No Such Thing As No Such Thing As A Crab

Bertie Terrilliams of the Margate Crab Museum joins Dan, Anna and James to discuss cures, curators, crabs and KAPOW! Visit nosuchthingasafish.com http://nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish http://apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon http://nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Edited by James Harkin Produced by Leying Lee Team includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia Shopify: Own your customer relationships. Own your revenue. Start with a free trial at shopify.co.uk http://shopify.co.uk Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:28Speaker 01

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• 0:57Speaker 03

  Hi, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, where we were joined by the curator of the Margate Crab Museum, Bertie Terri Williams. Now, Bertie is someone who Dan has known for a very long time. The rest of us met him for the first time during this show, and what a great guy he is. He knows so much stuff about all of his subjects, and especially, as you can imagine, crabs. So, if you would like to go to the Margate Crab Museum, then go into Margate, go right into the center, because it's right there. I went there this weekend with my daughter. She absolutely loved it. She got to see crabs under a microscope. Can you believe that? And there's all sorts

• 1:41Speaker 03

  of facts in there. It's absolutely brilliant. But one more thing to say about Bertie is that under his guise as the Crab Museum, he has written some books, and his latest one is called The No-Brain Brain Explainer. What a great name. It's a book for kids, all about the brain. It's jam-packed with facts. You would not believe how many facts are in there, and it comes right off the back of his previous book, which is called A Natural History of Bums, which, as you Can imagine for people like me is absolutely brilliant. I read it to my daughter the other day and she loved it. She was laughing her head off all the way through. So yeah, if you would like to know more about Bertie, they search the internet for Crab Museum, you'll

• 2:23Speaker 03

  find information about his museum and all of his books there. Definitely recommend you get involved with that. But in the meantime, enjoy this show with curator of Europe's number one crab museum, Bertie Terri Williams. On with the podcast.

• 2:52Speaker 04

  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Holborn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, James Harkin and Bertie Terri Williams. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Bertie.

• 3:17Speaker 05

  A briefcase in Thai is a kapow James Bond. And the reason it is, is because kapow just means bag. James Bond obviously means James Bond, but there wasn't a word for briefcase in Thai before the James Bond movies were shown in Thailand.

• 3:37Speaker 04

  Okay, so Man With The Golden Gun, that's what was filmed there. Did briefcases exist in Thailand? Or did they literally see?

• 3:43Speaker 05

  They probably existed in Thailand, but I think it's quite a niche item that perhaps maybe like aristocrats might have had. But there wasn't a popular word for it. And sort of general Thai people wouldn't have really had much of a need to have really known what a briefcase was prior to James Bond.

• 4:01Speaker 06

  I like the question, did briefcases exist though? As if maybe they had done for hundreds of years and everyone just didn't know what to do when they saw one. I like your, what is that hanging from your hand?

• 4:10Speaker 05

  Probably rectangular black cases existed, but whether or not they were briefcases.

• 4:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:16Speaker 05

  Before they had the, you know, the category of briefcase.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  Bertie, you're, you're half Thai, right? So this is a word that you saw used in Thailand?

• 4:24Speaker 05

  Yep. And I, and I did, I did my due diligence and I did check with the aunties and I did say, do you, you do still use Kapow James Bond for briefcase? And they're like, oh, yes, I suppose we do. Why do you want to know? It's like, oh, I'm on a podcast. And they're like, oh, what's a podcast? Had to have a whole conversation with them about, about what my life is now.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  Maybe in the future in Thailand, it'll be known as a Bertie radio show.

• 4:50Speaker 04

  Great coincidence, the word kapow.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. Lovely Batman-esque villain.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  It comes from an old Chinese word, pow, meaning to rap or a bundle. And actually our word bag comes from the old Norse word baggy, which means a bundle as well.

• 5:08Speaker 06

  That's it.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  As you would imagine, I suppose. We get some words from Thai in English, not that many.

• 5:13Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  There's 27 in the Oxford English Dictionary.

• 5:17Speaker 05

  As many as that? Wow.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Most of them are actually like foodstuffs. Bong, the pipe for smoking stuff.

• 5:24Speaker 06

  No way.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  From a Thai word. Tuk tuk, the mode of transport and mai tai, the combat sport and all the others are kind of foodstuff.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  There's another Thai word that we use within the world of fish on our WhatsApps to each other when we say something's funny. Five, five, five, five.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Five, five, five, five. Yeah.

• 5:41Speaker 06

  And remind me why that is? It sounds like laughing.

• 5:44Speaker 04

  The five is pronounced ha in, in Thai. And so ha, ha, ha, ha, ha is what you're saying. Five, five, five, five, five.

• 5:50Speaker 06

  It's weird, but it's weird that the Thai have that as well, that it's ha, because when you laugh, you don't actually go ha, ha, ha, ha, do you?

• 5:57Speaker 05

  I do.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  If you're a bund villain, you do.

• 5:59Speaker 06

  You're right. You're absolutely right.

• 6:02Speaker 06

  Correct. There's the one that I kept coming across, I think, because I was looking at, oh, I was looking at Siamese cats in Thailand. And the word for cat is meow, except I don't think I've pronounced it quite right. It sounds actually almost more like meow said by Thai. Do, can you say it?

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's meow.

• 6:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  Meow, I think.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  There was another one that you told me, I remember, which is toast. And then the difference between toast and toaster.

• 6:25Speaker 05

  Yes, well, so it's bread and toast. So bread is konom ban. So pan comes is a bit like pan is in that pan of chocolat. I think it's a loan word from French. So there's pan for bread. Konom is a snack because obviously bread is a snack. Anything that's not rice or noodles is a snack and is not proper food.

• 6:45Speaker 06

  Oh, right.

• 6:46Speaker 05

  Like, you know, pasta or whatever, like, what are those weird noodles? You know, that's not proper food. But they're like, proper food is rice and noodles.

• 6:52Speaker 06

  Got it.

• 6:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. Konom ban, which is bread, is like bread snack. And then when you toast bread, it's konom pam ping.

• 7:00Speaker 06

  Oh, cool.

• 7:01Speaker 05

  Pops up out of the toaster.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  So the ping is the toaster.

• 7:03Speaker 05

  The ping is the toast.

• 7:04Speaker 06

  Really nice.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Your surname, I introduced you on this show, is Terri Williams, but that's your married surname. You've changed your name.

• 7:10Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  But you have, you have a Thai surname, which is Surisat?

• 7:14Speaker 05

  Uh, Surisat.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  Surisat.

• 7:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:16Speaker 04

  And Thailand has a very interesting thing with its surnames in that everyone has a unique surname, basically. When the survey was done, it showed that eighty one percent of people who did the survey all had unique surnames and that it's, it's picked by the family because Thailand never.

• 7:30Speaker 05

  You say unique, it's unique to the family, not to the person, right?

• 7:32Speaker 04

  To the family, exactly, yeah. Because up until nineteen thirteen, they were only given names. And then you might say, kind of like Leonardo da Vinci of Vinci, you might say where you were from, but it wasn't your surname. And so you're, you've got effectively, I guess, a unique surname.

• 7:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, I guess so. I mean, well, my surname means honest in Thai. Hilarious, given the reputation of some of my family members. But that was chosen by a granddad who moved to Thailand from Vietnam as a child. And I think as a new immigrant in a new country, calling yourself honest is probably a good move.

• 8:04Speaker 06

  I don't know. It sounds a little bit Lady Death Protest too much, doesn't it?

• 8:10Speaker 04

  It wasn't me.

• 8:13Speaker 06

  Check my name. Um, well, they're really into nicknames as well. Do you have a nickname in Thailand? Or are you not that Thai?

• 8:19Speaker 05

  Bertie just gets shortened to Burr.

• 8:21Speaker 06

  That's not as good as most Thai nicknames, if I'm honest.

• 8:24Speaker 05

  I've got like a really long sort of forename, and then it just gets shortened to Burr. I've got like one of our cousins, she's got an amazing name. So she's about like eighteen months old or something now. She might be a little bit older now. I met her for. For the first time when I went back in January and back then that was um well over the last well probably thousand years depending how you count it but it flared up again recently. There's the war with Cambodia and our family live right on the border with Cambodia.

• 8:49Speaker 06

  Oh wow.

• 8:50Speaker 05

  And uh she was called bomb. She was named because of bombs are going off in the background. But because bomb wasn't cute enough for a girl, they added bem on the end. So she's bomb bem.

• 9:01Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 9:01Speaker 05

  If she was, if she'd been born a boy, she would have just been bomb.

• 9:04Speaker 06

  Right.

• 9:05Speaker 05

  But you can't call a girl bomb.

• 9:06Speaker 06

  I actually know someone in my village called Zep, short for Zeppelin, named after his great grandfather, who was named Zeppelin in the First World War. When that became a big thing.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  As in the actual real name or nickname?

• 9:18Speaker 06

  Real name, first name Zeppelin and this little boy, this little three year old's real name is now Zeppelin. Because you know, the thing that's attacking you as your mom gives birth, I guess she goes, yeah, why not?

• 9:28Speaker 03

  I guess I wonder what's gonna happen to my daughter when she gets married because her name's Covid and they might not remember.

• 9:36Speaker 05

  Uh my cousin Bombem, who was named after the the bomb. Um a bomb landed in our grandmother's fish pond, um sort of at the height of the war and it kind of sort of flares up every now and again this war.

• 9:47Speaker 06

  The war between Thailand and Cambodia.

• 9:49Speaker 05

  The war between Thailand and Cambodia, yeah. It's like a sort of border dispute that's been going on forever. Most of the time it's kind of fairly relaxed as far as wars go. Uh and then it kind of got a little bit more, a little bit more fighty recently. Um but our granny was in the house at the time and a Cambodian rocket landed in her fish pond. And it didn't blow up because thankfully the Cambodians have rubbish weapons, turns out. Uh and then they sort of splashed water all over.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Quite fighting talk.

• 10:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, what are you gonna do about it?

• 10:17Speaker 05

  Uh no, I think they've all got like kind of Soviet era stock of missiles and things. Uh but anyway, it didn't blow up, um but then they phoned up the military police. Who sort of sent someone round and they were kind of sort of ummed and ahhed and they just left it there. And because when it landed, it sunk through the water and went deep into mud. And they're like, oh, well, it's probably fine then if it's gone into mud. If it landed on solid ground, we would dispose of it. But if it landed in mud, we'll we'll like, you know, we might get to it at some point or we might just leave it.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Is it still there?

• 10:45Speaker 05

  Still there, yes.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Sticking out of the pond, you can see it?

• 10:48Speaker 05

  You can't see it, no. It's sunk into the into the mud and it's just sort of sat there. And we we ended up doing karaoke shortly after. And they take karaoke very seriously and my family hired a big like sort of festival style sound system to do karaoke off of.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 11:04Speaker 05

  And it's sort of like a few drinks in, we're just like, hold on, maybe we should turn it down in case we set the bomb off. Like, maybe we're doing like

• 11:10Speaker 06

  I don't know if that's how it works.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Thailand doesn't have an alphabet. It doesn't have a true alphabet. It has something called an abugida. And an abugida is like an alphabet, but instead of using letters for vowels, they use diacritical symbols and marks. So if you see Thai written down, and this is outside my wheel zone, so correct me if I'm wrong, Bertie, but you have the word, you have no spaces in between the words. And then the vowels are like little sort of squiggles that are above or below or to the side of the letters. Is that right?

• 11:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm trying to work out. I mean, I can't read Thai at all. Trying to work out where one word begins and when one word ends is like kind of impossible because it's just it's just like a just an endless stream of squiggly characters.

• 11:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, why haven't they fixed that? Because I would say that the rest of the world has now come up with a system where it is easier to distinguish words. We used to have the endless string in like early, middle ages. And Thailand, it does seem a bit stubborn that you're sticking with the no spaces between words.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Here's the thing, if you're a natural speaker, you can work out where the spaces are quite easily because certain symbols for vowels are in certain parts of the words and they always are. So it's quite easy to work out. But there was a study in 1997 from a couple of people at the University of Nottingham. And they tried it out. So they got some Thai sentences. And they put spaces for one of the sentences and didn't put spaces in the other one. And they gave it to Thai people and said, can you read this? Of course they could. How quickly can you read it? And yeah, but basically the idea is if you're used to it, maybe. You can do it without the spaces better and the spaces actually put you off?

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Or did the people actually find the spaces useful? What do you think?

• 12:57Speaker 04

  I'd say they found it useful.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Yeah?

• 12:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, I guess I've I've come down pretty hard on that side.

• 13:02Speaker 05

  I'm gonna say that they found it easier without the spaces just because they're used to it.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Well, that's what I would have thought as well, but actually they found that the spaces were more useful.

• 13:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, so much more useful.

• 13:12Speaker 06

  Well, I hate to say my point.

• 13:15Speaker 05

  So the white man was correct all along. Damn it again.

• 13:18Speaker 06

  Now, look, we're not that kind of podcast.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  But yeah, and there's also a mark in Thai called the thantha cat, which is would be really useful for us, which is when a letter is silent, you put this little mark on it. So let's say you had the word knife. You could just put a little squiggle next to the K and everyone would know not to say the K. Wouldn't that be useful?

• 13:42Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 13:43Speaker 06

  We just have to use it in every word so many times though in English.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  You'd have some like English village names where you've got 50 of these, wouldn't you?

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  But actually, so it's thantha cat, like I say, the mark to make a letter silent, but it also means execution by beating one to death with a stick. So two meanings.

• 14:00Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  Feels unlikely that those two would ever get mixed up in a hilarious way.

• 14:07Speaker 06

  If Andy was here, he'd say, I feel a format coming on.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  I was looking into notable people from Thailand. And I discovered, I think, one of the most famous people on our planet is half Thai. And I just never knew that. So who do you think? Who do you think the most famous Thai person is? And they're half Thai.

• 14:26Speaker 06

  Oh, sorry.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  Half Thai.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 14:28Speaker 06

  The most famous person is Donald Trump and that would be astonishing.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  No, no, the most famous person who is Thai.

• 14:33Speaker 06

  Yes. No, I think that was an essential element.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Tiger Woods is half Thai.

• 14:37Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Is that correct? Was that the one?

• 14:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  The clue's in his name.

• 14:41Speaker 06

  That's really good.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  Tiger Woods.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, son of a Thai woman called Tider Woods. It's pronounced Tida, but it's it's basically Tida. And it's really fascinating. He's he's got quite a mix in his family. So he is one quarter Thai, one quarter Chinese, one quarter Caucasian, one eighth African American and one eighth Native American. He calls him, he calls himself Kablinasian, which is a term he coined for Caucasian, black, American, Indian and Asian. So that's how he refers to himself.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  Very cool.

• 15:12Speaker 05

  Kablinasian?

• 15:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Right. Sounds how he would refer to himself when he'd been caught driving. What's your ethnicity, Tiger? I'm Cambodian.

• 15:20Speaker 04

  He probably had to back invent that meeting when he was off later by the press. No, no, I've always called it that. But I looked into it and there's basically no national footprint of Tiger Woods there. As in, there's no statues, there's no buildings, there's no roads, as far as I can tell, that are named after him. It doesn't seem like they've connected him to the country. And the only statue I could find, because actually, there is one. It's in a restaurant called Cabbages and Condoms. And it's a condom-themed restaurant. And it is a condom-built Tiger Woods. It's just packets of condoms and he's holding a golf club. And then there's a sign that says, "Did you use them, Tiger?", next to the statue. That's the only one that I could find of him.

• 16:02Speaker 05

  What a legacy.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. Cabbages and Condoms, great restaurant, by the way.

• 16:05Speaker 06

  But its theme is just condoms, so they actually should just be called condoms.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  No, the point was, is that it was trying to show that family planning and protection was not being part of the education of the people in Thailand, particularly during the AIDS pandemic and HIV pandemic. So, he was saying, the owner of this restaurant, "It should be as accessible and easy to talk about as cabbages at a grocery store. You should be able to buy condoms like you buy cabbages."

• 16:29Speaker 06

  I see.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, so he called it Cabbages and Condoms.

• 16:31Speaker 06

  I see, I never buy cabbages.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, but they don't put the cabbages behind the counter, do they?

• 16:36Speaker 06

  No, they should.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  He's got a big basket full of condoms going, "Can I have three cabbages in there?"

• 16:45Speaker 06

  I have to say, when you're a quarter something, it is like not being something. I'm a quarter Polish and I don't think, as yet, there's a giant, there should be, but a giant statue of me in Krakow as one of four members of a moderately okay podcast in Britain, so...

• 17:01Speaker 04

  I think Tiger Woods is possibly one of the most recognised names globally.

• 17:04Speaker 06

  I won't hear it, Dan.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  Okay, sorry.

• 17:06Speaker 06

  I won't hear that Tiger Woods is more famous than I am.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that soft-shell crabs aren't actually a species. They're just a crab in between houses. This is, to me, mind-blowing. I thought soft-shell crab was just a type of crab that existed, and that's what I was eating in restaurants. But yeah, it's basically because they're continuing to grow and the shell's too small for them. So they'll molt, they'll get rid of this hard shell. And it's quite a fun process because they shed it by taking water in and breaking it up. And they shoot it out, basically, as it's crumbling.

• 17:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, like the Hulk. Is it the Hulk who like goes "brrrrr" and like gets bigger and bigger and bursts out of his skin?

• 17:54Speaker 04

  No.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Out of his clothes.

• 17:56Speaker 06

  Out of his clothes, maybe.

• 17:57Speaker 05

  I think it's not too far off of that because it's swelling up and then breaking. And then they sort of find the cracks in their shell and sort of pull themselves out, like sort of backwards out of the back of their shells.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  Yes, but I think Hulk expands. He doesn't shatter his outer layer of human. Bruce Banner doesn't go flying everywhere on the walls. Yeah, no, so it basically, before the hard shell has disappeared, there's a sort of very soft shell that's ready to harden. And fishermen go for the ad hoc moment. They capture them and then that is soft-shell crab.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  So and then they sell it as meat, right? So if you go to a restaurant in America, say, you could get hard-shell crab or soft-shell crab. And the hard-shell one, you have to dig out the meat, and the soft one, you don't? Is that right?

• 18:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  And that's basically the difference.

• 18:40Speaker 04

  That's basically the difference. But potentially, you're eating the same species. You're just eating their brother who was molting faster than the other one.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  It could be both at the same time.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  Because the female will always mate with a male immediately after her own shedding. So she sheds her shell, and then a male comes over and has sex with her. And that, if you are a fisherman, is the perfect time because you can get a soft-shell and a hard-shell at the same time. And then you can sell them both to the restaurant, and they get two for one.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:11Speaker 06

  And then you can make ethical eaters feel better because you can say they died doing what they loved.

• 19:17Speaker 06

  And the window you've got is so brief, hadn't realised, because when, so the gal's molting and she wants to grow her new exoskeleton as fast as possible, apparently it's got to be three hours after they've melted is the right time, because you need the shell to have hardened just enough that it's not so soft that it's going to die in transit, but it can't have hardened enough that you can't chew down on it and get that nice soft texture. And so yeah, so they like spy on these crabs, just waiting for the moment, and then they have to dive in at exactly the right time.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  But also, when they're soft shell, they like kind of hide in little nooks and crannies, because obviously for predators, that's a really good time to eat them as well.

• 19:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Not just us being predators, I mean, like, animal kingdom predators. So in actual fact, it's really hard to catch them. So what they tend to do is, the soft shell crabs these days, they will farm them, because then you don't have to go digging through nooks and crannies.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 20:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Get your hard shell, take it to your farm, wait for it to shed and then get it.

• 20:15Speaker 06

  But it's kind of why we farm all animals, isn't it? That's what we said thousands of years ago, we're like, you know what, these cows, really hard to catch.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 20:23Speaker 06

  In a field with a fence, easier.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  These hard shell crabs that we're talking about, there's a few different species. One of them is the blue crab. And do you know where you find the blue crab, where they're often fish from?

• 20:36Speaker 03

  America.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  Yep, you get them in America, but you also get them right by James Bond Island, which is in Thailand.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  Dun dun dun.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  Which is the other thing that's been named after James Bond, as a result of the man with the golden gun, because that was the island where the villain lived, and it's full of blue crabs that are used as soft shell crabs.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  You also get some blue crabs in the Mediterranean, which is a problem, because they're not, they're more not meant to be there, because they're invasive, they're super aggressive, blue crabs are.

• 21:01Speaker 06

  Are they? What are they taking on? They're taking on other crabs?

• 21:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think also that on the north side of the Mediterranean, or the Italians and so on, they don't have a culture of eating them, so they don't really eat them. And on the southern coast of the Mediterranean, many Muslims consider them to be haram as well. So nobody, humans aren't really eating them at all in the Mediterranean.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, we get them in Montenegro, where my parents-in-law live. There's a big sort of bay there, and all of the little... Local crabs have gone and it's just these blue crabs left.

• 21:30Speaker 06

  Really?

• 21:30Speaker 03

  No one eats them.

• 21:31Speaker 06

  No one wants to eat them. We should say, this is probably insensitive you buddy, because you actually won the crab museum, which is all about devoting itself to crabs. And we're just talking about how delicious they are.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  What's the museum position on eating them?

• 21:44Speaker 05

  I mean, that's the thing. I think eating invasive species is morally different to eating like an endangered species.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 21:53Speaker 05

  I think, but yeah, if you're in Montenegro, fill up on blue crabs, I think.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Personally, I don't like crabs.

• 21:58Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't, yeah, I don't really, I don't try, try not to eat meat wherever possible. But I mean, I think there is a bit of a moral difference. And there's a lot, like our green shore crabs from the UK are invasive on both coasts of the US as well. And there'd be a problem there. And then the Americans are also like, what do we do with these things? We've never eaten them before.

• 22:13Speaker 06

  Oh, really?

• 22:14Speaker 05

  Yes. You have to teach a human to eat stuff. Humans just want to eat stuff. I say humans, people just want to eat stuff that, you know, their grandmother cooked them or whatever.

• 22:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:21Speaker 05

  There's an emotional attachment to it.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  It's like if, like if in our shops, suddenly a lot of invasive pinto beans came over and took over all of our Heinz baked beans. No one would want to eat them.

• 22:32Speaker 06

  Such a good point.

• 22:33Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Is it a good point? Because the way everyone looked at me suggested it might not have been a good point.

• 22:39Speaker 06

  I think the way to make someone stop talking is sometimes just to say, good point.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:45Speaker 05

  That's what I do with my kids. Wow. So.

• 22:52Speaker 05

  But going back to crabs molting, you're right that, yeah, many crabs hide when they're molting. Other crabs, like spider crabs, molt in huge piles. So you'll get like a hundred thousand individuals, say, or more. And they'll all molt in gigantic sort of heaps underwater. And the softest ones are right in the middle. And then as they harden up, they get pushed out to the edge. And then the ones on the edge are sort of almost hardened again.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 23:15Speaker 05

  So they all kind of sort of look after each other. It's a bit like, you know, the sort of penguins that take it in turns to go on the cold edge of the ball.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 05

  And yeah, the spider crabs do that. And it's also basically a giant orgy, because when they've all molted, they're all shagging in the middle of the pile.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  You see, when you said at the start, it's like, oh, everyone's so nice. They're looking after the ones in the middle. And now it sounds like a big old pile on them.

• 23:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is. It is. Yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 04

  Because the shells would be on top of them. So if you looked at it, you'd be like, oh, it's just a bunch of crabs hanging out. But underneath.

• 23:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  They're shagging away.

• 23:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. And there's that sort of undercurrent. So there's sort of like really soft shagging crabs in the centre. And then, and then they sort of harden up and get pushed further out. And presumably at some point they stop shagging.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  It's ironic though, you think that the harder you get, the less likely you are to have sex.

• 23:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, crabs, so crabs have often have two vaginas.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  Good point.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  That's true, James. So yeah, birdie.

• 24:08Speaker 04

  What, um, what happens to the exoskeletons then? Because that's a huge mound.

• 24:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, animals will eat them. Or they'll just kind of break down into sand and sort of just general stuff at the bottom of the sea. Yeah.

• 24:19Speaker 04

  We haven't worked out how to use that for some kind of handbag or something.

• 24:23Speaker 06

  Building material, replacing concrete in the future.

• 24:25Speaker 05

  Well, there is kite, so it's made crab shells are made out of chitin. And there's a new treatment for like bullet holes, because chitin's got a thing where it's extremely absorbent. It swells up loads and is antibacterial and stuff.

• 24:38Speaker 06

  Do you mean bullet holes in people or bullet holes in, really?

• 24:41Speaker 05

  So you could make these like plugs and it's like a new thing that they're using in hospitals for like gunshot wounds and sort of stab wounds and stuff. But it's derived from crab shells and it swells up inside the wound and blocks off all of the capillaries and prevents further bleeding.

• 24:56Speaker 06

  That's amazing. They should put a hospital next to you guys.

• 25:02Speaker 06

  There's this theory that everything's going to become a crab, isn't there? Carcinisation. There's, and people are really into it, I think, because like evolutionary theorists are really into it. I think because crabs have evolved five times, at least five times.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  I also read an article that said, let me just read this. Experts at Crab Museum in Margate say they now have people coming in every day, questioning if humans really will end up sprouting claws.

• 25:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a pretty common, yeah, it's a pretty common thing. People come up to us and be like, oh yes, I heard we're all turning into crabs.

• 25:34Speaker 06

  When's that happening? Go on, give me your tie for the show.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  Then come in going, I might as well be here because I'm going to turn into a crab. This is a crab museum. I'll just wait here until it happens.

• 25:43Speaker 05

  You've got to be, be ahead of the curve, right? You've got to.

• 25:45Speaker 06

  Do they all come in sideways?

• 25:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, and so this is crustaceans all seem to turn into crabs.

• 25:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 06

  And humans are quite far from crustaceans. And also, even though that's happened five times, decarbonisation has happened at least seven times in evolution, as in things turning away from crabs. So it seems like even if things visit crabdom as an existence, they then decide against it and move on.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  So you're saying no, is your prediction?

• 26:08Speaker 05

  I'm gonna say no to that. Crustaceans do turn into into crabs, but yeah, crabs also turn into shrimp and prawns turn into lobsters and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's all sort of pretty fluid. All of this takes a really long time, millions of years. And the word crab obviously doesn't predate humans being a thing. We've only been around for, you know, 300,000 years or whatever. So what we define to be a crab, this is sort of the slightly wafty answer, but we define crabs basically off of vibes. Crab isn't really a thing.

• 26:36Speaker 06

  No such thing as a crab?

• 26:37Speaker 05

  There's no such thing as a crab. There is legit, that's my new, uh, rival podcast. Yeah, I'm gonna take you all down, yeah.

• 26:44Speaker 06

  Oh, no.

• 26:45Speaker 05

  Um, but yeah, no, there is no such thing as crab. And you can say a crab's turning into lobster, you can say a lobster's turning into a prawn or a shrimp or whatever, it depends how you define these animals.

• 26:54Speaker 06

  And it seems to be that generally people are defining this as you've got a big hard shell on top that covers everything up and your eyes retreat into yourself, right?

• 27:01Speaker 05

  Yes, but then there's also in the crab world, it's hotly debated whether or not things like hermit crabs are crabs. There's true crabs, which are brachyurans crabs, um, which are kind of the kind of classic crabs that you'd imagine. Then there's like coconut crabs, um, squat lobsters, snow crabs or king crabs, I can't remember, one of them, they're missing a set of legs. And then there's annamurans, like hermit crabs, that are strictly speaking not crabs, depending on who you ask.

• 27:27Speaker 06

  I think we-

• 27:28Speaker 05

  I say we're, I'm pretty inclusive though. I think I would include all of them as crabs.

• 27:31Speaker 03

  Weirdly, on QI, I don't know if we ever did it, but I definitely wrote this question, which was name a type of crab. Because pretty much all the ones that people will be able to bring to mind, like hermit crabs or horseshoe crabs or whatever, are not true crabs.

• 27:44Speaker 06

  Genital?

• 27:45Speaker 03

  They're not crabs.

• 27:47Speaker 05

  No, they're insects.

• 27:48Speaker 06

  True crabs.

• 27:49Speaker 05

  They have a mite thing.

• 27:51Speaker 06

  All right. Tamara, I was hoping to turn into one of those.

• 27:55Speaker 04

  I found a few different crab-inspired things. And I want to quiz and see if any of you guys know what they are. So here we go. Does anyone know what a crab landing is?

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Crab landing.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  What's a crab landing?

• 28:10Speaker 03

  So something is landing. An aircraft, maybe a helicopter, because they look a bit like crabs, don't they?

• 28:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Uh, and they do it. All of these things are going to be just they do things sideways. Because it kind of feels like.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  There you go. It is. It's not helicopters, it's airplanes. So when an airplane is landing, you know, sometimes you'll see videos online of heavy storms and planes landing in them, but the plane is positioned on a diagonal angle as they're coming. And then what they do right at the last second is they turn it back so that the wheels are landing straight as they're coming in.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  I suppose because you always have to land into a headwind. So you would have to do it that way if there's a crosswind on the.

• 28:47Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. The strip, I suppose.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, there is crab scratching.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Okay, we might be down to genitals again.

• 28:55Speaker 04

  No, this is a, this is a DJ, uh, method.

• 28:58Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  So it's when you are doing, you're combining rapid hand movements on the vinyl itself as well as the crossfader. So a really quick scratch movement. Yeah, that was James, just so the audience at home knows, we didn't have a mix master Mike with us in the studio today. Cheers, Mike. Thank you. That'll be all. And then the last one is ejecta crab.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  Sideways ejection.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, though it's in rowing, it's when someone's oar.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  Oh, a crab. You catch a crab.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, we have done this.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  We've caught crabs, haven't we?

• 29:28Speaker 04

  Oh, thank you.

• 29:29Speaker 06

  Is it when you, is it when you put in the oar when it's going the wrong way and it gets kind of flipped out of the water again?

• 29:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, extreme ejecta crab is when you get flipped out of the boat because the, uh, because the hold is so great in the water.

• 29:40Speaker 06

  But then you can enter the pole vault, um, with that move.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  That would be a great combo Olympic sport.

• 29:47Speaker 06

  It should happen. Crabs, testes and ovaries, um, swell and shrink with the moon, I believe.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  That's a good one.

• 29:55Speaker 06

  That wor- it worries me if you, Bertie, are saying, "Oh, I'm interested."

• 29:59Speaker 05

  No, I wouldn't put it past them.

• 30:00Speaker 06

  No, I don't think I will put it past them. I think they do do it because they-

• 30:03Speaker 03

  Could you use them as a calendar?

• 30:04Speaker 06

  It's not super precise. If it's like, I need to be there at 9:30 in the morning, then probably not.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  But if you like to remember what day, like, let's say you get paid on the 27th of every month, you could have a little crab ovaries.

• 30:15Speaker 06

  I think if you always get paid on the new moon, which is how our office works, yes.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Okay, my fact this week is that in late 19th century America, butt plugs were advertised as a cure for bad breath.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Uh, yes.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  You stick them in your mouth.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  And then you can't breathe.

• 30:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, how does this, how does this work? Is there a theory?

• 30:48Speaker 03

  Well, it doesn't work.

• 30:49Speaker 06

  Shit. Okay, I'm getting a refund.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  They were a thing called Young's dilators. Uh, and they were patented in 1892 by Frank E. Young. And he sold them as a radical cure for piles and constipation. And the idea was that you would use these butt plugs, you'd put them up your bum, and help you to, uh, train your muscles up there. And that would help you for various, uh, rectal issues that you might have. But then, they kept pushing them for more and more different things. And in 1949, the USDA banned their advertisements because they claimed to cure foul breath, bad taste in the mouth, acne, arrhythmia, uterar area, anemia, insomnia, anorexia, headaches and nervousness.

• 31:35Speaker 03

  Uh, but if you see these things, they come in lots of different sizes. I would say they would enhance my nervousness.

• 31:41Speaker 04

  Yes. Is that getting rid of insomnia? I don't think having a giant butt plug up your-.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  But yeah, you just see these, um, these images online of-

• 31:51Speaker 06

  You might do, James, but my, my Google searches are slightly different.

• 31:55Speaker 04

  Well, actually, I did find one because there's one going on eBay at the moment.

• 31:59Speaker 06

  It's there.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's an original and, um-

• 32:01Speaker 06

  Oh, God, is it Spike Milligan's butt plug or something?

• 32:03Speaker 04

  I don't, it doesn't say if it's been used or- Not, but yeah, it's going for seventy one pounds. And then you've got about thirty pounds postage and handling. And I'm looking at the buy it now button, but I just feel like.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  That sounds like a bargain.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  It does, doesn't it? Because someone on the article that you sent around, James, in the comments said, I found one in my grandfather's old belongings. Do you think they're worth a lot? And he said, oh, they're not too much. And this is the only one I could find on eBay that's going.

• 32:29Speaker 05

  I think maybe we've been a little bit too hard on Dr. Young here.

• 32:32Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:33Speaker 05

  And so hear me out. I think curing bad breath by sticking something up your bum is not a completely insane idea. The theory being that lots of kind of gut issues are caused by sort of imbalance of different bacteria. And so some bacteria that are meant to be in your large intestine can end up in your small intestine. And they produce different chemicals, some of which are hydrogen sulfide, which smells really bad. And is the sort of fatty smell in stink bombs. And these stinky compounds get into your bloodstream and then they end up coming out in your bad breath. But one of the ways of solving gut issues is using a fecal transplant. If you know anything about fecal transplants.

• 33:13Speaker 05

  So they're to inoculate an ill person with healthy bacteria from a, from somebody else's poo. So sticking a dildo up your bum clean wouldn't do anything. But if it was covered in a healthy person's shit.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 33:30Speaker 05

  Then you could cure your bad breath.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  What does it say on the eBay listing, Dan?

• 33:34Speaker 04

  It's been cleaned, damn it.

• 33:38Speaker 05

  So a used rectal dilator might help.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 33:42Speaker 05

  In an indirect way, because then that would solve your gut issues, which would then stop your bad breath issues.

• 33:46Speaker 06

  You know what? Listerine first and then the poo up the back, I think.

• 33:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:50Speaker 06

  For me. I mean, so dilating that area is good for certain things. So I feel like originally they probably intended them for things like fissures, anal fissures, which can be worse. If you're like a bit too tightened, so you'll have something to dilate and relax the muscles, which can alleviate the fissure.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Not an anal fissure as in, oh, this crab is not nearly hard enough. I'm going to put it back for two more. Minutes.

• 34:16Speaker 06

  Are they all talk, those people?

• 34:17Speaker 03

  If they're anal, they are.

• 34:19Speaker 06

  Sorry, of course, yes.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  Good point, James.

• 34:22Speaker 06

  Good, good point.

• 34:23Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:24Speaker 06

  Thanks for coming. Is it your bedtime yet?

• 34:28Speaker 06

  Um, anyway, I got into some pretty, pretty dodgy territory. I'm looking at 19th century treatments for anal fissures and putting things up your bum, which does work. And there was a method which was to introduce fingers, as you know, men will have a prostate check, obviously, doing the same thing. Fingers would work to relax the muscle a little bit, but there was a doctor called Jules Mesonneur, who was operating in the mid 19th century. And he said the, using the fingers to relax that muscle was too slow, often had to be redone in order to alleviate these problems. And so he suggested a more complete and quick way by gradually insinuating the fingers one by one into the rectum until the whole hand was inside, then firmly clenching it and forcibly withdrawing. And apparently, according to the 1884 book, which I was reading, it said this repulsive

• 35:12Speaker 06

  procedure met with no favour whatsoever.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  Thus, ventriloquism was born.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  Doesn't sound great.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  I found another one called Atkinson's Registered Rectum Supporter, which it looks a bit like a weightlifting belt, if you can imagine that, but then it has some sort of bulbous bits that you appear to go up your bum. And they, again, it was like for fissures and for piles and all that kind of stuff. But what's kind of interesting is that this went on display in the great exhibition of 1851. So, but this big exhibition at Crystal Palace.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  And they had like all these incredible things from all around the world, but if you went right at the corner to be able to find this.

• 35:58Speaker 06

  What, Queen Victoria went to that, I should, and what does this one do?

• 36:02Speaker 04

  This way, ma'am, this way, ma'am.

• 36:06Speaker 06

  You're a bum expert, right? Bertie, have you written a book on them?

• 36:09Speaker 05

  I have written a book on bums. I mean, it's a children's book on bums, but...

• 36:12Speaker 04

  Oh, it's a great book though, Natural History of Bums. I read it to my kids and there was great ones like rabbit poo. How they have a poo that basically isn't digested properly the first time around, so they eat the poo again, the pellets.

• 36:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:25Speaker 04

  And then poo it out as poo proper the second time.

• 36:27Speaker 05

  Yes, because they have to get B12 out of it, but you have like, grass is really, really, really difficult to eat. So rabbits eat it twice, whereas things like hippos and cows and stuff have multiple stomachs. But yeah, most animals have a bum. And I think it's only things like sort of jellyfish and sort of like brittle stars and basket stars and stuff like that that don't. And sea sponges, things like that. But generally, 99% of animals have bums because it's just such a good system.

• 36:52Speaker 06

  It is. I'm not complaining.

• 36:54Speaker 04

  It's such a good moment in our history, the moment we decided to separate the mouth from the anus.

• 36:58Speaker 06

  Well, there's a new theory that actually it was separating the anus from the sperm duct, I think. They've looked, there's a study that's looked at what genes are responsible for what things. And I mean, I think this is one of those theories that might be supplanted in 10 years. But currently, there's research from the University of Bergen in Norway. They were looking at the genetics of Xenoselomorphs, which are like, they look a bit like flatworms. They're like weird, lumpy things. And anyway, they've got a genital opening, which is called a gonadopore, which is where the sperm comes out. And they use the same genes to make that genital opening as human embryos use to make their digestive tube. And so all of these facts, they've pieced together to say, at some point, we had this sperm opening.

• 37:41Speaker 06

  And then we started to think, or evolution decided that we should merge it with the digestive tract and have poo come out of it.

• 37:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:49Speaker 06

  Now, I don't know how they're explaining the fact that then another sperm opening had to be created, which it was.

• 37:53Speaker 05

  I did read an article in New Scientist by the people who did this study. And they said, once a hole is there, you can use it for other things.

• 38:02Speaker 04

  Ah, yes.

• 38:05Speaker 05

  How wise.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  It feels like a bumper sticker.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  Humans are really good at lots of things, but what one thing we got that no other animal has got?

• 38:15Speaker 04

  Podcasts.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  Maybe, culture, I guess you could say, but then those bonobos that put little grass in their ear and then all the others copied it.

• 38:25Speaker 06

  I think like planning, like long-term planning and stuff, people always say, you know, we're able to have episodic memory and then we can turn that to long-term planning. But you're gonna say it's bums.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  It's bums. I think it's bums. Yeah, so there is, there are some transverse folds in our rectum called Houston's valves. And these seem to support the weight of fecal matter, which means that you can kind of hold your poo in a little bit. You don't always, as soon as you need to go, you just need to go. Obviously doesn't always work out. But they're named after a guy called John Huston and they appear to be only in humans. There was a study back in the 19th century, which looked for Huston valves in as many different mammals as they could find. So in wolves, bears, rhinoceroses, primates, couldn't find it in any of them, only in humans.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 39:12Speaker 03

  So it could be that this specific fold in your bum is the one thing that makes us special.

• 39:17Speaker 04

  That's so good, because if I, if I ever shit myself in public from now on, I'm gonna say, Huston, we've had a problem.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  So that's the thing that we've, that we've got that's so different from everyone else.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  Well, I'm sure, I mean, there are many other things. I'm just being a bit facetious, but you know.

• 39:32Speaker 05

  I think we've got the musliest bums of any animal as well. I think we've got the largest bum in relation to our body size. So like hippos and elephants, whatever, obviously have way bigger bums. But the body size, our bums are the biggest.

• 39:46Speaker 03

  And that's good because our glutes are used for long distance running and walking.

• 39:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, and standing up.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:52Speaker 06

  And because the Kardashians wouldn't have had a show, would they?

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're back to culture again.

• 39:58Speaker 06

  Yes, here we go.

• 39:59Speaker 05

  High culture.

• 40:00Speaker 06

  Weirdly, I did read a study about how the fact that we can hold it in might have caused us to out-compete all other animals, because basically it means that you're not pooing everywhere and leaving your scent everywhere, so you can't be followed.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 40:11Speaker 06

  This is in 2013. And these authors said it may have contributed to the successful march of hominids along the road of evolution. So there we go. Maybe you're right. It's all about the anal fold.

• 40:22Speaker 04

  Very cool.

• 40:22Speaker 06

  Well, we've blown, we've blown this wide open and it's been painful.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  Back to putting things up our bums.

• 40:28Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  There was quite a recent thing in the medical literature about a man who went to hospital because he had some heart palpitations. They, you know, didn't really know what was wrong with him, but they decided that it was bad enough that they were going to have to give him a cardioversion, which is a thing where you restore the heartbeat properly. Anyway, before they did that, they had to check that he didn't have any gastrointestinal bleeding. And so the physician did a digital rectal exam to check there was no bleeding up there. Finger up the bum, pulled it back out, no blood on there, good. But then the man's heart palpitations completely disappeared. His heart slowed right down to 80 beats per minute and they decided, well, we don't need to do anything more.

• 41:13Speaker 03

  He came back a few months later and had no problems again. And they think that maybe the finger up the bum is what cured him. According to the paper, it could have been due to stimulation of the vagus nerve, which is a very trendy thing at the moment, which is the nerve that goes right the way up your body. And supposedly if you stimulate it in some way, it can help all sorts of different things.

• 41:33Speaker 06

  Is that trendy like on the front page of Cosmo?

• 41:36Speaker 03

  It is kind of like in, you know, if you see headlines about, oh, all you need to do is stimulate your vagus nerve and it will, you know, save all these different things.

• 41:45Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  If you have headaches, it's probably your vagus nerve. If you have this, it's probably your vagus nerve.

• 41:50Speaker 06

  And if you've ever wondered if all of those cases about people sticking things up their bottoms, you know, there's comedy cases you get in the news about whoopsie daisy, I tripped on my Hoover. If they are just a 21st century phenomenon, they are not. I was reading a list from 1757 by the French anatomist Solvère François Morond, who decided to publish a list of all the cases he'd come across of people putting things up their bums. It was published in the Memoirs of the Royal Academy of Surgery.

• 42:17Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 42:19Speaker 04

  Well, because imagine you've got away with it, you know, you're back home, you're like, no one's ever going to find out about this. And then there's an announcement, we've collated all the people.

• 42:26Speaker 06

  Don't you worry.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  When was this?

• 42:29Speaker 06

  1757.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  Are all the things very 18th century things that they put up their bums?

• 42:34Speaker 06

  Um, a candle, so that's quite 18th century. Yes. Doesn't mention if it was lit or not. So he catalogs it very nicely. So he first of all puts in a column what it was up with the rectum, the bladder or the willy.

• 42:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, I know. Some people, that was the candle one, actually. And then he'll put what it was that went up, and then he'll put who it was in the explanation. So it was like rectum bottle priest.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  This is the worst game of Cluedo ever.

• 43:04Speaker 06

  That was because the priest suffered from a stubborn flow and was told to put a whole candle in his urethra. Now, I would say lots of the other ones, which are just man or woman, as opposed to priest, he said apparently or allegedly, or they claimed. But with the priest, he just took his word as read, which I'm gonna say, I don't know about that priest. I don't know if I believe him. Bladder, three beans, man, had trouble urinating, so tried to enlarge his urethra. Bladder, one bean, man, still would not acknowledge he'd put the bean in there himself. Rectum bottle priest, suffered from constipation, used the long bottle to irrigate his rectum and lost it.

• 43:46Speaker 04

  That's a good, that's a good excuse, that one. I would almost believe that one, almost.

• 43:50Speaker 06

  It's a rectum irrigation, or is that, you mean the excuse for when the wife says, what's happened to my bottle?

• 43:56Speaker 03

  I lost it. Where did you lose it? I don't know, I've lost it. Where did you last see it? Let's not go into that.

• 44:02Speaker 04

  Why are you not sitting down with me? I'm just gonna stand for a bit, actually.

• 44:08Speaker 06

  Anyway, and then there are lots and lots and lots of rings stuck around penises. And for all of those ones, it just says, no reason given.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  No reason, okay.

• 44:15Speaker 06

  No reason given.

• 44:16Speaker 04

  That's fair enough. Yolo.

• 44:19Speaker 06

  If they'd had that phrase, I'm sure he would have written that.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  So much of history would have been possible with that yolo as an explanation back then.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna.

• 44:36Speaker 06

  My fact this week is that there is no customer toilet in the Icelandic Punk Museum, even though the whole thing is within a toilet.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  That's great.

• 44:48Speaker 05

  I imagine really needing a piss, being denied a piss and then being angry about it is quite a punk thing.

• 44:54Speaker 06

  Maybe that's why they don't provide the customer toilet. This is the Icelandic Punk Museum, open 2016. Seems like a very cool place and all the exhibits are in a toilet.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  Is it like one of those underground toilets?

• 45:09Speaker 06

  It is, yes.

• 45:10Speaker 03

  I walked past this place, it was closed when I went. I like, I saw it when I was in Reykjavik.

• 45:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, in Reykjavik, yeah, exactly. And I think it was one of the only public toilets in downtown Reykjavik. And so they've just erected lots of exhibits in the toilet bowls, in the sinks. And I did try to call to confirm this is definitely true. And I called the number that, it's quite hard to find a number for them, I think they might just not have a phone. And the number that AI thought that they might have, I rung up and they said it was a rock bar. And when I said, is it definitely not the toilet? They didn't know what I was talking about.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  I can say it definitely exists from the outside.

• 45:45Speaker 06

  It definitely exists. I'm 100% sure it exists. I just wanted to check that there's no toilet.

• 45:49Speaker 04

  I can imagine a punk museum would answer their phone like that.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:53Speaker 04

  Well, no, we don't, but something else.

• 45:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're right. Yes, sticking it to the man.

• 45:57Speaker 04

  They were, when it opened, Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols opened it. Yeah, he went over and he was part of the opening. So it's a sort of very legit thing because there's a lot of great punk history in Iceland. Bjork used to be in a punk band.

• 46:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, the purists complain about the amount of Bjork in there.

• 46:15Speaker 04

  Do they?

• 46:16Speaker 06

  They do. And I should say, on the fact that it was opened by Johnny Rotten, something funny about my research was, I just couldn't work out the truth because there were these different histories. I knew it was opened by someone in the Sex Pistols, but some of the sources said it was opened by John Lydon and then some of the sources said it was opened by Johnny Rotten.

• 46:33Speaker 04

  How long did you spend wasting your time on that one?

• 46:35Speaker 06

  It was a good 15 minutes of like, where's the, was a photo or something and which one is that?

• 46:40Speaker 04

  And then you were like, oh, great, they look the same. How am I meant to work this out?

• 46:46Speaker 04

  That's very funny. It's a shame, James, that you didn't go down the stairs to see the reason for if it was closed, because apparently a few people that have gone, it will say things like, "Closed today because, I don't know, someone's died or someone's ill, whatever, pick one."

• 46:59Speaker 03

  I have a feeling it was just a Monday and it doesn't open on Mondays or something. I just went to the penis museum in the end, anyway.

• 47:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. One of the mainstream ones in the end. You've got to do the obvious tourist traps.

• 47:09Speaker 04

  They've got great museums there, though, Iceland.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  Iceland, yeah.

• 47:12Speaker 04

  You must have been to a bunch, right?

• 47:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:14Speaker 04

  Did you go to the Bobby Fischer one?

• 47:16Speaker 03

  No, I didn't. What was that?

• 47:17Speaker 04

  That's in Reykjavik. It's the Bobby Fischer Centre. And it's a, basically, the 1972 World Chess Championship was there. And this one is, I guess, you know chess really well, but that was a seminal championship.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  No, it was, yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 04

  Because the Soviet Union had a stranglehold, and Bobby Fischer comes in as an American, being told by the major party heads in America, "You've got to do this. We're in a big battle right now. This is a huge symbolic thing for us." And what they have in the museum is a replica of the chessboard that they played on. But they've also got-

• 47:48Speaker 03

  I mean, all chesspads like this.

• 47:50Speaker 04

  That's what I was confused about. So, yeah. But they've got a printout for the radiation measurements that were demanded by Boris Spassky's delegation. And that was because Bobby Fischer was winning these matches, and they thought he was using all these tricks to do it. One was that his seat that he was sitting on was electrically charged and was sending electromagnetic stuff towards Boris, and it was freaking him out. They thought that the lights were doing something.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  They wanted to check absolutely everything. Whereas Fischer, on the other hand, he was quite mercurial, and he just played his own game. He was not an anal Fischer, is where that went.

• 48:30Speaker 06

  I see.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  Well, there was a-

• 48:32Speaker 03

  Nice, James. Okay. So I think Bert's got something to say now?

• 48:36Speaker 05

  There were allegations that the current chess champion was cheating, using a vibrator up his arse.

• 48:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. It wasn't the current champion, but it was someone who was playing against- Oh, it was Magnus who claimed that this guy was doing it.

• 48:48Speaker 04

  When in fact, he was just trying to get his breath smelling a bit better.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:52Speaker 05

  I guess that's sort of the modern radiation. I suppose.

• 48:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a paranoid game.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  They took the lights off and they found two dead flies in it and they almost performed autopsies on the flies to see if they were somewhere involved and that got cut short in the end. But anyway, that's there, that's there, the Bobby Fischer Centre.

• 49:10Speaker 06

  That's cool. Very cool. I mean, it must be hard starting a weird niche museum and expecting anyone to turn up to it.

• 49:17Speaker 03

  Is it, is it Bertie?

• 49:19Speaker 04

  What kind of loser?

• 49:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it is. And we didn't, we had no idea what we were doing. And when we opened, I remember thinking, oh my God, we've spent all of our life savings on this. I have a child. What have we done? This is terrible. But yeah, we do have a toilet though. So we've got one thing over there.

• 49:34Speaker 06

  Huge. That's my idea would be five stars, actually.

• 49:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just because of the toilet. On the day we opened, actually, we, we'd had an idea and we weren't sure whether or not to do it. And we had like an hour spare. So we ran to Morrison's and bought a load of like pasta and flour and some croissants and stuff. And then we put that in our toilet. So we've got a smaller museum in our toilet, which is the crab museum, which is completely unrelated to the crab museum. So it was, it was Chase's idea. He's got kind of weapons grade dyslexia and ADHD. He wouldn't mind me saying that. And he really struggles to read things. And it was really useful having him, he, he sort of went through all of the, all of the material that me and Ned have ever written and sort of going, this is too boring, change the font, you need to change the spacing. Like if I can't read it, then like a child won't be able to, nobody else is going to be able to.

• 50:22Speaker 06

  But of course you didn't put any spaces between any of the words.

• 50:24Speaker 05

  No, no, of course. Yeah. And I just put these little weird squiggly vowel markings over the top of everything. But yeah, he came up with this idea for the crab museum, which is just all of his sort of bad spelling mistakes.

• 50:35Speaker 06

  And why the crab? Were you a crab lover beforehand? Or were you just in Margate and you thought, well, they have a lot of them here?

• 50:41Speaker 05

  No, I think, I think a crab lover of sorts.

• 50:43Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 50:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. If that's, if that's a term.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, because if you're just named after things that happen in Margate, it'd just be like Tyce and Hipsters.

• 50:51Speaker 05

  I mean, the tiresome hipster museum, there's definitely room for a tiresome hipster museum.

• 50:56Speaker 04

  It will be me opening it, that's for sure. But would you believe it, it is the only museum dedicated to decapods in all of Europe.

• 51:04Speaker 06

  That is surprising.

• 51:06Speaker 05

  In fact, it's the only place in the world outside of China and Taiwan.

• 51:11Speaker 06

  Really?

• 51:12Speaker 05

  So yeah, there's a Taiwan crab museum, and then there's another one just on the other side of the strait in mainland China, because the Chinese were like, well, if the Taiwanese have got a crab museum, we're gonna get an even bigger one. And their one's like twice the size.

• 51:25Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 51:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  There are four anchovy museums in Europe. Yeah, there's one in Sicily, one on mainland Italy, and two in the Spanish town of La Scala. This town has a population of 10,374, but it has two anchovy museums.

• 51:43Speaker 04

  That's great.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  And there's a pilchard works in Cornwall, it's a museum for pilchards. I was just looking for other seafood museums.

• 51:53Speaker 06

  Why do they need two? Is it one was so oversubscribed that it's for the overflow?

• 51:57Speaker 03

  It's basically the entire town is anchovies. You know, it's where most of the anchovies come from this area in Spain.

• 52:04Speaker 06

  Yum.

• 52:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:05Speaker 04

  That's very cool. We've got just back down in Margate Way, there's a neighboring town of Ramsgate, and there's a small museum there that's called, but this museum is not, in brackets, obsolete, and it is a museum that is dedicated entirely to what are seemingly obsolete bits of technology and music equipment and so on.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, like Betamax and stuff.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, and that's run by a guy who is called Look Mum, No Computer, who some of you might recognise that name because he was this year's entrant for Britain

• 52:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:39Speaker 04

  in the Eurovision contest.

• 52:40Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 52:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:41Speaker 06

  That's what it was.

• 52:42Speaker 04

  So he's got an amazing little museum down in Ramsgate.

• 52:46Speaker 06

  Is it as amazing as his Eurovision entry? I heard, and I haven't actually seen or heard it, so I'm just going by popular opinion.

• 52:56Speaker 03

  Is it in Ramsgate because all these old bits of computers have got lots of RAM?

• 53:04Speaker 03

  Oh dear, gosh.

• 53:05Speaker 06

  Dear lord. So on other weird museums born of real passion, there's the Museum of Clean in Idaho, which I think is my favourite, just because it's made by someone who it's his life's devotion, a guy called Don Aslett. And so when he was 16, I think it was in 1953, he'd never even made his bed before, but he decided, I'm gonna make a living through cleaning. He put an ad in the local paper saying, Don Aslett, professional cleaner. And he built himself up and up, became the king of clean, has a whole janitorial empire, and has, you know, written 40 books on how to be clean. He's like the original.

• 53:42Speaker 03

  Trini and Susanna.

• 53:42Speaker 06

  He's the original Trini and Susanna for people our age, or the original, what's that clean influencer?

• 53:49Speaker 04

  Mrs Hinch?

• 53:50Speaker 06

  Mrs Hinch, yes. Anyway, he.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  I can't believe that I'm so old that my cleaning influencer is no longer current. That is so upsetting.

• 54:03Speaker 06

  Sad times. Anyway, this museum sounds amazing. So what I did quite like about it was that the most of the negative reviews of it, I read all of them, and in fact, the only thing that said about it negatively is that it is too cluttered or too dusty and dirty. There was one person who said, it's like grandma's attic, the overall impression is a muddle. For a clean museum, there's lots of dust. But yeah, he's obsessed with decluttering.

• 54:29Speaker 03

  I've had a few more ironic museum things.

• 54:31Speaker 04

  Oh yeah.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  In 2024, the Museum of Neoliberalism in Lewisham, which is against capitalism, it was reported they had to be closed down because they were being turned into luxury flats.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  Although I went on the website and they do seem to still exist, so I don't know if they moved or whether they changed this plan. But if you go in there, for instance, they have the bottle of Amazon employee urine that someone who was like driving Amazon parcels around and wasn't allowed to go for a wee, would urinate into a bottle. That's in the museum.

• 55:04Speaker 06

  Sorry, it's against neoliberalism. I get it.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 55:08Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. And in 2019, the American Kennel Club opened the Museum of the Dog, which said, no dogs allowed.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  Oh, come on.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  Unless you're a support animal, you weren't allowed to bring dogs in there.

• 55:22Speaker 04

  I went, when we were in DC doing Phish live over there, I went to the Ford Theatre, where Lincoln was shot. And as you walk in, it has a no guns sign. It's like, it's still, they're still, they're still feeling it.

• 55:36Speaker 06

  Still tense.

• 55:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:36Speaker 06

  Just in case.

• 55:38Speaker 04

  There was an interesting thing that museums were faced with a few years ago. This is around 2021. Social media started banning them from posting up lots of their art if nudity was involved. So a group of museums in Vienna created an OnlyFans account where they posted all of these nudes up there. And they were trying to just get their point about the craziness of censorship that was going on.

• 56:01Speaker 06

  And there you go. And there's your excuse. Million men listening for the reason you have the OnlyFans account.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  I was going for the Vienna art thing and my finger just slipped onto Big Boob McGee or whatever. I followed Big Boob McGee too. Oh, she's good.

• 56:20Speaker 04

  Love her work.

• 56:22Speaker 06

  That might, yeah, I mean, that's a huge issue, isn't it? Because almost every statue museums are naked. They've got, they've got to rethought that. Just another inadvertent thing that happened when museums were clamped down on. Do you remember last year when the Trump administration was doing its big clampdown on DEI? I mean, it still is. So there's this massive long list of words that they weren't allowed to use in any of their websites, any of their materials. Words included stuff that you'd imagine, like the word inclusion, you're not allowed to use, the word gender, you're not allowed to use, the word pronoun, you're not allowed to use. And I guess they just got an AI or an idiot to just comb through all their websites.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  This has clearly been written by AI or an idiot.

• 56:58Speaker 06

  It's the only two people working for the administration. But the word diversity was on that list. Now, what do museums say all the time? They say, we've got an incredibly diverse collection. So suddenly, all these museums had to remove all mentions of their collections being diverse. And all these website pages were shut down. Just real sledgehammer, sledgehammer nut stuff.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  That's like the London one, the Horniman Museum. Remember all of its emails were getting clogged up in people's spam because it was being registered is a rude word horny man is not coming into your inbox. Now, I found a great one, which is in Hastings, they've got a true crime museum, which is pretty brutal, the exhibits that they have because it is real life crimes in and around the UK, but they were broken into and the person didn't steal anything because the main bit of the museum was behind steel doors and they couldn't break through. So they just went around bashing up cutouts of the Cray brothers and stuff like that.

• 57:52Speaker 06

  Come, that would be satisfying. Getting to punch a Cray brother.

• 57:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, it would be nice, but they managed to catch the guy on CCTV, standing in front of the museum's hype chart for police mug shots. So the quote from the lady at the museum says, he's literally standing right in front of our police mug shot photo opportunity. It's designed for people to stand and write their name and their crime and stand in front of it. And that's the shot we have of him.

• 58:17Speaker 06

  That's brilliant.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  Do you have like a sack and a striped shirt?

• 58:21Speaker 04

  Exactly. And so there was talk about, and I couldn't find if it's been done, but there was talk about turning that moment itself into an exhibit in the museum. So that might actually be something you can see in the museum now.

• 58:31Speaker 06

  Well, you can guarantee it will be turned into a very tedious 52 episode American podcast, but hopefully that's it.

• 58:42Speaker 04

  Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online. I'm on at Shriverland on Instagram. James?

• 58:55Speaker 03

  Coming at me on LinkedIn. James Harkin.

• 58:58Speaker 04

  Bertie, where are you?

• 58:59Speaker 05

  On Instagram at at Crab Museum.

• 59:02Speaker 04

  Yes, that's right. And just a reminder, we said at the top of the show, but Bertie's new book is out. It's written by the Crab Museum, but really it's by Bertie and it's called The No Brainer Brain Explainer. This is your second book after A Natural History of Bums. And it's just absolutely rammed with facts about the brain. It's the perfect thing to be reading your kids. Tell us a bit more about it before we wrap up.

• 59:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's the natural sequel to the bum book because you need a bum in order to ingest enough energy to keep your brain going. And there's a diverse, we'll scrub that word, a diverse amount of animal brains. I mean, like an octopus brain, they've got one in their head where you'd expect there to be. And then eight smaller brains in all of their legs. So is an octopus. One animal? Is it nine animals?

• 59:46Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 59:47Speaker 05

  But yeah, there's all sorts of, all sorts of brains in there.

• 59:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's absolutely awesome. It's beautifully illustrated and it's out now. So get it wherever you get your books and why not come to the seaside and visit the crab museum and the carb museum. They are open now. It's a perfect time of the year to come and see it. And if you want to get to us as a group, by the way, we are where, Anna?

• 1:00:05Speaker 06

  We're on Instagram at nosuchthing or email podcast at qi.com.

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, podcast at qi.com. That's the important one because we want you to send all your feedback there. If it's stuff that you've experienced yourself related to the things we've spoken about. Maybe you've been to the crime museum. Maybe you've been to the Bobby Fischer one.

• 1:00:20Speaker 05

  Maybe something's got up your bum.

• 1:00:23Speaker 04

  Let us know and send pictures, uh, cause we want to talk about it. And all of that will go towards our bonus show, which is part of Club Fish, which is on Patreon. So patreon.com slash Club Fish and that's called Drop Us A Line. We read out the best of your emails there. It's really fun. So check that out. Or if you have a good fact of your own that you want us to read out, we have a Monday bonus show called Little Fish where we read out the best of your stuff and we are doing that weekly. So send it in there and we'll cherry pick the best to bring to the show. But otherwise you can just come back here next week because we will be back with another episode and we'll see you then. Goodbye.

• 1:01:10Speaker 07

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