the street and my papers are just in here oh no hang on oh no they're in here oh we should say belly dance is completely western phrase is a translation of the french Danse du ventre Dancing of the stomach So it's not an Egyptian phrase at all I think in Egypt people get quite annoyed with it Being called belly dance basically I was looking into other dances That had a sort of animal element to it Oh crumbs, okay You had a bee that was running around in there That you need to take your clothes off I found the tarantella My pronunciation This is a dance It's a folk dance That became so popular That classical musicians like Chopin and Liszt wrote songs for it for tarantula dances and its origins go back to the 15th and 17th century and it's connected to a thing called tarantism and people thought if you were bitten by a venomous tarantula that you could frenzy the dance and get it off and it's from it's from taranto in italy um which is also where the tarantula got its name as well sort of is it from there yeah i thought it was south american things well it's really interesting because it's it's a wolf spider which is often called a tarantula.

26:10So it's not in your head a classic tarantula. It's more a wolf spider. Interesting. Yeah. Cool.

26:15Dan Schreiber:Because also I came across another animal related dance which I don't know if it was real but it was claimed to be real by a late 19th century anthropologist from the West who were always reliable. And he was in Senegal and he said there is a dance called the Bambula which is a dance of the Wolof people and he said that it imitated the mating of ducks. But what I was impressed by in what is otherwise quite an objectionable text is that he did specify that the Drake has a member of a corkscrew shape. Which is true. Which is absolutely correct. Dutch do have their corkscrew willies. And good on this old bloke for knowing that.

26:54Dan Schreiber:And he said a peculiar movement is required to introduce it into the whole of the duck. And so that is the movement. Let's say the whole of the duck. That is irritating. The whole duck or the whole of the duck?

27:05Anna Ptaszynski:because they're about 45 centimeters long it does go into the hole of the duck

27:08Dan Schreiber:another dance that's quite sexy is um your classic irish dancing river dance style in which i am

27:16Anna Ptaszynski:trained of course you are no you're not i am why are you trained in river dance i just did it for a while when i was younger what do you just did it for a while that isn't a thing i just had some river dance why are you so coy you mentioned it i shouldn't have mentioned that did you perform on stage of course have you met across lat across europe i taught flatly everything he knows no i did do a bit of it how old what age i'm not telling you that okay let's just say i had to stop to do my degree yeah um and you hold your hands by your sides in irish dancing right did you do

27:53Dan Schreiber:the classic michael flatly hands by your sides legs flailing out everywhere that's right very straight yeah yeah well nobody knows why that is how you do irish dancing so there are just lots of theories that are claimed confidently by various irish dancing societies and i just like one of the theories which is that it is so that you can not touch members of the opposite sex so it's because it's too sexy a dance and you've got to keep your hands by your side otherwise you'll end up groping your partner in the irish dance but i also just really like this theory um which is another potential reason why um it's that when the british were trying to um dominate irish culture basically kind of like um flatten it out in the 19th century um then they wanted to get rid of all aspects of irish identity including their dancing but the irish wanted to keep their

28:35Anna Ptaszynski:songs and dances so compromise halfway up and down the body is that what we're saying is it like northern ireland if this is what i think you're gonna say this is the most exciting thing well it's that the british would be patrolling outside pubs at night no and so they would look through the windows and everyone will be standing still just holding a glass pint of guinness in their hand chatting but underneath that window the legs were they were going for it oh my god this is

29:05Dan Schreiber:they could do it behind hedges behind bars wherever you like this is weirdly more offensive than anything i imagined you would say it's clever it's very clever

29:22Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

29:26Dan Schreiber:My fact this week is that according to ancient Hindu astrology, if you have matching testicles, you will be a king. Yes, this is in one of the many hundreds, thousands of Hindu texts there are. It's such a fun religion because there are so many fun texts you can draw on. And this is in one called the Burhat Samhita. which is a 6th century Sanskrit text. And there's a chapter called On the Features of Men. And it's sort of like palm reading or something, you know, predicting your outcomes depending on your body qualities. And one of the bits says, if both a man's testicles be alike, he will be king.

30:02Dan Schreiber:If the testicles be not alike, he will be fond of sexual intercourse. A person with a single testicle will suffer death by drowning.

30:10Anna Ptaszynski:Is that because of a lack of buoyancy aids?

30:12Dan Schreiber:Yeah, you're just always tipping onto your side. I think we can assume Archie Bold Grace the fourth. He was a double bald man If they be raised up A person will not live long And if they hang down He will live to the age of 100 So where do you guys fall As it were What's confusing is You've read out some there And it sounds like that's a lot There is so much more To do with the penis That means I don't even know Where you would begin It starts contradicting itself Here's another set of ways You can tell if you'll be rich or poor If the penis be small The person will be rich Oh, congratulations, Dad.

30:48Come on.

30:49Dan Schreiber:This is the 1980s. That's great. If large, he will have no sons. Oh. So that's okay. So now we've gone size. Okay, so you've got three sons. Cool. If it be... But he is poor. It's so confusing. If it be inclined on the left side, he will be poor. Oh, there we go. If not straight, he will be without sons and without money. Check this one out. If covered with muscles, he will have very few sons. And I now have on my Google search, can you have a muscly penis? And no, you can't. It's a muscle-free zone. So what's going on here that muscly penises existed back in the day? Did evolution get rid of it?

31:35Dan Schreiber:Yes, that's what happened. In the past thousand years, evolution has just been very speedy evolution. Well, I guess if covered with muscles, you'll have very few sons. They've died out The muscle penised humans are gone Look at this one Because this one is also an answerable one If the urine fall in a line And twisted The person will get very beautiful sons If the urine fall in two, three or four lines And twisting from left to right The person will be a king Isn't that interesting? I have king predictors Two, three or four lines Does imply that you've got some sort of hole punch yeah there's some sort of problem there yeah i'd say get it checked out but it's

32:15Anna Ptaszynski:interesting how many things are predictors of being a king as in there can't have been that many kings to go around so is it all of these things are quite rare as in because the testicle symmetrical also if your feet are dry you'll be a king but you have to have soft soles closed toes beautiful red nails and invisible ankle raised like a turtle so actually that's very specific and that presumably narrows down the number of people who are claiming kingship because i don't know what you what you can do who do you report to and say excuse me i'm a king but maybe it's like colloquial like she's a queen he's a king maybe it's not literally very possible you know all of this is to do with um astrology isn't it yeah it's to do with divination and you know this is a very lengthy text written in the oh what century it was ad wasn't it sixth century okay and the subjects are unbelievable because the number of things from which you can predict an omen according to the system enormous so there are omens from slits of garments you know particular Well, if you've got a slit in your garment, just literally a slit in your clothing, where it hangs, how it falls, if it's large, small, left, right, all of that, that has particular divination.

33:17Anna Ptaszynski:Omens number eight, the intention of horses. Omen nine, the attitude of elephants. It's just all sorts in there.

33:24Dan Schreiber:Wait, so what, a slit in your garment could tell you what the intention of horses was?

33:28Anna Ptaszynski:No, that's a completely separate chapter. It says a chapter on the omens that result from slits and garments, and there's a chapter from the intentions of horses.

33:36Dan Schreiber:It is extraordinarily detailed. It seems to have come from some fevered minds. Well, it comes from someone, this particular text comes from a very specific person who lived so long ago that we don't know the proper dates of. But it was someone called Vahara Mihira, ancient Indian mathematician, astrologer slash astronomer. He lived about 500, the year 500, roughly. We're not 100 % sure. But this was his text, wasn't it? Yeah. And this is what is so interesting about Hinduism. So there are all these texts. So a lot of Hinduism is based in the Vedas. But then there are all these auxiliary texts.

34:10Dan Schreiber:And this comes from that, which are about Hindu astrology. It's called Geotisha, I think. And this is one of those texts. But yeah, hundreds of them. So you can kind of pick and choose. And they are fun. They are more fun than the bits of the Bible that I've read, which granted there aren't that many. Well, it's funny, like my sister is married to my brother-in-law's Indian. and they had an Indian wedding and the astrologer dictated what time the ceremony had to be. And it was at 3.30 a.m. on Boxing Day. And we were like, okay, well, I guess that's what we're doing then. What had they done to annoy him?

34:47Which country? This is in India, yeah. It's 3.30 a.m. somewhere. You didn't do that. It isn't like a beer, no. Yeah, so it was like everyone just had to get up at 2 in the morning, get ready. Wow, that's so funny. And it was amazing. It was because of the astrology, yeah. Did you go back to bed afterwards? Or did you stay up and do the whole... I didn't. Oh, that was a dry wedding. Really? Yeah. Okay. That's an astonishing, because any overseas wedding in its own right is annoying when you're sent the invitation. You've got, I'm flying where? To go to this wedding? To then see wedding starts 2.30am.

35:21I think is pushing it.

35:23Dan Schreiber:And there's no alcohol. Yeah.

35:25Anna Ptaszynski:We were like, cool. Lots of people get married on certain days, don't they? So I think when it's... Saturdays is very common. Saturdays is common. But if it's auspicious, then the number of weddings rockets. And obviously there are a few different astrology systems. But for the very big ones, so for example, there was a day in 2003 where 12 ,000 couples got married on that one day because it was auspicious. I know there are more than a billion people in India. So I don't know whether that's... It feels like that is reasonably high. But, you know. And there is now a trend. once you've been married a little while you might be expecting a baby and there is a huge trend for pregnant women to book cesareans for auspicious days What if it's three months in?

36:07Anna Ptaszynski:There was a woman who asked to have hers four weeks early to avoid any astrological problems It would create some more problems I think doctors don't like it for obvious reasons which is that they're trying to just do what is best for their health the health of mother and baby and women are being asked to be induced, to have their labor induced in particular hours to guarantee the right star sign and things like that. I mean, the planning goes into the conception. In a lot of cultures, I know that the Chinese birth chart is often used if people want to have a boy, for example. You don't try for a kid until the chart tells you.

36:43Anna Ptaszynski:You just put a rubber band around one testicle and that sort of solves it. You might drown then. You might confuse your body into thinking you've only got one ball. Maybe the biggest geopolitical thing that's ever happened as a result of Hindu astrology, Indian independence, the transfer of power, 15th of August 1947. Now that happened a day earlier for Pakistan, which was the other huge area of British territory. Pakistan went a day earlier, 14th of August, and India waited a day for an inauspicious period to end. Really? Yeah, yeah. And various astrologers have claimed that actually Pakistan paid the price for that because in 1971 it split off into bangadesh uh which i don't need to say it was for other reasons as well as astrology the complicated politics happened yeah i would say um if i'd lived through the partition

37:32Dan Schreiber:of india which did not go very well for many people i'd be asking for a refund from that astrologer yeah um are you sure the inauspicious period had fully ended um yeah hinduism

37:44Anna Ptaszynski:polytheistic or monotheistic i would say poly yeah you'd think wouldn't you only seven percent

37:50Dan Schreiber:of Hindus say that there are multiple gods. Ah, really? Yes. So 61 % of Hindus say that there is just one God who has many manifestations, which I really didn't realise that that was the conception of God for most people. And then the other 30 % just say there's only one God. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. Do you want to talk about testicles, Andy?

38:10Anna Ptaszynski:I do. I feel like you have been this whole time anyway. Okay. Jamie have you ever heard of balls maxing Balls maxing I haven't but I feel like I should Well I'm about to so Well it's the pursuit of bigger balls that's all So it looks maxing but for your bollocks I'm afraid so How do you do it Injection of saline solution Oh yeah I know as ever with all of these trends Is it a trend or is it actually A few weirdos on one reddit thread Podcast at qr.com If you're a keen balls maxer do write in and um please no photos um yeah yeah there's also ball ironing or scrotox which is a thing and all of the i mean this is this is mostly mad stuff but basically when studied scrotums are just not attractive and this has been studied scientifically why just ask any human exactly why is that even logged in the scientific study why is that a thing the aesthetics of the study there was a specific study i think it's because more men and again the numbers are small but it's rising i was sort of worried about their personal appearance uh you know in that region beneath the uh beneath the below the irish pub window and it was just to see whether any of this makes any difference at all so it was a small sample size but women a range of women were asked to rank eight unique scrotai uh on the uh the leica scale which measures how much people like something although it's named after someone called like a never mind that um but of the eight scrotums that they were asked to rate um not one of them got a positive ranking so it's plus three to minus three was the scoring system all of them scored below zero and the researchers concluded i just love the phrase they used it was barely possible to identify a quotes beautiful scrotum we must instead speak of the least ugly okay so i just think there's no point in doing any of this stuff, you know, if you're balls maxing.

40:14Yeah, but we don't know if someone who was balls maxing or ironing their balls was part of this study. That might have absolutely skewed the results.

40:21Dan Schreiber:Oh, were they not part of the study? I thought some people had balls maxed and some people hadn't. Anyway, all I have to say is let's keep funding academia.

40:36Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 1980, a woman called Maureen Wilcox chose the winning numbers for both the Massachusetts and Rhode Island lotteries. Unfortunately, the numbers she chose for the Rhode Island lottery were the winning numbers for the Massachusetts lottery and vice versa. Crushing.

40:57Dan Schreiber:God, that's worse, isn't it? It's so much worse than not winning. Yeah. Do we know how much it was worth? Well, it was about a pound each. Who cares? No, no. These would have been big sums. The main source that we have for this is one newspaper, as far as I could find. It's been repeated multiple times in books about improbability and luck and so on. But it was first published, as far as I could tell, on May 16th, 1980 in the Morning Union. It was a little piece. My birthday. Oh, my goodness. Not the year. I'm not that old. Jesus. Oh, yeah. Okay. Sorry to interrupt, but it felt worth saying. Yes.

41:33Dan Schreiber:Happy birthday. so this is what the article said the odds were 1 in 2400 and this was calculated by a University of Rhode Island mathematics professor and this lady Mrs. Wilcox beat those odds so she said it's like buying a new suit with two pairs of pants getting ready to go out to a special place and getting a huge gravy stain on the jacket what a labored and unnecessary it took a while for me to get it yeah hang on down the odds surely are much much longer than one in two and a half that's what i thought as well that seems very short doesn't it but this is the this is the original source and it's often used this story as one of those examples of the opposite of luck how to be unlucky the kind of person who sits on a fountain to give themselves an enema thinking it is at the same jet propulsion no that's not unlucky that's not oh god how was i possibly to know that I could have in any way backfired as an idea.

42:37Anna Ptaszynski:Because also you'd surely see that the water was blasting out with an unnatural force before you decided to lower yourself onto it. Yeah. I guess sometimes the fountains take a break, don't they? So he might have positioned himself over ready for the next round.

42:51Dan Schreiber:I assume that he can't because he can't have pulled himself on while it was going. Yeah, if it was that heaviest dream. You'd notice.

42:57Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah, yeah. Maybe it's got one of those little sensors you have to wave your hand in front of it like or your ass a button like a jacuzzi or yeah yeah a dyson fountain yeah yeah yeah anyway back to this i do like stories like this and i also like this is bad but i like stories when lots of people think they've won the lottery and then it turns out they haven't yeah they happen often enough so there was a story quite recently in the guardian it was about um 47 000 norwegians all of whom got told they'd won big amounts of money on the lottery and the terrible thing was it had been got wrong by the lottery company so they had made a mistake converting euros to Norwegian kroner which have very different values so people were told for example one guy got told he'd won the equivalent of 86 ,000 pounds, he'd actually won 9 pounds and it's just I think when that happens the lottery company should have to honour it I think they should have to pay 47 ,000 people 100 grand each I would like that

43:57Dan Schreiber:I wonder how extensive his plans had got before he realised. I know, I know. I got quite obsessed with the lottery curse. Ooh. You know, people who kind of win a lot of money and then their lives just kind of disintegrate. Yeah. And have you read about someone called Vivian Nicholson? No. So she won£152 ,000 in 1961, which is like worth millions today, I think. On the pools, the football pools with her husband, Keith. Lovely couple. And she was interviewed when they won this money. and they said, what are you going to do with it? She said, spend, spend, spend. Oh, that's a famous quote. It is a famous quote, yes.

44:34And she bought fur coats and sports cars and holidays. She just went mad and lost it all within a few years. Yeah, it was pretty quickly. Keith died in a car crash. Oh, very sad. With a very nice posh car that he bought. Yeah. And then she went through four more husbands and they all died. Did they all die? A few of them did

45:01Dan Schreiber:You wouldn't become the sixth husband Right Quite And it became a stage musical What was it called? Spend, spend, spend Do you know who produced that stage musical? No Your dad? My dad No Really? And I'm here to tell you It was not successful But he did spend, spend, spend A lot on it He did And got nothing back I thought it was great Lovely soundtrack Some cracking songs Was it successful in any way? Artistically Critically It was critically successful And no one went to see it To the extent that I think his company Bought him a big poster Which we still have somewhere Which says Spend spent skint It's good though Viv Nicholson And he worked with her On it Right Was she involved?

45:43Yeah she was Her photograph is on the cover Of the Smith song Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now Oh really? That's her There's a picture of that old lady Well not old lady That lovely lady That's her That's her So sad

45:55Dan Schreiber:So do you think winning the lottery makes you more or less happy in life more oh do you i think it makes you a bit more to begin with well the vast majority of people say that it makes you less happy because there's such a conception now um because people have claimed there are all these studies about the lottery curse there's such conception so when people are asked um is it destructive to people they mostly say yes it is and i'm afraid for any lottery losers out there um it's not true winning the lottery does indeed make you happier and there's all this stuff that it makes it's more likely to make you bankrupt um it's not particularly although i will say that the only two studies that have confirmed that it does make you happier were in germany and sweden which i thought might be about their national mentality so maybe they're more sensible people who kind of invest it and think probably about what to do with the money and i reckon lottery winners in britain are probably still idiots who spend it all not necessarily though because i think they've identified that so i was in a cab the other day and the cab driver was telling me that his best mate had won the national lottery and so i said oh well you know about this crazy curse thing where people spend it how's he doing and he said the national lottery paired him immediately up with a bank manager or a investment investment consultant and they put all the money into various different places he bought a horse for the races which which won its first race apparently that's how the horses get you in

47:16Anna Ptaszynski:though that's how like all the horses agree oh like jimmy's got a new owner so we'll impress him today get him really on the hook he'll buy five more horses keep that funding going then we're all right i think it's a scam by horses what are they getting like nose bags full of wheat and a rosette all the carrots you can eat um that's very interesting so this is another thing that happens when you win the lottery this might be the swedish study anna you mentioned different things happen depending on your sex so men who win the lottery again in this swedish study uh were more likely either to get married or stay married doesn't make put women in the best light no it doesn't and i think i can predict i think i can predict the fact that's coming next you do have more children either way that's by the by if you're a married woman and you win a lot of money on the lottery the odds of you getting divorced double yeah so i think clearly what that is it's actually not it doesn't say a lot of good stuff about many that Jamie's we're so unbearable humans are awful our wives want to divorce us but they just don't have the capital together yet right I think that's it but would any of you guys if you won the lottery would you admit to it no because there's this big thing of like if you because immediately great Jesus Christ no because people come out in the woodwork even if you won 20 quid

48:36Dan Schreiber:I'm not bloody letting those other guys get their hands on this

48:41Anna Ptaszynski:I don't even like confessing that i did irish dancing lessons when i was young you think i'm gonna tell you guys about winning the lottery it's not gonna happen because in some countries you and some states in america actually you have to legally no say that you've so people go to extraordinary length to try and um disguise themselves because they have to do press conferences and and in in some countries people dress up so in in jamaica in 2019 um there was a guy called a campbell who won 158 million jamaican dollars and he arrived at his press conference he was legally obligated to go to dressed with a ghost face mask from scream brilliant nice and he's just sat there do they make it compulsory so that it's good publicity for the lottery basically like that's a condition of winning my research didn't go that deep okay um someone else came as a giant yellow winking emoji okay there's a huge i mean i think that's kind of ingenious yeah i don't know I feel like if you want a lot of money, you suddenly realize life's going to be a lot classier.

49:43You're going to have the best of life. If I then have to get into a big, I don't know, Yogi Bear costume to go to a conference, that would be humbling. Yeah, that's true.

49:51Anna Ptaszynski:But no one would know it's you. Yes. So it's fine. That's true. Yeah. No, well, I just think it'll wreck your life if all your friends know. Well, it's not even that. It's that people, you get all of these sob stories, people coming up to you constantly. How could you not give money to people that are in need? then give it to them that would be my answer to anyone

50:13Dan Schreiber:who's won the lottery and is pissed off about the people asking them for money if they need the money this is similar to Dan's facts

50:21Anna Ptaszynski:I wouldn't do it Jamie you'd never see me again in fact I'd immediately go to hiding Anna doesn't even take a salary from QI she's such a good person

50:32Dan Schreiber:I'd give it to Andy actually he made me sign this thing years ago just give it to him okay cool to me that's how i have a roof over my head now and yet he still has the beard i've bought him razor after razor um okay do you have sympathy for this person in 2007 there was the headline court rules women who didn't enter lottery not entitled to money from the lottery this was a woman who'd entered a postcode lottery so um sorry this is a woman who hadn't entered a postcode lottery, crucially. So the postcode lottery is where if you're in a certain postcode, then you win a certain amount of money, can be a huge amount of money.

51:11Dan Schreiber:Now, I think everyone else, or seven other people with her exact same postcode, did decide to opt into the postcode lottery. She decided to opt out. They won 13.9 million euros each. Each? Each. 13 million each. That's 13.9 actually. So if we're rounding. But after taxes, even so it's a lot.

51:29Anna Ptaszynski:No, good point. It's tax-free, I think. Most lottery wins. National Lottery wins are tax-free. Are they? Yeah, they're tax-free. They're not in America, but they are here. How did you know that, Andy?

51:43Anna Ptaszynski:I'm not going to be on this podcast again without my lawyers and my BL team, okay? And my horse.

51:54Dan Schreiber:So she sued the postcode lottery.

51:56Anna Ptaszynski:Wow.

51:57Dan Schreiber:For emotional distress. She said it had been so upsetting for her. She said one winner ostentatiously displayed his new Porsche in her very sight line, which is hard not to do if you bought a new Porsche. The same postcode lives opposite you. Interesting choice of word, isn't it, Andy? Ostentatious. Who is this? She said that it was really difficult because every time she had to write her own postcode, it was just another reminder of what she'd lost. I mean, it is a shitter. Like you would feel so stupid. but like surely there were other people in their postcode that didn't win as well i'm not sure i think she might have been the only one if it's the exact postcode sometimes i mean all seven of

52:36Anna Ptaszynski:them will probably have moved house quite soon so that'll be yeah that'll make things a bit easier what if you find a lottery ticket which that wins on the street yeah your pocket what can you do about it so this has actually happened yeah happened in uh 2009 a couple in swindon found lottery ticket it won uh not a huge amount but 30 000 pounds not bad a huge amount what's going on here you definitely have won the lottery no but compared with millions you know it was it was very very welcome right but it was not theirs it had been dropped by a woman called dorothy who was she had bought it the couple spent half the money uh 15 000 pounds clearing their debts debts but then uh she took them to court over this she was able to prove that she had bought it because she kept the receipt and they had to pay back the other half but they paid it back i think uh i'm i'm not sure whether they paid it back to her or to the lottery either way dorothy only got half the£30 ,000 winnings.

53:44Anna Ptaszynski:And Camelot said, well, look, if you didn't write your name and address on the back of the ticket, as we advise everybody to do, then we can't prove that it's yours. Like, she lost it. Sorry. Finders keepers. And also, how is the couple supposed to know who it belongs to? What do you do? Yeah. You go to Camelot and you say, we found this. Right. Please can we have it?

54:03Dan Schreiber:Yeah, well, I don't know. Does the receipt show, does lottery receipts show what the numbers were on your lottery ticket to prove it? Like, how does the receipt actually prove it? There might be a serial number that's on the, Yes, it must be. Transaction numbers. Yeah, you're right. Let's match that. Hey, do you know that the Sydney Opera House only was able to be built because of a lottery?

54:20Anna Ptaszynski:Oh, really? Yeah, so it needed funding badly. It went so far over budget. So they did a national lottery. And I know this because my grandfather, who was just over from Australia, he's 94, he bought into the lottery multiple weeks. Wow. And they raised$102 million in total. And that's what built the Opera House. and my grandfather never went to it until we, as No Such Thing as a Fish, played there. It's the first time he sat in it and apparently he said to everyone he spoke to, I paid for this.

54:56Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we're all online. I'm on Instagram at at Schreiberland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Jamie. me at uncle eagle i know should change that and uh if you want to get to us as a group anna you can email podcast at qi.com or on instagram at no such thing yes uh or if you want to contribute yourself to our shows we have a bonus show every monday called little fish where we read out your facts we put ours down and we pick out the best that you have sent in to that email podcast at qi.com and he goes through them all he brings them to that show but also if you have general general feedback.

55:40He cherry picks the best of those and he brings them to our Club Fish episode, which is called Drop Us a Line. Club Fish, our members club. It exists on Patreon. Go to patreon.com slash clubfish. We've got so many fun things there. There is bonus episodes. There's video episodes of Drop Us a Line. And also, if you want to find out about live shows and so on, no such thing as a fish.com. That's our actual website. But come back next week because we're going to be here with another episode. Thanks as ever to Leanly, Ethan Ruparelia, as well as the larger fish buster team and we'll be back again next week with another episode see you then goodbye