Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish No Such Thing As A Hedgehog In A Lifeboat About this episode Melanie Bracewell joins Dan, James and Andy to discuss springtime, snot and Selena Gomez.
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Transcript 10,592 words · 6 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Stop the podcast.
0:01 Speaker 01 Stop the podcast.
0:02 Speaker 00 Hi, everybody. We are sponsored this week by Progressive.
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0:27 Speaker 00 They're basically the outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, and baby gates of insurance.
0:32 Speaker 01 Don't wait. Get your quote today at progressive.com.
0:35 Speaker 00 Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. On with the show.
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1:18 Speaker 01 Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Fish. Dan here. Hope you're doing well. Just wanted to let you know before we get into the show about our guest joining us today. It's one of our favorites, someone who's joined us a number of times over the last few years. It is New Zealand comedian Melanie Bracewell. So Mel, if you haven't heard her on the show before, is someone whose work you may have seen in other places. Her stand-up clips are always popping up online for any doom scrollers out there. If you're an Aussie, you'll know her from the TV show she co-hosts called The Cheap Seats. If you're a fan of Taskmaster and have consumed all the international formats, you will have seen Mel on series four of the New Zealand Taskmaster. And if you're a general connoisseur of comedy, it's good to know that she has had a hand in the writing
2:01 Speaker 01 of such shows as the rebooted Time Bandits and also the absolutely brilliant Wellington Paranormal, of which she starred in two episodes. As well. But this is all stuff that's on the screen over on the other side of the planet. What about us in the UK? Well, good news. Mel is in the country right now on a stand-up tour, literally happening as I speak. So the good news is you can see her in person doing the thing she does best, which is stand up with her new show called A Little Treat. And if you want to find all the details for that, go to her Instagram, it's at Melanie Bracewell, or just Google her name and A Little Treat UK Tour. It'll all come up. But basically, as of March 1st, she's going to be in Norwich, then she's going to be going to Brighton, Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Glasgow,
2:46 Speaker 01 Leeds and Cardiff. So it's a limited run, but the tickets are selling fast. So quickly get in now before she heads back over to Oz, where just a heads up for the Aussies and New Zealanders, she's going to be on tour with this show from May. All the details are online. But for now, enjoy her here, dorking out with me, Andy and James on No Such Thing as a Fish. On with the show.
3:25 Speaker 01 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Mel Bracewell. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Mel.
3:50 Speaker 03 My fact this week is that the New Zealand government is stopping invasive species by using Selena Gomez Oreos.
4:01 Speaker 03 It's huge. It's specifically possum. So there's a huge possum problem in New Zealand. There's no natural predators for possums. Basically, they were trying to lure out the really persistent possums that weren't able to be trapped by other means. They say what happens often is that they will go and have a little bit of bait, get a bit sick, and then go, I'm never gonna eat that bait ever again. Or they get almost stuck in a trap, and then they don't ever go towards traps again. So they were trying to find something that would lure these possums that are very afraid of the traps in. And what worked specifically was Oreos, but not just any Oreos. They had to be the Selena Gomez Oreos.
4:42 Speaker 01 Why did they like them so much?
4:43 Speaker 03 So they have like a combination of chocolate and cinnamon that the possums just love.
4:49 Speaker 01 What a review. What a review for the Oreos.
4:51 Speaker 04 I reckon I would be straight in those traps.
4:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, really?
4:54 Speaker 05 They do sound, they sound very nice. This is not an advert for Selena Gomez or for Oreos. But they, you know, she's put a lot of work into the flavour profile, I think. Oh, yeah, it was like years. She really wanted to be-
5:06 Speaker 01 She was in the lab, wasn't she?
5:07 Speaker 05 She wanted to be an Oreo person.
5:08 Speaker 01 That hasn't been a new album from her in quite some time.
5:10 Speaker 05 She's a singer.
5:11 Speaker 01 I didn't know that. Sorry, who do you think Selena Gomez is?
5:15 Speaker 05 I don't know. I was asking.
5:16 Speaker 01 A scientist?
5:17 Speaker 03 This was an article on the Spinoff, which is a New Zealand website. And that was one of my favourite parts of the article, is that the scientist does not know who Selena Gomez is. He said, "I don't know who she is, I just know she makes a good Oreo."
5:29 Speaker 05 She has made no comment. They have asked repeatedly, "What do you think that your Oreos are being used to wipe out possums in New Zealand?"
5:38 Speaker 04 She's a busy woman.
5:39 Speaker 05 She's a busy woman.
5:40 Speaker 01 What's a tough gig as well, because it is being used for what is getting rid of a pest. You kind of- It's being used to protect native New Zealand birds. Absolutely. But at a cost of killing an animal. If you're against that, that's a big issue, I guess.
5:52 Speaker 04 Like, if you sent her an email this week, I don't know if you did or not, but if you sent her an email saying, "Dear Miss Gomez, have you been killing animals in New Zealand?" She's not gonna respond to that.
6:02 Speaker 01 P.S. What do you do? What's your line of work? The line she's used as the strapline is, "Great for movie night, and make wonderful birthday treats, and music-
6:10 Speaker 05 Award watch party snacks. She didn't include an exterminating an invasive species.
6:15 Speaker 03 The initial experiment that they had toyed with, what they would do is they'd leave these, these things outside of traps so that the, the possums would get a taste for them. And what they were toying up was actually using drugs, like addictive drugs.
6:28 Speaker 05 Right.
6:29 Speaker 03 Uh, and then they read a study about like chocolate and cinnamon having similar properties and similar properties of addiction. And so they would leave them out and not trap them and then get them addicted to these Oreos and then.
6:42 Speaker 04 That's really interesting.
6:43 Speaker 05 Well, they're gonna stop making these things. This is a limited edition Oreo.
6:46 Speaker 03 That's the issue. Yeah.
6:48 Speaker 05 They're gonna run out and they're gonna need something else to lure in the, um, the possums into the traps.
6:52 Speaker 04 Yeah. No, so it's things of fish Kit Kats?
6:54 Speaker 05 Yes.
6:56 Speaker 04 What do you think?
6:56 Speaker 05 I don't wanna be part of.
6:57 Speaker 04 Perfect for podcast listening parties.
7:00 Speaker 05 Fish, are we saying fish flavored Kit Kat?
7:02 Speaker 04 No, cinnamon and chocolate.
7:03 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah. No, the possums aren't gonna eat that. Fish flavored Kit Kat. Well, I think I would. Would you? Yeah, yeah. Yum. Fish ringer.
7:12 Speaker 05 It's not a legally protected term, I'm sure. Right. Very true.
7:14 Speaker 04 So these guys have come over to New Zealand from Australia. Is that right?
7:18 Speaker 03 Um, yeah, Australia. And then there's some people that have been introduced from England as well. And sorry, guys, sorry to bring it up. Um, but what they found.
7:29 Speaker 04 We were booked for that, Tom. We were asked to come. Um, so the reason that they're not a problem as much in Australia is because they do have predators. And one of them is the powerful owl.
7:42 Speaker 03 Oh.
7:43 Speaker 04 And the powerful owl is Australia's largest owl and it is able to disembowel a possum in less than 20 seconds.
7:50 Speaker 05 Wow. That's impressive when you say it like that, but I've no metric of how long it should take me to disembowel a possum. Do you know what I mean?
7:58 Speaker 03 Bring it in.
8:03 Speaker 04 Yeah, I know what you mean. But the reason, interestingly, the reason they disembowel it is because they're meat eaters and they're not interested in eating vegetables, but the possums eat vegetables. And so they don't want to eat the insides because they're just full of useless green stuff. They want to eat the meat.
8:19 Speaker 05 That is insane. What is the equivalent of a kid picking the peas out of their food? Nice.
8:27 Speaker 05 Do you know why possums were brought over to New Zealand in the first place? They were brought over for the fur trade.
8:31 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
8:32 Speaker 05 And it didn't work for fur, but then the numbers exploded. And I think there are now 47 million, give or take, which ironically would be plenty for a thriving.
8:42 Speaker 03 That's a lot of fur.
8:43 Speaker 05 Thriving fur trade.
8:44 Speaker 04 That's what the fur trade then said, like, maybe about 15, 20 years ago. They were like, hey, why don't we turn these guys into lovely pelts? And everyone, that's a really good idea. Wait a minute, weren't you the guys who brought them over in the first place?
8:55 Speaker 05 I'm not trying to say I'm on the side of big fur.
8:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:58 Speaker 05 But then, and they, as you say, you've got loads of invasive things. You've got weasels and stoats and rabbits. The really annoying thing, the stoats were brought in to control the rabbits, which had been brought in.
9:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
9:10 Speaker 03 Yeah. It's the old lady who swallowed a fly thing. Yeah, yeah.
9:14 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:14 Speaker 03 It's mad.
9:15 Speaker 01 The other thing they're doing with them is it's become a bit of a delicacy over in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan and China and so on. And so they're sold over there and they're sold under the name Kiwi Bear.
9:25 Speaker 04 Oh.
9:26 Speaker 05 That's the meal that you have.
9:27 Speaker 04 Yeah.
9:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, it does, doesn't it? Yeah.
9:30 Speaker 03 One pest that really ravages New Zealand and it's more difficult to get rid of are hedgehogs. And what people think is because hedgehogs are quite cute, is that they're cuter and they're diabolical. They'll eat, they'll eat birds' eggs and things like that. But because people think they're cute, they're less likely to want to poison them.
9:50 Speaker 04 Can I give you a tip to get rid of them?
9:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
9:51 Speaker 04 Build bonfires.
9:52 Speaker 03 Okay.
9:53 Speaker 04 Because when we were a kid, we were told that if you build a bonfire, a hedgehog will always go inside it. So you have to check it before you set it on fire, the hedgehogs.
10:00 Speaker 05 That's true.
10:00 Speaker 04 So I think they're attracted to the moss something.
10:02 Speaker 05 They hibernate in them, don't they?
10:03 Speaker 04 Do they?
10:04 Speaker 05 They go and they think, oh, lovely, nice pile of leaves. And they're like, yeah, yeah.
10:07 Speaker 01 I'm worried about this.
10:08 Speaker 03 I love that your responses make it look like an accident.
10:13 Speaker 01 It's called the Beatrix Potter Effect is why it's too cute. Apparently there are more in New Zealand than in Britain, which is why they're obviously native to Britain, they're not native to New Zealand. And it's been proposed that we put all the hedgehogs on a big ship and sail it over.
10:25 Speaker 03 Yeah.
10:26 Speaker 01 But I don't think it's practical. I've not been proposed by anyone.
10:29 Speaker 03 What they had said was that the reason they introduced it was to remind settlers of gardens in the UK.
10:35 Speaker 04 Is the reason that you put them on a big ship and send them back because if you put them on a small dinghy, they're just gonna pop the thing?
10:42 Speaker 01 Yep. So I'm just thinking if it did hit something and they had to do an escape, quick, everyone into the emergency. Oh shit.
10:52 Speaker 04 Women and children first, hedgehogs definitely last.
10:57 Speaker 05 Is it controversial that, because I know that you've got this whole brilliant national scheme.
11:00 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:01 Speaker 05 I love it.
11:01 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:02 Speaker 05 Predator free New Zealand.
11:03 Speaker 03 Yes.
11:04 Speaker 05 I'm a fan of all those individual elements, right?
11:06 Speaker 03 You guys are trying it here, very slowly though.
11:09 Speaker 05 We're starting at the top.
11:10 Speaker 04 That's a Prince Andrew joke.
11:13 Speaker 03 I was trying to get there, but I didn't want to say it.
11:17 Speaker 04 We've just all had a buzz on our phones that he's been arrested, just for context.
11:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, have you tried arresting the possum? Sorry, but it seems like it's a very sort of big community effort. You know, people are setting up traps in their gardens. There was this school in 2022 on a place called, is it Rakira or Stuart Island?
11:36 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
11:37 Speaker 05 And they had a 100 day challenge for the children to kill as many rodents as possible. And the 40 students who were taking part, they caught 600 rats between them. One five year old did in 60 rats over three months.
11:50 Speaker 03 That's the thing that they say if a kid is trying to harm animals, that's like the sign of a psychopath, but we're trying to sort of just get them to get to that point.
11:58 Speaker 01 Well, I think it's a controversial thing to an extent because about a decade before that in 2010, a school got questioned because they did this, they did this kind of hunt for possums and for rats, but then they got the kids to play a game of possum tossing where who could, who could throw the possum the furthest? And we did a lot of surveys to see how people felt about that.
12:20 Speaker 04 I gotta say in 20 years' time, you guys are gonna have an enormous prison population or some incredible sports teams with just a killer instinct.
12:29 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
12:30 Speaker 05 The New Zealand empire begins to spread across the world.
12:33 Speaker 04 It can go the other way. So, uh, New Zealand has bush ticks, as do Australia, uh, but they've recently been introduced to America.
12:42 Speaker 05 Oh.
12:42 Speaker 04 Uh, with quite a lot of problems. And so much so, the first one they found, uh, was a couple of years ago, uh, in New Jersey. And a woman had been shearing her sheep and she came in with these ticks over her and said, I think there's a problem here. And it turned out to be these invasive ones. And she had so many on her, she had over a thousand on her pants alone.
13:03 Speaker 05 Wow.
13:03 Speaker 03 Oh my god.
13:04 Speaker 04 She was just head to toe in these ticks.
13:06 Speaker 05 In ticks?
13:06 Speaker 04 What, is this a person or a sheep? It was a person. Got it.
13:09 Speaker 05 And she survived?
13:10 Speaker 04 She survived, yeah.
13:11 Speaker 05 Tick bites, if you don't get the, if you don't pull them out and leave the head in, particularly Aussie ones, you get Lyme disease.
13:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, I assume they just sprayed her with something not very nice and the ticks fell off.
13:21 Speaker 05 Oh, what a pickle to be in. That's what it is, isn't it? What's the pickle? Like, as in?
13:28 Speaker 04 I'm covered in a thousand ticks. There's no good side.
13:30 Speaker 05 Oh, I thought a pickle means like, you, what a pickle I'm, I'm myself in.
13:33 Speaker 03 Do you think that there's two sides to a pickle?
13:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:35 Speaker 03 And I, I think, I think being in a pickle is, is bad overall.
13:39 Speaker 04 Isn't it? What about that saying, there's two sides to every pickle?
13:44 Speaker 04 That's the name of my autobiography.
13:47 Speaker 03 Oh, I guess that the, in a pickle, you think of someone who's trying to make a decision, right?
13:51 Speaker 05 What a pickle I find myself in. No, you're in trouble.
13:54 Speaker 03 It's like whether, but in a pickle, it's kind of both sides are still bad, right?
13:58 Speaker 05 Yeah. You're on the horns of a dilemma. You're in a pickle. Oh, nightmare.
14:01 Speaker 04 What Mel say.
14:04 Speaker 05 Unbelievable. You can't rely on guests just to hoof you out of problems.
14:10 Speaker 05 Mel, have you ever seen a peacock wild in New Zealand?
14:12 Speaker 03 I haven't seen them wild in New Zealand. I think I may have seen them wild in Australia.
14:16 Speaker 05 Oh, okay. Cause they're a big problem in New Zealand as well.
14:18 Speaker 03 Yeah.
14:18 Speaker 05 Which I didn't know about. And it's partly because, um, the opossums have been successfully trapped and hunted in various areas.
14:23 Speaker 03 Yeah.
14:24 Speaker 05 Now, no one's eating those delicious, delicious peacock eggs. They're also invasive and they, they're, they're feral and they're very hard to catch because they're very wary of humans. They flee, they do lots of damage to crops and things like that. But obviously they're also very beautiful and majestic.
14:37 Speaker 03 Yeah.
14:38 Speaker 04 Best animals to get over there, really.
14:40 Speaker 05 That is, that is huge. But it is for the amazing birds of New Zealand, which are beautiful. And in the areas where they've managed to fence it off, they've done various islands. The birds have all come back. Yeah. And it's now a cacophony of incredible birds nesting there. And it's, it's, it is pretty amazing. It is beautiful. Yeah. And if it takes a million possum skulls to crush under our heels, we'll do it.
15:00 Speaker 01 Fish Kit Kats are now available in your local stores.
15:06 Speaker 00 Stop the podcast.
15:07 Speaker 01 Stop the podcast.
15:09 Speaker 00 Hi, everybody. We are sponsored this week by Progressive.
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15:39 Speaker 01 Don't wait. Get your quote today at progressive.com.
15:41 Speaker 00 Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states. On with the show.
15:50 Speaker 01 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that one of the reasons married couples slept in twin beds in Victorian England is because doctors claimed that the weak sleepers stole their partner's vitality during the night.
16:05 Speaker 04 Hmm. I think that's true.
16:08 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:09 Speaker 01 Interesting.
16:10 Speaker 04 Would you say like if I'm snoring all night and my wife's just gonna wake up tired?
16:14 Speaker 01 Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I think though it could be the, the weak sleeper is also the one who wakes easily. So you would be, so it's, it's, you know, it's a hell of a pickle, this situation.
16:25 Speaker 05 And what's the good part of it? This isn't about snoring and waking up. This is just about someone being an energy drain.
16:32 Speaker 04 Is that what it is?
16:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. It's sapping the vital essence.
16:35 Speaker 01 It went more, didn't it? It was like electromagnetic energy was being sucked from you.
16:39 Speaker 04 In that case, who the hell is saying this shit?
16:42 Speaker 01 Well, this is, this is Victorian England, so.
16:45 Speaker 04 Oh, right. Okay.
16:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, all of it, all of Victorian England. We're currently looking. Into getting twin beds in our house. And as happens with you guys, you start Googling stuff and you go, what do I know about twin beds? Unfortunately.
16:55 Speaker 04 But the thing is with you, this is getting more intimate because previously you're in bunk beds.
16:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm, I'm currently sleeping in a bottom bunk bed of my son's room while my wife's in bed with our three kids. Yeah.
17:08 Speaker 05 Looking into getting twin beds.
17:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, but not for me and my wife, for our, for our two youngest kids.
17:12 Speaker 05 Okay, thank you, context.
17:16 Speaker 03 Now you know that your vitality is being drained. It may change.
17:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. Fortunately, someone had the same question about the history of twin beds, and that was Lancaster University Professor Hilary Hines. And she wrote a cultural history of twin beds. As she was looking into it, she discovered that it was believed in around 1860s that it would literally be taking away your energy.
17:37 Speaker 03 But the quotes are so extreme. This was one of my favorites.
17:42 Speaker 03 Each sleeper should have a single bed in a large, clean light room so as to pass all the hours of sleep in a pure, fresh air. And those who fail in this will in the end fail in health and strength of lemon brain and will die while their days are not all told. It's so, it's like, they should, you should do this. And then it's going, no, you'll die. You will die.
18:02 Speaker 05 It's very powerful, you know, it's quite persuasive.
18:05 Speaker 04 There's like quite a longstanding history of people sleeping in separate rooms even in the British aristocracy. And that is because, well, for lots of different reasons. One reason, because you're just gonna have a better night's sleep quite often. But secondly, because they thought that it was unhealthy to sleep in the same bed because germ theory had just come out and they didn't really know how the germs would work. And the other thing is like, if you wanted a bit of romance, you could go to your partner's room rather than sort of like nudging them with a cold foot and saying, do you fancy a bit? You actually have to knock on the door and say, you know, let me in.
18:42 Speaker 03 Your seduction techniques in real time.
18:45 Speaker 04 Interesting that you assume that was my technique and that my wife's technique.
18:50 Speaker 03 We seem to be in a pickle.
18:53 Speaker 05 There's also the other thing of this with, so the Edwardian, so early 20th century, a big bit of the reason that they had separate rooms was to allow adultery.
19:05 Speaker 04 Oh.
19:06 Speaker 05 Bam, bam, bam. Because upper class Edwardian society was absolutely rife with adultery and it was kind of expected that a husband and wife would get married, they'd have some children and then once the children are out, it's free play. And so. Out of the house or the womb? Out of the womb. Okay, so while the children are still living there. Ideally, they'll be at school or off on a trip or whatever. No, no, but it's not when they've grown up and moved out. It's literally in the, in the family home. It's literally, well, it's, it's especially not just in the family home, but in grand houses where you might go visiting, you might go for a weekend party at someone's house. So you'd have single rooms and some of these rooms have little brass brackets outside with a little name label saying exactly who's in where. And supposedly it was to help the butler identify who was who.
19:51 Speaker 05 But it had a very useful second purpose of allowing a bit of hanky panky. So you're not knocking on the wrong door in the middle of the night and ending up in a real, you know, tangle.
20:00 Speaker 04 Even more than that, there was a house called Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire, which was the biggest house in England, basically. And they, when they had all the toffs coming to visit, they gave everyone a map to all the bedrooms.
20:13 Speaker 05 Brilliant.
20:13 Speaker 04 So you could kind of look at the map and go, oh, I want to go to Mrs Jones's room. So I need to go up here, down there, round there. This Wentworth Woodhouse was the biggest private house in the whole of England.
20:25 Speaker 05 Right.
20:25 Speaker 04 Victorian era, how many bedrooms do you think it had?
20:29 Speaker 05 Ooh.
20:30 Speaker 04 Riddle me this.
20:32 Speaker 05 I'll say, I mean, bedrooms, I'll say high double figures. Yeah. I mean, it can't have more than about 50 or 60 bedrooms, I would assume. I was going way more. I had to get the dad crushing.
20:47 Speaker 03 I mean, it's, it's.
20:48 Speaker 05 Or a million.
20:52 Speaker 03 I feel like the other times I've been on this podcast, Dan, you always ruin the guessing game because you guess so high. And so then the real fact feels kind of lame in comparison.
21:02 Speaker 01 You're meant to be backing me up. Don't listen to Andy.
21:06 Speaker 03 Oh, sorry, sorry.
21:06 Speaker 01 Well, no, I think, because I was thinking that I know George Harrison has a house, which is absolutely monstrous. Like, it's huge. And I thought that that had in the hundreds. I thought that had close to like 400. So I'm going to say 400 rooms.
21:21 Speaker 03 Okay, I'm gonna say, well, maybe I'll lowball it. I'll say 42.
21:27 Speaker 04 Okay, okay.
21:29 Speaker 01 I said 50 or 60.
21:31 Speaker 03 Yeah.
21:31 Speaker 01 42, 400.
21:33 Speaker 04 George Harrison's kind of had 400. My sweet lord, Dan is the closest.
21:37 Speaker 03 Oh my gosh, I'm sorry for doubting you.
21:40 Speaker 01 There we go.
21:40 Speaker 04 300 rooms.
21:42 Speaker 03 Wow.
21:42 Speaker 01 Wow.
21:43 Speaker 04 Basically, they would have big hunting parties where everyone would come and shoot guns and stay in all the rooms.
21:49 Speaker 01 But interestingly, interesting, it was only two bathrooms because of the plumbing arrangements of the time. And that was fine. Yeah.
21:55 Speaker 04 Yeah.
21:55 Speaker 01 And twin beds were quite modern. This is the interesting thing. Because of the association with greater hygiene and not having your energy sapped away from you, they were seen from the late 19th century and early 20th to be the modern thing. Now we think of them as being quite old fashioned, but they were really kind of modern and quite cool.
22:13 Speaker 04 They were, but again, it was for the richer people.
22:16 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
22:17 Speaker 04 And it's normal people, like forever, normal people would share beds. And then what happened was around the 50s, there are a few different reasons, but one of the reasons is television started to be more realistic and television shows would show married couple. And also the Hayes Code had finished, so people were allowed to show men and women in bed together. So people started showing men and women in bed together. And everyone thought, well, now that's the modern thing. That's the fashionable thing.
22:44 Speaker 01 That's what changed it.
22:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's a few different things.
22:46 Speaker 01 The Hayes Code was fascinating because in Hollywood, you had a guideline saying don'ts and be carefuls within movies. So the don'ts were explicitly do not do this. The be carefuls were this is the guideline, if you're going to do this kind of scene. And if someone who is watching it finds that offensive, they will not allow for that to be in the movie. So one of the things.
23:06 Speaker 05 That's very useful in the bedroom too, to have don'ts and be carefuls.
23:09 Speaker 01 Yes.
23:09 Speaker 05 You know?
23:10 Speaker 04 And he's got a side on the side of his bed. No heavy petting, no bonning, no running.
23:15 Speaker 03 No cold foot nudging me.
23:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, this was a big problem for Hollywood. So there's a specific example of a movie where the marital bed was one mattress and it was a Lucille Ball movie and they had to reshoot the scenes. So it cost $30,000 for them to go and reshoot this. And it was simply that they just had to have it something like 12 inches apart. That was like the expected length of how far the beds needed to be apart.
23:46 Speaker 05 Not enough distance for me, am I right?
23:52 Speaker 05 Oh my god.
23:55 Speaker 01 Okay, so some opinions about whether you prefer to sleep in bed with a partner or not.
23:58 Speaker 04 Okay.
23:59 Speaker 01 This is a recent poll by YouGov. 5% say their dream arrangement is different beds in the same room. So that is twin beds.
24:07 Speaker 04 Okay.
24:08 Speaker 01 10% say different beds in different rooms is the dream. 76% say same bed in same room.
24:15 Speaker 04 Hmm.
24:15 Speaker 03 Interesting.
24:16 Speaker 01 Nobody says same bed but different rooms.
24:22 Speaker 03 Wow, what a challenge.
24:23 Speaker 01 Just my preference.
24:24 Speaker 03 Well, there was some studies that determine that often when people sleep with their partner, their subjective view of how well they slept was higher, but the truth is that they had a worse sleep.
24:37 Speaker 01 Oh, interesting.
24:38 Speaker 03 Which I feel like is what sleep trackers do to my brain, where I feel like I've had a great sleep and I'll wake up and I'll say, you've had a horrendous sleep and then I'll be in a bad mood. I'll go, well, it told me I've had a bad sleep. So I'll spend the rest of my day feeling bad. But then the opposite, I'll have a tear, feel like I've had a terrible sleep and then my phone will say, it was a great one. I'll go, you know what, let's really put a people in my step.
24:59 Speaker 01 Yeah. I think for a lot of people, if you have a partner, there's a sense of safety.
25:02 Speaker 03 Yes.
25:03 Speaker 01 So you sort of turn around, they're there, everything's okay. So it doesn't matter that you woke up, you did it so you could check and you feel a lot more safe.
25:09 Speaker 05 Did you read the Marie Stoops line?
25:11 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:13 Speaker 05 Marie Stoops, who was very, very famous for writing a book called Married Love. And she was a campaigner for birth control?
25:21 Speaker 04 Yes.
25:22 Speaker 05 Yes, big campaigner for that, that kind of thing. She wrote that the twin bed set was an invention of the devil, jealous of married bliss.
25:30 Speaker 03 I hate you.
25:31 Speaker 05 And she proposed that you shouldn't have twin beds. Instead, the wife should have a room with a double bed and the husband should have a bedroom to himself for general use, keeping the wife's bedroom a romantic place.
25:42 Speaker 04 I think. And then the husband can like have a bed that's in the shape of a race car.
25:48 Speaker 04 I'd hate my Tuesday.
25:50 Speaker 05 Yes. I would kill for that versus the Bifed right now.
25:55 Speaker 03 Um, on, on an unusual, uh, bed sharing, uh, story. Um, this John Adams and Benjamin Franklin shared a bed once. Uh, it's an excerpt from his diary.
26:07 Speaker 05 President, John Adams of America.
26:09 Speaker 03 Yes.
26:10 Speaker 05 And, okay.
26:10 Speaker 03 In seventeen seventy six, uh, he described the time he had to share a tiny bed with Benjamin Franklin. And instead of sleeping, they had an argument about whether to keep the windows open or closed. Franklin eventually won the argument when Adams got too tired and fell asleep.
26:23 Speaker 05 Nice. Who really wins because Adams has fallen asleep first.
26:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's true.
26:28 Speaker 04 And also Adams became president and Franklin never did.
26:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Double win. Double win for Adams. You did Franklin. Nice.
26:36 Speaker 04 I mentioned before that snoring is a problem. There's been a new study that gives you a way out of snoring.
26:42 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
26:42 Speaker 04 Uh, and that is before you go to bed, you have to blow on a conch shell.
26:48 Speaker 05 Oh, no way.
26:50 Speaker 04 I, you might have seen this study before that if you blow on didgeridoos, that's supposed to help because it helps your breathing. You have to do circular breathing.
26:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
26:58 Speaker 04 Well, apparently conch shells are even better because if you learn properly how to blow a conch shell, you have to do very deep breathing, have to do very strong exhalations. And also the spiral shape of the shell gives like a, you, a unique kind of type of blow. That means you won't snore.
27:14 Speaker 05 No way. I need to, I do snore. Well, I've, well, I've got a conch. Do you?
27:18 Speaker 03 Wow. Oh my gosh.
27:21 Speaker 05 Sleepover party? Absolutely.
27:22 Speaker 04 That's how Andy manages his household, isn't it? You're only allowed to speak if you're holding it.
27:27 Speaker 05 And I never get hold of it. I'm so annoying.
27:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, no, I've got a big blowable. It makes an incredible note when you blow it. It's really good. Where'd you get it from? Uh, uh, long, long way away.
27:39 Speaker 03 Under the sea.
27:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, it was a, it was an island, a holiday in, I think somewhere like the Caribbean. It was many years ago and, uh, but you, it makes a great noise.
27:47 Speaker 04 Was it not, was it not when your school crashed on that desert island that time?
27:53 Speaker 05 I'd rather not talk about that weekend.
27:57 Speaker 03 If you were the only survivor, how weak were the rest?
28:08 Speaker 05 I was king of that island, Mel.
28:12 Speaker 05 Wow. Wearing, wearing my opossum skull armour.
28:22 Speaker 01 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy.
28:26 Speaker 05 My fact is, it's eight degrees warmer inside a daffodil than outside.
28:30 Speaker 03 Oh, cute.
28:32 Speaker 05 If you're feeling chilly and you're listening to this and there's a daffodil nearby, spring is coming. Um, just get it, get it in there. You could put at most a little pinky.
28:41 Speaker 03 Are you about to open up what I think you're about to open up yet?
28:43 Speaker 05 No.
28:43 Speaker 03 Oh no, okay. Cause I was, when I saw the list of facts, I saw a daffodil out while I was going for a walk. And so I put my finger in the daffodil and I sent the photo to Dan and he did not reply to the photo.
28:57 Speaker 05 I'm sorry, but.
28:57 Speaker 03 So it was such an ominous thing to send.
29:00 Speaker 05 It was uncomfortable when I was sitting next to my wife and Mel slipped into my DMs with a picture of her fingering a daffodil.
29:09 Speaker 03 I think doing some research for the show.
29:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's the photo there. Amazing.
29:15 Speaker 04 Was it what?
29:15 Speaker 05 Yeah.
29:15 Speaker 03 It, I can't, I can't tell. It was such a cold day that I don't know, like, cause it's up to eight degrees, right? That requires probably a bit of sunshine, but I don't know.
29:25 Speaker 04 You probably also need to keep it in there for a certain amount of time and you can't just stand there with your finger in a daffodil.
29:32 Speaker 05 The park, the park keeper will, will pop over. Um, but basically the daffodil's really interesting. They're not like a normal flower because they've got this trumpet thing, which, which most flowers don't have. And they want to get bees in and, and pollinating insects in general. And often daffs are some of the first flowers of spring, so it's quite cold still when they're up. And the cone acts as a windbreak and the petals are directing sunlight inwards. And third thing, the stem is turning the trumpet away from cold breezes. So basically they're making it a lovely, as warm as possible environment to lure in any pollinating insects that are up and about at this time of year.
30:09 Speaker 03 I love it. It's like a restaurant with a fireplace.
30:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's very nice. So it's very, very charming.
30:15 Speaker 04 Cause I think there aren't any bees around at this time of year, are there really?
30:19 Speaker 05 No, probably not.
30:20 Speaker 04 So I think they'll be pollinated by flies.
30:22 Speaker 05 Yes.
30:23 Speaker 04 And this is the thing, the flies that are around this time of year, they tend to be colourblind. And so that's why the flowers that you see this time of year, like snowdrops and daffodils, are white and yellow because they stand out against the green.
30:36 Speaker 05 Contrast is the main thing. Yeah, yeah.
30:38 Speaker 04 And then later in the year, you get more colorful ones.
30:41 Speaker 05 So good.
30:41 Speaker 03 Does the heat in the daffodil sort of warm up the pollen? So it's like, like a hot meal? Is there like, is there any?
30:49 Speaker 05 Yeah, I like it. Uh, yes, I'm gonna say yes, it absolutely does.
30:52 Speaker 04 Anyone have your daffs out already?
30:54 Speaker 05 What's? Yes.
30:55 Speaker 04 We're recording this on the 19th of February.
30:57 Speaker 05 I've got a couple in my garden.
30:58 Speaker 01 I do. They started coming up a few days ago. Yeah.
31:00 Speaker 04 How are they looking?
31:01 Speaker 05 They're looking, uh, yellow.
31:03 Speaker 04 Yeah. Is the head like bent a little bit?
31:05 Speaker 05 It is. It's bending down.
31:06 Speaker 04 Oh dear. Because according to English folklore, that means you're gonna die this year.
31:11 Speaker 05 Oh damn.
31:13 Speaker 04 Dear me.
31:13 Speaker 05 Oh no. Now that is a pickle.
31:19 Speaker 05 Beautiful flowers or death? Oh, that's very funny.
31:24 Speaker 04 If you dream of them, uh, any maiden who dreams of daffodils is warned not to go into a wood with her lover.
31:30 Speaker 05 Right.
31:31 Speaker 04 Uh, and if you see the first daffodil of the year out of all your friends and stuff, it means you will have more gold than silver for the rest of the year. Although silver's doing quite well, isn't it?
31:41 Speaker 05 Both are overpriced at the moment. Yeah, yeah.
31:44 Speaker 04 It doesn't say anything about Bitcoin.
31:47 Speaker 03 But even more gold than silver doesn't necessarily mean like more money. If you had, uh, like a million silver coins and two gold coins, you still have more wealth overall.
31:59 Speaker 04 And also they're both good things. It's like a reverse pickle.
32:06 Speaker 01 Um, the daffodil bending over though.
32:08 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:09 Speaker 01 I mean, that's, that's quite, um, sort of daffodil-ish to do, I would say. I would say it's a classic daffodil move. Um, in fact, the name daffodil, when it goes back to Narcissus, uh, which is what the family it's from, is it? Yeah. Um, that was obviously because when Narcissus was looking down into the water, he couldn't stop staring at his reflection.
32:29 Speaker 05 Yeah.
32:29 Speaker 01 In the mythology and they say that daffodils do the same. They look down at the water, they're looking at themselves.
32:33 Speaker 04 But do you know that that Narcissus is actually Narcissus poeticus? It seems, which is a different, it's not the daffodil that you know. It's a related daffodil which is white. And so the, like, and that's the one that Linnaeus called Thanassisus because he based it on that bit of mythology.
32:52 Speaker 01 Oh, I didn't know that.
32:54 Speaker 04 And the one that we have is just a related flower.
32:55 Speaker 01 We just have a related flower? That's so interesting.
32:57 Speaker 05 This is the really weird thing. There are 36 different species of daffodil, right? But they became very popular for breeding and crossbreeding and making your own variety. So different to species is variety, right? So there are 36 species of daff, but there are 27,000 varieties.
33:14 Speaker 01 Yes.
33:15 Speaker 05 It's crazy.
33:16 Speaker 01 And there's, there's actually.
33:17 Speaker 05 I just love it. And loads, and loads of them are not attractive to insects.
33:20 Speaker 01 Right.
33:21 Speaker 05 Because they've been bred by plant breeders for their looks, they've not been breeding them for their, you know, their, their pollen qualities or anything, or their attractiveness to insects. Uh, so they've taken over the process. So that selection process has, has meant that lots of daff that you get these days are not actually as special and delicious.
33:37 Speaker 04 So humans have to go in and propagate them, do they?
33:39 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. If you look carefully, if you just like, if you have a garden or some daff in your garden, just keep an eye out because you'll often find a creepy old man.
33:46 Speaker 04 With a finger in the daffodil.
33:48 Speaker 03 I'll send the photo to all of you guys so you can have that.
33:55 Speaker 01 But there's, there's lots of, um, if you go online, there's lots of missing daffodils in the UK now of these crossbreeds that they're really hoping are still out there. So you can find a list of people saying, if you live in this area, so for example, Lewis, uh, in the UK, in Sussex, um, there is a, a daffodil that's known as the Sussex Bonfire. So they have a big bonfire night celebration there in a local.
34:16 Speaker 03 And so many dead hedgehogs.
34:18 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah, there's a local plant breeder called Noel Borough who created this thing and it hasn't been seen for the last 20 years, but they think it must still be in someone's garden. They just haven't identified it. So they sort of say, please look around, see if you can find it.
34:32 Speaker 03 But they look so similar, it's like a Weas Wally. Cause it's like, do they look like a, a ordinary daffodil? Or they've got different qualities?
34:37 Speaker 01 I think, no, I think they do have different qualities.
34:39 Speaker 03 Okay, alright.
34:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. There's the, uh, the Mrs. R. O. Backhouse daffodil as well that's missing. They're desperately hoping to find the Mrs. William Copeland daffodil. There's all these amazing little crossbreeds that have become famous.
34:50 Speaker 04 This could be your new show, Dan, Daffodil Hunters.
34:52 Speaker 01 Yes.
34:53 Speaker 04 I feel like going around looking for interesting daffodils.
34:56 Speaker 01 Yes.
34:57 Speaker 04 It's like, you know, um, what's his name? Bob Mortimer, like his show where he just fishes and, you know, people love it because it's like nice and relaxing. You see lots of countryside, but you also get a great comedian.
35:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:09 Speaker 05 I think that's a really good idea.
35:10 Speaker 01 Just me crawling through people's gardens.
35:13 Speaker 04 Just looking for a rare daffodil.
35:16 Speaker 05 But I'm doing it with rummish.
35:19 Speaker 04 Have you guys heard of Peter Barr, the daffodil king?
35:23 Speaker 05 No, no.
35:24 Speaker 03 No.
35:24 Speaker 04 So daffodils originally came from Spain and Portugal and then they were brought here by the Romans. And that means that in Spain and Portugal, you have lots of different varieties of daffodils. And in order to make the new ones, you need to get some of the old ones and then cross them. So he rode through Spain and Portugal, sleeping under rocks with only a single blanket for comfort. And was once mistaken for a famous bandit by police as he went around looking for daffodils. And he made thousands and thousands of these.
35:54 Speaker 03 Sounds like something someone says to say that they're tough, like I just sleep under rocks every day.
35:58 Speaker 05 Under rocks is weird.
36:01 Speaker 03 Sounds like something from the manosphere.
36:05 Speaker 04 My wife has her own bed and of course I just sleep under rocks.
36:11 Speaker 04 And I read a newspaper clipping about this guy, Peter Barr, the daffodil king. And the clipping said that the only other man close to claiming the title was Dorian Smith. But that gentleman is too content with his ownership of the silly isles to enter in a vain rivalry.
36:27 Speaker 05 He owned the silly isles? These are little islands off the coast of Cornwall, is it? They're very, they're really, yeah, yeah.
36:34 Speaker 01 Cornwall is king of daffodils.
36:35 Speaker 04 Is it?
36:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's the biggest producer of daffodils in the world.
36:38 Speaker 05 Well, Britain is the biggest country. It's like this is, we're world leaders in daff production.
36:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:43 Speaker 05 It's not nothing.
36:46 Speaker 01 Thirty, thirty million tonnes of bulbs.
36:49 Speaker 04 Thirty million tonnes of bulbs?
36:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
36:51 Speaker 05 That doesn't sound plausible.
36:53 Speaker 01 It could, that could be a number that's over a hundred years. I'm not sure if that's an annual produce, but.
36:57 Speaker 05 Oh, right.
36:58 Speaker 01 No, of course it is.
37:00 Speaker 04 Interesting.
37:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, that's unbelievable.
37:02 Speaker 04 And it's why I just cut flowers, people buy them because they look nice.
37:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. But I, we have mentioned this before, but I forgot it. They're very poisonous.
37:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, like cats or dogs and things can't eat it.
37:14 Speaker 01 Well, and humans.
37:15 Speaker 03 And humans, oh yes.
37:19 Speaker 03 My worry.
37:22 Speaker 05 Well, no, but this is a problem because often when you go into a local supermarket, the flowers will be positioned right next to the fruit and veg, right? And there's been people that are saying you've got to stop leaving the daffodils near the Chinese vegetables, near the onions, because they can be mistaken for them. And people have been hospitalized quite a few times.
37:40 Speaker 04 If you have a daffodil like-
37:42 Speaker 03 Like mistaken for?
37:44 Speaker 04 So they're often sold, they're not open yet, right?
37:46 Speaker 05 Yeah.
37:47 Speaker 04 So they look a little bit like spring onions and there are also some other like spring greens that you get in China that look quite a lot like them.
37:53 Speaker 05 Right.
37:54 Speaker 04 I was reading an article by John Robertson, who works at the Poison Garden in Annick.
37:59 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
38:00 Speaker 04 It's like a garden with all poisonous plants in it. And he's found lots of examples of people being poisoned by daffodils. He said there was some parents who were not very well and they had a couple of children who were just old enough to make a stew. And they went and picked out what they thought were onions and put them in and they were daffodil bulbs and they got really sick.
38:19 Speaker 03 What is the right age to make a stew?
38:23 Speaker 04 It's a really good question, isn't it?
38:24 Speaker 05 Normally you have to get your licence in the UK. I don't know if that's a thing that you do.
38:27 Speaker 03 On bees and heat, a study from North Carolina State University found that bumblebees carrying pollen, their bodies heat up depending on how much pollen they have. It's a workout. So the weight of the pollen that they're carrying around makes their bodies warmer. And so they're afraid that global warming, the workout of carrying pollen will be too much for them and they'll overheat. I know.
38:53 Speaker 04 Do you know what happens if, sorry to interrupt, but do you know what happens if a bee overheats? We've mentioned this on our show before, it ejaculates itself to death.
39:04 Speaker 05 Really?
39:04 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:05 Speaker 03 Wow.
39:06 Speaker 05 Really, it just can't stop. It's just-
39:07 Speaker 04 It can't stop, yeah. I can't remember the exact details, but I remember that sentence very clearly for some reason.
39:14 Speaker 05 Sticks in the mind. Just on the thing that Mel said, they are now flowering two or three weeks earlier than in the past.
39:20 Speaker 04 I don't-
39:20 Speaker 05 This is a climatic thing. This is a world getting warmer thing. So if Wordsworth went for his famous walk with his sister today,
39:29 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:30 Speaker 05 there might be nothing there at all because although they'd have already flowered a couple of weeks ago, he'd have had to ride about something else.
39:35 Speaker 04 Right.
39:36 Speaker 05 It doesn't seem like the biggest problem with-
39:38 Speaker 03 A real sliding doors moment.
39:39 Speaker 05 Yeah. This is not the biggest effect of climate change that you can think of, but it is bad.
39:44 Speaker 04 But that is the thing about it, is he says, "I wandered lonely as a cloud." But he wasn't lonely, he was with his sister the whole time.
39:49 Speaker 05 But if he'd said, "I wandered out there with my sister," what's the rhyme? Blister, I suppose, I got a blister.
39:56 Speaker 03 I mean, I've spent a few days in here. I don't think the clouds are that lonely. There's quite a few hanging out together.
40:05 Speaker 05 With a thick mass across the countryside. Yeah, you're right.
40:09 Speaker 03 So maybe in an ironic way.
40:14 Speaker 00 Stop the podcast.
40:15 Speaker 05 Stop the podcast.
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40:59 Speaker 05 Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.
41:02 Speaker 04 Okay, my fact this week is that you may be able to cure chronically blocked noses with a snot transplant.
41:10 Speaker 03 Oh, wow.
41:11 Speaker 04 Lovely. It's future, guys.
41:13 Speaker 05 Yeah.
41:13 Speaker 03 Incredible.
41:14 Speaker 05 It does sound good.
41:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
41:15 Speaker 05 Reading about it, I thought, yeah, sign me up.
41:18 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know if you suffer from this kind of thing. I do, definitely, chronic rhinocytus. In fact, I had surgery for it a few years ago, and that was kind of the best way to deal with it, and it kind of still is. But I read about a new study in New Scientist this week, and they've come up with this idea of basically siphoning snot out of someone and shoving it right up there. It's as simple as that, really.
41:41 Speaker 03 But surely the people that don't have blocked noses don't have a lot of snot to offer. So they could probably only be a donor for one person.
41:51 Speaker 03 Their noses are way too clear.
41:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
41:53 Speaker 04 See what he means. Well, they're basically, everyone has some kind of micro- Biome in their sinuses. And what you're trying to do is get those bacteria and viruses out of a healthy person's nose and put them into an unhealthy person's nose.
42:06 Speaker 05 It's really cool.
42:07 Speaker 04 It's really good.
42:07 Speaker 05 I think it just sounds like a great idea. So it was, um, was one of the pioneers of it a scientist called Amy Mange?
42:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, Amy Mange from Vancouver and another guy called Anders Mortensen from Helsingborg.
42:19 Speaker 05 Yes. And so she was inspired by fecal transplants.
42:23 Speaker 04 Yeah.
42:23 Speaker 05 Which, which we've talked about before as being very useful.
42:26 Speaker 04 You don't want to get those two mixed up.
42:27 Speaker 05 Absolutely not, absolutely.
42:31 Speaker 04 You've just put snot up this person's bum. Wait a minute, that means.
42:37 Speaker 05 So, yeah, it gets referred to as a sinus probiotic. Cause you've got, you know, this, um, you're fighting snot with snot, basically. Cause and this thing, chronic sinus condition or chronic rhinosinusitis, it sounds awful.
42:51 Speaker 04 It's a shocker.
42:52 Speaker 05 So you've had it?
42:53 Speaker 04 I still kind of have it, but, um, the surgery helped quite a lot.
42:56 Speaker 05 You've mentioned your sinuses in the past, but I've always thought, eh, I've got a cold too. And I didn't, I'm so sorry, James.
43:02 Speaker 04 But basically I often can't breathe.
43:04 Speaker 05 Yes, yes, yes, yes.
43:06 Speaker 04 Kind of vital for living.
43:08 Speaker 05 Absolutely. That's priority one. Um, but it's, it gets dismissed by lots of doctors as a minor inconvenience, but people living with it, which might be up to 10%, I read, approaching this number. Your face hurts, you're always bunged up, you lose your sense of smell, headaches, bad breath.
43:24 Speaker 04 Try getting on an aeroplane.
43:25 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah, of course.
43:26 Speaker 04 As soon as you, you know, when your ears sort of, when your ears pop.
43:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
43:30 Speaker 04 When that happens for you, I just get this incredible pain in my sinuses.
43:34 Speaker 05 I've had that if you go on the flight and you've got a bit of a cold, that can happen, can't it? And just suddenly, oh, and that, well, allegedly people with it seem to be 77% likely to have depression than those without. Cause it's just such a chronically debilitating.
43:48 Speaker 03 There's a research team, this is a game, you guys guess what the name of the research team trying to work out? They're using like AI to work out the cause of, of this rhinositis in people.
44:01 Speaker 05 Okay.
44:01 Speaker 03 What is the name of this research team?
44:04 Speaker 05 It's like the acronym, you mean?
44:06 Speaker 03 Uh, it's not an acronym. It's just like a fun bit of word play and it's, it's like, when you read it, you go, of course.
44:13 Speaker 05 Okay, blow.
44:14 Speaker 04 Who knows how to fix this?
44:17 Speaker 03 I mean, you've got the right pun.
44:19 Speaker 04 Am I?
44:20 Speaker 03 Well, in terms of it is, it's got nose in it, but it's medical. And it's about figuring out.
44:25 Speaker 05 Do nose harm?
44:26 Speaker 03 No, it's so much simpler than that. It's literally just a word in the medical field that you would use a lot. A doctor. What does a doctor do?
44:35 Speaker 04 Diagnose.
44:36 Speaker 03 Yes.
44:39 Speaker 01 Lovely.
44:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, too good, too good.
44:42 Speaker 05 That's pretty good.
44:43 Speaker 04 Because, Dan, you talked about acronyms. There is the way to measure whether you have chronic sinusitis is the sinus nasal outcome test or snot.
44:53 Speaker 05 Beautiful.
44:54 Speaker 04 Beautiful. And they basically give you 22 things. Do you need to blow your nose? Do you sneeze a lot? Do you have a runny nose? And you put how often? Does it happen all the time or does it happen never?
45:05 Speaker 01 What's interesting is how much mucus and snot we produce per day.
45:09 Speaker 04 Buckets.
45:09 Speaker 01 It's buckets. It's 1.5 litres per day is what the body produces.
45:14 Speaker 04 Okay, that's like a large bottle of Coca-Cola, isn't it?
45:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, and it's used for various different things. I didn't realise it was used for. It lubricates poo so then it makes it easier to exit our body.
45:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, you're saying it with a slightly disgusted look on your face, but you try going without. You'll be crying out for that mucus to come back, you know?
45:32 Speaker 01 I don't know how I tried.
45:33 Speaker 03 You tried going without mucus.
45:36 Speaker 01 I don't know what things were like.
45:37 Speaker 05 It's too good for mucus, do you? How dare you?
45:40 Speaker 01 I don't know how bad it got for you on the Lord of the Flies island, but we keep our poo's lubricated.
45:44 Speaker 03 That's the thing is that people obviously would find the idea of eating snot disgusting. But we are swallowing our snot all the time. Most of that, those litres, we're just swallowing it.
45:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, because it traps like bacterias or tiny hairs or whatever that are all landing in your body. And it can be in the lining to your lungs and things like that. Then you bring that up, you know, that's all trapped, gets full of the pollutants. You bring it up, you swallow it, out it goes.
46:10 Speaker 04 Easy. One interesting thing about picking your nose and eating it is that according to some scientists, they think that might be a good thing because the pathogens that get stuck in your nose are the weaker ones because they haven't managed to get all the way up. So if you take those ones out and eat them, then that's like.
46:27 Speaker 03 It's like a vaccine.
46:28 Speaker 04 Like a vaccine, exactly. I should say not all scientists like this.
46:33 Speaker 05 Okay, that's good to know. Before this podcast recording, actually, Mel sent me a photo of her with her finger jammed up her nose. I didn't understand it till now.
46:42 Speaker 03 It's so much warmer up here.
46:46 Speaker 04 You can get terrible sinusitis if you're a tortoise. There was a tortoise-
46:52 Speaker 03 Sorry to any tortoises listening.
46:55 Speaker 04 There's a tortoise in Bristol Zoo in 2014 called Helen, who had a terrible nasal infection and they gave them a course of antibiotics and lots of sinus rinses and stuff. And the reason is that tortoises can't cough and so if you get the infection, they can't get it out of their body. But the reason I mainly bring it up is that this tortoise called Helen has a underfloor heated sandpit.
47:21 Speaker 05 No way.
47:22 Speaker 04 And it's a bit of a sore point on this show, Mel, that Andy hasn't got underfloor heating in his house.
47:27 Speaker 05 That makes me sound like an insane diva. I'm just saying, I'm just saying the Romans had it 2000 years ago. Why don't, why don't we all have it? It's not just me. It's like, why don't-
47:35 Speaker 03 Why does Helen have it?
47:36 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, yeah, that genuinely, what the hell?
47:40 Speaker 05 There are humans out there who could do with underfloor heating. Some of them around this table. Wow. Well, congratulations, Helen. I hope you're very happy.
47:51 Speaker 03 I hope your sinusitis never gets better.
47:55 Speaker 05 Cold medicine in the UK is substantially worse than it used to be.
48:00 Speaker 04 Is that right?
48:01 Speaker 05 Yeah.
48:02 Speaker 03 Is this pseudoephedrine or no? This is not to do with the actual-
48:05 Speaker 05 Certainly is.
48:06 Speaker 03 Oh, it is. Right. Okay. Is it because they outlawed pseudoephedrine in New Zealand for a bit and they've brought it back?
48:13 Speaker 05 Oh, did they?
48:13 Speaker 03 Because it's very easy to turn that cold medication into drugs.
48:18 Speaker 05 Yes.
48:18 Speaker 04 Is it?
48:18 Speaker 03 Is it?
48:19 Speaker 05 A key ingredient of crystal meth-
48:22 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:23 Speaker 05 Is pseudoephedrine and pseudoephedrine is where pseudo fed gets its name from.
48:30 Speaker 04 Okay.
48:30 Speaker 05 Pseudo, do you hear it? Pseudoephedrine.
48:32 Speaker 04 It's a beginning bit, right?
48:33 Speaker 05 It was used for, it's another name. It was used for decades, banned in 2008 and replaced with something much less effective called phenylephrine.
48:44 Speaker 05 And I mean, it's good news if you don't like crystal meth being a big part of your community.
48:48 Speaker 04 Bad news if you have chronic sinusitis.
48:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
48:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:51 Speaker 05 Can't you get, can't you get it?
48:54 Speaker 04 Can I get it under the counter somewhere?
48:55 Speaker 05 I think there are very specific-
48:56 Speaker 04 The problem is I can't get my head under the counter because it all goes into my eyes.
49:01 Speaker 01 There are very specific circumstances, I think, under which a doctor will give it to you, but it's not just ladled out now because it's too easy to use it to make crystal meth.
49:08 Speaker 04 How interesting.
49:09 Speaker 01 I've written a new script called Blowing Bad and I think it's going to be really successful. I'm really excited.
49:14 Speaker 04 Very nice.
49:15 Speaker 01 Yes.
49:16 Speaker 04 A doctor, a German doctor called Wilhelm Fleiß, was a friend of Freud and he thought that your nose got more swollen once a month and it kind of had its own menstrual cycle. Ah. And he thought that the swelling of the nose caused some kind of like sexual disorders.
49:36 Speaker 01 Yes.
49:36 Speaker 04 And.
49:37 Speaker 01 What's that, Dan? Yes.
49:40 Speaker 03 Explain my disorders.
49:41 Speaker 01 Preach!
49:42 Speaker 04 Okay, and now I sit back and allow Dan to explain what the hell he was thinking with that interjection.
49:49 Speaker 01 Well, I just know that. Take the tampon out of your nose before you talk to us, Dan. I've always thought that the nose was very similar to a vagina.
50:00 Speaker 03 You've always thought that?
50:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:03 Speaker 03 As a young boy.
50:04 Speaker 01 As a young boy, I just always thought, no, because we share very similar, we, my nose and vaginas, share very similar tissues on the inside, right?
50:12 Speaker 04 They have erectile tissues in your nose.
50:14 Speaker 01 Oh.
50:15 Speaker 04 Exactly. And it is true that if you get excited down there, it can give you a blocked nose sometimes. That's called honeymoon rhinitis and it's because the blood rushes to the erectile tissue in both places.
50:27 Speaker 01 Whoa.
50:28 Speaker 04 But this guy, Wilhelm Fleiß, he thought that the best way to deal with it is to take cocaine.
50:34 Speaker 01 Ah.
50:35 Speaker 04 And he thought that if you took cocaine, then it would stop your nose from going through this menstrual cycle and that it would stop your sexual disorders. And surprise, surprise, Sigmund Freud absolutely agreed.
50:47 Speaker 03 Yeah.
50:48 Speaker 04 And was the one who would prescribe him this cocaine so that he would, his patients would feel better.
50:54 Speaker 01 Well, give it a go.
50:57 Speaker 05 It was a big cold and flu remedy, wasn't it?
50:58 Speaker 04 Yeah.
50:59 Speaker 05 Cocaine was just a standard thing. Again, cocaine, crystal meth, all these drugs before we really understood.
51:04 Speaker 04 And heroin was good for coughs, wasn't it?
51:06 Speaker 03 I was trying to think of a pun that whole time and the only thing I could think of is you've got a stiffy and a stuffy.
51:12 Speaker 05 Yes.
51:13 Speaker 03 That's all I could get, that's all I could get.
51:15 Speaker 05 Can I tell you one more weird transplant thing?
51:17 Speaker 04 Yes, please.
51:18 Speaker 05 That's not transplants. So there is a belief among some doctors that we might, within the next 10 years, get the first ever head transplant.
51:27 Speaker 04 Ah.
51:28 Speaker 05 Yeah.
51:28 Speaker 04 Okay.
51:29 Speaker 03 Wow.
51:29 Speaker 05 It's pretty interesting. So this is a surgeon called Bruce Matthew, who's a former NHS neurosurgeon, so qualified. And basically, it's really a body transplant, actually.
51:38 Speaker 04 Yeah.
51:38 Speaker 05 Because, yeah, as I say.
51:40 Speaker 04 It's taking.
51:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, true. The head is the person.
51:43 Speaker 05 The head is the person. No, it's not the same transplant, because if they say we're giving you a head transplant, that means they're going to take off your head and put someone else's head on. But what happens to your head? It's your head, but the key thing apparently is that your head and your spinal column have to be kept together. There's no way of just taking off a head and putting it on another body. It has to be head and spinal column.
51:59 Speaker 04 Okay.
52:00 Speaker 05 Um, and then I found myself looking into what other transplants we can do. So shoulder replacement surgery absolutely happens, that's fine. Knee surgery, again, very cool by now, knee replacement. But we don't seem, as far as I know, to do toe transplants.
52:15 Speaker 04 Toes onto your fingers, I've seen that.
52:17 Speaker 05 Toes becomes thumb. That is the gold standard for letting you pinch things again.
52:21 Speaker 04 Okay.
52:22 Speaker 05 But I don't think they ever say we're going to take a toe off someone else's.
52:25 Speaker 04 Is it because you can manage without one of your toes?
52:29 Speaker 03 I had a broken toe and the doctors go, well, we don't really, we're not going to put your toe in a cast. So then I just have a toe that just doesn't bend.
52:36 Speaker 05 Oh, okay.
52:37 Speaker 04 Like, you can't live your life without working kidneys, right?
52:40 Speaker 05 Yeah.
52:40 Speaker 04 But if you lose one of your toes, it's not great, but you can still live your life.
52:44 Speaker 03 You're not going to be able to get many people to sign up to, like, donating their body if they find out they're just donating their toes. Your toe could save someone's awkward conversation at the pool.
52:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. It's not top of the list of things to solve, for sure, for absolutely sure.
53:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's true. Wait, so, okay, so we're doing heads?
53:04 Speaker 05 Yep.
53:04 Speaker 01 Shoulders?
53:05 Speaker 05 Yeah.
53:06 Speaker 01 Is that what's going on here?
53:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
53:07 Speaker 03 Oh my, oh my god, I can't believe it.
53:09 Speaker 01 No, I knew the second you said it, I could see in your face. You didn't just mention toes for no reason. There's no waste with Andy, he's not.
53:17 Speaker 03 Wow.
53:23 Speaker 01 Okay, that's 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've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online. I'm on at @tribaland on Instagram. James? My Instagram is @nosuchthingasjamesharkin. Andy? At AndrewHunterM. And Mel?
53:39 Speaker 03 At MelanieBracewell.
53:40 Speaker 01 Nice. And you are in the UK right now.
53:43 Speaker 03 I'm in the UK. I'm touring around. So come see my show if you'd like.
53:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, all the dates are on your Instagram, right? So you can, it's a pinned post.
53:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, you can check it out. And also, if you can't come, I'll be releasing it as a special sometime during the year. So.
53:55 Speaker 01 Amazing.
53:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, you can catch it on it.
53:58 Speaker 01 Great. Okay, cool. Well, also, if you want to get to us as a group, podcast at qi.com is the place to send your emails. If you've got amazing facts that you want to let us know about, we do our show Little Fish, where we gather together all the best of those facts and we read them out. That's every Monday. Or if you want to give us some feedback about things we've talked about in main episodes that you think we need to know about, we have another show, which is part of our secret members' club, Club Fish, which you can get by going to patreon.com/nosuchthingasafish. And Andy goes through all those emails. He picks the best of them out and we do that show. Drop us a line where we discuss them all. So check that out. Otherwise, why not just come back next week? Because we're going to have another episode. Thanks as ever to Ling Li and Ethan
54:41 Speaker 01 Ruparelia, as well as the larger Fishbuster team here at the offices in Holborn. And we'll see you next week. Goodbye.
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